JC Classics flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Interpretatio Romana

The Roman practice of identifying Greek gods with native Roman deities, as when Zeus became Jupiter, Athena became Minerva, and Aphrodite became Venus, shaping Latin literature's reception of Greek myth.

Aetiological myth

A story that explains the origin of a custom, place name, ritual, or natural feature, such as the myth accounting for the founding of a city or the naming of a spring.

Hesiod's Theogony

A Greek didactic poem describing the genealogy of the gods from Chaos through the generations of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus, ending with Zeus's victory and the order of Olympus.

Twelve labours of Heracles

The canonical set of tasks imposed on Heracles, from the Nemean lion and Lernaean Hydra to Cerberus, often read as expiation for the killing of his family and as pan-Hellenic civilising myth.

Dactylic hexameter

The quantitative epic metre of Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, and Lucan, built from dactyls and spondees with a fixed cadence; its recitation shaped the formulaic style of oral epic.

In medias res

Beginning a narrative in the middle of the action, as the Iliad opens in the tenth year of the war and the Odyssey with Odysseus detained on Calypso's island.

Oral-formulaic theory

Parry and Lord's account of Homeric composition through repeated epithets, type-scenes, and formulae, developed from fieldwork on living oral epic traditions in the Balkans.

Virgil's Aeneid structure

A twelve-book Latin epic whose first six books echo the Odyssey's wanderings and whose last six echo the Iliad's war, ending with Aeneas killing Turnus in a scene of unresolved violence.

Lucan's Bellum Civile

An unfinished ten-book Latin epic on the Caesar-Pompey civil war, notable for omitting the traditional divine machinery and for its anti-imperial, declamatory tone.

City Dionysia

The Athenian festival at which tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies were performed competitively; its programme included dithyrambic choruses and the public display of tribute.

Hamartia

Aristotle's term in the Poetics for the error or misjudgement that contributes to a tragic protagonist's downfall; it is not simply a moral flaw, as later readings often assume.

Peripeteia and anagnorisis

Aristotle's paired plot devices: peripeteia is a reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis is a recognition or discovery, most effective when the two coincide, as in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus.

Parabasis

A feature of Aristophanic Old Comedy in which the chorus steps out of the dramatic illusion to address the audience directly, often on political or literary topics.

Menander's Dyskolos

The only substantially complete surviving play of Greek New Comedy, recovered on papyrus; it centres on the misanthrope Knemon and the romantic plots surrounding his daughter.

Herodotus's Histories

A nine-book Greek prose work on the Persian Wars and the peoples involved, organised around ethnographic excursuses and the theme of imperial overreach, written in the fifth century BCE.

Thucydides' methodology

In Book 1, Thucydides states he composed speeches as what the situation demanded and verified events as far as possible, aiming at a possession for all time rather than immediate acclaim.

Livy's Ab Urbe Condita

A 142-book Roman history from the city's founding to 9 BCE, of which Books 1-10 and 21-45 survive; it combines annalistic structure with moralising exempla.

Tacitus's Annals

A partly surviving Latin history covering the reigns from Tiberius to Nero, characterised by compressed, pointed prose and a hostile scrutiny of imperial power and senatorial complicity.

Polybius's anacyclosis

The cyclical theory of constitutions in Polybius's Histories, in which monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy degenerate in turn, and the mixed constitution of Rome is praised for stability.

Socratic elenchus

The question-and-answer method dramatised in Plato's early dialogues, in which Socrates tests an interlocutor's definition and exposes contradictions without necessarily supplying a positive answer.

Plato's allegory of the cave

A simile in Republic Book 7 in which prisoners mistake shadows for reality; education is the turning of the soul toward the intelligible realm and the Form of the Good.

Aristotle's four causes

The material, efficient, formal, and final causes used to explain change and being; the final cause, or telos, is central to Aristotle's biology and ethics of flourishing.

Stoic logos

The rational principle pervading the cosmos in Stoic philosophy; living according to nature means aligning one's reason with this order and treating virtue as the only true good.

Cicero's De Oratore

A dialogue on the ideal orator, set in 91 BCE and featuring Crassus and Antonius; it argues for broad liberal education and combines rhetorical technique with philosophical culture.

Black-figure and red-figure

The two principal Athenian vase-painting techniques: black-figure paints silhouettes in slip and incises detail, while red-figure reserves figures in the clay ground and paints the background.

Kouros and kore

Archaic Greek freestanding statues of nude young men and clothed young women, typically frontal and smiling, used as votive offerings and grave markers from the seventh to fifth centuries BCE.

Pompeian painting styles

Four successive schemes of Roman wall decoration at Pompeii and Herculaneum, from painted masonry blocks to illusionistic architectural vistas and fantastic figural panels.

Opus caementicium

Roman concrete made from lime mortar and aggregate, which enabled vaults and domes such as the Pantheon's; its use is a defining feature of Roman architectural innovation.

Koine Greek

The common Greek dialect that spread after Alexander's conquests and became the standard for administration and literature, forming the language of the New Testament and later papyri.

Stemmatics

The method of reconstructing a text by building a family tree of manuscripts and identifying shared errors, so that an archetype can be inferred before editorial conjecture is applied.

Oxyrhynchus papyri

A cache of thousands of Greek papyri excavated in Egypt from 1896 onward, yielding lost literature, documents, and early Christian texts that transformed classical scholarship.

Apparatus criticus

The section of a critical edition recording manuscript variants, conjectures, and sigla at given line numbers, allowing readers to reconstruct the editor's decisions about the text.