Traces the developing attitude of poets of the first century BC, considering why they came to write as they did.

Latin love elegy is one of the most important poetic genres in the Augustan era, also known as the golden age of Roman literature. This volume brings together leading scholars from Australia, Europe and North America to present and explore the Greek and Roman backdrop for Latin love elegy, the individual Latin love elegists (both the canonical and the non-canonical), their poems and influence on writers in later times. The book is designed as an accessible introduction for the general reader interested in Latin love elegy and the history of love and lament in Western literature, as well as a collection of critically stimulating essays for students and scholars of Latin poetry and of the classical tradition.

Textual Permanence is the first book to examine the influence of the Roman epigraphic tradition on Latin elegiac poetry. The frequent use of invented inscriptions within the works of Rome's elegiac poets suggests a desire to monumentalise elements of the poems and the authors themselves. This book explores inscriptional writing in the elegies of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid, showing that whenever an author includes an inscription within a poem, he draws the reader's attention beyond the text of the poem to include the cultural contexts in which such inscriptions were daily read and produced. The emphases that these inscriptions grant to persons, sentiments and actions within the poems are reflections of the permanence that real-life inscriptions grant to a variety of human efforts. These poetic inscriptions provide unique windows of interpretation to some of Rome's most significant and influential poems. Teresa Ramsby traces an important relationship between the Roman tradition that honoured individual participation in Roman politics, and the way that elegiac poetry was early applied in Rome to the same activity. In the course of the book she offers fresh interpretations of poems that have been analysed by a host of scholars.

These ardent, even obsessed, poems about erotic passion are among the brightest jewels in the crown of Latin literature. Written by Propertius, Rome's greatest poet of love, who was born around 50 b.c., a contemporary of Ovid, these elegies tell of Propertius' tormented relationship with a woman he calls "Cynthia." Their connection was sometimes blissful, more often agonizing, but as the poet came to recognize, it went beyond pride or shame to become the defining event of his life. Whether or not it was Propertius' explicit intention, these elegies extend our ideas of desire, and of the human condition itself.

The Roman elegiac poet Propertius was one such author. This final published collection, issued in 16 BCE, has been traditionally read as an abandonment by Propertius of his earlier flippant love poems for a more mature engagement with Roman public life or else a comical send-up of imperial policies as embodied in Rome's public buildings. The Elegiac Cityscape explores Propertius' Rome and the various ways his poetry about the city illuminates the dynamic relationship between one individual and his environment. The relationship between poet and city is complicated at every turn by the presence in the background of the emperor Augustus, whose sustained artistic patronage of Roman monuments brought about the most pervasive transformation that the city had yet seen. Combining the approaches of archaeology and literary criticism, Tara S. Welch examines how Propertius' poems on Roman places scrutinize the monumentalization of various ideological positions in Rome, as they poke and prod Rome's monuments to see what further meanings they might admit. The result is a poetic book rife with different perspectives on the eternal city, perspectives that often call into question any sleepy or complacent adherence to Rome's traditional values. Book jacket.

A comprehensive treatment of the reflections by Augustan poets on Apollo as an imperial icon.

Vincent Katz offers translations of all 107 known poems by the Augustan poet Sextus Propertius, a contemporary of Ovid. The translations keep as closely as possible to the original syntax, as Propertius' willful compressions & unusual tellings of myth are definitive of his poetics.

Interdisciplinary in approach and methodologically sophisticated, this book explores the dynamic reception of Latin erotic elegy in Renaissance love poetry.