The Poet’s Voice is an intervention in the field of classics and is committed to the slow, close reading of Greek texts. The testing of how critical activity could be transformed by theoretical reflection is to be found in how the texts of antiquity were opened to a transformative exploration of their meaning. The practice of the discipline – how texts are read and understood, what questions are authorized, what sorts of answers countenanced – is what is at stake in such an enterprise. The Poet’s Voice is written from within the discipline of classics, to transform it from within, and hence its focus is on critically reading the texts of the discipline, both the ancient literature and its modern critics. That is how its theoretical commitment is embodied and enacted.

Imperial ekphrasis is the topic of Chapter 8. The disinterest in the aesthetics of deception in Hellenistic epigrams is continued in the ekphrastic works of Callistratus and the Philostrati. They use the term apatē not infrequently but, by and large, do not tie aesthetic illusion to deception in an ethical sense. It is another text, commonly disregarded as simple and unsophisticated, that intriguingly plays with the ambiguity of apatē. I will argue that the Tabula Cebetis, besides toying with the recession of representational levels, also uses the personification of Apatē in the painting it describes to associate aesthetic illusion with moral corruption, thereby issuing a reading instruction for itself. In fact, it can even be argued that in the Tabula Cebetis the aesthetics of deception, which Lucian had marshalled to criticize protreptics, helps preempt this criticism.

Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, discussed in Chapter 10, still awaits its discovery by scholars of ancient aesthetics. The latest of the five fully preserved ancient Greek piercingly reflects on the aesthetics of deception. After a close reading of a passage from book 3 that sharply juxtaposes deceit and aesthetic illusion and simultaneously intimates their similarity, I will explore their blending together in the Athenian novella. The aesthetics of deception also pertains to the Ethiopica themselves, which are designed to enthral the reader and simultaneously threaten to dupe her. A Platonic intertext that evokes the condemnation of poetry in the Republic highlights this danger. At the same time, Heliodorus recasts the aesthetics of deception differently from Plato and suggests an allegorical reading of his novel that envisages aesthetic illusion ultimately as a means of overcoming deception.

Plato is not only a key figure in the history of the aesthetics of deception; the focus of my study also permits us to reassess his criticism of poetry in the Republic. Chapter 4 examines how Plato takes seriously Gorgias’ playful entwinement of aesthetics with ethics and uses it to give new substance to the charges against poetry that Gorgias had deflated. For Plato, immersion is a central factor of the harm done by poets. After exploring his entanglement of aesthetic illusion with the corruption of the soul, I consider passages that seem to respond to Gorgias and help us capture the similarities and differences between the two thinkers. Finally, I contend that, while unanimously condemned by a broad alliance of scholars, Plato’s view of poetry is premised on an assessment of aesthetic experience that turns out to be valid when seen in the light of cognitive studies.

Chapter 7 moves on to Lucian, who extends the field of reflection by conjuring up the entwinement of deception with aesthetic illusion, not exclusively but chiefly in texts devoted to philosophy and its pretensions. Philopseudes uses the allure of superstitious tales circulated by philosophers to contemplate the effect of immersive narrative at large; Nigrinus calls upon the aesthetics of deception to expose the shortcomings of protreptic discourse and facile ideas of conversion; Hermotimus compares philosophical misguidance to the effects of visual art and poetry. However, Lucian’s engagement with the aesthetics of deception is not confined to ridiculing philosophy; it is carried by a serious concern with the effects of logos as diagnosed by Plato. The high reflexivity that the form of dialogue and the layering of narrative levels generate in the discussed texts can be seen as a response to the danger inherent in immersion.

Deceit plays a major role in Sophocles’ Electra, the subject of Chapter 3. As I will argue, the messenger scene at the core of this play blends together deception and aesthetic illusion – the lie of the paedagogus about Orestes’ death relies on a highly immersive narration to be analysed from an embodied and enactive perspective. It would be more than bold to envisage Electra as inspired by Gorgias fr. 23 DK; what Sophocles’ play does is show that the association of deception and aesthetic illusion pinpointed by Gorgias was somehow in the air and could be exploited to great dramatic effect. I will also suggest that Electra features reflections on aesthetic illusion that contain the seeds of the later rhetorical category of enargeia.

In the second chapter, I first present other texts from the Classical period that use apatē to signify the effect of theatre and other forms of representation. These texts give evidence for the wide circulation of apatē as an aesthetic term, perhaps – this is my tentative suggestion – as a result of a Gorgianic coinage. Then, I critically examine the tendency to view Gorgias fr. 23 DK merely as paving the way for Aristotle’s Poetics. This view is in danger of confounding aesthetic illusion with fictionality and ignores the salience of apatē’s enmeshing of aesthetics with ethics.

The ekphrastic play with verbal and iconic representations reveals that not only literature but also pictures can effect apatē. Chapter 9 is devoted to a piece of early Christian apologetic writing that cashes in on the ambiguity of apatē for an assault against pagan idolatry. Clement’s Protrepticus, an interesting document for the multifaceted attempts of the early Christians to negotiate the relation of their faith with pagan culture, is couched in the language and imagery of the culture it is criticizing; it not only takes up specific theories of perception, but also knowingly transfers the aesthetics of deception from poetry to pictures. While other apologetes assume that demons instrumentalize statues for their deception, Clement makes the capacity of iconic representation for deception itself a cornerstone of his deconstruction of pagan modes of viewing.

Plutarch’s De audiendis poetis, discussed in Chapter 6, is one of the first testimonies to the resuscitation of apatē as a critical term in the Imperial era. In defending the educational function of poetry, Plutarch is responding to Plato. While Plutarch’s positive view disagrees with Plato’s negative verdict, his argument, as I will argue, is predicated on Plato’s association of immersion with corruption. Plutarch, after acknowledging poetry’s spell, lays out a strongly reflexive mode of reading intended to render the young readers immune to the dangers of absorption. His agenda has been appraised as prefiguring the modern hermeneutics of suspicion, but there are also important differences to be noted. Besides drawing our attention to the role of Plato, De audiendis poetis suggests further reasons for the appeal of apatē in the Imperial era, notably a culture of rhetorical epideixis that put a premium on captivating performances and the socio-political function of literature for the Greek elites in the Roman empire that gave new prominence to its ethical dimension.

The exploration of the ancient aesthetics of deception takes its cue from Gorgias fr. B 23 DK. After contemplating the fragment in its original contexts – Plutarch cites it in two different treatises – I will argue that Gorgias’ assertion derives its poignancy from the transformation of several topoi. What reads like a mere witticism is the result of a crossing of an epistemological tradition with an ethical paradox and a poetological premise, all under the auspices of aesthetics.

Hellenistic criticism provides little material for my study; Chapter 5 tries to grasp why this is due not only to its scanty transmission. Neither critics who championed pleasure as the function of poetry nor the ekphrastic tradition seem to have taken an interest in apatē’s ambiguity. We find more evidence at the beginning of the Imperial era in the critical essays of Dionysus of Halicarnassus and in Philo’s polemics against a specific kind of rhetoric and myth. Only Philo, however, exploits apatē’s oscillation between aesthetic illusion and deception. Philo’s debts to Plato help us identify one reason for apatē’s decline in Hellenistic criticism: as some scholia illustrate, Plato’s criticism of poetry was well-known but was often felt to be less compelling than the ideas of other philosophical schools. With due caution, I also suggest that the waning interest in apatē is related to the emergence of the Hellenistic book-culture that made it easy to contemplate aesthetic issues independently of ethical issues.

This chapter is an overview of the ways in which Seamus Heaney engages with Greek and Latin mythologies and literatures in his work, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Aeneid VI (2016), and from allusions to more sustained forms of intertexuality, including versions. First discussing classical presences in his early poetry, the chapter shows how Heaney became increasingly interested in Greek and Latin literatures after the late 1980s, at a time of personal and political crises in Northern Ireland. It explains that, in those years, classical texts helped him address family deaths as well as contemporary violence in the North. Finally, it argues that in his rewritings of Sophocles, and in his classical poetry, mostly inspired by Virgil, Heaney ultimately revisits Ireland as a classical and secular space, reflecting social and cultural changes on the island, in the context of the Northern Irish peace process, as well as of globalisation.

This chapter addresses the extensive fragment attributed to Aeschylus’ Carians/Europa, in which the speaker Europa describes her rape by Zeus, the births of her three children, and her fear for the safety of her son Sarpedon; this speech allows the audience ‘to contemplate the sufferings of Europa over a woman’s full lifecycle, culminating in her role as aged mother awaiting her only surviving son’s return’. Considering issues of lexicon and dramatic technique, the chapter supports a date for the play in the 420s, noting with sympathy Martin West’s argument this play’s author was Aeschylus’ son Euphorion.

Usually marking moments of elevated emotion, tragic song is used to powerful effect in the characterisation of both male and female (non-choral) characters, but is more strongly associated with the latter, in part owing to the associations of ritual lament as a women’s genre. This chapter analyses a notable instance of female song in Euripides, the titular figure’s monody in Hypsipyle. This character’s song came to be viewed as so representative of the playwright’s New Musical tendencies that she was parodied in Aristophanes’ Frogs as ‘the Muse of Euripides’. A detailed reading of both the monody itself and Hypsipyle’s Aristophanic reception blends the study of mousikē, aesthetics, synaesthesia, and cult to show how Euripides’ singing heroine absorbs the audience into her desire for a form of music marked as Asian, Orphic, and citharodic, and which forges a continuous chain between the musical culture of Lemnos and Euripides’ contemporary Athens. In this interpretation, Hypsipyle’s song showcases not just the playwright’s skill in the creation of a virtuosic female voice, but also his use of female song to create a link to the political realities of the world of the audience.