All drama, indeed all literature, shows people acting on the basis of beliefs and values. We take those values for granted when we watch a play, and observe how the characters negotiate their way within the world as it appears to them. I wish to call attention to some underlying moral and psychological assumptions to which we implicitly assent as a condition for appreciating the story in a couple of Greek tragedies. For sometimes those assumptions are just what the play is really getting across.

‘Closure: Get Over It’
Miss Manners 12/6/98

‘I know, it probably doesn't have the sense of closure that you want, but it has more than some of our other cases.’
Agent Dana Scully on ‘The X-Files’

Thebaid 12 is a problematic ending to a disturbing poem. Part of the problem is the unsatisfactory nature of the final book. Book 12 is itself concerned with the processes of ending and its problems. The main narrative of the Thebaid is the story of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, and their battle over the throne at Thebes. Their final confrontation occurs in Book 11. This ending is full of closural allusions and very closely linked to the ending of the Aeneid and its final battle between Aeneas and Turnus. If the poem is ‘over’ after Book 11, why does Statius write the final book? It's not enough to say—as critics have—that it's just badly structured poetry.

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.

‘she is always and never the same’
(advertising slogan for ‘Contradiction’, a ‘fragrance for women’ by Calvin Klein, 1999)

In the first poem of his second book, Propertius presents an emphatic declaration of his status as a love poet, slyly incorporating a detailed recusatio to Maecenas, who he claims has requested that he compose epic instead. Later in the poem, Propertius' preference for elegy over epic seems to be echoed by the predilections of his lover Cynthia, who, as Propertius insists, finds the entire Iliad distasteful. According to Propertius, Cynthia's aversion to the poem emerges from a very specific source: the epic's primary female protagonist, Helen. For, as Propertius recalls it, Cynthia disapproves of the whole epic precisely because she finds fault with its ‘leuis’ heroine: si memini, solet ilia leuis culpare puellas,/et totam ex Helena non probat Iliada (‘If I remember, she is accustomed to castigate mutable women and does not approve of the whole Iliad because of Helen’, 2.1.49f.).

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:

‘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.

The ends of epic poems are always particularly contested sites, and Statius' Thebaid is no exception. In this article, I hope to present a new angle on the debate by taking comparison with Lucan's Bellum Ciuile as my starting point. Reading Statius through Lucan suggests to me that there must be dissent in the ending of the Thebaid about the degree of closure that the poem should and does achieve. This dissent in Lucan characterises both the ending of Bellum Ciuile and the unofficial and tentative problematisation of closure in the burial of Pompey.

Blemyis capita absunt, uultus in pectore est. Satyris praeter effigiem nihil humani. Aegipanum quae celebratur ea forma est. haec de Africa.
Pomponius Mela Chorographia 1.48

The Blemyes lack heads: their faces are in their chests. There is nothing typical of humans about the Satyrs, apart from their superficial appearance. The Aegipanes have the shape described in stories. So much for Africa.

How useful are Roman geographical texts? Outrageous claims like the one cited above have invited scepticism concerning the scientific value of geographies and ethnographies produced by Roman authors. To a large extent, the importance attributed to a geographical text will depend on what is being sought from that text. For example, O.A.W. Dilke tells us that, ‘We are fortunate in possessing all seventeen books of the Geography of Strabo,’ and that Strabo ‘shows good critical power in assessing earlier geographical writers and giving us a verbal picture of the known world of the time.’ However, ‘a contrast with Strabo's work is provided by the very simple and popular Chorographia of Pomponius Mela,’ of which Dilke expresses die view that it would have been preferable had Juba II's work survived.

Although there are countless feminist readings of Plato and readings of Plato as (a) feminist, the French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray's extended—nearly 200 page!—reading of the cave passage from Book 7 of Plato's Republic may still come as something of a surprise to the classicist. In the recently published book Feminist Interpretations of Plato, however, there is an essay by Irigaray on Plato's Symposium included as just another example of this now established genre. Just any other?—well not quite… As in its sister volume Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, the editors have decided that unlike any other article in the collection, Irigaray's contribution needs some further exegesis for the classical scholar. An essay on Irigaray reading Plato appears in tandem to her own article. Just like in the Aristotle volume, this essay presents itself as a guide to the perplexed, explaining to the ancient philosopher schooled in a more traditional idiom of Anglo-Saxon academic research some of the context for Irigaray's seemingly inappropriate style. Freeland writes of Irigaray's Aristotle piece: ‘Irigaray's essay will be astonishing to the Aristotle scholar who reads it unaware of Irigaray's earlier writings’; in fact, she continues, ‘…it may seem unclear whether one is reading Aristotle scholarship, a primitive biology text or an erotic novel ….Reading her then,’ she concludes, ‘is far different from reading the usual commentators on the Physics. Clearly, style is paramount to Irigaray's method of reading.’