Parallel Lives

Chapter 3 samples some ancient conversations across language at the interface of literature and lived experience: life style , in the strictest sense. The title nods at antiquity’s most famous Greco-Roman comparativist, Plutarch; but discussion quickly moves on to the Latin prose miscellanist Aulus Gellius. What can we learn if we press the micro-dramas of philological competition characteristic of Gellius’ so-titled Attic Nights for cultural insights into the ‘parallel lives’ of the Greeks and Romans encountered in them? Next comes a matter earlier raised amid the counterfactual vignettes of Chapter 1: what if we had some stories to tell, against the grain of literary history, about a Greek poet responding to something – anything – written in Latin ? Virgil’s fame makes his a good case to ponder here; and the Bay of Naples, where Virgil spent much of his life, invites attention as a microclimate of poetic biculturalism. The last section considers a collection of Greek epigrams assembled by a Greek who enjoyed patronage in first-century CE Rome: in the face of most modern critical work on the Greek Anthology , what happens if the Garland of Philip is read as Roman poetry?