The worlds of Roman literature: Bilingual culture, imperial power and literary tradition in the ancient Mediterranean

Abstract

This dissertation explores bilingual cultures of reading, writing and patronage among the elites of the Roman empire as an important context for the interpretation of literature from the Roman world. Drawing on approaches from comparative literature and translation studies, I interrogate the ways in which Roman literature has traditionally been conceptualized as an object of study and develop an alternative framework which provides a method for the study of canonical Latin texts in dialogue with other, less well-studied materials from the same period that were composed from different linguistic, religious and geographical perspectives. I situate Rome’s Latin literature within the broader multilinguistic literary landscape of the Roman empire, exploring the circulation of literature across political and linguistic borders and probing the relationships between culture, literary production, and systems of state power. In doing so, I show how our readings of texts from the Roman Mediterranean can be enhanced by understanding them within the complex multilingual imperial world in which they were produced. This dissertation intervenes to reimagine the ways in which we make sense of Roman literature and advances significant reinterpretations of specific developments in literary history like the initial creation of a Latin literary tradition, the flourishing of Augustan literature, the emergence of the Second Sophistic, and the spread of literary activity associated with Christianity, by situating them within the broader sweep of Roman literary history from c. 250 B.C.E. to 250 C.E. and the persistent interactions and interconnections between the writers and readers of the empire’s two major literary languages over this period.