Cherchez la femme? Fadia in Plutarch's Life of Antony

In his Philippics Cicero more than once refers to Fadia, whom he depicts as Antony's wife, and to the children she bore him. He also discusses Fadia in his correspondence with Atticus. Plutarch was aware of the Philippics and much of Cicero's correspondence, and therefore of Fadia, and yet, in his Life of Antony, he says nothing about her. This paper examines three possible explanations for the biographer's silence: (i) an informed sensibility regarding the historical value of invective; (ii) the narrative design of this Life and its contribution to Plutarch's characterisation of Antony; (iii) Plutarch's (disturbing by contemporary standards) disapproval of an aristocrat's siring children on women of the lower orders – even by way of legitimate marriage or concubinage. It is, it appears, the ensemble of these factors which excludes Fadia from Plutarch's biography, and the pertinence of each adds to our appreciation of Plutarch's biographical principles.

The Man in the Background: The Search for Maecenas

Since the late sixteenth century parts of the ‘imperial frieze’ of the Ara Pacis have been known. The most striking figure in the background of the southern frieze is that long thought to be a portrait of Maecenas, the Etruscan prince and literary patron of the Augustan era. This article attempts three things: to discover 1.Where and how this identification originated,2.What evidence there now is for that identification, and3.What alternative identifications can be offered.The bibliography is substantial, the trail is complicated and highly paradoxical, and fantasy has often played a large role. The ‘evidence’ in play for centuries has sometimes evaporated into thin air. The identities proposed are, in fact, numerous. Not of least interest is the hidden or mistaken identity, in turn, of crucial modern scholars. A method is proposed at last for evaluating the identifications of this background portrait, including obvious comparison with other background figures. This analysis emphasizes how much is still not known about the most famous piece of Augustan art. An attempt is nevertheless made in the last analysis, to support what can be offered, in the light of current understanding, as the most plausible identification.

Patronage, Poetic Lineage, and Wordplay: A New Dedicatory Acronym in Vergil's Sixth Eclogue

This article identifies and defends a previously unobserved dedicatory acronym to Maecenas in the second half of Ecl. 6.69 (MAEC- in reverse: Calamos, En Accipe, Musae) and contextualizes the specific linguistic choices and central themes of that acronym within a broader network of Vergilian word games. I argue that the dedicatory acronym in Ecl. 6.69 shares linguistic and thematic features with numerous previously identified Vergilian word games, and that from this network of wordplay emerges a common discourse on poetic lineage, genre, and patronage. An awareness of this network of wordplay in Vergil's corpus provides a starting point for a more comprehensive and nuanced interpretation both of individual Vergilian word games and of Vergilian wordplay as a general phenomenon. On a literary level, the conclusions I draw from the MAEC- acronym and the relationship between wordplay and various thematic issues inform a clearer picture of generic shifts and expectations in Eclogue 6, the Eclogues in general, and Vergil's corpus more broadly, and contribute to an understanding of the subtle ways in which Vergil negotiates issues of patronage in his first collection.

A Dung Beetle's Victory: The Moral of the Life of Aesop (Vita G)

The Life of Aesop is an entertaining yet profound account of Aesop's life dating from the first to second centuries ad. Although it is widely agreed that the Life of Aesop may be read as a ‘metafable’, there has been, in my view, a widespread and perversely negative interpretation of the supposed moral of this life story: that ‘pride comes before a fall’. This supposed moral is not borne out by the ending, in which Aesop's prophecies of doom prove to be correct, the Delphians are thrice punished for executing Aesop, and Aesop himself achieves everlasting fame as a storyteller. In this paper, I will argue that a more fitting moral for the Life of Aesop is that ‘even the weakest may find a means to avenge a wrong’. This is the moral that accompanies the quintessentially Aesopic fable of the dung beetle, the hare, and the eagle in which a tiny dung beetle triumphs over a powerful adversary. This fable is pointedly narrated by Aesop to the Delphians just before he is put to death. By reading the Life of Aesop as an exposition of this fable, I will demonstrate that Aesop, just like the dung beetle, is not the loser but the ultimate victor.

Women and Genre in Calpurnius Siculus’ Eclogues

This article aims to examine the ways in which the Calpurnian text converses with the earlier pastoral tradition focusing on the women identified in the collection. Leaving aside the mythical female figures who are also traced in the collection (e.g. Pales and Venus), this study focuses on all the female characters mentioned by male figures, trying to show that women in the Eclogues, among other elements (such as subjects, motifs, intertexts, language and style), constitute a significant means by which Calpurnius shows originality and generic evolution.It is argued that the female characters in Calpurnian pastoral are the erotic objects of the herdsmen and the recipients of their songs and in that sense they recall the pastoral tradition (Greek and Roman) that Calpurnius inherited. What is more, they are central metapoetic elements which show Calpurnius’ metaliterary engagement with gender in a collection that stresses the originality of the Neronian pastoral. Most importantly, however, they incorporate features and elements from other literary genres (mostly from Roman comedy and love elegy) and in that sense they constitute a significant means by which Calpurnius maintains the generic tensions employed by his literary antecedents (i.e. Vergil) and broadens the limits of pastoral.

The Gift of Aphrodite in Iliad 24.30

In the famous story of Paris’ choice, he favoured the goddess who offered him ‘grievous lust’ (μαχλοσύνην ἀλɛγɛινήν). This is what Homer tells us in Il. 24.30. It has not often been noticed that Cratinus (5th cent. BC) and Lucian (2nd cent. AD) mention another gift – that Aphrodite's bribe was to make Paris irresistible to women. This alternative version happens to correspond to a high degree with several literary and artistic representations of the same story, telling it in a manner that implies or suggests the variant account. This paper argues that the set of instances containing this alternative gift may be based on an actual episode within the oral tradition. Homer himself seems to hint at this link when he refers to the ‘grievous lust’ of Paris. The Homeric reference to the alternative gift was acknowledged by Herbert Rose in 1951, even though he rejected the line in Homer which mentioned the Judgement of Paris (Il. 24.30). This seeming contradiction of Rose's accepting the alternative gift while rejecting the Judgement makes his explanation rather atypical. His uncommon viewpoint, nevertheless, will allow us to identify the presence of this alternative gift in many literary and artistic works, whether explicitly mentioned, implied, or suggested.

A Brutal Hack: Tyranny, Rape, and the Barbarism of Bad Poetry in Ovid's Pyreneus Episode

Poet-figures in Ovid's Metamorphoses have been the object of much study, especially those silenced by the powerful, but little attention has been given to Pyreneus. Immediately before the famous contest of the Muses and Pierides, the former briefly narrate their attempted rape by the usurping Thracian tyrant Pyreneus and his precipitous death while trying to fly after them. The few critics who have touched on this episode have tended to focus exclusively on one aspect, be it the poetic, sexual, political, or religious. None has provided a holistic interpretation which does justice to the complex interplay of these four dimensions or to Ovid's witty and characteristic reification of figurative language.Pyreneus is simultaneously an invading usurper, an attempted rapist, an impious theomach, and, on the poetic plane, a talentless plagiarist or derivative imitator, who tries to appropriate others’ work but bathetically and disastrously fails. The interrelation of these four roles, each troping the others, throws light on all, and Pyreneus needs to be contextualized among the Met.'s other tyrants, rapists, and theomachs, as well as its poet-figures. The episode itself, derivative and overstuffed with Ovidian motifs, is mimetic of the sort of narrative bad (would-be) poets like Pyreneus produce.

Life-Change and ‘Conversion’ in Antiquity: An Analysis of the Testimonies of Dion of Prousa and Aelius Aristeides

Our image of ‘conversion’ takes its form from well-known episodes in the lives of St Paul and St Augustine. Paul's life is turned around by a blinding vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus (Act. Ap. 9.1–22); Augustine is directed by an oracle to a scriptural passage that ends his hesitations and sets him on the course that he has long known he should take (August. Conf. 8.12). Very much in parallel, although in a non-Christian context, are crisis-provoked life-changes reported by the Second Sophistic orators Dion of Prousa and Aelius Aristeides. Aristeides finds his life transformed by the intervention of the god Asklepios; Dion receives – he claims, from a god – advice that, put into effect, makes him the philosopher he has aspired to be. Were Dion and Aristeides ‘converts’? Adopting a conservative definition of ‘conversion’, I will argue that their accounts – though not autobiographies in the strict sense of that term – can legitimately be called ‘conversion narratives’. I will then test each for its goodness-of-fit to two influential life-change models, the first developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner in the context of initiation rituals, and the second, Lewis Rambo's process model of conversion.