Understanding Latin Literature

Susanna Morton Braund is Professor of Latin Poetry and its Reception at the University of British Columbia, Canada and holder of a Killam Research Fellowship. She taught previously at Stanford University and Yale University in the USA, and at the Universities of London, Bristol and Exeter in the UK. She has published extensively on Roman satire and epic and has translated Lucan’s Civil War, the Satires of Persius and Juvenal, and Seneca's De Clementia, Agamemnon, Oedipus and Phoenician Women. She is currently working on a major project on the reception of Virgil's poems in later eras as manifested in translation history.

Braund provides a superb overview of pertinent issues related to Latin literature through her unique organization by topic. The second edition includes a new and instructive chapter on the reception of Latin literature, and effectively incorporates recent scholarship on such varied topics as gender, performance and spectacle, slavery, public v. private, and the relationship between literature and society. Braund’s takes on all are well informed, often thought-provoking, openly personal, and delivered in a crisp and clear, always accessible style. - Professor David Christenson, University of Arizona, USA

• List of figures About this book Acknowledgements1 Virgil and the meaning of the Aeneid 2 Role models for Roman women and men in Livy 3 What is Latin literature? 4 What does studying Latin literature involve? 5 Receptions and reverberations of Latin literature 6 Making Roman identity: multiculturalism, militarism and masculinity 7 Performance and spectacle, life and death 8 Intersections of power: praise, politics and patrons 9 Annihilation and abjection: living death and living slavery 10 Writing ‘real’ lives 11 Introspection and individual identity 12 Literary texture and intertextuality 13 Metapoetics 14 Allegory 15 Overcoming an inferiority complex: constructing Roman literature BibliographyTimeline