Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions was the last of seven works signed by Kierkegaard and published simultaneously with an anonymously authored companion piece. Imagined Occasions both complements and stands in contrast to Kierkegaard's pseudonymously published Stages on Life's Way. The two volumes not only have a chronological relation but treat some of the same distinct themes. The first of the three discourses, "On the Occasion of a Confession," centers on stillness, wonder, and one's search for God--in contrast to the speechmaking (...) on erotic love in "In Vino Veritas," part one of Stages. The second discourse, "On the Occasion of a Wedding," complements the second part of Stages, in which Judge William delivers a panegyric on marriage. The third discourse, "At a Graveside," sharpens the ethical and religious earnestness implicit in Stages's "'Guilty'/'Not Guilty'" and completes this collection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CONRAD'S REPLY TO KIERKEGAARD by Jerry S. Clegg Varied answers to a fixed question have often guided interpretations of Conrad's novella, Heart ofDarkness. Who, that question has been, was Conrad's model for the enigmatic colonial official he calls Kurtz? Hannah Arendt has speculated that it was Carl Peters, an early explorer of east Africa.1 Norman Sherry has picked Arthur Hodister, a Belgian officer, as his candidate.2 Ian Watt has (...) likewise suggested historical figures: Henry M. Stanley and King Leopold of Belgium.3 Since all these men had a reputation for cruelty, those thinking that Conrad had them in mind when describing Kurtz have stressed the political message of his story; for them it is basically an indictment of colonialism. Stephen Reid has argued for a mythic model. Kurtz, he holds, was meant to be seen as one of the man-gods of Frazer's Golden Bough—a primitive king who is obliged to maintain his political position by engaging in certain bestial rites.4 Kenneth Bruffee has recendy cast Kurtz as Conrad's version of Byron's Childe Harold, arguing that the eventualjudgment on him by the character Marlow represents the effort of a squire-narrator to free himself from the pernicious influence of his knight-hero.5 For Bruffee Heart of Darkness is the prototype of a genre oftwentieth-century literature thatrejects the values ofaristocratic romance in favor of democratic norms. There may be truth in all these associations of Kurtz with known colonizers, mythical kings, and fictional knights, but they share a pair of deficiencies. They do not clarify the argument of Heart ofDarkness and so do not dojustice to its copious philosophical content. They also 280 Jerrys. Clegg281 fail to note those features ofKurtz that identify his model most precisely. The prototype of Conrad's famous character is biblical. He is a modern version of Abraham, and the work most intimately related to Heart of Darkness is Kierkegaard's panegyric on Abraham: Fear and Trembling. Conrad's story is, in fact, an addendum to Fear and Trembling written from the point of view of a poet-narrator—Marlow—who has accepted some, but not all, of the tenets of Kierkegaard's own poet-narrator, Johannes de Silentio. It is Marlow's quarrel with de Silentio that explains the structure of Heart ofDarkness, that constitutes its deepest message, and that tells the reader who the model for Kurtz was. An appreciation of that quarrel also helps clarify other matters. It makes plain, for example, the symbolism of light and dark that Conrad uses as an accompaniment to his argument.6 Heart of Darkness is, unarguably, a meditation on several subjects. It is about the Belgian Congo under the administration of King Leopold. It is also about European colonialism in general. It may be about other matters as well. Its primary subject, however, is the relationship of the religious to the ethical and the aesthetic. Since for Conrad the ethical and the aesthetic were allied, this subject may be best cast as the relationship ofreligion to art. It is introduced at the very start ofthe novella. Conrad's primary narrator there offers a theme for his seafaring friend, Marlow, to meditate on aloud: the great English knights-errant of the sea who, like "jewels flashing in the night of time," have born the torch of civilization into the mystery of an unknown earth.7 As this theme is announced, what was a mournful gloom that had hung over London becomes a lurid glare under the stars, and Marlow begins to talk of these, and still other, kinds of light and their relationship to the dark. The primary narrator has already identified what the dark stands for: time. Marlow does not challenge that equation. He only asks who, and with the aid of what kind of light, effectively combats "the night of time." During his meditation he considers four answers to his question, three of which are of primary importance. Certain "redeeming facts," illustrated by the restraint shown by hungry cannibals, quietly dazzle with reassurance, and so what mightbe called the person ofethical conduct— when stripped bare of pretense and the opaque "cloak of time... (shrink)

Panegyric IV , 24, 2: diducta acie inreuocabilem impetum hostis effundis, dein quos ludificandos receperas reductis agminibus includis. Acidalius' correction ludificando is accepted in both the Teubner editions. The addition of the s would, of course, be an easy error, and quite characteristic of the MSS, of these authors. But there is no need for the correction, in view of the frequency; in the Panegyrici Latini, of the Gerundive as a Future Participle Passive, an unquestionable example of which occurs, (...) in fact, in the last sentence of the chapter in question. ‘Quos ludificandos receperas’ means ‘whom you had admitted with the intention that they should be tricked,’ is equivalent in sense to ‘quos ludificaturus receperas.’ The Gerundive used as Future Participle Passive gives an appropriate picture of the purpose with which the manoeuvre described by receperas was carried out. (shrink)

Attributed in Christian scripture to Jesus’s very lips, the intriguing Aramaic phrase ‘Talitha, Kum!’ has emerged as an important refrain within gendered African theological scholarship. African women’s experiences in the hands of religion and culture do so resonate with the two tangled stories that comprise the phrase’s literary context. The resonance is such that African women’s Bible reading strategies have come to be referred to as ‘Talitha cum African women’s biblical hermeneutics’ or some variant thereof. The ensuing panegyric by (...) a male admirer engages the fresh ways whereby African women biblical hermeneutics (aka Talitha) are breathing new life into (African) biblical scholarship. In appreciation and tribute to African women theologians’ fragrant contributions to Christian life and reflection, the ode samples their work in a manner that in places feels intrusive whilst certainly nowhere near complete. (shrink)

In a new reading of Tacitus's account of the quarrel between Helvidius Priscus and Eprius Marcellus at Hist. 4.6.3–4.10.1, I show that the historian stages a confrontation between panegyrical and Realpolitik rhetoric about the Principate. Helvidius uses the consensus-rhetoric of panegyric to propose that the senate claim the freedom they theoretically possess in the regime of a civilis princeps. Eprius describes the autocratic “reality” of the Principate in terms of contingency, necessity, and power. Helvidius's panegyrical fantasy runs up against (...) practical limits, but Eprius's hardheaded truisms prove equally problematic for senatorial oratory. The failures of both speeches comment on the necessity of a consciously fictive “public transcript” such as Pliny's Panegyric while pointing to historiography as the proper place for Realpolitik truths. The debate sheds new light on Tacitus's praise of Trajan and Nerva at the beginning of the Histories as a locus for collective senatorial self-fashioning. (shrink)

The present paper deals with the famous punishment of the delatores by Trajan in a spectaculum described in chapters 33-36 of Pliny’s Panegyricus. The examination of this scene on a literary level with the help of textual analysis and interpretation seeks to illustrate how Pliny displays Trajan’s actions as well as the devices and techniques that Pliny uses to achieve his panegyrical purpose. Noteworthy is the integration of religious terminology, the choice of perspective and the actual comparisons with Trajan’s predecessors. (...) Thus, Trajan appears as a link between humans and gods, and Pliny’s depiction of his actions elevates him to the divine level as far as possible. (shrink)

Claudian of Alexandria's last datable poem, the Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of Honorius, was delivered in Rome in 404, presumably on 1 January. This performance occurred in the course of the first visit to Rome by an emperor for nearly a decade and a half. Imperial visits to Rome were notoriously rare in the fourth century and, in a well-known passage of that poem, the goddess Roma herself muses on their rarity: she had only seen an Augustus three (...) times in the last hundred years. This is not quite true, but the only legitimate emperors known to have paid formal visits to Rome in that period were Constantine in 312–13, 315 and 326, Constantius II in 357, and Theodosius I, accompanied by his four-year-old son Honorius, in 389. In this article I shall begin by making an observation about the court's intentions in moving to Rome in late 403, and then deal with two problems bound up with the interpretation of this poem and with the circumstances of imperial visits. The first problem concerns the visit of Honorius during which the poem was first performed. In Claudian's narrative the description of Honorius' triumphal entry leads into a description of his assumption of the consulate, and scholars have sometimes asserted that he made a triumphal entry as consul on 1 January 404. This is clearly wrong: Honorius arrived in Rome weeks or months before. But even when this point is recognized, it is often asserted that the poem blends triumphal and consular imagery, and elements of the triumphal entry are confused with the assumption of the consulship. My argument therefore moves from the chronology of Honorius' visit to elucidating the structure and imagery of Claudian's poem, as well as casting light on the patterns of the late antique imperial aduentus more broadly. The second problem concerns the description of Honorius' previous visit to Rome with his father in the summer of 389. Here it has sometimes been inferred on the basis of Claudian, and of late chronicles, that Honorius was created Caesar by his father on 13 June, the day of the aduentus. I shall show on the basis of a critical examination of the chronicle tradition, as well as a survey of contemporary numismatic, epigraphic and literary evidence, that this belief is unfounded, and that the relevant passages of Claudian require a different interpretation. However, this evidence also makes clear that signals were being sent in 389 about Honorius' imperial future. (shrink)

In two letters, Pliny and Trajan discuss a petition sent to the governor by the guild of athletes concerning their rewards after winning contests (Plin. Ep. 10.118–19). In his request, Pliny refers to a regulation by which Trajan had settled the rights of the victorious athletes in regard to their home cities. In his response, Trajan repeats the case with slight variations. The two letters pose both philological and historical difficulties, which this article aims to solve. The relevant passage in (...) Trajan's letter is corrupt. As scholarship has misunderstood the historical background of the letters, no satisfying solution for the restoration of the text has been found to date. The argumentation of this article is twofold. First, it offers a new reading of the corrupt passage in the emperor's letter which respects both the textual transmission and the historical situation. Second, it is argued that the two letters refer to a Trajanic law which settled the regulations of iselastic contests for the first time, but left some details undecided. In sum, this article proposes a new reading of a damaged passage in Plin. Ep. 10.119 as well as offering a historical commentary on agonistic activities in imperial Asia Minor. (shrink)

El zéjel n.° 84 de Ibn Quzmān se ha considerado hasta ahora como un poema inacabado, al que le falta la sección final de panegírico, debido a un supuesto accidente en la transmisión del manuscrito. Según esta teoría, el poema ha llegado incompleto a nuestros días. Este artículo, a través del análisis de algunas de sus características temáticas sobresalientes, estrechamente relacionadas y que muestran una estructura compleja y cuidadosamente organizada, pretende mostrar que existen fuertes razones para sugerir que el zéjel (...) n.° 84 no está inacabado, sino que se compuso omitiendo, de forma deliberada, la parte final que se espera encontrar usualmente en un panegírico árabe. Se sugiere a continuación que este recurso fue adoptado por el poeta para estimular, en el oyente/lector, la aparición de unas consideraciones de tipo teológico, filosófico y moral a través de una obra que, superficialmente, parece ser tan sólo de carácter bufonesco y sin preocupación social alguna. Finalmente, el artículo intenta explorar el valor literario del poema y el extraordinario mérito de su autor. (shrink)

Summary Trajan’s status as a model emperor is perhaps most famously expressed in Eutropius’ catchphrase “More fortunate than Augustus, better than Trajan” (Eutr. Brev. 8.5.3). Modern scholarship has similarly stressed Trajan’s exemplary status, assuming that Trajan’s virtues were already a point of departure by which to measure second- and third-century emperors. This article challenges that notion; it argues that Trajan’s status as a model emperor was a late-antique literary construct. Trajan only entered the repertoire of exemplary emperors during the course (...) of the fourth century to become the model emperor in the very late-fourth- and early-fifth century. This development depended on the historical context and ideological demands, as well as on the availability of the then-existing material discussing and depicting the historical Trajan. (shrink)

This paper suggests a new emendation to the text of the final passage of Pliny's Panegyric, where a small lacuna has long been suspected after substiti.

One of the most controversial episodes in early medieval hagiography was the legend of the Roman Emperor Trajan, who escaped hell by the intercession and the prayers of Pope Gregory. Was there a way out of hell? How could this legend be interpreted without disrupting core ideas of Western scholastic theology like the eternity of damnation? This paper takes this example and provides a diachronic overview of the gradual emergence of this new capacity for understanding hagiography from the early Middle (...) Ages to the Early Modern Period. It draws special attention to a group of lesser-known Early Modern theologians like Alonso Salmeron, Alonson Chacón, Caesar Baronius or Alexandre Noël, whose contributions to the debate over the fate of Trajan’s soul are illustrative of a process of negotiation wherein innovative scholarly methods were interwoven with an overarching drive to purify theology. The result was a situation in which a problematic authority that could not be demolished by way of rational arguments based on its own internal logic could at least be brought down by undermining the value and legitimacy of its genre. (shrink)

This article proposes an interpretation of Claudian’s preface to his Panegyric for Mallius Theodorus that places the poem in the communicative context of its recitation and in the literary frame of the panegyric. An analysis of the political messages in both poems, the panegyric and its brief ‘paratext’, reveals that the preface consistently uses the myth of the two eagles of Jupiter to indicate symbolically that the new consul is still upholding ‘genuine’ Hellenic culture in the West. (...) This interpretation illustrates how Claudian’s poems for the new consul of 399 assume the Greek cultural heritage to be a part of the Roman identity and that they play a significant role in the poet’s agenda between 397–400, by progressively unveiling the anti-Byzantinism of the Western court. (shrink)

A new line of self projection magazines that started blooming in Lagos, Nigeria, about the mid-1990s defined itself by filling almost completely every issue with photographs that depict politicians, businesspeople, sports and show business stars enjoying fruits of their extraordinary achievements on festive occasions. The magazine’s cozy coverage of the rich and famous irks a lot of serious cultural and literary critics who believe that this style resembles praise singing too closely. This paper, unlike mainline criticisms of the pictorial magazines, (...) takes praise singing to be a serious subject. Its central proposition is that the Nigerian magazine culture embraced these magazines because they have successfully translated into photography the panegyric tendency that pervades popular, self-projection arts in the underlying Yorùbá cultural environment of southwestern Nigeria. The sub-genre of Yorùbá panegyric that the magazines rework into the photographic medium is oríkì bọ̀rọ̀kìnní, or praise chants of the eminent. The paper analyzes sample issues of Ovation magazine to outline ways of placing contemporary African cultural forms in a long perspective and to propose an example of how inter-mediality operates today in popular cultures. In the concluding section, the essay proposes that a “poetic” understanding of photography, as opposed to “theatricality” and or melancholic substitution, represents the best way to think about the type of festive portraiture practiced in Ovationand its imitators. (shrink)

The article presented a panegyric reading of the Sermon on the Plain in the Malawian context. It observed that, unlike its Matthean counterpart, the Sermon holds an insignificant place in African hermeneutics. Based on the Sermon’s structure and content the article proposed the Greco-Roman panegyric, whose function was to inculcate commonly held values, as a framework for reading of the Sermon. It argued that when read in its original context as a Greco-Roman panegyric, the Sermon’s radical stance (...) on poverty and riches had significant implications for African and Malawian socio-economic realities. It brought into light the complicated relationships between the poor and rich both among Luke’s original audience and the contemporary Malawian context. The panegyric reading of the Sermon also had a significant bearing on the application of the ubuntu philosophy in socio-economic interrelationships in Malawi. The article posited that the socio-economic inequalities in Malawi caused by corrupt, cronyism and nepotism not only challenge the majority Christian status of the nation but also the foundations of the African values of ubuntu. As a panegyric, the Sermon therefore challenges Malawian Christians to rethink their values and the relationship between the rich and the poor.Contribution: The article provides a new perspective to the interpretation of the Sermon on the Plain in African context. Against the background of its apparent neglect in African hermeneutics, the article underscores the relevance of the Sermon on the Plain to -socio-economic discourse in Malawi in particular and Africa in general. (shrink)

Gaston Bachelard occupies a unique position in the history of European thinking. As a philosopher of science, he developed a profound interest in genres of the imagination, notably poetry and novels. While emphatically acknowledging the strength, precision and reliability of scientific knowledge compared to every-day experience, he saw literary phantasies as important supplementary sources of insight. Although he significantly influenced authors such as Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and others, while some of his key concepts are still widely used, his oeuvre tends (...) to be overlooked. And yet, as I will argue, Bachelard’s extended series of books opens up an intriguing perspective on contemporary science. First, I will point to a remarkable duality that runs through Bachelard’s oeuvre. His philosophy of science consists of two sub-oeuvres: a psychoanalysis of technoscience, complemented by a poetics of elementary imagination. I will point out how these two branches deal with complementary themes: technoscientific artefacts and literary fictions, two realms of human experience separated by an epistemological rupture. Whereas Bachelard’s work initially entails a panegyric in praise of scientific practice, he becomes increasingly intrigued by the imaginary and its basic images, such as the Mother Earth archetype. (shrink)

Claudian's panegyric for Olybrius and Probinus, the young consuls of 395, includes a passage describing Rome armed in the image of the goddess Minerva. Lines 83–90 read as follows: ipsa, triumphatis quae possidet aethera regnis,assilit innuptae ritus imitata Mineruae.nam neque caesariem crinali stringere cultu 85colla nec ornatu patitur mollire retorto;dextrum nuda latus, niueos exserta lacertos;audacem retegit mammam laxumque coercensmordet gemma sinum; nodus, qui subleuat ensem,album puniceo pectus discriminat ostro. 90.

In this paper I discuss the ways in which the early Christian writer Arnobius of Sicca used rhetoric to shape religious identity inAduersus nationes. I raise questions about the reliability of his rhetorical work as a historical source for understanding conflict between Christians and pagans. The paper is intended as an addition to the growing literature in the following current areas of study: the role of local religion and identity in the Roman Empire; the presence of pagan elements in Christian (...) religious practices; the question of how to approach rhetorical works as historical evidence. (shrink)

This volume gathers together for the first time are all the key texts in a crucial debate in modern philosophy, centered on Leibniz's famous 1695 essay, the "New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication," in which he introduced his strikingly original theory of metaphysics. His "system" became increasingly famous and drew him into discussion and development of these ideas, both in public and in private, with a variety of thinkers, most notably the great French philosopher Pierre Bayle. (...) Woolhouse's and Francks's new English edition gives the only full representation of this debate, and will therefore be essential reading for anyone who wishes to gain a proper understanding of Leibniz's philosophy and its intelletual context. All the texts are newly translated and extensively annotated; many appear in English for the first time. (shrink)

The problems recently detected in the famous words ars adeo latet arte sua (Ov. Met. 10.252) can be resolved if the line is repunctuated on the basis of an unjustly neglected interpretation put forward by Byzantine and Renaissance scholars.

It is argued that a Greek citation in Fulgentius’ Expositio Virgilianae Continentiae previously thought to be prose is in fact a corrupt hexameter verse.

An infamous Byzantine scholion about Pisistratus and Homer (Anecd. Gr. II 767–768 Bekker) includes the wildly anachronistic comment that Pisistratus tasked seventy-two scholars, including Zenodotus and Aristarchus, with editing the Homeric poems. The scholion is therefore rightly impugned in modern scholarship. It has however been overlooked that a ninth century Arabic version of the scholion exists in a letter by the Syrian scholar Qusṭā ibn Lūqā (d. 912 ad), which omits mention of the seventy-two scholars and Zenodotus and Aristarchus. As (...) the Arabic version is the earliest precisely dated testimonium for the scholion, it allows for a reconsideration of the textual tradition of this legend about the editorial activity of Pisistratus. (shrink)