Published in 1951, this is an exhaustive study of the versification of the great Latin elegists of the Augustan age.

A striking feature of Latin elegiac verse is its very free word order. One gets the impression that the word order is just random or that the rules of Latin syntax have been suspended for metrical convenience. Combining ample philological documentation with an overall theoretical stance, this book argues that these impressions are wrong and proceeds to analyze the syntax of Latin verse as a coherent system generated by the application of a small set of derivational rules. While these rules are independently available syntactic mechanisms like scrambling, stranding and verb raising, their systematically regular application both at the clausal and at the phrasal level is remarkable. Not only complete constituents but also partial constituents are constantly attracted towards the left edge of the phrase that contains them. The cumulative effect of this is to narrow the extent and attenuate the weight of the nuclear assertion, which reduces its processing domain and the span of its prosodic correlate. This book will be of interest both to Classicists and to linguists: it aims to solve an old problem in Classical philology, while at the same time working out a configurational syntax for a language with extreme free word order.

Latin love elegy is one of the most important poetic genres in the Augustan era, also known as the golden age of Roman literature. This volume brings together leading scholars from Australia, Europe and North America to present and explore the Greek and Roman backdrop for Latin love elegy, the individual Latin love elegists (both the canonical and the non-canonical), their poems and influence on writers in later times. The book is designed as an accessible introduction for the general reader interested in Latin love elegy and the history of love and lament in Western literature, as well as a collection of critically stimulating essays for students and scholars of Latin poetry and of the classical tradition.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.