The interest in early Latin developed mainly outside the field of normative grammar, particularly in authors who belonged to the tradition of scholarly or antiquarian writing. Varro’s encyclopaedic works testify to a unique effort to save uestigia of the cultural and historical past by means of linguistic operations. His approach soon lost its institutional character and was replaced by curiosity for rare minutiae, as in Pliny’s Dubius Sermo. Grammarians like Probus and Caper, whose orientation was philological rather than didactic, considered that the auctoritas of literary models made divergences from the norm or contemporary usage acceptable, and viewed uetustas as the area of experimental variation, both lexical and morphological, with respect to the usage of Republican writers. The inclusion of an immense corpus of literary quotations in comprehensive works (artes grammaticae) facilitated the adoption of an overall perspective that embraced the evolution of the linguistic system at all levels, and kept alive an awareness of the diachronic dimension of the language, which became increasingly profound in scholars like Priscian who read Terence in sixth-century Constantinople.

This chapter has two purposes. First, it outlines the problems of and methods for finding the popular voice in our evidence from Roman antiquity. Utilising James C. Scott’s paradigm of hidden transcripts, this chapter argues that wider perceptions of the Roman emperor can be excavated from a wide-range of different material. Second, the chapter explores the history and historiography of the Roman emperor and how the power of the Roman emperor has been described and understood in antiquity and beyond.

The introduction defines the two key terms of the book, “matter” and “making.” For the early English court poets, “matter” was a relative term. In its most concrete sense, it denoted the pre-existing textual sources that a poet used as the basis for his poetry, but it also referred, in a broader and Aristotelian sense, to whatever materials a poem was understood to be made from. “Making referred to the set of techniques that early writers used to rework matter into poetry, and it had its origins in classical rhetoric: a poet was said to begin by “inventing” (or identifying) matter on which to work, and only afterwards to “dispose” (or restructure) that matter into a new form and shape. “Making” differs from the Scholastic model of authorship, which stresses the authority (or auctoritas) of the writer, and it also differs from early modern theories of authorship, which stress the autonomy of the literary work. It persists as the prevailing method for writing poetry even to the reign of Elizabeth I, although literary attitudes towards matter in particular begin to shift during the sixteenth century.