Arts and Humanities

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which ancient Greek tragedy has contributed to the formation, negotiation, and transformation of cultural memory and identity across different historical periods. Focusing on the continuing circulation and reinterpretation of tragic myths, it explores how narratives originating in classical antiquity acquire new meanings when transferred into changing social, political, and intellectual contexts. Particular attention is given to the tension between continuity and transformation: recurring mythical structures, characters, and ethical questions preserve recognisable connections with antiquity, while successive communities reshape inherited material in response to their own concerns. Bringing together classical studies, reception studies, and cultural-memory theory, the article approaches tragedy not simply as a corpus of ancient literary texts but as a dynamic historical phenomenon whose meanings are continually reconstructed through performance, translation, adaptation, and political appropriation. It develops case studies of Sophocles’ Antigone in occupied France and post-war Greece, the Aeschylean Oresteia and modern representations of violence and justice, Yannis Ritsos’ Philoctetes and the memory of exile, and George Seferis’ use of Aeschylean tragedy in his poetry on the Greek Civil War. These cases demonstrate that the afterlife of tragedy depends neither on unchanging transmission nor on complete reinvention. Its cultural vitality lies in the productive tension between recognisable inheritance and historical transformation.

Abstract: Translatable oral characteristics can be translated between poetic languages that are linguistically or metrically very different. This paper begins with describing an effort of manually clustering such characteristics and listing the passages in which they co-occur. Following this process, five non-trivial clusters have been discovered in the Iliad. The clusters are non-trivial in the sense that they have many semantically diverse characteristics, are often detailed, are few in number, and are widely applicable. As such, they contrast with trivial clusters of semantically close characteristics, like king, wealth, and gold. The discovery of three of these non-trivial clusters is supported by chi-square tests of independence. They are conjectured to have origins in separate Mycenaean, Aeolian, and Ionian oral traditions. Nevertheless, the statistical investigation is about the existence of these three non-trivial clusters, not their geographical origins. A list of 21 statistically significant results is obtained, of which 13 are extremely significant, while only 4 are not significant. Given that no trivial concept, type-scene, or story explains the clusters, their existence, meaning, contours, and origins should be of primary concern for Homerists, as they probably have much historical and literary value.

Abstract: (1) Background: Homeric analysis has traditionally focused on linguistic, philological, and metrical features of the Greek text. (2) Methods: This article proposes a complementary, non-linguistic approach to the analysis of the Iliad, based on the systematic identification of translatable oral scopes and their associated oral characteristics. An “oral scope” is defined as a bardic subspecialty consisting of a traditional set of conceptual patterns that can be expressed across different languages. Such scopes may remain obscured when they contain numerous characteristics, or occur interwoven with other scopes, with a distorted logic, or incomplete. By manually clustering translatable oral characteristics, hidden oral scopes and their historical backgrounds can be revealed. (3) Results: Reported here is the discovery of 25 hidden Homeric oral scopes and the distinction of at least 776 oral characteristics, documented in an English-language Homeric Traditions Apparatus. The five most prominent oral scopes are the Mycenaean, Aeolian, and Ionian Traditions, and the European War and Narrative Roles that form the European Tradition together. The other hidden oral scopes are stories, story types, type-scenes, and roles. (4) Conclusions: The many results suggest that a translationally oriented, non-linguistic analysis can complement existing linguistic approaches and provide a wealth of new insights.

Abstract: In the famous medieval magical manual called Picatrix, the unknown author describes the phenomenon of magic with the term nigromantia. As is well known, the original meaning of the Greek term necromantia has a more concise meaning. It is used for a special kind of divination, i.e., divination through the parts of a cadaver and the conjured spirit of the dead. Seemingly in the Picatrix, no necromantic ritual can be found; moreover, the author stresses that his main goal is pious, i.e., to find the path leading to the ultimate source of the universe, the one and only God. In my paper, I show that on some pages of the Picatrix, there are traces of divinatory practices that may be connected to the original meaning of the term nigromantia. In the third book of the manual, descriptions of some interesting rituals attributed to the pagan Sabeans of Harran and their teacher, the god Hermes can be found. During the practices, the magician involved conjured spirits of the heavenly bodies and powers as well. Because of this, by looking closely at and analyzing the given text, it is possible to piece together a complex web of necromantic and demonic divinatory rituals.

Abstract: In this study we sought to investigate the impact of urbanization, presence of concrete river bottom, and nutrient pollution on microbial communities along the L.A. River. Six molecular markers were evaluated for identification of bacteria, plants, fungi, fish, and invertebrates in 90 samples. PCA (principal components analysis) was used with PAM (partitioning around medoids) clustering to reveal community structure and an NB (Negative binomial) model in DESeq2 was used for differential abundance analysis. PCA and factor analysis exposed the main axes of variation but were sensitive to outliers. Differential abundance of Proteobacteria was associated with soft bottom sites, and there was an apparent balance in the abundance of organisms responsible for nitrogen cycling. Nitrogen cycling was explained by differential abundance of ammonia oxidizing archaea, the complete ammonia oxidizers Nitrospira sp., nitrate reducing bacteria Marmoricola sp., and nitrogen fixing bacteria Devosia sp. which were differentially abundant at soft-bottom sites (p adj < 0.002). In contrast, differential abundance of several Cyanobacteria and other anoxygenic phototrophs was associated with the concrete bottom sites, which suggested the accumulation of excess nitrogen. The soft bottom sites tended to be represented by differential abundance of aerobes, whereas the concrete-associated species tended to be alkaliphilic, saliniphilic, calciphilic, sulfate dependent, and anaerobic. In Glendale Narrows, downstream from multiple water reclamation plants, there were differential abundance of cyanobacteria and algae, however indicator species for low nutrient environments and ammonia-abundance were also present. There was differential abundance of ascomycetes associated with Arroyo Seco and a differential abundance of Scenedesmaceae green algae and cyanobacteria in Maywood, in the analysis which compared suburban with urban river communities. The proportion of Ascomycota to Basidiomycota within the LA River differed from the expected proportion based on published worldwide freshwater and river 18S data; the shift in community structure was most likely associated with the extremes of urbanization. This study indicates that extreme urbanization can result in overrepresentation of cyanobacterial species that could cause reductions in water quality and safety.