A familiar image from the Roman world is a Pompeian portrait of a man and woman sometimes identified as Terentius Neo and his wife. He has a papyrus roll under his chin, while she looks out with a writing tablet in one hand, a stylus held to her lips in the other. The message of the attributes presented would seem to be: ‘ We can and do read and write’. But how should the message be interpreted? To judge from the (...) houses in which this and similar portraits were found, the couple was not of the elite decurion class, but belonged to that difficult to define group of varying social, economic and cultural statuses recently described by Keith Hopkins as ‘sub-elites’. Does the display of book and pen then reflect the social reality of the sub-elite orders of Pompeian society, or is the self-representation rather an expression of social pretension, with the couple attempting to emulate the Roman elite? If the latter is the case, what does the image say about the habits of the Roman ruling class? This question has been raised in relation to the issue of literacy, particularly women's literacy, but the image invites another question. (shrink)

Hunters of acrostics have had little luck with Horace. Despite his manifest love of complex wordplay, virtuoso metrical tricks and even alphabet games, acrostics seem largely absent from Horace's poetry. The few that have been sniffed out in recent years are, with one notable exception, either fractured and incomplete—the postulatedPINN-inCarm.4.2.1–4 (pinnis?Pindarus?)—or disappointingly low-stakes; suggestions of acrostics are largely confined to theOdesalone. Besides diverging from the long-standing Roman obsession with literary acrostics, Horace's apparent lack of interest is especially surprising given that (...) Virgil, his contemporary, friend and ‘poetic pace-maker’, was at the time conducting what seems to be a systematic adaptation of Hellenistic acrostic-poetics into Latin poetry. (shrink)

Discarding the unreliable late evidence for the Library of Alexandria in the Hellenistic period, I establish a new history of libraries and books on more secure primary sources. Beginning in the second century BCE at various places across the eastern Mediterranean, rich, powerful men began to sponsor collections of books. These new public displays of aristocratic and royal munificence so transcended earlier holdings of books—which had been small, vocational, and private—that in an important sense they constitute the invention of the (...) library. As political institutions, these libraries depended on a revaluation of books, treating them as valuable irrespective of their content, and in various domains people increasingly attended to books as formal objects. Romans accelerated the pace and scope of this biblio-political revolution and extended the revaluation of books, transformations which gave a deeply anachronistic imprint to the frequently cited late stories about Hellenistic libraries. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss Cicero's practice of submitting his texts to others for comment, arguing that the mutual reading and correction of friends' works played an important social function. By discussing what would make a text better, Cicero and his collaborators worked to forge and maintain social ties. In addition, I pursue an important corollary: for a text to provoke this activity, it must present itself as unfinished or in progress. Cicero was aware of this corollary, and in the (...) Brutus he used images of textual incompletion to critique Atticist and Caesarian theories of style as solitary, antisocial, and implicitly autocratic. This led him to formulate an important new literary politics, which he put into practice in the years after Pompey's defeat in the civil war. (shrink)

This article investigates the interplay of agriculture and writing in the elder Cato's aristocratic self-fashioning . I argue that the De Agricultura represents Cato and his contemporaries as individual, small-plot farmers by making explicit the agricultural inflection of a more general masterly extensibility, i.e., that slaves were prosthetic tools with which owners accomplished various tasks, a move that in turn reveals the ubiquitous, assiduous “labor” of the individual owner. The preface's valorization of small-plot farmers, past and present, contextualizes the owner's (...) “labor” both culturally and historically , and thereby seeks to bridge the agricultural and temporal divide that separates Cato and his contemporaries from their esteemed predecessors. (shrink)

According to many recent interpretations of Catullus 101, the ritual performance it describes serves primarily as a foil, highlighting the greater expressiveness and communicative power of the poem itself. I argue instead for using the complexities of Roman funerary ritual as a model for understanding the poem's ambiguities. As funerary offerings at once establish a bond between family members and the dead and affirm a distinction between them that allows the survivors to rejoin the society of the living, so the (...) poem articulates a tension between assertions of the brother's absence and intimations of his presence as addressee, even as speaker. Similarly, the split between the poem's fictional context as a one-time-only farewell to the brother and its existence as a repeatable literary artifact further accentuates the double allegiance of the poet. In the second section I consider how the poem, without being an epitaph itself, fulfills the functions of an epitaph, by allowing for the re-performance of the ritual, constructing the opposition between permanence and temporality present in the epitaph/monument complex, "inscribing" the brother's death at the prominent literary "crossroads" of the beginning of the Odyssey, and finally making the commemoration of the brother performed through each reading of the poem a sacrum that builds its audience into a community. (shrink)

At some point before the late fifth centurya.d.an unidentified writer compiled and affixed to each book of Dio'sRoman Historyan index, most notably comprising a table of contents and an excerpt of the consularfasti. Of dubious provenance these paratexts have played a peripheral role in the editorial history of the work. Bekker and Dindorf, with somewhat puritanical zeal, removed them from the main text of their editions of theRoman Historyin the belief that they were not by Dio's hand. Conversely, the stereotyped (...) edition of Dio's history produced under the auspices of Karl Tauchnitz at Leipzig in 1818 provided Latin translations of the indices, but omitted the Greek. Dio's more recent editors have restored them to their editions of theRoman History, despite questions over their origins. (shrink)

This paper will examine intertextual references between the Dialogus of Tacitus and the letters of Pliny, in particular those regarding boar hunting. It will argue that there are clues in the letters of Pliny which can help us to understand the relationship between these two writers as well as the tone and purpose of the Dialogus. By studying Pliny's letters to Tacitus on hunting , one can see the specific reference to boars as an allusion to Marcus Aper, the chief (...) spokesperson for contemporary eloquence in the dialogue, indicating a degree of humor and irony in the Dialogus that is further displayed by the similarity of Pliny's opening exhortation in Epistle 1.6, ridebis et licet rideas, to the final words of the Dialogus, cum adrisissent, discessimus. Moreover, the dialogue between Pliny and Tacitus in Pliny's letters can be seen as an indication that the Dialogus itself may have been revised throughout the years, thus problematizing the debate about the “publication date” of the Dialogus. (shrink)