Department of Classics

This document explains the set of images of a manuscript destroyed in WW II that have been placed in open access on Shared Shelf Comments. A group of 175 images was made available in early 2016. In May 2018, 106 additional images were made available, and this revised version of the document takes account of the additions and provides other updates to the documentation.

The 9th-century manuscript Metz 292 (Metz, France, Bibliothèque municipale) of Servius' commentaries on the poems of Vergil was destroyed in World War II. Photographs taken in the 1930s for the Harvard Servius Project are the only surviving evidence for this important manuscript of Servius.

This short document provides background information for the placing of digitized versions of the photographs in the open-access Shared Shelf Commons (ArtStor) and the URL for access.

August W. Schlegel published his essay "Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide" in Paris in 1807 and included a very slightly revised version in his Essais littéraires et historiques in 1842, but these publications are not widely available and are not included in German editions of Schlegel's works. The "Comparaison" makes detailed comments on Jean Racine's Phèdre of 1677 and Euripides' Hippolytus of 428 BCE (Racine's major source, although he also drew on Seneca's Phaedra and other classical sources), and is an interesting document in the reception of Euripides and of Racine as well as useful evidence of the development of tragic theory in the German neoclassical and romantic traditions.

This revised digital edition (version 2) presents the text of the 1842 edition (with critical notes recording the variants of the 1807 version) with introduction, glossary of proper names, and annotations (many identifying quotations and allusions made by Schlegel without bibliographic reference), as well as some paragraphs from the preface to the 1842 book that comment on the circumstances of original publication. In addition, an English translation by Emily Allen-Hornblower has been added.

Minor additions and corrections have been in the glossary and annotations, and links have been added to the PDF to facilitate moving from French to English and back or navigating to the annotations or glossary entries.

August W. Schlegel published his essay "Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide" in Paris in 1807 and included a very slightly revised version in his Essais littéraires et historiques in 1842, but these publications are not widely available and are not included in German editions of Schlegel's works. The "Comparaison" makes detailed comments on Jean Racine's Phèdre of 1677 and Euripides' Hippolytus of 428 BCE (Racine's major source, although he also drew on Seneca's Phaedra and other classical sources), and is an interesting document in the reception of Euripides and of Racine as well as useful evidence of the development of tragic theory in the German neoclassical and romantic traditions.

This digital edition presents the text of the 1842 edition (with critical notes recording the variants of the 1807 version) with introduction, glossary of proper names, and annotations (many identifying quotations and allusions made by Schlegel without bibliographic reference), as well as some paragraphs from the preface to the 1842 book that comment on the circumstances of original publication.

A subsequent version or versions of this digital edition will contain a more extensive introduction and an English translation of Schlegel's essay.

Explanation and justification of the conventions and methods adopted in the Harvard Edition of the Servian commentaries on Vergil, as they are being applied in the author's in-progress volume covering commentary on Aeneid 9-12.

This paper was part of a panel sponsored by the Committee on Publications of the American Philological Association (later renamed Society for Classical Studies) at the Annual Meeting, January 5, 2004, in San Francisco. 

Of the other papers in the panel, that of Cynthia Damon and the response to all papers by Robert Kaster have been added here as supplemental files in January 2018, while the paper of James Zetzel is to be made available at his academia.edu site.

Logos in Greek culture is language that stakes a claim on the attention of its addressee. It therefore implies a question as to the authority of the utterer. This article investigates how the basis of that authority was distributed between utterer, audience, and the sense that the utterance makes, as well as how that distribution changed over time.

The basic development from archaic to classical culture in the sphere of logos is this: whereas in archaic culture the speaking-position and the position of authority are united in the same person or group, in classical culture they become separated. This occurs in the context both of the lawcourts and of political assemblies. The judging, articulate, authoritative kings and elders of Homer and Hesiod are replaced in court by the silent Athenian jury and in the Assembly by a popular audience, who are spectators of others’ speeches. When authority rests with the judges or voters, but these constitute the audience rather than the speakers, speaking becomes the principal means by which the ambitious could obtain authority for themselves — in effect, taking it over from those in whom it ultimately resided. Skillful public speaking was no longer primarily a professional calling with a special group definition and social place (e.g. that of poetry), but the all-purpose tool by which a man could make something of himself in society.

A man's logos had become, quite generally, his virtue; nevertheless, logos had maintained its traditional affiliation with deception. Paradoxically, the practice by which a man gained virtue and status in the eyes of its arbiters came itself to seem dangerously amoral, as shown both by hostile witnesses such as Aristophanes and Plato, and the efforts of friendly reformers such as Isocrates.

The article concludes by extending this pattern to two further contexts: resistance to the new technology of writing, which was seen as embodying the disconnection of logos from authority; and the attempt made by philosophers to transcend the pattern by becoming their own judges, thereby occupying the position both of speaker and of audience.

Postprint of article "Actors on High: The Skene Roof, the Crane, and the Gods in Attic Drama" published in Classical Antiquity, volume 9, October 1990, pages 247-94, copyright 1990 by the Regents of the University of California.

Discussion of the probable form of the roof as acting space in the fifth-century Theater of Dionysos in Athens, arguing for flat roof with no regular second story or superstructure above the one-story skene building; means of access to the roof by ladder or trapdoor or the theater crane; use of roof as acting space for human characters, gods, and ghosts; significance of spatial separation of human characters and divine characters and of the distinctiveness of divine locomotion. Appendix 1 lists uses of roof and crane and testimonia about the crane. Appendix 2 argues that crane had the form of a pivoted counterweighted beam (or shadouf) and offers speculation about its dimensions and operations.