Aspects of the Language of Latin Poetry

Download or read book Aspects of the Language of Latin Poetry written by Roland Mayer and published by British Academy. This book was released on 1999 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the peoples of ancient Italy, only the Romans committed newly composed poems to writing, and for about 250 years Latin-speakers developed an impressive verse literature. The language had traditional resources of high style, e.g. alliteration, lexical and morphological archaism or grecism, and of course metaphor and word-order; and there were also less obvious resources in the technical vocabularies of law, philosophy, and medicine. The essays in this volume show how the poets in the classical period combined these elements, and so created a poetic medium that could comprehend satire, invective, erotic elegy, drama, lyric, and the grandest heroic epics. These wide-ranging studies will be essential reading for all students of Latin.