Introduction. Literary careers: classical models and their receptions Philip Hardie and Helen Moore; 1. Some Virgilian unities Michael C. J. Putnam; 2. There and back again: Horace's poetic career Stephen Harrison; 3. The Ovidian career model: Ovid, Gallus, Apuleius, Boccaccio Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie; 4. An elegist's career: from Cynthia to Cornelia S. J. Heyworth; 5. Persona and satiric career in Juvenal Catherine Keane; 6. The indistinct literary careers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel; 7. Re-inventing Virgil's wheel: the poet and his work from Dante to Petrarch Andrew Laird; 8. Did Shakespeare have a literary career? Patrick Cheney; 9. New spins on old rotas: Virgil, Ovid, Milton Maggie Kilgour; 10. Bookburning and the poetic deathbed: the legacy of Virgil Nita Krevans; 11. Literary afterlives: metempsychosis from Ennius to Jorge Luis Borges Stuart Gillespie; 12. 'Mirrored doubles': Andrew Marvell, the remaking of poetry and the poet's career Nigel Smith; 13. Dryden and the complete career Raphael Lyne; 14. Goethe's elegiac sabbatical Joseph Farrell; 15. Wordsworth's career prospects: 'peculiar language' and public epigraphs Nicola Trott; 16. Epilogue. Inventing a life: a personal view of literary careers Lawrence Lipking.