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Gli eventi narrati nel quinto libro dell’Eneide segnano uno snodo fondamentale tra la prima e la seconda esade. Enea, organizzando i giochi funebri in onore di Anchise, si sostituisce a lui nel ruolo di pater della comunità troiana, mentre la fondazione di Segesta permette ai membri più anziani della flotta di porre fine al loro viaggio e di cedere, al contempo, il passo alle giovani generazioni, che aspirano a raggiungere l’Italia. Non è pertanto un caso che l’apice di questa sezione del poema sia rappresentata dal Lusus Troiae, una performance a metà tra spettacolo e atto cultuale, generalmente interpretata come un rito di passaggio, nato per commemorare il dramma dell’ultima notte di Troia. A partire da tali premesse, il presente contributo intende analizzare il modo in cui Virgilio ha sfruttato l’impianto metaforico della competizione sportiva per alludere alle iniziative portate avanti da Ottaviano per forgiare la propria identità politica di erede di Cesare, nel contesto dei torbidi che fecero seguito alle Idi di Marzo. Inoltre, focalizzandosi sui significati simbolici del Lusus Troiae, il contributo cercherà di mettere in luce il fatto che il poeta abbia interpretato i giochi funebri organizzati dal futuro Augusto in onore del dittatore come un solenne rito di passaggio tra padri e figli, tra vecchi e nuovi sistemi di potere, entrando in competizione con i propri avversari politici. Questa cornice interpretativa permetterà anche di illustrare i meccanismi con cui Virgilio, attraverso l’Eneide, ha cercato di apparire agli occhi del proprio pubblico come il protagonista di un ulteriore passaggio di testimone: adottando il modello dell’Iliade per narrare gli eventi del presente, egli si è posto quale legittimo erede di Omero nella nuova Roma di Ottaviano.

Ovid’s tale of Cipus, the returning general who discovers that horns have miraculously appeared on his forehead, combines narrative elements that point back to the poem’s early books with others that suggest historiography. Cipus’ own hybridity, therefore, figures a generic combination that simultaneously invites incredulity and belief. These different interpretative strategies feature in the different responses to the prodigy within the episode. The general’s determination to keep his horned presence, and the kingship it predicts, out of Rome makes space for Republican history to proceed as normal, while his likeness to other metamorphic figures within the poem complicates that strategy. As a representation of the Roman past, Ovid’s Metamorphoses necessarily summons up foreign, even tyrannical, comparands at the moment of their exclusion and questions the very reality on which history’s authority depends by grounding it in unbelievable stories. The second half of this article uses this Ovidian perspective as a vantage point for re-examining the blending of myth and history at the conclusion of Aeneid 6, intermittently recalled by the language and imagery of the Ovidian episode. Reading Vergil back through Ovid exposes the earlier poet’s refashioning of history to serve dynastic ends: Cipus’ prescription for the Roman future, ‘no kings’, sets up a Republican response to the entire Vergilian spectacle and suggests how its internal contradictions persist in the normative conclusions Anchises draws from it.

In this paper I take a close look at the way Vergil reworks Aratus’ weather signs in Georgics 1.393-397. This in turn leads to a new interpretation of these difficult lines and allows for a political and poetical reading of the passage.

This paper examines the sonic world of the Eclogues, arguing that 'resonance' might be a more appropriate term under which to consider it than the more commonly cited 'echo'. It examines not only the characteristic sonic effects of the Eclogues as poetry, but also the importance of a resonant acoustic to the pastoral genre. The discussion of resonance in the Eclogues lead to a reconsideration of current trends in the study of intertextuality and metapoetry as well as the implications of the term resonance for the reception of the Eclogues.

This article examines a case study in Silius Italicus’ Punica using two distinct but complementary approaches to Flavian epic intertextuality: a methodological move to expand and further incorporate computational tools within philology, and a literary theoretical move to combine intertextuality and thematic interpretation. The case study focuses on the debates in the Carthaginian senate described in Punica 2 and 11, both of which Silius adapts from similar scenes in Livy while also drawing on Vergil’s Aeneid. Part 1 of the essay introduces a new tool for finding a range of inexact verbal parallels based on a bioinformatics technique known as sequence alignment. After comparing the method with two other computational tools, Diogenes and Tesserae, we assess our tool’s ability to detect intertexts in the Punica already noted in traditional scholarship. We then analyse a series of computationally identified parallels that have not been commented on previously and find that all three tools can reveal morphologically and syntactically similar phrases of apparent literary interest. Part 2 focuses on a feature of Silius’ triangulation of Livy and Vergil, the characterisation of the Carthaginian senator Hanno. Through allusions to Vergil’s Drances, Silius turns Hanno from a shrewd judge of Roman character and strength, as he appears in Livy, into a far more ambivalent, Quisling-like figure. Moreover, the effect of blending the two sources is to make more porous the distinctions between nationalities and other categories that structure the reader’s response to Hanno and to the Punica as a whole. In concluding, we suggest that the context in which these literary interactions take place - diplomacy and debate - itself figures the kind of negotiation taking place at a textual level between the various works and their worldviews. The conclusion unifies the methodological and theoretical parts of the essay under the rubric of “triangulation”, in part by drawing on the application of the term in the philosophy of Donald Davidson.

In dem folgenden Beitrag wird das Thema des "Orientalismo Romano" nicht motivisch, sondern radikalphilologisch behandelt. Ausgehend von der Hypothese, daß die Sicherheit der neuen, augusteischen Weltordnung ein zugleich souveränes und phantastisches Denken der Grenze ermöglicht, wird der Anfang der Vergilischen Aeneis als das Paradigma einer poetischen Geschichtsdarstellung gelesen, in der das Abenteuer der Stadtgründung als das perpetuum mobile einer Traditionsbildung erscheint, die den Gegensatz, der sie hervorgebracht hat, sprachlich und denkerisch immer neu zur Geltung bringen muß. Während Catull noch, in dezidierter Umkehrung der odysseischen Fahrtrichtung, im Osten die Pathogenese seines römisch-modernen Dichtersubjekts erfährt, liefert Vergil das Erfolgsmodell einer hochgradig assimilationsfähigen "obliquen Originalität". In Horaz' späten Oden werden die überlieferten stereotypen Wahrnehmungen des Ostens zu präzisen Formeln ihrer inneren Unwahrheit. Nicht um die Fortschreibung einer allein an der Logik feindlicher Auseinandersetzung orientierten Wahrnehmung des Ostens geht es, sondern um die poetische Dokumentation und Kodifikation jener widerstreitenden Momente der Staatsräson, die ein nur juristisch-formales Denken nicht angemessen beschreiben könnte. Die augusteische Dichtung erreicht gerade in der Fragmentierung der ideologischen Totale eine Objektivität, die die Architektur des römischen Herrschaftsgedankens mit all ihren Rissen und Widersprüchen zur Darstellung bringen kann.

In this paper we attempt to show that the prologue of the first book of the Georgics, in which a series of deities is invoked to preside over the beginning of Vergil’s text, should be related to the pompa circensis, the grand procession of deities which preceded the celebration of the ludi circenses. The Vergilian passage is compared with the descriptions of the pompa to be found in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 7.72.1-18 and Ovid, Amores 3.2. It is also discussed in relation to the prologue of Georgics 3, where a pompa is explicitly mentioned. In addition, we relate the prologue’s prediction of Octavian’s apotheosis to the fact that the pompa circensis was Rome’s most remarkable display of images of the gods and hence a major focus for the categorization of the divine, particularly in Triumviral and early Augustan Rome.

This paper looks at some key examples of the symbolic use of the sea and of sea-voyaging as images for epic poetry, for original poetic enterprise and for the progress of the plot within a poem. Beginning from the emblematic use of this symbolism in Hellenistic poetics, it traces the treatment in Catullus 64 of the journey of the Argo as the primal voyage of both human culture and Greco-Roman literature, suggests some further allusions to voyage-symbolism to add to those already known in Virgil's Georgics, and examines the analogy between the progress of the Trojans' voyage and of the epic plot in Virgil's Aeneid. It concludes by looking at two odes of Horace, one of which is a test case for the limits of epic-ocean symbolism.

This paper looks at two examples of anagrammatic wordplay in Vergil and Claudian, and argues that in each case the poet carefully signals the presence of the anagram to the reader.