Roman literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: literary interactions, AD 96-138

This volume builds on the work of two international conferences held in St Andrews in June 2013 and in Rostock in June 2014, under the aegis of the on-going ‘Literary Interactions under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian’ research project (http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/literaryinteractions/). It brings different authors of the period (Pliny, Martial, Tacitus, Frontinus, Juvenal, Suetonius, Plutarch, Dio and Arrian, inter al.) into dialogue with each other, with a view to enhancing our understanding both of individual texts and of the literary culture in which they were produced. The last few decades have seen some exciting scholarship in this field, but the trend has been for author-specific studies, leaving the connections and interactions between texts under-explored. Yet the authors themselves worked in dialogue with each other; they attended recitals, commented on drafts, referenced each other in their writings, and defined their own styles and agenda alongside or against those of other writers. Beyond that, many of them engaged with each other personally, socially and politically, and were not only influenced by but even helped to shape many of the social, cultural and political developments of the age through their interactions with each other. In exploring the variety of relationships between a broad spectrum of texts and authors (historians and biographers, satirists and epigrammatists, epistolographers and philosophers, orators and educationalists, military and administrative writers) this volume not only sheds new light on the dynamics of literary production and consumption under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian; it also examines the interface between literary, social, cultural and political spheres of activity, and in so doing contributes both to the wider history of this fascinating period and to the study of literature in Roman society more broadly. Trajanic Rome currently lacks the kind of study which brings political, social, cultural and literary strands together; compare, for instance, Boyle & Dominik’s Flavian Rome, and Nauta et al. Flavian Poetry. This project aims to address that gap; but we also have much more specific agenda, focused around intertextuality and the sociology of literary production in the period.