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This paper interprets Socrates’ defense speech in Plato’s Apology in the light of recent studies on the Athenian amnesty of 403BC and the rhetorical conventions to which the amnesty gave rise. Specifically, I establish parallels between Socrates’ rhetorical tactics and those in Lysias’ Against Eratosthenes. I argue that Socrates’ argument for the importance of philosophy appropriates and transforms the rhetoric characteristic of the post-amnesty era.

Antigone in Magnesia: Plato’s Revision of the Sophoclean Tragedy in the Laws

Plato’s Laws offers a treatment of the civic role of performance that radically departs from his previous views. Whereas much scholarly discussion on the Laws’ engagement with tragedy has centered on Book VII, I argue that, throughout Book VIII, Plato engages in a revisionist rewriting of Sophocles’s Antigone. This intertextual engagement, which encompasses issues of both gender and genre, allows Plato to articulate a normative theory of natural, unwritten law.

            The importance of constellations and astrological references in Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses has been well-documented (Newlands 1995; Gee 2000), but such references in the Ars Amatoria have received relatively little attention.

Still Waters Run Deep: Interpretations of the Metamorphoses' Pools

            The construction of gender within Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a subject of perennial interest, largely because of the characters’ self-determination, and even transformation, of their gender identities. Characters who transform their gender, such as Iphis, Tiresias, Caenis/Caeneus, and Salmacis/Hermaphroditus, provide the clearest look at how gender is constructed (Kamen 2012, Liveley 2003, Pintabone 2002).

At the end of the Metamorphoses, after celebrating others’ transformations, Ovid envisions himself as a typical Greek hero, defeating toothed creatures— in this case, the monster Time (Biebighauser, 2005). While the Greek heroes finally reach resting places of worship, he completes his apotheosis with a post-mortem fusion with Rome (Met. XV, 870-5).

On the fifth-century Athenian comic stage, subtlety and innovation were terms of both praise and abuse. Aristophanes criticizes his rival Crates for ‘ultra-urbane plot conceits’ (Eq. 539 ἀστειοτάτας ἐπινοίας), and is himself derided by Cratinus as an ‘oversubtle’ heckler in the audience (fr. 342 ὑπολεπτολόγος). Elsewhere, Aristophanes complains that his Clouds failed precisely because its ‘great newness … of conception’ (Vesp. 1044 καινοτάτας . . . διανοίας), and that only true connoisseurs within the audience had appreciated its genius.

In his Kolakes (“Spongers”), Eupolis (c. 446-411 BCE) describes Cecrops as “human as far down as the crotch, then a tunny-fish from there on down” (F 159). This peculiar portrayal of the first king of Athens differs radically from the enduring convention depicting theriomorphic Cecrops as a serpent-legged creature (Gantz 1993; Kron 1976).

The relationship between politics and Aristophanic comedy has been a matter of debate. On the one hand, some scholars have ascribed to Aristophanes’ oeuvre a politically neutral outlook, arguing that references to contemporary politics were a convention of genre and that comedy had no real-life impact (Gomme 1938; Rosen 1988; Olson 2010). On the other hand, there have been arguments for a partisan outlook, which in turn was analyzed as either a conservative and anti-democratic (de Ste.

The significance of the frog chorus in Aristophanes’ Frogs has long been a source of debate. For example, some scholars have viewed the frogs as symbolic of comedy’s low register (Reckford, Hubbard, Biles); some suggest that the agōn between Dionysus and the frogs prefigures that between Aeschylus and Euripides by offering a critique of the frogs’ musical abilities (Defradas, Worman); and one especially ingenious interpretation analyzes the amphibians as a parody of Aristophanes’ rival at the Lenaea of 405 BCE, Phrynichus Comicus (Demand).