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.

(Iliad 2.603-14)

The Iliadic catalogue of ships stands as a monument to the victory of memory over time. Through the medium of hexameter verse, the names and deeds of the dead have been recalled and passed on to the living. The device of the catalogue, in fact, has the potential to stand as a pure model of epic recollection: the listing of names, places, and numbers of men, along with particular details, such as the Arkadians' ignorance of seafaring, provides the illusion that what is recalled is fact, that the poem is a screen on which the reality of the past is projected to the audience of the present for the purpose of commemoration, the safeguarding of communal memory.

We have learned a great deal in recent years about reading Horace's satires; there is now widespread agreement that the speaker of the satires is himself a character within them, a persona. Such a persona may be most effective when it has obvious connections with its creator, but that fact does not preclude the exaggeration of reality, or even its complete inversion. For Horace the implications of this approach are exciting: instead of a poet discoursing with cheerful earnestness on morality, on poetry and on his daily life, we have a fictional character, whom we do not have to take seriously at all.

The three diatribe satires present us with a character so absurd that they have been taken, I think rightly, as parodies. Although the poems were once appreciated as effective moralising sermons, even their admirers found it hard to justify the lack of intellectual coherence, to say nothing of the astonishing vulgarity of the second satire. As parodies, however, the poems are wonderfully successful. The speaker trots out a series of banalities: ‘people should be content with who they are’; ‘people should not go to extremes’; ‘people should be consistent’. But he invariably gets distracted, goes off on tangential rants, and makes a fool of himself. The moralist of the first three satires is, to put it bluntly, a jerk.

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.

In his monumental work on Tacitus, Syme suggested that Tacitus made veiled criticisms directed against Hadrian in the Annals; subsequent scholars have not always accepted his suggestion. Yet those scholars who are sceptical of Syme's argument have not yet, on the whole, taken up the question of the reception of Tacitus' work by his contemporaries; this is a peculiar gap, when one considers the politically charged nature of Tacitus' Annals, which places under a miscroscope not only individual emperors, but the institution of the principate itself. It is, therefore, the intent of this essay to examine the audience's reception of Tacitus' Annals within the work's historical and cultural context: for Tacitus' audience (which I assume to consist primarily of elite males of senatorial and equestrian status), an understanding of the past about which he writes was made meaningful in part, I should like to suggest, by the present. Such an approach results in an open-ended understanding of the work, and decentralises it from its author in favour of the audience. The end result is a text which simultaneously questions even as it reaffirms Trajan as princeps.

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.

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.

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.