Department of Ancient Studies

Permanent URI for this community

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/41

Browse

Browsing Department of Ancient Studies by browse.metadata.advisor "Claassen, J. M."

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Cape in Latin and Latin in the Cape in the 17th and 18th centuries
    (Stellenbosch University, Department of Ancient Studies, 2003) Van Stekelenburg, A. V.; Claassen, J. M.
    Different authors work in different ways. Bert van Stekelenburg would usually choose a new topic that interested him, do initial, sometimes fairly cursory, research on the subject, give one or more public lectures and/or read a fairly brief scholarly paper and then spend some years refining the topic by means of extensive research in both local and overseas libraries, carefully building up a scholarly argument in the manner of a sculptor in clay, whose work in the end would be cast in bronze — the scholarly publication that followed. This paper started as a public lecture to the Western Cape branch of the Classical Association of South Africa in March 2002. It had flowed from previous research done on an interesting Latinist who lived at the Cape, Jan Willem (“Johannes Guilielmus”) Van Grevenbroek, on whose life Bert had been working since 1997. After a lecture series was initiated by a paper read at Avila in Spain in 1997, several more popular lectures followed. This research culminated in a scholarly publication, “Een intellectueel in de vroege Kaapkolonie. De nalatenschap van Jan Willem van Grevenbroek (1644-1726)” Tydskrif vir Nederlands en Afrikaans 8, 2001, 3-34. Bert was working on this present article just before he left for his last, fateful ornithological expedition, using the computers of various friends, including that of his present editor, but after his death we have been unable to find the diskette on which he had kept this article, which had seemed to be almost completed. Also, no printouts have been found. This version is the editor’s attempt to make sense of the body of Bert’s talk (of which several versions in his handwriting exist) as well as the copious scholarly notes in English, Afrikaans and Dutch (which he had been in the process of incorporating) and the texts of various poems and other citations that he had used at the March 2002 lecture. Every attempt has been made to keep to the author’s style and contents as he envisaged them and not to allow the editor’s personal opinion to intrude into the paper (Editor).
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Cicero : 'haruspex' vicissitudinum mutationisque rei publicae : a study of Cicero's merit as political analyst
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2000-03) Schneider, Maridien; Claassen, J. M.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Dept. of Ancient Studies.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study is to explore Marcus Tullius Cicero's awareness and interpretation of contemporary political events as reflected in his private correspondence during the last years of both the Roman republic and his own life. Cicero's correspondence gives a detailed view of current political events in Rome and constitutes, with Caesar's own narrative, our major contemporary evidence for the circumstances of the civil war of 49 BC. The dissertation takes as Leitmotiv Cicero's own judgement of the state as 'sacrificial victim' to the ambitions of individual politicians, with as metaphor his examination of a 'dying' body politic in the manner of a haruspex inspecting the entrails of a sacrificial animal. It poses the question whether Cicero understood the message of political decline signalled by the 'entrails' of the 'carcass' of the res publica, and whether this ability in its turn enabled him to anticipate future political development in Rome. In what follows, the theoretical input of Cicero's predecessors, their perceptions of constitutional development, and of Roman politics in particular, as well as Cicero's own perception of their political theories will be considered in order to determine the extent of Cicero's awareness of a larger pattern of political events, and how consistent he was in his analyses of such patterns, that is, to what extent Cicero may be considered seriously as a political analyst.