Monica R Gale

Biographic Data

ID1160207
NAMEMonica R Gale
GIVEN NAMESMonica R
FAMILY NAMEGale
SIGNATUREGALE M R
AFFILIATIONSTrinity College Dublin
ORCID0000-0002-6032-5718
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS30
TOTAL CITATIONS25
AUTHOR COUNT27
EDITOR COUNT3
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1991
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX2

  • Desire, Agency and the Divine in Catullus and Contemporary Philosophy

    Open AccessMonica R GaleARTICLEReligions2026

    Catullus invokes the love gods Venus and Cupid/Amor some twenty times within the relatively exiguous corpus of his surviving poems. On occasion, their names seem to be little more than metonyms for love, desire or sexual attractiveness; but the modern reader may wonder what we should make of apparently more personalized references, such as the allusion to the ‘two-faced goddess’ in poem 68, or—still more so—the despairing appeal to the gods in ge…

  • The Augustan Space: The Poetics of Geography, Topography and Monumentality

    Open AccessMonica Gale, Sandra Citroni Marchetti et al.BOOKAugustan Space2024

    Augustus famously boasted that, having inherited a city of brick, he bequeathed a city of marble; but the transformation of the City's physical fabric is only one aspect of a pervasive concern with geography, topography and monumentality that dominates Augustan culture and – in particular – Augustan poetry and poetics. Contributors to the present volume bring a range of approaches to bear on the works of Horace, Virgil, Propertius and Ovid, and e…

  • Poetic and Imperial Spaces in Propertius, Books 1–3

    Open AccessMonica R GaleCHAPTERAugustan Space2024

    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 ‘c…

  • Writing Literary History in the Greek and Roman World

    Open AccessEvelyne Prioux, Elisa Romano et al.BOOKWriting Literary History in the…2024

    Covering a wide variety of Greek and Latin texts that span from the Archaic period down to Late Antiquity, this volume represents the first concerted attempt to understand ancient literary history in its full complexity and on its own terms. Abandoning long-standing misconceptions derived from the misleading application of modern assumptions and standards, the volume rehabilitates an often neglected but fundamentally important subject: the Greeks…

  • Epicurus in Rome: Philosophical Perspectives in the Ciceronian Age

    Open AccessGeert Roskam, Daniel P Hanchey et al.BOOKEpicurus in Rome2023

    The role of Greek thought in the final days of the Roman republic is a topic that has garnered much attention in recent years. This volume of essays, commissioned specially from a distinguished international group of scholars, explores the role and influence of Greek philosophy, specifically Epicureanism, in the late republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views of Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosophe…

  • Otium and Voluptas: Catullus and Roman Epicureanism

    Open AccessMonica R GaleCHAPTEREpicurus in Rome2023

    Catullus’ collection contains several clear echoes of the work of two contemporary Epicurean poets, Lucretius and Philodemus. Indeed, several of the neoteric poet’s central themes (the attractions of otium and disengagement from public life; patronage by members of the high elite and its pitfalls; dissatisfaction with the mos maiorum) bring him potentially into close alignment with Epicurean ideals. In this chapter, however, I argue that, on clos…

  • Otium and Voluptas: Catullus and Roman Epicureanism

    Open AccessMonica R GaleCHAPTEREpicurus in Rome2022

    Catullus’ collection contains several clear echoes of the work of two contemporary Epicurean poets, Lucretius and Philodemus. Indeed, several of the neoteric poet’s central themes (the attractions of otium and disengagement from public life; patronage by members of the high elite and its pitfalls; dissatisfaction with the mos maiorum) bring him potentially into close alignment with Epicurean ideals. In this chapter, however, I argue that, on clos…

  • Epicurus in Rome: Philosophical Perspectives in the Ciceronian Age

    Open AccessGeert Roskam, Daniel P Hanchey et al.BOOKEpicurus in Rome2022

    The role of Greek thought in the final days of the Roman republic is a topic that has garnered much attention in recent years. This volume of essays, commissioned specially from a distinguished international group of scholars, explores the role and influence of Greek philosophy, specifically Epicureanism, in the late republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views of Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosophe…

  • Catullus and Augustan Poetry

    Open AccessMonica R GaleCHAPTERCambridge Companion to Catullus2021

    The Catullus of the Augustans is, above all, a poet of love. Regularly paired with Calvus, as in the two quotations above, he is hailed for his doctrina (‘learning’) and lasciuia (‘licentiousness’, ‘playfulness’), and acknowledged as a founding father of erotic elegy: Propertius locates him in the canon of love-poets that also includes Cornelius Gallus, and to which he himself aspires; and Ovid imagines him as coming to greet his successor, the r…

  • Plagues and the Limits of Didactic Authority: Lucretius and Others

    Monica R GaleCHAPTERTeaching through Images2021

  • Texts and Violence in the Roman World

    Monica Gale, Monica R Gale et al.BOOKTexts and Violence in the Roman…2018

  • ‘Te sociam, Ratio…’

    Monica R GaleBOOKGrattius2018

    This chapter investigates Grattius’ close engagement with his Roman didactic predecessors, especially Lucretius and Virgil’s Georgics , to explore the poet’s use of hunting as both metaphor for intellectual enquiry and emblem of cultural development and civilization. Grattius, it is argued, takes on Lucretius’ confidence and authority and reconfigures it to suit the celebratory tone and rhetoric of religious revival prevalent in the age of August…

  • Aliquid putare nugas: Literary filiation, critical communities and reader-response in Catullus

    Open AccessMonica R GaleCHAPTERLatin Literature and Its…2015

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  • Latin Literature and its Transmission

    Open AccessAlessandro Barchiesi, Matthew Reeve et al.BOOKLatin Literature and Its…2015

    This is a series of innovative studies in the textual and literary criticism of Latin literature, exploring how these two branches of the discipline are mutually supportive. The contributors include many leading scholars in the field. Individual essays are devoted to Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, Tacitus and Virgil, and there are also essays on the Renaissance reception of Virgil and on principles of editorial practice. The collectio…

  • Virgil’s Caesar

    Monica R GaleCHAPTERAugustan Poetry And The Roman…2013

    This chapter sees poetic treatments of Julius Caesar as a figure for reflection on the position of Octavian/Augustus in Roman society (vis a vis intertextual relationships with Catullus and Lucretius’ criticism of the corruption of Roman public life). In this context, the poets overtly express the hope that Octavian/Augustus will, in fact, be different from the series of extraordinary leaders whose longer or shorter periods of dominating Roman po…

  • Piety, Labour, and Justice in Lucretius and Hesiod

    Monica R GaleCHAPTERPoetry, Philosophy, Science2013

    This chapter reads Lucretius' didactic poetry in intertextual connection with that of Hesiod, at the level not so much of close verbal correspondences but of wide‐ranging thematic and symbolic interaction. The effect is to create a kind of anti‐Hesiod within Hesiodic allusion, holding up an Epicurean mirror to the Hesiodic world view. The discussion is pursued under three guiding principles of that world view: piety, labour, and justice.

  • Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers

    Open AccessA J Woodman, Ian Du Quesnay et al.BOOKCatullus2012

    In this book, a sequel to Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace (Cambridge University Press, 2002), ten leading Latin scholars provide specially commissioned in-depth discussions of the poetry of Catullus, one of ancient Rome's most favourite and best loved poets. Some chapters focus on the collection as a whole and the interrelationship of various poems; others deal with intertextuality and translation and Catullus' response to his Gre…

  • Lucretius: De Rerum Natura: Book V

    Open AccessTitus Lucretius Carus, Monica R GaleBOOKRerum Natura2008

    For a work written more than two thousand years ago, in a society in many ways quite alien to our own, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura contains much of striking, even startling, contemporary relevance. This is true, above all, of the fifth book, which begins by putting a strong case against what it has recently become fashionable to call 'intelligent design', and ends with an account of human evolution and the development of society in which the limit…

  • Lucretius and previous poetic traditions

    Open AccessMonica R Gale, Monica GaleCHAPTERThe Cambridge Companion to…2007

    Ennius ... noster ... qui primus amoeno detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam ( DRN 1.117-18) Our own Ennius, who first brought down from pleasant Helicon a garland of evergreen leaves auia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante trita solo. iuuat integros accedere fontis atque haurire, iuuatque nouos decerpere flores insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam unde prius nulli uelarint tempora Musae ( DRN 1.926-30 = 4.1-5) I wander through trackl…

  • Didactic Epic

    Monica R Gale, Monica GaleOTHERA Companion to Latin Literature2005

  • Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry: Genre, Tradition and Individuality

    Monica R Gale, Monica GaleBOOKLatin Epic and Didactic Poetry2004

    How is it possible for a poet to find his own individual voice, when he is writing in a tradition so venerable and so constrained by convention as Roman epic? How do poets working in related genres - particularly didactic - conceptualize their relationship to the main epic tradition? The eleven essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field of Roman poetry and its post-Classical receptions, consider some of the strategies which writers f…

  • Virgil on the Nature of Things: The "Georgics", Lucretius, and the Didactic Tradition

    Michael C J Putnam, Monica R GaleARTICLEThe Classical World2003

    Preface List of abbreviations 1. Introduction: influence, allusion, intertextuality 2. Beginnings and endings 3. The gods, the farmer and the natural world 4. Virgil's metamorphoses: mythological allusions 5. Labor improbus 6. The wonders of the natural world 7. The cosmic battlefield: warfare and military imagery 8. Epilogue: the philosopher and the farmer Bibliography Indexes

  • Virgil on the Nature of Things: The "Georgics", Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition

    W Batstone, William W Batstone et al.ARTICLEPhoenix2003

  • Etymological Wordplay and Poetic Succession in Lucretius

    Monica R GaleARTICLEClassical Philology2001

  • Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics , Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition

    Open AccessMonica R GaleBOOKVirgil on the Nature of Things2000

    The Georgics has for many years been a source of fierce controversy among scholars of Latin literature. Is the work optimistic or pessimistic, pro- or anti-Augustan? Should we read it as a eulogy or a bitter critique of Rome and her imperial ambitions? This book suggests that the ambiguity of the poem is the product of a complex and thorough-going engagement with earlier writers in the didactic tradition: Hesiod, Aratus and - above all - Lucretiu…