https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/320 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1047 This is a comparison of Agathon’s role, in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae and Plato’s Symposium. Firstly, I examine the platonic version, and the unique, idiosyncratic part Plato gives Agathon to play, as a host to all, and a hostage to Socrates. Secondly, I discuss his interaction with Inlaw, the ordinary Athenian, in Aristophanes’ play. Such parallel reading allows us not only to refine our outlook on the dramatic construction both of the “talking party” and of the comic performance, but also to capture how really poikilos, for better or worse, that urban love could be. Finally, I analyze the significance of this juxtaposition, as an intertext. Plato, I argue, produces a proper palinode of Agathon, as an erotikos and a mimetic poet. By taking seriously the face-to-face between Agathon and Agathon, two dissonant, and yet compatible, variations on one man, our picture of Athenian erotic culture emerges sharper, and in greater detail. jeu., 16 juin 2022 08:31:02 +0200 ven., 13 oct. 2023 10:38:15 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1047 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/308 This paper reconsiders the narrative of his own death delivered by the shade of Deiphobus in Aeneid 6 (509-530). This episode is usually compared to Agamemnon’s encounter with Odysseus in the first nekuia of the Odyssey, but I argue that the underworld meeting of Agamemnon and Amphimedon in the second nekuia (Odyssey 24.121-190) is also an important intertextual model. Deiphobus and Amphimedon both accuse a woman – Helen, Penelope – of conspiring with their sexual rivals – Menelaus, Odysseus – to bring about their deaths. Yet comparison of Amphimedon’s and Deiphobus’ narratives highlights the misleading and self-aggrandizing character of their rhetoric and raises questions about how women are represented by male narrators and by the epic tradition more broadly. This paper suggests that Deiphobus’ narrative works together with other competing and contradictory views of Helen within the Aeneid in order to fracture the epic tradition’s univocal representation of her – and women more generally – as casus belli. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:38:22 +0200 jeu., 23 mars 2023 09:48:34 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/308