Historical Poetics and the Intertext

In recent years, scholarship on Silius has emphasized the Punica’s position within Flavian Rome as the new national epic replacing the Aeneo-centric prototype by looking at the challenging heyday of the Roman republic during the Second Punic War. This paper sheds light on three episodes of cremation and burial in the poem with the goal to re-examine the Flavian poet’s relationship with his historiographical models, especially Polybius and Livy.

This paper will argue that Caesar was evidently familiar with Sisenna’s work.

Caesar’s Commentarii have hardly been studied with regard to antecedent Roman historians, probably because of their generic difference from historia and, more generally, alleged overall sparseness (Cic. Brut. 262). Even though the question is compounded by the fragmentary state of early republican historiography, this paper will argue that there is ample evidence of Caesar’s familiarity with, and even imitation of, the Historiae by Lucius Cornelius Sisenna.

Recent scholarship on Lucian has revisited his reception of Thucydides and Homer with particular emphasis on his treatment of history and fiction (Ligota 2007, Kim 2010). Contributing to this discussion, this paper examines Lucian's discourse on the function of epainos in poetry, rhetoric, and historiography with the intention of shedding new light on his multifaceted appreciation of archaic and classical Greek literature.

This paper re-examines the figure of Solon in the Histories of Herodotus. It suggests that we do so by looking first at the Herodotean Solon and the Solon known to us from poetry and traditions associated with him. Second, the connection between the Herodotean Solon and Herodotus as narrator and author needs to be evaluated. Finally, we should consider the idea of a Solonian Herodotus, a Herodotus who himself is a performer of wisdom.