Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic

How the Romans came to have a literature reflecting native and foreign impulses, and how it formed a legacy for subsequent generations have become central questions in the cultural history of the Republic. This book explores the development of Roman literary sensibility from early interest in epic and drama, through invention of satire and eventual enshrining of books in public collections important to Horace and Ovid. The "early" literature is seen to be a product less of the mid-Republic, when poetic texts began to circulate, than of the late Republic, when they were systematically collected and canonized.

• Combines traditional philological arguments with the insights of modern critical theory
• Covers a broad range of texts, prose as well as poetry
• Contextualizes literary study by relating texts to significant aspects of Roman social practice