The last decades have shown that Nicander's Theriaca (second century b.c.e.), a didactic hexameter poem of 958 lines on snakes, scorpions, spiders, and the proper treatment of the wounds they inflict, is a markedly more playful work than most readers thought. Rather than considering the poem as a vehicle of authentic learning, literary approaches to the nature of Nicander's strange poetic world have focussed on his eye for Alexandrian aesthetics, intertextuality, linguistic innovation, and awareness of the didactic tradition that started with Hesiod's Works and Days, but also on his predilection for horror, voyeuristic sensationalism, and gory details. Although literary-minded readers have found it hard to disprove convincingly that Nicander may have had some professional knowledge of his subject matter, a glance at his arcane language is enough to convince any reader that the Theriaca cannot be concerned solely with its explicit subject. In this article I will make some additional observations on the way in which Nicander has turned the Theriaca into a work of literature, focussing on some of the choices that he has made with regard to his less than veracious depiction of snakes and animals. While Spatafora rightly points to Nicander's eye for detail when portraying floral beauty, I will argue that the poet's play with the topos of the locus amoenus has a darker side. Rather than creating an epic world of beauty, Nicander shows his talent for taking the reader along an unpleasant path of apprehension and negative feelings, portraying a choice selection of afflictions. Not only does he have many ways of giving his quasi-scientific account a markedly negative atmosphere, but his world may well be a deliberate reversal of that other well-known Hellenistic portrayal of the natural world, Theocritus' bucolics.

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.

Delia, the name given to Tibullus’ mistress in five of the poems in the first book of his elegies (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5, 1.6), has long inspired curiosity. Two approaches have dominated discussion. The biographical approach takes its cue from the Apology of Apuleius (10), which regards Delia as a pseudonym:

At Book 5.324–37, the DRN’s narrator says that the world is young, claims that the nature of the world has been understood only recently (with the advent of Epicureanism), and asserts that he is either the ‘very first’/‘most pre-eminent’ or, as I suggest here, ‘among the first’/‘among the most pre-eminent’ to turn (vertere) Greek Epicureanism into Latin. It is the last of these three claims that concerns us:

denique natura haec rerum ratioque repertast   335
nuper, et hanc primus cum primis ipse repertus
nunc ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces.

In Fam. 13.1 Cicero, visiting Athens en route to Cilicia in the summer of 51 b.c., writes to C. Memmius L.f., praetor in 58 but by the time of Cicero's communication an exile in Athens after the shambolic consular elections for 53; Memmius was (temporarily, one assumes) absent from Athens in Mytilene, hence the need for Cicero to write to him. This letter, along with Att. 5.11.6 and 19.3, is our focus in the argument that follows, but, to summarize the situation in the very broadest terms, Cicero's concern in it is with Memmius’ intentions regarding a plot of land in Athens occupied by a house of Epicurus, and with the objections to Memmius’ plans that had been raised with Cicero by the scholarch of the Epicurean community in Athens, Patro.

Cedant arma togae, ‘let arms yield to the toga’. Thus begins the famous verse from Cicero's poem on his consulship that highlights the protagonist's suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy by favourably contrasting this political achievement with success on the battlefield. But how does the line continue? Its conclusion is transmitted in two different versions, concedat laurea laudi and concedat laurea linguae, and scholars have long been divided over which one is Cicero's original text. In this paper, we revisit the issue and not only (1) propose an answer to the question of what Cicero actually wrote, but also (2) examine those attestations of the verse that date to the author's own lifetime, elucidating the contexts that account for the quotation of one variant rather than the other.

Denys Page, discussing this poem in his classic Sappho and Alcaeus, seemed unimpressed by its aesthetic merits. In his note on line 7 he says: ‘The sequence of thought might have been clearer.... It seems then inelegant to begin this parable, the point of which is that Helen found O Krλλιστον in her lover, by stating that she herself surpassed all mortals in this very quality’ (p. 53). His interpretative essay phrases further objections. ‘In a phrase which rings dull in our doubtful ears, she proceeds to illustrate the truth of her preamble by calling Helen of Troy in evidence’ (p. 56). About the Helen exemplum itself he says: ‘the thought is simple as the style is artless’ and ‘the transition back to the principal subject was perhaps not very adroitly; managed’ (p. 56). Page's criticism centres on the function of the exemplum of Helen. A close reconsideration of this exemplum, with special attention to the way in which it is embedded in the preceding and following context, will result in a better understanding and appreciation of this poem.

The aim of this article is to map the relationship between the main words that comprise the Homeric lexicon of roads, journeys, paths and travel. The central task is to explore the relationship between the words hodos and keleuthos; along the way, the article will also address other terms that appear less frequently, such as atarp(it)os and poros. The article first teases out a difference in sense between keleuthos in the singular and in the plural. The discussion of keleuthos provides a key distinction, namely between ‘object-concepts’ and ‘activity-concepts’, that proves valuable in discussing different senses of the word hodos. Rather than differentiating the words keleuthos and hodos as others have suggested, however, this distinction should be used to differentiate domains of meaning within each word. The result will be what might be conceived of as a four-part grid, with the two words hodos and keleuthos split into two distinct parts along the ‘activity-concept’/‘object-concept’ axis. Finally, concepts drawn from discussions of verbal aspect and philosophy of action are deployed heuristically to develop further the analysis of this semantic field.

The best-known fact about the interaction of the Republican Roman poet Gaius Lucilius (c.180–103/102 b.c.e.), the inventor of the genre of Roman verse satire, with the doctrine of Scepticism is probably a statement of Cicero: that Clitomachus the Academician dedicated a treatise to the poet (Cic. Luc. 102). Diogenes Laertius makes much of that writer's, Clitomachus’, industry (τὸ φιλόπονον, 4.67), with the comment: ‘to such lengths did his diligence (ἐπιμελείας) go that he composed more than four hundred treatises’. This phraseology surely reminds those interested in Lucilius’ influence on later Latin poetry of Horace's disparaging comment, in hora saepe ducentos, | ut magnum, uersus dictabat (‘as a bravura display, he would often dictate two hundred verses in an hour’, Sat. 1.4.9–10); moreover, Horace shortly afterwards calls his predecessor garrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem (‘talkative and too lazy to bear the work of writing’, 1.4.12). Yet, a sceptical view of Horace's critique might have to think of Lucilius as hard-working, like his putative friend the Academic philosopher, Clitomachus.

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.