Religion is central to Seamus Heaney’s work. Alongside his preoccupations with Catholic and Celtic belief, ancient Greek and Roman religions are significant in Heaney’s methodological palette, in which ‘low intensity’ allusions to aspects of religious culture can inform operations of poetry and ritual. Greek and Roman culture provides Heaney with a repository of spirit-guide figures, symbolic characters such as Heracles and Tiresias, forms and tropes, including funerary rituals, burial, pilgrimage, and katabasis, and entire works which the poet reimagined, such as Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Euripides’s Antigone, in which civic and religious duties intersect in ways germane to the poet’s reflections on his own time.

Dante traces the question of happiness to our nature, knowledge of which is available.His decision to persist in rational inquiry is not arbitrary as rests on such knowledge. At the heart of Paradiso Dante speaks with his ancestor Cacciaguida about Florentine politics and nobility because the needed self-knowledge is gained through reflection on political life. From the contemplative unity characteristic of the previous Heaven to the political conflict in Mars is an ascent.

The key discussion concerns how candidly Dante’s poem should express the truth. The literary question points to the political problem of posed by the enduring tensions among human goods, and these tensions disclose the conflicts inherent in an embodied mind. Among beings that desire and reason, that are “mortal” and aware of their mortality, there is decisive inequality, inequality regarding the willingness and ability to discern truth.The scope of this difference defies the possibility that good can be understood by deduction from a principle or law, making it a matter for inquiry. The life devoted to this inquiry, as indicated in these central Cantos, is available here and now and grounds every genuinely common good. Dante calls his epic of self-reflection a “comedy.”

Chapter 3 samples some ancient conversations across language at the interface of literature and lived experience: lifestyle, in the strictest sense. The title nods at antiquity’s most famous Greco-Roman comparativist, Plutarch; but discussion quickly moves on to the Latin prose miscellanist Aulus Gellius. What can we learn if we press the micro-dramas of philological competition characteristic of Gellius’ so-titled Attic Nights for cultural insights into the ‘parallel lives’ of the Greeks and Romans encountered in them? Next comes a matter earlier raised amid the counterfactual vignettes of Chapter 1: what if we had some stories to tell, against the grain of literary history, about a Greek poet responding to something – anything – written in Latin? Virgil’s fame makes his a good case to ponder here; and the Bay of Naples, where Virgil spent much of his life, invites attention as a microclimate of poetic biculturalism. The last section considers a collection of Greek epigrams assembled by a Greek who enjoyed patronage in first-century CE Rome: in the face of most modern critical work on the Greek Anthology, what happens if the Garland of Philip is read as Roman poetry?

This chapter examines the three foundational strands that shaped early Christianity and, in turn, western thought: Judaism, Hellenistic philosophy, and Roman culture. It begins with Judaism, emphasizing its monotheism, prophetic self-criticism, and teleological view of history – features that deeply influenced Christian theology. The Book of Isaiah is central, offering themes of justice, suffering, and messianic hope later interpreted as prefiguring Christ. The chapter then turns to Hellenistic philosophy – especially, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism – which informed Christian ideas about the soul, virtue, and the good life. These schools stressed moral discipline and the pursuit of wisdom, values that Christianity absorbed and reinterpreted theologically. The Roman contribution centered on imperial power, civic virtue, and especially the Latin language, which became Christianity’s primary medium in the West. Roman thinkers like Cicero and Virgil helped transmit Greek ideas, emphasizing duty, eloquence, and destiny. These strands – Jewish, Greek, and Roman – were not seamlessly integrated, but their dynamic interaction laid the groundwork for a western intellectual tradition rooted in moral inquiry, historical depth, and a universalizing spiritual vision.

This chapter examines the early colonial imaginary of Australia. It demonstrates how there was no unified perception of the land but rather movement between utopic and dystopic visions, often according to audience. The chapter discusses poetic speculation on the expansion of empire into what was viewed as the ‘New World’ and the publicising of the colony as a space of pastoral idyll for prospective emigrants. It also considers the negative depictions of Australia as a penal colony, particularly through broadside ballads that were popular among the working class. Lastly, the chapter analyses the representation of female convicts and the adaptation of the eclogue form by Robert Southey.

I read District and Circle (2006) in the context of a poetry of praise and the influence of Czesław Miłosz. Heaney’s poetry of praise is intimately connected to his sense of place and the title of the collection suggests that Heaney is circling back over his childhood district of Mossbawn. When Heaney turns to Virgil in his final collection Human Chain (2010), he does so partly in place of a Catholicism that has been increasingly displaced throughout his work. However, I conclude that the foundational questions of Heaney’s childhood faith – post-mortem existence, how we commune with the dead, the longing for something beyond the bounds of material sense – account, in part, for his turning to Virgil and, specifically, to Book VI of the Aeneid, a full translation of which was posthumously published in 2016. In the end, in a synthesis of Christian and Classical, Heaney’s poetry finds a unifying vision which allows him to retain a felt sense for his Catholic upbringing even as he moves beyond its orthodox expression.

The introductory chapter to this study of Propertius 4 as a collection composed in the wake of Virgil’s death begins by highlighting some of the more obvious ways in which the elegist advertises his allusive engagement with the Eclogues, Georgics and, in particular, the Aeneid, and how the troping of this engagement as hospitality suggests a relationship that might be cooperative or antagonistic. From there it looks back to the only two Propertian elegies in which the name Vergilius features – 1.8 (ostensibly referring to the Pleiades constellation but, it is argued, punningly invoking the poet) and 2.34 (in a review of Virgil’s career to date), each constructing a relationship between elegiac and epic poetics that, as later chapters show, will be revisited in Book 4. After these preliminary case-studies the Introduction presents a history of approaches to poetic memory by way of a survey of the scholarly responses mobilized by Propertius 4 as a Virgilianizing collection. These approaches are then tested in the laboratory of elegy 4.9, a Virgilio-Propertian diptych on Hercules which, it is argued, is programmatic for allusion and intertextuality as enacted in this collection.

Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

Pastoral as Goldsmith’s model has been overlooked because literary historians still commonly assume that the last notable pastorals were published by Pope in 1709, and that pastoral poetry thereafter declined, or was turned into a mock form by Gay and Swift. In retrospect we see that the old genre system was breaking down, that some traditional genres (e.g., Georgic) were rising in importance and others declining, that new genres and subgenres and mixed forms were appearing. But that was not clear in 1750, when Goldsmith began his literary career and was looking about for models. This chapter surveys the models upon which Goldsmith drew and proposes that, in The Deserted Village, Goldsmith returns to Virgil and to the roots of English pastoral.

This chapter examines Propertius’ poetics of space, particularly as it relates to Roman imperialist rhetoric. Beyond the relatively obvious metapoetic images of height and lowliness, it suggests that Propertius employs a range of other spatial metaphors in his construction of a poetic self-image, drawing notably on the language of boundaries and boundlessness, centre and periphery; here, elegiac poetics capitalises on what the author terms the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ aspects of imperialist discourse, whereby Rome expands to fill the world, but also subsumes or draws in the products and characteristics of all other nations. In his more confident moments, the elegist represents himself not merely as echoing or collaborating with, but as surpassing the achievements of Augustus himself. A similar symbolic rivalry may be seen in Propertius’ self-representation as triumphator; the author links this in turn to the poet’s references to monumental architecture, particularly the ecphrasis of the Temple of Palatine Apollo in 2.31, which may be understood as a figurative monument to the power of poetry, dependent on but not identical with its counterpart in the physical landscape of Rome.

This chapter focuses on three Virgilian entrances to the underworld – Cumae (Aen. 6.237–42), Ampsanctus (Aen. 7. 563–71) and Tainaron (G. 4.464-470). Using the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia (other space) the author argues that these three spaces legitimate multiple forms of religious knowledge, which are, however, linked to the progressive imposition of Augustan authority.