This article examines the Virgilian echoes in Giacomo Leopardi’s All’Italia, focusing on how Leopardi drew on heroic figures from Virgil’s Aeneid to shape his vision of modern heroism. The study begins by analysing Leopardi’s views on Aeneas, contrasted with the Homeric heroes, as expressed in the Zibaldone. Through a close examination of textual and thematic allusions to the...
This article examines the classical writings of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, The Commentaries of Caesar (1870) and The Life of Cicero (1880), contextualizing them in contemporary discussions of the late Roman Republic and the author’s own career and world-view.
Gaudy Night is unique among Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective novels in its prolific use of Latin quotations. While scholars have considered the two Latin quotations which are integral to the novel’s plot, this article will explore Sayers’ incidental Latin phrases and quotations as well, in order to fully illuminate the significant role the language plays within the novel. Sayers uses...
This article weaves together three main strands: first, the ambiguities of mirror metaphors in relation to concepts of artistic representation and expression; secondly, the double-sided and sometimes paradoxical influence of Plato in this area of aesthetics; thirdly, the need to interpret long-lasting metaphors in the history of ideas not as static figures of speech but as...
Este trabajo analiza el uso que hace Andrea Camilleri de los poemas presuntamente escritos por el poeta griego Estesícoro, para desarrollar una trama policíaca en la novela Noli me tangere. La figura de Estesícoro y de sus poemas sobre Helena de Esparta sirven al escritor italiano, en primer lugar, para justificar, casi en términos autobiográficos, el primer poema difamatorio...
The study retraces Nietzsche’s 1875 notes for the planned but never published Unfashionable Observation, We Philologists, through a specific focus on the topics of science, life and art in their close and seldom discussed interrelation. The questions that the investigation addresses are: what is the significance of Nietzsche’s problematisation of science in We Philologists for...
Near the end of his career, Dante wrote two eclogues, instigating a literary fashion which was to outlast the Renaissance. These poems—Dante's only known compositions in Latin verse—were prompted by a verse epistle from Giovanni ‘del Virgilio’, in which the humanist scholar goaded Dante to compose a martial epic in Latin celebrating contemporary Italian military victories, which...
This article explores the use of Greek mythology in current ecological discourse. In Classical Studies, specifically in Classical Tradition studies, the ecocritical revision of Greco-Latin texts and their survival is still in its infancy. The ecological question is usually approached as a reconstruction of notions and uses of nature, with little reference to the contemporary...
This article puts on trial the assumed authorship of a sixteenth-century manuscript poem reminiscent of Ovid’s Heroides, currently ascribed to Lady Elizabeth Dacre. After establishing a revised edition of the text, it provides arguments based on historical, material, literary and textual analyses of the source, strongly indicating the unlikeliness of its supposed attribution to...
This paper attempts to interpret Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an example of the classical motif of the ‘katabasis’ or descent into the Underworld, a descensus ad Inferos sui generis, conditioned by having its origin as a fairy tale intended for the entertainment of a child reader (descensus ad Terram Mirabilem): this tale would have as its matrix reference...
The growing field of historical game studies (which studies the intersection of history and video games) has often described video games with historical settings as virtual museums, based on their potential to allow players to move through a historical game space and/or interact with historical artefacts. The present article investigates how these insights may be applied to...
Memnon, the mythic king of Ethiopia killed by Achilles during the Trojan War, had a double or fused identity in classical antiquity: both Asian and African for Greek and Roman writers because of his parentage and because of the geographical indeterminacy of ‘Aithiopia’ and of ‘India’, but definitely black-skinned for Roman writers. How was this figure received in medieval texts...
Classics has been used for various social, cultural and political purposes on the African sub-continent. Part I highlights some theoretical considerations regarding the traditional models of the classical tradition and the classical reception in Africa. The idea of the classical ‘traception’ embraces the classical tradition through its suggestion of linear descendent and the...
In 1314, the Oxford Dominican monk Nicholas Trevet was commissioned to write a commentary on Seneca’s tragedies. Trevet’s interpretation of character and plot in Seneca’s Medea differs in many ways from 21st-century classical scholars. Because Trevet relied on a single manuscript from the A tradition, he and his readers did not have access to a Senecan Medea who asks Jason...
When Europeans settled on the Australian continent, Britain’s connections to the Greco-Roman classical tradition were being actively promoted as an inherent component of the empire’s cultural heritage. Since the foundation of the Australian colony of New South Wales, comparisons between the British dominion and classical antiquity were made in the hope that one day soon the...
Naomi Iizuka’s Polaroid Stories (1997) combines a stage adaptation of selected tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses with the stories of homeless young people. Iizuka’s use of these two sources in her play provides a new insight into Ovid’s treatment of the theme of sexual violence in the Metamorphoses as well as exposing the dangers faced by young people on city streets today. In...
Author, artist, designer and collector Thomas Hope (1769–1831) published his influential Costume of the Ancients in 1809 and in an enlarged version in 1812. This article identifies archaeological sources for figures in the plates of Costume of the Ancients and seeks to explain why Hope altered his sources by adding patterns from Greek vases. The process of adding Greek vase...
Marisela Treviño Orta’s Woman on Fire (2016) tells the story of a Chicana U.S. citizen haunted by the ghost of a Mexican woman who demands burial after having died attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border. In this paper, I demonstrate how Treviño Orta’s play presents a uniquely Latine Antigone-story through its investigation into the realities of living and dead Chicane and...
Anonymous alchemical poetry, which flourished during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England, consisted of laboratory texts mainly concerning recipes and practical notes about the production of the philosophers’ stone or elixir. These texts, which are not part of the authoritative writings of the famous alchemists of the time, re-purposed the Opus in a prosaic and...
Scholars have suggested that Cassius Dio’s Roman History was among the Greek sources used by the 16th century polemicist Sir Richard Morison in two of his treatises from the 1530s. This short article shows that this is not the case. Rather, Morison can be seen to be borrowing from Seneca’s De Clementia and Politian’s Latin translation of Herodian’s History of the Empire after...