The age of Augustus has long been recognized as a time when the Roman state put a new emphasis on "traditional" feminine domestic ideals, yet at the same time gave real public prominence to certain women in their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Kristina Milnor takes up a series of texts and their contexts in order to explore this paradox. Through an examination of authors such as Vitruvius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Seneca the Elder, and Columella, she argues that female domesticity was both a principle and a problem for early imperial writers, as they sought to construct a new definition of who and what constituted Roman public life.

The age of Augustus has long been recognized as a time when the Roman state put a new emphasis on traditional' feminine domestic ideals, yet at the same time gave real public prominence to certain women in their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Kristina Milnor takes up a series of texts and their contexts in order to explore this paradox. Through an examination of authors such as Vitruvius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Seneca the Elder, and Columella, she argues that female domesticity was both a principle and a problem for early imperial writers, as they sought to construct a new definition of who and what constituted Roman public life.

In this volume, Milnor considers how the fragments of textual graffiti which survive on the walls of the Roman city of Pompeii reflect and refract the literary world from which they emerged. Focusing in particular on the writings which either refer to or quote canonical authors directly, Milnor uncovers the influence- in diction, style, or structure-of elite Latin literature as the Pompeian graffiti show significant connections with familiar authors such as Ovid, Propertius, and Virgil. While previous scholarship has described these fragments as popular distortions of well-known texts, Milnor argues that they are important cultural products in their own right, since they are able to give us insight into how ordinary Romans responded to and sometimes rewrote works of canonical literature. Additionally, since graffiti are at once textual and material artefacts, they give us the opportunity to see how such writings gave meaning to, and were given meaning by, the ancient urban environment. Ultimately, the volume looks in detail at the role and nature of 'popular' literature in the early Roman Empire and the place of poetry in the Pompeian cityscape.