This work offers a theoretical look at Latin didactic poems. It discusses the characteristics that make a poem didactic from the points of view of both theory and literary history, and traces the genre's history, from Hesiod to Roman times.
This work offers a theoretical look at Latin didactic poems. It discusses the characteristics that make a poem didactic from the points of view of both theory and literary history, and traces the genre's history, from Hesiod to Roman times.
How is it possible for a poet to find his own individual voice, when he is writing in a tradition so venerable and so constrained by convention as Roman epic? How do poets working in related genres - particularly didactic - conceptualize their relationship to the main epic tradition? The eleven essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field of Roman poetry and its post-Classical receptions, consider some of the strategies which writers from Lucretius onwards have employed in negotiating their relationship with their literary forebears, and staking out a place for their own work within a tradition stretching back to Hesiod and Homer.
Here a team of established scholars offers new perspectives on poetic texts of wisdom, learning and teaching related to the great line of Greek and Latin poems descended from Hesiod. In previous scholarship, a drive to classify Greek and Latin didactic poetry has engaged with the near-total absence in ancient literary criticism of explicit discussion of didactic as a discrete genre. The present volume approaches didactic poetry from different perspectives: the diachronic, mapping the development of didactic through changing social and political landscapes (from Homer and Hesiod to Neo-Latin didactic); and the comparative, setting the Graeco-Roman tradition against a wider backdrop (including ancient near-eastern and contemporary African traditions). The issues raised include knowledge in its relation to power; the cognitive strategies of the didactic text; ethics and poetics; the interplay of obscurity and clarity, playfulness and solemnity; the authority of the teacher.
In this volume an international team of early career and more established scholars explores the ways in which didactic poets of Greco-Roman antiquity use imagery, broadly defined, in order to convey their teaching.
Dalzell presents three of the major didactic poems in the classical canon: the De rerum natura of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Ars amatoria of Ovid, considering what tools are available for their understanding.
This volume brings together case studies on key aspects of Neo-Latin and vernacular bilingualism in the early modern period, such as language choice, translations/rewritings, and the interferences between vernacular and Neo-Latin discourses.