Readers of Vergil's poetry have always been struck by its highly imitative qualities. The standard expression of this viewpoint is to explain his whole career as a coherent rewriting of canonical Greek models: Theocritus in the Bucolics, Hesiod in the Georgics, Homer in the Aeneid. But there are other ways of looking at Vergilian imitatio. At least one early reader set out to identify all of the poet's 'thefts' from other authors, effectively accusing him of massive plagiarism. In more recent times, scholars have tended to use the vocabulary of echo, reference, allusion and/or intertextuality to try to get a grip on Vergil's reworking of multiple poetic sources and complex literary traditions.

This lecture will relate work on Vergilian  intertextuality to the study of the circulation of books in the Roman world. What do we know about the books Vergil read? What kind of editions did he use? How did he work? Did he write at a cluttered desk? Or did he dictate orally to a slave? What do we know of libraries in Augustan Rome or on the Bay of Naples? Finally, can the answers to these questions in turn have any impact on the assumptions we make about the nature of Vergilian poetry and the way we read it today?