Ebook: The Roman Audience: Classical Literature as Social History

Who were Roman authors writing for? Only a minority of the population was fully literate and, in any case, books were very expensive, individually hand-written on imported papyrus. So does it follow that great poets and prose authors like Virgil and Livy, Ovid and Petronius, were writing only for the cultured and the privileged? In an ambitious overview of a thousand years of history, from the formation of the city-state of Rome to the establishment of afully Christian culture, T. P. Wiseman examines the evidence for the oral delivery of Roman 'literature' to mass public audiences.