Moschus' Europa has long been recognised to be a highly visual and pictorial poem. It is also dominated by an erotic theme: the sexual awakening of the maiden Europa and her love affair with Zeus. This article will focus on a connection between erotic theme and highly visual narrative that has received attention in relation to Greek texts from the Roman Empire, but none in relation to Moschus. The sophisticated and self-conscious use of vision and ekphrasis in erotic narrative which has been traced in authors such as Achilles Tatius (in particular by Goldhill) is anticipated, I shall argue, in Moschus' Hellenistic poem. The work done on this theme in Achilles Tatius provides a useful framework for analysing Moschus' treatment of vision and desire and as such, I will refer to the work of Goldhill and Morales where it illuminates my approach to Moschus.

The Europa displays a striking combination of erotic theme and ekphrastic style: Moschus uses the motifs and techniques of ekphrasis to explore the erotic gaze, whereby the process of viewing a desirable object becomes the ‘action’ of the plot and ekphrasis transcends its normally digressive or embedded position within the structure of the text and appropriates the very narrative function of the poem. In terms of its visuality and exploration of visual themes, Moschus' Europa differs from Achilles Tatius and from the poetry of his own contemporaries such as the Argonautica, for although other poets often explore similar themes of vision and desire, the form and structure of Moschus' poem set his treatment apart. The Europa is a short poem of 166 lines and it is dominated by visual description: firstly by the ekphrasis of the basket and then by three extended descriptive scenes which, as I argue below, should also be treated as ekphraseis.

The Shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.478-608) can easily be qualified as ‘the mother’ of all ekphraseis, and scholarly interest in this passage has been massive. Scholars have mainly discussed three issues: the relation between the Shield and real shields; the relation between the scenes on the Shield and the Iliad; and the method of description.

In this article I will focus on the third point. As noted famously by Lessing, the description of the Shield is dynamic, both in the sense that we see Hephaestus making the shield and that the scenes depicted become stories, with characters speaking and thinking and events following one after the other. My central question is: who is responsible for these narrativised scenes, Hephaestus or the Homeric narrator? Or to put it more poignantly: who creates the scenes on the Shield? I note the following positions. It is the divine artist Hephaestus who either creates figures which (1a) can really move, like his tripods and handmaids: 18.376f., 418-20 (‘the figures are not merely lifelike, they really live!’), or (1b) at least suggest movement, a suggestion to be decoded by the narrator (‘the consistent transformations of gold into natural image, of image into action, give us to understand that the qualities of sound and movement and emotion come into being through the responsive participation of the spectator in the work’). Or, it is the Homeric narrator who either (2a) cannot suppress a ‘youthful pleasure in animated narration’ and himself narrates stories instead of describing the figures which Hephaestus makes, or (2b) subtly blends description and narration (‘a cycle of scenes wrought in metal—or in words? This description of the shield actually is a poem’).

Keeping in mind Emily Gowers's dictum that ‘food, for the Roman writer who chose to discuss it, was simultaneously important and trivial’, let us go on a mushroom hunt through the fragmented habitat of Latin literature, with some preliminary nosing about in the Greek. We are looking for μύκαι and μύκητες in Greek, and fungi in Latin, and we are keeping an eye open for one kind in particular, the boletus, although we also will stumble upon the occasional interesting fungus suillus (‘pig fungus’). We are not truffle hunting: tubera (Greek ὕδνα) are a topic for another day. Although no survey, however comprehensive, of the appearances of one foodstuff in Latin literature can do full justice to the individual sources, we can still gain something from an overview of the tradition; and although what we learn may be trivial, even the trivial can make its own small contribution to our understanding of a larger matter, in this case the representation of time and change in the Roman world.

Ahead of us with knife and collecting basket roams the ghost of the Reverend William Houghton M.A., F.L.S., Victorian parson, Rector of Wellington parish in Preston township, Shropshire, a man with time on his hands—and at least two cats—who in 1885 compiled a list titled, ‘Notices of Fungi in Greek and Latin Authors’. Dr Denis Benjamin, author of Mushrooms: Poisons and Panaceas, says that ‘it would take the persistence of another classical scholar to discover if he [Houghton] missed or misrepresented anything’. Persistence, in the form of the TLL—in its infancy when Houghton was doing his research—the RE entry ‘Pilze’, Maggiulli's Nomenclatura Micologica Latina, and the PHI database, has indeed added to the good Rector's basket a few more specimens on the Latin side, some of which are useful for our inquiry.

Propertius 3.12 leads us right to the middle of Book 3, and as such really ought to have attracted more attention than it has. Sitting twelfth in a twenty-four poem collection, it negotiates the reader's passage into the second half of the book—and it does so by introducing what must seem at first glance a new kind of elegiac woman and, indeed, a new kind of Propertian elegy: in this poem we meet the chaste wife Aelia Galla, upon whose marriage Propertius reflects with uncharacteristic favour. In the discussion that follows, I hope to show that this central elegy both shakes elegy up—and yet brings renewed focus on a moral core that existed in elegiac writing since the beginning. In doing so, Propertius 3.12 marks a central waypoint within a collection which reflects obsessively on its own poetic past, and yet which prepares (us for) the more expansive elegy that we eventually encounter in Propertius' fourth book.

Achilles Tatius' novel Leucippe and Clitophon is widely recognised by critics as generally ‘philosophical’, even ‘Platonic’, but critics also agree that the meaning of this philosophy and Platonism–whether it is serious or satiric, semantic or aesthetic–is unclear. As a result of this ambivalence, a perplexity confronts the reader who wants to understand the particularly political philosophical meaning of Achilles' novel, especially through its depiction of gender norms and hierarchies. The purpose of this article is to revisit the philosophical possibilities of Achilles' novel in view of its various literary and social-historical contexts. To do this, I work through rather than against the perplexity that confronts the reader of L&C, proposing a relational, reflexive mode of reading that attends to the interplay of Platonism, Stoicism and the social-historical associations that Achilles' mobilisation of each imparts. Such a mode of reading suggests, against numerous critical interpretations, that L&C may actually relate the feminine to the world in a progressive way. In addition, the development of this mode of reading in response to L&C potentially undermines, not only the masculinist gender norms that the novel seems to reinforce, but also the very subject-object dualism that underpins mainstream historicist modes of relating to ancient texts as something out there in the walled-off universe of competing textualities that is ‘the past’.

In his influential reading of Heroides 1, Duncan Kennedy argues that successful fictional letters can be felt to arise naturally from or be motivated by the depicted events and, ideally, be seen as agents in the forward movement of those events. Building on Kennedy's arguments, Peter Knox asserts that Ovid reconfigures his heroines in the Heroides to develop serious issues raised by his literary models from a new perspective. In this paper, I shall follow Kennedy's and Knox's suggestions to propose a new reading of Heroides 3. I shall first discuss how Briseis' letter can be felt to be both naturally motivated by and seriously engaged with Achilles' arguments in Iliad 9. More importantly, I shall argue that Ovid implicates Patroclus' aid in the composition and delivery of Heroides 3. The result is that one can view the fictional letter as having some influence upon Patroclus' fateful appeal to Achilles, thus providing an Ovidian reinterpretation of Iliad 16. Imagining this fictional role for Heroides 3 ultimately provokes comparison of Briseis, Patroclus and their relationships with Achilles. Such a reading uses Kennedy's and Knox's suggestions as a point of departure for making Heroides 3 a more successful and provocative fictional letter.

After tricking Pelias' daughters into killing their father, Ovid's metamorphic Medea flies in her (future reflexive) Euripidean dragon chariot from Thessaly to Corinth by a very circuitous route. In so doing, she performs a physical and narrative praeteritio, passing rapidly over both the landscape and its local myths, which remain unnarrated. This article will reflect on some of the metapoetic connotations of the praeteritio and its rhetoric of obscurity, and propose an identification for one of the most obscure of the figures over whom Medea passes. It will also identify a technique whereby Ovid plays with concepts of obscurity and doctrina to unmask and dramatise a common reading practice.

Medea's literal enactment of a rhetorical strategy is one among many instances in the poem of the reification of figurative language, an operation which most commonly takes place in the process of metamorphosis or the depiction of personifications, but by no means always. Among such reifications, the particular instance of the ‘literal praeteritio’ has antecedents in Apollonius’ Argonautica, where the Argonauts ‘passed by’ (παϱάμειβον) Calypso's island, and in Virgil's Aeneid, where Aeneas and the Trojans on at least three occasions pass by sites such as Ithaca, the land of the Phaeacians, and Circe's island. In each of these four cases the epic narrator is also ‘passing over’ the Odyssean narrative associated with the site.

If the Neapolitan humanist Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530) receives any recognition in scholarly circles these days, it is usually for his Arcadia, an elaborate pastoral in twelve books, each combining prose and verse, that forms one of the most important links between the work of Petrarch, its inspiration, and that of Sir Philip Sidney. The Arcadia, published first authoritatively in 1504, is written in Italian, as are the hundred or so surviving Rime (songs and sonnets), largely products of the last decade of the fifteenth century. But Sannazaro was also a prolific writer in Latin. It is a question worth asking why, after the success of his vernacular magnum opus, he opted to use primarily a classical language for the major poetry that occupied his attention for the opening decades of the subsequent century. Perhaps a confirmation of his allegiance to Christian humanism is one reason. Perhaps also it was his devotion to Virgil whose three great works provided him with the most telling impetus for his own achievements in the Augustan poet's tongue.

One of Horace's best-known allegations in Epistles 1 is that where in the world you are is neither here nor there, as long as you have peace of mind (animus aequus):

caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
strenua nos exercet inertia; nauibus atque
quadrigis petimus bene uiuere. quod petis, hie est,
est Vlubris, animus si te non deficit aequus.
(Hor. Ep. 1.11.27-30)

This turns out to be one of the book's hugest lies. It makes all the difference how Horace and his correspondents are placed when he is writing to them: Rome is different from backwater Ulubrae, Baiae from Brundisium. In Morals and Villas in Seneca's Letters, John Henderson has attached similar importance to named locations in calibrating metaphorical distance between Seneca and the correspondent of his Epistles, Lucilius. This paper aims to close a gap of two centuries between two of the most disparate figures in Latin literature: the same Seneca, that knotted-up recluse, and another Lucilius, the laughing cavalier satirist. The link: a journey made from Rome to Sicily, or, more precisely, the uses of the road to Sicily in epistolary-philosophical discourse (by way of Horace's Satires and Epistles). Lucilius' Iter Siculum and Seneca's mental journeys to Sicily in the Epistulae Morales are related stages, I will argue, in the philosophical applications of travel writing.

It has become a scholarly commonplace to remark that the ancient Roman city had, at least after the time of Augustus, a wide, varied, and almost omni-present regime of writing in public. This regime included texts of many different types, commercial, political, dedicatory; written with charcoal, paint, stylus or chisel; on stone, wood, plaster and mortar; on private houses, public monuments, temples, shops, baths, fountains and tombs. In part, this is due to what has come to be known as the ‘epigraphic habit’, the characteristically Roman practice of recording acts and events on stone. From the late Republic onwards, both public and private individuals who had even marginal means to hire a stonecutter left behind inscriptions—honorific, commemorative, funerary—which document multiple aspects of social life, from birth to death. Many of these texts have direct ties to civic authority: decrees of the Senate or the Emperor; dedicatory texts on buildings by consuls, tribunes or other magistrates; milestones, boundary markers, altars, statue bases and the like, all of which record the names of the officials responsible for their placement. The production of such publicly-readable texts, however, was not simply the purview of the state: wealthy private individuals also could and did erect monumental inscriptions, which often recorded some act of public beneficence like the construction of a building or the presentation of gladiatorial games. Other writing was less formal: thus, in Pompeii, the famous caue canem (‘beware of the dog’) mosaic which marked the threshold of the House of the Tragic Poet; the bakery which featured a terracotta plaque with a phallus and the perhaps aspirational legend hic habitat felicitas (‘here dwells good fortune’); or the cookshop of Euxinus whose front sign announces phoenix felix et tu (‘the phoenix is lucky, and so may you be!’). As William Harris once noted, ‘Roman cities…were full of things to read’.