Empire of Letters: Writing in Roman

Literature and Thought from Lucretius

to Ovid Stephanie Ann Frampton
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Empire of Letters
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Empire of Letters
Writing in Roman Literature
and Thought
from Lucretius to Ovid

stephanie ann frampton

1
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1
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Stephanie Ann Frampton, author.
Title: Empire of letters : writing in Roman literature and thought from
Lucretius to Ovid /​Stephanie Ann Frampton.
Description: Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018014534 (print) | LCCN 2018016152 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190915421 (epub) | ISBN 9780190915414 (updf ) |
ISBN 9780190915438 (oso) | ISBN 9780190915407 (bb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Latin literature—​History and criticism. |
Writing in literature. | Writing—​Rome—​History.
Classification: LCC PA6003 (ebook) | LCC PA6003 .F735 2018 (print) |
DDC 870.9/​001—​dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2018014534
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

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For my parents
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Contents

List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: More than Words 1

1. Classics and the Study of the Book 13
2. Writing and Identity 33
3. The Text of the World 55
4. Tablets of Memory 85
5. The Roman Poetry Book 109
6. Ovid and the Inscriptions 141
Conclusion: Texts and Objects 163

References 171
Index 195
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Figures

1. Five reed pens bound to a board with a small piece of linen. Ptolemaic
Egypt. Brooklyn Museum 37.451E. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum. 3
2. Diagram of an ancient bookroll. Reproduced from Johnson (2009), 260,
fig. 11.2. 15
3. Latin letter in papryus from Suneros to Chios. Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. 30
bce–​14 ce. POxy 3208. Courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration
Society. 24
4. Wooden board with school exercises. Ca. fouth century ce, Egypt. PMich
763. Courtesy of the University of Michigan Library. 68
5. Graffito syllabary from the nypheum of the House of Neptune and
Amphitrite, (V, 6/7e), Herculaneum, Italy. Before 79 ce. CIL
4.10567. 84
6. Diptych writing tablets of wood with ivory hinges from the shipwreck off
of Uluburun, Turkey. Ca. 1300 bce. Courtesy of the Institute of Nautical
Archaeology. 86
7. The Muse Calliope holding writing tablets. Wall painting from the Inn
of the Sulpicii, Murecine, Italy. Before 79 ce. Copyright Pio Foglia/–​
Fotografica Foglia SAS. 87
8. The “Gallus Papyrus.” Egyptian Museum of Cairo PQasr Ibrîm 78-​3-​11/​1.
Reproduced from Capsasso (2003), 123, tav. 6 by kind permission. 110
9. Composite detail of Rodolfo Lanciani’s 1901 Forma Urbis Romae
showing the approximate locations of the public libraries in central
Rome. Copyright the Open Forma Urbis Romae (2012). Developed by
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x Figures

the University of Oregon, Stanford University, and Dartmouth

College (http://mappingrome.com/). Courtesy of the University
of Oregon. 142
10. Greek epigram on papyrus from an Arsinoite miscellany. Egypt.
First century ce. PLond 256 b (recto). Courtesy of the British
Library. 164
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Acknowledgments

It is an enormous privilege to be able to acknowledge some of the debts that

I have accrued to individuals and institutions over the course of writing this
book. When I began, I had no sense of the number of scholars or the variety of
fields with which this work would bring me into contact. That has been one of
the greatest pleasures of this undertaking. Many friends and colleagues were
generous with their advice and expertise, showing enthusiasm for the project
at its various stages and offering feedback that greatly improved it. Though
it would be impossible to recognize each one of them here, warmest thanks
to Arthur Bahr, Alan Bowman, William Broadhead, Raffaella Cribiore, Erika
Zimmermann Damer, Joseph Farrell, Denis Feeney, Peta Fowler, Mary Fuller,
Diana Henderson, Joseph Howley, Damien Nelis, Hannah Marcus, Michael
McOsker, Duncan MacRae, John Oksanish, Emily Richmond Pollock, Aaron
Pratt, Victoria Rimell, John Schafer, Sharmila Sen, Donca Steriade, Michael
Suarez, Richard Tarrant, Barnaby Taylor, Rosalind Thomas, James Uden, and
Katharina Volk. Matthew Horrell undertook a much-​needed round of copy-​
editing at a critical moment. Michael Hendry helped to compile the index, and
caught many errors. I thank Matthew Kirschenbaum for suggesting my title.
Above all, Emma Dench, who supervised the dissertation from which this work
stems, has been an unflagging source of confidence, wisdom, and humor.
Portions of the book were written while on fellowship at the American
Academy in Rome, Balliol College at Oxford University, the University of
Cincinnati, and the Fondation Hardt in Vandoeuvres, Switzerland. I thank all
of those institutions, their faculty, staff, and librarians for the welcome I re-
ceived, as well as my colleagues at MIT for being extremely generous with
leave time and support. This publication was subsidized in part by the Harvard
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xii Acknowledgments

Studies in Comparative Literature and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation,

to whom I am also very grateful. Particular thanks are due to Prof. Bowman
for his hospitality at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford
during Hilary Term, 2016. I am indebted to Prof. Bowman and to Robin
Birley and Ralph Jackson for helping to arrange access for me to view Roman
leaf tablets at Vindolanda, the British Museum, and Blythe House in 2012.
Likewise, I thank Gianluca Del Mastro for coordinating my visit to the Officina
dei Papiri Ercolanesi at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli to see the Latin
fragments from Herculaneum in 2014. In the same year, Rebecca Benefiel was
kind enough to allow me to join the first field season of the Ancient Graffiti
Project. Jeff Kattenhorn arranged my viewing of PLond 256 and other materials
at the British Library in 2016, and Monica Tsuneishi helped with a visit to the
papyrology collection at the University of Michigan in 2015. Parts of this book
were presented at the American Academy in Rome, the Notre Dame Global
Gateway in Rome, Stanford University, and Columbia University between
2014 and 2018. My thanks to the audiences for insightful feedback on those
occasions. The bulk of the work, however, was done at home, in Cambridge.
Sincerest thanks to the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard for
securing my privileges at the Harvard Libraries all of these years.
It has been a great pleasure to find a home for this work at Oxford
University Press, where Stefan Vranka and his team have done an extraordi-
nary job to shepherd the text from manuscript to book. Finally, I give heartfelt
thanks to Cotton Seed for his ceaseless encouragement, sine qua non.
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Empire of Letters
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1

Introduction
More than Words

The pen is ready, the ink is mixed, even the paper is

polished: now let me begin.1
—​Cicero Letters to Quintus 2.14.1

Toward the end of July 54 bce, the orator, lawyer, and sometime politi-
cian Marcus Tullius Cicero picked up pen and papyrus. He was writing
to his younger brother, Quintus, then in serving Gaul as a general in the
army of Julius Caesar that was advancing toward Britain. The elder Cicero
wrote that day from Rome about walking a political tightrope to stay in
the good graces of both Caesar and Pompey, about the high rate of in-
terest in the Forum, and about bribery in the election campaigns for the
year’s tribunes and his friend Cato’s attempts to thwart it.2 As he began,
Marcus Cicero had all the necessary materials at hand: a reed pen freshly
cut, some solid ink ready mixed with water, a sheet of papyrus burnished
with ivory to make its surface smooth and bright. An auspicious start, per-
haps. But Cicero says why he makes such a fuss: his last letter to Quintus
had been less than perfectly legible. “You write that you were hardly
able to read my previous letter. Brother, it was for none of the reasons

1. Cicero Q Fr. 2.14.1: calamo et atramento temperato, charta etiam dentata res agetur.
My rather loose translation. Throughout the book, short translations are typically
my own and longer ones sometimes are. Where I have used others’ translations,
I have tried always to indicate the sources. Further information about editions and
translations and abbreviations can be found in the References.
2. These were precarious times: within a little more than a decade, all five men—​
Pompey, Cato, Caesar, and both Ciceros—​and many hundreds of others were to be
assassinated or forced to commit suicide in the turmoil of civil war.
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2 Empire of Letters

which you suppose, for I was not busy or bothered or angry with anyone.
It is just that whatever pen comes to my hand, I treat it as if it were a
good one.”3
Good pen or bad, the vagaries of writing a letter in the first century bce
were numerous. Reed pens and papyrus were imported from abroad and could
be costly or of poor quality.4 When authors say anything about their writing
tools, as Cicero does here, it is often to express annoyance. Pens needed to be
sharpened regularly (Figure 1). It’s likely Cicero’s previous one had been dull.
The grammarian Quintilian bemoans the fact that the frequent need to dip
the nib in ink disrupted one’s train of thought.5 The poet Persius, imagining
himself a student again, complains of ink sticking to the tip: “How can I study
with a pen like this?”6 Horace even warns that pens could be blamed for their
user’s lack of talent.7 Papyrus, too, was a source of trouble. According to Pliny’s
Natural History, certain kinds of papyrus paper were too thin to stand up to
fine pens and tended to tear or allow pigment to bleed through.8 He writes
of a papyrus shortage under Tiberius that he says would have “sent life into
chaos” had it not been managed by the senate.9 On the other hand, once you did
manage to send a letter off, there was no guarantee that it would reach its des-
tination. In the same summer that Cicero was corresponding with Quintus in
Gaul, his friend Atticus wrote from Greece to complain that he had received no
reply to an earlier letter: one of Cicero’s had gone astray.10 Anticipating hazards,
Cicero sometimes sent several copies of important notes with different carriers
or wrote them in code in order to frustrate unscrupulous ones.11 Although at the

3. Cic. Q Fr. 2.14.1: scribis enim te meas litteras superiores vix legere potuisse. in quo nihil
eorum, mi frater, fuit quae putas. neque enim occupatus eram neque perturbatus nec
iratus alicui. sed hoc facio semper ut, quicumque calamus in manus meas venerit, eo sic
utar tamquam bono.
4. Harris (1989), 193–​ 6, esp. 194 n. 104, on the expense of papyrus; though
Winsbury (2009), 18–​ 20 argues that claims of expense are overstated. Lewis
(1974, with 1989) is the standard history of its trade. The most extensive ancient
account of papyrus manufacture is Pliny Natural History 13.74–​89. Papyrus was
as a rule imported to Italy, but it is possible that the highest-​quality pens also
were: e.g. Martial’s gifted pens are Memphitica (Epigrams 14.38).
5. Quint. Inst. 10.3.31.
6. Persius Satires 3.19.
7. Horace Satires 2.3.7.
8. Plin. NH 13.80. The quality of papyrus paper had apparently improved significantly
between the Augustan period and Pliny’s day.
9. Plin. NH 13.89.
10. Cic. Letters to Atticus 2.13.
11. White (2010), 67, with 199 n. 24. Cf. Cic. Att. 2.19.5.
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Introduction 3

Figure 1 Ptolemaic pen set bound to a palette with linen. Brooklyn Museum 37.451E.
Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

height of his fame the novelist Apuleius brags that he would trade all the goods
in the world for a writing pen, most Roman authors are not nearly so bullish.12
Despite frustrations, Romans did write, and wrote a lot. If the deposits of an-
cient wooden leaf tablets found at military settlements across Roman Britain are any
sign, Roman citizens with even moderate education put pen to paper (or, in this case,
to thin slip of wood) for lots of reasons: to ask for more beer and socks; to ask one’s
superior for leave; to copy lines from the Aeneid as schoolwork; and, in an example
famously signed in the hand of a Roman woman, Claudia Severa, to invite a friend
to one’s birthday party.13 The remains of documents from Roman Egypt, where pa-
pyrus was the writing surface of choice, tell a similar story: writing used to secure
funds or issue IOUs, writing used to introduce friends or to warn acquaintances
of conmen and cheats (as in Suneros’s note to Chios, POxy 3208, reproduced in
Chapter 1), writing of letters sent home to parents, writing of parents to children,
writing of school children and their teachers, and copyists making books.14 Much
of this material was written by scribes, professionals, paid to take down dictation
or to write up standard documents such as receipts and contracts, who could be
slaves, freedmen, or citizens.15 But many people who hired scribes signed their own
names, and it is clear that the business of being Roman by the turn of the

12. Apuleius Florida 9.27: pro his praeoptare me fateor uno chartario calamo me reficere
poemata, “above these, I confess I choose a single writing pen to create poetry.”
13. See Bowman and Thomas (1983) and (2003); Bowman (1994); and Bowman et al.
(2010). Tomlin (1996) is still a useful review of the material. Severa’s letter is Tab.
Vindol. II 291.
14. For an introduction to the variety of material, see the essays collected in Bagnall
(2009), with further bibliography pp. 27–​9.
15. See the discussion of Palme in Bagnall (2009), 358–​94. When he was busy, Cicero
himself often had a scribe (librarius) write his letters, e.g., Q Fr. 2.16: occupationum
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4 Empire of Letters

millennium involved frequent recourse to written documents in daily life.16 High

and low, male and female, young and old: the discoveries from Roman Britain and
Egypt, and even the scarce examples of papyrus and tablet documents and wall
inscriptions that survive in Italy itself, reveal traces of the whole breadth of the
Roman people.17
Yet the surest sign that Romans wrote and read may indeed be the rich
legacy of literary texts that have reached us not through their direct physical
survival, but through a long and complex history of copying and recopying
in the age of manuscript books. Beginning at least in the third century bce,
with the staging of theatrical ludi, Rome became a center for the production
of literary works.18 Some of them, including the ludi Romani themselves,
were translations and adaptations of Greek models, from the epics of Homer
translated by Livius Andronicus and freely romanized by Virgil to philosoph-
ical writings of Epicureans, Academicians, and Stoics.19 Others took originally
Greek forms in radical new directions, such as profound innovations in the
genres of love elegy, hexameter satire, and literary epistle. According to L. D.
Reynolds and Nigel Wilson, by the year 500 ce, in the Latin west, Plautus,
Terence, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Persius, Juvenal, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, both Plinys,
Seneca, and Fronto were actively circulating in manuscript: works of drama,
prose, and poetry by authors who had been dead for three centuries or more.20
In the ensuing millennium, many, if not most, classical texts continued to
be maintained and renewed through copying within a network of monastery
scriptoria and cathedral libraries across Europe.21 The rise of the printing press
in the sixteenth century again provided a new vehicle for classical learning, a
machine fueling the study of Greek and Latin authors even into our own age,
when we find ourselves once more in the throes of a media revolution that is
reshaping our contact with classical learning.22

mearum tibi signum sit librari manus, “Let the hand of my scribe be to you a sign of
my busyness.”
16. Bagnall (2011). Harris (1989), of the late Republic and the high Empire: “In mani-
fold ways [. . .] the Roman world was now dependent on writing” (p. 232).
17. Graffiti: Garrucci (1856); Canali and Cavallo (1991); Solin et al. (1966); Milnor
(2014) discusses literary connections. Italian papyri and other documents: Capasso
(1991).
18. On the importance of the ludi for Rome’s sense of literature, see Wiseman (2015). If
I can be accused of overestimating the importance of writing in the Roman world,
Wiseman may be accused of underestimating it.
19. See especially Feeney (2016) on Rome’s “translation project.”
20. Reynolds and Wilson (2013, orig. 1968), 81.
21. Reynolds and Wilson (2013, orig. 1968), 80–​122.
22. Kallendorf (2015) is a fascinating study of the reception history of Virgil across time
and media, up to today. See also Pfeiffer (1976); Grafton (1997); O’Donnell (1998);
Grafton et al. (2010); and now Hunt, Smith, and Stok (2017).
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Introduction 5

Interest in the history of the book in Europe has refocused attention on

the ways that texts are continually reconstituted in the hands of makers and
readers.23 At the same time, classical scholarship has done enormous work to
recuperate the original performativity of ancient texts.24 But just as the ideals
of song, performance, and occasion have considerable symbolic weight within
ancient literatures, so too did writing, and its various forms play a significant
symbolic role in the work of authors and artists across genres. Other languages
do a better job than English to distinguish writing itself (i.e., marks, made on
a surface, having some kind of linguistic character) from the acts that pro-
duce it (i.e., the making of such marks) and its metaphysical products (i.e.,
the linguistic information encoded therein). French has écriture, écrire, and
écrits; German, Schrift and schreiben. In English, all of these are “writing.” By
“writing,” then, I mean those marks, stains, scratches, impressions, scores,
gashes, grooves, and lines that are the visible signs of verbal communication,
as well as the material substrates or physical media that were made to contain
them.25
Bugs can be features, too. Rather, like Cicero’s letter to Quintus, writing’s
very failures always to transmit the perfect intention of an author—​and the
failures of certain pieces of writing ever to reach their intended readers—​reveal
one of writing’s most productive potentialities: that the medium is not actually
the message. That is, the inscribed artifact (the object that bears writing) and
the literary work (the intellectual substance embedded in it) are not one and
the same. This difference allows authors to play with the concinnity between
form and content in ways that are legible and meaningful to readers. Ovid
dresses his book poorly, since the poetry it contains is full of sorrow. Catullus
jokes about the grandness of a papyrus sheet used to copy the most overblown
poetry. Horace’s booklet of Odes can claim to outlast a monument. For Virgil,
we shall see, the particular textuality of his poetry becomes a kind of secret con-
fidence between the author and a coterie of readers, including the princeps and
excluding the general reading public.26
One of the greatest challenges of working in this field is the very poor
state of the material evidence for ancient Latin books. Hardly a lick of Latin
literature survives in its original form from the first centuries bce or ce. I can

23. See Cavallo and Chartier (1999, orig. 1995). Darnton (1986) is seminal.
24. The foundational work is Lord (1960). For Roman song and performance, see
Habinek (2005); Lowrie (2009).
25. On the semiotic implications of the characteristic of writing (and all other forms
of communication) that it can be used to refer to itself, see Winthrop-​Young (2013)
with Siegert (2014), 10–​12.
26. Ovid Tristia I.1; Catullus 22; Hor. Carmina 3.30; Virgil passim. These examples are
discussed in more detail elsewhere: Ovid, in Chapter 6, and the rest in Chapter 5.
Bibliographic references can be found there.
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6 Empire of Letters

count the scraps of professionally produced poetry books on the fingers of

one hand: fifty-​two lines of a poem about the Battle of Actium from the Villa
dei Papiri at Herculaneum; twenty-​five lines of a comedy from the time of
Quintilian, now in Hamburg; twenty on parchment of a poem about Philip
of Macedon from Oxyrhynchus; another nine of the elegist Cornelius Gallus
from Upper Nubia.27 A bit more prose has survived—​a fragmentary copy of
Cicero’s Verrines, scraps of otherwise unknown culinary and grammatical
treatises, bits of a speech by Claudius and of a juridical handbook—​but not a
lot.28 If the silence of the material record is almost deafening, that of Roman
authors about the human labor that flowed behind the books they wrote is
almost equally so: slaves made to copy dictation, secretaries asked to make
corrections, copyists making clean drafts in bookshops. They leave barely any
trace in the literary texts of our authors, though it is clear that their handiwork
runs through Roman literature like a torrent.29
In the face of such remarkable absences, how are we to tell the story of the
Latin book in antiquity? We must take guidance from other forms of writing
that survive in larger numbers: epigraphic inscriptions on stone and bronze
from Italy and the empire; graffiti preserved on the plaster walls of the cities
destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius; fragments of Greek books and other
papyrus documents in Greek and Latin that have endured by the thousands
in the waste piles of Roman Egypt; precious traces of Latin writing on wooden
tablets from Britain, Egypt, and the Vesuvian cities; and the depictions of
scrolls and other media in the iconography of Roman wall paintings and stat-
uary.30 This book therefore asks us to imagine how the lives of all of those
dwelling in Rome were meaningfully embedded within a particular, evolving
media landscape: in the shadow of laws posted in bronze on the Capitoline
and the tituli displayed on new public monuments, including Augustus’s
libraries on the Palatine and at the Porticus of Octavia; among the bookstalls
of the Vicus Tuscus and the graffiti of the forum; coming and going past the
mile markers and suburban epitaphs that lined the Via Appia and the other
roads that led to Rome; fingering coins with alphabetic legends and, often,
keeping or commissioning their own records and account books. Despite
the low levels of literacy continuing into the Augustan age—​ one scholar
guesses no more than 20 to 30% of the adult male population would have
read to the current UNESCO standard—​the symbolic and expressive qualities

27. The survivors are catalogued by Ammirati (2015), 23–​44. See also Cavenaile (1981).
28. Ammirati (2015).
29. Cicero’s letters are the exception. On literary labor generally, see Cavallo et al.
(1989–​2012), vol. 1, Produzione del testo; Puglia (1997).
30. For the representations of bookrolls in Roman art, see still Birt (1907). Other topics
listed here are treated more fully in the current study.
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Introduction 7

of writing, beyond their linguistic content, must have been much more
widely legible.31 Moreover, in the context of Rome’s growing dominion in
Italy and abroad, authors, too, seem to have been increasingly aware that they
communicated not only with immediate audiences at the capital, but also ed-
ucated readers throughout the Latin-​speaking world who accessed their works
only through the written word: Zmyrna cavas Satrachi penitus mittetur ad undas,
“[Cinna’s] Smyrna will travel as far away as the deep-​channeled streams of
Satrachus” (Catullus 95.5, tr. Goold). Rome’s was the first republic; so too, the
first “Republic of Letters.”
As we shall see in Chapter 2, the florescence of the Latin alphabet at Rome
is situated uniquely between the development of earlier linear alphabets in
the eastern Mediterranean in the first half of the first millennium bce and the
rise of the codex book-​form in the first centuries of the first millennium ce.
The earliest writing in Italy appears in Latium in the first half of the eighth
century bce, around the same time that we see significant signs of Roman ur-
banization: the settlement of the Palatine Hill, the building of the first stone
structures in the forum, the beginnings of changes to the city’s topography.32
These developments coincide with the traditional date of Romulus’s founda-
tion of the city in 753 bce. Potsherds from the Roman Forum show the ap-
pearance of writing in the city not very much later.33 Unlike the Greeks and
Etruscans, to whom Romans continued to compare themselves, the Roman
state was thus the first major power in the ancient Mediterranean to come into
being in the context of alphabetic literacy. That is, there was essentially never a
time in the history of the city when writing was not in some way present. Even
if only a small percentage of the population was able to read and write at any
point in time, in a fundamental sense, Rome has always been a literate city.34
Since at least 1948, when Ernst Curtius posited the trope of books and
writing as one of the foundational images in the classical tradition, scholars of
literature have been probing self-​reflexive uses of the figure of writing within
writing.35 But Curtius himself downplayed the writing’s figurative importance
during the very era with which we are concerned here: “Roman literature in its
period of florescence made very little use of book metaphors [. . .] It is barely

31. This is a question to which we shall return again and again in this study. Perhaps
the foundational discussion of the “expressiveness” of textual media is McKenzie
(1986).
32. Cornell (1995); Holloway (1994). On the earliest writing in Latium, the so-​called
Eulin inscription, see Watkins (1995) and Bietti Sestieri (1989–​90) and now Janko
(2015), who puts the date even earlier.
33. Colonna (1988).
34. I mean “literate” in the broadest sense here. Cf. Rama (1996, orig. 1984). Harris
(1989) estimates actual rates of literacy in ancient cities over time.
35. Curtius (1953), 302–​47.
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8 Empire of Letters

represented in the stock of images of Augustan poetry.”36 Similarly, in his sem-

inal work on the history of writing systems, I. J. Gelb insisted that the Roman
writing habit was derivative and unexceptional:

One would look in vain [. . .] in this study for a discussion of Latin

writing through ancient, medieval, and modern times, because that
system represents nothing new and important for the theory of writing.
Generally speaking, we write to-​day the way the ancient Romans did,
and the ancient Latin writing is identical in principle with that of the
Greeks, from whom it was borrowed.37

Because the Romans and Greeks shared so very much, from their myths to
their meters, it can often seem as though differences between them are too
subtle to be meaningful. And, indeed, we find many more points of corre-
spondence than distinction between Greek and Roman practice throughout
this study. But focusing on Roman literature and Latin authors draws both
similarities and differences into relief.
A simple example from epigraphy may be illustrative. In general, in
Greece, posted laws were inscribed in stone, either on the walls of public
buildings or on freestanding stelae.38 In classical Italy, on the other hand, laws
were typically inscribed on bronze tablets.39 Both materials are extremely du-
rable if not directly tampered with—​Greek and Roman laws, in significant
numbers, survive in their original form to this day—​and thus connote perma-
nence, naturally a desirable characteristic for documents that were themselves
meant to be long lasting.40 But why the preference for stone in one case and
bronze in the other? It is not because Romans had greater access to bronze,
or Greeks to stone. Quite the opposite; Italy was relatively poor in natural
deposits of metal.41 Rather, in either case it has been suggested that, despite
exceptions, the material chosen was the one that had traditionally been asso-
ciated with religious inscriptions, above and beyond its legal use. Since laws
across the ancient world were enacted with expectation of divine sanction, the
preferred material in each place was that which was seen to have the greatest

36. Curtius (1953), 308–​9.

37. Gelb (1963), v–​vi.
38. Thomas (1995). Thomas (1992), 87 also ties the use of stone as a substrate for civic
inscriptions to the mnemonic and monumental uses of natural rocks in archaic
Greece.
39. Williamson (1987).
40. For a précis or surviving epigraphic evidence, with further references, see the entry
by Kaja Harter-​Uibopuu in EAH s.vv. Law, epigraphical sources for (Greek and
Roman).
41. See BNP s.v. Mining.
9

Introduction 9

efficacy for establishing a law’s sacred protection.42 In this case and in others,
understanding a difference in attitudes toward textual materiality allows us to
recognize a continuity between Greek and Roman practice that is otherwise
hidden.
The project of this book is to keep both kinds of evidence in mind while we
are reading ancient writers: the literary and material. In that regard, it joins a
growing body of research on reading and writing in the ancient Mediterranean.
For Greece and Rome, Ancient Literacy was a turning point.43 Despite its lim-
itations, this is a text to which every subsequent study of reading and writing
in ancient Greece and Rome has been indebted.44 Equally influential is the
work of Rosalind Thomas, who extends an interest in questions of readership
to consider the cultural factors that contributed to the development of literate
practices in ancient Greece.45 Studies on the social character of writing materials
at Rome, such as those of Elizabeth Meyer and Shane Butler on the uses and
abuses of legal documents, draw on the insights of Thomas and others.46 In
other languages, Guglielmo Cavallo and Horst Blanck, inter alios, have made
significant contributions to placing the history of writing in antiquity into the
larger field of histories of the book.47 Meanwhile, new work on the papyrolog-
ical remains of antiquity continues to flow out of Italy, the United Kingdom,
the University of Michigan, and elsewhere, providing essential knowledge
for Roman book culture and writing on which I have drawn extensively.48
I am also deeply indebted to previous scholarship on Roman authors, collec-
tive and individual.49 If this study distinguishes itself in any way from what
has come before, it is in drawing attention to (1) the Roman alphabet, (2) the

42. In this connection, Bodel (2001), 23 mentions other examples of “extra-​textual,

metaphorical elements” in the choice of epigraphic materials, including the use of
lead for curses (“its density and pallor conveyed negative associations appropriately
directed at the target”) and of gold for Orphic prayers (“because the words they
carried were valuable and the world to which they promised access was golden”).
43. Harris (1989).
44. Specific responses to Harris are Humphrey (1991); Bowman and Woolf (1994);
Johnson and Parker (2009).
45. Especially Thomas (1989) and (1992).
46. Meyer (2004) and Butler (2002).
47. E.g., Cavallo and Chartier (1999, orig. 1995) and Blanck (1992). Birt (1882) was
foundational.
48. Highlights include Tomlin (2016) on the London tablets; Ammirati (2015) on Latin
books; Obbink (2007) on the Latin texts of Herculaneum. Johnson (2004) remains
essential on the bookrolls of Oxyrhynchus, and Bagnall’s (2011) work on “everyday
writing” has had special impact on this study.
49. Of particular influence are Feeney (2016); Lowrie (2009); and Goldberg (2005), as
well as Oliensis (1998) on Horace and Martelli (2013) on Ovid.
01

10 Empire of Letters

material culture of Roman literate practice, and (3) the impact of writing media
on broader intellectual, epistemological, artistic, and social constructions. This
approach is anticipated by the studies collected in the 2009 Ancient Literacies
volume, but it has never been the focus of a book-​length study and never one
on Roman writing, rather than Greek.50
The book takes as its starting point the history of Roman alphabetism and
alphabetic literacy, but throughout I look past mere letters. My concern is with
identifying and analyzing how authors of the late Republic and early Empire
thought about and through textual materiality, especially in light of existing
material evidence for ancient writing. The reader should know that I am nei-
ther an epigrapher nor a papyrologist, though I have tried as much as possible
to represent the technical material from those fields accurately and have relied
on the expertise of generous friends and colleagues throughout. This book is
deeply indebted to previous scholarship in all of the fields that it touches. Its
readings are meant not to be determinative on their own. Rather, I have sought
to cast a light on those aspects of Roman thought and literature that appear
to me to have become most obscure because of the dissimilarity between the
ways we experience texts in the modern age and the ways the ancient Romans
experienced them. In what may be one of the most rudimentary applications
of the poststructuralist principle, by defamiliarizing the text itself, we come to
see it anew.
The chapters that follow are loosely organized into three sections of
two chapters each. Chapters 1 (“Classics and the Study of the Book”) and 2
(“Writing and Identity”) address preliminary questions of scholarly and histor-
ical background, in the first case finding common ground among the related
disciplines of book history, bibliography, textual criticism, and the Classics, so
that scholars of each of those fields may approach this book on equal footing. In
the second, I look at the broadest possible historical sources, from Herodotus
to Tacitus, to understand what stories ancient Romans told themselves about
the origins of their alphabet and how they used those myths and histories to
connect themselves with other, more ancient writing cultures in and around
the Mediterranean basin, including the Greeks. Chapters 3 (“The Text of the
World”) and 4 (“Tablets of Memory”) focus on the use of writing in two gov-
erning metaphors in Roman didactic literature: the famous analogy between
letters and atoms in the natural philosophy of Lucretius’s De rerum natura and
the image of the “wax tablet of the mind” in classical theories of memory and
rhetoric. Borrowing Aleida Assmann’s notion of the “figure of thought,” we see
in either case how writing, or a particular feature of it, became embedded into
the very ways that the ideas of matter and the mind were formulated within
their respective intellectual traditions. Chapters 5 (“The Roman Poetry Book”)
and 6 (“Ovid and the Inscriptions”) round out the study by focusing on Roman

50. Johnson and Parker (2009).

11

Introduction 11

poetry: first, on representations of bookrolls and authorial writing within the

poetic tradition in Latin in the longue durée, including Virgil’s peculiar avoid-
ance thereof, and, next, on the iconic use of books and inscriptions in a se-
ries of poems from Ovid’s collections of exile poetry, the Tristia. In both cases,
though to very different ends, we find that representing different kinds of tex-
tual media within their poetry allowed Roman authors to signal and negotiate
their relationships with readers in the world outside of their poems, including
that most important reader of all, Augustus. The Conclusion offers some
further thoughts on the intrinsic nature of texts as objects, using an ancient
papyrus miscellany from Roman Egypt—​the earliest surviving manuscript ex-
ample of indented, elegiac mise en page—​to discuss, again, the importance of
the symbolic functions of writing in our reading of Roman evidence.
My hope is that students of other periods of antiquity and of other kinds
of books and literature will find much of interest here. When quoting ancient
sources, I provide both the original text in Latin or Greek, as well as a trans-
lation in almost every case, to satisfy the needs of classicist and non-​classicist
readers alike. The problems I discuss center on some of the most canonical
voices in Roman letters, including Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid.
Cicero, the oldest of my key authors, was killed in the midst of this political
upheaval, at the height of his career in 43 bce, the same year that the youngest
of my authors, Ovid, was born. The fact that these men happen to have lived
and worked within a century of one another is hardly an accident. Rather, it
reflects the wealth, both cultural and economic, of Rome at that moment, at
the turn of the millennium, having fully unified Italy, and endeavoring to con-
trol an even broader and more prosperous empire across the Mediterranean
and Europe. This period effectively marks the end of Rome’s wars at home.
Caesar had been killed the year before; Anthony and Octavian were to finish
their civil war abroad at the end of the next decade. And it marks the begin-
ning of a great age of expansion and enfranchisement of colonies in northern
Africa, northern Europe, Iberia, and the Mediterranean East. The present
study loosely spans the seventy-​seven-​year lifetime of the man who was to be
Augustus: born Gaius Octavius in 63 bce, renamed Caesar Octavian at the time
of his posthumous adoption by Julius Caesar in 44 bce, remade again with the
honorific Augustus by the senate of Rome in 27 bce, and deified by them upon
his own death in 14 ce. While this book is not about the relationship between
Augustus and the poets, it does address the effects of the changing political
order in this period on literary representations of writing.51 Although there was
no major technological innovation at this time, one can think of empire itself
as a significant part of the media history of antiquity. Empire caused words and

51. For Augustus’s relationships with poets, the bibliography is vast. Miller (2009);
Barchiesi (1997, orig. 1994); and Farrell and Nelis (2013) are all good points of entry.
21

12 Empire of Letters

people to circulate in greater numbers across vaster distances. It increased the

importance of the written word in managing the expanse of Roman dominion
at great remove, while also broadening the reading publics of elite authors. By
the end of our period, Rome was not just a Republic, but had become a fully
fledged “Empire of Letters.”
Near the end in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a letter
to a friend, not with reed pen and papyrus, nor even with quill pen and paper,
but, for the first time in his life, using a newly purchased Malling-​Hansen
Writing Ball, an early typewriter. His now-​famous insight upon that occa-
sion was to declare, in capital letters, “Our writing tools are working on our
thoughts.”52 Radical shifts in writing technologies and practices since the late
twentieth century have made us collectively more sensitive to the impact of
structures and interfaces on what Matthew Kirschenbaum calls our “sense of
the text.”53 But the principle was no less true two thousand years ago, when
the “tools” that our authors worked with—​and that worked on them—​were
scrolls and reed pens, tablets and styluses, monumental inscriptions in stone
and bronze. Elements of style and substance distinguished Roman writing cul-
ture from others around them and, often easier to overlook, from our own.
Far from being transparent vehicles for transmitting information from an au-
thor to a reader, written texts were objects, too, in ways that were essential
to the worldviews and self-​fashioning of the authors whose works took shape
in them.

52. “UNSER SCHREIBZEUG ARBEITET MIT AN UNSEREN GEDANKEN.” The

quotation is unearthed and translated by Kittler (1999), 200.
53. Kirschenbaum (2017). Kirschenbaum (2016), 10 identifies the phrase as originating
with Haas (1996).
13

1
Classics and the Study of the Book

It may seem self-​evident that Classics, as a discipline, is nothing if not the study
of books. But the “study of the book” is itself a flourishing field, which takes the
meaning of the book as a material object as its central domain of interest. This
focus has given rise to a new set of approaches, especially to literary evidence
and its social contexts, that ask us to consider the significance of medium along
with message.1 Classics and book history, however, have not always been happy
partners. While a history of the book has arisen out of the textual abundance
of the age of print, the written evidence that survives directly from classical
antiquity is much more sparse, and especially so for Latin. Even with the great
surge in papyrological publishing since the end of the nineteenth century—​in-
cluding the massive reports from Oxyrhynchus and other Egyptian sites and
continued progress on deciphering the library of burnt papyrus scrolls from
Herculaneum (Mommsen had predicted the twentieth would be the “century
of papyrology”)2—​we have but a handful of anything more than the barest
fragments of Roman books. Literary manuscripts in Latin before the second
century bce are limited to a few examples like the Carmen de bello Aegyptiaco
from Herculaneum, the Gallus Papyrus from Primis (on which see Chapter 5),
and the fragment of Cicero’s Verrines now in Giessen. There are only about
two thousand individual literary papyri in Latin overall, and well less than a
hundred of those date from before the end of the second century ce.3 As we
shall see, the methodological outlook of book history is based on assessing

1. Finkelstein and McCleery (2006) collect some of the foundational essays in the field.
2. Van Minnen (2009), 644.
3. These figures are according to the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (http://​
www.trismegistos.org/​ldab), in which literary papyri include school exercises (see
Chapter 3). The number of proper “books” (i.e., professionally prepared bookrolls
and codices) is significantly smaller for both periods; see Ammirati (2015).
41

14 Empire of Letters

large quantities of written evidence. How do we even start to construct a book-​

historical narrative for a tradition from which we have such insubstantial bits
and pieces?
But what, after all, is a “book”? In everyday speech, “book” conjures
the shape of the codex, shelved in libraries, found in bookstores, and per-
haps sent to your door by Amazon. You might even be holding one in your
hand. Of course, “books” in antiquity looked somewhat different. Although
they were also fairly “handy” as physical objects that one could manipu-
late, ancient literary books were generally produced on scrolls, held hor-
izontally, and read column by column, rather than page by page (Figure
2).4 Perhaps you are reading Empire of Letters on some kind of screen. In
that case, commentators will remind us that digital modes of navigation are
more like those of an ancient reader: swiping or “scrolling” through a series
of visually continuous pages from left to right, from top to bottom.5 While
such analogies can naively obscure the very different material specificities
of screen-​and scroll-​based reading—​something that book history teaches
us to attend to very carefully—​they are helpful reminders that both screens
and scrolls are at the technological and chronological edges of the category
of book.6 It is for this very reason that old media and new media can mutu-
ally help to distill the fundamental properties of “book,” above and beyond
the printed codex.7
When you read a Kindle, are you reading a “book”? Certainly. Like the
word “writing,” which can be used to refer both to the signs on the page and to
the linguistic information they encode, “book” means not only certain kinds of
physical forms but also the texts or kinds of texts that are typically held in those
forms. Your Kindle or your computer screen is not itself a book, but when you
read something on it that is that kind of text, both the marks on the screen and
the words they transmit are a book. The bookish tradition of later Latin, in fact,

4. Johnson (2004) is essential reading on technical aspects of bookrolls, based on

Oxyrhynchite evidence. Kenney (1982) remains a cogent description of Roman
books and their publication, to which Starr (1987) is an important supplement.
5. See, for example, the Economist’s interactive web essay “From Papyrus to Pixels: The
Future of the Book” (2014), with Schnapp and Battles (2014), 14–​37.
6. Kirschenbaum’s (2012) investigation of the “materiality of electronic texts” can be
seen as an important analogue to our study.
7. The place of the medieval framework remains underexplored in the present volume.
Nichols’s (1990) call for a “New Philology” focusing on the “material matrices” that
texts inhabit has resonances with the approach I take here, and especially with a
Classics project like Jansen (2014), though ultimately may have more in common
with the directions taken in bibliography proper in the wake of McKenzie (e.g.,
2002) in dealing with multiplicity as the primary feature of evidence and interpreta-
tion, rather than scarcity. See also Johnson (2017).
 15

Figure 2 Diagram of an ancient bookroll, from Johnson (2009).

61

16 Empire of Letters

observes this very distinction: “The exemplar is the form, the exemplum what it
carries inside” (exemplar genus est exemplum quod trahis inde).8
As always, a look into the Oxford English Dictionary may be edifying. The
first definition for “book,” revised, expanded, and promoted to top billing in the
third edition, reads as follows:

1. a. A portable volume consisting of a series of written, printed, or

illustrated pages bound together for ease of reading. In modern use
the pages are typically printed and made of paper, and are usually
trimmed to a uniform rectangular or square shape, sewn or glued
together along one side to form a flat or rounded back, and encased
in a protective cover, but other materials and construction methods
may be used. In early and historical use, and with reference to non-​
Western cultures, book may refer to a literary work in portable form
written on a wide variety of other materials (as vellum, parchment,
papyrus, cotton, silk, palm leaves, bark, tablets of wood, ivory, slate,
metal, etc.), and put together in any of a number of forms (as a scroll,
or as separate leaves which may be hinged, strung, stitched, or glued
together).9

Latin, too, has a variety of ways to express the sense of “book”:

The specifically Roman word for book, to which Greek offers no

analogue, was volumen ‘roll’. This remained the term proper to the book
as a physical object; whereas liber might mean (i) ‘roll’ (= uolumen); or
(ii) a ‘book’ of a work written to occupy more than one roll, e.g. a ‘book’
of Virgil or Livy; or (iii) a ‘book’ in the sense of a work of literature,
e.g. the Aeneid. This last sense is rare, and in most of the passages
taken by lexicographers and others to represent it, there is at least a
tinge of senses (i) or (ii). For a work consisting of more than one liber
(sense (ii)) the normal designation would be libri, as when Cicero
refers to his De re publica as his ‘books on the Constitution’ (Fin. 2.59
in nostris de re publica libris) or Quintilian to his ‘books on the teaching
of oratory’ (praef. 1 libros quos . . . de institutione oratoria scripseram).
Use was also made of such variants as opus ‘work’ (Ovid, Amores epigr.

8. Rolandinus de Passageriis, Summa artis notariae, thirteenth century. Zetzel (1973),

227 n. 10 discusses this quotation as given by Du Cagne in his 1681 Glossarium me-
diae et infimae Latinitatis. It appears near the beginning of chapter ten of Rolandinus’s
treatise, printed many times in the Early Modern period, for which no modern edi-
tion is readily available. In the 1546 Venice edition, preferred by the Congresso
nazionale del notariato for their 2000 Atti e formule, it appears on 397r.
9. OED3 (March 2014) s.v. book. Emphasis original.
17

Classics and the Study of the Book 17

2, referring to a work in three or five libelli), charta, properly ‘papyrus,

paper’ (Lucretius 3.10 tuis ex . . . chartis); and of descriptive terms such
as versus, carmen, poemata, commentarii, epistulae [. . .] A convenient
alternative to liber was its diminutive libellus, properly ‘small book’,
used particularly of poetry (Catullus I.1, Ovid, Amores epigr. I, Martial
I praef., I.3, Statius, Silvae I praef., etc.).10

In modern usage, “book” includes works produced in non-​codex forms, in-

cluding papyrus scrolls. But, in this study, we are concerned with many forms
of writing that are beyond even the most expansive definitions of “book,” in-
cluding inscriptions and documents, some of which are not portable and many
of which are not literary, such as the monumental bronze copies of Augustus’s
deeds that are a focus of Chapter 6.11 Are these “books”? Certainly not in the
sense given by the OED, which also, incidentally, neglects pixels. Somewhat
ironically, in the field of book history itself, “book” is coming to have a much
more capacious meaning. As editors Michael Suarez and Henry Woudhuysen
write in the introduction to The Book: A Global History:

The use of ‘the book’ to designate the great diversity of textual forms
considered in the ‘history of the book’ [. . .] is a kind of synecdoche,
a single example to represent the many. Yet, because book history
is, necessarily, about far more than the history of books, ‘the book’
as a category or abstraction encompassing everything from stelae
inscriptions to laser-​printed sheets is not a formation that comes
naturally in English, as it does in French (Le Livre; histoire du livre),
or in German (Buchwesen). Naturally, the use of the term ‘book’ in
our title in no way excludes newspapers, prints, sheet music, maps,
or manuscripts, but merely suggests a degree of emphasis. Mindful
that in [Germanic and Latinate idiom] the word for ‘book’ is traceable
to the word for ‘bark’, we might profitably think of ‘book’ as originally
signifying the surface on which any text is written and, hence, as a
fitting shorthand for all recorded texts.12

The very idea of “book” within the academic study of the book is thus changing
and growing as book historians themselves seek out models that encompass
textual media globally and historically, in different cultures, communities, and
times, and including Graeco-​Roman antiquity. You may already have noticed
that the OED definition refers to papyrus, tablets, and scrolls, and that Suarez

10. Kenney (1982), 15.

11. For the Res gestae divi Augusti, see Cooley (2009).
12. Suarez and Woudhuysen (2013), xii.
81

18 Empire of Letters

and Woudhuysen refer to stelae. Accounting for the strangeness of classical

forms of evidence is part of what has been pushing book history toward more
generous definitions. Within Classics, we have the opportunity to harness this
momentum to our own traditions of technical textual study, including epig-
raphy and papyrology, thus framing ancient textuality properly as a “prehis-
tory” of the Western book.

Histories of the Book

As Suarez and Woudhuysen indicate, the “history of the book” is effec-

tively a calque for the French histoire du livre, which got its start in 1958 with
Lucien Febvre and Henri-​Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre (The Coming of the
Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–​1800).13 Simultaneously, the French “Annales”
school—​itself named for a print journal that had been co-founded by Febvre
and Marc Bloch in 1929—​taught a generation of young historians to delve
deeply into abundant regional manuscript archives in order to write the social
history of the same period.14 Across the Channel, English pressmen, librarians,
collectors, and historians took a somewhat different approach. Gathering
under the flag of the Bibliographical Society, they homed in on the history of
insular printing by tackling the archives of British academic and commercial
presses, thus joining the archival concern of the Annales school with the bib-
liographic interest of the histoire du livre. By the end of the 1960s, this work
had put Britain, as D. F. McKenzie wrote, “firmly ahead of any other country in
the command of its printed past.”15
Characterizing both endeavors was the sense that there was a great wealth
of surviving archival evidence available to researchers to tell the social, cultural,
and in fact literary history of early modern Europe. Within the study of litera-
ture, this sense led ultimately to Franco Moretti’s infamous injunction that we
might replace “close reading” of texts with “distant reading” of the archive, by
which he meant that the scholar’s attention could turn from the particulars of
any given passage in any given text to the whole literature of a period.16 She
could scour paratextual information coming out of the archives—​such as the
Bibliographical Society’s English Short Title Catalogue or the British Library’s
Incunabula Short Title Catalogue—​without necessarily reading the books them-
selves. Abundance was the name of the game.

13. Febvre and Martin (1976, orig. 1958).

14. Originally Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, the journal has gone through
many names in subsequent years, always keeping Annales in the title.
15. McKenzie (2002, orig. 1969), 264.
16. Moretti (2000).
91

Classics and the Study of the Book 19

Ann Blair, an American trained in the Annales tradition at the École

Normale in the 1980s, calls to mind the similar dispositions of the historian and
her subject in the title of her most recent book, Too Much to Know: Managing
Scholarly Information before the Modern Age.17 Blair’s work is itself a tour de
force of information management. Mirroring her subjects, the editors and
authors of early-​modern reference works, Blair employs a somewhat radical
strategy for managing archival abundance by putting all original-​language ref-
erence quotations in a web-​based supplement that runs some seventy-​seven
pages on its own.18
Another student of the Annales school, eighteenth-​century historian Arlette
Farge, speaks of encountering “traces by the thousands” in the French National
Archive in her resonant memoir, translated as The Allure of the Archives.19
Rather than surfing the Internet superhighway, Farge describes investigating
a “highway [. . .] of paper,” where she finds “traces by the thousands . . . the
dream of every researcher.”20 In the very same breath, though, Farge’s tone
shifts as she acknowledges the deep evidentiary and material gulf between her
field and ours: “the dream of every researcher—​think for instance of historians
of antiquity”!21 Given that book history was founded in the study of periods and
places for which artifactual abundance “seems infinite,”22 how, then, does one
write such a history for periods from which so little textual evidence survives,
as in ancient Greece and Rome?
Moreover, despite attempts to expand the definition of the book, the his-
tory of book history again and again reveals its particular inclination toward
paper and print. In comparison to media studies, for example, book history
can seem quite restrained. Anglo-​American media studies, in particular, has
foregone the kind of historical outlook that book history shows itself more
and more wanting to embrace, and instead focuses on global popular cultures
and the “new” media of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries: that is, es-
pecially, audio-​visual and digital media, including the overlapping domains of
film, television, the Internet, gaming, and social media.23 The stark absence of

17. Blair (2010).

18. Blair (2010); original language references: http://​history.fas.harvard.edu/​files/​his-
tory/​files/​blair-​quotationspostedsummer2011_​0.pdf.
19. Farge (2013), originally Le goût de l’archive (“The taste of the archive,” 1989).
20. Farge (2013), 5, 14.
21. Farge (2013), 14.
22. Farge (2013), 5.
23. McLuhan (1964) on television remains foundational. The focus on “mass media” in
Ouellette (2012) is representative, but see also Gitelman (2014) and Kirschenbaum
(2016). German media studies, in particular, has taken a somewhat different tack,
hewing more closely to cultural history and what is called “media archaeology.” See espe-
cially Kittler (1990, orig. 1985 and 1999, orig. 1986), and more recently Parikka (2012).
02

20 Empire of Letters

the digital from the OED and Suarez and Woudhuysen definitions of “book”
points to a very sharp line between what is generally considered to fall under
the purview of book history and what to scholars in the study of media. In
the collection Comparative Textual Media, itself an attempt to bridge this di-
vide, digital literature scholars Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman offer
a salutary reminder: “print is itself a medium, an obvious fact that tends to be
obscured by its long dominance within Western culture.”24 The inflection of
Hayles and Pressman’s statement is telling. Print has long been the dominant
medium of Western culture, and the culturally dominant form of print, the
codex. Again, observing this broader context points to a basic reality at the
heart of our everyday experience of the Classics: namely, our relative lack of
familiarity with the forms of texts that were common in antiquity versus our
everyday comfort with encountering ancient texts in modern (printed, codex)
editions. It begs the question: what do classicists imagine when we imagine
a classical book?

“Never to Be Seen Plain”

The textual histories of early modern Europe and of classical literature have
much more in common than an ideology of “originals” would allow. As Blair
reminds us, the abundance of information in the early-​modern period has
long been attributed to the rediscovery of ancient classics.25 Conrad Gesner’s
Bibliotheca Universalis, perhaps the most ambitious bibliographic project of
that era, was conceived as an encyclopedia of all of the works ever written in
the classical languages: “a universal library, or rather the richest possible cata-
logue of all the writers in the three languages Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, extant
and not extant, old and more recent up to today, wise and ignorant, published
and hiding in [manuscript] libraries.”26 Latin was the predominant language of
early European printing, and many of the first great incunables were classical
texts. Even more, with few exceptions our texts of classical authors are based
on manuscripts written many hundreds of years after the originals.27 The rare
discoveries in papyrus like the “new” texts of Sappho, Posidippus, or Gallus

24. Hayles and Pressman (2013), vii, my emphasis. In the same volume, see, for ex-
ample, William Johnson’s contribution, “Bookrolls as Media,” pp. 101–24.
25. Blair (2010), 21–​2.
26. Gesner (1545) 1r Bibliotheca universalis, sive, Catalogus omnium scriptorum
locupletissimus in tribus linguis Latina, Graeca & Hebraica: extantium & non extantium,
veterum & recentiorum in hunc usque diem, doctorum & indoctorum, publicatorum & in
bibliothecis latentium. See Blair (2010), 161–​4; Frampton (2017b).
27. Reynolds and Marshall (1983); Tarrant (1995) and (2016).
21

Classics and the Study of the Book 21

are exceptions that prove the rule.28 Rather, the predominant source of ancient
literary texts is in manuscripts from precisely the century or two before the
advent of commercial printing. As we peel back layers of textual history, we
find that there are many more layers beneath.
For textual criticism and for a “classical” literature in English, 1756 is
something of an originary moment.29 In that year, Samuel Johnson wrote
to prospective subscribers to his edition of Shakespeare, beginning his call
with a comparison of his task to the classicist’s: “The business of him that
republishes an ancient book is, to correct what is corrupt, and to explain
what is obscure.”30 Johnson goes on to adduce the reasons why Shakespeare’s
oeuvre, more than any other in that early age of print, was prone to textual
difficulties: dramatic works circulated in print and manuscript versions si-
multaneously; actors did not keep their copies nor their delivery fair and
faithful; the quality of Shakespeare’s language, described by Johnson as more
“sublime and familiar” than any other Englishman’s, was always difficult; and
printing itself was in its infancy, never again to be “in such unskilful hands.”31
Johnson’s method for producing his Shakespeare is instantly familiar to
anyone who has worked with a critical edition of a classical text:

The corruptions of the text will be corrected by a careful collation of

the oldest copies, by which it is hoped that many restorations may yet
be made: at least it will be necessary to collect and note the variations
as materials for future criticks, for it very often happens that a wrong
reading has affinity to the right.
In this part all the present editions are apparently and intentionally
defective. The criticks did not so much as wish to facilitate the labour
of those that followed them. The same books are still to be compared;
the work that has been done, is to be done again, and no single edition
will supply the reader with a text on which he can rely as the best copy
of the works of Shakespeare.
The edition now proposed will at least have this advantage over
others. It will exhibit all the observable varieties of all the copies
that can be found, that, if the reader is not satisfied with the editor’s
determination, he may have the means of chusing better for himself.32

28. Sappho: West (2005); Posidippus: Gutzwiller (2005); Gallus: Anderson, Parsons,
and Nisbet (1979), and now Capasso (2003). See also Van Minnen (2009).
29. See McGann (1983).
30. Quoted from Johnson (1756), 3.
31. Johnson (1756), 4. McGann (1983) situates Johnson’s project in the history of tex-
tual criticism.
32. Johnson (1756), 6.
2

22 Empire of Letters

Although his project precedes the genealogical method that was to become the
hallmark of textual editing from the nineteenth century on, Johnson’s princi-
ples for producing a text are fundamentally the same: to collate all available
versions, to undo corruptions, to leave notice of paths not taken. As in Classics,
later witnesses are thought to be more deviant from the original text, but
Johnson promises faithfully to leave the reader “the means of chusing better
for himself.”
In a wonderful polemic on editing the Latin classics, Richard Tarrant sees
a direct relationship between the ways that classicists have tended to treat later
evidence and our ideologies of editing. He notes that the preponderance of what
he calls “late and fallible copies from which to work” leads classical editors not
only to remove a significant subset of such texts from their stemmata as codices
recentiores descripti (“more recently copied manuscripts”), but, what’s more, to
employ conjecture more often than our medieval and modern counterparts
in restoring ancient texts.33 He writes, “instead of seeing manuscripts as
embodiments or versions of the text, the classical editor regards them as imper-
fect carriers of an entity that is wholly independent from them and far supe-
rior to them in value. [. . .] The absence of the originals permits classicists to
imagine them endowed with a stable perfection that consorts poorly with the
untidiness of most writers’ worktables.”34 Moreover, he goes on, “The tendency
to idealize the lost original entails greater methodological risks when the ed-
itor scrutinizes the transmitted text for possible error. In deciding whether to
treat a suspect manuscript reading as a scribal slip or an authorial oddity, the
classical editor is often led by admiration of the author and mistrust of the
scribe.”35 Further, “It may seem strange that in a pursuit without any means of
verification, where judgment is supreme and conjecture and probability play
leading roles, such confident appeal is made to ‘truth’ or ‘correct readings’ or
‘what the author must have written.’ ”36
The evocation of “writers’ worktables,” the idealization of lost originals,
and what Tarrant calls “devotion to masterpieces that are never to be seen
plain” should give us pause,37 and may indeed recall one of the key moments
in the study of bibliography in the twentieth century: the 1969 publication
of D. F. McKenzie’s essay “Printers of the Mind.”38 There, McKenzie effec-
tively dismantled what had been the orthodoxy of bibliography over the
preceding thirty years: that it was possible to tie patterns of errors on the page

33. Tarrant (1995), 96. See now also Tarrant (2016).

34. Tarrant (1995), 96–​7, my emphasis.
35. Tarrant (1995), 98.
36. Tarrant (1995), 98.
37. Tarrant (1995), 98.
38. McKenzie (1969), reprinted in McKenzie (2002).
23

Classics and the Study of the Book 23

in punctuation, spacing, and especially spelling—​what Walter Greg called

“accidentals”—​to the work product of specific pressmen, who again and again
made the same mistakes in setting type into text blocks. The approach reduced
these “accidentals” to the smallest common denominators and identified such
entities with imagined individuals dubbed “Compositor 1” or “Compositor 2.”
Working from the employment records of Cambridge and London printers,
McKenzie instead found evidence for much more variation and much more
slack. Work was done piecemeal, without factory-​like efficiency. John Smith
took two days off; John Doe worked only in the mornings. A given book run-
ning through the shop passed through a maximum, rather than a minimum
number of hands. Compositors’ errors overlapped in unpredictable ways, and
could not be used reliably to recreate the printing process. McKenzie thus did
away with the once dominant bibliographic ideal of “printers of the mind.”
Part of what the study of the book can teach us, then, is to seek out such
untidiness. Scribal culture, we can imagine, might have worked similarly in
the longue durée. Manuscript books are ultimately more likely to represent a
concatenation of the maximum, rather than the minimum number of hands-​
at-​work. An individual book might accrue the marks of many hands, including
copyists’, correctors’, readers’, and owners’.39 Some scribes will have left traces
that later readers believe improved the text. Some will have left traces that later
readers believe corrupted the text. Given the number of hands intervening,
it is exceedingly difficult in most cases to recover those traces as such. As
Dr. Johnson wrote, it often happens that “a wrong reading has affinity to the
right.” We should take very seriously the lesson from bibliography, and avoid
attributing too much to “scribes of the mind.”

Substantives and Accidentals

Beyond the matter of possibility is a question of desire: what kinds of texts

we want to produce and why. As I have already mentioned, the bibliographer
and editor of Shakespeare, Walter Greg, distinguished between what he called
textual “substantives” and “accidentals.” In his words, the former are “the sig-
nificant, or [. . .] ‘substantive,’ readings of the text, those namely that affect the
author’s meaning or the essence of his expression”; the latter are features such
as “spelling, punctuation, word division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal
presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or [. . .] ‘accidentals,’ of
the text.”40 Spelling is one of the fields upon which debates about scholarly

39. Reynolds and Wilson (2013, orig. 1968). For readers’ hands in medieval manuscripts,
see, inter al., Wakelin (2014); Schleif and Schier (2016).
40. Greg’s “The Rationale of the Copy-​Text” quoted by McKenzie (2002), 201.
42

24 Empire of Letters

Figure 3 Latin letter on papyrus from Suneros to Chios. POxy 3208.

Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society and Imaging Papyri Project, Oxford.

editing and, in fact, about ancient literacy have long been waged. Should or-
thography be artificially standardized across a given work, as in G. P. Goold’s
Manilius? Should inconsistencies of spelling found in early manuscripts be
preserved, as in Michael Winterbottom’s De officiis? Or should we preserve only
those variants that provide a lectio difficilior, a more difficult reading presumed
to be less likely to have been invented by a copyist and more likely to belong to
the original, as Stephen Heyworth advocates in his Propertius commentaries?41
Moreover, is deviation from standard spelling in any given place and time to
be considered a sign that the author was uneducated or less educated? Then
again, whose spelling standard do we apply? Just ask a Brit how to spell “color.”
When we consider our own standards for evaluating manuscript copies,
surviving papyri may yet yield some clues. In the earliest complete Latin letter
from Egypt (Figure 3), dating probably to the Augustan age, we see several
“nonstandard” or “alternative” spellings (bolded in the following transcrip-
tion): for example, adduxsit for adduxit, Oxsyrychitem for Oxyrynchitem, tibei
for tibi, demostrabit for demonstrabit.42 The text is otherwise very close to what
we recognize as classical Latin, complete with regular interpuncts:43

41. These examples and many others are discussed in Tarrant’s essay in Scholarly Editing
(1995). See also Tarrant (2016).
42. These are attributed to archaism, sound similarity, and “learned” overcorrection.
Dickey (2009), 165. Compare the archaic (or archaizing) spelling see in the Gallus
Papyrus, p. 111 n. 11.
43. Though note patiarus for patriaris in line 4 and alio for alii in the final line, both
irregular forms.
25

Classics and the Study of the Book 25

Suneros Chio suo plur(imam) sal(utem). s(i) v(ales) b(ene est). Theo
adduxsit ad me Ohapim, | regium mensularium Oxsyrychitem, qui
quidem mecum est locutus | de inprobitate Epaphraes. itaque nihil
ultra loquor quam [[no]] | “ne patiarus te propter illos perire.” crede
mihi, nimia bonitas | pernicies homin[i]‌bus est ‘vel maxsuma.’ deinde
ipse tibei de mostrabit | qu[i]t rei sit qum illum ad te vocareis. set
perservera: | qui de tam pusilla summa tam magnum lucrum facit,
| dominum occidere volt. deinde ego clamare debeo, siquod video, |
“devom atque hominum [[fidem.” si tu [.] ista non cuibis]] | tuum erit
vindicare ne alio libeat facere.44 (POxy 44.3208)
Suneros [sends] very many greetings to his own Chios. If you are
well, [that’s] fine. Theo brought to me Ohapim, the public banker of
Oxyrhynchus, who spoke with me about the wickedness of Epaphras.
And so I say nothing beyond, “Don’t allow yourself to be ruined because
of them.” Believe me, excessive generosity is a source of disaster for
men, rather the greatest. He himself will show you what this business
is about when you call him to you. But be persistent: someone who
makes such a big profit from such a trifling sum is willing to kill his
master. I ought to shout, if I am seeing things [right], “of gods and
men—​!” You will have to seek compensation; no one else will do it for
you. (tr. adapted from Dickey)

Because the letter comes to us directly, it is an interesting thought experiment

to imagine how it might have fared had it been passed on via the manuscript
tradition. Particularly distinctive are “substantive” features—​all considered to
be less prone to change in scribal transmission—​like word order, inflections,
verb endings, and vocabulary, that tend to follow classical Latin as we know it.
Beyond linguistic elements are aspects of the manuscript that would not have
survived recopying, but that give us insight into the genesis of the letter: the way
that Suneros has added the phrase vel maxuma above the line, as an emphatic
afterthought, “excessive generosity is a source of disaster for men—​rather the
greatest!”, or the way that he has begun a thought near the end of the page only
to scratch it out in favor of a sententious conclusion: tuum erit vindicare; ne ali˹i˺
libeat facere (“You will have to seek compensation; no one else will do it for you”).
Features like these may be related in a transcription or a commentary—​as they
are, in our example, by putting the interlinear addition between apostrophe

44. The text follows Dickey (2009), 164. Her double brackets [[ ]‌] indicate text that is
canceled (i.e., crossed out) in the original, which I have chosen to leave out of my
translation. The papyrological and epigraphic transcription conventions used in
this example and some others that appear in this book are known as the “Leiden
system. See Schubert (2009), 203; Bodel (2001), xxv–xxvi.
62

26 Empire of Letters

marks, the canceled text between double brackets, and the editorial correction
between Quine corners—​but generally they do not qualify as substantives on
their own.45
Eleanor Dickey posits that “writers of papyrus documents usually tried hard
to use classical spelling and grammar.”46 But unless we are very careful, our
interpretation may be circular. It is telling that a category of Suneros’s spelling
errors are called “learned.” In particular, scholars postulate that the spelling
xs for x was taught in ancient Egyptian classrooms as a corrective to a sound-
change that was at that time happening naturally in the spoken language: in
most contexts, the /​k/​dropped out, leaving an /​s/, as we see in modern Italian,
such as esempio for exemplum. In theory, children were taught to write two let-
ters on the page in order to prompt the articulation of two consonants in their
speech.47 This orthography is indeed learned, even if it was not learnèd.
In a second version of the letter, Dickey gives Suneros’s text as it might
have looked “had it been written by someone with Cicero’s educational back-
ground,”48 applying precisely the kind of normalization that we tend to expect
would have softened the orthographic edges of ancient texts in the course of
scribal recension over five or ten centuries.

Syneros Chio suo s(alutem) p(lurimam) d(icit). s(i) v(ales) b(ene)

e(st). Theo adduxit ad me Ohapim, argentarium publicum
Oxyrhynchitem, qui quidem mecum est locutus de improbitate
Epaphrae. itaque nihil ultra moneo quam “ne patiaris te propter
illos perire.” crede mihi, nimia bonitas pernicies hominibus est vel
maxima. deinde ipse tibi demonstrabit quid rei sit cum illum ad te
vocaveris. sed persevera: qui de tam pusilla summa tantum lucrum
facit, vel dominum occideret. deinde ego clamare debeo, si quid
intellego, “pro divum atque hominum fidem.” tuum erit vindicare
ne alii libeat facere.49

Tarrant reminds us, “[o]‌n the whole [. . .] the extant manuscripts of Latin authors
employ a ‘modernized’ orthography (i.e., that prevalent in late Antiquity),

45. An interesting experiment in iconographic transcription, somewhat germane to our

themes here, is Vander Meulen and Tanselle’s (1993) edition of Samuel Johnson’s
manuscript translation of excerpts from Sallust. For further considerations on the
critical transcription of modern texts, see Tanselle (2005).
46. Dickey (2009), 150.
47. Adams (2013), 217.
48. Dickey (2009), 166.
49. Dickey (2009), 166.
2
7

Classics and the Study of the Book 27

which is in turn the orthography of most modern editions of classical texts.”50

James Clackson also warns, “The current spelling of most Classical texts, as
maintained in dictionaries such as the Oxford Latin Dictionary, shows cer-
tain later developments from the way in which Cicero would have written.
[. . .] In many respects, Cicero’s orthography would appear archaic to modern
readers.”51 That is, it is not at all clear that we would always find what we
recognize as Ciceronian orthography in a copy of Cicero. The existence
of treatises like Scaurus’s De orthographia from the reign of Hadrian, the
discussions of orthography in Quintilian and Suetonius, and, according to
Scaurus, an even earlier tradition in late-​Republican authors such as Lucilius
and Varro imply not that a standard orthography was ever the norm in the
Latin-​speaking world in the classical period, but rather that Latin orthog-
raphy was a point of contention. “Classical Latin orthography was never as
fixed as the orthography of modern standard languages. There was no agreed
resource specifying ‘correct’ spelling which all writer[s] could rely upon, and
surviving documents and inscriptions from the Classical period show con-
siderable variation.”52 The text of the Ancyra copy of the Latin text of the Res
gestae divi Augusti has c]laussum in one line (­chapter 13) and clausum two lines
later.53 My own readings of graffiti in the curia of Herculaneum show that the
writers even closer to Rome regularly mixed up C and G.54 Suetonius reports
that Augustus himself preferred to write according to the sound of his speech
rather than by the rules (Aug. 88): one could hardly imagine someone better
educated.55 Scaurus writes about precisely the learned correction employed
by Suneros: “People also err when as an innovation they add the letter s to
‘nux’ and ‘trux’ and ‘ferox,’ and when others make it a double s, since x has s
in it already.”56 It was a common enough correction, and one that represented
education and conservatism. Whose standards should we apply when we
judge such textual evidence?

50. Tarrant (2016), 5.

51. Clackson (2011), 245, with further discussion pp. 245–8. Apropos of tibei versus
tibi, Clackson describes the digraph -​ei, as in Suneros’s tibei, as “[a]‌nother archaic
feature which Cicero would have used” (p. 245).
52. Clackson (2011), 245.
53. In accordance with the “Leiden system,” an unpaired bracket indicates missing
letters; here the editor has supplied an initial c. The transcription follows Cooley’s
(2009) edition.
54. Frampton (forthcoming).
55. Clackson (2011), 247 perhaps rightly attributes Augustus’s ability to hold such an
opinion to his secure position in society.
56. Scaurus De orthographia Keil vol. 7, p. 19, lines 13–​14: peccant et qui nux et trux
et ferox in novissimam litteram s dirigunt, cum alioqui duplex sufficiat, quae in se et
s habet.
82

28 Empire of Letters

As much as there is heuristic value in “stable perfection” of authorial

originals, so too is there value in textual instability, multiplicity, and variance
not just as traces of textual reception, but precisely insofar as they allow us to
understand more accurately how authors and readers in antiquity encountered
their own books and media. We must imagine that errors and the marks of
their correction were thus something ancient readers would have been very
used to seeing. It was standard practice for readers in antiquity to “correct”
their texts as they read, and literary papyri from Egypt to Herculaneum show
the attentive marks of readers correcting small mistakes of spelling and sim-
ilar “accidents.”57 A memorable epigraphic example appears in the otherwise
elegant fourth-​century ce plaque for a pet dog Margarita, now in the British
Museum, where the sculptor corrects sub parvo marmore terra teget to tegit.58
While this is just a slip, Jean Mallon has collected examples of epigraphic
errors due to the mistranscription of cursive letters into capitals when texts
were set out onto stone from handwritten models, directly paralleling the
scribal mistakes we know from the transmission of manuscript texts between
one bookhand and another.59 And, although they are of a very different kind,
the additions and cancellations in Suneros’s letter don’t at all detract from its
legibility. Rather, they are legible in interesting ways that are related to, but are
not isomorphic with, their linguistic content. From such evidence, we can only
assume that an ancient author would not have expected that his work would
ever have been reproduced perfectly, from copy to copy, let alone in any orig-
inal. This is borne out in the literary sources, where publication was a source
of some anxiety and revision was an extended process.60 Symmachus puts it
memorably in a letter to Ausonius (Epistles 1.31.2): “As soon as a poem has left
your hands, you resign all your rights; a speech once published is a free en-
tity.”61 Taking a broad book-​historical view, and comparing as many different
forms of material evidence as we can thus begins to change how we envision
the very standards of ancient authenticity and authorship.

57. For example, Strabo 13.1.54: καὶ βιβλιοπῶλαί τινες γραφεῦσι φαύλοις χρώμενοι καὶ
οὐκ ἀντιβάλλοντες, ὅπερ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἄλλων συμβαίνει τῶν εἰς πρᾶσιν γραφομένων
βιβλίων καὶ ἐνθάδε καὶ ἐν Ἀλεξανδρείᾳ (“and certain booksellers used bad copyists
and would not collate the texts, which also happens in the case of the other books
that are copied for selling, both here and at Alexandria,” tr. adapted from Jones). See
also Johnson (2004), 35–6.
58. CIL 6.29896 = British Museum 1756,0101.1126: “Beneath the small marble, the
earth covers [me],” corrected from “will cover.” Booms (2016), 92–​3.
59. Mallon (1952); Cooley (2012), 294–​6.
60. Gurd (2012) and Martelli (2013) on revision. Oliensis (1995) on the anxieties of
publication.
61. Symmachus Ep. 1.31.2: cum semel a te profectum carmen est, ius omne posuisti. oratio
publicata res libera est.
92

Classics and the Study of the Book 29

Although we have little direct evidence for authorial versioning in an-

cient manuscripts, it is clear that the possibility of there being multiple versions
of works had purchase with Latin authors.62 Versioning could happen in a va-
riety of ways. A speech given in public might be transcribed and circulated
without an author’s approval, as did one of Caesar’s speeches (Suet. Iul. 55.3), an
early version of Cicero’s Pro Milone (Asc. in Cic. Mil. 42.2–​4 Clark), and several
shorts works by Quintilian (Inst. 1.pr.7 and 7.2.24).63 Social practices of revision
also meant that texts might circulate at different times in different versions.64
Cicero’s Academica and Ovid’s Amores are conspicuous as examples in which
authors make direct reference to issuing a significant revision:65

qui modo Nasonis fueramus quinque libelli,

tres sumus; hoc illi praetulit auctor opus.
ut iam nulla tibi nos sit legisse voluptas,
at levior demptis poena duobus erit (Am. 1 epigr.)

“We who were just now five booklets of Naso now are three; the author
has preferred his work to be this way than that. Even now there may be
no pleasure for you in having read us, but with two books taken away
your pains will be lighter”.

Pseudonymous writing, too, might be interpreted as a kind of versioning (or

perversioning?) and was a real and present danger: a text like Galen’s Περὶ τῶν
ἰδίων βιβλίων (“On my own books”) thus acts as a kind of authorial revision,
excluding titles that were never his.66 Finally, there are quite a few examples
of notionally unfinished works in the Latin corpus, almost all of them epic
poems—​Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Fasti, Lucan’s Civil
War, and Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica—​a phenomenon that represents an-
other kind of challenge to the notion of textual and authorial fixity.

62. A fascinating survival is the so-​ called Index academicorum (PHerc 1021) of
Philodemus, an opisthograph (scroll with writing on both sides) in which the au-
thor has added text on the verso to supplement and revise the text of the recto. It
is thought to be an autograph draft (“Autorenmanuskript”) of the same text that
appears in PHerc 164; see the discussion of Fleischer (2017). Zetzel (1973) argues
quite sensibly against our ability to recover ancient authorial drafts from medieval
manuscript versions, but the notion remains useful even if it cannot be directly
observed except in the rarest case.
63. These examples are drawn from White (2009), 278–​9.
64. See Gurd (2012). In an example I will discuss in Chapter 5, Cicero complains in a
letter to Atticus (Att. 13.21a.1) that he let acquaintances read a version of De finibus
that had been sent for editing, not circulation.
65. Unfortunately, two overlapping versions do not survive for either Cicero’s Academica
or Ovid’s Amores. On the status of versions throughout Ovid’s work, see Martelli (2013).
66. On literary fakes, Peirano (2012).
03

30 Empire of Letters

A modern comparison may again be illustrative. Neoclassical, nineteenth-​

century Romanticism especially valued the appearance of spontaneity in the
production of poetry. Keats writes, “If Poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to
a tree it had better not come at all.” Robert Browning opines of the revised edi-
tion of Tennyson’s poems, “The alterations are insane. Whatever is touched is
spoiled.”67 But in her work on modernist revision, Hannah Sullivan has shown
that the next generation of writers embraced the affordances of print pub-
lishing and developed a literary aesthetics of newness through versioning,
republishing, and revision. She writes, “The aims of modernist revision might
have been largely aesthetic—​a feeling toward new forms and styles—​but the
practice was significantly enabled by technological improvements in the pub-
lishing process, including cheaper typesetting and storing and the invention of
the personal typewriter, and by a culture of patronage that allowed for multiple
sendings of proof and a relative lack of concern for economic profit.”68 Revision
thus always has an aesthetic as well as an economic valence. This is no less
true for ancient Rome, where the bookshop was the effective site of publica-
tion and where concern for profit was paramount.69 We hear of Quintilian
and others rushing works into circulation at the urging of booksellers and
to ward off plagiarists.70 This is the context for Horace’s plaintive twentieth
epistle (Ep. 1.20), in which the book is a verna, a household slave, and the book-
seller a pimp who sells him into service.71 Propertius, too, frames his book as
his girlfriend, “Cynthia,” and has mixed feelings about seeing Cynthia lecta
foro, “Cynthia read in the forum” (Prop. 3.15.2). Once the book was out of the
author’s hands, it was no longer his own.
Accounts of unfinished texts are all the more interesting in this regard,
as they posit a final, authorial version that never was to exist—​one just as ide-
ological and imaginary as any modern editor’s—​as they simultaneously call
the status of such a version into question, leaving the work always unfinished
and thus always in the state of composition. We could interpret this move as
authors’ aspiring in textual form to the idealized aesthetics of performative
composition, but such questions will ultimately bear further attention from
a media-​history perspective; after all, publication took place across media, in
a variety of forms of writing and performance. More to the point, when we
think about the possibility of recovering an “authorial intended original,” we
must also recognize that ancient authors had access to and exploited the idea

67. Emphasis original. Both Keats and Browning, quoted from Sullivan (2013), 3.
68. Sullivan (2013), 5.
69. On the Roman book trade, Kenney (1982), 19–​23; Starr (1987) and (1990); White
(2009).
70. Quint. Inst.1.pr.7 and 7.2.24. See White (2009), 278–​9.
71. On this poem, Oliensis (1995), with further parallels in Williams (1992).
Another random document with
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 1650. Cromwell in Scotland.
1649–1685. Restoration of the Stuarts. Charles II crowned,
1660.
Prelacy established in Scotland. The
dragonnades.
Archbishop Sharp assassinated.
Drowning of the martyrs at Wigtown.
John Graham of Claverhouse. Battle of Bothwell
Bridge.
1633–1701. James II of Great Britain.
1680. James, Duke of Albany, in Scotland.
1685. Coronation. The Roman ritual in Westminster
Abbey.

MODERN SCOTLAND
1688. Landing of William III.
1690. Restoration of the Kirk in Scotland.
1689. Battle of Killiecrankie.
1692. Massacre at Glencoe.
1695–1701. The Darien Scheme.
1686–1758. Allan Ramsay, poet and musician.
1707. Union of Scotland and England.
1715. The Old Pretender.
1725. General Wade opens the Highlands: road-
building.
The Black Watch Regiment formed from loyal
Highland clans.
1730–1740. Large number of Scottish students in English
schools and universities.
1745. “Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
1746. Culloden. Scottish feudalism ended.
Scottish history merged with that of Great
Britain.
1746–1770. The Highlanders assimilated, enrolled in the
British army, or emigrate to America.
1751–1773. Robert Fergusson, poet.
1773. Dr. Samuel Johnson visits the Hebrides and
Highlands. His book an epoch-maker.
1773. Fingal’s cave first described.
1759–1796. Robert Burns.
1802. The Edinburgh Review started.
1771–1832. Sir Walter Scott: poetry, 1805–1815; prose,
1814–1830.
1822. Caledonian Canal opened.
1795–1881. Thomas Carlyle.
1843. Disruption. Formation of the Free Church of
Scotland.
1830. Railway system inaugurated.
1846. Large emigration to America.
1819–1901. Queen Victoria. In the Highlands often, from
1852.
The Highlands become game preserves.
1915. The 225th meeting of the General Assembly in
Edinburgh.
 INDEX

Abbeys, 18, 53, 146.

Abbotsford, 41–43.
Abercrombie, 145.
Aberdeen, 191–96.
Agricola, 15, 51, 202, 279.
Alexander I, 264.
Alexander III, 281.
Allan, Mr. Robert, 133.
Alloway Kirk, 224.
America, 10, 25, 183, 184, 240, 262, 267.
America’s debt to Scotland, 270–77.
American Civil War, 80, 227.
American drinks, 141.
American influences in Scotland, 25, 148, 265.
American officers, 176, 197.
Americans in Scotland, 25, 202, 259.
Anachronisms, 48, 49.
Ancestors, 33, 60, 61.
Anchor Line, 6.
Animals, 35–37, 110.
Appalachian chain, 274.
Archery, 151.
Architects, 40.
Architecture, 39–42, 67, 106, 127, 191, 225, 244.
Armstrongs, 60.
Arran, 9, 13.
Art, ii, 36, 67, 102, 187, 233, 239.
Artillery, 104, 159.
Asquith, Mr., 198.
Assembly, General, 243, 284, 286.
August 12th, 183, 184.
Auld Reekie, 30.
Auroch, 220.
Australia, 86, 123.
Automobile, 164.
Ayr, 223, 224, 229, 231.
Azoic rock, 164, 165.

Baalam, 98.
Bagpipes, 222.
Ballaculish, 110.
Ballads, 56, 225.
Ban, 59, 186.
Bannerman, Sir Campbell, 198.
Bannockburn, 100, 199, 239, 281.
Banns, 45.
Barnum, P. T., 98.
Bayonets, 158–63, 172.
Bazaars, 261.
Beaton, Cardinal, 78, 79, 105.
Beds, 91, 153, 180.
Bees, 182.
Bell, Henry, 16, 25.
Bell Rock, 192.
Ben Nevis, 133, 136.
Ben Venue, 216.
Bible, 106, 224, 225, 239, 247, 249, 262, 277.
Birds, 7, 183.
Birnam Wood, 92.
Bishops, 243, 248, 284.
Black Watch, 285.
Blaikie, Professor, 192.
Blood, 198.
Bloody Mary, 249, 250.
Boece, Hector, 89, 282.
Boethius, 182.
Bonnie Prince Charlie, 132, 148, 153, 156–62, 192, 285.
Border Land, 47, 50–64, 284.
Boston, 61, 110, 244.
Bothwell Bridge, 285.
Bowen, Marjorie, 115.
Branksome Hall, 38, 41, 55.
Breakfast, 262, 263.
British army, 267, 286.
British Empire, 266–68, 286.
Brooks, Phillips, 244.
Brooms, 180.
Brown, Dr. John, 230, 231.
Bruce, George, 197, 198.
Bruce, Robert, 9, 10, 15, 40, 41, 70, 77, 192, 281.
Bruce, Thomas, 196.
Buccleughs, 60.
Buchanan, George, 240, 247, 258, 284.
Burns, Robert, 3, 28, 70, 130, 223–33, 242, 271, 286.
Burr, Prof. George, 265.
Byron, 46.

Cæsar, 278.
Cairn, 148.
Caithness, 31, 65, 210.
Caledonia, 51, 53.
Caledonian Canal, 131, 132, 141, 164, 210, 286.
Calvinists, 114, 228, 230, 249.
Cambuskenneth, 281.
Cameron, 276.
Cameronian Regiment, 268, 269.
Campbell, 117.
Canada, 122, 123.
Canals, 108, 110, 131, 132.
Canmore, Malcolm, 69, 70, 73, 146.
Canon Gate, 30.
Cape Club, 230.
Cardross Castle, 15.
Carlyle, Thomas, 123, 223, 252–54, 286.
Carnegie, Andrew, 68, 71–73.
Carse, 83.
“Castle Dangerous,” 209.
Castles, 15, 34, 55, 92, 99, 133, 168.
Cathedrals, 19, 199, 200.
Cattle, 219, 220, 276.
Cattle-lifting, 166, 169, 218.
Cavalry, 139, 148, 149.
Caves, 125.
Cayuga Lake, 226.
Celtic Scotland, 52, 65–67, 156, 280.
Celts, 67, 166, 210.
Cemeteries, 146, 224.
Chambers, 152.
Characteristics, 221, 261.
Charles I, 284, 285.
Charles II, 71, 167, 258.
Cheviot Hills, 52, 54.
Chillingham cattle, 219, 220.
Chimneys, 21, 98, 173, 174, 281.
China, 47, 107, 197.
Choate, Rufus, 248.
Christianity, 11, 53, 126, 129, 186, 244–46, 256.
Churchill, Winston, 198.
Churchman, 244.
Cities, 26, 67.
Civilization, 210, 246.
Clans, 170–72, 175, 189.
Claverhouse, 81, 115, 116, 241, 285.
Claymores, 149–51.
Cleveland, President, 260, 265.
Clyde, Firth of, 14, 119.
Clyde River, 14, 16.
Cochrane, 276.
Cockades, 162.
Coilantogle Ford, 216.
Collies, 36.
Colors, 178–83, 186, 208, 245.
Colquhon, 214.
Columba, St., 23, 24, 125, 126, 146, 280.
Confederate Scots, 275.
Constance, 56.
Cornell University, 73, 205.
Coronach, 215.
Costume, 185–90.
“Cotter’s Saturday Night,” 130, 231, 261, 262.
Covenants, 71, 254, 255, 284, 285.
Cowboys, 61.
Crafts and Guilds, 81, 195, 196.
Cranmer, 257.
Cranstoun, Sir William, 59, 63.
Crieff, 164.
Cromwell, Oliver, 146, 167, 285.
Crops, 121, 174, 235.
Crosses, 58, 128, 200.
Crusades, 41, 187, 191.
Culdees, 71.
Culloden, 147–54, 168, 189, 285.
Cumberland, Duke of, 152, 176.
Cumbria, 24.
Cuyler, Theodore, 223.

Dalrymple, 115.
Dances, 135, 139, 140, 145.
Danes, 125, 127, 128, 206.
Dante, 38.
Dargie Church, 264.
Darien Scheme, 285.
Darnley, 282.
David I, 281.
Declaration of Independence, 227, 241, 258.
Deer, 213.
Democracy, 26, 67, 257, 262, 271.
Denmark, 202, 203, 282.
Deserted villages, 94.
Dick Deadeye, 224.
Dies iræ, 42, 43.
Dissenters, 244.
Distilleries, 133, 141, 181.
Dogs, 35–37.
Dokkum, 264.
Doon Valley, 226.
Douglas, 41, 102, 103, 191.
Dragonades, 285.
Dragons, 85, 86.
Dress, 135, 143, 153, 162, 185–88, 210, 269.
Drinks. See Tea, Whiskey.
Druids, 71, 126.
Drumclog, 116.
Drummossie Moor, 147–54, 158–62.
Dryburgh, 43, 44.
Dulwich Galleries, 208.
Dumbarton Castle, 15, 65.
Duncan, 91.
Dundee, 67, 68, 76–87, 116, 263.
Dunfermline, 65, 68–74, 281.
Dunkeld, 53, 91, 92.
Dunoon, 225.
Dunottar Castle, 192.
Dunsinane, 90–94.
Dutch, 191, 208.

Earthquakes, 146.
Economics, 189.
Edinburgh, 26–37, 158, 230, 263, 268, 269.
Edinburgh Castle, 74.
“Edinburgh Review,” 286.
Education, 235, 283.
Edward I, 100, 199, 281.
Edward III, 281.
Edward VI, 248.
Edward VII, 203.
Electricity, 26.
Elgin, 196–201.
Elizabeth, Queen, 236, 249, 258.
Ellen, 216.
Ellen’s Isle, 214, 217.
Elliots, 60.
Ellislan, 225.
Emigrants, 122, 139, 140.
Empire, British, 190.
Engineering, 272, 286.
England, 266–68.
English in Scotland, 66, 165, 237.
English language, 249.
Episcopacy, 225, 284.
See Bishops.
Erskine, Ralph, 71.
Ethnic elements, 210.

Fair Island, 207.

Family worship, 262.
Faroe Islands, 207.
Fergus, 280.
Fergusson, Robert, 230, 231, 286.
Feudalism, 55, 56, 84, 98, 122, 156, 168–72, 245, 258, 281, 282,
285.
Field, Eugene, 86, 87.
Fiery Cross, 218.
Fife, 68, 69.
Fillmore, Millard, 196, 197.
Fingal, 125.
Fingal’s Cave, 123, 124, 286.
Firearms, 150, 159, 172.
Firth of Forth, 54.
Fisheries, 34, 194, 195, 208.
Fitful Head, 205.
Fitz-James, 62, 166, 216, 217.
Flags, 157, 284.
Flodden Field, 283.
Flora MacDonald, 149.
Flowers, 148, 152.
Food, 121, 122, 194.
Football, 58, 59.
Forbes of Culloden, 189.
Foreign missions, 269.
Fort Augustus, 138.
Fort William, 132.
Foyers, 138.
France, 32, 106, 107, 153, 247, 248, 283.
Free Churchmen, 44, 46.
Free Church of Scotland, 286.
French Revolution, 227.
Friesland, 264.
Frontiers, 50–64, 141.
Froude, J. A., 262.
Fuing land. See Feudalism.

Gaelic speech, 12, 53, 125, 133, 153, 165.

Gaels, 12, 165.
Gallows Hill, 205.
Games, 133–36, 146.
“Gardeloo,” 32.
Garden parties, 261.
Geddes, Jenny, 284.
Geikie, Archibald, 212.
Gelderland, 203.
Geology, 14, 119, 123, 131, 164, 203.
George III, 233.
German Ocean, 131, 192–95.
Germany, 202, 260, 264–66.
Giant’s Causeway, 9.
Gillespie, Thomas, 71.
Glaciers, 33, 208.
Gladstone, Mr., 196.
Glamis, 90.
Glasgow, 16–26, 216, 267.
Glencoe, 110–12, 285.
Glen Fruin, 214.
Glens, 221, 222.
Goats, 174, 218, 219.
Goblin’s Cave, 218.
Golf, 234.
Gordon Highlanders, 144.
Gothic architecture, 107.
Gowrie, 84.
Gows, 84.
Grampian Hills, 51, 98, 120, 164.
Granite, 193.
Grant, 273, 274.
Greek, 192, 225.
Greenock, 14, 225.
Gretna Green, 44–46.
Grey Friars’ Church, 105, 282.
Griffins, 76, 77.
Grouse, 183, 184.

Hamerton, 239.
Hamilton, 10.
Hanoverian dynasty, 157, 272.
Harris, Townsend, 197.
Hawthorne, 251.
Heath bell, 182, 185.
Heather, 177–85.
Hebrides, 117, 119, 120.
Henry, Joseph, 275.
Hepburn, 283.
Hepburn, J. C., 276, 277.
Heraldry, 187.
Hessians, 162.
Highland costume, 33, 260.
Highlanders, 53, 117, 221, 222.
Highland Mary, 14, 225.
Highlands, 65–67, 141, 164–76, 211, 220, 286.
High Street, 32, 199.
History, 64, 67, 74, 80.
Holland, 36, 106, 191, 206, 237.
Holmes, Dr. O. W., 95.
Holy Isle, 55.
Holy Pool, 214.
Holyrood, 283.
Homes, 259–66.
Honey, 174–75, 182.
Hooker, 241.
Hospitality, 68, 80, 259–61.
Hotels, 164, 259, 260.
Houses, 31, 173–75.
Hume, David, 235.
Huts, 173–75, 180.
Hydros, 259.
Hygiene, 31.
Inch Caillaich, 213.
Inch Cruin, 213.
Inch Fad, 213.
Inch Loanig, 213.
Inch Tarranach, 213.
Inch Vroin, 216.
Independents, 255.
See Pilgrim Fathers.
India, 200.
Indian Ladder, 215.
Indian, 159.
See Iroquois.
Inns. See Hotels.
Insane people, 214, 231.
Invasions, 51–54, 157, 282, 283.
Invergowrie, 83, 84, 259–67.
Inverness, 142–47, 281.
Iona, 119, 244, 280.
Ireland, 7, 11, 14, 74, 75, 113, 140, 188, 280.
Irishmen, 139, 140, 221, 222, 279, 280.
Irish missionaries, 205.
Iroquois, 35, 63, 150, 167, 205.
Irving, Washington, 42, 88.
Islands, 213, 216.
Ithaca, 139, 226, 265.
Ivanhoe, 42.

Jacobites, 132, 147, 154, 192.

James I, 103, 106, 146, 282.
James II, 282, 285.
James III, 101, 203.
James IV, 283.
James V, 101, 105, 283.
James VI, 34, 59, 60, 101, 106, 236, 240, 252, 258, 284.
Japan, 20, 35, 47, 57, 58, 96, 127, 135, 171, 197, 219.
Jardines, 60.
Job, 269.
“John Anderson, My Jo John,” 229.
John o’ Groat’s House, 56.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 65, 109, 122, 128, 167, 173, 259, 286.
Jougs, 84, 85.
Jute, 80.

Kail, 167.
Kenneth, 11, 96.
Kentigern, St., 23, 280.
Kerns, 170–72, 189.
Kerr, Sir Robert, 58.
Kerrs, 60.
Khaki, 269.
Killiecrankie, 116, 168, 285.
Kingdoms, 280.
Kings, 236, 239, 240.
Kirk, 234, 254, 255, 284, 285.
Kirkwall, 203.
Kitchener, Lord, 29.
Knitting, 206.
Knox, John, 18, 20, 78, 106, 228, 237, 238, 247–54, 283.
Kyloe, 219, 220.

“Lady of the Lake,” 214, 217.

Lakes, 131, 141, 213–15.
Lamberton, 45.
Landlords, 66.
Landscape, 13, 20, 47, 54, 98, 186, 212, 245.
Land tenure, 169–72.
Lang, Andrew, 65–96.
Language, 3, 56, 67, 69, 121, 128, 249, 266.
Lanrick Mead, 216.
Law, 44–46.
“Lay of the Last Minstrel,” 38–41, 55.
Lee, Joseph, 81, 82.
Leighton, 259, 260.
Leisler, Jacob, 112, 248.
Leith, 34.
Lemprière, 52.
Lerwick, 205, 208.
Libraries, 43, 67, 72, 201.
“Limited,” 117.
Lincoln, Abraham, 29, 95, 227, 237, 242.
Lindisfarne, 56.
Ling, 177.
Loch, 214.
Lochaber, 134.
Loch Achray, 214, 216.
Loch Katrine, 214, 217.
Loch Lomond, 213–16.
Loch Nenacar, 216.
Locke, John, 241.
Lollards, 234, 282.
London, 184, 194, 248, 262.
Lord of the Isles, 121, 146, 200, 283.
Lowlands, 24, 47, 65, 67, 166.

Macaulay, 112.
Macbeth, 5, 88–94, 146, 280, 281.
MacClernand, 274.
Macdonalds, 112, 121, 151, 281.
Macdougalls, 112, 113.
Macduff, 84.
Macfarland, 276.
Macgregors, 214.
MacIntoshes, 159.
MacMurtrie, 142.
Macpherson, 273, 274.
Mahomet, 235.
Makars, 232.
Malcolm Canmore, 69, 70, 73, 146, 280.
Malcolms, 90, 91, 280, 281.
Map, 65.
Margaret of Denmark, 203.
Margaret, Queen, 34, 69, 70, 73–75, 264, 281.
Marmalade, 174.
Marmion, 56, 117, 198.
Marriage, 44–46.
Mary, Highland, 14, 225.
Mary of Gelderland, 282.
Mary, Queen of Scots, 34, 81, 156, 248, 250–54, 258, 283, 284.
Mascots, 35.
Mather, Bailie, 79.
Maxwells, 60.
Mayflower, 255.
Medieval institutions, 244–46.
Meg, 226.
Melrose Abbey, 38–43, 244.
Melville, Andrew, 20, 192, 240.
Middle Ages, 47–48.
Mikado, 223.
Miller, Hugh, 3.
Milton, 258.
Misprints, 130.
Missionary interest, 269, 276, 277.
Monasteries, 18, 53.
Monk, General, 132.
Monks, 22, 69, 86, 127.
Monroe Doctrine, 260, 265.
Montrose, 191, 192.
Monuments, 28, 56, 116, 224, 225.
Moorish art, 207, 208.
Moors, 178.
Moray Firth, 147.
Morse, 275.
Moss troopers, 57–60, 63.
Mountains, 103, 104, 215.
Mungo, 22.
Murillo, 208.
Music, 116–20, 162, 163, 211, 222, 283.

Names, 22, 60.

National League and Covenant, 71.
Navy, 268, 269.
Necropolis, 19, 20.
Netherlands, 23, 157, 191.
Nevilles, 60.
Newport-on-Tay, 275.
New York, 14.
Nobles, 238.
Normans, 237, 281.
Norsemen, 7, 205.
North Sea, 194, 195.
Northumbria, 54.
Norway, 203, 206, 211, 281.

Oatmeal, 174.
Oban, 108, 109.
Orcades, 202.
Order of the Thistle (St. Andrews), 206.
Orkneys, 96, 202–04, 210.
Ossian, 111, 212.
Oxen, 218–20.
Oxford, 241, 258.

Pageants, 195.
Parks, 72, 201.
Parliament, 183, 202, 255, 272, 281, 282, 283.
Peat, 7, 182.
Pebbles, 137, 138.
Pei-ho, 197.
Pennsylvania, 10, 60, 72, 118.
Pentland Firth, 131, 203.
People, the, 130, 237, 238, 240.
Percy’s “Reliques,” 233.
Perry, Commodore, 197.
Philadelphia, 23, 42, 72, 139, 155.
Philosophy, 4, 20, 234, 236, 271.
Picts, 95, 96, 146, 182, 280.
Pilgrim Fathers, 255, 264, 271.
“Pirate, The,” 208.
Pittencrieff, 71, 72.
Pladda, 10.
Plaids, 109, 153, 186.
Poetry, 227–33.
Police, 60, 62.
Pomona, 203.
Ponies, 204.
Portraits, 251, 252.
Prayer, 261, 262, 268, 269.
Preachers, 224.
Prelates, 242, 284, 285.
Presbyterians, 71, 171, 237, 255, 256, 261, 284.
Prescott, 61.
Prestonpans, 168.
Pretenders, 157.
Princes Street, 28.
Princeton, 4, 58.
Printing, 283.
Proverbs, 180, 198, 201.
Public schools, 226.
Puritans, 235, 241, 242, 255, 271.

Quandril, 6, 43, 97, 115.

Races, 65–68, 165, 221, 222, 249.

Railways, 27, 62, 286.
Rain, 121, 134, 136, 137, 222.
Ramsay, Allan, 28, 232, 233, 285.
Ramsay, Allan, 2d, 233.
Rathlin Island, 9, 119.
Reformation, 127, 171, 228, 236, 238, 283.
Religion, 21, 71, 121, 129, 168, 249, 256, 262.
Renaissance, 258.
Renwix, Port, 226.
Republicanism, 237, 258.
Revolution, American, 271, 272.