Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Statius' Thebaid is a rarity. More of the surviving Latin epics of the classical period are incomplete or unfinished than not: Lucan's Bellum civile, Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, Statius' Achilleid, perhaps Silius Italicus' Punica and of course Virgil's Aeneid (although his dissatisfaction may relate to polish rather than scope: we do not know). Only Ovid's Metamorphoses and Statius' Thebaid seem complete. Yet the question of epic endings casts a fascination upon critics, especially perhaps where the ending does not exist or where there is evidence that it is not the ending planned by the author. Critics use their interpretations of the endings to inscribe meaning in the preceding text and to clinch one reading against another. The readings advanced enact different kinds of closure or refuse to see any closure at all.

It seems paradoxical that one of the few epics to survive complete has not yet received a full stint of attention devoted to its ending. In this paper, my purpose is to situate the end of the Thebaid in its literary and ideological context. This involves examining how the close of the poem interacts with earlier epic, particularly with the Aeneid. My argument is that Statius offers a supplement to, or even a critique of, the open-endedness of the Aeneid in the form of a triptych of resounding endings. I shall then suggest that there are other elements in Statius' closural strategy which are highlighted by a consideration of his Romanisation of his Greek material.

Ancient ‘etymology’ is now such a well-established modern scholarly interest that a paper about it need no longer be prefaced by an account of its commonest forms or by a justification of its importance, especially in poetry – and that despite the pseudo-etymological nature of many ancient etymologies. For such matters it is sufficient to refer to what have already become the standard works on ancient etymologies and etymologising. If further explanation of the high intellectual status accorded by antiquity to etymologising seems necessary, it can be provided economically by reference to those ancient philosophical theories of language, e.g. that of the Stoics, which held that words are related to the reality (φύσις) of the things which they name, and to the close links which surviving ancient etymological treatises assert between etymology (i.e. derivations) and ‘semantics’ (i.e. meaning). The etymologies most familiar to older classical scholarship are those revolving around proper names; but even before the recent upsurge of interest in ancient etymology there was some awareness of the additional potential for common nouns, verbs and adjectives to be etymologised.

The sixty-fourth poem of Catullus, a work which has in times past been dismissed as contrived, is now appreciated precisely because it is carefully contrived. The majority of modern scholarship seems willing, implicitly or explicitly, to look upon the poem's intricacies and apparent contradictions as constituting part of its attraction, acknowledging that artifice does not necessarily preclude art.

The complexities of poem 64 are contingent to a large degree upon its interaction with earlier poetic models. Structural devices of narrative are borrowed from a variety of sources; themes and scenes are delineated so as to reveal their full meaning through reader awareness of other works; literary allusions pervade the text. Perhaps the most salient intertextual feature of Catullus' epyllion is its interaction with previous literary treatments of the myth of Jason and Medea. In this regard, it has long been recognised that a poem of central importance for the reading of Catullus 64 is the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, and this present exploration of allusion in poem 64 will concentrate on the intertextual connections between 64 and its Hellenistic epic predecessor.

a quo [sc. Deo] si non esset lapsus Adam, non diffunderetur ex utero eius salsugo maris, genus humanum profunde curiosum et procellose tumidum et instabiliter fluidum

This paper begins with a puzzle, a passage of Confessions 13 which has left commentators baffled. How can Adam have a uterus? Gibb and Montgomery, in 1927, gave the problem a name; O'Donnell, in 1992, opted for citing their comment with a quiet gloss of his own

utero G–M (understatement): ‘A remarkable example of catachresis. It is to be explained, no doubt, by the fact that “Adam” is used generically rather than personally.

Here is a text which incorporates all the readings and supplements which I explain below and some which I do not.

In a programmatic article, published nearly twenty years ago, Peter Laslett characterized historians who try to write social history from literature as people who look at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. His particular examples of their inverted gaze were not always well chosen: warfare in Homer, the young age at betrothal of Shakespeare's Juliet, the extra-marital affairs in Restoration Comedy. The main point, however, still challenges ancient historians. ‘The great defect of the evidence’, as A. H. M. Jones forewarned readers of his social history, ‘is the total absence of statistics’: at best, we have isolated numbers which do not survive in significant sequences. Yet since 1951, ancient historians have continued to look down their telescopes and find social history in a widening range of texts. In the past decade, Roman historians have re-read prose fictions for this purpose, while on the Greek side, more recent attention has gone to poetry, especially tragedy and Homeric epic.

In 29 B.C., at the ludi Actiaci held to celebrate the victory of Octavian over the forces of Antony and Cleopatra, Rome witnessed the first performance of one of the most celebrated of Roman tragedies, the Thyestes of Varius Rufus. Later critics are in agreement as to the quality of the piece: Curiatius Maternus in the Dialogue on Orators of Tacitus rates it equal to the Medea of Ovid; Quintilian describes it as comparable to any Greek tragedy; Philargyrius in a note to Eclogues 8.6 goes as far as to dub it the greatest of all tragedies (omnibus tragicis praeferenda). More intriguingly, at least one contemporary was extremely taken with the play, for a note in the eighth-century Codex Parisinus 7530 and the ninth-century Codex Casanatensis 1086 indicates that Varius was paid one million sesterces for his efforts. That that contemporary was the organiser of the Actian games, either Octavian himself or a close associate acting as intermediary, is not in dispute. What is at issue is the political and ideological significance of a tragedy on the theme of Atreus and Thyestes which could make it so valuable a part of the celebration of the victory of the new regime. It is to this problem that this paper is addressed.