The establishment of the Augustan regime presents itself as the assertion of order and rationality in the political, ideological, and artistic spheres, after the disorder and madness of the civil wars of the late Republic. But the classical, Apollonian poetry of the Augustan period is fascinated by the irrational in both the public and private spheres. There is a vivid memory of the political and military furor that destroyed the Republic, and also an anxiety that furor may resurface, that the repressed may return. Epic and elegy are both obsessed with erotic madness: Dido experiences in her very public role the disabling effects of love that are both lamented and celebrated by the love elegists. Didactic (especially the Georgics) and the related Horatian exercises in satire and epistle, offer programmes for constructing rational order in the natural, political, and psychological worlds, but at best contain uneasily an ever-present threat of confusion and backsliding, and for the most part fall short of the austere standards of rational exposition set by Lucretius. Dionysus and the Dionysiac enjoy a prominence in Augustan poetry and art that goes well beyond the merely ornamental. The person of the emperor Augustus himself tests the limits of rational categorization. Augustan Poetry and the Irrational contains contributions by some of the leading experts of the Augustan period as well as a number of younger scholars. An introduction which surveys the field as a whole is followed by chapters that examine the manifestations of the irrational in a range of Augustan poets, including Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the love elegists, and also explore elements of post-classical reception.

This volume gathers together about two thirds of the articles and essays published between 1983 and 2021 by Philip Hardie, whose work on ancient literature has been of seminal importance in the field. The centre of gravity lies in late Republican and Augustan poetry, in particular Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid, with important contributions on wider Augustan culture; on Neronian and Flavian epic; on the Latin poetry of late antiquity; and on the reception of Latin poetry.

Inspired by Theodore Papanghelis’ Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (1987), this collective volume brings together seventeen contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the different ways in which Latin authors and some of their modern readers created narratives of life, love and death. Taken together the papers offer stimulating readings of Latin texts over many centuries, examined in a variety of genres and from various perspectives: poetics and authorial self-fashioning; intertextuality; fiction and ‘reality’; gender and queer studies; narratological readings; temporality and aesthetics; genre and meta-genre; structures of the narrative and transgression of boundaries on the ideological and the formalistic level; reception; meta-dramatic and feminist accounts-the female voice. Overall, the articles offer rich insights into the handling and development of these narratives from Classical Greece through Rome up to modern English poetry.

This volume of essays is intended to commemorate the eminent Latin scholar David West, best known for his work on Lucretius, Horace, Virgil and Shakespeare. The contributors – Francis Cairns, Ian Du Quesnay, Bruce Gibson, Alex Hardie, Stephen Harrison, John Moles and Tony Woodman – have aimed to produce close readings of classical texts, paying due attention to historical context and literary tradition in the manner adopted by David West himself. The authors covered are Empedocles, Antisthenes, Callimachus, Lutatius Catulus, Catullus, Horace (Epodes and Odes), Propertius, Virgil (Aeneid), Dio Chrysostom and Hildebert of Lavardin.

A wide-ranging exploration of the construction and representation of space and monumentality in central texts of the Augustan period.

Virgil's Georgics, the most neglected of the poet's three major works, is brought to life and infused with fresh meanings in this dynamic collection of new readings. The Georgics is shown to be a rich field of inherited and varied literary forms, actively inviting a wide range of interpretations as well as deep reflection on its place within the tradition of didactic poetry. The essays contained in this volume – contributed by scholars from Australia, Europe and North America – offer new approaches and interpretive methods that greatly enhance our understanding of Virgil's poem. In the process, they unearth an array of literary and philosophical sources which exerted a rich influence on the Georgics but whose impact has hitherto been underestimated in scholarship. A second goal of the volume is to examine how the Georgics – with its profound meditations on humankind, nature, and the socio-political world of its creation – has been (re)interpreted and appropriated by readers and critics from antiquity to the modern era. The volume opens up a number of exciting new research avenues for the study of the reception of the Georgics by highlighting the myriad ways in which the poem has been understood by ancient readers, early modern poets, explorers of the 'New World', and female translators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This volume sets out to explore the complex relationship between Horace and Seneca. It is the first book that examines the interface between these different and yet highly comparable authors with consideration of their œuvres in their entirety. The fourteen chapters collected here explore a wide range of topics clustered around the following four themes: the combination of literature and philosophy; the ways in which Seneca’s choral odes rework Horatian material and move beyond it; the treatment of ethical, poetic, and aesthetic questions by the two authors; and the problem of literary influence and reception as well as ancient and modern reflections on these problems. While the intertextual contacts between Horace and Seneca themselves lie at the core of this project, it also considers the earlier texts that serve as sources for both authors, intermediary steps in Roman literature, and later texts where connections between the two philosopher-poets are drawn. Although not as obviously palpable as the linkage between authors who share a common generic tradition, this uneven but pervasive relationship can be regarded as one of the most prolific literary interactions between the early Augustan and the Neronian periods. A bidirectional list of correspondences between Horace and Seneca concludes the volume.