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Prosopography is a modern term for the study of individuals, and is derived from the Greek prosōpon, one meaning of which is ‘person’. There is no agreed or official definition of prosopography, which goes under different names in different disciplines (to the social scientist, prosopography in one of its manifestations is ‘multiple career-line analysis’: see L. Stone in bibliog. below). Prosopography, as used in ancient history, is a historical method which uses onomastic evidence (see names, personal, greek and roman) to establish (i) regional origins of individuals and (ii) family connections, esp. via marriage-ties but also via *adoption (which leaves traces on nomenclature), between individual and individual and between group and group. (See genos and gens for the basic large *kinship units; but ‘group’ theories of Roman politics, see below, presuppose units made up of more than one gens. Thus Scullard posited a ‘Fulvian-Claudian group’ in late 3rd cent. Rome, see various entries under Fulvius and Claudius.) Conclusions about the origins and family connections of individuals then classically lead to inferences about their likely political sympathies and allegiances.

‘Reception’, in the specialized sense used within literary theory, is a concept of German origin, associated primarily with the Constance school of critics led by H. R. Jauss and W. Iser, and often subsequently used to replace words like tradition, heritage, influence, etc. , each key-word having its own implied agenda (for a symbiotic relationship between reception and tradition, see Budelmann and Haubold in Hardwick and Stray (eds.) (2008)). Studies of reception-history (Rezeptionsgeschichte) are studies of the reading, interpretation, (re)fashioning, appropriation, use, and abuse of past texts over the centuries. In providing a theoretical framework for such studies Jauss started from the proposition, previously advanced within German hermeneutics, e.g. in Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960; Eng. trans. 1975), that interpretation always takes place within history, and is subject to the contingencies of its historical moment; there is no permanently ‘correct’ reading of a text, but an ever-changing ‘fusion of horizons’ between text and interpreter. Thus reception-theory, like other modern theories of reading, stresses the importance of the reader, within the triangle writer–text–reader, for the construction of meaning. So Horace, as a man, as a body of texts, as an authority for different ways of living, has been diversely read in the west over the last 500 years, by scholars, poets, and ‘men of letters’, and our current images are shaped in response to that reception-history.