This volume sets out to explore the complex relationship between Horace and Seneca. It is the first book that examines the interface between these different and yet highly comparable authors with consideration of their œuvres in their entirety. The fourteen chapters collected here explore a wide range of topics clustered around the following four themes: the combination of literature and philosophy; the ways in which Seneca’s choral odes rework Horatian material and move beyond it; the treatment of ethical, poetic, and aesthetic questions by the two authors; and the problem of literary influence and reception as well as ancient and modern reflections on these problems. While the intertextual contacts between Horace and Seneca themselves lie at the core of this project, it also considers the earlier texts that serve as sources for both authors, intermediary steps in Roman literature, and later texts where connections between the two philosopher-poets are drawn. Although not as obviously palpable as the linkage between authors who share a common generic tradition, this uneven but pervasive relationship can be regarded as one of the most prolific literary interactions between the early Augustan and the Neronian periods. A bidirectional list of correspondences between Horace and Seneca concludes the volume.
Elaine Fantham provides here a fresh Latin text of Seneca's Traodes and an English version, with an extensive introduction and critical commentary--the first separate treatment of the play in English since Kingery's 1908 edition. Arguing that the Troades was not intended for stage production, the author also discusses the atmosphere of Rome at the time the play was written, when both political and poetic life were felt to be in decline. Although Seneca's plays reflect his experience of tyranny, corruption, and compromise, they are enriched by his contract with the nobler world of poetry. Demonstrating how Seneca loved and imitated the Augustan poets, Professor Fantham reveals the originality that is part of his imitation. Professor Fantham discusses not only the particular characteristics of Seneca's generation but the interplay of his moral and poetic concerns in relationship to his subject--the Trojan captivity.By analyzing his reactions to accounts of this theme in Homer, Euripides, and Augustan epic, she explains his methods and motives in composition. Comparison of the play with Seneca's other works and with other drama exposes some inconsistency, formulaic writing, and excess of ingenuity. It also reveals the influence of epic in loosening his dramtic form and makes apparent his immense vitality. Elaine Fantham is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto and author of Comparative Studies in the Republican Latin Imagery (Toronto). Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This volume explores various perceptions, adaptations, and appropriations of Horace in the Early Modern age across textual, visual and musical media. It thus intends to advocate an interdisciplinary and multi-medial approach to the exceptionally rich and variegated afterlife of Horace.
This volume shows the pervasiveness over a millennium and a half of the little-studied phenomenon of multi-tier intertextuality, whether as ‘linear’ window reference – where author C simultaneously imitates or alludes to a text by author A and its imitation by author B – or as multi-directional imitative clusters. It begins with essays on classical literature from Homer to the high Roman empire, where the feature first becomes prominent; then comes late antiquity, a lively area of research at present; and, after a series of essays on European neo-Latin literature from Petrarch to 1600, another area where developments are moving rapidly, the volume concludes with early modern vernacular literatures (Italian, French, Portuguese and English). Most papers concern verse, but prose is not ignored. The introduction to the volume discusses the relevant methodological issues. An Afterword outlines the critical history of ‘window reference’ and includes a short essay by Professor Richard Thomas, of Harvard University, who coined the term in the 1980s.
INTRODUCTION Voices in the moralising satires 1 of Horace: 'diatribe' as dialogue PART ONE: MULTIPLE VOICES Dialogic discourse and 'addressivity' in the 53 moralising satires ('diatribes') of Horace Sermones Book One CHAPTER ONE Satires 1.1: The dialogue of 55 monologue CHAPTER TWO Satires 1.2: Addressing 99 adultery, speaking sexuality CHAPTER THREE Satires The dialogue of 135 friendship PART TWO: OTHER VOICES Speakers, audiences, and other role reversals 163 in the moralising satires of Horace Sermones Book Two CHAPTER FOUR The moralising satires of 165 Horace's second book: an echo and a retort CHAPTER FIVE Sources, speakers and 197 addressees: Horace's experiment in 'derived' discourse in Satires 2.2. CHAPTER SIX Speaking with authority: 225 'authoritative discourse' versus 'internally persuasive discourse' in Satires 2.3 CHAPTER SEVEN A world turned upside down: 261 Saturnalia as proto-Carnival in Satires 2.7.
This book describes the philosophy of ancient Rome in an original, convincing and, at the same time, captivating manner. Roman philosophy is both a continuation of Greek philosophy and a substantially different way of thinking. The predominant examples dealt with in this book are language and time. Emphasis is laid upon the interweaving of philosophy and religion. The principal figures here are Cicero and the Greek philosopher Plotinus; the rise of Christianity is shown against the background of the philosophy of those days.
Historian O'Neill examines a great variety of evidence from many specialties and reaches an astonishing and novel conclusion: Classical Greek Civilization was not destroyed by Barbarians or by Christians. It survived intact into the mid-7th century when everything changed.
From the bites and scratches of lovers and the threat of flogging that hangs over the comic slave, to murder, rape, dismemberment, and crucifixion, violence is everywhere in Latin literature. The contributors to this volume explore the manifold ways in which violence is constructed and represented in Latin poetry and prose from Plautus to Prudentius, examining the interrelations between violence, language, power, and gender, and the narrative, rhetorical, and ideological functions of such depictions across the generic spectrum. How does violence contribute to the pleasure of the text? Do depictions of violence always reinforce status-hierarchies, or can they provoke a reassessment of normative value-systems? Is the reader necessarily complicit with authorial constructions of violence? These are pressing questions both for ancient literature and for film and other modern media, and this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of cultural studies as well as of the ancient world.
England became a centrally important maritime power in the early modern period, and its writers – acutely aware of their inhabiting an island – often depicted the coastline as a major topic of their works. However, early modern English versifiers had to reconcile this reality with the classical tradition, in which the British Isles were seen as culturally remote compared to the centrally important Mediterranean of antiquity. This was a struggle for writers not only because they used the classical tradition to legitimate their authority, but also because this image dominated cognitive maps of the oceanic world. As the first study of coastlines and early modern English literature, Dire Straits investigates the tensions of the classical tradition’s isolation of the British Isles from the domain of poetry. By illustrating how early modern English writers created their works in the context of a longstanding cultural inheritance from antiquity, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy offers a new approach to the history of early modern cartography and its influences on literature.
Author of plays, love-lyrics, essays and, among other works, The Civil War, the Davideis and the Pindarique Odes, Abraham Cowley made a deep impression on seventeenth-century letters, attested by his extravagant funeral and his burial next to Chaucer and Spenser in Westminster Abbey. Ejected from Cambridge for his politics, he found refuge in royalist Oxford before seeing long service as secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria, and as a Crown agent, on the continent. In the mid-1650s he returned to England, was imprisoned and made an accommodation with the Cromwellian regime. This volume of essays provides the modern critical attention Cowley’s life and writings merit.