To Munro's conjecture, which has been accepted by Diels , S. B. Smith , Bailey , Büchner , Martin , and M. F. Smith , there is a serious, possibly a fatal, objection: the genitive plural of hiems is a grammarians' figment and never occurs in classical Latin ; while Lachmann's conjecture is palaeographically improbable. Read ad gelidas rigidasque pruinas; rigidas was omitted by haplography, a fecund source of corruption, and hiemis then supplied from the context to repair the metre. (...) Cf. 2.431 denique iam calidos ignis gelidamque pruinam, 2.521 hinc flammis Mine rigidis infesta pruinis, and, for the collocation of the two adjectives, 2.858 nec frigus neque item calidum tepidumque uaporem. (shrink)

The sixty years between 43 BC, when Cicero was assassinated, and AD 17, when Ovid died in exile and disgrace, saw an unexampled explosion of literary creativity in Rome. Fresh ground was broken in almost every existing genre, and a new kind of specifically Roman poetry, the personal love-elegy, was born, flourished, and succumbed to its own success. Latin literature now became, in the familiar modern sense of the word, classical: a balanced fusion of what was best and most stimulating (...) in earlier Greek and Roman writing, charged with new and original life by the individual genius of, most particularly, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. Augustan literature, conventionally viewed as the expression in writing of the age itself - political and social stability reflected in artistic equilibrium - turns out on a close and critical reading to have been subject to the same stresses and strains as the society in and for which it was produced. In appraising the monumental literary achievements of the age the underlying tensions and contradictions are not ignored. The critical discussions in this volume do full justice to the complexity and subtlety of the literature itself. (shrink)