Adrian S. Hollis - Böcker

This book aims to fill in the literary history of the greatest period of Latin poetry, about 60 BC to AD 20. Catullus (by a slender thread) has survived, but later contemporaries valued his friend Calvus just as highly; comparison of the two reveals an extraordinarily close relationship. Horace mentions Varius Rufus in the same breath as Virgil. Adrian Hollis prints fragments of up to thirty poets, with an individual introduction and a translation for each. Almost every genre of ancient poetry is represented, from heroic epic to scurrilous lampoon. Hollis's commentary, fuller and richer than any yet published, contains many new ideas. In some cases (such as Varius Rufus) the fragments illumine the history of this period, which saw the collapse of the Roman Republic and establishment of the Augustan Empire. Taken together, these fragmentary texts enable us better to appreciate surviving great poets such as Catullus and Virgil.

Adrian Hollis's second edition of Callimachus' Hecale includes an English translation of the original Greek text. Twenty years after the first edition appeared in 1990, close study of the Byzantine poets, scholars, and clerics who knew Callimachus' poem intimately has allowed significant progress in our understanding of the poem. Equally valuable are two Byzantine lexicons which clearly had access to an ancient commentary on the Hecale; an Attic vase, which provides our first artistic representation of the myth; and an inscribed Greek elegy from Kandahar, which suggests that Callimachus' `miniature epic' was known to a Greek poet working in that remote bastion of Hellenism - additional proof of the poet's importance within Hellenistic culture.