late antiquity left no theoretical treatment on literary practice, which would be the equivalent of Aristote’s rhetoric and Poetic, the Ars poetica d’Horace or the Oratory Institution of Quintilien. This creates a methodological difficulty: it is very tempting to approach the texts of this period in the light of theories that are already centuries old. If we cannot completely ignore these theories, which are still effective, given the weight of the traditi...