“The Ties that Bind,” takes us in a new direction as we begin to explore Lucretius’ curative efforts toward his male audience. Quite naturally then, we train our focus on the famous honey-rimmed cup of medicine metaphor of 1.921–50 (4.1–25). We find that the verses present a figure denser than the simple doctor-patient-medicine schema. Rather surprisingly, Lucretius has woven into the image a complex set of allusions to mythical female characters. In overlapping ways, Lucretius identifies his authorial voice with Circe, Helen, and the Sirens as he seeks to seduce, drug, and divert his audience away from what they might imagine to be their dearest goals in life. Lucretius reveals that the emasculating web of deceit he spins becomes a safety net to rescue his audience from the trap of self-delusion and superstition in the face of nature’s laws.

While some Classicists have made cases for the birth of fiction, linking it to various authors and texts, others have argued that fictionality is a core concern of Greek literature from its beginnings to the Imperial era. In chapter 2, I agree with the idea that fictionality did not have to be discovered at some point but then proceed to argue that neither did it ever play an important role. After presenting evidence for the familiarity of fictionality in antiquity, I reconsider two authors who often appear as cornerstones in histories of fictionality, Gorgias and Aristotle. A closer look at their reflections draws our attention to two dimensions of ancient narrative that were deemed far more important than its referentiality, namely its immersive quality and its moral thrust.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the polemical dismissal of Epicurean teachings as sub-masculine and morally suspect. Epicureans are shown to figured as sexually receptive and effeminate by their ideological opponents. I argue that Lucretius accepts these criticisms and turns them around to show that Roman men are equally effeminate and penetrable. Objective, empirical observation of nature and physics proves that everyone, regardless of biological sex and sociological gender, is rendered penetrable and vulnerable by the constant issue and reception of atoms.

Perhaps the most prominent cognitivist concept in recent narratology is the Theory of Mind. Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine and others have been highly influential with their claim that mind reading is at the core of our engagement with narrative in general. However, these scholars have not only ignored how controversial the idea of the Theory of Mind is in psychology – ancient literature, I believe, also belies their argument about narrative at large. Mind reading is certainly central to our responses to modern realist novels, but ancient narratives, as my test case, Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, illustrates, were more invested in the reconfiguration of time than in individualized minds. Plot was crucial for the experiential quality of narrative hailed by critics, as shown in Chapter 2. This prominence of plot is reflected in Aristotle’s Poetics and other critical works. In order not to play off plot against character, I propose experience as a category that integrates cognitive processes as well as matters of plot.

This chapter explores the indexical potential of time in three ways: chronological perspective, the use of temporal adverbs and adjectives to situate an episode within a larger span of literary history; marked iteration, the self-reflexive replay or foreshadowing of other events; and epigonal self-consciousness, the direct or indirect appeal to poetic predecessors. All three tropes are active in archaic epic and lyric, but with differing accents. In epic, references to time and iteration mark intratextual and intertextual cross-references and doublets, while epic heroes’ epigonal relationships with their πρότεροι figure the tensions of the poet’s relationship with his predecessors. In lyric poetry, temporal references similarly index tradition; δηὖτε marks both generic and intertextual repetition; and direct appeals to πρότεροι follow and challenge both whole genres and specific texts. Indexical temporality was deeply embedded in archaic Greek poetics from the very start.

After acknowledging the important contribution of structuralist narratology to the study of ancient literature in the past decades, the first chapter highlights its price: forged mostly in the reading of modern novels, narratological taxonomies have occluded peculiarities of ancient narrative and its understanding of narrative. I discuss various alternative approaches to ancient narrative and then introduce the one chosen in this book: I take key concepts of modern narrative theory and explore how ancient texts relate to it. Instead of striving to prove the existence or prefiguration of these concepts in antiquity and thereby to prove ancient literature as modern avant la lettre, I will zero in on the fault lines, where the ancient sense of narrative does not map onto our categories.