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It is well known that Ovid's Amores begin with a reference to Virgil's Aeneid in the very first word, arma (‘weapons’, Am. 1.1.1 = Verg. Aen. 1.1), which implies that the elegist had been composing epic before Cupid, by stealing a foot, apparently forced him to write elegy. In spite of this incapacitation at the hands of the love god, Ovid continues to toy with Virgil's epic by making the first two poems of his collection of elegiacs into a mini-Aeneid, or – to be precise – by making the second poem of the collection into the second half of the Aeneid. One result is that the three-book edition of Amores threatens to be over even before it has begun. Another is that Ovid can be identified with the Latin enemies, on the wrong side of history, from the Aeneid. I restrict the argument largely to what can be observed in Amores 1.2, leaving aside, for instance, the possibility that Ovid shot by Cupid's arrow in 1.1 might be thought comparable to Dido, similarly shot and causing Aeneas to dally in Carthage with her in Aeneid 4.

This collection of essays explores the oratory of the Roman Republic as practised by everyone apart from Cicero. It addresses the problems arising from the partial and often unreliable evidence for these other Roman orators and investigates new ways of interpreting this evidence. The contributors seek to contextualize these fragments and testimonia, both in their original settings and over the course of their subsequent transmission, to explore a range of questions: what was said in the Roman Republic, and what counted as public speech or ‘oratory’ at Rome? Who did the speaking, and to what extent can we identify anonymous speakers? What were the formal and informal scenarios in which public speech took place? What non-verbal signals should be considered together with the speakers’ words? How reliable and selective is our evidence? How does the development of rhetoric as a discipline affect the reception and transmission of public speech? The resulting discussions reshape our understanding of public speech in the Roman Republic and enable us to move the study of Republican oratory decisively beyond Cicero.

The best-known fact about the interaction of the Republican Roman poet Gaius Lucilius (c.180–103/102b.c.e.), the inventor of the genre of Roman verse satire, with the doctrine of Scepticism is probably a statement of Cicero: that Clitomachus the Academician dedicated a treatise to the poet (Cic.Luc. 102). Diogenes Laertius makes much of that writer's, Clitomachus’, industry (τὸ φιλόπονον, 4.67), with the comment: ‘to such lengths did his diligence (ἐπιμελείας) go that he composed more than four hundred treatises’. This phraseology surely reminds those interested in Lucilius’ influence on later Latin poetry of Horace's disparaging comment,in hora saepe ducentos, | ut magnum, uersus dictabat(‘as a bravura display, he would often dictate two hundred verses in an hour’,Sat.1.4.9–10); moreover, Horace shortly afterwards calls his predecessorgarrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem(‘talkative and too lazy to bear the work of writing’, 1.4.12). Yet, a sceptical view of Horace's critique might have to think of Lucilius as hard-working, like his putative friend the Academic philosopher, Clitomachus.

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