Lucretius' primary didactic aim in De Rerum Natura (DRN) is to teach his readers to interpret the world around them in such a way as to avoid the formation of false beliefs. The price of failure is extremely high. Someone who possesses false beliefs is liable to experience fear (of the gods, or of death, or both), and so will not be able to attain the state of tranquillity that, for Epicureans, constitutes the moral end. Equipping readers with sufficient knowledge always to form true beliefs about the phenomena they encounter thus serves no less a purpose than the enabling of their future happiness. This paper is concerned with how Lucretian intertextuality contributes to this primary didactic aim. For reasons to be explained below, I will focus on Lucretian engagement with the texts of Greek and Roman drama. I will show that allusions to drama in DRN, rather than functioning simply as ‘honey on the rim of the cup’, make a direct contribution to Lucretius' ethical project, teaching readers how to respond rationally to the full variety of their cultural experience.

The name ‘Chloe’ appears four times in Horace's Odes, once in Book 1 (1.23) and three times in Book 3 (3.7, 3.9, 3.26). Whether the ‘Chloes’ represent a woman or women from Horace's real life is probably not something we could know. Furthermore, there is no obvious reason to assume that all the ‘Chloes’ are the same person. However, there is likewise no obvious reason not to read the odes in which the name ‘Chloe’ appears, as some scholars have done, as referring to the same woman, fictional or otherwise. This article argues both that ‘Chloe’ is a consistent character in the Odes and that the portrayal of Chloe is not only connected across odes but also sequential. Taking the poems in order, we see Chloe grow up from a girl who is inexperienced in the world of men to a mature mistress who plays the dominant role in her love affairs.

Modern readings of Cicero's reception of Greek culture tend to reflect the way we frame the larger question of Roman reception of Greek culture. In the nineteenth century, and indeed well into the twentieth, when Hellenism was in the ascendant and Latin awarded a decidedly second place, Cicero was often read as a slavish copyist in thrall to the Greek classics. Recent work, however, has emphasized Cicero's sense of control over and entitlement to the cultural capital of this conquered province, and his manipulation of it in ways that position Rome (and himself) as a cultural and intellectual rival to Greece.

In the fourth book of the Aeneid Virgil presents the epic's titular hero as fated to found Rome, initially neglecting and ultimately reassuming his mission, all the while being accorded praise or blame for his progress. In this article I shall re-examine Virgil's use of the specifically Chrysippan Stoic doctrine of Fate and human responsibility in Aeneid 4, with a focus on three key points: the role of assent in creating a compatibility of Fate and human responsibility; the ‘Lazy Argument’, the position that Chrysippus combatted, that if things are fated they will happen without any effort on my part; and the Stoic conception of Fate as a chain of causes that includes human assents. I shall argue that Virgil's impeccable, almost obsessive, scholarship results in a detailed homage to Chrysippan Stoic doctrine that actually alludes to its finer points. I restrict my comments to Book Four on the grounds that the Dido-episode tests to the limit Aeneas’ resolve to ‘follow … Italy’ (361), even if non sponte, and that the juxtaposition with Dido sheds added light on the picture. I hope thereby to contribute to a topic of research that deserves renewed investigation using the discoveries in Hellenistic philosophy over the last two generations.

‘But tell us, Tityrus, who is that god?’ (sed tamen, iste deus qui sit, da, Tityre, nobis). This is what the herdsman Meliboeus asks in Virgil's first Eclogue (Ecl. 1.18) in response to Tityrus' assertion that a certain deity granted him the leisure to sing and to pasture his herd (o Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit. | namque erit ille mihi semper deus, Ecl. 1.6–7). In posing this question, the herdsman raises the issue of this god's identity also for us, Virgil's readers. We are invited to ponder ‘Who is that deus?’ The question lingers, hanging over the text for the next twenty-three verses, without answer. For despite Meliboeus' blunt and plainspoken query (qui sit, da … nobis), which demands a concrete response, Tityrus—on finally returning to the question qui sit—pointedly names no names. Rather, he leaves his divinity anonymous. We learn only that the god is a iuuenis, whom Tityrus saw at Rome, and who answered the herdsman's entreaty (hic illum uidi iuuenem … | hic mihi responsum primus dedit ille petenti, Ecl. 1.42, 44). In honour of this deity, Tityrus' altars smoke with sacrifice every month of the year (quotannis | bis senos cui nostra dies altaria fumant, Ecl. 1.42–3). As the poem takes the form of a dramatic dialogue without narrative frame, no authoritative voice intervenes to offer further guidance as to the god's identity. Thus we continue to wonder as to the identity of this divine iuuenis. The question remains open, an incitement to readerly conjecture.

At the beginning of Tristia 2, a single long apologetic elegy, Ovid struggles with making sense of his continued occupation with poetry, despite the disaster it has brought upon him. In lines 7–8 he broods over Augustus’ displeasure, roused by the Ars Amatoria, which led to his reproach. The passage is also sometimes adduced as a reference to the removal of the Ars from Rome's public libraries.1

The dating of Catalepton 9 has been the central issue of scholarship on that poem. The more particular questions of the poem's authorship, the identity of the addressee, and its chronological relation to other texts, both depend on and contribute to ascertaining the date of composition. The clearest exposition of the problem remains that by Richmond. Evidence provided by Catalepton 9 falls into two categories: literary and historical. Literary evidence encompasses two kinds of data: various formal features of the text and intertextual links with other poetry. While the poem's metre, language and style suggest a relatively early date of composition (before the Eclogues), the close textual parallels with the Eclogues, interpreted as borrowings from rather than sources of Virgil's poetry, point in the opposite direction. Historical indications are likewise ambivalent. On the one hand, it seems likely that the addressee is M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus (cos. 31 b.c.) and, further, that the occasion of composition is his (only) triumph in 27 b.c. (Catalepton 9.3 uictor adest, magni magnum decus ecce triumphi). On the other hand, the allusions to his military achievements (4–5, 41–54) are both too vague and exaggerated, and, if taken literally, do not fit well our Messalla at any particular point of his career (nor any other known member of the family). Richmond, following Birt and followed by Schoonhoven, believed that at least some of the historical references are ‘intended to be prophetic’. More recently, Peirano has attempted to explain this lack of precision by arguing that Catalepton 9 is not a real-life panegyric but a later biographical fiction, the real focus of which ‘is to be found […] in the relationship that the poem constructs between Virgil and his patron’.

In the Roman Republic, in the case of the death of both consuls or a situation which made it impossible to proceed with the election of their successors, the Senate would decide to establish an interregnum. For that the senators chose several persons of patrician dignity from among their midst, and awarded them the auspices and the signs of magisterial power. The interreges had the task of preparing for the elections of new consuls and hold the electoral assembly. Although the interreges had been chosen by the Senate, rather than elected by the People, and were in power for a short period, they resembled extraordinary magistrates. The interrex was appointed by the senator with auspices; likewise, the magistrate was elected in accordance with the will of the gods (auspicato). As well as the auspices and the attributes of magisterial power (lictores, fasci, sella curulis), the interreges were provided with an ius agendi cum patribus et cum populo and could summon the People to the centuriate assembly. In an epistle to C. Trebatius Testa (Fam. 7.11.1), written in January 53 (all dates are b.c.), Cicero ironically said that, with such a large number of interreges, an experienced lawyer could use them to prepare a defence in civil suits by asking each interrex for two adjournments to obtain legal assistance. Interreges, albeit as part of a jest, were seen here as holders of some civil jurisdiction. Referring to Asconius' clarification that a certain M. Lepidus was appointed interrex because he had been elected as a curule magistrate, Theodor Mommsen concluded that every interrex was regarded as magistrate. In fact, Asconius means here that Lepidus held a curule magistracy in addition to his being interrex (or, more precisely, the magistracy entitled him to this role). Nevertheless, the notion of extraordinary magistrate has been frequently applied to the interrex by modern scholars. When interreges periodically appeared at the head of the Republic as holders of auspices and of the signs of the highest power for five days, the Romans became accustomed to thinking that the interreges received supremacy for that period.

Book 8 of Lucan's Bellum Civile opens with Pompey in desperate flight from Caesar after the disaster of Pharsalus, and in equally desperate search for a reliable ally. Before the fateful decision is taken that Pompey should make for Egypt, where he will be murdered upon arrival by minions of the treacherous Ptolemy XIII, Pompey dispatches his Galatian client-tetrarch Deiotarus to sound out the distant Parthians and summon their armed hordes to wage war on his behalf (8.209-38); the king promptly embarks on his arduous errand (8.238-43), never to reappear in Lucan's text. Although Pompey is said by several historical sources to have expressed an interest in exploring the prospect of an alliance with Parthia, the mission of Deiotarus is almost certainly a complete fiction, as Duff has convincingly demonstrated. What could Lucan's motive have been for inventing this episode out of whole cloth?

Towards the end of Book 2 of Tacitus' Annals, Germanicus, great-nephew of Augustus, grandson of Mark Antony, and nephew, adopted son and heir of the emperor Tiberius, falls ill and dies at Antioch (2.69-72). His travels in the eastern Mediterranean in a.d. 18 thus reach a sad conclusion. They had begun when, after being recalled from the wars of conquest in Germany described in detail in the opening books of the Annals (1.50-1, 1.55-71; 2.5.2-26), he was sent from Rome by Tiberius to preside over the installation of a new king of Armenia (2.43.1; cf. 2.3-5.1).

That the extraordinary narrative experiment known as the Satyricon has regularly stimulated scholarly investigation into the relationship between status and freedom is not surprising for a work, the longest surviving section of which features an excessive dinner party at the house of a libertus. Much of the discussion has concentrated on the depiction of the dinner's host and his freedmen friends. Following the lead of F. Zeitlin and others in seeing the depiction of a ‘freedmen's milieu’ in the Cena, J. Bodel argued in a seminal paper published twenty years ago that the Cena opens a window onto the ‘freedman's mentality’. The last ten years or so have seen a revival of the theme, with much emphasis on the display of an open society in the Cena, even a Saturnalian world-view, based on a suspension or reversal of the traditional social hierarchies, all framed by a general air of excessive liberality: whatever satirical lens the Satyricon’s author is seen to have projected onto Trimalchio and his freedmen friends, they are understood as celebrating ‘freedom's defining difference’. In the light of such a unifying conceptualization of the Cena’s motley crew, it is not surprising that scholars have come to understand the libertine assemblage as a reflection of ‘the social class of the “freedmen” in first-century a.d. Italy’. After all, ‘class’ can be defined as ‘a number of individuals (persons or things) possessing common attributes’, and, with specific regard to human society, as ‘a division of society according to status’.

The Apology of Apuleius is a rare example of a complete forensic speech in Latin from the High Roman Empire. The prosecution on the charge of magia of a renowned rhetor in the court of a Roman proconsul, who might himself have been a distinguished Stoic philosopher, offers modern scholars a remarkable opportunity to observe an encounter between scholarship and legal practice. Apuleius arrived in the city of Oea en route to Alexandria as part of a life of learning and travel. While visiting Oea, Apuleius met his old schoolfriend Sicinius Pontianus, who encouraged him to wed his recently widowed mother Aemilia Pudentilla. The reason for this unusual request was Pontianus' wish that his mother would not marry someone unsuitable. Apuleius agreed and the marriage took place. However, it left Sicinius Aemilianus, a brother of Pudentilla's first husband, and Herennius Rufinus, Pontianus' father-in-law, aggrieved and they decided to pursue Apuleius through the courts. The Apology, which Apuleius later published as a record of his defence, has long attracted scholarly interest. Two commentaries have been published, the literary aspects analysed and the authenticity of the speech scrutinized.

Phoebe, mone, si Cumaeae mihi conscia uatis 5
stat casta cortina domo, si laurea digna
fronte uiret …

In these lines, as critics have long recognized, resides evidence for identifying Valerius Flaccus as a quindecimuir sacris faciundis. Emphasis is placed on the tripod emblematic of this sacred office which is here intimately associated with expertise in the oracular communications of the Cumaean Sibyl. The libri Sibyllini, the supervision and interpretation of which were amongst the earliest and most conspicuous of the XVuiri's responsibilities, could be traced to the Sibyl at Cumae (Lactant. Div. inst. 1.6.10-11, citing Varro, even if this connection was less than the entire story from a strictly historical perspective). Wreathes, too, formed part of the XVuir's equipment, and of course during the Imperial period the Sibylline books were deposited in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. In little more than two lines, then, one finds an abundance of references that cannot fail to fashion this addressee of Apollo as a quindecimvir.

The renaissance of Apuleian studies of the past few decades shows no signs of abating.1 The summer of 2014 may well be the highest watermark yet recorded in the tide of interest in Apuleius: June and July alone saw the release of two monographs, one each from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, and one edited conference volume, from Routledge.2 The clearest sign that the sophist of Madauros has come into his own is his admission into the exclusive club of the Oxford Classical Texts: the first volume of his complete works containing the Metamorphoses edited by Maaike Zimmerman came out in 2012. One of the most salutary effects of this renewed interest has been the reappraisal of the ‘whole Apuleius’: Apuleius has more to offer than just the Metamorphoses, and recent scholarship on the rhetorica and the philosophica have shown not only how these opera minora can help us understand the opus maius, but also how they are important and interesting documents in their own right.3

There has been a tendency, even among authors who have regarded Valerius Maximus as worthy of independent study, to use the Facta et Dicta as a neutral conduit of information about other wider areas. Valerius has thus sometimes become a sourcebook mined for nuggets of information but effectively invisible to those who work it. The past thirty years have seen valuable contributions that raise awareness of the importance of the genre of the Facta et Dicta and (to a lesser extent) the personal input of Valerius, but traces of the ‘conduit’ approach are still preserved in some authors’ attempts to justify their study of the work. For instance, Valerius provides an insight into the historical image of Marius, and is valuable precisely because he has no opinion or personal ideas to offer, because he preserves the language of school rhetoric, because his collection gives us strictly conventional material about religion, because he presents an unadulterated mirror-image of imperial policy and propaganda and because he is ‘middle-brow’ and thus depicts common attitudes. The text has also sometimes been studied for what it reveals about Early Imperial Latin, non-Republican culture and the organisation of Roman knowledge. Most recently, Tara Welch has argued that Valerius deliberately strips exempla of all authorial input, including his own, in an attempt to make himself a conduit for traditio. Alternatively, study of the text is justified by interest in the time period in which it was written.

As the church historian Henri Crouzel observed, questions about the nature of human autonomy were central to the thought of the third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria. On this question, his influence on later generations, though complicated, would be difficult to overstate. Yet, what exactly Origen thought autonomy required has been a subject of debate. On one widespread reading, he has been taken to argue that autonomy requires that human beings have the capacity to act otherwise than they do in fact act; that is, that alternative possibilities of action are causally available to them. As Susanne Bobzien has argued, however, there is good reason to think that the view that such alternative possibilities are required for the ascription of autonomy did not explicitly emerge until Alexander of Aphrodisias, a rough contemporary of Origen's of whose thought he was likely unaware. In revisiting Origen on the notion of ‘free will’, Michael Frede, against the ‘alternative possibilities’ reading, argued that his theory of the will was largely attributable to Stoicism, and in particular to Epictetus’ theory of will as προαίρεσις. George Boys-Stones, for his part, has claimed that, while Origen's theory of the descent of the pre-existent minds is aimed at providing an account of how human beings are entirely responsible for their characters, in the embodied state we find no evidence that he understood human choice subsequent to the fall to depend upon the existence of alternative possibilities in order to be autonomous.

This paper focusses on two lines in what counts as our best available literary source for the study of religious life in the Roman Near East. In paragraph 5 of Περὶ τῆς Συρίης Θεοῦ (On the Syrian Goddess), a treatise professing to describe the temple and cult at Hierapolis, a place in northern Syria also known by its indigenous names of Manbog or Bambyce, the author writes:

In Alan Cameron's long-awaited and epoch-making study The Last Pagans of Rome, a typically erudite and stimulating chapter is devoted to the anonymous poem generally known today as Carmen contra paganos (CCP), written in the late fourth or (some have argued) early fifth century. This poem (of 122 lines)—of which the text is still in many places uncertain, in spite of a wealth of critical attention from the time when it was brought fully to light by Delisle in 1867 to the present day—is a blistering invective against worshippers of the traditional gods and their practices, and against one person in particular, whose identity has been much debated. Cameron has brought forward a battery of strong arguments, many of them new, against the claims of Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, for a long time the front runner, whose name used to be given confidently in the poem's title, and, like Ellis and Cracco Ruggini, has strongly championed the claims of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, the grandee who was consul designate for the year 385 but did not live to take up the office.