Horace’s famous criticism of Lucilius’ hexameters, that if you were to remove the fixed rhythms and rearrange the words you would not find the limbs even of a dismembered poet (non… invenias etiam disiecti membra poetae, Sat. 1.4. 60-63), draws on a conventional literary vocabulary that metaphorically figures texts and parts of texts as their authors’ bodies and limbs1). This critical vocabulary developed in fifth-century Athens, perhaps in sophistic circles, and is so well established by the Hellenistic period that Callimachus need not refer specifically to either body or limbs to set in play a series of puns linking physical traits with literary goals (Aet. fr. 1.31-32, Pf.) 2). Roman writers consciously adapt this vocabulary to expositions of Latin literary, especially rhetorical, style3). From their earliest appearance Roman rhetorical handbooks use corpus, membra, and other body parts metaphorically of literary texts and their component parts4). Cicero, for example, compares the movement of a speech without rhythmic cadences to the motion of a man untrained in the gymnasium (Or. 229), and regularly discusses rhetorical style in terms of