Ovid, the Fasti and the stars

According to Quintilian, poetry cannot be fully understood without a good knowledge of the stars. As one example he cites the fact that poets frequently indicate the time of year by the rising and setting of stars and constellations, a device familiar to us from Hesiod onwards.1 For Quintilian, who had the benefit of a stable civil calendar, there may have seemed little reason beyond a desire for poetic expression to specify the date in this manner: but before Caesar’s calendar reforms in 45 BC, the appearance and disappearance of certain stars just before sunrise and just after sunset provided a much more regular guide to the year than the erratic calendars of Greece and Rome, which were often out of step with the solar year.2 It is therefore not surprising to find the same method of specifying the date in prose authors too;3 and lists of these stellar phenomena, arranged in various calendar-like formats, are found in both texts and inscriptions. These lists, known as parapegmata, can be traced back to fifth century Greece, but the tradition may be considerably older.4 Whatever our reaction to Quintilian’s claim, it is certainly the case that a good knowledge of the stars is important for a full understanding of Ovid’s calendar poem, the Fasti. To a large extent the poem presents itself as a poetic version of the Roman calendar: each book covers a different month, and as the year and the work progress, Ovid marks the dates of various religious festivals and historical events, as in the real fasti. However, unlike many of the extant fasti, Ovid combines this material with material from the parapegmatic tradition, giving dates for the rising and setting of various stars and constellations, and for the journey of the sun through the zodiac. The inclusion of the constellations – and of the aetiological tales explaining their presence in the sky – enables Ovid to introduce a variety of Greek myths into the Roman calendar, where they would otherwise have no place

Was Ovid a Silver Latin Poet?

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Reporting methodological search filter performance comparisons : a literature review

© 2014 The authors. Health Information and Libraries Journal © 2014 Health Libraries Journal.Peer reviewedPostprin

Using Reference Manager

This is a handout to describe how to use Reference Manager v12. It is focused on the BioMedical area and covers linking to PubMed, Web of Knowledge, other biblographic providers (OVID and EBSCO) and searching for book information. The notes include how to use Word 2003 and Word 2007/2010 . You must be running v12.0.3 or later for Reference Manager to work with Word 2010

Cancer Surveillance using Data Warehousing, Data Mining, and Decision Support Systems

This article discusses how data warehousing, data mining, and decision support systems can reduce the national cancer burden or the oral complications of cancer therapies, especially as related to oral and pharyngeal cancers. An information system is presented that will deliver the necessary information technology to clinical, administrative, and policy researchers and analysts in an effective and efficient manner. The system will deliver the technology and knowledge that users need to readily: (1) organize relevant claims data, (2) detect cancer patterns in general and special populations, (3) formulate models that explain the patterns, and (4) evaluate the efficacy of specified treatments and interventions with the formulations. Such a system can be developed through a proven adaptive design strategy, and the implemented system can be tested on State of Maryland Medicaid data (which includes women, minorities, and children)

“And Carthage souls be glutted with our bloods” : Marlowe’s Lucanian Dido in The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage

textDespite most scholars agreeing that Christopher Marlowe's The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage was composed fairly contemporaneously with his adaptation of Pharsalia 1, Lucans First Booke Translated Line for Line, few have recognized the intertextuality between the two works. This paper will consider Marlowe's relationship with Lucan's 1st century epic poem--both through his own posthumously published translation as well as selections he might have encountered during his petty school and graduate school study--and argue for the presence of distinctly Lucanian conventions in his drama, particularly in the portrayal of his protagonist, Dido. By revealing the Lucanian features of his play, in narrative structure as well as verbal echoes with the Pharsalia's Cornelia, The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage exposes Marlowe's "republican imagination" and allows us to discern a political commentary in the seeming playfulness of his Virgilian parody. His employment of Lucanian devices is his attempt to imitate and outdo the self-proclaimed plus quam(ness) of Lucan's Pharsalia. In doing so, he introduces his own political subtext to the stage and interrogates, through the unassuming guise of child actors, the Elizabethan monarch's appropriation of a Trojan ancestry.Comparative Literatur