Pleasures recalled: A.R. 3.813-814, Asclepiades and Homer

Abstract

recalls, through a nexus of allusions to Hellenistic and archaic poetry, a series of contexts whose implications for her own situation the naive and self-deceptive Medea fails to understand. The opposition between the delights of life and pleasurelessness of death is a widespread commonplace,3 but the language of 3.813 displays a specific resemblance to a verse from an epigram by Asclepiades (HE 816-819 [AP 5.85]) in which the speaker playfully reminds his vir-