Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

This chapter examines Propertius’ poetics of space, particularly as it relates to Roman imperialist rhetoric. Beyond the relatively obvious metapoetic images of height and lowliness, it suggests that Propertius employs a range of other spatial metaphors in his construction of a poetic self-image, drawing notably on the language of boundaries and boundlessness, centre and periphery; here, elegiac poetics capitalises on what the author terms the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ aspects of imperialist discourse, whereby Rome expands to fill the world, but also subsumes or draws in the products and characteristics of all other nations. In his more confident moments, the elegist represents himself not merely as echoing or collaborating with, but as surpassing the achievements of Augustus himself. A similar symbolic rivalry may be seen in Propertius’ self-representation as triumphator; the author links this in turn to the poet’s references to monumental architecture, particularly the ecphrasis of the Temple of Palatine Apollo in 2.31, which may be understood as a figurative monument to the power of poetry, dependent on but not identical with its counterpart in the physical landscape of Rome.

This chapter focuses on three Virgilian entrances to the underworld – Cumae (Aen. 6.237–42), Ampsanctus (Aen. 7. 563–71) and Tainaron (G. 4.464-470). Using the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia (other space) the author argues that these three spaces legitimate multiple forms of religious knowledge, which are, however, linked to the progressive imposition of Augustan authority.

In Elegy 4.9, Propertius provides an aetiology for a detail of the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima: the prohibition on women attending the ceremony. He presents this particularity as a retaliatory measure taken by the hero himself, who reacted to the banning of any male from the space in which the cult of Bona Dea is celebrated. Propertius describes the priestess of Bona Dea as trying to prevent Hercules from entering the sacred space by arguing that female chastity must be respected. After having argued that there is no insurmountable difference between the sexes since there may be role reversal between men and women, Hercules forces the door. Propertius uses this episode located in ancient Latium to put forward some reflections on a (modern) topic, specific to the elegiac genre: sexual identity and gender relations. He presents an alternative point of view that includes both facets of what Augustus seeks to impose in his politics of promoting ancient social practices, essentially concerned with control over morality and sexuality: a strict conception of female morality, and a crucial questioning of gender conceptions: what makes the difference between the sexes? It is dress, behaviour or the body?

The inclination to withdraw himself from the public as far as possible is regarded as one of Virgil’s most salient characteristics: this at least is the impression given by the few testimonia and numerous anecdotes of his life. The guiding principle of Virgil’s life as a poet of the res publica Romana could be described as an ‘art of disappearing’, which becomes evident in different ways. By means of this Virgil sometimes succeeds in withdrawing himself spatially even from Augustus, the mightiest designer of space, and in establishing certain limits to his ‘topotactic’ power. To present the ‘withdrawing technique’ practised by Virgil, this chapter draws on information gathered from biographical texts on Virgil as well as on relevant passages of Virgil’s work, naturally without ignoring the documentary fragility of the texts considered. Nevertheless there are conspicuous correspondences between the texts about Virgil and the poetological messages within his literary works, which give an impression at least of his effective seclusion. His reception by his contemporaries and immediate successors proves his greatest success in this respect.

Virgil’s is the only literary biography whose development, from the early Imperial Age to Late Antiquity and beyond, we can examine. It was largely constructed through inferences drawn from the author’s works, selected on the basis of their reception and according to the cultural characteristics of different ages of reception. The biography was adapted to school teaching, particularly in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but it was also influenced by the critical interpretation of Virgil, which variously modified the image and the evaluation of the poet.

In contrast with the emphasis put on pietas and providentia by Flavian discourse, the Thebaid is the only Flavian poem that begins and ends without gods, much like Lucan’s Bellum Civile. However, Statius’ gods are described in Ovidian terms and use thought-provoking allusions to the Metamorphoses to challenge the readers’ poetic memory with distorted versions of their literary past. The ways in which Statius and his gods allude to and manipulate the Metamorphoses’ divine narratives, reworking Ovid’s coded use of celestial geographies, both mark a significant distance from Lucan’s epic universe and highlight the Roman significance of the Thebaid’s divine world. The gods’ attempts to legitimise their morally dubious actions by manipulating the readers’ understanding of the Metamorphoses not only shows the Thebaid’s sophisticated engagement with the former literary tradition but also exploits the traditional analogy between heavenly and Roman power to reflect on the Flavian emperors’ progressive sacralisation of the imperial institution and selective renegotiation of Augustan legacy in the tense religious atmosphere of post–civil-war Rome.

The Conclusion summarises the book’s main arguments and offers an analysis of the poem’s epilogue to reassess the post-Ovidian nature of the Thebaid. By reflecting on the new insights offered by the book into the poetics and the politics of different types of literary interactions, this analysis raises new questions in different fields, from Flavian and intertextual studies to the study of spatiality, suggesting ways to further advance the practical and theoretical study of ancient intertextuality and intermediality.

Evocations of Classical Greece and Rome pervade Robert Lowell’s entire oeuvre. His fascination with Latin literature in particular shaped his own poetry. The density and involved syntax of Virgil and Propertius are echoed in the crabbed and tortured involutions of Lowell’s earlier poetry. His confessional verse is in part a response to Catullan frankness. His view of America as declining from republic into empire was colored by the historiography of Suetonius and Tacitus, in whose portraits of imperial tyrants Lowell found a frame for depicting the darker elements of his own character. He essayed many (usually very free) translations or versions of Greek and Roman poems, often with autobiographical inflections. A number of “original” poems can be shown to have originated as translations from Catullus, Virgil, Propertius, or Horace. In contrast with his almost obsessive engagement with Roman literature, Lowell’s engagement with Greek was less extensive, often mediated through later European literature, and (notably in his versions of Aeschylus) less vivid.

Building on the concept of enargeia, Chapter 4 examines the cinematism of epic ecphrases: passages containing detailed descriptions of remarkable objects. To the ancients, Homer’s vividness of presentation put him in the forefront of painters, while film directors, chiefly Eisenstein, have repeatedly referred to him as a precursor. In particular, the stories told on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad validate Eisenstein’s concept. Eisenstein wrote extensively about Lessing’s thesis, advanced in his influential Laocoön, about the limits of painting and poetry; both authors’ approaches are evaluated here, with Eisenstein’s argument proven the stronger one. The story of Theseus and Ariadne depicted on the coverlet in Catullus’ poem 64, the most complex ecphrasis in classical literature, is then treated as the basis of a film adaptation, which reveals the astonishing sophistication that can be discovered from the perspective of cinematism. Shorter observations about Virgil and, in passing, Juvenal round out this chapter.

Chapter 4 examines Naipaul’s engagement with the legacy of slavery beginning with The Loss of El Dorado (1969), a remarkable example of a novelistic rendition of historical events based on Naipaul’s reading of nightmarish primary documents relating to the colonization of the West Indies and littoral Latin America. What surfaced in the creative history that he wrote is a narrative of failures and failed, egotistical heroes, and administrators who, living out their own fantasies, saw nothing aberrant in their treatment of the slaves they traumatized and condemned, and the Indians they dispossessed and then killed off. Before The Loss of El Dorado, Naipaul had written his first travel book, The Middle Passage (1962), also discussed in this chapter. Naipaul returns to the theme twenty-five years later in A Way in the World (1994). The chapter examines the disturbing novel Guerrillas (1975), a dark book about fantasy-driven Black Power enthusiasts and, given the historical connections between Spanish and English slavery, a work on the American South, A Turn in the South (1989). The chapter makes the case that to Naipaul nations fail when they do not fully come to terms with their history.

William Fitzstephen wrote a vivid description of London in the 1170s, as the prologue to his biography of Thomas Becket. He describes the churches, the schools and above all the life of the people in the city, such as their festivities and sports, including skating.

Felix wrote his life of St. Guthlac also during the zenith of Latin writings in Anglo-Saxon England, namely in the early eighth century. In vivid, distinctive Latin Felix tells of the experiences of this solitary who went off into the fens of East Anglia to devote himself to God at Crowland, including his dramatic encounters with the demons of hell and various unusual miracles, including the retrieval of a parchment folio carried off by a thieving magpie.

Alcuin’s dialogue on grammar shows two teenage students discussing the basics of Latin grammar with their teacher. The work survives in a manuscript written at Tours in the early ninth century, now in St. Gallen in Switzerland.

Birinus, who was to become bishop of Dorchester and a missionary in southern England, came from Rome in the seventh century. An anonymous writer of the late eleventh-century wrote a distinctive Latin biography of Birinus, with a highly rhetorical style. Here the account of Birinus’ crossing of the English Channel, involving a miracle, is included, both in the Anonymous version and in a verse version of the thirteenth century by the prolific Latin poet Henry of Avranches.

Here excerpts are given from an Anonymous Life of St. Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne, and from the Life of Cuthbert written by Bede, both in verse and prose. Two stories are chosen, one about Cuthbert meeting the otters on the beach, and the other about him foreseeing the death of a worker on the monastic estate.A brief excerpt from Alcuin’s poem on the bishops and saints of York shows how he condenses into two hexameters one of the stories recorded by Anonymous and Bede.