This research aims to explore the ways in which creative writing may be used as a pedagogical tool in the Latin language classroom, in particular how creative writing may benefit students in Latin prose composition. The lesson sequence delivered as part of this research was undertaken in an academically-selective, independent coeducational school in an affluent, inner-metropolitan area. The sequence of four 60-minute lessons formed part of the language (as opposed to literature) portion of timetabled Latin lessons for a group of nine Year 12 students (aged 16–17). As part of their language lessons, the students had been following a course of study in prose composition based upon Andrew Leigh's (2019) Latin Prose Composition: A Guide from GCSE to A Level and Beyond1. The lesson sequence was intended to build on this work by making use of, and thus consolidating, grammatical constructions and vocabulary which the students had already encountered in the context of prose composition. The sequence was designed in such a way that students were required to apply their linguistic knowledge in new and creative ways. Students' responses to the various activities were positive and they expressed enjoyment in the methodologies.

Surviving in excellent condition on papyri and wax tablets, the Commentary and other late antique shorthand manuals offer a new way to investigate the complexity and diversity of non-elite intellectual culture in the later Roman Empire. Stenographical skill and obedience were hymned by elite authors, but the methods used to inculcate that skill and extract that compliance have rarely been examined. This article, the first to subject shorthand pedagogy to social historical analysis, argues that the difficulty of the shorthand system increased the potency of the ideological lessons it delivered to its (predominantly non-elite, often enslaved) students. It finds that, in addition to technical instruction, the Commentary communicated a coherent, if troubling, vision of late ancient society and of the proper dispensation of power within it. Student-authored marginalia point to the successes and limits of the Commentary's moral pedagogy and raise fresh questions about how non-elite communities developed their own intellectual identities and traditions.

Rhet. Her. 1.2 quoad eius fieri poterit contains the surprising reading quoad eius. Earlier scholarship has debated the authenticity of this reading and its relationship to quod eius. A survey of the sources shows that quod eius appears in a number of inscriptions as well as in the transmitted text of nine passages within surviving Latin literature. So that phrase must be authentic; it appears to have arisen as a limiting formula in the language of the law. In two other passages, quoad eius appears in inferior manuscripts that lack authority, while the reading transmitted by authoritative textual sources is quod eius. Rhet. Her. 1.2 is the only passage in which quoad eius is the transmitted reading. This phrase is also linguistically problematic. Hence it is very likely to be corrupt. It probably arose as a conflation of quod eius with quoad, both of which are attested in similar contexts. On balance, it seems more likely that the original reading in this passage was quoad.

Imagine a student reading Odysseus’ Cretan tale at Odyssey 19.172–84. When faced by a string of unfamiliar names – in addition to ‘native Cretans’, there are Achaeans, Cydonians and Dorians, as well as the individuals Minos, Deucalion, Idomeneus and the speaker, Aethon (Odysseus in disguise) –, they use their digital edition to find out more about each of these people and their places of origin. A personal name opens an online encyclopaedia entry, while clicking on a place launches an emerging world beyond the single text – an online atlas that provides information about the place's toponymy, form and exact location as well as links to other resources (textual and archaeological, ancient and modern) about this place, including those to which our student has contributed. The year? 2023 (Figure 1).1

The present paper deals with the first Ptochoprodromic poem's treatment of the early patristic tradition. Its focus is on the conjugal life of the Ptochoprodromic couple, whose interaction is compared to the precepts of the Byzantine Fathers on the ideal Christian marital life. Evidently, the poet parodies the tradition to which the said precepts belong, offering a comic image of the ideal Christian couple in which gender roles have been reversed. Moreover, the final scene of the poem, where the husband disguises himself, is linked to the hagiographical tradition of cross-dressing women, as well as of male saints in disguise.

This article examines ancient depictions of the death of Troilus in art and literature and challenges the widespread belief that the Iliad implies an alternative version of the myth in which Troilus dies in battle. In particular, it argues that the death-in-battle interpretation is both insufficiently supported by the internal evidence and incompatible with the external evidence. Given the evident popularity of the story of Achilles’ ambush of Troilus in the Archaic period, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the poet of the Iliad knew the story of Troilus’ death by ambush. That the poem's only reference to Troilus does not contradict this story, and possibly even alludes to it, should persuade critics of the strong likelihood that the popular story of Troilus’ ambush at the fountain was also the one in the poet's mind.

This article brings together two well known literary readings: the obscene interpretation of Catullus’ passer, and the interpretation of Ovid, Amores 2.6 as a self-conscious, creative imitation of Catullus 3. It will first offer a further reason to think that Catullus’ contemporary readers understood c.3 as a poem about impotence, and then go on to suggest that Ovid had some fun with this interpretation in his psittacus-poem.

The idea that the sea is a dangerous and alien element in which one is at the mercy of higher powers, is deeply imbedded in Mediterranean culture, and has many parallels in Greek and Roman literature. From an Epicurean point of view, however, such higher powers belong to the realm of irrational beliefs which could threaten one's ἀταραξία (‘peace of mind’). What counts in Epicureanism is the rational calculus of all factors in order to minimize the influence of τύχη (‘chance’) on one's endeavours. This article explores how the Epicureans thought about the sea and its many dangers. It tries to establish under which circumstances the sage will travel by sea and gives special attention to Diogenes of Oenoanda's letter (fr. 71 + NF 214 + fr. 72 + fr. 70) about the shipwreck of Niceratus and his friends’ failure to minimize the agency of chance.

This article argues that the discovery of Pythagorean volumes in Numa's tomb in 181 b.c. may have played a significant role in the conception of the meeting between Numa and Pythagoras in the last book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, since several features of this event integrate very well into the discourse at the heart of Book 15 on the Greek origins of Roman culture and literature, on the immortality of poetry, and on the relationship between poetry and power. The article further argues that Ennius’ Annals Book 15 may have covered the events up to 179, if that really was the year of Nobilior's dedication of the Aedes Herculis Musarum, and included the discovery of Numa's books in 181; and hence that Ovid may have used the Ennian account of this discovery as a model for the Numa–Pythagoras episode, appropriating the poetic and political meaning that it already had in Annals Book 15.

This note shows that Virgil's description of Fama at Aen. 4.173 is inspired by Sappho, fr. 44.12 Voigt.

One of the most remarkable features of the language of early Greek writing is a pervasive rhetorical strategy which consists in personifying objects for the purpose of identifying humans closely associated with them. Such ‘speaking objects’ have no Semitic parallel; how, then, is their conventional status in the Archaic Age to be explained? This article first considers the formulaic language of speaking objects, which is no straightforward transcription of speech, and seeks to explain where it comes from. It then turns to the question of why writers employed the curious strategy of personification by setting it in the broader context of early Greek writing and literature. Variously analogous to herms, slaves and skytalai, speaking objects are shown to have been conceived as messengers acting on behalf of their senders by not speaking in their name.

The article discusses a passage in book 15 of Pliny's Natural history which lists Livia among the creators of new fruit cultivar. It argues that Livia's unique position within and outside her family explains why she appears to be the only woman remembered for her direct involvement in arboriculture. The article then discusses grafting, which in ancient Rome was charged with many symbolic meanings, and contextualises the appearance of Livia in horticultural discourse within the ideology of the Augustan era and the increased interest in horticultural matters at that time.

In the poetic epistles addressed to his unnamed wife, Ovid makes a number of recognisably consolatory exhortations that poignantly reframe her perception of grief. By depicting exile as a form of living death and his departure from Rome in Tristia 1.3 as a funeral, Ovid is able to cast his wife in the role of a mourning widow whom he consoles from his exilic grave. The moment of their separation becomes a traumatic event that gives the wife the emotional endurance to handle any future adversity. Such appeals to earlier resilience, frequently found in consolation, are employed in Tristia 3.3 and 5.11. In these poems, Ovid also draws upon the consolatory argument that death is not a malum and reframes this same notion about exile to assert his status as a relegatus to his wife and a broader audience. This paper connects Ovid's use of these ideas with the broader tradition of Graeco-Roman consolation, expanding our understanding of the genre and the Tristia's place therein.

Among Latin rhetorical treatises and imperial writers on technical subjects, the Institutio Oratoria stands out for the sheer number of quotations of poetry that Quintilian incorporates into his discussion. Whereas Cicero's De Inuentione has 13 quotations of poetry and the Rhetorica ad Herennium 16, the index locorum in Russell's Loeb edition of the Institutio records 320 quotations from Greek and Latin poets. Despite the distinctive scale of Quintilian's engagement with poetry, scholars have not taken much interest in it, perhaps under the influence of the persistent belief that in the imperial period ‘the introduction of poetry into orations as an ornament of style’ was ‘often a useless affectation’ or that such quotations constitute mere ‘window dressing’. Early twentieth-century treatments such as that of Cole, who evaluated Quintilian's citations of poets for their ‘textual accuracy’, and Odgers, who used the relative infrequency of Quintilian's quotation of Greek literature to establish the limits of Quintilian's knowledge of Greek, set a tone of dismissiveness in relation to any question of how and why Quintilian quotes poetry as he does: Cole and Odgers attribute any ‘discrepancies’ between Quintilian's quotations and those found in the manuscripts of the poets he quoted to a (presumed) tendency to quote from memory that made him ‘rather liable to errors’. Later critics have extrapolated from their findings to attribute to Quintilian the ‘grave deficiency’ of ‘know[ing] little directly of the major Greek writers’ and to diagnose ‘intellectual stagnation’ in his engagement with Latin literature. These negative judgements are, of course, in line with the traditional assessment of Quintilian as ‘neither a great writer nor a great thinker’, one who is ‘more often belittled than understood’.

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.