Afterword

Summary

This book has been shamelessly traditional in many ways, but perhaps most significantly in its basic shape: Roman poetry of the late Republic and early empire has been set against the work of the great figures of Greek poetry of the third century bc, whom the Roman poets clearly, and often explicitly, imitated. Along the way, however, the scanty remains of Greek poetry of the later third, second, and first centuries have come into view from time to time: post-Theocritean bucolic (the Lament for Bion is a poem into which students of Latin poetry (should) bump interestingly often), the mythological poetry of Euphorion, one of Callimachus' closest Greek imitators, the religious poetry of Isidorus and others in praise of the great goddess Isis, the outpouring of epigram, known to the Romans through the anthologising (and hence canonising) activities of Meleager and through the poems of Philodemus and men like Philodemus which were all but contemporary with, and often produced alongside, their own work in Latin. Greek poetry was a living thing, not (or not just) an exhibit in the Museum. If monumentalisation is one aspect both of the Ptolemaic appropriation of the Greek past and of the Roman appropriation of Greek culture, we must also recognise that, for the Romans, Greek poetry was being productively created all over the Mediterranean and was thus changing before their eyes; we have seen one small example of this in the metonymic use of divine names.

Did chronology matter to the Roman sense, and exploitation, of Greek literary history? We may pose at least two relevant questions.