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My argument is that one of the ways to ‘sustain’ the reading of Ovidian and other pre-modern poetry in the contemporary world is to explore it through the lens of the greatest challenge of our time, the ecological crisis. In this paper, I take hunting as a trope with which to examine the relationships between different inhabitants of the biosphere, using the stories of Actaeon and of the Calydonian boar hunt to show how Ovid’s Metamorphoses can draw the reader into engagement with clashes of needs and values, that have been at work since before the dawn of civilisation, and have reached a level of unprecedented urgency in the 21st century. more...

This article explores metamorphic outcomes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. While the poem may be steeped in constant mutability, for the most part gender emerges as a surprisingly static feature, and one that carries remarkable weight also when read beside the aftermaths of Ovidian transformations. Though there may be no fixed schema that categorically establishes disparities in the final destinations of male and female transformations, I show that there are significant gendered patterns with some perhaps unexpected consequences for class and social status also. In considering the poem’s main destinations, we can see distinct patterns of outcomes: heavily gender-based for trees, gender-significant (albeit not simply determined) for watercourses, gods, and stones, and gender-equal in the case of birds and other animals. The article tackles some of the unconscious gender preconceptions at play, and explores the enduring significance of gender for the Metamorphoses within the various outcomes of those who become victims, or occasionally beneficiaries, of Ovidian metamorphosis. more...

The aim of this paper is to put to ancient texts of the Roman period a question about which they themselves are remarkably coy: what makes a good (or bad) husband, or what are the characteristics that we would expect to see in such a creature? I begin by warning the reader of the trap which awaits both ancient texts and modern commentators, which is that discussions of what makes a good husband very quickly slip into discussions of what makes a good wife, as if it were more the duty of a woman to be a good wife than it is of a man to be a good husband. Despite the efforts of ancient texts to keep the focus away from the question of what makes a good husband, I attempt to interrogate a number of texts on a number of related questions. I begin and end with a well-known moment in Virgil’s Aeneid, when Mercury uses the word uxorius to disparage Aeneas’ behaviour in directing building work in Dido’s Carthage. The messenger god clearly intends the adjective as an insult, but my wider investigations suggest that in doing so he is drawing on only one end of the range of meaning available in this word. When I return to Aeneas’ husbandly credentials at the end of the paper, I suggest that the kind of Roman reader who would sympathise with Mercury’s scornful twist to the term uxorius might in fact see in the coldly political future husband of Lavinia the “ideal Roman husband”. Other Roman readers, however, would also be able to find justification in their culture for a more positive reading of his earlier manifestations: the bereaved husband of Creusa, who went back into the destroyed Troy to search for the wife he had lost (it has to be admitted, carelessly, if not misogynistically), and the almost-husband of Dido, whom he almost-loved in an almost-perfect almost-marriage, until Mercury came and spoiled everything. That Roman reader, however, would have to face the fact of a strong value in Roman discourse which emphasises above all else control of the self and especially of the emotions. It is this need for control that can undermine other Roman values and stop them from showing through the texts as much they otherwise might. One such value, surprisingly, is for love and tenderness as part of what makes a good husband. An element in my paper, therefore, is to contribute towards a challenge to the common modern notion that ancient marriage has nothing to do with love. more...

Feminist reading of the classics requires a difficult negotiation between the struggle to be heard and the struggle to avoid appropriation. The aim of this paper is to explore some few words of Virgil, especially those reacting to the mother of Euryalus’ reaction to her son’s death, and those of his readers through the ages, as a paradigm case of a wide theoretical and philosophical issue in feminist literary criticism. The fundamental question asked in this paper is whether feminist readers of the classics should concentrate on listening to differentiated female voices or on arguing for some form of what we might metaphorically call “equal rights” among the protagonists of ancient literature. more...

This paper examines the semiotics of props and other physical items in Plautus’ Curculio. The play is over-determined with props: a candle, a door, fragrant wine, water, a ring, which comes in twice (and has a twin), a letter to go with it, a seal with represented elephant-slaying sword, a missing eye, a bad gut, animal names, like the wolfy banker Lyco, and the weevil-parasite Curculio, and a property manager who comes out for a little chat with the audience about the real-life Rome they can see around them. I am particularly concerned with the most powerfully metatheatrical and metapoetic elements, including the preternaturally quiet door, and the ring which has a life of its own weaving through the play and indeed through the comic tradition. more...