Recently added articles from Helios:
"Too difficult for a single man to understand": Medea's out-jutting foot.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... I The Aegeus scene, set squarely in the middle of Euripides' Medea, has received a great deal of critical attention, set in motion largely by the enigmatic comment of Aristotle that this episode is improperly motivated (alogia). (1) For all that Medea needs a safe haven, and ...
Panegyris channels Penelope: Metis and Pietas in Plautus's Stichus.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... Plautus's Stichus is an odd play. Instead of a traditional New Comic plot, we find a tripartite structure that highlights different groups of characters at the beginning, middle, and end. Furthermore, there is a marked change in the tone, which descends from a highly moral beginning to ...
Language, satire, and heteroglossia in the Cena Trimalchionis.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... I. Introduction In the Cena Trimalchionis, the protagonist of the Satyrica, a poor but well-educated nebbish of uncertain social status, descends into the house of the fabulously wealthy and fabulously gauche Trimalchio for a theatrical dinner party. The nouveau riche at table ...
Seneca's nausea: "Existential" experiences and Julio-Claudian literature.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2008; ... A proper commentary, however, never understands the text better than its author understood it, though it certainly understands it differently. Only this difference in understanding must be such that it encounters the same thing which the explicated text is meditating. --Martin ...
Review essay: the romance of tragedy and psychoanalysis.(Euripides, Freud, and the Romance of Belonging)(Book review)
Mar 22, 2008; ... In The Interpretation of Dreams, in the chapter on dreamwork under the heading of "absurd dreams," Freud tells of the following dream: "A man who had nursed his father during his last illness and had been deeply grieved by his death, had the following senseless dream some time afterwards ....
Introduction.(Editorial)
Sep 22, 2007; ... The papers assembled here represent the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Reading in June 2004 and titled "Classical Subjects and Modern Subjectivities." The impetus behind the conference was to explore not the public dimension of classical reception, as in the ...
Subjects, selves, and survivors.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2007; ... The Subject of Time Classicists can legitimately argue that their right to be stakeholders in the new economies of the academy is based on the philosophical idea, first fully developed in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (Sein und Zeit [1927]), that a key constitutive element ...
Hellenism, romanticism, and subjectivity.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2007; ... I In his essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," published two years after his Birth of Tragedy, and with the Greeks still clearly in mind, Friedrich Nietzsche called attention to what he considered <Pre> the most characteristic quality of modern ...
Religion and gender in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris.
Sep 22, 2007; ... The second half of the eighteenth century saw a new impetus in the relationship between Europeans and classical literature. There was a clear move away from what had become perceived as artificial forms of expression based on baroque notions of proper restraint. Preoccupations with history ...
Horace and the construction of the English Victorian gentleman.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2007; ... The reading, criticism, and imitation of particular classical authors formed a natural part of self-construction for the elite classes in Victorian England, since the centrality of classics in the education of the period ensured that these texts were a key element in contemporary ...
"She Who Steps Along": Gradiva, telecommunications, history.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Gradiva was able to return the love which was making its way from the unconscious into consciousness, but the doctor cannot. Gradiva had herself been the object of the earlier, repressed love; her figure at once [sofort] offered the liberated current of love a desirable aim ....
Literary anamnesis: Boethius remembers Ovid.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2007; ... Manlius Anicius Severinus Boethius composed the Consolatio philosophiae in the first quarter of the sixth century C.E., while the ex-consul was exiled from Rome, probably imprisoned at Pavia and awaiting execution. Boethius was a victim of the complex politics of his time that set the ...
Hellish love: genre in Claudian's De raptu Proserpinae.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2007; ... For Gian-Biagio Conte, genre, rather than being rigidly constituted by formal features, is "a discursive form capable of constructing a coherent model of the world in its own image. It is a language, that is, a lexicon and style, but it is also a system of the imagination and a grammar of ...
"Welcome to heaven, please watch your step": the "Mithras Liturgy" and the Homeric quotations in the Paris Papyrus.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2007; ... I. Introduction The "Mithras Liturgy," (1) the most famous (or infamous) of all the material in the Papyri graecae magicae (hereafter, PGM), occupies lines 475-820 (2) of the Paris Papyrus, an eclectic collection of charms, rites, and various recipes, which is alternatively ...
The imitation of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan.(adventurer Josiah Harlan)(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2007; ... <Pre> No one was like him. Terrible were his crimes--but if you wish to blackguard the Great King, think how mean, obscure and dull you are, your labors lowly and your merits less ... --Robert Lowell, quoted in Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past ...
Introduction: Cornelia and her maternal legacy.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2006; ... At De lingua latina 10.41, Marcus Terentius Varro, one of our major authorities on how Romans spoke and thought during the late republican period, offers the following analogy: "Among offspring the son is to the father as the daughter is to the mother, and in matters of time noon is to the ...
Fulvia, mother of Iullus Antonius: new approaches to the sources on Julia's adultery at Rome.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2006; ... In a 1983 essay, Amy Richlin sought to reconcile several wildly divergent accounts of Roman attitudes toward transgressive female sexual behavior. She observed that "each [account] obeyed the conventions of a [different literary] genre, [telling] the portion of the truth which its audience ...
How women (re)act in Roman love poetry: inhuman she-wolves and unhelpful mothers in Propertius's elegies.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2006; ... The Roman poet Propertius uses motherhood as one lens through which to explore the intersection of gender and ethical behavior in first-century B.C.E. Rome. Using familiar and traditional figures, such as the Greek mythological heroides Thetis, Niobe, and Medea, as well as figures ...
Procul este parentes: mothers is Ovid's Metamorphoses.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2006; ... Introduction Mothers are marginal or invisible in many genres of Greek and Roman literature. They are less visible than casual sex partners like the Thespian paramours of "fifty-in-one-night" Hercules (1) or battered, betrayed, and abandoned wives such as the goddess Juno and ...
Mothers in Statius's poetry: sorrows and surrogates.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2006; ... Statius's poetry was written during the reign of Domitian (81-96 C.E.). Unlike Augustus, Domitian did not stand at the head of a thriving band of youthful dynastic contenders. His marriage to Domitilla, though long, produced no living children. The imperial couple had one son who died in ...