In this paper I shall outline a possible new interpretation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. I find that despite universal agreement that this drama has immediate and deep relevance to our lives, there is no available reading which comes closely to grips with the rich, specific details of the play as well as its broad outline. Prometheus Bound is neither a symbolist drama nor an allegory, since the Olympian gods and their predecessors were immediate, shared reality for the Greeks of the early fifth century. So we should begin by asking what Aeschylus meant by his choice of scene and subject, and in particular what issues would have been evoked for the Athenian audience by the confrontation between Prometheus and Zeus.

The manuscripts place before this drama an excerpt from the History of Poetry attributed to Dionysius the younger. Singling out Aeschylus' Prometheus plays for special praise, the author comments that ‘the dramas are filled with the most senior of the gods, and all the masks, both on the stage and in the orchêstra, are divine’.

For the artist, obscenity is an aesthetic, not a legal, problem. I wish to analyze the uses to which Catullus puts obscenity and comment on the nature of obscenity in poetry. Catullus comments on his obscene subject matter in three poems. These furnish a starting point for an anatomy of the obscenity of Catullus. Poem 50 describes an afternoon of light verse composition (versiculi) with a friend. ‘We played around a lot, each toying in verse’ (lusimus, ludebat) suggests competition, also banter and ridicule (cf. Cic. de Orat. 1.12.50). Lepor in speech is wit more than charm or pleasantness (Cic. Brut. 38. 143; also, iocum and facetiae). No doubt, then as today, a fine insult or obscenity was more immediately appreciated than a magnificent simile or compliment. No mention is made of versifying obscenity in 50, but we learn of Catullus' attitude towards writing light, and probably passionate, poetry. It is fun (lusimus), it is metrically exciting (numero modo hoc modo illoc, ‘now in this metre, now in that’), it is competitive (tuo lepore/incensus, ‘aroused by your charm’), it encourages audacity (audax), and it can leave one physically aroused.

In poem 104, Catullus claims to have been unable to insult (maledicere) his love. To ensure that no one might think him unable to write nasty, obscene poems, the fourth line insults the unknown addressee: Sed tu cum Tappone omnia monstra facis (‘But you perform every monstrosity with Bozo’).

Attempts to determine an absolute chronology for the composition of Seneca's tragedies have been frustrated by our lack of both external and internal evidence for dating. Even a relative chronology moreover will be open to dispute as long as we must depend almost solely on metrical, stylistic and linguistic considerations. Recently, for example, Calder has questioned the opinion of Leo, and other scholars, that Agamemnon was written before Thyestes. Calder has examined stylistic features of both plays, and he suggests, quite correctly, that the opening scene of Agamemnon is similar to that of Thyestes in structure and imagery but is less skilfully connected to the subsequent action. He concludes, however, that Thyestes is the earlier play, and he offers the following conjectures as proof: Seneca borrowed the opening scene of Thyestes from a play of Sophocles; then, when composing Agamemnon, instead of using the watchman's prologue of Aeschylus, he attempted to create a new opening scene after the pattern of his Thyestes. Not explicitly stated, though perhaps implied, is the unfortunate conclusion that the Thyestes opening scene is successful because Seneca followed Sophocles, that Agamemnon is flawed because Seneca later tried to innovate, to deviate from his Greek ‘models’.

Such a conclusion fails, I think, to take into proper consideration Seneca's creativity in his use of sources, and the reasons why he used an opening scene by a superhuman figure, rather than a watchman. Three of Seneca's plays begin with a scene in which appears a superhuman figure: Hercules Furens, Agamemnon and Thyestes. If we compare the first two plays with the Herakles of Euripides and the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, which both open with human figures, we find that in both Seneca has preferred not to imitate the prologues of the Greek dramatists. (We have, unfortunately, no complete Greek Thyestes with which we can compare Seneca's.) In addition, his opening scenes differ in style from those Greek plays in which a superhuman figure does appear in the prologue. Obviously, the choice of a human or non-human prologist, as Heldmann says, depends on something other than a Greek source.

Several myths of the Metamorphoses are stories about nights. These imaginary voyages are taken either by artists or by characters granted an experience analagous to artistic experience. The possibility of vision made available through the act of flying provides the immediate connection between flight and art. Characters within the fictive world of the poem achieve literally a perspective on the cosmos analogous to Ovid's metaphoric vision of his poetic universe. Insofar as vision is the initial act of artistic creation, characters who engage in flying, whether specifically artists or not, enact within the context of the narrative this part of the creative process. Because the attempt at vision is only a preliminary, Ovid must find a way for the metaphor of flight to express the rest of the creative process and its culmination in an artifact. The means of flight, whether Apollo's chariot or the wings designed by Daedalus, are therefore works of art that express both the mimetic and interpretive aspects of this process. Artifacts created by Ovid's fictive artificers repeatedly prove inadequate or ambiguous, however, and they fail as their makers' attempts at vision fail. These characters are unable to sustain vision or interpret what they see, and so the efficacy of their art is called into question. In telling their stories, Ovid conveys the powers and limitations of vision and art. At the same time, he implies his own success as poet through the ironic treatment of the artists within the poem.

The Frogs continues to intrigue and to trouble. In structure it does not resemble any of Aristophanes' other plays, since the poet here inverts the sequence of scenes, contest, and parabasis he normally used; and the play does not possess, so many would argue, any overall organic unity of content. Even worse, Aristophanes' decision to make the literary contest of two tragedians the climactic issue of his comedy might be considered foolishly risky, involving him in matters dangerously ‘high-falutin’ and so conceivably boring to an audience whose intelligence he had too often cajoled to be deceived about. As if deliberately to defeat both unity and sense, Aristophanes also saw fit to add another chorus to his play, totally distinct in character from his main chorus and apparently unrelated to his theme: frogs and literature? Strangest of all, he leaves this additional chorus unseen, if not unheard, in a visual medium like the theatre where an audience in antiquity no less than today might be counted on for some prolonged laughter or applause at the sight of cleverly costumed performers hopping, croaking, and looking altogether ridiculous.