The concepts of progress and decline play a dominant role in ancient views on literary history. Roman culture inherited from Aristotle the idea that the arts gradually mature. Whereas archaic and classical Greek literature was generally known to the Romans as a corpus of canonical works that represented the acme of each genre, Latin literature gave the Romans the image of a long march of advancement towards the Greek models’ perfection. From Aristotle onwards, progress is conceived as an addition of pertinent procedures. The attainment of maturity does not entail decadence, but rather the possibility of creating works fully corresponding to the nature of the genre. If an acme is thought to have been reached, later authors may aim at what they regard as a more authentic acme; the process thus continues. Various Latin texts show that a continuous progress towards an ideal perfection is not excluded. The idea of decadence, in Cicero’s Brutus and in post-Augustan texts, relates to reasons that do not concern ‘internal’ dynamics of artistic development, but the distrust in the conditions and prospects of politics and morality in the ‘external’ context, including the lack of self-discipline in an excessive display of increasingly sophisticated formal virtuosity.

This chapter discusses Plutarch’s On the Oracles at Delphi, and in particular the account of the grammarian Theon as to how prose came to replace verse, not just in the delivery of the Delphic oracle, but in literary discourse as a whole. Theon’s account of the history of Greek literate culture is an important document of how learned Greeks in the Roman empire imagined how their world had changed, along with the literature in which it was represented. The first part of the chapter considers another Plutarchan account of cultural and intellectual change, namely the opening of On the Obsolescence of Oracles, which tells the foundation story of Delphi. Both texts lay weight upon the fact of change itself, rather than on any detailed plotting of that change, let alone a chronology for it; so too, both illustrate a tendency to see recurrent patterns of change, by which the outlines of Greek literary history are found already adumbrated in classical literature itself. Among the classical texts which are central to this appropriation of past models are the programmatic chapters of Thucydides and Aristotle’s account of the development of poetic language.

Aristotle describes the history of poetry (in Poetics 4–5) in terms of a gradual progress, starting from primitive beginnings and concluding with the perfect forms of Attic (classical) drama. Characteristic of this Aristotelian approach to literary history are the notion of gradual progress, the notion of a τέλος, and the suggestion that different historical ideas, authors or genres belong to one coherent process of development. This chapter examines to what extent Aristotle’s approach has informed ancient literary criticism. It is demonstrated that the Aristotelian framework is in different aways adopted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his history of early historiograpy (On Thucydides 5–6), and by Demetrius in his history of prose styles (On Style 12–15). Modern histories of (ancient) literature likewise adopt the Aristotelian narrative of progress. The author of On the Sublime, however, contradicts the Aristotelian model: Longinus’ enthusiasm for early authors like Homer, Archilochus and Hecataeus shows that, according to this critic, the history of the sublime is not one of gradual progress from a primitive beginning towards a perfect form in the classical age. Longinus suggests that the sublime was there from the very beginning. The special position of On the Sublime is explained as resulting from a deliberate rejection of Aristotelian principles.

In Satire 1.6, Horace depicts himself as a private citizen free to move around as he wishes in opposition to another character who does not enjoy such freedom of movement, owing to the fact that he is a politician. Seneca, in De clementia (perhaps recalling Horace), extols the freedom of movement he enjoys in the urban space thanks to the emperor, who, on the contrary, complains about the limitations imposed on him by his role. In Xenophon, Hiero, who was a private citizen before becoming a tyrant, is questioned by Simonides about the joys and woes of the two conditions: private citizens can go anywhere, while for tyrants everywhere they go is like travelling in enemy territory. In Horace’s sermo, the concrete space of the city refers to a potentially open political space: the figures we see moving around the streets of Rome are free to choose between political abstention and participation on the basis of their own personal inclinations. But the political and social situation was uncertain and unstable. Situations and characters tend in fact to transcend their immediate concreteness, referring to something else as well: something suited to satisfying the search for a principle of authority.

A locus desperatus is, in text-critical terminology, a passage which we deem irremediably corrupt. In these instances, we use cruces and keep hoping for a salvific stroke of genius. It is one of the paradoxes of the Roman Empire that, along with its borders, it kept shifting the criteria for their perception. To the more sensitive minds of the age, the expansionary drive of the Romans opened up many a locus desperatus, where hitherto the simple formats of order, coherence and accessibility obtained. The Augustans do not simply mend the sore spots on the imperial map that have become illegible. Rather, they point to them and, at times, even indicate the way that this drive into vague infinity could be steered: through concentration and the creation of spaces which, in their concrete and sensual materiality, seem to counteract the vacuous phrases of a propagandist territorial politics. If we believe Suetonius, one man cannot be blamed for the vacuity of such an ideology: Augustus himself. Not only does he prove to be a careful reader and interpreter of his own destiny, intent on every single letter; in his last days, we also see him operating according to the improvised rules of a topopoetics whose phantasmagorical productivity is adumbrated in the famous deathbed words: ‘Life: a mime!’ This begs the question: how Augustus-like were the Augustans, and how Augustan was Augustus?

This chapter charts the rise and fall of Virgil’s Carthage to explore some of the ways in which the paradoxical resonances of this city are productive of a sublimity that expresses its ambivalent status in the Aeneid. Under construction in Book 1, Carthage surges up before us offering a glimpse of the city’s glorious Augustan refoundation, but also a vision of the nascent Punic menace that would become Rome’s greatest enemy. In Book 4, Carthage has lapsed into an almost ruinous state threatening imminent collapse, a threat partly realised in the image of the city’s destruction that is a fantasy of its Roman conquest (4.669–70). From the start of the poem, though, it is clear that this city is not just Carthage, it is also Troy and Rome, so the vision of its destruction is not only a reassuring affirmation of Rome’s eventual triumph but a disturbing reminder of vulnerability. Virgil’s paradoxical Carthage encapsulates the Burkean sensation of the sublime ‘delight’ that ‘turns on pain’, its Augustan space sublime and thrillingly unstable.

For narrative and theme, space like time is a key element in the Fasti of Ovid as well as the Metamorphoses. After an initial exploration of the programmatic establishment of the theme of place in each poem, this chapter focuses on the thematic use of geography in the Fasti. The first section reflects on the prominence given to Rome’s physical and metaphorical place in the world: it is the city to which migrants travel, from which armies depart, to which victorious generals return with new sacra. The poem also treats Rome as urban space, and uses topography to help give meaning to sequences of adjacent temples and festivals. The final section touches on how Ovid’s own exile gives depth to the presentation both of Rome and of travel in the wider world: things are out of place.

This chapter focuses on three Virgilian entrances to the underworld – Cumae (Aen. 6.237–42), Ampsanctus (Aen. 7. 563–71) and Tainaron (G. 4.464-470). Using the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia (other space) the author argues that these three spaces legitimate multiple forms of religious knowledge, which are, however, linked to the progressive imposition of Augustan authority.

This chapter deals with onomastic homonymy as a phenomenon of ancient Greek literary history. Focusing first on early Greek poets about whom ancient testimonies claim there were doublets (Euenus, Xenophanes, Alcman and Sappho), the chapter moves on to examine doublets of poets emerging in the Parian Chronicle (Simonides, Sosiphanes, Stesichorus, Melanippides), to conclude with the Phocian Homer of Byzantine scholarship (Tzetzes). After distinguishing between historical homonyms and scholarly constructs, the chapter examines the possible reasons behind the duplication of poets, most particularly the need to deal with conflicting details in the transmitted biographies while preserving the textual tradition.

It is well known that Virgil’s reference to the ‘woods of Molorcus’ in the prooemium of Georgics 3, echoing Callimachus’ poem staging this otherwise unknown figure in his Victoria Berenices, enables the Roman poet to signpost his reappropriation of the Alexandrian epinicion within the loaded context of the celebration of Octavian’s victory over Egypt. In line with this interpretation, this chapter focuses more closely on Molorcus himself and his (devastated) land as a significant theme in its own right. By alluding to the story of this impoverished farmer unable to perform his ‘georgic’ tasks in a poem centred on the countryman’s labour, Virgil retroactively constructs his Callimachean model as a failure to live according to the main precepts of his didactic poem, thus making the land of Molorcus appear as an anti-type of Octavian’s idealised rural Italy. Moreover, this failure is connected to the havoc created by a ‘terrible lion’ whose slaying by Heracles readily offers an image of the princeps’ victory over his foes, thus making the poor farmer’s land a contrasting prefiguration of the hoped-for Augustan space.

This chapter shows how epigrams contributed to the formation and dissemination of literary criticism and theories of style, while also expressing ideas about literary history and the development of a given literary genre or τέχνη. These epigrams, which allowed their author to express ideas on literary tradition and style, were often written as pseudo-epitaphs for poets of the past. The use of companion pieces could also allow epigrammatists, such as Posidippus of Pella, Asclepiades of Samos, Dioscorides of Nicopolis and Antipater of Sidon, to comment on pairs of artists or poets who represented different and often opposing aesthetics. Posidippus’ and Dioscorides’ epigrams are of peculiar interest, since they seem to allude to lost treatises that used recurring frameworks to write the history of a given τέχνη, for example one of the visual arts or a literary genre. The ideas initially expressed in these prose treatises appear to have been reworked, in a very creative manner, by epigrammatists who were eager to formulate their own ideas about poetry.

This chapter looks at potential allusions in Horace’s Odes to the religious buildings in Rome known to have been constructed or substantially repaired by Augustus. These major construction projects in Rome in the Augustan period are naturally a topic of interest to contemporary poets; in the case of the Odes, it can be argued that there are many points of contact between poetic and architectural artefacts, and even that the Roman literary achievement of the Augustan poet as proclaimed in Odes 3.30 can be paralleled with a Roman architectural project of Augustus himself. It is also interesting to note that though Horace’s Odes contain a number of potential allusions to a range of projects in the considerable programme of temple construction and renovation later carefully recorded by Augustus in the Res gestae, there are no allusions to the Temple of Diuus Iulius, perhaps because the memory of Julius Caesar was felt to be too problematic.