Latin Literature (Understanding the Ancient World)

by Susanna Morton Braund

This highly accessible, user-friendly work provides a fresh and illuminating introduction to the most important aspects of Latin prose and poetry.
Readers are constantly encouraged to think for themselves about how and why we study the texts in question. They are stimulated and inspired to do their own further reading through engagement with a wide selection of translated extracts, and with a useful exploration of 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 structure of the book makes it suitable both for individual and class use.

322 pages, Paperback

First published December 14, 2001

About the author

Susanna H. Morton Braund (born 6 February 1957) is a professor of Latin poetry and its reception at the University of British Columbia.

Reviews

[max · Rating 3 out of 5]

This introduction to Latin literature will be especially useful to undergraduates coming to the Latin classics (whether in the original or translation) for the first time. The book's chief merit is the manner in which it sets various works of Latin literature in their cultural context, revealing how products of Latin literature, while often being modeled on Greek literary antecedents, are uniquely reflective of the values and ideals of the Romans.

The author also deals with the manner in which certain famous Latin stories are handled in later traditions (e.g., her discussion of Renaissance paintings depicting the rape of Lucretia, a story in Book I of Livy's history). A whole book could be written on the influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses on later (Renaissance) painters.

Also addressed in various places are important critical issues that have occupied scholars of Latin literature in more recent times.

This little volume contains the following chapters:

1. Virgil and the Meaning of the Aeneid
2. Role models for Roman women and men in Livy
3. What is Latin literature?
4. What does studying Latin literature involve?
5. Making Roman identity: multiculturalism, militarism and masculinity
6. Performance and spectacle, life and death
7. Intersections of power: praise, politics and patrons
8. Annihilation and abjection: living death and living slavery
9. Writing 'real' lives
10. Introspection and individual identity
11. Literary texture and intertextuality
12.Metapoetics
13. Allegory
14. Overcoming an inferiority complex: the relationship with Greek literature
15. Building Rome and Building Roman literature
Appendix A
Extract From Darkness Visible by W.R. Johnson
Appendix B
Who's afraid of literary theory? by Simon Goldhill
List of Authors and Texts
Time-line
List of translations used / adapted
Index of Names and Topics
Index of Passages quoted.

In her chapter on the Aeneid, the author provides an excellent summary of the critical battle that scholars have waged for decades concerning Aeneas' killing of Turnus in Aeneid 12. Is this controversial climactic scene "pro-Augustan" or "anti-Augustan"? Braund musters the arguments for both sides, along with passages from other books of the poem, political considerations, and viewpoints from Roman philosophical school that are relevant to the discussion.

Each chapter concludes with a short section entitled "Further Reading and Study" in which she discusses recent scholarly articles and books that have opened new critical avenues.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sussana Braund sets out clearly and with a refreshing lack of scholarly obfuscation a range of critical responses, both traditional and contemporary, to canonical and non-canonical texts. Declaring her intention of beginning discussions rather than making definitive judgements, she interrogates, among other topics, attitudes towards the public and the private, performance and spectacle, identity and slavery, allusion and intertextualiy. As someone who studied Latin forty years ago, I found it invigorating to learn how developments in critical theory have radically affected attitudes towards the classical world.

[Mahmoud Haggui]

I recommend this book for those who are fully interested in literature and culture, it's a masterpiece of Susanna Braund