Understanding Latin Literature is a highly accessible, user-friendly work that provides a fresh and illuminating introduction to the most important aspects of Latin prose and poetry. This second edition is heavily revised to reflect recent developments in scholarship, especially in the area of the later reception and reverberations of Latin literature. Chapters are dedicated to Latin writers such as Virgil and Livy and explore how literature related to Roman identity and society. Readers are stimulated and inspired to do their own further reading through engagement with a wide selection of translated extracts and through understanding 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 and accessible structure of Understanding Latin Literature makes it suitable for both individual and class use.

This highly accessible, user-friendly work provides a fresh and illuminating introduction to the most important aspects of Latin prose and poetry and the fundamental connections between Latin literature and issues of elite Roman culture

Beyond Anger is a detailed literary analysis of the three poems which make up Juvenal's third book of Satires (i.e. Satires 7, 8 and 9). Dr Braund pays particular attention to the satiric techniques Juvenal employs in this book, arguing that in Book III Juvenal uses a new, ironic persona, which makes his satire more indirect, subtle and double-edged than does the angry approach found in the earlier books.

This new translation in free verse conveys the full force of Lucan's writing and his grimly realistic view of the subject. The Introduction sets the scene for the reader unfamiliar with Lucan and explores his relationship with earlier writers of Latin epic, and his interest in the sensational.

Starting from the conviction that Latin literature gains from being viewed as performance, the author sees the creation of different characters or "masks" in Latin literature as a result of the Greco-Roman training in rhetoric. She treats the texts of Roman satire as drama and focuses on the characters whose voices are heared in these performances: the angry satirist, the mocking satirist and the smiling satirist. She goes on to explore the implications of the use of these "masks" for authors and audiences of satire.

Virgil remains one of the most important poets in the history of literature. This emerges in the rich translation history of his poems. Hardly a European language exists into which at least one of his poems has not been translated, from Basque to Ukrainian and Dutch to Turkish. Susanna Braund's book is the first synthesis and analysis of this history. It asks when, where, why, by whom, for whom and how Virgil's poems were translated into a range of languages. Chronologically it spans the eleventh- and twelfth-century adaptations of the Aeneid down to present-day translation activity, in which women are better represented than in earlier eras. The book makes a major contribution to western intellectual history. It challenges classicists and other literary scholars to reassess the features of Virgil's poems to which the translators respond and offers a treasure-trove of insights to translation theorists and classicists alike.

"Oedipus, king of Thebes, is one of the giant figures of ancient mythology. Through the centuries, his story has inspired works of epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, opera, a gospel musical and more. The myth has been famously deployed in psychology by Sigmund Freud. It may not be too bold to claim that Oedipus is the name from Greco-Roman mythology best known beyond the academy at the present time, thanks to Freud's famous phrase 'the Oedipus complex'. The most famous version of the Oedipus myth from antiquity is the Greek play by Sophocles. But there is another version, the Latin drama by the Roman philosopher and politician Seneca. Seneca's version is an entirely different treatment from that of Sophocles and reflects concerns special to the author and his Roman audience in the first century AD. Moreover, the play actually exercised a much greater influence on European literature and thought than has usually been suspected. This book offers a compact and incisive study of the multi-faceted Oedipus myth, of Seneca as dramatist, of the distinctive characteristics of Seneca's play and of the most important aspects of the reception of the play in European drama and culture. The scope of the book ranges chronologically from Homer's treatment of Oedipus myth in the Odyssey down to a twenty-first century Senecan treatment by a Lebanese Canadian dramatist. No knowledge of Latin or other foreign languages is required"--