Introduction: Campania: Poetics, Location, and Identity

The region of Campania exerted a powerful influence over the Roman cultural imagination. the volcanic landscape around the Bay of naples was blessed with immense natural beauty and abundance but also harbored some of nature’s most violent forces. in this suitably monumental setting, mythological heroes such as Heracles and aeneas were said to have performed famous deeds. campania was, moreover, the center of the Greek colonial presence in mainland italy from the eighth century Bce. as such it possessed an ancient grandeur to rival that of Rome itself. after its assimilation to imperial rule during the samnite Wars (343–275 Bce), the region came to be a focus for Roman interest in Hellenistic culture.1 accordingly, campania was associated not only with artistic and intellectual pursuits, but also with the pursuit of luxury and excess. the dynamic cultural environment of Greco-Roman campania has been explored in a number of influential studies, although there has been less emphasis on its importance in the history of classical literature.2 this collection of essays highlights Campania’s significance as both a center of literary activity and an imaginative fulcrum, from the time of the earliest latin authors, throughout the Roman period, and in later traditions of antiquity. attention has been drawn recently to the role of the Greek-speaking areas of southern italy in the original emergence of a literature in latin.3 The first article, by ian Goh, shows how the beginnings of satire, that distinctively “Roman” poetic genre (Quint. Inst. 10.1.93), were shaped by a distinctively campanian author, lucilius. Goh argues that lucilius, from the Roman colony of suessa aurunca on the border with latium, presents in his fragments a satiric persona that alludes to wider perceptions of campanian characteristics in the second