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Playing the Farmer reinvigorates our understanding of Vergil's Georgics, a vibrant work written by Rome's premier epic poet shortly before he began the Aeneid. Setting the Georgics in the social context of its day, Philip Thibodeau for the first time connects the poem's idyllic, and idealized, portrait of rustic life and agriculture with changing attitudes toward the countryside in late Republican and early Imperial Rome. He argues that what has been seen as a straightforward poem about agriculture is in fact an enchanting work of fantasy that elevated, and sometimes whitewashed, the realities of country life. Drawing from a wide range of sources, Thibodeau shows how Vergil's poem reshaped agrarian ideals in its own time, and how it influenced Roman poets, philosophers, agronomists, and orators. Playing the Farmer brings a fresh perspective to a work that was praised by Dryden as \"the best poem by the best poet.\"

In Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves, Opritsa Popa has documented what might justifiably be described as the most celebrated case of looting of two German cultural treasures by a member of the U.S. Army at the end of World War II and their subsequent odyssey across both an ocean and a continent: the pilfering from a cellar in Bad Wildungen of the ninth-century Liber Sapientiae, containing the two leaves of the oldest extant German heroic poem, the Old High German Hildebrandslied, along with the fourteenth-century illuminated Willehalm codex, both of which had been removed from the State Library in Kassel for protection from bombing raids.

This chapter contains sections titled: The History of Mythology Antiquity The Middle Ages The Renaissance and the Early Modern Period The Enlightenment Nineteenth‐Century German Scholarship Myth and the British Contemporary Approaches to Myth Further Reading

These delightful poems—by turns whimsical, beautiful, and vulgar—seem to have primarily survived because they were attributed to Virgil. But in David R. Slavitt’s imaginative and appealing translations, they stand firmly on their own merits. Slavitt brings to this little-known body of verse a fresh voice, vividly capturing the tone and style of the originals while conveying a lively sense of fun.

These ardent, even obsessed, poems about erotic passion are among the brightest jewels in the crown of Latin literature. Written by Propertius, Rome's greatest poet of love, who was born around 50 b.c., a contemporary of Ovid, these elegies tell of Propertius' tormented relationship with a woman he calls \"Cynthia.\" Their connection was sometimes blissful, more often agonizing, but as the poet came to recognize, it went beyond pride or shame to become the defining event of his life. Whether or not it was Propertius' explicit intention, these elegies extend our ideas of desire, and of the human condition itself.

A selection of essential essays, by leading scholars, on Lucan's civil war epic, De Bello Civili. Five essays appear in English for the first time, and quotations from Latin and Greek have been translated. A specially written Introduction, by Susanna Braund, provides an up-to-date guide to scholarship and reception.

This chapter contains section titled: Just the Facts Please Diatribe Re‐Programming Book 2: Writing Satire Down For Love of Food and Country Further Reading

This chapter contains sections titled: The Uses of Myth Epic and Intertextuality Storytelling Time

This chapter contains sections titled: The Poet of the City Pimping for Rome The Problem with Panegyric

This chapter contains sections titled: On time and reliability On spacecraft and reliability: early studies Book organization