Grattius ― Hunting an Augustan Poet

Grattius' Cynegetica, a Roman didactic poem on hunting with dogs, is the author's only surviving work, though it reaches us now in an incomplete form. Thanks to a passing reference by Ovid in his Epistulae ex Ponto it can confidently be dated to the Augustan period, and yet while his literary contemporaries have been and continue to be subjects of academic scrutiny, Grattius is seldom read and remains almost completely unappreciated in classical and literary scholarship.

This volume is the first book-length study of Grattius in English or any other language and sets out to rehabilitate the neglected poet by making him and his work accessible to a wide audience. Prefaced by an introduction to the poet and his work, as well as the Latin text of Cynegetica and a new English translation, it presents a broad collection of interpretive essays from an international team of scholars. These essays explore the poem within its literary, intellectual, and socio-political contexts and look forward to Grattius' (more charitable) posthumous reception in Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As a whole they aim to reveal his enduring relevance for the tradition of didactic poetry and the study of other Augustan poetry and culture, and to provide an impetus for future discussions.

Steven J. Green, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, Yale-NUS College Singapore, and Honorary Research Fellow, University College London

Steven J. Green is Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Yale-NUS College Singapore and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. He specializes in Roman literature and culture of the first centuries BCE and CE and his major publications have so far focused around Ovid, Manilius, Roman didactic poetry, the interaction between Roman literature and religious experience, and the reception of the classical world in twenty-first-century Hollywood film. His latest monograph is Disclosure and Discretion in Roman Astrology: Manilius and his Augustan Contemporaries (OUP, 2014).