—Pind. O. 2.86-88 Abstract. This paper treats a topos found in Greek poetry from the archaic to the Hellenistic period, involving a confrontation between antagonistic and contrast- ing species of birds. Tracing the continuities and distinctions among the uses of the conceit in Hesiod, Pindar, and Callimachus, I argue that on each occasion it serves poets as a means of articulating their literary personae and the ethical, stylistic, and generic choices shaping their compositions. Not just a means of poetic polemic, self-definition, and self-positioning, the avian terms used within the conceit also come to figure in the literary critical vocabulary of the late fifth century and its redeployment in Hellenistic times. in an article of 1996, A.-T. Cozzoli traced the Nachleben of the pas- sage above from Pindar's second Olympian, where the singer contrasts himself, the "bird of Zeus," with a pair of garrulous crows. Cozzoli dem- onstrated how subsequent Greek and Roman poets drew on the conceit in various programmatic contexts. According to her fine reading, the core message behind the image—a caution against imitating the inimitable, of undertaking a feat above or foreign to the individual poet's present enter- prise or powers—remains a constant through later uses of its elements. I want to extend the parameters of Cozzoli's discussion, suggesting that Pindar's feathered protagonists descend from a still earlier avian pair and that such aerial hostilities assume multiple configurations and functions within Greek song, giving authors a device for self-representation and the expression of their ethical, stylistic, and generic choices. 1 While Cozzoli

Feathers Flying: Avian Poetics in Hesiod, Pindar, and Callimachus

A s heLen and meneLaus make their way toward the Egyptian shore and the boat that will take them back to Greece, the chorus of captive Greek women performs its third and final stasimon, singing of the couple’s return home escorted over the sea by the Dioskouroi. The song has figured in a number of recent fine discussions. While several readers have focused on its internal unity and pertinence to the larger structure and themes of the play, 1 others have mined its references to the cult of the Leukippides and the festival of the Hyakinthia as a means of reconstructing Spartan religious practices and Helen’s status within those rites. 2 In Helene Foley’s reading, the singers’ turn to cult complements the drama’s thematic design: while promoting Euripides’ twofold presentation of his heroine as both archetypal parthenos and married woman and mother, the several roles that Helen claims in Spartan ritual, the song also suggests that recurrent and atemporal cult practice, perhaps more effectively than literary revisionism, may undo a damaging reputation and establish or restore an alternate and more primary version of events. 3 For a third group of scholars, the stasimon’s interest lies in its embrace of the diction, syntax, and motifs associated with the “New Music” in vogue in late-fifth-century Athens and in its deployment of elements characteristic of dithyrambic style, the mode of composition that accommodated the most radical musical innovations and genre-mixing experiments of the time. 4 In one further set of accounts, the ode proves exemplary of the “choral projection” practiced by Attic tragedians, a device whereby the choreuts evoke the activities of other singing, dancing choruses, and so blend their current performance with that of the singers whom they describe. 5 Since choral projection is common to both dithyramb and the New Music, it stands as fresh proof of Euripides’ engagement with the musical avant-garde. 6

Dancing with the Stars: Choreia in the Third Stasimon of Euripides' Helen

How do we model our public sphere and the discourse that takes place within it - as a space of gradually emerging consensus or of endless competition? And how can we determine what constitutes appropriate, or even beneficial, competition and what constitutes inappropriate or harmful competition? In my dissertation, I utilize both literary and philosophical sources to examine classical Greek thoughts about the ethical problems of competition in public discourse. I argue, first, that public speech was virtually always conceived of as a fundamentally competitive enterprise; and secondly, that such competitiveness was viewed as particularly problematic in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Authors in various genres explored the utility and abuses of competitive discourse through the vehicle of debate pieces that were intended to both entertain and illuminate. The agones that I examine are thus quasi-theoretical in that each contestant seeks to define the nature and limits of productive, fair competition and to distinguish it from harmful competition; but as one might expect, the agonistic format of the debate often colors the values expressed in the arguments. I organize my dissertation according to Aristotle's three divisions of rhetoric--epideictic, forensic, and deliberative--in order to show how each genre attempts to define its own version of 'good eris' largely through differentiating itself from the other genres. I use Euripides as an example of explicitly epideictic debate. In the agons from Suppliants (399-580), Phoenician Women (446-635), Iphigenia in Aulis (317-414), and Andromache (147-273), the playwright presents competitive discourse as an ultimately irresolvable problem. At the same time, his ability to rise above the fray and offer a balanced presentation of the issue sets him apart from practitioners in the other genres (and ideally helps him to defeat his opponents in the dramatic contest). I then turn to Demosthenes and Aeschines for my example of forensic debate. In these legal agons, we see each contestant attempting to present himself as a superior competitive speaker, while each opponent is accused of a different kind of unfair epideixis. Finally, I examine three debate scenes from Thucydides' History (Cleon vs. Diodotus, Nicias vs. Alcibiades, and Hermocrates vs. Athenagoras), where we see the contestants walking a fine line between public and private interests and trying to outdo their opponents by more persuasively defining the type of competition proper to deliberative debate.

/pdf/agon-and-ethics-competitive-discourse-in-fifth-and-fourth-2ia7t3cbv1.pdf

Agon and Ethics: Competitive Discourse in Fifth and Fourth Century Greece

In this essay I argue that despite its increasingly catastrophic social and natural consequences, neoliberalism retains its ideological appeal partly due to the way collective faith in market forces validates neoliberal ideology as a disavowed form of divination.1 I begin by briefly canvassing both the history and persistence of divination practices. I then read neoliberal views of random market forces as productive of âknowledgeâ as a contemporary form of divination practice, defined as any tradition-bound practice of taking chance seriously as a conduit for more-than-human knowledge. I follow Philip Mirowskiâs argument that under neoliberalism markets are understood primarily as superhuman âmeta-information processorsâ which, partly based on randomness, produce correct âknowledgeâ about the social good in the form of prices. I argue that the way this chance emergence of âknowledgeâ is conflated with human freedom, particularly in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, is an uncanny parallel to the divinatory solicitation of chance. Markets themselves are isomorphic with perennial divination tools. Part of the effort to undermine and displace the neoliberal era must involve dismantling the appeal of its particular form of divination, a complex task (not undertaken here) involving exposure of the way neoliberalism offers a simplification of, and authoritarian solution for, complex problems posed by the role of chance in politics, science and metaphysics. This article is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.

/pdf/neoliberalism-as-a-political-theology-of-chance-the-politics-1y2h84xbel.pdf

Neoliberalism as a political theology of chance: the politics of divination

Lucretius' \"On the Nature of Things\", one of the glories of Latin literature, provides a vivid poetic exposition of the doctrines of the Greek atomist, Epicurus. The poem played a crucial role in the reinvention of science in the seventeenth century, its influence on the French Enlightenment was powerful and pervasive, and it became a major battlefield in the wars of religion with science in nineteenth-century England. But in the twentieth century, despite its vital contributions to modern thought and civilisation, it has been largely neglected by common readers and scientists alike. This book offers an extensive description of the poem, with special emphasis on its cheerful version of materialism and on its attempt to devise an ethical system that suits such a universe. It surveys major relevant texts form the eighteenth and ninetheenth centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the ancient scientific tradition he championed has become marginalised in the twentieth century. It closes with a discussion of what value the poem has for students of science and technology in the new century: what advice it has to offer us about how to go about reinventing our machines and our morality.

Lucretius and the Modern World

❦Near the end of his 1929 essay on surrealism, and in the context of serious discussions of the occult, Walter Benjamin suggests a connection between investigations into reading and into telepathic phenomena, 1 a theme he returns to again, in the context of reading and more ancient traditions of magic, in his 1933 essay “Doctrine of the Similar.” 2 This connection he suggests between reading practices and the occult is a profound one, both historically and for Benjamin’s own time and work, and not just in terms of telepathy. Some of the earliest practices of reading were not of letters, words, or books, but of stars, entrails, and birds, and these practices had a significant impact on the way reading was understood in the ancient world. And the relations between such ancient magic and reading were still (or again) of crucial importance to the modernists of the early twentieth century, including Benjamin and his sustained interest in what he called ‘das magische Lesen.’ What I will present here is part of a larger project devoted to tracing out the more salient connections in both the ancient and modern worlds between the practices of reading and of magic, and particularly those of magic most closely aligned with practices of divination. 1

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mln/v126/126.3.downing.pdf

Divining Benjamin: Reading Fate, Graphology, Gambling

Pages 1-16 of Cabinet of the Muses: essays on classical and comparative literature in honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, edited by Mark Griffith and Donald J. Mastronarde (Atlanta 1990).

/pdf/apate-agon-and-literary-self-reflexivity-in-euripides-helen-3ja7a6y6j1.pdf

Apatê, Agôn, and Literary Self-Reflexivity in Euripides' Helen

Lucretius at the Camera: Ancient Atomism and Early Photographic Theory in Walter Benjamin's Berliner Chronik

Am Beispiel von Storms Novelle wird das Problem von Realismus und Reprasentation unter dem Aspekt von Wiederholung bzw. Widerstand gegen die Wiederholung untersucht. Vier “romantische” Hauptmotive nehmen das Problem auf: das Motiv der zweiten Frau, die die tote erste Frau wiederholen bzw. werden soll, das lebendige Portrait, das die Erzahlwelt zu uberwaltigen droht, die tote Geliebte als Muse und der verspukte Garten.

Repetition and Realismi the ‘Ligeia’ impulse in Theodor Storm’s Viola tricolor

L'A. etudie la preface de l'ouvrage de A. Stifter intitulee «Bunte Steine» (1852) qui etablit de facon prophetique les principes esthetiques du realisme poetique et represente la realite historique d'une facon non-politique. L'A. tire les consequences de ce programme resolument non-politique du point de vue du realisme esthetique de l'ecrivain

Common ground: conditions of realism in Stifter's «Vorrede»

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Eric Downing

Author Tools

Chat about Author