Investigates time and its contours as described by the ancient Romans, first as Rome positioned itself in relation to Greece and then as it exerted its influence as a major world power. This book examines the most important of the ancient world's time divisions, that between myth and history.
Virgil was the greatest of the Roman poets and "The Aeneid" served as the model for all the Latin epics of the medieval period and then for the new classical epic of the Renaissance. This study edition contains both the text and a commentary upon it.
A History Today Best Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Yet, Denis Feeney boldly argues, the beginnings of Latin literature were anything but inevitable. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history. “Feeney is to be congratulated on his willingness to put Roman literary history in a big comparative context... It is a powerful testimony to the importance of Denis Feeney’s work that the old chestnuts of classical literary history—how the Romans got themselves Hellenized, and whether those jack-booted thugs felt anxiously belated or smugly domineering in their appropriation of Greek culture for their own purposes—feel fresh and urgent again.” —Emily Wilson, Times Literary Supplement “[Feeney’s] bold theme and vigorous writing render Beyond Greek of interest to anyone intrigued by the history and literature of the classical world.” —The Economist