Chapter 1 examines how locality matters to the Eclogues, and how the poetry collection conceptualizes and constructs local place. In Eclogues 1 and 9, Vergil stresses the importance of local dwelling, representing multifaceted place attachments between individuals and their familiar homes. At the same time, in dramatizing the effects of land confiscations, Vergil probes the highly contingent nature of place, defined by unstable boundaries and through power relations. In addition to providing new readings of these particular poems, this chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book by exploring the concept of local place and showing how a multifaceted examination of place making and place attachment offers a more nuanced and fuller reading than a focus on landscape, nature, or an opposition between town and country. The chapter then turns to an apparent problem with this place-based reading of the Eclogues: the poems’ ambiguous settings. Drawing on Theocritus and Cicero, it shows that the Eclogues are interested in the many intersections and cross-fertilizations between actual and fictional places. The poems construct local places, even if they cannot be located.

An examination of the Anatolian sources of Greek theogonic traditions, syncretistic myths that took shape in admixed Ur-Aeolian–Luvian communities in the Late Bronze Age, and descendent Aeolian assemblages of mythic and cult elements that persist into the Iron Age. Essential to many of these traditions is the presence of honey, especially honey having psychotropic properties of a sort that occurs naturally along the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.

Acting in Stoppard requires verbal dexterity, great emotional intelligence, and clarity of thought. The original production of Arcadia, in which the essay’s author played Valentine, marked a particularly productive combination of text, actors, and cultural and intellectual history that highlighted the genius of Stoppard’s writing for the theatre.

The explicit attention to Classicism and Romanticism in Arcadia and The Invention of Love highlights Stoppard’s interest in the dramatic potential of contrasting head and heart. However, beyond the simple opposition of aesthetic categories and temperaments, the Classical-Romantic dynamic generates the playwright’s deepest understanding of history, epistemology, and creativity. Indeed, it cuts to the very nature of theatre as an art form and Stoppard’s approach to it.

As the newly invigorated and performative disciplines of poetry and rhetoric took hold in court cultural life, so too did the inseparable activities of poetic recitation and performance. Civic humanism was adapted to the new cultural ethos of the courts, which cultivated courtly splendor and entertainment as an expression of dynastic magnificenza. Court life accordingly reshaped poetic practice in important ways: through hybridizing interaction with polyphonic practice, the fostering of intensifying debates on the nature and status of Italian vernacular, the turn to more introspective poetic modes and forms modeled on Petrarch’s canzoniere, and the cultivation of more socialized forms of poetic expression such as the dialogue and theatrical presentations. This chapter focuses on three centers (Ferrara, Urbino, and Naples), which have been chosen for the vitality of their poetic performance practices and for the variety of their court cultures. Like humanism in general, cantare ad lyram took hold in each of these centers in a manner particular to each court’s distinctive character: residual feudalism and a strong university in Ferrara, the complex patronage structure of Naples (including the Spanish heritage of its Aragonese kings), and the Urbino court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro as seen through the idealizing lens of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano.