The author’s exposition of the gospel message takes the form of a homily addressed in part to an audience located elsewhere, suggesting a comparison with early Christian letters. The author is clearly influenced by the letters of Paul, while comparison with the letters of Ignatius and the fragments of Valentinus’s letters bring to light significant contrasts that help to locate the Gospel of Truth more accurately within the early Christian literary landscape.

Rather than extended historical narratives, extant pre-Herodotean iambic and elegiac poetry contains brief descriptions of past events that may serve as political or military exempla for local audiences in times of crisis. Herodotus also tells stories about the past – at far greater length – in order to educate and inspire his audience; his exhortation is implicit rather than explicit, however, and his audience is Panhellenic. The relationship between Simonides’ “Plataea elegy” (however fragmentary) and Herodotus’ Plataea narrative is especially enlightening. The presence of supernatural beings on Simonides’ battlefield underscores simultaneously both Herodotus’ general reticence in matters of divine and the extraordinary, possibly poetic role played by Demeter in his account of the fighting at Plataea. More broadly, the political realism of Herodotus’ account, which highlights dissension among the Greek forces, suggests tacit rejection of Simonidean encomium, which aims to perpetuate martial kleos as Homer did for the warriors at Troy.

A conspicuous discourse feature shared by Herodotus and Pindar is the constant presence of a first-person narrator, one of whose functions is to assess traditions concerning past events. For example, in Olympian 1 Pindar sanitizes the Pelops myth for piety’s sake and to make Pelops a worthy paradigm for the ode’s honoree, Hieron. This revision illustrates the epinician poet’s intent to portray a mythical past that is not factually true but serves the interests of his local audience (the victor, his family, and community). By contrast, Herodotus’ unflattering but true revision of the Trojan War narrative demonstrates his willingness to challenge the views of his Panhellenic audience. The same conviction characterizes his assessment of the Athenians as the difference-makers in the war against Xerxes – a truth resented by most Greeks in his day (echoing the epinician distinction between the victor’s true worth and the falsehoods spread by his resentful detractors).

This chapter focuses on various forms of choral disruption: choral exits mid-action, dramatic and textual manifestations of choral silence, as well as off-stage cries as phenomena which ‘interrupt’ the chorus. This chapter explores how the chorus is (dis)embedded in the flow of dramatic narrative, while accentuating choral conventions and expectations. Among the standard conventions of Greek tragedy is the continuous presence of the chorus on stage following their entrance in the parodos. The chapter thus analyses the five plays in the surviving tragic corpus that feature a chorus which exits the stage mid-action: Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Sophocles’ Ajax, Euripides’ Alcestis and Helen, and the fourth-century tragedy Rhesus. It also examines how tragedians disrupt the rhythm of choral performance in crises of emotion or action, from scenes in which a literal interruption on stage silences a chorus to those where an expected choral ode is delayed or cut short.