In a time of aggressive imperial expansion, Latin elegists expressed geographical concerns about boundaries and limits through masculine and feminine subjects in their poetry. Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire argues that the subject in Latin elegy, beginning with Catallus, constitutes itself in relation to the dynamic space of empire from the late Republic to the end of the Augustan age. The lack of fixiity in the elegiac subject and space of empire go hand in hand, and in imagining geographical space the question of our very nature as subjects comes to the fore. Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid each offers his own unique expression of the gendered subject, and their poetry runs the gamut of responses to the expanding geographical empire. First comes the dream of Roman imperium sine fine, an empire that capaciously stretches to the ends of the inhabited world. And yet, imperium sine fine requires the existence of some sort of fines, even if the fantasy demands that they be overrun. Formlessness, or worse, rapidly alternating forms, gives rise to anxieties and the desire to set down some fines, to establish where, exactly, the boundaries of empire are, what belongs "inside" and what can be relegated to "outside". But fines, cartographically speaking, are never as stable as we want them to be, and, for a rapidly expanding empire, are always under pressure. The very constitution of the gendered elegiac subject mirrors, anticipates, runs parallel to the problems and anxieties that the map of expanding empire both tries to solve, yet simultaneously reveals in its production of space.

Inspired by Theodore Papanghelis’ Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (1987), this collective volume brings together seventeen contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the different ways in which Latin authors and some of their modern readers created narratives of life, love and death. Taken together the papers offer stimulating readings of Latin texts over many centuries, examined in a variety of genres and from various perspectives: poetics and authorial self-fashioning; intertextuality; fiction and ‘reality’; gender and queer studies; narratological readings; temporality and aesthetics; genre and meta-genre; structures of the narrative and transgression of boundaries on the ideological and the formalistic level; reception; meta-dramatic and feminist accounts-the female voice. Overall, the articles offer rich insights into the handling and development of these narratives from Classical Greece through Rome up to modern English poetry.

Latin love elegy’s flourishing concurrent with Rome’s transition from Republic to Principate has remained an issue central to scholarship on the genre since the turn of the last millennium. This book addresses the Greco-Roman literary inheritance and Augustan socio-political context that paved the way for that flourishing, while examining the genre’s key elements and characters as illustrated in the poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, and Sulpicia. Special attention is paid to the gendered dynamics that govern the relationship between “poet-lover” (amator) and beloved and to the role of the poet as artist and creator of a “written girl” (scripta puella).

Martin West is widely recognized as one of the most significant classicists of all time. Over nearly half a century his publications have transformed our understanding of Greek poetry. This volume celebrates his achievement with twenty-five papers on different areas of the subject which he has illuminated, written by distinguished scholars from four continents. It also includes West's Balzan Prize acceptance speech, 'Forward into the Past', in which he explains his approach to literary scholarship, and a complete bibliography of his academic publications.

First published in 1962 and 1963, these two volumes bridge the gap between the study of classics and the study of literature and attempt to reconcile the two disciplines. The collection of essays offers a critical examination of Latin literature and aims to stimulate critical discussion of a selection of Latin poets. This experimental and ground-breaking set will be of particular interest to students of Roman Literature, Classics and Poetry.

This study, first published in 1998, explores the subtle, many-faceted interplay of power in Tibullus' first book of elegies.

This indispensable volume provides a complete course on Latin erotic elegy, allowing students to trace a coherent narrative of the genre's rise and fall, and to understand its relationship to the changes that marked the collapse of the Roman republic, and the founding of the empire. The book begins with a detailed and wide-ranging introduction, looking at major figures, the evolution of the form, and the Roman context, with particular focus on the changing relations between the sexes. The texts that follow range from the earliest manifestations of erotic elegy, in Catullus, through Tibullus, Sulpicia (Rome's only female elegist), Propertius and Ovid. An accessible commentary explores the historical background, issues of language and style, and the relation of each piece to its author's larger body of work. The volume closes with an anthology of critical essays representative of the main trends in scholarship; these both illuminate the genre's most salient features and help the student understand its modern reception.