CAMS 1102: ROMAN CIVILIZATION

ROMAN LITERARY CULTURE

 ROMAN LITERARY CULTURE
 The author in Roman culture is usually male

 The author at Rome was in many genres both composer and

performer

 Author’s background, social class or status

(senatorial/equestrian order-an outsider-freeborn and
enslaved through kidnapping or as prisoner of war).

 Patronage: gave the authors an entrée to society-an audience

and a reputation. Maecenas

 Author’s education: rhetorical training (Cicero, Virgil, Ovid);

philosophical training (Cicero).

 Bilingualism: the Roman learned Greek beside his own

language at a very early age, by hearing the poetry of Homer.

 For the understanding of both poetry and prose we need to

know whom the poets looked to as master in the genre, both
Greek and Roman, and how they saw the history of their
genres up to their own time
 Audience or public of literature at Rome
 In early Latin literature, public and occasion go together:
literature for performance (dramatic scripts, epic poetry)

 A reading public can be assumed in Cicero’s day: the works

in this period will have both an immediate audience and a
subsequent readership

 Public recitation seems to have become official in the

triumviral period

 From the time of Horace onward we hear of readers in Africa

or Spain who awaited the arrival of texts published at Rome

 From 240 B.C. to around 125 B.C. (the time of Lucilius) the
poetic record is almost exclusively of drama (for the masses)
and epic (for the ruling class) and it is the members of the
ruling class who commission the plays performed for the
public games (ludi), reward poets etc.
Domitian insisted that spectators at public games came properly
dressed in togas. These men in procession in a first-century AD
fresco are wearing the toga praetexta of senators.
 Rome’s Earliest Literary Culture
Ennius and Cato

Ennius: poeta (maker)

wrote tragedies and comedies (less successfully), a
poem on gastronomy, satura on miscellaneous topics
Annales or “Chronicles” (Rome’s national epic)

Cato: first history of Rome and Italy in Latin, 150 speeches of

every kind, a manual of agriculture, and an encyclopaedia
 NEW GENRES OF LITERATURE

Lucilius: the beginning of satire for Romans

Literary mime

Literature of politics: political autobiography, contemporary

history, political oratory