Commenting on the Past

This Festschrift celebrates the career of Christina S. Kraus.  For nearly four decades, Professor Kraus has been an influential voice, contributing to and sometimes defining numerous sub-fields in the study of classical literature, from commentaries to prose style and from Greek tragedy to Roman historians.  She has collaborated with scholars to produce volumes on the commentary as a genre of scholarship and the idea of the canon. She is perhaps best known for her work on Livy and Roman historiography.

The resulting volume contains essays on Roman historians (Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus), prose style (Polybius, Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Seneca), intertextuality (Sallust, Virgil, Livy, Tacitus, Augustine), epistolography, reception (the Varronian disaster, Tacitism, George Bernard Shaw), and paratragedy.

In addition to their thematic unity, the papers are brought together both by cross-references and by the editors’ preface, which highlights the interconnections among the individual contributions. The preface also provides summaries of the essays.

Jane D. Chaplin, Middlebury College, Middlebury Vermont, USA; Irene Peirano Garrison, Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts, USA; Christopher Stray, Swansea University, Swansea, UK.