Catullus’ poem 51, paradoxically, would be incomplete without its famous lacuna: the gap in 51.8 functions as an acoustic channel through which the sonorous presence of Sappho and her lyric poetry is evoked. This paper shows how this ‘epiphanic’ textual lack enables the readers to experience the past in its sublimity, or to feel themselves connected to a chain of voices and silences. Catullus’ lacuna, accordingly, is interpreted as an empty monument of the ‘absent presence’ of the Sapphic voice which is being simultaneously silenced and reanimated by the endlessly iterable events of reading. In that regard, Catullus’ ‘translation’ is a realization of Walter Benjamin’s imperative included in ‘The Translator’s Task’, awakening the ‘echo’ of the Sapphic original. At the same time, the lacuna – labelled here as Catullus’ ‘Black Square’ – is envisioned as an inherent part of the poetic play between Calvus and Catullus in poems 50 and 51, to be supplemented by Calvus’ textual or bodily presence. In this sense, the 30 or so conjectural supplements of 51.8 in the textual history of the poem – among others, the famous vocis in ore – do nothing more than take on the role of Calvus, and write a palimpsest of absences and presences.

This chapter explores Elena Ferrante’s use of Virgil’s Dido as a model for Elena and Lila, the two protagonists of the Neapolitan Novels, through the lens of absence. Not only is Ferrante able to conjure and comment on the Aeneid’s treatment of one of its most divisive characters following the classical rules of intertextual engagement with the ghosts of masterpieces past; she ends up changing the whole game. By teasing narrative material out of Virgil’s silences in Dido’s story-arch, Ferrante centres and requalifies the very reason of Dido’s undoing – the trauma which stems from the loss of love – as the generative force behind both Elena’s and her own literary output. However, by making Lila’s invisible writing and her subsequent disappearance into the beating heart of Elena’s writing, Ferrante uses Virgil as her Muse to stage a woman-centred takeover of literary greatness. Elena’s anxieties over how much of Lila’s life she has truly cannibalized, and her responsibility in Lila’s disappearance, not only take Virgil to task for hiding his Muse, but suggest an alternative model of criticism; moving beyond the postmodern view of the absent author and his unaccountability by giving agency back to the Muse.

This chapter revisits reception theory through an exploration of the metaphysics of presence and absence across time. Bringing together the ‘Letter to Horace’ of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and Horace’s own Epistles, it uses the theory of communication developed by John Durham Peters and the philosophy of the afterlife of Samuel Scheffler to elucidate the experience of, on the one hand, communicating with a past where one and so much of what makes one what one is was not present and, on the other, of projecting oneself into a future in which one will no longer exist so as to communicate with those who do not yet exist and whom one will never know. Recent metaphysical thinking has sought to make us sensitive to the existential incompleteness of people and things and the fragility of selves that are distributed across the multitude of ‘attachments’ which Bruno Latour suggests as one ‘mode of existence’ that makes us what we are. Latour suggests that we should not think of ourselves as simple, atomized, points of emission and reception for texts, and appeals to Étienne Souriau’s notion of instauration to suggest how our selves and what and whom we value are sustained.

Imperial ekphrasis is the topic of Chapter 8. The disinterest in the aesthetics of deception in Hellenistic epigrams is continued in the ekphrastic works of Callistratus and the Philostrati. They use the term apatē not infrequently but, by and large, do not tie aesthetic illusion to deception in an ethical sense. It is another text, commonly disregarded as simple and unsophisticated, that intriguingly plays with the ambiguity of apatē. I will argue that the Tabula Cebetis, besides toying with the recession of representational levels, also uses the personification of Apatē in the painting it describes to associate aesthetic illusion with moral corruption, thereby issuing a reading instruction for itself. In fact, it can even be argued that in the Tabula Cebetis the aesthetics of deception, which Lucian had marshalled to criticize protreptics, helps preempt this criticism.

Chapter 8 turns to the famous judgment of Julius Caesar’s commentarii (nudi, recti, venusti, 262). Not only textual aesthetics but also visual analogies and the plastic arts underlie Cicero’s judgments. An analysis of statuary analogies and of the fuller contexts for Cicero’s statements suggests a deft ploy on his part. He portrays himself as Phidias crafting a statue of Minerva (the Parthenon Athena) and Caesar as Praxiteles crafting a statue of Venus (the Aphrodite of Knidos). The fundamentally different symbolic resonances of the goddesses simultaneously challenge Caesar’s military accomplishments and underscore Cicero’s civic achievements. Cicero thereby promotes his vision of the need to restore the Roman republic once the civil war has concluded.

Catullus’ poem 51, paradoxically, would be incomplete without its famous lacuna: the gap in 51.8 functions as an acoustic channel through which the sonorous presence of Sappho and her lyric poetry is evoked. This paper shows how this ‘epiphanic’ textual lack enables the readers to experience the past in its sublimity, or to feel themselves connected to a chain of voices and silences. Catullus’ lacuna, accordingly, is interpreted as an empty monument of the ‘absent presence’ of the Sapphic voice which is being simultaneously silenced and reanimated by the endlessly iterable events of reading. In that regard, Catullus’ ‘translation’ is a realization of Walter Benjamin’s imperative included in ‘The Translator’s Task’, awakening the ‘echo’ of the Sapphic original. At the same time, the lacuna – labelled here as Catullus’ ‘Black Square’ – is envisioned as an inherent part of the poetic play between Calvus and Catullus in poems 50 and 51, to be supplemented by Calvus’ textual or bodily presence. In this sense, the 30 or so conjectural supplements of 51.8 in the textual history of the poem – among others, the famous vocis in ore – do nothing more than take on the role of Calvus, and write a palimpsest of absences and presences.

Cicero’s Brutus and Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus deal with the silence of eloquence resulting from the change of the political system in the first century BC. This silence leads to a paradoxical effect: it produces all the more eloquent speech, which helps to keep the discourse of the position of eloquence going.

In the Brutus, the narrative is driven by the interlocutors’ desire for eloquent speech while the silence of speech is compensated for by the history of Roman eloquence. The conversation is set in a field of tension between two poles of omnipresent silence: the reason for the political change, Caesar, and the climax of rhetorical history, Cicero himself. The former is explicitly omitted, the latter continually postponed until the climax of eloquence is finally released at the end of the dialogue.

The Dialogus deals in hindsight with the absence of great eloquence. While speech and voices are represented in abundance, small but numerous gaps occur within them, creating a gauze of silence that, unobtrusively, keeps the meaning of the text unstable. The conversation is driven on not by the interlocutors’ desire for eloquent speech but by the speech act of promise, which is renewed throughout the text.

Soon after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, Pompeii seemed to have vanished. The buried city maintained a presence in the region’s collective memory primarily as an overwhelming absence, repressed even in the near-contemporary poetry that ruminated on its demise. In such texts, the name of Pompeii is conspicuous by its absence, and the shock over the swallowing up of this solid ancestral ground is keenly felt. This chapter argues that Martial, Statius, and others initiate the trope of Pompeii as an absent presence that continues to characterize our responses to the site today, even in the face of the apparently abundant materiality of the site. By following Pompeii’s disappearing act from these Latin authors through a variety of more recent engagements with the city – from the subterranean journey to the site in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), to the sci-fi dislocation of the city in Amelie Nothomb’s novella, Péplum (1996), and the recent video installation Soleil Noir (2014), in which Pompeii becomes a post-human landscape – we can observe Pompeii’s importance as a locus for understanding the absences that permeate Roman culture, and our modern receptions of it.

Despite the many studies devoted to aposiopesis in Latin poetry, a deeper insight into this rhetorical figure in Statius’ Thebaid is called for. This paper argues that Statius is the first to use such a figure of speech extensively in Latin epic and does so in his poem also marking programmatic loci, teasing out a tension between the epic and other literary genres, otherwise said between the Thebaid itself and the ones before it (see e.g. Theb. 4, 516; 8, 60; 7, 210; 12, 301; 380–5). By discussing some of the most relevant points, my paper highlights Statius’ programmatic use of aposiopesis: it shows the poet’s choice to avoid deviations to other poetic genres – such as tragedy or elegy – in his epic, in contexts where such contaminations would not be suitable. Moreover, the paper argues that aposiopesis is a relevant intertextual link between the Thebaid and Statius’ poetic background: we are dealing with silent challenges which further develop Statius’ meta-poetic discourse on generic interactions and literary memory.

Chapter 3 examines the Brutus as an intervention in contemporary politics. It begins by revisiting the preface but focuses on its discussion of the contemporary civic crisis and the immediate history of the civil war (1–25). In both the preface and the digression on Julius Caesar (254–57) Cicero presents an alternative civic vision as a response to the crisis. The chapter concludes by considering the portrayal of the younger generation of orators: Curio (filius), Caelius, Publius Crassus, and Marcellus. The last figure merits special attention because Cicero’s oratorical canon includes only two living figures: Marcellus and Caesar. Marcellus is accorded a prominent role as part of Cicero’s attempt to offer a coherent vision of the republic, one based on the restoration of the senatorial elite and the reinstatement of the traditional institutions of government.

This chapter takes the Meditations to act out the jam in autodiegetic biography, 1. through synkrisis with the SHA M. A., 2. through the programmatic/prelusory relations of M1 with 2-12. In representation reticulated through the diplomatics of first-person self-promotion, concentrated absenting delivers strongly motivated presencing. This is a book that wears its status as a book but wears it thin.

Allegory ‘speaks the other’, that which was previously unspoken, and sometimes that which is unspeakable. Allegory also makes present what was absent; allegories are often absent presences. Allegory offers a fullness of meaning, but often succeeds only in delivering linguistic emptiness. Allegory may be a stepping-stone from the unreal or less real to the more real, in the anagogical exegeses of Neoplatonism. Biblical typology connects two historical events, one Old- and one New-Testament, the latter being understood as the ‘fulfilment’ of the former. Just how empty that leaves the former is disputed: should we talk of supersession, or of transformation? The presence of allegory requires the collusion of the reader. Allegories may become absent when their presence is denied, as for example in a persistent critical denial of the ‘typologies’ of Aeneid 8. The plausible deniability of allegory can also serve political purposes. The absences and presences of personification allegory are explored in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Prudentius’ Psychomachia. Ovid energises the long history of personifications conscious of their ‘selves’, while Prudentius brings words given bodies up against the Word made flesh. Finally I examine Claudian’s dissolution of the subjects of his panegyrical epics into a cloud of images and myths.

This essay formulates a critical response to scholars’ Freudian-Lacanian understanding of Ovidian desire in terms of frustration, futility, absence and lack. It focuses on the Remedia Amoris, a poem it takes as paradigmatic and culminatory in Ovid’s elegiac project, and attempts to give an account of what is meaningful and productive about the rhythmic process of Ovidian amor in and of itself, through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent book on jouissance (Coming, 2017). The Remedia, it argues, performs absence not as tragic loss but as an undoing-remaking that continually regenerates desire and teaches investment in the pleasure of process. The second half of the essay explores how the poem’s temporal instabilities and dislocated subject positions produce a series of imagined inter-relations and ‘elsewheres’ that move readers away from Lacanian desire as continually projected into an ungraspable future, and into the experience of jouissance in the elegiac present.

Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, discussed in Chapter 10, still awaits its discovery by scholars of ancient aesthetics. The latest of the five fully preserved ancient Greek piercingly reflects on the aesthetics of deception. After a close reading of a passage from book 3 that sharply juxtaposes deceit and aesthetic illusion and simultaneously intimates their similarity, I will explore their blending together in the Athenian novella. The aesthetics of deception also pertains to the Ethiopica themselves, which are designed to enthral the reader and simultaneously threaten to dupe her. A Platonic intertext that evokes the condemnation of poetry in the Republic highlights this danger. At the same time, Heliodorus recasts the aesthetics of deception differently from Plato and suggests an allegorical reading of his novel that envisages aesthetic illusion ultimately as a means of overcoming deception.