Lampas - Volume 53, Issue 1, 2020

This article investigates the internal structure of ἔρως, as it is conceptualized in Plato’s Symposium. The analysis first focuses on the three constitutive elements of love on the lover’s side: a lack, a consciousness of it, and the perceived worth of what is lacking. It explores these in relation to the rest of the Symposium and to the Socratic elenchus. The second part of the analysis turns to the beloved’s end of the relation. By means of a comparative reading with the Lysis it explores possible ways of understanding the idea that something is loved for the sake of something else. On the reading offered here, the lover’s love of beauty is always for the sake of immortality, even if this beauty be the Form itself. Finally, considerations about narrative framing and the characterization of Diotima should prompt us to see some distance between this conception and Plato himself. The Symposium’s primary aim is not doctrinal but protreptic.

In the Aeneid, the recurrent themes of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ (the topic of the Latin final exam of 2020) can be connected to generic roles. Dido, founder of Carthage, is presented progressively in elegiac terms, as is suggested by a number of echoes of Sapphic love poetry; as a character, she is guided primarily by personal motives. Dido’s ‘elegiac role’ forebodes her own destruction and that of her city. Aeneas, on the other hand, needs to adhere to his epic role as founder of the new Trojan/Roman nation, in order to avert destruction and the repetition of Troy’s fate. When during his stay in Carthage he starts to show signs of transforming into an elegiac lover, the gods intervene and put him back onto the epic track: the public interest should take precedence over personal feelings. This opposition between elegiac Dido and epic Aeneas may grant insight into Vergil’s message for his contemporaries.

On the basis of a broad perspective on theatricality and tragedy in imperial Rome this article argues that theatrical and tragic elements play an important role in the episode on the death of Nero’s mother Agrippina in Tacitus’ Annals 14.1-10. These elements fall into three categories: 1) theatricality, 2) generic, tragic elements and 3) allusions to specific tragic texts. These evocations of the (tragic) stage serve to underscore Tacitus’ characterization of the reign of Nero and of imperial Roman society in general as fundamentally artificial. Tacitus’ use of tragic material does not reflect an Aristotelian, tragic vision of history, but rather stresses the theatricality of the historical events, drawing upon a cultural memory of Nero and Agrippina as the creators of, and actors in, their own farcical world. At the same time the episode is presented by Tacitus as the paradigmatic starting point of Nero’s engagement in various forms of spectacle entertainment (Annales, 14.11-22). In Tacitus’ presentation of the aftermath of the murder theatricality and spectacle represent a moral decline characterized by lascivia and licentia, reflecting Tacitus’ moral concerns.

This article examines the long feud between ancient historians Moses Finley and Joseph Vogt on the subject of ancient slavery. Their enmity has often been attributed to differences in character or in political views. However, it is shown here that Finley’s attack was above all directed against the tradition of classical Bildung (the German ideal of self-cultivation) and against the corresponding philosophy of history that informed Vogt’s work. Because the philosophy of Bildung presupposed a linear and exclusive connection between ancient Greece and modern Germany, Finley argued that it was easily turned into an ideological weapon, most fatally so in Nazi Germany. At a time when the alt-right’s political use of classical antiquity resembles Vogt’s views, Finley’s criticism is not only topical, but it also urges ancient historians to reconsider some of their basic concepts.

In this contribution the authors of the new Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek outline their views on the need for a new Greek reference grammar, discuss their methodological and organizational principles, and offer some thoughts on how the book may be used as a teaching resource.