Deceit plays a major role in Sophocles’ Electra, the subject of Chapter 3. As I will argue, the messenger scene at the core of this play blends together deception and aesthetic illusion – the lie of the paedagogus about Orestes’ death relies on a highly immersive narration to be analysed from an embodied and enactive perspective. It would be more than bold to envisage Electra as inspired by Gorgias fr. 23 DK; what Sophocles’ play does is show that the association of deception and aesthetic illusion pinpointed by Gorgias was somehow in the air and could be exploited to great dramatic effect. I will also suggest that Electra features reflections on aesthetic illusion that contain the seeds of the later rhetorical category of enargeia.

This article examines the fraught relationship between loss and poetic creation in Catullus 101 and in Anne Carson’s Nox. I argue that Catullus 101 performs a process of mourning through substitution, turning from absent brother to present poem. This process risks becoming an abandonment of his brother, and significant contradictions linger in the poem between the demands of mourning and of learned poetry. I then show how Anne Carson takes up these tensions in Nox while exploring philology and mourning as two related responses to loss. I argue that Carson practices an obsessive philology in Nox, whose unending project offers a model for an ongoing intimacy with her own lost brother. I conclude by returning to Catullus and demonstrating that in his poem, too, forms of literary erudition and intertextuality offer the mourner the possibility of significant and ongoing relationships across a gulf of absence.

In the second chapter, I first present other texts from the Classical period that use apatē to signify the effect of theatre and other forms of representation. These texts give evidence for the wide circulation of apatē as an aesthetic term, perhaps – this is my tentative suggestion – as a result of a Gorgianic coinage. Then, I critically examine the tendency to view Gorgias fr. 23 DK merely as paving the way for Aristotle’s Poetics. This view is in danger of confounding aesthetic illusion with fictionality and ignores the salience of apatē’s enmeshing of aesthetics with ethics.

Germania is read as a response to Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, and contrasted with Tacitus’ account of conquest in the Agricola. Focusing on the absence of historical narrative, discussion goes beyond the well-recognized denial of history to the Germanic Other to consider the implications of moments when Germania comes close to recounting history without doing so. Narrativity and the predominance of description are discussed, with a view to understanding Germania as epideixis. It is suggested that the absence of historical narrative emphasizes the vivid portrayal of Germania as unconquered territory, and that Germania provides a vivid exploration of the limits of Roman power and epistemologies. The text expresses an imperialist perspective, but does not claim a triumph for Roman ratio over a territory that is resistant to it.

This paper engages with the anonymous verses quoted by Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars. By analyzing several poems concerning Julius Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius, it shows how these powerful men had had to deal with an anonymous (and pseudonymous) anti-propaganda which involves different social backgrounds cooperating together from the stage of composition to that of circulation. The presence of these voices offers a means of testing the authoritarian climate and the different reactions between the three figures of power considered above.

In the opening of Plautus’ Casina the prologue warns the audience: ‘in case you’re waiting for [Euthynicus], he isn’t returning to the city in this comedy today. Plautus didn’t want him to. (64–6)’. The adulescens Euthynicus never becomes present onstage, and yet he is not completely absent either: his mother ‘knowingly supports him in his absence’, by supporting him against her lascivious husband. Euthynicus is not alone: Roman comedy is populated by a crowd of absent characters who are represented on stage by (guileful) proxies. Thanks to the poet’s imagination all these absent characters become present, and through their proxies they ‘benefit us in their absence as if they were present’, as the same prologue of Casina proclaims (20), with reference to the most important proxied absence of all, Plautus himself. There is something inherently theatrical about ‘proxiness’ and (Roman) comedy, a genre performed by actors proxying absent playwrights, featuring slaves proxying absent masters, and written by playwrights proxying both the Roman elite and the (lost) Greek models. The aim of the chapter is to delve into the world of proxied absentees in Roman comedy, investigating their meta-theatrical potential and the comic force of ‘proxiness’ in general.

The ekphrastic play with verbal and iconic representations reveals that not only literature but also pictures can effect apatē. Chapter 9 is devoted to a piece of early Christian apologetic writing that cashes in on the ambiguity of apatē for an assault against pagan idolatry. Clement’s Protrepticus, an interesting document for the multifaceted attempts of the early Christians to negotiate the relation of their faith with pagan culture, is couched in the language and imagery of the culture it is criticizing; it not only takes up specific theories of perception, but also knowingly transfers the aesthetics of deception from poetry to pictures. While other apologetes assume that demons instrumentalize statues for their deception, Clement makes the capacity of iconic representation for deception itself a cornerstone of his deconstruction of pagan modes of viewing.

Plutarch’s De audiendis poetis, discussed in Chapter 6, is one of the first testimonies to the resuscitation of apatē as a critical term in the Imperial era. In defending the educational function of poetry, Plutarch is responding to Plato. While Plutarch’s positive view disagrees with Plato’s negative verdict, his argument, as I will argue, is predicated on Plato’s association of immersion with corruption. Plutarch, after acknowledging poetry’s spell, lays out a strongly reflexive mode of reading intended to render the young readers immune to the dangers of absorption. His agenda has been appraised as prefiguring the modern hermeneutics of suspicion, but there are also important differences to be noted. Besides drawing our attention to the role of Plato, De audiendis poetis suggests further reasons for the appeal of apatē in the Imperial era, notably a culture of rhetorical epideixis that put a premium on captivating performances and the socio-political function of literature for the Greek elites in the Roman empire that gave new prominence to its ethical dimension.

The chapter includes readings of Germania 1, 2, 3, 28, 33, 37, 46.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

The final chapter commences with an episode from Petronius, which illustrates that it would be rewarding to look for the aesthetics of deception in Latin literature. However, instead of staying within the temporal boundaries of antiquity, I conclude my inquiry with some contemporary spotlights. By no means did apatē have the reception history of mimēsis, and yet, I contend, its association of aesthetic illusion with deception has particular force in our world. After pointing out a significant shift of focus from the ancient to the present aesthetics of deception, I discuss examples from journalism, politics, art and psychotherapy that in various ways engage with immersion and deception.

This chapter examines the range, scope, generic roots and poetics of Hellenistic paradoxographical collections. The cultural context surrounding the production of the first paradoxographical collections in Ptolemaic Alexandria is thoroughly explored. The relationships between paradoxography, wonder and previous traditions of Greek ethnographic writing and contemporary Peripatetic scientific writing are outlined through the examination of Antigonus of Carystus’ Collection of Marvellous Investigations, Ps. Aristotle’s On Marvellous Things Heard, Herodotus’ Histories, Callimachus’ Aitia and Aristotle’s biological writings.