121.4

In this article, I re-evaluate the Troezenian setting of Euripides’ Hippolytus in dialogue with the concept of “liminal landscapes,” culturally constructed spaces imagined as occupying the margins of political geography, whose symbolically laden topographies mark them as zones of transgression and transformation. I argue that Euripides’ “liminal” rendering of his fictive Troezen—as a wild borderland on Athens’ frontier, representing freedom and purity, but also alienation and contested identity—underscores the fraught civic status of the tragedy’s three main characters as well as recent tension between the historical communities of Athens and Troezen.

I argue that Catullus evokes both on- and offstage elements of the Roman theatrical experience to simulate the experience of attending a play at Roman ludi in c. 64. The offstage elements that Catullus evokes include the audience’s behavior, the physical performance space, and the embodied sensory experience of attending ludi and watching a theatrical performance. Understanding that Catullus evokes this experience in c. 64 allows for a more nuanced understanding of the poem and particularly its famous coda about moral decline.

The Cipus episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15, featuring a Roman with horns, is unusual because it contains no moment of transformation. The narrative also contrasts with that of Valerius Maximus in ways that the difference between genres cannot entirely explain. I suggest that Ovid alludes to the Horned Man paradox, a comparatively well known (and often derided) logical problem. This would add to existing evidence that Ovid knew and played with philosophical themes, most obviously in the Speech of Pythagoras earlier in Metamorphoses 15.