Richard F. Thomas

2017
Why Bob Dylan Matters
Thomas, Richard F. 2017. Why Bob Dylan Matters. New York : HarperCollins. Publisher's Version
2014
The Virgil Encyclopedia
Thomas, Richard F, and Jan M Ziolkowski, ed. 2014. The Virgil Encyclopedia. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 1600. Publisher's Version Abstract

The Virgil Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive reference volume to be published in English on Publius Vergilius Maro, the classical Roman poet whose works and thoughts have been at the center of Western literary, cultural, artistic, and pedagogical traditions for more than two millennia. Through more than 2,200 carefully researched entries, scholars and students alike are provided with an in-depth treatment of all aspects of Virgil’s poetry and his immeasurable influence that continues to the present day.

2012
Thomas, Richard F. 2012. “The Streets of Rome: The Classical Dylan.” Reception and the Classics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition, edited by William Brockliss, Pramit Chaudhuri, Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, and Katherine Wasdin, 134–159. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, Richard F. 2012. “Thoughts on the Virgilian hexameter.” Multi nominis grammaticus. Festchrift for Alan J. Nussbaum, edited by Adam I Cooper, Jeremy Rau, and Michael Weiss, 306–314. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press.
2011
Thomas, Richard F. 2011. “Epigram and Propertian Elegy’s Epigram Riffs: Radical Poet/Radical Critics.” Latin Elegy and Hellenistic Epigram: A Tale of Two Genres at Rome, edited by Alison Keith, 67–85. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Horace: Odes I V and Carmen Saeculare
Thomas, Richard F, ed. 2011. Horace: Odes I V and Carmen Saeculare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

The Carmen Saeculare was composed and published in 17 BCE as Horace was returning to the genre of lyric which he had abandoned six years earlier; the fourth book of Odes is in part a response to this poem, the only commissioned poem we know from the period. The hardening of the political situation, with the Republic a thing of the past and the Augustan succession in the air, threw the problematic issue of praise into fresh relief, and at the same time provided an impulse towards the nostalgia represented by the poet's private world. Professor Thomas provides an introduction and commentary (the first full commentary in English since the nineteenth century) to each of the poems, exploring their status as separate lyric artefacts and their place in the larger web of the book. The edition is intended primarily for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, but is also important for scholars.

2001
Virgil and the Augustan Reception
Thomas, Richard F. 2001. Virgil and the Augustan Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

This book examines the ideological reception of Virgil at specific moments in the past two millennia. It focuses on the emperor Augustus in the poetry of Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity pro- and anti-Augustan readings, studies Dryden's 1697 Royalist translation, and also naive American translation. It scrutinizes nineteenth-century philology's rewriting or excision of troubling readings, and covers readings by both supporters and opponents of fascism and National Socialism. Finally it examines how successive ages have made the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet.