In Language and Meter, Dieter Gunkel and Olav Hackstein unite fifteen linguistic studies on a variety of poetic traditions, including the Homeric epics, the hieratic hymns of the Ṛgveda, the Gathas of the Avesta, early Latin and the Sabellic compositions, Germanic alliterative verse, Insular Celtic court poetry, and Tocharian metrical texts. The studies treat a broad range of topics, including the prehistory of the hexameter, the nature of Homeric formulae, the structure of Vedic verse, rhythm in the Gathas, and the relationship between Germanic and Celtic poetic traditions. The volume contributes to our understanding of the relationship between language and poetic form, and how they change over time.

A Companion to Roman Italy investigates the impactof Rome in all its forms—political, cultural, social, andeconomic—upon Italy’s various regions, as well as theextent to which unification occurred as Rome became the capital ofItaly. The collection presents new archaeological data relating to thesites of Roman Italy Contributions discuss new theories of how to understandcultural change in the Italian peninsula Combines detailed case-studies of particular sites withwider-ranging thematic chapters Leading contributors not only make accessible the most recentwork on Roman Italy, but also offer fresh insight on long standingdebates

A fresh look at the multicultural influences on Quintus Ennius and his epic poem, the Annals. Quintus Ennius, often considered the father of Roman poetry, is best remembered for his epic poem, the Annals, a history of Rome from Aeneas until his own lifetime. Ennius represents an important bridge between Homer’s works in Greek and Vergil’s Aeneid. Jay Fisher argues that Ennius does not simply translate Homeric models into Latin, but blends Greek poetic models with Italic diction to produce a poetic hybrid. Fisher's investigation uncovers a poem that blends foreign and familiar cultural elements in order to generate layers of meaning for his Roman audience. Fisher combines modern linguistic methodologies with traditional philology to uncover the influence of the language of Roman ritual, kinship, and military culture on the Annals. Moreover, because these customs are themselves hybrids of earlier Roman, Etruscan, and Greek cultural practices, not to mention the customs of speakers of lesser-known languages such as Oscan and Umbrian, the echoes of cultural interactions generate layers of meaning for Ennius, his ancient audience, and the modern readers of the fragments of the Annals.

This volume contains twenty-five contributions adapted from papers presented at the International Conference on Poetic Language and Religion in Greece and Rome, held at the University of Santiago de Compostela on 31tst May – 1st June 2012. The book fulfils two principal aims: to highlight the impulse and continuity of a research field that combines Indo-European and Classical Studies, which has generally been recognised for several decades as a very fruitful collaboration, and to provide the academic community with the current results of one of the most important topics of Classical Studies. The first part of the book focuses on the Indo-European tradition, tracking its remnants, particularly in the Classical languages. The Indo-European poetic tradition can be traced through linguistic reconstruction (formulae, onomastics) and some scattered mentions in literary texts. In the second part, the focus is placed on the poetic language in Greece and Rome. The rich and complex tradition of Classical literatures makes a clear-cut description of the inherited or innovative aspects of the religious and literary development more problematical. Ritual or cultic poetry, onomastics, phraseology, paeans and hymns, oracles as divine language, and magic all receive deep and thorough treatment from a reliable ensemble of scholars.

This book describes the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic features of Sabellian demonstratives. It contains new hypotheses on the epigraphic genres in Republican Italy and a reconstruction of these grammatical items’ Italic origins based on typological principles.

This book examines the nature of human mobility, attitudes to it, and constructions of place over the last millennium BC in Rome and Italy. It demonstrates that there were high rates of mobility, challenging the perception of sites and communities as static and ethnically oriented entities.