Encomium

Abstract: Linda Dowling. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. xvi + 173. $25.95 cloth. During Oscar Wilde's prosecution for "acts of gross indecency with another male," the evidence brought against him included several of his own letters, among them a sensuously figured encomium to Lord Alfred Douglas and his "red rose-leaf lips": "I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days" (Letters 326). In that florid conjunction of red lips and Greek days, we tend to see but another late-Victorian instance of a homosexual desire seeking expression under the aegis of Ancient Greece, with all its cultural prestige. But as the interpretation of homosexual desire itself becomes ever more complex in our time, it is well to note that Wilde would later recall with dismay the judicial and popular interpretations of that letter, protesting that "every construction but the right one is put on it" (Letters 441). It is at least as problematic today as ever before, what a "right" construction might after all be in such a case. Linda Dowling provides some compelling suggestions with her Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, an engaging and elegantly presented discussion of the rise of Oxonian homosexual discourse. As the first scholarly book to focus entirely on the Victorian intrication of things Greek with things "homosexual," Dowling's study advances a welcome convergence of contemporary historical and New Historical procedures. Following studies by Richard Jenkyns and Frank Turner in the early 1980s, a growing body of historical scholarship has clarified the privileged role that Ancient Greece played in the imaginations of many Victorians. And in a largely independent critical vein over the last decade or so, appropriations of Michel Foucault's ideas into English-language scholarship have profoundly enriched and complicated our awareness of the construction of male homosexual subjectivity in the late Victorian era. Dowling draws from both these critical directions in tracing the development of Oxford Greek studies into what she calls a "homosexual code." Dowling begins by arguing that crises in English political and religious consciousness made Greece appear appealing on grounds quite other than an incipiently homosexual sympathy. When it comes to diagnosing the anxieties of the Victorians, cultural flux is of course the usual suspect, and Dowling ably details the manifold political and religious transformations that were to prepare the way for Victorians to find in Ancient Greece a saving alternative. At a time when a worrisomely scientistic and materialistic culture was rendering theological orthodoxies increasingly untenable, the Greek philosophers (Plato, at least) seemed to provide an alternative ground for transcendental value. And in an England made anxious by French Jacobinism and creeping political fragmentation, the sane vitalism of Greece seemed to offer a salutary vehicle for negotiation between the Scylla of anarchic radicalism and the Charybdis of entropic political stagnation. Tenets of this sort are in fact common to most recent studies of Greece and the Victorians, so Dowling's distinctive achievement here emerges in the particular range and quality of reference she vitalizes relative to these topics, and in the suggestive force with which she charts the translation of this Greek investment into a specifically homosocial/homosexual apologetic. Like Alan Sinfield in his recent The Wilde Century, Dowling takes up the concept of effeminacy and charts the term's use in a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "classical republican discourse" that would continue to show its influence into the Victorian period. In this classical republicanism, "effeminacy" signified, not a failure of male heterosexual inclination, but rather a failure of martial propensity and valor, a failure of the civic virtus. In such a civic discourse, claims Dowling, male effeminacy posed a threat to the precarious sense of security available to a polis worried about military invasion. …

Abstract: James Arnt Aune's provocative study appears at a time when the appeal to "market forces" has become the ascendant discourse of a triumphal U.S. push for deregulation and integration of global economies. Using the perspective of rhetorical criticism, the author provides a skeptical reading of both academic and popular defenders of laissez-faire capitalism, from public choice theory and radical libertarians to cyberpunk fiction and John Galt's encomium to the free market (Rand, 1957). Ultimately, he argues, free market rhetoric is "at a loss to explain the

Abstract: The works of the second-century Greek satirist Lucian enjoyed a tremendous vogue in the early Renaissance. His Greek prose furnished one of the first texts in the Florentine classroom around 1400, and it aroused as much interest as Plato. At first praised as an eloquent rhetorician, Lucian was soon appreciated for his irreverent wit, which inspired new satirical and paradoxical currents in Renaissance literature.Until now, no study has attempted to connect the Latin translators and imitators of Lucian with his wider European influence. In "Lucian and the Latins," David Marsh describes how Renaissance authors rediscovered the comic writings of Lucian. He traces how Lucianic themes and structures made an essential contribution to European literature beginning with a survey of Latin translations and imitations, which gave new direction to European letters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Lucianic dialogues of the dead and dialogues of the gods were immensely popular, despite the religious backlash of the sixteenth century. The paradoxical encomium, represented by Lucian's "The Fly" and "The Parasite," inspired so-called serious humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Guarino of Verona. Lucian's "True Story" initiated the genre of the fantastic journey, which enjoyed considerable popularity during the Renaissance age of discovery. Humanist descendants of this work include Thomas More's "Utopia" and much of Rabelais' "Pantagruel.""Lucian and the Latins" will attract readers interested in a wide variety of subjects: the classical tradition, the early Italian Renaissance, the origins of modern European literature, and the uses of humor and satire as instruments of cultural critique.David Marsh is Professor of Italian, Rutgers University.

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to increase our understanding of what archaic verse epitaphs meant to contemporary readers. Section I suggests their fundamental message was praise of the deceased, expressed in forms characteristic of poetic encomium in its broad, rhetorical sense, i.e., praise poetry. In section II, the conventions of encomium in the epitaphs are compared to the iconographic conventions of funerary art. I conclude that verse inscriptions and grave markers, not only communicate the same message of praise, but do so in a formally parallel manner. Section III, drawing on Pindar as a preserver of archaic thinking, attributes the parallelism between verse epitaph and grave marker to their common debt to funerary ritual. The epigrams will be seen to share with their monuments the goal of memorializing this ritual.