The invention of literature, writes Florence Dupont, is recent, and its classical ancestry is not firm. Rather than representing solely the remains of a network of readers and writers, the odes, epics, tales, and dramas of Greece and Rome had a much more diversified background and purpose. Some works were intended to be read in groups; other works were not meant to be read at all.

Resisting the traditional temptation to project current tastes and beliefs backward upon Greece and Rome. The Invention of Literature presents classical writings in all their differences. The labor of understanding a lyric or an epic as it was understood in its time requires a radical reconsideration of what reading is and what it means.