Konstan. Doubting Domitian's Divinity Statius Achilleid 1.1-2

Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry
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Volume 36
Wordplay and
Powerplay in Latin
Poetry
Edited by Phillip Mitsis and Ioannis Ziogas

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Table of Contents
Ioannis Ziogas
Introduction: Power, Puns, and Politics From Horace to Silius Italicus 1
Rhiannon Ash
Tacitus and the Poets: In Nemora et Lucos … Secedendum est
(Dialogus 9.6)? 13
Alex Dressler
Nominal Intelligence: Conspiracy, Prosopography, and the Secret of Horace,
Odes 2.10 37
Joshua T. Katz
Another Vergilian Signature in the Georgics? 69
Jay Reed
Mora in the Aeneid 87
Emily Gowers
Dido and the Owl 107
Michael Fontaine
Freudian Bullseyes in Classical Perspective: The Psycholinguistics of Guilt in
Virgil’s Aeneid 131
Michael C. J. Putnam
Virgil and the Achilles of Catullus 151
Gregson Davis
Violent Retribution and Pietas: The Closure of the Aeneid Revisited 169
Peter J. Davis
Freedom of Speech in Virgil and Ovid 183
Mathias Hanses
Love’s Letters: an Amor-Roma Telestich at Ovid, Ars Amatoria
3.507 – 10 199
VI Table of Contents
Ioannis Ziogas
Love Elegy and Legal Language in Ovid 213
Matthew M. McGowan
Pythagoras and Numa in Ovid: Exile and Immortality at Rome 241
Matthew Leigh
Lucan’s Caesar and Laelius 259
Joy Connolly
A Theory of Violence in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile 273
Michael Paschalis
From Pastoral to Panegyric in Calpurnius Siculus 299
John G. Fitch
Speaking Names in Senecan Drama 313
Michèle Lowrie
Civil War, the Soul, and the Cosmos at Seneca, Thyestes 547 – 622:
A Tropology 333
Erica Bexley
Doubtful Certainties: The Politics of Reading in Seneca’s Oedipus 355
David Konstan
Doubting Domitian’s Divinity: Statius Achilleid 1.1 – 2 377
Martha Malamud
As if: Reflections on an Exemplary Wife 387
Arthur J. Pomeroy
Silius Italicus and Greek Epic: Imperial Culture Wars 413
List of Contributors 437
Publications by Frederick Ahl 443
Index of passages discussed 445
General Index 449

Ioannis Ziogas
Introduction: Power, Puns, and Politics
From Horace to Silius Italicus
Wordplay is intricately enmeshed with powerplay in Latin language and poetry.
The meaning of the Latin uis ranges from political power and physical violence
to the significance and etymology of words. Unpacking the latent potential of
words is to activate the entire scope of their semantic force. Take, for instance,
Ovid’s wordplay on uis in the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. In introduc-
ing her tale, Alcithoe, Ovid’s internal narrator, promises to explain the origins of
Salmacis, the spring whose waters had an emasculating force: causa latet, uis est
notissima fontis, Metamorphoses 4.287 (‘the cause is hidden, the power of the
fountain is well- known’). ¹ The ability of the spring to incapacitate men is noto-
rious and behind its debilitating power lies the significance of the infamous lake
Salmacis, a byword for weak and effeminate persons (see Cicero, de Officiis
1.61.9, quoting Ennius 347 Jocelyn). We can translate the line as ‘the cause is hid-
den, the meaning of the fountain is well-known’. As is often the case, etiological
narratives (causa) unfold vis-à-vis the origins and significance of words. And Al-
cithoe, whose name is semantically related to ἀλκή (‘strength’ ‘force’) and θοός
(‘quick’ ‘nimble’), is a particularly appropriate narrator for explaining the verbal
and physical force of Salmacis’ running waters.²
Frederick Ahl has analyzed the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in his
Metaformations, focusing on the ways in which changes in the shape of words or
syllables coexist with changes in bodily shape (Ahl 1985: 239 – 44). The power of
wordplay can shift from lexical to physical violence, depriving men of their vi-
rility. One needs to be aware of the power of words when swimming in the
murky waters of Latin etymologizing. One of Ahl’s major contributions to classi-
cal scholarship is his study of wordplay not as mere poetic ornament or display
of Alexandrian learning but as fundamental to the politics of Latin poetry.³ In-
stead of demarcating the limits of etymologizing, Ahl has opened new horizons
 Similarly to Ovid’s causa latet, Strabo (..) notes the uncertainty about the origins of the
spring’s reputation (ἡ Σαλμακὶς κρήνη, διαβεβλημένη οὐκ οἶδ’ ὁπόθεν ὡς μαλακίζουσα τοὺς
πιόντας ἀπ’ αὐτῆς ‘the fountain Salmacis, slandered, I don’t know for what reason, because it
supposedly makes effeminate those who drink from it’). While the geographer dismisses this
superstitious belief, whatever its origin, Ovid is interested in revealing the mythological aition.
 Ahl is a pioneer in arguing that internal narrators are significant for interpreting embedded
narratives. See Ahl ()  – ; ().
 See especially Ahl ()  –  and passim.
2 Ioannis Ziogas
in examining how wordplay’s inherent power for ambiguity and polysemy can
destabilize the advertised certainties of authoritarian regimes. The use of puns
for political purposes does not proclaim itself from the topmost levels of the nar-
rative. It is rather, like so much of the art of Latin poetry, concealed. Not unlike a
skilled sculptor, a poet versed in wordplay engraves (caelare) by concealing (ce-
lare) his art (cf. Ahl 1985: 64– 9). Etymological wordplay is related to what Ahl
calls the art of veiled speech and safe criticism (Ahl 1984a), yet it is a fascinating
paradox that etymologizing is simultaneously associated with unveiling the
truth. Etymology (from ἔτυμος ‘true’) lays a claim to disclosing the true power
of words by tracing their original meaning; it is the art of authoritative deriva-
tions and that is why etymological wordplay is a trope of authorial powerplay.
The power of wordplay to undermine proclaimed certainties can be seen in
the following lines from Ovid’s Fasti:
assidet inde Ioui, Iouis est fidissima custos,

et praestat sine ui sceptra timenda Ioui.
Fasti 5.45 – 6
She (Maiestas) sits by Jove, is Jove’s most loyal guardian, preserves Jove’s dread scepter
without violence.
The Muse Polyhymnia is the speaker of these lines, in an episode in which the
Muses contest the etymology of May (Fasti 5.1– 110). For Polyhymnia, Maius de-
rives from Maiestas, Ovid’s daring personification of a key term under Augustus.⁴
As a Muse that gives a Romanized version of Hesiod’s Theogony, starting from
chaos and ending with Romulus, Polyhymnia can be seen as praising Augustus’
Jovian regime.⁵ Her name suggests her generic affiliations with hymns and by ex-
toling Jupiter’s majesty she fulfils the role of her Hesiodic counterparts (Theo-
gony 36 – 7).⁶ At the same time, her Roman universe is an improved version of
Hesiod’s Theogony. Polyhymnia’s statement that Maiestas is seated next to Jupi-
ter sine ui is a revision of Hesiod, who had Bie (‘Power’) and Kratos (‘Strength’)
sit by Zeus (πὰρ Ζηνὶ βαρυκτύπῳ ἑδριόωντα, Theogony 388 ‘Bie and Kratos sit
beside loud-thundering Zeus’). Maiestas is enough for Jupiter/Augustus, who
does not have to rely on force or violence once he prevailed upon his enemies
 On Julius Caesar’s and Augustus’ redefinitions of the republican value of maiestas populi Ro-
mani as integral to this episode of the Fasti, see Mackie (). On Maiestas in this episode, see
also Pasco-Pranger ()  – .
 On Polyhymnia and Hesiod, see Fantham ()  – ; Boyd ()  – ; Labate ()
 – .
 On Polyhymnia’s affiliation with hymn, see Barchiesi () .
and restored order. The hymnic polyptoton (Ioui, Iouis…Ioui) further adds to the
solemnity of Polyhymnia’s panegyric.
Yet in this laudatory passage, wordplay creeps in like a virus infecting impe-
rial propaganda. The very august repetition of Ioui, Iouis, Ioui suggests that there
is actually uis in Iouis; that it is paradoxical, almost absurd, to deprive Jove of his
violence.⁷ While Polyhymnia declares that her Jove rules without violent guard-
ians, wordplay tells an entirely different story.⁸ The gerundive timenda, tellingly
yet unconvincingly emended by some to tenenda, further suggests that a scepter
to be feared is barely a scepter wielded without violence. In fact, the issue of fear
and freedom of speech is suggested by the very presence of Maiestas. Under Au-
gustus, the law of maiestas extended to include libel and slander against the
emperor.⁹ And the punishment and consequences for verbally injuring the
princeps’ majesty were powerful and violent.¹⁰ The hymn to Maiestas can be
read as a covert comment on imperial censorship since it raises the question
of how sincere a hymn to the divine incarnation of repression could be. ¹¹ A
poet whose freedom of speech is legally constrained can resort to wordplay, to
the inherent power of words to defy imperial definitions, their playful potential
for endless deferral. By punning on Iouis-uis, Ovid plays with the meaning of uis
as physical violence and semantic force. In other words, uis as the basis of the
wordplay draws attention to itself, to the semantic relation of uis with etymolo-
gizing. A Jove with guardians sine ui is an insignificant Jove, a Jove without
meaning. Ovid’s ingeniously self-reflexive pun highlights the paradox of his
Muse’s imperial declaration and undermines her authority. Wordplay exposes
Polyhymnia’s laudatory meaning to a causality that remains external to the
speaking voice and thus destabilizes it. As Paul Allen Miller (2004: 161) puts
it, every pun in Ovid reveals not a hidden truth but another series of double
meanings that reflects back on itself to create a depthless mise-en-abyme.
 My reading here is inspired by Ahl ()  – , who argues that the wordplay between uis
and Iouis is key to interpreting the story of Io in the Metamorphoses, the nymph who suffers from
Jupiter’s violence in a tale that forces us to interpret Iouis as a combination of Io and uis; Jove’s
name signifies the violence done to Io. Cf. Hinds ()  –  on the etymological wordplay on
Venus and uis.
 As Hinds ()  puts it, “etymological word-plays can unfix poetic meaning just as effec-
tively as they can fix it.”
 Under Augustus’ lex Iulia maiestatis (Digest .; Suetonius, Augustus ; Tacitus, Annales
.. – ) allegedly subversive works became an act of treason.
 The works of Ovid, Titus Labienus, and Cassius Severus were banned under Augustus. Ovid
and Cassius Severus were banished, while Labienus committed suicide.
 On the issue of free speech under the principate as central to the Fasti, see Feeney ().
4 Ioannis Ziogas
In this volume, all the contributors have taken as their point of departure
critical issues that have been at the center of Frederick Ahl’s scholarship, espe-
cially how Latin poets employ linguistic tropes, in order to shape, reshape, de-
construct, and reconstruct the Roman world.¹² The volume covers a representa-
tive number of poets, whose works are intricately engaged with the Roman
sociopolitical milieu. From Horace to Silius Italicus, all the poets under discus-
sion have been the focus of Ahl’s contributions to interpreting the deeply polit-
ical nature of Latin poetry within the larger culture of imperial Rome. Critics
point out that Latin poetry does not comment on politics from some distant vant-
age point, but is a political factor.¹³ This approach does justice to poetry’s power
to form and not just comment on political realities, but still leaves open the ques-
tion of whether poetic authority supports, undermines or competes with imperial
power.
In answering this question, the contributors to this volume do not follow a
uniform line of inquiry, but examine issues of poetic authority from various an-
gles and draw different conclusions. Adopting a one-sided reading of poetic
works whose political allegiance or defiance is notoriously hard to pin down
would do injustice both to the poets under discussion and to our honorandus.
Against the background of Ahl’s pioneering work in interpreting the politics of
Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile, aka Pharsalia (Ahl 1976), Joy Connolly reads Lucan’s
epic not as a commentary on imperial politics but as a direct participant in con-
structions of political reality. Building of Mbembe’s analysis of reiterative vio-
lence in postcolonial politics (Mbembe 2001), Connolly argues that the corrupt
Romans of Lucan’s iconoclastic epic are enamored with violent tyrants that
wield dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, the obscene, the grotesque, and the
absurd do not undermine totalitarian regimes but create a bond between tyrants
and their subjects, between the sublime and the ridiculous. While acknowledg-
ing the farcical dimension of Lucan’s praise of Nero, Connolly argues that the
grotesque supports oppressive rulers instead of undermining tyranny.
The diversity of political interpretations in this volume is exemplified in the
approaches of contributors who point out that Latin poets shift the onus of po-
litical interpretation from themselves to their readers. In his analysis of Horace’s
Ode 2.10, for instance, Alex Dressler concludes that it is up to the reader to pick a
side and make Horace a member of the opposition against Augustus. Similarly,
double speak and ambiguity forces Ovid’s readers to choose whether the Ars Am-
atoria reforms or endorses Augustan legislation. Ovid can have it both ways, but
 See, for instance, Ahl (a); (b).

 See, e. g., Kennedy (); cf. Feldherr ()  and passim.
his readers can hardly escape from a partisan interpretation (see Ioannis Ziogas).
In Statius’ Siluae 5.1, the poetics of imitation and representation dazzle the read-
er who is left to ponder the cognitive dissonance of excessive exemplarity (Mar-
tha Malamud). In a truly Ovidian fashion, Statius’ poetry appropriates the impe-
rial power to reshape reality through spectacle. Yet the identification of poetry
with the imperial projections of illusory reality still leaves a crucial question
open for the reader to decide: Does Statius expose the artificiality of this imperial
mechanism or does he contribute to the authentication of imperial fantasies?
Along those lines, Erica Bexley examines the stakes involved in reading and in-
terpreting poetry in Seneca’s Oedipus, who is cast both as a reader of poetry and
a subject of interpretation. Bexley analyzes the tyrant’s futile attempts to monop-
olize meaning and his downfall as a result of poetic ambiguity that lies beyond
his control. Seneca’s Oedipus can ultimately caution the readers or audience of
the tragedy against interpretative bias.
Poetic ambiguity and interpretative indeterminacy can put the reader in the
position of a paranoid tyrant such as Oedipus (see Dressler, Bexley). Paranoia
becomes the default, if not the ideal, way of interpreting poetry under authoritar-
ian regimes that suppress the freedom of expression.¹⁴ Peter Davis examines the
loss of libertas, this most valuable ideal of the Roman Republic, in the last years
of Augustus’ rule. Imperial censorship and the dangers involved in potentially
subversive works define the interpretative parameters of the works under discus-
sion in this volume. The hermeneutics of suspicion spread from insecure tyrants
to their subjects and still affect the way we interpret Latin imperial poetry. Josh-
ua Katz wonders whether the acronym he traces at Vergil’s Georgics 2.475 (M-
VER-P) is an authorial signature (Publius Vergilius Maro reversed) or an over-in-
terpretation. Similarly, we can read the Mantuan Ocnus (from ὄκνος ‘delay’ ‘hes-
itation’) at Aeneid 10.198 – 203 as a figure of Vergil, whose cognomen Maro is an
anagram of mora (see Jay Reed). Hidden acronyms that cover the author’s iden-
tity in a self-referential gesture that waits to be decoded by attentive readers have
always been the material of conspiracy theory, but the examples of authorial ac-
ronyms that Katz discusses provocatively suggest that the world of Latin poetry
may not be entirely divorced from the world of political conspiracy (cf. Dressler).
The authorial powerplay in etymologies, puns, anagrams, telestichs, and ac-
ronyms features prominently in this volume (see Jay Reed, Emily Gowers, Mi-
chael Fontaine, Mathias Hanses, John Fitch). Jay Reed examines the deep the-
matic, verbal, narrative, and political interconnections between Roma, amor,
and mora in Vergil’s Aeneid. Far from being frivolous wordplay, this anagrammat-
 Cf. Hinds ().

6 Ioannis Ziogas
ic nexus is central to the Aeneid’s narrative and imperial dynamics, which re-
volve around a passion for the foundation of Rome that bypasses the ominous
delays of amorous inertia. Following Ahl’s insightful connection of anagrammat-
ic wordplay with semantic pluralism, Reed examines the polysemy of the mora-
amor-Roma complex, a nexus whose significance depends on how one defines
the terms under discussion and how internal and external readers focalize the
narrative of Vergil’s epic. Mathias Hanses traces a hitherto unnoticed telestich
in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria 3.507– 10 that reflects the Amor-Roma palindromic word-
play of Roman graffiti. Similarly to Reed’s chapter on the Aeneid, Hanses exam-
ines the anagrammatic cluster of Amor-Roma-mora in the Ars Amatoria and the
ways in which anagrams and telestichs revolve around the ways in which amor
has conquered Roma, a tension that is set against a generic interaction between
martial epic and love elegy.
The issue of focalization, characterization, and the emotional state of inter-
nal and external narrators is the key to interpreting Vergilian wordplay according
to Michael Fontaine. Arguing against the Freudian psychoanalytic model, Fon-
taine zooms in on Vergilian narrative, in order to interpret puns not as errors
but as psycholinguistic instances of emotional self-consciousness. By focusing
on puns’ associations with guilt, the self-conscious emotion par excellence, Fon-
taine finds the notions of the unconscious inadequate in interpreting the signif-
icance of puns in Vergil and other Latin poets. Freudian slips give way to “Fre-
dian” slips that tie these linguistic features to the narrative of empire.
Similarly to Reed and Fontaine, Emily Gowers further explores the potential
of soundplay and wordplay to enrich Vergil’s narrative by containing one mean-
ing within another in an almost infinite series. The metamorphic power of word-
play turns Dido into bubo (‘owl’), an ominous bird that forebodes death. The fan-
tasies of avian transformations merge with Dido’s metamorphosis into an
avenger, which is fulfilled in Roman history with Hannibal. Birdcalls are cast
as foreign speech, an imperialistic and Romanocentric perception of Dido’s
bird transformation. The unfulfilled potential of a narrative of desertion, exile,
gender bending, and escape through avian transformation lurks behind Dido’s
semantic and sonic similarities with the owl. In Reed’s, Gowers’, and Hanses’ pa-
pers, the poetics of Latin wordplay is inseparable from Roman politics.
Just as wordplay is integral to Vergil’s narrative dynamics, etymologies of
proper names are significant in Senecan drama. John Fitch examines instances
of speaking names in Seneca in an attempt to interpret their function in the fab-
ric of Seneca’s tragedies and further tackle the question of whether the play-
wright intended these etymological wordplays. Fitch’s systematic analysis of
Seneca’s etymologizing of proper names is related to Bexley’s arguments
about the powerplay and consequences involved in etymologizing Oedipus’
name in Seneca’s tragedy. The question whether an etymology really is there may
never be answered adequately (cf. Katz) but that is why the search for the signif-
icance of proper names is all the more fascinating. The discovery and interpre-
tation of etymological wordplay implicates audience and characters in construct-
ing meaning that has the potential of empowering or debilitating them.
Far from simply referring without signifying, a proper name is highly signif-
icant in literature. By focusing on the name Laelius in Lucan, Matthew Leigh ar-
gues that the speech of Lucan’s centurion alludes to his namesake in Cicero’s De
Amicitia. Leigh examines the narrative and political implications of Laelius’
speaking name (cf. Fitch). The Ciceronian intertext sharply contrasts with the
value system of Lucan’s centurion, who is ready to put Caesar above any form
of Roman pietas (cf. Connolly’s discussion on Laelius’ attraction to power and
the reiterative violence that underpins it). The junior officer rebukes his superior
in a striking twist of Republican libertas/parrhesia (cf. Peter Davis) and his
speech succeeds in inspiring a perverted passion for action and thus putting
an end to delay and hesitation (cf. Reed). While Martha Malamud sees imitation
as a form of pietas, Leigh reads Lucan’s Laelius as the embodiment of impiety
against the Ciceronian intertext.
Leigh’s chapter shows how a speaking name can function as an intertextual
marker, activating a dialogue with an important philosophical source. Far from
being merely a literary game, intertextuality is an author’s way of claiming mas-
tery and control over tradition. Intertextual allusions are meaningful as appeals
to previous authority or as polemical subversions of established norms. While in-
tertextual references are often a trope of authorial constructions, their allusive
nature shifts once more the onus of interpreting them from authors to readers.
Malamud examines the potentially subversive and multilayered nature of inter-
textual references in Statius, while Arthur Pomeroy argues that Silius’ references
to Homer are culturally and politically charged since they are related to the clas-
sicism of the Flavian era. Peter Davis similarly examines the Roman concerns
with freedom of speech against the Iliadic intertext.
Similarly to Peter Davis, Martha Malamud, and Arthur Pomeroy, David Kon-
stan shows how Greek myth can allude to Roman politics by interpreting the
subversive potential of Domitian’s comparisons with Achilles in Statius’ Achil-
leid. The transvestite Achilles recalls Domitian’s similar disguise in the garb of
a follower of Isis. Even though a comparison with Achilles should in principle
be flattering for Domitian, Konstan argues that such a parallel may actually em-
phasize Domitian’s mortality and his forbidden deification. Achilles is also the
focus of Michael Putnam’s chapter, which examines the ways in which Vergil’s
allusions to Catullus 64 contribute to Aeneas’ characterization. The Catullan in-
tertext opens a window to reading Dido as the abandoned Ariadne (cf. Gowers)
8 Ioannis Ziogas
and Aeneas as Theseus. The figure of Achilles from Catullus’ epyllion influences
the representation of Aeneas at key moments in the Aeneid. In particular, the
wrath and brutality of Catullus’ Achilles are transferred to Vergil’s Aeneas. The
ferocious and pitiless Achilles from Catullus 64, who is responsible for the sac-
rifice of a helpless female victim (Polyxena), also colors not only Aeneas’ rela-
tionship to Dido, who in turn becomes a type of Polyxena, a victim of Aeneas’
Achillean journey toward Rome, but also the final act of the raging Aeneas,
the sacrifice of Turnus.
Just as Achilles is an alter ego of Domitian in Statius (Konstan), Aeneas and
Achilles may reflect back on the emperor Augustus in Vergil. Such a comparison
would bring to the fore the ambiguities in casting Achilles as a model warrior
and ruler. The inherent tension in the figure of Achilles throughout the history
of Greco-Roman literature to be both virtuous and cruel, a saver of comrades’
lives and responsible for countless deaths of his companions, an exemplary mor-
tal of honest deeds and a semi-divine being of dangerous passions makes the
best of the Achaeans a particularly useful figure for poets writing under the
Roman Empire.¹⁵ Achilles is an excellent model for composing poetry that can
be interpreted both as apparent praise and veiled criticism of Roman emperors.¹⁶
The plurality of political interpretations of Latin poetry in this volume is ex-
emplified by reading Michael Putnam’s chapter vis-à-vis Gregson Davis’ contri-
bution. Even though the raging Aeneas is modeled on Achilles’ vengeful wrath
and cruelty when he kills the suppliant Turnus and thus the final episode of
the Aeneid casts a dark shadow on the Augustan value of clementia, Gregson
Davis argues that Aeneas’ angry outburst is consistent with the Roman value sys-
tem and evokes concepts of ira in Epicurean thought. For Gregson Davis, Aeneas’
righteous anger contributes to his pietas. Vergil ultimately places his hero in the
Augustan context of Mars Ultor. However such a pro-Augustan reading of the Ae-
neid may contrast with Ahl’s interpretation of the poem, Gregson Davis examines
the influence of Epicurean philosophy on Vergil, an aspect of the Aeneid on
which Ahl comments repeatedly in his richly annotated translation.¹⁷ Reading
 On this tension in the character of Achilles, see King (). Ovid may be picking up on this
tension when he represents Augustus as another Achilles in Tristia . – , where the exiled
poet becomes himself an abject Telephus in need of healing from the one who dealt the wound.
Again, at Metamorphoses ., Augustus is brought into comparison with Achilles, perhaps in
relation to their shared divine status, but also in view of the (divine) anger they partake in.
 Cf. Ahl (a); (b).
 Cf. in particular Ahl () , his comment on inclemency and impiety in Epicurean phi-
losophy. See also Ahl () , , . Ahl’s commentary on the Aeneid is avidly antici-
pated.
the different approaches to the final scene of the Aeneid in this volume demon-
strates the kaleidoscopic nature of Vergil’s epic. Depending on the critical per-
spective, whether it is wordplay (Fontaine), intertext (Putnam) or philosophy
(Gregson Davis), the death of Turnus is invested with different political resonan-
ces.
Philosophy plays an important role in the politics of defining ideals and re-
defining the significance of words. Etymologizing, for instance, was closely asso-
ciated with Stoic philosophy in Rome. While Gregson Davis examines Epicurean
definitions of ira in Vergil’s Aeneid, Michèle Lowrie analyzes the Stoic back-
ground to civil war imagery in Seneca’s Thyestes, focusing on the choral ode
in 547– 622. Lowrie’s analysis complements Leigh’s study of how the various
forms of pietas problematize the politics of civil war and family conflict,
which in turn relates to Gregson Davis’ philosophical examination of Aeneas’
pietas. For Lowrie, the political and philosophical dimension of civil war is
not linked to the tumultuous era of Nero. Instead, Lowrie argues that the ode
is a characteristic example of Roman political thought, which tends to project in-
ternal and familial conflict to a cosmic scale. By focusing on the politics of Sen-
ecan tragedy without limiting her research to Nero (see also Bexley), Lowrie
traces obsessions and patterns of Roman political thought that exceed the imme-
diate historical context (cf. Rhiannon Ash on Tacitus’ interest on the immediate
political context of poetic composition and performance). To the externalization
of inner conflict, we may add the blurring of the private and public spheres,
which Ioannis Ziogas sees as fundamental in the clash between Augustan legis-
lation and Ovidian elegy, but is also a source of tension in Roman politics over-
all.
Philosophy and politics are the focus of Matthew McGowan’s chapter, which
deals with the recurring motif of exile in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in particular in
the tale of Pythagoras and Numa. Pythagoras, an exiled philosopher who advo-
cated the continuous reincarnation of souls, is closely related not only to the po-
etics of transformation in the Metamorphoses but also to the realities of Ovid’s
exile. The transmigration of the souls provides the exiled poet with the means
of escape from the imperial constraints of his banishment. Such an approach
complements Gowers’ reading of Dido’s avian transformation as a trope of
exile and liberation from political, ethnic, and gendered restrictions. McGowan
examines the legal background to the teachings of Pythagoras and Numa,
Rome’s second king whose name was etymologized from νόμος (‘law’).¹⁸ Just
as Pythagoras is the teacher of Numa in the Metamorphoses, Ovid instructs
 For the etymological connection between Numa and νόμος, see Maltby () s.v.
10 Ioannis Ziogas
the Romans about the recent legal reforms. McGowan’s chapter raises issues that
Ziogas examines in his paper, which argues that the praeceptor amoris in the Ars
Amatoria acts as a legal authority by teaching Romans about love, a topic legally
prescribed by recent imperial legislation. Ovid is simultaneously a teacher of law
and love. In an ineluctable collision between poet and emperor, Augustus in-
trudes into the bedrooms of Roman citizens, while the elegiac praeceptor at-
tempts to regulate sex, thus stepping into imperial territory. Elegy attempts to es-
tablish transgressive desire as the superior law. The legal dimension of love
examined in this chapter can be read vis-à-vis Connolly’s analysis of violence
in the Pharsalia. Amatory passion in Ovid and violence in Lucan rename
crime as law. Ziogas further traces Acontius’ expertise in law (Heroides 20)
against the profile of love elegy as a discourse of instruction and seduction.
Acontius’ letter legalizes elegiac love and ratifies literary tradition by casting
sources as legal documents. This chapter reads allusion as a trope of authoriza-
tion of previous texts and is thus related to the intertextual analyses of Michael
Putnam, Peter Davis, Matthew Leigh, David Konstan, Martha Malamud, and Ar-
thur Pomeroy.
In a collection focusing on the fundamental confluence of poetics and pol-
itics, Michael Paschalis’ interpretation of Calpurnius Siculus’ Eclogues stands
out as an attempt to distinguish the political from the pastoral. For Paschalis,
the crucial difference between Vergil’s and Calpurnius’ Eclogues is that while
Vergil’s bucolic poetry signals the conjunction of the pastoral and political
world, Calpurnius organizes his collection on the basis of an antithesis between
bucolic and panegyric. In contrast with Vergil, Calpurnius dissociates the lowly
world of singing shepherds from the politics and poetics of imperial Rome.
It is the premise of the volume that the context of composition and reception
defines interpretation.¹⁹ In this respect, Rhiannon Ash’s chapter on how Tacitus
represents poets in his work picks out some important features of this collection.
Tacitus is not interested in poets that live and create in a political vacuum, but is
fascinated with the contexts of composition, performance, and reception. The
poets in Tacitus are actively involved in the powerplay of the Roman politics.
The immediate sociopolitical dynamics and performative parameters play a cru-
cial role in constructing poetic voices as dissenting or supportive of the status
quo. The context of performance becomes an issue of life and death. In a prin-
cipate notoriously shaped by display (see also Malamud), showing can be more
significant than telling (see also Bexley). Tacitus provocatively suggests that the
framework of reception is more important than the very contents of poetic texts.
 On the hermeneutics of reception in Latin poetry, see Martindale ().

The volume comes out of a conference titled “Ars Latet Arte Sua: Speaking to
Power in Latin and Greek Literature”, which was organized in honor of Frederick
Ahl at Cornell University in September 7– 8, 2013. While the conference at Cornell
had a wider purview, for the sake of a unified volume we restricted the topic to
Latin poetry and invited a range of scholars not necessarily identified with Ahl,
but all influenced by his readings and all engaging with his scholarship. In our
view, one of the best ways to honor Ahl is to disagree with him and we trust that
our “Fredschrift” is far from being a typical Festschrift. We should acknowledge,
however, that in a volume aiming to honor a scholar as influential and diverse as
Frederick Ahl, there will be inevitable gaps. In our attempt to achieve thematic
coherence, we did not invite contributions on Greek poetry and comparative lit-
erature, even though Ahl’s impact on these fields is well known. It is also well
known that Ahl’s translations of Sophocles, Vergil, and Seneca are proof that
he is not only a scholar but also a poet.²⁰ The contributors to this volume
could not match his unique skill in translating, but it should be noted that sev-
eral of them (e. g. Reed, Gowers, Fontaine, Bexley) point out that in Ahl’s trans-
lations lies a wealth of critical insights along with the beauty of poetry.
Bibliography
Ahl, F. 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY.
— 1984a. “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome”, AJPh 105: 174 – 208.
— 1984b. “The Rider and the Horse: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to
Statius”, ANRW II.32.1: 40 – 124.
— 1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets.
Ithaca, NY.
— 1986. Seneca: Three Tragedies: Trojan Women, Medea, Phaedra. Ithaca, NY.
— 1989. “Homer, Vergil, and Complex Narrative Structures in Latin Epic: An Essay”, ICS
14:1 – 31.
— 2007. Virgil: Aeneid. Oxford.
— 2008. Two Faces of Oedipus: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Seneca’s Oedipus.
Translated and with an Introduction. Ithaca, NY.
Barchiesi, A. 1991. “Discordant Muses”, PCPhS 37:1 – 21.
Boyd, B.W. 2000. “Celabitur Auctor: The Crisis of Authority and Narrative Patterning in Ovid,
Fasti 5”, Phoenix 54: 64 – 98.
Fantham, E. 1985. “Ovid, Germanicus, and the Composition of the Fasti”, Papers of the
Liverpool Latin Seminar 5: 243 – 81.
 Ahl (); (); ().

12 Ioannis Ziogas
Feeney, D. 1992. “Si licet et fas est: Ovid’s Fasti and the Problem of Free Speech under the
Principate”, in: A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus.
Bristol, 1 – 25.
Feldherr, A. 2010. Playing Gods. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton,
NJ.
Hinds, S. 2006. “Venus, Varro and the vates: Towards the Limits of Etymologizing
Interpretation”, Dictynna 3: 1 – 19.
— 2007. “Ovid among the Conspiracy Theorists”, in: S.J. Heyworth, P.J. Fowler, and S.H.
Harrison (eds.), Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and
Epicurean. Oxford, 194 – 220.
Kennedy, D. 1992. “ ‘Augustan’ and ‘Anti-Augustan’: Reflections on Terms of Reference”, in:
A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus. Bristol, 26 – 58.
King, K. 1987. Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages. Berkeley,
CA.
Labate, M. 2005. “Tempo delle origini e tempo della storia in Ovidio”, in: J.P. Schwindt (ed.),
La représentation du temps dans la poésie augustéenne—Zur Poetik der Zeit in
augusteischer Dichtung. Heidelberg, 177 – 201.
Mackie, N. 1992. “Ovid and the Birth of Maiestas”, in: A. Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and
Propaganda in the Age of Augustus. Bristol, 63 – 96.
Maltby, R. 1991. A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies. Leeds.
Martindale, C. 1992. Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception.
Cambridge.
Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA.
Miller, P.A. 2004. Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real.
Princeton, NJ.
Pasco-Pranger, M. 2006. Founding the Year: Ovid’s Fasti and the Poetics of the Roman
Calendar. Leiden/Boston, MA.
Rhiannon Ash
Tacitus and the Poets: In Nemora et Lucos …
Secedendum est (Dialogus 9.6)?
Summary: Despite Tacitus’ poetic and allusive Latin, he is selective about the
named poets actively appearing in his narratives. This article examines how Tac-
itus represents such figures. I argue that above all Tacitus is fascinated by living
poets, who actively engage with the world of politics and power and refuse to live
in an artistic vacuum.
I first consider four relatively undistinguished Tiberian poets (Clutorius Pris-
cus, Gaius Cominius, Mamercus Scaurus, Sextius Paconianus). Three end up
dead, when they promptly cease to be interesting. The nature, genre, and quality
of their poetry are almost incidental to their fates, which come about through a
combination of formidable enemies, folly, and bad luck. Yet under Nero, the dy-
namics shift: poetry now conspicuously takes center-stage. In the last hexad of
the Annals, we meet a more distinguished group of poets (Britannicus, Antistius
Sosianus, Seneca, Lucan, Curtius Montanus, and Nero himself). A conspicuous
strand of many of their individual stories involves the politicized performance
of their work, either as a prelude to danger (Britannicus, Antistius Sosianus)
or belated revenge (Lucan). Their representation demonstrates that Tacitus is en-
gaged by the unique performative contexts of their poetry, which crucially im-
pact on the ‘outside’ world of politics and power.
Keywords: Tacitus; Tiberius; Nero; poetry; performance; power; politics
Introduction
Distinctive footprints of the poets are visible throughout Tacitus’ surviving cor-
pus. Whether in the form of specific phrasing and vocabulary borrowed from ear-
lier poets for a range of purposes, or through whole scenes elegantly shaped so
as to engage in dialogue with suggestive episodes from epic or tragedy, Tacitus
works creatively and dynamically with poetic intertexts (both Latin and Greek)
at every step to enrich his own distinctive brand of historiography.¹ Not only
 There is much discussion of Tacitus’ engagement with poetic texts, but see Baxter (),
Baxter (), Miller (), Putnam (), Keitel (), Ash (), Joseph (). Mayer
(b) explores an allusion to Homer.
14 Rhiannon Ash
that, but figures of poets also regularly populate the landscape of his texts. Yet
the paradox is that Tacitus himself, despite the obvious diversity of his generic
choices, conspicuously chooses not to make poetry his own creative outlet.
Does Tacitus’ consistent preference for the medium of prose reveal something
telling about his assessment of those who do write poetry under the empire?
Might he have considered poetry as having limitations, whether in terms of rele-
vance, utility, or longevity? Or is it simply that Tacitus regarded the writing of
history as being the best way to drive contemporaries to lead honorable lives
and to hold up a mirror to present and future principes in a bid to moderate
their conduct? Retrieving Tacitean opinions from his text is of course a notori-
ously tricky business, but it is still worth attempting.² In this paper, I will consid-
er how Tacitus represents named poets in a bid to shed some light on his atti-
tudes to poetry as an activity and a decisive force (or not) for triggering socio-
political change under the empire. The act of writing poetry can never be decou-
pled from politics; or as Ahl puts it, Roman poetry always ‘has a political soul’.³
As we will see, Tacitus’ snapshots of those who write poetry show vividly both
the strengths and the limitations of that activity in an imperial context.
Maternus, the Ur-Poet?

Tacitus’ projection of poetry shifts and evolves as his corpus develops, so that
cumulatively we get more and more poets to consider and compare. Yet the
‘grandfather’ of them all is arguably Curiatius Maternus in the Dialogus. He
can be seen as the yardstick against which all subsequent poets in the corpus
can be measured. We first meet Maternus sitting quietly in his room holding a
book of his now notorious tragedy, Cato, from which he had given a reading
the previous day. The play is contentious, having caused offence to the animi po-
tentium (Dialogus 2.1), apparently because Maternus had thrown himself into the
reading so wholeheartedly that his own identity had been totally subsumed by
that of his subject, Cato. This is a crucial point: it is not so much that Maternus
has written and recited a contentious praetexta which causes the problem, but
the degree to which the living poet identifies with his dead historical subject,
and the subsequent talk and notoriety that this fusion triggers. That collapsing
of identities between author and subject is the heart of the trouble. Mayer pro-
poses that this reflects how ancient audiences generally tend to react to litera-
 Luce () is sensibly cautious. See too Sailor ()  and Pelling ().
 Ahl (a) .
Tacitus and the Poets: In Nemora et Lucos … Secedendum est (Dialogus 9.6)? 15
ture: “Where they were faced with a persona, an assumed character who was
plainly not the writer, their inclination was to take the character’s words as rep-
resenting the writer’s view, unless it was otherwise clear that the writer was in-
dulging in ethopoeia”.⁴ Yet Maternus apparently takes this to a new level with his
Cato. Quite why his lively ‘necromancy’ of Cato should have offended the po-
tentes for this reason is an intriguing question. Gallia speculates that the offense
may have been triggered by ‘the apparent similarity between Maternus’s behav-
ior and his protagonist’s final act of principled self-destruction’.⁵ That reading
may have some merit, but of course the difficulty is that Maternus, himself
still alive, conspicuously has not (or not yet) reenacted Cato’s suicide in a Flavian
setting. So at least at the dramatic date of the dialogue, the nature of the offense
may be different. Strunk sees the key as being the Stoic dissident Helvidius Pris-
cus, condemned to death in AD 74/75: “it is reasonable to speculate that Mater-
nus’ Cato drew analogies between the resistance and suicide of Cato the Younger
and the dissidence and execution of Helvidius Priscus”.⁶ This historically-anch-
ored line seems more promising.
Yet what is also striking is that although Secundus speculates that Maternus
is perhaps judiciously working through the text to excise any material which
could have given rise to praua interpretatio, “perverse interpretation” (Dialogus
3.2), it is still not clear that the play’s text alone is the problem. What is at
issue is Maternus’ own visibility as a dissident public figure, who has actively
turned his back on public life to become a writer, but who pointedly draws atten-
tion to that withdrawal by the extraordinary way in which he gives his recitation:
even if the written artifact of the tragedy itself has some dissident elements, the
implication is that it would not in itself necessarily have caused offense without
the powerful ventriloquising presence of the living writer.⁷ In reciting the play,
Maternus may forget himself (Dialogus 2.1, sui oblitus) and think only of Cato,
but ironically his distinctive performance makes him (Maternus) the talk of the
town (Dialogus 2, eaque de re per urbem frequens sermo haberetur) and the
focal point for memory. It is, I suggest, important to think more carefully
about the nature of Maternus’ offense, since it has crucial implications for the
 Mayer (a) .

 Gallia () .
 Strunk () .
 Dressler ()  considers the ‘interpretative dilemma’ of the Dialogus and asks an interest-
ing question about the precise nature of this praua interpretatio: “Is that a polite way of describ-
ing a reader, informer or Emperor, misconstruing Maternus’s Cato and willfully reading into it a
subversive meaning? Or is prava interpretatio what a reader has to do in order to unpuzzle the
hidden subversive meaning that Maternus knows full well is there?”.
16 Rhiannon Ash
question of free speech in Rome and the status of poetry. One possibility emerg-
ing here is that Vespasian’s Rome in AD 74 or 75 may be cast as a more tolerant
place than the dramatic scenario of the Dialogus might at first suggest and that
active censorship of literature by the powerful was not at that stage ubiquitous.⁸
Indeed, despite the atmosphere of fear which hangs over the Dialogus, we do not
actually know whether Maternus’ play proved deadly to its author. In addition,
Gallia suggests that the potentes who take offense in the Dialogus do not neces-
sarily include the emperor himself: he proposes instead that they are more likely
to be a cabal of delatores with whom Maternus has a particularly hostile person-
al relationship (for whatever reason).⁹
For the moment, what I wish to emphasize is the phenomenon of Maternus’
identity fusing with that of his text. It is reminiscent of a wry comment by Seneca
the Elder in his Suasoria involving the possible scenario of Cicero being granted
his life by Antony, provided that he burns his own writings: omnes pro libris Cic-
eronis solliciti, nemo pro ipso, “everyone worried on behalf of the books of Cicero,
not on behalf of Cicero himself” (Seneca, Suasoria 7.10). Apparently no declaimer
was prepared to try to persuade Cicero to comply with Antony, because ‘Cicero’
(the author) subsumes Cicero (the man), whose identity has totally merged with
that of ‘Cicero’ the author. What is also intriguing here is that this notion of fu-
sion has direct implications for Tacitus’ own status as a historian. So, Sailor has
explored the implications of distinguishing between narrative voice on the one
hand (‘Tacitus’) and historical author on the other (Tacitus), suggesting that
for a Roman audience the distinction was much less clear for historical texts
than for some other genres of literature: “it is not clear that … readers of history
were ready, or typically asked, to distinguish the voice that narrates the text from
the voice of the person who produced it”.¹⁰ If so, then Maternus, despite seeming
to write verse tragedy, is articulating it as if he were a prose historian. This may
be an element of the problem for the unnamed potentes.
 Cf. Sailor () : “There were really only two sorts of response the regime might make: it
might take repressive action or do nothing”. Cf. Annals .., Cremutius Cordus’ reference to
the poems of Bibaculus and Catullus, pointedly ignored by Julius Caesar and Augustus: namque
spreta exolescunt: si irascare, adgnita uidentur, “what is spurned tends to abate; but, if you be-
come angry, you appear to have made an admission”.
 Gallia () . Strunk ()  reminds us that one of Maternus’ unexpected guests, M.
Aper, has “a number of affinities with the imperial delatores”.
 Sailor () ; Pelling ()  n.  emphasizes the importance of a reader’s knowledge
of the historian’s extratextual experience in responding to the narrative voice. Mayer (a) 
argues that the concept of the authorial persona was demonstrably unavailable to the ancient
reader and that this viewpoint should be extended more widely across ancient literature.
Poetry on the Margins: A Quartet of Tiberian

Poets
This initial consideration of Maternus suggests that Tacitus’ particular interest
lies above all in living poets (or at least, in poets who were alive in their histor-
ical context) and in what impact they have on their immediate social and cultur-
al setting (and vice versa). The significant poets for Tacitus are the ones who do
not exist in a vacuum. One of the important points for Aper is that, unlike Secun-
dus’ close friend, the poet Saleius Bassus, Maternus is “born for manly elo-
quence and oratory” (Dialogus 5.4, natus ad eloquentiam uirilem et oratoriam),
whereas Saleius has no aptitude for forensic activity and therefore his quiet
life as a poet is essentially unproblematic. Yet even so, this notion that in
order to write accomplished poetry, some poets have to withdraw from public
life and, as Aper says, “retire into the solitude, as the poets themselves say, of
the woods and the groves” (Dialogus 9.6, utque ipsi dicunt, in nemora et lucos,
id est in solitudinem secedendum est)¹¹ can be deviously exploited by someone
shrewd. Domitian, for example, upon seeing that he is being sidelined in the
early days of Vespasian’s principate, decides to turn this marginalization to his
own advantage by playing a role: studiumque litterarum et amorem carminum
simulans, quo uelaret animum et fratris <se> aemulationi subduceret, cuius dispar-
em mitioremque naturam contra interpretabatur (Histories 4.86.2), “… pretending
devotion to literature and love of poetry to conceal his real character and to with-
draw before the rivalry of his brother, on whose milder nature, so unlike his own,
he put a bad construction”.¹² As a politically shrewd creature, the dissembling
Domitian is here represented in such a way that he artfully adopts the unthreat-
ening mask of a solitary Saleius Bassus, when actually he does not even like lit-
erature. Whatever the reality, the stereotype of the reclusive poet was widely
known.
 At Dialogus ., Maternus quotes this phrase back at Aper. Pliny also alludes to the phrase
in a letter to Tacitus (Epistle .., inter nemora et lucos), if that is the right ‘direction of travel’
and not vice versa.
 Cf. Suet. Domitian . simulauit et ipse mire modestiam in primisque poeticae studium, tam
insuetum antea sibi quam postea spretum et abiectum, recitauitque etiam publice, “he himself
also made a wonderful pretence of modesty, and especially of an interest in poetry, an interest
foreign to him previously and thrown aside with contempt later on, and he even gave readings
publicly”. Domitian apparently wrote an epic poem on the battle between the Flavians and Vi-
tellians on the Capitol in AD  (Martial ..) and another poem on the Jewish war (Valerius
Flaccus .). That sounds like more than dabbling. See Quintilian .., Pliny, Historia Nat-
uralis pref. , and Silius Italicus . for praise of Domitian’s talents as a poet.
18 Rhiannon Ash
What about Tacitus’ later representations of named poets, all of whom clus-
ter in the Annals? Our first poet is the intriguing case of a Roman knight, Clutor-
ius Priscus (Annals 3.49.1), from AD 21:¹³
fine anni Clutorium Priscum equitem Romanum, post celebre carmen quo Germanici suprema
defleuerat, pecunia donatum a Caesare, corripuit delator, obiectans aegro Druso composuisse
quod, si extinctus foret, maiore praemio uulgaretur. id Clutorius in domo P. Petronii socru eius
Vitellia coram multisque inlustribus feminis per uaniloquentiam legerat.
At the end of the year Clutorius Priscus, a Roman equestrian who had been given money by
Caesar after a celebrated poem in which he had lamented the final moments of Germani-
cus, was seized by a denouncer, casting at him the charge that during an illness of Drusus
he had composed something which, if the man’s life were extinguished, would be publish-
ed for an even greater reward. Clutorius Priscus as a foolish boast had read it at the house
of P. Petronius in the presence of Vitellia, the latter’s mother-in-law, and of the many illus-
trious females.
There are several points of interest here. Firstly, the fact that Priscus is the ben-
eficiary of a financial reward for his celebre carmen about the dead Germanicus
suggests that Tiberius recognizes the potential for poetry to contribute something
useful to his own standing in society. By retroactively paying Priscus for the
poem, Tiberius implies that he approves of the subject matter and thus can try
to counteract the negative comments about his own failure to mourn adequately
after the popular Germanicus’ death. That composition was after the event (and
indeed, may well have been spontaneous, rather than commissioned by the em-
peror), but Priscus’ peril comes in writing a similar poem about Drusus before he
has died and in parading it for public consumption at a recitatio. ¹⁴ Priscus the
poet does not emerge as an impressive figure. Tacitus refers to his uaniloquentia
in reciting that poem before various women by way of boasting, which suggests
an insecure peacock, rather than a serious threat or an outspoken critic of the
regime.¹⁵ Nor does the description of the original poem about Germanicus as
 PIR . no.. All translations from the Annals, except where otherwise stated, are by
Woodman ().
 Cf. Seneca, Controuersiae  Pref.  on the self-censorship of the normally outspoken rhet-
orician Titus Labienus, who at a recitatio refused to read out to his friends parts of his history
which he considered contentious. Perhaps this was just a deft way to generate interest in his
work, but it also shows the power of public exposure at a recitatio before even a small audience.
 uaniloquentia, “after appearing in Plautus, seems absent from almost all intervening verse
and prose except Livy (..)” (Martin and Woodman () ). It is a rare word in Tacitus,
featuring again only at Annals .. Dio .. likewise highlights how Priscus “took great
pride in his poetic talents”. Pliny, Historia Naturalis . preserves a story which further sug-
gests Priscus’ showiness, namely that he spent ,, buying a eunuch-slave called Pae-
celebre necessarily suggest anything positive about its literary quality: it could be
famous without being accomplished. Perhaps the most interesting point about
the story, however, is that Priscus is put to death by an enthusiastic vote of
the senators, without approval from Tiberius, who is conspicuously irritated by
the penalty.¹⁶ This is an ill-judged preemptive strike, not a clear-cut case of an
emperor’s paranoia.
Our next poet, Gaius Cominius, also an equestrian, is the author of an appa-
rently much more overtly political poem in AD 24 (Annals 4.31.1– 2):
his tam adsiduis tamque maestis modica laetitia intericitur, quod C. Cominium equitem Ro-
manum, probrosi in se carminis conuictum, Caesar precibus fratris qui senator erat concessit.
quo magis mirum habebatur gnarum meliorum et quae fama clementiam sequeretur tristiora
malle. neque enim socordia peccabat; nec occultum est, quando ex ueritate, quando adum-
brata laetitia facta imperatorum celebrentur.
Amid these events, so constant and so sorrowful, there was a limited but welcome interval
whereby, when Gaius Cominius, a Roman equestrian, was convicted for an abusive poem
against Caesar, Tiberius made a concession to the pleas of his brother, who was a senator.
It was therefore considered all the more amazing that a man aware of the better course, and
of the reputation which followed upon clemency, should nevertheless prefer the grimmer. It
was not that he did wrong through insensibility, and there is no concealing when emperors’
deeds are celebrated genuinely and when with a merely spurious delight.¹⁷
This is an intriguing sequence. Previously, Tiberius had been stung by anony-

mous poems attacking his superbia and saeuitia (Annals 1.72.4), but he chose
to ignore them. Yet Cominius was not so lucky, since his authorship of the insult-
ing carmen was apparently not in doubt, and as a result he had been convicted
(by whatever means). That conviction gave Tiberius the opportunity to show
clementia, defusing the power of the poetry to do damage by generously sparing
the poet. So the sequence of events could have been presented as a positive re-
flection of the emperor’s conduct. Yet this is not how Tacitus plays it. Instead,
this single instance of clementia is used paradoxically to draw attention to
how seldom Tiberius displays it.¹⁸ What is most striking here, however, is Taci-
tus’ appended authorial comment as ‘literary critic’, decisively proposing in a
zon (if this is the same Priscus. Koestermann ()  thinks not, but Beagon ()  im-
plies that he is our Priscus and indeed that he was able to afford Paezon precisely because of
Tiberius’ lavish financial reward).
 Knox ()  suggests that the case of Priscus “illustrated both the extreme sensitivities of
Tiberius to literary activity and the degree to which his attitudes influenced the behavior of those
who surrounded him”.
 This translation includes some modifications of Woodman ().
 Dowling ()  –  discusses Tiberius’ public commitment to a policy of clementia.
20 Rhiannon Ash
generalized timeless present tense (nec occultum est) that it is easy to tell wheth-
er literary praise of an emperor is sincere or insincere. This is an extraordinary
remark (which undercuts large swathes of modern scholarship), but one which
has implications for the immediate context. It seems to suggest that (whatever
the reality) Cominius’ poem may not even have been openly abusive, but
those who convicted him read it in such a way that the surface praise veiled
deeper insincerity.¹⁹ One can compare here the divergent critical opinions
amongst modern scholars about the sincerity (or not) of Lucan’s celebration of
Nero at Pharsalia 1.33 – 66. With Cominius, Tacitus’ comment implicitly recasts
a straightforwardly offensive poem as an instance of doublespeak and suggests
a literary tussle articulated at opposing ends of the spectrum of sincerity and in-
sincerity. So, Cominius’ critics base their condemnation on the notion that Com-
inius in his poetry is being disingenuous, while his defender (his brother) coun-
ters by insisting on his brother’s essential sincerity as a poet. This recalls Ahl’s
perceptive point while discussing Horace: “Even if the emperor catches the
point, there is not a great deal he can do about it; because to admit that he
has caught it is to acknowledge its accuracy”.²⁰ Of course this may not prevent
later imperial vengeance further down the line, but it is one factor contributing
significantly to the power of a poet’s voice.
Our third poet is an intriguing figure, Mamercus Aemilius Scaurus.²¹ This
man stands out because he comes from the distinguished family of the Aemilii
Scauri and had a career as an orator.²² Seneca the Elder (Controuersiae 10
Pref. 2– 3) acknowledges that he had some good qualities as a speaker, but com-
ments on his laziness and wasted talent. Tacitus is a little kinder, calling him or-
atorum ea aetate uberrimus “the most fertile of the orators at that time” (Annals
3.31.4). Despite having angered Tiberius (Tacitus, Annals 1.13.4), Scaurus became
suffect consul in AD 21. Tacitus, however, characterizes him as a tarnished indi-
vidual, calling him an opprobrium maiorum “a reproach to his ancestors” (Annals
3.66.2).²³ Tiberius’ resentment of Scaurus meant that he took a personal interest
 It is possible that the probrosum carmen was less ambivalent. For example, Mayer (a)
 characterizes the offending poem as a “lampoon”.
 Ahl (a) .
 PIR  A .
 Seneca, Suasoriae . says that with his death, the family became extinct.
 Seneca, de Beneficiis . relays some choice stories about Scaurus (including one about
him catching in his open mouth the menstrual flow from his slave-girls and another about
him propositioning Annius Pollio for a bout of buggery). Unsurprisingly, he too compares Scau-
rus unfavourably with his famous ancestors.
when he was prosecuted for treason (Annals 6.9.3 – 4), but the crunch finally
comes in AD 34 (Annals 6.29.3 – 4):
Mamercus dein Scaurus rursum postulatur, insignis nobilitate et orandis causis, uita probro-
sus. nihil hunc amicitia Seiani, sed labefecit haud minus ualidum ad exitia Macronis odium,
qui easdem artes occultius exercebat detuleratque argumentum tragoediae a Scauro scriptae,
additis uersibus qui in Tiberium flecterentur: uerum ab Seruilio et Cornelio accusatoribus
adulterium Liuiae, magorum sacra obiectabantur. Scaurus, ut dignum ueteribus Aemiliis,
damnationem antiit, hortante Sextia uxore, quae incitamentum mortis et particeps fuit.
Next Mamercus Scaurus was arraigned again, distinguished for his nobility, and at plead-
ing cases but in his life a scandal. He was undermined not by Sejanus’ friendship, but by
the hatred (no less effective as regards extermination) of Macro, who operated the same
practices more secretly and had denounced the plot of a tragedy written by Scaurus with
additional verses which could be twisted against Tiberius. But the imputations cast at
him by the accusers Servilius and Cornelius were of adultery with Livia and of magicians’
rites. Scaurus, as was worthy of the old Aemilii, forestalled condemnation at the urging of
his wife, Sextia, whose incitement was as partner in his death.
It is striking here that we only find out that Scaurus is a poet at his very final
appearance in the historical narrative, when we already have a deeply en-
trenched sense of his flawed morals. And far from Scaurus’ poetry having any
beneficial impact on his contemporaries, his tragedy is opportunistically exploit-
ed by Macro as a weapon against its author. Tacitus seems to be deliberately
vague about the details of the tragedy.²⁴ In contrast, Dio (58.24) says that Scau-
rus’ play was the Atreus and that Tiberius had taken offense at a line where a
character had advised somebody to tolerate the selfishness of the ruler. Since Ti-
berius thought that Scaurus was aligning him with Atreus, he responded by mak-
ing Scaurus an ‘Ajax’ and forcing him to commit suicide.²⁵ This version of the
story is different from Tacitus’ account, whose formulation (additis uersibus,
with the ablative absolute masking the agent) even allows for the possibility
that a third party had interpolated the offending ambiguous lines of poetry
into Scaurus’ harmless original play. If that was not the scenario, then Macro
still does damage by denouncing the plot and then enumerating lines of verse
susceptible to praua interpretatio. As Goldberg observes: “it is impossible to
know whether the play was political by design or whether Scaurus merely fell
 Woodman ()  suggests that Tacitus thought it pedantic to give the title of the trag-
edy, but the omission perhaps also diminishes the status of the tragedy as a politically charged
piece of writing.
 Cf. Suetonius, Tiberius . for an unnamed poet (Scaurus?) who slandered Agamemnon in
a tragedy. He was then put to death and his work was destroyed.
22 Rhiannon Ash
victim to Macro’s malicious imaginings”.²⁶ Nonetheless, it seems a strong possi-

bility that Tacitus is nudging readers towards the latter reading. Certainly, in Tac-
itus’ account, Scaurus’ status as a poet emerges very belatedly and is almost in-
cidental to his characterization elsewhere. In the end, the contentious tragedy is
not even included in the list of charges, effectively and expressively eviscerating
it as a piece of charged political writing.
Finally, we have the case of Sextius Paconianus. This man, who had served
as praetor, was an associate of Sejanus and the audax maleficus who had helped
him concoct a plot against Caligula to which Tacitus refers in the narrative of AD
32 (Annals 6.3.4). This apparently caused his imprisonment, and he languished in
jail for several years until AD 35, when Tacitus explains (Annals 6.39.1): Paconia-
nus in carcere ob carmina illic in principem factitata strangulatus est, “Paconia-
nus was strangled in prison for poems devised there against the princeps”. So
although Paconianus meets a brutal death by strangulation because of his
steady stream of poems composed in prison against Tiberius, that belatedly ag-
gressive poetry serves as the excuse for his removal, not the fundamental cause.
The truth appears to be that although he survives initially because he cravenly
turns informer, he eventually outlives his usefulness: the poetry is simply pulling
the trigger of a gun which is already aimed against him. The composition of hos-
tile poems comes when he has nothing to lose except his life. Indeed, the impres-
sion given is that he is almost trying to catch Tiberius’ attention by this poetry, so
that he can be put out of his misery. Outside Tacitus, Paconianus is virtually in-
visible. The fourth-century AD grammarian Diomedes quotes four lines from him
about the four cardinal winds (in a poem written presumably before his impris-
onment), cited because of the contrived recurrence of nouns with vowel endings
in –o. Rather like Clutorius Priscus, Paconianus seems to be an unlucky oppor-
tunist, who would probably have been put to death anyway because of his asso-
ciation with Sejanus, regardless of his poetry.²⁷
So, our four Tiberian poets (Clutorius Priscus, Gaius Cominius, Mamercus
Scaurus, Sextius Paconianus) seem rather a grubby bunch. Three of them are vir-
tually complete unknowns, whose poetry has almost completely sunk without
trace, while the fourth (Mamercus Scaurus) is a morally dubious aristocrat
who fails to live up to the standards set by his famous ancestors. As personali-
ties, they appear to be weak figures, who follow the prevailing political wind as
best they can, but who seem ill-equipped to cope. The equestrian Clutorius Pris-
 Goldberg () .

 Courtney ()  –  calls Paconianus “an unsavoury follower of Sejanus” and with the
fragments of his poetry he compares Ovid, Tristia .. – .
cus tries preemptively to please Tiberius but gets it wrong; Gaius Cominius, an-
other equestrian, has to be rescued by his more successful senatorial brother;
Mamercus Scaurus, a friend of Sejanus, is an opportunistic prosecutor (Annals
3.66) with a morally dubious lifestyle, but he is no match for Macro; and Paco-
nianus gambles that the power of Sejanus will prevail – and loses. Their poetry
sparks the dangers that they face, but for better or worse, it fails to have much, if
any, impact on their immediate social and cultural setting. They are not even
pale imitations of Maternus from the Dialogus, and they seem to have been nei-
ther great poets nor great political operators. Of course, Tacitus’ snapshots of
these little-known poets may simply reflect reality. As Knox observes, there
were “no great names in the roll call, little to suggest that later generations of
readers urgently reserved a portion of their libraries to the Tiberian poets”.²⁸
At least under Tiberius, dissenting voices of the poets seem for the most part
to have been either silent or ineffectual, and Tacitus’ representation of these
four poets underscores this point. Yet that impression may be artificially skewed
by his notorious silence about Ovid, whose death is not even mentioned.²⁹ That
may be because Tacitus essentially saw Ovid (and his fate) as a ‘relic’ of the Au-
gustan principate, or perhaps because Ovid, who had actively turned his back on
a public career, was therefore an isolated outsider like the poet Saleius Bassus.
Or as Knox puts it: “Ovid’s misfortune, which was of no account in the historical
record, held no interest for Tacitus in this context”.³⁰ That, however, may not
quite capture the nuances of the situation. The fact that Tacitus in his Latin so
readily and subtly redeploys Ovidian language at significant moments suggests
to me that he is fundamentally sympathetic to the expressive power and subver-
sive ideology of Ovid’s poetry.³¹ And Tacitus is certainly counter-suggestible: the
fact that people might have expected to read an obituary of Ovid in his narrative
may be precisely why he does not supply one.
 Knox () . Blänsdorf () includes fragments of hardly any Tiberian poets.
 Syme () .
 Knox () .
 See for example Ash ()  on Tacitus borrowing from Ovid in nec quemquam saepius
quam Verginium omnis seditio infestauit (Histories ..), where the verb (a hapax legomenon in
the surviving Tacitean corpus) colorfully casts Verginius as being at the mercy of Scylla and
Charybdis (i. e. the mutinous soldiers).
24 Rhiannon Ash
Poetry in Motion: The Neronian Poets

In Tacitus’ narrative, it is only during Nero’s principate that a more intriguing
and varied range of named poets enters the scene and that the potential of po-
etry to serve as a political ‘weapon’ starts to become clear. The first case involves
the young prince Britannicus during the celebration of the Saturnalia in Decem-
ber AD 55, when Nero spitefully tries to exploit the opportunity to humiliate him
(Annals 13.15.2):³²
ubi Britannico iussit exsurgeret progressusque in medium cantum aliquem inciperet, inrisum
ex eo sperans pueri sobrios quoque conuictus, nedum temulentos ignorantis, ille constanter
exorsus est carmen, quo euolutum eum sede patria rebusque summis significabatur. unde
orta miseratio manifestior, quia dissimulationem nox et lasciuia exemerat.
…but when he ordered Britannicus to rise, proceed into the middle, and begin a song
(thereby hoping for ridicule of a boy ignorant of even sober, to say nothing of drunken gath-
erings), the other embarked on a poem in which it was indicated that he had been turned
out of his paternal abode and the supremacy. Hence there arose a pity all the more evident
because night and its recklessness had removed dissembling.
What is striking here is how Britannicus (only fourteen at the time) brilliantly
turns the tables on Nero by exploiting the opportunity provided by the sponta-
neous (semi‐)public performance of his carmen: as in the case of Maternus, the
recital of the poem by the living poet is just as important, if not more so, than
any written artifact.³³ Moreover, in an intimidating situation, Britannicus deploys
significatio, whereby aliud latens et auditori quasi inueniendum “something is
hidden and has to be found, as it were, by the listener” (Quintilian, Institutio Or-
atoria 9.2.65).³⁴ He thereby calls Nero’s bluff and puts him in an impossible sit-
uation: either Nero acknowledges the figured speech and thus implicitly accepts
the truth of the allegations, or he pretends not to see them and so risks looking
naïve and isolated in a setting where everyone else clearly understands the fig-
ured speech. It is precisely because the audience for the performance consists of
both Nero and a wider group that Britannicus’ gambit works – however briefly.
As Dressler observes, “interpretability is at least as much a matter of externality
 Bartsch ()  –  discusses the passage.

 Britannicus seems to have been quite good at snubbing Nero: cf. Suetonius, Nero . where
he pointedly calls Nero ‘Ahenobarbus’ after his adoption, thereby tacitly denying the legitimacy
of his new status.
 See Ahl (b)  – . Schmitzer ()  discusses this scene well.
as of internality—as much a matter of context as of intention”.³⁵ In terms of the

poem itself, Narducci suggests that the mythological subject matter for Britanni-
cus’ recital might have involved the conflict between Eteocles and Polynices for
taking power after Oedipus’ death.³⁶ Schmitzer points specifically to the closing
scene of Seneca’s Phoenissae as a relevant intertext, with Iocasta potentially to
be read as an Agrippina figure, Eteocles as Nero, and Polynices as Britannicus.³⁷
Tacitus, however, omits the precise details of the play and of how the figured
speech works, leaving us instead with the memorable image of Britannicus the
performer using his poem on one specific occasion to undermine Nero’s author-
ity. The poem itself matters much less than its politically engaged performer. Or
to borrow Ahl’s assessment of Lucan’s Pharsalia, “It is a political act as well as a
political poem”.³⁸
Our next Neronian poet, Antistius Sosianus, is rather less impressive than
Britannicus. We first meet him briefly in AD 56 in his role of tribune of the
plebs, intervening to secure the release of some actors’ supporters who had
been arrested (Annals 13.28.1). Then he crops up at the center of a maiestas
case in AD 62 (Annals 14.48.1):
P. Mario L. Afinio consulibus Antistius praetor, quem in tribunatu plebis licenter egisse mem-
oraui, probrosa aduersus principem carmina factitauit uulgauitque celebri conuiuio dum
apud Ostorium Scapulam epulatur. exim a Cossutiano Capitone, qui nuper senatorium ordi-
nem precibus Tigellini soceri sui receperat, maiestatis delatus est.
With Publius Marius and Lucius Afinius as consuls, Antistius, a praetor whose licentious
behavior during his tribunate I have recalled, scribbled slanderous poems against the
princeps and publicized them at a populous party while he was dining at the house of Os-
torius Scapula. Thereupon Cossutianus Capito, who had recently recovered his senatorial
rank through the pleas of his father-in-law Tigellinus, denounced him for treason.
Scholars have commented helpfully here on the suggestive dialogue with our ear-
lier case of Clutorius Priscus.³⁹ So, Antistius too gets himself into trouble for
 Dressler () .

 Narducci ().
 Schmitzer ()  – , who resists imposing a direct allegorical reading on the Phoenis-
sae, but allows for seeing the incomplete play as “a mythological commentary” on the conflict
between Nero and Britannicus. Tarrant ()  –  follows Fitch () in suggesting that the
Thyestes and Phoenissae were late plays of Seneca, approximately dateable to AD  – . Nisbet
() agrees, but reaches this conclusion by a different route. Kohn () remains cautious
about identifying Seneca the tragedian with Seneca the Younger. Even so, the Phoenissae at
least demonstrates the potential for poetry on a mythical topic to be read in a figured way.
 Ahl () .
 Ginsburg () is invaluable.
26 Rhiannon Ash
reading out his poetry, this time at a dinner-party hosted by Ostorius Scapula. Yet
unlike Priscus’ ill-judged and ill-timed carmen of lamentation about Drusus, An-
tistius’ poetry seems to be straightforwardly hostile to the emperor. The most sig-
nificant point about the prosecution prompted by his poetry, however, is the spir-
ited response that it provokes from Thrasea Paetus, who intervenes vigorously to
defend Antistius: libertas Thraseae seruitium aliorum rupit “The free-speaking of
Thrasea exploded the servitude of the others” (Annals 14.49.1). Unlike Clutorius
Priscus, who is executed, Antistius gets away with banishment as a result of
Thrasea’s intervention. This is an intriguing sequence. The implication is that An-
tistius’ poems were relatively frivolous, even if they were slanderous, and that he
had not expected his poetry to prompt a treason charge. All the same, the poems
do prompt a significant and unexpected intervention from Thrasea Paetus, who
agrees that Antistius is guilty, but who is not prepared to stand by and see the
senate and the emperor ride roughshod over the imposition of appropriate
legal penalties. Here we have an instance where the poetry is important because
it inadvertently triggers a desirable and morally robust response from a vigilant
senator. It is not the intrinsic quality of the poetry or the moral caliber of Anti-
stius as a person which matters (both are dubious), but the forceful intervention
it provokes from Thrasea Paetus which is important, since a matter of principle is
at stake. This point is further underscored by two subsequent details. First, the
fact that Antistius himself is cast as an unprincipled man, prepared to inform on
others to secure himself a return from exile (Annals 16.14), but despite Antistius’
personality, Thrasea intervened anyway. Second the fact that Nero, still bearing a
grudge that Thrasea Paetus secured the milder penalty of exile for Antistius, sees
that as a persuasive reason to eliminate Thrasea Paetus (Annals 16.21.2). This re-
minds us of the high cost of Thrasea’s intervention. Antistius may be a flawed
man and the author of some unremarkable poems, but he is still the catalyst
for the intervention of Thrasea Paetus, one of the political giants of Nero’s prin-
cipate – and so begins a chain of events which ultimately leads to his death.
Hot on the heels of the Antistius case, in the same year (AD 62), we encoun-
ter our next poet, Seneca the Younger, now in trouble after the death of Burrus
has broken his power and the sharks begin to circle (Annals 14.52.3):
obiciebant etiam eloquentiae laudem uni sibi adsciscere et carmina crebrius factitare,
postquam Neroni amor eorum uenisset.
They cast against him [Seneca] too the charge that he was arrogating praise for eloquence
to himself exclusively and was scribbling poems more frequently, now that Nero’s love of
them had emerged.
Here we see Seneca using poetry preemptively as a defensive weapon to engage

in captatio beneuolentiae of his mercurial former pupil (as he did with the Apoc-
olocyntosis), while the unnamed critics try in turn to undermine his gambit by
unmasking the strategy. This is poetry which lies at the center of a complex
web of power-struggles, as conflicting forces seek to exploit the poetry as a po-
litical weapon (whether defensive or offensive). Seneca’s writing is a dynamic
force here whose status is up for grabs, rather in the way that Priscus’ carmen
of lamentation about Drusus could potentially have triggered either positive or
negative consequences for its author. Again, the relationship of the poetry
with its immediate political context is for Tacitus really more significant than
the poems themselves. That said, there has been some disagreement about
which carmina are in the spotlight here. Syme takes this as a veiled reference
to the tragedies.⁴⁰ Yet it is difficult to see how the late plays Thyestes and Phoe-
nissae (given their subject matter and tone) could safely be used as a way to en-
snare Nero’s affections. It seems much more likely that the carmina are some
kind of lighter verses catering to the emperor’s tastes, as Ker suggests.⁴¹ We
can think here too of the after dinner ‘poetry slam’ events, where Nero invites tal-
ented but unknown young men (including Lucan?) to bring along their own un-
finished poems (or to make them up on the spot) so that the inspired partici-
pants can supply lines and verses for other poets’ unfinished compositions
(Annals 14.16.1).⁴² The heady atmosphere of frenzied poetic creativity must
have been like that memorably captured in Catullus 50, the poem to Licinius Cal-
vus. Certainly, the setting sounds far more charged and exciting than the staid
and settled occasion of the formal recitatio. ⁴³ Tacitus’ assessment of the poetry,
as bearing the hallmarks of contributions from multiple, living, poetic voices
(non impetu et instinctu nec ore uno fluens “flowing as they do with neither im-
pulse nor inspiration nor a uniform movement”, Annals 14.16.1) is perceptive and
vivid. No doubt the excitement stemmed not just from the aesthetic creativity,
but also from the huge scope for spontaneous lines of poetry (uncensored by
their creators in the heat of the moment) to provoke danger. In an instant, one
badly judged line could brutally restore the status quo whereby Nero resumes
his normal role as emperor and promptly drops his temporary liberating mem-
 Syme () .

 Ker () , n. , citing Pliny, Epistle .. –  on Seneca as a famous author of uersiculi
and the study of Dingel ().
 See Sullivan ()  on such occasions.
 For a lovely example where the stuffy and formal atmosphere of the recitatio hall causes the
reciter (Claudius) to have an attack of irrepressible giggles when a fat man sits down and inad-
vertently breaks the bench at the start of the recitation, see Suetonius, Claudius ..
28 Rhiannon Ash
bership of this explosively creative little band of poets. At any rate, the important
point is that in the highly-charged setting of Nero’s household, poetry does not
exist in a vacuum or on the margins. Instead, in a living performative context
and during a principate notoriously shaped by display, it can serve, for Seneca
and others, as a direct pathway to secure the emperor’s good will (or conversely,
his resentment).⁴⁴ We are a long way now from Aper’s isolated “woods and
groves” (Dialogus 9.6) as the locale for poetic composition. Of course, Nero him-
self wrote poetry, and Tacitus grudgingly praises his youthful efforts in this
sphere (Annals 13.3.3 aliquando carminibus pangendis inesse sibi elementa doctri-
nae ostendebat “sometimes in the composing of poems he showed that he had
elements of learning”). Yet if we only had Tacitus, we would know hardly any-
thing substantive about the nature of Nero’s poetic output: as Champlin ob-
serves, Nero’s creative range as a writer was broad, “running from mordant satire
to hymns to a proposed epic on Roman history, and almost certainly included the
appropriate monologues, arias, and libretti for his performances on stage”.⁴⁵ One
pointed comment from Tacitus (Annals 14.16.1 carminum quoque studium adfec-
tauit “he adopted an enthusiasm for poetry too”) even makes Nero seem insin-
cere about reading and writing poetry (cf. Domitian at Histories 4.86.2). Com-
pared with our other sources, Tacitus really plays down Nero’s status as a
creative writer of poetry in his own right, for example, by marginalizing
poems which Nero unambiguously composed as author, rather than recited
(cf. Annals 16.4.2, Nero … primo carmen in scaeno recitat, “Nero at first recites
a poem on stage”). Tacitus accentuates instead Nero’s identity as an empty per-
former (whether through lyre playing, acting tragedies, or dancing pantomimes)
and enacts a kind of damnatio memoriae on him as a writer.⁴⁶
The strong gravitational pull of Nero’s court on literary talents means that a
blurring of boundaries in poetic compositions between the political and the pri-
vate was almost inevitable. This ‘poetry in motion’ at the imperial centre, once
unleashed, made it impossible for a poet to retreat again to the safety of the mar-
 The importance of the living, performative context for Tacitus may be suggested by the strik-
ing formulation factitare + carmina (five times in the Annals, all – apart from one – in a Neronian
setting, and occurring nowhere else in extant Latin): it is the repeated frequentative activity of
the poet that matters, almost more than the poems themselves.
 Champlin () .
 See Courtney ()  –  and Blänsdorf ()  –  for the testimonia and fragments.
Suetonius, Nero  is kinder about Nero’s talents, clarifying that he has looked directly at Nero’s
notebooks where the annotations on the lines of poetry in his own hand clearly mark it out as
his own. On Nero’s poetry, see Baldwin ().
gins. Lucan discovers this to his cost, when Nero’s efforts to censor his poetry
drive him to join the Pisonian conspiracy (Annals 15.49.3):
Lucanum propriae causae accendebant, quod famam carminum eius premebat Nero prohib-
ueratque ostentare, uanus adsimulatione ⁴⁷
Lucan had his own reasons inflaming him, since Nero in a vain attempt at assimilation was
trying to suppress the fame of his poems and had prevented him from showing them off.
Here attempted censorship of poetry becomes a real political driving force and a
potential trigger for historical change, pushing Lucan to adopt a course of action
which, though ultimately unsuccessful, could have resulted in a political assas-
sination and a new emperor. Granted, as a motivation for joining a conspiracy,
Lucan’s anger at the attempted suppression of his poetry may perhaps seem
self-centered and unedifying, but it is a real stimulus all the same – and one
prompted by Nero’s own insecurities and associated actions, which had a real
impact on Lucan’s ability to function as a poet. Nor is it an isolated instance
of poetry having a part to play in the evolution of the conspiracy: another par-
ticipant, Afranius Quintianus, is prompted to act by Nero’s own abusive poem
casting aspersions on his masculinity (Annals 15.49.4).⁴⁸ This response might
seem excessive, but the abusive poem plays a causal role in Quintianus joining
the plot.
After the conspiracy fails and one by one the participants meet their deaths,
Tacitus finally puts the spotlight on Lucan (Annals 15.70):
exim Annaei Lucani caedem imperat. is profluente sanguine ubi frigescere pedes manusque et
paulatim ab extremis cedere spiritum feruido adhuc et compote mentis pectore intellegit, re-
cordatus carmen a se compositum quo uulneratum militem per eius modi mortis imaginem
obisse tradiderat, uersus ipsos rettulit eaque illi suprema uox fuit.
Thereupon he commanded the slaughter of Annaeus Lucanus. As his blood poured forth
and he realized that his feet and hands were chilling and that the pulse was gradually with-
drawing from his extremities, yet his breast was still warm and in control of his mind, he
recalled a poetic composition of his in which he had transmitted that a wounded soldier
 If Ahl ()  is right that Lucan, in his lost poem de Incendio Vrbis, held Nero responsible
for the fire of Rome in AD  and that this lay behind Nero’s ban, then Tacitus’ choice of the
metaphorical verb accendo seems a caustic dig at the poet by alluding to the basic cause of
the feud with Nero. The formulation propriae causae may involve some wordplay too – ‘his
own reasons’, yes, but also reasons which Lucan had himself provoked.
 Nero seems to have enjoyed concocting insulting poetry. Suetonius, Nero . cites Nero’s
poem which includes criticism of King Mithridates, while Domitian . mentions Nero’s poem
Luscio (‘One-Eyed Man’) about Clodius Pollio.
30 Rhiannon Ash
had met a form of death of the same sort; he repeated the actual verses, and they were his
final utterance.
Turpin proposes that in the suicide, “Lucan to some extent redeems himself,
after betraying his own mother, by dying as the proud author of a great
poem”.⁴⁹ That may be so, but the implications of this scene are perhaps more
complex. So, Lucan’s deliberate efforts to fuse his own identity with that of
his poetic creation, the wounded soldier, recall the reason why the potentes
are so irritated by Maternus in the Dialogus. That was because of the degree to
which the (living) poet Maternus identified with his (dead) subject Cato, but
here we have a twist, as the (soon to be dead) poet Lucan identifies with his
(dying) subject, the soldier, in such a way as to immortalize them both. In this
connection, it is striking that Suetonius in his short Vita Lucani hyperbolically
calls Lucan paene signifer Pisonianae coniurationis “virtually the standard-bearer
of the Pisonian conspiracy”. That military metaphor suggests that Lucan’s gam-
bit to be identified as a soldier through his poetry had some impact. What is also
powerful here is the performative element: once again, Tacitus focuses on the
poet’s unique performance even more than the poetry – a point further under-
scored by the Suetonian Vita Lucani, where one of Lucan’s final acts before kill-
ing himself is to write a letter to his father containing corrections for some of his
verses. Yet there is no performance. In Tacitus, Lucan’s ingenious fusion of iden-
tities (himself as civilian poet and his military subject) is meant to inspire and to
serve as raw material with which future writers can produce their own critical
narratives of Nero. Lucan’s poetry certainly has its own part to play in Tacitus’
construction of the bleak history of Nero’s principate. Yet it is crucial too that
the actual lines of verse are conspicuously not quoted uerbatim. ⁵⁰ In excising
them from the suicide scene, Tacitus is pointedly retaining authorial control
and making it clear that as a historian, he is not following Lucan’s script uncriti-
cally.
Our final named poet before the Annals breaks off is Curtius Montanus, who
first crops up in AD 66 in an indignant outburst from Eprius Marcellus fulminat-
ing against Thrasea Paetus, but also berating Helvidius Priscus, Paconius Agrip-
pinus, and Curtius Montanus, who was detestanda carmina factitantem “scrib-
bling his execrable poems” (Annals 16.28.1). The implication here is that
Montanus was some kind of satirist or writer of vitriolic epigrams, although it
 Turpin () .

 Various suggestions have been made about which part of Lucan’s Pharsalia is meant here
(. – , the death of Lycidas, is often cited). Yet, as Ker ()  n.  correctly observes,
“Tacitus’ wording may suggest a stand-alone poem”.
is striking that there is no mention of him directly attacking the emperor, which
one might have expected Marcellus to have made clear. No misdemeanor is men-
tioned apart from the poems. Eprius Marcellus’ fiery assault on Montanus stirs
unease in the senators, who quietly reflect that it is unfounded (Annals
16.29.2): enimuero Montanum probae iuuentae neque famosi carminis, quia protu-
lerit ingenium, extorrem agi “And as for Montanus, a young man of probity rather
than of defamatory poetry, he was being banished as an outcast because he had
proclaimed his talent”.⁵¹ Here we see another tussle over how to react to partic-
ular poems: Eprius Marcellus sees them as defamatory (without saying how),
whereas the senators cast Curtius Montanus as a talented young poet who ech-
oes Lucan in stirring Nero’s jealousy. In the event, Montanus is let off relatively
lightly, being forgiven for his father’s sake, provided that he does not stay in pol-
itics (Annals 16.33.1). It would be intriguing to know whether Montanus the poet
from the Annals is the same Montanus, the outspoken orator who crops up in the
Histories. Early in Vespasian’s principate, Montanus proposes in the senate that
Piso’s memory should be honored as well as Galba’s (Histories 4.40), but he is
most conspicuous for a bitter and sarcastic speech attacking the Neronian pros-
ecutor Aquilius Regulus (Histories 4.42).⁵² If he is the same man as our Monta-
nus, then Tacitus’ readers would know that this attempt in AD66 to stifle Mon-
tanus’ political career failed, and that the young poet would evolve into an
articulate and engaged politician in his own right. Thus he may be another illus-
tration of Tacitus’ pervasive interests in living poets, who actively engage with
the world of politics and power and refuse to live in an artistic vacuum.
Conclusions
Quintilian famously describes the genre of history as proxima poetis “closest to
the poets” (Institutio Oratoria 10.1.31). This is an intriguing formulation, since as
 This distinction between an upright life and grubby poetry implicitly triggers a defense used
by the poets (Catullus . – ; Ovid, Tristia .; Martial ..).
 See Martin () on this speech, conspicuous for its sustained deployment of Ciceronian
rhythm (which Tacitus plays down elsewhere). Martin believes that the Histories Montanus is
the same as the Annals one. The main reason why critics think that we might here have a father
(Histories) and son (Annals) is that the son would be too young to speak so early in a debate in
the senate (Koestermann () ; Chilver and Townend () ). Yet given the unusually
turbulent backdrop to the debate in the Histories (including the young Domitian presiding, rath-
er than his absent father), this does not seem a conclusive argument. Heubner ()  is sim-
ilarly cautious. For more on Regulus, see Ash ().
32 Rhiannon Ash
a yardstick for history, he introduces (human) poetae, “poets”, rather than (ab-
stract) poiesis, “poetry”. So, how close is Tacitus to his poets? And where does
this analysis of Tacitus’ portrayal of named poets leave us? Despite the undeni-
ably poetic texture and allusive quality of Tacitus’ distinctive Latin, which is un-
derpinned and enriched by allusions to poetic texts, he is still comparatively se-
lective about which named practitioners of poetry appear as active figures in his
narratives. We have followed the stories under Tiberius of four relatively undis-
tinguished poets (Clutorius Priscus, Gaius Cominius, Mamercus Scaurus, Sextius
Paconianus), three of whom end up dead, when they promptly cease to be inter-
esting: certainly, their poetry does not bring them any posthumous fame. In a cu-
rious way, the nature, genre, and quality of our quartet’s poetry seem almost in-
cidental to their individual fates, which (for the three dead poets) are brought
about largely by a dangerous combination of formidable enemies, folly, and
bad luck. The only poet to survive, Gaius Cominius, achieves this through the in-
tervention of his influential brother, a senator. Under Nero, the dynamics have
shifted, so that poetry now conspicuously takes center-stage in the imperial
domus. In what survives of the last hexad of the Annals, we meet a rather
more distinguished and varied group of poets (Britannicus, Antistius Sosianus,
Seneca, Lucan, Curtius Montanus). They all come from a higher social stratum
than most of the Tiberian poets, and a conspicuous strand which runs through
many of their individual stories involves the politicized performance of their
work, either as a prelude to danger (Britannicus, Antistius Sosianus) or as a be-
lated form of revenge (Lucan). That may make us think back to the Ur-poet, Ma-
ternus. So, it seems that Tacitus is drawn above all to living poets in the land-
scape of his narrative and to the unique performative contexts in which they
bring their poetry to life and have an impact on the ‘outside’ world of politics
and power. The written artifacts of their poetic texts (and the inner world and
fine-granulation of the poems) are less important to Tacitus, at least as an
overt focal-point for his historical narrative, than the poets themselves. If the
spheres of poetry and politics fail to intersect or clash, then Tacitus is happy
to keep poets at arm’s length. A case in point is the brief appearance of the
epic poet Silius Italicus, who is named as a witness for a meeting which took
place between Vitellius and Vespasian’s brother Sabinus in the Temple of Apollo
on the Palatine (Histories 3.65.2). Even though Tacitus certainly uses Silian-fla-
vored Latin when it suits him to do so, he says nothing about Silius’ status as
an epic poet at this moment.⁵³ Why would he though? Tacitus’ interest lies in
 Ash ()  considers Tacitus’ expression lubrica ad mutandam fidem classe “since the
fleet was ready at the least impulse to change its allegiance” (Histories ..) as an elegant
the dynamic intersection between poets and those in power (whether emperors
or figures lower down the hierarchy), not in ossified and static poetic texts for
their own sake.⁵⁴
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 I thank Chris Pelling for comments on an earlier draft. I offer this paper as a small token of
gratitude to my formidable friend and colleague Fred Ahl. Nobody has done more than Fred to
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34 Rhiannon Ash
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Alex Dressler
Nominal Intelligence: Conspiracy,
Prosopography, and the Secret of Horace,
Odes 2.10
Summary: By triangulating Frederick Ahl’s contribution to the study of Roman
poetry with earlier modern and later postmodern studies of Roman history
and literature, this article explores the controversial scholarly suggestion that
Horace’s poem of the “Golden Mean,” Odes 2.10, is implicated in a conspiracy
to topple Augustus in 23 BCE. Detecting a prefiguration of Paul Ricoeur’s “herme-
neutics of suspicion” in Nisbet and Hubbard’s and Ronald Syme’s prosopograph-
ical treatments of the poem, the article exploits rumors that Syme was involved
in intelligence and posits a model of the text as an active site of ongoing intrigue,
comprising codes and aliases in the fashion of a ‘kerygma’ and demanding a tac-
tical or ‘partisan’ approach to ancient literature.
Keywords: Horace, Odes; Odes 2.10; decorum; hermeneutics of suspicion; Ronald

Syme; prosopography; conspiracy; kerygma; Varro Murena; Augustan/anti-Augu-
stan
Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? – Mao Tse-tung 1966, 12
Introduction: Figured Speech, Prosopography,

and the Partisan of the Truth
“It is easier for a government to defeat a conspiracy than to prove its existence.”¹
So begins the few pages of trenchant prosopography that Ronald Syme devoted
to the mystery of the addressee of Horace, Odes 2.10. In this poem, the poet coins
the famous slogan of the Golden Mean (aurea mediocritas) in the midst of “a
string of nine moral precepts,” which, David West continues, “it is no easy mat-
ter to make…into a poem.”² Does anything else distinguish this poem of medioc-
rity? Syme did not think so, and thus disagreed with Nisbet and Hubbard who
uncharacteristically introduce the poem with a veritable epyllion of historical
 Syme () .

 West () .
38 Alex Dressler
intrigue.³ A manuscript superscription reads “To Licinius Murena, that the mid-
dle way of life is best”; Maecenas’ brother-in-law is identified in Velleius as ‘L.
Murena’;⁴ Dio makes a mistake about the year, but recounts a conspiracy around
the time of the second Augustan settlement, which involved a Likinios Mourêna. ⁵
Combining these and other prosopographical details, Nisbet and Hubbard follow
the tradition and identify the addressee of Horace’s ode, a certain “Licinius,” as
none other than Maecenas’s “polyonomous” affine, Terentius Varro Murena,
who, as consul, conspired against Augustus in 23 BCE, was deposed, and
executed.⁶
There is no way of knowing whether Horace’s ‘Licinius’ was that Murena,
and Syme’s dictum applies as much to the procedure of the modern prosopogra-
pher as to ancient attempts to uncover conspiracies.⁷ In this paper, I argue that
the ambivalence of Horace’s ode to moderation reflects the ambivalence of sig-
nification and interpretation in general: in other words, meaning in general,
and certainly that “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible de-
gree,” which Pound identified as “literature,” may only arise in the utterance
whose full significance resists demonstration.⁸ Further, the possibility that Hora-
ce’s language is evasive in this way endows it with an air of conspiracy that his-
torical context may or may not substantiate, raising the possibility that what
Frederick Ahl first identified, following Quintilian, as “figured speech” (significa-
tio) may appear earlier than thought, not only in the late Augustan period, when
Stephen Hinds has suggested something like it is at work in Ovid’s exile poetry,
but also at the heart of ‘Golden Age’ Augustanism.⁹ Ahl almost suggested as
much in the piece that will be my touchstone throughout what follows, “The
Horse and the Rider: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry.”¹⁰
 Nisbet and Hubbard ()  – , cf., e. g., Nisbet and Hubbard ()  on Sestius.
 All translations throughout are mine; the text of Horace is Shackleton Bailey (), modified
throughout in accordance with the specifications of De Gruyter.
 Nisbet and Hubbard ()  f., with Vell. .. and Dio ... Verrall ()  – 
makes Murena central to Odes  and thus Odes  – , but see Santirocco () .
 OCD R: “to be distinguished from the consul designate of  BC… Brother-in-law of C. Maece-
nas, but not the recipient of Horace, Odes ..”
 Cf. Pagán () ; Lowrie () , , ; Dressler ()  – .
 Pound () , cf. Ahl (b)  f.
 Ahl (a)  – , (b)  f., developed by Bartsch () . On Ovid as an object of
conspiracy theory, see Hinds () , cf. Barchiesi ()  – , esp.  f., with Horace,
and Feeney ()  – ; cf. Syme () . Note also the rather ‘post-Augustan’ charge lev-
eled against the conspirators of , maiestas: Levick ()  f; cf. the intimations of Silver
Age obsequiousness in Suetonius’ Vita: Lyne ()  n. ; cf. Dressler ()  f.
 Ahl (b)  f., .
Nominal Intelligence: Conspiracy, Prosopography, and the Secret of Horace 39
Two consequences follow from this generally conspiratorial air of Latin liter-
ature, ancient and modern. As a first consequence, in antiquity, it is in the gen-
eral dimension of possible conspiracy that indirect perlocutions of the kind Odes
2.10 represents achieve their capacity to change reality and become political.¹¹
Thus, for example, Horace will say that Apollo is sometimes merciful (Odes
2.10.19 f.). On the properly conspiratorial reading, this might be taken as an en-
couragement to Augustus, alias Apollo, Jupiter, etc., to show ‘Licinius,’ alias Mur-
ena, mercy.¹² On the other hand (and here we are still exploring the consequence
for the ancients), by conferring such a central place to the explication of medi-
ocritas, which, as Lowrie notes, always is what it is by reference to what it is
not,¹³ Horace endows his poem with the very duality that makes the poetics of
conspiracy efficacious. If Odes 2.10 exemplifies mediocritas, then it, too, is
what it is by reference to what it is not. In other words, it is ‘merely’ a poetical
play, the proliferation of anodyne aphorisms, and something like pure poetry of
the kind that West, and Santirocco also, suggest.¹⁴ As a result, as Syme suspect-
ed, it proves nothing at all. If Santirocco is also right that the significance of Odes
2.10 is primarily structural (a poem about the golden mean, it occurs halfway
through the second book, itself the halfway point of Odes 1– 3), then its vacuity
may be deliberate: it is the empty center on which the collection turns.¹⁵ Alter-
natively, this very vacuity may be, so to speak, a beard: if Odes 2.10 proves noth-
ing at all, then it may also suggest that this ‘Licinius,’ who may yet be Murena,
may be innocent. Nothing to prove means nothing to disprove.
The second consequence of the possibility of conspiracy affects the modern
interpreter. In a statement that distills her contribution to Horatian scholarship,
Ellen Oliensis wrote: “The concept of decorum is never innocent.”¹⁶ With this as-
sumption of guilt, Oliensis exemplifies the temper of an age founded in the ‘her-
meneutics of suspicion’: dubbed thus by Paul Ricoeur, this approach to culture
suggests that participation in most societies is tantamount to collusion in some
kind of cover-up.¹⁷ In the case of Horace, the possibilities abound: on a global
 Ahl (b)  reserves this status for Lucan.

 Nisbet and Hubbard () , cf. Miller ()  f.
 Lowrie ()  f., cf. ; also Santirocco () .
 Santirocco () .
 Santirocco () , cf. Porter () . On the structure of Book , see below.
 Oliensis () , cf. Geue ()  – . Ahl (b)  differs from Oliensis in the de-
gree of consciousness that he accords the conspirator: “Horace and Vergil recognized Octavian
beneath Augustus. But to profess that recognition openly was to flirt with danger. If they sought
to criticize, they must fight the civil war of compliments.”
 Dressler ()  – , on Ricoeur ()  – .
40 Alex Dressler
scale,¹⁸ patriarchy and domination (so Oliensis); more locally, dissimulation of

the basis of ‘Augustus’’ ‘Golden Age’ in the political violence of Octavian (so
Ahl)¹⁹; more locally still, the conspiracy of Murena, or ‘Licinius’ (so Nisbet and
Hubbard).
Rather than merely nuancing Ahl’s influential invocation of ‘figured speech’
in “The Horse and the Rider,” in the present contribution I’ll use Syme’s interven-
tion in the history of Odes 2.10, along with his rumored intervention in world his-
tory in wartime intelligence, to recover an Ahlian tendency of interpretation,
which I call that of the partisan of the truth. This tendency does not entail believ-
ing in any assortment of particular truths, which constitute ‘the truth’ – that, for
example, Horace really was aware of the conspiracy of Murena, that he wrote as
he did when Maecenas fell from favor, etc. Rather, in the light of an experience of
fundamental insight into an event (say, ‘The Roman Revolution’), the partisan of
the truth reconfigures his or her approach to the evidence in such a way that she
maintains fidelity to her singular insight, even when all other ‘evidence’ contra-
dicts it and the results appear, compared to the quotidian truth of ‘common
sense’ or positivism, paradoxical.²⁰ “Augustus is the creation of the supreme
eiron, the supreme dissimulator,” writes Ahl, where irony requires a state of af-
fairs from which the eiron can dissimulate, even if “[t]he ‘real’ Horace is as elu-
sive as the ‘real’ Augustus.”²¹ Similarly, Ahl will recall Lucretius’ statement, “sto-
len is the mask, and the fact remains,” in the deployment of a rhetoric of
demystification: “Caesar’s rhetorical mask was not complete.”²² From the critic’s
fidelity to an event (again, e. g., the ‘Roman Revolution’), there arises a dimen-
sion of history that grounds his or her access to the reality behind the mask.
As a result, one can say, panegyric after panegyric of Augustan literature not-
withstanding: “Vergil and Horace may well have profited as much as did Octa-
vian from this bizarre symbiosis, even if all parties sincerely loathed one
another.”²³
That the expressions of masking and revelation, which facilitate such osten-
sibly paradoxical claims, occur in Syme also is an index of Ahl’s epistemic ped-
igree. Of Octavian, the historian writes: “As with Pompeius, face and mien might
be honest and comely. What lay behind the mask?”²⁴ At the same time, by put-
 Cf. Ricoeur () .

 Ahl (b)  – .
 Badiou () ,  – , cf. ()  – .
 Ahl (b) .
 .: eripitur persona, manet res; for the rest, see Ahl (b) , .
 Ahl (b) , , cf. Lyne () , ,  f.,  f., Putnam ()  – .
 Syme () .
ting ‘reality’ in quotation marks as he does in discussing the “‘real’ Horace,” Ahl
already raises questions about the validity of his claims by the normal, common
sense criteria of positivist, empirical, or inductive interpretation. Can we recon-
cile the claims that he makes about reality with the questions that he raises
about ‘reality?’
One exemplary (postmodern) solution to the dilemma posed by reality and
‘reality’ (i. e., appearance?) is to embrace the mask as the reality, and to insist
that there is only ‘reality,’ as Oliensis does (1998: 2):
Horace is present in his personae [N.B. ‘masks’], that is, not because these personae are au-
thentic and accurate impressions of his true self, but because they effectively construct that
self – for Horace’s contemporary readers, for us, and also for Horace himself. The reason I
prefer the concept of face…to the new-critical concept of the persona is that it registers this
de facto fusion of mask and self.
In this paper, consistent with Horace’s own apparent cultivation of moderatio, I

advocate a third way of interpretation between the modern and postmodern.
While I believe that this third way was effectively operative in Ahl from the be-
ginning, I also think it took the programmatic postmodernity of an Oliensis to
see beyond the ‘trutherism’ of its first articulation – that is, the belief that
there is a reality, even if it only seems safe or prudent to call it ‘reality,’ behind
the mask; this is the belief, which Stephen Hinds describes as the paranoid faith
that grounds historicism, viz. “The truth is out there.”²⁵ In contrast with either
modern or postmodern positions, however, the tendency of the partisan of the
truth is the interpretation of the reader who ‘knows’ that the results of her ap-
proach cannot be ‘proven’ or ‘disproven’ in the traditional terms of positivism
and empiricism but pursues them anyway. The partisan justifies this pursuit
with a conviction more compelling than, or at any rate epistemologically prior
to, simple positivism. The conviction is that there are stakes in the struggle,
and one has to act. As a result, it is more accurate to think of the knowledge pro-
duced by literary scholarship not as knowledge per se but as knowledge as ac-
tion – in other words, as ‘intelligence.’ The model for this is neither Ahl nor
Sir Ronald but Ahl after Oliensis and Syme the spy.
 Hinds () . Ahl’s quotation marks obviate the diagnosis of paranoia (his is, then,
‘truth,’ not truth) but on such quotation marks, see Derrida ()  – . On the rejection of
depth (of, e. g., reality for ‘reality’) in postmodernity, see Jameson ()  – ,  – . Fellow
traveler Rudich () viii f. rejects the “absolutization of the reader,” which could describe the
Oliensian approach (and mine), in the name of “the quest for truth”; cf. Dressler ()  n. ,
 n.  where add Syme () .
42 Alex Dressler
To demonstrate the continuities and ruptures between Syme, Nisbet and

Hubbard, Ahl, the spies, and us, I explore the secret of Odes 2.10 in two stages.
First, in the next section I situate the poem in the history of its interpretation, in
the context of the cold war, with particular attention to Syme’s rumored involve-
ment in intelligence work in the twentieth century. In the section after that, I sur-
vey the poem itself in its layered embedding in the Odes as a whole and the
intra-poem dynamics that recapitulate the inter-poem or poetry book dynamics.
It is here that I deploy the closest reading of Odes 2.10, and where readers who
don’t completely recall the poem of mediocrity can find it quoted in full. In the
course of my reading, I develop a model of the poem as workable code, which I
borrow from Paul Ricoeur, and call a ‘kerygma.’
In the end, I will suggest that we can know the truth behind the illusion of
Odes 2.10, not because Horace did or did not offer such a truth, not because there
were, then, properly Augustan and anti-Augustan positions in the early Empire,
and not even because, à la Duncan Kennedy, the Augustan presupposed the anti-
Augustan, and the anti-Augustan the Augustan, with the result that, because the
resistance was everywhere, it was also nowhere.²⁶ On the contrary, precisely be-
cause of the last-mentioned consequence of deconstruction, the way to know the
truth behind the illusion is to take a position (such is partisanship) and watch
the rest of the pieces fall into place. From the perspective of criticism, the posi-
tion that one takes will be arbitrary, but from the perspective of present history
and the critic’s own place within it, one’s position is based on a field of conflict
more pressing than the Augustan or anti-Augustan (Republican, etc.). It is based,
as I’ll suggest in the final section, on a resistance to the aristocracy, the hoarders
of property whom Augustus and Horace used in common.²⁷ But since neither
poet nor princeps confronted the old guard directly or for ideologically pure rea-
sons, it is necessary to play the part of the handler in espionage and, as the spies
used to say, to turn the most vulnerable, plausibly conflicted of the two, the poet
– to our ends.
Finally, while the broad intertext that I adopt for this endeavor, the cold war,
may be untimely, it is justified in part by the historical framework of the relevant
players, and in part by the clarity of ideological boundaries that – at least rhet-
orically, that is, in deconstruction – it permits.²⁸
 Kennedy ()  – , Schiesaro () .

 On the redistributionism of the ‘Roman Revolution,’ see Osgood ()  f.,  – ,
 – , ,  – . I am pleased to find a similar, but not identical conclusion in Geue
(), and for his piece, as well as for that of Schiesaro (), on which I also draw, I endeav-
or, through Ahl, Syme, and Oliensis, to provide a theoretical rationale.
 Cf., e. g., Derrida ()  – .
Prosopography and Cold War Classics: NH, AA,

A.T.[erentius A. f… Var]ro Murena (and
sometimes L.)
“22 or 23?” In a formulation that earned the scorn of the social historian, and
other knight, Sir M.I. Finley (a.k.a. Moses Finkelstein), appears the question
on which the dating of Odes 2.10, the possibility of its implication in the ‘Murena
Affair,’ part of the internal dynamics of the (second) ‘Augustan Settlement,’ and
the date of the publication of Odes 1– 3 all turn.²⁹ On this question, Nisbet and
Hubbard, in their famous commentary to Odes, Book 2 (hereafter NH), dedicate a
long introductory note, rivaling Syme in the ratiocination of the method that he
introduced in The Roman Revolution (hereafter RR) and would revisit, pace NH,
in the chapter entitled “Nobiles in Horace” in The Augustan Aristocracy (hereafter
AA). Even as he would contest NH, however, Syme himself entertained the pos-
sibility that date, conspiracy, and consul all converge in Horace’s ode in RR:
“The tall trees fall in the tempest and the thunderbolt strikes the high peaks,”
he writes in a chapter entitled “Crisis…”; then, in the footnote: “So Horace, os-
tensibly prophetic, in an Ode addressed to Licinius (2, 10, 9 ff.) – who is probably
Murena.”³⁰ Why did Syme then change his mind? What does the possibility of
such a change have to teach us about the relationship of representation and re-
ality, of a Horatian text to its social context, and the way we bridge the gap in
interpretation?
NH base their conclusion that the poem at least refers to the Murena affair
on a variety of evidence.³¹ As the pièce de résistance, they refer Horace’s coinage
of the Peripatetic slogan “the Golden Mean” to the philosophical interests of the
real Murena (Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) 152 f.):
Strabo records how the philosopher Athenaeus of Seleucia (in Cilicia) was involved in Mur-
ena’s fall (14.5.4)… The significant thing is that Athenaeus was one of the leading Peripa-
tetics of the day… Horace’s ode is a commendation of the middle way, and the mediocritas
 Finley and Hopkins ( []) , with Jameson (); cf. Hölkeskamp ()  f.,
Wilkinson () . On the date, see Syme ()  n. , Raaflaub and Samons ()
, Levick ()  – , (), Wilkinson ()  f., and, Horatian, Henderson ()
 – ,  –  and Geue ()  f.
 Syme ()  n.  on , cf.  n.  and  n. . As late as the year Nisbet and Hub-
bard () was published, Syme ( [])  still wrote of the “ill-starred consul”; cf.
Syme ()  n. , and note the omission, at Syme ()  n. , of Syme ().
 Nisbet and Hubbard () , cf. , and Syme () .
44 Alex Dressler
which he enjoins was a Peripatetic watchword… It would be a strange coincidence if the

Licinius of the ode were somebody other than Athenaeus’s patron.
In view of this, NH conclude that the work as a whole was indeed published “in
the second half of 23,” and that, as a result, “Murena’s downfall should be put in
two distinct stages.”³² The length of time of his disgrace they partly attribute to
the uncertainty that followed Augustus’s ongoing rearrangement of the constitu-
tion around himself (the ‘Augustan Settlement,’ Part 2, of the late 20s). In AA,
Syme is sparer (387):
M. Primus the proconsul of Macedonia stood trial for high treason… The advocate of Primus
raised objection, to be countered by the Princeps… Licinius Murena, who defended the pro-
consul, was a man of violent tongue and temper. Conceiving annoyance, he went in with a
conspiracy which Fannius Caepio promoted… Neither his brother Proculeius could save
Murena, nor Maecenas, the husband of his sister.
Supplementing such bare ‘facts,’ NH wrote (155):
Maecenas had early news of the discovery of the plot, and in his terrible dilemma betrayed
the secret to his wife Terentia… predictably, she informed her brother, who may have gone
into hiding at this point. Though Augustus was astute enough to foresee this outcome (he
must have hoped for a tactful suicide rather than another state trial), he could not overlook
the indiscretion of his increasingly embarrassing minister.
In AA, Syme objects not to the novelistic interiority of the account provided by
NH,³³ but to the numerous lines that must be drawn to connect it from Varro Mur-
ena through the ‘Licinius’ of Odes 2.10 to the name-making consul ordinarius of
23. Among these are the multi-stage theory of decline, the ‘inadequacy’ of Hora-
tian scholia as a rule, the irrelevance of the consular fasti in this particular
instance, ³⁴ and Horace’s failure to capitalize, in addressing someone of so
grand a lineage, on the “double opportunity, of prestige as well as nomencla-
ture,” of the name Varro Murena.³⁵
 Nisbet and Hubbard ()  f., pace Syme ()  n. . Pace both, the poem could
be addressed to Murena after he died: cf. Odes ., to ‘Vergil.’
 How could he? See, e. g., Syme ()  – ; on the novelistic results of reconstructing
Roman conspiracies, see Lowrie ()  f.
  – , and N.B. Syme ()  n. . On the case of Crassus, see Syme ()  f.,
Galsterer ()  f.
 While at Syme ()  Syme identifies the Peripatetic affiliation of Murena as a “valua-
ble extraneous fact” in the discussion of Odes ., he credits not Nisbet and Hubbard ()
but Griffin ()  (who cites Nisbet and Hubbard ()!).
The tactic that Syme employs in his treatment of the conspiracy, in AA at

least, is instructively similar to that which he employs in the more famous matter
of Ovid’s exile in History in Ovid: separating everything that can be derived from
the poetry, the prosopographer comes to his conclusion, and only then proceeds
to treat the poetry.³⁶ In the case of Horace, Odes 2.10, he similarly resolves the
“amalgam” of three identities: (A) Murena=consul, (B) Murena=conspirator, (C)
Murena=‘Licinius,’ where A and B are prosopographical questions of a properly
political kind and C is a literary question, and where questions of type C always
follow questions of type A and B. The class-constituting relations of individuals
described by prosopography are, in other words, the base, from which poetry,
philosophy, morality, the Roman constitution, and much else, are but
superstructure.³⁷ When poetry, philosophy, morality, and the rest are the explicit
subject of discussion in Syme, base determines superstructure.³⁸
Syme presents this principle of the political basis of cultural production as
though it applied only to evidentiary value, and not to the original efficacy, of
poetry. Nevertheless, the assumption, which he more or less shares with NH
(“In his paraeneses Horace normally advised his patrons to do what they are
doing already”³⁹), is that poems do not do anything, then as now (Syme (1986)
389 f., with my italics):
 Syme ()  – .

 Cf. Syme ()  n. : “What is commonly called the ‘Rechtsfrage’, and interminably dis-
cussed, depends upon a ‘Machstfrage’”; cf. Marx ( []) : “Between equal rights force
decides.” See further, e. g., Syme ()  (cf. ),  –  (cf.  – ), , ,  – ,
. For related examples of “realism,” see Syme () vii, , ,  f., ,  f.,  n. ,  f.,
, ,  with , ; further, Syme ()  n. , ,  – , , . On this
matter, the old and new historicists are not so different: see, e. g., Habinek ()  f., cf. Finley
()  f.; on Syme’s innovation, Bowersock () , ; Galsterer () , with
Dressler (b)  f.; Galinsky () . On ideology, Roman republicanism, and base
and superstructure, see Wilkinson ()  – .
 But see, on the Cleopatra Ode, Syme () : “Created belief turned the scale of history”;
cf. : “poetry…could be…perhaps no less effective […] than the spoken or written word of the
Roman statesmen.” But when, on his reading, was that ever effective? See, e. g., Syme () .
Cf. Galsterer ()  f. In his very inconsistency, Syme anticipates recent dialectical ap-
proaches (such as Feeney () , Kennedy ()  – , Barchiesi ()  f., Lowrie
()  f., Geue ()  f.) at Syme () : “it is at least remarkable that certain
Odes of Horace…should contain such vivid and exact anticipations of the reforms…for which
Rome had to wait five years longer”; cf. Syme () ,  f.; contrast Syme ()  – 
(“The Organization of Opinion”), and see White ()  – , Lyne () , Putnam
()  n. , Milnor ()  – ; cf. Syme () , .
 Nisbet and Hubbard () , cf. Lyne () . For good reasons against this static ap-
proach to addressees, see Geue ()  – , cf. Schiesaro ()  f.
46 Alex Dressler
No necessity therefore subsists for putting the catastrophe of Varro Murena in the second
half of the year, or, for that matter even later, in 22. That is, unless one is prepared to invoke
and exploit a Horatian ode… Wide divergences obtain among the interpreters of certain
odes; and doubt arises when the character, pursuits, and social status of a recipient are ei-
ther assumed to be known or to be inferred from the language. When it is a mere matter of
convivial habits or a life passed in tranquility, disquiet need not be felt, or hesitation about the
personal relevance for example to Sestius, or to Postumus…
But in a serious matter, not of private, but rather of political reality?

In short, Syme’s subsequent rejection (in AA) of the conspiracy theory of NH
(from RR) entails an a priori bracketing of the internal dynamics of poetry and
thus of a whole subtle but distinct field of evidence and action. Yet it is not ob-
vious that, from a purely tactical perspective, one need make this elimination,
and the ironic fate of Syme’s famous method in the twentieth century proves
this. In A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative of the Hero
Whose Spy Network…Changed the Course of History, the real, historical “hero”
of the title, William Stephenson, credits Syme, by way of émigré classicist and
army man Gilbert Highet, with the development of a “technique for synthesizing
psychological-behavioral patterns from random information gathered about a
subject…called…‘Proso-Profiles.’”⁴⁰ Here, “art” (historiography) actually pro-
ceeded life (history). In the case of the authors of the latter, the aim of
“proso-profiling” is patently tactical, but is the former, at least in Syme, so dif-
ferent? “Though concealed by craft or convention, the arcana imperii of the no-
bilitas cannot evade detection.”⁴¹
This last claim is the key. Time and again throughout RR, Syme denigrates
the attempt to establish the intentions of the individuals in favor of what can
be established in spite of their attempts, or the attempts of history, to “baffle”
us⁴²; better than the assessment of motives, he suggests, is the determination
of what can be known (now) and what could be done (then), where the two
are strangely equivalent in his treatment.⁴³ Who else would describe the “system
 Stevenson ()  f., cited in Bowersock () ; cf. Bowersock ().
 Syme () , cf. ; the phrase arcana imperii is from Tacitus, e. g., Annals .., His-
tories ..; it also appears in Münzer ( []) , with Linderski () , with critique
in Hölkeskamp ()  f.; cf. Galsterer ()  – ,  f.
 The word “baffle” is ubiquitous in Syme: e. g., Syme () viii, , , , , , , ,
, ; in contrast, the relation of text to context rarely “baffles”: Syme () , . Cf.
Le Carré ( []) : “He had put the tea-cosy over his one telephone and from the ceil-
ing hung a baffler against electronic eavesdropping – a thing like an electric fan, which con-
stantly varied its pitch.”
 Syme ()  f., , , , , ; but see ; cf. Galsterer ()  f.
of dependent kingdoms and of Roman provinces which [Antony] built up” with
the bizarre zeugma “both intelligible and workable?”⁴⁴ Syme’s understanding of
politics is the understanding of the field agent, who does not think, with the
Marxist, for instance, in terms of the forces of history on a global scale, but in
terms of the individual, his or her contribution to immediate situations, and tac-
tical necessities.⁴⁵ Is it at all surprising, then, that Syme, a secretive, solitary in-
ternational with a gift for languages and nearly photographic memory, later
knighted, spent years after the war in Istanbul, the European capital of
espionage?⁴⁶
In view of the reversal of art and life, or historiography (Syme) and history
proper (the cold war), the words of George Smiley, the bookish spymaster of
John le Carré’s legendary Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, are instructive (1991 [1974],
215, italics mine, cf. Hepburn (2005): 59):
It is a habit in all of us to make our cover stories, our assumed personae, at least parallel
with the reality… I often thought that. I even put it to Control: we should take the opposi-
tion’s cover stories more seriously, I said. The more identities a man has, the more they ex-
press the person they conceal…
In the case of Odes 2.10, the matter is more complex, but at root the same; we
have not intercepted the transmission of the agent, but rather of his handler
or a lower level counterintelligence officer – all of which only makes the cover
story more significant. What if Horace not only knew what was going on, but
was trying to communicate it to various parties, ‘Licinius’ included, only without
appearing to do so? What if he was trying to alert Augustus, even after the fact,
that he did in fact know what was going on, but was himself opposed to it? What
if the very name ‘Licinius’ is a red herring, and just happens to recall the last in-
dividual whose ambition impinged upon the Princeps in the vicinity of the pre-
vious Augustan settlement of 27 BCE, Marcus Licinius Crassus who claimed the
spolia opima, everywhere in Syme a “renegade,” and possibly also a proximate
cause of the conspiracy of his maybe-namesake in Horace, ‘Licinius’ Murena?⁴⁷
 Syme () , with my italics.

 Cf. Lowrie () : “the uncovering of conspiracy requires action”; cf. Hepburn ()
 f. On the opposition of prosopography to Marxism, see James (); cf. Millar ()  f.
 Bowersock ()  f.; ()  f.,  – , cf. Griffin () xii f. On Turkey during
and after the war, see MacIntyre () ,  f., ; cf. Mitchell () .
 See, e. g., Syme () ,  f. On Crassus’ proximity to Primus, see Levick ()  f.
Similarly, at Odes ., a certain ‘Pompeius’ is not Pompey (I used to think I was the only person
who thought this more than a coincidence, until I read Ahl (b) ); cf. Lowrie ()  f.,
also Schiesaro ()  (on the Cinnas of Ov. Ibis ).
48 Alex Dressler
In this case, pace Syme, Horace is capitalizing “on the double opportunity of…
nomenclature” of his addressee, only with the sense of economy of the field
agent. The simple name Licinius is doing double duty, and therefore altogether
more, than the double name, Varro Murena, could.
Like Syme, Ahl exhibits a binary conception of art and life throughout his
work, a sense of the tactical interplay, not between politics and politics, behind
the scenes that poetry provides (so Syme), but rather between politics and poet-
ry. In contrast with the theorizations implied by Syme and NH, in ANRW Ahl pits
Horace and the other poets against Augustus and the other Caesars, describing
both the interaction of representation and reality and its further representation
(and possible reality: the cover story – which may be more real than we think) as
subject to tactical manipulation: to intelligence, in other words, and politics.⁴⁸
Ahl is a partisan, just as Syme was, because he refuses to consign Horace to
the losing side of history but speaks of Augustus as his “imperial opponent
and rival.”⁴⁹ In contrast, Syme used the word “enemy” not of the poets but of
the political classes from which Augustus rose: “The nobilitas and the consular,
those were his enemies.”⁵⁰ In each case, the battle is on, even if it rages in secret:
“Of resentment among the nobiles,” Syme writes, “the written record betrays no
trace – and confirms its inadequacy.”⁵¹ As a result of such “inadequacies,” the
historian attends to the play of names (nomina), while the critic attends to the
play on words (nomina).⁵² But between the two, something like a reality, even
if it is only the evidence of a tactical necessity that we constitute in our very in-
terpretation, begins to emerge. To grasp it, it is necessary to take the cover story
 For a veritable allegory of such tactics, see Ahl’s ()  –  Oedipus.

 Ahl (b) . Lyne () , ,  f.,  f. is more moderate. Cf. Henderson ()
 f.
 Syme () , cf. . In a similar policing of the line between political base and poetic
superstructure, Syme () ,  insists that Horace’s “real enemies” in the Epistle to Au-
gustus are – Ovid and Ovidians. Contrast Ahl (b)  – , pace Syme () : “there is
no call to put a high estimate on the ‘deprecatio’ of Horace.”
 Syme () , cf. , ; cf. Syme () .
 Cf. Galsterer ()  f., Linderski ()  f., and esp. Millar ()  f. with the almost
Ahlian connection between names and literature: Ahl ()  – ,  – ,  – ,  –
,  – ; more generally, Putnam ()  f. Similar scope for ‘play’ is afforded Syme
()  f. by the poetic treatment of the names of cities; cf. Syme () , also
(); cf. Lowrie ()  f. Syme ()  f. seems to suggest that Ovid’s Corinna, iden-
tified as “called by me by a name not true” (Tristia ..), was a historical person; compare
Horace’s polynomial formulation of Odes .. f.: “Nor came Lydia after Chloe,/ Lydia of a lot of
name [multi Lydia nominis],” with Nisbet and Rudd ()  for the proper translation. Hora-
ce’s interest in the alias is thus more complex than Syme ()  suggests: see Lowrie ()
, Nisbet and Rudd ()  f., cf. Schiesaro ()  – .
of the opposition more seriously, to recognize in Horace a potential accomplice,

and search the face of Augustanism for tells.
Odes 2.10 and Other Kerygmata

In the story set “between the wars,” John Buchan’s cryptographer “Channell”
tells his collaborator that all he needs to break the hardest code is “a mistake
and a repetition.”⁵³ In RR, written about a decade later, Syme presents his
most famous extant model, the historian Tacitus, as the Roman presents the Au-
gustan settlement (324):
The significance of the measure could be grossly exaggerated by the adulatory or the un-
critical. Such was no doubt the opinion of the suspicious Tacitus, ever alert for the contrast
of name and substance. At Rome, it did not mark an era in dating; in the provinces it
passed almost unnoticed… Indeed, the precise formulation of the powers of the military
leader in the res publica which he sought to ‘establish upon a lasting basis’ [Suet.
Aug. 28.2] is not a matter of paramount importance.
In this formulation of the ideology of the new age, Syme sides with Tacitus and
identifies the part played by “a mistake and a repetition,” not in the resolution of
the code, but in its institution – the institution of Augustan culture. What “Chan-
nell” will call a “mistake,” however, inaugurates the code: it is calling the end of
the Republic, along with Augustus and his contemporaries, pax et republica
when, according to Tacitus, it was really pax et princeps, when, according to
Syme, it was really pax et dominus. ⁵⁴ A mistake (for it is neither res publica
nor merely princeps), followed by a repetition. So, e. g., res publica reddita+res
publica restituta=Augustan ideology=Horace, Odes=Vergil, Aeneid=Livy, Ab
urbe condita, etc.⁵⁵
If it is possible for it not always to work in lockstep with ideology, the func-
tion of poetry may be its reversal – not, then, mistake and repetition (e. g., repeat
after me: “X is not potentia, but auctoritas,” “the Republic has been restored,”
etc.), but rather: repetition and mistake, theme and variation, unmarked words
and marked, repetition and difference.⁵⁶ If, as a result of its formal character,
the function of poetry is to make the trivial profound,⁵⁷ then poetry counters
 Buchan ( []) ; cf. MacIntyre () .

 Syme ()  f.
 Cf. Hepburn ()  – ,  – .
 See Compagnon ()  – , cf. Lowrie ()  f.,  f.
 Cf. callida iunctura of Ars  f.
50 Alex Dressler
the force of ideology, pace Syme, precisely when a “cool estimate” would find
“not a matter of paramount importance.”⁵⁸ Formally, the beginning of Odes,
Book 2, is a case in point: ‘Pollio’ is writing about the civil wars (stanzas
1– 4); imagine five stanzas of such a thing (stanzas 5 – 9); now never mind (stan-
za 10). A repetition (“cf. Pollio”=stanzas 1– 9) that was a mistake (stanza 10: “Be
not so serious, indecent Muse…”) leads to a history of interpretations that seek to
penetrate the mask of Horatian quietism.⁵⁹
Odes 2.10 is, in contrast, flawless, simplex et unum. If the ‘mistake’ on which
it rests is considered a part of the poem (decorum, a.k.a. mediocritas for the rest
of us=Augustanism=authoritarianism, imperialism, patriarchy), then, it is pure
ideology; if one discounts that mistake, or counts it outside the poem, it is
pure poetry. As a code, its metaphors and mythologies, the storm-tossed ship
and angry god, may function, in the language of Syme and the spies, as perfect
bafflers.⁶⁰ As a result, 2.10 looks monotonous and lacking in subtlety, the unnec-
essary distillation of the ethical and aesthetic policy of decorum artfully com-
bined with different themes – wine and friendship, sex and self-control, politics
and poetry – everywhere else in the Odes. Like the Augustan settlement, on
Syme’s defusing reading in RR, Odes 2.10 is, relatively speaking, “not a [poem]
of paramount importance.”
Rectius uiues, Licini, neque altum

semper urgendo neque, dum procellas
cautus horrescis, nimium premendo
litus iniquum.
auream quisquis mediocritatem 5
diligit, tutus caret obsoleti
sordibus tecti, caret inuidenda
sobrius aula.
saepius uentis agitatur ingens
pinus et celsae grauiore casu 10
decidunt turres feriuntque summos
fulgura montis.
sperat infestis, metuit secundis
alteram sortem bene praeparatum
pectus. informis hiemes reducit 15
 So Syme’s (probably Horatian) Pollio, see Syme ()  f., ; () , ; cf. Millar
() , Raaflaub and Samons ()  f., Altman ()  – .
 Lowrie () : “displacement, like negation…brings…to the fore by relegating…to the
background”; cf.  f.,  f. On the revocatio, see Sallmann ()  – , , Porter
()  f.
 In ancient terms, allegoria: see Kalina ()  f.
Iuppiter, idem
summouet. non, si male nunc, et olim
sic erit: quondam cithara tacentem
suscitat Musam neque semper arcum
tendit Apollo. 20
rebus angustis animosus atque
fortis appare; sapienter idem
contrahes uento nimium secundo
turgida uela.
More in the right will you live, Licinius, in not

always pressing the deep and in not, when you are
shirking from blasts with worry, too much squeezing
the unequal beach.
Whosoever esteems the Golden Mean 5
is, in his safety, free from the squalor of
the worn-out house, is free in sobriety from
the hall of jealousy.
Oftener by the winds the enormous pine
is harried and with a heavier fall the high 10
towers tumble and lightning strikes
the tallest mountains.
Hoping in the worst and afraid in the positive
for the opposite is the heart that is best
readied; hideous winters Jupiter brings. 15
He, the same,
takes them away; bad now doesn’t mean it will
be so someday; sometimes the Muse who’s quiet
with her lyre Apollo excites; he’s not
always the archer. 20
In dire straits, you, spirited and brave
appear. With wisdom, one and the same,
you’ll draw, in wind too positive, your
swollen sails.
Even its commanding theme appears with more complexity elsewhere in the col-
lection (Odes 1.14): “O ship, new waves will carry you back to the sea” (O nauis,
referent in mare te noui/ fluctus). With that over-determined ode to no one, the
poet produces a poem that is ‘really’ about the poet, poetry, politics,
prostitution…⁶¹ More complex too is the earlier appearance of the sinner in the
hands of an angry god in Odes 1.34.12– 16:
 On the ship, see Lowrie ( [])  f., cf. Lyne ()  – .
52 Alex Dressler
ualet ima summis

mutare et insignem attenuat deus,
obscura promens. hinc apicem rapax
Fortuna cum stridore acuto
sustulit, hic posuisse gaudet.
the high and low

the god can switch, diminish the distinguished,
bringing the dark to light; where thieving Luck
has snatched the hat with a whistling wind,
she’ll laugh to have put it back.
This poem of philosophical recantation simply reverses the menacing tenor of

Odes 2.10; it does so, however, (a) as part of a quarrel between rival philoso-
phies, which as formal elements are thus in conflict and complexity (repetition
and difference), and (b) as a form of self-address, therefore doubling the poet’s
own subjectivity, while (c) filling out the poet’s autobiography. In Odes 2.10, by
comparison with these, the ship only goes one way, means only life; the poem as
a whole is devoted to only one philosophical message, addressed, moreover, to
someone (‘Licinius’) who may be no one.⁶²
But is this poem as unitary as all that? Taking inspiration from the figure of
the double agent, in this section, I follow Ahl, flip Syme, and read Odes 2.10 for
the tactical part that it plays in a struggle that, as the field agent assumes as an
operational necessity, has yet to be determined or has, as Ahl suggested in
ANRW, only gone underground since ‘Augustus’ ‘won.’ On this analysis, Odes
2.10, is not a unitary and cohesive poem, primarily just philosophical or poetic
in orientation but precisely particular and political. It is, further, the centerpiece
of Book 2, which, more than the tour de force of Book 1 or the grand finale of
Book 3 with its front-facing firewall of ‘Roman Odes,’ is Horace’s most dangerous
book, the book of conspiracy in which the poet attempts to strike a balance of
powers amidst the second-tier of still ambitious elite.⁶³ Putting this background
to the front in his typical pose of recusatio, Horace makes this plain with the
opening imagery that all political readers of Odes 1– 3 remember, not least
Ahl: “You take in hand a work full of dangerous chance/ and over the flames
you advance,/ packed with treacherous ashes.”⁶⁴
 On the tradition of underwhelmed responses to Odes , see Griffin () .

 Cf. Putnam ()  – .
 Odes .. –  (periculosae plenum opus aleae,/ tractas, et incedis per ignis/ suppositos cineri
doloso), with Ahl (b) : “This latent fire of civil war threatens both winner and loser”; cf.
Sallmann ()  f., Lowrie ()  – ; Henderson ()  – ; cf. Levick ()
.
What I will suggest here is not that Odes 2.10 has an absolutely knowable
secret meaning. Rather, the possibility that it does, on the close reading of the
formalist or the cryptographer, reveals the form that secret meanings in other
poems will take, while these other poems in turn authorize the possibility of
the secret meaning of Odes 2.10.⁶⁵ The reflexivity or cyclicality that all this entails
– whether it is vicious, complicit, seditious, or simply generative – is just the
mode of being, believing, or acting of the double agent. It is thus a mode that
is not operational without a handler – in this case, us. A job for the partisan.
Constituted by a stream of changing metaphors, Odes 2.10 falls into two
parts; their unity lies in the development of the continuous substance. First,
the vehicles of the tenor, or meaning born, are emphatically sublunary: the
ship at sea (first stanza); the edifice (second); the storm and trees and towers
(third). Then, the vehicles become ethereal, theological, ethical: fate and Jupiter
(fourth stanza); Apollo, Muse, and war (fifth); wisdom and, by way of extra “spi-
rit” (animosus, l. 21), wind and sail (sixth). As theme and variation, through syn-
ecdoche, the return of the ship in ring composition presents itself now thorough-
ly metaphorized, spiritual and not concrete, now art as opposed to life (and
history and politics). Analyzed in its cyclical trajectory from concrete to abstract,
the poem becomes a performance of art for art’s sake, “pure poetry,” West’s
take⁶⁶; but it also anticipates the trajectory of Book 2 as a whole – a book that
ends, after a series of balanced poems all “directed for the most part at signifi-
cant personalities of the second rank,” with two odd poems, first about the poet
meeting Bacchus (2.19), and then about becoming a swan and soaring (2.20).⁶⁷ In
contrast with the first half of the book, which notably alternates between Alcaic
and Sapphic stanzas for the first eleven poems (that is, up through one poem
after Odes 2.10), the content of the last two poems (2.19 – 20) thus follows the
form of the first middle poem (2.10): specifically, the last two poems end the
book with a thorough metaphora, or translatio – of the poet himself, to the heav-
ens – just as the trajectory of 2.10, in itself, was: first, sublunary, then ethereal;
 The hermeneutics of suspicion, which Sedgwick () seminally dubbed paranoid, is a

“strong theory”: “the size and topology of the domain that it organizes” () is vast, while,
as “an explanatory structure that a reader may see as tautological, in that it can’t help or
can’t stop or can’t do anything other than prove the very same assumptions with which it
began,” it “may be experienced by the practitioner as a triumphant advance towards truth
and vindication” ().
 Cf. Hadju () .
 Nisbet and Hubbard () , cf. Syme () ; Lowrie ()  –  suggests that
the cycle culminates with Odes ., where note, in .., animosus and recollection of sea and
shore (ll.  – ); cf. Porter () , cf. Schiesaro ()  f., .
54 Alex Dressler
first, more or less concrete (procellas, uentis), then, by synecdoche, metaphori-

cal, even “spiritual” (animosus).⁶⁸ It is, in fact, just the thoroughness of the met-
aphorization at the end of Odes 2.10 that makes it a little sterile: the tenor and
the vehicle (N.B. ship) have been reversed, as the poem leaves reference behind,
soars in metaphor, and sails nowhere. Alternatively – and here the repetition is
the mistake – the poem of mediocrity suggests that the heights are the goal.
The structural properties of the text that allow such dilation of the meta-
phorical dimension of language – reference become pure poetry or poetry con-
tradicting ostensible reference – can be, as Ricoeur has suggested, hypostatized.
One can, in other words, “prolong and reinforce the suspension affecting the
text’s reference to the environment of a world and the audience of speaking sub-
jects,” and thus dilate the figurative dimension which will then occlude its refer-
ential function.⁶⁹ The same formal properties that one can dilate, however,
allow, not just an explanation but also, again with Ricoeur, an interpretation,
a hermeneutic act, which in the case of Odes 2.10 can also be historical and po-
litical in reference.⁷⁰ The last poem in the alternating Sapphic/Alcaic sequence of
Odes 2.1– 11, addressed to a certain Quinctius – double-named, in distinction
with ‘Licinius,’ also Hirpinus, and probably also Pollio’s brother-in-law⁷¹ – be-
gins with the injunction to stop worrying about the wars (against foreigners),
while the first poem in the sequence, the programmatic ode to Pollio himself
(2.1: “The only political poem in the full sense”), worries about writing about
Rome’s wars against itself.⁷² Odes 2.10 thus points back to 2.1, and forward to
2.11, by ‘formal’ queues. In 2.10, Horace writes: “hideous winters Jupiter brings./
He, the same,/ takes them away [idem/submouit]… With wisdom, one and the
same,/ you’ll draw [idem/contrahes], in wind too positive, your/ swollen sails.”
In 2.11, the poet next explicates his own structure when he writes (ll. 19 – 21):
 The very term aurea mediocritas synthesizes physical and spiritual: Santirocco ()  f.
See, more generally, Oliensis ()  f., Lowrie (a)  – .
 Ricoeur () , cf.  f., ()  f.; Lowrie (a),  – ,  – .
 Ricoeur () : “we now need an instrument of thought for apprehending the connec-
tion between language and speaking, the conversion of system into event.”
 Nisbet and Hubbard () ; Lyne ()  f.,  f., cf.  – ; Lowrie ()  f.
 Nisbet and Hubbard ; on civil as foreign wars, see Lowrie ()  f. The last last poem of
the Alcaic-Sapphic sequence is actually Odes ., in a new meter, and addressed to Maecenas:
cf. Ludwig () ). For structural analyses of Odes , see Port ()  f., with Ludwig
() ,  f., and Santirocco ()  – ; cf. Sallmann ()  f., Porter ()
 – , Putnam ()  – . On ascriptions of cyclicality in general, see Anderson ()
 f., with background in Santirocco ()  – .
“Not always the same [idem] is the value of the springtime/ flowers, with not one
[uno] face does the blushing moon/ shine…”⁷³
The purely formal explication of the repeated idem of 2.10 by the idem-uno
complex of 2.11 bears notice for two reasons. First, it is another instance of “a
repetition and a mistake” (idem…idem…idem…uno), which, like Heraclitus’
river and the sun (“different and still the same”) elsewhere in Horace, proffers
a paradigm of aesthetic enactment in general (one can never perform the
same poem twice).⁷⁴ Second, more locally, by being specifically self-referential,
the idem-stream reverses the flow of the poems with comparison back. ⁷⁵ Now,
the ‘last’ ‘same’ poem, on a purely structural basis, was, again, either Odes
2.1, the Pollio ode which stood in the first position in the first half, just as
Odes 2.11 stands in the first position in the second half, or 2.2, which stands in
the same relation to Odes 2.1 as 2.11 stands to its self-identifying (equally
idem-employing) partner, Odes 2.10.⁷⁶ Can it be a coincidence that, in the second
stanza of Odes 2.2, the second-place poem to which the Odes 2.10 – 11 complex
refers us, the poet unnecessarily introduces, in addition to the poem’s actual
dedicatee, in this book of second places, a certain Proculeius, the brother of Mur-
ena the conspirator, who is also described in relation to his brothers (2.2.5 – 8)?
uiuet extento Proculeius aeuo

notus in fratres animi paterni;
illum aget penna metuente solui
Fama superstes.
With his age sustained, Proculeius will live

well-known for his fatherly spirit towards his brothers;
on a wing afraid to relax, Fame will convey him
as his survivor.
That the language is language of both reputation and notoriety follows from the
risks of eminence explored in Odes 2.10, where the lightning hits the mountains;
note that, either before or after the revelation of the Proculeius’ brother Murena
in the conspiracy, such language is significant. Before the conspiracy, it is appro-
priate; after the conspiracy, given Proculeius’ plausible abandonment of his im-
 non semper idem || floribus est honor/ uernis, neque uno || Luna rubens nitet/ uultu… Note the
parallel positions of idem and uno, in analogous hyperbaton.
 C. saec. : aliusque et idem, with Lowrie (a) , also () , cf. Manil. .; cf.
Dressler (a)  – . At .. note also iterare, in the middle of fas…fas…tu…tu (ll. , ,
 f.): cf. Lowrie ()  f. where note also idem of Bacchus, with medius, at .. f.
 Cf. Lowrie ()  f.
 All poems likewise emphasize moderatio: Ludwig () .
56 Alex Dressler
petuous brother (Dio 54.35), it becomes downright misleading. It is, as such, an-
other ‘mistake’ which may be, à la NH, a just avoided impropriety – or a clue
(Roman ‘fathers’ sometimes abandoned truant sons). As a direct consequence
of such ambivalence,⁷⁷ the final lines of the above stanza may describe both a
positive and a negative condition: either that achieved by Horace, soaring in
swan-form in Odes 2.20, or that against which ‘Licinius,’ with swollen sails, is
cautioned in Odes 2.10.⁷⁸ Moreover, after 2.2.6, we may have seen this coming.⁷⁹
These are the political, precisely prosopographical possibilities to which the
formal analysis, first of Odes 2.10 and then of Odes, Book 2, as a whole, can lead.
From such possibilities would follow the analysis of the previous section. From
them in turn follows a formal possibility, namely the possibility of understand-
ing the form of reference to such political possibilities in the Odes as a whole. To
express this possibility, I suggest, Horace resorts to that form of utterance which
I will call the ‘kerygma,’ or code poem.⁸⁰ I borrow this concept, like that of the
hermeneutics of suspicion discussed in §1, from Paul Ricoeur and use it denote
the message that a poem, understood as a kind of code, discloses through its pat-
terns of meaning (a repetition), especially when those patterns are broken (a
mistake).⁸¹ To conceive of a poem in this way is to interpret the deployment of
linguistic functions in the cybernetic (and likewise cold war) structuralist
terms of transmitter, message, code, and receiver.⁸² What I will suggest in this
and the next section is that analysis of the poem into these four aspects, once
we accept that the last of them, the receiver, may be ourselves, allows us special
access to the first: the transmitter, Horace.
Before proceeding to that point, however, let’s note that, taken in itself, Odes
2.10 does not immediately justify such an analysis. Because 2.10 is flawless, its
true message is indecipherable to anyone to whom its code is not already
 See Lowrie () , Fowler ()  – ; cf. Nisbet and Hubbard () : “Some see
a reference to the melting wax of Icarus (.. ff.), but that illustration is too particular and too
ill-omened.” One need not go as far as Odes ; see, e. g., .. f., : “Double in form, I am not
born/ on a familiar or slender wing [tenui penna, cf. ..: penna metuente]…/ Already more re-
nowned [notior, cf. ..: notus] than Daedalean Icarus.” On such caution in Nisbet and Hub-
bard (), see Lyne ()  f. n. , Fowler () .
 So Lyne () .
 The detection of this “mistake” I owe to Elena Giusti.
 Cf. Sallmann () .
 Ricoeur ()  f.; () .
 Cf. Jakobson ()  through Pindar in Nagy () , cf. Lowrie ()  f.,  f.,
Bowditch ()  f. On allegoria sine translatione, that is, in effect, a code without a key, see
Kalina () .
known, which first requires that this receiver recognizes it as a code.⁸³ Correla-
tively, the transmitter (alias the poet) can be expected to conceal its kerygmatic
character all the more, the more he has a secret to transmit. Odes 2.10 in fact be-
gins by scrambling the usual signals of the kerygma, couching its injunction in
the future indicative verb that memorably begins the ode (rectius uiues). Its coun-
terpart in the last clause of the poem (idem contrahes, l.23), is also strangely re-
mote, improbably prophetic: in the future tense, it is not really an injunction at
all.⁸⁴ The vividness of the future has, paradoxically, an effect comparable to the
enargeia of the civil wars from the past in the ode to Pollio: it powerfully empha-
sizes what is in fact not happening as we read.⁸⁵ Finally, more than any other
comparable poem in the Odes, the apostrophe and imperative are as far from
one another as possible: Licini (l. 1), appare, (l. 22 of 24). When it does finally
appear, the imperative is comparatively weak (the usual imperative is “stop”:
e. g., desine): such mildness, not to mention the injunction to diverge from reality
in the cultivation of appearance, hardly diminishes suspicion.⁸⁶
While not immediately justified, then, the interpretation of the poem as a
kerygma is occasioned by Odes 2.10 in view of its context: the immediately pre-
ceding and following Odes, 2.9 and 11, which Horace’s special sequencing of Al-
caic and Sapphic poems, and termination of the sequence at 11, again throws in
relief. In addition to this clue of sequence, Odes 2.10 elicits attention on behalf of
Odes 2.9 and 11 because, like them, it consists of a sequence of metaphors, allu-
sions, and mythological exempla; in contrast with Odes 2.10, however, Odes 2.9
and 11 conspicuously change their form or vary their code, make the necessary
‘mistake,’ and thus admit decoding.
The first of the two poems, Odes 2.9, is addressed to Rufus Valgus in the en-
jambment between the first two stanzas: “nor, on the shores of Armenia,/ Valgus
my friend, does ice stiff always stand.”⁸⁷ Beginning thus with two stanzas of var-
 Ricoeur () : “To understand, it is necessary to believe; to believe it is necessary to

understand”; cf. Lowrie ()  – .
 Cf. Lowrie ()  f., , .
 For documentation and discussion, see Lowrie (a) .
 Cf. Putnam ()  on Syme () . Ars  –  parallels the trajectory of Odes .
with decipimur specie recti (: “we are deceived by the appearance of right”~ ..: rectius
vives) and serpit humi tutus nimium timidusque procellae (: “too safe does he creep on the
ground, afraid of the wind”), which continues ( f.): “who…puts the dolphins in the woods
and the bees in the seas.” In the midst of the implicit injunction that Geue ()  reads
as conformist, Horace actually uses comparable adunata (cf. Geue ()  on Ars : humano
capiti) elsewhere of himself, and to opposite effect, viz. exemplification of eminence: Odes
.. – , cf. Fowler ()  – , Schiesaro ()  f., .
  f.: nec Armeniis in oris,/ amice Valgi, stat glacies iners.
58 Alex Dressler
iously local meteorology, the third stanza introduces the elegies of Valgus
(“You’re always pressing, in tearful [flebilibus] measures,/ Mystes deceased”)⁸⁸
and ends the first half of the poem before the second half (stanzas 4– 6),
which begins with mythological exempla in just the same pattern (weather
and gods) that we find in Odes 2.10 to ‘Licinius.’ In contrast with 2.10, 2.9 finally
issues as an imperative the message of the poem, breaking the code.⁸⁹ With the
same enjambment that Horace uses to fuse the first and second stanzas, between
the third and fourth stanzas, he writes: “nor…/…did the Phrygian sisters/ always
weep [semper fleuere]. || Cease from your soft/ laments at last.”⁹⁰
Continuing the six stanza, bipartite structure, which both Odes 2.9 and 11
share with Odes 2.10, the final poem in the Alcaic-Sapphic sequence (2.11), be-
gins with one stanza about geography, in which the addressee is also identified:
“What the militant Cantaberian and the Scythian,/ O Hirpinian Quinctius, are
thinking…” It then proceeds almost immediately to an injunction (“…stop seek-
ing [that]”), which is not, however, the main point of the poem. In fact, by the
time we get to the second half (stanzas 3 ff.), the real point of the poem reveals
itself in an effective injunction which also applies to the poet, again with the fa-
miliar enjambment (2.11.13 – 17):
cur non sub alta uel platano uel hac

pinu iacentes sic temere et rosa
canos odorati capillos,
dum licet, Assyriaque nardo
potamus uncti?
Why, under the tall plane tree, or this here

pine, thus lying pellmell, with white hair
made fragrant with the rose,
while it’s possible, with perfume from Assyria also
oiled, do we not drink?
The strained translation is meant to convey the delay that reveals the actual mes-
sage of the poem, which is, as always, neither meteorological, theological, nor
even strictly speaking apolitical (i. e., stop worrying about the wars), but rather,
actually, an invitation to a party, a poem which is practically its own genre in
Horace, but is here in 2.11 refashioned in the form of the kerygma. In the case
of Odes 2.11, metrical features of the second half of this poem emphasize the
  f.: tu semper urges flebilibus modis/ Mysten ademptum.

 Putnam () .
  – : nec…/…Phrygiae sorores/ fleuere semper. desine mollium/ tandem querelarum.
Cf. .. with Putnam ()  n. .
‘mistake,’ countering the repetition that makes the code of the kerygma other-
wise undecipherable. The first three stanzas of the poem consist of periodic sen-
tences, which the fourth stanza, beginning the second half of the poem, and just
quoted, carries on, except that with the primary injunction, which breaks the
code, the syntax is also broken: potamus uncti? || dissipat Euhius/ curas edaces.
|| quis puer ocius… The marking of the caesura makes the breakage clear; addi-
tional signposts include the word of dispersal or loosening (in Latin theory prose
is uerba soluta), dissipat; and if the internal ‘dissolutions’ were not enough, Hor-
ace punches the line breaks with the precise rhyme Euhius/ocius.
There are other such kerygmata in the corpus of Odes, Books 1– 3. The most
paradigmatic of them is probably Odes 1.7 where, again, Horace subjects a famil-
iar genre to the same delay, same play of identification of addressee and injunc-
tion, in the famous priamel…eventually addressed to Munatius Plancus.⁹¹ As in
Odes 2.9, the injunction begins exactly past one half of the 32-line poem: “Like-
wise, you remember in wisdom to draw a line [finire]/ on moodiness and toils of
life,/ O Plancus, with soft wine…”⁹² Of poems such as this, whose halving he also
notes, Lyne correctly writes that Horace “likes to set us a puzzle.”⁹³ Clearly. Ex-
actly the same can be said, and Lyne says it, for Odes 1.4: a poem that can be
broken into five units of four lines starts on the subject of spring, and only in
the fourth of five stanzas do we learn the name of the addressee: “O flourishing
Sestius,/ the little span of life prohibits one from laying a foundation for long
hope.”⁹⁴ The word “long” is probably significant: had the poem been longer
(six ‘stanzas’ instead of five), the identification of Sestius coming in the fifth
stanza, would have come just after the first half, the usual placement for the rev-
elatory volta of the kerygma. Here then, a kerygma interrupted: a repetition –
and a mistake.
Examples can be multiplied.⁹⁵ Odes 2.5, for instance, another well-known
poem, is not addressed to anyone – and so perhaps, we hear, it is addressed
to the speaker himself – but there, in another poem of six stanzas, the poet be-
 Syme associates Plancus with the three addressees who open Odes : Pollio, Sallustius
Crispus, Dellius (Syme () , ).
 Odes .. – : sic tu sapiens finire memento/ tristitiam uitaeque labores/ molli, Plance,
mero.
 Lyne ()  f.; see Nisbet and Hubbard () , with Lowrie () ; Sallman
() .
  f.: o beate Sesti,/ uitae summa breuis spem nos uetat incohare longam.
 See, e. g., Odes . to Maecenas, with Lyne ()  – ; cf. . with Lowrie ()  or
. with Nisbet and Rudd () : “The ode begins with an arresting exemplum, whose full
implications are not immediately apparent.” Similarly . to a woman (l. ), or a cup () or (in
fact) Messalla (l. ): Nisbet and Rudd () .
60 Alex Dressler
gins with a series of animals and plants that are not ready for human use; in the
third stanza, after the now familiar enjambment and caesura, he writes, of the
nubile heifer, that only to field and stream is she “rearing to go. || Get rid of de-
sire for/ the unripe grape.”⁹⁶ The stanza that follows, the first stanza of the sec-
ond half, finally introduces a possibly identifying pronoun (13): “now she’ll fol-
low you [iam te sequetur].” By the end of that stanza we learn the identity, not of
the addressee, but of the subject of the code: “Now with a wanton/ face Lalage
will a partner seek.”⁹⁷ In this kerygma, the code is broken, the message is re-
vealed, but the receiver remains a mystery.⁹⁸
This development in the “genre” of the kerygma is instructive. From the
background of the conspiracy, which formal features of the poems somehow
both throw into relief and refract into indeterminacy, a genre of determinate in-
determinacy emerges. Consisting of discrete features – especially code and mes-
sage, transmitter and receiver – and exhibiting distinctive patterns, repetition
and mistake, the kerygma as I have identified it also allows for adjustments of
the parts, such that, eventually, even something as distinctive as the receiver
of the message can be encrypted. In addition to making, as it were, the unintel-
ligibility of the addressee of Odes 2.10 (“Licinius”) intelligible as a function, the
many permutations of the parts of the kerygma make it possible that a poem
with no actual message – no actual injunction – may be just as much a kerygma,
or a poem of secret message.⁹⁹ At this point, the suggestion of NH that Odes 2.10
is secretly addressed to Augustus becomes more plausible. As mentioned above
(see §1), this was their interpretation of the middle section of the second half
of the poem: “hideous winters Jupiter brings./ He, the same,/ takes them
away…/ sometimes the Muse who’s quiet/ with her lyre Apollo excites; he’s
not/ always the archer.” “The image of the taut bowstring normally occurs in ex-
hortations to relax, and Horace may be hinting indirectly that this is the best
course for everybody.”¹⁰⁰
  f.: praegestientis. tolle cupidinem/ immitis uuae. Cf. “Porphyrio”: transit in aliam allegoriam
in Kalina () .
  f.: iam proterua/ fronte petet Lalage maritum.
 Porter ()  f.
 According to the evidence of Kalina () , of the thirty-four references to “allegory” in
the scholia of Horace’s Odes, “Porphyry” uses the word on average once or twice per poem; the
exceptions are Odes ., where it occurs three times; . where it occurs three times (cf. Quint.
Inst. .., with Lowrie ()  f.); and Odes . where it occurs four times. On allegoria as
“puzzle” (Rätsel) “incomprehensible to the uninitiated,” see Kalina ()  f. Cf. Ricoeur
()  f.
 Nisbet and Hubbard () , with my italics.
But at this point, this is not the only implication of the possibility of permu-
tations in the kerygma, and we come to a paradox that, in another venue, the
sometime philosophically trained Horace may have appreciated: how many
parts of the kerygma can one remove and still have a kerygma?¹⁰¹ If it does
not need a receiver, does it need a message? Odes 1.15, for instance, is addressed
to no one and merely describes a pastoral interlude combined with a troubling
but, in context, effectively referenceless prophecy: is it an essay in epyllion or
maybe the supreme kerygma?¹⁰² Similarly, if one does not need a message and
a receiver, does one even need a transmitter – that is, a poet? Might not the
best kerygma be the one for which the poet himself has the least responsibility,
for which he was not the cause, and which he did not intend?¹⁰³ When, for in-
stance, Horace addresses a poem, supposedly not to Murena, but to “Murena’s
brother” (alias Murena!), and the poem begins with the indirect questions of
this Murena’s symposiastic speculations (“How far from Inachus/ is Codrus?”),¹⁰⁴
who is responsible for this poem about family relations? In the very next line, the
poem could prove a kerygma within a kerygma: this Murena, either the conspir-
ator or his brother, notes that Codrus was “not afraid to die for his country [pro
patria non timidus mori],” as he himself, or his brother, could, on an “anti-Augu-
stan” reading, be construed to have done. Similarly, Nisbet speculates in Nisbet
and Rudd, that the reference to Troy in the next lines may be a coded reference to
the great-grandfather of both “Murenas,” the “original” Licinius, who “[w]hen
Sulla rescued Ilium in 85…may have played a significant part.”¹⁰⁵ Why not
then the previous lines about the rightness of dying for one’s country? Will
the “right” Murena, conspirator, survivor, or any figure of their kind (“Murenas”
as a class),¹⁰⁶ know that he did the right thing when he reads this poem about
“his” ancestor – assuming he has not been executed and is not therefore also
at this moment, conjured from the dead, a standing reproach to Augustus, at
least to those in the know? We are already in the realm of figured speech,
 See, e. g., Hor. Ep. .. – , cf. Ep. .. – , also Pers. Sat. .,  –  with Cic.
fr. . –  (cf. Lowrie ()  f.), Ac. ., . Similar “polynomials” occur in Horace’s
amores: e. g., Odes .. – .
 Lowrie ()  f.,  – ; cf. Odes ..
 Cf. Odes ., with Oliensis ()  – , cf. .
 Odes .. f.: Quantum distet ab Inacho/ Codrus?
 Odes .. (et pugnata sacro bella sub Ilio), with Nisbet and Rudd () .
 On this, “the political, apart from the particular,” see Geue ()  – ; cf. Schiesaro
()  n. .
62 Alex Dressler
only here, in the midst of the collection authored by Horace, even the author is
an enigma.¹⁰⁷
Who is responsible for such a poem? Is it Augustus, the general auctor of the
‘age’ he named while, more locally, the double agent is, not Horace, but the
‘Murena’ who opens such a poem of indirect interrogation? Alternatively, does
Horace not even know what he’s doing, in the same way that Maecenas became
the unwitting agent of the princeps when he leaked the leak of the conspiracy to
Terentia? Should we follow the line of questioning to its logical conclusion and
acknowledge, maybe predictably, that, as the agents of preservation of the poem
in interpretation, we are the transmitters and ourselves unwitting agents of Au-
gustus or, maybe more palatably, double agents– members of the underground
and resistance, whether or not the “poet” realized that he was giving us so
much material for our ends, just by virtue, à la Duncan Kennedy’s deconstruc-
tion, of being a poet?¹⁰⁸
Conclusion: Partisan Song

When I presented the concept of the kerygma in structuralist terms, I was only
telling half the story. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy, the element of mean-
ing is not just structural, not just the result of an explanation of the form of an
artifact (code or whatnot), nor even only interpretive, or the result of a herme-
neutic process that seeks to integrate the explanation of the structure of the
poem into larger structure – the poetry book or the society that produced it.
The kerygma in the work of Ricoeur is also existential: it is, true to its origin
in biblical hermeneutics, the call that an object of interpretation issues to me.
The event is now, and the third-person mode of scholarship and conspiracy theo-
ry alike become first-person when we recognize that “you” is “us” and take a po-
sition in the opposition “us” and “them.”¹⁰⁹
The interpretive upshot of the previous section, then – the possibility that
the transmutation of the kerygmatic or code ode – ultimately leads to no one,
and therefore everyone (e. g., Augustus, patriarchy, imperialism), is likewise
only part of the story. Reading the poem as addressed to “me” – in the way
that reading it as addressed to “Licinius” allows – distinguishes the global ap-
plication of the hermeneutics of suspicion as practiced by politically oriented
 Cf. ‘Maternus’ in Tac. Dial. ., with Bartsch () ,  f.
 See n.  above; cf. Lowrie ()  f.; () .
 Ricoeur () ,  f.,  f., Henderson ()  f.
postmodern critics from the local application of the partisan of the truth.¹¹⁰ The
partisan of the truth sees the poem as part of a living struggle in which, to be
sure, all interpretation is relative, but for the partisan of the truth, the relation-
ships, always of conflict, have yet to be played out, are subject to revision,
change, defection.¹¹¹ This is not to say that “I” make of the text what “I” want
to make of it, or that “who” “I” “am,” in some application of the principle of
“the personal voice,” determines “my” interpretation. On the contrary, “I” am
all the more alive to the constraints that history and the field of objects present
and impose on “me” because all that is so much material for “my” ends.¹¹²
I am eager to distinguish this formulation from the old, familiar claims of
interpretive relativity¹¹³ because of the alternatives that emerge in light of the
present discussion, which are three: first, the endless shift of interpretive ground
described at the end of the previous section; second, more perniciously, the in-
sistence that, e. g., the ugly political ‘realities’ that the texts in question exempli-
fy are facts of a universe of possibilities and impossibilities that still obtain and
are thus still the secret injunction of ‘realism,’ ‘common sense,’ etc. (Augustan-
ism was ugly, so are we, that’s just the way life is, no sense in changing it). The
third alternative to interpretive relativity is the quite untimely cold war hope,
which probably few true cold warriors ever harbored, that the participants in
the opposition to whom we have the best access, such as Horace, are not only
double agents, but double agents who actually work for us. ¹¹⁴ But as any reader
of spy stories knows, handlers have little use for the double agent whose alle-
giance is secure.¹¹⁵ In the end, it is up to the handler to turn the agent, to
make him work for ‘us’ by manipulating the conditions of his operation and re-
 Cf. Schiesaro ()  f.

 Similarly, Ahl ()  read Oedipus on the assumption that fate could be escaped; not so
Lucan’s Cato: Ahl ()  – . For relevant readings of relational meaning, see Lowrie
()  f., Barchiesi ()  – ,  f.
 How else to evince the secret positions that Feeney ()  f. suspects imperial ideology
mediated? Cf. Syme () : “On all sides prevailed a conspiracy of decent reticence about
the gap between fact and theory. It was evident: no profit but only danger from talking about it.
The Principate baffles definition.” Note again the unlikely convergence of old and new histori-
cisms.
 See Galinsky ()  – .
 See Galinsky ()  f.
 Cf. MacIntyre ()  f.: “Philby was telling Moscow the truth and was disbelieved but
allowed to go on thinking he was believed; he was deceiving the British in order to aid the So-
viets, who suspected a deception and were in turn deceiving him. Moscow’s faith in Philby
seemed to ebb and flow; sometimes he was considered suspect, sometimes genuine, and some-
times both simultaneously.” The best critical comportment towards Horace will be just this.
64 Alex Dressler
vealing his consciousness of those conditions to be, not irrelevant in the ex ca-
thedra assertion of the intentional fallacy of both formalists and historicists, but
one more strategico-critical element in a system of relations along with others.
Synthesizing and reversing both Syme and Ahl, let us make the author’s in-
tention in Odes 2.10 this. A poem about the middle way, let us see it as a testa-
ment to a kind of middle class, which is neither exactly faithful to the nobilitas,
whom ‘Murena’ represents, nor to Augustus per se, but rather to the interests of
the poet, aligned with those of Augustus against the aristocracy. R.O.A.M. Lyne
suggests that, when another poem in this same treacherous book, 2.18, is ad-
dressed to no one but ‘you,’ we should infer, through a series of techniques
not altogether different from the cybernetics that I deploy in the previous sec-
tion, that the poem is really addressed to Maecenas.¹¹⁶ This becomes interesting,
and ripe for exploitation, when the addressee of 2.18 is advised to stop expropri-
ating the land of the less well off. Could this be, in a strange and unexpected
turn of Marxist reductionism actually the secret message of the Odes as a
whole: Octavian, stop the aristocracy, the likes of Murena and Maecenas, from
its endless exploitation, the crushing ambition of the old regime, because you
are in a position to do so, whereas I am not?¹¹⁷
Only by believing in a reality behind the mask can such a message be the
message of Horace’s poem, even if Horace didn’t know he meant it, and even
if such a meaning would have been unmentionable in the circles in which he
was moving. The point is Horace can be made a party to the conspiracy to
stop the aristocracy, and he is ours to make. If we do so, the intelligence that
we gain from him is this: there was not, as the (high modern) trutherism of
 Lyne () , cf.  – . In view of Schiesaro ()  f., Odes . – , first on
property then on Bacchus, simply compresses the trajectory of .,  – ; note also, in
.., dulce periculum est vis-à-vis pro patria non timidus mori (.. above) via the echo/
forecast of .., dulce et decorum est pro patria mori with decorum as a synonym for moder-
ation (mediocritas).
 Horace is thus the ‘enemy’ of a Maecenas qua elite and the ‘friend’ of Augustus via ‘the
enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and the Schmittian (Schmitt  [],  f.) dictum that
true friends and enemies are not personal. In the present instance, the form of contestation is
thus pro-poetry=anti-Nobilitas, qua Augustan, pace, e. g., Finley ()  (there was no
“Roman Revolution”), with Galsterer ()  n. ,  f., Raaflaub and Samons ()
 f.,  – . All this slightly modifies Geue’s () recent contribution, which appears to
restore the Augustanism of the author whom I read as ‘Augustan’ (e. g., ): “the Ars becomes
a key text of social and political lobotomy, and a key act of Augustan reconstruction.” Even if
Geue is ‘right,’ and Horace is an Augustan (rather than ‘Augustan’) collaborator in political lo-
botomy (which I take to be a bad thing), the argument here is that he need not be, so why let
him?
the anti-Augustan camps would suggest, but one dimension of conflict in 23 BCE,
nor were there infinite dimensions in one global conspiracy of culture (postmod-
ern). There were, rather, a few distinct dimensions of conflict: nobiles vs.
Princeps (Syme), poet vs. Princeps (Ahl), Realpolitik vs. mystification/poetry (Au-
gustus, e. g., Tacitus, Syme), and also poet vs. nobiles (Ahl+Syme≈Oliensis, or
the critic of hegemonic discourse as such). What we find in Horace is thus,
not only a conflict between poet and princeps, but also between poet and nobi-
litas (e. g., ‘Licinius,’ ‘Murena,’ ‘Maecenas’), a coded message to each about the
defects of the other, and a coded message to us about the defects of the culture.
But only if we pick a side.¹¹⁸
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Joshua T. Katz
Another Vergilian Signature in the
Georgics?
Summary: Vergil’s name appears, unambiguously, only once in his œuvre, as
Vergilium at G. 4.563. Nevertheless, scholars have spotted authorial signatures
of a ludic sort throughout the Georgics (1.2, 1.429 – 33, and 2.321– 7), as well as
in the Aeneid (12.587– 8); the most famous, not to say infamous, instance is
the syllabic acrostic MA-VE-PV (G. 1.429, 431, and 433), which many believe to
stand for the poet’s tria nomina, Publius Vergilius Maro – reversed. This paper
provides a critical survey of the evidence and proposes one more example: the
acronym M-VER-P spelled out by the first three words of a self-referential passage
near the end of Book 2 of the Georgics, me uero primum (2.475).
Keywords: acronym; acrostic; Aeneid; Aratus; Georgics; metapoetics; signature;

tria nomina; Vergil; wordplay
Vergil’s name appears, unambiguously, only once in his œuvre, in the sphragis at
the very end of the fourth Georgic:¹
haec super aruorum cultu pecorumque canebam

et super arboribus, Caesar dum magnus ad altum 560
fulminat Euphraten bello uictorque uolentis
per populos dat iura uiamque adfectat Olympo.
illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat
Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti,
carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuuenta, 565
Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi.
So much I sang in addition to the care of fields, of cattle, and of trees, while great Caesar
thundered in war by deep Euphrates and bestowed a victor’s laws on willing nations, and
essayed the path to Heaven. In those days I, Virgil, was nursed by sweet Parthenope, and
rejoiced in the arts of inglorious ease—I who toyed with shepherds’ songs, and, in youth’s
boldness, sang of you, Tityrus, under the canopy of a spreading beech.
 The translations from Vergil’s Georgics are by Fairclough [Goold] (); those from Vergil’s
Aeneid, Lucretius’ De rerum natura, and Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus are by Ahl (), Rouse
[Smith] (), and Peterson [Winterbottom] () respectively. Footnotes are omitted.
70 Joshua T. Katz
At least four other authorial signatures have, however, been detected, three of
them elsewhere in the same poem.² The purpose of this note, dedicated to a lead-
ing scholar of Latin wordplay whose work has significantly influenced me and so
many others, is to suggest one more.
For a start, I have argued that the very beginning of the first Georgic,
Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram 1

uertere, Maecenas, …,
What makes the crops joyous, beneath what star, Maecenas, it is well to turn the soil, …
contains the names of both Vergil and Aratus hidden away in the phrase terram /
uertere ‘to turn the soil’, a periphrasis of ‘to plow’ (arare, past participle aratus)
that might be rendered instead as ‘to turn/translate/VERgilize terra’.³ It is, in
other words, an invitation to read boustrophedon and take terra as ‘arret’, there-
by alluding in the main Latin poem about the land to Aratus’ well-known ‘signa-
ture’ ἄρρητον,⁴ likewise enjambed in the second line of his hugely influential
Greek poem about the sky, the Phaenomena. ⁵
In addition, the most infamous would-be signature of all – believed by in-
creasingly many scholars, it would seem, though emphatically rejected by a
 For a couple of additional would-be Vergilian signatures that I do not discuss in this paper,
see below, n. .
 See Katz ().
 The leading references on ἄρρητον are Levitan ()  n. , Kidd ()  and ()
, Hopkinson () , and especially Bing () and ()  – . For further refer-
ences and discussion, especially in connection with Aratus’ most famous acrostic (on which
see immediately below in the text), see Katz ()  –  (also  –  and  on three al-
lusions to Aratus in Eclogue , including the punning use of arator at line ); see as well now
Kubiak () and Nelis ().
 For what it may be worth, the first three letters of terram backwards, namely ‘marret’, could be
an overlapping allusion to Vergil’s cognomen, Maro (thus Eiríkur Kristjánsson apud Katz ()
); also possible, I suppose, is that Vergil was conscious of the fact that his cognomen –
which has a famous anagrammatic relationship to Amor and Roma, the sort of matter on
which Ahl () is the greatest authority – shares its first two letters with Maecenas. If so, uer-
tere is even more of a pivot between terram/‘marret’ and Maecenas, and the phrase “Maecenas =
himself” in the following phrase taken from Katz ()  should rather read “Maecenas =
Vergil and himself”: the start of the Georgics “present[s] a tightly meshed and really quite extra-
ordinary genealogy: Quid faciat laetas segetes = Hesiod; quo sidere = both Hesiod and Aratus;
terram / uertere = both Aratus and Vergil; and Maecenas = himself – who is receiving this
poem from Vergil, who received it from Aratus, who received it in turn from Hesiod (and the lat-
ter two got their material from on high, be it from Zeus or the Muses)”.
few – is the reversed, skipped-line syllabic acrostic MA-VE-PV in G. 1.429, 431,

and 433, first pointed out by Edwin L. Brown:⁶
si uero solem ad rapidum lunasque sequentis

ordine respicies, numquam te crastina fallet 425
hora, neque insidiis noctis capiere serenae.
luna reuertentis cum primum colligit ignis,
si nigrum obscuro comprenderit aëra cornu,
maximus agricolis pelagoque parabitur imber;
at si uirgineum suffuderit ore ruborem, 430
uentus erit: uento semper rubet aurea Phoebe.
sin ortu quarto (namque is certissimus auctor)
pura neque obtunsis per caelum cornibus ibit,
totus et ille dies et qui nascentur ab illo
exactum ad mensem pluuia uentisque carebunt, 435
uotaque seruati soluent in litore nautae
Glauco et Panopeae et Inoo Melicertae.
But if you pay heed to the swift sun and the moons, as they follow in order, never will to-
morrow’s hour cheat you, nor will you be ensnared by a cloudless night. Soon as the moon
gathers her returning fires, if she encloses a dark mist within dim horns, a heavy rain is
awaiting farmers and seamen. But if over her face she spreads a maiden blush, there
will be wind; as wind rises, golden Phoebe ever blushes. But if at her fourth rising—for
that is our surest guide—she pass through the sky clear and with un-dimmed horns,
then all that day, and the days born of it to the month’s end, shall be free from rain and
wind; and the sailors, safe in port, shall pay their vows on the shore to Glaucus, and to
Panopea, and to Melicerta, Ino’s son.
Could Publius Vergilius Maro really have meant MA(ximus) to stand for his cog-
nomen, VE(ntus) for his nomen gentilicium, and PV(ra) for his praenomen? Yes,
in my opinion. The best reason to believe that MA-VE-PV is a deliberate move by
Vergil is that G. 1.424– 37, which is filled with metapoetic signals (e. g., sequentis /
ordine respicies (424– 5)),⁷ evidently picks up on Arat. Phaen. 778 – 818 – a de-
scription of weather signs that happens to contain the most celebrated instance
of alphabetic wordplay in antiquity, the ‘gamma-acrostic’ Λ(επτή)-Ε-Π-Τ-Η
(783 – 7; the first word of 783 is itself λεπτή), which was rediscovered a bit over
half a century ago by J.-M. Jacques.⁸ The secondary literature since Jacques
and Brown on MA-VE-PV – as well as on Greek and Latin acrostics in general,
 Brown ()  – , esp.  – . I should perhaps say that Brown is the first to have
pointed out MA-VE-PV in modern times since it is at least possible (see Brown ()  –
) that the acrostic sequence MA-VER-P in Col. ., , and  is modeled on it.
 See, e. g., Feeney and Nelis ().
 Jacques ().
72 Joshua T. Katz
acrostics specifically in Aratus, and other Aratus-inspired acrostics, including

elsewhere in Vergil – is large and growing rapidly;⁹ of particular value to the
present discussion is the excellent suggestion of Peter Bing that what Vergil
may be doing with his acrostic signature MA-VE-PV is ‘conflating models’, allud-
ing at one and the same time to Aratus’ acrostic Λ-Ε-Π-Τ-Η and to his signature
ἄρρητον.¹⁰ It will be remembered that there is no small body of evidence in the
Greco-Roman tradition for “literary acrostichs in which authors one way or an-
other sign their works”.¹¹
It is not that I am hopelessly credulous. For example, after unveiling MA-VE-
PV, Brown considers at some length G. 2.315 – 42 and gives reasons to accept the
intentionality of P-VER-MA in the identically spaced lines 321, 324, and 327¹² –
 See Katz (a)  –  and passim – my introduction to the volume The Muse at Play: Riddles
and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry (Kwapisz, Petrain, and Szymański (eds.) ()), in
which, besides proposing a new way to read Aen. . –  that involves an acrostic (A-B-E-
O(s)-O(stia)-S-O-S), I give a summary account of classical acrostics, especially Aratean and
Latin ones, and provide up-to-date bibliography ( n. , as well as nn.  – ). To the refer-
ences given there add already Danielewicz (c), who takes Λ-Ε-Π-Τ-Η and MA-VE-PV in a
number of intriguing directions; Kersten (), on an acrostic in Lucan; Castelletti (),
on Aratean acrostics in Valerius Flaccus; Fabiszewski (), on Aratean acrostics in Germani-
cus; Hanses (), who adduces a convincing example of further play on λεπτή in Aratus’ lines
with the famous acrostic; Hawkins ()  –  and passim, on Catullus  (an acrostic-cum-
telestich); Laurent (), who has much to say about Nicander’s two onomastic acrostics and
places them in their wider intellectual context; Danielewicz (), who builds on Hanses
(whose paper in this volume offers up a new telestich in Ovid); Giusti (forthcoming), on a further
acrostic in Lucan, one that is palindromic besides; and Gowers (forthcoming), on an acrostic in
Eclogue . (See also Danielewicz (b)  –  and passim, for the latest word on Hellenistic
λεπτότηϛ; Nelis ()  – , with n. , on an anagram at G. .; and Smith (),
who finds “acrostic features” – notably acronyms (see below, n. ) – in Ovid.) Perhaps the
main contribution on MA-VE-PV from recent years comes from Somerville (), who makes
a plausible, if complicated, suggestion for why Vergil would have reversed the tria nomina
(–) but ignores a great deal of significant bibliography, above all Damschen (); Dan-
ielewicz (c) has ideas about the reason for the skipped lines as well as the reversed order.
The most significant newly discovered Latin acrostic is surely Vergil’s V-N-D-I-S (Ecl. . – ),
spotted by Grishin (). I have considered acrostics and related instances of elaborate word-
play in Latin poetry also in Katz (), (), and (), as well as in Katz (b)  – 
and  – , (a), and (b).
 See Bing ()  –  and ()  – ; for a quick summary, with further references,
see Katz ()  – . Somerville ()  adds the attractive suggestion that the syllabic
acrostic ΜΕ-ΣΗ (Phaen.  – ), pointed out by Haslam () , shows that “Vergil’s signa-
ture acrostic conflated not just two of Aratus’ metalinguistic games in the Phaenomena, but
three”.
 See Courtney (), with quotation at .
 See Brown ()  – .
but for reasons explained below, I am more skeptical of (though, yes, ultimately
inclined to accept) this fourth Vergilian signature under consideration.¹³ Here is
the central part of the passage in question:
optima uinetis satio, cum uere rubenti

candida uenit auis longis inuisa colubris, 320
prima uel autumni sub frigora, cum rapidus Sol
nondum hiemem contingit equis, iam praeterit aestas.
uer adeo frondi nemorum, uer utile siluis,
uere tument terrae et genitalia semina poscunt.
tum pater omnipotens fecundis imbribus Aether 325
coniugis in gremium laetae descendit, et omnis
magnus alit magno commixtus corpore fetus.
auia tum resonant auibus uirgulta canoris,
et Venerem certis repetunt armenta diebus;
parturit almus ager Zephyrique tepentibus auris 330
laxant arua sinus; superat tener omnibus umor,
inque nouos soles audent se gramina tuto
credere, ….
The best planting season for vines is when in blushing spring the white bird, the foe of long
snakes, is come, or close on autumn’s first cold, while the hot sun does not as yet touch
winter with his car, and summer now is waning. Spring it is that clothes the glades and
forests with leaves, in spring the soil swells and craves the vital seed. Then does Heaven,
sovereign father, descend in fruitful showers into the womb of his joyful consort and,
mightily mingling with her mighty frame, gives life to every embryo within. Then secluded
thickets echo with melodious birdsong and at the trysting hour the herds renew their loves;
the bounteous earth prepares to give birth, and the meadows ungirdle to the Zephyr’s
balmy breeze; the tender moisture avails for all. The grass safely dares to face the nascent
suns, …
True, P-VER-MA gives the names in the canonical order. True, too, the “tricolon
abundans [uer … uer … / uere (323 – 4)], with anaphora of the key word, serves
as an emphatic opening” to this section on the praises of spring (323 – 45) and
 Also skeptical would seem to be Richard F. Thomas, whose approval of MA-VE-PV (Thomas
() .: “difficult to resist”) did much to establish Brown’s idea but who ignores P-VER-
MA, as do most other scholars, even Damschen (); it is striking that Erren () mentions
P-VER-MA neutrally () but worries a bit about MA-VE-PV (). Note that Brown () 
points in passing also to MA-VE-P, symmetrically arranged, in Ecl. . – , though he appears
to consider this to be a matter of chance, and – perhaps of greater importance – that Damschen
()  –  n.  believes in the significance of PV-MA-VE in Aen. . – , likewise sym-
metrically arranged, with seven-line gaps that he suggests are highlighted by the phrase numeris
septem discrimina uocum (); I expressed doubt in Katz ()  n.  and I still feel it,
though I would not find it easy to say exactly why. See also below, n. .
74 Joshua T. Katz
could be said, along with uere at 319 and uer … uer at 338, to highlight Vergil’s
name.¹⁴ And, for what it may be worth (not much, to my mind), it is not just P-
VER-MA but P-VER-MA plus PART (330) and CRE (333), with the last two stand-
ing, in Brown’s view, for Vergil’s “adopted city as well as his childhood
home”: Publius Vergilius Maro Parthenopeius Cremonae.¹⁵
As for the fifth authorial name that is already in the literature (i. e., the fourth
hidden one plus Vergilium at G. 4.563), Matthew A. S. Carter has suggested that
there is a similar, but “extremely compact”, syllabic signature – similar to MA-
VE-PV, that is (he, like many others (see above, n. 13) ignores P-VER-MA) – in
Aen. 12.587– 8:
inclusas ut cum latebroso in pumice pastor

uestigauit apes fumoque impleuit amaro,
So, when a shepherd has tracked down bees in the porous, volcanic
Rock where they hide and has filled its chambers with billows of acrid
Smoke, …
which is to say, PVmice … / VEstigauit … aMARO.¹⁶ Carter bolsters the idea¹⁷ in a

number of ways, including by pointing out that Vergil’s cognomen and nomen
are
placed emphatically at the ends of a single verse, while the [praenomen] is announced by
inclusas and latebroso, which indicate that something is being encrypted. latebroso thus be-
comes metapoetical, since it is the word pumex itself that is ‘full of hiding places’. Vestigare
‘to track, search out’ [= follow the vestigia of] and implevit also participate in this network
of signals.¹⁸
Now, the first three signatures in the Georgics that I have mentioned – 1.2,
1.429 – 33, and 4.563 – have a number of things in common:
 Thus Thomas () .. In the words of Brown () , “The appearance of ver 
times in  lines establishes a record – for repetition of substantive – not apt to be equaled
in the whole of the Georgics”; see also Erren () , , and passim on the “Klangfiguren:
… eine lange Anaphernreihe (ver, ver, vere, tum, tum, non alios dies, ver, ver, cum primae), die in
der Mitte durch eine vielgliedrige Reihe von Annominationen und Assonanzen musikalisch ver-
stärkt wird, nie ohne innere Beziehung der Melodie zum Text der Wörter” (). Mynors (),
who ignores Brown, has nothing to say about the repetition of uer in this “-line panegyric of
spring” ().
 Brown () .
 See Carter (), with quotation at .
 Now acknowledged by Tarrant () : “ingenious[]”.
 Carter () .
(1) the first and last form a ring, neatly asserting Vergil’s authorship from begin-
ning to end;¹⁹
(2) there is in all three cases a thematic reason for Vergil to name himself in that
place since besides the evident utility of a seal at the beginning and end of a
work, the ludic signature in the second is a follow-up to – really, an example
of one-upmanship of – Aratus’ ludic signature in the Phaenomena;
(3) all three are metapoetic, with a pregnant use of uertere in the first, a large
pile of signals in the second, and explicit self-reference in the third;
(4) the first two are evidently inspired by Aratus; and
(5) even aside from the ludic quality of these first two, all three passages show
awareness of elaborate Hellenistic wordplay, with the last sporting a gamma
telestich O-T-(ot)I or O-T-(ot)I-A (4.562– 4/5) – i. e., the final word of 4.564 is
itself oti – that alludes to Vergil’s use of otia at the dawn of his career
(Ecl. 1.6) as well as being signaled by the verb lusi (4.565).²⁰
Do the other two would-be signatures – G. 2.321– 7 and Aen. 12.587– 8 – fit as
well? Maybe yes, maybe no. In short, both display metapoetic signals (point
(3)) but neither has a direct and obvious thematic connection to Aratus (point
(4)) or, then, to Aratean wordplay in particular (point (5)).
Somewhat less briefly: as far as the passage in Georgics 2 is concerned,
Brown has pointed to self-referentiality beyond the repetition of uer(e) (notably
auctor (315) and prima (321 and 336, with the first letter of the former an onomas-
tic cue)), and while there is evidently nothing about beginnings and endings in
its placement in the poem (point (1)), it might be said that attention to the name
Vergilius is particularly appropriate at the start of a section on the primaveral be-
 This ring is in addition to the even larger one formed by the near-repetition of the very first
line of the Eclogues (.) as the very last line of the Georgics (.).
 The telestich was first pointed out by Schmid ()  – ; for the metapoetic nature of
lusi as well as the ring with Ecl. ., see Carter ()  n. . (It will be noted that ludus plays
a significant role in the argument of Grishin () for V-N-D-I-S in Eclogue  (see above, n. );
that Ecl. . –  sports the ‘watery’ acrostic F-O-N-S (see in the first place Clauss ()); and
that a Hellenistic, seemingly specifically Callimachean, game with water is found also in the
placement of the river Euphrates at G. . (on which there has been a stream of secondary
literature since the short note of Scodel and Thomas ().) Compare also the thematic ring
in Ovid’s Metamorphoses between . and ., with “the amusing acrostic INCIP” in
. –  (Barchiesi () ). For recent literature on telestichs (and acrostics-cum-tele-
stichs and such other curiosities as reversed acrostics), see Castelletti (), Danielewicz
(a)  –  and (c), Fabiszewski (), Hawkins ()  – , Laurent (),
and Hanses (in this volume).
76 Joshua T. Katz
ginning that is uer ‘spring’ (point (2)).²¹ However, the passage is Aratean only by
virtue of the supposition that P-VER-MA would be a continuation of the game es-
tablished in the first book by MA-VE-PV.
The situation with the passage in Aeneid 12 is much the same. Beyond the
general metapoetic potential of inclusas and latebroso, Carter points to the fol-
lowing specific verbal links with Vergil’s poetic career: “As in the other onomas-
tic [i. e., G. 1.429 – 33], the interspersed words function as autobiographical de-
tails: we think of the poet of the Eclogues [pastor] and especially the Georgics
[apes, cf. Pastor Aristaeus at 4.317]”.²² And he goes on immediately to say that
“[t]he retrospective quality of these verses also suggests a link with the sphragis
of G. 4.559 – 66”, which has the word pastorum at 565. While Carter’s passage is in
the final book of the Aeneid, which might make one think of point (1), it is in the
middle of that book, and the “subtler autograph”²³ here does not in fact seem to
me to fit terribly well with either point (1) or point (2). While we might not expect
specifically Aratean wordplay in the Aeneid, significant acrostics do not appear
to be absent from the text,²⁴ and if Carter is right, then Aen. 12.587– 8, like G.
2.315 – 42, has verbal connections to better-positioned Aratus-inspired games
elsewhere. On balance, then, I am weakly inclined to believe in Brown’s and Car-
ter’s readings of these two passages and not to think (as Carter wryly writes in
his closing sentence) that either is “follow[ing] in the footsteps of Nabokov’s de-
luded caricature of a commentator, Dr Charles Kinbote”.²⁵
It is high time for me to unveil my promised new Vergilian signature. Men in
white coats, stand by! What is wanted, of course, is a passage that, if not at the
beginning or the end (point (1)), is nonetheless one in which it is appropriate for
the poet to be highlighting himself (point (2)); that has metapoetic features
(point (3)); and that continues the tradition of Aratus (point (4)) and Hellenistic
wordplay more generally (point (5)). As far as points (1) and (2) are concerned, it
would be difficult to think of something more fitting than the middle section of
 See Brown ()  – . For similar play on Vergil’s name in Hor. Carm. .., see Reck-
ford ()  –  +  and Belmont () ; Thomas ()  thinks this worthy of note
while conceding that it “will not convince all”.
 Carter () .
 Carter () .
 The celebrated instance is M-A-R-S (Aen. . – ), best known thanks to Fowler (),
though he was not the first to think it significant (see the overview of secondary literature pro-
vided by Horsfall ()  and Katz ()  n. ). For other possible examples, some or all
of which may be mirages, see Katz () on Aen. . – , Katz (a)  –  on
Aen. . –  (see above, n. ), and Castelletti () on Aen. . –  (!; compare also Dam-
schen ()  n. , who builds on an idea of A. Heil).
 Carter () .
“the famous conclusion to the Second Georgic, … [l]ong recognized as the core of
the Georgics and of Vergil’s thought, … where the farmer, the poet, and the phi-
losopher and the knowledge appropriate to each converge”.²⁶ To quote Leah J.
Kronenberg’s words at the start of her article on G. 2.458 – 540,²⁷ a passage gen-
erally called the “Praise of Country Life” (or “Lob des Landlebens” or “Laudes
ruris”), it “occurs at a programmatically important place in the work and
forms part of what [P. R.] Hardie terms the ‘most extended self-referential discus-
sion of the poet’s task in Virgil’s œuvre.’”²⁸
The core of Vergil’s recusatio begins at line 475 (whether it goes to 494 or 502
is a matter of dispute) and comes directly after what Jenny Strauss Clay in a clas-
sic article calls “a sudden break …; from the rustic life, Vergil turns to himself
and a prayerful request to the Muses”.²⁹ “It is important”, she goes on, “to em-
phasize the abruptness of this break in thought” before the section, which
includes some of the most famous lines in all of Vergil, repeatedly cited not only for their
great beauty and resonance, but also for the insight they afford into Vergil’s spiritual and
philosophical development. … The importance of these lines cannot be over-estimated, for
they provide one of the very few utterances of Vergil about himself.
R. A. B. Mynors puts it similarly:
Had 474 been the last line of the book, we should have been content. Unforeseeably, but
with no breach of continuity, the poet for the first time reveals his own ambitions with a
startling me uero, and repeats the idyllic picture of country life in more detail and with
a new depth and brilliance, greatly strengthened by our sense that he is now himself deeply
committed.³⁰
Here is this new beginning:
me uero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, 475

quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore,
accipiant caelique uias et sidera monstrent,
defectus solis uarios lunaeque labores;
unde tremor terris, qua ui maria alta tumescant
 Clay ()  (my quotation breaks up one of Clay’s sentences by placing a bit from the
immediately following sentence in the middle).
 On which see now Marchetta ().
 Kronenberg () , with reference to P. R. Hardie () . (Note that Hardie, follow-
ing Buchheit ()  –  and to some extent also W. Wimmel, considers G. . – . as a
block, a view in which he is followed in turn by, e. g., Nelis ().)
 Clay () .
 Mynors () .
78 Joshua T. Katz
obicibus ruptis rursusque in se ipsa residant, 480

quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soles
hiberni, uel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet.
But as for me—first may the Muses, sweet beyond compare, whose holy emblems, under the
spell of a mighty love, I bear, take me to themselves, and show me heaven’s pathways, the
stars, the sun’s many eclipses, the moon’s many labours; whence come tremblings of the
earth, the force to make deep seas swell and burst their barriers, then sink back upon them-
selves; why winter suns hasten so fast to dip in Ocean, or what delays clog the laggard
nights.
All must find the signature now.

The opening lines are full of interwoven allusions to Lucretius and, as it hap-
pens, Aratus (point (4)).³¹ The comparison to Lucr. 1.922– 5,
… sed acri
percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor
et simul incussit suauem mi in pectus amorem
musarum, …, 925
… but the high hope of renown has struck my mind sharply with holy wand, and at the
same time has struck into my heart sweet love of the Muses, …
seems clear enough, and the story with Aratus is much the same:
With the departure of Iustitia from the earth (‘excedens terris’ [G. 2.474]) we are transported
to the heavens and into a region of Aratean allusion; these cosmological and literary co-or-
dinates also locate the immediately following lines, 475 – 7 …. The address to the Muses is
closely modelled on Aratus 16 – 18:
χαίροιτε δὲ Μοῦσαι
μειλίχιαι μάλα πᾶσαι· ἐμοί γε μὲν ἀστέραϛ εἰπεῖν
ᾗ θέμιϛ εὐχομένῳ τεκμήρατε πᾶσαν ἀοιδήν.
Hail Muses, most gentle every one of you: answer my prayer that I may rightly tell of the stars, and guide all my
song.
Particularly close is the echo in ‘dulces ante omnia’ of μειλίχιαι μάλα πᾶσαι.³²
 See above all P. R. Hardie ()  –  (repr. in: Volk (ed.) ()  – ), esp.  – , as
well as Gee ()  – . For Lucretius, see also, e. g., Schäfer ()  – , Gale ()  – 
and  – , Kronenberg ()  – , and now Mistretta (), who pays particular attention
to Hor. Epod. . – ; Buchheit ()  n.  lists and gives brief bibliography on Aratean
echoes in the final hundred lines of Georgics  (see also Kidd ()  – ).
 P.R. Hardie ()  (footnotes omitted).
“[E]ven lines 475 and 477, which seem to be purely Aratean, conceal Lucretian
allusion”, writes Philip R. Hardie,³³ but it will be noted straightaway that
while the final four of the seven words in G. 2.475 – dulces ante omnia
Musae ³⁴ – come from Vergil’s two literary models, in neither case does this influ-
ence extend to the first three words: me uero primum – “but as for me first”, that
is to say, “but as for me, Vergil, first”.³⁵ And there is, I suggest, a good reason for
this, namely that precisely these three words are not Aratean and not Lucretian
(or Epicurean) but should instead be understood as Vergilian through and
through: the acronym Me VERo Primum. ³⁶
Now, it would not be correct to say that nowhere else in Vergil’s corpus are
there three words in a row that begin m, u, and p, in this or another order.³⁷ But
the context here is very special: if there is one place in the Georgics aside from
the beginning and the end where one positively expects ‘authorial rhetoric’ of a
ludic kind, it is here, at the start of a passage that is at the same time Aratean
and personal.³⁸ Note, too, how intensely metapoetic the phrase me uero primum
is (point (3)), for all three words allude not just in sound but also in meaning to
Vergil himself:³⁹
 P.R. Hardie () .

 On the mystic significance of this phrase, see A. Hardie ()  –  and passim.
 The reader’s first instinct is to take primum as an adjective agreeing with me (see below, with
n. , on the ‘primus motif’), though in the end it is clear that it is instead a sentential adverb
“answered by sin in ” (Mynors () ; note that the structure of Mynors’ lemma makes
clear that he does see me uero primum as at some level a unit). Compare the well-known matter
of the force of prima at the start of Eclogue  (see, e. g., Coleman ()  – ).
 The foundational note on Latin acronyms is by Hendry (), who proposes that Vergil’s M-
A-R-S acrostic (see above, n. ) may be an allusion to an Ennian acronym (Ann.  Sk.); for a
possible connection in turn between this and the acrostic I have now argued for in Aeneid  (see
above, n. ), see Katz (a)  –  n. . See also my suggestion apud Colborn ()  n. 
that there may be an intentional acronym S-E-R-O at Man. .: this would gloss spargo, as in
the significant acrostic S-P-A-R-S-V that begins right there (. – ) and that is of real scholarly
importance, as Colborn elegantly demonstrates, for it allows us to date Germanicus’ Aratea to
before the first book of the Astronomica. Smith ()  –  and  –  suggests a number of
politically charged acronyms in Ov. Pont. .. – .
 From Georgics , for example, I note the following: m—u—p (), m—p—u ( and ), u
—m—p (), u—p—m (), and p—m—u ( –  and  – ). None of these seems any more
significant to me than the line made infamous by Nisbet ()  – PUlVERulenta coquat MA-
turis solibus aestas (G. .) – though the u of  is uerum and  (exactum ad mensem pluuia
uentisque carebunt) falls in the MA-VE-PV passage.
 Rutherford () considers “Authorial Rhetoric in Virgil’s Georgics” but with no mention of
verbal games.
 The line as a whole is heavily spondaic, which adds to its expressive character; compare now
Tarrant ()  – .
80 Joshua T. Katz
(i) me is obvious;
(ii) uero is a signpost of veritable – i. e., etymological (uerus = ἔτυμοϛ) – truth⁴⁰
and specifically emphasizes the shift to the pronoun me,⁴¹ the referent of
which is the author;⁴² and
(iii) primum, besides priming the importance of the initial letters (as Jerzy Dan-
ielewicz points out to me), suggests the ‘primus motif’, the well-known con-
vention by which a Roman stakes his claim to being the first to venture into
some part of Greek literary territory.⁴³
Finally, is there elaborate wordplay in the passage (point (5)) aside from the
signature itself? I believe that there may be and that the games involve further
references to Vergil himself and also to Aratus. First of all, while uero is, to be
sure, a common enough discourse particle, it is perhaps not fanciful to suggest
that readers would recall the use of the same word at G. 1.424, likewise second in
its section in the MA-VE-PV passage, which has established m—u—p as a possible
nominal order in the poem (and, if the would-be signature in G. 2.321– 7 is dis-
missed, as the order of record). Be that as it may, there is in the passage from
Georgics 2 under consideration a drumbeat of that most famous anagram in
Latin poetry (compare above, n. 5): amore (476) and mora (482), plus (side)ra
mo(nstrent) (477) and (tre)mor and mar(ia) (both 479) – and, if I am right, a hid-
den Maro in the signature me uero primum (475). Furthermore, while there are,
for clear thematic reasons, many instances of the word for ‘sun’ in the Georgics,
such that the appearance of solis (478) and soles (481) a few lines apart is hardly
a matter of great notice, I propose that they remind the reader of Aratus’ Cilician
hometown of Soli (Σόλοι) – just as Michael Haslam suggests for sol … solem in G.
 Compare Katz () on etymological and folk-etymological ‘truth’.

 See Klingner () . For a discourse-pragmatic account of uero, see Kroon ()  –
 and passim (no references to Vergil).
 Wordplay of this kind is not necessarily sensitive to vowel length, so the fact that Vĕrgilium
has a short first vowel while uēro has a long one (as does the word for ‘spring’, uēr; see above on
G. . – ) is probably of no consequence. (Compare Carter ()  n.  on Mărō vs.
amārō at Aen. ., though it is possible that he is mistaken when he writes that “the com-
parable syllable in the Georgics acrostic [i. e., MA(‐VE-PV)] … is long only by position”. The evi-
dence is not conclusive, but there is some chance that the form is actually māximus: see, e. g.,
Weiss ()  n. . I am grateful to Benjamin Fortson for discussion of the matter.)
 See, e. g., Volk () Index s.v. “primus motif”. Compare also prima at G. . (see above)
and the further significant uses of prima/primum and πρῶτον discussed by Feeney and Nelis
().
1.438 – 9, right after the MA-VE-PV passage⁴⁴ – though it presumably goes too far
to think that the first two words of the line defectus solis uarios lunaeque labores
(478) could be a sign that Vergil is improving on his Greek source.⁴⁵ If the present
paragraph contains some stretches, this does not, I hope, detract from the rest of
the arguments I have advanced for understanding me uero primum as being more
than the sum of its elemental parts.
In section 13.5 of his Dialogus de oratoribus, Tacitus quotes G. 2.475:
‘“me uero dulces” (ut Vergilius ait) “Musae”, remotum a sollicitudinibus et curis et necessitate
cotidie aliquid contra animum faciendi, in illa sacra illosque fontis ferant, …’.
[“]As for myself, may the ‘sweet Muses,’ as Virgil says, bear me away to their holy places
where sacred streams do flow, beyond the reach of anxiety and care, and free from the ob-
ligation of performing each day some task that goes against the grain.[”]
Of course the historian – or, rather, the speaker in the dialogue, Curiatius Mater-
nus – gets it slightly wrong. Whatever this may mean, the fact that he leaves pri-
mum out of me uero primum dulces ante omnia Musae shows that he did not see,
or at least did not care about, Vergil’s signature.⁴⁶ Am I misguided to see it two
millennia later? And even if I am not misguided, is it something worth caring
about?⁴⁷ Such queries seem as good a way as any to end a contribution whose
title contains that distancing punctuation device so frequent in papers on word-
play: the question mark.⁴⁸
 See Haslam ()  – , with n.  on the fact that “[t]he quantitative difference (Sōl, Sŏl-
eus) does not inhibit” (compare above, n. ).
 The line is modeled on Lucr. . (solis item quoque defectus lunaeque latebras); Vergil does
not otherwise use the noun defectus, strikingly avoiding it at Aen. . (hic canit errantem
lunam solisque labores). As Ovid puts it, cum sole et luna semper Aratus erit (Am. ..).
 On the Tacitean passage, see now Thibodeau ()  –  + .
 Ioannis Ziogas reminds me of Hinds (), on the “crisis between respectable and non-re-
spectable interpretation” (). Hinds’ argument that “the extratextual and intratextual ambi-
ence of [Ovid’s] exile poetry requires us all to read not just ‘ultra-suspiciously’, as [S.] Casali sug-
gests, but with the super-heated obsessiveness of conspiracy theorists” (; italics in original)
applies also, perhaps, to signature-hunting in Vergil: “Literary critics are always abnormal read-
ers. To be a literary critic is to spend six months, or six years, or sixty years poring over the
meaning of a text … and this is an obsessive activity, not a normal one” (; italics in original).
 On titular question marks in articles on Greco-Roman acrostics and other forms of wordplay,
see Katz (a) , with n.  (add now Kersten () and Danielewicz ()); see also Lau-
rent ()  n. .
My thanks go to Jerzy Danielewicz, Elena Giusti, Emily Gowers, Mathias Hanses, Maxime Lau-
rent, and Damien Nelis for allowing me to read and cite work in advance of publication.
82 Joshua T. Katz
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Jay Reed
Mora in the Aeneid
Summary: Through wordplay with amor and Roma, this paper explores places in
Virgil’s poem where mora—charged variously with a sense of deferral, hesitation,
or obstruction—meaningfully interacts with ideas of desire and national founda-
tion. The poem hints at an unstable equation between the three ideas, by defer-
ring Roman foundations beyond the limits of the poem and by troping that tra-
jectory as desire, both in the various personal loves that may abet or frustrate the
national goal and in the metaphorical “love” of it. Love is a convertible term in
our triad; various narrative voices oppose it to either “Rome” or “delay.” Yet at a
deeper level than those voices, amor is opposed to neither, and its involvement
in this complex of signification underscores how, in the service of its teleology,
the narrative employs the devices of desire, suspense and deferral. Like all seem-
ingly inexorable processes in the Aeneid, this one, too, depends on the rhetoric of
the poem and its speaking and focalizing personae.
Keywords: Virgil; Aeneid; mora; delay; desire; love; Rome; foundation; ktisis; Ae-
neas; Dido; Turnus
Longitudes
Wordplay with mora, “delay,” though it is obviously an anagram of amor and
Roma, has not received as much interpretive attention in Aeneid criticism as
that palindromic pair, whose association may go back at least to the time of
Ennius.¹ The present discussion aims to explore places in Virgil’s poem where
mora—charged variously with a sense of deferral, hesitation, or obstruction—
meaningfully interacts with the poem’s themes of desire and national founda-
tion. Often when the Aeneid raises one of these ideas the text seems instinct
with the other two, either drawing equations or hinting, κατ’ ἀντίφρασιν, at al-
ternative experiences that never stop haunting the narrative outcomes.² We see
the wordplay subtended by ideas rooted deep in the poem (not always using
 In general see Stanley (); on Virgil’s possible use see Skulsky (). The variation in the
quantity of the o (Rōma, amŏr or amōr-, mŏra) is immaterial for meaningful wordplay: Ahl
()  – .
 On (etymological) wordplay that operates κατ’ ἀντίφρασιν, through opposite meanings, see
O’Hara () .
88 Jay Reed
these particular words, and always semantically conditioned by context). By de-

ferring Aeneas’ foundation—let alone the ultimate foundation of Rome—beyond
the limits of the poem, and by troping that trajectory as desire, the language of
the Aeneid suggests an unstable equation between the three ideas.
Let us experimentally substitute amor or Roma for mora in significant pas-
sages and attend to the resulting play of repetition and divergence. Consider,
for example, the word’s first appearance in the poem. Venus makes her son in-
visible so that no one in Carthage might moliriue moram aut ueniendi poscere
causas (1.414 “cause them delay or interrogate them as to why they were
coming”)³; the verb moliri helps make of this imminent mora a dire counter-
moles to Roma, the foundation that is her descendants’ destiny, as expressed
in the more general statement at 1.33 tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem
(“planting the Roman nation’s roots was a task of immense scale”). Not only
does Venus’ strategy expedite her plans for the Roman future, but the phrasing
anagrammatically anticipates her own contriving, on her next appearance
(1.657– 94), the amor of Dido for Aeneas (675 magno Aeneae mecum teneatur
amore, “bind her to me, then, with bonds of a mighty love for Aeneas”),
when, confiding to Cupid that Dido is “delaying” Aeneas with “winning
words,” she finds an opportunity to turn the tables and seize the advantage
(670 – 1): nunc Phoenissa tenet Dido blandisque moratur / uocibus (“Now a Phoe-
nician, Dido, controls him, and she with her smooth talk, / Makes him delay”).
The antithesis between “Phoenician” and “(future) Roman” is implicit, as is se-
duction in blandis uocibus. In commandeering this amor to prevent any mora
against Roma, she is “declining” the word in different forms—Ahl’s term for
this move, borrowed from Varro’s usage in De lingua latina. ⁴
The more or less ad hoc love that Venus imposes on Dido eventually be-
comes a threat to the emergence of Rome and a more dire mora itself, and
needs to be superseded for the sake of Roman destiny. An especially productive
complex of the three ideas of delay, desire, and nationality occurs in Mercury’s
second, urgent command to Aeneas at 4.566 – 70:
“iam mare turbari trabibus saeuasque uidebis

conlucere faces, iam feruere litora flammis,
si te his attigerit terris Aurora morantem.
heia age, rumpe moras! uarium et mutabile semper
femina.”
 My longer translations of the Aeneid are from Ahl (). I follow Mynors’ Oxford text ()
for the Latin.
 Ahl ()  – .
“Soon you’ll see timber churn up waves, massed menacing firebrands

Burst into flame, beaches leap with the fires of a blazing inferno,
If, that is, dawn’s light catches you still hanging round in this country!
Hang the delays! What you face is a complex and changeable constant:
Woman.”
Whereas in Venus’ example the viewpoint tends to oppose mora to both its hid-
den reflections, Mercury’s control of the wordplay in 569 rumpe moras (a violent
metaphor; literally, “break delays”) determines a different complex of synonymy
and antonymy; he—that is, Jupiter, whose message he is carrying—equates Ae-
neas’ stay in Carthage with a laggardliness on his part.⁵ Aenas must convert
mora/amor to Roma/amor. Mercury’s phrase—which picks up morantem at the
end of 568 and is anticipated by the ant simile at 4.406 – 7 (pars agmina cogunt,
/ castigantque moras, “some enforce the formation, / Bullying idlers along”)—
works straightforwardly in wordplay with amor ⁶: Aeneas, Mercury implies, is
to break off his love affair with Dido, the cause of his lingering. But as an ana-
gram for Roma the term works by antithesis: Aeneas is to replace his demoratio
in Carthage with the quest that he will not see achieved, but that must become
his new object of desire; as he himself says to Dido at 347 of his Italian destina-
tion, hic amor, haec patria est (“this is my love and my homeland”). Earlier, at
3.134, Aeneas had recounted that in settling his people on Crete he had exhorted
them “all to feel love for their homes” (amare focos): foundation is a kind of love,
but that love’s direction changes until he understands its true object.⁷ The meta-
phor, if not the sublimation, long precedes Rome and Latin wordplay: Aeneas’
expressions of a national desire at 3.134 and 4.347 are prefigured by that of a
speaker in Sophocles’ Laocoön, where Trojan refugees following Aeneas desire
the colony he is about to lead (οἳ τῆσδ’ ἐρῶσι τῆς ἀποικίας Φρυγῶν).⁸ Virgil’s
usage will prove irrestistible to the revisions of such a reader as Lucan, whose
preface uses it to invert and undo Augustan foundational tropes: “if you, o
Rome, have such great love for unholy war, then turn your hand against yourself
only when you have first subjected the world to the law of Latium” (Bellum Ciuile
1.21– 3 sed si tantus amor belli tibi, Roma, nefandi …). The Virgilian phrase tantus
amor, which the Aeneid directs toward ktistic ends,⁹ is now directed toward self-
 Reed () .

 Cf. Malamud ()  – .
 Fletcher ().
 Soph. fr. . Radt = D.H. ... Cf. Fletcher () , ,  – . For the metaphor in
Greek see also Thuc. .. τῆς πολέως … ἐραστὰς γιγνομένους, pointed out to me by Ricardo
Apóstol.
 Reed ()  – .
90 Jay Reed
destruction, one that the symmetry of the verse reinscribes into the very name of
Rome.
Mercury’s declension at 4.569 rumpe moras thus helps articulate Aeneas’
movement from hesitancy to zealous commitment against various obstacles to
the national mission that the gods (ascribing it to fate) have prescribed—helps
articulate, that is, the dynamic of the Aeneid’s ktistic narrative.¹⁰ His journey
from Troy to Latium is punctuated by various morae, some initially of his own
making, later mostly the work of his opponents. Jupiter prompts Mercury’s locu-
tion: instructing his messenger before his earlier epiphany, he wonders aloud,
quid struit? aut qua spe inimica in gente moratur …? (4.235 “What does he
hope he can build by delay in this enemy nation?”). Nor does Jupiter’s accusa-
tion fall far from the facts: Anna specifically encourages the lovesick Dido to de-
tain Aeneas in Carthage: causasque innecte morandi (4.51, literally “weave to-
gether reasons for delaying”). Mercury, retailing the divine command to
Aeneas at 271, had translated that complaint into quid struis? aut qua spe Libycis
teris otia terris? (“What do you hope you can build, you deserter, in Libya’s de-
serts?”—Ahl’s rendering of the wordplay with ter‐), which perhaps, he later sees,
requires the stronger emphasis of heia age, rumpe moras! with both its forceful
catachresis and its insinuation of the ktistic substitute, Roma, for the amor being
condemned.
The wordplay becomes especially resonant during the most serious impedi-
ment to Aeneas’ mission: the Latin war, particularly the final combat with
Turnus over Lavinia; and in the last book “hesitation,” like much of the
poem’s burden of blame or failure, shifts decisively from Aeneas to Turnus. In
Turnus’ first words in Book 12 (11 nulla mora in Turno) we are to read his own
sense of antithesis between “delay, hesitation” (which he attributes to the ignaui,
“cowardly, slothful, hesitant,” Trojans) and his driving passion for Lavinia, as
well as a further ironic hint, in anagram, of his exclusion from the fated nation-
ality. An amor most certainly dwells in him (indeed, “disturbs” him inwardly, as
at 71 illum turbat amor, at his sight of Lavinia’s blush), but the Roman future does
not: another highly contingent play of synonymy and antonymy. Iris had said to
Turnus at 9.11– 12 quid dubitas? … rumpe moras omnis (“Why dither? … / Smash
any force that delays you”), echoing the metaphor that Mercury used to Aeneas
in Carthage, but reconfiguring its covert oppositions. As the motor of his action,
Turnus’ desire for Lavinia is implicit under Iris’ words, as is more immediately
 Malamud () : “Τhe importance of mora is clear not only from its frequency, but from
its presence as a structuring principle in the Aeneid.”
the Roman destiny it is her mistress Juno’s wish to break. Turnus, with a deco-
rous prayer to heaven, promptly obeys.
Delay, indeed, is not in his style, as we see at 10.308 nec Turnum segnis ret-
inet mora (literally, “and no sluggish hesitation holds Turnus back”). It is partly
his alacrity—not to say hotheadedness (he is commonly described as audax,
“bold,” or ardens, “blazing”)—that makes Juno’s protection of him in Aeneid
10.633 – 88 seem so wrong: to remove him from battle, she conjures up a
decoy, phantom Aeneas to entice him onto a ship in pursuit and then cuts
him adrift, sending him down the coast “to Ardea, ancient city of Daunus, his
father.” This ploy—which Jupiter sardonically characterizes at 10.622 as a mora
praesentis leti, “delay of his imminent death”—excites Turnus to frustrated
speech, pleas to Jupiter alternating with attempts (thwarted by Juno) to throw
himself overboard. He is more acquiescent in Book Twelve when Juturna, dis-
guising herself as his charioteer, attempts to divert him from battle; but finally
—again, as in Book Ten, motivated by the present danger to his Rutulians—he
turns, telling her at 12.676 iam iam fata, soror, superant, absiste morari (“Fate
has now taken decisive command, sister. Stop your delaying”). Amata’s desper-
ate outcry during the dispute early in the book, which prompts Lavinia’s omi-
nous tears and blush, elicits a fatalistic qualification of the meaning of the
word on his part: neque enim Turno mora libera mortis (12.74 “Turnus, besides,
isn’t free to delay death’s hour or defer it”).¹¹ By the hour of his single combat
with Aeneas, however, his drive seems to have left him for good: 916 cunctatur-
que metu letumque instare tremescit (“[he] hesitates, frightened, and shakes at
the sight of the menacing javelin”) and 919 cunctanti telum Aeneas fatale corus-
cat (“as he hesitates still, Aeneas with javelin brandished …”). Finally, Aeneas’
fierce opening question to Turnus at 889, quae nunc deinde mora est? (“Why
dally now at the climax?”), is a consummational “ironic echo”¹² of 11 nulla
mora in Turno. He, in the meantime, seems to have taken on Turnus’ impatience
for the decisive moment: “he hates the delays” (431 oditque moras), with a pi-
quantly marked antithesis to the love for Rome that seems finally to have fully
possessed him.¹³ Mercury’s catachresis is pried open and augmented for Aeneas’
turn to single combat at 699 praecipitatque moras omnis, opera omnia rumpit
(“[He h]urries all obstacles out of the way, ends all operations”).
 Tarrant () ad loc., noting that “[f]or T. to speak of his death as imminent seems logically
inconsistent with his earlier boasts,” follows Servius in interpreting “… if my death is fated.”
 Tarrant () ad loc.
 Cf. the antithesis in Lucan . (Caesar) aeger … morae flagransque cupidine regni (“sick of
delay and flaming with desire for tyrannical rule”).
92 Jay Reed
We get an inkling of this turnaround already in Aeneas’ impatience at

10.888 – 90 inde ubi tot traxisse moras, tot spicula taedet / uellere … iam tandem
erumpit … (“Then, when he tires of extended delays and of pulling out countless
/ Javelins … he breaks from defense …”¹⁴): a subtle but unmistakable echo of
Mercury’s rumpe moras, almost a concrete application of the phrase (in so far
as “delays” here becomes metonymical for the enemy weapons that tiresomely,
though momentarily, impede the hero). “It is, however, A[eneas],” Tarrant (2012:
4) notes, “who is responsible for the last and most significant delay in the book.
For a long moment it appears that the inevitable conclusion will be not just de-
ferred but cancelled. The final obstacle to A.’s destiny that must be removed is
the promptings of his own better nature.” His old doubt recrudesces at Turnus’
final words—940 – 1 et iam iamque magis cunctantem flectere sermo / coeperat
(“Slowly but surely the words take effect. He’s begun hesitating …”)—before
the sight of Pallas’ sword-belt sweeps it away.
One of the turning points in Aeneas’ ardor for his mission comes in the Un-
derworld, and can be traced in Anchises’ responses to his son’s attitude; for ex-
ample, in his hortatory query, after the sight of the future Augustus: et dubitamus
adhuc uirtutem extendere factis (“do we still hesitate to extend our strength by
our manhood?”). By 889 his protreptic has “kindled / Love for the glory to
come as a flame in his [son’s] spirit” (incenditque animum famae uenientis
amore). He is keen to squelch any proclivity toward mora. His welcome to Aeneas
at 6.687– 8 includes a subtle, tendentious reproof of some real or imagined tar-
rying on his son’s part¹⁵: uenisti tandem, tuaque exspectata parenti / uicit iter
durum pietas? (“Have you at last really come? Did righteous love for your father
/ Conquer the rough road here as I thought it would?”). But Anchises’ ghost most
definitively busts all delays at 851– 3:
“tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento

(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos”
“You, who are Roman, recall how to govern mankind with your power.
These will be your special ‘Arts’: the enforcement of peace as a habit,
Mercy for those cast down and relentless war upon proud men.”
 Cf. Lucan . –  (Scaeva) ille moras ferri neruorum et uincula rumpit (“he breaks the im-
peding weapon together with the ligaments [of his stricken eyeball]”). For other instances of
rumpere moras in Lucan see ., ., ., . – .
 Cf. . (of Aeneas among the Trojan dead) iuuat usque morari.
His addressee, Aeneas, seems made already Roman in the invocation Romane;
the interminable morae toward the future city and its imperium seem precipitous-
ly broken off, as if the figures he sees in Elysium, and their history, were already
long reality. And this being-Roman is most definitely the object of amor, one
carefully managed and interpreted by the wily ghost, whose discourse somehow
sublimates his son’s plaintive, almost appalled question about the dira cupido
(“perilous desire”) of souls to forget their past lives and reascend into new bod-
ies (721) into Aeneas’ own transformative famae uenientis amor (889).¹⁶ It will be
noticed that the poem is more diffident there than Anchises’ manes, in insisting
that the glorious object of that amor is, literally, “coming report”—perhaps aware
of the deferrals and mediations that must accompany any desire.
A sort of counter-exemplum to the sense of ktistic immediacy expressed by
his address Romane has just arisen in the spirit of Fabius Maximus, whose “hes-
itation” refounds Rome in Anchises’ piquantly antiphrastic reproach and enco-
mium at 6.845 – 6 quo fessum rapitis, Fabii? tu Maximus ille es / unus qui nobis
cunctando restituis rem (“Fabii, where do you rush me? I’m tired. You’re Fabius
the Greatest: / You alone slow action down to restore our republic”). A corrective
variation on our anagram then emerges when Anchises exhorts Aeneas to re-
member that his special art is to add mos to pax in ruling the nations at line
852. It is as if the morem—the “habit” of Roman civilization that is to follow
Roman peace—both completed the mere rem that Fabius’s delaying tactics had
conserved and replaced the near-homonym moram, a version of Fabius’ cunctari.
But it will take a mindful, remembering Roman—one who is memor—to achieve
this state. “Rome” is a function of time and memory as well as of desire.
Prolongations
Surely Virgil could have said, and does say, all of this without anagram. What
does wordplay do? It insinuates the uneasy sense of postponement that, the
poem whispers, lies within both amor and Roma. Other declensions may also
be found significant¹⁷: oram (the shore ever elusive that marks out the itinerary’s
goals, stages, and boundaries, as in 1.1– 2); armo (the act of arming that prepares
 Reed ().
 Cf. Smith in Leonard and Smith () on Lucr. . – . See Ahl’s discussion ()  of
George Herbert’s poem Lucus , which rings these various changes.
94 Jay Reed
for so much of the action)¹⁸; ramo (the bough by whose means Aeneas, dedicat-
ing it on the threshold of Persephone, passes safely through the Underworld and
out with his spirit newly kindled to his mission). The three under scrutiny here,
however, form a basic triad. The significance of our passages lies in their expres-
sion of a triform metonymy for the narrative dynamics of the Aeneid; the teleol-
ogy of ktisis, aiming towards Rome, is supported in this poetics by desire, both in
the various personal loves that may abet or frustrate the national goal and in the
metaphorical “love” of it, and these trajectories in turn are ultimately those of
narrative itself.
The poem’s action ratchets forward against the innumerable little delays it
posits. The characters’ alacrity or impatience emerge from phrases with mora
amounting to “forthwith, immediately,” such as the expressions nec mora or
haud mora, literally “and no delay” (3.207, 548; 5.140, 749; 6.177, 156; 10.153;
11.713). Some other examples: 3.472– 3 interea classem uelis aptare iubebat / An-
chises, fieret uento mora ne qua ferenti (“Meanwhile, Anchises was issuing orders
to get the fleet’s rigging / Ready for sail so there’d be no delay should a favoring
wind rise”); 5.638 – 9 (the false Beroe) iam tempus agi res, / nec tantis mora pro-
digiis (“Now’s the time to take action, not dither! / Portents are so strong!”); 6.40
nec sacra morantur / iussa uiri (“No time’s lost. Men ready the offerings demand-
ed”). At the same time, mora governs a whole series of military tropes that pro-
liferate in the Italian war, and especially in Book 10, registering hindrances in
the thick of combat—whether successful or momentary—to death, the telos of
the larger narrative of life: Turnus at 9.143 fossarumque morae, leti discrimina
parua (“trenches that may slow us down, the thin line between life and destruc-
tion”); 10.400 – 1 hoc spatium tantumque morae fuit Ilo (“and that’s how a re-
prieve was granted to Ilus”); 10.427– 8 primus Abantem / oppositum interimit,
pugnae nodumque moramque (“he started by killing / Abas, a knot to frustrate
any blade, who rose up to oppose him”); 10.485 loricaeque moras et pectus per-
forat ingens (“pierced the resistant breastplate and dug through the muscular rib-
cage”); 10.622– 3 (Jupiter to Juno) “si mora praesentis leti … oratur …” (“‘If what is
asked is delay of his death …”); 12.541 nec misero clipei mora profuit aerei (“…
found that his bronze-clad shield couldn’t dampen the impact of iron”). As
often, the variety of the English equivalents Ahl finds for the word betrays the
creeping spread of its semantics.
 Cf. Lansing ()  : “The first and last words [of the poem’s first sentence], arma and Ro-
mae, by sharing three letters, are virtual anagrams expressing the relationship between cause
and effect: war leads to the building of Rome.”
The Aeneid’s narrative arc is one great mora made up of smaller ones. The
epic never reaches Aeneas’ settlement of Lavinium, let alone Rome; it throws
out vague hints of Aeneas’ apotheosis (1.250, 259 – 60, 265 – 6; 6.764; 12.794– 5)
and couches the achievements of Roman history in indirect speech or ecphrasis,
sometimes mediating them doubly or triply.¹⁹ Its abrupt end has inspired contro-
versy and supplements. Even after his arrival at his destination there is a perma-
nent truth to Aeneas’ sad characterization, during his wanderings, of “Ausonian
fields that are always receding” (3.496 arua … Ausoniae semper cedentia retro),
echoed in his plea to Apollo at 6.61– 2, even as he stands on Italian shores:
“Now Italy’s coastlands, ever receding, / Lie in our grasp. Let our Trojan luck
pursue us no longer!” (iam tandem Italiae fugientis prendimus oras. / hac Troiana
tenus fuerit fortuna secuta). For Anchises, Augustus—pointed out in the midst of
the catalogue of heroes, out of chronological order (Virgil’s Roman readers could
supply the correct teleology)—represents a consummation (6.789 – 805). But Mar-
cellus—coming at the end of the catalogue of heroes as we hear it reported—re-
minds us of an ideal Romanness that the boy will never quite instantiate; his vir-
tues recede into subjunctive conditions, climaxing in a baffled si clause (6.878 –
82). And his very status as Augustus’ heir complicates the consummatory power
of the Augustan aurea saecula that Anchises predicts (6.792– 3); of that moment,
too, the world may have no more than a glimpse.
The poem knows that delay is crucial to narrative. Sinon, pausing in his tale
at 2.102 quidue moror? (“Why delay now?”), keeps his audience on tenterhooks in
aid of his deadly scheme, and simultaneously Aeneas keeps Dido and his audi-
ence in Carthage in suspense, as Virgil does us: a triple lesson in the power of
narrative delay. A like figure lurks within Venus’ parallel between Dido’s life
story as she retails it to Aeneas—pictured as a labyrinthine architectural work
of which the goddess (apparently espousing a more direct narrative mode,
even as she tantalizes with the suggestion of details left unsaid) will note only
the fastigia, literally the “roofpeaks” or “gables” (1.341– 4 longa est iniuria, long-
ae / ambages; sed summa sequar fastigia rerum, “It’s a long tale of wrong and
injustice, a long tale: / Twists, turns, full of deceit. But I’ll summarize most of
the main points”)—and her apprehension of Dido’s abode itself as a maze of en-
trapment for Aeneas, literally a “convoluted house” (1.661 quippe domum timet
ambiguam Tyriosque bilinguis, “Moods at the palace, she feared, could shift;
double-talk was a Tyrian / Art-form”).²⁰ Inanimate objects slow the action
down just enough to engage our wonderment and worries. At 6.211 the Golden
 Reed ().
 Hannah ()  – ,  – .
96 Jay Reed
Bough notoriously “hesitates” (cunctantem) against the eager (auidus) Aeneas’

grasp, whereas the Sibyl had predicted that it would break off readily or not
at all. Juno, who in particular is wont to throw obstacles in Aeneas’ path, know-
ingly represents narrative protraction at 7.315 “at trahere atque moras tantis licet
addere rebus” (“Yet … there is room to prolong and delay these momentous pro-
ceedings”), sparing us an unsatisfying wrapping-up of the story halfway
through; and the Gates of War delay despite her pushing at 7.620 – 1, as if agree-
able to her deeper diegetic urges, however resistant to her present plot: tum re-
gina deum caelo delapsa morantis / impulit ipsa manu portas (“Then the queen of
the gods, slipping down from the heavens, / Pushed the reluctant gates with her
own hand”).
In his past work the poet had rebuked himself for delaying at Georgics
3.42– 3: en age segnis / rumpe moras (“But come, break these sluggish delays”)
—what does that mean? The expansive opening, with its elaborately deferred
and metaphorically expressed plans for a grand project on Caesar’s lineage
and victories, suddenly repented of as dilatory? When he next uses this phrase,
in the person of Mercury, he will correct its national import. Before beginning
that encomium Virgil had invoked Apollo as memorande (Georgics 3.1), “you of
whom I must tell, whom I am bound to commemorate”—as if the morae of the
ensuing verses, however inimical to his immediate poetic imperative, were some-
how built into it by soundplay. The Aeneid, too, inscribes the idea of delay even
more plainly into its narrative. The passages under discussion here might be con-
sidered to expand anagrammatically on the overt opening of narrative at the be-
ginning of the poem (1.1– 8):
Arma uirumque cano Troiae …

multa quoque et bello passus dum conderet urbem
inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum
Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae.
Musa, mihi causas memora ….
Arms and the man I sing of Troy …

… and he suffered profoundly in war to establish a city,
Settle his gods into Latium, making this the land of the Latins
Future home to the Elders of Alba and Rome’s mighty ramparts.
Muse, let the memories spill through me ….
The first sentence of the poem follows a crooked itinerary from Troy, through
stages in Lavinium and Alba Longa, to end in a Rome that the poem itself will
never reach. Upon sighting this telos the poet immediately abandons his inde-
pendent stance as singer (cano) to ask help of his muse, specifically for the caus-
es, the etiology of the events, and does so in an alliterative complex solidary with
the last phrase of the sentence that precedes (moenia Romae./ Musa, mihi …
memora) and mirroring its climactic toponym.²¹ Actually, a principal “cause”
has already entered in line 4: saeuae memorem Iunonis ob iram, “savage
Juno’s anger” that actively “remembered” Aeneas and her own diverse grievan-
ces against the princes of Troy, even as she looked ahead fearfully to Rome (line
23). “Make me memor of something memor ….” The qualities required of the ktis-
tic poet seem to accrue in dialogue with the manufacturer of morae to Rome.
For the Aeneid’s very idea of Rome and Roman identity, it can be argued,
never coheres except as a negative position against other national entities—a
system of deferrals.²² Compare the poem’s love, on its surface as in its deep po-
etics, for a “sensibility of the near miss,”²³ images of intangibility and incom-
mensurateness, as with Camilla at 7.808 – 11—
illa uel intactae segetis per summa uolaret

gramina nec teneras cursu laesisset aristas,
uel mare per medium fluctu suspensa tumenti
ferret iter celeris nec tingeret aequore plantas.
She could fly over the tops of the highest stalks in a grainfield,
Leaving the tender ears of the crop unharmed by her crossing.
She could pass over the breadth of the sea, over waves, over sea-swell
High up, speeding through air, never touching her feet to the surface—
or like Mercury on his way to Carthage, barely pausing on Mount Atlas before he
perches on the roof of a shed to excoriate Aeneas, never touching the ground be-
fore he “vanishe[s] away in the thinness of air” (4.278 et procul in tenuem ex ocu-
lis euanuit auram).²⁴ These images are signs of poetic polycentrism, of anti-tele-
ology. A similar asymptosis enters the poem’s treatment of finis, “end,” which
presses and explores teleology itself. The odd phrase at 1.223 et iam finis erat (lit-
erally “and by now there was an end”)—most provocative, here at the beginning
of the story—should be read alongside nearby uses of the word. It introduces Ju-
piter’s magisterial view from the heights of heaven after the storm and Neptune’s
clean-up efforts. “Now that the crisis was past …”: so Ahl translates, correctly for
the basic sense; but an excess of meaning still teases. Venus picks up the ques-
tion with her own to Jupiter at 241, quem das finem, rex magne, laborum? (“What
end will you set to their trouble, great ruler?”); Antenor’s Padua, now settled in
placida pace, is her example of the sort of finis she hopes for. Jupiter’s response
 On mora and memorare see Ahl () .

 Reed ().
 Levitan (), speaking of near-complete acrostics in Aratus.
 Cf. Reed () .
98 Jay Reed
deals rather with the “endlessness” of Roman imperium (277– 8): he of course
means that he has given the Romans eternal power, confined by neither spatial
nor temporal boundaries (though his emphatic ego pono suggests the possibility
that limits might come from elsewhere); and yet he has sidestepped the more
basic teleological question, in a deep sense putting the lie to Aeneas’ statement
to his followers at 1.199 dabit deus his quoque finem (“God will grant us an end to
these sufferings also”). Establishing a Roman nation is indeed endless work. It
comes as no surprise that the last instance of the word finis in this poem
comes in Jupiter’s own question to Juno, never conclusively answered,²⁵ at
12.793: quae iam finis erit, coniunx? (“Wife, tell me: how will it come to an end?”).
The immanence of mora in the Aeneid’s reflections on Rome and amor vir-
tually both enacts and names the “potential for words to fall into endless pat-
terns of deferral” that Hinds sees as one interpretive outcome of Roman etymo-
logical wordplay.²⁶ The ambages we have explored are more properly regarded as
a symptom of the open-ended nature of Virgilian epic—perhaps even of poetic
discourse in general—than of the dawdling, backtracking, never-finishing
modus operandi itself of P. Vergilius Maro. In life, indeed, he is said to have com-
pleted parts of the Aeneid at a recitation by telling his freedman Eros to write his
ex tempore supplements down “without delay” (statim): “love” serves only to ex-
pedite, not draw out, the progress of the Roman epic.²⁷ And yet it would not be
excessively biographical on the part of a critic to scrutinize the origins that this
Maro makes his ktistic poem ascribe to his home city of Mantua (10.198 – 203):
ille etiam patriis agmen ciet Ocnus ab oris,

fatidicae Mantus et Tusci filius amnis,
qui muros matrisque dedit tibi, Mantua, nomen
Mantua diues auis, sed non genus omnibus unum:
gens illi triplex, populi sub gente quaterni,
ipsa caput populis, Tusco de sanguine uires.
There you see Ocnus as well, son of Manto, the seer, and of Tuscan
Tiber, the river. He’s levied a force from the banks of his homeland.
Mantua: Ocnus endowed you with walls, named you after his mother,
 Cf. Feeney ().

 Hinds () . Focusing on Varro’s etymologies for “Venus” in de Lingua Latina , he
prefers to read in this tradition a “movement towards plenitude and perfection in meaning”—
one not inevitably inconsistent with the other interpretation nor inapplicable even to Virgil’s
multivocal text, especially in Hinds’ emphasis on Augustan poetry’s use of wordplay as “on
one level a way of explaining or seeking control over the world” (), as long as we allow
for contestation of that explanation and that control.
 Suet. Vita Vergili .
Mantua, heir to an ancestry rich, but not all of one bloodline.

Three distinct peoples are there, each people with four distinct cities.
Mantua heads up their league. Her strength is her blood that’s Etruscan.
Whatever the relationship of this isolated myth to other attested ktiseis of Man-
tua, to the city’s putative ethnic composition, and to the mythological prophetess
Manto,²⁸ Ocnus’ name is a Latinization of Greek ὄκνος, “delay, hesitation,” and
thus the semantic equivalent of an anagram of Virgil’s cognomen, as is noted by
Malamud (who connects the wordplay with that on amor and reads Ocnus as a
symbolic poet-figure parallel to Virgil). Within his own ktistic mythology (and in
dialogue, as usual, with Greek), Virgil himself comes ultimately from Delay, off-
spring of a love affair between the Tiber and Prophetic Poetry.
Longing
In associating these sounds, ideas, and narrative dynamics Virgil may be build-
ing upon precedent. At Ennius, Annales 77 Skutsch, where Romulus and Remus
separately await the foundational omen, the twin brothers certabant urbem
Romam Remoramne vocarent (“were vying to see whether they would call the
city Roma or Remora”). Mora is in a sense rejected from the name along with
Remus’ authentication of the city, lending a sense of immediacy, legitimacy,
and everlasting presence to Romulus’ claim. The name of the potential, ‘lost’
city Remora even more closely recalls the compound verb remorari, ‘wait, linger,
delay.’²⁹ The Aeneid, whose action is set prior to Romulus and Remus, would
seem to leave it to the Annales to resolve this question: despite the change in Ae-
neas’ resolve, the movement to expunge mora from the essence of Rome will not
end until the actual foundation of the city. The defense against a “Remoran”
identity may again arise intertextually in Aeneas’ decisive words to Turnus at
12.948 – 9 te … Pallas / immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit (“yes Pal-
las / Makes you the sacrifice, spills your criminal blood in atonement”), in so far
as the wording suggests the model of Romulus at Ennius, Annales 95 Skutsch mi
calido dabis sanguine poenas (“with hot blood you will give me atonement”—re-
placing “hot” with “criminal” and dropping “me,” because to Aeneas Pallas is
 Servius and Servius Auctus on Aeneid ., G. Garbugino in EV s.v. Ocno, Malamud ()
 – , Vanotti (), Fletcher ()  – .
 With heavy wordplay in this situation on remores aves, said by Festus  Lindsay to man-
date that something ‘be delayed’: Linderski () ; Fisher ()  – , .
100 Jay Reed
paramount).³⁰ The would-be ktisis by Remus is otherwise quite suppressed by

the Aeneid, elided or misrepresented by the speaking characters (Jupiter and An-
chises) who have opportunities to look ahead to the twins’ activities (1.292– 3,
6.777– 80). And yet the Aeneid’s relentless wordplay also retrojects into the An-
nales the suggestion that mora does necessarily persist in Roma, through the
more unstable and malleable significance of anagram. On the Aeneid’s terms,
the victory of Romulus and his name for the city might nevertheless eternally
suspend us—waiting, lingering—in that moment when the nation’s backwards
twin image, its alter ego, might have superseded.
Love has typically been the convertible term in our triad; the various voices
that contest the meaning of history in the Aeneid’s narrative oppose it to either
‘Rome’ or ‘delay.’ Yet at a deeper level than those voices, amor is opposed to nei-
ther, and its involvement in this complex of signification underscores how, in the
service of its national teleology, the narrative employs the signal ruses of desire,
suspense and deferral³¹ (one thinks of the anagram mora-amor-Roma as Pucci
reads it in Propertius’ Monobiblos, finding it expressive of an ineluctable
liminality).³² It is precisely qua object of amor that Rome will never be reached
in Virgil’s poem. But the Aeneid also permits the duality “love-delay” to operate
apart from consideration of Rome. Dido’s love story exemplifies a hidden mora
within amor in an alternative, parallel poetics to Virgilian ktistic narrative. Her
love for Aeneas somehow becomes infused with an artificial, tendentious lon-
gueur that begins soon after Cupid’s contagion during the banquet in 1.748 – 9
nec non et uario noctem sermone trahebat / infelix Dido longumque bibebat amor-
em (“Talking of this and that to extend night’s span ever further / Dido, unfulfil-
led, drank deeply of love’s heady vintage”) and ends with her death at 4.693 – 4
tum Iuno omnipotens longum miserata dolorem / difficilisque obitus … (“Juno Al-
mighty pitied her difficult death with its painful / Anguish long drawn out …)”:
the “long love” and “long anguish” are equivalent, and both together amount to
her story. By the end of Book Four (the shortest, be it noted, in the poem), longus
amor would seem to make at least some literal sense: part of the winter has
elapsed. Yet we cannot fail to remember that her love was somehow always pro-
longed from the outset. We may even realize that we don’t know its precise be-
ginning, in whatever predisposition Venus takes advantage of, either in Dido’s
 See Tarrant () .

 Reed () .
 Prop. .. –  sua quemque moretur / cura, neque assueto mutet amore locum (“let each
lover’s love hold him fast, and not relocate him from a love grown familiar”). Pucci ()
finds the anagram meaningful at Prop. .., .., and elsewhere; he draws Roma into
the complex on p.  and  n. . Cf. also Sissa ()  on amor ~ mora in Ovid’s Amores.
own widowed state or in some effect of the “quiescent and welcoming attitude”
that Jupiter has Mercury instill in her in preparation for her receiving the Trojans
(1.303 – 4 regina quietum / accipit in Teucros animum mentemque benignum).
At the feast where the Trojans and Tyrians, according to Dido, are to cele-
brate their coming together (1.732), the singer Iopas launches into a cosmological
narrative (742– 9):
hic canit errantem lunam solisque labores,

unde hominum genus et pecudes, unde imber et ignes,
Arcturum pluuiasque Hyadas geminosque Triones,
quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soles
hiberni, uel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet;
ingeminant plausu Tyrii, Troesque sequuntur.
nec non et uario noctem sermone trahebat
infelix Dido longumque bibebat amorem ….
[He s]ings of the unpredictable moon, of the sun and its labors,
Origins human and animal, causes of fire and moisture,
Stars (Lesser, Greater Bear, rainy Hyades, also Arcturus).
Why in the winter the sun so hurries to dive in the Ocean,
What slows winter’s lingering nights, what blocks and delays them.
Tyrians encore, applaud. Thus cued, Troy’s men show approval.
Talking of this and that to extend night’s span ever further
Dido, unfulfilled, drank deeply of love’s heady vintage …
In 748 nec non et seems almost to assimilate Dido’s love to Iopas’ song, partic-
ularly the lingering nights of winter, delayed by whatever forces, with which
the song apparently ends. Indeed, thus primed, Dido—who has characteristically
been assimilating his experiences to her own³³—goes on to ask Aeneas about his
own “settings and wanderings,” his casus and errores (754– 5; Virgil, too, asked
about Aeneas’ casus and labores at 1.9 – 10), as well as the story of the fall of Troy
“from its earliest planning” (a prima … origine), and on this winter night she
draws out conversation as her love lengthens. The result of this transferal is
two books of Aeneas’ narrative flashback, which interrupt the immediate
story: his requital, so to speak, of her “long love,” as he himself cannily frames
it after a brief show of reluctance (sed si tantus amor cognoscere nostros …, “Still,
if you’re so much enamored with learning how ruin befell me”).³⁴ The same un-
satisfiable desire will overtake her at 4.77– 9:
 Reed ()  – .

 Cf. Reed ()  – .
102 Jay Reed
nunc eadem labente die conuiuia quaerit,

Iliacosque iterum demens audire labores
exposcit pendetque iterum narrantis ab ore.
Now, day drooping to dusk, she’s the same. She repeats the same banquet:
Crazily pleading to hear once more what the Trojans have suffered,
Once more hanging in awe on his lips as he tells her the story.
Ahl’s translation of her epithet infelix as “unfulfilled” brings out various unmet
desiderations to which she is subject. In this diegetic economy, mora yields more
mora.
When we finally reemerge from Aeneas’ reminiscences into the main narra-
tive, Book Four begins on a peculiar note: 4.1 at regina graui iamdudum saucia
cura (“Now though, the queen, long since pierced through by her terrible an-
guish …”). Does iamdudum have its normal force of “long since, already for a
long time now”? Because it hasn’t really been all that long. We are still at a
point when Dido has known Aeneas for less than twenty-four hours, and been
in love with him for less than that (note especially 6 – 7 postera … Aurora,
“next day’s Dawn”). Servius and the augmented version of his commentary ad
loc. suggest the sense “excessively, vehemently” (“nimium et uehementer”) or, al-
ternatively, void the term of any implication of length of time, and make it stand
in neutrally for “ever since” in reference to some one of the various possible
causes, during the previous day, of Dido’s passion: her sight of Aeneas, his
story-telling, or the initial intervention of Love (“id est a quo tempore uidit Ae-
neam … aut ex quo narrare coepit Aeneas; aut ex quo interuenit Cupido”).³⁵ Nei-
ther explanation satisfies. Yet iamdudum reinforces the equally curious 1.749 lon-
gumque bibebat amorem and 4.693 longum miserata dolorem and the other
devices by which Virgil “figuratively dilates the duration of the queen’s
agony.”³⁶ The anomaly is similar to the prolepsis in 1.12 urbs antiqua, “ancient”
Carthage as seen from Virgil’s time,³⁷ but is more insistent and less reducible to a
standard trope; rather, this treatment of brief time as a long time temporally dis-
locates the reader within the narrative.
One interpretation would see here a narrative viewpoint identifiable with Ju-
piter, Mercury, and “fate,” tendentiously and hyperbolically warning that the
queen’s love is delaying Aeneas’ mission. For some readers, on the other
hand, this prolongation would seem to depend on Dido’s own powerful view-
point (which tends to accompany it) and to be a function of her amor. On 4.1 iam-
 The text found only in Servius Auctus is conventionally italicized.

 Putnam () .
 Reed ()  – .
dudum Pease (1935) comments that “to a lover like Dido the time seems long,
however short it may objectively be, and her infatuation had occupied a relative-
ly large part of the brief period of her acquaintanceship with Aeneas.” At Dido’s
sight of Aeneas’ appurtenances surmounting her pyre, the narrative even threat-
ens, through her viewpoint, to withhold her death on its far horizon: 4.649 – 50
paulum lacrimis et mente morata / incubuitque toro dixitque nouissima uerba
(“She for an instant delayed deadly purpose in tears and reflection, / Fell, ghost-
like, on the bed where she uttered a few final phrases”).³⁸ It then lingers on her
last words, somewhere amid which she stabs herself, so that when we emerge
from them, the focalization has surreptitiously passed to others (her attendants,
her sister Anna) and the queen is dying with the city mourning around her—
though she is granted one last groan and look at the sky (692) before Juno pities
her “long anguish” (693). Putnam (2014: 104) emphasizes the plural difficilis
obitus that registers her demise at 694, as suggesting that its manifold, unfa-
thomable causes since Book One were each a separate death: “if we have
been witnessing her death over the length of four books of an epic, Dido’s actual
moment of dying is itself also powerfully protracted in its exposition…. In the
case of Dido, death is implicit in love and marks its beginning.”
Along with amor Dido has imbibed not only mors but mora. Is this a tempo-
ral viewpoint that (whether for good or ill) resists Roman ktisis as long as pos-
sible—one that (as Anna recommends) “weaves together reasons for delaying”
Aeneas’ divine mission, until the textual basis for that viewpoint unravels? In
certain ways, rather, Dido’s love as we have traced it exceeds that relation; its
mora, as mysterious and remote as that of the winter sun, follows for the dura-
tion of her strong consciousness an autonomous narrative course in which Rome
is irrelevant even as a foil, and which helps give the Aeneid (especially this epi-
sode) its power apart from any national message. Elsewhere the poem seems to
be steadily subsuming amor into Roma and dividing them both from mora, work-
ing inexorably through the stages of Aeneas’ journey to defeat all narrative de-
lays and clear the way for Rome. Like all seemingly inexorable processes in
the Aeneid, this one, too, manifestly depends on the rhetoric of the poem and
its speaking and focalizing personae; the configuration of meaning is potentially
reversible, and hinges on a sublimation, redirection, and fudging of the meaning
of love. It is Ahl’s insight to identify anagrammatic play with semantic pluralism
—“the plural, latent, paradoxical, or contradictory”—against monocentrism,
 Cf. the curious withholding of the death of Silvia’s deer (last heard of at .), whose sur-
vival—against the war begun nominally over its death—is too monstrous a disproportionality to
entertain.
104 Jay Reed
against a need for simplicity and unity in the meaning of a text.³⁹ The Aeneid’s
semantics of the complex mora-amor-Roma cannot be reduced to one message,
to one winner. No doubt it was always true that omnia uincit Roma. But resist-
ance in its various forms can also claim a stealthy victory.
Bibliography
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 Ahl () .

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Emily Gowers
Dido and the Owl
Summary: This paper considers the role of birds in the Aeneid, in relation to po-
etic sounds, flight, and exile. In the first half, connections are noted between the
name of the Carthaginian queen Dido and the owl (bubo) that sings a dirge be-
fore her death in Aeneid 4, and discussed in the context of Virgil’s sensitivity to
sound. Dido’s name, with its dying fall and outlandish ring, is usually placed at
the ends of lines and appears to be used expressively, always in the nominative
case. The second half of the paper argues for traces of a projected bird metamor-
phosis in Dido’s curse (Aeneid 4.383 – 4), picking up hints that she imagines Ae-
neas transformed into a seabird and endlessly calling the name of the woman he
loves. This corresponds to connections in other mythical bird transformations
with unhappy love, restless wandering, or settling in new lands. A coda consid-
ers the role of sound in some reappearances of Dido in 20th century American
literature.
Keywords: Dido; birds; sound; Aeneas; Virgil; wordplay
The Aeneid, we know well, is filled with the rustle of alternative dramas. Its pro-
tagonists travel in their imaginations down roads not taken, and Dido is the ul-
timate wanderer of the poem. In her dreams, she becomes Pentheus and Orestes
– or is it the Furies and Clytemnestra?¹ In the underworld, she and Aeneas act
out Odysseus’ encounter with Ajax – or is it the lock of hair addressing
Berenice?² The curses Dido rains on her parting lover include fantasies about
Medea’s dismemberment of her brother Absyrtus and about Thyestes’ vengeful
cannibalistic feast – or is it Procne’s?³ In this paper, I attempt to uncover a fur-
ther subliminal drama, what might be called a crypto-myth of the Aeneid: anoth-
er imaginary alternative fate for its hero, dreamt up by vengeful Dido. This is a
paper largely about birds, by a non-expert. Flitting from Virgil to Homer, and
Ovid to Apuleius, and touching on birdcalls, poetic sounds, nonsense words, ety-
mologies, aetiologies, and metamorphosis, it asks its readers to put on a stout
pair of wings and suspend themselves at all times over an ocean of disbelief.
 See e. g. Schiesaro ()  –  on the ambiguities here.

 Lyne (), Wills ().
 Schiesaro ()  notes that . abreptum ‘snatched away’ and . absumere ‘take
away’ are “phonic reminders” of Absyrtus’ name.
108 Emily Gowers
It starts with the owl in Aeneid 4. As Dido prepares to die, an owl hoots from
the battlements, letting out a long, plaintive cry conveyed by the sound of the
lines themselves:
solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo

saepe queri et longas in fletum ducere uoces (Aeneid 4.462– 3)
High on a rooftop, a lone screech owl keened death in repeated

Dirges, and wailed shrill cries drawn out into pulses of sobbing.
Not many commentators linger here, except to note that owls were commonly as-
sociated with death in ancient Rome.⁴ The creature here looks like classic back-
ground decoration, part of the gothic scenery of this climactic Liebestod and a
lonely harbinger of Dido’s doomed descent to the Underworld. But Virgil takes
care with the sound effects, making the owl’s cry a token querulous or even el-
egiac voice to match his own mournful song. The ō-sounds at the beginning and
end of the first line suggest a long-drawn-out or echoing shriek; and in the sec-
ond line saepe ‘often’) and longas … ducere uoces (‘draw out long sounds’) draw
attention to the poet’s repetition of lugubrious syllables. So, too, does the sound
of the owl’s name, būbō, with its internal repetition of the consonant and the
long vowels. But it is not only the sound and placing of the word that might
give us pause for thought. This bird has certain other unique properties as well.
For a start, this is the only time Virgil uses the word bubo. It is just one of
many words for ‘owl’ in many languages that are expressive of its cry: the hoot-
ing sound can be heard in Old High German ūwila, Hindi ullū, Hebrew oah,
French hibou (and the verb boubouler) and Greek τυτώ (from which the modern
genus Tyto takes its name).⁵ Virgil need not have used bubo: other owl-names
available and indeed used by him elsewhere include noctua (Georgics 1.403)
and ulula (Eclogues 8.55) – the second of which would have been appropriately
mournful, echoed as it is twice by the feminine wails of ululare in this especially
mournful book (4.168, 609). But Virgil did choose to use bubo here, and I want to
start with the proposition that he had specific reasons, quite possibly subcon-
scious ones, for using it, as well as for placing it at the end of the line.
One scholar who does consider the owl is Alessandro Schiesaro, in his full-
scale exploration of Dido’s metamorphosis into a second Medea.⁶ For him, the
bird is a reincarnation of Dido’s dead husband Sychaeus, who has been calling
his widow from beyond the grave (460 – 1 hinc exaudiri uoces et uerba uocantis |
 Pease () ad loc.

 Cf. Modern Greek κουκουβάγια.
 Schiesaro ().
uisa uiri, “From it, she thought she could hear both the voice and the words of
her husband”),⁷ and he points to the “disturbing contiguity between [Sychaeus’]
uoces and those of the owl.” This is acute, but there is something else unusual to
note about Virgil’s use of the word here. His owl is feminine (this we know from
the adjective sola ‘lonely’ at the start of the line). In fact, according to Robert Re-
nehan, in a remarkable paper on poetic gender-switching, this is the only time
bubo is feminine in the whole of Latin poetry.⁸ Euphony, in his view, is the
usual reason a poet alters a normal gender (here, sola with its open final
vowel is more appropriately expressive than solus). But there may be a further
reason for making this owl female. A line that starts with sola and follows it
with rooftops and a mournful song might lead us to expect another ending:
Dido. She, too, is a singer of magical chants (510 – 11; cf. 487 carminibus),
which bring on her own death; she, too, is lonely (cf. 467 sola);⁹ she, too, appears
high up on the battlements (410 arce e summa), to watch Aeneas’ preparations
for departure.¹⁰ The owl may be feminine, then, not because she is Sychaeus but
because she is some kind of mystic familiar of the queen herself.
As Schiesaro notes, Ovid draws on his memory of this uniquely feminine Vir-
gilian bubo when he describes the doleful wedding of Tereus and Procne in Met-
amorphoses 6 (431– 2 tectoque profanus | incubuit bubo thalamique in culmine
sedit, “an ill-omened owl perched on the roof and settled on the rafters of the
wedding-chamber”).¹¹ Humans transformed into owls in Greek mythology are
often associated with family dysfunction – incest, bestiality or cannibalism –
which makes them need to escape the light of day: Nyctimene, who slept with
her own father; Polyphonte, who fell for a bear; Harpalyke, who served her
son up to the father who had raped her.¹² But although this wedding takes
 Schiesaro () .

 Renehan () . Serv. ad loc.: ‘sola’ contra genus posuit, “He uses ‘sola’ contrary to gen-
der.” See also Corbeill (), esp.  – .
 Cf. . sola fuga nautas comitabor ouantis?, “What? Be a runaway woman among jubilant
sailors?”; . (Aeneas) o sola infandos Troiae miserata labores, “You, you alone, have shown
pity for Troy’s inexpressible anguish”; Dido calls Anna sola at . See Bolton ()  –  on
Dido’s implied loneliness in Heroides .
 See Schroeder ()  on the detached, Epicurean quality of Dido’s bird’s-eye view.
 Other bubones of ill omen in Ovid include: Amores .. – , Metamorphoses . (As-
calaphus transformed by Proserpina), Metamorphoses . –  (Myrrha’s incest), Metamor-
phoses . (Julius Caesar’s murder), Ibis .
 Forbes Irving ()  – . Ioannis Ziogas reminds me that Myrrha uses the example of
birds to justify human incest (Ov. Metamorphoses . – ). Might there even be a story of fra-
ternal incest lurking behind Venus’ abbreviated Tyrian tale (. – ), which tells of the rup-
ture between Dido’s husband Sychaeus and her brother Pygmalion, who remained securus amo-
110 Emily Gowers
place under the auspices of another malign owl, cousin to the Furies, this time it
sits mid-line and is normalized as masculine.
Dido on her lilo

Dido and the owl are familiars in another way, too. Būbō turns out to be one of
only two nouns in Latin with the nominative sequence consonant-vowel-same
consonantō. The other noun is Dīdō. Could it be, then, that bubo is there in
the first instance because Virgil is attuned to using the exotic-sounding name
of the Carthaginian queen? Might the name Dido have a particular expressive
quality, in a poem that gets much of its archaic character from the unusual
sounds of names, from Arruns to Ufens? ¹³ Did Virgil perhaps find Dido especial-
ly eccentric, even a bit nonsensical, as a heroine’s name – as the words ‘dodo’
and ‘dado,’ say, are for us, or names like ‘Dada’ and ‘Ubu’? The name has con-
tinued to be played on throughout literary history, from Shakespeare, who gives
us “Widow Dido” and “Dido a dowdy,”¹⁴ to cartoonist and parodist Osbert Lan-
caster, who in his modernist pastiche “Aeneas on the Saxophone” (Drayneflete
Revealed, 1949) indulges in some very Sitwellian silliness:
…Delenda est Carthago!

(ses bains de mer, ses plages fleuries,
And Dido on her lilo à sa proie attachée)
And shall we stroll along the front

Chatting of this and that and listening to the band?
The plumed and tufted sea responds

Obliquely to the trombone’s call
rum | germanae, “secure in his sister’s / Love for them both” ( – )? Shades of Medea’s killing
of Absyrtus at . –  and the dangling half-line . germani minas, “Threats from your
brother” open up unspoken possibilities. See Hardie () on Virgil’s suggestions of an inces-
tuous relationship between Dido and Aeneas.
 Cf. Tsur () on “light and dark” sounds that combine two shades: e. g. English miaow,
heehaw, ding dong.
 The Tempest, Act II, Scene : Adrian. Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon to
their queen. Gonzalo. Not since widow Dido’s time. Antonio. Widow! A pox o’ that! How came
that widow in? widow Dido!; Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene : Mercutio. Now is he [Romeo]
for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura to his lady was but a kitchen wench; marry,
she had a better love to be-rhyme her; Dido a dowdy; Cleopatra a gipsy; Helen and Hero hildings
and harlots …
The lecherous seaweed’s phallic fronds

Gently postulate the Fall.
But between the pebble and the beach rises the doubt,
… Delenda
Between the seaside and the sea the summons,
… est
Between the wagon and the lit the implication,
… Carthago.
Less high-flown, folksier tongue-twisters include French “Didon dîna, dit-on,

d’un os du dos dodu d’un dodu dindon”, “They say that Dido dined off the
fat back of a fat turkey”) and English “Diddle diddle Dido, the cat’s swallowed
Fido.”
Once again, Virgil was perfectly free to avoid using the name. Phoenician in
origin and usually thought to signify ‘wanderer, hobo,’ Dido could be replaced
by the queen’s other name, Greek Elissa.¹⁵ Virgil has rules about when he uses
either form. Unlike Ovid, for example, he never uses inflected forms of Dido,
only the nominative; for other cases, he prefers Elissa.¹⁶ Nine out of ten occur-
rences of Dido in Book 4 come at the end of a line (as with bubo); so does the
first mention of Dido in Book 1 (1.299), her first actual entry (1.496), and her
two last appearances – when she looms through the Underworld mist (6.450)
and when she is remembered at the moment of Pallas’ burial in (11.74). My
sense is that the word is being used as some kind of mournful entity with its
own self-contained existence and its own dying fall.
Some further generalizations can be made about internally repetitive words.
Bubo and Dido may be the only nouns, but they are not the only words in Latin to
follow the sequence just described. Apart from the adverbs tuto ‘safely’ and toto
‘completely,’ one miscellaneous category is simply, of course, first-person verb-
forms: bibo, dedo, dido, coco (coquo), olo (oleo), oro, ouo, roro, ruro, uiuo. Of
these there is a subsection of what we might call “childish” verbs, the group
of reduplicated pairs involving basic consonants invented cross-culturally by pa-
rents to facilitate a child’s first responses to the people around it.¹⁷ In Latin these
include caco ‘poop’ and lallo ‘sing a lullaby,’ which belong with other reduplicat-
ed words like mamma ‘breast, mommy,’ pappa ‘mush,’ and tata ‘daddy, grand-
father,’ chosen to simulate the kind of uncontrolled effusion an infant is capable
 Hexter (). For Dido = ‘wanderer,’ see Pease () ad Aeneid ., O’Hara ()
 – .
 Mackail () ad ..
 Jakobson ().
112 Emily Gowers
of in its early attempts at speech (cf. in English mama, papa, gaga, nanny, baby,
bubba, booboo, poopoo, doodoo).¹⁸ Expressions of glee, horror, surprise, and so
on, in Latin are another category: oho and hahae, hahahae and the Plautine pat-
ter of babae tatae papae (Stichus 771); another such word, this time from the an-
imal sphere, is coco or cucurru (‘cockadoodledoo’). There is a further category of
insult words, like gugga (Plautus) or baba (Seneca). There are also borrowed for-
eign words like cici ‘castor-oil tree’ or cuci ‘doum-palm tree’; cf. English ‘native-
speak’ – ‘dodo,’ ‘voodoo,’ ‘mumbo jumbo’. Another subsection of verbs particu-
larly relevant to this paper consists of onomatopoeic animal- or bird-sounds:
bebo ‘bleat,’ pipo or pipio ‘chirp,’ titio ‘cheep (of a sparrow),’ zinzio, ‘twitter (spe-
cifically of a blackbird).’
Cuckoos, babies, ninnies, barbarians: there seems to be a consistent connec-
tion between reduplicating words and the languages and worlds of “Other Peo-
ple” – or other animals – those incapable of restrained speech or behavior.¹⁹
Dido is of course the most effusive speaker in the Aeneid. It has always been
tempting to detect a Phoenician or Punic flavour to her speech. Many other
Punic names end in -ō, from Matho, Mago, Mutgo (an alternative father to
Belus for Dido), Hanno (both Livy’s and Plautus’), and Flaubert’s Salammbô.
True, Dido’s speeches contain some reduplicated syllables, but no more than
normal: iam iam (‘now, now,’ 371), te teneo (‘I hold you,’ 380).²⁰ The notoriously
ambivalent Tyrios bilinguis, ‘two-tongued/double-talking Tyrians’ (1.661) may
signal an interest in bilingualism on Virgil’s part. Beyond this, it is hard to
tell. But no less an authority than J. N. Adams has confirmed some of these sus-
picions about the sound of Dido’s name in a paper on feminine forms of speech,
where he singles out the word dĭda, a nurse’s word for ‘breast,’ as typical
woman-to-woman-specific speech (like English ‘boob,’ perhaps); the word hap-
pens to be found first in Roman Africa.²¹
 Heraeus ().
 An interesting forerunner of Dido as migrant barbarian princess is Aeschylus’ Cassandra,
who “like a swallow speaks a barbarian tongue” (Agamemnon  – ) and sings her final
prophecy “like a dying swan” (Agamemnon  – ). See Ahl ()  – .
 For Herescu () , consecutive repeated syllables are “a peculiarly Latin vice.”
 Adams (). NB Dido has no surviving nurse. Virgil bothers to tell us at . –  that she
buried hers in Tyre but then adopted her dead husband Sychaeus’, proleptically named Barce
after – or before – Hannibal’s dynasty (the Barcaei, an African tribe, are mentioned as a
local threat to Carthage at .). Adams ()  finds three more local Punic or African
terms (also with repeated consonants) in the two probably African medical translations in
which is found: ginga ‘henbane,’ bob(b)a ‘mallow,’ and zenzur ‘knot-grass.’ He also cites an in-
scription that names an African fort called Tububuci.
Back to the owl. What do we know about the sounds this or any other an-
cient bird made? As noted above, Latin is full of onomatopoeic verbs for pipping
and squeaking, and plenty of Latin birds get their names from their sound. Varro
at de Lingua Latina 5.28 lists a few: upupa, cuculus, coruus, hirundo, ulula, bubo;
item haec: pauo, anser, gallina, columba. Here, ulula, bubo makes a fine hexam-
eter ending to round off one section of the list, with -ina columba doing the same
in the second section. Our bubo comes last, just as it comes last in the line in
Aeneid 4. Repeated syllables abound – upupa ‘hoopoe,’ ulula ‘owl,’ cuculus
‘cuckoo’ – and words ending in final –o (hirundo ‘swallow’ and pauo ‘peacock’);
bubo uniquely combines both effects. The list makes a good starting-point for no-
ticing patterns of reduplication in bird-names and –sounds. Aficionados may be
referred to the most fabulous catalogue of onomatopoeic animal- and bird-
sounds: a fragment preserved from Suetonius’ De Naturis Animantium. ²²
Unsurprisingly, another good source for ancient bird names and sounds is
Aristophanes’ Birds. Often, the sound here is just a simple τι or τυ or τιο, re-
solved into an intelligible human phrase: at Ar. Aves 314, τι x 8 turns into τίνα
λόγον ‘what word?,’ while the call of the hoopoe, ἐποποποι, ποποποποῖ ποποῖ,
resolves itself into ποῖ ‘whither?’ (227), followed by ἰτὼ x 4, which becomes
ἴτω τις ὧδε ‘come here, someone’ (228 – 9). Behind these patterned squawks,
we recognize a familiar tale: the tyrant Tereus and his wife Procne, transformed
into a hoopoe and a nightingale respectively, call for their son, Itys, whom she
has murdered and he has eaten.²³ Such resolutions of birdsong into known
human words operate, indeed, in a similar way to a standard metamorphosis eti-
ology, which ‘translates’ a bird’s unintelligible sound into the intelligible words
of the human trapped inside it. Greek verbs for birdcalls include τιτίζω, πιππίζω,
and τιττυβίζω, along with the onomatopoeic owl-name τυτώ.²⁴ In the Birds, an
owl makes the rather different sound, κικκαβαῦ (261). But there is a parallel in
Plautus’ Menaechmi (653 – 4) where one character, tired of being accused tu tu
“You [did it],” asks sarcastically, uin adferri noctuam,/quae ‘tu tu’ usque dicat
tibi?, “Do you want me to bring an owl in, to keep saying tutu to you?”.
Another classic source for bird sounds is Virgil’s passage on weather signs in
Georgics 1 (351– 423). As one might expect, Virgil is usually sensitive to the mu-
sicality of birdsong and how to convert it into poetry (just as the celebrated coo-
ing sound of the elm-dwelling turtle-dove, turtur ab ulmo, adds to the soporific
 Reifferscheid ()  – .

 The nightingale is usually said to be Philomela, Procne’s sister and accomplice; see Thomas
() ad Hor. Carmina .. for a similar confusion.
 Tichy (), esp.  – , discusses reduplicated onomatopoeic words in Greek and
Latin.
114 Emily Gowers
hum of the pastoral world created in Eclogue 1).²⁵ He will often give a bird a de-
liberate place in the line, with directions to notice the sound when it comes. In
the felicitous line he lifted wholesale from Varro of Atax (Georgics 1.377 = fr. 14
Courtney), aut arguta lacus circumuolitauit hirundo, “or shrilly the swallow
wheels around the lakes,” hirundo ‘swallow’ is placed at the line-end to exploit
the expressive potential of the final ōsound, while arguta ‘shrill’ at the beginning
of the line cues us to look at the sound the swallow’s name makes when it finally
appears; so at Georgics 4.307, garrula quam tignis nidum suspendit hirundo,
“when, chattering, the swallow hangs its nest from beams,” garrula ‘chattering’
determines the sound while suspendit ‘hangs’ holds the bird precariously until it
drops.²⁶ As for the owl here (noctua), the puzzling and slightly redundant adverb
nequiquam ‘in vain’ (403) may incidentally suggest the bird’s screech. Likewise,
the description of ravens – Georgics 1.410 – 11 tum liquidas corui presso ter gutture
uoces | aut quater ingeminant, “then ravens repeat their shrill caw three or four
times from their tight throats” – both defines the birds’ sound as throaty and re-
duplicated and voices it in the repetition of ter, the croaky, redoubled quater, and
the final echo of reuisere nidos, “revisit their nests.”²⁷ Similarly, ouantes gutture
corui, “ravens cheering from their throats” (423), may, besides conjuring up an
exultant crowd, indicate a guttural “o-uo” sound in the birds’ caw. Virgil famous-
ly includes a metamorphic back-story in his brief allusion to Nisus and Scylla
(404– 9). Meanwhile, his stately shore-pacing crow – Georgics 1.388 – 9 tum cor-
nix plena pluuiam uocat improba uoce | et sola in sicca secum spatiatur harena,
“Then the immoderate crow rails at the rain with croaking voice, and alone by
herself paces the parched sand” – must wait for Ovid to provide her with an etio-
logical precursor, a princess who survives a maritime rape-attempt (Metamor-
phoses 2.572– 3) to be transformed into a haughty bird.²⁸
 See Lutwack ()  –  on poets’ attempts to reproduce birdsong, especially the nightin-
gale’s, from Aristophanes to D. H. Lawrence.
 A similar line-end occurs in the simile comparing Juturna to a swallow at Aeneid .:
peruolat et pennis alta atria lustrat hirundo, “a swallow, who sweeps through his towering
halls on her feathers.”
 Cf. Stat. Silvae .. on repeated syllables (iterata uocabula) in the song of the partridge.
 Barchiesi () ad loc. corrects Keith ()  in the matter of the tense of soleo at Meta-
morphoses . –  nam cum per litora lentis | passibus, ut soleo, summa spatiarer harena, “for I
paced at the edge of the sand with slow steps, as I am [now] accustomed”: the allusion must
refer specifically to the present gait of the (Virgilian) crow, not the past gait of the (Ovidian) prin-
cess – “as I am accustomed,” not “as I was accustomed.”
Aeneas on the rocks

Leaving the owl behind, I turn now to a different bird in Aeneid 4, an unknown
bird – invisible, but not, I think, any less audible. It makes its voice heard half-
way through Dido’s vehement speech to the departing Aeneas at 365 – 87, where
in her wildest frenzy she conjures up hopes for a deadly storm and curses him
with shipwreck.²⁹ In her fantasy, Aeneas will be dashed against the rocks and
at the moment of death he will repeatedly call her name:
i, sequere Italiam uentis, pete regna per undas.

spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt,
supplicia hausurum scopulis et nomine Dido
saepe uocaturum. (Aeneid 4.381– 4)
Go with the winds! Pursue Italy! Chase across seas for your kingdoms!
My hope, if righteous forces prevail, is that, out on some mid-sea
Reefs, you’ll drink retribution in deep draughts, often invoking
Dido’s name.
What is the case of Dido here? Not nominative, though the form is identical to
those other final Didos. Possibly an accusative, Greek-style (Austin (1955) ad
loc.), but more likely a vocative.³⁰ As it happens, these lines and the ones
about the owl have much in common. In both cases a line starts with saepe
‘often’ – saepe uocaturum; saepe queri – indicating that both Aeneas’ wail and
the owl’s hoot are repeated sounds; Aeneas is imagined as calling not Dido,
but Dido Dido. And in both cases saepe is preceded by our two favourite
words with their own internal sound-repetition: Dido and bubo (nomine Dido her-
alds carmine bubo – while nomine adjusts the pitch of penultimate numina a line
earlier). According to O’Hara (1996: 75 – 9), (cog)nomine ‘by name’ often acts as
an etymological signpost in Latin poetry, alerting a reader to a significant
name. As it happens, this line is not on his list of examples, but it looks strongly
as though Dido is saying: listen to the sound of my name, repeated over and over
as it is in this book. Small wonder that the Pléiade poet Étienne Jodelle, in his
play Didon se sacrifiant, The Sacrifice of Dido, turns Virgil’s nomine Dido |
saepe uocaturum into a glorious tongue-twister of repetitions:
 See Schiesaro ()  –  on storm/sea metaphors for Dido’s mental frenzy.

 Cf. Virg. Eclogues . ut litus ‘Hyla Hyla’ omne sonaret, “so every shore will echo ‘Hylas,
Hylas’,” and Prop. .. resonent mihi ‘Cynthia’ siluae,’ “the woods may echo ‘Cynthia’
back to me.”
116 Emily Gowers
… et mesmes en mourant,
Mon nom entre tes dents on t’orra murmurant,
Nommant Didon, Didon … (935 – 7)
And dying, you will be heard murmuring my name between your teeth, calling Dido, Dido …
One very plausible suggestion is that Dido, in Virgil’s Dido’s mouth, is a bilingual
pun on the Greek verb δείδω ‘I am afraid.’ This was first proposed by Kowalski
(1927), without further justification; it goes unmentioned by O’Hara. It happens,
however, to fit well with a classic example of etymological play in Homer that
O’Hara does discuss in his introduction to True Names: the lines from the
Iliad where Idomeneus declares δείδια δ᾽ αἰνῶς | Αἰνείαν “I terribly fear Aeneas”
(13.481– 2). There, it is Aeneas’ name that is etymologized from ‘fear,’ in the
shape of αἰνῶς ‘terribly.’³¹ We might read these words from Dido as a response:
by staking her own claim to fearsomeness and linking her own name with the
other ‘fearing’ word in the Homeric line, δείδια/δείδω, she is retaliating in
kind and alluding to the Iliadic past at the same time.
This would all be perfectly sufficient as an explanation of the pointer in no-
mine. Why continue, then, to suggest that the name Dido has something to do
with birds? If bubo is an onomatopoeic owl-name, could it be that Dido is
used here as an expressive bird-sound, too? Remembering that τυτώ, ἰτώ, and
τυτυ are all bird-sounds in Greek, might we here have the putative outline of an-
other imagined fate for Aeneas? What if he had not left safely for Italy? What if
he had instead been shipwrecked, dashed against the rocks – not drowned, ac-
cording to the usual assumption, but transformed into a seabird with a haunting
cry? Behind Aeneid 4 lies a web of Hellenistic love stories: Ariadne on the rocks,
Medea brewing up her potions. In her later curse-speech, Dido draws on the
myths of other destructive mythological women: scattering Aeneas’ limbs on
the waves as Medea scattered Absyrtus’, serving up Ascanius to his father as
Atreus served up his nephews to their father Thyestes, or as Procne (in league
with her sister, just as Dido is) served up her son Itys to his father Tereus – a
tale with bird metamorphoses aplenty?³² Can we see in Dido’s speech the out-
lines of another story of desertion, revenge, cruel rocks, and a bird that flies
free from the wreckage, granted a respite from its fate but destined always to
sing the name of the beloved it cruelly betrayed?³³
 O’Hara () .
 Aeneid . – .
 There is no real inconsistency between this scenario and Dido’s elaboration of Aeneas’ fate
that he remain ‘unburied on the sand’ after shipwreck: cadat ante diem mediaque inhumatus
harena, “Let him lie dead, / Well before his due day, halfway up a beach and unburied”
Many metamorphosis myths of humans transformed into birds – pre‐ and

post-Virgilian – share elements of this scenario. Forbes Irving notes a persistent
theme: a human polluted, then saved by divine mercy from death, but fated in-
stead to wing his or her way through wild places as punishment for savage
behavior.³⁴ The hideous narrative of rape, incest, tyranny, and cannibalism fo-
cused on Procne, Philomela, and Tereus, for example, combines pollution
with an opposition between family order and wildness, though the bird-transfor-
mations – Procne to a swallow, Philomela to a nightingale, Tereus to a hoopoe –
offer a relatively gentle and remote alternative to violence on the human level.³⁵
Seabirds, Forbes Irving notes, more commonly have the destiny of permanent
grief because they are such “uncanny mysterious creatures.”³⁶
One story that fits this type well is that of Scylla, who, after betraying her
father by cutting off his talismanic purple lock to help her enemy-beloved
Minos, was condemned to lead a savage life as a sea-hawk, pursued by a sea-
eagle, haliaetos/haliaietos, her father Nisus. The post-Virgilian Ciris, longest ex-
tant version of the story, describes the bird haunting a coastal wilderness:
517– 19 infelix uirgo nequiquam a morte recepta | incultum solis in rupibus exigit
aeuum, | rupibus et scopulis et litoribus desertis, “The unhappy maid, rescued
in vain from death, lives out her wild life among the lonely rocks – rocks, cliffs,
and deserted shores.”³⁷ Traces of the Scylla story can been seen in Dido’s subse-
quent curse on Aeneas, that she will pursue him with atris ignibus, ‘dark fire’
(384).³⁸ From being a love-struck pursuer like Scylla, she turns into the vengeful
pursuer of a polluter, like Nisus chasing his unruly daughter in circles of repet-
itive language at Georgics 1.406 – 9: ³⁹
(). Forbes Irving ()  –  gives many examples of the ancient belief that the drowned
and unburied continued to wander over the sea and were linked with gulls: e. g. AP .,
., Ach. Tat. Astronomus . (“They say that the spirits of the drowned do not descend
to Hades but remain here wandering over the sea”). Dionys. De Avibus . (gulls were once fish-
ermen). See Pollard ()  on Homeric gods who dive into the sea “like” or “as” birds: cf.
Hom. Iliad . –  (Thetis), Iliad . –  (Iris).
 Forbes Irving ()  – ; see especially , noting that transformation into a bird often
“follows a crime of pollution and family murder”; , on the “opposition between the family
order of the house and the wilds”; , for connections between eating one’s own family and
incest.
 Forbes Irving () .
 Forbes Irving () .
 With litoribus desertis, ‘deserted shores,’ Lyne ()  compares Aeneid . culmini-
bus desertis (‘deserted heights’), describing the Dira’s haunts.
 Similar is Canidia’s threat to the boy at Hor. Epodes . –  that she will pursue him like a
nocturnal Fury with curved talons.
 Cf. Dido’s nightmares about chasing and being chased by Aeneas (Aeneid . – ).
118 Emily Gowers
quacumque illa leuem fugiens secat aethera pennis,

ecce inimicus atrox magno stridore per auras
insequitur Nisus; qua se fert Nisus ad auras,
illa leuem fugiens raptim secat aethera pennis.
Wherever she flees, clipping the insubstantial air with her wings, lo, her fierce enemy Nisus
pursues her, screeching, through the breezes; where Nisus moves through the breezes, she
flees, clipping the insubstantial air with her wings.
Other seabird stories include that of Sciron (Ciris 467), who throws his promiscu-
ous daughter Alcyone into the sea, where she becomes a halcyon, Ovid’s lovers
Ceyx and Alcyone (Metamorphoses 11), the Alkyoneides, and the daughters of Ci-
nyras (from Greek κινυρός ‘mournful’; halcyons are known for their plaintive
song). In an alternative version, Daedalus threw himself in remorse off a cliff
and became a bird – an outcome bypassed by Ovid in his telling in Metamorpho-
ses 8 but realized in the apprentice Perdix’s transformation into a partridge and
hinted at twice in the Daedalus and Icarus story proper, in the simile of a fledg-
ling wobbling on the edge of its parent’s nest (Metamorphoses 8.213 – 16) and in
the father’s suggestive cry Icare … Icare … Icare (which I was told at school was a
seagull’s squawk, though I cannot find it suggested in any commentary). Daeda-
lus’ namesake in Metamorphoses 11, Daedalion, goes mad out of grief before
jumping off a cliff and turning into a hawk, a bird-man whose transformation,
in Forbes Irving’s words (1990: 110), is “already anticipated in the description
of his inhuman emotional state” (Metamorphoses 11.330: “he heard these
[words of comfort] no more than cliffs hear the murmuring of the sea”). Dido’s
curse on Aeneas similarly stresses his savage origins from Caucasian rocks
and Hyrcanian tigers (4.366 – 7) and his uncivilized infringement of the laws of
hospitality. Yet another story from Metamorphoses 11 (751– 95) has Aesacus fling-
ing himself off a rock to punish himself for causing a nymph’s death by chasing
her until she steps on a snake and dies; then he turns into a gull.
Often in these stories, a bird’s cry plays a central part, the point being to
graft human myths or aetiologies onto natural sounds. Thus, as we have seen,
the nightingale calls ἰτώ ‘come here’ because a trapped Philomela is calling to
her nephew Itys; her brother-in-law the hoopoe Tereus, seeking his family,
calls ποῦ ποῦ (“where are you?”).⁴⁰ Ceyx in Ovid’s account names his wife Al-
cyone in death (Metamorphoses 11.567 nominat Alcyonen), though rather surpris-
 Cf. Hor. Carmina .. Ityn flebiliter gemens, “tearfully moaning ‘Itys’”; Pound () 
(Canto IV, ): “Ityn! / Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn!”. See also Lutwack ()  – .
Paus. .. attributes the tale to the mournful sound of nightingales and swallows.
ingly we have no answering cry of Ceyx spelled out (only 707 at nomen nomine
tangam, “but I shall join name with name”) to pin the husband’s name specifi-
cally to the cry of the diver-bird (Greek kayax, kauax, or kēx).⁴¹ The bird’s sound
is not mentioned in the story of Aesacus either, but there are moments of fore-
shadowing: e. g. Metamorphoses 11.783 – 4 dixit et e scopulo, quem rauca subeder-
at unda | decidit in pontum, “He spoke and jumped from the rock, which the roar-
ing waves had eroded, into the sea,” where rauca … unda, “roaring waves,”
anticipates the future seagull’s squawk. Aesacus’ story ends up instead with
an etymology of the name mergus ‘gull’ from the fact that the bird loves diving
(mergere) into the sea: 795 aequora amat, nomenque tenet, quia mergitur, illo, “it
loves the sea and has the name [diver] because it dives therein.”⁴²
We have drifted a long way from Aeneas, but not as far as it might seem. Ae-
sacus, hero of the last bird transformation in Metamorphoses 11, is a Trojan seer,
brother of Hector. Ovid’s story of Aeneas’ lovesick kinsman is doing something
very typical of the Metamorphoses – prioritizing an obscure “elegiac” episode
in the post-Iliadic story and sending a relative down one of the paths Aeneas
himself did not take. Is it an accident that the name of the nymph over whom
Aesacus is so distraught is Hesperie – Ovid’s exclusive invention, it seems?⁴³ Ae-
neas’ heroic mission is rewritten in subversive elegiacs in Heroides 7, where Dido
fixates on Aeneas’ motive for leaving: not to found a city but to pursue an alter
amor, ‘another love.’ Can we look back at the Aeneid and see in Dido’s words a
vision of Italia/Hesperia (Aeneid 4.381 i, sequere Italiam, “Go … pursue Italy!”;
Aeneid 1.569 – 70 seu uos Hesperiam magnam … | … optatis, “or whether you
choose great Hesperia”) as the ‘other woman’ for whom she was betrayed, the
mirage who will cause her lover to founder on the rocks? There is no name-call-
ing in Heroides 7 (Ovid only emphasizes the shipwreck element), but his Dido is
introduced as singing her lament “just as the white swan (olor) sings its song”
(Epistulae (Heroides) 1.7.4) – a more plaintive, elegiac substitute for the malign
bubo or avenging sea-hawk.
In any case, there is already a seabird in Aeneid 4 that paves the way for
Dido’s crypto-metamorphic curse. Another source for the Aesacus myth is Ser-
vius, who tells it in some detail, confirming the Ovidian etymology of mergus
 Cf. Dion. De avibus .: “After their mates’ death, they grieve at length and waste away, ab-
staining from all food and drink; on the point of death, they more frequently repeat ceyx ceyx
[ceyx ceyx saepius repetunt] and so they die.”
 Cf. Var. de Lingua Latina ..
 Bömer () vol. , : “anderweitig nicht bekannt” (“otherwise unknown”); see now
Reed ()  – .
120 Emily Gowers
from mergere in the process.⁴⁴ His narrative is part of a footnote to the simile at
Aeneid 4.253 – 5 where Virgil compares winged Mercury to a seabird as he plum-
mets down to the shores of Africa as Jupiter’s messenger, to tell Aeneas to leave
for Italy:
hinc toto praeceps se corpore ad undas

misit aui similis, quae circum litora, circum
piscosos scopulos humilis uolat aequora iuxta.
From there, powered out by the weight of his body,

Seaward he dived like a tern, who’s been circling shorelines and cliff pools
Teeming with fish, skimming wave-tops.
Mercury is ‘like a bird’; or is Virgil speaking of a specific bird? Servius, like many
modern editors, has the urge to identify it: “Some say the fulica” (ut quidam uo-
lunt, fulicam), a type of coot. He himself favours the mergus ‘gull’ and sees Virgil
as having deliberately suppressed this undignified word. To justify this, he com-
pares a well-known passage in Georgics 2 (320), where Virgil prefers to leave out
the word ciconia ‘stork’ and identify it only by its snake-eating habit – an evasion
that Thomas (1988) has plausibly explained as a typically Alexandrian riddle.
There seems in general to have been a long tradition of these unanswered
bird riddles and deliberate confusions among bird types, a kind of running ‘a lit-
tle bird told me’ joke: the bird is often just called an auis with certain qualities.
At Aeneid 12.862 – 4, the Dira sent to flit around the faces of Turnus and Juturna is
compared to a night bird that haunts tombs or deserted rooftops:
alitis in paruae subitam collecta figuram,

quae quondam in bustis aut culminibus desertis
nocte sedens serum canit importuna per umbras
she compresses
Her full self, in a flash, to the size and the shape of a smallish
Bird such as settles at night on a funeral site or abandoned
Rooftop to sing a foreboding, late-watch dirge through the ghostly
Shadows.
 Arnott () . Serv. ad Aen. .: “This is the story about the gull: a boy Aesacus, son
of the nymph Alexirhoe, loved another nymph from the same spring … After the love-struck
youth saw her, he threw himself into the sea; when his limbs were borne up on the waves,
the gods took pity and changed him into a gull, because gulls love the waves” [in auem mergum
mutatus est, quia semper mergi fluctibus gaudent].
Here, the bird is some kind of owl – perhaps a noctua, hinted at in the words
nocte, ‘at night,’ and serum, ‘late,’ or even a bubo, echoed or etymologized in
the sound of bustis and umbras? ⁴⁵ In Mercury’s case, perhaps we are being
given a puzzle whose solution is an etymology of Mercury from mergus (or
vice versa) – just as Mercury’s descent over Mount Atlas, who happens to be
his grandfather, gives him an understated family pedigree (cf. the pun at 254
on aui similis, ‘like a bird’/ ‘like his grandfather’).⁴⁶ This bogus bird-etymology
is absent from Maltby (1991) but would make a good example of a phenomenon
noted by O’Hara, where Virgil binds together one or two Homeric elements (here,
Hermes and a seabird) with an etymological link that works only in Latin.⁴⁷ Once
again, the harsh sound of the bird’s cry is suggested in the repeated croaking
sounds of circum … circum … aequora.
Hot on the heels of another pseudo-bird, winged Fama, Mercury provides an
acrobatic display that contrasts with the nose-dives of human bird-men like Ica-
rus: a teasing plunge (almost suicidally headlong), followed by a last-minute
skid onto the surface by this boundary-skimming god.⁴⁸ The simile derives
from the Odyssey, where Mercury’s Greek counterpart Hermes is similarly com-
pared to a seagull when he flies down to Calypso’s island to extract Odysseus
and send him off on his nostos (Odyssey 5.51). The intertext with the (comic)
Odyssey encourages us to cast Aeneas as a brutal Odysseus and Dido as a tragic
Calypso. It also reminds us that Odyssey 5 has something of an obsession with
seabirds. It is not just Hermes who is compared to one: so, too, is Ino,⁴⁹ who
swoops down ‘like an αἴθυια’ (the Greek word for ciris) to lend Odysseus a
cloak for his voyage (Odyssey 5.337); on the two occasions her name – another
falling disyllabic sound – appears in the Odyssey (5.333 and 5.461), it is placed
at the line-end. Even the description of Calypso’s magical hut includes nooks
for owls (σκῶπες) and other birds, including sea-loving shearwaters (66 – 7).
 Virgil most famously glosses an absent bird-name, ciris, in his sketch of Scylla and Nisus at
Georgics . – , where secat … secat, ‘cuts … cuts,’ translates the Greek etymologizing word,
κείρω ‘cut.’
 Dyson (). Cf. Aeneid ., where Mantua is called diues auis, ‘rich in ancestors,’ but,
assuming a Greek-style accusative of respect instead of the usual genitive or ablative (OLD s.v. ),
one could also read: ‘rich in birds’; Ahl ()  n. , O’Hara () , Dyson ().
 O’Hara ()  –  on dictamnum (Greek dicte + Latin amnis);  –  on hippomanes
(Greek hippos + Latin manare). My thanks to Jim O’Hara for discussion of this point.
 See Hardie ()  –  for competition between winged Fama and winged Mercury, and
 –  for connections between Fama, who loves heights, screeches, and flies by night (Aeneid
. – ), the screeching, nocturnal Dira at Aeneid . – , and birds, especially owls.
 See Pollard ()  on Homeric gods who dive into the sea “like” or “as” birds: cf. Hom.
Iliad . –  (Thetis), Iliad . –  (Iris).
122 Emily Gowers
Homer pictures Odysseus twice as standing forlornly on the shore weeping and
looking out to sea, as if he were the bird-to-be Alcyone – or the bird Cicero plays
in his letter to Atticus about his longing for Pompey: nunc emergit amor, nunc
desiderium ferre non possum, nunc mihi nihil libri, nihil litterae, nihil doctrina
prodest. ita dies et noctes tamquam auis illa mare prospecto, euolare cupio,
“Now my love comes to the surface, now I cannot bear my longing, now
books, literature, learning all do me no good. Thus, day and night, like that
well-known bird, I look out to sea and long to fly away” (Epistulae ad Atticum
9.10.2 = 177.2 Shackleton Bailey). It is generally accepted that Cicero alludes to
the caged bird with which Plato identifies himself (at the court of the tyrant Di-
onysius) in Letter 7,⁵⁰ but there might alternatively be traces of an erotic tradition.
Again, an etymological pun seems to be involved: emergit / mergus – with auis
illa being a riddle as much as a literary allusion.
Just as Odysseus is about to flee his enchantress for more important things,
so Mercury holds out the prospect of opportune escape to Aeneas.⁵¹ How differ-
ent this surfing god and absconding lover are from the bird-victims in another
passage, from the other end of the Aeneid. In Book 11, the Latin ambassadors re-
port on their meeting with Diomedes, who cannot be persuaded to come out of
Southern Italian retirement to replay his aborted Iliadic showdown with
Aeneas.⁵² The mournful diasporic adventures he recounts to them are remarka-
bly similar to Aeneas’: Diomedes, too, escaped Troy, landed in Africa, fell in love
with a princess, deserted her, and founded a city in Italy. Towards the end of his
account, we learn that his companions never made it to their final resting place
but were punished by Venus by being transformed into seabirds:
et socii amissi petierunt aethera pennis

fluminibusque uagantur aues (heu, dira meorum
supplicia!) et scopulos lacrimosis uocibus implent. (Aeneid 11.272– 4)
My comrades,
Lost to me, soared to the sky upon wings or are river-birds drifting
Aimlessly. Oh what a ghastly affliction has punished my people!
Now they are filling the rocks by the coasts with their sorrowful screeching.
 Shackleton Bailey () vol. , .

 Cf. Mercury to Aeneas at . (picking up  praeceps ‘headlong’: non fugis hinc praeceps,
dum praecipitare potestas?, “Why aren’t you getting out fast while a fast getaway’s still an op-
tion?”
 On the metapoetics of this self-consciously post-Homeric passage and its Ovidian counter-
part, see Hinds ()  – , Papaoiannou ().
A cluster of words here – supplicia, scopulos, and uocibus – strikingly echo the
words in Dido’s curse.⁵³
I have now set myself the puzzle of identifying from its cry the kind of sea-
bird Dido wants Aeneas to become. And I have to admit that I cannot do it with
any ornithological precision. Dido Dido is admittedly more reminiscent of the
wail of τυτώ or ἰτώ, owl or nightingale noises, than the usual seabird sound,
the raucous kayax, ceyx, or Icare, and I cannot get much closer. In any case, I
am reassured by the negative capability of two of the best-known ornithological-
ly minded classicists. Arnott (1964) 249 cautions, “There is a touch of foolhardi-
ness, in the attempts to establish a precise identification for the great majority of
birds mentioned by the authors of classical antiquity.” In this view, he follows
his great predecessor D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1918) 95, who pronounced:
“[H]owever accurate we may find the poets now and then, I fancy that often
enough they cared little, and possibly knew less, of the bird to which this or
that name belonged; one bird was well-nigh as good as another and you need
not ask too many questions.”⁵⁴
But there is a further strand in the Aeneid that does suggest a possible iden-
tification. If there are shades of a classic bird metamorphosis story, Scylla’s, in
Dido’s curse, we might think of the ciris, the mythological bird Scylla becomes,
a name derived from Greek κείρω ‘cut’ (from her removal of her father’s talis-
manic lock of hair). With this in mind, Dido’s death-wish for Aeneas might
make one notorious intertextual scandal in the Aeneid just a little less strange:
Aeneas’ famously incongruous echoing of Catullus’ lock of Berenice when he ap-
proaches Dido in the Underworld at 6.460 – where his inuitus, regina, tuo de li-
tore cessi (“It was no choice of my will, good queen, to withdraw from your coun-
try”) unambiguously echoes Catullus 66.39 inuita, o regina, tuo de uertice cessi
(“It was no choice of my will, good queen, to withdraw from your head”). Ex-
planations of this jarring echo have often grasped at common features between
Berenice’s story and Dido and Aeneas’: shared links with lucky homecoming,
 In Ovid’s longer adaptation, the birds are speechless (Metamorphoses .). See Myers
() ad . –  on Ovid’s play with their identity (“if you want to know what birds they
were suddenly transformed into, they were like white swans, but they were not swans”); sugges-
tions include coots (Plin. Historia Naturalis .) or herons/shearwaters (Serv. ad Aen. .
Graeci eas ἑρωδιούς dicunt). Thompson ()  –  agrees with Fowler () that they are
shearwaters, alleging that their modern counterparts make the sound ‘owyah, owyah.’ At 
he refers to “our little group of bird-names,” including ἐρωδιός, αἴθυια, ardea, and mergus,
which are “constantly mixed up by the glossographers.”
 Thompson (), pref. to nd ed., apologizes for having previously “ignored the Shearwa-
ters” (see his expanded entry for αἴθυια).
124 Emily Gowers
thank-offerings, and swearing by heads.⁵⁵ But if Dido’s curse had already

changed Aeneas into something like a persecuted ciris, then Aeneas’ own bor-
rowed metaphor transforms him rather defiantly back into a lock of hair, one
that successfully flies free of female toils.⁵⁶
It is here, in these ideas of flight and escape, that the real argument lies for
finding traces of a bird metamorphosis in Dido’s speech. Aeneas’ transformation
is, of course, at most wishful thinking on Dido’s part. He will fly away, not just
from Carthage but from the earth altogether, when he is raised to the stars as
a god (predicted even in Book 1: 259 sublimemque feres ad sidera caeli | magna-
nimum Aenean, “you will raise great-souled Aeneas | Up to the stars of the
skies”). Of the two possible ways out with which he taunts Turnus at Aeneid
12.892– 3, opta ardua pennis | astra sequi clausumque caua te condere terra,
“then pray you can soar to the starry | Heights upon pinions or seal yourself
off within earth’s hollow chasm,” he achieves the first, while Turnus is left
with the second (although Ovid partly mitigates this by allowing Turnus’ city
Ardea to fly away in heron-form in Metamorphoses 14).⁵⁷
Dido’s life force, on the other hand, is simply dispersed at the end of Book 4,
when the rainbow-bird Iris (700 croceis … pennis, “upon crocus | Wings”) cuts
her lock of hair (crinem) and releases her soul to the winds (704– 5).⁵⁸ There
are two ways in which she will take wing again: long-term, once the Romans’ fu-
ture enemy Hannibal, that Phoenician phoenix, rises from the ashes of her funer-
al pyre,⁵⁹ and short-term, when the flying thing, Dira, is sent by Jupiter to rattle
 See Lyne (). Hardie ()  –  sees in the allusion to Ptolemaic brother-sister mar-
riage a further hint of ‘incestuous’ relations between Dido and Aeneas.
 Lyne ()  – : “ [A]t . we find him [Aeneas] parroting lines from the intertextual
Queen’s lock whose happy fate contrasts bitterly with Dido’s but which his own will in fact one
day resemble.” Pelliccia ( – ) widens the intertextual net considerably to include many
literary representations of unwilling separations, whether genuinely felt or not: for him,
Ovid’s Ceyx and Alcyone are genuinely sad, while their joint transformation into birds is a hap-
pier version of Dido and Aeneas’ more diverse fates ( – ).
 Henderson (). Both he (at ) and Casali ()  note Servius’ Freudian slip (ad
Aen. .) in attributing the burning of Turnus’ Ardea to Hannibal.
 Lyne () and Wills () discuss Virgil’s allusion to Catullus’/Callimachus’ Berenice
and the similar passage at Iliad . –  where Peleus vows a lock of Achilles’ golden
hair if he ever returns to his homeland. NB Wills ()  – : “Whether we juxtapose
Achilles’ unrealized return … with Dido’s death in a foreign land or we contrast it with Aeneas’
successful one.” Ioannis Ziogas points out to me that Iris sounds like Ciris: Dido would thus play
the betrayed male dux ‘leader’ here.
 See Stocks () for a fascinating argument, independently conceived but complementary,
that Hannibal, too, is related to the (usually masculine) ill-omened bubo, insofar as the adjec-
Turnus and Juturna in Book 12, like an owl that flutters around their faces. Forget
whether this is a noctua or a bubo: what is not in dispute is that this scene, with
its dialogue between tragic hero and helpless sister, is packed with verbal rem-
iniscences of Dido.⁶⁰ Her ghost goes on haunting the end of the poem in the
shape of her familiar, the owl. A similar implied reincarnation occurs in Apu-
leius’ Metamorphoses, when Psyche’s jealous, meddling sisters die by throwing
themselves off a cliff in true bird-man fashion, and immediately a meddlesome
seabird, a gannet (gauia, seemingly etymologized from garrire ‘chatter’), emerges
and dives down to the ocean bed to spread gossip to Venus. In Ovid’s Metamor-
phoses, we are told that the swamp where Philemon and Baucis live is inhabited
by gulls, mergi and fulicae (8.625); Hallett (2000) 555 – 6 has suggested that these
are unlucky sinners transformed into birds after the gods’ destruction of the
local Sodom and Gomorrah.
What does it add to the Aeneid to fold in this buried myth? Above all, a bird’s
state – suspended between heaven and earth, perpetually adrift, in a sort of
limbo or purgatory – is analogous to human exile or wandering. A bird may
lose its home and never find another; or it may be blessedly released from tur-
bulent human suffering.⁶¹ After he has killed Hippolytus, Euripides’ Artemis asks
Theseus, “Why don’t you hide under the ground in shame or change your life for
that of a bird to escape this misery?”.⁶² Birds in the Aeneid are associated with
successful or unsuccessful attempts at relocation. Souls waiting to cross the
Styx in Book 6 are compared to birds migrating to sunnier lands (311– 12), and
sea gulls happily sun themselves on a little rock off the coast of Sicily in Book
5 (128). In this poem of exile, migration, and new nesting, Aeneas will make
landfall in Italy, as Daedalus had done. Indeed, he is identified with the ruthless
eagle in the omen that appears to the Rutulians at 12.244– 50 (12.260 – 3 ferrum |
corripite, o miseri, quos improbus aduena bello | territat inualidas ut auis, et litora
uestra | ui populat, “Take up arms, poor folk, though this ruthless intruder’s ag-
gression | Scares you as though you were strengthless birds, and the power of his
violence | Devastates you and your coasts”). But Diomedes’ exiled friends will
not be so lucky; nor will Aesacus, far from Troy. Turnus’ city Ardea is destined
tives often used to describe this owl, dirus ‘cursed’ and abominatus ‘abominated,’ are also those
traditionally associated with the Carthaginian bogeyman.
 Tarrant () .
 Dido identifies with Aeneas’ similar experience of wandering and settling: . –  me quo-
que per multos similis fortuna labores | iactatam hac demum uoluit consistere terra, “Fortune has
battered me too, with some similar twists, through so many / Trials, yet finally willed that I settle
down here in this country.”
 Eur. Hippolytus  – , cited by Forbes Irving () .
126 Emily Gowers
for earthly obliteration; Dido will remain a wanderer still in the Underworld. That
is why it helps to see unhappy bird-pairs – Scylla and Nisus, Procne and Tereus –
flitting around her curse in Book 4. In another tale about shipwreck, birds, and
mournful sounds, Ovid’s Alcyone envisages happy, twinned reunion, si non
| ossibus ossa meis, at nomen nomine tangam, “if I do not touch his bones with
my bones but his name with my name” (11.706 – 7) – in strong contrast to the vi-
olent polyptoton with which Dido describes the future enmity of Rome and
Carthage: litora litoribus contraria, fluctibus undas | imprecor, arma armis, “Men-
ace of coast against coast and of waters hurled against waters, | Arms against
arms, I invoke” (4.628 – 9). Mythical bird-stories often end in hatred: Scylla the
ciris was notoriously hated not just by her father but by all other birds; the
same story goes for the owl.⁶³ Owls and crows were traditional enemies, such
that a proverb goes, “The owl says one thing, the crow another.”⁶⁴ A pitched bat-
tle of birds in Aeneid 4 suits a book about two people and, in future, two cities, at
loggerheads.
Aftercries
I end with a brief tour of four modern, transatlantic reincarnations of Dido, all of
which persist in associating her name with sounds – jangling, nostalgic, or
plaintive. Allen Tate’s “Aeneas at Washington” (1933) is a meditation on the
theme of city-building, ancient and modern. Civilization has moved west from
Troy to Rome to the United States, and Aeneas sees his own dogged experience
as a colonist reflected in the work of recent pioneers: “the towers that men | Con-
trive I too contrived long, long ago.” At the end of the poem, he stands on a riv-
erbank and listens to an owl hoot:
I stood in the rain, far from home in the nightfall

By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,
The city my blood had built I knew no more
While the screech-owl whistled his new delight
Consecutively dark.
Stuck in the wet mire

Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.
 Arist. Historia Animalium  a , Ael. de Natura Animalium ., ..

 Suda C.
Masculine this time, and four thousand leagues away from the origin, but could
this whistling owl be a recreation of Virgil’s Dido?⁶⁵
In his poem “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid,” from The Mills of the Kava-
naughs (1951), Robert Lowell chooses to remember Dido more actively in connec-
tion with birds. An old man falls asleep in his study in Concord while reading
Virgil and dreams that he is Aeneas at Pallas’ funeral. In the dream, Aeneas’
sword, the one Dido had killed herself with, turns into a bird and starts chirping
a Punic or Carthaginian word:
I hold
The sword that Dido used. It tries to speak,
A bird with Dido’s sworded breast. Its beak
Clangs and ejaculates the Punic word
I hear the bird-priest chirping like a bird.
The Punic word would appear to be something sounding like ‘yuck-a yuck-a,’ the
sound of the yellowhammers knocking against the old man’s window. However,
Thomas (2006) has argued that the word must be that plus quam Punica ‘more
than Punic’ concept, perfidia ‘perfidy.’⁶⁶ Later, the old man wakes up and realizes
that he has been asleep in his study and the Aeneid is nothing but a museum
exhibit whose birds have all long since gone quiet: “the dust / on the stuffed
birds is breathless.” Yet we can hear those old stuffed birds come to life again
in the memory of Virgil’s poetry.
A different kind of Dido appears in Robert Penn Warren’s novel A Place to
Come To (1977), when the narrator looks back on the central love affair of his
life and turns Virgil’s Dido into trailer trash:
When Aeneas came to Carthage, he moved, in a protecting cloud provided by Venus, to-
ward Dido the Queen, whom he was to love, and then, in the fulfillment of his mission,
leave her to the fate of the flames. Well, when I came to Nashville, my cloud was a ram-
shackle bar car, and if my progress was presided over by the Goddess of Love, she was em-
bodied in the poor, drunken, courageous female with the clanging charm bracelet and the
bum gam. But even if Nashville was scarcely Carthage – only a thriving middlesize commer-
cial city of the Buttermilk Belt – I was to find a queen there. (Warren (1977) 125)
Here, the clanging charm bracelet of a Nashville Venus is the down-market ver-
sion of Lowell’s clanging Punic word.
 Ziolkowski ()  suggests that it is the owl of Minerva.

 Thomas ().
128 Emily Gowers
Finally, a more oblique echo of Dido, in the context of marine birdsong, can
be heard by a careful reader of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (2000
[1934]), his portrait of a marriage in free fall against the backdrop of the French
Riviera. A nightingale even has a walk-on part one evening when the young star-
let Rosemary is plagued by the singing of one “insistent bird,” but avian imagery
goes far beyond the Keatsian title to inform the central action of the novel, the
triangular love affair and rift between Rosemary and the aptly named Divers
(Dick and Nicole).⁶⁷ “Birds in their little nests agree,” says a Swiss psychoanalyst
sardonically about this dysfunctional knot of fragile characters; Nicole has al-
ready been destroyed by the sexual interference of her father, though she sang
at the time and continues singing.⁶⁸ While Nicole is a “young bird with wings
crushed,” her husband Dick is a “gruff red bird,” and at Dick and Rosemary’s
first meeting “their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings.”⁶⁹ But it is towards
the end of the novel that one really hears the birds crying, and even a fleeting
echo of Dido’s name. For the damaged and volatile Nicole, a “perverse phoenix,”
one “designed for change, for flight, with money for fins and wings,” a bird’s
flight turns into a metaphor for escape from a broken marriage. Poised on the
brink of her decision as if about to take to the air, “Nicole could feel the fresh
breeze already – the wrench it was she feared, and the dark manner of its
coming.”⁷⁰ It is when she returns to the Riviera beach where they all once sun-
bathed happily that she hears a sound whose dying fall we may recall from
Virgil:⁷¹
… simple little French girls climbing on the breakwaters crying ‘Dîtes donc! Dîtes donc!’ like
birds.⁷²
 Fitzgerald ( []) . See Doherty () on the Keatsian hue of the novel.
 Fitzgerald ( []) .
 Fitzgerald ( []) , , .
 Fitzgerald ( []) .
 Fitzgerald ( []) .
 It is a pleasure to offer this paper to Fred Ahl, intrepid pioneer in Latin wordplay, who heard
it at Cornell in April . Much earlier versions were given to audiences at the Universities of
Oxford and St Andrews and the Johnian Society of New York. All translations from the Aeneid
are from Ahl (). My thanks to Joshua Katz, Jim O’Hara, and Ioannis Ziogas for their helpful
comments.
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Michael Fontaine
Freudian Bullseyes in Classical Perspective:
The Psycholinguistics of Guilt in Virgil’s
Aeneid
Summary: Roman poets and readers seem to have taken it for granted that our
preoccupations determine or affect the words we utter in moments of extreme
emotion. By noticing how those words resemble other words, therefore, we can
sometimes decode or glimpse an anguished speaker’s private thoughts. This is
the conclusion suggested by several puns in the poetry of Virgil, Lucretius,
and Catullus, puns that are better explained by a psycholinguistic than a psycho-
analytic (Freudian) model. Since they appear in correct, ordinary speech—in con-
trast to Freudian slips, in which a pun results from a speech error—I call those
puns ‘Freudian bullseyes.’
Keywords: Aeneid; Freud; Freudian slip; psycholinguistics; psychopathology;

wordplay; guilt; pun; Virgil; Catullus; Lucretius; The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life
For Fred, MaXVMo honore
Talent hits a target no one

else can hit;
Genius hits a target no one
else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)*
I
The publication of Frederick Ahl’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in 2007 revealed
more clearly than ever before just how shot through the epic is with wordplay. In
so doing, Ahl has forced us to consider what it means. If the puns are not funny
(and they often are not), if they are not ‘etymological glosses’ (and they often are
* Schopenhauer () : “Das Talent gleicht dem Schützen, der ein Ziel trifft, welches die
Uebrigen nicht erreichen können; das Genie dem, der eines trifft, bis zu welchem sie nicht ein Mal
zu sehn vermögen.” (Translator unknown)
132 Michael Fontaine
not), and if we don’t like the pseudo-explanations that psychoanalysis offers up

(and I do not), then what are they doing in the text? To answer this question I
take as my starting point three puns in the Aeneid—two as yet unnoticed in
print—that involve the notion of guilt.
Guilt is a compelling means of understanding Virgil’s puns. The emotion is
rare in Homer but common in the Aeneid, where characters routinely blame
themselves for thoughts or actions. What is more, in my three examples Virgil
focalizes the puns in a way that invites us to reflect on the connections between
guilt, thought, and language. Finally, since guilt is often the universal explana-
tion of psychoanalysis, the examples will allow me to distinguish my views from
that theory sharply, especially where my views seem to approach Freud’s most
closely.
Guilt is a social and self-conscious emotion. As the American psychiatrist
and philosopher Ron Leifer (2013) explains, it involves a cognitive component
and would not exist without the evolution of language. That Roman authors
took its cognitive aspect for granted is reflected in the fact that the single
word conscientia regularly means ‘a guilty conscience.’ And because guilt is cog-
nitive, it means the emotion is liable to Whorfian linguistic analysis—that is, to
analysis that considers whether and how language shapes thought. I shall come
back to that matter below.
What betrays a guilty conscience? Since Freud, many would automatically
reply that a slip of the tongue does; or, when our speech does not betray us,
that body language does. The former is a very old idea; several examples in Plau-
tus’ Casina reveal that authors and audiences in ancient Rome shared our ‘Freu-
dian’ view of slips of the tongue. We do not know whether they saw a relation-
ship between guilt and unguarded body language, but there is not much
evidence for it if they did.¹
Absent an error in speech, then, what else could betray feelings of guilt? The
answer is puns. Virgil’s three examples seem to make this point clear. Let us have
a look at them in the translation of Ahl (2007), occasionally modified.
(1.) Book 4 begins with Dido in anguish. A recent widow, she finds herself
obsessed with Aeneas. He haunts her thoughts and dreams and, Virgil seems
to say, she is losing her mind—her “sanity is fading” (v. 8 male sana = insana,
‘insane’). At last she confides her feelings to her sister, Anna (9 – 23):
“Anna soror, quae me suspensam insomnia terrent!
 Casina: Feldman (). The negative claim about body language rests on the evidence in
Corbeill ().
Freudian Bullseyes in Classical Perspective 133
 quis nouus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes,

quem sese ore ferens, quam forti pectore et armis!
credo equidem, nec uana fides, genus esse deorum.
degeneres animos timor arguit. heu, quibus ille
iactatus fatis! quae bella exhausta canebat!
 si mihi non animo fixum immotumque sederet
ne cui me uinclo uellem sociare iugali,
postquam primus amor deceptam morte fefellit;
si non pertaesum thalami taedaeque fuisset,
huic uni forsan potui succumbere culpae.
 Anna (fatebor enim) miseri post fata Sychaei
coniugis et sparsos fraterna caede penatis
solus hic inflexit sensus animumque labantem
impulit. agnosco ueteris uestigia flammae.”
“Anna my sister, what sleepless dreams suspend me in terror!

 Who is this newcomer guest who has set up his quarters in our home?
Oh, what a grand look he has, how brave in his heart and in battle!
Gods generated his line; I believe this, not simply on blind faith.
Base-born, degenerate souls are exposed by their fear. What a beating
Destiny gave him! What wearying wars sang out in his story!
 Were it not rooted, immovably fixed in my mind, that I’d never
So much as wish to ally myself with another in marriage,
After my first great love deceived me and failed me by dying,
Were I not weary of weddings, my thoughts about marriage so altered,
I could, perhaps, succumb to (succumbere) this one point of censure.²
 Anna, I have to confess: ever since my poor husband Sychaeus
Died and my brother stained our household’s shrines with his slaughter,
This is the one man who’s suppled my senses and pummeled my fainting
Mind’s resolution. These embers of long-lost fires, I recall them.”
My interest is in the Latin of line 19, huic uni forsan potui succumbere (“succumb
to’) culpae. If Dido pauses before culpae, her words generate a temporary ambi-
guity. In that case we would have to interpret huic uni as a reference to Aeneas
(sc. uiro) and would have to take succumbere as equivalent to concumbere, ‘have
sex with.’ In her preoccupation with Aeneas Dido seems to be thinking—but not
saying— “Oh! I could, perhaps, have sex with this one man!” Yet the thought is
as taboo as the words would be. The rhetorical trick the pun entails, known as
 Because he has already seen the pun and understands its implications, Ahl translates, “I, per-
haps, could rest easily with this—one point of censure.” At the risk of impiety I have changed his
translation to clarify my point.
para prosdokian (surprise turn, switcheroo), is well established in comedy. But

Dido is not joking.
(2.) In book 10 Aeneas has accepted King Evander’s son, Pallas, as his ward
and has taken responsibility for his safety. He seems to regard the young man as
a surrogate son, though some scholars, such as Putnam (1985), detect hints of a
pederastic relationship. In 10.479 – 89—the most momentous scene of the epic—
the Rutulian prince Turnus kills Pallas and strips off the boy’s baldric as a prize.
The killing enrages Aeneas and drives him on a murderous rampage of revenge.
Seeking Turnus, he deals death indiscriminately—because, Virgil makes a point
of saying, his thoughts are entirely on Pallas and Evander (515 – 16, Pallas, Evan-
der, in ipsis / omnia sunt oculis, “It’s all there: Pallas, Evander, clear in his mind’s
eye.”) Aeneas fails to meet Turnus but does at last reach Mezentius, the Etruscan
king allied to Turnus, and does combat with him. Mezentius falters in the fight
and when Aeneas goes to deliver the deathblow, Mezentius’ son, Lausus, moves
to intercept it. Hoping to block it, the young warrior is struck and dies tragically
in his father’s stead. Virgil pauses the narrative to describe the thoughts that
occur to Aeneas as the boy bleeds out (821– 4):
At uero ut uultum uidit morientis et ora,

ora modis Anchisiades pallentia miris,
ingemuit miserans grauiter dextramque tetendit,
 et mentem patriae subiit pietatis imago.
Yet, when he sees the expression that spreads on the face of the dying
Youth, on that face growing stunningly pallid, the son of Anchises
pities him, utters a groan from his heart, reaches out with his right hand.
 Here, mirrored sharp in his thoughts, is his own righteous love for his father.
It is important to realize that Lausus and Pallas are mirror images of one another.
The two Italian princes are equal in age, physique, valor, and doom—each is kil-
led in battle by his enemy’s greatest hero (10.433 – 6). My interest is therefore in
the Latin of line 818, ora modis Anchisiades pallentia (pallid) miris. It contains a
pun on the name Pallas (the genitive, Pallantis, generates the adjective Pallan-
tius, a, um). In his preoccupation with failing to save Pallas, Aeneas seems to
be thinking, “How could I, entrusted to look after Pallas, kill a boy just like
him? How strangely like Pallas his face looks, his face so pallid in death…!” Re-
markably, Virgil implicates the father-son relationship in these thoughts (Anchi-
siades; patriae pietatis imago). It seems that in killing Lausus, Aeneas has be-
come responsible for Pallas being killed a second time.
(3.) My third example returns to the death of Lausus from a different point of
view. When, shortly after, Mezentius sees the lifeless body of his son being
brought back to him, he is overcome with survivor guilt and resolves to end
his life (10.846 – 56):
“tantane me tenuit uiuendi, nate, uoluptas,

ut pro me hostili paterer succedere dextrae,
quem genui? tuane haec genitor per uulnera seruor
morte tua uiuens? heu, nunc misero mihi demum
 exitium infelix, nunc alte uulnus adactum!
idem ego, nate, tuum maculaui crimine nomen,
pulsus ob inuidiam solio sceptrisque paternis.
debueram patriae poenas odiisque meorum:
omnis per mortis animam sontem ipse dedissem!
 nunc uiuo neque adhuc homines lucemque relinquo.
sed linquam.”
“Son, was the pleasure of staying alive so great that it kept me

Back, and that I allowed (paterer) you, my own child, to replace me in battle,
Facing our enemy’s sword? Am I saved, I your father, by your wounds?
Living because you died? My exile is now void of any
 Sense of fulfillment in misery. This is the wound driven deeply!
Son, I’m the very same man whose criminal actions have ruined
Your good name: I was loathed, overthrown, I was stripped of my fathers’
Scepter. I should myself have exacted the judgment my soul’s guilt
Owed my land and my people’s hate: some death in a thousand
 Forms. And I’ve not yet left these regions of humans and daylight.
I’m still alive. But I’ll leave.”
My interest is in the Latin of line 847, ut pro me hostili paterer succedere dextrae.
It contains a pun on pater, “father.” Not blaming Aeneas and, as a man who
scoffs at the gods (contemptor diuom, 7.648), unwilling or unable to blame
them, the Etruscan warrior blames himself for Lausus’ death. It is a common re-
action to bereavement. Yet in his preoccupation with failing to save Lausus (for
whose death he is not really responsible), Mezentius is not blaming himself for
his conduct on the battlefield. He is blaming himself at this moment for his fail-
ures as a father. He is expanding his sense of responsibility from a single event to
the conduct of his life. Remarkably, as in my second example, Virgil once more
implicates in the pun the father-son relationship and suicidal thoughts (or ‘ide-
ation’).
It may not be an accident that Virgil explores the relationship of bereave-
ment to (self‐) blame by means of a character named Lausus, whose Etruscan
name Aeneas associates with the Latin word laus (‘praise’) in the prequel to this
passage (v. 825 laudibus). Be that as it may, H.C. Gotoff (1984: 201) surely missed
the pun if he could read this passage and conclude, “Nor is paterer, in the sense
required here, in the slightest applicable.”
The unvoiced thoughts of succumbere/concumbere, Pallas, and pater conveyed

by succumbere, pallentia, and paterer are not expressed but they are transparent.
If we consider them together, Virgil seems to be implying, or at least taking for
granted, something about the relationship of guilt to spontaneous utterance
(or, in Aeneas’ case, the spontaneous upwelling of thought). At this point it is
not clear whether we should also consider directly relevant certain interpersonal
states or relationships implicit in them that, after Freud, might appear so—name-
ly, the fresh sexual stirrings of a widow and the father-son relationship (or male
homosexuality). Since recent years have been witnessing a resurrection of inter-
est in psychoanalytic explanations of Latin authors³, I should explain why an al-
ternative explanation of the phenomena is both possible and, therefore, prefera-
ble.
II
The second chapter of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (2002 [1901]) is
the most famous chapter in his famous book. Freud presents it as a case study in
what he calls ‘psychopathology’—that is, in his belief that a lapse in speech,
writing, memory, or action provides clues to, and evidence of, a repressed
thought or diseased psyche. In it a young Austrian Jew who is unhappy with
the political and social status of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire harangues
Freud. He intends to cap his rant by quoting Dido’s curse in Aeneid 4.625, Exor-
iare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor, “Rise from my bones, my avenger—and there
will be an avenger!” But his memory fails him at the crucial moment. He can re-
call only most of the line, and that imperfectly, as Exoriare ex nostris ossibus
ultor, “Rise from my bones, my avenger!” He leaves out the word aliquis and re-
verses the order of nostris ex.
After prompting and listening to his free associations (in reality, not so free!),
Freud deduces the young man is worried about the outcome of a sexual encoun-
ter. The young man had, he reveals, slept with an Italian woman on a recent trip
to Naples. Freud’s discussion does not say whether the encounter was casual or
 Oliensis () is a prominent example.

not, but the young man is now anxiously expecting imminent confirmation of
his worst fears. According to Freud, the young man ‘repressed’ aliquis because
uttering it would have brought these worries to conscious thought.
It is worth reviewing the associations and analysis that enable Freud to draw
his conclusion. The young Jew—who, like Freud, speaks and thinks in German—
begins by dividing the Latin words aliquis into a-liquis (he is not sure why), then
finds his thoughts run on at random to the German words Reliquien (relics), Liq-
uidation, Flüssigkeit (liquid), and Fluid; then to the relics of Saint Simon of Trent,
whose death or murder in the Middle Ages was, yet again, now being attributed
to Jews; then to Saint Augustine and his views on women; then to a meeting he
recently had with a man named Benedikt, a truly ‘original’ sort of man; then to
Saint Januarius, whose blood, kept in a phial in a church at Naples, miraculously
liquefies on one holy day each year; then to a particular occasion on which the
miracle was delayed and required human intervention to help bring it about; and
then, at long last, the young man’s thoughts turn to his personal predicament:
his Italian lady friend has missed her period, and it’s presumably his fault.
If it seems strange that Freud does not seize immediately on the verbal con-
nection between aliquis and Liquidation (the second, not first, association),
which could link aliquis to menstrual blood, then we must not forget that his ‘pa-
tient’ spoke German. In that language Liquidation is largely a financial term,
whereas Flüssigkeit (liquid) is only conceptually and not acoustically connected
to it. In other words, Freud does not see a simple, one-to-one relationship be-
tween a word and the unvoiced thought that it puns on and hints at.
Moreover, in two chapters of The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual
Criticism, the Italian classicist Sebastiano Timpanaro (1976) demonstrated on
philological grounds the intellectual bankruptcy of Freud’s psychoanalytic ex-
planation of the mistake. Virgil’s line is unusual because it combines an indefi-
nite third-person pronoun (aliquis) with a second-person verb (exoriare). As Tim-
panaro shows in detail, that is why Freud’s young man—like any medieval
copyist—simply banalized its unfamiliar syntax. Virgil’s combination of second
and third person referents is impossible in German (and English), so it was al-
most foreordained that a German speaker would accidentally smooth it out
with a more familiar construction. These mistakes are so familiar to us philolo-
gists, of course, that no further explanation is necessary.
Timparano also shows in painful detail how Freud’s technique of associa-
tion turns out not to be so free after all—Freud regularly intervenes to help his
‘analysand,’ or patient, along. We can and should say more about that. I think
(and Timpanaro implies) it is unlikely the young Jew was really ‘unconscious’
of his anxiety about having or aborting a child accidentally fathered on a
woman, perhaps a stranger, in a foreign country. I assume it is obvious the
young man was preoccupied with those thoughts and the feelings of self-blame
that accompany them. To consider those thoughts and feelings ‘unconscious’ in
the psychoanalytic sense of the word is ridiculous. As a doctor, Freud had surely
seen how patients typically behave and speak when they must wait for the re-
sults of an important medical test—how they ruminate about the difficult choices
they might have to make, and how the stress of thinking about it spills out.
Freud would need no special insight into the human condition, much less med-
ical training, to realize that for many a young man, the results of the only med-
ical test that matters in life depend on the arrival of a young woman’s period.
This is only one of many reasons a psychoanalytic analysis of the three puns
above will lead us up a garden path and why it must be rejected. Let me give
another. Ellen Oliensis has recently asked us to entertain the notion of a ‘textual
unconscious’ and invokes it to explain the presence and purpose of puns in
Latin texts. Since the existence of a human unconscious is not a proven fact, I
hope readers sympathetic to her argument will forgive me for simply stating I
cannot bring myself to believe in the existence of a textual unconscious either
—and this is, to be sure, a question of belief. Let me quote the American psychia-
trist Thomas Szasz on this point (1976: 1– 2):
One thus knows that he is a heretic when his friends and colleagues confront him with an
incredulous and indignant: “You mean you’d believe that…?” What one does not believe
might be that the Jews are the Chosen People; or that Jesus is the Son of God; or that
Freud was a scientist. Each of these disbeliefs is a heresy for those who believe in them,
but not for those who do not. When a psychoanalyst friend says to me, earnestly but con-
temptuously: “You mean you don’t believe in the unconscious?”—as if not believing in the
unconscious were like not believing in the liver—it is because my disbelief offends his be-
lief.
I agree with Szasz that the unconscious is unlike the liver, and I think that dis-
placing and reattributing it to the text only compounds the metaphor in an un-
helpful way.
That is not to say that Freud was completely wrong, of course. He was quite
right to zero in on certain phenomena and realize that they are, or at least can
be, related. I agree with him that something connects accidental puns—which,
within psychoanalysis, are the result of dreams or slips of the tongue, pen, or
memory—with mental preoccupation, guilt, interpersonal relationships, and un-
rehearsed or emotional speech. I disagree with him on the justice of the symbol-
ism and the many steps psychoanalysis typically requires to discover what a
speaker is preoccupied with. There is nothing pathological (or ‘psychopatholog-
ical’) about it. Most importantly and productively, I think we can look beyond
verbal slips in Virgilian epic to verbal successes—that is, the correct or ordinary
use of language—and still make valid inferences about what matters a speaker is
preoccupied with.
I would like to suggest there is a simple, direct, and transparent relationship
between what a guilty-minded speaker says and what Virgil wants us to under-
stand the guilty-minded speaker is thinking.
III
A chicken-or-egg question undergirds the young academic fields of psycholin-
guistics and cognitive psychology. The question is whether language shapes
thought or thought shapes language. The belief that language shapes thought
is called Whorfianism. George Orwell gave it popular form in his novel 1984
when he asserted that politicians could limit our thoughts by limiting our vo-
cabulary.
The legitimacy of Whorfianism is a matter of fresh and ongoing controversy
but people have taken its Orwellian form for granted for a very long time. Adver-
tisers, comedians, poets, psychologists, textual critics, politicians, and rhetori-
cians have long known that they can prime, or control, our thoughts. They
know, or think they know, that by making use of the power of suggestion—espe-
cially suggestive language—they can all but guarantee their audience will think
of another word. Rhyme is one means of eliciting a target word. Another is to
prepare a suggestive context rich in synonyms for a particular word before utter-
ing a rarer word that looks much like that word.
Virgil’s puns illustrate this practice only too well. Pallentia suggests Pallas
(‐antis) or the adjective made from his name, Pallantia, because apart from
palla and pallium, both garments neither of which is mentioned in the Aeneid,
the Latin dictionary shows that nothing in common usage begins with pall-
and nothing resembles the longer pallent-. Likewise, the only two words that pa-
terer looks like are pater, which is ubiquitous and relevant in the context, and
patera, a rare word for a libation bowl. Because of Latin’s impoverished vocabu-
lary, Virgil knew he could make us think of Pallas and pater in these contexts: he,
qua poet, uses language to shape our thoughts. Everything leading up to the
puns prepares the way for them.
That explanation works for Virgil, who carefully wrought his epic, but will it
work for the spontaneous speech or thoughts of his characters Dido, Aeneas,
and Mezentius? Are they unwittingly making puns because language is shaping
their guilty thoughts, or is it the other way around, with guilty thoughts shaping
their language? Here is where recent speculation in psycholinguistics can help.
Psycholinguists, such as Griffin and Ferreira (2006), state that the first step
in uttering a word is conceptualization (or message planning), the formal name
for deciding what to express. It is distinguished from formulation, the step of de-
termining how to express it, and articulation—expressing it. Conceptualization is
a process of selecting semantic content. Before we utter a word, say psycholin-
guists, our mind seems to activate a number of words of similar meaning or
sound, or both, before selecting its target—that is, the word we actually utter
aloud. On this view, the belief that meaning precedes sound is a fundamental
property of speech.
Griffin and Ferreira base their argument on many of the same phenomena
that interested Freud and that he took as evidence of ‘psychopathology.’ They
investigate tip-of-the-tongue situations, inadvertent speech errors (slips) and,
what is especially relevant in this context, malapropisms.
A malapropism is a fascinating and special kind of slip of the tongue. It is
the act of using a wrong word that sounds like the right one. According to Fay
and Cutler (1977), Aitchison (2007: 249), and Erard (2007: 43, 208, 206), a mala-
propism is distinguished by four characteristics:
the slip is a real word.

the slip and target word are unrelated in meaning
the slip and target word are of the same grammatical category
the slip and target word sound similar; specifically:
they usually have the same number of syllables, and
they have the same stress pattern,
they often share an initial sound or syllable, and/or
they share a rhyming suffix.
For example, a speaker might say delusions when he means allusions, or punctu-
ality for punctuation, or cuticle for cubicle. By definition the malapropism is an
accidental pun on the target word. The pun is—again by definition—obvious to
the audience, which never hesitates to interpret it according to its sympathies.
That is why comedians love them but most of us fear them.
Malapropisms come in two types. When they have no obvious Freudian po-
tential, we suspect the speaker—say, George Bush—is ignorant. When they do, we
tend to think he is distracted. Our sympathies with or against him dictate our in-
terpretation of his mistake. The American journalist and linguist Michael Erard
(2007: 265) points out how in recent years commentators across the American po-
litical spectrum were routinely saying Osama instead of Obama. When we sym-
pathize with the speaker, we forgive him his innocent mistake. When we dislike
him, we are outraged at his evil gaffe and have fresh reasons to hate him, since it
proves he secretly believes the president is a terrorist.⁴
What explains malapropisms? Psycholinguists say they occur when we are
tired or distracted—distracted by feeling nervous, flustered, bothered, or con-
fused—and so we get confused at the level of conceptualization. It certainly
does seems intuitive that mental distraction can interfere with, influence, or
shape conceptualization, and hence the word we actually do utter. That does
not of course mean the explanation is true. The theory seems to fall apart
when we inquire what exactly psycholinguists mean by ‘conceptualization.’
They say we start off with the ‘idea’ or ‘concept’ of a word before fitting it to pho-
netic form. But how can we have ideas if not in words?
Still, playwrights have long seemed to think that is the way they work. Plau-
tus’ Truculentus of c. 184 BC features several of them, and Shakespeare’s Dogber-
ry and Elbow, the bumbling constables in Much Ado About Nothing and Measure
for Measure, are famously prone to misusing words to comic effect. And the psy-
cholinguistic literature never fails to point out the origin of our term malaprop-
ism itself—it comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Sheridan’s 1775 comedy
The Rivals.
I think Virgil, like these playwrights, shared the psycholinguistic interpreta-
tion of malapropisms. He had surely encountered and experienced them himself
in real life. He would have taken it for granted that guilt (conscientia) is a con-
scious and cognitive emotion, and he must have assumed its disturbance
could cause competition between two ideas in the psyche at the level of concep-
tualization. What makes his understanding of this psychic competition more in-
teresting than Freud’s is that Virgil seems to think that guilt becomes manifest in
language even when the result is not a malapropism—that is, Virgil writes as if
correct language gives us unwitting access to unvoiced but transparent thoughts.
Since the phenomenon I am about to describe does not have a name, I sug-
gest we think about it as a ‘tropapropism.’ Unlike the malapropism, which is a
Freudian slip, a tropapropism is a correct word that hits the mark all too appro-
priately, deliciously and suspiciously so. Although it is spot-on in its context, it is
so close to a more familiar word that it tells your audience, inadvertently, too
much about what is really on your mind. The only difference between it and a
malapropism is that the latter is an error and the former is not. In every other
respect, they are identical:
 Bercovici (). Incidentally, since the killing of Osama bin Laden in  the frequency of
this error has fallen off sharply. Psychologists warn us that verbal primes are apt to weaken and
disappear over time, leaving subsequent generations unsure of what the fuss was all about.
the word uttered is a real word.

the uttered and suggested words are unrelated in meaning. (Contrast semantic errors)
the uttered and suggested words are (often) of the same grammatical category
the uttered and suggested words are pronounced similarly, specifically
they usually have the same number of syllables, and
they have the same stress pattern,
they often share an initial sound or syllable, and/or
they share a rhyming suffix.
I suggest we call these inadvertent puns Freudian bullseyes, and it should be ob-
vious that I consider Virgil’s three puns (succumbere ~ succumbere/concumbere;
pallentia ~ Pallas; paterer ~ pater) examples of the phenomenon. It would be ab-
surd to call them jokes or etymological glosses, and only Dido’s could be consid-
ered an accidental double entendre. They reveal a speaker’s all-too-understand-
able preoccupations, and in a direct way that anyone can interpret by relying on
common sense and human feeling.
On this view, nothing specific about the interpersonal relationships implicat-
ed in the puns—in Dido’s case sexual, and in the others, the father-son relation-
ship—is directly or causally related to the puns, as psychoanalytic theory holds.
The reason the puns appear in contexts involving sex and remorse, in my view, is
not because anything directly connects those thoughts to words but because
both sex and remorse distract and expose us: sex, to another; remorse, to our-
selves.
Freudian slips reveal the alleged unconscious. Freudian bullseyes reveal
guilty preoccupations. Freud declared (1953 [1900]: 608): “The interpretation
of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the
mind.” Just so, I submit that the interpretation of Freudian bullseyes in the Ae-
neid is the royal road to a knowledge of the preoccupations of a guilty con-
science.
IV
Did Virgil invent the belief that Freudian bullseyes offer us access to a speaker’s
anguish or is it something he merely took for granted? Or to rephrase the ques-
tion, do Virgil’s three puns help us rediscover and appreciate an aspect of an-
cient poetry of potentially great application in Latin literature, an aspect that
psychoanalytic and etymological interpretations have been hindering us from
seeing?
Like Virgil, Catullus and Lucretius were Roman poets of the last century BC
of similar philosophical and poetic outlook. Virgil and Lucretius were Epicur-
eans, and though we have no affirmative statement on the matter, Catullus prob-
ably was, too. If we find Freudian bullseyes in their poetry, we may also find that
Virgil has simply taken their effect for granted—perhaps as a Roman poet, and
perhaps as an Epicurean. At any rate, I believe we can find them in both.
Since (in my view) the relationship between uttered word and guilty thought
is a simple and direct one, my remarks will be brief.
At the start of De Rerum Natura, just before his famed assault on Religion,
Lucretius anticipates the blasphemous or sinful feelings he expects his material-
ist doctrine will stir in readers (1.80 – 2, trans. Humphries (1968)):
80 Illud in his rebus uereor, ne forte rearis

impia te rationis inire elementa uiamque
indugredi sceleris.
80 I fear that, in these matters, you may think

You’re entering upon a path of crime,
The A B C’s of godlessness.
Here the situation is a bit different, but overall it seems related. In this case, I
suspect Lucretius chose the word rearis not to prime the thought in his reader’s
mind, but because he suspects the notions of reus and reatus, ‘guilty’ and ‘guilt,’
are already on his reader’s mind. He knows or suspects that in reading his new
heresies, we are having guilty thoughts about it, and by a kind of innuendo he
chooses a word that conjures up and forces us to confront those thoughts fully.
Catullus 63 is a veritable study in guilt, remorse, disillusionment, and fear.
In it Attis, a young Greek, runs off to join Cybele’s cult in Phrygia. He castrates
himself, joins a band of revelers, and ends the night in enthusiastic bliss. When
morning dawns he awakens and takes stock of his situation. He realizes his fool-
hardiness and, in the Hellenistic tradition, utters a long woman’s lament. I quote
its entirety in the text and translation of Stephen Harrison (2005) (63.50 – 73):
 patria o mei creatrix, patria o mea genetrix,

ego quam miser relinquens, dominos ut erifugae
famuli solent, ad Idae tetuli nemora pedem,
ut aput niuem et ferarum gelida stabula forem,
et †earum omnia† adirem furibunda latibula,
 ubinam aut quibus locis te positam, patria, reor?
cupit ipsa pupula ad te sibi derigere aciem,
rabie fera carens dum breue tempus animus est.
egone a mea remota haec ferar in nemora domo?
patria, bonis, amicis, genitoribus abero?
 abero foro, palaestra, stadio et gyminasiis?
miser a miser, querendum est etiam atque etiam, anime.
quod enim genus figurae est, ego non quod obierim?

ego iuuenis, ego adulescens, ego ephebus, ego puer,
ego gymnasi prius flos, ego eram decus olei:
 mihi ianuae frequentes, mihi limina tepida,
mihi floridis corollis redimita domus erat,
linquendum ubi esset orto mihi Sole cubiculum.
ego nunc deum ministra et Cybeles famula ferar?
ego Maenas, ego mei pars, ego uir sterilis ero?
 ego uiridis algida Idae niue amicta loca colam?
ego uitam agam sub altis Phrygiae columinibus,
ubi cerua siluicultrix, ubi aper nemoriuagus?
iam iam dolet quod egi, iam iamque paenitet.“
 “My country, who gave me birth, my country, mother to me,

That I left in my misery, as slaves who flee their masters (erifugae)
Leave their owners, and carried my step to the groves of Ida,
To be amid the snow and the chilly haunts of beasts (ferarum),
To visit the [?] lairs of [?] in my madness,
 Where or in what location should I think (reor) of you lying, my country?
My very eye yearns to direct its gaze towards you,
While my mind is free from fierce madness for a space.
Shall I be carried (ferar) far away from my home to these groves?
Shall I be away (abero) from my homeland, my wealth, my friends, my parents?
 Shall I be away (abero) from the forum, the wrestling-school, the stadium,
the gymnasia?
My poor, poor spirit, I must lament again and again.
For what kind of shape is there which I have not passed through?
I have been a young man, a youth, a stripling, a boy,
I was the flower of the gymnasium before, the glory of the oil-bottle:
 My doors were crowded, my thresholds were warm,
My house was clad with flowery garlands,
When I came to leave my bedchamber at sunrise.
Shall I now be spoken of (ferar) as the servant of the gods, the handmaid of
Cybele?
Shall I be a Maenad, a mere part of myself, a sterile man (uir)?
 Shall I haunt the chilly regions of green (uiridis algida) Ida, clothed with snow?
Shall I spend my life under the lofty peaks of Phrygia,
Where the hind lives in the woods (cerua siluicultrix), where the boar
wanders the groves (nemoriuagus)?
Now, now my deed gives me pain, now, now it gives me regret.” (paenitet)
Attis’ language makes his self-blame and unvoiced preoccupations crystal clear.
The verbal connections cluster when he ruminates on his present condition and
recede when he thinks back to his past (61– 7). Ferar signals his fear of living
among wild animals (ferae). He blames himself for fleeing his country ‘as slaves
who flee their masters’ (erifugae); the thought breaks out again in the word abero
(i. e. ab ero, ‘away from my master’). The word reor evokes his feelings of respon-
sibility (reus). The same interpretation accounts for his explicit pun on uir and
uiridis—he regrets castrating himself. Manhood is foremost on his mind.
His other thoughts are equally transparent. He is thinking of ἄλγος (‘pain’),
as we learn from algida (‘chilly’), of the culter (‘knife’), as we learn from the neo-
logism siluicultrix, of his self-enslavement (seruus), as we learn from cerua
(‘hind’), and of his mixed-up status between man and woman, expressed in
puns on uagina and penis evoked by the neologism nemoriuagus and the final
word of the lament, paenitet. If the reader agrees with me these puns are real
and intentional, I hope he will agree it would be ridiculous to call the thoughts
they elicit ‘unconscious.’
In short, these examples suggest Virgil was not making any extraordinary in-
novation in language or poetry in making use of Freudian bullseyes in the Ae-
neid. They rather hint at a once-widespread understanding of the relationship
between thought and language, a relationship that has in modern times been
conceived of rather differently but that can become productive once more.
With that in mind, let me finish with a final example from the Aeneid, a
newly discovered pun that brings with it consequences for the interpretation
of the poem as a whole.
V
The Aeneid ends with Aeneas flaring up in anger and killing Turnus. Why he does
is the chief question the epic raises. Virgil says Aeneas’ rage was triggered by the
sight of Pallas’ baldric on Turnus (12.945 – 7):
 ille, oculis postquam saeui monimenta doloris

exuuiasque hausit, furiis accensus et ira
terribilis:
 As his eyes drink in these mementoes of savage

Pain, these so bitter spoils, Aeneas grows fearsome in anger,
Burning with fire of furiis.
Again we find ourselves in a context in which Virgil seems to give us access to

Aeneas’ thoughts and mind’s eye, but the poet presents them with an extraordi-
nary ambiguity. Does furiis = furore, ‘madness,’ or Furiis, ‘Furies, Erinyes’? The
Furies were the chthonic deities of justice and retribution, especially active in
family disputes. To ask our question differently, therefore, is Aeneas’ killing of

Turnus an instance of murder (furiis) or—as Gregson Davis does a fine job of
showing in this very volume—vengeance (Furiis)? As a minute speck of sand
stimulates the growth of the pearl, so can the split between optimistic and pes-
simistic readings of the poem be traced in good part to this single ambiguity.⁵
In his commentary Richard Tarrant (2012: 21 n. 81) summarizes the contro-
versy while commenting in a footnote: “At 7.392 Virgil plays on the ambiguity fur-
iis/Furiis, as also in 3.331 scelerum furiis agitatus Orestes…. I find it hard to see
ambiguity of that kind here.” The reason why Tarrant finds it hard to see the am-
biguity, I suggest, is because furiis is only half of it. An equal component is the
word accensus. Everyone interprets it as ‘burning’ or ‘exploding,’—naturally
enough, because accendere is a catchword of the poem (starting at 1.29 accensa,
of Juno) and a leitmotif of book 12 (e. g. 12.9 accenso, of Turnus). The phrase furiis
accensus evokes the earlier descriptions of Dido as furiis incensa in 4.376 and ac-
censa furore in 4.697, and of the Laurentine mothers, who are under the spell of
the fiery fury Allecto, as furiisque accensas pectora in 7.392. But that is all, I sug-
gest, merely priming. Of those four -cens- phrases (and many more like them),
only the last, accensus in 12.946, is genuinely ambiguous.
That is because beside accensus the participle there is accensus the noun.
Ultimately from accensere, ‘to add to, to reckon among the list of,’ it has two
meanings in ordinary discourse. One is ‘supernumerary’ and is irrelevant here.
The other, very relevant for my purposes, is ‘a state officer who attended one
of the highest magistrates (consul, proconsul, praetor, etc.) at Rome or in the
provinces, for the purpose of summoning parties to court, maintaining order
and quiet during its sessions, and proclaiming the hours’ (Lewis and Short s.v.
accenseo A). In practice, an accensus was a minister, deputy, state officer, appa-
ritor, or herald, often of lictors, and it can take a dative of ‘the boss’ (e. g. qui tum
accensus Neroni fuit, Cicero In Verrem 2.1.28). That is the meaning we must keep
in mind here.
On my view, Virgil is simultaneously saying that Aeneas is either (1) ‘burning
with madness’ (furiis ablative) or (2) ‘the Furies’ apparitor’ or ‘orderly’ or ‘har-
binger’ (Furiis dative). Inspired by the sight of Pallas’ baldric, Aeneas sees him-
self literally here as he does metaphorically in 2.337– 8, where he claimed that
amid the Greeks’ destruction of Troy, he “whirled into flames, into combat wher-
ever Erinys…directs me” (quo tristis Erinys…vocat).
The ambiguity—which is insoluble—permits, legitimates, and encourages
two entirely contradictory readings. On the one, Aeneas is a crazed victim of
 Horsfall ()  –  discusses the ambiguity and its implications succinctly.
his passion, and unjust in killing Turnus; on the other, he is, or sees himself, as
the righteous and divinely sanctioned avenger of Pallas—a fourth Fury.
Because this example is complex, let me be as clear as I can about what I
mean. I am not saying that accensus is an example of Virgil having guilty
thoughts. I am saying that Virgil planted an irresolvable (and, therefore, plausi-
bly deniable) ambiguity in accensus, an ambiguity that no one has noticed be-
fore. Once we realize that accensus really is ambiguous, it complicates our
choices in a way that makes the split between optimistic and pessimistic read-
ings of the end of the Aeneid even harder to resolve than it was before. To wit:
because the noun accensus only makes sense with Furiis (capital F), the passage
presents us with the following four choices:
If accensus furiis means ‘burning with fire of Furies,’ then Virgil is (arguably) saying Aeneas
is justified in killing Turnus. This is an old interpretation.
If accensus furiis means ‘burning with madness,’ then Virgil is (arguably) saying Aeneas is
unjustified in killing Turnus. This too is an old interpretation.
If accensus Furiis means ‘harbinger of the Furies,’ then either:
Virgil, in his narratorial voice, is saying that Aeneas is justified in killing Turnus. This is a
new interpretation.
Aeneas, through whose thoughts the passage is focalized, sees himself that way. This too is
a new interpretation, and it says in the strongest possible terms that the killing is unjust.
Why must the last option mean the killing is so unjust? Because in the real world
there is no such thing as a human ‘angel of death’ or ‘harbinger of vengeance,’
but there is, and there probably always has been, the kind of man who calls him-
self that. We know the type from the daily news: it is your garden-variety mass
murderer, who justifies his violence by saying that he is ‘doing God’s work.’ Plau-
tus, reworking an older Greek play, has a nice example of the type in Menaechmi
831– 75.⁶ Colloquially we call such people crazy and psychiatrically we call them
paranoid schizophrenics, but in either case we always condemn their murderous
actions as unjustified. We recognize the claim is a rationalization of evil.
How does this relate to puns and guilt? If you accept that Virgil intended the
last interpretation (3B), then what makes it possible is the focalization of the am-
biguity. Virgil wants us to understand that Aeneas’ thoughts shift at the critical
moment. The process is: “I am burning up—I’m furious—I am an angel of venge-
 As I argue in Fontaine (forthcoming), Aeschylus presents another example of the type in the
Orestes of his Libation Bearers, but his point is usually misunderstood.
ance.” His first thoughts are the silent equivalent of Dido’s shout in 4.375, heu
furiis incensa feror!, but in an instant, the linguistic accident that made accensus
the participle sound identical to accensus the noun amplifies and maddens his
thinking.
I readily grant that I have never looked upon myself as a divine avenger, and
there is no evidence that Virgil did either, but that is how I think it works (and
how I think Virgil thought it worked).
VII
It is easy to see how Freud, exploring phenomena similar to those I have consid-
ered here, was led to develop his technique of free association. I should therefore
conclude by making it clear how my notion of Freudian bullseyes differs from
classical psychoanalysis.
Free association does sometimes incorporate puns, as several examples in
Freud’s Psychopathology and Interpretation of Dreams show. But it is not limited
to them, indeed is not limited much at all—an ‘analysand’ (patient) is allowed or
asked to extend the chain of associations as long as the analyst deems necessary
for him to discover the allegedly unconscious thought.⁷ Several recent works that
apply psychoanalysis to Latin literature follow this unrestricted procedure.
By contrast, I am suggesting a single transparent link between two words,
the one uttered and the other not. The one is a virtual pun on the other. The vir-
tual pun is close and intuitively obvious because the author has primed it appro-
priately. In using them the speaker is, an author means to show us, preoccupied
with his or her guilty feelings and that preoccupation is spilling over into ordi-
nary language. The guilty thought plays a role in determining word choice.
Since guilt is the self-conscious emotion par excellence, there is no need to in-
voke psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious.
Virgil did not devise the technique, and there is no obvious reason to think it
is necessarily limited to guilt. It may well extend to all the anxious or cognitive
emotions, or even to thoughts in general. Nor is there any reason to suppose that
later Latin authors did not also make use of it. Did his successors—say, Ovid—
also use language to hint at anxious thoughts? That is a question for another
essay, but anyone inclined to take it up will find a perfect starting point in Fred-
erick Ahl’s (1985) Metaformations.
 Timpanaro ().
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London.
Michael C. J. Putnam
Virgil and the Achilles of Catullus
Summary: My essay further explores the influence of Catullus 64 on Virgil’s Ae-
neid, especially of the earlier poet’s language depicting Achilles. I begin, as pref-
ace, by examining how three lines from 64 (349 – 51) exert their individual force
on three diverse occasions. I then draw a parallel, with Catullus’s help, between
Theseus deserting Ariadne and Aeneas absconding from Dido. Virgil’s portrayal
of Dido figures prominently in my analysis as she becomes a second Ariadne. Fi-
nally, and at greatest length, I turn to the importance of Catullus’s Achilles in
Virgil’s formulation of Aeneas. His brutality is my particular focus. I first survey
examples of Achilles’s destructive presence in books 7 and 10 of the Aeneid. But
my primary example takes us from Catullus’s description of the slaughter of Pol-
yxena on the tomb of Achilles, “her knee bowed under her,” to Turnus, the sup-
pliant, “his knee doubled under,” before he is killed by Aeneas. I conclude with
observations on the reasons why Catullus’s Achilles is present as the epic ends
and Aeneas performs his final human sacrifice.
Keywords: Achilles; Aeneid; Aeneas; Catullus; Dido; Theseus; Virgil
I will be dealing with two forms of power, each concerned with poetry. One is the
vitality with which great authors can suffuse the characters that they create, a
liveliness that affects all those within range. The other is the force which poetic
tradition exerts as later authors both absorb, challenge, and renew the past. The
line I will be following leads from Homer to Virgil which is to say from the high
point of accomplishment in Greek epic to the equivalent in the Roman literary
pantheon. And a third genius forms part of my argument, Catullus. He is usually
understood and honored as a writer of shorter forms constructed from lyric, iam-
bic or epigrammatic verse. Yet his masterful hexameter epyllion, poem 64, builds
so eminently on aspects of the epic tradition as to extend the legacy of Homer
and thus to serve also as a major influence on Virgil throughout his career but
especially on the Aeneid.
My primary focus will be on the figure of Achilles. The profound effect of
Homer’s characterization of the Greek hero on Virgil’s portrayal of Aeneas, espe-
cially in the final triad of books of the Aeneid, is more and more appreciated.¹
 Of the many treatments of the subject I would single out Mackay (); Anderson ();
Van Nortwick (); King (); Lyne (). I have examined aspects of the intertextual
connections in Putnam (), see especially Chapters  and  as well as the Epilogue.
152 Michael C. J. Putnam
What has not been sufficiently studied is the force on Virgil of the vivid descrip-
tion, in Catullus’s long third-person narrative, of the demigod offspring of Peleus
and Thetis that forms part of the epithalamium sung by the Fates at their
wedding.² The lines in question run from 338 to 370 of that great poem whose
powerful presence in later Latin literature goes now without question. The figure
of Theseus, as set forth earlier in the same poem, also exerted an important in-
fluence on Virgil’s epic. To demonstrate how Catullus’s Theseus also comple-
ments his Achilles in the formation of the later poet’s masterpiece is a parallel
part of my project.
By way of preface, first let me offer an illustration of how pervasive was the
impact of the earlier poet’s 64th poem on the Aeneid as a whole. Let us start
where the Fates are commenting on the results of Achilles’s prowess. Given
the epithalamium’s larger context, their praise is touched with an irony that ul-
timately extends also into Virgil’s treatment of the Greek hero (348 – 51):
illius egregias uirtutes claraque facta

saepe fatebuntur gnatorum in funere matres,
cum incultum cano soluent a uertice crinem,
putridaque infirmis uariabunt pectora palmis.
[Achilles’] outstanding abilities and notable deeds mothers

will often acknowledge at the burial of their sons when they
loose unkempt hair from their white head and bruise their
withered breasts with feeble hands.³
I will return later to line 348 and in particular to the word uirtus. ⁴ I would like
here to show how the final two feet of the three subsequent lines reappear at
three different moments in the Aeneid and how they all draw the weight of
their Catullan context with them.
The first takes us to book 9 of the epic and to Euryalus’s mother voicing her
grief at his death (486 – 7):
…nec te tua funere mater

produxi pressiue oculos aut uulnera laui,…
 Among recent studies devoted to the Catullan influence on Virgil see Putnam ( [/
]), for bibliography see p. , n. ; and Nappa (), especially  – . Among earlier stud-
ies the most useful are still those of Westendorp Boerma (), in particular  – , and Fer-
guson ( – ), especially  – , with notes.
 All translations are by the author.
 On “Catullus’ damning assessment of Achilles” see most recently Farrell and Nelis () .
Boës () senses no irony in Catullus’s treatment of the uirtutes of Achilles.
…nor did I, your mother, lead you out in your funeral

procession or close your eyes or bathe your wounds,…
Virgil’s impressive scene particularizes Catullus’s generality.

We move from the sweep of the deaths, mourned by a series of mothers,
which Achilles causes during his career, to a single, singular moment of pathos
as the mother of the young Trojan warrior bemoans the loss of her son at the
hands of Volcens.⁵
My second example, uertice crinem, concludes an hexameter in another de-
piction of death, also one of the most striking in the poem, namely that of Dido
(Aeneid 4.696 – 9):
nam quia nec fato merita nec morte peribat,

sed misera ante diem subitoque accensa furore,
nondum illi flauum Proserpina uertice crinem
abstulerat Stygioque caput damnauerat Orco.
But since she was dying not through fate nor by a death she
deserved and pitifully before her day and set afire by a
sudden madness, Proserpina had not taken a golden lock
from her head or condemned her life as victim to Stygian Orcus.
This passage serves as an instance of what will be my main topic: Achilles as a

latent figure behind the Carthaginian queen’s suffering and demise. Suffice it to
point out here again the presence of this segment of Catullus’s masterpiece at a
crucial moment in the Aeneid.
The phrase pectora palmis ends the last of our trio of lines. This time Virgil’s
allusion takes us to the episodes depicted on the temple Dido was building in
honor of Juno. Half way through the ekphrasis we are watching the women of
Troy pleading with Athena (1.479 – 82):
interea ad templum non aequae Palladis ibant

crinibus Iliades passis peplumque ferebant
suppliciter, tristes et tunsae pectora palmis;
diua solo fixos oculos auersa tenebat.
Meanwhile the Ilian women were making their way to the

temple of unkindly Pallas, their hair loosened, and like
suppliants were carrying a peplos, sad, their breasts beaten by
the palms of their hands. The goddess, turned away, was
holding her eyes fixed on the ground.
 Forms of the word mater appear in the larger episode also at , ,  and .
A different warrior, Diomedes, is now the source of the protagonists’ sorrow but
much remains in common with our previous illustrations.⁶ Again women are
mourning, this time those dwelling in a city whose fighters are falling victim
to another of the Greek chiefs. And again, as in our second example, we
watch the mourners’ hair as a locus for the expression of emotion. Death also
is once more in the foreground.
From a look at these three examples we can see how the imaginative energy
that Virgil received from this central segment of Catullus’s epithalamium is dis-
tributed at crucial moments throughout his epic.⁷ We will shortly pursue other
examples of its potency but first let us turn to book 4 of the Aeneid and a still
more vivid instance of the influence of poem 64 on its unfolding.
We open with Dido suffering love’s metaphoric flame and wound (4.1– 4):
At regina graui iamdudum saucia cura

uulnus alit uenis et caeco carpitur igni.
multa uiri uirtus animo multusque recursat
gentis honos;…
But the queen, long stricken now by grievous sorrow, fosters

the wound with her blood and is consumed by hidden fire.
Often the man’s excellence and often the renown of his
people rush back to her mind…
Utilizing all the force that an initial line can muster as it prepares its readers for
what follows, Virgil leads us directly back to Catullus 64 and to Ariadne brooding
on her pain (64.250):
…multiplices animo uoluebat saucia curas.
…stricken she mulls over her manifold sorrows in her mind.
At the start of the book that leads to her demise, Virgil would already have us
imagine Dido as Ariadne not only enduring the pangs of love but about to suffer
 Virgil is referring to Iliad . –  where the appeal is in vain.

 Of several further examples let me note four. First, the phrase morti…aggere bustum
(. – ) recurs at Aeneid . – . Second, variations on the hexameter ending corpora
ferro (.) occur at Aeneid . and .. Third, in his bow to . –  at Aeneid
. – , Virgil adds the bodies of horses to Catullus’ already gruesome depiction of heaps
of human corpses. (What is particularized in the earlier look at Achilles the warrior at work,
is generalized in the Aeneid as the two warring sides battle each other.) Fourth, Virgil draws
on the Fates’ description of the taking of Troy (moenia bello /…Pelopis [.  – ]) for Sinon’s
mendacious prediction of a Trojan victory (Pelopea…moenia bello [Aeneid .]).
desertion by Aeneas, Theseus redivivus. Virgil confirms the association by the

next allusion to Catullus 64. This occurs in line 10 as Dido exclaims to her sister
Anna:
quis nouus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes,…!
Who is this remarkable guest who has made his way into our dwelling…!
Virgil would have us think back to line 175 – 6 of the earlier poem where Ariadne
vainly prays away the initial arrival of her faithless lover:
…nec malus hic celans dulci crudelia forma

consilia in nostris requiesset sedibus hospes!
…[would that] this evil guest, veiling cruel intentions with

a seductive appearance, had not found rest in our dwelling.⁸
The repetition of nostris…sedibus hospes serves to reinforce the parallel between

Aeneas and Theseus, which is to say between the two deserting lovers and, in the
case of Virgil, by means of allusion also to prejudice for the informed reader the
characterization of Aeneas at the start of the episode as potentially another
wicked dissembler.
The reference to poem 64, with its implicit equation of Aeneas with Theseus,
is confirmed, with a variation that offers further corroboration of their poetic in-
timacy, at 4.20 – 2. Dido is still addressing her sister:
Anna (fatebor enim) miseri post fata Sychaei

coniugis et sparsos fraterna caede penatis
solus hic inflexit sensus…
Anna (for I will admit it) after the death of my pitiable

husband Sychaeus and after my household gods were
spattered with my brother’s blood, this man alone has moved my feelings…
Here Virgil would have us drawn to consider an only slightly later moment in
Ariadne’s soliloquy of lament, as she momentarily ponders the possibility of
seeking help from her father Minos (180 – 1)
an patris auxilium sperem? quemne ipsa reliqui

respersum iuuenem fraterna caede secuta?
 Williams () , on Aeneid . , notes the Catullan source of the phrase sedibus hospes.
Virgil has Dido herself repeat the word hospes with some irony at  (also at the conclusion of
the hexameter).
Or am I to expect help from my father, whom of my own

accord I abandoned, as I pursued a youth splattered with the blood of my brother?
With Catullus’ support Virgil suggests that we should still expect the future story
of Aeneas to complement that of Theseus, forsaking Ariadne for ambitions
elsewhere.⁹ But the present allusion shifts the mythic parallel away from the
male protagonists to suggest a similarity between Dido and Ariadne that only
further strengthens the other association. Dido’s brother Pygmalion had killed
his sister’s husband, just as Theseus had disposed of the Minotaur, here fully
humanized into the role of frater.
And Catullus 64 retains a prominent presence throughout the book as it
evolves. Let me offer two examples. When we first meet the Cretan princess it
is by means of simile, as she watches her beloved recede into the distance on
his ship (60 – 2):
quem procul ex alga maestis Minois ocellis,

saxea ut effigies bacchantis, prospicit, eheu,
prospicit et magnis curarum fluctuat undis,…
The Minoan girl watches him, alas, afar, from the seaweed,
like the stone figure of a maenad, watches him, and seethes
on huge waves of distress.
Catullus’s words lead Virgil in two directions. First is the repetition of prospicit
combined with the extraordinary exclamation eheu which can refer to Ariadne’s
own suffering, to the narrator’s sympathy with her plight, or to both. Virgil
adopts the verb at one of the most poignant moments in his text (4.408 – 10):
quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus,

quosue dabas gemitus, cum litora feruere late
prospiceres arce ex summa,..!
What then were your feelings, Dido, as you beheld such a

sight, or what groans did you utter when from the top of the
citadel you looked out on the shore swirling far and wide!
Both heroines are observing the withdrawal of their lovers. Catullus has his read-
ers share in the event by having the exclamation eheu apply to Ariadne as she
suffers, to the empathetic narrator, or even to us as we appreciate both her sit-
uation and its expression in poetry. Virgil absorbs and reproduces his predeces-
 The repetitions are also noted by O’Hara () , on .  –  and Nappa () .
sor’s complex presentation of emotionality by directly addressing his character,

in this case Dido, a type of figuration extremely rare in epic. Through Virgil’s
genius, we are there on the fortress of Carthage sharing its ruler’s emotions.¹⁰
Likewise the phrase magnis curarum fluctuat undis reappears later in the
saga of Dido as she ponders her destiny (4.531– 2):
…ingeminant curae rursusque resurgens

saeuit amor magnoque irarum fluctuat aestu.
…her sufferings redouble and love rages, swelling up again,

and she seethes on a mighty tide of anger.
Ariadne’s curae are both reiterated and mutated into irae as the forsaken, now
enraged, lover prepares to bring about her own demise.
Let me offer one final example of Ariadne’s metamorphosis into Dido. At
64.197, as she nears the finale of her lament, Ariadne calls herself inops, ardens,
amenti caeca furore (helpless, burning, blind from insane madness). Virgil’s Juno
uses similar language to describe love-sick Dido (Aeneid 4.101):
ardet amans Dido traxitque per ossa furorem.
Dido burns with love and conveyed the wildness through her bones.
Virgil saves inops to distinguish Dido at line 300 when, like Ariadne, she is as-
sured of her lover’s departure. At this earlier stage of her denouement Virgil
makes the small alteration from Catullus of amenti into amans as if to have us
hear some equivalency between love and madness.¹¹
But a further set of allusions to Catullus 64 within these same lines compli-
cates, and deepens, this straightforward connection of our present adventurer on
the way to Rome and the mythic king of Athens. For, again through the interme-
diary of Catullus, Virgil adds a different hero, Achilles, to the parallels he addu-
 The phrase prospiceres arce ex summa also looks in two directions within Catullus’ poem. It
serves as a reminder of l.  where Ariadne is “looking out from the wave-resounding shore of
Dia” (fluentisono prospectans litore Diae). Prospectans, in turn, looks ahead to Catullus’ double
use of prospicit and to Virgil’s prospiceres just as litore anticipates litora. Secondly the phrase
arce ex summa is a bow to Catullus’ use of summa ex arce (.). There Aegeus is seen yearn-
ing for his son’s return as he looks out over the water. Like Dido, he becomes a suicide.
 We might also note the reappearance of part of .: nullus amor tali coniunxit foedere
amantes,…(no love joined lovers in such a pact) at Aeneid . when Dido speaks of lovers
not equally allied (…non aequo foedere amantis). The first tells of the union of Peleus and Thetis,
the second of her connection with Aeneas. Again Achilles is implicitly in the background of both
passages.
ces for Aeneas. We noted earlier how the appearance of the word uirtutes, ap-
plied to Achilles at 64.348, anticipates its reappearance in reference to Aeneas
at 4.3 (uiri uirtus). It is time to see how Virgil bolsters the suggestion.
At 64.338 – 41 the Fates sing of the marriage’s offspring as follows:
nascetur uobis expers terroris Achilles

hostibus haud tergo, sed forti pectore notus,
qui persaepe uago uictor certamine cursus
flammea praeuertet celeris uestigia ceruae.
Achilles, immune from fear, will be born to you, known to

his enemies not at all by his back but by his brave breast.
Quite often, in the wide-ranging contest of the race, he will
outstrip the fiery footsteps of the fleet deer.
We first meet Catullus’ Achilles at line 11 whose preceding hexameter I have al-
ready quoted. I will add it again as a further reminder of the earlier poet’s intense
presence here in Virgil’s imagination (4.10 – 11):
quis nouus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes,

quem sese ore ferens, quam forti pectore et armis!
Who is this remarkable guest who has made his way into
our dwelling? What distinction his features carry, how brave in heart and weaponry!
The fact that this is Virgil’s only use of the phrase forti pectore in the singular
makes the bow to Catullus the more striking.¹² The new guest is like Theseus
but his stalwart appearance is also similar to that of Catullus’ Achilles. Line 11
reaffirms the parallel in one of the Augustan poet’s most extraordinary acts of
poetic homage.¹³
Twelve lines later, still in Dido’s speech to Anna, Virgil gives her a striking
phrase as she realizes that her feelings for Aeneas are akin to the emotions
she had felt for her late husband (4.23):
…agnosco ueteris uestigia flammae.
 We find fortia…pectora at Aeneid . – .

 At line  Dido observes that Aeneas’s mien demonstrates his divine background (genus esse
deorum). Catullus uses a similar phrase (deum genus) at . to define the race of heroes in
more general terms. Since he continues on to describe the initial meeting of Peleus and Thetis,
Achilles is also vicariously at hand.
…I sense again the traces of the former flame.¹⁴
Catullus’ phrase flammea uestigia is unique in preserved Latin letters. Virgil

sensed its distinction and made it his own by turning the adjective flammea
into its noun, flammae, and by humanizing the metaphor.¹⁵ What is fiery now
is not an animal’s fleetness of foot but the warmth of emotion, the recollection
of past sensation that now becomes an aspect of the fire (igni, 2) by which Dido
is engulfed. But the very brilliance of Virgil’s adoption stresses all the more the
influence of poem 64, which is to say the specter of Catullus’s Achilles behind
Aeneas and his relationship with Dido.¹⁶
Virgil carefully complicates matters by adding another allusion from the ep-
ithalamium to the mix and another figure to his intellectual cast of characters.
We have already met Achilles, the product of the marriage. Through Virgil’s var-
iations on his predecessor’s art we also now take note of one of the strangest at-
tendees at the ceremony itself, Prometheus. He figures in the myth of Peleus and
Thetis for having warned Zeus against marrying the future bride because she was
predicted to bear a son stronger than his father. What Catullus calls to our atten-
tion – and Virgil has us implicitly remember – is the punishment that he suffered
for defying the gods and granting fire to mankind. He follows in a procession of
guests (64.295)
extenuata gerens ueteris uestigia poenae,…
bearing the faded traces of his ancient penalty,…
Virgil’s salient change of Catullus’s poenae to flammae not only recalls the asso-
ciation of Prometheus with fire but makes a specific connection with the meta-
phoric “blind fire” in which Dido is caught at the opening of the book.
It thus also suggests that the fire is both illicit and destructive, illicit because
it violates the fidelity Dido acknowledges that she owes her dead husband, de-
structive because it will soon take its turn toward realism in the conflagration
that is part of the queen’s death scene.
 For the intertextual force of agnosco here see Hinds () . I thank Ioannis Ziogas for call-
ing this reference to my attention.
 Catullus’s cerua also soon reappears in the simile that begins at Aeneid ..
 The phrase uestigia flammae is equally unique.
The literary afterlife of Virgil’s wording also deserves notice. At line 48 of canto 30 of the Pur-
gatorio canticle of the Divina Commedia, Dante has his pilgrim announce “conosco i segni dell’
antica fiamma.” He has just seen his new escort, and former beloved, Beatrice, and Virgil has
vanished, as guide within the story but not as ancestor poet.
Several other bows to Catullus also suggest the Greek hero’s presence in
these initial lines.¹⁷ The first occurs at line 16 where Dido announces that it is
a firm purpose “for me not to wish to ally myself with anyone in the bond of
the marriage yoke” (…ne cui me uinclo uellem sociare iugali). Virgil would have
us think back to Catullus’s narrator telling (64.302) how the goddess Diana
“had no desire to share in honoring the wedding torches of Thetis” (nec Thetidis
taedas uoluit celebrare iugalis).
It is not only the repetition of the verb uolo in uoluit and uellem or the echo-
ing line endings (…are iugalis becomes…are iugali) that suggest we hear the ear-
lier passage in the later. Catullus’ is the first use in Latin of the adjective iugalis,
the simple form where we might expect the compound coniugalis,¹⁸ in connec-
tion with the yoke of marriage. Virgil’s use, at Aeneid 4.16, is the second.¹⁹ For
a moment Dido is still akin to the virginal Diana, as Virgil had presented her
in simile at 1.498 – 502. But Aeneas as Theseus and Achilles is also already at
hand in her life through the magic of words.
Lines 65 – 7 present perhaps the most intensive borrowing of all:
heu, uatum ignarae mentes! quid uota furentem,

quid delubra iuuant? est mollis flamma medullas
interea et tacitum uiuit sub pectore uulnus.
Alas, ignorant minds of seers! What help are prayers, what

help shrines to a raging woman? A flame gnaws at her
vitals all the while and a silent wound lives beneath her breast.
Virgil would have us compare a parallel moment in the career of Ariadne

(64.91– 5):
…non prius ex illo flagrantia declinauit

lumina quam cuncto concepit corpore flammam
funditus atque imis exarsit tota medullis.
heu, misere exagitans immiti corde furores
sancte puer, curis hominum qui gaudia misces,…!
…she did not turn her burning eyes away from him [Theseus]
until she caught fire deep within her whole body and burned
 Achilles is already present inferentially by the several parallels in Aeneid  between the ban-
quet Dido puts on for Aeneas and the preparations for the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis.
Cf. in particular Catullus . –  and Aeneid . –  and . Several of the parallels, and
their consequences, are discussed by Nappa (), especially  – .
 The first preserved use of the compound is by Varro Reatinus (in Nonius M).
 Virgil employs the same phrase again shortly later (uincla iugalia, .).
throughout in her inmost vitals. Alas, godlike youth, to an

extreme stirring up madness with your pitiless heart, who mingle men’s joys with cares…!
The echoes of flammam, medullis, and furores in flamma, medullas, and

furentem ²⁰ sustain the recollection. But what gives this parallel particular
force is the intensity of the authorial intervention. In both instances we have
the same exclamation – heu! – at the opening of the hexameter, and in both
we continue with the use of apostrophe. In Catullus the address is to Cupid,
who brings madness to lovers. In Virgil the narrator exclaims at the thoughts
of seers who imagine they can bring comfort to an affliction that, in Dido’s
case, will know no cure. In each instance the correspondence reminds us that
we are at the start of a love affair that will bring acute sorrow to both protago-
nists and in one case will lead to death.
One further example links Dido’s faltering self-analysis with Catullus’s wed-
ding-hymn of the Fates. As they near their conclusion the three singers command
the marrying couple (64.372 – 3):
quare, agite, optatos animi coniungite amores.

accipiat coniunx felici foedere diuam,…
Come, then, unite the loves which your mind has yearned
for. Let the husband receive the goddess in happy compact…
Their command resonates with Dido’s own concluding reminiscence of Sychaeus

and her own earlier marriage (4.28 – 9):
…ille meos, primus qui me sibi iunxit, amores

abstulit; ille habeat secum seruetque sepulcro.
He who first joined me to himself has taken away my

loves. Let him keep them with him and guard them in the grave.
Because of the Catullan parallel, as we read line 28 we first expect amores to be

the subject of iunxit. It is only when we turn to the beginning of the next line and
to the enjambed verb abstulit do we realize that Dido is claiming that Sychaeus
took all her ability to love intensely – hence the poetic plural, amores – away
with him in death. But the very disjointedness of the syntax from the start of
line 28 suggests a form of disjuncture between her words and her thoughts,
which is also to say between herself and her past. It will not be long before Vir-
gil’s narrator defines the situation with open exactness (4.171– 2):
 Furentem is reiterated shortly in furens ().

nec iam furtiuum Dido meditatur amorem:

coniugium uocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam.
Dido does not now contemplate a stealthy love. She calls it

marriage. With this title she veils her fault.
The advent of Aeneas in his many guises has caused the disintegration of one
coniugium – a loyalty belonging to the past – and the initiation of another,
more destructively disrupting one.
A further reminiscence, one which caught the attention of Macrobius,²¹ also
involves brilliant figuration. In the first Ariadne is speaking (64.171– 2):
Iuppiter omnipotens, utinam ne tempore primo

Cnosia Cecropiae tetigissent litora puppes,…
All-powerful Jupiter, would that in the first place the Attic

ships had not touched the Cnosian shores…
In Virgil’s transformation Dido is uttering her last speech as her self-wounding

with Aeneas’ sword takes effect (4.657– 8):
…felix, heu nimium felix, si litora tantum

numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae.
…happy, alas too happy, if only the Dardan vessels had

never touched our shores.
Once again, as he describes her life ebbing away,²² Virgil, by allusion, has his
heroine compare herself to grieving Ariadne and, therefore by implication, Ae-
neas to the departing Theseus. But Virgil changes Ariadne’s negative wish into
Dido’s prayer that is also an act of distancing self-scrutiny. Apostrophe to a
god is replaced by the words of a speaker capable of exclaiming in sorrow at
her own too-happy past. Ariadne would will away what has already happened.
Dido, through Virgil’s magic, can also intervene in her own final words to ex-
press a grief in which we all share.
Given the immediacy of Catullus 64 especially in the opening lines of Aeneid
4, it is with some irony that Virgil allots the punning phrase uiri uirtus (3) to Dido
as she ponders the quality of her Trojan guest. Let us look at Catullus’s uses of
 Macrobius Saturnalia ...

 With typical tact Virgil chooses not to describe the actual moment where Dido
stabs herself. At line 646 she unsheathes Aeneas’ sword. At 664– 5 it is frothing with blood.
the second word. We first find it at line 51 as we begin the expansive ekphrasis
describing the coverlet of the marriage bed:
haec uestis priscis hominum uariata figuris

heroum mira uirtutes indicat arte.
This cloth, embroidered with the shapes of men of old,

sets forth in astonishing artistry the excellences of heroes.
Since what follows is essentially the tale of Ariadne’s desertion by Theseus that
features her extensive soliloquy of grief,²³ the high quality of his heroic behavior,
which the introduction leads us to expect, consists largely of abandoning the
woman who had helped him achieve his mission and who was now following
him as lover. As the narrator puts it (64.57),
desertam in sola miseram se cernat harena.
she beholds herself, pitiable, forsaken on the lonely sand.
Catullus’s next example of heroic “virtues,” as we noted earlier, is to be found at

line 348 where we are introduced to the prowess of Achilles, his “outstanding
abilities and notable deeds” that mothers declare at the funeral ceremonies of
their sons whom he has killed. The generality is confirmed at line 357 by a par-
ticularly gruesome detail:
testis erit magnis uirtutibus unda Scamandri,…
The wave of the Scamander will serve as witness to his great virtues…
The Trojan river has been “narrowed” by the results of his uirtutes, namely by the
heaps of bodies he has slaughtered. And there is a further witness (testis, 362),
perhaps the most ironic of all, to his prowess: the slaughter of Polyxena as sac-
rifice on his tomb.²⁴ Catullus’ repetitions of wording, sound and sense urge our
imaginations to view the two occasions in common. Achilles, in life, (64.360):
 The influence of Ariadne’s speech on Dido’s addresses to Aeneas and their surrounding cir-
cumstances has often been remarked upon. For example, cf. . –  and Aeneid . – ,
 –  and  – ,  –  and  – ,  –  and  – .
The division of Ariadne’s double apostrophe perfide at 132– 3 between Aeneid 4.305 and 336 is
discussed by Wills (1998), especially 278 – 9. See also Wills (1996) 15 – 33, especially 26 – 30; Kil-
roy (1969).
 For Achilles’ relationship with Polyxena see most recently Fantuzzi ()  – .
For Polyxena’s death the locus classicus is Euripides Hecuba 18 – 82. In Latin literature, apart
from her appearance in Catullus 64, see Ovid Metamorphoses 13.439 – 80 and Seneca Troades
…alta tepefaciet permixta flumina caede.
…will make the deep streams warm with the mingled gore.²⁵
In death he claims the virgin’s blood (64.368):
…alta Polyxenia madefient caede sepulcra,…
…the lofty tomb will become dank with the blood of Polyxena.
Courageous Achilles impedes the natural with the unnatural and from the grave
demands a helpless woman as victim.
We will look again at Catullus’s depiction of the latter event in a moment.
But first let us return to Catullus and the opening of Aeneid 4 by way of summa-
ry. Catullus 64 has us share in two separate delineations of heroic uirtutes, each
rife with irony. Following the linearity of the poem we first watch the valor of
Theseus, as illustrated on the bridal coverlet, when he deserts, while she sleeps,
the woman who had helped him accomplish one of his most famous deeds and
thereafter had followed him on his return home. We then listen to the epithala-
mium sung by the Fates as they tell of the bravery of Achilles while he plugs up a
river’s channel with corpses and in death demands as offering a virgin slaugh-
tered on his tomb.
Allusions to Catullus’s two characterizations permeate and are intermeshed
in the opening verses of Aeneid 4. From the references to Theseus we expect that
the hero-lover will abandon the woman who had given him aid, and Virgil will
not disappoint us, however complex his examination of the moral judgments of
each of his protagonist. By means of the linkage between Aeneas and Catullus’s
Achilles we expect bloodshed to follow, as in the case of Polyxena, bloodshed
caused by a hero’s command, issued in absentia. Again our expectations are
not thwarted as the initial metaphors of fire and wound become at the book’s
conclusion the flames of the pyre that engulf the suicidal queen and the fatal
1118 – 64 (with the commentary of Boyle (1994) ad loc). See also Andromache’s reference to her
sister-in-law’s death at Aeneid 3.321– 3 with Servius’s comment.
The Ovidian passage and especially its references to Aeneid 12 deserve separate treatment.
 With permixta flumina caede cf. also Aeneid . –  (…permixti caede uirorum /
semianimes…equi). On these lines see Putnam (2011) 22.
With 64.368– 9 cf. also Aeneid 5.328 – 30. These contain the only uses of the
verb madefacio in each author.
wound inflicted by Aeneas’ sword, once a present from lover to lover, now
“frothing with [Dido’s] blood.”²⁶
Catullus concentrates the brutality of Achilles into some two dozen verses of
his masterpiece.²⁷ Virgil has us watch the evolving violence of his hero as he
comes to power over the last three books of his epic. In book 10 we study Aeneas’
merciless conduct against the background of the barbarous behavior of Achilles
in book 21 of the Iliad. And book 12, and especially the poem’s ending, offer a
masterful recasting of the chase and death of Hector at the hands of his Greek
assailant as told in Iliad 22. Achilles offers his opponent Hector no mercy. Nei-
ther does Aeneas spare Turnus, his wounded, suppliant foe as his epic con-
cludes.
Particular examples of the presence of Catullus’s Achilles are to be found
scattered through the poem’s second half. For example, 7.720 – 1:
…cum sole nouo densae torrentur aristae

aut Hermi campo aut Lyciae flauentibus aruis. –
…when in the early sun crowded corn-ears are scorched

either in the plain of Hermus or the golden fields of Lycia. –
is drawn in part from the image of Achilles as grim reaper of bodies at 64.353 – 5:
namque uelut densas praecerpens messor aristas

sole sub ardenti flauentia demetit arua
Troiugenum infesto prosternet corpora ferro.
…for as the reaper, cropping crowded corn-ears under the

burning sun, mows down the golden fields he with his hostile
weapon will lay low the bodies of Trojan-born.
Three books later, at 10.513 – 15, Virgil allots the same analogy to Aeneas himself:
…proxima quaeque metit gladio latumque per agmen

ardens limitem agit ferro, te, Turne, superbum
caede nova quaerens.
…With the sword he mows down whatever is nearby and

afire drives a wide swath through the ranks with his weapon,
tracking you, Turnus, proud from your fresh slaughter.
 Aeneid . –  (ensem…cruore / spumantem). Virgil mentions the metaphoric uulnus at

lines  and , the real wound at , in the plural, and .
 On Achilles’s barbaric conduct see Putnam () especially ; Daniels ( – ) in
particular  – .
Catullus’s future Achilles becomes Virgil’s present Aeneas as he pursues his way
toward Turnus, his prideful foe.²⁸
It is only at the conclusion of the poem that the two meet in decisive combat.
I will end by tracing one further allusion to Catullus’s Achilles. This will lead us
back to a last look at Dido.
We return to Polyxena, Achilles’s final victim, and extend our examination
from a line that we looked at before (64.368 – 70):
…alta Polyxenia madefient caede sepulcra;

quae, uelut ancipiti succumbens uictima ferro,
proiciet truncum summisso poplite corpus.
…the lofty tomb will become dank with the blood of

Polyxena. She, like a victim collapsing beneath the double-
bladed sword, will throw forward her headless body with her knee bowed under her.
The intensely graphic nature of Catullus’s description fixes it in our mind. The
parallel back and forth between the two participles succumbens and summisso
at the same point in adjacent hexameters, by their joint use of the prefix sub-
calls attention to the lowered posture of the victim’s body, yet proiciet vivifies
the corpse’s ability to thrust itself forward even in death.
Line 369 looks ahead to Virgil’s use of the phrase ferro ancipiti at Aeneid
7.525 as the initial battle lines join. But it is to an extraordinary echo of line 370:
proiciet truncum summisso poplite corpus –
at the end of his epic that the poet would have us particularly attend. Aeneas has
hurled his spear, flying like a black whirlwind, which pierces the thigh of his op-
ponent. Then (926 – 7):
…incidit ictus
ingens ad terram duplicato poplite Turnus.
Stricken, huge Turnus fell to the ground, his knee doubled

under.
The assonance with which the sentence begins, incidit ictus, leads us inexorably
into the next line (ingens) while the rhyming, disyllabic hexameter endings
(ictus, Turnus complemented by ingens) reinforce the tight mesh of words de-
 The connection is made by Philip Hardie in his illuminating essay on “Virgil’s Catullan
Plots” () especially .
scribing the hero’s collapse. But it is the echo of Catullus that lends Virgil’s lan-
guage its particular moral force. The repetition of poplite, the sonic echoes of
truncum in terram and of corpus in Turnus, each in the same position in their re-
spective lines, ask us to draw Catullus’ context into Virgil’s and to serve as com-
mentary on it.
When we do so Aeneas becomes Achilles for the poem’s last time. But the
absorption of one scenario into another produces a particularly horrendous re-
sult. Achilles’s fellow Greeks slay Polyxena as an offering to their dead compan-
ion at his orders from beyond the grave. His Roman counterpart is very much
alive as he kills his victim, now a supplex (the word is a further expansion of Ca-
tullus’s summisso). And, four lines from the epic’s end, Virgil makes it clear that,
in Aeneas’s own words, this is once again a human sacrifice (948 – 9):²⁹
‘…Pallas te hoc uulnere, Pallas

immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit.’
“…Pallas, Pallas sacrifices you with this wound and exacts

punishment from your criminal blood.”
The voice from outside in Catullus has now become the voice of Pallas speaking
first from within the living Aeneas and then from outside to us. And that voice
tells of a criminality of which Virgil’s text has hitherto offered no evidence
and of a sacrifice based on vengeance extracted from a suppliant pleading for
mercy. It is not as far as one might at first think from Polyxena to Turnus, the
one slaughtered on a tomb of the dead, the other immolated in memory of the
dead who in fact lives pointedly on (Pallas, Pallas) in the person of his surrogate.
Aeneas performs the act of requital necessary, at least in his thoughts and words,
to satisfy the demands of retaliation.
This leads us back to Dido and to the ghost of Catullus’s Achilles hovering
over Virgil’s presentation of Aeneas to the Carthaginian queen as she begins the
tortuous journey from metaphor to reality, from love’s wound and flames to the
immediacy of her self-slaughter on the pyre of her own manufacture. The irony
that lies in the fact that she uses Aeneas’s gifted sword for her deed has not been
lost on critics. That she precedes Turnus as a type of Polyxena, a victim of Ae-
neas’s Achillean journey toward Rome, on the one hand, and toward intense
emotional loss, on the other, should be brought into the conversation.
 Virgil uses the word immolo twice in book  (lines  and ) to describe Aeneas’ kill-
ings.
Bibliography
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97 – 101.
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Gregson Davis
Violent Retribution and Pietas: The Closure
of the Aeneid Revisited
Summary: The final episode of Vergil’s Aeneid – the slaying of Turnus – has
sparked extended controversy among many leading scholars in the past century
regarding the portrayal of pius Aeneas. The hero’s succumbing to fierce and
vengeful anger upon catching sight of the sword belt of Pallas decorating the
body of the suppliant Turnus, and his outright rejection, after momentary hesi-
tation, of the latter’s plea for mercy have seemed to many modern readers to be
inconsistent with Julian values of clementia and to the imperial policy, embodied
in Anchises’ speech in Aeneid 6, of “sparing the subjugated” (parcere subiectis).
Several critics interpret Aeneas’ action and its motivation as a deplorable rever-
sion to the notorious Achillean model of uncontrolled anger. This paper revisits
the issue of the nature and scope of Aeneas’ angry outburst from both an ethno-
graphic and philosophical perspective. The execution of Turnus is shown to be
totally consistent with, even required by, Roman norms of pietas and its core ob-
ligations. In terms of the ethical implications of the episode, the violent ira dis-
played by Aeneas is fundamentally consonant with Epicurean thought on the
subject of justified anger – a subject in which Vergil was demonstrably steeped.
Keywords: Pius; pietas; ira; furor; clementia; modus; Epicurean thought; Philode-
mus; ethics
In her introduction to Ahl’s robust English rendition of the Aeneid in the Oxford
World’s Classics series, Elaine Fantham interrogates the controversial episode
that closes the poem: the execution of Turnus:
“Does anger at Pallas’ pathetic death, or shame at failing to protect him, justify him [Ae-
neas] in over-riding Anchises’ precept of sparing the humbled? Here most recent scholars,
especially in North America, believe that Virgil withholds his approval from Aeneas’ act,
and that the emphasis on his anger marks the poet’s disapproval of Aeneas’ action.”
After this summary of what now verges on becoming the conventional wisdom on the sub-
ject, Fantham offers an alternate interpretation that is both succinct and persuasive: “There
is another way of reading the act, however: remembering Hercules’ anger with Cacus, and
Aeneas’ own rage at the innocent and honourable Lausus, I would suggest that Aeneas’
anger can be seen as psychologically necessary, if he is to kill his humbled opponent,
and that it is even more necessary, politically, for Turnus to die.”[Emphases mine].¹
 Fantham () xliv. The most eloquent and sophisticated argument for interpreting the
170 Gregson Davis
In this paper, I shall amplify Fantham’s recourse to psychological and political

modes of explication by bringing into play equally significant philosophical
and cultural perspectives on Aeneas’ consummate act. My discussion aims at
synthesizing insights provided by these complementary vantage-points on the
poem’s finale, and thereby at further undermining the anachronistic scholarly
opinion regarding Vergil’s presumed “disapproval” of his hero’s action. The ex-
ecution of Turnus is, I hope to sustain, fully consonant with Aeneas’ signature
virtue of pietas, as well as with Greco-Roman cultural norms that selectively jus-
tify anger and violent acts of revenge that so many modern critics have found
morally repugnant. I shall argue, somewhat against the grain, that the ethical
subtext underpinning the narrative execution vindicates the hero’s momentarily
deferred, but ultimately appropriate, action of killing his opponent. My revisit to
the arena of the long-standing philological contestation builds upon the path-
breaking articles of Galinsky that pointed the way to a philosophically grounded
understanding of Vergilian poetry.²
Before unpacking the ethical dimension of the act, a brief reconsideration of
the “ring-compositional” organization of Vergil’s epic is in order. The “relentless
anger of savage Juno” (saeuae memorem Iunonis ob iram) is foregrounded at 1.4
as a root cause of Aeneas’ prolonged and perilous journey to his new home in
Italy. After calling on the Muse to enunciate the multiple factors (causas) fueling
the goddess’ anger, the poet asks first a specific, and then a general question
(1.8 – 11):³
Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso

quidue dolens, regina deum tot uoluere casus
insignem pietate uirum, tot adire labores
impulerit. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?
Muse, let the memories spill through me. What divine will was wounded,
What deep hurt made the queen of the gods thrust a famously righteous
Man into so many spirals of chance to face so many labours?
Anger so great: can it really reside in the spirits of heaven?
The rhetorical question strikingly elevates the explanation of the multiple mo-
tives fueling the anger of a particular goddess, Juno, to a broad, ontological
slaying of Turnus as powered by irrational and unjustifiable rage is to be found in Putnam

()  – .
 Galinsky (; ).
 The text of the Aeneid is cited in the edition of Geymonat (). Accompanying English
translations are from Ahl (), with occasional slight alterations duly noted. Emphases are
mine.
query into the nature of the divine mind in relation to anger. Especially salient in
the formulation of the question is its overtly philosophical mold; more precisely
stated, it is framed in transparently Epicurean terms. As articulated most clearly
for Vergil’s generation by Lucretius, the gods in the ontological concepts of the
Garden, are imagined as totally detached from the affairs of earth-bound hu-
mans; they dwell in the intermundia and, untouched by turbulent human emo-
tions, such as anger, enjoy perfect ataraxia (De Rerum Natura 2. 646 – 651): ⁴
omnis enim per se diuum natura necessest

immortali aeuo summa cum pace fruatur
semota ab nostris rebus seiunctaque longe.
nam priuata dolore omni, priuata periclis,
ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri,
nec bene promeritis capitur nec tangitur ira.
for the whole nature of the gods necessarily

enjoys immortal existence in perfect peace, far
removed and set apart from our affairs; for
relieved of all pain, relieved of all dangers,
potent by virtue of its own resources, without
need of us, it is neither affected by our devotions
nor touched by anger.
By virtue of the generalizing scope of his interrogation, the poet of the Aeneid not
only challenges the traditional Olympian apparatus that the epic genre inherited
from Homer, but also places the problematic of anger in relation to eudaimonia
at the ethical forefront of the narrative. In a striking coda of “ring-composition-
al” inversion, the poem culminates in the violent action of a “righteous” hero
who, terribilis ira, gives vent to his aroused emotions by executing his defeated
and supplicant opponent (12.946 – 7). Both in its divine and semi-divine embodi-
ments (Juno and Aeneas), the problematic of anger constitutes thematic “book-
ends” that mirror a central preoccupation of the narrator.
To what extent is Vergil’s portrayal of Aeneas’ anger in the latter half of the
poem compatible with the Epicurean framework he foregrounds in the poem’s
opening? Contrary to a widespread misperception that both Stoics and Epicur-
eans condemned anger in absolute terms, there is ample documentation in
our main sources to show that the Epicureans, at least, fully condoned the ex-
pression of human anger, provided it was limited in scope and duration. In
this respect, their flexible doctrine on this matter does not depart substantially
from the position of Aristotle and the Peripatetics, who went so far as to regard
 De Rerum Natura is quoted in the text of Bailey’s OCT (). The English translation is mine.
172 Gregson Davis
acts of angry vengeance as not only justifiable under the right circumstances but
also commendable and in keeping with virtue.
Leading scholars of Epicurean philosophy have, of course, long been aware
that the founder’s teaching on the subject of anger (orge; thymos) is far more
nuanced than might have been logically inferable from a value-system that
sees mental serenity (ataraxia) as the highest good. Our knowledge of this com-
plex Epicurean stance has been vastly increased in the last few decades, thanks
to the renewed and proliferating scholarly attention being paid to the writings of
Philodemus, whose treatise on anger (De Ira) has been magisterially edited by
Indelli. In the introduction to his edition of the fragmentary text, Indelli summa-
rizes these views in authoritative fashion: according to the precepts of the Gar-
den, anger is a natural emotion and the sophos may give vent to it if it is ration-
ally motivated and kept within appropriate bounds. Vergil’s extended sojourn in
Campania (“Parthenope”), during which he studied philosophy under the guid-
ance of resident émigré Greek philosophers (Siro and Philodemus), makes it vir-
tually certain that he was intimately familiar with this view of the Epicurean
school that bestowed approval of anger within certain limits.⁵
If the expression of anger on the part of the virtuous man (sophos) did not
meet with disapproval in Epicurean doctrine, then our understanding of the
angry action of the virtuous Aeneas at the closure of the epic needs to take
this contemporary conversation seriously into account. Within these historical
and philosophical parameters, what emerges as reprehensible in the expression
of anger throughout the latter half of the Aeneid, in particular, is a lack of mod-
eration (modus) on the part of leading characters who act out this powerful emo-
tional impulse.
The idea of justifiable anger in the ethical domain converges, on the socio-
cultural plane, with the imperative undergirding military arête, for success on
the battlefield, in the Greco-Roman tradition, requires an angry disposition as
a necessary part of the mental equipment of the warrior. Readers of the Homeric
poems encounter this formulaic element repeatedly in the motif of heroic aristeia
as performed by both Greek and Trojan combatants. It is no exaggeration to
maintain that the deliberate arousal of anger is an endemic (even banal) prereq-
uisite to soldierly prowess. Vergil is at pains to emphasize this association be-
 See Indelli ()  – . For a thorough-going analysis of the Epicurean outlook on anger,
consult further Indelli (); Galinsky (); Asmis (). On the impact of Vergil’s Campa-
nian studies on his early work, in particular, see Davis (). Janko ()  –  documents
Vergil’s close association with the Epicurean circle of émigré Greek teachers of philosophy at
Herculaneum. For a penetrating discussion of the intertextual linkage to the Homeric treatment
of anger, see Barchiesi ().
tween efficacious battlefield combat and its emotional stimulus at the precise
moment in the epic when Aeneas is about to enter the fray, having freshly re-
ceived the divine armor supplied by Vulcan and is getting ready to do battle
with Turnus. While his unbridled opponent is portrayed as giving way to a spe-
cies of anger that is compared to that of a ferocious bull on the rampage
(12.100 – 6), the Trojan hero, by contrast, puts on an angry frame of mind,
based on the self-arousal of the mental “equipment” that is the sine qua non
of battlefield combat (12.107– 9):
Nec minus interea maternis saeuus in armis

Aeneas acuit Martem et se suscitat ira,
oblato gaudens componi foedere bellum.
Meanwhile Aeneas, who’s no less ferocious in armour his mother

Gave him, is honing his own Martial edge, self-lashed in his anger. ⁶
Thrilled that the war’s being settled on terms that his treaty has offered.
This fulcral scene, which opens the curtain on the decisive phase of the confron-
tation between Turnus and Aeneas, leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind about
the intrinsic bond between military arete and the angry disposition that is essen-
tial to its successful realization. At the same time, it discriminates between the
unbounded and irrational thymos of Turnus and the martial frame of mind
that Aeneas deliberately assumes in preparation for the ensuing conflict. The lat-
ter’s subsequent performance on the battlefield against the formidable Rutulians
evinces his timely recovery of his dormant capacity for martial ira that is a pre-
requisite for his eventual pacification of Italy and the fulfillment of his destined
role as Rome’s founder.
To resume our delineation of the ethical dimension of the conflict between
the leaders of the two sides, let us briefly review the terms in which Vergil explic-
itly faults Turnus in the narration of the slaying of Pallas. After the conventional
exchange of vaunts, the unequally matched contest proceeds to its predictable
result. At this juncture in the action, the epic narrator pointedly editorializes,
in philosophical tones, on the conduct of the victorious Turnus (10.501– 2):
Nescia mens hominum fati sortisque future

et seruare modum rebus sublata secundis!
 I have substituted the phrase “no less ferocious” for “no less a savage” in Ahl’s translation of
the words nec minus…saeuus on the grounds that, whereas Vergil portrays the ferocity of both
combatants as matched in intensity, the motivating force behind each warrior’s anger is quali-
tatively different.
174 Gregson Davis
Witness the human mind, knowing nothing of fate or the future,

Nothing about [observing] moderation when puffed with success and good fortune!⁷
The governing idea behind the narrator’s gnomic intervention is the importance
of observing the mean (seruare modum) in relation to circumstances, whether
these are adverse or, as in the case of Turnus, favorable (secundis).⁸ In Epicurean
ethics the injunction to impose a limit (peras) on human drives figures promi-
nently as a guide to prudential tempering of extreme emotions. Turnus’ immod-
erate conduct and accompanying words blatantly violate this ethical norm and
the poet, in an undisguised foreshadowing of the end of the poem, expatiates
on the eventual regret on the part of the impetuous Italian leader (10.503 – 5):
Turno tempus erit magno cum optauerit emptum

intactum Pallanta, et cum spolia ista diemque
oderit
Turnus will find there’s a time when he’ll wish he could purchase an unscathed
Pallas, a time when he’ll hate these spoils and the day he won them
This unequivocal moral encoding of Turnus’ behavior sets the stage for his ulti-
mate slaying at the hands of an incensed Aeneas – a slaying that dooms the im-
moderate adversary to justified retaliation.
The notion that an act of violent retribution may be deemed praiseworthy
under the right circumstances is fully in keeping with Greco-Roman cultural val-
ues relating to kinship responsibilities. In the case of archaic society – the pre-
sumptive dramatic setting for Aeneas’ transplantation to Italy – the obligation of
the father to exact vengeance on behalf of crimes perpetrated against members
of his close kin was widely accepted. To the extent that Vergil cast Aeneas as the
designated protector – virtually a surrogate father –in relation to Evander’s son,
Pallas, it became incumbent upon the Trojan hero to take ultimate vengeance on
Turnus. Aeneas in his lament over Pallas’ death expresses his commitment to
Evander in terms of promised fides (promissa: 11.45; magna fides: 11.55). In his
call for blood-retribution, the “directives” (mandata) Evander sends to Aeneas
 I have added the word “observing” as an explanatory parenthesis to Ahl’s translation in order
to bring out Vergil’s emphasis on the verb, seruare, which is crucial to his point about the ob-
servance of limit.
 The emotional mean in relation to fortune is based on a rational calculus. The idea is already
fully articulated in the archaic lyric of Archilochus (W) in a passage imitated by Horace (Car-
mina .,  – ). For discussion of the ethical prescription, see Davis ()  – .
when he learns of the death of his beloved son are starkly peremptory (11.176 –
81):
Sed infelix Teucros quid demoror armis?

uadite et haec memores regi mandata referte:
quod uitam moror inuisam Pallante perempto,
dextera causa tuast, Turnum gnatoque patrique
quam debere uides. Meritis uacat hic tibi solus
fortunaeque locus; non uitae gaudia quaero,
nec fas, sed gnato manis perferre sub imos.
Why, though, do my ruined dreams of fulfillment keep Teucrians from battle?

Go! And report these directives to your king: be sure you remember!
“I delay death, in a life I hate now seeing Pallas is taken,
Just to put your hand on trial. You are aware that it owes son and father
Turnus as recompense due. And for proving its worth and good fortune
There’s only one venue open. I am not suing you to bring my life
Pleasure, that wouldn’t be right, but to please my son in the dead world.”
Evander explicitly clothes his injunction to Aeneas in the language of ritual ap-
peasement owed to the shade (manes) of Pallas. Ethnographically, then, we are
squarely in a world of reciprocal blood vengeance in which the obligation of pie-
tas encompasses, even demands, ritual violence.
After wavering in his resolution (and thereby coming close to dereliction of
his acknowledged responsibilities to Evander and his son’s shade), Aeneas kills
Turnus in the poem’s finale, while pronouncing sentiments that underscore the
logic of sacral atonement (12.947– 9):
Tune hinc spoliis indute meorum

eripiare mihi? Pallas te hoc uulnere, Pallas
immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit.
You, dressed in the spoils of my dearest

Think that you could escape me? Pallas gives you this death-stroke, yes Pallas
Makes you the sacrifice, spills your criminal blood in atonement!
The possessive meorum (Ahl’s “my dearest”) carries a connotation of virtual kin-
ship with the despoiled Pallas, while the verb immolare (“sacrifice”), which de-
fines the tenor of the act of slaying, draws on the lexicon of religious ritual in so
far as it identifies Turnus “as a victim whose blood he has a right to demand.”⁹
The reader is undoubtedly meant to recall the human sacrifices of enemy sol-
diers that Aeneas performs at the funeral ceremony dedicated to the corpse of
 Page () ad loc.

176 Gregson Davis
Pallas. On that occasion, Aeneas’ intention was described as wishing to send an

offering to the shades (11.81– 2: quos mitteret umbris/inferias) by sprinkling the
blood of the sacrificed enemy victims on the flames of the pyre. Perhaps no
other single gesture in the religious universe of the Aeneid emphasizes so clearly
the need for modern philologists to “defamiliarize” Vergil’s moral compass and
pay stricter attention to the cultural “otherness” of the values enshrined in the
pre-Christian conception of pietas.¹⁰
Within the cadre of Roman religio, it is of paramount significance that the
narrator invokes the traditional figure of the Furies in his characterization of Ae-
neas’ ira (12.945 – 7):
Ille, oculis postquam saeui monimenta doloris

exuuiasque hausit, Furiis accensus et ira
terribilis.¹¹
As his eyes drink in these mementoes of savage

Pain, these so bitter spoils, Aeneas grows fearsome in anger,
Burning with the fire of the Furies.
The dramatic intervention of the Erinyes (Furies) at this climactic point in the
narrative is more than a vivid trope signaling the scale of Aeneas’ rage; rather,
it emphasizes his ineluctable obligation to exact retribution for blood-guilt –
the very domain of influence under the control of these formidable chthonic nu-
mina. Their incitement to revenge gives the needed impetus to the reluctant ex-
ecutioner to fulfill the duty he owes to the shade of Pallas in the underworld. The
conception of pietas that governs this closing scene of sacral violence is a far cry
from the proto-Christian “piety” that often, despite routine disclaimers, seeps
into modern, ethnographically myopic, opinions in respect to the moral premises
of the Vergilian protagonist.
The catalyst for Aeneas’ recuperation of his waning ira is his catching sight
of the baldric of Pallas that Turnus has rashly stripped from the slain youth. Ver-
gil’s brief but telling ecphrasis of the scene depicted on the baldric – the Da-
naids’ murder of their husbands on their wedding-night – has elicited a fair
number of astute scholarly interpretations of its complex import in relation to
the three players in the drama: Pallas, Turnus and Aeneas.¹² The context of
 The semantic field of pietas is well described in the monograph of Scheid () passim.
 In this passage I deviate slightly from Geymonat’s text (and concur with Ahl’s English ver-
sion) in capitalizing furiiis. On the question of the presumed ambiguity (Furiis/furiis), see the
skeptical comment of Tarrant ()  n. .
 See e. g. Spence (), Putnam ().
the ecphrasis is the aftermath of Turnus’ exultant speech as he is about to snatch

the baldric from the corpse (10.495 – 500):
Et laeuo pressit pede talia fatus

exanimem rapiens immania pondera baltei
impressumque nefas: una sub nocte iugali
caesa manus iuuenum foede thalamique cruenti,
quae Clonus Eurytides multo caelauerat auro;
quo nunc Turnus ouat spolio gaudetque potitus. ¹³
As he spoke, he was stamping his left foot

Firm on the corpse as he stripped off its sword-belt, a work of quite monstrous
Weight, stamped heavy with crime. For engraved in gold there by Clonus,
Eurytus’s son, was a wedding of blood, where, in one night, so many
Bridegrooms were foully murdered by brides in an orgy of slaughter.
It’s now Turnus’ spoils. He’s happy to have it, triumphant
From the ethical vantage-point we have adopted here, it is essential to note the
poet’s focus on the nefarious aspect of the bloody mass assassination (nefas;
foede; cruenti). This aspect of the myth, as Vergil represents it, appears especially
ironic in light of the thematic linkage between the iconographies engraved on
the armor of both antagonists; for whereas Pallas’ baldric displays the awesome
crime of the Danaids, the shield of Turnus exhibits on a grand thematic scale (ar-
gumentum ingens) a powerful image of their distant ancestor, Io (7.789 – 91):
At leuem clipeum sublatis cornibus Io

auro insignibat, iam saetis obsita, iam bos,
argumentum ingens
Decorating his smooth shield,

Horns elevated, is Io, chased clearly in gold and already
Covered all over with bristling hide and already a bovine,
Arguing family claims
The complementarity of the two mythographic ecphrases subtly furthers Vergil’s

ethical program, in so far as Turnus’ appropriation of Pallas’ baldric symbolical-
ly casts him in the ill-omened role of vindicator of the Danaid line of which he is
a descendant. In this respect, his final punishment at the hands of Aeneas ac-
 The name, Clonus, that Vergil ascribes to the artist who chased the baldric contains a signif-
icant wordplay related to violence (see LSJ under klonos, defined as “any violent motion, espe-
cially in the press of battle”). On the widespread use of wordplay (and soundplay) in Vergil’s
Aeneid, see the seminal contribution of Ahl ()  – .
178 Gregson Davis
quires an added layer of significance, since the Trojan hero becomes an agent of
retributive justice who moves to restore a moral order that has been transgressed
by the immoderate actions of the Danaids.¹⁴ Like the Danaids, who desecrate
their nuptials, Turnus is incited to violate a sacred foedus by trampling on the
solemn pact between Latinus and Aeneas. The ancestral image that Turnus im-
agined would protect him in battle has proved to be an illusory talisman.
If the righteous execution of Turnus is culturally and philosophically “over-
determined” in the manner we have been sketching, how does Aeneas’ notorious
hesitation to perform the deed square with Vergil’s portrait of an imago pietatis
who is conscientious in carrying out his obligations? To address this question ad-
equately, a comparison with Aeneas’ amatory dalliance at the court of Dido is
illuminating. When the Trojan hero endeavors to explain to a distraught Dido
the reasons for his decision to abandon her, his apologia draws heavily on
both his filial and paternal obligations to Anchises and to Ascanius/Iulius
(4.354– 50):
Me patris Anchisae, quotiens umentibus umbris

nox operit terras, quotiens astra ignea surgunt,
admonet in somnis et turbida terret imago;
me puer Ascanius capitisque iniuria cari,
quem regno Hesperiae fraudo et fatalibus aruis.
Each time night cloaks earth with opaque, dank shadows of spectral
Darkness, and fire-born stars rise upwards, my father, Anchises’
Angry face in my dreams chastises me, stalks me with terror,
As does my son Ascanius. The damage I’ve done his dear person!
Cheating him out of his destined Hesperian kingdom and croplands!
By his own anguished account, he has shamelessly abnegated his responsibili-

ties towards his son, Ascanius, and, concurrently, lost sight of his destined mis-
sion to found a dynasty in Italy. This blatant neglect of pietas during his dalli-
ance at Carthage is paralleled, at the end of the poem, by his momentary
reluctance to execute his duty while considering the plea for clemency on the
part of the abject Turnus. Pietas triumphs over amor in the fulcral Dido episode,
just as it triumphs over clementia in the closing scene of the epic.¹⁵
 In Augustan propaganda in the visual medium the crime of the Danaids figures prominently,
not least in the colonnade he erected adjacent to the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, on which
see Zanker ()  – ; Kellum ()  – .
 The epic narrator metonymically interlinks the two episodes when he depicts a mournful Ae-
neas covering the corpse of Pallas on the funeral pyre with a hand-woven garment that was a
gift of Dido to him (. – ).
The view that clemency – seductive though it was to the pacific Aeneas –
would have been ethically inappropriate as a reaction to Turnus’ desperate
plea runs counter to a common opinion that sees Aeneas as disregarding, or
even repudiating, the famous injunction of his father Anchises: “parcere subjec-
tis et debellare superbos” (“mercy for those cast down and relentless war upon
proud men” (6.853).
This sedimented opinion, however, is based on a radical misconception re-
garding the rhetorical context of Anchises’ grandiose counsel.¹⁶ The epigram-
matic precept intoned by Aeneas’s father comes as the cap to a priamel in
which Greek achievements in the arts are presented as foil to the Roman genius
in imperial statecraft. The very scale of the exhortation is crucial to a proper as-
sessment of its (mis)applicability to the case of the execution of Turnus. The col-
lective vocative singular “Romane,” which is directed to the Roman people as a
whole, indicates clearly that Vergil’s persona is dispensing counsel at the level of
hegemonic political relations. The sparing of Rome’s defeated national oppo-
nents is therefore not to be conflated with the moral imperative of punishing (de-
bellare) individual leaders who embody an inordinate superbia, as exemplified
by Turnus.¹⁷
When Augustus boasts in the Res Gestae of his clementia towards defeated
opponents, he is certainly not including individual perpetrators of crimes in the
likes of the assassins of Julius Caesar, to whom he is obligated to fulfill the terms
of his pietas.¹⁸ On the contrary, his eventual construction of the grandiose temple
to Mars Ultor in his forum is monumental testament to his righteous vengeance
in retribution for the murder of his adoptive father. In sum, the vengeful execu-
tion of the overbearing Turnus is an ethically congruent ending to an heroic saga
in which the issue of justified violence occupies a privileged position in the clo-
sure of the poem.
The ethical subtext we have adumbrated in this account of Aeneas’ culmi-
nating act of immolation/execution may shed some light on the ongoing schol-
arly debate surrounding the nature and scope of the ideological affiliation be-
tween the political program of the princeps and the “national epic.” The
analogy between the epic protagonist’s primary task of ending an internecine
war on Italian soil and Augustus’ burden of establishing a lasting peace (the
so-called pax Augusta) after the protracted hemorrhage of the Civil Wars is wide-
ly acknowledged by the majority of readers, ancient and modern. The investiga-
 For a magisterial analysis of the rhetoric of Anchises’ speech, see Norden () ad loc.
 On Turnus’ superbia and its fatal repercussions, see the detailed analysis of Traina ().
 In the Res Gestae he famously lists clementia among four virtues by which he stakes his
claim for immortal renown (Aug. Anc. ).
180 Gregson Davis
tion of the ‘political’ aspect of the parallel, however, carries the risk of unfalsifi-
able trivialization of the poem if it is decoupled from the underlying philosoph-
ical substratum (and especially if the broad Aristotelian conception of ‘politics’
as part and parcel of ‘ethics’ is taken into account).
The over-arching proposition – first broached in dogmatic form by Servius –
to the effect that Vergil’s epic is fundamentally designed to laud Augustus serves
as a useful point of reentry into the critical conversation surrounding the pre-
sumed propagandistic aspect of the narrative. It is not, prima facie, entirely re-
ductive to read the portrayal of pius Aeneas as a prototype of the ideal ruler
(to be embodied later in Augustus), provided that the ethical dimension of the
narrative episodes is fully brought into the equation.
The encomiastic premise is by no means incongruous with the terms of the
antagonism between Aeneas and his ethical antitype, Turnus. As we have seen
above, the narrator makes a critical intervention in respect to Turnus’ emotional
attitude during his slaying and despoiling of Pallas when he expatiates on the
ethical ramifications of the episode. But if Turnus represents a negative para-
digm of the leader, his victorious adversary, Aeneas, does not conform to the car-
icature of a perfect role model – witness, inter alia, his infamous dereliction of
responsibility at the court of Dido. What gives depth and complexity to the por-
trayal of Aeneas as laudandus is the observation that ethical paraenesis is a con-
ventional rhetorical element in praise poetry, from Pindar to the Augustan poets
and beyond. In that tradition the laudator typically goes beyond praise of a par-
ticular individual in offering counsel of a universal sort that focuses on the eth-
ical limits to be placed on human ambition and outstanding achievement. Ver-
gil’s friend and soul-mate, Horace, includes unabashed critique of materialism
and the pursuit of riches for its own sake in the very midst of his praise of his
super-wealthy patron, Maecenas. In short, the paraenetic element, which nor-
mally takes a philosophical cast, is crucial to the conventions of encomiastic dis-
course.
If a wider ethical lens is brought to bear on the final episode of Vergil’s hero-
ic saga, then the underlying ‘political’ aspect of Turnus’ execution becomes cor-
respondingly clearer. As Turnus, who embodies superbia and immoderate thymos
is struck down in the concluding gesture, so Aeneas is simultaneously elevated
for his timely understanding of the limit of clementia and of the implementation
of appropriate orge, and for his rededication, after a momentary lapse, to the re-
cuperation of his defining trait of pietas.¹⁹ In so doing he symbolically takes his

place within the sanctified space of Mars Ultor.
Bibliography
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Bologna, 91 – 120.
Tsouna, V. 2007. The Ethics of Philodemus. Oxford.
Zanker, P. 1988. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Ann Arbor, MI.
 For a nuanced discussion of the Epicurean conversation about typologies of anger in relation
to vengeance, see the chapter, “Anger and the desire for revenge” in Tsouna ()  – .
Peter J. Davis
Freedom of Speech in Virgil and Ovid
Summary: This paper reflects on the changing nature of free speech in the Augu-
stan period through an examination of episodes in its two most important epics.
It focuses primarily on the council of the Latins in Aeneid 11 and a sequence of
stories in Metamorphoses 2 and 3 in which outspokenness is punished. It is par-
ticularly striking that while Virgil’s Drances can demand freedom of speech in a
public context, freedom of speech in Metamorphoses exists only in private. This
reflects, I suggest, the altered political circumstances between the 20s BCE and
the first decade CE.
Keywords: freedom of speech; Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Drances
graue putas eripi loquendi arbitrium regibus, quod humillimi habent. (Seneca, Mercy 1.8)
You think it a serious matter to deprive kings of the right to speak, a right that the most
lowly possess.
The concept of liberty is rarely invoked in Augustan epic, with libertas occurring
only once in the Aeneid’s narrative¹ and only once in Metamorphoses. ² On both
occasions it explicitly denotes freedom of speech, with Drances insisting on his
right to speak frankly before Turnus (det libertatem fandi, 11.346), and Byblis as-
suming that she holds the right to speak freely (est mihi libertas tecum secreta
loquendi, 9.559, “I have the freedom to speak to you in confidence”). But if verbal
statistics suggest that Augustan epic poets are indifferent to one of the great re-
publican freedoms,³ their narratives suggest otherwise. This chapter will focus
 Libertas is used twice outside the Aeneid’s narrative sections. It is used in Anchises’ speech
(.) and in the description of the shield (.). In both cases it denotes republican in-
stitutions.
 By contrast, libertas occurs thirty times in Lucan.
 Cf. Syme () : “Freedom of speech was an essential part of the Republican virtue of
libertas, to be regretted more than political freedom when both were abolished;” Brunt ()
: “Thus it is untrue that in the Republic freedom of speech was not associated with the
Roman conception, or rather some Roman conceptions, of libertas, nor is it legitimate to
argue e silentio that it was properly confined to men of rank.” Millar () ,  points to
the operation of free speech in both public and private contexts: () “in a formal sense, con-
tiones [non-decision-making meetings summoned by a magistrate] could begin with an invita-
tion to whoever wishes to address the people to come forward and do so” and () “If we
think in terms of freedom of speech, the Roman res publica had at any rate no means of checking
184 Peter J. Davis
primarily on the council of the Latins in Aeneid 11 and a sequence of stories in

Metamorphoses 2.
Little scholarly attention has been paid to the council in Aeneid 11. The epi-
sode merits examination, however, because, as Hardie points out,⁴ this is “the
single example in the poem of an extended scene of human political debate.”
The singularity of this scene is striking if we recall that there are several debates
in the Iliad on both Achaean and Trojan sides.
I would like to begin by comparing Aeneid 11’s council with its primary
model, the debate in Iliad 2 over Agamemnon’s proposal that the Achaeans
abandon the Trojan war. Highet noted the principal resemblances between the
two meetings: both are prompted by a hero’s refusal of essential support
(Achilles in the Iliad, Diomedes in the Aeneid), both begin with a king’s proposal
to end the war, both include a provocative intervention by a quarrelsome speaker
and both close with the war’s continuation.⁵
There are, however, important differences. Note, for example, that Iliad 2
contains not one but two debates. First Agamemnon summons a council of eld-
ers (βουλὴν … γερόντων, 2.53). Although only two participants are named, Aga-
memnon and Nestor, it is clear that the council consists of major Achaean prin-
ces, for the narrator tells us that when the council is complete the scepter-
bearing kings obeyed Agamemnon (πείθοντό τε ποιμένι λαῶν / σκηπτοῦχοι βασι-
λῆες, 2.86). This council, however, is merely a prelude to a much larger assembly
of the whole army (ἀγορή),⁶ whose magnitude is underlined by an impressive
simile, likening the Achaean soldiery to swarms of bees (2.87– 90).
This, however, is not an assembly of the kind familiar from democratic Ath-
ens or even republican Rome. Indeed Odysseus uses the assembly as an oppor-
tunity to denounce the idea of popular sovereignty: οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη·
εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω (“rule by the many is not a good thing; let there be one
ruler,” 2.204). In Agamemnon’s assembly the function of ordinary soldiers is pri-
marily to be manipulated by their commander-in-chief, for Agamemnon plans to
inspire his men to attack Troy (somewhat perversely) by declaring that there is
no hope of winning the war and by proposing immediate retreat.
In this context it is hardly surprising that Thersites’ intervention in the as-
sembly is particularly unwelcome. First of all there is his social status, for, as
Kirk points out, “he is the only character in the Iliad to lack both patronymic
on or repressing private speech.” See also Chrissanthos () esp.  – . Chrissanthos argues
that freedom of speech obtained even in the army.
 Hardie () .
 Highet () .
 Hom. Iliad ., , , , , .
and place of origin.”⁷ Despite Thersites’ claim to be a warrior (231), the princes
clearly consider him to be a person of no account. We see the importance of so-
cial status in the assembly in Odysseus’ different approaches to those who fail to
understand Agamemnon’s intentions: he speaks gently to kings or men of out-
standing quality (188 – 9), i. e. to the elders who were present at the council
(194), but rebukes and strikes the ordinary troops with his staff (198 – 9). Second,
Thersites fails to show his betters the deference that they expect: the narrator,
Odysseus and even the common soldiery note his tendency to quarrel with the
princes (214, 247, 277).
Homer’s representation of Thersites is remarkable, for not only does he lack
a home and a genealogy, but he also lacks the physical beauty typical of Homer’s
humans (2.216 – 19).⁸ On the other hand, Thersites puts together an effective
speech (225 – 42) and even Odysseus has to acknowledge his rhetorical skills
(λιγύς περ ἐὼν ἀγορητής, “though you are a clear-voiced speaker,” 2.246).⁹
What is more, the content of his speech gains credibility from the fact that Ther-
sites reworks some of the arguments advanced by Achilles in Iliad 1: both regard
Agamemnon as greedy (1.122, 2.225 – 31), both favor withdrawal from Troy (1.169 –
70, 2.235 – 6) and both speak of Agamemnon’s present action as “his final out-
rage” (νῦν ὕστατα λωβήσαιο, 1.232, 2.242).¹⁰
In Aeneid 11, we find a superficially similar situation: first we have a prelimi-
nary meeting (this time an embassy of Latins to Aeneas [100 – 138]) which is then
followed by a larger meeting involving Latins alone [225 – 447]). The embassy can
hardly be said to resemble the meeting of Agamemnon’s council of elders and so
it is not surprising that Knauer notes no allusions to Iliad 2.¹¹ What then of the
second meeting, Latinus’ “grand council” (concilium magnum, 234)? What kind
of meeting is this: a council of elders or an assembly of the people? If we turn for
guidance to Horsfall’s commentary, we find a disappointing lack of precision: the
 Kirk () . This seems to be the common view. Thalmann ()  describes Thersites
as “evidently a common soldier” and claims that this is “the usual interpretation.” See, however,
Marks () , who views Thersites and Odysseus as social equals. It will be clear from my ar-
gument that I think that Marks is mistaken. Halliwell ()  seems to adopt a compromise
position when he claims that “Thersites’ ancestry and social status are indeterminate.” “Indeter-
minate” suits Halliwell’s overall thesis concerning Thersites’ role as a creator of laughter. “Un-
known,” however, is a more accurate description and a clear sign of non-aristocratic lineage.
 Hephaestus is perhaps his divine analogue. For recent discussion of this parallel see Halliwell
()  – ,  – .
 Kirk ()  suggests that Odysseus’ tone is sarcastic. It is not clear that this is so. Will-
cock () simply notes that λιγύς (“clear-voiced”) is “a complimentary term for an orator.”
 This combination of words is used nowhere else in the Iliad.
 Knauer () .
186 Peter J. Davis
grand council resembles both the “Trojan assembly” in Iliad 7 and “the council
in Iliad 2,” while the adjective “suggests a general assembly of the Latin
elders.”¹²
To determine the nature of the meeting we need to turn, I suggest, to its lo-
cation and to Virgil’s choice of language:
ergo concilium magnum primosque suorum

imperio accitos alta intra limina cogit.
olli conuenere fluuntque ad regia plenis
tecta uiis. (Verg. Aeneid 11.234– 7)
Therefore he convenes the grand council and the leaders of his people, summoned by his
authority, within the lofty threshold. They come together, fill the streets and flow towards
the royal dwelling.
The meeting takes place within Latinus’ palace. This is clearly a larger meeting
than Agamemnon’s council of elders, which takes place alongside Nestor’s ship
(2.54), and smaller than the assembly of the Achaean army, an assembly so vast
that the earth groans beneath it (2.95). We find further details in the description
of Latinus’ palace in Book 7:
hic sceptra accipere et primos attollere fascis

regibus omen erat; hoc illis curia templum,
hae sacris sedes epulis; hic ariete caeso
perpetuis soliti patres considere mensis. (Verg. Aeneid 7.173 – 6)
Here it was an omen for the kings to receive the scepter and raise the fasces for the first
time; this temple was their meeting place, this was a site for sacred feasting; here, when
a ram was slain, the fathers were accustomed to sit at continuous tables.
The fact that the debate takes place within the confines of Latinus’ dwelling,
large though it may be, suggests that this meeting is very different from Agamem-
non’s warrior assembly. As La Penna points out, it is in fact a meeting of the
king’s council, the concilium regis. ¹³
But if this is a meeting of the king’s council, it is one with a peculiarly repub-
lican flavor. Note, for example, that the king himself addresses his councilors as
 Horsfall () . In particular it is not clear what Horsfall means by “the council in Iliad
.” If he means Agamemnon’s council (the βουλή at . – ), then the resemblance to Latinus’
council is not obvious. In his comment on line  () Horsfall invokes the parallel of the
Roman assembly. Gransden () offers no help.
 La Penna () .
“citizens” (ciues, 11.305), as do Venulus and Turnus (243, 459).¹⁴ Note too that,
like a senior republican magistrate, Latinus summons the council by virtue of
his imperium (11.235) and that cogere (235, 304, 460) is the appropriate constitu-
tional term to use for convening a meeting of the Roman Senate.¹⁵ And the hall is
labeled a curia (7.174, 11.380), the technically correct name for the Senate’s meet-
ing place;¹⁶ is designated a templum (7.174), as religious ritual demanded; and is
associated with the fasces (7.173), the insignia of imperium. ¹⁷ Finally, and perhaps
most importantly, Latinus’ councilors are given the title patres (“fathers”), an
honorific reserved for members of the senatorial order.¹⁸ Both the location and
the choice of constitutional language suggest that this meeting of Latinus’ coun-
cil is intended to remind us of the republican Senate.¹⁹
How does Drances, the new Thersites, fit into this altered context? Given that
no man without family or place of origin could be a member of the Roman Sen-
ate (or, presumably, the concilium regis), it is not surprising to learn that Drances
possesses an aristocratic, if flawed, lineage:
genus huic materna superbum

nobilitas dabat, incertum de patre ferebat. (Verg. Aeneid 11.340 – 1)
His mother’s nobility made his ancestry proud, from his father he bore uncertain ancestry.
Although the precise meaning of the second clause is disputed,²⁰ it seems likely
that Fantham²¹ and Horsfall²² are right when they argue that Virgil’s language
 Cf. . where Drances refers to the Latins as Turnus’ “wretched fellow citizens” (miseros
… ciuis).
 OLD s.v. cogo §; Lintott () .
 OLD s.v. curia §; note also §.
 See Lintott ()  on curia and templum and  on the fasces.
 OLD s.v. pater §.
 La Penna ()  reaches the same conclusion by a different route.
 Commentators and translators are divided in their views. I cite only a selection. La Penna
()  sees Drances as a nouus homo, with aristocratic ancestry from only one side. Wil-
liams ()  seems to agree, offering as a translation “he had dubious ancestry on his fa-
ther’s side.” Gransden ()  follows Servius and suggests “his paternal ancestry was not
known.” Ahl ()  translates “he was vague when discussing his father,” taking ferebat in
the sense of “say.” This is of course possible. Ahl’s version has the considerable merit of allow-
ing for different interpretations.
 Fantham () : “a bastard then.” Fantham has a good discussion of other possible in-
terpretations in n. .
 Horsfall () : “V. rather indicates his illegitimate origins.” His criticism of Fantham’s
note  ignores her clear statement in the body of the text.
188 Peter J. Davis
implies that Drances is a bastard. As Servius comments, his paternal ancestry is

“not ignoble, but completely unknown” (non ignobile, sed penitus ignoratum).
Drances is both similar to and different from Thersites. Although both may
be motivated by spite (2.211– 16, 220; 11.122, 337), Thersites is prone to quarrel
with all the princes (2.214, 247), while Drances, though prone to faction (340),
is hostile to Turnus alone (122– 3, 336 – 7). If Thersites, as a member of the
Achaean army, can justifiably claim warrior status (2.231), Drances’ right hand
is said to be “cold in war” (sed frigida bello / dextera, 11.338 – 9). Both Thersites
and Drances are acknowledged to be effective speakers (2.246, 11.338, 339).²³
Still more importantly, both are presented as endorsing the views of the
epic’s central character. As commentators have pointed out,²⁴ Thersites’ criti-
cisms of Agamemnon’s greed echo those of Achilles in the previous book. Indeed
Homer underlines the connection between Thersites and Achilles by having
Thersites recycle sentiments that he cannot possibly have heard: a line from
Achilles’ prayer to Thetis, which Thetis then repeats in her prayer to Zeus.²⁵ So
too with Drances. In his encounter with the Latin ambassadors at the beginning
of Book 11 Aeneas singles out for criticism Latinus’ abandonment of his offer of
guest-friendship (hospitia, 113 – 14) and his decision to support Turnus (114). And
these are the issues upon which Drances focuses in his confrontation with
Turnus: either Lavinia should be handed over to Aeneas as first promised
(11.352– 6; cf. 7.264 – 73) or Turnus, if bent on a royal wedding, should confront
Aeneas alone (11.369 – 75).
But even though Thersites and Drances have much in common, they are
treated very differently by their fellows. Thersites’ speech is rewarded by abuse
and a beating from Odysseus and the mockery of the multitude (2.244– 77).
And of course his speech has no effect whatever: his arguments are over-
whelmed by brute force. Drances, by contrast, speaks with impunity. In fact,
 Ahl ()  notes Drances’ diplomatic skills: “Despite Virgil’s preamble, Drances hurls
no accusations here, ignore Aeneas’ charges, and, from a position of powerlessness, secures the
desired truce through courtly flattery without making binding concessions. Can an ambassador
do any better?”.
 E. g. Kirk () : “Yet all the points raised by Thersites are valid in retrospect”; Thal-
mann ()  – : “Thersites is Achilles’ comic double. His scene repeats the assembly
and quarrel of Book , in a debased but clearer form.” Willcock () : “Thersites puts him-
self forward as spokesman of the Greeks. In fact he speaks rather like a parody of Achilles in the
quarrel in Book I.”
 Iliad . = ., : ἠτίμησεν· ἑλὼν γὰρ ἔχει γέρας αὐτὸς ἀπούρας, “He dishonoured
(me/him). Having taken away (my/his) prize, he keeps it, having robbed (me/him) himself.” Nes-
tor adapts the first part of the line, when criticising Agamemnon to his face at .: ἠτίμησας,
ἑλὼν γὰρ ἔχεις γέρας, “You have dishonoured him, for you have taken and keep his prize.”
his arguments carry the day and lead to Turnus’ decision to fight a duel with Ae-
neas (11.440 – 4).
Why this difference in treatment? One reason will be the varied character of
the institutional settings in which these interventions take place. Thersites be-
rates his superior in front of the Achaean army. Drances, by contrast, is address-
ing a Virgilian approximation of the Roman Senate. He demands the right to
speak freely in the council (11.346) and that right is clearly granted, for Drances
delivers an oration thirty-two lines long. In making this demand, Drances insists
upon a cardinal senatorial value, for, as Brunt observes, “The authority of the
senate was itself a nullity if it could not take decisions without fear of pressure.
Every member should be able to voice his opinions with some chance of swaying
the issue.”²⁶ In this respect, and perhaps in this respect alone, Drances resem-
bles Cicero,²⁷ for Cicero insists constantly upon the right of members of the Sen-
ate to express their opinions freely.²⁸
When we turn to Ovid’s Metamorphoses we find an apparently similar claim
to the right to free speech when Byblis writes to Caunus “I have the freedom to
speak to you in confidence” (est mihi libertas tecum secreta loquendi, 9.559). The
key difference between the claims of Drances and Byblis lies in their context.
While Drances claims a political right in public, Byblis asserts a merely private
prerogative: a girl may talk to her brother. That difference is underlined by By-
blis’ use of the word secreta (“in confidence,” “in private”). It is not clear, how-
ever, that characters in Metamorphoses possess even that limited right.
If we turn to Metamorphoses 2 we find a world in which speaking frankly in-
curs the risk of punishment (2.531– 835). Given that the stories of the crow and
the raven, of Ocyroe and Battus have been thoroughly explored in recent years
by Alison Keith and Alessandro Barchiesi,²⁹ I do not propose to examine each
one in detail. Rather I would like to explore Keith’s suggestion that Ovid’s “inter-
est in the ‘appropriate’ use of speech may reflect – and reflect upon – political
developments under the institution of the principate.”³⁰ In particular I propose
to examine the connections between some of these stories and the poet’s self-
representation elsewhere in Metamorphoses and in the exile poetry.
 Brunt () .

 It was once common to argue that Cicero is a model for Drances. See, for example, La Penna
()  – , who rightly rejects this thesis.
 For references see Brunt ()  – .
 Keith (); Barchiesi ()  – .
 Keith () ; see also her Epilogue  – .
190 Peter J. Davis
Let’s begin with the story of the raven and the crow.³¹ The concern of this
complex of “nested”³² stories with speech and its perils is clear from the outset,
when the narrator addresses his new character as “talkative raven” (corue lo-
quax, 535) and announces the moral even before the bird tells its story: “its
tongue was its ruin; because of its talkative tongue …” (lingua fuit damno; lingua
faciente loquaci …, 540). Note too that the raven’s interlocutor, the crow, is descri-
bed by the epithet “garrulous” long before its species is identified (garrula … / …
cornix, 546 – 7). It is also important to note, as Keith does, that one feature of the
crow’s narrative is its emphasis on story-telling.³³ She points to the recurrence of
uox and uocare in the crow’s speech (559, 565, 578, 579) and the fact that the crow
is punished precisely because it tells the story of Aglauros’ crime to Minerva
(562– 4).
I would like, however, to draw attention to the opening words of the crow’s
speech: “‘non utile carpis’ / inquit ‘iter: ne sperne meae praesagia linguae!’”
(549 – 50, “‘You press on with a pointless journey,’ it said, ‘do not reject my
tongue’s forewarnings’”). As Anderson notes,³⁴ praesagium (“forewarning”) is
an Ovidian coinage and this is the word’s first occurrence in Latin literature.
While the word is employed in non-prophetic contexts,³⁵ it is overwhelmingly
used by Ovid and subsequent poets of the utterances of one or more uates. It
is used, for example, by Helenus the prophet (uates, 15.435), when he speaks
to Aeneas at Metamorphoses 15.439 – 40: nate dea, si nota satis praesagia nostrae
/ mentis habes, non tota cadet te sospite Troia (“Goddess-born, if you hold on suf-
ficiently to my mind’s well-known forewarnings, Troy will not wholly fall as long
as you are safe”) and of unnamed uates in the poem’s last line (15.879): siquid
habent ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam (“if the forewarnings of uates have any
truth, I will live”).
Who then are the uates of Metamorphoses’ final line? The word’s ambiguity
is well-known, with OLD giving two meanings, first a prophet or seer, and sec-
ond, beginning in the Augustan period, a poet or bard. That ambiguity is sus-
tained in Metamorphoses’ mythological world, with Tiresias and Helenus, for ex-
ample, as instances of the uates as prophet (3.348, 15.435) and Orpheus as
representative of the uates as poet (10.89, 143, 11.2). While it is conceivable that
Ovid is speaking of prophets or seers in the traditional sense at 15.879, it is far
 For Ovid’s verbal play in this episode see Ahl ()  – .
 Keith ()  speaks of a “ ‘Chinese box’ pattern of nested stories.” Barchiesi () 
speaks similarly of “narrazioni a scatola cinese.”
 Keith () .
 Anderson ()  on line .
 E. g. of Pandion’s forebodings at Metamorphoses ..
more likely that he is referring to poets and more particularly to himself. After all
the poem’s epilogue is written in the first person and concerns itself with the fu-
ture of both poem and poet. Further, when Ovid employs the phrase praesagia
uatum in Tristia and ex Ponto he does so in contexts which are plainly self-
referential.³⁶
What then are we to make of the crow’s “forewarnings”? That the crow is a
uates in the pre-Augustan sense is established by its role in earlier literature³⁷
and by the fact that the crow is an oscen, a significant bird in Roman augural
practice, “a bird,” as the OLD says, “that gives omens by its cry (rather than
its flight).”³⁸ On the other hand, Ovid’s crow, unlike its predecessor in Callima-
chus’ Hecale, is not technically a prophet at all. Whereas the Callimachean
crow predicts the raven’s transformation from white to black,³⁹ the Ovidian
crow draws on its own experience with Minerva to warn the raven against bring-
ing bad news to Apollo. But if the crow is not a prophet in the manner of Tiresias
or Helenus, it is a poet in the style of the creator of Metamorphoses because it is
the author of an intricately-worked narrative. Like Ovid, the crow is capable of
virtuoso metrical effects like a four-word hexameter (561) and a golden line
(575), and of telling the story of a god’s pursuit and its own transformation in
the manner of Daphne or Callisto.⁴⁰
If we turn to the raven we find a more straightforward version of the crow’s
story, told this time by the Ovidian narrator. The raven is “a relentless informer”
(non exorabilis index, 546), “loquacious” (535) and a victim of its own loquacity
(540). The raven too has Roman connections, for it too was an oscen. In this case,
however, we are explicitly reminded of that Roman connection, for where Calli-
machus had likened the raven’s whiteness to that of swans, milk or the sea’s
foam,⁴¹ Ovid compares it to three kinds of white bird. First place is given to spot-
less doves (537) and third to the river-loving swan (539). Second place is assigned
 Tristia .., Epistulae ex Ponto ... Bömer ()  speaks of “Ovids Selbstver-
ständnis als vates.”
 E. g. A.R. . – , Verg. Eclogues ., Prop. ...
 OLD s.v. oscen. Festus . explains: Oscines aues Ap. Claudius ait, quae ore canentes fa-
ciant auspicium, ut coruus, cornix, noctua (“Appius Claudius says that the birds we call oscines
are those which make omens by singing, like the raven, the crow, the owl.” Barchiesi () 
notes the connection with this story.
 Call. Hecale fr. . –  Hollis ().
 As with Daphne and Callisto the narrator gives us a precise account of the bodily transfor-
mation. In particular, . –  (tendebam bracchia caelo / bracchia coeperunt … “I stretched my
arms to the sky, my arms began to …”) recalls . –  (tendebat bracchia supplex / bracchia
coeperunt … “a suppliant she stretched her arms, her arms began to …”).
 Call. Hecale fr. . –  Hollis ().
192 Peter J. Davis
to geese, but not just any geese: “nor would it yield to the geese destined to pre-
serve the Capitol with their vigilant voice” (nec seruaturis uigili Capitolia uoce /
cederet anseribus, 538 – 9). While this comparison marks a resemblance between
geese and the primeval raven, their whiteness, it also suggests a significant dif-
ference, for although the geese used their voice to bring bad news (“The Gauls
are coming!”), they were rewarded by being remembered as Rome’s saviors.
The raven, by contrast, is punished by Apollo for revealing the truth about Co-
ronis. For both raven and crow truthful speech is a source of danger.
I would like to turn now to the next story in the sequence, the story of Ocyr-
oe. Unlike the crow, Ocyroe is explicitly a uates, for her mind conceives “prophet-
singing frenzy” (uaticinos … furores, 640). That Ocyroe is genuinely prophetic is
clear from the fact that the narrator tells us that she sang of “fate’s secrets”
(639). What then are these “secrets”? Ocyroe begins by addressing Aesculapius,
predicting, first that mortals will owe their lives to him, second that it will be
right for him to revive dead souls, third that he will defy the gods in one partic-
ular case, and finally that from being a god he will become a lifeless body, but
become a god again. Next she speaks to Chiron, predicting that although he is
immortal, he will one day long to die and that his wish will be granted. In
one sense these are contrasting prophecies: Aesculapius is destined to be immor-
tal, while Chiron is fated to die. There is, however, a common element: both sto-
ries present the barrier between mortality and divinity as permeable.⁴²
At this point it is important to note that Aesculapius is a god who has impor-
tant Roman connections. So important are they, that the story of the god’s trans-
lation from Epidaurus to Rome in 291 BCE is introduced by the poem’s first in-
vocation of the Muses (15.622) and that the story constitutes the endpoint of
Ovid’s account of Rome’s republican history. Equally important is the fact that
in Book 15 Ovid emphasizes the links between the divine inhabitant of the
Tiber island and Apollo’s activities in Book 2. First the god is called “Coronis’
son” (Coronides, 15.624)⁴³ and his descent from Apollo is marked, first when
the Delphic oracle calls him “Apollo’s son” (Apolline nato, 15.639), and second
when the narrator uses the extraordinary expression “Phoebean snake” (Phoe-
beius anguis, 15.742).⁴⁴ Note too that Ocyroe declares that the god will be “the
world’s health-bringer” (salutifer orbi, 2.642) and that the narrator declares
him to be “the City’s health-bringer” (salutifer Vrbi, 15.744), salutifer being anoth-
 Barchiesi ()  makes the point like this: “Entrambe le storie riguardano violazioni del
confine tra mortali e immortali e suscitano preoccupazione nel mondo divino.”
 While the god’s Roman name was intractable in hexameters, his Greek name, Asclepius, pre-
sented little difficulty: Homer uses it four times in the Iliad.
 Phoebeius may be yet another Ovidian coinage (Ars Amatoria .).
er Ovidian coinage. And the verbal play that Barchiesi notes at 2.647 (exsangue
means both “bloodless” and “from a snake”)⁴⁵ recurs at 15.627, just before the
god really does become a snake.
But if the question of the permeability of the barrier between divinity and
mortality is important in the case of Aesculapius, it is even more important in
the story that Ovid relates next:
hic tamen accessit delubris aduena nostris:

Caesar in urbe sua deus est. (Ov. Metamorphoses 15.746 – 7)
But Aesculapius approached our shrines as a foreigner: Caesar is a god in his own city.
Note that the connection between Aesculapius and Caesar is analogical not chro-
nological. There is after all a gap of several hundred years between the arrival of
Aesculapius in Rome and the rise of the Caesars. Note too that while it is not
clear in the lines quoted which Caesar is the focus of the narrator’s attention
(it might be Julius, it might be Augustus), it quickly becomes clear that we are
concerned with the apotheosis of Julius, an apotheosis not brought about by
his great achievements, but effected by his son (746 – 50).
But let’s return to Book 2 and to Ocyroe. We have seen that Chiron’s daughter
sings of “fate’s secrets” (fatorum arcana, 639). This of course makes Ocyroe re-
semble the Virgilian Jupiter, for he too tells of “fate’s secrets,” when explaining
Rome’s future to Venus at Aeneid 1.262 (fatorum arcana mouebo).⁴⁶ The connec-
tion between Jupiter and Ocyroe is clear, because apotheosis is important to the
narratives of both, for while Jupiter bookends his prophecy with the apotheoses
of Aeneas and Caesar (1.259 – 60, 289 – 90), Ocyroe tells of Chiron’s deification-
in-reverse and of Aesculapius’ repeated crossings of the boundary between
death and immortality.
It is, however, precisely this revelation of “fate’s secrets” that leads to the
silencing and metamorphosis of Ocyroe, for, as the narrator observes, “there
were more fates to tell” (restabant fatis aliquid, 655). And that Ocyroe is silenced
because of her prophetic ability could hardly be more explicit, for as her trans-
formation from human to horse begins she declares:
praeuertunt … me fata, uetorque

plura loqui, uocisque meae praecluditur usus.
 Barchiesi () .

 The phrase is also used in Aeneid  when Aeneas claims that Anchises left him fatorum ar-
cana (.). The prophecy was actually given to him by Celaeno at . – .
194 Peter J. Davis
non fuerant artes tanti, quae numinis iram

contraxere mihi: mallem nescisse futura! (Ov. Metamorphoses 2.657– 60)
Fate forestalls me and I am forbidden to say more and use of my voice is prevented. Those
arts were not worth so much, that brought a divinity’s anger upon me: I would prefer that I
had not known the future.
Ocyroe’s choice of language here inevitably makes the reader think of Ovid’s
own situation, for the phrase numinis ira (“a divinity’s anger”) is used five
times in the exile poetry, four times in Tristia and ex Ponto, when describing
the cause of Ovid’s own plight,⁴⁷ and once in Fasti when Carmentis explains
the plight of Evander, Evander and his mother being figures for the poet.⁴⁸
And if we recall that Ovid refers to his most notorious poem as Artes in the
exile poetry,⁴⁹ it is worth noting that Ocyroe recognizes that her “arts” are re-
sponsible for her punishment.
When we reflect upon the political implications of Ocyroe’s prophecies, it is
not difficult to see why those in power might wish to ensure her silence, for if the
boundaries between mortality and immortality are so porous as to allow both
Chiron and Aesculapius to move from one state to another, it follows that
there is nothing particularly special about the deifications of the Caesars. In
Ocyroe’s world, and indeed in the fictional world of the Metamorphoses, such
transitions are not unusual.
I would like to conclude this discussion of this sequence in Metamorphoses 2
with an examination of the story of Battus and Mercury. The only earlier account
of Mercury’s theft of Apollo’s cattle occurs in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, as
one of two interwoven stories.⁵⁰ Ovid’s story plainly owes much to the Greek ver-
sion. The location is the same, with Pylos being named in both poems.⁵¹ In both
works Hermes/Mercury steals Apollo’s cattle and in both an old man is sworn to
secrecy but reveals what he has seen. There are, however, important differences.
First, in the Hymn the old man remains anonymous, while in Ovid he is named.
Second, in the Hymn the old man discloses what he has seen to Apollo, the
owner of the cattle, while in Ovid he makes his revelation to Mercury in disguise.
 Tristia .., .., .., Epistulae ex Ponto ...

 Fasti .. Boyle ()  explains the connection like this: “Evander’s and Carmentis’
exilic journey to Rome in Fasti  not only imitates and reverses Ovid’s own exilic journey, but
imitates its causes too.”
 E. g. Tristia ., .. – , Epistulae ex Ponto .., ...
 The other story concerns Mercury’s invention and gift of Apollo’s lyre.
 Hymnus ad Mercurem , ; Metamorphoses ..
Third, in the Hymn the old man is not punished, whereas in Ovid he is trans-
formed into a stone (705 – 6).
Let’s examine these differences. The fact that the old man remains anony-
mous in the Hymn suggests that the author has no particular interest in him.
The Hymn is nearly six hundred lines long and the old man is mentioned
twice, first when Mercury demands his silence (87– 93) and second when Apollo
extracts the truth (190 – 211). Ovid’s Battus, by contrast, is a key player. How do
we account for his name? One possibility, favored by Bömer,⁵² is that the name
means “chatterbox,” despite the fact that according to LSJ the word means
“stammerer.” A second suggestion, favored by Barchiesi but rejected by
Bömer, is that the name is intended to remind us of Battus, the royal ancestor
of Callimachus, Battiades (“descendant of Battus”) being a common way of re-
ferring to the Alexandrian poet in Catullus and Ovid.⁵³ A third but less perhaps
likely possibility derives from the fact that Apollo addresses him as βατοδρόπε
(“bramble-puller”). The first two suggestions are in my view particularly persua-
sive and they have in common the idea of speech. This is perhaps confirmed by
Ovid’s reference to Pylos and Neleus, Neleus being the father of the notoriously
garrulous Nestor.⁵⁴
Let’s turn to the second major difference, to the fact that in the Hymn the old
man reveals the truth to Apollo, while in Metamorphoses he speaks to Mercury.
In both poems Hermes/Mercury offers the old man a reward for keeping silence,
in the Hymn he offers a successful vintage (90 – 4), while in Ovid he promises a
gleaming cow (694). The god makes his request in similar terms in both poems,
for Hermes demands that the old man “be unseeing in seeing, deaf in hearing
and silent” (καί τε ἰδὼν μὴ ἰδὼν εἶναι καὶ κωφὸς ἀκούσας, / καὶ σιγᾶν, 93 – 4),
while Mercury insists that Battus “deny what he has seen” (uidisse nega, 693).
In the Hymn the old man does not promise to obey and there is no second meet-
ing with Hermes. Rather Apollo approaches him several days later, offers nothing
and makes an innocent request: have you seen a man with my cattle? (200). In
Metamorphoses, by contrast, Battus is subjected to a test. Mercury insists on si-
lence and Battus agrees: “Go in safety; that stone will sooner speak of your
thefts” (tutus eas; lapis iste prius tua furta loquitur, 696). Moreover, Mercury
only pretends to leave, returns quickly, alters his shape and voice and then offers
 Bömer () .

 E. g. Catul. ., ., Ov. Amores .., Tristia ., ...
 Metamorphoses ., . Ovid calls Nestor Neleius (“Neleus’ son”) at Metamorphoses
. and refers to antiqui Neleia Nestoris arua (“the Nelean fields of ancient Nestor”) at Epis-
tulae (Heroides) ..
196 Peter J. Davis
a second bribe (697– 701). Ovid’s Mercury is more deceitful than his Greek ances-
tor.
Still more important is the fact that in the Hymn the old man is not punished
for failing to follow Hermes’ instructions. After all, Apollo has no reason to chas-
tise him and the poem is more concerned with whether the infant Hermes should
be punished as a thief. In Ovid, by contrast, Battus is transformed into the “hard
flint” known as “informer” (index, 706). Battus is plainly punished for a crime of
speech. The central theme of this story also finds its analogue in the exile poetry,
in the roughly contemporary Fasti where birds are no longer immune to sacrifice
because “their informer’s guts gave the gods pleasure” (iuueruntque deos indicis
exta sui, 1.450) and where the people of Lampsacus sing, as they sacrifice an ass
to Priapus: “as is fitting, we give the informer’s guts to the flames” (apta … flam-
mis indicis exta damus, 6.346). I might also add that in Tristia 4.10 Ovid is well
aware of the danger that informing poses to his own safety:
causa meae cunctis nimium quoque nota ruinae

indicio non est testificanda meo. (Tristia 4.10.99 – 100)
And I must not bear witness to the cause of my ruin by informing, even though it is too well
known to all.
It is not only in the mythical world that it is dangerous to be an informer.

In their different ways each of these stories from Metamorphoses 2 reflects on
the dangers inherent in the exercise of free speech. Moreover, Ovid’s use of allu-
sion, whether intra- or intertextual, suggests that these are not innocent narra-
tives, that they are connected with the poet’s conception of himself and of his
position in Augustan Rome. In this of course they resemble Ovid’s accounts of
artists like the daughters of Pierus in Book 5, of Arachne in Book 6 and of Or-
pheus in Books 10 and 11.⁵⁵ And we should not forget that Mercury punishes
Herse’s thoughts and words (2.833) and that the narrator focuses upon the trau-
matic effects of the loss of the power of speech when describing the transforma-
tions of Io in Book 1 and Actaeon in Book 3.
I began this essay by asserting that, despite the statistics, freedom of speech
is important in Augustan epic. But if the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses share a
common concern with the subject, their treatments are very different. In Aeneid
11 Drances, unlike his Homeric ancestor, can demand and receive the right to
speak in a public context and use that right to oppose successfully the most pow-
erful warrior on the Italian side. In Metamorphoses 2, by contrast, speech is per-
 The literature on Ovid’s treatment of artists is very large. For a recent treatment see Johnson
().
ilous, as the crow knows all too well (565), because offending the powerful in
words leads to hideous punishment. Given the self-referential elements in
these stories, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that one reason for the differ-
ences between the Virgilian and Ovidian treatments of this issue is the Augustan
regime’s increasingly oppressive attempts to control communication, attempts
which culminated in Ovid’s exile in 8 CE.⁵⁶
Bibliography
Ahl, F.M. 1985. Metaformations. Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets.
Ithaca, NY.
— 2007. Virgil. Aeneid. Oxford.
Anderson, W.S. (ed.). 1997. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books 1 – 5. Norman, OK.
Barchiesi, A. (ed.). 2005. Ovidio, Metamorfosi, Vol. I (Libri I-II). Milan.
Bömer, F. 1969. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen: Kommentar Buch I-III. Heidelberg.
— 1986. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen: Kommentar Buch XIV-XV. Heidelberg.
Boyle, A.J. 1997. “Postscripts from the Edge: Exilic Fasti and Imperialised Rome”, Ramus 26:
7 – 28.
Brunt, P.A. 1988. “Libertas in the Republic”, in: The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related
Essays. Oxford, 281 – 350.
Chrissanthos, S.G. 2004. “Freedom of Speech and the Roman Republican Army”, in: I. Sluiter
and R.M. Rosen (eds.), Free Speech in Classical Antiquity. Leiden, 341 – 67.
Fantham, E. 1999. “Fighting Words: Turnus at Bay in the Latin Council (Aen. 11.234 – 446)”,
AJPh 120: 259 – 80.
Gransden, K.W. (ed.). 1991. Virgil, Aeneid, Book XI. Cambridge.
Halliwell, S. 2008. Greek Laughter. A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early
Christianity. Cambridge.
Hardie, P.R. 1998. “Fame and Defamation in the Aeneid: The Council of Latins”, in: H.-P. Stahl
(ed.), Vergil’s Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context. London, 243 – 70.
Highet, G. 1972. The Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid. Princeton, NJ.
Hollis, A.S. (ed.). 1990. Callimachus: Hecale. Oxford.
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WI.
Keith, A.M. 1992. The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 2. Ann Arbor,
MI.
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der Homerzitate in der Aeneis. Göttingen.
 I am happy to acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council for my
research on this subject.
198 Peter J. Davis
La Penna, A. 1971. “Spunti sociologici per l’interpretazione dell’ Eneide”, in: H. Bardon and R.
Verdière (eds.), Vergiliana. Recherches sur Virgile. Leiden, 283 – 93.
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Marks, J. 2005. “The Ongoing Neikos: Thersites, Odysseus, and Achilleus”, AJPh 126: 1 – 31.
Millar, F. 1998. The Crowd in the Late Roman Republic. Ann Arbor, MI.
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Mathias Hanses
Love’s Letters: an Amor-Roma Telestich at
Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.507 – 10
Summary: This paper argues that Ovid deliberately arranged lines 3.507– 10 of
the Ars Amatoria to have the letters at line end spell out AMOR when read ver-
tically. Together with the last word of the passage, which is itself Amor, this tele-
stich produces a shape (û) that recalls a famous Γ-acrostic in Aratus. Since the
relevant Ovidian lines discuss mirrors, they also constitute an invitation to
read AMOR backwards as ROMA. The telestich thus emerges as engaging inter-
textually with a variety of plays on the city’s name, including the famous
AMOR-ROMA word squares that are preserved in Imperial Roman graffiti. Within
the mildly subversive genre of elegy, Ovid’s palindromic wordplay creates a con-
trast between traditional expressions of Roman military valor—familiar from
works like the Aeneid, where an acrostic significantly spells out MARS—and
his own world, where the city of ROMA has come to be dominated by AMOR.
Keywords: telestich; acrostic; wordplay; Amor; Roma; mora; Ovid; Ars Amatoria;
Virgil
Ovid’s Ars Amatoria abounds in playful advice on the exchange of hidden mes-
sages: lovers should compose their notes in secretive handwriting or use milk as
invisible ink; they should have trustworthy servants carry these letters back and
forth; and they should encode hidden meanings in their missives that are dis-
cernible only to the knowing recipient.¹ This interest in clandestine communica-
tions makes the poem an obvious hunting ground for modern students of an-
cient wordplay, who have in recent years increasingly uncovered acrostics and
similar ‘intexts’ in Greek and Latin poetry. In what follows, I will point out an
instance of such playfulness at Ars amatoria 3.507– 10—where the letters at
line end spell out the noun AMOR or, inversely, ROMA—and discuss this tele-
stich’s relevance to the themes and poetics of the work.
The poet’s fascination with covert correspondence is discernible throughout
the Ars, but it is particularly apparent in Book Three. Here, the praeceptor Amoris
revisits the advice he gave to male lovers in the first two books of his poem, but
turns the tables to now instruct women in the corresponding ways of conducting
 For milk as a substitute for sympathetic ink, see Ov. Ars Amatoria . – . Ovid’s other
letter-writing advice is adduced below.
200 Mathias Hanses
affairs. To this new endeavor he devotes only about half the space he allotted to
his advice to men, so the treatment of each individual subject is necessarily more
compressed. At Ars Amatoria 3.469 – 514, we read a condensed treatment of how
lovers in general, and women in particular, should go about sending letters²:
uerba uadum temptent abiegnis scripta tabellis;

accipiat missas apta ministra notas. 470
inspice, quodque leges, ex ipsis collige uerbis
fingat an ex animo sollicitusque roget.
postque breuem rescribe moram: mora semper amantes
incitat, exiguum si modo tempus habet. […]
munda sed e medio consuetaque uerba, puellae,
scribite: sermonis publica forma placet. 480
a, quotiens dubius scriptis exarsit amator
et nocuit formae barbara lingua bonae!
sed quoniam, quamuis uittae careatis honore,
est uobis uestros fallere cura uiros,
ancillae pueriue manu perarate tabellas, 485
pignora nec puero credite uestra nouo. 486
perfidus ille quidem, qui talia pignora seruat, 489
sed tamen Aetnaei fulminis instar habent. 490
uidi ego pallentes isto terrore puellas 487
seruitium miseras tempus in omne pati. 488
iudice me fraus est concessa repellere fraudem, 491
armaque in armatos sumere iura sinunt.
ducere consuescat multas manus una figuras,
(a, pereant, per quos ista monenda mihi!),
nec nisi deletis tutum rescribere ceris, 495
ne teneat geminas una tabella manus. […]
si licet a paruis animum ad maiora referre,
plenaque curuato pandere uela sinu, 500
pertinet ad faciem rabidos compescere mores:
candida pax homines, trux decet ira feras.
ora tument ira, nigrescunt sanguine uenae,
lumina Gorgoneo saeuius igne micant.
‘i procul hinc,’ dixit ‘non es mihi, tibia, tanti’, 505
ut uidit uultus Pallas in amne suos.
uos quoque si media speculum spectetis in ira,
cognoscat faciem uix satis ulla suam.
nec minus in uultu damnosa superbia uestro:
comibus est oculis alliciendus Amor. 510
odimus immodicos (experto credite) fastus:
saepe tacens odii semina uultus habet.
 The Latin text is based on Gibson (). All translations are my own.
Love’s Letters: an Amor-Roma Telestich at Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.507 – 10 201
spectantem specta, ridenti mollia ride:

innuet, acceptas tu quoque redde notas.
Let words inscribed on wooden tablets test the waters,

and let a loyal servant receive the signs that were sent. 470
Inspect them, and determine from what you will read, from the words themselves,
whether he is faking it or writes from the heart and in a state of distress.
And write back after a brief delay: delay always stirs up
lovers if it lasts only for a short time. […]
Write elegant words, girls, but common and customary ones:
it is everyday parlance that pleases. 480
Ah, how often did letters inflame a doubtful lover
and how often did unpolished speech harm a beautiful figure (formae)!
But since, although you lack the honor of (marital) fillets,
you care to deceive your men,
inscribe (perarate) the tablets in the handwriting of a slave girl or boy, 485
nor trust a new servant with your pledges. 486
Treacherous indeed is he who holds on to such securities, 489
but they contain (a power) akin to a thunderbolt from Aetna. 490
I have personally seen girls, blanching at this terror, 487
miserably suffer eternal servitude. 488
To my mind, deceit is a valid defense against deceit, 491
and the laws allow us to take up arms against armed men.
Let a single hand be accustomed to multiple scripts (figuras)
(ah, may they perish on whose account I have to utter these warnings!),
nor is it safe to write unless the wax has been completely erased 495
to make sure the same tablet does not contain two hands. […]
If I may now turn my mind from small to greater matters,
and fully extend my sails in a rounded curve: 500
it befits a (pretty) face to rein in rabid moods.
Joyful peace suits human beings; savage wrath suits beasts.
The face swells with anger; the veins grow black with blood;
the eyes flash with fire more savagely than the Gorgon’s.
“Away with you,” said Pallas, “you are not worth that much to me, flute,” 505
when she saw her face in the river.
If you too should glance in mid-wrath at a mirror,
with difficulty would any of you recognize her own face. No
less does an expression of arrogance spell doom:
it is with affable eyes that we must attract Love. 510
We hate excessive haughtiness (believe the expert):
often even a silent look bears seeds of hatred.
Glance back at him who glances, laugh back sweetly at him who laughs.
If he nods to you, you too return the signs you have received.
Lines 3.473 – 4 contain an instance of what Frederick Ahl, following Varro, called
‘declension,’ the cycling through different inflections and spellings of a given
202 Mathias Hanses
noun to produce puns and other kinds of wordplay.³ Forms of the noun MORA
(‘delay’), an anagram of AMOR, occur twice in line 473. That we are to think
of the latter when we read the former is clarified by the occurrence of amantes
in the same hexameter. Significantly, a playful look at the Latin yields the imper-
ative rescribe moram, or “rewrite mora.” This reads like an encouragement to di-
vide up the word MORA into its constituent letters and reassemble them into
such variants as AMOR, ROMA, or MARO, all of which will indeed factor into
my interpretation.
It is appropriate, then, and in keeping with a common custom in ancient
wordplay, that the rest of the passage is rife with oblique announcements of
our AMOR telestich. The praeceptor’s advice is to scan any letters carefully for
signs of love (!), paying close attention to the words themselves (ex ipsis … uerbis,
3.469 – 72, at 471). The lovers’ communications are to be elegant and use common
words (3.479 – 80) to avoid doing damage to the ‘figure’ (formae, 3.482). They
should cover up their true intentions by writing (perarate, 3.485)⁴ in disguised
handwriting and by employing different figurae (3.493) to express their affection.
In the same vein, they are to make sure that their love is not too plainly visible
on their writing tablets (3.495 – 96). Finally, since Ovid told us at the outset that
Love is better after Delay,⁵ it is appropriate that our AMOR telestich occurs only a
bit later, after an ostensible change of subject. As announced, the careful reader
of lines 3.507– 10 finds a secret message embedded in the very words of the text,
encoded in the letters at line end. Fittingly, this hidden forma or figura literally
spells out the writer’s ‘Love’ (or ‘Rome,’ when read backwards):
uos quoque si media speculum spectetis in ira,

cognoscat faciem uix satis ulla suam.
nec minus in uultu damnosa superbia uestro:
comibus est oculis alliciendus Amor.
If you too should glance in mid-wrath at a mirror,

with difficulty would any of you recognize her own face. No
less does an expression of arrogance spell doom:
it is with affable eyes that we must attract Love.
This ‘love letter’ is no accident of poetic composition. Studies of ancient word-

play generally assume that an acrostic is intentional if the relevant lines’ first
 Ahl ()  – . See also Jay Reed’s chapter (in this volume).
 perarate is Bentley’s restoration of manus ferat arte codd. The verb also occurs at Ov. Amores
.., Ars Amatoria ., and Metamorphoses .; see Gibson () ad loc.
 Ovid follows his own advice by delaying the description of actual love making until the very
end of the Ars Amatoria (. – ). See also Ars Amatoria . –  and ..
word is identical to the intext that is detectable along the left margin, that is, if
first word and acrostic form a gamma (Γ). The archetype for gamma acrostics is
in Aratus’s Phaenomena at lines 783 – 7,⁶ a passage that found many imitators in
both Greek and Roman literature.⁷ Here, the relevant word is ΛΕΠΤΗ, an adjec-
tive that means ‘faint’ or ‘elegant.’ Within Hellenistic poetics, it also points to
literary sophistication and tongue-in-cheek wordplay. Appropriately, several ad-
ditional, hidden occurrences of the adjective have recently been uncovered in the
Phaenomena passage.⁸ Ovid’s AMOR-ROMA telestich belongs in the same tradi-
tion—indeed, it constitutes a deliberate nod to the Hellenistic poet. After all,
Ovid’s lines likewise call for elegant words (munda … uerba, 3.479). And what
is more, the verb he uses in his advice to write in elusive scripts, perarate
(3.485), if correct,⁹ is a pun on Aratus’s name.¹⁰ Finally, in combination with
the intext, Ovid’s lines’ final word produces a shape (û) that recalls the Phaeno-
mena’s gamma, thereby guaranteeing that the telestich is not fortuitous.
However, while Ovid’s û does recall Aratus’s Γ, it significantly inverts its
shape. This, too, is no coincidence. After all, the women addressed in the rele-
vant lines of the Ars are glancing into a mirror. It only makes sense, then, for
Ovid’s telestich to be the mirror image of Aratus’s acrostic. Perhaps the intext
is even supposed to resemble a mirror, with the Amor of line 510 representing
 In modern classical scholarship, this acrostic was first noticed by J.-M. Jacques (). Aratus
is himself imitating a (possibly fortuitous) acrostic at Hom. Iliad . – . For important discus-
sions of the related passages, see the full bibliography assembled at Hanses (), as well as
notes , , and  below. The term ‘gamma acrostic’ was pioneered by Morgan (). For other
shapes, such as a lambda (Λ) or a delta (Δ), see Trzaskoma (forthcoming).
 The best-known instance is Virgil’s encoding of his own name into lines . –  of the
Georgics. For this and similar ‘Aratean’ acrostics in Greek and especially Roman literature, as
well as telestichs and other intexts, see, e. g., Hilberg ( – ); Brown ()  – ;
Vogt (); Fowler (); Courtney (); Bing () and (); Haslam (); Barch-
iesi () ; Clauss (); Carter (); Damschen (); Danielewicz (), (a),
(b), and (c); Feeney and Nelis (); Bielsa i Mialet (); Hurka (); La Bar-
bera (); Katz (), (), (), and (); Castelletti (), (a), (b),
and (); Gore and Kershaw (); Grishin (); Luz (), esp.  –  and  – ; Som-
erville (); Colborn (); Kersten (); Smith (); Giusti (); and the relevant
contributions in this volume. The reasons for Aratus’s popularity at Rome are discussed in
Volk ().
 For renewed discussions of Aratus’s ΛΕΠΤΗ acrostic, see Hanses (); Danielewicz (),
and Trzaskoma (forthcoming).
 See n. .
 For similar punning allusions to Aratus’ name, both in the Phaenomena itself and in the
poet’s later imitators, see esp. Levitan () , n. ; Kidd (); Springer ( – );
Bing () and (); Katz (); Kubiak (); and Van Noorden () , n. .
204 Mathias Hanses
the handle and the telestich itself forming the reflecting surface.¹¹ This effect
would have been even more palpable if, as some wordplay scholars have sus-
pected from hints in several pertinent passages, intexts were sometimes high-
lighted through rubrication.¹² If the letters of the telestich were indeed offset
in red, they would also have provided an illustration of the kind of palimpsest
that Ovid describes at 3.495 – 6, that is, a half-erased love letter shining through
more recent writing on a wax tablet.
Perhaps more importantly, the passage’s mirroring theme offers an invitation
to read in alternating directions. And when glanced at in a reflection, each indi-
vidual instance of AMOR turns into ROMA. Alternatively, we can string together
all of the telestich’s seven relevant letters into just one continuous sequence and
uncover the palindrome AMOR(R)OMA, which too (by definition) can be read
backwards and forwards. The letters used in this palindrome are particularly ap-
propriate to a play on mirrors: except for the R that forms the hinge where AMOR
and ROMA connect—or the reflecting surface that turns AMOR into ROMA—all
relevant letters are symmetrical (A, M, O) and look the same if mirrored along
the Y-axis.¹³
The telestich thus emerges as an anagrammatic play on the city’s name. The
AMOR-ROMA palindrome probably predates Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, and it seems to
have been widely appreciated in the Imperial era. For example, a famous graffito
discovered on a wall of the House of Menander in Pompeii has the relevant let-
ters arranged into a word square (CIL 4.8297):
R O M A
O I I M
M I I O
A M O R
 For discussions of technopaegnion poems, whose shape (e. g., an axe, an egg, a syrinx, or an
altar) resembles their content, see esp. Levitan () ; Higgins (); and Luz ().
 The use of visual effects in support of written wordplay was a common practice in later an-
tiquity and the Middle Ages, but is not attested for the first century; see esp. Levitan ()
 – ; Courtney () ; and Heil (). Studies that claim to have found hints at rubrica-
tion in texts from the Hellenistic and Roman eras include Damschen () , n. ; Habinek
() ; and Hanses ()  – . Damschen’s suggestion that Ov. Ars Amatoria
. –  (nec uos / excipite arcana uerba notata manu, “do not intercept words spelled out
in a secret hand”) alludes to visually offset acrostics now strikes me as more plausible than it
did when I wrote Hanses () , n. . At the same time, the objection that rubrication
would defeat the purpose by revealing the secret remains legitimate.
 I owe this observation about the letters’ symmetrical shape to Joshua Katz.
In whichever direction the passersby chose to read along the edges of the square,
they always arrived at either ROMA(A)MOR or AMOR(R)OMA. Together with sim-
ilar examples from Rome,¹⁴ Ostia (Guarducci (1965) 262– 6 with fig. 8), and Spain
(IRBaelo 00102),¹⁵ this Pompeian word square attests that visual plays on the
city’s name were popular not just at the Empire’s geographical center or
among its literary elite.¹⁶ While it is impossible to tell which came first, the
word square—for which we only have the terminus ante quem of Mt. Vesuvius’s
eruption in 79 CE—or Ovid’s palindromic telestich, they clearly both belong in
the same tradition. After all, the graffito also has two instances of AMOR ar-
ranged in a û-shape:
R O M A
O I I M
M I I O
A M O R
Ovid’s Ars Amatoria thus presents itself at its most ‘literary’—that is, most con-
cerned with the actual, material litterae on the page—precisely at the point
where it engages with supposedly sub-literary graffiti. Ironically, this kind of
play more than most requires a literate recipient.
As regards the wordplay’s interpretation, the ROMA-AMOR square has been
understood as an expression of Roman Imperial self-confidence. We may consid-
er it a portrayal of the entire cosmos as contained by Rome, by the love goddess
from whom its founders descended, and by the ‘love’ the city spread in form of
the pax Romana. ¹⁷ In Ovid’s elegiac contexts, however, other, more subversive
readings also suggest themselves.
 This particular version of the word square was discovered together with the palindrome
ROMA SUMMUS AMOR under S. Maria Maggiore. See Castrén () and Wheeler (forthcoming),
n. .
 I reproduce here the version found in Pompeii. Its Roman, Ostian, and Spanish counterparts
replace the Is at the center with the letter combination IL to produce additional palindromic
plays on OLIM and MILO:
R O M A
O L I M
M I L O
A M O R
 So also Benefiel () .

 On the AMOR-ROMA anagram, including its use in a famous uersus recurrens (Roma tibi sub-
ito motibus ibit amor), its role in word squares and graffiti, and its relation to the city’s Imperial
ambitions (including the speculation that Amor was Rome’s secret name), see Focke ();
206 Mathias Hanses
The elegiac lover is commonly seen as the distorted mirror image of tradi-
tional Roman values. Instead of embracing a life of service to the state, the gen-
re’s lovers reject careers in politics or the military to pass their time instead in a
militia Amoris. ¹⁸ For those familiar with the AMOR-ROMA anagram, this lifestyle
would quite literally constitute the opposite of militia Romana. ¹⁹ Such potentially
subversive tendencies are apparent throughout the Ars, but especially in Book
Three, where women are incited to dedicate their lives to erotic adventures.²⁰ It
is appropriate, then, that Ovid’s amatory and anti-militaristic poem includes—
in our telestich—an oblique reference to AMOR being the reverse of ROMA. Sig-
nificantly, the Pompeian word square grants equal space to both ROMA and
AMOR, but Ovid’s wordplay reproduces only the bottom-right corner, where
‘Love’ is much more immediately visible. This choice privileges AMOR over
ROMA, even as the text’s palindromic arrangement highlights the connection be-
tween the two. Form here matches content, in that a telestich necessarily goes
against the grain of the text and thereby disrupts its flow, inverts its sense,
and subverts traditional meanings.
By having AMOR dominate ROMA, then, both in our passage and throughout
the Ars Amatoria, Ovid presents a counter-image of Rome as the City of Love, a
martial metropolis taken over by Venus and Amor. As he himself puts it at the
beginning of the work (1.59 – 60)²¹: quot caelum stellas, tot habet tua Roma puel-
las: / mater in Aeneae constitit urbe sui (“your Rome has as many girls as the sky
has stars; the mother of Aeneas has established herself in her son’s city”).²² Our
telestich passage’s preoccupation with mirrors befits this reading as well. In the
Ars Amatoria, readers glance into a reflection of their true self that they may not
Stanley (); Guarducci (); Pucci (); Ahl (), esp.  –  and ; Skulsky
(); Nelis (); Cairns (); Sissa (); Benefiel (); and Wheeler (forthcoming).
 In relatively close proximity to the telestich, and befitting its emphasis on mirrors and ap-
pearances, see, e. g., Ov. Ars Amatoria .: militiae species amor est (“love has the appearance
of warfare”) or .: hoc quoque militia est (“this, too, is warfare”).
 See e. g. Murgatroyd (), who traces the emergence of the militia Amoris concept, and
Gale (), who explores its true complexity and ambiguity. For general introductions to (Ovi-
dian) elegy, see Holzberg () and Volk ()  – . The elegiac poets’ awareness that their
Amor is an anagram of Roma is at its most apparent in Prop. .., where the two nouns occur
within the same line: per te nunc Romae quidlibet audet Amor, “it is on your account that Amor
now dares to do whatever he wants at Rome.” For additional plays on AMOR, ROMA, and MORA
in Roman elegy, see Pucci ().
 The Ars Amatoria’s open advocacy for a supposedly immoral militia Amoris may in fact have
been partially to blame for Ovid’s banishment from Rome to Tomis. See e. g. Gibson ()  –
 for a nuanced discussion with bibliography.
 I would like to thank Katharina Volk for reminding me of this reference.
 See also the Propertian line quoted in n. .
have anticipated. Where they expected to find the familiar and conventional
ROMA, they end up observing a ROMA ruled by AMOR. Nevertheless, they
should refrain from anger, as Ovid insists perhaps with a hint of anticipation
of his upcoming punishment through exile. If we just glance with good will at
the AMOR we see in the mirror, and take on its properties, we will come to
like what we see; we will ourselves be more pleasant to look at; and we will
reap the appropriate amatory benefits.²³
Finally, the contrast between Ovid’s devotion to AMOR and traditional
ROMA’s more martial values suggests an intertextual connection to another fa-
mous acrostic. Within the Ars Amatoria, Virgil’s Aeneid commonly serves as a
conformist foil to Ovid’s more pacifist poetry, as is apparent from passages
like 1.59 – 60 just quoted above. AMOR, of course, is not just an emotion, but
also a divinity. The corresponding personification of warfare would be MARS,
and it is fitting that while Ovid encodes the one god in his text, Virgil did the
same to the other. Note the MARS acrostic that marks the beginning of the Ae-
neid’s description of the Latin custom to open the Gates of War at the beginning
of a conflict (7.601– 5)²⁴:
mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quem protinus urbes

Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum
Roma colit, cum prima mouent in proelia Martem,
siue Getis inferre manu lacrimabile bellum
[…] parant […]
Martial custom there was in Hesperian Latium, which from the first the
Alban cities held holy and which now the greatest in the world,
Rome, adheres to when for the beginnings of battles they
stir up Mars, be it that they prepare to force lamentable war on the Getans…
In this oft-noted passage, the MARS acrostic corresponds to the lines’ topic—war-
fare—and makes explicit how important this activity (prima mouent in proelia
Martem (!), 603; inferre manu lacrimabile bellum, 604) is to Rome’s self-image.
The AMOR telestich picks up on this instance of Virgilian wordplay, but lays a
competing claim to ROMA (so prominently mentioned at Aeneid 7.603) in the
 For ancient perceptions of mirrors as revealing (at times inconvenient) truths, but at the
same time providing exemplary models and calls for self-improvement, see Sen. De ira
.. –  and McCarty ().
 This acrostic was first noted by Hilberg ( – ) , who however considered it for-
tuitous. Fowler (); Feeney and Nelis (); and others consider it intentional and point to
the additional occurrence of Martem at ., which can hardly be a coincidence. See also Hors-
fall () ad loc.
208 Mathias Hanses
name of AMOR. It is appropriate to this context of an Ovidian telestich implicitly

subverting Virgil that the word AMOR also constitutes a jumbling and re-consti-
tution of the letters that make up (Publius Vergilius) MARO, a poet who was him-
self no stranger to intexts punning on his name.²⁵
Ovid’s telestich thus emerges as an expression of the poet’s poetics in a va-
riety of ways. He continues the tradition of Aratean λεπτότης; he plays on the
spelling of AMOR and ROMA in the manner of Imperial Roman graffiti, which
is appropriate to his preoccupation with the quotidian; and he presents in the
right margin of his page a mirror image of what Virgil presented on the left.
Here and elsewhere, the Ars’s dedication to militia Amoris provides an amatory
counter-model to the Aeneid’s devotion to MARS. In a way, the AMOR telestich
also delivers on a promise that Ovid made at the beginning of his poem.
There, the praeceptor had said he would tame Love the way Tiphys steered the
Argo, Automedon directed Achilles’ horses, and Chiron controlled Achilles him-
self (Ov. Ars Amatoria 1.1– 24). Ovid, in turn, has now quite directly ‘captured’
AMOR on the pages of the Ars. And finally, it is in keeping with the text’s de-
mand to make Love, not War, that our passage insists on peaceful interactions.
Rather than be angry or arrogant (much less banish each other to the edges of
the known world), we should “Glance back at him who glances, laugh back
sweetly at him who laughs. If he nods to you, you too return the signs you
have received” (spectantem specta, ridenti mollia ride: / innuet, acceptas tu quo-
que redde notas, 3.513 – 14). How much more directly could Ovid have asked his
male and, here especially, female readers to keep writing, and looking for, acros-
tics and telestichs?²⁶
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Ioannis Ziogas
Love Elegy and Legal Language in Ovid
Summary: Ovid’s engagement with legal discourse is a version of the elegiac rec-
usatio, a simultaneous appropriation and denial of legalisms. Set against the
background of Augustus’ adultery laws, Ovidian elegy aspires to dictate and re-
form the rules of amatory conduct. The Ars Amatoria exemplifies the profile of
love elegy as legal discourse by attempting to regulate love affairs under a re-
gime that institutionalized passion. The conflict and interaction between the
world of elegiac seduction and that of Roman law feature prominently in Acon-
tius’ letter to Cydippe (Heroides 20). In this letter, literary sources legitimize po-
etic imitations; fanciful innovations mirror established traditions; wedding con-
tracts converge with amatory deception and witness-statements with love letters.
By construing an intricate nexus between the fantasies of desire and the reality
and materiality of legal documents, Ovid suggests that, in the end, Cupid is in
charge of both the letter and the spirit of the law.
Keywords: elegy; law; recusatio; adultery; marriage; love letter; materiality; wit-
ness-statements; magic; seduction
Elegiac Denial and Legal Commitment

Latin love elegy is a literary genre that defines itself by denial. The so-called rec-
usatio, the disavowal of epic war for the sake of love, shapes the profile and
agenda of elegiac discourse. Yet this denial is simultaneously an appropriation.¹
Roman elegy may apparently refuse to engage with the world of wars and men,
but actually enlists martial epic in the service of love poetry. Elegy’s strategy is
more aggressive than it looks at first sight; the genre conquers by feigning a re-
treat and transforms epic narratives into elegiac metaphors.² From that perspec-
tive, elegy is more imperialistic than epic since it expands by dividing and con-
quering the martial and amatory aspects of epic poems. The denial of an active
military and political life is a powerful political statement. By refusing actively to
 Hinds ()  –  discusses Latin poets’ simultaneous appropriation and denial in the
rather different context of the so-called primus motif.
 E. g., the motif of militia amoris. On this elegiac motif and its ironies, see Gale (); Drink-
water ().
214 Ioannis Ziogas
take part in Roman imperialism, the Roman elegists make a revolutionary poetic
and political choice. Elegy’s action is its pretense of inaction.
A similar combination of denial and appropriation applies to elegy’s stance
towards Roman law. The elegiac motif of seruitium amoris is not only a reworking
of epic imagery for elegiac purposes, but also a legal concept that is employed as
poetic metaphor.³ In the manner of the traditional recusatio, Propertius reassures
Cynthia that Roman laws and Jovian weapons are incapable of separating ele-
giac lovers (2.7.1– 6).⁴ Ovid’s decision to abandon a career in law for the sake
of a career in poetry is another twist of the recusatio. ⁵ The exiled poet implies
that courtroom rhetoric is reprocessed for poetic effects.⁶ Ovid’s autobiographi-
cal poem (Tristia 4.10), in which he contrasts his brother’s inclination for legal
studies with his own poetic pursuits, is a case in point:
frater ad eloquium uiridi tendebat ab aeuo,

fortia uerbosi natus ad arma fori;
at mihi iam puero caelestia sacra placebant,
inque suum furtim Musa trahebat opus.
Tristia 4.10.17– 20
My brother inclined towards oratory from his tender age, born for the strong weapons of the
garrulous forum; but I even as a boy delighted in heavenly rites and stealthily the Muse was
pulling me into her dear work.⁷
The forensic eloquence required for a legal career is cast in epic language; the
strong weapons (fortia arma), an unmistakable symbol of martial epic, are en-
meshed with the busy verbosity of the forum. Ovid denied this wordy and world-
ly career for the divine pleasures of poetry. His reference to his boyhood not only
suggests his affinities with the puer Cupid, but also alludes to the boyish nature
of Ovidian and Callimachean poetics with its schoolboy frivolity which pointedly
punctures the manly grauitas of epic.⁸ By contrast, his brother’s green age subtly
puns on his latent manhood (VIRidi…ab aeuo), ready to take up strong weapons.
The juxtaposition of Ovid and his brother is a version of the elegiac recusatio. The
 See Kenney ()  – , for seruitium amoris; cf. Kenney () ; Gebhardt ()
 – .
 On recusatio in Propertius ., see Cairns () .
 Ovid models his poetic career on Vergil and his literary aspirations replace the public cursus
honorum; see Farrell (); (); Barchiesi and Hardie ()  – .
 Recent scholarship has focused on legal diction in Ovid’s exile poetry; see Lowrie ()
 – ; McGowan ()  – ; Gebhardt ()  – .
 Translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
 On this topic, see Morgan ().
priority of pleasure (placebant), the attraction to the female Muse, and the steal-
thy work (furtim) of the Muse’s divine seduction all point to main preoccupations
of Roman love elegy. The lure of amatory poetry is more persuasive than the
noisy rhetoric of forensic litigations.
When his father admonishes him to try more profitable pursuits, Ovid at-
tempts to abandon the realm of poetry and write prose. But whatever he tried
to write would turn into verse on its own accord (Tristia 4.10.21– 6). This is the
common interpretation of sponte sua carmen numeros ueniebat in aptos (‘of
its own accord a poem would come upon suitable meter’, Tristia 4.10.25), a
line which, in this context, draws attention to the poetic and legal meaning of
carmen. While forsaking a public career for the sake of poetry, Ovid pointedly
uses carmen, a word that not only refers to verse as opposed to prose, but is
also closely associated with legal and authoritative statements.⁹ Ovid’s prosaic
and futile attempts to engage with public administration end up in verse.
Thus, the transformation of Ovid’s prose into poetry is simultaneously a denial
and an appropriation of legal diction. Ovid did not simply refuse forensic
speech; instead legal discourse magically and spontaneously morphed into po-
etry. The word carmen, which is equally applicable to legal and poetic diction,
remains the same, but its form changes. True to the spirit of his Metamorphoses,
Ovid’s carmen shifts shape while its nature continues to be essentially
unchangeable.¹⁰ The poet manages both to disavow and highlight the legal na-
ture of his poetry.
The Word of the Law

Poetry builds its own imperial program and passes its own laws. The overlap be-
tween the politics of poetry and the poetics of empire that features so prominent-
ly in Augustan poetry¹¹ is partly enabled by the Latin language, which uses
words and phrases that apply both to poetic and imperial authority. Recent
scholarship, for instance, suggests that the verb cano has little, if anything, to
 See Putnam ()  – ; Lowrie ()  notes that carmen is used to refer both to po-
etry and law. The semantic range of the Greek νόμος (‘melody’ and ‘law’) corresponds to the
Latin carmen (‘song’ and ‘law’). Svenbro ()  – ,  –  argues that in Greece the
law was originally sung out by the law-chanter. More on carmen below.
 Metamorphosis often highlights continuity rather than change. Feldherr ()  points
out that human beings who undergo metamorphosis do not lose the enduring aspects of their
being, rather they take on a form that reveals them; cf. Anderson ()  – .
 See Hardie (); Lowrie (); Feldherr ().
216 Ioannis Ziogas
do with a distinction between singing and speaking. Instead, canere seems to de-
scribe a statement that carries authority independent of external ratification.¹²
Similarly, carmen describes powerful language that can bring about a physical
reaction that reifies the speaker’s wishes.¹³ Carmen can refer to law and by reg-
ularizing carmen as a word for a poem the Augustan poets claim a quasi-legal
status for their poems. Augustan poetry appropriates legal discourse, and
Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is probably the best example of the rivalry between Augus-
tus’ and Ovid’s carmina.
Ovid composed his Ars Amatoria against the background of Augustus’ lex
Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, which made adultery a criminal offense. In spite
of or maybe because of Ovid’s conceited statements that his love lessons do
not break the law (see, e. g., Ars Amatoria 1.31– 4, 2.599 – 600, 3.57– 8; Tristia
2.247– 50), the Ars Amatoria was presumably one of the reasons why the emperor
relegated Ovid to Tomis. The accusation was that Ovid’s didactic poem teaches
adultery, which is illegal under the lex Iulia. Some scholars, such as Mario
Labate,¹⁴ argue that Ovid’s Ars does not really go against Augustus’ legislation,
but this seems to be a minority view, especially in Anglophone scholarship. Most
critics now focus on Ovid’s playfully subversive diction and some argue that his
Ars Amatoria clearly breaks Augustus’ adultery laws.¹⁵
In my view, the Ars is a politically provocative work not only because it
transgresses the boundaries of Roman law, but mainly because it presents itself
as an authoritative document that sets the rules on a subject that is legally pre-
scribed by the new regime. Poems and shows that involve obscenity and adultery
may not be per se subversive. In his defense of the Ars, Ovid points out that mar-
riageable girls and married women regularly watch obscene adultery mimes and
there has never been any problem with it (Tristia 2.497– 506).¹⁶ Why would Au-
gustus mind his Ars Amatoria? Alison Sharrock responds that obscenity is not
politically sensitive: rather it is the undermining of authority which might be
so.¹⁷ An adultery mime may show characters breaking the law but this is differ-
 See references in Lowrie ()  – ,  – .

 Putnam () . See also Habinek ().
 Labate ().
 Davis (). On the Ars Amatoria and Augustus’ adultery laws, see Wallace-Hadrill ();
Gibson ()  – ; Davis ()  – ; Lowrie ()  – . On the adultery laws, see
Raditsa (); Treggiari ()  – ,  – ; McGinn ()  – .
 Admittedly, this might be a subversive thing to say.
 Sharrock () . She further argues that after Vergil politicized didactic poetry with his
Georgics, it is impossible to read Ovid’s Ars Amatoria as apolitical, especially since it repeatedly
subverts Vergil. In my view, didactic poetry has been deeply political since Hesiod.
ent from challenging the validity of the law or defining legal boundaries. And
Ovid’s Ars does undermine Augustus’ authority because the praeceptor assumes
the pose of a legislator who dictates the legal code which should govern love af-
fairs. Ovid and Augustus compete for control over the highly disputed and con-
troversial area of extra-marital sex.
The Ars opens with a couplet that seeks to establish the poet’s authority as
the praeceptor addresses any Romans who may need instruction in love:
Si quis in hoc artem populo non nouit amandi,

hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet.
Ars Amatoria 1.1– 2
If there is anyone in this nation who does not know the art of loving, let him read this poem
and by reading it let him fall in love as a learned man.
Ovid’s diction suggests the beginning of a rhetorical speech and thus the poem
begins with bringing together the art of loving and the art of speaking.¹⁸ The ad-
dress to the Roman people is characteristic of rhetorical discourse and the prae-
ceptor assumes right from the beginning a Ciceronian pose. The first words
strongly suggest the opening of a Ciceronian speech.¹⁹ In the Pro Caelio, for in-
stance, Cicero imagines a certain stranger who might be ignorant of Roman law:
Si quis, iudices, forte nunc adsit ignarus legum…miretur profecto (‘If someone ig-
norant of our laws, jurors, were by chance now to be present…he would certainly
be surprised’, Pro Caelio 1.1). The relevance of the Pro Caelio for the Ars Amatoria
has not been studied, as far as I know, but it is certainly worth examining given
that both works are preoccupied with the legal aspect of extra-marital affairs.²⁰
Cicero and Ovid start with the hypothesis of an ignorant man and proceed to in-
struct this imaginary person. Ignorance commonly compels poets to write didac-
tic poetry, but rendering the jurors open to teaching is also a distinctive charac-
 Ovid’s didactic poem repeatedly draws a parallel between ars amandi and ars orandi, and its
title, Ars Amatoria, puns on Ars Oratoria.
 Several of Cicero’s speeches start with si quis: see Pro Caelio .; Diuinatio in Q. Caecilium
.; Pro Sestio .; de Prouinciis Consularibus .; Pro Rabirio Postumo .; cf. the highly rhet-
orical opening of the prologue in Terence’s Eunuchus  – . Cicero opens his Pro Caelio like a Ter-
entian prologue and it has been argued convincingly that comedy plays a crucial role in this
speech; see Geffcken (); Leigh (). The comic plot of erotic deception is also central
to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. Ovid opens his Remedia Amoris with an exordium of similar diction
(see Remedia Amoris  – ).
 Overall, the influence of Cicero on the Ars Amatoria has been by and large ignored. Gibson
()  – ,  – ,  – , a study of the importance of Cicero’s De officiis in the Ars Amato-
ria, is an exception.
218 Ioannis Ziogas
teristic of the rhetorical exordium.²¹ In Cicero, the hypothetical foreigner would

be surprised at the peculiarity of a law which ordered that certain cases had to
be tried even on public holidays²² and Plato employs a similar hypothesis in
order to provide critique in the Laws. ²³ Thus, Ovid not only assumes the pose
of an orator beginning his speech, but opens his work with a rhetorical exordium
that implies instruction on legal issues.
Advice on love affairs under Augustus is legally fraught and Ovid’s instruc-
tions are inevitably entangled with legal statements. The opening couplet evokes
an authoritative declaration. A condition marked by si quis in the protasis and
the imperative or the jussive subjunctive in the apodosis is a distinctive stylistic
feature of legal tabulae. ²⁴ Thus, the jussive subjunctives (legat, amet) in the apo-
dosis of the protasis si…non nouit suggest the authority of legal carmina. ²⁵ The
opening couplet of the Ars performs a speech act structured like a legal state-
ment; the participial resumption hoc legat et lecto carmine conveys the rapidity
and efficiency with which reading and the practical application of what is read
merge together. Ovid’s carmen defines the socio-political dynamics of love af-
fairs, and its performative aspect –which breaks the boundaries between reading
and doing– endows it with legal power.²⁶ This is the very nature of a carmen; a
carmen is powerful language that changes the physical world and both carmen
and legere are closely associated with legal discourse.²⁷ The etymological link
between legere and lex in combination with the legal connotations of carmen
 Ignorance compels a poet to write didactic poetry: see Lucretius, De Rerum Natura . (ig-
noratur enim quae sit natura animai ‘for they ignore what the nature of the soul is’); Verg. Geor-
gics . (ignaros…uiae…agrestis ‘ignorant of the rustic way’); Grattius, Cynegetica  (ignarum
perfudit lumine uolgus ‘he enlightened the ignorant multitude’). The ploy is as old as Hesiod (see
Opera et Dies  – ,  – ) and Empedocles (fr.  D-K). For the rhetorical doctrine that the
exordium should render the jurors open to teaching (dociles), see Lausberg ()  – ;
Dyck ()  – .
 Cicero does not openly criticize the law but rather its application to Caelius’ case.
 Noted in Dyck () .
 See Meyer ()  – .
 Cf. si defexit…ferito, Livy ..; si quis…faxit…esto, ILC = CIL .; si quis…fecerit…
esto, Lex de imperio  – ,  – ; see Crawford () . – ; cf. si quis aduersum ea fecerit…
iurent omnes socii, Cato, de Agri Cultura . ‘if someone has violated these rules…all the as-
sociates should take an oath’.
 On the performativity of Ovid’s legal statements in Tristia , see Lowrie ()  – .
Lowrie ()  notes that Ovid sets the poet and the lawmaker in contest as authors
whose writings contradict each other. She further focuses on the dynamic interaction between
Augustan poetry and Augustan law and examines the performative dynamics of literature and
law; Lowrie ()  – .
 See Lowrie ()  – ,  – .
point to the oral reification of a law. Magdelain argues that lex is etymologically
related to legere because the law was read aloud in the Senate before it was rati-
fied by oath.²⁸ Along similar lines, Meyer (2004: 97– 101) examines the interac-
tion between writing, reading, and posting the law as a ‘unitary act’ for the
law’s ratification. Ovid’s first couplet performs all the procedures of senatorial
ratification. The author (auctor) writes down a legal statement (carmen), which
needs to be read by his readers in order to be sanctioned. Once this speech
act is performed, Ovid’s carmen has the power to fulfil the authoritative state-
ment that a law would carry within itself.²⁹ From the very beginning Ovid pits
his poetic diction against legislative acts.
Appropriation of legal acts for amatory purposes is not unknown before
Ovid.³⁰ In Plautus’ Asinaria 746 – 809, a parasite draws up a contract between
the young lover Diabolus, the courtesan Philaenium, and the procuress
Cleareta.³¹ The terms of the contract are referred to as leges and the author as
poeta (Asinaria 747– 9, 809), a telling conflation of legal and poetic authority.
The etymological figure leges pellege (Asinaria 747) evokes the style of a carmen
and suggests that a law is put into effect by being read aloud.³² The parasite’s
contract contains conditional sentences typical of legal language: ‘If the girl
has looked at another man, she should become blind on the spot’ (si quem
alium aspexit, caeca continuo siet. Asinaria 770).³³ At this point, legal and mag-
ical language merge together.³⁴ Appropriately, the word carmen refers to laws
and incantations since both legal and magical words are powerful speech acts
with punitive force. The parasite’s curse is both a magic spell and a legal state-
 Magdelain ()  – . Svenbro ()  –  argues that a similar connection be-
tween reading and the law applies in Greek. For Svenbro, νόμος (‘law’) is etymologized from
νέμω (‘I read’, not just ‘I distribute’) and Greek culture developed a conception of law insepa-
rable from its conception of reading.
 Cf. Lowrie () , citing Pierre ().
 See Meyer ()  – , a discussion of parodies of legal language.
 Meyer ()  points out the legal language and style of the parasite’s contract. See also
Cynthia’s formula legis in Propertius .. – .
 Etymological figures are a distinctive characteristic of legal style (cf. dedit dono, Asinaria
, nomen nominet, Asinaria ). For figura etymologica as a stylistic element of carmina,
see Meyer () , .
 Cf. et si qua inutilis/ pictura sit, eam uendat, Asinaria  –  ‘if there is any useless picture,
she should sell it’; si magis religiosa fuerit,/ tibi dicat, Asinaria  –  ‘if she is further obliged
by religion, she should tell you’; si dixerit,/ haec multa ei esto, Asinaria  –  ‘if she has said,
let this be her punishment’; si…dixerit,/…reddat,  –  ‘if she said… she should give’.
 Magical spells were treated as an extension of or substitute for courtroom rhetorical efforts
and legal punishment in Athens; see Allen ()  – .
220 Ioannis Ziogas
ment that binds Philaenium to a monogamous affair with Diabolus. The comic
contract takes on added meaning if we take into account that prostitutes used
their charms to seduce lovers and bawds routinely resorted to magic spells.³⁵
The parasite’s contract usurps this power from Philaenium and Cleareta and
turns it against them.
To some extent, the praeceptor of the Ars also usurps the magical power of
the bawd and employs her erotodidactic discourse.³⁶ Ovid’s hoc legat et lecto car-
mine doctus amet (Ars Amatoria 1.2) combines the legal and magical power of
reciting a carmen. Since the reading of Ovid’s poem will transform the readers
and turn them into learned lovers, the ablative absolute (lecto carmine) functions
as an ablative of means and thus Ovid’s students will fall in love by reading his
fascinating poem. The Ars Amatoria is a charming poem and an authoritative law
and the reading of such a work is a speech act that validates its contents and
casts a spell on its readers.
The Letter of the Law: Acontius and Cydippe

The motif of falling in love by reading features prominently in Latin poetry. Ca-
tullus, for instance, tells us that a certain girl was consumed by the fires of pas-
sion after reading Caecilius’ forthcoming epyllion, the Magna Mater (35.13 – 15).
The myth of Acontius and Cydippe is also a case in point. Cydippe is bound to
marry Acontius after she reads the hero’s message, which is inscribed on an
apple, and inadvertently swears to marry none other than Acontius (see Callima-
chus, Aetia fr. 75.23 – 7 Pf.). But there is more to the myth than a cheeky trick.
Cydippe virtually falls in love by reading Acontius’ words. Hardie argues that
Ovid’s Acontius redirects his message with his elegiac epistle (Heroides 20); he
further examines the magical power of the apple and its message and notes that
the repetition of the inscription on the apple in the epistle lends to the latter something of
the magical power of the oath to act at a distance, to produce effects in the physical world
through the insubstantial tokens of words spoken or written, and ultimately to bring togeth-
er the lovers in physical presence.³⁷
 The lena Dipsas, for instance, is an expert in magic spells; see illa magas artes Aeaeaque
carmina nouit, Ov. Amores .. ‘She knows magical arts and Aeaean spells’. See McKeown
() ad .. –  for further examples of lenae and prostitutes with magical powers.
 See Gibson ()  – ,  – ,  – ; cf. Fear ().
 Hardie () .
Acontius’ message is a carmen, a magical speech act that causes Cydippe’s phys-
ical lovesickness. Interestingly, Acontius’ letter repeatedly employs the language
of law.³⁸ For Acontius, Cydippe is legally bound to marry him after reading his
message. The hero dresses up Cydippe’s involuntary oath in legal terms: she is
his res (Heroides 20.150) in the legal meaning of ‘chattel’, and her reading result-
ed in a pactum (Heroides 20.151, 155).³⁹ In objectifying Cydippe, Acontius em-
ploys the legal language that describes a slave (res) and thus the elegiac poet
gives another twist to the legalistic motif of seruitium amoris; the hero’s alluring
inscription makes the heroine the slave of his desire. Magic spells become the
basis of legal claims and the reading of love poetry is the cause of erotic passion.
The recitation of charming verses is essentially a legal action.⁴⁰
Acontius’ expertise in law seems to be Ovid’s innovation.⁴¹ In Callimachus,
Eros taught Acontius the art of winning over Cydippe, a variation of the motif of
Eros as a teacher of love poetry:⁴²
Αὐτὸς Ἔρως ἐδίδαξεν ᾿Aκόντιον, ὁππότε καλῇ

ᾔθετο Κυδίππῃ παῖς ἐπὶ παρθενικῇ,
τέχνην – οὐ γὰρ ὅγ’ ἔσκε πολύκροτος – ὄφρα λέγο..[
τοῦτο διὰ ζωῆς οὔνομα κουρίδιον.
Callimachus, Aetia fr. 67.1– 4 Pf.
Eros himself taught Acontius the art when the boy was burning for the beautiful maiden
Cydippe – for he was not cunning – so that he might gain the name of husband for the
rest of his life.
 See Kenney (); Videau (); Alekou ()  – .

 See Kenney ()  – ; Alekou ()  – ,  – .
 Acontius’ letter exemplifies Goodrich’s thesis, that the love letter is both more than law and
in breach of law; see Goodrich (). For Goodrich, the love letter expresses the priority of de-
sire over duty, of freedom of choice over marital subjection, of feminine autonomy over property
interest. The political project of the love letter is aimed at nothing less than the subversion or
transformation of institutions as spaces of relationship. Whether it supplements current legisla-
tion or violates it, the love letter is fundamentally a legal action– in fact, Goodrich argues, it is
the original legal discourse that still survives in the affectivity of the legal subconscious.
 See Kenney ()  – . Cydippe’s legal voice is also Ovid’s innovation. Stella Alekou
(per litteras) points out that Ovid enriches Callimachus’ polypaideia on history, medicine etc.
with legal nuances.
 See ποιητὴν δ’ἄρα Ἔρως διδάσκει, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρὶν, Euripides, Stheneboea fr. 
Nauck ‘but Eros instructs a poet then, even though he was songless before’; οἱ γὰρ Ἔρωτες ποι-
ητὰς πολλοὺς ἐδίδαξαν τοὺς πρὶν ἀμούσους, Theocritus, SH  ‘for the Erotes taught many
poets who were songless before’; see also Plato, Symposium d.
222 Ioannis Ziogas
Erotic desire turns inexperienced boys into resourceful lovers. Ovid’s Acontius is
aware of this conceit when he writes to Cydippe that even though he is not nat-
urally cunning, she makes him an expert.⁴³ Cydippe seems to have replaced the
anthropomorphic Eros of the Aetia, but Ovid’s rational interpretation of erotic
desire is followed by a distinctly anthropomorphic Amor, who gives Acontius
legal advice:⁴⁴
te mihi conpositis (siquid tamen egimus) a se

adstrinxit uerbis ingeniosus Amor.
dictatis ab eo feci sponsalia uerbis,
consultoque fui iuris Amore uafer.
Heroides 20.27– 30
If indeed we played any part in the matter, ingenious Love joined you to me with words that
he contrived. I made the betrothal with words he dictated and I became cunning in the law
since Amor was my counselor.
Acontius takes legal advice from Amor, a counselor learned in the law who pre-
pares his client for appearance in court.⁴⁵ The passage is rife with legal diction:
adstringo refers to the language of a binding oath, the κατάδεσμος of Greek love
charms,⁴⁶ but it can also mean ‘to bind by laws or promises’ (OLD s.v. 8); the pro-
saic and legalistic ab eo feci sponsalia conveys the formal tone of Amor’s dicta-
tion of the act of betrothal;⁴⁷ iuris ingeniously applies both to Acontius, who be-
comes cunning in law (iuris…uafer), and Amor, who is Acontius’ jurisconsult
(consulto…iuris).⁴⁸ Ovid builds on Amor’s traditional role as a teacher of love
and love poetry, and adds a legal dimension to this motif. In Heroides 20,
Amor’s dictation of an elegiac message is indistinguishable from his legal in-
structions since elegiac discourse has the power of making and enacting a
contract.⁴⁹ Cydippe is legally bound by what she reads, but also falls in love
 non ego natura nec sum tam callidus usu; /sollertem tu me, crede, puella, facis. Heroides
. –  “I am that cunning neither by inclination nor by practice; you, trust me, girl, make
me wily” alludes to and rationalizes Ἔρως ἐδίδαξεν ᾿Aκόντιον… τέχνην – οὐ γὰρ ὅγ’ ἔσκε πολύ-
κροτος, Callimachus, Aetia fr. . –  Pf.
 On Amor as both a god and desire or a god who is Desire, see Hardie ()  – .
 “Ovid makes Acontius say that he has taken the best professional advice: the picture is that
of a consultation, with Cupid as counsel learned in the law, sending his client away well primed
for his appearance in court.” Kenney () .
 See Barchiesi () ; Rosenmeyer () .
 Acontius’ ‘I made a betrothal’ is provocative, given that two parties were necessary for a be-
trothal; see Kenney () ad loc.
 See Kenney () ad loc.
 On elegiac love as contract, see Gebhardt ()  – .
by reading Acontius’ seductive message. Amor dictates the laws of erotic persua-
sion and the legal details of a nuptial contract.⁵⁰
Acontius’ amatory missive is reminiscent of a sponsio (an oral betrothal) or a
stipulatio (an oral contract). The verb spondeo is used in the contractual formula
of the stipulatio/ sponsio; it means ‘I give a pledge’ to do something in general or
‘I give a pledge to give in marriage’ in particular. According to traditional Roman
law, the stipulatio was binding even if it was the result of a trick; it was a contract
of strict law (the promisor was still bound even if he had entered the contract as
a result of fraud or extortion). This was remedied by praetors around 80 BCE.⁵¹
Ovid’s Acontius takes part in a juristic dispute by claiming the validity of his oral
contract, even though it was the product of dolus. The elegiac discourse of seduc-
tion merges with Roman property and family laws. Erotic desire acquires juridi-
cal authority and tricks are the justified means for winning over the beloved.
Ovid manages to add a legal dimension to Callimachus’ Aetia by alluding to
his source with the key word causa, the Latin translation of the Greek αἴτιον. A
particularly perceptive student of Cupid’s lessons in law, Acontius mischievously
complains that he is forced to plead his case in absentia: ⁵²
nunc reus infelix absens agor et mea, cum sit

optima, non ullo causa tuente perit.
Heroides 20.91– 2
Now I am prosecuted in my absence as an unfortunate defendant and my case, though the

best, is lost since I have no defense counsel.
Acontius’ causa is the best since it derives from Callimachus, an excellent model
for poets like Ovid. At the same time, Acontius’ legal pose recontextualizes
Ovid’s appeal to his source. The Aetia turns out to be more important than a lit-
erary model or a source for etiologies since it provides Acontius with authorita-
tive evidence that offers invaluable support to his trial (causa). Acontius bases
his case on a mythological version that comes straight out of Callimachus’
Aetia and thus expects his readers to consider his arguments truthful:
 The confluence of law and love has been the focus of recent studies in legal theory; see
Bankowski (); Goodrich ().
 See Watson () . From a different perspective, Videau (), ()  – , and
Alekou ()  – ,  – , argue that Acontius refers to the legal concept of dolus
bonus. Acontius asks Cydippe to summon him in order to defend himself in court (alluding to
in ius uocatio), at Heroides . – .
 Videau () and Alekou ()  –  point out that a procedure by default was not in
iure.
224 Ioannis Ziogas
ei mihi, Cydippe, timeo tibi dicere uerum,

ne uidear causa falsa monere mea;
dicendum tamen est.
Woe to me, Cydippe, I fear to tell you the truth, lest I seem to lie for my cause. However, I
should speak.
Acontius shares with Callimachus a concern about the true cause (causa/αἴτιον)
of Cydippe’s illness. The Alexandrian poet reveals that his source was Xeno-
medes, an old historian who was concerned with the truth of the tale of Acontius
and Cydippe (πρέσβυς ἐτητυμίηι μεμελημένος, fr. 75.76 Pf.).⁵³ In the Aetia, the
reason for Cydippe’s illness is given by Apollo (fr. 75.22– 37 Pf.), an oracle that
solves the mystery and is a catalyst for the fulfillment of Acontius’ plan. Apollo
is proverbially a god of truth (Pindar, Pythian Odes 3.29 – 30, 9.42; Ovid, Ars Am-
atoria 3.789 – 90) and his oracle straightforwardly explains that Cydippe is bound
with an oath to marry none other than Acontius. The reason which Ovid’s Acon-
tius gives (Heroides 20.109 – 16) to explain the cause of Cydippe’s illness is a ver-
sion of Callimachus’ Aetia (fr. 75.10 – 12, 16 – 37 Pf.) and that is why the hero’s
claim to truth needs to be taken seriously. A number of authoritative voices res-
onate in Acontius’ statement: Apollo, the prophet of truth, Xenomedes, the truth-
ful historian, and Callimachus, the poet of the Aetia and ultimate source of Acon-
tius’ letter. Ovid’s Acontius does not invent excuses for his own benefit (causa…
mea), but appeals to a long and authoritative tradition of history and etiology.⁵⁴
Acontius has indeed a strong case and that is what he says in his apostrophe
to his rival:
nam quod habes et tu gemini uerba altera pacti,

non erit idcirco par tua causa meae.
Heroides 20.155 – 6
even though you too have another agreement with identical words, your cause will not be
for that reason equal to mine.
 Commenting on Callimachus’ citation of the historian Xenomedes, Rosenmeyer () 

notes: “By pointing to these historical origins, Callimachus subtly argues for the “truth” of
his own writings. The direct reference to the historical source supports his claim to scholarly au-
thenticity, as he builds his text on the foundation of yet another text.” Historical documents con-
firm mythological truths.
 Rimell ()  notes that Ovid’s Cydippe is framed by the onus of canonical texts.
Acontius imagines that he is settling a legal dispute with Cydippe’s fiancé.⁵⁵ They
both have identical contracts that claim the same woman, but Acontius’ causa is
superior since it originates in Callimachus’ Aetia. Ovid’s causa refers simultane-
ously to legal action and poetic tradition. Literary sources are recast as evidence
in a legal dispute and intertext becomes the trope of law within the court of el-
egiac love. As he elaborates on his claim that his causa is superior to his rival’s,
Acontius suggests a legal reform based on the laws of amatory passion. His con-
tract, he argues, is based on love and that is why it is superior to any legal com-
mitment that ignores the rules of desire.
There are several levels of correspondence in Heroides 20 – 21. There is the
correspondence between Acontius and Cydippe, the imaginary dispute between
Acontius and Cydippe’s fiancé, the correspondence between love elegy and
Roman law, between divine and human law, and between Ovid and his sources.
Discussing the precedence of the love letter over legal codes, Goodrich (1997: 285)
notes that the “[l]aw shares the lover’s concern with the structural significance of
originals– with authenticity and the iconic status of written expression”. Acon-
tius’ obsession with legal evidence intersects with Ovid’s love for literary
texts. Not unlike Ovid’s intertextual authentication, law is a matter of originals
because it is always bound to the inscription of prior forms. Legal writing is a
correspondence, a writing that is always a rewriting of older sources, of prece-
dents which repeat or customs which inscribe a prior, superior or divine law
(see Goodrich 1997: 286).
But the Roman law is an odd companion of elegiac persuasion. Acontius
makes sure to stress that he is seeking lawful marriage, not an illegitimate affair:
coniugium, pactamque fidem, non crimina, posco;

debitus ut coniunx, non ut adulter, amo.
Heroides 20.7– 8
I seek marriage, and a loyal contract, not adultery; I love you as your destined husband,
not as a womanizer.
Despite his overall deceptive strategy, Acontius is sincere here; he actually wants
to marry Cydippe, not simply have an illicit relationship with her, and his lan-
guage creates a sharp distinction between marital bonds and extra-marital af-
fairs. Legally fraught terms polarize the loyalty of a husband and the reprehen-
sible behavior of an adulterer. On the one side of the couplet we have coniugium,
pactamque fidem, debitus coniunx, while on the other crimina and adulter. The
distinction is between following the law and breaking it, but also between ele-
 Note the transactional tone of the prosaic idcirco.

226 Ioannis Ziogas
giac passion, typically extra-marital and often described as a crimen, and conju-
gal union. Ovid’s Acontius ostensibly denies playful loves and criminal adulter-
ies for the serious commitment of wedlock. Yet his peculiar marriage contract is
attempted adultery, given that Cydippe is already engaged with another man and
bound with a betrothal that is legitimate, unlike Acontius’ shenanigans. We are
dealing with a love triangle typical of Roman elegy: Acontius is the amator who
tries to seduce a woman who belongs to another man.⁵⁶
Acontius’ language creates tensions and intersections between elegiac and
legal discourse. His formal betrothal is at odds with his elegiac passion, while
the law becomes a servant of elegiac deception. Ovid’s readers know that a lov-
er’s oaths and pledges are proverbially void⁵⁷ and that Cydippe’s involuntary
oath would have no value in Rome. Kenney (1970: 395) notes that it was a prin-
ciple of Roman law that no claim founded on dolus could stand, but Acontius
evokes the legal concept of dolus bonus ⁵⁸ and the stipulatio as a stricto iure con-
tract. While the legitimacy of dolus is exceptional in the world of Roman law,
treachery and deceit rule over elegiac seduction. In fact, the words Acontius
sent to Cydippe literalize the common Latin idiom uerba dare (‘to deceive’); in
some manuscripts, Heroides 20 opens with precisely this pun (Accipe, Cydippe,
despecti nomen Aconti–/ illius in pomo qui tibi uerba dedit. Heroides 20.1a-2a ‘Re-
ceive, Cydippe, the name of scorned Acontius who deceived you/ sent you a mes-
sage on his apple’)⁵⁹ and, in her response, Cydippe plays on the literal and trans-
ferred meaning of uerbum (uerba quid exultas tua si mihi uerba dederunt…?
Heroides 21.121 ‘why do you rejoice in your words if they deceived me…?’). A mes-
sage sent to be read aloud is a pledge exacted with deception and Acontius’ law-
ful fraud both brings together and polarizes legal and elegiac carmina. In Her-
oides 20, the law has become a rhetoric of seduction, a discourse manipulated
by Amor for deceiving a beautiful woman.
To some extent, Ovid employs legal language in order to stress the weakness
of the law in the face of true passion. A rational interpretation of the myth would
suggest that a beautiful woman would be more excited about the love of a pas-
sionate young man than the prospect of an arranged marriage. Cydippe’s sick-
ness caused by her reading the apple is lovesickness; the young woman has fall-
en in love by reading Acontius’ message and suffers from the typical symptoms
 Acontius twists this and warns his rival that he is getting close to committing adultery (Her-
oides .).
 See Callimachus, Epigram ; Meleager, AP .; Catullus ; Ovid, Ars Amatoria . – .
 Videau (); ()  – ; Alekou ()  – ,  –  on the legality of dolus
bonus.
 Kenney ()  is sure that the couplet is spurious; see also Kirfel ()  – .
of elegiac infatuation. The temptation of Acontius’ inscribed apple is far more

powerful than an unemotional engagement and the language of desire trumps
the technicalities of a wedding pact. Acontius’ legal claims are unconvincing,
even ludicrous, but this is the point. Ovid casts Amor as an authority on legal
issues, in order to stress that true passion is not only above the law, but also
is the law.
Cupid and Diana join forces in order to make the marriage of Acontius and
Cydippe happen. The collaboration of these antithetical divine archers who en-
able Acontius to wound Cydippe with his love missile (see Heroides 20.229 –
39) is as striking as the collusion of Roman law and elegy. The hero ends his let-
ter with a fantasy; he imagines the dedication of a golden apple to Diana in imi-
tation of the original fruit, which helped him to possess Cydippe. An elegiac cou-
plet will be inscribed on a votive offering, Acontius muses, acknowledging the
authorization of the message on the original apple:
aurea ponetur mali felicis imago

causaque uersiculis scripta duobus erit:
EFFIGIE POMI TESTATUR ACONTIVS HVIVS
QUAE FVERINT IN EO SCRIPTA FVISSE RATA.
A golden image of the fruitful apple will be set up and the reason will be written in two
little verses:
WITH THE LIKENESS OF THIS APPLE ACONTIUS SOLEMNLY DECLARES THAT WHAT WAS
WRITTEN ON IT HAS BEEN CERTIFIED.
The language of prayer merges with the language of law. The votive apple attests
that Acontius’ prayer to marry Cydippe or rather Cydippe’s involuntary oath to
marry Acontius was granted fulfillment (rata). At the same time, the diction is
distinctly legalistic. The phrase testatur Acontius evokes the language of a testa-
tio, the written declaration of a witness that was commonly taken into account in
court. Witnesses often wrote these statements in the third person and attested or
declared (testantur) that this or that had occurred.⁶⁰ The statements commonly
speak of obligations that have been discharged or contracts that have been
fulfilled.⁶¹ Acontius’ couplet is exactly this sort of witness-statement. The phrase
in eo scripta fuisse rata is a declaration that the message on the original apple
has been rendered legally valid.⁶² In this context, testatur means that Acontius
 There are several examples from Pompeii and Herculaneum; see Meyer ()  – .
 See Meyer ()  – .
 Note the prosaic in eo that conveys the dry style of legal transactions.
228 Ioannis Ziogas
certifies the message on the apple as authentic (see OLD s.v. testor 2b). A decep-
tive oath inscribed on a piece of fruit is treated as a legal document and the gold-
en likeness of this apple, the votive offering for the marriage’s fulfillment, au-
thenticates the legitimacy of the original message. In a genuinely Ovidian
manner, imitation validates deception.
The medium of witness-statements played a crucial role in court and it was
their physical form that made them authoritative. A testatio had to be written on
a tabula or tabella, while other forms of documents, such as letters and testimo-
nies on papyri, were an invitation to objections. As Meyer puts it, truth was em-
bodied in tabulae; the other forms of documents were bitterly contested
ground.⁶³ Given the importance of the physical form of legal statements, it is
worth examining the material on which Acontius’ statement is inscribed. His
first message is delivered via an apple, a potent symbol of enchantment and
temptation, but a medium that could hardly be authorized in a Roman court-
room. Yet the source of Acontius’ apple is Callimachus’ Aetia. Ovid’s causa acti-
vates the reference to Callimachus’ Aetia and imago is a marker of an intertextual
echo.⁶⁴ From an intertextual perspective, the story of Acontius and Cydippe is in-
scribed on and prescribed in the Aetia, a work in which the poet draws attention
to the fact (or the fiction) that he is writing on a δέλτος (fr. 1.21– 2 Pf.), the Greek
equivalent to the Latin tabula. Callimachus brings up the material medium of his
poetry in the famous epiphany of Apollo in the prologue:⁶⁵
καὶ γὰρ ὅτ⌋ε πρ⌊ώ⌋τιστον ἐμοῖς ἐπὶ δέλτον ἔθηκα

γούνασι⌋ν, ᾿A[πό]λλων εἶπεν ὅ μοι Λύκιος
Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1.21– 2 Pf.
And when I first put a writing-tablet on my knees, Lycian Apollo told me
Ovid reworks this passage in the epiphany of Janus at the beginning of the Fasti
(haec ego cum sumptis agitare mente tabellis,/ lucidior uisa est, quam fuit ante,
domus. Fasti 1.93 – 4 ‘While I was pondering these after taking up my tablets, the
house looked brighter than it was before’). Ovid translates δέλτον as tabellis and
 Meyer () . On the importance of the physical form of the tabulae in legal statements,
see Meyer ()  – . Other forms of letters were also cited by advocates (especially in the
last century of the Republic), but their validity depended mostly on the authority of the sender.
 See Barchiesi ()  for causa in Heroides . as alluding to the Aetia as Ovid’s
model. For imago as intertextual echo, see Barchiesi ()  – ; cf. Hinds ()  – .
 Callimachus mentions the writing-tablets of Xenomedes in the episode of Acontius and Cy-
dippe. The authoritative mythographer chronicled the history of Ceos in his δέλτοι (γέρων ἐνε-
θήκατο δέλτοις, fr. . Pf. ‘old Xenomedes recorded in his writing-tablets’). Callimachus’ writ-
ing-tablets reproduce the work of Xenomedes of old.
marks his allusion to Callimachus with a subtle wordplay on Λύκιος-lucidior. In

the Fasti, a work whose very title is a legal term, Ovid becomes a scribe who
writes down the words of Janus. The Roman poet programmatically blends di-
vine inspiration with legal directions in a passage that replaces the Greek Apollo
of the Aetia with the distinctly Roman Janus.⁶⁶ If we take into account the impor-
tance of the Aetia in Heroides 20 – 21, we realize that Acontius’ imaginary inscrip-
tion works on two levels: within the fiction of the epistles, the hero refers to his
original message on the apple, but outside the fictional world, Ovid has Acontius
certify the authoritative text of Callimachus’ Aetia, a work written on a δέλτος/
tabula and thus carrying the significance of a legal statement. The cause that
binds Cydippe to her oath is to be found in Callimachus and Ovid turns the lit-
erary authority of the Aetia into legal evidence.
In the Heroides, fictional objects converge with intertextual realities. Yet the
division between wishful thinking and wish fulfillment is also crucial within the
framework of the mythological tale. Even within the fictional world the likeness
of the apple is merely a fantasy, yet its realization depends on Acontius marrying
Cydippe, a happy ending known to the reader, who can thus entertain the real-
ization of the golden apple by indulging in Acontius’ fantasy. Ovid’s readers can
venture to predict the mythological future because they are aware of the literary
past. At the same time, the daydream of a votive offering is flimsy if we consider
that it is a fanciful Ovidian innovation that has no basis in literary tradition. Ovid
likes to draw attention to his belatedness by simultaneously alluding to literary
traditions and inventing playful novelties. The future projection of another apple
is an imitation of and an innovation on Callimachus’ original. What is more, the
second apple is a comment on Ovid’s Heroides as texts composed after the Aetia.
Ovid’s epistle both imitates and updates Callimachus.
The materiality of messages inscribed on apples should be examined vis-à-
vis the writing-tablets of Callimachus and Ovid. Both poets mention the δέλτος/
tabella on which they are writing and Ovid mentions the tabellae of love letters
several times.⁶⁷ And once we suspend our disbelief and give credit to the mytho-
logical realities of Acontius’ letter, we realize that the hero’s imaginary authori-
zation of his original message is actually written on a tabella sealed with his sig-
nature. From that perspective, the medium and diction of his inscription look
more like a testatio and less like a fanciful reverie. It is also important to bear
in mind that witness-statements were ratified by being read aloud. The reader
 On law and etiology in the Fasti, see Gebhardt ()  – .
 See Amores .., ,  – , .. – , .., , .., ..; Ars Amatoria .,
., ; Metamorphoses .,  – .
230 Ioannis Ziogas
embodied the voice of the witness and his or her recitation was a simultaneous
validation of the witness’ statement. Acontius wants to make Cydippe play this
role.⁶⁸ The hero has resorted to a similar trick in his apostrophe to Cydippe’s
fiancé. Acontius demands that the words of the contract be read and encourages
his rival to have Cydippe read them (recitetur formula pacti;/ neu falsam dicas
esse, fac ipsa legat. Heroides 20.151– 2 ‘let us have the actual terms of the agree-
ment read out; and lest you say it is false, make her read them’). Kenney notes
that Acontius uses the language of an advocate in court demanding the produc-
tion of documents.⁶⁹ By reading aloud his message, Cydippe would declare
Acontius’ statement valid and she would once more fulfill his wishes. At the
end of his letter, Acontius attempts to deceive the heroine again with an inscrip-
tion, which would trick her into certifying his fantasies, and Ovid inventively re-
plays and Romanizes the Callimachean scenario.
The authorization of witness-statements depends both on textual materiality
and oral delivery. The myth of Acontius and Cydippe revolves around the contro-
versial idea that the heroine’s recitation validates the hero’s message and Ovid
repeatedly resorts to the realities of the Roman legal system in order to legitimize
his playful appropriation of a Greek myth. While reading is etymologically graft-
ed into Roman law, the erotic aspect of the author/reader relationship is essen-
tial to understanding Acontius’ success. According to Greco-Roman perceptions
of reception, the author penetrates the reader by means of a written message.⁷⁰
Reading aloud someone else’s words is how an author enters the body of a read-
er. This sexualization of recitation is the key to understanding how Acontius
manages to possess Cydippe by means of written words read aloud. As Cydippe
finishes the recitation of Acontius’ letter, she embodies the imaginary inscription
on a golden apple and thus she embodies the imaginary apple.
The heroine’s name puns on the Greek word for quince (Κυδώνιον μῆλον)
and Aristaenetus attests that Acontius deceived Cydippe with a Cydonian
apple (Aristaenetus 1.10.27 Vieillefond).⁷¹ Ovid relies on the Cydippe-κυδώνιον
wordplay in order to show that Acontius’ message collapses Cydippe’s identity
with that of the apple of temptation. In her epistle, the sick (or lovesick) heroine
compares her bloodless complexion with the pale color of the fruit (concidimus
macie, color est sine sanguine, qualem/ in pomo refero mente fuisse tuo, Heroides
 Cydippe tries to protect herself from the risk of reading Acontius’ words aloud and opens her
epistle by saying that she read his letter silently (Heroides . – ). Ovid’s heroine does not
want to repeat the mistake of her Callimachean counterpart.
 Kenney () ad ..
 See Svenbro ()  – ; Rosenmeyer () .
 See Rosenmeyer ()  n. ; Trumpf ().
21.215 – 16 ‘I am enfeebled with emaciation, my complexion is bloodless, just like

the color that, as I recall, was in your fruit’).⁷² The pallor of the fruit subtly but
clearly suggests that it is a pale quince, not a red apple.⁷³ The passionate mes-
sage transforms the woman’s complexion into the color of a quince and the ef-
fect of Acontius’ trick is that it assimilates Cydippe to the Cydonian apple; the
heroine turns into Acontius’ passion fruit.⁷⁴ While reading the projected inscrip-
tion of Heroides 20.239 – 40, Cydippe becomes an imitation of the votive apple, a
corporeal realization of a fictive image. The heroine’s delivery bears the fruit of
Acontius’ fantasy and her body becomes the medium of a message that symbol-
izes Acontius’ possession of herself. This is a fine example of Ovid’s favorite in-
terplay between the textual and sexual nature of love elegy’s object of desire.⁷⁵
An imaginary inscription on a Cydonian apple is materialized with the oral rec-
itation of a Cydonian heroine, an addition to the interchangeability between the
corpus of elegiac poetry and of elegiac puellae. Cydippe is the vocal embodiment
of Acontius’ passion.
The reception of Heroides 20 is further nuanced if we take into account that
Ovid likes to draw attention to the language and materiality of the letters in order
to highlight their fictionality. In Heroides 3.1– 4, for instance, Briseis apologizes
for her broken Greek and the teary blots on her letter. We are invited to imagine
Achilles reading a foreign woman’s clumsy Greek in a letter littered with mis-
prints, but what Ovid’s readers actually face is the poet’s clear and fluent
Latin.⁷⁶ The involvement of the reader in the text (Achilles in Heroides 3 or Cy-
dippe in Heroides 20) should be distinguished from the experience of the reader
of the text (Ovid’s readership). From our perspective, a formal ratification of
 Cf. quam tibi nunc gracilem uix haec rescribere quamque/ pallida uix cubito membra leuare
puta! Heroides . –  ‘how wasted away you must imagine her to be who can scarcely pen
this answer to you, how sallow the limbs that she can scarcely raise on one arm’ (transl. Ken-
ney). Ovid echoes Callimachus’ τὴν δ᾽ εἷλε κακὸς χλόος, fr. . Pf. ‘but evil pallor seized her’.
 Cf. palluit, ut…/…quaeque suos curuant matura Cydonia ramos (Procris) Ovid, Ars Amatoria
. –  ‘She grew pale, just as ripe quinces which bend their own branches’.
 Cf. Cydippe’s forma noui talis marmoris esse solet, Heroides . ‘such as the usual appear-
ance of a new marble’, on which Alekou ()  comments: “un appariement original est
introduit qui dépasse celui esquissé par Acontius, lorsque la comparaison avec le marbre con-
firme la virtualité allégorique de la peinture. La mise en valeur du support d’épigrammes et du
matériau à sculpter transforme la figure en œuvre d’art. Toutefois, de la pomme au marbre, l’ob-
jet iconique se transforme jusqu’à ce qu’il s’identifie à la lettre en soi. L’inversion concerne autant
la figure que le texte, puisque le “ sujet ” syntaxique est en même temps l’objet iconique.” (My
emphasis).
 See Wyke (); ().
 See Ziogas ()  – . Similarly, Cydippe refers to her poor handwriting in Heroides
..
232 Ioannis Ziogas
Acontius’ tabula is nothing more than part of Ovid’s insubstantial poetics. In-
stead of conflating Greek myth with Roman reality, the anachronistic application
of the legal realities of the Romans to an ancient Greek myth ultimately stresses
the irreconcilable gap between the fictional world of Ovid’s characters and the
real world of his readers. Witness-statements, seals, and ratifications of author-
itative documents belong to the Roman legal system, but become immaterial
rhetoric at Ovid’s hands. Yet pure rhetoric is what matters above all in Latin
love elegy and the technicalities of the law are useful only if they serve the pur-
poses of elegiac persuasion and deception. In the end, hard evidence fades away
and illusion reasserts its power in matters of desire.
Libertine Love and Legal Limitations

Roman law and love elegy are brought together at the beginning of the Ars’ in-
uentio. The prologue of the Ars opens with an invitation to the reader to authorize
the praeceptor’s instructions, as we have seen above, and the first couplet of the
inuentio brings up issues of legal and amatory license:
dum licet et loris passim potes ire solutis,

elige cui dicas ‘tu mihi sola places.’
Ars Amatoria 1.41– 2
While it is permitted and you can go everywhere on a loose rein, pick a girl and tell her:
‘you alone please me.’
Ovid’s dum licet implies the legal restrictions to the carefree period of amatory
pursuits. Emilio Pianezzola reads this couplet as drawing a distinction between
the frivolous love affairs of youth and the serious commitments of a more mature
age.⁷⁷ The license granted to young men’s playful affairs with prostitutes is coun-
terbalanced by grown-up-men’s legal obligations to marriage; the leisure of
youth gives way to the business of adult life. This transition from youthful play-
fulness to adult responsibilities is a defining characteristic of Roman comedy. In
Terence’s Adelphoe, for instance, the lenient senex Micio says that young men
should be allowed to have affairs with prostitutes (101– 10). The rationale is
that this license should be given to youth, so that inappropriate love affairs
do not occur at a more responsible age. Ideally, a young man will eventually
get fed up with prostitutes and devote himself to the good old Roman values.
 Pianezzola () XXIII and ad Ars Amatoria . – . For a similar approach, see Labate
()  – .
Even the censor Cato approved of a young Roman whom he saw coming out of a
brothel since sex with prostitutes protected Roman citizens from committing
adultery (see Hor. Satires 1.2.31– 5). From that perspective, Ovid’s dum licet refers
to youthful extra-marital affairs with prostitutes, that is, affairs which do not
break adultery laws. As the slave Palinurus puts it: dum ted apstineas nupta,
uidua, uirgine, / iuuentute et pueris liberis, ama quidlubet (‘So long as you stay
away from the married woman, the widow, the maiden, the youth, and freeborn
boys, love whatever you fancy’ Plautus, Curculio 37– 8). Young men should make
sure to choose eligible women for their playful loves.
In his Pro Caelio, Cicero employs similar rhetoric. Caelius is cast as an ado-
lescens from Roman comedy and Cicero reminds the jurors that license to playful
loves is traditionally granted to young men (Pro Caelio 48). Cicero appeals not
only to the licentia of his age but also to the customs and consent of the ances-
tors (maiorum consuetudine atque concessis, Pro Caelio 48) when it comes to
young men’s love affairs with meretrices and thus he makes sex with prostitutes
part of the mos maiorum. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria often gives the impression that it is
addressed to jurors⁷⁸ and at this point it echoes the rhetoric of the Pro Caelio. Cic-
ero’s licentia corresponds to Ovid’s dum licet and Cicero’s concessis parallels
Ovid’s concessaque furta (Ars Amatoria 1.33), the wittily subversive ‘legitimately
illegitimate affairs’ that forms part of the legal language of the programmatic
disclaimer.⁷⁹ Ovid seems to subscribe to a long tradition of Roman comedy
and rhetoric according to which it is lawfully permitted to young men to indulge
in affairs with prostitutes. Such frivolous liaisons ultimately protect the chastity
of Roman women and buttress traditional Roman morality.
This interpretation is certainly legitimate, but there is another way of reading
Ars 1.41– 2, which renders the traditional concerns of Roman law and the Augu-
stan legislation irrelevant. Ovid’s focus here is not necessarily on young age in
general and its entitlement to playful love affairs in particular, but in a period
when a man has not lost his freedom due to love’s constraints. Freedom does
not follow the laws and customs of conventional Roman morality but is subject
to the constrictions of amorous passion. Hollis (1977: 41) points out that dum licet
implies that there might come a time when Ovid’s addressee is really in love and
no longer a free agent. In the world of Roman love elegy, Cupid enslaves the
lover and puts an end to his free will; freedom is something one enjoys before
 The disclaimers are the most prominent examples (e. g., Ars Amatoria . – , . – ).
 See also the legal language in Seneca, Controuersiae .. (concessis aetati uoluptatibus
utor et iuuenali lege defungor; id facio quod pater meus fecit cum iuuenis esset. ‘I am enjoying
the playfulness granted to my age and taking advantage of the law for young men. I am
doing what my father did when he was young’).
234 Ioannis Ziogas
one falls in love. Within the generic framework of Roman love elegy, Hollis’ read-
ing makes sense, especially if we take into account another Ovidian couplet that
begins with dum licet:
dum licet, et modici tangunt praecordia motus,

si piget, in primo limine siste pedem.
Remedia Amoris 79 – 80
While it is permitted and moderate emotions touch your heart, even if it is unpleasant, stop
your step at the edge of the threshold.
Obviously, Ovid is not talking about the Roman legal system or the free rein
given to youthful liaisons with prostitutes. Instead, the poet refers to the first
symptoms of erotic desire. Not unlike a disease, love can be cured more easily
and efficiently at the start, before the infection spreads throughout the body
and the mind. Resist passion before it is too late and thus impossible to fight
back, advises the poet of the Remedia Amoris. The message of Ars 1.41– 2 is sim-
ilar. Rational selection (elige) is possible at this early stage of looking for the
right woman. The first stage of a conscious and calculated choice of the appro-
priate object of desire will inevitably end once the lover is entangled in the nets
of monogamous obsession. The commitment of tu mihi sola places signals the be-
ginning of the end of a lover’s freedom. To be sure, such confession is conceited
and the beloved’s uniqueness is undermined by the banality of the statement.⁸⁰
In the Ars, the echo of the conventional statement of elegiac devotion is part of a
self-conscious strategy of seduction, not a sincere confession of true love.⁸¹ Yet
while the praeceptor urges his students to parrot a common tag of Latin love
elegy, there is always the danger that the man who plays the role of the lover
will actually fall in love (see Ars Amatoria 1.615 – 16). Feigned love may become
real and, as an antidote to true passion, Ovid recommends that men should have
two or, if possible, more girlfriends (Remedia Amoris 441– 2). Similarly, Lucretius
suggests that the festering obsession of a monogamous lover can be cured with
the wandering pleasures of a wandering Venus (De Rerum Natura 4.1068 – 78).
An exclusive desire for a single woman can be the source of suffering that
leads to loss of freedom. Ars 1.41– 2 is appropriately framed by dum licet… ‘tu
 Ovid here quotes and encourages his students to repeat the elegiac lover’s conventional dec-
laration of faith to his exclusive beloved (see Prop. ..; [Tib.] ..).
 Ovid will later advise his students to seduce the maid before seducing the lady (Ars Amatoria
. – ) and instruct them how to be successfully unfaithful to their girlfriends (Ars Amatoria
. – ).
mihi sola places’ since freedom of choice is lost once the lover devotes himself to
a single woman.
Ovid’s tu mihi sola places echoes a common elegiac dictum, but in a couplet
that brings up issues of love and legislation it further activates a specific refer-
ence to Propertius’ tu mihi sola places (2.7.19), which concludes a poem that cel-
ebrates the triumph of elegiac love over marriage legislation.⁸² Propertius begins
his poem by stating that Cynthia is happy because a law that threatened their
affair is now repealed.⁸³ In a twist of the elegiac recusatio, Propertius declares
that Caesar’s Jovian arms are mighty in war but have no power over love affairs
(2.7.3 – 6). The nature of Propertius’ love is above the law of Rome and his Roman
duty to father children. The confession of his exclusive love for Cynthia (tu mihi
sola places) emphasizes that the uniqueness of his affair defies social norms and
legal categorizations (e. g., marital, extra-marital, illicit, adulterous). Cynthia can
rejoice in Augustus’ repeal of a marriage law, but Propertius reminds us that im-
perial legislation has no power over true love anyway. Cynthia alone pleases the
poet and sola pits the elegiac puella not only against other women but also
against the Augustan ideals of fighting battles and fathering children for
Rome.⁸⁴ Ovid’s Propertian echo in Ars 1.42 reminds his readers that the love
for a special woman matters more than anything else and that the shackles of
elegiac passion are stronger than any legal constrictions.
In sum, there are two ways of reading Ars 1.41– 2: one is concerned with
Roman law, while the other refers to the laws of elegiac passion. Both of these
readings deal with time and timing: the former refers to a transition from the fri-
volities of youth to the serious responsibilities of adulthood, while the latter re-
fers to a transition from the playful affairs of a libertine to the dire constraints of
monogamous passion. Both interpretations are valid and both should be taken
into account, but it should be noted that they can hardly co-exist. In Freudian
terms, this is a case of Kompromissbildung, a semiotic manifestation which
makes room, simultaneously, for two opposite meanings, which stand in an ir-
 On Propertius’ stance at Augustus’ marriage law in this poem, see Cairns (); Stahl
()  – ; Gale ()  – .
 We do not know much about the legislation and its contents, and reconstructing the law
from Propertius’ elegy is an unreliable method. On this issue, see Cairns (); Stahl ()
 – . Badian () argues that this was not Augustus’ law but an old law repealed by Oc-
tavian in  BCE along with other Triumviral measures. He speculates that the repealed law
was about taxation of bachelors. Badian’s theory is not supported by Propertius’ text, or actually
by any other evidence, and unsurprisingly did not find many followers; see Treggiari ()  –
.
 Cf. Rothstein () ad loc.; Stahl ()  – .
236 Ioannis Ziogas
reconcilable relationship to one another.⁸⁵ The reader needs to choose one and
when Ovid makes readers choose, he prompts them to make a political decision.
This is an example of what Frederick Ahl calls “the art of safe criticism”:⁸⁶ Ovid
forces the reader to “find the points for himself and suppose the judgment he
passes is his own, not one suggested by the writer.”⁸⁷ The poet tries to protect
himself by remaining noncommittal, while triggering a disclosure of his readers’
biases and political affiliations.
We can choose to interpret the couplet as Ovid’s subscribing to conventional
morality and validating Augustus’ adultery laws, but we cannot ignore that an
alternative reading trumps traditional Roman mores. Whatever we choose, our
choice would probably reveal more about ourselves and less about Ovid’s inten-
tions. Ovid’s text is a mirror that reflects our own prejudices. And this is precisely
what objective critics fear the most. Scholars sometimes argue that a single in-
terpretation is objectively the correct one or more often try to resist commitment
to a single reading and have it both ways. It is part of the scholarly style to as-
sume a detached and disinterested pose, but it is a characteristic of a passionate
reader to commit to one reading. Admittedly, Ovid expects his readers to be both
disinterested and passionate, but, like the elegiac lover’s sober reasoning, dis-
passionate judgment fades away once we dedicate ourselves to Ovid’s poetry
and let his charm seduce us. Shedding all pretensions of critical impartiality, I
confess that I prefer to read Ovid as undermining Augustan legislation. Passion
has its own rules and its power exceeds moral and social norms. Once erotic de-
sire incapacitates free choice and rational decision, there is little room for heed-
ing legal restrictions. Overall, the Ars Amatoria replaces moral for aesthetic
criteria⁸⁸ and makes desirability rather than eligibility the main characteristic
of the beloved. It is legitimate to argue that in Ovid the law of love annuls the
law of Rome.
Concluding Remarks
Personal passion is the foundation of elegiac love, while family and public duty
dictate the terms of marriage contracts. But the fantasies of Latin love elegy and
the realities of Roman marriage laws can hardly be reconciled. We can attempt to
 See Casali ()  for Kompromissbildung in the Aeneid.

 Ahl ().
 Ahl () . Ovid draws attention to the open-ended nature of reception in his letter to
Augustus (Tristia ); see Gibson ().
 See Gibson ()  – ,  – ,  – ; ().
harmonize elegiac ideals with Roman legislation by positing a distinction be-

tween elegiac love as youthful, frivolous, and extra-marital but permitted on
the one hand, and marriage as befitting a mature and responsible age aware
of a man’s duty to his fatherland on the other. Yet elegy’s claims about Amor’s
universal dominion seriously undermine neat categorizations that would but-
tress Roman morality. True passion knows no social, moral or legal limits and
Amor’s agenda is as imperialistic and ambitious as Augustus’. The tension be-
tween elegiac love and marriage is only exacerbated with Augustus’ marriage
legislations which break the boundaries between personal and public affairs.⁸⁹
As a pater patriae Augustus sees Rome as his own family and his rule leaves
no space for unregulated affairs. By contrast, love elegy creates and validates
a legal code that utterly confounds the branding of relationships as marital,
extra-marital, and adulterous. In this generic framework, laws and legislations
are subjected to the rules of erotic deception. Love conquers everything, the
Roman law included.
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Matthew M. McGowan
Pythagoras and Numa in Ovid: Exile and
Immortality at Rome
Summary: This article sets out to consider the link between the exile poetry and
the Metamorphoses by examining the representation of Pythagoras and Numa in
both places. I aim to show that the role Pythagoras plays as the teacher of Numa
in the Metamorphoses is similar to the didactic role Ovid assumes in his poems
from exile: the exiled poet teaches the people of Rome about the recently re-
formed shape of religion and law in the early principate. In short, the Tristia
and Epistulae ex Ponto need to be read in light of Ovid’s epic poem on changing
forms and belong, in the end, to the carmen perpetuum, or “continuous song,”
that defines the poetic program of the Metamorphoses.
Keywords: Ovid; Pythagoras; Numa; exile; Metamorphoses; Tristia; Epistulae ex

Ponto; metempsychosis; carmen perpetuum; poetic immortality
– There’s a word I wanted to ask you.

She … began to search the text with the hairpin till she reached the word.
– Met him what? he asked.
– Here, she said. What does that mean?
He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.
– Metempsychosis?
– Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?
– Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmi-
gration of souls.
– O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.
James Joyce, Ulysses, 64
In the final book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pythagoras of Samos, philosopher

and political exile, gives a lesson in the history of Greek thought to Numa Pom-
pilius, Rome’s second king and legendary founder of Roman religious practice
and sacred law.¹ This lesson includes the central teaching of Pythagorean philos-
ophy: the metempsychosis of souls—or theory of eternal reincarnation—and the
admonition against meat- and bean-eating. The extent to which Ovid’s incorpo-
ration of Pythagorean doctrine is intended as a serious attempt at providing phil-
 See Brill’s New Pauly, s.v. “Numa” (M. Haase) and Panitschek (); cf. Verg. Aeneid . –
: quis procul ille autem ramis insignis oliuae / sacra ferens? nosco crinis incanaque menta / regis
Romani primam qui legibus urbem / fundabit Curibus paruis et paupere terra, / missus in im-
perium magnum.
242 Matthew M. McGowan
osophical heft to his poem—instead of, say, a playfully learned veneer of divert-
ing ideas introduced for rhetorical purposes—will occupy me later in this paper.
To start, it is important to note the obvious: Pythagoras’ teaching fits convenient-
ly into the thematic focus of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by promoting the inevitabil-
ity of change and providing intellectual support from the Greek philosophical
tradition for the poet’s claim to the immortality of his verse. Changing forms
and poetic immortality are also central to understanding Ovid’s final body of
work, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, which the poet composed in exile
after he was banished from Rome to the Black Sea by the emperor Augustus
in 8 CE. In these poems, Pythagoras and Numa reappear in significant passages
that elucidate the recurring themes of metamorphosis and immortality. In what
follows, I shall consider the link between the exile poetry and the Metamorpho-
ses by examining the representation of Pythagoras and Numa in both places. I
aim to show that the role Pythagoras plays as the teacher of Numa in the
Metamorphoses ² is similar to the didactic role Ovid assumes in his poems
from exile: the exiled poet teaches the people of Rome about the recently re-
formed shape of religion and law in the early principate.³ In short, the Tristia
and Epistulae ex Ponto need to be read in light of Ovid’s epic poem on changing
forms and belong, in the end, to the carmen perpetuum, or “continuous song,”
that defines the poetic program of the Metamorphoses.
The speech of Pythagoras has always enjoyed a good deal of scholarly
attention,⁴ perhaps more than any other single speech in the Metamorphoses
(I say “speech” to distinguish it from the poem’s proemium and epilogue, with-
out which there is no poetic program and thus which cannot be ignored by even
the most desultory of critics). The Pythagoras-episode’s popularity among critics
is not at all surprising given that it is the longest speech, occurs towards the end
of the poem in its final book, and involves a famous philosopher who straddles
the world of history and myth, a liminal figure between man and god, and thus
an ideal subject for Ovid’s artistry. As scholars have noted,⁵ Pythagoras’ speech
tells a tale of Greek learning imported to Italy, where it is linked to the founding
of Roman religious practice and sacred law. It provides Ovid with a convenient
 On the technical aspects of this didactic passage, see Volk ()  – .

 Galinsky ()  argues that Ovid reverses Lucretius’ technique in De Rerum Natura—
teaching via myths by replacing them with uera ratio (i.e. framing lesson with Venus/plague)
—by using “philosophical” episodes to frame his fundamentally mythological poem: the cos-
mogony and Pythagoras.
 For example: Saint-Denis (); Swanson (); Segal (); Otis ()  – ; Segl
(); Curran (); Hardie () and ()  – ; Galinsky ().
 E. g., Hardie ().
and compelling transition for moving the poem in its final, historical phase from
Greece to Rome, from the world of ancient myth to contemporary events, from
the beginning of time up to his own day, as the poet himself states at the start
of the poem, Metamorphoses 1.3 – 4: primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpet-
uum deducite tempora carmen “spin out a song continuous from the origin of the
universe up to my time.” Yet little has ever been said about Numa’s significance
to the passage, and the debate surrounding Pythagoras’ status as an exile tends
to fester over his adherence to Neo-Pythagorean doctrine, a moot point given the
scarcity of evidence. Few have noted, for example, that of the eight clearly iden-
tifiable exiles in the Metamorphoses (by which I mean identified by the word
exul or exilium), three appear in Book 15, all in succession: Pythagoras, Hippo-
lytus and Cipus.⁶ It is hardly coincidence, then, that in his oft-cited article
from 1913, “Die Abfassungszeit in Ovids Metamorphosen,” Max Pohlenz singled
out as revised in exile the speech-within-the-Pythagoras-speech of Helenus to
Aeneas on the future greatness of Rome.⁷ Moreover, Hermann Fränkel, in his
Sather Classical Lectures from 1943, regarded the Hippolytus episode from
book 15, as “perhaps … written under the cloud of impending exile, if not
after the poet’s departure.” According to Fränkel, “Hippolytus’ mind was entirely
taken up by the prospect of exile that he failed to register anything else (514–
15),” not unlike Ovid in his famous account of his own ruin, itself akin to the
fall of Troy, in Tristia 1.3.⁸ Moreover, the episode involving Cipus, who refused
to rule as king and preferred a voluntary exile, has been interpreted by Sven
Lundström (1980: 67– 79) as a thinly veiled attack, ex inverso, on an emperor
who would rather rule like a king and send others into exile. Indeed, the succes-
sion of exiles from Pythagoras to Cipus is curious, and the exilic recension (or
revision) of the Metamorphoses continues to be a topic of some interest among
contemporary critics of the Ovidian corpus such as E.J. Kenney and Peter
 The others are: Cadmus & Lycabas (an otherwise unknown sailor attacking Dionysus on the
ship for which he paid with exile) (), Niobe (), Daedalus (), Amphiarus’ son Alcmaeon (),
Hecabe (). Note that when Ulysses says in .: neque in his quisquam damnatus et exul
“and no one among them (my ancestors) was condemned to exile,” his words are prophetic.
Moreover, when Ajax links Ulysses’ treatment of Philoctetes, he assumes the latter was sent
into exile by Ulysses, . f.: ergo aut exilio uires subduxit Achiuis / aut nece “either by exile
or death he has drawn off the Greeks’ strength.” The murder refers to Palamedes. Consider,
too, Nyctimene, whose metamorphosis into the owl is described thus by the crow, .: a cunc-
tis expellitur aethere toto. And Aeneas, .: rursus … fugiens noua moenia (= exul).
 Pohlenz () .
 The lectures were published in  as Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds; both citations come
from p. .
Knox.⁹ Nevertheless, in what follows I focus on Pythagoras’ didactic relationship

to Numa and show how this didactic set-piece relates to the figure of the poet—
Ovid himself—in exile.
As a reputed lover of peace and founder of ritual practice and sacred law at
Rome, Numa stands diametrically opposed to his predecessor Romulus. In Du-
mézil’s famous formulation, Numa is the priest-king of religious foundation
and legal formulation to Romulus’ warrior-king of martial prowess and urban
defense.¹⁰ It is clear that both Julius Caesar and Augustus invoked Numa and
not Romulus as a model of a pious and peaceful ruler when they seized
power after an extended spate of civil wars.¹¹ To be sure, both cultivated the ap-
pearance that—like Numa—they stood for piety and peace, even if they were—
after Romulus—Romans in name.¹² In the final book of the Metamorphoses,
Ovid considers how the people of Italy eventually became Romans—a metamor-
phosis of an historical rather than mythical nature—by exploiting the popular
legend of Pythagoras and Numa.
According to tradition—and Ovid is one of our sources for this tradition—
Numa had been a student of Pythagoras at Croton in southern Italy, Fasti
3.151– 54: primus oliuiferis Romam deductus ab aruis/ Pompilius menses sensit
abesse duos,/ siue hoc a Samio doctus, qui posse renasci/ nos putat, Egeria siue
monente sua. “(Numa) Pompilius, who was brought to Rome from the fields
 On stylistic grounds some have ascribed the “double letters” of Epistulae (Heroides) ( – )
to the exilic corpus, cf. Knox () , with bibliography; on possible post-exilic revisions of the
Metamorphoses, see Richmond ()  – ; Kenney ()  n. ; Pohlenz (); on the
Fasti as an “exile-poem,” see Boyle () ; Feeney ()  – .
 Cf. Dumézil ()  – : “the reigns of Romulus and Numa were conceived as the two
wings of a diptych, each of them demonstrating one of two types, the two equally necessary
but antithetical provinces of sovereignty. Romulus is a young demigod, impetuous, creative, vi-
olent, unhampered by scruples, exposed to the temptations of tyranny; Numa is a completely
human old man, moderate, an organizer, peaceful, mindful of order and legality.” Of course
later (), Dumézil notes that “for many Romans Numa was still the pythagorean king, a val-
uable and ancient link between Greece and Rome between wisdom and politics.” For Livy’s
treatment of the Romulus-Numa pair, cf. Levene ()  – , who cites (n. ) the more gen-
eral discussion of the indo-european warrior-king and priest-king in Dumézil ()  – . For
a judicious account of the pointed criticism that Dumézil’s model – the so-called “ideologie tri-
partite” – has received, see Belier ().
 Littlewood ()  analyzes the Romulus-Numa antithesis to show how “Numa fits into
the essential duality of Augustan iconography.” Cf. Ogilvie () .
 Cf. Hinds ()  – : “Augustus’ aim is to be a Romulus, but a Romulus who has many
of the features of a Numa: both a man of war and an architect of peace. But that, in terms of
Ovid’s version of the Romulean prototype, is an impossibility. In the ideology of Fasti , to be
a Romulus is by definition to fail to be a Numa.”
where olives grow, was the first to realize that two months were missing from the
year, whether he was taught by the Samian (Pythagoras), who believes that we
can be reborn, or whether it was Egeria who told him.” A version of this story
is alluded to later in the Epistulae ex Ponto, where in a catalogue of a familiar
type in the exile poetry, Ovid adduces examples from myth of students who
brought no harm to their teachers, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.3.43 – 4: praemia nec Chi-
ron ab Achille talia cepit,/ Pythagoreaeque ferunt non nocuisse Numam. “But Chi-
ron got no such payment from Achilles, and they say that Numa did no harm to
Pythagoras.”
It is difficult to say whether the Numa-Pythagoras, student-teacher legend
stems from a Greek or Roman source,¹³ but the tradition was well established
by the time of Cicero. Both he and Livy comment on the chronological impossi-
bility of having Pythagoras teach Numa, who ruled about 150 years before the
exiled philosopher ever landed on Italian shores in around 530 BC.¹⁴ Yet both
authors acknowledge the extent to which the foundations of Roman culture
were influenced by Pythagorean thought.¹⁵ Numa’s reputed interest in sacred
law and social harmony seems to have reminded Italy’s educated class of Pytha-
goras and of the Pythagorean commitment to philosophy as a way of life. Pytha-
goras’ sect was viewed as a distinctly Italian phenomenon and thus spoke to a
feeling of national pride at Rome, a city that became—on the model of Numa—
 After Ferrero () and Gabba () scholarly consensus posits a fourth-century Greek
source, probably from Tarentum and perhaps Aristoxenus, a student of Pythagoreanism and Ar-
istotle, music theorist, and the author of a lost life of Pythagoras, which is believed to be the
source for Iamblichus’ De Vita Pythagorae. See Panitschek () for a balanced review of
the problem and the possibility of a purely Roman source. Cf. Dench ()  on Pythagorean
interest from the rd cent. BC in Numa as a figure of Sabine (rather than Roman) ethnicity.
 E. g. Cic. de Republica ., where Scipio calls the story “entirely false, and not merely ‘made
up’ but even ignorantly and absurdly so” (falsum est enim … id totum, neque solum fictum sed
imperite absurdeque fictum). Feeney ()  –  notes that Ovid may be playing with Cicero’s
idea of the story as fiction, also cited by Feldherr ()  n. .
 Cic. Tusculanae Disputationes .: erat enim illis (sc. maioribus nostris) paene in conspectu
praestanti sapientia et nobilitate Pythagoras, qui fuit in Italia temporibus iisdem quibus L. Brutus
patriam liberauit “For almost within sight of our ancestors was Pythagoras who lived in Italy at
the same time L. Brutus freed his country;” Tusculanae Disputationes .: et deorum puluinari-
bus et epulis magistratuum fides praecinunt quod proprium eius fuit de qua loquar disciplinae (sc.
Pythagoreae) … multa etiam sunt in nostris institutis ducta ab illis (Pythagoreis), quae praetereo
ne ea quae repperisse ipsi putamur aliunde didicisse uideamur. “Stringed instruments play before
the staged seatings of the gods and feasts of the magistrates which was a special feature of that
[Pythagorean] training I am talking about … and I’ll pass over the many things that have been
taken over from the Pythagoreans in our own institutions lest we appear to have learned from
elsewhere things we are thought to have discovered ourselves.”
more interested in redressing its lack of philosophical sophistication. With the

help of Pythagoras, Numa does double duty for an increasingly sophisticated
class of Romans eager to acquire both the intellectual riches of Hellenic culture
and to maintain what made them distinctly Roman. He also provides the foun-
dation of Roman religious and legal practice with a direct link to Greece. Now,
however, it is an identifiably Italian version of Greece. In this spirit Ovid introdu-
ces Numa into his Metamorphoses, 15.3 – 11:
destinat imperio clarum praenuntia ueri

fama Numam; non ille satis cognosse Sabinae
gentis habet ritus, animo maiora capaci
concipit et, quae sit rerum natura, requirit.
huius amor curae patria Curibusque relictis
fecit ut Herculei penetraret ad hospitis urbem.
Graia quis Italicis auctor posuisset in oris
moenia, quaerenti sic e senioribus unus
rettulit indigenis, ueteris non inscius aeui.
Fame, messenger of truth, designates the renowned Numa for rule [at Rome]. Not content
with knowing the rites of the Sabine race, he hatches larger plans in his capacious intellect
and seeks to know what the nature of the universe is. His love of this pursuit made him quit
his native country and the Cures and go as far as the city that once paid host to Hercules.
When he asked about the founder who had put up Greek walls on Italian shores, one of the
elder locals, not ignorant of the past era, answered him thus.”¹⁶
Whether Numa was in fact a man of philosophical mettle like Pythagoras—or

whether he existed at all!¹⁷—is beside the point. In Latin literature Numa be-
comes a sage and ethical reformer on the model of one of the greatest ethical
reformers in the Greek (and Italian) tradition. Herein lies the appeal of figures
like Numa and Pythagoras to Ovid in his Metamorphoses, where the poet recre-
ates a chronological continuum via Greek myth and Roman history from the ori-
gins of the universe to contemporary Rome. The natural end to this mytho-histor-
ic epic is the apotheosis of Rome’s most recent leaders, Julius Caesar and his
adoptive son Caesar Augustus Octavianus, an apotheosis explicable only by
way of Rome’s extensive contact with the Greek east. In fact, Luigi Alfonsi
(1958) has argued persuasively that the Pythagoras of Ovid’s poem channeled
Greek thinkers such as Euhemerus and, especially, Posidonius who made it the-
oretically possible for men—great men, of the kind both Caesar and Augustus
 Galinsky () offers an unconvincing interpretation of this passage: Numa never heard the
lecture despite being said at the end to have taken in Pythagoras’ teaching.
 Cf. Ogilvie () .
considered themselves to be—to bridge the gap between mortality and divinity,
to pass over death and to become, at least in theory, gods.
Alfonsi’s article, “L’inquadramento filosofico delle Metamorfosi ovidiane,”
has been instrumental in shaping my own arguments here, but it suffers from
the author’s earnest attempt to make Ovid into a Greek philosopher—and even
outdo Lucretius in this regard. Alfonsi concludes from his exposition of what be-
comes a philosophical text that Pythagoras furnishes Numa with the proper in-
struction to create a completely new Roman ethos, one inherently opposed to the
war-loving savagery of the fratricidal Romulus and thus consonant with Augus-
tus’ claims to have brought pax Romana to the known world and a heightened
sense of moral rectitude to the Romans themselves. The opposition to Romulus
is not in doubt. Problematic, however, is that Alfonsi brings Ovid’s poem in line
with Julio-Claudian propaganda to a degree that the text does not allow. For
many of the Pythagorean precepts Ovid presents (and invents)—for example,
against animal sacrifice—fly in the face of Augustan religious ritual. More plau-
sible is that Pythagoras offers Numa a rational explanation—even if that explan-
ation is more poetic than philosophical—for addressing what it means to be
Roman in Ovid’s Rome. The very question of what it meant to be Roman, how-
ever, was newly and quite widely open to debate precisely because the very
make-up of Rome—its laws, rituals, literature, architecture, monuments, and
body politic—had been fundamentally reshaped by the first emperor Augustus
Caesar. Part of that re-shaping, I submit, also entails that the emperor enjoys
the possibility of being worshiped and, ultimately, becoming a god at the end
of his life, a transformation seemingly in keeping with the precepts taught by Py-
thagoras in Metamorphoses 15. Indeed, that is exactly what happens at the end of
Ovid’s poem: Augustus and his father are assured a place in heaven together
with the traditional deities of Greek and Roman myth.
Of course, Ovid’s Metamorphoses does not in fact end here with the divini-
zation of Rome’s first emperor and his father. It ends rather with the poet’s own
claim to be able to supersede death, a claim guaranteed by the immortality of his
verse, Metamorphoses 15.871– 9:
iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iouis ira nec ignes

nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere uetustas.
cum uolet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius
ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aeui:
parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis
astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum,
quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris,
ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama,
siquid habent ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam.
Now I have finished a work that neither the anger of Jupiter nor fire nor iron nor the devour-
ing power of old age can destroy. When it will, let that day, which has no claim but to my
mortal body, end the span of my life. Still my better part will be borne beyond the stars, I
shall be immortal, and my name will be indelible. Wherever Rome’s power extends through
the lands she has subdued, my words will be on people’s lips. And if the prophecies of
bards have any truth to them, my fame will live through every age.
There is no better passage to underscore the close link between Ovid’s sprawling
epic and his doleful elegies from exile than the close of his well-known and oft-
quoted autobiography there, Tristia 4.10.125 – 32:
nam tulerint magnos cum saecula nostra poetas,

non fuit ingenio fama maligna meo,
cumque ego praeponam multos mihi, non minor illis
dicor et in toto plurimus orbe legor.
si quid habent igitur uatum praesagia ueri,
protinus ut moriar, non ero, terra, tuus.
siue fauore tuli, siue hanc ego carmine famam,
iure tibi grates, candide lector, ago.
For though this age of ours has produced great poets, fame has not begrudged my genius;
and though I put many before myself, I am not said to be lesser than they, and in all the
world I am the most read. If the predictions of sacred bards have any truth – even though
I die forthwith – I shall not be yours, earth. But if through favor or by poetry I have won this
fame, kind reader, rightly do I give you thanks.
The twentieth-century French social historian of Rome and Latin literary critic,
Jerome Carcopino, has argued that at the heart of both these passages lies the
“credo of the Neopythagoreans.”¹⁸ Carcopino’s article, it must be said, is curious:
in it Ovid becomes a true believer and devout practitioner of Neopythagorean
doctrine.¹⁹ Invoking belief or “credo” here, as Carcopino does, overstates the
case, but it would be misguided to assume that Ovid was not familiar with Neo-
pythagoreanism, a philosophical sect that had re-appeared at Rome in the time
of Cicero and that was especially attractive to upper-class Romans—such as
 At Metamorphoses . to be exact, Carcopino (a) . Carcopino’s point has not
found much scholarly support, although Simone Viarre’s important book, L’image et pensée
dans les Metamorphoses d’Ovide (), with its focus on magic and divination and the figure
of Pythagoras, owes a good deal to Carcopino, in particular to La Basilique pythagoricienne
().
 The title of Carcopino’s next book is instructive here: De Pythagore aux apôtres (Paris
b).
Varro²⁰—as a kind of philosophical answer to Roman religion. Indeed, as schol-

ars from Burkert to Barchiesi have pointed out, it is easy to imagine in Ovid a
true affinity for Neo-Pythagorean thought.²¹ Ovid’s representation of Pythagoras’
inquiry into the nature of the universe at the start of this book (15.60 – 74) recalls
the passage on Numa that we looked at above. For Rome’s second king, Sabine
rites were apparently insufficient, and he was thus led by natural disposition to
inquire into the nature of the universe (Metamorphoses 15.6: quae sit rerum na-
tura, requirit, which is the technical language of Greek philosophy most easily
recognizable in its Latin form in Lucretius, whose poem is titled De Rerum Na-
tura). Indeed, the beginning of Pythagoras’ speech serves as a potted history
of Greek philosophy from the legendary inventor of the very word
“philosopher”.²² Much of what Ovid attributes to Pythagoras has been diligently
traced back to particular sources in the history of ancient thought, for example,
to Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Anaxagoras and especially Empedocles, all of which
is filtered through the Stoics Chrysippus, Panaetius, and in particular Posido-
nius, as well as the Romans Lucretius, Varro, the Sextii, and Publius Nigidius Fig-
ulus. Perhaps the most important figure in this illustrious line-up, however, is
the vegetarian philosopher and Neo-Pythagorean, Sotion, Seneca’s teacher
whom Ovid may have known—so Segl in his Salzburger dissertation (1970:
102– 3)—and had heard lecture, of which we may even hear an echo in Pythago-
ras’ speech, Metamorphoses 15.66 – 7: in medium discenda dabat coetusque silen-
tum/ dictaque mirantum magni primordia mundi/ et rerum causas et, quid natura,
docebat “he was wont to hold public lessons and to teach the crowds of silent
listeners wondering at his words about the beginnings of the universe and the
causes of things.”²³
In the generation before Sotion, however, there was Nigidius Figulus, a
shadowy figure of nebulous significance, but clearly a man of rank and intellec-
tual vigor and important enough to have received the dedication of Cicero’s
translation of Plato’s Timaeus, and who has been referred to by Elizabeth Raw-
 Varro is known to have synthesized Pythagorean thought and was buried modo pythagoreo,
that is, in a clay coffin.
 See Burkert () ; Barchiesi () . Perhaps the most persuasive and intelligent com-
mentary on this question is to be found in Simone Viarre’s brilliant book on the Metamorphoses
() passim.
 On the attribution of the invention of the term φιλόσοφος to Pythagoras, see Burkert ().
 Both Barchiesi ()  and Galinsky () take the coetus silentum here to be the dead,
as elsewhere in Ovid, so that Pythagoras is meant to be holding his speech in the underworld.
This is an intriguing idea that may indeed underscore an even greater affinity between Metamor-
phoses and the exile poetry via Pythagoras.
son as the second-most learned man in late Republican Rome after Varro.²⁴ De-
spite the report in Suetonius²⁵ that he had predicted to Octavius, the future em-
peror’s biological father, that his son would rule the world, he was exiled by the
young Octavian’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar, in the political purge that fol-
lowed civil war in the mid-40s. Unlike most political exiles of the period, Nigi-
dius was denied a return and died in exile c. 45 BC. I want to be very cautious
about concluding that Caesar kept him from Rome because he was a Pythagor-
ean, but this may in fact be what is implied in St. Jerome’s translation of Euse-
bius’ Chronicle, Hier. chron. a Abr. 45 a.Chr.: Nigidius Figulus Pythagoricus et
magus in exilio moritur “Nigidius Figulus, a Pythagorean and sorcerer, dies in
exile.” From a later passage in the Chronicle we meet the Greek philosopher
Anaxilaus of Larissa, who taught about Neopythagoreanism in Rome during
the late Republic and early Principate and was exiled by Augustus in 28 BC
for what looks like the same reason: he too was a Pythagorean and a sorcerer.²⁶
It seems that Pythagoreanism had become connected with sorcery, that is, with a
type of divination that had made itself dangerous to the emperor. I say danger-
ous because sorcerers were believed to have knowledge of the future—and Nigi-
dius’ prediction of Augustus’ future domination of the world is a case in point—
which was considered perilous for emperors: sorcerers could predict their death.
Regardless of what we think of the notoriously fatuous Christian Chronicle and
its reliability on this issue, it is nevertheless noteworthy that in the waning
years of the Republic under Caesar and the early years of its re-founding
under Octavian, two Neo-Pythagorean philosophers—one Roman, one Greek—
were exiled from Rome. In light of this curious convergence consider that in
the first line of his introduction to Pythagoras Ovid mentions the philosopher’s
exile, Metamorphoses 15.60 – 2: uir fuit hic ortu Samius, sed fugerat una/ et Samon
et dominos odioque tyrannidis exul/ sponte erat. “There was a man here, a Sa-
mian by birth, but he had fled Samos together with its rulers, and through hatred
of tyranny was living in voluntary exile.” (“Fugerat” is the Latin translation of
the Greek φυγεῖν “to be exiled.”) On this I shall elaborate no further; for in
spite of these tantalizing tidbits, it is nevertheless impossible to prove, as Carco-
pino had tried and others since, that Ovid was a Neopythagorean and was exiled
for his association with a group noted for dangerous divination.
The answer, it seems, is less fantastic, though perhaps more in keeping with
the spirit and outsized ambition of Ovid’s epic poem. Consider, for example, Py-
 Rawson ()  – .

 Suet. Augustus .: P. Nigidium … affirmasse dominum terrarum orbi natum.
 Jer. Chron. Ol. .: [Anaxilaus Larisaeus] Pythagoricus et magus Vrbe et Italia pellitur.
thagoras’ teaching on the immortality of the soul and the inevitability of chang-
ing forms, Metamorphoses 15.153 – 75:
O genus attonitum gelidae formidine mortis!

quid Styga, quid tenebras et nomina uana timetis,
materiem uatum, falsique pericula mundi?
corpora, siue rogus flamma seu tabe uetustas
abstulerit, mala posse pati non ulla putetis:
morte carent animae semperque priore relicta
sede nouis domibus uiuunt habitantque receptae.
ipse ego (nam memini) Troiani tempore belli
Panthoides Euphorbus eram, cui pectore quondam
haesit in aduerso grauis hasta minoris Atridae.
cognoui clipeum, laeuae gestamina nostrae,
nuper Abanteis templo Iunonis in Argis.
Omnia mutantur, nihil interit: errat et illinc
huc uenit, hinc illuc et quoslibet occupet artus
spiritus eque feris humana in corpora transit
inque feras noster, nec tempore deperit ullo,
utque nouis facilis signatur cera figuris
nec manet, ut fuerat, nec formas seruat easdem,
sed tamen ipsa eadem est, animam sic semper eandem
esse sed in uarias doceo migrare figuras.
ergo, ne pietas sit uicta cupidine uentris,
parcite, uaticinor, cognatas caede nefanda
exturbare animas, nec sanguine sanguis alatur.
A living race thunder-struck by the fear of an icy death! Why do you fear the Styx? why the
underworld and mere names, the stuff of poets and dangers of an imaginary world? Do not
think that our bodies, whether consumed by the flame of the funeral pyre or the wasting
away of old age, are able to suffer any harm. Death does not touch our souls and when
they leave their former seat, they continue to live, always received in new abodes. At the
time of the Trojan War I myself (as I recall) was once Panthous’ son, Euphorbus, whom
the heavy spear of the lesser son of Atreus once impaled in the heart. Recently I recognized
the shield I used to bear on my left arm hanging on the temple of Juno at Abas in Argos. All
things change; nothing dies: the soul wanders, going from here to there and from there to
here, occupying whatever limbs it will, moving from beast to human and from human to
beast and never dying. Even as impressionable wax is marked by new etchings, never stay-
ing as it was, never keeping the same form and yet it is the same, so do I say is the soul,
always the same even as it changes shape. And so, let not piety be overcome by the belly’s
craving. I warn you as a seer: stop banishing kindred souls by impious murder, and let not
blood be nourished by blood.
The closing line refers to Pythagoras’ famous (though perhaps made-up) absti-
nence from eating meat, as Ovid joins a long line of Greek and Roman writers
who single out the unconventional practices of the Pythagoreans. Indeed, herein
lies a neat explanation—as Viarre and others have shown—for the presence of
Pythagoras (and thus Numa) in the closing book of the Metamorphoses: he
had become a literary topos, a figure that nearly all Roman poets from Ennius
to Ovid had found a way to write about. In Ennius, for example, Pythagoras’
teaching on the transmigration of souls allows the poet to channel the spirit
of classical antiquity’s paradigmatic poet, Homer, as Horace’s and Porphyry’s
comments on the passage make clear.²⁷ There is no need to list all the others
here, but I shall mention the well-known passages from Horace’s Satires and
Propertius’ elegies where Pythagorean doctrine is held up for playful ribbing:
the ban on bean-eating becomes the brunt of a joke.²⁸ We will also remember
how Vergil in all of his works draws on the teachings of Pythagoras, as Plato
did before him, to inject his poetic endeavor with philosophical heft, for example
in Eclogue 4, the Messianic eclogue, or in the final book of the Georgics (4.221– 7),
which posits the pervasive presence of the Pythagorean (or Posidonian) deus in
all things, and finally, of course, Aeneid 6, with the transmigration of souls in the
underworld. In this sense, the incorporation of Pythagoras into the final book of
the Metamorphoses not only provides another philosophical layer to this multi-
layered poem, or rather an additional shape to this multi-formed work, it also
engages with, indeed reforms, the immediate history of Greek and especially
Roman literature.
As Hardie (1995) and, more recently, Galinsky (1998) have shown, the Ennius
passage quoted above (n. 27) about Homer and widely discussed in antiquity (by
Cicero and Horace for example) is a particularly important intertext here. In a
sense, in the passage we just read Ovid may be said to summon Homer too by
allowing Pythagoras to recollect his exploits as Euphorbus in the Iliad and to
be reminded of the role Pythagoras had in striking Patroclus and thus making
it possible for Hector to kill Achilles’ friend in Book 16. In fact, Galinsky’s article
(1998: 327) argues that Ovid’s whole poetic program in the Metamorphoses is to
recreate and reunite the various literary forms—poetry, history, philosophy, and
rhetoric—which originated with Homer. In this connection, it is crucial to recall
that for Ovid’s contemporary, Strabo, Homer was the founder of the science of
 Enn. fr.  Skutsch: uisus Homerus adesse poeta “the poet Homer appeared to be present.” Cf.
Hor. Epistulae .. – : Ennius, et sapiens et fortis et alter Homerus,/ ut critici dicunt “The crit-
ics call Ennius ‘another Homer’, both wise and accomplished in epic.” Porph. ad Hor. Epistulae
..: quod secundum Pythagorae dogma anima Homeri in suum corpus uenisset “because in
accordance with Pythagoras’ teaching the soul of Homer had come into his body.”
 Hor. Satires ..: faba Pythagoreae cognata. The famous th cent. Pythagorean strategos of
Tarentum, Archytas, is also mentioned by Propertius ...
geography and surpassed all men for his excellence in poetry and his experience
in the life of the polis, Geog. 1.2:
καὶ πρῶτον ὅτι ὀρθῶς ὑπειλήφαμεν … ἀρχηγέτην εἶναι τῆς γεωγραφικῆς ἐμπειρίας
῞Ομηρον· ὃς οὐ μόνον ἐν τῇ κατὰ τήν ποιήσιν ἀρετῇ πάντας ὑπερβέβληται τοὺς πάλαι
καὶ τοὺς ὕστερον, ἀλλὰ σχεδόν τι καὶ τῇ κατὰ τόν βίον ἐμπειρίᾳ τὸν πολιτικόν.
And first [let me say] that we are right to have regarded Homer as the founder of geography;
for he surpasses all men past and future not only in his excellence in poetry but, I dare say,
even in his experience of the polis.
A similar sentiment is voiced later in the first century CE by Quintilian, for whom
Homer represents the consummate artist, Institutio Oratoria 12.11.21: ut de Hom-
ero taceam, in quo nullius non artis aut opera perfecta aut certe non dubia uestigia
reperiuntur “I say nothing of Homer, in whose every art we find either works of
perfection or, at any rate, no traces of weakness.” This notion had been devel-
oped in the Hellenistic period where the figure of Homer was viewed as “a foun-
tain-head from which later poets, men of letters, philosophers had drunk.”²⁹ The
poet of the Iliad and Odyssey was for Ovid and his contemporaries a paradigm
for the learned man, a polymath, whose experience transcended poetry and
was applied more generally to nearly every facet of life and culture.³⁰ Via Pytha-
goras Ovid invokes the spirit of Homer to underscore the mutability of things and
their changing forms. Moreover, he serves as an ideal transitional figure in the
translation of Greek learning to the Italian peninsula, in the poem’s final move-
ment from east to west, from Greece to Rome, from myth to history.
In the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, Pythagoras reappears—his soul trans-
migrates, if you will—even as the aforementioned geographical movement of the
exile poetry tacks in the opposite direction: indeed, the poet is displaced from
west to east, from Rome to Tomis, from the seat of empire to a former Greek col-
ony on the Black Sea. In exile there, he constantly bemoans his dire condition
alone among barbarians and at a far remove from Rome. Fittingly, the possibility
that Pythagoras’ teaching on the soul may be true provides another occasion for
 So Brink () ; cf. Feeney () : “Certainly Homer, the master, was praised as con-
taining all three levels of narrative (ἅπερ ἅπαντα παρὰ τῷ ποιητῇ ἐστι, AbT . – ). It was, in
fact, conventional to regard epic as being a mixture of the actual and the invented, or false, and
hence as containing elements of narrative style appropriate to more than one level: thus, Poly-
bius defines Homer’s poetic licence as ‘a mixture of history, description, and myth’ (συνέστηκεν
ἐξ ἱστορίας καὶ διαθέσεως καὶ μύθου, ..).”
 Galinsky () , goes so far as to state the Ovid’s whole poetic program in the Metamor-
phoses is to recreate and reunite the various literary forms – poetry, history, philosophy, rhetoric
– which originated with Homer. See also Galinsky () , for more on this point.
lament, Tristia 3.3.59 – 64: atque utinam pereant animae cum corpore nostrae,/ ef-
fugiatque auidos pars mihi nulla rogos./ nam si morte carens uacua uolat altus in
aura/ spiritus, et Samii sunt rata dicta senis,/ inter Sarmaticas Romana uagabitur
umbras,/ perque feros Manes hospita semper erit. “And would that my soul could
perish with my body and no part of me escape the greedy flames of the funeral
pyre. For if the spirit, unable to die, flies high in the empty air and the sayings of
the aged Samian (sc. Pythagoras) are true, my soul as a Roman will wander
among Sarmatian souls and will always be a stranger in the midst of fierce spi-
rits.” What had furnished literary allusion and philosophical argument for the
immortality of his verse in the final book of the Metamorphoses now brings
the poet to tears.
But Ovid’s lament on the immortality of the soul must be read within the
larger context of the exile poetry. In brief, lament consumes the poet of the Tris-
tia and Epistulae ex Ponto and belongs to the rhetorical stance of existential res-
ignation he adopts in exile. As part of this poetic posturing, Ovid often repre-
sents his exile as a living death, e. g. Tristia 5.1.47– 8: interea nostri quid agant,
nisi triste, libelli?/ tibia funeribus conuenit ista meis “what meanwhile would
my books bring if not sadness? The reed-pipe is appropriate to my funeral.”³¹
Thus, if Ovid is already “dead” in exile, Pythagoras’ teaching on the eternal na-
ture of the soul allows him to continue pursuing what has become his sole
source of meaning: writing verse. His poems from exile recreate his presence
in the city, a paradoxical presence in absence, which allows him to be heard
there even in death. It follows from this that these poems fulfill the poet’s
claim from the end of the Metamorphoses to live on after death in the mouths
of men. It is an irony worthy of Ovid that the fulfillment of death defeated
does not depend upon the immortality of his verse but comes while he is yet
alive.
There is another way in which Ovid returns in exile to the problem of his
Metamorphoses. There, metamorphosis in myth occupies the poet until the
final book where the changing forms of Rome’s recent history, including turning
 Further, Tristia .. – : non sum ego quod fueram: quid inanem proteris umbram? / quid
cinerem saxis bustaque nostra petis? Epistulae ex Ponto ..: et similis morti pectora torpor
habet; .. – : uosque, quibus perii, tum cum mea fama sepulta est, / quoque de nostra
morte tacere reor; .. – : nos satis est inter glaciem Scythicasque sagittas / uiuere, si uita
est mortis habenda genus. Further, his departure for exile is like a funeral, Tristia ..;
..; .. – ; Epistulae ex Ponto ..; Tomis sits on the Styx, Tristia ..; Epistulae
ex Ponto ..; ..; the poet writes his own epitaph, Tristia .. – . On the recurring
theme of exile as equivalent to death, see McGowan ()  with n.  for bibliography.
Cf. Cic. Epistulae ad Atticum ..; Epistulae ad Familiares ...
men like Caesar and Augustus into gods by legal decree of the senate, dominate
the climax of the poem. In this vein, the exiled Ovid refers to Augustus as the
most powerful and pervasive divinity of the mythological framework of the Tris-
tia and Epistulae ex Ponto. The poet is still concerned here with changing shapes.
Now, however, the shapes are historical in nature. He addresses, in particular,
the refigured make-up of Roman religious and legal practice as he did at the
end of the Metamorphoses. Ovid acknowledges the emperor’s desire to become
divine via legal decree by turning him into a mythological deity in the exile po-
etry. But “Augustus the god” is now subject to the poet’s representation in verse.
Though exiled and physically lost to his former life at Rome, Ovid lays claim to
the power of poetry to determine how gods maintain a quintessential feature of
their divinity: immortality.³² It should come as no surprise to readers of the Met-
amorphoses, where the ira deorum has nearly free rein, that Augustus is depicted
here as a vengeful god whose anger knows no bounds. The emperor may have
styled himself an ethical reformer of Roman religion and law on the model of
Numa,³³ but in Ovid’s exilic verse he appears more like the capricious Olympians
whose seemingly willful acts of vengeance fill the Metamorphoses. According to
the poet’s professed claim to immortality there, this highly critical picture is des-
tined to outlive the present historical circumstances that have made Augustus
ruler of Rome. In the immediate sequence of events, the power of the princeps
threatens to smother the voice of the poet by banishing him to the margins of
empire, and Ovid himself becomes the first casualty of the new shape of religion
and law introduced at Rome by the emperor. But his verse ultimately trumps the
princeps’ punishment; for the poet always has the last word.
Of course, Ovid’s immediate response to the oppressive burden of exile is to
lament. Fittingly, he changes his tune from the lofty epic of the Metamorphoses
to the doleful elegy, the meter traditionally associated in antiquity with lamen-
tation for the dead. Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto offer themselves as an
extended epitaph at Rome for his plight in exile. These poems erect a literary
tombstone, as it were, bearing witness for posterity to the poet’s suffering at
the hands of an autocrat. Such a metaphor implies existential resignation and
immediate defeat. Yet there is something empowering about exile for the poet.
As Philip Hardie has remarked in his sensitive reading of the exile poetry from
his essential Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (2002: 308): “Ovid’s mind is as free [in
 See Feeney () . It may be noted here that Feeney ()  – , has already ar-
gued that the apotheosis of Caesar at the end of the Metamorphoses is framed by the very recent
Roman institution of legal transformation of humans into gods, esp. : “Caesar is a god be-
cause his adopted son made him one.”
 Littlewood () , quoted above n. .
exile] as that of the exiled Pythagoras … to roam where it will.” As it did for Py-
thagoras in flight from the tyranny of Polycrates on his native island of Samos,
exile provides Ovid with a place of intellectual refuge from which to comment on
religious and legal changes taking place in Augustan Rome. By professing to im-
mortalize this commentary in verse, Ovid turns exile into an enduring source of
poetic redress of the very circumstances that made his banishment possible. His
exilic voice is the voice of poetry in se, the voice of the uates or sacred bard, the
prophet calling out from the outermost extreme of the Roman Empire to re-create
his presence in the city. The disembodied voice of the uates goes on singing in
spite of exile. His song is immortal, as Pythagoras conceived of immortality.
For Ovid it is the carmen perpetuum.
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— 2009. Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge. Cambridge.
Hinds, S. E. 1992. “Arma in Ovid’s Fasti”, Arethusa 25: 81 – 153.
Joyce, J. 1946. Ulysses. New York.
Kenney, E.J. 1982. “Ovid”, in: W. Clausen and E.J. Kenney (eds.), Cambridge History of
Classical Literature. Vol. 2. Cambridge, 420 – 57.
Knox, P. 1995. Ovid Heroides. Select Epistles. Cambridge.
Levene, D.S. 1993. Religion in Livy. Leiden/New York/Cologne.
Littlewood, R.J. 2002. “Imperii pignora certa: The Role of Numa in Ovid’s Fasti”, in: G.
Herbert-Brown (ed.), Ovid’s Fasti. Historical Readings at Its Bimillennium. Oxford,
175 – 97.
Lundström, S. 1980. Ovids Metamorphosen und die Politik des Kaisers. Uppsala.
McGowan, M.M. 2009. Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex
Ponto. Boston, MA/Leiden.
Ogilvie, R.M. 1965. A Commentary on Livy Books 1 – 5. Cambridge.
Otis, B. 1970. Ovid as an Epic Poet. (2nd edition). Cambridge.
Panitschek, P. 1990. “Numa Pompilius als Schüler des Pythagoras”, GB 17: 49 – 65.
Pohlenz, M. 1913. “Die Abfassungszeit von Ovids Metamorphosen”, Hermes 48: 1 – 13.
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Volk, K. 2002. The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius. Oxford.
Matthew Leigh
Lucan’s Caesar and Laelius
Summary: This paper examines the speech of the centurion Laelius in Book 1 of
Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile. It argues that the name of the centurion is a figure of al-
lusion pointing back to the speaker of Cicero’s De Amicitia. In this work Laelius
the wise considers whether or not one should follow a friend if he makes war
against the state and argues that one should not. Lucan’s Laelius asserts his ab-
solute loyalty to Caesar and his readiness to destroy any city, even Rome itself.
Cicero’s Laelius discusses two Roman exempla: Blossius of Cumae and Coriola-
nus. Closer examination of the historians’ accounts of both figures is highly pro-
ductive for analysis of the speech of Lucan’s Laelius.
Keywords: Lucan; Cicero; Coriolanus; civil war; friendship
Nearly forty years have now passed since the publication of Frederick Ahl’s
Lucan: An Introduction and yet it remains an essential point of reference for
any scholar getting to grips with the poet. When first I started to think about
the role of spectacle in the Bellum Ciuile, Ahl’s chapter “Sangre y Arena” was
there to point the way. As I grew more and more interested in the relationship
between Caesar and his subalterns, I could again turn to Professor Ahl’s succinct
and incisive discussion of the topic. It is to that very particular relationship that I
return in this paper.
Laelius the centurion makes his only appearance in Book 1 of the Bellum
Ciuile. He is a primipilaris and wears the corona ciuica customarily awarded
for the rescue in line of battle of a fellow Roman soldier.¹ His role, however, is
to break through the moral qualms felt by Caesar’s troops at the invasion of
Italy and to rouse a new unity of purpose amongst his peers. At the end of
what is a startling profession of loyalty and devotion to his leader, the army
cries out as one and the advance can proceed.
Although there can be no doubt about what Laelius contributes to the action
of Book 1, there are some unresolved questions about his presentation. On the
one hand, it is clear that he belongs to a group of junior officers in the ranks
of Caesar’s army, who give voice to and demonstrate an absolute dedication to
 For the significance of Laelius wearing the corona ciuica, see Ahl () ; Leigh ()
 n. .
260 Matthew Leigh
their leader’s cause.² On the other, while Vulteius and his band of Opitergini in
Book 4, Scaeva in Book 6, and Crastinus in Book 7 are all to be found either in
Caesar’s Commentarii or in the Periochae of Livy, there is no reference anywhere
else in the historical record to Laelius or to his speech.³ This has therefore en-
couraged most scholars to regard him as an invention of the poet.⁴ To this
view, the traditional Roman resonances of the name given to the centurion are
particularly piquant in the light of the disregard for all things Roman that he
will go on to express.⁵
This paper presupposes the essential fictionality of the centurion. Its focus is
rather on his name.⁶ When Lucan calls his character Laelius, he has a more spe-
cific point of reference than is customarily perceived. For the terms with which
Laelius gives voice to his unflinching loyalty to Caesar as the latter launches
his march on Rome stand in striking contrast to the reflections of another Lae-
lius, the principal speaker of Cicero’s De Amicitia, as he questions whether
one’s obligations to a friend extend as far as following him when he launches
an assault on Rome itself.⁷ Moreover, two examples to which Laelius refers at
length – the finally aborted assault on Rome of Coriolanus and the unabashed
devotion of Blossius of Cumae to Tiberius Gracchus – feature in the broader his-
torical tradition in ways that make them strikingly relevant to all that Lucan’s
centurion professes to be ready to do for his general, and therefore call for fur-
ther analysis.
At Bellum Ciuile 1. 299 – 351, Caesar delivers an extended speech of exhorta-
tion to his troops. They are the veterans of his Gallic campaigns and the demon-
ization of their general threatens to deny them the proper reward for their long
 Ahl () ; Leigh ()  – ; Radicke () , ; Galimberti-Biffino
( – ); Fucecchi ().
 For the Opitergini, see Livy, Periochae . Vulteius is named at Flor. Epitome .. –  but
in a passage that appears strikingly derivative of Lucan. For Scaeva, see Caes. Bellum Ciuile
.. – ; ILLRP  and a. For Crastinus, see Caes. Bellum Ciuile . and ; Livy ap.
Commenta Bernensia .; Plut. Caesar . – , Pompey . – ; App. Civil Wars
.. – .
 Grimal () ; Heyke ()  n. ; Lebek () ; Radicke () ; Gall ()
; Roche () ; Fucecchi ()  – . For openness to the historicity of Laelius, see
Getty () ; Fantham () .
 Radicke () ; Dinter () .
 The approach to be adopted is suggested in passing by Lebek ()  n.  but appears to
have gone unnoticed by subsequent scholars.
 Cic. De Amicitia  – .
and bloody service.⁸ The senate here is embodied in the chattering Marcellus and
the empty name that is Cato,⁹ but the true villain of the piece is Pompey. Caesar
looks back to his rival’s sanguinary apprenticeship under Sulla,¹⁰ and represents
his subsequent career as consistently unconstitutional: Pompey claimed the con-
sulship before the proper age and now refuses to let his power go;¹¹ where Pom-
pey now enjoys kingly power, Caesar disavows any such ambitions and seeks
only to remove masters from a city complicit in its own enslavement.¹² This is
a vigorous and effective vindication of Caesar’s position, but his audience
reply only with uncertain mumbling: fear of the general and their terrible love
of the sword pull them one way, duty and the household gods pull them in
another.¹³ The key word here is pietas nor is this the only occasion in the
poem when its call will restrain, if briefly, the blood-lust of the combatants.¹⁴
The pietas that holds back Caesar’s troops may be defined as a sense of duty
towards the gods, the fatherland, parents and blood kin.¹⁵ Each and every one of
these categories is referred to in the speech of Laelius and each is put second to
the imperative of loyalty to Caesar:
 Luc. . –  and  –  refer to the Gallic campaign; . –  demands a home and
land to farm for the troops; for a just cause now vindicated by arms, see . – : arma tenenti
| omnia dat, qui iusta negat.
 Luc. .: Marcellusque loquax et nomina uana Catones.
 Luc. . for the triumph granted to Pompey by Sulla in  B.C.; . –  for Pompey
trained in civil war by Sulla; . –  for Sulla and Pompey as kings.
 Luc. .: ille semel raptos numquam dimittet honores?
 Luc. . – : scilicet extremi Pompeium emptique clientes | continuo per tot satiabunt tem-
pora regno?; . – : ex hoc iam te, inprobe, regno | ille tuus saltem doceat descendere Sulla;
. – : nam neque praeda meis neque regnum quaeritur armis: | detrahimus dominos urbi ser-
uire paratae.
 Luc. . – , esp. : pietas patriique parentes,  – : diro ferri … amore | ductorisque
metu.
 Luc. ., .. Roller () is impressive on this topic.
 Plaut. Asinaria , Pseudolus  – ; Ter. Hecyra , ,  show an early association
between pietas and dutiful behavior towards parents. Wagenvoort ()  points to passages
such as Cic. De Inuentione . and  as evidence that Cicero initially associates pietas
with devotion to blood kin and the fatherland as opposed to religio, which concerns the gods.
Yet whereas passages such as Cic. De Finibus . and De Natura Deorum ., . show
that pietas erga deos is a major concern of Cicero’s late philosophical works, Wagenvoort’s at-
tempts at pp.  –  to mark a strong break between this final stage of Cicero’s thought and earlier
works is contradicted by the evidence of Cic. Pro Cluentio  delivered in  B.C. and Cic. De
Domo Sua  and De Haruspicum Responsis  delivered in  B.C. Wagenvoort does not dis-
cuss passages such as Naev. fr.  Blänsdorf; Plaut. Casina  and Enn. Scaenica  Jocelyn.
262 Matthew Leigh
iussa sequi tam posse mihi quam uelle necesse est.

nec ciuis meus est, in quem tua classica, Caesar,
audiero. per signa decem felicia castris
perque tuos iuro quocumque ex hoste triumphos,
pectore si fratris gladium iuguloque parentis
condere me iubeas plenaeque in uiscera partu
coniugis, inuita peragam tamen omnia dextra;
si spoliare deos ignemque inmittere templis,
numina miscebit castrensis flamma monetae;
castra super Tusci si ponere Thybridis undas,
Hesperios audax ueniam metator in agros.
tu quoscumque uoles in planum effundere muros,
his aries actus disperget saxa lacertis,
illa licet, penitus tolli quam iusseris urbem,
Roma sit.
To follow your orders I must have as much the capacity as the will. Nor is he my fellow-
citizen against whom, Caesar, I shall have heard your war-trumpets blast. I swear by stand-
ards successful through ten campaigns and by your triumphs against every which foe,
should you command me to bury the sword in my brother’s breast or a parent’s throat or
into the guts of my wife great with child, though my hand shrinks back I shall still carry it
all out. If you bid me to despoil the gods and set fire to the temples, the flame of our camp
mint will melt down the divine powers; if you bid me set up camp above the waters of the
Tuscan Tiber, I shall come, a bold planner, into Hesperian fields. Whatsoever walls you
wish to raze to the ground, the ram will scatter the rocks driven on by these arms, even
if the city that you order to be utterly destroyed should be Rome.¹⁶
The speech of Caesar to which Laelius responds is striking for its determination
to cast the invasion of Italy as a just response to an unjust regime.¹⁷ Yet the cen-
turion does almost nothing to develop this theme.¹⁸ His true audience are his fel-
low-soldiers held back from crime by thoughts of duty and the household gods.
Nor is he entirely a stranger to such feelings: to ask, as he does, whether it is real-
ly so wretched to conquer in civil war is to acknowledge the conviction of others
that this is indeed a crime;¹⁹ all the deeds that Caesar bids him to commit, he
will perpetrate, but he will do so with a shrinking hand;²⁰ he will raze any
city even if it be Rome.²¹ For all that the speech of Laelius is addressed to Caesar
from first to last, its true target lies somewhere else. The complete success of this
 Luc. . – . For discussion, see Menz () ; Heyke ()  – .
 Heyke () .
 Luc. . regnum … senatus is perhaps the closest that Laelius comes to political analysis.
 Luc. .: usque adeo miserum est ciuili uincere bello?
 Luc. .: inuita peragam tamen omnia dextra.
 Luc. . – : illa licet, penitus quam iusseris urbem, | Roma sit.
strategy is underlined in Lucan’s description of the reaction of the soldiers, who

promise their hands held high for whatsoever wars the general proclaims.²²
I do not propose here to revisit what I have previously written about the vi-
cious deeds that Laelius offers to perform or about the peculiarly intense rela-
tionship between the general and his troops that Lucan finds in the historical
tradition and reimagines in his own distinctive terms.²³ I would, however,
point to my previous analysis of vv. 367– 372 as a version of the military sacra-
mentum and of the importance in this context of the prior adaptation of this
oath in Roman personal poetry to express ’the devoted loyalty of friends …
[and] of one lover … for another’.²⁴ For the conflicting demands of friendship
and of duty to the state are the central issue addressed in the passage of the
De Amicitia that has so much to bring to the analysis of this speech and to
which Lucan may be said to allude through the name that he gives to his centu-
rion.
At De Amicitia 36, Laelius the wise considers how far love (amor) in friend-
ship should go and whether any friends of Coriolanus, if he had any, would have
been right to join him in bearing arms against the fatherland.²⁵ The phrasing is
cautious and with reason: Coriolanus is a singularly lonely figure and the histor-
ical tradition offers scant reference to any fellow-citizens joining him in his exile
amongst the Volscians and later march on Rome.²⁶ More recent experience does,
however, offer an alternative example and 37 goes on to describe how Q. Tubero
and others of his peers abandoned Tiberius Gracchus as he troubled the state,
but Blossius of Cumae excused himself for staying true on the grounds that he
esteemed his friend so highly that he felt that he should do whatever Gracchus
desired.²⁷ Laelius then records himself as asking Blossius whether he would
 Luc. . – , esp.  – : elatasque alte, quaecumque ad bella uocaret, | promisere
manus; Heyke () ,  – .
 Leigh ()  – .
 Leigh ()  citing Catul. . – ; Hor. Epodes . – ; Prop. .. – ; Verg. Ec-
logues . –  and  – . See now Roche ()  – .
 Cic. De Amicitia : quamobrem id primum uideamus, si placet, quatenus amor in amicitia
progredi debeat. numne si Coriolanus habuit amicos, ferre contra patriam arma illi cum Coriolano
debuerunt? For the specific issue of ‘how far’ we should go in the name of friendship and the
discussion of this issue in the works of Cicero and Theophrastus, see Gel. .. Note ..
μέχρι πόσου, .. quonam usque, .. quousque, .. quatenus.
 Cic. De Amicitia  says of Themistocles and Coriolanus: his adiutor contra patriam inuentus
est nemo. Plut. Coriolanus . refers to three or four clients who leave Rome with Coriolanus,
but at D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. he leaves alone.
 Cic. De Amicitia : at C. Blossius … hanc ut sibi ignoscerem causam adferebat, quod tanti
Tiberium Gracchum fecisset ut quidquid ille uellet sibi faciendum putaret.
264 Matthew Leigh
obey if Gracchus asked him to set fire to the Capitol. This, Blossius replies, Grac-
chus would never have desired of him, but, had he done so, then he would have
obeyed.²⁸ Nor were these empty words. For Laelius describes Blossius as going
beyond mere obedience to his rash associate; he took charge and presented him-
self not as the companion of his folly but as the leader.²⁹ Nor, adds Laelius, was
he alone: C. Carbo and C. Cato both followed Tiberius and now his younger
brother Gaius is most vigorous in his cause.³⁰
Cicero’s dialogue is firmly anchored in the Rome of 129 B.C. between the fall
of Tiberius and his brother’s ascension to the tribunate. Laelius can see that
Rome has departed somewhat from traditional practice and he is anxious for
the future.³¹ His immediate anxiety is for the career of Gaius,³² but the prophetic
tone that he adopts is that of one looking beyond the horizon and anticipating
the sorrows of Cicero’s own time.³³
Towards the end of this section of the dialogue, Laelius returns to Coriolanus
and sets him alongside his near-contemporary, Themistocles.³⁴ The most famous
and powerful of the Greeks is said to have fallen victim to resentment (inuidia)
and to have been driven into exile, but he was wrong not to put up with the
wrong done to him by his ungrateful fatherland and did what, twenty years pre-
viously, Coriolanus had done to Rome. Neither found any supporters and both
were driven to suicide.³⁵ Great though these men were, and sad their ends, Lae-
 Cic. De Amicitia : tum ego: “etiamne si te in Capitolium faces ferre uellet?” “numquam,”
inquit, “uoluisset id quidem; sed si uoluisset, paruissem.”
 Cic. De Amicitia : et hercule ita fecit, uel plus etiam quam dixit; non enim paruit ille Tiberii
Gracchi temeritati, sed praefuit, nec se comitem illius furoris sed ducem praebuit.
 Cic. De Amicitia .
 Cic. De Amicitia : deflexit iam aliquantum de spatio curriculoque consuetudo maiorum; :
serpit diem e die res quae procliuis ad perniciem, cum semel coepit, labitur.
 Cic. De Amicitia : de Gai Gracchi autem tribunatu quid exspectem, non libet augurari.
 Cic. De Amicitia : uidere iam uideor populum a senatu disiunctum, multitudinis arbitrio res
maximas agi; plures enim discent quemadmodum haec fiant, quam quemadmodum his resistatur;
 mihi autem non minori curae est qualis res publica post mortem meam futura, quam qualis
hodie sit. Powell () : “The reader is of course meant to think of Sulla and especially Cae-
sar”. For emphasis on the immediate aftermath of Caesar’s assassination as illustrated by the
correspondence between Cicero and Matius, see Steinmetz ()  –  and note especially
Matius at Cic. Ad Familiares ..: neque enim Caesarem in dissensione ciuili sum secutus,
sed amicum; quamquam re offendebar tamen non deserui, neque bellum umquam ciuile aut
etiam causam dissensionis probaui, quam etiam nascentem exstingui summe studui.
 For this pairing of Coriolanus and Themistocles, see also Cic. Brutus  – ; Gel. .. –
.
 Cic. De Amicitia : quis clarior in Graecia Themistocle, quis potentior? qui cum imperator
bello Persico seruitute Graeciam liberauisset, propterque inuidiam in exsilium expulsus esset, in-
lius is quite sure that things turned out as they should have done. For anyone to
have aided either man against the fatherland on grounds of friendship would
have been a grievous wrong.³⁶
Such then are the convictions of Laelius Sapiens and it scarcely needs stat-
ing that they are in the starkest contrast to those espoused by Laelius the centu-
rion. In Book 4 of Lucan, the Opitergian Vulteius represents collective suicide as
the best possible pledge of love for Caesar,³⁷ while in Book 6 Scaeva claims that
his opponents’ love for Pompey and the cause of the senate falls short of his own
love of death.³⁸ Where the philosopher is concerned to set a proper limit on the
demands of amor within amicitia, Caesar’s subalterns reveal through their crazed
excesses just what amor for the general can produce. I have argued elsewhere
that the manner in which Laelius the centurion addresses his leader has its
own strongly erotic coloring and what he promises, just as much as what Scaeva
and Vulteius actually do, reveals the very want of those limits that Cicero’s Lae-
lius seeks to impose.³⁹
The significance for Lucan of De Amicitia 36 – 43 extends somewhat further
than the contrasting attitudes of the two Laelii. Of particular interest are the two
Roman historical exempla introduced by Laelius the philosopher: Blossius of
Cumae and Coriolanus. It will be helpful to consider the significance of both
and to probe a little further into the historical tradition surrounding them.
The career of Blossius of Cumae is indeed striking. A Stoic philosopher and
associate of Antipater of Tarsus, he appears to have been a persistent thorn in
the side of the Roman aristocracy. Exiled from Rome after the fall of Tiberius
Gracchus, he made his way to Asia Minor and joined the rebellion of Aristonicus
and the self-styled Heliopolitae.⁴⁰ Yet what matters most in this context is the
gratae patriae iniuriam non tulit quam ferre debuit: fecit idem quod uiginti annis ante apud nos
fecerat Coriolanus. his adiutor contra patriam inuentus est nemo; itaque mortem sibi uterque con-
sciuit.
 Cic. De Amicitia : quare talis improborum consensio non modo excusatione amicitiae tegen-
da non est, sed potius supplicio omni uindicanda est, ut ne quis concessum putet amicum uel bel-
lum patriae inferentem sequi. For the impropriety of aiding a friend against the fatherland as ax-
iomatic, see Gel. .. – : “contra patriam” inquit Cicero “arma pro amico sumenda non sunt.”
hoc profecto nemo ignorauit, et “priusquam Theognis”, quod Lucilius ait, “nasceretur”.
 Luc. . – : sed non maiora supersunt | obsessis tanti quae pignora demus amoris.
 Luc. . – : Pompei uobis minor est causaeque senatus | quam mihi mortis amor. There is a
para prosdokian effect here because we expect him to refer to his love for Caesar. For amor mortis
in Lucan, see Rutz ().
 For the erotic coloring of the interaction of Caesar and his troops, see also Fantham ()
.
 Plut. Tiberius Gracchus .; Dudley ()  – .
266 Matthew Leigh
suggestion that he was not so much the companion as the leader of Tiberius’
folly and, in particular, his reported confession that he would have set fire to
the Capitol had his leader bid him do so. Laelius claims here to have been assist-
ing the consuls Laenas and Rupilius in an advisory capacity;⁴¹ Valerius Maximus
tells the same story and in words that make clear his debt to Cicero, but also
adds the detail that the consuls were mandated by the senate to decide on the
appropriate punishment for the followers of Tiberius.⁴² This suggests that the
story in the De Amicitia is no ad hoc invention but rather a compressed reference
to an existing historical tradition. Plutarch’s life of Tiberius Gracchus confirms
this suspicion. For he states that Blossius appeared before the consuls, but
claims first Nasica, then many others put the crucial question to him, and
gives an importantly different version of the philosopher’s reply: Gracchus
would never have told him to fire the Capitol, but had he done so, it would
have been proper to obey, because Gracchus would only have issued such an
order had it been in the interests of the people.⁴³ Blossius of Cumae was clearly
a man known to the historians of the fall of the Republic and what made him
notorious was his readiness to set fire to the Capitol had his leader told him
to. He is a significant model for the fealty to Caesar promised by Lucan’s Laelius.
The career of Coriolanus also merits close attention.⁴⁴ The principal histor-
ical sources for his life describe his valiant and distinguished military service
as a young man and, like Lucan’s Laelius, he is the recipient of the corona
ciuica. ⁴⁵ Yet in political life the inflexible opposition of Coriolanus to popular in-
terests results in his eventual trial and exile from Rome. Taking up residence
amongst the Volsci, he leads them to great military success against Rome’s
Latin allies and eventually marches against the city itself, setting up camp at
the Fossae Cluiliae. At this point a succession of embassies are sent from the
city in an attempt to persuade him to abandon his campaign: two made up of
 Cic. De Amicitia : cum ad me (quod aderam Laenati et Rupilio consulibus in consilio) dep-
recatum uenisset.
 Val. Max. ..: nam cum senatus Rupilio et Laenati consulibus mandasset ut in eos qui cum
Graccho consenserant more maiorum animaduerterent, et ad Laelium, cuius consilio praecipue
consules utebantur, pro se Blossius deprecatum uenisset …
 Plut. Tiberius Gracchus .: εἰπόντος δὲ τοῦ Νασικᾶ πρὸς αὐτόν· “τί οὖν εἴ σε Τιβέριος
ἐκέλευσεν ἐμπρῆσαι τὸ Καπετώλιον;” τὸ μὲν πρῶτον ἀντέλεγεν, ὡς οὐκ ἂν τοῦτο Τιβερίου
κελεύσαντος· πολλάκις δὲ καὶ πολλῶν τὸ αὐτὸ πυνθανομένων, “ἀλλ’ ἐκείνου γε
προστάσσοντος” ἔφη “κἀμοὶ τοῦτο πρᾶξαι καλῶς εἶχεν· οὐ γὰρ ἂν Τιβέριος τοῦτο προσέταξεν,
εἰ μὴ τῷ δήμῳ συνέφερεν.”
 It is clear from Fabius Pictor fr.  FRHist = Livy .. –  that the Coriolanus story was
established early in Roman tradition.
 For the corona ciuica, see D.H. Antiquitates Romanae ..; Plut. Coriolanus ..
groups of first five, then ten senators,⁴⁶ one of priests and augurs,⁴⁷ and finally
one from the women of Rome led by his mother, Veturia, and wife, Volumnia, and
accompanied by his two sons. Only the last is able to induce him to abandon the
campaign.⁴⁸ Accounts of his subsequent fortunes are various.⁴⁹
The crucial element here is the significance of the four embassies to which
all the principal sources refer. For taken as a whole the different appeals made to
Coriolanus may be identified as invoking the different parts of pietas: the sena-
tors signify pietas to the fatherland, the priests pietas to the gods, and the final
group pietas towards blood kin.⁵⁰ In what is by far the most extensive version of
the story, that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the leader of the first senatorial em-
bassy, Minucius, also appeals to Coriolanus in the name of friendship,⁵¹ and
both he and Veturia make reference to all the different elements of pietas or
eusebeia. ⁵² Much about Coriolanus encourages the belief of others in his pietas
 D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. – ..; Livy .. – ; Plut. Coriolanus . – .;
App. Italika . – ; Zon. ..
 D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .; Livy ..; Plut. Coriolanus . – ; App. Italika ..
 D.H. Antiquitates Romanae . – .; Livy .. – ; Plut. Coriolanus . – .; App.
Italika . – ; D.C. . – .
 Fabius Pictor fr.  FRHist = Livy .. –  suggests that Coriolanus grew old in an un-
happy exile. D.C. . also records the tradition of death in old age but with it that found at D.H.
Antiquitates Romanae . –  and Plut. Coriolanus . –  according to which he falls victim
to a conspiracy by his detractors amongst the Volscians.
 It may be relevant here to consider the account at Cic. De Officiis . of the differing grades
of affinity between humans of which the most compact is that which binds relative to relative.
Note especially artior uero conligatio est societatis propinquorum; ab illa enim immensa societate
humani generis in exiguum angustumque concluditur. See also Cic. De Amicitia : sic enim mihi
perspicere uideor, ita natos esse nos, ut inter omnes esset societas quaedam, maior autem ut quis-
que proxime accederet; itaque ciues potiores quam peregrini, propinqui quam alieni; cum his enim
amicitiam natura ipsa peperit.
 D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. describes the ambassadors as οὓς μάλιστ’ ἐκεῖνος ἠσπά-
ζετο while Minucius at .. claims that they are περὶ σὲ προθυμότατοι. See also .. – ,
where Coriolanus describes himself as a friend to the ambassadors if not to the state as a
whole and .. and .. –  where he says of his treatment by the Romans and then the
Volscians that those whom he regarded as friends have become his enemies and vice versa.
Plut. Coriolanus . also stresses the good relations between Coriolanus and the members of
the first embassy: οἱ δὲ πεμφθέντες ἀπὸ βουλῆς ἦσαν μὲν ἐπιτήδειοι τῶι Μαρκίωι, προσεδέχοντο
δὲ πολλὴν περί γε τὰς πρώτας ἀπαντήσεις φιλοφροσύνην παρ’ ἀνδρὸς οἰκείου καὶ συνήθους.
 At D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .., .. – , .., Minucius deplores Coriolanus’ vio-
lence against the sacred places of Rome while at .. – , .. (cf. .. – ) he and Cor-
iolanus debate the attitude to the gods of his deeds. At D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. –  and
. Minucius reminds Coriolanus of the suffering that he brings on his mother, wife, and chil-
dren through his impiety. For references to piety toward the gods in the encounter with Veturia,
268 Matthew Leigh
even as he makes war on Rome,⁵³ but it is his final surrender to Veturia that puts
the seal on his reputation: nearly five hundred years after his death, says Diony-
sius, he is still hymned and sung of at Rome as a man of justice and of duty.⁵⁴
Coriolanus is a necessarily ambiguous figure and this is apparent in many an
ancient account of his career. Inasmuch as he resolves to march on Rome, he be-
comes a figure of impiety.⁵⁵ Inasmuch as he finally yields to his mother’s appeal
he becomes the opposite.⁵⁶ At De Beneficiis 5.14.4– 5, Seneca indicts that ingra-
titude and perverse reasoning that mistakes violence against the fatherland for
power and standing and that leads generals to urge troops to violence against
wives, children, and the gods.⁵⁷ At 5.16 he then introduces a long catalogue of
Roman ingrates who made war against their own city. The first of these is Corio-
lanus, ungrateful inasmuch as made war on Rome and pious only late on and
after repenting of his crime and in the midst of parricide.⁵⁸ This formulation cap-
tures perfectly what makes Coriolanus so eloquent a moral example at Rome.
In Book 1 of Lucan an implicit parallelism is established between the hesi-
tation of Caesar’s troops before the decisive intervention of Laelius and the ear-
lier confrontation between Caesar and the image of his grieving homeland.⁵⁹ The
speech of Patria lasts no more than two lines and turns simply on the warning
that the banks of the Rubicon, at which Caesar finds himself, are the legal limit
to his army’s advance.⁶⁰ At this sight, horror strikes the limbs of the general, his
hair grows stiff, and a languor holds back his steps on the very bank of the river.
This moment of hesitation does not last. Soon Caesar prays for the favor of Rome
and her cults and proclaims himself Rome’s soldier wherever he may be; the
see D.H. Antiquitates Romanae  ., .., ... For appeals to pietas to the homeland, see
D.H. Antiquitates Romanae. For further references to εὐσέβεια and ἀσέβεια in these exchanges,
see D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .., .., .., .., ... For εὐσέβεια translated as
pietas, see CGL ii. .
 D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .., .., ...
 D.H. Antiquitates Romanae ...
 Cic. Ad Atticum ..; Livy .. – .
 Livy ..; Val. Max. ..; Cornell () .
 Sen. De Beneficiis .. – : hoc iam amplius est: beneficia in scelera uersa sunt, et sanguini
eorum non parcitur, pro quibus sanguis fundendus est; gladio ac uenenis beneficia sequimur. ipsi
patriae manus adferre et fascibus illam suis premere potentia ac dignitas est; humili se ac depres-
so loco putat stare, quisquis non supra rem publicam stetit; accepti ab illa exercitus in ipsam con-
vertuntur, et imperatoria contio est: “pugnate contra coniuges, pugnate contra liberos! aras, focos,
penates armis incessite!”
 Sen. De Beneficiis ..: ingratus est Coriolanus, sero et post sceleris paenitentiam pius; pos-
uit arma, sed in medio parricidio posuit.
 Menz () ; Lebek ()  – .
 Luc. . – .
guilty party will be the man to make him an enemy of the state.⁶¹ All delay is cut
short and he hastens on to war.⁶²
The personification of the Patria and the challenge to Caesar has been much
studied and various models have been suggested as an inspiration for the
scene.⁶³ The specific location of the challenge on the banks of the Rubicon
and thus at the border between Gallia Cisalpina and Italy has been related to
the account in Dio of the challenge to Drusus by the image of a barbarian
woman of superhuman size as he stood on the banks of the Elbe.⁶⁴ The civil
war context lends particular pertinence to the challenge to Catiline by the Patria
in the first Catilinarian of Cicero.⁶⁵ The description of the head of the Patria as
crowned with towers has encouraged comparison with descriptions of both Cy-
bele and Tyche though analysis of coinage suggests that this is also a conven-
tional way of representing the goddess Roma.⁶⁶ By letting her hair hang loose
the Patria indicates the state of mourning into which she is thrown by the threat
of invasion.⁶⁷ In the myth of Coriolanus, there is likewise repeated reference to
the wretched garb adopted by the women who come to appeal to him.⁶⁸ Yet
what is more striking is the description of the hair of the Patria as white. For
the personified homeland is thus a singularly elderly figure and this aspect
brings her ever more closely into relationship with Veturia, the mother of
Coriolanus.⁶⁹ That the fatherland should more truly be a motherland relates in-
triguingly to the report in Plutarch that, on the eve of the crossing of the Rubi-
con, Caesar dreamt that he was having sex with his mother.⁷⁰
 Luc. . – .

 For recent discussion of this passage, see Moretti ().
 Peluzzi () offers a detailed account of prior scholarship and many new ideas. See also
Narducci ()  – , which reworks elements of Narducci (); Moretti ().
 D.C. . – , cf. Suet. Claudius . for a similar apparition meeting Drusus as he advances
beyond the Rhine; Peluzzi () ; Narducci ()  – .
 Cic. In Catilinam ., cf. Rhetorica ad Herennium .; Peluzzi ()  and n. ; Nar-
ducci ()  – .
 Peluzzi ()  – .
 For the Patria’s gestures of mourning, see Heyke ()  n. ; Roche () ad loc.
 For the mourning garb of the women who come to Coriolanus, see, e. g., D.H. Antiquitates
Romanae .., .., .., .., ..; Plut. Coriolanus ..
 For the advanced years of Veturia, see D.H. Antiquitates Romanae ..; Livy .. and 
magno natu mulier … longa uita et infelix senecta.
 Plut. Caesar ; Moretti ()  – . For the slippage between mother and motherland in
the speech of Veturia at Livy .. – , see Cornell () . The same pattern is evident at
D.H. Antiquitates Romanae .. as Minucius refers to the homeland that begat and raised Cor-
iolanus.
270 Matthew Leigh
The drama of hesitation, speech, and onward movement is thus played out
twice in the first book of the poem, first in Caesar’s encounter with the Patria,
then again as the troops confront their feelings of pietas, only to be overwhelmed
by the rhetoric of the centurion. If the figuration of Patria as an elderly woman in
mourning lends her encounter with Caesar much of the external form of that be-
tween Coriolanus and Veturia,⁷¹ the second episode of the moral discomfort of
the troops and the intervention of Laelius the centurion speaks even more clearly
to the conflict of allegiances that makes Coriolanus so memorable a figure.⁷²
To Roman writers in general and Lucan in particular, to make war against
one’s fellow-citizens is a paradigmatic act of impiety.⁷³ What makes the speech
of Laelius so shocking is the way that he lists all those entities that should prop-
erly inspire feelings of pietas – siblings, parents, wives, the unborn child, the
gods, even the city of Rome – and promises to put each and every one second
to loyalty to his general. He is not indifferent to the moral reprehensibility of
the actions that he will undertake, but he is subject to an alternative imperative
as urgent as it is morally dubious. What, though, is most alarming about Laelius
is the instant success of his rhetoric. His speech opens with a form of parrhesia,
in which the junior officer chides his superior for his hesitation and asks him
whether he has lacked confidence in his men.⁷⁴ The true target of this question
is not, in fact, Caesar himself, but those troops whose feelings of pietas have left
them temporarily paralyzed and unable to respond to their general’s exhortation
with the proper degree of ardor. There is, then, reason to question the army be-
fore Laelius speaks up; but by the end of his address they all cry out in agree-
ment and promise their hands for whatever wars ensue.
The starting point for this paper was the prevailing uncertainty about wheth-
er Lucan’s Laelius was or was not a historical figure and what his name might
imply. My conclusion is that Laelius is a speaking name and that its purpose
is to indicate the significance for this episode of Cicero, De Amicitia 36 – 43.
There Laelius the wise considers whether or not feelings of friendship should in-
 For Lucan’s Patria figured as a woman in mourning, see Heyke ()  n. . The descrip-
tion of Patria at Luc. . as turrigero canos effundens uertice crines is relevant inasmuch as
she, like Veturia, is clearly an elderly woman.
 For affinities between the encounter of Caesar and Patria and that between Coriolanus and
Veturia, see Henderson ()  – ; Peluzzi ()  n. ; Ambühl () .
 Verg. Georgics ., Aeneid ., . – , .; Hor. Epodes ., Odes .. – ,
.. – ; Sen. Phoenissae , , ; Luc. ., ., ., ., ., .,
.; Stat. Thebaid ., ., ..
 Quint. Institutio Oratoria ..: quod idem dictum sit de oratione libera, quam Cornificius
licentiam uocat, Graeci παρρησίαν. quid enim minus figuratum quam uera libertas? sed frequenter
sub hac latet adulatio. For such figured parrhesia, see Ahl ()  citing Plut. Moralia D.
duce us to join an assault on the fatherland and considers the examples of Blos-
sius of Cumae and of Coriolanus. The significance of the former lies in his fa-
mous assertion that he would have done for Tiberius Gracchus what Laelius
the centurion here offers to do for Caesar and set fire to the city of Rome. The
significance of the latter lies in his abortive march on the city and indifference
to the call of pietas as represented by the embassy of friends and aristocrats
sent by the senate, then by that made by the high priests of the state. Only
when his mother, wife, and children come to him does Coriolanus relent. Lucan’s
Laelius touches on each and every one of the relationships embodied in these
three embassies and acknowledges the feelings of moral obligation that have
overtaken those to whom his words are truly addressed. Yet whereas Veturia
and Volumnia do finally persuade Coriolanus to abandon his campaign and
allow him to emerge as a figure of great if not unambiguous pietas, nothing
can hold back either Laelius or those whose scruples he combats. Loyalty to Cae-
sar finally trumps all.⁷⁵
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Joy Connolly
A Theory of Violence in Lucan’s
Bellum Ciuile
Summary: Recent important and influential readings of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile
have treated the extravagantly described scenes of violence in the epic as symp-
toms of the disintegration of the human subject. This paper argues instead that
for Lucan, violence plays an integrating and unifying role in establishing the
Roman state, both in its past identity as a republican empire and in its incarna-
tion as an autocracy under the Julio-Claudians. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s
analysis of the African postcolony, the paper concludes that leaders and people
alike share in a grotesque sublimity that is the figure of Roman power.
Keywords: violence; Lucan; panegyric; style; sublime; grotesque
The practice of violence binds men together as a whole, since each individual
forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence
which has surged upward.¹
The Stylistics of Excess

At least ten major American films released in the summer of 2013, to take a rep-
resentative example, featured the violent destruction of New York or another
American city by the forces of war, environmental disaster, or alien invasion.
People in these films died in a dizzying variety of ways: crushed, drowned, zap-
ped by lasers, bombed to bits. The technological arts that are a proven element of
these movies’ appeal make possible an extravagant style of representation so ex-
treme that the violence takes on the tinge of farce.
What is the meaning of Hollywood’s preoccupation with the devastation of
America and by extension, the First World or the West? What fuels audiences’
appetite for watching the disintegration of American cities and civic institutions?
Slavoj Zizek suggests that there is more to these movies than the expression of
American guilt about the nation’s over-consumption and exploitation of global
labor and environmental resources. He speculates that the excess of their digital
artificiality reflects Americans’ embrace of civic artificiality. Having collectively
 Fanon () .

274 Joy Connolly
chosen to cultivate a political discourse that suppresses awareness of suffering

and patterns of domination, Americans require visions of near-total destruction
in order to envision a plausible democratic present or future. Zizek adds an im-
portant methodological note: “Rather than interpreting films, and searching for
keys to interpretation, we should view movies as direct participants in political
reality.”²
Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile is an epic poem of a special violence.³ It begins by in-
dicting Rome for leaving itself vulnerable to invasion by choosing civil war in-
stead of war on the borders (1.8 – 23). But in the event, this alleged act of self-
abandonment hardly seems to matter. Even the poet’s wish that the Romans de-
vote their energies to conquering foreign peoples leads ironically down a dead
end, since in the history of the res publica, according to Lucan himself in the
same passage, foreign expansion and civil war are tied together. Echoing Sallust
and anticipating a line of critics leading up to Hannah Arendt, Lucan describes a
Rome grown by imperial conquest too large to bear itself, falling victim to a le-
thal competition for dominance among its most powerful men (nec se Roma fe-
rens, 72).⁴ Where Zizek sees the cinematic showcasing of extreme violence as a
putative psychotherapy for the diseased postmodern state, Lucan presents vio-
lence as the constant of Roman experience, whether Romans direct it outward
from their borders or inward towards their own guts (in sua…uiscera, 3).⁵
“You, Rome, were the cause of evils” (82).
Since 1976, when Frederick Ahl brought Lucan back into focus for classicists
and other literary scholars with his book Lucan: An Introduction, the poet’s po-
litical sympathies have been the focus of intensive debate. Much of it has re-
volved around the poem’s representations of violence, starting in book 1 with
the centurion Laelius’ gruesome oath to murder his family at Caesar’s command
(1.374– 86) and climaxing with the battle at Pharsalus, Pompey’s beheading in
Egypt, and Cato’s journey through Libya. For most readers, there is an essential
relation between style and politics, and episodes of extreme violence have help-
 Zizek (): “It’s important at the end of Independence Day that everyone pulls together:
Jews, Arabs, blacks…Disaster films might be all that’s left of the utopian genre.” See further
Zizek ()  – .
 Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s opening remark on Francis Bacon ().
 Arendt: “abundance of wealth may erode power, riches are particularly dangerous to the
power and well-being of republics” ()  – . Extended translations are Braund’s; in-
text translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.
 See Connolly ()  –  on the Roman republican confidence in violence as the best bul-
wark against tyranny.
ed to ground the consensus view of Lucan as a poet devoted to republican liber-

tas and deeply critical of Julius Caesar and his dynasty.⁶
The founding member of this group in modern criticism, Ahl called Lucan’s
style “preposterous” in his analysis of one notorious episode where the younger
Cato’s men die horrible deaths in the Libyan desert, poisoned by snakes. But Ahl
also saw the elaborate mythological references punctuating the desert tale as
evidence for interpreting it as Cato’s aristeia, a celebration of his republican uir-
tus and confirmation of the genuine heroism of his resistance to the tyrant
Caesar.⁷ To Charles Martindale, Lucan uses paradox and hyperbole to convey
his vision of a corrupt imperial world. He crafts an anti-Vergilian style of epic po-
etry, better suited than the elegant Aeneid to meet the task of representing the
norm-destroying enormity of war.⁸ David Quint and John Henderson also see
in Lucan’s disjointed style a diagnosis of the disunity of the state and a rewriting
of official Roman history, as Lucan resists the “unifying historical fictions” of the
Julio-Claudians.⁹ In an influential essay, Glenn Most suggests that the changing
political and social atmosphere of the Neronian period, notably the Caesars’ dis-
ruption of the senatorial order’s traditional domination and the increasingly
outré spectacles in the gladiatorial arena, drew writers’ attention to the moments
at which experiences of physical and emotional extremity breach the integrity of
the self.¹⁰
In her stimulating book on Lucan, Shadi Bartsch boldly develops Most’s ar-
gument. Citing work by John Henderson and Jamie Masters on Lucan’s persistent
interest in boundaries and their violation, and linking the Bellum Ciuile to con-
temporary Stoic thinking about the care of the self, she reads Lucan’s represen-
tation of Caesar’s colossal power and the many mutilated bodies in his epic as
close studies of violation at its most extreme. “Lucan’s description of the civil
war, right down to the level of his syntax, renders the human being a thing,
an unfeeling lump of matter that comes apart as its boundaries are violated, rob-
 For some, politics and style are only incidentally connected. Viewing Lucan’s choices as a mat-
ter of current fashion, they point to contextual influences like declamation, a form of practice or
show oratory whose practitioners began to cultivate the achieving of heightened emotional ef-
fects under the Julio-Claudians, possibly because the imperial law-court was no longer a safe
place to experiment with summoning up the passions. Lucan’s grand-uncle the elder Seneca
is one of our most important sources for tracing the grand passions of semi-professional de-
claimers under Tiberius. Bonner ().
 Ahl () ; on Cato,  – ,  – .
 Martindale ()  – . See further Fantham () : hyperbole is “almost his natural
mode of thought.”
 Quint () .
 Most ()  – .
276 Joy Connolly
bed of agency and animation, linked to the undermining of the sense of self; all
as a graphic illustration of how civil war and the tyranny that followed could
strip humans of their humanity.”¹¹
Bartsch’s reading takes the individual human subject as Lucan’s central con-
cern. In his literally blow-by-blow depictions of the massacres at Rome during
the Sullan proscriptions (book 2), the naval battle near Massilia (book 3), the
witch Erictho’s summoning of a zombie oracle (book 6), the battle at Pharsalus
itself (book 7), the execution of Pompey (book 8), the snakes in the desert (book
9) and similar passages, she sees a sublime horror at work best understood
through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, which “testifies to the
precarious grasp of the subject upon its own identity…the subject may slide
back into the impure chaos out of which it was formed.”¹² When the father of
the Massilian soldier Argus recognizes his dying son, for instance, the young
man is discovered not as a man, she says, but as a mess of “breathing limbs”
(spirantes artus), bespeaking “the terrible interchangeability of the person qua
person with his body parts.”¹³ The core problem with the erasure of boundaries
is dehumanization and the numbness that it imposes on its observers, both the
characters within the poem, like Argus’ father, and us as readers. By the end of
Bartsch’s book, her focus has shifted from the disintegrating Roman subject in
the text to embrace the subject reading the text, in whom the poem cultivates
an attitude of both distanced skepticism from the fantasies created by politics
and a willing, knowing engagement in sustaining them.¹⁴
I take Lucan’s dominant theme to be not the violated human subject but
Rome, the violent community. The horror at the heart of the poem emerges
from the fact that despite the spectacular line-up of disintegrated citizen bodies,
a collective entity known and recognizable as Roma nonetheless survives. Lu-
can’s stylistics of excess strains to capture the awesome, gruesome acts of vio-
lence through which it does so.¹⁵ Lucan represents this new order as the artifact
of collaboration between leaders and the “criminal people” (impia plebs, 7.760).
Violence and the suffering it creates unify the collective, providing a certain con-
sistency to experience for both the characters in the poem and its readers. In this
sense, as Zizek suggests of recent disaster films, Bellum Ciuile is a direct partic-
 Bartsch () .

 Bartsch () , quoting Grosz () .
 Bartsch () .
 Bartsch ()  – .
 See Dinter (),  – : “the Bellum Civile is organized not by standard structural features
such as linearity, teleology, or causality, but through imagery, in this case representations of the
body, which unifies the work even as it mirrors and enacts fragmentation.”
ipant in imperial reality. Reading Lucan’s poem, we see how sensible experience
is organized such that the new ruling order and its violent actions, whether just
or unjust, become the object of disgust and awe, resistance and enjoyment, ali-
enation and an uncanny form of identification.
The political significance of the Bellum Ciuile lies not in Lucan’s purported
sympathy with Pompey against Caesar, or with Cato against all, or with nostalgia
for the free republic as it was, but in his near-hallucinatory accounting of the vi-
olence men do to one another, which mirrors and at times even amplifies the
voracious excesses of the victor. This violence extends in space to disrupt the
whole cosmos (totaque discors / machina divolsi…mundi, 1.80) and future time:
“By these swords,” Lucan says, referring to the weapons wielded by the soldiers
at Pharsalus, “every age which will serve in slavery is conquered” (uincitur his
gladiis omnis quae seruiet aetas, 7.641). We will see at the end how Lucan’s rep-
resentation of the people’s and Caesar’s mutual implication in violence should
affect our interpretation of his notorious dedication to Nero near the start of
the first book.
A Theory of Violence
In his essay Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin distinguished between several
different types of violence: the violence that founds a state, which identifies the
territory over which power is exercised, and establishes the government as the
sole power by which it exerts authority and judges itself; the violence that pre-
serves law, by converting founding violence into a legitimate, legitimizing au-
thority; the mythical violence that, while operating outside the law, preserves
law and the boundaries on which the law depends; and the divine violence
that is unknowable, but functions as an “antidote” to mythical violence, because
its law-destroying force lays open the path for a new world.¹⁶ Responding implic-
itly to Benjamin (whom she does not mention) and explicitly to Frantz Fanon,
Hannah Arendt buttressed the essential difference Benjamin saw between
power and violence. Power, she observed, is essential to politics and thus may
be (and ideally is) legitimate. Violence is merely an instrument, which may be
“justifiable, but it will never be legitimate.”¹⁷
 See Lowrie (), a brilliant discussion of the Critique of Violence and its implications for
thinking through Vergil: she uses the word “antidote” to describe Benjamin’s theory of divine
violence () .
 Arendt () . See Benjamin () .
278 Joy Connolly
In his analysis of modern African politics, Achille Mbembe adds to Benja-

min’s and Arendt’s accounting another form of violence which is neither found-
ing nor law-preserving but nonetheless ensures the spread and maintenance of
the ruling authority in human life. Because it constitutes the central cultural
imaginary of the state and society, it authenticates and “reiterates” the distribu-
tion of power by maintaining a peculiar kind of order, as we shall see.¹⁸ It also
retains elements of mythic and divine violence. Colonial and later, postcolonial
sovereignty exist in areas where founding violence, law-preserving violence, and
Mbembe’s new form of violence – I will call it “reiterative” to capture its pres-
ence in everyday life – interact and reinforce one another.¹⁹
What makes this form of violence distinctive is the way it simultaneously re-
inforces and undermines order. Mbembe points out that western analyses of Af-
rican politics and society tend to normalize disorder as the natural condition of
the continent and its peoples. This stance, the product of centuries of racism, ob-
scures the fact that postcolonial governments establish their power precisely on
the promise of maintaining order, including the rule of law, security, political
predictability, and decorum. But at the same time, the leaders and agents of
these governments disrupt the law, violate citizens’ rights, destroy their visions
for the state, and practice (and publicize) excessive, transgressive behaviors. If
the postcolony’s discordant strategy does not contravene the philosophical
core of Arendt’s claim about the essential illegitimacy of violence, it reveals
the limits of what her argument can explain about the practice of politics, and
more specifically, about the sensory experience of politics – how citizens
think, feel, and live embodied lives in particular regimes.
Mbembe argues that though the postcolonial government acts, and claims to
act, as a source of both political and moral authority, it does so on the basis of
aggressively eliminating distinctions between means and ends, justice and injus-
tice, obedience and disloyalty, self-control and extravagance.²⁰ The ensuing reit-
erative violence occurs in different modes and on different sites. It is exercised
on individual citizen bodies, through torture and execution, and on the economy.
 Mbembe () , and for the ideas discussed later in the paragraph,  – . He also ad-
dresses the reading of Benjamin in Derrida (), which probes the distinction between found-
ing violence and divine violence that destroys law (especially  – ). Because he seeks to ex-
plain how postcolonial regimes sustain themselves in times of official peace, he says this new
type of violence falls short of actual war. See further : “The violence insinuates itself into the
economy, domestic life, language, consciousness. It does more than penetrate every space; it
pursues the colonized even in sleep and dream. It produces a culture; it is a cultural praxis.”
 Mbembe does not give this new form of violence a name.
 Mbembe () .
It is also wreaked in the realm of the aesthetic, in the cultural imaginary, through
the destruction of citizens’ expectations and standards of propriety, predictabil-
ity, and reason in political discourse and state action. In various forms – politi-
cians’ grotesque rhetoric, their sometimes immense accumulations of wealth, in-
dulgence in food, sex, and luxury possessions, and the ubiquitous, over-sized
celebrations of the regime and its leaders on flags and posters – excess and ob-
scenity become “an integral part of the stylistics of power.” The postcolony
makes a virtue of crude and violent acts. Further, and importantly, a convivial
intimacy develops between rulers and ruled out of which emerges the simula-
crum of order. Out of mingled fear, identification, and desire, the citizens ener-
getically imitate the grotesqueries of the governing authority. What kind of agen-
cy is this? The effect of these combined experiences of corporeal, infrastructural,
and imaginary violence, Mbembe concludes, is to create a peculiar condition of
“intrinsic unconditionality” by which the capacity to act, let alone to criticize au-
thority or participate in democratic politics, is fatally damaged.²¹ Reiterative vi-
olence anchors the postcolony, preserves order and disorder at the same time,
implicates leader and people alike in sustaining the ruling order, and thus
helps keep political alternatives at bay.
Reiterative Violence: The Protagonists and the

People
When Lucan describes the contents of his epic as “wars on Emathian fields,
more than civil, / and legality applied to criminal act” (1.1– 2), he describes vio-
lence that is not accounted for by Benjamin’s list or Arendt’s effort to cast vio-
lence out beyond the law. This violence does not found or preserve legitimate
power; it renames crime as law. Nor does it clear the ground for a new order,
since much of the traditional operations of the republican order persist. It is clos-
er kin to what I am calling “reiterative violence,” the violence Mbembe sees at
work in the African postcolony. In its representations of Roman leaders and peo-
ple, the Bellum Ciuile illuminates the sensations of reiterative violence – espe-
cially the combination of horror and pleasure that helps ensure the persistence
of tyranny against resistance, by inviting the people to fear and to enjoy the ex-
ercise of power.
 Mbembe ()  (“stylistics”),  (“simulacrum”),  and  (“conviviality”), 
(“unconditionality”).
280 Joy Connolly
On the one hand, throughout the poem, Caesar, Pompey, Brutus, and Cato
present themselves as leaders acting in the name of preserving the traditional
order and its laws. The practice of religion endures; temples are built; oaths
are sworn. Caesar retains the name of consul and the loyalty of Roman citizens
who cite the name of the office as their reason for joining his side. Notably, these
supporters include men who had first fought for Pompey. After his murder in
Egypt, some of his partisans desire a ruler, so long as he has the appearance
of institutional legitimacy: they wish to “pass into the power of a citizen in
toga,” they inform Cato (sub iura togati / ciuis eo, 9.238 – 9). When Caesar claims
that his acts of violence are designed to preserve the law, Lucan shows, he does
not speak for himself alone, but for men like these Pompeians. Their desire to
make some kind of order out of chaos – which Lucan shares as the composer
of an epic (as disordered as it is) – is an important driver of the poem’s action.
But though the semblance of law is preserved, Lucan says at the start that it
“is given over to crime” (iusque datum sceleri, 1.2). The violence he represents,
which is swift, unpredictable, sometimes almost beyond human understanding,
sweeping aside the traditional order, has the flavor of agency that is beyond
human and the reach of human law. Caesar, in particular, wields violence like
a force of nature or a god. After comparing Pompey to an ancient oak tree,
Lucan famously introduces Caesar in the form of a Jovian thunderbolt:
qualiter expressum uentis per nubila fulmen

aetheris inpulsi sonitu mundique fragore
emicuit rupitque diem populosque pauentes
terruit obliqua praestringens lumina flamma:
in sua templa furit, nullaque exire uetante
materia magnamque cadens magnamque reuertens
dat stragem late sparsosque recolligit ignes (1.151– 7).
Just so flashes out the thunderbolt shot forth by the winds through clouds,
accompanied by the crashing of the heavens and sound of shattered ether;
it splits the sky and terrifies the panicked
people, searing eyes with slanting flame;
against its own precincts it rages, and, with nothing solid stopping
its course, both as it falls and then returns, great is the devastation
dealt far and wide before it gathers again its scattered fires.
Here and in similar passages Caesar appears as a sublime figure. As Ahl remarks,
“Caesar is energy incarnate, a Zeus-like being whose attacks wither and destroy
all in their way.”²² Later Lucan makes a general comment on the radical new
 Ahl () . Lucan indirectly suggests that Caesar possesses divine power with his de-
scope of mortal power, and the newly divine status of mortal men, in the wake of
civil war (7.454– 7):
mortalia nulli
sunt curata deo. cladis tamen huius habemus
uindictam, quantam terris dare numina fas est:
bella pares superis facient ciuilia diuos,
fulminibus manes radiisque ornabit et astris
inque deum templis iurabit Roma per umbras.
Human affairs
are cared for by no deity. Yet we have revenge
for this disaster, as much as gods may give to mortals:
the civil wars will create divinities equal to those above,
with thunderbolts and rays and stars Rome will adorn
the dead and in the temples of the gods will swear by ghosts.
Civil war makes a world without gods, and makes gods out of men.
Lucan portrays civil war as having cosmic as well as human consequences, cre-
ating a massive upheaval in the natural order that inspires horror no less than
awe. As Caesar embodies sublime power, he becomes grotesque, committing se-
rious transgressions of propriety in speech and act. He dismisses the law in favor
of fortune (1.225 – 27), destroys the sacred grove at Massilia (3.399 – 452), and
commands his helmsman to steer into a storm, comparing himself to the gods:
“If you refuse Italy because of divine authority, seek it because of mine” (Italiam
si caelo auctore recusas, / me pete, 5.579 – 80).²³ He treads ignorantly and irrev-
erently over the bones of Hector at the ancient site of Troy, causing the priest to
exclaim in protestation, in a passage underlined by Lucan’s own awkward bid to
share Caesar’s immortality through “our Pharsalia” (9.950 – 86: nostra Pharsalia
uiuet, 985 – 6). For the quasi-divine Caesar, “the stretch of the Roman globe is not
sufficient” (Romani spatium non sufficit orbis, 10.456). He transcends the limits of
the material world and further, in the lightning simile, matter itself.
His putative kingdom thus incorporates earthly matter and heavenly cosmos,
and his affect as ruler is both divine and mortal. So the momentous final scenes
of the epic as we have it suggest. Book 10 places Caesar in an Egyptian banquet
scription of Pompey’s forces before the battle at Pharsalus, thrown into disarray by lightning and
thunder (. – ). Day ()  –  offers insightful analysis of the simile and its appear-
ances in Lucretius, Vergil, and Longinus.
 Day () , with excellent discussion of the Lucretian intertexts and their meanings: “In
reality this hubris proves spectacularly ill-founded but this in no way impinges on the quality of
Caesar’s experience…the storm launches him into the sublime.” Dinter ()  shows how
Caesar’s body successfully exercises authority over the cosmic one.
282 Joy Connolly
where his lusts take on global scope (discit opes Caesar spoliati perdere mundi,
10.169) and where, though he is more than satiated with pleasure (lassata uolup-
tas, 10.172), he prolongs the evening with an extravagant promise to cease fight-
ing if he can learn the secrets of nature (188 – 92). The scene shifts to Ptolemy’s
courtiers, Pothinus and Achillas, who spur themselves on to assassinate Caesar
by visualizing his excesses, including sex with Cleopatra, whose over-adorn-
ments are almost crushing her own body: he is “full with feasting, soaked
with wine, and ready for love” (plenum epulis madidumque mero Venerique para-
tum, 10.360 ff.). In their excited vision Caesar is a body ready to be beheaded like
Pompey, an image Lucan embellishes with a flurry of references to his throat
being sliced open and his head falling in a welter of blood on the banquet
table (iugulum, 387, 395, 409; see also 420, 424). Then, in a vivid simile, when
the Egyptian troops attack, Caesar responds at once like a “noble wild animal”
breaking its “rabid teeth” against its prison (fera nobilis…frangit rabidos praemor-
so carcere dentes, 445 – 6) and like the god Vulcan, were he trapped with no out-
let inside the caves of Etna (447– 9). For the final two hundred lines of the poem
Caesar wavers from fear and uncertainty (expauit, 453; incerto, 460), to decisive-
ness (tanta est constantia mentis, 490) and murderousness (instantly killing Po-
thinus at 514– 15) to fear and uncertainty once more, as he gazes at his supporter
Scaeva, “doubtful whether to fear or to wish for death” (dubiusque timeret / op-
taretne mori, 542 – 3). The shift of registers in these four hundred lines of poetry
defies categorization. Caesar appears repulsive and courageous, awesome and
vulnerable. He bestrides the world, seeks to understand its rational workings,
and reacts to danger like a beast. His sublimity is grotesque, his grotesqueness
sublime.
As he enters the realm of the grotesque sublime, Caesar is accompanied by a
throng. Lucan noted in the opening lines of the poem that violence is not an in-
strument used exclusively by individual men fighting for domination. Armed vi-
olence on a massive scale created the republican empire, and it is embedded in
Rome’s identity and heroic memory of itself. This is why Lucan dwells on the na-
ture and disposition of the nations and peoples bordering Rome: watchful and
aggressive, they stand ready to respond in kind to the violence done in past cen-
turies in the neighboring territories now called Roman. Deeply inculcated in the
habit of imperialistic war, the maddened Roman people have been primed to
turn against themselves, in a distorted re-enactment of imperial expansion (in
arma furentem…populum, 68 – 9).
Some of the populus will resist the forces of Caesar and Pompey; others are
as ready as Caesar to throw the dice at the Rubicon. Lucan dwells on the intimate
relationship between the leader and his forces: their “immeasurable strength”
make Caesar confident to dare greater things (inmensae…uires / audendi maiora
fidem fecere, 1.467– 8). Martin Dinter notes the significance of Lucan’s frequent
puns on the words manus and arma, which he uses to assimilate Caesar to his
troops (e. g., 3.338 – 9, 5.519 – 20), as well as the pattern of individual soldiers
standing in for the entire army or the camp, defending Caesar, who in turn fig-
ures Roman power.²⁴
Caesar’s (and to a lesser degree, Pompey’s) grotesque sublimity expresses it-
self in awesome, defiant transgressions of the cosmic order. The Roman people’s
grotesque sublimity expresses itself through suffering and death. Further, the
people crystallize as a community around the deaths of the community’s mem-
bers. This is a motif of Roman history, and we shall see how Lucan’s death-com-
munities are associated with both republican and post-republican Rome.
The Art of Dying

Through ecphrasis, treating dying bodies as artworks, Lucan at once underscores
the grotesque horrors of violent death and hoists the vision of the dying body
into the realm of sublimity. In the bay of Massilia, the scene of a prolonged
sea-battle at the end of book 3 (521– 762), the decks, prows, and rigging of the
ships function like small stages for sculpture. One soldier, Catus, is pierced by
weapons that lodge in his torso at precisely the same moment, so that “the
blood stood uncertain from which wound to flow, until a large flow of blood
drove out both spears at the same time, and cut his life-spirit in two” (et stetit
incertus, flueret quo uolnere, sanguis, / donec utrasque simul largus cruor expulit
hastas / diuisitque animam, 589 – 91). Another man, Gyareus, swings from the
side of a ship, pinned by a lance (600 – 2). Yet another tries to grab his own
right hand which has been chopped off but still clings to the rail of the enemy
ship, only to lose his left as well before he throws himself bodily at his
enemy, lacking any other weapon, and “his noble trunk shows great rage”
(609 – 26). Another is very slowly torn in two (637– 40). And so on. As Lucan
says: “that day on the sea provided many miraculous examples of different
ways to die” (multaque ponto / praebuit ille dies uarii miracula fati, 634– 5).
As these men stand or hang in a state of ghastly suspension, the fatal flow of
blood delayed by the extremity of their wounds, their suffering transcends the
corporeal; it becomes supernatural. Here and in other scenes, notably the
mass suicide of the Caesarians (book 4), the battle at Pharsalus (book 7), and
Cato’s trek across the desert (book 9), the spectacle of one disfigured individual
 Dinter ()  – .
284 Joy Connolly
after another, battered, crushed, mangled, swollen, torn, pierced, pulverized,

split, and zombified, composes a collective image of humans that is almost be-
yond human.
Henry Day, acknowledging the presence of the grotesque in the sublime in
passages like this, writes eloquently of the “ethical instabilities” inherent in sub-
limity, which give rise to the long critical tradition of seeing the sublime as the
figure, and even the inevitable celebration, of tyranny.²⁵ For Edmund Burke, for
instance, terror is “either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sub-
lime,” and experience of the sublime requires yielding oneself to a “superior”
power. From Burke to Dominick La Capra, Day cites a long tradition of scholars
and critics who see the sublime as a fall into intoxication by tyrannical domina-
tion, leading to impotence or moral blindness.²⁶ Against this critique Day insight-
fully sets Longinus’ nuanced characterization of the sublime as the aesthetic
amalgamation of domination and nobility. Longinus’ account is derived from
the subjective experience of profound mobility or transport: that is, the artwork
summons up powerful emotions in such a way that the listener cannot help
but feel the sensations of movement and change within himself, and ultimately,
he is taken out of himself (De Sub. 13, 15). When we experience “living passion”
through ornate language and amazing speed of expression, it is impossible for
us to remain unmoved. This, Longinus says, is how we feel the power of lan-
guage, in the action of words and our reaction to them. We cannot experience
the sublime without risk (34.2). At the same time, the sublime is the “echo of
a noble mind” (9.2). For Day, Caesar and Pompey, and indeed the poem itself,
are the central figures of Lucanian sublimity. But if I am right in saying that
the realm of the grotesque sublime in the Bellum Ciuile belongs not only to
the powerful (whether in politics or in poetry) but also to its many dead and
dying men, how does this square with the sublime’s traditional association
with tyranny?
Reiterative violence provides a new frame through which to answer this
question, and in doing so, to make sense of the scenes of men dying at Massilia,
Pharsalus, Libya, and elsewhere in the empire. They do not simply symbolize the
power of Caesar and the horrors of autocracy. Just as Caesar’s violence borders
on the divine, and his tyrannical energies take on the flavor of the sublime,
the people fighting and dying through the poem are described in similarly exces-
sive terms, with similarly ambiguous effects.
 Day ()  – , esp.  – .

 Day () : and see his useful citations, especially Hardie ()  –  on the grotes-
que and the sublime.
Leader and people collude in violence. Mbembe remarks that the grotesqu-
eries of postcolonial tyranny are fed not only by coercion and terror but “by a
desire for majesty on the part of the people,” who see the ruler as the source
of material resources and pleasure. This desire imbricates the people in an inti-
mate relation with the ruler. The “real inversion” of legitimate (for Mbembe, dem-
ocratic) authority occurs when the ruling power, in its “violent quest for gran-
deur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence,” and the
people, in the desire for majesty, “join in the madness and clothe themselves
in cheap imitations of power.”²⁷ In Lucan’s epic, the corruption of Rome goes
just that deep. For all his talk of libertas, most of the characters in the Bellum
Ciuile appear to want to be ruled. The people are in love with raw power, and
love the men who wield violence.
After Caesar reminds his legions of his complaints against Pompey, the cen-
turion Laelius rebukes him for waiting so long: “Do you lack confidence in us?…/
Is victory in civil war so dismal?” (deratne tibi fiducia nostri?…usque adeo miser-
um est ciuili uincere bello? 1.362, 366). Tellingly citing “the lucky standards” of
Caesar’s ten campaigns, and the triumphs he celebrated over the enemy, Laelius
swears to obey whatever Caesar commands, from stabbing his brother, parent, or
pregnant wife, setting temples on fire, or invading the city of Rome (374– 86).
Laelius reveals his attraction to power and the reiterative violence that under-
pins it, which manifests in his desire to have a share in the transgressive cruelty
that will inaugurate the new order. This order preserves the appearance of repub-
lican assent (“all the cohorts agreed in the same moment, hands held high,” his
cunctae simul adsensere cohortes / elatasque alte… / promisere manus, 386 – 8).
The familiar discipline of the soldiers’ gesture intensifies the obscenity of Lae-
lius’ imagination: they offer up in allegiance multiple versions of his hands,
which he has just committed to unspeakable crime.
Pompey’s men similarly portray their fight as driven by loyalty (amor Pom-
pei); they are not fighting for freedom or the republic. As we have already seen,
some of his supporters express the wish after his death to “pass into the power of
a citizen in toga” (sub iura togati / ciuis eo, 9.238 – 9). After Cato harangues them,
they respond enthusiastically to the power of his authority, flying back like bees
commanded to make honey, and “the shepherd rejoices” (9.292). At this point,
Cato has been possessed by the spirit of Pompey (9.17– 18) and has taken “into
his care his fatherland / when it lacked a guardian” (tutore carentem, 9.24– 5).
Cato may be the defender of republican liberty, waging “a civil war without de-
siring power (regnum),” doing “nothing for himself: his party after Magnus’
 Mbembe ()  – .

286 Joy Connolly
death was wholly that of freedom” (27– 30). In a further turn, Cato is the epitome
of self-sacrifice: he risks death by refusing water in the desert more than once
(9.500 ff., 590 – 2) and risks death by poison (9.611– 18). But like Caesar, he wields
tyrannical power over his soldiers, a power the poet suggests they recognize and
welcome.
This power leads men to commit acts whose unspeakability Lucan figures
with puns and inversions, many of them drawn from declamation, an emerging
genre in Lucan’s lifetime.
Crimine quo parui caedem potuere mereri?

Sed satis est iam posse mori (2.108 – 9)
For what crime could these little ones deserve to die?

But now it is sufficient to be able to die
Cinyphias inter pestes tibi palma nocendi est:

Eripiunt omnes anima, tu sola cadauer (9.787– 8).
Among Cinyphian plagues, the prize for injury is yours;

they all remove life, but you alone the corpse.
Ralph Johnson invents a new word to describe passages like this: “comic-ugly.”²⁸
Comic-ugly is an apt word to describe the much-studied episode when some
of Caesar’s forces, led by Vulteius, find themselves isolated at night on a raft off
the Cilician coast, and decide to wait until daylight to commit mass suicide in
the full view of soldiers on both sides (4.402– 581). Lucan depicts the ensuing
slaughter with emphatic gestures that bring the passage into the realm of the ab-
surd. The acts of killing and dying are identical (pariter), there is not a moment of
hesitation or error, and duty or reverence (pietas) is redefined to signify an effi-
cient kill:
pariter sternuntque caduntque

uolnere letali, nec quemquam dextra fefellit
cum feriat moriente manu. nec uolnus adactis
debetur gladiis: percussum est pectore ferrum
et iuguli pressere manum. cum sorte cruenta
fratribus incurrunt fratres natusque parenti,
haud trepidante tamen toto cum pondere dextra
exegere enses. pietas ferientibus una
non repetisse fuit (4.558 – 66).
 Johnson () . See further Day () .

Equally they kill and fall

with fatal wound and though they strike with dying hand
it never fails them, nor is the wound produced
by the sword’s deep thrust but the weapon is struck by the breast
and the hand attacked by throat. When with bloody destiny,
brothers charge at brothers and son at father,
they thrust their swords not with shaking hand
but with all their weight. The single duty of those who strike
was not to strike a second blow.
On display here is the obscene power of the tyrant and the role of the people in
sustaining that power – even, as the obscene symmetry of the passage suggests,
taking pleasure in it (as we readers may, despite or because of our groans of dis-
gust or pained disbelief). Thanks to the extravagant style in which they are rep-
resented, exemplified by the paradoxical image of torsos and soft throats striking
blows on sharp swords, and thanks to Lucan’s insistence on perfect murderous
accord even in combat that pits father and brother, these deaths exceed the hero-
ic economy of republican self-sacrifice. In fact they exceed any sense at all.²⁹ Vul-
teius and his men are dying, after all, in a war that one man has freely decided to
wage, a man they love beyond reason.³⁰
namque suis pro te gladiis incumbere, Caesar,

esse parum scimus; sed non maiora supersunt
obsessis tanti quae pignora demus amoris (4.500 – 2).
And of course we know that it is not enough for your men to fall
on their own swords for you, Caesar, but as men besieged we have
no greater pledge to give of our deep love.
The heroism of so extreme a form of love invites admiration and identification –

an invitation both undercut and sustained by the elements of farcical horror in
the scene.
Compare the experience of Cato’s soldiers in the Libyan desert in book 9.
After the Pompeians’ defeat at Pharsalus, the younger Cato leads his men
through the deserts of Libya in a final attempt to resist Caesar and preserve
the republic. The group encounters a desert filled with poisonous snakes
whose bites wreak a hellish variety of tortures. When a soldier named Aules is
bitten, neither the glory of the empire (decus imperii) nor the commands of
 Edwards ()  –  lucidly discusses the fundamentally theatrical nature of Vulteius’ act,
which he orchestrates for Caesar as main spectator.
 Nancy ()  – ; and further on love,  – .
288 Joy Connolly
Cato (iura Catonis) can restrain him from seeking water, and he goes mad and
tries to drink sand (9.741– 60). Sabellus is bitten by a snake whose flesh-eating
venom lays his bones bare; his body melts into a boiled-down pool of poison in-
cluding the bones: “all that makes a human being is uncovered” (775 – 88). One
men swells to death; another freezes.
What is the difference between what happens to Vulteius’ men and to Cato’s?
Admiring Cato’s dying comrades allows readers vicariously to indulge them-
selves in the pleasure of the vision of republican resistance to the tyrannical
power that brought about their deaths. It also revives the fantasy of heroic
self-sacrifice that sustains Vulteius’ choice. Republican history is full of such
“virtuous” examples. My point in comparing the two is that the grotesque ele-
ments of the images draw our attention and hold us at a distance: the vision
of bodies tormented by snakebites or stabbed in crazed suicidal haste is por-
trayed with a dramatic extravagance that encompasses farce or irony. Lucan is
simultaneously displaying the deep attractions of violence in the moment –
the way it instills a kind of insanity in its practitioners and its viewers – and ad-
vising us not to fall too much in love with it. As a recent critic says of Kafka, “the
pathos of the vision is continually undercut by the theatrics of the narrative.”³¹
Regarding twentieth century artists who create scenes of sublime violence,
this same critic remarks that profound aesthetic satisfaction derives from the in-
disputable evidence these scenes furnish of our human finitude. Extremity can
also convey the sense of “a peculiar vacillation” between the shock of a textual
encounter with fleshy matter on the one hand, and a “spectral” sense of imma-
teriality on the other. The intensity of the scene does more than alienate us; we
may feel strangely oblivious to the agony before us.³² We may have been trans-
ported beyond the representable, and thus, in a sense, beyond ourselves. Georg-
es Bataille might say that this is an experience of ecstatic self-loss whose goal is
nothing but a zero-state consciousness. The effects of violence staged here create
a sense of unrealness, a realm that exists at some remove from reality.
Mbembe’s arguments on behalf of the grotesque re-locate the encounter with
the unreal in the experience of reiterative violence. From his perspective, the ex-
traordinary flashes of comedy or irony in passages like these evoke a form of
crazed laughter that comes “from the bottom of the chest,” as he puts it, from
the same place as suffering.³³ As the poem’s stylistic excess recreates the extrem-
ity of the experience of civil war and the post-war ruling order, the resulting com-
 Buch () .

 Buch () .
 Mbembe () . Janz () describes the autocrat as “negation-in-excess” and draws
attention to the link Mbembe draws between laughter and suffering.
bination of alienation and curious attraction harbors a range of ways to feel life
under domination. For these scenes also stupefy.³⁴ Like Vulteius and his men,
like zombies, we readers recreate the horrified awe with which the original ob-
servers watched great changes occur – and helped set them in motion.
Note that the poem avoids simply indicting the dead as slaves to tyranny,
willing or forced. In key passages, the dead bodies are transfigured, forming a
version of community that Lucan presents to us as the object of mingled disgust,
disbelief, and wonder. These scenes of violence in the poem recall paintings by
Francis Bacon where the human form is represented as a dense mass, distorted
almost beyond recognition. Gilles Deleuze has observed that these paintings do
not necessarily or only lament the loss of individuality: rather, Bacon’s bodies
seem to be trying to escape from themselves, to assume a form that rejects or ex-
ceeds old limits.³⁵ Lucan certainly acknowledges the loss of individuality that vi-
olent collective death entails. In an anonymous Roman citizen’s recollection of
the Sullan proscriptions at the beginning of Book 2, for example, the corpses
piled in Rome, “melting with decay and blurred with time’s / long passage,
have lost their features,” and frightened parents and the narrator himself anx-
iously comb through the mess to find body parts they recognize (160 – 73).
These characters’ aim is to unite the fragments into a knowable, nameable enti-
ty. But Lucan also draws attention to the unifying effect of the collective experi-
ence of fragmenting violence, for example at Praeneste, where the victors can
scarcely push through the crowds of bodies they are trying to destroy (201– 5).
When the slaughter is over, the bodies are so thickly packed they cannot fall
to earth, and some die by suffocation, as “weighty trunks crush living bodies”
(uiua graues corpora trunci, 206). The people of Praeneste become a distorted ver-
sion of the organic metaphor familiar from Livy, where the republic is a body
made up of parts, each part leaning on the rest for support (2.32– 3). Never before
have they been so united as in this common death.
The dead carpeting the battlefield at Pharsalus enjoy a similar horrible unity.
By giving us death in the plural in an intense sensory cascade, Lucan elevates
his victims. Note that he does not mourn them as individuals but as an anony-
mous collective:
 This is a vision of men as flesh, non-human, animal, something governable. Mbembe notes
that both colonial and postcolonial governments drew on the long tradition of identifying the
native with the animal. Drawing on the Hegelian and Bergsonian traditions, the governing au-
thority defined the native as alien to itself, as a bundle of drives but not capacities, where the
only possible relationship is domination. Being simply a “body-thing,” the colonized native
has no spirit.
 Inspired by Buch () , who discusses Deleuze on Bacon.
290 Joy Connolly
inpendisse pudet lacrimas in funere mundi

mortibus innumeris,
mors nulla querella
digna sua est, nullosque hominum lugere uacamus (7.617– 18, 630 – 1).
When the world is dying I feel shame to spend my tears

On the innumerable deaths and to follow individuals’ destinies
No death deserves
Its own lament; we have no space to grieve for individuals.
At times, this perfect community of the dead even protects its own. In a striking
image that opens Lucan’s account of the sea-battle at Massilia, the extraordinary
number of dead bodies creates a momentary slow-down in the killing. The sol-
diers and sailors are fighting at close quarters, since “the sword has the most im-
pact in a naval battle” (nauali plurima bello / ensis agit, 569 – 70). As men die,
they fall, some of them drowning in a mixture of seawater and their own
blood (577), crushed between ships, or battered by weapons dropped haphazard-
ly from above (582). The rain of corpses into the water is so heavy that a floating
island of crumpled flesh keeps the ships too far apart for hand-to-hand combat
(prohibent, 575).
The sheer pile-up of mutilated bodies may strike us as ridiculous or horrible,
but it is worth considering the impact of accumulation more carefully. Hannah
Arendt points the way with her remark on the “extreme loneliness of death”
when it is faced alone or in a state of dependence on others. But faced “collec-
tively and in action,” she notes, death “changes its countenance; now nothing
seems more likely to intensify our vitality than its proximity.” We become
aware of something we normally suppress or are unconscious of, that our own
death goes hand in hand with the “potential immortality” of our family, nation,
or species. “It is as though life itself [were] nourished, as it were, by the sempi-
ternal dying of its individual members.”³⁶ Here is Gratidianus, vengefully killed
in public during the Sullan proscriptions:
cum laceros artus aequataque uolnera membris

uidimus et toto quamuis in corpore caeso
nil animae letale datum, moremque nefandae
dirum saeuitiae, pereuntis parcere morti. 180
auolsae cecidere manus exsectaque lingua
palpitat et muto uacuum ferit aera motu.
hic aures, alius spiramina naris aduncae
 Arendt () .

amputat, ille cauis euoluit sedibus orbes

ultimaque effodit spectatis lumina membris (2.177– 85)
…we saw mangled limbs, each with a wound,

and no death-blow dealt although the entire body
was gashed; we saw the dreadful practice
of unutterable cruelty—to keep alive the dying man.
Down fell the hands, torn off; the cut-out tongue
quivered, beating empty air with noiseless movement.
One cut off his ears, another the hooked nose’s nostrils;
a third tears out the eyeballs from their hollow sockets
and, compelling him to view his body, finally gouges out his eyes.
What has happened here? This is horror pushed to the extreme, illustrating what
Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “total absurdity, or disastrous puerility” of the death
work, that is, death when it has come to be “the work of common life,” the proj-
ect of the collective that no longer understands itself as a community except in a
perverted mode, through the repeated commission of violence both in the name
of and against the law.³⁷
From the beginning of the poem, when Lucan first invokes and addresses
Nero, it is clear that the grotesque sublimity of these extreme depictions is
part of what creates and sustains the current moment in Rome’s still-new auto-
cratic regime. Leader and citizen, individually and collectively, summon up ex-
altation and repulsion. The scenes of violent death invite a certain convivial ad-
miration even as they bespeak finitude and at times, a distorted exaltation, when
bodies take on a new form. It is not enough to say with Bartsch and Day that
these scenes that make us spectators of violence are at odds with themselves,
at once energizing and alienating, morally horrifying and comically
exaggerated.³⁸ We can move beyond claims for Lucan’s deep moral ambivalence.
Through Lucan’s representations of violent death, we grasp a critical anatomy of
imperial power, one where destructive, disintegrating violence paradoxically
unifies the civic body.
Nero: Grotesque and Sublime

But if the Fates could find no other way
for Nero’s coming, if eternal kingdoms are purchased
by the gods at great cost, if heaven could serve its Thunderer
 Nancy () .

 On alienation, see Bartsch () .
292 Joy Connolly
only after wars with the ferocious Giants,

then we have no complaint, o gods; for this reward we accept
even these crimes and guilt; though Pharsalia fill its dreadful
plains, though the Carthaginian’s shade with blood be sated;
though the final battle be joined at fatal Munda;
though added to these horrors, Caesar, be the famine of Perusia…
yet Rome owes much to citizens’ weapons, because it was
for you that all was done. You, when your duty is fulfilled
and finally you seek the stars, will be received in your chosen palace
of heaven, with the sky rejoicing. Whether you choose to wield
the sceptre or to mount the flaming chariot of Phoebus
and to circle with moving fire the earth entirely unperturbed
by the transference of the sun, every deity
will yield to you, to your decision nature will leave
which god you wish to be, where to set your kingdom of the universe.
But choose your seat neither in the northern sphere
nor where the torrid sky of opposing south sinks down;
from these positions you would view your Rome with star aslant.
If you press on either side of the boundless ether,
the sky will feel the weight: maintain the mass of heaven poised
in the sphere’s midpoint; let that part of the clear ether
be wholly empty: let no clouds bar our view of Caesar.
Then may humankind lay down its weapons and care for itself
and every nation love one another; may Peace be sent throughout
the world and close the iron temple-gates of warring Janus.
Does this passage praise Nero, or poke fun at him? The latter interpretation ap-
pears as early as the 10th century Adnotationes super Lucanum and the twelfth-
century notes by Arnulf of Orleans. Championed by Ahl, it has been dominant in
Anglo-American scholarship over the past forty years. First, critics say, the ideas
in the passage are simply too excessive to be taken seriously. To claim that Nero
is worth civil war and then to list the corporeal horrors of war – blood soaking
the ground, funeral pyres, hunger, laboring bodies – breaks the rules of propri-
ety we know from Cicero and Quintilian. Second, there is the problem of the em-
peror’s body as Lucan represents it here, an obese bulk that weighs down the
heavens, with a “sideways” glance that may refer to a deformity Nero had, a
squint (obliquo).³⁹
Anchoring these claims is the assumption, drawn from Bakhtin’s reading of
Rabelais, that the grotesque body, simply because it is grotesque, does not and
cannot belong in a context of serious praise or even serious flattery, and further,
 Dewar ()  has shown that there is no basis for believing Nero was fat or had a
squint.
that the presence of this body undermines the ruler’s claim to authority and le-
gitimacy. Bakhtin claims in Rabelais and His World that the grotesque and the
obscene, the lower half of the body, sex, the consumption of food, and “low”
humor compose “the province of ordinary people.” He argues that as a means
of resistance to the dominant order, and as a refuge from it, ordinary people em-
ploy obscenity to undermine the dominant order and gain back a sense of inde-
pendence, even if only temporarily, through parody and ridicule. At the time
when Bakhtin worked on Dostoevsky and Rabelais, the Soviet state had begun
to enshrine a new political high culture that rigidly excluded the folkways and
habits of ordinary people in favor of a remote, even sublime realm of rulership.
In bodies, matter, and materialism Bakhtin saw a utopian force whose dynamism
and hybridity could oppose the static ascetic sterility of Soviet thought and prac-
tice. It is this theory that Achille Mbembe criticizes and revises in his view of the
grotesque as “intrinsic to systems of domination.”⁴⁰
In On the Postcolony Mbembe links his critique of Bakhtinian dualism to the
question of why there is no serious resistance, as resistance is conventionally un-
derstood, to the dominant order in Cameroon. He concludes that instead of seek-
ing to restrain or condemn gossip about their sex lives, feasts, and conspicuous
consumption, postcolonial Cameroonian officialdom cultivates images and idi-
oms of self-indulgence and hostility to continence that also have the effect of en-
compassing and foreclosing resistance to authority. Those who laugh at the rul-
er’s body or make fun of the ruler’s extravagant boasts about his power are not
resisting power, then, but part of the dominant signifying order: they “bear wit-
ness” that the grotesque and the obscene are integral to rule – especially when
the ruler claims that his body is sacred or superhuman. In their desire for “maj-
esty,” Mbembe says in a passage from which I have already quoted, ordinary
people “borrow the ideological repertoire of officialdom, along with its idioms
and forms; conversely, the official world mimics popular vulgarity, inserting it
at the core of the procedures by which it takes on grandeur.” From this perspec-
tive, popular laughter or obscenities, like farting at the name of the president’s
party or joking about the number of girls he sleeps with per week, are not oppo-
sitional. Rather they constitute a logic of conviviality that unites dominant and
dominated in the same networks of desires and pleasures.⁴¹ The state apparatus,
including images of the ruler, finds its way into subjects’ intimate spaces, from
pop songs to wallpaper to t-shirts. Ceremonies create opportunities for courtiers
and ordinary people to “preach the fiction of [the state’s] perfection in dancing
 Mbembe () .

 Mbembe () .
294 Joy Connolly
and singing crowds.”⁴² Mbembe concludes that in order to understand power, we

must replace the rationalizing binaries with which we are all familiar – order ver-
sus obscenity, mind versus body, dominance versus submission, law versus vice,
discipline versus perversity – with an understanding of power where the grotes-
que inhabits, sustains, even constitutes the dominant order.
Lucan’s proem, baffling to so many readers, expresses the loss of a sense of
proportion and propriety. Viewed in light of the reiterative violence that I have
sought to track in his epic, one where the ruler and the ruled partake of grotes-
que sublimity in the sustaining of empire, it is possible to see Nero’s over-sized
body as a sign of a system of shared values where the grotesque sublime is pre-
cisely the sign of power. The violence he may wreak on the cosmos, as awesome
as it first appears, signifies horrors that Roman imperial rule has made conven-
tional.
I am not simply suggesting that Bellum Ciuile is an especially potent unmask-
ing of the horrors of war or tyranny: this thought exercise would scarcely have
been necessary by the middle first century CE. Nor is it an attack on the Julio-
Claudian regime. When the Pompeians tell Cato they will follow Caesar, the “to-
gate citizen,” they are not praising the emperor’s new clothes while the narrator
ironically suggests to the reader that he has none. We have seen that Lucan’s Cae-
sar is a more complex figure whose arrogant, egoistic excess is a form of destruc-
tive negation, attracting while it horrifies, and whose promises to uphold custom
and law appeal partly because his actions violate both. The representation of
Nero is strung together in a fantastic (but by the criteria of epic, plausible) man-
ner, making the politically implausible fact – the success of dynastic autocracy
at Rome – plausible.⁴³ It is important to remember that the senatorial class is
also implicated in Lucan’s anatomy: Caesar becomes “everything” as many of
them yield to him, and he in turn absorbs and transcends the power of the
curia (omnia Caesar erat, 3.108).
Conclusion
In an aesthetic tradition where the individual is a central object of concern, ei-
ther as creator or protagonist, uncovering the dynamics of community in a liter-
ary work is not easy. Jean-Luc Nancy rightly criticizes the West’s failure to recog-
 Mbembe () .

 Mbembe () . This reading makes better sense of poems like Statius’ Siluae .,
where the emperor’s imperial munificence is expressed in the soft, luxurious, effeminized
terms of ripened fruits and rain showers and the paternal authority of Jupiter.
nize the thinking art and literature and other “figures of ecstasy” have done and
can do about community. He calls on readers to pay a different kind of attention
to literary texts, examining them for new ways to understand and imagine pol-
itics rather than reducing them to explications of conventional categories like
nation, class, fraternity, intersubjectivity, and the like. Rejecting nostalgic or
transcendental illusions of community, whether Christian or totalitarian or some-
thing else, he suggests that we can better grasp what collective life has been and
might be and what it has felt or might feel like through aesthetic experiences that
are “entrenched in the ordeal of community, at grips with it.”⁴⁴
Among the effects reiterative violence can account for in Lucan is the formu-
laic feel of his most violent scenes. Horrible as his dying bodies are, they have a
history, a recognizable model: they obey the pathos formula defined by Aby War-
burg as “the primeval vocabulary of passionate gesticulation,” a formula that
takes shape in Lucan’s era in the exercises and handbook collections of
declamation.⁴⁵ When Lucan borrows a method of representing extreme violence
from declamation, as he does with his ironic sententia, he turns the dying human
beings into familiar objects of description and thus by implication accessible to
our understanding. They make a certain aesthetic sense, not in tension with, but
precisely out of the disgust or disbelief they inspire. As we sense the “type-ness”
of scenes like Vulteius on the raft or the piles of dismembered limbs in the
Forum, we sense that these are scenes with a history. In this moment we gain
critical distance on their theatrical horrors: we may even be able to smile. Our
smiles may protect us from the existential horror that the renditions of violent,
painful death summon up. Alternatively, and finally, the type-ness of these
scenes signals simply that their meaning is to be found here, even as the pres-
ence of extreme excess or irony serves to acknowledge the unspeakable.
Remember, in closing, the spectacular deaths of characters in contemporary
Hollywood blockbusters, punctured by bullets, blasted, crushed. The familiar
type-ness of all these deaths is evidence that the violence that results from Cae-
sarian or American wars is not chaotic. It is ordered; it has techniques; it has
meaning. I have argued here for an understanding of the violence in the Bellum
Ciuile as reiterative violence, and that this violence, practiced by protagonist and
 Nancy ()  – . See further : “Community, which is not a subject, and even less a sub-
ject (conscious or unconscious) greater than ‘myself,’ does not have or posses this conscious-
ness: community is the ecstatic consciousness of the night of immanence, insofar as such a con-
sciousness is the interruption of self-consciousness.”
 Bonner ().
296 Joy Connolly
populus together and made visible in Lucan’s grotesque sublime, forms and sus-
tains the Roman Empire under the Caesars.⁴⁶
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Benjamin, W. 1921. “Critique of Violence”, reprinted in P. Demetz (ed.) 1986. Reflections. New
York.
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 I want to express my gratitude to Phillip Mitsis and Ioannis Ziogas for the invitation and for
their patience. I am also grateful to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study for the gener-
ous fellowship in  that enabled me to start work on this topic in a research group convened
by Ineke Sluiter of Leiden University. Warm thanks to her and my fellow group members Tazuko
van Berkel and Saskia Peels, as well as Robert Hariman and Ralph Rosen, for helpful critique of
a very early draft of this essay.
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— 2013. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London.
Michael Paschalis
From Pastoral to Panegyric in Calpurnius
Siculus
Summary: In the Theocritean corpus there is a clear division between pastoral
and panegyric. By contrast Virgil expanded the range of the pastoral song and
elevated its status so as to create a context for incorporating the praise of the
ruler and the political and intellectual elite. Calpurnius conceived the pastoral
and the political Eclogue in contrast to each other and divided his seven Eclogues
into political (1, 4, 7) and merae bucolicae (2, 3, 5, 6). The division of the poems
implies a division between two political, social and aesthetic orders. Indeed in
Eclogues 1 and 4 the world of the shepherd effaces itself before the world of
the emperor and in a sense it exists solely for serving the latter. The “farewell
to the pastoral genre” sometimes associated with Eclogue 7 is pronounced al-
ready in these two Eclogues.
Keywords: Theocritus; Virgil’s Eclogues; Calpurnius Siculus; pastoral; panegyric
In the Theocritean corpus there is a clear division between pastoral and panegy-
ric. The encomia of Hieron II of Syracuse (Idyll 16) and Ptolemy II Philadelphus
(Idyll 17) are not placed in the mouth of shepherds or goatherds. When eulogies
of the ruler are embedded this happens in the urban mimes of the corpus (Idylls
14 and 15).¹
By contrast Virgil expanded the range of the pastoral song and elevated its
status so as to create a context for incorporating the praise of the ruler and the
political and intellectual elite. The establishment of a relationship between the
pastoral world on the one hand and the world of history and power on the
other is Virgil’s major contribution to the evolution of the genre and he succeed-
ed in making it a dominant model for pastoral poetry through the ages. In the
programmatic Eclogue 1 the pastoral utopia falls apart and is reestablished
through the goodwill of the unnamed youth who dwells in Rome – in reality Oc-
tavian, the future emperor Augustus. Tityrus who had lost his land but retrieved
it thanks to his favor sings his praises, recognizes a god in him and promises him
divine honors. The blending of pastoral with panegyric is based precisely on the
new pastoral myth of the ruler who reestablished the shattered pastoral world
while his deified adoptive father is beneficial to shepherds and farmers (cf. Ly-
 Hunter (); Stephens ()  – .

300 Michael Paschalis
cidas about the sidus Iulium in Eclogues 9.46 – 50; Menalcas in Eclogues 5.56 – 80
about the deified Daphnis-Julius Caesar, an association proposed already in an-
tiquity).
While Theocritus opted for the disjunction (at least explicitly) of pastoral
and panegyric and Virgil for their conjunction, Calpurnius organized his collec-
tion on the basis of an antithesis between pastoral and panegyric. His seven Ec-
logues are divided into political (1, 4, 7), which contain praises of the emperor in
the form of a divine prophecy, a song exchange, and a narrative, and merae bu-
colicae (2, 3, 5, 6), which deal with pastoral and agricultural themes.²
This arrangement of the Calpurnian book is not a mere imitation of the Vir-
gilian precedent³ and can be misleading. One reason is because in Virgil encomia
of various kind occur in most Eclogues (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9)⁴ and the interaction be-
tween the pastoral and the outer world pervades in one way or another the
whole collection. In terms of substance the Calpurnian arrangement is intended
to convey a strong contrast between the lowly world of the shepherd and the ex-
alted world of the emperor and consequently between pastoral and panegyric in
the generic hierarchy (not to be confused with poetic ambition within the bucolic
genre, as in Eclogues 4.58 – 69), while Virgil did the exact opposite: he enhanced
the thematic and ideological limits of pastoral poetry and elevated its status to
the level of the world of power and beyond.
To put it differently the division of the poems implies a division between two
political, social, and aesthetic orders. One way to confirm this point would be to
examine what happens within the political Eclogues themselves, where pastoral
and panegyric are not just placed side by side, as it happens with individual Ec-
logues, but interact. In Eclogues 1 and 4 the world of the shepherd effaces itself
before the world of the emperor and in a sense it exists solely for serving the
latter.⁵ These two political Eclogues pave the way for the repudiation of the pas-
toral world in the third one, which is also the last Eclogue of the collection (see
further the conclusion of this paper).
 For a brief but informed introduction to Calpurnius Siculus, see Mayer ()  – ; Kar-
akasis ()  – .
 Cf. Davis ().
 Nauta ().
 The political poems of the collection have been variously evaluated: see especially Leach
() and (), Sullivan ()  – , Davis (), Newlands (), Vozza () and
(), Vinchesi ()  – , Hubbard ()  – , Magnelli (), Mayer (), Kar-
akasis ()  – ; and respective commentaries: Verdière (), Keene ( []),
Korzeniewski (), Amat () on all the Eclogues; Schröder () on Eclogue , Di
Salvo () on Eclogue .
Below I will argue that in Calpurnius the distance that separates the world of
the shepherd from the world of the emperor is so great that the shepherd cannot
eulogize the emperor in the immediate and direct way this happens in Virgil, Ec-
logue 1. The Virgilian young god of Rome and the shepherd Tityrus share the
same aesthetic values, in the sense that the former grants the latter the space
and opportunity for pastoral otium and pastoral singing while in the Calpurnian
Eclogues Corydon’s patron secures for him the basic necessity of food.⁶ Hence
Virgil’s Tityrus can pass directly from singing of beautiful Amaryllis tο the eulogy
of his benefactor (Eclogue 1.1– 10):
M. Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi

siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena;
nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua.
nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.
T. O Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit.
namque erit ille mihi semper deus, illius aram
saepe tener nostris ab ouilibus imbuet agnus.
ille meas errare boues, ut cernis, et ipsum
ludere quae uellem calamo permisit agresti. ⁷
M. Tityrus, you lie beneath the spreading beech

and practice country songs upon a slender pipe.
I leave my father’s fields and my sweet ploughlands,
an exile from my native soil. You sprawl in the shade
and school the woods to sound with Amaryllis’s charms. 5
T. O Meliboeus, it was a god who gave me this repose.
He’ll always be a god to me. Often I’ll stain
his altar with blood of a young lamb from my fold. He
it was who allowed my cattle to graze like this and me
to play the songs I choose upon my rustic flute.⁸
By contrast in the Calpurnian Eclogues the distance between the shepherd and
the emperor creates a gap between pastoral and panegyric which has to be bridg-
ed. Pastoral and panegyric are incompatible with each other and therefore the
shepherd is obliged to renounce or change established pastoral conventions
 In reworking the Virgilian lines Corydon thanks his patron Meliboeus for saving himself and
his brother from hunger and thus allowing them “to recline well-fed in the shade and enjoy the
woodland of Amaryllis”: Eclogue . –  per te secura saturi recubamus in umbra / et fruimur
siluis Amaryllidos.
 The Latin text of the Aeneid is taken from Mynors ().
 Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues are by Fowler ().
and singing locations in order to compose a song or read a prophecy in praise of

the emperor. Only formally does he continue to be an inhabitant of the pastoral
world, because in substance he has already consciously attached himself to the
world of imperial power and sings in order to acquire imperial patronage.⁹ Below
I will explore the ways in which Calpurnius constructs the transition from pas-
toral to panegyric starting with Eclogue 1.1– 23:
C. Nondum Solis equos declinis mitigat aestas,

quamuis et madidis incumbant prela racemis
et spument rauco feruentia musta susurro.
cernis ut ecce pater quas tradidit, Ornyte, uaccae
molle sub hirsuta latus explicuere genista?
nos quoque uicinis cur non succedimus umbris?
torrida cur solo defendimus ora galero?
O. Hoc potius, frater Corydon, nemus, antra petamus
ista patris Fauni, graciles ubi pinea denset
silua comas rapidoque caput leuat obuia soli,
bullantes ubi fagus aquas radice sub ipsa
protegit et ramis errantibus implicat umbras.
C. Quo me cumque uocas, sequor, Ornyte; nam mea Leuce,
dum negat amplexus nocturnaque gaudia nobis,
peruia cornigeri fecit sacraria Fauni.
prome igitur calamos et si qua recondita seruas;
nec tibi defuerit mea fistula, quam mihi nuper
matura docilis compegit arundine Ladon.
O. Et iam captatae pariter successimus umbrae.
quam modo nescio quis properanti falce notauit?
aspicis ut uirides etiam nunc littera rimas
seruet et arenti nondum se laxet hiatu? ¹⁰
C. Not yet does the waning summer tame the sun’s horses, although the wine-presses are
squeezing the juicy clusters and a hoarse whisper comes from the foaming must as it fer-
ments. Look, Ornytus, do you see how comfortably the cattle our father trusted us to watch
have lain down to rest in the shaggy broom? Why do not we also make for the neighboring
shade? Why only a cap to protect our sunburnt faces?
O. Rather let us seek this grove, brother Corydon, – the grottoes over there, the haunt of
Father Faunus, where the pine forest thickly spreads its delicate foliage and rears its
head to meet the sun’s fierce rays, where the beech shields the waters that bubble ’neath
its very roots, and with its straying boughs casts a tangled shade.
C. Whithersoever you call me, Ornytus, I follow. For by refusing my embraces and denying
me nightly pleasures, my Leuce has left it lawful for me to enter the shrine of horned Fau-
 On aspects of pastoral alienation in Calpurnius but from a strictly generic view, see especially
Karakasis ()  – .
 All Calpurnian quotations are from Korzeniewski ().
nus. Produce your reed-pipes then and any song you keep stored for use. My pipe, you will
find, will not fail you – the pipe that Ladon’s skill fashioned for me lately out of a ripely
seasoned reed.
O. Now we have both come beneath the shade we sought. But what legend is this inscribed
upon the hallowed beech, which someone of late has scored with hasty knife? Do you no-
tice how the letters still preserve the fresh greenness of their cutting and do not as yet gape
with sapless slit?¹¹
In the passage quoted above Corydon suggests to Ornytus that they should seek
relief from the oppressive heat in a neighboring shaded place but the latter pro-
poses instead that they go to the grove of the god Faunus. Once inside the grove
they find inscribed on the god’s sacred beech a prophecy which is emphatically
non-pastoral (29 nihil armentale resultat). It tells of the return of the Golden Age
and the advent of a godlike young ruler of Julian descent, and announces a new
era of peace, law and justice.
The eulogy of the emperor is therefore cast in a form different from the con-
ventional pastoral song and is located not under the conventional pastoral shade
but in a pseudo-pastoral and essentially imperial ambience. The opening dia-
logue is intended to convey precisely this contrast between pastoral and panegy-
ric. As a matter of fact Corydon’s initial suggestion to Ornytus that they should
join the cattle, which have couched themselves in the grass under the shade, en-
hances the pastoral aspect of his proposal and highlights the antithesis with im-
perial panegyric which “has nothing reminiscent of the herd’s sound” (nihil ar-
mentale resultat).¹²
As frequently noted the Calpurnian scene was inspired by Virgil, Eclogue
5.1– 15, where the issue of the appropriate place for singing is also raised and
a choice is made:
Me. Cur non, Mopse, boni quoniam conuenimus ambo,

tu calamos inflare leuis, ego dicere uersus,
hic corylis mixtas inter consedimus ulmos?
Mo. Tu maior; tibi me est aequum parere, Menalca,
siue sub incertas Zephyris motantibus umbras
siue antro potius succedimus. aspice, ut antrum
siluestris raris sparsit labrusca racemis.
Me. Montibus in nostris solus tibi certat Amyntas.
Mo. Quid, si idem certet Phoebum superare canendo?
 Translations of passages from Calpurnius’ Eclogues are derived from J.W. Duff and A.M. Duff
().
 Cf. Hubbard (): “Once they have entered the grove of Faunus, the cattle are neglect-
ed and out of sight (it is a place of nihil armentale [Calp. .])”.
Me. Incipe, Mopse, prior, si quos aut Phyllidis ignis

aut Alconis habes laudes aut iurgia Codri.
incipe: pascentis seruabit Tityrus haedos.
Mo. Immo haec, in uiridi nuper quae cortice fagi
carmina descripsi et modulans alterna notaui,
experiar: tu deinde iubeto ut certet Amyntas.
Me. Why do we not, Mopsus, since both of us are skilled,

you at playing slender reeds, I at verse,
sit down here among the mingled hazels and elms?
Mo. You’re the elder. It’s right that I do what you say, Menalcas,
whether beneath the flickering shadows that western breezes
chase or in this grotto we take our rest. Look
how the forest vine sprinkles the cave with sparing clusters.
Me. Upon our hills Amyntas alone contends with you.
Mo. What if he strives to surpass Phoebus himself in song?
Me. Begin, Mopsus, be first, if any flame you have
for Phyllis or compliments for Alcon or quarrels with Codrus.
Begin. Tityrus will care for your pasturing goats.
Mo. Rather these songs which recently I wrote upon
the green bark of beech, marking the times of pipe
and song. Then you order Amyntas next to compete.
In this passage Menalcas proposes to Mopsus that they sit down together among
the hazels and elms and make music, while Mopsus expresses a preference for a
cave nearby, overspread with clusters of wild grapes. Menalcas tacitly agrees and
invites Mopsus to begin, suggesting three themes (love of Phyllis, praise of
Alcon, abuse of Codrus); but Mopsus replies that he will try out a song he has
recently carved on a beech tree. Menalcas concedes and they next exchange
songs on the death of Daphnis (Mopsus) and his apotheosis (Menalcas).
The choice between two locations for music-making is of Theocritean
origin.¹³ In Virgil the more elaborate cave setting may reflect the elevated
topic¹⁴ but the song is nonetheless pastoral going back in particular to the
dirge for Daphnis in Theocritus’ Idyll 1 and the anonymous Lament for Bion.
By contrast Calpurnius constructs a more elaborate setting, unparalleled in
the pastoral tradition, in order to provide the space appropriate for imperial pan-
egyric, which a divinity inscribes on the bark of a beech.¹⁵
 Clausen () ad loc., who cites Theocr. . – ,  – .

 For its probable implications, cf. Putnam ()  – .
 To be noted that the beech on which Virgil’s Mopsus inscribed the words and musical nota-
tion of his pastoral song has nothing to do with the cave where he and Menalcas perform.
Together with conventional pastoral setting Corydon and Ornytus reject pas-
toral song as well first and foremost by turning themselves into mere readers of
an imperial panegyric cast in the form of a divine prophecy. Furthermore on the
way to the cave of Faunus Corydon suggests to Ornytus that they engage in a
song contest and invites him to take out his pipe and any songs he may keep
in store for use. However this pastoral song contest never occurs. We have
seen that in Virgil Menalcas proposes three pastoral themes but next agrees to
exchange songs with Mopsus on a different pastoral topic. What happens in Cal-
purnius is remarkable. Ornytus does not even reply to Corydon’s proposal but an-
nounces their arrival at the cave and the discovery of a text inscribed on the bark
of a beech. Rather than assume that Ornytus and Corydon never have, in realistic
terms, the chance to perform their own songs because in the meantime they
reach the cave,¹⁶ I would suggest that Ornytus’ response implies that pastoral
singing and music making do not even merit consideration and are to be totally
ignored in the prospect of imperial panegyric.
“For by refusing my embraces and denying me nightly pleasures, my Leuce
has left it lawful for me to enter the shrine of horned Faunus,” says Corydon to
Ornytus. The idea that sexual deprivation makes Corydon eligible to enter the sa-
cred precinct of Faunus has puzzled scholars. In my opinion it should be viewed
as another prerequisite for passing from pastoral to imperial panegyric, which
consists in making oneself worthy of the task by abandoning the frivolous pas-
toral erotic life.¹⁷
Contrary to the passage from Virgil’s Eclogue 5 quoted above, in Calpurnius
there is no mention of the themes of the pastoral songs to be exchanged between
Corydon and Ornytus. This may be a further indication that pastoral song is
downplayed vis-à-vis imperial panegyric. In addition if Corydon’s words fistula
/ compegit arundine Ladon (17– 18) allude to the myth of Pan and Syrinx and
the invention of the syrinx or pan-pipes,¹⁸ I would be inclined to see in what Cor-
ydon and Ornytus leave behind a subtle rejection of an archetypal pastoral con-
text involving love, music making and Pan, the god of herdsmen and their poet-
ry. According to Ovid, Syrinx was a nymph of the river Ladon; Pan chased her
 A very different situation is Eclogue  where the discord between the singers makes the song
impossible.
 Cf. Leach () : “But here, I think, Corydon’s privation is meant to show his readiness
for new occupations, for a change in the mode of his pastoral life. Leuce appears no more in the
poems. The attention once given to love, or love-thoughts, will soon be dedicated to the contem-
plation of higher affairs.”
 Korzeniewski () ad loc. comments on the choice of the name Ladon in relation to the
transformation of Syrinx.
but captured instead the reeds into which she was transformed; he waxed them
together and made the pipes that bear the name of the beloved person (Metamor-
phoses 1.689 – 721). The possible allusion in Calpurnius to the god Pan, inventor
of the syrinx in Virgil (Eclogues 2.32 – 33) and prominent in Virgilian pastoral, ac-
quires significance in light of the fact that his place is next taken by Faunus
whose imperial panegyric substitutes for pastoral music. As commonly noted,
Calpurnius’ Faunus is the god who in Aeneid 7 predicts the advent of Aeneas
and the establishment of the powerful dynasty to whom Nero belonged.¹⁹
The opening lines of Eclogue 4 introduce a variation of the passage from pas-
toral to panegyric outlined above. Since the issue is substantially the same I will
only briefly treat some of its formal aspects. The major formal difference with Ec-
logue 1 is that the context for imperial panegyric in terms of location, mood and
theme is already there when the Eclogue begins and the interlocutor, instead of
proposing an alternative location or song, questions it from a pastoral viewpoint
(1– 15):²⁰
M. Quid tacitus, Corydon, uultuque subinde minaci

quidue sub hac platano, quam garrulus astrepit umor,
insueta statione sedes? iuuat umida forsan
ripa leuatque diem uicini spiritus amnis?
C. Carmina iam dudum, non quae nemorale resultent,
uoluimus, o Meliboee; sed haec, quibus aurea possint
saecula cantari, quibus et deus ipse canatur,
qui populos urbesque regit pacemque togatam.
M. Dulce quidem resonas, nec te diuersus Apollo
despicit, o iuuenis, sed magnae numina Romae
non ita cantari debent, ut ouile Menalcae.
C. Quidquid id est, siluestre licet uideatur acutis
auribus et nostro tantum memorabile pago,
nunc mea rusticitas, si non ualet arte polita
carminis, at certe ualeat pietate probari.
M. Corydon, why sit you silent with a visage that bodes something ever and anon? Why sit
you in an unwonted place, beneath this plane-tree at whose roots brawl the prattling wa-
ters? Maybe you like the watery bank, where the breeze from the neighboring stream as-
suages the heat of day?
C. For long, Meliboeus, have I been pondering verses, verses of no woodland ring but fit to
celebrate the golden age, to praise even that very god who is sovereign over nations and
cities and toga-clad peace.
 For a detailed discussion, see Esposito (). Faunus dominates the Calpurnian Eclogues
as opposed to Pan who is mentioned only once; see Karakasis ()  n. .
 For an elucidation of the opening lines of Eclogue  from different perspectives, see Vozza
(), Karakasis ()  – .
M. Sweet of sound are your lays and ’tis not with cold disdain that Apollo looks upon you,
young Corydon: but the divinities of mighty Rome are not to be extolled in the same style as
the sheepfold of Menalcas.
C. Whate’er my song, though it seem boorish to a critic’s ears and worthy of record only in
my own village, yet, as things are, my awkwardness, even if lacking in poetry’s polish and
skill, must surely win approval for its loyalty.
The beech in Virgil’s Eclogue 1 provides abundant shade for both the pastoral
song for Amaryllis and the encomium of the young god whom Tityrus met in
Rome. Not so in Calpurnius. Meliboeus sees Corydon sitting silent and brooding
not beneath a beech but in the shade of a plane-tree and beside a noisy stream.
He is surprised and comments on the “unfamiliar spot” (insueta statione). He as-
sumes that Corydon is seeking relief from the heat of the day in that cool spot but
the latter replies that he has been composing a poem that will celebrate the
Golden Age and will praise the godlike Roman ruler.
Here as in Calpurnius’ Eclogue 1 ordinary pastoral umbra is not appropriate
for imperial panegyric. In place of the cave of Faunus and the sacred beech with
the godlike prophecy inscribed on it the present Eclogue introduces the rich and
large shade of the plane-tree²¹ which is worthy of an emperor. To be noted that
platanus comes from Greek πλάτανος, which was etymologized ἐκ τοῦ πλάτους,
“from its large shade” (Isid. Origines 17.7.37); according to Pliny (Naturalis Histor-
ia 12.6), the plant was imported in Greece and Italy “merely for the sake of its
shade.” The fact that the plane-tree is excluded from the Virgilian flora, is not
mentioned anywhere else in Calpurnius and is in general a stranger to the pas-
toral landscape would account not only for the fact that Meliboeus considers the
spot “unfamiliar” but also for the witty paradox of Corydon composing poetry
“without woodland resonances” (non quae nemorale resultent) though sitting be-
neath a tree – I would assume because this is not a pastoral but an imperial tree.
Corydon and Meliboeus draw a sharp distinction between pastoral and pan-
egyric in terms of mood and style. The former replies to Meliboeus that his silent
and pensive mood is required by the task of composing an imperial panegyric;
and the latter agrees that singing the praises of the godlike ruler of Rome re-
quires a style and tone different from the one used when referring to Menalcas’
sheepfold. Corydon proceeds to describe his poetry as being ‘sylvan’ (siluestre)
and as smelling of ‘rusticity’ (rusticitas) and wishes that, if not his poetic
skill, at least the ‘loyalty’ (pietas) of his song towards the emperor may be appre-
ciated and recognized. Through these self-deprecatory remarks the highly appre-
 For detailed discussion of sub hac platano, see Vozza ()  – .

ciated pastoral poetic skill utterly effaces itself in the face of imperial
panegyric.²²
A few lines below Meliboeus advises Corydon, just before the latter begins to
sing, to avoid the “tinkling pipes” made of fragile boxwood and appropriate for
the praise of Alexis and use instead the pipes “which sang of woods worthy of a
consul” (4.73 – 7):
M. Incipe, nam faueo; sed prospice, ne tibi forte

tinnula tam fragili respiret fistula buxo,
quam resonare solet, si quando laudat Alexin.
hos potius, magis hos calamos sectare, canales
et preme, qui dignas cecinerunt consule siluas.
Begin, my favor is with you; but take heed lest perchance your tinkling pipe breathe from
boxwood as frail as is its usual sound whene’er the praise of Alexis is the theme. Rather
these reeds, these far more you must pursue: press the pipes which sang of woods worthy
of a consul.
Meliboeus contrasts the style of Virgil, Eclogue 2 (the praise of Alexis) to the
more elevated style of Eclogue 4 (the praise of a consul), proposing the latter
as appropriate for imperial panegyric. Through his words Calpurnius retrospec-
tively attributes to Virgil his own distinction between pastoral and panegyric.
What sounds however like an imitation is actually a distortion of Virgil, in the
sense that the Augustan poet distinguishes between levels of pastoral style
while Calpurnius builds on the distance between the shepherd and the emperor,
between pastoral and panegyric.
Let us consider, for instance, Calpurnius 7.77 qui dignas cecinerunt consule
siluas, which reproduces Virgil, Eclogue 4.3 si canimus siluas, siluae sint consule
dignae. A few lines below Corydon’s brother Amyntas prays that Caesar “may not
disdain” (88 neu dedignetur) to visit their hills. He thus disparages the ‘dignity’ of
the pastoral world, while Virgil did the exact opposite: he elevated the ‘dignity’
of the ‘woods’ (a Virgilian metonymy for the pastoral song) to the level of a con-
sul (siluae sint consule dignae). Furthermore Calpurnius’ woods fall silent at
merely hearing Caesar’s name (97– 8 Aspicis, ut uirides audito Caesare siluae /
conticeant?). What this amounts to is that pastoral poetry does not just regress
but it utterly fades before panegyric. In strong contrast to the magnitude of Vir-
gil’s pastoral vision famously rendered through paulo maiora canamus (Eclogue
4.1), Calpurnius extols the majesty of the emperor and places the entire pastoral
world at his service.
 See further Karakasis ()  – .

In the last Eclogue of the collection Calpurnius rewrites Virgil, Eclogue 1: Cor-
ydon goes to Rome and upon his return he recounts to Lycotas his fascination
with Nero’s wooden amphitheater, the spectacle he watched and the godlike
young emperor himself. Differently from Virgil’s Tityrus who enjoys the reestab-
lished pastoral world, Calpurnius’ Corydon repudiates the pastoral world and
completely espouses the values of the imperial world.²³ I quote lines 1– 6:
L. Lentus ab urbe uenis, Corydon; uicesima certe

nox fuit, ut nostrae cupiunt te cernere siluae,
ut tua maerentes exspectant iubila tauri.
C. O piger, o duro non mollior axe, Lycota,
qui ueteres fagos noua quam spectacula mauis
cernere, quae patula iuuenis deus edit harena.
L. You are slow, Corydon, in coming back from Rome. For twenty nights past, of a truth,
have our woods longed to see you, and the saddened bulls waited for your yodelings.
C. O you slow-coach, no more unbending than a tough axle, Lycotas, you prefer to see
old beech trees rather than the new sights exhibited by our youthful god in the spacious
arena.
Calpurnius completely reverses the opening lines of Virgil, Eclogue 1 through

conspicuous verbal repetition and calculated substitutions (note especially len-
tus, ueteres fagos, patula, iuuenis deus): the pastoral ease of singing beneath
the broad beech shade, a gift to Tityrus by the young god of Rome (Virgil, Ec-
logue 1), is now exchanged for a prolonged visit to Rome and the spectacle spon-
sored by another young god and held in the spacious arena of the amphitheater
(Calpurnius, Eclogue 7).
As I have argued above the “farewell to the pastoral genre” sometimes asso-
ciated with Eclogue 7 is pronounced already in the programmatic Eclogue 1 and
repeated in Eclogue 4. In Eclogue 7 it is simply confirmed. The major reason why
Eclogue 7 strikes the reader as being something substantially different is Cory-
don’s visit to Rome and especially the fact that Calpurnius transferred it to the
last Eclogue of the collection while in Virgil it occurs in the first one. But in sub-
stance Corydon’s visit and the fascination with the imperial world is only a for-
mal gesture of what has already been there from the very beginning and consists
in alienation from the pastoral world. The imperial world has dominated pastor-
al life and vision all along and imperial panegyric had effaced and silenced the
pastoral voice before Corydon went to Rome.
 See for instance Hubbard ()  – .

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John G. Fitch
Speaking Names in Senecan Drama
Summary: A study of wordplay and syllable‑play in Seneca’s dramas would as-
sist substantially in our understanding of the dramas’ poetics. As a contribution
to that goal, this article studies plays on names (almost all Greek, because of the
mythological context of the dramas), both those of the dramatis personae and
others including place‑names. It illustrates some of the many and varied func-
tions of name‑plays within the fabric of the dramas. The article also tackles
the question whether a word‑play ‘really is there’ in the text: examples where
Seneca responds to plays on the same names in earlier authors, notably Vergil
and Ovid, confirm the reality of the name‑plays both in Seneca himself and in
his predecessors. Appended to the article is a Glossary of all etymological
name‑plays noted in Seneca’s dramas by other readers and myself.
Keywords: etymology; word‑play; names; wit; puns
Preamble
There has been an increased awareness in recent years of the extent and impor-
tance of wordplay, including etymological play, in Roman poetry. The ground-
breaking work was that of Fred Ahl on Ovid published in 1985, a book whose
title had its own wordplay, Metaformations. A briefer but influential discussion
of etymological plays, based like Ahl’s on Varronian principles, was that of
Cairns.¹ These pioneers were followed by two books on Vergil which appeared
almost simultaneously, one by James O’Hara in 1996 and the other by Michael
Paschalis in 1997; Paschalis was liberal in recognizing wordplay and relating it
to the themes of the Aeneid, whereas O’Hara was more cautious, and more con-
cerned to establish criteria for judging whether or not wordplay is present in any
instance. Study of etymological play was facilitated by Robert Maltby’s Lexicon
of Ancient Latin Etymologies, published in 1991. Ten years later Maltby’s student
Andreas Michalopoulos produced a lexicon of Ancient Etymologies in Ovid’s Met-
amorphoses, i. e. wordplays involving etymologies for which there is independent
evidence in the grammarians or scholiasts or other sources. There have also been
several articles, including one on Ovid by Alison Keith (2001), and one on Sene-
ca’s dramas by John Stevens (2002).
 Cairns ()  – .
314 John G. Fitch
Play on the apparent meaning of names is just one element in the whole fab-
ric of wordplay and syllable-play in Seneca’s dramas. I have chosen to focus on
‘speaking names’ as a manageable topic for the present context, but there is a
larger study waiting to be made, which would contribute greatly to our under-
standing of Seneca’s poetics. Such a study would usefully shed light on Seneca’s
plays on Latin words, whereas the plays studied here are inevitably on Greek
names, given the Greek mythological context of the dramas.²
A question that hovers over the issue of speaking names is the following:
How can we be sure that a particular play on a proper name really is there in
the text (to use objectivist terms)? Are we modern scholars being over-ingenious
in finding it? O’Hara raises this issue squarely: “How can I distinguish between
an etymological wordplay made by the poet, which I have discovered, and one
that I myself have invented, or forced upon the poet?”³ We can be reasonably
confident about an etymological connection if it is explicitly made elsewhere
by a writer such as Varro or Servius or one of the scholiasts. O’Hara also lists var-
ious characteristics of Vergilian etymologizing, which can in themselves be used
as criteria: does a particular instance fall into a recognizable category, for exam-
ple the single-adjective gloss (of which examples later)? But it is his last criterion
with which I am concerned here: “Later comment: poets after Vergil (especially
Ovid) allude to his etymologizing”.⁴ He does indeed provide a generous list of
places where Ovid appears to respond to Vergilian wordplays,⁵ but almost no ex-
amples from poets after Ovid. This is not a criticism of O’Hara’s book, which is
immensely helpful on the whole etymologizing tradition up to Ovid, but it
does indicate what remains to be done, and how the study of Seneca, for exam-
ple, may shed light on Vergil and vice versa.
One example will illustrate this point. In Troades Helen announces (falsely)
that Polyxena is to be married to Pyrrhus. Andromache reacts with shock and
outrage: flagrant strata passim Pergama: o coniugale tempus! (889 – 90), “the
wreckage of Pergama is blazing all around: an apt time for a wedding!”⁶ Now
 Seneca almost completely avoids bilingual name-plays, i. e. those which play a Latin word off
a Greek name. The reason is perhaps that such plays are clearly puns, with no claim to etymo-
logical status. Such puns are familiar in comedy (e. g. Epidamnus/damnum at Pl. Menaechmi
 – ), and therefore threaten to carry the wrong associations for tragedy. The only possible
examples I have noted are Argo/argutus and Cassandra/cassus (see Glossary). On the humorous
use of verbal play in Plautus, see particularly Fontaine ().
 O’Hara () .
 O’Hara () .
 O’Hara ()  – .
 All translations are mine.
the name Pergama can evoke the Greek γάμος ‘marriage’, and Andromache’s
coniugale seems to resonate with that word. Vergil uses a similar wordplay,
again with reference to Helen: Pergama cum peteret inconcessosque hymenaeos,
“when she was heading for Pergama and an unlawful marriage” (Aeneid 1.651).
O’Hara does not list this Vergilian play in his “Catalogue”, presumably because it
had not been noticed by previous commentators⁷ and he himself is quite cau-
tious. But the likelihood of the wordplay in Seneca strengthens its likelihood
in Vergil, and vice versa; the two texts speak to each other.
The present article aims simply to illustrate some of Seneca’s uses of name-
plays, and to discuss some of the issues that arise from them. The Glossary at the
end of the article is somewhat more comprehensive, in that it lists all the name-
plays that I have noticed in the Senecan corpus.
Before proceeding, I should make some caveats which are familiar yet worth
repeating. First, the ancient criteria for etymology are quite different from those
of modern linguistics. Consequently, when I suggest a certain derivation as the
basis of a name-play, it is not proposed as the ‘real’ origin of the name, but
what might have sounded like its origin to an ancient audience. Second, when
a poet makes a play on the possible meaning of a name, he is not necessarily
suggesting the actual origin of the name, even by ancient criteria; the play
may be purely playful.⁸ Third, despite the ludic aspect of playing on names, a
particular name-play may carry more weight of meaning and emotion than we
moderns might expect, because of the belief encapsulated in the phrase
nomen omen, i. e. the belief that a personal name may express or even somehow
predetermine a person’s destiny.
Name-Plays and the Dramatis Personae

Not surprisingly, many of the name-plays in Seneca’s dramas are associated with
the dramatis personae. They are often found, for example, when a character first
enters, or is first addressed. John Stevens (2002) discussed this pattern fully, so I
will give just two examples. At the start of Act 2 of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra is
addressed as inclitum Ledae genus, “glorious child of Leda” (125); the adjective
inclitus/inclutus is related to the Greek κλυτός, and plays on the start of Clytem-
 It is, however, noted by Paschalis ()  with n. .

 Fuller discussion of these issues at O’Hara ()  – .
316 John G. Fitch
nestra’s name.⁹ A more complex example (not in Stevens) appears at the begin-
ning of the Phoenissae, where Oedipus addresses his daughter Antigone: nata,
quam tanti est mihi / genuisse uel sic, “daughter, it is worth the cost to have fath-
ered you, even as it happened” (i. e. incestuously). This plays on what sound like
the two elements in Antigone’s name, viz. the preposition ἀντί which can mean
‘in return, in recompense’ and γονή ‘birth, begetting’, which has the same root as
genuisse, the word that Seneca uses here.¹⁰
I note in passing that neither character, neither Clytemnestra nor Antigone,
is actually named in the text. These are examples of what O’Hara calls ‘suppres-
sion’, from Servius’ phrase supprimens nomen. ¹¹ (Suppression is not the ideal
term in English, since it carries overtones of improper concealment of what
should be made explicit, but I use it faute de mieux.) What does suppression
of a name imply for Seneca’s audience, whether in stage performance or in rec-
itation? They are being prompted to supply the name itself, simply by the dra-
matic situation, and in supplying the name they are also prompted to think
about what the Greek name might mean, or might suggest. This sounds to us
like an esoteric procedure, but not, I think, for an educated person in Seneca’s
Rome; the names Clytemnestra and Antigone are hardly obscure, and an educat-
ed person would by definition be familiar with the Greek language, and with the
literary tradition, and with the widespread practice in that tradition of reading
meaning into names. So I prefer to say that a member of the audience who catch-
es these name-plays would be an educated person, but not necessarily a learned
one. It is also worth noting that catching these ‘suppressed’ name-plays involves
active participation on the part of audience members in the construction of
meaning. Of course this is true of any wordplay: the listener must make the men-
tal connection between the word and the significance that is being suggested.¹²
But it is doubly true when the listener has to supply the name itself as well as its
significance.
Name-play may happen not only at a character’s first appearance, but also
when a character is first mentioned in the drama. When Juno starts to think bit-
terly about Hercules, she says gloriae feci locum, “I have given scope for his
glory” (36), i. e. by imposing labors in which he has succeeded triumphantly.
 Stevens ()  –  suggests a play not only on κλυτός but also, in the second half of Cly-
temestra’s name, on the root μη- ‘cunning’ (seen in μήδομαι ‘plan cunningly’ and μήστωρ ‘coun-
sellor’) at Agamemnon  euolue femineos dolos, “spin your female wiles.”
 Sarah McCallum points out to me the partial homophony of ἀντί and tanti.
 O’Hara ()  – .
 “Poetic etymologising is thus revealed as a process demanding active involvement of the
reader”, Cairns () .
The phrase alludes to the well-known interpretation of the name Hercules (Hera-
kles) from Ἥρα and κλέος, i. e. ‘the glory of Hera’. (There is a touch of paradox
here, as the phrase ‘the glory of Hera’ would in itself more naturally suggest
glory conferred on Hera, rather than glory conferred by her on Hercules.)¹³ In
this case the name of Hercules is spoken by Juno, but not until five lines later
(41), so we have at least temporary ‘suppression’ happening. I note in passing
that the name Hercules is used some 95 times in the corpus without reference
to this etymology, and only once with reference to it: similarly with other
names there may be just one or two etymological plays among many usages.
An example of name-play at the first mention of a figure outside the drama is
Phaedra 94 audacis proci, ‘audacious suitor.’ This refers to Pirithous’ attempt to
carry off Proserpine from the underworld, and glances at πειρ- ‘attempt’, which
both as noun and verb can refer to attempts at seduction or rape (LSJ svv. πεῖρα,
πειράζω, πείρασις, πειράω); more generally, audax can be used pejoratively, as
here and e. g. Troades 349, Oedipus 908, and similarly πειρ-, e. g. Soph.
El. 470 f. πικράν …πεῖραν τήνδε τολμήσειν. Here again the name itself is sup-
pressed.
Name-plays can be particularly powerful when one of the dramatis personae
speaks his or her own name, with reference to its apparent meaning. I discussed
this pattern in an article written with Siobhan McElduff (2002), on self-construc-
tion in Senecan tragedy, so here I will just give one example not cited there. In
Troades Andromache in despair cries to her dead husband, seruire Graio pateris
Andromachen uiro, / crudelis Hector? “Do you allow Andromache to be a slave to
a Greek man, callous Hector?” (804 f.). This alludes to the apparent meaning of
her name, from ‘man’ (ἀνδρ‐) and ‘fight’ (μάχη): she should be a woman who
fights with a man, as she has attempted to do with Ulysses, not one who serves
a man. Here and in the examples discussed in the earlier article the ‘speaking
name’ contributes to characters’ self-construction, to their understanding of
what their true identity is, embodied in their ‘true name’, their etymon.
The etymology of Andromache’s name has a history in Latin literature which
is of interest. Ennius in one of his tragedies had written the line Andromachae
nomen qui indidit, recte indidit, “Whoever named Andromache named her right-
ly”, the implication being “because she fights with men, or with her man.” Varro
criticized this line as obscure; the play on the name was clear in Euripides, he
 See Michalopoulos ()  –  for various derivations of the name. With Hercules Furens
 compare Probus on Verg. Eclogues ., who says the name is derived from Hera quod eius
imperiis opinionem famamque uirtutis sit consecutus, “because it was through her commands
that he gained renown and a reputation for valour”.
318 John G. Fitch
says, because he was writing in Greek, but it is not clear in Ennius, i. e. for a
Roman audience.¹⁴ Does this mean that Seneca’s play on the name Andromache
would also be obscure for a Roman audience? First we have to allow for Varro’s
prejudice: he is writing about the Latin language, and is happy to explain all
kind of Latin linguistic oddities in Accius and Ennius, but disapproves of this
Greek name-play. Second, Seneca’s play on the name Andromache does not de-
mand that the audience should grasp it, unlike Ennius’ challenging approach:
the Senecan line makes sense without the name-play, but is given an extra di-
mension for those who do grasp it. Third, Latin literature has become more so-
phisticated since Varro’s day, and in particular the educated public has become
sensitized to etymological plays, primarily through Vergil. In fact Vergil himself
plays on the name Andromache at Aeneid 3.297 et patrio Andromachen iterum
cessisse marito. The issue here, as in Seneca, is Andromache’s man/husband
after Hector: in Seneca she is assigned to the Greek Pyrrhus, but in Vergil Aeneas
learns that she has “passed once more to a husband of her own nationality.” The
verb cedere has a legal sense here, ‘to pass as property’ (OLD s.v. cedo 15), but
the root sense is of course ‘to yield’, which sets up a play e contrario with
“she who fights with her man.” Here again the Senecan passage and the Vergi-
lian passage speak to each other.¹⁵
Another kind of connection between a character and a speaking name is a
thematic link. Seneca’s Phaedra contains such a link between Phaedra and her
name, which means ‘the bright one,’ φαιδρά. The link is present in the opening
words of her Nurse, Thesea coniunx, clara progenies Iouis, “Wife of Theseus,
bright/illustrious progeny of Jove” (129). Her brightness or brilliance is related
to the fact that, in addition to being a grandchild of Jove through her father,
she is also a grandchild of the Sun through her mother; later she appeals to
this ancestry, to the coruscum lucis aetheriae iubar, “gleaming rays of heavenly
light” (889). But her passion for Hippolytus has displaced this heavenly bright-
ness with another kind of fire, that of amor; hence, as the Nurse says, her eyes,
which used to manifest Phoebus’ torch, no longer gleam with that ancestral bril-
liance: et qui ferebant signa Phoebeae facis / oculi nihil gentile nec patrium micant
(379 f.).¹⁶ Similarly she discards the gleaming apparel which is part of her brilli-
 Ennius fr.  J = SRP fr.  R; Varro de Lingua Latina ..

 The wordplay in Vergil is recognized by Morland () , followed by Paschalis () 
n. . The cautious O’Hara ()  judges it “perhaps unlikely”, but if he had been aware of
the Senecan parallel, he might have judged differently.
 There is an interplay here with φοῖβος ‘bright’ (see Glossary s.vv. Phoebe, Phoebus), further
emphasizing Phaedra’s inheritance of brilliance.
ance, the purple, the silk, the gold (386 – 403). As Stevens says, “to spurn these is
to flee her very nature,” a nature which is embodied in her name.¹⁷
To what extent do speaking names influence the action of the plays? John
Stevens took a strong line on this: he argued that “Seneca built his tragic
plots around the meaning of the names displayed in his wordplay” (136). I do
not believe that this case can be made. But there is one place where a speaking
name has a close association with the action, and that is in the final act of the
Phaedra. The body of Hippolytus, son of Theseus, has been torn apart as he was
dragged behind his horses. In the final act of the play, his dismembered body is
brought onstage, and his father Theseus sets the body in order, in a fruitless
symbolical attempt to make it whole again. Now the name Theseus sounds as
if it were connected to the root θη-, meaning ‘place, set’, found in the verb τί-
θημι. Vergil had played on this connection in the Georgics, in the phrase Thesidae
posuere (2.383): the sons of Theseus ‘set out’ prizes for dramatic competitions. In
Act 5 of Phaedra, Theseus speaks the verb ponere three times of his own actions:
membra … in ordinem dispone, “set the limbs in order” (1256 f.); hic laeva …
manus ponenda, “here the left hand is to be set” (1259 f.); hic hic repone,
“here, set it here” (1268). It looks, then, as if the name Theseus may have suggest-
ed the dramaturgy of this scene, either to Seneca himself or to a source on which
he is drawing.¹⁸
The World of Death

Play on names is as varied as the dramas themselves, and any attempt to cate-
gorize all the examples would be Procrustean. Given this situation, one strategy
is to take a cross-section, so to speak, through the dramas, and to study the va-
riety of etymological references. The world of death looms large in Senecan trag-
edy: it is described at length in the Hercules; Theseus returns from that world in
Phaedra; the ghosts of Thyestes and Tantalus and Laius emerge from there in
other plays. The topic of the underworld therefore provides a kind of cross-sec-
tion which may be useful.
The regular name for the ruler of the underworld in Seneca is Dis, though he
is occasionally called Pluto. Now dis is also the contracted form of diues ‘weal-
 Stevens () .

 In view of the similarity of this scene to Euripides’ dramaturgy in a now lost passage of the
Bacchae (Dodds on ), and Euripides’ liking for etymological references (O’Hara ()  –
), a possible source is Euripides’ first Hippolytus tragedy, the Kaluptomenos.
320 John G. Fitch
thy’, and an association between Dis and wealth is paralleled by the fact that
Pluto was etymologized from πλοῦτος ‘wealth’.¹⁹ In the tragedies Dis is twice
called “greedy”, Hercules 782 auari Ditis, Agamemnon 752 auidi … Ditis. Biller-
beck, who notes this etymological play at Hercules 782, regards it as “ein poin-
tiertes Oxymoron.” Not necessarily so: the rich may be rich because they are
greedy, and auarus can also mean ‘miserly’, again a characteristic of some weal-
thy individuals. In a further play on Dis as ‘wealthy’, Hercules’ abduction of Cer-
berus from the underworld is twice described as ‘despoiling’ Dis (Hercules Fu-
rens 51 spolia, 833 regem spoliare).²⁰
Another name for the lord of the underworld is Hades, which is sometimes
etymologized from ἀϊδής ‘unseen.’²¹ At Hercules Furens 664 we find the phrase
Ditis inuisi domus; while inuisus regularly means ‘hated’ in Seneca’s plays, the
word in itself also means ‘unseen,’ and the possibility occurred to me that it
might carry both meanings here, with a glance at ἀϊδής. This would be a complex
wordplay, and I might have rejected the possibility if it had not occurred inde-
pendently to my colleague Harry Edinger. Later I noticed that Philip Hardie
had suggested the same double sense of inuisus, ‘hated’ and ‘unseen’ (in
Hades), at Aeneid 9.495 – 6 aut tu, magne pater diuum, miserere, tuoque / inuisum
hoc detrude caput sub Tartara telo (“or else you, great father of the gods, must
pity me, and thrust my hated self down to Tartarus with your thunderbolt”).²²
Another debatable instance from the underworld is Hercules Furens 581
flentes Eurydicen iuridici sedent, “the judges sit weeping for Eurydice.” There
is a close resemblance of sound between Eurydicen and iuridici, which is paral-
lelled by the echoing effect of flentes and sedent. Is there also an etymological
play? A reference to δίκη ‘justice’ would fit the context of the judges seated at
their bench, but it is not clear that ‘wide justice’ is relevant to Eurydice; she is
not herself a judge, in the underworld or elsewhere. Here, then, the play may
be primarily auditory.²³
Among the supernaturals associated with death are the Fates, who spin the
life-threads and shear them off. One of their names is the Parcae, which invites
association with parcere by contraries, i. e. because they spare no-one. This
name-play seems to hover in all three places in the corpus where the name Par-
 Jocelyn on Enn. scenica  J; Paschalis () .

 Noted by Billerbeck () ad .
 Hom. Iliad ., cf. Pl. Gorgias b.
 Hardie () ad loc., cited by O’Hara () .
 Chris Trinacty, to whom I am grateful for discussion of this instance, suggests a play on
εὖρυς ‘wide’ and dicere ‘speak’, etymologising Eurydice as ‘she who is widely spoken of.’ See
n.  on the issue of bilingual name-plays.
cae is used, Hercules Furens 188, 559, Hercules Oetaeus 1097– 8: the last runs nulli
non auidi colus / Parcas stamina nectere, “there is no-one for whom the Parcae
do not spin the greedy distaff’s threads.”²⁴ Other death-figures include the Fur-
ies, one of whose names is the Dirae, the dread ones; that name is not used in
the tragedies, but it is perhaps alluded to in phrases such as Hercules Furens 1221
dira Furiarum loca, “dread haunts of the Furies.”²⁵
The rivers of the underworld are candidates for name-play because their
names in several cases have clear meanings. Lethe, ‘forgetfulness’ (λήθη), is re-
lated to the belief that the dead, after drinking from this river, forget their former
lives. The author of HO plays on this meaning with his phrase immemor Lethe,
“Lethe of oblivion” (936); this is a standard type of etymological reference,
which O’Hara calls “the single-adjective gloss.”²⁶ Seneca himself makes a
more complex reference at Hercules Furens 681 demit curas, Lethe “takes away
cares”; this not only refers to the meaning of the name Lethe but also alludes
to Vergil’s Lethaei ad fluminis undam / securos latices et longa obliuia potant,
“by the current of Lethe River they drink care-dispelling waters and long
oblivion.”²⁷ Another transparent name is Cocytus, related to κωκύω ‘wail, la-
ment’: again HO uses a single-adjective gloss, gementis stagna Cocyti, “the
pools of wailing Cocytus” (1963), and again Seneca is more subtle: he refers to
the swamps of the Cocytus, and then in the next line he has the ‘wailing’ of a
foreboding owl, luctifer bubo gemit (Hercules Furens 686 – 7). A third transparent
name is Phlegethon, the ‘burning’ river (from φλέγω), which yields one reference
with suppression of the proper name (Phaedra 1180 per amnes igneos … sequar,
“I shall follow you through fiery rivers”), as well as two references in which the
 There is also a further contrast here between ‘sparing’ and ‘greedy’; cf. Nisbet and Hubbard
() on Hor. Carmina ...
 Cf. Thyestes  dira Furiarum agmina, “dread troops of Furies,”  dira Furiarum cohors,
“dread band of Furies,” ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus  sequitur dira lampade Erinys, “the Erinys
pursues with her dread torch,”  –  dira … Megaera,  dira Tisiphone. At Octavia  – 
dira cui genetrix facem accendit, referring to Agrippina, the adjective dira perhaps strengthens
her characterization as Fury.
 O’Hara ()  – . Cf. Paschalis (: ) “By far the most common form of etymological
association from the time of Homer is the one in which a name is ‘glossed’ by a word or phrase
of synonymous or opposite sense.” Both O’Hara and Paschalis cite the phrase pluuiasque Hya-
das (Verg. Aeneid ., .), implying a derivation from ὕω ‘to rain’, echoed by Seneca at
Medea .
 Verg. Aeneid . f., taken up by Ov. Epistulae ex Ponto .. securae pocula Lethes,
“drafts of care-freeing Lethe.”
322 John G. Fitch
name is included;²⁸ again there is a precedent for this etymology in Aeneid 6.²⁹
Acheron is less self-evident in meaning, but it was etymologized either from ἄχος
‘grief’ or from α privative and χαίρω ‘rejoice’ (Paschalis 1997: 217– 18); hence
Thyestes 17 maestus Acheron, “sad Acheron,” another single-adjective gloss. Fi-
nally, the most famous of these names, Styx, was associated not only with
στυγερός ‘hated’ but also with στυγνός, which can mean ‘gloomy’: hence per-
haps the reference to “gloomy Styx”, Styga tristem (Agamemnon 607), and to a
“sombre branch from the Stygian stream,” tristis Stygia ramus ab unda (Medea
805).
The Choral Odes

In the choral odes, speaking names again serve various functions; they are as
varied as the odes themselves, and a commentator has to resist any temptation
to corral them into neat categories. I want to concentrate here on just one func-
tion, namely helping to establish a particular atmosphere. In the first ode of
Medea, the Corinthian chorus celebrates the impending marriage of Jason with
the princess Creusa. But the celebratory atmosphere is subverted for the audi-
ence, who know the familiar story of Medea’s revenge, and have heard Medea
plotting revenge in the prologue. The ode begins with invocation of the gods,
and prescription of the animal sacrifices to win their favour for the marriage:
Lucinam niuei femina corporis

intemptata iugo placet. (61– 2)
“Let a female of snow-white body, untried by the yoke, appease Lucina.”
The name Lucina suggests lux ‘light’, as the goddess of childbirth who brings
children into the light; nivei plays on this derivation, and both words reflect
the chorus’ desire to create a bright, well-omened, positive atmosphere.³⁰ But
the rest of the language undercuts it: femina, overtly referring to a heifer, sug-
 Phaedra  Phlegethon nocentes igneo cingens uado, “Phlegethon encircling the guilty
with its fiery stream”; Thyestes  –  alueo medius tuo, / Phlegethon, relinquar igneo cinctus
vado, “let me be left amidst your channel, Phlegethon, encircled by your fiery stream.”
 Verg. Aeneid . f. flammis … torrentibus amnis, / Tartareus Phlegethon, “the river with its
burning flames, Tartarean Phlegethon.”
 There is another play on Lucina and light at Agamemnon  –  tu maternam sistere Delon, /
Lucina, iubes, “you bade your mother’s isle of Delos stand firm, Lucina”: see the Index below s.v.
Delos. The context is again a celebratory ode.
gests also a human female, a woman; niuei corporis hints at the amatory lan-
guage applied to a young attractive woman; intemptata iugo suggests an unmar-
ried woman, through the familiar metaphor of the yoke of marriage. As Hine
rightly comments, the personification of this victim suggests that “the unmarried
heifer is Creusa … So the Chorus’s prayers foreshadow their own futility.”³¹
By the third ode the atmosphere has darkened further, and the chorus have
lost any optimism. No violence of fire or wind, they say, matches the potential
violence of a spurned wife, i. e. Medea:
Non ubi hibernos nebulosus imbres

Auster aduexit, properatque torrens
Hister et iunctos uetat esse pontes (583 – 5)
“not when the cloudy south wind brings the rains of winter, and the river Hister rushes in
spate and forbids bridges to remain joined.”
Hine points out that the name Hister can be etymologized as ‘stopper’, from
ἵστημι ‘to make to stand or stop’, and he comments that Seneca “exploits the par-
adox of a swift river being so called.”³² I would suggest a similar paradox in the
case of Auster. Tarrant notes that Auster is a “remarkably protean wind in Latin
poetry:” at times it is hot and dry, at other times wet.³³ This reflects the climatic
reality of winds from the south in Italy; blowing from the Sahara, they can be dry
and sandy (as in the harmattan), or they can pick up moisture from the
Mediterranean.³⁴ The drying aspect of Auster is underlined by an auditory asso-
ciation with αὖος ‘dry.’³⁵ So we have another paradox here, of a potentially dry-
ing wind bringing the rains of winter. The double paradox is underlined by the
fact that Auster and Hister occupy the same position in the line, and by the sim-
ilarity of sound. The effect, however, is not simply one of paradox, but also a sug-
gestion of something disordered and chaotic in nature itself: what should be a
‘stopper’ is rushing, what should or could be a ‘dryer’ brings rainstorms. Yet nei-
 Hine () ad .

 Hine () ad . Cf. (again e contrario) Thyestes  f. Hister fugam / praebens Alanis,
“the Hister offering escape to the Alani”, and (not e contrario) Medea  f. Hister … compressit
undas, “the Hister … constrained its waters”, noted by Hine () ad loc.; also Phaedra  et
quae stanti ludit in Histro, “and the one that frolics on the still Hister”.
 Tarrant () ad Agamemnon .
 The sirocco is an “often dusty or rainy wind blowing from North Africa across the Mediter-
ranean to southern Europe” (OED s.v. sirocco).
 See O’Hara () , who records that W.F.J. Knight noticed a name-play e contrario in
Verg. Georgics . umidus Auster; note the similar phrase pluuio … Austro Sen. Agamemnon
, and the play at ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus  Austrum madentem siccat.
324 John G. Fitch
ther of these ominous forces, according to the chorus, is as dangerous as Medea

herself.
After the references to the Auster and the river Hister, Seneca turns to Mt
Haemus in Thrace:
non … ubi in riuos niuibus solutis

sole iam forti medioque uere
tabuit Haemus (587– 90)
“not … when, with its snows melted into streams, with the sun now strong in mid-spring,
Haemus seeps.”
Harry Hine notices a play on αἷμα ‘blood’ and tabuit: “the corresponding noun
tabes often refers to blood and other fluids oozing from wounds.³⁶ The imagery
has connotations of death.” This play on Haemus recalls one of the best known
of all name-plays in Latin, that at Vergil Georgics 1.491 f. nec fuit indignum superis
bis sanguine nostro / Emathiam et latos Haemi pinguescere campos, “and the
gods did not find it unworthy that Emathia and the broad fields of Haemus
should twice grow rich with our blood.”³⁷ But notice how much further Seneca
takes things: in Vergil the fields are enriched by blood, which is literally true
even if magnified in extent; in Seneca the mountain becomes a living being ooz-
ing blood, a macabre and surreal and very Senecan moment.³⁸ These three ety-
mological references – the drying wind bringing rain, the stopping river in spate,
the mountain oozing blood – all underline the chaotic and destructive forces of
nature, and therefore the even greater violent potential of Medea.³⁹
The discussion of the name Auster above requires a codicil. The double as-
pect of the south wind, at times drying and at times wet, casts light on a puzzling
passage in Agamemnon, where the various winds contribute to the superstorm
that wrecks the Greek fleet:
Strymonius altas Aquilo contorquet niues

Libycusque harenas Auster ac Syrtes agit;
 Hine () ad Medea , cf. .

 O’Hara () , cf. Paschalis () .
 Compare the surreal effect at Hercules Furens  f., where the thickets famous for Pentheus’
murder are reddened once more by the dawn light (see Fitch () ad loc.) – an image that
undercuts the seemingly idyllic atmosphere of the opening ode (cf. my comments on Medea
 above).
 On Medea as aligned in this play with nature’s forces, see my brief comments at Fitch ()
. By contrast the Argonauts are at odds with nature, by breaking the limits built into the nat-
ural world, the foedera mundi (Medea , ).
nec manet in Austro, fit grauis nimbis Notus,

imbre auget undas. (479 – 82)
The north wind Aquilo brings snow, the south wind as Auster brings sand and
then as Notus brings rain. Now the name Notus was etymologized from νοτίς,
‘moisture.’⁴⁰
It appears, then, that the passage contains a double etymological play: the
south wind in its drying aspect is Auster, and in its wetting aspect is Notus.
Line 481 therefore means, “and it does not remain in the form of Auster [the dry-
ing wind], it becomes Notus [the wetting wind] heavy with rainclouds.” (For in
meaning ‘as, in the form of’ v. OLD s.v. in 43, citing, inter alia, Ov. Metamorphoses
2.362 nostrum laceratur in arbore corpus, Plin. Naturalis Historia 34.79 aquilam
sentientem, quid rapiat in Ganymede.) Since this interpretation restores sense
in 481, I would now retain the line rather than deleting it.⁴¹ The passage as a
whole seems to constitute an etymological display: Aquilo contorquet niues
(479) plays on aquilus ‘dark’ in contrast to snow, while the following Eurus …
quatiens … Eoos sinus (482– 3) plays on the supposed derivation of Eurus from
Ἠῷος ‘of the Dawn’ (see Glossary below).
Conclusion: The Question of Doctrina

The use and variety of etymological name-play in Seneca’s dramas manifests a
high level of linguistic skill and wit. The richness of such play in Seneca is a fea-
ture that has not been well appreciated until recently, and it needs to be taken
into account as critics continue to reassess his poetics. Ideally, however, it
would need to be studied within the broader issue of the presence of all kinds
of wordplays in his work.
How learned are Seneca’s name-plays? The term ‘learned’ in this context is
loaded: it implies a deliberately recherché, Alexandrian kind of learnedness. Cer-
tainly Seneca can do the Alexandrian thing on occasion. One example will illus-
trate. At Troades 856 Seneca refers an island called Neritos near Ithaca, and de-
scribes it as parua breuior Zacyntho, “smaller than little Zacynthos.” Now the
adjective νήριτος is rare, and its meaning was already obscure in antiquity,
 Gel. .. Graece Νότος nominatur, quoniam est nebulosus atque umectus; νοτίς enim
Graece umor nominatur. See Michalopoulos ()  and O’Hara () .
 Tarrant placed daggers around the words nec manet in austro fit in line . Other editors
have deleted the whole line, followed (alas) by myself in the Loeb edition ( – ).
326 John G. Fitch
but the scholiasts explained it as meaning ‘large, immense, countless’. Vergil is

thought to glance at this meaning of the adjective when he describes Neritos as
ardua saxis, “towering with its cliffs.”⁴² So Seneca is being playfully learned, in
the Alexandrian fashion, in calling Neritos a teeny little island. But that example
of arcane doctrina is exceptional; most name-plays in Seneca are more like Her-
cules as the glory of Hera, or Haemus as a place of blood, i. e. not particularly
demanding for an audience culturally attuned to recognising such allusions.
The more educated members of the audience would have had long passages
of Greek and Latin poetry by heart; they would been trained from childhood
in this literary tradition in which such name-plays are a familiar feature.⁴³
It is also relevant that Seneca’s name-plays are in general less overt than Ver-
gil’s. Vergil not infrequently uses what O’Hara calls “naming constructions”
(75 – 9) to call attention to a name-play, e. g. Aeneid 7.412 magnum manet Ardea
nomen, “and now the mighty name of Ardea remains” (playing on arduus).
Such signposts are less common in Seneca. (There are only five overt etymolo-
gies, signaled by use of the word nomen, four of them occurring in choral
odes.)⁴⁴ In part this reflects a difference in genre: naming constructions are
more appropriate to the omniscient voice of an epic narrator than to the voice
of a particular dramatis persona. The infrequency of such naming constructions
in Seneca, however, means that name-plays are less challenging for the audience
than Vergil’s, in the sense that audience members are not required to perceive
and understand any particular name-play.
The question of the audience is clearly relevant here. After all, a poet may be
as learned as he wishes, but if his learning is so obscure as to be exclusionary, to
exclude the audience, he will not be read – the fate of Lycophron and Euphorion.
But Seneca’s doctrina does not work in that way. Here I would invoke the notion
of levels of meaning, and levels of audience appreciation. Presumably some
members of Seneca’s original audiences would not have registered his name-
plays at all. This is not necessarily a failure on the part of these listeners, or
 Aeneid .. See O’Hara ()  – . In this context it is worth noting that Vergil’s doc-
trina extends as far as etymological plays with languages other than Latin and Greek (O’Hara
()  – ), not a feature of Senecan name-plays.
 Roland Mayer in his paper ‘Doctus Seneca’ () argued that Seneca not infrequently dis-
plays doctrina by alluding to obscure versions of myths. But versions that seem arcane to us
need not have appeared so to educated Romans, exposed as they were to countless visual rep-
resentations of myth, as well as literary versions of which the great majority do not now survive.
When Mayer calls a particular version of a myth the “only example in Latin literature” (), he
means the only extant example, which is a different matter.
 See the Glossary of Etymological Name-Plays under Baetica, Boeotia, Icarium mare, Myrtoan
Sea, and Oedipus.
of the poet: the great majority of examples in Seneca do not demand to be rec-
ognised, for the text makes perfectly good sense without, as we noted earlier in
the case of Andromache.⁴⁵ But any particular wordplay would have been recog-
nised by a portion of the audience, and for that portion of the audience there
would have been the pleasure of wit, combined with the pleasure of active in-
volvement, of creating or recreating the connection between the name and the
punning phrase. Finally, some of these audience members would also perceive
the relationship of a particular name-play to earlier plays on the same name
in the literary tradition, to passages in Vergil or Ovid or Homer or Greek tragedy.
These audience members would constitute the ideal audience, so to speak, for
the dramas. They would be actively involved in constituting not only the
name-play itself but also its relationship to the literary tradition, and this
would contribute to their appreciation of the rich and complex texture of the
dramas.
Glossary of Etymological Name-Plays

Acheron. ἄχος ‘grief’, or ἀ- ‘not’ and χαίρω ‘rejoice’: Thyestes 17 maestus Acheron. Discussed in
Section 3.
Aethiopes. αἴθω ‘burn’ and ὤψ ‘face’: Hercules Furens 38 binos propinqua tinguit Aethiopas face.
Noted by Fitch (1987) ad loc.; see Michalopoulos (2001) 21.
Aetna. αἴθω ‘burn’: Hercules Furens 106 qui caminis ignis Aetnaeis furit, Medea 410 tantis Aetna
feruebit minis, Phaedra 102, 190, Thyestes 583, ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 286, 1157.
Alcides. ἀλκή ‘strength, courage’: Hercules Furens 186 – 87 nimium, Alcide, pectore forti / prop-
eras maestos uisere manes. Paschalis (1997) 289 n. 89.
Amazon. μαζός ‘breast’: Hercules Furens 545 niuei uincula pectoris. Vergil plays on this etymol-
ogy at Aeneid 1.492 aurea subnectens exsertae cingula mammae and 11.649 unum exserta latus
pugnae: Paschalis (1997) 377.
Andromache. ἀνδρ- ‘man’ and μάχη ‘fight’: Troades 804 seruire Graio pateris Andromachen uiro.
Cf. Verg. Aeneid 3.297 et patrio Andromachen iterum cessisse marito. Discussed in Section 2.
Antigone. ἀντί ‘in return, in recompense’ and γονή ‘birth, begetting’: Phoenissae 2– 3, quam
tanti est mihi / genuisse, discussed in Section 2.
Aquilo. Aquilus ‘dark’: Agamemnon 479 Aquilo contorquet niues, ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 778
niuosi … Aquilonis (both e contrario). Cf. Verg. Georgics 1.460 et claro siluas cernes Aquilone
moueri (similarly e contrario), Aeneid 5.2 fluctusque atros Aquilone secabat: O’Hara (1996) 159,
265.
 The only instances that require the audience to make a connection are the overt etymologies
listed in the previous footnote. Three of these have Ovidian precedents (details in the Glossary);
of the others, the name Baetica is not difficult to supply from Baetis, and Oedipus ‘swollen-foot’
is one of the most familiar of ancient etymologies.
328 John G. Fitch
Araxes. ἀράσσω ‘shatter’: Oedipus 428 frangit Araxen. Noted by Farnaby ad loc. and Boyle (2011)
215. For a different exploitation of this etymology note Verg. Aeneid 8.728 pontem indignatus Ara-
xes: O’Hara (1996) 216 – 17.
Arctophylax. Thyestes 873 custos plays on φύλαξ ‘guard’, the second half of the name. Noted by
Tarrant (1976) ad loc.
Argo. At Medea 349 ipsaque vocem perdidit Argo, the reference to the ship’s voice hints at a play
on argutus ‘clear-voiced.’ For a Latin word played off a Greek, cf. Cassandra below. For etymol-
ogies of Argo see O’Hara (1996) 52.
Astraea, from ἀστραῖος ‘starry’: ps-Sen. Octavia 424 Astraea uirgo, siderum magnum decus.
Astyanax. ἄστυ ‘town’ and ἄναξ ‘lord’: Andromache in Troades 771– 82 laments that he will
never play the role embodied in his name. The etymology goes back to Homer: O’Hara (1996) 10.
Atlas. *τλάω ‘bear, endure’: ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 12 non poterit Atlas ferre cum caelo Hercu-
lem?, 1599 passus an pondus titubauit Atlas? For the etymology cf. Verg. Aeneid 4.247 Atlantis
duri, Ov. Metamorphoses 2.296 – 7 Atlans en ipse laborat / uixque suis umeris candantem sustinet
axem: Michalopoulos (2001) 38 – 39; Paschalis (1997) 158; O’Hara (1996) 64. The passages in Ovid
and Hercules Oetaeus perhaps play on the initial α as privative, i. e. Atlas cannot ‘endure’.
Atreus. ἄτρεστος ‘fearless’: Thyestes 486 Atrea timendum, 704 immotus Atreus. ⁴⁶ Fitch and McEl-
duff (2002) 26 n. 24, Stevens (2002) 149.
Auster. αὖος ‘dry’: Medea 583 f. non ubi hibernos nebulosus imbres / Auster aduexit (e contrario),
Agamemnon 480 f. Libycusque harenas Auster ac Syrtes agit, / nec manet in Austro, fit grauis nim-
bis Notus. Discussed in Section 4.
Baetica. Named for River Baetis: Medea 726 nomenque terris qui dedit Baetis suis, an overt ety-
mology, but with suppression of the name Baetica.
Boeotia. βοῦς and bos, ‘cow’: Oedipus 718 – 23, an overt etymology (but with suppression). The
etymology is also explicit (or virtually so) at Ov. Metamorphoses 3.10 – 13: v. Michalopoulos
(2001) 43.
Bootes. βοώτης ‘ploughman’: Medea 314 f. flectitque … plaustra Bootes, Agamemnon 70 uersat
plaustra Bootes, ps-Sen. Octavia 233 – 34 plaustra .. regit Bootes.
Calchas. χαλάω ‘slacken’: Troades 353 Pelasgae uincla soluisti rati, noted by Stevens (2002) 135.
Stevens notes also καλχαίνω ‘ponder,’ in reference to Troades 354– 7.
Calliope. κάλλος ‘beauty’ and ὄψ ‘voice’: Medea 625 uocali … Camena, a single-adjective gloss
with suppression of the name.
Cassandra. Cassus ‘ineffectual’: Troades 37 uana uates ante Cassandram fui. Paschalis (1997) 84
notes Verg. Aeneid 2.405 of Cassandra ad caelum tendens ardentia lumina frustra. If correct, this
would play a Latin word off a Greek, i. e. it would not suggest a Greek etymology.
Charybdis. Cf. ἀναρροιβδέω (ἀναρρυβδέω) ‘swallow, suck down’: Medea 408 Charybdis … mare
… sorbens, Thyestes 581 f. mare … quod rapax haustum reuomit Charybdis. Sorbere is similarly
used of Charybdis at Verg. Aeneid 3.422: Paschalis (1997) 136.
Clotho. κλώθω ‘spin’: ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 768 f. colos / Clotho manu proiecit, Octavia 15
mea rupisset stamina Clotho.
Clytemnestra. κλυτός ‘famous’: Agamemnon 125 inclitum Ledae genus, discussed in Section 2.
Stevens (2002) 139 – 41 suggests also a play on μη- ‘cunning’ at Agamemnon 116 evolve femineos
dolos.
 Sarah McCallum points out that the play at Thyestes  is strengthened by the presence of
other lexical items connoting ‘fear’ in lines  –  (times, timori, metuo, times).
Cocytus. κωκύω ‘wail, lament’: Hercules Furens 686 – 7 luctifer bubo gemit, ps-Sen. Hercules Oe-
taeus 1963 gementis stagna Cocyti. Discussed in Section 3.
Creon. κρείων ‘ruler’: Medea 143 sceptro impotens, 178 tumidus imperio (cf. 177 regius cardo), 460
regius … gener. Perhaps also Oedipus 687– 8 solutus onere regio regni bonis / fruor.
Cyclas. κυκλόω ‘move in circles’: Agamemnon 371 f. errantem / Cyclada (cf. Verg. Aeneid 3.76 er-
rantem, also of Delos); Thyestes 595 Cyclades … motae with Tarrant (1976) ad loc.
Cycnus. From κύκνος ‘swan’: Troades 183 cana nitentem … iuuenem coma (with suppression of
name), Agamemnon 215 niuea proles Cycnus.
Daedalus. δαιδάλλω ‘work cunningly’: Oedipus 899 f. callidus … Daedalus, a single-adjective
gloss.
Deianira. δηιόω ‘kill’ and ἀνήρ ‘man’: ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 440 perimes uirum.
Delos. δῆλος ‘clearly seen’: Agamemnon 368 – 9 tu maternam sistere Delon, / Lucina, iubes, an
interplay with Lucina. Callimachus too connects the island’s name with its becoming fixed
and easily seen, no longer wandering and obscure (Hymn 4.51– 4). Verg. Aeneid 6.12 Delius inspir-
it uates aperitque futura hints at a connection between the name and ‘clear’ oracular responses:
O’Hara (1996) 165 – 6, Paschalis (1997) 210.
Dirae. Dirus ‘dread.’ Discussed in Section 3.
Dis. Dis/diues ‘wealthy.’ Discussed in Section 3.
Dryads. δρῦς ‘tree, oak’: Phaedra 783 nemorum deae, with suppression of the name; ps-Sen. Her-
cules Oetaeus 1052 f. quercum fugiens suam … Dryas.
Eurus. Ἠῷος ‘of the Dawn’: Agamemnon 482 f. Eurus … quatiens … Eoos sinus. Michalopoulos
77– 8 cites, inter alia, Verg. Aeneid 2.417 f. laetus Eois / Eurus equis, Stat. Thebaid 2.379 Eoos …
Euros.
Eurybates, cf. εὐρύς ‘wide’ and βαίνω ‘walk’: Agamemnon 388 uasto concitus miles gradu (with
the name postponed to 391). Noted by Stevens (2002) 126.
Eurydice. Perhaps playing on δίκη ‘justice.’ Discussed in Section 3.
Fama. Fari ‘speak’: Hercules Furens 194 Fama … garrula, a single-adjective gloss.
Haemus. αἷμα ‘blood’: Medea 590 tabuit Haemus. Discussed in Section 4.
Hector. ἔχω ‘hold.’ In the sense ‘sustain,’ Troades 124– 29, cf. Hom. Iliad 5.473 φῆς που ἄτερ
λαῶν πόλιν ἑξέμεν. In the sense ‘hold back’ (LSJ s.v. ἔχω A9 – 10), Troades 124 mora fatorum,
Agamemnon 211. In the sense ‘have’, Troades 132 satis Hector habet. ⁴⁷
Helena. ἑλεῖν ‘take, destroy’: Troades 861– 63 quicumque hymen … lamenta caedes sanguinem
gemitus habet / est auspice Helena dignus: the name Helen is itself an evil auspice. Cf. the ex-
plicit connection of her name with ἑλεῖν at Aesch. Agamemnon 681– 90.
Hercules/Herakles. Ἥρα and κλέος, ‘glory of Hera’: Hercules Furens 36 gloriae feci locum. Dis-
cussed in Section 2.
Hippolytus. ἵππος ‘horse’ and λύω ‘loose’: Phaedra 1055 Hippolytus … continet … equos (e con-
trario). On the other hand, Phaedra 1106 distractus Hippolytus is borrowed from Verg. Aeneid
7.767 distractus equis (a play on ‘loosened by horses’), and is part of an interpolated couplet:
Fitch (2002) 312.
Hister. ἵστημι ‘to make to stand or stop’: Medea 584 f., 763 f., Phaedra 59, Thyestes 629 f., dis-
 This last play (Troades ) was pointed out to me by Sarah McCallum.
330 John G. Fitch
Hyades. ὕω ‘rain’: Medea 311 pluuias Hyadas, a single-adjective gloss found at Verg. Aeneid
1.744 = 3.516. See Nisbet & Hubbard (1978) on Hor. Carmina 1.3.14, Michalopoulos (2001)
94– 5, O’Hara (1996) 130 – 1.
Icarium mare. From Icarus: Oedipus 898 nomen eripuit freto, ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 690 dedit
ignoto nomina ponto; both overt etymologies, with suppression in Oedipus. Noted by Boyle (2011)
315. Precedents include Hor. Carmina 4.2.3 – 4 uitreo daturus nomina ponto, Ov. Metamorphoses
8.230 aqua quae nomen traxit ab illo: Töchterle (1994) 574.
Ida. From ἰδεῖν ‘to see’: Troades 1049 celsa cum longe latitabit Ide, Agamemnon 457 et dubia pa-
rent montis Idaei iuga, both e contrario. Cf. Verg. Aeneid 2.801 iamque iugis summae surgebat Lu-
cifer Idae: Paschalis (1997) 94– 95. From ἴδη ‘timber-tree’: Agamemnon 730 Idaea cerno nemora:
Paschalis (1997) 94.
Idmon. ἴδμων ‘knowing: Medea 652 Idmonem, quamuis sua fata nosset, noted by Hine (2000) ad
loc.
Lethe. λήθη ‘forgetfulness’: Hercules Furens 681 demit curas (cf. Verg. Aeneid 6.714 f., Ov. Epistu-
lae ex Ponto 2.4.23), ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 936 immemor Lethe. Discussed in Section 3.
Leucate. λευκός ‘white’: Phaedra 1014 cana … spuma Leucaten ferit (cf. ps-Sen. Hercules Oetaeus
732 f. Leucas … spumat). For other references to Leucate and whiteness see O’Hara (1996) 141 on
Verg. Aeneid 3.274 Leucatae nimbosa cacumina montis; O’Hara suggests the clouds here connote
whiteness, whereas Paschalis (1997) 131 thinks they are dark e contrario.
Lucina. Lux ‘light’: Medea 61 f. Lucinam niuei femina corporis / … placet, Agamemnon 368 f. tu
maternam sistere Delon, / Lucina, iubes. Discussed in Section 4.
Maenas. μαίνομαι ‘be mad’: Medea 383 recepto Maenas insanit deo, Troades 673 – 4 deo / percus-
sa Maenas entheo … gradu.
Manto. μάντις ‘prophet’: Agamemnon 319 praescia Manto, a single-adjective gloss.
Medea. μήδομαι ‘plan cunningly,’ μῆτις ‘cunning intelligence’: Medea 910 Medea nunc sum:
creuit ingenium malis. Fitch and McElduff (2002) 26; Stevens (2002) 148; O’Hara (1996) 29.
Megara. μέγας ‘big’ (e contrario): Hercules Furens 203 Megara paruum comitata gregem, at stage-
entry. Noted by Stevens (2002) 135. At Hercules Furens 359 – 60 O clarum trahens / a stirpe nomen
regia Lycus may mean simply that her name is distinguished as a result of her royal descent;
however, the phrase has the ring of a ‘naming construction’ (cf. Ov. Metamorphoses 4.291,
8.230, 10.223) and may suggest that her name is derived from μέγας.
Menelaus. μένω ‘await’: Troades 923 f. ista Menelaum manent / arbitria: a play on one half of the
name only.
Myrtoan Sea. From Myrtilus: Thyestes 140 – 42, an overt etymology. For this derivation Tarrant
ad loc. cites ps-Apollod. Epitome 2.8, Ov. Epistulae (Heroides) 16.209 – 10.
Neritos. νήριτος, apparently meaning ‘large’: Troades 856, discussed in Section 5.
Oceano. ὠκύς ‘swift’: Hercules Furens 238 ruenti … Oceano. Paschalis 1997: 55 cites, inter alia,
Verg. Aeneid 2.250 ruit Oceano nox.
Oedipus, Oedipodes. From οἰδέω ‘swell’ and ποῦς ‘foot’: Oedipus 813 tumore nactus nomen ac
uitio pedum, an overt etymology with suppression of name. From οἶδα ‘know’: Oedipus 216 am-
bigua soli noscere Oedipodae datur. Fitch and McElduff (2002) 26; Stevens (2002) 132; Töchterle
(1994) 265; Boyle (2011) 169.
Ophiuchus. ὄφις ‘serpent’ and ἔχω ‘hold’: Medea 698 pressas … soluat Ophiuchus manus.
O’Hara (1996) 48 notes, in Cicero’s translation of Aratus, hic pressu duplici palmarum continet
Anguem.
Pallas. πάλλω ‘shake,’ especially a missile: Agamemnon 536 Pallas [fulmen] excussit manu, ps-
Sen. Hercules Oetaeus 1315 f. cuspidem … iaculare, Pallas. Paschalis (1997) 36 notes this etymol-
ogy, and cites Verg. Aeneid 1.42 ipsa Iouis rapidum iaculata e nubibus ignem, again of Pallas’ at-
tack on Ajax and the Greek fleet.
Pallene. πάλλω ‘shake’: Hercules Furens 979 Pallene tremit.
Parcae. Parcere ‘spare’ e contrario (they spare no-one): Hercules Furens 188 – 90, 559, ps-Sen.
Hercules Oetaeus 1097 f. nulli non auidi colus / Parcas stamina nectere. Discussed in Section 3.
Pergama. γάμος ‘marriage.’ Troades 889 f. flagrant strata passim Pergama; / o coniugale tempus!
Discussed in Section 1.
Phaedra. φαιδρά ‘bright’: Phaedra 129, 379 – 80, discussed in Section 2.
Phaethon. φαέθω ‘shine’: Medea 601– 02 quos polo sparsit furiosus ignes / ipse recepit (with
suppression of name), 826 – 7 fulgura flammae / de … Phaethonte tuli.
Phlegethon. φλέγω ‘burn’: Phaedra 1180, 1227, Thyestes 72– 73, cf. Verg. Aeneid 6.550 – 1. Dis-
Phoebe. φοίβη ‘bright’: Agamemnon 818 candida Phoebe, a single-adjective gloss; Phaedra 309
dea clara, a single-adjective gloss with suppression of the name.
Phoebus. φοῖβος ‘bright’: Medea 298 clarum priusquam Phoebus attollat diem, cf. e. g. Hercules
Furens 940 f. Phoebus obscuro meat / … uultus (e contrario), Phaedra 800 Phoebo colla licet splen-
dida compares, Agamemnon 463 nitidum cadentis inquinat Phoebi iubar. O’Hara (1996) 216 notes
Verg. Aeneid 8.720 niueo candentis limine Phoebi.
Phorbas. φορβάς (φέρβω) ‘feeding, pasturing’: Oedipus 839 f. arbitria sub quo regii fuerant gre-
gis, / Phorbas. Noted by Boyle (2011) 303.
Phryges, Phrygius. φρύγω ‘roast’: Troades 29 cineres … Phrygum, Agamemnon 189 amore Phry-
giae uatis incensus, 705 f. tot illa regum mater et regimen Phrygum, / fecunda in ignes Hecuba. For
the association of ‘Phrygian’ with ‘burning’ in Vergil, v. Paschalis (1997) 307 n. 12.
Pirithous. πειρ- ‘attempt’: Phaedra 94 audacis proci (with suppression). Discussed in Section 2.
Pleiades. πλείονες ‘more, a throng’: Medea 96 densi latitant Pleiadum greges. Maltby (1991) 480,
Hine (2000) 127.
Scylla. Cf. σκύλαξ ‘puppy’: Medea 350 f. uirgo … rabidos utero succincta canes, with suppression
of her name. The play is familiar in Latin poetry, v. Michalopoulos (2001) 157– 58, O’Hara (1996)
248 – 9.
Sigeon. σιγή ‘silence’: Agamemnon 436 relicti sola Sigei loca. For this etymology of Sigeon see
Paschalis (1997) 197 n. 120.
Spartoi. σπαρτός ‘sown’: Oedipus 588 dente Dircaeo satae, 739 dignaque iacto semine proles.
Sphinx. σφίγγω ‘bind’: Oedipus 101 f. nodosa sortis uerba et implexos dolos … alitis ferae, with
suppression; 641 magisque monstrum Sphinge perplexum sua. Noted by Stevens (2002) 142.
Styx. στυγνός ‘gloomy’: Agamemnon 607 Styga tristem, Medea 805 tristis Stygia ramus ab unda.
Discussed in Section 3.
Syrtes. σύρω ‘sweep along’ (LSJ s.v. σύρω 2): Agamemnon 64 f. Syrtibus aequor / furit alternos
uoluere fluctus.
Tempe. τέμνειν ‘cut’: Hercules Furens 285 f. scissa … Tempe.
Theseus. *θη-, meaning ‘place, set’ (τίθημι): discussed in Section 2.
Thyestes. At Agamemnon 27 uiscera exedi mea Stevens (2002) 138 suggests a play on θύω ‘sac-
rifice’ and ἐσθίω ‘eat’; uiscera could suggest sacrificial entrails.
Trachin. τραχύς ‘rough’: Troades 818 lapidosa Trachin, a single-adjective gloss; the play noted
by Fantham (1982) ad loc. and Boyle (1994) ad loc.
Virginia. uirgo ‘virgin’: ps-Sen. Octavia 296 uirgo dextra caesa parentis (with suppression of
name).
332 John G. Fitch
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Michèle Lowrie
Civil War, the Soul, and the Cosmos at
Seneca, Thyestes 547 – 622: A Tropology
Summary: When the chorus in the Thyestes calls the conflict between Atreus and
Thyestes bellum ciuile (“civil war,” 562), Roman notes jar us into searching for
local resonances. Instead of looking for pointed messages to Nero, I situate
the ode within the developing field of Roman political thought. Seneca here
folds civil war into a larger discursive progression: from disturbance within
the soul on a micro level, through divisive conflict within the family and the
state, to disturbance within the cosmos on a macro level. After this progression
from sphere to sphere, the chorus depicts the hierarchy within the social and re-
ligious order that is meant to guarantee the peace and overlays it with a warning
against a tranquility of spirit grounded in false hopes. This one choral ode offers
a microcosm of overlapping tropes that inform Roman thinking about politics by
presenting internal dissension as a threat to security at all levels. Civil war is a
political category, but its integration into a larger discourse connecting inwards
to psychology and outwards to the organization of the universe is representative
of Roman political thought in both substance and form.
Keywords: Seneca; Thyestes; civil war; soul; cosmos; trope; Roman political
thought; metaphorology
Even absolute metaphors therefore have a history. They have a history in a more radical
sense than concepts, for the historical transformation of a metaphor brings to light the met-
akinetics of the historical horizons of meaning and ways of seeing within which concepts
undergo their modifications. Through this implicative connection, the relationship of meta-
phorology to the history of concepts (in the narrower, terminological sense) is defined as an
ancillary one: metaphorology seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the un-
derground, the nutrient solution of systematic crystallizations; but it also aims to show with
what ‘courage’ the mind preempts itself in its images, and how its history is projected in the
courage of its conjectures.
Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology 5
When the chorus in the Thyestes calls the conflict between Atreus and
Thyestes bellum ciuile (“civil war,” 562), Roman discord colors the Greek
myth.¹ Shortly thereafter, their portrait of a generalized leader paints him
 Roman categories stand out all the more in the voice of ostensibly Argive citizens. On the
334 Michèle Lowrie
in the guise of the Roman Emperor.² Such Roman notes jar us into searching
for local resonances. Are they a hint to allegorize Seneca’s tragedy as a com-
mentary on contemporary politics? An unanswered conundrum is how far to
read this play as a pointed message to Nero. ³ I will make a different argu-
ment, less ambitious and historicizing with regard to any allegorical mes-
sage about or to the emperor, but broader within the scope of the Roman po-
litical thought, which is developing as a distinct and historically grounded
field within political theory and conceptual history.⁴
The choral ode as a whole folds civil war into a larger discursive progres-
sion of metaphorical homologies across spheres: from disturbance within
the soul on a micro level, through divisive conflict within the family and
the state, to disturbance within the cosmos on a macro level. ⁵ After this pro-
gression from sphere to sphere, the chorus depicts the hierarchy within the
social and religious order that is meant to guarantee the peace and overlays
it with a warning against a tranquility of spirit grounded in false hopes. This
one choral ode brings together in dense compass, but with great clarity,
Roman conceptions of how order and disorder stretch from soul to family,
to city and empire, and on to the world.⁶ It offers a microcosm of overlapping
chorus’ identity, see Davis () . Schiesaro ()  emphasizes their impersonality
(other bibliography at n. ).
 Tarrant ()  underscores the play’s “patently Roman context”; also at lines  – .
 Tarrant ()  acknowledges Seneca’s “first-hand observation of absolute power” and sug-
gests that his depiction of Caligula in the De ira in terms similar to Atreus here could serve as a
negative exemplum to the young Nero, but warns that any allegory would have to be well con-
cealed. Schiesaro ()  –  entertains how the play’s meaning would change according to
various possible performance venues, but dismisses a political reading before the play’s more
universal psychological power.
 Hammer (). See also n.  below.
 Ahl ()  begins his article on politics and power in Roman poetry by giving civil war
pride of place: conflict over its meaning exercised poets long afterwards. I would add the choral
ode in Seneca’s Thyestes to this claim, not in the sense of staking out an interpretation of the
civil wars, but in thinking about civil war more abstractly. Ahl targets the struggle’s ideological
nature: “Because the Roman civil war is a more than military struggle, and the attempt to control
the way people think more intense than the effort to control their bodies, poets belong on the
front lines with the soldiers and the generals” (). His comment could be extended to conflict
within the structure of the psyche in a formal sense beyond any commitments to one side or an-
other.
 Rosenmeyer () x: “The disciplines of astronomy and of meteorology, like the study of
statecraft and of the life of the soul, are part of the extended curriculum we associate with
Stoic science.” Although Seneca’s intertwining of these topics here is surely Stoic, the extended
parallels I pursue throughout this piece suggest a broader Roman approach independent of phil-
osophical sect, even if, as Rosenmeyer claims, Vergil, and Ovid – whom he offers exempli gratia
Civil War, the Soul, and the Cosmos at Seneca, Thyestes 547 – 622: A Tropology 335
tropes that inform the Roman political imaginary by presenting internal dis-
sension as a threat to security that extends to all levels. Civil war is one of
Rome’s original contributions to the history of concepts, ⁷ but its integration
into a larger discourse of interrelated figurations that connect inwards to
psychology and outwards to the organization of the universe is representa-
tive of Roman political thought not only in substance but also in form. My
close reading of this short passage offers it as a paradigmatic instance of
the fundamentally non-conceptual procedures of Roman political thought
and aims to demonstrate that to recover a better understanding of a tradition
formative for the history of Western thought but lost to the majority of twen-
tieth-century political theory, we need the resources of metaphorology.⁸
The impetus for the ode is the apparent resolution of the dispute be-
tween Atreus and Thyestes. Atreus has invited his previously estranged
brother to share the governance of Mycenae and, after overcoming misgiv-
ings, Thyestes happily accepts.⁹ They go off together in harmony to seal
the deal with a banquet where Atreus will exact his awful revenge: in return
for Thyestes’ seduction of his wife, he cooks his brother’s children and feeds
them to him. Incest and cannibalism – within the family no less! – represent
the ultimate dissolution of social bonds. While celebrating the return from
conflict to order, the choral ode retails with relief the strife that has been
left behind. By recounting this strife, however, the chorus keeps it at the
forefront of the text, ¹⁰ so that the ode, which sits at the turning point of
– are “in varying degrees indebted to Stoic ways of looking at the world” (xvi). Asmis () 
finds a homology between the rule of god, political rule, and self-governance in Seneca, but also
shows that his conception of fortune as a force to be struggled against contains conventional
Roman elements that do not quite accord with Stoic doctrine. The semantic field covered in
this paper goes beyond the bounds of Stoicism.
 Armitage (forthcoming).
 Primary interventions in the competitive collaboration between conceptual history and meta-
phorology are Blumenberg (), Koselleck (), Blumenberg (); for a lucid introduc-
tion to metaphorology, see Savage’s postscript to Blumenberg (); for its apparent philo-
sophical detour, see Haverkamp () ; for a political science approach to metaphor and
its pragmatic effects, see Carver and Pikalo (). For metaphor and exemplum in Seneca,
see Dressler ().
 The chorus’ ignorance of Atreus’ intentions, declared in Act , is a challenge for performance
(see Davis ()  – ), but well serves Seneca’s deployment of interconnected political
tropes.
 Rosenmeyer () ,  – ,  – , who calls this ode “one of most remarkable con-
structions in Latin Literature,” emphasizes the “movement between contraries” and “interde-
pendence of opposites,” so that “peace and war, pleasure and pain, fortune and misfortune
are no longer kept apart, but have come to imply one another.”
336 Michèle Lowrie
the plot between apparent resolution and revealed horror, uneasily prepares
for the horrific scenes where Atreus’ revenge is first narrated by a messenger
and then the two protagonists respectively grovel in anguish or exult beyond
measure.
I read the ode less as devastating irony at the expense of a clueless dra-
matic character than a mood-heightening lyric interlude through which
Seneca accomplishes two aims.¹¹ The tension between affect (dread) and ap-
parent message (relief) prepares the audience for the difficulty Thyestes will
face in reconciling his emotions with knowledge (or its lack) as he gradually
learns what his brother has done to him. But furthermore – and this will be
my main focus – at this play’s dramatic turning point, Seneca condenses all
its concerns into one short poetic meditation and sets them under the sign of
civil war. Although this concept is named only once in the play, it emerges
here as its governing trope.
The ode offers a textbook example of Roman discourses about civil war:
civil war stands for the ne plus ultra in content and in structure its discourse
revolves around a system of related tropes.¹² Each section of the ode is gov-
erned by a specific trope concerning internal order and disorder that further-
more links one realm to another: soul, family, city, cosmos, and empire.
These tropes may rely on local metaphors, such as the storm for political up-
heaval, but they also establish larger analogic patterns that surpass any in-
dividual figuration. In addition to serving as a metaphor for the city’s trou-
bles, the storm’s figurative reach extends to the soul and the cosmos and
thereby knits all these realms together in a homological relationship. The
ode furthermore deploys images with overlapping figurations. The unwilling
sword is a personification as well as a metaphor for conflict within the will.
Conventional metaphors (again the storm), allusion to earlier Latin litera-
ture, and homologies across spheres taken together add up to a single tropo-
logical system whose center is civil war.¹³ I will analyze the ode section by
 Schiesaro ()  –  reads the ode along more dramatic concerns.
 Lucan, of course, will step over the bounds of the ne plus ultra with the opening of De bello
ciuili: Bella per Emathios plus quam ciuilia campos / … canimus (“Wars more than civil over the
Emathian plains we sing,” . – ). The traditional interpretation that conflict within the family
of Pompey and Caesar is worse than civil war ignores the function of familial strife as a figure for
civil war. The resulting paradox that civil war is worse than civil war reenacts civil war within the
concept through figuration. Further discussion of this passage below.
 Bartsch ()  examines how Seneca conceives of metaphor as a crutch or prop in our
progress toward becoming a Stoic sage. See also Dressler (). I submit that a tropology is
such a crutch writ large. I fail to understand the objection to understanding Senecan tragedy
as conveying a demonstration on a massive scale of the actions and emotions we should
section to show that its organization depends on a coherent set of interrelat-

ed discourses with deep roots in Latin literature. ¹⁴ My larger claim is that
this passage pulls together the Roman tradition of thinking about civil war
as an intervention in conceptual history both in substance and in method.
Instead of defining the concept, it enacts its metaphorological crystalliza-
tion.
The City and the Soul (546 – 59)

Ever since Plato’s analogy between the city and the soul in the Politeia, the
soul’s condition has been an important issue for political theory.¹⁵ The per-
sistence of this analogy might go some way to explaining how a Latin
word for tranquility of soul, securitas (“a state of lacking concern”), which
is first attested in Cicero’s philosophical works, expanded to encompass po-
litical security in the early Empire. For Cicero, the context of securitas re-
mained psychological.¹⁶ In Velleius Paterculus, however, we find for the
first time the phrase securitas applied to empire: (spem … perpetuae securi-
tatis aeternitatisque Romani imperii, “hope for the perpetual security and
eternity of the Roman Empire,” 2.103.4).¹⁷ Seneca’s progression in this choral
ode from Atreus’ prior lack of internal self-control, to the condition of the
city, and on to empire, maps similar ground, so that a psychological state
evolves into the domain of politics. In each case what is represented is the
return to tranquility after disturbance, that is, the re-establishment of secur-
ity at all levels.
avoid, provided we also acknowledge its huge ability to entertain. Literature cannot be reduced
to a didactic function, but may nevertheless include one. See the tug-of-war between Schiesaro
(), who resists reducing the Thyestes’ psychological acuity to a doctrinaire Stoic message,
and Gill ()  – , who argues for Seneca’s dramatization of passion as a kind of “sick-
ness or madness” () in Stoic terms, specifically in the internal division of the title characters
of Medea and Phaedra.
 I follow the section divisions in Zwierlein (). Latin without line numbers can be found
in the section being discussed.
 Blössner () provides an introduction and overview.
 De finibus .., .. – , ..; Tusculanae Disputationes ..; de Officibus
..; De natura deorum ... Hamilton ()  – .
 Hamilton () . Lowrie (work in progress) addresses the extension in meaning with a
special focus on Augustan literature as the transitional point; see also Lowrie (forthcoming).
For a focus on the imperial semantics of securitas, see Instinsky ().
338 Michèle Lowrie
Roman political thought characteristically uses tropes and implicit asso-

ciations rather than concepts and explicit argumentation. Recent work on
political thought and moral reasoning among the Romans has emphasized
their use of affect, exempla, imagination, metaphor, narrative, and practical
reasoning in education and deliberation. ¹⁸ Seneca’s choral ode fits this
model. Although the language of security does not occur within it, the
play frames this transition point in the play with references before and
after to inner tranquility in related terms and leaves it to the reader or audi-
ence to fill in the blanks. Before the ode, Thyestes explains the advantages of
a humble condition – ironically, he focuses on the ability to enjoy “feasts
without care” (securas dapes, 450), a horrific signal to the audience in the
know. Afterwards, the messenger’s description of young Tantalus as sui se-
curus (“secure in himself,” 720) while facing death paints him with Stoic ap-
probation (Busch 2009: 266 – 70), but security turns into its dark twin, lack
of concern, when he describes Atreus as securus (“unperturbed,” 759) while
butchering and cooking his nephews.¹⁹ Atreus taunts Thyestes with having
reclined as a “carefree guest” (conuiua securo, 898) and Thyestes tries to
banish his anguish once he understands what has happened by calling on
his heart to lay down its “worried cares” (sollicitas … curas, 921).
These usages of securus and its cognates all refer to states of soul, but
elsewhere, Seneca turns tranquility toward the political and conceptualizes
the reciprocal obligation between people and ruler with the term securitas:²⁰
errat enim, si quid existimat tutum esse ibi regem, ubi nihil a rege tutum est: securitas secur-
itate mutua paciscenda est.
De clementia 1.19.5 – 6
 For rhetoric, passion, and fantasy as constructive of identity and political belonging, see
Connolly () and (). Hammer ()  calls Roman political thought “embarrassingly
affective and tangible”; () especially  – . Langlands () and () focuses on the role
of exempla in situation ethics. For Roman exemplarity in intellectual history, see introduction to
Lowrie and Lüdemann (). Specifically for Seneca, see Rosenmeyer ()  – ; Bartsch
(); Wray ()  – ; Roller (). Bartsch ()  notes Atreus’ perversion of ex-
emplarity: he cooks children just like his ancestors and he tries to match their exempla at lines
 – .
 Hamilton ()  maps the paradoxes of care’s negation.
 For the development of securitas as a political task, see Instinsky (), especially the sec-
tion on the antithesis to civil war ( – ). Hamilton () . See also Star () , who
analyzes Seneca’s king bee in the same treatise: “He is not to be feared; hence his safety is as-
sured.”
He errs if he thinks a king can in any way be safe in a situation where nothing is safe from
the king: security may be contracted only at the price of mutual security.
This is exactly the compact, mutually assured security, that Atreus refuses in
his exchange with the Satelles, who advocates stability of rule based on mor-
ality and the right kind of care (cura), the etymological root of security.
Atreus embraces instead his own will.
Sat. Vbi non est pudor

nec cura iuris sanctitas pietas fides,
instabile regnum est. At. Sanctitas pietas fides
priuata bona sunt; qua iuuat reges eant.
215 – 18
Sat. Where there is no shame, nor care for right, holiness, duty, faith, the rule is unstable.
At. Holiness, duty, faith are private goods. Kings may go where it pleases them.
One of the great ironies of the play is that Atreus, that seething cauldron of
hatred, ends up exercising a cool self-mastery in a perverse enactment of
Stoic wisdom. The chorus in an earlier ode defines as king one who controls
himself and his emotions. He has set aside fear along with other diri mala
pectoris (“evils of a dire heart,” 348) and is not subject to ambitio impotens
(“uncontrolled ambition,” 349): rex est qui metuet nihil, / rex est qui cupiet
nihil: / hoc regnum sibi quisque dat (“King is he who will fear nothing,
king is he who will desire nothing: this rule each gives himself,” 388 – 90).
Atreus is the horrific inversion of such a king – Stoic commonplaces appear
as in a funhouse mirror (Davis 1989: 428 – 30). He controls all, most especial-
ly himself, not to tame, but rather to revel in his insatiable passion, namely
the desire for revenge. Unlike the security pact outlined in the De clementia,
which grounds political order on a stabilizing reciprocal freedom from anxi-
ety, Atreus exemplifies the perversion of the soul and of the political order
alike. He achieves security not through mutual respect and the banishment
of fear all around, but by utterly crushing his enemy. ²¹ This is the security of
the tyrant.
In the choral ode, Seneca figures Atreus as a tyrant not merely through
his savage cruelty (ferus et acer … truculentus), but also through his prior
 Accius’ Atreus conceptualizes destroying Thyestes in term of his heart, that is, as a question
of affect: maior mihi moles, maius miscendumst malum, / qui illius acerbum cor contundam et
comprimam (“A greater labor, a greater evil must be blended by me, by which I am pound
and crush his bitter heart,” fr.  –  Ribbeck ( []) ).
340 Michèle Lowrie
lack of internal mastery: nec potens mentis. ²² The illusory good news is that
Atreus has returned to a state of virtue. A personified Pietas has prevailed
over Mavors, so that instead of anger, agitation, and fury (ira, agitata, agi-
tatus, furibundus), she has imposed peace. Beyond Atreus’ internal tranquil-
ity, the expectation is that peace will return as well to the city. The tranquil-
ity of the king leads to tranquility in the state.
Already in this section, Seneca presents a homology between the soul,
family relations, and the political order that the ode will develop further.
The restoration to calm, in the chorus’ understanding, happens at the
same time in Atreus’ soul and in his relations with Thyestes. It is the sight
of his brother that stuns him (stupefactus) so that true pietas and love
cause him to put down the sword and join hands. Love, pietas, and peace
have broken out within Atreus, his family, and the city all at the same
time. The final word of the section, negantes, however, sounds an ominous
note: as a concessive, it reveals the brothers’ persistent hostility, which is
even now, as the chorus speaks, breaking the peace as Atreus feeds Thyestes
his children offstage (Tarrant 1985: line 559). It shows up the anxiety that
persists under erasure in securitas. The unresolved turmoil within the broth-
ers’ souls will rupture the familial bond and with it peace at the political and
cosmic levels.
Seneca moves the peace from an internal affair to one with a broader
scope by contrasting love among family members with the regular hardening
of disputes against those outside the group (externis). Such ‘strangers’ could
be alien with respect to the family, but more usual would be to take them as
enemies of state. The suggestion of external warfare sets up the turn to civil
war by antithesis in the following section, where civil war mediates between
familial and external warfare. It is not to be taken for granted that the dis-
pute between these specific brothers should be couched as civil war, but a
passage from Lucretius suggests that a link between disturbances in the
soul, civil war, and the myth of the house of Pelops might go back in
Latin to Accius’ Atreus, an important predecessor for Seneca’s play.
sanguine ciuili rem conflant diuitiasque

conduplicant auidi, caedem caede accumulantes,
crudeles gaudent in tristi funere fratris
et consanguineum mensas odere timentque.
Lucretius, De rerum natura 3.70 – 3
 In Accius’ Atreus, the king is called a tyrant (fr.  Ribbeck ( []) ). Star ()
 –  analyzes how Seneca defines the ruler as a tyrant or a good king on the basis of his soul.
They amass property with civil blood and greedily double their wealth, piling slaughter on
slaughter; they rejoice cruelly in the sad death of a brother and both hate and fear the ta-
bles of kin.
Lucretius frames this passage with a discussion of how false terrors and envy
motivate this evil behavior: these are emotional disturbances arising from
the fear of death. The phrase conjoining hatred and fear recalls Accius’ fa-
mous line, oderint dum metuant (“let them hate, provided they fear,” Atreus
fr. 203 – 4 Ribbeck (1962 [1871]: 162), and the reference to “tables of kin” ac-
cords with the myth, so allusion is likely.²³ Although Lucretius does not spec-
ify civil war per se as the result of the fear of death on display here, “civil
blood” and joy at a brother’s death evoke it in combination and E.J. Kenney
suggests that Lucretius “had Rome’s present troubles in mind” (1971: 85). We
cannot know the contemporary political resonances of Accius’ play when it
was composed, but his emphasis on hatred and fear highlights the turmoil in
the soul that underlies the myth.²⁴
In Seneca, civil war becomes more explicitly an affair of the soul – or
rather, it becomes a trope for expressing disturbances in the soul. A leitmotif
of the following sections is fear, with the result that although the chorus says
it is relieved because peace has been restored, the emotional tenor of the ode
prepares us for the revelation of the horror to come. Even while the ode pro-
claims security, its tone ratchets up the feeling of danger that is insecurity.
Civil War (560 – 72)

Seneca reverses a common trope: in Latin literature, killing within the family
often stands for civil war. Here the strife between the brothers is called civil
war and it extends throughout the city: modo per Mycenas / arma ciuilis cre-
puere belli (“Just now through Mycenae the arms of civil war clattered”). The
description in the following lines could pertain to any warfare: a mother
clings to her children; a wife fears for her husband; all strive to shore up
 I thank Mathias Hanses for calling my attention to this allusion in another context. Accius’
line was important for Seneca, who cites it several times (e. g., De clementia . – , De ira
..).
 Jocelyn ()  thinks the Atreus might have been performed in  BCE on the basis of
Cicero, Brutus , but this passage does not identify the play performed when Accius says
he was thirty years old. Seneca attributes it to the time of Sulla, although he was probably mis-
taken (De ira ..). For the idea “that an utterance can reveal the political spirit of the age,”
see Star () .
342 Michèle Lowrie
the city’s defenses. The context of civil war, however, draws a contrast be-
tween Atreus and Thyestes and this list of family members who are so nicely
concerned for one another. Brothers have held special resonance for civil
war at Rome ever since Romulus slaughtered Remus – or at least since the
origin of the myth (Bannon 1997: 158 – 73).
In his seventh Epode, Horace explicitly derives the civil war that has led
the city “to perish by her own right hand” (sua / Vrbs haec periret dextera?
9 – 10) back to the crime of Remus’ murder, whose bloodshed has been ac-
cursed for Romulus’ descendants.
sic est: acerba fata Romanos agunt

scelusque fraternae necis,
ut inmerentis fluxit in terram Remi
sacer nepotibus cruor.
(17– 20)
So it is: harsh fates drive the Romans and the crime of a brother’s slaughter, ever since the
blood of Remus, a curse on his grandchildren, flowed undeserved onto the land.
Although many of the Republican stories linking fratricide to civil war tell of
unintended deaths, where pietas still prevails, ²⁵ authorial horror attends a
joyful response to learning of a brother’s death, all the more so when perpe-
trated by his brother. Beyond Lucretius’ condemnation of such joy as
“cruel”, Vergil laments in the Georgics “discord driving faithless brothers”
(infidos agitans discordia fratres, 2.495) and those who “rejoice drenched
in their brothers’ blood” (gaudent perfusi sanguine fratrum, 2.510). Especial-
ly scandalous is the horseman who, as Tacitus recounts in the Histories,
“sought a prize from the leaders when he professed his brother had been
slain by himself in the most recent conflict” (eques occisum a se proxima
acie fratrem professus praemium a ducibus petierit, 3.51.1).
In characterizing the dispute between Atreus and Thyestes as civil war,
Seneca is operating at the border between myth and history. Allusion to Ver-
gil’s first Eclogue takes the reader back to the civil wars through which Au-
gustus ascended to power and that were finally exhausted with his victory.
The phrasing otium … quis deus fecit? (“What god made peace?” 560 – 1) re-
 For stories of mourning over the unwanted death of a brother in civil war that results in the
remaining brother’s suicide, whether or not he was responsible, see Sisenna fr.  Peter =
fr.  Cornell (quoted by Tacitus, Histories ..), Livy Epitome , Valerius Maximus,
... Tacitus Histories . provides a story of mourning of an unintended parricide that
stops short of suicide. See Bannon ()  – .
calls O Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit (Vergil, Eclogues 1.6) and “makes
explicit” the connection with civil war “that remains below the surface of
Vergil’s poem.” ²⁶ The most famous historical civil war combatants, Pompey
and Caesar, were not brothers, but much of Latin literature emphasizes that
they were indeed related as father-in-law and son-in-law.²⁷ Furthermore,
brothers did put each other on proscription lists.²⁸ In the stories cited in
the previous paragraph, however, the anonymity of the brothers – besides
Romulus and Remus – shows that their function as a trope for civil war
takes precedence over the strictly factual record.
Another element in Seneca’s ode, conflict internal to the will, becomes
associated with civil war. Here, a personified sword resists orders: cum
manum inuitus sequeretur ensis (“when the sword unwillingly followed the
hand”). The personification externalizes what are really at odds, the soul
and the hand, a pair that further externalizes a division in the will. In
Lucan, the internal division of civil war is often figured with the hand. The
right hand, picked up from Horace’s Epode, marks the city’s suicide at the
opening of the poem.²⁹
Bella per Emathios plus quam ciuilia campos

iusque datum sceleri canimus, populumque potentem
in sua uictrici conuersum uiscera dextra
cognatasque acies
De bello ciuili 1.1– 4
Wars more than civil over the Emathian plains and right given to crime we sing, and a peo-
ple turned against its own guts with victorious right hand and kindred battle-lines.
The Berne scholiast interprets “more than civil” as indicating that the war
was a family affair, in accord with the trope of civil war as violence within
 Tarrant () ; also Trinacty ()  – .

 E. g., gener and socer at Vergil, Aeneid . – ; Lucan compares Pompey and Caesar to
the Sabines, ut generos soceris (“as sons-in-law to fathers-in-law,” ), before Julia’s death pro-
vided yet another cause for the deterioration of their relations.
 See Velleius Paterculus .., who recounts the soldiers’ chant after Philippi: de Germanis
non de Gallis duo triumphant consules (“Over brothers German, not the Gauls do the two consuls
triumph”).
 Ahl ()  n. : “The notion of the suicide of the state is thus established by Lucan at
the very outset.” In work in progress, I interpret suicide as one further twist of the trope in a
progression from civil war, to intra-familial violence, to suicide, to psychomachia.
344 Michèle Lowrie
the family.³⁰ The adjective cognatus returns from the end of Sallust’s Bellum
Catilinae, where the soldiers plundering the battlefield after Antonius de-
feated Catiline discovered dead friends, guests, relatives (cognatos), and
personal enemies, all with a mix of contradictory emotions: laetitia, maeror,
luctus atque gaudia (“happiness, grief, mourning, and joy,” 61.8 – 9). The
right hand returns in Lucan with even greater internal emotional conflict.
Laelius exhorts Caesar’s troops with an enthusiastic embrace of civil war.
usque adeo miserum est ciuili uincere bello? …

… per signa decem felicia castris
perque tuos iuro quocumque ex hoste triumphos,
pectore si fratris gladium iuguloque parentis
condere me iubeas plenaeque in uiscera partu
coniugis, inuita peragam tamen omnia dextra…
De bello ciuili 1.366, 374– 8
Is it so miserable to vanquish in a civil war? … By the standards ten times happy for the
camp, by your triumphs over whatever enemy, if you should order me to bury my sword
in the neck of my brother or father and into the guts of my wife, full of child, I will still
do it all, though my right hand be unwilling.
Surpassing the usual slaughter among family members, Laelius envisages a

double murder of his wife and his unborn child at the same time. His hyper-
bole is accompanied by an expression of conflict in the will. He would order
something his hand would be unwilling to do, like the unwilling sword that
follows the hand nevertheless at Thyestes 565. Such parallels for paradoxical
expression might be used to support the text at line 212, where Atreus, argu-
ing for tyranny against the Satelles, says: quod nolunt uelint (“let them wish
what they do not want”). David Kovacs (2007: 788) argues for a more logical
quod nolunt uelit (“let the king demand what his subjects do not want”), but
the conflict within the will expressed as a conflict between hand and sword
should be enough to defend the transmitted text even without additional
parallels from Lucan and elsewhere in Seneca.³¹ In civil war, the will is div-
ided against itself, by analogy to the polity.
 On the scholiast, see Ahl () , who also adds a reference to Seneca’s Phoenissae
 – , where Oedipus – like Lucan – sets fratricide beyond civil war: non satis est adhuc ciuile
bellum / frater in fratrem ruat (“Civil war is not yet enough: let a brother rush against a brother”).
 According to Quintilian, who cites the line, Atreus is forced to commit deeds he himself char-
acterizes as awful in Varius Rufus’ Thyestes: iam fero infandissima, / iam facere cogor (“Now I
endure the most unspeakable things, now I am compelled to do the same,” fr.  Schauer
() ; fr.  Hollis () , his translation). Even if it is Thyestes’ actions that
force Atreus to seek revenge, his judgment and his will are in conflict. Compare Phaedra’s
Throughout this section Seneca emphasizes emotional disturbance, spe-

cifically fear. Civil war is a threat to security. The mothers were “pale” (pal-
lidae); the wife “feared” (timuit); the guard was “afraid” (pauidus) during an
“anxious night” (anxiae noctis). In the final line, the statement that “the very
fear of war is worse than war itself ” (peior est bello timor ipse belli) shows
that it is less the actuality of danger than insecurity in the soul that is at
issue. ³² Over against the healthy fear that arises from the love the citizens
feel for their family in Mycenae, the perverted emotions between the broth-
ers within the royal house stand out.
Seneca did not have to choose to call the brothers’ conflict civil war: it
would have been entirely possible to present the rivalry within the house
of Atreus as an intra-familial palace intrigue. His choice to qualify the inter-
nal political disturbance as one between citizens, as bellum ciuile, colors the
myth with a specifically Roman perspective informed by the events of the
previous century. The figuration of fraternal strife as civil war sets the
story within a framework that speaks to Roman concerns. Seneca invites
contemporaries to see his version of the Greek myth as an exercise in polit-
ical thought with relevance to their own history.
Cosmic Disturbance (573 – 95)

If civil war takes the familial conflict into the realm of politics, in the next
section Seneca expands into a yet larger sphere. By comparing the peace
that has returned to the city (576) to the calm that follows a storm (577–
95), he deploys the imagery linking political to cosmic disorder that is so
prevalent in Vergil’s Aeneid and becomes a major figuration in Lucan. ³³
oath: testor … hoc quod uolo – me nolle (“I swear, I do not will what I desire,” Phaedra  – ) –
I thank David Wray for this reference. The unity of judgment and will in Seneca’s Atreus is dis-
tinctive by contrast. The change of mind attributed to him by the chorus turns out to be illusory.
 Seneca elsewhere says, “nothing in [things] is terrible, except for fear itself” (nihil in istis ter-
ribile nisi ipsum timorem, Epistulae . – ); see Bartsch () . Franklin Delano Roo-
sevelt may not have been reading Seneca (http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-his
torian/; accessed November , ), but commonplaces travel.
 The classic analysis of cosmology in Vergil is by Hardie (), who also traces the imagery
forward to Lucan (). See also Marti () for the cosmic significance of civil war in Lucan.
The imagery of chaos and cataclysm returns here at  – ,  – ,  – , see Park Poe
() . Accius also graces his Atreus with a violent storm: sed quid tonitru turbida toruo /
concussa repente aequora caeli / sensimus sonere? (“But what perturbed shoals of the sky, shak-
en with savage thunder, did we hear suddenly resound?” fr.  –  Ribbeck ( [] ).
346 Michèle Lowrie
This is no ordinary storm, but one that crosses from the Straits of Messina all
the way over to Ithaca, that threatens to mix the elements, and entails fear
within the family. It is a storm in the mold of civil war that stretches from the
soul to the cosmos.³⁴
Allusion to Vergilian moralizing hyperbole makes the cosmic point, as
Seneca bases his version of Scylla and Charybdis on his predecessor and
then moves on to the Cyclops, here the standard blacksmith.³⁵ In addition
to the threatened violation of elemental mixing, Seneca adds the Cyclops’
fear of his own parent Poseidon:³⁶
et ferus Cyclops metuit parentem

rupe feruentis residens in Aetnae,
ne superfusis uioletur undis
ignis aeternis resonans caminis
582– 5
And the fierce Cyclops, lingering on seething Aetna’s cliff, fears his parent, that the fire
roaring in the eternal forge be violated by waves pouring in on it.
Disturbance among the elements and the family are indicative of civil war.
These tropes point to the trouble stirred up within the soul and explain
the fear that is felt by a whole string of increasingly impersonal agents: sai-
lors, the Cyclops, Laertes, a ship, and even the landscape. The Cyclades,
unmoored during a storm qualified by Vergil’s characteristic hyperbolic ad-
jective ingens (“huge”), elevate the fear to a universal level. It is not mere
souls, but the world in its geographic extension that has been implicated
in the disturbance.
Beyond Vergilian allusion, Seneca also looks back to Horace, specifical-
ly to poems with a political resonance that also speak to the questions of
 Park Poe () interprets the storm at  –  as an externalization of Atreus’ passion and
makes the link to Stoicism, where “Every action has reverberations throughout the universe”
(). Schiesaro ()  –  analyzes Thyestes’ psychology at lines  – , where he
uses storm imagery to describe his ominous shift in mood.
 Tarrant () ad loc. shows the specifically Vergilian background to Seneca’s description of
the Sicilian locale. For “moralized hyperbole” in Vergil’s description of Charybdis at . – 
and  – , see Hardie () .
 Tarrant ()  comments on the “distortion of family ties,” however remote, and at
 –  suggests that the expansion of the storm over to Ithaca might anticipate the “universal
destruction envisaged in the final chorus.”
governance, extreme emotion, and calm after civil tumult.³⁷ Given the verbal
parallel between Seneca’s stagno pelagus recumbit (“the sea leans back on
the calm waters”) and Horace’s ponto unda recumbit (“the wave leans
back on the sea,” Odes 1.12.31– 2), both in a context of calming a storm (Tar-
rant 1985: lines 588 – 9), it is hard not to draw the contrast between Horace’s
celebration of Augustus in his ode and Seneca’s graphic depiction of the tyr-
annical Atreus. Further elements from Odes 1.12 return in the next section of
the chorus and are treated below. Moreover the nod to Horace draws our at-
tention to his mention of the Cyclades in Odes 1.14, conventionally identified
as an allegory of the Ship of State. There the ship has also been tossed in a
storm, where the inference is that the Republic had been recently tossed in
the turbulence of civil war.³⁸ Seneca’s extended simile comparing the calm
after the storm to peace restored in a city torn by civil war frames Horace’s
poem within such a context, whatever the earlier poem’s original concep-
tion. Horace closes his ode with a focus on the turbulent emotions felt by
the poet who watches.³⁹ Again the security concern is not the mere safety
of the ship, but how seeing it in danger affects the soul with cares (cura).
nuper sollicitum quae mihi taedium,

nunc desiderium curaque non leuis,
interfusa nitentis
uites aequora Cycladas.
Odes 1.14.17– 20
You who were recently a source of worried weariness to me, now one of desire and a care
not light, may you avoid the waters poured between the shining Cyclades.
The fear and anxiety elicited by the risk to the ship resonates again through
allusion in the Thyestes and binds the condition of the soul to the political
circumstances.
 Trinacty () ,  –  emphasizes the special role Horace played for Senecan choral
odes, particularly ones using Horatian meters, like this ode, which uses Sapphic hendecasylla-
bles.
 Since Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria ..) takes the poem as an allegory of the ship of state,
the interpretation is likely to have been known to Seneca. The actual historical context is disput-
ed. See Nisbet and Hubbard ()  – . Other allegories have been proposed in the mean-
time, for which see bibliography at Lowrie () , but the question at issue here is Seneca’s
understanding.
 Blumenberg () ,  – ,  –  sets Horace’s ode within a larger history of the met-
aphor of shipwreck with spectator. Hamilton ()  –  analyzes the ambivalence of Hora-
ce’s cura toward the ship, source of both desire and disgust.
348 Michèle Lowrie
Empire under God (596 – 615)

Cosmic order conventionally rests on a hierarchy of rule, where Jupiter’s
sway over mortal kings is analogous to theirs over their people. This topos
is the classical equivalent to the Christian divine right of kings, where the
king derives his authority from acting as God’s representative on earth,
but doing so constrains him to act according to His will. Many of the com-
monplaces Seneca deploys in the ode’s penultimate section also occur in
Horace, where they knit together a message that Augustus’ success in restor-
ing order in the wake of civil war depended on subordinating himself to the
higher norm of Jupiter’s rule. We can only wonder if Varius’ Thyestes con-
veyed a similar combination of praise and warning. After all, it was per-
formed in Augustus’ triple triumph over Illyrium, Actium, Egypt, which cele-
brated the end of civil war along with the foreign victories.⁴⁰ The Senecan
chorus’ optimistic statement about the supreme ruler’s fear of the gods,
like its proclamation of peace after tumult, will of course come to ruin as
soon as the messenger announces Atreus’ horrific revenge in the next
scene and will not be borne out by the rest of the play, where “the evil gen-
erated by Atreus’ passions is so great that it exceeds the limits of what, in a
well-ordered universe, ought to be possible” (Tarrant 1985: lines 610 – 14).
Just as in the De Clementia, where Seneca defines the good ruler as clement
to Nero, Horace was setting before Augustus a model for kingship based on
leaving vengeance and strife behind. The fear traversing this section, howev-
er, suggests the fragility of the cosmic and the political order: no restorative
model of kingship will hold.
Starting with mutability between the “lowest” and the “highest” posi-
tions (ima … summis), which recalls Horace’s phrasing (ima summis, Odes,
1.34.12) with the same message, Seneca hits Horatian notes in his depiction
of the “anxious” (anxius) emperor. Like the man under the sword of Damo-
cles at Odes 3.1.17– 24 – a metaphor for the tyrant’s state of mind that Horace
extends to anyone who lives on perpetual tenterhooks – Seneca’s emperor
“fears” (metuit) despite his position because he knows the threats to his
throne from plotting rivals who “move all” (mouentes / cuncta) and from
chance. In the same poem Horace produces his most quoted expression of
the hierarchy from Jupiter through kings to their subjects.
 It also won its author a handsome monetary reward from Augustus. See Housman ();
Jocelyn ().
regum timendorum in proprios greges,

reges in ipsos imperium est Iouis,
clari Giganteo triumpho,
cuncta supercilio mouentis.
Odes 3.1.5 – 8
The empire of fearsome kings is over their own flocks, that of Jupiter over the kings them-
selves, Jupiter, resplendent from his triumph over the Giants, who moves all with his eye-
brow.
Seneca transfers Horace’s cuncta mouentis of Jupiter’s power to the conspir-

ators and the reference to the battle of the gods with the Giants in line 7 is a
conventional figuration of civil war as cosmic disorder in this period. ⁴¹ Those
who recognize the allusion will fill in the context of civil war. Horace also
expresses a similar idea about the hierarchy of power in Odes 1.12, the
poem that provides wording for Seneca’s scene where the storm is calmed.
Horace addresses Jupiter: tu secundo / Caesare regnes … te minor latum
reget aequos orbem (“May you rule with Caesar as your second. … Lesser
than you he will rule the wide world fairly,” Odes 1.12.52, 57). Seneca’s for-
mulation similarly emphasizes hierarchy with the vocabulary of greater
and lesser:
Vos quibus rector maris atque terrae

ius dedit magnum necis atque uitae,
ponite inflatos tumidosque uultus:
quidquid a uobis minor expauescit,
maior hoc uobis dominus minatur:
omne sub regno grauiore regnum est.
607– 11
You to whom the ruler of the sea and the land gave the great right over death and life, lay
aside your puffed up and swelling countenances. Whatever someone lesser fears from you,
this the greater lord threatens you with. Every rule is under a weightier rule.
Even the list of foreign foes who have ceased to wage war recalls Horace: the
conjunction of the Mede and the Indian (Medus et … Indus) is also found at
Odes 4.14.42 (Medusque et Indus), where Horace praises Augustus as the
guardian of Italy and Rome, for subduing those who have never before
been subdued, and for arousing wonder even beyond his empire.
All these Horatian resonances signal that the chorus is expecting a new
kind of leadership in the wake of the cessation of civil war and fraternal
 Hardie ()  –  with further bibliography specifically on civil war at  n. .
350 Michèle Lowrie
strife. The supreme commander will follow in Augustus’ model, lay down the
savagery of his youth and become god-fearing, because he is well aware of
the mutability of fortune. Yet again, the chorus is wrong. Fortune’s mutation
will defy expectation. Thyestes will not rise to prominence from his lowly po-
sition, but rather fall further from humility to abjection.
Fortune (615 – 22)

The concluding section of the ode is extremely conventional and Tarrant
notes Seneca’s failure to deploy a more orthodox Stoic message here,
which would emphasize that everything accords with god’s plan for the uni-
verse (1985: 617– 21). The standard answer to such puzzles is that here he
speaks as a playwright, not a philosopher, and one could note furthermore
that the chorus shows no signs of formal philosophical training. Their con-
ventionality accords entirely with their dramatic role. To restrict Seneca’s
philosophical interventions to doctrine, however, is to miss the ode’s work
in synthesizing a basic figure of the Roman political imaginary. The conjunc-
tion of fortune and civil war suggests another look at Horace.
Seneca keeps Horatian resonances in play. He denies we can count on
another day with crastinum (“tomorrow”), which recalls: quis scit an adiciant
hodiernae crastina summae / tempora di superi? (“Who knows whether the
gods above will add time tomorrow to the sum of today?” Odes 4.7.17– 18).
His superbum evokes Horace’s most extensive treatment of Fortune, who
lays low the proud in the ode bearing her name (superbos, Odes 1.35.3). Es-
pecially resonant for Seneca’s chorus is his ending the poem with a prayer to
preserve Caesar (Odes 1.35.29), specifically in his capacity as the conveyor of
imperial expansion, the conventional antidote to civil war. The poet exclaims
(heu, heu cicatricum et sceleris pudet / fratrumque, “Alas, alas, we are
ashamed of our scars, our crime, our brothers!” Odes 1.35.33 – 4) and wishes
that the blade be reforged and turned against foreign foes. The conjunction
of crime with brothers deploys the common periphrasis for civil war. Ending
the choral ode in the Thyestes with an expatiation on fortune prepares for
the revelation to follow. Horace’s wish to avert civil war in a context of for-
tune supports the desires of the chorus and evokes its fears.
Tropology
Civil war is no mere standard metaphor for fraternal strife at line 562. The
extensive parallels and allusions marshaled here show that Seneca organiz-
es his ode according to a broader set of discursive associations that cluster
around the concept of civil war in Roman thinking.⁴² The Romans had an
abundant vocabulary for internal violence and bellum ciuile specifies formal
warfare among citizens over against other disturbances such as sedition,
conspiracy, tumult, war with allies (bellum sociale) or slaves (bellum
seruile).⁴³ Beyond the technical category, however, civil war carries a tropo-
logical burden that invites thought about the ties binding the psychic, so-
cial, and cosmic orders all together. Seneca’s choral ode provides a concise
example of how a complex network of tropes, including fraternal strife, the
storm, the unwilling right hand, the subordination of the rule to god, the mu-
tability of fortune, all work in conjunction as a system. This semantic field
does not merely enrich the concept. Civil war does not serve merely as a spe-
cific designation of a type of warfare in contradistinction to others. Rather,
the semantic field conveys an idea about the structure of the world that sur-
passes the expressive capabilities of a single concept and can only be con-
veyed through figuration. Poetry does not advance an argument based on
the abstract analysis of concepts, but rather imparts meaning by a constel-
lation of allusions, conventions, metaphors, and other figurations. If the
odes’ beauty consists in part in its dense and shifting imagery, it draws
power from the way its network of tropes conveys a consistent, familiar,
and specifically Roman thought world, where civil war poses an existential
threat at all levels.
 For a treatment of the semantic fields surrounding social and political concepts, see Kosel-
leck () . Ahl () , whose focus is on the “nexus of relationships among sounds,”
nevertheless recognizes as one task of scholarship the discovery of “related words and con-
cepts.” I hope to have contributed a small chapter to the “investigation of figurative language
in poetry” that Curtius ()  calls for on the basis of Goethe’s outline of a program for
such in a passage on tropes in “Oriental poetry.” Curtius continues, “It would have to extend
to all literatures, ascertain their peculiarities, and present the facts in orderly fashion. Thus it
would have to be at once general and comparative.”
 Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck ()  –  survey Roman terminology for various kinds
of internal strife (sub-section by C. Meier within a larger article on “Revolution” authored by Ko-
selleck). On differences between civil war and revolution, see Koselleck ()  – , with a
plethora of terms (). Armitage (forthcoming) shows that Greek stasis and Roman civil war sim-
ilarly follow different logics.
352 Michèle Lowrie
Philosophy at its most creative is also not limited to the strictly concep-
tual. If Blumenberg’s ‘absolute metaphor’ may extend beyond philosophy’s
fundamental ontological to its fundamental political questions, his descrip-
tion certainly pertains to civil war: “The realm of the imagination could no
longer be regarded solely as the substrate for transformations into concep-
tuality … but as a catalytic sphere from which the universe of concepts con-
tinually renews itself, without thereby converting and exhausting this found-
ing reserve” (2010: 4). As a concept, bellum ciuile may be restricted to
warfare among citizens, but its consistent analogical extension from the
soul to the cosmos commutes it into a figure of thought that fights internally
against conceptual confinement. That is, civil war performs as a figure the
internal divide it denotes. Seneca’s ode turns out to be profoundly philo-
sophical not because it accords – imperfectly at that – to the tenets of Sto-
icism, but because it adduces and gives concise form to a fundamental trope
of the Roman political imaginary, one with a bright and bloody future.⁴⁴
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Erica Bexley
Doubtful Certainties: The Politics of
Reading in Seneca’s Oedipus
Qui legis Oedipoden caligantemque Thyesten,
Colchidas et Scyllas, quid nisi monstra legis?
Martial, 10.4.1– 2
non tam interest quo animo scribatur quam quo accipiatur

Cicero, Ad Familiares 6.7.1
Summary: This paper examines Seneca’s Oedipus as a reader both of poetry and
of himself. I argue that when Seneca describes prophecy (233 – 38; 626 – 58) and
extispicy (293 – 399), he presents these acts as poetic texts that demand interpre-
tation and that Oedipus repeatedly fails to comprehend. The tragedy overall em-
phasizes the gap between the protagonist’s assumed knowledge and the audien-
ce’s. As a result, it belittles Oedipus’ authoritarian attitude and creates a
sustained joke at his expense. Seneca undermines Oedipus by depicting him, si-
multaneously, as a paranoid ruler bent on enforcing his own version of events,
and as the unwitting object of others’ analysis. Over the course of the play, Oe-
dipus is reduced to a set of signs that Seneca invites the audience to decode. The
playwright also uses the binary dubius / certus to illustrate Oedipus’ increasing
lack of political and analytical control.
Keywords: Seneca; Oedipus; authority; signs; ambiguity; reader; interpretation
There are four episodes in Seneca’s Oedipus that find no equivalent in Sopho-
cles: Oedipus reminisces about his encounter with the Sphinx (92– 102); Creon
reports the Delphic oracle in full (233 – 38); Tiresias conducts an extispicy
(293 – 399); and Laius’ ghost rises from the dead to condemn his criminal off-
spring (530 – 658).¹ These differences are so marked that they cannot simply
be ascribed to Seneca’s style or to contemporary Roman tastes.² Rather, they
 It is not clear whether these episodes are entirely Seneca’s invention or whether they have
been adapted from earlier literary version of the myth, tragic or otherwise. On the sources likely
to have been available to Seneca when he composed his play, see Töchterle ()  – .
 Previous generations of scholars typically blamed these scenes on what they regarded as
Seneca’s degenerate tastes and/or dramatic incompetence. The play’s extispicy, in particular,
has attracted a lot of hostile verdicts over the last century, of which I provide just a few. Friedrich
()  –  argued that it was composed as a sensationalist and entirely detachable episode;
Mendell ()  accords it little significance: “the scene is long and harrowing and well nigh
exhausts even Seneca’s vocabulary, but produces no results as far as the solution of the plot is
356 Erica Bexley
are integral to the way in which Seneca’s tragedy approaches issues of knowl-
edge. Whereas Sophocles’ Oedipus interrogates individuals in his search for
Laius’ killer, Seneca’s Oedipus confronts evidence much more directly, in the
form of prophetic utterances and rituals that demand analysis from protagonist
and audience alike.³ Prophecy, extispicy, and memory take on meta-poetic qual-
ities in this play, functioning as quasi-literary texts that Oedipus must scour for
meaning.⁴ His failure to do so is a source of prolonged dramatic irony, because
Seneca’s play encourages the audience to see what Oedipus cannot.⁵ Occupying
the core of this tragedy is a contest over interpretation, over how one reads
omens, prophecy, poetry, and finally, Oedipus himself. It is a contest that subor-
dinates the protagonist to the audience’s sense of superior knowledge.
This act of subordination is what makes knowledge such a deeply political
issue in Seneca’s tragedy. Like Sophocles’ Oedipus, Seneca’s takes pride in his
ability to solve riddles, or in his own terminology, to transform dubia into
certa. He cannot, however, exercise control over poetic meaning, because he
himself is fundamentally dubius, an object of audience analysis, and of hostile
critique from the play’s various uates. The language of Seneca’s tragedy draws
close connections between Oedipus’ autocratic power and his desire either to
regulate poetic utterance, or to enforce his own interpretation as absolute and
final. The fact that he achieves neither of these possibilities demonstrates his
concerned.” Although Pratt ()  –  and ()  –  has far more patience for the extis-
picy’s symbolism, he too regards it as a symptom of Senecan ‘melodrama’. Recent, favorable ap-
praisal of Seneca’s dramatic aims in the Oedipus is given by Boyle () and Kohn ()  –
.
 On rhetoric and interrogation in Sophocles’ Oedipus, see Ahl ()  –  and ()  –
. It seems reasonable to suppose, with Holford-Strevens ()  – , that Seneca was ac-
quainted with the Sophoclean version, though Seneca’s play is, of course, very much an inde-
pendent work.
 Several scholars have acknowledged, in passing, the meta-literary qualities of one or more of
these scenes: Schiesaro ()  –  regards the Tiresias-Laius episode as fundamentally meta-
poetic; Trinacty ()  –  examines Oedipus’ role in ‘reading’ the literary intertext of the
necromancy scene; Seo ()  attributes a meta-poetic function to Oedipus’ memory of the
Sphinx.
 I use the term ‘audience’ throughout this paper regardless of the debate over whether Seneca’s
tragedies were or were not intended for performance, and the adjacent debate over whether they
are in fact performable. Those in favor of treating the plays as fully stageable dramatic scripts
include: Sutton () and Kohn (); those who define Seneca as ‘recitation drama’ include:
Zwierlein (); Fantham ()  – ; and Goldberg (). For a new approach to the
question of dramatic recitation, see Bexley (). Rather than address such issues here, I re-
gard the term ‘audience’ as encompassing anyone who watches, listens to, or even reads this
play.
weakness at the same time as it creates an atmosphere of ‘doublespeak’ or veiled

criticism, in which the ruler cannot detect the hostile content that is patently ob-
vious to other readers.⁶ The uates of Seneca’s play attack Oedipus, but he cannot
understand their message. In the end, he himself becomes a monstrum for the
play’s audience to interpret: his body is a text; he is presented as a sacrificial vic-
tim; he is a riddle “more perplexing than his own Sphinx” (magis…Sphinge per-
plexum sua, 641). In Seneca’s version of the Oedipus story, deciphering poetic
meaning is equivalent to challenging the ruler’s sense of himself; it is an essen-
tially political act.
Oedipus Reading
Each of the four episodes under discussion in this paper – the Sphinx (92– 102);
the Pythia’s oracle (233 – 38); the extispicy (293 – 399); Laius’ prophecy (626 – 58)
– is described by Seneca in language that evokes the composition and perform-
ance of poetry. In other words, these episodes may be regarded as poetic texts
not only for the reason that they invite analysis, but also because they reflect
on the very act of creating a text. The Sphinx is a perfect example. When Oedipus
recalls his encounter with her, he depicts her as a weaver who “twines words in
blind rhythms” (caecis uerba nectentem modis, 92) and speaks “knotted words
and entwined trickery” (nodosa…uerba et implexos dolos, 101). He also calls
her a uates (93), which in the context of the surrounding imagery hints at the
word’s etymology a uersibus uiendis (“from the weaving of songs” Varro L.
7.36).⁷ Such terminology doubtless alludes to Sophocles’ description of the
Sphinx as ἡ ῥαψῳδός (Oedipus Tyrannus 391), but Seneca’s purpose also goes
beyond mere recognition of his dramatic predecessor.⁸ Unlike Sophocles, who
has Creon mention the Sphinx in passing, Seneca has Oedipus recollect her in
substantial detail. As a consequence, he brings to the fore Oedipus’ encounter
 On doublespeak and veiled criticism, see MacMullen (); Ahl (a) and (b);
Bartsch (); and Rudich ().
 For the various Latin etymologies of uates, see Newman () .
 It is likely that the Greek term ῥαψῳδός also takes its etymology from weaving, combining
ῥάπτω and ἀοιδή, as in Pindar Nemean Odes . ῥαπτῶν ἐπέων…ἀοιδοί. On the links between
Seneca’s uates and Sophocles’ ῥαψῳδός, see Töchterle () ad Oedipus , who provides an
extensive list of comparanda, and Boyle () ad Oedipus .
358 Erica Bexley
with a poet and with her poetry.⁹ Not only is weaving an established metaphor
for the creation of a poetic text, it also implies a deceptive and potentially hostile
act: the weavers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular, often use their art to trick
others and to challenge higher powers.¹⁰ Artistic practice is just as political in
Seneca’s Oedipus, where poetic texts often critique Oedipus in aggressive
terms, and where the protagonist’s ability to overcome figures like the Sphinx
is closely related to his capacity for secure, stable kingship. Oedipus’ acquisition
of political power depends upon his having interpreted the Sphinx’s poetry cor-
rectly, and although this event is a standard element of the Oedipus myth, Sene-
ca, as we shall see, uses it to draw close links between politics and reading. In
this regard, Oedipus’ recollection of the Sphinx functions programmatically, an-
ticipating his encounter with other uates in the play and presenting the only ex-
ample of his analyzing a poetic text and comprehending its hostility with any
degree of success. His position as a reader, moreover, is highlighted by the
phrase carmen…solui (“I untied the song”, 102), because the verb soluere can
be used to denote literary analysis (e. g. Quint. Institutio Oratoria 1.9.2: uersus…
soluere, “to analyze poetry”). The fact that Oedipus does not quote the riddle
at all in his reminiscence suggests that its meaning is no longer an issue; it
has been resolved and hence, the play’s audience will not get a chance to exam-
ine it.
The Pythia’s oracle, in contrast, is quoted in full. It is even marked off as a
quotation, because when Creon delivers it at 233 – 38, he switches out of trochaic
tetrameter and into the dactylic hexameter typically used for oracles.¹¹ Whereas
Sophocles’ Oedipus must examine Delphi’s information second-hand in the form
of Creon’s summary (Oedipus Tyrannus 84– 105), Seneca’s protagonist and those
watching him are given a complete text on which to pass judgment. The text,
moreover, is presented as inherently poetic, since the Pythia, like the Sphinx,
is a uates (230), and her “tangled response” (sorte perplexa, 212) and “twisted
obscurities” (ambage flexa, 214) recall the Sphinx’s implexos dolos. (101). Oedi-
 Seo ()  regards the episode as having yet another meta-literary layer, namely Oedi-
pus’ recollection of his former self, which she argues recalls the strong, decisive Oedipus that
appears at the beginning of Sophocles’ tragedy.
 Snyder () investigates the origins of weaving imagery and its association with poetic
composition in early Greek epic and lyric. As regards Ovidian scholarship, weaving is as popular
a theme as it is in the Metamorphoses itself. Harries () treats the Arachne episode; Rosati
() analyzes the entwined topics of weaving and poetry in Metamorphoses  and ; Johnson
()  –  discusses the ways in which weaving – and poetic activity more generally – in-
spire divine anger in Ovid’s epic.
 Ahl ()  draws attention to the significance of this metrical change.
pus, naturally, boasts of his ability to comprehend such material; he commands

Creon: fare, sit dubium licet / ambigua soli noscere Oedipodae datur (“speak it,
even though it is uncertain: understanding ambiguities is a skill granted to Oe-
dipus alone” 215 – 16). Alluding to his previous triumph over the enigmatic
Sphinx, Oedipus implies that superior knowledge is now integral to his self-def-
inition. His choice of words likewise conveys this idea, because the conjunction
of noscere and Oedipus points to a pun on οἶδα present in the hero’s name and
used already by Sophocles (Oedipus Tyrannus 397).¹² Of course, Oedipus’ claims
to knowledge produce ironic effects in both the Greek and Roman versions of the
tragedy, but Seneca makes this irony much starker, by presenting the Pythia’s en-
tire text, which cannot seem at all dubius to the audience:
Mitia Cadmeis remeabunt sidera Thebis,

si profugus Dircen Ismenida liquerit hospes
regis caede nocens, Phoebo iam notus et infans.
nec tibi longa manent sceleratae gaudia caedis:
tecum bella geres, natis quoque bella relinques,
turpis maternos iterum reuolutus in ortus.
Gentle to Cadmean Thebes will the stars return in their motion

If the fugitive guest leave the spring of Ismenian Dirce.
He killed the king and brought plague, marked out an as infant by Phoebus.
Villainous killer, you will not enjoy your pillage much longer!
You’ll fight a war with yourself, leave war to your sons as their portion,
Son, who vilely returned to rise back in the womb of the mother.¹³
(Oedipus 233 – 8)
Contrary to Oedipus’ expectations, there seems to be nothing to solve here. The

oracle’s latter lines even employ second-person forms to point to Oedipus direct-
ly as the guilty party.¹⁴ When, following this quotation, Oedipus proceeds to
question Creon about Laius’ murder, his inability to interpret the Pythia’s poetry
could not be clearer. At the same time, the audience has been given a chance to
exercise its own interpretive powers, and to comprehend what Oedipus cannot.
 The noscere / Oedipus wordplay is noted by Frank ()  and Fitch and McElduff ()
. For Sophocles’ punning on Oedipus’ name, see Goldhill ()  – ; for puns in the
myth overall, see Segal () .
 All block translations in this essay come from Ahl () which is a masterful translation of
both Seneca’s and Sophocles’ plays.
 Both Boyle () ad Oedipus  –  and Töchterle () ad Oedipus  remark on the
Pythia’s second-person address without, however, considering how it affects the characteriza-
tion of Oedipus.
360 Erica Bexley
Seneca pursues these themes of poetry and reading later in the second act,
where Tiresias and Manto conduct a sacrifice in the hope of conjuring the name
of Laius’ murderer from the entrails.¹⁵ As many scholars have observed, the phys-
ical signs produced by this lengthy ritual appear to symbolize episodes from Oe-
dipus’ life, and from the Theban mythic cycle more generally.¹⁶ Hence: the sac-
rificed heifer is pregnant in an unnatural way, signifying Jocasta (371– 5); smoke
from the altar settles in a ring around the king’s head, designating his kingship
and self-blinding (325 – 6); the sacrificial flame splits in two and fights itself, des-
ignating Eteocles and Polynices (321– 3); further signs of the impending Theban
civil war are found in the liver, which has seven veins – the seven gates of Thebes
(364) – and two nodes, indicating shared power (359 – 60).¹⁷ Given their wealth
of allusions, these entrails are comprehensible only to someone who possesses
prior literary knowledge of the Theban cycle. Like so much of Senecan drama,
the extispicy scene plays on its own ‘secondariness’, encouraging the audience
to situate it within the context of earlier poetry.¹⁸ It is those watching the play,
and not those inside it, who can understand fully the literary texture of this rit-
ual.
 Where and how to divide the acts in Seneca’s Oedipus is a tricky question, one over which
scholars themselves are divided. See Boyle ()  –  for a summary of the arguments. Over-
all, I concur with Paratore () , Müller ()  n. , and Boyle ()  –  in giving
the play a six-act structure, which divides as follows: Act  ( – ); Act  ( – ); Act 
( – ); Act  ( – ); Act  ( – ); Act  ( – ).
 Major studies of the episode’s symbolism include: Pratt ()  – ; Bettini () and
(); and Busch (). Töchterle () ad loc. and Boyle () ad loc. both provide
ample commentary in their discussion of this section.
 On the symbolism of the flame and smoke, see Pratt ()  –  and Paratore () .
In his discussion of the liver, Pratt ()  makes a further, ingenious observation: the two
nodes rising from the divinatory organ “with equal swelling” (capita paribus bina consurgunt
toris, ) can also be taken to represent the two occupants of Jocasta’s marriage bed (torus).
Bettini ()  –  provides the most comprehensive and convincing analysis of the preg-
nant heifer, proposing not only that its perversion evokes Jocasta and Oedipus, but also that
Seneca’s contradictory phrase conceptus innuptae bouis () recalls Sophocles’ Oedipus
, where the chorus states that time has long ago condemned the king’s “unmarried mar-
riage”: δικάζει τὸν ἄγαμον γάμον πάλαι. Busch () advances a contrary argument by suggest-
ing that the extispicy’s signs do not permit such clear analysis; while clever, his suggestions are
undermined somewhat by the fact that Statius (Thebaid . – ) regarded the details of
Seneca’s extispicy as very clear indeed.
 Such ‘secondariness’ more usually results in self-conscious metatheatre, as in the famous
cases of Seneca’s Medea citing her own name. On the literary self-awareness of Senecan
drama, see in particular: Boyle ()  – ; Schiesaro ()  – ; Littlewood
(); Hinds (); and Seo ()  – .
Further, the ritual itself resembles poetic material and its interpretation is
described as if it were a form of reading. Tiresias is called upon to analyze the
signa (384) and notae (331; 352) present in or on the victims’ bodies; the latter
term, in particular, conflates ritual interpretation with reading, since nota de-
notes not only symbols, but also lettering and written communication. Similarly,
the verb eruo, which Tiresias employs at 297 – fata eruantur (“let fate’s decree be
rooted out”) – can also be used in the context of uncovering hidden meanings in
literature or oratory, as in Quintilian’s description of rhetorical emphasis: cum ex
aliquo dicto latens aliquid eruitur (“when something hidden is extracted from
some phrase”, Institutio Oratoria 9.2.64). This connection between interpreting
natural signs and interpreting a literary text is not unique to Seneca, either, be-
cause Cicero regards the two practices as analogous in his De Divinatione: inter-
pretes, ut grammatici poetarum, proxime ad eorum, quos interpretantur, diuinatio-
nem uidentur accedere (“men capable of interpreting seem to approach very near
to the prophecy of the gods they interpret, just as scholars do when they inter-
pret the poets”, Div. 1.34).¹⁹ The extispicy, therefore, is yet another kind of poetic
material that Oedipus, and the audience, must confront in this play.
The fourth and final scene of reading comes in Act 3, when Creon reports the
necromancy conducted by Tiresias, and recites in full Laius’ prophetic, condem-
natory speech. Although many of this scene’s meta-poetic qualities have been
noted already by Alessandro Schiesaro, I shall summarize them briefly here.²⁰
First, Seneca draws attention to Tiresias’ combined role as mantis and poet, call-
ing him uates three times in the space of Creon’s speech (552; 571; 607). The seer’s
authorial role extends further still, because when he summons the dead from
Hades, he engages in an act of poetic creation, reanimating major literary char-
acters from the Theban cycle: Zethus and Amphion (611– 2); Niobe (613 – 5);
Agave and Pentheus (615 – 8). Schiesaro remarks that Tiresias’ action “powerfully
re-enacts what poetry and poets do”; it revivifies – and in Laius’ case, endows
with speech – personae that otherwise have no agency of their own.²¹ In this re-
gard, the carmen magicum that Tiresias utters (561) functions as both an incan-
tation and as poetry. It may even be construed more specifically as tragic poetry,
since the dead whom Tiresias reanimates belong to tragedy more than to any
other genre: Zethus and Amphion featured in Euripides’ lost Antiopa, and in Pa-
 The connection is explored in more detail by Struck ()  –  who argues that the
semiotics of divination resemble closely ancient allegorical readings of poetry, and that the
two approaches were particularly popular among adherents of Stoic philosophy.
 Schiesaro ()  – .
 Schiesaro () .
362 Erica Bexley
cuvius’; Niobe in plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles; Pentheus and Agave most
famously in Euripides’ Bacchae.
As if to match its meta-tragic content, Seneca’s necromancy scene is also
meta-theatrical. While Tiresias resembles an author composing a text, Creon re-
sembles an actor presenting that text to an audience. As was the case with the
Pythia’s oracle, Creon relays Laius’ words in direct speech (626 – 58), an action
that leads him to step into the part of Laius and assume his dramatic persona
for more than thirty lines. Although most striking, understandably, when staged,
this layering of performance within performance nonetheless emerges clearly
even when the scene is read. Creon is an actor, and once again, Oedipus is the
audience. Creon could even be said to play the further part of a tragic messenger,
inasmuch as he reports at length the details of an off-stage event, to someone
waiting for news, at a critical point in the tragedy’s action.²² Dramatic self-aware-
ness permeates this entire scene and, as in the previous three instances, it puts
Oedipus in the position of watching, listening to, and ultimately having to inter-
pret what has been performed.
Seneca also emphasizes the poetic texture of the necromancy scene by draw-
ing close connections between Tiresias qua uates and Laius’ ghost, and further
connecting the two of them to Vergil’s Sibyl. Laius in particular resembles Tire-
sias so closely that he becomes almost an extension of the seer himself.²³ Both
are disheveled – Tiresias wears “dirty attire” (squalente cultu, 554), Laius’s hair is
“caked with dirt and grime” (paedore foedo squalidam obtentus comam, 625) –
and both speak ore rabido (“with raging mouth”, 561– 2; 626). The latter phrase
is significant because it recalls Vergil’s Sibyl (os rabidum, Aeneid 6.80; rabida
ora, Aeneid 6.102), herself a simultaneously poetic and prophetic figure, whose
role as vates makes her, in the words of Emily Gowers, “a plausible surrogate
for Vergil.”²⁴ This potential confluence of author and character occurs at an in-
ternal level in Seneca’s Oedipus, with Laius replicating Tiresias’ authorial role as
uates. Just as Creon’s speech overall may be regarded as a kind of poetic text
with Creon as its performer, so Laius’ speech resembles a poetic text with
Laius/Tiresias as its author. Examined from one angle, Laius is a dramatic char-
acter; from another, he is a poet figure like the Pythia and the Sphinx.
 Boyle () ad Oedipus  –  likens Creon’s retelling of Laius’ speech to a messenger
speech. The hesitancy Creon displays prior to delivering his report is likewise typical of Seneca’s
messengers: see, for instance, Phaedra  – .
 On Laius as an extension of Tiresias, see Schiesaro () . Statius, always a close reader
of Seneca, acknowledges this connection between Laius and Tiresias at Thebaid . – ,
where the former appears to Eteocles in a dream, disguised as the seer.
 Gowers () .
Taken altogether, the four poetic ‘texts’ in this play achieve the same end:
they foreground the act of reading. Seneca compels both Oedipus and the audi-
ence to test their respective powers of interpretation. At the same time, audience
members are able to analyze this material from a more informed standpoint than
Oedipus qua character could ever hope to achieve. Thus, Seneca creates a gap
between internal and external ‘readers’, and this gap widens progressively
over the course of the drama.
Oedipus Ruling
As much as Seneca’s Oedipus prides himself on his ability to answer riddles and
decode oracles, he also regards that ability as fundamental to his status as ruler.
In this tragedy, acts of interpretation are in themselves acts of power: Oedipus
strives to resolve not only ambiguous poetic meaning, but ambiguous political
motives as well; he makes parallel efforts to exert his grip on kingship and his
grasp of the play’s multiple poetic texts. Seneca associates these two spheres
of Oedipus’ activity via the binary terms dubius and certus, which dominate
the play’s language whenever the protagonist attempts to impose or confirm
his authority.
In his influential study of Seneca’s Oedipus, Donald Mastronarde shows how
the tragedy’s themes develop around repeated images and clusters of adjectives
that draw various sections of the text together into a tight, symbolic system.²⁵
The adjectives dubius and certus belong to this pattern; Mastronarde notes
that the former is particularly prominent, and that it contributes to the play’s
overall atmosphere of foreboding.²⁶ Yet dubius evokes more than just Oedipus’
fear and uncertainty; it also describes the kinds of ambiguity that Oedipus per-
sistently, if misguidedly, opposes throughout the drama. When Creon returns
from Delphi, for instance, he announces that the oracle has given responsa
dubia (“unclear answers”, 212). Oedipus’ own immediate response is to imbue
the adjective with political connotations and use it to imply that the Pythia,
and/or Creon, is not assisting the state by being opaque: dubiam salutem qui
dat adflictis negat (“uncertain help is no help at all”, 213). In his role as king,
Oedipus wants to feel secure, which means he wants definite solutions to the
problems besetting him. Despite Creon’s reminder that Delphic oracles are usu-
ally indirect – ambage flexa Delphico mos est deo / arcana tegere (“it is custom-
 Mastronarde ().
 Mastronarde ()  – .
364 Erica Bexley
ary for the Delphic god to hide secrets in twisting riddles” 214– 5), Oedipus in-
sists that he alone has the ability to resolve dubious poetic material: fare, sit
dubium licet / ambigua soli noscere Oedipodae datur (“speak, even if it is uncer-
tain: understanding ambiguities is a skill granted to Oedipus alone” 215 – 6).
Aside from acknowledging Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus 397, where Oedipus like-
wise boasts of his victory over the Sphinx – ὁ μηδὲν εἰδὼς Οἰδίπους, ἔπαυσά νιν
(“I, know-nothing Oedipus, I stopped her”) – line 216 of Seneca’s version also
characterizes Oedipus as a selfish autocrat, a role he shares with many other
Senecan protagonists.²⁷ By claiming sole interpretive power, Oedipus implies
that he controls poetry itself, what it means and how it is received. In fact, Oe-
dipus presents his singular authority (soli…Oedipodae) as the only solution to the
oracle’s inherent doubleness (dubia, 212; dubiam, 213; ambage flexa, 214; dubi-
um, 215; ambigua, 216). Seneca uses this language of one and two to depict a fun-
damental conflict between autocratic rule, which must by nature be singular,
and poetic meaning, which tends to resist being resolved into one, simple mes-
sage. As far as Oedipus is concerned, ambiguities threaten his status as king.
A later scene between Oedipus and Creon explores this idea more fully. At
the end of Act 3, Oedipus accuses his kinsman of plotting to take the throne,
and although Creon protests that one should not condemn a potentially innocent
man (699), Oedipus waves this caveat aside in favor of an autocratic response:
dubia pro certis solent / timere reges (“kings often fear uncertainties as certain-
ties”, 699 – 700).²⁸ A typically Senecan sententia, Oedipus’ reply reveals his
urge to impose a single, definite meaning on ambiguous material: Creon’s
guilt has not been proven, it is merely suspected and, in this regard, it is open
to interpretation. But Oedipus cannot tolerate such semantic ambivalence, be-
cause it has the potential to destabilize his power both as a ruler and as a reader.
To protect his political position, Oedipus must judge Creon guilty, a need that he
himself acknowledges with the phrase omne quod dubium est cadat (“everything
doubtful must fall”, 702).²⁹ Such an assertion puts Oedipus in the position not
only of being able to judge what counts as dubium, but also of being able to en-
force it. Oedipus’ status as king allows him to enshrine his own version of events
as official and final. In effect, Oedipus transforms dubia into certa precisely by
punishing Creon, because once the king’s verdict has been passed, interpreting
 On the rhetoric and psychology of power in Senecan drama, see Braden () and ()
 – .
 Detailed analysis of this scene can be found in Mader ().
 The tyrannical quality of Oedipus’ statement is acknowledged by the anonymous author of
the Octavia, who adapts Oedipus  and puts it into the mouth of Nero: quidquid excelsum est
cadat (Octavia ).
the situation in any other manner amounts to an act of political rebellion. As Ae-
gisthus remarks in the Agamemnon, “when a master hates, a person becomes
guilty without trial” (ubi dominus odit, fit nocens, non quaeritur. Agamem-
non 280). The exchange between Oedipus and Creon exemplifies the truth of
this aphorism: Creon’s actions are defined entirely by Oedipus’ autocracy, and
anything dubius is certus if Oedipus declares it so. Gordon Braden’s description
of Senecan rhetoric sums up the effect perfectly: “absolute power inserts itself
between words and their significations and rewrites them as opposites.”³⁰ We
may add, too, Stephen Greenblatt’s remark about Renaissance politics, which ap-
plies just as well to Seneca’s Oedipus: the quintessential sign of power is “the
ability to impose one’s fictions upon the world: the more outrageous the fiction,
the more impressive the manifestation of power.”³¹
Oedipus’ reaction to Creon in Act 3 corresponds in some essential respects to
his treatment of the Pythia in Act 2. In both instances, Oedipus sets himself up in
opposition to everything that is dubius: vatic inscrutability on Delphi’s part, po-
litical untrustworthiness on Creon’s. A major result is that Oedipus associates his
ability to interpret with his ability to rule. Further, the binary of dubius and certus
applies also to Oedipus himself, as Jocasta acknowledges in the play’s very first
scene:
regium hoc ipsum reor:

aduersa capere, quoque sit dubius magis
status et cadentis imperi moles labet,
hoc stare certo pressius fortem gradu
Being a king, I think, means this: coming to grips

with what confronts you. The harder it is
to stand, the more power’s burden slips and slides,
the more determinedly you must take
your stand. Be brave! Step confidently now!
(Oedipus 82– 5)
Although Jocasta means to depict autocratic firmness in positive terms, the be-
havior she adumbrates is what Oedipus himself exhibits when he condemns
Creon: he shows no sign of wavering, he reacts with absolute certainty, even
in a situation that is far from clear. In effect, Oedipus confirms his own certitude
by imposing it on whatever material he is required to interpret. At the same time,
 Braden () . Although Braden applies this remark to Sen. Thyestes  – quod nolunt
uelint – it fits Seneca’s Oedipus equally well.
 Greenblatt () .
366 Erica Bexley
however, the terms of Jocasta’s description reveal a deep irony: the king must
confront an uncertain situation (dubius…status) and take a stand (stare) with se-
cure step (certo…gradu), all of which recalls the popular etymology of his name
from οἰδέω and πούς, “swollen-foot”.³² Underlying Jocasta’s words is the sugges-
tion that Oedipus is actually far more dubius than he, or anyone else suspects. If,
as Jocasta implies, Oedipus’ governmental position depends on his displaying
himself as certus, then Oedipus’ very identity undermines his power. Despite
his attempts to eradicate ambiguities, Oedipus will end up being the play’s
most ambiguous figure.
A possible objection to the argument I have advanced so far is that Seneca’s
Oedipus behaves in a fearful, hesitant manner far more often than he behaves in
an autocratic one. Fear, in particular, appears to be his default mode, and Mira
Seo notes how Oedipus’ apprehension contributes to the play’s already high lev-
els of dramatic irony.³³ But even in this regard Oedipus displays a solipsistic at-
titude typical of Senecan protagonists. For instance, he fears and laments the de-
struction the plague has visited on Thebes only to wonder what special disaster
awaits him alone: iam iam aliquid in nos fata moliri parant /…cui reseruamur
malo? (“now the fates are devising something against me…for what evil am I
being reserved?” 28 – 31). As in the scene with Creon, Oedipus’ autocracy reveals
itself in his exceptionalism. His suffering only makes him feel more prominent;
paradoxically, it reinforces his own sense of power, since only the very powerful
can be faced with such disasters.³⁴ Thus, Oedipus’ fear enhances rather than di-
minishes his unshakeable sense of his own importance. By the end of the play,
he even goes so far as to exult that his misfortune outstrips what Apollo predict-
ed: o Phoebe mendax, fata superaui impia! (“Apollo, you lied, I have surpassed
my sacrilegious fate” 1046). Oedipus’ dominant attitude at this moment is the
same one he displays towards the Pythia and towards Creon: even at this
nadir of wretchedness, his feelings of singularity and specialness induce him
to promote his own version of events as the most valid. The power he asserts
as a ruler gives him the capacity to define events as he pleases, even to the ex-
tent of calling Apollo a liar.
Of course, Oedipus can never really define events at he pleases, and that is
why the business of interpretation involves such high stakes in this play. On the
one hand, Oedipus desires to be both an autocratic ruler and an autocratic read-
 As far as I am aware, Ahl () is the first to note, via his translation, the way this passage
puns on Oedipus’ name.
 Seo ()  – .
 As Oedipus himself declares at lines  – , the more supreme one’s power, the more open
one is to fortune’s blows. It is a standard sentiment in Senecan tragedy.
er; on the other, his perspective is so limited that he does not realize his funda-
mental ignorance of the play’s poetic texts. Neither Oedipus nor his interpretive
powers can be certus as long as the audience understands what he cannot. Es-
sentially, Seneca’s drama is so arranged that it invites the audience to exercise its
critical powers in competition with Oedipus’ own; further, those who watch, lis-
ten to, or read the play are encouraged to analyze Oedipus himself, to treat the
king as precisely the kind of ambiguous poetic material he often desires to con-
trol.
Oedipus Text
Far from being able to resolve ambiguities, Seneca’s Oedipus himself comprises a
collection of signs that require interpretation.³⁵ In the first section of this chapter
I discussed Oedipus’ apparent inability to understand the play’s various poetic
texts such as extispicy and prophecy. In this section, I argue that Seneca assim-
ilates Oedipus himself to poetic and prophetic material. The result is that Oedi-
pus, too, becomes subject to the audience’s interpretive powers, which necessa-
rily weakens his autocratic claims. Not only is Oedipus unaware of the meaning
conveyed by the Pythia, by Laius, or by the extispicy, he also fails to read the text
that is his own identity.
I mention above that the extispicy in Seneca’s play may be read as a text of
events from Oedipus’ life and from the Theban mythic cycle. The reverse is also
true: the figure of Oedipus, especially his physical form, is portrayed throughout
the drama as material suitable for an extispicy. Notably, Seneca likens Oedipus
to a sacrificial victim. Just as Tiresias seeks “definite signs” in the bulls’ entrails
(certis…notis, 331; certas…notas, 352), so Oedipus carries unmistakable marks on
his own body (certas…notas, 811). When Oedipus commands the Corinthian,
nunc adice certas corporis nostri notas (“now tell in addition the definite
marks on my body,” 811), he presents himself as essentially extispicial material,
inviting interpretation in the same way that Tiresias demands to hear from Manto
which signs are present in the entrails: sed ede certas uiscerum nobis notas (“but
tell to us the innards’ definite signs”, 352). Language used in the extispicy scene
 The prevalence of signs in this play, and the onus repeatedly laid on interpreting them, sug-
gests a connection with Sophocles’ Antigone, especially Antigone  – , where Tiresias de-
scribes a moment of divination and a failed sacrifice, both of which he struggles to interpret. A
further potential connection between the Antigone and Seneca’s Oedipus comes when Oedipus
orders guards to take Creon away and shut him up in a cave as punishment: seruate sontem
saxeo inclusum specu ().
368 Erica Bexley
also returns when Oedipus is punishing himself: he searches out his eyes (scru-
tatur, 965) just as Manto searches through the entrails (scrutemur, 372); when he
tears at his sockets, the participle eruentis (961) recalls Tiresias’ remarks at 297,
fata eruantur (“let fate’s decree be rooted out”).³⁶ Similarly, Oedipus’ act of “un-
rolling” his eyes’ shattered orbs (uulsos…/ euoluit orbes, 966 – 7) likens his body
to a poetic text, because the verbs uoluere and euoluere can denote either the un-
raveling of scrolls, or the recitation of verse. This latter meaning applies in the
necromancy scene, when Tiresias “recites a magic song” (carmen…magicum uo-
luit, 561) in order to summon the dead. Finally, Oedipus’ encounter with the
Sphinx likewise presents him as a sacrificial victim, since the creature’s impa-
tience to tear his innards (uiscera expectans mea, 100) can, in the context of
so much extispicial activity, double as a potentially interpretive action. The
Sphinx is a uates (93) intent on Oedipus’ uiscera (100). The fact that she sings
“in blind rhythms” (caecis…modis, 92) also assimilates her to Tiresias, the
blind uates par excellence, who, in the process of analyzing a sacrifice inciden-
tally analyzes Oedipus as well.³⁷
The main effect of these associations is to invite the play’s audience to treat
Oedipus precisely as if he were a piece of poetry or prophecy, a set of physical
signs and symbols. Further, the protagonist’s ignorance of his own identity is
presented as proof of his inability to ‘read’ poetic material. Despite Oedipus’ de-
sire to be certus, he fails to grasp the significance of his own certas notas; the
fact that he cannot properly comprehend these notae suggests his broader inabil-
ity to comprehend texts.
The marks on Oedipus’ body are one example of Seneca resuming the certus /
dubius binary, this time to illustrate the protagonist’s loss of authority.³⁸ Al-
though Oedipus tries to eradicate ambiguity, he himself turns out to be funda-
mentally ambiguous material. Seneca emphasizes Oedipus’ dubius status
throughout the play. For instance, when Laius condemns his son to “hobble, un-
sure of the path” (reptet incertus uiae, 656), the image recalls and reverses Jocas-
 The latter correspondence is noted by Boyle () ad , who declares eruere a “thematic
verb” in the context of this play. The verb scrutari is also significant, because it associates Oe-
dipus’ physical ‘self-examination’ with the moral self-examination Seneca advocates in his phi-
losophy (e. g. Epistulae .: excute te et uarie scrutare et obserua); for more on such practices of
therapeutic psychology in Seneca’s Oedipus, see Dressler ()  – .
 Busch ()  suggests another, equally valid, way of interpreting the phrase caecis
modis: he regards it as relating to the smoke from the sacrificial flame, which blinds Oedipus
during the extispicy (Oedipus  – ).
 Curley ()  – , examines the ways in which Seneca uses the dubius/certus binary to
evoke Oedipus’ weakness as well as his strength.
ta’s exhortation for Oedipus to stand firm (82– 5).³⁹ Similarly, Tiresias enquires
during the sacrifice whether the flame is strong or whether it “creeps along un-
certain of the way” (serpit incertus uiae, 312). Once again, such corresponding
phrases draw a close connection between the events of the extispicy and the
events of Oedipus’ own life, to the extent that interpreting sacrificial signs is
the same act as interpreting the figure of Oedipus. The bull, too, symbolizes
the king: it “rushes, doubtful, here and there” (huc et huc dubius ruit, 343)
and, when sacrificed, gushes blood from its eyes in a manner that anticipates Oe-
dipus’ own self-directed violence: sed uersus retro / per ora multus sanguis atque
oculos redit (“a great amount of blood turns back and flows through the mouth
and eyes”, 349 – 50).⁴⁰ Even the conjunction of versus and retro in line 349 makes
us think of Oedipus, whose incestuous actions figure in this play both as a form
of return (reuolutus, 238) and as an overturning of the laws of nature (natura
uersa est, 371) and of generation (reuersas generis…uices, 870). Not only does
the extispicy represent Oedipus, on a more essential level, it is Oedipus; it is a
natural perversion deriving from the protagonist’s perverted nature. Moreover,
by using the dubius / certus binary in this scene, Seneca reinforces the idea
that Oedipus is subject to interpretation rather than in control of it. Although
the king of Thebes has on several occasions attempted to assert himself as an
active ‘reader’, he has featured all along as a passive object of other people’s
analysis. As much as he fails to understand poetry, Oedipus simply is poetry,
in all its ambiguity and multiplicity.
Laius, too, characterizes Oedipus as poetic material when he denounces his
son as implicitum malum / magisque monstrum Sphinge perplexum sua (“an inter-
twined evil, a monster more perplexing than his own Sphinx”, 640 – 1). Recalling
both the Sphinx’s song and the Pythia’s prophecy, the adjectives implicitus and
perplexus point to Oedipus being a kind of text. The term monstrum serves a sim-
ilar end, branding Oedipus not just a freak of nature, but also a prophetic symbol
that requires analysis.⁴¹ Because of the comparisons it draws, Laius’ interpreta-
tion of Oedipus directly challenges the king’s autocratic authority. In fact, Laius
adopts the same position towards Oedipus that Oedipus once adopted towards
 Chinnici () , makes the interesting observation that the verb repto at Oedipus 
denotes the crawling movement of a child, hence Laius’ curse evokes Oedipus’ infancy and
his wounded feet, along with his imminent exile as a blind old man.
 The parallel between Oedipus and the bull is noted by Fitch ()  n. .
 In the words of Jeffrey Cohen () : “the monster exists only to be read…a glyph that
seeks a hierophant.” For the ancient etymologies of monstrum, see Maltby ()  – ; on
the term’s significance in Seneca tragedy, see Staley ()  – , and Bexley () 
and  – .
370 Erica Bexley
the Sphinx. Whereas Oedipus described the Sphinx as having “bloodied jaws”
(cruentos…/rictus, 93 – 4), Laius calls Oedipus a “bloodied king” (rex cruentus,
634) who “wields the scepter with bloodied hand” (cruenta sceptra qui dextra
geris, 642).⁴² By equating Oedipus with the monster he defeated and the riddle
he solved, Laius implies that Oedipus has not, in fact, succeeded in reading
any poetic text. Further, by asserting his own interpretive ability, Laius robs Oe-
dipus of the power to define the world as he pleases; even more crucially, he im-
plies that power itself has led Oedipus to misinterpret and misrepresent reality: it
is because he assumes that he knows, or can dictate, what the truth is, that Oe-
dipus has failed to see the monstrum he actually embodies.
Laius is not the only figure in this play who redefines and thus undermines
Oedipus’ claims; the Pythia, too, uses her prophecy to reassess Oedipus’ image
of himself. When she describes Laius’ murderer as a profugus (“fugitive” 234) and
a hospes (“guest”, 234), she picks up on only to redeploy two key words from
Oedipus’ introductory monologue: at line 23, Oedipus calls himself a profugus
from Corinth, and at 80, an “ill-omened guest” (infaustus hospes). He also
uses an imperative form, profuge (“flee”, 80) when he muses that his mere pres-
ence is having a catastrophic effect on Thebes. By repeating this terminology, the
Pythia’s prophecy draws attention to the ways in which Oedipus has misread
both his situation and his identity.⁴³ For Oedipus, his supposed exile from Cor-
inth represents proof – or at least reassurance – of his innocence; for the Pythia,
it represents precisely the opposite. Further, the term profugus in the Pythia’s
oracle makes most sense if read as a substantive in apposition to the verb liquer-
it: mitia…remeabunt sidera…/ si profugus Dircen Ismenida liquerit hospes (“gentle
stars will return if the guest leaves Ismenian Dirce as an exile”). Taken in this
way, profugus implies not Oedipus’ past, not the exile he assumes he is under-
going already, but his future exile from Thebes, a journey he will begin at the
play’s end. Thus, the text of the Pythia’s speech reinterprets the text of Oedipus’
 Parallels noted by Mastronarde ()  and Boyle () ad Oedipus  – . The final
syllable of cruenta in line  can in fact scan as either long or short, ambiguously agreeing
both with sceptra and with dextra.
 Pratt ()  notes that the Pythia’s prophecy echoes key words from Oedipus’ earlier
speech, but a mistake in the manuscripts leads him to overstate his argument. Pratt follows
manuscript A in reading non at the beginning of line  – non ego penates profugus excessi
meos – rather than the far more plausible hoc suggested by Bentley and accepted by Zwierlein
(); Töchterle (); and Boyle (). As a result, Pratt asserts that the Pythia contradicts
Oedipus directly (by calling him an exile) when she actually reinterprets the king’s words in a
subtler manner.
own, earlier speech; in doing so, it invites the play’s audience to see in both Oe-
dipus’ and the Pythia’s words meanings that are opaque to Oedipus himself.
The Pythia also challenges Oedipus’ claims about knowledge, by declaring
the king Phoebo iam notus et infans (“known to Phoebus already, as a child”,
235). The passive form, notus, balances the active form, noscere, that Oedipus
has used just 20 lines earlier when asserting his ability to interpret oracles: am-
bigua soli noscere Oedipodae datur (“understanding ambiguities is a skill grant-
ed to Oedipus alone”, 216). Given that, throughout the play, Oedipus is the object
of other people’s analysis, the passive notus is perfectly appropriate: far from
knowing, Oedipus is known. He is, moreover, known via the notae on his
body, which must be recognized and interpreted in the same manner as a text
– Frederick Ahl notes this pun when he translates notus in line 235 as
“marked”.⁴⁴ This passive form of noscere appears again later in the tragedy, at
another significant moment, when Oedipus asserts his self-knowledge in face
of what is by now overwhelming evidence to the contrary: sed animus contra in-
nocens / sibique melius quam deis notus negat (“but on the other hand my mind,
innocent and better known to itself than to the gods, denies it”, 766 – 7). The
phrase deis notus recalls Phoebo notus in 235 and in doing so, it points once
again to Oedipus’ status as an object of analysis and a text to be read. It also
confirms – if any confirmation were necessary – that Oedipus has failed an as
interpreter of texts because he does not know himself. Despite Oedipus’ valiant
assertions to the contrary, events will prove that the gods actually do compre-
hend his mind far better than he does.
Unveiled Speech
As must be clear by now, Seneca’s tragedy relies on the audience’s prior knowl-
edge of the Oedipus story, and it is from this assumed knowledge that the play
derives the majority of its effects. Seneca ensures even at the play’s outset that
his audience is aware of Oedipus’ guilt, for instance by having the king declare
correctly – albeit for the wrong reasons – that he is the cause of the plague (Oe-
dipus 36). The audience is also expected to understand Oedipus’ identity in ad-
vance, from its reading of earlier texts, Sophocles above all.⁴⁵ The result is not
just dramatic irony, however, because by inviting audience members to see
 Ahl () .

 In making this claim, I disagree with Ahl () and (), who argues for Oedipus’ inno-
cence both in Sophocles’ text and in Seneca’s.
372 Erica Bexley
what Oedipus cannot, Seneca encourages them to take a critical view of Oedi-
pus’ kingship.
A striking characteristic of poet figures and poetic texts in this play is that
they are, on the whole, hostile towards Oedipus. The Sphinx is an obviously an-
tagonistic uates, but the Pythia and Laius too denounce the protagonist in re-
markably violent terms, portraying him more or less as a tyrant who has seized
power and enjoys it by illegal means. The Pythia describes Oedipus’ current state
of kingship as sceleratae gaudia caedis (“the joys of criminal slaughter”, 236)
while Laius calls his son “a bloodied king, who seizes the scepter as a prize of
savage slaughter” (rex cruentus, pretia qui saeuae necis / sceptra…occupat,
634– 5). Although technically correct, both descriptions attribute to Oedipus
an unfair degree of intent, as if he had murdered Laius for the express purpose
of stealing his throne. In effect, Seneca grants both the Pythia’s and Laius’
speeches a slightly political bent; he presents them as opposing not just Oedi-
pus, but Oedipus in his position as king. Because of its political quality, more-
over, Laius’ and the Pythia’s poetry bears some resemblance to opposition liter-
ature: it criticizes the way a powerful figure wields his power, and it invites the
audience to acknowledge this criticism, while the ruler himself cannot fully ac-
cess the text’s meaning.
This gulf that Seneca creates between Oedipus’ understanding and the audi-
ence’s results in what may reasonably be termed ‘doublespeak’, a situation in
which a text’s potentially subversive meaning is comprehensible only to those
who can detect its ‘code’ and therefore interpret it in the proper way.⁴⁶ This
kind of veiled speech typically takes the form of allusive language, which
hides a hostile meaning beneath a more innocuous one. Careful work by Freder-
ick Ahl in particular shows how Roman writers under oppressive regimes use fig-
ured language to voice their political opposition.⁴⁷ The two scenes of prophecy in
Seneca’s Oedipus perform a similar function, though they do not use quite the
same method. Nothing of what the Pythia or Laius says could be classed as al-
lusive, figured, or veiled. If anything, their accusations are presented in very
clear terms, and seem to be made clearer still when both texts address Oedipus
directly, in the second person. The Pythia, as reported by Creon, declares:
nec tibi longa manent sceleratae gaudia caedis:

tecum bella geres, natis quoque bella relinques,
turpis maternos iterum reuolutus in ortus.
 For further definition of the term ‘doublespeak’, see Bartsch ()  – .

 Ahl (a) and (b).
Villainous killer, you will not enjoy your pillage much longer!
You’ll fight a war with yourself, leave war to your sons as their portion,
Son, who vilely returned to rise back in the womb of the mother.
(Oedipus 236 – 8)
Laius, also reported by Creon, addresses Oedipus in much the same manner:
te, te cruenta sceptra qui dextra geris,

te pater inultus urbe cum tota petam
You hold my scepter in your bloodstained hands.

But I, your father, as yet unavenged,
Will, with the whole world, hunt you down.
(Oedipus 642– 3)
Strictly speaking, it is not unusual for oracles to be delivered in the second per-
son, as they are, for example, in Herodotus 1.65 (ἥκεις, ὦ Λυκόοργε, ἐμὸν ποτὶ
πίονα νηόν; “O Lycurgus, you have come to my rich temple”) and 1.85 (Λυδὲ
γένος, πολλῶν βασιλεῦ, μέγα νήπιε Κροῖσε; “Lydian, king over many, O Croesus,
you great fool”). In the case of Seneca’s Pythia, however, the second person
forms are particularly striking because Oedipus does not acknowledge them as
being directed at him. In any other context, these forms could be interpreted
as generic exclamations; when spoken by Creon, directly to Oedipus, they ac-
quire an unavoidably condemnatory tone. For an audience acquainted with Oe-
dipus’ story, the meaning of both the Pythia’s and Laius’ words is clear to the
extent of being thoroughly ‘unveiled’.⁴⁸ But Oedipus still cannot make sense
of these pronouncements, and it is from this dissonance, from this gap between
Oedipus and the audience that doublespeak emerges. Laius and the Pythia both
create poetic texts that criticize a ruler; the ruler neither understands, nor in the
Pythia’s case even detects the criticism; the play’s audience, however, is able to
activate the text’s meaning and in doing so, is able to smile grimly at Oedipus’
expense.⁴⁹
Thus, the poetic texts presented in Seneca’s play appear subversive not just
because they critique a ruler, but more specifically because they condemn him in
terms that he himself cannot properly comprehend. By pitting Oedipus’ analyt-
ical ability against that of the tragedy’s external audience, Seneca evokes the po-
 Thus Boyle () ad Oedipus  –  calls Laius’ prophecy “a masterpiece of clarity.”
 Understandably enough, the audience plays a crucial role in detecting subversive meaning
and creating doublespeak; MacMullen ()  remarks, “code depends on decoders.” Bartsch
()  –  makes a similar point: “in practical terms it was the audience’s reaction that trans-
formed a given statement into an act of opposition or an ad hominem slur.”
374 Erica Bexley
litical pressures brought to bear on literary activity under the principate, a time
when writers would voice their resistance by relying on the shared and prior
knowledge of a particular interpretive community. The Pythia and Laius likewise
rely upon an interpretative community in order to convey their accusations. The
only difference, in their case, is that their speech is made allusive by its context
rather than through its language.
Conclusion
The scenes of extispicy, prophecy, and necromancy that punctuate Seneca’s Oe-
dipus draw attention to repeated confrontations between poets and autocrats,
rulers and readers. Each of these episodes resembles a poetic text, which, in
the process of revealing the king of Thebes’ identity, also contests his power.
A major theme of Seneca’s tragedy is the struggle for authority that occurs simul-
taneously in the realm of politics and of art, with Oedipus in particular assuming
that his analytical ability is an extension of his position as king. All acts of in-
terpretation, in this play, are bids for control: Oedipus develops his own version
of events in order both to assert and to preserve his absolute power; the play’s
uates undermine that power by transforming Oedipus himself into a text; finally,
the play’s audience members are encouraged to assume power because of their
superior ability to read and comprehend the texts that Oedipus cannot decipher.
Far from being certus, in his rule, his views, or even his sense of himself, Sene-
ca’s Oedipus turns out to be fundamentally dubius, a collection of poetic and
prophetic symbols, a riddle for others to decode and thereby, to dominate.
Over the course of the tragedy, Oedipus moves from analyzing subject to analyt-
ical object, a transformation that deprives him of his privileged position chiefly
because he fails to understand, or even try to understand, himself. What charac-
terizes Seneca’s Oedipus is his persistent assumption that power can be translat-
ed into knowledge. But the play’s uates and the audience realize that this equa-
tion only works when it is the other way around.⁵⁰
 I would like to thank the volume’s editors and the anonymous readers for the helpful feed-
back I received during the drafting process. Thanks are also due to the Australian National Uni-
versity, for providing me with the visitor’s status I needed in order to complete this paper.
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David Konstan
Doubting Domitian’s Divinity: Statius
Achilleid 1.1 – 2
Summary: The opening couplet of Statius’ Achilleid declares that Jupiter sought
to prevent his son (in reality, his grandson) Achilles from ascending to Olympus.
Since Domitian is explicitly equated with Achilles, I argue that these verses al-
lude to the fact that Vespasian chose as his successor Titus rather than Domitian
(the older brother), thereby effectively preventing Domitian’s deification. Various
details in the epic support the implicitly subversive character of the poem.
Keywords: Statius; Achilleid; Domitian; subversive poetry
Frederick Ahl is preeminent among those scholars who have discovered subver-
sive innuendos in the literature composed under the Roman Empire, and espe-
cially in the first century of the Principate, when memories of republican liberties
still lingered in the minds of highborn Romans who chafed under imperial autoc-
racy. Of necessity, any such criticisms had to be expressed not only guardedly but
cryptically; the emperors were neither illiterate nor fools, and if they detected a
hostile insinuation, however subtle, in a work of literature or art, their response
would be swift and very likely lethal. As a result, it requires considerable ingen-
uity to detect such nuances, and this fact naturally invites disagreement and
controversy. Is what appears to us like excessive and indeed obsequious praise
of an emperor such as Nero or Domitian, whom we regard as arbitrary and tyr-
annical, necessarily ironic, meant to alert the reader to its own insincerity? It is
tempting to think so, but perhaps we misunderstand the conventions that inform
such eulogies and the attitudes to authority even of poets such as Lucan and
Seneca, who paid with their lives for what was perceived as opposition to the re-
gime.
The poetry of Statius is an interesting case in point. He seems to have accept-
ed happily Domitian’s claims to divinity, referring to him as deus in his verses (cf.
Siluae 4.3.128 – 9), and, in the words of one critic, who wrote before the time
when paradox and ambivalence began to be regarded as poetic virtues, “is aban-
doned in his flattery” of the emperor.¹ And yet, scholars have seen indications of
 Scott () ; contrast Newlands () : “the extravagant language of the Silvae not
only expresses the poet’s intense appreciation for his object of praise; it also admits doubts and
reservations and draws attention to the wider cultural significance of the original occasion. For
praise … can encompass advice, admonition, criticism, even anxiety, as well as celebration”; cf.
378 David Konstan
a less subservient posture in his Siluae and especially in his grand epic, the The-
baid. As Carole Newlands puts it, “all Statius’ work to varying degrees, the The-
baid in particular, reflects Rome’s troubled dynastic history of the past hundred
years and the rupture with Augustan optimism.”² In this respect, the Achilleid is
an exception: in general, it has escaped political interpretations, and has been
discussed, when at all, for its rich allusions to earlier epic and other genres, be-
ginning, of course, with Homer’s Iliad, which Statius self-consciously claims, if
not to rival, then at least to supplement with an account of the entire life of
the hero.³ No doubt, at least part of the reason is the unfinished state of the
text, which breaks off early in the second book; though the fragment as we
have it is highly polished, its completion may have been forestalled by Statius’
death, probably in 96 and shortly before the death of the emperor Domitian in
September of that same year. The existing text, moreover, treats Achilles’
youth, including the episode of his cross-dressing, at his mother’s insistence,
so as to escape service at Troy, where Thetis knew he was doomed to perish.
This is material less amenable to a political reading, unless one wishes to see
a negative reference of some sort to Domitian’s own younger years; but there
is no obvious point of comparison, and in any case Achilles is represented as
tough and warlike, and once his disguise is penetrated he is eager to join the
expedition.⁴ Now, there is perhaps an episode in Domitian’s life that might
have been evoked by Achilles’ masquerade on the island of Scyros, to which I
will return below. But I wish mainly to examine the opening verses of the Achil-
p. : “Today the Silvae have provoked sharply opposing reactions, particularly as regards the
poems concerning Domitian and his entourage. They have been considered either as court
propaganda or as a form of ‘doublespeak’ that mocks and subverts a hated tyrant.” Newlands
()  pays homage to “Ahl’s brilliantly subversive reading” of Siluae .; cf. Ahl ()  –
. See also the sobering conclusion in Criado (): “The Thebaid and the Silvae, as with the
Greek tragedies about Thebes, offered no room for political dissent. Nevertheless, there is def-
initely room for reflection, hopeless though it may be.”
 Newlands () ; for a pioneering study in this direction, see also Dominik (). But con-
trast Sharrock and Ashley () : “it is difficult to read the epic [sc., the Achilleid] as a sub-
versive allegory.”
 See especially Hinds (); Hinds notes, for example, that Achilleid . – , where Thetis
rises from the sea to behold Paris sailing back to Troy with Helen, echoes Catullus . –
, where Thetis and other Nereids emerge to see the Argo (pp.  – ). Given the horrific pic-
ture of Achilles’ achievements narrated by the Parcae in the latter poem, such an allusion might
invite a darker interpretation of Statius’ epic. See also McGowan ()  with n.  for the
image of Achilles in Ovid.
 In Statius’ epic, Achilles rapes Deidamia (an allusion to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria . – ),
rather a brutish way of asserting his masculinity; Heslin ()  remarks: “Rape, that Ovi-
dian signifier of maleness, has surprisingly limited repercussions for Achilles’ own identity.”
leid, where I believe we may plausibly see a remarkably clear, if still cautious,
challenge to Domitian’s divine pretentions. Yet these lines seem not to have ex-
cited the suspicions even of readers disposed to find hints of a dissident voice in
the poem. Perhaps they are more circumspect than I imagine; or else, the reverse
may be the case, and the critique, rather than being latent, would be so obvious,
were it there, that Statius cannot possibly have intended it. I will suggest a rea-
son why he might have, despite what may seem its brazen conspicuousness. But
first, the verses themselves:
Magnanimum Aeaciden formidatamque Tonanti

progeniem et patrio uetitam succedere caelo,
diua, refer (Achilleid 1.1– 3).
I translate literally:
Tell, goddess, of great-hearted Aeacides, offspring dreaded by the Thunderer and forbidden
to succeed to his paternal heaven.⁵
Aeacides signifies, of course, the grandson of Aeacus, a status that Achilles

shared with his cousin Ajax. The Thunderer is Zeus or Jupiter, and the back
story is that Jupiter had been warned of a woman whose son was destined to
be greater than his father; there was thus a risk that the succession to the throne
of Olympus, which had already passed from Jupiter’s grandfather Uranus to his
father Cronus (that is, Saturn) and from him to Jupiter himself, might yet by oc-
cupied by a son of Jupiter’s. When Jupiter learned that the fated woman was The-
tis, he betrothed her to the mortal Peleus, thereby neutralizing the threat. Now,
by any standard, Statius’ allusion to this tale is strained: Achilles was not the
offspring of Jupiter, but of Peleus; that is precisely the point of the myth. Perhaps
 Cf. the version by Mozely (): “Tell, O goddess, of great-hearted Aeacides and of the prog-
eny that the Thunderer feared and forbade to inherit his father’s heaven.” Slavitt () offers a
freer translation, which incorporates explanatory material: “Of the great-spirited hero of Aeacus’
line, of him even the Thunderer feared to beget, lest, as Proteus warned, the son might exceed
the father, inheriting heaven, goddess tell.” Shackleton Bailey () renders the lines: “God-
dess, tell of great-hearted Aeacides, and offspring feared of the Thunderer and forbidden to suc-
ceed to his father’s heaven.” Hall and Ritchie ()  give: “Tell, O Goddess, of the great-
souled grandson of Aeacus, a child feared by the Thunderer and forbidden to succeed to his fa-
ther’s heaven”; cf. Heslin () : “Goddess, consider Achilles, great-hearted grandson of
Aeacus, the offspring who was feared by Jupiter the thunderer, and who was forbidden to inherit
the kingdom of heaven.” Wartel () leaves no doubt about the sense: “Le magnanime
Achille, ce héros à qui le maître du tonnerre craignit de donner la vie, de peur de le voir un
jour lui ravir le trône du ciel, Muse, c’est à toi de le chanter.”
380 David Konstan
we might render the phrase formidatamque Tonanti/ progeniem in a predicative

sense, “feared as [i. e., were he to be] a child of Jupiter’s”; but then, what to do
with patrio … caelo, that is, “paternal [or ancestral] heaven”? Once again, we are
obliged to take it as a contrary to fact proposition: “his father’s heaven [sc., had
Jupiter been his father].”⁶ Statius seems to have gone out of his way to suggest
that somehow Achilles really was the son of Jupiter, though in the poem it is per-
fectly clear that he was not (he was Jupiter’s great-grandson).⁷
But in any case, why begin with this detail about Achilles’ parentage, so
enigmatically expressed? Why note, however obscurely, that the hero of the
epic was denied access to Olympus and immortality? It could, of course, be
seen as an indirect statement of his grandeur – had it not been for Jupiter’s fore-
sight and precaution, Achilles would indeed have ascended to the throne of the
gods.⁸ But there may be something more elusive at stake.
In her excellent study of Statius as a poet mentioned above, Carole New-
lands offers an interpretation of this passage that I take the liberty of quoting
in extenso:
The Achilleid is not the expected poem about Domitian’s military achievements, despite the
earlier promise in the introduction to the Thebaid that Statius would tackle such a work
later. The proem ends with another deferral of Domitianic epic (1.14– 19). Although Domi-
tian is represented here as a good reader for Statius’ mythological epic, for he is praised for
his twin competencies in the martial and liberal arts (Ach. 1.15 – 16) – his education, in other
words, reflects what we learn of Achilles’ education by Chiron – nonetheless he does not
 Dilke (), in the commentary ad v.  f., under the lemma patrio … caelo, quotes Beraldus
(): “Id est Iovis, qui Achillis pater fuisset ni a Thetide abstinuisset.” Méheust () notes
that the phrase could simply mean “le ciel de son ancêtre,” since Jupiter was Aeacus’ father and
hence Achilles’ great-grandfather; but as Méheust observes, “la simplicité n’etant pas chose cou-
rante chez Stace, sans doute vaut-il mieux entendre avec C. Béroalde” (citing the same com-
ment), and adds (: ): “Le poète établit ainsi un contraste entre ce qu’est Achille et ce
qu’il aurait pu être”. So too Jannaccone ()  notes ad v. , s.v. patrio: “sarebbe stato pa-
terno (no lo era), se Giove avesse sposato Tetide.”
 Statius may have had in mind Valerius Flaccus . – , where, in an ecphrasis, Thetis is
represented as lamenting that Achilles will not be born greater than Jupiter (Peleos in thalamos
uehitur Thetis; aequora delphin/ corripit, <ipsa> sedet deiecta in lumina palla/ nec Ioue maiorem
nasci suspirat Achillen).
 Criado ()  observes that in the Thebaid, “Jupiter decrees that two houses of which he
is progenitor, Argos and Thebes (. – ), should perish. If it is necessary, Jupiter claims, he
will himself raze Thebes to its foundations (. – ) and destroy the innocent city of Argos,
whose only crime is that of having been descended from the criminal Tantalus (. – ),
with a great flood (. – ).” Statius is bolder than either Silius Italicus or Valerius Flaccus
in assuming the mantle of Ovid in his representation of the chief god of the pantheon.
inspire the poem.⁹ Achilles is introduced in the poem as a hero who, unlike Domitian and
his family, has been forbidden deification (a child forbidden to succeed to his father’s heav-
en). The opening patronymic by which Achilles is named (Ach. 1.1), Aeaciden (grandson of
Aeacus), emphasizes his mortality through the male line. Not only has Statius again defer-
red writing about Domitian’s deeds, he has also focused on a hero who in a key respect was
very different from the emperor who energetically cultivated the idea of his own divinity,
and closely associated himself with Jupiter … ¹⁰ Counterbalancing his own literary imperial
ambitions, Statius puts spatial bounds around a hero who will never seek the sky.¹¹
Domitian had indeed taken to describing himself as a god, in his correspondence

and in other contexts, and as I have mentioned, Statius, like other poets of his
time, did not hesitate to represent him as a divinity. Nevertheless, by what was
now a venerable tradition, emperors were formally declared to be deities and a
cult was devoted to their worship only after their death; and however close Do-
mitian may have been to such a transformation when the Achilleid was written
(we know it was a late work of Statius, probably begun in the year 95), he
had not yet achieved it and was, in fact, denied posthumous apotheosis, as
the Senate decreed a damnatio memoriae, erasing his image and records of his
reign to the extent possible (in practice nowhere near totally).¹² Rather than a
contrast between an emperor who “closely associated himself with Jupiter”
and “a hero who will never seek the sky,” we might see here a none too subtle
intimation that Domitian will be equally denied immortality.
After all, in the proem Domitian is not identified with Jupiter but precisely
with Achilles; as Statius declares in his invocation to Domitian, “great Achilles
is a prelude to you” (magnusque tibi praeludit Achilles, 1.19), referring both to
the poem, which is a foretaste of the grand epic on Domitian that Statius is
once again postponing, and to the qualities of the hero, who, as Newlands ob-
serves, is also described as accomplished in warfare and in song. If we take seri-
ously the analogy between Achilles and Domitian, and there is no reason why we
should not, then Statius has opened his epic with the broad hint that Domitian
has been denied access to heaven by his father, which is to say, Vespasian – a
point that might very well have struck a nerve with the notoriously hyper-sensi-
 There may, of course, be irony here; Ahl () , citing Suetonius’ Domitian , remarks
that the emperor may “have paid little attention to the poetry he commissioned.”
 The note here (n. ) refers to Zanker ()  – .
 Newlands () .
 See Flower (), chapter , titled “The Shadow of Domitian and the Limits of Disgrace”
(esp. pp.  – ); also Varner () chapter  (on Domitian).
382 David Konstan
tive emperor, who had recently put to death several writers on suspicion of ob-
lique criticism.¹³
It is well known that Vespasian passed over Domitian in favor of his brother
Titus as his successor to the imperial throne, and it possible to view this act as a
way of denying him access to the heavens. To be sure, after Titus’ short reign and
early death, Domitian acceded to royal power, with at least the hope of post-mor-
tem divinization. But Statius does not say that Achilles never made it to heaven
(legend had it that he enjoyed an afterlife in the Elysian Fields, and for his vir-
tues succeeded in having as his bride none other than Medea),¹⁴ but only that his
father vetoed it. In any case, as we have observed, Domitian was still in this
world, and was not inspiring a great deal of affection among the elite classes
at this time. It might have begun to seem that Vespasian’s distrust in his son’s
abilities to rule the Empire was not entirely misplaced. Alternatively, one
might see in Jupiter’s quashing of his descendant’s aspirations a kind of
small-minded spite, a move to eliminate the possibility that the son would
prove greater than father; such a reading might be more in line with Domitian’s
own pretensions.
I would not wish to claim that the Achilleid is a straightforward allegory, with
Achilles standing in for Domitian, though a comparison with the great Homeric
hero would not in principle be unflattering. Since we do not know how Statius
might have developed Achilles’ character, it is not possible to draw plausible
parallels with the emperor. We have already seen that Statius himself draws at-
tention to Domitian’s literary skills, which he then gave up in favor of military
achievement (cui geminae florent uatumque ducumque/ certatim laurus – olim
dolet altera uinci, 1.15 – 16), a reference to his maturation and relinquishing of
lesser pastimes. Thetis’ efforts to prevent her son from engaging in military ac-
tivity may reflect Vespasian’s reluctance to assign Domitian responsibility for
campaigns. Suetonius, who is to be sure a very hostile source, reports that Domi-
tian “began an expedition against Gaul and the Germanies, which was uncalled
for and from which his father’s friends dissuaded him, merely that he might
make himself equal to his brother in power and rank. For this he was reprimand-
ed, and to give him a better realisation of his youth and position, he had to live
with his father, and when they appeared in public he followed the emperor’s
 See Suetonius, Domitian .; Juvenal Satire .. – ; Jones () ; Rutledge
()  – .
 According to a scholium on Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (ad .), this story was
first related by Ibycus and subsequently by Simonides.
chair and that of his brother in a litter.”¹⁵ Suetonius adds that “when Vologaesus,
king of the Parthians, had asked for auxiliaries against the Alani and for one of
Vespasian’s sons as their leader, Domitian used every effort to have himself sent
rather than Titus; and because the affair came to nothing, he tried by gifts and
promises to induce other eastern kings to make the same request” (2.2– 3).¹⁶ Like
Achilles, Domitian is eager to prove himself as a warrior, but is inhibited by a
parent’s opposition.
Even the cross-dressing episode, in which Achilles hides out in drag to avoid
engagement in the Trojan War, may have an analogue in Domitian’s early career.
For Suetonius tells us that during the civil war with Vitellius, Domitian
took refuge in the Capitol with his paternal uncle Sabinus and a part of the forces under
him. When the enemy forced an entrance and the temple was fired, he hid during the
night with the guardian of the shrine, and in the morning, disguised in the garb of a fol-
lower of Isis and mingling with the priests of that fickle superstition, he went across the
Tiber with a single companion to the mother of one of his school-fellows. There he was
so effectually concealed, that though he was closely followed, he could not be found, in
spite of a thorough search (1.2).¹⁷
Now, as Stefano Rebeggiani has brilliantly shown, far from concealing what
might have been regarded as an ignoble flight in the midst of battle, Domitian
made the episode out to be an early example of his exceptional courage, joining
the besieged group, fighting his way free, and cunningly exploiting a form of
camouflage.¹⁸ What is more, as Rebeggiani convincingly argues, Statius had sub-
 Expeditionem quoque in Galliam Germaniasque neque necessariam et dissuadentibus paternis

amicis incohauit, tantum ut fratri se et opibus et dignatione adaequaret. Ob haec correptus, quo
magis et aetatis et condicionis admoneretur, habitabat cum patre una sellamque eius ac fratris,
quotiens prodirent, lectica sequebatur; trans. Rolfe ().
 cum Vologaesus Parthorum rex auxilia aduersus Alanos ducemque alterum ex Vespasiani lib-
eris depoposcisset, omni ope contendit ut ipse potissimum mitteretur; et quia discussa res est, alios
Orientis reges ut idem postularent donis ac pollicitationibus sollicitare temptauit.
 Bello Vitelliano confugit in Capitolium cum patruo Sabino ac parte praesentium copiarum, sed
irrumpentibus aduersariis et ardente templo apud aedituum clam pernoctauit, ac mane Isiaci ce-
latus habitu interque sacrificulos uariae superstitionis cum se trans Tiberim ad condiscipuli sui
matrem comite uno contulisset, ita latuit, ut scrutantibus qui uestigia subsecuti erant, deprehendi
non potuerit.
 Rebeggiani (forthcoming) esp. ch. , “The Gauls on the Capitol.” As Rebeggiani explains,
“When he became Emperor at the age of , Domitian, unlike his brother, could boast no mili-
tary success. In spite of his strong desires, he had not been given a chance to lead a military
expedition before his accession to the throne. One thing, however, he could pride himself on:
he had played an active role in the events of  CE, being the only member of the Flavian family
to fight Vitellius in person. True, the future Emperor was not credited with any particularly hero-
384 David Konstan
tly alluded to this episode in his account of the siege of Thebes in the Thebaid
(10.514– 18), giving it a decidedly positive spin. Seen from a hostile perspective
such as that of Suetonius, however, doing himself up as a priest of the foreign
cult of Isis smacked not only of cravenness but also of effeminacy. Suetonius sug-
gests as much in his life of Otho:
Neither Otho’s person nor his bearing suggested such great courage. He is said to have been
of moderate height, splay-footed and bandy-legged, but almost feminine in his care of his
person. He had the hair of his body plucked out, and because of the thinness of his locks
wore a wig so carefully fashioned and fitted to his head, that no one suspected it. Moreover,
they say that he used to shave every day and smear his face with moist bread, beginning the
practice with the appearance of the first down, so as never to have a beard; also that he
used to celebrate the rites of Isis publicly in the linen garment prescribed by the cult
(Suet. Otho 12.1, trans. Rolfe [1914]).
Is it far-fetched to compare Domitian’s refuge with a friend’s mother to Achilles

taking shelter among the maidens of Scyros, at his mother’s behest?¹⁹
This is not the place for a full-scale analysis of the political resonances of
Statius’ Achilleid, though I believe that such a study would be fruitful. Returning,
then, to the opening verses that are the focus of this paper, we may, I think, con-
fidently recognize an allusion of some kind to Domitian’s vexed relationship to
his own father. Perhaps, as I have suggested above, Statius meant his readers, or
at least Domitian, who is, in Newlands’ words, represented “as a good reader for
Statius’ mythological epic,” to understand that Domitian, unlike (or possibly
like) Achilles, succeeded in gaining his father’s throne despite the paternal
veto.²⁰ But hinting, at the very beginning of the poem, at Vespasian’s misgivings
ic deed during the siege, but the story could be used to underline his courage (in spite of his
young age when he had joined his uncle to fight Vitellius) and to demonstrate that he enjoyed
the gods’ favour…. The story soon became a special topic in panegyric of Domitian. Both Statius
and Silius praise Domitian’s heroic participation in the  siege.” Rebeggiani shows too that Do-
mitian’s propaganda analogized the siege of the Capitol by Vitellius to the sack of Rome by the
Gauls in the th century B.C. I am immensely grateful to Rebeggiani for permitting me to read and
quote from the manuscript of his book in progress.
 We may note too that, according to Suetonius, Domitian in his youth allowed himself to be
abused (corruptum), as Suetonius imagines it, by one Claudius Pollio and also, rumor had it, by
the future emperor Nerva, who succeeded Domitian to the throne (Domitian .).
 Stefano Rebeggiano points out to me (per litteras) that in the beginning of Domitian’s reign,
the fact that he had been passed over was an embarrassment, and that the poets are silent about
it, “for they are not sure how to treat this delicate matter and how the emperor himself wants to
frame his relationship with father and brother.” In the proem to the Thebaid, written soon after
Titus’ death, “Titus is conveniently ignored, and Domitian is described as having received power
directly from his father (subeuntem exorsa maturi parentis, .).” Later, poets felt free to men-
about his second son might equally have reminded readers of the father’s pres-
cience, especially as Domitian revealed increasingly paranoid traits in his final
years.²¹ Would Statius have risked so dangerous an ambiguity? He was approach-
ing the end of his life, as we have remarked, and there is no reason why he could
not have revised the proem at the last moment – poets do not compose linearly,
from start to finish. I imagine Statius, back in Naples, taking a chance in the final
touching up of his epic, knowing he would not live to complete it and making
bold to register, with practiced poetic craftiness, his ambivalence concerning
the emperor upon whom he had so often fawned in the past.
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Bowman, H.M. Cotton, M. Goodman, and S. Price (eds.), Representations of Empire:
Rome and the Mediterranean World. Oxford, 105 – 30.
Martha Malamud
As if: Reflections on an Exemplary Wife
Summary: Statius’ Siluae are an example of the public medium of elite reading
culture in Flavian Rome. This article examines the politics of reading Siluae 5.1, a
consolation to Abascantus, a high official in Domitian’s court, for the death of
his wife, Priscilla. Siluae 5.1 exposes the disturbing dynamic of exemplarity, spec-
tacle, and surveillance that characterized Flavian Rome. Dead Priscilla is recre-
ated as an exemplary wife, but the various representations of her never harmo-
nize into a coherent whole. There is the Priscilla that Statius would have painted
or carved if his hand had the skill, the Priscilla that Apelles, master of illusion-
istic realism, would have painted, or that Phidias would have carved. Hovering
allusively in the background are the wax statue that Laodamia takes to her
bed and the mannequin Alcestis that Admetus looks forward to taking to his.
As Statius proceeds through the poem, Priscilla is further refracted through sim-
ile bewilderingly piled upon simile. As Priscilla disappears into a sort of hall of
mirrors, Abascantus emerges as a reflection and extension of Domitian.
Keywords: Statius; Domitian; Siluae; Flavian literature; Latin poetry; Roman

women; statues
That’s my last duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her?
Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a dramatic monologue spoken by a widowed

Duke who is showing someone a portrait of his wife. The reader is trapped in
a one-sided dialogue in which he can never respond to the serially monogamous,
relentlessly monologous narrator. The poem centers on a painting that we cannot
see—a “wonder” that causes us to wonder: what does the painting look like? We
are led to question the identity of the duchess who is the subject of the painting;
the nature and motives of the narrator, the painter, and the painted duchess; the
identity of the interlocutor; and finally our own complicity in the possessive, voy-
euristic gaze of the narrator. Siluae 5.1, another poem about a widower’s re-
sponse to the death of his wife in which her representation figures prominently,
resembles “My Last Duchess” in several ways. In both poems, women are pre-
sented “as if” they were alive; in both, husbands replace their dead wives
with artistic replicas. Like “My Last Duchess,” 5.1 is a meditation on likeness
388 Martha Malamud
of various sorts—replication, representation, exemplarity, imitation, simile and

similitude— set not in Renaissance Italy, but in the very different cultural context
of Flavian Rome.
The poem is addressed to the Emperor Domitian’s secretary ab epistulis,
Abascantus, a year after the death of his wife, Priscilla. The earliest date for
the poem is 94. Sometime before Domitian’s assassination in 96, Domitian re-
placed Abascantus, a freedman, with Titinius Capito, an equestrian, who held
the post under Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan. What happened to Abascantus is
unknown, but some suspect he may have been a potential victim of Domitian’s
purge of high-level freedmen from his court near the end of his reign. Alex Har-
die has argued that against the backdrop of political turmoil at the end of Domi-
tian’s reign, this poem should be read not so much as a consolatio as an attempt
to allay Domitian’s growing mistrust of the freedmen in his household by empha-
sizing Abascantus’ loyalty and devotion.¹ Noelle Zeiner, picking up on this, an-
alyzes the poem as Statius’ attempt to increase Abascantus’ social capital, and
makes the case that
Statius (perhaps on his own initiative, but more likely at the explicit request of Abascantus)
has artfully exploited the occasion of Priscilla’s death, and deliberately molded her portray-
al for the purpose of highlighting her husband’s distinction. By carefully fashioning Priscil-
la’s characterization as an idealized faithful wife, much like a “faithful Penelope,” Statius
directly and indirectly promotes her husband’s imperial pietas as a form of symbolic capital
distinctive in its own right…²
So, part of the work of this poem of mourning is political: as Carole Newlands
puts it, “In the Siluae, consolation invites exploration of the interaction between
the home and the state….This seems to be a defensive poem that uses mourning
to cancel suspicions that Abascantus was less than loyal to Domitian.”³ As New-
lands has pointed out, while the epic Thebaid explores at great length the phe-
nomenon of female grief, the Siluae explore male grief for premature death. In
both works, grief reverses traditional gender roles; the grieving women at the
end of the Thebaid are possessed by masculine violence and frenzy, while in Sil-
uae 5.1, Abascantus takes on the ritual behavior associated with grieving women
and slaves when he surpasses his slaves in lamentation and prostrates himself
upon the ground during his wife’s funeral. The excessive reality of death leads
to excessive expression of grief, which the poet addresses with a strategy of
 Hardie ()  – . Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

 Zeiner () .
 Newlands () .
his own, a strategy of excessive exemplarity—an aspect of Statius’ over-the-top

style so at odds with our modern conventions that, as Frederick Ahl noted in
his seminal article on Statius, “The Rider and the Horse,” it could be taken as
“mannerism gone mad.”⁴
The poem opens with an introductory prose preface, a letter to Abascantus,
the first sentence of which is: omnibus adfectibus prosequenda sunt bona exem-
pla, cum publice prosint. “Good exempla must be pursued with all our energies,
when/since they benefit the public.”⁵ With this opening sentence Statius casts 5.1
as a meditation on exempla, which, true to his word, he does pursue with all his
energies.⁶ The range of meaning of exemplum is vast—imitation, image, portrait,
model, pattern, precedent, warning. Statius promises to pursue good exempla
with all his energies: ego enim huic operi non ut unus e turba nec tantum quasi
officiosus adsilui “For I have leapt to the task, not like one from a crowd nor
only because I owe you a favor.” The dynamic verb adsilui reflects the break-
neck poetics of the Siluae. ⁷ As he promises in the preface, Statius rushes to pro-
vide in 5.1 a torrent of exempla of various sorts, real and imagined, each an at-
tempt to reflect the absent Priscilla; in the course of the poem, as Gibson ob-
serves, “Abascantus becomes exemplary by surpassing or matching other
examples of devotion” (2006) 77.
In what follows, I want to use 5.1 to examine various aspects of this exem-
plarity, which is a product of the elite reading and visual culture of Flavian
Rome. As John Henderson has argued, cultural institutions such as poetry and
the visual arts are inevitably focused on power relations:
The whole point of the public medium of elite reading culture is to focus and orient civic
discourse around the modelling and re-modelling of power-relations at the social summit.
Institutions such as poetry frame terms for peaceful coexistence and parameters for (in)
subordination; they need not only lead and reconcile people to their place. This is why
the politics of reading is so crucial for any community this side of civil strife.
 Ahl () .

 Henderson is worth reading on the importance of the prefaces to the project(s) of the Siluae:
“Preface mediates between poems and reader, proposing a perspective for their reception. But
Preface and poems also interact, in particular staging a discussion of ‘temporality.’ Readers
of the book can move back and forth between reading the poems as representations of the oc-
casions that motivated their composition, and reading the poems re-motivated as Statius’ offer-
ing to his reading public” Henderson () .
 As Newlands ()  notes, Statius’ prose prefaces to the books of the Siluae “provide a
significant forum…for laying out the poetic principles of the collection….The prefaces are a cru-
cial part of the packaging of the poetry book as a tightly controlled artistic form”.
 Wray () explores the far-ranging implications of the word silua and its Greek equivalent,
hulē.
390 Martha Malamud
Most scholars read 5.1 as a defense of Abascantus at a politically difficult mo-

ment. I do not disagree with this reading, but I would like to push beyond it
to contemplate how Statius explores and exploits exemplarity as a means of
modeling and re-modeling social relations between husband and wife, emperor
and freedman, patron and artist, artist and subject.
Portraits of a Lady
Statius begins with a recusatio in which he conjures up the encaustic paintings
and ivory and gold sculptures that his hand is not skilled enough to bring to life
(5.1.1– 9). Abascantus, Statius apostrophizes, deserves to have you, Priscilla, re-
turned, your face represented by Apelles (the master of illusionary realism,
whose paintings cannot be told from the real thing) or, in another medium,
born again as a statue carved by Phidias, sculptor of the enormous statues of
Olympian Zeus and Athena Parthenos. Then there is Priscilla the phantom, the
umbra her husband vainly tries to snatch from the bier; and finally, the multiple
portraits produced by exhausted artists to meet the frustrated Abascantus’ de-
mands.
As Helen Lovatt has observed, Statius, although he does not mention them
by name in these opening lines, evokes literary exempla as well artistic represen-
tations: Admetus and Laodamia, widowed spouses who attempt to comfort
themselves with images of the dead.⁸ In Euripides’ Alcestis, Admetus tactlessly
tells his dying wife Alcestis of his intention to have a statue made of her and
to take it to bed with him as a surrogate when she is gone (349 – 60). Admetus
(at least apparently) gets his wife back from the underworld because Heracles
appears fortuitously and manages to defeat Death in a wrestling match: Statius
refers to this at lines 7– 8, ingens certamen cum Morte gerit, he [Abascantus]
wages a huge battle against Death. In Alcestis, it is Heracles, Admetus’ surrogate
who literally wrestles with Death; in Siluae 5.1, Abascantus wrestles Death by hir-
ing artists to portray his dead wife. In Alcestis, Admetus’ sexual surrogate statue
remains imaginary, unless we view the veiled and silenced woman who appears
at the end of the play as the statue’s equivalent. Because the woman cannot
speak, the audience does not know for sure whether Heracles has indeed
 Lovatt () . She also notes that in addition to Admetus and Protesilaus, Statius here
evokes Siluae ., where Lucan’s widow Polla continues to worship his statue long after his
death. Admetus and Alcestis and Protesilaus and Laodamia are also paired and offered as
role models in Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto ., a poem that serves as a source for both Siluae
. and Statius’ poem to his own wife, Claudia (Siluae .).
brought back Alcestis from the dead, as Heracles claims, or a different woman,
or even, as Stieber (1998) suggests, Alcestis’ funerary statue.
The story of Protesilaus and Laodamia has several variants. All agree that
Protesilaus leaves his bride to fight with the Greeks in the Trojan War; according
to an oracle, the first Greek to leap to shore was destined to die. As the etymol-
ogies of his name suggest, Protesilaus fulfilled that destiny. His name can be
construed as “first to jump,” from Greek protos + hallomai, to leap or jump; or
“first of the troop,” protos + laos, assembly, people, troop). In some versions
of the story, the gods take pity on the devastated bride and send Protesilaus
back from the dead, but only for a short time; Laodamia then dies of grief as
she embraces his corpse and accompanies him to the underworld. In other ver-
sions, she consoles herself for his original absence or his death by sleeping with
a statue of him.⁹ When her father discovers her strange behavior, he has the stat-
ue burned; she casts herself on the pyre and is burnt along with the statue. In his
discussion of the myth, Maurizio Bettini notes the emergence of a model from the
different versions of the story, that the shade of the dead Protesilaus is equiva-
lent to the portrait surrogate possessed by Laodamia.¹⁰ We see the same quasi-
equivalency in Abascantus’ attempt to lift the umbra of his wife from the pyre
and to “love her in every material.”¹¹ Both are ways of “waging war on death.”
In the sentence from the preface quoted above, ego enim huic operi non ut
unus e turba nec tantum quasi officiosus adsilui, Statius characterizes himself
as leaping to the task, but not as one of a turba (‘troop’). In his use of adsilui
and turba Statius alludes to both etymologies of the second half of Protesilaus’s
name (turba recalls laos, while adsilui renders hallomai). One might note further
that, anagrammatically, adsilui contains silua, as does Protesilaus. And while it
is likely that Siluae 5 was published posthumously, and so may not have been
arranged by Statius, it is still worth noting one further anagrammatical play:
5.1 is the first, protos, poem of this book of Siluae. Protesilaus, who appears in
many forms—a living man, a dream, a dead body, a ghost, a statue, and a subject
 Protesilaus is first mentioned at Iliad . – . According to the Cypria (f.  Davies), his
wife was Polydama, daughter of Meleager but later accounts say she was Laodamia, daughter of
Acastus. The first attestation of her meeting with Protesilaus’s ghost after death seems to be Euri-
pides’ (lost) Protesilaus. See also Pseudo-Apollodorus, Epitome to The Library, E..; Ovid,
Epistulae (Heroides), ; Hyginus Fabulae  and . Collard and Cropp ()  – 
have a good summary of the sources for variants of the story of Protesilaus and Laodamia.
 Bettini () .
 See Gibson ()  on translating metallum as material. And, surely it should be her body,
not her shade, which can be lifted from the pyre?
392 Martha Malamud
of poetic texts—is an appropriate figure to underlie the preface both to this poem
and to Siluae 5 as a whole, in which three of the five poems are consolations.
Statius moves from attempts to reproduce the dead Priscilla to describing the
emotions of Abascantus at her death; this involves more exemplars. One is Or-
pheus, who is closely associated with the myth of Alcestis, but not in a way flat-
tering to Abascantus.¹² Abascantus is so distraught that Orpheus would not have
been able to comfort him, not even if backed by a parade of priests of Apollo and
Bacchus and all eight of his aunts, the Muses The ninth is his mother Calliope,
who is not mentioned; she may still be busy mourning dead Lucan, as she was in
Siluae 2.7. Helen Lovatt has analyzed the use of Orpheus in the Siluae; in regard
to 5.1 she notes, “This image slips away from what you might expect: Orpheus
triumphant over death, who succeeded up to a point in resurrecting his wife. In-
stead, he is Statius, in competition with Abascantus’ grief for control of his mind.
Far from resurrecting Priscilla, Statius encodes the defeat of the function of his
poem: he cannot even console.”¹³
In the next cluster of exempla, Abascantus out-weeps a triad of archetypal
grieving mothers: Niobe, Thetis, and Aurora.¹⁴ His extravagant grief symbolically
unmans him, casting him in an abjectly feminine role;¹⁵ as we shall see, the gen-
der reversal is sustained throughout the poem, with Priscilla taking on the active,
masculine role opposite her feminized husband. At this precise point there is an
imperial intervention, as Abascantus’ excessive grief attracts Domitian’s atten-
tion:
macte animi! notat ista deus qui flectit habenas

orbis et humanos propior Ioue digerit actus,
maerentemque uidet lectique arcana ministri.
hinc etiam documenta capit, quod diligis umbram
et colis exsequias. hic est castissimus ardor,
 See Plato, Symposium d for Orpheus as a failed Alcestis, and Euripides, Alcestis  – ,
where Admetus promises to create a statue of Alcestis as a sexual surrogate, then imagines a
phantom Alcestis visiting in his dreams and wishes he had the voice of Orpheus to summon
her back from Hades.
 Lovatt () .
 Of these three, Niobe and Aurora are associated with statues—Niobe becomes a statue, and
there was a famous speaking statue that commemorates Aurora’s son Memnon. Ancient sources
on the statue: Strabo, Geography ..; Tac. Annals .; Plin. Naturalis Historia .; Pau-
sanias, Guide to Greece I..; Lucian Toxaris ., Philopseudes .. The most extensive ac-
count is in Philostratus’s Vita Apollonii ..
 Cf. Plato Symposium d (and n.  above), where Orpheus is less successful than Alcestis
in saving his spouse.
hic amor a domino meritus censore probari.

Siluae 5.1.37– 42
Bless your soul! The god who guides the reins

Of the universe and, closer than Jove, interprets
human performances, takes note of those things,
and sees both the grieving man and the secret thoughts of his chosen minister.
From here indeed he gathers proof that you love her ghost
and care for her funeral rites. This is most chaste passion,
this love deserves to be approved by the Lord Censor.
Statius here stresses Domitian’s divinity: he is a god, deus, closer than Jupiter,
who guides the reins of the universe. Readers of the Siluae—and of Fred Ahl’s
“The Rider and the Horse” – have seen this god guiding the reins before, in
the description of the enormous equestrian statue of Domitian in Siluae 1.1:
An te Palladiae talem, Germanice, nobis

Effinxere manus qualem modo frena tenentem
Rhenus et attoniti uidit domus ardua Daci?
Siluae 1.1.5 – 7
Was it the hands of Pallas, Germanicus, that

shaped you thus for us, holding the reins, just as the Rhine
and the steep home of the astonished Dacian saw you?
A little later in that poem, Statius describes the statue, addressing it, or the em-
peror, in the second person:
Ipse autem puro celsum caput aere saeptus

Templa superfulges et prospectare uideris,
An noua contemptis surgant Palatia flammis
Pulchrius, an tacita uigilet face Troicus ignis
Atque exploratas iam laudet Vesta ministras.
Siluae 1.1.32– 36
But you yourself, your lofty head surrounded by the pure ether,
gleam above the temples and seem to oversee
whether the new Palace rises more lovely, scorning the flames,
or whether the Trojan fire stands guard with silent torch
and Vesta now praises her tested servants.
The emperor controls, through his prospective gaze, both the rising buildings of
Flavian Rome and the archetype of forbidden interior space, the temple of
394 Martha Malamud
Vesta.¹⁶ The colossal statue’s scrutiny of the Vestals is a reminder of one of Do-
mitian’s most notorious actions, his prosecution of the Vestal Virgins and the
men accused of being their lovers. These trials culminated in the condemnation
of the Chief Vestal Cornelia, who was buried alive in 86, the year when Domitian
made himself Censor for Life.
Once again, it is in the role of censor perpetuus that Domitian appears in Sil-
uae 5.1; the language in lines 37– 42 makes this strikingly clear. He takes note of
things (notat ista); he interprets the performances of people, humanos…digerit
actus; he sees (uidet) both the grieving Abascantus and his innermost secrets (ar-
cana), and gathers proof (documenta) about him. Abascantus’ love of his wife’s
ghost and his care for her remains meet with official censorial approval—“this
most chaste passion, this love deserves to be approved by the Lord Censor.” Su-
etonius describes the correction of public morals through the policing of person-
al behavior as a hallmark of Domitian’s reign.¹⁷ It is evident in this poem as well,
and it extends beyond Domitian’s scrutiny of Abascantus’ official duties to the
scrutiny of his secret thoughts and gestures of mourning as well.
The theme of Concordia was important to Domitian,¹⁸ and the figure of Con-
cordia appeared on his coinage with both Domitian’s niece, Julia, and his wife,
Domitia. Statius draws attention to this Flavian virtue in lines 43 – 47:
Nec mirum, si uos collato pectore mixtos

iunxit inabrupta Concordia longa catena.
illa quidem nuptumque prior taedasque marito
passa alio, sed te ceu uirginitate iugatum
uisceribus totis animaque amplexa fouebat;
Siluae 5.1. 43 – 47
It is no wonder if Concordia joined you two, mingled in love, breast to breast, with a long,
non-snapped chain. She, indeed, endured another marriage earlier and a wedding to an-
other husband, but she embraced and cherished you, yoked to her in marriage, like a virgin,
body and soul.
Gibson (2006: ad loc.) notes the irony (“The image of the unbroken chain, refer-
ring to the married life of Priscilla and Abascantus, is ironic, since the link has
been broken by death”) and the etymological wordplay on collato pectore and
Concordia. John Henderson brings out the emphasis in his rendering of lines
43 – 44:
 Fredrick () .

 Suet. Domitian .
 Nauta () .
No surprise, you two. Linked hearts, stir,

conjugate. Harmonics sostenuto. Enchained melody.
He comments, “The (too much protestant) coinage and hapax in-ab-ruptus,

(“non-snapped”) tells us (generically) to mark the end—and that white wedding
hocus, what’s that?“¹⁹
Like a Virgin
Yes, what is that white wedding hocus? Lines 45 – 46 are odd enough to have gen-
erated textual difficulties. Editors have found the manuscript reading iugatum
vexing; as Gibson puts it, this gives the “slightly strange sense” ‘she used to cher-
ish you, when you had been married…as if in her maidenhood.’ Baehrens pro-
posed, and Gibson accepts, the emendation iugata, which he translates “she
cherished you as if joined to you as a virgin bride,’” taking iugata as a nomina-
tive—this is the translation he uses in his edition.²⁰ But, as Frederick Ahl takes
great pains to teach his students, sometimes a perceived textual problem is gen-
erated by editors’ expectation of what the author must have intended to say. In
this case, editors think, surely it must be the wife who is yoked and domesticated
by marriage, not the husband. Wouldn’t a yoked husband be “slightly strange?”
There is, however, a notable precedent for such a reversal of roles at Siluae 3.5,
where Statius reflects on his own marriage to Claudia. In both poems, the wife is
in control, older, and more experienced than her husband. Here is Statius de-
scribing his own wedding night:
Etenim tua, nempe benigna,

Quam mihi sorte Venus iunctam florentibus annis
Seruat, et in senium, tua, quae me uulnere primo
Intactum thalamis et adhuc iuuenile uagantem
Fixisti, tua frena libens docilisque recepi,
Et semel insertas non mutaturus habenas
Vsque premo…
Siluae 3.5.22– 8
For willingly and tamely I took your reins—your kind reins! For
Venus keeps you, luckily joined to me in my young years,
 Henderson () .

 If iugata is an ablative to be construed with uirginitate, says Gibson () ad loc., “the
sense is perhaps more strained: she, as if her maidenhood were being yoked, used to cherish
you…”
396 Martha Malamud
safe for me into old age, you who pierced me when I was still untouched by sex
and confused, like a teenager. And, not about to exchange those reins
you inserted, I press on, all the way…
In this marriage, it is the older, experienced Claudia who does the penetrating
and taming—the youthful Statius was intactum until she pierced him (fixisti);
he tamely (docilis) receives the reins she inserts in his mouth (insertas…habenas).
If Statius himself is the horse bridled and ridden by his wife, why find it “slightly
strange” that Abascantus is the one who goes under the yoke in 5.1?²¹ To me, the
most peculiar aspect of this line is not who is yoking whom, but rather the era-
sure of Priscilla’s previous marriage. Lest we miss the point, Statius picks up on
this notion and hammers it home in lines 51– 6:
laudantur proauis seu pulchrae munere formae,

quae morum caruere bonis falsaeque potentes
laudis egent uerae: tibi quamquam et origo niteret
et felix species multumque optanda maritis,
ex te maior honos, unum nouisse cubile,
unum secretis agitare sub ossibus ignem.
Siluae 5.1.51– 6
Women who lack good character and have reputations

Rather than good repute are praised for their ancestors and
The gift of a lovely form: although you have a splendid
Ancestry and a fortunate appearance and are greatly
In demand as a wife, there is a greater honor that comes from you yourself: That you know
only one bed, that one flame stirs deep within your bones.
Here it is instructive to read 5.1 against another of the Siluae. Statius tells us in
the letter to Abascantus that Priscilla was a particular friend of his own wife,
Claudia, and there are a number of echoes throughout the poem of Siluae 3.5,
which Statius presents as a “conversation,” sermo, with his wife, intended to per-
suade her to retire with him to Naples. Both women are older than their hus-
bands, both have been married before. The fidelity of both is compared to that
of ancient heroines—in Priscilla’s case, immediately after praising her for
being a uniuira, Statius compares her to a triad of heroines, Helen, Aerope
(wife of Atreus), and Penelope. All are exemplary—two exemplars of unfaithful-
ness, one of loyalty.
illum nec Phrygius uitiasset raptor amorem

Dulichiiue proci nec qui fraternus adulter
 Henderson () ; Treggiari ()  – .

casta Mycenaeo conubia polluit auro.

Siluae 5.1.57– 9
That Phrygian pirate would not have violated that love of hers,
Nor the Ithacan suitors nor the one who committed adultery against his own brother and
polluted a chaste marriage with Mycenean gold.
Claudia too is compared to Penelope at the beginning of 3.5, in an amusing

sketch that perhaps gives us a glimpse of her strong personality, ²² and later
to a cluster of heroines—Penelope, Aegiale, Meliboea, and Laodamia, again ex-
emplars of both good and bad wifely behavior. In Priscilla’s case, her achieve-
ment of the status of uniuira is what raises her to the rank of exemplary
women. Claudia, however, demonstrates her exemplary wifely qualities in a
very different way:
Sic certe cineres umbramque priorem

Quaeris adhuc, sic exsequias amplexa canori
Coniugis ingentes iterasti pectore planctus
Iam mea.
Siluae 3.5.51– 4
Certainly in just this way you still seek the ashes and shade of your prior husband, in just
this way you embraced the remains of your poet-husband and again and again you—my
wife now—have poured laments from your breast.
In addition to Claudia, other examples from the Siluae suggest that Priscilla’s
erasure of her first husband is extraordinary—Polla, Lucan’s wife, has a shrine
to her first husband and celebrates his birthday; Violentilla hesitates to remarry
out of loyalty to her dead husband. It is thus puzzling that critics find nothing
odd about the claim that Priscilla know only one bed. “To be called uniuira
was one of the highest compliments to a married woman, particularly in an
age when divorce and remarriage were by no means uncommon,” says Bruce
 Etsi egomet patrio de litore raptus

Quattuor emeritis per bella, per aequora lustris
Errarem, tu mille procos intacta fugares,
Non imperfectas commenta retexere telas
Sed sine fraude palam, thalamosque armata negasses.
Siluae 3.5.6 – 10
Indeed if I had been torn from my native land and were wandering for twenty long years through
wars and over the seas, you, unviolated, would have put a thousand suitors to flight, not by de-
ceptively reweaving the unfinished fabric—no, you would have grabbed a sword and openly,
without fraud, refused to let them in your bed.
398 Martha Malamud
Gibson.²³ He and Zeiner-Carmichael (2007) both agree that casting Priscilla as a

uniuira is a way of expressing the depth of her love of her husband. But the claim
to monogamy comes right after the reminder of Priscilla’s previous marriage in
45 – 6, and the effect is jarring. The poker-faced claim that Priscilla was just
like a virgin when she married, and just like a uniuira (except for the fact that
she was married before) is quintessential ‘truthiness,’ and Statius, like American
comedian Stephen Colbert, is adept at exposing its mechanism and leaving us to
deal with the resulting cognitive dissonance.²⁴
The Good Wife

After doubling down on Priscilla’s faux virginity, not to mention the erasure of
her former husband, Statius returns to praising her, imagining how she would
have heroically followed her husband into battle or risked dangerous sea voyag-
es to be with him—but fortunately, she did not have to; she was able to help him
just as much by her prayers to the gods and the emperor:
sed meliore uia dextros tua uota marito

promeruere deos, dum nocte dieque fatigas
numina, dum cunctis supplex aduolueris aris
et mitem genium domini praesentis adoras.
Siluae 5.1.71– 4
But –a better way—your prayers have rendered the gods

Favorable to your husband, as you wear them down night
And day, as you prostrate yourself in prayer at every altar
And worship the kind genius of the lord who is with us.
Priscilla’s assiduous supplication of the emperor echoes that of other poems in

praise of an absent but carefully constructed literary wife; Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1,
which, as Henderson (2007) has demonstrated, is an important model for Siluae
3.5, and Tristia 1.6. In Tristia 1.6, Ovid compares his wife to many exemplary
 Gibson () .

 ‘Truthiness’ was the American Dialect Society’s word of the year in , after being coined
by Stephen Colbert in . Merriam Webster defines it thus:
1. truthiness (noun)
1 : ‘truth that comes from the gut, not books’ (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert
Report,” October 2005)
2 : ‘the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts
known to be true’ (American Dialect Society, January 2006)
wives, including Laodamia and Penelope, and ends the wives with Livia, the wife
of Augustus (Ovid’s wife, like Augustus’ Livia, was his third): ²⁵
femina seu princeps omnes tibi culta per annos

te docet exemplum coniugis esse bonae,
adsimilemque sui longa adsuetudine fecit,
grandia si paruis adsimilare licet.
Tristia 1.25 – 8.
Or whether that first among women, worshipped by you through the years, teaches you to
be the exemplary good wife, and, by long association, makes you like herself, if one may
liken small things to great.
In Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1 Ovid, writing from exile, lays out in detail what he wants
his wife to do for him back in Rome. Priscilla’s labors on behalf of Abascantus
are clearly modeled on Ovid’s instructions to his wife, who is told to work for
him night and day (nocte dieque, 3.1.40), and not to demonstrate her heroism
by going into battle (which Priscilla is prepared to do but does not), but rather
to supplicate the emperor (which is what Priscilla, successfully, does):
Nota tua est probitas testataque tempus in omne:

sit uirtus etiam non probitate minor.
Nec tibi Amazonia est pro me sumenda securis
aut excisa leui pelta gerenda manu.
Numen adorandum est, non ut mihi fiat amicum,
sed sit ut iratum quam fuit ante minus.
Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1.93 – 8
Your virtue is known and established for all time:

don’t let your courage be less than your virtue.
You don’t have to lift an Amazon’s axe on my account,
or carry a crescent shield on your slender arm.
You must beseech the god, not that he befriend me,
but that he be less angry with me than before.²⁶
Ovid specifically states that his wife is playing a role, and that she will be called
an exemplum of the good wife:
Magna tibi inposita est nostris persona libellis:

coniugis exemplum diceris esse bonae.
 Thanks to Ioannis Ziogas for this observation.

 Transl. A.S. Kline () poetryintranslation.com, (http://www.poetryintranslation.com/
PITBR/Latin/OvidExPontoBkThree.htm#anchor_Toc)
400 Martha Malamud
Hanc caue degeneres, ut sint praeconia nostra

uera; uide Famae quod tuearis opus.
……
Quicquid ages igitur, scena spectabere magna
et pia non paucis testibus uxor eris.
Crede mihi, quotiens laudaris carmine nostro,
qui legit has laudes, an mereare rogat.
Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.43 – 6; 59 – 62
A great role has been imposed on you in my little books:

you are said to be the model of a good wife.
Take care you don’t slip from that position, so what I have
Published is true. See that you guard Fame’s work.
…
And so, whatever you do, you will be watched on a great stage,
and you’ll be a virtuous wife before many witnesses.
Believe me, whenever you are praised in my verse,
whoever reads that praise asks if you deserve it.²⁷
Both Ovid’s wife and Priscilla play the role of the Good Wife before “many wit-
nesses”—the emperor above all, for whom the performance is intended, but also
his court, the commemorating, judging poet, and posterity. The parallel with
Mrs. Ovid suggests that a significant part of Priscilla’s claim to be a good wife
was her successful intercession on her husband’s behalf to Domitian. In Siluae
5.1.75 – 83, Statius congratulates Priscilla for persuading Domitian to appoint
Abascantus as secretary ab epistulis, a job that entails passing on intelligence
and tracking soldiers and bureaucrats—very similar to Domitian the Censor’s
own activities. And, once again, Domitian appears as the all-seeing, all-knowing,
master of the four quarters of the universe.
Priscilla’s exemplary wifely qualities are described through a cavalcade of
oddly juxtaposed similes. Prostrating herself at Domitian’s feet, she pours out
her heart, and her rapture is compared to two types of violently possessed, rav-
ing women: the Pythia wandering, somewhat out of her Delphic zip code, on Hel-
icon, and a Bacchant leading the revels. These similes of frenzied women are at
odds with the qualities Statius singles out to praise—Priscilla’s quies, probitas,
and mores modesti. Her career culminates in an imaginary trip by her husband’s
side, as he enters battle next to Domitian (127– 34):
parva loquor. tecum gelidas comes illa per arctos

Sarmaticasque hiemes Histrumque et pallida Rheni
 Translation adapted from A.S. Kline ().

frigora, tecum omnes animo durata per aestus ²⁸

* * * * * *
et, si castra darent, uellet gestare pharetras, 130
uellet Amazonia latus intercludere pelta;
Caesarei prope fulmen equi diuinaque tela
uibrantem et magnae sparsum sudoribus hastae
dum te puluerea bellorum nube uideret.
Siluae 5.1.127– 34.
I speak of trifles. She, your companion through

The icy north, the Slavic winters and the Danube
And the white cold of the Rhine, with you she endured in her mind
Through all the summer heat
* * *
And, if the camps allowed, she would carry quivers,
She would protect her flank with an Amazon’s shield,
As long as she could see you, in the dusty cloud of war,
Next to the thunderbolt of Caesar’s horse, hurling divine weapons
And sprinkled with sweat from his great spear.
Like Statius’ Claudia and Ovid’s wife, Priscilla would follow her husband any-
where, even play the part of an Amazon, as long as she could see him next to
Domitian’s war horse, brandishing divine weapons as if he were the deified em-
peror, bizarrely sprinkled with the sweat of the imperial spear.
Cut, and cue the violins—it’s time for the death scene. Pausing only to change
his costume (he exchanges his laurel crown for funereal cypress), Statius hastens
from describing the highlight of Priscilla’s life—her husband’s proximity to Do-
mitian’s spear—to her death and Abascantus’ reaction to it. The peripeteia pro-
vokes an impassioned outburst from the poet:
Quisnam impacata consanguinitate ligauit

Fortunam Inuidiamque deus? quis iussit iniquas
aeternum bellare deas? nullamne notauit
illa domum, toruo quam non haec lumine figat
protinus et saeva proturbet gaudia dextra
Siluae 5.1.137– 41
For what god has bound Fortuna and Envy

in implacable kinship? Who ordered these
unjust goddesses to wage eternal war?
 The asterisks that follow represent a lacuna. See Gibson () , note ad  – . The
text is vexed, and he follows Courtney in positing a lacuna at line .
402 Martha Malamud
Is there no house noted by the former that

the latter does not instantly fix with her evil eye
and overthrow its joys with her savage hand?
Statius attributes Priscilla’s sudden illness to the “implacable kinship” of Fortu-

na and Invidia, goddesses who should not belong together but who team up to
bring destruction to the household. Once again the language of censorial surveil-
lance surfaces, as Fortuna takes note of houses, notauit, which Inuidia then fixes
with her evil eye, toruo…lumine figat. Etymological wordplay is at work again
here, as Inuidia is deployed against Abascantus. Baskania is a Greek equivalent
of inuidia—it means malignant magic or jealousy, the evil eye, as the etymolog-
ical gloss toruo lumine brings out. Abascantus should be “free from inuidia,” as
his name implies, but instead he falls prey to it. ²⁹
Priscilla’s deathbed bears a strange resemblance to the imperial court, with
Priscilla taking on the role of censor in her death throes. Like the emperor, she is
surrounded by a throng of hangers-on—in her case, doctors and servants—who
conceal their true feelings. Both hypocrisy and surveillance are present in the
dying woman’s chamber, as her comrades try to deceive her with feigned expres-
sions of hope, while she takes censorial note (notat) of her weeping husband:
comites tamen undique ficto/ spem simulant uultu, flentem notat illa maritum.
The more fortunate Mrs. Ovid did not, as far as we know, have to keep on playing
the Good Wife on her deathbed, but Priscilla keeps up her exemplary perfor-
mance to the end, even outdoing Alcestis as she succumbs to her illness:
Iamque cadunt uultus oculisque nouissimus error

optunsaeque aures, nisi cum uox sola mariti
noscitur; illum unum media de morte reuersa
mens uidet, illum aegris circumdat fortiter ulnis
immotas obuersa genas, nec sole supremo
lumina sed dulci mauult satiare marito.
Siluae 5.1.170 – 5
And now her face falls and her eyes begin their final wandering
and her ears are dulled, except when her husband’s voice
alone is recognized; her mind, returned from the midst
of death, sees only him; bravely, she throws her feeble arms
around him, turning her motionless eyes³⁰ towards him.
She would rather sate her eyes with her sweet husband
than with a last glimpse of the sun.
 The wordplay is noted by Nauta ()  n.  and Gibson () ad loc.
 Gibson () ad loc. argues convincingly for translating genas as ‘eyes’ here.
The scene is modeled on Alcestis 201– 8, when Alcestis is feeling the effects of
impending death.³¹ Admetus holds her in his arms, mourning, begging. Alces-
tis’s only action is to search desperately for one last look at the Sun’s bright circle
of rays—rather pointedly not at her self-pitying husband. But in 5.1, Priscilla
takes a far more active role, perhaps embodying, as she reprises Alcestis’
death, the strength inherent in Alcestis’ name (from Greek alkē, courage, prow-
ess, strength—a manly quality). Though her senses are fading, she can still rec-
ognize her husband’s voice, still see him; she puts her sickly arms around him,
and she out-wifes the exemplary Alcestis by preferring the sight of her husband
to a final glimpse of the sun. A little later, after her deathbed speech, she takes
an even more proactive role. Normally the grieving relative catches the dying per-
son’s last breath, and closes his or her eyes. But it is Priscilla who passes her
dying breath into her husband’s mouth, she who takes his hands and closes
her own eyes with them.
On her deathbed, Priscilla gathers her strength for a final speech, in which
she rehearses the reasons why she is willing to accept her fate. Once again, from
a husband’s point of view, she outdoes Alcestis. While Alcestis complains that
she is taken from life too soon, and that it would have been more natural for
his parents to sacrifice themselves for Admetus, Priscilla argues that because
she is older, she ought to die first. Where Alcestis’ urgent concern is for her chil-
dren, and she makes Admetus swear not to replace her with a stepmother, the
childless Priscilla’s concern is entirely for the further advancement of her hus-
band’s career. We shall return to her advice on the best means for advancement
below.
After Priscilla’s death, Abascantus reacts with maddened grief, first attempt-
ing suicide, then indulging in necrophilia.³² He holds a lavish, no-expense-
spared funeral, awash in exotic incense and spices, featuring the Loved One’s
embalmed body on a palanquin shaded by purple fabric. We learn that Priscilla
has been laid to rest in a tomb outside the city, on the Via Appia near the Almo
river. The actual tomb has likely been identified; it is a round, two-story structure
with thirteen aediculated niches on the upper story in which statues would have
been placed. Statius describes it at length:
hic te Sidonio uelatam molliter ostro

eximius coniunx (nec enim fumantia busta
clamoremque rogi potuit perferre) beato
 In Epistulae ex Ponto .. – , Ovid proposes Alcestis as a role model for his wife.
 Statius rather graphically describes his passionate embrace of his dead wife’s corpse: ore li-
gato/ incubat amissae, with mouth glued to hers, he lies on top of his missing wife, . – .
404 Martha Malamud
composuit, Priscilla, toro. nil longior aetas

carpere, nil aeui poterunt uitiare labores:
sic cautum [siccatam] membris; tantas uenerabile marmor
spirat opes. mox in uarias mutata nouaris
effigies: hoc aere Ceres, hoc lucida Cnosis,
illo Maia nites, Venus hoc non improba saxo.
accipiunt uultus haud indignata decoros
numina
Siluae 5.1.225 – 35
Here your excellent husband placed you, Priscilla, softly veiled in Sidonian purple, on a
blessed couch (for he could not endure the smoking pyre and the roar of the funeral
fire). Additional years will not be able to harm; the toils of time will not be able to corrupt
you, so much care has been taken with your body [with your limbs thus embalmed], so
much wealth the venerable marble exudes. Soon you are made new, changed into various
shapes: you gleam as Ceres in this bronze statue, in this one as the shining Cretan, Maia in
that, and as modest Venus in this stone. The goddesses, not at all angered, accept your
lovely features.
In the tomb are statues of different goddesses, each with Priscilla’s features;
wherever Abascantus looks, he sees Priscilla in a different guise and a different
material. In Statius’ conceit, the goddesses are honored to be given her beautiful
features. Abascantus has servants prepare constant banquets there, and the
place is always crowded. It is, cries Statius, a house, a house, not a tomb!³³
And this emotional response triggers a revelation in a passer-by:
hac merito uisa pietate mariti

protinus exclames: ’est hic, agnosco, minister
illius, aeternae modo qui sacraria genti
condidit inque alio posuit sua sidera caelo’.
Siluae 5.1.238 – 41
Once you have seen the husband’s piety, you would instantly, and rightly,
exclaim, “I recognize him! This man is the minister of that man
who just recently founded a temple to his eternal dynasty
and placed his own constellations in another heaven!”
That man, ille, is Domitian. You, says Statius, would be able to recognize Aba-
scantus through his likeness to Domitian, who in 94 dedicated the Templum Fla-
viae Gentis on the site of his own birthplace, near the Temple of Romulus on the
Quirinal. Domitian’s temple is the tenor, Priscilla’s tomb the vehicle; similitude
 Perhaps another allusion to Protesilaus, who is described by Homer as being in the process
of building his house when he died.
yokes the emperor and his aspiring freedman together in an inseparable bond,
like the unnaturally yoked Fortuna and Inuidia.
Imitating his emperor, Abascantus creates a hybrid structure that is both a
house and a tomb. Domitian’s Templum was also a hybrid, both a mausoleum
and a temple, marking a change from Julio-Claudian practice of keeping the
mausoleum separate.³⁴ Abascantus has the resources to represent his wife as a
series of goddesses. As a god himself, Domitian was able to go farther and
have his family members— Titus, Vespasian, and Domitian’s son, who died as
a child—officially deified and later buried in the Flavian Templum. Perhaps
more to the point for 5.1, the most recently deified occupant of the Temple of
the Flavian Dynasty was Titus’s daughter and Domitian’s niece, Julia, who
died in 91.³⁵ As Zeiner reads the meaning of Priscilla’s tomb, “(t)he implication
is that Abascantus’ religious pietas mirrors that of the Emperor—in this case imi-
tation is not only a form of flattery, but proof of imperial pietas….Like Domitian
Abascantus provides not just a funerary tomb, but a monument and temple. This
act of faithful imitation may become even more significant when we realize that
higher-ranked Romans generally did not follow such a funerary practice, and
thus Abascantus has “shown himself a true servant of Domitian.”³⁶ The similar-
ity between the emperor and his official is reinforced through a metaphor com-
paring Domitian to a great ship and Abascantus to a small bark, both sharing the
same sea.³⁷
With this exuberant apostrophe, Statius encourages “you,” his audience, to
read Priscilla’s tomb as an imitation, or emulation, of the Templum Flaviae Gen-
tis, and thus to read the multiple representations of Priscilla as reflections of the
divinized Julia. According to several sources, Domitian had a long-standing, pub-
lic affair with his niece. Suetonius says:
After persistently refusing his niece, who was offered him in marriage when she was still a
virgin, because he was entangled in an intrigue with Domitia, he seduced her shortly after-
wards when she became the wife of another, and that too during the lifetime of Titus. Later,
when she was bereft of father and husband, he loved her ardently and without disguise,
and even became the cause of her death by compelling her to get rid of a child of his by
abortion.
Suetonius Domitian 22.1, Loeb transl. Rolfe (1914).
 Davies ()  – .

 Wood ()  – .
 Zeiner () .
 .. – ; see Zeiner () .
406 Martha Malamud
Whether or not Domitian actually had an affair with his niece, Julia played an
important role in Domitian’s construction of the imagery of the imperial family.³⁸
There are numerous coin-types representing her on one side and a goddess on
the other. A half-naked Venus is a common reverse, but she also appears as Con-
cordia, Ceres, Vesta, and Cybele. The women of the imperial household were fre-
quently represented as goddesses. Three busts of Julia as Venus survive; no full-
length statues of her remain, but Martial 6.13 describes a statue of Julia as a sexy,
half-nude Venus.³⁹
At Statius’ urging, “you” will identify Domitian’s treatment of the dead Julia
as a model for Abascantus’ uxorious behavior, and it is evident from Martial and
Juvenal (who wrote after Domitan’s death) that Domitian’s relationship with Julia
was not necessarily construed as a positive model.⁴⁰ But while Abascantus imi-
tates Domitian in the architecture of his wife’s tomb, he looks back to an earlier
emperor in his treatment of Priscilla’s body, which he has embalmed, draped in
purple, and displayed on a couch.
This is highly unusual. Embalming was not a normal Roman practice, and
when it is described, it is marked emphatically as non-Roman: Tacitus calls it
“a custom of foreign kings” (Annals 16.6.2). But Abascantus is not acting entirely
without precedent. Pompey’s head was embalmed, according to Lucan, so it
could be presented to Caesar,⁴¹ and Marc Antony was embalmed so he could
 Vinson () argues that the charge of adultery is post-Domitianic invective; Grewing
()  concurs.
 Coleman ()  notes that Martial, at least, portrayed the relationship as adulterous in
..
 Juvenal hones in on both the proliferation of images of Domitian and his inability to sire a
successor in an invective against Julia written after Domitian’s death that stresses the hypocrisy
of his moral reforms:
qualis erat nuper tragico pollutus adulter
concubitu, qui tunc leges reuocabat Amaras
omnibus atque ipsis Veneri Martique timendas,
cum tot abortiuis fecundam Iulia uulvam
solueret et patruo similes effunderet offas.
Juvenal Satires 2.29 – 33
“That’s how Domitian, that recent adulterer, behaved, defiled
By a fatal union, he who revived such bitter laws in his day,
To terrify everyone, even the deities, even Venus and Mars,
While Julia, his niece, ditched the contents of her ripe womb
With abortifacients, and shed lumps resembling her uncle.
Is it not just then and right, when the extremes of depravity
Sneer at every false Scaurus, and bite back when castigated? (Transl. A.S. Kline 2011).
 Lucan BC . –  (tr. Braund): Then by their hideous art
be buried by Cleopatra. Given that Pompey and Antony both died in Egypt,
where embalming was standard practice, this is not a startling development.
More surprisingly, Nero embalmed his wife, Poppaea Sabina, after her untimely
death. The grief-stricken husband gave her an elaborate funeral, in which a
year’s worth of exotic spices was consumed; delivered the funeral oration him-
self; and had her buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus, which housed the re-
mains of the Julio-Claudians. According to Cassius Dio 63.26, Poppaea was
later posthumously honored with a temple inaugurated by Nero in the spring
of 68, shortly before his own death. There she received honors in the guise of
the goddess Venus. Patrick Kragelund (2010) has recently proposed that this tem-
ple was located in Campania, and that Nero may have hastened his own demise
by lingering longer than was wise in Naples, ignoring urgent messages about
trouble in Rome, in order to dedicate the temple on the Kalends of April (the
month he had renamed after himself). If Kragelund is correct, Neapolitan Statius
is likely to have visited the temple himself.
But even embalming, deification, and a temple were not enough for Nero. He
also surrounded himself with Poppaea surrogates:
….Nero missed her so greatly after her death that on learning of a woman who resembled
her he at first sent for her and kept her; but later he caused a boy of the freedmen, whom he
used to call Sporus, to be castrated, since he, too, resembled Sabina, and he used him in
every way like a wife. In due time, though already “married” to Pythagoras, a freedman, he
formally “married” Sporus, and assigned the boy a regular dowry according to contract;
and the Romans as well as others publicly celebrated their wedding.⁴²
Not content with having female and male surrogates, the histrionic and senti-
mental emperor performed Poppaea as well—Dio tells us that he “wore masks,
sometimes resembling his roles, sometimes resembling his own face; [but] all
his female masks were fashioned in the likeness of Poppaea, so that she, even
though dead, might tread the stage” (Dio 63.9.5).⁴³
the fluid is taken from the head, the brain removed

and skin dried out, and rotten moisture flowed away from deep 690
within, and the features were solidified by drugs instilled…
 Dio ., tr. E. Cary (Loeb  – ).
 Transl. Cary. It was a common custom for aristocratic families to hire professional mimes to
imitate the dead at funerals—at Vespasian’s funeral, the dead emperor was impersonated by a
mime actor named Favor. “Even at his funeral, Favor, a leading actor of mimes, who wore his
mask and, according to the usual custom, imitated the actions and words of the deceased during
his lifetime, having asked procurators in a loud voice how much his funeral procession would
cost, and hearing the reply “Ten million sesterces,” cried out: “Give me a hundred thousand and
408 Martha Malamud
The obsession with theatricality and spectacle, simulation and dissimula-

tion in Neronian and Flavian Rome is well summed up in Joseph Smith’s com-
ment on the post-Neronian drama Octavia, which brings out the uneasy slippage
between resemblance and dissemblance that permeates the literature of the pe-
riod: “The face…in so far as it provides the superficial signs of the underlying
person, functions as a mask; Nero’s court, as Octavia would have it, is a cabinet
of living imagines.” ⁴⁴ The Flavian emperors were busily transforming the city of
Rome into an imperial stage set for this cabinet of masks. In “Architecture and
Surveillance in Flavian Rome,” David Fredrick describes how the architecture
and urban space of Flavian Rome reflects the construction of the emperor as
an omniscient, omnipotent being, arguing that “…a polarized model of spatial
relations emerged. On the one hand, an emperor who attempts to see everything
through a labyrinth of peepholes and mirrors; on the other, senators and knights
isolated and feminized in the dark before his gaze…”⁴⁵
Siluae 5.1 exposes the disturbing dynamic of exemplarity, spectacle, and sur-
veillance that characterized Flavian Rome. Dead Priscilla is recreated as an ex-
emplary wife, but the various representations of her never harmonize into a co-
herent whole. There is the Priscilla that Statius would have painted or carved if
his hand had the skill, the Priscilla that Apelles, master of illusionistic realism,
would have painted, or that Phidias would have carved. Hovering allusively in the
background are the wax statue that Laodamia takes to her bed and the manne-
quin Alcestis that Admetus looks forward to taking to his. As Statius proceeds
through the poem, Priscilla is further refracted through simile bewilderingly
piled upon simile, allusion upon allusion—she is Eurydice, Niobe, Aurora, The-
tis; she is the elm tree supporting a grapevine; she is NOT Helen or the seduced
wife of Atreus, but she IS Penelope. She is like an Amazon, a possessed Sibyl, a
raving Bacchant, an Apulian or Sabine farmer’s wife, a ruined vineyard, a pine
tree stripped of its foliage. Her deathbed scene is modeled on Alcestis; she is cast
as both Ovid’s wife and Statius’ own wife Claudia. After death she reappears,
metamorphosed in statue form as Ceres, Ariadne, Maia, Venus—and presumably
as nine other divinities as well, as there were thirteen niches for statues in her
tomb.
No longer herself, mutata, Priscilla is the fantasy Good Wife, becoming
through Abascantus’ representation of her what Statius ensures that we know
she was not—a virgin bride, a uniuira. Abascantus, imperial freedman and
fling me even into the Tiber” (Suet. Vespasian , transl. Rolfe (Loeb) ). Thus it was in keep-
ing with Nero’s self-created persona as actor-emperor for him to play Poppaea himself.
 Smith () .
 Fredrick () .
right-hand man of Domitian, expresses his grief in the imperial idiom, using
myth, art, architecture, and surrogates of all sorts to construct his own version
of reality. This is what you, unnamed bystander, recognize when your viewing
of the tomb reveals the similarity between Abascantus and Domitian.
There is another statue I have not yet mentioned. The dying Priscilla has one
last request for her husband. Unlike Alcestis, whose final wish is that Admetus
put their children first and refrain from marrying again, Priscilla is fully focused
on Abascantus’ future career—such a Good Wife! —and she has figured out with
astonishing specificity how he can advance himself in Domitian’s favor. Cutting
through the saccharine clichés of the deathbed scene, Priscilla, this pastiche of
allusions, tropes, similes, and stereotypes, hones in unerringly in her final words
on her husband’s best survival strategy: suck (it) up, honey—you know you want
to.
nunc, quod cupis ipse iuberi,

da Capitolinis aeternum sedibus aurum,
quo niteat sacri centeno pondere uultus
Caesaris et propriae signet cultricis amorem.
Siluae 5.1.188 – 91
Now—and you yourself want to be told to do this—

give eternal gold to the Capitoline hill,
weighing a hundred pounds, through which
the sacred face of Caesar may shine
and signify the love of his very own worshipper.
Unlike those useless surrogate statues Statius dismissed at the beginning of the
poem, this statue serves a function. It is a love signifier, one hundred pounds of
love-signifying gold!⁴⁶ And it signifies Abascantus and Priscilla’s love—but not
for each other. There is, and has been throughout, a third party in this mar-
riage—the all-seeing, ubiquitous Domitian.
The imperial visage was omnipresent: “So many honors of this kind were
voted to him that nearly all of the world under his rule was filled with his like-
nesses and statues made of silver and gold,” says Cassius Dio (67.8). Domitian
even specified the minimum weight for gold and silver statues of himself erected
on the Capitoline. Priscilla’s instruction to her husband shows what is necessary
to survive under Domitian: to present to the imperial gaze a gleaming, precious
 The world’s largest gold bar stands at  kg ( lb), measuring at the base . cm ×
. cm and  cm high with  degree draft angle (equal to , cm³, or . in × . in
× . in ≈ . in³)—according to Wikipedia. One must therefore assume that Priscilla’s stat-
ue is a colossal gilded statue, like the Colossus of Nero, rather than a solid gold statue.
410 Martha Malamud
reflection of itself, sparing no expense. Abascantus and Priscilla have fully ab-
sorbed the imperial mindset, and express it through replication. His grief repli-
cates the gestures of the bereaved Nero, and the bereaved Domitian. And acting
like an emperor turns Abascantus, briefly, into a second Domitian, the object of
every gaze. At Priscilla’s funeral it is Abascantus, not Priscilla, who is the object
of the gaze of Magna Roma:
sed toto spectatur in agmine coniunx

solus; in hunc magnae flectuntur lumina Romae
ceu iuuenes natos suprema ad busta ferentem:
Siluae 5.1.216 – 18.
But in that whole group the husband alone is looked at:

the eyes of Great Rome are bent on him, as if he were
carrying adult sons to the final funeral pyre.
The topos of a father burying his sons expresses the exceptional grief that comes
from a death that contradicts the natural order of children burying their parents.
As so often in this poem, though, the dissimilarities between tenor and vehicle
are as significant as the similarities. At the moment all Rome looks at Abascan-
tus, they see a bereaved father, but Abascantus was not a father. The adult sons
in the simile are the children Abascantus and Priscilla never had. Once again,
through Abascantus’s staging of her death Priscilla becomes to the watching
crowd something she was not in life. While the crowd shed tears for the hus-
band, they call her felix for having died a tranquil death.⁴⁷ At the moment
when Abascantus is most like Domitian, the object of Great Rome’s obsessive
gaze, he shares the emperor’s ability to re-stage and re-shape reality through
spectacle. It is as if his Priscilla is felix, fruitful, as well as being a uniuira and
a virgin bride.
In the end, the many Priscillas conjured up by Abascantus through his ob-
sessive replication of her in omni metallo, in every material, and by Statius
through his shower of similes and allusions to mythical and literary exemplars,
when put in the balance, are counter-weights to the one hundred pound, colos-
sally expensive, gold statue commissioned by the politically adept cultrix Priscil-
la. As Abascantus becomes a reflection and extension of Domitian, Priscilla dis-
appears into a series of surrogates, a hall of mirrors, and the overwhelmed
 Gibson () ad loc. points out that felicemque uocant may be an allusion to Tristia ..
 – , another reminiscence of Ovid’s urging his wife to exemplary behavior: quae te/ nostrorum
cum sis in parte malorum/ felicem dicant, they may say that you, who share my woes, are fortu-
nate.
reader is left to ponder the cognitive dissonance of excessive exemplarity as “the

rhetorical project deconstructs into a baffled reach for its desired goal, or cure,
and endless deferral through representation.”⁴⁸
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this Festschrift (with particular thanks to Ioannis for his helpful editorial comments on my
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Arthur J. Pomeroy
Silius Italicus and Greek Epic: Imperial
Culture Wars
Summary: Pliny the Younger’s well-known letter on the death of Silius Italicus is
regularly cited for biographical information on the poet and literary judgement
on his epic. Certainly the portrayal of the senator’s reverence for Cicero and Ver-
gil is important, but Silius’ literary forerunners include Ennius (who briefly fea-
tures in his poem) and Homer. The significant Homeric allusions are important
both for the structure of the Punica, which turns Livian history into the manifes-
tation of divine destiny as in the Iliad, and as indications of the combined Greco-
Roman culture dominant in the Second Sophistic. Silius, like other Flavian writ-
ers, sought to indicate that his age showed a clear break with the extravagance of
the Neronian period. This was reflected both in social behaviour and in poetic
style, recalling the classical models of Greek and Roman prose and verse.
After the downfall of Domitian, however, the new generation of Roman senators
such as Tacitus and Pliny sought to distance themselves from the previous dy-
nasty. Hence Pliny’s critical comments on Silius, whose poetry should be over-
shadowed by the Trajanic epic in Homeric verse to be composed by his letter’s
recipient. A carefully phrased evaluation of Silius using allusions to Thucydides
deliberately suggests that for Pliny Silius remained in fact a profligate Neronian,
the last remnant of a past that had now been swept away.
Keywords: Silius Italicus; Flavian culture; Roman epic; Homer; Pliny the Young-
er; Vergil; Ennius
The Protagonist
A letter from the younger Pliny (Epistle 3.7) announces the passing of the ex-con-
sul and significant figure in Roman society, Silius Italicus. In this case Pliny has
been given an opportunity not merely to record the demise of an individual, but
also the passing of a generation. Silius was the last appointed of Nero’s consuls
and the last of the consuls serving under that emperor to die. The message is
clear: life is short and art is long, so best to get cracking and compose while
one still has the opportunity.
414 Arthur J. Pomeroy
As with all of Pliny’s letters, the content rewards unpacking.¹ First, the recip-
ient is Caninius Rufus, an old friend of Pliny’s from Comum. Like Pliny, Caninius
was a benefactor of his birthplace, since he is given advice on civic philanthropy
in 7.18. He was almost certainly also regarded by the established senator as his
protégé in literary circles. The very first letter to him in the collection encourages
him to leave aside his other duties and achieve immortality by writing (1.3) and
later letters indicate shared literary interests: for instance a discussion of the
modern writer of comic plays, Vergilius Romanus, is directed to Caninius (6.21)
and he is the recipient of the famous missive on the death of the Hippo dolphin
(9.33). Perhaps most interestingly, the reader discovers from Epistle 8.4 that Can-
inius is preparing to write an epic on Trajan’s Dacian War. The material is rich,
full of romantic and storybook elements (poetica et … fabulosa materia)², includ-
ing the glorious suicide of king Decebalus. Of course incorporating into hexam-
eter verse a foe whose name begins with three short syllables would be problem-
atic. Still, if Homer could shorten or lengthen and otherwise modify the pliant
vocabulary of the Greeks, why shouldn’t Caninius do something similar not
from self-indulgence but with the licence of necessity?
On reflection, then, Caninius was no chance recipient of Pliny’s report of Sil-
ius’ death, but chosen because of a shared interest in epic. Indeed it is quite like-
ly that he and Pliny had both on occasion been present at Silius’ literary soirées
packed with attendees from all social status groups (cubiculo semper, non ex for-
tuna frequenti: 3.7.4) or one of the many public recitations of his poetry (non num-
quam iudicia hominum recitationibus experiebatur). Although Pliny does not
specify Silius’ literary masterwork, the seventeen book Punica on the Second
Punic War, it is more than tempting to contrast that epic, devoted to heralding
the revival of Rome in the Flavian era, with Caninius’ Trajanic epic that celebra-
tes the achievements of a new dynasty. That Silius in retirement in Campania had
not returned to Rome to greet the new emperor arriving at last from the German
frontier shows a clear break from the Flavian era. That Trajan was not upset by
this behaviour shows how libertas, the right to act as one feels befits one’s sta-
tus, was to be a feature of the new regime. Furthermore, there was no longer
need for the cooperation of men whose time has passed.
Once upon a time in Rome Silius had received constant attention from those
coming to pay their greetings at the morning salutations or seek advice and offer
services as clients (salutabatur colebatur). In Campania, he in turn devoted him-
 On Pliny, Epistulae ., see in particular Vessey (), McDermott and Orentzel (),
Pomeroy ()  – .
 All translations from Latin and Greek throughout are those of the author.
self to serving the liberal arts and even appeared to offer worship to the images
of Vergil that he owned, treating the Roman poet’s birthday as more sacred than
his own and at Naples paying homage at his tomb as if it were a holy shrine (mul-
tum imaginum … non habebat modo, uerum etiam uenerabatur, Vergili ante
omnes, cuius natalem religiosius quam suum celebrabat Neapoli maxime, ubi
monumentum eius adire ut templum solebat: 3.7.8). The Vergilian connection,
also emphasized by Martial, is visible throughout the Punica. The Aeneid, the
epic of the Augustan era, is thus the obvious reference for Silius’ Flavian epic.
However, the veneration of the poet as a demi-god in the Hellenized setting of
Campania recalls the cult of Homer in the Greek world after Alexander.³ Indeed,
it is Homer that Pliny recalls when recommending ways of celebrating the ex-
ploits of Trajan to Caninius. Although Pliny’s rhetoric might suggest that
Homer is to Caninius as Vergil to Silius, the question of poetic authority and in-
debtedness is more complex and worth exploring. So I will now turn to Silius’
use of Greek poetry and Homer in particular, which I hope will highlight some
previously underappreciated features of the Punica before returning to Pliny’s
death notice for Silius which I believe can then be better understood in its liter-
ary and political milieu.
Silius and Greek Poetry

We know nothing for certain about the background of Silius, although an in-
scription that indicates his nomen was Catius and cognomen Ascanius (Tib. Cat-
ius Asconius Silius Italicus) may indicate a relationship to the Ciceronian com-
mentator Asconius Pedianus and a northern Italian origin for his family.⁴
However, his governorship of the prestigious senatorial province of Asia Minor
(AD 77 or 78),⁵ the time he spent around the Bay of Naples, and his poetry all
indicate that, like most Romans of his class, he was bilingual and well versed
in Greek literature. He advertised his adherence to the classical figures of
Roman literature: in prose this was Cicero (whose Baian villa he owned), in po-
etry, Vergil, whose tomb on the road out of Naples he seems to have placed under
his protection. Certainly Martial describes him as a worthy dominus, owner of
Cicero’s property, and heres for Vergil’s tomb and the first line of his epigram an-
nouncing this (11.48.1) is composed in the style of an inscription to be attached to
 Brink ().
 Calder (); Syme ()  n. .
 Eck ()  – , .
the shrine: Silius haec magni celebrat monimenta Maronis (“This is the memorial
to great Vergil that Silius Italicus honours”). After the eruption of Vesuvius in AD
79, in which Pliny records heavy ash fall and seismic tremors as far west as Mis-
enum (Epistles 6.20.13 – 20), it is likely that both Cicero’s villa, the Cumanum, lo-
cated close to the bradyseismic area of the Phlegraean fields, and Vergil’s tomb
would have needed repair and restoration.⁶
Still Pliny indicates his Hellenic values by describing the senator using the
Greek term φιλόκαλος (“a connoisseur of the arts”). He would have been familiar
as the fountainhead of Greek poetry and traditions, a deduction that is thorough-
ly confirmed by Homeric references in the Punica. Silius had also read at least
parts of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, and Bruce Gibson has
highlighted Silius’ cognizance of Hellenistic Greek prose traditions about Sicily,
whether from reading the original authors’ works or indirectly via compilations
of these tales.⁷ This is entirely consonant with the interest in geographical details
seen throughout Roman poetry. In addition, as a senator in favour with Nero, Sil-
ius would surely have been well aware of the Hellenistic sources so beloved by
the poet-actor emperor, which include overwrought dramatic depictions of
mythological heroines or emotional retellings of the sack of Troy.
This makes it all the more surprising that Silius in his Punica, unlike Statius
in the Thebaid, makes no display of his acquaintance with Greek tragedy or the
Callimachean tradition of Hellenistic poetry. The Greek epic tradition based on
the quest for the Golden Fleece, most evident in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonau-
tica and still strong in Valerius Flaccus’ almost contemporary retelling, leaves no
trace in the Punica. ⁸ The closest possible link is between Medea’s unhappy
brother Apsyrtos and Silius’ Camilla-like Libyan heroine, Absyrte, from Book
Two of his epic. Absyrte, like Apsyrtos/Phaethon is a charioteer who meets a
tragic end. Still, her origin can be more obviously linked to the Punic cult of
Hammon Asbystes (2.66).⁹ No use of Pindar by Silius can be clearly detected,
nor borrowings from Hellenistic poetry, in contrast with Lucan whose snake epi-
 The well-known painting () by Joseph Wright of Derby showing Silius at Vergil’s tomb
offers a more romantic depiction of the poet worshipping alone at the ruined structure, probably
a cistern, at Naples that had come to be associated with the poet in modern times.
 Pomeroy (), Gibson ().
 Fucecchi ()  claims that Apollonius should be included in Silius’ epic models, while
admitting (n. ) that Argonautic material could come from other sources. Chaudhuri ()
 –  discusses the portrait of Idas as despiser of the gods in Argonautica . –  as a
forerunner of Statius’ Capaneus and Silius’ Flaminius without making any claims for direct in-
fluence.
 Spaltenstein ( – ) ad loc.
sode has obvious Greek antecedents. Use of the Latin poets Horace and Ovid is
more readily perceived and strong similarities in language and subject matter in-
dicate familiarity with other Flavian epic writers. Yet even more than Valerius
and Statius, Silius follows in the footsteps of Homer via Vergil. Statius may
have acknowledged his debt to the Augustan vates in his epilogue to the The-
baid, but Silius, as noted above, undertook the role of Vergil’s heir, not only up-
holding the dignity of the deceased, but also undertaking the care of his funeral
monument as a duty that would normally accrue to the inheritor (heres) of a
Roman estate.
Leaving aside the mythological figure of Orpheus, only four historical poets
are mentioned in Silius’ epic: Homer, Hesiod, Ennius, and Vergil. The last is spe-
cifically celebrated by mention of both the Georgics and the Aeneid in the cata-
logue of Roman forces that fought at Cannae:
Mantua mittenda certauit pube Cremonae,

Mantua, Musarum domus atque ad sidera cantu
euecta Aonio et Smyrnaeis aemula plectris. (Punica 8.592– 4)
Mantua strove to surpass Cremona in sending its youth, Mantua, carried up to the home of
the Muses and the stars by Hesiodic song and a match for the lyre-playing of Homer.
Indeed Vergil is Homer’s match, since Aeneas’ katabasis in Aeneid Six is a major
source for Silius’ depiction of the Underworld within which the shade of Homer
appears (Punica 13.778 – 97).¹⁰ Still, as he has not been born yet, let alone died,
Vergil can only be adumbrated via this depiction of Homer. Born, but not yet
dead and so not in Elysium, is Quintus Ennius, the author of the first epic
that incorporated the Hannibalic War.¹¹ Silius might have incorporated him with-
in the epic as a performing bard, as Demodocus is shown in the Odyssey, Iopas in
Aeneid 1, and Teuthras, who entertains Hannibal at Cumae, in Punica 11. Instead,
he inserts Ennius as a character into an epic that encompasses the material he
would later narrate, a trope that has become common in modern novels and
films, as when, for instance, Conan Doyle is portrayed as solving crimes in the
fashion of his character, Sherlock Holmes. Silius makes Ennius a heroic warrior
engaged in the fighting in Sardinia in 215 BC (Punica 12.387– 419). He even pro-
motes him to the rank of centurion, which as a Messapian he certainly could not
have been.¹² An Italian socius would be ineligible for this Roman rank: Ennius
 Reitz (), Billerbeck ().

 Bettini (), Casali (), Dorfbauer (), Augoustakis ()  – .
 It is amusing to see Silius in turn depicted as a delator in AD  Rome in Lindsey Davis’ The
Accusers (). This characterization is based on Pliny’s suggestion (Epistulae ..) that Silius
gained his citizenship from his praise poetry in 184 (Cicero, Brutus 80), long after
he had left Sardinia for Rome as a praise poet in 204 BC.¹³ This event recorded in
Nepos seems to have inspired Silius to place Ennius on the island a decade ear-
lier and to elevate the skirmishes on the island that Livy hardly ranks worthy of
noting in 23.40 – 1 into the greatest of campaigns. The epic tone is pronounced:
the poet notes his inability to describe the countless deaths and dreadful deeds
of the participants and thus must call on Calliope who as Muse can ensure that
the deeds of a great hero, hardly remembered in Silius’ day, be transmitted to a
future age. Silius, just as he in real life protected Vergil’s tomb, here acts with the
Muse to enshrine (sacremus) in his poem the honour due to the bard (12.392).
Like Orpheus fighting at Cyzicus in the Argonautica, Ennius is shown as able
to ply the martial arts as well as sing of them. When Hostus, the son of the Car-
thaginian leader casts his spear at him, Apollo intervenes to turn the spear aside
and an avenging arrow transfixes Hostus’ head. The enemy immediately retreats
in panic and Hostus’ father, Hampsagoras, maddened by grief commits suicide.
Clearly this incident is based both on the story of Mezentius and his son Lausus
from Aeneid 10 (Silius describes Hostus as “his handsome offspring, worthy of a
better warrior for his parent” in Punica 12.346) and the tale of Ascanius’ singular
act of valour in striking down Numanus Remulus in Aeneid 9.621– 58. Ennius and
his exploits are described in terms of Augustan poetics: the poet is under divine
patronage (sacer), protected by the Muses of Helicon and a worthy mouthpiece
(uates) for his tutelary deity, Apollo. ‘This is the man who will be the first to
sing of Italy’s war in noble verse [that is, in hexameters, unlike Naevius’ Satur-
nians] and raise its leaders to the heavens; this is the man who will teach Helicon
to echo with Latin song and who will match the old man of Ascra [Hesiod] in
respect and reputation’ (Punica 12.408 – 13).
What is striking is that while Ennius can rival Hesiod, presumably through
compositions such as his Euhemerus, he is no rival for Homer, even if Ennius had
in his Annals suggested that he was a reincarnation of the Greek bard. In the
Punica, Homer is still in the Underworld, not reincarnated in the Messapian
poet. Indeed the intervention of Apollo on Ennius’ behalf both recalls the efforts
of the god on behalf of the Trojans in the Iliad and his intervention to praise As-
canius and dissuade him from further martial efforts in the Aeneid. While Apollo
appears in Augustan poetry to frustrate epic pretensions and support lighter
verse forms (Horace, Odes 4.15 is the model for such action), here the god inter-
might have brought prosecutions on his own account under Nero that harmed his reputation
(but note the proviso credebatur, ’people thought’: he need not have acted so and his behaviour
afterwards was exemplary).
 Badian ().
venes to ensure the birth of Roman epic. Yet the truly divine genius of Roman
poetry who will be Italy’s Homer is still to be born.¹⁴ Silius’ cult of Vergil can
thus be seen as a parallel to the Hellenistic worship of Homer, as epigonoi, the
descendants of the great, can claim parental authority for their verse.
The parallelism between Vergil and Homer is reinforced by passages in the
Punica that draw on the work of both poets. For instance, the potamomachia at
the Trebia of Punica 4.570 – 703 draws substantially on Iliad 21, but the interven-
tion of the raging river on Juno’s request follows the causality of the storm in Ae-
neid 1; the games staged by Scipio in Spain (Punica 16) are derived both from
Iliad 23 and Aeneid 5.¹⁵ Furthermore, Scipio’s descent into the Underworld in
Punica 13 is both based on the nekyia of Odyssey 11 and the katabasis of Aeneid
6: Odysseus meets his mother, Aeneas his father, but Scipio meets both his pa-
rents separately). In brief, Silius has both a Greek father and a Roman parent
and acknowledges both.¹⁶ This willingness to embrace both cultures seems typ-
ical of the Flavian Age and the cultural movement that will come to be labelled
‘the Second Sophistic’. Both Achilles and Hector can enjoy the Elysian Fields in
the company of Homer (Punica 13.800: ‘he was dumbfounded by Achilles, he
was dumbfounded by great Hector’) and Odysseus is seen as the equal of
Achilles (Punica 15.803), not as the infamous Greek trickster of Aeneid 2.¹⁷
Of course, the Punica is saturated with Homeric echoes that by the Flavian
Age were an accepted part of Roman culture. Silius’ account of the Second Punic
War begins with the theme of kleos for the descendants of Aeneas and the impo-
sition of Italian law on wild Carthage (Punica 1.1– 3). Rome breeds great heroes,
while it is the role of the race of Cadmos to challenge the terms of peace. As in
Livy’s summation of the Hannibalic War (21.1), the event is a near-run thing
where at one point it looked like the eventual winner was down for the count.
While the Dardanian leader (Scipio) forced open the Agenorean citadel (Carth-
age), the Palatine was surrounded by a Punic ditch and Rome had to trust to
its walls for its salvation. The two opponents are here clearly described in Ho-
meric terms and, perhaps surprisingly, they are both of Trojan descent. Silius’ de-
scription of the impius ensis of the Carthaginians both links them to the Romans
through the Lucanian reference and offers a devastating reproach for their con-
tinuing resort to violence, unlike their Roman cousins.
 Van der Keur ()  rightly notes that ‘Silius is the new Homer exactly because he is
also the new Virgil’.
 Potamomachia: Juhnke ()  – , ; funeral games:  – ,  – .
 Von Albrecht ()  – ; Juhnke ()  – .
 Ripoll ()  – .
In this new Iliad, Rome may appear as the Greek camp, surrounded by a
ditch but never taken by Hector. Similarly, the actual capture of Troy did not
occur under Scipio, the Roman Achilles, but by his descendant, Scipio Aemilia-
nus as Neoptolemus. All this is the final outcome of a process that began when
Ennius portrayed Rome’s enemies as neo-Achaeans threatening the offspring of
Aeneas, drawing on Pyrrhus of Epirus’ self-depiction as the descendant of
Achilles coming to wage war on those Trojans who had escaped their city’s de-
struction. Vergil extends this in the Iliadic half of the Aeneid, turning the Italian
champion Turnus into an Achilles (so, for instance, he pursues the phantom of
Aeneas in Book 12, as Achilles does with Agenor in Iliad 21). However, Aeneas
can also assume Greek roles: as Menelaus wounded by the arrow that ends
the truce (Aeneid 12; cf. Iliad 4), or as Achilles, mortally wounding Turnus just
as his counterpart kills Hector in Iliad 22. Likewise, Turnus can take on the
role of Hector that is mainly associated with Aeneas, for instance when he at-
tacks the Trojan camp in Book 9. In the Punica, Hannibal can be Achilles threat-
ening a substitute Troy/Rome at Saguntum in Books 10 – 12, but he can also be
Hector seeing in his son Astyanax the future of his city in the Imilce episode of
4.763 ff.
All this is well known and the examples could be multiplied. Silius’ actual
Homeric usage was investigated in detail by Herbert Juhnke in his 1972 mono-
graph that includes a lengthy appendix listing all Homeric parallels for the Pun-
ica that had been noted by commentators up to that time. Juhnke’s volume, fol-
lowing the lead of Georg Knauer’s Die Aeneis und Homer (1964), is particularly
strong on verbal parallels and direct borrowings of epic terms. More recently
François Ripoll has extended the comparison to the role of Homeric epic in Sil-
ius’ artistic enterprise: for instance, comparisons between Fabius and Nestor
confirm the epic tone of his retelling of historical events, as does the revival
of common Homer aetiologies, such as the relationship between Diomedes
and south Italy, in the context of the battle of Cannae. This admixture of histor-
ical and epic is most evident in Scipio’s wish, expressed after viewing Homer in
the Elysian Fields, that he might obtain a poet capable of celebrating his achieve-
ments. This wish, to be fulfilled both by Ennius and more obviously by Silius
himself, is of course based on Alexander’s lament that he lacked a literary talent
in his entourage who could advertise his own kleos in the manner that Homer
celebrated Achilles.¹⁸
 Ripoll (), esp.  – .

Homer’s Influence on Silius’ Narrative Structure

To extend the exploration of Homer’s influence on Silius, I think it is worth ex-
amining an allusion that seems to have attracted little attention previously, pos-
sibly because of its narratological implications as opposed to verbal
intertextualities.¹⁹ When in Punica 3 Hannibal arrives in Italy, Venus is deeply
alarmed and hastens to Jupiter to complain about this potential gigantomachy:
Alpibus imposuit Libyam finemque minatur/imperio (‘he has set Africa up on
top of the Alps and threatens an end to Rome’s rule’: 563 – 4). The context sug-
gests that the imperium is that of Rome, but as the noun is not modified it
also implies a threat to Jupiter himself. Jupiter reassurance is well-known: the
future of the city is guaranteed, but his intention is in the meantime to test
the mettle of Rome’s heroes.
magnae molis opus multoque labore parandum

tot populos inter soli sibi poscere regna. (Punica 3.583 – 4)
It is a task involving great effort and enormous toil

To demand for itself alone amid so many nations the power to rule.
Paulus, Fabius, and Marcellus will by the spilling of their blood (per uulnera)
bring forth an empire (regnum) that cannot be destroyed by the extravagance
of their descendants (3.588). This empire will be begun by Scipio’s victory over
Hannibal and lead to a long series of rulers descended from Venus, to be re-
placed in turn by the Flavian dynasty (3.590 – 629).
According to Ruperti (1795 – 8: ad 3.570), Heinsius the Elder in the seven-
teenth century was the first to connect Jupiter’s prediction of Rome’s future
greatness with Anchises’ description of the parade of Roman heroes in the Un-
derworld from Aeneid 6. More recently the general message of the inevitability of
Roman rule and its culmination in the Flavian dynasty has been well explored
by Raymond Marks (2005). However, only Herbert Juhnke, and then only in a
brief aside (1972: 223), appears to have noticed that there is an Iliadic parallel
of significance. Jupiter explains why he should wish to test the Romans by offer-
 It is not the intention of this paper to re-investigate the intertextuality of the Punica with Ho-
meric epic, whether through Vergil or by direct relationship to the Greek text. For those interest-
ed in this subject, I refer in particular to Juhnke () and Karakasis () who discusses Sil-
ian intertextuality and, in particular, ‘window references’ where an allusion to one text also sets
in motion a chain of references to similar texts that may extend as far back as Homeric epic
while also bringing the ethical force of earlier parallels into play in the Flavian world ( – ).
ing numerous victories to Hannibal by suggesting that this is a ‘toughening-up’

process, a sort of boot camp for future rulers.
gens ferri patiens ac laeta domare labores

paulatim antiquo patrum desuescit honori,
atque ille haud umquam parcus pro laude cruoris
et semper famae sitiens obscura sedendo
tempora agit multum uoluens inglorius aeuum
sanguine de nostro populus, blandoque ueneno
desidiae uirtus paulatim euicta senescit. (Punica 3.575 – 81)
The race which had endured steel and was glad to overcome its tasks
Has gradually grown unaccustomed to the ancient honour of its fathers
And while it was once never sparing of its blood in exchange for glory
And always thirsty for renown, the people sprung from my blood is now leading
A life without fame, in disesteem, and completely defeated by the pleasant poison
Of inaction its courage is gradually fading away.
This nigh-Darwinian treatment of survival of the fittest is well in line with an-
cient theories of inevitable decline that can in fact be reversed by stern treatment
of the subject. Indeed Seneca’s views on tree-pruning follow exactly this pattern:
severe amputation will force renewed invigoration (Epistles 112). Within Roman
society the animalistic thirst for reputation and willingness to shed one’s own
blood to achieve this has been diluted by inactivity and the poisonous pleasures
of leisure. The ‘Choice of Hercules’ offered to Scipio in Punica, Book 15 is adum-
brated by the use of the terms labores (‘toil’) and desidia (‘sloth’) in Jupiter’s
speech. Yet behind all this is the famous choice of Achilles from Iliad 9.410 – 16:
μήτηρ γάρ τέ μέ φησι θεὰ Θέτις ἀργυρόπεζα

διχθαδίας κῆρας φερέμεν θανάτοιο τέλος δέ.
εἰ μέν κ’ αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν ἀμφιμάχωμαι,
ὤλετο μέν μοι νόστος, ἀτὰρ κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται·
εἰ δέ κεν οἴκαδ’ ἵκωμι φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν,
ὤλετό μοι κλέος ἐσθλόν, ἐπὶ δηρὸν δέ μοι αἰὼν
ἔσσεται, οὐδέ κέ μ’ ὦκα τέλος θανάτοιο κιχείη.
My mother, the silver footed goddess, tells me

That two fates, ending in death, bear me along.
If I were to remain here and fight around the city of the Trojans
I would lose my chance to return, but my glory would be everlasting.
If I were to go home to my beloved fatherland,
My noble glory would perish, but my life would be
Long, and the death’s end would not quickly catch up with me.
Achilles has to choose between a long life of obscurity or to fight at Troy, gain
everlasting fame, but die in the process. In line with his claim to be ‘best of
the Achaeans’, he will inevitably finally choose the latter path.
To return to the prayers of Venus to Jupiter in the Punica, it is clear that the
original inspiration is again Homeric, if also filtered through Jupiter’s pro-
nouncement in Aeneid 10 that the fighting between the Trojans and Italians
should cease since a war with genuine cause is already fated to occur in the dis-
tant future:
adueniet iustum pugnae (ne arcessite) tempus,

cum fera Karthago Romanis arcibus olim
exitium magnum atque Alpis immittet apertas. (Aeneid 10.11– 13)
The time will come for a honest war – don’t hurry it along –
When wild Carthage will at some stage hurl great destruction
Against the Roman citadel and throw open the Alps.
Venus’ complaints to Jupiter are also reminiscent of her outraged call for divine
support in this same divine council (10.16 – 62), countered by Juno’s defiant re-
sponse (62– 95), and Jupiter’s decision to let the efforts of mortals decide the out-
come – for that day (104– 13). Thetis’ entreaty to Zeus that the Trojans may suc-
ceed until Achilles, who is pining away after withdrawing from the fighting, is
once more honoured by the Greeks (Iliad 1.495 – 530) is also filtered through
Zeus’ promise to Venus in Aeneid 1.227– 96. The king of the gods promises that
Juno’s pursuit of the Trojans will eventually end once Aeneas defeats the Italians.
This will mark of turn of Fortune for his people, rather than simply the justifica-
tion of an individual:
his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono:

imperium sine fine dedi. (Aeneid 1.278 – 9)
For them [the new Roman race] I set neither boundaries nor time limits:
I have given them empire without end.
Silius, combining both the fate of individuals and that of the Roman nation as a
whole, both in the narrative time of the epic and the future of his own day, thus
draws on both Homeric and Vergilian tradition. In the Iliad, Hector himself
boasts in Book 8 that Zeus has guaranteed him victory and that the ruler of heav-
en will assist him to cross the Achaean ditch and attack the Greek ships:
γιγνώσκω δ’ ὅτι μοι πρόφρων κατένευσε Κρονίων

νίκην καὶ μέγα κῦδος, ἀτὰρ Δαναοῖσί γε πῆμα. (Iliad 8.175 – 6)
I see that Zeus looking into the future has agreed to

Victory and fame for me, but suffering for the Greeks.
The will of Zeus is most clearly expressed in his instructions to the Olympian dei-
ties in 15.59 – 77: Hector is to drive the Greeks back to their ships, after which
Achilles will send Patroclus out to fight for him. Hector will kill Patroclus,
Achilles Hector, and the fighting will continue back and forth until the destruc-
tion of Troy. Until, however, the Greeks are forced to retreat in desperation, as
Achilles wished and Zeus had guaranteed to Thetis, no divine help may come
their way. The plan is accomplished when the Trojans push the Greeks back
(15.592– 600):
Τρῶες δὲ λείουσιν ἐοικότες ὠμοφάγοισι

νηυσὶν ἐπεσσεύοντο, Διὸς δ’ ἐτέλειον ἐφετμάς,
ὅ σφισιν αἰὲν ἔγειρε μένος μέγα, θέλγε δὲ θυμὸν
᾿Aργείων καὶ κῦδος ἀπαίνυτο, τοὺς δ’ ὀρόθυνεν. 595
Ἕκτορι γάρ οἱ θυμὸς ἐβούλετο κῦδος ὀρέξαι
Πριαμίδῃ, ἵνα νηυσὶ κορωνίσι θεσπιδαὲς πῦρ
ἐμβάλοι ἀκάματον, Θέτιδος δ’ ἐξαίσιον ἀρὴν
πᾶσαν ἐπικρήνειε· τὸ γὰρ μένε μητίετα Ζεὺς
νηὸς καιομένης σέλας ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ἰδέθαι. 600
The Trojans fell on the ships like lions

Eating their prey alive and Zeus’ orders were accomplished,
Who continually awoke the great spirit within them, but dulled
The hearts of the Argives and denied them glory, while he encouraged the others.
For his heart wanted Hector, the son of Priam, to achieve
Glory so he might thrown unquenchable fire into
The curved ships and bring to fruition Thetis’ terrible curse
Completely. So counselling Zeus waited
To see with his own eyes the blaze of a ship on fire.
Eventually a Greek ship is set alight and Zeus’ plan completed.

In the context of the Punica, Zeus’ plan of gaining kleos for the Romans thus
does not only revolve around the defeats they suffer at the Tîcînus, Trebia, Tra-
simene, and Cannae, but around a turning-point. This must certainly be Hanni-
bal’s attack on Rome in Book 12 (541– 752), a challenge to the city of Aeneas’ de-
scendants that might be seen as completing Dido’s curse.²⁰ Still Hannibal is an
attacker before the Trojan city, who may desire to destroy the enemy, but is re-
peatedly turned back by Jupiter’s thunder and lightning, as is Diomedes in
Iliad 8.167– 71. However, if Diomedes hesitates three times in quick succession,
 On this, see now Stocks ()  – .

Hannibal’s more substantial threat needs to be thwarted on three consecutive

days by Jupiter (12.609 – 26; 651– 63; 686 – 728).²¹ The last attempt results in the
king of the gods despatching Juno to warn Hannibal:
‘siste uirum. namque, ut cernis, iam flagitat ignes

et parat accensis imitari fulmina flammis.’ (12.699 – 700)
“Halt your hero. For, as you can see, he is now demanding torches
And readying to match the lightning with the flames he was kindled.”
Hannibal is here thus both Hector ready to burn the Achaean ships and Capa-
neus, challenging the divine:
rursus in arma uocat trepidos clipeoque tremendum

increpat atque <amens> imitatur murmura caeli. (683 – 4)
[uenus: mss; armis: edd.; minis: Bauer; amens: Summers; tonans: Watt]
He called his frightened men back to fight and let out a fearful boom
With his shield and in his madness imitated the roar of the sky.
This is his third and final attempt. The first repulse is excused by use of Stoic
physics when Hannibal ridicules the warning signs as blindly directed fire
from the clouds and an empty roar spread by the winds. After the next attempt,
like Lucan’s Caesar in the holy grove at Massilia, he reassures his fearful men
that attempting to destroy Rome is no unholy act (nec Romam exscindere
Poeni/ credant esse nefas: 670 – 1). Now, however, Juno clears the mist from Han-
nibal’s view of Rome and reveals the Olympians defending the city (12.706 – 25),
a reversal of Aeneas’ vision of the same gods destroying Troy in Aeneid 2 (594–
631). Only now does he withdraw. The rush of the Romans after Hannibal’s de-
parture to inspect the enemy’s camp, after carefully checking for any Punic
trap, once again mirrors the actions of the unsuspecting Trojans in Aeneid 2
(26 – 30), but this time without harm.
In 1964, Michael von Albrecht was the first to examine in depth the threat to
Rome as a leitmotiv of the Punica in a substantial subsection of his monograph
on Silius (Moenia Romae, 24– 46). The attack on the capital has been Hannibal’s
dream from his youth, achieved by proxy through his capture of Saguntum and
the goal of all his victories in Italy. Von Albrecht, however, compares Hannibal’s
efforts with those of Homeric Greek heroes. His attack on the city spreads panic
through its inhabitants, just as the Trojans are terrified by the spectre of a victo-
 For a detailed treatment of this episode, see now Chaudhuri ()  – , as part of his
chapter on Hannibal as theomach.
rious Achilles in Iliad 21. However, Jupiter, returning from Ethiopia (12.605) rec-
ognizes what is occurring, an Homeric reference, that recalls Neptune’s reaction
to seeing Odysseus daring to cross his realm in Odyssey 5.282– 3: τὸν δ’ ἐξ
Αἰθιόπων ἀνιὼν κρείων ἐνοσίχθων/τηλόθεν ἐκ Σολύμων ὀρέων ἴδεν (“far off
from the mountains of the Solomoi, the lordly earthshaker on his way back
from the Ethiopians spotted him”). The ruler of heaven first intervenes personal-
ly, then invokes the aid of the full group of Olympic deities.
Von Albrecht concluded that Book 12 was the high point of Silius’ epic and
that the dramatic tension is released after Rome’s successful defense.²² This
treatment of the epic, however, did not seem to adequately explain the compo-
sition of the Punica, and in 1986 Ahl, Davis, and Pomeroy suggested that it might
be more valuable to take into consideration the central position of the battle of
Cannae, a Roman defeat that can also be seen as a victory for the indomitable
spirit of a people.²³ Still it is not Cannae, but the attack on Rome that Silius high-
lights in his preface (1.14– 16) following the Vergilian encapsulation of the Han-
nibal War, with wild Carthage (fera Carthago; cf. ferox Carthago in Punica 1.2– 3)
hurling destruction and the unlocked Alps at the Roman citadel (10.12– 13).
Yet, as I have indicated, Rome is more than a more fortunate Troy. It is also
the Achaean camp that represents the pinnacle of Hector’s achievement when
the first ship is burnt and in turn indicates a peripeteia that will lead to Achilles’
glory. Historically, Hannibal’s attack on Rome was but one minor action in a
campaign that would extend for a decade more. In Silius, however, it represents
the point from which Rome’s success can be dated as the figure of Scipio, return-
ing to the fighting after the Trebia and Cannae, becomes the Achilles who threat-
ens Carthage. In short, the drama is not over after Hannibal’s attack, merely
moving to its inevitable conclusion (Hannibal as Hector metaphorically coming
to the limits of his success outside the walls of Carthage).
And Rome? It is both the historical city and, in Vergilian pattern, another,
but more successful Troy. Yet, as epic heroes can be both Hector and Achilles,
Aeneas and Turnus, so Rome can be both the Trojan refuge and the Greek
encampment.²⁴ This reflects its author: a Roman senator whose cultural values
come not so much from the Campanian community in which he lived as from
the renewed classicism of the Flavian era. It is this cultural invention that
 Von Albrecht () : “Die dramatische Spannung … lässt nach.” Cf. Tipping ()
 – : “Repulse of Hannibal marks a divinely aided victory of Rome and das Recht over the
transgressive evil of Carthage and its demonic leader.”
 Ahl, Davis, and Pomeroy ()  –  (‘The Battle-centered Structure’).
 Hardie () Chapter One.
needs now to be explored both to recognize what Silius intends with his epic and
to appreciate Pliny’s response to the poet with which this chapter began.
Flavian Rome
While it is a common modern practice to attach labels to particular cultural or
historical periods (for instance, the Renaissance, the Victorian Age, or the
Thatcherite/Reaganite eras), the use of such nomenclature seems less common
in Rome. The regal period, the Republic, and the imperium of Augustus and
his descendants are the main divisions expressed by Tacitus in his prefaces to
the Histories and the Annals. Appian was undoubtedly drawing on earlier sour-
ces when he described as the Civil Wars those years between the tribunate of Ti-
berius Gracchus in 131 BC and the death of Sextus Pompeius in 35 BC. Unlike
Tacitus, he does not end the era with the battle of Actium, since he is following
the Augustan tradition of a Roman revival begun in the 30s that was not chal-
lenged by the conflict between Rome and Egypt (the latter led by Cleopatra
and the renegade Roman, Marcus Antonius).
The death of Nero, of course, led to a dynastic change from the Julio-Clau-
dians to the Flavians, but not a change in the system of the Principate. However,
Tacitus in a fascinating passage (Annals 3.55.1), poses a topic for discussion:
‘Why has extravagance gradually disappeared?’ The question is an important
one, since conspicuous consumption was regarded by Roman historians and
moralists as the reason for the decline of the Republic and the lapse into civil
war. In Silius, Jupiter sees the rebirth from the Hannibalic War as creating a do-
minion (regnum) that the descendants of the Roman heroes weak of spirit and
sunk in luxury will not be able to ruin (quod luxu et multum mutata mente ne-
potes/ non tamen euertisse queant: Punica 3.589 – 90).
Tacitus suggests that two changes in social practice have produced the un-
usual result of an improvement in Roman mores. First, the old aristocracy was
undermined by their own competitive practices, especially when the imperial
family would not brook any rivals. Then from AD 70, one must take into account
the behaviour of the new intake from Italian country towns and the provinces
into the Senate, men of traditional parsimony who continued to be reluctant
to spend their wealth even after their elevation in status. In addition, the figure
of Vespasian, famed for his tight-fistedness, offered a model that was advanta-
geous to emulate in the competitive world of Roman politics and provided a de-
cisive impetus for universal change.
The passage has been frequently noted in discussions of Tacitus’ historiog-
raphy. Most notably Reinhard Häussler in his work on ‘Tacitus and Historical
Awareness’ stresses the convergence of individual (or ‘great man’) causation and
group psychology that is rare elsewhere in ancient historiography.²⁵ The break
coincides with the death of Nero (the most extravagant of the Julio-Claudians)
and the elevation of Galba, a man of old-fashioned stubbornness and excessive
sternness (antiquus rigor et nimia severitas) according to Tacitus in Histories
1.18.3, a characterization to which he adds ‘which we can no longer match’
(cui iam pares non sumus). The historian is thus not merely describing a change
in dynasty, but a difference in mindset. One might parallel the cocaine-sniffing
decadence of the Reagan era, most notably portrayed in Brian DePalma’s Scar-
face (1983), that apparently gave way to the small-town morality of the Clinton
administration or the way the egoism of Thatcherite Britain is said to have
been transformed by Blair’s ‘Third Way’ into a much more socially responsible
mind-set.
A more interesting question is whether this depiction of discontinuity in
Roman lifestyles is a Tacitean idiosyncrasy or not. Clearly life changed little
for the majority of the populace in the Roman world, just as a good proportion
of the world’s population was bemused by the Judaeo-Christian fixation on the
year 2000 that ignored Islamic and Buddhist calendars. If they had an opinion,
the majority probably regretted the end of displays of imperial generosity as ef-
fected by Nero. However, there are other indications of similar attitudes to that of
Tacitus in the upper sections of Roman society. If we return to Pliny’s letter on
the death of Silius Italicus, it is clear that the writer constructs a clear division
between life under Nero (where “some say Silius brought charges against others
without any pressure being applied”) and the subject’s blameless civic service
and social influence in the years that followed. The change in times is particu-
larly stressed by Silius’ decision to remain in Campania rather than make his
way to Rome for the inauguration of Trajan, a mark of the felicitas of the era
that echoes Tacitus’ approving description of the Nervan-Trajanic age in the in-
troduction to the Histories (1.1.4). Still, just as he is tepid toward Silius’ poetry,
Pliny stresses that the senator was in many ways a survivor from an earlier
age, noted for his extravagant expenditure on villas and works of art, and that
the passing of the last of Nero’s consuls also marks the dying of a lifestyle.
These two Flavian senators, who flourished in the age of Trajan, in many
ways formed a mutual admiration society if Pliny’s letters to his friend are any-
thing to go by.²⁶ Hence, that they should have a similar view on recent history
may not be surprising. Their careers began under the Flavians and they would
 Häussler () .

 Marchiesi (); Gibson and Morello ().
have felt little connection with the previous period (the case of Nerva, a sterling
performer in suppressing the Pisonian Conspiracy of AD 65 is exceptional). How-
ever the suggestion that the present age is an improvement on the past can al-
ready be detected in the literature of the Flavian period. After AD 96 this is
adapted to turn the generally unmentionable Domitian into a Neronian throw-
back, while Nerva and Trajan are portrayed as being in direct descent from the
earlier Flavian model.
Silius Italicus, in a passage almost certainly composed in the 80s, depicted
the Flavians as successors to the Julio-Claudians in Jupiter’s prophecy of Rome’s
future (Punica 3.594– 629). Perhaps he was following the lead of Vespasian who
erected a temple to his benefactor Claudius and justified the construction of the
Flavian amphitheatre on the grounds that he was following Augustus’ original
intentions (Suetonius, Vespasian 9.1). Both of these acts were of course intended
to suggest the illegitimacy of Nero, since Claudius’ adopted son had ‘destroyed’
(or perhaps more realistically, altered) the temple to his predecessor that had
been begun by Agrippina and the Colosseum was later created on the site of
the lake in front of the Domus Aurea. Silius also places stress on the humble ori-
gins of the Flavii in the reference to their origin from Cures and their self-earned
glory (se … uirtus caelestis ad astra/ efferet: Punica 3.594– 5), echoing the dom-
inant theme of his epic: the display of Roman manliness when faced by adver-
sity. In addition, the Flavian gens’ rustic habits could be associated with old-
style military virtue (bellatrix gens bacifero nutrita Sabino: “a warlike race nur-
tured by the olive-bearing Sabine land”, 3.596). Still, there is no sign of discon-
tinuity in Silius’ depiction of Roman history – one might even suggest that he
glosses over the civil wars of 69, since only the story of Domitian’s miraculous
escape from the Capitol is referenced in 3.608 (nec te terruerint Tarpei culminis
ignes: “nor will the flames at the top of the Capitoline terrify you”). That is hardly
surprising, given that, as Pliny notes, he was a confidant of Vitellius at the
time.²⁷
By contrast, Valerius Flaccus in the proem to his Argonautica, in a passage
whose date is disputed but certainly composed in the Flavian era,²⁸ contrasts
the martial abilities of Vespasian and Titus with those of the Julio-Claudians.
In a barbed jab at the claimed Asiatic origins of the gens, the failures of the Phry-
gian Julii on the North Sea from Julius Caesar onward are recalled to contrast
 See also his role in negotiating the transfer of power from Vitellius to Vespasian, a peaceful
transition that was thwarted by the army mutiny that led to the siege of the Flavian representa-
tives and supporters on the Capitol and the destruction of the site in the subsequent fighting
(Tacitus, Histories . – ).
 See most recently, Stover ()  – .
with the deeds of Vespasian in conquering Britain and Valerius emphasizes the
heroics of Titus at Jerusalem as well. The war exploits of Titus, black with the
grime of war as he sets fire to the towers of the city, are the antithesis of the dis-
plays of eastern extravagance by the previous dynasty. Indeed, the poet implies,
the Judaean war would be a splendid theme for real epic – if only it hadn’t been
forestalled by a composition from Vespasian’s second offspring (Argonautica
1.5 – 14). Statius’ treatment of Vettius Bolanus in Siluae 5.2 shows a similar strat-
egy to that of Valerius when he stresses the martial prowess of a man who was to
become a Flavian stalwart. Bolanus while still a youth was able to quell the Ar-
menians who had refused to submit to Nero and achieved success in Britain, just
as Vespasian had done before him. We might note that the Armenian successes
of Corbulo (Bolanus’ superior) were actually achieved under the auspices of Nero
and that Bolanus was in fact appointed to govern Britain in 69 by Vitellius, not
the Flavians. That, however, is not the impression given.
A similar use of Trojan themes to the detriment of the Julians that is visible
in Valerius Flaccus can be observed in one of Martial’s epigrams on Titus’ naval
games, his naumachia (De Spectaculis 34).²⁹ According to the epigrammatist, Au-
gustus’ naval theatre was nothing in comparison with the complexity and length
of Titus’ displays. That emperor’s naumachia even surpass the Fucine Lake naval
battle put on by Claudius, memorably described by Suetonius and Tacitus (Sue-
tonius, Claudius 21.6; Tacitus, Annals 12.56). Finally there is a direct comparison
with the salt water pond (stagna) created by Claudius’ successor (see Suetonius,
Nero 12.1 for an event in 57 and Dio 62.15.1 for a possible display in 62), who is
dismissed with a telling epithet as ‘Trojan’ Nero. If, as Kathleen Coleman argues
in her commentary, the Neronian naumachia was actually staged in the lake that
was part of the Domus Aurea, now converted as a civic amenity to the Flavian
Amphitheatre, the pointed comparison is even stronger.³⁰ Certainly Martial
hints at both the extravagance and effeminacy of the Neronian age, compared
to the glories of his own time.
When Vespasian became princeps, the gens Flavia had little to boast about
in comparison with the dynasty that preceded them. Vespasian and Titus could,
however, claim military success in Judaea, whereas the last of the Julio-Claudi-
ans to engage in campaigning in his own right was Tiberius and that was
prior to his ascent to the purple. Nero was notoriously unwarlike: his ‘expedition’
to Greece was high class tourism around the major sites of the Greek games and
his projected eastern campaign was abandoned in the face of Galba’s rebellion
 Cf. Suetonius, Titus . and Dio .. –  for descriptions of this or similar events.
 Coleman () .
(Suetonius, Nero 19). I suspect this image of a cowardly emperor, imbellis Nero,
also offered an opportunity for the supporters of Vespasian, the new intake into
the Roman Senate, to differentiate themselves from the earlier aristocracy. With a
war hero now emperor, they could compete on domestic, not military terms. So
Statius describes the wife of Domitian’s ab epistulis Abascantius as supporting
her husband and serving him simple meals after the fashion of the emperor’s
own (Siluae 5.1.119 – 23). Priscilla thus becomes the proverbial Apulian woman
or better, given the origins of the Flavii, Sabine wife. The trope of parsimony
vs. extravagance can then be read back into Neronian history. Consider Tacitus’
description of the outsiders who fail to applaud Nero sufficiently and need to be
physically encouraged in their efforts at applause (Annals 16.5.1). These seem to
be exactly the same type of people who would later prosper under the Flavians,
the forerunners of the canny senators of Annals 3.55. Indeed their future leader,
Vespasian, is to be seen dozing through the brilliance of the imperial perform-
ance, an act which was said to have placed him in serious danger at the time
(Annals 16.5.3). Tacitus thus seems to be having a little joke in defining an impe-
rial rival to Nero by his cultural habits, rather than suggesting any political
threat.
A similar strategy can be seen in Tacitus’ recreation of Galba’s speech when
he adopted Piso to be his successor in AD 69 (Histories 1.16.1– 2). One household
(the Julio-Claudians) had treated the Roman state as their property to be inher-
ited generation after generation. But that was a family that had descended into
extravagance: Nero’s monstrousness (immanitas) and profligacy (luxuria) grew to
such an extent that the entire state was unable to bear the weight. Time to put
big government on a diet, as a modern politician might say. It was also helpful
that Vitellius had attempted to legitimate his reign by advertising his family con-
nections with the Julio-Claudians (his father’s prominence under Claudius was
in fact his main claim to power). A man who made funeral offerings to Nero
(as Tacitus, Histories 2.95.1 reveals him doing) needed to be overthrown.
An obvious point of attack on Nero was via the Golden House and its opu-
lence. Even while the emperor was alive there were epigrams circulating that
suggested a project that had got out of hand (Suetonius, Nero 39.2).
Roma domus fiet: Veios migrate, Quirites,

si non et Veios occupat ista domus.
Rome will become the Palace. Flee to Veii, citizens –

Unless your Palace has got in first to Veii as well.
Our reaction obviously depends on whether we believe Suetonius’ statement that

these were contemporary verses and not later compositions. Furthermore, Nero’s
attempts to rebuild Rome as a better city after the fire of AD 64 need not be seen
as pure self-aggrandizement, since imperial buildings and their grounds were
also open to the public and could be seen as civic amenities. The clearing of
the Subura certainly had much to recommend it (Tacitus, Annals 15.42.1 talks
of open fields and ponds flanked by woods along with viewing areas). The re-
building of the rest of the city or what had escaped the Palace (ceterum urbis
quae domui supererant), as the historian sarcastically remarks in Annals
15.42.1, changed a rabbit’s warren of buildings into a modern city with open bou-
levards, a major improvement, particularly in the light of the Great Fire of Rome.
Whether Nero acted for public good or from personal designs is open subject
to debate – similar comments might be made about Mussolini’s clearance of the
same area for the via dei Fori imperiali in 1931– 33. Nevertheless the emperor’s
actions gave the following dynasty a chance to appear as civic-minded saviours.
Martial (Liber Spectaculorum 2) celebrates the building of the Baths of Titus over
Nero’s dining hall and the Flavian Amphitheatre in the area of the palace’s lake.
Such communal projects are regularly celebrated in Flavian literature. In fact the
dynasty’s public works were remarkably numerous. Approximately sixty build-
ings or restorations can be attributed to Domitian alone, the most prominent
of which are listed by Suetonius (Domitian 5). Domitian also sought to widen
the streets of the city and pave the roads, a project that is the subject of a positive
epigram by Martial (7.61). All these efforts are remarkably similar to Nero’s activ-
ities after AD 64.
The discourse of big-spending government contrasted with public-minded
austerity, however, does not end with the Flavian dynasty. The emperor Trajan
is portrayed by Pliny in his Panegyricus of AD 100 as opening up the palace to
the public (after all, he was actually installed in the Domus Flauia). This requires
the (rather unpersuasive) suggestion that the building had been kept barred by
Domitian. Pliny even opines, even more unpersuasively, that Domitian had ac-
tually been a supporter of Nero, since his punishment of Nero’s freedman Epaph-
roditus, a man who had risen to the post of a libellis in his court (Suetonius, Do-
mitian 14.4), could only be taken as a sign of support for Epaphroditus’ former
master (Panegyricus 53.2– 4). Ironically, in AD 100 Trajan, in the years before
his Dacian and Parthian campaigns, has no military successes to celebrate
and must publicize his euergetism in contrast to that of the regime he is replac-
ing. He may continue Domitian’s public donations (congiaria) and support
schemes for the youth of Italy (alimenta), but at least, according to Pliny, he
does not do it to salve his conscience. The Flavians had simultaneously reconfig-
ured Neronian monuments for public use and sought to surpass the works of
their predecessors. Trajan plays the same game. An inscription from the Circus
Maximus dating to 103 indicates a rebuilding of the stands and the dedicatory
thanks of the tribes of Rome for the extra seating given to the populace (Inscrip-
tiones Latinae Selectae 286). If this construction was the one that reused the
stone from Domitian’s naumachia (Suetonius, Domitian 5) possibly even as a con-
tinuation of a Domitianic project as was the forum of Nerva, we can see the pop-
ulism of the Flavians now adapted for propaganda against their dynasty. Only
three years before, in 100, before Trajan had time to create major monuments,
he was a restorer, not a builder (parcus in aedificando, diligens in tuendo,
Pliny, Panegyricus 51.1), a penny-pinching emperor (frugalissimus princeps) in
the Flavian mould.
In brief, after AD 68, all Romans were post-Neronian. This was not necessa-
rily a true cultural break, but a deliberately constructed relationship to the past
that was created by the Flavians, an ideology readily adapted by their succes-
sors. While military success was part of the mythology of the princeps as imper-
ator, emperors could not count on suitable victories within their reigns and were
unlikely to possess such glory at the outset. So, instead of thinking about events
in war (belli), services on the home front (domi) were more readily celebrated.
Just as modern political parties laud their own services to the nation and
blame their fiscally inept predecessors, so after the emperor Nero his age became
the reference point for future development.
The Culture Wars

Returning to Silius, it is now clear that he too shares in this Flavian ideology. His
portrait of a Rome that had suffered and could survive the extravagances of the
years and look to a bright Flavian future corresponds completely with the out-
look of his contemporaries. However, this Domitianic viewpoint would be unac-
ceptable to the likes of Pliny and Tacitus, who are post-Neronian but, through
their service to Trajan, post-Domitianic as well. They are proud to have been
part of the Flavian revival, but distance themselves from the last of the dynasty.
It is as part of this strategy that Pliny treats Silius not as a Flavian senator but as
the last of Nero’s senators. Silius himself appears to react against the past by
treating Rome as eternal (no Iliou Persis recitations during the Great Fire for
him) and choosing the most respectable of models (Homer, Vergil) in an Augu-
stan-style revival of Roman epic. Pliny, however, is tepid toward his poetry (he
views Homeric verse as more fitted to the era of Trajan). Most notably, he strikes
at Silius’ entire cultural strategy. When he describes the senator as philokalos, he
is recalling the values of Periclean Athens, particularly the famous quotation in
the Funeral Oration: φιλοκαλοῦμεν μετ’ εὐτελείας (“we appreciate the beautiful
without extravagance”). It is initially unclear whether philokalos is rather to be
taken in its disparaging sense (‘a lover of bling’), but Pliny’s reservation usque ad
emacitatis reprehensionem (‘to such an extent that he was criticised as a shopa-
holic’) indicates that this must be the case.³¹ Using an archaic Latin term (ema-
citas, from emere, ‘to buy’) contrasts Greek extravagance with Roman parsimony
in a carefully crafted epigram whose Thucydidean origins would be recognized
by the educated. To Pliny, Silius is irredeemably fixed in the discredited Neronian
past, while he and Caninius represent the social and literary future.
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List of Contributors
Rhiannon Ash is Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Merton College, Oxford University.
She has research interests in Roman Historiography, especially Tacitus, and in
Latin literature of the imperial age more generally. She has published widely
in these areas, including Ordering Anarchy, her monograph on Tacitus’ Histories
(1999), and her commentary on the Latin text of Histories 2 (2007). She is current-
ly in the final stages of writing a commentary on Tacitus Annals 15 for Cambridge
University Press.
Erica Bexley is Lecturer in Classics at Swansea University. She earned her PhD
from Cornell University in 2013. She then held a Visiting Fellowship at The Aus-
tralian National University before moving to the University of Cambridge to take
up a temporary lectureship in Latin. Erica’s main research interests are Neronian
literature and Roman drama; she is currently writing a monograph about char-
acter and identity in Seneca’s tragedies.
Joy Connolly is Professor of Classics and Dean for the Humanities in the Faculty
of Arts and Science at New York University. She works on the history of Roman
political thought and ancient ideas about aesthetics and rhetoric, concentrating
on the many points where those areas meet. Her most recent book is The Life of
Roman Republicanism (Princeton 2014). Currently she is co-editing an Oxford vol-
ume on Greek and Roman literary theory and criticism with Nancy Worman and
writing articles on Hannah Arendt, Roman imperialist nostalgia, and the debate
over republican revolutions in late eighteenth century England and America.
Gregson Davis, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, is currently An-

drew W. Mellon Research Professor in the Humanities at Duke University. He has
taught both Classics and Comparative Literature at Stanford, Cornell, Duke and
New York Universities. A native of Antigua in the English-speaking Caribbean, he
received his higher education at Harvard College (AB) and the University of Cal-
ifornia at Berkeley (PhD). His main research interests include Latin poetry, pri-
marily of the Late Republican period, as well as contemporary francophone
and anglophone Caribbean poetry. Among his published monographs are: Poly-
hymnia: the Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse; Parthenope: the Interplay of
Ideas in Vergilian Bucolic; and Aimé Césaire.
Peter J. Davis is a Visiting Research Fellow in Classics at the University of Ade-

laide and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania, Austral-
438 List of Contributors
ia. He works primarily on Ovid, Seneca, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus. He is the
author of three books, Shifting Song: The Chorus in Seneca’s Tragedies (1993),
Seneca: Thyestes (2003), and Ovid and Augustus: a Political Reading of Ovid’s
Erotic Poems (2006).
Alex Dressler is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin

– Madison. His interests include Roman literature and ancient philosophy, gen-
der and sexuality, subjectivity and the self, and ancient and modern aesthetic
theory. His book, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, is enti-
tled Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy and considers the in-
terrelation of gender and personhood in the figurative language of the Roman
philosophers, Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca.
John Fitch completed his Dissertation in 1974 under the direction of Frederick
Ahl. His published scholarship has been chiefly concerned with Senecan trage-
dy, and includes a widely accepted relative dating of the dramas (1981), an editio
maior of the Hercules (1987), and a new edition of all the plays in the Loeb Li-
brary (2002– 4), with an accompanying textual commentary (2004). He has
also published a translation of Palladius’ Opus Agriculturae (2013). Most of his
career was spent at the University of Victoria, from which he retired in 1999 as
Professor and Chair of the Department of Greek and Roman Studies.
Michael Fontaine is Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Dean of the

Faculty at Cornell University, and in 2014 was the Paideia Professor at the Pai-
deia Institute’s Living Latin in Rome course. He is the author of Funny Words
in Plautine Comedy (Oxford, 2010), co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Greek
and Roman Comedy (Oxford, 2014), and the editor and translator of Joannes Bur-
meister: Aulularia and Other Inversions of Plautus (Leuven University Press,
2015). He is proud to be a colleague of Fred Ahl’s and has learned more from
him than he can say.
Emily Gowers is Reader in Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge and

Fellow of St John’s College. She is author of The Loaded Table: Representations
of Food in Roman Literature (1993) and Horace: Satires I (2012) and co-editor
(with William Fitzgerald) of Ennius Perennis: The Annals and Beyond (2007).
She is working on a book about Maecenas in Latin literature and later Western
culture.
Mathias Hanses is Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean

Studies at Penn State University (PhD: Columbia University, 2015). He is currently
working on a book manuscript entitled The Life of Comedy after the Death of
Plautus, which examines Roman comedy and its influence from the stage onto
the pages of Latin literature (ranging from Cicero to Juvenal). He has published
on the reception of Plautus in the Imperial era, Greek and Latin wordplay, ideo-
logical biases in Roman historiography, and the History of Classical Scholarship
in Europe and North America.
Joshua T. Katz is Professor of Classics and sometime Director of the Program in

Linguistics at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1998. A linguist by
training (B.A. Yale 1991, MPhil. Oxford 1993, Ph.D. Harvard 1998), a classicist by
profession, and a comparative philologist at heart, he counts wordplay as one of
his principal scholarly and extracurricular interests. His publications, which con-
sider topics from Vedic riddles to Irish pronouns, include a number of papers on
Vergil, as well as one on a hidden signature in another Roman author, Horace
(MD 59 (2007) 207– 13).
David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University. Among his books
are Roman Comedy (1983), Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Relat-
ed Genres (1994), Greek Comedy and Ideology (1995), Friendship in the Classical
World (1997), Pity Transformed (2001), The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks
(2006), Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea (2010), and Beauty: The
Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea (2014). He served as president of the American
Philological Association in 1999, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Hu-
manities.
Matthew Leigh is a Professor of Classics at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the

author of Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement (Oxford, 1997), Comedy and the Rise
of Rome (Oxford, 2004), and From Polypragmon to Curiosus. Ancient Concepts of
Curious and Meddlesome Behaviour (Oxford, 2013).
Michèle Lowrie is Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. Her interests

focus on the intersection of literature and political thought at Rome and on the
reception of Roman figurations. She has published Horace’s Narrative Odes (Ox-
ford 1997) and Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome (Oxford
2009), as well as edited Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace’s Odes
and Epodes (Oxford 2009), and co-edited several volumes. Forthcoming in
2015 is Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy,
Literature, and Law (Routledge), co-edited with Susanne Lüdemann. Current
projects include: Safety, Security, and Salvation in Roman Political Thought; Con-
440 List of Contributors
sequential Narratives: The Exemplum and Exceptional Politics from Cicero to Au-
gustus; and Civil War and the Republic to Come, the last co-authored with Barbara
Vinken.
Martha Malamud received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and wrote her Cor-
nell Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Frederick Ahl, from whom she
learned much, but who should not be held accountable for the idiosyncrasies
of her scholarship. She taught at the University of Southern California for
eight years and is currently a Professor in the Classics Department at the Univer-
sity at Buffalo (SUNY). She has edited the journal Arethusa since 1995. Her re-
search interests include late antique Latin poetry, the classical epic tradition,
and Neronian and Flavian poets.
Matthew M. McGowan (Ph.D. NYU) is Associate Professor of Classics at Fordham

University in New York City. His research focuses primarily on Latin poetry, an-
cient scholarship, and the classical tradition, and he is the author of Ovid in
Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (Brill
2009). At present, he is at work on a survey of dictionary writing in ancient
Rome provisionally titled Latin Lexicography: The Art of Dictionary Writing in An-
cient Rome.
Phillip Mitsis is the A. S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization at

NYU, a Senior Affiliate in the Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi, and Academic Di-
rector of the American Institute of Verdi Studies. He was first a student and then
a colleague of Fred Ahl for twenty years at Cornell. His most recent book is L’Éth-
ique d’Épicure (Garniers, 2014).
Michael Paschalis is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Crete, De-

partment of Philology. He has published or edited 14 books and over 80 articles
on Classical and Hellenistic Poetry, Classical Roman Literature, the Ancient
Novel, the Poetry of Late Antiquity, the Reception of the Classics, Modern
Greek literature as well as Italian, French and English literature. His latest
books are: Holy Men and Charlatans in the Ancient Novel, Groningen 2015 (co-
edited with Stelios Panayotakis and Gareth Schmeling); Nikos Kazantzakis:
From Homer to Shakespeare. Studies on his Cretan Νovels, Heraklion 2015.
Arthur Pomeroy published, with Frederick Ahl and Martha Davis, the Silius Ita-
licus chapter in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 34.4 (1986). His pub-
lications include Arius Didymus: Epitome of Stoic Ethics (Scholars Press, 1999),
Roman Social History: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2007), and Then it was De-
stroyed by the Volcano (Duckworth, 2008). He has written various articles on Sil-
ius and Tacitus, as well as the reception of the ancient world in film, and is pres-
ently editing the Wiley/Blackwell Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on
Screen. He is Professor of Classics and Head of School at Victoria University of
Wellington, New Zealand.
Michael C.J. Putnam is MacMillan Professor of Classics and Professor of Compa-

rative Literature, emeritus, Brown University. His recent books include Poetic In-
terplay: Catullus and Horace (2006), Jacopo Sannazaro: The Latin Poetry (2009),
The Humanness of Heroes: Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil’s Aeneid (2011), and
(with Rodney Dennis) The Complete Poems of Tibullus (2012). A past president of
the Society for Classical Studies, he is Life Trustee of the American Academy in
Rome and recipient of its Centennial Medal (2009). He is also a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philo-
sophical Society.
Jay Reed is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

He has published commentaries on Bion of Smyrna and Ovid, Metamorphoses
10 – 12, as well as Virgil’s Gaze, a study of Roman identity in the Aeneid. He
has also published articles and delivered talks on Greek bucolic and other Hel-
lenistic poetry, Augustan poetry, Lucan, the myth and cult of Adonis, and the lit-
erary reception of Greek and Roman antiquity.
Ioannis Ziogas is Lecturer in Classics at Durham University. He is the author of

Ovid and Hesiod: The Metamorphosis of the Catalogue of Women (CUP 2013) and
co-editor (with M. Skempis) of Geography, Topography, Landscape: Configura-
tions of Space in Greek and Roman Epic (DeGruyter 2014). He has published ar-
ticles on Augustan poetry and its reception.
Publications by Frederick Ahl
Monographs, Translations
1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 39. Ithaca, NY.
1985. Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca,
NY.
1986. Seneca: Three Tragedies. Ithaca, NY. Also published as three separate volumes:
1986. Seneca: Trojan Women (repr. 1996). Ithaca, NY.
1986. Seneca: Medea (rev. 2nd edition 1991; repr. 1994). Ithaca, NY.
1986. Seneca: Phaedra (rev. 2nd edition 1991; repr. 1994). Ithaca, NY.
1991. Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction. Ithaca, NY.
1996. The Odyssey Re-Formed. Ithaca, NY. (co-authored with H. Roisman).
2007. Virgil Aeneid a verse translation, with notes and glossary. Oxford.
2008. Two Faces of Oedipus. Ithaca, NY.
Articles, Book Chapters, Reviews

1967. “Cadmus and the Palm Leaf Tablets”, AJPh 88: 188 – 94.
1969. “Pharsalus and the Pharsalia”, Classica et Medievalia 30: 331 – 46.
1971. “Lucan’s De Incendio Urbis, Epistulae ex Campania, and Nero’s Ban”, TAPhA 102: 1 – 27.
1972. “Hercules and Curio”, Latomus 31: 997 – 1009.
1974. “Propertius 1.1”, WS NF 8: 80 – 98.
1974. “Review of David Vessey Statius and the Thebaid”, PhQ 53.1: 141 – 4.
1974. “The Pivot of the Pharsalia”, Hermes 102: 305 – 20.
1974. “The Shadows of a Divine Presence in the Pharsalia”, Hermes 102: 566 – 90.
1982. “Review of R. Syme History in Ovid”, Prudentia 14.1: 75 – 7.
1982. “Review of S. Newmyer Statius’ Silvae”, Phoenix 36.1: 92 – 4.
1982. “Lucan and Statius”, in: J. Luce (ed.), Ancient Writers. New York, 917 – 41.
1982. “Amber, Avallon, and Apollo’s Singing Swan”, AJPh 103.3: 373 – 411.
1984. “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome”, AJPh 105.2: 174 – 208.
1984. “The Rider and the Horse: Politics and Power in Roman Poetry from Horace to Statius”,
ANRW II.32.1: 40 – 110.
1984. “Review of H.-J. van Dam Statius’ Silvae II”, Phoenix 40: 360 – 2.
1985. “Review of Richard Thomas Landscapes and Peoples in Roman Poetry: the
Ethnographical Tradition”, CPh 80: 186 – 9.
1985. “Review of The Cambridge History of Latin Literature, vol. 4”, EMC 29: 478 – 83.
1986. “Silius Italicus”, ANRW II.32.4: 2492 – 561. (Co-authored with M. Davis and A.
Pomeroy).
1986. “Statius’ Thebaid: A Reconsideration”, ANRW II.32.5: 2803‐912.
1987. “Review of D.E. Hill Statius’ Thebaid”, Phoenix 40: 358 – 60.
444 Publications by Frederick Ahl
1988. “Ars est Caelare Artem: Art in Puns and Anagrams Engraved”, in: J. Culler (ed.), On
Puns: The Foundation of Letters. Oxford, 17 – 43.
1989. “Uilix MacLeirtis: The Classical Hero in Irish Metamorphosis”, in: R. Warren (ed.), The
Art of Translation: Voices from the Field. Boston, MA, 173 – 98.
1989. “Homer, Vergil, and Epic Narrative”, ICS 14: 1 – 31.
1991. “Classical Gods and the Demonic in Film”, in: M. Winkler (ed.), Classics and Cinema.
Bucknell Review 35. Lewisburg, PA, 40 – 59.
1991. “Pindar and the Sphinx: Celtic Polyphony and Greek Music”, in: R. Wallace and B.
MacLachlan (eds.), Harmonia Mundi: Musica e filosofia nell’antichità. Rome, 131 – 50.
1992. “Moenia Mundi: The Akritic Poet: a response to Charles Segal”, in: G.K. Galinsky (ed.),
The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics? Frankfurt am Main,
Germany, 157 – 69.
1993. “Form Empowered: Lucan’s Pharsalia”, in: A.J. Boyle (ed.), Roman Epic. London,
125 – 42.
1994. “Apollo in Latin Epic after Virgil”, in: J. Solomon (ed.), Apollo: Origins and Influences.
Tucson, AZ, 113 – 34.
1997. “Admetus Deuteragonistes”, ColbyQ 33.1: 9 – 25.
1998. “Review of H. MacL. Currie, Silver Latin Epic”, CO 76:
2000. “Seneca and Chaucer”, in: G.W.M. Harrison (ed.), Seneca in Performance. London,
151 – 71.
2002. “Wordplay and Apparent Fiction in the Odyssey”, Arethusa 35.1: 117 – 32.
2007. “Troy and Memorials of War”, in: M. Winkler (ed.), Troy from Homer’s Iliad to
Hollywood Epic. Malden, MA, 163 – 85.
2007. “Spartacus, Exodus, and Dalton Trumbo: Managing the Ideologies of War”, in: M.
Winkler (ed.), Spartacus. Malden, MA, 65 – 86
2009. “Chaucer’s Englishing of Latin Wordplay”, in: A. Galloway and R.F. Yeager (eds.),
Through A Classical Eye: Transcultural & Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English,
Italian, and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee. Toronto, 267 – 86.
2010. “Gendering the Underworld: Bodies in Homer, Virgil, Plato, and Silius”, in: F.
Schaffenrath (ed.), Silius Italicus (Akten der Innsbrucker Tagung vom 19.–21. Juui 2008).
Frankfurt am Main, Germany/Berlin, 47 – 58.
2010. “Quintilian and Lucan”, in: N. Homke and C. Reitz (eds.), Lucan’s Bellum Civile:
Between Epic Tradition and Aesthetic Innovation. Berlin/New York, 1 – 16.
2011. “Translating a Paean of Praise”, in: J. Parker (ed.), Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The
Classic and the Modern Proof. Oxford, 29 – 37.
2011. “Making Poets Serve the Established Order: Censoring Meaning in Sophocles, Virgil,
and W.S. Gilbert”, Partial Answers 10.2: 271 – 301.
2015. “Transgressing Boundaries of the Unthinkable: Sophocles, Ovid, Vergil, Seneca, and
Homer Refracted in Statius’ Thebaid”, in: W. Dominik, C.E. Newlands, and K.G. Gervais
(eds.), Brill’s Companion to Statius. Leiden, 240 – 65.
2015. “A mão de Deus: Diego Maradona e a natureza divina da trapaça na antiguidade
clássica”, Archai 14: 11 – 19.
(forthcoming). “Etimologias do heroismo: buscando e destruindo identidade, de Odisseu a
Lampião”, (trans. J. Avellar and Maria Cecília de Miranda N. Coelho) in: G. Cornelli and
Maria Cecília de Miranda N. Coelho (eds.), Deuses, homens e heróis – entre gregos e
Baianos. São Paulo, Brazil.
Index of passages discussed
Aratus Homer
Phaenomena Iliad
16‐18 78 8.175‐6 423‐4
9.410‐16 422
Callimachus 15.592‐600 424
Aetia
Fr. 1.21‐2 Pf. 228 Horace
Fr. 67.1‐4 Pf. 221 Epodes
7.17‐20 342
Calpurnius Siculus Odes
Eclogues 1.14.17‐20 347
1.1‐23 302 1.34.12‐16 52
4.1‐15 306 2.2.5‐8 55
4.73‐7 308 2.10 50‐1
7.1‐6 309 2.11.13‐17 58
3.1.5‐8 349
Catullus
63.50‐73 143 Lucan
64.50‐1 163 Bellum Ciuile siue Pharsalia
64.57 163 1.1‐4 343
64.60‐2 156 1.151‐7 280
64.91‐5 160‐1 1.366 344
64.171‐2 162 1.374‐8 344
64.175‐6 155 1.372‐86 262
64.180‐1 155 2.108‐9 286
64.250 154 2.177‐85 291
64.295 159 4.500‐2 287
64.338‐41 158 4.558‐66 286‐7
64.348‐51 152 7.454‐7 281
64.353‐5 165 7.617‐18 290
64.357 163 7.630‐1 290
64.360 164 9.787‐8 286
64.368 164
64.368‐70 166 Lucretius
64.372‐3 161 De rerum natura
1.80‐2 143
Cicero 1.922‐5 78
Letters to His Friends 2.646‐51 171
6.7.1 355 3.70‐3 340‐1
CIL
4.8297 204 Martial
10.4.1‐2 355
Dio Cassius
62.28 407
446 Index of passages discussed
Ovid Thyestes
Ars Amatoria 215‐18 339
1.1‐2 217 582‐5 346
1.41‐2 232 607‐11 349
3.469‐514 200‐1
Epistulae ex Ponto Silius Italicus
3.1.93‐8 399 Punica
3.43‐6 400 3.575‐81 422
3.59‐62 400 3.583‐4 421
Fasti 8.592‐4 417
5.45 – 6 2 12.683‐4 425
Heroides 12.699‐700 425
20.7‐8 225
20.27‐30 222 Statius
20.91‐2 223 Achilleid
20.107‐9 224 1.1‐3 379
20.155‐6 224 Siluae
20.237‐40 227 1.1.5‐7 393
Metamorphoses 1.1.32‐6 393
2.657‐60 193‐4 3.5.22‐8 395
15.3‐11 246 3.5.51‐4 397
15.153‐75 251 5.1.37‐42 392‐3
15.746‐7 193 5.1.43‐7 394
15.871‐9 247 5.1.51‐6 396
Remedia Amoris 5.1.57‐9 397
79‐80 234 5.1.71‐4 398
Tristia 5.1.127‐34 401
1.25‐8 399 5.1.137‐41 401‐2
4.10.17‐20 214 5.1.170‐5 402
4.10.99‐100 196 5.1.188‐91 409
4.10.125‐32 248 5.1.225‐35 404
5.1.238‐41 404
Seneca 5.1.216‐18 410
Medea
61‐2 322 Strabo
583‐5 323 Geography
587‐90 324 1.2 253
479‐82 324‐5
Oedipus Suetonius
82‐5 365 Domitian
233‐8 359 1.2 383
236‐8 372‐3 22.1 405
642‐3 373 Nero
On Mercy 39.2 431
1.8 183 Otho
1.19.5‐6 338‐9 12.1 384
Index of passages discussed 447
Tacitus 4.696‐9 153

Annals 6.851‐3 92
3.49.1 18 7.173‐6 186
4.31.1‐2 19 7.601‐5 207
6.29.3‐4 21 7.808‐11 97
13.15.2 24 7.789‐91 177
14.48.1 25 7.720‐1 165
14.52.3 26 9.486‐7 152‐3
15.49.3 29 10.11‐13 423
15.70 29 10.198‐203 98
Dialogus 10.495‐500 177
13.5 81 10.501‐2 173‐4
10.503‐4 174
Vergil/Virgil 10.513‐5 165
Aeneid 10.821‐4 134
1.1‐8 96 10.846‐56 135
1.8‐11 170 11.176‐81 175
1.278‐9 423 11.234‐7 186
1.479‐82 153 11.272‐4 122
1.742‐9 101 11.340‐1 187
4.1‐4 154 12.107‐9 173
4.9‐23 133 12.370 166
4.10 155 12.587‐8 74
4.10 – 11 158 12.862‐4 120
4.20 – 2 155 12.926‐7 166
4.23 158‐9 12.945‐7 145, 176
4.28‐9 161 12.947‐9 175
4.65‐7 160 12.948‐9 167
4.77‐9 102 Eclogues
4.101 157 1.1‐10 301
4.171‐2 162 5.1‐15 303‐4
4.253‐5 120 Georgics
4.354‐50 178 1.1‐2 70
4.381‐4 115 1.406‐9 118
4.408‐10 156 1.424‐37 71
4.531‐2 157 2.319‐33 73
4.462‐3 108 2.475‐82 77‐8
4.566‐70 88‐9 4.559‐66 69
4.657‐8 162
General Index
Abascantus 387‐92, 394, 396, 399‐406, authority 3‐4, 7, 10, 25, 112, 186, 189, 215‐19,
408‐10, 431 223, 227, 229, 277‐9, 281, 285, 293,
Achilleid 7, 378‐82, 384 348, 363‐4, 368‐9, 374, 377, 415, 419
Achilles 7‐8, 151‐3, 157‐60, 163‐7, 184‐5, 188,
208, 231, 245, 252, 378‐84, 419‐20, birds 6, 73, 107‐8, 112‐28, 190‐1, 196
422‐4, 426
acronym 5, 69, 79 Caesar see Augustus and Julius Caesar
acrostic 71‐2, 75‐6, 199, 202‐3, 207‐08 Callimachus 191, 195, 214, 220‐1, 223‐5,
adultery 21, 216, 225‐6, 233, 236, 397 228‐30, 416
Aeneas 7‐9, 88‐103, 107, 109‐10, 115‐27, Calpurnius Siculus 10, 300‐2, 304‐9
132‐6, 139, 145‐7, 151, 155‐6, 158‐60, carmen perpetuum 242, 256
162‐7, 169‐80, 185, 188‐90, 193, 206, Cato 14‐15, 30, 233, 261, 264, 274‐5, 277,
243, 306, 318, 417, 419‐20, 423‐6 280, 283, 285‐8, 294
Alcestis 387, 390‐2, 402‐3, 408‐9 Catullus 7‐8, 27, 123, 142‐3, 151‐67, 195, 220
allusion 7, 10, 32, 57, 70, 72, 75, 78‐9, 114, characterization 6, 7, 22, 95, 151, 155, 164,
116, 122, 140, 153, 155‐7, 159, 162, 164, 176, 284, 388, 428
166, 185, 196, 214, 223, 229, 245, 254, Cicero 1, 7, 16, 122, 146, 189, 217‐18, 233,
263, 305‐6, 314, 317, 321, 326, 336, 245, 248‐9, 252, 260, 264‐6, 269‐70,
341‐2, 346‐7, 349, 351, 357, 359‐60, 372, 292, 337, 355, 361, 415‐16, 418
374, 378‐9, 384, 391, 408‐10, 421 civil war 9, 50, 57, 179, 244, 250, 262, 269,
ambiguity 2, 4‐5, 8, 21, 133, 145‐7, 190, 268, 274‐6, 281, 285, 288, 292, 333‐7,
284, 359, 363‐4, 366‐9, 371, 385 340‐52, 360, 383, 427, 429
Amor 5‐6, 10, 17, 26, 77‐8, 80, 87‐90, 92‐3, clementia 8, 19, 178‐80
98‐104, 119, 122, 133, 157, 161‐2, 178, conspiracy 5, 29‐30, 37‐40, 44‐7, 52, 55, 60,
199‐200, 202‐8, 214, 221‐3, 226‐7, 237, 62, 64‐5, 349, 351, 429
246, 263, 265, 285, 287, 318, 393, 396, Coriolanus 260, 263‐71
409 cosmos 205, 277, 281, 294, 334, 336, 346,
anagram 5‐6, 70, 72, 80, 87‐90, 93, 96, 352.
99‐100, 103, 202, 204, 206, 391
Apollo 32, 39, 51, 53, 60, 95‐6, 191‐2, 194, decorum 39, 50, 278
195‐6, 224, 228‐9, 306‐7, 366, 392, 418 delay 5‐7, 58‐9, 78, 87‐96, 98‐103, 137, 175,
Aratus 70, 72, 75‐6, 78, 80, 203, 330 201‐2, 269, 283
Ariadne 7, 116, 154‐7, 160, 162‐3, 408 desire 10, 60, 87‐90, 93‐4, 100‐1, 160, 221‐3,
Augustan/anti-Augustan 4, 8‐9, 23, 38, 40, 225, 227, 231‐2, 234, 236, 255, 279, 285,
42‐4, 47, 49, 50, 61, 63, 65, 89, 95, 158, 293, 322, 347, 350, 356, 368
180, 183, 190‐1, 196‐7, 215‐16, 233, Dido 6‐9, 87‐90, 95, 100‐3, 107‐12, 115‐19,
235‐6, 247, 256, 308, 378, 415, 417‐8, 121, 123‐8, 132‐4, 136, 139, 142, 146,
427, 433 148, 153‐63, 165‐7, 178, 180, 424
Augustus 2‐5, 8, 10, 38‐40, 42, 44, 47‐9, 52, doctrina 28, 122, 326
60‐2, 64‐5, 69, 92, 95‐6, 179, 180, 193, Domitian 7‐8, 17, 28, 378‐85, 388, 392‐4,
216‐18, 235‐7, 242, 244, 246‐7, 250, 400‐1, 404‐6, 409‐10, 429, 431‐3
254‐5, 299, 308, 342, 347‐50, 399, 407, Drances 183, 187‐9, 196
427, 429‐30
450 General Index
Ennius 1, 87, 99, 251‐2, 317‐18, 417‐18, 420 irony 15, 40, 46, 90‐1, 152, 162‐4, 167, 177,
Epicurean philosophy 8‐9, 79, 143, 171‐2, 174 205, 254, 274, 288, 294‐5, 336, 338‐9,
ethics 174, 180 356, 359, 366, 371, 377, 394, 432
etymologizing 1‐3, 6, 9, 116, 121, 125, 307,
314, 320, 322‐3, 325 Julius Caesar 7, 179, 193, 244, 246, 250, 254,
etymology 1‐2, 7, 119, 121, 315, 317, 322, 259‐62, 265‐6, 268‐71, 274‐5, 277,
327‐8, 330‐1, 357, 366 280‐7, 292, 294, 296, 300, 308, 343‐44,
exempla 57‐8, 265, 338, 389‐90, 392 406, 425, 429
exemplarity 5, 388‐90, 408, 411 Jupiter 2, 39, 51, 53‐4, 60, 89‐91, 94, 97‐8,
exile 6, 9, 26, 38, 45, 125, 135, 189, 194, 100‐2, 120, 124, 162, 193, 248, 348‐9,
196‐7, 207, 214, 241‐5, 247‐8, 250, 377, 379‐82, 393, 421‐7, 429
253‐6, 263‐6, 301, 370, 399
kerygma 42, 56‐62
figuration 157, 162, 270, 335‐6, 345, 349, 351 ktisis 89‐90, 93‐4, 97‐100, 103
figured speech 24‐5, 38, 40, 61
flattery 292, 377, 405 law 3, 9, 10, 69, 89, 118, 201, 214‐20, 222‐3,
Flavian literature 432 225‐7, 230, 232‐3, 235‐7, 241‐2, 244‐5,
foundation 6, 59, 87‐9, 99, 236, 244‐6 247, 255, 277‐81, 291, 294, 303, 305,
Freud 6, 132, 136‐7, 140‐1, 148, 235 315, 369, 419
Freudian slip 6, 132, 137‐8, 140‐2 libertas 5, 7, 26, 183, 189, 275, 285, 414
friendship 21, 50, 188, 263, 265, 267, 270 Livia 21, 399
Furies 107, 110, 145‐7, 176, 321 love 6, 10, 17, 26, 73, 78, 88‐9, 91‐2, 94,
furor 145‐6, 153, 157, 160‐1, 169, 192 97‐103, 116‐17, 119, 122, 127‐8, 133‐4,
154, 157, 161‐2, 167, 202, 205‐6, 208,
graffiti 6, 199, 204‐5, 208 213, 215‐18, 221‐2, 225‐7, 231‐2, 234‐6,
grotesque 4, 279, 281‐5, 288, 291‐4, 296 246, 261, 263, 265, 282, 285, 287‐8,
guilt 6, 26, 39, 132, 135‐6, 138‐9, 141‐3, 304‐5, 340, 345, 393‐4, 397‐8, 409
147‐8, 176, 269, 273, 292, 359, 364‐5, love letter 10, 199‐200, 202, 204, 221, 225,
371 229
Lucretius 40, 78‐9, 142‐3, 171, 234, 247, 249,
hermeneutics of suspicion 5, 39, 56, 62 340‐2
Homer 7, 107, 116, 121‐2, 132, 151, 171‐2, 185, ludic signature see signature
188, 194, 196, 252‐3, 327, 378, 382,
413‐21, 423, 425‐6, 433 magic 21, 109, 121, 160, 162, 215, 219‐21,
361, 368, 402
illusion 5, 42, 178, 232, 295, 340, 390, 408 marriage 128, 133, 158‐9, 160‐3, 216, 223,
immortality 30, 171, 192‐4, 242, 247‐8, 250, 225‐8, 232, 235‐7, 315, 322‐3, 394‐8,
254‐6, 281, 290, 380‐1, 414 405, 409
interpretation 4‐5, 7‐8, 10, 15, 38, 40‐3, 48, materiality 229‐31, 288
50, 54, 57, 60, 62‐3, 102, 140‐2, 145, metaphor 30, 50, 53‐4, 57, 89‐90, 94, 96,
147, 169, 176, 202, 205, 215, 222, 226, 124, 128, 138, 146, 154, 159, 164, 167,
233, 235‐6, 274, 277, 292, 317, 325, 356, 213‐14, 255, 289, 323, 334, 336, 338,
361, 363‐4, 366‐7, 369, 374, 378, 380 348, 351, 352, 358, 405, 426
intertextuality 7, 10, 99, 123, 196, 207, 225, metaphorology 333, 335, 337
228‐9, 421 metapoetics 71, 74‐6, 79
ira 8‐9, 97, 145, 157, 169‐71, 173, 176, 194, metempsychosis 241
200, 202, 247, 255, 340
General Index 451
modus 172 revenge 13, 32, 116, 134, 170, 176, 281, 322,
mora 5‐6, 78, 80, 87‐104, 202, 329 335‐6, 339, 348
Roma 5‐6, 87‐90, 93, 99‐100, 103‐4, 199,
Nero 4, 9, 13, 20, 24‐30, 32, 277, 291‐2, 294, 202‐8, 262, 269, 274, 276, 281, 306,
306, 309, 333‐4, 348, 377, 407‐8, 410, 410, 425, 431
413, 416, 427‐33 Roman Empire 8, 256, 296, 337, 377
Numa 9, 241‐7, 249, 251, 255
sacrifice 8, 99, 115, 163, 167, 175‐6, 196, 247,
Oedipus 5‐6, 25, 316‐17, 328‐31, 355‐74 286‐8, 322, 360, 368‐9, 403
securitas 337‐8, 340
palindrome 6, 72, 87, 204‐6 seduction 10, 88, 215, 223, 226, 234, 317,
panegyric 3, 10, 40, 299‐309, 432‐3 335
parrhesia 7, 270 semantic 1, 3, 6, 88, 94, 99, 103‐4, 140, 142,
pastoral 10, 61, 114, 299‐309 351, 364
performance 9‐10, 13, 15, 24, 28, 30, 32, 53, signature 5, 70, 72‐6, 78‐81, 229
173, 316, 357, 362, 393‐4, 400, 402, 431 signs 71, 113, 201‐2, 208, 294, 336, 355,
Philodemus 172 360‐1, 367‐9, 408, 425
pietas 7‐9, 92, 134, 170, 175‐6, 178‐9, 181, soul 9, 14, 93, 124‐5, 133, 135, 192, 218, 241,
251, 261, 267, 270‐1, 286, 306‐7, 250‐4, 334, 336‐41, 343, 345‐7, 352, 394
339‐40, 342, 388, 404‐5 sound 6, 27, 79, 96, 99, 107‐8, 110, 112‐16,
pius 180 118‐19, 121, 123, 126‐8, 140, 142, 148,
Pliny the Younger 413‐16, 427‐9, 432‐4 163, 280, 301, 303, 307‐8, 319‐20, 323
politics 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 31‐2, 47‐8, 50‐1, spectacle 5, 259, 275, 283, 309, 408, 410
53, 180, 206, 215, 274, 276‐9, 284, 295, statues 390‐1, 393‐4, 403‐4, 406, 408‐10
334, 337, 345, 358, 365, 374, 389, 427 Stoic philosophy 9, 171, 275, 338‐9, 350, 352,
Polyxena 8, 163‐4, 166‐7, 314 425
Pompey 122, 260‐1, 265, 274, 276‐7, 280, sublime 4, 276, 280‐4, 288, 291, 293‐4, 296
282‐5, 343, 406‐7 Syme, Ronald 27, 37‐50, 52, 64‐5
postcolonial 4, 278, 285, 293
principate 10, 17, 23‐4, 26, 28, 30‐1, 189, Tacitus 9‐10, 13‐14, 16‐25, 27‐32, 49, 65, 81,
242, 250, 374, 377, 427 342, 406, 413, 427‐8, 430‐3
Priscilla 388‐90, 392, 394, 396‐406, 408‐10, telestich 5‐6, 75, 199, 202‐8
431 testatio 227‐9
prophecy 61, 192‐4, 248, 300, 302‐3, 305, Theocritus 300, 304
307, 356‐7, 361, 367‐70, 372, 374, 429 Thersites 184‐5, 187‐8
prosopography 37‐8, 45, 56 Theseus 8, 125, 152, 155‐6, 158, 160, 162‐4,
psycholinguistics 6, 139‐41 318‐19
psychopathology 136, 138, 140 Thyestes 9, 27, 322, 327‐31, 333, 335, 344,
puns 2‐3, 5‐6, 116, 121‐2, 131‐9, 142, 145, 347‐8, 350
147‐8, 159, 162, 202‐3, 207‐8, 214, 226, Tiberius 18‐23, 32, 430
230, 255, 283, 286, 327, 359, 371 trope 2, 4, 7, 9‐10, 89, 94, 102, 176, 225,
Pythagoras 9, 241‐7, 249‐56, 407 335‐6, 338, 341, 343, 346, 351‐2, 409,
417, 431
recusatio 52, 77, 213‐14, 235, 390 Turnus 8‐9, 90‐2, 94, 99, 120, 124‐5, 134,
Republic/res publica 5, 7, 42, 49, 93, 183‐4, 146‐7, 165‐7, 169‐70, 173‐80, 183, 187‐9,
186‐7, 192, 249‐50, 266, 274‐5, 277, 420, 426
282‐3, 285, 287‐9, 342, 347, 377, 427
452 General Index
tyranny 4, 117, 250, 255, 276, 279, 284‐5, violence 1‐4, 7, 10, 40, 44, 89, 117, 125‐6, 147,
289, 294, 344 165, 170‐1, 174‐6, 179, 268, 273‐4,
tyrant 4‐5, 113, 122, 275, 287, 339, 348, 372 276‐80, 282‐5, 288‐9, 291, 294‐5, 323‐4,
343, 351, 369, 372, 388, 400, 419
uates 190‐2, 256, 328‐9, 356‐8, 361‐2, 368,
372, 374, 418 wit 233, 307, 325, 327
uis 1, 3 wordplay 1‐3, 5‐7, 9, 70‐1, 75‐6, 80‐1, 87,
uniuira 396‐8, 408, 410 89‐90, 93, 98‐100, 131, 199, 202‐7,
229‐30, 313‐16, 319‐20, 325, 327, 394,
Valerius Flaccus 416, 429‐30 402
Varro Murena 38‐40, 43‐6, 48, 55, 61‐2, 64‐5

Konstan. Doubting Domitian's Divinity Statius Achilleid 1.1-2

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Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry

Edited by Phillip Mitsis and Ioannis Ziogas

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

List of Contributors 437

Publications by Frederick Ahl 443

Index of passages discussed 445

General Index 449

assidet inde Ioui, Iouis est fidissima custos,

 See, for instance, Ahl (a); (b).

 Cf. Hinds ().

 On the hermeneutics of reception in Latin poetry, see Martindale ().

 Ahl (); (); ().

Keywords: Tacitus; Tiberius; Nero; poetry; performance; power; politics

Maternus, the Ur-Poet?

 Mayer (a) .

Poetry on the Margins: A Quartet of Tiberian

This is an intriguing sequence. Previously, Tiberius had been stung by anony-

victim to Macro’s malicious imaginings”.²⁶ Nonetheless, it seems a strong possi-

 Goldberg () .

Poetry in Motion: The Neronian Poets

 Bartsch ()  –  discusses the passage.

as of internality—as much a matter of context as of intention”.³⁵ In terms of the

 Dressler () .

Here we see Seneca using poetry preemptively as a defensive weapon to engage

 Syme () .

 Turpin () .

Keywords: Horace, Odes; Odes 2.10; decorum; hermeneutics of suspicion; Ronald

Introduction: Figured Speech, Prosopography,

 Syme () .

 Ahl (b)  reserves this status for Lucan.

scale,¹⁸ patriarchy and domination (so Oliensis); more locally, dissimulation of

 Cf. Ricoeur () .

In this paper, consistent with Horace’s own apparent cultivation of moderatio, I

To demonstrate the continuities and ruptures between Syme, Nisbet and

 Kennedy ()  – , Schiesaro () .

Prosopography and Cold War Classics: NH, AA,

which he enjoins was a Peripatetic watchword… It would be a strange coincidence if the

Supplementing such bare ‘facts,’ NH wrote (155):

The tactic that Syme employs in his treatment of the conspiracy, in AA at

 Syme ()  – .

But in a serious matter, not of private, but rather of political reality?

 Syme () , with my italics.

 For a veritable allegory of such tactics, see Ahl’s ()  –  Oedipus.

of the opposition more seriously, to recognize in Horace a potential accomplice,

Odes 2.10 and Other Kerygmata

 Buchan ( []) ; cf. MacIntyre () .

Rectius uiues, Licini, neque altum

More in the right will you live, Licinius, in not

ualet ima summis

the high and low

This poem of philosophical recantation simply reverses the menacing tenor of

 On the tradition of underwhelmed responses to Odes , see Griffin () .

 The hermeneutics of suspicion, which Sedgwick () seminally dubbed paranoid, is a

first, more or less concrete (procellas, uentis), then, by synecdoche, metaphori-

uiuet extento Proculeius aeuo

With his age sustained, Proculeius will live

 Ricoeur () : “To understand, it is necessary to believe; to believe it is necessary to

cur non sub alta uel platano uel hac

Why, under the tall plane tree, or this here

  f.: tu semper urges flebilibus modis/ Mysten ademptum.

Conclusion: Partisan Song