Literature in the Roman World

'Our present appreciation of Greek and Roman literature should be informed and influenced by consideration of what it was originally appreciated for. The past, for all its alienness, affects and changes the present.'The focus of this book - its new perspective - is on the 'receivers' of literature: readers, spectators, and audiences. Six contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, explore the various and changing interactions between the makers of literature and their audiences or readers from thebeginning of the Roman empire to the end of the classical era.The contributors deploy fresh insights to map out lively and provocative, yet accessible, surveys. They cover the kinds of literature which have shaped western culture - epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, rhetoric, epigram, elegy, pastoral, satire, biography, epistle, declamation,and panegyric. Who were the audiences, and why did they regard their literature as so important?

Oliver Taplin is Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at Oxford University, where he is a Tutorial Fellow at Magdalen College. He is also co-director (with Edith Hall) of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama. His books include 'Homeric Soundings' (Oxford, 1992) and 'Comic Angels' (Oxford, 1993). He maintains the importance of reaching wider audiences, and has collaborated with various productions in radio, television, and the theatre.