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The editor: Monica Gale has written extensively on the poetry
of the Late Republican and Augustan periods, with a particular focus
on questions of genre and intertextuality.
How is it possible for a poet to find his own individual voice,
when he is writing in a tradition so venerable and so constrained
by convention as Roman epic? How do poets working in related genres
- particularly didactic - conceptualize their relationship to the
main epic tradition? The eleven essays in this volume, by leading
scholars in the field of Roman poetry and its post-Classical receptions,
consider some of the strategies which writers from Lucretius onwards
have employed in negotiating their relationship with their literary
forebears, and staking out a place for their own work within a tradition
stretching back to Hesiod and Homer.
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