The study of off-stage characters—by which I mean human characters with a physical presence within the world and setting of the play, but who never actually appear on-stage—is a critical angle seldom applied to Greek tragedy. I hope to show that Euripides' Hecuba particularly repays this unorthodox approach. Its on-stage characters are complemented by crucially important offstage figures, and I shall focus on the four who are of greatest importance for Hecuba: Achilles, Neoptolemus, Cassandra and Helen. My investigation will be structured around the following questions:

• • What traditions were associated with these characters before Hecuba, and what resulting preconceptions might Euripides' audience have held about them?

• • How are these characters represented by the on-stage characters, and with what effect?

• • What is the symbolic effect of the absence of these characters?

Taken together, the answers to these questions will provide a new reading of Hecuba, revealing how Euripides' choices over which characters to feature offstage and how to represent them contribute to the overall themes of the tragedy. My exploration will lead to me engage with many issues of interpretation, both literary and textual. I hope to show that Euripides' decision to keep a character off-stage is as deliberate and strategic as the decision to feature one prominently on-stage.

It has become a commonplace of Statian criticism that, if Thebaid invokes Virgil as model, then Achilleid sees Statius using Ovid. Important work has been done in this field, most notably by Rosati and Hinds: Rosati has explored the relationships between Achilleid and several Ovidian texts, while Hinds has insisted on the centrality of Metamorphoses to understanding Achilleid: ‘it is an epic: a markedly Ovidian, markedly metamorphic epic’. This essay aims to extend that discussion through consideration of the differences between Statius and his Ovidian models in his handling of a number of key episodes.

The most obvious connection between Ovid's works and Statius' Achilleid is the story of Achilles' rape of Deidamia, for these are the only extant classical poets to narrate the story at any length. That Statius' account actually alludes to Ovid's account in Art of Love is clear. For example, both poets use marked alliteration when describing Achilles' violence:

(Ars 1.699f.)

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.

The sixth book of Silius Italicus' Punica opens with the aftermath of the battle at lake Trasimene: the victory of the Carthaginians has been total. An analeptic narrative on the adventures of Regulus in Libya during the First Punic War occupies a large portion of this book (62-551). Regulus' son, Serranus, wounded after the battle at Trasimene, finds refuge at the house of his father's faithful companion, Marus. In a flash-back narrative, Marus relates the killing of a serpent at the river Bagrada (140-293), the capture of Regulus and his mission to Rome (299-402), Marcia's reaction to her husband's uncompromising attitude, Regulus' speech to the Senate (403-520), and his final return to Carthage, resulting in his death (521-51).

The poet brings several innovations into his account in Book 6 in comparison to pre-Silian tradition. He introduces three persons around the figure of Regulus who are otherwise unknown or remain anonymous in other sources. The first is Serranus, Regulus' son. Although Regulus' son must have participated in the battle at Trasimene, this fabricated Serranus is called iuuenis (‘young man’, 101, 415) and flore nitens primo (‘in the flower of his youth’, 65), references which further complicate historical chronology. Another Silian innovation is Marus, Regulus' faithful companion during his tribulations in Africa. His presence fits into the scheme of Silius' portrayal of Serranus' ‘education’ by Marus, who will tell the story of Regulus' heroic adventures in Africa and Rome. Generational continuity would be guaranteed through the precepts of an older man. And finally, Silius gives Marcia herself a substantial role.

Catullus' Carmen 64 unfurls a narrative tapestry rich in meaning and allusion. Its account of the marriage of Thetis and Peleus recalls the Trojan cycle, the Iliad and the Cypria in particular, and offers a response to and program for epic. Although Catullus' Alexandrian poem revels in its own retrospection and nostalgia, Carmen 64 expresses the futility of attempting to achieve any true νόστος (‘return’) to the dominating yet foreclosed world of Homeric epic. Carmen 64 reveals new perspectives in which traditional epic elements are reversed, reordered or juxtaposed in unexpected ways; these challenge received notions such as the admissible constituents of epic background, foreground, narrative and digression; the definitions of heroic deeds; and the implications of speech and writing.

In the course of this revisionary project Carmen 64 avails itself of a systematic imagery involving cloths, clothes and textiles that are viewed and accessed by the poem's characters throughout to convey or receive knowledge: messages that are ‘written’ or ‘read’ or even ‘missed’ (as in the case of Aegeus seeing the forgetful Theseus' sails) in a variety of textile mediums: the uestis uariata of the central ekphrasis, Ariadne's clothes, her thread in the labyrinth, Theseus' sails, the threads of the Parcae, the thread to measure the neck of the newlywed Thetis—all these inform a text that is unified from Carmen 64's textiles. Recollection and representation are central to much fiction—μνῆσαι (‘remember’) is Priam's first word to Achilles at Iliad 24.486—and Carmen 64 reaches far back into memory to cull myths from the epic repertoire to weave into its fabric.

Discussions of Tacitus' use of theatricality or dramatic episodes are nothing new, but these studies have primarily focused on the Neronian books, where they are seen as particularly appropriate. The notions of performativity and pageantry, however, pervade all of Tacitus' historical writing, even in places where they have not previously been sought. I focus in this article on how Germanicus' conduct while quelling the Rhine mutiny of 14 CE dangerously assimilates him to the German soldiers insofar as both treat the uprising as an opportunity to display their most flamboyant behaviours in an attempt to frame the mutiny in their own terms. I see each party as staging performances designed to carry weight with their audience and so render the actors' claims to truth more persuasive.

But first a distinction must be drawn between acts that are merely extravagant (e.g. the ‘dramatic gesture’) and those which, whether extravagant or not, happen in front of a group that is thereby constituted as the audience to a performance; only the latter will be of interest here. Nearly all forms of public discourse in Roman society aim at persuasion, and the scholarship on the subject often encourages slippage between dramatic, theatrical and performative acts: not everything that happens on a stage is performative, and not everything done with an eye to effect is theatrical. I therefore, with some hesitation, use throughout this piece the designation ‘performative’ to indicate those behaviours reminiscent of things that happen on stage (or, sometimes, in oratorical contexts), and which, because of their already familiar nature, seek to construct the audience to them specifically as a passive audience, i.e. to create a ‘script’ for the situation that requires a certain kind of response. So, to take an example from Old Comedy, the use in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae by the character Euripides of scenes taken from his own tragic plots seeks to persuade the audience-within-the-play that his relative must be rescued; it is thus both performative and persuasive.

My purpose in this article is straightforward, to counter some misconceptions about two of Statius' poems, Silu. 2.1, his consolatory poem for the death of the twelve-year old Glaucias, and Silu. 2.7, his consolatory poem for the death of the poet Lucan. These are the first and last poems of Book 2. Poems of lament and consolation constitute the majority of the poems of Statius' Siluae. Yet these poems have been generally dismissed as wearisomely rhetorical and have been largely overlooked in the critical literature about consolationes as they endorse lamentation, elaborate upon it, and thus run counter to philosophical strictures against overt grief. Issues of class also surely play a role in their dismissal as trivial poems. Unlike Augustan poems of lament—for instance Ovid's poem on the death of Tibullus—two of the poems in Book 2 mourn a child of low birth and a young slave (Silu. 2.1 and Silu. 2.6). A proper understanding of the social occasions and circumstances in which Silu. 2.1 and Silu. 2.7 are embedded, however, will show that they can offer valuable insight into contemporary Flavian society. Such an understanding moreover can point the way to a fresh literary appreciation of these poems, although that is not the chief aim of this article.

Iamblichus' Babylonian Tales, whose extravagant adventures of female homoeroticism, extreme violence and mistaken identity sit uneasily alongside those told in the so-called ‘ideal’ Greek novels, is a work largely ignored by scholars of the ancient novel, or relegated to discussions of ‘fringe literature’ We are not helped by the fact that the novel survives only in fragments and through the critical summary by the Byzantine scholar Photius, in his collection of epitomes called Bibliotheca. This article attempts a fresh analysis of Babylonian Tales, taking as its starting point the sexual relationship between two of its female characters and moving on to discuss the politics of the novel and its self-positioning in relation to Rome and Roman conquest. It argues that Babylonian Tales challenges some of the rather neat stories that are currently told about the Greek novels, and that moving it from the ‘fringe’ to the centre might radically alter how we think about the genre.