Rome and the Literature of Gardens

Fencing the plot, weeding and pruning, keeping out pests and reaping the harvest operate as metaphors for culture and ideology, and guide P.s investigation of authorial intention, the audience, generic conventions, anxiety of inuence, and cultural and political critiques. The last part of the chapter discusses what P. unabashedly calls this loud, obnoxious fart, with which Priapus scares the witches, and interprets its signicance for the relationship between the satirist and his audience: the fart also scares o sceptics who doubt the satirists power to transgress decorum. P. concludes the chapter and the book with a reection on Classics as a scholarly eld through her reading of The Invention of Love, whose protagonist, A.E. Housman, uses gardening metaphors when he talks about textual criticism and the desire for knowledge.P. has written her book for as wide an audience as possible (p. ix).