This paper examines three different receptions of Plato’s Charmides – Oscar Wilde’s Charmides, Cavafy’s In a Town of Osroene, and Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades. It focuses on their responses to the erotic and philosophical element in the Charmides. Wilde provides an example of minimal textual engagement: the name Charmides is invoked solely for its connotations of young, male beauty. In Cavafy explicit allusion to ‘the Platonic Charmides’ recasts the poem an expression of homoerotic desire, and endows its group of young men with the prestige of a Platonic gathering and Platonic love. In contrast, Plutarch’s engagement with the Charmides is implicit, and depends entirely on the reader’s ability to recognise a series of detailed verbal echoes. Plutarch denies that Socrates’ motivation was sexual, and integrates allusion to the Charmides into a broader network of allusions to other passages in which Plato describes Socrates’ encounters with beautiful young men, or the ideal relationship of a mature man with a younger beloved, in which the sexual element is entirely absent. In so doing, Plutarch “corrects” Plato with Plato, and removes what had become an embarrassment in his period.

This chapter examines the reception of two Platonic texts, the Protagoras and the Statesman, in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and Plutarch’s Gryllus. It argues that part of the reason for the success of this reception lies in the way that Plato’s texts are embedded in insolvable problems such as what constitutes nudity and how one distinguishes between animal and human. Embedding a text in a wicked problem is an effective way to ensure it afterlife. In the case of Plato, the difficulty of this problem is exacerbated by his decision to ground his distinction between animal and human in the presence or absence of body-hair. Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch, in different ways, draw attention to the simultaneous complexity, instability, and capaciousness of body-hair as a signifier. They are attracted to explore its potential, but are ultimately forced to reject it and the systems of thought that it supports as unsatisfactory.

In this paper D’Alessio explores the reception of the ideology of choral performance in Horace’s Carmen Saeculare arguing that, contrary to current scholarly consensus, it is profoundly indebted to Hellenistic choral theory and practice, and, more particularly, to its crucial, but often overlooked configuration in Callimachus. D’Alessio’s interpretation starts from an analysis of the relationship between divine ‘presence’, political power, and the ‘present’ of poetry in the Epistle to Augustus, moving to the centrality of choral performance as the site for recognizing and legitimizing divine presence and staging political power relations in Hellenistic choral poetry and in Callimachus’ Hymns, where, as he argues in detail, this theme finds one of its most fully articulated formulations. In the following section the author shows how important features of the Carmen Saeculare should be read against the lively tradition of post-classical, Hellenistic and later Greek public cultic poetry, as well as through intertextual Callimachean links, and finally draws attention to Horace’s peculiar re-configuration of the ideological background provided by his models.

Beginning with a striking passage in which the Sibylline narrator asserts her intellectual ownership of Homer’s work, I point out its Theogonic framing, before surveying other thematic and stylistic invocations of Hesiod across the Sibylline corpus. I argue that Hesiod, without being named, is given programmatic importance as a Classicizing alternative to Homeric authority and wisdom. I then distinguish three strategies of Sibylline transformation of Biblical material in Homeric colouring into apocalyptic visions: amplification of scenes of destruction, cosmic revision of individual action, and the countering of heroic epic values with monotheistic principles. In each of these, ideas of ‘the Hesiodic’ generated by its ancient reception provide a cipher for the critique of the Homeric cosmos implied by Sibylline rewriting of Jewish and Christian scriptures in the direction of universal history. I conclude by offering comparanda for future studies.

The naming of poetic predecessors within one’s own composition, often associated with a so-called Hellenistic aesthetic, has a less explored heritage going back to the sixth century BCE. This chapter traces the strategy in its earliest phases, especially as we find it within lyric poetry, from the reported statement by Stesichorus [fr. 168 Finglass] that the Shield of Heracles was indeed composed by Hesiod, to the Simonidean allusion to Homer as his forerunner in praise-poetry (fr.11.15–18), and on to Pindar’s complex and varied namings of Archilochus, Terpander, and the masters of hexameter verse. It offers a typology of three main functions of such naming (approbation, criticism, or the representation of conversational interaction), and then an in-depth analysis of two problematic issues: the generic affiliations of Stesichorean art, and the difficulties related to the Pindaric naming of Homer, in particular at Nemean 7.20–7. The device of naming a predecessor emerges as a sort of reception degree-zero, whereby previous verbal art is highlighted, distilled, and set up as a foil, while a new performative space is opened up for the presentation of one’s own innovative productions.