These quotations exemplify a general consensus among critics that the narrative poet must not be seen in process of shaping our opinions for us. Most people would agree that moralising interruptions disrupt the reader's chain of thought and weaken his hold on the world which the narrator is creating. We want to see as little as possible of the author's thought-processes; he should follow Schiller's precept and remain as invisible behind his material as the Creator behind his Universe. When in The Eustace Diamonds Trollope begins a paragraph about Frank Greystock by saying ‘Within the figure and frame and clothes and cuticle, within the bones and flesh of many of us, there is but one person, — a man or woman, with a preponderance either of good or of evil. …’, the reader will, according to his nature, either grit his teeth and pursue the homily to its conclusion a page and a half later, or skip to the next point in the narrative. Most modern readers wish that Trollope would spare them. But in fact even Homer, ‘rapid and direct’ as he is, does sometimes pause for a word of moralising comment. Perhaps the most striking occasion is at Il. XXIII, 24, where Achilles has in mind the mutilation of Hector's body, and Homer describes such deeds as aeikea (‘unseemly’).

Folk sagas, and epics, develop around a common sequence. A hero is isolated from his society, he enters a land of mystery, is tested by a confrontation with some dread power, he undergoes a symbolic death, and experiences a life-enhancing return to those he left behind. At the end, he is reinstated into the world of men. Joseph Campbell documents the ubiquity of this progression in Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe.

The most prominent fact which seems to contradict the above order in the Iliad is the absence of any land of fantasy into which Achilles travels, and, along with this omission, the absence too of any weird or supernatural being against whom the hero must contend. We may even say that their is no real journey that the hero undertakes, for the action of the story lies consistently around Troy. Achilles appears static: he sits in a perfectly ordinary tent. However, this turn of the usual plot achieves something new: it allows Homer to suggest Achilles as an inwardly existing personality, whose mental estrangement is all the more clearly defined by the physical continuities about him. Unlike Odysseus and the many wandering heroes who get blown off course, lose their way in the woods, or who are kidnapped on their wedding nights, Achilles is within reach. Yet he remains apart.

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.

From our viewpoint, the bucolic genre begins with Theocritus, though ancient critics considered him not the founder but the best in a class. The difference between their perception and ours will serve to remind us that no idea of genre can be taken for granted. Generic conceptions, like any other products of literary work, have history. Implied in the work of poets, they are the practical marks of similarity and thus also touchstones of significant difference with respect to other modes of discourse in a period; and through time they measure continuity and change in a tradition. From the actual texts, however, critics abstract conceptions of genre according to the tastes, interests, received and new ideas — intellectual currency of their own time. Abstracted, then, and cast in simple and intelligible form, they begin a tralatitious life in ambivalent, quasi independent relation to their texts of origin. They do provide a ready general view of the material, but by this very virtue tend to substitute themselves for it. Ersatz, vicarious, they satisfy and misinform the reader, cutting off effective access to the texts. Useful, then, yet pernicious, go-betweens that get between, generic conceptions partake of the double nature of critical discourse, procuring insight and blindness, like some pharmakon, both good news and bad news.

On the infrequent occasions when De Rerum Natura is discussed in terms of pastoral, it is assumed that Lucretius describes the typical locus amoenus familiar since Plato's Phaedrus, and critics concentrate either on tracing his Hellenistic sources or on the basic contrast between luxury and simplicity. But there is more to Lucretian pastoral, just as there is more to Lucretius' atomic universe, than meets the eye. The essence of his pastoral is original, centered around animals rather than shepherds, and his use of pastoral pervades the poem and is integral to its design.

The most inclusive definition of pastoral possible is Empson's, the expression of the complex through the simple. It is more useful, however, to think of pastoral as the expression of an unfulfillable longing for a simpler and happier life, which may include a return from the city to the country, from politics to the land, from the Iron Age to the Golden Age, from war to peace, from vice to virtue, or from adulthood to childhood. Traditional pastoral is usually set in the country among shepherds and flocks, and man and nature interact harmoniously according to what has been called since Ruskin the ‘pathetic fallacy’. Plato ‘creates’ pastoral by contrasting city and country in the Phaedrus. Roman poetry uses elements of the urban-rural contrast not only in pastoral poetry as such but in satire, elegy and epic as well. The varied directions in which individual poets take the generic pastoral form are as interesting as the persistence of the form itself, and Lucretius' version, occurring as it does in a didactic epic, is extremely individual when viewed both from within and without the classical tradition of pastoral.

Euripides' Alcestis presents its audience with a curious problem. Why is a blatant coward rewarded? The answer has usually been discovered in Admetus' scrupulous observance of the law of hospitality (10), that is, in a personal trait. The significance of this solution is important because the ostensible morality of the play, one characterized by its peculiar blend of fairy-tale and harsh reality, is now dependent upon the single redeeming quality of one individual. Conversely, the less attractive features of Admetus, and they exist in varying degrees of unpleasantness, become defensible solely as progressive steps in the testing of his mettle. Impropriety, therefore, functions as the necessary adjunct of anagnorisis and reparation. By contrast, the sacrifice of Alcestis assumes an even more notable proportion; her rescue from the dead appears more an absolute act of justice than a miracle. Nonetheless, by the end of the play doubt still persists concerning the extent to which Admetus has revised his perception of right and wrong, his virtue notwithstanding.

Verrall, at the turn of the century, protested vigorously against just such a pragmatic acceptance of Admetus' philoxenia as a facile explanation. Ironically enough, he inadvertently predicted a trend which was not only to grow, but to become more entrenched. Admetus' saving grace has indeed carried the day. A husband's untoward submission to a wife's substitution; a son's disgraceful argument with his father before the rites of interment; a host's inner crisis as he juggles the respective merits of hospitality versus bereavement; a man's shallow repentance for living at another's expense — in short, each vital turning point in Admetus' private dilemma has received thorough and shrewd analysis, but always through the special refraction of the host motif.

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.

In such terms Zeus instructs Athena to bind together the kingdom of Odysseus in enduring harmony and thereby brings to a happy conclusion the hero's long, painful nostos from Troy. The conditions of Odysseus' future contrast radically with the dangerous instability of his past; in the invocation to the poem (1.1-10), the accent falls somberly on wandering, destruction, suffering, helplessness, and frustration. By the end of Book 24, however, Odysseus is powerfully in control of his world, restored to his family and people, and assured of divine sanction for the enjoyment of peace and prosperity into a sleek old age and a gentle death (23.281-84).