This chapter pinpoints engagements with alleged weakness as a central pre-occupation of Latin studies over the last thirty years and ponders the limitations of its conventional treatment and understanding by discussing a series of examples from Latin literature against the wider context of modern thought. Addressing central dimensions of the poetics of the weaker voice studied in detail in subsequent chapters—notably: authorial self-fashioning, hierarchies of genres, value judgements tied to literary history—it argues that, while there are many ways to stage a complex of inferiorities in any text, the central strategy in most, if not all, of them relies upon an upheaval of expectations: literary inferiority often, almost paradoxically, leads to an authorial voice of superiority as the ‘discourse of the low’ turns the tables on the ‘high’, and these texts marshal their own inferiority against the reader/audience, urging them to reconsider their judgement of superiority and inferiority.