Writing the Hunt: Self-Fashioning, Literary Authority, and Generic Adaptation in Ancient Cynegetic Texts

This thesis argues that ancient hunting literature constitutes a coherent literary tradition in which authors use the hunt as a vehicle for self-fashioning, generic experimentation, and navigation of the ideological demands of their respective socio-political contexts. Using Xenophon's Cynegeticus, Grattius' Cynegetica, and Pliny the Younger's Epistle 1.6 as case studies, this thesis demonstrates that each author deploys hunting not merely as a technical subject, but as a site for constructing masculine authority and negotiating broader cultural anxieties. Xenophon grounds hunting in divine sanction and practical instruction to model aristocratic masculine virtue, Grattius transposes this tradition into Augustan didactic poetry through intertextual engagement with Vergil and Ovid, and Pliny transforms the hunt into a stage for literary competition with Tacitus. Although these texts have rarely been put in conversation with one another, reading them together reveals a coherent literary tradition. Exploring Greek, Latin, prose, verse, and authors across different time periods demonstrates that the cynegetic genre was a flexible literary mode that elite authors adapted to the pressures of their own historical moments.