- Scholars of ancient literature have often focused on the works and lives of major authors rather than on such questions as how these works were produced and who read them. In Roman Literary Culture, Elaine Fantham fills that void by examining the changing social and historical context of literary production in ancient Rome and its empire. Fantham’s first edition discussed the habits of Roman readers and developments in their means of access to literature, from booksellers and copyists to pirated publications and libraries. She examines the issues of patronage and the utility of literature and shows how the constraints of the physical object itself, the ancient "book", influenced the practice of both reading and writing. She also explores the ways in which ancient criticism and critical attitudes reflected cultural assumptions of the time. In this second edition, Fantham expands the scope of her study. In the new first chapter, she examines the beginning of Roman literature, more than a century before the critical studies of Cicero and Varro. She discusses broader entertainment culture, which consisted of live performances of comedy and tragedy as well as oral presentations of the epic. A new final chapter looks at Pagan and Christian literature from the third to fifth centuries, showing how this period in Roman literature reflected its foundations in the literary culture of the late republic and Augustan age. This edition also includes a new preface and an updated bibliography. Contents : Introduction. Toward a social history of Latin literature ; Author, audience, and medium ; Ennius and Cato, two early writers ; New genres of literature, from Lucilius to Apuleius ; Generic preoccupations -- One. Starting from scratch ; Drama -- the first literary genre ; Comedy: Naevius, Plautus, and Terence ; The tragic tradition ; Patriotism and history in poetry and prose ; The first Latin history: Cato's Origines ; From the Gracchi to Sulla: Lucilian satire and the new individualism ; Catullus and Lucretius -- Two. Rome at the end of the Republic ; Roman education, for better or worse ; Literature and nationalism ; Literature and the amateur ; Literary studies and the recreation of literary history ; Literature and scholarship: Cicero's evidence for the studies of Caesar and Varro -- Three. The coming of the principate: "Augustan" literary culture ; Two survivors: the new poets Gallus and Virgil ; The Roman poetry book, a new literary form ; Private and public patronage ; The emperor as theme and patron ; The best of patrons, and the patron's greater friend ; Performance and readership ; Spoken and written prose in Augustan society: rhetoric as training and display ; The first real histories -- Four. Un-Augustan activities ; The literature of youth ; Love and elegy ; Ovid the scapegoat, and the sorrows of Augustus ; Innocence and power of the book. -- Five. An inhibited generation: suppression and survival ; Permissible literature: prose ; Moral treatises and letters ; Didactic and descriptive poetry ; The tastes and prejudices of Augustus's imperial successors ; The divergence of theater and drama -- Six. Between Nero and Domitian: the challenge to poetry ; The Neronian revival ; Poetry and parody in a new setting ; Vicissitudes of the epic muse ; Professional poets in the time of Domitian -- Seven. Literature and the governing classes: from the accession of Vespasian to the death of Trajan ; Equestrian and senatorial writers: a changing elite ; Choices of literary career: fame or survival? ; Pliny's letters and his literary world ; The public world of the senator and orator ; The world of the auditorium. -- Eight. Literary culture in decline: the Antonine years ; Hadrian, the Philhellene ; The traveling sophists ; The provinces and Latin culture ; Marcus Aurelius and his teachers ; Aulus Gellius, the eternal student in Rome and Greece ; Apuleius, the ultimate word artist -- Nine. Classical literary culture and the impact of christianity ; Tertullian and his successors ; Diocletian and a generation of political change ; Ausonius ; The controversy over the Altar of victory: Symmachus and Prudentius ; Claudian ; The maturity of christian prose: Jerome and Augustine ; Macrobius: the last celebrant of secular literary culture.