Lysias’s funeral speech is a paradoxical work. In theory a funeral speech by a foreign speech-writer should not exist. At first glance, this oration seems to point to a failure of process. What does it say about Athenian democracy that it had carefully selected a man to deliver a speech who needed to employ a speech-writer because, presumably, he was not up to the task of writing the speech himself? Moreover, how could it be that the best person to write an encomium of Athens is not an Athenian, but a metic? Lysias, what is more, was not just any metic, but one to whom Athenian democracy had repudiated a grant of citizenship. Lysias’ funeral speech thus potentially disrupts any straightforward story that we might want to tell about the relationship between the funeral oration, citizenship and civic ideology. His speech highlights the constructed nature of the genre’s statements about normative values. This chapter explores the implications of this speech for our understanding of the epitaphic tradition. It reviews the evidence for the authorship and authenticity of Lysias’ funeral speech. It canvasses the various possibilities for the construction and dissemination of his text.

This chapter examines the reception of two Platonic texts, the Protagoras and the Statesman, in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and Plutarch’s Gryllus. It argues that part of the reason for the success of this reception lies in the way that Plato’s texts are embedded in insolvable problems such as what constitutes nudity and how one distinguishes between animal and human. Embedding a text in a wicked problem is an effective way to ensure it afterlife. In the case of Plato, the difficulty of this problem is exacerbated by his decision to ground his distinction between animal and human in the presence or absence of body-hair. Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch, in different ways, draw attention to the simultaneous complexity, instability, and capaciousness of body-hair as a signifier. They are attracted to explore its potential, but are ultimately forced to reject it and the systems of thought that it supports as unsatisfactory.

INTRODUCTION

It was the mythological figure of Hercules that provided the inspiration for, and helped fuel the success of, comics’ greatest hero, Superman. It is therefore only appropriate that the world of comics should in turn be one of the revitalizing forces that has brought Hercules back to the cinematic screen. One of the most recent and potent examples of the cinematic appropriation of the Herculean myth cycle is Hercules (2014), a film that adapts for the screen Radical Comics’ graphic novel Hercules: The Thracian Wars by Steve Moore (art by Admira Wijaya). Together with The Legend of Hercules (2014), Hercules (2014) provides a useful opportunity to revisit the status and critical responses to the Hercules myth in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

This chapter attempts to place these films within the broader history of cinematic imaginings about Hercules as well as articulate their novel contribution to this tradition. In contrast to earlier versions, in these more recent films we see a cinematic hero more attuned to the problematic nature of heroic mythology and more aware of the narrative problems that such mythology presents to filmmakers. In my analysis, I trace the origins of this new, textually flexible, less canonical hero-type to a recalibration of the status of myth that emerged in the late 1990s where critical modes such as pastiche, irony, and intertexuality encouraged a more playful and less reverent approach to mythical adaptions. Disney's Hercules (1997) is emblematic of this turn. This capacity to reimagine the character of Hercules has been further facilitated by the recent emergence of an audience now trained through the rise of the “mega-text” – texts whose storylines inhabit and cross multiple genres (comics, film, television shows, books, fan writing) – to think newly about topics such as canonicity, tradition, and adaptation. Myth and comic-book storylines have increasingly started to overlap in recent years. Indeed, we can trace the influence of comics not only in providing subject matter, but also in the provision of new reading practices for approaching mythological storylines. In doing so, these films are able to rise to the challenge of how to represent Hercules in the post-Romantic age.