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This paper examines the Nemean episode of Statius’ Thebaid (4.646-7.104). It is argued, against recent interpretations, that the episodeis not simply a Callimachean digression from martial themes : the hostilities between Argives and Nemeans recall the bella plus quam ciuilia between Caesar and Pompey ; the incursion of the Argives violently destroys Nemea’s pastoral landscape ; and Nemea becomes the site of quintessentially epic events. The snake that kills Opheltes looks back to Vergil’s Calabrian water-snake in Georgics 3 (and the Culex) : Vergil’s didactic persona had warned not to fall asleep when dangerous snakes are around. The death of the child can also be read as a pessimistic inversion of Vergil’s fourth Eclogue. On a poetic level, we witness the epic dissolution of Nemea’s pastoral world. On a political level, the Nemean episode seems to suggest the impossibility of an Augustan Golden Age in the Flavian poem’s disturbing universe of nefas. Nemea is Statius’ paradise lost.

The subject of this paper is the rapport of two epistolary poems of Catullus (poems 50 and 65) to the rendition of earlier poets that follow them (poems 51 and 66) as read through the prism of a Callimachean epigram (34 G.-P. = 2 Pf.). The paper seeks to further not only our understanding of Catullus’s use of Sappho and Callimachus as both artistic models and actual poetic figures of his own work, but to demonstrate how widely the intertextual resonance of one poem, here a sepulchral epigram for a dead poet, can be spread throughout the composition of a later author.

Lucretius’ De rerum natura is one of the relatively few corpora of Greek and Roman literature that is structured in six books. It is distinguished as well by features that encourage readers to understand it both as a sequence of two groups of three books (1+2+3, 4+5+6) and also as three successive pairs of books (1+2, 3+4, 5+6). This paper argues that the former organizations scheme derives from the structure of Ennius’ Annales and the latter from Callimachus’ book of Hynms. It further argues that this Lucretius’ union of these two six-element schemes influenced the structure employed by Ovid in the Fasti. An appendix endorses Zetzel’s idea that the six-book structure of Cicero’s De re publica marks that work as well as a response to Lucretius’ poem.