The fifth chapter covers the broad span of prose and poetic Latin literature that intends to instruct. But didactic works are never simply technical: even those that seem clunky to us were written with an eye to style, at least in parts. On the other hand, some of those that seem purely ornamental have in fact been found genuinely useful by some readers. We discuss the genre’s origins in Greek literature, and explore primary prose and poetic exemplars: Cato, Varro, Cicero, Lucretius, Vergil and Ovid.

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 ninth chapter finishes what was started in the fourth, covering personal poetry of the Augustan period. It begins with Vergil’s Eclogues, first explaining why.The majority of the chapter focuses on the varied works of Horace, his long career, and his relationship with power. It ends with Ovid’s exile poetry, which is the last literature of the republic.

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

For narrative and theme, space like time is a key element in the Fasti of Ovid as well as the Metamorphoses. After an initial exploration of the programmatic establishment of the theme of place in each poem, this chapter focuses on the thematic use of geography in the Fasti. The first section reflects on the prominence given to Rome’s physical and metaphorical place in the world: it is the city to which migrants travel, from which armies depart, to which victorious generals return with new sacra. The poem also treats Rome as urban space, and uses topography to help give meaning to sequences of adjacent temples and festivals. The final section touches on how Ovid’s own exile gives depth to the presentation both of Rome and of travel in the wider world: things are out of place.

In Elegy 4.9, Propertius provides an aetiology for a detail of the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima: the prohibition on women attending the ceremony. He presents this particularity as a retaliatory measure taken by the hero himself, who reacted to the banning of any male from the space in which the cult of Bona Dea is celebrated. Propertius describes the priestess of Bona Dea as trying to prevent Hercules from entering the sacred space by arguing that female chastity must be respected. After having argued that there is no insurmountable difference between the sexes since there may be role reversal between men and women, Hercules forces the door. Propertius uses this episode located in ancient Latium to put forward some reflections on a (modern) topic, specific to the elegiac genre: sexual identity and gender relations. He presents an alternative point of view that includes both facets of what Augustus seeks to impose in his politics of promoting ancient social practices, essentially concerned with control over morality and sexuality: a strict conception of female morality, and a crucial questioning of gender conceptions: what makes the difference between the sexes? It is dress, behaviour or the body?

This chapter focuses on the episode of Hippolytus and Egeria in Ov. Met. 15.479–551, and particularly on the relation between the content of the two stories told (Hippolytus’ death and rebirth; Egeria’s metamorphosis) and the space in which they are told. The inner story, recounted by Hippolytus himself, involves the characters (Hippolytus, Theseus, Phaedra) in a well-known plot, with a tragic outcome and a Greek setting. The frame of the story is the Latian wood of Aricia, in which the rites in honour of Diana/Lucina, goddess of birth and fertility, take place: here we have no story of violence and death, but of rebirth (Hippolytus/ Virbius), devotion and fidelity (Numa and Egeria). The place rewrites the destinies of the characters involved: the space of Rome is the one in which Ovid celebrates not (only) the political power of Augustus, whose mother comes from Aricia, but more and most prominently the cultural power that Augustan poetry has to give life to a new mythology of regeneration and transformation of old forms (Hippolytus) into new ones (Virbius).

This chapter provides an overview of vegetarian and vegan practice from Ancient times to the beginning of the twentieth century. The first section focuses on the representation of Pythagoras in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and on the Aristotelian and Biblical depictions of the relationship between humans and non-human animals; the second explores Early Modern attitudes, including a discussion of the vegetarianism in More’s Utopia; the third offers readings of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World; the fourth details the emergence of the word ’vegetarian’ in the context of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.

Chapter 1 focuses on the poem’s symbolic treatment of landscape and reads the Thebaid’s articulation of the relationship between human authority, nature, and wilderness as able to conceptualise power and reflect on important socio-cultural issues of Flavian Rome. While Statius’ praeteritio seems to cut off Ovid’s Theban histories from the poem, Tisiphone’s journey to Thebes, Polynices’ journey to Argos, Tydeus’ embassy to Thebes, Tyresias’ necromancy, and the march of the Argives against Thebes display episodes of destruction of the landscape by natural, divine, and chthonic forces that suggest Statius’ Theban universe being characterised by the same deceptiveness, tendency to chaos, and accessibility to infernal forces of the Metamorphoses’ world. By reworking the spatial narratives deployed by Ovid to critically rewrite the Aeneid’s geopolitical discourse, the Thebaid not only influences our understanding of the Augustan classics, but also provided ancient readers with a chaotic worldview that potentially challenged their perceptions of the narratives of re-established order and providence heralded by the urban and socio-cultural landscapes of Flavian Rome.

In contrast with the emphasis put on pietas and providentia by Flavian discourse, the Thebaid is the only Flavian poem that begins and ends without gods, much like Lucan’s Bellum Civile. However, Statius’ gods are described in Ovidian terms and use thought-provoking allusions to the Metamorphoses to challenge the readers’ poetic memory with distorted versions of their literary past. The ways in which Statius and his gods allude to and manipulate the Metamorphoses’ divine narratives, reworking Ovid’s coded use of celestial geographies, both mark a significant distance from Lucan’s epic universe and highlight the Roman significance of the Thebaid’s divine world. The gods’ attempts to legitimise their morally dubious actions by manipulating the readers’ understanding of the Metamorphoses not only shows the Thebaid’s sophisticated engagement with the former literary tradition but also exploits the traditional analogy between heavenly and Roman power to reflect on the Flavian emperors’ progressive sacralisation of the imperial institution and selective renegotiation of Augustan legacy in the tense religious atmosphere of post–civil-war Rome.

The Conclusion summarises the book’s main arguments and offers an analysis of the poem’s epilogue to reassess the post-Ovidian nature of the Thebaid. By reflecting on the new insights offered by the book into the poetics and the politics of different types of literary interactions, this analysis raises new questions in different fields, from Flavian and intertextual studies to the study of spatiality, suggesting ways to further advance the practical and theoretical study of ancient intertextuality and intermediality.

This chapter considers Shelley’s attempt to think before the “Error and Truth” of Enlightenment humanity, and before the binaristic split between the white male bourgeois Human and those not included in those definitions of humanity. Tracing his iconoclastic resistance to normative categories of gender, race, and the human as well as his idealistic attempt to recreate those categories in a reading of The Witch of Atlas, with its double creation of Witch and the Witch’s “sexless” creature, the chapter explores the poet’s radical understanding of gender and sex beyond the male–female binary alongside the poet’s commentary and critique on the dimorphic gender–sex systems circulating in discourse of his day. The chapter argues that his imagining of the creation of new beings – both the Witch and her creature – figure Shelley’s reply to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as an alternative being beyond Western, Enlightenment notions of the human. Particularly through the envisioning of the nonbinary being of the Witch's creature as well as its flight through the world as an “image” and “sexless thing,” Shelley attempts to conceive of a continuum of gender and sex, one in which the gendered and racialized alterity of the Witch’s creature is embraced and prioritized, even though it may be imperfectly imagined.

Chapter 3 explores how the models of the healer and head of state converged around the figure of the princeps. Although each proved useful in validating the Principate, their distinctive Republican histories invested them with divergent imperial trajectories. Because Cicero had already integrated the figure of the healer into Republican discourse, Augustan writers could soon locate the princeps in this role as well. The regal resonance of the caput, in contrast, made it unavailable as a descriptor of the “first citizen.” It is therefore absent in the works of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius. Yet for a society steeped in organic comparisons and confronted with constitutional change, the utility of the metaphor was obvious. Livy responded to this quandary in his first pentad, which depicts three stages in the life cycle of the Roman body politic: a regal polity topped by a caput, a Republic structured around the Fable of the Belly, and a fusion of these two forms under Camillus. Livy’s narrative thereby helped make the head of state metaphor available for contemporary usage. As Augustus’ rule came to an end, Ovid finally began identifying him as the caput orbis.

Jocelin of Brakelond was a monk at Bury St Edmunds monastery at the time of the famous Abbot Samson, whose election and abbacy Jocelin describes. Jocelin writes his account of the monastery in a Latin that contains references to both the Bible and classical writers, as well as words drawn from Greek, or based on contemporary French and English.

This chapter provides an accessible overview of the wide, diverse and ever-expanding field of classical reception studies. It begins with an overview of the word ‘reception’ and its origins in philosophical hermeneutics, and surveys a series of critiques that have been made of the word’s usefulness. Then the chapter makes three claims. First, allusions to antiquity have frequently occurred within a broader matrix of challenge and contestation, and so the critical analysis of classical reception should pay attention to voices that challenge the values accorded to classical literature, as well as those who embrace them. Second, a focus on the history of education can help us see classical allusion as a social challenge rather than simply a submission to prevailing literary or cultural norms. Third, the study of reception is at its most vital as a mode of communication outside classics, whether to the public, to students or to scholars in other fields. Ultimately, reception studies make up a vital part of the future of classical scholarship, and yet questions remain about whether the word ‘reception’ best communicates the subject’s intellectual range and ambition.

This chapter explores metamorphosis by focusing on the so-called ‘shearwaters of Diomedea’ – a group of seabirds whose odd behaviour recalls their previous existence as humans. It puts these birds in conversation with other humans-turned-animals both ancient and modern and investigates how they reflect on the experience of transformation. The chapter reveals that both ancient and modern tales of metamorphosis draw on the notion of hybridity in so far as many of the creatures undergoing such a transformation are, in effect, hybrids: they retain part of their human identity while also sporting the body of an animal. At the same time the chapter points to an important difference between ancient and modern ways of thinking the human. It shows that modern tales of metamorphosis tend to explore the dissolution of the boundary that separates the human from all other animals. The ancient conversation, by contrast, returns to – and ultimately affirms – the positions of some of the Greek philosophers arguing for an essential human difference.