The antiquarian interests of Propertius 4 introduce a series of vignettes of early Rome (elegies 4.1, 4.4, 4.9, 4.10), and several further poems include rustic or quasi-rustic loca amoena in less likely contexts (a marine locale in 4.6, an urban park in 4.8). This chapter investigates how these passages engage elegy in an encounter with the genre of pastoral as codified in Virgil’s Eclogues, expanded in the Georgics and inserted in the antiquarian Aeneid. The politics of this encounter are urgent, pastoral being a vehicle of the Augustan ‘Golden Age’, but also inherently evanescent and ‘elegiac’. No less urgent are its poetics, pastoral being a lowly erotic genre like elegy, but also capable of cosmic and epic flights (as in Eclogue 6, notwithstanding its recusatio of epic themes – a tension closely tracked in elegy 4.6 on Actium). This ‘upward mobility’ is another respect in which pastoral is, arguably, analogous to elegy in its late-Propertian phase (if not earlier in the lost work of Gallus, an ‘absent presence’ here). Propertius’ recurrent loca amoena (which are not as idyllic as their name suggests) are thus spaces of generic negotiation in which ideology is never far away.

When Horace first published the Odes in 23 BCE, in an edition comprising the eighty-eight poems of books 1–3, Ode 3.30 stood as a self-reflexive epilogue in which the poet surveyed his work and announced the achievement of his own goals. Its clear and confident claims to poetic immortality resonate pointedly in form and tone with Horace’s earlier statements. The first two lines of the poem are particularly forceful, and feature one of the collection’s more memorable images and more durable phrases.

This chapter considers the early stages of Roman slavery in Italy from a comparative perspective, drawing above all on the experience of slavery in the Sokoto caliphate in the nineteenth-century Sudan.

This chapter reconnects the architectural terracottas from different roofs of the cult building on the acropolis at Satricum with related foundations and in the process discovers a hitherto-unknown temple. While it was known that the cult building at the site went through multiple phases of extension, refurbishment, and reconstruction, the application of 3D modelling techniques in which all elements of the buildings are connected has succeeded in reconciling problematic data by identifying a new structure named ‘Sacellum II’. When the results are compared to contemporary temples in Rome, the relative precociousness of different cities’ architecture can be re-evaluated, leading to the suggestion that Caere, along with eastern Greece and Sicily, may have been influential in the development of religious architecture in central Italy. The project shows the value of studying terracottas and foundations together, something that is not done as a matter of course.