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Latin epics such as Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Civil War, and Statius' Thebaid addressed Roman aristocrats whose dealings in gifts, favors, and payments defined their conceptions of social order. This book argues that these exchanges play a central yet overlooked role in epic depictions of Roman society. Tracing the collapse of an aristocratic worldview across all three poems, it highlights the distinction they draw between reciprocal gift giving among elites and the more problematic behaviors of buying and selling. In the Aeneid, customary gift and favor exchanges are undermined by characters who view human interaction as short-term and commodity-driven. The Civil War takes the next logical step, illuminating how Romans cope once commercial greed has supplanted traditional values. Concluding with the Thebaid, which focuses on the problems of excessive consumption rather than exchange, the book closes its case that these poems constitute far-reaching critiques of Roman society during its transition from republic to empire.

This book proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism, but as powerful tools for complex imaginative work. In making this argument, Machines of the Mind disrupts a debate over the nature of allegory that has persisted for nearly a century. One side of the debate sees medieval personification as the literary manifestation of an extreme form of philosophical realism that treats abstractions such as Truth and Justice as really existing independent beings. The other side sees it as the literary manifestation of an extreme form of philosophical nominalism that treats these same abstractions as mere rhetoric, with no connection to any external reality. Machines of the Mind demonstrates that neither of these positions were considered viable during the Middle Ages. Instead, it finds that medieval personifications embody the full range of positions in the medieval debate over philosophical universals, varying according to the convictions of individual authors and the purposes of individual works. It identifies three different types of personification – Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian – that allowed medieval writers to apply the trope with utility and subtlety, employing methods of personification as tools that serve different functions.

In this age of the sound bite, what sort of author could be more relevant than a master of the epigram? Martial, the most influential epigrammatist of classical antiquity, was just such a virtuoso of the form, but despite his pertinence to today's culture, his work has been largely neglected in contemporary scholarship. Arguing that Martial is a major author who deserves more sustained attention, this book provides a tour of his works, shedding light on the Roman poet's world—and how it might speak to our own. Writing in the late first century CE—when the epigram was firmly embedded in the social life of the elites of Rome's elite—Martial published his poems in a series of books that were widely read and enjoyed. Exploring what it means to read such a collection of epigrams, this book examines the paradoxical relationship between the self-enclosed epigram and the book of poems that is more than the sum of its parts. It goes on to show how Martial, by imagining these books being displayed in shops and shipped across the empire to admiring readers, prophetically behaved like a modern author.

Persius’ Satires have long resisted interpretation. A curious amalgam of satire and philosophy, they are couched in bizarre and violent metaphorical language and unpleasant imagery. They show little concern for the pleasure and understanding of the reader, instead attacking all humans for falling short of Stoic moral standards and depicting their values and behaviour in mocking terms. This short study investigates the function of Persius’ primary metaphors, showing how he turns to digestion, cannibalism, and pederasty to formulate his critique of men, mores, and contemporary poetry as part of the same corrupt framework. Developing elements taken from the poetic tradition and from philosophy, he opposes his own metaphors to those that give pleasure, casting the latter, and the poetry that uses them, as unable to teach or heal the audience. It is only Persius’ own poetry, a bitter and boiled-down brew, that can make us healthier, better and more Stoic, as if it were a form of poetic medicine, a healing draught with no honey on the rim. Ultimately, however, Persius encourages us to leave behind the world of metaphor altogether, even if his metaphors are salutary and not pleasing; instead, we should concentrate on the non-emotive abstract truths of Stoic philosophy and live in a world where neither poetry, nor rich food, nor sexual charm, are put to use in the service of philosophical teaching.

Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome questions the truism that poetry and translation are inherently at odds, arguing for translation as a defining condition of ancient Roman lyricism. The study focuses on the late Republican poet Catullus, arguing that translation plays a central role in his work and conditions many of his most celebrated innovations. It argues that translation permeates this poet’s oeuvre but in forms that are frequently unrecognizable to modern readers. It suggests that many poems we moderns would tend to label as lyric originals have been shaped by Roman translation practices and mentalities quite different from our own. Chief among these is the foundational Roman assumption that translation is not a literary liability but a sign of power and a potential motor of poetic invention. Re-reading Catullan translation from this perspective exposes new layers of ingenuity within a familiar corpus of Latin poems and also offers a number of ancillary rewards: it illuminates the idiosyncrasies of Roman translation practice, it reconfigures our understanding of translation history, and it calls into question basic assumptions about lyric poetry, the genre most closely associated with Catullus’s eclectic oeuvre.

This book looks at mythology and ancient belief, revising our understanding of myth, heroism, and the status of women and animals in Western culture. This book recounts and analyzes a variety of key literary and visual moments that highlight the weasel's many attributes. It highlights its legendary sexual and childbearing habits and symbolic association with witchcraft and midwifery, its role as a domestic pet favored by women, and its ability to slip in and out of tight spaces. The weasel, the book reveals, is present at many unexpected moments in human history, assisting women in labor and thwarting enemies who might plot their ruin.