Books in the Roman Literature and its Contexts series

This book explores the presence of slaves and slavery in Roman literature and asks particularly what the free imagination made of the experience of living with slaves, beings who both were and were not fellow humans. As a shadow humanity, slaves furnished the free with other selves and imaginative alibis as well as mediators between and substitutes for their peers. As presences that witnessed their owners' most unguarded moments they possessed a knowledge that was the object of both curiosity and anxiety. The book discusses not only the ideological relations of Roman literature to the institution of slavery, but also the ways in which slavery provided a metaphor for a range of other relationships and experiences, and in particular for literature itself. It is arranged thematically and covers a broad chronological and generic field.

The Latin language is popularly imagined in a number of specific ways: as a masculine language, an imperial language, a classical language, a dead language. This book considers the sources of these metaphors and analyses their effect on how Latin literature is read. It argues that these metaphors have become idees fixes not only in the popular imagination but in the formation of Latin studies as a professional discipline. By reading with and more commonly against these metaphors, the book offers a different view of Latin as a language and as a vehicle for cultural practice. The argument ranges over a variety of texts in Latin and texts about Latin produced by many different sorts of writers from antiquity to the twentieth century.

How should we react as readers and as critics when two passages in a literary work contradict one another? Classicists once assumed that all inconsistencies in ancient texts needed to be amended, explained away, or lamented. Building on recent work on both Greek and Roman authors, this book explores the possibility of interpreting inconsistencies in Roman epic. After a chapter surveying Greek background material including Homer, tragedy, Plato and the Alexandrians, five chapters argue that comparative study of the literary use of inconsistencies can shed light on major problems in Catullus' Peleus and Thetis, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Vergil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Lucan's Bellum Civile. Not all inconsistencies can or should be interpreted thematically, but numerous details in these poems, and some ancient and modern theorists, suggest that we can be better readers if we consider how inconsistencies may be functioning in Greek and Roman texts.

This book applies some of the procedures of modern critical theory to the interpretation of Latin poetry. The author argues for an approach which sees the meaning of a text as always and necessarily involved in the process of 'reception', that is the way it has been read and interpreted from the time of its composition down to the present day.

This study examines the role of female characters in Roman epic poetry. Its five chapters argue that the feminised landscapes, militaristic women, and beautiful female corpses of the Roman epic tradition should be interpreted in conjunction with the use of the genre by ancient educators.

This book is a critically sophisticated introduction to the epic tradition of the early Roman empire, specifically the epic poems of Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus. It explores the use that they all make of the great Augustan epic of Virgil, the Aeneid. All Latin is translated.

This book examines the love elegies of the Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid from the point of view of the way the meanings attributed to the poems arise out of the interests and preoccupations of the cultural situation in which they are read.

This book explores how the memory of the Roman Republic manifested itself over the course of the early Empire (AD 14-117). Case-studies are presented of major imperial authors and key monuments in order to trace the relationship between memory and history in Roman thought.

This sophisticated and important short study of Roman religion examines the vital importance of Roman literature within the dynamic religious culture.

What did the city of Rome mean to ancient Romans? The writings of Roman writers Cicero, Virgil, Juvenal and others, have played a vital part in determining responses to the city both in their own time and in later centuries. This book explores a wide range of descriptions of the city from later periods as well as from antiquity.

This fascinating 1998 book examines how the poets of classical Rome found artistic inspiration in the words and themes of their poetic predecessors. It combines traditional classical approaches with modern literary-theoretical devices.

Examines the Roman reaction to, and adoption of, the Greek poetry of the last three pre-Christian centuries. The critical readings offered embrace not just the central figures of Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes but the full scope of what remains of Hellenistic poetry.

Re-examines the most traditional area of classical scholarship, offering critical assessments of the current state of the field, its methods and controversies, and the challenges it faces. Useful both to classicists who are not textual critics and to non-classicists interested in issues of editing.