What's in a Name?: The Significance of Proper Names in Classical Latin Literature

"Latin poets and prose writers of the classical period and later used - and withheld - names subtly and to important effect. Here, in eleven new essays, an eminent international cast explore themes which include `speaking' names, often involving bilingual Latin/Greek play; the ways in which persons and objects are named in contexts of invective or endearment; the significant suppression or changing of names; the religious and historical significances of names; the uses of names in literary catalogues; names as devices to structure a group of shorter poems.

Joan Booth is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Leiden University in The Netherlands. She was formerly Reader in Classics at the University of Wales, Swansea, and is author of A Commentary on Ovid, Amores II. Robert Maltby is Professor of Latin Philology at the University of Leeds. He graduated from Cambridge and worked on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich and at the Department of Classics in Sheffield before moving to Leeds in 1989. His main publications are A Selection of Latin Love Elegy (Bristol 1980), A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (Leeds 1991) and Tibullus: Elegies, Text, Introduction and Commentary (Cambridge 2002). His research interests include Roman Comedy and Elegy and ancient etymological and linguistic theory.