The Oxford History Of The Classical World

laws had made adultery criminal; he produces a second edition of Ars, and Amores, at about the time when Augustus' own daughter ...

Phaedra And Hippolytus: detail of a carved sarcophagus (late second century A.D.). The youthful Hippolytus (centre) is shunning ...

attempt something at once seriously Callimachean and patriotic: the calendar offered ample pegs on which to hang praise of Rome ...

Virgil (By Jasper Griffin) Preamble Publius Vergilius Maro, in English normally called Virgil, was a celebrated figure in his ...

emerges, Rome has burst into his world. After the defeat of Brutus and Cassius in 42, the Caesarian party had to take care of th ...

Daphnis, another name from Theocritus. Cruelly cut off and lamented by his mother, Daphnis becomes a god, a patron of peace, hai ...

Relief Of Mother Earth On The Ara Pacis (13-9BC). The fruitfulness of the earth, portrayed in typical Hellenistic style with chi ...

Pastoral Landscape By Claude Lorraine (1645). The great seventeenth-century landscape painter was much influenced by Virgil, and ...

But over high Parnassus' lonely crest Poetic rapture bears me: sweet to pass Where never wheel has marked the tender grass. He w ...

No less burn heavy poppies, slumber-drowned. The repetition of the verb, the shaping of the sentence, the unusual rhythm of the ...

The Aeneid Virgil was still working on his epic when in 19 B.C. he died. We are credibly told that at the last he asked his frie ...

The epic starts with Aeneas and his Trojans on their sea-journey to the West. The poet opens with a weighty introduction: Arms a ...

Aeneas had long been famous for his 'piety', and he was often depicted in the act of carrying his old father on his shoulders ou ...

emotional point that, like Desdemona, Dido comes to love Aeneas as he tells her of the dangers he has passed. Juno is an unscrup ...

Dido And Aeneas In The Cave: illustration from a manuscript of Virgil in the Vatican Library (c. A.D. 500). The immense importan ...

very close to the wind. The book is dominated by a series of passionate speeches by Dido, of reproach, entreaty, bitterness, cur ...

Wounded Aeneas: painting from the House of Siricus at Pompeii (between AD 62 and 79). closely based on a passage in Latin poetry ...

Sit Romana potens Itala uirtute propago Other poets might have produced fine poetry on the greatness of conquest and dominion Th ...

widely accepted as Virgilian within eighty years of the poet's death. Others make no pretence of Virgilian authorship, and it se ...

Roman Historians (By Andrew Lintott) Origins A small proportion of the works of the Roman historians has survived the hiatus i ...