The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies 0199211523, 9780199211524

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Introduction

Introduction   Alessandro Barchiesi and Walter Scheidel The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies Edited by Alessandro Barchiesi and Walter Scheidel Print Publication Date: Jun 2010 Subject: Classical Studies, Ancient Roman History Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199211524.013.0001

Abstract and Keywords Roman Studies defies straightforward definition in large part because of the sheer size and depth of the footprint of the Roman Empire. Roman Studies not only cuts across con­ ventional disciplinary boundaries but also liberally extends the notion of ‘Roman-ness’ across a variety of cultures from the Atlantic into the Middle East. Its location within Classics entails a notion of guardianship, of preserving and increasing our knowledge of cultures that owe their privileged status in the present to putatively unique traits or their putative influence on what is, in similarly loaded terms, labelled ‘Western Civilization’. The study of Latin literature and related forms of expression remained important in me­ dieval and early modern Europe, in literary history and in diverse areas such as religion, history of thought, science, and postcolonial studies. The evolution of ‘Latin Studies’ even differs in outlook from Roman antiquarian and historical studies. This book explores the tools needed to unlock the Roman past, including the legacy of its cultural production. Keywords: Roman Studies, Roman Empire, Western Civilization, Classics, Latin literature, Latin Studies, cultural production, literary history, religion, science

ROMAN Studies defies straightforward definition in large part because of the sheer size and depth of the footprint of the Roman Empire. Constantine's giant foot, pictured on the front cover and as a frontispiece, illustrates this crucial point. A marble fragment of a colossal—originally close to 10 metres tall—seated statue of the equally colossally named Imperator Constantinus, Victor, Maximus Augustus, Pontifex Maximus, Pater Patriae, Pro­ consul, Triumphator Omnium Gentium, Restitutor Libertatis, Restitutor Totius Orbis, Ger­ manicus Maximus, Sarmaticus Maximus, Britannicus Maximus, Persicus Maximus, Adia­ benicus Maximus, Medicus Maximus, Gothicus Maximus, Carpicus Maximus, Arabicus Maximus, Armenicus Maximus, Dacicus Maximus (r. 306–37 ce) now on display at the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, it speaks loudly of the power of the largest and most durable empire ever created in Eurasia west of Russia. But at the same time the emperor's foot symbolizes the utter ruination of Roman civilization, reduced to Ozymandi­ an rubble. It stands for the seismic shift from universal empire to the dynamic environ­ ment of polycentrism and competition that became a hallmark of medieval and modern Page 1 of 7

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Introduction Europe. Belonging as it does to the first Roman ruler to embrace the expanding Christian faith, Constantine's foot straddles the divide between religious pluralism and the new monotheism, and between the image of the gargantuan god-king reaching back to the days of the Pharaohs and universal subordination to a deity who suffered no earthly ri­ vals. As such, it foreshadowed what has arguably become the weightiest legacy of Rome, the Constantinian turn that put a particular brand of Christianity on a path to claiming some 2 billion (effective or nominal) adherents in the world today. No (p. 2) wonder that, in 1635, Pope Urban VIII placed the imperial foot on the massive pedestal on which it has rested ever since. Yet it was a secular movement that heaved Roman civilization as a whole onto a metaphorical pedestal. In the eighteenth century, as European powers be­ gan to dominate the globe, its intellectuals came up with a radical new theory to account for this success: European superiority was derived not from Christianity but from a cul­ tural tradition that began in ancient Greece. The Greeks invented freedom and rationali­ ty; Rome then spread these gifts across Europe. This was why only Europe had a Scientif­ ic Revolution and an Enlightenment; and why Europe was now colonizing the other conti­ nents. Anyone who wanted to understand the world had to begin with the history, litera­ ture, and art of Greece and Rome. Even if Roman Studies has in the meantime stepped down—or may still be in the process of being brought down—from this neo-humanistic pedestal, all these manifold continuities and discontinuities highlight the richness and be­ wildering complexity of our relationship with the Roman past: alien and distant, as the gi­ ant marble foot; broken down and finished, as the authority and specious permanence of the Roman Empire; but at the same time still very much with us, through the many ways in which what took place in the Mediterranean fifty or a hundred generations ago contin­ ues to shape the present. Roman Studies does not represent an established academic discipline in the way that philology, history, or archaeology have developed into discrete fields with their own de­ partments and degrees. When the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies was first set up in London a century ago, it sought ‘to promote the study of the history, archaeolo­ gy, and art of Italy and the Roman Empire, from the earliest times down to about A.D. 700’.1 As such, Roman Studies not only cuts across conventional disciplinary boundaries but also liberally extends the notion of ‘Roman-ness’ across a variety of cultures from the Atlantic into the Middle East. From this perspective, Roman Studies becomes the study of everything once covered by the Roman state, nothing less than perhaps a quarter of hu­ manity during the first few centuries CE. In his inaugural address delivered at the first annual meeting of the newly founded Soci­ ety on 11 May 1911, Francis Haverfield, the Camden Professor of Ancient History at Ox­ ford and an expert on the Roman remains of Britain, emphasized the need for profession­ al training to support research into all aspects of the history and material culture of the Roman Empire that had thus far been overshadowed by a preoccupation with Greek and Latin language and literature. This broadening in scope was bound to reveal more of the complexity of the Roman past and consequently required greater efforts to come to terms Page 2 of 7

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Introduction with it: Haverfield's judgement that, ‘if the study has grown harder, the rewards for the (p. 3) student have become immensely more abundant’, seems as true today as it was then.2 And yet, what are these rewards? To paraphrase a famous exchange from the 1979 come­ dy movie Monty Python's Life of Brian, what has Roman Studies ever done for us? It was tempting for Haverfield to consider it ‘at the present day the most instructive of all histo­ ries’. After all, did the constitution of the Roman Republic not offer ‘the one true analogy to the seeming waywardness of our own English constitution’; or did the Roman imperial system not ‘light up our own Empire, for example in India, at every turn’; and did not ‘the forces which laid the Roman empire low concern the modern world very nearly, more nearly indeed than do the reasons for the downfall of any other empire about which we have full knowledge’? Sweeping analogies that rediscover the past in the present and the present in the past may seem quaint today, as academic professionalization and the intel­ lectual detachment it encourages has made the Roman world seem more remote, exotic, and thus more different than it may have appeared to previous generations of observers.3 At the same time, this process has by no means resulted in the creation of a single, hege­ monic approach to Roman Studies. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon tradition of ‘Classics’—the study of all aspects of the Greco-Roman world under the umbrella of a single academic programme or department—continues to uphold a claim for the exclusive character of this endeavour, an exclusivity that is implicit not merely in the very term ‘classic(al)’ but also in this field's separation from the study of more recent periods that is conventionally divided among different disciplines such as Archaeology, Art History, Comparative Litera­ ture, History, Modern Languages, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. (In this respect, Classics has long foreshadowed recent transdisciplinary trends in ever-expanding fields such as English and Cultural Studies.) The location of Roman Studies within Classics en­ tails a notion of guardianship, of preserving and increasing our knowledge of cultures that owe their privileged status in the present to putatively unique traits or their putative influence on what is in similarly loaded terms labelled ‘Western Civilization’. Alternative­ ly, Roman Studies might be considered an early specimen of the transdisciplinary institu­ tion of ‘Area Studies’, devoid of preferential treatment but intellectually useful in coordi­ nating and contextualizing the efforts of archaeologists, historians, linguists, and literary critics—and indeed anthropologists, artists, botanists, climatologists, economists, geolo­ gists, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, zoologists, and many (p. 4) others—who share an interest in the period and territory circumscribed by the Ro­ man Empire, in the legacy of its cultural production, and in our engagement with this legacy. Returning once more to the question of ‘rewards’, this approach yields benefits more diffuse than those envisaged by Haverfield, in the most general sense by adding to and refining our understanding of human behaviour through the study of the past, an ob­ jective that—amongst fellow humans—should require no further justification. We have tried to imagine at least three specific categories of readers who will find some­ thing of interest in this collection: the first is made up, quite obviously, of students and scholars in their formative stages. A successful career often depends on a highly personal Page 3 of 7

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Introduction and individual approach, and people are drawn towards the study of antiquity for a wide variety of reasons; after the initial impulse they are also encouraged to specialize quickly. At some stage, during the learning process or the first research experiments, it can be helpful to glance at the entire panorama of what has been done or attempted with the past. The second category is the ‘good neighbour’; fortunately for the profession of Clas­ sics, a substantial number of neighbouring disciplines maintain an interest in develop­ ments in the study of Roman civilization. This book intends to offer updated points of ac­ cess for many intellectual trajectories of enquiry that are concerned with the modern world, or different ‘antiquities’, or even science. The third category is ourselves—not the two of us as individuals, but as scholars and teachers of Roman matters in general: in the process of editing this group of essays we have been surprised by the number and range of questions that can be asked about Roman antiquity and remain out of sight for us while we engage in our daily work or cultural practice. This feeling of disconnectedness is particularly strong across the divide that has (quite lit­ erally) been papered over by our choice to produce a handbook of ‘Roman Studies’: that between the literary and the historical, between approaches to philology and material culture.4 While most of the authors of chapters on history, society, law, and the arts would be happy, we presume, to identify themselves as ‘Romanists’ (on top of being ‘historians’, ‘archaeologists’, and so on), an expert on Latin texts from the Roman age is and remains a ‘Latinist’. The term carries ideological baggage: it reminds us of a language that— whilst hardly counting as ‘alive’—has nevertheless refused to ‘die’ like many other premodern languages. The study of Latin literature and related forms of expression re­ mained important in medieval and early modern Europe, in literary history and in diverse areas such as religion, history of thought, science, and postcolonial studies. The evolution of ‘Latin Studies’ even differs in outlook from Roman antiquarian and historical studies. It is rooted in early modern Europe, not in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as is the case with professional history and (p. 5) antiquarianism, and has a strong formalist and textual aspect. Of course, as so often, form is just a different name for politics. De­ bates on ‘Latinity’ in Italian Humanism, for example, were enmeshed in power structures, social distinction, and religious politics. Textual criticism began, with scholars such as Politian and Valla, at a time when disenfranchised intellectuals enjoyed growing influ­ ence. Later on the advent of national systems of education in Europe became the crucial factor: ‘Latin’ was turned into a massive, yet also elitist, educational practice. (We regret not having a separate chapter on modern education: this is perhaps the most glaring gap in our line-up.) As a result, the Latinist has long been a specialist of form, grammar, and style. This tradi­ tion still loomed large when the founders of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Stud­ ies surveyed their resources back in 1911. Initially, they chose to ignore literature, and with reason. Their initiative was propelled by (at least) three driving forces, all of them of significance in the competitive environment of the early 1900s: the accelerating pace of archaeological discovery; the increasing importance of ‘territorial’ knowledge and nation­ al heritage; and the spectacular success of Mommsen and his German ‘science of antiqui­ ty’. In many ways the study of Latin literature and philology had been lagging behind. Page 4 of 7

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Introduction Germany was home to the leading academic community of the late nineteenth century, and Latin studies in that country had long nurtured an inferiority complex towards Hel­ lenists. The decisive impulse for serious ‘Latin studies’ at the university level came from a generation slightly later than that of the foundational scholars of ancient history, philoso­ phy, or Greek literature: the breakthrough came too late for the ‘Roman Studies’ meeting of 1911, and was felt outside Germany only after World War I. The work of Friedrich Leo, Richard Heinze, Eduard Norden, and later Eduard Fraenkel was based on two principles: taking the typical Roman practices of imitation and Hellenization as a serious topic of re­ search, and applying a rigorous historicizing model. This model was intellectually superi­ or to other European traditions, but the decisive factor for its dissemination was the dias­ pora of Jewish and other German-speaking intellectuals from Nazi Germany to Britain, the United States, and other destinations. Back in 1911, even the Roman Society felt the need to accommodate Latin letters. This task, an afterthought, fell to the Labourite politician and enlightened Classicist John William Mackail, who two years later tackled the problem of establishing the importance of Latin authors within the new project. In ‘Virgil and Roman Studies’ he claimed that, ‘Year by year, almost day by day, we are getting more into touch with the ancient world, as something alive and solid’: our appreciation of a classical author such as Virgil had to be revised accordingly. Mackail's public address was marked by enthusiasm about new archaeological discoveries: it ended with a visionary parallel between Virgil's exploring the labyrinth at Cumae and reports of a spooky Cretan night spent by Manolis Akumi­ anakis, the foreman (p. 6) of Sir Arthur Evans, at Knossos.5 Latin studies, however, were never fully harmonized with these novel concerns. The historicizing turn typical of Leo's generation had strong motivations: it was a basic requirement of a new professionalism (an unavoidable trend in the new system of research-based institutions of knowledge), and offered a clean break with centuries of dilettanti and school grammarians. Artificial grammatical study abated (at least to some extent); textual criticism was retooled; liter­ ary studies acquired a promising perspective on Rome's cultural hybridity. The only breaking-point of this tradition was the increasing need to imagine historicism as a fore­ closing of modern perspectives. It was one thing to issue a clarion call towards readings of Latin literature within a Roman cultural and social context; yet another actively to dis­ courage questions that could not be framed in ‘Latinized’ terms of reference. That way, historicism became its own worst enemy, and revived a recurring temptation of studies of Latinitas, that of obsessive formalism. A reopening of the literary field was necessary, and for many of us is still ongoing. But the question, then as now, remains which competing approaches to history are leading ‘Roman Studies’, and what kind of approach to the tex­ tual material is more suited to a dialogue between historians and literary scholars, or to a productive disagreement? It is too early for us to say whether a dialogue between ‘Latin­ ists’ and ‘Romanists’ will continue and how, or indeed whether, such labels will retain any validity, but in the meantime we have been experimenting with cohabitation between two book covers.

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Introduction For all these reasons it is hard for a handbook to do justice to the sweep and intricacies of Roman—and Latin—Studies.6 Loosely grouped into five sections focusing on the tools needed to unlock the Roman past, on theoretical approaches, literary genres, historical change over time, and key elements of cognition, all these fifty-five chapters can hope to do is convey a taste of what this field has to offer. By combining factual information with suggestive ideas, their authors seek to shape as well as describe and interpret scholarly practice. Emphasis on one or the other varies from chapter to chapter, reflecting therein the different traditions and expectations that a diverse set of scholars has brought to this collaborative project. Reinforced by the transnational character of pertinent scholarship, this eclecticism is very much an inevitable consequence of the lack of a single ‘party line’, of a fully ‘disciplined’ academic field of Roman Studies. Often more of an ideal than estab­ lished practice, Roman Studies will—and indeed ought to—continue to mean different things to different practitioners and audiences. Orientation, therefore, is our main goal.7

Notes: (1) ‘Memorandum of Association of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies’, Jour­ nal of Roman Studies, 1 (1911), 249. (2) F. Haverfield, ‘An Inaugural Address Delivered Before the First Annual General Meet­ ing of the Society, 11th May, 1911’, Journal of Roman Studies, 1 (1911), pp. xi–xx. (3) To be sure, this shift must not be exaggerated: witness the flood of recent publications likening the United States to the Roman Empire, one of them by blithely asking, Are We Rome? Vaclav Smil's forthcoming book Why America is Not a New Rome gives the right answer. (4) For a Hellenic reconciliation, cf. now R. P. Martin, ‘Words Alone Are Certain Good(s): Philology and Greek Material Culture’, Transactions of the American Philological Associa­ tion, 138 (2008), 313–49. (5) J. W. Mackail, ‘Virgil and Roman Studies’, Journal of Roman Studies, 3 (1913), 1–24. (6) For overlapping and complementary surveys, see now especially G. Boys-Stones, B. Graziosi, and P. Vasunia (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies (Oxford, 2009); S. A. Harvey and D. Hunter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford, 2008); and E. Jeffreys, J. Haldon, and R. Cormack (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford, 2008). (7) Abbreviations in the text are generally those used in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn., ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (Oxford, 2003).

Alessandro Barchiesi

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Introduction Alessandro Barchiesi works on Roman poetic texts and literary-critical approaches; his latest published project is a multi-authored commentary on Ovid's Metamor­ phoses. He teaches Latin literature at the University of Siena at Arezzo and at Stan­ ford University. Walter Scheidel

Walter Scheidel, Dickason Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

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New Media (And Old)

Oxford Handbooks Online New Media (And Old)   James J. O'dqnnell The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies Edited by Alessandro Barchiesi and Walter Scheidel Print Publication Date: Jun 2010 Subject: Classical Studies, Ancient Roman History, Material Culture Studies Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199211524.013.0002

Abstract and Keywords The achievement of modernity in classical textual studies is the creation of the printed and seemingly reliable critical edition of the ancient text, the convenient book-in-hand that appears to relegate reference to the textual history and material substrate of literature to merely secondary importance. The new media that influence our modes of understanding of the ancient world are: media of transportation which bring together scholars and readers into physical communities, and that bring the books and articles produced in those communities to readers and scholars around the globe, with greater ease and diversity than ever known before; media of creation, storage, and dissemination of text; media of communication; and media of widespread representation of text, image, and other media. That we live in a moment in which the new media pose challenges to our ways of scholarship and to the future of Roman Studies cannot be denied. Keywords: Roman Studies, new media, transportation, communication, text, image, modernity

THE gnomic sages complement and contradict one another. ‘You cannot step in the same river twice’, said Heraclitus, but ‘The content of a new medium is an older medium’, said McLuhan (McLuhan 1965: 8). Every generation's innovation in the means of communication presents itself at the outset as though it were merely a plunge into familiar waters. To think about the fate and future of Roman Studies in an age of technological revolution, we must begin as boats against the current. In the beginning—no, there was no beginning. ‘Roman Studies’ do not descend from a Big Bang of formation in crisis, much less do they come about as the result of Intelligent Design by a benign and supervising deity. Rather, they accrete like a coral reef, where the fact of beginning is only visible long after, when elaborate development has made it clear which inklings would emerge as solid foundations—or obstacles—for understanding. This chapter will attempt to situate the present moment of our practices by capturing a Page 1 of 21

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New Media (And Old) picture of the reef as it now stands, some sections hoary with seaweed and neglect, others offering jagged and threatening edges, others still preserving bits of flotsam and jetsam drifted in from other atolls. The onrush of new technologies and media of communication in our time betoken farreaching changes in the way humankind consumes, produces, and transmits knowledge— a fortiori, the particular kind of knowledge about our pasts that scholars create and transmit. A materialist history of classical scholarship is overdue to be written, but if it existed, it would make this chapter easier to write (p. 8) and read. Nepos, alas, remains the patron saint of the history of scholarship, and so to speak of the present will require some framing of the past. But start here. An essay on the history, present, and future of classical scholarship knows how it should start. Compositio loci, as the old Jesuits would say: vivid imagination of scholars in their workplace. If we were determined to be conventional, the chances are good that we would have found an anecdote about Bentley or Erasmus or Photius or Cassiodorus or Varro or Callimachus to place on the first page. I might myself have preferred the story from Sandys's History of Classical Scholarship about the German worthy who declined an invitation in the nineteenth century to spend the winter in Italy. ‘What’, I would quote Lobeck to say, ‘is this that I hear, my dear friend? I can hardly believe my ears. Are you really wanting to go to Italy? Why Italy, of all parts of the world? NO! If I cannot visit Niagara, or the Mississippi, or Hekla, I prefer sitting here beside my own warm stove, reading GREEK SCHOLIASTS—which is, after all, the true end of the life of man’ (Sandys 1903–8:104). I have quoted that anecdote over more dinner tables than Sandys might have imagined, but I'll only come back to it after a different compositio loci. This chapter has been in my head for weeks, with scattered notes, but the scholarly primal scene of fertilization and creation in which I begin writing the first draft of the actual text is a fresh one. I wrote the first words (now long since deleted) on a laptop computer, sitting in the window seat on a railroad train entering Baltimore on a Sunday afternoon in spring, frustrated that we do not yet have wireless networking capabilities sufficient to let my laptop have full access to the riches of information of the Internet. First, the laptop itself holds a small ocean of downloaded materials, including, for example, the complete Latin works of Augustine. The formal and magisterial Augustine, who not long ago lived only in long rows of volumes on bookshelves in privileged places, now rides trains and a few months ago mailed himself around on a mini-CD sent through the post inside a greeting card. I have a primitive gadget (technology, that is, of a year ago) along with me that does have some network capability, and lets me tell how late my train will be (modestly), what the weather will be like (summery and humid), and even confirm that I told the one about the scholar by his stove in a book review in an online journal thirteen years ago. The same gadget brings me electronic mail that has nothing to do with this essay and lets me, depending how I like to think about it, productively multitask or distract myself from the business at hand. That handheld will be replaced by more and more powerful devices in the next years, or rather months, ones that be phones and cameras and music players and Page 2 of 21

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New Media (And Old) emailers and web browsers and GPS locators and … I also use the same laptop to write and do e-mail while lying in a hammock outside my home, and cannot decide at all whether this is better than working at my desk or worse than lying in the hammock reading Orhan Pamuk. (The penultima manus has been applied to these pages in November 2006 on the same laptop in a hotel lounge in Cairo, (p. 9) lifting my eyes every few minutes to a view of the great pyramid in the distance at sunset.) But the devices are secondary to the reader who uses them, and it is the evolution of textual practices that this chapter will follow, not the history of electromechanical devices. Let me start with the scholiast-reader by the stove. He embodies the main tropes of the classical age of classical scholarship to a tee. He is, first of all, German. He has countrymen who will elaborately explain that their ancestors were the essential un-Romans, the Germani who overthrew the Roman Empire, but from the late eighteenth century until World War II classical philology went to live in Germany. The crafts practised in those decades elsewhere in Europe, all embodying older traditions of great worth, seemed in those decades amateurish and derivative. The professionalization of American classical scholarship happily dates itself to the voyages of scholars like Gildersleeve to study in German institutions, while comic relief can be found in the wanderings of James Henry, the Irishman obsessed with Virgil, who chronicled his wanderings afoot in Germany with his daughter in diaristic verse of surpassing awfulness recounting very serious studies in the manuscript transmission of the poet. In observing that transfer of the heartland of classical scholarship to Germany, as in its arguable retransfer to the United States in the post-World War II world, we make visible the principal fact of Roman Studies as of all classical scholarship: the here and now (Germany in the nineteenth century, the United States today) take precedence over the there and then, and the media of choice of the here and now threaten to obscure and efface the media by which Rome's traces come to us. The double dislocation of time and space is accepted and normalized. The dislocation of time and space also has the effect of privileging text over artefact—the bound volume suitable for reading by a stove in Germany over the statues with broken noses that can be visited in Italy. More precisely, we regularly read inscriptions in volumes of CIL or SEG, where the performative and ostensive character of the (often surviving original) is elided in favour of normalization, linearity, and textuality. The text is, as we say too conventionally but quite truly today, a constructed idea about reality, the supposedly consistent and persistent thing that migrates from one manuscript to another, thence into one printed edition after another. I used, when young, to boast to an art historian of my acquaintance that while he needed to go to Spain to see the real paintings he was working on, I could hold the real Virgil or Augustine in my hands. I spoke an untruth that all agree to be valid and important. Even, or rather especially, for the literary text, the elision of the artefact in favour of the text misleads. The student of Shakespeare is in a position to confirm what we should always know and remember, that before the moment of canonizing print, the likelihood of Page 3 of 21

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New Media (And Old) finding two copies of the ‘same’ text that are alike in every detail is vanishingly small. An author or a work's title denotes a family of artefacts, not any one thing. In the ancient world, those artefacts were almost always linear in (p. 10) construction, trapped in the format of a papyrus roll, where one piece of the work could only be found by scrolling past all the others—VHS rather than DVD, to suggest a comparison that will make immediate sense to one generation only. But the preference for text to artefact replicates itself indefinitely. Our self-satisfied scholar is reading not a primary text but ancient scholia—marginalia to a text—and what he himself will produce is further derivative—notes on notes on a text. One last dislocation essential to our trade is present in that nineteenth-century worthy: he is reading Greek scholiasts and sneering at a visit to Italy. ‘Roman’ studies as we construe them are shaped and deined by their connectedness to ‘Greek’ studies, which have trumping prestige. Though we congratulate ourselves on the broadening of horizons in the last generations that takes classicists beyond golden and silver ages to a more embracing vision of Roman study from the archaic city to the late empire, we still constrain that Roman study (as does this volume) to the period of time when political hegemony was exercised from Rome and the adjacency and prestige of Greek culture form a constant subtext, or perhaps better a continuo, for the Roman account of itself. ‘Greek’ studies are similarly perversely constrained in most institutions to a comparable time-frame, usually defined by the adjacency and prestige of a ‘Persian’ threat or opportunity, but when contemporary generosity and ambition expand the chronology, the word ‘Greek’ can persist and embrace study of periods as late as the present. By contrast, when Roman studies extend much past 600 CE, common consent adjusts the appellation from ‘Roman’ to ‘Latin’ (Farrell 2001) and still finds it hard to push the terminal date much past the invention of printing, for all that a lively, if learned and sometimes perverse, Latin culture persisted well past that date (Binns 1990). The achievement of modernity in classical textual studies is the creation of the printed and seemingly reliable critical edition of the ancient text, the convenient book-in-hand that appears to relegate reference to the textual history and material substrate of literature or document to merely secondary importance. It was the responsibility of senior professors to terrify the young into remembering that the printed text was a false friend, but at the same time the undeniable progress of textual studies left each year fewer and fewer pages of ancient texts unprovided with serviceably reliable printed representations. So at the moment in time, when electronic texts begin to undermine the stability we have believed in, it is possible (indeed necessary) to find priests of the new medium who profess absolute blank incomprehension in the face of the notion that it matters what edition you might use as basis for your electronic text. The text so self-authorizes itself to such readers that all the acts and interventions of scholars, copyists, and printers' helpers simply vanish from the imagination and only the eternal verity of the text remains.

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New Media (And Old) In the exact same moment of digital dawn, however, scholars imagine the yet more perfect critical edition, the one that comprises images and transcriptions of every important manuscript of an ancient work, the one that allows the reader to (p. 11) select and attend to manuscript evidence in different ways for different purposes— though no such edition is yet more than a gleam in a scholar's eye. So what now? Prophecy, of course, is a mug's game. I argued in a book ten years ago that the errors of prophecy that confused the first generations of critics of the printed book were all errors of limited imagination (OʼDonnell 1998). The economy and the culture that the printed book would make possible were both so many orders of magnitude larger than what denizens of manuscript culture knew, that their natural habit, of taking what is known and inflating by 50 per cent in order to get a picture of the future, fell laughably short of what would happen in short historical time. Our own imaginations not only fall short by more orders of magnitude than was the case 500 years ago, but the time-frame within which we will be proven laughably wrong is to be measured in a small number of decades at most. Consider now afresh the history of Roman Studies—of the things we study and the way we study them—not in terms of genres and authors and readers but in terms of the artefacts of culture—the media—that made them powerful in their time and gave them their chance of surviving to our own. Henri Pirenne made a famous name for himself in the early twentieth century by arguing that the ancient world did not come to an end until the Muslim conquest of North Africa closed the Mediterranean's commercial ways and gave Christian post-Rome reason to turn in on itself and look north (1939). The decline in the trade in papyrus was one of his chief pieces of evidence, a subject over which much ink has been spilled since. Papyrus was not necessary for any given act of communication, but it was essential for the culture. Roman literature is the product of a Mediterranean-wide social order, where papyri brought out of Egypt originally by Phoenicians are the vehicle for works of literature that imitate Greek models. Greeks and Latins relied not only on the facile, portable, and technologically advanced medium of papyrus, but on the continuing reliability and increased exploitation of what seemed to be the originary medium, carving on stone. The ‘epigraphic habit’ is a source of precious information for historians, but at the same time an essential part of the permeation of Hellenistic and a fortiori Roman society by the written word. Augustus's Res Gestae, for example, had several important effects: first, it spun the story of Augustus for an elite audience; second, by its many public copies, it got that spun story to a broad audience of literate elites and semi-elites throughout the Roman world; but third, and by no means least, it declared to the illiterate and the semi-literate that there was a story to be told by the god-like ruler, and that the fact of its flamboyant presentation in public places was a sign of the power of the ruler and the power of his story.

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New Media (And Old) This culture of words on papyrus and stone lasted as long as the city of Rome and its cultural institutions did—that is, until the ‘Roman Empire’ under Justinian set out to destroy the empire in order to save it in the sixth century. The final closing of the schools of the city of Rome may as well be dated to 554 CE as to any given year, and that one is convenient because it is the year in which Justinian's (p. 12) Pragmatic Sanction established the terms for the reopening of the schools and their staffing. What the distant imperial capital decrees after such regime change does not always come to pass. Until Justinian intervened, Roman gentlemen, often with names that harked back to former centuries and former glories (Henderson 1997), continued to copy the old books and write their names proudly in the colophons. Macrobius' Saturnalia in the mid-fifth century embodied this spirit of the culture of perpetual repetition, representing scholarly gentlemen at work comparing the virtues of Homer and Virgil, cataloguing old, bad jokes, and poking a little discreet—so discreet that it long escaped notice—fun at contemporary foibles. That Macrobius by this time had to crib much of his erudition from Aulus Gellius is a sign that repetition can be a creative and original activity (the classical Chinese mandarin would agree). The upper classes are not the place to look for innovation. The papyrus roll, imported fetish of literary culture, was a luxury commodity, not a workaday tool. When words needed to be recorded on the run, away from the leisured study, for temporary use, they found their way into physical objects of a different shape, books in the codex form. So men used wooden boards of some thickness, made concave on one or both sides as the thickness allowed. The cavity was filled with melted wax in a smooth, flat surface. Any kind of pointed stick could serve as stylus to record words, words only slightly less evanescent than spoken ones, inasmuch as a thumb's rub could turn ordered words into tabula rasa in a second. Two or more of these tablets attached together by a string or thong produced a rudimentary compendium. By habit these objects were rectangular on more or less the golden section's proportions, and by habit again, they were bound together at the longer sides, depending on an aesthetic of the ‘page’ that descended from the papyrus roll and the stonecutter's art. (Our laptops are bound the same way but turned on their side for writing, and it is too early to tell whether we will accept ‘pages’ shorter than they are wide in consequence.) From the second to fifth centuries of the common era, a collection of peoples who called themselves devotees of Christ, the godly Jewish carpenter, began to use more flexible forms of the codex book to carry their message. They were not the only ones to do so, and they can, on present evidence, make no secure claim to originality, for the moments at which the codex began to be more widely used in more literary, or at least textual, ways are at present lost to our sight. Since, for other reasons, history brought Christians forward to a leading place in Mediterranean society in the fourth century and after, an easy narratology lets us combine their success with the success of the medium. This ‘codification’ of the book was voiceless. We have no witness to tell us what anybody was thinking and no originary document to see what purpose drove them to the new form. But at each stage in the adoption of the codex form Christian texts predominate, Page 6 of 21

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New Media (And Old) and by the fifth century the form was standard. There are papyrus codices, and the old material adapted well enough to the new form, but it is also (p. 13) clear that the new form adapted itself well to materials that were less suitable for making book rolls, such as animal skins. The parchment or vellum book could be produced anywhere and did not require trans-Mediterranean importation, but the medieval manuscript was far more costly to produce than the mass-market papyrus-back of antiquity. Nothing from the rise of the codex to the introduction of printing is of comparable importance for our topic, and all has been well and faithfully explored in many standard scholarly works. Three developments of the millennium that separated Augustine from Gutenberg are worth emphasizing for our purposes. First, the return of Greek. Antiquity meant Latinity for almost a thousand years, the Greeks known mainly by rumour and report. The recovery of Greek (aided, for the West, by the conquests of Mehmet II, one of numerous favours he performed for Greek civilization) gave Latinity and thus Roman Studies not only a competitor for the attention of scholars, but gave back to Rome itself a dominant elder sibling that it had thought itself long since to have mastered and subjugated. From the fourteenth century to the present, Rome has been put firmly in its place as the second of ancient privileged western civilizations—still distinctly ahead of anything Semitic or Germanic, to be sure, but distinctly behind the miraculous birth of the Greek genius. Modern Roman Studies have been well and truly Greeked. The second transformation was brought about by the realization of the possibilities that print gave birth to. Though many of the scholarly aids to inquiry and memory that print would bring to fullness had begun to appear in manuscript culture, the emergence of the lexicon, the commentary, the decisively edited text, and the collection of texts began to build libraries of classical and a fortiori Roman authority different from anything known before. These collections differed first by virtue of their encapsulation and isolation from the rest of ‘contemporary’ (often theological) culture, and second by their powers of collection. Where once it had been the work of a hunter-gatherer culture of librarians and scholars to bring together disparate materials that might be of interest, now the same could be done by purchase. If we today sometimes feel a little bit like cheats when our electronic tools let us find apposite passages and quotations in a twinkle of the eye, we should remember that the early readers of, for example, Erasmus' Adagia must have had the same sense of guilt at the thought of erudition-by-purchase. Third, where polite studies under a Quintilian were carried out for the formation of gentlemen, now Bildung has acquired a rival, a sibling, a cousin, and cannot shake it: that is to say, the spirit of study for Wissenschaft. (Both have acquired an even more powerful rival, of course, the spirit of study for utility, commonly—rightly?—seen by all those who admire the ancients as an enemy of our studies.) In the United States in particular, one of the central functions of the university is to be the place in which the contested relationship of Wissenschaft (which (p. 14) we call research) and Bildung (which we call teaching) works itself out laboriously and divisively. The main thing to be said in favour of Page 7 of 21

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New Media (And Old) this system is that any system in which research has decisively prevailed over teaching, the new over the old, is one in which the teaching is demonstrably inferior. We are what we argue about. For classicists, one upshot of that long irresolution is the marginalization of material culture. The Bildung-culture of classics is textual—verbal/literary, with offshoots reaching into history and philosophy. The Wissenschaft-culture of classics embraces the material remains of antiquity and works assiduously to extend our knowledge of those material remains by excavation, but a modern classics major for undergraduates and a modern Ph.D in classics for the advanced remains a thing of words in the main. That could change, and should, as more students approach classics through courses and experiences that integrate the visual with the verbal. The best tools created in the first, foundational digital age are intended for research. The scholarly journal—to which it is conventional to assign a seventeenth-century birthdate, though the serious classical journals are all nineteenth- or twentieth-century in initiation and elevation—is the most reliable and predictable vehicle for the advancement of Greek and Roman studies. The emergence of the standard forms of the modern classical ‘book’ in the nineteenth century, however, is intimately bound up with the history of the journal, inasmuch as the book looms larger (in classics than in the sciences) in prestige and durability. Research begins with the book—the reference work, the standard edition, the authoritative treatment—and then proceeds to the article. The best articles are eventually collected in book form—either the author's opera minora or, increasingly, anthologies of the best work on this or that topic—and book publication effectively ratifies and canonizes the journal work. (A different form of book, the translation, has a sluggish history of emergence into the light, long thought slightly embarrassing for an elite that was supposed to know its Greek and Latin, now thought to be of secondary importance for scholarly contribution, but there are signs that the balance of opinion is changing.) The great shift of the twentieth century fell in the domain of literary studies, where a decisive transition from textual and editorial activity towards critical and theoretical activity reshaped the output of book publishers in the field. That classicists famously lagged by a generation the practices of literary scholars in other fields is a testament either to the depth of their learning or their slow learning: opinions will differ. The transition was also marked at its outset (say 1950–80) by a narrowing of authors and genres towards the canonical and the classical and the poetic, especially in American practice. That narrowing is repeated cyclically through the centuries, and is now abating somewhat. The emergence of the great research universities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in whose history the story of classical scholarship plays a diminishing part (Frank and Gabler 2006), combined with the explosion in the (p. 15) production of scholarly work in classics (attested by the ballooning shape of the standard annual bibliographical reference volume, LʼAnnée Philologique), is a Renaissance-that-kills of its own sort. As late as the 1960s, Arnold Toynbee could marvel at the possibility of Page 8 of 21

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New Media (And Old) producing high-quality original scholarship (he was completing Hannibal 's Legacy) in a small liberal-arts college in the American Midwest. But the need to have access to libraries of constantly expanding richesse, combined with the need to have time and leisure to devote to scholarship, has increasingly disprivileged the smaller institution (to say nothing of the secondary school and its faculty) in favour of those at the institutions which offer the broadest library facilities and the most generous teaching loads to their faculty. An ideology of democracy and equality of access among scholars and librarians only partially offsets this material concentration and privileging. The opportunity for a liberating explosion in access has been tasted in the last decade, but both policy and technology need to be shaped to achieve our ends in this regard. All that I have said so far is familiar, or could be. To sketch the rudiments of the history of classical scholarship can help sketch the way new media will continue and disrupt old practices. The need for such a sketch is the widespread perception that all is changed, changed utterly, by the introduction of digital media. A sketch of this sort, taken in the fourteenth year of the graphical web browser, the twenty-fifth year of the personal computer, and still within the lifetime of the founding fathers of humanities and classical computing—I mean Roberto Busa, Joseph Raben, Theodore Brunner, Steven Waite, David Packard—will inevitably be as accurate as a sketch of the Irish revolution of 1916 and following made before World War II. At such a moment someone may prophesy with accuracy a De Valera, but not a Celtic Tiger, and assuredly not Bono. What has in fact changed? The new media that influence our modes of understanding of the ancient world are, I would suggest, these: 1. Media of transportation that bring together scholars and readers into physical communities, and that bring the books and articles produced in those communities to readers and scholars around the globe, with greater ease and diversity than ever known before. That said, the communities created remain chiefly those of the speakers of Germanic and Romance languages, but it is undeniable that the Americas and Europe and that the British Isles and the continent see far more movement and communication than ever before among scholars. David Lodge is the poet of this revolution and its sexual implications. 2. Media of creation, storage, and dissemination of text. As late as the 1980s classicists would handwrite manuscripts and leave them to be typed by employees of lower social status and limited education (I hear that this is still done in one place in, of course, Oxford), but the adoption of the technology undoubtedly sped (p. 16) and spread scholarly activity apace, especially when accompanied, from the early 1960s onward, by the photocopier and its power of reproducing the written and printed word rapidly, if in modest quantities at first. (By the early 1980s Bryn Mawr Commentaries used very limited and locally available repro shops in order to produce serviceable if cheaply bound—and very cheaply sold—runs of hundreds of copies of high-quality classroom editions.)

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New Media (And Old) The digital computer represented at first an intensification of what the typewriter could do. In the late 1960s I earned tidy sums as a college student typing papers for my less dexterous peers, but joined in the general mockery of the engineering student who sought to compete with us typists by producing instead computer printouts on the university's mainframe. He boasted accuracy, though he could not boast elegance, and none of us thought him the wave of any future; and on a strict accounting, the service he provided was far too expensive, if the full costs of the computing service were recognized. A few of the earliest worthies of the tribe well understood the value of ‘machinereadable texts’ (ut nostrates tunc aiebant) and did all those who would follow remarkable service in creating an abundant supply of mainly classical authors in both Greek and Latin. Absent a project, and a project manager, as intensely focused and well-managed as the TLG, and Ted Brunner, Latin studies lagged a bit, but by the late 1980s the Packard Humanities Institute produced a serviceable CD-ROM with a sober collection of classical texts. Where TLG had begun with the classical but laudably pressed forward with the Hellenistic and Byzantine, however, not-for-profit classical scholarship made no comparable advance in Latin, with the result that traditional boundaries of the ‘classical’ were mainly preserved and reinforced. Forprofit European publishers, in creating the CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts, the Chadwyck-Healey (now Proquest) Patrologia Latina Database, and the electronic Monu-menta Germaniae Historica, as well as many enthusiastic nonprofessionals creating resources like the Bibliotheca Augustana and the Latin Library, have built up, however, repositories that allow study and research to go far beyond the polite confinement of golden and silver ages. It is now conventional, among some of those excited by these prospects, to belittle the pioneers, inappropriately, for their inattention to matters of apparatus and variant. With the introduction of the ‘personal computer’ in the early 1980sthetransformation of the working lives of individual scholars began. The ability to create, organize, manage, reproduce, revise, and reproduce again one's own academic materials, whether for teaching or for publication, offered an immense but often invisible boon to productivity. Younger scholars, for example, scarcely credit my own story of rising an hour early every day of the week for two months at the outset of my first year of full-time employment, simply to spend that hour at the typewriter (p. 17) creating a clean copy of the manuscript of my first book to send off to a publisher, and I do not have the heart to gaze into the endless pages of laboriously handwritten notes that I took in the 1970s for later use, notes that are now immensely less usable—because not searchable or copyable—than anything I have done since 1983. Much attention was given by some in those early days of the PC to specialized software that would create and manage bibliographical records for the individual scholar, well mindful of the labours that had gone into creating sometimes immense files of small file cards with either notes or bibliographic entries. (That same book manuscript of mine cost my typewriter one of its keys, the numeral 6, whose uppercase character was the underscore mark—battered to an early death by endless Page 10 of 21

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New Media (And Old) repeated striking to provide the typewritten ersatz of italics.) Roman Studies were in the main foreign to the efforts of the Graeculi to find ways to represent Greek text on screen, and to the sense of liberation that came with the release of the first Macintosh computers in the mid-1980s. I have lost count of the diferent ways I have known and used to represent Greek text with full diacritical marks on screen, most of them now a sheer waste of effort in a world of ubiquitous Microsoft software and Unicode standards. 3. Media of communication: Electronic mail became more or less widely available among faculty at research institutions with technological ambitions in the 1980s and at all institutions in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1990s. Anglophone scholars typically welcomed the advance of communication, with its democratizing inclinations, while continental scholars have been more cautious, if also less immediately well-served institutionally. By the mid-1990s universal student access to e-mail was common, and by the late 1990s it became possible to presume that e-mail was an acceptable alternate form of communication to anything that would have been sent on paper. The transition was more obvious among scientists, who had, for example, long employed staff to manage the photocopying and mailing of ‘preprints’ of their articles, only to abandon that practice wholesale and quickly in the mid-1990s; they are now emulated in a start-up project shared for classicists by Princeton and Stanford. Electronic mail has become ubiquitous among scholars, while the cellular telephone has made its societal ubiquity felt among scholars as well, though academics were scarcely leaders in that area, and indeed the United States lingered behind many European and developing countries in adopting cellu-larity. The other modes of immediate communication that are of intense interest and widespread use in some social sectors around the globe, notably Instant Messaging and SMS text-messaging, to say nothing of blogging, have had almost no discernible impact among working scholars of 20o6. Podcasting is making slight inroads into pedagogy. (Contemporary students give an (p. 18) enormous amount of their often divided attention to a variety of media. So far their teachers compete mainly for a share of the time they devote to print media.) Internet discussion lists devoted to the classics have been a signal failure at engaging the time and attention of senior and serious scholars, many of whom sampled the genre and ran in fright from the democracy they discovered there, unable to stay long enough to help shape valuable communities of dialogue— an opportunity that remains open and unfulfilled. The 1960s vintage telefax technology remains in widespread use, for no good reason.

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New Media (And Old) 4. Media of widespread representation of text, image, and other media. Beginning in the very early 1990s, there was wide interest among technologists in means of disseminating information broadly through the Internet. ‘Listserv’ discussions and Usenet newsgroups, common from the late 1980s, were mainly seen to be limited to plain text and were vulnerable to abuse (OʼDonnell 1994 is a period piece describing possibilities). There was a clear market for media that would allow the individual to seek out the information she or he wanted and the standard of that time, Usenet news groups, was broadly unacceptable. The early 1990s saw the emergence of ‘gopher’ software, coming from the University of Minnesota, that allowed a rudimentary menu of textual files for immediate access, and academic technologists spent a great deal of time debating the merits and usefulness of ‘Campus-Wide Information Services’— running on specialized software and representing the institution to its stakeholders. All such inklings of the future were demolished in an eye-blink by the arrival of the World-Wide Web. The first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was released in 1993 and over the course of the next year gradually penetrated the consciousness of an elite of early adopters, including a few classicists. The release of Netscape in October 1994, with greater ease of use and smoother function, however, dramatically changed the landscape of information presentation. Within a year, no reasonable academic institution failed to have a website of its own, and pages with links to scholarly resources multiplied apace. The fundamental transformation that the WWW offers is that it is medium-indifferent and universal. The WWW is as happy presenting video as audio as 3-D graphics as text. It creates a global space in which information can dwell and be readily accessible in what is, at least in principle, an absolutely democratic manner.

The absoluteness of that democracy is limited by what is often regretted as the ‘digital divide', that which separates those with access to networked computing from those without. Three observations of the mid-2000s on that point: (i) the penetration of ‘cybercafes’ (first seen in Seattle in 1995) to what might reasonably be called the ends of the earth (e.g. Luang Prabang, Laos, where I saw them in 2004) and the thronging of them by young people of evidently (p. 19) modest means in post-Soviet Russia and beyond suggests that the divide is less than impenetrable; (ii) it may be taken as a rule that no social group of which I am told by politicians that I should be afraid will be without easy and widespread access to the WWW; (iii) the emergent convergence of cellular telephony and web browsing, combined with the broad penetration of the lower end of the socioeconomic scale of western societies by cellularity, suggest that progress does occur. Since the introduction of the graphical browser in 1993, there has been no further indication of any fundamental technological change in the near future. It is controversial to assert, as I have done elsewhere, that we live in a technologically stagnant age, but in one important regard that is true. The fundamental paradigm of 1993, an individual fullfeatured information appliance connected to a global community of information and communication through an Internet connection, remains unaltered. The technological advances of the last decade and more have refined that paradigm and enriched it, to be sure, but they have not changed it. The personal appliance shrinks in size and cost and Page 12 of 21

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New Media (And Old) the variety of forms of information accessible via the network grows apace, but in important ways we have made a permanent mental shift already, and nothing comparable yet looms. (Any such statement is given, quite deliberately, as a hostage to fortune, in the brave hope that it will not yet be obsolete at the date of publication of this chapter.) That we live in a moment in which the new media pose challenges to our ways of scholarship and to the future of Roman Studies cannot be denied. But in suggesting the limitations of technological change for us now, I emphasize that the work to be done is intellectual and scholarly, not technological. The tasks of the next decade and more for the renovation and extension of Roman Studies are for scholars, not geeks. I will outline a few of them by way of conclusion: I. E pluribus plura. We think we understand how to locate and use high-quality scholarly information. Our model is the library, and a model of surpassing splendour that is indeed. The essential structure of the library is found in the intersection between the urge to collect and the urge to classify and evaluate. The ideal library is infinite in scope but meticulously catalogued. No such library exists, which is why the model can prevail. An infinite library, after all, could not be catalogued and could not be selective. Our poverty empowers us in the libraries we really know and u