This chapter focuses on the episode of Hippolytus and Egeria in Ov. Met. 15.479–551, and particularly on the relation between the content of the two stories told (Hippolytus’ death and rebirth; Egeria’s metamorphosis) and the space in which they are told. The inner story, recounted by Hippolytus himself, involves the characters (Hippolytus, Theseus, Phaedra) in a well-known plot, with a tragic outcome and a Greek setting. The frame of the story is the Latian wood of Aricia, in which the rites in honour of Diana/Lucina, goddess of birth and fertility, take place: here we have no story of violence and death, but of rebirth (Hippolytus/ Virbius), devotion and fidelity (Numa and Egeria). The place rewrites the destinies of the characters involved: the space of Rome is the one in which Ovid celebrates not (only) the political power of Augustus, whose mother comes from Aricia, but more and most prominently the cultural power that Augustan poetry has to give life to a new mythology of regeneration and transformation of old forms (Hippolytus) into new ones (Virbius).

B 115 is generally regarded as the reference fragment of Empedocles’ doctrine of rebirth, being the place where he presents himself as a god banished from the divine community as a result of certain crimes, sent into exile on our earth and here condemned to be reborn as all kinds of mortal beings. In Chapter 1 I argue that, contrary to the vast majority of editions of Empedocles’ fragments, B 115 belongs to the incipit of his physical poem. The chapter mostly focuses on the Strasbourg papyrus and the evidence it uncovered that is relevant to the question of the character and content of the physical poem. After questioning the basis on which scholars have placed B 115 within the Purifications, I will show that the Strasbourg papyrus provides strong proof for its allocation within On Nature. The relocation of this central fragment thus sets the stage for a re-evaluation of Empedocles’ physical system in its entirety, by indicating that it consists of mythical and religious themes in synergy with more strictly physical principles.

As Christianity continued to transition from school churches to the monepiscopate, the role of hiddenness and openness in Christian teaching become an increasingly contested issue. Three writings associated with the so-called Hippolytan school – the Traditio apostolica, the Commentarium in Canticum Canticorum, and De Christo et antichristo – shed light on the tensions between hiddenness and secrecy in baptismal instruction.

Stoic virtue relies on the judgment of internal impressions. This aesthetic and ethical process echoes Shakespeare’s theatrical art, which frequently focuses on its own artifice and capacity to affect reality. While early modern dramatists frequently mocked Stoicism as stuffy and impractical, a closer look at fundamental texts by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius reveals their interest not in attaining perfect sagacity but instead in the day-to-day reality of attempting to live better. Stoicism, thought of in this way, becomes what Pierre Hadot calls “a way of life,” and allows us to read Shakespeare’s drama more charitably as a mode of philosophical exercise. This chapter surveys Stoic understandings of virtue before turning to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to examine how the play’s testing the imaginative powers of theatricality mirrors the Stoic’s internal processes of judgment. Drawing on key Stoic texts as well as the 1581 translation of Seneca’s Hippolytus, a source for Midsummer, I propose that the play reveals the potential for imaginative impressions to become mere fantasy — but also admits to their power over our consciousness. While this may appear anti-Stoic, Midsummer in fact mounts its apology for the imagination by practicing mercy, a key Stoic virtue.

The Introduction first sets the stage by inviting the reader to consider a few Roman sarcophagi in depth. Serving as an introduction to these compelling objects, this also reveals just how odd it was that deities and mythic heroes came to be expelled from their surface decoration in the third century. It then contextualizes that oddity through an overview of main developments within Roman sarcophagus production from the second through the fourth centuries. The book’s scope and terms are then addressed, and its structure laid out.

Chapter 4 discusses autonomy (or its lack) as a key element in characters’ fictional ontology. It divides the topic into three themes - freedom, revenge, and suicide - each of which plays a vital role in Seneca’s dual concept of personal and fictional independence. The first section addresses Stoic isolationism as an assertion of individual sovereignty and demonstrates that this trait is shared by Seneca’s sapiens and tragic characters alike. The second section examines revenge as, simultaneously, an amplification and limitation of characters’ autonomy. Finally, the chapter considers Senecan suicide as an expression of free agency in the midst of misfortune, charting its importance across both the prose and the dramatic works.

Chapter 3 charts the prevalence of physical description in Senecan tragedy, arguing that this is not a symptom of Rezitationsdrama, but a consequence of Seneca’s interest in physiognomy and pathogonomy, both of which use bodily signals to evaluate the quality of people’s internal psychological / emotional / mental states. Like coherence and exemplarity, physiognomic analysis unites the quasi-personal and purely fictional elements of character, on the one hand by encouraging audiences to infer a psychology behind characters’ surfaces, and on the other by focusing attention on textual signs and symbols. This chapter discusses the confluence of bodily and mental states in Seneca’s Phaedra and Oedipus.

Classical scholars have often singled out the miscellany as a very open-ended genre that requires active participation from the reader, who is called to miscellanise, to select what is beneficial to his or her situation in the moment. Clement, meanwhile, has been cast either as a mere conduit of the divine logos delivering a fixed message, or as a sophist seeking to legitimise his wares in the marketplace of competing philosophies. Implicit in these portrayals of Clement’s authorial voice is a theological question of the relation between author, reader, text and God. By juxtaposition and comparison with imperial miscellanies, we see that Clement reinterpreted this relationship in light of his Christian spirituality and theology. He attributes his vocation to ‘the Saviour himself’ and portrays the reading and writing of notes as a spiritual and ascetic practice, shaped in light of eucharistic devotion and a psalmic prayer. He situates it within the life-generating tradition of the apostles and depicts his own, exemplary journey of discovery culminating in miscellany-making in chaste love, imaged as rest with the bee that anthologises the scriptural meadow in Egypt.