This chapter, necessarily making much use of Barber 1989, explores Western European illustrated editions of Longus, Daphnis and Chloe between 1626 (Crispin de Passe the Younger) and 2014 (Karl Lagerfeld’s Moderne Mythologie), picking out for closer analysis in a table nine printed between 1890 (Raphaël Collin and Eugène-André Champollion) and 1961 (Marc Chagall), editions which are witnesses to the European taste of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first six decades of the twentieth. That table registers the different scenes in Longus chosen by different illustrators, which might have been expected to cluster around a few favourites: but alongside some favourites (Daphnis and Lycaenion, Chloe bathing Daphnis and herself, the couple’s wedding night) there are, as it reveals, many chosen by only two artists, some by only one. Other phenomena that emerged from its analysis are that Paris was the pre-eminent location for the production of illustrated editions, and that, unlike Crispin de Passe the Younger in 1626, later artists chose subjects bearing upon the couple’s growing understanding of ἔρως, ‘desire’, much more than ones depicting their few adventures.

At the end of our journey through the simile worlds of five poems, what have we learned about the simile world of epic poetry more broadly? Which characters and situations can be found in each poem? How do the pain, love, hunger, fear, cold, danger, and so forth experienced by those characters differ across poems, and how do they stay the same? How do similes immerse us in those feelings and experiences? The shape of the simile world resembles that of the mythological tales that form the basis of most epic stories, in that both are defined by the tension between a stable core common to every telling and the details that individual narrators change, omit, or create to tell their own unique version of the tale. To a great extent, the narrative in a traditional medium like epic or about a traditional story like the Trojan War is created by these tensions. And similes, a key feature of the epic genre, are framed by expressions that identify sameness and difference as an explicit focus of our attention.

A dreary overstuffed catalogue of bygone orators or a magnificent intellectual achievement? A swan song for public speech or an apology for the art of eloquence? A timid retreat into academic leisure or a brazen challenge to civil war and Caesar? Despite the divergent viewpoints of these questions, it is hard to come away from Cicero’s Brutus without seeing merit in each of them. There is some of almost everything in Cicero’s stunning dialogue, and for that reason its seeming hodgepodge of intellectual curiosity, political statement, and documentary diligence has spurred modern observers to widely differing interpretations.

The Introduction outlines crucial intellectual contexts and frameworks for thinking about how Cicero's Brutus is a crucial intervention in the the civic crisis and the writing of literary history. It also surveys the scholarship to date and examines how Cicero's project reflects general trends in academic inquiry and civic government.

Chapter 7 considers stylistic imitation and appropriation in the debate over Atticism and Asianism, with a special focus on how Cicero distorts the aims and positions of his detractors in the diatribe against the Atticists (285–91). He trades on various meanings of Atticus/Attici in order to make a rhetorical – rather than strictly logical – case. He downplays Atticism as outdated and relegates its stylistic virtues to the plain style (genus tenue). Rejecting Atticism does not entail rejecting the plain style. Instead he acknowledges it as one of many oratorical virtues to be subsumed under the capable orator’s broad stylistic repertoire. Cicero promotes a model of stylistic diversity, examples of which are found in the long histories of Greek and, especially, Roman oratory.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s simile world becomes a more fragmented and less cohesive place where simile characters from the past may appear rarely or not at all, similes are so short that they often do not achieve the immersive effects typical of the simile worlds of earlier epics, and they do not work hand in hand with the story to bring forward key themes. Some conventional simile features take on different functions in the Metamorphoses, such as the chase similes that describe erotic pursuits instead of battle scenes. Main roles become cameo appearances while minor characters from earlier epics may find themselves at center stage. Yet similes retain many of their familiar qualities, and some of the poem’s most memorable moments are achieved in part with heart-pounding scenes familiar from earlier epics of predators chasing their prey, raging fires, battle scenes, and sailing. Similes help the Metamorphoses both to claim the epic genre for itself and to take that genre to new places it had never been before. The story and the similes tell a tale of constancy and change, of passion rather than battle as the most important arena for human conflict, and of storytelling itself.

The dangers, sorrows, and failures of caretaking figures in the simile world of the Iliad parallel and reinforce the poem’s concern with the costs of poor leadership. Absent or incompetent leaders in the simile world range from shepherds and helmsmen to parents – both human and animal – who fail to keep their charges and children safe. Without effective leaders, both the simile characters and the story characters to whom they are compared are injured, killed, and bereaved. The similes contribute to an epic tale about the sufferings that all leaderless characters endure, whether a shepherd whose cattle are eaten by a lion, the grief of Patroclus over the sufferings of his fellow Greeks, or Trojan forces dying in battle. Even though the Greeks and Trojans are fighting each other, the simile world treats them very much the same. In scenes of battlefield stalemate, clusters of similes regularly bring together the perspectives of different participants and create unity between the warriors on both sides. The similes convey that more unites Greek and Trojan warriors than separates them, including but not limited to the misery they endure because of their leaders’ shortcomings.

Chapter 2 focuses on the dialogue’s intellectual filiations. It begins by examining the preface’s (1–25) insistence on remaining silent about the civic crisis even as the interlocutors' exchange of written texts incessantly circles back to the accomplishments and struggles of the Roman state. Atticus’ Liber Annalis and Brutus’ de Virtute inspired the Brutus, but to what extent and to what purpose remains initially unclear. In aligning their texts with de Republica and the Brutus, Cicero creates a complex web of learned exchange in the service of the republic. The chapter then considers other potential intellectual predecessors: Varro’s writings on literature, the history of the dialogue genre, and Cicero’s own works. The Brutus draws together several intellectual currents and promises significant innovations in how to document and conceptualize the literary past.