Tombs of the Ancient Poets ― Between Literary Reception and Material Culture

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 collection makes a distinctive contribution to the study of literary reception by focusing on the materiality of the body and the tomb, and the ways in which they mediate the relationship between classical poetry and its readers. From the tomb of the boy poet Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, which preserves his prize-winning poetry carved on the tombstone itself, to the modern votive offerings left at the so-called 'Tomb of Virgil'; from the doomed tomb-hunting of long-lost poets' graves, to the 'graveyard of the imagination' constructed in Hellenistic poetry collections, the essays collected here explore the position of ancient poets' tombs in the cultural imagination and demonstrate the rich variety of ways in which they exemplify an essential mode of the reception of ancient poetry, poised as they are between literary reception and material culture.

Nora Goldschmidt, Associate Professor of Classics, Durham University, Barbara Graziosi, Professor of Classics, Durham University

Nora Goldschmidt is Associate Professor of Classics at Durham University. She is the author of Shaggy Crowns: Ennius' Annales and Virgil's Aeneid (Oxford University Press, 2013) and is currently completing a monograph on fictional biography and the reception of Latin poetry, Afterlives of the Roman Poets: Biofiction and the Reception of Latin Poetry (under contract with Cambridge University Press).

Barbara Graziosi is Professor of Classics and Head of Department at Durham University. Her most recent monographs are The Gods of Olympus: A History (Profile Books, 2014) and Homer (Oxford University Press, 2016). She recently completed a major research project, funded by the European Research Council, on visual and narrative portraits of the ancient Greek and Roman poets, entitled Living Poets: A New Approach to Ancient Poetry. This volume stems from that project.