Tartarus

Julius Caesar, one of the protagonists of Lucan’s Pharsalia, disappears from the scene for a long time after the Battle of Pharsalus. He reappears at the end of Book 9, when he pays a visit to the ruined city of Troy. The function and the source of this historically unsupported scene are both worth examining. Earlier research disclosed as the literary source of the Troy scene the episode in Aeneid Book 8, when Evander shows Aeneas the future site of Rome. While fully accepting that, I would like to present another possible source that might have as much effect on the constructing of Lucan’s Troy as the Evander–scene: the katabasis in Book 6 of the Aeneid. Definite parallelisms can be identified between the two scenes on both motivic and textual levels. Furthermore, the connection between these three scenes can be proved on the level of content, since by examining them together the real purpose of the Troy scene can be decoded: Lucan predicts Rome’s destruction in this episode.

The prevailing understanding among critical scholars is that Genesis is made up of stories that are parochial versions of popular mythological stories and what they consider to be the unquestionable proof is the story about Noah and the flood that supposedly was copied from the ancient story about Gilgamesh. Moreover, scholars claim that what characterizes all these ancient stories is that they were written by people who had mythical minds and what they wrote had no relationship to the world as we know it today. The article analyses these ancient stories and finds out that the reason modern scholars cannot make any sense of these stories is because they are handicapped by the concept of objective reality so that they interpret all the images used by ancient authors as descriptions of a world that they imagined and had no relationship to the world in which they lived. Scholars claim that the reason ancient writers were unable to provide descriptions of the world in which they lived that made sense is because they had a different kind of mind than that of modern people, a mind that they call mythical and is radically different from their own that they call scientific. As a result of this study, those supposed mythical minds that ancient people had turns out to be a myth in itself, but one created by the scholars themselves due to their inability to read ancient texts, and debunking this myth is meant by demythologizing mythology. Therefore, ancient stories not only were not written by idiots who were unable to describe the world in which they lived, but were masterpieces that not only accurately described the problems that ancient societies faced, but those problems are to a greater extent present today. Although traditional understandings of mythological stories are fascinated with great heroes such as Herakles/Hercules, Achilles, Odysseus/Ulises, Hector, Paris, Aeneas, Gilgamesh, and so on, when read with the proper concepts and using the methodology employed in these studies, they make clear that violence has always led to the collapse of all ancient societies and civilizations, and they do not see or offer any solution to the problem of violence and evil. As the story about Gilgamesh and about Noah prove, the biblical writers not only were aware of the mythological stories that were popular at their time, but unlike those stories that only accurately described the problems that human societies from all times faced without offering any solution, the Bible is the only book that offers a radical and revolutionary solution to the problem of evil in the end of the story about the Flood.

The present article aims to explore the notion of Existentialist essence in the major and minor characters of Albert Camus’s short story “The Guest.” It also takes it upon itself to investigate the different implications of the setting of the story. The central questions of this survey, therefore, are: which of the characters of the short story can be said to have developed a sort of personality we associate with Existentialism? What can be inferred from Camus’s choice of the setting? To answer the questions, this moral/philosophical study first reviews the basic tenets of Existentialism in a nutshell and then probes them as well as their functions in the characters and the setting of the narrative. The present research argues that the only person who fits into Camus’s conception of an Existentialist hero is Daru, even though The Arab, too, develops certain traits which are attuned with the Existentialist mindset. It is also revealed that in “The Guest,” there are significant allusions toThe Myth of Sisyphus, Inferno, Hell, Notes from Underground, “The Waste Land,” and Psalm 23, which create a gloomy setting and represent Daru as a modern Sisyphus. A possible implication is that Camus is effectively comparing the plateau/Algeria/the world to Hades/inferno/Hell and that he is identifying himself with Daru and the people living in the mid-twentieth century with the residents of Tartarus.

The Greeks and Romans spent considerable effort discussing the afterlife and what it was like to be dead. In this class you examine texts that explore the way of the underworld and what people thought they could expect. In classical literature, Heracles, Theseus and Orpheus all went to the underworld and back. More famously, Odysseus goes to the land of Hades to gain information about his future from the dead Teiresias in The Odyssey. In Aristophanes’ comedy, The Frogs, Dionysus goes to Hades to bring back a great poet. Delve into the darkness that was Greek and Roman afterlife, and come away with a new understanding of what it means to be human.

Thanks to Christine Perkell who spotted my typos for Dionysus, now fixed.

В средневековой историографии и позже восточных славян и русских стали называть античными наименованиями, сравнивая или даже отождествляя их со скифами, роксоланами, рутенами. Как уже довольно давно было установлено, скифы и роксоланы – древние народы иранской группы, а рутены – кельты. То есть к славянам они прямого отношения не имели, разве что некоторые из них жили в Северном Причерноморье, где гораздо позже жили и восточные славяне. Скифы были самыми известными из древних обитателей Северного Причерноморья, да и само созвучие слов «роксоланы», «рутены» и «русские» («россияне») казалось тогда достаточным. В устах западноевропейских авторов, именовавших русских такими античными псевдонимами, эти отождествления означали приписывание русским признаков дикости и жестокости. Сами же отечественные писатели и историки использовали такие вот классицистические, книжные шаблоны, чтобы подчеркнуть исконность, древность, самобытность своего народа, да ещё и старались перетолковывать собственное «скифство» в положительном смысле.