This study examines the literary complexities of the poetry Ovid wrote in Tomis, the poet's place of exile on the Black Sea after he was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus in A.D. 8. Exile transforms Ovid into a melancholic poet of despair who claims that his creative faculties are in terminal decline. These claims are contested in this study through close and original analysis of the literary maneuvers that contradict Ovid's pose. The evidence thus revealed counteracts traditional scholarly antipathy to these poems.

This study examines the literary complexities of the poetry Ovid wrote in Tomis, the poet's place of exile on the Black Sea after he was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus in A.D. 8. Exile transforms Ovid into a melancholic poet of despair who claims that his creative faculties are in terminal decline. These claims are contested in this study through close and original analysis of the literary maneuvers that contradict Ovid's pose. The evidence thus revealed counteracts traditional scholarly antipathy to these poems.

Ovid's rarely studied Ibis is an elegiac companion-piece to the Tristia and Ex Ponto written after his banishment to the Black Sea in AD 8. Modelled on a poem of the same name by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, Ibis stands out as an artistically contrived explosion of vitriol against an unnamed enemy who is characterised in terms of the Egyptian bird with its unprepossessing habits. Based in a tradition of curse-ritual, it is the most difficult of Ovid's poems to penetrate. Robinson Ellis's edition remains an indispensable - if typically eccentric - platform for the study of the poem's...

Seneca's Natural Questions is an eight-book disquisition on the nature of meteorological phenomena, ranging inter alia from rainbows to earthquakes, from comets to the winds, from the causes of snow and hail to the reasons why the Nile floods in summer. Much of this material had been treated in the earlier Greco-Roman meteorological tradition, but what notoriously sets Seneca's writing apart is his insertion of extended moralizing sections within his technical discourse. How, if at all, are these outbursts against the luxury and vice that are apparently rampant in Seneca's...

When the Romans adopted Greek literary genres and artistic techniques, they did not slavishly imitate their models but created vibrant and original works of literature and art in their own right. The same is true for philosophy, notwithstanding the fact that the rich Roman philosophical tradition is still all too often treated as a mere footnote to the history of Greek philosophy. This volume aims to reassert the significance of Roman philosophy and to explore the "Romanness" of philosophical writings and practices in the Roman world, endeavoring to show that the Romans in their creative...

Seneca's Natural Questions is an eight-book disquisition on the nature of meteorological phenomena, ranging inter alia from rainbows to earthquakes, from comets to the winds, from the causes of snow and hail to the reasons why the Nile floods in summer. Much of this material had been treated in the earlier Greco-Roman meteorological tradition, but what notoriously sets Seneca's writing apart is his insertion of extended moralizing sections within his technical discourse. How, if at all, are these outbursts against the luxury and vice that are apparently rampant in Seneca's...