Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 93

Aspects of the Language of Latin Poetry

edited by J N Adams & R G Mayer

Published 1999

234 x 156 mm; 456 pages
hardback, ISBN 978-0-19-726178-1
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International array of contributors, bringing together both traditional and more recent approaches to provide valuable insights into the poets’ use of language.

Covers authors from Lucilius to Juvenal.

Of the peoples of ancient Italy, only the Romans committed newly composed poems to writing, and for 250 years Latin-speakers developed an impressive verse literature.

The language had traditional resources of high style, e.g., alliteration, lexical and morphological archaism or grecism, and of course metaphor and word order; and there were also less obvious resources in the technical vocabularies of law, philosophy and medicine.

The essays in this volume show how the poets in the classical period combined these elements, and so created a poetic medium that could comprehend satire, invective, erotic elegy, drama, lyric, and the grandest heroic epos.

These wide-ranging studies will be essential reading for all students of Latin.

CONTENTS

including an option to download PDF files of particular articles