148

Stasis was an important category of analysis for the ancient Greeks (e.g. Gehrke, Loraux, Kalimtzis, Gray). Textual and epigraphic sources designate a relatively small number of conflicts as staseis explicitly (e.g. Alc. 130, Thuc. 3.82-85, Arist. Pol. 5.1302b25-33). They also document a larger number that may or may not qualify as staseis, depending on how broadly one interprets the term (e.g. Hdt. 9.5, Dem. 15.14-15, SEG 57.576). In this paper, I develop a criterial framework to determine which of these ambiguous cases do qualify.

Allusion to Ajax has long been identified as a vector for the introduction of “further voices,” particularly voices questioning Aeneas’ leadership, into the Aeneid (Lyne, Panoussi). Most notably, in Aeneid 12, Vergil deploys an allusion to Ajax’s tragic tradition that shows Aeneas “as playing the role of the tragic Ajax” in a way that is “significant, and disturbing,” and that undermines the strain of the epic that portrays Aeneas as a selfless, dispassionate leader (Lyne).

Euripides’ Hippolytus has received only occasional or passing attention as tragic source material for Aeneid IV (Hardie (1997), Harrison (1973, 1989)). I argue that Euripides’ play forms a significant intertext for Aeneid IV and provides a framework for Dido’s principal ethical dilemma (15ff). Dido, Anna, and Aeneas map allusively onto the figures of the Hippolytus, and Euripides’ illustration of Prodicus’ Virtue and Vice gives Vergil an ethical foundation on which to set the action of his epyllion.

This paper will argue that Virgil’s use of pastoral elements in the Aeneid draws on tragedy to create a destabilizing incongruity between readers’ expectations and epic outcomes. In the Eclogues, peaceful shepherds devote themselves to song; in the Aeneid, in contrast, shepherds enter the epic action at crucial junctures with catastrophic results, culminating in war between Aeneas’ Trojans and the Italians with whom they are fated to join in a new nation.

Tragic Poetics in Vergil’s Aeneid

It is commonly noted that Cicero “never published” the De Temporibus Suis, the three book epic about his exile and return on which he was working in the mid-50s (e.g. Courtney; Knox; Volk). Proposals for what might have replaced the abandoned poem are less forthcoming. Given Cicero’s fervent desire for commemoration (Fam. 5.12), it is unlikely that he would set the work aside with nothing to take its place.

In the second book of Tusculan Disputations, Cicero adduces and translates from Greek tragedy three examples of suffering caused by pain—Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Heracles and Aeschylus’ Prometheus—only to relegate these shameful representations to literature and advocate, instead, the tolerance of pain. Nevertheless, each tragic hero resembles Cicero in his suffering. He is an exile, like Philoctetes, and a foe to tyrants, like Prometheus.

This paper reexamines Cicero’s De consulatu suo from the contemporary critical understanding that the poetic works “gave Cicero the opportunity to write and disseminate a public persona” (Steel 1995, 19) and, in turn, forever reshaped Roman epic poetry through their innovative generic qualities (Gee 2013; Volk 2013).

In this paper I argue that Cicero’s de Consulatu suo, an auto-biographical epic poem that survives now only in fragments, was inadequate as a monument to Cicero’s role in the Catilinarian conspiracy and did not allow Cicero to become part of the exemplary tradition of the conspiracy.

By any metric, Cicero wrote across an astonishing range of genres. Quickly canonized as the master of Roman prose, he did indeed master almost all its ancient facets: oratory, rhetoric, dialogues, treatises, letters. For ancient readers, trained to believe that authors were naturally disposed towards a single genre (Rep. 394e-395b; Farrell 2003), Cicero’s movement between prose genres was unusual enough, but his composition of—and pride in—works of poetry was far more unsettling.