The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard's postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future development. The Critical Guide aims to stimulate reflection on how we engage with Latin literature. Texts, tools and territories are the three areas of focus. The Guide situates the study of classical Latin literature within its global context from late antiquity to Neo-Latin, moving away from an exclusive focus on the pre-200 CE corpus. It recalibrates links with adjoining disciplines (history, philosophy, material culture, linguistics, political thought, Greek), and takes a fresh look at key tools (editing, reception, intertextuality, theory).

Pliny the Younger's nine-book Epistles is a masterpiece of Roman prose. Often mined as a historical and pedagogical sourcebook, this collection of 'private' letters is now finding recognition as a rich and rewarding work in its own right. The second book is a typically varied yet taut suite of miniatures, including among its twenty letters the trial of Marius Priscus and Pliny's famous portrait of his Laurentine villa. This edition, the first to address a complete book of Epistles in over a century, presents a Latin text together with an introduction and commentary intended for students, teachers and scholars. With clear linguistic explanations and full literary analysis, it invites readers to a fresh appreciation of Pliny's lettered art.

This volume is the first holistic investigation of Roman literature and literary culture under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian (AD 96-138). With case studies from Frontinus, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Quintilian, Suetonius and Tacitus among others, the eighteen chapters offer not just innovative readings of literary (and some 'less literary') texts, but a collaborative enquiry into the networks and culture in which they are embedded. The book brings together established and novel methodologies to explore the connections, conversations and silences between these texts and their authors, both on and off the page. The scholarly dialogues that result not only shed fresh light on the dynamics of literary production and consumption in the 'High Roman Empire', but offer new provocations to students of intertextuality and interdiscursivity across classical literature. How can and should we read textual interactions in their social, literary and cultural contexts?

Imitation was central to Roman culture, and a staple of Latin poetry. But it was also fundamental to prose. This book brings together two monuments of the High Empire, Quintilian's Institutio oratoria ('Training of the orator') and Pliny's Epistles, to reveal a spectacular project of textual and ethical imitation. As a young man Pliny had studied with Quintilian. In the Epistles he meticulously transforms and subsumes his teacher's masterpiece, together with poetry and prose ranging from Homer to Tacitus' Dialogus de oratoribus. In teasing apart Pliny's rich intertextual weave, this book reinterprets Quintilian through the eyes of one of his sharpest readers, radically reassesses the Epistles as a work of minute textual artistry, and makes a major intervention in scholarly debates on intertextuality, imitation and rhetorical culture at Rome. The result is a landmark study with far-reaching implications for how we read Latin literature.

This volume is the first holistic investigation of Roman literature and literary culture under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian (AD 96-138). With case studies from Frontinus, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Quintilian, Suetonius and Tacitus among others, the eighteen chapters offer not just innovative readings of literary (and some 'less literary') texts, but a collaborative enquiry into the networks and culture in which they are embedded. The book brings together established and novel methodologies to explore the connections, conversations and silences between these texts and their authors, both on and off the page. The scholarly dialogues that result not only shed fresh light on the dynamics of literary production and consumption in the 'High Roman Empire', but offer new provocations to students of intertextuality and interdiscursivity across classical literature. How can and should we read textual interactions in their social, literary and cultural contexts?

This volume brings together some of the best and most influential work to be published on the Epistles of Pliny the Younger in recent decades. Covering historical, (auto)biographical, and literary aspects of the Epistles and their reception, the nineteen classic articles included here offer a wide and representative range of approaches to Pliny, from prosopography and social history to intertextuality and self-representation. Topics include Pliny's villas, friends, and career, alongside literary and historical readings of some of his most famous letters, such as those on the eruption of Vesuvius and the torture of Christians, and correspondence with and about his wife Calpurnia, his uncle Pliny the Elder, his rival Regulus, the historian Tacitus and the emperor Trajan. The volume includes several chapters currently out of print or scarcely available (such as Birley's on Pliny's career and Eco's on the first Vesuvius letter), one which has been wholely rewritten (Cameron on reception) and one newly translated from German (Schenk on intertextuality). In addition, most have been updated by their authors, and translations of all Latin and other foreign languages have been added. A substantial introductory chapter by the editors offers the first full account of the history of scholarship on the Epistles from the birth of printing to the present day, summarises important recent work in languages other than English, and contextualises the articles included within the broader context of modern approaches to Pliny. Pliny the Younger's ten books of Epistles have only recently moved into the mainstream of classical studies from their traditional role as fodder for Latin beginners or filing cabinet for Roman historians. This volume marks and consolidates that shift by reprinting nineteen of the best and most influential contributions on Pliny and his Epistles from recent decades, newly edited, revised and/or translated into English. It begins with a new, substantial account of the history of Plinian scholarship and survey of the contemporary scholarly landscape. Together this collection offers a detailed study of the man, the events of his time, his career, his friends, even his possessions, and above all the varied artistic and ideological facets of his letters.