Classics

Shane Butler takes us back to an age, long before Edison, when writing itself was still relatively new. He meticulously reconstructs a series of Greek and Roman soundscapes ranging from Aristotle to Augustine.

Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods. The resonant world we encounter in ancient sources is at first unfamiliar, populated by texts that speak and sing, often with no clear difference between the two. But Butler discovers a commonality that invites a deeper understanding of why voices mattered then, and why they have mattered since.

With later examples that range from Petrarch to Puccini, Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice — as an anatomical presence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strengths and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice by Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time to students and scholars in voice studies, sound studies, and media theory. The Ancient Phonograph will appeal not only to classicists but to anyone interested in the verbal arts — literature, oratory, song — and the nature of aesthetic experience.

Fragmented, buried, and largely lost, the classical past presents formidable obstacles to anyone who would seek to know it. ‘Deep Classics’ is the study of these obstacles and, in particular, of the way in which the contemplation of the classical past resembles – and has even provided a model for – other kinds of human endeavor. This volume offers a new way to understand the modalities and aims of Classics itself, through the ages. Its individual chapters draw fruitful connections between the reception of the classical and current concerns in the philosophy of mind, cognitive theory, epistemology, media studies, sense studies, aesthetics, queer theory, the history of science and eco-criticism. This groundbreaking collection of essays makes a pointed intervention in the study of the classical tradition, now generally known as classical reception studies.

Indeed, the words that come at me from all directions overthrew me long ago. I have never really commanded them. I am more like their slave. And yet, every now and then—but in a way that makes me wonder whether it is happening all the time, even when I do not notice—the signal seems to change. Take, for example, a letter of Cicero’s written late in 46 BCE to his best friend, Atticus…

Not far down the Italian coast from Rome, a little past Anzio, a small and lonely medieval castle, perched on submerged Roman ruins just off the present shoreline, turns an almost windowless back to the mainland and stares out instead at the Tyrrhenian sea. Somewhere very near this spot, in a villa he describes as in mari ipso, “right in the sea,” Cicero once sought to shut out the world, in order to be alone with a seemingly limitless grief…

John Addington Symonds (Bristol 1840 – Rome 1893) was one of Victorian Britain’s most prolific authors, with works that included poems, translations, travel essays, and scholarly studies on topics ranging from classical literature to the Renaissance to the poetry of his contemporaries. Today, however, he is usually remembered for his long unpublished Memoirs, a major early monument of queer life-writing, and for two privately printed, secretly circulated essays, one of which includes the earliest printed appearance in English of the word homosexual. This new word, first coined in German, has long provided a useful milestone for historians of sexuality charting the emergence not only of new typologies but of whole new regimes of knowledge. But what of the rest of Symonds’s vast body of work? To reduce his writing to its single most influential word or to the confessional mode of his autobiography is to overlook the more radical potential of his wider thought. This book returns to Symonds, not as the origin of a now familiar history, but as a far more complex thinker, with an ambitious vision of the queerness of the world itself—and of what it means to live in it.

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Let us begin by conjuring the ghost of a specific nonhuman listener: Kleinzach, the beloved dog of composer Jacques Offenbach, evidently named for the dwarf in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, ‘Klein Zaches, gennant Zinnober’, ‘Little Zaches, Called Cinnabar’…

PROBABLY NOTHING ANGELO POLIZIANO WROTE has more often been quoted than this: "Non exprimis, inquit aliquis, Ciceronem. Quid tum? Non enim sum Cicero! Me tamen (ut opinor) exprimo" (Someone says to me, "You don't express Cicero." So what? I'm not Cicero! All the same, as I see it, I express myself). 1 These sixteen words comprise roughly one-half hundredth of a percent of Poliziano's published Latin and Greek works, and one suspects that their author would be dismayed to find his vast, rich oeuvre-and his brief but extraordinary life-so often reduced to a single epigram. 2 And yet, there it is: abrupt, arresting, remarkable. One way or another, one cannot really reckon with Poliziano without reckoning with his most famous dictum…

The 'Elegy on the Nightingale' is a curious Latin poem of uncertain (but probably post-classical) date and authorship that is transmitted by several medieval manuscripts. It offers a catalogue of animal sounds rich in what linguists call iconicity, and literary scholars, onomatopoeia: to read these verses aloud is to imitate the sounds being described. The poem begins in address to the nightingale of its title, praised for her ability to make music by mimicking all she hears. By the end has the poem itself done the same? For all their playfulness, the verses strike at the heart of our own theoretical commonplaces, starting with the supposed arbitrariness of the sign, always unsettled by such examples, exceptional though they may be. So too did the writing down of non-human sounds preoccupy ancient linguists, who sought to segregate them from language proper. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that these sound-words conjure what they name, especially since, in many cases, it is only our ability to match their sounds to animals we can still hear that enables us to know what the poem is saying. What happens to our understanding of the poetic text as a transcription of human speech or song when we take it seriously as a recording of non-human sound? And even more dramatically, what happens to our understanding of human language when we strive (as this poem strives, albeit surreptitiously) to listen with non-human ears? With some help from the animal imaginings of Jakob von Uexküll, this article attempts some preliminary answers.