List of Illustrations . . ix
List of Contributors . . xi

1. Introduction: Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture . . 1
2. Horace's Ars Poetica and the Marvellous . . 19
3. Where the Wild Things Are: Locating the Marvellous in Augustan Wall Painting . . 41
4. Against Nature? Some Augustan Responses to Man-made Marvels  . . 75
5. Virgil: A Paradoxical Poet? . . 95
6. The Question of the Marvellous in the Georgics of Virgil . . 113
7. In Search of the Lost Hercules: Strategies of the Fantastic in the Aeneid . . 126
8. Thaumatographia, or 'What is a Theme?' . . 145
9. Phaethon and the Monsters . . 163
10. Prodigiosa mendada uatum: Responses to the Marvellous in Ovid's Narrative of Perseus (Metamorphoses 4-5) . . 189
11. Encountering the Fantastic: Expectations, Forms of Communication, Reactions . . 213
12. Constructing a Narrative of mira deum: The Story of Philemon and Baucis (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8) . . 231
13. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.416-51: noua monstra and the foedera naturae . . 248
14. Latrator Anubis: Alien Divinities in Augustan Rome, and how to Tame Monsters through Aetiology . . 268
15. Ordering Wonderland: Ovid's Pythagoras and the Augustan Vision . . 288
16. Delusions of Grandeur: Lucretian 'Passages' in Livy . . 310
17. The Strange Art of the Sententious Declaimer . . 330

References . . 350
Indexes . . 381