Throughout the Metamorphoses Ovid draws special attention to the colors red and white. Red (rubor, rutilus, rubesco, puniceus, purpureus, ‘red’ or ‘purple’) is, of course, the color of blood, of a blush, of ripening fruit, Tyrean dye, and the sky at dawn. White is the color of marble, ivory, lilies, and the sky at noon. If we examine this pair in erotic contexts, however, we will find that white is associated with innocence and chastity, with the frigid absence of sexual feeling and with emotional and physical death. Red is associated with pudor, that sense of shame that afflicts the innocent whose eyes have just been opened to erotic reality, and with the heat of violence, both the violence of feeling (furor) and the violence of rape.

Perhaps one of the most familiar examples of this color contrast and its erotic associations occurs in the story of Pygmalion and his ivory maiden, in Book X. Ovid is emphatic that the statue is ivory (X.247-48: niveum … ebur, ‘snowy ivory’; 255: ebur, twice) and that the ivory is white. Her ivory flesh, however, is so lifelike that the sculptor fears she will bruise. He dresses her like a real woman, adorns her with countless gifts, and makes her recline on a couch covered with red-dyed spreads (X.267: conlocat hanc stratis concha Sidonide tinctis).

The relevancy of the appearances of the two goddesses, Aphrodite and Artemis, to the action, causation and characterization of the Hippolytus has long been debated. The rationalists' view is that they constitute a superficial and largely structural frame for the real, human drama, having little or nothing to do with what happens on the stage between epiphanies. Indeed, it is hard to deny that the human characters have a great deal to do with their own undoing. The divine nature of the catastrophe, on the other hand, prevents our rationalizing the superhuman element as outside the tragedy. If we include Poseidon in our Olympian cast of characters, it may be possible to find a relationship of the gods to the action of the play of another kind than a strictly causal one. It is the purpose of this paper to show that the characters and motivations of the persons of the drama both human and divine are so closely parallel that they form but a single frame of action within a dramatic structure that is so tight that barely an oimoi is superfluous. And surely two (or three) divinities have not been added for their appeal to the audience's love of the spectacular, or from a simple desire for balance.

In a recent article B. D. Frischer has observed that between the human and divine frames, as well as within each frame, the principle of concordia operates. He asserts, however, that the device of reenactment (which ‘harmonizes characters by showing them doing and saying the same things’, 87) functions within but not between frames. My contention is that in action and in character the human actors are like their gods, that their actions parallel those of their gods, that they try to impose on the situation a state of immutability that is not suited to the mortal condition, and that they impose upon themselves and each other an isolation which is very close to the gods' aloofness and anti-social existence. It is through the goddesses' statements and the implications of these statements when transferred to human relationships that we become aware of what is taking place at the human level.

Writers from Homer to O. Henry have used it. Critics from Servius to Bömer have commented on it. Students of rhetoric from Quintilian to Laussberg have analysed it. Yet there is very little agreement about what zeugma is and what it does. Some editors note its existence and leave it at that. Others distinguish (sometimes passionately) between zeugma and syllepsis, zeugma and equivoque, zeugma and attelage, zeugma and plokē, zeugma and amphibole. Therefore I shall do well to clarify at the start my own use of the term.

It is probably best to begin by distinguishing between a group of figures (most commonly called zeugma or syllepsis) which link several notions into one, and another group (hendiadys and related figures) which expand one concept by expressing it in two ways or from two points of view. Zeugma implies yoking (zeugnumi), two or more elements joined so as to make a team. The yoked words are in some way incongruous — perhaps abstract linked with concrete, animate with inanimate, or physical with mental — and the resulting team is, accordingly, both surprising and noteworthy, rather as if a horse were yoked with an ox.

Elucidation of the imbricate ironies in the Alcestis has been an important dimension of much of the scholarship on the play during the past twenty five years. Another type of inquiry, best represented by the work of A. P. Burnett, has been the identification of typologies of plot and scene. Both approaches share, however, a common deficiency in the subjectivity of their analyses of character. Is Heracles ‘a big-hearted, stupid glutton and drinker’ (Beye) or ‘the one man in the world who does not pursue a hedonistic career’, the hero whose ‘cause is freedom, the freedom of spirit and freedom of action’ (Rosemeyer)? How are we to view Admetus' spontaneous proposal to commission a statue of Alcestis as a surrogate wife for his bed? Is this ‘a promise that is positive, delicately stated, and filled with a powerful meaning’ (Burnett), or is it ‘difficult to believe that a fifth-century audience would not have found the idea ludicrous and disgusting’ (Beye)? Is Alcestis ‘a tragic heroine’, one whose love for Admetus motivated her sacrifice (Barnes, Dale), or a rather cold figure, not above emotional blackmail (Beye)? Is Admetus ultimately guided to success by his ‘nobility’ (Burnett) or one whose person, apart from his vague hosiotēs (‘piety’), offered no particular interest to Euripides (Dale)? A sampling shows that the discrepancy of critical perception is often so intense as to suggest the existence of an entirely new, exquisitely subtle facet of Euripidean irony which survives as a wilfully dolose legacy to the community of scholars.

My argument in this paper assumes that most if not all readers of Vergil's Aeneid find Turnus' death and the death of young men such as Lausus and Pallas a disturbing accompaniment to the poem's laudatory aspects. Critical approaches to the resultant interpretive difficulties have traditionally focused on philosophical, historical, or cultural explication in an effort to resolve or dispel the reader's questions about the poem's purpose and success. I propose here that the poem's tensions engender an uncertainty in the reader which is itself an inevitable and intentional result of Vergil's narrative, and that this response to the poem is a process deliberately set in motion by the poet. Vergil's intent is to implant in his reader a sense of conflict, not only objective (centered in Aeneas' labores and their goal), but subjective, in that the reader recognizes tension or contradiction in his own response: he knows that Rome did emerge from Aeneas' struggles, and became, in many of the senses foreshadowed by the poem, great, but his reactions to the development of that greatness are negative. Many of the seeming contradictions in the Aeneid make sense if interpreted as efforts on the part of the poet to lead the reader to question both the claims of the narrative and eventually his own responses which once seemed certain and clear. The present essay explores one aspect of the Aeneid which produces conflict in the reader's response, the ways Vergil constructs a tension between the future as subject of the poem and the future within the poem, a tension rooted in the fact that the future within the poem dies, while the reader himself lives in the future to which the poem refers.

With these words Circe prepares Odysseus for his voyage to the land of the dead. Following the enchantress' instructions, he soon completes his mission: Teiresias is duly summoned, provides his information, then — at 11.151 — departs forever. But what of the rest of the book? Circe's words at the close of Book 10 have led us to expect none of the encounters which are described in 11.152-635, yet these occupy the greatest part of Odysseus' time among the shades. Particularly problematic has been the catalogue of women which extends from 225 through 332. Denys Page thought this passage an awkward interpolation, since the women who appear in it ‘have nothing whatever to do with Odysseus; he has nothing to say to them, and they have no motive for reciting to him their pedigrees … the episode is wholly irrelevant to Odysseus and his story; it is loosely attached and carelessly adapted to its surroundings …’ Shortly after Page published his views, however, T. B. L. Webster bluntly denied ‘all Page's strictures on [the passage's] quality’, suggesting that the list was genuine because it contained information which would have been ‘of extreme interest to the Ionian descendants of the Mycenaeans’; and W. B. Stanford restated his belief that the episode was authentic, noting again that it seemed an appropriately clever device by which Odysseus could entertain — and by so doing secure the favor of — Arete, the queen of the Phaeacians.