For half a millennium the printed book has been the primary means of communicating ideas in the Western world. The history of Roman literature effectively begins with Ennius. Plautus in his comedies had reproduced his Greek models in metres in which the influence of native Latin verse is apparent. Roman educational institutions, predictably, follow Greek models. The casual and fluid nature of publication in the ancient world is described just as characteristic of what happened to books after publication. For educational and rhetorical purposes epitomes and abstracts were increasingly in vogue. Roman scholars took over the traditions of Alexandrian literary scholarship along with the rest of Hellenistic culture. From Virgil onwards Latin poetry was profoundly influenced by rhetoric, and a style of literary criticism that fails to take account of this fact will miss much that is essential to the poetry. Literary Latin was an artificial dialect, quite distinct from the spoken idiom.

Books and readers in the Roman world

Reading Greek and Roman New Comedy through Oscar Wilde's Society Plays

The satires of Ennius and Lucilius

In response to critics who charged him with plagiarism, Virgil is said to have responded that it was easier to steal Hercules' club than a line from Homer. This was to deny the allegations by implying that Virgil was no plagiarist at all, but an author who had done the hard work of making Homer's material his own. Several other texts and passages in Latin literature provide further evidence for accusations and denials of plagiarism. Plagiarism in Latin Literature explores important questions such as, how do Roman writers and speakers define the practice? And how do the accusations and denials function? Scott McGill moves between varied sources, including Terence, Martial, Seneca the Elder and Macrobius' Virgil criticism to explore these questions. In the process, he offers new insights into the history of plagiarism and related issues, including Roman notions of literary property, authorship and textual reuse.

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Plagiarism in Latin Literature

This thesis is an investigation into the styles and voices of the non-dramatic Greek poetry of the fourth century BC. This has been a neglected area of study in Greek literary history, and the extant poems of the fourth century have either been largely ignored or regarded contemptuously by modern critics. I seek to redress this balance by providing close readings of surviving poems, and aim to show that contrary to widespread opinion, there are signs that this is a period of dynamic creativity. The first section looks more closely at the various factors that have led to a neglect of fourth-century poetry, including issues of periodization, the transmission of texts and the canonisation of poetry, the impact of musical and technological innovations and of social changes. Scholarship on late-classical Greek art is also discussed as a comparison. I then turn to discuss specific texts in depth, focussing on the way poems characterise themselves through speakers and addressees. I begin with inscribed poetry (epigrams and hymns), in which I observe tendencies both to conform to a generic model and occasionally to produce more apparently literary-conscious works. The sometimes intrusive presence of the learned author-narrator is discussed in „bookish‟ poems; the final section is devoted to various kinds of sung poetry, including enkomia, burlesque and parody. Although the texts I analyse are diverse in genre and character, they are sufficient to point to a wider vitality of literary activity throughout the century.

The styles and voices of non-dramatic Greek poetry in the fourth century BC

Terence’s use of Greek originals was careful and original, and less aimed at sentimentality or at realism than has been thought.

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The Originality of Terence and his Greek Models

Most of the epigrams ascribed to Plato by Diogenes Laertius are shown by style and substance to have been composed in the third century B.C., except for the non-erotic Dion poem.

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Walther Ludwig

Papers

The Originality of Terence and his Greek Models

Plato’s Love Epigrams