This article comprises a discussion of four separate passages in Homer and some of the critical problems which each involves. My intention is not to produce a blueprint or set of rules for the interpretation of Homer, but rather — a more limited aim — to increase attention to the complex texture of the poetry of the Odyssey, and to the need for a critical practice alive to such complexity. The four passages are the speech of Amphimedon's ghost; the recognition scene between Odysseus and Argus; the story telling of Menelaus and Helen; and, finally, Odysseus' first speech to Nausicaa. Each passage opens questions about how Homer is read, and, in particular, about how what is often referred to as Homer's juxtapositional technique interrelates with the role of the reader in the activity of interpretation.

The Metamorphoses is a poem full of tales of erotic pursuit. It is also a poem full of fictional narrators and audiences. These two features frequently intersect, since erotic pursuit is often the subject of an embedded tale, and sometimes — but considerably less often — the occasion for one. Erotic seduction is much more common as the subject for a story than as the objective of one. Narrative seduction in the frame, however — that is, a narrator's seduction of an audience into listening to, or even soliciting, a story — is quite common. Indeed, most embedded tales in the Metamorphoses are requested tales, and quite often the request is engineered by the prospective narrator. In considering instances of narrative discourse as ‘narrative transactions’, Barbara Hernnstein Smith has suggested that one should examine the general question ‘why … someone has chosen (or agreed) to tell someone else that something happened and why the latter has chosen (or agreed) to listen’. More specifically, Robert Scholes and Gerald Prince have both pointed to a figuratively erotic relationship between narrator and audience, viz. the fact that the narrator must first arouse desire for a story. Ovid himself seems to hint at this connection between erotic and narrative seduction by calling attention to the narrative situation in so many of his tales of erotic pursuit.

The ‘meaning’ of a complex literary work like the Hippolytus cannot be reductively condensed into an abstract paraphrase. Meaning exists as (inter alia) a dynamic relation among the various areas of personal and social life that the play brings together in analogies and contrasts. Thus, to take a central nucleus of meaning in this play, the cleavage between appearance and reality is replicated in the dramatic movement between interior and exterior, in the contrast between house and city, and therefore between male and female, and is made explicit in isolated, though programmatic, statements like that of Phaedra about ‘thought’ and ‘hand’ and that of Hippolytus about ‘tongue’ and ‘thought’ (317, 612).

The multiple configurations of these patterns of similarity and difference and their capacity to generate numerous specific realisations in the details of action and language invite and make possible many different descriptions. Because critics are always seeking their own formulations for these multiple relations and selecting their own corpus of details that embody them, no single interpretation is likely to be definitive. But one interpretation can be better than another if it is more accurate, discriminating and discerning in finding the sets of relations that are of particular interest to us as readers, if it describes those relations with greater precision and exhaustiveness, and if it includes a wider range of relevant textual details that are informed by the patterns under consideration.

In hujus carminis percensendis celebrandisque virtutibus facile deficias vel si tibi linguae centum atque ora sient totidem vocesque Iiquatae.

G. Mitscherlich

A. W. Verrall wrote in 1884 that Horace's great Maecenas-ode, 3.29, was ‘insipid’ in its most philosophic moments if it was read only for its apparent meaning, that is, as a lecture on a philosophy of life. Especially because of the so-called Murena affair of 22 B.C., Verrall thought that to read 3.29 only as a pedagogical exercise was to stretch our very understanding of Horace's greatness: ‘… if he was a lyrical poet [his italics] at all, … the question of “before or after the year 22” goes to the essence of his work.’ Yet received opinion, formed almost exclusively since Verrall wrote, has read the ode precisely in the way Verrall thought made it sound insipid, as affirming a philosophy of life. Virtually no one has followed the dramatic and compelling lines of argumentation Verrall has laid out in his study of the ode. As a result, both the virtuosity as well as the drama of 3.29 have suffered from a lack of close attention.