Footnote *The book before you aims to offer a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with our introduction and Mary Beard’s postscript, approach these questions from (we hope) a refreshing range of familiar and less familiar angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer suggestions and provocations for its future development. Most broadly, we hope to stimulate reflection on how we – whoever ‘we’ may be – engage with Latin literature: what texts do we read? How do we read them? And why?
We’ll spare you potted summaries of the chapters. Instead, we divide our introduction into four parts. The first situates this Guide in the field, and surveys topics and approaches adumbrated in it (and some that are not). Then we elaborate on two specific thrusts. One of them, signalled most obviously by the inclusion of chapters on mediaeval Latin and Neo-Latin, is a call to decentre work on Latin literature from the ‘classical’ corpus. The other, related to that, is to contemplate ways in which literary scholarship can enrich and be enriched by work in adjoining disciplines: history, linguistics, material culture, philosophy. Finally, we offer ‘distant reading’ as a complement to the close reading that defines the field. Along the way, we draw out some of the threads of the chapters to come, and sample some of the conversations running across them.
A Critical Guide: Texts, Tools, Theories
The provenance and heft of this Guide might invite comparison with the Latin volume of the Cambridge History of Classical Literature edited by E. J. (Ted) Kenney and Wendell Clausen in 1982. In part that is apt, and not just because Cambridge University Press commissioned this book as a successor, in some sense, to that one. There too contributors pooled expertise to survey the field of Latin literature in the light of recent work, free of the obligation to cover basic information and instructed to be ‘critical’ (p. xiii). There are some signal differences too. Most obviously, ours is not a history,Footnote 1 nor a reference book in the traditional sense:Footnote 2 no potted biographies or bibliographies for ancient authors, no arrangement by chronology or genre, no aspiration to ‘full’ coverage, whatever that might mean – though we do invite you to join us in venturing beyond (even) late antique Latin, if you don’t already. Hence too the shift of emphasis away from introducing and explicating primary texts, and towards reflection on modes of scholarship. Scholarly approaches have changed quite a bit since the Latin CHCL was commissioned in 1971;Footnote 3 it won’t surprise you that ‘authors’ (in the biographical mode) and their ‘intentions’ rarely feature here except to be problematised,Footnote 4 nor perhaps that the rod of judgement wielded so often there – entertainingly but not always inspiringlyFootnote 5 – is rejected in favour of a more democratic search for the merits, not the failings, of our texts.Footnote 6 The profession has evolved too, in a way reflected here: no gender parity yet, still less racial diversity, but seven of the seventeen contributions are authored by women; and each chapter in its way holds up a mirror to what we do, including Therese Fuhrer’s survey of Latin literature studies past and present around the globe.Footnote 7 We address a broad audience: scholars and students of Latin literature first and foremost, of course; but we hope that the chapters on linguistics, material culture, philosophy, political thought, history and Greek will both serve as bridges for Latinists into these related fields, and encourage traffic in the opposite direction too. Finally, this Guide has been a substantively collaborative venture, encouraged in particular by a two-day workshop in June 2018, where first drafts were discussed around a table; cross-references are just the most visible consequence of those formative exchanges.
Nearer in time, and in some ways in manner, is the Blackwell Companion to Latin Literature edited by Stephen Harrison in 2005. That is a hybrid of literary history and ‘general reference book’ (p. 1), combining surveys of the field with thematic essays on such topics as ‘the passions’, ‘sex and gender’ and ‘slavery and class’.Footnote 8 Perhaps its most striking feature is the cut-off point of 200 ce, reflecting a canon of convenience enshrined in the Oxford Latin Dictionary and in many programmes of study, but also perpetuating it. The present volume, by contrast, subjects such conventions to concerted scrutiny – one reason that it opens with Irene Peirano Garrison’s chapter on canons and Gavin Kelly on periodisation (and we will have more to say about the OLD in a moment). And our topic is not so much Latin literature ‘itself’ (texts, history, genres, themes) as on how we read it: a critical guide in the maximal sense. Perhaps the nearest comparandum, or so we would like to think, is the series Roman Literature and its Contexts edited by Denis Feeney and Stephen Hinds;Footnote 9 like those books, the essays here are above all ideas-driven, not an encyclopaedic gathering of data; like their authors, our contributors have been encouraged to be opinionated, to adopt and address different methodologies, and to speak in whatever voice they see fit. The avowed subjectivity is programmatic, as we try to critique or at least reflect on the ideological underlay of what we do, as well as doing it.
The volume is therefore by definition partial. We have aimed for a suitable spread, and you will encounter Latin authors from Livius Andronicus in the third century bce to Giovanni Pascoli at the turn of the twentieth ce, but, to repeat, we do not aspire to complete or even coverage; to take an extreme case, Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of Plants (1789) has ended up with several pages,Footnote 10 Pliny the Elder’s Natural History none.Footnote 11 It’s true, the ‘classical Latin’ of the first centuries bce and ce is a centre of gravity; James Clackson, for instance, makes Catullus a fil rouge for his chapter on linguistics, and the Aeneid gets sustained treatment by Donncha O’Rourke and Aaron Pelttari on intertextuality, Michael Squire and Jaś Elsner on ecphrasis and Michèle Lowrie on political thought.Footnote 12 Such emphases reflect in part inherited canons, in part the expertise of many of our contributors (and of most Latinists in university posts). But this centre of gravity is also deliberately destabilised, both internally, by Peirano Garrison’s opening reflections on marginality (pp. 52–9), and chronologically, by the three chapters that focus on post-antique material (mediaeval Latin, Neo-Latin and reception) and by the routine inclusion of late antique material in others.
In the same spirit, let us clarify that the ‘Latin literature’ of our title is a term of convenience, and intended inclusively. Latin is only one of two or more languages spoken by most of its authors, whether ancient or modern; from a cultural–historical point of view, ‘Roman literature’ might therefore be a better term for ancient texts – though not for much post-antique Latin.Footnote 13 (Of course that is only the tip of an iceberg about language, identity and above all the Graeco-Latin ‘cultural hybridity’ central to Simon Goldhill’s chapter and recurrent elsewhere.)Footnote 14 And ‘literature’ is simply a practical choice: Critical Guide to Latin might suggest a book on linguistics; Critical Guide to Latin Studies seemed obscure. It is not, therefore, restrictive: if for many people ‘literature’ once meant high poetry above all,Footnote 15 tastes tend now to the catholic, and our own tenor is to encourage open-mindedness. Sander Goldberg offers a working definition: ‘texts marked with a certain social status, whose “literary” quality denotes not simply an inherent aesthetic value but a value accorded them and the work they do by the society that receives them’.Footnote 16 That invites a whole series of questions about canon formation, elitism and more, but is also usefully open, allowing the case to be made that ‘technical’ writings, for instance, should be called literatureFootnote 17 – or, more to the point, that they merit reading with the sorts of tools and approaches typically brought to bear on it. From another perspective, the term ‘literary texts’ is commonly used to denote texts which have come to us through the manuscript tradition, as distinguished from those written on stone, bronze, plaster, papyrus or wood.Footnote 18 But, as Myles Lavan argues, these latter types may respond very productively to ‘literary’ analysis (as shown by work on the Res gestae, that great exception to the rule); at the same time, literary scholars stand to gain a great deal from incorporating such material into their reading of ‘literary’ texts – to enrich our sense of cultural context, for instance, and to profit from opportunities to look beyond the literary elite.Footnote 19 Mediaeval Latin offers a salutary perspective, as Justin Stover remarks, and the same is true of Neo-Latin: compared with their vast corpora, no definition, however generous, could be said to make ancient Latin literature an unmanageably large field.Footnote 20
As with texts, so the topics treated here are necessarily selective. The opening two chapters on canons and periodisation interrogate two crucial ways in which texts are sorted and shifted; a third, genre, is also addressed by them, and elsewhere.Footnote 21 Alongside the chapters on philosophy and political thought we could have set one on rhetoric,Footnote 22 and another on religion;Footnote 23 education, science and law also merit attentionFootnote 24 – but choices had to be made. We have preferred to spread discussion of gender, too, across the volume, while highlighting here its continued pressing importance, whether in drawing attention to female writersFootnote 25 and calling out chauvinism ancient and modern,Footnote 26 or interrogating cultural constructions of genderFootnote 27 at a time of rising challenges to binaries and an explosion of interest in trans-ness.Footnote 28 So too with the increasing attention to other suppressed voices (the enslaved, subalterns, alien cultures)Footnote 29 and, conjoined with that, the often uncomfortable role of Classics in modern experiences of race.Footnote 30
The tools of the Latinist’s trade, too, are explored in several ways. Among those tools textual editions remain a sine qua non;Footnote 31 Sam Huskey and Bob Kaster (Chapter 10) introduce the principles of stemmatics, consider their limitations in the face of a text such as Servius’ commentary on Virgil, and explore the opportunities and challenges of editing in a digital age with reference to the Library of Digital Latin Texts under construction at the University of Oklahoma.Footnote 32 Further key resources – commentaries,Footnote 33 dictionaries and grammars,Footnote 34 translationsFootnote 35 – are thematised across the volume, as are other ‘technical’ matters, style and metre among them;Footnote 36 Clackson (Chapter 11) considers more broadly what linguists can do for literary scholars. A technical matter of a different sort concerns ancient technologies of reading and their literary and sociocultural dimensions,Footnote 37 highlighted here in several contributions.Footnote 38 Modern technologies, in particular digital humanities, are another repeated port of call; we draw attention here to the range and uses of open-access corpora,Footnote 39 not least in intertextual studies, where text-comparison software is now a routine tool (though no panacea)Footnote 40 and big data computation offers new analytical approaches,Footnote 41 as well as in editing and stylistic studies;Footnote 42 and some broader advantages and disadvantages of scholarship in the age of the internet.Footnote 43
What of ‘theory’? For many, the pragmatic truce that broke out after the wars of the late twentieth century – that ‘easygoing pluralism’ excoriated by Charles MartindaleFootnote 44 – seems to hold; and our failure to poke some hornets’ nests may disappoint some. That said, theory is of course omnipresent. It is thematised most explicitly by Alison Sharrock on authorship and identity,Footnote 45 O’Rourke and Pelttari on intertextuality (a subset of the discipline that continues to stimulate interest and scepticism in equal measure),Footnote 46 James Uden’s survey – and revitalisation – of reception theory,Footnote 47 Lowrie’s kaleidoscope of critical approaches to the end of the Aeneid (pp. 795–804), and Goldhill’s exploration of Greek–Latin interactions in postcolonial terms (Chapter 16), but different theoretical approaches are displayed and interrogated throughout.Footnote 48 The centre of gravity is firmly cultural–historical, embraced explicitly by Kelly on periodisation (p. 119–20) and Lavan in his call for a more nuanced historicism when addressing questions of politics and power in Roman texts;Footnote 49 so too Katharina Volk, with her manifesto for a culturally grounded reading of Roman philosophy,Footnote 50 and Uden’s vindication of reception as cultural studies in the strong sense.
Where will the ‘high theory’ of the coming years be? Prophecy is a fools’ game, but we note with Sharrock (p. 200) the still fresh shoots of ecocriticism,Footnote 51 the stirrings of posthumanism,Footnote 52 and the rich promise of the cognitive turn.Footnote 53 Queer theory continues to evolve,Footnote 54 and Global Classics is another important impulse,Footnote 55 not least in its continuing call to disciplinary self-awareness. In that spirit, we offer as one last critical tool a running self-reflexivity about the state of the discipline and its practitioners: contributors reflect explicitly on their own careers,Footnote 56 as well as on the continued imbalance in genderFootnote 57 and race,Footnote 58 the more or less explicit marginalising of areas such as post-antique and reception studiesFootnote 59 and the effect on research of changing patterns of teaching and of funding structures.Footnote 60 Navel-gazing is easily mocked; but explicit reflection on individual presumptions and disciplinary norms is surely a prerequisite for truly critical engagement.
Territories (1): ‘Classical’ and Later Latins
One of the purposes of this volume is to highlight tools and methodologies that can be used to interrogate canonical texts in fresh or challenging ways. Another is to highlight less familiar texts. Why do we relegate so much of our corpus to the categories of ‘marginal’ and ‘minor’? For most practising Latinists the largest single area of neglect is the literature of late antiquity and beyond: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and – when Latin goes global – the modern and early modern eras.Footnote 61 Walter Scheidel has argued that Roman historians can only grasp what is specific to the Roman Empire if they pay equal attention to ‘what happened later on in the same geographical space’.Footnote 62 Similarly, specialists in classical Latin – whom we take to be a large part of our readership – can benefit from asking what becomes of literature later on, in the same linguistic space.Footnote 63 As Joseph Farrell puts it, Latin can be appreciated ‘as richer and more appealing for the diversity that it gained through time and space in the contrasting voices of many speakers’:Footnote 64 there is clear advantage in shifting from an image of classical Latin as a cluster of texts ensconced within a pomerium to the thought that we lie only at the beginning of Latin literature. (The image of the pomerium also encapsulates the limited spatial distribution of the Latin literature of the late republic and early Empire, which is heavily concentrated within the metropolis; the north African Apuleius and Tertullian point the way to the greater geographical diversity of the future.) The accumulated expertise of those who work on the vast range of texts from late antiquity to neo-Latin and modern vernacular receptions of Latin texts has much to offer the rest of us in both teaching and research – not least a sense of our place within the world history of Latin.Footnote 65
That is one reason why more than half the contributors to this volume are scholars who work primarily on material outside classical Latin literature. But how is ‘classical Latin’ defined, and how useful or valid is such a definition? How big is the extant classical corpus, how does it relate to the corpus as perceived in antiquity, and how big is it by comparison with later eras? And how well is modern scholarship distributed across surviving Latin texts?
Defining Classical Latin
‘Classical Latin’ is a term as various as it is exclusive. To take just chronology, it may be used to describe the Latin of all antiquity (excluding mediaeval and beyond), just the Latin of the republic and early principate (excluding later antiquity), or most narrowly the ‘model’ prose and verse of a few select authors (excluding, then, almost everything).Footnote 66 We use it here in the second sense, as a counterpole to ‘late antique’, objectionable in perpetuating a polarity which this volume sets out to challenge, but adopted as a term of convenience.Footnote 67 One powerful demarcation of classical Latin in that sense is enshrined in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. Issued serially from 1968 to 1982, with a second edition in 2012, the OLD is the flagship lexicon in the English-speaking world, and exerts due influence.Footnote 68 According to a decision taken early on, it covers texts up to around 200 ce, adding some from later,Footnote 69 but excluding even second-century Christians:Footnote 70 so for instance Ulpian (born c. 170) is in, but Tertullian (born 155) stays out.Footnote 71 It was a practical decision – to add Augustine alone would have doubled the material,Footnote 72 and the project took over half a century as it is – and not one that reflected scholarly consensus: ‘an irreparable blunder’, said Robin Nisbet;Footnote 73 ‘a terminal limit devoid of linguistic or literary validity’, declared Frank Goodyear.Footnote 74 But it had significant intellectual consequences: despite many advances,Footnote 75 the OLD has failed to supersede its flawed Victorian predecessor ‘Lewis and Short’ in an important point of content (as well as in actual use),Footnote 76 and it reinforces a widespread tendency to see Latin after Apuleius as exotic. (Those educated in different systems, including a Germanic tradition centred on the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, whose coverage runs into the sixth century, often conceptualise the field rather differently.)Footnote 77
The exclusion of Christian texts continued a trend that had been in train since Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer (1795) and perhaps earlier, as Classics extricated itself from ‘philology’s shadow’, theology.Footnote 78 If they were parting ways in the nineteenth century, the two disciplines remained closely enmeshed in methodological terms, thanks to a mutually reinforcing investment in textual criticism and authenticity, as well as a commitment to close – very close – reading of ancient authors.Footnote 79 By the early twentieth century, the fissure was deeper. New subjects had arrived to take the place of theology as methodological allies, and the shared concerns of the Victorian age appeared antiquated.Footnote 80 As in many divorces, the former partners began to define themselves against one another, in an act of disavowal whose unacknowledged force shapes the discipline as we know it today.Footnote 81
And yet classical Latin is in an important sense the brainchild of Christianity – one of which Quintilian might have approved, for all the Christian insistence on a gulf separating the heavenly concerns of Jerusalem from the affairs of Athens.Footnote 82 After the reign of Hadrian, Latin literature famously begins to fall quiet until the resurgence beginning with Diocletian in the late third century. It is hardly a uniform decline: not to mention Fronto, Gellius and Apuleius, jurisprudence flourishes and a Christian tradition gets underway, especially in north Africa. A century of political, military and economic turmoil from the late 160s onwards might be one explanation. Greek suffers a gradual decline in production over the course of the third century (at least by comparison with the peak years of the later second century); but authors of the stature of Athenaeus, Herodian, Philostratus and Plotinus flourish in the late second and early third centuries.Footnote 83 The reasons for the perhaps unequal fortunes between the two languages are unclear.Footnote 84 But as Latin literature made its return in the late third and (particularly) fourth centuries, the Christian population of the empire rocketed, from perhaps 5–10% in 300 ce to a position of clear dominance by 400.Footnote 85 This was the era in which (classical) Latin as the language of literature was gradually standardised to some degree: the pronounced stylistic experiments attempted in the age between Tacitus and Apuleius in the second century seem to became rarer in the new era.Footnote 86 Such standardisation was in part due to the gradual diffusion of an accepted canon of (classical) works taught at school for emulation: Cicero and Virgil, of course; also Terence, Sallust, Horace and Livy.Footnote 87 Like most canons, it had stylistic diversity within it; in any case, as Clackson remarks (p. 584), classical Latin had never been an unchanging monolith.Footnote 88 Augustine could move seamlessly, all the same, from teaching Latin rhetoric at the schools of Carthage to those of Rome and Milan, despite consciousness of his north African (‘Punic’) accent.Footnote 89 It is one of the great paradoxes, then, of the OLD and the field it serves that the very authors and texts who colluded in creating a canon of classical Latin are so often excluded from view.
Sizing up the Corpus
We will return in a moment to those flimsy yet consequential barriers between classical and later Latins. First, we address some questions about scale in the classical corpus: how much literature survives, and how much was there? Surprisingly little effort seems to have been put into answering the second question; but inspiration can be found in Reviel Netz’s Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture (2020), a provocative and challenging essay on the extent of Greek literature in antiquity.Footnote 90 Netz’s approach cannot be mapped directly onto Latin, given the quantitative and qualitative differences between the surviving Greek and Roman corpora. But we summarise it here to gesture at the bigger picture of the ancient literary Mediterranean, and to illustrate the methodology and potential rewards of a quantitative approach.
On Netz’s projection, by the end of the second century ce around 30,000 people had written literature in Greek,Footnote 91 of whom around 10,000 had works still circulating; the latter number fell to perhaps 500 to 1,000 by the ninth century.Footnote 92 Today around 200 authors are transmitted either in whole works or in whole parts of works (i.e. one or more constituent books still whole).Footnote 93 In other words, surviving Greek authors represent perhaps 2% of the total circulating in 200 ce and well below 1% of the authors active to that date.Footnote 94
Those proportions rise if we include fragmentary authors.Footnote 95 But to reach even a 10% survival rate from before 200 ce, we would need works or fragments of 3,000 authors.Footnote 96 The canon of the Thesaurus linguae Graecae runs to around 4,000 – but across a much longer span (to the fall of Byzantium); and late antique Christians are on the whole more likely to be preserved than their earlier pagan counterparts, for a simple practical reason: a text written in 400 bce had to survive much longer before being copied onto parchment than one written in 400 ce.Footnote 97 Even including fragmentary authors, then, perhaps no more than 5% have survived in any extent. As for the quantity of surviving text, this is often assumed to be less than 1%.Footnote 98 Suppose, though, that most of our 30,000 putative writers were neither eminent nor prolific, failing to spur the sorts of efforts put into preserving the likes of Aristotle, Plutarch and Galen: that might raise the estimate to perhaps 2%.Footnote 99
Can Netz’s approach be replicated for Latin? His estimates come from probabilistic arguments based on attestations in ancient sources. Despite a high attrition rate, the surviving Greek corpus is not small, and we have plenty of attestation-rich works, including the post-classical Suda. Latin is perhaps as well endowed with similar texts, proportionally.Footnote 100 But there is perhaps ten times as much Greek literature down to the fifth century ce extant as there is Latin,Footnote 101 with presumably a significant multiplicative effect on attestations of lost authors. In consequence, we probably have less information about texts we know of but do not possess, and an even shakier basis for estimating what else there was. Above all, we lack the Egyptian papyri that, for Greek literature, grant direct access to antiquity and preserve many texts not otherwise selected for re-copying onto parchment. There is, then, a fundamental quantitative and qualitative difference between the surviving Latin and Greek corpora and what they are equipped to tell us about losses.Footnote 102
Still, Netz provides the impetus for a quantitative approach to the Latin corpus. But we start at the other end with extant (rather than attested) authors. The OLD cites over 700 different whole or fragmentary works from about 370 authors, including grammarians and those embedded in the Digest;Footnote 103 of these, around 65 have works wholly or substantially extant. There are also around 35 unattributed works fully extant (some perhaps written by authors with attributed works extant; but to be generous to the corpus, let us assume the overlap is relatively small), and 270 or so authors of whom only fragments survive. These numbers are rough and ready (leaving aside, for instance, the XII Tables and similar compilations), but they offer a basic starting-point.Footnote 104
It is safe to assume that the OLD does not draw on every pagan author from before 200 to survive. What percentage does it include?Footnote 105 For the period up to 140 ce, Peter White counts just over 120 poets ‘of whose verse any portion is extant in a manuscript tradition’;Footnote 106 95% of them are listed among the OLD’s sources. If we guess that prose is less privileged, we might suppose – at least as a sighting shot – that the OLD cites around 80% of authors whose work substantially survives, and around 50–60% of authors who survive as fragments.Footnote 107 If so, we can project a surviving Latin classical (and pagan) corpus with 100 to 125 authors surviving in whole or whole parts and 270 to 450/540 authors in fragments. Assume an overall survival rate, as for Greek, of 5%, and we might (very) provisionally project something between 7,400 and 11,500/13,300 Latin authors before 200 ce.Footnote 108 Then again, the average Latin text was much younger by the time it was first copied onto parchment, suggesting a better survival rate; our projections should be dropped a little if so.Footnote 109 The corpus of Classical Latin as understood by the OLD then consists, on any reasonable estimate, of perhaps not very much more than 100 authors surviving whole or in whole parts.Footnote 110 The overall survival rate, assessed by bulk, looks – as might be expected – low.Footnote 111
On ‘Representativeness’
It is conventional to lament the loss of large swathes of Ennius or Livy and the near or total disappearance of others such as Gallus: like Greek, and unlike many other disciplines in the humanities, scholarship on classical Latin ‘has a constitutive relationship to loss’.Footnote 112 Lamentation may be misplaced in two rather different senses. In ethical terms, the neglect, indifference or cultural hostility suffered by Latin literature over the centuries might be viewed in the context of the ‘epistemicide’ (cultural, environmental, religious) that the Romans themselves so enthusiastically inflicted on their imperial subjects.Footnote 113 In simpler terms of scale, what survives in fact appears to be, to a perhaps surprising extent, representative of works circulating in antiquity: we have many of the authors who were most widely read.
In a famous passage of his Education of the Orator, written in the early 90s ce, Quintilian sets out which Greek and Latin authors a budding orator should read (Inst. 10.1.38–131). Towards sixty writers make the cut in Latin, including poets, historians and philosophers as well as orators. Of course, the list is not straightforwardly representative of what actually was being read in his day: Quintilian is not much interested in literature before Cicero, excludes authors alive at his time of writing, and omits several genres altogether (no biography, epistolography, fables, novels or pastoral; no Apocolocyntosis and no Natural History, to mention a couple): he is prescribing a canon, and specifically a paedagogical one (for the aspiring orator), as much preserving one. Still, in other ways his tastes look catholic, including poets whose manner and content were far from smooth or risk-free (Lucretius, Catullus, Lucan).Footnote 114 Of his nearly sixty authors, we possess over a third either whole or in whole parts, and substantial fragments of many of the rest. The spread is uneven across genres: only one of Quintilian’s fourteen orators (Cicero – who of course supplies a very great deal of our extant prose), but wholes or whole parts of two-fifths of the poets and historians, and one-third of the philosophers. Still, this is a striking outcome: although perhaps only 5% (or slightly more) of classical Latin authors may have survived in any form at all, we seem to have a disproportionately good sample of mainstream literature as it appeared towards the end of the first century ce.Footnote 115
Otherwise put, it appears that the classical canon that Christians would later make their own in the fourth century and beyond was already forming in the first. That suggests considerable stability in tastes, and commensurate fortune in transmission – allowing for the addition of Petronius and others who found more favour with Christian copyists than with Quintilian (whose focus on education overrides all other considerations).Footnote 116 But how ‘traditional’ is our own canon in research and teaching? In other words, how many of the 100 or so classical authors whose works survive wholly or substantially attract regular attention?
Answers to that question must be subjective. What counts as regular? One dedicated article each year? A monograph a decade? The expanding girth (or, nowadays, database) of L’Année philologique tells its own story about the increasing volume of classical research, but not about its distribution. The teaching canon remains small. The ‘Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics’ (better known as the ‘Green and Yellows’) is certainly the largest and perhaps the most widely used commentary series in the world; yet despite a pronounced expansion in range since its inception in the 1970s, it features only around twenty Latin authors.Footnote 117 Just one of those is late antique; five others, or at least their floruits, postdate Quintilian (Tacitus, Pliny, Juvenal, Suetonius and Apuleius), and two were alive when he was writing, disqualifying them from mention (Martial and Statius).Footnote 118 The remaining twelve ‘Green and Yellow’ authors all feature in Quintilian’s list: sign of a remarkably static canon. Of course, curricula are not tied inexorably to that series; even so, probably no more than thirty writers of classical Latin are taught with any regularity, at least in the Anglosphere.Footnote 119
Not many more receive systematic attention in research. If we expand that to irregular or incipient research and to figures whose stock has been rising, but who remain on the edges of many scholars’ horizons – prose writers such as Valerius Maximus, Velleius Paterculus, Pomponius Mela and Florus, for instance; the poets Germanicus, Grattius and Phaedrus; the pseudepigrapha pinned to Virgil, Tibullus and Ovid – we might reach a total somewhere in the sixties. The number of authors considered ‘mainstream’ has undoubtedly expanded in recent decades, with the rehabilitation of such previously derided figures as Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus and Pliny the Younger.Footnote 120 Yet there remains ample room for expansion: an already small canon is more constricted than need be.Footnote 121 And, as this volume is designed in part to demonstrate, we have the tools that we need to undertake the research. More fundamentally, as Peirano Garrison argues in her chapter on canons (Chapter 2), we need to interrogate the link between the perceived authority of the critic and the market value of a text; to recognise that a discourse of the ‘minor’ might be a textual strategy deliberately co-opted by an author; and to embrace marginality ‘as a way of doing business’.Footnote 122
Looking to Late Antiquity
This is not a call to abandon Quintilian’s authors. Other constituencies within and beyond academia expect and even rely on us to curate the ‘classic’ texts, and the boom in reception studies has perhaps had the unintended consequence of focusing attention on a relatively small number of canonical works whose reception has ‘gone global’.Footnote 123 We can in any case now generate more data for interpretation, frame our tasks with more precision, and ask new and challenging questions of our canonical texts. There are also limits to how far we can go in our embrace of the classical margins – albeit limits that we are far from reaching. The long arc of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century demand for re-evaluation of previously neglected authors was a necessary reaction to an earlier era which seemed to give little serious attention to poets other than Virgil or Horace (Quintilian was hardly so narrow). After all, why should there be a monotonous function from how ‘central’ an author is to how often they should be studied? But many would consider it a stretch to insist that Cornelius Nepos’ Eminent Foreign Generals should be studied as intensively as Tacitus’ Annals.Footnote 124 Another (and complementary) route lies across the disciplinary and institutional boundaries erected between classical philology and theology – and giving serious attention to the Latin (and mainly Christian) texts of what is called ‘late antiquity’.Footnote 125
Many (classical) Latinists will have their own prejudices to overcome. ‘The field of Classics’, as Peirano Garrison observes, can easily pose as a ‘protector of the secular in opposition and response to the culturally hegemonic reach of monotheistic religions … in a kind of scholarly post-enlightenment version of the separation of State and Church’.Footnote 126 (Certainly the rich vein of ‘republican’ thinking in Roman texts analysed in Lowrie’s chapter has been an important inspiration to early modern and modern theorists of the avowedly secular state.Footnote 127) The OLD instantiates a version of this polarity between church and state.Footnote 128
Yet such binary thinking is false at an elementary level in the study of literature: the language that Cicero attempted to standardise in the first century before Christ (or ‘before the common era’, in the dating system imposed in this volume) was largely unchanged in the essentials of morphology and syntax nearly half a millennium later. Change was already underway, of course, as Stover reminds us in his chapter, with the emergence of Christian sermo humilis and, in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, a non-classical ‘mannered’ style. And, as Peirano Garrison shows (pp. 72–3), Christian education eventually recognised a distinction between secular and ecclesiastical texts. Nevertheless, continuity in language and persistence of cultural processes demand that we think across the disciplinary gulf between classical and late antiquity. Goldhill (pp. 891–6) situates Jerome’s translation of the Greek New Testament within a long tradition of Roman encounters with the literature and culture of the Greek-speaking Empire – albeit, in this case, one that eventually led to the imposition of rigid barriers between east and west. The intertextual practices of classical writers, as O’Rourke and Pelttari argue (pp. 240–51), similarly benefit from being considered as part of a continuum with the poetic centos of late antiquity and the typological reading of Jewish scriptures by Christian authors. And, Volk suggests (pp. 736–7 and 740), both Apuleius and his north African compatriot Tertullian need to be seen as operating in the same tradition of the Roman sophist.
Of course, just because we can read the Latin texts of Christian late antiquity does not mean that we are necessarily equipped to understand them.Footnote 129 Yet if we hive off to departments of history, religion or theology the responsibility for understanding the culture of this era, then we will not be able to understand fully even the intellectual milieu that produced the late antique grammarians, critics and commentators such as Servius and Macrobius – considered here by Huskey and Kaster (pp. 537–40) and O’Rourke and Pelttari (pp. 250–3) – who remain fundamental to comprehension of earlier texts.Footnote 130 So too with visual commentary: in the words of Squire and Elsner (p. 652), illuminated manuscripts such as the Vatican Virgil demand respect as ‘a series of responses to … works closer to their original resonance and reception than our own reactions’. More fundamentally, as Kelly argues, ‘The continuity of … patterns of thought [across classical and late antiquity] is why periodisation matters and … how it does intellectual harm, by narrowing our horizons and by encouraging a fundamentally unhistorical understanding of literature’ (p. 119). There is also the incongruity of ignoring something so essentially Roman as late antique Christianity. It is difficult to decide, as Keith Hopkins put it, whether the transformation that followed Constantine’s great decision ‘should be called the triumph of the Christian church or the triumph of the Roman state’.Footnote 131
The riches of the late antique corpus are extensive; how extensive is harder to say. Not even the Thesaurus linguae Latinae keeps count of all its auctores and fontes.Footnote 132 But the general impression that significantly more Latin authors from late antiquity are extant than there are from before it gets empirical confirmation from handbooks such as Part 6 of the Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike, dedicated to ‘the age of Theodosius’ (374–430).Footnote 133 Covering just fifty-five years, its two volumes treat well over 200 authors and pseudonymous or anonymous texts or collections of textsFootnote 134 – more than double the number that survive from the four centuries to 200 ce.Footnote 135 Much of this work can be said to fall outside the realms of high literary culture; but it is hard not to be impressed by such an extraordinary outpouring of intellectual energy, and by its hardiness in survival (helped of course by the shift in this period from papyrus roll to codex, a seismic change which also brought with it a marked increase in the visualisation and illustration of the written corpus);Footnote 136 similarly with the astonishing quantities of prose produced by the likes of Augustine and Jerome. If ‘definitions of the classical’, as Peirano Garrison puts it (pp. 44–5), ‘have been traditionally invested in claims of the universal superiority of the Graeco-Roman tradition and therefore implicitly of western culture’, then a willingness to go beyond the boundaries of the classical is a necessary first step towards dismantling these attitudes.
Using bulk rather than author count, Jürgen Leonhardt estimated that Christian texts comprise around 80% of all Latin texts to survive antiquity, including inscriptions. But even the combined bulk of pagan and Christian texts is as nothing compared with the quantity of post-antique Latin. Antique texts as a whole are outnumbered by 10,000 to 1 (constituting, then, ‘0.01 percent of the total output’);Footnote 137 classical Latin texts, therefore, by 50,000 to 1.Footnote 138 To be sure, these dizzying figures pay no attention to quality of text, and they include plenty of material (legal dissertations, for instance) which few would call literature. But Leonhardt does have a point: there is a lot of Latin out there. And much of it, particularly that of late antiquity, the high Middle Ages, the Renaissance and early modernity, is written in a form (at least) comprehensible to those trained in classical Latin.Footnote 139 Here is an ocean of material compared with the pond of classical Latin texts.Footnote 140
One of the functions of this volume is to point the way towards this world of Latin beyond the second century ce, to decentre classical Latin, and to provide some first points of orientation. Attitudes to the Latin canon in all periods are becoming more expansive.Footnote 141 Yet the encounters of classical Latinists with later texts (and their scholarship) are often a product of serendipity or toe-dipping.Footnote 142 We aim to provide broader vistas of landscapes ahead – without, we hope, being gripped by the ‘Columbus complex’, with its delusions of easy access to lands long settled by others with superior environmental knowledge and skills.Footnote 143 Since an ideal of competence in all periods of Latin is clearly impossible, we might instead aim for the ‘nodal’ Classics advocated by Constanze Güthenke and Brooke Holmes as a solution to the tensions between expansion (hyperinclusion) and limitation (hypercanonicity) in the discipline: ‘rather than imagine the individual as encompassing a body of material, either within a field of vision or by means of her own self as the frame by which the fragments are restored to wholeness, we could imagine her as situated within a potential web of connections’. The task is to bring constituent parts of the web into contact.Footnote 144
If the absence here of dedicated chapters on late antiquity and Christianity appears paradoxical in that light, it is positively motivated: rather than roping those areas off (as the discipline so often does), we have aimed at organic incorporation. Individual chapters routinely bring together texts which are ‘classical’ and ‘late’, pagan and Christian; and the relationships between and across them are repeatedly put under scrutiny. Peirano Garrison challenges the inherited distinction between Christian and pagan canons (pp. 67–77), and Kelly interrogates the boundaries between the classical, the late antique and the mediaeval (pp. 97–120). Stover adumbrates the vast terrain of extant (and largely unpublished) mediaeval Latin literature. ‘Heterogeneous, and the product of accidental formation’ (p. 275), the mediaeval canon cannot realistically be defined by the usual touchstones of period, place or literary analysis. Instead, Stover models different ways of approaching the field, with a particular emphasis on diachronic ‘microhistories’ of genre (particularly epic and bucolic) and synchronic histories of style, including the non-classical ‘mannered’ style affected by many elite literary productions. Yasmin Haskell investigates the benefits of more explicit disciplinary dialogue between classical, Renaissance and early modern varieties of Latin by considering Neo-Latin as a modern discipline and historical discourse, before using old, new and hybrid genres alongside the undervalued element of ‘emotion’ as paths into the neo-Latin domain and its varied canons. The global reach of the Latin language well beyond Europe and North America and its continuing life as a literary medium emerge clearly from this chapter. Fuhrer demonstrates that the study of Latin can sometimes signify rather distinctive things in other intellectual cultures where disciplinary boundaries are positioned differently. In particular, varying levels of institutional investment and support for late antique or Neo-Latin studies can be detected in Europe, north America and elsewhere.Footnote 145 And Uden looks at the decentring effects of the global reception of classical texts, urging that we lessen the risk of insularity in reception studies by subjecting ourselves to refereeing processes from those beyond the field.Footnote 146
Uden issues an invigorating call ‘to transform the centre and periphery of Classics itself, reconceptualising work on Latin literature in later periods as part of the core of the discipline’ (p. 432). We hope this volume may contribute in some small way to that endeavour.
Territories (2): Disciplinary Neighbours
A second principal drive of this volume is to look afresh at relations between Latin and its fellow sub-disciplines within Classics. Specialists in Latin and Greek literature (and most are one or the other) and in ancient archaeology, art, history, linguistics, philosophy may find themselves grouped together in various institutional combinations, particularly in larger departments of Classics and Ancient History in the Anglosphere. This is proudly cited as proof that ours is the original interdisciplinary ‘subject’. But how much do we have in common? What are the (largely undiscussed) problems standing in the way of more successful communication? What can we learn from one another?
To start with linguistics, a ‘literary’ Latinist trying to use a book such as Pinkster’s Oxford Latin Syntax or Adams’ ground-breaking trilogy on Latin bilingualism, regionalism and social variation might well come away puzzled or discouraged.Footnote 147 Literary allusion is not admitted as part of grammatical explanation, but poorly evidenced Italic languages are freely cited; it is assumed that (reconstructed) spoken Latin is the primary point of reference as well as focus of research; single explanations are preferred to multiple competing interpretations; and Proto-Indo-European appears to be the object of baffling cultic veneration. (PIE linguists perhaps share an unacknowledged disciplinary border with theology: the existence of the invisible subject of study is ultimately a matter of faith; God is in the gaps.) For linguists, as Clackson puts it (p. 575), ‘individual utterances or texts are of themselves only revealing insofar as they can give information about the language system that produced them’. The goal is to make a general statement about Latin as a language, not to explicate the apparent quirks of individual authors: literary Latinists attempting the journey from general description to particular explanation will encounter linguists travelling in the opposite direction. Yet, as Clackson argues, a better understanding of such differences will allow the two constituencies to make better use of each other’s work: to take one of his examples, work on the historical semantics of Venus/uenus can help literary readers of Catullus as well as linguists.
If linguists and Latinists at least share a language as object of study, that has been less true of Latinists and ancient philosophers. Despite the fact that Hellenistic philosophy is preserved largely through Latin accounts of it, Roman philosophy scarcely existed as a subject for most of the twentieth century. As Volk suggests (p. 701), such devaluation has much to do with the institutional history of philosophy as a university subject, where ‘what is relevant is the originality and, as it were, quality of a given argument, the way it stands up to scrutiny and improves on earlier approaches’ – leaving Roman philosophy ‘derivative and second rate’ by comparison to Greek. (Not a view shared by all, of course.)Footnote 148 If we are to understand Roman philosophy, a paradigm shift is required: much philosophy in Latin was written by non-philosophers who wanted to understand how to apply the teachings of philosophy to their own lives; they wanted to make it work, not to elaborate technical innovations. The tense cultural imbrication of Rome with Greece, and assumptions (by Hellenists) of the cultural superiority of Greek over Latin – both considered by Goldhill in his chapter – provide the larger context for these struggles for recognition.Footnote 149
Institutional relationships between Classics and Archaeology have not always been good, at least in the Anglosphere.Footnote 150 Many archaeologists speak of ‘text-hindered’ approaches or look with disdain on a field that does not annually produce vast new sets of data. To classicists, archaeological reports can seem hopelessly fragmented, their authors ‘more interested in doing another dig and writing up last year’s finds than in making sense of the last generation’s advances’.Footnote 151 Although literary scholars often share departments with researchers who identify primarily as art historians or archaeologists, there is all too little cross-fertilisation with work on material culture, as Squire and Elsner (pp. 614–17) point out – a state of affairs that allows, for instance, the illustrated manuscripts of late antiquity mentioned earlier to fall down the cracks between Latin literature and Roman art history. More fundamentally, they argue, there is too little appreciation of the fact that ecphrasis is not exclusively a literary phenomenon, or that epic texts and representations of epic action in paintings or friezes share a common cultural framework. In sum, ‘if Latin texts can help in reconstructing theories and practices of Roman seeing, so too can material objects help us to understand the conceptual framework that Roman authors and readers brought to the composition and reception of Latin literature’ (p. 672).
Latin literature and Roman history, at least in the English-speaking world, are not so much guilty of ignoring one another as in serious danger of reaching a crisis after previously close relations. Viewed from the outside, the coming of that crisis may not be immediately apparent.Footnote 152 Fuhrer (p. 460), writing from the perspective of a career spent in Germanophone Classics, draws a contrast between an older German tradition of antiquarian, lexicographical and philological scholarship in Latin and an Anglophone tradition that often has stronger links with cultural history: witness the Journal of Roman Studies, whose pages are equally at home with a study of the army and the spread of Roman citizenship as they are with digital analysis of Latin prose rhythm or the question of how Romans conceptualised future time.Footnote 153 Such mingling reflects to some extent the institutional structures in the Anglosphere, where experts in (for instance) literature and history more commonly cohabit than in the German-speaking world, where Latin literature and Roman history rarely share a building, never mind a library.
From the outside looking in, a relative lack of philological depth in Anglophone Latin studies – in part stemming from a lack of exposure to historical linguistics during the training of Latinists – may be compensated by a broader cultural-historical range.Footnote 154 Yet not every scholar trained in the German tradition sees advantage in the Anglosphere’s stabling of sub-disciplines. In his 2020 address to the American Association of Ancient Historians, Walter Scheidel called for a decoupling of Graeco-Roman history from literature. His goal was not to reinstate the continental European system, where, he argued, a narrowness of focus has isolated classical historians from History as a broader discipline. Rather, he proposed re-imagining ancient Mediterranean studies as global and comparative history: scholars might aim for expertise in ‘state formation in literate state-level pre-industrial societies’ rather than ‘in the history of the Later Roman Empire with a side line in Augustine and Mediaeval Latin’.Footnote 155 There are clear but unacknowledged dangers in this venture. As the ‘Postclassicisms Collective’ observes, ‘interdisciplinarity risks repeating many of the same tropes of disciplinary behavior, but on a larger scale’.Footnote 156 In any case, the ground continues to move unbidden beneath our feet. Economic, social and then cultural history dominated the agendas of the most forward-thinking ancient historians of the 1960s to the 1990s, and global history captured the biggest headlines in the first two decades of the new millennium; but new currents of thinking continue to be generated. Maintaining a global perspective remains important: the Graeco-Roman world is only one among many ancient pasts available for study, even within the ambit of the Mediterranean.Footnote 157 But, as history at the same time returns to a bottom-up approach and re-examines relationships with ‘sources’ – in part through recognition that the Roman Empire is too vast and diverse to bear many more generalisations – this is a good time for Latinists to re-examine their ties with Roman historians.
Lavan warns that the relationship between literary and historical studies is under threat: ‘I think Latinists ought to be worried by the degree of disinterest [sc. in their work by historians], which sometimes borders on alienation’ (p. 817). The historiographical turn is a case in point: transformational work has been done on the rhetoricity and literary texture of ancient historians, with important consequences for historians as well as for literary readers; but such work risks not so much being provocative, as evading ‘complex questions about the relationship between historiography and history’ (p. 841). So too on broader historical questions: where literary Latinists, working primarily on texts produced by or for the senatorial elite, are often fixed on political history, and (when it comes to the literature of the principate) obsessed with responses to monarchy, historians are more likely to be interested in wider social history, and in an elite perspective that goes beyond anxieties vis-à-vis the emperor. Latinists can perhaps find more common ground with their historian colleagues, Lavan suggests, by taking an interest in the longue durée of social formation (rather than particular imperial dynasties) or in the kinds of non-literary texts where skills of close reading remain in demand (inscriptions, the juristic corpora, documentary letters).
The Limits of Literature
That brings us back to the question of which texts we read, and which we do not. Why study epigrams transmitted on parchment, but ignore the vast corpus of epigram inscribed on stone?Footnote 158 Perhaps the greatest challenge, however, is to re-examine our focus on texts produced by or for the Roman political elite. Finding other sorts of texts to read is clearly one direction for the future. Equally, as Lowrie shows in her chapter, we can radically change the questions we ask of elite canonical texts, and in the process move into closer contact with disciplines beyond the world of Classics. If we focus on political thought, rather than on political and dynastic history, a whole body of Latin texts can be re-evaluated for their contribution to political theory. Roman works of the classical era, unlike their Greek counterparts, are usually deemed short on abstract political theory. Yet they are rich in ‘commentary … on the actual and ideal organisation of human life and the obstacles to success’ (p. 756). It is important to ‘probe how the Romans thought about politics in their own language in addition to what their ideas were’, in poetry as well as in prose.Footnote 159 Practices of thinking, rhetoric, works addressed to emperors, reflections on the constitution, (contested) exemplarity, histories of conceptual terms, metaphor – all these become resources for understanding Roman political thought.
Political thought is not confined, of course, to canonical texts. Roman law is rich in resources for this area of study, but offers a particularly resonant example of a set of texts marginalised in the Anglosphere, at least. This corpus straddles key boundaries we have mentioned, between classical and later Latin, pagan and Christian, Latin west and Greek east. Jurists flourished in the third century ce, just as belletristic literature faltered. Roman law was one of the reasons that a Greek under Rome might want to learn Latin (so Libanius claimed),Footnote 160 and it was Justinian, ruling in Constantinople, who initiated the single most influential codification of Roman law in his Corpus iuris ciuilis.Footnote 161 From the eleventh century onwards, Roman law began to inform legal education and administration across Europe, giving rise to an enormous body of interpretative literature.Footnote 162 Yet the prestige of the Roman jurists is low in the Anglosphere, the degree to which Roman literature and thought are permeated by law underappreciated.Footnote 163
One partial explanation for this relative neglect is that civil codes in the English-speaking world, unlike those of continental Europe and elsewhere, largely derive from sources other than Rome. The resulting disparity in interest in Roman law carries shades of opposition between church and state and between Protestant and Catholic.Footnote 164 (The concomitant neglect of Roman law and patristic Latin perhaps renders reception of the ancient world in the Anglosphere distinctly eccentric in a global context.) The inclusion of imperial edicts in Justinian’s codification gave prominence to ecclesiastical policy and religious orthodoxy,Footnote 165 and his own Novella 131, added in 545 ce, gave the status of law to the rulings of the great church councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon, so initiating the canon law of the church. To make things almost too neat, in 529 ce – the year which saw publication of his first edition of imperial edicts – Justinian is said to have closed down Plato’s Academy in Athens. True or not,Footnote 166 the symbolic power of the story is self-evident: Justinian, codifier of Roman law and steadfast proponent of religious orthodoxy, ended a millennium-long tradition of free enquiry. Yet in terms of recognised intellectual stature, Roman law is a counterpart to the Greek philosophical corpus, and one which has doubtless had greater influence on how lives have been actually lived. Much work remains to be done here, not least in promoting conversation between specialists in Roman law, with their own set of abstract concepts, historians who mine it for data or try to reconstruct socio-economic contexts, and literary scholars studying how law shaped the thinking of other texts tooFootnote 167 – if not (and why not?) reading the jurists themselves.
Critical Reading
Roman law is cited by Lavan too as one genre where the close reading skills of Latinists might establish common ground with Roman historians. He remarks, though, that in the course of his journey away from Latin literature he has found himself ‘producing fewer close readings of particular texts and more often trying to generalise about Latin language and discourse’ (p. 819). This disciplinary divergence raises questions about the privileged status of ‘close reading’ among Latinists. The habit has been part of the genetic code of the sub-discipline since antiquity: Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Persius, Lucan, Statius, Juvenal and others attracted from the outset a variety of intensive reading practices, including marginal and interlinear annotations, quaestiones and treatises, mythological companions, single-author and variorum commentaries, and essayistic exposition.Footnote 168 Christian authorities likewise developed a rich tradition of linear and lemmatic commentary on biblical texts, often deriving from sermons in which oral exposition was offered of a text read aloud to a Christian congregation.Footnote 169
This symbiosis between classical and Christian reading practices has endured into the modern era: lemmatic commentaries are characteristic of and fundamental to Graeco-Roman literature, as they are in biblical studies.Footnote 170 Literary monographs likewise tend to privilege intense work with selected key passages. Close reading is something Latin literary work is good at, and revels in; and it plays an avowedly central role in the chapters to follow. Reading across texts is also hardwired into the discipline, traditionally in the currency of ‘parallels’; more recently in the contested dimensions of allusion, reference and intertextuality.Footnote 171 But what of ‘distant reading’?Footnote 172 This might take us to a different set of authors from the ‘minor’ writers identified by Peirano Garrison, many of whom (particularly the pseudonymous poets) offer intense rewards, intertextual and other, to close readers. Keith Hopkins notoriously derided an inductive approach to history whereby credit went ‘to the ancient historian who makes the best pattern out of the largest number of pieces and cites the most obscure sources relevantly’:Footnote 173 he advocated rather for a deductive approach, insisting that historians first create a broader framework within which to contextualise the piecemeal ancient data.Footnote 174 Something of this method can be seen in Netz’s Scale, Space and Canon, which attempts a survey of all Greek literature up to 200 ce in order to contextualise what we have, and to understand long-term shifts in literary culture, such as the collapse of the early imperial model of patron and author and a change in late antiquity towards the model of the teacher and his circle.
Smaller data sets than the whole of Greek or Latin literature can also be read from a distance. To take an example close to the interests of both editors of this volume, around fifty Graeco-Roman ‘literary’ letter collections survive in manuscript form from the period up to the sack of Rome in 410. They run to many thousands of individual letters: the correspondence of Cicero, Libanius, Augustine and Isidore of Pelusium alone consists of nearly 5,000 pieces.Footnote 175 Much of this vast corpus responds well to close reading of the sort normally practised on poetry, including readings with an explicitly intertextual focus. But perhaps as much is resistant: letters of recommendation, consolation and friendly solicitation or regard, for instance, tend to work with a relatively small number of repeated tropes. The ‘Ancient Letter Collections’ project run by Roy Gibson, Andrew Morrison and Antonia Sarri aims for ‘distant’ reading of all fifty collections by collecting data on selected aspects of each one (numbers of senders and addressees; number and range of length of letters; the arrangement of the letters in manuscripts; what else is transmitted with each collection). Andrew Riggsby suggests other ways in which we might read epistolographical corpora from a distance, by focusing for instance on discourse structure, topic modelling and sentiment analysis.Footnote 176 Biography, declamation, sermons, dialogues, commentaries and works of exegesis, martyr narratives and medical and technical texts might benefit from similar approaches. The greatest riches for distant reading are offered by digital humanities and the vast amounts of data that computer-led approaches can harvest for interpretation.Footnote 177 The greatest obstacle remains the incomplete digitisation of Latin texts in machine-readable form, particularly for later antiquity and the early mediaeval period, and the fact that databases are frequently locked behind paywalls.
There is ample place, then, for both ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading – critical readings both – in a field which is far from exhaustion, but also ripe for expansion. If we have focused here on just some of the ways in which that expansion might be pursued – distant reading, conversations across sub-disciplinary fences, and more dialogue between classical and later Latins – we hope that this introduction has offered a suitable taste of the Guide that awaits.
