NON DEERIT ETIAM IN HAC ... SOME THOUGHTS ON READING AND WRITING LITERATURE IN THE FOURTH CENTURY

This article focuses on the link between reading and writing attitudes and on how the rhetorical schooling shared by author and public alike helped to form a rhetorical mindset that operates both on the side of reception and of production, based as it is in the pervasiveness of efforts at reformulation. The workings of this mindset can be illustrated by Donatus' Interpretationes Vergilianae, which give us a clear indication of how the literary production in the fourth century can be related to the inculcation of well-defined parameters that are both enabling and restrictive.