Offering an anthology of the first history of Latin literature, Sicco Polenton's Scriptorum illustrium Latinae linguae libri XVIII is a collection of biographies that spans the period from ancient Rome to the 15th century. Compiled between 1419 and 1433, the main focus of the Scriptores illustres is on the life and works of ancient Latin authors, but Polenton also displays a wider interest in the history of Roman culture, institutions and...

Propertius' Cynthia considers Propertius' metapoetic and intra- and intertextual habits and their relationship with the repetitious amatory discourse that he fashions for himself with his beloved, Cynthia. Where scholarship tends to treat as separate the metaliterary and the amatory aspects of Propertius' poetry, this volume - focussed on Books 3 and 4 - argues that his discussion of his own poetry and of his relationship to it as an author-figure - his metapoetic commentary - is ...

This volume brings together eleven chapters on the genre of Latin elegy by leading scholars in the field. Latin elegy is typically thought to have flourished for a brief period at Rome between c. 40 BC and the early decades of the first century AD; it was the pre-eminent vehicle for writing about amatory matters in this period and among its principal exponents were Propertius and Ovid, whose works constitute the focus of this volume. Their poems and poetic collections were, however, by no ...