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This chapter explores how Greek tragedy evokes the paean. The chapter begins with an investigation of the paean, a religious song associated with Apollo, establishing its function in society and common features. The chapter gives an overview of how the paean is deployed in Greek tragedy, before going on to examine two case‐studies in detail: Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Euripides' Ion. Both these plays evoke the paean regularly, and do so to enhance some of their central themes. In particular, both plays use paeanic imagery to highlight questions they raise about the role that the gods play in mortal affairs.

Chapter 3 tackles the use (and abuse) of material tokens in tragic scenes of recognition, focusing primarily on Euripides’ Ionand Electra. The tokens reuniting Ion with his mother are replicas (mimêmata) that evoke the birth of Ericthonius, a mythical ancestor to the Athenian audience. It is argued that these tokens give a mythico-political cast to what might otherwise be characterized as a private reunion between a mother and her son. The recognition scene of Euripides’ Electra, usually read as a parody of the similar scene in the Choephoroi, more overtly politicizes the recognition of Orestes. Rejecting the familial tokens that had secured Orestes’ identity in the Choephoroi, Euripides’ re-staging has this scene instead hinge on the recognition of a bodily scar. The authentication, or recognition, of Orestes is thus made into a proto-exemplar for the audience of their own practice of scrutinizing citizens, known as the dokimasia.

This chapter shows how ideological attachments are generated out of the suspense between narrative means and ends in Ion. It argues that for all their openness and questioning, Euripides' plays produce a kind of closure, an investment in a secure dramatic and ideological end. That closure should not be moralized as the antithesis of democratic freedom; instead, it should be imagined as the passionate attachment to certain ideological tenets that is essential to any political system, even one as relatively open as Athens's radical democracy. Ion shows how that attachment not only survives critique—including the play's own— but is in fact strengthened by it: the more contingent ideology is shown to be, the more necessary it becomes.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. It argues that Euripides' imperfect alignment of form and meaning forces form itself onto center stage. It makes us aware of a play's form, granting it density and texture. Even at its emptiest, form is always full, replete with meaning. We have seen Euripides exploring that meaning, thinking in form about tragic form and its fullness and emptiness. The plays have shown us form as generative and enabling, producing, for example, an aspiration to justice (in Hecuba and Trojan Women), or a renewed attachment to the polis (in Ion), or even history itself (in Suppliants and Orestes. We have also seen the constraints and oppressions of form, both dramatic and social. In Electra, empty forms encrusted with outdated content constrained human behavior and foreclosed radical social possibilities. Form functioned as a deadweight upon the play's own imagination.

The chapter takes its starting point from an under-explored passage in the Philebus. According to this passage, ignorance involves thinking of oneself as richer, more beautiful, and wiser than one really is. It is argued that Socratically blameworthy ignorance is Transferred Ignorance: a cognizer thinks of herself as good in some way—an expert on something, generally smart, a person of importance, etc.—and is thereby mislead into unfounded knowledge-claims about important questions. The chapter discusses the Apology, the ignorance of Ion in Plato's Ion, and the extract from the Philebus mentioned above. It offers distinctions between different kinds of ignorance and explores intuitions relevant to the Socratic proposal that doxa is a kind of ignorance.

This brief envoi reads the verse epistle ‘Ad Joannem Rousium, Oxoniensis Academiae Bibliothecarium’, the last poem in Milton's 1673 reissue of his 1645 Poems, as Milton's submission to a future in which it is his turn to be recreated by others. It shows how the story of Phaethon, with the complementary tale of Ion told by Euripides, suggests the poem's possible futures. Noting that the last lines of Milton's poem rework Ovid's hope for immortality in Amores 1. 15, it argues that Milton's career comes full circle, as the act of authorial self‐fashioning is always continued in the process of reception.

This chapter challenges the lop-sided modern orthodoxy which makes Plato an outright ‘enemy’ of poetry; it revives an older tradition of interpretation which saw in Plato's work a complex of resistance and attraction to poetry's psychological intensity. The central thesis is that the dialogues, including Socrates' interrogation of the poets in the Apology and of a rhapsode in Ion, manifest a tension between the need for discursive understanding of poetry and, on the other hand, a recognition of the seductively imaginative and emotional elements of poetic experience which block such understanding. This tension is salient in the conclusion to the critique of poetry in book 10 of the Republic: far from simply banishing poetry, Socrates here expresses lingering love of its bewitching effects. A close reading of Republic 607–8 leads to a revised assessment of the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry and draws out the ambiguities of the passage's judicial, erotic, and medical imagery.

Euripides' Ion is centrally concerned with sexual and reproductive secrets, as well as with remedies for a couple's childlessness. In a highly modern way, it explores the kinds of story that a now infertile woman who has a hidden history of pregnancy might tell to others (or herself), and it also dramatizes a situation in which the three members of a newly made nuclear family consisting of father, mother, and adolescent boy, are all subject to different levels of knowledge about what must be taken as the reality of the boy's birth origins. This scenario is then compared to contemporary situations in which issues of disclosure arise in relation to donor eggs or sperm in new reproductive technologies.

This chapter analyses the Athenian voicing of tragic panhellenism. After examining the semantic field of ‘Panhellenes’, the Theatre of Dionysos as a place of Hellenic assembly, and tragedy as a synthesis of the meters and forms of Hellenic poetry, it formulates three main arguments: that constructions of Athens as a synecdoche for Hellas, defender of panhellenic law, and origin of the Hellenes reconfigure Athenian imperialism as hegemony; that calls for Hellenes to end internecine strife and wage war against the barbarian c. 408 inform the dilemmas of Philoktetes and Iphigeneia in Aulis – to sack Troy or be sacked by one's own; that Helen and Iphigeneia, which repatriate and re-hellenize heroines stranded in Hellene-slaughtering lands, exploit emotions and modes of self-definition involved in this panhellenism. Synthesizing tragedy and satyr play, these dramas suggest that tragedy, which focuses on internecine strife, was less amenable to panhellenism than comedy or satyr play.

Two of the most influential mid-20th-century discussions of Sophocles' style operated by trying to fit the surviving plays to the threefold scheme; the most recent, and very thorough, discussion of The Language of Sophocles (Budelmann (2000) ), cites it in the third sentence of the first page. If authentic, it would be a rare case where we can see a great practitioner reflecting on his own technique, no less illuminating — perhaps even more illuminating because less jokey — than Aristophanes' remarks in several parabaseis on the various stages of his early development. And, despite the scepticism that such literary anecdotes normally excite among sober scholars, there may be good reason why they suspect that this one is indeed authentic, or at least has its origin in an authentic comment even if it is not a verbatim quotation We can even see how an authentic remark could have survived in some form, for it is a guess, but a plausible one, that the remark could come from Sophocles' contemporary Ion of Chios. Ion was himself a tragic poet, enjoyed gossiping about his meetings with the great and what they had said, and we know that he wrote about Sophocles; we know too that Plutarch knew Ion's work well, and used it thoughtfully and tellingly. This chapter contends that if Ion is the intermediary, then Plutarch's version will be only that one step away from Sophocles' original remark, despite the five-hundred-year time lag. This, then, may be a fitting topic for a tribute to Martin West, who has written with such distinction on Ion as well as on Sophocles — and on so much more.

Some of the so-called Homeric Hymns, dating from the seventh century bc, provide evidence of poetic performance at festivals in Greece. Alongside the sung hexameter epics, two other verse traditions appear to have been recited without music: iambics and elegiacs, both of which were used in public performances. We hear of a new kind of recited performance in the sixth century, that of the rhapsode, the fullest account of which (admittedly from a hostile perspective) is that given by Plato in the Ion. This chapter discusses the figure of the rhapsode, and the significance of a performance tradition in which a fixed text is used, perhaps with the aid of a written script. The chapter ends with a consideration of Plato’s hostility to poetry and Aristotle’s response to his arguments.

This chapter explores the first major steps in the relationship between the European Union (EU) and Romania, culminating in the start of entry negotiations in 2000 and the return to power in 2001 of the Social Democratic Party, which would be the chief Romanian interlocutor with the EU over the next four years. Ion Iliescu's strategy of cautious democratisation without meaningful de-communisation remained largely intact. Progress with the EU application appeared to be the most realistic option for strengthening ties with the West. The EU's institutions of multilevel governance proved remarkably prone to lobbying from the Romanian state and the allies it had meanwhile cultivated in Western Europe in order to advance its cause. The 1999–2000 medium-term economic strategy proved to be an ephemeral document and the EU failed to prioritise vital areas such as administrative reform. The EU's multi-layered decision-making system failed to produce a hard-headed cost-benefit analysis.

This chapter uses the myth of autochthony to illustrate the dynamic nature of Athenian democratic ideology. The myth of autochthony originated from the combination of two traditions: the earthborn kings of Attica and the indigenous Athenians. It thus potentially endangered the unity of Athens’ citizen body, because the earthborn kings could be perceived as more autochthonous than the rest of the Athenians. Through an analysis of funeral speeches, Euripides’ Ion and Apollodorus’ Against Neaera, this chapter shows that institutions enabled the Athenians to resolve the ambiguity within the myth of autochthony by moving the focus away from or onto the earthborn kings, or to exploit the myth’s contradictory aspects. The Athenians could thus attribute the nobility of birth (eugeneia) and exclusiveness associated with autochthony to larger or smaller sections of their citizen body and produce more or less inclusive ideas about their community. The chapter also stresses the evolving nature of ideology, which could incorporate newly developed ideas and values. This is the case in Lysias’ Funeral Oration, where the Athenians’ collective eugeneia is complemented by the relatively novel notion of concord (homonoia).

This chapter examines the Legion of the Archangel Michael's willingness to engage in political violence during elections as well as its system of discipline and punishment. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu stated in 1932 that the Legion's goal was not to win elections but rather to ensure that Romania should “be led according to the will of the legionaries.” Aware that contesting the 1933 elections would not be an easy proposition, Codreanu formed disciplined echipe morţii (death teams) who would use violence to ensure that their message was heard. This chapter first discusses the legionaries' assassination of the prime minister, Ion G. Duca, and the subsequent arrest and imprisonment of some legionaries. It then considers how the assassination boosted the Legion's reputation and how the “heroism” of prison inspired old and new recruits alike to be willing to make even greater sacrifices for the Legion. It also explains how the Legion disciplines and punishes its members.

This chapter examines the Legion of the Archangel Michael's rhetoric on salvation and sacrifice. It begins by focusing on Father Grigore Cristescu, who became heavily involved in the Legion from 1933 forward, mentoring legionary students who wanted to pursue careers in theology. Cristescu's rhetoric about sacrifice, individualism, the corruption of society, the power of the deed, and the importance of strong, moralistic government resonated perfectly with legionary teachings. This chapter explores how the Legion successfully blended religion and ultranationalism in Romania, how it won the support of priests, and the legionaries' participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936. It also considers how the Legion used the deaths of Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin as a propaganda exercise that translated directly into success in the elections of December 1937.

This chapter focuses on the fall of the Legion of the Archangel Michael. The elections of 1937 produced a hung Parliament in Romania. For the first time in the country's history, the incumbent party failed to win the election. On January 14 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu issued a circular ordering his legionaries to abstain from slander or negative comments about their electoral opponents and to “maintain an attitude of the greatest dignity.” At the same time, he ordered the legionaries to draw up blacklists of police officers and political opponents who tried to interfere with legionary propaganda. This chapter examines how the dictatorship of Romanian King Carol II ended the Legion as an effective social movement before discussing Romania's transformation into the National Legionary State. It also considers the legionaries' rebellion against General Ion Antonescu, Michael I's coup d'état against Antonescu, and the view that the Legion was a spiritual movement aimed at fighting communism.

This article attempts to survey and analyse different aspects of Herta Müller's relationship with Romanian culture and language. It begins with a brief historical account of the German communities of the Banat where Müller was born and raised. Then it focuses on three main dimensions of Müller's relationship with Romanian language and culture. First, statements about the qualities of the Romanian language and its influence upon her work are surveyed. Second, an account is given of various possible Romanian literary influences. Without overstating the extent of this influence, attention is given to the Romanian avant-garde tradition, notably the writer Gellu Naum; but also to the popular chanteuse Maria Tănase. Third, the article considers Müller's Romanian-language collages, published in 2005 as Este sau nu este Ion.

The easiest pain to bear is someone else’s. In the preanesthesia era, the prospect of surgery was so terrifying that it was not uncommon for a tough-hearted man to commit suicide rather than go through that unbearable, excruciating agony. It is hard to believe t hat t here was a time when nothing was effective to a lleviate surgical pain. The patients were simply strapped down and that was it. As a consequence, speed was the most important attribute of a surgeon in those days. A great English surgeon, Robert Liston at the University College Hospital, once boasted that he had amputated a leg in 29 seconds, along with a testicle of his patient and a finger of his assistant. The operation rooms were often strategically located at the tops of towers in the hospitals to keep fearful screams from being heard. During wartime, surgeries were even worse than battlefield injuries, because during the fight soldiers were temporarily “hypnotized” and became oblivious to pain. Before anesthesia, surgeons resorted to whatever means were available to deaden the pain oft heir patients during operations. The three most popular methods were alcohol, ice, and narcotics. Legend has it that a surgeon first conceived the idea of operating during a patient’s alcoholic coma when he noticed that a drunkard had had parts of his face chewed away by a hog but was not aware of it during a drunken stupor. Chinese surgeon Bian Què (401–310 B.C.) was reported to have operated on a patient’s brain using herbal extracts to render him unconscious more than 2,000 years ago. Hua Tuo (115–205 A.D.) made his patients take an effervescing powder (possibly cannabis) in wine that produced numbness and insensibility before surgical operations. Cold deadens pain by slowing the rate impulse conduction by nerve fiber. Some surgeons used ice to numb limbs before amputations. This method was invented by Baron Dominique Jean Larrey (1766–1842), surgeon of Napoleon’s Grande Armée.

Cosmology is a subject that borders on and sometimes merges with philosophy and religion. Since antiquity, the deep mysteries of the universe have intrigued mankind. Who are we? Where do we come from? What are we made of? Is the development of advanced intelligence capable of comprehending the grand design of the cosmos, the ultimate purpose of the universe? Is there life elsewhere in the universe? Is ours the only advanced intelligence or the most advanced intelligence in the universe? These questions have motivated great thinkers to pursue what Einstein called "the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty." In the fourth century B.C., the essence of the cosmological question was formulated by the philosopher Chuang Tzu:… If there was a beginning, then there was a time before that beginning. And a time before the time which was before the time of that beginning. If there is existence, there must have been non-existence. And if there was a time when nothing existed, then there must be a time before that—when even nothing did not exist. Suddenly, when nothing came into existence, could one really say whether it belonged to the category of existence or of nonexistence? Even the very words I have just uttered, I cannot say whether they have really been uttered or not. There is nothing under the canopy of heaven greater than the tip of an autumn hair. A vast mountain is a small thing. Neither is there any age greater than that of a child cut off in infancy. P'eng Tsu [a Chinese Methuselah] himself died young. The universe and I came into being together; and I, and everything therein, are one. … Fortunately, our subject matter, solar system chemistry, is less esoteric than the questions asked by Chuang Tzu. A schematic diagram showing the principal pathways by which our solar system is formed is given in figure 4.1. The great triumphs of modern science have been summarized in this figure as fundamental contributions to the five "origins": (a) origin of the universe, (b) origin of the elements, (c) origin of the solar system, (d) origin of life, and (e) origin of advanced intelligence.