As opposed to feeble imitations of the Aeneid, the epic poems of Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus are viewed as dynamic works that use the Virgilian model creatively to reflect the moral and political issues of their own day. -- Amazon.com.
The poets and prose-writers of Greece and Rome were acutely conscious of their literary heritage. They expressed this consciousness in the regularity with which, in their writings, they imitated and alluded to the great authors who had preceded them. Such imitation was generally…
