This collection of papers responds to the question of whether a ritual at the end of a text can offer resolution and order or rather a complicated kind of closure. It reveals that ritual can bring but also can thwart closure by alluding to new beginnings. A ritual could be a perfect kind of ending but it hardly ever seems to be. In Flavian literature this is even more apparent because of the complicated political background under which these texts were produced. Ancient religious practices in the closing sections of Flavian texts help us create connections between endings and (new) beginnings, order and disorder, binding and loosening, structure and dissolution which reflects the structure of the Empire in Flavian Rome. Overall, this volume offers a new tool for studying literary endings through ritual, which promotes our understanding of Flavian culture and politics as well as creating a new perception of the use of religion and ritual in Flavian literature: instead of giving a sense of closure, this volume argues that ritual is a medium to increase complexity, to expose ritual actors and to project a generic riskiness of ritual actors also onto the epic actors who are acting before and mostly after a ritual scene.

This collection of papers responds to the question of whether a ritual at the end of a text can offer resolution and order or rather a complicated kind of closure. It reveals that ritual can bring but also can thwart closure by alluding to new beginnings. A ritual could be a perfect kind of ending but it hardly ever seems to be. In Flavian literature this is even more apparent because of the complicated political background under which these texts were produced. Ancient religious practices in the closing sections of Flavian texts help us create connections between endings and (new) beginnings, order and disorder, binding and loosening, structure and dissolution which reflects the structure of the Empire in Flavian Rome. Overall, this volume offers a new tool for studying literary endings through ritual, which promotes our understanding of Flavian culture and politics as well as creating a new perception of the use of religion and ritual in Flavian literature: instead of giving a sense of closure, this volume argues that ritual is a medium to increase complexity, to expose ritual actors and to project a generic riskiness of ritual actors also onto the epic actors who are acting before and mostly after a ritual scene.

Roman epic is traditionally understood to advance a masculine, martial form of heroism. In his version of the Argonaut legend, the Argonautica, however, Valerius Flaccus challenges that prevailing ethos of the genre by turning Medea, Jason’s love interest in the story, into a heroic figure and Jason himself into her emasculated victim. The present study charts this plotline as it unfolds in the second half of Valerius’ epic, finding its key source of inspiration in the poetry of Ovid with its tales of transgressive love, gender-bending, and unconventional heroism. Employing an extensive program of allusion to his Metamorphoses and elegiac works, Valerius transforms Medea from the innocent, vulnerable girl we see in her first appearance in the poem into a threatening, powerful, and masculine figure, who not only helps Jason fulfill his quest for the golden fleece, but eclipses him as hero in the process. Readers of this study will gain insight into Valerius’ inventive reworking of the Argonaut myth and innovations within the epic genre as well as a greater appreciation for Ovid’s influence on Roman epic poetry in the first century CE.

This ambitious book investigates a major yet underexplored nexus of themes in Roman cultural history: the evolving tropes of enclosure, retreat and compressed space within an expanding, potentially borderless empire. In Roman writers' exploration of real and symbolic enclosures - caves, corners, villas, bathhouses, the 'prison' of the human body itself - we see the aesthetic, philosophical and political intersecting in fascinating ways, as the machine of empire is recast in tighter and tighter shapes. Victoria Rimell brings ideas and methods from literary theory, cultural studies and philosophy to bear on an extraordinary range of ancient texts rarely studied in juxtaposition, from Horace's Odes, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Ibis, to Seneca's Letters, Statius' Achilleid and Tacitus' Annals. A series of epilogues puts these texts in conceptual dialogue with our own contemporary art world, and emphasizes the role Rome's imagination has played in the history of Western thinking about space, security and dwelling.

While most work on Dionysus is based on Greek sources, this collection of essays examines the god’s Roman and Italian manifestations. Nine contributions address Bacchus’ appearance at the crossroads of Greek and Roman cultures, tracing continuities and differences between literary and archaeological sources for the god. The essays offer coverage of Dionysus in Roman art, Italian epigraphy; Latin poetry including epic, drama and elegy; and prose, including historiography, rhetorical and Christian discourse. The introduction offers an overview of the presence of Dionysus in Italy from the archaic to the imperial periods, identifying the main scholarly trends, with treatment of key Dionysian episodes in Roman history and literature. Individual chapters address the reception of Euripides’ Bacchae across Greek and Roman literature from Athens to Byzantium; Dionysus in Roman art of the archaic and Augustan periods; the god’s relationship with Fufluns and Liber in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE; Dionysian associations; Bacchus in Cicero; Ovid’s Tristia 5.3; Bacchus in the writings of Christian Latin writers. The collection sheds light on a relatively understudied aspect of Dionysus, and will stimulate further research in this area.

"Beginning with Cicero and Varro and ending with Statius and Pliny the Younger, this chapter offers a chronological investigation of the ways in which real and literary gardens developed from the first century BCE to the first century CE as a means of elite masculine self-representation and the reactions of elite Roman men to the increased social and cultural power of villa and horti estates and their grounds. Gardens served as powerful symbols of wealth and as creative displays of the cultural aspirations of their owners in ways that challenged traditional definitions of gardens and of Roman manliness. Since these large-scale 'gardens' are primarily associated with leisure (otium), authors are concerned with describing and justifying their activities in these sites as befitting Roman masculine ideals. We can trace a change in attitude towards leisure and the private display of wealth, and consequently gardens, largely attributed to changes in the socio-political circumstances of the Roman elite, in the works of Statius and his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who use laudatory descriptions of extensive villas and grounds as a means of expressing social and literary power"--

The epics of the three Flavian poets--Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus--have, in recent times, attracted the attention of scholars, who have re-evaluated the particular merits of Flavian poetry as far more than imitation of the traditional norms and patterns. Drawn from sixty years of scholarship, this edited collection is the first volume to collate the most influential modern academic writings on Flavian epic poetry, revised and updated to provide both scholars and students alike with a broad yet comprehensive overview of the field. A wide range of topics receive coverage, and analysis and interpretation of individual poems are integrated throughout. The plurality of the critical voices included in the volume presents a much-needed variety of approaches, which are used to tackle questions of intertextuality, gender, poetics, and the social and political context of the period. In doing so, the volume demonstrates that by engaging in a complex and challenging intertextual dialogue with their literary predecessors, the innovative epics of the Flavian poets respond to contemporary needs, expressing overt praise, or covert anxiety, towards imperial rule and the empire.