Chapter X makes a case for considering the ancient scholars as the agency behind the creation of myth in text and image.

Chapter IX argues that ekphrasis originated in the ancient Near East rather than in Classical anituityh discussing examples from a royal building hymn, royal inscriptions and Late Babylonian propagandistic literature.

Chapter II discusses former approaches to Mesopotamian mythology in Assyriology that conceived of myth as either ‘primitive’ and ‘mythopoeic’; as an explanation of natural phenomena and political realities; as a reflection of historical events; and as a negotiation of gender roles, as well as attempts towards outlining the intertextuality of mythical narratives.

It was a cliché of ancient literary criticism that Sophocles was ‘most Homeric’: Polemo put the idea epigrammatically when he said Homer was the epic Sophocles and Sophocles the tragic Homer.1 Modern scholarship has tended to endorse this view without paying very close attention to the particular ways in which Sophocles uses his epic models or to the new kinds of perception and sensibility he brings to bear on them.2 Of course there are important similarities: Sophocles seems more interested than either of his great rivals in heroic behaviour and (in the extant plays at any rate) characteristically chooses models of human experience that are very like those of the epic, as when he shows a great individual pitting his moral strength against the rest of the world in a sort of test of man’s endurance.

Armed conflict and the proximity of soldiers and other combatants shaped late ancient monastic communities in diverse ways that reflected not only the vulnerability of victims but also the resourcefulness of innovators. Monks were wounded, captured, and killed, and some became the objects of veneration as martyrs; monastic communities built walls and towers for protection and offered help to victims of violence; monks interacted with barbarians peacefully and violently and integrated their fears of barbarians into their spiritual lives; monks formed new and often beneficial relationships with military men, some of whom chose to become monks themselves; and the military may have provided one of the models for the organization of monastic communities. Monks saw themselves as soldiers of the heavenly king, not entirely different from the nearby soldiers of the earthly king.

My choice of title calls for a word of explanation – perhaps of apology. When I opted to discuss the study of Greek manuscripts I was thinking particularly about the pioneering days of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and I hoped to find out what sort of imaginative impression was made on classical scholars of the time by Byzantine culture in the shape of its books.

What I have found is plenty of evidence to reinforce my sense that this was indeed an exciting and even heroic period, when scholars attached enormous importance to tracking down manuscripts, and lavished a great deal of money and effort on travelling to find them and make collations or to acquire them for their own collections.

There is no trace of this comparison in the published version of Demosthenes’ response to Aeschines in the dispute over the crown (18); for whatever reason Demosthenes decided not to use it – or maybe it was Aeschines’ invention in the first place.1 For my purposes ownership is not the most important point: either way, the music of the Sirens is a memorable image for the voice of the actor/orator, and its associations – glamour, power, danger – are relevant to the two related questions that I attempt to deal with in this paper, namely what is the logic of Demosthenes’ critique of Aeschines qua performer, and how far can this be related to contemporary perceptions of actors in public life.