Greek and Roman stories of origin, or aetia, provide a fascinating window onto ancient conception... more Greek and Roman stories of origin, or aetia, provide a fascinating window onto ancient conceptions of time. Aetia pervade ancient literature at all its stages and connect the past with the present by telling us which aspects of the past survive ‘even now’ or ‘ever since then’. Yet, while the standard aetiological formulae remain surprisingly stable over time, the understanding of time that lies behind stories of origin undergoes profound changes. By studying a broad range of texts and by closely examining select stories of origin from archaic Greece, Hellenistic Greece, Augustan Rome, and early Christian literature, Time in Ancient Stories of Origin traces the changing forms of stories of origin and the underlying changing attitudes to time: to the interaction of the time of gods and men, to historical time, to change and continuity, as well as to a time beyond the present one. Walter provides a model of how to analyse the temporal construction of aetia, by combining close attention to detail with a view towards the larger temporal agenda of each work. In the process, new insights are provided both into some of the best-known aetiological works of antiquity (e.g. by Hesiod, Callimachus, Vergil, and Ovid) and lesser-known works (e.g. Ephorus, Prudentius, and Orosius). This volume shows that aetia do not merely convey factual information about the continuity of the past, but also implicate the present in ever-new complex messages about time.
Die drei flavischen Epen bilden keine monolithische Einheit: Valerius Flaccus, Statius und Silius... more Die drei flavischen Epen bilden keine monolithische Einheit: Valerius Flaccus, Statius und Silius Italicus haben unterschiedliche Auffassungen von der Form und Funktion epischen Erzählens. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, welche persona des epischen Erzählers aus einem jeden dieser Werke spricht und wie die dargestellten Sänger- und Prophetenfiguren die Haltung dieses Erzählers widerspiegeln. Dabei zeigt sich auch, dass die Interaktion zwischen dem Erzähler und der von ihm dargestellten Welt dynamischer ist als häufig angenommen.
Die flavischen Epen erscheinen als das Produkt einer Zeit, die mehr von Wandlung als von Gleichförmigkeit bestimmt ist und die immer neue literarische Antworten auf ihre sich ändernden Herausforderungen verlangt: Während Valerius Flaccus in seinem Epos den richtigen Weg zwischen Vergessen und Erinnern sucht, um in ein neues „episches Zeitalter“ aufzubrechen, stellt Statius jede Fähigkeit des Epos, bleibende Erinnerungen an Ruhmestaten zu schaffen, in Frage. Silius Italicus nimmt eine moderatere Position ein, die einen neuen Ausgleich zwischen Erinnern und Vergessen schafft.
Ursachen erzählen – von Ursachen erzählen: Unser Band vereint Untersuchungen zu Texten aus ganz v... more Ursachen erzählen – von Ursachen erzählen: Unser Band vereint Untersuchungen zu Texten aus ganz verschiedenen Bereichen. Altes und Neues Testament, Fachschriften, literarische, historiographische und urkundliche Texte von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit und sogar die Marseillaise kommen zur Sprache. Alle Interpreten haben sich folgende Fragen gestellt: Wie werden Ursprungsgeschichten erzählt? Lassen sich in einzelnen Gattungen, Textsorten, Bildern, wissenschaftlichen und literarischen Kontexten gemeinsame Strukturen feststellen, wie Aitien eingesetzt und gestaltet werden? Bildet sich eine eigene Systematik aus, die sich von anderen Erzählungen abhebt? Welche Erkennungsmuster bieten die Ursprungsgeschichten, seien sie in wissenschaftlichen, in fiktionalen, in bildlichen Zusammenhängen präsent, ihren intendierten Rezipienten an? Mythos, Überzeugung, Historie, Sprechen und Wissen: In jedem dieser Bereiche erweist sich die Frage nach dem aitiologischen Kern als fruchtbar.
cherry-picking. For example: 'myths are stories which are retold, never merely told; they are a k... more cherry-picking. For example: 'myths are stories which are retold, never merely told; they are a kind of cultural patrimony, absorbed from childhood. And yet they belong, too, to the world of intellectual achievements' (2); 'the imagination does not roam on its own but is housed in a living person who moves about the world' (3); 'there is nothing mechanical about the way [the Periegesis] works.. .Pausanias, for all his rhetorical stylings, is in the end a craftsman putting Greece into words, and the fabric of Greece is woven tight with paideia' (19); 'Heracles' panhellenism rested on diffuse, decentralized knowledge rather than any one particular mechanism.. . The reader thus oscillates between a common repertoire of panhellenic facts and the new possibilities of local knowledge. But this is an oversimplification. .. In practice, mythical knowledge is diverse' (55-6); 'we can know a lot about places we have never visited.. . To put it another way we can have knowledge of places we have not experienced because places exist in any number of ways' (118); 'we can indeed take epichoric informants seriously as indications of local storytelling so long as we do not slip into making them avatars of actual local storytellers. Pausanias' locals.. .are products of storytelling infrastructures which fuse local opportunities to trans-local ambitions, chauvinism with outward-looking self-consciousness' (162-3); 'I have sought to show that what Pausanias has to tell us about Greek myth is not reducible merely to those things he says about it' (202). A rich and profoundly rewarding book.
In his Thebaid, Statius includes a couple of festivals that structure
the narrative and mark the ... more In his Thebaid, Statius includes a couple of festivals that structure the narrative and mark the key stages in the run-up to the full outbreak of the war against Thebes in the second half of the epic. Among other intertexts, he closely engages with Vergil’s Aeneid and the very prominent role that the festival of Hercules Invictus in book 8 plays for the poetic and political program of the epic. In the topsy-turvy world of Thebes, however, the festivals make it very clear that epic order and memory are turned on their head: The festive commemoration of key moments of the epic plot is notably premature, leading to a climactic battle that, according to Statius, should be forgotten by future generations (Theb. 11.574–579). This raises further questions on the relevance of the Thebaid for Domitianic Rome, asking the epic’s audience to ponder to what extent their own festivals are wholly positive celebrations of foundational events and values, or whether they might actually be implicated in (self-)destructive tendencies.
The Nisus and Euryalus episode in the ninth book of Vergil’s Aeneid and Kevin Powers’ 2012 novel ... more The Nisus and Euryalus episode in the ninth book of Vergil’s Aeneid and Kevin Powers’ 2012 novel The Yellow Birds on a soldier’s experiences in the year 2004 during the American War in Iraq are both constructed around a very similar story pattern of two friends who go to war together and are faced with bloodlust, cruelty, death, mutilation, and the duties of friendship, as well as the grief and silencing of a bereft mother. While the narrative and commemorative background of the two texts is very different – including the sense of an anchoring in tradition, the role of memory, even the existence of a coherent plotline itself – both the Augustan epic and the modern novel employ strikingly similar techniques and sensory imagery in their bid to convey the fundamental experience of warfare and of “what it felt like” as vividly as possible.
In Book 1 of the Fasti, the festival dedicated to Carmentis, a prophetess (vates) named after car... more In Book 1 of the Fasti, the festival dedicated to Carmentis, a prophetess (vates) named after carmen, ‘song’ itself, has strong programmatic implications for Ovid’s own song and his vatic persona. Harking back to Book 8 of the Aeneid, where Carmentis is mentioned in passing, Ovid presents her in a new light: as a vates of exile and deification. Carmentis both prophesies and prefigures what will become an entire chain of deifications of members of the house of Augustus, and she is deified herself. She strikingly contrasts with the poet Ovid, who will not receive similar honors. Instead, his own fate is mirrored in Carmentis’ first speech, on the topic of exile. We can recognize a ring structure with strong closural force: the prophecies of the very first vates, Carmentis, foreshadow the birth of ‘gods’ that were so powerful that they could send Ovid into exile and silence Rome’s most recent vates. Ovid’s exile thus becomes more than a personal mishap. It marks the completion of a circle of events that began once the first vates set her foot on Italian soil.
Greek and Roman stories of origin, or aetia, provide a fascinating window onto ancient conception... more Greek and Roman stories of origin, or aetia, provide a fascinating window onto ancient conceptions of time. Aetia pervade ancient literature at all its stages and connect the past with the present by telling us which aspects of the past survive ‘even now’ or ‘ever since then’. Yet, while the standard aetiological formulae remain surprisingly stable over time, the understanding of time that lies behind stories of origin undergoes profound changes. By studying a broad range of texts and by closely examining select stories of origin from archaic Greece, Hellenistic Greece, Augustan Rome, and early Christian literature, Time in Ancient Stories of Origin traces the changing forms of stories of origin and the underlying changing attitudes to time: to the interaction of the time of gods and men, to historical time, to change and continuity, as well as to a time beyond the present one. Walter provides a model of how to analyse the temporal construction of aetia, by combining close attention to detail with a view towards the larger temporal agenda of each work. In the process, new insights are provided both into some of the best-known aetiological works of antiquity (e.g. by Hesiod, Callimachus, Vergil, and Ovid) and lesser-known works (e.g. Ephorus, Prudentius, and Orosius). This volume shows that aetia do not merely convey factual information about the continuity of the past, but also implicate the present in ever-new complex messages about time.
Die drei flavischen Epen bilden keine monolithische Einheit: Valerius Flaccus, Statius und Silius... more Die drei flavischen Epen bilden keine monolithische Einheit: Valerius Flaccus, Statius und Silius Italicus haben unterschiedliche Auffassungen von der Form und Funktion epischen Erzählens. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, welche persona des epischen Erzählers aus einem jeden dieser Werke spricht und wie die dargestellten Sänger- und Prophetenfiguren die Haltung dieses Erzählers widerspiegeln. Dabei zeigt sich auch, dass die Interaktion zwischen dem Erzähler und der von ihm dargestellten Welt dynamischer ist als häufig angenommen.
Die flavischen Epen erscheinen als das Produkt einer Zeit, die mehr von Wandlung als von Gleichförmigkeit bestimmt ist und die immer neue literarische Antworten auf ihre sich ändernden Herausforderungen verlangt: Während Valerius Flaccus in seinem Epos den richtigen Weg zwischen Vergessen und Erinnern sucht, um in ein neues „episches Zeitalter“ aufzubrechen, stellt Statius jede Fähigkeit des Epos, bleibende Erinnerungen an Ruhmestaten zu schaffen, in Frage. Silius Italicus nimmt eine moderatere Position ein, die einen neuen Ausgleich zwischen Erinnern und Vergessen schafft.
Ursachen erzählen – von Ursachen erzählen: Unser Band vereint Untersuchungen zu Texten aus ganz v... more Ursachen erzählen – von Ursachen erzählen: Unser Band vereint Untersuchungen zu Texten aus ganz verschiedenen Bereichen. Altes und Neues Testament, Fachschriften, literarische, historiographische und urkundliche Texte von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit und sogar die Marseillaise kommen zur Sprache. Alle Interpreten haben sich folgende Fragen gestellt: Wie werden Ursprungsgeschichten erzählt? Lassen sich in einzelnen Gattungen, Textsorten, Bildern, wissenschaftlichen und literarischen Kontexten gemeinsame Strukturen feststellen, wie Aitien eingesetzt und gestaltet werden? Bildet sich eine eigene Systematik aus, die sich von anderen Erzählungen abhebt? Welche Erkennungsmuster bieten die Ursprungsgeschichten, seien sie in wissenschaftlichen, in fiktionalen, in bildlichen Zusammenhängen präsent, ihren intendierten Rezipienten an? Mythos, Überzeugung, Historie, Sprechen und Wissen: In jedem dieser Bereiche erweist sich die Frage nach dem aitiologischen Kern als fruchtbar.
cherry-picking. For example: 'myths are stories which are retold, never merely told; they are a k... more cherry-picking. For example: 'myths are stories which are retold, never merely told; they are a kind of cultural patrimony, absorbed from childhood. And yet they belong, too, to the world of intellectual achievements' (2); 'the imagination does not roam on its own but is housed in a living person who moves about the world' (3); 'there is nothing mechanical about the way [the Periegesis] works.. .Pausanias, for all his rhetorical stylings, is in the end a craftsman putting Greece into words, and the fabric of Greece is woven tight with paideia' (19); 'Heracles' panhellenism rested on diffuse, decentralized knowledge rather than any one particular mechanism.. . The reader thus oscillates between a common repertoire of panhellenic facts and the new possibilities of local knowledge. But this is an oversimplification. .. In practice, mythical knowledge is diverse' (55-6); 'we can know a lot about places we have never visited.. . To put it another way we can have knowledge of places we have not experienced because places exist in any number of ways' (118); 'we can indeed take epichoric informants seriously as indications of local storytelling so long as we do not slip into making them avatars of actual local storytellers. Pausanias' locals.. .are products of storytelling infrastructures which fuse local opportunities to trans-local ambitions, chauvinism with outward-looking self-consciousness' (162-3); 'I have sought to show that what Pausanias has to tell us about Greek myth is not reducible merely to those things he says about it' (202). A rich and profoundly rewarding book.
In his Thebaid, Statius includes a couple of festivals that structure
the narrative and mark the ... more In his Thebaid, Statius includes a couple of festivals that structure the narrative and mark the key stages in the run-up to the full outbreak of the war against Thebes in the second half of the epic. Among other intertexts, he closely engages with Vergil’s Aeneid and the very prominent role that the festival of Hercules Invictus in book 8 plays for the poetic and political program of the epic. In the topsy-turvy world of Thebes, however, the festivals make it very clear that epic order and memory are turned on their head: The festive commemoration of key moments of the epic plot is notably premature, leading to a climactic battle that, according to Statius, should be forgotten by future generations (Theb. 11.574–579). This raises further questions on the relevance of the Thebaid for Domitianic Rome, asking the epic’s audience to ponder to what extent their own festivals are wholly positive celebrations of foundational events and values, or whether they might actually be implicated in (self-)destructive tendencies.
The Nisus and Euryalus episode in the ninth book of Vergil’s Aeneid and Kevin Powers’ 2012 novel ... more The Nisus and Euryalus episode in the ninth book of Vergil’s Aeneid and Kevin Powers’ 2012 novel The Yellow Birds on a soldier’s experiences in the year 2004 during the American War in Iraq are both constructed around a very similar story pattern of two friends who go to war together and are faced with bloodlust, cruelty, death, mutilation, and the duties of friendship, as well as the grief and silencing of a bereft mother. While the narrative and commemorative background of the two texts is very different – including the sense of an anchoring in tradition, the role of memory, even the existence of a coherent plotline itself – both the Augustan epic and the modern novel employ strikingly similar techniques and sensory imagery in their bid to convey the fundamental experience of warfare and of “what it felt like” as vividly as possible.
In Book 1 of the Fasti, the festival dedicated to Carmentis, a prophetess (vates) named after car... more In Book 1 of the Fasti, the festival dedicated to Carmentis, a prophetess (vates) named after carmen, ‘song’ itself, has strong programmatic implications for Ovid’s own song and his vatic persona. Harking back to Book 8 of the Aeneid, where Carmentis is mentioned in passing, Ovid presents her in a new light: as a vates of exile and deification. Carmentis both prophesies and prefigures what will become an entire chain of deifications of members of the house of Augustus, and she is deified herself. She strikingly contrasts with the poet Ovid, who will not receive similar honors. Instead, his own fate is mirrored in Carmentis’ first speech, on the topic of exile. We can recognize a ring structure with strong closural force: the prophecies of the very first vates, Carmentis, foreshadow the birth of ‘gods’ that were so powerful that they could send Ovid into exile and silence Rome’s most recent vates. Ovid’s exile thus becomes more than a personal mishap. It marks the completion of a circle of events that began once the first vates set her foot on Italian soil.
The Nisus and Euryalus episode in the ninth book of Vergil’s Aeneid and
Kevin Powers’ 2012 novel ... more The Nisus and Euryalus episode in the ninth book of Vergil’s Aeneid and Kevin Powers’ 2012 novel The Yellow Birds on a soldier’s experiences in the year 2004 during the American War in Iraq are both constructed around a very similar story pattern of two friends who go to war together and are faced with bloodlust, cruelty, death, mutilation, and the duties of friendship, as well as the grief and silencing of a bereft mother. While the narrative and commemorative background of the two texts is very different – including the sense of an anchoring in tradition, the role of memory, even the existence of a coherent plotline itself – both the Augustan epic and the modern novel employ strikingly similar techniques and sensory imagery in their bid to convey the fundamental experience of warfare and of “what it felt like” as vividly as possible.
This special issue of thersites (edited by Annemarie Ambühl) addresses artistic representations o... more This special issue of thersites (edited by Annemarie Ambühl) addresses artistic representations of war in literature and other media, focusing especially on the role of sensory perceptions and emotions as well as on gender issues. In line with the transcultural and diachronic outlook of thersites, issues of reception are approached either by applying modern theories and methods to the interpretation of classical texts or by comparing and contrasting ancient and modern responses to war and violence and their impact on human beings and society in general. The issue features contributions that range from Homer to postmodern novels and movies, as well as reviews of thematically related recent publications. Within this wide horizon two thematic clusters emerge: One group of papers studies the narratological, aesthetic and psychological dimensions of (fictional) descriptions of battles and other forms of violence in Latin literature, especially in Caesar’s war commentaries and the epics of Lucan, Valerius Flaccus and Statius, while another group of papers looks at novels that directly or indirectly reflect on experiences from both World Wars and the recent wars in Iraq through a complex engagement with classical narratives and concepts derived from classical antiquity.
The second volume of Harm Pinkster's Oxford Latin Syntax is a stunning achievement and an admirab... more The second volume of Harm Pinkster's Oxford Latin Syntax is a stunning achievement and an admirably thorough account of the Latin ‘complex sentence and discourse’. Far from restricting itself to classical prose, the work covers Latin texts from c. 200 bc to c. ad 450, in both poetry and prose. Overall, I was struck by the good balance that Pinkster maintains between presenting Latin syntax in a systematic and well-structured way and leaving enough room for the portrayal of the Latin language as a dynamic phenomenon, in which the frequency of and predilection for certain linguistic constructions keeps changing and the ‘correctness’ of certain expressions is a matter of time and context. Equally salutary are Pinkster's reminders of the role that intonation must have played in the production and reception of Latin – and of what we lose by no longer having access to it. Throughout, Pinkster gives due consideration to the fact that it is often hard to securely classify a grammati...
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Books by Anke Walter
Die flavischen Epen erscheinen als das Produkt einer Zeit, die mehr von Wandlung als von Gleichförmigkeit bestimmt ist und die immer neue literarische Antworten auf ihre sich ändernden Herausforderungen verlangt: Während Valerius Flaccus in seinem Epos den richtigen Weg zwischen Vergessen und Erinnern sucht, um in ein neues „episches Zeitalter“ aufzubrechen, stellt Statius jede Fähigkeit des Epos, bleibende Erinnerungen an Ruhmestaten zu schaffen, in Frage. Silius Italicus nimmt eine moderatere Position ein, die einen neuen Ausgleich zwischen Erinnern und Vergessen schafft.
Papers by Anke Walter
the narrative and mark the key stages in the run-up to the full outbreak
of the war against Thebes in the second half of the epic. Among other
intertexts, he closely engages with Vergil’s Aeneid and the very prominent
role that the festival of Hercules Invictus in book 8 plays for the poetic and
political program of the epic. In the topsy-turvy world of Thebes, however,
the festivals make it very clear that epic order and memory are turned on
their head: The festive commemoration of key moments of the epic plot is
notably premature, leading to a climactic battle that, according to Statius,
should be forgotten by future generations (Theb. 11.574–579). This raises
further questions on the relevance of the Thebaid for Domitianic Rome,
asking the epic’s audience to ponder to what extent their own festivals are
wholly positive celebrations of foundational events and values, or whether
they might actually be implicated in (self-)destructive tendencies.
Die flavischen Epen erscheinen als das Produkt einer Zeit, die mehr von Wandlung als von Gleichförmigkeit bestimmt ist und die immer neue literarische Antworten auf ihre sich ändernden Herausforderungen verlangt: Während Valerius Flaccus in seinem Epos den richtigen Weg zwischen Vergessen und Erinnern sucht, um in ein neues „episches Zeitalter“ aufzubrechen, stellt Statius jede Fähigkeit des Epos, bleibende Erinnerungen an Ruhmestaten zu schaffen, in Frage. Silius Italicus nimmt eine moderatere Position ein, die einen neuen Ausgleich zwischen Erinnern und Vergessen schafft.
the narrative and mark the key stages in the run-up to the full outbreak
of the war against Thebes in the second half of the epic. Among other
intertexts, he closely engages with Vergil’s Aeneid and the very prominent
role that the festival of Hercules Invictus in book 8 plays for the poetic and
political program of the epic. In the topsy-turvy world of Thebes, however,
the festivals make it very clear that epic order and memory are turned on
their head: The festive commemoration of key moments of the epic plot is
notably premature, leading to a climactic battle that, according to Statius,
should be forgotten by future generations (Theb. 11.574–579). This raises
further questions on the relevance of the Thebaid for Domitianic Rome,
asking the epic’s audience to ponder to what extent their own festivals are
wholly positive celebrations of foundational events and values, or whether
they might actually be implicated in (self-)destructive tendencies.
Kevin Powers’ 2012 novel The Yellow Birds on a soldier’s experiences in the year 2004 during the American War in Iraq are both constructed around a very similar story pattern of two friends who go to war together and are faced with bloodlust, cruelty, death, mutilation, and the duties of friendship, as well as the grief and silencing of a bereft mother. While the narrative and commemorative background of the two texts is very different – including the sense of an anchoring in tradition, the role of memory, even the existence of a coherent plotline itself – both the Augustan epic and the modern novel employ strikingly similar techniques and sensory imagery in their bid to convey the fundamental experience of warfare and of “what it felt like” as vividly as possible.