Claudian was the last important poet of Rome, the more striking in his talent because of the lack of competitors in the age in which he lived. It is interesting to note that of the people who have actually read his works, most can find in them something attractive or entertaining enough to justify the effort. One example is the opinion of Gibbon:

If we fairly balance his merits and his defects, we shall acknowledge that Claudian does not either satisfy or silence our reason. It would not be easy to produce a passage that deserves the epithet of sublime or pathetic; to select a verse that melts the heart or enlarges the imagination … [but] he was endowed with the rare and precious talent of raising the meanest, of adorning the most barren, and of diversifying the most similar topics; his colouring, more especially in descriptive poetry, is soft and splendid; and he seldom fails to display, and even to abuse, the advantages of a cultivated understanding, a copious fancy, an easy and sometimes forcible expression, and a perpetual flow of harmonious versification.

Exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum. 5
non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
vitabit Libitinam: usque ego poster a
crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium
scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex:
dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus 10
et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
regnavit populorum, ex humili potens
princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
deduxisse modos. sume superbiam
quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica 15
lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.

So Juno claims, famously, expressing her determination to thwart the newlyforged alliance between Aeneas and the Italians, and setting in motion (through the agency of Allecto) the violence and passion that fuels the ‘Iliadic’ Aeneid—the ‘Energy of Hell’, as Philip Hardie calls it—energy necessary to sustain the momentum of a long narrative poem, a demonic ‘burst of power’ imitated by Vergil's successors—Lucan, Silius, and especially Statius, who opens the Thebaid with an embittered Oedipus summoning the dark forces of the underworld embodied in the Fury Tisiphone (Theb. 1.48ff.). Vergil's hexameter might also serve as a motto for Ramus to the degree that the journal has mounted a radical—and oedipal—critique over the last quarter century, assaulting the stuffy status quo in classical studies, finding a place ‘on the shelves of all the young and cool’, although those sons (and daughters), now a generation older, are themselves the new fathers, the new superi. Juno's claim so impressed Freud that he placed it on the title page of his magnum opus—The Interpretation of Dreams—anticipating psychoanalysis' assault on Western subjectivity and describing Freud's own exclusion from the academy, his circuitous ‘professional journey’. Years later Freud would maintain that the hexameter line provides a portrait of ‘repressed instinctual impulses’, suggesting that, long before the twentieth century, Vergil and his epic successors understood the project of psychoanalysis. ‘The poets and philosophers,’ Freud was fond of saying, ‘discovered the unconscious before I did.’

For the Argonauts of Valerius Flaccus the Black Sea and its surrounding lands are an alien world. As Argo leaves the Mediterranean behind and enters the Propontis, we are told that the Minyans begin to gain ‘a view into another world’ (alium prospectus in orbem, 2.628). So too when the ship makes its way through the Bosporus, on the point of entering the Black Sea, we are told that the Greeks ‘see all things new’ (noua cuncta uident, 4.424). Clearly this voyage is presented by Valerius as a major event in world history.

One question which must confront any reader of Valerius’ poem is whether the effects of this voyage should be viewed negatively or positively. Indeed the poem itself poses that question at the outset, through its inclusion of two versions of Argo's destiny: the negative prophecy of Mopsus (1.211-26) and the more reassuring prediction of Idmon (1.234-38). In this paper I propose to consider aspects of this problem through an examination not of Valerius' treatment of the voyage itself, but of its consequences as they are presented in the second half of the poem.

In 364 BCE Clearchus, a former student of Isocrates and Plato, staged a coup d'état in his native city of Heraclea Pontica and made himself tyrant. Twelve years later in 352 Clearchus fell victim to a conspiracy led by another former student of Plato and native Heraclean, by the name of Chion. Some centuries later an author whose name we do not know and about whose date and place of residence we can only speculate fixed on this event as the basis of a historical epistolary novel, which comprises a sequence of seventeen letters purportedly written by Chion himself. The novel survives in a number of manuscripts, the majority of which give it the title Letters of Chion. It is with this text that this article is concerned.

The sequence tracks Chion's progress from the time he leaves home in order to pursue his studies at the Academy to two days before the assassination. Most of the letters are addressed to Chion's father Matris, and so fall into the category of ‘letters home’ in which Chion narrates and reflects on his encounters and thoughts at various stages of his sojourn abroad. The final one however is written from Heraclea back to Athens; it is addressed to Plato, and from its tone and content Chion clearly expects of his master that he regard the upcoming assassination as his student's graduation summa cum laude in the field of political ethics. Critical opinion on the Letters is largely unanimous in maintaining that the author shares this view; that the whole sequence is designed to show Chion developing the philosophical acumen needed to make the right decision on the on the ethical issues that confront him and the emotional maturity needed to take decisive political action at the appropriate time.

The structural formation of Martial's books of epigrams, especially what has been termed the intratextuality of the poems in each volume, has received considerable attention in recent studies of the author. Both Scherf and Merli, for example, in the latest collection of essays on Martial, not only provide useful critical surveys of past scholarship on the issue but propose their own, occasionally more detailed, schemes. The result is a growing recognition of the intricate designs Martial created out of his varied themes and of their importance in helping us to understand the literary purpose of the books.

Orpheus has a prominent place in the choral odes of Seneca's Medea, Hercules Furens, and Hercules Oetaeus (the last, even if not by Seneca, may be considered within the context of Senecan drama). Outside of the tragedies, Seneca has only a passing reference to Orpheus as the figure with whom poetry begins (Ep. 88.39). In the tragedies he treats Orpheus as a magical poet-savior and a civilizing hero. In contrast to Virgil and Ovid, to whose versions of the Orpheus myth he clearly alludes, he deliberately de-emphasizes the brutal death at the hands of the Thracian maenads.

Seneca draws on the double focus of the myth in the earlier tradition. On the one hand Orpheus is the consummate poet who knows the mysteries of nature and through his art stands in special sympathy to it. On the other hand as a victim of love and the furor it may bring, he is also a tragic figure who through passion experiences loss, mourning, and death. In this latter aspect the Hercules Oetaeus contrasts his end unfavorably with the future apotheosis of its hero (H.O. 1035); but, as we shall see, Seneca elsewhere takes a more favorable attitude to the poet-hero.

Recent studies have analysed the essential role of interpoetic rivalry in Aristophanes' comic imagination. Zachary Biles has shown that ‘festival agonistics provide an underlying logic for the overall thematic design of individual plays’ and that ‘the plays can be treated as creative responses to the competitions.’ Aristophanes' dramatisation of comic competition has been viewed as a reflection of the struggles of political factions in late-fifth-century Athens or as an expression of a ‘rhetoric of self-promotion’ that builds the comic plot through the mutual borrowing of comic material (jokes, running gags). This paper suggests that Knights presents interpoetic rivalry as a conflict of embodied aesthetic modes. In this play, Aristophanes' tendentious definition of his comic self against his predecessor Cratinus results in opposed ways of conceptualising the sonic quality of dramatic performance and its material effects on the audience. The nexus of voice and temporality, which, as I argue, shapes the play's agonistic plot, equates the intergenerational duelling of Aristophanes' and Cratinus' political counterparts (the Sausage Seller and the older Paphlagon, respectively) to a contrast of somatic experiences grounded in sound.

Isthmians 3 and 4 have not fared well at the hands of critics. Norwood judged them (taken together) as spurious, Wilamowitz as ‘artistically insignificant.’ Most discussions have focussed on the problem of whether they form one ode or two and on the fortunes of the Cleonymid clan to which the victor, Melissus of Thebes, belonged. Of recent interpreters, Köhnken stresses the significance of the myth of Ajax for the unity of the composition, but, like most scholars, ignores the pyres of the children of Heracles at the end, a passage to which I shall pay particular attention later (as if to confirm the de gustibus of Pindaric criticism, these lines were Norwood's final proof of the inauthenticity of the ode). Thummer's commentary is helpful for the relation of I. 3 to I. 4 and for the topoi of epinician praise, but he attempts no full critical study. McNeal has offered a good analysis of the architecture of I. 4, but in his search for formal unity underestimates the quality of Pindar's poetic language and indeed finds I. 4 not ‘particularly noteworthy for any unique images.’

The ‘unity’ of this work, as of most Pindaric odes, lies not merely in a ‘program’ or a rhetorical structure of encomium (which is not to deny their importance) but in the interaction of the formal elements in that encomiastic armature with imagery, myth, and conventional symbols of success and failure in Pindaric diction (e.g. light, flowers, gold). Repetitions of words or themes, recurrent metaphors, and parallel thought-patterns and image-patterns also help shape and clarify the ode's organic coherence as it proceeds from its beginning to its end. All this is to say that Pindaric poetry, despite the special circumstances of epinician festival and encomiastic convention, is ultimately not different from any other poetry and (subject to obvious limitations and qualifications) is amenable to the same analytical techniques. I should not want to throw out the Bundy with the bath water, only remind us that every bathtub obeys those fundamental laws of hydraulics which make plumbing possible.

Statius is the arch-describer. Even when it was universally agreed that his poetry was essentially second-rate hack-work, his ability to evoke the visual and his relationship to works of art provided fascination and interest. Yet the ekphraseis in the Thebaid have not received much detailed critical attention. This paper looks at the double ekphrasis of the prizes at the end of the chariot race in Thebaid 6. If ekphraseis tend to be ignored and passed over, if ekphraseis are moments outside narrative, still visions for the viewer in the text, interludes, as it were, then an ekphrasis within a set of games is doubly distant from the thrust of the text. For games themselves have suffered the same marginalisation: read as purely ‘decorative’ or ‘imitative’ their importance for understanding the wider realities of the text has often passed unnoticed. An ekphrasis, then, is indeed a sort of game, and, I would argue, this is particularly so in this case. For Statius uses this passage to make a new move in his poetic contests with his predecessors. He takes one Homeric object and one Virgilian object, decorates them with Ovid and sets them against each other. Hinds has read the Achilleid as an Ovidian epic but Ovid is also extremely important in the Thebaid and much more work is needed on this.

The fiercest political debates in 1850s Britain were inextricably bound up with the Classical past. Traditionalists and eulogists, priests and pamphleteers, doctors and revolutionaries all set their arguments and their ideals within a Classical framework. Amongst those who sought to use the ancient for decidedly contemporary purposes, Robert Brough was one of the most passionate. He was a revolutionary, a playwright, and a Classicist—though up until the performance of his burlesque Medea (on July 14th 1856), he had never been all three at once. This article will explore how, at the time, the myth of Medea was the perfect vehicle for radical politics—and how Brough exploited its potential to the full. It will frame his play within some of the most controversial debates of the period. It will explore Brough's (on the face of it, startling) claim that his burlesque would give the audience more to think about than any play they had seen before, that it would be ‘a conjugal lesson, surpassing in intensity anything ever before presented’. Brough wrote his Medea believing in ‘the Revolution’. And, as I hope to show, he wanted his audiences to leave the theatre believing in it too.

This paper argues for a combined reading of Odes 1.3, the propempticon for Virgil, and Odes 1.22, the Lalage ode. The arrangement of the first book of Odes places 1.3 in structural relation to 1.22; and the appearance of scelus, ‘sin’, in the penultimate verse of 1.3 and the initial line of 1.22 activates a thematic affiliation that has gone unexamined in the scholarship. I take the poet's use of scelus as my starting point, analysing in what follows the ways in which Virgil and Horace are both positioned in the drama of 1.3 as practitioners of scelus of a kind that associates them with Prometheus, Daedalus and Hercules. Then I press the question of how such a depiction makes sense, given the ways in which these mythological exemplars are shown to be transgressors of natural boundaries. I then turn to 1.22 for an answer otherwise not forthcoming in 1.3, where scelus reappears in a poem about the power of song. I argue that the transgression Virgil and Horace practise in 1.3 is poetic composition itself—a sin Horace himself commits in the very odes that dramatise it, but whose staging extols the purity and integrity of a kind of singing that is prior to the concatenation of word, metre and music that go into the composing of any poetry. I see in these odes, then, a meditation on the ways in which poets cross back and forth between a boundary that separates originary song from the polished songs of poetry that it initiates—surely a topic that interested, and vexed, Horace for all of his career, and about which these odes have something fundamental to tell.

In the prologue of Callimachus’ Aetia, every single word opens up a wide, virtually boundless spectrum of suggestions, intimations, and evocations. In this paper, I heed Callimachus’ formal intricacies, joining the decoding game that has vexed and entertained ancient and modern readers by homing in on the para-etymological potentialities of the verb ἀείδω (‘I sing’). I wish to explore the possibility that, in this architext of Callimachean programmatics, ‘singing’ may amount to a sort of aesthetic satisfaction in self-deprivation, with formal elements mobilizing a spiral of eating and non-eating. This exploration offers the opportunity to think about Callimachean ‘singing’ as a challenge to conventional notions of human subjectivity and to the very idea of poetic immortality, expressing something like the wish of a poète maudit not for monumental permanence, but for a looping insistence. We may then see Callimachean aesthetics as less rarefied, aristocratic, and decorous than it is usually made out to be. In the recalcitrance, the unruly looping of poetic form, we may glimpse an aesthetic sense that is more subversive, shaped by temporal stuckness, a rejection of fulfillment, and a hunger that rejects the lack that is satisfaction. I first locate the possibility of an alternative para-etymologizing of ἀείδω within the prologue's discourse of corporeality, in its precarious opposition of thinness and fatness. I then search the epigram dedicated to Heraclitus and the Hymn to Demeter for traces of the restless aesthetics inherent in this para-etymologizing, which I will ultimately connect with queer temporality. The Callimachean hymn invites us to see the poetic persona of the Aetia's proem in a new light—as a counterpart of the starving binge eater Erysichthon, Demeter's enemy, who is barely distinguishable from the goddess herself.

Virtually nothing is known for certain about Sophokles' satyr play Salmoneus. However, a number of extremely probable deductions may be made on the basis of the few surviving fragments and the mythographic testimony about its eponymous villain (the iconographical record is totally unhelpful, or almost so). This article adds some further suggestions about the implications of the three most substantial fragments, which, if they do not quite share that level of extreme probability, it is hoped have a high degree at least of plausibility, and some significance for (meta-)dramatic and thematic aspects of the play as a whole. I shall argue that a reference to the malodorous quality of the thunderbolt draws attention to the gross physicality of the thunder-machine or bronteion (βροντεῖον) which Salmoneus has invented and constructed out of ox-hides. This has both a metatheatrical dimension, since the bronteion was probably part of the stage-machinery of 5th-century drama, and a thematic one, since it emphasises the low, corporeal nature of Salmoneus' thunder in contrast to the sublime weapon of Zeus which it imperfectly mimics. The established parallelism between thunder and farting adds another level to the debasing of Salmoneus’ invention and concomitant deflation of his pretensions. Finally, I shall suggest that another fragment relating to the sympotic game of kottabos may have drawn a similarly deflating parallel between the hurling of the wine-lees and that of the tyrant's ersatz thunderbolts.

Prometheus Bound (PV) is a meditation on God par excellence, second only perhaps to the Bible or Paradise Lost. It is, accordingly, the only extant tragedy from the ancient world featuring the most characters as gods. For this reason it stands out in a genre fixated principally on human suffering, where ‘death carries overwhelmingly more weight than salvation’. Gods, of course, do not suffer like humans: Prometheus, the play's protagonist extraordinaire, may be subject to an eternity of punishment for stealing fire from Zeus, but his pain, real and visceral as it is, differs from ours in that it lacks the potential closure of death. It is perhaps justifiable then to suggest the play's focus is not just the awful things gods are capable of doing to one another (just like humans), but rather the meaning of such behaviour without the ultimate consequence (death). That is, the portrayal of Prometheus suffering and Zeus menacing redounds equally to the type of characters they are as to simply what they are. Whereas the former aspect is of psychological or political interest, the latter is a theological concern. And PV is theological in its implications as much as it is political. Hence the question: What type of theology does it convey? The answer is complex.

In the modern world PV has primarily been read for its political allegory—as a meditation on oppression, or martyrdom for the intellectual cause. Eric Havelock's translation and study of the play, to cite an illustrative example, was called The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (1950). Many critics therefore argue that the play articulates the conflict between Prometheus and Zeus in terms of freedom versus authoritarianism. As Shelley famously wrote in the prologue to his Prometheus Unbound, the imprisoned Prometheus represents ‘the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends’ (1820). Marx and Goethe felt similarly. This position aligns Prometheus with the forces of enlightenment and progress over against the brutality of Zeus's authority.

At some point in the early second century CE Suetonius set out to compose biographies of important Roman literary figures. The largest surviving section of this work—known as the De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus—opens with what is generally considered an account of the early beginnings of philology in Rome.

Teknophagy (τεκνοϕαγία), or child-eating, is an apt subject for tragedy. It introduces the theme of miasma, it escalates violence and epitomises the destructive family feuds that Aristotle prized as the most suitable stories for tragedy. Therefore, unsurprisingly, the teknophagies of Thyestes and Tereus were dramatised in three fifth-century tragedies, all of them preserved only in fragments: Euripides’ Thyestes, Sophokles’ Thyestes (Β) and Sophokles’ Tereus. What is surprising is the appearance of plays by the same titles in the comic tradition, including Tereus plays by Kantharos (C5 BC), Anaxandrides (C4 BC) and Philetairos (C4 BC) along with Diokles’ Thyestes (Β) (late C5 BC to early C4 BC). Therefore, this study will first consider how Tereus’ teknophagy was adapted to mythical burlesques, to then consider how comic adaptations of Thyestes’ teknophagy influenced Seneca's Thyestes.

While it is dangerous to generalize about so vast a field as Homeric scholarship, it is perhaps safe to say that before the 1970s interpretation of the Wanderings of Odysseus was dominated by the larger question of the Odyssey’s moral and theological coherence, particularly as this pertains to the justice of Odysseus’ and his companions’ sufferings. The controversy between Analysts and Unitarians did much to determine how this question was asked and answered, with Analysts viewing moral incoherence as a symptom of multiple authorship and Unitarians striving to demonstrate coherence. First-generation anthropology introduced the idea that incoherence might reflect not (only) different authors, but (also) different stages of cultural development. This development was conceived mainly as an advance from primitive ‘savagery’ to more enlightened ‘humanity’, albeit with a tinge of nostalgia for savagery's more holistic ecological consciousness.

Vitruvius’ book is chock full of bodies. It is by means of his oiled body that Dinocrates gains an audience with Alexander (2.praef.1), and by means of his naked one, and the equivalent body of water that it displaces, that Archimedes solves his well-known quandary (9.praef.9f.). The body is a living, vital thing (7.praef.2f.), even as it is a book, a body of work (7.praef.10), arising from a body of education (1.1.12). Most important of all, Vitruvius outlines a ‘body of architecture’ (corpus architecturae, 6.praef.7) to propagate and extend the reach of the deified Augustus, commander-in-chief (1.praef.1), and this idea arguably gives rise to that of the ‘body politic’ (corpus imperii). Vitruvius’ text has been interpreted in terms of these bodies in important studies by Indra Kagis McEwen and John Oksanish; both authors treat the body as replete with meaning, the site of contact between architecture and the political, between text and author. This chapter adds to our understanding of the repertoire of bodies in Vitruvius by looking at those earlier incarnations of circular and square bodies which Vitruvius inherits, and in terms of which he construes the human body as a site of ideal proportions.