This chapter investigates modernist biofictions, with a particular focus on Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945). Engaging with Virgil’s texts and the ancient biographical traditions about him, Broch’s novel neatly foregrounds the interactions between biofiction, classical reception and the literary, intellectual and political preoccupations of the first half of the twentieth-century. The novel’s title proleptically echoes Roland Barthes’ famous essay on the modern ‘Death of the Author’, self-consciously bringing techniques of intertextuality to bear on the biofictional reception of Roman poetry, as, in Broch’s words, Virgil’s text and biography are ‘continuously interwoven’ (‘fortlaufend eingewoben’) with his own. It is steeped in the author’s reading of Freud, engaging with contemporary psychoanalytical techniques to construct Virgil as a biofictional subject. Finally – written partly in a Gestapo prison – the novel puts biofiction at the heart of twentieth-century political concerns. As the ostensible biofictional entity ‘Virgil’ merges in an interauthorial dialogue with ‘Hermann Broch’, biofictional reading of Roman poetry becomes a medium for interrogating the role of art at a time of cultural and political crisis.

Writers of the Greek Imperial period believed that they were living in a great period of prose; it was an element of their self-conscious periodization. When a visitor to Delphi asks in Plutarch’s The Oracles at Delphi are No Longer Given in Verse why the Pythia no longer gives poetic prophecies, the interlocutor Theon explains that it is not only the Pythia that has moved from verse to prose, but a large number of other genres of literature have made the change as well, such as history and philosophy. Modern scholars tend to agree with this ancient assessment. The rise of the novel, the Gospels, the cultural capital of display oratory, even the emphasized innovation of Aelius Aristides’ composition of prose hymns is adduced by modern scholars as evidence of a change that was noticed by authors of the time.

The conclusion (‘Post-Mortem’) suggests future possibilities and brings together the interrelated threads of individual chapters to restate the case for the importance of the biofictional reception of Roman poetry not only to the understanding of ancient literature and its reception, but also to the history of modern life-writing. Taken together, the chapters in this book tell a cultural history of the biofictional reception of Roman poetry. They put the author back into the discussion of Roman poetry, and in doing so bring to light a fundamental mode of reading and writing Latin poetry which opens up new perspectives on the ways in which antiquity and its reception have helped to shape paradigms of how to read, write and live lives.

The introduction makes the case for fictional biography (or ‘biofiction’) as fundamental to understanding the reception of Roman poetry. Bringing together developments in life-writing studies and recent work on ancient biography and poets’ Lives, it develops a concept of biofictional reading as a key mode of the reception of Latin poetry. Aware of ancient habits of reading poetry ‘for the life’, Roman poets wrote autofictional versions of their Lives for later readers to pick up, creating a body of literature that demands to be read in terms of Lives in reception.

Chapter 1, ‘Medieval Ovids’, opens the discussion with perhaps the most prolific and the most devious author of autofiction in ancient literature: the poet Ovid. Ovid had no surviving ancient tradition of Lives, but his texts themselves provided an ideal ground for the creation of biofictional narratives. Encoding within them a life-story that deliberately teeters between fiction and reality, Ovid’s texts invited a life-centred reception that illustrates some of the essential dynamics of biofictional reading. With no ancient Life available to them, medieval writers willingly took up Ovid’s implicit invitation to produce biofictional supplements to his texts, telling and retelling stories about the poet’s imaginary lives: from the accessus or ‘introduction’ that typically prefaced texts of ancient authors, often inscribed as a paratext to the poet’s works in the manuscripts themselves, to the thirteenth-century pseudepigraphal De vetula, a 2400-line poem presented as Ovid’s autobiography from exile discovered in the poet’s recently excavated tomb. Seemingly situated on the margins of medieval culture, these experiments in life-writing show that biofictional engagement with Ovid functioned as a dynamic and creative site of reading texts and writing Lives in the period, foregrounding the case for biofiction as a mode of textual engagement in reception.

The ability of ancient biofiction to become actively political comes to the surface in this chapter. It focuses on biofictional receptions of Lucan’s Bellum ciuile (sometimes called Pharsalia), an epic written under Nero about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, in and around periods of revolutionary politics, and in particular in early modern England in the period leading up to and following the English revolution and in peri-revolutionary France. At the centre of the ancient and Renaissance biographical tradition about Lucan was the story of how the poet was forced to commit suicide by Nero crudelis (Martial 7.21.3) following his involvement in a plot to assassinate the emperor. For readers working through ideas of republicanism, reading Lucan’s text through the lens of the Life transformed the poet’s death into a function of his own epic, inscribed in the textual discourse of the Bellum ciuile itself.

Silence is a good thing … If you will learn and discover, silence is a friend and a fellow-worker. But seeking eloquence and aptitude, you will find it in speech and nowhere else, or in words and in their continuous practice.

A brief entry in Jerome’s Chronicle – the only Life of Lucretius surviving from antiquity – claims that he wrote De rerum natura ‘in the intervals of insanity’ before committing suicide. Jerome’s brief Life and its early modern accretions became a virtual blueprint for reading Lucretius’ poem in biofictional terms. De rerum natura was seen as a document of a mind divided against itself: the Life interacted with contradictions in the text to read Lucretius’ poem as a dramatized version of a modern subject facing the competing pressures of religion and its scientific other. This chapter looks at how Victorian readers engaged in biofictional receptions of De rerum natura as a means to thinking through psychological modernity. Lucretius’ popularity – as is now widely acknowledged – was crucial to the scientific culture of the period. But his Life and his poem were associated with another sort of inquiry: the psychological investigation of the human mind. Focusing on Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson, the chapter examines how these writers, in exploring the make-up of the human psyche at the crisis of modernity, used biofictional reading of Lucretius’ to work through contemporary cultural anxieties. The Roman poet was co-opted as an ersatz Victorian, and, in the process, modern subjectivity itself could be discovered.

If dialogues should lead to new dialogues, to the opening up of new topics to explore and discuss, then it is my hope that this book will do the same. In particular, I have had little room in this book to look at the other surviving dialogues of Methodius, although On Free Will, On the Resurrection and On Leprosy have had a certain role to play in the story that I have told. My hope is that future scholars interested in the literature of the transitional period of the Crisis of the Third Century will take up the challenge of reading and analyzing these fascinating and woefully understudied texts. Even more fundamentally, I hope that this book has contributed to two larger scholarly projects. I hope that it has convinced scholars of Imperial literature that they ignore Christian evidence to their own loss, and I hope that I have convinced scholars of Late Antiquity that interesting things are happening in the field of literature.