Ovid S Terence

The Illustrated Afterlife of Terence’s Comedies (800–1200)

Widely read as school texts, the comedies by the Roman dramatist Terence have come down to us in hundreds of medieval copies. Fourteen of the manuscripts produced between 800 and 1200 were given some kind of illustration. In this volume, Beatrice Radden Keefe explores the semiotics of the imagery found in the earliest illustrated Terence manuscripts, and its relationship to the iconography of comedy and theatre from antiquity. She examines six further manuscripts to show how later illustrators abandoned this imagery to varying degrees, finding new emphases and creating new layers of meaning. Illustrators of Terence, it is demonstrated here, brought a range of interests to illustrating the comedies, clarifying their narrative, incorporating social commentary and moralisation, and linking them with Christian allegorical traditions.

Greek and Latin Love

It is often claimed that the kind of love that is variously deemed 'romantic' or 'true' did not exist in antiquity. Yet, ancient literature abounds with stories that seem to adhere precisely to this kind of love. This volume focuses on such literature and the concepts of love it espouses. The volume differs from and challenges much existing classical scholarship which has traditionally privileged the theme of sex over love and prose-genres over those of poetry. By conversely focusing on love and poetry, the present volume freshly explores central poets in ancient literature, such Homer, Sappho, Terence, Catullus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid, alongside less canonized, such as the anonymous poet of The Lament for Bion, Philodemus and Sulpicia. The chapters, which are written by world-leading as well as younger scholars, reveal that Greek and Latin concepts of love seem interconnected, that such love is as relevant for hetero- as homoerotic couples, and that such ideas of love follow the mainstream of poetry throughout antiquity. In addition to the general reader interested in the history of love, this volume is relevant for students and scholars of the ancient world and the poetic tradition.

Cicero pro S. Roscio Amerino, tr. by T.J. Arnold