This is the first book-length study to reconstruct the role of women in the epic poems of the Flavian period of Latin literature. Antony Augoustakis examines the role of female characters from the perspective of Julia Kristeva's theories on foreign otherness and motherhood to underscore the on-going negotiation between same and other in the Roman literary imagination as a telling reflection on the construction of Roman identity and of gender and cultural hierarchies.

• Introduction: Other and same: Female presence in Flavian epic
• 1: Mourning endless: Female otherness in Statius' Thebaid
• 2: Defining the other: From altera patria to tellus mater in Silius Italicus' Punica
• 3: Comes ultima fati: Regulus' encounter with Marcia's otherness in Punica 6
• 4: Playing the same: Roman and non-Roman mothers in the Punica
• Epilogue: Virgins and (M)others: Appropriations of same and other in Flavian Rome