How do words represent images? In what ways do visual signs function like (and unlike) verbal ones? And which medium better captures its represented subjects—pictures that are seen, or poems that are heard, written and read?

These questions stretch the length and breadth of western literary criticism. Already in the Homeric description of Achilles' shield (Il. 18.478-608), we find the respective resources of pictures and poetry pitched against one other, in a passage that plays with the respective visibility of words and the audibility of images. By the late sixth century BCE, the relationship between poetry and painting seems to have been theorised explicitly. Whatever the origins of the maxim attributed to Simonides—‘frequently repeated’, as Plutarch elsewhere describes it—a related sentiment was evidently widespread by the fourth century BCE. When Plato came to theorise the relationship in his Phaedrus, he has Socrates define words and paintings in closely related terms: ‘the creatures that painting begets stand in front of us as though they were living entities,’ Socrates concludes; ‘ask them a question, however, and they maintain a majestic silence’ (ϰαὶ γὰϱ τὰ ἐϰείνης ἔϰγονα ἕστηϰε μὲν ὡς ζῶντα, ἐὰν δ' ἀνέϱῃ τι, σεμνῶς πάνυ σιγᾷ, Pl. Phdr. 275d). Vt pictura poesis—as is painting, so is poetry’: that was how Horace famously summed up the analogy some four centuries later, giving rise to the so-called ‘sister arts’ tradition of conceptualising painting and poetry.

For the Argonauts of Valerius Flaccus the Black Sea and its surrounding lands are an alien world. As Argo leaves the Mediterranean behind and enters the Propontis, we are told that the Minyans begin to gain ‘a view into another world’ (alium prospectus in orbem, 2.628). So too when the ship makes its way through the Bosporus, on the point of entering the Black Sea, we are told that the Greeks ‘see all things new’ (noua cuncta uident, 4.424). Clearly this voyage is presented by Valerius as a major event in world history.

One question which must confront any reader of Valerius’ poem is whether the effects of this voyage should be viewed negatively or positively. Indeed the poem itself poses that question at the outset, through its inclusion of two versions of Argo's destiny: the negative prophecy of Mopsus (1.211-26) and the more reassuring prediction of Idmon (1.234-38). In this paper I propose to consider aspects of this problem through an examination not of Valerius' treatment of the voyage itself, but of its consequences as they are presented in the second half of the poem.

Chthonic scenes have often been considered in terms of their metapoetic potential. The very nature of such episodes, in which protagonists typically encounter characters from the literary-mythological past, arguably encourages a kind of artistic self-consciousness. In Currie's words,

This article examines whether the portrayal of ghosts in the necromancy of Statius Thebaid Book 4 can be read as a meditation on the poem's place in the literary tradition. It views the scene as a commentary on the epic's artistic practices, wherein Statius both acknowledges his predecessors, especially Ovid and Seneca, and asserts his own literary contribution through the appearance of the ambushers depicted earlier in the poem. It then argues that Statius validates his place in the canon by enacting the integration of the ambush scene into literary and Theban history.

We start with a stop. In recent years, long pause has been taken for inquest into the narrative dynamics of ancient literature. How stories are told, by whom, in what order—these have become key questions of narratology, a discipline whose tools most critics would now keep somewhere in their kit. Narratological criticism of poetry has ‘naturally’ drifted towards poems of long narrative span (i.e. hexameter epics). Recently, however, the ‘smaller’ genres have been extended the benefits of narratological civilisation, particularly in the realm of temporality. To take a loaded and leading example, Latin love elegy has been well serviced by narratology of late; what was once considered a genre ‘unfit’ for narrative, let alone narratological study, is now a prime setting for both. But it surprised me that the recent volume Latin Elegy and Narratology all but neglected Ovid's most ‘narrative’ elegy of all: the Fasti. Such an editorial decision may have been motivated by the perception that the Fasti needs no reclamation as a narrative poem; at any rate, the volume's interests lie in the processes of ‘fragmentation’, the way that elegy claims its own non-narrativity as alternative. Whatever the reasoning, I felt that the Fasti's near-relegation from this fascinating volume was something of an oversight. Many of the concerns emerging from the chapters on ‘other’ elegy can be usefully transferred to the Fasti.

In 364 BCE Clearchus, a former student of Isocrates and Plato, staged a coup d'état in his native city of Heraclea Pontica and made himself tyrant. Twelve years later in 352 Clearchus fell victim to a conspiracy led by another former student of Plato and native Heraclean, by the name of Chion. Some centuries later an author whose name we do not know and about whose date and place of residence we can only speculate fixed on this event as the basis of a historical epistolary novel, which comprises a sequence of seventeen letters purportedly written by Chion himself. The novel survives in a number of manuscripts, the majority of which give it the title Letters of Chion. It is with this text that this article is concerned.

The sequence tracks Chion's progress from the time he leaves home in order to pursue his studies at the Academy to two days before the assassination. Most of the letters are addressed to Chion's father Matris, and so fall into the category of ‘letters home’ in which Chion narrates and reflects on his encounters and thoughts at various stages of his sojourn abroad. The final one however is written from Heraclea back to Athens; it is addressed to Plato, and from its tone and content Chion clearly expects of his master that he regard the upcoming assassination as his student's graduation summa cum laude in the field of political ethics. Critical opinion on the Letters is largely unanimous in maintaining that the author shares this view; that the whole sequence is designed to show Chion developing the philosophical acumen needed to make the right decision on the on the ethical issues that confront him and the emotional maturity needed to take decisive political action at the appropriate time.

Two sets of ‘autobiographical’ text that span the transition from the first principate into the second—the Res Gestae Diui Augusti and the poetry of Ovid's exile—offer a rare opportunity to compare the contemporaneous self-portraits of the politician and poet whose careers have evolved in tandem up until this point. Yet where scholars have studied the interactions between these texts, they have tended to overlook the parallels between the self-fashioning strategies deployed by their respective authors in favour of a hunt for corroborating historical data.

A recent book by Michele Lowrie challenges us to treat as part of the same problematic the authorising claims made in texts as ostensibly disparate as these. In this study, Lowrie balances her exploration of how the literary productions of the Augustan era responded to its social and political upheavals, reflecting and refracting the performative powers that were being used to effect political transformation at this time, against the efforts made by Augustus to appropriate the self-fashioning strategies exemplified by the poets. Her focus on how Augustus' own manipulation of the media replicates the modes of authorship practised by his literary contemporaries thus makes the social energies circulating across cultural boundaries in Rome at this time appear as traffic in a two-way street. With this work, then, we have been given a new incentive to treat the authorial names and authorising claims of Augustus and of the ‘Augustan’ poets as a package-a prompt to which I will respond in this article by unpacking the signatures of ‘Naso’ and ‘Augustus’ as a twin pair. I will therefore be looking to the Res Gestae and to the poetry of Ovid's exile in order to see how the authorial signatures of poet and princeps fare alongside each other at this defining moment of the Augustan principate; and will attempt to refine the theoretical framework required in order to plot the ways in which these different types of signature play off one another.

Towards the end of the life of Aesop, probably written in the first century CE, a surprising, bawdy tale appears. I give here the version preserved in Vita W chapter 131, also collected as fabula 386.

(Vit. Aesop. 131W)

In this article I suggest ways in which a gorgeously crafted, colourful, compelling 20th century painting of an abandoned Ariadne highlights both her tragic and comic presence in classical literary representations. Joseph South-all's 1925-6 work Ariadne in Naxos (tempera on linen, 83.5 × 101.6 cm), reproduced below, can be viewed in all its glory in the Birmingham City Art Gallery (bequeathed by the artist's widow, Anne Elizabeth, in 1948) but it was featured to fine effect in the 2007 exhibition The Parrot in Art: From Dürer to Elizabeth Butterworth, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham. It was in this psittacine (psittaceous?) context that I first encountered Ariadne's parrot so the bird perhaps loomed larger in the painting than it might as a stand-alone Southall on its home ground in the Gallery.