The act of taking another’s written or spoken material and passing it off as one’s own in order to receive credit for having produced it. While Cicero has M. Pupius Piso accuse the Stoics of plagiarizing philosophical ideas from the Peripatetics (Fin. 5.74), other sources understand plagiarists to steal a predecessor’s particular expression of ideas and content. Plagiarism was not a single concept or category across time, media, and genre. Instead, it appeared in a constellation of practices sharing fundamental traits that closely map onto modern notions of plagiarism. Plagiarism in ancient Rome occurred in oral and written form from oral and written sources. A plagiarist could steal an earlier text in its entirety or with just minimal changes, or he could steal some section or lines of an earlier text. In the latter localized cases, accusations of plagiarism were often mechanical. Yet they were grounded in particular ideas, whether stated or implied, of what constituted the offense. One was that plagiarism had an aesthetic dimension and was a matter of staying too close to a model. While an author usually modified his source material in such instances, he was still subject to plagiarism charges based on the similarities that remained, which his accuser(s) deemed excessive and culpable. At the same time, intentions typically played a decisive role in determining if someone plagiarized. The question was whether the person deliberately set out to deceive an audience into giving him authorial credit for what he, in fact, took from someone else.
Article
Emily J. Gowers
Article
Philip Hardie
At the summit of the ancient hierarchy of genres, epic narrates in hexameter verse the deeds of gods, heroes, and men The authority of Homer, the name given to the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey, ensures that the forms and conventions of the Homeric poems are determinative for the whole of the Greco-Roman tradition of epic. From an early date, the production and reading of epic poems was accompanied by intensive scholarly and critical activity. Over the centuries, numerous epics were written on both legendary and historical subjects, as the genre responded to changing aesthetic and ideological conditions. In Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid successfully established for itself an authority comparable to that of the Homeric poems, and all later Latin epics place themselves within a Virgilian tradition. Epic in Greek and Latin continues to flourish in late antiquity, when Christian writers appropriate its forms to propagate their own messages and praise their own heroes.
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Fiachra Mac Góráin, Don P. Fowler, and Peta G. Fowler
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70–19
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Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed
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D. P. Nelis
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Peta G. Fowler and Don P. Fowler
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Patrick Glauthier
In the context of Latin literature, inconsistency is most often invoked to mean self-contradiction: for example, in the second Georgic, Virgil declares that Italy is blissfully free from snakes, but in the following book, snakes pose a deadly threat to the Italian farmer and his animals. Inconsistency, however, can also describe general ambiguity, lack of unity, factual inaccuracy, and incoherence of almost any kind. A number of historically contingent factors affect how readers recognize and respond to inconsistencies. Ancient criticism of the Homeric poems and the Aeneid often considered inconsistencies flaws, and this tradition has influenced modern thinking about the topic. From the late 20th century onwards, critics have frequently viewed the creation of inconsistency as a deliberate authorial strategy: the reader is exposed to two different realities, and the resulting tension contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. The apparent receptivity of Roman literary culture to inconsistency may imply a worldview that had more in common with quantum mechanics than an Aristotelian universe dominated by the law of non-contradiction.
