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• Phoenician Vengeance: Dido, Anna, and the Lore of the Numicus

  5–19.

  Lee Fratantuono

  Views:

  125

  Scholarly attention has been paid to the depiction of the Carthaginian sisters Dido and Anna, particularly in Virgil’s fourth Aeneid. Close attention to the later portrayals of Anna in Ovid (Fasti 3) and Silius Italicus (Punica 8) reveals a portrayal of Dido’s sister as the unwitting agent of the fulfillment of the queen’s curse against Aeneas. The hitherto unappreciated connection between the festival of Anna Perenna and the date of the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar may be seen in light of Dido’s curse on Aeneas and the Julian gens descended from his son Iulus.

• Augustus as Princeps Senatus

  203–218

  Andrei Y. Markelov

  Views:

  426

  Octavian took the title of princeps senatus during the first lectio senatus of his long reign. The article deals with the role of the title of princeps of the Senate in the system of government under Augustus. I argue that the first Roman Emperor attached importance to his position of the princeps senatus not only in the context of the First settlement but during his whole long reign. The Emperor was eager to highlight the overall importance of this post. Moreover, he defined his place in the Senate with this position and it had functional significance for him during sessions of the consilium publicum. The restoration of the title of princeps senatus took place in a new circumstance. The reality of the epoch led to some transformations in the title’s functionality.

• MA VE PU again: Kill Caesar! (Georg. I 424–471)

  73–90

  Neil Adkin

  Views:

  200

  This article deals with the Virgilian onomastic in Georgic I 429-433: some fresh considerations are advanced. In particular this sphragis would seem to endorse an overlooked acrostic: “Kill Caesar!”

• When elephants weap.: Plin., Nat. 8, 20-21

  75–88

  Ágnes Darab

  Views:

  222

  The literature of classical antiquity has lost much of its attraction, and the circle of its possible readers has been narrowed significantly. Even in literary criticism that reaches beyond classical philology, its position has dwindled to a source of motifs, topics, archetypes, and we clearly lack such interpretations as would present ancient literature from an angle that would appeal to the readers of our age. This paper is devoted to an analysis of the 20th and the 21st chapters of the zoological part (book 8) of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. Through a comparative interpretation that is attentive to the cultural-medial aspects of the textual locus, the essay provides a paradigm for uncovering the meaning – which would appeal to readers in the 21st century – in ancient texts with the help of different methodological perspectives, in this case the simultaneous application of narratological and comparative approaches.