Wiener Studien ‒ Zeitschrift für Klassische Philologie, Patristik und lateinische Tradition, Band 129/2016

Literary criticism is considered to have originated in archaic Greek rhapsodic tradition advanced mainly by two persons, Xenophanes of Colophon and Theagenes of Rhegium. The popular theory, greatly supported by the authority of Rudolf Pfeiffer, runs as follows: Xenophanes once ceased to recite Homer and began to criticize his views; his attacks induced another reciter, Theagenes, to invent methods of protecting the poet. Thus the art of interpreting literary texts came into being. Various aspects of this scheme were criticized but the attempt to fully deconstruct it by reconsidering all the evidence was never made. Through a detailed analysis of testimonies this essay examines the possible origins of ‘rhapsodic philology’ and suggests a more realistic model.

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The objective of the present paper is to prove the inner coherence of Pindar’s Nemean 6. The kinship between Gods and men which is the subject of the famous proem provides the fundamental idea pervading the entire victory ode. The divine heritage inheres human beings as their inborn potential, which needs to be realized and developed. Thus the interpretation can also be understood as a correction of the scholarship’s tendency to overemphasize the dependency of men either on nature or Gods in Pindar’s work.

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This paper discusses an incoherence in the strophe of the second stasimon of Euripides’ Ion: against the general gist of the song and the entire play, Ion seems to be accused of having planned to intrude into Creusa’s family by employing an untruthful oracle. That sense, however, is only produced by a number of conjectures. If the interference with the transmission is reduced, the train of thought becomes coherent again: the strophe then deals with Ion’s integration into existing social structures.

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In this paper I mainly deal with two questions. Firstly, I examine the human characteristics that cannot be influenced by regimen as presented in ch. I 36 of De victu and especially the reasons why the Hippocratic author placed them outside the reach of dietetics; within this inquiry I will make an excursus on the theory of perception in ch. I 35. Secondly, I analyse the text of the voice analogy and offer an interpretation that suits the author’s intention.

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Recent interest in the Platonic Theages has revealed considerable disagreement over the interpretation of the dialogue’s lengthy and famous presentation of Socrates’ divine sign. Drawing on a close reading and philological analysis of the text of Theages and a full consideration of scholarship on the dialogue, this article seeks to demonstrate in detail the degree to which its presentation of Socrates’ sign is unique within the Platonic Corpus, the author’s motives for crafting this presentation, and the bearing which it has on the question of the dialogue’s meaning and authenticity.

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This paper sets out to explore a fairly trivial, yet curiously understudied question related to our understanding of Orphic mythology: its ties with popular mythology of Homeric and Hesiodic provenance. It uses the Orphic Hymn to Chthonios Hermes as a case in point, to the end of assessing the extent to which chthonic Hermes in Orphism owes a lot to its epic peers when transcribing what came to be viewed as traditional attributes of him such as lineage, psychopompic capacity, and presiding over sexual or marital rites of initiation within catabatic settings. I stake out the position that the narrative tradition represented by the Orphic Hymns innovates in the sense that it launches the multi-focal image of a mystagogic Hermes whose traditional traits are made to match the purposes of Orphic theology, given the latter’s over-emphasizing of eschatology and rituals of death and re-birth.

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This paper deals with some textual problems in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe. A new edition with German translation of Longus’ novel is to be published by the authors in 2016.¹ Here we discuss some of our divergences from the edition by M.D. Reeve (³1994).

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The first book of Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica describes the aristeia and death of the Amazon heroine Penthesilea. Close study of the narrative of the poet’s Penthesilead illustrates how Quintus manipulates and reverses the plot of Book 11 of Virgil’s Aeneid, the account of the equestrian battle in which the Volscian Camilla plays the central role.

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In the tradition of the political theory established by Plato and Aristotle Cicero asks for the best constitution and gives the answer in his work On the state. In a fictional dialogue, dated to the political crisis of the Gracchi in 129, Roman politicians led by Scipio Africanus come to the result that either the mixed constitution of the Roman republic or the monarchy is the best constitution for the Roman state. It is shown that with the form and contents of this fictional dialogue Cicero, in all probability, becomes the literary model for similar constitutional debates in the works of Cassius Dio and Philostrat.

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Scholars generally assume that Vergil portrays Tityrus as a literal slave in Eclogue 1, but I argue that it is preferable to interpret Tityrus as a metaphorical slave. libertas (27) may refer to the liberty that is won when Tityrus leaves his home and thereby escapes the metaphorical slavery of his mistress, Galatea, as well as to the liberty that is won when Tityrus is able to keep his property, in the context of land confiscations, and thereby have the liberty to enjoy otia (6). libertas (27), then, is a capacious term, but it need not have anything to do with literal slavery. The image of male slavery to a mistress, the servitium amoris trope, is particularly associated with the Augustan elegists, but the modern reader may choose to assume that Vergil introduces the trope in Eclogue 1, via an allusion to Theocritus’ Idyll 14.

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It is often said that in the first book of his epistles, Horace turns his back on poetry and converts to philosophy. However, as a freethinker, he does not subscribe to one single philosophical school, but rather expounds an autonomous eclecticism instead. – Beginning from an examination of the opening verses of Epistle 1, 1, the present article subjects this idea to a critical analysis and rejects it. In a second part, an alternative reading of Horace’s book of poetical letters is put forward.

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The following article focuses on aspects of the textual transmission of Ambrose’s De obitu Theodosii. It examines the content of (the fragmentary) manuscript Ferrara, Bibl. com. Ariostea Cl. II. 238, not known to the former editor of the speech, which is an interesting new witness of the text, and discusses its value for establishing the text of the speech, but also of Epistula extra collectionem 1 (the manuscript could have preserved original readings of this Epistula, not known so far, discussed below). Furthermore, the article sheds light on the interrelation of two important Milanese manuscripts transmitting De obitu Theodosii (Bibl. Ambrosian. B 54 inf. and I 71 sup.) and asks, if manuscript Bologna, Bibl. univ. 2531 (neglected by the former editor) could help to learn more about the text of manuscript Köln, Erzbischöfl. Dom- und Diözesanbibl. 32.

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