For more than a century, critics of the Aeneid have assumed that all or most of its episodes must propound something about Aeneas and his mission to found the Roman people, and through them about Rome and Augustus; whether that is their positive aspects, or their brutality and destructiveness, or the contrast between the public "voice" of their achievements and the private "voice" of the suffering they cause. This book argues that this assumption is wrong; the Aeneid's main purpose was to present a series of emotionally moving episodes, especially pathetic ones. This book shows...

Homeric Morality is an attempt to answer two questions: whether or not the Homeric gods are concerned with 'justice' in human society, and what mechanism controls the social behaviour of Homeric man. It shows that the gods distribute good and bad fortune to men not in response to their moral behaviour, bus as required by fate; men, however, believe that the gods are concerned with human morality, and subsequently their behaviour is restrained by their faith in the moral gods as well as by many other forces, social and emotional. This volume, taken as a whole, serves as a...

The excerpts from the Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus (2nd century A.D.) are one of our major sources of knowledge concerning controversiae, model court speeches on fictitious themes. These formed the focus of Roman higher education and therefore had an enormous effect on Latin literary style and content from the late Republic on. They also contain important indirect evidence for contemporary social history. This book provides a general introduction to the work, a new Latin text, plus the first English translation and only full modern commentary. The latter discusses the...

The Argonautica was said to have been the source of a quarrel between Apollonius, who wrote what looks like an epic poem, and Callimachus, who denounced the writing of epic poetry. Although the quarrel did not take place in the real world, its issue controls the poem. The heroes are determined to take part in a Homeric epic, which the Callimachean narrator refuses to write. Drawing on the methods of modern literary theorists but eschewing the jargon, DeForest shows how Apollonius uses the literary dispute in Alexandria to give a three-dimensional quality to his poem. The amusing...

The epic poem the Thebaid by P. Papinius Statius, written about AD 80 to 92, deals with the fraternal strife between Oedipus' sons Eteocles and Polynices for the mastery of Thebes. Book VII describes the forced march of the Seven and their arrival at Thebes, Jocasta's vain attempt at mediation and Amphiaraus' spectacular katabasis. This book is the first which deals with Thebaid VII since Barth (1664) and Amar & Lemaire (1825-30). Apart from being a commentary in the philological sense, it examines in close detail the poet's mannered style and analyses the text as a...

Blood and Iron is an exploration of the role of gossip, rumor and storytelling in the society depicted in the Odyssey and in the real world in which the poem was performed. It includes extensive analysis of Homeric narrative technique, with particular attention to the way the singer creates tension in a largely traditional tale. Individual chapters treat discrete, generally very traditional literary and historical problems, including the significance of the term kleos, the presentation of Telemachos, the internal chronology of the poem, the nature of Homeric kingship, and...

The scraps of hard evidence are carefully sifted from the putative so as to uncover the probable extent and nature of interpolation in Thucydides. This gives a coarse but firm "typology," which may be of some use in the study of other MS traditions, and clarifies hard passages many of which are discussed in depth, so that the book's Index Locorum can be a tool for students of this author. Separate chapters examine evidence given by MS disagreement, by a long inscription, by papyri, by scholiasts, by Valla's translation and more. A chapter analyzes the types of mechanical "interpolation"...

The Gorgon's Severed Head looks at three plays of Euripides, one early, one middle and one late in his career. Innovations in genre, in the use of the traditional stories, in the representation of women and of gender issues are present at every period. In all three plays characters are depicted creating themselves and each other. Chapter One on Alcestis looks at the artistry of the two main characters and is especially concerned with finding a role for Admetus, the play's most serious problem. The second chapter treats the physical displacement of the myth in Euripides' version of the...

The 13 essays presented here shed new light on the role of panegyric in the western and eastern Roman Empire in the late antique world. Introductory chapters give an overview of panegyrical theory and practice, followed by studies of major writers of the early empire and the anonymous Panegyrici latini. The core of the volume deals with prose and verse panegyric under the Christian Roman Empire (4th-7th century): key themes addressed are social and political context, the 'hidden agenda', and the impact of Christianity on the pagan tradition of the panegyric, including the portrayal of...