The Epicurean Parasite: Horace, Satires 1.1-3

We have learned a great deal in recent years about reading Horace\u27s satires; there is now widespread agreement that the speaker of the satires is himself a character within them, a persona. Such a persona may be most effective when it has obvious connections with its creator, but that fact does not preclude the exaggeration of reality, or even its complete inversion. For Horace the implications of this approach are exciting: instead of a poet discoursing with cheerful earnestness on morality, on poetry and on his daily life, we have a fictional character, whom we do not have to take seriously at all.The three diatribe satires present us with a character so absurd that they have been taken, I think rightly, as parodies. Although the poems were once appreciated as effective moralising sermons, even their admirers found it hard to justify the lack of intellectual coherence, to say nothing of the astonishing vulgarity of the second satire. As parodies, however, the poems are wonderfully successful. The speaker trots out a series of banalities: ‘people should be content with who they are’; ‘people should not go to extremes’; ‘people should be consistent’. But he invariably gets distracted, goes off on tangential rants, and makes a fool of himself. The moralist of the first three satires is, to put it bluntly, a jerk

Teknophagy and Tragicomedy: The Mythic Burlesques of Tereus and Thyestes

Teknophagy (τεκνοϕαγία), or child-eating, is an apt subject for tragedy. It introduces the theme of miasma, it escalates violence and epitomises the destructive family feuds that Aristotle prized as the most suitable stories for tragedy. Therefore, unsurprisingly, the teknophagies of Thyestes and Tereus were dramatised in three fifth-century tragedies, all of them preserved only in fragments: Euripides’ Thyestes, Sophokles’ Thyestes (Β) and Sophokles’ Tereus. What is surprising is the appearance of plays by the same titles in the comic tradition, including Tereus plays by Kantharos (C5 BC), Anaxandrides (C4 BC) and Philetairos (C4 BC) along with Diokles’ Thyestes (Β) (late C5 BC to early C4 BC). Therefore, this study will first consider how Tereus’ teknophagy was adapted to mythical burlesques, to then consider how comic adaptations of Thyestes’ teknophagy influenced Seneca's Thyestes

4. Faire parler les Enfers

Une partie très importante de l’œuvre de Lucien de Samosate met en scène les Enfers et leurs habitants : dans Ménippe ou la Nécyomancie, l’auteur nous présente la descente aux Enfers du philosophe cynique et homme de lettres Ménippe, racontée par lui-même ; dans le dialogue La Traversée ou le Tyran, des morts sont transportés aux Enfers après leur trépas ; et dans les trente Dialogues des morts, Lucien relate la « vie » (quoique ce terme soit paradoxal dans des circonstances d’outre-tombe) de..

Für Religionsfreiheit, Recht und Toleranz

In dieser Schrift wendet sich der bedeutende spätantike Redner Libanios an den römischen Kaiser Theodosius, um seine Unterstützung für den Erhalt heidnischer Tempel zu gewinnen, die von fanatischen Christen bedroht werden. Libanios weist dabei vor allem auf die kulturgeschichtliche und identitätsstiftende Bedeutung der heidnischen Heiligtümer hin