The Rape of Proserpine


Book Description




Claudian: De Raptu Proserpinae


Book Description

An exhaustive study of Claudian's unfinished mythological epic, with a text, apparatus criticus, and commentary. The long introduction begins with a catalogue of manuscripts; and this leads to an investigation into the manuscript tradition and the history of the poem's transmission. Dr Hall then surveys the most important printed editions of the poem. He examines various theories of dating and discusses the sources of the story. He concludes the introduction with a brief critical assessment of the form and style of the poem. Dr Hall establishes his text after an examination of all the extant manuscripts. The apparatus, though very full, is selective in that it records readings of younger manuscripts only when they offer something new. It also ignores trifling corruptions. The commentary is similarly selective. In general, it discusses everything relevant to the establishing of the text and ignores points of purely mythological and literary interest.




Claudian: De Raptu Proserpinae


Book Description

An exhaustive study of Claudian's unfinished mythological epic, with a text, apparatus criticus, and commentary. The long introduction begins with a catalogue of manuscripts; and this leads to an investigation into the manuscript tradition and the history of the poem's transmission. Dr Hall then surveys the most important printed editions of the poem. He examines various theories of dating and discusses the sources of the story. He concludes the introduction with a brief critical assessment of the form and style of the poem. Dr Hall establishes his text after an examination of all the extant manuscripts. The apparatus, though very full, is selective in that it records readings of younger manuscripts only when they offer something new. It also ignores trifling corruptions. The commentary is similarly selective. In general, it discusses everything relevant to the establishing of the text and ignores points of purely mythological and literary interest.




Claudian the Poet


Book Description

This comprehensive reassessment of the carmina maiora of the fourth-century poet Claudian contributes to the growing trend to recognize that Late Antique poets should be approached as just that: poets. Its methodology is developed from that of Michael Roberts' seminal The Jeweled Style. It analyzes Claudian's poetics and use of story telling to argue that the creation of a story world in which Stilicho, his patron, becomes an epic hero, and the barbarians are giants threatening both the borders of Rome and the order of the very universe is designed to convince his audience of a world-view in which it is only the Roman general who stands between them and cosmic chaos. The book also argues that Claudian uses the same techniques to promote the message that Honorius, young hero though he may seem, is not yet fit to rule, and that Stilicho's rightful position remains as his regent.




Panegyricus de Sexto Consulatu Honorii Augusti


Book Description

Claudian is often called the last poet of the classical tradition. This edition of his last extant work offers a newly edited text with facing English translation. A superb example of the literature of late antiquity, it records in exquisite verse the splendor of the western imperial court and serves as a historical witness to the events and attitudes of the last years of the Roman empire. The introduction and commentary analyze the historical background and, more importantly, Claudian's language, style, imagery, and use of other Greek and Latin sources.




Repeat Performances


Book Description

The uses and effects of repetition, imitation, and appropriation in Latin epic poetry.




The Poetics of Late Latin Literature


Book Description

The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Greco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element-the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the formal, aesthetic and religious transformations of ancient poetics in Late Antiquity. The Poetics of Late Latin Literature attempts to capture the excitement and vibrancy of the living ancient tradition reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of great Latin writers mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries AD. A series of the most distinguished expert voices in later Latin poetry as well as some of the most exciting new scholars have been specially commissioned to write new papers for this volume.




The Transvestite Achilles


Book Description

Statius' Achilleid is a playful, witty, and open-ended epic in the manner of Ovid. As we follow Achilles' metamorphosis from wild boy to demure girl to lover to hero, the poet brilliantly illustrates a series of contrasting codes of behaviour: male and female, epic and elegiac. This first full-length study of the poem addresses not only the narrative itself, but also sets the myth of Achilles on Scyros within a broad interpretive framework. The exploration ranges from the reception of the Achilleid in Baroque opera to the anthropological parallels that have been adduced to explain Achilles' transvestism. The study's expansive approach, which includes Ovid and Ovidian reception, psychoanalytic perspectives and theorizations of gender in antiquity, makes it essential reading not only for students of Statius, but for students of Latin literature, and of gender in antiquity.




Texts, Editors, and Readers


Book Description

A critical reassessment of the methods of Latin textual criticism and editing, in a form accessible to non-specialists.




Geography, Topography, Landscape


Book Description

By introducing a multifaceted approach to epic geography, the editors of the volume wish to provide a critical assessment of spatial perception, of its repercussions on shaping narrative as well as of its discursive traits and cultural contexts. Taking the genre-specific boundaries of Greco-Roman epic poetry as a case in point, a team of international scholars examines issues that lie at the heart of modern criticism on human geography. Modern and ancient discourse on space representations revolves around the nation-shaping force of geography, the gendered dynamics of landscapes, the topography of isolation and integration, the politics of imperialism, globalization, environmentalism as well as the power of language and narrative to turn space into place. One of the major aims of the volume is to show that the world of the Classics is not just the origin, but the essence of current debates on spatial constructions and reconstructions.