This collection of freshly commissioned essays covers the entire range of the works of an exceptionally versatile and innovative poet. The essays introduce readers to a variety of critical approaches to Horace and to Latin poetry, as well as a number of different contexts--political, philosophical, historical. The collection sheds light not only on Horace but on Augustan poetry in general.

This book is a critically sophisticated introduction to the epic tradition of the early Roman empire, specifically the epic poems of Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus. It explores the use that they all make of the great Augustan epic of Virgil, the Aeneid. Instead of being feeble imitations of the great classic (a common critical viewpoint), these poems are shown to be dynamic works that use the Virgilian model creatively to reflect the moral and political issues of their own day. All Latin is translated.

This book applies some of the procedures of modern critical theory to the interpretation of Latin poetry. The author argues for an approach that sees the meaning of a text as always and necessarily involved in the process of "reception," that is the way it has been read and interpreted from the time of its composition down to the present day. A study of its reception-history facilitates novel and more profitable ways of reading. He illustrates his approach with exemplary readings of Virgil, Ovid, Horace and Lucan.

This study examines the role of female characters in the Roman epic poetry of Virgil, Ovid and other writers. Its five chapters argue that the feminized landscapes, militaristic women, and beautiful female corpses of the Roman epic tradition should be interpreted in conjunction with the use of the genre by ancient educators as a means of inculcating Roman codes of masculinity and femininity in their pupils. The issues addressed are of interest not just to classicists but also to students of later poetic traditions and to those pursuing gender studies.

This book exploits recent reevaluations of Roman religion in order to argue in favor of taking the religious dimensions of Roman literature seriously, as important cultural work in their own right. Instead of seeing Roman religious and literary activity as derivative and parasitic upon Greek originals, the book questions the romanticizing biases of classical studies, and argues for the power and creativity of the Romans in their engagements with Greek culture.

This is a book about how the poets of Classical Rome found artistic inspiration in the words and themes of their poetic predecessors. It combines traditional Classical approaches to poetic allusion and imitation with modern literary-theoretical ways of thinking about how texts are used and reused, valued and revalued, in particular reading communities. Like other volumes in the series it is among the most broadly conceived short books on Roman literature to be published in recent years.

How should we react as readers and as critics when two passages in a literary work contradict one another? Classicists once assumed that all inconsistencies in ancient texts needed to be amended, explained away, or lamented. Building on recent work on both Greek and Roman authors, this book explores the possibility of interpreting inconsistencies in Roman epic. After a chapter surveying Greek background material including Homer, tragedy, Plato and the Alexandrians, five chapters argue that comparative study of the literary use of inconsistencies can shed light on major problems in Catullus'...

The Latin language is popularly imagined in a number of specific ways: as a masculine language, an imperial language, a classical language, a dead language. This book considers the sources of these metaphors and analyzes their effect on how Latin literature is read. By reading with and more commonly against these metaphors, the book offers a different view of Latin as a language and as a vehicle for cultural practice. The argument ranges over a variety of texts in Latin and texts about Latin from antiquity to the twentieth century.

This book deals with the ways in which the ancient Roman literary imagination explored the phenomenon of slavery. It asks what the free imagination made of the experience of living with slaves, beings who both were and were not fellow humans. The book covers the full range of Roman literature, and is arranged thematically. It discusses the ideological relation of Roman literature to the institution of slavery, and also the ways in which slavery provided a metaphor for other relationships and experiences, and in particular for literature itself.