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Achilles’ remarks on the jars of Zeus at Iliad 24. 525ff) illustrate a characteristic archaic Greek attitude towards the nature and possibility of happiness. This ‘principle of alternation’ recurs in a variety of forms, from individual aphorisms to large-scale narrative patterns, throughout Greek literature. Though the general notion of the mutability of fortune can be readily paralleled in other cultures, the principle of alternation has a particular salience in Greek narrative thanks to its presentation, in exemplary form, in the Greek tradition's most exemplary work. This is a model to which Greek narratives repeatedly and explicitly return. It is a good example of how the encapsulation of traditional norms, with their associated ways of feeling, in a traditional artistic form encourages a symbiotic replication both of the form and of the response that it evokes; it helps define the emotional and ethical repertoire of both artists and audience.

As Chapter 17 makes clear, the asexualist/sexualists controversy continued even as Johann Hedwig and Karl von Nägel demonstrated the existence of sex in cryptogams by discovering the Alternation of Generations (1782, 1784), hybridizers A. F. Wiegman and Carl Friedrich von Gaertner recieved prestigious prizes for their work, and Giovanni Battista Amici and Adolphe-Theodore Brongniart discovered—and confirmed—the pollen tube. Unconvinced, Matthias Jacob Schleiden, co-founder of the cell theory, insisted that ferns grow asexually from spores, and that spores, not seeds, are the primary units of propagation in seed plants also. He argued (1853) that the entire life-cycle of seed plants is based on duplicative cell divisions that produce seeds entirely by vegetative processes. Following the Aristotelian doctrine that the female parent provides the material substance of the embryo, he concluded pollen must be a female structure that reproduces vegetatively—thus making the case for a unisexual, plants-as-female model.

Wilhelm Hofmeister established the unity of the Plant Kingdom through the discovery of Alternation of Generations. In both cryptogams and flowering plants a diploid asexual stage, or sporophyte, alternates with a haploid sexual stage. Thus the flower is not the true sexual stage, but rather the asexual spore-producing stage. The main difference between ferns and roses is that the spores of the fern are visible on the undersides of the leaves, while the spores of the rose are concealed within the anthers and ovaries. These spores develop into the actual sexual stage of the spermatophyte, the male and female gametophytes, i.e. the pollen tube and the embryo sac. Hofmeister’s discovery solved of the age-old quandary over plant sex. The sexualists and the asexualists can both claim to have been correct, but it was the sexualists who freed their minds from cultural biases and glimpsed the true sexual nature of plants.