"One of the most entertaining short narratives of all time, the Achilleid is a stand-alone work of compelling contemporary interest that moves with great rapidity and clarity. Its compact narrative, which encompasses a brutish childhood, an overprotective mother, temporary gender bending, sexual violence, and a final coming to manhood with the promise of future military prowess, may be unparalleled in a single narrative of such brevity. The text has survived in hundreds of manuscripts, sometimes copied with Statius' much longer and lugubrious Thebaid , but just as often with other racy short narratives and dramas taught in the medieval schools. The poem's literary playfulness, visual imagery, and lighthearted treatment of mythological and historical data made it-and can still make it-a goldmine in the classroom. Until now, however, it has been virtually impossible to get a sense of the work if one did not know Latin-recent translations notwithstanding. Stanley Lombardo's translation of the Achilleid is a dream: it's sound, enthralling, and will fully engage readers with this enticing, perplexing, at times distressing, but ultimately rewarding work." -Marjorie Curry Woods, Blumberg Centennial Professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor, The University of Texas at Austin

In the Odes, Horace writes of his own work, "I have built a monument more enduring than bronze,"-a striking metaphor that hints at how the poetry and built environment of ancient Rome are inextricably linked. This fascinating work of original scholarship makes the precise and detailed argument that painted illustrations of the Trojan War, both public and private, were a collective visual resource for selected works of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius. Carefully researched and skillfully reasoned, the author's claims are bold and innovative, offering a strong interpretation of the relationship between Roman visual culture and literature that will deepen modern readings of Augustan poets. The Museum of Augustus first provides a comprehensive reconstruction of paintings from the remaining fragments of the cycle of Trojan frescoes that once decorated the Temple of Apollo in Pompeii. It then finds the echoes of these paintings in the Augustan-dated Portico of Philippus, now destroyed, which was itself a renovation of Rome's de facto temple of the Muses-in other words, a museum, both in displaying art and offering a meeting place for poets. It next examines the responses of the Augustan poets to the decorative program of this monument that was intimately connected with their own literary aspirations. The book concludes by looking at the way Horace in the Odes and Virgil in the Georgics both conceptualized their poetic projects as temples to rival the museum of Augustus.

"One of the most entertaining short narratives of all time, the Achilleid is a stand-alone work of compelling contemporary interest that moves with great rapidity and clarity. Its compact narrative, which encompasses a brutish childhood, an overprotective mother, temporary gender bending, sexual violence, and a final coming to manhood with the promise of future military prowess, may be unparalleled in a single narrative of such brevity. The text has survived in hundreds of manuscripts, sometimes copied with Statius' much longer and lugubrious Thebaid , but just as often with other racy short narratives and dramas taught in the medieval schools. The poem's literary playfulness, visual imagery, and lighthearted treatment of mythological and historical data made it-and can still make it-a goldmine in the classroom. Until now, however, it has been virtually impossible to get a sense of the work if one did not know Latin-recent translations notwithstanding. Stanley Lombardo's translation of the Achilleid is a dream: it's sound, enthralling, and will fully engage readers with this enticing, perplexing, at times distressing, but ultimately rewarding work." -Marjorie Curry Woods, Blumberg Centennial Professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor, The University of Texas at Austin