Lampas - Volume 54, Issue 3, 2021

Starting from the story of Iphidamas in Iliad 11, this article argues that the presentation of war in the Iliad and Odyssey is mostly negative, with strong emphasis on its many victims and the suffering and losses on both sides. Within this context, the idea of κλέος (‘fame’) is found mainly as a motivation to join the war or to engage in the fighting. The victims’ family and friends do not find comfort in it, as we can see very clearly in the cases of Patroklos and Hektor. Nor do the heroes themselves, confronted with a premature and often cruel death, find any comfort in the prospect of fame. Consequently, κλέος appears as a kind of illusion that tempts men to go to war, but in the end has nothing to offer them. Only later generations and people far removed from the actual events can enjoy the κλέα ἀνδρῶν.

The famous letters by Pliny the Younger and emperor Trajan about the Christian community of Bithynia-Pontus have traditionally been highly significant in the study of early Christianity. However, the letters have often been read in isolation. The rest of the correspondence between emperor and governor contained in the tenth book of Pliny’s Epistulae, meanwhile, has rarely been taken into account in a systematic way. This contribution will demonstrate that our understanding of the Christian letters is significantly enhanced by taking into account the underlying principles that shaped Roman provincial administration, and by placing Pliny’s interactions with the Christian community within the wider context of his duties as a Roman governor.

This article studies the reception of the comedies of the Athenian playwright Aristophanes in 12^th-century Byzantium. It takes as its starting point various scholarly and didactic texts that facilitated this reception. These texts were written by Gregory of Corinth, John Tzetzes and Eustathius of Thessaloniki, who all used Aristophanes, and ancient literature more generally, in their teaching and scholarly practice. This article explores (1) what moral functions Byzantine scholars ascribe to ancient drama; (2) how they instruct Byzantine writers to weave elements of humour and ridicule into their own work by either imitating Aristophanes’ techniques or quoting his verses; (3) how they use the Athenian playwright as a model for correct atticizing language; (4) and how Tzetzes engages on a personal level with Aristophanes as a historical figure and with the comedies he wrote. This examination of the reception of Aristophanes in the work of Gregory, Tzetzes and Eustathius thus demonstrates the versatility of the Byzantine reception of ancient comedy.

In the period from about 1890 to 1960, there was a widespread belief that a universal language would make an important contribution to both material progress and international understanding. Alongside artificial languages such as Esperanto and national languages such as English and French, for a long time Latin also received serious attention as a potential world language of the future. This article provides an analysis of the discussion held in the Netherlands about the pros and cons of Latin as a modern world language. On the one hand, this analysis shows that due to a unique combination of properties, strong arguments could be made in favour of Latin. On the other hand, both its notorious difficulty and the problems raised by attempts at modernising its archaic vocabulary complicated the candidacy of Latin as a future lingua franca. The article concludes that underlying the ultimate failure of Latin as a modern world language was a misguided attempt to reinvent Latin as a ‘living’ language. The paradoxical lesson this failure teaches is that it is not the ‘life’, but precisely the ‘death’ of the Latin language that is able to maintain it for contemporary use.