Dept. of Classics

The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

In 1975, Tony Harrison published his translation of a selection of epigrams by Palladas, a fourth-century citizen of Alexandria and one of the last pagan poets. Harrison had been inspired by Peter Jay's modern verse translations of ancient Greek epigrams, mostly drawn from the Greek Anthology. 1 Palladas' cynical voice clearly struck a chord in the alienated young Harrison, who described it at the time as "the authentic snarl of a man trapped physically in poverty and persecution, and metaphysically in a deep sense of the futile." 2 Through this separate edition Harrison rescued the distinctive individual voice of the ancient poet from centuries of anthologized oblivion. Amongst the verses Harrison chose to translate (which include satirical lines on the problems involved in reading canonical literature, misogynist tirades, and meditations on the brevity of life) is this succinct assault on another poet: Where's the public good in what you write, raking it in from all that shameless shite, hawking iambics like so much Betterbrite? (Harrison's no. 43 = The Greek Anthology 11.291)

This chapter explores classical Mediterranean thought on suffering through a detailed examination of one Greek tragedy, Sophocles' Philoctetes, in which both moral philosophy and medicine also feature. Suffering in this play has no inherent metaphysical or ethical status, but it does raise the rather practical as well as ethical question of how other human beings can and should respond to the sufferer-examining in close detail how an individual's acute suffering deforms his everyday life and his relationships with his or her community and showing how very differently individuals respond to the suffering of others. It even asks the proto-Utilitarian question of whether the suffering of a single individual should be allowed to outweigh the interests of the whole community. There is perhaps no other artwork that explores so intensely the problem which incurable suffering presents to the community to which the sufferer belongs.