Thee, shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves And all their echoes mourn.Milton,LycidasWebster's Third International Dictionary defines the ‘pathetic fallacy’ as ‘the ascription of human traits or feelings to inanimate nature.’ While this definition is in substance what John Ruskin meant when he first spoke of the pathetic fallacy more than a century ago, the great critic intended not merely to describe a movement in art, but to denounce that movement:All violent feelings … produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic fallacy.’… The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is … that of a mind or body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion …Ruskin rejected the pathetic fallacy when artists reduced it to a stock attribute of nature which neither they nor their public believed to reflect the truth. When, however, the pathetic fallacy did convey the artist's true feelings about nature — as groundless in reality as that feeling might have been — the artist was somehow less culpable: the truth of the sentiment mitigated the violation of empirical Truth.

I start with four quotations: (1) ‘That all European poetry has come out of the Provençal poetry written in the twelfth century by the troubadours of Languedoc is now accepted on every side.’ [The writer is talking of love poetry.] (2) The passion and sorrow of love were an emotional discovery of the French troubadours and their successors.’ (3) ‘French poets in the eleventh century discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth.’ (4) ‘The conception of romantic love which has dominated the literature, art, music, and to some extent the morality of modern Europe and America for many centuries is a medieval creation.’ Those words come from a Frenchman, a German, and Englishman and a Scot — namely Denis de Rougemont, E. R. Curtius, C. S. Lewis, and Gilbert Highet — a distinguished quartet, not lacking in knowledge or influence. The view they represent has met with little opposition and is, in fact, so widely held that it may be regarded as orthodox. The layman finds it all the easier to accept in that ‘romantic love’ is readily connected with the first definition of ‘romance’ given by theOxford English Dictionary, namely The vernacular language of France as opposed to Latin’.

A common view among scholars is that Homer's verse, ‘When the early-born (ērigeneia), rose-fingered (rhododaktylos) dawn appeared’, is a conventional standard phrase used by Homer to say ‘when the day broke out’. In this they of course follow Milman Parry who illustrated with this very phrase his famous definition of formula.This implies that we have here a mere piece of compositional technique. The poetic value of the phrase is either disregarded or taken for granted. It is seen, at best, as a good instance of artistic craft—as one of those countless formulas which make up Homeric verse.It is my contention that the phrase reflects a mode of perception and thought. Technique, compositional device, style are but the outcome of a way in which things are visualized and expressed. The phrase must thus be explained on the strength of a deeper poetic reason, it must be appreciated both in its intrinsic value and in its relation to the context. In order to do this, let us look at its occurrences, and then at what these occurrences imply as regards the conception of the poems as a whole.

Criticism of theIonhas been more successful in defining the play's problems than in arriving at any sort of consensus about its interpretation. Indeed, modern critical response has run the gamut from Verrall's view that Euripides was fashioning a pointed attack on Apollo to Kitto's insistence that he was above all concerned to present a piece of lighthearted entertainment. Despite this wide range of opinion, however, discussions have tended to delineate several issues which seem central to the play, and so have endured as subjects for critical examination. One of these is the network of irony which is so prominent a feature of theIon's structure. It is abundantly clear that dramatic irony is important to theIon, and that Euripides was deeply involved with the tension between appearance and reality; however, despite its obvious position in the play, this aspect of theIoncontinues to present an interpretive problem.In this study I want to concentrate on three areas that are of special significance in the development of the general theme of appearance and reality into a coherent intellectual position within theIon, for it was an idea on which Euripides often touched in plays written in this period. First, there is the concept of identity which is of great importance for Ion and to a lesser extent for Creusa and Xuthus. Next, I will discuss the complexity of relationships between Ion, Creusa, and Xuthus. These change dramatically as the play develops, and the characters react to their perceptions of the truth regarding their relationships with alarming irregularity. Finally, I will look at the problem of understanding Euripides' presentation of Apollo's oracle from the point of view of these other complications caused by the interplay of truth and reality. When we have analyzed theIonalong these lines it will be possible to make some general observations about the approach to reality which Euripides has presented in his play, for these elements suggest that he is making a more formal epistemological statement than is generally realized.

The Theogony is a poem about the creation of a cosmos, that is, an order. This order is created through the interaction of sexual beings, and the essentially sexual nature of the creative act eventually comes to structure and organize the space of the universe. Sexuality, moreover, implies a fundamental source of tension or conflict between opposites. Paradoxically, conflict in the Theogony is not destructive; rather, conflict enhances and expands the creative potential of sexuality by ensuring that the end product of sexual interaction, new being, will be able to act upon the world.Conflict arises in the first two divine generations when a divine being attempts to contravene the telos of sexual movement by preventing his already conceived and fully gestated offspring from coming into the world. Conflict thus works against the destructuring of the world. The consequence of each conflict is a world which is more ordered and structured, as the offspring first of Gaia and Ouranos, and then of Rheia and Kronos, are permitted to assume their appropriate places in it, or as Zeus is able to turn his attention from the suppression of his enemies to the establishment of a fixed moral order. Thus conflict decreases the entropy of the world and tends toward creation and new order.

tum dea nube cava tenuem sine viribus umbram in faciem Aeneae — visu mirabile monstrum — Dardaniis ornat telis, clipeumque iubasque divini adsimulat capitis, dat inania verba, dat sine mente sonum gressusque effingit euntis, morte obita qualis fama est volitare figuras aut quae sopitos deludunt somnia sensus. (A. 10.636-642)Then out of hollow mist the goddess makes a powerless phantom in the likeness of Aeneas — a sight marvelous to behold! — fits it with Trojan arms, simulates the shield and plumes on its godlike head, and gives it empty words, a voice without a mind, and the gait of a walking man; like phantom forms that flit about, it is said, when death is past, or like dreams that delude the sleeping senses.Near the mid-point of his aristeia in Iliad 5, Diomedes crushes the hip bone of Aeneas with a great boulder (302 ff.). Before he can administer the coup de grâce, however, Aphrodite intervenes and attempts to protect her son by covering him with the folds of her garment (311 ff.). Not to be thwarted, Diomedes attacks the goddess herself, wounding her on the wrist (334 ff.). She immediately abandons Aeneas and returns, in pain, to Olympus.

Language is among the most mysterious of man's attributes. Its power not only to communicate truths about reality, but also to compel assent in the face of reality has often appeared miraculous, magical, and also dangerous. The marvel that mere words could impel men to the most momentous actions, and the admiration or fear that this fact inspires, are recurrent themes in classical literature. To express and understand this power Greek myth early framed the figure of Orpheus, a magical singer, half-man, half-god, able to move all of nature by his song. How that myth shifts in meaning and emphasis in representing that power is the subject of this essay. Though primarily concerned with classical writers, I shall also consider how a few modern poets used and transmuted this mythic material. My reading of the myth is both diachronic and synchronic. I attempt to study some aspects of its historical development and also to interpret it (especially in part I) as if all of its versions, taken together, form a contemporary statement about the relation of art and life.Orpheus is a complex, multifaceted figure. For the ancients he is not only the archetypal poet, but also the founder of a mystical religion known as Orphism, with a well-developed theology, cosmogony, and eschatology of which much survives in hymns and short epics, mostly of late date. The ‘poetic’ Orpheus inevitably overlaps with the founder of Orphism, but it is the Orpheus of the poetic tradition that this essay discusses.

Almost as soon as Odysseus sets sail from the terra firma of Troy in the direction of Ithaka, once the sacred citadel has been burnt to ashes, he seems to enter a Never-Never land of giants, monsters, witches, demigods and demigoddesses, strange beasts, fabulous kingdoms, and the dead. One adventure follows on the heels of another in a sequence as bewildering as any which ever occurred in the murky woods of Arthurian legend. Odysseus travels south, north, east, and west to the limits of the known earth. He spends seven years languishing on the island of Ogygia ‘at the navel of the ocean’ (1.50). At different moments he is threatened with tempest, armed attack, cannibalism, dismemberment, sorcery, and several sorts of seduction. He captures magnificent booty, receives fabulous gifts, enjoys the love of two goddesses, and is offered the hand of a king's daughter in marriage — and by the time that he finally arrives on the shore of Ithaka and sets out to reclaim his kingdom, he is utterly alone, bereft of all companions, his appearance that of a ragged beggar.

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The opening lines of the Eclogues are justly famous: Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagisiluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena.(E. 1.1-2)Tityrus, you lie beneath spread of sheltering beechStudying the woodland Muse on a thin oat-straw.Their rich, inviting allusiveness is well known. The sonal echo of Theocritus Idylls 1.1, the Callimachean canon (tenui, ‘thin’; cf. tēn Mousan leptaleēn, ‘the thin Muse’, Aetia fr.1.24 Pf.), the Lucretian siluestrem Musam (‘woodland Muse’) provoke the imagination, goad the intellect. Virgil's reference to his Roman predecessor especially intrigues. The context alluded to — Lucretius' ascription (DRN 4.577-89) of the fiction of satyrs, nymphs and the siluestris Musa of Pan to the echo-producing properties of rocky, solitary places — contains embryonically a theory of poetics, an evaluation of pastoral song, which, quickened into life in the Eclogues' initial statement, appears to be of programmatic significance. The theory — the viewing of pastoral poetry as essentially (to use Marie Desport's compelling phrase) ‘une poésie à écho’ — may be termed the echoic theory of pastoral song. Its main import is — as I take it — reductive: pastoral song is to be construed as the internal resonance of the singer's fictive world, condemned to triviality by its inability to reach beyond the boundaries of private experience or private vision so as to affect the world of action, events, history.