"The often overlapping discourses of nationalism and imperialism, along with related ideas of social decline, have been central in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-European views of the world. This book offers four readings of Latin literary texts to show that the templates for these 'modern' discourses were forged in their essentials by the early Roman imperial period. Each chapter follows the relevant rhetorical thread in works of Horace, Tacitus or Juvenal, comparing their strategies with the defining structures of modern nationalist or colonialist discourses."--BOOK JACKET.