A Guide to Latin Elegy and Lyric

In A Guide to Latin Elegy and Lyric, authors Barbara K. Gold and Genevieve Liveley offer an innovative approach for exploring the language of Latin poetry and understanding the social, political, and cultural context of the time in which the poetry was produced. Treating elegy alongside lyric, the authors focus on the poetry of Catullus, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Sulpicia. Readers are presented with a diverse range of topics ranging from the Hellenistic influences on Augustan poetry to typical themes of militia amoris (“the warfare of love”) and servitium amoris (“the slavery of love”).

Ideally suited for those encountering the poetry for the first time—with or without previous knowledge of Latin—the book includes complete translations, cultural and historical background, and helpful sections explaining how to read and teach a Latin elegiac or lyric poem. The authors outline and address autobiographical realism, psychoanalysis, narratology, and other modern critical approaches to Latin poetry, and analyze many of the tropes incorporated by the Roman poets: sexuality and gender, politics and patronage, myth and religion, wealth and poverty, empire, madness, magic, witchcraft, and many more.

A Guide to Latin Elegy and Lyric provides novice and experienced Classics and Latin students with the knowledge and context necessary to read elegiac and lyric poetry while contributing original insights about the major poets and poetry of Rome’s Augustan Age.