Inspired by Theodore Papanghelis’ Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (1987), this collective volume brings together seventeen contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the different ways in which Latin authors and some of their modern readers created narratives of life, love and death. Taken together the papers offer stimulating readings of Latin texts over many centuries, examined in a variety of genres and from various perspectives: poetics and authorial self-fashioning; intertextuality; fiction and ‘reality’; gender and queer studies; narratological readings; temporality and aesthetics; genre and meta-genre; structures of the narrative and transgression of boundaries on the ideological and the formalistic level; reception; meta-dramatic and feminist accounts-the female voice. Overall, the articles offer rich insights into the handling and development of these narratives from Classical Greece through Rome up to modern English poetry.

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in classical studies in the ways meaning is generated through the medium of intertextuality, namely how different texts of the same or different authors communicate and interact with each other. Attention (although on a lesser scale) has also been paid to the manner in which meaning is produced through interaction between various parts of the same text or body of texts within the overall production of a single author, namely intratextuality. Taking off from the seminal volume on Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations, edited by A. Sharrock / H. Morales (Oxford 2000), which largely sets the theoretical framework for such internal associations within classical texts, this collective volume brings together twenty-seven contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the evolution of intratextuality from Late Republic to Late Antiquity across a wide range of authors, genres and historical periods. Of particular interest are also the combined instances of intra- and intertextual poetics as well as the way in which intratextuality in Latin literature draws on reading practices and critical methods already theorized and operative in Greek antiquity.

Considering the ubiquity of rhetorical training in antiquity, the volume starts from the premise that every first-person statement in ancient literature is in some way rhetorically modelled and aesthetically shaped. Focusing on different types of Greek and Latin literature, poetry and prose, from the Archaic Age to Late Antiquity, the contributions analyse the use and modelling of gender-specific elements in different types of first-person speech, be it that the speaker is (represented as) the author of a work, be it that they feature as characters in the work, narrating their own story or that of others. In doing so, they do not only offer new insights into the rhetorical strategies and literary techniques used to construct a gendered ‘I’ in ancient literature. They also address the form and function of first-person discourse in classical literature in general, touching on fields of research that have increasingly come into focus in recent years, such as authorship studies, studies concerning the ancient notion(s) of the literary persona, as well as a historical narratology that discusses concepts such as the narrator or the literary character in ancient literary theory and practice.

Inspired by Theodore Papanghelis’ Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (1987), this collective volume brings together seventeen contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the different ways in which Latin authors and some of their modern readers created narratives of life, love and death. Taken together the papers offer stimulating readings of Latin texts over many centuries, examined in a variety of genres and from various perspectives: poetics and authorial self-fashioning; intertextuality; fiction and ‘reality’; gender and queer studies; narratological readings; temporality and aesthetics; genre and meta-genre; structures of the narrative and transgression of boundaries on the ideological and the formalistic level; reception; meta-dramatic and feminist accounts-the female voice. Overall, the articles offer rich insights into the handling and development of these narratives from Classical Greece through Rome up to modern English poetry.