Flavian Poetry and its Greek Past breaks new ground by investigating the close interaction between Flavian poetry and Greek literary tradition and by evaluating the meaning of this affiliation in the socio-political and cultural context of the late first century CE. Authors examined include Martial, Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus. Their interaction with Greek literature is not just thematic or geographical: the Greek literary past is conceived as the poetic influence of a variety of authors, periods, and genres, such as Homer, the Cyclic tradition, Greek lyric poetry, Greek tragedy, Hellenistic poetry and aesthetics, and Greek historiography.

The reign of the Flavian emperors (69-96) saw the production of a large and varied body of Latin poetry: the epics of Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus and Statius, the Silvae of the same Statius, and the Epigrams of Martial. This poetry, long seen as derivative or decadent, is now increasingly appreciated for the daring originality of its responses both to the Latin literary tradition and to the contemporary Roman world. In the summer of 2003, the first-ever international conference on Flavian poetry, was held at Groningen, The Netherlands, bringing together leading scholars in the field from Europe, North America and Australasia. This volume offers a selection of the papers delivered on that occasion.

This collection of essays reaffirms the central importance of adopting an intertextual approach to the study of Flavian epic poetry and shows, despite all that has been achieved, just how much still remains to be done on the topic. Most of the contributions are written by scholars who have already made major contributions to the field, and taken together they offer a set of state of the art contributions on individual topics, a general survey of trends in recent scholarship, and a vision of at least some of the paths work is likely to follow in the years ahead. In addition, there is a particular focus on recent developments in digital search techniques and the influence they are likely to have on all future work in the study of the fundamentally intertextual nature of Latin poetry and on the writing of literary history more generally.

The construction of a new Latin library between the end of the Republic and the Augustan Principate was anything but an inhibiting factor. The literary flourishing of the Flavian age shows that awareness of this canon rather stimulated creative tension. In the changing socio-cultural context, daring innovations transform the genres of poetry and prose. This volume, which collects papers by influential scholars of early Imperial literature, sheds light on the productive dynamics of the ancient genre system and can also offer insightful perspectives to a non-classicist readership.

This collection addresses the role of ritual representations and religion in the epic poems of the Flavian period. Drawing on various studies on religion and ritual and the relationship between literature and religion in the Greco-Roman world, it explores the poets' use of the relationship between gods and humans and religious activities.

The politics, literature and culture of ancient Rome during the Flavian principate (69-96 ce) have recently been the subject of intense investigation. In this volume of new, specially commissioned studies, twenty-five scholars from five countries have combined to produce a critical survey of the period, which underscores and re-evaluates its foundational importance. Most of the authors are established international figures, but a feature of the volume is the presence of young, emerging scholars at the cutting edge of the discipline. The studies attend to a diversity of topics, including: the new political settlement, the role of the army, change and continuity in Rome’s social structures, cultural festivals, architecture, sculpture, religion, coinage, imperial discourse, epistemology and political control, rhetoric, philosophy, Greek intellectual life, drama, poetry, patronage, Flavian historians, amphitheatrical Rome. All Greek and Latin text is translated.

This book investigates the presence of Fides (good faith) in Flavian literature, exploring its ideological significance in the aftermath of Rome's civil wars (68-69 CE) in a variety of works by prose and verse authors.