Susanna Morton Braund - Understanding Latin Literature

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Understanding Latin Literature

Braund provides a superb overview of pertinent issues related to Latin literature through her unique organization by topic. The second edition includes a new and instructive chapter on the reception of Latin literature, and effectively incorporates recent scholarship on such varied topics as gender, performance and spectacle, slavery, public v. private, and the relationship between literature and society. Braunds takes on all are well informed, often thought provoking, openly personal, and delivered in a crisp and clear, always accessible style.

Professor David Christenson, University of Arizona, USA

Understanding Latin Literature is a highly accessible, user-friendly work that provides a fresh and illuminating introduction to the most important aspects of Latin prose and poetry. This second edition is heavily revised to reflect recent developments in scholarship, especially in the area of the later reception and reverberations of Latin literature. Chapters are dedicated to Latin writers such as Virgil and Livy and explore how literature related to Roman identity and society. Readers are stimulated and inspired to do their own further reading through engagement with a wide selection of translated extracts and through understanding the different ways in which they can be approached. Central throughout is the theme of the fundamental connections between Latin literature and issues of elite Roman culture. The versatile and accessible structure of Understanding Latin Literature makes it suitable for both individual and class use.

Susanna Morton Braund is Professor of Latin Poetry and its Reception at the University of British Columbia, Canada and holder of a Killam Research Fellowship. She taught previously at Stanford University and Yale University in the USA, and at the Universities of London, Bristol and Exeter in the UK. She has published extensively on Roman satire and epic and has translated Lucans Civil War, the Satires of Persius and Juvenal, and Senecas De Clementia, Agamemnon, Oedipus and Phoenician Women. She is currently working on a major project on the reception of Virgils poems in later eras as manifested in translation history.

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Understanding the Ancient World

Forthcoming:

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Understanding Latin
Literature

Second edition

Susanna Morton Braund

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This book is dedicated to all the students who have taught me so much

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The first edition of this book was written in the year 2000, the year that I moved from England to New England. Since then I have migrated west, first to California and then to British Columbia. It has been a delight to return to the book to prepare a second edition and to take the time to observe the shifts in approaches to Latin literature in the intervening years.

This book has been shaped by many individuals. There have been conversations with friends and with colleagues, too numerous to name here, though I thank you all for your ideas, advice, enthusiasm and encouragement. Richard Stoneman was important at the outset; for the second edition, the Routledge readers made wonderful suggestions, most of which I have followed. I have also benefitted from an excellent copy editor, Dr Catherine Hanley. More than anything, this book has been shaped by my teaching and by my students. At Royal Holloway I taught an introductory course on Latin literature in English translation, which generated many ideas and strategies for this book. At Yale and Stanford Universities I taught the survey of Latin literature to senior undergraduates and graduate students. I repeat my thanks from the first edition to Giles Gilbert, Tim Hill and Josiah Osgood and add thanks to Jayne Knight and Andrew McClellan now, along with Emma Hilliard, who valiantly recalibrated the indices in a very short time.

This book is not intended to be comprehensive. There are some glaring gaps in the primary texts culled and, inevitably, in the secondary literature referred to. I make no apology for these gaps because the book is intended as an introduction. That is why the chapters are relatively short. I have provided a list of all the authors and texts, Latin and Greek, referred to, along with all the translations which I have adapted, at the end of the book; the rest of the translations are my own. I have tried to avoid using abbreviations or Latin titles that will deter those meeting this material for the first time. This book is intended to be very user-friendly.

Use of this book will vary. Teachers who choose to use it might have students read just one chapter before a class and use the material as a launch-pad. I have numbered the paragraphs to make this easier and have inserted ample cross-references so that anyone interested in how topics interconnect can pursue such questions. It is not essential to read the chapters in the sequence presented. Nor is it essential to read the whole book; for example, Chapters 1214 on literary texture could easily be omitted from an elementary course. My material is organized into fifteen short chapters to fit with a fifteen-week semester; in a shorter term or quarter, the teacher can select the eight, ten or twelve most germane chapters as a basis for study.