Explorations in Latin Literature

Denis Feeney is Giger Professor of Latin in the Department of Classics at Princeton University. His publications include The Gods in Epic (1991); Literature and Religion at Rome (Cambridge, 1998); Caesar's Calendar (2007); Beyond Greek (2016). He was also a Series Editor, with Stephen Hinds, of Roman Literature and its Contexts for Cambridge University Press. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

A collection of essays from one of the world's greatest scholars of Latin literature and Roman culture. Covers ancient epic, historiography, lyric, elegy, and drama, with a particular focus on ancient literary criticism, comparative religion, historicism and the technology of the ancient book. With a foreword by Stephen Hinds.

Introduction; 1. The taciturnity of Aeneas; 2. The reconciliations of Juno; 3. Epic hero and epic fable; 4. Stat magni nominis umbra: Lucan on the greatness of Pompeius Magnus; 5. History and revelation in Virgil's underworld; 6. Following after Hercules, in Apollonius and Virgil; 7. Beginning Sallust's Catiline; 8. Leaving Dido: the appearance(s) of Mercury and the motivations of Aeneas; 9. Epic violence, epic order: killings, catalogues, and the role of the reader in Aeneid 10; 10. Mea tempora: patterning of time in Ovid's Metamorphoses; 11. Interpreting sacrificial ritual in Roman poetry: disciplines and their models; 12. Tenui¿latens discrimine: spotting the differences in Statius' Achilleid; 13. On not forgetting the 'Literatur' in 'Literatur und Religion'; 14. Virgil's tale of four cities: Troy, Carthage, Alexandria and Rome; 15. First similes in epic; 16. Fictions of citizenship in Livy's History.