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Fifth-century Greek tragedy and visual art centres on interaction between people, including antithetical relations, reflecting a society shaped by monetised exchange and commerce. Platonic metaphysics is focused on unchanging being, placing supreme value on the possession of money and devaluing or excluding exchange and interaction. Although dialogues such as the Phaedo contain the idea of the unity of opposites, and binary opposites such as body and soul, Platonic metaphysics aims at the negation of opposites, and thus of antithesis. The contrast between being and seeming emerges in fifth-century tragedy and philosophy, but it is given much greater prominence by Plato and is linked with the theory of Forms. One of the Platonic accounts of the relationship between Forms and particulars is in terms of original (Form) and copy or image (particulars). Plato is the first to offer a theorization of the idea of the image (in the Sophist) and to define the idea of mere image (not reality). Plato’s treatment of the being-seeming relation, like the theory of Forms generally, expresses the reification of the value of money, treated as the basis of possession, excluding exchange.
This chapter discusses the increasing presence of antithesis, rather than aggregation, in fifth-century Greek historiography, tragedy and vase-painting. In certain key incidents and in narrative patterns in Herodotus and Attic tragedy, we find antithesis in the form of the unity of opposites and the reversal of an apparently stable situation. This reflects the influence of mystic initiation, Pythagorean thinking (in the case of Aeschylus), and, in a broader sense, the emergence of the polis, in which social oppositions are contained within a political unit. In fifth-century Attic vase-painting and sculptural groups, there is also a progressive shift from aggregation to antithesis, paralleling the pattern found in the newly emerging genres of historiography and tragedy. This too reflects the increasing prevalence of monetary exchange and interactions within the unified framework of the polis.
The poetic investiture scene in Quintus’ Posthomerica (12.308–13) is the only passage in which this epic’s narrator speaks about himself in the first person. These lines have often been commented upon from an intertextual and metaliterary perspective, but the specificity of the geographical markers mentioned by Quintus has not been adequately explained. This article proposes that Quintus places his Homer specifically at the site of the old city of Smyrna, which is not the same as that of the Roman (and modern) city. Other elements of the investiture scene allude precisely to the legend which, in the Imperial age, ascribed to Alexander the Great the relocation of the city from its old site, nearer the Hermus river, to the new, near the Meles. Local legends and traditions help to explain several details of the investiture, from its placement in the precinct of a temple to the presentation of Quintus’ young Homer as a shepherd. The article also explores the ideological implications of the poem’s return to the distant, pre-Ionian past of Smyrna and its appeal to the city’s ancient history and legends, from the suggestion that Quintus may be de-Romanizing his poem to the relevance of Homer in a rapidly Christianizing third-century Smyrna.
In 1926, Roberto Bartoccini excavated a late-antique tomb at Sirte, Libya. Fifty-three inscriptions in Latin, Greek and Latino-Punic have been recorded and used as evidence of a thriving Christian community. This article reassesses these inscriptions, paying particular attention to the Latino-Punic texts, and discusses the persistence of a Punic identity that can be placed in the context of the wider archaeological landscape.