This chapter focuses on various forms of choral disruption: choral exits mid-action, dramatic and textual manifestations of choral silence, as well as off-stage cries as phenomena which ‘interrupt’ the chorus. This chapter explores how the chorus is (dis)embedded in the flow of dramatic narrative, while accentuating choral conventions and expectations. Among the standard conventions of Greek tragedy is the continuous presence of the chorus on stage following their entrance in the parodos. The chapter thus analyses the five plays in the surviving tragic corpus that feature a chorus which exits the stage mid-action: Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Sophocles’ Ajax, Euripides’ Alcestis and Helen, and the fourth-century tragedy Rhesus. It also examines how tragedians disrupt the rhythm of choral performance in crises of emotion or action, from scenes in which a literal interruption on stage silences a chorus to those where an expected choral ode is delayed or cut short.

This chapter reconstructs the relationship between the Gospel of Truth’s author and his intended audience, arguing that its author ensures its rhetorical effectiveness by his use of keywords and vivid imagery.

The Lydian logos is indebted to tragedy for many features: its large-scale narrative structure and (in its constituent stories) small-scale episodic structure, narrative motifs and themes, even vocabulary. However, Herodotus also diverges from his tragic sources in ways that clarify the nature of his own inquiries. The source of the constraint under which Gyges makes his fateful decisions is not divine (as in Aeschylus), but the will of his king and queen, highlighting a characteristic feature of Eastern monarchy. In the final sentence of the Atys/Adrastus story, the distinctive ethnographic formula that describes Adrastus’ suicidal thoughts marks him as a uniquely Herodotean tragic hero. Croesus’ pyre scene contains both an echo of the Aeschylean Cassandra (the king’s dramatic breaking of his silence) and a defining feature of Herodotean historiē: the citation of a Lydian source for Apollo’s epiphany demonstrates the critical attitude that Herodotus brings to popular and poetic traditions.

The aim of the translation is to provide an English text that is both scholarly and accessible. The referencing system resembles the familiar biblical chapters and verses; sections are provided with titles that identify their key theme and bring to light the structure of a work often regarded as diffuse and repetitive.

In his prologue Herodotus establishes a complex relationship with his poetic predecessors and contemporaries. He presents his narrative of the Greco-Persian Wars as simultaneously indebted and opposed to a network of poets, whose Panhellenic cultural prestige he challenges in the innovative medium of prose. Homeric epic is tacitly acknowledged as a model of primary importance: Herodotus adopts the martial subject matter of the Iliad and projects the persona of the peripatetic hero Odysseus. In perpetuating the kleos of fully human warriors rather than their heroic forebears, Herodotus implies that his own medium of prose historiē, committed to writing, will surpass poetry’s ability to perform its traditional function of public commemoration. Herodotus constructs the entire prologue as an ingenious prose priamel, a poetic rhetorical structure that enables him to emphasize important points of contact with and departure from Homeric epic, Sappho’s fragment 16, and the portrayal of Croesus in epinician poetry.

Chapter 3 reveals how the Secret Book of John uses John’s apostolic authority and continues the story of the apostle John (who is probably thought of as the beloved disciple). It discusses how the Secret Book serves as a kind of prequel to John’s prologue and how the Acts of John gives a good sense for the apostle John as a literary character in the late second century.

Aeschylus’ Persae is an important antecedent for the account of Xerxes’ Hellenic campaign in the Histories, serving as both a source of phrases, images, and themes and a poetic foil for Herodotean inquiry. The tragedian’s presence is palpable in the staging of the king’s decision to attack Greece, although Herodotus shifts the causal emphasis from Xerxes’ personal flaws to coercive political and religious forces. Herodotus’ insistence on the contingency of Greek victory at Salamis marks a telling departure from Aeschylus’ vision of the battle as a great Panhellenic victory, vouchsafed by the gods and undisturbed by the conflicting interests of the poleis allied against Xerxes. In their presentation of Greco-Persian conflict both Aeschylus and Herodotus partially deconstruct the polarity between Hellenes and Persians, encouraging their respective audiences to look beyond cultural differences to common human traits that shaped the course of events before, during, and after the Persian invasion.

As the Gospel of Truth is read on its own terms, and not through the lens of Irenaeus’s hostility, points of contact come to light with other early gospel literature. The most extensive parallels are with Johannine theology, but echoes of the Gospel of Matthew are also perceptible along with thematic links to the Gospel of Thomas.

The Notes on the Text and Translation focus on key issues important for understanding the Secret Book of John (especially in Codex III), which could not be addressed in the preceding chapters.