Rhet. Her. 1.2 quoad eius fieri poterit contains the surprising reading quoad eius. Earlier scholarship has debated the authenticity of this reading and its relationship to quod eius. A survey of the sources shows that quod eius appears in a number of inscriptions as well as in the transmitted text of nine passages within surviving Latin literature. So that phrase must be authentic; it appears to have arisen as a limiting formula in the language of the law. In two other passages, quoad eius appears in inferior manuscripts that lack authority, while the reading transmitted by authoritative textual sources is quod eius. Rhet. Her. 1.2 is the only passage in which quoad eius is the transmitted reading. This phrase is also linguistically problematic. Hence it is very likely to be corrupt. It probably arose as a conflation of quod eius with quoad, both of which are attested in similar contexts. On balance, it seems more likely that the original reading in this passage was quoad.

This paper analyses the metaliterary statements that pervade the oeuvre of Ennodius of Pavia (a.d. 474–521) in order to reconstruct his underlying conception of language: its nature, power, function, limitations, and dangers. This new perspective provides a more nuanced insight into the paradoxical poetics of the author as well as his final renunciation to literature after his appointment as bishop of Pavia.

La riqueza epigráfica de las ánforas olearias de la provincia Bética es bien conocida gracias a los numerosos sellos de alfarero, rótulos pintados (tituli picti) y grafitos grabados en la arcilla fresca (ante cocturam). Éstos últimos suelen contener signos y simples letras, pero a veces, también nombres de personas y fechas calendariales y consulares. En este trabajo presentamos un grafito de carácter excepcional por su contenido estrictamente literario. En él, proponemos identificar un fragmento de poema de Virgilio. Analizamos y discutimos el contexto en que se realizó, la autoría del mismo y su significación para el conocimiento del grado de alfabetización de la sociedad rural romana en el Valle del Guadalquivir. Constituye el primer caso constatado sobre ánfora romana y es de excepcional interés para arqueólogos, epigrafistas y filólogos del latín vulgar.

This article considers two passages in which either the sky (Plin. HN 17.74) or the sun (Manilius 2.941) is described as ‘green’; it argues that in both cases such a colour epithet is out of place and proposes to correct uiridi caelo to nitido caelo in the former case, and uiridis … Phoebus to rutilus … Phoebus in the latter.

In Prudentius, the bodily resurrection becomes a figure for poetic immortality. Just as the author believes that his God will one day raise him from the dead, he expects and invokes a Christian reader to authenticate and authorise the fragile verbal records of a poetry that is insistently human and fallen. In other words, Prudentius’ metapoetics are perfectly in sync with his theology. After (I) presenting Prudentius’ transformation at the end of his Praefatio and setting out the terms and scope of the argument, this article (II) shows how the author puts himself at the mercy of his readers and patrons in the Peristefanon poems and then (III) considers the body and the resurrection in the Liber Cathemerinon. A short section (IV) on fictionality and belief opens up the argument, and a conclusion (V) advances it through a reading of the end of De opusculis suis. This metapoetic reading of Prudentius reveals that the author's hopes for an afterlife are expressed in and through the creative imagining of poetic and fictional scenes.

This article investigates the use, in Pliny's official writings of imperial praise, of the theme of ‘divine comedy’ – the idea that everything is for the best in the imperial world under the ideal emperor. An examination of this prominent theme can help us understand how Pliny handled the inevitable tensions in an imperial ideology which was grounded in the opposing figures of the ‘good’ emperor who deserved deification, and the ‘bad’ emperor who deserved tyrannicide.

An allusive plot of an incestuous brother-sister marriage runs through Virgil's story of Dido and Aeneas, signalled both by imagery comparing Dido and Aeneas to Diana and Apollo, moon and sun, and by allusion to Callimachean poems celebrating actual brother-sister marriages at the Ptolemaic court. Aeneas' departure from Carthage marks the relegation to the past of Alexandrian temptations and a journey to a future foundation based on exogamy, although Italy itself is not free from the dangers of incest and fratricide. Ovid's explicit tales of incest comment on Virgil's allusive narrative.

This paper examines the political content and context of Seneca's Natural Questions. It argues that, on the one hand, Rome is marginalized in the context of the immensity of the cosmos; and philosophy is elevated above traditional Roman pursuits, including political activity and historical writing. But at the same time the work is firmly anchored in its Roman geo-political context; Seneca situates himself in a long and continuing tradition of investigation of the natural world, where Roman writers can stand alongside Greeks and others; and the current emperor Nero is presented not just as princeps and poet, but as sponsor of geographical and scientific investigation.

This paper seeks to locate Seneca's treatment of earthquakes in Natural Questions 6 in the broader ancient seismological tradition; and, more particularly, to examine the initiatives which potentially transform his treatment into a highly original mode of literary-philosophical investigation not just into the cause of earthquakes, but also of how a ‘scientific’ understanding of them can at least partially quell the intimidating effect of such wonders of nature. On this approach Natural Questions 6 is perhaps concerned not so much with earthquakes per se but with shaping attitudes towards the natural world as a whole, inculcating in us a vision of such phenomena as but ‘normal’ aspects of cosmic functioning. By this method the book promotes within us a different, engagingly Senecan appreciation of cosmic integrity.

Phaedrus, far from being a Greek freedman striving to inscribe himself among the élite of Latin letters, was a Roman aristocrat masquerading as a man of the people to say in fable what could not safely be otherwise said. Modern biographical constructions are mostly fantasy. In coded terms the poet playfully reveals his gentle birth in Rome itself; he parades a mastery of the two most Roman contributions to literature, (Horatian) satire and jurisprudence; and he proclaims his belief in life's unfairness and in resignation to it, his contempt for both monarchs and mobs, and his admiration for the wise individual.