The Chorus of the Agamemnon depict death and the afterlife in diverse ways, both in their dramatic role as the Elders of Argos and in their more universal choral songs. This chapter examines the ethical and political values their contradictory references imply, whether any affect their actions as characters, and how each links to other themes in the trilogy. The Elders go further than the Herald by not only treating death as oblivion at some points but even actively wishing death at others. In what way does this seeming escapism, contrasted with their emphasis on a good death as glorious, affect their resistance to the coup d’état? How does their story of returning casualties color the Argive critique of the Trojan War? The choral songs introduce different types of afterlives into the trilogy: in the memory of the living, at the grave, through the psyche that survives after death, in the possibility of resurrection, and even as a realm of punishment for ethical wrongs. The rest of the Oresteia significantly develops many of the Elders’ wide-ranging speculations.

The celebrated scholar and literatus Maximos Planoudes (ca. 1255–ca. 1305) was a leading exponent of the study of ancient literature in the late Byzantine world. While best known for this engagement – embodied in his collection of epigrams, the Planoudean Anthology, in his critical editions of, and scholia for, classical texts and in his translations of Latin literature – he also composed an undeservedly little-known poem in the tradition of the ancient Greek idyll. A humorous piece, drawing on numerous ancient sources, particularly on bucolic poetry in the tradition of Theocritus and on Lucian’s satires, it exhibits a refreshing jocularity not usually evident in his other literary activities. This chapter offers a close reading of the Idyll, highlighting its themes of love and homoeroticism, the alterity of otherworlds, and magic and the marvellous. It investigates its connections to other literary traditions and to Planoudes’ scholarship as a whole, and considers the reception of the poem in Byzantium. In composing an idyll – unprecedented in Byzantine poetry – Planoudes creates a parody of ancient texts and authors that is both entertaining and instructive, while being unique in its setting and context.

The introduction provides necessary background on Ancient Greek religious and literary ideas about the afterlife, methods for analyzing ethics in literature that several of the chapters will challenge, a working definition of tragic poetics, and historical context and preliminary definitions relevant for political structures and themes in the Oresteia.

In the Oresteia’s central scene, Cassandra tells of being cursed by Apollo to foretell the future but be disbelieved. The Trojan princess, who “cheated” the god in a violent sexual encounter, who survived her city’s extirpation, goes to her own known doom bravely, predicting Agamemnon’s death and vengeance to come. Yet there is an unexplored aspect to this famous and moving scene – Cassandra’s hint of her own continuation in the afterlife. It seems (eoika) to her that she will soon be singing prophecies in Hades. This chapter argues that attention to Cassandra’s potential afterlife changes how we view her prophecies of death and vengeance, her rebellion against Apollo and Clytemnestra, her bravery, her language of closure, and the ironies each of these entail. Moreover, the “poetics of plurality” uncovered in Cassandra’s statement and its uncertain status sophisticate and perhaps even reverse our understanding of her fate.

By using a broad selection of ‘commentary discourse’, this chapter looks at the practice of reading, teaching and composing texts whose purpose is (partly) to explain older texts. Such commentaries, which can take various and sometimes unexpected forms, are of paramount importance for understanding the Byzantine intellectual and cultural framework of literary production, not only as a system of ‘authoritative mimesis’ but also as a system of ‘subversive anti-mimesis’. Thus, the chapter examines paraphrases of the Iliad, grammatical exercises such as the schede of Theodore Prodromos, lives of saints with integrated gnomologia, laudatory orations and novels, poetical treatises of political admonition (e.g. the anonymous Spaneas), scholia on ancient authors (like those produced by John Tzetzes on Aristophanes and Lycophron or by Eustathios on the Homeric poems), but also large-scale commentaries on Byzantine hymnongraphy (e.g. by John Zonaras on John of Damascus), philosophical and theological commentaries (Michael of Ephesos on Aristotle or Niketas of Herakleia on the Psalms). These texts represent different and yet interrelated discourses that highlight the key role of ‘commentary’ as a hermeneutic tool of and testimony to a broad spectrum of sociocultural and literary tensions within the longue durée of the Komnenian era.

From Late Antiquity onward many Homeric verses and phrases were considered to have a proverbial value and as such were employed as independent witty sayings. While the use of these Homeric proverbs in Byzantine writings has yet to be thoroughly investigated, in the early sixteenth century these expressions were gathered in paroemiographical collections. These include Erasmus’ Adagia and Arsenios Apostolis’ Violarium, two works which seem to be interdependent in this respect. Apostolis copied many Homeric verses and their accompanying scholia into the margins of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, gr. 3058, with the intention to add another section to the four existing typologies (proverbs, maxims, apothegms and anecdotes). In doing so, he explored and exploited available sources, such as the Commentaries on Homer by Eustathios of Thessalonike. The criteria according to which Apostolis organized the proverbs, as well as his creation of a separate section on Homeric proverbial verses, were innovations in Greek literature. This chapter explores the textual relationship between Apostolis’ compilation and the long exegetical tradition on Homer. More particularly, it will demonstrate how Eustathios’ works were preserved and adapted to the expectations of a new era.

Poetic, religious, and philosophical engagement with the beyond transcends cultures and time periods. The notion of the afterlife has always operated both literally and as a metaphor. Issa evokes the thin crust separating everyday life from the cavernous domain of death, ever present but disregarded. Zweig incites us, through Freud’s continuing influence, to examine unconscious, violent forces, both in our individual psyches and on a global level. Achebe narrates the rituals surrounding dead ancestors and the role that their masked impersonators play in traditional life, including the active mediation of quarrels for the sake of the community.

This introduction sets forth the approach to Byzantine commentaries on ancient Greek texts taken in this volume: it places the Komnenian and Palaiologan commentaries firmly within their intellectual and sociocultural contexts and examines the process of commenting on ancient texts as a deliberate and culturally significant choice made by the commentators. We define commentary both in a narrow and a broad sense. In the narrowest sense, commentaries are concerned with explaining an ancient text and the knowledge related to it, often in a didactic context. Defined more broadly, commentaries include treatises on ancient literature and paraphrases of ancient authorities, which likewise demonstrate how these texts were read and taught. In the broadest sense, commentaries can be any literary texts that creatively engage with ancient texts and thus shed light on Byzantine attitudes towards their ancient heritage. The very practice of composing commentaries on ancient texts was a creative and targeted enterprise of identity building. The introduction discusses different kinds of Byzantine commentaries on ancient poetry and prose within the context of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science, and introduces some of the key figures of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods.

This chapter proposes that the gothic ballad revival, and the formal experimentation it engendered, also became an opportunity for Romantic-era writers to experiment with different models of mind. From the poems Matthew Lewis included in his novel The Monk to the ‘new principle’ of meter Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed to have invented for ‘Christabel,’ metrical inventiveness was one way that poets gave shape to a gothic interest in alterity and idiosyncrasy. In his reading of gothic metrical experiments, Daniel Robinson has described this neogothic love of nonce meters – poetic forms that invent their own idiosyncratic lines and stanzas – as ‘weird form,’ aligned with a broader interest in historical difference and gothic excess (155). On my argument, that interest in ‘weird form’ also had implications for longer-standing conversations about the history of cognition. In particular, this chapter reads gothic imitations as a response to an earlier moment in the eighteenth-century ballad revival, which had framed ballads as the products of an early phase in cultural development – and which, consequently, read them as artifacts shaped by common, pre-cultural features of the human mind. Joseph Addison's emphasis on ballads’ formal simplicity and universalizable sentiment, for example, implied a uniformitarian account of mental development, where simplicity of form and feeling pointed back to a common origin point. Another way to put this is that eighteenth-century writings on the ballad revival often double as claims about the history of cognition. Those claims frequently emphasize continuity over time: literary artifacts were made to uncover and naturalize aspects of mental functioning that came to appear universal, timeless, and embodied. Neogothic experiments, in contrast, show that ballad studies also afforded a different approach to the history of cognition.

The idea that poetic meter reflected the rhythmic, embodied movements of thought itself had a long history in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Recently, that attention to rhythmic thinking has helped recover Romantic writers’ commitment to the mind's embodiment: to the idea that thinking happens in and through the body's rhythms. Yet even as gothic nonce meters and irregularities suggest that kind of embodied movement – in Robinson's words, marking ‘the pulses and beats of English meters and, at the same time, in the human psyche’ – they can still seem strangely decorporealizing, especially when the ‘weird’ seems to pull in the direction of ‘other-worldly or subconscious sources’ or an ‘evocation of the uncanny’ (164).

Romantic Consciousness and Psychoanalysis

Published in 1970, Harold Bloom's Romanticism and Consciousness signals the apotheosis of a surge in Romantic studies that reflected the previous decade's mood swings between optimism and disillusionment. In the struggle between revolution and reaction, if not reform, the volume found its not so uncanny double in the Romantics. The tutelary spirit of this version of Jerome McGann's Romantic ideology, as noted in this volume's Introduction, and despite the diverse critical backgrounds of Bloom's contributors, was psychoanalysis. This orientation made sense, given Bloom's debt to Freud. But it also made sense, given that, especially post-World War Two, American psychoanalysis was dominated by ego psychology, which sought to make the darkness of the unconscious visible and thus champion the subject's ability to conquer inner demons. Yet, at the same time, the Romanticism of Bloom's volume reflects a world at once very and yet never quite sure of itself. This ambivalence heralds a version of psychoanalysis focused more on indeterminacy than resolve, one that took its cue from Continental theory and philosophy, particularly through Jacques Lacan's return to Freud, in which the cogito and its consciousness do not add up to the same subject. Lacan was, of course, a key influence on a deconstructive and poststructuralist thought whose impact can already be felt in Bloom's volume in essays by Geoffrey Hartman and especially Paul de Man. So, while Romanticism and Consciousness reflects a desire to bring the unconscious to consciousness, particularly by healing the Romantic subject's alienation from the world, it also heralds another psychoanalysis in which this desire for a cure is only one of the plague of fantasies by which we live.

Reassessing Freud's legacy closer to our own time, Adam Phillips argues that ‘Freud … charts the development of the unknowing and largely unknowable modern individual in a culture obsessed by knowl-edge; of the distracted and disrupted individual whose continuities and traditions are breaking down around him’ (10–11). This assessment speaks directly to Romanticism as a process of ‘restless self-examination’ (Rajan 25) and entails one of the period's central preoccupations with what Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, calls a ‘willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith’ (2:6). Phillips adds that ‘Freud moves from wondering who to believe in, to wondering about the origins and the function of the individual's predisposition to believe’ (Phillips 111).

The extraordinary power of Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (1970) was, in the first instance, a consequence of the collective interpretative insight of the contributors, such as Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, M. H. Abrams, and Paul de Man. Yet the critical acumen of these critics was itself enabled by elective affinities between many of their theoretical orientations, especially psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and Romantic literature itself. Some of these affinities had genealogical origins: as Henri Ellenberger documented in The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970), Freud's concept of the unconscious was heavily indebted to Romantic-era authors such as F. W. J. Schelling, while deconstruction and poststructuralism relied on an assimilation of Martin Heidegger's philosophy with an anthropological version of G. W. F. Hegel's Romantic-era idealism (Descombes; Borch-Jacobsen 1–20). Bloom’s, Hartman’s, and de Man's scintillating illuminations of Romantic structures of intergenerational antagonism, ambivalence toward nature, and approaches to poetic language (among other topics) were thus in part a consequence of these critics’ uncanny reinventions and reoccupations of Romantic-era approaches.

If there is a lesson here for the project of revisiting relationships between Romanticism and consciousness in light of early twentieth-first-century neuro-approaches, it is that these latter are most likely to have a real interpretative grasp on the literature of the period when they themselves resonate with, or even have their distant origins within, Romantic theories, practices, and approaches. This is, at any rate, my approach here, and I suggest that a basic conceptual matrix first established in the Romantic period persists in many contemporary neurological accounts of consciousness. This conceptual matrix connects three kinds of agents or entities – institutions, individuals, and populations – by means of two kinds of process: automatic processes that occur below the level of consciousness and self-conscious acts of cognition. While we can discern this conceptual matrix in the work of many Romantic-era authors and discourses, I focus here on the debate among Edmund Burke, William Godwin, and Thomas Malthus over the foundations of social order. Burke argued that social order required that traditional institutions do some of our thinking for us (a claim echoed in Germany by Hegel).