Greece has played many roles in Europe's story. For a country that, unlike Rome, had very little geopolitical influence on Europe, these roles are neither, in their extent, expectable, nor, in their variety, consistent. Why Greece? As for territory, Egypt and Asia seem to have been more colonisable projects for the Greeks. The texts of Herodotus, Thucydides (Book VIII), Xenophon (ubiquitously) suggest a continuing engagement with Eastern cultures.

Callimachus fr. 178 Pf. (= 89 Massimilla) tells how the Athenian Pollis—the name is known from a citation in Athenaeus—continued to celebrate Attic festivals in the Alexandria of the poet's own day. At Pollis' party to commemorate the Attic festival in honour of Erigone, the αἰώρα, the poet met Theogenes, a visitor from the Aegean island of Ikos (modern Alonnisos):

Martiis caelebs quid agam kalendis,
quid uelint flores et acerra turis
plena miraris positusque carbo in caespite uiuo,

docte sermones utriusque linguae:
uoueram dulcis epulas et album
Libero caprum prope funeratus arboris icru.

hic dies anno redeunte festus
corticem adstrictum pice dimouebit
amphorae fumum bibere institutae consule Tullo.

sume, Maecenas, cyathos amici
sospitis centum et uigiles lucernas
perfer in lucem: procul omnis esto clamor et ira.

mitte ciuilis super urbe curas:
occidit Daci Cotisonis agmen,
Medus infestus sibi luctuosis dissidet armis,

seruit Hispanae uetus hostis orae
Cantaber sera domitus catena,
iam Scythae laxo meditantur arcu cedere campis.

neglegens, ne qua populus laboret,
parce priuatus nimium cauere et
dona praesentis cape laetus horae: linque seuera.

What I, a bachelor, am doing on the Kalends of March, what the flowers mean and the casket full of incense and the coal placed on the living turf, you marvel at, learned in the conversations of both languages: I had vowed a savoury feast and a white goat to Liber when I was nearly done to death by the tree's fall. This feast day, as the year returns, will remove the cork, tightened with pitch, from a jar taught to drink the smoke when Tullus was consul.

Twenty five years ago in the infant Ramus, J.P. Sullivan wrote ‘In Defence of Persius’. Not many scholars writing today would think of choosing that title: having contemplated the indefensible aspects of Classical literature, most are far too wary to leap to the defence of any classical author, let alone a writer of Satire, a genre distinguished by its combination of crassness and cruelty, its insistence on turning its audience into victimisers. Sullivan's defence rests partly on his perceptive appreciation of Persius' unusually complex and intense poetic style. Twenty years later, also in Ramus, John Henderson took a different approach to the same author: his (ironical?) strategy was not to defend the poet, but to banish him and his style entirely:

The formulation of the object of study as a textual trace—no longer an obscure poet, but a central and key textual trace—transforms the reading of an unpopular minor Latin author (surely a self-indulgent exercise, after all; not the sort of thing our educational system ought to be funding) into an exemplary study of the cultural formation of imperial subjectivity. Persius would have enjoyed sharing this secret with his ditch.

So Juno claims, famously, expressing her determination to thwart the newlyforged alliance between Aeneas and the Italians, and setting in motion (through the agency of Allecto) the violence and passion that fuels the ‘Iliadic’ Aeneid—the ‘Energy of Hell’, as Philip Hardie calls it—energy necessary to sustain the momentum of a long narrative poem, a demonic ‘burst of power’ imitated by Vergil's successors—Lucan, Silius, and especially Statius, who opens the Thebaid with an embittered Oedipus summoning the dark forces of the underworld embodied in the Fury Tisiphone (Theb. 1.48ff.). Vergil's hexameter might also serve as a motto for Ramus to the degree that the journal has mounted a radical—and oedipal—critique over the last quarter century, assaulting the stuffy status quo in classical studies, finding a place ‘on the shelves of all the young and cool’, although those sons (and daughters), now a generation older, are themselves the new fathers, the new superi. Juno's claim so impressed Freud that he placed it on the title page of his magnum opus—The Interpretation of Dreams—anticipating psychoanalysis' assault on Western subjectivity and describing Freud's own exclusion from the academy, his circuitous ‘professional journey’. Years later Freud would maintain that the hexameter line provides a portrait of ‘repressed instinctual impulses’, suggesting that, long before the twentieth century, Vergil and his epic successors understood the project of psychoanalysis. ‘The poets and philosophers,’ Freud was fond of saying, ‘discovered the unconscious before I did.’