This book, a sequel to Clio and the Poets (Brill 2002), takes as its point of departure Quintilian's statement that 'historiography is very close to the poets': it examines not only how verse interfaces with historical texts but also how first-century AD Roman historians engage with issues and patterns of thought central to contemporary poetry and with specific poetic texts. Included are substantive discussions of a wide range of authors, notably Lucan, Seneca, Statius, Pliny, Juvenal, Silius Italicus, and Tacitus.

Professor Dihle sees the Greek and Latin literature between the 1st century B.C. and the 6th century A.D. as an organic progression. He builds on Schlegel's observation that art, customs and political life in classical antiquity are inextricably entwined and therefore should not be examined separately. Dihle does not simply consider narrowly defined `literature', but all works of cultural socio-historical significance, including Jewish and Christian literature, philosophy and science. Despite this, major authors like Seneca, Tacitus and Plotinus are considered individually. This work is an authoritative yet personal presentation of seven hundred years of literature.

Poetics of the First Punic War investigates the literary afterlives of Rome’s first conflict with Carthage. From its original role in the Middle Republic as the narrative proving ground for epic’s development out of verse historiography, to its striking cultural reuse during the Augustan and Flavian periods, the First Punic War (264–241 BCE) holds an underappreciated place in the history of Latin literature. Because of the serendipitous meeting of historical content and poetic form in the third century BCE, a textualized First Punic War went on to shape the Latin language and its literary genres, the practices and politics of remembering war, popular visions of Rome as a cultural capital, and numerous influential conceptions of Punic North Africa. Poetics of the First Punic War combines innovative theoretical approaches with advances in the philological analysis of Latin literature to reassess the various “texts” of the First Punic War, including those composed by Vergil, Propertius, Horace, and Silius Italicus. This book also contains sustained treatment of Naevius’ fragmentary Bellum Punicum (Punic War) and Livius Andronicus’ Odusia (Odyssey), some of the earliest works of Latin poetry. As the tradition’s primary Roman topic, the First Punic War is forever bound to these poems, which played a decisive role in transmitting an epic view of history.

This history of Latin literature offers a comprehensive survey of the 1000 year period from the origins of Latin as a written language to the early Middle Ages. It offers a wide-ranging panorama of all major Latin authors.

The aim of this project is to provide a sustained analysis of the concept of ‘self’ in Statius’ Thebaid. It is this project’s contention that the poem is profoundly interested in ideas of identity and selfhood. The poem stages itself as a metapoetic exploration of the difficulties for a belated epicist in finding a place in the literary canon; it shows the impossibility of squaring large-scale epic poetics with small-scale, finely-wrought Callimacheanism; it reflects the violent disjunction between Statius’ authorial pose as a poet without power and the extreme violence of his poetics; it opens up the intricacies of constructing original, coherent characters out of intertextual, exemplary models. The central tenet of the project is that Statius in the Thebaid stages his own 'death', but does so that his poem may live. This book is intended for an academic audience including undergraduate and graduate students as well as specialists in the field. Although the project will be of primary importance to readers of Flavian literature, it will also be of interest to those who study intertextuality and characterisation in Roman literature more generally, selfhood and identity in Roman literature and culture and the reception of Roman literature.