James Joyce s Ulysses is a modern version of Homer s Odyssey, but Joyce who was a better scholar of Latin than of Greek also was deeply influenced by the Aeneid, Virgil s epic poem about the journey of Aeneas and the foundation of Rome.
Joyce wrote Ulysses during the Irish War of Independence, when militants, politicians, and intellectuals were attempting to create a new Irish nation. Virgil wrote the Aeneid when, in the wake of decades of civil war, Augustus was founding what we now call the Roman Empire. Randall Pogorzelski applies modern theories of...

Silenced Voices is a pointed examination of the loss of speech, exile from community, and memory throughout the literary corpus of the Roman poet Ovid. In his book-length poem Metamorphoses, characters are transformed in ways that include losing their power of human speech. In Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, poems written after Ovid's exile from Rome in 8 ce, he represents himself as also having been transformed, losing his voice.

Bartolo A. Natoli provides a unique cross-reading of these works. He examines how the motifs and ideas articulated in the...

Presenting an innovative new reading of Sophocles' plays, Tragic Rites analyzes the poetic and narrative function of ritual in the seven extant plays of Sophocles. Adriana Brook closely examines four of them--Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus--in the context of her wide-ranging consideration of the entire Sophoclean corpus. Exploring the playwright's dramatic technique, she shows how he used elements of ritual to guide the perceptions and expectations of his fifth-century audience about plot and character.

Employing both modern ritual...