This chapter examines H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961). While H.D. reviews her own life’s (Greek) work in her long poem in ways that recall Pound’s gathered currents in Women of Trachis, the challenge she sets herself is the opposite of that discernible in Pound’s late cantos: not coherence, but the embrace of proliferating images. The whole poem is an extended “hatching” of the Greek word eidolon ‘image, phantom, idol.’ The importance of the eidolon for H.D. has been previously recognized; the argument here differs in the specificity with which the author traces its lexical and conceptual translation throughout the poem. She reads the first part of Helen in Egypt both as a faithful and programmatic translation of Euripides’s Helen and as a revision of H.D.’s own previous writings on Helen. As with H.D.’s earlier translations, this one too catalyzes new writing: Helen in Egypt’s next two parts in subsequent years, where the Euripidean play’s import and relevance, as well as its unresolved tensions, are teased out. Helen in Egypt thus both performs and argues for the kind of approach to Greek here termed modernist hellenism: balancing freedom and constraint, “philology” and poetry.

Philoctetes is the most ethically complex of all Sophocles’ plays. Philoctetes, Odysseus and the background figure of Achilles present various paradigms for the young Neoptolemus, who must decide in the course of the play which, if any, to adopt as his model. Philoctetes and Odysseus are both endowed with established convictions, but Neoptolemus’ moral character is still in the process of formation. Moral argument and choice take on a peculiarly dynamic role in the plot as we see him exposed to the influence of each of the two older men in turn. Odysseus has come to Lemnos to steal Philoctetes’ invincible bow, which, according to the oracle of Helenus, is necessary for Greek success at Troy. But he knows that Philoctetes hates him bitterly (75f.), so his plan requires the cooperation of Neoptolemus. Odysseus characterises the scheme as a joint one (25), but also makes his own controlling role quite clear. Neoptolemus is to serve (15), and to listen while Odysseus explains his plan (24f.).

The second chapter touches more firmly on the philosophical debate and the arguments for human exceptionalism put forward over its course. The chapter puts Xanthus (the prophetic horse from Homer’s Iliad) as the first and prototypical speaking animal in the Western tradition in conversation with other famous speaking animals, including Plutarch’s speaking pig Grunter (Gryllus), a speaking rooster who claims to be a re-incarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras, and Kafka’s Red Peter. The chapter shows that the figure of the speaking animal is central to Western conceptions of the human. In classical antiquity, it features in stories that confirm the vertical relationship between humans (at the top) and animals (below). And yet, at the same time, right from the start of the conversation in the ancient world, the apparent anthropomorphism of the speaking animal was also used to critique the very idea of human exceptionalism. There is a direct line between how some modern animal fables point to man’s animal nature and the concept of the human explored in parts of the ancient evidence.

The dangers, sorrows, and failures of caretaking figures in the simile world of the Iliad parallel and reinforce the poem’s concern with the costs of poor leadership. Absent or incompetent leaders in the simile world range from shepherds and helmsmen to parents – both human and animal – who fail to keep their charges and children safe. Without effective leaders, both the simile characters and the story characters to whom they are compared are injured, killed, and bereaved. The similes contribute to an epic tale about the sufferings that all leaderless characters endure, whether a shepherd whose cattle are eaten by a lion, the grief of Patroclus over the sufferings of his fellow Greeks, or Trojan forces dying in battle. Even though the Greeks and Trojans are fighting each other, the simile world treats them very much the same. In scenes of battlefield stalemate, clusters of similes regularly bring together the perspectives of different participants and create unity between the warriors on both sides. The similes convey that more unites Greek and Trojan warriors than separates them, including but not limited to the misery they endure because of their leaders’ shortcomings.

This chapter explores how archaic Greek poets evoke and challenge prior traditions and texts through appeals to hearsay (e.g. φασί, λόγος). Case studies include the Iliad’s appropriation of theogonic and Theban myth; Homeric allusion to specific character traits (Antilochus’ speed, Nestor’s age, Achilles’ ancestry, Odysseus’ cunning); agonistic engagement with other traditions (the Iliad’s countering of Achillean immortality, the Odyssey’s positioning of Penelope against the Catalogue of Women); and further indexed allusions across the works of Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and other epic fragments. Indexical hearsay is even more prominent in lyric poetry, from Archilochus to Pindar: case studies include Archilochus and fable, Simonides on Hesiod’s Arete, Theognis’ Atalanta, Bacchylides’ Heracles, Ibycus’ Cassandra, Sappho’s Tithonus, sympotic skolia on both Ajax and the tyrannicides, and Pindar’s flexible mythologising. Poets employed this device to signal mastery of tradition, to challenge alternative myths, to foreground major intertextual models, to invite audiences to supplement untold details, and to authorise creative reworkings of tradition. The ‘Alexandrian footnote’ has a long history before Alexandria.

“The Isolation of Amphiaraos,” argues that Pindar generates tensions between Amphiaraos’ contemporary status as a Theban oracle and his identity as the noble Argive seer portrayed in epic and tragedy, in order to establish Amphiaraos as a site of contestation between modes of human and divine exaltation. In Nemean 9, Pindar contrasts Amphiaraos as underdetermined oracle with two figures defined by types of immortality also potentially available to the victor: Adrastos, who enjoys immortality in cult and Hektor, who enjoys poetic immortality in epic song. In Pythian 8, Pindar localizes this modeling more explicitly in the exaltation of epinician praise by first setting up Amphiaraos as a disoriented oracular voice, removed from the reciprocal systems of epinician exaltation, then reestablishing his right to participate in those systems by assimilating him to the contemporary model of the Aiginetan pater laudandi, thus reorienting him to his humanity.

“Herakles Looks Back at the World,” argues that in Isthmian 4 and Nemeans 3 and 4 Pindar deploys Herakles’ biography as a framework for theological modeling by foregrounding the apotheosis as a salient feature of Herakles’ epinician identity. The motif of the pillars of Herakles informs the significance of the apotheosis, characterizing Herakles’ unparalleled passage from mortality to immortality as a break within the arc of his life, rather than as a reward analogous to the praise and exaltation enjoyed by the victor. This modeling emphasizes that the victor’s epinician exaltation belongs to the world of human experience, defined by mortality, a world that Herakles leaves behind with his apotheosis. The chapter emphasizes how Pindar’s theological modeling plays on the tensions and congruencies that develop between the depictions of Herakles within an ode and those already in play in the local landscape, demonstrating the distinct resonances evoked by the matrix of pillars and apotheosis at Thebes (Isth. 4) and at Aigina (Nems. 3 and 4).

Machiavelli criticizes Plato’s explicit celebration of the contemplative philosophic life over the active political life as harmful both to politics and to philosophy, he praises Homer as an effective teacher of political leaders or "princes," and he follows the example of Homer by hiding his own philosophic life under the guise of one who exclusively leads and admires the active political life. Machiavelli, however, responding to the Platonic and also Christian legacy of radically depreciating the political life during his own times, departs from Homer’s portrayal of the political life of virtue as tragic and therefore pointing beyond itself to the contemplative philosophic life, by portraying the political life of virtue, if properly understood, as one that leads to happiness and therefore does not so clearly point beyond itself to the contemplative philosophic life.

Plato criticizes Homer’s effort to promote religious skepticism through his portrayal of the gods for overestimating the power of human reason and underestimating the power of human passions, and he criticizes Homer’s education concerning human excellence for inadvertently glamorizing the passionate and tragic hero Achilles and all too effectively hiding his own example as a philosophic thinker behind the mask of the divinely inspired singer. Plato therefore replaces the Homeric education with a new, poetic, Platonic education that presents Socrates – the fearless, dispassionate, self-sufficient, apolitical philosopher who promulgates the pious, edifying, and reassuring doctrines of the separate Forms and the Immortality of the Soul – as an explicit object of admiration and model for imitation.

Nietzsche criticizes Plato for having praised the philosophic life in such a way as to deprive the active political and military life of the honor and vitality it enjoyed in the Greek culture founded by Homer and therefore seems to call for a reversal of the moral and political legacy of Platonism and Christianity and a revival of Homeric culture. But Nietzsche ultimately criticizes Plato more seriously, not for explicitly celebrating the philosophic life as the best way of life for a human being, but rather for presenting the philosopher as a champion of morality and religion and thereby obscuring the skeptical nature of the philosopher and he therefore seeks, through his rhetorical presentation of philosophy as emphatically opposed to morality and religion, to reintroduce the radical moral and religious skepticism of philosophy to a world that has lost sight of it.

Homer first presents as a model of human excellence the hero Achilles, who lives a life of political and military virtue to the fullest, who becomes painfully aware of the limits of that way of life, and whose example as a tragic, suffering, questioning hero points to the contemplative singer Homer as the true model of human excellence in the Homeric poems. Through his explicit, skeptical judgments concerning gods and heroes; his scientific but compassionate accounts of death; and his similes, Homer points to himself as a philosophic thinker, but he deliberately hides his philosophic life in the poems to avoid incurring popular hostility and to encourage the most thoughtful members of his audience to discover the independent-minded life of philosophy on their own and for themselves.

Plato identifies Homer as the philosophic educator of Greece but severely criticizes the Homeric education for his portrayal of the gods, his portrayal of heroes as exemplars of human excellence, and his portrayal of himself. Homer reveals through his poems that nature limits the power of the gods and that the gods’ own immortal nature renders them incapable of understanding and caring for humans and hence incapable of providing for them.

Statius’ unfinished epic, the Achilleid, describes in its surviving opening portion the attempt of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, to stop him joining the expedition against Troy by disguising him as a girl on the island of Scyros. The chapter analyses Roman conceptions of gender and sexuality, as Achilles’ disguise does not prevent him from having sex with Deidamia. His underlying violent masculinity is revealed by the trickery of Ulysses.

The characterisation of theatrical space as gendered and the roles that female characters are able to play in creating, inhabiting, manipulating, and traversing that space have continued to receive sophisticated analysis. This chapter expands this discussion to encompass the relationship of non-human female characters to theatrical space, and considers how the matrix of gender and topography might have played out across the full span of a tragic production in the case of the conjectured Aeschylean trilogy of Myrmidons, Nereids and Phrygians/The Ransoming of Hector. The chapter argues that the chorus of sea-goddess Nereids provided a contrasting female presence within the trilogy, usurping the roles of the male voices central to the plays’ Iliadic source material, and demonstrates how their presence would have rendered the theatrical space unusually fluid, in both senses of the word. The suggestion is made that other Aeschylean plays with female choruses may have been similarly imaginative in their manipulation of the representation of theatrical space, often involving configurations that move beyond the oikos/polis opposition.

The Shield of Achilles is described in Iliad 18.478‒608 as it is being made by Hephaistos. It is an evolving description that remains unfinished. This essay details the ekphrasis of the shield and considers the main arguments regarding the analysis of the shield including different methods of ekphrasis, Greek philological observations, and specific comparative historical linguistic discussions.