Doctus sermones utriusque linguae?

Abstract

The statement ‘a knowledge of Greek was universal in the Roman society of Cicero’s day’ may be taken as reflecting a generally held view, in which there is much less truth than one could wish. We need to consider the Romans’ capacity to understand classical Greek literary texts, let alone reproduce them, not as part of some ‘universal knowledge’ but on the basis of the evidence, such as it is, but from which we cannot assume in educated Romans, not even in authors, a fluent comprehension of all Greek literary texts. Some of the implications which this sceptical outlook may have for the Quellenforschung and for the readership of some Latin poets are indicated.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 61 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.