Abstract:The moral and political implications of new forms of organisation and resource allocation in education are explored. Markets, even when heavily regulated and administered, induce effects contrary to the values of individual and social freedom upon which public education is understood to be founded. Their ‘efficiency’ as allocative and distributive mechanisms is questioned and examined specifically in relation to the formative and constitutive role of community life in conferring identity and autonomy upon individuals. Competition, it is claimed, leads to stratification (...) of opportunities and outcomes. Putative efficiency gains may be outweighed by equity losses. (shrink)

Aksumite elites electively identified themselves as “black” in relation to the paler integument of other Mediterranean peoples. Prior to the fourth century CE, the proper noun Aithiopía referred to the area of northern Sudan. Aksum, however, deliberately appropriated the Greek term for its own geopolitical purposes, partly as a way to write itself both into the grand narratives of Graeco-Roman history, where “Ethiopians” recurrently figure as morally “blameless,” as well as—with their conversion to Christianity—into Old and New Testamental eschatologies that (...) consistently position “Ethiopians” as first in the sight of God. This process of self-definition—achieved under the formative gaze of Hellenic, Roman, and Levantine Others—ultimately allowed ‘Ityȯpyā to become a key, if nonetheless still liminal and rogue, player in the post-Constantinian politico-religious arena, in such a way that both economic and cultural capital accrued to the benefit of Aksum. (shrink)

This article considers Catullus’ reaction to his brother’s death and argues that the poet, having found the masculine vocabulary of grief inadequate, turns to the more expansive emotions and prolonged dedication offered by mythological examples of feminine mourning. I begin by showing how Catullus complicates his graveside speech to his brother in poem 101 by invoking poems 65, 68a, and 68b. In these compositions, Catullus likens himself to figures such as Procne and Laodamia, and their feminine modes of grief become (...) associated with the poet. While these women’s grief brings them to a dreadful end, in my second reading of poem 101 I show how Catullus incorporates their emotional intensity and devoted attention into a masculine performance of mourning. Connecting his voyage to his brother’s grave with Odysseus’ journey, Catullus valorizes his single-minded remembrance of his sibling, even as he acknowledges that he will never overcome the distance between them. (shrink)

This study examines a recurrent scenario in Roman poetry of the first-person genres: the separation of the poet from his writing tablets. Catullus' tablets are stolen ; Propertius' are lost ; Ovid's are consigned to disuse and decay by their disappointed owner. Martial, who does not reproduce the specific narrative of loss, nonetheless engages with the tradition of lost tablets from within the fiction of festive gift-exchange in his Apophoreta : rather than losing or rejecting the tablets, he gives them (...) away to guests/readers at his Saturnalian party. I argue that the representation of writing tablets and their loss is involved in the production of authorial presence. The scene of lost tablets demonstrates how the poet retains the capacity for poetic speech even when deprived of the aid of his material medium. The ostensibly accidental and sometimes lamented loss of the poet's tablets thus contributes to a sophisticated strategy of authorial self-representation. The tablets do not so much stand for the literary text as provide a focus for metapoetic concerns with voice and writing, author and text, presence and absence, immortal ingenium and expendable materia. Examination of the shifting representation of writing tablets from Catullus to Martial will provide insight into the invention of the Roman poetic author. (shrink)

This essay attempts a reevaluation of the use of Greek tragedy in Vergil's Aeneid, drawing on recent advances in the study of literary allusion and on current approaches to Greek drama which emphasize the importance of social context. I argue that extensive allusions to the figure of Ajax in the Aeneid serve as a subtext for the construction of the personae of Dido and Turnus. The allusive presence of Ajax attests to the existence of a tragic register in the epic, (...) which intersects with and complicates the multiple allusive registers within the poem. Moreover, I propose that a detailed examination of Vergil's manipulation of tragedy's articulation of socio-political and ideological problems may in turn illuminate the Aeneid as a national epic and its much-contested relationship with Augustan ideology. More specifically, I argue that issues of identity and moral action explored in Sophocles' Ajax are crucial in the cases of Dido and Turnus, who similarly find themselves in conflict with and unable to adapt to the new social and political structure of Aeneas' new order. Like Ajax, Dido and Turnus define themselves through constant reference to their relationship with their people. All three, however, engage in action which pits them against the interests of their communities and which results in their complete isolation. Unable to adjust their behavioral code to ensure their survival, Dido and Turnus embody a heroic ideal which, though laudable, can have no place in Aeneas' Roman future. Vergil thus mobilizes a tragic allusive register in order to illustrate the tension between the celebration of this ideal and the realization that social change has rendered it obsolete. At the same time, the loss of the ideals that Dido and Turnus represent necessitates the articulation of a comparable, if not superior, ethical code which Aeneas is called on to embody. Allusive evidence linking Aeneas to the tragic Ajax, however, seems to indicate Aeneas' failure to emerge as a superior moral force in the poem. (shrink)

This article describes how cc. 39 and 37 create distinct tones of voice and use them to preclude the social pretensions of Egnatius in different spheres. The style of c. 39, markedly oratorical—and non-Catullan—in the syntax of its opening lines, develops into the voice of a respectable senex by way of archaisms of vocabulary and syntax and is capped by a figure of humor otherwise absent from the polymetrics, the apologus. The style thus creates a voice perfectly suited to chastise (...) Egnatius' social ineptitudes and, more importantly, constitutes on the verbal level an embodiment of the standards of the urban elite. Catullus thus illustrates to Egnatius that a subtle system of social gestures can be learned - something which Egnatius, for all his apparent pretensions to social prominence, manifestly has not grasped, marred as he is by the habit of grinning inappropriately. C. 37, which ends with an attack on the same Egnatius, is far different in tone, commingling tokens of artfulness with vulgarity and forcefulness. That mixed style exercises ironic decorum towards Lesbia's lovers, who are themselves an oddly mixed group, well-off on the one hand, but "backstreet adulterers" on the other. But the two tones of voice, and indeed the two groups of lovers, also embody the paradoxes of the Roman construction of stylish behavior, which could be represented as elegant dalliance or reprehensible vice. Inasmuch as Egnatius' fashion affectations, ridiculed at the poem's end, fail to qualify him for the ranks of Lesbia's lovers, he is represented as outside sophisticated society, however it be constructed. In concert the two poems utterly derail Egnatius' social pretensions: c. 39 as it were outflanks him on the "right," barring him from respectable society, and c. 37 outflanks him on the "left," barring him from the "jet set.". (shrink)

As the narrator of the Ciris prepares to describe Cupid's attack on Scylla, daughter of Nisus, he offers a concise aretalogy of this powerful god : sed malus ille puer, quem nec sua flectere materiratum potuit, quem nec pater atque auus idemIuppiter,idem tum tristis acuebat paruulus irasIunonis magnae...

Elegies 1.19 and 2.15 combine the motifs of loss, desire, and writing in complex ways. In each poem, the speaker's attempt to recapture the past-to possess his beloved by writing about her-leads him to confront the imperatives of time and the limits of his own poetic art. Furthermore, because Cynthia is so closely identified with Propertius' project as an elegiac poet, she becomes a focus of literary as well as erotic unease. In poem 1.19, the narrator's anxiety about Cynthia's fidelity (...) discloses a deeper anxiety about the reception of his poetry, and about the ability of a text to represent its author faithfully once it enters the public domain. In contrast to 1.19, elegy 2.15 seems initially to resist the prospect of change and loss. In the first ten lines of the poem, the narrator affirms a kind of mastery over time and his beloved, re-creating a scene of pleasure from the past, and presenting Cynthia's unclothed body as the object of his and the reader's amorous gaze. Yet Cynthia's active role in the scene-the evidence of "her" desire-leads to the dissolution of the amatory tableau. Cynthia brings elements of narrative into the erotic spectacle created by the poet-lover; as in poem 1.19, she is associated with forces which threaten the text's stability or closure. In both elegies, however, the poet's fictive encounters with loss are productive as well as unsettling. Such fictions permit him to view both love affair and poetic project retrospectively, and to evaluate their significance. They give expression to literary anxieties, but also allow these anxieties to be explored and partially mastered. Finally, they offer a way of thinking about the limits of love, of representation, and of a writer's control over his text. (shrink)

According to many recent interpretations of Catullus 101, the ritual performance it describes serves primarily as a foil, highlighting the greater expressiveness and communicative power of the poem itself. I argue instead for using the complexities of Roman funerary ritual as a model for understanding the poem's ambiguities. As funerary offerings at once establish a bond between family members and the dead and affirm a distinction between them that allows the survivors to rejoin the society of the living, so the (...) poem articulates a tension between assertions of the brother's absence and intimations of his presence as addressee, even as speaker. Similarly, the split between the poem's fictional context as a one-time-only farewell to the brother and its existence as a repeatable literary artifact further accentuates the double allegiance of the poet. In the second section I consider how the poem, without being an epitaph itself, fulfills the functions of an epitaph, by allowing for the re-performance of the ritual, constructing the opposition between permanence and temporality present in the epitaph/monument complex, "inscribing" the brother's death at the prominent literary "crossroads" of the beginning of the Odyssey, and finally making the commemoration of the brother performed through each reading of the poem a sacrum that builds its audience into a community. (shrink)

Two of the most moving personal poems of Catullus, 8 and 76, present the reader with difficulties of interpretation which highlight the inadequacy of a very widely-held view of the nature of Catullus' personal poetry. In this view the poet is regarded as handling his own actual experience directly, so that the poems present reality, perhaps not entirely, but certainly to a degree that is not the case with the elegiac poets or with the Horace of the Odes. Extreme forms (...) of this view may be seen in the old idea that Catullus threw off the Lesbia poems as the odi or the amo of the moment constrained him, and in the more recent view that the poems can usefully be seen as either attempts to contain an overpowering wave of emotion or to state, and so get to grips with, a baffling personal problem. The first of these extreme forms has been long discredited, but the second still exerts a persuasive pressure, to judge by recent discussion of Catullus. (shrink)

Two of the most moving personal poems of Catullus, 8 and 76, present the reader with difficulties of interpretation which highlight the inadequacy of a very widely-held view of the nature of Catullus' personal poetry. In this view the poet is regarded as handling his own actual experience directly, so that the poems present reality, perhaps not entirely, but certainly to a degree that is not the case with the elegiac poets or with the Horace of the Odes. Extreme forms (...) of this view may be seen in the old idea that Catullus threw off the Lesbia poems as the odi or the amo of the moment constrained him, and in the more recent view that the poems can usefully be seen as either attempts to contain an overpowering wave of emotion or to state, and so get to grips with, a baffling personal problem. The first of these extreme forms has been long discredited, but the second still exerts a persuasive pressure, to judge by recent discussion of Catullus. (shrink)

The identity of the Caesar at "Aeneid", 1.286 is a long-standing problem. The prevailing opinion since Heyne favors Augustus, but a few scholars agree with Servius that the Dictator is meant. In recent years the suggestion that Vergil was being deliberately ambiguous has been advanced as a solution to the problem. I argue the case for Julius Caesar anew. The paper is in five sections. The first four deal respectively with the question of nomenclature; chronology; the descriptive epithets applied to (...) Caesar, especially spoliis Orientis onustum in 289; and the rhetoric of the passage. The fourth section confronts the challenge posed to my reading by the well-known view of Ronald Syme, held to throughout his lifetime, that Julius Caesar was a virtual non-person in the Rome of Vergil's day because the princeps tried to avoid awkward comparison with the Dictator. But this view has been challenged, and I draw on recent work in this area. In the fifth and final section I support my reading with references to Vergil's earlier poetry, attending especially to what it can tell us about Vergil's attitude toward Julius Caesar. Of particular relevance is the use he makes of the sidus Iulium, an image found in the Eclogues and important in connection with the apocalyptic outlook abroad at the time of Caesar's assassination. This section of the paper expands on Servius' generally neglected note, which maintains that the Caesar in question is Julius. (shrink)

Aeneas' encounter with Deiphobus forms a critical juncture in Vergil's "Aeneid". In the underworld Aeneas retraces his past to its beginning; so too Vergil's audience returns to its starting point: the fall of Troy. Deiphobus himself is a metonym of Troy, embodying her guilt and punishment. But Aeneas is frustrated in his attempt to reconcile himself to this past. Aeneas attempts the Homeric rites of remembrance-heroic tumulus and epic fama-but these prove to be empty gestures. The aition of Deiphobus' tomb (...) is revealed to have miscarried. Rhoeteum was known as the tomb and shrine of Telamonian Ajax, not Deiphobus, and Octavian's recent restoration of the Rhoetean memorial would have strengthened the already close association between Rhoeteum and Ajax in the mind of Vergil's audience. Vergil exploits Rhoeteum's resonance with Telamonian Ajax and Odysseus, Antony and Octavian, to reflect on the process of constructing national memory, a process of which epic is an integral part. Vergil suggests that one hero's memorial frequently involves the appropriation and effacement of another. In a similar vein, the heroic fama of Deiphobus which Aeneas had heard in Troy is proven false. Deiphobus' narrative of his death is replete with Odyssean allusions which critique both Homeric heroism and Homeric kleos. Evocative allusions to Catullus' laments for his brother suggest eternal elegiac mourning as an alternate generic model for memorial and reconciliation with the past. But Aeneas is denied this option. At the center of the epic, at high noon, on a cosmic crossroads, Aeneas is poised between past and future, between mourning and hope, between Deiphobus and Deiphobe, between epic and elegiac. The Sibyl interrupts and moves Aeneas forward. Aeneas is not purged of his past, but rather denied the opportunity for true reconciliation, which is bestowed not by forgetting but by remembrance. (shrink)

This article argues for an allusion in Virgil's Eclogue 4 to one of Pindar's victory odes. It will be suggested that this Pindaric pretext is viewed by the Latin poet through a Callimachean perspective which adds to it further layers of significance. Consequently, the evidence will be discussed for reading the allusion in terms of royal ideology which places Virgil's poem in the tradition of Hellenistic ruler-encomia.