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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.

When we think of Roman Poetry, the names most likely to come to mind are Vergil, Horace, and Ovid, who flourished during the age of Augustus. The genius of Imperial poets such as Juvenal, Martial, and Statius is now generally recognized, but the final years of the Roman Empire are not normally associated with poetic achievement. Recently, however, classical scholars have begun reassessing a number of poets from Late Antiquity—names such as Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius—understanding them as artists of considerable talent and influence. This book offers the first systematic study of these fourth-century poets since Michael Robert's foundational The Jeweled Style. It is the first to give equal attention to both Christian and Pagan poetry and the first to take seriously the issue of readership. Like the Roman Empire, Latin literature was in a state of flux during the fourth century. As the book shows, the period marked a turn towards forms of writing that privilege the reader's active involvement in shaping the meaning of the text. In the poetry of Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius we can see the increasing importance of distinctions between old and new, ancient and modern, forgotten and remembered. The strange traditionalism and verbalism of the day often concealed a desire for immediacy and presence. We can see these changes most clearly in the expectations placed upon readers. The space that remains is the space that the reader comes to inhabit, as would increasingly become the case in the literature of the Latin Middle Ages.

How did Roman poets create character? This book frames this question through the cultural and intellectual horizons of Roman authors and audiences. By applying the philosophical, rhetorical, and cultural discourses of selfhood and exemplarity to the poetics of character, we can become more aware of characterization’s function in Roman poetry. Through a series of case studies, this book expands our awareness of characterization in Roman poetry both as a literary practice and as a discourse of the self. Individual character studies examine the dynamics of literary genealogy, Stoic hagiography, exemplarity, and intertextuality in Vergil’s Aeneid, Lucan, Senecan tragedy, and Statius’ Thebaid.

Of all the Roman poets, Catullus is the most accessible for the modern reader. His poems range from the sublimely beautiful to the scatologically disgusting, from the world of heroic epic poetry to the dirt of the Roman streets. This book, which assumes no prior knowledge of the poet or of Roman poetry in general, explores Catullus in all his many guises. In six concise chapters, it deals with the cultural background to his poetic production, its literary context, the role of love, Alexandrian learning and obscenity, and, in the final chapter, considers the coherence and rationale of the collection as a whole. Each chapter is illustrated by readings of a number of poems, chosen to give a representative overview of Catullus' poetry. All quotations from the text are translated, and a brief discursive section of ‘Further Reading’ is provided at the end of each chapter. A timeline giving dates of authors mentioned and a full bibliography are also supplied.

This book describes the legends surrounding the origins, foundation, and early history of Rome; the significance the Romans attached to the legends of their origins; and the uses to which they put them. Between 1000 BC and 650 BC a cluster of small, isolated groups of thatched huts on the Roman hills became an extensive and complex city, its monumental buildings and large public spaces evidence of power and wealth. Two competing foundation legends accounted for this shift, one featuring the Trojan fugitive Aeneas and the other the wolf-reared Romulus and Remus. Both played a significant role in Roman thought and identity, preoccupying generations of Roman historians and providing an important theme in Roman poetry. In the last two centuries, the foundation era of Rome has been the subject of extensive investigations by archaeologists. These have revealed much that was previously a mystery and have allowed the piecing together of a coherent account of the early history of the city. The book considers this evidence and the degree to which it supports or undermines the legends, Roman documentary accounts, and the work of modern scholars. It reveals what now seems the most probable history of Rome's origins and rise to regional pre-eminence.