The chapter analyses a series of puns throughout Lucan’s Bellum Civile on the insubstantiality and ephemerality of the reputation of Pompey the Great, showing how his former military glory is a thing of the past, and arguing that Pompey only achieves true and lasting fame in his death.

The chapter investigates two prominent models for interpreting the representation of ritual sacrifice in Roman poetry, especially the Georgics of Virgil. It is not possible to impose a template of what sacrifice means in Rome onto a poetic text; rather, the chapter analyses the way that a range of different religious discourses interact in Roman society.

The word ‘hero’ in ancient terminology does not refer to the ’hero’ of a poem or play, and ancient epics do not require a central hero to unify the action. This understanding of the role of the leading figures in epic is still current for John Milton in Paradise Lost.

Plautus’ Pseudolus plays upon the concept of ‘credit’, and reveals the similar nature of the belief that audiences grant to the stage-events and the belief in someone’s credit that underpins borrowing and lending. The Roman understanding of credit in both senses anticipates the modern emergence of the concept of fiction within a modern mercantile economyy.

Focusing on Book 10 of Virgil’s Aeneid, the chapter investigates what new work the old epic conventions of the catalogue and of violent warfare are made to do. The catalogue of Etruscans highlights the eventual disappearance of Etruscan culture, while the aestheticised depictions of violence remind the reader of the way that epics make beauty out of horror.

When Mercury in Book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid appears to Aeneas and tells him to leave Dido he is not simply a representation of Aeneas’ inner thought processes. He stands for a world-historical vision that is communicated via Mercury from Jupiter. The chapter analyses the divine intermediaries in Homer and Apollonius as well as Virgil.

The prophecy of future Roman greatness that Aeneas hears from his father Anchises in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid is not mere triumphalism, but shows the strong influence both of Plato’s apocalyptic myths in the Republic and of Cicero’s adaptations of Plato in his Somnium Scipionis. The vision of future Roman history is severely qualified when viewed through the perspective of philosophical scepticism about human glory and worldly achievement.

From Homer on, the first similes in epic are strongly paradigmatic and symbolic; they emblematise an order on the human or cosmic scale, showing a contest between order and chaos. This pattern is analysed from Homer, Lucretius, Virgil and Lucan up to Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose first similes show a deep understanding of this ancient template.

Catullus 61 is an epithalamium, celebrating the wedding of Catullus’ friend Manlius Torquatus to Vibia Aurunculeia, and the chapter gives a close reading of the poem. The tradition of epithalamium is very rich in similes and comparisons, from the world of nature and the world of myth. The chapter argues that similes are particularly at home in wedding-songs because they highlight issues of similarity and difference which are apposite in a wedding context: marriage brings together two people who are similar but not identical, just as similes bring together terms which are similar but not identical.

The depiction of Troy and Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid is influenced by the very recent events of the civil war between the future Augustus and Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The orientalising propaganda directed against Cleopatra and her city of Alexandria has left its mark on the depiction of Carthage and Dido, whose temptations for Aeneas recall the temptations of Alexandria and Cleopatra for Mark Antony. The victory at Actium over Antony and Cleopatra represents the defeat of a threat of a Roman reversion to their Eastern origins in Troy.

The chapter shows how an acrostic in Virgil’s Georgics develops a technique already visible in the Hellenistic poet Aratus: word play draws attention to the presence of an acrostic by directing the reader to look at the edges of the lines.

The chapter argues that Cicero’s literary and philosophical writings had a profound effect on Virgil and Horace, and later on Ovid. Taking the autobiographical mode of literary history as an example, the chapter investigates how Horace followed Cicero in constructing literary histories from the perspective of his own career; it is then argued that Ovid follows both Horace and Cicero in constructing a literary history of his own time in which he, like them, finds himself isolated and unappreciated at the end of his career.

Statius’ unfinished epic, the Achilleid, describes in its surviving opening portion the attempt of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, to stop him joining the expedition against Troy by disguising him as a girl on the island of Scyros. The chapter analyses Roman conceptions of gender and sexuality, as Achilles’ disguise does not prevent him from having sex with Deidamia. His underlying violent masculinity is revealed by the trickery of Ulysses.