This article calls for a new understanding of the relationship between classicizing and Christian discourses of exemplarity through a close reading of the figure of Scipio Nasica in Livy, Ab urbe condita Book 29 and Augustine, De ciuitate Dei Books 1–2. Nasica, whose selection as a uir optimus by the Senate in 204 b.c.e. has puzzled modern scholars, was a source of historiographical difficulty for Livy that prompted him to reflect upon exemplarity, mythmaking and the tenuous relationship between past and present. For Augustine, on the other hand, Nasica was a pagan, and thus imperfect, realization of Christian pietas and restraint from luxurious behaviour. Although differing in their interpretations of the Republican exemplum, both Livy and Augustine point to the complexities inherent in invocations of paradigmatic Roman maiores. The close study of Scipio Nasica thus reveals the classicizing precedent lingering behind the supposedly ‘Christian’ rejections of pre-Christian Roman culture in the De ciuitate Dei.

This article offers a new interpretation of Apuleius’ story of Cupid and Psyche. Most scholars have previously offered a second-time reading of this story, according to which the reader reaches Book 11 and then looks back at Psyche's story of fall and redemption as a parallel for Lucius’ life. Following Graverini's and other scholars’ emotional approach to the Metamorphoses, I argue that the ecphrasis of Cupid's palace within the story of Cupid and Psyche includes multiple re-enactments of the novel's prologue. These re-enactments invite the reader to undertake a first-time and immersive reading of this story, which focusses on Psyche's experience of Cupid and her reaction to his epiphany. In its use of immersion, this article draws from recent developments in cognitive narratology and pushes scholars of Apuleius to focus on the reader's immersive and emotional response in order to reassess the value of a second-time reading of the Metamorphoses.

The article argues that the famous story about the strike, exile and return of the Roman aulos players, which is recorded in the sixth book of Ovid's Fasti and referred to by other Latin and Greek sources, is based on a narrative model that already existed in Greece in the Archaic period. The study draws parallels between the tale of the pipers and the myth of the return of Hephaestus to Olympus, suggesting that, apart from similar plots, the two stories share many motifs, such as references to themes derived from comedy and satyr drama. Searching for a possible channel of transmission of the story from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome, the study explores the presence of satyric motifs in Etruscan vase-painting and Roman processional rites. It is furthermore emphasized that many of these motifs, which also appeared in lost satyr-plays, are echoed in Augustan poetry.

Use of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements (usually nouns or prepositional phrases) with a third (usually a verb) that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context.