The thirteen essays in this collection investigate the different ways in which Shakespeare took advantage of the contrast between the mythologized ancient values of a Rome long past and the sense of their decline: a crisis which was already there, in his Augustan or even later Latin sources - and which he appropriates dramatically in his theatre, as a discoursive pattern, to make it interact anachronistically with the unsettling context of his own early modern times. Perhaps thus metamorphosing the mythical core of Rome and its history into what is - tragically - spectrally meaningful and returning.