«Дети мои или иной кто, слушая эту грамотку, не посмейтесь, но кому из детей моих она будет люба, пусть примет ее в сердце свое и не станет лениться, а будет трудиться. Прежде всего, Бога ради и души своей. Страх имейте Божий в сердце своем и милостыню давайте нескудую, это ведь начало всякого добра. …» ...
Not much can be known about the life of Maximianus, who has been called «the last of the Roman poets,» beyond what can be inferred from his poetry. He was most likely a native of Tuscany, probably lived until the middle of the sixth century, and, at an advanced age, went as a diplomat to the emperor's court at Constantinople. A. M. Juster has translated the complete elegies of Maximianus faithfully but not literally, resulting in texts tha ...
Written sometime in the 1170s, Walter of Chatillon's Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great loomed as large on literary horizons as the works on Jean de Meun, Dante, or Boccaccio. Within a few decades of its composition, the poem had become a standard text of the literary curriculum. Virtually all authors of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries knew the poem. And an extraordinary two hundred surviving manuscripts, elaborately a ...
The most sophisticated and daring poetic ironist of the early Roman Empire, Publius Ovidius Naso, is perhaps best known for his oft-imitated Metamorphoses . But the Roman poet also wrote lively and lewd verse on the subjects of love, sex, marriage, and adultery—a playful parody of the earnest erotic poetry traditions established by his literary ancestors. The Amores , Ovid's first completed book of poetry, explores the conventio ...
The Roman philosopher and dramatic critic Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-3 B.C.), known in English as Horace, was also the most famous lyric poet of his age. Written in the troubled decade ending with the establishment of Augustus's regime, his Satires provide trenchant social commentary on men's perennial enslavement to money, power, fame, and sex. Not as frequently translated as his Odes, in recent decades the Satires have been rendere ...
Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire—a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid , he wrote two other collections of poems: the Georgics and the Bucolics , or Eclogues . The Eclogues were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources sa ...
The great poetic tradition of pre-Christian Scandinavia is known to us almost exclusively though the Poetic Edda . The poems originated in Iceland, Norway, and Greenland between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, when they were compiled in a unique manuscript known as the Codex Regius . The poems are primarily lyrical rather than narrative. Terry's readable translation includes the magnificent cosmological poem Völusp&aacu ...
