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.

The brief story of Tiresias’ punishment in the third book of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Met. 3.316–38) becomes a privileged site for mapping the different ways readers can reinterpret episodes of the poem in the light of the rest of Ovid's corpus. Tiresias, the first human uates of the poem, who is punished with blindness for voicing what he should have kept silent, can be included among those punished artists who double the poet in the Metamorphoses: while Tiresias is condemned for having voiced his knowledge of both sexes, Ovid is exiled for giving amatory advice to, and therefore knowing, both men and women. Thus the Tiresias episode reads as a pendant to that of Actaeon in the same book (the latter explicitly likened to Ovid's fate in Tristia 2.103–8), with the pair suggesting a veiled allegory of the carmen and error that caused Ovid's exile.

Caesar's visit to Troy has always been something of an enigma. Historically, the episode is unattested. Caesar wanders through a congeries of sites at Troy ranging from Ajax's grave on the Rhoetium promontory at its beginning to Priam's Herceian altar at the end. Numerous interpretations have been offered. Bruère has argued for Aeneas' tour through the future site of Rome in Aeneid 8 as a backdrop. Ahl has noted the connection between the ruins of Italy described in Bellum Ciuile (B.C.) 7 and the ruins of Troy in B.C. 9. Rome/Italy and Troy merge in essence as vanishing fabulae, which the poet keeps alive. Zwierlein sees Caesar's visit as modeled on Alexander the Great's visit nearly three hundred years earlier. Caesar through this scene is established as a destroyer of empires, inferior only to Alexander. Ormand stresses Caesar as an authoritative reader of the ruins of Troy, where Caesar reads the Aeneid instead of the Iliad. Rossi similarly focuses on Caesar as reading Troy's ruins to the advantage of the Julian dynasty. Gergo has opened up the passage with the correct observation that Lucan has in mind Aeneas’ katabasis in Aeneid 6. But the relationship between the brief tour at Troy and Aeneid 6 is both more comprehensive and precise. Indeed this essay will present a systematic interpretation of Caesar's tour as a parallel to Aeneid 6 in its entirety, a parallel to which Lucan most likely does not give his character Caesar access.

This paper discusses how Roman visual culture might be useful for deciphering the ecphrastic passages of the ancient Greek novel. Whereas ecphrasis has been one of the blossoming topics in the field, the examination of novelistic ecphrasis alongside particular works of art is still a desideratum. As a test case I will use Xenophon of Ephesus’ ecphrasis of the bed canopy depicting Ares’ and Aphrodite's embrace, in the Ephesiaca, a novel that might have been written as early as AD 65. In what follows I will argue that the scene described on the canopy would have stimulated a variety of intertexts, both literary and visual, in the minds of the imperial audience: that is, Xenophon's reader would have been encouraged to recall not just Demodocus’ song of the love of Ares and Aphrodite but also the idealised Roman version of the myth, which was so frequently depicted on frescoes and mosaics in Roman villas in the first century. I then explore Xenophon's ‘interpretatio Romana’ through the adaptations of the Ares and Aphrodite myth found in Plutarch and Lucian.

Paulinus of Nola might not be very widely read today, even among professional classicists, but he remains the most popular Latin poet in his adopted hometown. At the Christian basilica complex in Cimitile, near Nola, where Paulinus founded a community for ascetic devotees of the cult of St. Felix in the late fourth century, his poetry is still recited publicly on a number of festive days each year. On a recent visit to Cimitile, I found myself in the audience at one of these narrazioni, which had been organized as a prelude to the Festa dei Gigli, held annually in Paulinus’ honor on June 22. For a group of local residents, gathered around the tomb of Felix in the basilica uetus, an actor read passages from an Italian translation of Paulinus’ carmina, which were then subjected to theological exposition by the Vicar General of the Diocese of Nola. Even now, therefore, Paulinus’ poems, with their straightforward diction and everyday subject matter, are seen as an appropriate vehicle for inspiring religious devotion in the lay community. It is not difficult to imagine a similar scene at Cimitile when Paulinus himself was leading the festivities, 1600 years ago. Still, this modern recitation raises questions about how the Natalicia—that is, the series of poems he composed for Felix's feast day each January 14—were performed in their original context. Presumably, Paulinus would have delivered the Natalicia on his own, without the assistance of actors—but would he have recited all 858 verses of Natalicium 13 (for example), or would he only have presented excerpts? Would the readings have been supplemented by any commentary—theological, or even literary?