Overview

This book presents the first commentary on the whole of [Tibullus] 3 in English. It consists of a text, translation, introduction and commentary. The text rests on the author's autopsy of the most important manuscripts of [Tibullus]. The prose translation is as literal as possible, in order to bring out clearly the meaning of the Latin. The detailed line-by-line commentary serves to clarify the language and literary associations of the poems and to back up the theory that the whole work was composed by a single unitary author. It argues that what were previously thought of as separate sections of the book, composed by different authors at different times, were in fact the product of a single anonymous poet impersonating, or adopting the mask of, different characters in each section: Lygdamus (poems 1-6), a young Tibullus (7), a commentator on Sulpicia's affair with Cerinthus (8-12), Sulpicia (13-18) and Tibullus (19-20). The close connections and associations between these different sections and their use of the same Augustan intertexts are shown to favour a unitary interpretation of the work. The main literary inspiration for the work, this volume argues, comes from the elegists of the Augustan period, but its date of composition could have been late in the first century AD, linking it with the other pseudepigraphical writings of this century such as the Virgilian and Ovidian Appendices.

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9781527568235

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'[T]his is a valuable work that will be welcomed by students and scholars alike. It renders this endlessly intriguing collection more accessible than it ever has been, and makes a compelling case that we should take it seriously as a work of art and explore the relationships between its parts with careful attention.'Adrian GrampsLecturer in Latin, University of St Andrews

Author Information

Robert Maltby is Emeritus Professor of Latin Philology at the University of Leeds, UK. After graduating from Cambridge, he worked on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich before taking up a lectureship in Latin at Sheffield. He has also served as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Munich and at All Souls' College, Oxford. His research interests include Roman comedy and elegy and ancient etymological and linguistic theory. His main publications include A Lexicon of Latin Etymologies (1991), Tibullus: Elegies. Text, Introduction and Commentary (2002), a commentary on Terence's Phormio (2012) and Wiley's Real Latin: Learning Latin from the Source (with Kenneth Belcher, 2014). He is currently contributing to parts of a new edition of Fragmentary Republican Latin for the Loeb Classical Library.

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