Lampas - Volume 52, Issue 4, 2019

Though it is generally agreed upon that the Greeks borrowed (and modified) the alphabet from the Phoenicians, there is no consensus about the moment when this took place. Over the years, several dates have been proposed, ranging from the 14^th to the 8^th – 7^th century BCE. In classical studies the prevalent opinion is that the alphabet was introduced in or shortly before the 8^th century BCE, when the first attestations of Greek alphabetic writing appear. There are, however, quite a number of indications (from existing and new evidence) that plead for a much earlier date. In this article, an analysis of the presently available archaeological, epigraphic and linguistic data will be presented to argue the case for an introduction in the 11^th century BCE at the latest. The earliest documents, which were in all likelihood economic and administrative records, have not come down to us, because they were written on perishable materials.

This paper examines the themes of Plato´s Symposium and the general functions of the first five speeches. It also discusses the importance of the person of Socrates as a subject of the dialogue and his connexion to eros. Eros and Socrates together form the focus of the Symposium. The second part of this article analyses the speech of Aristophanes in detail. This funny speech has several functions: Plato uses the speech to develop a general notion of eros which is interesting and worthwhile to reflect upon. The myth offers an explanation for the three kinds of sexual identity, but also for things like promiscuity, the function of sexuality and the feeling that eros is more than just sex. Eros is a force regulating human life.

At the same time, his speech is a defence of homosexual love, a rather strange position for someone who usually paints a very negative picture of homosexuality in his comedies. The article aims to demonstrate that Aristophanes is ridiculing himself in the Symposium. The things he says in his speech are the opposite of his own ideas. In fact, Plato treats Aristophanes in the same way as the poet of comedies treated Socrates in the Clouds. So this speech, too, is related to Socrates.

The present article discusses three hotly debated interpretational issues in Diotima´s speech in Plato´s Symposium. The first of these is the relationship of Diotima´s speech to other dialogues, such as the Phaedo and the Republic, with regard to the immortality of the soul. It is argued that there is no discrepancy at all, because the immortality of the soul does not play any role in the Symposium. The second issue is the nature of the three classes of posterity: biological, spiritual and philosophical. Whereas the posterity of the first two classes can be relatively easily defined, the character of the philosopher´s posterity, ‘true virtue’, remains rather vague. It may consist in dialectical teaching of the Idea of Beauty by Socrates. Thirdly, it is argued that the philosopher´s immortality differs only gradually from the immortality of the other two classes, that is, the philosopher as a man only survives by means of his posterity.

In this article I will apply an intertextual perspective to a selection of epigrams from the Greek Anthology in order to assess the role of variation within these epigrams. Within the tradition of the literary epigram, the element of variation had always been important, yet some Hellenistic and Imperial epigrammatists, such as Archias and Zosimus, took this dimension of the genre to extremes, in creating strings of epigrams which intentionally vary on their Imperial models and on their Imperial models´ Hellenistic models. This article charts some of these epigrammatic ‘chain reactions’: the poems on the three hunting brothers Damis, Clitor and Pigres, the birthday epigrams of Leonides of Alexandria, the epigrams on the shipwrecked Antheus, and several epigrams on ships that were destroyed prematurely. All serve to assess the way in which intertextual processes develop within the epigrammatic tradition, and to show that such a perspective is essential to their appreciation.

This article sketches and critically discusses the scenarios that have been postulated for the establishment of a canon of Euripides´ tragedies in what is generally believed to be the second or third century CE. Although the establishment of the canon has received some critical attention over the years, criteria that fit all the canonical Euripidean tragedies are yet to be drawn up. This article discusses the difficulties in doing so, illustrated by an examination of several case studies on the basis of a set of possible criteria extrapolated from an article by Rafaella Cribiore (2001b) on Euripides´ Phoenissae.

There were four classicists named Leopold who obtained a PhD in the Netherlands between 1892-1904, one of whom was the poet J.H. Leopold (1865-1925). This is cause for considerable confusion, as one is easily given the mistaken impression that some of their theses were in fact written by the same person. This article aims to provide biographical clarity and charts the progress of their careers as indicative of the state of classical studies within Dutch academic circles during their lifetimes. It is argued that the scholarly emphasis on philology and textual criticism at times prevented classicists from pursuing their intellectual interests, thereby stymieing the development of the discipline as a whole.