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Pliny’s Cultured Nightingale: NH 10.81-84

In this paper I seek to bring a fresh perspective to an old debate in Roman social history, namely, how successful the descendants of ex-slaves were in reaching their municipal council of decurions. This type of social mobility represented the pinnacle of honors in the Roman municipal context. Although local families with a long aristocratic pedigree often controlled the council and the highest offices for generations, demographic and social realities also made it necessary to recruit new members ‘from below,’ including the families of prominent local freedmen.

I will argue that an examination of dactylic hexameters across the comic corpus reveals a consistent relationship between comic poets as a group and epic. Revermann and Silk, however, have argued that Aristophanes is the exception to comedy’s relationship with epic, basing this assessment of epic’s influence on the titles of lost plays by other playwrights. Instead of considering epic characters in titles, I will use the meter of epic to assess how comedy interacts with the genre.

The inscrutable temporality of Ovid’s Ibis has received little scholarly attention, though it is one of the most remarkable features of his work. In this paper, I argue that Ovid skews the contours of time in the poem in order to enact a cognitive dissonance that is endemic to exilic experience.

Horace’s Carmen Saeculare is often viewed as an entity unto itself, generically distinct from the rest of the Horatian corpus. As a result, when Horace pauses briefly in Epist. 2.1 to consider choral song’s place in Latin literary history, scholars have argued that Horace is likely talking about his own secular hymn, performed in 17 BCE [Hornblower et al. 2014: 395, Lyne 1995: 195 n.7]. In this passage, Epist. 2.1.132-8, Horace assigns to the chorus a variety of apotropaic and favor-winning functions (2.1.134-6).

Book 17 of Silius Italicus’ Punica brings the poem to a close with a striking juxtaposition. The victorious general Scipio Africanus leads a triumphal parade through the streets of Rome, and the final image of the parade (17.644: imago) is an effigy of Hannibal fleeing over the fields of Zama (643-4). I argue that Silius is toying with long-held Greco-Roman associations linking funeral and triumphal processions (e.g. Sen. Consol. ad Marc. 3.1: funus triumpho simillimum; Flower, 107-9; Beard, 284-6).

Consideration of violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses has most often been within the context of his rape narratives, and my own inquiry began with a question much like that of Amy Richlin, who, in the introduction of an important article, “Reading Ovid's Rapes,” says: “we must ask how we are to read texts, like those of Ovid, that take pleasure in violence” (1992, 158). Both my point of departure and conclusions are rather different, however, and I see this pleasure as part of a larger pattern of poetic attention to violence, lack of control, and the victim’s awareness of the loss.

More Latian Anagrams (Aen. 8.314-36)

The pre-socratic Empedocles is widely acknowledged as an important model for Lucretius’ philosophical poetry, but his description of this predecessor (DRN 1.716-733) has played little role in the scholarship on form and content. This paper bridges that gap by identifying two layers of didactic persona in this passage, showing how a philosopher’s stern lesson is intertwined with a poet’s playful commentary on literary style.

Much recent work has considered how Greek speakers of the early Roman empire reinterpreted canonical classical texts to develop and assert their own identities (Whitmarsh 2001, Kim 2010), but relatively little attention has been paid to early non-hexametric poetry (though see Bowie 1997, 2008a, 2008b, 2009; Cannatà Fera 1992, 2004). In attempting to understand the place of early melic, iambic and elegiac poetry in this context, this paper shows how Plutarch represents intellectuals engaging with such poetry as an expression of aesthetic taste in his Table Talks.