After reviewing current opinions about the social function of literature in second-century BCE Rome, I focus on two controversial fragments assigned to Cato the Censor's Origines. In the first, Cato portrays the ancestors in a convivial setting as they sing the praises and the manly deeds of famous men; in the second, he gestures towards the pontifex maximus' specialized use of writing and the functioning of the tabula as a locus of memory. By drawing on the field of performance studies, (...) I identify the performative features inherent in both of these fragments and map out how these features inform the positioning of Cato in relation to the identity politics of his time, professionalism, and writing. The aim of this study is to return the Origines to its immediate socio-cultural purview, but working towards this aim will also entail a shift in perspective and a reassessment of our notions of “poetry” and “prose.” In fact, by stressing the performance dimension that underlies the genesis of the Origines as a text, this article will also expose the shortcomings inherent in the hyper-literary approaches that have been so far adopted. (shrink)

Scholars have long recognized that hypothêkai, or instructional wisdom sayings, served as building blocks for larger structures of Greek wisdom poetry. Yet the mechanism that gets from saying to poem has never been traced in detail. If the transition involves more than piling sayings on top of each other, what intervenes? Focusing on the archaic hexametrical tradition of Homer and Hesiod, the paper develops a repertory of variations and expansions by which the primary genre, the hypothêkê speech-act, is transformed into (...) a secondary genre—the larger-scale wisdom constructions we find in various Homeric speeches and much if not all of the Works and Days. The paper first argues for a precise formal description of the hypothêkê saying in the archaic hexameter; it then develops a toolbox of variations on the saying's basic form. Finally, the toolbox is put to work in order to read a forty-verse excerpt of Hesiod's Almanac. (shrink)

Lycambes, the most famous of Archilochus' whipping boys, is everywhere upstaged in the surviving iambic texts and testimonia. This paper seeks to reconstruct something of Lycambes' voice and its role in the Archilochean tradition. I begin with a reconsideration of Archilochus' “first epode” and argue that Lycambes is styled as an older public rival to Archilochus who questions the role of the poet's iambos. The preliminary results of this section are then strengthened by drawing upon two relevant episodes in the (...) later ancient reception of Archilochean poetics: the sniping between Aristophanes and his older rival Cratinus and the Mnesiepes Inscription's tale of the uproar surrounding Archilochus' first performance. Lycambes emerges from this study as a character constructed to question the value and status of the iambist within the social space of contemporary Paros. As such, his criticisms afford Archilochus the opportunity to trumpet his claim to the very cultural capital that Lycambes strives to deny him. More than just a private enemy, Lycambes raises aesthetic and ethical debates that can still be heard throughout the iambographic tradition. (shrink)

This essay examines "Philoctetes" as an exercise in self-representation by looking at the self-referential and metatheatrical dimensions of the play. After suggesting an enlarged understanding of metatheater as "a particularly vigorous attempt to engage the audience at the synthetic and thematic levels of reading," I examine "Philoctetes" as a self-conscious discourse on tragedy, tragic production, and tragic experience, one which participates in a larger conversation in the late fifth century about the ethics of tragedy, including the remarks of Gorgias on (...) theatrical deception . The play points up its own constructedness in a variety of ways, most strikingly in the theatrical character of the intrigue by which Odysseus deceives Philoctetes, which provides a play within a play and a representation of texts and readers, plays and spectators. In laying bare the kinds of strategies and techniques that undergird this "intratext," "Philoctetes" offers a model of tragedy and of the tragic poet based on power, deceit, and manipulation. Yet by attributing these characteristics to the moral deficiencies of its internal creator and by demonstrating his failure to achieve his ends, "Philoctetes" rejects such a theater of sophistry. At the same time, the play considers issues of textual reception by providing in Philoctetes an audience for this internal text and a protocol of reading that suggest a more positive model of tragic response. "Philoctetes" uses this model to offer the spectator a subject position that affirms the inherent value of reading tragedy, a humanistic model of reading based upon the audience's identification with and sympathy for the tragic protagonist. Sophocles thus finds in this exercise in self-representation a way to frame critical questions on dramatic theory and to define his own dramatic practice. (shrink)