When Seneca's Medea flies off in her serpent-drawn chariot, shedding ruin, heartbreak and death and leaving it all behind her on the stage, we are too stunned to wonder where she might be headed. As it turns out, this enterprising exile continued her career with great success in Roman Africa. This essay considers two remarkable Later Roman Medeas: Hosidius Geta's early third (?) century tragedy Medea and Dracontius' late fifth century epyllion Medea. Both were products of the flourishing, experimental, literary culture of Roman Africa that produced such writers as Apuleius, Tertullian, Augustine, Corippus, Martianus and Fulgentius. Although the two poems present radically different heroines, both exhibit the sophisticated allusivity, wordplay and interest in formal structures and rules that characterise Latin literature from Africa. One Medea makes a lethal intervention in Vergilian poetics; the other Medea channels a distinctively Statian Muse.

Hosidius Geta's Medea is a short tragedy consisting of eight scenes and three choral songs that recounts the familiar events of Medea's vengeance in an unfamiliar form—it is the first extant example from antiquity of a cento. Mystery shrouds the origins of this Medea—we are unlikely ever to know for certain where, when or by whom it was written. It is probably a late second or very early third century text from Roman Africa. It is first mentioned by Tertullian, who brings it up as an example of the kind of improper manipulation of scripture perpetrated by heretical readers—that is, as a perverted form of reading. Tertullian's digressive expostulation is the first account we have both of Hosidius' Medea and of the cento form, i.e., the creation of poems made entirely from lines or half lines of a master-text. Tertullian's wording, however, implies that his readers will immediately recognise what a cento is, suggesting that this art form had been around for a long time. More interestingly, in light of the later Christian adoption of the cento form, he disapproves of the reading practices their composition implies, and finds Scripture especially vulnerable to such abuse. It is not hard to see why the fundamentalist preacher Tertullian would be alarmed by the poetics of the cento, for centos expose the multivalent nature of language, forcing the reader constantly to focus on the protean ability of words to change their meanings depending on context. To one whose goal is to establish truth according to the authoritative rule of faith, such linguistic play is threatening.

‘she is always and never the same’
(advertising slogan for ‘Contradiction’, a ‘fragrance for women’ by Calvin Klein, 1999)

In the first poem of his second book, Propertius presents an emphatic declaration of his status as a love poet, slyly incorporating a detailed recusatio to Maecenas, who he claims has requested that he compose epic instead. Later in the poem, Propertius' preference for elegy over epic seems to be echoed by the predilections of his lover Cynthia, who, as Propertius insists, finds the entire Iliad distasteful. According to Propertius, Cynthia's aversion to the poem emerges from a very specific source: the epic's primary female protagonist, Helen. For, as Propertius recalls it, Cynthia disapproves of the whole epic precisely because she finds fault with its ‘leuis’ heroine: si memini, solet ilia leuis culpare puellas,/et totam ex Helena non probat Iliada (‘If I remember, she is accustomed to castigate mutable women and does not approve of the whole Iliad because of Helen’, 2.1.49f.).

Il y a plus affairs à interpréter les interprétations qu'à interpréter les choses.

Montaigne

The ninety-three line galliambic narrative of the story of Attis and his encounter with Cybele occupies an important position in the oeuvre of Catullus, yet it has received relatively little attention from Catullan scholars and critics. One reason for this inattention may be traced to the fact that Poem 63, one of the carmina maiora, seems to contain little or no biographical information; thus it has been passed over by critics and scholars of the biographical persuasion and by those who tend in that direction, in favor of the shorter poems which are more closely connected to Catullus' personal life and experience. The old but tenacious belief in the ‘spontaneous Catullus’ has also served to divert attention from the carmina maiora as a group, since these poems are such obvious products of a doctus poeta writing in the neoteric and Alexandrian fashion. Critics like Elder and Quinn have done well to demonstrate that the so-called ‘spontaneous’ poems are often full of the same carefully calculated artistic effects and subtle doctrina which characterize the long poems, and such efforts have led to renewed consideration of the carmina maiora, especially of Poem 64. Moreover, the demonstration of stylistic connections between the long poems and the rest of the Catullan oeuvre has provided the impetus for Ross's recent study, which argues that there are closer links between the carmina maiora and the polymetrics than between the polymetrics and the epigrams which make up the last part of the liber Catulli. Despite all this, however, I would maintain that serious critical discussion of Poem 63 still lags behind some of the work being done on other poems of Catullus, that consideration of the Attis is still hampered by its distance from the poet's ‘experience’ or by misguided and forced attempts to make it somehow connect with that experience.

Euripides' Alcestis presents its audience with a curious problem. Why is a blatant coward rewarded? The answer has usually been discovered in Admetus' scrupulous observance of the law of hospitality (10), that is, in a personal trait. The significance of this solution is important because the ostensible morality of the play, one characterized by its peculiar blend of fairy-tale and harsh reality, is now dependent upon the single redeeming quality of one individual. Conversely, the less attractive features of Admetus, and they exist in varying degrees of unpleasantness, become defensible solely as progressive steps in the testing of his mettle. Impropriety, therefore, functions as the necessary adjunct of anagnorisis and reparation. By contrast, the sacrifice of Alcestis assumes an even more notable proportion; her rescue from the dead appears more an absolute act of justice than a miracle. Nonetheless, by the end of the play doubt still persists concerning the extent to which Admetus has revised his perception of right and wrong, his virtue notwithstanding.

Verrall, at the turn of the century, protested vigorously against just such a pragmatic acceptance of Admetus' philoxenia as a facile explanation. Ironically enough, he inadvertently predicted a trend which was not only to grow, but to become more entrenched. Admetus' saving grace has indeed carried the day. A husband's untoward submission to a wife's substitution; a son's disgraceful argument with his father before the rites of interment; a host's inner crisis as he juggles the respective merits of hospitality versus bereavement; a man's shallow repentance for living at another's expense — in short, each vital turning point in Admetus' private dilemma has received thorough and shrewd analysis, but always through the special refraction of the host motif.

The nature of Theocritean otium (hasychia) is not a new topic in the general field of Theocritean studies; sooner or later those critics who wish to come to terms with the poetic intent of the major Greek bucolic poet will have to arrive at some definition of the precise significance of that movement towards peace, harmony, and spiritual and intellectual fulfilment which provides the overriding impetus in pastoral. Rosenmeyer has done much, possibly more than most, towards a complete description of this ideal (yet enigmatic) state, and he is right, I think, to stress not only the centrality of otium to the bucolic Idylls (‘Otium is a keyword in the discussion of the pastoral’), but the unmistakable Epicurean bias of the work. This affinity with certain fundamental goals of Epicureanism suggests that one is to regard otium as signifying a considerable amount more than that which can be deduced merely from the sum of its physical parts — shade, peace, music, sex. These aspects of existence are undoubtedly present in the poems, but ultimately they tend towards a definition of a more abstracted state, one which touches not simply pastores, Daphnis, and Lycidas, but the lot of man in general.

Within the Terentian corpus the senes (‘old men’) Simo (of the Andria) and Chremes (of the Heauton Timorumenos) enjoy an extraordinary understanding of the conventions of Roman comedy. While slaves in Plautine comedy certainly exhibit similar knowledge of their genre's conventions, as do the young men who are allied with them (one thinks of Charinus' prologue to the Mercator), Plautine senes do not usually share in this awareness. This paper focuses on the Andria's Simo and the Heauton's Chremes because—despite their unusual generic knowledge, which each man reveals in several metatheatrical remarks—they nevertheless misinterpret their slaves. Indeed, we shall see that both men's knowledge of the character type of the clever slave leads to their belief that they can control the slaves and see through their attempts at deception. However, in the end both men actually deceive themselves because their knowledge leads them to see deceptions where there are none—to interpret truth as a fiction contrived by their slaves. Interestingly, Simo and Chremes have something else in common: they both appear in plays whose prologues feature references to an unnamed opponent of Terence—the maleuolus uetus poeta (‘spiteful old poet’). This individual is alleged to have charged Terence with (1) mixing the plots of multiple Greek comedies together in the composition of his own plays, and (2) accepting the help of powerful friends in the writing of his comedies.

Disease, and talk of disease, provide some of the most potent expressions of Sophokles' symbolic imagination. The plague in Oidipous Tyrannos; the blindness of the ‘seer’ Teiresias in the same play; the later blindness of Oidipous in both the Oidipous plays; the fatal sickness of Herakles in the Trachiniai; the incurable wound of Philoktetes — all these sicknesses are used by the playwright to express some important truths about the characters who suffer from them and about these characters' relationships to the world around them. We may add to this catalogue the madness of the title character of the Ajax, for it is often called a nosos in the play, and it serves as one of the play's leading symbols. This paper will examine how that symbol works and what it means. In particular, it will argue that Ajax' delusion that cattle were Greek leaders corresponds to a more general delusion about the nature of the world; and that his recovery from the former delusion early in the play anticipates his recovery from the latter one, which is shown in the much-discussed third monologue (646-692). Sophokles uses the story of Ajax' madness and recovery to underline and develop a larger, more philosophical, story.

Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli,
sive in extremos penetrabit Indos,
litus ut longe resonante Eoa tunditur unda,

sive in Hyrcanos Arabasve molles,
seu Sagas sagittiferosve Parthos,
sive quae septemgeminus colorat aequora Nilus,

sive trans altas gradietur Alpes,
Caesaris visens monimenta magni,
Gallicum Rhenum horribile aequor ultimosque Britannos,

omnia haec, quaecumque feret voluntas
caelitum, temptare simul parati,
pauca nuntiate meae puellae non bona dicta.

cum suis vivat valeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium ilia rumpens;

nee meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est.

(Furius and Aurelius, companions of Catullus, whether he will make his way into the farthest Indi, where the shore is beaten by the far-resounding eastern wave, or into the Hyrcani or the soft Arabians, whether to the Sagae or arrow-bearing Parthians, whether into the waters which sevenfold Nile dyes, whether he will cross over the lofty Alps, viewing the memorials of mighty Caesar, the Gallic Rhine, bristling water and remotest Britons — all these things, prepared to test together whatever the will of the gods shall bring: announce a few words to my girl, words not pleasant. Let her live and flourish with her adulterers, whom three hundred at once she holds in her embrace, loving no one of them truly, but again and again breaking the strength of all. And let her not look for my love, as before, which by her fault has fallen like a flower of the remotest meadow after it has been touched by a passing plough.)

If the critical re-evaluation of classical authors in recent years has brought nothing else, it has given us a humbling awareness of how difficult it is to arrive at a fully satisfactory reading of ancient pastoral poetry. The poet of the Eclogues, seen less and less as merely a painter of dreamy landscapes or a contriver of political allegories, has emerged increasingly as a self-conscious artist whose conventional, but highly symbolic and allusive language embraces questions of man's relation to art and imagination, to passion and work, to the potential for order and violence in his own being. Is it valid to look at Theocritus in similar terms? Is there more in the Idylls than keenly etched portraits of shepherds among verdant hills singing of love in dulcet hexameters and in an atmosphere of easeful sensuousness? Or should we merely enjoy the surface felicities and depart sated and content, like Horace's well-fed guest? The rhythms and resonances of Theocritus will continue to give pleasure as long as Greek is read. Yet recent work in both ancient and later pastoral suggests that the Idylls will sustain and reward a critical reading which looks beneath this charming surface.

The concept of Homeric or simply Greek honour is not as easy to comprehend as is commonly assumed. Basically it is a system of values stemming from the belief that no harm done to self, kinsman, friend or property should remain uncompensated or unavenged. In a way, what is subsumed under the term honour is an awareness that the higher one bids the higher one is. In the present article the English word ‘honour’ is only a code word for the various fundamentals of life that belong to the semantic compass of Homeric timē. The word ‘cattle’ is also a code word for livestock, especially bovine animals as well as sheep and goats. Honour is not much talked about these days, and many educated people are familiar with some of its aspects mostly through the works of cultural anthropologists who, it seems, have to go to the far corners of the earth to study it. Yet, both honour and the price for honour are ubiquitous in our modern world. The difference is that the state is the keeper of every citizen's honour and as such it regulates punishment for offence to collective or individual honour and, through its courts, decides the material price that must be paid in compensation for real or even intended harm.

In his monumental work on Tacitus, Syme suggested that Tacitus made veiled criticisms directed against Hadrian in the Annals; subsequent scholars have not always accepted his suggestion. Yet those scholars who are sceptical of Syme's argument have not yet, on the whole, taken up the question of the reception of Tacitus' work by his contemporaries; this is a peculiar gap, when one considers the politically charged nature of Tacitus' Annals, which places under a miscroscope not only individual emperors, but the institution of the principate itself. It is, therefore, the intent of this essay to examine the audience's reception of Tacitus' Annals within the work's historical and cultural context: for Tacitus' audience (which I assume to consist primarily of elite males of senatorial and equestrian status), an understanding of the past about which he writes was made meaningful in part, I should like to suggest, by the present. Such an approach results in an open-ended understanding of the work, and decentralises it from its author in favour of the audience. The end result is a text which simultaneously questions even as it reaffirms Trajan as princeps.

Dining with Domitian could be a trying experience. Dio describes one memorable meal with the emperor:

(Dio 67.9)

The first sentence of the Histories, which identifies and justifies the work as a whole, reveals the author's double aim of celebration and explanation:

Both explanation and celebration account for Herodotus' inclusiveness. On one hand, anything great and wonderful should be saved from oblivion, and is therefore appropriate subject for the exposition. On the other hand, the research of the causes of an event leads the historian beyond the simple narrative of the event itself into its remote antecedents and any circumstance which may have possibly affected it. Thus the specific focus of the inquiry — the war between Greeks and Barbarians — is doubly broadened even before it is announced.

Ovidians today agree that humour is central to understanding the Metamorphoses; but much disagreement exists about what passages are funny; what type of humour is used; and what response it is intended to elicit. Since his own time Ovid's humour has provoked criticism: Quintilian and the two Senecas criticise him for introducing to the Metamorphoses an inappropriate tone. The Romantics found Ovid's humour in bad taste. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries it was taken to be light and on the surface. More recently scholars identify his humour as either deep and humane or hateful and misogynistic. This division is caused, in my opinion, by Ovid's black humour, which by its very nature is easily misunderstood or missed, especially by those inclined to see the tragic in things, disinclined to see comedy mixed into a scene of death or rape, inclined to think the tragic, serious and universal more worthy, profound and significant than the comic, base and particular.

The study of the ancient world has often come under scrutiny for its questionable ‘relevance’ to modern society, but Greek tragedy has proven rather resilient. From tragedy's perceived value in articulating an incomplete but idealised state of political and ethical being in Hegel to its role in thinking through the modern construction of politics and gender (often through a re-reading of Hegel), tragedy has loomed large in modern critical inquiry into definitions of the political and the formation of the subject.’ This is another way of saying that the richly textured tragic text has in some respects laid the foundation for subsequent theorising of the political subject.

Given the importance placed on such figures as Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone starting with Schelling and Hegel, it is perhaps not surprising that recent work in critical theory has tended to recast these particular tragic figures in its critique of Enlightenment thought. Nonetheless, there are problems with the adoption of these figures as paradigms through which tragedy becomes a tool to represent the ancient Greek polis and to work through modern political and ethical problems. The repeated returns to certain aspects of Oedipus or Antigone have contributed to a structured silence around the issue of class relations. Along with the increasingly dominant role of neoliberalism and the continuing importance of identity politics, much recent critical theory has contributed to the occlusion of class and labour from public discourse and academic research. In such a climate, it is no wonder that historical materialism rarely figures in academic works. I wonder whether another narrative is possible through the study of Greek tragedy.

The Metamorphoses is a poem full of tales of erotic pursuit. It is also a poem full of fictional narrators and audiences. These two features frequently intersect, since erotic pursuit is often the subject of an embedded tale, and sometimes — but considerably less often — the occasion for one. Erotic seduction is much more common as the subject for a story than as the objective of one. Narrative seduction in the frame, however — that is, a narrator's seduction of an audience into listening to, or even soliciting, a story — is quite common. Indeed, most embedded tales in the Metamorphoses are requested tales, and quite often the request is engineered by the prospective narrator. In considering instances of narrative discourse as ‘narrative transactions’, Barbara Hernnstein Smith has suggested that one should examine the general question ‘why … someone has chosen (or agreed) to tell someone else that something happened and why the latter has chosen (or agreed) to listen’. More specifically, Robert Scholes and Gerald Prince have both pointed to a figuratively erotic relationship between narrator and audience, viz. the fact that the narrator must first arouse desire for a story. Ovid himself seems to hint at this connection between erotic and narrative seduction by calling attention to the narrative situation in so many of his tales of erotic pursuit.

This epigram of Callimachus is one of the best known poems in Classical literature, but it suffers more than most from the misfortune of having to live permanently in the shadow of its own translation. It may no longer be the case that every schoolboy knows ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’, but it is certainly true that Cory's English version is much more widely known, and much more widely quoted, than Callimachus's Greek original. One result of this has been that a good deal of attention has often been given to comparing the two poems, but little time has been spent on examining the Callimachus as a poem in itself in an effort to see what its virtues are. One may occasionally find a few remarks on the restraint or simplicity of the Greek, as opposed to the English, or a note suggesting that Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, the poet to whom the verses are addressed, wrote a volume of verse the title of which was actually Aēdones (‘Nightingales’) — hence the ‘nightingales’ of the second last line. Occasionally a commentator will go a little further. K. J. Mckay for instance remarks: ‘The high respect in which this epigram is held is fully justified. The way in which the thoughts spill over their barriers in the first four lines, the magic of katedusamen (suggestive of a communion of uncommon power), the skilful location of key thoughts (teon moron, katedusamen, aēdones), the pathos of an unknown grave and an abiding grief cannot but move us. Above all, the suggestion of unfathomable sorrow.’

Dis Manibus Peter James Connor

That Lucretius should choose to end his Epicurean representation of the world with a long and harrowing account of the plague that struck Athens in 430 BCE is certainly one of the more remarkable facts in classical Roman poetry. More remarkable still is the suddenness of the ending. The poem simply breaks off as one critic says ‘almost in mid-sentence’; and even if we follow this same critic in tidying up the end by transferring 6.1247-51 to follow 1286 we are still left very much in mediis rebus, with the plague at its height and death and misery all around. Our initial response is one of surprise and puzzlement as we feel cheated of a sense of an ending; this in turn leads to questions about overall design and authorial intent. Why does the poem end this way? Indeed, has it ended at all?

We have learned a great deal in recent years about reading Horace's satires; there is now widespread agreement that the speaker of the satires is himself a character within them, a persona. Such a persona may be most effective when it has obvious connections with its creator, but that fact does not preclude the exaggeration of reality, or even its complete inversion. For Horace the implications of this approach are exciting: instead of a poet discoursing with cheerful earnestness on morality, on poetry and on his daily life, we have a fictional character, whom we do not have to take seriously at all.

The three diatribe satires present us with a character so absurd that they have been taken, I think rightly, as parodies. Although the poems were once appreciated as effective moralising sermons, even their admirers found it hard to justify the lack of intellectual coherence, to say nothing of the astonishing vulgarity of the second satire. As parodies, however, the poems are wonderfully successful. The speaker trots out a series of banalities: ‘people should be content with who they are’; ‘people should not go to extremes’; ‘people should be consistent’. But he invariably gets distracted, goes off on tangential rants, and makes a fool of himself. The moralist of the first three satires is, to put it bluntly, a jerk.

‘This poem is the feeblest and least poetical of all the Heroides, and has certain solecisms in diction and metre, which are either spurious or show that the epistle is an unfinished and careless performance.’ So Arthur Palmer in the preface to his commentary on Heroides 8, Hermione's letter to Orestes imploring him to rescue her from Neoptolemus, her abductor; and Peter Knox fans the flames of doubt about the authenticity of the letter (or at least parts of it) in his analysis of lines 65-74, where Hermione locates herself alongside Leda, Hippodamia and Helen in a Tantalid tradition of rape-victims:

num generis fato, quod nostros durat in annos,
Tantalides mattes apta rapina sumus?
non ego fluminei referam mendacia cygni
nee querar in plumis delituisse Iouem.
qua duo porrectus longe freta distinet Isthmos,
uecta peregrinis Hippodamia rotis;
[Castori Amyclaeo et Amyclaeo Polluci
reddita Mopsopia Taenaris urbe soror;]
Taenaris Idaeo trans aequor ab hospite rapta
Argolicas pro se uertit in arma manus.
(Her. 8.65-74)