This book is a study of one of the most famous poems of Roman literature, Virgil's Georgics. By close reading of selected passages in the poem it seeks to understand the work in terms of the cultural and political upheavals that were afflicting Rome at the time of its composition. The poem, it argues, constitutes an audacious attempt to explain and justify the violent civil wars that had recently brought Octavian (the future Augustus, with whom Virgil was closely associated) to power in Rome.

A characteristic of Greek and Latin poetry (sometimes an intimidating one) is the variety of metrical shapes it can adopt. Llewelyn Morgan offers an accessible account of some of the most common of these metres in Roman poetry, and explains how the poets can exploit them to support, supplement, or indeed drive the meaning of the poems they carry. Metre is revealed as an aspect of Roman poetry which is every bit as creative as its word play, and new insights are given to a range of Roman poems, from reassessments of familiar poems by Catullus and Horace to explanations of the remarkable...