Although kings are often central to the extant literary (and other textual) evidence from Mesopotamia, the wider Near East and the eastern Mediterranean, the texts themselves were usually authored by others, such as poets, priests, prophets or scholars. If mortal kings typically claimed to rule thanks to divine support, these latter characters similarly tended to base their authority on their ability to articulate and enact the divine will. Inevitably perhaps, the stage was set for narratives of conflict between kings and other intermediaries of the divine. This chapter shows that the ancient sources again exhibit a consistent pattern: it is always the king who initiates the conflict, often in a military context. The king is not necessarily impious, but shows casual disregard for the divine will, despite the information offered by a reliable intermediary. This is invariably depicted as an act of folly. The negative consequences soon become apparent, but they are usually borne primarily by the people whom the king was supposed to lead. The first attestations are found in Sumerian sources from early Mesopotamia. The other main bodies of evidence are the Hebrew Bible and the early Greek epics of Homer and Hesiod.

This chapter brings Sappho fr. 44V into dialogue with queer theorist Lee Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurism. As part of its represention of the wedding entourage of Andromache and Hector, Sappho fr. 44V invites us to reconsider the value of “undying fame” (aphthiton kleos) when this eminently heroic commodity is imported from martial epic into a poetic space where love, desire, and marriage overshadow military pursuits. It is argued that Sappho fr. 44V is a wedding song being queered at the very moment of its performance. It is not just not a real wedding song, and therefore a fictional wedding song – which is where those who have rejected the epithalamium hypothesis have tended to leave it. Rather, Sappho fr. 44V is a “wedding song” inverted, turned inside out.

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.

Chapter 2 investigates how identity in Senecan tragedy is achieved via sympathetic identification with others, whether individuals or groups. The chapters focuses on Roman practices of exemplarity, which encouraged the formation of individual selves via the appropriation of others’ - often normative - characteristics. This habit of coyping and becoming a copy of other people connects the human individual to the fictional character, which is by nature inherently replicable. The two plays discussed in this chapter are Troades, where Astyanax is constantly characterised as a ‘second Hector’, and Hercules, where the protagonist pursues self-aemulatio in place of family attachments.