Lampas - Volume 57, Issue 1, 2024

This article discusses several problematic aspects of the simile of the Cave in Plato’s Republic: its relation to the two preceding similes of the Sun and the Line, plus a number of issues within the simile of the Cave itself.

This article presents a short introduction to the interpretation of Greek discourse particles, followed by an analysis of particle usage in several passages in Plato (taken mostly from the reading list for the Dutch secondary school final exams of 2023).

When reading Greek texts at school, pupils are confronted with long sentences and a variable word order. In this article I argue that we can help our pupils by presenting the text in a different layout, divided into cola, short meaningful sections of text. Ancient grammarians, both Greek and Latin, already used this concept in discussing texts, but they hardly gave any criteria to determine where one colon ends and the next begins. Eduard Fraenkel, Kenneth Dover and Frank Scheppers have demonstrated that we can indeed determine colon boundaries. Based on these criteria I have analysed two passages of Greek and tried to show how our pupils could benefit from a layout in cola. The sections they have to deal with are much shorter, and they will – hopefully – learn to appreciate the word order an author has chosen. In the final section I will link this colometric reading of the text with theory on word order, based on a functional approach.

Reading Livy’s long periods is often seen as a daunting task by students (and their teachers). Commonly, an analytical approach is used in the classroom, starting with the syntactical core of the sentence – which may, however, violate the order in which the author chose to present his material. This article presents an alternative by analysing two passages of Livy’s third decade according to the positional reading method, a method that uses a colometric reading of Latin sentences and interprets new elements in the order in which they are encountered according to a fixed scheme of content positions. This allows students to follow the line of thought and images, so that they visualize and ‘experience’ the sentence as it unfolds – as if it were a film.

This article takes the brief paragraph on Livy’s style in the syllabus Central Examination Latin Language and Culture 2024 as a starting point for a discussion of Livy’s art of writing which is based on linguistic and narratological analysis. The first part discusses a combined linguistic-narratological tool that can help in a better understanding of the style and composition of Greek and Latin narrative texts at the meso and macro levels. In the second part, this tool is applied to Livy’s Book 21, especially the Alpine passage, in order to show how this method of analysis (which is in fact also a close reading method) can reveal tension arcs at different levels of the text, including at the sentence level. It is demonstrated, among other things, how such analysis can help identify which emphases the narrator is placing in his narrative, thus contributing to the process of interpreting the content and giving meaning to the text.