Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval

The core of this book is an investigation of the treatment of the recognition motif in the Greek novels. It also includes forays into the Roman novels, early Jewish and Christian narratives, and an overview of a sample of early modern European texts, which have been influenced by the ancient novel in their recognition scenes. The ancient novels inherit the recognition motif from epic and drama, and acknowledge their debts by citations or allusions. They also share an ideological mainstay underlying the poetics of recognition in ancient literature: poetic justice, or “goodness wins.” Recognition rewards the deserving couple with the happy ending (this idealistic scenario is not endorsed by the Roman novels). At the same time, the Greek novels also innovate, adding more “natural” ways of recognition (the voice, appearance, the telling of one’s life, instinct, even breathing) to the artificial and conventional ones (tokens or bodily marks) preferred by tradition. This shift of emphasis is related to the idealization of love typical of the genre. Love itself is recognition and should suffice for lovers to recognize each other. Novelists play with this dictate in a variety of ways, romantically endorsing it or challenging it irreverently. Recognitions of family identity likewise negotiate tradition with innovation, bringing the call of blood, or nature’s voice, to bear on the revelation of kinship between family members unknown to each other. The final pages of this book follow the fortunate developments of the motif of blood’s call in later literature.

This book studies Cicero's first and fullest dialogue, on the ideal orator-statesman. It illustrates the dialogue's achievement as a reflection of a civilized way of life and a brilliantly constructed literary unity, and considers the contribution made by Cicero's recommendations to the development of rhetoric and higher education at Rome. Because Cicero deliberately set his extended conversation in the generation of his childhood teachers, a study of the dialogue in its historical setting can show how the political and cultural life of this earlier period differed from Cicero's personal experience of the collapse of senatorial government, when the overwhelming power of the ‘first triumvirate’ forced him into political silence in the last decade of the republic. After an introductory chapter reviewing Cicero's position on return from exile, chapters include a comparative study of the careers of M. Antonius and L. Licinius Crassus, protagonists of the dialogue, a discussion of Cicero's response to Plato's criticisms of rhetoric in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, and his debt to Aristotle's Rhetoric, analysis of the dialogue's treatment of Roman civil law, existing Latin literature and historical writing, Strabo's survey of the sources and application of humour, political eloquence in senate and contio, theories of diction and style, and the techniques of oral delivery. An epilogue looks briefly at Cicero's De re publica and Tacitus' Dialogus de oratoribus as reflections on the transformation of oratory and free (if oligarchic) republican government by debate to meet the context of the new autocracy.

This book offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and strategies of self-representation among Roman authors at the end of the republic and the beginning of the principate. It focuses on Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Martial, and Pliny the Younger, but also offers discussions of earlier Greek material, including Isocrates, Plato, and Hellenistic poetry. The book argues that revision made textuality into a medium of social exchange. Revisions were not always made by authors working alone; often, they were the result of conversations between an author and friends or literary contacts, and these conversations exemplified a commitment to collective debate and active collaboration. Revision was thus much more than an unavoidable element in literary genesis: it was one way in which authorship became a form of social agency. Consequently, when we think about revision for authors of the late republic and early empire we should not think solely of painstaking attendance to craft aimed exclusively at the perfection of a literary work. Nor should we think of the resulting texts as closed and invariant statements sent from an author to his reader. So long as an author was still willing to revise, his text served as a temporary platform around and in which a community came into being. Much more was at stake than the text itself: like all communities, such textual communities were subject to imbalances and differentiation in taste, ideology, capability and willingness to participate, and above all power, the ability to propose and enforce a specific set of textual choices.