The yo-yo problem: first Psyche is mortal and exposed as though for death (DOWN); then she is rescued and cohabits with Cupid (UP); then she falls from Cupid (DOWN); then she searches and with help almost succeeds in her trials (UP); then she fails and lies in a sleep like death (DOWN); then she is rescued by and married to Cupid (UP).

Ken Dowden, ‘Psyche on the Rock’ (1982)

Well I've been down so goddam' long, that it looks like up to me.

Jim Morrison, ‘Been Down So Long’ (1971)

Bella fabella (‘beautiful little story’) exclaims the ass at the conclusion of the unnamed old woman's narration of the tale that we have come to know as ‘Cupid and Psyche’, a tale that occupies 63 chapters of books 4, 5 and 6 of Apuleius' Metamorphoses. The beauty of the tale is enhanced by the contrast with its setting: a bandits' cave whose inhabitants' heroicisation of violence and thuggery is very much in the spirit of Homer's Cyclops or Little Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and an audience that comprises two individuals wrenched from their homes and families by these bandits' depredations—Charite, the kidnapped girl, and Lucius, lashed into assisting in the ransacking of his host Milo's house in Hypata. The tale transports us into a world of romance and fairy tale far removed from the difficulties and dangers of what is portrayed as the real world in Metamorphoses 1-10.

This paper aims to read Plautus' Amphitruo in the light of the Roman triumph. Local references and allusions to the triumph in the Amphitruo have often been pointed out, but only rarely has the play as a whole, with its story of the arrival home and treatment of a returning victorious general, been seen as reflecting the triumph. However, Mary Beard, in the recent collection Rome the Cosmopolis, has made this connection, seeing in the Amphitruo a theatrical and metatheatrical parody of the triumphator. For Beard, the triumph is a ceremony which problematises issues of mimesis and representation. The triumphator, dressed and painted to imitate perhaps Jupiter himself, perhaps a statue of Jupiter, or perhaps the Etruscan Kings, exemplifies this problem. As Beard says, just as the tableaux vivants, carried at triumphs, with their depictions of the triumphator's various achievements, can be seen as replications of reality, as artifice, or as pure and simple sham, so the general can be seen as Jupiter's double, as a living statue, or as an actor making a fool of himself at a costume party. According to Beard, what is at stake in the triumphator's performance is the hermeneutic question of how can one tell the difference between ‘being’, ‘playing’ or ‘acting’ god. It is in this light that Beard locates the Amphitruo, reading the play as a parody of triumphal mimesis. Whereas the triumphator usually imitates Jupiter at the triumph, here Jupiter imitates the triumphator.

Toute pensée de l'origine des choses n'est jamais qu'une revérie de leur disposition actuelle, une manière de dégénérescence du réel, une variation sur ce qui est.
Paul Valéry in his Preface to Poe's Eureka.

The World of Hesiod is familiar as a title, but the world of Hesiod is difficult to locate in a single place. Indeed, it is a number of places. It seems to have its centre in Askra in Boiotia and to extend out in space as far as the high slopes of Mount Helikon. It is a land-locked world and its severe limitations are apparent from what the poet says about the sea and the short sea passage from the mainland at Aulis to Chalkis on Euboia. Even as he offers his advice to the seafarer, he admits that he has no experience in seafaring or ships himself (W&D 649). He had only made the trip across to the island of Euboia once to compete as a poet at the funeral games of Amphidamas (W&D 646-60). Hesiodic poetry, when it centres on Hesiod's home, seems to crowd into a very small and disagreeable patch of typical Greek countryside. But his Muses enlarge this world. They provide him with a knowledge that he cannot gain himself—both of seafaring and of the vast expanse of the physical world whose origins go beyond the very beginnings of human time. Hesiod's local Muses transport him from the springs of Permessos to the deep currents of Ocean and they disclose to him a universe vaster in its extent and deeper in time than that of the Homeric poems. A sign of these enlarged horizons is the fact that in the Theogony Hesiod begins to sing of the Muses of Helikon (1-4), but then shifts attention to the Muses of Olympos (36-80).

(Greek Anthology 16.160, attributed to ‘Plato’)

Paphian Cytherea came through the waves to Knidos,
Wishing to see her own image.
Having viewed it from all sides in its open shrine,
She cried, ‘Where did Praxiteles see me naked?’

‘Through a glass, darkly:’ not just a hackneyed, Biblical phrase summing up our inability to apprehend God, but a pithy visualisation of the gap between divine truth and our perception of it. Yet Paul's words might also stand as an image for the trope of ekphrasis, the bewildering textual prism through which the frustrated reader attempts to view an enclosed and distant image. In this paper I will attempt to unite these two themes; one, the complexities of viewing and representing the divine, and two, the unrequited desire engendered by the ekphrastic text. Both of these rely upon an interplay of presence and absence which is, in a literary context, brilliantly communicated by the series of epigrams in the Greek Anthology dealing with images of gods, particularly, if we are to speak of desire, those which address images of Aphrodite.

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.

Theocritus rarely speaks in his own person. As an impersonal narrator he is concerned primarily with dramatic situations, each of which focuses upon the personalities of a few actors. Often, moreover, even as a narrator, Theocritus offers little more than brief introductions to set the scene for dramatic monologues or dialogues between the fictional characters of his poems. Sometimes his characters present themselves without any explicit commentary. As a consequence our assessment of Theocritus' own values and views is bound up with our sense of his relation to the characters whom he portrays. In many cases there is an implicit but nonetheless forceful contrast between the author and his characters, so that there is no question of taking their views as the author's or of taking the characters themselves as embodiments of the author's own values.

Rather, the reverse is true. The characterization of Gorgo and Praxinoa, for example, the two housewives who are childishly awed by the splendor and bustle of Alexandria on a holiday, suggests the poet's own confident urbanity. Similarly, the characterization of the two drinking companions in Idyll 14 who exchange accounts of misadventure in love and the virtues of service in Ptolemy's mercenary army, implies the poet's commitment to the values of refinement and restraint. Contrast between Theocritus and his characters in those poems is self-evident if for no other reason than the contrast between the refinement, self-consciousness, and obvious artificiality of Theocritus' style and the spontaneity and coarseness of the characters whom he portrays.

In the darkness of these times, it may well prove that we are the last generation to pursue the study of classics at all seriously, whether we are hewing squarely to the philological, or more modern, approaches to classical literature. The rights and wrongs of this particular ideological struggle will be settled, I suspect, by time and our students. One may, however, take for granted the perceptible erosion of anything like a real inwardness with Latin as a language among the protevangelists of either school. The gentlemanly dilettante stuck to his familiar authors, such as Virgil and Horace, ignoring their Alexandrian complexities for their human values; the supposedly serious scholar adopted such a scientific attitude to Latin that it would sometimes seem that his main pleasure consisted in correcting Lewis and Short, while putting together prose and verse compositions for his peers or pupils.

Certainly ignorance on the one hand and pedantry on the other are logical culprits, along with time, for this loss of inwardness with Latin as a language. One would like to think that Dr. Johnson (and some of his contemporaries) had something close to the careless familiarity with Latin displayed by Dante or Poggio: unfortunately a glance at the frigid exercises to Ms Thrale or to his Highland hosts, written during his tour of the Hebrides, quickly dispels this illusion.

Plato's so-called ‘middle period’ saw the composition of what are generally agreed to be his finest philosophical dramas, and of these the Symposium is usually singled out for special praise. Yet it is only recently that serious attempts have been made to approach the Symposium as a work of literature rather than a philosophical treatise. Those who employ the work as a source-book for Platonist doctrines rarely venture beyond Socrates' dialectical refutation of Agathon and his report of what Diotima told him (199c-212b); and if they do, it is to point out the logical or perceptual fallacies — i.e. the philosophical deficiencies — of the other five encomia and to find in Alcibiades' contribution a glowing tribute by Plato to that most remarkable of human personalities, the philosopher Socrates. This, however, is not the way to arrive at a real understanding of the Symposium. The author clearly intends the reader to respond to this work not as a philosophical treatise on the subject of Eros but as a work of literature which portrays a group of thinking human beings engaged in appraisal of an issue which is of fundamental importance in their lives. His primary purpose in dramatising this intellectual event is thus not to expound the philosopher's conception of Eros or to expose our minds to auto to kalon (‘the beautiful itself’). Rather the true subject of the work is man the intellectual animal, whose logoi (‘speeches’) demonstrate his capacity for analysing, evaluating and idealising his feelings and aspirations. It depicts ‘philosophy brought down from the sky and located in the cities and homes of men’; we are shown how, and how successfully, philosophy can function as a vital constituent of human life, rather than a barren and essentially irrelevant dispute about the mechanics of the universe.

Cependant, elle, qui croyait bien connaître Jacques, s'étonnait. Il avait sa tête ronde de beau garçon, ses cheveux frisés, ses moustaches très noires, ses yeux bruns diamantés d'or, mais sa mâchoire inférieure avançait tellement, dans une sôrte de coup de geule, qu'il s'en trouvait défiguré.
Zola, La Bête Humaine

It may seem banal to note that in its original conception Greek tragedy depended for much of its force on costume and visual effect. The dramas themselves often make clear, however, that costume, as a central feature of a character's visible type, communicates essential aspects of how she is situated both literally and figuratively. Not only do characters often enter in heroic or royal regalia, but the more elaborate or bedraggled one's appearance, the more likely it is that other characters comment upon it and thereby give it some overarching significance. As historians of Athenian drama have noted, the plays themselves do not provide very detailed evidence about the actual costumes that actors wore. Nor do vase paintings of particular stories always supplement the dramas with sufficiently detailed images of characters; and die written sources are too late to be definitive. I would nevertheless suggest that in Sophocles and especially in Euripides the plays draw attention to differentiations among the appearances of characters when the character's visible type contributes importantly to understanding her place in the social and symbolic structure of the play.

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.

In his Life of Augustus Suetonius records that just before his death the emperor requested that his appearance be made right, and that he then spoke some lines of Greek verse:

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.

In this study, I examine what it means to be a father, a son, and the father-son relationship in three Terentian comedies, the Andria, Self-Tormentor, and Adelphoe. Like the Menandrian originals on which they are based, these plays all employ a marriage plot centring on a young man's efforts to win and or retain his beloved in marriage or a temporary union. In each case, the story (or stories) about the romantic union of a young man and woman takes a back seat to a story about the negotiations between men needed to forge that union. As in Menander's plays, this homosocial orientation invests Terence's marriage plot with a dense network of cultural and ideological concerns. These concerns surface most clearly in the characterisation of the obstacle to the young man's relationship. In the plays under consideration here, the primary obstacle to the marriage or love relationship is the young man's father. In most cases, the fathers only object to their sons having relationships with non-marriageable women when they (the fathers) decide that it is time for their sons to marry. Significantly, the perceived status discrepancy does not operate as an absolute barrier to the young man's romantic relationship in the father's eyes (as in Menander's extant plays and fragments). Rather, the problem arises when the son's desire to remain in the relationship conflicts with his father's desire that he marry a respectable woman. Because the obstacle is framed in this way—as a direct confrontation between the discordant desires of fathers and sons—Terence's marriage plots provide an important window on the ideology of the Roman family and its kinship structure.

Seneca's Medea is not a rewriting of Euripides' character. At least, Seneca's Medea shares more similarities with Ovidian Medeas (the extant ones, at any rate) than the Euripidean Medea. Rather than focusing on Seneca's departures from the tragic legacy of Euripides (however important they are for an informed reading of the play), I would like to focus on Seneca's Medea as a potentially Ovidian character. Specifically, I would like to posit that the Senecan Medea reads more like a dramatisation of Medea's experience within the ellipsed Corinthian episode of Ovid's Metamorphoses (7.394-97). Seneca's Medea (more so than Euripides' Medea) identifies with a specifically transformative project, and, one might initially suspect, supplies a neat explication of the transformation missing from Medea's narrative in the Metamorphoses. What we find, however, is that, in dramatising her process of metamorphosis, Seneca irreparably alters our relationship with the transformed Medea.

In the Metamorphoses, ‘Ovid does not explain the reason for Medea's transformation into a sorceress and semidivine, evil being…’, but it is clear in the narration that a metamorphosis does occur: ‘Ovid passes abruptly from a sympathetic portrayal of Medea as love-sick maiden to a tragi-comic account of her career as accomplished pharmaceutria (witch) and murderess.’ But the metamorphosis of Medea's character is signalled just as much by her own retreat into silence. The ‘love-sick maiden’, who lays her thoughts out in the open, gives way to the ‘semidivine, evil being’, who speaks only pragmatically (in incantatory language or to the daughters of Pelias) or not at all (e.g., while flying, in Corinth, and in Athens). The loss of Medea's perspective is much of the reason why Ovid's ‘transformed’ Medea seems so unsympathetic. Seneca provides this missing perspective, and in doing so creates a uniquely sympathetic and inhuman result: Seneca's Medea leaves the stage as abruptly as Ovid's Medea leaves Iolcos and Athens (Met. 7.350 and 7.424, respectively), having committed the same crimes as Ovid's Medea, and as ‘supernatural’ as Ovid's Medea (if not more so), yet her newfound system of values is completely comprehensible. In creating a comprehensible account of her motives for transformation, Seneca's Medea, even as the semidivine ‘pharmaceutria’, seems more sympathetic even as she maintains similarities to Ovid's character.

For forty years a debate has raged in Petronian studies between the moralists and, for want of a better term, the anti-moralists. From Highet in the 1940's to Bacon and Arrowsmith in the 1950's and 60's, the moralists held a certain advantage. Whatever important divergences there were among these critics, all agreed on a Petronius who stood in some critical relation to his society. The dissenting voices have grown much louder of late. Ironically, the literary brilliance of Arrowsmith's New Critical reading of the Satyricon helped to turn the tide against the moralist viewpoint. The more apparent the literary sophistication of the Satyricon has become, the less willing late twentieth century readers have been to see a programmatic moral critique as its main purpose. Sullivan's view of Petronius as a ‘literary opportunist’ has come to dominate the field.

With Graham Anderson's book, Eros Sophistes: Ancient Novelists at Play, the retreat from the position of Highet is now complete. We have finally reached the logical, New Critical conclusion that the Satyricon is an entirely self-contained literary game without any message whatsoever; in effect we are told that, like any serious piece of literature, the Satyricon ‘should not mean, but be’. Anderson is eager to disavow ‘the unproven conviction that every work must have a message, however diffusely or perversely expressed’.

Surprises await the reader who approaches the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus expecting to find a pleasant but unchallenging version of the content of Apollonius Rhodius' epic retold in Vergilian style. The poem is much more than ‘a thrilling tale that has absorbed and delighted readers and hearers’ and much more than an imitation of the work of two great predecessors. If we consider the matter of story line alone, Valerius differs from Apollonius. He included the rescue of Hesione by Hercules, which was part of the myth of Argo but not used by Apollonius, and he created an entire book (Book 6) full of new material by recounting how Jason and the Argonauts joined Aeetes in a civil war at Colchis. The syntax, long supposed to be Vergilian, on closer examination appears to have departed from Vergil's ways.

Valerius made his individuality clear from the beginning of his epic:

prima deum magnis canimus freta peruia natis fatidicamque ratem, Scythici quae Phasidis oras ausa sequi mediosque inter iuga concita cursus rumpere flammifero tandem consedit Olympo.
(Arg. 1.1-4)
I sing the straits first navigable for great sons of gods and the prophetic ship that dared to seek the shores of Scythian Phasis, that dared to burst a course between clashing rocks, that settled down at last on fiery Olympus.

The following is an investigation of the nature of women in the Homeric poems. It is generally accepted that epic figures are typical rather than individual, idiosyncratic personalities. So it is reasonable to assume that the women of the two poems represent the general conception of female behaviour held by Homer's audience. Even if the poems represent a tradition which was a long time in the making, it remains true that what appears within the poems must have made sense somehow to Homer's contemporary audience. And that is the sense we must seek.

There has been very little said about the role of women in the Homeric epics. Discussion is bound to be uneven; women are glimpsed infrequently in the Iliad, whereas they are everywhere in the Odyssey. But this in itself perhaps offers insights into the nature of the difference between the two poems. In addition an analysis of the part women play in these poems helps to explain the continual appeal of the Iliad and the Odyssey. For the poems, like all truly great pieces of literature, say things that we humans need and want to hear. As is true of other facets of the poems the female characters are extraordinarily authentic. They manifest moods and psychological states which are true to women, at least in the Western world. Moreover the poems, especially the Odyssey, show with great profundity some important truths of male-female relationships. Whether these are inherent and never-changing or it is because women's situation has not much changed through the millenia is hard to say.

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.

‘Why is inert Matter female and the animating Nous male, please?’
‘Because earth is the Mother, because all beautiful things spring from her, trees and flowers and creatures.’
A.S. Byatt Angels and Insects

Byart's characters, the Victorian gentlewoman who asks the question and the poet who answers, articulate an enduring notion of Western popular and intellectual culture. The association of women with matter and the body, men with form and the soul, is the legacy of ancient Greek thought which gendered the physical universe according to social convention: women were considered to be passive and therefore acted upon by the formative male principle. Examples of this bilateral symmetry include preformation theories of conception which suggest that a mother only provides the fetus with its raw material, while the father's seed organises that undeveloped material into its human form. This is a value-laden distinction, as we see from ancient philosophy which privileges the masculine soul over the feminine body and aligns men with the intellect but women with the baser corporeal passions.

Euripides' Alcestis presents its audience with a curious problem. Why is a blatant coward rewarded? The answer has usually been discovered in Admetus' scrupulous observance of the law of hospitality (10), that is, in a personal trait. The significance of this solution is important because the ostensible morality of the play, one characterized by its peculiar blend of fairy-tale and harsh reality, is now dependent upon the single redeeming quality of one individual. Conversely, the less attractive features of Admetus, and they exist in varying degrees of unpleasantness, become defensible solely as progressive steps in the testing of his mettle. Impropriety, therefore, functions as the necessary adjunct of anagnorisis and reparation. By contrast, the sacrifice of Alcestis assumes an even more notable proportion; her rescue from the dead appears more an absolute act of justice than a miracle. Nonetheless, by the end of the play doubt still persists concerning the extent to which Admetus has revised his perception of right and wrong, his virtue notwithstanding.

Verrall, at the turn of the century, protested vigorously against just such a pragmatic acceptance of Admetus' philoxenia as a facile explanation. Ironically enough, he inadvertently predicted a trend which was not only to grow, but to become more entrenched. Admetus' saving grace has indeed carried the day. A husband's untoward submission to a wife's substitution; a son's disgraceful argument with his father before the rites of interment; a host's inner crisis as he juggles the respective merits of hospitality versus bereavement; a man's shallow repentance for living at another's expense — in short, each vital turning point in Admetus' private dilemma has received thorough and shrewd analysis, but always through the special refraction of the host motif.