Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture

✍ Scribed by Reviel Netz

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 906
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Greek culture matters because its unique pluralistic debate shaped modern discourses. This ground-breaking book explains this feature by retelling the history of ancient literary culture through the lenses of canon, space and scale. It proceeds from the invention of the performative 'author' in the archaic symposium through the 'polis of letters' enabled by Athenian democracy and into the Hellenistic era, where one's space mattered and culture became bifurcated between Athens and Alexandria. This duality was reconfigured into an eclectic variety consumed by Roman patrons and predicated on scale, with about a thousand authors active at any given moment. As patronage dried up in the third century CE, scale collapsed and literary culture was reduced to the teaching of a narrower field of authors, paving the way for the Middle Ages. The result is a new history of ancient culture which is sociological, quantitative, and all-encompassing, cutting through eras and genres.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
List of Maps
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
General Introduction
Part I Canon
Chapter
1 Canon: The Evidence
1.1 Data from the Papyri
1.2 The Significance of the Data from the Papyri
1.2.1 General Remarks
1.2.2 Spatial Homogeneity inside Egypt
1.2.3 Chronology and Continuity
1.2.4 Education and Scholarship, Curation and Discard
1.3 Out of Egypt
1.3.1 The Internal Evidence of the Papyri
1.3.2 The TLG Evidence
1.3.3 The Evidence of the Portraits
1.3.4 The Codices and the Big Library
1.4 Adjusting the Sample
1.4.1 Bringing in the Adespota
1.4.2 Considerations of Sample Bias
1.5 The Ancient Greek Canon: Conclusions
Chapter
2 Canon in Practice: The Polis of Letters
2.1 Introduction
2.1.1 Setting the Questions…
2.1.2 …And Theory
2.2 The Polis of Letters: Structure
2.2.1 Genre/Author/Work: The Works beneath the Author
2.2.2 Genre/Author/Work: The Genre above the Author
2.2.3 The Topology of Ancient Literature
2.2.4 The Polis of Letters
2.3 The Polis of Letters: History
2.3.1 Becoming an Author: What Did It Take?
2.3.2 The Making of the Athenian Canon: Chronological Data
2.3.3 The Invention of the Brand in Early Greek Philosophy and Literature
2.3.4 The Tyranny of Athens over Greece
Part II Space
Chapter
3 Space, the Setting: The Making of an Athens-against-Alexandria Mediterranean
3.1 A Note on Measuring Cities
3.2 The Unlikelihood of an Enduring Center: Cities in Transit
3.3 The Road to Alexandria
3.3.1 Alexandria and the Scientific Mediterranean
3.3.2 Courts and Canons – before and after Chaeronea
3.3.3 Alexandrian Generations
3.4 The Road to Athens
3.4.1 Before Athens: The Rise of Philosophical Spatial Organization
3.4.2 Foundations of Athens
Chapter
4 Space in Action: When Worlds Diverge
4.1 Alexandria: A Literary Survey
4.1.1 Alexandria: General Comments
4.1.2 Alexandria: Vignettes
4.1.3 Alexandria: A Formula
4.2 Athens: “Beneath Literature”?
4.2.1 A Contrast: Outside Athens
4.2.2 A Contrast: Before Athens
4.2.3 The Routinization of Socrates
4.3 The View from Alexandria: What Did Alexandria Know about Philosophy?
4.3.1 The Exact Sciences
4.3.2 Medicine
4.3.3 The Thinness of Contact
4.3.4 A Close-Up: Aratus
4.4 The View from Athens: What Did Athens Know about Science?
4.4.1 General Observations and Historical Background: Philosophy on Science
4.4.2 The Stoa and Medicine
4.4.3 The Stoa and the Mixed Exact Sciences
4.4.4 Mathematical Notes
4.4.5 Interim Conclusion
4.5 Coda to Hellenism: When Worlds Converge
4.5.1 Exhibit Number One: Posidonius
4.5.2 Coda to Hellenism: The Sciences
4.5.3 Coda to Hellenism: Philosophy
4.5.4 Coda to Hellenism: Literature
4.5.5 When Worlds Converge: Towards an Account of the First Century BCE
Part III Scale
Chapter
5 A Quantitative Model of Ancient Literary Culture
5.1 First Route: From the Papyri
5.1.1 Counting Papyri
5.1.2 Beyond Papyrus: A First Stab at the Number of Authors
5.2 Second Route: From the Set of All Authors
5.3 Third Route: From the Genres
5.3.1 Poetry
5.3.2 Prose
5.3.3 A Calculation of the Genres
5.4 Observations on Cultural Scale in Social Setting
5.5 Coda: By Way of Methodology
Chapter
6 Scale in Action: Stability and Its End
6.1 Scale before Rome: The Rise and Wobble?
6.1.1 The Rise
6.1.2 Wobble?
6.2 To the High Empire: A Quantitative Introduction
6.3 To the High Empire: Patronage and the Quest for Status
6.4 The Scale of Authorship in the Third Century
6.4.1 The Authors of the Third Century: Attestation
6.4.2 The Authors of the Third Century: Interpretation
6.5 Late Antiquity and the New Equilibrium
6.5.1 Stability in the Scale of Non-Authorial Culture
6.5.2 The Rise of the Self-Conscious Circle
6.5.3 Late Antiquity: Teacherly Circles and the Rise of Commentary
6.5.4 The Equilibrium, Punctuated: Into the Middle Ages
Coda to the Book
Bibliography
Index