Latin Lineages

A Family Tree from Catullus to Today

Regine May, Catherine Conybeare

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9783111707655
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Literature

This book traces lineages of intertextuality and reception between Latin poets of the first century BC with prose authors of the second century BC and their later reception in English literature.

The authors of each chapter explore how writers like Catullus or Vergil, Horace or Apuleius engage intertextually with each other and are themselves subject to the reception of later periods. Recurring strands like a focus on philosophy (notably Epicureanism) and history (notably Roman history and gender politics) can be traced into more modern periods, where authors as distinctive as Alexander Pope, Italian fascists or queer adaptors of Latin poetry continue to explore the same challenges as their Roman ancestors by returning again and again to these ancient texts and similar themes of reception.

Its readers will be able to track recurring themes through Latin authors who read their predecessors and are themselves objects of reception from antiquity to the modern world. While each chapter is a standalone study of a specific Latin author, the book showcases the shapes and forms in which reception can be studied, ranging from close intertextual readings and learned allusions to playful creative engagements with and homages to these Roman authors.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Introduction
• Stephen Harrison’s Major Publications (June 2025)
• L. Manlius Torquatus’ in Sullam
• Catullus in the Ancient Greek Novels (with a Focus on Chariton)
• A Queer Catullus for the 2010s and 2020s?
• Swearing like a Philosopher on Trial: Catullus, Epicurus, and Beards in Apuleius’ Apologia
• Apuleius and the Greek Novel: Generic Infringement
• Philosophical Enrichment: Akrasia in Vergil
• Pallas, Son of Hercules
• Vergil in Ethiopia? Nello Martinelli’s Amba Alagia
• How the Winds Blow: Inherited Anemologies in Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica
• The Gnat’s Descent: Intertextuality and Poetic Memory in the Pseudo-Vergilian Culex
• Vergilian Roleplay in The Rape of the Lock
• Back to the Future: (Spatio)temporal Enrichment in Horace’s Odes 3.3 and 3.27
• List of Contributors
• Index Rerum et Nominum
• Index Locorum