Rnd3/RhoE has two distinct functions, regulating the actin cytoskeleton and cell proliferation. This might explain why its expression is often altered in cancer and by multiple stimuli during development and disease. Rnd3 together with its relatives Rnd1 and Rnd2 are atypical members of the Rho GTPase family in that they do not hydrolyse GTP. Rnd3 and Rnd1 both antagonise RhoA/ROCK‐mediated actomyosin contractility, thereby regulating cell migration, smooth muscle contractility and neurite extension. In addition, Rnd3 has been shown to have a (...) separate role in inhibiting cell cycle progression by reducing translation of cell cycle regulators, including cyclin D1 and Myc. We propose that Rnd3 could act as a tumour suppressor to limit proliferation, but when mutations bypass this activity of Rnd3, it can promote cancer invasion through its effects in the actin cytoskeleton. (shrink)

I argue for a version of logical pluralism based on the plurality of legitimate formalizations of the logical vocabulary. In particular, I argue that the apparent rivalry between classical and relevant logic can be resolved, given that both logics capture and formalize normative and legitimate senses of logical consequence: classical logic encodes “follows from” as truth preservation and captures the truth conditions of the logical constants, while relevant logic encodes a notion of “follows from” which, apart from preserving truth, avoids (...) the violation of certain Gricean maxims and captures a different inferential role for the same logical constants, enriching their meaning pragmatically. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to present a pluralist thesis about the inferential role of logical constants, which embraces classical, relevant, linear and ordered logic. That is, I defend that a logical constant c has more than one correct inferential role. The thesis depends on a particular interpretation of substructural logics' vocabulary, according to which classical logic captures the literal meaning of logical constants and substructural logics encode a pragmatically enriched sense of those connectives. The paper is divided (...) into four parts: first, I introduce the motivation for the pluralist thesis of the paper; second I introduce the calculus for the different logics endorsed in the pluralist thesis; third, I motivate how the different behaviors of the logical vocabulary of these logics can be pragmatically interpreted, and fourth, I motivate how the different inferential roles that each substructural logic attribute to logical constants can coexist, and how we should reason with a logical constant c given this plurality. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a general solution to the paradoxes of the material conditional, including the paradoxes generated by embedded conditionals. The solution consists in a pragmatic reinterpretation of the formal languages of classical logic LK and relevant logic LR as presented in Paoli. In particular I argue that the material conditional in the classical logic LK captures the truth conditions of “if...then”, but ignores certain pragmatic enrichments that are associated to it, while relevant logic LR (...) can give a systematic diagnostic of the cases in which a conditional is pragmatically enriched and those cases in which it is not. This diagnostic shows the reason why the paradoxes seem unacceptable and why they are, nevertheless, truth-preserving. This reinterpretation will also cover the solution that Paoli gives to McGee’s paradoxes of the Modus Ponens. (shrink)

According to an intuitive picture of relevant entailment, an entailment is relevant if all the formulas it contains contribute to its validity. In this paper, we provide a ground-theoretic analysis of this notion of contribution, and as a result of relevant entailment. We build a system of bilateral logical grounding within which we can derive classical entailment and analyze the contribution of premises and conclusions, in terms of a certain type of connection between their respective logical grounds. The resulting framework (...) is shown to have a strong unifying and explanatory power by bringing together the notions of grounding and relevance and explaining the commonalities and differences between alternative contribution-based accounts of relevance. (shrink)

The conclusion of Chrysalus' famous canticum comparing the successful duping of his master Nicobulus to the sack of Troy has often been suspected by critics : nunc Priamo nostro si est quis emptor, comptionalem senemuendam ego, uenalem quem habeo, extemplo ubi oppidum expugnauero.Now, if there's any buyer for our Priam, I'll sell as a job lot the old man, whom I have for sale as soon as I've stormed the city.The lines are condemned by Leo, Gaiser, and Jocelyn, but (...) defended by Lefèvre and printed by Lindsay, Barsby, Questa, and most recently De Melo. In addition to qualms about the inconsistency of casting Nicobulus as Priam here when he was Ilium little over thirty lines earlier – an inconsistency which can surely be attributed to the ebullience of Chrysalus rather than the incompetence of an interpolator – the main objection to these lines is their divergence from the mythological tradition about Priam's fate at the sack of Troy. As Jocelyn puts it, ‘The threat senem uendam … would have been ludicrous to any audience acquainted with the heroic story.’. (shrink)

he true relation between these scenes and historic fact is more mysterious and less simple. The metamorphosis takes place on a higher plane. Historic events and the poet's inner experience are stripped of everything accidental and actual. They are removed from time and transported into the large and distant land of Myth. There, on a higher plane of life, they are developed in symbolic and poetic shapes having a right to an existence of their own. The fact, therefore, that the (...) subjection of the storm is described in a simile for a moment highlighting a very important sphere of the poem is more decisive than a possible allusion to the younger Cato. (shrink)

he true relation between these scenes and historic fact is more mysterious and less simple. The metamorphosis takes place on a higher plane. Historic events and the poet's inner experience are stripped of everything accidental and actual. They are removed from time and transported into the large and distant land of Myth. There, on a higher plane of life, they are developed in symbolic and poetic shapes having a right to an existence of their own. The fact, therefore, that the (...) subjection of the storm is described in a simile for a moment highlighting a very important sphere of the poem is more decisive than a possible allusion to the younger Cato. (shrink)

In the Iliad the symbolic value of gifts as tokens of reciprocity is more important than their material value. This is exemplified in the encounters of Diomedes with Glaucus in book 6 and Achilles with Priam in 24. Glaucus readily agrees to offer a much more valuable gift than Diomedes, and the narratorial suggestion that Zeus took away Glaucus’ wits is not shaped as the report of a fact but captures the views or feelings of observers such as members (...) of the audience. Achilles agrees to release the body of Hector in exchange for gifts. As Glaucus and Diomedes seal their pact and renew the ancestral guest-friendship relationship with the exchange of gifts, so Achilles seals his pact with Priam and his earlier one with the dead Patroclus with the acceptance and promise of gifts respectively. (shrink)

Nietzsche penetrates behind any rational discussion to its affective ground, but though he goes deeper than Gadamer's fusion of horizons, he nevertheless fails to acknowledge any other affective disposition besides the will to power. Hence for him Gadamer's Sichverständigung, or reaching an understanding, is fiction. In contrast, Gadamer's Zugehörigkeit, a sense of kinship, and Nachlassen, relenting, suggest not only the possibility of reaching an understanding but its real, affective ground. Two passages from Homer's Iliad illustrate how Nietzsche might penetrate behind (...) Gadamer's intellectualism yet how, at the same time, Gadamer ultimately gets beyond Nietzsche. In Book I, Achilles and Agamemnon can get no further than strife because of their pathos of rage and hostility. Here Nietzsche's will to power explains their altercation entirely. On the other hand, when Achilles is confronted with the devastated Priam in book XXIV, philia and eleos, kinship and mercy, replace his anger; and with the corresponding affective shift in Priam from fear of Achilles to his own feelings of kinship and forgiveness, antipathy becomes sympathy. Only this fusion of affect allows them to reach an understanding. (shrink)

This article argues that the episode in Il. 24.552–658 involving Achilles and Priam brings out the hero’s ability to control his emotions – even if he did lose them momentarily – by means of his calculation of what will come next. This interpretation fits the compositional structure of the epic, whose closure is highlighted by the hero’s dramatized emotions in his encounter with the Trojan king.

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides'Bacchaeand again inThe Greeks and the Irrational, we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own debt to (...) him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection.The working out of the anger of Achilles in theIliadbegins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of theOdysseyhinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simplySuppliants, and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. (shrink)

AN inquiry into the use of paradeigma in the Iliad must begin with Niobe. At 24. 602 Achilles introduces Niobe in order to encourage Priam to have some food. The dead body of the best of Priam's sons has now been placed on the wagon ready for its journey back to Troy. Achilles says , ‘Now let us eat. For even Niobe ate food, and she had lost twelve children. Apollo and Artemis killed them all; they lay nine (...) days in their blood and there was no one to bury them, because Zeus had turned the people into stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. But she managed to eat some food, when she was tired of weeping. And now among the mountains, although turned into stone, she still broods over her sorrows. But come, let us also eat. You can weep for your son again later’. (shrink)

Did Plato see something that Aristotle missed? According to a familiar narrative, Plato regarded literature as dangerous to the aims of philosophy, and he accordingly exiled the poets from his ideal republic. By contrast, Aristotle is supposed to have reconciled literature and philosophy, not only through his appreciative account of epic and tragedy in the Poetics but also through his invocations of literary examples at crucial junctures elsewhere in his corpus, for example his use of the Trojan legend of (...) class='Hi'>Priam in the Nicomachean Ethics. (shrink)

AN inquiry into the use of paradeigma in theIliadmust begin with Niobe. At 24. 602 Achilles introduces Niobe in order to encourage Priam to have some food. The dead body of the best of Priam's sons has now been placed on the wagon ready for its journey back to Troy. Achilles says, ‘Now let us eat. For even Niobe ate food, and she had losttwelvechildren. Apollo and Artemis killed them all; they lay nine days in their blood and (...) there was no one to bury them, because Zeus had turned the people into stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. But she managed to eat some food, when she was tired of weeping. And now among the mountains, although turned into stone, she still broods over her sorrows. But come, let us also eat. You can weep for your son again later’. (shrink)

This article explores the allusive strategy of the late second-century cento-tragedy Medea attributed to Hosidius Geta, which recounts Medea's revenge against Jason using verses from the works of Virgil. It argues that the text's author recognized a consistent strand of characterization in earlier treatments of the Medea myth, whereby the heroine's filicide is presented as a corrupted sacrifice. Geta selectively uses verses from thematically significant episodes in the Aeneid—the lying tale of Sinon and the death of Laocoön; the murder of (...) Priam; the suicide of Dido—at key points to foreground the theme of pseudo-sacrificial violence. Geta's use of Virgil evinces a keen appreciation both of the symbolism of the broader mythic tradition in which his text is situated and of the original narrative contexts of the verses he recycles. The article's findings contribute to a growing recognition of the creative potential afforded by the cento technique. (shrink)

To, Odisej, ti zamudnežu piše Penelopa tvoja.Nič ne odpiši nazaj! Rajši mi pridi ti sam!Troja, odurna danajskim ženám, poteptana na tleh je!Priam in Troja tegà sploh nista vredna bila.O, da takrat, ko s svojim brodovjem je plul proti Šparti,bedno vlačugar končal v divjih bi morskih vodáh!V postelji ne bi prezebala zdaj, zapuščena in sama,tarnala ne bi, kako dnevi počasi teko,tuhtala ne bi, kako noči naj predolge si krajšam,ne bi ob statvah bedé vdova si utrujala rok.

These are the words Achilles speaks to Hektor, whom he has just struck with a fatal blow. He reminds the son of Priam how, after stripping Patroklos’ fallen body, Hektor made off with the fallen man's armour, which is Achilles’ own.

In memoriam: Mira Balija PlanincEuripides's Hecuba is not one of the best-known tragedies. The story is vividly memorable, however. Troy has fallen. The Greeks have finished their killing and plundering and have begun their homeward journey. As soon as they cross the Hellespont and make camp on what some might call the European side, in Thrace, they bury Achilles. The Trojan queen, Hecuba, is enslaved, as are the only two of her daughters who remain alive, Polyxena and Cassandra, the latter (...) to Agamemnon himself. Her husband Priam was killed at Troy, and so too were all of their many sons—except one: the youngest, Polydorus, who years before had been sent for his protection, along with a substantial amount of Trojan... (shrink)

Tree-chopping in the Aeneid has long been seen as a disturbingly violent symbol of the Trojans' colonization of Italy. The paper proposes a new reading of the poem which sees Aeneas as progressive extirpator not just of foreign rivals but also of his own Trojan relatives. Although the Romans had no family “trees” as such, their genealogical stemmata (“garlands”) had “branches” (rami) and “stock” (stirps), and their vocabulary of family relationships takes many of its metaphors from planting, adoption, and uprooting, (...) while plant life is often described in human metaphors. Imperial historians use the growth and collapse of trees to mark the rise and fall of dynasties; natural historians like Columella and Pliny use metaphors of adoption, abortion, and adultery to characterize the perversions of agriculture and horticulture. It is thus no coincidence that Aeneas' encounters with Hector, Priam, Deiphobus, and others often take place against a background of real or metaphorical trees (tree similes, headless or mutilated human trunks, ancient trees and woods). These encourage us to see an element of dynastic encroachment in scenes that look pious and peaceable but confirm Aeneas' ascendancy and claim to Trojan succession. The Polydorus episode in particular can be read not just as a grotesque interlude but as a nightmare about endlessly reproducing heirs; one loose strand from Priam's house is allowed to remain, while Virgil deals imperfectly with the problem of Aeneas' own successors. The paper ends by re-examining Virgil's account of grafting in Georgics 2 and arguing that it is viewed positively, perhaps in order to cast Augustus' adoption of heirs as a miracle solution. (shrink)

What have the following in common: Epimetheus, Paris, Anchises, and the suitors of Penelope? The ready answer might be that it must have something to do with women, for it requires no great thought to see that the attractions of femininity proved the undoing of three of them, while for Anchises life was never to be the same again after his encounter with Aphrodite. But suppose we add to our first group such figures as Zeus, Priam, Polynices, and Eumaeus? (...) The fates of all these characters as they, appear at certain points in the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and others give expression i to a network of interrelated sexual and economic anxieties that seem to underlie a { great deal of what the Archaic poets say about the female sex. In this article I 1 propose to explore a particular part of that network, which I have called the ? ‘Pandora complex’, since it is Hesiod′s version of the Pandora myth which provides the classic statement of the male dilemma over women, poised between the conflicting desires for sexual gratification and domestic stability.1. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Renaissance ExerciseRoy GlassbergDescribing the influence of Aristotle's Poetics on education in Renaissance Italy, Lane Cooper writes, "Before 15431 it was a regular academic exercise to compare a Greek tragedy with a Senecan, with the demands of the Poetics as a standard."2An interesting prompt for an article, one that I shall here pursue. In what follows, I compare Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus with Seneca's Trojan Women in terms of their (...) adherence to a set of three criteria culled from the Poetics, dramatic elements that were regarded by Aristotle as conducive to a well-constructed tragedy. For example, Aristotle writes in chapter 6 that "the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy [are] Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes."3 And that these are most effective when they occur concurrently (A, p. 41). Thus, I will inquire of each play whether it includes a scene of reversal and recognition and whether these happen simultaneously.Criterion one: Aristotle states in chapter 13 that "a well-constructed plot should … be single in its issue rather than double as some maintain" (A, p. 47). The plot of Trojan Women is double, one line of action leading to the death of Astyanax, the son of Hector and Andromache, and the other to the death of Polyxena, the daughter of Hecuba and Priam. The plot of Oedipus Tyrannus, on the other hand, is single, with its action focused on Oedipus from its beginning through its middle to its end. [End Page 490]Criterion two: Aristotle tells us in chapter 13 that "a perfect tragedy should … imitate actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation" (A, p. 47). He further remarks that "pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune and fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves" (p. 45). Thus, we pity Andromache and Hecuba for the loss of their children and fear the loss of our own. Similarly, we pity Oedipus for his unmerited misfortune, his situation being the result of a curse brought down upon Laius, his father. And we fear being subject, ourselves, to unmerited divine hostility.Criterion three: As noted above, reversal and recognition are regarded by Aristotle as providing "the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy" (A, p. 27).In Oedipus Tyrannus, reversal and recognition transpire simultaneously when the messenger comes bearing good news that turns out to be bad news: that the king and queen of Corinth are not Oedipus's real parents.4 We find no scenes of reversal and recognition in Trojan Women.Thus, in comparing Oedipus Tyrannus with Trojan Woman in terms of the three criteria presented above, the game goes to Sophocles.Roy GlassbergPortland, OregonFootnotes1. 1543 was the date of Cinthio's translation of Aristotle's Poetics into Italian, thus making the students' efforts at their own translations moot.2. Lane Cooper, The "Poetics" of Aristotle: Its Meaning and Influence (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963), p. 201.3. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1951), p. 27; hereafter abbreviated A.4. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 54–55.Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This article examines social interaction in Homer in the light of modern conversation analysis, especially Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Some notoriously problematic utterances are explained in terms of their 'off-record' significance. One particular off-record conversation strategy is characterized by Homer as kertomia, and this is discussed in detail. The article focusses on social problems at the end of Achilles' meeting with Priam in Iliad 24,. and in particular on the much-discussed word "epikertoméon" (24.649).

This article examines social interaction in Homer in the light of modern conversation analysis, especially Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Some notoriously problematic utterances are explained in terms of their significance. One particular off-record conversation strategy is characterized by Homer as kertomia, and this is discussed in detail. The article focusses on social problems at the end of Achilles' meeting with Priam in Iliad 24, and in particular on the much-discussed word (24.649).

From beginning to end, the poem is literally made up of relations…[that] constitute a method of contemplation and criticism, a way of inviting the reader to think in terms of one thing in terms of another. Consider, for example, Odysseus' trip to Chryse in book 1, a passage I never read without surprise: in this tense and heavily charged world, in which everything seems to have been put into potentially violent contention, why are we given this slow and deliberate journey, (...) so heavily formulaic in texture? The answer is that this is a ritual of reconciliation, a kind of healing, which will receive its most ample performance at the great movement in book 24 when Achilles and Priam share their sorrows. A movement begins here that will run throughout the poem.It is by such an art of arrangement, by placing one thing against another, that Homer criticizes the world of book 1 with which he began; not, as we expect of a writer today, by elaborating competitive languages of motives and value but by ordering his materials into patterns of experience that teach the reader something different from anything the material itself seems to say.1 In a way the poem, as a whole thus has the form of argument; not, of course, argument in the ratiocinative sense of a thesis supported by propositions, from which it can be said to proceed by the rules of logic or the laws of probability, but argument as an activity of critical engagement, a definition of resources and a testing of limits, that results in the creation of a new position taken by the writer and offered to the reader. An argument goes on in the text, but its method is closer to that of music than debate.· 1. Cf. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition chap. 6, for another view of the ways that formula and image combine.James B. White is a professor in the law school, the college, and the committee on the ancient Mediterranean world at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Legal Imagination, Constitutional Criminal Procedure, and a book on rhetoric and culture, from which the present article is drawn. (shrink)

The meaning of κερτομω and its congeners in Homer has been the subject of debate in this journal. Jones has argued that ‘to κερτομω someone is to speak in such a way as to provoke a powerful emotional reaction’, whether of anger or fear, and thus means ‘“to utter stinging words at [someone]”, “pierce to the heart”, “cut to the quick”, rather than merely “provoke” This definition seems to work well enough for some cases, but certainly not for all, and (...) especially not for the passage from which the whole controversy began: Iliad 24.649, where Achilles speaks to Priam ༐πικερτομέωυ. As Richardson says in his Iliad commentary, ‘there is no sign that Akhilleus’ speech has this direct effect [i.e. arouses fear] on Priam’. Jones's article was responding to an earlier one by J. T. Hooker, who attempted to ascertain the sense of Achilles’ ༐πικερτομέυ by surveying the usage of kertom- words throughout Homeric epic. He concluded that the basic meaning is ‘to taunt’ or, more abstractly, it ‘indicates the provocation of another person into behaving in a certain way, whether that is the behaviour desired by the speaker… or is not desired by the speaker’. The problem was that this definition did not seem to fit the very line from which his inquiry began, the words of Achilles to Priam. Hooker then hypothesized that the verse betrayed signs of an ‘imperfect adaptation’ of a different version of the poem in which Achilles taunted a defeated enemy or perhaps preserved his grudge against Agamemnon to its end. This explanation is unpersuasive. (shrink)

Despite the importance of the Judgement of Paris in the story of the Trojan War, the Iliad has only one explicit reference to it. This occurs, rather out of the blue, in the final book of the poem in a dispute among the gods about the treatment of Hector's body. Achilles keeps dragging the body around behind his chariot, but Apollo protects it with his golden aegis. Apollo then speaks among the gods and attacks the conduct of Achilles, claiming at (...) the end that he offends the dumb earth. Other gods too have their concerns about what is going on, and they keep trying to get Hermes to snatch the body away. The three most powerful divine enemies of Troy, however, Hera, Poseidon and Athena, will have none of this. They remain as hostile to Troy and Priam and his people as they ever were, and it is in this context that the Judgement of Paris is mentioned: ἔνθ' ἄλλοις μὲν πᾶσιν ἑήνδανɛν, οὐδέ πoθ' Ἥρῃοὐδὲ Ποσɛιδάων' οὐδὲ γλαυκώπιδι κούρῃ,ἀλλ' ἔχον ὥς σϕιν πρῶτον ἀπήχθɛτο Ἴλιος ἱρὴκαὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς Ἀλɛξάνδρου ἕνɛκ' ἄτης,ὃς νɛίκɛσσɛ θɛάς, ὅτɛ οἱ μέσσαυλον ἵκοντο,τὴν δ' ᾔνησ' ἥ οἱ πόρɛ μαχλοσύνην ἀλɛγɛινήν.And this was pleasing to all the others, but never to Heranor to Poseidon, nor to the flashing-eyed maiden,but they remained hostile to sacred Ilios as in the beginning,and to Priam and to his people, because of Alexander's folly,he who insulted the goddesses when they came to his inner courtyardand praised her who provided his grievous lust. (shrink)

Chryses' supplication of Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad is anomalous in three interconnected ways: neither the language nor the gestures is typical of supplications in the Iliad, and there is no mention of the family of the person supplicated. These apparent difficulties, however, allow Chryses' supplication to play its role in the economy of the narrative. In some ways Chryses' supplication matches Priam's supplication of Achilles, since in both incidents a father asks for the return of his (...) child. But in other ways Chryses' supplication does not match this or other typical supplications in the epic. Chryses' supplication is described by the narrator with the verb λίσσομαι but most of the uses of λίσσομαι occur in situations which are not strong supplications. In general, supplication is characterized by the verbs γουνοῦμαι and γουνάζομαι often coupled with the action of grasping the knees, but Chryses does not use submissive language and gestures. Chryses, like Achilles, can invoke divine aid when he is wronged. If Chryses' speech act had not been a supplication, the parallel with Priam's situation would be impossible, but if it had been typical, then the parallel with Agamemnon's treatment of Achilles would be impossible. Moreover, the lack of an appeal to familial pity may be interpreted as a subtle allusion to the story of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis and as a comment on the characterization of both Chryses and Agamemnon; and the lack of the language or gestures of submission allows Achilles to interpret and to re-interpet this first event, to place himself in two different roles, the supplicant and the supplicated, as his own understanding of the events of the story grows and deepens. (shrink)

Tippett is often cast as a composer with a strong visionary streak, but what does that mean for a twentieth-century artist? In this multi-faceted study, David Clarke explores Tippett's complex creative imagination - its dialogue between a romantic's aspirations to the ideal and absolute, and a modernist's sceptical realism. He shows how the musical formations of works such as The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam, and The Vision of Saint Augustine resonate with the aesthetic and theoretical ideas of key figures (...) in modern Western culture - some known to have been influential to the composer, others not usually associated with him. Analyses of late works such as the Triple Concerto and Byzantium also speculate on Tippett's sexuality as a critical element in his creative and political consciousness. (shrink)

In a short speech in Book 24 of the Iliad , Priam tells Hecuba of his intention to visit the camp of the Achaians in order to attempt to ransom the body of Hector. Hecuba responds with predictable consternation to this dangerous proposition.

In a short speech in Book 24 of the Iliad, Priam tells Hecuba of his intention to visit the camp of the Achaians in order to attempt to ransom the body of Hector. Hecuba responds with predictable consternation to this dangerous proposition.

‘The Thebans have also a grave of Hektor, son of Priam, beside a spring which is called the Spring of Oedipus, and they say that they brought his bones from Ilium in consequence of the following oracle: “Thebans who dwell in the city of Cadmus, If you wish your clan to dwell with noble wealth, Bring to your homes the bones of Hektor, son of Priam, From Asia and by the command of Zeus worship him as a hero.”’.

‘My own father’, Achilles says to Priam in the last book of the Iliad, ‘was a rich man and a powerful one. He was king of the Myrmidons, and he had a divine wife. But even so the gods gave him evils too. He had no family, only one son, and that son a παναώριος one. I do not look after him in his old age, but am far away, sitting here in Troy, inflicting misery on you and your (...) children.’The problem I propose to discuss is the meaning of παναώριος. The word is unique to this passage, and the standard translation ‘of all-untimely fate’ or ‘doomed to die young’ is open to many objections. I shall argue that by describing himself as ‘untimely’ what Achilles means is that he is someone who is always doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, a misfit. It may seem a petty point, hardly worth the long argument that will be needed to establish it. But it has consequences for our judgement of the Iliad as a whole. If the one interpretation is correct, then Homer is content to repeat his effects without regard to the situation of his characters, which in any other author we would call careless writing. On the other interpretation he is capable of focusing down to quite detailed nuances. The question is not therefore one of lexicology alone but also of literary criticism.The translation ‘all-untimely doomed’ has warrant from antiquity. Leaf quotes a scholium παντελ⋯ς ἄωρον ⋯ποθανούμενον, and the word ⋯ωρία is used by a scholiast at 1.505 to refer to the fate by which Achilles was to die early. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of ConscienceEric SpencerDaemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of Conscience, by Ned Lukacher; x & 228 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $37.50 cloth, $15.95 paper.Daemonic Figures is a specialist’s book twice over. Profiting from it requires not only considerable familiarity with Heidegger, but also unquestioning acceptance of the rhetorical conventions and critical methods of contemporary theory. Lukacher uses these conventions and (...) methods to argue that conscience, properly understood, poses uncomfortable questions about the origins of self-knowledge, and leads to a mysterious but presumably enriching encounter with the limits of our certainty. Shakespeare enters the argument as the supreme example of a poet who discovers, through sensitivity to the ambiguities of language, how to peer without flinching into the Heideggerian abyss. Although the book relies too heavily on Heidegger’s unforgiving idiom, and pauses too seldom to justify suggestive but tenuous claims, at its heart lie hard, interesting questions about what having a conscience means.Lukacher wishes to restore to the idea of conscience all its paradoxical force. As a silent inner voice carrying a moral imperative from elsewhere, conscience immediately suggests an internally divided self. And although, according to Lukacher, Christian tradition locates the source of the imperative in God, and classical tradition in natural law, conscience remains irreducibly “uncanny,” because “the most intimate site of human habitation [i.e., the self] is also the strangest of places, for it is there that the (unfamiliar) god comes to presence through the language of moral judgment that tells us that we are and that because we are what we are we should act thus” (p. 7). For Lukacher, then, the question of conscience is the question of being, a question without an answer because it involves the unthinkable idea of something prior to and beyond being. The book argues that whatever speaks to us under the name of conscience must be both within and without any categories we have to explain it.Hence “daemonic figures”: drawing on the Greek notion of a realm of daimones dwelling between the human and divine worlds, Lukacher claims that the “daemon is the cipher, the name, and the figure for the incontrovertible [End Page 240] ghostliness, the familiar strangeness, that dwells between the perceptions and reflections of consciousness and the enigmatic ground of Being itself” (p. 2), or “the medium in which we come to ourselves as precisely that which is divided from itself... from the outset” (p. 6). And because, in Lukacher’s scheme, language articulates this daemonic mediation, we must seek in literary works which explore conscience—like Hamlet and Macbeth—traces of uncanniness welling up through ostensibly coherent words. Literary value accordingly involves “giving us the words with which to bring that enigmatic lack to presence” (p. 92). Simultaneously ubiquitous and inscrutable, conscience both calls to and evades us, and literature makes its home in such paradoxical territory.It follows that Lukacher seeks in texts brief flashes of something else in the midst of what’s apparently going on, a procedure which constantly risks arbitrary idiosyncrasy. For instance, in his chapter on Hamlet, Lukacher notes that the Player’s description of Priam’s death includes a line—“and with a hideous crash / Takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear”—whose sequence of sounds produces a ghostly authorial signature: sh... akes... Pyr... ear. And because this “countersignature” appears fragmented, in a context of hesitation, destruction and decline, Lukacher claims it creates an allegory of the “nonrelation at the heart of self-revelation” (p. 135). That is, it (and the larger drama of Hamlet’s revenge to which it obliquely gestures) reveals that at the heart of authorship, of authorized speech, of the moral law of conscience, lies “the silent play of the letter” (p. 135), the “daemonic figure” of dissolution in the midst of self-assertion, which unsettles all authorization. Hence Hamlet’s famous difficulties—he hears the whisper of Otherness in what ought to be a straightforward moral imperative to vengeance.Lukacher justifies this procedure by noting that “Derrida’s writing, no less than that of Heidegger [and presumably Shakespeare], relies on the invention of figures and metaphors through which... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of CharacterGraham ZankerAchilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, by Jonathan Shay; xxiii & 246 pp. New York: Atheneum, 1994, $20.00.This book, a study of posttraumatic stress disorder victims among U.S. Vietnam veterans which considers the Iliadic Achilles as a test-case, has a clear tripartite structure. First, the causes of PTSD are located in a sense of (...) betrayal by superior officers which results in a shrinkage of social and moral horizons to include only one’s closest friend who, if killed, triggers off guilt and frequently the berserk state. The parallel with Achilles’ relations with Agamemnon, Patroklos, and Hektor is strikingly close.Second, Shay discusses the importance of honoring the enemy, as he finds happens in the Iliad; remarks on “what Homer left out,” like deprivation; illustrates the limitations placed by luck upon the soldier’s virtue, engaging usefully with the work of Martha Nussbaum in the context of the Iliad and actual modern combat; and considers the Homeric gods as “REMFs” (Rear Echelon Mother-Fuckers), a droll notion by no means devoid of truth.The third section argues for the inadequacy of the U.S. definition of PTSD and offers suggestions for preventing the disorder, like proper grieving for the dead, and strategies for treating it, including the communalization of the trauma by narrative, which Shay sees in exemplary form in Attic tragedy.The four reservations I set forth here are meant on the whole to offer the perspective of a Homerist, and are discussed in detail in my The Heart of Achilles: Characterization and Personal Ethics in the Iliad. First, Shay recognizes the vital role of honor in Iliadic society, but does not point home quite clearly enough that honoring the enemy was built into the Iliadic warrior-ethic: the intensely individualistic sense of honor insisted that combatants knew one another by [End Page 376] name, for anonymity was uniformly detested. Thus, when Shay makes his convincing case for honoring the foe in modern combat as benefiting the mental health of combatants and veterans, his suggestion that the Iliad’s warriors were acting “properly” should, I feel, have been accompanied by a distinction between Iliadic and modern motives for honoring the enemy. Second, Shay could profitably have probed more deeply into Achilles’ reasons for refusing the supplication of the Achaians: Achilles now expresses doubt over honor as the driving factor in human effort, for he claims that the only ultimate honor is shared by warriors both great and small—death. Third, I suggest that Shay underplays the meeting of Priam and Achilles in Iliad 24 where, as I have argued, Achilles goes far beyond what is commended by the reciprocity-driven warrior honor code, achieving a magnanimity which modern philosophers like Bernard Williams would call altruism. Fourth, Shay denies that any true war story can carry a moral (p. 183). If Book 24 shows Achilles to any degree restating or refining the generosity admitted by the “code,” the Iliad, for one, assuredly carries a moral. The narrative is bleak, but the narrator leaves the audience uplifted by the thought that pity and kindness can meaningfully be extended even to an enemy, given that all humanity is subject to forces beyond its control, an idea explicitly stated in Achilles’ image of the Jars of Zeus.That said, and while this book is targeted primarily at medical professionals, literary scholars will be fascinated to find the Iliad used sometimes as an exemplar for modern war practice, for instance in Shay’s commendation of Diomedes’ moderation during combat, sometimes as strikingly paralleling the mental processes of the modern soldier, especially, of course, in the progress of Achilles. Putting the relationship of Achilles and Patroklos in the context of the experience of the Vietnam berserker, for example, adds a significant dimension to what has often been felt to be a mysteriously underdeveloped presentation of the friendship. Scholars will be grateful to see a respected psychiatrist reminding us that Homer’s original audiences, with their frequent experience of warfare in the service of their local lords, would have been particularly alert to any psychological improbabilities... (shrink)