Browsing by Author "Shelton, Matthew"

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    Divine Madness in Plato’s Phaedrus
    (2024-04-17) Shelton, Matthew
    Critics often suggest that Socrates’ portrait of the philosopher’s inspired madness in his second speech in Plato’s Phaedrus is incompatible with the other types of divine madness outlined in the same speech, namely poetic, prophetic, and purificatory madness. This incompatibility is frequently taken to show that Socrates’ characterisation of philosophers as mad is disingenuous or misleading in some way. While philosophical madness and the other types of divine madness are distinguished by the non-philosophical crowd’s different interpretations of them, I aim to show that they are not, in fact, presented as incompatible. Socrates’ pair of speeches demonstrates that madness can be divided into harmful and beneficial kinds, and in Socrates’ key discussion of philosophical madness (249c4-e4), I argue that the crowd correctly recognises that the philosopher is mad on the basis of his eccentricity, but wrongly assumes that the philosopher’s madness is of the harmful type because it fails to realise that the philosopher is enthused. Socrates’ second speech provides information about human souls and gods which shows that philosophical madness belongs to the beneficial type and so falls under the heading of divine enthusiasm after all. Importantly, human souls and gods are shown in the speech to be roughly isomorphic. Both philosophical and other kinds of divine madness involve having something divine inside a human body (entheos): in the former a human soul has become godlike; in the latter a human soul has been displaced by a god. Because of this, I propose that philosophy is presented as a genuine form of divine madness alongside the other more conventional examples.
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    OMNIA VINCIT AMOR: parody and tone in Ovid's Amores 3.11a&b
    (2025) Shayne, Ryan; Shelton, Matthew
    Ovid's Amores 3.11a&b has been discussed by many in passing, and few in detail. The poem contains the Ovidian lover's second attempt at a renuntiatio amoris, and (arguably) comprises two parts of a whole: in 3.11a, the lover boasts to have emancipated himself from love's shackles and proceeds to outline the reasons for his renunciation (largely his beloved's indiscretions); in 3.11b, however, he backtracks into a drawn-out internal conflict between his love and hate for her, that exhausts in elaborate detail the Catullan odi et amo idea. Because in this poem elegiac commonplaces abound, and because of Ovid's verbal dexterity and allusiveness, the poem has often been deemed simply a playful parody of or variation on the Catullan theme: that is, insincere and not at all serious. Few have considered the possibility that in 3.11 we ought to take Ovid more seriously than elsewhere. I aim to show that there is good reason to do so: that the poem's irony and humour need not preclude seriousness, and that its literariness does not come at the expense of emotional intensity. Ovid's elegiac lover in the Amores, like the praeceptor in the Remedia Amoris, treats love as a game to be won through strategy and artifice. I suggest that, in Am. 3.11, Ovid reflects on the inevitable failure of this approach. By considering Ovid's use of intertextuality and intratextuality, and the difference between the Ovidian lover's attitude in Am. 3.11 and elsewhere in the Amores, I argue that the poem voices a serious concern: the lover's attempts to conquer love inevitably fail, because love conquers all; it cannot be treated as a game, because it is not one — at least not one that he can win.