Forma Breve

Las iras de Aquiles

Francesco De Martino — 2023-11-20

If only the proem of the Iliad had remained, who knows how much we would have fabled about a psycho-emotional heroic poem. The anger of Achilles is a brilliant Homeric invention, but Achilles’ anger as a central compact theme does not last much longer than 200 lines and Achilles himself is just a “latent” protagonist, but ostentatiously in otium. Featured as the first word of the proem (μῆνιν) and underlined in the proem, his wrath is in no way comparable to many other fatal wraths of gods and men no to his other angers (a total of 5). More than furious, Achilles is polemical as already with Agamemnon in Tenedus (Cypr. Arg., p. 41.52 Bernabé2, cf. S., fr. *566 Radt2), and later with Odysseus in the fight sung by Demodocus (Od. 8.74-82). Controversial but surprisingly reasonable and humane, as in the episode with old Priam in Book XXIV, even eccentric as in Book IX, where he displays the lyre more than anger, playing it as if in peacetime. One of the ways, along with sports and games, to appease anger.

“Achilles: dismeasure figuration”

Ana Paula Pinto — 2023-11-20

In the complex framework of the heroic figures of Greco-Latin mythology, Achilles appears as one of the most relevant references in antiquity. This exceptional popularity, which allowed the character to survive the erosion of oblivion and to exert on the imaginary incomparable influence, is due to the fact that Homer chose him as the protagonist of the Iliad, and guided the peculiar angle of view of the Trojan War, which antiquity considered the greatest historical event of Humanity, by the passionate intensity of his anger. Although the narrative of the Odyssey already centres on the figure of Ulysses, the double evocation of the warrior of sudden rage, of superlative feats, and of the obsession with honour, already dead in Hades, in Od. XI and Od. XXIV, contributes to underlining in the poetic message a much more positive and optimistic moralising tone, which transcends the tragic determinism of the Iliad.
We know that the hero’s appeal already exercised itself on the Greek imagination before the regular and universal knowledge of Homeric poetry had referenced him as a heroic paradigm, because the set of the so-called Cyclic Poetry - particularly the Cypria, with the details of the background of the Trojan War, and the Aethiopis, with the list of the facts that followed Hector’s funeral - offers many of the traditional details about Achilles to which Homer alluded only discreetly. Taking the Homeric Poems as a starting point, we propose to approach the narratives of the poetic reworking of the Trojan Cyclic Poems, widely documented still in the ceramic paintings of the Classical period. This comparative perspective will allow us, in synthesis, to propose different models of symbolic approach to the heroic figure of Achilles.

Meleager in archaic Greek poetry: war and grief, wrath and vengeance

Giuliana Ragusa — 2023-11-20

This article aims at discussing the images of Meleager in the tragic webs that interweave war and grief, wrath and revenge, mainly in archaic Greek poetry. The most extensive and well-preserved texts that are herein referred to are the Iliad and the famous embassy to Achilles (chant IX), and the 5th Epinician of Bacchylides. Through these and the bits and pieces we gather from other texts we learn of the ancient and well-known tradition that involves Meleager and his family – his father Oineus, his mother Althaia – in the context of war and under the divine wrath of Artemis. By doing so, it will reflect on the elements of the myth, its use in the epic poem and in the epinician, and the image of the central characters – mother and son – in the poems.

Achilles’ somatizations: Aisthetikai of the fury in Greek pottery (VI-V BC)

Ana Rita Figueira — 2023-11-20

Through a set of figurations of Achilles in Greek vases, the present paper reflects on the centrality of the notion of boundary and that of a cluster of related concepts pertaining to the distinction of expressions of Achilles’s fury and to the configuration of homologies with the dynamic of the cosmo, thus contributing to the formation of the sentiment of justice, dike.

Murder and madness: war trauma, revenge, and academic discomfort with Euripides’ Hecuba and Star Wars: Rebels

Jose L Garcia — 2023-11-20

The history of modern scholarship on Euripides’ characterization of Hecuba is one of simultaneous fascination and revulsion, empathy and horror, understanding and rejection. David Grene and Richard Lattimore cite August Wilhelm Schlegel’s On Dramatic Art and Literature as the juncture wherein dramatic and scholarly opinion of Hecuba soured, a trend that continued with scholars such as JA Spranger, Gilbert Norwood, and JJ Rieske. My project, building from Grace Zanotti’s explorations of Hecuba and Tonya Pollard’s study of Hecuba as essential to Shakespeare’s women, asserts that modern storytelling, particularly the character of Sabine Wren in Star Wars: Rebels, deals with Hecuba more genuinely than post-Schlegel scholars largely have.
The charges against Hecuba are that her character and her actions do not seem to be the work of one character, and that the play may be an amalgamation of several shorter plays that Euripides did not feel met the required length of a dramatic work. As such, they consider the depths of Hecuba’s sorrow at the murder of Polyxena and the heights of her rage at the murder of Polydorus to be two different Hecubas.
I apply Pollard’s examination of Hecuba’s centrality to Shakespeare’s works to the character of Sabine Wren, who has the strongest echoes of Euripides’ Hecuba, encompassing the fullness of emotion from her towering anger at the Galactic Empire to the depth of her sorrow at the near loss of her family. Within that analysis, I argue that scholarship claiming Hecuba as a weak play is unwilling or unable to engage with Hecuba emotionally, and that even Zanotti’s project, which seeks to rationally explain how Hecuba can be both mourner and murderer, is indicative of a trend in modern scholarship to dismiss the validity of those emotional zeniths and nadirs in art.

Lisístrata ou de cando as mulleres reviraron, un híbrido aristofánico contra la guerra

Iria Pedreira Sanjurjo — 2023-11-21

The rewriting and reworking of the models of Greco-Latin Antiquity has been constant in contemporary Galician drama since the second half of the 20th century. Mythological, historical, comic or philosophical themes inspire an important part of the Galician dramas that are published and/or performed from the 1950s to the present day and can even be used by their playwrights to establish a dialogue with its actuality through the canonical paradigm of the classical tradition. Lisístrata ou de cando as mulleres reviraron (1997) by Eduardo Alonso and Manuel Guede Oliva is a clear example, a new version that pairs two works by the comic poet Aristophanes, Lysistrata (411 BC) and Assemblywomen (392 BC), and uses the reinterpretation of both classic texts to explore on stage the alternatives to the established power, the anti-war and pacifist discourse or the role that women must assume in resolving the social and political problems that concern them. These lines will attempt to offer a critical and analytical reading of this Galician reworking of the plays by Aristophanes, paying close attention to its context of production and its repercussion in its theatrical system, as well as the existing intertextuality relationships between the new piece of Alonso and Guede and their reference hypotexts, the introduction of innovative elements both in the formal aspects and in the plot plane or the new vindictive and emancipatory readings that the Galician playwrights contribute to the utopian subversions of the Greek playwright.

Achilles, Chariton, and some Homeric verses quoted by Plato

Adriane da Silva Duarte — 2023-11-21

Among the authors of the ancient Greek novel, Chariton is the one that most frequently quotes Homer. Most of these quotations have the effect of highlighting the pathetic component of the narrative, contributing to the characterization of the novel’s hero and heroine. In Chaereas and Callirhoe, two of these quotes (C&C, I.4; V.2; VI.1) were previously referred to in a well-known step in Plato’s Republic (387 b – 388 c), in which Socrates reproaches Homer for portraying Achilles in suffering, quoting some verses from the Iliad (Il. 18, 23-24; Il. 24, 10-12) to illustrate his point of view. Through the examination of these passages, I intend to investigate Chariton’s use of Homer and whether his reading can somehow reflect Plato’s, establishing an intertextuality relationship between epic, philosophy and ancient romance.

Do ideal heróico ao ideal burguês: Jasão, o herói banalizado

Marília Pulquério Futre-Pinheiro — 2023-11-21

In the Argonautica’s prelude, one image, that of the man wearing only one sandal, stands out. Has this initial image any impact as a symbolic tool on the unfolding cognitive process of the narrative or on the re-negotiation of pre-established meaning? Can it be used as potential premise for further interpretative goals? And what meaning does Apollonius want to assign to it? Our aim in this paper is to highlight the meaning of this embodied metaphor, as a cognitive and emotional construct, and to demonstrate that it plays crucial role in Apollonius Rhodius’Argonautica, establishing and re-negotiating the whole coherence of the poem.

For a woman. Reception of a Homeric topic in the Acts of Paul and Thecla

Carlos Pereira — 2023-11-22

Briseis, “like golden Aphrodite” (Il. 19.282), one of the main characters in Iliad, is the center of the strife between Agamemnon and Achilles. On Lyrnessus’ attack, Achilles captured the beautiful woman by whom to take a liking. However, the Mycenean’s king wanted to recover the girl Briseis, attitude that increasing the anger of the hero. Achilles blames Agamemnon because he won the girl. To calm down the situation, Nestor, the old man, advises Agamemnon to offer gifts for Achilles. The Athridae delivers Briseis and do a swear: he never slept with her. The Acts of Paul and Thecla, an apocryphal text of the second/third century CE, tell the story of a pretty women named Thecla who lived in Iconium. Thamyris is an important man of the city and Thecla was betrothed to him. When Paul arrives to the city, the plans of the young fiancé change quickly. Thecla break off the engagement and become Christian. She is condemned to the fire. Then, she survives and go with Paul to Antioch of Pisidia. In this city, a relevant man named Alexander wants to conquer her, but with no success. Another condemnation, but Thecla run way again. The purpose of this paper is to study the possible reception of the Homeric topic in the apocryphal Christian text, which a beautiful girl is disputed by several mans that fell love and, at the same time, jealousy and the desire of revenge.

The Figure of the Warrior Hero in Late Greek Declamation

Vanessa Fernandes — 2023-11-22

This article focuses on the works of Libanius and Choricius (rhetoricians of the 4th and 6th century respectively), expounding on the different facets which the figure of the hero-soldier acquired in their declamations – model exercises composed for classroom use but which also had an independent entertainment value and could be performed in other social settings, outside the classroom. While the Greek literature of late antiquity is increasingly becoming the object of serious study, scholars have not paid much attention to the literary qualities of Greek declamation: its world-making capacities; its absorption of literary models (epic, drama, and the novel); and its growing tendency to delve into the personal rather than the civic or political. This article first contextualizes the practice of declamation within the panorama of late antique education. It then considers the recasting of the Iliadic hero by excellence, Achilles, analyzing the controversial and ambiguous nature of the hero in two progymnasmata by Libanius of Antioch (8.3 and 9.1) and two declamations by Choricius of Gaza (Decl. 1 e 2). A third and final section takes in the theatrical connotations of declamation, analysing first the braggart warrior hero (Lib. Decl. 33) and then the hero in love (Chor. Decl. 5 e 6), exploring how both figures echo analogous heroes in New Comedy and the Greek novel. This overview illustrates not only the literary evolution of such figures but also how these – and the previous, core genres and authors in which they were embedded – shaped late antique paideia and were in turn shaped by, and adapted to fit, contemporary social expectations.

The anger of Achilles: its tradition and relevance in the Latin literature of Late Antiquity

William J. Dominik — 2023-11-22

The anger of Achilles is the most prominent characteristic of his personality. Μῆνις (“anger”), which is the first word of the proem of Homer’s Iliad, is mentioned as being the theme of the entire poem (cf. 1–7). The reception of Achilles in Greek and Roman literature had a number of stages to go through from Homer to Late Antiquity, during which Homer’s text assumed a significant role as a didactic text and the reader was educated to examine it from different perspectives, which involved a reassessment of Achilles’ actions and conduct, including his anger. Achilles’ role in Roman culture and literature during Late Antiquity illustrates that he functioned as both positive and negative exempla. This literary ambivalence of his representation is omnipresent in Late Antique Latin literature. In some accounts of Achilles’ actions and words, his famous temper is absent; in other texts, his irascibility and cruelty are stressed; and in yet others his use of violence is portrayed both negatively and positively by Latin writers, sometimes by the same author. Both the favourable and negative aspects of Achilles and his anger that appear in Late Antique Latin works are linked to the aspirations of the Roman elite and the values emphasized by Christian writers. Achilles is employed as a favorable model and even as a negative foil for the emperor or one of his representatives when he confronts the enemy. Despite aspects of Achilles’ irascible character and conduct being viewed negatively in Christian terms, his reputation as a fierce warrior seems to have encapsulated, if somewhat paradoxically, the type of strong character that appealed to the Roman elite in the struggle to maintain their ascendancy in the face of military and political confrontations with their barbarian neighbours.

The wrath of Achilles and the Trojan War in Byzantine literature: from 12th-century epic and historiography to 14th- and 15th-century romance

Rui Carlos Fonseca — 2023-11-22

In this paper, I intend to analyze representations of Achilles, his wrath and the Trojan War in some works of Byzantine literature. The analysis will focus on the epic, historiography and romance, especially on John Tzetzes’ Carmina Iliaca, the Synopsis Chronike of Constantine Manasses, the Alexiad of Anna Comnena and the anonymous Aquileid and Byzantine Iliad. Achilles appears in these Byzantine texts according to the conventional portrayal of him in Homeric poetry: the hero par excellence, powerful and ruthless, exceeding all other fighters in war. Regardings the epithets assigned to him, some are of Homeric usage, others, later scholarly constructions. The selective account that Homer provides of the Trojan War differs, however, from the extended view presented by the Byzantine writers, for key episodes of the Iliad, such as Achilles’ wrath, the dispute with Agamemnon, and Briseis “abduction”, are referred to briefly and/or irrelevantly. In these aforementioned works, episodes such as the death of Palamedes, the enmity with Odysseus, the romance with Polyxena, and the murder by Paris and Deiphobus are greater highlighted. Byzantine writers imitate Homer while retelling the Trojan War, adapting it to the circumstances of their own time. Yet they do recognize the authority of the archaic poet. It is this deliberate combination of approximation of and departure from the Homeric tradition that will be emphasized here with regard to the literary representation of Achilles among the Byzantines.

The epic pattern of war and the new way of Camões

Maria Mafalda Viana — 2023-11-22

In Os Lusíadas, Camões develops a meta-poetic speech and measures himself very often with the old poets Homer and Vergil, but also Ovid. In my reflection it is my aim to think about the theme of the epic pattern of war proposed by Camões, analysing the occurrence of the term «fury» in I, 5, 1 (which I link to Achilles) that I think it is pertinent to cross with the expression «férvidos e irosos» of III, 132, 7. This topic is part of a larger reflection on the tension between the themes of war and love in the epic poem of Camões.

Horses, birds, dogs, lions: animals and the animalization of humans in The Lusiad

Virgínia Boechat — 2023-11-22

This article explores the deep relevance of the presence of animals in The Lusiad. Far from being a mere accessory resource in the Camões epic, the mention of animals and the animalization of some human characters are part of the significant, basic axes of this poem, especially in passages related to fury or passion.

Homeric characters in the Portuguese Restoration Literature

André Simões — 2023-11-22

The Portuguese revolution of December 1640 saw the birth not only of a new dynasty in Portugal but also of a whole literary source of support for the new Portuguese monarchy. Over the three decades of war that passed from the revolution to the Peace of Lisbon, numerous documents were produced in Portugal for internal and external consumption: legal treaties, battle reports, gazettes, memorials, but also sermons and panegyrics, always with the objective of juridically and politically justifying the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy, but also praising the new king and his descendants. This paper focuses on a particular type of praise and justification: on the one hand, the panegyric topics of emulation by King John IV of the Homeric heroes, specifically of Achilles; on the other hand, the justification of the antiquity of the kingdom of Portugal, foundation and descendants of the same Homeric heroes.

Achilles and Polyxena in As Troianas, by Hélia Correia and Jaime Rocha: male and female time and kleos

Maria José Ferreira Lopes — 2023-11-22

In As Troianas (2018), Hélia Correia and Jaime Rocha rewrite the aftermath of the fall of Troy, addressing as central episodes the distribution of female trophies and the sacrifices of Polyxena and Astyanax. The clear inspiration on Euripides is permeated by original options, and expressed with a sometimes comic vivacity, based on a mixture of colloquiality and lyricism. The prominence of the two Aeacids, and Pyrrhus’ obsessive evocation of his father’s deeds in successive arguments with Agamemnon, suggest a parallel with Seneca’s The Trojan Women. The Stoic’s play explores the contrast between the selfish brutality of Achilles and his son, and the moderation advocated by a more humanised Agamemnon. However, the king is forced to obey the whims of the gods, transmitted by the insensitive Calchas. Hélia Correia and Jaime Rocha’s Pyrrhus is contradictory – brutal with Polyxena but committed to the survival of Hector’s family –, and thus modern.
The authors continue to expose the horrors of “war and its enthusiasms” (Perdição – Exercício sobre Antígona, p. 40), which perpetuate a barbaric heroic model: in the prologue, through an innovative chorus of wolves, who present the cyclical human self-destruction as an absurd violation of the laws of Nature; and above all, throughout the play, by exposing the barbaric and immoral rage of Achilles, who intervenes as a spectre to impose the supremacy of Death over Life. Polyxena’s status of exceptional victim places her resistance within the feminist theme, already present in Hélia Correia’s previous plays.
In addition to the analysis of how As Troianas by Hélia Correia and Jaime Rocha drew inspiration from and innovated the creations of Antiquity – especially those mentioned above –, the absolute relevance of past reflections on the impact of war and heroism on women will be highlighted.

Achilles in contemporary Portuguese poetry

Susana Marques — 2023-11-22

This reflection intends to show how the recovery of the myth of Achilles to express contemporary realities or experiences is a purpose common to several Portuguese poets, from different moments in Portuguese and European history, involving a constant intertextual dialogue, illustrative of G. Genette’s famous palimpsest theory.

Formas e genealogias do mal em H.G. Cancela – ou a negação da felicidade humana

José Cândido de Oliveira Martins — 2023-11-17

In this text, we intend to analyse a novel by H.G. Cancela, The People of Drama (2017), a contemporary author rather ignored by literary criticism, despite the quality of his work. This recent novel lends itself to a very fruitful analysis, when viewed from the point of view of the forms of violence, hatred and evil that often guide interpersonal relationships. Whether or not there is ancestral guilt, evil and the corresponding relations of hatred and violence, under various masks (verbal, sexual, social, cultural) may occur socially in the most diverse and unexpected ways. In fact, this theme is very dear to the author’s writing and worldview, even in essayistic writing. In The People of Drama, we come across dramatic atmospheres and scenic interpretations, rather lonely and agonistic characters, true shadows of tragic heroes, living situations of pain and interdict, of loneliness and incommunicability, of perverse misogyny and misanthropy.

“All for an empty tunic, all for a Helen” - eros and eris, from Troy to the Minas Gerais province

Maria Cecília de Miranda Nogueira Coelho — 2023-11-17

This article deals with the reception in some Brazilian artistic works of the figure of Helen of Troy, with whom desire (eros) and discord (eris) are closely linked. The films Memória de Helena (1969 by David Neves and Vida de Menina (2004) by Helena Solberg (both based on the memoir Minha Vida de Menina (1942) by Helena Morley) and Elena (2012) by Petra Costa, will be analyzed. Although none is an adaptation or transposition of the myth of Helen as an individualized female figure, “the fame of the name” as Gorgias said (Encomium of Helen, § 2), indicates close approximations between aspects of the characterization of the protagonists of all these works and the most beautiful and seductive character in Greek literature.

“The battered space”: some war images in José Luandino Vieira

Maria do Carmo Cardoso Mendes — 2023-11-17

The main purposes of the essay are: to examine, in José Luandino Vieira’s four literary works, images of colonial violence in Luanda; to identify the influence that a space dominated by violence has on human behaviour and interactions; to highlight practices of torture, racial and socioeconomic discrimination; to show that he condemnation of colonial violence means for the Angolan writer a strong ethical commitment.

What Leonor López Left Unsaid

Marina S. Brownlee — 2023-11-17

Thanatology — the study of death — finds fertile ground for research in the Middle Ages given the precariousness of life due to war, disease, and the rudimentary knowledge of medicine. Much more than the counting and recounting of dead knights, and women and children who die during childbirth, the focus on the details of death in a wealth of genres, from epics and chronicles, to autobiographies and spiritual accounts is very revealing of the expectations, emotions and symbolic values of death and dying. The Memorias of Leonor López (b. 1362 or 1363) is a compellingly enigmatic document written by a politically influential author. The paradoxical conflation of autobiography and memoir in her historical writing about the murder of Pedro I of Castile and León by his half- brother Enrique II de Trastámara (known as The Fratricide), is a narrative of war, trauma, and death, and their consequences — but also, surprisingly, of transcendence. Leonor — Castile’s first memorialist and first female prose writer — was incarcerated at the age of eight, spending eight years as a prisoner because of Enrique’s perfidy against Pedro, with whose family she was aligned. Enrique was the first King of Castile and León from the House of Trastámara. He became king in 1369 by murdering his half-brother Pedro (known as both The Just or the Cruel, depending on the opinion of political allies or foes). After numerous rebellions and battles as king, he was involved in the Fernandine Wars and the Hundred Years’ War. Leonor chronicles the gruesome deaths of her relatives, a fate which only she and her problematic husband survived. After her traumatic losses as a prisoner of war, however, Leonor gains notable political power, rising to become the Queen Regent of Catalina de Lancaster. The postscript to this position is both tumultuous and unexpected.

Dionisio Ridruejo. A fascist poet in the Spanish civil war

José Luis de Micheo Izquierdo — 2023-11-17

The Spanish civil war faced two revolutions that were taking place in Europe. Two totalitarianisms that found an appropriate battlefield to settle the controversy between fascism and communism, in a country divided for social, political, and religious reasons.

In this initial conglomerate, the propaganda was carried out by the Falangists. and among them Dionisio Ridruejo stood out, who brought together in his person the hierarch, the activist and the writer, without a doubt, if one can speak of a fascist poetry during the war and the first years of Francoism, it is Ridruejo who leads it (anothers, are poets or fascists). However, Ridruejo soon abandoned these positions and evolved towards liberal democracy. Poetically towards the existentialist, intimate and perhaps social lyric.
This work covers this transition through the analysis of three books: Poesia en armas (1936-1939), and Poesia en armas (Cuadernos de la campaña de Rusia)). Both written at the same time, practically, and that embody the two periods of his work in the first three years after the war. Then, we shall have a look to both books, in order to find their deep differences: one in the line of a ordinary fascist poetry, and the second, an existentialism poetic work.

Achilles, an updated character in two Spanish plays of exile of 1939: Héctor y Aquiles, by José Ramón Enríquez and La hija de Dios, by José Bergamín

María Teresa Santa María Fernández — 2023-11-17

First, we study and comment how Achilles figure is adapted in the Spanish Literature and then we analyse his myth in the exile theatre. The Spanish Civil War, in 1936, remember the classic Trojan War, that appear in the Greek Tragedies and Epic in the war itself, the republic surrenders and, finally, the exile. On the other hand, Ulysses is a paradigmatic representation of the “nostoi” or come back desire, while Achilles is the fighter with some sense of justice. However, in the two exile plays where the Greek hero appears, the image is not of a mythic and epic warrior. José Ramón Enríquez, member of the “Second Generation” and resident in Mexico, presents, like in other plays with classic plot, another point of view about the fight between the Trojan princeps Hector and the Greek hero Achilles. Bergamín, writer with more literary experience before the exile, removes Achilles presence like revenge causa of Teodora/Hecuba in La hija de Dios. There are two innovative conceptions about Achilles and the war in both playwrights. Because Bergamín and Enríquez knew the horrible consequences – death and exile – that the war causes. So, they Will denounce and create another end for the mythic Achilles story.

Excluded and Betrayed: a Medea Victim of the Spanish Civil War

Mª Teresa Amado Rodríguez — 2023-11-17

The end of the Spanish civil war in 1939 brought victory to the rebel side, but not peace for all, since the losers were persecuted and saw their safety compromised until the onset of democracy, almost forty years later. A part of these losers went into exile, while some others chose to take to the hills and live as refugees in harsh conditions and permanently harassed. It is in this context that Manuel Lourenzo sets his Medea dos fuxidos, a rewriting of Jason and Medea’s legend, in which the exclusion imposed by political circumstances acquires a special harshness for the heroine on her condition as a woman. In this work we will analyze the techniques of transformation of the classic myth based on the new reality that surrounds it.

“Troia with return ticket”: Arturo Perez-Reverte The Painter of Battles

Marta Isabel de Oliveira Várzeas — 2023-11-17

The Homeric Poems forever shaped a way of narrating war as a “mirror of life” in which the worst and best of human beings are clearly reflected. This article seeks to show the marks that the Homeric narrative left in contemporary literary texts, taking as an example the novel The painter of battles, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.

“Our own Correspondent from Greece”; Covering Diplomatic War and Conflict in Early-Victorian Britain (1835–1857)

Pandeleimon Hionidis — 2023-11-17

In the years 1835–1857 the British diplomatic mission in Athens did not confine its activity to carrying out British policy but built up a straightforward and carefully cultivated relationship with the English press. Several episodes revealed its intention of using the papers as a vehicle in order to vindicate the conduct and the opinions of its personnel on Greek politics. This article argues that in early-Victorian Britain statesmen were fully conscious of the implication of supervising the information on foreign affairs that reached the public and of exerting diplomatic pressure on other states through the daily press. As international developments gradually made interesting reading, the scarcity of communication from a faraway country such as Greece lent authority to the reports published in the London papers, which were heavily “influenced” by British international considerations. In this context the columns of a daily newspaper and the brevity of journalistic contributions enabled members of the British Legation in Athens to present their severe censor of successive Greek governments to a wider section of the British political body.

Achilles’ Fires and Marguerite Yourcenar

Ramiro González Delgado — 2023-11-17

Marguerite Yourcenar wrote Fires (Feux, 1936) when she was thirty-two. This work is the result of a passionate crisis and the feelings experienced by the author are expressed through nine prose poetries, separated by aphorisms and sentences that Yourcenar defined as “a certain notion of love”. Achilles is the main character of two of these stories: “Achilles or the lie” (“Achille ou le mensonge”) and “Patroclus or the destiny” (“Patrocle ou le destin”). The first story recreates the hero’s stay at the court of Lycomedes, when he hid there to avoid going to the Trojan War. The second is located precisely in that war and focuses on the hero after Patroclus’ death.
In this work we will analyze these two stories, especially the mythical innovations that Yourcenar carries out, as well as the aphorisms and sentences that she includes before and after them. Thus, all these texts are related to the general context in which they were created; this context allows us to link Achilles’ love feelings with those of the author herself.

The geometric rigor of the epic: “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force”, by Simone Weil

Antonio Alías — 2023-11-17

This article seeks to analyse the hypothesis of poetic thought in the work of Simone Weil, especially from the reading – and translation – of classical Greek poems (Electra, Antigone, Iliad). While this possibility does not exactly come from the theory of literature, we must look into its poetic clarification about union issues on proletariat work, which were linked by Weil with a certain decay of values in a capitalized society. The crisis of a social order results in Weil also a crisis of ideals, therefore of morality, a fundamental subject in the epic pólemos – the war – and in the tragedies of Greek poems. In this context, her approach to epic in L’Iliade ou le poème de la force (1941) reveals, in addition to a historical and political sense –as Hannah Arendt read–, another connection between the poetic and the ethical. Precisely, Weil discovers in this nexus a peculiar aesthetic sensibility, when she places Aristotelian mimesis as a poetic correlate of another form of representation of archaic Greek thought: geometry. In this way, in the Homeric poem, created for a representation that politically subscribes to an exemplary equality – as if the myth was still in balance in poetic logos’ tekné, of a kósmos that organizes the history of humankind – the proportion of actions virtuously converge with the rather ethical reverence of Greek heroes. Thus, Weil formulates a kind of hermeneutics in line with a geometry of poetic passions, particularly focused on the conception of force.

Away from Achilles’s footsteps

Bruno Henriques — 2023-11-17

In the Iliad, Achilles refuses to take part in the battle, because Agamemnon takes Briseis, as spoils of war from the king of the Myrmidons, for himself. Is this well-known fact the literary precedent that Ben, the protagonist of The Mercy Seat, updates? Written by Neil LaBute in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, this 2002 play explores the limits of human selfishness: Ben and Abby take advantage of the dust to which thousands of their compatriots have been reduced to to spout cheap philosophy in the extramarital bedroom. Like Achilles, who abandons the Greeks out of spite, Ben ignores national and family tragedy out of selfishness. However, Achilles remains a hero, Ben, for many, a pusillanimous scoundrel. In this article, I will try to determine the underlying reasons for this discrepancy.

Superman: from the mythical hero to the modern warrior

João de Mancelos — 2023-11-17

Mythic heroes do not die: they recycle themselves through the ages. In this paper, I intend to demonstrate that Superman possesses qualities and frailties like the protagonists of Greek mythology. I examine the following aspects: lineage, wisdom, superpowers, war, love and vulnerabilities. As examples, I resort to myths, legends, comic magazines, movies and series. I substantiate my research with essays from several mythologists, anthropologists, and cartoonists.

Mutants, machines and monsters: faces of war in science fiction cinema

Luís Nogueira — 2023-11-17

War – understood here in a broad sense, and encompassing multiple iterations in terms of scale, protagonists and motivations – is certainly one of the most present themes in science fiction cinema of the last five decades. Sagas such as Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Mad Max, Terminator, The Matrix or The Hunger Games are, in this regard, very demonstrative, as the films Escape from New York, Dune, Children of Men or Avatar are. These are works that, regardless of the cinephile’s judgment or their critical status, occupy a prominent place in the Western imagination and culture. What we intend in this essay is to organize a gallery of portraits of the main protagonists and antagonists of these narratives. To do so, we will resort to a hybrid and heterogeneous, multi-, trans- or even a-disciplinary approach, depending on the perspective adopted at each step: we propose to operate a broad semiotic approach that sends or intersects with a set of notions arising from philosophy, narratology, religion or aesthetics, in a repertoire organized in conceptual triads that will allow us multiple points of view and, in this way, detect the signs of the portrayed in their condition of faces-idea, faces-archetype or faces-figure: the human, the posthuman and the inhuman; the hero, the anti-hero and the villain; the soldier, the alien and the android; the beautiful, the sublime and the ugly; the allegory, the parable and the fable; the paradise, the purgatory and the hell; the utopia, the heterotopia and the dystopia. Through the analysis of these faces of the future war, we intend to outline the hypothetical gallery/iconology of a warlike development of the human condition.

History suspended in the speeches of Lions for lambs by Robert Redford

Ignacio Roldán Martínez — 2023-11-17

Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs (2007) was filmed six years after the fall of the Twin Towers, which led to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by a Western coalition. It is, as stated by the director and can be seen in Carnahan’s script, a reflection on the causes of the confusion that seems to prevail in American society and a call for youth to assume their responsibility in building tomorrow. Fourteen years after the premiere, the West has dizzyingly abandoned Kabul, interpreting a retreat that in the Western imagination is reminiscent of the retreat of the last Roman legions against the barbarians; and furthermore, Russia has invaded Ukraine, bordering with NATO and European Union countries, bringing war once again to a continent whose recent identity has been built around peace. The plot takes place in three spaces: the office of a senator with presidential aspirations, interviewed by a veteran television journalist; the office of a university professor, who encourages a talented but frivolous student to take responsibility; a snowy, nocturnal summit in Afghanistan, where a black soldier and another Hispanic have been surrounded by the Taliban. The smooth transitions from one space to another and the articulation of the different discourses -political, journalistic, educational and civic-military- give unity to the action. However, the question of which of the three discourses is the most congruent with reality remains unanswered. In this way, the interrelation of the discourses gives us a meaning characterized by its openness and, therefore, by its lack of definition: History remains suspended.

Music and Conflict: Overcoming Trauma through the work of Art in Cândido Lima and Iannis Xenakis

Helena Maria da Silva Santana — 2023-11-17

Cândido Lima and Iannis Xenakis lived, both, the reality of the war. Lima has the experience of the Colonial War and Xenakis that of World War II. Those experiences influence their technical, aesthetic and imagistic contents, as well as the overcoming of the trauma and conflict. In the case of Cândido Lima, his stay on the African continent, in Guinea-Bissau, allowed him to come into contact with another musical reality, both in its creative and interpretative aspects. The proliferation of sound manifestations, the rhythmic, harmonic and melodic richness they present, dazzles the composer. He assumes this and other influences, namely that of Iannis Xenakis. In this sense, the titles he lends to his creations, such as Nô, African Rhytms, Ritos de África, Missa Mandinga, Ncàãncôa or Nanghê, show a universe imbued with imagery content where the structures and techniques he develops portray Africa and the Colonial War. In the case of Iannis Xenakis, overcoming conflict and trauma is done by continually overcoming himself, as well as the technical, interpretive and expressive demands that he imposes to his performers. For Xenakis, Art is a meaning of alienating himself from the traumas of a lifetime.
In this text, we will show how the Portuguese (Minhoto) and African (Guinean) universes contribute to the creation of a singular sound-image universe in the musical work of the Portuguese composer Cândido Lima, as well as the Greco-French universes (scientific, philosophical and cultural) and military (World War II and Resistance), are present in the work of Iannis Xenakis. We will also show how composers try to overcome the conflict and trauma resulting from the experience of war, through artistic creation, and the conception of a set of musical works of undeniable artistic, aesthetic and musical value.

“War” and journalistic language: metaphoricity and objectivity

José Teixeira — 2023-11-17

Expressions of war are inevitable in the daily life of media: war in the prototypical meaning (such as the current one, 2022, in Ukraine) and in a metaphorical meaning, such as those in sports (in Portugal they appear mainly when the theme is football) or “everyday fights” for survival.
Apparently, the thematic real war-metaphorical “war” does not convey ambiguity, since the classical tradition of Rhetoric is based on the axiom that, in verbal language, the literal plane is not confused with the figurative plane.
This text starts from a divergent perspective of classical Rhetoric, because it argues that there is no dual or rigid separation between metaphorical and non-metaphorical language, and admits that there are different degrees of metaphoricity, which is understood as a dynamic and variable distance between non-figurative-figurative plane (or connotation-denotation, not metaphorical-metaphorical planes).
We therefore argue that, in the case of discourse on war and conflicts, the same situation can be presented as “war” (real) and as “non-war” (only metaphorical war) and, therefore, the discourse can have manipulative power in the construction of transmitted concepts.

Retrato de um presidente em guerra nos títulos dos jornais

Sara Pita — 2023-11-17

References to war in the media dominated the last year, not only to detail military advances and retreats, but also to show the role of the various actors. In 2022, war broke out in Europe and, during this period, one figure in particular gained prominence: we are talking about the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The press in general has real power in its hands, since it decides what is relevant, what is new, what should be reported (Charaudeau, 2013). It also has the ability to populate the imagination of readers with some political figures through what is said and the way of saying it. The distribution of information can condition the reader’s interpretation, since, as Ducrot (2001) mentioned, a statement includes more than a mere description of the situation.
Considering the role of the press in the construction of social representations, this article proposes to analyze the linguistic materiality of news headlines published in three Portuguese newspapers, collected between February and September 2022, to observe how Zelensky is portrayed. The choice of titles is due to their communicative function, since, as the reader’s first (and sometimes the only) contact with the news, it constitutes a summary (van Dijk, 1985) of current events.
In this work, the thematic elements (THEME and RHEME) are identified and the lexical items present in RHEME that contribute to the construction of an image of Zelensky are analyzed. The data reveal that the reference to Zelenksy appears, mostly, in the THEME position, which seems natural taking into account his importance in the conflict and his constant presence in the news. About this, several new data (RHEME) are presented that enhance the creation of different images, namely honesty, authority or criticism.

Achilles in school speeches

Rui Miguel Duarte — 2023-11-17

nasmata have a prominent place. The first mention of an ensemble of exercises is by the author of Rhetorica ad Alexandrum (4th century B.C.). Through them, the apprentices were called upon to perform rhetorical exercises, argumentation and literary composition on various themes and Greek and mythical historical characters, as a preparation for the longer speeches that future orators would deliver. Achilles is one among these characters. To him a certain reputation, glory, narratives and a temperament are associated.
To the teachers of progymnasmata, Achilles’ character was useful for three exercises. One of these progymnasmata was the ethopoeia, in which the character, with a given psychological and emotional profile was worked on and the words that this character would utter under given circumstances and in dialogues with others, were imagined. Plausibility in accordance with the character’s reputation was the criterion of the well composed exercise. See in this regard a scholium to the unplausible questions in his commentaries on Hermogens of Tarsus’ On Issues by Sopratus. Since it’s about a hero, it serves as well to the enkomion and psogos, praise and invective. An invective, yes, because Achilles and his anger also motivated invective-speeches. What’s more, although he is the most famous hero of the legends, a paradigm of bravery in war, in a papyrological text Achilles is portrayed as a coward! Another exercise is the synkrisis, in which a character was compared to another of his equals (such as Diomedes), regarding birth, education, virtues, deeds and death.
In this paper, passages from the treatises on progymnasmata by Aelius Theon, Pseudo-Hermogenes, Aphtonius, Nicolaus of Myra and Libanius will be examined. In Libanius, in contrast to his predecessors, there was a concern to provide a wide collection of micro-speeches, as paradigms for each exercise. Our goal in doing so is to retrace a portrait of Achilles in these school discourses.