The fourth chapter introduces several ‘personal voices’, immediately complicating our understanding of how personally to take them: the authors discussed here seem to offer us an unmitigated look at their inner lives, but Latin literature does not, for the most part, work like that. Through discussions of Lucilius, in-depth treatment of Catullus, and exploration of the letters of Cicero, we show the public nature even of what seems most personal.

The eighth chapter begins with the question of why monumental epic came to be written again after a period of neglect; it suggests that the epyllion provided a way forward. After a history of republican epics after Ennius, Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses form the primary subjects of this chapter. Coverage focuses on what was innovative about them, language, plot, historical contexts, and style, and compares them to one another.

The seventh chapter focuses on Latin love elegy, tracing its history from several Greek roots and in Roman comedy, and concentrating on the genre as a whole. It also looks at other poetic treatments of love, Catullan, Lucretian, and Horatian, in order to show what was so distinctive about elegy. At the end, it observes that the genre lasted only a short while, and explores some of the reasons why. Treatments of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, with brief exploration of Gallus

Evocations of Classical Greece and Rome pervade Robert Lowell’s entire oeuvre. His fascination with Latin literature in particular shaped his own poetry. The density and involved syntax of Virgil and Propertius are echoed in the crabbed and tortured involutions of Lowell’s earlier poetry. His confessional verse is in part a response to Catullan frankness. His view of America as declining from republic into empire was colored by the historiography of Suetonius and Tacitus, in whose portraits of imperial tyrants Lowell found a frame for depicting the darker elements of his own character. He essayed many (usually very free) translations or versions of Greek and Roman poems, often with autobiographical inflections. A number of “original” poems can be shown to have originated as translations from Catullus, Virgil, Propertius, or Horace. In contrast with his almost obsessive engagement with Roman literature, Lowell’s engagement with Greek was less extensive, often mediated through later European literature, and (notably in his versions of Aeschylus) less vivid.

Building on the concept of enargeia, Chapter 4 examines the cinematism of epic ecphrases: passages containing detailed descriptions of remarkable objects. To the ancients, Homer’s vividness of presentation put him in the forefront of painters, while film directors, chiefly Eisenstein, have repeatedly referred to him as a precursor. In particular, the stories told on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad validate Eisenstein’s concept. Eisenstein wrote extensively about Lessing’s thesis, advanced in his influential Laocoön, about the limits of painting and poetry; both authors’ approaches are evaluated here, with Eisenstein’s argument proven the stronger one. The story of Theseus and Ariadne depicted on the coverlet in Catullus’ poem 64, the most complex ecphrasis in classical literature, is then treated as the basis of a film adaptation, which reveals the astonishing sophistication that can be discovered from the perspective of cinematism. Shorter observations about Virgil and, in passing, Juvenal round out this chapter.

This chapter explores the intersections between work by literary scholars with that done in synchronic and diachronic Latin linguistics. As an example of the different approaches and different toolkits employed by the linguist and the literary scholar, I discuss the way linguists have explained the phrase Veneres Cupidinesque in Catullus 3.1, contrasted with interpretations given in commentaries on Catullus and in Latin dictionaries. In the linguists’ account, the phrase is an archaism which continues an earlier Indo-European pattern used to refer to pairs, finding its closest parallels in Sanskrit texts. I then compare literary Latin to other registers and dialects, and discuss the difficulties involved in the term ‘Vulgar Latin’. The chapter also examines other areas in which linguistic scholarship might be usefully consulted by readers of Latin literature: word accent, vowel-length and metre; etymology, semantics and the lexicography; grammars and monographs on morphology, syntax and discourse analysis, including in particular recent approaches using sociolinguistics. Passages from Catullus are discussed throughout.

The bacio mordace, or the biting kiss, was one of the most erotic and consequently very popular poetic tropes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, particularly through the poetry of Battista Guarini (1538–1612) and Giambattista Marino (1569–1625). In his later books of madrigals, particularly the Seventh Book of 1619, Monteverdi was drawn to madrigals with such provocative imagery, although in a more overt way compared to his earlier kiss madrigals of the Second Book of 1590. In his later kiss madrigals, Monteverdi sought to give a musical dimension not so much to a cerebral obsession with kisses, but rather in the execution of them. The concertato medium proved ideal to render musical poets’ syntactical play on who is kissing whom, and the degree to which teeth were involved.

Kisses have an uneasy relationship with time. They are ever desired, withheld, stolen, and multiplied because they create more longing than they satiate. The kiss is both sensual and spiritual, direct and oblique, unifying and dividing – it is the embodiment of the erotic paradox. From its origins in the Song of Songs and Catullus, to the Basia of Secundus and the baci mordaci of Marino, the tradition of kiss-poetry conveys the pleasurable frustration of talking about love instead of making it: the necessity of speech acts in bringing about the physical act of kissing, and the impossibility of simultaneity between the two. Monteverdi’s engagement with the poetic conceit of kisses – mouths uttering delights by actions, words, and song – dates to his introduction to the poetry of Torquato Tasso (1544–95) during his final years in Cremona. This chapter traces the history of kiss poetry to focus on Monteverdi's earliest interactions with kiss poetry, the madrigals from his Second Book of 1590.

How does Plinian intertextuality contribute to making a book unit distinctive from its fellows? Taking Book 6 as its subject, this chapter first looks at the depth of intertextual investment made by Pliny in the second Vesuvius letter (6.20), and looks at the challenge set by its apparent references to Petronius. It then looks at the persistent intertextual presence across Book 6 of Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, Quintilian and Tacitus, and argues for a coherent programme of engagement particularly with Vergil, Quintilian and the Dialogus of Tacitus. The chapter ends by reflecting on why Pliny appeared to have good reason in the early second-century CE to be confident about the vigour and life-expectancy of public oratory at Rome.

Pliny the Younger’s Epistles contain a significant number of letters where Pliny presents himself as openly hostile to certain individuals by ridiculing them or expressing his indignation. The individuals who are the targets of Pliny’s epistolary invectives or satires usually do not appear as addressees in the collection: the chapter discusses Pliny’s letters 1.5 and 4.7 on Regulus, 7.29 and 8.6 on Pallas, 4.25 on an anonymous senator’s behaviour during a secret election and 6.15 on the faux pas of Iavolenus Priscus during a recitation. It then moves on with investigating how Pliny evokes the tradition of scoptic poetry, satire and invective not only in those letters where one would expect it, but also in letters which, at first glance, present themselves as friendly or joking conversations with various addressees such as Ep. 2.2 and 5.10. Here, the scoptic tone of literary models such as Catullus and Martial is transformed into a different context of communication, according to the conventions of epistolography.

Catullus’ collection contains several clear echoes of the work of two contemporary Epicurean poets, Lucretius and Philodemus. Indeed, several of the neoteric poet’s central themes (the attractions of otium and disengagement from public life; patronage by members of the high elite and its pitfalls; dissatisfaction with the mos maiorum) bring him potentially into close alignment with Epicurean ideals. In this chapter, however, I argue that, on closer consideration, Catullus’ intertextual engagement with his two contemporaries points rather to a self-consciously antagonistic stance towards Epicurean ethics. Catullus’ attack on ‘Socration’ in Poem 47, combined with parodic echoes of Philodemus’ epigrams in Poems 13 and 43, bears comparison with Cicero’s deployment of anti-Epicurean clichés in the In Pisonem; similarly, Philodemean and Lucretian echoes underline a striking divergence both from Epicurean ideals of friendship and from the rejection of romantic love explicit in Lucretius and arguably implicit in Philodemus’ Xanthippe cycle.

This chapter investigates a selected translation and reception history of Catullus 85 in English, with a focus on Brandon Brown’s embodied retranslation. The chapter argues that embodied, iterative, intersemiotic, and pedagogicial translation strategies create ruptures in the hegemonic approaches to translating Catullus 85 in particular and canonical ancient Classical texts in general. These ruptures invite readers to engage more critically with old texts in new and renewed ways.