The Audience of Ammianus Marcellinus and the Circulation of Books in the Late Roman World (original) (raw)

THE DISSEMINATION OF TEXTS IN THE HIGH EMPIRE

There were in the ancient world books that circulated without the direct authorization of authors, and versions of texts that competed with one another. These texts were disseminated before an author could emend them and release them to the public. This article focuses on books from the point of view of the author who wrote them, sometimes left them incomplete, distributed them informally, or lost sight of them. It argues that we should recognize that there was a difference between those books that had been emended by an author and subsequently released, and those that for various reasons circulated without the author's full consent or knowledge.

Letters, Writing Conventions, and Reading Practices in the Late Roman World. Analysing Literary Reception in Late Antiquity and Beyond

Linguarum Varietas, 2017

This paper questions the common modern distinction between literary and non-literary texts in Graeco-Roman culture. With special focus on the private and o cial letters of aristocrats in Late Antique Gaul it will be shown that, neither from the point of view of the writer, nor from that of the contemporary reader, did a given letter not have a ‘literary’ quality per se. Obvious di erences in language and style are not necessarily an indication of an intended ‘literary’ or ‘non-literary’ reception, they merely re ect di er- ent communicative situations and rhetorical codes. The form of transmission or medial representation may serve as false friends: Cassiodor’s o cial letters, for example, were legal texts in the rst place, but became ‘literature’ by being copied into a manuscript collection. This ‘redeployment’ truly changed the nature and semantic of the original text by changing its mediality, signalling to or preparing the reader for a speci c literary reception. Thus the private letter exchanges of Avitus of Vienne, Ennodius or Ruricius of Limoges – indeed highly elaborate social performances – were only collected and pub- lished after their authors had died. However these letters certainly had a ‘literary’ recep- tion during contemporary circulation within the peergroups of their authors. Instead of projecting modern ideas of ‘the literary’ onto Late Antiquity, one would therefore do well to look at the actual reading conventions and habits within the elite micro-communities in which these letters were exchanged. Fictional texts aside, only the reconstruction of the essential ‘contracts’ between texts and readers makes for historical reliability and o ers insight into the forms and manners of literary reception within relatively closed interpre- tative communities.

Roman Fiction and its Audience: Seriocomic Assertions of Authority

2009

Narrative fiction and fable, as literary genres, shared an ambiguous cultural status in Rome. Roman authors of fabulae, like Phaedrus and Apuleius, as well as Roman intellectuals like Gellius and Fronto, Apuleius’ contemporaries who wrote similar forms of ‘edifying entertainment’, use comparable approaches to persuade their potentially sceptical Roman reader of the centrality of their literary efforts, only apparently advertising them as ‘marginal’, ‘low’, or ‘childish’ (neniae; aniles fabulae; nugae). Adopting comparable forms of mock self-irony, often more or less explicitly connected with the Socratic tradition, these authors invent self-conscious strategies of self-presentation, which allow them to assert Roman authority and identity in a playful way, and to prepare their Roman readers for perceptive and inquiring reading.

By the Elite, for the Elite? The Audience of the Ancient Greek Novel

Journal of historical studies, 2016

Until fairly recently the Greek novel was of little to no interest to historians of antiquity. Within the previous few decades however academic opinion on the genre has steadily grown more favourable to the point where study of the Greek novel has experienced something of a revival, consequentially resulting in the rehabilitation of the genre into the internationally recognized wider corpus of canonical ancient literature. As a result of this invigorated engagement scholars have, quite naturally, deliberated over sociological aspects of the Greek novel within the historical context of its conception. Of paramount importance within this discussion has been the question of the novel’s intended and unintended ancient readership, as it is known that most, if not all, of the Greek novels were circulated widely throughout the Roman Empire, especially within the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean, from the mid 1st century CE to the late 4th century.