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In terms of rhetoric, Aeschylus is often considered irrelevant. Many manuals of ancient rhetoric would agree that “disappointingly but perhaps rather predictably, the earliest tragedian, Aeschylus, does not add much to our knowledge of rhetoric” (Usher 1999, 16). Aeschylus’ work with persuasion, specifically in the Oresteia, has been very comprehensively discussed (Halliwell 1997; Buxton 1982; Kennedy 1963); moreover, there have even been some studies on specific rhetorical techniques found in Aeschylus (Navarre 1900).

The recent surge of interest in Greek epigram has brought new attention to the ‘forgotten’ Greek poets who lived and wrote under the Roman empire (Nisbet 2003, e.g.). As a result, we are beginning to understand more clearly the “intertextual matrix of genres” that connected Greek and Latin literary cultures in the early imperial period (Gutzwiller 2005, ). My goal in this paper is to contribute to this growing understanding by reading a selection of Martial’s ekphrastic epigrams with and against those written by the Roman poet’s Greek contemporaries.

In this essay we examine how Juvenal’s eighth satire employs echoes of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and Tacitus’ Agricola in order to bring the contemporary moral and social landscape into sharp relief. Each of these texts leads the reader to imagine noble ancestors who gaze at their descendants, whether from celestial habitations, funerary masks, or statuary (Somn.13, 19; Agr. 46.1-3, Sat. 8.1-18).

Among the basic questions interpreters of Horace Odes 4.12 must wrestle with is whether the Vergilius it addresses is or is not identical to the famous Augustan poet, and how to account for its abrupt shifts in tone from one stanza to the next. This paper supports the view now shared by most scholars (see most recently Thomas 2011, 226-7) that the addressee is indeed the epic poet, and builds upon the suggestion of Clay 2002 that the ode invites poet to come, as if from the realm of the dead, for a drink.

Propertian elegy provides a window into, and ironic commentary on, Rome’s complex relation to Hellenic culture and the phenomenon of “philhellenism” as a consequence of Romanization. Propertius 3.21 and 3.22, poems that make up part of a closing sequence in the lover-poet’s affair with Cynthia, present two of the many faces of Rome’s relationship to Greece and the Hellenized Mediterranean at large—cultural dependency and absorption, commingled with military dominance and expansion.

Propertius’ Elegy 3.6 has been a source of puzzlement and controversy among Classicists for centuries due to difficulties in the manuscript tradition and the complicated voice of the narrator. This paper will apply a narratological approach of the poem in order to argue for the presence of the lover’s voice throughout.

In this paper, I argue that Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis was written in honor of the princess Berenike, daughter of Berenike II and Ptolemy Euergetes in 239 or 238 BCE. This identification makes the Hymn to Artemis Callimachus’ latest datable work and could push back the presumed date of Callimachus’ death, which is usually placed around 240-238 BCE. My argument is based on evidence from a trilingual inscription from 238 BCE known as the Canopus Decree (OGIS 56) as well as intertextual ties to Callimachus’ twelfth Iambus.

Although intertextual and reception studies have largely been the bread and butter of Callimachean scholarship for several decades, comparatively little has been said about the poet’s literary representations of his engagement with actual, physical texts. As the scholar charged with categorizing the Great Library’s collection, and as a poet immersed in the burgeoning book culture of Alexandria, Callimachus lived in an academic environment dependent upon the arrival and availability of physical texts.

Hipparchus’ second century BC commentary on Aratus’s Phaenomena has been acknowledged as the earliest extant ancient commentary, and yet scholarship has neglected its value as a locus for early discussion of reading strategies that we find practiced in the later commentary tradition. Instead, the focus has been on its value for reconstructing the history of astronomical knowledge (Neugebauer 1975; Lloyd 1987; Evans 1998) and, most recently, the commentary’s function of establishing a method of “doing” and “writing” science (Tueller and Macfarlane 2009).

In Book 2 of Apollonius’ Argonautica, as the Argonauts sail past the southeastern coast of the Black Sea, the poet describes the customs of three tribes who inhabit this region: the Mossynoikoi, the Tibarenoi, and the Chalybes (2.1000-1029; cf. 2.351-81). Remarkably, the voyage of the Argonauts past these three tribes anticipates and mirrors another epic journey, this time a historical one: the passage of the Ten Thousand through the lands of these same tribes, as narrated by Xenophon in the Anabasis (5.4-5).