ABSTRACT

Didactic Epic was enormously popular in the ancient world. It was used to teach Greeks and Romans technical and scientific subjects, but in verse. Epic Lessons shows how this scientific poetry was intended not just to instruct but also to entertain.

Praise for its predecessor, Reading Epic

'Toohey's erudition makes the complexities and the strangeness of these ancient poems appear as clear as daylight and his enthusiasm renders them as attractive as the latest blockbuster.' - JACT Review

chapter 1|19 pages

Who Reads Didactic Epic?

chapter 2|29 pages

Word of Mouth

Orality and didactic poetry from Hesiod to Empedocles

chapter 3|29 pages

The Universe as a Book

Hellenistic literacy and the poems of Aratus and Nicander

chapter 4|31 pages

Roman Renewal

Cicero and Lucretius

chapter 5|37 pages

Politics, Power, And Play

Polyphony in Virgil's Georgics and Ovid's Fasti

chapter 6|29 pages

Amusements for a Smoky December

Horace on poetry and Ovid on eros

chapter 7|19 pages

Humans, Nature, and God

Epic lessons in the first century

chapter 8|19 pages

Resisting Instinct

Hunting, fishing, science, and God

chapter 9|25 pages

Didactic Dinners

Instruction in narrative epic and in the novel

chapter 10|14 pages

A Literary History of Leisure?

The didactic epic