In recent decades, Latin love poetry has become a significant site for feminist and other literary critics studying conceptions of gender and sexuality in ancient Roman culture.

This new volume, the first to focus specifically on gender dynamics in Latin love poetry, moves beyond the polarized critical positions that argue that this poetry either confirms traditional gender roles or subverts them. Rather, the essays in the collection explore the ways in which Latin erotic texts can have both effects, shifting power back and forth between male and female. If there is one conclusion that emerges, it is that the dynamics of gender in Latin amatory poetry do not map in any single way onto the cultural and historical norms of Roman society. In fact, as several essays show, there is a dialectical relationship between this poetry and Roman cultural practices.

By complicating the views of gender dynamics in Latin love poetry, this exciting new scholarship will stimulate further debates in classical studies and literary criticism with its fresh perspectives.

Sarah Pomeroy's groundbreaking Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves introduced scholars, students, and general readers to an exciting new area of inquiry: women in classical antiquity. Almost fifty years later, New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World builds upon and moves beyond Pomeroy's seminal work to represent the next step in this interdisciplinary field. The "new directions" for the study of women in antiquity included in this volume of newly commissioned essays feature new methodological questions to be asked, new time periods to be explored, new objects of study, as well as new information to be uncovered. In addressing these new directions, the editors have gathered a distinguished group of contributors that includes historians, philologists, archaeologists, art historians, and specialists in subfields like ancient medicine, ancient law, papyrology, and epigraphy. While some chapters focus primarily on Greece or Rome, others straddle or go beyond these artificial boundaries in interesting ways. While the focus of the volume is antiquity, the issues it raises will be of interest also to those studying women and theorizing the study of women in other periods as well. The volume will help readers to see women in antiquity with fresh eyes and to view anew important issues related to women today.

"Keeping teachers up to date on recent developments in Latin scholarship"

Catullus, Horace, Ovid, Cicero, and Vergil are the official Advanced Placement Program Latin authors as well as standard reading for college and advanced secondary students of Latin. This book provides accessible information about recent scholarship on these authors to show how an awareness of current academic debates can enhance the teaching of their work.

This is the first book aimed specifically at keeping teachers up to date on recent developments in Latin scholarship. Edited by Ronnie Ancona, a classics scholar with expertise in pedagogy, it features contributions by established authorities on each of the five Latin authors. Each essay combines theoretical material with Latin passages so that instructors can see how practically to apply these methods to specific texts.

These contributions reveal many and varied ways to approach the reading and study of Latin texts while conveying the excitement of recent scholarship. A practical sourcebook for busy teachers who wish to keep abreast of current critical thought, "A Concise Guide to Teaching Latin Literature" contributes to the ongoing conversation between pedagogy and scholarship as it shows ways to broaden students' appreciation of these timeless classics.

In Horace's Odes love cannot last. Is the poet unromantic, as some critics claim? Is he merely realistic? Or is he, as Ronnie Ancona contends, relating the erotic to time in a more complex and interesting way than either of these positions allows? Rejecting both the notion that Horace fails as a love poet because he undermines the romantic ideal that love conquers time and the notion that he succeeds becauses he eschews illusions about love's ability to endure, this book challenges the assumption that temporality must inevitably pose a threat to the erotic. The author argues that temporality, understood as the contingency the male poet/lover wants to but cannot control, explains why love fails in Horace's Odes.
Drawing on contemporary theory, including recent work in feminist criticism, Ancona provides close readings of fourteen odes, which are presented in English translation as well as in Latin. Through a discussion of the poet's use of various temporal devices--the temporal adverb, seasonal imagery, and the lover or beloved's own temporality--she shows how Horace makes time dominate the erotic context and, further, how the version of love that appears in his poems is characterized by the lover's desire to control the beloved. The romantic ideal of a timeless love, apparently rejected by the poet, emerges here instead as an underlying element of the poet's portrayal of the erotic. In a critique of the predominant modes of recent Horatian scholarship on the love odes, Ancona offers an alternative view that takes into account the male gender of the lover and its effect on the structure of desire in the poems. By doing so, she advances a broader project in recent classical studies that aims to include discussion of features of classical literature, such as sexuality and gender, which have previously escaped critical attention.
Addressing aspects of Horace as a love poet--especially the dynamics of gender relations--that critics have tended to ignore, this book articulates his version of love as something not to be championed or condemned but rather to be seen as challengingly problematic. Of primary interest to classicists, it will also engage the attention of scholars and teachers in the humanities with specializations in gender, sexuality, lyric poetry, or feminist theory.