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’.

Catullus described a full emotional circle in his short life from delight in unconstrained aesthetic sensuality free of socially-defined patterns (cc. 5, 6, 13 for example) to longing for a stable bond in the relationship of man to woman. He pictured such a bond as placed within the traditional Roman frame of marriage and home, but cast in a personal mold; he wanted to preserve his aesthetic and sensual response to a woman while combining it somehow with the stability and intimacy appropriate to friendship (amare and bene velle). Poems 72 and 87, for instance, directly express the ideal in acknowledging its absence from Catullus' relations with Lesbia.

Catullus liked to feel that the possibility of complete union was what he offered Lesbia. Perhaps it was his inability to fashion a compelling synthesis of sexual intimacy and friendship with her that led him to write a series of poems exploring attempts, mainly failures, at full reciprocal love. The successful attempts are idyllic or mythic (Septimius and Acme, Peleus and Thetis, neither unambiguously positive). The failures come, in Catullus' portrayal, when union founders on the obstacle of the narcissistic personality, the man or woman unable to forfeit autonomy, desirous of holding others in thrall without being himself held. Catullus' highly developed sensitivity to narcissism must be a reaction to its prominence in the character of a certain kind of sexually attractive individual, the one who is alluring but uncapturable, the kind of woman, like Lesbia, with whom Catullus sought union. Catullus conveys the quality of narcissism in such a character in part through the image of the flower (appropriately, considering the source of the modern name for it).

For the Bacchae Lévi-Strauss' view of myth as concerned with the mediation of fundamental polarities is both fruitful and fruitfully inadequate. The conflicts between Pentheus and Dionysus clearly involve an opposition of city and wild, culture and nature, rationality and emotion, male and female. Further in the background stands another series of antitheses: mortal and immortal, man and beast, Greek and barbarian, heavens and earth, fire and water. Like much of Greek literature, the Bacchae is founded on the proportion, mortal: immortal :: beast : man. That proportion, in turn, is part of an encompassing cosmic order which distinguishes the three basic categories of animate beings: god, man, and beast. What is unique and disturbing about this play is the thoroughness and violence of the reversals which take place in a situation in which god fuses with beast and beast with man.

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.

The opening lines of the Eclogues are justly famous:

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena.
(E. 1.1-2)

Tityrus, you lie beneath spread of sheltering beech
Studying the woodland Muse on a thin oat-straw.

Their rich, inviting allusiveness is well known. The sonal echo of Theocritus Idylls 1.1, the Callimachean canon (tenui, ‘thin’; cf. tēn Mousan leptaleēn, ‘the thin Muse’, Aetia fr.1.24 Pf.), the Lucretian siluestrem Musam (‘woodland Muse’) provoke the imagination, goad the intellect. Virgil's reference to his Roman predecessor especially intrigues. The context alluded to — Lucretius' ascription (DRN 4.577-89) of the fiction of satyrs, nymphs and the siluestris Musa of Pan to the echo-producing properties of rocky, solitary places — contains embryonically a theory of poetics, an evaluation of pastoral song, which, quickened into life in the Eclogues' initial statement, appears to be of programmatic significance. The theory — the viewing of pastoral poetry as essentially (to use Marie Desport's compelling phrase) ‘une poésie à écho’ — may be termed the echoic theory of pastoral song. Its main import is — as I take it — reductive: pastoral song is to be construed as the internal resonance of the singer's fictive world, condemned to triviality by its inability to reach beyond the boundaries of private experience or private vision so as to affect the world of action, events, history.

Late in the fifties Munro's long-standing and influential verdict on the Acme and Septimius poem (‘the most charming picture in any language of a light and happy love’) suddenly came under fire. A flurry of scholarly reaction arose, and strangely enough, almost as quickly subsided, to support, then condemn, and finally to modify beyond recognition S. Baker's proposition that Catullus ‘never wrote about love without some irony’. A rehearsal of the various responses to Baker's assessment is especially illustrative both of the particular difficulties in this poem and, more importantly, of the misconceptions which have for years plagued interpretations of the love poetry of Horace as well as Catullus. Indeed, it is fortunate that the frequently observed relationship between Odes 3.9 and its predecessor enables us to examine comprehensively what is symptomatic of general critical approaches to both poets.

Baker's doubt of the idyllic proportions of the love portrait presented in Carmen 45 is certainly not unfounded. However, his arguments in favor of an overriding ironic tension result, if correctly understood, from his conviction that, since elsewhere Catullus cannot ‘speak of love directly and simply for many lines running’, the lovers' bliss is therefore immediately suspect. The poems used in corroboration of this view are nearly all drawn from the so-called Lesbia cycle (2, 5, 7, 51, together with the two epithalamia, 61-62). While in a very restricted sense Catullus' ofttimes exaggerated declaration of passionate love for Lesbia may seem a unifying feature of these pieces, it is incorrect to assume that any single modulation of the love experience is an automatic cipher for all others.

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.

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.

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.