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Roman Literary Culture: From Plautus to Macrobius by Elaine Fantham (review)

When I was a graduate student, a mentor cautioned me against reviewing books I could not write myself. Had I heeded this advice, I would not dare to evaluate the second edition of Elaine Fantham’s Roman Literary Culture: From Plautus to Macrobius (RLC). Enormously ambitious and just as successful, RLC is a triumphant synthesis of decades of thinking, offering a rigorous account of how, and why, some Romans produced texts and others consumed them. RLC’s most provocative section is its introduction, in which Fantham sets out her methodology and motivations for writing a social history of Latin (not Roman) literature, one that mutatis mutandis mobilizes the tools of reception studies to interrogate how author, audience, and medium interact to create the primary Roman reception of a text. As Fantham herself readily admits, this project has its own strict limitations: RLC “does not try to be a literary history” (xvii) for two reasons. First, that task is too large, and second, the publication of an updated and expanded English translation of Gian Biagio Conte’s Latin Literature: A History renders it dilatory. Indeed, Fantham reminds her readers that her book is intended as a “companion volume” to Conte’s (xvii), and I agree; RLC works best when the reader has Conte at hand to fill in factual gaps that are outside RLC’s scope. As well, in order to have the time and space to tease out various primary receptions, RLC “must renounce analysis and interpretation of individual works, leaving literary criticism for other, more specific discussions” (1). Rather, RLC positions itself as a way of helping scholars deepen their understanding