Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds

Book excerpt: This book consists of seventeen essays by a team of international scholars exploring aspects of the reception of literature from the earliest surviving Greek poetry to the demise of classical literature at the end of the Roman empire. Deploying fresh insights to map out lively and provocative surveys, the contributors examine all genres of the classical world--epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, rhetoric, epigram, elegy, pastoral, satire, biography, epistle, declamation, panegyric--in search of answers to the questions of who were the genres for and what did these people make of them.