In her conversation with Socrates, Diotima explains that ‘all men are pregnant both in body and soul, and when they come of age, our nature desires to give birth; it cannot give birth in anything ugly, only in what is beautiful’ (206c). The man who has been pregnant with wisdom, moderation and justice in his soul since early youth, now wishing ‘to beget and give birth’ (209b), goes in search of a beautiful boy in whose company he may produce his offspring. Through passionate communion with the youth, ‘he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages’ (209c), engendering the instructive speeches on virtue and other matters which he delivers to the beloved. Diotima's equation between physical and mental parturition seems so appropriate and intuitively right that we tend to gloss over the real puzzle of her account: in this mode of procreation, which holds good for literal as well as spiritual birth, pregnancy precedes the actual moment of intercourse. The reading of the Symposium I wish to offer may not explain the biology of this unlikely reproductive act, but aims to set the riddle within the context of a leitmotif that weaves through the larger text: statues, and the particular mode of love they experience and inspire, are uniquely able to perform acts of autonomous generation.

‘Noble’: the invariable response of readers and critics of the Captiui. Read almost any modern work on this play and you will not have to wait long for that word. Up it pops, reflexively. The slave Tyndarus' readiness to stay in captivity, risking and in the event undergoing a gruesome punishment to free his master Philocrates, the master keeping his side of the bargain and returning to Aetolia to redeem Tyndarus in exchange for Hegio's son Philopolemus when he could as easily have stayed home (why should he care about a slave?)—surely actions that reflect refinements of character and feeling so unlike the routine skulduggery of New Comedy. We all know Lessing's famous eulogy on this play. That was determined by his own personal and cultural situation. But most critics in this century, to judge from the regularity with which they cite the Epilogue, agree with Lessing that this is a play in which ‘the good become better’ (ubi boni meliores fiant, 1034).

Dis Manibus Peter James Connor

That Lucretius should choose to end his Epicurean representation of the world with a long and harrowing account of the plague that struck Athens in 430 BCE is certainly one of the more remarkable facts in classical Roman poetry. More remarkable still is the suddenness of the ending. The poem simply breaks off as one critic says ‘almost in mid-sentence’; and even if we follow this same critic in tidying up the end by transferring 6.1247-51 to follow 1286 we are still left very much in mediis rebus, with the plague at its height and death and misery all around. Our initial response is one of surprise and puzzlement as we feel cheated of a sense of an ending; this in turn leads to questions about overall design and authorial intent. Why does the poem end this way? Indeed, has it ended at all?

terra malos homines nunc educat atque pusillos.
Today the earth breeds a race of degenerate weaklings.
Juvenal 15.70

nee galeam quassas, nee terram cuspide pulsas.
You do not shake your helmet, nor beat the ground with your spear.
Juvenal 2.130

My intention here is to describe what seems to me an aspect of this superb and notorious poem that has been insufficiently examined, a major disruption in the sign-systems it makes use of and is used by. In order to do that I will be, as best I can, setting aside questions about the poem as a product (its meaning, how its form and content fuse to effect that meaning) and about the intentions its producer (the poet or his persona) had when he went about producing that product; whether the meaning and the intention are recoverable or not, whether they are decidable or not, is a moot question, and to try to answer it here would obscure my project (and doubtless waste our time). ‘To interpret a text,’ says Barthes, ‘is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it.’ To have some access to the portion of that plural that concerns me, I have to be arbitrary (and fictive) with the question of the poet's meaning/intention and to set aside as well questions of his poem's aesthetic charms.