Drawing on the historicizing turn in Latin literary scholarship, Roman Literary Cultures combines new critical methods with traditional analysis across four hundred years of Latin literature, from mid-republican Rome in the second century BC to the Second Sophistic in the second century AD. The contributors explore Latin texts both famous and obscure, from Roman drama and Menippean satire through Latin elegies, epics, and novels to letters issued by Roman emperors and compilations of laws.

Each of the essays in this volume combines close reading of Latin literary texts with historical and cultural contextualization, making the collection an accessible and engaging combination of formalist criticism and historicist exegesis that attends to the many ways in which classical Latin literature participated in ancient Roman civic debates.

Alison Keith is a professor of classics, comparative literature, medieval studies, and women and gender studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic.

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Jonathan Edmondson is a professor in the Department of History and the Programme in Classical Studies in the Division of Humanities at York University.

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‘All articles are minutely argued… Editors and contributors should be congratulated for this engaging addition to Phoenix Supplementary Volumes.’

The Classical Journal June 2017

"Charming and impressive, this volume is characteristic both of the editors and of Elaine Fantham; she must have been pleased."

University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018