This article focuses on a set of problems involving a controversial portion of the HHA that describes the performance of the Delian chorus in a rare instance of early performance criticism. First, the two variants for a key noun in line 162, bambaliastus and krembaliastus, are discussed. Skepticism is expressed about the applicability to this scene of the first variant. On the contrary, krembaliastus——the suitability of which has not been discussed in detail, even by scholars who seem to have favored (...) it——can make good sense. Literary and iconographic evidence makes it plausible that krembaliastus denotes the act of generating through percussion devices called krembala rhythmic patterns meant to govern stylized movement, what the Greeks called schêêmata. The marked term krembaliastus was probably employed to evoke a characteristic trait of the highly skilled Deliades. Furthermore, as vocal and kinetic activities were inextricably linked in choral practices, they are ultimately conceptualized as part of the same unified expressive mechanism. The author also questions the conventional interpretation of mimeisthai as ““mimicking,”” instead reading it as ““representation,”” involving the evocation of the essence of an entity but not necessarily exact reproduction of its formal details. Finally the essay argues that the Delian chorus' art of ““knowing how to represent the voices and the rhythmic patterns of all people”” designates the perfection of choral performance, as an all-inclusive enactment that forms a powerful trans-local bond. (shrink)

In the First Action of the Verrines Cicero highlights the issue of judicial corruption, which appears to be leading to the passage of legislation ending the senatorial monopoly on composition of the juries in the quaestio de repetundis. The work might theoretically, therefore, furnish an important study of how Cicero publicly positioned himself on a key political issue at a crucial point in his career. Historians, however, often dismiss the political impact of the work, arguing that jury reform was essentially (...) a fait accompli before the trial began. Rhetoricians likewise tend to understate its political importance, both because of its status as a substitute for a longer and fully elaborated oration and because of a pronounced tendency in recent scholarship to subordinate political comment in the judicial speeches to the immediate practical goals of legal advocacy. Cicero's prosecution of Verres, however, involved an unprecedented move in the orator's career. Through the trial he injected himself forcefully, and for the first time, into a contemporary political debate and thereby created for himself a new space from which to operate within the political landscape. (shrink)

This volume explores the political implications of the first five books of Livy's celebrated history of Rome, challenging the common perception of the author as an apolitical moralist. Ann Vasaly argues that Livy intended to convey through the narration of particular events crucial lessons about the interaction of power and personality, including the personality of the Roman people as a whole. These lessons demonstrate the means by which the Roman republic flourished in the distant past and by which it might (...) be revived in Livy's own corrupt time. Written at the precise moment when Augustus' imperial autocracy was replacing the republican system that had existed in Rome for almost 500 years, the stories of the first pentad offer invaluable insight into how republics and monarchies work. Vasaly's innovative study furthers the integration in recent scholarship of the literary brilliance of Livy's text and the seriousness of its purpose. (shrink)