The question of 'identity' arises for any individual or ethnic group when they come into contact with a stranger or another people. Such contact results in the self-conscious identification of ways of life, customs, traditions, and other forms of society as one's own specific cultural features and the construction of others as characteristic of peoples from more or less distant lands, described as very 'different'. Since all societies are structured by the division between the sexes in every field of public and private activity, the modern concept of 'gender' is a key comparator to be considered when investigating how the concepts of identity and ethnicity are articulated in the evaluation of the norms and values of other cultures. The object of this book is to analyze, at the beginning Western culture, various examples of the ways the Greeks and Romans deployed these three parameters in the definition of their identity, both cultural and gendered, by reference to their neighbours and foreign nations at different times in their history. This study also aims to enrich contemporary debates by showing that we have yet to learn from the ancients' discussions of social and cultural issues that are still relevant today.

The question of 'identity' arises for any individual or ethnic group when they come into contact with a stranger or another people. Such contact results in the self-conscious identification of ways of life, customs, traditions, and other forms of society as one's own specific cultural features and the construction of others as characteristic of peoples from more or less distant lands, described as very 'different'. Since all societies are structured by the division between the sexes in every field of public and private activity, the modern concept of 'gender' is a key comparator to be considered when investigating how the concepts of identity and ethnicity are articulated in the evaluation of the norms and values of other cultures. The object of this book is to analyze, at the beginning Western culture, various examples of the ways the Greeks and Romans deployed these three parameters in the definition of their identity, both cultural and gendered, by reference to their neighbours and foreign nations at different times in their history. This study also aims to enrich contemporary debates by showing that we have yet to learn from the ancients' discussions of social and cultural issues that are still relevant today.

The works of Virgil (70-19 BCE) define the 'golden age' of Latin poetry and have inspired a long tradition of interpretation and adaptation that starts in his own time and extends to important modern authors. His ascent from the lesser genre of pastoral (the Bucolics) through a more ambitious didactic mode (the Georgics) to the soaring heights of epic (the incomparable Aeneid) shaped the canonical writings of other authors, from his younger contemporary Ovid through the medieval writers Dante and Petrarch to the early modern poets Spenser and Milton and well beyond. Virgil, as Alison Keith shows, has never gone out of critical or popular fashion. This wide-ranging introduction appraises a figure of central importance in the history of Western music, art and literature. Offering close readings of the Bucolics, Georgics and Aeneid, Keith places Virgil and his poetry in historical context before tracing their impact at key moments in the culture of the West. Emphasis is placed on Virgil's reception of the classical literary and philosophical traditions, and on how his poetry has attracted modern interest from writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot and Ursula K. Le Guin.

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 meters 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.

The works of Virgil (70-19 BCE) define the 'golden age' of Latin poetry and have inspired a long tradition of interpretation and adaptation that starts in his own time and extends to important modern authors. His ascent from the lesser genre of pastoral (the Bucolics) through a more ambitious didactic mode (the Georgics) to the soaring heights of epic (the incomparable Aeneid) shaped the canonical writings of other authors, from his younger contemporary Ovid through the medieval writers Dante and Petrarch to the early modern poets Spenser and Milton and well beyond. Virgil, as Alison Keith shows, has never gone out of critical or popular fashion. This wide-ranging introduction appraises a figure of central importance in the history of Western music, art and literature. Offering close readings of the Bucolics, Georgics and Aeneid, Keith places Virgil and his poetry in historical context before tracing their impact at key moments in the culture of the West. Emphasis is placed on Virgil's reception of the classical literary and philosophical traditions, and on how his poetry has attracted modern interest from writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Unlike many studies of the family in the ancient world, this volume presents readings of mothers in classical literature, including philosophical and epigraphic writing as well as poetic texts. Rather than relying on a male viewpoint, the essays offer a female perspective on the lifecycle of motherhood.  Although almost all ancient authors are men, this book nevertheless aims to carefully unpack the role of the mother – not as projected by the son or other male relations, but from a woman’s own experiences – in order to better understand how they perceived themselves and their families. Because the primary interest is in the mothers themselves, rather than the authors of the texts in which they appear, the work is organized according to the lifecycle of motherhood instead of the traditional structure of the chronology of male authors. The chronology of the male authors ranges from classical Greece to late antiquity, while the motherly lifecycle ranges from pre-conception to the commemoration of offspring who have died before their mothers.

Drawing on the historicizing turn in Latin literary scholarship, Roman Literary Cultures combines new critical methods with traditional analysis across four hundred years of Latin literature, from mid-republican Rome in the second century BC to the Second Sophistic in the second century AD. The contributors explore Latin texts both famous and obscure, from Roman drama and Menippean satire through Latin elegies, epics, and novels to letters issued by Roman emperors and compilations of laws. Each of the essays in this volume combines close reading of Latin literary texts with historical and cultural contextualization, making the collection an accessible and engaging combination of formalist criticism and historicist exegesis that attends to the many ways in which classical Latin literature participated in ancient Roman civic debates.

The relationship between the genres of elegy and epigram has been much debated and from a dizzying variety of angles. The contributors to this volume explore the impact of Hellenistic Greek epigram on Latin erotic elegy in the light of the recent discovery and publication of papyrus book-rolls, especially those containing Hellenistic Greek epigram collections. Individual chapters approach the interrelations of Greek epigram and Latin elegy through the theoretical frameworks of intermediality (the contamination of the two different media of stone inscription and book roll) and textual criticism (applying to the Latin elegist Propertius the editorial lessons learned from the papyrus collections of Greek epigrams). Some chapters focus on the reception of specific Greek epigrams, particularly those of Meleager and Philodemus, in particular elegies of Propertius and Ovid, while others take the Latin elegists as their focus and examine their appropriation of both the thematic motifs of Greek epigram and the organizational structures of Hellenistic epigram books. All bear witness to the importance of Hellenistic Greek epigram to the authors of Latin erotic elegy, consolidate our understanding of the formal relations between the two genres in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, and deepen our appreciation of individual Greek epigrams and Latin elegies.