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Virgil lived through the fall of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Empire. In his poems we see a series of attempts, increasingly ambitious in scale and conception, to combine technical brilliance and beauty with profound meditation on the nature of imperialism and the relation of the individual to the State. From short pastoral poems on love and song he progressed to the heroic myth of the founding of Rome. "The Aeneid," immediately recognised as the greatest masterpiece of Latin literature, has had incalculable influence on European literature in the two thousand years...

"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" stand at the very beginning of Greek literature. Much has been written about their origins and authorship, but Jasper Griffin, although he touches briefly on those questions, is here concerned with the ideas of the poems, which have had such an incalculable influence on the ideas of the West. He shows that each of the two epics has its own coherent and suggestive view of the world and of man's place in it.

In Latin Poets and Roman Life Jasper Griffin studies the inter-relation of literature and life in the Augustan poets. The works of Virgil, Horace, Propertius and Ovid are characterized by a brilliant polish and a dazzling repertoire of devices for stylizing events and emotion; yet they remain convincing as a direct response to experience. Theories which deny that directness are criticized in this book as mistaken. The life of pleasure, in its kaleidoscopic variety - eating, drinking, bathing, love - is a central subject, but so is death. The book also discusses the uses of...