ABSTRACT
In the 1970s and 1980s, the heyday of New Criticism in classical literature, it became fashionable to use the rhetorical handbooks of the second sophistic and late antiquity to create new readings of Latin verse. Readings, however daring, could be legitimized by consulting the processes of epideictic oratory taught in the schoolrooms of the empire. Only one thing was taboo; it was deemed illegitimate to assume criticism of the laudandus the person who is to be praised. Classicists have long moved on from this type of interpretation, but Byzantinists are still faced with the legacy of just those rhetorical handbooks, the basis of the education of the rhetors and writers of the Byzantine empire In a highly developed, highly sophisticated literary society it would seem very unlikely that a subtext was not audible to fellow-practitioners and the very best educated of the audience.
