Falling Masts, Rising Masters: The Ethnography of Virtue in Caesar's Account of the Veneti
����� �� CAESAR’S ACCOUNT OF THE REVOLT of the Veneti and neighboring tribes along the northwest coast of Gaul (BGall. 3.8‐15) contains a clear assertion of Rome’s superiority in virtus over her foes. While the account of the Veneti has sparked considerable debate over Caesar’s political motivations and Venetic topography, 1 the passage’s literary themes merit study in their own right. This paper examines the respective roles of technology and virtus in Caesar’s presentation of the Venetic defeat. The first section establishes that Caesar conceived of the sea battle fought against the Veneti as a contest about virtus. The next section argues that the technology of enemy boat design detailed in an ethnographic passage is represented by Caesar as a source of Venetic strength in place of true fighting spirit. This naval ethnography, dismissed by several commentators as an afterthought awkwardly inserted into the text, 2 is, on the contrary, the cornerstone of a sophisticated exposition on the theme of native technological strength failing to compensate for a lack of virtus. Caesar’s presentation of the final defeat of the Veneti at sea, the subject of the third section, exposes native weakness in a remarkable scene wherein falling masts and sudden calm metaphorically cast enemy failure within a gendered opposition of hard and soft.
Power and Impotence in Horace's Epodes
Horace's Epodes are seldom considered as a whole. On the face of it, there would seem to be good reason for this fact. It is generally agreed that the poems were written over a period of ten years (from after Philippi to after Actium), during which time there was a great deal of change in the Roman world and in Horace's circumstances. Furthermore, the collection contains a considerable diversity of themes, genres and what, for lack of a better expression, one must call levels of reality. The Archilochean persona maintained in several of the poems is a unifying factor, of course, but it has not seemed pervasive enough to have allowed a systematic interpretation of the whole collection, and even within the Archilochean group scholars have tended to separate the political poems from the invective poems.3 Attempts to find some principle of arrangement for the collection have not been very enlightening, since they have rarely amounted to more than classifying each of the poems by type or theme (usually a completely unsystematic mixture of both), and then putting them into groups, which reveals structural patterns that have a no more than decorative function, or else simply displays Horace's penchant for variatio.
Introduction and experience with the primary mail services based on their names for students
Kyushu University provided mail service based on student IDs such as "1AB10123X" to the university students for many years. Using this model, we had problems communicating with the students who graduated from the University and enrolled in the graduate school. The students received new mail addresses based on their new student IDs such as "2AB12789Y". Faculty members were forced to change the student mail addresses in the mailing lists and in their mail client address book. Furthermore, students were forced to notify the e-mail address change to all of their existing contacts. We introduced a new mail system to provide addresses based on the student name, as well as student ID in April 2011. The new naming convention uses the following format: lastname.firstname.999 where 999 is a random number of 3 digits. Students can select some combination patterns of their first and last names for Japanese. We also consider the middle names for foreign students. In the system implementation, we did not have the formal information of alphabetical names for students. We generated alphabetical names from Japanese Katakana names. It is not easy for us to get the appropriate name in this manner. We implemented a confirmation stage of the alphabetical name at first use, and then students can select their mail addresses for their convenience. We paid much attention to the user interface in the system. Since April 2011, the number of users who use the mail address based on their own name has been increasing gradually. This paper will detail the usage status of the new system.