The reception of Circe's island in and through Classical Antiquity has largely focused on the enigmatic sorceress herself. The long literary chain of interpretive topoi—Circe the witch, the whore, the temptress—stretches from Apollonius, Virgil, Ovid, and Dio Chrysostom to Spenser, Calderón, Joyce, Margaret Atwood, and Madeline Miller. Her role as Odysseus’ benefactor, so unmistakable in Homer, is soon forgotten; to Virgil, she is above all dea saeva, (‘the savage goddess’, Aen. 7.19). One distinguishing feature of Circe and her reception is the focus on representation: the enchantment of Circe, as Greta Hawes puts it, is above all a study in allegory. From the moment Circe put a spell on Odysseus’ companions, transforming them into animals in Book 10 of the Odyssey, Circe has invited analogical reasoning, centered on what the transformation from one being into another represents. More often than not, this transformation is interpreted according to a dualist thinking about humans and animals: subjects are transformed from one being into another being, thus representing some moral or physical degradation. This article, by contrast, concentrates on Circe's island through the lens of becoming-animal, the concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…’. I explicate the concept of becoming-animal by applying it to a Deleuzian encounter with Circe's island, both in its ancient articulations and in its various receptions, including H.G. Wells's science fiction novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.

This paper is an exploration of the performance of Greek drama from the perspective of the performers, more specifically, of the chorus-in-training. The notion that khoreia constitutes an essential part of paideia and ethical instruction is an ancient one. And the notion persists, though in different forms, among scholars of the social and political context of these dramatic performances that to have participated in a chorus was in particular ways to have received training in essential perspectives and experiences of citizens: ‘the events and characters portrayed in tragedy are meant to be contemplated as lessons by young citizens.’ And yet what the members of a chorus were expected to learn, did learn, and, moreover, how they learned, have remained largely unexplored topics.

I will suggest ways that we might begin to piece together a baseline of experiences and impressions that come through learning to sing, dance and compete in dramatic festivals. Most of the experiences that I will describe are partly functions of universal properties of the human mind; of course, culture and thoughts and other aspects of shared and individual experience are highly variable. Indeed, the contents of thought are unrestricted. But there are regular, even fixed, ways in which the mind and brain appear to work. I propose to describe an approach to the ways in which the words and movements and environment of dramatic competition are universally present to and apprehended by the senses and minds and bodies of a chorus-in-training. I am not suggesting that there are not other aspects of experience that are important to the performance and appreciation of drama. Rather, I hope to establish at the very least those aspects of training and performance that are necessary and perhaps even sufficient to bring a drama (and I take the chorus to be the most important part of drama) to the arena of competition. I will consider some of the lasting effects of dramatic training and performance on the life of the performer, i.e., how every performer may be changed by his experience.

The Plautine corpus contains five letter-plays, comedies in which epistles are composed, delivered and/or read onstage and figure as a major element of the plot. These embedded missives, both stolen and forged ex nihilo, are variously employed by the personae to enact deception and engender duplicitous maneuvering of epistolary conventions, as well as sophisticated jokes about literacy and the dynamics of the medium. The Bacchides features the most elaborate manifestation of this motif. A servus called Chrysalus schemes to facilitate the love affair between his erus minor, Mnesilochus, and the young man's beloved Bacchis. Bacchis resides at Athens with her sister, another hetaera likewise called Bacchis, whose name and affair with the Bacchides’ second adulescens, Pistoclerus, precipitate a misapprehension that causes the play to reset. Under the mistaken impression that Pistoclerus is in love with his own Bacchis, Mnesilochus returns the money Chrysalus has successfully filched from his father, Nicobulus, informing on the tricky slave and undoing his progress. Once the mistake is clarified, Mnesilochus prevails upon Chrysalus to invent a new ruse for getting the girl. The schemer uses epistles to do it all over again. His second round of tricks consists of a two-pronged stratagem in which he forges and delivers a pair of letters to Nicobulus allegedly from Mnesilochus. The missives serve to pilfer not one but two sums of gold from the old man, permitting Chrysalus and his younger master to both purchase Bacchis’ freedom from her contract with the miles and have some fun.

Latin scholarship through the years did not exactly splash out on this pig's whisper of a carmen, 3.22. Stunted notices regularly saw it off as ‘a traditional invocation’—just a coda and confirmation for 3.21—and it is securely penned into the Hellenistic dedicatory ‘Epigrammstypus’. Yet the poet has indeed set t/his tree off against the poetic wood that lines the continui montes of Odes I-III. In that company, the poem primes a cultural reading by framing the interpretivity of its performance against all the other scenarios. As a recurrent event in Roman pedagogy and classical reading-culture to this very moment (these very moments), it pushes us to enact religio as a modality of agent self, mobilised within the social imaginary of formative environment and temporality, and modelling a contribution to the formation of that sociality. The challenge to Horace, as to other ancient magi and musers such as Cicero, Varro and Augustine, is not not the same that faces modern gurus and pundits writing Roman religion: but poetry conscripts its readers for its project, animating the Roman religion it re-invents and activates, obliges the doing and the showing and the telling to fuse in the enthusing, three-in-one.

In the chapter called ‘Terce’ of the Second Day, the Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and his young apprentice Adso visit the scriptorium of an abbey in northern Italy, and discover, among the papers of the murdered Greek translator Venantius, a surprising text:

What Ovid endured as an ‘exile’ in Tomis is a great unknown—the stuff now of novels and ‘imaginary’ lives. If we take him at his word—the testimony of the exile poetry—literary isolation was the least of his worries. Bordering on the Black Sea, Ovid's frontier town was a place of life-threatening illness (Tr. 3.3.13, 3.8.23f.) and unbearable, limb-numbing cold (Ex Pont. 1.7.11f., 4.12.33f.), a place where inhabitants pass an existence at war, warding off frequent invasions by savage barbarians—so frequent, in fact, that the aged poet is himself conscripted into military service (Ex Pont. 18.7). In many respects, Tomis is constructed in the exile poetry as the antithetical opposite of the world of Rome; for the urbane ‘urban’ persona of the Ars Amatoria, life in Tomis rates as a fate worse than death, and often the poet describes his existence there as death-like (e.g. Tr. 5.9.19, Ex Pont. 1.8.27), his surroundings like the underworld (cf. Tr. 5.7.43f.), and his daily rituals as practice for dying. And although he outlived Augustus—the princeps who exiled the poet to the Black Sea in 7 CE—Ovid would indeed die in Tomis, far from family and home, out ‘on the furthermost limits of the unknown world’ (in extremis ignoti partibus orbis, Tr. 3.3.3).

Recent interpretations of Propertius 4.2 see in Vertumnus' shifting costumes a programmatic statement about the new poetics of Propertius' fourth book of elegy. The statue's ability to assume and shed identities with a simple wardrobe change mirrors the poet's desire to challenge the traditional generic boundaries of love elegy, dressing it up now in Roman themes, now in amatory ones. No doubt this is so. And yet, more generally, recent criticism finds elegy as a genre hospitable to interpretations that focus on issues of gender and identity. Indeed, as Marilyn Skinner has succinctly summarised, ‘texts of the late first century BCE are notorious for the phenomenon of “gender dissonance”…boundaries between ‘male’ and ‘female’ as essential categories of psychosexual identity fluctuate wildly and eventually break down.’ Propertius' fourth and final poetic collection provides fertile territory for an interrogation of gender, since it both highlights female voices—for example Arethusa, Cynthia or Cornelia—and explores moments of transvestism—for example Vertumnus and Hercules. I argue that when Propertius cloaks the speaking statue, Vertumnus, alternately in ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ attributes, he lays bare not simply poetics, but, further, he questions the very constitution of gender. In other words, Propertius probes the relationship between self-representation and identity and reveals that both are fluid and, more surprisingly perhaps, that the former gives rise to the latter.

As Martin Revermann forecast in 1999, the reception history of Greek drama has become ‘big business’ and, as the present volume demonstrates, we are indeed trying to move beyond the ‘Atheno-centric civic ideology approach to Greek drama, which has, fruitfully, been dominating our mode of thinking for quite some time now'. Nevertheless, like Revermann, I believe that work on the reciprocity between social context and theatre that Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (1990) so well exemplifies has been and continues to be an important approach to the field. Examining plays not simply as literary works, but as integral parts of social and political systems, remains a useful method of inquiry. Indeed, one strand of useful research may build on the work that has been done to situate Greek drama in Athens to ask similar questions about theatre outside Athens.

In the case of South Italy and Sicily, the problem is particularly pressing. This is not only because of the traditional separation between the fields of philology, epigraphy, history, archaeology, art history and political science, which made comprehensive examination of theatre as a social and political phenomenon difficult in Athens, but also because of competing histories of the development of theatre in the ancient Greek world. In particular, the history of Athenian theatre, both from the literary perspective and now from the socio-political perspective, is so dominant that it often incorporates into its own narrative what evidence there is for theatre outside Attica. Likewise, from the later period, Roman theatre includes the evidence from Sicily and South Italy into its own history, though to a lesser extent. Nothing to Do with Dionysos? may nevertheless serve as a model for the development of a vital, and still missing, perspective on the theatrical evidence that remains from the West. How did drama and the theatre fit into the socio-political contexts of Greek cities outside Attica? Is it possible to write the history of Sicilian and South Italian theatre, or were these new world cities only recipients of the Attic theatre and stepping stones to that of Rome?

I attempt below to set out a few of the questions that, I think, frame the debate. This is a preliminary, tentative examination of some of the problems that arise in this field, and it is not in any way exhaustive.

A collection of critical essays on Virgil's Georgics needs no defence. A great, a magnificent poem, widely read, if not universally applauded, the Georgics has received far less critical attention than either the Eclogues or the Aeneid. Index in part of the apparently uncongenial nature of ‘didactic’ verse, the relative dearth of critical activity on the poem is particularly to be regretted in view of the Georgics' chronologically central position in Virgil's poetic career, its crucial role in the development of his style and thought. Indeed, given the peculiar and self-conscious unity of Virgil's poetic oeuvre, its complex system of evolving themes, images, structures, its bonding, meditated network of inter-poem reference, the critical neglect which the Georgics has received — there are brilliant, recent exceptions — seems less omission, more outrage. Even the Georgics' influence on later European poetry — one thinks, for example, of the Italian humanists, Politian and Alamanni, the eighteenth century English poets, especially Thomson and Cowper, and that remarkable twentieth century English georgic, The Land, by Virginia Sackville-West — while not of the magnitude of that of either the Eclogues or the Aeneid, ought to have elicited a more substantial investigation of the poem than has transpired. No boast, Wilkinson's claim that his 1969 book on the Georgics was the first to appear in English was sad affirmation of this major critical gap.

The two best-known essays on Seneca's Oedipus, by Willy Schetter and Gerhard Müller, argue that the play is fundamentally a tragedy of fate, and Müller goes so far as to call fate the ‘principal actor.’ Although it may be possible to question the importance that Müller attaches to the role of fate, it is clear that the universe of Oedipus is a determined one. Not only have Oedipus' murder and marriage been predestined, but the plague and its consequences have as well. If, however, fate's control of Oedipus' actions is indisputable, it is linked with a fundamental difficulty of interpretation: that of Oedipus' guilt, which the play in the end seems emphatically to affirm (see 875f. and 1025f. and below, pp. 149f.). What does it mean to speak of moral responsibility in the absence of free choice? The notion of Oedipus' guilt would seem particularly hard to reconcile with a Stoic interpretation of the play; for Oedipus' conscious intent is virtuous, and Stoicism judges action according to the will of the agent, not its result. The view that Oedipus is innocent, moreover, appeals to our own moral logic, with its individualistic bias. Yet in the end Oedipus himself is convinced of his guilt; otherwise his self-mutilation would be unintelligible. It is at least evident that Seneca is bringing prominently to our attention a conception of wrong-doing that cannot be understood in terms of Stoic ethics.

This paper will examine the central image of Ἱστοί (‘Looms’ or ‘Webs’), that of the web woven by the spider, as a Callimachean expression, or objectification, of the highly self-conscious treatment of art and play with illusion in the Imagines, that is, its play with the interaction of vision and text. In so doing, it will attempt to show in what ways Ἱστοί might be said to describe the artistic process of the work of which it forms a part, and to illuminate, from its context of painting and its ekphrastic oratory, something of the function and structure of ekphrasis itself. It will not be long enough to deal with the wider questions, about mimesis and the definition of ekphrasis, that it will perhaps have invited.

In his influential reading of Heroides 1, Duncan Kennedy argues that successful fictional letters can be felt to arise naturally from or be motivated by the depicted events and, ideally, be seen as agents in the forward movement of those events. Building on Kennedy's arguments, Peter Knox asserts that Ovid reconfigures his heroines in the Heroides to develop serious issues raised by his literary models from a new perspective. In this paper, I shall follow Kennedy's and Knox's suggestions to propose a new reading of Heroides 3. I shall first discuss how Briseis' letter can be felt to be both naturally motivated by and seriously engaged with Achilles' arguments in Iliad 9. More importantly, I shall argue that Ovid implicates Patroclus' aid in the composition and delivery of Heroides 3. The result is that one can view the fictional letter as having some influence upon Patroclus' fateful appeal to Achilles, thus providing an Ovidian reinterpretation of Iliad 16. Imagining this fictional role for Heroides 3 ultimately provokes comparison of Briseis, Patroclus and their relationships with Achilles. Such a reading uses Kennedy's and Knox's suggestions as a point of departure for making Heroides 3 a more successful and provocative fictional letter.