This book collects essays and other contributions by colleagues, students, and friends of the late Diskin Clay, reflecting the unusually broad range of his interests. Clay's work in ancient philosophy, and particularly in Epicurus and Epicureanism and in Plato, is reflected chapters on Epicurean concerns by Andre Laks, David Sedley and Martin Ferguson Smith, as well as Jed Atkins on Lucretius and Leo Strauss; Michael Erler contributes a chapter on Plato. James Lesher discusses Xenophanes and Sophocles, and Aryeh Kosman contributes a jeu d'esprit on the obscure Pythagorean Ameinias. Greek cultural history finds multidisciplinary treatment in Rebecca Sinos's study of Archilochus' Heros and the Parian Relief, Frank Romer's mythographic essay on Aphrodite's origins and archaic mythopoieia more generally, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou's explication of Callimachus's kenning of Mt. Athos as "ox-piercing spit of your mother Arsinoe." More purely literary interests are pursued in chapters on ancient Greek (Joseph Russo on Homer, Dirk Obbink on Sappho), Latin (Jenny Strauss Clay and Gregson Davis on Horace), and post-classical poetry (Helen Hadzichronoglou on Cavafy, John Miller on Robert Pinsky and Ovid). Peter Burian contributes an essay on the possibility and impossibility of translating Aeschylus. In addition to these essays, two original poems (Rosanna Warren and Jeffrey Carson) and two pairs of translations (from Horace by Davis and from Foscolo by Burian) recognize Clay's own activity as poet and translator. The volume begins with an Introduction discussing Clay's life and work, and concludes with a bibliography of Clay's publications.

The collection of essays in this volume offers fresh insights into varied modalities of reception of Epicurean thought among Roman authors of the late Republican and Imperial eras. Its generic purview encompasses prose as well as poetic texts by both minor and major writers in the Latin literary canon, including the anonymous poems, Ciris and Aetna, and an elegy from the Tibullan corpus by the female poet, Sulpicia. Major figures include the Augustan poets, Vergil and Horace, and the late antique Christian theologian, Augustine. The method of analysis employed in the essays is uniformly interdisciplinary and reveals the depth of the engagement of each ancient author with major preoccupations of Epicurean thought, such as the balanced pursuit of erotic pleasure in the context of human flourishing and the role of the gods in relation to human existence. The ensemble of nuanced interpretations testifies to the immense vitality of the Epicurean philosophical tradition throughout Greco-Roman antiquity and thereby provides a welcome and substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of reception studies.

Aime Cesaire is arguably the best-known poet in the French Caribbean. His poetry and drama have established his formidable reputation as the leading francophone poet and elder statesman of the twentieth century. In this study Gregson Davis examines the evolution of Cesaire's poetic career and his involvement with many of the most seminal political and aesthetic movements of the twentieth century. Davis relates Cesaire's extraordinary dual career as writer and elected politician to the recurrent themes in his writings. As one of the most profound critics of colonialism, Cesaire, the acknowledged inventor of the famous term 'negritude', has been a hugely influential figure in shaping the contemporary discourse on the postcolonial predicament. Gregson Davis's account of Cesaire's intellectual growth is grounded in a careful reading of the poetry, prose and drama that illustrates the full range and depth of his literary achievement.

The role of Greek thought in the final days of the Roman republic is a topic that has garnered much attention in recent years. This volume of essays, commissioned specially from a distinguished international group of scholars, explores the role and influence of Greek philosophy, specifically Epicureanism, in the late republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views of Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosopher of the day, and Lucretius, foremost among the representatives and supporters of Epicureanism at the time. Throughout the volume, the impact of such disparate reception on the part of these leading authors is explored in a way that illuminates the popularity as well as the controversy attached to the followers of Epicurus in Italy, ranging from ethical and political concerns to the understanding of scientific and celestial phenomena.

Originally published in 1939, Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal is a landmark of modern French poetry and a founding text of the Negritude movement. This bilingual edition features a new authoritative translation, revised introduction, and extensive commentary, making it a magisterial edition of Cesaire's surrealist masterpiece.

Aime Cesaire is arguably the best-known poet in the French Caribbean. His poetry and drama have established his formidable reputation as the leading francophone poet and elder statesman of the twentieth century. In this study Gregson Davis examines the evolution of Cesaire's poetic career and his involvement with many of the most seminal political and aesthetic movements of the twentieth century. Davis relates Cesaire's extraordinary dual career as writer and elected politician to the recurrent themes in his writings. As one of the most profound critics of colonialism, Cesaire, the acknowledged inventor of the famous term 'negritude', has been a hugely influential figure in shaping the contemporary discourse on the postcolonial predicament. Gregson Davis's account of Cesaire's intellectual growth is grounded in a careful reading of the poetry, prose and drama that illustrates the full range and depth of his literary achievement.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire--a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the "Aeneid," he wrote two other collections of poems: the "Georgics" and the "Bucolics," or "Eclogues."The "Eclogues" were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources say that he spent three years composing and revising them at about the age of thirty. Though these poems begin a sequence that continues with the "Georgics" and culminates in the "Aeneid," they are no less elegant in style or less profound in insight than the later, more extensive works. These intricate and highly polished variations on the idea of the pastoral poem, as practiced by earlier Greek poets, mix political, social, historical, artistic, and moral commentary in musical Latin that exerted a profound influence on subsequent Western poetry.Poet Len Krisak's vibrant metric translation captures the music of Virgil's richly textured verse by employing rhyme and other sonic devices. The result is English poetry rather than translated prose. Presenting the English on facing pages with the original Latin, "Virgil's Eclogues" also features an introduction by scholar Gregson Davis that situates the poems in the time in which they were created.

Originally published in 1939, Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal is a landmark of modern French poetry and a founding text of the Negritude movement. This bilingual edition features a new authoritative translation, revised introduction, and extensive commentary, making it a magisterial edition of Cesaire's surrealist masterpiece.

Timeless meditations on the subjects of wine, parties, birthdays, love, and friendship, Horace’s Odes, in the words of classicist Donald Carne-Ross, make the “commonplace notable, even luminous.” This edition reproduces the highly lauded translation by James Michie. “For almost forty years,” poet and literary critic John Hollander notes, “James Michie’s brilliant translations of Horace have remained fresh as well as strong, and responsive to the varying lights and darks of the originals. It is a pleasure to have them newly available.”

Horace's Odes have a surface translucency that belies their rhetorical sophistication. Gregson Davis brings together recent trends in the study of Augustan poetry and critical theory and deftly applies them to individual poems. Exploring four rhetorical strategies--what he calls modes of assimilation, authentication, consolation, and praise and dispraise--Davis produces enlightening, new interpretations of this classic work. Polyhymnia, named after one of the Muses invoked in Horace's opening poem, revises the common image of Horace as a complacent, uncomplicated, and basically superficial singer. Focusing on the artistic persona--the lyric "self" that is constituted in the text--Davis explores how the lyric speaker constructs subtle "arguments" whose building-blocks are topoi, recurrent motifs, and generic conventions. By examining the substructure of lyric argument in groupings of poems sharing similar strategies, the author discloses the major principles that inform Horatian lyric composition.

The essays collected in this issue offer complementary critical perspectives on the mature lyric work of Derek Walcott, the acclaimed Nobel laureate from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. The centerpiece of the ensemble is a previously unpublished essay in which Walcott's reflections on poetics illuminate his project in the masterpiece, "Omeros."
Other contributions by literary scholars in North America and the Caribbean focus on fundamental dimensions of Walcott's craft and on such thematic preoccupations as the intersection of pictorial and verbal modes of representation, the deployment of nuanced intertextual strategies (especially in relation to the Greco-Roman canon), the invention of a viable artistic identity in a postcolonial intercultural milieu, and the psychosocial modeling of the process of literary apprenticeship.

"Contributors. "Edward Baugh, Peter Burian, Gregson Davis, Carol Dougherty, Joseph Farrell, Judith Harris, Timothy Hofmeister, Derek Walcott