Bøger udgivet af California Classical Studies

This work presents five studies that are parerga to the ongoing online edition of Euripidean scholia (EuripidesScholia.org). Among its highlights are evaluation of previous editions and argument for a more comprehensive treatment of annotations; a review of the traces in the scholia of views attributed to named ancient scholars; a discussion of a genre of annotation here termed "teachers' scholia" and an edition of a miscellany of such notes on Hecuba; assessments of connections to Ioannes Tzetzes, Eustathius, and Planudes in Euripidean scholia; a thorough consideration of the script and dating of Marcianus graecus 471 (M); and clarification of the process of production of Vaticanus graecus 909 (V) as well as its dating.

During the first century B.C.E. a complex system of surveillance towers was established during Rome's colonization of the central Alentejo region of Portugal. These towers provided visual control over the landscape, routes through it, and hidden or isolated places as part of the Roman colonization of the region. As part of an archaeological analysis of the changing landscape of Alentejo, Joey Williams offers here a theory of surveillance in Roman colonial encounters drawn from a catalog of watchtowers in the Alentejo, the artifacts and architecture from the tower known as Caladinho, and the geographic information systems analysis of each tower's vision. Through the consideration of these and other pieces of evidence, Williams places surveillance at the center of the colonial negotiation over territory, resources, and power in the westernmost province of the Roman Empire.

Alexander of Aphrodisias's commentary (about AD 200) is the earliest extant commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics and the most important indirect witness to the Metaphysics text. In this study, Mirjam Kotwick demonstrates how to reconstruct from Alexander's commentary the Metaphysics text Alexander used and how to make use of this ancient version of the Metaphysics for improving the text of our direct manuscript tradition. Moreover, Kotwick investigates how Alexander's commentary may have influenced the transmission of the Metaphysics at various stages. Kotwick's study is the first book-length examination of a commentary as a witness to an ancient philosophical text. This blend of textual criticism and philosophical analysis both expands on existing methodologies in classical scholarship and develops new ones.

With a new introduction and some revisions, these reprinted essays on Classical Greek satyr plays suggest new critical approaches to this important dramatic genre. Griffith argues that satyr plays presented audiences with sophisticated, multilayered narratives of romance, escapist adventure, and musical-choreographic exuberance, amounting to a "parallel universe" to that of the accompanying tragedies in the City Dionysia festival. The class and status distinctions between heroic/divine characters and the rest (choruses, messengers, servants, etc.) that are so integral to Athenian tragedy are shown to be present also, in exaggerated form, in satyr drama, with the satyr chorus occupying a role that also inevitably recalled for the Athenian audiences their own (often foreign-born) slaves. The satyr plays' stylistic fusion of adventure and romance, elegant sophistication and rustic naïveté, anticipates in many respects the later developments of Greek pastoral and prose romance.

Pindar's epinikia were poems commissioned to celebrate athletic victories in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Drawing on the insights of interpretive anthropology and cultural history, Leslie Kurke examines the odes as public performances which enact the reintegration of the athletic victor into his heterogeneous communities. These communities-the victor's household, his aristocratic class, and his city-represent competing, sometimes conflicting interests, which the epinikian poet must satisfy to accomplish his project of reintegration. Kurke considers in particular the different modes of exchange in which Pindar's poetry participated: the symbolic economy of the household, gift exchange between aristocratic houses, and the workings of monetary exchange within the city. Her analysis produces an archaeology of Pindar's poetry, exposing multiple systems of imagery that play on different shared cultural models to appeal to the various segments of the poet's audience.