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The Ciris has received a certain amount of scholarly attention during the twentieth century, but on the whole has failed to meet with an adequate appreciation. This book aims to vindicate the Ciris, mainly by exploring its use of pre-Virgilian poetic texts largely ignored in previous scholarship. The core of the book consists of a discursive literary commentary, divided into chapters that examine consecutively the poem's main narrative units. Viewing allusion and allegory as intrinsic features of poetic composition rather than mere artistic devices, the book explores, among more prominent intertexts, Apollonius' Argonautica and Callimachus' Hecale, Lucretius and Catullus 64. Allusions are also suggested to Homer and Empedocles, Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion, Nicander and Euphorion, Choerilus of Samos and Asius of Samos, Ennius and Cicero. Through its intricate web of references to poetic intertexts, the Ciris, it is argued, creates an implicit allegorical pattern with an original poetological message. Allusion and Allegory is thus the first book-length study to offer a coherent literary interpretation of this controversial poem.
The Dirae is a curse uttered, in bucolic hexameters, by an Italian farmer against his former estate confiscated to enable the settlement of Caesarian veterans in the aftermath of the battle of Philippi: this commentary is the first work, in eighty years, to offer a systematic exploration of the poem within the literary and historical context of the Late Republic. At the heart of the volume is a freshly edited Latin text, based on a thorough reappraisal of manuscript evidence and earlier textual scholarship, which in particular aims to restore the poems stanzaic organisation, gravely distorted in the course of transmission. Besides providing an account of the manuscripts and an overview of th...
The Ciris is a small scale epic poem which relates the myth of Scylla, daughter of king Nisus of Megara, who betrayed her homeland for love, and was transformed into a sea-bird. It is one of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, a collection that has been ascribed to Virgil as his carmina minora. Earlier scholarship has mostly been concerned to prove that the Ciris is not by Virgil, and then to demonstrate that it is a late and derivative composition of little intrinsic merit. The present book argues that Ciris was composed by a contemporary of Virgil, a product of the golden age of Latin poetry. It aims to bring the poem to the attention of modern readers and to rescue it from ill-deserved ...
The canon of classical Greek and Latin poetry is built around big names, with Homer and Virgil at the center, but many ancient poems survive without a firm ascription to a known author. This negative category, anonymity, ties together texts as different as, for instance, the orally derived Homeric Hymns and the learned interpolation that is the Helen episode in Aeneid 2, but they all have in common that they have been maltreated in various ways, consciously or through neglect, by generations of readers and scholars, ancient as well as modern. These accumulated layers of obliteration, which can manifest, for instance, in textual distortions or aesthetic condemnation, make it all but impossibl...
This collection brings together twenty eight chapters written by Stephen Harrison’s colleagues and former students from around the globe to celebrate both his distinguished teaching and research career as a classicist and his outstanding and admirable service to the international classical community. The wide variety of original contributions on topics ranging from Greek to Latin and ancient literature’s reception in opera and contemporary writing is divided into five parts. Each corresponds to the staggering publication record of the honorand, encompassing, as it does, a broad literary spectrum, starting from the literature of the end of the Roman Republic and coming down to Neo-Latin and the reception of Classics in Irish, in English poetry and in European literature and culture in general. This corpus of compelling chapters is hoped to match Stephen Harrison’s rich research output in an illuminating dialogue with it.
thersites is an international open access journal for innovative transdisciplinary classical studies edited by Annemarie Ambühl, Filippo Carlà-Uhink, Christian Rollinger and Christine Walde. thersites expands classical reception studies by publishing original scholarship free of charge and by reflecting on Greco-Roman antiquity as present phenomenon and diachronic culture that is part of today’s transcultural and highly diverse world. Antiquity, in our understanding, does not merely belong to the past, but is always experienced and engaged in the present. thersites contributes to the critical review on methods, theories, approaches and subjects in classical scholarship, which currently s...
Among the earliest written texts on the history and theory of Netherlandish art, these two key writings are now available together in an English translation. Dominicus Lampsonius’s The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) is the earliest published biography of a Netherlandish artist. This neo-Latin account of the life of the painter, architect, and draftsman Lambert Lombard of Liège offers a theoretical exposition on the nature and ideal practice of Netherlandish art, emphasizing Lombard’s intellectual curiosity, interest in antiquity, attentive study of the human body, and exemplary generosity as a teacher. This volume offers the first English edition of The Life of Lambert Lombard, compleme...
Questions on identity have been often the main focus of Classical Studies. The starting point of this book is that identity is not a monolithic idea. Instead of exploring what exactly ‘identity’ is, the contributors here examine how the concept of ‘self-presentation’ can facilitate our understanding of how individuals present their identities. Moreover, the interpretation of the means and character of this self-presentation itself enables more general conclusions to be drawn. Topics covered in this volume include identities shaped through the self-presentation of authors in Latin literature, and explorations on epigraphy and historical analyses. Overall, using the theme of self-presentation, the contributors offer a glimpse into various subjects and suggest new ways for students and scholars to approach the different forms of individual and communal identities.
By examining some early poetic understandings of what it might have meant to be Vergil, Ovid, and Tibullus, this volume explores what those authors meant to near-contemporaries, and what the construction of authorship they were a part of meant to the later western tradition.