Mortal action in the ancient epic world is shrouded in murk. Even chosen sons of goddesses like Aeneas have very little notion of what they...

The previous post  offered the notion that Dido's passion for Aeneas issues in a mode of giving that is complex, implicative, and carri...

Wherever Odysseus went, the people he visited believed themselves the very center of the world. But all these lands are on the margins of h...

Motifs associated with Troy lingered in the lore of Europe well into the middle ages.  The meander above might have little to do with He...

A different account by Virgil in his Aeneid (3.163f), has Aeneas in a dream learn from his ancestral Penates that "Dardanus and Fa...

It can be illuminating to see how different Virgil's Dido is from Ovid's heroine. The Carthaginian queen's last speech in Aen...

[A few changes and additions come toward the end of this.] The last time I looked, Perseus's bi-lingual edition of the Heroides was n...

I've come away from our reading of Pindar's Olympian I and Ovid's Heroides I with a stronger and clearer sense of major diffe...

Since we're thinking about Homer's epics in connection with Heroides I , it was good to find a brief note in sententiae antiquae (...

Ovid begins his book of love letters with Penelope, writing to her husband whose fate is unknown. As she explains, she heard much of the ...

Pindar's First Olympian has several interesting motifs. This is about one of them: digestion. The ode begins with a banquet honoring ...