In his 1980 article ‘Aristophanes as a Lyric Poet’, Michael Silk argued that Aristophanes' lyrics, widely admired as jewels of Greek poetry, were overrated. He faulted them above all for lack of intellectual point and profundity, for a generic, timeless lyricism that lacked a genuine metaphysical dimension. To the hoopoe's song in Birds, for example, he juxtaposed Pindar's famous—

(Pythian 8.95-97)

Creatures of a day!

What is someone?

What is no one?

Man: a shadow's dream.

But when god-given glory comes a bright light shines upon us and our life is sweet.

(tr. Frank J. Nisetich)

The short Platonic dialogue, the Ion, has suffered a strange fate. Its authenticity has been doubted, and its content considered slight or repetitious. The greatest and most surprising setback the work has encountered is that critics have never even been able to agree on its subject. Therefore, an analysis of the dialogue requires that we first investigate whether the dialogue questions the knowledge of poets or critics, the two subjects proposed. Second, Socrates' argument denying an area of expertise to rhapsodes needs examination; and, finally, the implications of the Ion's argument, especially in regard to the connections between literary criticism and philosophy, deserve attention.

The main argument of the Ion is anticipated by two questions posed at the beginning of the work. Socrates asks Ion whether he is as skilful (deinos) in discussing Hesiod and Archilochus as he claims to be in regard to Homer (531a1-2). When the rhapsode responds that his talent is limited to Homer, Socrates concludes that Ion's ability to speak about Homer is not based upon technical knowledge (tekhnē) or a scientific method (epistēmē) but upon divine inspiration. Shortly afterwards, Socrates asks whether Ion or a seer could better assess Homeric and Hesiodic passages about soothsaying (531b3-6). This question anticipates the argument in the last third of the dialogue where Socrates insists that Ion has no particular expertise in regard to the Homeric works and that in fact specialists in various technical fields are better qualified to judge Homeric passages. The question also prefigures the important role divination will play in the dialogue.

Casina is one of Plautus' most metatheatrical comedies. Self-reflexive role-play, plays within plays, explicit references to theatrical context or convention are usual in Plautine drama. In Casina they constitute much or most of the dramatic action. During the prologue the audience is encouraged to sit back and enjoy the games (23ff.); whereas by Act 5 it is the play's women who have come out ‘to watch the wedding games out here on the street’ (Judos visere hue in viam nuptialis, 856). The stage-set, which the audience accepts implicitly as ‘a street’, has been turned back into a stage-set. The women converse like a regular audience: Myrrhina in particular has ‘never laughed so much in one day’ (numquam … ullo die risi adaeque, 857) and thinks theirs the equal of any play ever written (860f.). Moreover, when Olympio enters, he acknowledges the ‘real’ audience with his narrative of events inside Alcesimus' house, but seems oblivious of the on-stage audience—which is dependent for its early information concerning Olympio's wedding night on his relations to the former, real audience. What is involved here is a complete reversal of the conventions of illusionistic theatre, in which the audience finds out about off-stage action from the conversation of characters inside the drama. Pardalisca's interruption restores the conventional order: the remainder of Olympio's narrative is told, ostensibly, to her; the audience is returned to the condition of unseen eavesdroppers.

The question before us at the turn of both century and millennium is how one determines whether Horace is a dangerous love-poet (unrecognised because we read badly). Or a panderer, playing to our delight in the comedy of manners. Or a serious analyst of communication between the sexes—even a prophet for our time. The choice varies from villain to vates, the extremes reminding us how certainly the past exists, as Robert Frost laments in ‘Directive’: ‘Back in a time made simple by the loss/Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off,/Like a graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.’

Recently, a Classical scholar, writing about what she termed ‘Horace's detachment as a love poet’, asserted that his readers ‘remain trapped, perhaps by necessity, in male assumptions about desire that they are unable to question.’ She believes that there is a ‘disturbing picture of love and desire’ which critics have missed because we read, almost all of us, with half-closed eyes, ignoring ‘erotic subterfuge’ in the love-odes. We overlook, she insists, ‘the overpowering desire’ of the male ‘poet/lover’ because, in ‘unacknowledged identification’ with Horace, we put on Horatian eyes. This charge raises disquieting questions about distinctions between speaker and poet, persona and historical figure, art and life.

The rich diversity of Martial's Epigrams makes up, in Duff's words, ‘one of the most extraordinary galleries of literary pictures, vignettes, miniatures, portraits, caricatures, sometimes almost thumbnail sketches' of the Classical Age. Yet the books are by no means merely random or haphazard assortments. Like other Roman poets, Martial was attentive to the need to impose a sense of order and continuity on his published material. Naturally the very number of poems, as well as their varied inspiration and often impromptu composition, would militate against any overall thematic coherence. Moreover, Martial was also keen to exploit the inherent variety of the epigrammatic genre; thus, in the preface to Book 8, he says that he has interspersed more trivial and jocular material among his panegyrics of the emperor to prevent continuous eulogies from becoming tiresome to their recipient.