The conclusion (‘Post-Mortem’) suggests future possibilities and brings together the interrelated threads of individual chapters to restate the case for the importance of the biofictional reception of Roman poetry not only to the understanding of ancient literature and its reception, but also to the history of modern life-writing. Taken together, the chapters in this book tell a cultural history of the biofictional reception of Roman poetry. They put the author back into the discussion of Roman poetry, and in doing so bring to light a fundamental mode of reading and writing Latin poetry which opens up new perspectives on the ways in which antiquity and its reception have helped to shape paradigms of how to read, write and live lives.

The introduction makes the case for fictional biography (or ‘biofiction’) as fundamental to understanding the reception of Roman poetry. Bringing together developments in life-writing studies and recent work on ancient biography and poets’ Lives, it develops a concept of biofictional reading as a key mode of the reception of Latin poetry. Aware of ancient habits of reading poetry ‘for the life’, Roman poets wrote autofictional versions of their Lives for later readers to pick up, creating a body of literature that demands to be read in terms of Lives in reception.