TEXT and COMMENTARY
ARTICLES and CHAPTERS
- "Aristophanes' Banqueters and the Design of Republic I," forthcoming in The Classical Journal.
- "Dulce et decorum est, Actium, and the Clupeus Virtutis," The Phoenix 74.1-2 (2020) 59-78.
- "Senecan 'Meta-Stoicality': In the Cognitive Embrace of Atreus" Classical Quarterly 68.2 (2018) 573-90.
- "Landino, Vergil and Plato" Renaissance Papers (2009) 1-20.
- "Platonism and Stoicism in Vergil's Aeneid" in Platonic Stoicism - Stoic Platonism. The Dialogue between Platonism and Stoicism in Antiquity. Edd. Mauro Bonazzi and Christoph Helmig. Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, De Wulf-Mansion Centre Series I, Dir. Carlos Steel, vol. XXXIX (Leuven University Press 2007) 87-107.
- "The Imagery of Cicero's Somnium Scipionis" in Collection Latomus 301. Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History XIII. Ed. C. Deroux (2006) 155-65.
- "Etymology and Plot in Senecan Tragedy" Syllecta Classica 13 (2002) 126-53.
- "Preliminary Impulse in Stoic Psychology" Ancient Philosophy 20 (2000) 139-68.
- "Seneca and Horace: Allegorical Technique in Two Odes to Bacchus (Hor. Carm. 2.19 and Sen. Oed. 403-508)" Phoenix 53.3-4 (1999) 281-307.
- "Friendship and Profit in Xenophon's Oeconomicus" in The Socratic Movement, ed., P.A. Vander Waerdt (Ithaca 1994) 209-237.
- "Posidonian Polemic and Academic Dialectic: The Impact of Carneades upon Posidonius' peri pathôn" Greek, Roman, & Byzantine Studies 34.3 (1993 publ. 1995) 229-323.
CITATIONS
REVIEWS
- Margaret Graver, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4. Translated with a Commentary. (University of Chicago 2002), Ancient Philosophy 23 (2003) 244-47.
- John G. Fitch, Seneca. Hercules. Trojan Women. Phoenician Women. Medea. Phaedra. Loeb Classical Library (Harvard 2002) in The Classical Bulletin 79 (2003) 159-62.
- A.E. Rorty, Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (Princeton 1993) in The Classical Bulletin 71 (1995) 32-36.
PAPERS
- "Plato's Poetic Solution to the Problem of Philosophy in Republic X" Breslin Lecture in Classical Studies, U. South Carolina 4/23.
- "Aristophanes' Banqueters and Plato Republic I" Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Winston-Salem, NC 3/22.
- "Dream of Scipio as an Imitation of Plato's Republic." Ancient Philosophy Society, Waco TX, 3/17
- "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. That is the Question." Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Williamsburg, Va. 3/16.
- "Xenophon's Cyrus as Plato's Perfect Criminal" Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, New York, 10/15.
- "Doctus Vergil: Eleven Lines that Lay the Foundation of Rome" NC Classical Association, Winston-Salem, 3/15.
- "Deductum Carmen: Platonic Epic on Vergil's Slender Oat" Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, New York, 10/14.
- "Vergil's Etymological Use of Rhetorical Figures." Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Grand Rapids, MI, 4/11
- "Vergil, Plato and Landino." Southeastern Renaissance Conference, Columbia SC, 10/09
- "Platonism and Stoicism in Vergi's Aeneid" Colloquio 'Platonismo e Stoicismo,' Gargnano, Palazzo Feltrinelli, 19-22 aprile 2006 a cura di Pierluigi Donini e Mauro Bonazzi, Università degli Studi di Milano in collaborazione con Carlos Lévy, Université La Sorbonne, Paris IV e Carlos Steel, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven - De Wulf-Mansioncentrum.
- "Telum immedicabile: Plato on Vergil's Parthian Shot" Classical Association of the Middle West and South, St. Louis, MO, 4/04
- "Vergilian Pietas and Plato's Doctrine of Forms" Vergilian Society panel of the APA, San Francisco, 1/04
- "The Temple of Jupiter in Cicero's Somnium Scipionis" Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Lexington, KY, 4/03
- "The Golden Bough and the Gate of False Dreams: The Philosophical Landscape of the Aeneid" delivered at Loyola Univ. Maryland, 3/01 and at the North Carolina Classical Association in Greenville, 4/01.
- "Libet reverti: Inversions of Augustan Themes in Seneca's Agamemnon." Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Knoxville TN 4/00
- "I Was Unwise with Eyes Unable to See: Appearance, Reality and Love in Vergil's Aeneid" delivered to the Junior Classical League in Greensboro, 11/00 and as an invited talk at Loyola Univ. Maryland, 3/01
- "Les propatheiai dans le stoïcisme: étude diachronique," an invited lecture before a conference of the Centre d' études sur la philosophie Hellénistique et Romaine, Paris, France, 3/99.
- "Seneca's 'Wide-Stepping' Eurybates, or A Punny Thing Happened on the Way to Inform Them", Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Charlottesville, VA, 4/98.
- "Impulse and Animal Action in Stoic Psychology" in a panel of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, American Philological Association, 12/96.
- "Tantae erat molis: Deception, the Reader's Trial (Aen. 12.843-952)", Vergil panel, Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Nashville, TN, 4/96.
- "The Ode to Bacchus in Seneca's Oedipus: A Refutation of the Embolima-Theory" Senecan Tragedy panel, Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Omaha NE, 4/95.
- "Exercises to Improve Comprehension in Third Semester Latin," Latin Pedagogy panel, Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Southern Section, Chapel Hill, 10/94.
- "Ambiguous Decision and Audience Response in Senecan Tragedy," Senecan Tragedy panel, Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Atlanta GA, 4/94.
- "Coping with Complex Poetry: Reading Pindar's Second Olympian," a talk before the Department of Classics of Loyola College, Baltimore MD, 3/93.
- "The Ode to Amor in Seneca's Phaedra: A Bathetic Incongruity Completely Lacking in Ovidian Wit?" for the Duke University Department of Classical Studies, 11/91.
- "Friendship and Profit in Xenophon's Oeconomicus," Xenophon's Socrates panel, Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, New York NY, 10/90.
- "A Passion for Posidonius," Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, New York, 10/89.
SEMINARS
In Memory of Roger Hornsby, Dec. 2010
When after a long morning's drive out of Paris, seeing the great Cathedral rise before our eyes mile after mile, we stood at last before the sculptural labyrinth of Chartres, Roger said laconically, "Now begin." 22 years later, I wonder again how to convey the depth of what he taught us.
We owe a cock to Aesclepius, and must see that it is paid. More remains of our Socratic teacher than Catullus' "mute ash" of which Roger once said, "The sense of loss is emphasized by the irony of the final line, aue atque uale. He arrived only to bid farewell." We feel the pain of elision today as we come to these final "broken sentences."
I was a student of Roger's from 1983-88. He prepared me for that visit to Chartres by seeing to it that I studied French and medieval art, and encountered a bestiary, all in addition to my classics work. What I shall remember most is how he was interested in everything. From Gerda Seligson, his Diotima, he learned the vital link between quest and question. Gerda would say, "The answers are easy, Roger. The questions are hard." And so the two of them worked on a course in Latin that asked on the first test: "Explain the following and give an example: Intransitive, accusative, coordinating conjunction." Next to my wrong answers throughout the tests, he wrote comments like "You weren't applying logic." "Good, but not good enough" "You are becoming unduly sloppy; now we must correct that, mustn't we?" In Latin III the questions became "comment on the relative length of the tricolon and rewrite the anaphoric clauses with the gaps filled" and the comments became "I would like to agree but it isn't so"; "trust yourself"; and then "no, no, no." There is a brilliant simplicity to "define accusative." He asked us to describe the abstractions of grammar and to examine the gaps in our thinking and in so doing invited us to fall in love with language itself and with the life of the mind.
His favorite exemplum of classical simplicity was Horace Ode 1.38 on the garland of myrtle. Roger says only, "Explain the rhetorical figures of the first stanza. What purpose do they serve?" The answer, that the chiastic arrangement of nouns and adjectives, as well as of subjective and objective experience suggest the exquisite complexity of the woven garland. Horace said, "I care not that you are anxious to gild the simple myrtle. The myrtle is not beneath you, boy, nor me as I drink beneath the trained vine." Roger's teaching invited us to his locus amoenus even as it trained us in subtle ways. He gave us confidence that middle class kids from Iowa could understand the world's most complex poems written in an ancient newly-learned form of words. He was interested in much more than Vergil: Plato's first tetralogy, the proskynesis of Tiridates, the iconography of Caravaggio, Jessie's beloved Proust, Ivor Winters, T.S. Eliot, the perfect system of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and the heroes of Iowa City and the world who rescued scholars and artists and fought the 20th century's tyrannies and prejudices. But, more marvelous to tell, he was interested in us and everything we did.
He thought of his role like one of Eliot's Guardians from The Cocktail Party who work unseen to help the young know themselves and learn the difference between self-deception and social grace. Not until many years later, as we were reading together by telephone did I realize that the origin of his "now, begin" was the last line of that play, in which Edward and Lavinia, without speaking it, acknowledge how much they have learned from their teachers about love and how to be civilized. Now as the doorbell rings, and Roger has come to see what sort of party we will live, he hopes, I am sure, that we understand Lavinia's last line, "Oh, I'm glad. It's begun."