Monica R. Gale

For a work written more than two thousand years ago, in a society in many ways quite alien to our own, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura contains much of striking, even startling, contemporary relevance.

Lucretius: De Rerum Natura V

J. H. D. Scourfield

From the bites and scratches of lovers and the threat of flogging that hangs over the comic slave, to murder, rape, dismemberment, and crucifixion, violence is everywhere in Latin literature. The contributors to this volume explore the manifold ways in which violence is constructed and represented in Latin poetry and prose from Plautus to Prudentius, examining the interrelations between violence, language, power, and gender, and the narrative, rhetorical, and ideological functions of such depictions across the generic spectrum. How does violence contribute to the pleasure of the text? Do depictions of violence always reinforce status-hierarchies, or can they provoke a reassessment of normative value-systems? Is the reader necessarily complicit with authorial constructions of violence? These are pressing questions both for ancient literature and for film and other modern media, and this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of cultural studies as well as of the ancient world.

Texts and Violence in the Roman World

A collection of important scholarly articles on the Roman poet Lucretius, whose philosophical epic, the De Rerum Natura or On the Nature of the Universe (c.55 BC), seeks to convince its readers of the validity of the rationalist theories of Epicurus. An Introduction contextualizes the essays, and all Greek and Latin is translated.

Lucretius

A wide-ranging study of violence in Latin literature, across the spectrum of texts and genres from Plautus to Prudentius.

Oxford Readings in Lucretius

Assesses Lucretius' aims and methodology by considering his attitude to myth and its role in the De Rerum Natura.

Myth and Poetry in Lucretius

Virgil

John Conington

Henry Nettleship

John Conington (1825–69) was a towering figure in Victorian scholarship, not least because of his remarkably sensitive and literate commentaries on Virgil's Aeneid. The three-volume cloth edition of The Works of Virgil, begun by Conington in 1852, has been unavailable for over a century, except in rare second-hand sets. Now, for the first time, the whole of Conington's work is being reissued in a set of six paperback volumes. Each volume includes a new introduction by an established scholar, setting Conington's commentary in context, as well as a general introduction to Conington's work by Philip Hardie, who offers a fresh appreciation of the work.

Georgics

The Georgics has for many years been a source of fierce controversy among scholars of Latin literature. Is the work optimistic or pessimistic, pro- or anti-Augustan? Should we read it as a eulogy or a bitter critique of Rome and her imperial ambitions? This book suggests that the ambiguity of the poem is the product of a complex and thorough-going engagement with earlier writers in the didactic tradition: Hesiod, Aratus and - above all - Lucretius. Drawing on both traditional, philological approaches to allusion, and modern theories of intertextuality, it shows how the world-views of the earlier poets are subjected to scrutiny and brought into conflict with each other. Detailed consideration of verbal parallels and of Lucretian themes, imagery and structural patterns in the Georgics forms the basis for a reading of Virgil's poem as an extended meditation on the relations between the individual and society, the gods and the natural environment.

Monica R. Gale

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