In his early Byzantine Chronicle, Johannes Malalas fills out the figure of Cyrus, Croesus' silent antagonist in Herodotus. While Croesus is consulting the Delphic oracle, Cyrus enjoys a quite different divine audience:

And the prophet Daniel came to the King of the Persians, Cyrus. And Cyrus says to him: ‘Tell me, am I going to conquer Croesus King of the Lydians?’

When the Christian prophet hesitates, Cyrus throws him to the lions – only swiftly to repent. Daniel returns the favour by confirming that Cyrus will defeat Croesus because God breaks the ‘might of kings’. Malalas' version of divine counselling clearly draws on Christian moralizing traditions; but it also flags up the confrontation between the powerful king and the word of god in Herodotus' narrativisation of Croesus' downfall. At the same time, however, it offers a radically different interpretative model. Here we don't just have a Croesus consulting the oracle and failing to comprehend it; Cyrus is told what will happen – and why – by the prophet Daniel! From Croesus (mis)reading the oracle to Cyrus receiving instruction from God, narrative dynamics have undergone a fundamental shift. It's now the gospel…

Scholarship on Croesus testing Delphi, and on oracles more generally, has tended to focus on reconstructing the ‘original’ oracular texts and assessing Herodotus' role as a historian (in the modern sense of the word) in the light of how accurate his record is deemed to be. Notwithstanding the fact that such positivist approaches to historical writing have been challenged and that recent studies have been far more nuanced, the oracles themselves remain the focus of investigation. In tracing their ‘changing representations’ I want to look exclusively at how they function within Herodotus' narrative.

On his recent retirement from the chair of classical archaeology in Cambridge University, Anthony Snodgrass reflected on the state of the subject, wondering whether a paradigm shift has occurred. Snodgrass assesses various matters, including, for our purposes, how archaeological approaches to ancient literary sources have changed. His comments deserve quotation in full:

…Classical archaeology is often stigmatized, by its many critics, as being ‘text-driven’ … [in] that the subject takes its orientation from, and adapts its whole narrative to, the lead given by the literary sources. Thus the archaeology of Roman Britain has been built around Tacitus' narrative of conquest; the study of Greek art around the text of the Elder Pliny; the archaeology of fifth-century Athens around the narratives supplied by Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon; that of Republican Rome similarly around those of Livy and Diodorus; that of Sicily again around Thucydides; and most notoriously, that of Aegean prehistory and protohistory around Homer…. But there is a deeper level still. Traditional Classical archaeology is stated…to have directed its energies at those aspects of the ancient world on which the written sources, taken as a whole, throw light. Thus, on urban but not on rural life; on public and civic, but not on domestic activity; on periods seen as historically important, but not on the obscurer ones; on the permanent physical manifestations of religion, but not on the temporary ones – sacrifice, patterns of dedication, ritual meals, pilgrimage; on the artefacts interred in burials, but not on burial itself; on the historically prominent states – in Greece, Athens and Sparta – but not on what has recently been called ‘the Third Greece’…

Heracles' image in antiquity is notoriously kaleidoscopic. Comedy represented him as a gluttonous buffoon, and myth made no secret of the brutal violence of many of his exploits. On the other hand, Pindar exalts him as a superlative figure who enforced the nomos of the gods, while Prodicus in a famous myth makes Heracles a supreme example of commendable conduct, a youth who chooses the path of Virtue over the path of Vice out of his own free will. This image of a moralized Heracles soon took root in the Greek imagination, and a whole host of Greek thinkers (Isocrates, Antisthenes, Diogenes the Cynic, and Plutarch, to name but a few) found in him a perfectly malleable exemplum for their various courses in moral edification. After undergoing a large number of transformations in Roman literature and the Church Fathers, Heracles resurfaces unscathed in the early Renaissance, when we find him again as an already established exemplum virtutis, now a man of letters, now a Christian. It would appear that, despite his multifarious metamorphoses, Heracles remained throughout the centuries essentially what he had been since Prodicus' day: an exemplary figure who undertook extreme toils and gained supreme recompense.

It is no exaggeration to say that Aristotle's Poetics is one of the most influential documents in the history of Western tradition. Not only, after its re-discovery in the early sixteenth century, did it dominate literary theory and practice for no less than three hundred years. Even after it had lost its privileged status – first to the alternative theories of literature brought forth by the Romantic movement and then to the literary theory and practice of twentieth-century modernism – the Poetics still retained its role of the normative text in opposition to which those new theories were being formulated. It will suffice to bring to mind the explicitly non-Aristotelian theory of drama developed by Bertold Brecht to see that, even when rejected, it was the Poetics that dictated the agenda of the theorists.

This has changed in the last thirty years, with the emergence of post-modern literary theory. Although in the questioning of the notions of closure, of artistic illusion, of unity of plot the post-modern theory owes much more than it cares to admit to such modernists as Brecht or Adorno and through them to Aristotle, the damnatio memoriae it has imposed on the Poetics is so thorough that some theorists seem to be hardly aware of the very fact of its existence. This is probably why many theorists, in their privileging of emotional distancing over identification, meta-theatrality over illusion, formal and semantic openness over determinacy and closure, find their models in Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other non-Western literary traditions rather than in ancient Greece. That is to say, in so far as Aristotle is no longer considered relevant to literary theory, Greek literary tradition too is not considered relevant. The tacit presupposition on which this attitude is based is that Aristotle's Poetics adequately represents ancient Greek literary practice.

In the first poem of Tristia 1, Ovid claims me mare, me uenti, me fera iactat hiems (‘the sea, the winds, the savage winter storm harass me repeatedly’, 1.1.42). This is no mere rhetorical flourish: the immediacy of the present tense becomes apparent in the second poem in the collection, which purports to be the poet's words as he faces a storm at sea. Critics tend to treat this poem as a literary exercise, focusing upon Ovid's exploitation of epic descriptions of the sea as a vast elemental force, subject to the machinations of the gods. In particular, interest has centred upon Ovid's debt to the storms which face Aeneas and Odysseus in Aeneid 1, 3, and 5 and Odyssey 5, as well as the relationship between this poem and Ovid's own version of an ‘epic’ storm in the story of Ceyx and Alcyone at Metamorphoses 11.410–748.

However, this poem contains much more than the sum of its various epic models: 1.2 is programmatic for the rest of Tristia 1, not least because it can be seen as the first ‘proper’ poem of the collection, given that 1.1 is addressed to Ovid's new book of poetry as he sends it to Rome, and as such, self-consciously stands apart from the rest of the book.

The fourth-century painted ceiling at Trier, Germany was destroyed less than two decades after it was decorated, yet today it is one of the best-known monuments of Late Antique Gaul (figure 1). In excavations begun by Theodor Kempf in 1945, archaeologists collected the ceiling's fragments from the ruins of a Roman house beneath the city's Romanesque cathedral. Painstaking assembly of the plaster fragments into their original form was completed in 1980. Now displayed in the Trier Episcopal Museum, the ceiling is a rare example of Late Antique domestic painting. It comprises fifteen trompe l'oeil coffers which are outlined by red and green borders and a yellow guilloche. Each coffer contains an image of a different subject; bust-length female and male single figures alternate with pairs of putti in various active poses.

The ceiling's rarity, its mysterious, unidentified figures, and the possibility proposed by Kempf that it belonged to a palace built by the emperor Constantine have made it the subject of extensive scholarship. Because conservators assembled the ceiling over a thirty-five year span and individual scenes were published as they were completed, the first scholars of the ceiling studied sections in isolation from the whole monument. Attention first focused on the depictions of the woman with the mirror and the woman with the jewel box, because they were the first single figures to be restored and published. Many archaeologists and art historians concentrated on identifying the women as portraits of Constantine's family. Irving Lavin took a different approach and carefully addressed the painting's classicizing style. Scholars in the 1980s, with the advantage of the ceiling's completed restoration, have considered the ceiling as a thematic whole.