As Aeneas begins his story of Troy's fall he wonders if in relating it even her enemies, such as the Myrmidons or Dolopes or the soldiers of Ulysses, could refrain from tears . The reference to a weeping soldier of Ulysses is a subtle allusion to Vergil's Homeric model, but why are the Myrmidons and Dolopes mentioned? The usual explanation that these were the soldiers of Neoptolemus, who plays a central role in Aeneas' account of Troy's fall, is not entirely (...) satisfactory. In Homer the Myrmidons inhabit Phthia and are thus naturally linked with Achilles and Patroclus, but the Dolopes seem to play no role at all in the fighting. Their name occurs only once in the Iliad and not at all in the Odyssey. (shrink)

As Aeneas begins his story of Troy's fall he wonders if in relating it even her enemies, such as the Myrmidons or Dolopes or the soldiers of Ulysses, could refrain from tears. The reference to a weeping soldier of Ulysses is a subtle allusion to Vergil's Homeric model, but why are the Myrmidons and Dolopes mentioned? The usual explanation that these were the soldiers of Neoptolemus, who plays a central role in Aeneas' account of Troy's fall, is not entirely satisfactory. (...) In Homer the Myrmidons inhabit Phthia and are thus naturally linked with Achilles and Patroclus, but the Dolopes seem to play no role at all in the fighting. Their name occurs only once in the Iliad and not at all in the Odyssey. (shrink)

Anagrams and syllabic wordplay of the kind championed by Frederick Ahl in his Metaformations have not always been favourably received by scholars of Latin poetry; I would hesitate to propose the following instance, were it not for the fact that its occurrence seems peculiarly apposite to the context in which it appears. That Roman poets were prepared to use such techniques to enhance the presentation of an argument by exemplifying its operation at a verbal level is demonstrated by the famous (...) passage of Lucretius in which the poet seeks to illustrate the tendency of semina … ardoris to create fire in wood by the literal presence of elements from the word for ‘fires’ in that denoting wood. A similar conception may underlie the association insinuated by the love elegists between amor and mors, suggesting that death is somehow ‘written into’ love: so Propertius declares laus in amore mori, while Tibullus appears to point to the lurking presence of death in the pursuit of love in the lines interea, dum fata sinunt, iungamus amores: | iam ueniet tenebris Mors adoperta caput – so swift and unexpected is death's approach that it is already present in aMOReS in the preceding line. Ovid's awareness of the poetic potential of this kind of play is fully exhibited in his celebrated account of Echo and Narcissus in Metamorphoses 3, where the subject matter gives the poet ample scope to exploit the humorous and pathetic possibilities afforded by Echo's fragmented repetitions of the frustrated entreaties of her beloved. (shrink)

‘A property’, according to the author of De Rerum Natura in 1.451–4, ‘is that which can never be sundered and separated without fatal dissolution, as weight is to stone, heat to fire, liquidity to water, touch to all bodies, intangibility to void’, seiungi seque gregari. As elsewhere Lucretius, that most committed practitioner of word-play, makes his verb mirror the very separation which it describes.

‘A property’, according to the author of De Rerum Natura in 1.451–4, ‘is that which can never be sundered and separated without fatal dissolution, as weight is to stone, heat to fire, liquidity to water, touch to all bodies, intangibility to void’, seiungi seque gregari. As elsewhere Lucretius, that most committed practitioner of word-play, makes his verb mirror the very separation which it describes.

In these lines from the fourth poem of his first collection of satires, Horace defines his poetic identity against the figures of his satiric predecessor Lucilius and his contemporary Stoic rival Crispinus. Horace emerges as the poet of Callimachean restraint and well-crafted writing in contrast to the chatty, unpolished prolixity of both Lucilius and Crispinus. A proponent of the highly wrought miniature over the sprawling scale of Lucilius, Horace knows when enough is enough. And, owing to a playful link between (...) what is satis and satura, this makes Horace not only a skilful poet but also the consummate satirist. I suggest that this programmatic message is both emphasized and illustrated by a piece of wordplay beginning in line 14. In a previously unnoticed telestich, the last letters of lines 14–18 spell out the word satis. Moreover, this hidden word—made possible only by the particular arrangement of words in all five of its lines—anticipates and deepens the poem's later interest in the matter of compositio, or artful word-arrangement. While this may be unique as an example of a Horatian telestich, Horace does engage in various forms of wordplay elsewhere, and could look not only to Hellenistic poets but also to Lucretius as a predecessor in this regard. In the Satires, a collection in which problems of libertas make forms of implication and veiled speech especially significant, a wide range of hidden words and wordplay has been detected and suggested. The instance observed here reaffirms Horace's interest in wordplay, while its uniqueness as a telestich is, as I hope to show, particularly suited to its context in this poem. (shrink)

In this research I propose to bring to light the meaning of "Venus" in the invocation of Lucretius´s De rerum natura. This paper is divided into six parts. In the first, I give an account of the various interpretations of the invocation and I systematize them. In the second I analyze and discuss three incategorizable investigations. In the third and fourth parts I expose the epicurean concepts of pleasure and divinity respectively. In the fifth I look for the terms, by (...) way of epithets, that the poet uses to refer to the goddess, bringing to light the nuances that light up them alternately in various instances of the invocation. In the sixth, finally, I give mine interpretation of vv 44-49 explaining why they should be included in the invocation. (shrink)