Chapter 3 - Where Was the Audience?

Summary

Given that short poems were composed in the first instance for viva voce delivery to an audience (e.g. at a dinner party), the hospites of poem 4 can be located in the dining room of the poet’s home at Sirmio, and the contubernales of poem 37 on benches outside a bar on the south side of the Forum piazza. Evidence is provided of the way a poet’s friends would find ‘live audiences’ for his poems; this was the primary form of their ‘publication’, long before collection in a papyrus book. The ‘social history’ context of the poems has been unhelpfully neglected in previous scholarship.