Vol 86, No. 2 Fall 2012 - Monmouth College

Abstracts from the 2012 Convention
Judgmental Anger or Unreflecting
Passion?: The ὀργή of the Athenians in
Thucydides by Kirsten Block (Eta Delta)
Book II Abstract: In Thucydides’ History
of the Peloponnesian War, he employs two
senses of ὀργή. Sometimes he employs the
original meaning of “impulse” or “passion,”
as when the Lakedaimonian king Archidamos
speaks of the course of war coming
about through ὀργή. Other times, he uses
the sense that it has in the fifth and fourth
century authors like Aristotle and the
Attic Orators — as an angry feeling connected
with a sense of judgment, directed
toward a particular person for a specific
offense deemed worthy of punishment. In
Book II, in the context of the ὀργή felt by
the Athenians toward their leader Pericles,
both senses are apparent, revealing a difference
between the way Pericles speaks
to the Athenians about their ὀργή and
the way the narration describes it. When
speaking to the Athenians about their
ὀργή, Pericles consistently employs the
later sense of the word, seeming to ascribe
to the Athenians the capability of rendering
judgment upon others. The narration
surrounding his speeches also employs
this later sense of the term, yet it mixes
in some indications of the earlier sense as
well. The double sense of the term in the
narration reveals that the angry judgment
of the Athenians against Pericles, regardless
of how Pericles speaks about it to the
Athenians themselves, actually is a kind of
unreflecting, impulsive passion.
A Critical Eye for Livy: Using an
Apparatus Criticus by Ashley Gilbert
(Zeta Beta)
Many students go through their entire
undergraduate careers without ever looking
down to the bottom of a critical text
at the apparatus criticus. Yet a reading of
a text which does not take the apparatus
into account gives too much authority to
the text, treating it as a single work by a
single author. In reality the transmission
of manuscripts renders works that were
originally by a single person into texts by
multiple authors, from multiple sources.
Since I have started using apparati critici in
2012 panelists (left to right): Anne Cave, Ashley Gilbert, Kirsten Block, and Emily Goodling
my own reading, I now see ancient texts as
unstable works. This paper is an exercise in
using an apparatus criticus. I have chosen a
page out of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, which
contains discrepancies of various types,
outlined in the apparatus criticus. I dissect
the apparatus criticus, applying it to the
text above and following what I find to secondary
resources, including commentaries
and unabridged dictionaries. I investigate
the classical scholars whose names appear
within the apparatus. Through my analysis
of the apparatus criticus, I show how an
unstable text requires active and close
reading, which means making choices
through an informed comparison of the
alternatives provided by discrepancies.
When approached from the right perspective,
these discrepancies can be windows
to discovery. Unstable texts, when looked
at with fresh eyes, may yield surprising new
results. This is only possible when young
scholars learn to use the apparatus criticus.
The Driest Work Ever Written — Just
Add Water: A Look at Water Systems
in Ancient Rome and Modern India by
Anne Cave (Gamma Omicron)
My main research regards the ancient
water system in the city of Rome in the
first century AD during the time of Frontinus.
Its primary purpose is to discuss the
benefits and flaws of the aqueduct system
at that time along with the changes the
water commissioner Frontinus added to the
system. Its secondary purpose is to show
the universality of those issues by relating
them to a modern system. For information
about Roman aqueducts and water
transport, I relied primarily on Frontinus’
Latin text De Aquaeductu Urbis Romae for
information. I also got information from
a variety of sources in JStor articles and
books on aqueducts and engineering in the
ancient world. To supplement the research
on Roman aqueducts, I chose a modern
city for comparison. This city, Pune, is
one in which I lived for a span of four
months and on which one of my colleagues
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