Florus’ dialogue, of which only a fragment survives, dealt with the literary issue of whether Virgil, who had already been a canonical author in the Roman school for decades, was an orator or a poet. The preserved section contains the setting of the story in a temple in Tarragona (temple of Augustus), an account of Florus’ travels through the Roman empire and a lively defence of the beauty of teaching against the prejudices of the time. The volume includes an extensive introduction, which provides information about the author (onomastics and biography) and the work itself (history of the text, genre, dating, prose of art, intertextuality, and reception), a new critical text, an Italian translation, and the first comprehensive commentary on the dialogic fragment.
