The Oxford Book of Latin Verse: From the Earliest Fragments to the End of the Vth Century A.d.

This is poetry excavated from the bones of an empire. Spanning centuries from the first rough fragments scratched onto stone to the sophisticated verses of the late classical period, the anthology gathers what survives of Latin's lyrical heartland, excluding the grand epics and dramas to focus on something more intimate: the love poems, the philosophical meditations, the satirical barbs, the didactic verses that Romans whispered to themselves. Here are voices from the funeral pyres and the symposiums, the private journals and the public monuments, each fragment a door cracked open onto a lost world. The collection moves from the ritual incantations of early Roman religion through the towering achievements of the golden age and into the twilight centuries, tracing how a civilization learned to make language sing. For anyone who has ever felt that English poetry began too late, these pages offer something primal and essential.