There is a long history, going back to Plato and beyond, to the idea that writing is like having a child. In Ovid’s Tristia, however, metaphors of poetic parenthood are not merely a literary commonplace, but complex poetic statements that have significant implications for one of the central themes of his exile poetry – power. Who has the power to create poetry, and who has the power to determine its meaning? Using a gender-sensitive approach to Ovid’s parenthood metaphors, this article draws out the contrasts between his treatment of poetic maternity and poetic paternity, with close readings of Tristia 1.1, 1.7. 3.1 and 3.14. Ovid’s poetics of parenthood are then brought into dialogue with the gendered power dynamics of the Roman family and Augustus’ own self-fashioning as Pater Patriae, ‘father of the fatherland’. The article concludes with a new reading of the gendering of poetic creativity in Tristia 3.7, in which Ovid reflects on poetic immortality in a unique address to a female poet, Perilla.

Revue internationale de poétique latine, Dictynna existe sous forme électronique depuis 2004 et sous forme papier depuis 2007. Les analyses et les réflexions publiées dans cette revue portent sur la notion même de littérature (l'écriture référentielle ou réflexive, le statut de l'oeuvre dans la cité...), sur les genres littéraires (leurs définitions, leurs origines, leurs évolutions, leurs interactions...), sur les techniques narratives, sur les modes de représentation du réel (lieux communs, figures, thèmes...), sur des champs culturels comme le mythe, la religion, la morale, l'État..., ainsi que sur la réception et ses effets. Elles prennent aussi en compte les arts, la philosophie et les sciences en tant qu'instruments d'appréhension de l'homme et du monde.

This paper examines how a complex of ideas involving memory and materiality can offer a new way to view metamorphosis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Through the embodiment of power in transformed things, Ovid uses several of the episodes in the poem to push back against mutability and loss of speech, and to assert a different kind of permanence. Much of Ovid’s discourse about memory and materiality is linked through the trope of aetiology, i.e., the explanation of how something that exists now came into existence at a specific point in the past. Aetiology is by its nature a form of mnemonic device: it both highlights the enormous gulf separating past and present, and ensures temporal and cultural continuity. The aetiological narrative thus establishes its subject as a sign of permanence in an otherwise constantly changing landscape.

This paper explores how Menaechmus II of Syracuse unintentionally succeeds in removing Menaechmus I, his Epidamnian twin, from a society which has been exploiting him. The process of withdrawal runs through the play, and is achieved in two stages in which Menaechmus II assumes his twin brother’s meta-dramatic role: in the first play the newly arrived brother alienates the Epidamnian twin from his immediate social and family milieu; and in the second he almost leads the Epidamnians to have his brother isolated within the community on account of the latter’s alleged insanity. As servus bonus, Messenio initially discourages Menaechmus II from comic merrymaking, thus impeding the reunion of the siblings, but later assists in forwarding the plot: he thwarts the Epidmanians’ intention to seclude him and eventually facilitates the recognitio between the twins as well as their final decision to return to their native land. Thus, Menaechmus II’s quest for his twin, which seems to have been deferred when he first arrives in Epidamnus, is prepared for and effectively carried through via the evolution of meta-plots.

Perhaps no poetic genre is as central to the ‘Classical Tradition’ as is pastoral; at times, indeed, despite its ostensibly narrow and stylized terms of reference, pastoral seems to operate as the privileged space of European classicism, a genre into which everything Greek and Roman can be subsumed, and more besides. This paper takes as its case study the Adulescentia of Baptista Mantuanus (1447-1516): its readings of Mantuan’s early modern pastoral collection offer synecdochic glimpses of the reception-history of Virgil's Eclogues, and map the generic self-awareness of the Adulescentia itself.

L'articolo propone una nuova discussione dell'autobiografia come elemento chiave della satira luciliana e oraziana: si insiste sulla caratterizzazione del genere attraverso la fisionomia dell'autore e dettagli personali a lui pertinenti, nonché sul ruolo dell'amicizia con i grandi come garanzia dell'innocuità e della controllabilità sociale di un genere poetico costituzionalmente destinato a suscitare diffidenza, allarme, rigetto. L'analisi parte dalla quella specie di archeologia del genere prospettata nell'Epistola 2,1 ed è condotta attraverso una discussione di luoghi programmatici delle Satire: soprattutto 1, 4 e 2, 1, di cui è proposta un'analisi ravvicinata, che cerca di ricostruire il difficile filo logico che si dipana nel componimento nel nesso non sempre perspicuo tra aggressività e autobiografia.

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.

This article argues that Lucretius’ ‘tableau’ of Mars and Venus at the opening of the De rerum natura (DRN 1.29-43) imparts to elegy’s fixation with love and war a quasi-Empedoclean outlook on the creative and destructive forces that regulate the world and human life. In the context of an age that claimed to have begotten peace through war (cf., e.g., Augustus, Res Gestae 13), the elegiac opposition of love and war is a political theme with urgent philosophical ramifications. The implications of Lucretius-reception in Virgil (Aeneid 8) suggest parallel avenues for exploration in three elegiac case-studies: Tibullus 1.1 and 1.10; Propertius 3.4 and 3.5; Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.771-788. These examples suggest that elegy’s manifold juxtapositions of Mars and Venus, peace and war, and even militia amoris may be more frequently informed by Empedocleo-Lucretian implications than we are accustomed to think.