Books by Aldo Tagliabue
This monograph is a revised version of the introduction of my PhD dissertation. Most of the previ... more This monograph is a revised version of the introduction of my PhD dissertation. Most of the previous studies of Xenophon of Ephesus' 'Ephesiaca' have pointed out its apparent lack of literary quality and consistency. Conversely, my analysis combines intertextuality, narratology and study of rhetoric and offers a new interpretation of the 'Ephesiaca' as a 'Bildungsroman', in which there is a systematic use of the Odyssey and Plato’s love dialogues.
Papers by Aldo Tagliabue
The Classical Quarterly
This article offers a new interpretation of Apuleius’ story of Cupid and Psyche. Most scholars ha... more This article offers a new interpretation of Apuleius’ story of Cupid and Psyche. Most scholars have previously offered a second-time reading of this story, according to which the reader reaches Book 11 and then looks back at Psyche's story of fall and redemption as a parallel for Lucius’ life. Following Graverini's and other scholars’ emotional approach to the Metamorphoses, I argue that the ecphrasis of Cupid's palace within the story of Cupid and Psyche includes multiple re-enactments of the novel's prologue. These re-enactments invite the reader to undertake a first-time and immersive reading of this story, which focusses on Psyche's experience of Cupid and her reaction to his epiphany. In its use of immersion, this article draws from recent developments in cognitive narratology and pushes scholars of Apuleius to focus on the reader's immersive and emotional response in order to reassess the value of a second-time reading of the Metamorphoses.
Hermes Zeitschrift Fur Klassische Philologie, 2013
This article focuses on the Sacred Tales (henceforth ST), Aelius Aristides' first-person account ... more This article focuses on the Sacred Tales (henceforth ST), Aelius Aristides' first-person account of his terrible diseases and subsequent healing brought about by Asclepius, and sheds new light on this text with the help of the notion of embodiment. In recent decades the ST has received a great deal of attention: 1 scholars have offered two main readings of this work, oscillating between the poles of religion and rhetoric. Some have read the ST as an aretalogy 2 while others have emphasised the rhetorical aims of this text and its connection with Second Sophistic literature. 3 My article focuses on Aristides' epiphanic dreams of Asclepius. Previous studies have considered these passages to be part of the traditional Greek epiphanic discourse, one in which, as argued by Verity Platt, 'the visual sense tends to predominate'. 4 This focus on sight in the epiphanic tradition matches the importance of seeing in the Greek religious practice: in ancient Greece sacred sites were visited in order to see the god. 5 My study, however, argues that these passages, by focusing on the narrator's interactive and multisensorial perception of Asclepius, are especially vivid because they present Aristides' perception of the god as embodied and enactive rather than purely visual (I explain these terms below). In the second part of this article, I turn my attention to the ancient readers of the ST: although the linguistic mediation prevents any literary account of epiphany from conveying a full experience of the divine, with the help of narratorial comments Aristides' dreams of Asclepius bring readers close to gaining it. Overall, this article confirms from a new angle the relevance of religion and rhetoric to the understanding of the ST, as well as suggesting that the body might play a more important role than usually thought in the ancient response to epiphanies.
Aelius Aristides' Sacred Tales is a complex literary text, and its first book—the diary—puzzles s... more Aelius Aristides' Sacred Tales is a complex literary text, and its first book—the diary—puzzles scholars , as it has no parallel in the entire work. This paper offers a justification for this section by arguing for a deliberate contrast between the diary and Books 2–6 of the Sacred Tales, as a result of which the latter section is crafted as a narrative about Asclepius. I will first identify a large series of shifts in the ST: starting with Book 2, change concerns the protagonist, which from Aristides' abdomen turns to Asclepius, the narrator, dream interpretation, genre, and arrangement of the events. Secondly, I discuss the impact of these shifts upon the readers' response: while the diary invites the readers to relive the everyday tension between known past and unknown future, the spatial form of Books 2–6 creates the opposite effect, turning the readers' attention away from the human flow of time towards Asclepius, and leading them to perceive features of his divine time.
This article demonstrates that Cnemon’s story in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica intertexts with the novel... more This article demonstrates that Cnemon’s story in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica intertexts with the novella of Deinias in Lucian’s Toxaris. The closeness of three textual parallels, along with a subtle use of characters’ names, proves that Heliodorus is deliberately recalling Toxaris. The focus of this intertextuality is Chariclea, the courtesan of Deinias’ story. This immoral figure is a striking counterpart to the lustful Demaenete, the main charac- ter of Cnemon’s story and the first immoral lover of the Aethiopica. At the same time, the evocation by Heliodorus of a lustful woman who has the same name as the protago- nist Chariclea, paradoxically enriches the characterization of the latter as chaste. Furthermore, this subtle evocation of Chariclea seems to have metaliterary implica- tions as well. In the Aethiopica Chariclea stands for the entire novel: Heliodorus appears to define the nature of his text in opposition to Lucian’s Toxaris and to the different kind of fiction it represents. Heliodorus’ definition of his own novel by means of establishing a contrast with other texts is an important function of his intertextuality with Imperial literature and possibly sheds new light on the status of ancient fiction as a whole.
The opening scene of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica has a special ekphrastic quality, and scholars have ... more The opening scene of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica has a special ekphrastic quality, and scholars have noted that its tragic banquet recalls the Mnesterophonia in Homer’s Odyssey. I argue that Heliodorus’s banquet is not only a literary remaking of the Odyssean episode but also an account that stresses its pictorial quality. This new reading is suggested by the vividness of the descrip- tion and by the echoes of drinking vessels and tables, the two distinctive features of the iconography of the Mnesterophonia, which was likely to be known in Heliodorus’s time (third-fourth centuries c.e.).
Hermes 141.3 (2013), 363-77.
Ancient Narrative 10 (2012), 17-46
Acme 62 (2009), 87-115.
L'epos di corinto e omero 1. Tradizioni corinzie ed Iliade: un problema "secolare"
Book Chapters by Aldo Tagliabue
Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece
This volume aims to pursue a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of str... more This volume aims to pursue a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies, focusing on the phenomenal and experiential dimension of our response to narrative and triangulating ancient narrative with ancient criticism and cognitive approaches. The introductory chapter offers an overview of the theoretical frameworks in play and briefly encapsulates how each chapter seeks to contribute to a multifaceted picture of narrative and aesthetic experience. Immersion and embodiment emerge as central concepts and common threads throughout, helping to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient narrative and ancient reading habits, as manifested in Greek criticism and rhetorical theory, though the individual chapters tackle a wide range of narrative genres, broadly understood, from epic, historiography, and the novel to tragedy and early Christian texts, and other media, such as dance and sculpture.
S. Thomson and T. Whitmarsh (eds.), The Romance between Greece and the East, Cambridge 2013, in press
Studi sull’epistolografia letteraria greca di età imperiale e tardo antica: Alcifrone, Eliano, Filostrato, Aristeneto, Teofilatto Simocatta, Bari 2013, forthcoming
In the study of intertextuality in Aristaenetus' Epistles, since Rohde scholars have noted the ex... more In the study of intertextuality in Aristaenetus' Epistles, since Rohde scholars have noted the exploitation of the Greek novel. In this paper, I will further explore this issue to highlight the importance of this model. Firstly, the Epistles recall the novelistic genre through a subtle interplay with the names of their addressees. Secondly, Aristaenetus mostly evokes scenes from Xenophon of Ephesus and Achilles Tatius which focus on the physical nature of eros, while he overlooks those episodes which illustrate the protagonists' faithful love. This selective approach suggests that in Proto-Byzantine Constantinople there was a literary interest in reading the Greek novel as part of a repertoire of passionate love, in which the silence about fidelity was probably the result of a deliberate irony.
M.P. Bologna and M. Ornaghi (eds.), Signa Antiquitatis, Atti dei Seminari di Dipartimento 2010, Quaderni di Acme 128, Milan 2011, 121-150.
Che l'Odissea sia il modello della narrativa di ogni epoca viene confermato dallo studio della le... more Che l'Odissea sia il modello della narrativa di ogni epoca viene confermato dallo studio della letteratura antica: un viaggio d'amore a lieto fine costituisce la trama di tutti i romanzi greci 2 e questi testi pullulano di narrazioni secondarie che emulano la performance di Odisseo a Scheria. Al culmine di questo processo si collocano le Etiopiche di Eliodoro: l'autore di Emesa "ricalca" l'Odissea persino nella struttura, iniziando il racconto in medias res e sostituendo lo schema circolare del viaggio tipico del genere con uno lineare. 3 Nel suo complesso, tuttavia, tale imitazione è tutt'altro che pedissequa: i romanzieri rivisitano l'Odissea da una prospettiva sentimentale e quindi offrono una nuova lettura del poema. Per questo motivo, Grave-
Book Reviews by Aldo Tagliabue
Ancient Narrative, 2012
S.M. TRZASKOMA (trans.), Two Novels from Ancient Greece. Callirhoe and An Ephesian Story 2010, pp... more S.M. TRZASKOMA (trans.), Two Novels from Ancient Greece. Callirhoe and An Ephesian Story 2010, pp. xxxvii, 195. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Paper $13.95 ISBN 9781603841924 "The aim of an edition such as the present one is [...] above all to present the texts themselves--primarily in a way that facilitates a reader's direct and immediate contact with them and, secondarily, in a way that provides broad context for such contact" (XXXIII). And the intended audience--as we discover later--is composed of "general readers and students" (182). With this presentation, Stephen Trzaskoma (T. from now on), Associate Professor of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of New Hampshire, highlights the originality of his book. This publication constitutes a new step in the study of ancient fiction. During the last century the Greek novels were so neglected by classicists that editions of them were scarcely produced. However, this attitude has recently changed. Since the publication of Collected Ancient Greek Novels in 1989, edited by Reardon, (1) the Greek novel as a genre has become increasingly popular in the study of Classics; and both Chariton's and Xenophon's texts have been published in the Teubner series by Reardon and O'Sullivan, (2) and in the Loeb series by Goold and Henderson. (3) Although T. became aware of Henderson's project only after he was commissioned to produce this publication, the aim of his edition is clearly not to remedy a lack of translations, but to make Xenophon and Chariton accessible to those who are no experts in Classics. For this reason, T. adopts a non-traditional approach. First, he decides to combine the so-called "pre-sophistic novels", challenging those scholars who see them as unworthy of consideration. This choice is very appropriate for undergraduate students: Callirhoe and the Ephesiaca can provide them with an idea of the Greek novel, without requiring them to pick up the intricate threads of Achilles Tatius' and Heliodorus' texts or to interpret the sophisticated construction of Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, which are more appropriate to a postgraduate class. The second innovation concerns the translation technique: as the author himself declares, at the beginning he tried to write texts which "were more [...] colloquial and non-literary" (XXXVI); but then he realized that this approach was creating "a growing gap between the content and the language of the stories and the language of the translations" (ibid.). Thus, he decided to "follow a middle way and produced English versions [...] which give a strong sense of how these authors come across in the original Greek" (XXXVI). In other words, the author suggests that his translation is less formal than usual but, at the same time, is not distant from the Greek. Before offering examples of this special style, I will first consider the introduction to the book. The introduction This section is conceived as a general survey of the study of ancient novels, as the author addresses issues of genre, audience, plot, style, intertextuality, and informs the readers about dates and titles, and the identities of Chariton and Xenophon. Although the overall tone of the discussion is general, on more than one occasion T. advances criticism of unsolved scholarly problems. For instance, in the analysis of novelistic readership he includes the novelists; this is certainly an important topic which requires more detailed work, as Tim Whitmarsh shows in his recent book. (4) In addition, T.'s view of the traditional identification of the "highly educated elite of the empire" (XVIII) as the audience of the Greek novels is most suggestive: "proving that one sort of audience read or could have read the novels is one thing, but such an argument can never prove that another audience did not read them" (XVIII). A similar problematizing approach characterizes the discussion of the common structure shared by the novels, in which T. …
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Books by Aldo Tagliabue
Papers by Aldo Tagliabue
Book Chapters by Aldo Tagliabue
Book Reviews by Aldo Tagliabue