this study developed from the nagging sense, increasingly common among students of the Roman world, that the traditional story told of Roman literature's origin and early development is deeply unsatisfactory. Challenges to the old verities have become too numerous, too insistent, and too convincing to keep the old story in place, but many of the alternatives now being proposed seem to me to be grounded too deeply in modern ideology and not deeply enough in ancient evidence. Like most New Historicists, I want to speak with the dead, but I am more eager to hear what they have to say than to tell them what I think it means. The following pages therefore set the primary evidence above the debates being waged over it. Scholarly opinions come and go (and sometimes come again), but the evidence endures. My presentation reflects that priority, quoting and discussing Roman sources in the text and being as clear as possible about why I read them as I do, but relegating the majority of my scholarly debts, disagreements, and suggestions to the notes. Yet this is not a strictly empirical study. It owes much to theorists, in particular to Stanley Fish for its definition of literature and to Pierre Bourdieu for its understanding of literature's role in society, and its way of reading Latin poetry is inevitably influenced by the work of Giorgio Pasquali and his successors.