Clio and the Poets: Augustan Poetry and the Traditions of Ancient Historiography

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David S. Levene, Damien P. Nelis
BRILL, 2002 - Literary Criticism - 396 pages
The Augustan age was one in which writers were constantly reworking the Roman past, and which was marked by a profound engagement of poets with the historians and historical techniques which were the main vehicle for the transmission of the image of the past to their day. In this book seventeen leading scholars from Europe and America examine the fascinating interaction between such apparently diverse genres: how the Augustan poets drew on - or reacted against - the historians' presentation of the world, and how, conversely, historians picked up and transformed poetic themes for their own ends. With essays on poems from Horace's "Odes" to Ovid's "Metamorphoses," on authors from Virgil to Valerius Maximus, it forms the most important topic so central to such a particulary relevant period of literary history.

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Contents

Propertius the Historian 3 3 112?
25
Augustan Victory and Defeat
45
Repetition and Sacrifice
61
Archaism and Historicism in Horaces Odes
81
Historiography in Horaces Odes
103
Ethnography and Politics in Firstcentury
123
Roman Archaeology in Vergils Arcadia Vergil Eclogue
143
Ovids Metamorphoses and Universal History
163
Between Tradition and Genre
231
Epic Encounters? Ancient Historical Battle Narratives
253
The Structure of Livys First Pentad and the Augustan
275
Ovids Fasti and Plutarchs
291
The Extinction of the Potitii and the Sacred History
313
History Poetry and Annales
331
Bibliography
363
Index of passages discussed
381

The Historian in Ovid The Roman History
191
an Ovidian
211
List of Contributors
395
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About the author (2002)

D.S. Levene, Ph.D. (1989) in Classics, University of Oxford, is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Leeds. He has published a variety of works on Latin historiography and rhetoric, including "Religion in Livy" (Brill, 1993). D.P. Nelis, Ph.D. (1988) in Classics, Queen's University of Belfast, is Professor of Latin at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of "Vergil and Apollonius: the Aeneid and the Argonautica" (Leeds 2001).

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