Within Classics, there is growing interest in the nature of reperformance, particularly in relation to archaic and classical Greek poetry and drama. Developing out of the now well-established ‘performative turn’ in studies of early Greek song, and gaining impetus from a series of publications focussing on the contextual specificity of archaic lyric and drama, those interested in reperformance ask what it means for a song or a play, composed for a specific occasion, to be reperformed in another time and (potentially) another place. While interest in reperformance is certainly not new, the debate is now increasingly taking place in dialogue with parallel studies of reperformance in other disciplines. Research in performance studies has articulated a paradox at the heart of reperformance: since aperformanceis imagined as a singular event that exists only in that moment, and in a specific context,reperformance is an attempt to repeat the unique. Theorists and practitioners have in turn explored this paradox in relation to the restagings and re-enactments of one-time events and performances, such as battle re-enactments, the reconstruction of ballet choreographies before the days of film and live performance art. These examples reveal the complex temporalities involved in reperforming notionally one-time events, as an attempt to capture the ephemeral and collapse the present and the past (as well as the there and the not-there) in the ‘syncopated time’ of the reperformance.

Scholarship on Homer'sOdysseyhas long recognised the importance of naming and reference in the poem, particularly in the way speakers refer to Odysseus. Here I consider one term regularly used for the protagonist, but largely overlooked in these studies: κεῖνος, ‘that man’. I argue that it acquires a specific and rich association with Odysseus in the epic, one that depends on the deictic properties of the pronoun as marking its object as distant in space and uncertainly located. This is contrasted with Odysseus’ use of the proximal deictic ὅδε, ‘this man’, to reveal his identity at the poem's climax.

This article considers Pindar’s use of the expression θαῦµα … ἀκοῦσαι, ‘a wonder to hear’, inPythian1 to describe the monster Typhoeus. I argue that the expression needs to be read against Hesiod’s use of a similar locution, θαύµατ’ ἀκοῦσαι, to describe Typhoeus in theTheogony. There, Hesiod adapts the common epic formula θαῦµα ἰδέσθαι, producing a unique phrase to indicate Typhoeus’ chaotic blending of sights and sounds, and at the same time his disruption of the rules of poetic communication. Typhoeus’ disharmonious poetics there stands in contrast to the orderly image of the choral Muses in the proem. I argue in turn that Pindar subtly reworks the Hesiodic formula to reflect Typhoeus’ defeat by Zeus, and thereby subsumes the monster’s ‘acoustics’ within the θαῦµα of the choral performance of the ode itself.