I was reading some old posts here about the Library of Alexandria, with people commenting on just how many stories people were writing at the time.
Do we know if people wrote public reviews of stories? Have any of these survived? Or do we know of any private correspondence where someone mentions a book they just read or a play they just saw?
I was originally thinking about this in terms of negative reviews. I was curious whether we have any surviving negative reviews (even one-liners like "this guy's play sucks, don't bother with it"), but I'd be interested in whether there were positive reviews as well.
Absolutely. One of the early surviving examples would be Aristotle's Poetics, which is essentially an attempt to define what makes a drama good or bad. Being an arch-empiricist, he frequently pulls examples from plays and comments on them to support his point. Another example would be in the works of Aristophanes, who frequently makes hilariously withering commentary on contemporary playwrights, particularly Euripides. In ancient Rome the literary culture was extremely self reflective and we have many works commenting on other works. For example, Catullus 14 gives a rather forceful (if almost certainly tongue in cheek) criticism of the poetry of one Calvus. Catullus 16 shows his rather upset (and again, probably tongue in cheek) reaction to criticism of himself.