Roman epic lays firm claim to being Western civilization's prime literary form. Roman Epic draws together 14 critically and methodologically distinct essays, focusing on particular epicists, their reaction to, influence on, and rewriting of each other. The book examines the formation and transformation of Roman epic from its beginnings in the third century B.C. Saturnian poets Livius and Naevius to the Renaissance Latin epic of Petrarch and Vida.

What results is the revelation of Roman epic not only as Rome's highest poetic genre but as a self-consciously intertextual, primarily political form. The Roman epicist's creative exploitation of his predecessors is not restricted to stylistic similarities and generic codes, but often encompasses more important levels of social, moral and political meaning. In the Roman tradition, the epic form shows an impetus to reform the celebratory values implicit in the form itself, admitting a plurality of interactive, often critical narrative voices.

This book reveals how the epic developed and critically considers the generic and literary tradition to which the texts belong. It demonstrates epic's critical significance for the foundational culture of the Western world.