Within Classics, there is growing interest in the nature of reperformance, particularly in relation to archaic and classical Greek poetry and drama. Developing out of the now well-established ‘performative turn’ in studies of early Greek song, and gaining impetus from a series of publications focussing on the contextual specificity of archaic lyric and drama, those interested in reperformance ask what it means for a song or a play, composed for a specific occasion, to be reperformed in another time and (potentially) another place. While interest in reperformance is certainly not new, the debate is now increasingly taking place in dialogue with parallel studies of reperformance in other disciplines. Research in performance studies has articulated a paradox at the heart of reperformance: since a performance is imagined as a singular event that exists only in that moment, and in a specific context, reperformance is an attempt to repeat the unique. Theorists and practitioners have in turn explored this paradox in relation to the restagings and re-enactments of one-time events and performances, such as battle re-enactments, the reconstruction of ballet choreographies before the days of film and live performance art. These examples reveal the complex temporalities involved in reperforming notionally one-time events, as an attempt to capture the ephemeral and collapse the present and the past (as well as the there and the not-there) in the ‘syncopated time’ of the reperformance.

Teknophagy (τεκνοϕαγία), or child-eating, is an apt subject for tragedy. It introduces the theme of miasma, it escalates violence and epitomises the destructive family feuds that Aristotle prized as the most suitable stories for tragedy. Therefore, unsurprisingly, the teknophagies of Thyestes and Tereus were dramatised in three fifth-century tragedies, all of them preserved only in fragments: Euripides’ Thyestes, Sophokles’ Thyestes (Β) and Sophokles’ Tereus. What is surprising is the appearance of plays by the same titles in the comic tradition, including Tereus plays by Kantharos (C5 BC), Anaxandrides (C4 BC) and Philetairos (C4 BC) along with Diokles’ Thyestes (Β) (late C5 BC to early C4 BC). Therefore, this study will first consider how Tereus’ teknophagy was adapted to mythical burlesques, to then consider how comic adaptations of Thyestes’ teknophagy influenced Seneca's Thyestes.

The Plautine corpus contains five letter-plays, comedies in which epistles are composed, delivered and/or read onstage and figure as a major element of the plot. These embedded missives, both stolen and forged ex nihilo, are variously employed by the personae to enact deception and engender duplicitous maneuvering of epistolary conventions, as well as sophisticated jokes about literacy and the dynamics of the medium. The Bacchides features the most elaborate manifestation of this motif. A servus called Chrysalus schemes to facilitate the love affair between his erus minor, Mnesilochus, and the young man's beloved Bacchis. Bacchis resides at Athens with her sister, another hetaera likewise called Bacchis, whose name and affair with the Bacchides’ second adulescens, Pistoclerus, precipitate a misapprehension that causes the play to reset. Under the mistaken impression that Pistoclerus is in love with his own Bacchis, Mnesilochus returns the money Chrysalus has successfully filched from his father, Nicobulus, informing on the tricky slave and undoing his progress. Once the mistake is clarified, Mnesilochus prevails upon Chrysalus to invent a new ruse for getting the girl. The schemer uses epistles to do it all over again. His second round of tricks consists of a two-pronged stratagem in which he forges and delivers a pair of letters to Nicobulus allegedly from Mnesilochus. The missives serve to pilfer not one but two sums of gold from the old man, permitting Chrysalus and his younger master to both purchase Bacchis’ freedom from her contract with the miles and have some fun.

The Culex—the earliest and best attested of the purported minor works of Virgil, and the most outright in gesturing towards Virgilian authorship—poses a problem for modern classical scholarship. Since at least the seventeenth century scholars have been preoccupied with the poem's authenticity. Is it a piece of early Virgilian iuuenilia, as the ancient testimonies and mediaeval transmission of the text seem to assert, or a later production? If a later production, should we see it as a deliberate forgery, or as a poem severed in the course of transmission from its original author and helplessly swept up in Virgil's train? The authenticity problem has proven persistent: as recently as the 1970s, scholars tried to claim the Culex for Virgil. Even among those who think it non-Virgilian, the apparent consensus of anonymous late-Tiberian authorship has been contested by Otto Zwierlein's suggestion of M. Julius Montanus and Jean-Yves Maleuvre's, even more unlikely, of Augustus.

The brief story of Tiresias’ punishment in the third book of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Met. 3.316–38) becomes a privileged site for mapping the different ways readers can reinterpret episodes of the poem in the light of the rest of Ovid's corpus. Tiresias, the first human uates of the poem, who is punished with blindness for voicing what he should have kept silent, can be included among those punished artists who double the poet in the Metamorphoses: while Tiresias is condemned for having voiced his knowledge of both sexes, Ovid is exiled for giving amatory advice to, and therefore knowing, both men and women. Thus the Tiresias episode reads as a pendant to that of Actaeon in the same book (the latter explicitly likened to Ovid's fate in Tristia 2.103–8), with the pair suggesting a veiled allegory of the carmen and error that caused Ovid's exile.

Caesar's visit to Troy has always been something of an enigma. Historically, the episode is unattested. Caesar wanders through a congeries of sites at Troy ranging from Ajax's grave on the Rhoetium promontory at its beginning to Priam's Herceian altar at the end. Numerous interpretations have been offered. Bruère has argued for Aeneas' tour through the future site of Rome in Aeneid 8 as a backdrop. Ahl has noted the connection between the ruins of Italy described in Bellum Ciuile (B.C.) 7 and the ruins of Troy in B.C. 9. Rome/Italy and Troy merge in essence as vanishing fabulae, which the poet keeps alive. Zwierlein sees Caesar's visit as modeled on Alexander the Great's visit nearly three hundred years earlier. Caesar through this scene is established as a destroyer of empires, inferior only to Alexander. Ormand stresses Caesar as an authoritative reader of the ruins of Troy, where Caesar reads the Aeneid instead of the Iliad. Rossi similarly focuses on Caesar as reading Troy's ruins to the advantage of the Julian dynasty. Gergo has opened up the passage with the correct observation that Lucan has in mind Aeneas’ katabasis in Aeneid 6. But the relationship between the brief tour at Troy and Aeneid 6 is both more comprehensive and precise. Indeed this essay will present a systematic interpretation of Caesar's tour as a parallel to Aeneid 6 in its entirety, a parallel to which Lucan most likely does not give his character Caesar access.

At the sentence level Suetonius often appears to be neutral, but I argue here that the persuasive force in the arrangement of his material creates a portrait that is absolutely not neutral. As David Wardle put it in a 2016 review, ‘Anyone who reads Suetonius without regard to the careful structures within which the biographer places his material can produce almost any picture.’ Yet these ‘careful structures’ are a mystery known only to the initiated. This paper lays out the complex and varied ways in which Suetonius uses structure, specifically the ‘rubric system’ of arranging his material under subheadings and those subheadings in sequences, in the hope that with this knowledge we see more accurately what ‘picture’ the biographer creates.

This paper discusses how Roman visual culture might be useful for deciphering the ecphrastic passages of the ancient Greek novel. Whereas ecphrasis has been one of the blossoming topics in the field, the examination of novelistic ecphrasis alongside particular works of art is still a desideratum. As a test case I will use Xenophon of Ephesus’ ecphrasis of the bed canopy depicting Ares’ and Aphrodite's embrace, in the Ephesiaca, a novel that might have been written as early as AD 65. In what follows I will argue that the scene described on the canopy would have stimulated a variety of intertexts, both literary and visual, in the minds of the imperial audience: that is, Xenophon's reader would have been encouraged to recall not just Demodocus’ song of the love of Ares and Aphrodite but also the idealised Roman version of the myth, which was so frequently depicted on frescoes and mosaics in Roman villas in the first century. I then explore Xenophon's ‘interpretatio Romana’ through the adaptations of the Ares and Aphrodite myth found in Plutarch and Lucian.

There is increasing interest in what might be thought ‘special’ about late antique poetry. Two volumes of recent years have focused on Latin poetry of this time, Classics Renewed: Reception and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity edited by Scott McGill and Joseph Pucci (2016) as well as The Poetics of Late Latin Literature edited by Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato (2017), while it has become increasingly acceptable to remark on late antiquity as a cultural period in its own right, rather than a point of transition between high antiquity and the middle ages. Greek poetry of late antiquity has yet to receive the level of attention offered to Latin literature of this time, and so it is to help answer the question of what may be thought special about late antique Greek poetry that I here discuss the poetics of later Greek ecphrasis.

Paulinus of Nola might not be very widely read today, even among professional classicists, but he remains the most popular Latin poet in his adopted hometown. At the Christian basilica complex in Cimitile, near Nola, where Paulinus founded a community for ascetic devotees of the cult of St. Felix in the late fourth century, his poetry is still recited publicly on a number of festive days each year. On a recent visit to Cimitile, I found myself in the audience at one of these narrazioni, which had been organized as a prelude to the Festa dei Gigli, held annually in Paulinus’ honor on June 22. For a group of local residents, gathered around the tomb of Felix in the basilica uetus, an actor read passages from an Italian translation of Paulinus’ carmina, which were then subjected to theological exposition by the Vicar General of the Diocese of Nola. Even now, therefore, Paulinus’ poems, with their straightforward diction and everyday subject matter, are seen as an appropriate vehicle for inspiring religious devotion in the lay community. It is not difficult to imagine a similar scene at Cimitile when Paulinus himself was leading the festivities, 1600 years ago. Still, this modern recitation raises questions about how the Natalicia—that is, the series of poems he composed for Felix's feast day each January 14—were performed in their original context. Presumably, Paulinus would have delivered the Natalicia on his own, without the assistance of actors—but would he have recited all 858 verses of Natalicium 13 (for example), or would he only have presented excerpts? Would the readings have been supplemented by any commentary—theological, or even literary?