Abstract: This article begins by analyzing the way in which reach and touch mark the achievement of Odysseus’s reunions and suggests a new way of conceptualizing Homeric desire and the protagonist’s need for fulfillment within a narrative through haptic action. It then turns to the ways in which the telos of reach, namely, touch, manifests in a gendered dynamic that pits the masculine grasp against

Abstract: Book 1 of the Odyssey presents us with the first bard-figure of the poem, singing what in many ways is an analogue to the Odyssey with “the return of the Greeks”; yet when Penelope appears, it is to attempt to put an end to his song. I use this scene as a starting point to suggest that Penelope is deeply implicated in narrative endings in the Odyssey. Looking at the end or τέλος of the poem

Abstract: This paper examines the many contradictions in Tibullus 1.1 that are subsequently repeated throughout his poetry, and have been repeatedly inscrutable for those working on the poems. Tibullus will drift between and amongst different locations, speakers, addressees, and viewpoints in a single poem, and on occasion within the space of a few lines. I will introduce Kierkegaard’s concept of despair

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Notes on Contributors Alexander Forte is lecturer in ancient and medieval studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research lies at the intersection of cognitive and historical linguistics, literary criticism, and intellectual history, with emphasis on the poetics of early Greek hexameter poetry. He is currently completing

Abstract:In the Odyssey, Helen and Penelope experience similar portents in their respective omen and dream episodes. Both involve the actions of an eagle and a goose/geese. What the interpretations of these visions also have in common is the entrenched epic's thematic focus on Odysseus's pending homecoming and the restoration of his οἶκος. Recent scholarship on Helen has commented that Od. 15.172–178

Abstract:This paper considers how and why the American playwright David Ives's 2010–2012 New York hit play Venus in Fur directed by Walter Bobbie borrowed the plot of Euripides' Bacchae to dramatize a new version of Leopold van Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella Venus in Furs (Venus im Pelz). The play gradually reveals that the actress auditioning for the part of its heroine, Vanda, is in fact the goddess

Abstract:While the burial at the end of Sophocles' Ajax is often interpreted as offering a form of ritual closure, this paper argues that the burial equally undermines closure. I use van Gennep's rite of passage model and Aristotle's Poetics to establish that both ritual and tragedy follow analogous, predictable tripartite progressions. On this foundation, I show that, as the Ajax's plot progresses

Abstract:In a lament on the rustic life of an exile, the persona loquens of Alcaeus 130b progresses through three spaces: the polis, esxatiai, and a temenos. The first is explicitly political, but the persona cannot occupy its territory; the latter two, where the persona can dwell, are apolitical while the temenos in particular is gendered in line with the Lesbian women who hold their beauty contests

Abstract:In New Comedy, plots involving a child conceived through rape present unique complications for women. In such plays women must work together to hide the pregnancies and rid themselves of the 'evidence.' Further, they do so within the confines of New Comedic conventions—there is no recourse to abortion. This article looks at rape-pregnancy plots in Roman Comedy, focusing particularly on the

The mythical figure of the Medusa has had a potent afterlife in twentieth-century critical theory from Freudian psychoanalysis to French feminism.1 In her classical literary reception, too, Roman authors struggle to come to terms with the power of her image. From Ovid in Metamorphoses 4, through Lucan in Bellum civile 9, to Statius in Thebaid 1, we can see the Latin epic poets treating Medusa’s gaze

My paper closely examines the text of Tibullus Book 3, poems 8–13, the eleven elegies about, and to my mind by, the Augustan poet Sulpicia, through the lens of “the visual.”1 It concludes by reflecting on what I would regard as an Ovidian echo of one particularly memorable visual detail in these elegies. Like Tibullus—whose death in 19 BCE Ovid laments, and whose poetry he evokes both reverentially

“Poetry for the eyes” is a felicitous definition of Ovid’s epic. The Metamorphoses are a model for the Achilleid in this as in other aspects,1 like the themes of deceit, transformation, and gender fluidity; the spectacle of appearances, matched by ambiguity in language; the provocation of the proem, with its program of a cyclic epos and a carmen deductum (finely spun song); the dialogue with alternative

In this paper I offer a comprehensive study of two stories told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 3 and 4, each about the meeting between a boy (Narcissus/Hermaphroditus) and a nymph (Echo/Salmacis), consumed with desire at first glance. In both passages Ovid uses a narrative pattern recurring in many erotic tales of the Metamorphoses with male and female protagonists: the sudden sight of an erotically attractive

Abstract:The ecocritic and philosopher Timothy Morton has recently proposed an aesthetics of “dark ecology” as the appropriate artistic response to difficult environments. Our interactions with such environments encourage us to recognize that we are neither superior to nor entirely separate from the objects and living beings that surround us. Accordingly, dark ecological art explores interpenetrations

Abstract:This essay takes a diachronic and phenomenological approach to the ending of Seneca’s Medea and pursues the semantic possibilities and consequences of Seneca’s choice to separate the murders of the two children. I look first at the development of Medea’s character throughout the play: What might an audience think drives this Medea to filicide, and how does Medea’s speech specifically guide

Abstract:Sulpicia, a young woman connected to an important literary circle through her uncle, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, may be the only extant female poet of the Augustan period. If so, it is likely that Ovid had privileged knowledge of a Roman woman’s poetic voice, as scholars have noted similarities between Ovid’s poetry and Sulpicia’s. We may see further correspondences between the Ovidian

Early in Book 20 of the Odyssey, on the eve of the bow contest for her hand in marriage, Penelope wakes from sleep, cries until she is sated, and then prays to Artemis for death. She asks Artemis either to shoot her with an arrow at once or to send a storm wind that will snatch her up and cast her into the streams of Oceanus, just as the storm winds carried off the daughters of Pandareus (20.61–66)

A reader of Catullus’s c. 64 is in for a perplexing, if captivating, experience. The poem, his longest by far, is often called an epyllion, or miniature epic.1 It opens with the voyage of the Argo, designated as the first ship at 64.11: illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten (She first inaugurated inexperienced Amphitrite [i.e. the ocean] with her journey).2 After nymphs marvel at the innovative

The last episode of Book 1 of Apollonius’s Argonautica (1.1187–1357) tells the story of Heracles’ loss of his beloved Hylas, snatched away by a spring nymph as he was fetching water to prepare dinner.1 The episode is a key component in the story of Jason and the Argonauts, because it explains why Heracles was not present when they reached Colchis and successfully (with Medea’s help) captured the Golden

Euripides’ “new Helen,” as Aristophanes (Thesm. 850) identifies her, occupies a tenuous position between the aggressive imposition of power (divine, political, and erotic) and resistance. In Hera’s replication of Helen, the goddess would nullify Helen’s identity in order to remove the stakes of a military conflict predicated upon Helen’s singular beauty. Although Helen’s eponymous heroine seeks to

Rome’s legendary historical narrative is an excellent source for the defining characteristics of self-constructed Roman identity.1 While this identity naturally centers on the masculine military/political realm, women do play a role in the construction of Romanitas. Rhea Silvia is raped to bear Rome’s founders; the kidnapped Sabine women form a human shield between their men folk to meld two peoples

Introduction Recognition in the Odyssey typically hinges on a visual or visualizable sign of some sort. There are, however, three recognition scenes--between Odysseus and his dog, his Nurse, and his bow--which turn instead on nonvisual triggers. Touch occasions Eurycleia's recognition of her master, as it does Odysseus's reunion with his bow, while there are strong hints that his sharp sense of smell

The past decade or so has seen a transformation of the landscape of speculative theory by various forms of new materialism which have sought to overturn the object relations of Kantian "correlationism," according to which we know neither things nor thinking in themselves, but only the relation between them. (1) Among the cognitive projects of speculative realism, object oriented ontology, and vibrant

Democracy is not the parliamentary system or the legitimate state. it is not a state of the social either, the reign of individualism or the masses . . . Democracy is the name of a singular interruption of this order of the distribution of bodies in a community that i have suggested should be conceptualised as police. it is the name of that which interrupts the smooth functioning of this order through

I. How Do You Solve a Problem like Caerellia? In a pair of letters to Atticus from late June and early July 45 BCE, Cicero complains about what is usually considered to be a decidedly modern problem: the unauthorized circulation of media on a peer-to-peer network. At the start of the first of these letters to Atticus, whom he blames for this 'leak,' Cicero writes: die mihi, placetne tibi primum edere

When in Book 1 of his Epistles Horace reflects back upon the beginning of his career in lyric poetry, he celebrates his adaptation of Archilochean iambos to the Latin language. He further states that while he followed the meter and spirit of Archilochus, his own iambi did not follow the matter and attacking words that drove the daughters of Lycambes to commit suicide (Epist. 1.19.23-5, 31). (1) The