with parallel lists of writers in Greek and in Latin, carefully arranged according to their genres and set before the reader as models for imitatio in the pursuit of rhetorical excellence. This avoidance of innovation and failure to welcome the concept of change is paralleled in Roman politics and life in every period. Iulius Caesar had outraged the establishment, at least, by preparing to change the shape of the state as arbitrarily as he changed the Roman calendar. The 'Roman revolution' of Augustus owed much of its success to the extent to which change was concealed under the cover of 'restoration of the Republic', and insistence on precedent was emphasized at almost every stage under the early Principate. Throughout three centuries of imperial development, there was apparently never a moment when an emperor or a political theorist so much as contemplated the suitability of the machinery of government and society to its changing function and attempted to lay down the pattern for a fundamental revision. In a very similar way, literary criticism is essentially conservative, with imitatio as a basic presupposition: first the transference into Latin of forms and ideas derived from the Greeks; then the recognition of a Roman master in the relevant field, whether a Lucilius (one of the few genuine innovators), a Cicero, a Cornelius Gallus or a Virgil, and an attempt to adapt his achievements to new themes and new demands; and all the time compliance with the rules of the genre, one of a limited number with names revealing their Greek origins,[1110] and on a lower level with the conventions of such forms of expression[1111] as the propemptikon (farewell to a traveller), the soteria (thanksgiving for safety), the kletikon (invitation) and others less clearly named or defined.
Only the genre of satire has no formal Greek model and no Greek name - indeed no secure Latin name either, until the tradition started by Ennius' satura prevailed over Horace's preferred and clearer title of sermones (conversations). At the same time the rules of the genre were established almost as firmly as those of almost any other, allowing that an inherent formlessness was part of the tradition; so that dactylic hexameters were prescribed, as already sometimes in Ennius and always in Lucilius after his early experiments. This was at the cost of excluding that eccentric alternative tradition known as 'Menippean', characterized by the total lack of formal rules to the point of mixing prose with verse in all sorts of metre. Quintilian could not help recognizing this variant, as introduced by so reputable a writer as Varro; but the examples which have come down to us in fragmentary form from the Neronian age, under the uncertain dtles of Apocolocyntosis and Satiricon, are not acknowledged by Quintilian or any other critic of the classical period.
The exclusion of satire from the canon of regular genres is marked by its admission into Ladn of Greek words and phrases, a licence shared by those two minor genres never fully recognized by the Greeks although invented by them, the episde (whether in prose or in verse) and biography. The true Greek genres are accepted by the Ladn writers without real question, and there are only minor attempts to cross the boundaries between them and to form such hybrids as Hamlet's 'tragical-comical-historical-pastoral', which sdll show the dominance of the classical categories. It is rare for a major writer to go as far as Virgil does in borrowing formal elements from tragedy to relate the story of Dido, and from Callimachean epyllion to describe Evander's recepdon of Aeneas on the Paladne. Once Cicero, Virgil and Horace were securely established as paragons in their different fields, their influence was paramount; and even in the Silver Age, starting with the death of Augustus and running on well after the disappearance of his descendants, reactions against the masters, such as those of Seneca and Lucan never escaped from dependence on the genre.
ii. patronage and its obligations
The social position of literature at Rome, never as fully integrated into the life of the city as it had been at Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries, changed markedly after Actium, when oratory lost its preeminence with its divorce from a genuine political function. Already at the end of the second century B.C. the function of drama, whether tragic or comic, seems to have been greatly diminished, as the population became too big and too cosmopolitan to provide the common cultural background necessary for a mass audience.[1112] Drama survived, so far as it did, simply because of the major reputation of tragedy and comedy among classical genres, and revivals may have depended for their appeal largely on the spectacle.[1113] There is virtually no evidence that the contemporary tragedies written by Q. Cicero, Caesar or Asinius Pollio ever reached the stage or were even intended to.
Instead, literature becomes more and more the property of an elite, as Horace repeatedly emphasizes.[1114] Writers had never expected direct financial returns from the sale of their works, so long as there was no possible system of copyright or royalties; and men like Terence, of provincial origin and low rank, had attached themselves to prominent figures in society, without any apparent loss of creative independence. Even Lucilius, financially secure and proud of being his own man, took pleasure also in being a close associate of Scipio Aemilianus, and did not object to devoting two or three of his satires to attacking his patron's political enemies, while confident of freedom from reprisals. Of the major writers of the last generation of the Republic, Cicero, Varro and Catallus had no need of literary patronage; the posidon of Lucretius and his possible dependence on C. Memmius remains mysterious.6
During the years from Philippi to Actium, political protection was perhaps more important; and the writer is traditionally pictured as dispossessed of his property and as welcoming the patronage of a great man for financial security at least. This tendency is perhaps accentuated by the fact that the great majority of writers, both in the Augustan period and throughout the following century, came from outside Rome, from the towns of Italy proper (Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid), from the old province of Cisalpine Gaul (several of the earlier neoteric poets, Cornelius Nepos, Virgil, Livy, and in due course the two Plinies), from southern Gaul (Cornelius Gallus and perhaps Tacitus a century later), or from Spain (the two Senecas, Lucan, Columella, Quintilian, Martial). But most of these men of letters appear to have enjoyed comfortable means and independent position, and to have fully assimilated into upper-class Roman society, with traditional Roman ideas and standards.
Not dissimilar was the position of Greeks, now rivalling Italians in the equestrian civil service, as the authors of extensive prose works in their own language. None of these comes from old Greece: Dionysius of Halicarnassus combines orthodox and respectable literary cridcism with antiquarian history, evidently to present Rome to the Greek-speaking world, in Rome and in the provinces; Nicolaus of Damascus stands sufficiently close to Augustus to exploit the emperor's own apologia in the composidon of his highly favourable biography, and then attaches himself to Herod the Great as a spokesman for the king and his people; Diodorus from Sicily writes voluminous if uninspired history, as does Strabo from Pontus, now known only from his geographical work. These men hardly need to be counted as 'Augustan writers', however important their work may have been in making the new era acceptable to the hellenistic world and cementing the unity of Greek and Roman after the rift in the 30s. Some dme later, Philo of Alexandria, well known for his activities as a spokesman for the Jews under Caligula and Claudius, but mainly concerned with arguing the connexion between Greek and Jewish philosophy, belongs almost exclusively to his own hellenistic- Jewish society; but the Greek epigrammadst Lucillius, largely interested in music and drama, must have some claim as part of the literary scene of an emperor as philhellene as Nero. But, outside the field of diplomadc activity, where Greek oratory found a new and increasing role in the