Shaggy Crowns is the first book-length study in almost a hundred years of the relationship between Rome's two great epic poems. Quintus Ennius was once the monumental epic poet of Republican Rome, "th
Conscious of ancient modes of reading poetry 'for the life', Roman poets encoded versions of their lives into their texts. The result is a body of literature that cries out to be read in terms of lives in reception. Afterlives of the Roman Poets shows how the fictional biographies (or 'biofictions') of its authors have shaped the reception of Latin poetry. From medieval biographies of Ovid inscribed in the margins of his texts to republican readings of Lucan's death in periods of revolution to the 'death of the author' in Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil, the book tells a cultural history of the reception of ancient literature as imagined through the lens of poets' lives. Putting modern life-writing studies and ancient poetry into dialogue, it brings biofictional reception to debates in classics, and puts antiquity and its reception onto the map of modern studies in life-writing.
This volume explores the ways in which the tombs of the ancient poets - real or imagined - act as crucial sites for the reception of Greek and Latin poetry. Drawing together a range of examples, the c
