About

Carole Newlands is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Berkeley. Her principal areas of research include Augustan and post-Augustan poetry, with strong interests in late Antique and Medieval poetry, as well as the reception of classical texts. She has held research fellowships at Clare Hall Cambridge and at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, along with fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation. Additionally, she has served as a visiting NEH Professor at the University of Richmond, a William Evans Fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and a research fellow at the Center for Humanities at the National University of Australia. Her scholarly work includes numerous articles on classical and medieval literature, with her first book focusing on Ovid’s Fasti, titled 'Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti,' published by Cornell University Press in 1995. She continues to publish on Ovid’s poetry, including a monograph in the Understanding Classics series and a co-edited handbook on Ovid. Her work on Statius includes two monographs, a commentary on Statius’ Siluae Book 2, and co-editing the Brill Companion to Statius. Among her current projects is a book titled 'Scotland and the Classics: Poetics, Translation, and Cultural Identity.'

Research topics

• Art
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Literature
• History
• Physics
• Ecology
• Classics
• Law
• Art history
• Astronomy
• Biology

Selected publications

• FRANCA ELA CONSOLINO (Ed.), After Ovid: Aspects of the Reception of Ovid in Literature and Iconography. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022. Pp. 374, illus. <scp>isbn</scp> : 9782503592503. €75.00.

  The Journal of Roman Studies · 2025-03-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This collection derives from a conference held at the University of L'Aquila in the wake of Ovid's bimillennial celebrations.It addresses a rich variety of Latin texts from the fourth century to the eighteenth, as well as late medieval and Renaissance works of art and book illustrations.All fourteen contributors are Italian, but all but one of the essays are in English, allowing Anglophone readers to access a rich range of Italian scholarship of the past half-century.The volume is organised diachronically, beginning with S. Filosini's study of the Psychomachia of the Late Antique poet Prudentius, whose description of the dazzling chariot of Luxuria owes much to Ovid's description of the doors of the Palace of the Sun at the start of Met. 2. Ovid's narratives of the fall of Phaethon and Hippolytus from their respective chariots underpin the imagery of Luxuria's demise.More surprising is Filosini's demonstration that Sobrietas' speech admonishing her errant troops owes much to Pentheus' impotent address to the Theban citizens at the end of Met. 4. While the Aeneid has been generally assumed to be Prudentius' main model, Ovid's poetry clearly plays important narrative and didactic functions as a text highly adaptable to new historical and epistemological circumstances.M.-P.Piere turns to a lesser-known author, the fifth-century North African poet Reposianus, author of the Concubitus Martis et Veneris; analysing the ecphrasis of the beautiful, Ovidian-style grove in which the two lovers meet, she argues that Ovidian influence blends with a North African culture where classical theatre in the form of pantomime remained popular.D. de Gianni addresses Ovidian allusions in the sixth/ seventh-century author Isidore of Seville, including Ovid's account of the Creation at the start of the Met.While often indirect, such references, De Gianni argues, inform Isidore's integrationist ideal of classical and Christian thought.Moving into the Middle Ages, F. Marzella's study of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, a long hexameter poem composed around 1150, reframes it as resting on Ovidian models as much as on Welsh sources for the Arthurian legend, anticipating a new age of experimentation, the aetas Ovidiana.The following two essays on metrics and linguistics will be of particular interest to specialists in these fields.L. Ceccarelli studies the metrical technique of medieval Roman comedy in comparison with Ovid's elegiac distich (offering valuable insight into Ovid's handling of the elegiac metre); while L. Corona presents ongoing work exploring the usefulness of early Italian translations of the Metamorphoses for tracking the development of the Italian vernacular.The next four essays consider Ovidian themes in late medieval and early modern art.G. Zanichelli discusses the innovative tradition of illumination that accompanied

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction

  2023-05-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter introduces readers to the volume on the Silvae. It showcases Statius’ complex, rich intertextuality on display in his exploration of villa culture, of patronage and friendship, and of life on the Bay of Naples rather than at court in Rome. The importance of Virgil’s poetry, both epic and pastoral, above all stands out as a major influence upon the Silvae. The introduction also offers summaries of Putnam’s individual essays on the Silvae.

  PublisherDOI

• Preface

  2023-05-18

  book-chapterSenior author

  Extract Michael C. J. Putnam has been an extraordinary scholar and teacher of Latin literature at Brown University for many decades, and Antony had the good luck of studying under him as his doctoral student. Michael is the foremost Virgilian scholar of our times. As a member of the Virgilian society and its editorial board, and also a member of the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana, he has spent a good deal of time in Naples, the city crucial to the intellectual formation of both Virgil and Statius as poets. In an extraordinary set of articles, originally published in Illinois Classical Studies,1 he turned his attention to the Silvae and to their intimate engagement with Augustan poetry, and with the poetry of Virgil in particular. Michael’s deep knowledge and understanding of Virgilian poetry lend valuable insights into the reception of Virgil by Statius. He shows how seriously the later poet pays homage to his canonical predecessor, how thoroughly he interprets the complexities of Virgilian poetry, and how he often, by placing a Virgilian reference in a different social and cultural context, boldly turns Virgil to new and more positive purposes. These articles are partly detailed commentary on the individual Silvae, partly brilliant reflective essays. They are in short, like Statius’ Silvae, sui generis.

  PublisherDOI

• Ali Smith and Robin Robertson: Marsyas on the margins

  Giornale Italiano di Filologia · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores the creative responses to Ovid’s myth of Marsyas (met. 6, 382-400) by two contemporary Scottish writers, the novelist Ali Smith and the poet Robin Robertson. Although they approach Ovid’s violent narrative from two very different perspectives, both writers reimagine the myth in ways that address some of the most pressing social and moral issues of our times.

  PublisherDOI

• Errant Poetics: Rethinking a Comment on Silvae 2.2.83–85

  2023-01-09

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  At the end of Virgil’s Aeneid 6 (900–901), Aeneas sails for the port of Caieta, thus creating a problem of chronology, for the port is named only after Aeneas’ nurse Caieta at the start of the following book has died and been buried there (7.1–4). In this chapter I argue that this troubling ‘border crossing’ provided a productive avenue for self-reflexivity on the part of Flavian poets whereby they could define their relationship to Virgil and his canonical text. For both Valerius Flaccus and Statius in particular, Virgil’s ‘mistake’ provided an opening for creative error, for ‘wandering’ within and outside the bounds of Roman literary tradition, while also maintaining to varying degrees the polemical attitudes that underlie much literary allusion, another Virgilian inheritance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Architectural Ecphrasis in Venantius Fortunatus: Beyond the Jeweled Style

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2023-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The Latin poetry of late antiquity is at the heart of A Late Latin Poetics? The Jeweled Style Revisited, and the volume aims to develop, complement and challenge Michael Roberts’s highly influential concept of The Jeweled Style (1989). In its first part, it examines how the concept of the jeweled style applies to poetry outside the late antique Roman West including imperial poetry in Latin and Greek as well as late antique prose. Scholars in this section also clarify specific aspects of the jeweled style, for example enumeration, unity or use of the phrase before Michael Roberts’s monograph. All of these studies understand the jeweled style as a set of formal features not limited to late antique literature. In the second part, experts of late antiquity interpret the jeweled style in its late antique context, drawing connections to Christian praise, homiletics, architectural ecphrasis, epigrams and centos. Furthermore, in this section, the jeweled style is contextualised within contemporary scholarly discourses such as exegesis or Neoplatonism. Throughout the volume, scholars suggest new ways of engaging with the jeweled style. Crucial to these approaches, and to the appeal of the volume, are analyses that integrate the last thirty years of scholarship on the concept while pursuing new methodologies and applications, extending the jeweled style to new genres, geographic regions and time periods.

  PublisherDOI

• Chaos, Cosmos and Creation in Early Greek Theogonies

  2022 · 2 citations

  • Literature
  • History
  • Philosophy

  Cosmological narratives like the creation story in the book of Genesis or the modern Big Bang are popularly understood to be descriptions of how the universe was created. However, cosmologies also say a great deal more. Indeed, the majority of cosmologies, ancient and modern, explore not simply how the world was made but how humans relate to their surrounding environment and the often thin line which separates humans from gods and animals. Combining approaches from classical studies, anthropology, and philosophy, this book studies three competing cosmologies of the early Greek world: Hesiod’s Theogony; the Orphic Derveni theogony; and Protagoras’ creation myth in Plato’s eponymous dialogue. Although all three cosmologies are part of a single mythic tradition and feature a number of similar events and characters, Olaf Almqvist argues they offer very different answers to an ongoing debate on what it is to be human. Engaging closely with the ontological turn

  PublisherDOI

• Actaeon in the Wilderness: Ovid and Christine de Pizan

  Helios · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper I explore the contribution of the medieval French writer Christine de Pizan (1365–c. 1431) to Ovidian reception studies in her early illustrated work, Epistle of Othéa (1399–1400). Along with the Ovide Moralisé, the Othéa stands at the start of a rich visual tradition of Ovidian illustration. Christine's written and pictorial response to the narrative of Diana and Actaeon demonstrates how Ovidian myth provided her with a powerful aesthetic and cultural discourse that evaded the phallocentric, exclusive domain of the male writer and validated the co-emergence of genders and identities.

  PublisherDOI

• Afterword

  2021-01-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Statius' prompempitkon and the geopoetics of Silvae 3.2

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Literature
  • Art

  Silv. 3.2, Statius’ propemptikon, stands alone as our only extant propemptikon from the Flavian period. Addressed to a friend, Maecius Celer, who is traveling to a military posting in Syria, it basically follows the conventions of the genre and acknowledges its Augustan predecessors. Yet it also playfully departs from convention in that the protagonist’s imagined journey is not fraught with substantial danger. The literary tradition is here repurposed for the new Flavian geographical and political reality of well-established trade and travel routes across the Mediterranean, a product of Roman imperium. The poem, however, also constructs a parallel journey, that of the poet’s route toward successful completion of his Thebaid. Celer’s physical journey and the poet’s metaphorical journey are linked, in particular, through pervasive allusion to Statius’ predecessor in civil war epic, Lucan. Silv. 3.2, I argue, is a homage to Lucan that, at the same time, invites scrutiny of the viability of both the propemptikon and Lucan’s brand of historical epic in the Flavian age.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alison Keith

  4 shared

• Johannes Haubold

  3 shared

• Brian W. Breed

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  3 shared

• Barbara Graziosi

  3 shared

• Emily Greenwood

  3 shared

• Rex Winsbury

  3 shared

• Robert Shorrock

  3 shared

• Maria Pretzler

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Comparative Literature

  University of California, Berkeley

Awards & honors

• Fellowship from the ACLS
• Fellowship from the NEH
• Fellowship from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation
• Visiting NEH Professor at the University of Richmond
• William Evans Fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand