Philip Hardie is Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.

• 1. Introduction: Paradox and the marvellous in Augustan literature and culture ; 2. Horace's Ars poetica and the marvellous ; 3. Where the wild things are: locating the marvellous in Augustan wall-painting ; 4. Against nature? Some Augustan responses to man-made marvels ; 5. Virgil: a paradoxical poet? ; 6. The question of the marvellous in the Georgics of Virgil ; 7. In search of the lost Hercules: strategies of the marvellous in the Aeneid ; 8. Thaumatographia, or 'What is a theme?' ; 9. Phaethon and the monsters ; 10. Prodigiosa mendacia uatum. Responses to the marvellous in Ovid's narrative of Perseus (Metamorphoses 4-5) ; 11. Encountering the fantastic: expectations, forms of communication, reactions ; 12. Constructing a narrative of mira deum: the story of Philemon and Baucis (Ovid Metamorphoses 8) ; 13. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.416-51: noua monstra and the foedera naturae ; 14. Alien divinities. How to tame monsters through aetiology ; 15. Ordering wonderland: Ovid's Pythagoras and the Augustan vision ; 16. Delusions of grandeur: Lucretian 'passages' in Livy ; 17. The strange art of the sententious declaimer

A refreshing and remarkably coherant collection edited by Philip Hardie.