The Historia Augusta’s “Audacity to Invent”: Biography and the Ancient Novel in the Late Empire
By Kathryn Langenfeld
Although the series of imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta purports to be the collective work of six biographers writing during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, general consensus holds that it is the work of a single author writing in the mid- to late fourth century CE (Dessau, Cameron).
Empire and Aporia in Petronius’ Bellum Civile
By Robert Simms
Petronius’ Bellum Civile, a periocha of 295 impromptu hexameters for a ‘proper’ epic on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey (if Eumolpus were to produce one), has been variously considered an epic sketched in earnest, satire, parody, and/or criticism that is directed mainly at Lucan’s de Bello Civile (see Connors:1998 100-101).
Coloring Outside the Lines: Magnus Felix Ennodius’ Distorted Declamations
By Miller Krause
Hannibal the Historian at Ticinus and Cannae
By Charles Oughton
This paper offers an analysis of Hannibal’s battlefield speeches in Polybius’ Histories and argues that the methods through which Polybius characterizes Hannibal as an internal narrator mark the Carthaginian as an ideal pragmatikos figure. He is capable of ascertaining and communicating the historical truth from a situation in a “Polybian” fashion. In so doing, I build upon the well-known scholarship on the didactic quality of Polybius’ historical narrative (Walbank 1972 and 2002; Sacks 1981; Marincola 2001: 125-40; Foulon 2001; Thornton 2013).
No Place Like Home: Narratorial Participation in Lucian’s True Histories
By Bryant Kirkland
Lucian’s True Histories (VH) is well-studied for its allusive and fantastic ethnographies (Georgiadou & Larmour 1998; von Möllendorff 2000).