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)

In the famous exchange between Passennus Paulus and Javolenus Priscus at Plin. Ep. 6.15, it has not been previously recognized that Priscus’ reply is metrical and carries on the hexameter begun by Paulus. This opens up some interesting new possibilities for the interpretation of the letter.

In the interpretation of fragments the omission or neglect of even the most minute detail can lead a scholar to false conclusions or to ill-founded speculations. How careful one must be to draw out every possibility and nuance from every little piece of textual evidence can be seen in the following case. This is the text of Soph. fr. 781 as quoted by a late lexicographer : ὁ δὲ Σοφοκλῆς τὴν σφαῖραν ἔγχος κέκληκεν, οἷον “τὸ δ’ ἔγχος ἐν ποσὶ κυλίνδεται”.

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)

The tradition of poets presenting eulogy to the sultan, being common in Turkish-Islamic societies, has strong religious backgrounds. According to the people, the sultanate is of divine origin and obedience to the sultan is obedience to Allah and his Messenger. The people respected the sultans because the Ottoman sultans were seen as the last guardians of the order with their justice. There are many examples of this in literary works such as odes, masnavis, and historical, religious-mystical works. Therefore it is (...) a very shortsighted approach to think that every poet presenting an ode to the sultan only expects rank and material gain. Sultan Bayezid II is an artist and an art-loving sultan who generously patronized scholars, artists and especially poets from all over the world during his princedom of in Amasya and his thirty-one-year reign (1481-1512). Being as an important calligrapher, composer and poet, Sultan Bayezid II is popularly known as "saint" in public. An inâmât book including registers of the gifts given to the poets during the reign of Sultan Bayezid II are an indication of the importance that the sultan gave to the poets. However most of the poets patronized by Sultan Bayezid II are unknown. Jauhari who is one of these poets, also his life and works are unknown. In this article, the newly found poems of Jauhari and the findings about his life are introduced. (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.

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)

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)

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)

A defense of the value of studying what Aristotle, in the Politics, refers to as useless things, and thereby a defense of the 'uselessness' of the study of the liberal arts.

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)

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)