Virgil's poetry has long been recognised as delving into a poetics of comparison which employs sudden shifts from the miniature to the gigantic. So too have Virgilian similes long been singled out as a privileged locus where complex inter- and intra-textual allusions serve to highlight the primary role that these similes play in the narrative and poetic context of Virgil's work. Along these lines, this paper addresses one such simile atAene.d1.430–6, where the Tyrians building Carthage are compared to busy bees working at their hive. The paper explores the impact that the recognition of the simile's inter- and intra-textual connections may have on the interpretation of the scene of Aeneas’ arrival at Carthage, and on certain long-debated aspects of the poem as a whole.

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Lucan's account of Caesar crossing the Rubicon (1.213–22) is dense with metapoetic allusion. Although the river has been specified as a small stream at Caesar's arrival (ut uentum est parui Rubiconis ad undas, 1.185), it becomes swollen, tumidus, as soon as Caesar ‘breaks the delay of war’ and ‘carries his standards in haste over the [now] swollen river’ (inde moras soluit belli tumidumque per amnem | signa tulit propere, 1.204-5). This has been pinpointed both as a metapoetic signpost of Lucan's engagement with the anti-Callimachean swollen river of grandiose epic (Callim. Hymn 2.108-9) at the outbreak of (his) Civil War, and as a programmatic statement that the whole Bellum Ciuile will set up a series of contrasts between Caesar's urgency in crossing boundaries and Lucan's narrative obstructions to or compliances with Caesar's progress. In fact, as Jamie Masters notes, ‘in spite of the “undoing of delay,” the perfect “tulit” and the adverb “propere,” Caesar has not crossed the river yet; or if he has, he must do it again’, precisely at 1.213–22. Within this densely self-reflexive passage, Lucan inserts a palindromic acrostic which signals both the doubling of Caesar's action (or at least the poet's double mention of the action) and Lucan's poetic representation of Caesar taming the forces of nature.

This review article of Joseph Farrell’s 2021 monograph on Virgil’s Aeneid (Juno’s Aeneid: A Battle for Heroic Identity, Princeton and Oxford) takes the cue from Farrell’s analysis of Virgil’s intertextuality with the Homeric epics and provides a methodological re-assessment of intertextuality in Virgilian studies and Latin literature more broadly. It attempts to retrace the theoretical history and some of the main applications of Latin intertextual studies and suggests some possible ways for Latinists to engage more profoundly with deconstructive criticism and post-critique.