Fifty Years at the Sibyl's Heels

This is a posthumous selection of 42 articles from the 150 which Nicholas Horsfall (1946–2019) wrote over a span of fifty years. Horsfall was prodigiously learned and, although best known for his five massive and dauntingly erudite commentaries on Virgil, was both a Latinist and a Romanist; the selection exemplifies the wide range of his interests and the coherence of his approach. Many of the Virgilian papers, which form the majority of the selection, are classics, and all of them command attention. This Virgilian concentration does not detract, however, from the extreme interest and value of the non-Virgilian papers, several of which were far ahead of their time and have led to standard treatments of their subjects, and all of which remain thought-provoking. Horsfall delighted in publishing in a wide variety of journals in many different countries, and he wrote in more than one language. Five of the papers (including his ground-breaking paper on Camilla) appear here in an English translation for the first time; almost half the papers are not online or easily found. The collection illustrates well his intellectual curiosity and his need to keep searching and asking questions while accepting that there may be no answers: ‘it has become, in some quarters, difficult or dangerous to say we do not know or, worse, “we cannot know”, or so much as hint that there is something disquieting about the evidence that remains’ (‘The Prehistory of Latin Poetry’)

Art · Literature · Poetry · Selection (genetic algorithm · Statistics · Value (mathematics · Variety (cybernetics · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Computer Science · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History · Mathematics · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Classical philology

• A Misunderstood Passage and an Unnecessary Deletion in Aeneid 11.399–409

  Sergio Casali•Classical Philology•2023

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• Deserta regna

  Brian W Breed•Classical Philology•2024

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