From Sam:

First off, interminable praise of Rome aside, the passage we read in translation had some great imagery--I particularly liked the fiery shield. As for the secondary readings, the discussion of late antique aesthetics touches on a topic that's one of my personal fascinations, namely, the extent to which any literary work is really a unity as opposed to a series of discrete, memorable episodes. Roberts views this, accurately, as a hallmark of late antiquity, but I think it's something with a long history in Greco-Roman poetics--starting with the Alexandrians and the anti-Homeric assumptions of epyllion, and, I would argue, culminating in the Metamorphoses. Brooks Otis has some compelling things to say about the Ovid'd unifying motifs, but they mostly seem on the order of Roberts' thematic, as opposed to narrative connectors. And this seems to be the model that wins out, both in late antiquity and the Middle Ages and Renaissance--I read somewhere (Eugenio Montale?) that despite his invocation of Virgil, Dante owes his "variety of incident" to Ovid; ditto Boccaccio in prose and Chaucer and Ariosto (and Byron!) in verse. And even Milton, trying to produce an authentically unified/Virgilian epic, creates something whose chief virtue is arguably in disconnected lyric passages, with the whole being something "no one ever wished longer". As for today's section of Rutilius, I was, as ever, bewildered by the fascination minute technical description held for antiquity both late and classical. His explication of the layout of towers and inlets and the end of today's reading could easily be levied against him as a species of late antique decadence--that is, if Homer weren't just as fond of raft-building. Of course, that raises the even more interesting question of just how unified/non-digressive/"classical" Homer really is.