Chapter 5 examines Achilles’ refusal of the Embassy’s offer in Book 9, a refusal often interpreted as blindness or arrogance. The chapter argues his refusal stems from the interlocutors’ failure to grasp the offer’s implications. Achilles explains that he will die at Troy, if he resumes fighting. This implies that a crucial part of Agamemnon’s offer (cities and a daughter in marriage when he returns to Greece) is void. This is why Achilles threatens to leave the next day. Phoenix fails to ‘read his mind’ by asking him to fight solely for gifts. Achilles relents after Ajax’ speech and promises to resume the fight if the Trojans reach his tent and ships. The embassy members do not know that Achilles asked Zeus to make them be defeated in battle; only Ajax unwittingly touches upon this. Odysseus, reporting on the Embassy to the Greeks’ assembly, only narrates the version that will make the warriors fight most vigorously. If we read Achilles’ mind, he must think that his final version has been reported to the Greeks. That is why he refuses to fight in Book 16, sending Patroclus instead. Achilles’ downfall, like Hector’s, is caused by a failure of communication.

This chapter examines how Sophoclean tragedy approaches and conceptualises the relationship between divine and mortal. It demonstrates that Sophocles builds on the early Greek theological, philosophical and literary tradition outlined in Chapter 1, but steers his own, distinctive course. It argues that Sophocles’ tragedies deploy ideas and beliefs about humans and gods in three, closely interconnected ways: in the explicitly theological and philosophical discourse uttered by characters and choruses; in the trajectories and experiences of individual characters on the stage; and in the broader, religious and ethical patterns that underlie these trajectories, which are occasionally and partially revealed to audiences. As part of its attempt to foreground the close interrelation of dramatic structure, form and content, the chapter devotes considerable space to a new interpretation of dramatic irony. This general discussion relies on readings of four Sophoclean plays, Oedipus Tyrannus, Ajax, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, as well as on brief comparative analyses of some Aeschylean and Euripidean examples.

This chapter examines the role of the storm as a setting for rhetorical performance in Roman epic, starting from the first simile of the Aeneid in which Neptun is compared to an orator and tracing its reception in Lucan and Silius. I argue that the orator in the storm becomes a key figure through which poets playfully question rhetoric’s claim to master the grand style that is traditionally assimilated to stormy natural phenomena. These scenes of “embedded” rhetorical performance provide a self-conscious commentary on rhetoric and its relation to poetry. Far from being “seduced” or “victimized” by rhetorical influence, poets address and react to the cultural narratives about poetry’s relation to rhetoric found in rhetorical texts, for example, in Cicero.

This chapter focuses on select scenes of deliberative oratory in Roman epic and on the figure of the demagogue who inhabits them - Thersites in the Iliad, Drances in Virgil’s Aeneid 11, Odysseus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 13, Cicero in Lucan, Varro in Silius. Tracing the ways in which poets use these orators as foils for their generic rivals, I suggest that far from chanelling disapproval of rhetoric, these demagogues are truly hybrid figures, who leverage anti-rhetorical discourse while simultaneously claiming for poetry the same power and persuasiveness of rhetoric.