The Roman Audience: Classical Literature as Social History

by T P Wiseman and T.P. Wiseman

Book Overview

Who were Roman authors writing for? Only a minority of the population was fully literate and books were very expensive, individually hand-written on imported papyrus. So does it follow that great poets and prose authors like Virgil and Livy, Ovid and Petronius, were writing only for the cultured and the privileged? It is this modern consensus that is challenged in this volume.

In an ambitious overview of a thousand years of history, from the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198718357
• ISBN13: 9780198718352
• Release Date: November 2015
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 342 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.6" x 9.4"