The Oxford Anthology Of Roman Literature

Each selection begins with a short biographical and historical essay.

A classic introduction to Latin literature, with translations of the best passages from Virgil, Livy, Ovid, Seneca and many others. This classic anthology traces the development of Latin literature from the early Republican works of Cicero and Catullus, to the writers of the Empire such as Lucan and Petronius, to the later writings of St Augustine. The selections cover comedy and epic, history and philosophy, in prose and in verse, and each passage is prefaced by an introduction to the author and his influence. The translators range across history from Alexander Pope and Lord Byron to contemporaries. The result is a broad and brilliant overview of the civilization of Rome and its Empire - an ideal introduction to Latin literature. Michael Grant was born in 1914. He served as an intelligence officer during the Second World War, and subsequently held academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Khartoum and Belfast. Over his lifetime, he published nearly fifty books on the ancient world, ranging from studies of Roman coinage, to biographies of Caesar, Nero and Jesus, to books on Ancient Israel and the Middle Ages. Many of his translations were published in Penguin Classics. Professor Grant moved to Italy in 1966, where he spent most of the rest of his life until his death in 2004.

Provides a guide to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, discussing the lives and works of the principal authors and placing them within the societal and political context of the day.

In this volume, we are offered a new perspective on Roman literature, based on the conviction that our present appreciation for it should be informed and influenced by how it was originally perceived. From the beginning of the Roman Empire to the end of the classical era, this book focuses on the "receivers" of Roman literature-the readers, spectators, and audiences who first witnessed the works. Six contributors map out the lively and provocative surveys, covering the kinds of literature that have shaped Western culture--epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, elegy, satire, biography, and panegyric.

The brief word-histories in this book are meant to provide background on some words that everyone learns when they study Latin, as well as some rarer terms that have interesting stories to tell about Roman culture. This book lists a new word or phrase that came into American English every year from 1975 to 1998, with a selection of early additions from 1497 to 1750, and discusses the history behind the adoption of each. Teachers and students of Latin can benefit from the slightly more formal, but still anecdotal, approach taken here to some key words in the Latin lexicon.

The debts that English poetry owes to the Classics are massive and various. But they have been richly repaid by the astonishingly inventive tradition of translation to which some of the greatest poets in the English language have contributed, including Chaucer and Jonson, Dryden and Pope,Tennyson and Ezra Pound. This anthology presents the wealth of this living tradition as it has never been seen before, ranging from King Alfred to the many contemporary poets here generously represented, and from North America to Ireland and Scotland. It offers a vast array of responses to the song,verse and drama of ancient Greece and Rome, Ovid, and Juvenal. Organized by classical author and text, it runs from the epics of Homer to the late antique world where Greek and Latin writing both face an emerging Christian culture, and juxtaposes English versions, sometimes of the same passage orpoem, to dramatize the endless re-animation of one great poetic tradition in and through another.

Redefines the great canon of American poetry from its origins in the 17th century right up to the present.