ABSTRACT

Understanding Latin Literature is a highly accessible, user-friendly work that provides a fresh and illuminating introduction to the most important aspects of Latin prose and poetry. This second edition is heavily revised to reflect recent developments in scholarship, especially in the area of the later reception and reverberations of Latin literature. Chapters are dedicated to Latin writers such as Virgil and Livy and explore how literature related to Roman identity and society. Readers are stimulated and inspired to do their own further reading through engagement with a wide selection of translated extracts and through understanding the different ways in which they can be approached. Central throughout is the theme of the fundamental connections between Latin literature and issues of elite Roman culture. The versatile and accessible structure of Understanding Latin Literature makes it suitable for both individual and class use.

chapter 1|14 pages

Virgil and the meaning of the Aeneid

chapter 3|12 pages

What is Latin literature?

chapter 7|15 pages

Performance and spectacle, life and death

chapter 10|17 pages

Writing ‘real’ lives

chapter 11|9 pages

Introspection and individual identity

chapter 12|12 pages

Literary texture and intertextuality

chapter 13|13 pages

Metapoetics

chapter 14|12 pages

Allegory