This volume offers a strikingly innovative account of Propertius' relationship with Virgil, positing a keen rivalry between two of the greatest poets of Latin literature, contemporaries within the circle of Maecenas. It begins by examining all of the references to Greek mythology in Propertius' first book; these passages emerge as strongly intertextual in nature, providing a way for the poet to situate himself with respect to his predecessors, both Greek and Roman. More specifically, myth is also the medium of a sustained polemic with Virgil's Eclogues, published only a few years earlier. Virgil's response can be traced in the Georgics, and subsequently, in his second and third books, Propertius continued to use mythology and its relationship to contemporary events as a vehicle for literary polemic. This volume argues that their competition can be seen as exemplifying a revised model for how the poets within Maecenas' circle interacted and engaged with each other's work - a model based on rivalry rather than ideological adhesion or subversion - while also painting a revealing picture of how Virgil was viewed by a contemporary in the days before his death had canonized his work as an instant classic. In particular, its novel interpretation offers us a new understanding of Propertius, one of the foundational figures in Western love poetry, and how his frequent references to other poets, especially Gallus and Ennius, take on new meanings when interpreted as responses to Virgil's changing career.

This volume offers a strikingly innovative account of Propertius' relationship with Virgil, positing a keen rivalry between two of the greatest poets of Latin literature, contemporaries within the circle of Maecenas. It begins by examining all of the references to Greek mythology in Propertius' first book; these passages emerge as strongly intertextual in nature, providing a way for the poet to situate himself with respect to his predecessors, both Greek and Roman. More specifically, myth is also the medium of a sustained polemic with Virgil's Eclogues, published only a few years earlier. Virgil's response can be traced in the Georgics, and subsequently, in his second and third books, Propertius continued to use mythology and its relationship to contemporary events as a vehicle for literary polemic. This volume argues that their competition can be seen as exemplifying a revised model for how the poets within Maecenas' circle interacted and engaged with each other's work - a model based on rivalry rather than ideological adhesion or subversion - while also painting a revealing picture of how Virgil was viewed by a contemporary in the days before his death had canonized his work as an instant classic. In particular, its novel interpretation offers us a new understanding of Propertius, one of the foundational figures in Western love poetry, and how his frequent references to other poets, especially Gallus and Ennius, take on new meanings when interpreted as responses to Virgil's changing career.

An enlightening look at the importance of war gods and their myths to the ancient Romans. This book redresses the relative lack of work published on the role of war in classical myth and legend. At the same time it debunks the popular view that the Romans had little mythology of their own and idly borrowed and adapted Greek myth to suit their own ends. While this is true to some extent, War in Roman Myth and Legend clearly demonstrates a rich and meaningful independent mythology at work in Roman culture. The book opens by addressing how the Romans did adopt and adapt Greek myths to fashion the beginnings of Roman history; it goes on to discuss the Roman gods of war and the ubiquity of war in Roman society and politics and how this was reflected in the Aeneas Foundation Myth, the Romulus and Remus Foundation Myth, and the legends associated with the founding of Rome. Also discussed are warlike women in Roman epic; Trojan heroes; and the use of mythology by Roman poets other than Virgil. The Theban Legion and the vision of Constantine myths conclude the journey.

The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil uses an enriched tripartite model of Roman culture-touching not only the public and the private, but also the solitary-in order to present a radical re-interpretation of Latin literature and of the historical causes of this third sphere's relative invisibility in scholarship. By connecting Cosmos and Imperium to the Individual, the solitary sphere was not so much a way of avoiding politics, as a political education in itself. As re-imagined by literature in this age literature, this sphere was an essential space for the formation of the new Roman citizen of the Augustan revolution, and was behind many of the notable features of the literary revolution of Virgil's age: the expansion of the possibilities of the book of poetry, the birth of the literary cursus, new coordinations of cosmology and politics within strictly organized schemes, the attraction of first-person genres, and the subjective style. Through close readings of Cicero's late works and the oeuvres of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius and the works of other authors in the age of Virgil, The Solitary Sphere thus presents a revelatory reassessment of the classicism of classical Roman literature, and contributes to the study of pre-modern culture more generally, especially for traditions that have taken antiquity as too fixed a point in their own literary, religious, and cultural histories.

Elegiac Love and Death in Vergil's 'Aeneid' poses new questions about Vergil's pervasive engagement with elegy, both amatory and funerary, throughout his final epic endeavor. A foundational discussion of elegiac experimentation in the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid 1-6 explores the aesthetic and conceptual development of destructive Vergilian amor (passion). The unique emphasis of subsequent chapters on the amatory and funerary elegiac dimensions of crucial episodes in Aeneid 7-12 illuminates the intergeneric character of Vergil's martial maius opus. A detailed examination of the inter- and intratextual strands of pivotal moments in the Aeneid evinces Vergil's intense engagement with literary predecessors and contemporaries, his evolving artistic vision, and his enduring influence on subsequent Roman poets. Each chapter of this volume enhances our understanding of the generic complexity of the Aeneid, presenting revisionary readings of key episodes and transformative interpretations of its main characters.

The elegiac poet Propertius responds in his verse to the complex changes that Rome underwent in his lifetime, taking on numerous topics of poetry, poetic and sexual rivalry, visual art, violence, imperialism, colonialism, civil war, the radical new emperor Augustus, and more. These essays, by well-known scholars of Roman elegy, offer new ways of reading Propertius' topics, attitudes, and poetics. This book begins with two distinguished essays by influential Propertian scholar Barbara Flaschenriem, who passed away unexpectedly. The other contributions, offered in her memory, are by Diane Rayor, Andrew Feldherr, Ellen Greene, Lowell Bowditch, Alison Keith, and volume editor Sharon L. James. These essays explore themes including Propertian didacticism, dream interpretation, visual art and formalism, sex and violence, Roman imperialism and its connection to the elegiac puella, and Propertius' engagement, in Book 4, with Vergil's poetry.

Born in 70 BCE, the Roman poet Vergil came of age during a period of literary experimentalism among Latin authors. These authors introduced new Greek verse forms and metres into the existing repertoire of Latin poetic genres and measures, foremost among them being elegy, a genre that the ancients thought originated in funeral lament, but which in classical Rome became first-person poetry about the poet-lover’s amatory vicissitudes. Despite the influence of notable elegists on Vergil’s early poetry, his critics have rarely paid attention to his engagement with the genre across his body of work. This collection is devoted to an exploration of Vergil’s multifaceted relations with elegy. Contributors shed light on Vergil’s interactions with the genre and its practitioners across classical, medieval, and early modern periods. The book investigates Vergil’s hexameter poetry in relation to contemporary Latin elegy by Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius, and the subsequent reception of Vergil’s radical combination of epic with elegy by later Latin and Italian authors. Filling a striking gap in the scholarship, Vergil and Elegy illuminates the famous poet’s wide-ranging engagement with the genre of elegy across his oeuvre.

It is often claimed that the kind of love that is variously deemed 'romantic' or 'true' did not exist in antiquity. Yet, ancient literature abounds with stories that seem to adhere precisely to this kind of love. This volume focuses on such literature and the concepts of love it espouses. The volume differs from and challenges much existing classical scholarship which has traditionally privileged the theme of sex over love and prose-genres over those of poetry. By conversely focusing on love and poetry, the present volume freshly explores central poets in ancient literature, such Homer, Sappho, Terence, Catullus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid, alongside less canonized, such as the anonymous poet of The Lament for Bion, Philodemus and Sulpicia. The chapters, which are written by world-leading as well as younger scholars, reveal that Greek and Latin concepts of love seem interconnected, that such love is as relevant for hetero- as homoerotic couples, and that such ideas of love follow the mainstream of poetry throughout antiquity. In addition to the general reader interested in the history of love, this volume is relevant for students and scholars of the ancient world and the poetic tradition.

Politics and Divinization in Augustan Poetry offers a new interpretation of one of the most prominent themes in Latin poetry, the divinization of Augustus, and argues that this theme functioned as a language of political science for the early Augustan poets as they tried to come to terms with Rome's transformation from Republic to Principate. Examining an extensive body of texts ranging from Virgil's Eclogues to Horace's final book of the Odes (covering a period roughly from 43 BC to 13 BC), this study highlights the multifaceted metaphorical force of divinizing language, as well as the cultural complications of divinization. Through a series of close readings, this book challenges the view that poetic images of Augustus' divinization merely reflect the poets' attitude towards Augustus or their recognition of his power, and puts forward a new understanding of this motif as an evolving discourse through which the first generation of Augustan poets articulated, interrogated, and negotiated Rome's shift towards authoritarianism.

This volume of essays in honor of Lucia Athanassaki offers a great variety of chapters on a number of topics in Greek and Latin literature and genres, from Greek epic and lyric poetry to Greek drama and late antiquity, Greek historiography, and Latin lyric poetry.