How is it possible for a poet writing in a tradition so venerable and so constrained by convention as Roman epic to find his own individual voice? How do poets working in related genres--particularly didactic--see their relationship to the main epic tradition? The eleven new essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field of Roman poetry and its post-Classical receptions, consider some of the strategies which writers from Lucretius onwards have employed in negotiating their relationship with their literary forebears, and staking out a place for their own work within a tradition stretching back to Hesoid and Homer.
