For more than a century, critics of the Aeneid have assumed that all or most of its episodes must propound something about Aeneas and his mission to found the Roman people, and through them about Rome and Augustus; whether that is their positive aspects, or their brutality and destructiveness, or the contrast between the public "voice" of their achievements and the private "voice" of the suffering they cause. This book argues that this assumption is wrong; the Aeneid's main purpose was to present a series of emotionally moving episodes, especially pathetic ones. This book shows that the Aeneid makes more sense when regarded primarily as a series of emotion-arousing episodes than as expressing a pro-Aeneas, anti-Aeneas or two voices message. That is how it was regarded into the nineteenth century and that is what the ancient Greeks and Romans assumed was the main purpose of literature.

Toward the end of the year A.D. 8, the emperor Augustus publicly sentenced the poet Ovid to exile in remote and barbaric Tomis on the Black Sea. The action presumably followed a secret hearing before the emperor, and the official reason given for the sentence was Ovid's authorship of a licentious work, the Ars amatoria, ten years earlier. The Mystery of Ovid's Exile is both a survey and an analysis of the literary detective work that has been devoted to explaining the cause of Ovid's banishment from Rome. In poems composed during his exile, Ovid laments having written the Ars amatoria, but he obviously considers the poem to be merely a pretext for his punishment. His downfall appears to have been caused by his having witnessed, or in some fashion been implicated in, a crime committed either by the emperor himself or by an immediate member of the imperial family. However, it’s possible that Ovid's banishment may have been ordered merely because he was unwittingly in possession of the key to an embarrassing secret, the importance of which he might have realized had he remained in Rome. John C. Thibault examines more than one hundred available hypotheses that have been advanced by inquisitive scholars from the Middle Ages to our own day. He demonstrates the unsoundness of each hypothesis in turn, and suggests that a solution to the problem of Ovid's exile is not possible given the available evidence. The Mystery of Ovid's Exil treats a controversy that will fascinate classical scholars as well as general readers interested in Roman manners and morals of the period. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

Unearthed in 1528 at Lyon, the Tabula Lugdunensis preserves the longest speech of a Roman emperor to survive in epigraphic form. In AD 48 Claudius addressed the senate to press a petition by elites of north-western Gaul to hold senatorial rank and office. In support he demonstrated Rome's history of constitutional innovation, particularly in integrating outsiders, and asserted a commitment to recruiting worthy provincial senators such as he claims the Gauls to be. The speech offers important evidence for the history and rhetoric of Roman political integration, unparalleled Etruscan testimony about Regal Rome, and insight into the Latin language and oratory of the early Principate. Uniquely, the Tabula can be set beside Tacitus' version of Claudius' speech in Annals 11 to provide a case-study of ancient historiographical practice. This edition contains a newly-edited text of the Tabula, an English translation, and a comprehensive introduction and commentary.

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Death, the ultimate change, is an unexpected Leitmotiv of Ovid’s career and reception. The eighteen contributions collected in this volume explore the theme of death and transfiguration in Ovid’s own career and his posthumous reception, revealing a unity in diversity that has not been appreciated in these terms before now.