This paper explores the significance of key martial scenes depicted in the latter books of the Aeneid by examining connections between the republican tradition of monomachy, the impact of Augustus’s sweeping reforms, and the probable meaning of Vergil’s single-combat depictions. In concentrating upon the sacral dimension of these connections, it is argued that Vergil sought to convey a sense of the religious (and socio-political) chaos of his era through an enigmatic treatment of the spolia opima tradition.

The story of Pygmalion's love for his statue is best known from Ovid's version in Metamorphoses 10.243-97. Ovid tells how Pygmalion, an art- ist from Cyprus, disgusted with the licentious sexual conduct of the Propo- etides, created a statue of a most beautiful woman and fell in love with it. After Venus granted his wish to bring the statue to life, Pygmalion and his maiden had a child named Paphos and lived happily. This paper discusses how Pygmalion seems to have made his statue, what it was made of, and why the artist chose ivory as his medium. Various contentions are put forward: that ivory is an appropriate material for an idealistic (rather than mimetic) work of art; that its pliability echoes the change-ability of forms in Meta- morphoses; that Pygmalion's maiden as ideal woman is a construction made of different parts and not a whole; and that the creation of the ivory maiden of pieces resembles and acts as a symbol for Metamorphoses, also a whole epic made out of smaller narrative segments, and for Ovid's con- ception of ars, and erotic ars in particular. 1 SOURCES, TExT, AND INTERTExT Although Ovid gave the myth of Pygmalion its literary form, the tale existed before him. The Christian authors Clement of Alexandria and Arnobius recall the story of a Cypriot named Pygmalion who fell in love with a statue of the goddess Aphrodite. Their source is Philostephanus of

The language of the Romans possessed many verbs used to mean “to say” (aio, dico, loquor, ecc.), but only one of them expresses the efficacity of the speech: fari. In this paper, then, I will attempt to characterize as fully as possible the mode of speech that the Romans classify with this verb. As I will demonstrate, fari represents a way of speaking that far surpasses other, normal utterances in terms of its authority, efficacy, and credibility. However, it is for this very reason that fari also, rather paradoxically, always risks losing its trustworthiness and credibility. In the course of this study of fari, moreover, I consider some key terms in Roman culture, such as facundia, fama, and fabula, and the cultural models that these terms represent.

Penelope's memory is celebrated within the Odyssey as the source of her fame and her husband's reputation, but it has failed to attract much scholarly attention. In this article, I examine Penelope's claim that she will remember her husband's house (19.581, 21.79) in the context of other statements (in the Odyssey and elsewhere) about female memory. I conclude that Penelope's remembering takes on monumental and epigrammatic qualities, making it not just worthy of epic kleos but also the secure foundation for a tradition of female memory, traces of which can be found in texts as diverse as Herodotus's Histories and Xenophon's Oikonomikos.

One way in which Augustus both represented and attempted to effect his vision for the future of Rome was through the "social legislation" that regulated marriage and family life. This paper argues that authors such as Tacitus and Horace, who directly represent the Augustan laws, and Livy, who addresses the same issues in his reconstruction of the debate over the marriage ban in the Twelve Tables, see them as connected to ideological (re)formulations of both space and time. The metaphor of landscape, which is used repeatedly to represent the laws, is thus both an acceptance of and challenge to the terms of the new social landscape that was being drawn in Rome under Augustus.

Copies of the maidens from the south porch of the Erechtheion on the Athenian Akropolis were employed extensively in Augustan monuments in Rome, most famously in the Forum of Augustus. This paper examines the origins of the conflation of Vitruvius's term "caryatid" and the Erechtheion maidens as well as the semiotics of their employment as part of Augustus's iconographic vocabulary of triumph. By using a contextualized diachronic approach to evidence and adopting Broucke's argument that the copies of the Erechtheion maidens found in 1952 at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli were salvaged from the Domitianic Pantheon mentioned by Pliny as being "caryatids in a class of their own," this problematic conflation of terms can be traced back to the first century A.D.

Roman artistic works from the Augustan period begin to use the bodies of women, but also of men and children, to represent the empire as a household with Augustus as its head. Such representations manipulate developing metaphors of family loyalty and paternal control to express the transformative power of Augustus's imperial policies that made former enemies into subjects or cooperative participants in Roman society. The poetry of Ovid reveals the pervasiveness of this imagery and the range of interpretations placed upon it by a member of the elite now subject to an emperor.

Though Ennius's Annales stood tall in the Roman cultural landscape, what the poem was in origin and what it became in retrospect were not necessarily the same thing. Creating a text is neither identical to nor always coextensive with creating "literature." The former task requires the talents of an author. We are told that, at Rome, the latter took some carelessness, in particular the carelessness of Crates of Mallos, the Pergamene scholar who arrived on a diplomatic mission in the early 160s, stepped into a drain, and broke his leg. He spent his convalescence lecturing on the fine points of Greek literary exegesis and, in the process, apparently awakened his Roman audiences to the possibility that they too might have some literature worth studying. Under Crates' influence, says Suetonius, Romans of the later second century were inspired to popularize certain poems that were not yet widely known and, in doing so, both laid the foundations of grammatical study in Latin and cultivated an interest in that special set of socially and aesthetically marked texts that we (and they) call "literature." Prominent among these works was the Annales, which the otherwise unknown Q. Vargunteius brought to public attention through public recitations that attracted large audiences.1 [End Page 427] Suetonius's account of these developments makes for occasionally dubious history: neither the precise service Vargunteius performed for Ennius's poem nor Crates' contribution to that service is at all certain. What matters for our purpose, however, is less the specific nature of Vargunteius's role in popularizing the Annales than the fact that this poem should ever have required that help. Ennius's achievement may itself have limited the appeal or hastened the eclipse of Naevius's Bellum Punicum, the other epic on Suetonius's list of targeted works, but it comes as a surprise to be told that the greatest poem of the Roman republic once languished among carmina parum . . . divulgata. Did its eventual status really owe as much to later scholarly intervention as to original poetic genius? It was no doubt a "classic" for later generations, but what do we know about the Annales' contemporary reception? The testimony is elusive and equivocal. Perhaps the most deflating example of the interpretive problem it presents is a famous passage from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations that appears to suggest that Ennius's epic career originally met with criticism as well as praise (Tusc. 1.3): Sero igitur a nostris poetae vel cogniti vel recepti. quamquam est in Originibus solitos esse in epulis canere convivas ad tibicinem de clarorum hominum virtutibus, honorem tamen huic generi non fuisse declarat oratio Catonis, in qua obiecit ut probrum M. Nobiliori, quod is in provinciam poetas duxisset; duxerat autem consul ille in Aetoliam, ut scimus, Ennium. quo minus igitur honoris erat poetis, eo minora studia fuerunt, nec tamen, si qui magnis ingeniis in eo genere exstiterunt, non satis Graecorum gloriae responderunt. Poets thus received late recognition or welcome from our countrymen. Although we find in the Origines that guests at dinner were accustomed to sing to the pipe about the deeds of famous men, Cato's speech in which he criticized M. Nobilior for taking poets to his province (the consul [End Page 428] had, in fact, as we know, taken Ennius to Aetolia) nevertheless declares that there was no honor in this activity. And so, the less poets were honored, the less attention was paid to them, although those whose great talent enabled them to stand out in that activity nevertheless matched the glory of the Greeks. Cicero is illustrating here what became a commonplace of Roman literary history, that is, that literary culture came relatively late to the Romans' bellicose ancestors.2 The terms of his assertion, however, prevent him from being as clear a witness to that phenomenon as we might wish. The argument in the Tusculans—and it is important to recognize that this is an argument, not an exposition—conflates and distorts what are three quite distinct levels of...