In Chapter IV we turn our attention abroad, where amicitia was the term used to describe a mutual alliance between states. How does a state become a friend? Are their different kinds of friendship between states? What happens when a state that had been friendly becomes an enemy? If we can understand our best and worst features by observing our personal friends, is the same true of allies? 

This chapter contains three texts focused on Rome’s greatest rival: the north African city of Carthage. First we will lean about how the lasting enmity between these two great empires arose by reading the biography that Cornelius Nepos (c. 105-–25 BCE) wrote about Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian general who carved out a new empire in Spain and then drove a mighty army up to the gates of Rome during the Second Punic War. We will then step ahead and back in time, looking at how the poet Vergil (70–19 BCE) identified Aeneas’ rejection of Dido, Queen of Carthage, as a decisive moment in Roman history. Finally, we will revisit this encounter between the founder of the Roman people and the founder of the city of Carthage in Ovid’s provocative Heroides 7, in which Dido writes a letter to Aeneas after their break-up.

Central to all three texts are questions of identity: what does it mean to be Roman (and not Roman)? We will have our first extended contact with poetry and encounter two new genres (biography and pseudepigraphic epistolography). We will experience these texts through different media than we encountered in Chapter I. An on-line commentary will support our reading of Nepos. For Vergil and Ovid, we will read their poems using different kinds of popular commentaries.