Chariton’s novel, Chaereas and Callirhoe, is intensely interested not only in the emotional experience of the protagonists but also in the emotional effect the narrative has on readers. Among the many emotions depicted within the text, one stands out for its architectonic function: jealousy. Jealousy articulates the plot and propels it forward. Jealousy is also represented as a fundamentally “readerly” emotion: scenes of reading focus on the potential of written texts to stir jealous emotions. Similarly, scenes of embedded narration focus (...) on the jealous reactions of narratees. The plot achieves closure when Chaereas learns to manage his jealousy as narratee and narrator. His experience, however, has implications also for Chariton and his readers. The text’s representation of jealousy as a narrative and textual force speaks both to the experience of writing in a culture that prizes the imitation of prestigious models and to the experience of reading a text that self-consciously hybridizes those models. (shrink)

This paper considers the nature of time and temporality in Homer. It argues that any exploration of narrative and time must, as its central tenet, take into account the irreducible plurality and interconnectedness of memory, the event, and experienced time. Drawing on notions of complexity, emergence, and stochastic behavior in science as well as phenomenological traditions in the discussion and analysis of time, temporality, and change, and offering extensive readings of Homer, of Homeric epithets and formulae, and of key passages (...) in the Iliad and Odyssey, the paper argues against chronological notions of linear time and progression and in favor of a complex, dynamic temporal “geometries” of Homeric temporality. The paper concludes by briefly extending the argument to the wider domain of ancient time in general. Homer is a fundamental point of reference in the ancient world. Thus, Homeric temporality—irreducibly complex—affects the cognition and perception of time throughout the whole of antiquity. (shrink)

The Timaeus is a muthos that attempts to imagine a logos of the cosmos. Like the demiurge, readers are to be mimetic artists, poets, who move constantly between the intelligible essences and their likenesses in the world of appearance, experience, and becoming, occupying a third register that is neither and both. The cosmology of the Timaeus is both a likely story and an allegory of its own failure. It takes place within the nonspace of the khōra, a realm accessible only (...) through bastard reasoning that we can perceive only as if in a dream. The Timaeus is an unfinalizable logos in which each moment of positing is also a moment of irony and interrogation, of simultaneous acceptance and active separation, of choric space. (shrink)

At a crucial moment in Euripides’ Andromache, the title character throws her hands around a statue of the goddess Thetis and laments the losses that have brought her to a point of desperation and despair. When Thetis appears at the end of the play, she answers Andromache’s pleas and grants her a renewed life of marriage and motherhood. Yet in her embrace of the statue, Andromache momentarily embodies an alternative impulse: a longing to merge with the stony form of the (...) goddess and to cease from the patterns of nuptial mobility and sexual reproduction that have defined her life thus far. In this article, I argue that we should understand this embrace as “queer”—as a moment of intimate contact between mortal woman and immortal goddess that deeply unsettles the models of sexual and reproductive order that dominate Greek art and literature. While the play ends by redirecting Andromache toward the propagation of the Trojan line, the queer potential of that crucial embrace is taken up by Thetis herself, who re-scripts her own marriage to Peleus in a way that both inverts gendered patterns of movement and rejects the valorization of female fertility. Euripides’ Andromache thus concludes with the restoration of mortal sexual and reproductive order, yet through Andromache’s encounter with Thetis, it also gestures to the queer and startling freedom of a barren future. (shrink)

This article considers how mourning is configured as a site of political and aesthetic conflict in Aeschylus’ Persae. Aeschylus represents the Persian defeat at Salamis as a catastrophe that unsettles the Persians’ habitual modes of visualizing and quantifying the empire’s population as an ordered whole. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, I show how characters in Persae construct novel representations of the war dead as social collectivities that do not fit into the hierarchical structures of dynastic (...) rule. I focus on two passages that stage this work in granular detail: the Messenger’s list of dead commanders recited soon after he reports the defeat and a second list of the dead sung by the Chorus in dialogue with Xerxes. Each passage advances a polemical recount of the dead, at once reevaluating the scale of the disaster and reframing how individuals and collectivities destroyed in the war should be mourned and memorialized. The Messenger and Chorus thereby contest the efforts of the royal family to count the losses at Salamis according to the circumscribed terms of imperial administration. By tracing how the memorialization of the dead galvanizes conflicting efforts to count the community as a whole, Persae raises larger questions about the political affordances of aesthetic form. (shrink)

Archimedes’ Sand-Reckoner presents a system for naming extraordinarily large numbers, larger than the number of grains of sand that would fill the cosmos. Curiously, Archimedes addresses the treatise not to another specialist but to King Gelon II of Syracuse. While the treatise has thus been seen as evidence for the dynamics of patronage, difficulties in both Archimedes’ treatment of Gelon and his discussion of astronomical models make it fit incongruously within contemporary court and scientific contexts. This article offers a new (...) reading of the Sand-Reckoner based on a reconsideration of the relationship between author and addressee: deferring assumptions about the historicity of that relationship, it analyzes Gelon’s role in the treatise with respect to both the stylistic features of Archimedes’ prose and a broader tradition of narratives about a variety of cultural actors who engage with kings, speaking not so much truth as wit to power. Such a reading resolves the social and scientific difficulties of the treatise, and develops the literary-experimental qualities of Hellenistic science. In turn, the article proposes a revised approach, sensitive to broader patterns of authorship, to understanding ancient scientific authors’ relationship to royal authority. It concludes, finally, that the royal patronage seemingly exemplified by the Sand-Reckoner had greater significance as a cultural trope than as a social institution. (shrink)