On the infrequent occasions when De Rerum Natura is discussed in terms of pastoral, it is assumed that Lucretius describes the typical locus amoenus familiar since Plato's Phaedrus, and critics concentrate either on tracing his Hellenistic sources or on the basic contrast between luxury and simplicity. But there is more to Lucretian pastoral, just as there is more to Lucretius' atomic universe, than meets the eye. The essence of his pastoral is original, centered around animals rather than shepherds, and his use of pastoral pervades the poem and is integral to its design.

The most inclusive definition of pastoral possible is Empson's, the expression of the complex through the simple. It is more useful, however, to think of pastoral as the expression of an unfulfillable longing for a simpler and happier life, which may include a return from the city to the country, from politics to the land, from the Iron Age to the Golden Age, from war to peace, from vice to virtue, or from adulthood to childhood. Traditional pastoral is usually set in the country among shepherds and flocks, and man and nature interact harmoniously according to what has been called since Ruskin the ‘pathetic fallacy’. Plato ‘creates’ pastoral by contrasting city and country in the Phaedrus. Roman poetry uses elements of the urban-rural contrast not only in pastoral poetry as such but in satire, elegy and epic as well. The varied directions in which individual poets take the generic pastoral form are as interesting as the persistence of the form itself, and Lucretius' version, occurring as it does in a didactic epic, is extremely individual when viewed both from within and without the classical tradition of pastoral.

When applied to the Augustan age, the term ‘ideology’ has frequently carried the same negative associations that it often bears in general use. Sir Ronald Syme was influential in creating a picture of Augustus as the deliberate founder of a monarchy who manipulated traditional sources of power for his personal ends. In his chapter ‘The Organisation of Opinion’ in The Roman Revolution, Syme argued that Augustus appropriated literature, coinage, festivals and monuments in a calculated attempt to create an impregnable system of autocracy. Although Paul Zanker in his The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus provided a more positive view of Augustus as an astute and benevolent monarch, the instigator of a great flowering of the arts, he followed Syme in seeing Augustus as the mastermind of a system of ideas and imagery specifically calculated to promote his personal power and ideals.

William Levitan concluded a study of the fourth century poet Optatian with the sentence, ‘The marble bones of Rome itself were chopped for a thousand years to raise the buildings of Europe.’ The theatres, baths and other edifices constructed by the Romans never wholly perished; they served the local populations for centuries as quarries for building materials. The writers of late antiquity treated the Latin literary tradition the same way that later inhabitants treated the ruins of Roman buildings, as a source for appropriate building blocks. The dismemberment of magnificent structures, whether architectural or literary is, to be sure, a kind of vandalism, but perhaps in the post-modern, resource-hungry world of the mid-1990's we can bring ourselves to think of it as something more positive, as an attempt to salvage and recycle valuable material.

It is an unfortunate weakness of most of the standard textbooks on Greek tragedy that they fail to communicate the immediacy of pressure that is of its essence. This particular inadequacy has hardly been corrected by the recent spate of books on either staging or the visual presentation of plays, which suggest themselves now as the standard adjustment to existing handbooks for students with or without the language.

One of the few certainties we have, in beginning the argument, is that tragedy is, if anything, about decisions and their consequences. This much is implied in Aristotle's intuition about hamartia, which if it means ‘mistake’ can be taken to direct attention to the circumstances which dictate a decision. Indeed, decisions are far more prominent in Attic tragedy than mistakes as such: to take two examples from the Oresteia, which as an Aeschylean trilogy should not seem so exceptional as people are inclined to make it, both Agamemnon and Orestes take decisions of terrifying consequence that can hardly be classed as ‘mistakes’ (namely to kill a daughter and to kill a mother, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra in Agamemnon and Libation Bearers respectively). In this respect, Aristotle might be taken as considering more closely the sentimental drama that flourished in his day, and in this, if we judge by his perceptions, it may well be that Oedipus the King of Sophocles in fact marks a turning-point—in the desperate futility of Oedipus' errors—which is more readily, and perhaps with less justice, ascribed to Euripides.

Advice on marriage and the proper deportment for wives begins with the earliest Greek literature. While Homer's Andromache and Penelope provide practical role models, Hesiod (Works and Days 695-705, Theogony 568-612), followed (in iambics) by Semonides (frr. 6, 7), forcefully articulates male concerns about evil wives and women's wicked wiles. Hesiod's imperatival infinitives as well as his viewpoint reverberate more than a millennium later in a poem of advice composed, probably in the early 380s, by the Christian Gregory of Nazianzus for the marriage (νῦν μὲν σοὶ τόδ' ἔδωκα γαμήλιον, ‘now I have given you this wedding gift’, 2.2.6.108) of Olympias, elder daughter of Vitalian, a local Nazianzene worthy. This paper seeks to contribute to recent revaluations of Gregory's poetry—and hence of his place in the larger development of later Greek hexameter poetry—by illustrating how reading of the Olympias poem is enriched by exploration of its literary allusions and intertexts and its poetic craftsmanship. My title adopts Gregory's own image of ‘sugaring the pill’ of instruction for the young by writing in verse, but I extend the expression to include the pleasure that any reader may obtain in recognising Gregory's literary artistry, even when unpalatable prescriptions for female married life are the theme. Since the corpus is not well known, I begin by locating the poem within the context of Gregory's verse.

Like any good Greek historian, Josephus salted his BJ with rhetorically elaborate speeches in direct discourse in order to explore the psychological interior of important historical players and to provide insight into motivations for the characters' actions at critical junctures in the narrative. The earliest methodological statement about speech-writing in an historical narrative fairly describes Josephus' own method in the BJ. I refer of course to Thucydides' famous, if perennially debated and reinterpreted, declaration at the end of his so-called Archaeology:

The Iliad and Odyssey are replete with single speeches or exchanges of speech which are described by the noun νεῖκος (‘quarrel’, ‘strife’) or its derived verb νεικέω. Some time ago, A.W.H. Adkins showed that νεῖκος and νεικείω are used in Homer to designate various kinds of agonistic discourse: threats, rebukes, insults, quarrels and judicial disputes. Critics often now describe νεῖκος-speeches and νεῖκος-exchanges in the Iliad as examples of ‘flyting’. This term, shared by the languages of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and the dialect of Old Scots, is transferred to the combination of boasting, invective and threats which Homeric heroes hurl at each other. This is because Iliadic νεῖκος has affinities with the traditional and highly stylised verbal exchanges which take place in the feasting halls and battles depicted in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Germanic heroic poetry.

In his book The Language of Heroes Richard Martin has argued persuasively that the flyting νεῖκος is a significant speech-act genre performed by Homeric characters and that its competitive mode is analogous to the Homeric poet's poetic project tout court. Just as Homer produces a monumental epic whose focus on Achilles may well be competitive with other renderings of epic tradition and is certainly derived through the manipulation of memory, Homeric heroes and gods flyte by manipulating and contesting the resources of memory. The best Homeric flyting is creatively poetic within existing conventions or strategies and is thereby rhetorically devastating. And Martin sees Achilles as the best flyter because he rhetorically manipulates memory better than any other hero. Thus, the hero is like his poet and the poet is like his hero. Achilles' competitive way with words is unique in (and to) the Iliad and is emblematic of Homer's overpowering competitive poetic achievement.

It would be depressingly easy, and not very instructive, to document the neglect of ‘later’ Greek poetry in books that claim to offer accessible introductions to ancient literature; that it is still possible to do so from books written very recently, when the whole notion of ‘the classical canon’ has come under increasingly strenuous examination and the study of ‘later antiquity’ has properly come into its own, might seem more depressing still, though it also sheds light on how the academy views its task of disseminating trends in research more broadly. In any case, any such catalogue of neglect would be widely (and perhaps rightly) regarded as a rhetorical move of self-justification of a kind very familiar in academic discourse; after all, it took years of voluminous writing about the ancient novel before scholars in that field abandoned the ritual complaint about the ‘neglect’ of this literature (the torch has perhaps been handed on to the study of early Christian narrative).

There is hardly any scene in Euripidean tragedy which is as baffling as the debate between Hecabe and Helen in the Troiades. So far, I have found no really satisfactory explanation of this scene. Of those who have dealt with it, Kitto recognises that ‘it interrupts the plot’. The reason for the interruption, according to him, is that it illuminates part of Euripides' thought, namely that ‘this war too was misconceived — its basis the worthlessness of a woman’. I doubt whether I could agree that the scene proves the worthlessness of Helen. But let that pass. There is a more important point to be raised. Would Euripides have interrupted his plot to illuminate part of his thought unless the part illuminated had some bearing on the theme of his play? Admittedly Euripides does love a debate and does sometimes wander from the point to make a point that is not very relevant. But that he has done so in this scene I find it very hard to believe. The scene is altogether too important to be brushed aside in that way. It is, in the first place, the longest scene in the play. In the second place, it interrupts the plot at a point when the interruption is most distracting because it occurs at the very climax of the tale of horrors inflicted by the Greeks upon the Trojans — the decision to kill Astyanax. Talthybius has just announced the decision to Hecabe and Andromache and has come to take Astyanax away.

There is no such thing as society.
Thatch

Friends and neighbours, that's where it's at
friends and neighbours, that's a fact.
Ornette Coleman (1970)

All Terence's ½-doz. plays come complete with instructions on how to read them. They give you a fair idea, for a start, of what you're going to get yourself involved in. They always did, delivering audiences to the exponentially expanding Roman culture of the 160s BCE, delivering drama, and theatre culture, from that critical world-beating juncture in the history of the West to a constantly self-renewing, and ultimately perpetual, Graeco-Roman education, through language + learning: Prologue (§1).

Before all, this is the play with the unpronounceable Greek handle. Just about its only Hellenism to survive processing into Terence's expertly screened Latinity. A word-and-a-half set to catch any lover of language—it made Baudelaire write a poem, just so he could list Hautontimoroumenos as a title in Fleurs du Mal: Je te frapperai sans colèrelet sans haine comme un boucher.… (For us, his line-and-a-half must be: Je suis de mon coeur le vampire.) The word-title is a paradigmatic slogan that roars—fortissimo—that complex internal relations between the person and the self feature as the semiotic-cum-problematic of this play. L'innommable—beyond Latinity to put into words, hence the compulsion to dramatise: Title (§2).

In connection with the beginnings of the Andria, there have been anecdotes and scholarly theories ever since the time of Suetonius and his sources for the Life of Terence, and they intrigued Donatus in his commentary. Naturally, then, they have developed their own influence in the scholarly tradition. An anecdote recounted by Suetonius, who does not name his source, reports that when Terence delivered his play to the aediles of 166 BCE (who would be producing the comedy at the Megalensian Games), he was ordered (or invited, iussus) to read it first to Caecilius Statius (the current grand old man of Latin Comedy). It happened that Caecilius was dining when Terence appeared, dressed with no distinction and therefore earning the coolness of Caecilius. The old man treated him like a servant and had him seat himself on a stool next to his couch and start reading, so as to disturb his dining as little as possible. However, once Terence began reading his play, after only a few verses, he was invited up to Caecilius' couch and proceeded to read through the remainder of the play to the considerable admiration of his host. Now, scholars have had several things to say about this story. First and most commonly, they have pointed out that good evidence fixes the death of Caecilius in 168, roughly two years before the performance of the Andria; and accordingly this story has no factual substance. Good, there is no reason to try to combat facts: this interesting meeting of Caecilius and Terence never happened. However, we do not need to throw away the Suetonian story as useless trivia. The reason someone devised the story was evidently to bring the older generation of comic poetry into contact with the new and to voice its strong approval of its successor's first product, the Andria. Although Caecilius himself may never have known Terence, the plays of the two were linked by a common impresario, Lucius Ambivius Turpio. The didascaliae to all six plays of Terence credit him with being the producer, and in the so-called second prologue of the Hecyra Ambivius reports that he had troubles producing the plays of Caecilius, as he had recently had with Terence's.

In 167 BCE, L. Aemilius Paullus celebrated a triumph in Rome following the defeat of King Perseus of Macedon at the Battle of Pydna in the previous year. All of the accounts of the procession enumerate the incredible volume of booty that was paraded into Rome—wagons loaded with shields, weapons, statues of gods and men, golden bowls, livestock, luxury goods. Perseus himself, the defeated king, marched in this procession, as did his two sons and a daughter. Plutarch writes that ‘the children of Perseus were led along as slaves’: τὰ τέκνα τοῦ βασιλέως ἤγετο δοῦλα (Aem. 33.6), and that they were accompanied by their tutors who wept, taught the royal children to beg, and stretched out their hands to the Romans, who are here called ‘spectators’ (θεατάς, ib.). Perseus himself comes next, dressed in the black of mourning. Plutarch goes on to give a psychological picture of Perseus—he is dumbstruck and gaping, unable to process how his life had been turned upside down (34.1). Because Perseus could not face suicide, Plutarch says, ‘he converted himself into part of his own spoil’ (34.2).

ecce inter medios caedum Tiburna furores
fulgenti dextram mucrone armata mariti
et laeua infelix ardentem lampada quassans
squalentemque erecta comam ac liuentia planctu
pectora nudatis ostendens saeua lacertis
ad tumulum Murri super ipsa cadauera fertur.
(Punica 2.665-70)

So Silius reintroduces the figure of Tiburna into the mass suicide at Saguntum in Punica 2 before concluding with a description of her suicide. The fury that surrounds Tiburna is not surprising of a female figure in Latin epic, yet her suicide in this context is perhaps at odds with the literary tradition in that it is not the result of erotic passion but political despair. The suicide of female figures has a long literary tradition going back to Greek tragedy (Antigone, Deianira, Phaedra) as well as the Roman paradigms, Lucretia and Dido. In the epics of the Flavian period, Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus all offer up their own depiction of female characters who take their own lives. But unlike their literary sisters, whose suicides are an aspect of or the result of their gender, the Flavian epic heroines commit suicide despite their gender, a phenomenon that demands explanation.

It is one thing to find Medea compelling, another to make her art, let alone funerary art. This article faces this complexity head on by examining Medea's visual identity within a sepulchral context. It interrogates her presence on Roman sarcophagi of the mid to late second century CE. The corpus is not insubstantial—nine intact relief panels plus further fragmentary pieces offer ample testament to Medea's presence in the funerary context. Beyond this sphere, Medea's emotionally charged legacy needs no introduction, and her characterisation—outsider, avenger, semi-divine sorceress, victim and murderer—is fleshed out by her capacity to fascinate and repel. Modern scholarship fans the flames, as she remains a popular subject for scholars of Latin and Greek literature, mythology and gender studies.

In contrast, Medea's visual sphere of interest has attracted less in-depth attention. Recent studies have acknowledged the implications of her presence on pots and in freestanding sculpture, and most notably, wall painting is beginning to receive careful treatment. Yet art-historians have been more reluctant to confront Medea within the enclosed and predisposed funerary context. Traditional approaches to mythological sarcophagi more generally have favoured consolado as the dominant mode of commemoration, in which empathy and pothos are paramount and protagonists like Adonis and Endymion seen as positive exempla worthy of analogy and assimilation. The deceased is elevated by association with these figures (an association which is often underlined by the use of a portrait head) and the bereaved reassured by the implied interaction of mundane and heroic, mortal and divine. In this way, desire becomes a gloss for grief and loss is translated as yearning.

At the mid-point of Euripides' Hippolytus, Theseus arrives to find that his wife Phaedra has hanged herself, for a reason yet unknown. As he laments over his wife's corpse, the chorus of Troezenian women offers apparently standard consolation:

The occasional poems of Statius are an enticing field for critics interested in topics like the interaction of Greek and Roman culture or the relationship between public activities like government and private activities like writing poetry. Most recently John Henderson has explored these issues in Statius' poem for the consular Rutilius Gallicus (Siluae 1.4). In this paper I will discuss Siluae 5.3, an epicedion for Statius' own father. Statius uses the occasion of writing the epicedion to celebrate his father's life as a teacher, writer and performer and, by extension, his own life too. In his poem Statius develops a portrait of himself and his father as Greeks in close sympathy with Roman values. Against a backdrop of teaching and performing Greek literature they value above all filial duty and the skills of Roman government. Yet literature does not remain consistently in the background. Because Statius' father was also his teacher and model in literature, Statius as the dutiful son celebrates his father's literary skill and defers to it. By extension, Statius defers also to the subjects of his father's teaching, the famous masters of Greek and Latin literature.

Let me start by quoting a paragraph from a century old edition of Terence, which will serve as a reminder of changes in our background knowledge of both comedy and this particular comic playwright:

There is plenty here to question, if not correct. What does it mean to call Adelphoe more true to human nature? What defines an ‘interesting character’? And do present day readers still find Hecyra the play of least merit? As for the art with which Terence’s plots are unfolded, we still cannot guess how much of this is his own contribution rather than derived from Menander (whose plays were still unknown when this edition was written). However, scholars have used both the evidence given by Terence in the prologues and his commentator Donatus to identify where he has himself innovated in his plots—removing the expository prologues to replace irony with suspense, introducing a second lover and slave into Andria, working a braggart soldier and his parasite into Eunuchus and inserting an abduction scene into the second act of Adelphoe. And yet it was Terence’s immediate predecessor Caecilius whom Varro, most learned of ancient critics, praised for his superior plots. Certainly Terence does not indulge in the extravagance of Plautus, but is this because he is ‘essentially an imitative artist’? On the other hand I would not challenge the editor’s evaluation of his scripts as ‘smooth, consistent and moderate’ or his praise for the playwright’s ‘artistic finish’. Instead I would ask if this is what we want, or ought to want from comedy.

The Plautine corpus contains five letter-plays, comedies in which epistles are composed, delivered and/or read onstage and figure as a major element of the plot. These embedded missives, both stolen and forged ex nihilo, are variously employed by the personae to enact deception and engender duplicitous maneuvering of epistolary conventions, as well as sophisticated jokes about literacy and the dynamics of the medium. The Bacchides features the most elaborate manifestation of this motif. A servus called Chrysalus schemes to facilitate the love affair between his erus minor, Mnesilochus, and the young man's beloved Bacchis. Bacchis resides at Athens with her sister, another hetaera likewise called Bacchis, whose name and affair with the Bacchides’ second adulescens, Pistoclerus, precipitate a misapprehension that causes the play to reset. Under the mistaken impression that Pistoclerus is in love with his own Bacchis, Mnesilochus returns the money Chrysalus has successfully filched from his father, Nicobulus, informing on the tricky slave and undoing his progress. Once the mistake is clarified, Mnesilochus prevails upon Chrysalus to invent a new ruse for getting the girl. The schemer uses epistles to do it all over again. His second round of tricks consists of a two-pronged stratagem in which he forges and delivers a pair of letters to Nicobulus allegedly from Mnesilochus. The missives serve to pilfer not one but two sums of gold from the old man, permitting Chrysalus and his younger master to both purchase Bacchis’ freedom from her contract with the miles and have some fun.

Latin scholarship through the years did not exactly splash out on this pig's whisper of a carmen, 3.22. Stunted notices regularly saw it off as ‘a traditional invocation’—just a coda and confirmation for 3.21—and it is securely penned into the Hellenistic dedicatory ‘Epigrammstypus’. Yet the poet has indeed set t/his tree off against the poetic wood that lines the continui montes of Odes I-III. In that company, the poem primes a cultural reading by framing the interpretivity of its performance against all the other scenarios. As a recurrent event in Roman pedagogy and classical reading-culture to this very moment (these very moments), it pushes us to enact religio as a modality of agent self, mobilised within the social imaginary of formative environment and temporality, and modelling a contribution to the formation of that sociality. The challenge to Horace, as to other ancient magi and musers such as Cicero, Varro and Augustine, is not not the same that faces modern gurus and pundits writing Roman religion: but poetry conscripts its readers for its project, animating the Roman religion it re-invents and activates, obliges the doing and the showing and the telling to fuse in the enthusing, three-in-one.