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.

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.

‘Bad poetry is written daily, and married women seduced; but it is seldom that a seduction becomes as famous as Helen's, or that a poem as bad as Colluthus’ survives for fourteen centuries to be re-edited with all the apparatus of scholarship and equipped with commentary at the rate of a page for every two lines of verse. γᾷ δ' ἐπισκήπτων πιϕαύσκω: Colluthus is one of the very worst ancient poets to have come down to us. His only notion of the art is to arrange in hexameters phrases borrowed from his predecessors, with little sense of their appropriateness or of narrative coherence. It is as if a parrot had learnt to fit his pseudo-speech to the metre of Shakespeare. Colluthus can give delight, but only to a connoisseur of the ludicrous.’ The opening paragraph of Martin West's review of Enrico Livrea's annotated edition of Colluthus may be the most devastating appreciation of The Abduction of Helen ever written. At the other end stands Giuseppe Giangrande's review of the same edition: ‘Colluthus was a poète savant, who delighted in skillfully borrowing, often with felicitous “humour” and “malice”, from his epic models, and who dexterously applied oppositio in imitando within the framework of arte allusiva.’

Ekphraseis of works of art exist at several levels. There is the physical, observable reality of an object or objects, or the potential for such. That (potential) reality may then be depicted within a work of art. A literary artist imaginatively (re-)presents that depiction, in the ekphrasis itself, and may further imbue the resultant description with a symbolic value for the story in which it is set. Not all of these layers need exist, nor need the correspondence between them be precise or even real. An ekphrasis, for example, may describe a completely fictitious object, which itself, however, reflects a possible actuality in the physical world of the senses. Or the question of symbolic value may appear irrelevant, if the purpose of the ekphrasis is instead to provide relief from the temporal drive of the narrative.

This paper seeks to elucidate the two surviving ekphraseis with astronomical content from Euripides, one from his Elektra describing a shield of Akhilleus, and the other from his Ion describing a ceiling tapestry. I take the view that if we can discern and then understand a potential reality described in an ekphrasis, then it is worth asking whether this reality helps us to understand better the literary image and hence its possible symbolism too. The need to answer such a question is the greater with regard to texts involving astronomical material, as this tends to lie outside modern readers' experience or knowledge, but lay well within the day-to-day experience of people in antiquity.

For well over a decade Pliny's Historia Naturalis has been recognised as a work which deals with moral questions and imperial culture as much as (perhaps more than) science and nature. These reassessments of the Elder Pliny move away from the disdainful and anachronistic judgments of his writings as ill-judged, naïve and unscientific, and towards a more productive analysis of the Historia Naturalis' symbolic significance and coherence within its first century Roman context. Mary Beagon finds that Pliny is representative of a particular first century ‘emphasis on humanity and its needs and aspirations’, while commenting that it is at this period that mundus and kosmos (Latin and Greek respectively for ‘world’ or ‘universe’) take on the specific meaning of ‘the inhabited world’. The coherence that Beagon finds in Pliny's work is therefore concentrated around the relationship between nature and humankind. It is this relationship, and the symbolic value given to natural phenomena, which allows so much of the Historia Naturalis to act as a cultural commentary on contemporary society. For example, Beagon, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Trevor Murphy identify luxuria (‘luxury’) as a key term in Pliny, and insist not only upon his aversion to this concept, but also on his transcendence of the traditional Roman diatribe against decadence and extravagance. For Beagon, Pliny's objection to luxury is partly determined by contemporary political and economic factors, as she claims that Pliny's stance mirrors that of Vespasian, who was attempting to rebuild the state's finances after Nero had squandered them. More particularly, luxuria is the antithesis of uita (‘life’), to the extent that it corrupts and distorts life, leading to passivity and desidia (‘lethargy’)—the exact opposite of the programmatic statement found in the Historia Naturalis Preface 19: uita uigilia est (‘life is being awake’).

Among the many delightful stories woven into Ovid's Metamorphoses, the tale of Baucis and Philemon in Book 8—not found before Ovid—has long proven a favourite with many readers. Narrated by the elderly Lelex, the story goes that Jupiter and Mercury are wandering on earth from door to door in need of shelter; they are received by a pious old couple, Baucis and Philemon, who entertain them with their utmost hospitality; the gods later reveal themselves, punish the inhospitable neighbourhood and reward the pious couple with everlasting life by turning them into sacred trees. This popular story has been the subject of at least two lighthearted operas, by Joseph Haydn (18th century) and Charles-François Gounod (19th century); both Rubens (c.1620) and Rembrandt (1658) have depicted scenes from the story on canvas; elegant poetic translations have been written by John Dryden (1693) and Jonathan Swift (1709). It is not difficult to understand why this story has provided particular enjoyment for the reader. In a poem which too often presents the gods as indifferent to justice and indulgent in their basest desires, here is a story which celebrates the proper relationship between divine and mortal, and pulls on moral, almost Christian heart-strings. Many might agree with G. Karl Galinsky's observation that the story has the effect of ‘radiating so obviously the sort of kindly warmth which some of Ovid's readers would like to find in more of [Ovid's] myths and, one suspects, in their daily lives.’

The lively debate about the function of the fable of Cupid and Psyche in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius is continually expanding. On the narrative level, they act like pairs of star-crossed lovers in the Greek Romance tradition, but by designating them ‘Love’ and ‘Soul’ Apuleius has invited philosophical, religious and loosely symbolic interpretations of this inset story. The ambiguity surrounding Cupid and Psyche (characters or concepts) is complicated and enriched by the storyline which concerns the falling in love of Love and the falling in love with Love by Soul (the respective states.of the hero and heroine). By making the Love God suffer the passion he inflicts upon other gods and upon mortals, Apuleius fulfils the sometimes heartfelt but more usually tongue-in-cheek desire of the elegiac poets to punish their tormentor. At the same time, Psyche (Soul) becoming besotted with Love has more serious implications in Platonist doctrine and her actions throughout the story and her ultimate fate have been read both positively and negatively by Apuleian scholars.

In the first throes of madness Seneca's Hercules declares, ‘I shall be borne aloft to the world's high spaces’ (in alta mundi spatia sublimis ferar, HF 958). To Amphitryon these are the unspeakable thoughts of a mind that is hardly sane, but nevertheless great (pectoris sani parum, / magni tamen, 974f.). For Gilbert Lawall, writing the first essay in the 1983 collection of Ramus essays on Senecan tragedy, the fundamental question of the play is the moral quality of its hero, who in his madness becomes a ‘caricature of his real self’. John Fitch, writing just a few years later, argued for a continuity of characterization between the hero of the labours and the murderer of his family. My own essay is concerned less with the morality of Hercules’ character and actions than with the poetics of sublime aspiration and the imagery of grand literary endeavour. Seneca's conception of sublime poetry, as embodied in the figure of tragic Hercules, I discuss through his reception of Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace. The ambivalence Fitch and others have observed in this tragedy of Herculean overreaching I interpret first in the light of a plurality of literary models of transgressive poetics. Juno and the chorus both see violence and danger in the figure of Hercules, but yet do not see the same figure. This difference is located to some degree in the different genres and particular texts which define their perspectives. The Hercules who makes war on the heavens and commits the drama's primary action is very much the creation of Juno and the tragic energies of famous programmatic passages of Aeneid 1 and 7. Lyric offers an alternative conception of sky-towering fame. In the latter part of the article I consider the Lucretian paradigm of heroic rebellion against tradition and Hercules’ failure to break the pattern of Junonian madness. Finally I reflect on the tensions of the Georgics—ars and labor holding ingenium and furor in fragile balance—and see them overwhelmed in the civil war which Hercules Furens, a more powerful Orpheus, wages with himself.

Early in the Pro Milone, Cicero's defence of Titus Annius Milo on trial for the murder of Publius Clodius Pulcher, the orator presents a list of exemplary figures from Roman history whose deeds offer parallels for Milo's alleged crime. Though these men murdered political enemies, they were nonetheless considered justified in their actions by their Roman peers. In emphatic and memorable last place in this list is an example drawn not from Roman history but from Greek tragedy:

Moschus' Europa has long been recognised to be a highly visual and pictorial poem. It is also dominated by an erotic theme: the sexual awakening of the maiden Europa and her love affair with Zeus. This article will focus on a connection between erotic theme and highly visual narrative that has received attention in relation to Greek texts from the Roman Empire, but none in relation to Moschus. The sophisticated and self-conscious use of vision and ekphrasis in erotic narrative which has been traced in authors such as Achilles Tatius (in particular by Goldhill) is anticipated, I shall argue, in Moschus' Hellenistic poem. The work done on this theme in Achilles Tatius provides a useful framework for analysing Moschus' treatment of vision and desire and as such, I will refer to the work of Goldhill and Morales where it illuminates my approach to Moschus.

The Europa displays a striking combination of erotic theme and ekphrastic style: Moschus uses the motifs and techniques of ekphrasis to explore the erotic gaze, whereby the process of viewing a desirable object becomes the ‘action’ of the plot and ekphrasis transcends its normally digressive or embedded position within the structure of the text and appropriates the very narrative function of the poem. In terms of its visuality and exploration of visual themes, Moschus' Europa differs from Achilles Tatius and from the poetry of his own contemporaries such as the Argonautica, for although other poets often explore similar themes of vision and desire, the form and structure of Moschus' poem set his treatment apart. The Europa is a short poem of 166 lines and it is dominated by visual description: firstly by the ekphrasis of the basket and then by three extended descriptive scenes which, as I argue below, should also be treated as ekphraseis.

Hellenistic and Roman Imperial prose fiction sprang from the ashes of the Haxāmanišiyan Empire (c.550-330 BCE). The multicultural autonomy that Iranian regents afforded their subject peoples laid the groundwork for social policy under Alexandros, the Diadokhoi, and Roman governance of the Near East. As literary fiction developed over the course of the ‘long’ Hellenistic period, the diversity of languages and cultures not only shaped the kinds of narratives produced: polyglossia became a subject of representation in and of itself, as did the possibilities of translation between one language and another.

The first poem in a new poetry book is of paramount importance. As the first that a reader — or browser — would see, it acted as a virtual preface by giving some indication of the content and style of the whole collection. While the initial poems in books of elegies and satires have often enough been examined for their ‘programmatic’ content, the function of the first of Horace's odes is less clear.

Euripides' Ion has suffered from the attempt to find in the play an overriding message or moral. Verrall and his successors saw the Ion as an attack against Apollo and organized religion; Wassermann and Burnett argue that it defends orthodox piety; Grégoire and Loraux view it as a hymn or lament on Athenian national pride; and Knox and Gellie respond that the Ion is pure comedy with no deeper meaning. There is of course some truth to each of these interpretations, but it does not follow that the play's ‘real meaning’ lies somewhere in between them. I suggest that we read the Ion not as an abstract argument but as drama, and in particular as a social comedy whose ‘meaning’ lies not in an underlying message but in the action itself and in the conflicts among the play's characters, human and divine, male and female, foreign and Athenian.

Such conflicts, in this play at least, focus attention upon the role of the gods, the place of foreigners in Athens, and relations between men and women. Of these three subjects, the first two have dominated discussion of the Ion, both by those who find them central to the play's religious or nationalistic theme, and by those who consider them incidental to the play as comedy. I shall first show that the third area of conflict — relations between men and women — is equally important in the Ion and reflects an important issue in contemporary Athens. Second, I shall argue that the gender issues raised somewhat provocatively in the first half of the play are upstaged by the melodramatic excitement of the second half. And I shall suggest, in conclusion, that although it is only one of many social and family conflicts in the drama, the battle between the sexes shows how the Ion raises important and difficult questions without becoming an ‘issue play’.

There is a general acceptance now that Propertius was able to mingle the humorous with the passionate and almost manic earnestness. Disagreement, of course, still flourishes about whether this or that poem can be said to be in whole or in part humorous, but by and large each of the four books contributes some poems describable under this head. Within each book, moreover — and here we have to take account of the general opinion that Propertius' work is often experimental, patchy, of uneven quality — some of the best poems are serious and some are humorous.

A further aspect of the common view is that as his writing progresses, Propertius turns more and more to humour, inventing the comic lover as L. P. Wilkinson claims, until by a steady progress he comes to the great humorous poems of Book Four. Again, there is no agreement on the humorous quality of some of the poems of this book (e.g. poem 7 and poem 6), though none would now, I think, opt for seriousness of intent in poems 8 and 9.

Over the past twenty-five years numerous studies have addressed the theme of sacrifice in Virgil's Aeneid. In 1993 the second chapter (‘Sacrifice and Substitution’) of Philip Hardie's The Epic Successors of Virgil broadened the scope of the topic to include post-Virgilian epic as well, but since then little attention has been paid to sacrifice in the case of at least one of Virgil's epic successors, Silius Italicus. The aim of the present paper is to narrow this gap in the existing literature by examining the evidence for a particular form of sacrifice, a kind of ‘self-sacrifice’ known as the deuotio, in the Punica. Although Silius' epic ideally requires a more thorough and comprehensive study of sacrifice than what is offered here, it is nevertheless hoped that the present study may lead to further inquiry into this aspect of the poem and may help, more generally, to disabuse readers of the notion that its poet is uninterested in or un-knowledgeable about matters of a religious nature.

In contrast to heroic epic and Homer's silence about himself, didactic epos was self-conscious right from the beginning, for Hesiod named himself and described his poetic consecration by the Muses in the proem to the Theogony (22-34). It was not usual for Greek poets to dwell upon their role as poets, and Pindar's attention to this theme makes him a notable exception. With Roman poets things were different, since the conditions under which Latin literature came into being forced upon its exponents an awareness of creating in a context, as part of a tradition in which much had already been accomplished. Accordingly, Ennius did not preserve Homeric anonymity, but actually claimed to be Homer reborn, and possibly added, as well, a ‘Hesiodic’ meeting with the Muses. Moreover, he did not hesitate to criticize his Latin predecessors and to point out how he differed from them. In turn, his successor in the hexameter, Lucretius, felt the need to situate himself in the tradition by acknowledging poetic descent from Ennius, as well as originality in his own enterprise (I.117-9, I.921-30; cf. IV. 1-5). The stance that combined homage of the inuentor of a genre with specific criticism of him became the framework for showing what was special about one's own handling of a genre. We see this in Horace's discussion of his relation to Lucilius in Satires I.4 and I.10.

When Sophocles wrote Electra's story, he gave her a sister, Chrysothemis. In their two scenes together, the sisters warn, entreat, cajole, insult, spar with, and proclaim affection for each other. While Electra maintains her public mourning for their father Agamemnon, Chrysothemis chooses not to openly defy his murderers, Aegisthus and their mother Clytemnestra, believing that resistance that accomplishes nothing is futile. Time has not been kind to this more pragmatic sister. In English-language criticism, she has acquired her own epithet, ‘timid’; her femininity has been dismissed as vacuous and her morality as driven by material self-interest. For many critics, she is a shallow and conventional figure whose main purpose is to act as a foil to the exceptional Electra. Since the pairing of a ‘stronger’ and a ‘weaker’ sister recurs in the depiction of Antigone and Ismene in Sophocles’ Antigone, this portrait of two contrasting sisters has been recognised since antiquity as distinctively Sophoclean, and the corresponding reduction of the sister–sister bond to a template has frequently precluded deeper examination of this relationship in both plays.

Ausonius' Mosella is probably the most remarkable, studied and beloved poem of late antiquity. This essay aims to examine it from a new perspective, by reinterpreting it as a complex and many-layered depiction of a sui generis epiphanic experience, ultimately triggered by an unmediated encounter with nature. This sudden ‘revelation’, be it real or merely an artful literary device, did not only provide Ausonius with a deeper insight into the world around him, but also raised many epistemological issues on the limits of human knowledge and the (in)ability of language to convey reality. Both aspects—the poetical rendering of a non-discursive quasi-mystical experience and the epistemological and philosophical reflections it brings about—pervade the whole of the poem and are absolutely central to an in-depth understanding of its very raison d’être.

Remarkably in a poem so concerned with warfare, there are prominent moments in the Iliad when it seems possible that the Trojan War can be settled and peace restored: for example, Agamemnon's three proposals that the Akhaians abandon the war and go home (Books 2, 9, and 14), the truce and single combat in Book 3, and the proposal in the Trojan assembly of Book 7 that Helen be returned to Menelaos. These episodes form a pattern of resistance, or potential counter-narrative, to what would otherwise seem a relentless progression to Troy's destruction. For the most part, therefore, they occur relatively early in the poem, when the course of events seems less determined than it does later. But twice in the late books, a character says something that, if pursued, might have led to peace. These later moments are striking because they occur even after the death of Patroklos, when alternatives to war and destruction appear to have been stripped away, and because they arise when Akhilleus has recognized something essential about human vulnerability. In both cases, the possibility of peace glimmers only faintly and then fades. But that it is raised at all so late in the narrative exemplifies how the Iliad makes a problem of violence while depicting it.