The ‘New Apuleius’ is a set of Latin summaries of Plato's works first published in 2016 by Justin Stover, who attributed it to Apuleius. The present article attempts to assess two key aspects of Stover's argument, viz. his reconstruction of the manuscript transmission of the new text and his use of computer-assisted stylometric techniques. The authors suggest that both strands of his argument are inconclusive. First, it is argued that the transposition of gatherings in the archetype of the Apuleian philosophica as envisaged by Stover is highly unrealistic. Second, replications of Stover's stylometric experiments show that their results are highly dependent on the particular algorithm settings and on the composition of the corpus. It is further shown that Stover's choice of highly specialized stylometric techniques is suboptimal, because popular generalist methods for statistical data analysis are demonstrably more successful in correctly identifying authors of Latin text fragments and do not support the case for Apuleius’ authorship of the new text. The authors conclude that there are no solid grounds to conclude that the ‘New Apuleius’ was indeed written by Apuleius.

Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars usually begin with a family tree. These family trees are often rhetorical, foreshadowing in the ancestors character traits that will be themes of the rest of the Life. This particular rhetorical strategy relies upon an older phenomenon of ‘family identity’—namely, the literary application of similar characteristics to people in the same family—such as the one that tells us that the Claudii are proud and the Domitii Ahenobarbi are ferocious. Gary Farney studied ‘family identity’ as a phenomenon of the Republic. There, it was the association of a family with a certain characteristic, a kind of ‘branding’. It would be perfectly obvious for Suetonius to use the family identities already in use for well-known families, but, as I show here, Suetonius’ selection of ancestors creates different family identities rather than simply using the traditional ones he would have found in other sources. In this study I concentrate on Nero and Tiberius. I focus on these two emperors because they are individuals where there is a known family identity in other sources and they also have the most detailed and elaborate ancestry sections in Suetonius’ Caesars. Family identity seems to be most interesting to Suetonius when it goes against expectations, and that is when Suetonius’ family trees are most elaborate.

This article examines the first-century c.e. Laus Pisonis, an anonymous panegyric for a certain Piso that lays particular emphasis on his skill at lyre-playing, ball games and the board game, the ludus latrunculorum (155–210). Whereas this focus has often been a cause of consternation among critics, this article argues that play is a crucial element of the poem's poetic and political operations. The first section shows that the poem employs images of poetic maturity and of temporality in order to justify a light or ludic topic for an allegedly young poet. The second section identifies a hitherto unobserved telestich (M-O-R-A) in the passage describing the ludus latrunculorum and argues that this letter game defines a positive period of play within the poem. The third section further demonstrates that this letter game is aimed specifically at the patron Piso as he is represented within the poem. That is, the poet parallels Piso's potential to uncover the telestich in the text and his ability to uncover the poet's hidden talent. The concluding fourth section explores the wider impact of this reinterpretation of the Laus Pisonis for the literary history of the Early Principate. It proposes that the poem's playfulness should not be seen as reflecting the progressive disempowerment of the political elite. Rather, the poem is an early case of Roman political discourse encroaching on the value of the trivial and the boundaries of otium. The Laus Pisonis makes play political.

This paper proposes a new synthetic account of the presence of Cicero as both character and source in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile. Lucan's treatment is derived primarily from Virgil's technique for creating intertextually complex characters, but further builds on Sallust's displacement of Cicero in his narrative of the Catilinarian conspiracy and on the declamatory practice of reducing the orator to a few prominent and recognizable traits. Cicero the character, as he briefly appears at the opening of the seventh book, is not simply an ahistorical caricature: he is constructed through a careful series of allusions designed to indict his use of violence in the suppression of Catiline. Other prominent aspects of Cicero in the tradition are displaced and transferred to other characters more important to Lucan's design, Cato and Pompey. Lucan's depiction of Pompey, especially his death and decapitation, draws on the language and affect of the tradition associated with Cicero, using Cicero's own words and the obituary of Cicero in the lost historical epic of Cornelius Severus. Finally, the language of Cicero's peace-making efforts in his correspondence, suppressed in Lucan's depiction of him as a warmonger, forms an important part of the narrator's own emotional evocations of the impending catastrophe of civil war. The combination of models Lucan uses is more broadly reflective of his technique in composing a historical epic.