Tombs of the Ancient Poets explores the ways in which the tombs of the ancient poets - real or imagined - act as crucial sites for the reception of Greek and Latin poetry. Drawing together a range of examples, it makes a distinctive contribution to the study of literary reception by focusing on the materiality of the body and the tomb, and the ways in which they mediate the relationship between classical poetry and its readers. From the tomb of the boy poet Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, which preserves his prize-winning poetry carved on the tombstone itself, to the modern votive offerings left at the so-called 'Tomb of Virgil'; from the doomed tomb-hunting of long-lost poets' graves, to the 'graveyard of the imagination' constructed in Hellenistic poetry collections, the essays collected here explore the position of ancient poets' tombs in the cultural imagination and demonstrate the rich variety of ways in which they exemplify an essential mode of the reception of ancient poetry, poised as they are between literary reception and material culture.

Shaggy Crowns is the first book-length study in almost a hundred years of the relationship between Rome's two great epic poems. Quintus Ennius was once the monumental epic poet of Republican Rome, 'the father of Roman poetry'. However, around one hundred and fifty years after his epic Annales first appeared, it was replaced decisively by Virgil's Aeneid, and now survives only in fragments. Looking at the intersections between intertextuality and the appropriations of cultural memory, Goldschmidt considers the relationship between Rome's two great canonical epics. She focuses on how - in the use of archaism, the presentation of landscape, embedded memories of the Punic Wars, and fragments of exempla - Virgil's poem appropriates and re-writes the myths and memories which Ennius had enshrined in Roman epic. Goldschmidt argues that Virgil was not just a slicker 'new poet', but constructed himself as an older 'archaic poet' of the deepest memories of the Roman past, ultimately competing for the 'shaggy crown' of Ennius.

Conscious of ancient modes of reading poetry 'for the life', Roman poets encoded versions of their lives into their texts. The result is a body of literature that cries out to be read in terms of lives in reception. Afterlives of the Roman Poets shows how the fictional biographies (or 'biofictions') of its authors have shaped the reception of Latin poetry. From medieval biographies of Ovid inscribed in the margins of his texts to republican readings of Lucan's death in periods of revolution to the 'death of the author' in Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil, the book tells a cultural history of the reception of ancient literature as imagined through the lens of poets' lives. Putting modern life-writing studies and ancient poetry into dialogue, it brings biofictional reception to debates in classics, and puts antiquity and its reception onto the map of modern studies in life-writing.