Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic

How the Romans came to have a literature reflecting native and foreign impulses and how it formed a legacy for subsequent generations have become central questions in the cultural history of the Republic. This book explores the development of Roman literary sensibility from early interest in epic and drama through invention of satire and eventual enshrining of books in public collections important to Horace and Ovid. The early literature is seen to be a product less of the mid-Republic when poetic texts began to circulate than of the late Republic when they were systematically collected and canonized.