Abstract The book proposes the following hypothesis: that non-technical literature in the Roman world, both poetry and prose, was composed in the first instance for oral delivery to a large public audience, and that the copying and circulation of written texts was only a secondary stage in the 'publication' process. The hypothesis is tested by a systematic survey of the evidence for a thousand years of Roman history, from the formation of Rome as a city-state (late seventh century BC) to the final establishment of a Christian culture (late fourth century AD). For the first four centuries of this period the contemporary evidence is necessarily indirect, by analogy with archaic Greek society and by inference from the iconography of terracotta reliefs, painted pottery and engraved bronzes; but once literary texts become available about 200 BC, close reading provides increasingly reliable information about the circumstances of literary production and dissemination. Particular attention is paid to the annual 'stage-games' (ludi scaenici), which enabled authors to reach an audience notionally coextensive with the Roman People. No clear distinction should be drawn between literature and drama, and some literary genres, in particular satire and 'epyllion', are best understood as part of a performance tradition involving actors and dancers. The whole argument treats literary history as part of the political and social realities of Roman popular culture, and examines the effect of the creation of large permanent theatres in Rome in the first century BC.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 121 citations exist upstream.