Style and Rhetoric

In recent years, classicists have increasingly explored the intersection of intertextuality and historiography. A series of SCS panels, articles, and books have have questioned how historiographical intertextuality relates to poetic intertextuality (e.g., O'Gorman 2009; Damon 2010; Levene 2010: chap. 2; Pelling 2013). They have raised the questions: how do historians reflect or contradict the prevailing cultural discourses? How do they translate reality into words? How do historians interact with literary texts?

It is striking how frequently games of chance are paired with anger in Greek literature. Passages from a wide array of genres and time periods associate dice and knucklebones with ire, but the details of the relationship vary considerably among the sources. For example, in the very first appearance of a game of chance in Greek literature, Patroclus becomes incensed while playing knucklebones (ἀμφ᾿ ἀστραγάλοισι χολωθείς, Odyssey 23.88) and kills Amphidamas’ son.

Jocasta: ‘To try to end their strife I persuaded Polynices to come to Eteocles under a truce before taking up the spear. The messenger I sent says that he will come.’ (E. Pho. 81-83; transl. Kovacs 2002)

Ancient critics did not simply talk about literary style; they also created their own. Although important work has been published recently on ancient literary criticism (de Jonge, Wiater, Worman, and Porter), the language developed by ancient critics for the analysis of style has not received due attention. Yet the style of aesthetic discourse that critics crafted in their treatises reveals broader cultural sensibilities and the remarkable creativity with which they approached the authors they cite.

At the beginning of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses an unnamed speaker promises to the reader that she will experience wonder, a siren-like seduction, and entertainment by listening to the novel’s stories about the metamorphoses of human characters (Graverini 2012, 1-50). This paper argues that a large section of the famous Cupid and Psyche story (henceforth C&P), namely the narration set in Cupid’s palace (Met. 5.1-24), contains an unnoticed re-enactment of the novel’s prologue, with a focus on its ‘poetics of seduction’.