While the metrical arrangement of the Catullan corpus has seemed to many scholars too artificial and inartistic to have been the poet's own choice, this opinion is now being challenged, in part because recent studies have shown that the collections could have been included in one roll, or Liber, and thus may be read as a single structure. Critics increasingly have sought the principles of organization in thematic correspondences or in the formation of ‘cycles’ within the three metrical groupings. Current studies have focused on the resonances in and among the groups, and on the function (and identification) of the first and last poems of each section and of the corpus as a whole.

Several scholars have suggested (although without unanimity in specifics, and for different reasons) that the three sections consist of poems 1-51, 61-64, and 65-116. Others (see Most, n. 3 below) argue that the long poems are arranged as a group, so that the corpus consists of the polymetrics, the long poems (61-68), and the short elegiacs (69-116). Any attempt to explain the arrangement of Catullus' poetry must address this controversy. One way to approach the problem is to examine c. 65, the first poem in elegiac meter. While some studies note that c. 65 hints at a ‘new poetic consciousness in Catullus’ this richly textured piece is still dismissed as ‘merely a covering letter.’ The following discussion seeks to discover whether c. 65 does simply accompany c. 66, or whether, reflecting the themes and motifs of the preceding poetry, it implies an alteration in the poet's sensibility.

The traditional ordering of Terence's plays in editions and translations obscures an important fact: the Hecyra was Terence's second play, not the fifth. It has fifth place in the collection because, as the second prologue narrates in some detail, the first two productions were failures, and the order is based on the date of the first successful production rather than on the order of composition. And there is no evidence that the author made any changes to the script; indeed, the prologues suggest quite the opposite. The first deliberately plays on the idea of ‘newness’: when it was given as a nouafabula (‘new play’, If.) it encountered a nouom uitium (‘new/novel disaster’, 2) and is now presented pro noua (‘as if new’, 5). When it was really new it met with a correspondingly new disaster: the tight-rope walker distracted everyone's attention so that no-one saw enough to make any sense of it (neque spectari neque cognosci potuerit, 3), and so we can reasonably assert that it is still new even though technically it isn't. The parallel with Turpio's account in the second prologue of what he did in the case of unsuccessful productions of Caecilius makes this clear: when he first put on new plays by this author he was sometimes driven out of the theatre and at others could scarcely hold his ground (15-17). But as he says he persevered: easdem agere coepi…perfeci ut spectarentur: ubi sunt cognitae,/placitae sunt (‘I undertook to put the same plays on again; I managed to get people to see them, and when they had worked out what was going on, they were a success’, 18, 20f.). The purpose was not to get Caecilius to rewrite the flops but to encourage him to write other new plays; by making successes of what had been flops in the original performance, the producer demonstrates to his scriptwriter that he really has talent after all. It worked for Caecilius and it has worked for Terence, too; now that he has forged a reputation with three more successes in the interim (alias cognostis eius, ‘you’ve understood his other stuff, 8), it is time to give this play the hearing and the appreciation that it has always deserved. (The emphasis on the intelligence required to be an audience member—cognosci, 3; cognostis, 8; cognitae, 20; uostra intelligentia, 31—is of course highly pertinent; this is not a play for populus stupidus, ‘stupid yobs’, 4.)

Pliny, Tacitus, and Juvenal were all released by the death of Domitian in A.D. 96 and the succession of Nerva, then of Trajan in 98 to embark on their separate careers of public and literary life. While Pliny reflects a happy present time, Tacitus and Juvenal look back on earlier times with disgust and indignation. But that, too, could well imply that, secure with the Trajanic Era, they were seeking more dramatic material for their comfortable audiences. When Trajan died in 117, Juvenal had published two books of poems consisting of what we call Satires 1 to 6. Trajan's successor, Hadrian, was a considerably different man, not only a capable soldier and administrator but a person of culture, widely travelled, fond of architectural experimentation, with a life-style that included both a wife and a handsome Bithynian named Antinous. Life was not so predictable under Hadrian for anybody. Pliny had already died, and Tacitus may not have survived very long into the new reign, but Juvenal was still alive and writing after 127.

I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me.

If you like a right mess, then Plautus' Poenulus (‘The Little Carthaginian’) is the play for you. When it is not being slatered, it is konstanly passed by, rarely translated [& then only for completeness' sake: one series or another] and left out of the chiefest recuperations of the oeuvre, of the chicest innovations of the genre (viz. Konstan, 1983; Slater, 1985: but do see Endnote). Poen. gets written off as ‘One of the least successful…’. [Only successful, it may be, in getting waves of Orientalist experts to brush up our Mediterranean languages. If that counts: little Latine, lesse Greek—and now beginners' Punic.] Otherwise, study of Poenulus has centred on two projects: ‘logical’ analysis of the unacceptabihty of the structuring of the plot and ‘archaeological’ dialysis of the text as botched, contaminated, interpolated miscegenation. That is, in both cases, everything that can hardly be dumped on the Greek dramatist Alexis, if it was his lost ‘Karkhēdónios' play that first Plautus mauled and meshed, then in succession his theatre-companies thrashed and threaded and through time his scribes sliced and stitched. Even its warmest admirers must hack Poenulus to bits, for a start, in order to suture some sort of text to admire (Maurach 1975, Zwierlein 1990). And the finicky pundits of this play impugn away with impunity, their fun the display of pungent finesse. Try reading them for laughs—and smile through the Poen.

Late in the fifties Munro's long-standing and influential verdict on the Acme and Septimius poem (‘the most charming picture in any language of a light and happy love’) suddenly came under fire. A flurry of scholarly reaction arose, and strangely enough, almost as quickly subsided, to support, then condemn, and finally to modify beyond recognition S. Baker's proposition that Catullus ‘never wrote about love without some irony’. A rehearsal of the various responses to Baker's assessment is especially illustrative both of the particular difficulties in this poem and, more importantly, of the misconceptions which have for years plagued interpretations of the love poetry of Horace as well as Catullus. Indeed, it is fortunate that the frequently observed relationship between Odes 3.9 and its predecessor enables us to examine comprehensively what is symptomatic of general critical approaches to both poets.

Baker's doubt of the idyllic proportions of the love portrait presented in Carmen 45 is certainly not unfounded. However, his arguments in favor of an overriding ironic tension result, if correctly understood, from his conviction that, since elsewhere Catullus cannot ‘speak of love directly and simply for many lines running’, the lovers' bliss is therefore immediately suspect. The poems used in corroboration of this view are nearly all drawn from the so-called Lesbia cycle (2, 5, 7, 51, together with the two epithalamia, 61-62). While in a very restricted sense Catullus' ofttimes exaggerated declaration of passionate love for Lesbia may seem a unifying feature of these pieces, it is incorrect to assume that any single modulation of the love experience is an automatic cipher for all others.

Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Old Testament never to allude to God, and to refer to neither the Covenant, the sacred institutions of Israel, nor to Jewish religious practice. The book has long engendered a fascinated revulsion in many of its readers, not only for its notable lack (or writing-out?) of God, but also for its overt celebration of genocide and the dubious moral qualities of its protagonists. Luther famously wanted the book excised from the Christian canon altogether, and the nineteenth-century biblical scholar Heinrich Ewald declared that the story of Esther ‘knows nothing of high and pure truths’, and that on coming to it from the rest of the Old Testament ‘we fall, as it were, from heaven to earth’. Humphreys terms Esther one of the ‘most exclusive and nationalistic units within the Bible’, and for Anderson, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, the tale resonates horribly with twentieth-century history and ‘unveils the dark passions of the human heart: envy, hatred, fear, anger, vindictiveness, pride, all of which are fused into an intense nationalism’.

Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish, on the other hand, placed the Book of Esther on a par even with the Torah, a sentiment echoed, centuries later, by Maimonides, who famously declared that when the Prophets and Hagiographa pass away, only Esther and the Law would remain. And this triumphant assertion of the scroll's worth is reminiscent of the attitude of Josephus, who specifically includes Esther in his list of the twenty-two Jewish records, and who devotes the extensive central section of AJ 11 to the Esther pericope. The dating, both relative and absolute, of the texts of Esther has been fiercely disputed, and need not concern us here; it should suffice to note that two extant Greek translations, or rather adaptations, of the Book of Esther—the Septuagint (LXX) and the highly variant Alpha Text (AT)—offer countless minor variations on the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT), and insert six extended passages into the narrative.

The imperial history play Octavia, transmitted among the corpus of Senecan drama, has suffered from uncertainty about its date, author, literary genre and intended audience as regards its appreciation in modern criticism. Although the majority of scholars will agree nowadays that the play was not written by Seneca himself, there is still a certain degree of disagreement about its literary genre and date. Anyway, such scholarly quibbles seem not to have affected poets and composers in the early modern era: they recognised the high dramatic potential of the story of Nero and his love relationships in 62 CE along with the involvement of the historical character and writer Seneca.

Indeed, this phase in imperial history was apparently quite popular in Italian and German opera of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The earliest of a number of operatic treatments of the emperor Nero (also the first opera presenting a historical topic) and arguably the best known today is an Italian version: L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea) to a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello (1598-1659) and music attributed to Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), first produced in Giovanni Grimani's ‘Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo’ in Venice during the carnival season of 1643. Among the latest operas on this subject is a German version, which is hardly known and rarely performed today: Die Römische Unruhe. Oder: Die Edelmütige Octavia. Musicalisches Schau-Spiel (The Roman Unrest. Or: The Magnanimous Octavia. Musical Play) by the librettist Barthold Feind (1678-1721) and the composer Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739), first performed in the ‘Oper am Gänsemarkt’ in Hamburg on 5 August 1705. In this period German opera was generally influenced by Italian opera, but at the same time there were attempts, particularly in Hamburg, to establish a typically German opera.

As Catullus and Horace are invariably thought to be Rome's two supreme lyric poets, it is cause for some comment that, in all his writings, Horace mentions his predecessor only once, and then in an indirect and, to all appearances, uncomplimentary aside. In the tenth satire in the first book, recommending that those who would write well first immerse themselves in the literature of the past, Horace refers with plain contempt to a contemporary litterateur as ‘that ape who was clever at reciting nothing but Calvus and Catullus’:

simius iste

nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum.

(Satires I.10.18-19)

How are we to explain this startling passage? We can say, with some older writers, that Horace is singling out for criticism only insensitive imitators of Catullus and Calvus; about Catullus himself he says nothing and, in the context, need say nothing. But more recent writers on the passage feel that it bears an at least implied criticism of Catullus and Calvus and the rest of the neoterics. Reasons why Horace need not have liked them are not hard to seek. The earlier poets paraded their learning (while Horace, in the ninth satire, tries to avoid a bore who is similarly doctus). They were ready to improvise in any meter (while Horace, in the Ars Poetica, insists the meter must fit the theme). They were handy with purple patches (and the two panni Horace objects to — Diana's altar smoking and a rainbow on the Rhine — sound like references to poems by neoterics Valerius Cato and Furius Bibaculus). Above all, they chose for lyric models the blasé Alexandrians (when they might have striven, as Horace did, to equal the much older, fresher, and more accomplished Aeolians, most especially Alcaeus and Sappho).

While it is the common nature of water to mirror the exact image of the body, it alone boasts the strange power that it mimics not human forms but human character (mores).

Claudian

As Claudian observes, water can display some very human moods and emotions, such as anger or calm. It can be quite anthropomorphic. Rivers, springs, the sea are readily personified. But, further than that, when water is imagined, it can also reveal many of the fantasies, wishes, fears and preoccupations of the person who does the imagining. The rich symbolism of water comes about, at least in part, because of the readiness of people to project on to it, as if on to a screen, the contents of their psyche, the character of their inner lives. Sadistic or lustful drives, nostalgic longings and much more may emerge in dreams, fantasies and images associated with water. Even when an author's work teems with traditional aquatic imagery, such images have to be selected from the larger cultural storehouse and the consequent array and treatment of these has a particular cumulative effect. Certain attitudes may reveal themselves. Imagined water that is particularly turbulent, for example, may reflect the turbulence of an author's psyche. Through an author's treatment of water one can often gain some idea of how changeable, comforting and threatening the world appears to him or her.

After Athena announces his acquittal in the trial of the Eumenides, Orestes offers thanks to the three gods who have driven him from the house into the city to restore him once again to his house — Pallas, Loxias, and the Third Savior who accomplishes all things, Zeus Sōtēr (757-760). In the plot of the Oresteia, this triad has made Orestes the third savior for whom the Chorus of the Choephoroi pray (1073); he comes in the third generation, after Atreus and Agamemnon, to save his line from the extinction threatened by the atē working its way through the generational cycles of the House of Atreus. His trial, which establishes in the polis the precedent of Ixion (cf. 441, 717-718), brings it an unbeatable grip of salvation and victory against its opponents (776-777). The evolution he thus effects in the human ethical order is an unwitting imitation, with Orestes as a human counterpart to Zeus, of the evolution in the divine ethical order effected by the young Olympian gods in the Prometheia, for only in the third generation, after Ouranos and Kronos, does Zeus halt the lawless cycle of divine usurpation. Zeus proves triaktēr, victor in the third bout, in the struggle for control of the kosmos (cf. Ag. 168-172); likewise, Orestes overcomes the atē which Elektra describes as atriaktos (Cho. 339), and, having offered Aegisthus as a third libation (Cho. 577-578), he proves triaktēr in his agōn against the Erinyes, although they claim to have tripped him in the first of three bouts (Eum. 589). Human history is an imitation of divine history, accomplished under Zeus' command by the Olympian gods, who seek to bring man's ethical order into line with the new order of the kosmos; only by thus reconciling the Chthonic gods to the new order can the Olympians establish the harmonia necessary if Zeus' regime is to stop permanently the cycle of crime and counter-crime.

It is nowadays a commonplace to state that every literary genre is a highly selective segment of a broader world of potential representations, and presents itself to the reader as a complete, self-contained model of interpretable mimesis of that particular aspect of reality. Yet this is especially true of bucolic poetry, whose very act of foundation rests on a joint effort, on the part both of the poets and their readers, to ‘conjure up a pre-existing “bucolic” tradition’ in the very same act of ‘founding such a tradition’. Theocritus' pastoral universe has its own bucolic hallmarks: landscape, gods and ‘professional’ accessories such as those required of a rustic life (milk-pails, shepherd's staffs, goatskin-coats and the like) are appropriately paraded and customised, and these hyper-‘realist’ markers are casually made to exist on the same level as the most unrealistic aspects of bucolic life (Theocritus' shepherds sing their time away while occasionally looking after their flocks). But it is especially in later imitators and interpreters that the possibilities of Theocritus' pastoral microcosm become necessities: generic consistency and recognisability are constantly pointed out and alluded to by obsessive repetition and normalisation of Theocritus ‘open’ pastoral world. The aim of the present paper is to read Colluthus' exploitation and, I would say, mobilisation of such a crystallised pastoral world against the background of ancient exegesis on the ‘bucolic problem’. In particular, it will be shown how bucolic criticism and Homererklärung (together with some important Hesiodic elements) are indissolubly intertwined in Colluthus' interpretation and reception of Theocritus' pastoral world. Comprehensiveness in charting Colluthus' critical response to such reading practices will not be attempted here: instead attention will be focused on those passages where Colluthus' scholarly engagement with bucolic generic conventions and their later accretions has a more direct impact on his narrative strategy.

Attempts to determine an absolute chronology for the composition of Seneca's tragedies have been frustrated by our lack of both external and internal evidence for dating. Even a relative chronology moreover will be open to dispute as long as we must depend almost solely on metrical, stylistic and linguistic considerations. Recently, for example, Calder has questioned the opinion of Leo, and other scholars, that Agamemnon was written before Thyestes. Calder has examined stylistic features of both plays, and he suggests, quite correctly, that the opening scene of Agamemnon is similar to that of Thyestes in structure and imagery but is less skilfully connected to the subsequent action. He concludes, however, that Thyestes is the earlier play, and he offers the following conjectures as proof: Seneca borrowed the opening scene of Thyestes from a play of Sophocles; then, when composing Agamemnon, instead of using the watchman's prologue of Aeschylus, he attempted to create a new opening scene after the pattern of his Thyestes. Not explicitly stated, though perhaps implied, is the unfortunate conclusion that the Thyestes opening scene is successful because Seneca followed Sophocles, that Agamemnon is flawed because Seneca later tried to innovate, to deviate from his Greek ‘models’.

Such a conclusion fails, I think, to take into proper consideration Seneca's creativity in his use of sources, and the reasons why he used an opening scene by a superhuman figure, rather than a watchman. Three of Seneca's plays begin with a scene in which appears a superhuman figure: Hercules Furens, Agamemnon and Thyestes. If we compare the first two plays with the Herakles of Euripides and the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, which both open with human figures, we find that in both Seneca has preferred not to imitate the prologues of the Greek dramatists. (We have, unfortunately, no complete Greek Thyestes with which we can compare Seneca's.) In addition, his opening scenes differ in style from those Greek plays in which a superhuman figure does appear in the prologue. Obviously, the choice of a human or non-human prologist, as Heldmann says, depends on something other than a Greek source.

Over the past two decades, scholars have devoted increasing attention to Roman civil war literature and its poetics, from the vocabulary of nefas, paradox, and hyperbole to the pervasive imagery of the state as a body violated by its citizens. Thebes and especially the civil war between Oedipus’ sons became prominent lenses through which Romans explored their country's strife-ridden past. Seneca's Phoenissae, however, has received comparatively little attention in this regard, often overshadowed by Statius’ epic Thebaid of the next generation. This paper investigates Seneca's contribution to the wider poetics of civil war through his expansion of the theme of incest, which Seneca uses to articulate civil war's most invasive, penetrative, and disintegrative effects. In particular, Seneca capitalizes on both the metaphorical potential of maternal violation and the eroticized imagery of Roman conquest to create disturbing points of contact between two generations of Jocasta's sons: the one who invaded her bed in the past, and the other who will soon invade his mother city. Seneca writes his Phoenissae to be an escalated return to the original sins of Oedipus’ incesta domus as another of Thebes’ native sons prepares to conquer his motherland.

A first-time reader of Tacitus' Annals is as unprepared for this shocking description of the Teutoburg Forest as the Roman soldiers who viewed the site themselves. Here, about three quarters of the way through the first book, sandwiched between an unremarkable summary of Roman/German relations and Germanicus' pursuit of Arminius, Tacitus has composed one of the most vivid, horrifying, poetic descriptions in the entire work. The visual details are stunning: a field covered with ‘whitening bones’, ‘bits of weapons’, ‘the limbs of horses’, and heads of men ‘fastened to the trunks of trees’. This is not merely an archaeological site, to be regarded by tourists with dispassionate curiosity; survivors are present to tell the story of the tragedy, a story at once their own and that of the relatives and friends of their audience. The men could hardly fail to reflect on the casus bellorum et sortem hominum.

In 1773, the celebrated enlightenment thinker G.E. Lessing discovered in Wolfenbüttel's Herzog August Library a manuscript which contained a previously unknown Ancient Greek poem. The manuscript identified the author as Archimedes (c.287-212 BCE), and the work became known as the Cattle Problem (henceforth CP). On the surface, its twenty-two couplets capitalise on Homer's depiction of the ‘Cattle of the Sun’ in Book 12 of the Odyssey and its numerical aspect. A description of the related proportions of black, white, brown and dappled herds of cattle, which are then configured geometrically on Sicily, creates a strikingly colourful image. The author's decision to encode a number into the figure of the Cattle of the Sun styles the poem as a response to, and expansion of, Homer's scene. Reading through the work, though, it becomes clear that the mathematics is more complex than that of Homer's Odyssey.

This paper discusses how Roman visual culture might be useful for deciphering the ecphrastic passages of the ancient Greek novel. Whereas ecphrasis has been one of the blossoming topics in the field, the examination of novelistic ecphrasis alongside particular works of art is still a desideratum. As a test case I will use Xenophon of Ephesus’ ecphrasis of the bed canopy depicting Ares’ and Aphrodite's embrace, in the Ephesiaca, a novel that might have been written as early as AD 65. In what follows I will argue that the scene described on the canopy would have stimulated a variety of intertexts, both literary and visual, in the minds of the imperial audience: that is, Xenophon's reader would have been encouraged to recall not just Demodocus’ song of the love of Ares and Aphrodite but also the idealised Roman version of the myth, which was so frequently depicted on frescoes and mosaics in Roman villas in the first century. I then explore Xenophon's ‘interpretatio Romana’ through the adaptations of the Ares and Aphrodite myth found in Plutarch and Lucian.

Seneca's Agamemnon is a revenge-drama; there is little scholarly dispute about this point. Agamemnon takes revenge on Troy, and then returns home to fall victim to Clytemnestra's desire for revenge. However the connection, if indeed one exists, between these two acts of vengeance has been a point of considerable scholarly disagreement. The issue of revenge is, of course, not limited to Agamemnon and Clytemnestra because many acts of vengeance are mentioned in this play. Agamemnon's murder, in fact, may be seen as the intersection of two tracks of avenging actions: those involving the house of Tantalus in particular, and those involving the Trojans and the Greeks. In addition, each deed of vengeance by one party may also be perceived from a different perspective as an expiatory action by another party. For example, Aegisthus' stabbing of Agamemnon can be viewed either as Aegisthus' revenge or as Agamemnon's expiation for depriving his cousin of a royal home and power (as well as Agamemnon's expiation for the cruelty of his father to Thyestes). The siege of Troy can be viewed either as the Greeks' revenge or as the Trojans' expiation for Paris' rape of Helen (as well as the Trojans' expiation for the perfidy of Laomedon). I said that there are two tracks of avenging actions, but more precisely there are three, because Clytemnestra's desire for revenge on Agamemnon can be separated from Aegisthus' desire; Clytemnestra's feelings of injury arose only after Agamemnon assumed leadership of the Greek expedition against Troy.

For the Argonauts of Valerius Flaccus the Black Sea and its surrounding lands are an alien world. As Argo leaves the Mediterranean behind and enters the Propontis, we are told that the Minyans begin to gain ‘a view into another world’ (alium prospectus in orbem, 2.628). So too when the ship makes its way through the Bosporus, on the point of entering the Black Sea, we are told that the Greeks ‘see all things new’ (noua cuncta uident, 4.424). Clearly this voyage is presented by Valerius as a major event in world history.

One question which must confront any reader of Valerius’ poem is whether the effects of this voyage should be viewed negatively or positively. Indeed the poem itself poses that question at the outset, through its inclusion of two versions of Argo's destiny: the negative prophecy of Mopsus (1.211-26) and the more reassuring prediction of Idmon (1.234-38). In this paper I propose to consider aspects of this problem through an examination not of Valerius' treatment of the voyage itself, but of its consequences as they are presented in the second half of the poem.