In just over a decade, interest in Xenophon's Symposium has risen dramatically. No longer the poor relation to its author's more popular Socratic works or to Plato's dialogue of the same name, it now merits scholarly attention on a regular basis. However, despite an increased sensitivity to the author's literary and philosophical strategies, modern readings of the text are informed above all by the presence of Socrates. Because the philosopher is assumed to be Xenophon's primary interest, the Symposium is viewed as an apology for the radical philosopher or a promotion of his ideas and methods. This perception derives in part from an old-fashioned dismissal of Xenophon as a poor man's Plato, intellectually incapable of anything more than biography. But it also relates to the work's longstanding association with Xenophon's other Socratic works, namely the Apology, Memorabilia, and Oeconomicus. Since scholarship on Xenophon began, the four texts have been treated as a unit, bound in purpose by their depiction of Socrates. However, although the philosopher certainly features prominently in these four texts, each work is structurally distinct. In the Apology, the narrator invites Hermogenes to replay his final conversation with Socrates and to describe the philosopher's performance in court, in order to correct inadequate understandings of Socrates' choice of death over life. By contrast, the Memorabilia depicts Socrates in extended disputation with many interlocutors on a wide variety of subjects as he seeks to lead them towards virtue and, in the narrator's opinion, demonstrates himself to be kalos kagathos (literally ‘beautiful and good’). Then again, the Oeconomicus records two exchanges, one between Socrates and Critoboulus and another between Socrates and Ischomachus, and juxtaposes their arguments one against the other. And finally, the Symposium locates Socrates within a lively symposion (drinking party) at the house of Callias, son of Hipponicus, in Athens during 422 BCE. Here, the philosopher often directs the conversation. However, his drinking companions also participate freely in the performances and conversations that take place. In short, Xenophon's four Socratic texts all have their own dramatic contexts and conceits, with different structures and ambitions, and different roles for Socrates. Yet even amongst them, the Symposium's dramatic staging of a vibrant and varied symposion particularly stands out.

This paper argues for a combined reading of Odes 1.3, the propempticon for Virgil, and Odes 1.22, the Lalage ode. The arrangement of the first book of Odes places 1.3 in structural relation to 1.22; and the appearance of scelus, ‘sin’, in the penultimate verse of 1.3 and the initial line of 1.22 activates a thematic affiliation that has gone unexamined in the scholarship. I take the poet's use of scelus as my starting point, analysing in what follows the ways in which Virgil and Horace are both positioned in the drama of 1.3 as practitioners of scelus of a kind that associates them with Prometheus, Daedalus and Hercules. Then I press the question of how such a depiction makes sense, given the ways in which these mythological exemplars are shown to be transgressors of natural boundaries. I then turn to 1.22 for an answer otherwise not forthcoming in 1.3, where scelus reappears in a poem about the power of song. I argue that the transgression Virgil and Horace practise in 1.3 is poetic composition itself—a sin Horace himself commits in the very odes that dramatise it, but whose staging extols the purity and integrity of a kind of singing that is prior to the concatenation of word, metre and music that go into the composing of any poetry. I see in these odes, then, a meditation on the ways in which poets cross back and forth between a boundary that separates originary song from the polished songs of poetry that it initiates—surely a topic that interested, and vexed, Horace for all of his career, and about which these odes have something fundamental to tell.

The opening poem of Propertius Book 4 famously contains a programmatic statement which presents not amor (love or desire)—the staple of Roman elegy through the 20s and into the 10s BCE—as the ruling theme of the collection, but Roman aetiology:

Roma, faue, tibi surgit opus, date candida ciues
omina, et inceptis dextera cantet auis!
sacra diesque canam et cognomina prisca locorum.
(4.1.67-69)

Rome, lend your support. This work arises for you. Citizens, grant bright
omens—and may the bird of augury sing favourably!
Of rites and days I will sing, and of the ancient names of places.

The focus on Roman origins in poem 1 itself specifically involves a comparison between the early history of Rome (the mythic past) and the poet's present (what we have come to know as ‘Augustan’ Rome). This comparison is introduced in the very opening lines of the poem:

hoc quodcumque uides, hospes, qua maxima Roma est,
ante Phrygem Aenean collis et herba fuit;
atque ubi Nauali stant sacra Palatia Phoebo,
Euandri profugae procubuere boues.
fictilibus creuere deis haec aurea templa,
nec fuit opprobrio facta sine arte casa.
(4.1.1-6)

Whatever you see here, stranger, where now is great Rome,
was hills and grassland before the coming of Phrygian Aeneas.
Where the Palatine shrine of Naval Phoebus now stands,
the cattle of Evander once lay down as refugees.
These golden temples grew from clay gods,
and there was no shame in an artless dwelling.

Anthropologists and sociologists have demonstrated the vital role which myths of origin, such as the poet here purports to represent, play in the formation, maintenance and expression of ethnicity in many cultures, ancient and modern. A.D. Smith even goes so far as to call such myths the sine qua non of ethnic identity. It seems reasonable to suggest, then, that the representation of Roman origins projects Roman identity. Indeed, some scholars have recently argued for this in the case of Propertius Book 4. What is more, as I will argue here, Propertius Book 4 accentuates the complexities inherent in the particular picture of Roman identity which Roman myth transmits, and dramatises them in such ways as to challenge the unitariness of that identity at the very moment of its assertion.

In Marcus Pacuvius' play Antiopa, the title character is reunited with her twin sons Amphio and Zethus, whom she had previously abandoned on Mt Cithaeron. Such is her state of unkemptness that Zethus, it appears, did not recognise her:

inluuie corporis
et coma prolixa impexa conglomerata atque horrida
(Pac. Antiopa 13f. W)

In dirtiness of body
And hair unkempt, matted, compacted and bristled.

Many of Pacuvius' plays deal with mother-son recognitions, often at crux moments of incestuous marriage or unholy kin murder; here it is the physicality of dirt that perverts the perceptions of the mind. The language wallows in this filth, with asyndeton and assonance and homoeoteleuton and vowel elision that runs all the adjectives into each other, such that their pronunciation smacks of the hairball, spluttering for breath, a noisy mastication with an unpleasant grating from those last staccato syllables. The focus on the physical accumulation of detritus betrays a psychological distaste and an inability to unravel a personality and identity from behind this rotting palimpsest of decay. The language reflects this distaste, compacting thought and knowledge in a filth unspeakable. Thus we might conjecture that this is even a sublime dirt(!), in the sense that Burke implies, one that terrifies, stuns and shuts down logical capacity. The awkward convolutions of the language mimic this inability to comprehend, and actually recognise, this awesome picture of the unwashed. Pacuvius thus uses linguistic ingenuity effectively to convey psychological disturbance by foregrounding its manifestation through a distorted apprehension of a physical phenomenon, one that reveals its very distortion as the language is matted and glued back into itself, denying the sort of clarity that recognition requires.

Over the past twenty-five years numerous studies have addressed the theme of sacrifice in Virgil's Aeneid. In 1993 the second chapter (‘Sacrifice and Substitution’) of Philip Hardie's The Epic Successors of Virgil broadened the scope of the topic to include post-Virgilian epic as well, but since then little attention has been paid to sacrifice in the case of at least one of Virgil's epic successors, Silius Italicus. The aim of the present paper is to narrow this gap in the existing literature by examining the evidence for a particular form of sacrifice, a kind of ‘self-sacrifice’ known as the deuotio, in the Punica. Although Silius' epic ideally requires a more thorough and comprehensive study of sacrifice than what is offered here, it is nevertheless hoped that the present study may lead to further inquiry into this aspect of the poem and may help, more generally, to disabuse readers of the notion that its poet is uninterested in or un-knowledgeable about matters of a religious nature.

For well over a decade Pliny's Historia Naturalis has been recognised as a work which deals with moral questions and imperial culture as much as (perhaps more than) science and nature. These reassessments of the Elder Pliny move away from the disdainful and anachronistic judgments of his writings as ill-judged, naïve and unscientific, and towards a more productive analysis of the Historia Naturalis' symbolic significance and coherence within its first century Roman context. Mary Beagon finds that Pliny is representative of a particular first century ‘emphasis on humanity and its needs and aspirations’, while commenting that it is at this period that mundus and kosmos (Latin and Greek respectively for ‘world’ or ‘universe’) take on the specific meaning of ‘the inhabited world’. The coherence that Beagon finds in Pliny's work is therefore concentrated around the relationship between nature and humankind. It is this relationship, and the symbolic value given to natural phenomena, which allows so much of the Historia Naturalis to act as a cultural commentary on contemporary society. For example, Beagon, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Trevor Murphy identify luxuria (‘luxury’) as a key term in Pliny, and insist not only upon his aversion to this concept, but also on his transcendence of the traditional Roman diatribe against decadence and extravagance. For Beagon, Pliny's objection to luxury is partly determined by contemporary political and economic factors, as she claims that Pliny's stance mirrors that of Vespasian, who was attempting to rebuild the state's finances after Nero had squandered them. More particularly, luxuria is the antithesis of uita (‘life’), to the extent that it corrupts and distorts life, leading to passivity and desidia (‘lethargy’)—the exact opposite of the programmatic statement found in the Historia Naturalis Preface 19: uita uigilia est (‘life is being awake’).

The imperial history play Octavia, transmitted among the corpus of Senecan drama, has suffered from uncertainty about its date, author, literary genre and intended audience as regards its appreciation in modern criticism. Although the majority of scholars will agree nowadays that the play was not written by Seneca himself, there is still a certain degree of disagreement about its literary genre and date. Anyway, such scholarly quibbles seem not to have affected poets and composers in the early modern era: they recognised the high dramatic potential of the story of Nero and his love relationships in 62 CE along with the involvement of the historical character and writer Seneca.

Indeed, this phase in imperial history was apparently quite popular in Italian and German opera of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The earliest of a number of operatic treatments of the emperor Nero (also the first opera presenting a historical topic) and arguably the best known today is an Italian version: L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea) to a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello (1598-1659) and music attributed to Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), first produced in Giovanni Grimani's ‘Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo’ in Venice during the carnival season of 1643. Among the latest operas on this subject is a German version, which is hardly known and rarely performed today: Die Römische Unruhe. Oder: Die Edelmütige Octavia. Musicalisches Schau-Spiel (The Roman Unrest. Or: The Magnanimous Octavia. Musical Play) by the librettist Barthold Feind (1678-1721) and the composer Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739), first performed in the ‘Oper am Gänsemarkt’ in Hamburg on 5 August 1705. In this period German opera was generally influenced by Italian opera, but at the same time there were attempts, particularly in Hamburg, to establish a typically German opera.

In the Punica, Silius Italicus narrates the events of the Second Punic War from the rise of Hannibal and his siege at Saguntum to the rise of Scipio Africanus and his triumph over Carthage. The importance of Scipio in the final books of the Punica is foreshadowed by events earlier in the poem; these early appearances of Scipio emphasise not only his future heroism and divine favour, but also his youth and immaturity. Although a development of his character can be traced through the Punica, the figure of Scipio is complex and contradictory. There are two significant episodes that bring Scipio into the forefront of the epic action—his nekyia in Book 13 and his choice at the crossroads between Virtus and Voluptas in Book 15. These events are critical in understanding Scipio's role in the Punica and as such have already received considerable scholarly attention. My focus will be on Punica 13 and Scipio's trip to the underworld, but rather than analyse this passage in terms of Scipio's development and heroism, I would like to make a number of connections between Punica 13 and passages in the first half of the epic, and, in doing so, suggest a somewhat different reading of Silius' presentation of Scipio that looks back to the disasters leading up to Cannae, rather than ahead to Rome's triumph at the end of the epic. I will begin, therefore, with a discussion of what bearing the structure of the Punica has on its meaning and suggest different uses of symbols and imagery between the two halves of the poem, before turning to Scipio in the second half of the epic.