This book examines how the Romans conceived of their poetic media. Song has links to the divine through prophecy, while writing offers a more quotidian, but also a more realistic way of presenting what a poet does. In a culture of highly polished book production where recitation was the fashion, to claim to sing or to write was one means of self-definition. This book examines the stakes of literary claims to one medium or another. Generic definition is an important factor. Epic and lyric have traditional associations with song, while the literary epistle is obviously written. But issues of int ... More

This book examines how the Romans conceived of their poetic media. Song has links to the divine through prophecy, while writing offers a more quotidian, but also a more realistic way of presenting what a poet does. In a culture of highly polished book production where recitation was the fashion, to claim to sing or to write was one means of self-definition. This book examines the stakes of literary claims to one medium or another. Generic definition is an important factor. Epic and lyric have traditional associations with song, while the literary epistle is obviously written. But issues of interpretability and power matter even more. Vergil's Sibyl resists the submission to the divine that song entails and would rather write up her prophecies, but the winds blow these around and make them uninterpretable. Song has advantages, but comes at a price. The choice of medium contributes to the debate about the relative potency of rival discourses, specifically poetry, politics, and the law. Writing offers an out from the social and political demands of the moment by shifting the focus toward the readership of posterity. This book fills two needs in the scholarship by focusing on the importance of the media in literary and political self-definition during this period and by providing an account of Augustan literature in its cultural setting. Speech act theory provides a tool for analyzing the interrelation of writing, utterance, and performativity.