This paper argues that Ovid was familiar with the philosophy of the Hellenistic dialectician Diodorus Cronus, in particular, his views on fate, which he probably knew from Cicero’s De Fato, and the ...so-called “horned” and “veiled” arguments associated with him. Ovid draws on these aspects of Diodorus’ philosophy to tell the story of Cipus in Metamorphoses 15 ; he uses them to portray Cipus’ attempt to avoid kingship as a highly ambiguous and unnecessarily risky, if not self-defeating, exercise in forestalling fate and thus leaves open the question of whether Cipus, in the end, succeeds in his attempt. This reading complements others that have argued that the inescapability of kingship, not Cipus’ moral choice, is the central point of the story. It also adds to our appreciation of Ovid’s use of philosophical material in his epic, an area of growing interest in Ovidian studies, which has thus far paid no attention to Diodorus Cronus and only a little to the influence of Cicero’s philosophical works.
Marks discusses the adding of the number of parallels between Statius' Thebaid and the Silius' Punica and strengthens the case for familiarity between them. He presents the parallels between the ...siege of Saguntum in Punica 1-2 and events in the Thebaid. There are several reasons why he focuses on Silius' Saguntum narrative for this purpose, but one, in particular, deserves mention from the start: a relatively high number of the total parallels he examines show one of two tendencies, both of which are evident in both epics.
Abstract
Silius alludes to the tale of the three hundred Fabii, recounted toward the beginning of Punica 7, in the military operations of Fabius and Hannibal that comprise the principle action of the ...book. In doing so, he differentiates Fabius from his ancestors and their enemy in the tale, the Veientes, and, instead, identifies Hannibal with both of these historical exempla. By weaving the tale into the book’s primary narrative, he also rewrites the story and gives it a new, victorious conclusion: by defeating Hannibal at Gerunium at the book’s end, Fabius Maximus reverses his ancestors’ defeat at the Cremera river.
InPunica14, Silius Italicus uses several digressions to associate Sicily with poetic traditions that were felt by the Romans to espouse a decidedly non- or anti-martial epic agenda (Alexandrian, ...Callimachean, neoteric). These digressions interrupt, delay and push back against the book's martial epic content, its narrative about Marcellus' invasion of the island. A conflict of genres or literary modes thus ensues in which epic's struggle to assert its hegemony over unepic literary traditions mirrors Rome's struggle to conquer Sicily. Through this conflict Silius explores the consequences of imperialism for Rome's Hellenistic heritage, including the influence of the Alexandrian poetic tradition on Roman epic.
Silius alludes to the tale of the three hundred Fabii, recounted toward the beginning ofPunica 7, in the military operations of Fabius and Hannibal that comprise the principle action of the book. In ...doing so, he differentiates Fabius from his ancestors and their enemy in the tale, the Veientes, and, instead, identifies Hannibal with both of these historicalexempla.By weaving the tale into the book's primary narrative, he also rewrites the story and gives it a new, victorious conclusion: by defeating Hannibal at Gerunium at the book's end, Fabius Maximus reverses his ancestors' defeat at the Cremera river.
Abstract
In Silius Italicus' Punica the Second Punic War is cast as a conflict fought over and between heads, and the decapitations in the epic thereby become ways of measuring the different ...trajectories and ultimate outcomes for each side in the war: the symbolic decapitation of Rome on the occasion of Paulus' death at Cannae in book 10 marks the low-ebb in the city's fortunes while the many decapitations perpetrated by Romans after Cannae reflect Carthage's own slide toward final defeat, an event that entails her symbolic decapitation too. Read in relation to this epic-wide program, Hannibal's abiding enmity toward Jupiter, the god of Rome's head, the Capitolium, gains greater clarity and purpose, as do his identification with Lucan's Pompey and Carthage's with Virgil's Priam toward the end of the epic. This concluding development is also succinctly recapitulated in the epic's final two lines, where an allusion to the final two lines of Bellum Civile 8 invites us to contrast Rome and Jupiter with Lucan's decapitated Pompey and to compare Carthage and Hannibal with him.
Horace does not distinguish neatly between the public "Augustan" voice he adopts in stanzas 1—3 of Odes 3.14 and the private "Horatian" voice he adopts in stanzas 5—7. In the latter, Horace both ...differentiates himself from and assimilates himself to Augustus, as portrayed earlier in the poem, and thus offers a portrait of himself that is best understood as a Horatio-Augustan composite. As both voices coexist in his self-representation, the similarities and differences between them cannot be interpreted as expressions of acceptance or rejection of Augustus as many have done. Instead, Horace is engaged in a form of identity negotiation.
