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Preface
In our Guide to Latin Elegy and Lyric, we hope to reach both students of Classics and Latin poetry at various levels and those who are interested in the ancient world in an avocational way. When I (Barbara Gold) first reached out to Genevieve Liveley about being my co-author, I don’t think that either of us had any idea how hard it would be to write about Latin elegy and lyric for people who might not know any Latin. But now that we have tackled writers like Catullus, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Sulpicia with exactly that audience in mind, I think that the two of us understand Latin elegy and lyric in a different and exciting way. We hope that our readers will be equally excited about this fantastic poetry and might even be tempted to learn a bit of Latin so that they could have a different sort of entry into the poetry.
We have included lots of Latin to help illustrate our discussions and offer a pathway towards some deeper insights into this poetry, but we have included our own translations for everything. We have tried to give some historical and cultural context for each of the authors and then to open up the world of each author by looking at themes, language, and ideas in their poems as well as possible modes of reception. We are very aware that reception of this poetry or any literature will vary depending upon who is doing the reading, so we hope that our understanding of this poetry will allow other, different interpretations that will open up the poetry in interesting and unforeseen ways.
We have included ten chapters: seven are devoted to individual authors or a set of authors, one to contexts of the poetry, one to major themes, and one to critical approaches. We have also written a preliminary chapter of Introduction on “How to Read a Latin Lyric or Elegiac Poem” and a pedagogical section, “How to Teach Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry”.
Our first main chapter covers the literary, political, and social contexts of the turbulent
