Pj Davis

'Since my part has been well played': Conflicting Evaluations of Augustus

In his Life of Augustus Suetonius records that just before his death the emperor requested that his appearance be made right, and that he then spoke some lines of Greek verse: petito speculo capillum sibi comi ac malas labantes corrigi praecepit et admissos amicos percontatus, ecquid iis uideretur mimum uitae commode transegisse, adiecit et clausulam: ἐπeὶ δὲ πάνυ καλῶς πέπαισται, δότe κρότον καὶ πάντeς ἡμᾶς μeτὰ χαρᾶς προπέμψατe (Suet. Div. Aug. 99) Asking for a mirror, he ordered that his hair be done and that his drooping jaws be set straight. And having summoned his friends, he asked whether he seemed to them to have played lifes farce adequately and added this ending: Since my part has been well played, give me applause And all of you dismiss us with a kind farewell.

Praeceptor Amoris: Ovid's Ars Amatoria and the Augustan D3EA of Rome

In Tristia 2 Ovid claims that he has always been devoted to the emperor. It is mere that he defends both himself and the Ars Amatoria : per mare, per terrain, per tertia numina iuro, per te praesentem conspicuumque deum, hunc animum fauisse tibi, uir maxime, meque, qua sola potui, mente fuisse tuum. optaui, peteres caelestia sidera tarde, parsque fui turbae parua precantis idem, et pia tura dedi pro te, cumque omnibus unus ipse quoque adiuui publica uota meis. quid referam libros, illos quoque, crimina nostra, mille locis plenos nominis esse tui? ( Tristia 2.53-60)

The Chorus in Seneca's Thyestes

The relationship between the choruses of Senecas tragedies and the action of the plays in which they occur is one of the least understood and most controversial aspects of the Roman dramatists work. It is often asserted that Senecas choral odes are mere act-dividers, that their relationship with the plays action is loose and unconvincing. I would not care to assert that the handling of the chorus is flawless in all instances in Senecas tragedies (or indeed in the works of any ancient tragedian), but in his best works it is, I believe, masterly. In this paper I propose to illustrate the close and complex interconnection between ode and action in Senecan tragedy through an analysis of the choruses of Thyestes .

P.E. Knox (ed.), Oxford Readings in Ovid

This new collection of articles on Ovid joins a long list of predecessors in the same series. Such a collection would have been unimaginable only 30 years ago, when Virgil so held sway that his poetic successors were more or less ignored. It is not surprising then that this book contains only one article that is over 30 years old (E.J. Kenney’s 1976 classic, ‘Ovidius Prooemians’, the only selection from that decade), with most dating from the 1980s and 1990s.