It is well known that Virgil’s reference to the ‘woods of Molorcus’ in the prooemium of Georgics 3, echoing Callimachus’ poem staging this otherwise unknown figure in his Victoria Berenices, enables the Roman poet to signpost his reappropriation of the Alexandrian epinicion within the loaded context of the celebration of Octavian’s victory over Egypt. In line with this interpretation, this chapter focuses more closely on Molorcus himself and his (devastated) land as a significant theme in its own right. By alluding to the story of this impoverished farmer unable to perform his ‘georgic’ tasks in a poem centred on the countryman’s labour, Virgil retroactively constructs his Callimachean model as a failure to live according to the main precepts of his didactic poem, thus making the land of Molorcus appear as an anti-type of Octavian’s idealised rural Italy. Moreover, this failure is connected to the havoc created by a ‘terrible lion’ whose slaying by Heracles readily offers an image of the princeps’ victory over his foes, thus making the poor farmer’s land a contrasting prefiguration of the hoped-for Augustan space.

This chapter shows how epigrams contributed to the formation and dissemination of literary criticism and theories of style, while also expressing ideas about literary history and the development of a given literary genre or τέχνη. These epigrams, which allowed their author to express ideas on literary tradition and style, were often written as pseudo-epitaphs for poets of the past. The use of companion pieces could also allow epigrammatists, such as Posidippus of Pella, Asclepiades of Samos, Dioscorides of Nicopolis and Antipater of Sidon, to comment on pairs of artists or poets who represented different and often opposing aesthetics. Posidippus’ and Dioscorides’ epigrams are of peculiar interest, since they seem to allude to lost treatises that used recurring frameworks to write the history of a given τέχνη, for example one of the visual arts or a literary genre. The ideas initially expressed in these prose treatises appear to have been reworked, in a very creative manner, by epigrammatists who were eager to formulate their own ideas about poetry.

This chapter looks at potential allusions in Horace’s Odes to the religious buildings in Rome known to have been constructed or substantially repaired by Augustus. These major construction projects in Rome in the Augustan period are naturally a topic of interest to contemporary poets; in the case of the Odes, it can be argued that there are many points of contact between poetic and architectural artefacts, and even that the Roman literary achievement of the Augustan poet as proclaimed in Odes 3.30 can be paralleled with a Roman architectural project of Augustus himself. It is also interesting to note that though Horace’s Odes contain a number of potential allusions to a range of projects in the considerable programme of temple construction and renovation later carefully recorded by Augustus in the Res gestae, there are no allusions to the Temple of Diuus Iulius, perhaps because the memory of Julius Caesar was felt to be too problematic.

In Elegy 4.9, Propertius provides an aetiology for a detail of the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima: the prohibition on women attending the ceremony. He presents this particularity as a retaliatory measure taken by the hero himself, who reacted to the banning of any male from the space in which the cult of Bona Dea is celebrated. Propertius describes the priestess of Bona Dea as trying to prevent Hercules from entering the sacred space by arguing that female chastity must be respected. After having argued that there is no insurmountable difference between the sexes since there may be role reversal between men and women, Hercules forces the door. Propertius uses this episode located in ancient Latium to put forward some reflections on a (modern) topic, specific to the elegiac genre: sexual identity and gender relations. He presents an alternative point of view that includes both facets of what Augustus seeks to impose in his politics of promoting ancient social practices, essentially concerned with control over morality and sexuality: a strict conception of female morality, and a crucial questioning of gender conceptions: what makes the difference between the sexes? It is dress, behaviour or the body?

The inclination to withdraw himself from the public as far as possible is regarded as one of Virgil’s most salient characteristics: this at least is the impression given by the few testimonia and numerous anecdotes of his life. The guiding principle of Virgil’s life as a poet of the res publica Romana could be described as an ‘art of disappearing’, which becomes evident in different ways. By means of this Virgil sometimes succeeds in withdrawing himself spatially even from Augustus, the mightiest designer of space, and in establishing certain limits to his ‘topotactic’ power. To present the ‘withdrawing technique’ practised by Virgil, this chapter draws on information gathered from biographical texts on Virgil as well as on relevant passages of Virgil’s work, naturally without ignoring the documentary fragility of the texts considered. Nevertheless there are conspicuous correspondences between the texts about Virgil and the poetological messages within his literary works, which give an impression at least of his effective seclusion. His reception by his contemporaries and immediate successors proves his greatest success in this respect.

This chapter focuses on the episode of Hippolytus and Egeria in Ov. Met. 15.479–551, and particularly on the relation between the content of the two stories told (Hippolytus’ death and rebirth; Egeria’s metamorphosis) and the space in which they are told. The inner story, recounted by Hippolytus himself, involves the characters (Hippolytus, Theseus, Phaedra) in a well-known plot, with a tragic outcome and a Greek setting. The frame of the story is the Latian wood of Aricia, in which the rites in honour of Diana/Lucina, goddess of birth and fertility, take place: here we have no story of violence and death, but of rebirth (Hippolytus/ Virbius), devotion and fidelity (Numa and Egeria). The place rewrites the destinies of the characters involved: the space of Rome is the one in which Ovid celebrates not (only) the political power of Augustus, whose mother comes from Aricia, but more and most prominently the cultural power that Augustan poetry has to give life to a new mythology of regeneration and transformation of old forms (Hippolytus) into new ones (Virbius).

Virgil’s is the only literary biography whose development, from the early Imperial Age to Late Antiquity and beyond, we can examine. It was largely constructed through inferences drawn from the author’s works, selected on the basis of their reception and according to the cultural characteristics of different ages of reception. The biography was adapted to school teaching, particularly in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but it was also influenced by the critical interpretation of Virgil, which variously modified the image and the evaluation of the poet.

The Euripides described by ancient biographers is the Euripides Aristophanes portrays in the comedies he wrote for Athenian audiences after the devasting plague of 430–429 BC: immoral, sophistic, and irreligious. Biographers created new anecdotes about him, using the comic poets’ techniques, taking lines from his dramas out of their original contexts and placing them in anecdotes in which they could be repurposed to express his personal thoughts. The process of transforming literature into biography can be seen most clearly in the Life of Euripides by the Hellenistic biographer Satyrus, which is based almost entirely on anecdotes created to provide new contexts for some of Euripides’ most memorable lines; for example, an account of Euripides’ death mirrors the account of Pentheus’ death in Euripides’ drama Bacchae. The idea that Euripides was critical of ancient religion, like some famous philosophers, explains why Diogenes Laertius refers to Euripides more frequently than any other poet. These ancient characterizations continue to have a profound and misleading influence on modern interpretation of his dramas, demonstrating how transformative an effect a skillful comic poet can have on the course of literary history.

This envoi looks at the impossible necessity of literary history. It explores the term ‘literary’, marking how it both opens ancient writing to scrutiny and obscures significant sets of connections or ideas, and it questions how narratives of the history of literature are always unfinished, partial and ideologically laden. It discusses the place of literary history within the field of classics.

Ancient literary-historical narratives commonly envisage developments in poetry and music in terms either of gradual technical progress, or of decadence and hyper-sophistication. This chapter argues that Lucretius strikingly combines these two perspectives in the concluding paragraphs of the culture-history at the end of De Rerum Natura 5: the invention of carmina as songs (5.1379–1411) is associated with simple pleasures, emphatically unsurpassed by later refinements in technique which are linked in turn to the insatiable and destructive desire for novelty and luxury; whereas carmina as (epic?) poems are mentioned amongst the refinements listed in the book’s closing lines as steps on the way to a ‘peak’ (cacumen) of artistic and cultural progress (5.1448–1457). The dual narrative adumbrated here may be linked in turn with the dichotomy between text as written artefact and poem as disembodied ‘song’, which has been a focus of attention in recent scholarship on Latin poetry: both models of textuality, like the conflicting models of cultural development that shape the finale to Book 5, are important to Lucretius’ poetics and his Epicurean didaxis. Lucretius’ poem thus exemplifies the manifold ways in which literary-historical narratives may be determined by the discursive demands of the text in question.

Ovid’s journey towards Tomis is represented as a reversal of Aeneas’ destiny, particularly because – unlike the Virgilian hero – the exiled poet has to leave Rome (the world capital, and not a ruined city) with no promises of a glorious future. Thus, his new subjective elegy which originates at this (wild) periphery of the empire cannot but be a sad elegy. However, Ovid’s ‘eccentric’ exile poetry increasingly displays – from the Tristia to the Epistulae ex Ponto – some remarkable traces of evolution. In particular, towards the end of the second collection, the poet sketches a peculiar image of himself: that of an interethnic uates who has been able to find a new, unprecedented audience in the Greco-Getic tribes. The public role he now plays in Tomitan society allows him to engage in a sort of civilising mission as an imperial officer. Such a complex strategy of self-accreditation emphasises the transnational character of his poetry rather than its merely national dimension. The exile still remains a harsh experience for Ovid: nonetheless, he conceives the possibility of an evolution and cultivates the dream of gaining universal poetic renown even from the extreme boundaries of the world.

This chapter considers the nature and development of Greek literary history before Aristotle, a generally acknowledged watershed. It covers all sorts of reflections on the literary past and studies the assumptions and paradigms at work in our earliest sources. While highlighting the continuity of tropes and stock narratives, it also seeks to understand the development of literary history in relation to the technology of writing and in relation to an emergent ideology of classicism, which literary historical thinking both reacted to and further strengthened. The first section briefly surveys immanent literary history in poetry from Homer to Aristophanes, typologising tropes which would endure through the ages and suggesting a skeletal metahistory of early literary history. The second and third sections then move forward in time and shift from poetry to prose in order to consider in greater detail two specific work. Glaucus of Rhegium’s On the Archaic Poets and Musicians and the Mouseion of the sophist Alcidamas, early instantiations of, respectively, a macroscopic narrative of progress and a literary biography, prefigure many core characteristics of later ancient literary history. A conclusion returns to the bigger picture to consider the distinctive value of studying ancient literary history on its own terms.

This book has tried to bring out the richness and complexity of the ethical fabric of Sophocles’ plays. Moral issues are not merely motifs, but inform the dramatic structure, and are developed with care and subtlety on the linguistic level. A multiplicity of ethical standpoints is presented in such a way that their implications and practical results are dramatised through choice and argument. While it may be true that an obviously unpleasant character tends to express sentiments contrary to conventional Athenian values, these plays are not melodramas in which only the virtuous command our sympathy and the villains our distaste.