The Theogony is a poem about the creation of a cosmos, that is, an order. This order is created through the interaction of sexual beings, and the essentially sexual nature of the creative act eventually comes to structure and organize the space of the universe. Sexuality, moreover, implies a fundamental source of tension or conflict between opposites. Paradoxically, conflict in the Theogony is not destructive; rather, conflict enhances and expands the creative potential of sexuality by ensuring that the end product of sexual interaction, new being, will be able to act upon the world.

Conflict arises in the first two divine generations when a divine being attempts to contravene the telos of sexual movement by preventing his already conceived and fully gestated offspring from coming into the world. Conflict thus works against the destructuring of the world. The consequence of each conflict is a world which is more ordered and structured, as the offspring first of Gaia and Ouranos, and then of Rheia and Kronos, are permitted to assume their appropriate places in it, or as Zeus is able to turn his attention from the suppression of his enemies to the establishment of a fixed moral order. Thus conflict decreases the entropy of the world and tends toward creation and new order.

Chthonic scenes have often been considered in terms of their metapoetic potential. The very nature of such episodes, in which protagonists typically encounter characters from the literary-mythological past, arguably encourages a kind of artistic self-consciousness. In Currie's words,

This article examines whether the portrayal of ghosts in the necromancy of Statius Thebaid Book 4 can be read as a meditation on the poem's place in the literary tradition. It views the scene as a commentary on the epic's artistic practices, wherein Statius both acknowledges his predecessors, especially Ovid and Seneca, and asserts his own literary contribution through the appearance of the ambushers depicted earlier in the poem. It then argues that Statius validates his place in the canon by enacting the integration of the ambush scene into literary and Theban history.

Few mythic narratives of the ancient world are more famous than the story of the Colchian princess/sorceress who betrayed her father and family for love of a foreign adventurer and who, when abandoned for another woman, killed in revenge both her rival and her children. Many critics have observed the complexities and contradictions of the Medea figure—naive princess, knowing witch, faithless and devoted daughter, frightened exile, marginalised alien, displaced traitor to family and state, helper-maiden, abandoned wife, vengeful lover, caring and filicidal mother, loving and fratricidal sister, oriental ‘other’, barbarian saviour of Greece, rejuvenator of the bodies of animals and men, killer of kings and princesses, destroyer and restorer of kingdoms, poisonous stepmother, paradigm of beauty and horror, demi-goddess, subhuman monster, priestess of Hecate and granddaughter of the sun, bride of dead Achilles and ancestor of the Medes, rider of a serpent-drawn chariot in the sky—complexities reflected in her story's fragmented and fragmenting history. That history has been much examined, but, though there are distinguished recent exceptions, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the specifically ‘Roman’ Medea—the Medea of the Republican tragedians, of Cicero, Varro Atacinus, Ovid, the younger Seneca, Valerius Flaccus, Hosidius Geta and Dracontius, and, beyond the literary field, the Medea of Roman painting and Roman sculpture. Hence the present volume of Ramus, which aims to draw attention to the complex and fascinating use and abuse of this transcultural heroine in the Roman intellectual and visual world. The present introduction briefly outlines Medea's Greek history before examining in detail her journey through Republican Rome. It concludes with a survey of her imperial configurations and a preliminary framing of the studies which follow.

A great virtue of Petronius, it seems to me, is his ability to say everything simply, which makes his language appear healthy and in touch with the living, spoken language. The Satyricon is marked by casual simplicity or off-hand stylishness which we envy because it appears to have cost nothing to achieve. Though this simplicity is, I believe, the end product both of labor limae and ingenium, it is imbued with such confidence and maturity that it embraces the reader as naturally and perfectly as erotic rapture or coming to terms with one's mortality. Whatever Petronius intends for the Satyricon (if anything) or means for his reader to see (if anything), he is in complete control of its language: the coercive strength of his rhetoric encourages the adventurous reader to carry through to the end, even if some of the subject material is disturbing.

‘Perhaps the most astonishing paragraph in the poem’ is Bailey's often quoted comment on 5.1308-49, the account of how men of the past tried to use wild beasts in war. ‘Fantastic’, ‘strange’, ‘bizarre’, ‘astonishing’, the product of ‘an intelligence fevered, perverted and cancerous’, a display of ‘obsessive exaltation’—such are the puzzled reactions of scholars to these disturbing lines.

The most recent commentator finds it full of ‘macabre and gory detail’ and ‘not integrated properly into its context’. And his reviewer's approval threatens to undo forty years' work on the patterns of thought, symbol and image in Lucretius: Bailey's biographical explanation, the poet's subjection to hallucination and even mental derangement, it is observed, ‘has never been satisfactorily refuted’. Even scholars who have sought to explain the passage rather than delete it as an interpolation or an aberration wonder whether the poet ‘has triumphed over the philosopher’ and therefore is called back to a more sober reality by the ‘recantation’ of 1341-49 (such things probably did not happen but might have, given the infinity of possible worlds).

Looking at us from all sides, you'll find that in our character and lifestyle we're in all respects most like wasps. First, no creature is more sharp-tempered than we are when irritated, or more cantankerous. Then again, we engineer everything else just like wasps: we gather in swarms as if into nests, some of us judging in the archon's court, some before the Eleven, and some in the Odeum, packed in tight against the walls like this, hunched toward the ground and hardly moving, like grubs in their cells. We're very resourceful in making a living, too: we sting everybody and so provide our daily bread.

Not long ago, the publication of two volumes of essays devoted to a rereading and rethinking of imperial Latin literature would have been held up as a classic example of professional Latinists making a virtue out of necessity — since we cannot all write on Vergil and Horace, some of us must therefore stiffen our upper lips and attempt to produce ‘sound’ scholarship on the reams of inferior poetry that make up the rest of Latin literature. The unspoken assumptions behind this attitude are beginning to be voiced, scrutinized, and rejected. Poetic works that until recently appeared mannered, degenerate, and even perverse are now being interpreted in new ways, and revealing hidden pleasures and unexpected virtues. It is thus an appropriate time to reconsider the work of Prudentius, poet of an age of radical experimentation in both language and culture. I try in this essay to maintain a kind of double vision, for it is important for those unfamiliar with Prudentius' poetry to realize the extent to which shifting cultural paradigms affect and are reflected in the poet's textual strategies. This is a somewhat amorphous task, and the article falls into two main segments whose relationship may not be entirely clear until the end. I begin with some examples of Prudentius' abstract and punning poetic technique, intended to provide the reader with an understanding of how to ‘decode’ the poems; I then offer a reading of two of his poems which illustrate his textual response to a contemporary cultural phenomenon, the increasing popularity of sexual renunciation. My title refers to two attempts at revision: ours, as we attempt to reclaim the ‘perverse’ poetics comdemned by generations of classical scholarship; and that of the men and women of Late Antiquity, who reversed a centuries-old paradigm and created a new virtue, virginity, out of what had been a form of perversity.

In the Punica, Silius Italicus narrates the events of the Second Punic War from the rise of Hannibal and his siege at Saguntum to the rise of Scipio Africanus and his triumph over Carthage. The importance of Scipio in the final books of the Punica is foreshadowed by events earlier in the poem; these early appearances of Scipio emphasise not only his future heroism and divine favour, but also his youth and immaturity. Although a development of his character can be traced through the Punica, the figure of Scipio is complex and contradictory. There are two significant episodes that bring Scipio into the forefront of the epic action—his nekyia in Book 13 and his choice at the crossroads between Virtus and Voluptas in Book 15. These events are critical in understanding Scipio's role in the Punica and as such have already received considerable scholarly attention. My focus will be on Punica 13 and Scipio's trip to the underworld, but rather than analyse this passage in terms of Scipio's development and heroism, I would like to make a number of connections between Punica 13 and passages in the first half of the epic, and, in doing so, suggest a somewhat different reading of Silius' presentation of Scipio that looks back to the disasters leading up to Cannae, rather than ahead to Rome's triumph at the end of the epic. I will begin, therefore, with a discussion of what bearing the structure of the Punica has on its meaning and suggest different uses of symbols and imagery between the two halves of the poem, before turning to Scipio in the second half of the epic.

So ends Titus' address to the embattled defenders of Jerusalem in the sixth book of Josephus' Jewish War (6.328-50). It is the most substantial instance of communication between Romans and Jews in the work. Titus compares himself to the master of a household and the Jewish rebels to his slaves. Is this how we expect a Roman to describe empire? If not, what does it mean for our understanding of the politics of Josephus' history? The question is particularly acute given that this is not just any Roman but Titus himself: heir apparent and, if we believe Josephus, the man who read and approved this historical account. It is thus surprising that, while the speeches of Jewish advocates of submission to Rome such as Agrippa II (2.345-401) and Josephus himself (5.362-419) have long fascinated readers, Titus' speech has received little or no attention. Remarkably, it is not mentioned in any of three recent collections of essays on Josephus. This paper aims to highlight the rhetorical choices that Josephus has made in constructing this voice for Titus—particularly his self-presentation as master—and the interpretive questions these raise for his readers. It should go without saying that the relationship of this text to anything that Titus may have said during the siege is highly problematic. (Potentially more significant, but unfortunately no less speculative, is the question of how it might relate to any speech recorded in the commentaries of Vespasian and Titus that Josephus appears to have used as a source.) What we have is a Josephan composition that is embedded in the broader narrative of the Jewish War.

It is a common observation that Latin literature of the imperial period is highly rhetorical. Usually this claim is made with reference to the elaborate and overwrought nature of the language (a function of elocutio) or to the recurrence of certain conventional themes, images, and topoi (a subdivision of inventio). But to the Romans, rhetoric was something larger and deeper. It involved an approach to any situation, not just the composition of literature, that paid attention to the needs and biases of one's interlocutor, the constraints of tradition and form, and, of course, the aims and purposes of the speaker. ‘The art of rhetoric would be an easy and paltry affair if it could be contained in one brief set of rules,’ writes Quintilian. ‘But with cases and circumstances, opportunity and necessity, all is changed about; and so the crucial qualification for an orator is judgement (consilium), because he directs himself in various ways, and in accordance with the circumstances of the situation (ad rerum momenta)’ (I.O. 2.13.2). This rhetorical, or situation-oriented approach to literature and to life was seen by the Romans as distinguishing themselves from the Greeks, who had their own obsessions with esoteric truths and hair-splitting sophistry. Alongside the satirist's contrast between the Graeculus esuriens (‘hungry Greekling’) and the upright Roman, there is an equally common, if less frequently observed contrast between the quick-witted Greek, good at dialectic and analysis, and the sensible Roman, concerned with the moral and practical dimensions of any situation. When Fannius and Scaevola ask Laelius at the outset of the Ciceronian dialogue named after him, if he can please discourse on friendship, he replies that he is no Greek, capable of debating pro and contra on the spur of the moment, but a Roman who can and will give them sound and efficacious exhortation on the significance of loyalty in human affairs.

This essay was largely completed before I had an opportunity to read Professor F. Ahl's contributions to Statian scholarship in ANRW. In those two essays there is to be found an extensive survey of the negative judgements accorded to Statius in general and to the Thebaid in particular, scholars have united in assuming that Statius' flattery of Domitian is either sincere or merely servile and that his epic has nothing to say about the world in which he lived. By challenging both these assumptions in an extremely trenchant and, I believe, convincing way, Professor Ahl has prepared my ground for me and I do hope that any reader who feels that the thesis of this paper must be unsound because of what we ‘know’ already about Statius will consult Professor Ahl first. On the other hand, while I do think that the recently traditional view of Statius as, at best, an escapist and, at worst, a toady is unsustainable, I do believe that Professor Ahl is, from time to time, guilty of over-interpreting and I think that there must be some danger that critics who can see the excesses in some of the details of his position will imagine that they can safely ignore his far more important fundamental point. In this piece, I intend to explore the first book of the Thebaid in the light of its models, especially the Aeneid, not because that is a method that will reveal all there is in the book but because it is possible to apply reasonably rigorous tests of plausibility. At a later time and elsewhere I hope to pursue this kind of analysis both to the rest of the epic and in relation to other sources. It is also my view that Statius presented his material in a particular order for his own good reasons and that it can be unhelpful, as many do, to rearrange the material in the hope of revealing some novel insight.

Callimachus fr. 178 Pf. (= 89 Massimilla) tells how the Athenian Pollis—the name is known from a citation in Athenaeus—continued to celebrate Attic festivals in the Alexandria of the poet's own day. At Pollis' party to commemorate the Attic festival in honour of Erigone, the αἰώρα, the poet met Theogenes, a visitor from the Aegean island of Ikos (modern Alonnisos):

Poetaster, plagiarist, parrot, and so on. During the last two centuries, Colluthus has been widely reputed an utterly bad poet by both amateur readers and professional scholars: his reputation is not much better than that once enjoyed by, say, Eudocia or Dioscorus of Aphrodito. It is therefore unsurprising that the literary features of his poem have won very little attention from the res publica philologorum. Efforts have been made to emend its (very badly transmitted) text, and much ingenuity has been devoted to the study of its sources and its diction; but few scholars have tried to analyse the Rape of Helen as a literary work. The present paper hopes to be a first step towards such a goal. Let me say from the very beginning that I am not concerned at all with Colluthus' inspiration, skill or the quality of his poetry. This is not what I mean by speaking of a ‘revaluation’ of our poem. Nor am I trying to follow in the steps of Giangrande, who once made a sustained effort to demonstrate that Colluthus was fond of learned allusion in an almost Alexandrian way—Giangrande rightly pointed to Colluthus' irony, but his interpretations of single passages and phrases were for the most part ill-founded, and it was quite easy for Livrea, in a spirited reply to Giangrande, to dispose of them. My concern is a simple one: what was the aim of the Rape of Helen? Are there any ‘signs of life’ in those 394 hexameters—to put it in other words: are we sure that Colluthus aimed at a slavish rewriting of the story of Paris and Helen with the bare addition of some Nonnian flavour, or rather may we suppose that his poetical project was slightly more ambitious?

Although there can be little doubt that Theocritus invented the pastoral genre, it is not at all clear that he regarded the pastoral poems as distinct from the rest of his idylls in anything but their rural setting. The narrative-dramatic form kata lepton (‘on a small scale’), the Doric dialect and the hexameter metre, which characterize the eight authentic Pastorals — I, III-VII, X and XI — are also exhibited in the urban mimes II, XIV and XV and in the mythological pieces XVIII and XXVI.

Nor is it easy to see the emergence of a distinct pastoral genre in the work of his Hellenistic successors. For although the pseudo-Theocritean Idylls VIII, IX, XX and XXVII are clearly in the tradition and the fragments of Moschus and Bion, whatever their context may have been, are markedly pastoral in style and content, the boundaries of the genre remain indeterminate. There is for instance Id. XXIII, an isolated precedent for the Renaissance piscatory Eclogues, and the mythological pieces like Moschus' Europa and Aphrodite in search of Eros, Bion's Lament of Aphrodite for Adonis and the anonymous Bucolic fragment (Page Greek Literary Papyri no. 123). Affinities between the Pastoral and erotic poetry of other genres are confirmed by the non-pastoral Id. XXIII. Finally there are two poems that point forward to subsequent developments within the Pastoral itself. In Bion's Myrson and Lycotas the pastoral setting is but a pretty frame for the tale of Achilles on Scyros and the anonymous Lament for Bion shows the first certain instance (since the precise circumstances of Id. VII are obscure) of the use of the pastoral myth for the treatment of a topical subject, the death of an actual poet. The attribution in this poem of a distinctly pastoral poesy to the dead poet is the one firm testimony we have that a specific pastoral genre was recognized in the Hellenistic world.

Mud and stars make a strange mixture, yet here in brief is Manilius' universe, in which the rarefied heavens regulate the coarse earth. As shown by the recent spate of critical attention to the Astronomica, his various intellectual resources—astronomical calculation, mythology, astrological lore and Stoic physics—, while not forming a unified dogma, are less muddled than previously thought. He switches between these different discourses (or as it were, idioms) in pursuit of his own cherished goal: an optimistic eulogy to a fatalistic cosmos in which the study of the heavens holds supreme interest and value. Manilius' discipline is the most specialised and mathematical, as well as the most novel, of all Roman didactic poets. He therefore takes a decidedly concrete approach to the inevitable balancing act between technical content and poetic form, as is immediately obvious in his self-portrait as a priest-poet uates tending the twin altar-fires of poem and subject (carminis et rerum, 1.22). The proposal of this paper will be that the division between poetic and technical corresponds far more profoundly with Manilius' dualistic universe (mundus), in which the realm of the hierophantic astronomer and natural philosopher is the sky (caelum) and that of the mythological poet is the earth (terra). Likewise, the constellations are both cosmic stars (stellae) and mythic signs (signa). Because the cosmos is a dynamic system, terrestrial inconstancy—violence, mortality and mess of all kinds—interferes with the absolute constancy of the celestial clockwork. The paradigm for such interference is catasterism, the translation of something mortal into stars. It turns the constellations into duck-rabbits: from one perspective they are eternal parts in the machinery of fate; from the other, vestiges of mortal beings or objects, which are often of dubious and even monstrous provenance. In this article I propose that Manilius' fundamental view is that the stars represent order and the earth chaos, a conviction partly expressed through Stoic doctrine and partly through poetic tropes. He frequently uses the imagery of the four elements to divide the superior realm of air and fire from the inferior realm of water and earth. Significant themes contributing towards this include Gigantomachy, cosmic vapours, the planets, and the figure of the Whale (Cetus) in the Andromeda story near the close of the poem.

…mihi prospiciam et Phaedriae.
Phormio 1036

…I'd better look ahead for my own interest, and Phaedria's.

If the anecdotal material from Terence's biography can be trusted, 161 BCE was the playwright's breakthrough year in which he secured his position in Rome as the premier comedian of his generation. At the Ludi Megalenses in April Terence's Eunuch was such a popular success it earned a same-day repeat performance and the unprecedented payment of 8,000 sesterces for its author. In September of that same year Terence was hired by the curule aediles once again to bring another play, the fifth he would compose, to the stage at the Ludi Romani. On that occasion, far from opening his prologue with the vaunting self-promotion of a poet who had recently pleased his audience so thoroughly, Terence returned for the fourth time to his customary complaints against some unnamed old poet who had yet again levelled criticism at his young rival. And while it appears that Terence was simply sticking with a proven, successful formula, in other regards the young poet was in fact showing signs of a new confidence of privileged position by varying from another of his regular compositional practices: he had, he tells his audience, changed the name of the original Greek play by Apollodorus to one of his own choosing:

nunc quid uelim animum attendite: adporto nouam
Epidicazomenon quam uocant comoediam
Graeci, Latini Phormionem nominant
quia primas partis qui aget is erit Phormio
parasitus, per quem res geretur maxume,
uoluntas uostra si ad poetam accesserit.
(Phorm. 24-29)

Now pay attention to what I want: I bring a
new comedy which the Greeks call Epidikazomenos,
and Latin speakers entitle Phormio
because the man who’ll play the chief part will be
the parasite Phormio, on whom the plot will mostly depend
if you’ll throw your favour to the poet.

Greek new comedy is infused with characters on the move, whether they be mercenaries, traders, economic migrants, refugees, or the many and various victims of trafficking (slave and free). While it is unclear exactly how closely comic mobility tracks historical circumstances, mobility in and out of Athens was certainly more frequent in the later part of the fourth century. Witnessing free and enslaved others—both in comedy and in culture—forced to contend with the consequences of migration and displacement gave audience members new opportunities to perceive and respond to the newly relocated and the dispossessed, and to take a closer look at their own circumstances and perceptual processes. This study investigates the way comedy brings the precarities faced by female economic migrants into view, and what this reveals about gender, freedom, and cultural frames, using Menander's Dis Exapaton with Plautus’ Bacchides as test cases.

The pessimism of the Eclogues is pronounced. Often denied, that of the Georgics is yet evident.

If satire is epic's ‘evil twin’, then tragedy is satire's ugly sister. Both epic and tragedy soar aloft in the stratosphere of the generic hierarchy, viewed humbly and from a distance by satire's pedestrian muse, who at the same time scoffs at their overblown irrelevance. Many of the same criticisms, often framed as back-handed compliments, are cast at both genres by their poor relation, but there are also distinctions. Epic, even if cloistered in an ivory tower, is constructed as sharing the impossible purity of that ivory, the better for its lofty and noble themes to be befouled, debased and perverted in the distorting mirror held up by its evil twin. Tragedy, however, is itself a perversion, ethically and aesthetically, a mishmash of vice and excess which is a natural target for satire, the self-appointed social policeman, but which also bears an uncomfortable resemblance to satire's own nature. Much work has been done in recent years on satire's engagement with and tendentious construction of tragedy, but very little on tragedy's reciprocal engagement with satire. The latter will be the focus of this article, approached from two, closely-related angles.