8
It is the year 41 BC. Mark Antony, the victor of Philippi, has crossed to Asia:
Kings thronged to his door, and their wives gave themselves to be seduced, vying with one another in their gifts and their beauty. While Octavian was being worn away in Rome by civic dissent and fighting, Antony himself enjoyed infinite leisure and peace, and his passions soon carried him round again to his old life. Men like the lyre-player Anaxenor, the flute-accompanist Xuthus, a dancer called Metrodorus – and indeed a whole troupe (thiasos) of such people, offering all the musical pleasures of Asia and even outdoing in their brazenness and buffoonery the pests which had come from Italy – all flooded in on him and took over his court. It was intolerable. Everything which came in was spent on things like this, and all Asia, like that city of Sophocles, was laden with incense,
‘laden with paeans and moans of despair’.
At any rate, when he entered Ephesus, the women dressed as Bacchants and the men and boys as Satyrs and Pans, and all marched in procession before him; the whole city was full of ivy, thyrsus wands, harps, pipes, and flutes, and the people hailed him as Dionysus, god of Grace and Gentleness. And so he was for some: but to most he was the Dionysus of Savagery and Wildness...
(Ant. 24.1–5)
robbing innocents of their possessions and presiding over a torn, shattered, exhausted land.
So much of Plutarch’s Dionysus is caught by that passage. There is the release in the middle of desperate hardship; there is the hint not merely of drink and excess but also of the theatre (even if Plutarch has misinterpreted the ‘paeans’ of the Sophoclean passage);1 there is the infectiousness, with all rushing instinctively to play their part, and the leader Antony responding in kind. But above all there is the multiplicity, with Antony responding not merely in kind but in kinds – the giver of grace and gentleness to some, but for most the Dionysus of savagery and wildness.
Two chapters later we have Cleopatra’s marvellous arrival, draped as Aphrodite on her barge;
and the word spread among everyone, that Aphrodite was come in revelry to Dionysus, for the good of Asia.
(Ant. 26.5)
It is a sacred marriage, a ιερος γάμος, which should guarantee the prosperity and health of the continent; and yet ‘for the good of Asia’ is tragic delusion. The consequences of this idyllic scene will be devastating.
These many forms of Dionysus offered Plutarch rich possibilities for presenting his more multifaceted characters, and it is notable how the Lives richest in Dionysiac allusions and imagery tend to be those most thought-provoking and problematic in their moral assessment – including some even more thought-provoking and problematic than Antony itself. Dionysus is ‘good to think with’.
Let us begin by returning to Theseus, discussed in the last chapter. In that Life Dionysus does not quite appear as a character but he is at least not far away in the Ariadne panel, 19–23. Those chapters are rich in variants, but Plutarch never airs the most popular variant of all, the version that Theseus abandoned Ariadne and Dionysus rescued and married her (or alternatively that she was already married to Dionysus when Theseus seduced her). The nearest we come to that is, first, the version of 20.1, where Ariadne goes on to live with a priest of Dionysus; and, secondly, that of 20.8–9, where there are two Ariadnes, one married to Dionysus and the mother of Staphylos and Oenopion (in an earlier variant these two were treated as Theseus’ own children, 20.2, despite their roisteringly Dionysiac names), and a second who was the victim of Theseus’ lust and faithlessness.2 The standard version would be too mythical, too unrationalized for this Life whose trademark is (as we explored in the last chapter) ‘purifying away the mythical and making it look like history’, at least where that is possible (1.5–6). But there remain some further hints of the Dionysiac in the context, especially the two androgynous but dangerous youths who, in the final and highly rationalized version at 23.2–5, pose as two of the sacrificial maidens and play their part in defeating the Cretans, and are duly celebrated ever after by sacrifices to Dionysus and Ariadne.
So even here, where Dionysus as a character is excluded by the demythologizing programme, the Dionysiac flavouring survives; and it accompanies themes which we will find to be recurrent in Plutarch’s more Dionysiac moments. First, the very profusion of Ariadne variants reflects the difficulty in pinning down the factual and moral truth about Theseus (another theme which I discussed in the last chapter): some of these variants are quite generous to Theseus (notably that of 20.3–7, and in a slightly odd way Rom. 30(1).6–7 defends too), but most are not. Secondly, Theseus’ treatment of Ariadne reflects a wider concern of the Life, for Theseus’ unsatisfactory behaviour towards women plays a large part in generating Plutarch’s overall moral ambivalence.3 The treatment of Helen is here central (31). This question of sexual behaviour is highlighted in the final chapter of the Synkrisis, with strikingly harsh words: Theseus emerges as even more sexually unsatisfactory than Romulus, architect of the Rape of the Sabine Women. That final chapter culminates in the breathtaking judgement that Theseus’ birth was contrary to the will of the gods (Rom. 35(6).7), an amazing emphasis for a figure who served as a focus for such national and civic pride.
That terminal judgement is picking up the warning given by Delphi to Aegeus: do not loosen your wine-flask before returning to Athens (3.5–6). Once again one notices the Dionysiac motif. It is reinforced by some interesting thematic patterning, for that is a scene in which Aegeus goes on to behave as badly with women as his son will do later, seducing the daughter of his host Pittheus. Then the ‘loosing of the wine-flask’ is itself picked up later in the dashing of the young Theseus’ poisoned kylix from his lips as Aegeus recognizes him, 12.2–6, and also in the further wine-skin oracle at 24.4–6, presaging the height of Theseus’ political achievement.4 So once again the Dionysiac becomes an element within a thought-provoking thematic pattern, in this case one which prepares for the most paradoxical moral judgement of the whole Life.
One further point. In that passage where the cup is dashed from Theseus’ lips (12.2–6), it is Medea who is trying to poison the boy. The hints of Euripides’ tragedy, with its further suggestions of Aegeus’ original oracle, are not far to seek: and this leads us into the role of tragedy in this Life.
On the whole, it is part of the Life’s demythologizing programme to distance itself from ‘tragic’ versions. Usually τράγ- and τράγίκ- roots are dismissive, with Plutarch rejecting theatrical versions in favour of his more ‘historical’ narratives: 1.3, 2.3, 15.2, 29.4.5 The panel at 28–9 (containing material on Amazons, other women, and sundry labours and achievements) is particularly interesting here, with several tragic versions dismissed in quick succession. Yet one version is not there rejected, and that is the story, familiar to us from Euripides’ Hippolytus, that in a fit of rage Theseus cursed his own son.6 The reference to this at 28.3 admittedly looks curt: ‘as for his misfortunes relating to Phaedra and his son, given that there is no discrepancy between historians and tragedians, we should assume that it happened in the way they all say’. Yet the memory of that cursing is expected to be secure enough in the audience’s mind for an important point to be built on it, most allusively, in the synkrisis at Rom. 32(3).2. The distancing from tragedy cannot be total: Theseus’ life and conduct were, in part, ‘tragic’.
It is interesting here to dwell on the reflection of 16.3, ‘it is a hard thing to incur the hatred of a city which possesses a voice and a Muse’. The character in point there is Minos, who ‘for evermore was reviled and slandered in the Athenian theatres’, so that the original truth about the just king became travestied. But there may be a wider point too. Is there a hint here that Theseus’ inflation was as influenced by the Attic theatrical tradition, so often dismissed in this Life, as Minos’ denigration?7
Whatever we think about that, the recurrent interplay of history and tragedy in the Life again touches on a theme which will recur elsewhere: the way in which the theatrical, as well as the releasing, aspects of Dionysus are recurrently hinted and explored in those Lives in which the Dionysiac element is most pronounced, and where moral judgement is most exploratory and balanced.
The world of Rome afforded a wide range of contrasts which could be phrased in a suggestive Dionysiac register: a world where drunken excesses were rife, but where grauitas, sobriety, and restraint were prized as ancestral virtues; a world where the private excesses of the great often had shattering consequences on thousands of subjects; and, in Plutarch’s presentational strategy, a world where comparison with Greek experience, including experience drawing on tragedy, provides a consistently stimulating point of reference and departure.
Wine itself provided a focus for many of Plutarch’s moral preoccupations: a test of self-control, an opportunity for civilized and humane exchanges, a revelation of the true character within. Sometimes, as in Camillus, the contrast of Roman sobriety and control with barbarian drunkenness and self-destruction can be relatively simple (Cam. 15.3–4, 20.2, 23.6–7, 35.4, 41.2). But even cases which are prima facie similar, such as Cato Maior, can be more thought-provoking.
The elder Cato prided himself on restraint, and a recurrent index of this is his moderation in wine-drinking.8 That stress on vinous restraint is then focused in a contrast between the murderous symposium of Lucius Flamininus which Cato punished so rigorously (17.1–5) and his own sober, indeed very strict symposia (21.3–4, 25.4). But there are two passages, one at the end of the Life and one in the comparison with Aristides, which offer a new, re-orienting perspective on such ostentatious austerity, inviting us to reassess the Life rather radically. The more straightforward example is that in the epilogue, where Cato’s preoccupation with prudent moneymaking, treated sympathetically in the Life itself, is suddenly made to seem less clear a strength.9
I should like to put the question to Cato himself. If wealth is something to be enjoyed, why pride yourself on owning a lot and being content with a moderate amount? And if indeed it is a fine thing – and it is – to be content with whatever bread comes to hand and drink the same wine as workmen and servants, and to feel no need for purple or stuccoed houses, then Aristides and Epaminondas and Manius Curius and Gaius Fabricius did not fall short in any way when they were unconcerned to obtain things whose need they rejected. (Aristides–Cato 31(4).4)
The more interesting passage comes in the closing chapter of the narrative itself. We have reached the dispute between Cato and Scipio Nasica on the future of Carthage: Carthago delenda est, or Carthago non delenda? Scipio’s reasoning is developed with sympathy (though there may well be a subtle Greek re-texturing of Roman metus hostilis):10
And there was one thing which was already too violent of Cato – to end any speech he was making on any topic by adding ‘it seems to me that Carthage should be destroyed’. Publius Scipio responded in kind: whenever he was called on he always declared ‘it seems to me that Carthage should survive’. It seems that Scipio could see that the demos was already going astray through hubris and was becoming hard for the boule to handle because of its prosperity and its spirit, and that the city as a whole was so powerful that it was being forcibly dragged in whatever direction its momentum took it: so he wished this fear, at least, to hang over the city as a sort of bridle to chasten the citizens’ brashness (θράσύτή”), thinking that Carthage was too weak to overcome Rome but too strong to be despised. Cato, on the other hand, thought this very point terrible (or ‘frightening’, δέίνον) – that a people that was plunged in Bacchic revelry and tottering in many respects through its power should have hanging over it a city that was always great, and had now been brought to sobriety (νήφούσάν) by its disasters and had been punished, and that Rome should fail to eradicate all dangers to the empire to leave itself free to repair its domestic mistakes.
(Cato Maior 27.2–4)
Anyone familiar with Plutarch would find it surprising if the issue were totally clear-cut. Both visionaries are given powerful language and imagery, and in some ways both are talking sense. Cato’s language, unsympathetic to Bacchic excesses, is what we would expect from the punisher of Lucius Flamininus. But still Scipio Nasica seems clearly the winner: that is made clear by the way Plutarch introduces it, ‘and there was one thing which was already too violent of Cato.’. Plutarch’s readers would also know what happened later; they would be quite clear that, if the idea of destroying Carthage was to leave Rome free to deal with her domestic distempers, it had not worked. The end of Flamininus derives interesting moral capital from Titus Flamininus’ hounding of Hannibal;11 Cato is here equally questionable for his similarly unyielding anti-Carthaginian feeling, that determination to destroy Rome’s great adversary. As so often, the great man’s rigidity is understandable, even in a way admirable, but it is carried too far.
So, once again, the most Dionysiac language of the Life is reserved for the moment where the moral problematic is at its most intense.
There is more to Dionysus, and to Dionysiac imagery, than drunkenness and wine; we should return to the importance of Dionysus as god of the tragic theatre, and the frequency with which these suggestions combine with those of Dionysiac excesses. Judith Mossman has recently brought out the importance of Dionysiac tragic self-destruction to Alexander, David Braund and Alexei Zadorojnyi that of Dionysiac theatricality and brutality to Crassus, and Rhiannon Ash that of Dionysiac dismemberment to the decapitation theme of Galba.12 Alexander is the more suggestive case for our present concerns, in particular the interaction of vinous excesses and theatrical motifs in the closing chapters.
Alexander is rich in Dionysiac imagery, from the involvement of Olympias in ‘Dionysiac ecstatic rites’ at 2.7–9 through to Alexander’s Dionysiac eastern process across Carmania at 67 (the latter evoking the familiar idea of Dionysus as the great Eastern conqueror and Alexander as his successor). Particularly interesting, though, is the notion that Dionysus will take vengeance on Alexander for his treatment of Thebes:
Later however the catastrophe of Thebes is said to have made him often more indulgent to many others. And indeed he was accustomed to attribute to the wrath and vengeful indignation of Dionysus his treatment of Cleitus, drunken as it was, and the cowardly refusal of the Macedonians to fight the Indi, abandoning as they did his campaign and his glory while they were still incomplete. No Theban later made any request to him without gaining it...
(Alex. 13.3–5)
That passage gives no more than hints of how Dionysus exercises that wrath (or, to be more precise, how Alexander thought he did).13 The mention of the Indi suggests Dionysus’ own protection of a favoured race, with an irrational mental surge injected into the Macedonians themselves in Dionysiac fashion; the Cleitus episode seems to point to a more naturalistic register, through Alexander’s own drunken excesses. And certainly the drunken register recurs frequently. Initially Plutarch treats the theme generously, as in the drunken komos where Theodectes’ statue is showered with garlands (17.9) and in the rather strained defence of Alexander against the charge of over-indulgence (23); but soon the motif recurs more destructively, in the great series of disquieting episodes at the core of the life. Wine thus plays a part in the Thais story (38) and the Philotas episode (48.5) as well as the murder of Cleitus (50); and then drunkenness is an important element in the macabre description of Alexander’s final illness and death (esp. 69.6, 72.2, 75.5–6).
In those final chapters another Dionysiac note also becomes felt, with the recurrent theatrical motifs: first the scene of Bagoas in the theatre in Gedrosia (67.8), then lots of theatrical events in Ecbatana (72.1) – indeed, Hephaestion drinks himself to death while his doctor is away in the theatre at one of them (72.2). True, Plutarch distances himself from the more sensationalist treatments of Alexander’s death, put together by those who ‘thought that this sort of thing was necessary, as if they were making up a tragic and pathetic exit for a great drama’ (75.5): but, as Mossman has stressed, the emphasis there falls on the ‘making up’, πλάσάντες.14 Plutarch’s own treatment is tragic and theatrical enough, without the need for sensationalist fabrication; and in his narrative the tragic aspect of Dionysus is fundamental to Alexander’s death. In Hephaestion’s case the theatrical and the vinous are both relevant, and that is also true, in a wider sense, of Alexander himself. As Mossman stressed, it is Alexander’s tragedy that he self-destructs, like so many tragic heroes before him. The vinous is one important way in which that self-destruction articulates itself; another is the strange, unreal, chilling mentality which invades Alexander in these final days, a royal and more deadly equivalent of that cowardice which crept over his troops amongst the Indi. This, finally, is Dionysus’ revenge; and several of his different facets – the riotous excess, the theatricality, the mental invasiveness, the tragical self-destruction – come together in orchestrating his victim’s death. The destructions of Alexander and Pentheus have something in common.
This provides a useful register for revisiting Demetrius–Antony. In my 1988 commentary on Antony I naturally stressed the importance of Dionysus as a linking theme in both Lives, with both Demetrius (Demetr. 2) and Antony imitating, even impersonating Dionysus, then the god abandoning Antony (Ant. 75); I also stressed the theatrical imagery throughout the pair; and I naturally dwelt on the vinous excesses. I discussed the hints of Antony’s mental disintegration, especially as he confronts the disaster not merely of Actium, but of how he has behaved at Actium (esp. 66.7, 67.1–6).15 But I now wish I had placed these various themes more firmly in a Dionysiac context. It is Dionysus who brings all these themes together, and here too, as in Alexander, the registers of the vinous excesses and the theatrical interestingly merge. We might begin by thinking of a reader, of this pair as of Alexander, asking how Dionysus is going to be most relevant – in Alexander how he will orchestrate his revenge, in this pair which of the many facets will be the dominant. But we will not be surprised if we fail to reach a single and simple answer, given Dionysus’ capacity to blur and complicate any clear-cut distinctions.
In both Demetrius and Antony the natural first suspicion is that Dionysus’ significance will be in the individuals’ excesses, and in important senses that remains the case. True, in Demetrius it for a time seems possible to keep excesses and industry in separate life-compartments, so that Demetrius can fit the stereotype of the man of action who relaxes riotously; several times Plutarch emphasizes that Demetrius’ excesses never harmed his military efficiency (Demetr. 2.3, 19.4–10, cf. the synkrisis at Ant. 90(3) ). The same is true at times of Antony, at least in his pre-Cleopatra days, and his capacity for convivial comradeship with his troops is a homosocial strength (esp. Ant. 4). Even after his first meeting with Cleopatra he can cast off his infatuation with Cleopatra ‘as if he had slept off a hangover’, ωωσπέρ έξύπνίσθέίς κάί άποκράίπάλήσάς, 30.3. But it is in the nature of Dionysus to resist restraint and compartmentalisation; even with Demetrius, then more decisively with Antony, the categories become catastrophically blurred, and private debauchery impinges on public competence. At 9.5–7 Demetrius secretly meets the beautiful Cratesipolis, and makes an undignified escape when surprised by his enemies; at 44.8 the Macedonians refuse to toil any longer to keep him in luxury. All is well for Antony as long as he shares the jokes and the conviviality with his troops:
Even things which seemed vulgar to other people – his boasting, his jests, his undisguised bouts of drinking, his practice of sitting down beside his men at their meals or standing to eat at the soldiers’ common table – all this created an extraordinary affection and longing for him among the troops. His erotic pursuits, too, were not without their charm (ήν δέ πού κάί το έρωτίκον ούκ άνάφροδίτον), and these won many over to his support, as he helped them in their love affairs and accepted with good grace the jokes about his own.
(Ant. 4.4–5)
So the Dionysiac and the Aphrodisiac are already coming together, as they do later in his meeting with Cleopatra (26.5: above, pp. 197–8). But then all the jokes, all the revelry begin to be shared with Cleopatra; and Antony’s love-life ceases to be the bonding, laughing matter with his men that we see in this early phase (‘accepted with good grace the jokes about his own’). It is that development which eventually drives the wedge between Antony and his own men, and leaves him abandoned and destroyed at the end.
When Shakespeare took up Plutarch’s treatment of Antony he concentrated on Hercules, not Dionysus, as Antony’s god; he had his own reasons for that,16 but thereby he obscured an important dimension of Plutarch’s original. For there is more of Dionysus than of Heracles in Plutarch’s Life. We have already seen the hailing of Antony as Dionysus at Ephesus (24.4: Plutarch is the only author to put Antony’s association with Dionysus so early, and it is more likely that historically it began two years later, in 39 rather than 41 Bc).17 As time went on Antony became known as the ‘New Dionysus’ (60.5), and showed appropriate favour to the Artists of Dionysus (56.7). Yet eventually, and most movingly and marvellously, the god abandons Antony, in an eerie thiasos (75).
Even before that there had been many disquieting omens; one had been at Athens, when a statue of Dionysus had fallen into the theatre (60.5): and once again, as with Alexander, we see that the theatrical and the vinous sides of Dionysus interweave. They had done the same at the end of Demetrius : his end was certainly drunken, but it is also distinctively tragic – ‘his burial too had a certain tragic and theatrical aspect’ (Demetr. 53.1); then the transition into Antony is ‘now the Macedonian drama is complete, it is time to bring on that of Rome’ (53.10). The end of Antony shows a similar rhythm. We have known for some time that Antony ‘wears his tragic mask for Rome, his comic for Alexandria’ (Ant. 29.4); now the Alexandrian donations appear ‘tragic, arrogant, full of hatred for Rome’ (54.5); and the last words of the pair, Antony ‘took himself off’ (93(6).4), also point to the tragic theatricality of his fall.
That is the mask of Dionysus which faces us at the end; and one element that binds the mix of different themes and different audience responses – disapproval but also engagement in the open frankness of the excesses, the sense of the tragic frailty which Antony shares with the rest of humanity, the shock at the destructiveness of a single pair’s excesses – is nothing but Dionysus himself, that god who is so multifaceted, so receptive, and yet so lethal.
Recent studies of Greek tragedy have made much of Dionysus as the god of the tragic festival.18 Dionysus, we are told, frequently mediates in tragedy between opposites: male and female, salvation and destruction, savagery and civilization – nothing could show that better than the Dionysus of Euripides’ Bacchae. ‘Mediates’, it must be emphasized, rather than ‘reconciles’: tragic Dionysus allows for the simultaneous presence in the same person or phenomena of apparent opposites.
If we find something of the same in Plutarch’s Dionysus, that need not imply that Plutarch’s own characters combine opposed or contradictory traits; on the contrary, Plutarch tends to favour what I elsewhere call ‘integrated’ characters – that is, not stereotypes nor unidimensional figures, but ones where the various character traits cluster naturally, so that each trait tends to predict the next and we are not presented with jarring or paradoxical combinations.19 One might even see Dionysus as advancing this integration: it is Dionysus’ own divine personality which means that a character’s vinousness can cluster naturally with theatricality, or with spasmodic mental derangement. But, even if characters themselves are ‘integrated’, they can still generate paradoxically contrary consequences – the exuberant joy but also the outrage and devastation which Antony and Cleopatra brought to those around them; and they can certainly generate challengingly conflicting responses in readers, as awareness of a character’s strengths carries with it insight into his or her weaknesses, and engagement and admiration jostle in our minds with disquiet and disapproval. It is no coincidence that assessment is at its least clear-cut and most equivocal when the hints of Dionysus are loudest.
Plutarch indeed found Dionysus ‘good to think with’: in particular, good for thinking about people, particularly those people whom he found most ethically fascinating.
Notes
1 As I argued in my commentary: Pelling 1988, 178–9.
2 Then there is a further hint in the synkrisis, Rom. 30(1).7): if Ariadne fell in love with Theseus ‘I myself would say that she was genuinely worthy of a god’s love, if she has such an affection for the beautiful and the good and such a love for the best’.
3 On this moral complexity, and the part played in it by delaying the material on the early rapes, see also pp. 311–12.
4 The oracle too has interesting thematic parallels: Apollo refers to ‘my father’ (Zeus) as he addresses Theseus’ father Aegeus. Then κλωστήράς (‘threads’) links with the preceding panel of Ariadne and the labyrinth: this is to be the next achievement in a thematically connected series, but will be a less morally problematic one.
5 Just as ‘tragic’ or ‘theatrical’ imagery usually has a negative tinge: cf. Wardman 1974, 170–3; Mossman 1988, 84–5 and n. 6 = Scardigli 1995, 212 and n. 6; Zadorojnyi 1997a, 169–70; Duff 1999, 125–6 and n. 89.
6 Cf. Wiseman 1993, 130, though we should not take as typical Plutarch’s acquiescence here in the historicity of a tragic plot; Larmour 1988, 374.
7 On this (Platonic) passage cf. p. 187, where I also suggest a further sense in which ‘tragedy’ may be misleading the reader in this Life.
8 This moderation of the elder Cato may be an intertextual referent in Cato Minor, a Life where memories of Cato’s sober ancestor often offer a relevant register for comparison, and which problematizes the younger Cato’s drinking habits (6) along with some aspects of his marital sexuality: cf. p. 103.
9 I return to this passage in ch. 12 at p. 275, and discuss the triangle of interrogator (Plutarch), interrogated (Cato), and narratee (reader); cf. also p. 312, and Pelling 1989,214–15.
10 As I argue in ch. 9, p. 225.
11 See pp. 351–2 and Pelling 1997a, 249–52, 313–18.
12 Mossman 1988; Braund 1993; Zadorojnyi 1997a; Ash 1997; cf. also Mossman 1992 and Braund 1997 on Pyrrhus. Cf. pp. 97–8 and 111 n. 27, and p. 296 on tragic imagery in Lysander and the importance of a Dionysiac setting for Lysander’s death.
13 The emphasis here, focalizing the idea through Alexander’s own nervous unease at what he has done, itself offers a naturalistic as well as a demonic register in which, if we chose, we could explain the later recurrence of the Dionysiac theme. That is relevant to the uncertainty in Alex.–Caes. on the degree to which the divine is really involved as an explanatory factor (a theme I develop in ch. 17, pp. 378–82); it also allows a further level on which psychic invasion is possible. Dionysus may genuinely be ‘invading’ the troops among the Indi; or ‘invading’ Alexander, in making him think in this way; or it may all be self-generated delusion of Alexander in any case. We cannot know: as so often in matters Dionysiac, clear-cut distinctions are impossible.
14 Mossman 1988, 91 (= Scardigli 1995, 224–5).
15 Pelling 1988, esp. 21–2, 123–4, 137–40, 177–81, 195, 209, 241, 257–8, 284–7,303–4.
16 Pelling 1988, 123–4.
17 Pelling 1988, 179–80.
18 In particular, see the collections of articles in Winkler and Zeitlin 1990, with the critique of Griffin 1998, and Carpenter and Faraone 1993. Naturally, I can here do no more than summarize dogmatically and enigmatically an insight which recurs, in subtle, varied, and partly conflicting ways, in a number of sophisticated studies by different scholars.
19 I develop this idea particularly in chs. 13 and 14: at pp. 334–5 n. 77 I acknowledge that apparent disharmonies can coexist, but suggest that such figures remain more predictably inconsistent than modern counterparts.