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Metamorphoses scansion12/31/2023 Over the years, many systems have been established to mark the scansion of a poem. In both cases, the meter often has a regular foot. In English poetry, they are based on the different levels of stress placed on each syllable. In classical poetry, these patterns are quantitative based on the different lengths of each syllable. ʃ ə n/ SKAN-shən, rhymes with mansion verb: to scan), or a system of scansion, is the method or practice of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse. The Bacchic Christology of the Philippians hymn does not leave the Dionysian typos intact, however, but simultaneously upends it as well.Representation of poetic meter An example of scansion over a quote from Alexander Pope In particular, I will suggest that for the Philippian church, Jesus’ Bacchic portraiture supports (in its own mythic register) a theology of the Son’s pre-existence, while simultaneously establishing him, in his veiled economic parousia, as a Dionysian antithesis to the imperial Apollonian kyrios Caesar-an image cultivated by Octavian and his successors. Rather, they accomplish a new integration of the letter’s Jewish and imperial-cultic transcripts. In light of these studies, the echoes of the Bacchae in Paul’s carmen Christi-at least at the level of the letter’s reception-emerge as more than literary enculturation. The plausibility of this position is supported not only by intertextual analysis of Philippians and the Bacchae (itself composed in Macedonia), but also by a study of Dionysus in the Roman religion and politics, including the Bacchic inscriptions catalogued by Pilhofer at Roman Philippi, the popularization of the Bacchae early on in the Latin paraphrases of Euripides by Pacuvius and Accius, and the phenomenon of cultured emulation of Dionysus, from Alexander the Great to Mark Antony and beyond. ![]() In particular, echoes of Dionysus’s opening monologue from Euripides’s Bacchae in the carmen Christi-recognized previously by Ulrich Müller-suggest that Roman hearers of Paul’s letter might well have understood Christ’s kenotic metamorphosis as a kind of Dionysian revelation-albeit, one which departs significantly from Euripides’ tragic grammar. While not disputing these two primary matrices, the following study suggests a third backdrop against which the carmen Christi would have been heard in Philippi: Euripidean tragedy. Scholarship on Phil 2:6–11, the carmen Christi, has long wrestled with the question of “interpretive staging.” Against which religious, cultural, or political matrix was the song’s dramatic Christology composed and heard? Recent studies of Phil 2:6–11 continue to trace its genealogy primarily along two lines: the Hellenistic/Roman apotheosis narratives of heroic and imperial cult or the philosophical and angelological speculation of Jewish wisdom literature and apocalypses. The interplay of the two Ovidian texts is construed as evoking the generic relationship between satyr play and tragedy in the fifth-century Attic tetralogy and reflects a broader generic dialogue between "tragic" episodes of the Metamorphoses and "satyric" narratives of the Fasti. In particular, the Fasti story functions as a lighthearted counterpart to the Metamorphoses tale by echoing its themes, structure, and figures. Moreover, it is shown that the narrative engages in an intertextual dialogue with another Ovidian generic hybrid, the Pentheus episode in the Metamorphoses (3.511-733), which constitutes an epicized tragedy being an epic narrative modeled on Euripides' Bacchae. In this context, I contend that the episode illustrates Ovid's adherence to Horace's artistic principles concerning proper satyric style as expounded in the Ars Poetica. This paper argues that the story can be read as a miniature elegiac version of a satyr play, on the grounds that it displays trademark elements of the genre. The humorous episode of Bacchus' institution of apiculture and Silenus' failed attempt to replicate the discovery is a satyric narrative in the Fasti (3.735-762) which has received hardly any attention as such.
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