This book by one of the preeminent Virgil scholars of our day is the first comprehensive study of ekphrasis in Virgil's final masterpiece, the Aeneid. Virgil uses ekphrasis--a self-contained aside that generates a pause in the narrative to describe a work of art or other object--to tell us something about the grander text in which it is embedded, says Michael C. J. Putnam. Individually and as a group, Virgil's ekphrases enrich the reader's understanding of the meaning of the epic. Putnam shows how the descriptions of works of art, and of people, places, and even animals, provide...
This book by one of the preeminent Virgil scholars of our day is the first comprehensive study of ekphrasis in Virgil's final masterpiece, the Aene...
The lives of Catullus and Horace overlap by a dozen years in the first century BC. Yet, though they are the undisputed masters of the lyric voice in Roman poetry, Horace directly mentions his great predecessor, Catullus, only once, and this reference has often been taken as mocking. In fact, Horace's allusion, far from disparaging Catullus, pays him a discreet compliment by suggesting the challenge that his accomplishment presented to his successors, including Horace himself. In Poetic Interplay, the first book-length study of Catullus's influence on Horace, Michael Putnam shows...
The lives of Catullus and Horace overlap by a dozen years in the first century BC. Yet, though they are the undisputed masters of the lyric voice i...
Volume 3 in the American Philological Association Series. The work of the Latin elegiac poet Tibullus (c. 55-19 b.c.) is characterized by an artful, witty "simplicity," and it relies on repetition, ambiguity, irony, and paradox for its effect. His poetry appealed to his countrymen in his own time, as it still does to students today, and this textbook is designed to explain and enhance that appeal. The commentary presented here is limited to the sixteen poems which comprise the first two books of the corpus Tibullianum, that is, to poems authentically by Tibullus. The notes focus on the needs...
Volume 3 in the American Philological Association Series. The work of the Latin elegiac poet Tibullus (c. 55-19 b.c.) is characterized by an artful, w...
In this collection of twelve of his essays, distinguished Virgil scholar Michael Putnam examines the Aeneid from several different interpretive angles. He identifies the themes that permeate the epic, provides detailed interpretations of its individual books, and analyzes the poem's influence on later writers, including Ovid, Lucan, Seneca, and Dante. In addition, a major essay on wrathful Aeneas and the tactics of Pietas is published here for the first time. Putnam first surveys the intellectual development that shaped Virgil's poetry. He then examines several of the poem's...
In this collection of twelve of his essays, distinguished Virgil scholar Michael Putnam examines the Aeneid from several different interpretive...
This is the first book devoted to Horace's Carmen Saeculare, a poem commissioned by Roman emperor Augustus in 17 B.C.E. for choral performance at the Ludi Saeculares, the Secular Games. The poem is the first fully preserved Latin hymn whose circumstances of presentation are known, and it is the only lyric of Horace we can be certain was first presented orally. Michael C. J. Putnam offers a close and sensitive reading of this hymn, shedding new light on the richness and virtuosity of its poetry, on the many sources Horace drew on, and on the poem's power and...
This is the first book devoted to Horace's Carmen Saeculare, a poem commissioned by Roman emperor Augustus in 17 B.C.E. for choral performance ...
