In a well-known article, Hodnett pointed out that Virgil emphasizes the peacefulness and quiet of the sea, its immensity and limitlessness, in contrast to the view articulated by the Roman poets of the Republic, which presents the sea as deceptive and fearsome. Among the many terms used in the Aeneid to denote the sea, aequor stands out precisely because it is the term most frequently used by Virgil in place of the word mare.

The expression pelle Libystidis ursae, which occurs at Aen. 5.37 and 8.368, has caused a certain amount of puzzlement among scholars. This article will attempt to explain, through Virgil's allusions to Apollonius' Argonautica, the function of Libystis as a pointer to the motif of the creation of a new homeland within a foreign territory, as is the case with Segesta and Rome. This idea is further developed by the two omens that forebode the foundations of Segesta and Rome, that is, the omen of Acestes' arrow at Aen. 5.522–8 and the weapon-omen at Aen. 8.524–9, both of which are consistently associated with flames, comets, and lightning. These elements underline the symbolism of destruction, rebirth, and Jupiter's will that characterizes the foundations of Segesta and future Rome.

In Epistulae ex Ponto 4.8, one of the last poems written from exile (dated to 15 or 16 c.e.), Ovid expresses his increasing hopes for Germanicus' assistance in effecting his recall to Rome. Though ostensibly addressed to his stepdaughter's father-in-law, P. Suillius Rufus, the poem contains a petition to Germanicus (27–88), as a poet to a poet, which promises future commemoration in Ovid's poetry if he is removed from Tomis:

clausaque si misero patria est, ut ponar in ullo,
qui minus Ausonia distet ab Vrbe loco,
unde tuas possim laudes celebrare recentes
magnaque quam minima facta referre mora.   (85–8)

Ovid's disclaimers in the Ars Amatoria need to be read in this context. My main argument is that, in his disclaimers, Ovid is rendering his female readership socially unrecognizable, rather than excluding respectable virgins and matronae from his audience. Ars 1.31–4, Ovid's programmatic statement about his work's target audience, is a case in point. A closer look at the passage shows that he does not necessarily warn off Roman wives and marriageable girls:

este procul, uittae tenues, insigne pudoris,
quaeque tegis medios instita longa pedes:
nos Venerem tutam concessaque furta canemus
inque meo nullum carmine crimen erit.   Ov. Ars Am. 1.31–4

Stay away, slender fillets, symbol of modesty,
and you, long hem, who cover half the feet:
we shall sing of safe sex and permitted cheating
and there will be no wrong in my song.

The Latin language is uncharacteristically rich when it comes to describing witches. A witch may be called a cantatrix or praecantrix, a sacerdos or vates. She may be docta, divina, saga, and maga, a venefica, malefica, lamia, lupula, strix, or striga. She may be simply quaedam anus. The available terms are copious and diverse, and the presence of such an abundant differential vocabulary might suggest (incorrectly, I shall argue) that Latin made clear linguistic distinctions between various witch types. It would seem a reasonable expectation that praecantrices, a word evocative of those who sing of events before they happen (prae + cantare), would be concerned with divinatory practices, while veneficae, given the term's close relationship to the word for poison (venenum), would deal in potions or philtres, leaving the lamiae (a Latinization of the Greek demon Lamia) or striges (personifications of the rapacious screech owl) to function as quasi-demonic bogeys posing threats to the lives of small children. However, this expectation of semantic and morphological concordance remains unfulfilled following any concerted attempt to correlate a witch's title with her function. Because of this disjuncture, this paper proposes to demonstrate not only the inaccuracy of the Latin vocabulary in articulating the functional differences between various witches, but also to assert the essential uniformity of witch characters in so far as each witch is, in essence, a blank canvas onto which a myriad of fears and anxieties may be mapped.

We are told that when news of Caracalla's death reached Rome a group of senators denounced their former emperor, likening him to all the tyrants of the past who had ruled over them. The senator who recorded these actions, the historian Cassius Dio, does not say which tyrants were listed, but it is likely that such a comprehensive list included the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, and his son Sextus. The senators' actions were doubtless more an act of group catharsis than a private show of loyalty to their new emperor, Marcus Opellius Macrinus. Yet what the scene reveals perhaps most clearly is the Roman exempla tradition in practice.

One of the most famous allegations made against the emperor Caligula was that he had intended to appoint his favourite horse, Incitatus, as consul. While Suetonius and Cassius Dio both preserve this allegation, neither explains the basis for it, what exactly Caligula had said or done to lead those about him to believe that this is what he had intended to do.

While Statius' decision to treat events in landlocked Thebes offered limited opportunity to integrate into his poem a maritime episode, which had become a staple epic ingredient by the first century a.d., the Thebaid is dotted with references to the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece, including a narrative flashback of the crew's time at Lemnos (Theb. 5.335–498). Following in a long tradition of cross-contamination between Argonautic and Theban literary texts (as shown by, for example, the Apollonian Argonautica's use of Antimachus' Thebaid), Statius' poem also evokes works of literature which narrate the legend, notably the Argonauticas of Apollonius Rhodius and Valerius Flaccus. A lack of scholarly focus on this latter area has generally led to a piecemeal scrutiny of individual allusive passages rather than a systematic treatment. However, Stover's recent paper paves the way for a more productive approach through its contention that the Thebaid makes widespread use of the mythic subject matter: ‘It … appears that Statius frequently appropriates the Argonautic tradition and that he does so largely to present the Argives as quasi Argonauts. This suggests that their adventure to conquer Thebes is analogous to the Argonauts’ voyage to Colchis.'

It is widely agreed that, in the re-emergence of Platonism as a dogmatic school of philosophy following the demise of the sceptical academy, Plato's works came to have an authoritative status. This paper argues for a particular understanding of what that authority consists in and how it was acquired.

In the Peristephanon, a collection of hymns in praise of the Christian martyrs, the Spanish poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (a.d. 347/8–c. 405) refers back to a time more than a hundred years before he was writing, when Christianity was not the predominant influence in the Roman world but the religion of a beleaguered minority. In the course of Prudentius' lifetime, the trials that were suffered by that minority under emperors such as Decius and Diocletian became an important point of reference for increasing numbers of Roman converts seeking to identify with Christianity and its sectarian past. At the time, however, those trials were recorded in only meagre written accounts. Prudentius, whose successful administrative career might have culminated in elevation to a senior position in the imperial scrinia, displays particular interest in the extent of the official archival material in the Peristephanon. In a number of passages in this work, he comments on the fragility of historical documents, which are easily destroyed by acts of malice or the effects of time. The following discussion will examine the ways in which he reflects on the permanence, or otherwise, of his own written texts. Analysis of his imitation of elegiac verse inscriptions will demonstrate how he draws attention to the inadequacy of even the most monumental types of human writing. But I will argue that, by identifying his poems with the martyrs' perishable bodies, Prudentius claims that they too can be a medium for a divine presence not confined to any perishable physical form.

It has long been noted that there are links between the Homeric portrayals of Odysseus' companions and the suitors. These two largely anonymous groups of Ithacans are connected not only by their ἀτασθαλίαι (‘reckless deeds’) but also by the fact that by the end of the Odyssey both groups will be dead. Clearly, these fatalities are – in their different ways – crucial to the story. Nagler regards the death of the suitors as a ‘grim inversion’ of the death of Odysseus' crew. Odysseus himself is depicted both by the primary narrator and in his own narrative in Od. 9–12 as making every effort to save his crew, all in vain. By contrast, he is the prime and highly effective instigator of the death of the suitors.

It is well known that in early Greek epic old age was something that could be scraped off a man, and it is the purpose of this note to explore the image and to suggest a possible origin. The idea is first attested in a counterfactual conditional sentence in Phoenix's speech at Il. 9.445–6: ‘nor even if [a god] himself were to undertake to render me young and flourishing after scraping off old age …’ (οὐδ' εἴ κέν μοι ὑποσταίη αὐτός | γῆρας ἀποξύσας θήσειν νέον ἡβώοντα …); in a description of Medea's magical rejuvenation of Aeson in the Nostoi (fr. 7.2 Bernabé = 6.2 Davies, γῆρας ἀποξύσας); and in the account of Eos' botched attempt to make Tithonus immortal in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (223–4):

οὐδ' ἐνόησε μετὰ ϕρεσὶ πότνια Ἠώς
ἥβην αἰτῆσαι, ξῦσαί τ' ἄπο γῆρας ὀλοιόν.

The extended exhortation of Tyrtaeus fr. 11 W urges the audience to take up their shield and spears and fight in a defensive fashion, ‘placing foot against foot, leaning chest on chest’ (v. 31). The overt message of the poem is clear: do not shirk nor run away, but rather stand firm and fight. Within the poem, Tyrtaeus weaves a more subtle message, describing a hoplite group which derives its defining characteristics through possession of a stalwart, ‘passive’ courage and a shield with a ‘belly’ (v. 24). The cohesion that this poem calls for and reproduces through its use of the second person plural and description of close, hoplite fighting, however, is disrupted by the last four lines of the poem, which form a jarring address that sit uneasily alongside the remainder of the poem. In West's text they read:

ὑμεῖς δ', ὦ γυμνῆτες, ὑπ' ἀσπίδος ἄλλοθεν ἄλλος
πτώσσοντες μεγάλοις βάλλετε χερμαδίοις
δούρασί τε ξεστοῖσιν ἀκοντίζοντες ἐς αὐτούς,
τοῖσι πανόπλοισιν πλησίον ἱστάμενοι.   (vv. 35–8)

The starting point of this brief discussion is the emendation in line 782 of Aeschylus' Septem proposed by M.L. West in his 1990 Teubner edition. In the fifth strophe of the second stasimon, the chorus recollects the misfortunes that struck Oedipus when he finally discovered the truth about his marriage. This severely corrupt passage, whose original meaning was lost at an early stage of transmission, runs as follows:

ἐπεὶ δ' ἀρτίϕρων ἐγένετο         [στρ. ε]
μέλεος ἀθλίων γάμων,
ἐπ' ἄλγει δυσϕορῶν             780
μαινομέναι κραδίαι
δίδυμα κάκ' ἐτέλεσεν
πατροϕόνωι χερὶ τῶν
†κρεισσοτέκνων δ' ὀμμάτων† ἐπλάγχθη.
τέκνοις δ' †ἀραίας† ἐϕῆκεν        [ἀντ. ε]
ἐπίκοτος τροϕᾶς, αἰαί,         786
πικρογλώσσους ἀράς.

Dicaeopolis brushes the informer aside and closes his deal with the starving Megarian:

ΔΙ. … λαβὲ ταυτὶ τὰ σκόροδα καὶ τοὺς ἅλας
καὶ χαῖρε πόλλ’. ΜΕ. ἀλλ’ ἁμὶν οὐκ ἐπιχώριον.
ΔΙ. πολυπραγμοσύνη νῦν ἐς κεϕαλὴν τράποιτ’ ἐμοί.   833

There is a widespread practice of spelling the forms κεχρώσμεθα in Euripides' Medea 497 and ϕώζειν in Strattis, fr. 9 K.–A. with the long diphthong omega–iota, that is, κεχρώισμεθα or κεχρῴσμεθα and ϕώιζειν or ϕῴζειν. These spellings are not correct from the etymological point of view, but are recommended by ancient grammarians. In this note I identify the foundation on which these recommendations rest, and provide an assessment of its philological solidness.

It has long been known that the Egyptian pharaoh was regarded as divine in Egyptian culture. He was the son of Re and the mediator between the gods and humankind. During the royal coronation, he was transformed into a manifestation of the god Horus. He could be referred to as a ntr (‘divine being’, ‘god’), and was regularly described in inscriptions as ‘the good god’ or ‘perfect god’ (ntr nfr). By the New Kingdom period, the king's divinity was believed to be imbued by his possession of a divine manifestation of the god Amun-Re called the ‘living royal ka’, which came upon him at his coronation, and which was also renewed during the yearly opet festival held in the Luxor temple in Thebes. As late as the period of Persian domination over Egypt in the fifth century b.c., Egyptian temple texts continued to describe their foreign king Darius I as a divine being, owing to the ‘living royal ka’. This hieroglyphic formula proclaiming the king's divinity continues for Alexander the Great and even in Ptolemaic temple reliefs.

The conclusion of Chrysalus' famous canticum comparing the successful duping of his master Nicobulus to the sack of Troy has often been suspected by critics (Plaut. Bacch. 976–7):

nunc Priamo nostro si est quis emptor, comptionalem senem
uendam ego, uenalem quem habeo, extemplo ubi oppidum expugnauero.

non, si Cambysae redeant et flumina Croesi,
dicat ‘De nostro surge, poeta, toro’.