A History of Latin Literature From its Beginnings to the Age of Augustus

Latin literature exploded onto the scene from relatively humble beginnings in the third century BCE. In an astonishingly short time the Romans adopted and adapted nearly all the genres of literature known to them and not only were they well aware of their large-scale appropriation but even, curiously, boasted of it. This readable new history of Latin literature covers the full span of the Roman republic, concluding with the age of Augustus, whose great poets engaged with the enormous political and cultural changes of their time and laid the foundations for the literature of the Imperial period. All the major writers are covered but attention is also paid to more fragmentary but still key authors such as Ennius, Cato, Lucilius, and Varro. Readers are given the essential historical, cultural, and literary background as well as close readings of specific passages, which reveal the charm and complexity which animate Latin literature.

Helps readers appreciate the exceptional nature of the origins of Latin literature, including its relationship with Greek literature, and how it was shaped by its distinctive and changing cultural circumstances
Provides close readings, suggestive rather than prescriptive, of passages from a broad range of writers
Presents useful contextual information in sidebars, a glossary and timeline

Product details

Published: November 2024
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 9781108481779
Length: 406 pages
Dimensions: 235 × 159 × 27 mm
Weight: 0.73kg
Availability: Available

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Contents

1. Romanized Muses: the birth of Latin literature
2. All the world's a stage: Roman republican drama and theatrical traditions
3. A good man skilled in speaking: oratory and rhetoric in Rome
4. Song of myself: the personal voice in republican literature
5. To educate and to entertain: didactic and the arrangement of knowledge
6. What's past is prologue: history and biography
7. Moments of Glad Grace: Augustan Love Poetry
8. Gods, monsters, and heroes: Augustan epic
9. Further voices: Augustan personal poetry.

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Authors

Laurel Fulkerson , Florida State University
LAUREL FULKERSON is Professor of Classics Emerita at the Florida State University. She has written forty articles and book chapters and has written or edited seven books, including The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides (Cambridge, 2005), No Regrets: Remorse in Classical Antiquity (2013), A Literary Commentary on the Elegies of the Appendix Tibulliana (2017), and Ovid: A Poet on the Margins (2016). She has won several local and national teaching awards, including the American Philological Association's Excellence in Teaching Award and an ovatio from CAMWS, and has had visiting appointments or guest lectureships across the United States and the United Kingdom. She edited The Classical Journal for six years and currently serves on the editorial board of Oxford University's Pseudepigraphica Latina commentary series. She was a co-founder and the first chair of the International Ovidian Society.
Jeffrey Tatum , Victoria University of Wellington
JEFFREY TATUM is Professor of Classics at Victoria University of Wellington. He the author of over a hundred papers and book chapters and has written or edited seven books, including The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher (1999), Always I am Caesar (2008), Plutarch: The Rise of Rome (2013), Quintus Cicero: A Brief Handbook on Canvassing for Office (2018), Athens to Aotearoa: Greece and Rome in New Zealand Literature and Society (2018), and A Noble Ruin: Mark Antony, Civil War, and the Collapse of the Roman Republic (2024). He has been a visiting fellow or guest lecturer at universities and learned institutions in Australasia, China, Europe, and North America; was the Visiting Professor of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens; and the recipient of a Royal Society Marsden Grant. He has won several local and national teaching and engagement awards in the USA and New Zealand, including the American Philological Association's Excellence in Teaching Award. He is currently chair of the editorial board of the Clarendon Ancient History Series.

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