In the fourth line of her first speech in Book 1, to Ilioneus and the Trojan castaways, Dido quotes the first word of the first line of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, and in the fourth line of her second speech, to Aeneas, she quotes the first words of the second line of the De rerum natura. This is not a coincidence but a signal of the importance of Lucretius and Epicureanism for the characterization of Dido in the Aeneid.

Dawn. Aeneas has just left. As soon as Dido notices that the Trojan fleet is sailing far away from Carthage she is overcome by despair and launches into an enraged monologue , which climaxes in her curse against Aeneas and all of his descendants . In the first part of the monologue Dido reproaches herself for how she has dealt with Aeneas.

Deianira complains that Hercules, as a slave of Omphale, did not refrain from telling to the Lydian queen his famous labours; among them, the Hydra: quaeque redundabat fecundo vulnere serpens fertilis et damnis dives ab ipsa suis ‘It will be admitted that redundabat, which usually means to “overflow”’ can only be applied to the Hydra by a very strong metaphor; but it is not only a strong one, it is quite unexampled: so A. Palmer in The Academy 49 , 160. (...) But his own emendation rebellabat has not convinced anybody – rightly, as I think. Still, his remark was not otiose: redundabat refers to the ‘growing again’ of Hydra's heads, that seem to ‘spring’ from the wounds like water's spurts; it is not impossible, but nevertheless it is strange. Why does Ovid use this metaphor ‘a fluctibus desumpta’ here? I suggest that there is a precise reason: Ovid does not mention the name of the serpens, but of course his reader knows it and also knows why the Hydra is so called: πò τν δτων. (shrink)

The fifth scene represented on the Shield of Aeneas describes Porsenna's siege of Rome and the resistance of the Romans, with the two classicexemplaof Horatius Cocles and Cloelia (Verg.Aen. 8.646–51):nec non Tarquinium eiectum Porsenna iubebataccipere ingentique urbem obsidione premebat;Aeneadae in ferrum pro libertate ruebant.illum indignanti similem similemque minantiaspiceres, pontem auderet quia uellere Cocles 650et fluuium uinclis innaret Cloelia ruptis.According to Roman mainstream tradition, at the beginning of the Republic, Porsenna, an Etruscan king of Clusium, tried to reinstate the exiled Tarquinius (...) Superbus by besieging Rome, but the heroism of Romans such as Horatius Cocles, C. Mucius Scaevola and Cloelia impressed him so much that he decided to give up the siege and make peace with his enemies. He then sent his army against the Latins and was finally defeated at the battle of Aricia by the joint forces of the Latin League and their allies from Cumae. However, there circulated also less flattering versions of the story: Tacitus (Hist. 3.72,Porsenna dedita urbe) hints at the fact that the Romans had in fact surrendered to Porsenna, and Pliny refers to a humiliating treaty imposed on them by the Etruscan king (HN34.139). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading After Actium: Vergil's Georgics, Octavian, and RomeSergio CasaliChristopher Nappa. Reading After Actium: Vergil's Georgics, Octavian, and Rome. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. xii + 293 pp. Cloth, $75.Nappa's reading of the Georgics is a linear one: in his own words, his book is "a literary commentary that moves sequentially through the text from beginning to end" (3). After the introduction, the book is divided into (...) four chapters, each one devoted to a single book of the poem. This is how Nappa presents his work: "It is my contention that the Georgics can be profitably understood as a post-Actium 'reading,' or rather a set of them, of the situation in which Octavian found himself in the early 20s b.c.e., after the battle of Actium and before the assumption of the title Augustus. Perhaps more importantly, the Georgics represents an attempt to engage in a constructive dialogue with Octavian on the potential courses available to him and on the potential interpretations of his character, achievements, and motives, which would have been a central concern to the Roman and Italian elite"; Nappa wants to read the Georgics "as a didactic work addressed to Octavian, one that invites him (and any other reader) to react to specific problems, puzzles, and challenges" (1–3).From these proemial declarations I was expecting a linear reading of the poem constantly focused on Octavian as the model reader of the text, a consistent attempt to imagine his reactions as the "disciple" of Vergil. In fact, Nappa does not do that, at least not in a fully consistent way. Octavian as the ideal disciple and the poem as a series of "lessons" to the princeps are only a part of Nappa's actual reading of Vergil's text. I must confess that this discovery has been a bit disappointing, especially since the first chapter does in fact rather brilliantly begin with a lesson to Augustus; but this is due to the fact that the poem, of course, opens with an invocation to the princeps. Unfortunately, after that Octavian will not always be the center of attention, as I was hoping. But this does not mean that Nappa does not have interesting things to say about Vergil's poem.The introduction (1–22) clarifies Nappa's avowedly reader-oriented approach to Vergil's text: he proposes to confront the poem's difficulties and contradictions as, in a sense, the real meaning of the text: "the lessons of the [End Page 611] Georgics do not consist of the transmission of information but of the experience of confronting the often chimerical world presented by the poet.... the Georgics emphasizes the fact that in our quest for a meaning various audiences will construct (or discover) different, and even mutually exclusive meanings" (3). After a defense of intentionality as a heuristic tool for reading the Georgics, Nappa discusses the complex status of Octavian in the poem. First of all, he is the poem's addressee, "the most important audience Vergil has ever had," to whom to poet address even harsh lessons ("Octavian must understand the nature of the world he is trying to govern and the way the world sees him," 6); but he is also one of the topics of discussion, and at the same time one of the gods who are asked to favor the poet's undertaking. For Nappa, "the poem does not express a view of the princeps or his achievements so much as it invites the audience, Octavian as well as us, to consider the theme from multiple points of view" (8). Vergil's famous "mistakes" also "serve a didactic purpose: by inviting his readers to consider agricultural advice that is either obviously erroneous or presented in a highly selective and nonsequential way, the teaching poet compels them to search for deeper meaning, a term I use with some reluctance. The meaning each reader finds will, of course, depend on that reader" (11). In the last section of the introduction, Nappa locates the position of his reading within recent scholarship on the Georgics: his aporetic stance recalls above all Christine Perkell, The Poet's Truth (Berkeley... (shrink)