I teach primarily intermediate and medieval Latin as well as Ancient Greek at the University of Michigan, where I received my PhD with a dissertation on the Roman poet Statius. My research interests focus primarily on Medieval Latin, Latin language pedagogy and the religious landscape of Late Antiquity. Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy and its influence upon early Christianity is also among my research interests. Address: Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
University of Michigan Press 2018 (https://www.press.umich.edu/9698909/reading_medieval_latin_with_the_legend_of_barlaam_and_josaphat), 2018
A textbook with which intermediate learners of Latin can improve their skills in reading Classica... more A textbook with which intermediate learners of Latin can improve their skills in reading Classical Latin prose. Those interested in learning to read Medieval Latin can focus on the version of the text with Medieval Latin spelling, which is included in the reader. The colorful and edifying stories, strung around the Christian retelling of a legend based upon the Life of the Buddha would take an intermediate learner of Latin about ten weeks to read. However, since each short story in the legend has a self-contained narrative, it can be plucked for sight-reading practice or can illustrate how Latin was used throughout the centuries as a medium for conveying the universal cultural treasures of humanity. The text is very suitable for independent study and as an entertaining reading during the summer months in order to maintain a student’s Latin proficiency with the help of a text of medium difficulty, supplied with abundant vocabulary and commentary.
Translation from the original 18th century Latin folio manuscript into Bulgarian by Donka D. Mark... more Translation from the original 18th century Latin folio manuscript into Bulgarian by Donka D. Markovska (now Markus); commentary by István Lénárd Magyar.
International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 2021
Hypatia and Synesius lived in a highly divisive time with religious extremism on the rise and the... more Hypatia and Synesius lived in a highly divisive time with religious extremism on the rise and the meaning and role of Classical cultural fixtures like paideia, philosophia and manteia being questioned and redefined. I examine Synesius' Letters, Dion, and De Insomniis to tease out the universalizing and harmonizing tendencies between pagan and Christian, theoria and paideia, philosophia and manteia that Synesius' writings, life and career embody. I look at Synesius' synthesis of Iamblichean and Plotinian tendencies, a binary found in modern scholarship, to show that theurgy was likely part of Hypatia's teaching within a well-rounded curriculum that included classical paideia and philosophical theoria. Synesius advocates for the importance of paideia, including rhetoric and philosophia as aids in the step-by-step approach to the spiritual ascent, while also acknowledging the value and universal accessibility of theoria reached by desert monks and the dream-divination (oneiromanteia) that everyone can experience in sleep. Paideia makes the fall from the heights of theoria more pleasant, while philosophia (which in Synesius' mind included theurgy) is essential for purifying the pneuma and making it receptive to divinely inspired dreams. I propose that it was in Hypatia's school that Synesius internalized a quote (from a lost work of Aristotle) that reconciles the two approaches (curated and amateur) to the ascent. While society at large was obsessed with ever widening opposites and binaries, Hypatia's Synesius both overtly and covertly emphasized harmonization and unity that are at the heart of philosophia.
The dissertation exploits the evidence that Statius' Thebaid was a successful public performa... more The dissertation exploits the evidence that Statius' Thebaid was a successful public performance, explains the features that relate it to other genres of public performance, and demonstrates the relevance of its narrative patterns to important contemporary social issues. The dissertation consists of two parts. Part One, The Thebaid in the Tradition of Public Performance, is divided into four chapters. Literary culture and audience in Domitian's Rome examines the evidence for the recitals of the Thebaid and the epic's standing in relation to Satire, epideictic rhetoric and praise poetry. The epic shares with Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus a concern over lack of access to an influential audience. In The proem in Performance, I discuss the features through which the proem imitates oral poetry and the techniques for conveying an impression of spontaneity and improvisation. The proem consists of three consecutive priamels and subtly asserts poetic authority by creating tensions between form and content. In The Illusion of Enactment, I discuss the use of dramatic techniques designed to increase the vividness of the public performance and to create the illusion of the presence of co-actors and internal audiences through addressee-variation and in-speech description of gestures. In The Vatic Persona in the Thebaid, I show how the poet balances poetic authority and political constraints by adopting a withdrawing, non-self-assertive poetic persona that avoids the first person singular and assimilates its voice to that of prophets in the poem. The second part, Aspects of Romanization, consists of three chapters. In The Rhetoric of Civil War, I discuss Statius' contribution to Roman civil war discourse and show the function of Roman civil war rhetoric in the poem. In Heroism, I ascertain a new heroic code in the Thebaid that replicates the acts of heroism most acceptable in Statius' time. There exists a pattern of defiant deaths and suicides which receive the most positive authorial validation. In Gender and Power, I show that women play an active role in the struggle for power in the epic and that their representations conform to female types participating in civil wars as recorded in various historical narratives.Ph.D.Classical literatureCommunication and the ArtsLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130534/2/9732134.pd
interim result, the first fruits of a new period in the history of scholarly studies on the Lycia... more interim result, the first fruits of a new period in the history of scholarly studies on the Lycian Epicurean and his inscription, and that further research in Oinoanda will shed further light on Diogenes’ ‘petrified’ philosophy and will result also in new insights regarding the many unsolved questions regarding this ‘empress of epigraphy’. MATTHIAS HAAKE Muenster University matthias.haake@uni-muenster.de
The detrimental effect of the public recital on the quality of epic production in the first centu... more The detrimental effect of the public recital on the quality of epic production in the first century is a stock theme both in ancient and in modern literary criticism. While previous studies on the epic recital emphasize its negative effects, or aim at its reconstruction as social reality, I focus on its conflicting representations by the ancients themselves and the lessons that we can learn from them. The voices of critics and defenders reveal anxieties about who controls the prestigious high genre of epic and about the construction of gender and social status through epic's public performance. Critics of the recitatio such as Horace, Persius, Petronius and Juvenal represent it as an informal and popular event that panders to public taste and incurs infamy. These critics charge that the epic recital has an effeminizing effect both on the recitator and on his audience, a charge traditionally advanced against orators and actors. Because the epic recital in Rome lacks a performativ...
The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 2021
Hypatia and Synesius lived in a highly divisive time with religious extremism on the rise and the... more Hypatia and Synesius lived in a highly divisive time with religious extremism on the rise and the meaning and role of Classical cultural fixtures like paideia, philosophia and manteia being questioned and redefined. I examine Synesius’ Letters, Dion, and De Insomniis to tease out the universalizing and harmonizing tendencies between pagan and Christian, theoria and paideia, philosophia and manteia that Synesius’ writings, life and career embody. I look at Synesius’ synthesis of Iamblichean and Plotinian tendencies, a binary found in modern scholarship, to show that theurgy was likely part of Hypatia’s teaching within a well-rounded curriculum that included classical paideia and philosophical theoria. Synesius advocates for the importance of paideia, including rhetoric and philosophia as aids in the step-by-step approach to the spiritual ascent, while also acknowledging the value and universal accessibility of theoria reached by desert monks and the dream-divination (oneiromanteia) t...
International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 2016
Through a novel set of texts drawn from Plato, Porphyry, Plotinus, Ps. Julian, Proclus, Hermeias,... more Through a novel set of texts drawn from Plato, Porphyry, Plotinus, Ps. Julian, Proclus, Hermeias, Synesius and Damascius, I explore how anagogic erōs in master-disciple relationships in Neoplatonism contributed to the attainment of self-knowledge and to the transmission of knowledge, authority and inspired insights within and outside the diadochia. I view anagogic erōs as one of the most important channels of non-discursive pedagogy and argue for the mediating power of anagogic erōs in the attainment of the main goal of the Platonist: reorienting desire (erōs) from sensible to intelligible beauty and changing one's ontological status to become like god and attain union with the divine. After considering the problematic nature of Socratic erōs, its skeptics and detractors, I discuss the dynamics of philosopher-disciple relationships and the experience of anagogic erōs in the following: the attack on Porphyry and defense by Plotinus following Porphyry's recital of an ecstatic poem on Hieros Gamos (Vita Plotini 15), the concealment of anagogic erōs behind the authoritative façade of an oracle (VP 22-23), the intensely devotional private letters of Ps. Julian to the aged Iamblichus and of Synesius to his female master Hypatia; the identification of anagogic erōs with theur-gic ascent in Syrianus's school according to Proclus and Hermeias and the experiences of anagogic erōs outside the diadochia in Damascius' Philosophical History. I conclude that the true and correct practice of philosophy had much, if not everything to do with the anagogic erōs between the true philosopher, the bacchant and the philosopher in training, aspiring to become transformed from thyrsus-bearer into bacchant. * I am deeply grateful to John Bussanich, John Finamore, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Virginia Burrus, Mark Edwards, Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, Geert Roskam and the audience at the 2012 AAR meeting of the Platonism and Neoplatonism group in Chicago for their stimulating questions, feedback and comments on this paper. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
Plato in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times, ed. Finamore, J.F. and Nyvlt, M., 2020
In Hierocles' view, the Golden Verses encompass "all of philosophy. This paper explores how Hiero... more In Hierocles' view, the Golden Verses encompass "all of philosophy. This paper explores how Hierocles comments creatively on this text to convey the importance of divine love and the remembrance of divinity for the attainment of the Platonic ideal of 'becoming like god'. The ontological status of man in the divine hierarchy depends on the uninterrupted nature of this remembrance according to Hierocles
University of Michigan Press 2018 (https://www.press.umich.edu/9698909/reading_medieval_latin_with_the_legend_of_barlaam_and_josaphat), 2018
A textbook with which intermediate learners of Latin can improve their skills in reading Classica... more A textbook with which intermediate learners of Latin can improve their skills in reading Classical Latin prose. Those interested in learning to read Medieval Latin can focus on the version of the text with Medieval Latin spelling, which is included in the reader. The colorful and edifying stories, strung around the Christian retelling of a legend based upon the Life of the Buddha would take an intermediate learner of Latin about ten weeks to read. However, since each short story in the legend has a self-contained narrative, it can be plucked for sight-reading practice or can illustrate how Latin was used throughout the centuries as a medium for conveying the universal cultural treasures of humanity. The text is very suitable for independent study and as an entertaining reading during the summer months in order to maintain a student’s Latin proficiency with the help of a text of medium difficulty, supplied with abundant vocabulary and commentary.
Translation from the original 18th century Latin folio manuscript into Bulgarian by Donka D. Mark... more Translation from the original 18th century Latin folio manuscript into Bulgarian by Donka D. Markovska (now Markus); commentary by István Lénárd Magyar.
International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 2021
Hypatia and Synesius lived in a highly divisive time with religious extremism on the rise and the... more Hypatia and Synesius lived in a highly divisive time with religious extremism on the rise and the meaning and role of Classical cultural fixtures like paideia, philosophia and manteia being questioned and redefined. I examine Synesius' Letters, Dion, and De Insomniis to tease out the universalizing and harmonizing tendencies between pagan and Christian, theoria and paideia, philosophia and manteia that Synesius' writings, life and career embody. I look at Synesius' synthesis of Iamblichean and Plotinian tendencies, a binary found in modern scholarship, to show that theurgy was likely part of Hypatia's teaching within a well-rounded curriculum that included classical paideia and philosophical theoria. Synesius advocates for the importance of paideia, including rhetoric and philosophia as aids in the step-by-step approach to the spiritual ascent, while also acknowledging the value and universal accessibility of theoria reached by desert monks and the dream-divination (oneiromanteia) that everyone can experience in sleep. Paideia makes the fall from the heights of theoria more pleasant, while philosophia (which in Synesius' mind included theurgy) is essential for purifying the pneuma and making it receptive to divinely inspired dreams. I propose that it was in Hypatia's school that Synesius internalized a quote (from a lost work of Aristotle) that reconciles the two approaches (curated and amateur) to the ascent. While society at large was obsessed with ever widening opposites and binaries, Hypatia's Synesius both overtly and covertly emphasized harmonization and unity that are at the heart of philosophia.
The dissertation exploits the evidence that Statius' Thebaid was a successful public performa... more The dissertation exploits the evidence that Statius' Thebaid was a successful public performance, explains the features that relate it to other genres of public performance, and demonstrates the relevance of its narrative patterns to important contemporary social issues. The dissertation consists of two parts. Part One, The Thebaid in the Tradition of Public Performance, is divided into four chapters. Literary culture and audience in Domitian's Rome examines the evidence for the recitals of the Thebaid and the epic's standing in relation to Satire, epideictic rhetoric and praise poetry. The epic shares with Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus a concern over lack of access to an influential audience. In The proem in Performance, I discuss the features through which the proem imitates oral poetry and the techniques for conveying an impression of spontaneity and improvisation. The proem consists of three consecutive priamels and subtly asserts poetic authority by creating tensions between form and content. In The Illusion of Enactment, I discuss the use of dramatic techniques designed to increase the vividness of the public performance and to create the illusion of the presence of co-actors and internal audiences through addressee-variation and in-speech description of gestures. In The Vatic Persona in the Thebaid, I show how the poet balances poetic authority and political constraints by adopting a withdrawing, non-self-assertive poetic persona that avoids the first person singular and assimilates its voice to that of prophets in the poem. The second part, Aspects of Romanization, consists of three chapters. In The Rhetoric of Civil War, I discuss Statius' contribution to Roman civil war discourse and show the function of Roman civil war rhetoric in the poem. In Heroism, I ascertain a new heroic code in the Thebaid that replicates the acts of heroism most acceptable in Statius' time. There exists a pattern of defiant deaths and suicides which receive the most positive authorial validation. In Gender and Power, I show that women play an active role in the struggle for power in the epic and that their representations conform to female types participating in civil wars as recorded in various historical narratives.Ph.D.Classical literatureCommunication and the ArtsLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130534/2/9732134.pd
interim result, the first fruits of a new period in the history of scholarly studies on the Lycia... more interim result, the first fruits of a new period in the history of scholarly studies on the Lycian Epicurean and his inscription, and that further research in Oinoanda will shed further light on Diogenes’ ‘petrified’ philosophy and will result also in new insights regarding the many unsolved questions regarding this ‘empress of epigraphy’. MATTHIAS HAAKE Muenster University matthias.haake@uni-muenster.de
The detrimental effect of the public recital on the quality of epic production in the first centu... more The detrimental effect of the public recital on the quality of epic production in the first century is a stock theme both in ancient and in modern literary criticism. While previous studies on the epic recital emphasize its negative effects, or aim at its reconstruction as social reality, I focus on its conflicting representations by the ancients themselves and the lessons that we can learn from them. The voices of critics and defenders reveal anxieties about who controls the prestigious high genre of epic and about the construction of gender and social status through epic's public performance. Critics of the recitatio such as Horace, Persius, Petronius and Juvenal represent it as an informal and popular event that panders to public taste and incurs infamy. These critics charge that the epic recital has an effeminizing effect both on the recitator and on his audience, a charge traditionally advanced against orators and actors. Because the epic recital in Rome lacks a performativ...
The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 2021
Hypatia and Synesius lived in a highly divisive time with religious extremism on the rise and the... more Hypatia and Synesius lived in a highly divisive time with religious extremism on the rise and the meaning and role of Classical cultural fixtures like paideia, philosophia and manteia being questioned and redefined. I examine Synesius’ Letters, Dion, and De Insomniis to tease out the universalizing and harmonizing tendencies between pagan and Christian, theoria and paideia, philosophia and manteia that Synesius’ writings, life and career embody. I look at Synesius’ synthesis of Iamblichean and Plotinian tendencies, a binary found in modern scholarship, to show that theurgy was likely part of Hypatia’s teaching within a well-rounded curriculum that included classical paideia and philosophical theoria. Synesius advocates for the importance of paideia, including rhetoric and philosophia as aids in the step-by-step approach to the spiritual ascent, while also acknowledging the value and universal accessibility of theoria reached by desert monks and the dream-divination (oneiromanteia) t...
International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 2016
Through a novel set of texts drawn from Plato, Porphyry, Plotinus, Ps. Julian, Proclus, Hermeias,... more Through a novel set of texts drawn from Plato, Porphyry, Plotinus, Ps. Julian, Proclus, Hermeias, Synesius and Damascius, I explore how anagogic erōs in master-disciple relationships in Neoplatonism contributed to the attainment of self-knowledge and to the transmission of knowledge, authority and inspired insights within and outside the diadochia. I view anagogic erōs as one of the most important channels of non-discursive pedagogy and argue for the mediating power of anagogic erōs in the attainment of the main goal of the Platonist: reorienting desire (erōs) from sensible to intelligible beauty and changing one's ontological status to become like god and attain union with the divine. After considering the problematic nature of Socratic erōs, its skeptics and detractors, I discuss the dynamics of philosopher-disciple relationships and the experience of anagogic erōs in the following: the attack on Porphyry and defense by Plotinus following Porphyry's recital of an ecstatic poem on Hieros Gamos (Vita Plotini 15), the concealment of anagogic erōs behind the authoritative façade of an oracle (VP 22-23), the intensely devotional private letters of Ps. Julian to the aged Iamblichus and of Synesius to his female master Hypatia; the identification of anagogic erōs with theur-gic ascent in Syrianus's school according to Proclus and Hermeias and the experiences of anagogic erōs outside the diadochia in Damascius' Philosophical History. I conclude that the true and correct practice of philosophy had much, if not everything to do with the anagogic erōs between the true philosopher, the bacchant and the philosopher in training, aspiring to become transformed from thyrsus-bearer into bacchant. * I am deeply grateful to John Bussanich, John Finamore, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Virginia Burrus, Mark Edwards, Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, Geert Roskam and the audience at the 2012 AAR meeting of the Platonism and Neoplatonism group in Chicago for their stimulating questions, feedback and comments on this paper. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
Plato in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times, ed. Finamore, J.F. and Nyvlt, M., 2020
In Hierocles' view, the Golden Verses encompass "all of philosophy. This paper explores how Hiero... more In Hierocles' view, the Golden Verses encompass "all of philosophy. This paper explores how Hierocles comments creatively on this text to convey the importance of divine love and the remembrance of divinity for the attainment of the Platonic ideal of 'becoming like god'. The ontological status of man in the divine hierarchy depends on the uninterrupted nature of this remembrance according to Hierocles
Review(s) of: Statius 2: Thebaid Books 1-7, by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (ed. and trans.), Cambridg... more Review(s) of: Statius 2: Thebaid Books 1-7, by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (ed. and trans.), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. 459. ISBN 0-674-01208-9. USD21.50. Review(s) of: Statius 3: Thebaid Books 8-12, by Achilleid. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. 442. ISBN 0-674-01209-7. USD21.50.
The renaissance in Statian studies of the past thirty some years has now this new edition and tra... more The renaissance in Statian studies of the past thirty some years has now this new edition and translation of the Thebaid and Achilleid to boast, a feat following in the footsteps of an earlier Loeb volume by Shackleton Bailey containing Statius' Silvae. These replace the long outdated two-volume Loeb translation of Statius' entire oeuvre by J. H. Mozley, first published in 1928. Since the new edition and translation is poised to replace Mozley in the future, comparisons with his work and with D. E. Hill's edition (1983) are in order. The separation of the Silvae into a separate volume is a logical move, even though less economical. Now one has to purchase three Loeb volumes to own all of Statius' work. Nevertheless, scholarship in recent years has focused attention on the Silvae as a separate field of study and this justifies its separation from the epics in the Loeb volumes.
The transition from reading individual sentences to reading a continuous text is one of the main ... more The transition from reading individual sentences to reading a continuous text is one of the main challenges for the intermediate Latin student. From short sentences, the student has to make a transition to a long passage with sentences that extend over several lines. For this environment the student has one extremely time-consuming strategy: look up each word in the dictionary and try to glean whatever meaning you can. Some students may be a little more sophisticated in trying to find verbs and subjects and hope that everything else falls into place around them. For the novice, the word and its semantic value is a chunk. But how does the approach of the novice differ from that of the experienced reader? This paper discusses how raising students' awareness of the processes which are involved in language comprehension, can not only make them self-reflective and critical thinkers, but also puts them in a better position to appreciate extra-textual cues and the aesthetic beauty of Latin literary prose. Cognitive psychologists have discovered that the reason why humans can understand language quickly is because they have unconscious processing strategies for their native language. The essence of this processing strategy is that we use both syntactic cues and semantic information throughout the processing of the sentence. We do not wait until the end of the sentence to assign grammatical structure. You can prove this to yourself by listening to the following sentence: THE OLD MAN THE BOATS. First, you asssigned the role of a subject to man and when I came to the end of the sentence without giving you a verb, you had to had to go back and reassign the role of subject to OLD and repackage MAN, the only ambiguous form as the verb. So, in our native language processing, our comprehension does not stem from a lexical look up in the metnal dictionary, but experiments have shown that people 1. Assign syntactic functions before reaching the end of a sentence and 2. People actively divide up the whole sentence into
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