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This chapter explores the fifth-century strands of reception of Helen. The Helens discussed in this chapter are a selection made to illustrate the postepic narrative as presupposed by various writers in various media. In addition to these fifth-century strands, the chapter also turns to the fourth century, which is another important strand of reception. The fourth century traces a strand which begins with the Pythagoreans in Croton in southern Italy and leads on to Goethe by way of Simon Magus. Another strand begins with the first fictional Helen, which can be found in Ovid. The chapter accompanies this discussion with an introduction into the concept of fiction. Finally, this chapter provides an example of the parallel phenomenon in Greek literature.

This final chapter argues that the study of the reception of Classics in the anglophone Caribbean needs to focus not just on the dialogue with the literatures of Greece and Rome, but also on the dialogue between Caribbean authors themselves. To this end, discussion turns to the Jamaican poet Figueroa, who many critics have identified as an important precursor for the New World classicism in Walcott's poetry. Similarly, Kamau Brathwaite's revision of universal history in X/Self is seen to offer an important framework for Caribbean Classics in view of the poet's contention that the Caribbean's history of catastrophe presents a logical vantage point from which to survey the global succession of empires leading back to Rome and beyond. The book concludes with the suggestion that anglophone Caribbean writers have recalibrated the canon so that they are the natural successors of Horace, or Ovid, writing from the provinces and holding the cultural centre.

This chapter analyses Tacitus's narratives of natural and man-made disasters, with special emphasis on those perpetrated by the principes against their own people. Tacitus consistently shows compassion towards Romans of all classes and does not stress the breakdown of social order among the masses during such disasters. He repeatedly evokes the sack of cities, the quintessential man-made disaster, when describing the tyrannical behaviour of principes such as Tiberius and Nero. Through allusions to Aeneid 2, Tacitus creates a portable, repeatable sack of Troy during the civil wars of AD 69 to underline the gravity of the situation as Italy and Rome suffer serial abuse from various contenders; the common motives of all leaders and armies in making war on their own country; the vicissitudes of fortune during civil war, and the profanation of Rome itself.

This introductory chapter undertakes a comparison between a folktale and a Greek myth. It attempts to define the folktale through two avenues concerning genre and terminology as well as mode of communication. Here, the chapter relates the folktale of “The Abduction of the Beautiful Wife” to the Greek epics such as the Iliad, eventually focusing the discussion on the story of Helen of Troy. To aid in the discussion, the chapter introduces the comparative circle, which begins from the perception of a similarity between the target text and some other text, and proceeds from this second text to a third and so forth, until the scholar constructing the circle decides to return to the explicandum.

This chapter turns to a comparison of the myth of Helen with “Abduction” as defined in Chapter 1. It reconstructs the myth by outlining the stages of Helen's life—her birth, her childhood, and so forth—and of episodes, which contain scenes of relatively independent actions, such as her abduction. Besides the events of Helen's life, the chapter also discusses the men most closely connected to her story, above all Menelaus and Paris. In addition, this chapter takes account of variants, recording and discussing them as they bear on the outline of Helen's life story. For this purpose, the chapter is guided by the principle that what is latest in the history of the sources may be earliest in the history of the myth.

This concluding chapter traces further lines of reception of Helen even as it examines further hypostases of Helen. Previous chapters have shown how the narrative or narratives of Helen were enough to generate new narratives, some of them even with doctrinal significance, and also have her remain a figure of reference separate from all of them. For the coming into being of these new Helens, this chapter argues nothing in her history requires that she have been “originally a goddess” or that she have an essential self. After exploring her various hypostases, the chapter considers the more recent lines of reception of Helen, and considers which of these iterations might last well into modern times.

This chapter investigates the characterization of Rome particularly with reference to her domestic affairs. It also looks at the presentation of Rome's actions outside Italy and progresses from instances in which Rome treats the peoples and lands as separate sovereign bodies to those instances where Rome is the primary authority within the region in question. Of course, the distinction between these two sorts of case allows for much interpretation and many intermediary steps. Again, it is important to recall that the discussion is not concerned with ‘reality’ per se, but the authorial representations and evaluations of Roman actions.

The first section, “Feeding the Heart: Educating Tennyson,” examines the classical education that Tennyson received at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the influential scholar Connop Thirlwall. Pearsall reviews the absorption of Tennyson and other Cambridge Apostles, including Arthur Henry Hallam, in questions of classical scholarship, and shows how intimately these were connected to contemporary political debates. “Locating Victorian Troy,” the second section, explores Victorian debates on the “Homeric question,” including an ongoing contestation between Tennyson and Gladstone. The author describes the intense controversy generated by Heinrich Schliemann’s claim in 1875 to have discovered the historical Troy and analyzes Tennyson’s refusal to accept the authenticity of Schliemann’s identification of Homer’s legendary city in terms of his conception of poetry and the poet’s foundational cultural role.

Chapter Four engages in a detailed reading of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” described as the prototypical Victorian dramatic monologue. The first section, “The Character of the Homeric Statesman,” establishes the monologue’s persistent stress on the importance of the knowledge of Tennyson’s Ulysses, examining the poem’s many sources, and a youthful epistolary debate between William Gladstone and Arthur Henry Hallam on Ulysses’ responsibility for the ruin of Troy. The second section, “Ulysses and the Rapture of Troy,” explores the political implications of the character of Ulysses, suggesting that his powerful resonance with his immediate audience within the monologue, as well as with the wider British public, is due to the illusion of a democratic ideal of equality conjured by his monologue. Ulysses’ desire is to effect a “rapture” of his audience, just as he formerly effected the “rapture” of Troy, illuminating the destruction of the fabled city as the monologue’s subtext.

This chapter studies the relationship between one of the central preoccupations of educators (the need not just to teach but also somehow to enforce the retention of knowledge) and one of pedagogy's principal anxieties (the fact not only that students forget lessons they have learned, but also that such forgetting is quotidian and unexceptional, a natural property of the mind). Schoolmasters, translators, and commentators were anxious that the schoolboy's experience of reading Virgil's Aeneid brought him into dangerous proximity with what David Quint calls the poem's investigation of ‘the therapeutic effects of forgetting’. This chapter engages with a broad range of materials, from the Aeneid itself and the translations of Books Two and Four executed by the Earl of Surrey, to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century directives for teaching Virgil's epic. It concludes with a reading of several significant Virgilian moments in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. The chapter argues that there is a sense in which the history of epic in early modern England can be read as a history of forgetting epic, and that the poetry of the 1590s manages to dwell not on the consolidating moment of the schoolboy's encounter with ancient epic, but on the seas of smaller texts those schoolboys encountered under the watchful eye of their masters. Counterintuitively, the project of forgetting epic is a form of remembering mastery, and poetic modes such as pastoral draw a significant amount of their power from the poet's dream (unless it is a nightmare) that a master is either watching him or about to re-enter the schoolroom.

Gladstone changed his mind about aspects of Homer during the period when he was writing about the poet. Instead of rejecting the possibility that the poet drew his ideas from nature worship, Gladstone argued in 1869 that it was Homer’s genius to incorporate the phenomena of nature into a pantheon in which the human predominates. The anthropomorphic principle meant that the gods and goddesses of Olympus were characteristically depicted in human form. The human element in the divine, which Gladstone had previously presented as a debasing influence, was now shown to be an elevating factor. Gladstone subsequently publicised the findings of Heinrich Schliemann on the site of Troy and argued for connections between ancient Greece and the civilisation of the East. In his last years, he was planning a book to repudiate the views about Homer of the evolutionary school of anthropology associated with Edward Tylor.

The reach of the Romans' time schemes was very great. They extended back to the fall of Troy when the Roman story could be said to begin, and sideways to take in the developments of the empires of Greece and the Near East. Horace's generation, and the ones immediately before and after it, are the ones to which this article returned repeatedly. This was a period when things were changing fast, and many people were actively engaged in creative work with Roman time. Julius Caesar's reform of the calendar was only part of a revolution in the representation of time under the evolving new order, with all the inherited forms undergoing profound change. The Romans' chronographic perspectives were in many respects superseded by their successors in the Renaissance, but not before they had contributed fundamentally to the creation of a new set of instruments for the charting of time.

This chapter examines the spiritual misery of human life in Euripides's poetry. In Troades, Hecuba frames the whole glorious and painful adventure of Troy as the song that the poets will sing. Hecuba speaks in harmony with epic poetry and borrows from it the power to reduce the senseless and manifold devastation of the world to a sensible and simple image. For the proud aristocratic characters such as Polyxena, Cassandra, and Hector, sacrifices, defeats, and heroic death are sources and themes for songs immortalizing their glory. This chapter considers how the prospect of immortality through song gives sense and meaning to the violence that has been shown on stage. It also discusses Euripides's belief, implied in Troades, that living your life in order to warrant a great postmortem celebration is meaningless.

This chapter discusses Herodotus' use of the Homeric concept of xenia in the Histories. It argues that the appearance of xenia in key passages reflects the importance of Homeric epic and of the Greek legendary and mythic tradition for Herodotus' historiography. Herodotus foregrounds xenia in two logoi: Croesus' acceptance of Adrastus as a xenos (I.35–45) and Proteus' rebuke of Paris for wronging Menelaus (II.114–117). These logoi culminate in the death of Croesus' son Atys and in Herodotus' statement of his own opinion about the reason for Troy's destruction. The terminology of xenia establishes a Homeric tone that highlights these passages' significance for one of the overarching themes of the Histories: from the earliest encounters of Greeks and Asians onward, the gods made it clear that great transgressions by Eastern rulers would be punished. Paris in the remote past and Croesus at the cusp of humanly verifiable memory are guilty of the same transgression as was Xerxes within living memory; they overstep their bounds and claim more than is their right. Herodotus' inclusion of recognizably Homeric xenia in these logoi underscores the inevitability of divinely-sanctioned nemesis against such transgressions.

Herodotus articulates the continuing presence and relevance of myth in the world of the fifth century. This chapter begins by examining an episode near the end of the Histories, where Herodotus appropriates local, oral mythological traditions in the form of a story about Helen of Troy (9.73). Herodotus' presentation reveals the role of mythic discourse in shaping fifth-century events as well as drawing out wider points about historical processes. The chapter then goes on to address the more sustained and complex example of Mardonius' self-mythicising image, where reference to the mythic past is inflected through the Panhellenic poetic genres of epic and tragedy, and the questions it raises about the purposes and effects of mythic discourse on the twin levels of history and the historian's presentation.

This chapter examines Virgil's epic poem Aeneid. It focuses on the chapters concerning the last night of Troy, Dido, and Aeneas and the Underworld. It analyzes various translations of the Aeneid and suggests that this work contains important Roman virtues born out of the Roman sense of duty and work. It also argues that unlike his contemporaries, Virgil worked teleologically.

Restorative justice involves the identification of harm and processes for repair. This chapter explores the various ways in which family members of capital offenders have been pronounced guilty and punished by the criminal justice system, their community, and society. It examines community-based harm to include the media and the harm that results from being scrutinized by the community. It also explores harm that occurs from the criminal justice system. Issues raised regarding the criminal justice system include the treatment of family members, race, quality of defense attorneys, and presentation of evidence. The chapter includes a discussion of death row inmate, Troy Davis, who is gaining international attention to get the evidence in his capital case heard. It argues that the harms incurred by offenders' family members should be central to restorative justice programs aimed at capital cases.