The book consists of two main parts: a) Structure and Contents, b) Catalogues in Context: In the first part the major subject is how a catalogue is organized internally. A number of structural patterns formed since Homer on the basis of the position the names held within the catalogue (density in the middle - spacing in the middle -ascending /descending mode - internal balance - erratic pattern) were to continue down to the period of Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid. Each pattern carries its own dynamism in the text and has its particular effects in the reading process. Especially when the poetic work evolves in time, the fluctuation of the density in names per verse entails a corresponding fluctuation of the narrative tempo. On occasion the reader may also recognize in the structure of the catalogue a visual parallel to the situation described. Mirroring technique -widely applied in literary and artistic works in antiquity- finds its place in the poetic catalogues of the period and can be distinguished in three major categories: the extratextual, the intertextual, and the intratextual. In Ovid the technique became most sophisticated. The second part deals with the relation of the catalogue to its surrounding text. In this respect, catalogue-markers and the way a catalogue is introduced or completed are issues which are discussed in this part of the work, as they can be indicative of the way the poet views the contents of a catalogue. What becomes evident here is that the usual catalogue-markers are the products of the notion that whoever or whatever is included in a catalogue is listed there as an individual entity, even if some of its characteristics are neutralized. This proves to be true in Virgil where the items of a catalogue retain their value whereas frame and content function in support of each other. This also occurs in the greater part of the epic tradition. Before Virgil, however, in Lucretius, the frame was often the means of subverting the traditional function of a catalogue, since it usually called into question the very existence of the beings named, or undermined their value. On some occasions, a Virgilian catalogue does not close with a verbal frame but with a pause. This mode of closure proves to be the strongest boundary between a catalogue and the continuation of the narrative. On other occasions we shall find a simile at the end of a catalogue. These closural devices stress the catalogue’s potentials as they affect the reading process. Things change in the Ovidian Metamorphoses. Ovid makes extensive use of various poetic techniques and devices which he draws from the tradition in general and Virgil in particular. In doing so, however, he often challenges their significance and forms catalogues that give the impression of delaying, by protracting the oncoming narrative. In Ovid’s work neither the pause nor the simile can easily constitute natural barriers to his catalogues. Everything in the Metamorphoses is in a continuous state of flux and the catalogue, too, has to adapt accordingly by acquiring new characteristics with novel values. This book is the first of the series Pierides, series editors: Philip Hardie - Stratis Kyriakidis

Lists and catalogues have been en vogue in philosophy, cultural, media and literary studies for more than a decade. These explorations of enumerative modes, however, have not yet had the impact on classical scholarship that they deserve. While they routinely take (a limited set of) ancient models as their starting point, there is no comparably comprehensive study that focuses on antiquity; conversely, studies on lists and catalogues in Classics remain largely limited to individual texts, and – with some notable exceptions – offer little in terms of explicit theorising. The present volume is an attempt to close this gap and foster the dialogue between the recent theoretical re-appraisal of enumerative modes and scholarship on ancient cultures. The 16 contributions to the volume juxtapose literary forms of enumeration with an abundance of ancient non-, sub- or para-literary practices of listing and cataloguing. In their different approaches to this vast and heterogenous corpus, they offer a sense of the hermeneutic, epistemic and methodological challenges with which the study of enumeration is faced, and elucidate how pragmatics, materiality, performativity and aesthetics are mediated in lists and catalogues.

This compendium (4 vols.) studies the continuity, flexibility, and variation of structural elements in epic narratives. It provides an overview of the structural patterns of epic poetry by means of a standardized, stringent terminology. Both diachronic developments and changes within individual epics are scrutinized in order to provide a comprehensive structural approach and a key to intra- and intertextual characteristics of ancient epic poetry.

This book inaugurates a series of discussions on what is permanent in the original thinking of the UNL – Universal Networking Language – and the changes that have been introduced during its development. The purpose of the book is to highlight the UNL’s fundamental principles that remain as integral as they were when they were first formulated several years ago, while showing how their materialization has evolved over time, following the advances in Linguistics, Knowledge Engineering and Information Sciences. The fundamental and unchanged principles of the UNL are: The idea of an artificial language that is able to describe the universe similar to any human language; The idea of a language that, though artificial, is made up of lexical, grammatical and semantic components in the same way as any natural language; The idea of a language that can represent information and knowledge independently of natural languages; The idea that it is a language for machines, and enables human-machine interaction in an intelligent partnership. For more than a decade, eminent linguists, IT developers, NLP scholars worked together on the materialization of the “idea” of the UNL. At the start, they adopted set specifications on the formalism of the UNL that were followed by all of them. As their work progressed, they gradually realized the need for adjusting some of the initial specifications and for introducing new ones. These specifications concern three basic components of the UNL linguistic structure: the “Universal Words” (UWs) which constitute the vocabulary of the UNL; the “Relations” that describe semantic functions between two UWs; and “Attributes” that describe circumstances under which UWs and “Attributes” are used.

Latin poets and prose writers of the classical period and later used - and withheld - names subtly and to important effect. Here, in eleven new essays, an eminent international cast explore themes which include 'speaking' names, often involving bilingual Latin/Greek play; the ways in which persons and objects are named in contexts of invective or endearment; the significant suppression or changing of names; the religious and historical significances of names; the uses of names in literary catalogues; names as devices to structure a group of shorter poems.