"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 cultur…
We take the existence of a literature in the Latin language for granted, but the emergence of this literature is a very strange moment in history. Latin literature should probably not have come into being in the form it took. This book explores the opening phase of Latin literat…
Ancient Roman authors are firmly established in the Western canon, and yet the birth of Latin literature was far from inevitable. The cultural flourishing that eventually produced the Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history, as Denis Feeney demonstrates in this…
Literature is such a familiar and widespread form of imaginative expression today that its existence can seem inevitable. But in fact very few languages ever developed the full-fledged literary cultures we take for granted. Challenging basic assumptions about literatures by unco…
