Constructing Authors and Readers in the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana
ISBN: 9780191896569
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Classical Literature;

The Augustan period in Rome was a golden age for poetry, and also the age in which the cult of the author began in the west. By examining some early poetic understandings of what it might have meant to be Vergil, Ovid, and Tibullus, Constructing Authors and Readers in the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana explores what those authors meant to near-contemporaries, and what the construction of authorship they were a part of meant to the later western tradition.

Constructing Authors and Readers in the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana takes its starting point from the Appendices attached to three major Augustan poets, exploring how their different conditions of production, and the differences between their authorising authors, result in different notions of what an appendical text 'ought' to contain. So, for instance, Vergil's biography leaves ample room for 'juvenilia', while Ovid's does not; the Tibullan appendix explicitly engages with a wider poetic community. Moving beyond questions of forgery and deception, some chapters ask how we would be able to know the difference between texts of genuine and of disputed authorship, given that most of the stylistic features that distinguish authors are replicable. Other chapters make the case for re-evaluation of poems that have been neglected or disparaged, and still others make sense of individual works in their likely context of composition.

The volume is the first to treat in conjunction the majority of the appendical works ascribed to Vergil, Ovid, and Tibullus, and to draw connections across corpora.



Tristan E. Franklinos, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics and Junior Research Fellow, Trinity College, University of Oxford, UK,Laurel Fulkerson, Associate Vice President for Research and Professor of Classics, The Florida State University, USA

Tristan Franklinos studied at the Universities of St Andrews and Oxford, and has taught at the latter since completing his doctorate. He is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics, and a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford.


Laurel Fulkerson has written several books on Latin poetry and on the emotions in antiquity, including A Literary Commentary on the Elegies of the Appendix Tibulliana; No Regrets: Remorse in Classical Antiquity; and The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides. She currently serves as the Associate Vice President for Research at the Florida State University.
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