It is now generally agreed that in Aristotle's Poetics, ch. 13 means ‘mistake of fact’. The moralizing interpretation favoured by our Victorian forebears and their continental counterparts was one of the many misunderstandings fostered by their moralistic society, and in our own enlightened erais revealed as an aberration. In challenging this orthodoxy I am not moved by any particular enthusiasm for Victoriana, nor do I want to revive the view that means simply ‘moral flaw’ or ‘morally wrong action’. I shall (...) try to show that the word has a range of applications, from ‘ignorance of fact’ at one end to ‘moral defect’, ‘moral error’, at the other, and that the modern orthodoxy, though not as clearly wrong as the moralizing interpretation it displaced, restricts Aristotle's meaning in a way he did not intend, and does lessthan justice to his analysis of classical drama. (shrink)

It is now generally agreed that in Aristotle's Poetics, ch. 13 means ‘mistake of fact’. The moralizing interpretation favoured by our Victorian forebears and their continental counterparts was one of the many misunderstandings fostered by their moralistic society, and in our own enlightened erais revealed as an aberration. In challenging this orthodoxy I am not moved by any particular enthusiasm for Victoriana, nor do I want to revive the view that means simply ‘moral flaw’ or ‘morally wrong action’. I shall (...) try to show that the word has a range of applications, from ‘ignorance of fact’ at one end to ‘moral defect’, ‘moral error’, at the other, and that the modern orthodoxy, though not as clearly wrong as the moralizing interpretation it displaced, restricts Aristotle's meaning in a way he did not intend, and does lessthan justice to his analysis of classical drama. (shrink)

In her masterly article on this passge, Dr. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood goes most of the way towards solving two serious problems: the text of Lys. 645, where the vulgate makes the ‘bears’ more than ten years old, contrary to all other evidence; and the meaning of of A. Ag. 239 . She argues cogently that in Aeschylus means ‘shedding’ the saffron robe, as most editors including Fraenkel have thought, and not ‘letting her robes fall to the ground’ as Lloyd-Jones, followed by (...) Page, has argued. (shrink)

It has long been accepted as a principle by editors and writers on Greek metre that brevis in longo and hiatus in tragic lyrics often coincide with some kind of sense-pause. The object of this inquiry is to determine the incidence of pause in such places, and show that it is significantly high; to show that there is a comparable incidence in the corresponding places in strophic systems; to show that period-ends determined by criteria other than brevis and hiatus are (...) attended by similar conditions. It might seem that if all this were true it would have been recognized long ago, particularly as the connection between sense and metrical structure, and symmetry of sense in strophe and antistrophe, has often been pointed out. (shrink)

So Pearson. The strange series of hypodochmiacs here and atO.T.1207 ff., with brevis in longo without pause atAj.421 andO.T.1208, seems metrically self-contained, despite their syntactical interdependence (esp.Aj.421–2οὐκέτ' ἄνδρα μὴ | τόνδ' ἴδητ', so that the word-overlap ofοἷονinto iambics in Pearson's text is unlikely.ἑξερῶ μέγαshould therefore be writtenplena scriptura. Thenοἷον οὔτιν' ἁ Τροί|α στρατοῦ…is possible, but the ithyphallic with word-overlap, sometimes found in the syncopated iambics of Aeschylus, is foreign to Sophocles. Divideἐξερῶ μέγα, | οἷον οὔτινα | Τροία…Thenϕίλοι τοῖσδ' ὁμοῦ = (...) οἷον οὔτινα, i.e.δ= hyp., which is not certainly found, and the antistrophe has two syllables extra. (shrink)

7 πῖαρ Plut.: πυαρ pap.Ath. Pol.ἀνταράξας … ἐξεῖλε pap., coniecerat Gildersleeve: ἂν ταράξας ἐξέλη Plut.Solon is answering his critics. Thedemoshas never had it so good. The ‘bigger and stronger men’, μείζους καὶ βίαν ἀμείνονες, also have cause to thank him. For if anyone else had had this office, ‘he would not have restrained thedemos, nor would he have stopped, before’, etc. Plutarch introduces the lines in almost the same words.V. 7 is difficult. Bergk and others construe: ‘until, having stirred up (...) the milk, he had taken the cream’. There are two objections to this. Firstly, the word order would involve an interlacing of main and participial clauses which Greek normally eschews. Bergk claims that Solon is peculiar in the freedom of his hyperbaton, but the examples he quotes are not of this type and are very much easier. Secondly, the sense: ‘it is not usual to stir up milk when it is wanted to skim off cream’. Linforth recognised the force of this argument, and concluded, in the truth of the ancient evidence, that πῑαρ refers to butter. (shrink)

In CQ 55 , 22–5, E. Harrison noticed that hiatus between verses in the trimeters of dialogue was much less frequent in tragedy when the sense ran on from one verse to the next, than when there was a pause in sense at verse-end. He observed that Aeschylus' Prometheus differed from the other plays of Aeschylus in this respect, the proportion of run-over hiatus to end-stopped hiatus being much higher, and more like that of comedy; that Sophocles had remarkably few (...) verses with run-over hiatus in the Trachiniae and Antigone , much less than Aeschylus in proportion to the number of non-stop trimeters in the play, though Oedipus Tyrannus had much the largest number in Sophocles , and no continuous chronological development was discernible; that in Euripides there was a general progression from relative strictness to relative freedom in the run-over hiatus allowed, though individual plays did not conform closely to this pattern; that in general comedy was freer than tragedy. (shrink)

There was once a man in a certain village in the mountains, who made his living by making up stories, which he used to tell to the people of his village to while away their evenings. One day he went on a journey to a strange village far away in the plains, and there he saw a group of men sitting round another story-teller. Being curious to learn whether his rival was as good a story-teller as he was, he joined (...) the group and listened. He was astonished to find that the story being told was one he had made up himself. So when the story-teller had finished, the man took him aside and said, ‘That was a good story, but it is my story, which I made up, and you must pay me money for it.’ ‘You are wrong,’ said his rival. ‘It is my story, for I made it up myself this morning’. (shrink)

There was once a man in a certain village in the mountains, who made his living by making up stories, which he used to tell to the people of his village to while away their evenings. One day he went on a journey to a strange village far away in the plains, and there he saw a group of men sitting round another story-teller. Being curious to learn whether his rival was as good a story-teller as he was, he joined (...) the group and listened. He was astonished to find that the story being told was one he had made up himself. So when the story-teller had finished, the man took him aside and said, ‘That was a good story, but it is my story, which I made up, and you must pay me money for it.’ ‘You are wrong,’ said his rival. ‘It is my story, for I made it up myself this morning’. (shrink)

Some years ago, Sir Kenneth Dover suggested a new interpretation of καρξαι. Prima facie, the chorus ask the sun to proclaim where Heracles is, and this sense is supported by such passages as Il. 3.277 Ήλιóς θ', ς πντ' ορς, Od. 9.109 Ήελου, ς πντ' ορ , Od. 8.270–1 αρ δ ο γγελος λθεν | Ήλιος, and especially h. Cer. 69ff., where ‘Demeter visits the Sun and implores him, “you who look down on all earth and sea…tell me truly of (...) my dear child, if you have seen her anywhere, who has gone off with her…”.’ This is the way καρξαι in Trach. 97 has always been taken. Dover points out, however, that κηρττειν also has a special, technical sense: to make proclamation inquiring about a missing person's whereabouts, as the town-crier used to do a century ago England and elsewhere, and the media do now. The model is not that of h. Cer. 69ff., but rather S. Aj. 845ff.: ‘Sun, when you see my native land, draw near and tell my aged father…of my fate.’ The examples he cites are enough to demonstrate the ‘interrogative’ use of κηρττω, though his first example, Ar. Ach. 748 γν δ καρυξ Δικαιóπολιν π, will not do: if sound, it means not ‘I will find out by κρυξ where Dicaeopolis is’ , but ‘I will summon Dicaeopolis to where ’. The normal ‘interrogative’ use is to enquire by herald the whereabouts of a Crminal or a runaway slave. (shrink)

Orestes has revealed himself to Electra and sworn with her to avenge Agamemnon. He outlines his plan and leaves the stage with a prayer to his father, after warning the chorus against indiscretion . They begin: Earth nurtures many dread hurts and fears; the sea's embrace is full of monsters hostile to man; lights in mid-air between earth and heaven also harm winged things and things that tread the earth; and one might also tell of the stormy wrath of tempests. (...) But who could tell of a man's unruly will, and of ruthless woman's unbridled passions, that share her heart with evil powers ruinous to mankind?3 But surpassing all is the wicked female passion whereby wedded union is worsted, among beasts and men alike. (shrink)

Recent research on grapheme-colour synesthesia has focused on whether visual attention is necessary to induce a synesthetic percept. The current study investigated the influence of synesthesia on overt visual attention during an oculomotor target selection task. Chromatic and achromatic stimuli were presented with one target among distractors among multiple ‘5’s ). Participants executed an eye movement to the target. Synesthetes and controls showed a comparable target selection performance across conditions and a ‘pop-out effect’ was only seen in the chromatic condition. (...) As a pop-out effect was absent for the synesthetes in the achromatic condition, a synesthetic element appears not to elicit a synesthetic colour, even when it is the target. The synesthetic percepts are not pre-attentively available to distinguish the synesthetic target from synesthetic distractors when elements are presented in the periphery. Synesthesia appears to require full recognition to bind form and colour. (shrink)

Colour has been shown to facilitate the recognition of scene images, but only when these images contain natural scenes, for which colour is ‘diagnostic’. Here we investigate whether colour can also facilitate memory for scene images, and whether this would hold for natural scenes in particular. In the first experiment participants first studied a set of colour and greyscale natural and man-made scene images. Next, the same images were presented, randomly mixed with a different set. Participants were asked to indicate (...) whether they had seen the images during the study phase. Surprisingly, performance was better for greyscale than for coloured images, and this difference is due to the higher false alarm rate for both natural and man-made coloured scenes. We hypothesized that this increase in false alarm rate was due to a shift from scrutinizing details of the image to recognition of the gist of the image. A second experiment, utilizing images without a nameable gist, confirmed this hypothesis as participants now performed equally on greyscale and coloured images. In the final experiment we specifically targeted the more detail-based perception and recognition for greyscale images versus the more gist-based perception and recognition for coloured images with a change detection paradigm. The results show that changes to images are detected faster when image-pairs were presented in greyscale than in colour. This counterintuitive result held for both natural and man-made scenes and thus corroborates the shift from more detailed processing of images in greyscale to more gist-based processing of coloured images. (shrink)

Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (N = 465; ages 11–18). We asked whether: (i) performance would be worse in negative versus neutral task contexts; (ii) performance would improve with age; (iii) affective interference would be greater in younger adolescents; (...) (iv) adolescents at risk for depression and higher in anxiety would show overall worse performance; and (v) would show differential performance in negative contexts. Results indicated that participants performed more poorly in negative contexts and showed age-related performance improvements. Those at risk of depression performed more poorly than those at lower risk. However, there was no difference between groups as a result of affective context. For anxiety there was no difference in performance as a function of severity. However, those with higher anxiety showed less variance in their reaction times to negative stimuli than those with lower anxiety. One interpretation is that moderate levels of emotional arousal associated with anxiety make individuals less susceptible to the distracting effects of negative stimuli. (shrink)

Education is so strongly emphasized in the Chinese culture that academic success is widely regarded as the only indicator of success, while too much physical activity is often discouraged because it drains energy and affects academic concentration. This study investigated the relations among academic achievement, self?esteem, school conduct and physical activity level. The participants were 333 Chinese pre?adolescents (aged 8?12) in Hong Kong. Examination results and conduct grades were obtained from the school records. Global self?esteem was measured with the Physical (...) self?description questionnaire (PSDQ), while physical activity patterns of the children were assessed with the Physical activity questionnaire for children (PAQ?C). Results showed that high academic achievers consistently attained better school conduct marks. However, physical activity level was quite an independent entity that was related neither to academic achievement nor school conduct. Furthermore, regression analyses showed that only academically high?achieving boys and physically active boys had higher self?esteem. (shrink)

The history of Western culture exhibits a profound cleavage of opinion on the nature of what its members take to be reality. On the one hand, there are those for whom certain aspects, at least, of the “real” exist in the human mind only. Others assign as the sole basis of reality the world of non-mental objects. This difference of temperament is so pervasive that it forms a perennial theme, not only for philosophers, but also for scientists, poets, and other (...) students of the vast panorama of the world and its people. (shrink)

Recently Mr. E. Courtney has reopened discussion on the authenticity of the last six Heroides, a subject which had almost universally been accepted as settled by scholars.2 He also briefly discussed the ninth epistle and examined certain grounds for doubting whether it is rightly included in the Ovidian canon. In this he is following Karl Lachmann, who was disposed to doubt the authenticity not only of the last six but also of those of the remainder which are not mentioned in (...) Ovid's catalogue of the epistles given at Amores 2. 18 f.3 This despoliation of the canon has not generally found favour since Lachmann, and in the case of Heroides 9 the editors and other scholars working on the poems 4 have without exception regarded the poem as a genuine specimen of Ovid's work. (shrink)

Visual neglect has been associated with an imbalance in the level of activity in the saccadic system: activity in the contralesional field is suppressed, which makes target selection unlikely. We recorded eye movements of a patient with hemispatial neglect and a group of healthy participants during an oculomotor distractor paradigm. Results showed that the interfering effects of a distractor were very strong when presented in her ipsilesional visual field. However, when the distractor was presented in her contralesional field, there were (...) no interfering effects when the target was presented in her ipsilesional field. These findings could not be explained by the presence of a visual field defect as revealed by the results of two hemianopic patients. Our results are in line with an imbalance in the level of activity in the saccadic system in visual neglect because visual elements presented in the contralesional field did not compete for saccadic selection. (shrink)

Recently Mr. E. Courtney has reopened discussion on the authenticity of the last six Heroides, a subject which had almost universally been accepted as settled by scholars.2 He also briefly discussed the ninth epistle and examined certain grounds for doubting whether it is rightly included in the Ovidian canon. In this he is following Karl Lachmann, who was disposed to doubt the authenticity not only of the last six but also of those of the remainder which are not mentioned in (...) Ovid's catalogue of the epistles given at Amores 2. 18 f.3 This despoliation of the canon has not generally found favour since Lachmann, and in the case of Heroides 9 the editors and other scholars working on the poems 4 have without exception regarded the poem as a genuine specimen of Ovid's work. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the use of technology to enhance the tracking and quality of clinical information available for patients in disaster settings. This paper describes the design and evaluation of the Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD).