Fragments of Roman Poetry C.60 BC-AD 20


Book Description

An edition and translation of a collection of fragments of Roman poetry composed between 60 BC and AD 20, when Latin literature was at its height. Study of these fragmentary texts enables us better to appreciate surviving great poets such as Catullus and Virgil.







Translation as Muse


Book Description

Poetry is often understood as a form that resists translation. Translation as Muse questions this truism, arguing for translation as a defining condition of Catullus's poetry and for this aggressively marginal poet's centrality to comprehending cultural transformation in first-century Rome. Young approaches translation from several different angles including the translation of texts, the translation of genres, and translatio in the form of the pan-Mediterranean transport of people, goods, and poems. Throughout, she contextualizes Catullus's corpus within the cultural foment of Rome's first-century imperial expansion, viewing his work as emerging from the massive geopolitical shifts that marked the era. Young proposes that reading Catullus through a translation framework offers a number of significant rewards: it illuminates major trends in late Republican culture, it reconfigures our understanding of translation history, and it calls into question some basic assumptions about lyric poetry, the genre most closely associated with Catullus's eclectic oeuvre.




A.E. Housman


Book Description

A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was a man of many apparent contradictions, most of which remain unresolved 150 years after his birth. At once a deeply emotive lyric poet and a precise and dedicated classical scholar, he achieved fame in both of these diverse disciplines. Although his poetic legacy has received much scholarly analysis, and yet more attention has been devoted to reconstructing his private life, no previous work has focused on Housman the classical scholar; yet it is upon scholarship that Housman most wished to leave his mark. This timely collection of papers by leading scholars reassesses the breadth and significance of Housman's contribution to classical scholarship in both his published and unpublished writings, and discusses how his mantle has been passed on to later generations of classicists.




Theatre and Autocracy in the Ancient World


Book Description

Why did ancient autocrats patronise theatre? How could ancient theatre – rightly supposed to be an artform that developed and flourished under democracy – serve their needs? Plato claimed that poets of tragic drama "drag states into tyranny and democracy". The word order is very deliberate: he goes on to say that tragic poets are honoured "especially by the tyrants, and secondly by the democracies" (Republic 568c). For more than forty years scholars have explored the political, ideological, structural and economic links between democracy and theatre in ancient Greece. By contrast, the links between autocracy and theatre are virtually ignored, despite the fact that for the first 200 years of theatre's existence more than a third of all theatre-states were autocratic. For the next 600 years, theatre flourished almost exclusively under autocratic regimes. The volume brings together experts in ancient theatre to undertake the first systematic study of the patterns of use made of the theatre by tyrants, regents, kings and emperors. Theatre and Autocracy in the Ancient World is the first comprehensive study of the historical circumstances and means by which autocrats turned a medium of mass communication into an instrument of mass control.




A Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses: Volume 3, Books 13–15 and Indices


Book Description

Comprising fifteen books and over two hundred and fifty myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the longest extant Latin poems from the ancient world and one of the most influential works in Western culture. It is an epic on desire and transgression that became a gateway to the entire world of pagan mythology and visual imagination. This, the first complete commentary in English, covers all aspects of the text – from textual interpretation to poetics, imagination, and ideology – and will be useful as a teaching aid and an orientation for those who are interested in the text and its reception. Historically, the poem's audience includes readers interested in opera and ballet, psychology and sexuality, myth and painting, feminism and posthumanism, vegetarianism and metempsychosis (to name just a few outside the area of Classical Studies).




The Romans in the Age of Augustus


Book Description

Incorporating the most recent scholarship, this book offers afascinating history of Rome and the Roman peoples during the ruleof the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Written in an easily accessible style, making it the idealintroduction to Augustan Rome for those with little previousknowledge Offers compelling insight into the workings of Roman societyduring this pivotal period in its history Incorporates the most recent scholarship on aspects ofAugustus's reign including the armed forces, religion, andintellectual and cultural life Andrew Lintott is a widely respected expert on the RomanRepublic




Brill's Companion to Silius Italicus


Book Description

Only recently have scholars turned their attention to Silius Italicus' Punica, a poem the reputation of which was eclipsed by the emergence of Virgil’s Aeneid as the canonical Latin epos of Augustan Rome. This collection of essays aims at examining the importance of Silius' historical epic in Flavian, Domitianic Rome by offering a detailed overview of the poem's context and intertext, its themes and images, and its reception from antiquity through Renaissance and modern philological criticism. This pioneering volume is the first comprehensive, collaborative study on the longest epic poem in Latin literature.




Spenser and Virgil


Book Description

Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry, the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. His sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic.Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the genre of pastoral itself.




The Epic Journey in Greek and Roman Literature


Book Description

From Homer to the moon, this volume explores the epic journey across space and time in the ancient world.