Rebecca Armstrong - Böcker

The Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid abound with plants, yet much Vergilian criticism underestimates their significance beyond attractive background detail or the occasional symbolic set-piece. This volume joins the growing field of nature-centred studies of literature, looking head-on at Vergil's plants and trees to reveal how fundamental they are to an understanding of the poet's outlook on religion, culture, and mankind's place within the world. Divided into two parts, the first explores the religious and more diffusely numinous aspects of Vergil's plants, from awe-inspiring sacred groves to divinely promoted fields of corn, and shows how both cultivated and uncultivated plants fit within and help to shape the complex landscape of Vergilian (and, more broadly, Roman) religious thought. In the second half of the book, the focus shifts towards human interactions with plants from the perspectives of both cultivation and relaxation, exploring the love-hate relationship with vegetation which sometimes supports and sometimes contests the human self-image as the world's dominant species. Combining a series of close readings of a wide range of passages with the identification of broader patterns of association, Vergil's Green Thoughts appositely reveals and celebrates the complexity and variety of Vergilian flora.

In this detailed study of the representations of Pasiphae, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin poetry, Rebecca Armstrong investigates both the literary history of the myths (the Greek roots, the interactions between Roman versions) and their cultural resonance. In addition to close readings of the major treatments of each woman's story (in Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca), she offers extended thematic explorations of the importance of memory, wildness, and morality in the myths. By extending the net to encompass three women (all from the same ill-fated family), the book gives a clear picture of the complexity and fascinating interconnectedness of myths and texts in Ancient Rome.

Ovid devoted about half of his poetic career to the production of several collections of amatory verse, all composed in elegiac couplets. Indeed, his irrepressible interest in love, sex and elegiac poetry is one of the defining features of his entire output. Here Rebecca Armstrong offers a thematic examination of some important aspects of the Amores, Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Starting from an investigation of the narrator's self-creation and presentation of other characters within his amatory verse, she assesses the importance of mythical and contemporary reference, as well as the influence of the erotic on Ovid's later works. By looking at the Ars and Remedia alongside the Amores, the continuities and contradictions in the poet's elegiac outlook are revealed, and a complex picture is formed of the Ovidian world of love. Ovid's erotic works present the reader with a glimpse inside the minds of both poets and lovers, mediated through eyes which are frequently inclined to comedy and even cynicism, but always sharp, perceptive and above all fascinated by human behaviour.