Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the Western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE–14 CE). Relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors use largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Plague as such functions frequently in Roman texts to enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective. In order to understand the figurative potential of plague, this book evaluates the reality of epidemic disease in Rome, in light of twentieth-century theories of plague discourse, those of Artaud, Foucault, Sontag, and Girard, in particular. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature identifies consistent features of the outbreaks described by Roman epic poets, charting the emergence of Golden-Age imagery, emphasis on bodily dissolution, and poignant accounts of broken familial bonds. Such features are expressed through Roman idioms that provocatively recall the discourse of civil strife that characterized the last century of the Roman Republic. The final chapters examine key moments in the resurgence of Roman plague topoi, beginning with early imperial poets (Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus), and concluding with discussion of late antique Christian poetry, paintings of the late Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-American novels and films.

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This paper argues that Catullus's characterization of Ariadne in c. 64 plays an important role in shaping the puellae of Augustan elegy. In particular, Ariadne's spatial, temporal, and social marginalization, as well as her power to disrupt teleological progress, become defining attributes of the elegiac beloved. Julia Kristeva's configuration of "women's time" and her linking of female subjectivity with the semiotic (as opposed to symbolic) components of language provide theoretical models that offer one explanation for Ariadne's spatio-temporal crisis and allow us to understand better the relationship between the heroine and her successor puellae.

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