Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> Ancient & Classical

In the wake of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey," poets of the seventh and sixth centuries BC composed epics which covered other parts of the Trojan War story or different areas of Greek mythology. Quotations from them and other testimonies as to their content survive in later authors and the evidence thus assembled allows us to reconstruct something of the poems' contents. Collectively these poems came to be known by Hellenistic scholars in Alexandria as 'The Epic Cycle'. With their often grotesque and fantastic tales, the cyclic poems were an important source for later writers of epic. Yet...

This is a literary explication to the Odyssey. The book includes a chronology, extensive notes, and suggestions for further reading.

Lucan's epic on the Civil War has dodged in and out of fashion. Widely admired in the 17th and 18th centuries, it came in the 19th and 20th to be criticised by comparison with Virgil's Aeneid. The latter was established as the standard by which all other epic poets fail. Lucan's besetting "fault" was seen as his reliance on rhetoric. This work sets out to consider the rules of ancient rhetoric as learned by Lucan and applied in his epic. Four themes commmon to poetry and to the declamatory schools (tyranny, storms, the occult and dreams) are closely analyzed in relation to the poem, and...

A historical-archaeological and linguistic commentary of Tacitus's
"Germania." Updated to include the findings of archaeological
investigation over the century, it serves to lift the veil that
shrouded the pre-history of the Germanic peoples and the process of
their expansion over central Europe.

Cicero's poetry has often been adversely, but unfairly criticised on the basis of the unfortunate line "O fortunam natam ne consule Roman." But this book argues there is much to admire in his translations from Homer, from Greek tragedy and especially from the "Phaenomena" of Aratus which influenced Virgil's use of that poem in the "Georgics." Cicero's hexameter verse, which is closely analyzed in this edition, marks a stage in the development of Latin metre, midway between Lucretius and Virgil. This edition was first published in 1933 and collects together all of the surviving lines and...

The Roman poet Statius' 4th book of "Silvae," published in AD 95, follows its preface with nine poems celebrating occasions from the building of a road to the gift-giving Saturnalian festival. This edition provides the first commentary since Vollmer's of 1898, and covers textual, linguistic, literary and historical questions. The introduction covers Statius' career, the book's chronology and its textual tradition, and the book contains new text, full critical apparatus and facing prose English translation.

Virgil lived through the fall of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Empire. In his poems we see a series of attempts, increasingly ambitious in scale and conception, to combine technical brilliance and beauty with profound meditation on the nature of imperialism and the relation of the individual to the State. From short pastoral poems on love and song he progressed to the heroic myth of the founding of Rome. "The Aeneid," immediately recognised as the greatest masterpiece of Latin literature, has had incalculable influence on European literature in the two thousand years...