Timothy Saunders. Bucolic Ecology: Virgil’s Eclogues and the Environmental Literary Tradition. London: Duckworth, 2008; Ellen Oliensis. Freud’s Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [Book review]

One of the most exciting books that I have ever read in classical studies is Charles Martindale's Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, the second volume in the consistently interesting series Roman Literature and Its Contexts, published by Cambridge University Press. Here Martindale rejects the positivism of empirical philology (orthodox in Latin studies at that time), and creatively engages Latin poetry (Virgil, Ovid, Lucan) with modern critical theory, in particular deconstruction (Derrida) and hermeneutics (Gadamer). Over the ensuing two decades approaches to Latin literature have diversified considerably and the two monographs under consideration continue this trend.