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Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse

Llewelyn Morgan

The wealth of metrical forms adopted by classical poetry is one of its characteristic features. Yet metre features only sporadically in contemporary criticism of ancient poetry. This book makes the ... More

The wealth of metrical forms adopted by classical poetry is one of its characteristic features. Yet metre features only sporadically in contemporary criticism of ancient poetry. This book makes the case that metre was central to the Roman experience of literature, and should be restored to a central position also in interpretation of that poetry. By the time Roman poets came to write hexameters, choliambics, and sapphics, these metres could all claim rich histories, and consequently brought a wealth of associations in their own right to the poems they carried. Powerful effects can be achieved by manipulation of the established characters of their metrical media: by giving the metre of classical Latin poetry its proper weight, critics can restore to that poetry a critical, neglected dimension. In four main chapters on representative metres or metre groups, this book considers how Roman poets exploited the connotations of metrical form: the ‘Catullan’ associations of the Flavian hendecasyllable; the logic that produced the ‘pure’ iambic trimeter; the sapphic stanza between Catullus, Horace, and Statius; and the various strategies attempted by poets to subvert the superlative status of the benchmark metre, the dactylic hexameter. Also considered are sotadeans, priapeans, saturnians, elegiacs, and Horace's epodic structures. Connections between poetic practice and the academic study of metre in antiquity are highlighted, and attention is also given both to Greek perceptions of the metres they bequeathed to Rome, and to the effect on Roman versification of the perception that these forms were irreducibly Greek.Less

Loyola's Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry

Yasmin Haskell

This is the first dedicated study of the classical-style, Latin didactic poetry produced by the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. The Jesuits were the most prolific composers of such ... More

This is the first dedicated study of the classical-style, Latin didactic poetry produced by the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. The Jesuits were the most prolific composers of such poetry, teaching all manner of arts and sciences: meteorology and magnetism, raising chickens and children, the arts of sculpture and engraving, writing and conversation, the social and medicinal benefits of coffee and chocolate, the pious life and the urbane life. The book accounts for this investment in so secular a genre by considering the Society's educational and ideological values and practices. Extensive quotation from the poems reveals their literary qualities, compositional methods, and traditions. The poems also command scholarly attention for what they reveal about social, cultural, and intellectual life in this period.Less

Days Linked by Song: Prudentius' Cathemerinon

Gerard O'Daly

Prudentius is arguably the greatest Latin poet of late antiquity. This book provides the Latin text, a new English verse translation, and critical reviews on each of his twelve lyric poems, the ... More

Prudentius is arguably the greatest Latin poet of late antiquity. This book provides the Latin text, a new English verse translation, and critical reviews on each of his twelve lyric poems, the Cathemerinon, Poems for the Day, which were published early in the fifth century ad. They reflect the religious concerns of the increasingly Christianized western Roman Empire in the age of the emperor Theodosius and Ambrose of Milan, but they are above all the writings of a private person, and of the ways in which his religious beliefs colour his everyday life. Several of these poems follow the day's course, from pre-dawn to mealtime and nightfall. Others celebrate Christ's miracles, cult of the dead, and the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany. They are rich in biblical themes and narratives, images and symbols. But they are written in the classical metres of Latin poetry, use its vocabulary and metaphors, and exploit its themes as much as those of the Bible. They achieve a remarkable creative tension between the two worlds that determined Prudentius' culture: the beliefs and practices, sacred books and doctrines of Christianity, and the traditions, poetry, and ideas of the Greeks and Romans. A good part of the attractiveness of these poems comes from the interplay in Prudentius' reception of these two worlds.Less

Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century

Jane Stevenson

This book addresses women's relationship to culture between the 1st century BC and the 18th century by identifying women who wrote poetry in Latin. It also considers women's prose writing in Latin ... More

This book addresses women's relationship to culture between the 1st century BC and the 18th century by identifying women who wrote poetry in Latin. It also considers women's prose writing in Latin and their performance as Latin orators. The earlier chapters move forward through time up to the Renaissance, which is then treated on a country-by-country basis, followed by a second suite of chapters on the early modern era. It surveys the phenomenon of women who achieved a position in public life at a time when this was not open to women in general, and how the societies in which this occurred permitted this to happen. It is completed by a checklist of more than 300 women Latin poets, identifying where possible their names, place, milieu, and providing details of their work and a comprehensive finding guide listing manuscripts, editions, and translations.Less

The Poetry of Pathos: Studies in Virgilian Epic

Gian Biagio Conte

S. J. Harrison (ed.)

This volume presents a collection of pieces from a celebrated world-class scholar and interpreter of Latin poetry, focusing on the interpretation of Virgil's Aeneid. It forms the sequel to two widely ... More

This volume presents a collection of pieces from a celebrated world-class scholar and interpreter of Latin poetry, focusing on the interpretation of Virgil's Aeneid. It forms the sequel to two widely influential earlier books on Virgil by the same author and translates and adds to a collection of papers published in Italian in 2002. Its central concern is the way in which Virgil reworks earlier poetry (especially that of Homer) at the most detailed level to produce very broad literary and emotional effects. Through detailed scholarly analysis, the book explores a central issue in Virgilian studies, that of how the Aeneid manages to create a new and effective mode of epic in a period when the genre appears to be debased or exhausted.Less

Ancient Historiography and its Contexts: Studies in Honour of A. J. Woodman

Christina S. Kraus, John Marincola, and Christopher Pelling (eds)

This volume collects essays written by colleagues and friends as a tribute to Tony Woodman, Gildersleeve Professor of Latin at the University of Virginia. These essays, like Woodman's own work, cover ... More

This volume collects essays written by colleagues and friends as a tribute to Tony Woodman, Gildersleeve Professor of Latin at the University of Virginia. These essays, like Woodman's own work, cover topics in Latin poetry, oratory, and Greek and Roman historiography. Recurrent themes are the importance of rhetoric and rhetorical training, the skilful use of language and recurrent motifs in narrative, the use and adaptation of topoi, the importance of intertextuality, and the subtle and varied ways in which literary texts can have a contemporary resonance for their own day.Less

Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome

Anthony Corbeill

From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender—masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), ... More

From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender—masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora). This book surveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and human hermaphrodites. Beginning with the ancient grammarians, the book examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as “dust” (pulvis) or “tree bark” (cortex). The book then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. It looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. The book shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories.Less

Manilius and his Intellectual Background

Katharina Volk

This book describes the Latin astrological poet Marcus Manilius. Manilius, about whose life nothing is known, composed his didactic poem Astronomica in the second decade of the 1st century AD. The ... More

This book describes the Latin astrological poet Marcus Manilius. Manilius, about whose life nothing is known, composed his didactic poem Astronomica in the second decade of the 1st century AD. The work is our earliest extant comprehensive treatment of astrology, a discipline developed in Hellenistic Greece under the influence of Near Eastern practices that had become highly fashionable in Rome during the final years of the Republic. Apparently without much impact in his own lifetime and the rest of antiquity, Manilius was rediscovered in the Renaissance and has received numerous editions over the centuries, including by such influential critics as Joseph Scaliger, Richard Bentley, and A. E. Housman. In recent times, however, his work has been largely neglected by classical scholarship. This book explores the manifold intellectual traditions that have gone into shaping the Astronomica: ancient astronomy and cosmology, the history and practice of astrology, the historical and political situation at the poem's composition, the poetic and generic conventions that inform it, and the philosophical underpinnings of Manilius' world-view. What emerges is a panoroma of the cultural imagination of the Early Empire, a fascinating picture of the ways in which educated Greeks and Romans were accustomed to think and speak about the cosmos and man's place in it.Less