On the Boundaries of Latin Poetry

In his Punica, Silius Italicus draws on the geographical work of writers such as Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder to contest earlier poetic descriptions of the world and to assert the universal importance of his subject.

This paper discusses the character of Silius Italicus’ Hannibal and its implications for imperial times, starting from a contradiction in the famous oath-scene that has gone unnoticed by modern scholarship. The oath of Hannibal in which he vows – usually at the age of nine – eternal hostility to the Romans is referred to by many Greek and Roman authors (e.g. Livy, Nepos, Polybios and Appian). It usually serves to explain the disturbing, unwavering aggressiveness of the Carthaginian leader.

In his first Satire, Juvenal mocks the crowd of epic poets recycling hackneyed themes, questioning the relevance of such poetry for contemporary life. This paper will argue that Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica uses the very fact of its recycled subject matter as a means to explore the re-use of traditional language in a new setting. It will examine the appropriation of female tropes by the poem’s heroines, as a means to insert their voices and interpretations into their own story.

Poem 61 of the Carmina Priapea stands out as a poem that, at first glance, defies the generic norms of the priapeum: it is the defensio of a barren fruit tree with no mention of Priapus and no obscenity. CP 61 is, therefore, not “Priapic,” when “Priapic” is reduced only to sexual humor. In this paper I offer a new interpretation of CP 61 that broadens what it means to be “Priapic” in the Carmina Priapea.

Book 8 of Lucan’s De Bello Civili vividly describes the death of Pompey Magnus, whose head is chopped off, impaled on a pike, paraded through the city, and then embalmed as a prize for Caesar. I argue that Lucan stages this gruesome scene as a figurative revolt of the Roman body politic. The inevitable toppling of Pompey’s head becomes central to the poet’s criticism of imperial power.

The Attic deme Hecale was named after the poor old woman who in her modest hut hosted Theseus on his way from Athens to capture the Marathonian bull. This previously obscure mythological tale was the subject of the epic poem Hecale by Callimachus of Cyrene, the most influential poet in Hellenistic Alexandria. Two centuries later, in the 50’s BCE one of the leading Latin translators and imitators of Callimachus' poetry was the Veronese poet C. Valerius Catullus, whose own epic on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (Carm.