In this classic study, Brooks Otis presents Virgil as a radically different poet from any of his Greek or Roman predecessors. Virgil molded the ancient epic tradition to his own Roman contemporary aims and succeeded in making mythical and legendary figures meaningful to a sophisticated, unmythical age. Otis begins and ends his study with the Aeneid and includes chapters on the Bucolics and the Georgics. A new foreword by Ward W. Briggs, Jr., places Otis's groundbreaking achievement in the context of past and present Virgilian scholarship. "This is a very careful and perceptive study of the...

In his study of the structure of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Professor Otis shows that the real unity of the poem is to be sought not in the linkage but in the order or succession of episodes, motifs and ideas. The poem is nothing less than what Ovid called it, a carmen perpetuum, a narrative poem with a real continuity achieved by a gradual shift of emotional emphasis through a long series of episodes arranged in an elaborate pattern. For this second edition of his study of the Metamorphoses, originally published in 1970, Professor Otis has written a new concluding chapter. He also takes account...

Otis clarifies the moral and theological issues raised in the Ortesia and relates them to certain stylistic and structural qualities of the three plays. He tackles the central questions of guilt, retribution, and the relation between human and divine justice, and he sees a carefully prepared evolution in the trilogy from a primitive to a more civilized form of justice. Otis treats the trilogy as a poem, a play, and a work of theological and philosophical reflection.

Originally published in 1981.

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