Moving between an analysis of the canon as a critical mechanism and a focus on the physical limits and definition of Latin literature, the chapter reviews the very discourse of the canon and its impact on the field. The ‘canonised’ nature of Classics determines not just a hierarchy of texts and methodologies worthier of being taught and researched but also informs the very approach to non-canonical or ‘para-canonical’ texts. Any canon, in other words, is not just about what we study, it is also about how we study it. Opening up the canon is a dynamic and self-reinforcing process and one which involves both readers who embody difference (social, racial, gender etc.) accessing and studying an expanded and evolving canon, and texts that embody difference (peripheral, post-classical, marginal etc.) being ‘read into’ the canon by an increasingly diverse readership. Interrogating our canon of Latin literature, this chapter argues, implies a fundamental repositioning of one’s scholarly stance not just towards non-canonical texts but also towards canonical authors.

This chapter exposes the fundamental interpenetration of critical ideas and practices in the editing of texts of both classical and scriptural writings, one of the defining practices of philology, and shows a shared commitment to the return ad fontes. It focuses on one of the giants of philology, Karl Lachmann, and maps the ease with which the founding scholars of the modern discipline of classical philology moved between Greco-Roman texts and the bible. The chapter emphasizes the historical importance of that vast monument of Greek literature generally ignored in the modern discipline of classics, the Septuagint. It goes on to address the issue of authenticity, a key component not just of philology’s pursuit of the faked or corrupt, but also of theology’s commitment to the true word of God, and to show how the search for a source matches the idea of the godlike author.

This chapter focuses on late-antique rhetorical analysis of Virgilian poetry: starting from the 2nd century AD, whether Virgil was to be considered an orator or a poet was one of the key issues in the reception of his work, as is attested by discussions in Florus, Macrobius, Servius and Tiberius Claudius Donatus. The chapter shows how Virgil’s text is “micro-rhetoricized” when elements of the poem are read as exemplifying a given rhetorical principle. As a close reading of Macrobius’ discussion of the issue in Saturnalia 5 reveals, this rhetorical analysis works also on the macro-level by constructing the poet himself as a rhetorical performer and reading as a form of rhetorical re-performance.

This chapter traces key moments in the rhetorical tradition in the context of which the problematic relationship of difference and similarity between rhetorical and poetic discourse is evoked and discussed. The competing claims of affinity and difference between poetic and rhetorical discourse in Gorgias’ Helen, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant and others are analyzed as aspects of rhetoric’s self-definition.

This chapter examines the role of the storm as a setting for rhetorical performance in Roman epic, starting from the first simile of the Aeneid in which Neptun is compared to an orator and tracing its reception in Lucan and Silius. I argue that the orator in the storm becomes a key figure through which poets playfully question rhetoric’s claim to master the grand style that is traditionally assimilated to stormy natural phenomena. These scenes of “embedded” rhetorical performance provide a self-conscious commentary on rhetoric and its relation to poetry. Far from being “seduced” or “victimized” by rhetorical influence, poets address and react to the cultural narratives about poetry’s relation to rhetoric found in rhetorical texts, for example, in Cicero.

This chapter focuses on the strategic evocation of the appropriate boundaries between rhetorical and poetic speech in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. If Quintilian’s exhortation to use poetic models judiciously in books 8 and 10 is read side by side with his elaborate deployment of poetic metaphors to represent both his work and that of the orator throughout the work, a far more complex picture emerges, one in which poetry is not simply a repository of sentences to be emulated but a source of cultural authority to be subsumed by the rhetorical medium.

Seneca the Elder’s account of Ovid’s relationship to the declaimers has typically been used to construct an argument for the growing influence of rhetoric on poetic practice. A close reading of the work and of Seneca’s cultural agenda reveals that the author has a stake in using poetry and the poetic to foreground his own version of a more wholesome model of rhetorical education embodied by Latro’s Spanish school.

This chapter focuses on late-antique rhetorical analysis of Virgilian poetry: starting from the 2nd century AD, whether Virgil was to be considered an orator or a poet was one of the key issues in the reception of his work, as is attested by discussions in Florus, Macrobius, Servius and Tiberius Claudius Donatus. The chapter shows how Virgil’s text is “micro-rhetoricized” when elements of the poem are read as exemplifying a given rhetorical principle. As a close reading of Macrobius’ discussion of the issue in Saturnalia 5 reveals, this rhetorical analysis works also on the macro-level by constructing the poet himself as a rhetorical performer and reading as a form of rhetorical re-performance.

This chapter traces key moments in the rhetorical tradition in the context of which the problematic relationship of difference and similarity between rhetorical and poetic discourse is evoked and discussed. The competing claims of affinity and difference between poetic and rhetorical discourse in Gorgias’ Helen, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant and others are analyzed as aspects of rhetoric’s self-definition.

The introduction summarizes the content of each section and distinguishes the selective focus on rhetorical texts, rhetorical reading practices and the communication between poets and rhetorical theorists employed in the book from previous studies typically geared towards enumerating technical elements of style and arrangement that any given poet is said to have “borrowed” from rhetorical critics.

This chapter focuses on select scenes of deliberative oratory in Roman epic and on the figure of the demagogue who inhabits them - Thersites in the Iliad, Drances in Virgil’s Aeneid 11, Odysseus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 13, Cicero in Lucan, Varro in Silius. Tracing the ways in which poets use these orators as foils for their generic rivals, I suggest that far from chanelling disapproval of rhetoric, these demagogues are truly hybrid figures, who leverage anti-rhetorical discourse while simultaneously claiming for poetry the same power and persuasiveness of rhetoric.

This chapter examines the role of the storm as a setting for rhetorical performance in Roman epic, starting from the first simile of the Aeneid in which Neptun is compared to an orator and tracing its reception in Lucan and Silius. I argue that the orator in the storm becomes a key figure through which poets playfully question rhetoric’s claim to master the grand style that is traditionally assimilated to stormy natural phenomena. These scenes of “embedded” rhetorical performance provide a self-conscious commentary on rhetoric and its relation to poetry. Far from being “seduced” or “victimized” by rhetorical influence, poets address and react to the cultural narratives about poetry’s relation to rhetoric found in rhetorical texts, for example, in Cicero.