P.J. Davis – författare

Written in Nero's Rome in about AD62, Seneca's "Thyestes" is one of the ggreatest and most influential of classical tragedies. As the bloodiest work in the Greco-Roman canon, "Thyestes" was long reviled for its depiction of savage violence and for its representation of human bestiality. Peter Davis argues that the play needs to be understood as the response of a major politician, philosopher and tragic poet to the increasingly tyrannical rule of the emperor. In this companion he explores key aspects of the play, including the circumstances of its composition, its performance history and its impact on subsequent dramatists, including Shakespeare and Jonson.

"Ovid and Augustus" deals with one of the most contentious issues in the study of Roman literature, the relationship between Augustan literary texts and Augustan politics. One of the central facts of Ovid's life is that he was exiled to the shores of the Black Sea. The poet himself tells us that he was being punished because of a poem and a mistake. Although the mistake is unknowable, we do have the poem, "Art of Love". Here, Peter Davis reads all of Ovid's early works (the erotic poetry: "Heroides", "Amores", "Art of Love", "Cures for Love") against their political context, and argues that they challenge the Augustan regime's political ideology and resist the Augustan conception of what it was to be Roman.