The ancient Greeks and Romans often conceived works of art as inspiring them to direct imitation of what they saw represented. Such mimetic contagion is attested to throughout antiquity, yet its operation as a motif is most usefully analysed in the context of a particular historical moment: this volume takes Terence's Eunuch both as an exemplar of a persistent pattern of framing responses to art, and also as a case study of how mimetic contagion functions as a key to a (...) particular literary work and a perspective on the cultural context in which it resides. (shrink)

This paper presents a literary reading of the Homeric Hymn to Pan, tracing the effects of phonetic, verbal, and thematic repetitions throughout the hymn and especially surrounding the appearance of Echo in line 21. A close reading of the structures generated by these repetitions reveals a complex superimposition of structural schemata, and a psychoanalytic reader-response analysis relates our deferred expectation for closure to Pan's disappointed desire for Echo in the erotic myth. The nightingale simile, in its allusion to the Odyssey, (...) enacts another kind of echo and illustrates the self-conscious intertextuality of the archaic Greek poetics of variation. (shrink)