Writing on Poenulus and Plautus’ genre, Henderson has proposed that the extant Plautine plays are ‘emphatically heterogeneous’, such that ‘no one play typifies the oeuvre.’ His argument counters a charge often leveled against Roman Comedy, that the plays are all the same, or at least that they all amount to the same thing. Henderson was right that they are not and do not, but the fact remains that Plautus’ plays have a certain predictability. Their formulaic nature is what promises, in the face of manifold obstacles, a happy ending. It is what indicates that the fragments of Vidularia once added up to a recognition play—and what defines ‘recognition plays’ as a group. It is what prompts claims that Captiui is ‘unusual’, filled with ‘oddities’ and ‘mistakes’.

The mutability of Philokleon's generational identity in Aristophanes’ Wasps is well established. Critics routinely write of his ‘rejuvenation’ in the second half of the play, and it is in the scene with the αὐλητρίϲ (‘aulos-girl’), Dardanis, that the old man most explicitly plays the part of an irresponsible youth waiting for his son (in the role of father) to die. However, inversions and perversions of generational identity pervade the whole play. Even before Philokleon has undergone his liberating transformation at the symposion, the educational roles of father and son are reversed as Bdelykleon schools him in the proper way to behave in polite society. More subtly and extensively, Bowie has shown how the three agones in which Philokleon unsuccessfully engages during the first half of the play correspond to the three stages of an Athenian male citizen's life: ephebeia, maturity in the hoplite phalanx, and old age in the jury. However, critics have not observed that Philokleon goes through another, parallel journey from youth through maturity to old age in the three ‘iambic scenes’ where he is confronted by the victims of his outrageous behaviour on his way home from the symposion. This article will show how Aristophanes constructs this third lifecycle (counting Bowie's agones and his literal maturation before the play's action begins) before considering its implications for the wider characterization of Philokleon and in particular the final scene.

In the final scene of Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (2015), Daisy Domergue, the sole female character among the titled eight, hangs suspended from the ceiling of the cabin in which they all have fought an operatically violent battle to the death. From her cuffed hand a chain dangles, at the other end of which is another cuffed hand, minus the rest of the body to which it had belonged. Its owner was her bounty hunter, who spent most of his time onscreen physically abusing her, including struggling with her over the control of weapons (e.g., machete and gun). We meet her with a black eye, to which are soon added a broken nose and teeth and a face repeatedly doused in her own blood and that of others. Two equally bloody antagonists string her up, pitting their injuries against her near-dead weight, so that for a time her body is triangulated by her attachment to them as well as to the remaining bit of the bounty hunter.

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At some point in the early second century CE Suetonius set out to compose biographies of important Roman literary figures. The largest surviving section of this work—known as theDe Grammaticis et Rhetoribus—opens with what is generally considered an account of the early beginnings of philology in Rome.

Recent investigations of Seneca'sMedeahave found consistently fascinating the way in which Medea progressively flags her realization of enacted identity and selfhood. She self-consciously pierces the fabric of her drama with identifying declarations, colored by especial reference to her name: the announcementMedea superest(‘Medea remains’, 166) and bald statement offiam(‘I will be’, 171) in response to hearing her own name lead to the supreme utterance ofMedea nunc sum(‘now I am Medea’, 910). Medea conjures herself into being with these three identifications, stepping fully into the troubling contours she knows of not only her own mythology, but also her literary history. Medea's dominating focus on her name allows this layered acknowledgement of self, of Medea as both mythological figure and literary fixture. In resultant discussions, the weight given to her name in precipitating this sense of identity within her play has, quite naturally, led to a proportionate emphasis uponwhoMedea is. In some ways, Medea's notably self-annotative process ofbecoming‘Medea’ eclipses other useful interrogative frameworks of her identity: the spotlight on the ‘who’ of Medea comes somewhat at the expense of the ‘what’, or the ‘how’. This is not to say that such categories are not mutually informative or intertwined, for Medea (by Seneca's time) does, in fact, have a defining act: the murder of her children. Who Medea is stems from what she does, the sentiment vividly expressed byMedea nunc sum. In light of these considerations, I would suggest a different perspective from which to conceptualize Medea's identity, one that takes into account the paired aspects of being and doing that together comprise an understanding of character, especially within drama. This perspective departs from a framework dependent on progressive structural characterization, as represented by the trio of passages cited above, and focuses instead on characterization via demonstrated patterns of linguistic tendency, on both macroscopic and microscopic levels. From the beginning, Medea displays measured consistency with her relentless knowledge of self as she transforms these categories of identification and action: as the play develops, her sense of ‘this is who I am’becomes‘this is what I do’.

It is not easy to know where to begin. Standing at the crossroads, one sees innumerable tracks leading in every direction down well-worn paths. Can one really say anything new, or is one condemned to repeat the already said? A possible way forward—but it has already been tried before…—is to double down on repetition. If one repeats enough and with sufficient diversity among the repetitions, then maybe among the interference patterns generated among so many different standing waves centered upon so many different points there will emerge something novel, the echo of a voice never heard before. And this would be the voice of an author, the voice of Seneca, for example.

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This article focuses on theSacred Tales(henceforthST), Aelius Aristides’ first-person account of his terrible diseases and subsequent healing brought about by Asclepius, and sheds new light on this text with the help of the notion of embodiment. In recent decades theSThas received a great deal of attention: scholars have offered two main readings of this work, oscillating between the poles of religion and rhetoric. Some have read theSTas an aretalogy while others have emphasised the rhetorical aims of this text and its connection with Second Sophistic literature.

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