Pericles’ funeral oration has played a significant public role, especially in Anglophone countries, over the last century. Renaissance humanists had valued it simply as a masterful piece of oratory, to be studied for its literary qualities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was seen primarily as a source of historical information about Athenian culture, with no present significance. The great change came in the early nineteenth century, when radical and liberal thinkers in Britain, for whom democracy was no longer a threat but a promise, focussed increasingly on the contents of the speech. Cultural achievement was, they argued, intimately bound up with the participation of the people in public life. For them, the proof was in Pericles’ praise of Athens and its institutions. Ancient and modern democracy were now elided, and the words of this funeral speech were thus made available for politicians seeking to celebrate their own societies, from the United States of America to the European Union. These readers of the funeral oration as a celebration of democracy almost entirely ignored the original context of the speech. Developments in modern warfare as well as the rise of the mass citizen army changed this.

Lysias’s funeral speech is a paradoxical work. In theory a funeral speech by a foreign speech-writer should not exist. At first glance, this oration seems to point to a failure of process. What does it say about Athenian democracy that it had carefully selected a man to deliver a speech who needed to employ a speech-writer because, presumably, he was not up to the task of writing the speech himself? Moreover, how could it be that the best person to write an encomium of Athens is not an Athenian, but a metic? Lysias, what is more, was not just any metic, but one to whom Athenian democracy had repudiated a grant of citizenship. Lysias’ funeral speech thus potentially disrupts any straightforward story that we might want to tell about the relationship between the funeral oration, citizenship and civic ideology. His speech highlights the constructed nature of the genre’s statements about normative values. This chapter explores the implications of this speech for our understanding of the epitaphic tradition. It reviews the evidence for the authorship and authenticity of Lysias’ funeral speech. It canvasses the various possibilities for the construction and dissemination of his text.

Within the group of classical Greek texts that we call funeral speeches, two have been passed down to us only in fragmentary form. We have just one single sentence from Archinus’ Epitaphios, and we know only a small number of relatively short quotations and paraphrases from Gorgias’ Epitaphios. Not surprisingly, these two texts are the least studied and the least well understood within the group of known funeral speeches. This chapter show shows that Gorgias’ Epitaphios played a vitally important role in the early formation of the literary genre. It begins with an overview of the text and the tradition of Gorgias’ literary version of a funeral oration before exploring its content, date, audience and purpose as well as its impact on the later funeral speeches. This chapter concludes that Gorgias’ Epitaphios was most likely composed and disseminated at some point in the last quarter of the fifth century, that the text was intended to be received primarily by an elite literary audience, and that Gorgias’ Epitaphios conveyed direct criticism of Athenian power politics at the time.

This volume reflects on modes of scholarship in Latin literature: what texts do we read? How do we read them? And why? The introductory chapter first surveys the tools of the trade in the twenty-first century, then asks how ‘classical Latin’ is defined. We reflect on the exclusion of Christian Latin texts from the Oxford Latin Dictionary, try to quantify the corpus of surviving classical Latin, and uncover striking continuities between the canon of authors prescribed by Quintilian and modern teaching and research in classical Latin; commensurately, we draw attention to the neglect suffered by most surviving classical Latin authors and still more by the pagan and Christian texts of late antiquity. In the process we set an agenda for the volume as a whole, of ‘decentring’ classical Latin, and offer some first points of orientation in the late antique, mediaeval and early modern eras. Third, we look afresh at relations between Latin and fellow sub-disciplines in Classics and beyond. How much do we have in common, and what problems stand in the way of more successful communication? We close with some reflections on ‘close reading’ and on the possibility of evolving ‘distant reading’.

This chapter explores the intersections between work by literary scholars with that done in synchronic and diachronic Latin linguistics. As an example of the different approaches and different toolkits employed by the linguist and the literary scholar, I discuss the way linguists have explained the phrase Veneres Cupidinesque in Catullus 3.1, contrasted with interpretations given in commentaries on Catullus and in Latin dictionaries. In the linguists’ account, the phrase is an archaism which continues an earlier Indo-European pattern used to refer to pairs, finding its closest parallels in Sanskrit texts. I then compare literary Latin to other registers and dialects, and discuss the difficulties involved in the term ‘Vulgar Latin’. The chapter also examines other areas in which linguistic scholarship might be usefully consulted by readers of Latin literature: word accent, vowel-length and metre; etymology, semantics and the lexicography; grammars and monographs on morphology, syntax and discourse analysis, including in particular recent approaches using sociolinguistics. Passages from Catullus are discussed throughout.

It is not hard to find examples of the use of Latin in nineteenth-century Cambridge to reject modernity or to mystify and police the boundaries of elite status and existing social and imperial hierarchies. But concentration on such examples obscures a history of the expression of radical ideas in Latin and of engagement with here-and-now issues. How can we incorporate such complexity into our understanding of the history of Latin studies, and avoid mistaking one side of an argument for the standard view of the elite? And how should Latin face its future or even its present? We should be brave enough to insist that the history of ‘western civilisation’ (not uniquely admirable or the only one to deserve attention) is incomprehensible without Latin.

This chapter considers the concept of an ‘edition’ from two different perspectives. In the first half, Bob Kaster writes as an editor preparing a critical edition for conventional publication, first retrieving the relevant data - chiefly, the versions preserved in manuscripts - then analysing them to form a theory of the text’s transmission that began with the author’s original copy. Much attention is given to the ‘stemmatic method’, used to sift variations among the transmitted versions, aiming to establish the archetype - the latest copy of the text absent which no other copies would survive - or to show that no archetype can be reconstructed, or even to show that the notion of an ‘author’s original’ is misconceived. In the second half, Sam Huskey writes as the director of the Digital Latin Library, a project that aims to move critical editions of Latin texts to a digital paradigm. To demonstrate that such a transition does not render obsolete the methods and skills described in the first part of the chapter, but rather depends on them, traditional editions are described as databases of information encoded visually (e.g. with typography and layout). The experiences of two editors making this transition close this part of the chapter.

Since Kristeva invented the term in the late 1960s, intertextuality has become a dominant concern in Latin literature, despite the fact that Latinists often use the term in a narrow sense. A brief history of intertextuality enables this chapter to model different understandings of intertextuality across different genres and periods. Consideration begins with a passage of Virgil long recognised as a calque of Homer, and moves to other maximal cases of intertextuality in Plautus and Terence. Awareness of the dynamics and ideological power of intertextuality enables fuller consideration of the metaphors with which such passages as these comment on their situation in wider networks of text. The importance of historical context is discussed through several phenomena prevalent in late antiquity, namely cento poetry, compilation and typological interpretation. Developments across these periods in the technology of text focus attention on the cognitive and material dimensions of memory. The chapter closes by putting intertextual memory in Latin literature into dialogue with emerging methods of reading enabled by digital corpora, search algorithms, hypertext and linked data.

Often viewed as derivative, philosophy written in Latin has in recent years been enjoying a scholarly renaissance, as critics realise that philosophical thought does not develop in a vacuum but is intrinsically linked to the time, place and language in which it is expressed.This chapter brings a historicising approach to the phenomenon of Roman philosophy, combining a diachronic narrative with a focus on particular themes.After considering the Roman adoption of Greek philosophy in the second century BCE, I use Lucretius as a case study for the Latinisation of Greek thought and Cicero as an example of the political and cultural uses of philosophy in the late Republic.I explore some of the many appearances of philosophy in Latin poetry – evidence of the saturation of the Roman cultural imaginary with philosophical ideas and the fact that Latin philosophical writing was not restricted to genres viewed as philosophical.Moving into the Empire, I discuss Seneca as a proponent of philosophy as a way of life and consider the self-representation of philosophers, with a focus on Apuleius, before concluding with an exploration of the Christianisation of philosophy in late antiquity.

This chapter introduces the rich intersections between Latin literature and Roman material culture. Why should Latin scholars concern themselves with ancient objects? How might study of Roman physical remains inform an understanding of Latin literature? In what ways do attitudes towards Roman material remains align with disciplinary approaches to interpreting Latin literature? The chapter proceeds in seven interconnected parts. The first examines the materiality of Roman texts, introducing the picture-poems of Optatian. This leads to cultural ideas about words and images – and not least to the artefactual nature of manuscripts in both roll and codex. Late-antique ‘illustrated’ manuscripts take us to the rhetorical phenomenon of ‘ecphrasis’. Ecphrasis has been much discussed in recent years; but there remains a reluctance to look across the landscapes of art and text: a residual blindness to the ‘cyclical’ dynamics between visual and verbal media. The point leads to an analysis of words and images displayed in a shared environment, as well as some of the Roman rhetorical conceptual underpinnings. It also leads, in the final section, to variables of education, learning and literacy.