This introductory chapter reflects on the importance of monuments, topography and symbolic space in the production of Augustan ideology, both reviewing the manifold ways in which the princeps sought to impose himself on the urban and Italian landscape, and seeking to contextualise these within wider patterns in the literary and cultural construction of space in the first century BC. After a brief review of the ‘spatial turn’ in Classical Studies, it goes on to identify six broad categories within which the construction and representation of space in ancient literary texts has typically been considered in recent scholarship: the relation between written and physical cities; the relation between space and hegemonic power; the contrasting paradigms of hodological and cartographic space; the relation between centre and periphery; space as a site of cultural memory; and the conceptualisation of poetics in spatial terms. A final section traces some key themes that emerge from the volume’s remaining chapters and relates them to these wider trends in Classical Studies.

Virgil’s is the only literary biography whose development, from the early Imperial Age to Late Antiquity and beyond, we can examine. It was largely constructed through inferences drawn from the author’s works, selected on the basis of their reception and according to the cultural characteristics of different ages of reception. The biography was adapted to school teaching, particularly in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but it was also influenced by the critical interpretation of Virgil, which variously modified the image and the evaluation of the poet.

This paper engages with the anonymous verses quoted by Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars. By analyzing several poems concerning Julius Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius, it shows how these powerful men had had to deal with an anonymous (and pseudonymous) anti-propaganda which involves different social backgrounds cooperating together from the stage of composition to that of circulation. The presence of these voices offers a means of testing the authoritarian climate and the different reactions between the three figures of power considered above.

This chapter examines the role played by lectica (litter) in Roman literature. Investigating Roman accounts of the conveyance's origins, it shows how lectica was repeatedly framed as an exotic import from the Near East, only available to Romans upon their exposure, through the process of imperial expansion, to Eastern softness. But such a projection involved carefully distinguishing this ‘decadent’ litter from already existing, sanctioned litter use (including its use as a 'stretcher'). The litter’s status as a newfangled import is moreover belied by coexisting narratives of republican-era patriarchs riding in lectica because of injury, old age, or disability, and numerous able-bodied Roman commanders who take the field in a lectica. That Cicero could at one moment lambast his juridical or political opponents for employing the litter and then invite a friend for a lectica joy-ride points up how such an object was used to focalize moral discourses in conflict. The chapter ultimately argues that the vehicle's configuration as an awkward boundary-crosser, constantly out of place whether in public or in private, helps shore up other more dominant categories, vehicular and otherwise.

The mushrooming bureaucracy of the Roman empire made much of documents. These written records – rescripts, inscriptions, edicts, among other things – became a gold standard of authority within a certain ideological schema. But the system was also open to ruffling. This chapter looks at how two seemingly unrelated authors – Justin Martyr and Suetonius – lodged their respective challenges to the authority of the imperial document. First, it examines how Justin manages to be parasitic on the fidelity of the document to find an authorised imperial home for Christianity, at the same time as he devalues the cold culture of official writing against the hot Christian culture of orality and immediacy. Second, it explores how Suetonius stages a movement in his Caesars from faith in the imperial written bureaucracy to disenchantment with documents, and to a concomitant investment in oral forms of knowledge. Most importantly, this epistemological drift actually explains the infamous ‘decline’ of the Caesars from dutifully documented, bureaucratically robust biography to glorified gossip column. The discourse of the document provides a new language of interaction to conduct this meeting of disparate texts.

The conclusion (‘Post-Mortem’) suggests future possibilities and brings together the interrelated threads of individual chapters to restate the case for the importance of the biofictional reception of Roman poetry not only to the understanding of ancient literature and its reception, but also to the history of modern life-writing. Taken together, the chapters in this book tell a cultural history of the biofictional reception of Roman poetry. They put the author back into the discussion of Roman poetry, and in doing so bring to light a fundamental mode of reading and writing Latin poetry which opens up new perspectives on the ways in which antiquity and its reception have helped to shape paradigms of how to read, write and live lives.

Chapter 2 examines the staging of lives in early modern England, focusing on what is probably the most densely biofictional play of the period, Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601). Poetaster is predicated on what Matthew Steggle has called the ‘poetics of personation’, creating fictional versions of the playwright and his contemporaries. But the ‘poetics of personation’ encompasses not just modern lives but ancient ones, too. Jonson’s play resurrects Virgil, Tibullus, Horace and Ovid based on extended passages of translation from their works. Poetaster thus actively stages the dynamics of biofictional reading. But in this multiplicity of characters ancient Lives and texts mingle and merge. Ovid enacts episodes from the biography of the emperor who banished him, Gallus belies his ancient life, regaining the favour of the emperor who – according to the biographical tradition – forced him to commit suicide. Issues are complicated further when Jonson’s ancient and modern ‘poetics of personation’ contaminate each other: Ovid mirrors the recently dead Marlowe; Crispinus and Demetrius figure Jonson’s rivals Marston and Dekker. Above all, Jonson himself lurks behind the figure of Horace, as the gap between ancient texts and modern biofictions allows the play to explore the political tensions between the poet and the state and the responsibilities of authorship.