Chapter 5 explores the role played by the Byblis episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a form of authorial self-portrait. Byblis, placed at what this paper shows to be the poem’s chronological centre, is both the work’s first long-form writer and its first, and only, dreamer of fully human dreams. Where Morpheus in the Metamorphoses’ House of Sleep may serve as model for the poet as shape-shifter and creator, Byblis represents the intimate connection between creativity and self-deception in Ovid’s poetic programme. Through Byblis, this paper argues, Ovid comes to recapitulate Latin literature’s ‘primal scene of instruction’, the Hesiodic and Callimachean dream of Homer that opens Ennius’ Annales. The metempsychotic dimension of Ovid’s representation of his own poetic project, this paper concludes, has important affinities with the circular form of the self-perpetuating fountain into which Byblis is transformed, and with the anthropocentric dreams that make possible Byblis’ metamorphosis, and the circle of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a whole.

The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil uses an enriched tripartite model of Roman culture—touching not only the public and the private, but also the solitary—in order to present a new interpretation of Latin literature and of the historical causes of this third sphere’s relative invisibility in scholarship. By connecting Cosmos and Imperium to the Individual, the solitary sphere was not so much a way of avoiding politics as a political education in itself. As reimagined by literature in this age, this sphere was an essential space for the formation of the new Roman citizen of the Augustan revolution, and was behind many of the notable features of the literary revolution of Virgil’s age: the expansion of the possibilities of the book of poetry, the birth of the literary cursus, new coordinations of cosmology and politics within strictly organized schemes, the attraction of first-person genres, and the subjective style. Through close readings of Cicero’s late works and the oeuvres of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius and the works of other authors in the age of Virgil, The Solitary Sphere thus presents a radical reinterpretation of classical Roman literature, and contributes to the study of premodern culture more generally, especially for traditions that have taken antiquity as too fixed a point in their own literary, religious, and cultural histories.

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This essay explores Ben Jonson's treatment of dramatic and historical time in his Roman tragedies, Sejanus His Fall (1603) and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611). Although the plays conspicuously fail to respect neoclassical strictures about the unity of time, both reproduce the temporal compression of Greek and Roman tragedy through their sustained intertextual engagements with a wide range of Roman source texts, including, above all, Lucan's Bellum Civile, and the works of the late antique court poet Claudian. The ultimate effect of these quotations, allusions, and reminiscences is to transform Jonson's dramas of early imperial corruption and late Republican civil conflict into proleptic visions of Roman history as a phantasmagoria of unceasing political violence, extending to the ends of both classical antiquity and classical literature.