the sun. By the time Valerius inherits it, the myth of the Argohas become a trope for
the impossibility of discovering an origin; for Valerius it seems also to be a metaphor
for the impossibility of creating a truly original text.... The Argomyth which seems
at firstglance to be about origins, exploration, and innovation, becomes in Valerius’
hands a vehicle for exploring the endless repetitions and variations of a profoundly
derivative literary world” (emphasis added).
- So Godwin 1995, ad loc.
101.OLDs.v. §5a; see Kroll 1922, ad loc., for the simplex pro composito
construction. - On the importance of Prometheus in the cultural history of the poem, see
Gaisser 1995, 609 – 10. - Cf. Bramble 1970, 24: “The demarcation between heroic past and sinful pres-
ent is deliberately blurred”; Gaisser 1995, 613: “All ages may be the same.” - Above, p. 118.
- Fine discussions in Fitzgerald 1995, 140 – 68, and Munich 2003. Syndikus
(1990, 104) well remarks on how unlike “bourgeois” Theocritean or Callimachean
epyllia Catullus’s poem is in its fascination with the glamorous and grand heroic (how-
ever qualified). - Especially Catullus 68, and 8, 58, 72, 76: see Putnam 1961; Traina 1975, 150 –
51; Mazzoli 2001, 136 – 37; Marincic 2001, 485, 488. - Good treatments are available in Fyfe 1983, on Medea;P. J. Davis 1983 and
Boyle 1987, esp. 18 – 24, on Phaedra;and Segal 1983, in general. - On this article of the Stoic creed, see Long and Sedley 1987, 1:400 – 401.
- In the Natural Questions,likewise, his discussion of the winds turns into a long
denunciation of the abuse of winds to enable sailing (5.18.4 – 16), ending with the
observation that “different people have different motives for launching a ship, but none
has a good one” (non eadem est his et illis causa soluendi, sed iusta nulli,16). - Fyfe 1983, 87.
- Tony Woodman attractively suggests that pingitur aethermay be a reference to
a model of the night sky. - In Epistle90, to which we turn shortly, Seneca offers a wonderful counterpart
to this moment, contrasting the fake ceilings above modern heads with the “remark-
able spectacle of the nights,” which were there for early man to gaze upon (insigne spec-
taculum noctium,42). - It is worth remarking that this kind of perspective is no part of Seneca’s coun-
terpart in Greek, Euripides’ Hippolytus. - P. J. Davis 1983, 114 – 15; Boyle 1987, 18 – 19, on Hippolytus’s assertion of vio-
lent control here. - Note how Theseus, the “normal” man par excellence,marks time through agri-
notes to pages 125 – 128. 269