summary: This article examines Ismene's nightmare in book 8 of Statius's Thebaid by contextualizing it within the epic's narrative, comparing it with the dream narrations of other female characters in epic poetry, and aligning it with other typically female modes of subjective expression in epic, such as weaving, teichoscopy, and lamentation. My analysis shows that by exposing the difficulties inherent in retelling a dream, Statius demonstrates sympathy with the female perspective on the horrific war that constitutes the central action of his poem and foreshadows the subsequent inadequacy of words in reaction to such horror.
In the second of three chapters examining Athens’ golden-age legacy, Scioli traces how Jules Dassin repeatedly draws attention to the origins of his 1962 melodrama Phaedra in Greek myth and tragedy through visual imagery, as a complement to his 1960 comedy Never on Sunday. Phaedra’s use of ancient Athenian art, and its suggestive modernization of elements from the ancient Athenian tragedyHippolytusand Racine’s 1677 adaptation Phèdre, force a confrontation with a particular modern formulation of the ancient Greek past. Dassin draws upon the golden age to characterize the world of ancient Greece that irrupts into the early 1960s setting of the film both visually and thematically. Rather than fostering nostalgia for a golden age that might prompt a desire for its return, Phaedra presents it as an intrusive presence from which its characters feel alienated, only to demonstrate that they are inextricably bound, in their modern dress, to repeat what the tragic past has prescribed for them. Such self-conscious appropriation of Athens’ literary-dramatic and artistic-material remains informs the tragic belatedness of Phaedra and reflects upon the American expatriate director’s sense of foreignness in the homeland of his lover and artistic muse, Greek actress and activist Melina Mercouri.
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