Christian Latin poetry from the fourth to sixth centuries was hugely influential on English and French medieval literature. In this, the first substantial overview of this poetry, Carolinne White sets the works in their literary and historical context, including translations of over thirty poems and excerpts, many never translated into English before.
Before the invention of printing, all forms of writing were done by hand. For a literary text to circulate among readers, and to be transmitted from one period in time to another, it had to be copied by scribes. As a result, two copies of an ancient book were different from one another, and each individual book or manuscript has its own history. The oldest of these books, those that are the closest to the time in which the texts were composed, are few, usually damaged, and have been often neglected in the scholarship. Ancient Latin Poetry Books presents a detailed study of the oldest manuscripts still extant that contain texts by Latin poets, such as Virgil, Terence, and Ovid. Analyzing their physical characteristics, their script, and the historical contexts in which they were produced and used, this volume shows how manuscripts can help us gain a better understanding of the history of texts, as well as of reading habits over the centuries. Since the manuscripts originated in various places of the Latin-speaking world, Ancient Latin Poetry Books investigates the readership and reception of Latin poetry in many different contexts, such schools in the Egyptian desert, aristocratic circles in southern Italy, and the Christian élite in late antique Rome. The research also contributes to our knowledge about the use of writing and the importance of the written text in antiquity. This is an innovative approach to the study of ancient literature, one that takes the materiality of texts into consideration.
Ennius' Annales, which is preserved only in fragments, was hugely influential on Roman literature and culture. This book explores the genesis, in the ancient sources for Ennius' epic and in modern scholarship, of the accounts of the Annales with which we operate today. A series of appendices detail each source's contribution to our record of the poem, and are used to consider how the interests and working methods of the principal sources shape the modern view of the poem and to re-examine the limits imposed and the possibilities offered by this ancient evidence. Dr Elliott challenges standard views of the poem, such as its use of time and the disposition of the gods within it. She argues that the manifest impact of the Annales on the collective Roman psyche results from its innovative promotion of a vision of Rome as the primary focus of the cosmos in all its aspects.
This is a book about poetry, language, and classical antiquity, and explains to the reader with little or no Latin how the language works as a unique vehicle for poetic expression. Fitzgerald guides the reader through samples of Latin poetry to give a sense of how the individual poems feel in Latin and what makes Latin poetry worth reading.
This study offers an introduction to the fragmentary record of early Roman poetry. In focus are the contexts, practitioners, and reception of early Roman drama (excluding comedy), epic, and satire, along with the challenges which our evidence for these entails.
After centuries of near silence, Latin poetry underwent a renaissance in the late fourth and fifth centuries CE evidenced in the works of key figures such as Ausonius, Claudian, Prudentius, and Paulinus of Nola. This period of resurgence marked a milestone in the reception of the classics of late Republican and early imperial poetry. In Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry, Philip Hardie explores the ways in which poets writing on non-Christian and Christian subjects used the classical traditions of Latin poetry to construct their relationship with Rome’s imperial past and present, and with the by now not-so-new belief system of the state religion, Christianity. The book pays particular attention to the themes of concord and discord, the "cosmic sense" of late antiquity, novelty and renouatio, paradox and miracle, and allegory. It is also a contribution to the ongoing discussion of whether there is an identifiably late antique poetics and a late antique practice of intertextuality. Not since Michael Robert's classic The Jeweled Style has a single book had so much to teach about the enduring power of Latin poetry in late antiquity.
Poetics of the First Punic War investigates the literary afterlives of Rome’s first conflict with Carthage. From its original role in the Middle Republic as the narrative proving ground for epic’s development out of verse historiography, to its striking cultural reuse during the Augustan and Flavian periods, the First Punic War (264–241 BCE) holds an underappreciated place in the history of Latin literature. Because of the serendipitous meeting of historical content and poetic form in the third century BCE, a textualized First Punic War went on to shape the Latin language and its literary genres, the practices and politics of remembering war, popular visions of Rome as a cultural capital, and numerous influential conceptions of Punic North Africa. Poetics of the First Punic War combines innovative theoretical approaches with advances in the philological analysis of Latin literature to reassess the various “texts” of the First Punic War, including those composed by Vergil, Propertius, Horace, and Silius Italicus. This book also contains sustained treatment of Naevius’ fragmentary Bellum Punicum (Punic War) and Livius Andronicus’ Odusia (Odyssey), some of the earliest works of Latin poetry. As the tradition’s primary Roman topic, the First Punic War is forever bound to these poems, which played a decisive role in transmitting an epic view of history.
First-person poetry is a familiar genre in Latin literature. Propertius, Catullus, and Horace deployed the first-person speaker in a variety of ways that either bolster or undermine the link between this figure and the poet himself. In I, the Poet, Kathleen McCarthy offers a new approach to understanding the ubiquitous use of a first-person voice in Augustan-age poetry, taking on several of the central debates in the field of Latin literary studies—including the inheritance of the Greek tradition, the shift from oral performance to written collections, and the status of the poetic "I-voice." In light of her own experience as a twenty-first century reader, for whom Latin poetry is meaningful across a great gulf of linguistic, cultural, and historical distances, McCarthy positions these poets as the self-conscious readers of and heirs to a long tradition of Greek poetry, which prompted them to explore radical forms of communication through the poetic form. Informed in part by the "New Lyric Studies," I, the Poet will appeal not only to scholars of Latin literature but to readers across a range of literary studies who seek to understand the Roman contexts which shaped canonical poetic genres.
