Hellenism and Empire explores identity, politics, and culture in the Greek world of the first three centuries AD, the period known as the second sophistic. The sources of this identity were the words and deeds of classical Greece, and the emphasis placed on Greekness and Greek heritage was far greater now than at any other time. Yet this period is often seen as a time of happy consensualism between the Greek and Roman halves of the Roman Empire. The first part of the book shows that Greek identity came before any loyalty to Rome (and was indeed partly a reaction to Rome), while the views of the major authors of the period, which are studies in the second part, confirm and restate the prior claims of Hellenism.

Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, A. D. 50-250

Founded upon more than a century of civil bloodshed, the first imperial regime of ancient Rome, the Principate of Caesar Augustus, looked at Rome's distant and glorious past in order to justify and promote its existence under the disguise of a restoration of the old Republic. In doing so, it used and revisited the history and myth of Rome's major success against external enemies: the wars against Carthage. This book explores the ideological use of Carthage in the most authoritative of the Augustan literary texts, the Aeneid of Virgil. It analyses the ideological portrait of Carthaginians from the middle Republic and the truth-twisting involved in writing about the Punic Wars under the Principate. It also investigates the mirroring between Carthage and Rome in a poem whose primary concern was rather the traumatic memory of Civil War and the subsequent subversion of Rome's Republican institutions through the establishment of Augustus' Principate.

Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid: Staging the Enemy under Augustus

One way or another, sexuality has always been a topic of interest to Virgil's readers. In his life of the poet, Suetonius reports that Virgil inclined toward the love of boys and that he addressed a favourite named Alexander under the name 'Alexis' in the Second Eclogue; Martial pretends to believe that it was this rosy-lipped young slave who excited the poet to compose his Aeneid (Mart. 8.5.11-20). It is only in the past two decades, however, that scholarly interest has begun to focus on the topic of 'sexuality and gender' in antiquity. The 'and' here covers a whole range of questions - for example, how is sexual difference represented in antiquity, how is it implicated with other kinds of socially constructed differences, is 'sexuality' a discrete concept or is it still awaiting its 'invention'? I will begin this essay by surveying Virgil's Eclogues (with side-glances at the Aeneid) to see what light they can shed on some of these issues. I will then turn to my central project, which is to sketch some of the ways sexual and gender differences help to articulate Virgil's poetry.

Sons and lovers: sexuality and gender in Virgil's poetry

Roman Theater-Temples

Virgilian Narrative: Ecphrasis

The portrait of Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid simultaneously telescopes alterity and sameness. Its barbaric and orientalising traits, highlighted by allusions to Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae and Aeschylus’ Persae, are counterbalanced by the presentation of Dido and her city as a mirroring image of Aeneas and Rome. While the theme of irrationality in Virgil’s Carthage can and has been studied in cultural continuity with ‘Doddsian’ Greek scholarship, this paper argues that Virgil exploits the ‘irrational’ deconstruction of the Greek vs Barbarian polarity present in Euripides’ Bacchae in order to show the irrationality inherent in writing about Carthage with the civil wars in mind. After explaining why I find that a ‘Doddsian’ reading of irrationality in Virgil betrays a Romantic belief in the superiority of Greek literature and culture, I approach the topic through the lens of Sallust’s view that the disappearance of metus hostilis after Carthage’s destruction was the first cause of the crisis which eventually brought about the civil wars. The barbaric, and specifically Persian, traits of Virgil’s Carthage, here discussed in detail, create continuity between the Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, and Augustus’ proposed wars against the Parthians, warding off the danger of further civil wars through the evocation of metus hostilis. At the same time, however, the analogies between Carthage and Rome and the irrational riddle of identities which Virgil stages between Trojans, Carthaginians and Greeks in his poem, provides a new, illogical phrasing to the famous proverb, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ which exemplifies Sallust’s Theorem of Negative Association.

/pdf/my-enemy-s-enemy-is-my-enemy-virgil-s-illogical-use-of-metus-1axug4ov29.pdf

My enemy’s enemy is my enemy : Virgil’s illogical use of metus hostilis

Lucan's account of Caesar crossing the Rubicon (1.213–22) is dense with metapoetic allusion. Although the river has been specified as a small stream at Caesar's arrival (ut uentum est parui Rubiconis ad undas, 1.185), it becomes swollen, tumidus, as soon as Caesar ‘breaks the delay of war’ and ‘carries his standards in haste over the [now] swollen river’ (inde moras soluit belli tumidumque per amnem | signa tulit propere, 1.204-5). This has been pinpointed both as a metapoetic signpost of Lucan's engagement with the anti-Callimachean swollen river of grandiose epic (Callim. Hymn 2.108-9) at the outbreak of (his) Civil War, and as a programmatic statement that the whole Bellum Ciuile will set up a series of contrasts between Caesar's urgency in crossing boundaries and Lucan's narrative obstructions to or compliances with Caesar's progress. In fact, as Jamie Masters notes, ‘in spite of the “undoing of delay,” the perfect “tulit” and the adverb “propere,” Caesar has not crossed the river yet; or if he has, he must do it again’, precisely at 1.213–22. Within this densely self-reflexive passage, Lucan inserts a palindromic acrostic which signals both the doubling of Caesar's action (or at least the poet's double mention of the action) and Lucan's poetic representation of Caesar taming the forces of nature.

/pdf/caesar-criss-crossing-the-rubicon-a-palindromic-acrostic-in-3pbei609ie.pdf

Caesar criss-crossing the rubicon: a palindromic acrostic in lucan (1.218–22)*

Starting from analysis of the strongly ambiguous sympotic frame of the only frankly propagandistic poem in the Epodes collection, this paper exploits its mixture of musical harmonies and background Bacchic frenzy as key for interpreting its notorious historico-political complexities. First, I consider much debated difficulties such as the dubious identification of the Caecubum in line 1 with that in line 36 and the mysterious setting of the symposium through the potentially etymologically relevant ναυςea of the poet. I argue that they deliberately contribute to shape an ambiguous attitude towards the princeps, which is epitomised in the cura metusque Caesaris rerum in line 37. Then, after analysis of the poem’s musical harmonies, by considering the Epode the first example of ‘Horace’s Bacchic poetics’ as later displayed in the Odes, I underline the political significance of Dionysiac tunes in Horace’s poetry and argue that the explicit need for musical concoction (9.5 sonante mixtum tibiis carmen lyra) matches the fusion between duces displayed in the second half of the poem. In this frame, Horace’s debt to Sallust’s reflections on metus hostilis underscores the ambiguity of par in line 23 (to be read in connection with dispar at 7.12). This is a key-word in a poem that explicitly plays on its characters’ identities: is the par dux Marius or Jugurtha? Is the Africanus one of the Scipiones or Hannibal? Is the uictus hostis Hannibal or Antony? This is a game of mirrorings with the enemy which, far from being a recognised characteristic of both Sallust’s Jugurthine and Livy’s Hannibalic War and much emphasised in Virgil’s Aeneid, becomes more disquieting when put into play in a poem that deals with the ‘Art of Falsehood,’ propagandistic disguising of a civil war.

Dithyrambic iambics: Epode 9 and its general(s’) confusion

Virgil's poetry has long been recognised as delving into a poetics of comparison which employs sudden shifts from the miniature to the gigantic. So too have Virgilian similes long been singled out as a privileged locus where complex inter- and intra-textual allusions serve to highlight the primary role that these similes play in the narrative and poetic context of Virgil's work. Along these lines, this paper addresses one such simile at Aene.d 1.430–6, where the Tyrians building Carthage are compared to busy bees working at their hive. The paper explores the impact that the recognition of the simile's inter- and intra-textual connections may have on the interpretation of the scene of Aeneas’ arrival at Carthage, and on certain long-debated aspects of the poem as a whole.

/pdf/virgil-s-carthaginians-at-aen-1-430-6-cyclopes-in-bees-env0qaufy9.pdf

Virgil's carthaginians at aen . 1.430–6: cyclopes in bees’ clothing

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