Ancient Literacies

sometimes only the book at dinner, with the music and comedy later.^65 His uncle also had books read at dinner.^66 Martial as ho ...

impression left by the sources is that poetry, even in the houses of the learned, played little part in entertainment and took s ...

Accordingly, nowhere in Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, or Ovid do we find a single suggestion that the poets ever ‘‘per ...

When we look closely at what actually happened at these various types of performances, six very important facts emerge. Not onl ...

A recitation gave only the penultimate draft of a work in progress. Pliny, for example, is explicit about the role of booksaft ...

arcano convivis tuis sed, si me amas, hilaris et bene acceptis, ne in me stomachum erumpant cum sint tibi irati. (16.3.1¼413 SB) ...

We are faced with an unmistakable fact. Recitations and private readings could be counted on to supply only fragments of a poet’ ...

Gellius (18.5) tells of an occasion in his youth when Antonius Julianus heard that a professional reader (anagnostes), who prefe ...

The picture we are given of Roman poetry (and literature in general), therefore, is very curious. It is a poetry rich in interte ...

In short, performance was a lousy way of getting to know literature. Pliny has read the poetry of Cicero, Calvus, Pollio, Messal ...

Once performed, its life was over. That is one of the reasons we do not have any texts of Roman mimes, except precisely for the ...

by people who happened to have been present at some distantrecitatio or mime adaptation at Rome. It arrived in the form of a wri ...

.Pliny writes to a friend about a comedy that he heard the poet recite. He does not write, ‘‘Come to Rome and hear it,’’ or ‘‘I’ ...

The evidence from Pliny and others is overwhelming: literature is, and is meant to be, disseminated in books.^130 Pliny in writi ...

IV. MONUMENTUM AERE PERENNIUS We can now finally turn to the poets. Here is what Catullus wrote in a book (36.1): ‘‘Annales Volu ...

We can now answer our question: Did the republican and Augustan poets write with readers or listeners in mind? The evidence is o ...

So Catullus assumed he would be read, and in books, by people far away in time: Libelli. .. quod.../plus uno maneat perenne saec ...

the votes of the fickle public with the expense of dinners and the gift of worn out clothes. I do not for I am the disciple and ...

people who had read Propertius’s first book were not all friends of the poet.^147 They did not attend his readings because they ...

nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, siqu ...