The first comprehensive treatment of Latin figures of repetition, this poetic handbook includes over ten thousand quotations from Ennius to Juvenal, with numerous examples From Latin prose and Greek literature for comparison. Long relegated to commentary notes, the figures of gemination, epanalepsis, polyptoton, and anaphora, for example, are finally treated systematically as distinct stylistic markers.

Under each topic, Jeffrey Wills studies extensively the authorial preferences and traditions of the various genres, with figures arising from the positional and framing structures of repetitions collected at the end. A section on formal means of allusion and the special attention given throughout the book to the use of figures for intertextual reference also makes the work a major contribution to the Latin poetics of allusion.

Literary critics, textual critics, and commentators should all find this volume indispensable.