Ovid and the Inscriptions

In the year 8 CE, Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea for “a song and a mistake.” This chapter explores a series of iconic poems from the Tristia in which Ovid imagines the state of exile through a variety of textual media: his own books of poetry sent back to the city and rejected from the public libraries; the lapidary inscriptions of Augustus he imagines them to encounter; and, several times over, his own funerary epitaph, formulated in explicit competition with Augustus’s own monumental list of deeds, the Res gestae. It is an examination of the challenges presented to the poet by exile and how he uses writing itself and written forms, real and imagined, to overcome that distance and disgrace, becoming increasingly aware that it was at the level of written language, and only at that level, that he and the emperor were “on the same page.”

Tablets of Memory

This chapter focuses on one of the foundational images in Western epistemology: that memory is like a wax tablet. Charting the origins of the figure in the theories of mind of Plato and Aristotle through its development in the Roman practice of an oratorical ars memoriae (“art of memory”) as described by the Auctor ad Herennium, Cicero, and Quintilian, it recovers a variety of ways that writing and thinking were connected in the ancient imagination. Especially within theoretical handbooks of the discipline of Roman oratory, memory was understood fundamentally to be a practice dependent upon and at the service of written texts. From the tabula rasa to the “memory palace,” the tablet functioned as both tool and metaphor for Roman thought.

The Text of the World

It has long been recognized that one of the governing images of Lucretius’s great natural-philosophical poem De rerum natura is the analogy between letters and atoms, both elementa (“elements”) in Latin. At several points in the poem, Lucretius explains the mystery of atomic composition by saying that the atoms are like letters, coming together into physical bodies just as letters come together into words, and words into poetry. Taking seriously the material-cultural roots of Lucretius’s materialist analogy, this chapter approaches the familiar figure in a new way. Using papyri that provide evidence for the methods by which children in antiquity learned to read and write, this chapter shows the debt that Lucretius’s description of writing—and thus his very ideas of atomism and the ; (clinamen) &#“swerve”—owe to one of the most common tools of ancient literate education: the syllabary.

Writing and Identity

What did ancient Romans believe about the origins of their alphabet? Focusing on the fact that the alphabet was recognized by Roman authors to have been borrowed from the Greeks, who in turn had borrowed it from more ancient cultures in the eastern Mediterranean, this chapter shows how those borrowings were used by Romans in the classical period to echo and reinforce popular myths and ideals about their own hybrid cultural identity. Discussion includes a comparison of Greek and Roman myths of alphabetic origins, including those of Herodotus, Plato, Tacitus, and Pliny the Elder, and analysis of Roman theories about the sources for differences between the Greek and Roman alphabets, stemming from histories of transmission from older writing cultures in the Mediterranean, including Etruscans, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Assyrians.

Introduction

The fundamental methodological challenge of studying the ancient Roman book is the very limited quantity of the evidence: barely any fragments of professionally produced Latin books survive from the first centuries BCE or CE. Offering an introduction to the surviving evidence and its interpretation, this chapter outlines a method of proceeding that takes into account other kinds of materials—from epigraphic writing in stone and bronze, to graffiti and other wall inscriptions and the comparanda of Greek bookrolls—in conjunction with the rich literary testimony in Latin that is the focus of this study. Summaries of individual chapters are included.

Conclusion

The conclusion examines a papyrus miscellany from Roman Egypt to discuss the importance of the symbolic uses of writing to our understanding of the world of the text in antiquity. Generally called a “commonplace book,” PLond 256 is rather a miscellaneous collection of public and personal documents, bound as a scroll to be reused as backing for other writing, a form known as tomos sunkollesimos (“scroll pasted together”). Collected among a tax receipt, two grain orders, and a fourth illegible document is a Greek epigram about the Battle of Actium: one of the earliest appearances in manuscript of the indentation of alternating lines that was to become characteristic of epigram and elegy into our own period. As this example underscores, understanding the written word involves kinds of “literacy” beyond pure decipherment of linguistic content, ones that accrue to different genres of texts, modes of production, imagined audiences, and material forms.

Classics and the Study of the Book

Addressing questions of scholarly background, this chapter finds common ground among the related fields of book history, bibliography, textual criticism, and the Classics, so that readers from each may approach the book on equal footing. It foregrounds the fundamental methodology of Empire of Letters—to study classical texts book historically—and outlines one of the major outcomes of such an approach: that studying the ancient book as “old media” helps to distill the fundamental properties of the “book,” above and beyond the printed codex. Changes in modern media offer an intriguing parallel in the expansion of the conventional Western definition of “book.”

The Roman Poetry Book

After discussing the now famous papyrus fragment discovered in 1979 in Lower Nubia and covered with lines of poetry identified with the elegist Cornelius Gallus, this chapter focuses on reconstructing the material habitus of Latin poetry within the Roman bookroll. Reviewing programmatic passages in Ennius, Plautus, Catullus, Ovid, and especially Horace and Virgil, the chapter shows many of the ways that Roman authors made reference to writing and textual materiality within their work to signal and often to resist intimacy with readers in the world outside of their poems. Focusing on the symbolic importance of the special copies that authors may have had prepared for friends and patrons, known now as “presentation copies,” these readings ultimately help to illuminate the surprising rarity of explicit references to writing in Virgil, an author, like others, exquisitely concerned with managing relationships with elite readers by way of his texts.