Hesiod's Theogony is not overtly concerned with the world of mortals. The place of humans in the Theogony nevertheless holds a certain fascination, perhaps more for what is not revealed—our origins, for example—than for what is. Focusing on a relatively neglected passage of the poem (Theogony 521-32), I want to trace here the way Hesiod lays out the cosmic coordinates of kleos (‘fame’ or ‘glory’) with a view to better situating the condition of mortality within the poem as a whole. Kleos, as we will see, is part of the fallout for humans of the battle of wits between Zeus and Prometheus: it is the compensation for their new, temporally inflected existence.

What we call things is important—it reveals what we think about the world. What we call ourselves, however, is even more important. It reveals ideas and assumptions about identity, gender, community. It helps us to see where we fit in in society; what we understand our purpose, our role to be; the kinds of activities we undertake. In a history where women have been largely barred from higher-paying, traditionally male occupations, the way in which women in particular use terminology to lay claim to skills and expertise in counterpoint to a generally male-dominant culture speaks volumes about the ways in which women see themselves and their relationship to their work. As Erica Jong puts it in her feminist essay, The Artist as Housewife, ‘naming is a form of self-creation’.

At the mid-point of Euripides' Hippolytus, Theseus arrives to find that his wife Phaedra has hanged herself, for a reason yet unknown. As he laments over his wife's corpse, the chorus of Troezenian women offers apparently standard consolation:

At the close of Euripides’ Electra, the Dioscuri suddenly appear ‘on high’ to their distraught niece and nephew, who have just killed their mother, the divine twins’ mortal sister. This is in fact the second longest extant deus ex machina (after the final scene in Hippolytus), and the only scene in which a tragedian attempts to resolve directly the aftermath of the matricide. In this article, I argue that Castor's and Polydeuces’ sudden apparition to Orestes and Electra constitutes a specialised point of intersection between the mortal and immortal realms in Greek tragedy: familial epiphany, an appearance by a god who has an especially intimate relationship with those on stage. Euripides’ focus on the familial divine as a category accentuates various contradictions inherent to both ancient Greek theology and dramaturgy. The Dioscuri are a living paradox, ambiguously traversing the space between dead heroes and gods, managing at the same time to occupy both. They oscillate uniquely between the mortal and immortal worlds, as different sources assign different fathers to each brother, and others speak of each one possessing divinity on alternate days. As I propose, the epiphany of these ambiguous brothers crystallises the problem of the gods’ physical presence in drama. Tragedy is the arena in which gods burst suddenly into the mortal realm, decisively and irrevocably altering human action. The physical divine thus tends to be both marginal and directorial, tasked with reining in the plot or directing its future course. The appearance of the familial divine, on the other hand, can in fact obscure the resolution and future direction of a play, undermining the authority of the tragic gods. In the specific case of Electra, I contend that the involvement of the Dioscuri, who are Electra's and Orestes’ maternal uncles, produces a sense of claustrophobia at the close of the play, which simultaneously denies the resolution that is expected from a deus ex machina while also revealing the pessimistic nature of what is typically considered a reassuringly ‘domestic’ and character driven drama.

Early in the Pro Milone, Cicero's defence of Titus Annius Milo on trial for the murder of Publius Clodius Pulcher, the orator presents a list of exemplary figures from Roman history whose deeds offer parallels for Milo's alleged crime. Though these men murdered political enemies, they were nonetheless considered justified in their actions by their Roman peers. In emphatic and memorable last place in this list is an example drawn not from Roman history but from Greek tragedy:

This article focuses on the Sacred Tales (henceforth ST), Aelius Aristides’ first-person account of his terrible diseases and subsequent healing brought about by Asclepius, and sheds new light on this text with the help of the notion of embodiment. In recent decades the ST has received a great deal of attention: scholars have offered two main readings of this work, oscillating between the poles of religion and rhetoric. Some have read the ST as an aretalogy while others have emphasised the rhetorical aims of this text and its connection with Second Sophistic literature.

Apuleius’ On the God of Socrates (De Deo Socratis), a lecture on Platonic demonology and Socrates’ daimonion that dates to the second half of the second century CE, is a critical work in the assessment of Apuleius’ Platonism, but it also should play a larger role in our reconstruction of his public image than it has. This popular philosophical lecture focuses on the same theme as two Greek works from roughly the same time period: Plutarch's dialogue On the Daimonion of Socrates (περὶ τοῦ Σωϰράτους δαιμονίου) and Maximus of Tyre's Orations 8-9 (Διαλέξεις). Discussion of On the God of Socrates has centered on its relationship with these other texts, with the aim of comparing Apuleius’ argument about daimones with Plutarch's and Maximus’. The consensus view is that Plutarch's treatment of demonology has little in common with Apuleius’ (I present further evidence supporting the consensus near the end of this essay). On the other hand, many scholars assert Apuleius’ closest Greek model is Maximus of Tyre, a sophist with a Platonic orientation who wrote forty-one brief lectures on ethics and other philosophical subjects in the second century CE.

Ausonius' Mosella is probably the most remarkable, studied and beloved poem of late antiquity. This essay aims to examine it from a new perspective, by reinterpreting it as a complex and many-layered depiction of a sui generis epiphanic experience, ultimately triggered by an unmediated encounter with nature. This sudden ‘revelation’, be it real or merely an artful literary device, did not only provide Ausonius with a deeper insight into the world around him, but also raised many epistemological issues on the limits of human knowledge and the (in)ability of language to convey reality. Both aspects—the poetical rendering of a non-discursive quasi-mystical experience and the epistemological and philosophical reflections it brings about—pervade the whole of the poem and are absolutely central to an in-depth understanding of its very raison d’être.