This book explores the whole range of the output of an exceptionally versatile and innovative poet, from the Epodes to the literary-critical Epistles. Distinguished scholars of diverse background and interests introduce readers to a variety of critical approaches to Horace and to Latin poetry. Close attention is paid throughout to the actual text of Horace, with many of the chapters focusing on reading a single poem. These close readings are then situated in a number of different political, philosophical and historical contexts. The book sheds light not only on Horace but on the general problems confronting Latinists in the study of Augustan poetry, and it will be of value to a wide range of upper-level Latin students and scholars.

This is the first of Professor Brink's three-volume commentary on Horace's literary epistles, originally published in 1963. The volumes' chief focus is the primary source of Horatian literary criticism: the Epistula ad Pisones, known as the Ars Poetica to most ancient and modern readers. Volume I of Horace on Poetry looks at the structure of the Ars Poetica, Neoptolemus and literary criticism, and the criticism and satire of Horace. Professor Brink's overriding argument is that the common dismissal of the Ars as a disorderly piece fails to take into account Horace's architectonic style. For Brink, this disorder is itself part of an intrinsic poetic design. The complete three-volume commentary constitutes one of the fullest scholarly commentaries on Horace's critical writing. It will continue to be of great value to all with an interest in this much-debated subject.

Book 3 of the Odes completes the lyric trilogy which Horace, who rivals Virgil as the greatest of all Latin poets, published in 23 BC. Arguably his most famous book, it opens with the six so-called 'Roman Odes', those defining texts of the Augustan Age, and concludes with the statement of his achievement: he has produced for his Roman readers a body of lyric poetry to rival the great lyric poets of Greece, a monument which will last as long as Rome itself. The present volume aims to place Horace's Odes in their literary and historical context, to explain his Latin, to articulate his thought, and to attempt to elucidate his brilliance. It presents a new text and adopts an approach independent of that of earlier commentators.

This book provides specially commissioned in-depth discussions of the poetry of Catullus from ten leading Latin scholars.

This book explores how Horace's poems construct the literary and social authority of their author. Bridging the traditional distinction between 'persona' and 'author', Ellen Oliensis considers Horace's poetry as one dimension of his 'face' - the projected self-image that is the basic currency of social interactions. She reads Horace's poems not only as works of art but also as social acts of face-saving, face-making and self-effacement. These acts are responsive, she suggests, to the pressure of several audiences: Horace shapes his poetry to promote his authority and to pay deference to his patrons while taking account of the envy of contemporaries and the judgement of posterity. Drawing on the insights of sociolinguistics, deconstruction and new historicism Dr Oliensis charts the poet's shifting strategies of authority and deference across his entire literary career.

First-person poetry is a familiar genre in Latin literature. Propertius, Catullus, and Horace deployed the first-person speaker in a variety of ways that either bolster or undermine the link between this figure and the poet himself. In I, the Poet, Kathleen McCarthy offers a new approach to understanding the ubiquitous use of a first-person voice in Augustan-age poetry, taking on several of the central debates in the field of Latin literary studies—including the inheritance of the Greek tradition, the shift from oral performance to written collections, and the status of the poetic "I-voice." In light of her own experience as a twenty-first century reader, for whom Latin poetry is meaningful across a great gulf of linguistic, cultural, and historical distances, McCarthy positions these poets as the self-conscious readers of and heirs to a long tradition of Greek poetry, which prompted them to explore radical forms of communication through the poetic form. Informed in part by the "New Lyric Studies," I, the Poet will appeal not only to scholars of Latin literature but to readers across a range of literary studies who seek to understand the Roman contexts which shaped canonical poetic genres.

In The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext, a team of international scholars consider the afterlife of early Greek lyric poetry (iambic, elegiac, and melic) up to the 12th century CE, from a variety of intersecting perspectives: reperformance, textualization, the direct and indirect tradition, anthologies, poets’ Lives, and the disquisitions of philosophers and scholars. Particular attention is given to the poets Tyrtaeus, Solon, Theognis, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Pindar, and Timotheus. Consideration is given to their reception in authors such as Aristophanes, Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, Athenaeus, Aelius Aristides, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, as well as their discussion by Peripatetic scholars, the Hellenistic scholia to Pindar, Horace’s commentator Porphyrio, and Eustathius on Pindar.

Throughout his work, the Roman poet Horace displays many, sometimes conflicting, faces: these include dutiful son, expert lover, gentleman farmer, man about town, outsider, poet laureate, sharp satirist and measured moraliser. This book features a wide array of essays by an international team of scholars from a number of different academic disciplines, each one shedding new light on aspects of Horace's poetry and its later reception in literature, art and scholarship from antiquity to the present day. In particular, the collection seeks to investigate the fortunes of 'Horace' both as a literary personality and as a uniquely varied textual corpus of enormous importance to western culture. The poems shape an author to suit his poetic aims; readers reshape that author to suit their own aesthetic, social and political needs. Studying these various versions of Horace and their interaction illuminates the author, his poetry and his readers.