Read more
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Si licet et fas est: Ovid's Fasti and the problem of free speech under the Principate; 2. 'Shall I compare thee ...?' Catullus 68 and the limits of analogy; 3. Towards an account of the ancient world's concepts of fictive belief; 4. Horace and the Greek lyric poets; 5. Criticism ancient and modern; 6. The odiousness of comparisons: Horace on literary history and the limitations of synkrisis; 7. Vna cum scriptore meo: poetry, principate, and the traditions of literary history in the Epistle to Augustus; 8. Two Virgilian acrostics: certissima signa? (with Damien Nelis); 9. Catullus and the Roman paradox epigram; 10. Becoming an authority: Horace on his own reception; 11. Fathers and sons: the Manlii Torquati and family continuity in Catullus and Horace; 12. Doing the numbers: the Roman mathematics of civil war in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra; 13. Crediting Pseudolus: trust, belief, and the credit crunch in Plautus' Pseudolus; 14. Hic finis fandi: On the absence of punctuation for the endings (and beginnings) of speeches in Latin poetic texts; 15. Representation and the materiality of the book in Catullus' polymetrics; 16. Catullus 61: Epithalamium and comparison; 17. Ovid's Ciceronian literary history: end-career chronology and autobiography; 18. Horace and the literature of the past: lyric, epic, and history in Odes 4; 19. Forma manet facti (Ov. Fast. 2.379): aetiologies of myth and ritual in Ovid's Fasti and Metamorphoses.
About the author
Denis Feeney is Giger Professor of Latin in the Department of Classics at Princeton University. His publications include The Gods in Epic (1991); Literature and Religion at Rome (Cambridge, 1998); Caesar's Calendar (2007); Beyond Greek (2016). He was also a Series Editor, with Stephen Hinds, of Roman Literature and its Contexts for Cambridge University Press. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Summary
A collection of essays from one of the world's greatest scholars of Latin literature and Roman culture. Covers ancient epic, historiography, lyric, elegy, and drama, with a particular focus on ancient literary criticism, comparative religion, historicism and the technology of the ancient book. With a foreword by Stephen Hinds.
