There are dangers and pleasures in reducing stories to universal themes. The Odyssey seems all too aware of this. Part of its appeal comes from whether this tale of a single man returning home can stand for far greater questions of what it means to be human. Our pleasure as we recognize these familiar stories mirrors the delight of the poem's characters as they recognize Odysseus. We want such events to be universal, because the pleasure of the familiar helps us on our own journey through the dangers and uncertainties of life. But, as an increasingly vast scholarly bibliography reminds us, recognition in this poem is far from simple. The poem's delight in riddles and trickery means that the joy of any delight in recognition conflicts with its rhetoric of suspicion and the almost paranoid need of its hero for self-preservation. This to and fro is also part of the poem's wider economy of thrift, as if we must pay for any pleasure we gain in recognition with the pain of belated reflection.

In the medical practice of Asclepian dream incubation, dreams offered a conduit through which the divine power of the healing god could be visited upon an ailing suppliant. This practice was enough of a part of everyday life in fifth-century Athens that it achieved the dubious honor of an extended parody in Aristophanes’ Plutus. An extensive inscriptional record suggests that it continued to flourish for many centuries. But there was another type of dream employed in ancient Greek and Roman medical practice, with a much scanter trail of evidence. These dreams had endogenous, physiological origins and provided information about the internal disposition of the body not by divine intervention, but by some manner of inward perception on the part of the patient. With the rising interest in observational methodology in the fith century, opsis, and ideally autopsy, became the basis on which scientific knowledge was produced and elaborated. Taboos against physically opening the human body, in life as well as in death, prevented physicians from directly observing their patients’ interiors. The visions of dreams, then, could potentially provide doctors with a uniquely valuable diagnostic tool: genuine access to the observation of a body's internal condition, albeit in a strange, mediated form.

Titles count for something. When conferred upon poems and plays they have the capacity both to rouse and to control the expectations of potential readers and spectators. You buy tickets to a performance of the Antigone only to find when you take your seat that it is a modern comedy; whether you are furious or whether you are amused, you are at least surprised. The titles of literary works have implications; they may be designed to entice, to intrigue, to whet the appetite, to shock. Giving something a name enables it to be spoken about as a distinct entity; giving a text a name may also imply some particular fully or partially defined purpose or character. But while titles sometimes describe, they can also mislead. To the minds of critics, titles are apt to suggest certain issues and questions for consideration, but may also tend to discourage the consideration of other issues and questions of equal or even greater importance.

The challenge to classicists to read Josephus ‘as literature’ is an awkward one, because it throws into relief the crooked, appropriative practices we undertake in the name of literary criticism. If Josephus' works are to be seen as ‘literature’—a category closely associated with specifically Hellenic literary ideals, in much of the ancient world as well as the modern academy—then we are also avoiding looking at them as documents of early Jewish cultural history or belief. ‘Literature’ is far from a neutral category.

Josephus would, however, have probably approved, at any rate up to a point. In the proem to the Jewish Archaeology—on which this article will focus—he promises a work of ‘universal usefulness’ (κοινή ὠϕέλειαν, 1.3), which will appear ‘worthy of study to the whole Greek world’ (ἅπασι…τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἀξίαν σπουδῆς, 1.5). Unlike Against Apion, which denigrates Greek historiography in relation to Jewish and other near-eastern narrative traditions (see esp. 1.6-56), the Archaeology seeks to translate biblical discourse into a Greek-friendly register. In terms of communication, ‘universal’ necessarily means ‘Greek’, a point of which the translators of the Septuagint were aware (as much as Cicero and Paul). Moreover, the tralatitious language (Thucydidean ὠϕέλεια, Dionysian σπουδή) coupled with the direct allusion in the work's title to Dionysius' Roman Archaeology reinforce the already clear impression that Josephus is inscribing his project into the Greek cultural tradition, marking its intelligibility within the conceptual framework that we would call ‘literature’, and Josephus and his contemporaries called paideia. The Archaeology converts the fragmented and at times self-contradictory narrative of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) into a coherent chronological narrative, seeking to confer on it the legitimacy (as gentile Greeks would see it) of historical narrative.

Sorting out just what Florus’ condensed work of history is has proved a significant impediment to an understanding of what it might mean. F.R.D. Goodyear's terse précis of Florus ‘The historian’—carefully decoupled from ‘The orator’ and ‘The poet’—in the Cambridge History of Classical Literature begins tellingly: ‘Florus’ outline of Roman history, ending with Augustus, was in late antiquity inaccurately described as an epitome of Livy.’ This is accurate enough. Despite the transmitted title, Epitoma(e) de Tito Liuio (also Bellorum omnium annorum septingentorum libri n. duo), Florus’ work is notably distinct from, say, Justin's abridgment of Pompeius Trogus or the Livian Periochae. Livy looms large in Florus’ history, but at no point in the text is he signaled by name, and numerous structural and thematic features mark this diminutive work's divergence from its huge predecessor. Florus’ Tableau (Jal's chosen title) simply doesn't read as mere paraphrase of Ab urbe condita. He frequently reshuffles, omits, or contradicts material found in Livy, or covers content that Livy does not include, or does not reach chronologically. Alongside Livy, Cato, Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, Seneca the Elder, Lucan, and (seemingly) Tacitus are conspicuous presences in Florus. Much has been said about how Florus fails to be a proper epitome. However, and perhaps more significantly as regards the reception of Florus’ quirky historiography, Goodyear's emphatic non-definition reinforces a summary dismissal of Florus’ value as a text. That is to say, in such a portrayal (and in that of many others), Florus suffers double punishment. He ‘has little to say which is new or remarkable’, but at the same time definitely fails as a reliable compiler. Derivative, and yet faithless: whatever Florus may be, he is something worse than epitome.

Perhaps the most intriguing feature of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis is the tendency of the characters to alter their attitudes towards the human sacrifice. Menelaus and Iphigenia (and even Achilles, it would appear) each undergo a single but remarkable change of mind, while Agamemnon displays so much confusion and uncertainty in adjusting his attitudes that it is not perfectly clear just how many times he actually changes his mind. These about-faces are not merely responses to changing circumstances or fresh information; rather they dramatize in an unusually arresting fashion a characteristically Euripidean psychology that emphasizes those forces or tendencies, both inside and outside the mind, that work to disrupt or even preclude the moral, intellectual or psychological integration of the character.

Now although this psychology typifies Euripidean drama in general in varying degrees, it would appear to take a more extreme form in the I.A. than in much earlier plays such as Medea or Hippolytus. We shall find it of some interest then, after examining closely the characterization and psychology of this late play, to hazard a number of necessarily brief comparisons with some earlier plays and also with Sophoclean drama.

I shall comment upon the way the elder Philostratus, author of Imagines, inscribes both the art of painting and his own interpretation of 65 particular paintings within a larger framework, which is composed of nature on the one hand, and the human perception of nature on the other. To get to this framework in a slightly oblique way, I will start with a brief reminder of Philostratus' often neglected classification of the arts.

In his Life of Apollonius of Tyana 8.7, Philostratus takes notice of the established opposition between the mechanic and the liberal arts (τέχναι βάναυσοι and τέχναι σοϕαί), but then proceeds to further divide the liberal arts into three groups: some are simply σοϕαί (poetry, music, astronomy, the art of sophist and orator); others are only seemingly liberal, ψευδόσοϕοι (the art of wizards or jugglers); between these two groups are situated the ‘less liberal arts’ or ὑπόσοϕοι τέχναι, namely painting, plastic art, sculpture, navigation and agriculture.

The titles Parens Patriae and Pater Patriae seem to have been employed controversially in ideological battles of the late Republic, especially from the consulship of Cicero onwards. It seems clear that, among other ideas, these polyvalent titles were capable of evoking the traditional Greek antithesis between the good king (who behaves as a gentle father to his people) and the tyrant, but whereas it is the tyrant who kills citizens in Greek thought, at Rome there was an understanding that the father could execute grown-up dependants who were threatening the state. This ambiguity both complicated and energised debates about the autocratic behaviour of the leading men of the late Republic. In other words, the father analogy was intended as a positive characterisation of the warlords and other leaders but its prominence in the first century BCE shows how anxious the Romans were about limiting and justifying the killing of citizens only as a last resort for the good of the state. Noticeably, Julius Caesar advertises the title Parens Patriae on his coins, and he was evidently invoked as Parens in the Forum cult which flourished for a time after his death. When Cicero speaks of his behaviour in 63 BCE and the positive interpretations put upon it by his friends, he tends to use the terms parens and pater synonymously. We ought to follow this cue and think that there is a fair degree to which the two can be synonymous. On the other hand, Caesar's supporters might have intended a contrast with his ideological rival Cicero, who had executed the Catilinarian conspirators without a trial. Their aim might have been to emphasise connotations of state benefactor and saviour rather than coercive aspects to do with patria potestas and the ius uitae necisque. The form Parens Patriae appears on the face of it to be less potentially threatening than Pater Patriae and more inclined to stress ideas of lifegiving, nurturing, and the like.

Oppian's address to Marcus Aurelius signals the end of his five-book didactic epic on sea-fishing and encapsulates the poetic project of the Halieutica: no ordinary fish-treatise, this poem illuminates the extraordinary realm of the sea and is presented as a gift and homage to the Roman emperor. The work, written by a Cilician during the joint rule of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (176-180 CE), attained great popularity in antiquity, was used as a Byzantine school-text and was much admired in the Renaissance and subsequent centuries. In more recent times, however, Oppian has languished in relative neglect. At the turn of the twentieth century, Wilamowitz curtly (and characteristically) dismissed the Halieutica as tedious and derivative, a poem whose subject-matter stems less from first-hand observation than from a ‘stale’ academic knowledge:

I have several times in the past given my students the following oversimplified scheme. Each of Virgil's three works was based on a Greek original: the Eclogues on the Idylls of Theocritus, the Georgics on Hesiod's Works and Days, the Aeneid on Homer's two epics. The difference among these Greek poets (I used to say in my opinionated way) is that while Theocritus was a very fine poet, and Homer of course a genius, Hesiod was only mediocre; therefore Virgil depended on him less and was able to be freer and more genuine in the Georgics than in the Eclogues or the Aeneid. And that, I used to conclude, is why only the Georgics surpasses its model, and justifies Dryden's description of it as the most perfect poem by the most perfect poet.

After spending some time working with the literary sources of the Georgics, I am still inclined to the same final conclusion, that the Georgics is Virgil's masterpiece. I have, however, come to some new observations about the relation of the Georgics to its literary predecessors, which may help in a small way to illuminate the poem.

Plautus' Captivi is a play of discovery rather than of action. Its plot is not so much a story as a situation, which is misperceived at first but gradually revealed to the characters in the drama. The chief complications of the plot are all given as part of the initial conditions, which are described in the prologue as having occurred prior to the time of the dramatic action. There had been a war between two Greek communities, Elis and Aetolia. The event itself is strictly and explicitly banished from the stage as befitting tragedy, not comedy (58-62). The prisoners taken on either side in the war were sold as slaves, as commonly happened. Among these was a young Aetolian named Philopolemus, son of Hegio, who fell into the possession of a doctor in Elis called Menarchus. As a result, Hegio, though a man of excellent character, has begun to purchase slaves on the slave market, not with an eye to profit, however, but in order to acquire an Elean captive whom he may exchange for his own son. On the day before the date on which the play is imagined to take place, Hegio has succeeded in buying, at considerable cost, a distinguished citizen of Elis named Philocrates, along with his personal slave, Tyndarus.

In this paper I shall outline a possible new interpretation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. I find that despite universal agreement that this drama has immediate and deep relevance to our lives, there is no available reading which comes closely to grips with the rich, specific details of the play as well as its broad outline. Prometheus Bound is neither a symbolist drama nor an allegory, since the Olympian gods and their predecessors were immediate, shared reality for the Greeks of the early fifth century. So we should begin by asking what Aeschylus meant by his choice of scene and subject, and in particular what issues would have been evoked for the Athenian audience by the confrontation between Prometheus and Zeus.

The manuscripts place before this drama an excerpt from the History of Poetry attributed to Dionysius the younger. Singling out Aeschylus' Prometheus plays for special praise, the author comments that ‘the dramas are filled with the most senior of the gods, and all the masks, both on the stage and in the orchêstra, are divine’.

In his 1980 article ‘Aristophanes as a Lyric Poet’, Michael Silk argued that Aristophanes' lyrics, widely admired as jewels of Greek poetry, were overrated. He faulted them above all for lack of intellectual point and profundity, for a generic, timeless lyricism that lacked a genuine metaphysical dimension. To the hoopoe's song in Birds, for example, he juxtaposed Pindar's famous—

(Pythian 8.95-97)

Creatures of a day!

What is someone?

What is no one?

Man: a shadow's dream.

But when god-given glory comes a bright light shines upon us and our life is sweet.

(tr. Frank J. Nisetich)

The sixth book of Silius Italicus' Punica opens with the aftermath of the battle at lake Trasimene: the victory of the Carthaginians has been total. An analeptic narrative on the adventures of Regulus in Libya during the First Punic War occupies a large portion of this book (62-551). Regulus' son, Serranus, wounded after the battle at Trasimene, finds refuge at the house of his father's faithful companion, Marus. In a flash-back narrative, Marus relates the killing of a serpent at the river Bagrada (140-293), the capture of Regulus and his mission to Rome (299-402), Marcia's reaction to her husband's uncompromising attitude, Regulus' speech to the Senate (403-520), and his final return to Carthage, resulting in his death (521-51).

The poet brings several innovations into his account in Book 6 in comparison to pre-Silian tradition. He introduces three persons around the figure of Regulus who are otherwise unknown or remain anonymous in other sources. The first is Serranus, Regulus' son. Although Regulus' son must have participated in the battle at Trasimene, this fabricated Serranus is called iuuenis (‘young man’, 101, 415) and flore nitens primo (‘in the flower of his youth’, 65), references which further complicate historical chronology. Another Silian innovation is Marus, Regulus' faithful companion during his tribulations in Africa. His presence fits into the scheme of Silius' portrayal of Serranus' ‘education’ by Marus, who will tell the story of Regulus' heroic adventures in Africa and Rome. Generational continuity would be guaranteed through the precepts of an older man. And finally, Silius gives Marcia herself a substantial role.

It is now widely recognised that Medea's last words in her elegiac letter to Jason, Heroides 12, combine the terrible foreshadowing of infanticide with a telling metapoetic signature:

quo feret ira, sequar! facti fortasse pigebit;

et piget infido consuluisse uiro.

uiderit ista deus, qui nunc mea pectora uersat!

nescioquid certe mens mea maius agit.

(Ov. Her. 12.209-12)

Where my anger leads, I'll follow. Perhaps I'll regret my deed—

as I regret the attention I paid to my faithless husband.

Be that the concern of the god who now goads my breast!

Certainly, something greater is stirring in my mind!

Ovid positions Heroides 12 as ‘a “prequel” to his own Medea-tragedy’, that maius opus which notionally provides Medea with an appropriate generic setting in which to exact her revenge; elegy is too light a medium to bear the weight of so tragic a denouement. Heroides 12 thus concludes by adapting itself to the contours of the larger Ovidian career—a career in which he was to revisit the Medea-theme for the third time in Metamorphoses 7. There, her life-story is selectively told from the beginning of the Argonautic voyage and Medea's first infatuation with Jason to her magical intervention in his gaining of the golden fleece (1-158); from her rejuvenation of Jason's father, Aeson, to the dastardly way in which she induces the daughters of Pelias, Aeson's half-brother, to murder their father (159-349); and from the briefly told murder of her children at Corinth to her marriage to Aegeus and the attempted murder of Theseus, his son, at Athens (394-423). At this point Medea takes flight once more (424; cf. 350-93, in the wake of Pelias' murder) and disappears from the Metamorphoses for good—or, we might imagine, for yet more evil to be worked.

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, it would seem, is an exercise in closure. In the opening scene, Oedipus, worn down by years of wandering blind and hungry, arrives at the borders of Athens. Here is where his legendary sufferings—his murder of his father, his incestuous marriage to his mother, his betrayal by his sons, his exile from Thebes—are fated to end. Following his miraculous death, his body will become a sacred gift to the city that receives him, protecting it against future attack. In the closing moments of the play, everything unfolds according to plan. Oedipus disappears offstage and mysteriously descends into the earth. The king of Athens, Theseus, alone marks the spot of his disappearance, knowledge he will pass down to his sons as part of his responsibility to the city. By the end of the tragedy, then, Oedipus has made his way home to the gods in a land capable of honouring his awesome, singular fate.

The concept of ‘coming home’ is integral, as this précis suggests, to the play's logic of closure. Yet, crucially, it governs only one of the two planes on which the drama unfolds, that of the gods. Oedipus' life has been in the hands of the gods since before he was born. That they reclaim him at the end of his life gives his exit the feel of a return. By contrast, the path to Athens, for all its meandering, is not circular but linear. Athens is definitively not Thebes, as the tragedy demonstrates over and over (nor is it Corinth, Oedipus' other point of origin). Thebes is, rather, the home that Oedipus rejects, most spectacularly through his resistance to Creon's demand that he return to the city of his birth. What is more, he repudiates any relationship to the Theban throne. When Polyneices arrives to ask his father to support his bid to reclaim the kingship from his brother Eteocles, Oedipus does not simply refuse to intervene but drives his son away with curses. His refusal is a refusal not just of Thebes but of the Labdacid line altogether (he goes so far as to call Polyneices ἀπάτωϱ, ‘fatherless’, 1383; see also 1369: ὑμεῖς δ' ἀπ' ἄλλον ϰοὐϰ ἐμοῦ πεϕύϰατον, ‘you are from another and not born from me’); his pact with Theseus creates an alternate genealogy of fathers and sons. Seen in this light, Oedipus' arrival at Colonus and, ultimately, his dramatic exit become the final stages of a process not of coming home but of leaving Thebes behind and with it ‘the radical tragic terrain where there can be no escape from the tragic in the resolution of conflict or in the institutional provision of a civic future beyond the world of the play’.

Was Homer sublime? The question is rarely asked today. Sublimity was once a staple of the ancient intellectual traditions, as Homer is perfectly suited to show. The present essay will take up the question of Homeric sublimity by examining four case studies drawn from ancient astronomy to literary criticism to Homer himself, who not only licensed but also inaugurated these later traditions. Longinus will lurk everywhere in the background, but part of the point of this essay is that Longinus, while broadly representative, is in fact a minority voice in the wider landscape of ancient thought, as is the purely literary critical perspective that he is usually assumed to represent. Just as sublimity transcends customary frameworks of experience by putting these radically into question, so does it challenge the ways in which we tend to carve up antiquity into domains and disciplines that are artificially removed from one another. Sublimity by its nature crosses over genres and discourses and brings out the underlying patterns of thought that they share. But now to our case studies, which will give us a clear entrée to the problem, and will supply us with criteria of what should or should not count as ‘sublime’, as we follow each case in turn.

The debate about how unified and consistent are the epic-like Histories of Herodotus is reminiscent of the form and redaction criticism developed around the Bible. The evangelical author, whose purpose is not to address posterity for a statement purely of the historical record, but rather to solicit his contemporaries in a catechetical fashion, shapes the historical deeds of the life and times of the Hebrews to suit a purpose, which includes history but is finally beyond mere history. The prophets, and their sources, are didactic; similarly Herodotus arranged his material for the purpose of highlighting the conflict of tyranny and freedom, of despotic empire and more democratic coalition. Books VII, VIII, and IX are the most elaborate and tight-woven of all the Herodotean logoi, just as the passion narratives that conclude the Gospels are the most factual and sustained narrative. The episodes prior to the climax life-death events in both the Histories and the Gospels compose a melange of fact and story, anecdote and reminiscence, pithy statement and imagined speeches, and colourful, fabulous deeds and wonders. Characters are introduced and biographies sketched: mini-dramas and conflicts among various interest groups build — all contributing to the climax and the great passion struggle. By way of introduction to these awesome events yet in the remembrances of living men, Matthew and Luke give the marvellous infancy narratives, and Herodotus presents the mythological rape stories of his prolog. And, just as the whole Bible begins with a marvellous blend of myth and history that is Genesis and ends with the epilog that is Apocalypse, so the Histories begin with the almost-out-of-memory stories of the kings’ daughters kidnapped, and end with the epilog where the ‘ghost’ of Cyrus appears and there discloses the final revelation of the inner impoverished core of Xerxes’ imperial court government.

So wrote G. Schubert in his study of dream symbolism (Die Symbolik des Traumes) published in 1814—one of many works of dream theory that served as a resource for Freud, whose magnum opus—The Interpretation of Dreams—would appear at the turn of the century. Schubert offers the example of the nonsensical association of the word ‘writing’ with the image of two men (‘one carrying the other on his back’) in an effort to argue a thesis later challenged by the work of Freud: that a ‘daytime language of words’ exists independent of, and unaffected by, a ‘nighttime language of dreams’. Read nearly a century after Freud, the passage is ironic, as Neil Hertz has observed, largely because Schubert's exemplary ‘nonsensical’ combination of word and image is richly suggestive of one of the principal concerns of poststructuralist psychoanalysis: how writing is a process of bearing the burden of the past and shouldering the father, an (oedipal) narrative of the son coming to terms with paternal authority: ‘The weight of the older man's body, the pressure of his will give substance to the voiced word…[w]riting, Freud would have us say, is Oedipal, a coming to terms with the Father, a shouldering of the burden of the past.’

Latin literature would be the poorer if the Satires of Persius had not survived. Many of course do not like his work because of a certain perceived incoherence or lack of shape or unity in his Satires, and many are of the opinion that their author was a student of books rather than of life: ‘an ideal example of an arrogant and spiritless young man wrapped up in poetry.’ As a merely academic poet, it is believed, Persius could do no more than depend heavily on poets who had gone before, and especially on Horace, reminiscences of whose work thickly lace the lines of Persius' satires. Furthermore, it is widely believed, Persius' ideas and the language in which they are expressed are often so obscure that it is impossible to interpret their meaning. The poet openly espoused a system he called iunctura acris, ‘the harsh collocation’ or ‘the surprising or illogical collocation’, by which he referred to a certain harsh, even violent, yoking together of ideas or images or words. The recent and most useful commentary by R. A. Harvey consistently interprets phrases by identifying them directly as iunctura acris, and a count of the occasions this definition is utilised (or resorted to) would be instructive. Persius' iunctura acris is evidently based on Horace's well-known callida iunctura, ‘the clever collocation’ (AP 47f.); but the changes wrought by Persius on this ‘shared’ phrase unequivocally mark the special characteristics of Persius' poetry, which are a sharp ferocity of expression and a certain aggressively extravagant imagination.