Words

This chapter focuses on words. An utterance was divided directly into words. These are literally the ‘parts’ of an utterance; and in practice the ancient terms were often interchangeable. A word was in Greek a lexis; in Latin a dictio. Both terms were technical. They were defined in grammars of either language by the place that words had in a hierarchy of vocal sound, of which the largest unit was again the logos or oratio. They were themselves the smallest parts of such a unit which, unlike a letter or a syllable, had meaning. For an ancient writer, a lexis or a dictio was what is now a ‘word-form’: a specific unit of an utterance that is related syntactically to others.

The heads of the Catechetical School in Alexandria

This is the second of two articles, the first article being concerned with general questions regarding the Didaskaleion in Alexandria. The account of the founding of the Didaskaleion in Alexandria is based on information provided by Eusebius of Caesarea (263�339), a Roman historian, exegete and Christian polemicist, in his well-known Historia Ecclesiastica, which he wrote during the first half of the 4th century. The heads of the Didaskaleion are, however, not indicated by Eusebius in an exhaustive order, as he referred to only some of them. The only ancient writer who attempted to assemble a list of heads at the Didaskaleion was Philip Sidetes (ca 380�440), also called Philip of Side (Side being a city in ancient Pamphylia, now Turkey), also a historian, of whom only a few fragments are extant. He provided a list of 13 heads (�teachers�), ending with Rhodon who allegedly was his teacher. This article will list and discuss all the scholars being referred to as heads of the Didaskaleion during her existence, which could date back to the second half of the 1st century CE and ended somewhere near the end of the 4th century.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Research about Africa done by Africans (inhabitants of Africa) needs to increase, because in many ways Africa is silent or silenced about her past. The fundamental question is: �Can anything good come out of Africa?� My answer is, �Yes! Come and see.� Therefore these two articles attempt to indicate the significance of Africa which was actually the place where Christian Theology was founded. This has intradisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary implications; in this case the investigation is done from a theological perspective.

Art and Archaeology

‘And verily so excellent he was in this perspective, that a man would say, his even, plaine, and flat picture were embossed and raised work.’ Philemon Holland's endearing 1601 translation of Pliny's Natural History (35.50) is one of the earliest documented references in English to ‘perspective’, understood as ‘the art of delineating solid objects upon a plane surface so that the drawing produces the same impression of apparent relative positions and magnitudes, or of distance, as do the actual objects when viewed from a particular point’ (OED). The passage relates to a Sicyonian painter called Pausias, whose penchant for representing oxen front-on, and yet conveying all their bulk and size, clearly impresses Pliny. But in a sour footnote, the Loeb edition comments: ‘there is no proof that perspective is meant’. It is true that the established text of Pliny does not support Holland's claim that Pausias ‘had a singular gift to work by perspective’. With the benefit of Renaissance expositions, Holland presumably knew what perspective was. But did Pliny know – or indeed did any other ancient writer or artist understand the basic principle of a vanishing point? Modern scholarship has been frustratingly incapable of answering that question, with authorities such as Panofsky and Richter concluding that the geometrical know-how existed, but was not applied, and others (e.g. John White) content to accept that artists understood the principle without needing its formal articulation. Given this aporia, one seizes Rocco Sinisgalli's monograph, Perspective in the Visual Culture of Classical Antiquity, with an eager hope that we may resolve the issue. It is a slim volume, and promises that ‘key concepts…are clarified and enhanced by detailed illustrations’ (cover). Alas, the diagrams rarely clarify or enhance the somewhat staccato text; and the central claim of the book, that ‘ancient theories of perspective were based primarily on the study of objects in mirrors, rather than on the study of optics and the workings of the human eye’ (cover), remains (appropriately, it may be) speculative. If read in a certain way, texts of Euclid and Ptolemy imply the use of mirrors by painters. But one has only to glance at the surviving text of Ptolemy's Optics, as translated from Arabic into Latin by a twelfth-century Sicilian admiral (sic) of Byzantine Greek origin, to see that it is the stuff of a very sadistic Latin Unseen; and that even if Ptolemy's terms meta (‘destination’) or nutus (‘sign’) be sympathetically understood as ‘principal vanishing point’, we could wish that Ptolemy – and indeed the other authors deployed by Sinisgalli, such as Lucretius and Vitruvius – had expatiated upon the utilization of a vanishing point by artists. The trompe-l'oeil trick of linear recession is played often enough in Roman wall-paintings – but that is not quite the same thing, and painters seem not to have been concerned about creating a complete illusion. Sinisgalli imagines Augustus at home on the Palatine, in the Room of the Masks: it is proposed that if the emperor was wearing slippers, with an eye-level at 1.48 metres, and in shadowy light, he would share in a unified ‘perspective’. But I fear we are still unsure.

George Christopher Stead 1913–2008

George Christopher Stead's aim, throughout his scholarly work, was to lay bare and explain. He was very good at it, as this first piece in 1961 shows. It is a fine example of Stead's mature thinking. All the features that distinguish his work and made it fresh at the time are apparent here: clarity and directness, thoroughness of research, a gift for illustration of a technical point of logic from plain examples; and the, perhaps most noticeable, sign of an essay on some patristic theme's being his very own–the presence in it of critical appraisal. Though Stead was, sometimes and in other contexts, to voice sharply destructive criticism, his appraisals are usually conducted, as in this first essay, so that sympathy with the ancient writer is preserved.

The Canal of Xerxes: summary of investigations 1991–2001

This paper summarizes the results of the earlier phase (1991–8) of geoarchaeological investigations at the Canal of Xerxes in northern Greece and then presents the findings of recent work. Through the combination of geophysical survey and analysis of sediments obtained from bore holes drilled along the supposed course of the canal it was established in 1996 that at least in the central sector of the 2 km wide isthmus there was indeed a deeply buried trench-like structure, c. 30 m wide. This is most likely to have been a canal that would have had a depth of water of up to 3 m. The recent work has explored first the situation at the southern end of the canal where one ancient writer claimed that the terrain would only have allowed the construction of a slipway (diolkos). However, seismic survey and sedimentological analysis of cores in that area found no obstacle to the digging of a canal. Second, the results of seismic survey (supported by the evidence of satellite imagery) at the northern end of the canal have suggested that its course was more easterly than that proposed earlier on the basis of the line of present-day lowest ground. In sum, all the indications are that there was a canal across the Athos peninsula and not a diolkos, and that the canal's features conform to those outlined by Herodotus in his description of the structure built by Xerxes to allow the Persian fleet into the Aegean for the invasion of Greece in 480 BC.

Juvenal's Libellus – A Farrago?

Little attention has been paid to the implications of the form of the ancient book for literary, as opposed to textual, criticism until very recently. The Arethusa volume entitled ‘Augustan Poetry Books’ (13.1.(1980)) has begun to plug that gap and has provided the impetus for the present article. The ancient book as known to the Classical authors was very different from the vellum codex which superseded it under Christian influence in the Early Empire and in turn formed the model for the modern printed book. We wish to draw attention to one aspect of the papyrus roll which has important implications for the ancient writer and reader.

The Eagle Portent in the Agamemnon an Ornithological Footnote

Professor Martin West's paper, titled ‘The Parodos of the Agamemnon’’, argues with characteristic learning and insight that Archilochus’’ fable of the fox and the eagle (frs. 174-81 West) was a major source for Aeschylus’’ description of the portent of the eagles and the pregnant hare in the parodos of the Agamemnon (108 ff.). The portent is vividly described by the chorus: two eagles, one black and one white behind feed upon a pregnant hare. Poetry is not real life, and Aeschylus’’ picture is not a naturalist's field-report. At the same time, an image's power increases in proportion to its precision, and I have no doubt that at some stage behind Aeschylus’’ description there was a personal sighting of a parallel incident by Aeschylus himself perhaps, or by Archilochus, or by an unknown figure who passed on his report. Fraenkel's commentary (p.69) avers that ‘precise zoological identification of the species of eagle named by Aeschylus must not be attempted.’’ This is a fair warning, but not for the reason advanced by Fraenkel here: the plumage variation among different birds of the same species, which makes the identification of large raptors in the wilds of Greece today a problem for even the most expert ornithologists. There are two better reasons. One will emerge in the course of this note. The other is that no ancient writer using the Greek language came at all near to the modern classification of eagle species native to Greece.

Tragedy and the Performance of Tragedy in Late Roman Antiquity

It is a widely held view that by the beginning of the Christian era the staging of full-length dramas had become very rare or had ceased altogether, and that any plays that were written during this time, like the ten 'Senecan’ plays that survive, were probably intended as no more than closet dramas. But the question of whether such plays were ever staged (and hence the question of whether they were intended to be staged or were even stageable) is complicated by the fact that the word ‘tragedy’ was also applied to other forms of dramatic performances: to the ballet of the pantomime artist (tragoedia saltata) and to short concert productions (tragoedia cantata). There was also thecitharoedia, a solo performance which consisted of a tragic aria accompanied by the lyre. Finally, the traditional kind of tragedy could be recited rather than staged. Each of these kinds of performances could take place in or out of the theater, with varying degrees of elaboration. When, therefore, an ancient writer speaks of the performance of a tragedy, it is not always clear just what type of production is being alluded to. When, for instance, Dio Cassius says that the Emperor Caligula just before his assassination (A.D. 41) wished to put on a ballet and enact a tragedy (ϰαὶ ὀϱχήσασθαι ϰαὶ τϱαγῳδίαν ὑποϰϱίνασθαι ἠθέλησεν) and announced that the revels would be prolonged three more days for the purpose, what does he mean ? Was there to be only one kind of performance or two? That is, were thepantomimusand hishypocritaeto dance and act a single tragedy, or was a story to be rendered first in dance, and then the same or another story acted out in dialogue and song? If the latter supposition is correct, was the tragedy to be a large-scale play or a modified and shortened concert tragedy? We know from Suetonius that the same play could be conceived of as being performed in different ways. He says that on the day before Caligula was killed, thepantomimusMnester danced the same tragedy that thetragoedusNeoptolemus had acted in the games at which Philip of Macedon was killed. Of course, in judging this matter we must also consider the question of how accurately the conceptions and practices reported by Suetonius (ca. 120) and Dio (ca. 220) correspond to those of Caligula's time.

Aristophanic and other Audiences

We have all suffered in the company of a bore who cracks jokes so obscure that they demand a laborious explanation, for, in order to raise a laugh, humour must have an immediate impact, and obscurity is seldom a hallmark of the good joke. A captive audience can be terrifyingly unresponsive, and anyone who has read an Aristophanic comedy with students soon learns for himself that a scholarly exposition may destroy any joke, irrespective of its qualities. Yesterday's joke is stale and last year's joke dead; to resurrect a joke more than two thousand years old is no easy task. In an attempt to make the ancient writer of comedy more vital, we may have recourse to a contemporary analogy: twenty years ago we might have compared the technique of Aristophanes' comedies with that of the comedy series currently successful on radio; today the medium as well as the show has changed, and we refer to the art of television humour, and this indeed is a better parallel, since television comedy depends upon visual as much as upon verbal effects. Both radio and television number their audience in hundreds of thousands, and, what is more important, their audience represents as fair a cross-section of the total population as did the audience attending the theatre in fifth-century Athens. The fact that Athenian drama was staged at festivals organized by the state proves that it was entertainment designed to please everybody and not just a select few, that is, it was designed for a ‘popular’ and not an élite audience. The colossal size of the Greek theatre (the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens accommodated some 14,000 spectators) offers further confirmation. But the modern theatre is no longer a source of mass entertainment, and even the long-running farce, however many parties up in town for the day may patronize it, hardly suggests the type of audience and atmosphere which Aristophanes and his compatriots would have known and been anxious to exploit. Some idea of this atmosphere may be gained if one thinks in terms of a frequently quoted modern parallel, the emotionally charged football match. The intimacy of the smart revue, an analogy favoured by some, makes it a poor basis for comparison. If it is the English stage and our own experience of the theatre which must provide us with our illustration, the most evocative comparison, I suggest, is one between the audience packed into the Theatre of Dionysus and the audience which jostles its way into the seats at the Christmas pantomime, for this is an audience mainly composed of children as unsophisticated and uninhibited (and as determined to squeeze every ounce of pleasure from what for them also is an annual treat) as those who witnessed the original performance of Old Comedy. The audience at the pantomime, joining in the choruses of the songs and booing the villain, can be unrestrained one moment, but sit spellbound a minute later as the spectators gape at the spectacular ‘set’ which precedes the intermission and announces the finale. The frequent address to the audience made by Aristophanes' characters argues for the same degree of audience participation, while the entry of the chorus—my personal favourite is the parodos of the Birds—would be greeted by an attentiveness in keeping with its solemnity and splendour.