The Philosophizing Muse: The Influence of Greek Philosophy on Roman Poetry

Despite the Romans’ reputation for being disdainful of abstract speculation, Latin poetry from its very beginning was deeply permeated by Greek philosophy. Philosophical elements and commonplaces have been identified and appreciated in a wide range of writers, but the extent of the Greek philosophical influence, and in particular the impact of Pythagorean, Empedoclean, Epicurean and Stoic doctrines, on Latin verse has never been fully investigated. In this volume, an international group of scholars specialising in Roman literature and the reception of the Greek philosophical tradition have come together to analyse the debt of Latin poetry to Greek philosophy across a range of authors, from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD. The volume contains ten chapters, which examine Plautus, Ennius, Cato and Lucilius (Dorota Dutsch); Lucretius (Gordon Campbell); Vergil (Joseph Farrell); Horace (David Armstrong); Ovid (Myrto Garani); Manilius (Ilaria Ramelli); Seneca (Claudia Wiener); Lucan (Francesca D'Alessandro Behr); Persius (Shadi Bartsch); and Valerius Flaccus (Andrew Zissos). The contributors address the poems in a variety of ways, each according to the nature of the work under consideration and its particular relation to Greek philosophy. The essays are all original, published for the first time in this volume, and they illustrate the subtle ways in which these Roman poets absorbed and transformed their sources.