the second a noncitizen Calabrian who came to Rome and won patronage for his poetry, then citizenship, practicing a variety of genres that looked to the Hellenistic world - a poet, not a politician. (...) Fantham does not elaborate on how the different social and civil backgrounds affected the literary culture, except to say that senators and some equestrians did not need to resort to patronage, whereas of course outsiders and equestrians like Horace did. We would expect that social background would often have had decisive and particular influence on writers, but that is an area where we still are groping for reliable methodology. How often did men use their literary presentation to turn their backs on their socially inferior or non-Roman background? How often did they look at Roman culture obliquely from the alien cultural position of their origins? A writer's education was obviously very important. We have a fair sense of how senatorial sons and wealthy equestrians were educated; Horace's father, who wasn't exactly poor, but rather undignified in the way he personally took the boy to and from school, saw to it that Horace was given an education that equaled the training of senatorial sons, both in Rome and later in Athens. Boys were taught Latin grammar, style, and the classics of Latin literature; and they were given a grounding in Greek. The amount of Greek and the relative mastery of that language would vary according to the century and the social and political intentions of the future writer. A young man whose family destined him for a political career and who one day might retire to write history, like Sallust or later Tacitus, would be unlikely to become as thoroughly bilingual and bicultural as a poet like Vergil, Horace, or Ovid, whose entire career was centered on poetry and achieving effective intertextuality with the great poets of Classical Greece and the Hellenistic world. There were men like Cato who ostentatiously put Greek culture down (while instinctively exploiting it), and men like Catullus, a century later, who idolized the literary culture of Alexandria. As Fantham notes, the word 'audience' (auditores) does not fully cover what we today mean by the literary public, but it was accurate to start with. Since the first literary material was tragedy and comedy, it was aimed at the audience which attended performances in Rome's makeshift theatres...' (WILLIAM SCOVIL ANDERSON in American Journal of Philology, 1998, pp.135-38).