Grattius Hunting an Augustan Poet

Grattius' Cynegetica, a Roman didactic poem on hunting with dogs, is the author's only surviving work, though it reaches us now in an incomplete form. Thanks to a passing reference by Ovid in his Epistulae ex Ponto it can confidently be dated to the Augustan period, and yet while his literary contemporaries have been and continue to be subjects of academic scrutiny, Grattius is seldom read and remains almost completely unappreciated in classical and literary scholarship.

This volume is the first book-length study of Grattius in English or any other language and sets out to rehabilitate the neglected poet by making him and his work accessible to a wide audience. Prefaced by an introduction to the poet and his work, as well as the Latin text of Cynegetica and a new English translation, it presents a broad collection of interpretive essays from an international team of scholars. These essays explore the poem within its literary, intellectual, and socio-political contexts and look forward to Grattius' (more charitable) posthumous reception in Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As a whole they aim to reveal his enduring relevance for the tradition of didactic poetry and the study of other Augustan poetry and culture, and to provide an impetus for future discussions.

Steven J. Green, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, Yale-NUS College Singapore, and Honorary Research Fellow, University College London

Steven J. Green is Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Yale-NUS College Singapore and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. He specializes in Roman literature and culture of the first centuries BCE and CE and his major publications have so far focused around Ovid, Manilius, Roman didactic poetry, the interaction between Roman literature and religious experience, and the reception of the classical world in twenty-first-century Hollywood film. His latest monograph is Disclosure and Discretion in Roman Astrology: Manilius and his Augustan Contemporaries (OUP, 2014).

Frontmatter
List of Contributors
Introduction
Text and Translation
Roman Didactic and Epic Interactions
1. Grattius' Cynegetica: A Protean Poem at the Heart of the Roman Didactic Tradition, Giulia Fanti
2. 'te sociam, Ratio . . .': Hunting as Paradigm in the Cynegetica, Monica R. Gale
3. Hunt as War and War as Hunt: Grattius' Cynegetica and Virgil's Aeneid, Boris Kayachev
4. Ars Venandi: The Art of Hunting in Grattius' Cynegetica and Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Christina Tsaknaki
Hunting and the World
5. Motion in Grattius, G. O. Hutchinson
6. Grattius and Augustus: Hunting for an Emperor, Steven J. Green
Mythical Hunters
7. The Conditions of Poetic Immortality: Epicurus, Daphnis, and Hagnon, Lisa Whitlatch
8. Authorial Surrogates in Grattius' Cynegetica, Donncha O Rourke
Grattius in the Early Modern Period
9. Hunting with Hounds in Neo-Latin: The Reception of Grattius from Fracastoro to Vaniere, Victoria Moul
10. Hunting and the Seventeenth-Century English Gentleman: Christopher Wase's Translation of Grattius' Cynegeticon (1654), Mike Waters
Appendix: Slaves, Poetry, and the Case against Transposition of Verses 61-74
Endmatter
Bibliography
Index