The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (review)

In reviewing this book by Thomas Habinek, Barbara Gold of Hamilton College writes: "Habinek enters into a fray that has long simmered in the discipline of Classics but that boiled up into a full-scale battle with the publication of Martin Bernals Black Athena. Habinek contends that Classical scholars idealizing view of the ancient world (more Greece than Rome) and their isolation of Latin literature from Roman culture has allowed them to ignore "the social implications of their own practice" , a comfortable, ahistoricized position that militates against reading Latin literature in a sociopolitical framework."