In his oft-cited and still fundamental Criticism in Antiquity (1981), Donald Russell wrote that ancient literary history was ‘very rudimentary by modern standards’. Going far beyond Russell’s brief chapter on the subject, this volume seeks to understand ancient literary history on its own terms. The introduction places the present volume in context by considering how the recent history of modern literary history, both inside and outside the discipline of classics, puts us in a better position to re-evaluate its ancient congener. Embracing a more expansive and less essentialist approach to the objectives and methodology of the modern study of ancient literary history can enable us to approach the ancient study of literary history in a fresh light. In other words, abandoning misconceptions about both ancient and modern literary history is a necessary condition for a full ‘rehabilitation’, as it were, of an often neglected subject within Classical Studies: the Greeks and Romans’ perception, study, and representation of their own literary pasts. The introduction closes by drawing out some of the overarching themes of the volume and provides a short introduction to each chapter.

In “Romantic Nature,” Mark S. Cladis surveys nature’s role in French, German, British, and North American Romanticism, with particular attention to the ideas of Rousseau, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. Addressing the concept’s ideological baggage, Cladis highlights how Romantic nature has been interpreted in Marxist, new historicist, and ecocritical theory. Analyzing the Romantic nature writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cladis demonstrates how Romantic representations of nature tend toward political engagement, challenging forms of institutional oppression such as colonialism and racism. Romantic nature, Cladis argues, isn’t particularly romantic (in a sentimental sense) and is conceptually and ideologically broader than many scholars have assumed.

The chapter investigates two prominent models for interpreting the representation of ritual sacrifice in Roman poetry, especially the Georgics of Virgil. It is not possible to impose a template of what sacrifice means in Rome onto a poetic text; rather, the chapter analyses the way that a range of different religious discourses interact in Roman society.

Horace’s Epistle to Augustus analyses the contemporary literary scene and gives a kind of literary history of Rome. Horace is defending himself against devotees of older Roman literature, of supposedy classic status; he shows that Rome’s classic age of literature is now, with the works of Virgil and himself establishing a modern literature that has classic status. He establishes an identification between himself and Augustus, since both of them are the last figures of their generation remaining, and they have now become the status quo after revolutionary beginnings.