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.

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.

Chapter 5 looks at passages of carpe diem within longer texts, such as satires of Horace and Juvenal, Petronius’ Satyrica and Vergil’s Georgics. As carpe diem poems are read and re-read, they become independent textual objects: they can be inserted just about anywhere but never lose their lyric splendour. Thus, Vergil applies the carpe diem motif to a context as humble as cattle-breeding, while both Seneca and Samuel Johnson ignore the context and treat this section as vatic wisdom. This chapter analyses how such excerpts relate to Latin satire, which bastardised other texts, to late antique anthologising, medieval florilegia, and early modern commonplace-books. The chapter also proposes a new model for understanding textual allusions and intertexts in classical literature. Finally, the chapter argues that clichés are important features of classical culture that are worthy of close study.

Around 500 CE Colluthus, writing in Greek, and Dracontius, writing in Latin, each composed an epyllion on the Abduction of Helen. However, apart from title, date, and genre, the two works have very little in common. This chapter presents an interpretation of the two poems that connects them with contemporary historical and social developments. On the one hand, the role of Hermione in Colluthus is connected with the changing role of children in late antique society, under the influence of Christian morality. On the other, the attitude towards Vergil in Dracontius is explained from the late antique political context (being after the fall of Rome) and the perspective of the author as an advocate in Carthage under Vandal rule. A comparison between the two poems sheds interesting light on how the ‘antehomeric’ narrative was adapted respectively in the East and the West: in Colluthus' Egypt and in Dracontius' Africa.

The myth of Trojan origins of the Romans was given new life in the middle of the first century BCE, with the rise to power of Caesar and Augustus. There was more than one way to negotiate the relationship between Greece and Rome that the myth implied. One way was to continue privileging Romulus and the old foundational legend by marginalizing the myth of Trojan origins along with the antagonism between Greece and Rome that it implied (Horace). Another way was to neutralize the antagonism by claiming that the Trojans were in fact of Greek descent ( Dionysius of Halicarnassus). But it was also possible, rather than avoiding the antagonism, to bring it to the fore by presenting the Trojans and, by implication, the Romans as superior to the Greeks (Vergil). Vergil’s solution suited best the new geopolitical reality and the imperial ambitions of Rome. This transpires not only from the Aeneid but also from those imperial Greek authors who recognized that the traditional narrative of the Trojan War did not suit any longer the world in which they lived. The revised Trojan myth they promulgated brought about a thorough revision of the Trojan tradition, which survived into the early modern period.

The myth of Trojan origins of the Romans was given new life in the middle of the first century BCE, with the rise to power of Caesar and Augustus. There was more than one way to negotiate the relationship between Greece and Rome that the myth implied. One way was to continue privileging Romulus and the old foundational legend by marginalizing the myth of Trojan origins along with the antagonism between Greece and Rome that it implied (Horace). Another way was to neutralize the antagonism by claiming that the Trojans were in fact of Greek descent ( Dionysius of Halicarnassus). But it was also possible, rather than avoiding the antagonism, to bring it to the fore by presenting the Trojans and, by implication, the Romans as superior to the Greeks (Vergil). Vergil’s solution suited best the new geopolitical reality and the imperial ambitions of Rome. This transpires not only from the Aeneid but also from those imperial Greek authors who recognized that the traditional narrative of the Trojan War did not suit any longer the world in which they lived. The revised Trojan myth they promulgated brought about a thorough revision of the Trojan tradition, which survived into the early modern period.

The chapter includes readings of Germania 1, 2, 3, 28, 33, 37, 46.

New cultural attitudes towards horticulture and gardening emerged in the early Middle Ages, and these structured the new economies and ways of life. From antiquity, land management was nested in several different clusters of ideas and values: ancient Roman cultural esteem placed upon effective estate management; emerging ideas about self-sufficiency of religious households, such as monasteries; and ideas about health and medicine. Some of these ideas were rooted in different genres of literature from antiquity, from agronomic treatises to medical theory, some of which were continued into the early Middle Ages. New, early medieval writings about monastic communities, about places where gardens grew, and about the use of plant material for medicines emerged. Each of these genres of writing is considered here for the light they shed on agricultural practices and consumption of urban produce. This chapter also considers the movement of cultivated urban spaces into ecclesiastical hands and explores how new cultural values attached to food provisioning for certain groups, such as the dedicated religious, informed habits of charitable or pro anima donations of cultivated land.

“Roman Revolutions” (the title is an allusion to the classic study by Sir Ronald Syme) celebrates the working landscapes of ancient Italy and Roman agrarian values. Romans in an age of decadence and excess are portrayed in this chapter as the first back-to-the-landers and trust-fund farmers—affluent urbanists yearning, like us, for a simpler, more “sustainable” way of life. Based on personal autopsy and field research at an unusual organic olive grove in the Sabine Hills, at which are preserved substantial remains of a villa rustica connected to Pompey the Great (10648 BCE), the author proposes that the establishment and growth of agriturismi in modern Italy re-instantiates early Roman farm culture and land-use policies, and that the agriturismo movement aligns closely, too, with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals regarding agriculture.

In the mythological account inherited by Ovid, Pasiphae went through a psychological transformation in which she was assailed by the grotesque desire to be mated by a bull. She thereby lowered the human character of her sexuality to that of an animal. When Ovid imports her story into the domain of elegy, her degradation runs counter to the genre’s conventional idealization of sexual life. Yet Ovid’s Pasiphae lives out that craving as if propelled by the rhetoric of elegy. She is a queen pursuing a beloved in a georgic landscape, but she behaves like a composite of the elegiac puella and the elegiac lover. Pasiphae thereby brings her grotesque psychology into the imaginative world of elegy, cultivating her dark desire under its mannerisms, until she manages to have sex with the bull. The elegiac echoes of her role in the erotic scenario, the meter in which it is outlined, and the elegiac allusions in its images – these all shift the ground of the reading experience from the mythical horror of aberrant sexuality to the realm of the elegiac grotesque, in which nefarious eroticism and elegiac love conventions are fused, appearing at once monstrous, contemptuous, and ridiculous.

Chapter 2 moves from Dante Alighieri’s contribution to the establishment of the vernacular as a language of knowledge and his critique of contemporary vernacular translation, which offer yet another perspective on the multifaceted process through which vernacular culture appropriated and, in a sense, tamed Aristotle’s authority. The chapter situates Dante’s portrayal of Aristotle within the poet’s broader reflection on language. Taking the appearance of Aristotle in the Divine Comedy as a starting point, I show that Dante’s notion of language cannot be understood without looking at his discussion of the relations between Latin and the vernacular, particularly in the Convivio. From this point of view, Dante’s harsh criticism of Taddeo Alderotti’s Italian translation of the Summa Alexandrinorum invites us to reconsider the failure of the Convivio itself, a project which did not foster the cultural revolution that Dante sought. By exploring the textual transmission of Taddeo’s translation between 1300 and 1500, the final section of the chapter enlightens its relevance to the vernacular reading communities that found forms of cultural and social legitimation in works of this kind.