Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil

<em>The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil</em> uses an enriched tripartite model of Roman culture-touching not only the public and the private but also the solitary-in order to present a radical re-interpretation of Latin literature and of the historical causes of this third sphere's relative<br>invisibility in scholarship. By connecting Cosmos and Imperium to the Individual the solitary sphere was not so much a way of avoiding politics as a political education in itself. As re-imagined by literature in this age literature this sphere was an essential space for the formation of the new<br>Roman citizen of the Augustan revolution and was behind many of the notable features of the literary revolution of Virgil's age: the expansion of the possibilities of the book of poetry the birth of the literary cursus new coordinations of cosmology and politics within strictly organized schemes <br>the attraction of first-person genres and the subjective style. Through close readings of Cicero's late works and the <em>oeuvres</em> of Virgil Horace and Propertius and the works of other authors in the age of Virgil <em>The Solitary Sphere</em> thus presents a revelatory reassessment of the classicism of<br>classical Roman literature and contributes to the study of pre-modern culture more generally especially for traditions that have taken antiquity as too fixed a point in their own literary religious and cultural histories.