This dissertation is a social and literary study of elite literature at the end of the Roman Republic as approached through de Oratore and Brutus of Cicero, and the poems of Catullus. Neither of ...these authors created their texts according to the established hierarchies of Hellenistic or Roman literary patronage, but rather composed, dedicated, and circulated their works according to a model of symmetrical reciprocity and elite social obligations. The primary texts with which this study is concerned are important for three innovative characteristics of form, language, and style. First, they are texts that also act as specialized venues for secondary display: as they circulate throughout an elite textual community, they provide repeat opportunities for private textual performance. Second, they were not merely objects of reciprocal circulation, but they also supplied a surface upon which the authors could create and define the language and terms upon which their exchange was predicated. Finally, the dedications of these reciprocally-circulated texts mark them as fully developed as tools of social negotiation, objects that both forge and reflect the ideology of the context in which it is produced. Catullus' poems self-consciously embody certain elements of the private display culture of the convivium, for instance, whereas Cicero's rhetorical dialogues can be read as literary echoes of elite public display: the tirocinium fori and convivium in de Oratore, and the laudatio funebris in Brutus. In each case, the textual display offers itself as an innovative replacement for the endangered public realms of display. Particularly important to these authors' development of a lexicon of literary reciprocity and display are otium, which comes to indicate the social time dedicated to private literary pursuits; amicitia, which indicates the system of elite reciprocity through which these exchanges are made, and munus, used to indicate the specific literary product with which the exchanges of amicitia are concerned. By building upon their new uses of these words, Catullus and Cicero write their dedications as tools of social negotiation by combining various elements of dedicatory practice from poetry, epistolography, and rhetoric, to produce a new kind of elite and isonomic literary culture.
In chapter 1, "The Task of Translation in Catullus 64," Young argues that poem 64 is centered on the themes of colonization, trade, and those Eastern luxury imports that mimic and mirror its own ...luxurious poetic creation. Chapter 2, "Excavating the Poetic Emporium: Material and Cultural Capital in the Polymetrics," continues with the theme of imported luxury items and their intersections with late Republican discourse, focusing primarily on poems 12, 25, 5, 7, and 16...
