http://hdl.handle.net/2144/1235 Department of Classical Studies 2013-05-19T07:22:31Z http://hdl.handle.net/2144/5440 The Vanishing Gardens of Priapus Uden, James This is a publisher's version of an article published in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology in 2010. The offprint is posted here by special permission via correspondence. 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2144/5439 The Elegiac Puella as Virgin Martyr Uden, James This paper explores the ideological currents running through Maximianus's subversive revival of the genre of Augustan love elegy in the beleaguered Rome of the mid-sixth century. The third elegy narrates an apparent childhood reminiscence of the poet, a failed romance with a young girl, Aquilina. But it soon becomes clear that, in the character of Aquilina, Maximianus has deliberately blurred the literary archetypes of the elegiac puella and the virgin martyr from Christian hagiography. This bizarre configuration allows the elegist simultaneously to provoke questions about the representation of female figures in both genres. By likening the elegiac puella to the martyr, Maximianus highlights the latent violence of elegiac topoi. By likening the martyr to the elegiac puella, Maximianus highlights the eroticism that often has a prominent place in accounts of virgin martyrdom. Not merely a formal experiment or the product of Augustan nostalgia, Maximianus's elegies represent a real attempt to reinvent elegy's questioning stance in a new social and religious context. This is a postprint (author's final draft) version of an article published in the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association in 2009. The final version of this article may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/apa.0.0023 (login may be required). The version made available in OpenBU was supplied by the author. 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2144/5438 Impersonating Priapus Uden, James Whenever Catullus is sexually aggressive or brutally frank in his poetry, modern commentators will often call him "Priapic," an adjective that tends to obscure rather than elucidate the various ways in which Catullus uses the figure of Priapus in crafting his poetic persona. This article attempts to read poems 47, 56, and, in particular, 16, as Catullus' experiments in the Greek and Roman subgenre of Priapic poetry. Once we see that these poems are focalized through the generic perspective of Priapus, Catullus' impersonation of Priapus becomes less an assumption of hyperphallic masculinity and more a witty way in which to lampoon a world-view dominated by an obsessive focus on penetration. Impersonating Priapus meant, in fact, exposing the garden god and his hopeless rusticity to urbane critique. This is a preprint (author's original) version of an article published in The American Journal of Philology in 2007. The final version of this article may be found at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ajp/ (login may be required). The version made available in OpenBU was supplied by the author. 2007-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2144/5437 The Contest of Homer and Hesiod and the ambitions of Hadrian Uden, James This article examines the compilation known as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. More usually mined for the material it preserves from the sophist Alcidamas, here I advance a reading that seeks to make sense of the compi- lation as a whole and situates the work ideologically in its Imperial context. An anecdote early in the compilation depicts the emperor Hadrian enquiring about Homer’s birthplace and parents from the Delphic Oracle; he is told that Telemachus was Homer’s father and Ithaca his homeland. When the text says that we must believe this self-evidently absurd response on account of the status of the emperor, its author is satirizing Hadrian’s ambitions to participate in the Greek intellectual world and the pressures on scholars to accept Hadrian’s authority in their field. Moreover, the compiler has linked this anecdote to the long account of the poetic contest between Homer and Hesiod in order to draw an unflattering parallel between Hadrian and King Panedes, who, as writers such as Lucian and Dio Chrysostom suggested, exposed his ineptitude in choosing Hesiod over Homer as the victor of the contest. This is a publisher's version of an article published in The Journal of Hellenic Studies in 2010. The offprint is posted here in accordance with existing publisher policy. 2010-11-19T00:00:00Z