Description
Book SynopsisThe Dirae is a curse uttered, in bucolic hexameters, by an Italian farmer against his former estate which was confiscated to enable the settlement of Caesarean veterans in the aftermath of the battle of Philippi: this commentary is the first work, in 80 years, to offer a systematic exploration of the poem within the literary and historical context of the Late Republic.
At the heart of the volume is a freshly edited Latin text, based on a thorough reappraisal of manuscript evidence and earlier textual scholarship, which in particular aims to restore the poem's stanzaic organisation, gravely distorted in the course of transmission. Besides providing an account of the manuscripts and an overview of the poem's structure and contents, the introduction discusses at length the Dirae''s engagement with other poetic texts and traditions, first of all with its ''sibling'' the Lydia, but also, crucially, with Greek bucolic, before considering its reception in Virgil''s Eclogues and late
