We can now answer our question: Did the republican and
Augustan poets write with readers or listeners in mind? The evidence is
overwhelming. Because Rome was not an oral culture, and because litera-
ture did not get passed down by oral transmission in unbroken succession
from generation to generation or place to place, all claims to poetic
immortality or worldwide fame must rest on the existence of written,
physically enduring texts. That books—not performances—were the med-
ium through which all poets make themselves known to the world is
the unmistakable testimony of Catullus (14, 22, 95), Horace (Sat.
1.10.72–74; Ars6, 372–73, 386–90), Propertius (2.34.87–90: scripta
Catulli...pagina Calvi), and Ovid (Am. 1.15.25–30).
139
Let us turn to the poets’ own works. Quinn claims, ‘‘He [the poet]
refers to his audience sometimes as his ‘readers’ (lectores) and sometimes
as his ‘listeners’ (auditores).’’
140
In fact, the republican and Augustan
poets never useauditorof the audience of their finished verse.
141
The
poets never speak of people ‘‘listening’’ to their books. There is not a
single example of Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, or Ovid writing
of the reception of their poetry: ‘‘When you hear my lines.. .As you sit
listening to my poetry... When you next attend a party and someone
recites my poetry to you ... .’’^142 Instead they write, again and again,
about their readers.
- Starr 1987, 223, seems to imply that publication was something new on the scene:
‘‘Authors in Pliny’s time may have wanted to reach further beyond the narrow circles of their
own friends and their friends’ friends. It would be misleading to think of this as an increase in
authors’ ambitions, because this might seem to imply that earlier writers were men of
modest ambitions. Rather, the change may have represented a somewhat broader conception
of the potential audience for a literary work’’; so, too, Fantham 1996, 64, dating the change
to the Augustan poetry book. However, the broadest possible conception of the potential
audience had been present in Roman literature since its beginning. Ennius hoped for
(Annales1.12 Skutsch) and achieved (Lucr. 1.119) fame throughout Italy; Lucretius hoped
for anaeternum leporemon his words (1.28); Catullus modestly hoped his book would last for
more than one generation, whereas Horace and Ovid looked forward to the entire civilized
and yet to be civilized world as their readership. - Quinn 1982, 87.
- The wordauditoris used exactly five times by the Augustan poets (never by
Catullus or Lucretius): once in OvidPont. 4.2.35 of the kind of trial recitations before friends
that he cannot now stage in exile; four times in Horace:Sat. 1.10.7, of the mimes of Liberius
contrasted with polished poetry;Ars100 and 149 of the theater (see esp. 112 3, and n. 144
below). In Hor.Ep. 1.19.39,auditorhas nothing to do with recitations; see n. 145 below. - Even the few places in which they do useaudioor the idea of ‘‘listening’’ are
revealing. Catullus and Tibullus never write of ‘‘hearing’’ poetry, their own or others’, only
reading and writing. Horace asks people to ‘‘listen’’ only when picturing himself as a singing
bard (Odes3.25.4, 4.2.45) or within the fictive conversational setting of theSermones, and
the fiction of a fiction of conversation inEpistles(Ep. 1.14.31, 1.17.16; cf.Ars153), and these
are always when Horace is delivering a moral ‘‘lecture.’’ Being listened to is not for lyric
poetry but for the theater (Ep. 2.1.187,Ars100, 149, 153, 180, etc.; n. 145). Propertius uses
‘‘listening’’ twice, once in the fiction of conversation (1.1.37 38); the other instance is
telling: Prop. 2.13.11 12, a reading to be sure, but a private one in Cynthia’s lap (Cf. Ov.Ars
2.283 84). So, too, Ov.Trist. 3.7.18 26: private lessons with Perilla, reading their verses to
Books and Reading Latin Poetry 219