Late Antiquity has increasingly been viewed as a period of transformation and dynamic change in its literature as in society and politics. In this volume, thirteen scholars focus on the intellectual and literary culture of the time, investigating complex relationships between late-Antique authors and the texts which they had inherited through the classical ('pagan') and Christian traditions. Particular emphasis is placed on works that carried special authority: Homer, Virgil, Plato, and the Bible. The volume thus contributes to the history of the reception of classical texts, and through its...

Jerome (c. 347-420 A.D.) is best remembered as the author of the Vulgate translation of the Bible. But he was also an untiring letter writer. Among the many letters which have survived are several written to friends who had suffered recent bereavement. In the most impressive of these, Letter 60, Jerome consoles Heliodorus, Bishop of Altinum in north-east Italy, on the early death of his young nephew Nepotianus. The letter is composed from a thoroughly Christian perspective, but it belongs to a tradition of consolatory literature that reaches far back into the pagan world. In this commentary,...