In Virgil’s Bucolics the shadow has a double value: the positive one of protection and refreshment, highlighted right from the initial image of Tityrus lentus in umbra, and the hostile and fearful one in the ending of ecl. 1, reflecting the perspective of Meliboeus, who has lost his certainties. The shadows of the evening do not provide serenity to Corydon in ecl. 2; on the contrary, they show him his extraneousness to the bucolic world. And in ecl. 9 the impending night, heavy with rain, prevents singing. The shepherd of ecl. 8, who expresses his suicidal intention while the shadows of the night are dissipated by the dawning day, seems to overturn this scheme, but the inversion also underlines his exclusion from life (the dies almus brings death to him). Only in a peaceful and carefree bucolic world the shepherds can sing: but many Virgilian characters, for different reasons, remain excluded from it. The last of them, in ecl. 10, are Gallus and Virgil with him, who both experience the same exclusion and the same failure.

The paper argues for a new architectural pattern in Horace’s second book of Satires, complementing the schemes of Boll and Ludwig. The book is structured around the investigation of ethical options. The poems evaluate, pro and con, three major approaches to the happy life - a structure probably influenced by Cicero’s De Finibus. Horace wades through virtue ethics (2.2-3), materialist ethics (2.4-5), and dependent ethics (2.6-7), and he frames his investigation by reflecting on options (2.1, 2.8). A book for a mid-life crisis, Satires 2 consolidates and critically evaluates a menu of options for living.

This text examines two questions about Augustan marriage policy that remain unresolved in research. On the one hand, it explores who Antonia Minor was supposed to take as her husband in a second marriage at Augustus’ request, and on the other, it examines the question of why the emperor did not arrange a new marriage for his designated heir Tiberius after his divorce from Iulia. Based on a passage in Flavius Iosephus and other evidence, it is shown that Augustus planned a marriage between Antonia Minor and Tiberius, which in turn was prevented by Antonia Minor. Even if this marriage did not occur, this and other planned marriages involving Antonia Minor’s branch of the family show that Augustus was carefully pursuing political goals. It is shown that he systematically integrated the gens Antonia into his family circle, deliberately linked several of his designated heirs with M. Antonius’ descendants and thus created the possibility that the subsequent emperors, as descendants of Augustus and Antonius, could equally secure the loyalty of political elites, royal dynasties and entire parts of the empire that had once sworn allegiance to Antonius in the civil war.

The study of the position of ἐγώ in the iambic trimeter of Greek Theatre has been added to with the data from comedy (Aristophanes and Menander) and conclusions have been drawn, comparing them with those from tragedy: Aeschylus and Sophocles, on the one hand, and Aristophanes and Menander, on the other, seem to be opposed in their tendencies.

Ancient traditions about Kadmos were invariably tied to the city of Thebes. Herodotus relates however the heroic genealogy of a clan in Sparta that prided itself of its Kadmeian origins: the Aigeidai, labelled by Herodotus “a great tribe in Sparta”. This article sets out to trace the deep traditions that informed the heroic genealogy of the Aigeidai. Disentangling the web of narratives and charting its strands in chronological sequence, the article shows how traditions about the leading figures in the genealogy of the Aigeidai were not only rooted in different locations, but in close conversation with the local environment from which they emerged. In the final section, the article offers an essentializing interpretation of the tradition: it shows the Aigeidai, a warrior band initially coming from Thebes, as a prominent clan in Sparta that asserted itself, with remarkable resilience, against Heraklid claims to prestige and leadership.

The essay shows that Ovid believed to know why he was relegated to Tomis and had every reason to avoid lying about it; therefore, his assertions are to be considered trustworthy. They are consistent with each other and seem to point to a stage representation of Ovid’s works in which Augustus was mocked. It was organized by influential people who wanted thereby to protest against the lex Papia Poppaea. Julia minor may have taken part in it. The challenge of Augustus’s political and perhaps paternal authority and the emperor’s antipathy against the erotic revolution for which he made Ovid responsible are the main causes of the relegatio. The main alternative explanations are shown to be incompatible with the sources and with probable assumptions about human behavior.

This article provides critical notes and conjectural emendations to five of Avianus’s fables (8; 15; 17; 34; 37), and a new interpretation of a controversial passage in the preface, namely fabulas (…) quas rudi Latinitate compositas elegis sum explicare conatus.

This essay explores the lex Manilia de libertinorum suffragiis and patterns of tribunician legislation. The law, which was passed on 29 December 67 BC, provided for freedmen to be enrolled into their manumitter’s tribe, instead of one of the four urban tribes. Initially, the speed with which Manilius pushed through his initiative resulted in procedural errors and so led to the abrogation of law. But he was not alone in his efforts to rush a law through the People’s Assembly as fast as possible. Roughly half of all rogationes in the late Republic can be dated to the beginning of a tribune’s year in office. This essay argues that the time lag between tribunes and consuls respectively taking office resulted in a power vacuum, which the tribunes of the plebs attempted to exploit.

Diodorus Siculus frames a number of his war narratives with a statement of the war’s formal name and duration. Although Diodorus was no mindless copyist of his own sources, the present paper argues that this narrative technique was derived from Ephorus, which would make him the earliest known historian to use war names and durations extensively and systematically to structure his account. Such an attribution sheds considerable light on the organization of Ephorus’ Histories and its role in the evolution of this now widespread historiographical technique.