Yale Classical Studies 21 Studies In Latin Poetry

1974 study of Latin poetry designed to encourage fresh readings and to illustrate critical approaches to the literature.

In these studies of Latin poetry Niall Rudd demonstrates a variety of critical methods and approaches. He shows how it can be fruitful at different times to consider the historical background of a poem, its language or structure, its place in a literary tradition, the role of critical paradigms, and so on. But if no single approach has special and invariable authority this does not imply critical anarchy. Each has its own validity for different purposes, its own strengths and limitations. The reader must be versatile and sensitive to a range of possibilities, but not doctrinaire.

A volume dedicated to studies in Latin poetry, beginning with an examination of Saturnian verse and ending with an investigation into how much Ovid actually knew of the law, and how he exploited this knowledge with piquancy and inventiveness in his writings.

Of the peoples of ancient Italy, only the Romans committed newly composed poems to writing, and for about 250 years Latin-speakers developed an impressive verse literature. The language had traditional resources of high style, e.g. alliteration, lexical and morphological archaism or grecism, and of course metaphor and word-order; and there were also less obvious resources in the technical vocabularies of law, philosophy, and medicine. The essays in this volume show how the poets in the classical period combined these elements, and so created a poetic medium that could comprehend satire, invective, erotic elegy, drama, lyric, and the grandest heroic epics. These wide-ranging studies will be essential reading for all students of Latin.

This volume of essays is intended to commemorate the eminent Latin scholar David West, best known for his work on Lucretius, Horace, Virgil and Shakespeare. The contributors – Francis Cairns, Ian Du Quesnay, Bruce Gibson, Alex Hardie, Stephen Harrison, John Moles and Tony Woodman – have aimed to produce close readings of classical texts, paying due attention to historical context and literary tradition in the manner adopted by David West himself. The authors covered are Empedocles, Antisthenes, Callimachus, Lutatius Catulus, Catullus, Horace (Epodes and Odes), Propertius, Virgil (Aeneid), Dio Chrysostom and Hildebert of Lavardin.