Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays from one of the world's greatest scholars of Latin literature and Roman culture. Covers ancient epic, historiography, lyric, elegy, and drama, with a particular focus on ancient literary criticism, comparative religion, historicism and the technology of the ancient book. With a foreword by Stephen Hinds.
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Si licet et fas est: Ovid's Fasti and the problem of free speech under the Principate; 2. 'Shall I compare thee ...?' Catullus 68 and the limits of analogy; 3. Towards an account of the ancient world's concepts of fictive belief; 4. Horace and the Greek lyric poets; 5. Criticism ancient and modern; 6. The odiousness of comparisons: Horace on literary history and the limitations of synkrisis; 7. Vna cum scriptore meo: poetry, principate, and the traditions of literary history in the Epistle to Augustus; 8. Two Virgilian acrostics: certissima signa? (with Damien Nelis); 9. Catullus and the Roman paradox epigram; 10. Becoming an authority: Horace on his own reception; 11. Fathers and sons: the Manlii Torquati and family continuity in Catullus and Horace; 12. Doing the numbers: the Roman mathematics of civil war in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra; 13. Crediting Pseudolus: trust, belief, and the credit crunch in Plautus' Pseudolus; 14. Hic finis fandi: On the absence of punctuation for the endings (and beginnings) of speeches in Latin poetic texts; 15. Representation and the materiality of the book in Catullus' polymetrics; 16. Catullus 61: Epithalamium and comparison; 17. Ovid's Ciceronian literary history: end-career chronology and autobiography; 18. Horace and the literature of the past: lyric, epic, and history in Odes 4; 19. Forma manet facti (Ov. Fast. 2.379): aetiologies of myth and ritual in Ovid's Fasti and Metamorphoses.
