Hannibal was forced by Roman pressure to flee Carthage in secret (195). Livy’s narrative is lively and amusing. Like a Classical Greek taking refuge with a Persian satrap, he spent the rest of his life with eastern royalty. His flight was precipitated by the arrival of three Roman envoys, whose mission was to accuse Hannibal of plotting war against Rome in combination with the Seleucid king Antiochus III. He had long prepared for something like this, and left the African mainland for a nearby island, Cercina. There he found Phoenician ships and suspected they might take news of him to Carthage. So he organized a midsummer banquet, including a huge improvised sunshade or marquee made from the ships’ sails. In the morning the crews awoke with hangovers to find their ships incapacitated. He sailed for Tyre, then Daphne, a suburb of Antioch. Back at Carthage, his town house was formally demolished.

The Emperor Julian’s momentous sojourn in Antioch is a key theme in the discourse of Christianity and paganism in the Greek East. This chapter chronicles the events and climate of 362 and 363 CE on the shores of the Orontes, not least highlighting Julian’s utopia of Antioch "city of marble."

The opulence of Antioch and Daphne’s houses is well known; how new theoretical and methodological approaches help us evaluate this complicated archaeological record is the focus of this chapter.

Since the 1930s, archaeologists have excavated over 300 mosaics at Antioch and its environs. This essay explores the developments and historiography on Antioch’s mosaics as well as new methodological approaches.

This chapter explores the essential aspect of water harvesting practices in Antioch, whether designed to tap into the Daphne springs to feed the aqueducts and baths or to impound runoff against floods. More subtly, the analysis documents the efforts of the royal and imperial agencies in controlling the city’s water infrastructure.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s simile world becomes a more fragmented and less cohesive place where simile characters from the past may appear rarely or not at all, similes are so short that they often do not achieve the immersive effects typical of the simile worlds of earlier epics, and they do not work hand in hand with the story to bring forward key themes. Some conventional simile features take on different functions in the Metamorphoses, such as the chase similes that describe erotic pursuits instead of battle scenes. Main roles become cameo appearances while minor characters from earlier epics may find themselves at center stage. Yet similes retain many of their familiar qualities, and some of the poem’s most memorable moments are achieved in part with heart-pounding scenes familiar from earlier epics of predators chasing their prey, raging fires, battle scenes, and sailing. Similes help the Metamorphoses both to claim the epic genre for itself and to take that genre to new places it had never been before. The story and the similes tell a tale of constancy and change, of passion rather than battle as the most important arena for human conflict, and of storytelling itself.

The next two chapters deal with key aspects of direct and indirect Ovidianism in film history. Chapter 3 details a particular moment, both Ovidian and cinematic, in the artistic development of Gabriele D’Annunzio, once Italy’s pre-eminent writer, and its far-ranging repercussions for D’Annunzio and all of film history. D’Annunzio saw himself as an artistic and spiritual descendent of Ovid. His poems, especially Alcyone, provide ample evidence. Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel tree in the Metamorphoses prompted D’Annunzio to abandon his earlier disdain for the new medium of cinema and to make film history himself: in his practical involvement with several productions and in regard to the origins of film stardom. D’Annunzio became one of the first formulators of film theory, perhaps the first ever. This chapter also addresses the Ovidian nature of a pre-cinematic apparatus such as the thaumatrope and the impulse that American educators received from early cinema and D’Annunzio. None of this would have occurred the way it did without Ovid in the background.