The Roman Poetry Book

Abstract

After discussing the now famous papyrus fragment discovered in 1979 in Lower Nubia and covered with lines of poetry identified with the elegist Cornelius Gallus, this chapter focuses on reconstructing the material habitus of Latin poetry within the Roman bookroll. Reviewing programmatic passages in Ennius, Plautus, Catullus, Ovid, and especially Horace and Virgil, the chapter shows many of the ways that Roman authors made reference to writing and textual materiality within their work to signal and often to resist intimacy with readers in the world outside of their poems. Focusing on the symbolic importance of the special copies that authors may have had prepared for friends and patrons, known now as “presentation copies,” these readings ultimately help to illuminate the surprising rarity of explicit references to writing in Virgil, an author, like others, exquisitely concerned with managing relationships with elite readers by way of his texts.