Project MUSE®: American Journal of Philology - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Journal of Philology.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 117 (1996) through current issueLatest Articles: American Journal of PhilologyTWOProject MUSE®American Journal of Philology1086-31680002-9475Latest articles in American Journal of Philology. Feed provided by Project MUSE®State of Play: Ancient Democracy Today
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986031
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As we begin the second quarter of the 21st century, democracy is in peril around the world. Despite the alleged triumph of democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, authoritarianism is again on the rise and the number of healthy democracies is in decline.1 This turn of events has prompted questions about how democracies devolve into autocratic regimes and how we can strengthen democracies against this slide.2 In these debates, the history and theory of ancient democracy have played a prominent role. Indeed, it is an exciting (and frightening!) time to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of democracy in both ancient and modern times.The study of ancient democracy and its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6/image/coversmallState of Play: Ancient Democracy Today2026-03-25text/htmlen-USState of Play: Ancient Democracy Today2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®810762026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Tripled Silence in the Final Tableau of Ajax
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986032
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It ought to be difficult to identify tableaux—when an actor or actors remain significantly still for a noticeable period of time—from a text alone; "significant" and "noticeable" are subjective qualities, particularly when stage directions must be inferred from the dialogue.1 Yet there is a surprisingly high degree of consensus on the outlines of tableaux in Greek Tragedy as compared to other aspects of staging. Tableaux are by definition static, so that only two actions need be inferred—the initial arrangement of the actors and the movement that disperses them—and most scholars seem to share a similar degree of sensitivity to textual indications of tableau establishment and dissolution.2 The final scenes of Ajax
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6/image/coversmallTripled Silence in the Final Tableau of Ajax2026-03-25text/htmlen-USTripled Silence in the Final Tableau of Ajax2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®1353492026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Antagonizing Fathers or Literary Choices? Tragedy as a Poetic Legacy in Ovid's Met. 13.22–34, 140–58
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986033
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In the opening episode of Met. 13, Ovid measures himself against the long-standing tradition surrounding one of the most significant episodes of the Trojan War, the Judgment of the Arms (Armorum Iudicium). The contest for the identification of Achilles' successor has a long literary history across different authors. Although the triumph of Odysseus over Ajax remains constant, other details vary, including the identity of its internal audience. The episode appears first in epic poetry: if its mention in Homer's Odyssey is fleeting,1 it is developed more at length in two poems of the Trojan Cycle, the Aethiopis and the Little Iliad, both pointing to different Trojans as judges.2 The strife between Ajax and Odysseus
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6/image/coversmallAntagonizing Fathers or Literary Choices? Tragedy as a Poetic Legacy in Ovid's Met. 13.22–34, 140–582026-03-25text/htmlen-USAntagonizing Fathers or Literary Choices? Tragedy as a Poetic Legacy in Ovid's Met. 13.22–34, 140–582026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®1686002026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25The Rhetor's Toolbox: Titles in Roman Declamation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986034
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Nearly all of the surviving individual examples of Latin declamatory exercises (controversiae and suasoriae) have titles. This article takes the linguistic peculiarity of these titles in the four extant collections (Seneca the Elder's Controversiae, Calpurnius Flaccus' Controversiae, Minor Declamations, and Major Declamations) as a starting point. While their form was already noted (albeit only in passing),1 I go deeper and demonstrate that declamatory titles were crafted with care and deliberateness, not out of mere pedantry but with specific pedagogical purposes in mind. I argue that declamatory titles share a distinctive form; that this form is indicative of their function(s) in context; and that they are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6/image/coversmallThe Rhetor's Toolbox: Titles in Roman Declamation2026-03-25text/htmlen-USThe Rhetor's Toolbox: Titles in Roman Declamation2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®1152572026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Tyrannizing the Tyrant: Philarchia and Plutarch's Ad principem ineruditum 779D–F
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986035
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In discussing the figures of Philarchos and Phyxarchos in Adamantios Korais' Dialogue on Greek Interests (Περὶ τῶν Ἑλληνικῶν συμφερόντων διάλογος) in his Prolegomena to Plutarch's political treatises, Sophia Xenophontos (2014, 143–50) points out that the 19th-century Greek scholar draws on Plutarch's portrayal of excessive ambition.1 She argues that Korais employs the term philarchia ("love of power") in cases where the Chaeronean would have used the word philotimia ("love of honor") in a negative sense when criticizing political office-seeking in the modern period. Xenophontos furthermore explains that, since philotimia in antiquity—and in Plutarch specifically—could carry positive, neutral, or negative meanings
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6/image/coversmallTyrannizing the Tyrant: Philarchia and Plutarch's Ad principem ineruditum 779D–F2026-03-25text/htmlen-USTyrannizing the Tyrant: Philarchia and Plutarch's Ad principem ineruditum 779D–F2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®1422682026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Making Sense: Envy in Libanius' Declamation 30
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986036
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Why would anyone pray to see a neighbor's house collapse, crushing everyone inside? Why cherish the memory of watching that same neighbor, one's former friend, beating his wife? And why petition the Athenian Council to authorize one's suicide? For a speaker in Libanius,1 the answer to all three questions is the same. Desperately envious of his neighbor's newfound wealth, he seeks escape, but that is not all he seeks. For he laces his speech with invective targeting the neighbor whom he envies, prompting us to wonder if defamatory intent might not lie behind his plea to die. I argue that in Libanius' rarely discussed Declamation 30,2 the dramatized speaker, in an effort to procure confiscation of his neighbor's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6/image/coversmallMaking Sense: Envy in Libanius' Declamation 302026-03-25text/htmlen-USMaking Sense: Envy in Libanius' Declamation 302026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®1334592026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Jokes in Greek Comedy: From Puns to Poetics by Naomi Scott (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986037
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The oscillation between two incongruous ideas (more recently called "scripts") has long been a familiar definition for jokes and puns. But in this book, Naomi Scott urges us to see this oscillation happening not just at the level of the joke (chapter 1), but also in comic staging (chapter 2) and plot (chapter 3). Is that choral cloud in Aristophanes supposed to be a cloud or an actor playing a cloud? Is the plot of the Trojan War in Dionysalexandros about Paris' choice or Dionysus' choice? Our minds oscillate playfully in that incongruous space created by the comedian. The verbal joke thus becomes an analytical tool to appreciate the variety of mechanisms at comedy's disposal for generating laughter. But Scott goes
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6/image/coversmallJokes in Greek Comedy: From Puns to Poetics by Naomi Scott (review)2026-03-25text/htmlen-USJokes in Greek Comedy: From Puns to Poetics by Naomi Scott (review)2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®145892026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Beyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome by Timothy C. Hart (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986038
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The simultaneous study of the Danubian provinces of the Roman Empire has only been at the forefront of research for a few decades, as the success of the conference series "Roma e le province danubiana," founded by Livio Zerbini, shows. The present book is based on a doctoral thesis of the same title, written at the University of Michigan. In his work, the author has sought to build his argument around a fundamentally correct basic idea, namely that the rivers that marked and protected the borders of the Roman Empire not only served to separate it from the so-called barbarians, but also, as an important part of Roman strategy, to link (following the long-standing debate between Luttwak and Whittaker) the two worlds.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6/image/coversmallBeyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome by Timothy C. Hart (review)2026-03-25text/htmlen-USBeyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome by Timothy C. Hart (review)2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®166872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Modernist Hellenism: Pound, Eliot, H.D., and the Translation of Greece by Katerina Stergiopoulou (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986039
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"Make it new!" declared the modernist poet Ezra Pound, one of the three subtitular authors in Katerina Stergiopoulou's Modernist Hellenism: Pound, Eliot, H.D., and the Translation of Greece. As Louis Menand has written, "The "It" in "Make It New" is the Old—what is valuable in the culture of the past. A great deal of Pound's poetry therefore takes the form of translation, imitation, allusion, and quotation" (Menand, Louis. 2008. "The Pound Error," The New Yorker). Stergiopoulou's book focuses mostly on this first aspect, offering in its introduction the mission statement that "Modernist Hellenism both insists on viewing Pound's and H.D.'s work with Greek through the lens of translation—understood as encompassing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/6/image/coversmallModernist Hellenism: Pound, Eliot, H.D., and the Translation of Greece by Katerina Stergiopoulou (review)2026-03-25text/htmlen-USModernist Hellenism: Pound, Eliot, H.D., and the Translation of Greece by Katerina Stergiopoulou (review)2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®152992026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25