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In Peristephanon 14, Prudentius creates an inventive verse rendering of the martyrdom of Agnes. Interestingly, in this poem, the portrayal of Agnes shares many features with the elegiac puellae of Roman love elegy. Prudentius’ classicising poetry is characterised by the mixture of genres and literary traditions, one of them being Roman love elegy. The affinities, however, between Prudentius and the latter tradition deserve closer attention. In this paper, by identifying vocabulary, themes and motifs of Roman elegy in Peristephanon 14, I will illustrate ways in which Prudentius’ Agnes can be read as a Christianised elegiac puella.

This article contributes to the discussion on the significance of the Latin Love Elegy, with regard to its language, themes and conventions, as a means of generic innovation in Valerius Flaccus’Argonautica. In particular, it will be demonstrated that in the scenes of lament and separation that take place in books 2 and 3, Valerius incorporates a selection of elegiac themes and motifs to enhance the effect and sensationalism of these episodes as well as the pathos in the rhetoric of his female protagonists (in particular the Lemnian wives and Hypsipyle as well as Clite, the wife of king Cyzicus). At the same time he will be seen to take a step further by inverting and/or refashioning some of these topoi and tropes so as to leave his own metapoetic comment on his negotiations with other genres in theArgonautica.

This paper reads Polyxena’s death inHecubavia a different lens and uncovers hidden aspects of Euripides’ technique in configuring her death as a heroic act. It argues that her death is a reshaped version ofkalos thanatos, with a binary, masculine and feminine, quality. In this framework a series of traditional, mainly epic and elegiac, motifs are employed (heroism, athletic victory, beauty, marriage) with multiple effects on Polyxena’s sacrifice. In conclusion, this article explores the implications of Polyxena’s death in the larger narrative ofHecuba.

The epigrams and other metrical texts inscribed on theTabulae Iliacaedocument an active engagement with the prior poetic tradition on the part of the artisans of these early Imperial reliefs, who adapt and reshape earlier texts in order to create for their Roman clientele a novel version of Greek myth and history.I reconsider the texts of three groups of inscriptions and argue for their significance to the history of Greek epigram. TheTabula Chigi(IG14.1296) transmits two elegiac couplets that employ dialectal variation to characterize the speech of Alexander the Great; a metrical irregularity reveals how the couplets were adapted to their inscriptional context. Variations in the two metrical signatures of Theodorus, the creator of theTabulae(IG14.1284;SEG14.626), reveal a nuanced attempt to characterize his relationship with his avowed poetic source, Homer. Verse summaries of theIliadon theTabula Sarti(IG14.1286) have been misunderstood because the sole surviving image of the tablet has been misread: a new edition shows the summaries’ close adaptation of Homer and uncovers the rationale for their unusual meter (anapestic tetrameter catalectic). An appendix discusses the whereabouts of theTabula Chigi, which is currently lost.

This article argues that in poem 4.3, Propertius depicts Arethusa not as a citizen wife, but as a concubine or an elegiac courtesan under exclusive contract to Lycotas. The Roman lexicon of marriage was frequently used to describe relationships other thaniustum coniugium, especially in love elegy. That is the situation presented in Propertius 4.3. Arethusa’s anxieties are primarily sexual, and thus identify her as something new in elegy: not a wife but a faithfulpuella. This poem gives us the poetic voice of a loving, loyal, contracted courtesan.

In his articleVoce voco. Ariadne in Ovids Heroides und die ‘weibliche Stimme’(Mnemosyne, this issue), Christoph Pieper proposes a metapoetic interpretation of OvidHeroides10 in terms of a gradual awakening (and subsequent faltering) of Ariadne’s literary voice. The present contribution serves as a supplement to this article, in that it provides some text linguistic support for this metapoetic reading. In a linguistically and narratologically oriented discussion of the structure ofHeroides10, it is shown how epic and elegy literally merge in this poem, for instance by means of an ingenious mixing of discourse modes and time frames, and a subtle play with the inherent ambiguity of the present tense. The analysis reveals by which formal means the poet manages to reconcile all of Ariadne’s different roles and perspectives in the poem (epistolary speaker, epic speaker, elegiac speaker, narrative character), and integrate them, by way of literary experiment, in one coherent text.

Abstract The article analyses how Ovid in the 10th letter of his Heroides experiments with the concept of a female voice within Roman literature. Ovid constructs Ariadne as a literary speaker against the background of (1) the Augustan elegiac tradition with its mostly male speakers, (2) the earlier phases of the Ariadne-myth in which Ariadne’s fate is determined by men (Theseus and Bacchus), and (3) the reception of this myth in Catullus’ famous ecphrasis in carmen 64. In the beginning of Heroides 10, Ovid shows how Ariadne develops consciousness of her own ability to speak. She develops from a heterodiegetic (epic) narrator to a homodiegetic (elegiac) speaker. In a second step, however, Ovid demonstrates that Ariadne is not only generally inexperienced in the field of literature, but that her attempt to re-shape her own story from a female perspective must necessarily fail. Her literary character cannot be separated from the previous (male) myth. At the end of the letter, she accepts her own literary immaturity when she asks Theseus to be the future narrator of her own fate. By showing that Ovid in his Ariadne-letter actually stages the failure of his protagonist’s attempt to free herself from a male literary tradition, I suggest that the Heroides should not be read as female literature, but as texts which reaffirm male dominance within Roman literary society.

Th e paradosis of Propertius 3.1.27: Idaeum Simoenta Iouis (cunabula parui) is either lacunose (N) or nonsensical (all other manuscripts). Gustav Wolff ’s celebrated. cum prole Scamandro runs against objections in terms of paleographical verisimilitude, intertextual relevance, and conformity with elegiac diction. Th is paper provides arguments in favor of. ruisse in pabula parta, which echoes two Homeric passages (Il. 5.773-7, 12.19-22) while pointing, intertextually, to Lucretius and the archaic forms of epic poetry. Paleographically, ruisse in pabula parta can easily have yielded Iouis cunabula parua. Moreover, Petrarch’s use of cunabula parua in 1342 suggests that his (lost) copy of Propertius, and the (now incomplete) manuscript A from which it was made in 1333, bore parua. If parui is a later correction, the standard theory, according to which the manuscript tradition of Propertius divides into the N and A families, is vindicated against the alternative theory recently put forward by James L. Butrica and Stephen J. Heyworth. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published, Accessible en ressource électronique via CIBLE

In the epilogue to Idyll 22, the hymn to the Dioscuri, Theocritus makes poetic claims concerning the reciprocity between poets and their laudandi. In making these claims, he compares himself with Homer, a comparison which has puzzled readers. This paper suggests that we can understand this comparison by recognizing how this epilogue engages with the elegiac poem by Simonides represented by fr. 11 W2, which belongs to the so-called new Simonides. Alexander Sens (1997) has observed that both passages contain a programmatic comparison with Homer. Pushing this observation, I argue that these parallels constitute an allusion to Simonides' composition which serves two purposes. First, it provides a parallel for Theocritus' comparison with Homer. Second, it introduces the anecdotal tradition concerning Simonides and the Dioscuri at a disastrous banquet in Thessaly, known most fully from Cicero and Quintilian, but also found in the Hellenistic era. By introducing this anecdote, Theocritus shows that his comparison with Homer is part of a literary game concerned with praising the Dioscuri. Through the allusion to Simonides, Theocritus positions himself as the winner in this game by reminding his laudandi that he has praised them better than either Homer or Simonides.

In the tattoo elegy, written on a papyrus from the second century BC, a speaker threatens to tattoo pictures of mythical sinners and their punishment on someone's skin. I try to show that this alludes to the ancient practice of tattooing a text which describes the offences of a criminal on his body. At the same time, the possible erotic context of the poem suggests that it modifies the mainly elegiac topos of leaving marks (notae in Latin) on the skin of the beloved (part 1). In the following parts I concentrate on the two most important literary forms the tattoo elegy combines, namely ecphrasis and catalogue. The poet stresses the catalogue form on different levels of content as well as of form (part 2). The combination of both forms is already prepared for in archaic poetry (part 3). The speaker exploits the uncertainty whether the description only tells what is represented in the pictures or whether it becomes a narrative expansion without a visible equivalent. This uncertainty is inherent in every ecphrasis, but in this special case, where the production of the picture is connected with the pain of the tattooing, it reaches a new degree of intensity.

Scholarly work on Juvenal has focused on the poet's self-fashioning as an 'angry man'. This paper, on Satire 6, shifts the emphasis to the object of the invective, in this case the Roman matrona. In creating a character who allegedly represents the typical Roman married woman of his day, the poet constructs an anti-matrona who resembles to a large extent her polar opposite in Roman thinking—the meretrix. A major way in which this effect is achieved is via intertextual connections with Latin love elegy, and the paper offers a detailed discussion of several passages in which the wife is constructed as elegiac puella and her husband as elegiac lover.

This study seeks to revive, defend and further illustrate the suggestion of Weil (1862) (adopted by Rossi (1953/4)) that the longer fragments of Tyrtaeus (nos. 10-12 in West 1992) were composed in five-couplet units (Weil called them 'strophes' but I prefer 'stanzas') that either alternate between exhortation and meditation (e.g. 10.1-30 or 11.1-20) or contrast, for example, the defensive and offensive modes of hoplite warfare (11.21-38), men skilled and unskilled in warfare (12.1-20) or the differing honors that await those war-heroes who die on the battlefield and those who return home alive (12.21-30 and 35-44). These units, moreover, often display a kind of responsion (similar to that found in ancient Greek choral poetry), which allows the poet to draw attention to the stanzaic architecture of the poem and emphasize parallels and contrasts between the individual stanzas. Weil's theory, moreover, provides us with evidence of later re-performances of these poems, especially Tyrtaeus 12, where the transmitted text shows clear signs of a subsequent performance (perhaps in classical Athens as the Platonic paraphrases in the Laws suggest) by a poet who was ignorant or careless of the earlier archaic practice.

Tibullus and Persius are characteristic examples of poets who in their programmatic poems take a stance as to the literary juxtaposition of rusticitas and urbanitas and side with the first. Thus, they express their opposition to the mores of urban society and support the rustic way of life, which points to moral probity, simplicity, frugality, an unaffected style, Roman thematology, an indifference towards praise and heroic action. Persius' views could be associated with Propertius' latent attack against Tibullus' rusticitas and can be interpreted as disagreement with Propertius' urbanitas. It is possible that in this way Persius expresses his disappointment in the replacement of some elegiac motifs of the past with elegidia and of the frugal, 'poor' Tibullus with the crudi proceres, who are praised in the aula Neroniana. Therefore, the fact that Persius is siding with Tibullus in his dispute with Propertius could suggest a poetic model more similar to his own.

This article considers the most prominent storm-narratives within the Ovidian corpus. These storm-narratives include the description of the storm in the first book of the Metamorphoses, the story of Ceyx and Alcyone in the eleventh book of the Metamorphoses, the story of Hero and Leander in the Heroides (Her. 18-9), and the three storm-poems in the first book of the Tristia (1.2, 1.4, 1.11). A brief summary on the literary tradition of storms provides the necessary context for my discussion of these individual passages. Three principal arguments are put forward in my analysis of the specific storm-narratives. Firstly, I point out that there are extensive verbal and thematic inter-connections between the various passages, and that this encourages us to see the 'storm theme' as a poetic subject which Ovid consciously exploits. Secondly, I focus on Ovid's treatment of the generic conflict between the epic and elegiac aspects of storms. Here I show that Ovid is capable of producing 'epic storms', but more often deploys storms within elegiac, or erotic, narratives. Thirdly, I consider how Ovid utilises the symbolic capabilities of storms to reflect the psychological turmoil of lovers like Alcyone and Leander, and exiles like himself.

Scholars are in agreement that Euripides' Aeolus is the source for the XIth epistle of the Heroides. Until the publication of the hypothesis of this tragedy in 1961, Aeolus was known to us only from a few fragments and some remarks by ancient authors. Though, however, some scholars, bearing in mind the hypothesis, made comparative studies on Euripides' play and Ovid's poem, the results of their studies seem to have been underestimated or even completely neglected by others who later wrote on Ovid's Heroides XI. F. Verducci1), for example, disconnects the Latin poem from its literary tradition and supports the assumption that the letter "unfolds a story of incest" (this idea is pervading the relevant chapter in her book) and that Canace is punished for her incest. For F. Spoth2) too, who favours Verducci's general interpretation of Canace's attitude, Canace's epistle is a letter of "pathologischer Erotik"; he further holds that "das Pathologische des Inzests", among other factors, has compromised Canace's elegiac role. Such interpretations are indebted to extra-textual factors, namely to the critic's ethical notions towards the sensitive theme of incest3). In this paper I intend to show that Heroides XI is not "an incest poem", that Ovid treats Canace's liaison with her brother Macareus as if it were a normal love affair, and that he presents the tragic denouement as the outcome of misfortune and not of moral devia