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Denis Feeney is one of the most distinguished scholars of Latin literature and Roman culture in the world of the last half-century. These two volumes conveniently collect and present afresh all his major papers, covering a wide range of topics and interests. Ancient epic is a major focus, followed by Latin lyric, historiography and elegy. Ancient literary criticism and the technology of the book are recurrent themes. Many papers address the problems of literary responses to religion and ritual, with an interdisciplinary methodology drawing on comparative anthropology and religion. The transition from Republic to Empire and the emergence of the Augustan principate form the background to the majority of the papers, and the question of how literary texts are to be read in historical context is addressed throughout. All quotations from ancient and modern languages have now been translated and Stephen Hinds has contributed a foreword.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. The taciturnity of Aeneas; 2. The reconciliations of Juno; 3. Epic hero and epic fable; 4. Stat magni nominis umbra: Lucan on the greatness of Pompeius Magnus; 5. History and revelation in Virgil's underworld; 6. Following after Hercules, in Apollonius and Virgil; 7. Beginning Sallust's Catiline; 8. Leaving Dido: the appearance(s) of Mercury and the motivations of Aeneas; 9. Epic violence, epic order: killings, catalogues, and the role of the reader in Aeneid 10; 10. Mea tempora: patterning of time in Ovid's Metamorphoses; 11. Interpreting sacrificial ritual in Roman poetry: disciplines and their models; 12. Tenui...latens discrimine: spotting the differences in Statius' Achilleid; 13. On not forgetting the 'Literatur' in 'Literatur und Religion'; 14. Virgil's tale of four cities: Troy, Carthage, Alexandria and Rome; 15. First similes in epic; 16. Fictions of citizenship in Livy's History.
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.
