Balbuena's Grandeza mexicana and the American Georgic

Bernardo de Balbuena’s Grandeza mexicana (1604) stands between two worlds. One of the earliest and most spectacular poetic celebrations of the wonders of the city of Mexico, this text was addressed both at the American and the Spanish audience, producing a duplicitous message. The capital of New Spain is presented as one of the most loyal and productive colonies of the Hispanic empire, though it is also celebrated for its economic autonomy and cultural supremacy with regards to the metropolis. These dualisms are also noticeable in the poetic style of Balbuena’s work, which, following the traditional idea of the Wheel of Virgil, adopts old classical models to portray the New World whilst anticipating Baroque poetics. Following the example of Virgil, Balbuena fashioned his literary career as a process organised in three distinct evolutionary stages, beginning with a bucolic text, Siglo de Oro en las selvas de Erífile, and culminating with an epic poem, El Bernardo. Grandeza stood between these two, adapting the rural setting of the Georgics to an urban context, and offering an idealised account of the Virgilian praise of human industry, which placed Balbuena and the other members of the lettered class on the forefront of Mexican society.     

Die kinder des Thyestes∗

Eclogue 6 is not odd, as alleged. Gallus fits the convention of Roman poets in Arcady. The Silenus song is generic, with various Greek antecedents. Silenus himself is drawn with humour, a neglected feature; his Lucretian tone may parody or pay tribute to that poet. Virgil is fond of singing mythological creatures. There is much linguistic‐thematic interplay with his other poetry. Eclogue 6 is studiedly pastoral, a synthesis of ingredients, beginning and ending with Virgil himself ‐ ‘Vir‐gilian’ is the appropriate label.     

Otto Warburg

Abstract

In the ancient world the dividing line between the Arts and the Sciences was not so rigidly drawn as in recenl times. Poets and prose authors alike frequently crossed the boundaries in their literary works. Notable Greek interdisciplinary writers include Hesiod, Aristotle and Theophrastus and, among the Romans, Lucretius, Virgil and Pliny the Elder are the best known. Thus Aristotle wrote the Poetics on the nature of drama and related topics and, in addition to many other philosophical and scientific works, the Meteorologica, a mixture of sciences. Virgil composed the Aeneid, a national epic glorifying Rome and the emperor Augustus, and the Georgics, a handbook of agriculture. Pliny the Elder, the nineteenth centenary of whose death was celebrated on 24 August 1979, had wide-ranging interests. His works include a treatise on the javelin, a history of Rome's wars against the Germans and the unique encyclopaedic Natural History. The present review examines Pliny's career and assesses his contribution to the early history of mineralogy.     

Some Reflections on the Poetic I in Vergil's Georgics

In this article, I shall reflect upon the relationship between the didactic speaker in Vergil's Georgics and the images of the poet associated with it. In my view, the first person voice in the poem is employed in different contexts and situations that influence its appearances and have the effect of creating associations between the textual ‘‘I” and the real poet. The didactic first person speaker or instance is a formal structure belonging to the text. But it easily seems to be merged with the historical author behind the text as well.     

Books in Summary

Eva Brann, What, Then, Is Time? Lowell S. Gustafson, (ed) Thucydides' Theory of International Relations: A Lasting Possession John R. Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity Virgil Krapauskas, Nationalism and Historiography: The Case of Nineteenth‐Century Lithuanian Historicism The English Idea ofHistory from Coleridge to Collingwood, by Christopher Parker. Justo Serna and Anaclet Pons, Cómo Se Escribe la Microhistoria     

Slanted histories,Hesperian fables: material form and royalist prophecy in John Ogilby’s The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro

ABSTRACT

This article considers the status of John Ogilby’s Virgil translations as royalist texts. The paratextual material to the 1649 and 1654 editions provides a framework which invites a royalist reading; the translation promotes this by manipulating Virgil’s text and contemporary typographic conventions. These factors combine in passages that depict the death of kings. The volume follows the Virgilian precedent of foretelling events that had already occurred by presenting the passage on the death of Priam in such a manner to imply that it anticipated Charles I’s execution. This allowed Ogilby to grant a sense of inevitability to the prophecies his translation offers regarding events that he hoped lay in the near future. The 1654 edition subtly draws on Caroline-era royalist literary tropes to suggest a permanent revival of the monarchy under Charles II. Ogilby’s contributions to Charles II’s coronation celebrations draw on the Virgil translations in vindication of such prophecies.     

Geomythology and the Death of King Priam in The Aeneid,Book 2

This article examines an anomaly in Virgil’s Aeneid, book 2, and offers a possible solution based on the method known as geomythology. In this section of the poem, the narrator depicts the fatal stabbing of King Priam in front of his own altar, within the citadel of Troy, as the city is being burned by the Greeks. Immediately following this passage is a curious ‘epitaph’ for Priam, which notes that his body is huge, decapitated, and lying on a beach. Scholars have provided various explanations for this apparent discrepancy, with varying degrees of success. This article explores how a geomythological approach, focusing on the misidentification of the remains of a woolly mammoth, may resolve the issue.     

María Rosa Lida,Borges y una cita inexistente de Lucrecio: filología y auctoritas

In 1952, María Rosa Lida de Malkiel published a work in Sur magazine about the literary sources of Jorge Luis Borges. In the second paragraph of that work she relates a passage from one of the Argentine's stories with a verse from the Aeneid and, later on, two verses of the poem “Las calles” with some others from Lucretius' work De rerum natura. In both cases, she cites the number of the book and verse of the Latin poets. The one referring to Virgil is correct; however, Lucretius' verses are apocryphal. In this work, I analyze the reasons the eminent philologist could have had to carry out tremendous artifice and, at the same time, the objective and personal qualms that, during the revision, produced the auctoritas of her figure.     

Some New Vergilian Loci and Second Thoughts on Old Ones*

I. The text of Ecl. 3.100–102 is discussed and evaluated: quam is defended against quom and Cartault’s proposal [1897. Étude sur les Bucoliques de Virgile. Paris: Armand Colin] Hisce cutes – not adopted by editors and hardly visible in later apparatus critici, but recommended as worthy of attention by Heyworth [2015. “Notes on the Text and Interpretation of Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics.” In Virgilian Studies. A Miscellany Dedicated to the Memory of Mario Geymonat [Studia Classica et Mediaevalia 10], edited by H.-C. Günther, 195–249. Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz] – is both brilliant and necessary. II. Based on grammar and context the abl. risu at Ecl. 4.60 is taken as modal: “Begin, little boy, to recognize (get to know) your mother with your smile”; then the final lines (62–63) must be restored to comply with Quintilian’s figura in numero (9.3.8) as qui risere (plural) followed by hunc “such a one” (singular); this change in number is shown to be in accordance with the use of a generalizing hic to denote quality. – III. At G. 2.22 I propose quos … vias construing reperire with two accusatives. – IV. At G. 2.266–268 I furnish parallels for similem … et as “like to” supporting Heyworth’s mutata … semina. – V. Rejecting my earlier position on A. 9.462–464 I now give a repentant vote in favour of Conte’s punctuation [2009. P. Vergilius Maro. Aeneis [Bibliotheca Teubneriana]. Berlin: De Gruyter] while at the same time adding an argument in its favour.     

Zu monumentum ancyranum

Like many of his contemporaries, Montaigne quotes abundantly from classical sources. But unlike most sixteenth-century writers, he does not use his quotations primarily as a source of authority or as rhetorical ornament. He deploys them in such a way as to make his readers take note not only of the quotation itself but also of its original context. He thus engages in a much deeper and more complex dialogue with his sources, one which may be regarded as a form of cross-cultural communication. As such, his quotation practice illustrates a fundamental (but often overlooked) feature of human communication: a great part of the information transmitted through an utterance or a text is communicated implicitly.1 This article is based upon a paper given at the workshop “Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and their reception”, organized by Dr Juan Christian Pellicer and Professor Monika Asztalos at the University of Oslo in November 2007. 2 I wish to express my gratitude to Terence Cave and Kyrre Vatsend, who read with great care earlier drafts of this article and gave valuable advice on crucial aspects of it.      

Dryden’s Virgilian Kings

This essay discusses the forms of kingship which Dryden represents in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.     

“Back in the heartland”: Seamus Heaney's “Route 110” sequence in Human Chain

This essay foregrounds the increasingly significant role translation has played in Seamus Heaney's compositional and creative practices since the 1970s, and how it functions as a means of displacement and route into imagined homecomings. It offers a detailed analysis of the sequence which occupies a central position within Human Chain, in which Heaney HeaneySeamusStations. Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975. [Google Scholar] attends to and seeks to reconcile once more the different “voices of my education”, that of originary familial/parish culture of Mossbawn and Bellaghy, and that acquired at St Columb's College and Queen's University that furnished him with rich linguistic and cultural assets, but sentenced him also to a “migrant solitude” (“The Wanderer”, Stations). “Route 110” illustrates the enduring effects of both bequests, as Heaney takes scenes and motifs from Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI, which details Aeneas' experiences on his descent into the seventieth year, Heaney takes readers with him on a road back to pre-Troubles Northern Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, stopping off initially at Smithfield Market, Belfast, in order to pick up a “used copy” of the Virgil that will become his guide. What he subsequently assembles is an album of snapshots of his youth, part of his legacy to his newly-born granddaughter.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography. By Arnaldo Momigliano. Guerrilla: A Historical and Critical Study. By Walter Laqueur. Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain. By Euan W. MacKie. A History of the Creek City States 700-338 B.C. By Raphael Sealey. Rome's Debt to Greece. By Allan Wardman. Medieval Heresy. Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus. By Malcolm Lambert. John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation. By Leslie F. Fairfield. Johti Ogilby and the Tnste of His Times. By Katherine S. Van Eerdc. The Godly Man in Stuart England Politics, Religion and the English Civil War. Edited by Brian Manning. The Growth of Parlinnientnry Parties 1689-1742. By B. W. Hill. The Formation of the British Liberal Party 1857-1868. By John Vincent. The Liberal Mind 1914-1929. By Michael Bentley. The Illusion of Peacc: International Relations in Europe 1918-1933. By Sally Marks. Industrialization in the Low Countries, 17951850. By Joel Mokyr. Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV: Absolute Monnrchy and Public Opinion. By Joseph Klaits. Montesquieu and the Old Regime. By Mark Hulliung. Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical Press, 1789-1791. By Jack R. Censer. The Kingdom of Nafiles under Alfonso the Magnanimous: The Making a Modern State. By Alan Ryder. Industrv and Economic Decline in Smnteenth-Centurv Venice. By Richard Tilden Rapp. The First Duce: D'Annunzio at Fiume. By Michael A. Ledeen. Ame'rico Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization. Edited by JosC Rubia Barcia. Imperial Germany and a World without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892-1914. By Roger Chickering. The Socialist Left and the German Revolution. A History of the German Independent Social Demociatic Party, 1917-1922. By David W. Morgan. The Fox of the North. The Life of Kutuzov, General of “War and Peace.” By Roger Parkinson. In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Pre-revolutionary Russia. By Adam B, Ulam. V. D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917. Edited by Virgil D. Medlin and Steven L. Parsons. The Czty in Late Imperial China. Edited by G. William Skinner. Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813. By Susan Naquin. The Emergence of Provincial New Hampshire, 1623-1741. By David E. Van Deventer. The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England. By Edward Cook. Labor and the American Revolution. By Philip S. Foner. Founding Principles of American Government: Two Hundred Years of Democracy on Trial. Edited by George J. Graham. The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections Robrrt Fulton. By John S. Morgan. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Worrlan's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. By Nancy F. Cott. A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Frerdmen's Rights, 1861-1866. By Herman Belz. The Democratic Party und the Negro: Northerti and Nutionul Politics, 1868-1892. By Lawrence Grossman. Competition and Coo.cion: Blochs i n the Americon Economy, 1865-1914. By Robert Higgs. The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction lo the NAACP. By James McPherson. Znternal Combustion: The Races in Detroit, 1915-1926. By Daniel Allan Levine. The Frontier: Comparative Studies. Edited by David Harry Miller and Jerome O. Steffen. The Mapping of Ohio. By Thomas H. Smith. The Mariposa Indian War, 1850-1851. Diaries of Robert Eccleston. Territorial Politics and Government in Montann, 1864-1889. By Clark C. Spence. Hawdin Garland's Obseruations on the American Indian T h e Politics of Business in California, 1890-1920. By Manse1 G. Blackford. The Eccentric Tradition: American Diplomacy in the Far East. By Robert A. Hart. American Diplomatic Relations with the Middle Bast, 1784-1975: A Suruey. By Thomas A. Bryson. American Liberal Disillusionment in the Wake of World War I. By Stuart I. Rochester. United States Foreign Policy and World Order. By James A. Nathan and James The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing: 1900-1970. By Carl Berger. A Concise History of Mexico from Hidalgo to Cdrdenas, 1805-I840. By Jan Bazant. Guardians of the Dynasty. By Richard Millett. with an introduction by Miguel D'Escoto.     

Settler Life Writing,Georgic Traditions and Models of Environmental Sustainability

The purpose of this article is to reveal that the settler life writing preserves the all-but-forgotten wisdom of traditional mixed-farming methods. My study focuses on the farm logs or journals kept by three members of the Sheppard family, British immigrants who settled in southern Alberta in the late nineteenth century to establish ranches. Pioneers such as the Sheppards imagined the prairies as an Eden where they could lead prosperous lives and radically transformed the prairies, changing the nature of that life form. I explore the Sheppard journals through a lens shaped by Virgil’s Georgics. There is value in the Georgics as a model of sustainability; thus, such analysis reveals a traditional, cyclical agrarian pattern in the journals from which emerges an ethic of sustainability.     

Photius,Phlegon, and Virgil

Abstract

In his Bibliotheca, codex 97, Photius passes under review the Compilation of Olympic Victors and Chronicles by Phlegon of Tralles, a freedman of Hadrian. This work was dedicated by Phlegon to an imperial official, P. Aelius Alcibiades. Neither the official nor the book are mentioned in the Historia Augusta or the extant Byzantine epitomes of Dio Cassius, or indeed in any literary source. The name Aelius, however, might have helped the HA to create one of its many bogus sources, to wit Aelius Maurus, a supposed freedman of Phlegon himself and supplier of an anecdote about Septimius Severus on his deathbed.     

Planting Islands: Marshall Islanders Shaping Land,Power, and History

This paper reframes encounters between ri-aelōñ-kein (Marshall Islanders) and ri-pālle (outsiders) between the 16th and 19th centuries through a ri-aelōñ-kein cultural lens. It applies a deep ethnographic approach and frameworks of cross-cultural exchange and mutual possession to re-present ri-aelōñ-kein engagements across the beach as purposeful attempts to ‘plant’ ri-pālle on land and within genealogies. It argues that, in addition to violence, ri-aelōñ-kein used ‘gifts’ of land and other exchanges to ‘plant’ ri-pālle within their realms and, in turn, augment their social status. While deployed most often by irooj (chiefs), kajoor (commoner) men and women used similar tactics with some success. Throughout, ri-aelōñ-kein made history by deploying aspects of culture to advance local ambitions through engagements with ri-pālle.     

Phenology of Six Ficus L., Moraceae,Species and its Effects on Pollinator Survival,in Brisbane,Queensland, Australia

The biogeography and historical distribution of various plants often depend as much on the environmental tolerance of their pollinators as they do on the tolerance of the plant. A four year, phenological study of 35 trees from six Ficus species was carried out in Brisbane's Central Business District. The presence of syconia (figs) and their sexual phases was recorded monthly for each tree. All six species bore ‘female’ phase syconia randomly in any month. The presence of ‘male’ phase syconia was seasonal for Ficus benjamina, Ficus microcarpa and Ficus virens. It was less seasonal for Ficus obliqua and Ficus rubiginosa. Ficus macrophylla exhibited aseasonal distribution of ‘male’ phase syconia. Symbiont pollinator wasp mortality was the cause of the skew in the seasonal distribution of ‘male’ phase syconia. Ficus benjamina, F. microcarpa and F. virens seldom had ‘male’ and ‘female’ phase syconia concurrently on an individual tree, while F. macrophylla and F. obliqua often did. Ficus rubiginosa was intermediate between the two groups. Intra‐tree overlap of syconia in both sexual phases permits short dispersal flights by pollinators and is advantageous to their survival during the cooler months. The pollinators of F. benjamina, F. microcarpa and F. virens, historically tropical and tropical/subtropical species, are unlikely to establish in temperate areas due to high winter mortality rates. The other three Ficus species historically occurred in temperate climates and the pollinators of two, F. macrophylla and F. rubiginosa, are extending their range into temperate Australia and New Zealand. The pollination biology of Ficus spp. will thus be a determining factor in whether a species is able to naturalise or become invasive in a location that experiences a particular climate, or if it is safe to use as a horticultural amenity species.     

White and Coloured Marbles of the Roman Town of Urbs Salvia (Urbisaglia,Macerata, Marche,Italy)

The results of an archaeometric study concerning the coloured stones and 14 white marble sculptures found in the ancient city of Urbs Salvia (Urbisaglia, Macerata) – one of the main Roman archaeological sites of the Marche region (east central Italy) – are presented here. Data show the presence of the most important decorative stones used by the Romans, originating in all of the Mediterranean provinces, from Egypt and North Africa to Asia Minor, Greece, Gallia, Iberia and Italy. Thirty‐one different coloured lithotypes have been identified, including red and green porphyries as well as marmor phrygium and numidicum, namely the four most expensive stones cited in Diocletian's edict. Crustae of marmor chium, taenarium, chalcidicum, scyreticum, lucullaeum and sagarium also feature. Another significant presence is that of coloured stones that are generally rare, even in Rome and Ostia, such as cipollino mandolato (which is very abundant at Urbs Salvia, more than anywhere outside Gallia), broccatello di Spagna, alabastro a pecorella, lapis ophytes, brecciated facies of marmor iassene and cottanello antico. Worthy of mention, too, is the abundant presence of so‐called Roman breccia from Lez (Upper Garonne valley, French Pyrenees), a stone never reported outside Gallia. The 14 marble sculptures analysed come from public and private buildings of the Roman city and are now exhibited at the Archaeological Museum of Urbisaglia. Our petrographic and isotopic analyses show that they are made of Lunense (five), Pentelic (three), Parian lychnites (three), Thasian (three) and Proconnesian (one Corinthian capital) marbles. The quality of the coloured stones identified, together with the presence of sculptures made of precious imported white marble varieties, reveals an opulent town and a local patronage wishing to decorate public buildings and rich houses with the most sought‐after marbles of Rome.     

Fascism,Nazism, and Japanism

ALEXANDER DE GRAND. Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982; PTERRE AYQOBERRY. The Nazi Question: An Essay on the Interpretations of National Socialism (1922–1975). Tr. by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1981; WILLIAM MILES FLETCHER III. The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982; and BEN-AMI SHILLONY. Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.