This chapter examines H.D.’s and Pound’s early work with Greek lyric – in particular, the Greek Anthology and Sappho. It traces Pound’s skeptical, ambivalent, and often self-contradictory use of Greek in the 1910s as he tries to articulate his poetics of the image, tracking the differing prisms (Provençal lyric, Bengali poetics, Chinese ideograms, Primitivism, Vorticism) through which he interprets the value of Greek as his own artistic alliances shift between 1908 and 1918. It contrasts Pound’s varying approaches, whether outlined in his prose writings on prosody and the visual arts or actually followed in his early poems based on Greek lyric to H.D.’s already highly sophisticated and well-developed perspective, as seen in her translations also from the Greek Anthology and Sappho – translations which are the basis of some of her best-known poems. The author argues, moreover, that H.D.’s engagement with Greece even at this early stage is more deeply textual, self-conscious, and historically aware than has been recognized. Nonetheless, she show that despite striking differences in tone and some distinction in approach, Pound and H.D.’s poetics were subtly evolving in similar ways.

This chapter continues the theme of dissemination by investigating two Pompeian wall paintings of Medea – one from the House of Jason and the other from the House of the Dioscuri – that show her contemplating the murder of her children. Building on the previous chapter, the argument now turns to the literal and figurative domestication of this ultimate monstrosity. By analyzing these paintings in conjunction with Ovid’s Heroides 12 (Medea’s epistle to Jason), we see how these images of Medea in a domestic setting invite viewers to (re)create the heroine’s own inner struggle – a process that would have rendered her sympathetic in the eyes of ancient spectators attuned to the figure of an abandoned elegiac lover. Whereas the lovers discussed in the previous chapters primarily evince tenderness through togetherness, Medea in her isolation becomes sympathetic through Jason’s conspicuous absence, which drives her to her horrific deed. That absence, of course, is also the necessary conceit of Ovid’s epistolary elegiac fictions. Far from the haughty, vengeful goddess of Euripidean tragedy, Medea in the poetry and painting of first-century Rome displays tender characteristics that resonate with early Imperial notions of marriage and domesticity.