The last two decades have seen a renewed emphasis on studies falling within the general area of Ritual and Drama. The majority of extant plays have been scrutinised in the search for ritual schemes and sequences, metaphors and allusions remoulded in their imagery and language, and some of the juiciest discussions of Greek theatre have emerged as a result. Nevertheless, compared to this proliferation of studies on particular aspects of ritual symbolism and ritual patterns, few scholars have attempted to investigate the ways in which ritual and theatre can interrelate and unfold in parallel at the level of dramatic plots. Brilliant, albeit isolated, examples of this type of inquiry can be sought in Froma Zeitlin's unequalled pieces on Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae and Euripides' Ion; in the rewarding work of Foley, Segal, Goldhill on the Bacchae as well as in Bowie's ‘ritual’ reading of Aristophanic plots and Seaford's monumental study of Dionysiac patterns in fifth-century Greek tragedy.

Recent interpretations of Propertius 4.2 see in Vertumnus' shifting costumes a programmatic statement about the new poetics of Propertius' fourth book of elegy. The statue's ability to assume and shed identities with a simple wardrobe change mirrors the poet's desire to challenge the traditional generic boundaries of love elegy, dressing it up now in Roman themes, now in amatory ones. No doubt this is so. And yet, more generally, recent criticism finds elegy as a genre hospitable to interpretations that focus on issues of gender and identity. Indeed, as Marilyn Skinner has succinctly summarised, ‘texts of the late first century BCE are notorious for the phenomenon of “gender dissonance”…boundaries between ‘male’ and ‘female’ as essential categories of psychosexual identity fluctuate wildly and eventually break down.’ Propertius' fourth and final poetic collection provides fertile territory for an interrogation of gender, since it both highlights female voices—for example Arethusa, Cynthia or Cornelia—and explores moments of transvestism—for example Vertumnus and Hercules. I argue that when Propertius cloaks the speaking statue, Vertumnus, alternately in ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ attributes, he lays bare not simply poetics, but, further, he questions the very constitution of gender. In other words, Propertius probes the relationship between self-representation and identity and reveals that both are fluid and, more surprisingly perhaps, that the former gives rise to the latter.

Nossis 11 (AP 7.718)

Reading is a difficult art. We read best, that is, not only with most sensitivity but with greatest pleasure, those texts which we have been taught to read well. Learning to read a new author, or in a new genre, is a great effort, the more difficult if it must be self-taught. Few readers are equipped to make the attempt wholly unaided. A new poet who wishes to become well-known does well to attempt visibly to attach her work to that of a canonical predecessor, to indicate how she wants her work to be read, and that it can be read with the critical tools already in the reader's possession.

Plato's Epistles are among the most disputed texts of antiquity. Were they written by Plato? Some of them? all? none? Answers have varied wildly: at times all thirteen have been declared forgeries, alien to the thought and character of the Plato we know from the dialogues; at other times, the whole set has been accepted as a genuine, if unexpected, revelation of the life and preoccupations of Plato as a man. Since this debate has so far proved intractable, I would like to take a different approach to the question. The Epistles themselves raise obsessively the question of authenticity. If, laying aside all issues of provenance for the time being, we read the thirteen letters as a corpus (whether by Plato or someone else), what emerges from this philosophical ‘text’ is the impossibility of an authentic written philosophy and of an authoritative self-present philosopher.