For poetry, read poverty, passim.
Martin Parker

This poetry-stricken essay on onomastication finds in Tristia 1.10 a polynymous atoll in Tristia 1's ocean of anonymy, allonymy, anomie, anatomi.

Sail away sail away sail away.
Enya

All aboard! The first book of the Tristia is an emotion-ocean autoportrait, where elegiac couplets and compositions mime troughs of helpless misery and swells of resentment at reality:

We start with a stop. In recent years, long pause has been taken for inquest into the narrative dynamics of ancient literature. How stories are told, by whom, in what order—these have become key questions of narratology, a discipline whose tools most critics would now keep somewhere in their kit. Narratological criticism of poetry has ‘naturally’ drifted towards poems of long narrative span (i.e. hexameter epics). Recently, however, the ‘smaller’ genres have been extended the benefits of narratological civilisation, particularly in the realm of temporality. To take a loaded and leading example, Latin love elegy has been well serviced by narratology of late; what was once considered a genre ‘unfit’ for narrative, let alone narratological study, is now a prime setting for both. But it surprised me that the recent volume Latin Elegy and Narratology all but neglected Ovid's most ‘narrative’ elegy of all: the Fasti. Such an editorial decision may have been motivated by the perception that the Fasti needs no reclamation as a narrative poem; at any rate, the volume's interests lie in the processes of ‘fragmentation’, the way that elegy claims its own non-narrativity as alternative. Whatever the reasoning, I felt that the Fasti's near-relegation from this fascinating volume was something of an oversight. Many of the concerns emerging from the chapters on ‘other’ elegy can be usefully transferred to the Fasti.

Iamblichus' Babylonian Tales, whose extravagant adventures of female homoeroticism, extreme violence and mistaken identity sit uneasily alongside those told in the so-called ‘ideal’ Greek novels, is a work largely ignored by scholars of the ancient novel, or relegated to discussions of ‘fringe literature’ We are not helped by the fact that the novel survives only in fragments and through the critical summary by the Byzantine scholar Photius, in his collection of epitomes called Bibliotheca. This article attempts a fresh analysis of Babylonian Tales, taking as its starting point the sexual relationship between two of its female characters and moving on to discuss the politics of the novel and its self-positioning in relation to Rome and Roman conquest. It argues that Babylonian Tales challenges some of the rather neat stories that are currently told about the Greek novels, and that moving it from the ‘fringe’ to the centre might radically alter how we think about the genre.

The story of Euripides' Cyclops resembles the corresponding episode in the Odyssey, except that in Euripides' version Polyphemus, at the time of Odysseus' landing, is master of Silenus and a band of satyrs who tend his flocks. This circumstance is loosely connected with the tale of Dionysus' abduction by pirates, which is related in one of the Homeric hymns: the satyrs had put to sea in search of the god, and were blown ashore, much like Odysseus, at the Cyclopes' island, which by the time of Euripides had come to be specified as Sicily. A role for the satyrs was, of course, required by the genre of the satyr play — if there were exceptions, they were few — and their captivity in a remote and savage place seems to have been a common theme, especially in Euripides' contributions. Considerations such as these have depressed the interpretation of the Cyclops, which is the only complete specimen of the genre. Homer's narrative looks like the perfect stock upon which to graft the typical satyr-motifs, and criticism may rest content with revealing the few places where structural changes in the narrative are demanded by the working in of the new material. Apart from that, one need remark only upon differences of tone, for the satyr drama was by nature playful, a mood that was carried especially by the chorus and Silenus, no doubt, but which left its mark as well upon the treatment of the myth as a whole.

Over the last thirty years or so our understanding of the world of late antiquity has undergone a radical transformation. In addition to the important contributions by historians such as Peter Brown (on the body and society) and Averil Cameron (on the evolution of Christian discourse), new perspectives have also been opened up on the material culture of the later empire. In the arena of literary criticism, however, signs of any analogous transformation have been much less obvious. Though, of course, it is easy to overstate the case, it is nevertheless clear from the bibliographic record that the literature of the late antique period has not yet been subject to the intense critical attention of other epochs, such as the Second Sophistic. This article will attempt on a necessarily modest scale to address this lack of critical attention.

My primary focus is the fifth-century CE epic poem, the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, a product of Roman Egypt, written in Greek in forty-eight chapter-length books. It runs to over 21,000 hexameter lines—some five thousand lines longer than Homer's Iliad—and tells the story of the wine-loving Dionysus, the hero whose destiny it is to become a god. Though its influence on the wider literary culture of late antiquity was profound, it has remained a marginalised and neglected text within the history of modern classical scholarship. The Dionysiaca exists as an often quoted yet rarely read compendium of obscure mythological information, and is periodically mined for allusions to earlier and implicitly ‘better’ poets whose works have only survived in fragmentary form, but it is rarely considered on its own terms.

The Women of Trachis — or more properly, the Girls of Trachis — looks backward to a work of Aeschylus, and forward to one of Euripides. All three, the Oresteia, the Trachiniae, the Medea, are tragedies about the sexes.

The Trachiniae reminds us of the Oresteia in the following points: Heracles, like Agamemnon, has been away for a long time, on ‘men's business’. He brings home a concubine, Iole, as Agamemnon brings Cassandra. Deianeira, like Clytemnestra, comments on the silence of the captive girl. Deianeira, like Clytemnestra, causes the death of her husband. Deianeira has a son Hyllus who, like Orestes, is loyal to his father and outraged by his father's murder. There the similarity ends. Although Heracles is not totally unlike Agamemnon, Deianeira could hardly be more different from Clytemnestra: she is feminine and passive, gentle with Iole, whose silence she understands, and she kills her husband accidentally, from love, not hatred. Hyllus, too, is different from Orestes: even when he thinks Deianeira has wilfully murdered his father, the worst treatment he can conceive for her is banishment with his curse. In the Oresteia, gods are ever-present, and appear in person on the stage to effect the happy conclusion of the trilogy.

This article focuses on the Sacred Tales (henceforth ST), Aelius Aristides’ first-person account of his terrible diseases and subsequent healing brought about by Asclepius, and sheds new light on this text with the help of the notion of embodiment. In recent decades the ST has received a great deal of attention: scholars have offered two main readings of this work, oscillating between the poles of religion and rhetoric. Some have read the ST as an aretalogy while others have emphasised the rhetorical aims of this text and its connection with Second Sophistic literature.

With the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BCE, the political fortunes of one of Caesar's lesser political partisans began to wane. Gaius Sallustius Crispus, a minor political figure, formerly involved in scandal and now left without a backer, retired from politics and began to write history. His first project was an account of a failed coup d'état from some decades before. Sallust recorded the efforts of a thwarted candidate for Rome's highest office named Lucius Sergius Catilina to raise an army of disaffected Romans and foreigners and to install himself and his partisans at Rome. In the end, though, nothing much came of the plot: some were arrested and killed; some fought and died; others who had not been caught in too manifest support of Catiline were suddenly expressing their enmity for the monster.

It has long been noticed that in his Oedipus, Seneca diverges conspicuously from his primary model, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (OT), in a number of aspects. Prominent among these is an expansive, two-part ritual sequence at the play's center, comprising a prodigy-filled yet spectacularly unsuccessful sacrifice and extispicium followed by a more successful, if no less terrifying, necromancy to raise the slain Laius. This article concentrates on the sacrifice and extispicium (Sen. Oed. 288-402). I argue that in this episode Seneca has employed tragic contaminatio (the weaving into one play of significant elements from two or more different source plays) and allusion to produce an exceptionally innovative scene that is a remarkable display of the Roman playwright's ingenuity. For while Sophocles’ OT remains an active intertext, Seneca has also imported elements from Euripides’ Phoenissae. His primary model for the passage, moreover, is actually to be found in a different Sophoclean Theban play, Antigone. Specifically, Seneca has reworked and elaborated upon the climactic reversal scene between Creon and Tiresias in Antigone (998-1114), in which the seer reports on the corruption of the prophetic rites he has just performed and identifies Creon as the cause of the pollution, both for his continued refusal to allow the burial of the fallen Polyneices and for his entombment of the living Antigone.

What, exactly, identifies the ekphrastic at work? Some basic definitive properties can be agreed: ekphrasis is a descriptive trope that brings what it describes vividly before the imaginative gaze of its audience. It is through its vivid evocation of a scene or object unseen to this audience that the ekphrasis fulfils its purpose, and makes an emotional impact upon them. The affective power of ekphrasis thus draws its audience into the fictional world of its narrative, blurring the boundaries necessarily erected by its verbal frame, while at the same time the focus on crafted objects that we often see in ekphraseis (particularly in those on which scholars have predominantly chosen to concentrate)—and the break that an ekphrasis can create when it is interposed in a continuing narrative—serve to highlight the very createdness of this world.

So ekphrasis is on the face of it a well-defined literary figure, easily recognisable both by its intrinsic attributes and by its effects. Nevertheless the boundaries of ekphrasis are not as clearly defined as the summary above might suggest. Ekphraseis of art objects have commanded the most scholarly attention: they allow for discussion of the fashioning of the text as well as its function and they conform to modern understandings of what an ekphrasis looks like. But defined in classical terms, ekphrasis covers a far broader descriptive territory than does verbal representation of representative art alone and can include, as well as descriptions of objets d'art, descriptions of battles, of cities, of persons, places, times and events, of plants and animals, and of festivals…

Almost every aspect of the Senecan text known as Phoenissae has been disputed except its authorship. The title, Phoenissae in the Etruscus, Thebais in the A-tradition of Mss, seems in each case to have been imposed for extraneous reasons, the former because of the close relationship between the text's second Jocasta-based phase and the opening episodes of Euripides' Phoenissae, the latter under the influence of Statius' epic poem of the Seven against Thebes. Euripides' chorus of Phoenician captives is not tightly integrated with his play, but there is no reason other than convention to assume that Seneca had intended to compose choral material for these scenes, still less to identify the chorus as Phoenician women. Do these scenes represent a complete dramatic action? Hardly, since the long opening dialogue lacks the characteristic expository material of a prologue and the extended last scene reaches a stalemate with no indication of either a moral resolution or a physical exodos. Indeed the crucial deaths of the brothers in mutual slaughter and of their mother from grief must surely have been the climax of any drama projected by Seneca as they were for Euripides. Do these scenes represent a continuous action in the Senecan sense, which need not entail continuity of both place and time? So most scholars in recent years have argued.

‘I no longer look upon Theocritus as a romantic writer,’ wrote Lady Montagu to Alexander Pope; ‘he has only given a plain image of the way of life amongst the peasants of his country … I don't doubt, had he been born a Briton, but his Idylliums had been filled with descriptions of thrashing and churning.’ Thanks to greater sophistication about the nature of pastoral and a better knowledge of Hellenistic poetry we have probably left behind forever the notion of Theocritus as the conveyor of a ‘plain image’ of rustic life. The alternative is not, of course, the ‘romantic’ Theocritus, but a poet of consummate literary artistry, wit, and irony.

Besides the critical commonplace of rustic realism the other stumbling block to a satisfactory appreciation of Theocritus has been the inevitable comparison with Virgil. Critics who have viewed Theocritus through lenses adjusted to Virgil have tended to emphasize the emotional complexity, inwardness, and seriousness of the Latin poet over against the outward-facing playfulness and lightness of the Greek. Theocritus certainly lacks the tension between historical reality and poetry which gives the Eclogues their special depth and poignancy; but he has a seriousness of a different sort. The simplicity and trivial realism which are sometimes attributed to the bucolic Idylls are in fact themselves part of the poetic fiction and often stand in deliberate self-contradiction with mythical elements in the form and structure of the work.

Elucidation of the imbricate ironies in the Alcestis has been an important dimension of much of the scholarship on the play during the past twenty five years. Another type of inquiry, best represented by the work of A. P. Burnett, has been the identification of typologies of plot and scene. Both approaches share, however, a common deficiency in the subjectivity of their analyses of character. Is Heracles ‘a big-hearted, stupid glutton and drinker’ (Beye) or ‘the one man in the world who does not pursue a hedonistic career’, the hero whose ‘cause is freedom, the freedom of spirit and freedom of action’ (Rosemeyer)? How are we to view Admetus' spontaneous proposal to commission a statue of Alcestis as a surrogate wife for his bed? Is this ‘a promise that is positive, delicately stated, and filled with a powerful meaning’ (Burnett), or is it ‘difficult to believe that a fifth-century audience would not have found the idea ludicrous and disgusting’ (Beye)? Is Alcestis ‘a tragic heroine’, one whose love for Admetus motivated her sacrifice (Barnes, Dale), or a rather cold figure, not above emotional blackmail (Beye)? Is Admetus ultimately guided to success by his ‘nobility’ (Burnett) or one whose person, apart from his vague hosiotēs (‘piety’), offered no particular interest to Euripides (Dale)? A sampling shows that the discrepancy of critical perception is often so intense as to suggest the existence of an entirely new, exquisitely subtle facet of Euripidean irony which survives as a wilfully dolose legacy to the community of scholars.

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

M. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

In a study published some years ago, J.-P. Vernant drew attention to the fundamental distinction Greek thought makes between spoken and all other modes of divination. It is a difference that reflects certain givens of ancient social and political structure, and that has its roots in the marked orientation of Greek society towards open discourse. What he has in mind as a paradigm of oral divination is the question-and-answer format of many ancient oracles. He argues that this provides far more direct and more ‘democratic’ access to the will of deity or the way of things than do styles of consultation dependent on interpretative schemes which, because of their indirect nature, are accessible only to a small and privileged group. The fine art of pyromancy, for instance, deploys a framework of transformational rules and techniques whose complexity removes the interpretation of ‘fire signs’ (empura sēmata) from the realm of ordinary skills and makes it instead the special province of a priestly caste, such as that of the Iamidai at Olympia.

The Frogs continues to intrigue and to trouble. In structure it does not resemble any of Aristophanes' other plays, since the poet here inverts the sequence of scenes, contest, and parabasis he normally used; and the play does not possess, so many would argue, any overall organic unity of content. Even worse, Aristophanes' decision to make the literary contest of two tragedians the climactic issue of his comedy might be considered foolishly risky, involving him in matters dangerously ‘high-falutin’ and so conceivably boring to an audience whose intelligence he had too often cajoled to be deceived about. As if deliberately to defeat both unity and sense, Aristophanes also saw fit to add another chorus to his play, totally distinct in character from his main chorus and apparently unrelated to his theme: frogs and literature? Strangest of all, he leaves this additional chorus unseen, if not unheard, in a visual medium like the theatre where an audience in antiquity no less than today might be counted on for some prolonged laughter or applause at the sight of cleverly costumed performers hopping, croaking, and looking altogether ridiculous.

Peace was performed at the City Dionysia in 421 BCE, just days before the signing of the fifty-year treaty known as the Peace of Nikias, which brought an end to the first ten years of the Peloponnesian War. The negotiations that led up to this definitive moment for Athens and Sparta had been initiated the previous summer by the simultaneous deaths of Cleon and Brasidas at Amphipolis, who had been, according to Thucydides, ‘the two principal opponents of peace on either side’ (5.16.1). These unexpected deaths created a power vacuum which was filled by more moderate politicians on both sides of the conflict—Nikias and Pleistoanax, respectively—each of whom had his own personal reasons for desiring peace, apart from alleviating the battle fatigue felt keenly throughout the Greek world by this point. At Athens, the break in military action occasioned by this transference of power put the focus back on the political situation at home, and it was during this break that Aristophanes produced his cautiously optimistic play Peace, which, in its celebration of this fortuitous turn of events, also displayed a renewed interest in the well-being of the Athenian home front at this time.

Two sets of ‘autobiographical’ text that span the transition from the first principate into the second—the Res Gestae Diui Augusti and the poetry of Ovid's exile—offer a rare opportunity to compare the contemporaneous self-portraits of the politician and poet whose careers have evolved in tandem up until this point. Yet where scholars have studied the interactions between these texts, they have tended to overlook the parallels between the self-fashioning strategies deployed by their respective authors in favour of a hunt for corroborating historical data.

A recent book by Michele Lowrie challenges us to treat as part of the same problematic the authorising claims made in texts as ostensibly disparate as these. In this study, Lowrie balances her exploration of how the literary productions of the Augustan era responded to its social and political upheavals, reflecting and refracting the performative powers that were being used to effect political transformation at this time, against the efforts made by Augustus to appropriate the self-fashioning strategies exemplified by the poets. Her focus on how Augustus' own manipulation of the media replicates the modes of authorship practised by his literary contemporaries thus makes the social energies circulating across cultural boundaries in Rome at this time appear as traffic in a two-way street. With this work, then, we have been given a new incentive to treat the authorial names and authorising claims of Augustus and of the ‘Augustan’ poets as a package-a prompt to which I will respond in this article by unpacking the signatures of ‘Naso’ and ‘Augustus’ as a twin pair. I will therefore be looking to the Res Gestae and to the poetry of Ovid's exile in order to see how the authorial signatures of poet and princeps fare alongside each other at this defining moment of the Augustan principate; and will attempt to refine the theoretical framework required in order to plot the ways in which these different types of signature play off one another.

Pignus Amoris

I begin with a pre-text. It is a short poem about intellectual hypocrisy which might have been written by Martial had he lived in southern California in the 1990's. Its author is in fact John Sullivan. The title of the poem is ‘Pop Sociologist’.