Literary History without Literature: Reading Practices in the Ancient World

“Literature” began, as Auden might have put it, in 1823, along with “Art” and the other shibboleths of Romantic aesthetics. The rise of “Literature” as a category is paralleled by the fall of Rhetoric as the privileged discipline of the liberal arts, and, with a beguilingly neat symmetry, as twentieth-century modernism has challenged the category “literature,” so rhetoric has regained its place as a master discourse in the modern academy. If we accept this narrative-at least in such broad terms-it leaves the classicist with something of a problem, however. A literary history that did not recognize that Homer is first and Vergil second (and closer to first than third, as Quintilian put it), would be a strangely trun- cated affair.