Lampas - Volume 55, Issue 2, 2022

The battle of Salamis can be considered a ‘miracle’ in three respects. There is the ‘David and Goliath’ kind of miracle that a much smaller Greek fleet manages to defeat the Persian opponent. There is the miracle that the Greeks offer battle at all, after their endless debates. But the biggest miracle is Artemisia, called a literal θαῦμα by Herodotus himself. My close-reading of her bravura martial feat, which makes her even more esteemed in Xerxes’ eyes, shows why for Herodotus such events are quintessentially historical stuff, more than exact numbers or military strategies.

Discussions about the interpretation of Plautus’ self-proclaimed tragicomoedia Amphitruo usually centre on the interpretation of the character of Alcumena, the wife of the eponymous general: should we see her as a tragic heroine or as a comic character? In this paper I will elaborate a third option, in which Alcumena is interpreted as a comic character precisely because her tragic features are grotesquely parodied, and I will argue for an analysis of the Amphitruo as a parody of tragedy. Mercury plays a central role as the divine seruus callidus who brilliantly directs the various reversals throughout the play and ‘performs’ the transition into a tragicomedy on the stage.

What we know about women in ancient Rome depends on the available sources, but also on the questions we ask. In this article, the role of women in Latin literature is discussed in relation to the academic interest for these characters and the changes in these interests. Whereas a first generation of studies of Roman women was mostly focused on (stereo)types in literature, the second generation used material and textual sources to contextualize the lives of actual women in specific places and at specific times, and the third generation is influenced by gender theories and questions what femininity and masculinity mean in a specific socio-cultural environment. The case of Arria as described by Martial and Pliny serves to illustrate the different approaches to women in antiquity.

The staging of Sophocles’ Antigone during and directly after the Second World War has been the subject of research in almost all European countries except the Netherlands. This is remarkable because Antigone was the only integral Greek tragedy that was performed during the Nazi-occupation of the Netherlands. In this article, I will compare the socio-political readings of productions of Antigone in 1943 and in 1952, by examining the historical circumstances, their reception in the media and the motives of actors and producers.

A central topic of discussion in second language acquisition research is the question whether new vocabulary should be presented to pupils by means of vocabulary lists or in phrases (context). This question is not raised as often by teachers of Latin and it is therefore unsurprising that vocabulary lists have dominated Latin text books in the Netherlands for decades. This article concentrates on the effects of presenting Latin vocabulary in context. It investigates which learning strategies pupils use if vocabulary is presented in context, and the relationship between these strategies and memorisation. For this purpose, three pupils are involved in a think-aloud protocol while learning Latin vocabulary in context. The analysis shows that the pupils seldom attempt to translate the phrases, presumably because of the complex grammar, but tend to fall back on familiar, common strategies such as repetition, to memorise new words. Therefore, the author advises future writers of text books who consider to present vocabulary in context, to develop exercises that explicitly stimulate pupils to translate the context as a strategy to discover the meaning of new words.