We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

M. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

In a study published some years ago, J.-P. Vernant drew attention to the fundamental distinction Greek thought makes between spoken and all other modes of divination. It is a difference that reflects certain givens of ancient social and political structure, and that has its roots in the marked orientation of Greek society towards open discourse. What he has in mind as a paradigm of oral divination is the question-and-answer format of many ancient oracles. He argues that this provides far more direct and more ‘democratic’ access to the will of deity or the way of things than do styles of consultation dependent on interpretative schemes which, because of their indirect nature, are accessible only to a small and privileged group. The fine art of pyromancy, for instance, deploys a framework of transformational rules and techniques whose complexity removes the interpretation of ‘fire signs’ (empura sēmata) from the realm of ordinary skills and makes it instead the special province of a priestly caste, such as that of the Iamidai at Olympia.

Euripides' Ion has suffered from the attempt to find in the play an overriding message or moral. Verrall and his successors saw the Ion as an attack against Apollo and organized religion; Wassermann and Burnett argue that it defends orthodox piety; Grégoire and Loraux view it as a hymn or lament on Athenian national pride; and Knox and Gellie respond that the Ion is pure comedy with no deeper meaning. There is of course some truth to each of these interpretations, but it does not follow that the play's ‘real meaning’ lies somewhere in between them. I suggest that we read the Ion not as an abstract argument but as drama, and in particular as a social comedy whose ‘meaning’ lies not in an underlying message but in the action itself and in the conflicts among the play's characters, human and divine, male and female, foreign and Athenian.

Such conflicts, in this play at least, focus attention upon the role of the gods, the place of foreigners in Athens, and relations between men and women. Of these three subjects, the first two have dominated discussion of the Ion, both by those who find them central to the play's religious or nationalistic theme, and by those who consider them incidental to the play as comedy. I shall first show that the third area of conflict — relations between men and women — is equally important in the Ion and reflects an important issue in contemporary Athens. Second, I shall argue that the gender issues raised somewhat provocatively in the first half of the play are upstaged by the melodramatic excitement of the second half. And I shall suggest, in conclusion, that although it is only one of many social and family conflicts in the drama, the battle between the sexes shows how the Ion raises important and difficult questions without becoming an ‘issue play’.

At Wasps 57-66, Aristophanes distinguishes his comedy from humor of the vulgar (phortikē) Megarian sort. Elsewhere he boasts that his comedy is more intellectual, for it is clever and wise (Clouds 548, 522); and alleges that his rivals write comedy which aims only at laughs and relies for this purpose on vulgar props and language, while his comedy is primarily verbal (epea, Clouds 544), conceptual (ideai, dianoiai, Clouds 547; Peace 750; etc.), innovative (kainon ti, Wasps 1044, 1053; Clouds 547), and infused with modesty (sōphrosunē, Knights 545, Clouds 537; etc.). It goes without saying that any and all of these claims, made within a comedy, ought not to be taken entirely innocently. Nor, however, ought they to be dismissed as mere nonsense, for they contain what is an important contradiction within the logic of the dialectic between old and new so fundamental to comedy; it is a contradiction which runs throughout Aristophanes' discussion of his comedy, yet which is encapsulated in the first parabasis of Clouds. Here the poet identifies with the avant-garde; yet his poetry is modest (sōphron) and he scorns the manners — the hairstyle, to be exact (ou komō, 545) — of the affected or decadent young of his day, although a sign of being refined (kompsos). Aristophanes in his posture of innovator shows impatience with the traditional inasmuch as it is repetitive; yet he also claims a position of priority and moral sensibility incompatible with the posture of innovator within the terms of his own comedy. Moreover, Aristophanes situates the antithesis between old and new within an overt hierarchy in which the old, although preferred for its moral authority, is continually being usurped by the new: sophistic rhetoric has appropriated the vocabulary which both sides of the opposition must employ and has, by controlling the terms and context, informed the debate between them.

The approach to the Satires of Juvenal via the persona theory is well-known and has been productive. Somewhat less notice has been given to the fact that a considerable number of the satires have their persona moulded around another character, an addressee or an interlocutor, or sometimes an important narrative figure. Such characters ‘justify’ the persona, which can now be seen as a kind of ad hominem irony. This matter is intricately linked with the role of indignatio. Thus indignation, programmed in the first satire, becomes a little suspect in Laronia's mouth in the second. Laronia is a small scale character, but the techniques used in her regard appear again in the third satire, where the difference between Juvenal and Umbricius reveals the inadequacy of indignatio a little more clearly. The difference between the treatment of Crispinus and of Domitian in the fourth satire carries this process further. In the fifth, Juvenal tries to rouse the abject Trebius, but in his own apostrophe to Virro (Sat. 5.107f.) shows that indignatio is not, perhaps, appropriate at all. The role of indignatio diminishes further in the later satires, noticeably in the ninth, where Juvenal's tone is one of banter and Naevolus reveals his own unpleasantness. Much of this process has been charted by S. Braund in a book on the seventh, eighth, and ninth satires. The argument can be resumed with the eleventh satire where there is a further development. In the earlier satires which use address or dialogue there is an impressive realism in dramatic terms about the confrontation and psychology. In the eleventh (and even more, the twelfth) the development of the techniques of irony begins to intrude on the dramatic plausibility: the voice assumed in the poem becomes more aware of the audience as well as the addressee. As the beginning of a demonstration of this change I now provide an analysis of the use of Persicus in the eleventh satire.