Explorations in Latin Literature: Volume 2, Elegy, Lyric and Other Topics

A collection of all the major papers by a leading Latinist, on key ancient genres and theoretical issues.

Denis Feeney (Author), Stephen Hinds (Introduction by)

9781108741514, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 March 2023

472 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.68 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literary theory [DSA]