Abstract: In the final extant book of Lucan’s Bellum Civile , the Egyptian priest Acoreus outlines theories surrounding the Nile flood and previous attempts to access the source of the Nile (Luc. 10.194–331). This elaborate digression—which emphasises the river’s scale (Luc. 10.298–331), its relationships with celestial bodies (Luc. 10.225–35, 259–61), and the unknowability of its origins (Luc. 10.213–14, 271)—frames the Nile as a cosmic landscape, a universal wonder, and source of the sublime from a distinctly cosmic perspective. As has been shown by scholars such as Eleni Manolaraki, Lucan follows the lead of Homer and Manilius (Hom. Od. 4.477, 581; Manil. 3.273–74) to conceive of the Nile in celestial terms, the latter of whom represents a crucial if overlooked influence on the Bellum Civile . This article considers the Nile digression’s debts to Manilius’s conceptions of Egypt and his modes of inquiry into sublime and quasi-cosmic entities; the episode’s status as a site where scientific, didactic, and poetic traditions converge; and the metonymic implications of the Nile’s sublime character for our reading of Lucan’s Egypt. After highlighting the parallels between Lucanian and Manilian representations of the Nile, I will show that, while detailing how to inquire into the Nile’s secrets (Luc. 10.194–98, 268–87), Lucan’s Acoreus recalls Manilius’s guidelines for engaging with and understanding the (sublime) cosmos (Manil. 2.122–27; Volk 2001). I suggest that, in doing so, Lucan equates the river with Manilius’s cosmos and, by extension, the brilliant and dangerous shades of the sublime which it embodies. Finally, given Lucan’s metonymic use of Nilus to refer to Egypt, I then consider the implications of acknowledging the Nile’s sublime qualities for our understanding of the Bellum Civile ’s wider representations of Egypt and its peoples.

Abstract: This article examines the Historia Augusta ’s presentation of Egypt and considers the work’s reuse and repurposing of earlier themes associated with Egypt in Latin literature. The article will examine various themes: 1) the association of Egypt and its inhabitants with sedition and instability (a key focus will be the letter to Servianus ascribed to Hadrian as quoted in Quadrigae Tyrannorum 8); 2) the significance of Egypt for its various products, including grain but also luxury products such as linen, and thus with wealth and decadence more broadly; and 3) the interest shown in the Historia Augusta in Egyptian antiquities and the Egyptian language. Examination of the representation of Egypt in the Historia Augusta will show that the perspective of the long history of Roman involvement in Egypt is used in innovative ways which suit not just the subject matter and content of the Historia Augusta , but which also have ramifications for the late antique world of the text’s readers. Egypt emerges as a place which can imperil the empire and its rulers, with an uncertain and volatile population.

Abstract: This article examines the changing relationship between Rome and Egypt in Lucan’s Civil War . It applies philological and ideological analyses to the epic’s destabilisation and restabilisation of the body politic of the Roman state as discernible from two interrelated sets of imagery: firstly, the language of arboriculture and propagation as evoked by Virgil’s Georgics and Theocritus’s 17th Idyll ; and, secondly, the mortuary treatments applied to Pompey’s body parts. Key to the restabilisation of the res publica is Caesar’s interpretation of Pompey’s remains, which reproduces Egypt as “Other” in relation to Rome while acknowledging its now enduring presence within the empire.

Abstract: My article is divided into three sections. The first surveys the extant literary evidence for the details of the story of Danaus and Aegyptus. I then examine its importance for Statius’s narrative and unearth the outline of Egypt as a mythical landscape via the significant patronymic Statius uses ( Belides ) in the parade of ancestors—to be read in close connection with the foundational stories of Argos. In the third section, finally, I consider Aegyptus’s portrayal in the hope of amending scholarly views of his presumed innocence by offering a link to Silvae 1.1 and Domitian’s countenance on his equestrian statue in the Forum as seen through Statius’s eyes. In sum, this article reflects on Statius’s renewal of the overdetermined Labdacid mythic tradition, with the grounding of its Egyptian background. This article also contributes to historicising trends in the study of the Thebaid , as well as probing the diegetic role of ekphrasis in the poem and the ekphrasis’ possible, distilled reverberations in the cultural milieu of Domitianic Rome.

Abstract: This article explores the use of Isis and her associated deities in the rhetoric of Christian apologia , with Minucius and Tertullian as case studies. Apologists center the chronological, geographical, and political malleability of the Isiac deities in order to undermine those gods’ perceived power and to claim a space for Christians in Rome’s marketplace of religions. Parsing the apologetic construction of the Gens Isiaca illuminates Christianity in the second century and hence adds to our knowledge about the transition between its Apostolic and Constantinian periods. Furthermore, since Christian responses to Egypt belong to the turn from classical to late antiquity, the discussion also contributes to the broader conversation concerning Egypt’s role in western intellectual history.