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The Ancient
Lives of Virgil
Edited by Phillip Hardie and Anton Powell
ISBN: 9781910589618 I Hardback
The Ancient Lives of the poet Virgil, written
in prose or verse, are of great, though controversial, influence.
They have often been scorned by modern critics, for trying to construct
biography of the poet from allegorical reading of his poems. Yet
some elements of the Lives are trusted, and quietly adopted as canonical,
such as the dating of Virgil’s birth and death. Some vignettes
in the Lives have been cherished for their image of an emotive poet
(see jacket illustration). Less romantic detail in the Lives, as
of Virgil’s privileged material circumstances at the heart
of the Augustan regime, has been less regarded.
The present volume, from a distinguished international team, aims
to revalue the Ancient Lives of Virgil in a variety of scholarly
genres.
Allegory in the Lives is here studied for its own sake, as part of
a developed Graeco- Roman school of interpretation. The literary
character of the verse Life attributed to Phocas is respectfully
analysed. Certain political references within the best-known prose
Life, the `Suetonian-Donatan’, are shown to be apparently independent
of allegory, and to be worth examining for new information on the
poet’s personal history. And ideas about Virgil received and
developed with brio in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are here
traced back to the Lives of the poet composed in Antiquity.
The editors Philip Hardie is Senior Research Fellow of Trinity
College and Honorary Professor of Latin at the University of Cambridge.
An international authority on Classical Latin poetry and its reception,
his most recent monograph is The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History
of Virgil’s Aeneid (I.B.Tauris, 2014).
Anton Powell is a specialist on Sparta, Thucydides – and the
literature of the Roman revolution. His monograph Virgil the Partisan:
A Study in the Re-integration of Classics (CPW, 2008) was awarded
the prize of the Vergilian Society of America for ‘the book
which makes the greatest contribution toward our understanding and
appreciation of Vergil’.
The contributors: Irene Peirano Garrison Nora Goldschmidt Stephen
Harrison Ahuvia Kahane Andrew Laird Scott McGill Anton Powell Hans
Smolenaars Fabio Stok