d'Hoine, P.; Roskam, G.; Schorn, S.; Verheyden, J. (eds): Polemics and Networking in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Turnhout., 2021
At the beginning of the 5th century A.D. there are a number of testimonies that place Cicero and ... more At the beginning of the 5th century A.D. there are a number of testimonies that place Cicero and Virgil in a competitive relationship and at the same time reflect a polemical debate between rival interpreters of poetry. Central issues in this debate are the reputation of poetry and prose both as literary genres and as subjects of instruction, the ‘correct’ reading of poetry and of Virgil in particular, and the question of who is competent and authorised to interpret and teach Virgil’s works.
The fact that such rivalries and interpretative claims in late antiquity could be expressed precisely in the comparison between Cicero and Virgil is based on a long history of reading and teaching literature in Rome. In this article, I shall outline this history in order to better understand which cultural and literary preconditions made the comparison plausible in the eyes of contemporary readers. To this end, I trace the development of three motifs, viz. the changing perspectives on Cicero and Virgil and their relationship to other authors, the idea of Virgil as being (comparable to) an orator and the tradition of polemics against grammarians. The paper concludes with some reflections on the rhetorical function and possible intentions for the use of the comparison motif.
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Books by Ute Tischer
The aim of this volume is to explore this tension and to examine commentaries and scholia on poetry in terms of authorship and ‘authoriality’. The contributions use several Latin and Greek corpora as case studies to shed light on how these texts were read, how they display authorial activity themselves, and how they fulfil their function as didactic works. They provide reflections on the relationship of author, authorship, and authority in ‘authorless’ traditions, explore how authorial figures and authorial viewpoints emerge in an implicit manner in spite of the stratified nature of commentaries, investigate the authorial roles adopted by commentators, compilers and scribes, and elucidate how commentators came to be perceived as authors in other exegetic traditions.
This makes the “author image” particularly suitable for examining the intersections of material, rhetorical and mental representations of literary authorship that form the subject of this volume. Using selected examples from Latin and Greek literature, the contributors explore the fields of cultural experience that nourish authorial images. They discuss the manifold possibilities of visualising and representing a person’s quality of being an author in general or being an author of specific works, be it physically through artworks or pictures, metaphorically through evoked authorial figures, through thematised representations of authors in a text, or through the combination of authorial images and texts.
These issues are addressed in four overlapping sections, each focusing on different areas of the metaphor’s application, namely material images in the form of artworks, knowledge about persons, textual images as authorial strategies and images in reception.
The volume starts by introducing three contextual concepts developed in the fields of cultural studies, linguistics and modern literary studies. A number of papers using Greek and Latin works as examples reflect on the meaning of context, the ways of establishing relationships between texts and contexts, and the resulting potential for analysis and interpretation. The papers are divided into three sections that focus on how the term and concept of context is used in interpretations, on the problem of missing or multiple contexts, and on possible interfaces that the ancient works themselves provide between text and context(s).
Papers by Ute Tischer
The fact that such rivalries and interpretative claims in late antiquity could be expressed precisely in the comparison between Cicero and Virgil is based on a long history of reading and teaching literature in Rome. In this article, I shall outline this history in order to better understand which cultural and literary preconditions made the comparison plausible in the eyes of contemporary readers. To this end, I trace the development of three motifs, viz. the changing perspectives on Cicero and Virgil and their relationship to other authors, the idea of Virgil as being (comparable to) an orator and the tradition of polemics against grammarians. The paper concludes with some reflections on the rhetorical function and possible intentions for the use of the comparison motif.