In her conversation with Socrates, Diotima explains that ‘all men are pregnant both in body and soul, and when they come of age, our nature desires to give birth; it cannot give birth in anything ugly, only in what is beautiful’ (206c). The man who has been pregnant with wisdom, moderation and justice in his soul since early youth, now wishing ‘to beget and give birth’ (209b), goes in search of a beautiful boy in whose company he may produce his offspring. Through passionate communion with the youth, ‘he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages’ (209c), engendering the instructive speeches on virtue and other matters which he delivers to the beloved. Diotima's equation between physical and mental parturition seems so appropriate and intuitively right that we tend to gloss over the real puzzle of her account: in this mode of procreation, which holds good for literal as well as spiritual birth, pregnancy precedes the actual moment of intercourse. The reading of the Symposium I wish to offer may not explain the biology of this unlikely reproductive act, but aims to set the riddle within the context of a leitmotif that weaves through the larger text: statues, and the particular mode of love they experience and inspire, are uniquely able to perform acts of autonomous generation.

Greece has played many roles in Europe's story. For a country that, unlike Rome, had very little geopolitical influence on Europe, these roles are neither, in their extent, expectable, nor, in their variety, consistent. Why Greece? As for territory, Egypt and Asia seem to have been more colonisable projects for the Greeks. The texts of Herodotus, Thucydides (Book VIII), Xenophon (ubiquitously) suggest a continuing engagement with Eastern cultures.

‘Noble’: the invariable response of readers and critics of the Captiui. Read almost any modern work on this play and you will not have to wait long for that word. Up it pops, reflexively. The slave Tyndarus' readiness to stay in captivity, risking and in the event undergoing a gruesome punishment to free his master Philocrates, the master keeping his side of the bargain and returning to Aetolia to redeem Tyndarus in exchange for Hegio's son Philopolemus when he could as easily have stayed home (why should he care about a slave?)—surely actions that reflect refinements of character and feeling so unlike the routine skulduggery of New Comedy. We all know Lessing's famous eulogy on this play. That was determined by his own personal and cultural situation. But most critics in this century, to judge from the regularity with which they cite the Epilogue, agree with Lessing that this is a play in which ‘the good become better’ (ubi boni meliores fiant, 1034).

Dis Manibus Peter James Connor

That Lucretius should choose to end his Epicurean representation of the world with a long and harrowing account of the plague that struck Athens in 430 BCE is certainly one of the more remarkable facts in classical Roman poetry. More remarkable still is the suddenness of the ending. The poem simply breaks off as one critic says ‘almost in mid-sentence’; and even if we follow this same critic in tidying up the end by transferring 6.1247-51 to follow 1286 we are still left very much in mediis rebus, with the plague at its height and death and misery all around. Our initial response is one of surprise and puzzlement as we feel cheated of a sense of an ending; this in turn leads to questions about overall design and authorial intent. Why does the poem end this way? Indeed, has it ended at all?

Callimachus fr. 178 Pf. (= 89 Massimilla) tells how the Athenian Pollis—the name is known from a citation in Athenaeus—continued to celebrate Attic festivals in the Alexandria of the poet's own day. At Pollis' party to commemorate the Attic festival in honour of Erigone, the αἰώρα, the poet met Theogenes, a visitor from the Aegean island of Ikos (modern Alonnisos):

Martiis caelebs quid agam kalendis,
quid uelint flores et acerra turis
plena miraris positusque carbo in caespite uiuo,

docte sermones utriusque linguae:
uoueram dulcis epulas et album
Libero caprum prope funeratus arboris icru.

hic dies anno redeunte festus
corticem adstrictum pice dimouebit
amphorae fumum bibere institutae consule Tullo.

sume, Maecenas, cyathos amici
sospitis centum et uigiles lucernas
perfer in lucem: procul omnis esto clamor et ira.

mitte ciuilis super urbe curas:
occidit Daci Cotisonis agmen,
Medus infestus sibi luctuosis dissidet armis,

seruit Hispanae uetus hostis orae
Cantaber sera domitus catena,
iam Scythae laxo meditantur arcu cedere campis.

neglegens, ne qua populus laboret,
parce priuatus nimium cauere et
dona praesentis cape laetus horae: linque seuera.

What I, a bachelor, am doing on the Kalends of March, what the flowers mean and the casket full of incense and the coal placed on the living turf, you marvel at, learned in the conversations of both languages: I had vowed a savoury feast and a white goat to Liber when I was nearly done to death by the tree's fall. This feast day, as the year returns, will remove the cork, tightened with pitch, from a jar taught to drink the smoke when Tullus was consul.

terra malos homines nunc educat atque pusillos.
Today the earth breeds a race of degenerate weaklings.
Juvenal 15.70

nee galeam quassas, nee terram cuspide pulsas.
You do not shake your helmet, nor beat the ground with your spear.
Juvenal 2.130

My intention here is to describe what seems to me an aspect of this superb and notorious poem that has been insufficiently examined, a major disruption in the sign-systems it makes use of and is used by. In order to do that I will be, as best I can, setting aside questions about the poem as a product (its meaning, how its form and content fuse to effect that meaning) and about the intentions its producer (the poet or his persona) had when he went about producing that product; whether the meaning and the intention are recoverable or not, whether they are decidable or not, is a moot question, and to try to answer it here would obscure my project (and doubtless waste our time). ‘To interpret a text,’ says Barthes, ‘is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it.’ To have some access to the portion of that plural that concerns me, I have to be arbitrary (and fictive) with the question of the poet's meaning/intention and to set aside as well questions of his poem's aesthetic charms.

Twenty five years ago in the infant Ramus, J.P. Sullivan wrote ‘In Defence of Persius’. Not many scholars writing today would think of choosing that title: having contemplated the indefensible aspects of Classical literature, most are far too wary to leap to the defence of any classical author, let alone a writer of Satire, a genre distinguished by its combination of crassness and cruelty, its insistence on turning its audience into victimisers. Sullivan's defence rests partly on his perceptive appreciation of Persius' unusually complex and intense poetic style. Twenty years later, also in Ramus, John Henderson took a different approach to the same author: his (ironical?) strategy was not to defend the poet, but to banish him and his style entirely:

The formulation of the object of study as a textual trace—no longer an obscure poet, but a central and key textual trace—transforms the reading of an unpopular minor Latin author (surely a self-indulgent exercise, after all; not the sort of thing our educational system ought to be funding) into an exemplary study of the cultural formation of imperial subjectivity. Persius would have enjoyed sharing this secret with his ditch.

So Juno claims, famously, expressing her determination to thwart the newlyforged alliance between Aeneas and the Italians, and setting in motion (through the agency of Allecto) the violence and passion that fuels the ‘Iliadic’ Aeneid—the ‘Energy of Hell’, as Philip Hardie calls it—energy necessary to sustain the momentum of a long narrative poem, a demonic ‘burst of power’ imitated by Vergil's successors—Lucan, Silius, and especially Statius, who opens the Thebaid with an embittered Oedipus summoning the dark forces of the underworld embodied in the Fury Tisiphone (Theb. 1.48ff.). Vergil's hexameter might also serve as a motto for Ramus to the degree that the journal has mounted a radical—and oedipal—critique over the last quarter century, assaulting the stuffy status quo in classical studies, finding a place ‘on the shelves of all the young and cool’, although those sons (and daughters), now a generation older, are themselves the new fathers, the new superi. Juno's claim so impressed Freud that he placed it on the title page of his magnum opus—The Interpretation of Dreams—anticipating psychoanalysis' assault on Western subjectivity and describing Freud's own exclusion from the academy, his circuitous ‘professional journey’. Years later Freud would maintain that the hexameter line provides a portrait of ‘repressed instinctual impulses’, suggesting that, long before the twentieth century, Vergil and his epic successors understood the project of psychoanalysis. ‘The poets and philosophers,’ Freud was fond of saying, ‘discovered the unconscious before I did.’