The opening of Book 4 of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica finds its protagonists confounded by the loss of Hercules, their hero-of-heroes whom Juno has caused to run off. As the Argonauts deliberate, loyalty to the man contends with the desire to carry on his heroic labor, presented in terms of Vergilian arma uirumque. This paper uses the debate over Hercules’ abandonment as a case study for Valerius’ engagement with Vergil’s celebration of the fides, pietas and magnanimitas of his hero as the foundation of Roman political legitimacy. By setting Valerius’ Vergilian framing in dialogue with his engagement with Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and Horace’s Epodes, I argue that the Argonautica rereads Aeneas’ exemplary model as a guide to internecine conflict, exploring how the essential Augustan concepts of duty and familial fidelity may be encoded and reproduced to a very different effect.

Scholarship on Roman political thought and its legacy, especially anglophone, has rapidly expanded over the last decade. The main drivers of this renewed attention to Roman political ideas and institutions are an historical interest in the collapse of the Roman republic; a philosophical interest in republicanism; and a growing sensitivity to the originality of Roman thinkers, especially Cicero, in contrast to the older view that they were simply derivative of the Greeks. In this essay I will discuss recent publications on Cicero and Roman political ideas. After offering an overview of key themes in this new scholarship, I seek to suggest promising directions for future research and encourage the growing interest in Roman political thought and Cicero in particular. Cicero provides a fascinating link between ideas, institutions and action on the ground and he is therefore with good reason at the centre of much of the rapidly expanding literature on Roman political thought. In addition, given his interest in developing a theory of justice as the foundation of the state (res publica), a focus on Cicero will help explore the legacy of republicanism from the angle of his ideas about justice while paying attention to scholarship placing these ideas into their historical and institutional context.

The Underworld is a ‘shared space’ for poets and their poems, but one that exists on different timelines to Upperworld spaces, such that it is built on cyclicality rather than linearity. In this article, I explore the cycles within and between the homoerotic Underworld poetry of Tibullus, Domitius Marsus, Ovid and Statius. Using a combination of traditional philology and queer temporal approaches, I show how characters ‘recycle’ through these texts, so that Tibullus’ Marathus cycles into Statius’ Philetus through metapoetic metempsychosis. I begin with the role of the Underworld in Latin poetry, before turning to Tibullus’ death, as commemorated by Ovid and Marsus. Next, I explore how Tibullus ‘kills’ Marathus, so that Ovid can hint at his being in the Underworld. Finally, I turn to Statius’ poem on Philetus to show how it continues the cycles of earlier poetry, before concluding with a discussion of the consequences of Elysium’s queerness.

In this paper I argue that the accepted reconstruction of Suetonius’ De viris illustribus has been shaped by unexamined assumptions that have been allowed to take on the appearance of fact. I begin by surveying the scholarly reconstruction of this work from the fifteenth century until today. I then examine two key underlying assumptions: that Suetonius planned and published his series of literary lives as a single compendious work and that it excluded men who were not writers or wrote in Greek; in both cases I propose alternative hypotheses. I lastly test these alternatives by sketching a new approach to a possible Suetonian book De philosophis. I conclude that the more we rid ourselves of a priori assumptions about De viris illustribus, the more clearly we can see that Suetonius’ interests and approach were remarkably consistent throughout all his lives.

Rome’s mid-republican period is back in the centre of attention. Roman money and coinage, however, are largely absent from the debate. As this field has seen important developments in recent years, this paper surveys recent research in order to explore how numismatic sources can contribute to our understanding of this formative period in Roman history. First, we present an overview of these new developments, which we then contextualise in the framework of the Roman economy, Roman state formation and the development of a distinct Roman identity. We argue for a development from coinage irregularly commissioned by individual Roman magistrates to a regular Roman state coinage; from haphazard production often outside Rome to large-scale and more regular coordinated production clearly institutionalised within the Roman state, with a distinct Roman appearance. We propose to recognise two principal moments of acceleration in this process: around 240 and, above all, 210 b.c.e., and show how these insights relate to broader debates on mid-republican Rome.