Given everything that we know about Latin literature as an outgrowth from Greek, about the persistent habit of Roman poets of fashioning their works as always and pervasively in dialogue with Greek, and more generally about the grounding of Roman elite education in Greek, shouldn’t we reasonably expect some actual surviving poetry in Greek from our canonical Latin poets? With just enough interesting exceptions to prove the rule, such poetry is conspicuous by its absence. In early modernity, in contrast, an analogously deep and learned engagement with an older literary and linguistic tradition (in this case Latin, now in the ‘Greek’ role), coinciding with the development of newer vernacular possibilities, leads to a situation in which poetic publication is possible either in the newer language or in the older one, or sometimes in both at the same time. If (say) Petrarch or Milton can have a bilingual poetic oeuvre, why not Virgil or Ovid? The chapter offers some close-up exploration of this ‘blind spot’ in ancient intertextual behaviour before taking a look at one late, partial, and spectacular exception, involving the fourth-century CE poet Ausonius.

Paul’s Incarnational Ethic: In Galatians, Paul encourages the Galatians to imitate Jesus’ self-gift by sharing themselves with other believers and by considering what belongs to others in the community as their own.

The sea battle at Artemisium is the third of the six battles of the Persian expeditions against Greece; see 7.198–239n. The episode has the following structure: (i) lead-up (1–5), which includes a Greek catalogue and a Greek pre-battle council; (ii) first day of battle (6–11); night-time storm, which is analysed by the narrator in terms of a divine intervention (12–3); second day of battle (14); third day of battle (15–7); and (iii) aftermath (18–26), which includes two ‘after-battle battlefield’ scenes (one of which actually pertains to the Battle of Thermopylae) and a Greek after-battle council. See Immerwahr 1966: 263–7.

The Histories begins with a one-sentence Preface, in which the narrator introduces himself with his name and hometown, defines the nature of his work (historical research), its aim (to preserve the memory of the past), its subject (‘things made to happen by humans’, and especially ‘great and marvellous achievements displayed by Greeks and barbarians’), and ends, in epic fashion, by indicating his starting point (‘the reason why they started to war with one another’; cf. Il. 1.6–8: ‘(Muse, sing about the wrath of Achilles, from the moment they [Agamemnon and Achilles] started to stand apart in quarrel’).

Conclusion: Love, for Paul, is oriented towards a relationship of shared selves. As such, Paul’s ethics are more properly articulated as an expression not of egoism or of altruism but of ‘nostruism’.

One ringleader, Aristagoras, having died, the other, Histiaeus, arrives from Susa exactly in time to take over command (‘a kind of “passing of the baton”’, ‘eine Art “Stabübergabe”’, Walter 1993: 265), which is denied him, however, by his own compatriots (1–5). The denouement of the Ionian Revolt, the naval defeat off Lade (6–17) and the Fall of Miletus (18–21), takes place while Histiaeus is far away in Byzantium. When he returns to Ionia, he is killed by Artaphrenes (26–30), and the Persians, quickly and harshly, reconquer the rest of Ionia (31–2). For an overview of the structure of the Ionian Revolt, see 5.28–38n.

Xerxes’ expedition against mainland Greece, the third and last Persian attempt to conquer this part of the world (books 7–9), is the climax of the Histories in every respect. The expedition involves three legendary battles, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, and, at least for its first part, is elevated through the personal participation of the Persian king. The narrator emphatically flags the grandeur of this expedition, and hence of his own work, by proclaiming that it surpassed all famous wars of the past, including that benchmark of all Greek wars, the Trojan War (20). The climactic nature of this final part of the Histories is underscored by the decrease in narrative speed: whereas the (main story of the) first six books covered about seventy-five years, now three years (480–478 BC) take up three books.

The Self-Sharing Messiah: Paul’s description of the Christ event in Galatians and elsewhere in his letters portray Jesus’ loving action not as self-sacrifice but as his positive participation in human and specifically Israelite condition. His action shares all that belongs to him with believers and establishes believers as competent moral actors and enables them to reciprocate his self-gift.

Chapter 3 samples some ancient conversations across language at the interface of literature and lived experience: lifestyle, in the strictest sense. The title nods at antiquity’s most famous Greco-Roman comparativist, Plutarch; but discussion quickly moves on to the Latin prose miscellanist Aulus Gellius. What can we learn if we press the micro-dramas of philological competition characteristic of Gellius’ so-titled Attic Nights for cultural insights into the ‘parallel lives’ of the Greeks and Romans encountered in them? Next comes a matter earlier raised amid the counterfactual vignettes of Chapter 1: what if we had some stories to tell, against the grain of literary history, about a Greek poet responding to something – anything – written in Latin? Virgil’s fame makes his a good case to ponder here; and the Bay of Naples, where Virgil spent much of his life, invites attention as a microclimate of poetic biculturalism. The last section considers a collection of Greek epigrams assembled by a Greek who enjoyed patronage in first-century CE Rome: in the face of most modern critical work on the Greek Anthology, what happens if the Garland of Philip is read as Roman poetry?

The Self, the Other, and the Telos of Prosocial Action: Paul and Ethicists Ancient and Modern: Ancient ethicists portrayed ideal behaviour as oriented towards the construction of shared selves whose interests are irreducibly common, whereas modern ethicists rejected the possibility of shared selfhood and so interpreted all actions along a spectrum of egoism and altruism. Paul’s letters appear to stand in the former tradition.

The Self-Gift of a Crucified Messiah: Self-gifts in ancient discourse are about offering the self into relationship. The phrase ‘gave himself’ in Galatians 1.4 and 2.20 portrays Jesus as not ‘sacrificing’ himself but as giving himself as gift through his death.