Latin Poetics and Poetic Theory

This paper examines references to wormwood in Roman literature (primarily the works of Lucretius and Ovid) and argues that modern readers must contextualize these references alongside ancient botanical knowledge about wormwood to understand their placement in Roman poetry.

Scholarship on Neotericism – that late Republican literary thing that Catullus is supposed to have been associated with – has been bedevilled with uncertainty. Were the Neoterics a tight-knit school of poets who broke from the earlier Latin tradition as, e.g., Lyne 1978, Schmidt 1996, and Johnson 2007 have thought? or was Neotericism instead a messy and wide-ranging literary movement (Alfonsi 1945, Bardon 1952, Hollis 2007)?

In his study of Latin poetic diction Unpoetische Wörter, Bertil Axelson presents a compelling argument that Horace uses a particularly prosaic vocabulary in the Odes (