Peter Russell is at his lyrical and satirical best in the Elegies of his alter ego Quintilius, a disaffected and maverick late Latin poet whose scabrous observations on the last decadent days and collapse of the Roman Empire, seen from a provincial perspective, are sharply pertinent to our own age. This enlarged edition reissues with much uncollected material a famous modernist jeu d’esprit which gave Peter Russell his true poetic voice – dyspeptic, witty, coruscating and chilled by sudden apprehensions of mortality.