legere enim et non intellegereneglegere est.
(To read and to misread is to miss a reading of one's world.)
Prologue to Dicta Catonis 1 (3rd Cent. CE)

In a recent paper I have studied the power play of notions such as tukhē (‘chance’) and telos (‘finality’) in the Oedipus Tyrannus, and in particular I have tried to show how these two principles are responsible for shaping different and overlapping narratives in the text. While the narrative of telos corresponds broadly speaking to the voice of Apollo the Father, the narrative of tukhē accommodates itself in the void and absence of the Father's voice. The encroachment of these two narratives upon one another not only outlines different visions of paternity—which is the central theme in the play—but also creates suspense and imprints an indecisive direction into the action of the play. In particular the narratives spun around tukhē, i.e. those that emphasize the mere accidentality of events, their mere human causation without any ultimate goal, resist the teleological thrust of the play, its divine finality—the necessary accomplishment of the oracles and of the prophecies— and accordingly also the ‘closure’ of the play. By closure of the play I understand the end of the play in accordance with the teleological premises that have been created during the action.

The heart does hurt.
And that's no metaphor.

The feeling is
that ‘throbbing muscle’ you can't say—
since that's ‘steel comic sex meat’.

But it does hurt
top-mid-left
under my shirt with its atrocious beat.

‘Didactic Poetry is poetry which is primrily intended to instruct. Most commonly, the label is used for poetry which teaches a moral. It can also refer to poetry which conveys factual information.’ Classicists will take issue with such a definition: that ‘also’ is provocative, and so are the priorities it signals; the wedge that is being driven between poetics as ‘moral’ as against poetics as ‘factual’, those terms—… Besides, what weight is to be placed on the opposition ‘teaches’ vs. ‘conveys… information’? What concept of ‘teaching’ can there be that stands proud of ‘conveying… information’?

This is the subject of the present essay. If we put this question—these questions—to the Satires of Persius, we will find in them both: (1) a strategic manoeuvre within the developing construction of imperial subjectivity within Roman discourse that has been strangely overlooked in the recent burst of critical attention devoted to this area; and also (2) a paradigmatic response to repressive encroachment on individual and collective liberties from the ‘defensive’ writer who contrives from the very constriction of the civic voice a vindication of the freedom to mean. Our freedom… to dissemble(,) dissent. Reflection of and on bur predicament: ‘meaning’ in the meaning-fullness of emphasis, the protocol of reading that problematises the containment of reading this side of the Diktat of Power/Knowledge. Hoc ridere meum (1.122).

On 5th February 1989, the review section of The Observer carried a full-page article on a film about Camille Claudel, the sculptress who was Rodin's mistress and who spent the last thirty years of her life in a mental asylum. The iconography of this page, supposedly concerned with the film and the woman, was telling. A large central image of Rodin, arms crossed and staring masterfully forward, is ringed by three, small, peripheral images of Claudel. Each is (of course) a photograph: one of the woman herself, one of the statue of her by her lover Rodin, and one of the actress who represents her in the film. The images display the slippage between women and artistic representations or creations (of women)—a slippage which is at the heart of the Pygmalion story. The title of the article is Love that turned to stone.

In Metamorphoses 10.148-739, Ovid has the master-poet, Orpheus, react to the double loss of his wife, Eurydice, by singing to surrounding nature a set of tales, including that of Pygmalion (245-97). Pygmalion, it will be remembered, created a beautiful statue, with which he fell in love. With the help of Venus and in response to the artist's erotic attentions, the statue came to life.

In Euripides' Suppliants as one commentator remarks, ‘the play consists of talk’. Much of the talk is about ideas, which weave a tantalizing and complex intellectual dance through the debates of the central figures. The tone is set by the first debate, between the suppliant Adrastus and the young Theseus. The former makes a plea in terms that he himself seems to characterize as inadequate, while the latter rejects the suppliant with a bravura speech that offers no less than a philosophy of religion, morality and politics. Theseus' ideas are marked by severe internal contradictions, and they are subjected to further contradictions by later statements of Theseus and others. Yet this puzzling philosophy is assigned to a character who seems entirely free from the misjudgments typical of other tragic protagonists. The Euripidean tag that ‘the gods ordain things counter to expectation’ appears not to be true in Theseus' case. Here is a tragic hero who, in a just cause, plans a brief war from which he hopes to return home successful, without major harm to his people and without offense to the gods; and—unlike the protagonists of several Aeschylean plays and Adrastus in this play— the Athenian king succeeds in all his aims. Even when Theseus reverses his initial rejection of Adrastus, he is careful to point out that his initial moral assessment was and is correct (334-36). The reversal itself suggests that, if Theseus has a susceptibility to error, the hamartēma may be located in the fit between logos and ergon, thought and reality, a famous dilemma in the intellectual history of the fifth century.

According to Proclus, the story of the bowman Philoctetes' return to Troy from his solitude on Lemnos appeared in the Little Iliad. In terms of the overall history of the war, the event occurs relatively late—shortly before the destruction of the city; indeed, according to the oracle of Helenus which inspired the recovery expedition to Lemnos, it seems to have been necessary to the success of the Greek war-effort. In terms of the epic tradition, it can be seen as something of a watershed, standing between a glorious, but unsuccessful, past and a successful, but somewhat ambivalent, future, recorded in the Iliou Persis.

Sophocles' play looks both forward to and back at the war in which it is situated. Neoptolemus and Odysseus, the men chosen to retrieve the great bow of Heracles and its current owner, Philoctetes, anticipate the glory that will belong to the destroyers of Troy. They also together concoct a manipulative account of the recent past—a version clearly at odds with familiar epics. The purpose of this account—narrated by Neoptolemus— appears to have been to win Philoctetes' trust and sympathy, and so to induce him to hand over the bow of his own accord. At first this bow seems to be the primary focus of the conspirators' designs, although eventually it becomes clear that Philoctetes himself also will be needed at Troy. Philoctetes hands Neoptolemus the bow when he falls ill, but shortly afterwards Neoptolemus explains the true reason for his arrival on Lemnos, and later returns the bow to Philoctetes. Neoptolemus' gradually emerging scruples are the obvious cause of this breakdown in the plot. He reclaims the heroic tradition of his father, Achilles, and rejects Odysseus' trickery.

At F. 6.3-8 Ovid lays claim to the kind of vatic authority (cf. fas mihi praecipue…, ‘I have a special right’, 7) which entitles him to a visitation from Juno (13ff.); but this pose soon turns out to be less stable and assured than he would have us believe at the start of the book (cf. facta canam, ‘I shall sing the truth’, 3). Cautioned by Paris' experience and the dangers implicit in favouring one goddess over others in a competitive iudicium (99f), he proves unable to judge between Juno, Juventas and Concordia as the source of the month's name (97f.). Throughout the Fasti, of course, gods and goddesses are invoked to authenticate the causae which Ovid reports for given festivals or rituals, but at the start of Fasti 6 (as at the start of Fasti 5) he is reduced to aporia through the very mechanism—divine invocation—which is normally the bedrock of his vatic authority. This adjustment in his role as vates, from the authoritative mouthpiece of the gods to the uncertain, judicially impotent arbiter, is but one illustration of a broader phenomenon in the Fasti: far from occupying a position of rigidly inflexible authority as he moves through the calendrical cycle, Ovid's vatic persona proves to be a flexible narratological instrument which compromises his vatic authority at different points within the poem.

The stage setting of Euripides' Hekabe is a sinister place. Its denizen is an ogre-like king who masquerades as an ally of the Greeks and a friend of the Trojans. He is a host who takes in a xenos (‘stranger/guest’) along with his golden hoard, both of which he promises to keep safe within his house. Site of death, site of thesaurization, Polymestor's locale bears an uncanny and parodic resemblance to the house of Hades and he to the form of that death god called Plouton. Paradoxically, the names of the victims who die there, the one he killed (Polydoros) and the one whom others sacrificed (Polyxena), sound like those ironic and euphemistic epithets of that underworld deity, who both gives and receives. This is also a place haunted by ghosts, one of whom appears on stage and speaks the prologue (Polydoros) and the other, Achilleus, who transmits his demand for the sacrificial gift of a ‘bride of death’ (Polyxena). In the end, there is a ‘house of Hades’, but it will be Hekabe's and not Polymestor's, and it is Polymestor and his children who will be lured into her secluded tent, following a path, as the chorus says, that leads thanasimon pros Haidan (‘to deadly Hades’, 1031f.; cf. 1021f.). He will later call the avengers (Hekabe and her women) Bacchants of Hades (1077).

Whenever we discuss the Frogs of Aristophanes we find ourselves discussing Athenian tragedy in the Frogs, because Frogs is the play that sends Dionysos down to Hades to recall the tragedian Euripides to Athens, the play that pits Aeschylus and Euripides against one another in a contest that provides one of the earliest specimens of Western literary criticism, and the play in which Aeschylus is finally resurrected to bring the Athenians the teaching that will save the city in its hour of distress. Athenian comedy in Frogs, in contrast, is a much less urgent topic, for while Frogs is a comedy, it does not seem to be about comedy in the same way that it is about tragedy. It includes no comic poets among its characters, it makes no mention whatsoever of comedy in the agōn of the tragic poets, and it even lacks the section of the parabasis praising Aristophanes' art, so familiar from the plays of the 420s. The few references to comedy that do appear in Frogs all occur in the first third of the play; after the parodos, there is silence.