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This article draws attention to the thematics of running in Homer, seeking to make sense of the difference between catching up and overtaking as it applies to the two epics. It begins by exploring how the Iliad foregrounds the problems and strategies involved in catching up with one's opponent and getting ahead. It then goes on to show how, by contrast, the Odyssey presents a world where the act of overtaking and the alternation between the categories of first and last are of central concern to Odysseus on his way home in Books 8 and 9. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As he concludes poem 1.12, Propertius romantically asserts that Cynthia was prima and will be the finis. This article explores the supplemental readings that open up if we focus not on the temporal but on the geographical meaning of the word finis, a move invited by the poem itself and by the poems (1.8a, 1.8b, 1.11) with which it belongs interpretively, all containing several allusions to space. Drawing on both Lacanian and cartographic theory, I suggest that the poet's engagement with questions of fines reveals Propertius' response to a growing awareness and concern with issues of physical space and empire in the Augustan period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]