The Pharsalia is Lucan's epic on the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey. It is a poem of immense energy and intelligence in which spectacle and spectatorship are prominent. Leigh shows that by transforming certain Virgilian narrative devices Lucan launches an attack on the Augustan ideology of the Aeneid where Virgil writes the foundation myth for the new regime and celebrates the connections between Augustus and Aeneas, Lucan produces a savagely republican anti-Aeneid which represents the civil wars as the death of Rome.

This volume is an original study of the plays of the two great Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence in the context of political and economic change in Rome in the third and second centuries BC. In contrast to the dominant trend of viewing the plays by reference to their largely lost Greek originals, the book adopts a historicist approach that concentrates on their effect on a contemporary audience.

This volume is an original study of the plays of the two great Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence in the context of political and economic change in Rome in the third and second centuries BC. In contrast to the dominant trend of viewing the plays by reference to their largely lost Greek originals, the book adopts a historicist approach that concentrates on their effect on a contemporary audience.

From Polypragmon to Curiosus is a study of how Greek and Latin writers describe curious, meddlesome, and exaggerated behavior. Founded on a detailed investigation of a family of Greek terms, often treated as synonymous with each other, and of the Latin words used to describe them, opening chapters survey how they were used in Greek literature from the 5th and 4th centuries BC, moving onto their Latin usage and relationship to that of Hellenistic and imperial Greek. Other chapters adopt a more thematic approach and consider how words, such as polypramon, periergos, philopragmon, and curiosus,...