Introduction : reception as conversation -- The English Homer : Shakespeare, Longinus, and English Neoclassicism -- Cowley's Horation mice -- The English voices of Lucretius, from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good -- If he were living, and an Englishman : translation theory in the age of Dryden -- Dryden and the tenth satire of Juvenal -- Dryden's Baucis and Philemon -- Nature's laws and man's : Dryden's Cinyras and Myrrha -- Dryden and Ovid's Wit out of season : the twelfth book of Ovid his Metamorphoses and Ceyx and Alcyone -- Translation, metempsychosis, and the flux of nature : Dryden's Of the Pythagorean philosophy -- Some varieties of Pope's Classicism -- Pope's Trojan geography -- Colonization, closure, or creative dialogue? The case of Pope's Iliad.