Greek and Roman mythology has fascinated people for more than two millennia, and its influence on cultures throughout Europe, America, North Africa, and the Middle East attests to the universal appeal of the stories. This title examines the best-known figures of Greek and Roman mythology together with the great works of classic literature.

In Poetic Autonomy in Ancient Rome, Luke Roman offers a major new approach to the study of ancient Roman poetry. A key term in the modern interpretation of art and literature, "aesthetic autonomy" refers to the idea that the work of art belongs to a realm of its own, separate from ordinary activities and detached from quotidian interests. While scholars have often insisted that aesthetic autonomy is an exclusively modern concept and cannot be applied to other historical periods, the book argues that poets in ancient Rome employed a "rhetoric of autonomy" to define their position within Roman...

Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503), whose academic name was Gioviano, was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance as well as a leading statesman who served as prime minister to the Kings of Aragon and southern Italy. The dominant literary figure of quattrocento Naples, Pontano produced literary works in several genres and was the leader of the Neapolitan academy. Among his large poetic output are the two brilliantly original poetical cycles that comprise the present volume. On Married Love stakes out new ground in the Western tradition as the first sustained exploration of married...