This volume is the first holistic investigation of Roman literature and literary culture under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian (AD 96–138). With case studies from Frontinus, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Quintilian, Suetonius and Tacitus among others, the eighteen chapters offer not just innovative readings of literary (and some 'less literary') texts, but a collaborative enquiry into the networks and culture in which they are embedded. The book brings together established and novel methodologies to explore the connections, conversations and silences between these texts and their authors, both on and off the page. The scholarly dialogues that result not only shed fresh light on the dynamics of literary production and consumption in the 'High Roman Empire', but offer new provocations to students of intertextuality and interdiscursivity across classical literature. How can and should we read textual interactions in their social, literary and cultural contexts?

The first holistic study of Roman literature and literary culture under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian (AD 96-138). Authors treated include Frontinus, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Quintilian, Suetonius and Tacitus. Key topics and approaches include recitation, allusion, intertextuality, 'extratextuality' and socioliterary interactions.

This book explores new ways of analysing interactions between different linguistic, cultural, and religious communities across the Roman Empire from the reign of Nerva to the Severans (96–235 CE). Bringing together leading scholars in classics with experts in the history of Judaism, Christianity and the Near East, it looks beyond the Greco-Roman binary that has dominated many studies of the period, and moves beyond traditional approaches to intertextuality in its study of the circulation of knowledge across languages and cultures. Its sixteen chapters explore shared ideas about aspects of imperial experience - law, patronage, architecture, the army - as well as the movement of ideas about history, exempla, documents and marvels. As the second volume in the Literary Interactions series, it offers a new and expansive vision of cross-cultural interaction in the Roman world, shedding light on connections that have gone previously unnoticed among the subcultures of a vast and evolving Empire.

Analyzes how Tacitus contributed to our current understanding of history and reveals the themes that permeated his writing

This is the first in-depth exploration of the extent and significance of Ovidian intertexts in Statius' Thebaid, with particular emphasis on the interplay between poetics, politics, and material culture. Introducing New Historicist, Cultural Materialistic, and Intermedial approaches to Latin literature, it suggests that, despite their Virgilian patina, Statius' depictions of landscapes, heroes, and gods are pervaded by verbal and semantic allusions to Ovid's mythical narratives. This multi-layered allusivity not only prompts alternative readings of the Augustan classics, but also challenges the reader's perceptions of the Augustanising worldview that the urban landscape of Flavian Rome was arguably meant to convey. The poetic and political significance of Statius' Theban saga thereby moves from critically rewriting the Aeneid to reflecting on the new socio-political issues of Flavian Rome. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

These new essays comprise the first collective study of Lucan and his epic poem that focuses specifically on points of contact between his text and the cultural, literary, and historical environments in which he lived and wrote. The Bellum Civile, Lucan's poetic narrative of the monumental civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus, explores the violent foundations of the Roman principate and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The poem, composed more than a century later during the reign of Nero, thus recalls the past while being very much a product of its time. This volume offers innovative readings that seek to interpret Lucan's epic in terms of the contemporary politics, philosophy, literature, rhetoric, geography, and cultural memory of the author's lifetime. In doing so, these studies illuminate how approaching Lucan and his text in light of their contemporary environments enriches our understanding of author, text, and context individually and in conversation with each other.

"Beginning with Cicero and Varro and ending with Statius and Pliny the Younger, this chapter offers a chronological investigation of the ways in which real and literary gardens developed from the first century BCE to the first century CE as a means of elite masculine self-representation and the reactions of elite Roman men to the increased social and cultural power of villa and horti estates and their grounds. Gardens served as powerful symbols of wealth and as creative displays of the cultural aspirations of their owners in ways that challenged traditional definitions of gardens and of Roman manliness. Since these large-scale 'gardens' are primarily associated with leisure (otium), authors are concerned with describing and justifying their activities in these sites as befitting Roman masculine ideals. We can trace a change in attitude towards leisure and the private display of wealth, and consequently gardens, largely attributed to changes in the socio-political circumstances of the Roman elite, in the works of Statius and his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who use laudatory descriptions of extensive villas and grounds as a means of expressing social and literary power"--