Abstract

In line with a growing trend to approach classics of Roman literature as much through their successors as through their antecedents, this essay offers a pair of case-studies in the post-antique reception of Cicero and Ovid. With an eye to the brief of the present volume, each case-study moves towards a crux locatable in the last decade, trying to show that our characteristic ways of interpreting a Latin author are implicated in changing ideas about the so-called "Classical Tradition" inside and outside the academy. The first part of the essay offers snapshots of the "Ciceronian man" from Petrarch to the present day; the second considers a new Ovidianism outside the academy, which has yielded a surprising range of re-readings of the Metamorphoses since the early 1990s.

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