Lampas - Volume 58, Issue 1, 2025

In many classrooms pupils are not encouraged to develop their own interpretations of literary texts. I developed an educational design to address this problem. My design is based on the principles of creativity, the highest order of thinking according to the taxonomy of Bloom/Krathwohl. Pupils are asked to fill a lacuna in a poem of Sappho (Fragment 16) and to discuss their supplements with classmates. My expectation is that these discussions include many forms of interpretation, since the entirety of the poem has to be understood to create a valid supplement. This design was put into practice to teach three groups of pupils (Dutch vwo 4 and 5). The data used for analysis are the audiotapes of the group discussions and interviews with pupils after completing the task. The design appears to have multiple outcomes. Two groups developed a rich interpretation of the poem, whereas one group limited their thoughts about the poem to the lines directly preceding the lacuna.

Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid is well known for its multiplicity of meanings and contradictions, often referred to as ‘ambiguity’. Many of its ambiguities pertain (sometimes implicitly) to the relationship between the legendary and mythological past that the poem narrates and the Trojan future under Augustan rule that it repeatedly foreshadows. In light of the 2025 Dutch Central Examination in Latin Language and Culture, which focuses on the relationship between Aeneas and Augustus in the Aeneid, this article provides a brief summary of the scholarly discussion on Virgilian ambiguity. I argue that the mere term ‘ambiguity’ does not suffice to accurately describe the many different aspects of ambiguity in the Aeneid, and I will introduce several additional axes and gradients to increase our grasp on the phenomenon. Finally, I discuss the figure of Aeneas’ son Ascanius as an example of how awareness of ambiguity may add to our understanding of this complex character and his role as a nexus between Aeneas and Augustus.

In recent decades insights from the cognitive sciences, especially the cognitive-psychological study of theory of mind/mindreading, have increasingly been brought to bear on the study of literary character portrayal, including in Antigone. This article argues that the scope of cognitive approaches to characterization should be extended beyond mindreading alone to include insights from psycholinguistics (on discourse processing) and social psychology (on attribution). Combining all these approaches, the paper analyses the characterization of Antigone and Kreon in Antigone. It is argued that Antigone’s mind is portrayed as difficult to read on account of the extreme nature of her intentions and beliefs, and that Kreon is portrayed as an overzealous and overconfident mindreader. The two characters are also different in how they connect short-term mind states (intentions, beliefs) to long-term character traits: Antigone tends to explain her own behaviour in terms of short-term reasons, while Kreon regularly infers long-term dispositions and traits from other people’s actions. The conclusion briefly discusses the question whether it is ‘legitimate’ to ponder the beliefs, desires, and character traits hidden behind the masks of Greek tragic characters.

Few female characters in Greek mythology are as widely admired as Sophocles’ Antigone, the daughter of Jocasta and Oedipus who was willing to defy the authority of the ruler of Thebes, her uncle Kreon, and to sacrifice her life so that her brother Polyneikes could be buried. In this contribution, I first contrast Antigone’s character and actions with those of similar tragic parthenoi in order to define what makes her so admirable. I then place some recent adaptations of the Antigone myth in the context of the recent wave of retellings from a ‘new’ female perspective. How can one describe a character who is already so prominent as a heroine once more ‘from a new perspective’? The answer is sought in a discussion of the antithesis Antigone versus Ismene, using two recent stage monologues and a novel: José Watanabe’s Antígona (2001), Lot Vekemans’ Zus van (2005) and Nathalie Haynes’ The children of Jocasta (2017).