Ancient Literary Criticism

Throughout Antiquity, Greeks and Romans interpreted, analyzed, and evaluated the texts of poets and prose writers. They formulated ideas about the nature of poetry, its effects, and its function in society. They also developed theories on the effective composition of prose texts, and they commented on the style of orators, historians, and philosophers. All these different activities can be summarized in the notion of “ancient literary criticism.” Literary criticism was not a separate discipline in Antiquity. Greek and Roman ideas on what we call “literature” (i.e., poems as well as texts of oratory, history, and philosophy) are found in many different kinds of texts (dialogues, epistles, treatises, commentaries, poems) that were produced in various intellectual contexts. Four of these contexts are relevant, in particular: poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, and scholarship. From its beginnings in the Homeric epics, Greek poetry reflected on its own nature, value, and function. Latin poetry was concerned with similar issues: Horace’s Ars Poetica is both a poem and one of the most influential texts of ancient criticism. Throughout Antiquity, poetry provoked all kinds of responses from philosophers. On the one hand, the relationship between poetry and philosophy was framed in terms of a conflict between competing traditions: Xenophanes notoriously objects to the poets’ presentation of gods, and Plato problematizes the mimetic nature of poetry in his Republic. On the other hand, philosophers made extensive use of poetic forms and developed theories of poetry: no critical text from Antiquity has been so influential as Aristotle’s Poetics. Rhetoric is another ancient discipline that is closely connected with literary criticism. In Greek and Roman teaching, students were continuously stimulated to read, study, and analyze the classical texts from the past, which formed the models of stylistic imitation and emulation. By consequence, the rhetorical treatises composed by such teachers as Demetrius, Dionysius, and Quintilian include numerous evaluative observations on specific passages of classical prose and poetry. Finally, there is the tradition of ancient scholarship that came to flourish in the Hellenistic period, most famously in Alexandria and Pergamum. The commentaries of Alexandrian scholars contained observations on literary (stylistic) aspects of the classical texts, which partly and indirectly survive in collections of scholia. This article offers a basic orientation to the study of ancient literary criticism. It lists general historical overviews, introductions to ancient criticism and related disciplines (rhetoric, philosophy, ancient scholarship, aesthetics), essential literature on the most influential critics and schools of criticism (including translations, commentaries, and studies), as well as important discussions of some general issues and concepts of ancient literary criticism.