Hellenistic poets of the third and second centuries BC were concerned with the need both to mark their continuity with the classical past and to demonstrate their independence from it. In this revised and expanded translation of Muse e modelli: la poesia ellenistica da Alessandro Magno ad Augusto, Greek poetry of the third and second centuries BC and its reception and influence at Rome are explored allowing both sides of this literary practice to be appreciated. Genres as diverse as epic and epigram are considered from a historical perspective, in the full range of their deep-level structures, providing a different perspective on the poetry and its influence at Rome. Some of the most famous poetry of the age such as Callimachus' Aitia and Apollonius' Argonautica is examined. In addition, full attention is paid to the poetry of encomium, in particular the newly published epigrams of Posidippus, and Hellenistic poetics, notably Philodemus.

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Tradition and innovation in Hellenistic poetry

Introduction 1. Sexual virtue on display: the cults of pudicitia and honours for women 2. Traditional narratives and Livy's Roman history 3. Valerius Maximus: the complexities of past as paradigm 4. Subversive genres: testing the limits of pudicitia 5. Declamation: what part of 'no' do you understand? 6. Sexual virtue on display II: oratory and the speeches of Cicero 7. Imperial narrative, imperial interventions.

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Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome

Preface 1. Catullan criticism and the problem of lyric 2. A postmodern Catullus? 3. Manhood and Lesbia in the shorter poems 4. Towards a Mediterranean poetics of aggression 5. Code models of Catullan manhood Works cited Passages discussed General index.

Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood

A companion to Roman love elegy

Freud's Rome: Index of passages discussed

List of illustrations Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Impossible objects of desire 3. Death, desire and monuments 4. The Heroides 5. Narcissus: the mirror of the text 6. Pygmalion: art and illusion 7. Absent presences of language 8. Conjugal conjurings 9. The exile poetry 10. Ovid recalled in the modern novel Bibliography Index of modern authors Index of passages discussed General index.

Ovid's Poetics of Illusion

Propertius (ca. 54 b.c.--ca. 2 b.c.) was a Roman poet who composed four compelling books of elegies in the chaotic years surrounding Rome's transition from republic to empire. The first three of these books revolve mostly around a tormented love affair with a woman called Cynthia. The fourth book of poetry rests on more diverse subject matter and is notoriously the most opaque and elusive. In The Politics of Desire, Micaela Janan radically reassesses Propertius' last elegies, using contemporary psychoanalytic theory to illuminate these challenging texts. Janan finds that the upheaval of Rome's transformation to empire corresponds to the intellectually unsettled conditions of our own time, so that contemporary methodologies offer an uncannily suitable approach for understanding Propertius. In particular, she uses the work of Jacques Lacan, since it provides the best conceptual tools for examining the relation between political crisis and the struggles of the self, a theme that resonates in these difficult elegies. This book expands our understanding of an important Roman poet, and its innovative and sophisticated methodological approach makes a substantial contribution to feminist and psychoanalytic criticism. In addition, Janan addresses elegy's relationship to larger cultural questions, and broadens our understanding of the social crisis affecting Rome during the early empire.

The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV

The poetry of the Late Roman Republican poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, a rich document of the human heart, is the earliest-known reasonably complete body of erotic verse in the West.Though approximately 116 poems survive, uncertainties about the condition of the fragmented manuscript and the narrative order of the poems make the Catullan text unusually problematic for the modern critic. Indeed, the poems can be arranged in a number of ways, making a multitude of different plots possible and frustrating the reader s desire for narrative closure.Micaela Janan contends that since unsatisfied desire structures both the experience of reading Catullus and its subject matter, critical interpretation of the text demands a "poetics of desire." Furthermore, postmodern critical theory, narratology, and psychoanalysis suggest a flexible concept of the "subject" as a site through which a multitude of social, cultural, and unconscious forces move. Human consciousness, Janan contends, is inherently incomplete and in a continuous process of transformation. She therefore proposes an original and provocative feminist reading of Catullus, a reading informed by theories of consciousness and desire as ancient as Plato and as contemporary as Freud and Lacan.The Late Roman Republic in which Catullus lived, Janan reminds us, was a time of profound social upheaval when political and cultural institutions that had persisted for centuries were rapidly breaking downa time not unlike our own. Catullus poetry provides an unusually honest look at his culture and its contradictory representations of class, gender, and power. By bringing to the study of this major work of classical literature the themes of consciousness and desire dealt with in postmodern scholarship, Janan s book invites a new conversation among literary disciplines."

When the Lamp is Shattered: Desire and Narrative in Catullus

The politics of desire

Much attention has been paid recently to the role of individual narrators within the Metamorphoses. Whereas it was once considered adequate to attribute the characteristics of the poem solely to Ovid as narrator, a number of critics have now drawn correlations between the development of certain tales and the character of the narrators to whom they are attributed within the poem.Book 10 calls particular attention to itself in this regard. Orpheus is its primary narrator: after losing Eurydice to death for the second and final time, he composes a song that recalls ‘boys beloved by the gods and young girls struck by unsanctioned passion’ (10.152-54) which occupies the major portion of the book. However, the marked dissonance between Orpheus' announced program and what actually unfolds pricks the reader's curiosity. The bard's initial criteria for choosing material implicitly condemn female passion and celebrate pederasty — an understandable, if extreme, reaction on the part of a man who has just been badly hurt by his passion for a woman. But of the seven stories that follow, only two concern divine pederasty; one of these ends unhappily. The subject of a third tale (Venus' love for Adonis) radically stretches the sense of ‘boy-love’. A fourth tale — of Pygmalion and his statue — does not fit either category of love.

Micaela Janan

Papers

Ovid's Poetics of Illusion

The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV

When the Lamp is Shattered: Desire and Narrative in Catullus

The politics of desire

The Book of Good Love? Design Versus Desire in Metamorphoses 10