This paper aims to read Plautus' Amphitruo in the light of the Roman triumph. Local references and allusions to the triumph in the Amphitruo have often been pointed out, but only rarely has the play as a whole, with its story of the arrival home and treatment of a returning victorious general, been seen as reflecting the triumph. However, Mary Beard, in the recent collection Rome the Cosmopolis, has made this connection, seeing in the Amphitruo a theatrical and metatheatrical parody of the triumphator. For Beard, the triumph is a ceremony which problematises issues of mimesis and representation. The triumphator, dressed and painted to imitate perhaps Jupiter himself, perhaps a statue of Jupiter, or perhaps the Etruscan Kings, exemplifies this problem. As Beard says, just as the tableaux vivants, carried at triumphs, with their depictions of the triumphator's various achievements, can be seen as replications of reality, as artifice, or as pure and simple sham, so the general can be seen as Jupiter's double, as a living statue, or as an actor making a fool of himself at a costume party. According to Beard, what is at stake in the triumphator's performance is the hermeneutic question of how can one tell the difference between ‘being’, ‘playing’ or ‘acting’ god. It is in this light that Beard locates the Amphitruo, reading the play as a parody of triumphal mimesis. Whereas the triumphator usually imitates Jupiter at the triumph, here Jupiter imitates the triumphator.

A moment in Tom Stoppard's post-pastoral Arcadia suggests a way into the pre-pastoral scene of Theocritus' first Idyll. Stoppard's play generates two narratives that are divided by almost two hundred years, yet linked by identity of location. The estate of Sidley Park, soon to be ‘gothicised’, houses overlaid stories from past and present that separately inhabit the same room until they finally achieve simultaneous existence on stage. In this exchange from 1809, Lady Croom is looking over the plan to transform her gardens; Thomasina is her ‘pert’ daughter:

LADY CROOM: But Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged—in short, it is as God intended, and I can say with the painter, ‘Et in Arcadia ego!’

‘Here I am in Arcadia,’ Thomasina.
THOMASINA: Yes, mama, if you would have it so.
LADY CROOM: Is she correcting my taste or my translation?
THOMASINA: Neither are beyond correction, mama, but it was your geography caused the doubt.

Among the many delightful stories woven into Ovid's Metamorphoses, the tale of Baucis and Philemon in Book 8—not found before Ovid—has long proven a favourite with many readers. Narrated by the elderly Lelex, the story goes that Jupiter and Mercury are wandering on earth from door to door in need of shelter; they are received by a pious old couple, Baucis and Philemon, who entertain them with their utmost hospitality; the gods later reveal themselves, punish the inhospitable neighbourhood and reward the pious couple with everlasting life by turning them into sacred trees. This popular story has been the subject of at least two lighthearted operas, by Joseph Haydn (18th century) and Charles-François Gounod (19th century); both Rubens (c.1620) and Rembrandt (1658) have depicted scenes from the story on canvas; elegant poetic translations have been written by John Dryden (1693) and Jonathan Swift (1709). It is not difficult to understand why this story has provided particular enjoyment for the reader. In a poem which too often presents the gods as indifferent to justice and indulgent in their basest desires, here is a story which celebrates the proper relationship between divine and mortal, and pulls on moral, almost Christian heart-strings. Many might agree with G. Karl Galinsky's observation that the story has the effect of ‘radiating so obviously the sort of kindly warmth which some of Ovid's readers would like to find in more of [Ovid's] myths and, one suspects, in their daily lives.’

Why does the Propertian speaker include a celebration of Rome, Elegy 3.22, in his third book of love elegies? Why does he address himself to Tullus, a name that appeared the last time in Elegy 1.22, the closing poem of the Mono-biblos? By paying attention to the nature of the elegy's topic rather than to the nature of the elegiac discourse, past and current Propertian scholarship fails to recognise the subtle and, at first sight, hidden links between the praise of Rome, the choice of the addressee, and the Propertian speaker's effort to re-locate himself in the realm of elegiac love and poetry in Elegy 3.22.

Past scholarship has read Elegy 3.22 either as a palinode to Elegy 3.21, the Propertian speaker's decision to leave Rome, or as an indication that Cynthia has been substituted by Rome as another theme. The latter interpretation entailed a discussion about whether Elegy 3.22 should be considered pro- or anti-Augustan or a sincere but unsuccessful elegiac tribute to Rome. All contributions offer hermeneutic readings that stem from a time before the critical tools of the ‘New Latin’ movement provided new possibilities for the re-contextuali ation of Roman poetry. Furthermore, both the past and the most recent interpretations of Elegy 3.22 are theme-centred as they focus on the praise of Rome, and not on the nature of the Propertian speaker's discourse.

The quotation in the title comes from one of Hamlet's famous soliloquies (‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I…’); it expresses his reaction to the fact that the Player reciting Aeneas' tale of the sack of Troy has broken down in tears as he describes the fate of this classical mater dolorosa:

Is it not monstrous that this Player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his whole conceit,
That from her working, all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?

The fiercest political debates in 1850s Britain were inextricably bound up with the Classical past. Traditionalists and eulogists, priests and pamphleteers, doctors and revolutionaries all set their arguments and their ideals within a Classical framework. Amongst those who sought to use the ancient for decidedly contemporary purposes, Robert Brough was one of the most passionate. He was a revolutionary, a playwright, and a Classicist—though up until the performance of his burlesque Medea (on July 14th 1856), he had never been all three at once. This article will explore how, at the time, the myth of Medea was the perfect vehicle for radical politics—and how Brough exploited its potential to the full. It will frame his play within some of the most controversial debates of the period. It will explore Brough's (on the face of it, startling) claim that his burlesque would give the audience more to think about than any play they had seen before, that it would be ‘a conjugal lesson, surpassing in intensity anything ever before presented’. Brough wrote his Medea believing in ‘the Revolution’. And, as I hope to show, he wanted his audiences to leave the theatre believing in it too.

The thesis of this paper is that the void, the sense of emptiness, created by some form of loss, is, to a considerable extent, filled and bridged by a number of activities and motifs that pervade the Dionysiaca. Nonnus projects a vision of life so resonant, full and fertile that it mostly overwhelms forces and behaviour that make for sterility and emptiness. However, constant effort is needed by various individual entities to harmonise polarities, and to keep the cosmos orderly and busy spinning cycles of germination, growth, death and reseeding/rebirth. Immortals, especially deities, have a greater capacity to relieve their own bereavements, separations and loss, including the gaining of forms of immortality for favoured individuals. For most mortals, reminders of the nature and power of life's eternal flow is no guarantee of individual post-mortem survival or of the healing of wounds incurred by the loss of someone or something precious. But the intimations of immortality and the resources for solace and recovery are persistent and insistent in Nonnus' narrative.