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- Volume 56, Issue 1, 2023
Lampas - Volume 56, Issue 1, 2023
Volume 56, Issue 1, 2023
- Redactioneel
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- Articles
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Ovid’s Cephalus and the dangers of mistranslation
More LessAbstractThis paper considers misunderstandings found within the story of Cephalus and Procris in Metamorphoses 7, misunderstandings that are regularly repeated in the scholarly interpretations and English translations of this episode. The interpretive challenges posed by Cephalus’ tale are indeed akin to those faced by the Ovidian translator, whose interpretive choices will influence how later readers construe his often ambiguous words. Whereas others see Cephalus as an unreliable narrator whose claim to have been raped by Aurora is open to doubt, I argue that his words are best read as he tells us to read them. Misunderstanding is due not to Cephalus’ unreliability but to the interpretive challenges posed by the changeable Ovidian world he inhabits, a world that is labyrinthine and ambiguous. Ovid himself helps us navigate the mazelike structure of Cephalus’ narrative by verbal clues and intra-/intertextual parallels that clearly align Cephalus with other rape victims in the epic. By understanding Cephalus first and foremost as a rape victim, his actions and words become more intelligible and shed light on the themes of rape, masculinity, and power within the epic as a whole.
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Hoe herkennen we de emoties van Ovidius’ Aglauros, Pyramus en anderen?
More LessAbstractEmotions make a story more than a list of events. While reading, readers assign emotions to characters, and this constitutes an important, if not crucial, aspect of understanding narrative texts. Information in the text enables this process of assigning emotions, but readers’ pre-existing knowledge and their previous (emotional) experiences also play a role. In this article, I aim to provide more insight into the interaction between reader and text, and present different types of information that play a role in understanding emotions in narratives. These types are based on research on text comprehension and reading processes and concepts from cognitive and affective narratology. Examples include knowledge about typical plot structures, types of characters and emotional scripts. I provide illustrations taken from the set texts of the 2023 Latin Dutch exam (Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Some passages in this corpus provide detailed descriptions of a character’s emotions, while others appeal more to the reader’s background knowledge. The collected texts contain many stories with a romantic plot line. We find gods with sudden feelings of desire, unrequited love, budding and forbidden relationships, long and happy marriages. Deception, misunderstanding and bad news (Fama) are obstacles to these relationships, creating strong emotions.
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Grieks zonder grenzen
More LessAbstractIt has often been claimed that Greek literature of the Roman world is obsessed with the (classical) Greek past and detached from the real world in which it was written. This article, however, argues that Greek texts of the imperial period offer a fascinating glimpse of the polyphonic and multicultural world of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was characterized by globalization, migration, and mobility. While Greek was the lingua franca of a large part of the Mediterranean world, especially in the East, writers of Greek literature came from many different places and regions, flexibly moving in a triangular space between local, Greek, and Roman identities. Three different examples are discussed: an epigram by Crinagoras of Mytilene, a passage from Pseudo-Longinus’ On the Sublime, and Lucian’s interview with Homer in True History. In different ways, these texts construct intercultural dialogues, which invite the reader to perceive the world and its literature as more diverse than just Greek and Roman.
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Asclepius in Messene
Authors: Jaap-Jan Flinterman & Mieke PrentAbstractThe city of Messene was re-founded as the central polis of Messenia after the region’s liberation from Spartan domination in 369 BC. At the end of the third or during the first half of the second century BC, an impressive sanctuary for the healing god Asclepius was built in the city centre. This contribution focuses on the question why the city built such a magnificent Asclepieum at this point in its history. Part of the answer lies in local and regional tradition. The Messenians claimed Asclepius and his sons as their compatriots, a claim dating back to the Late Archaic period, and part of the site of the Hellenistic Asclepieum had been a place of worship for the healing god since the Classical period. But in trying to explain the sanctuary’s grandiose rebuilding in the Hellenistic period, it is also useful to look into the political situation of the city in the early second century, a time when its independence and its dominant position in the region were eroding.
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