Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture

Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture PDF

Author: Joseph A. Howley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-12

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1316510123

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Long a source for quotations, fragments, and factoids, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius offers hundreds of brief but vivid glimpses of Roman intellectual life. In this book Joseph Howley demonstrates how the work may be read as a literary text in its own right, and discusses the rich evidence it provides for the ancient history of reading, thought, and intellectual culture. He argues that Gellius is in close conversation with predecessors both Greek and Latin, such as Plutarch and Pliny the Elder, and also offers new ways of making sense of the text's 'miscellaneous' qualities, like its disorder and its table of contents. Dealing with topics ranging from the framing of literary quotations to the treatment of contemporary celebrities who appear in its pages, this book offers a new way to learn from the Noctes about the world of Roman reading and thought.

Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire

Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire PDF

Author: William A. Johnson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-06-03

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 019972105X

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In Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, William Johnson examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses, beginning with the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny's teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan. Johnson then moves on to explore elite reading during the era of the Antonines, including the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto's pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is a rich cultural history of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.

Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire

Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire PDF

Author: William A. Johnson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-06-03

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 019988420X

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In Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, William Johnson examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses, beginning with the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny's teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan. Johnson then moves on to explore elite reading during the era of the Antonines, including the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto's pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is a rich cultural history of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.

Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire

Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire PDF

Author: Assistant Professor of Classics and Senior Research Associate of the Cobb Institute of Archaeology Scott J Digiulio

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0197688268

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"Aulus Gellius and his sole surviving work, the Noctes Atticae (NA), have long stood on the periphery of Classical scholarship. This second century CE compilation, conventionally termed a miscellany, collects vast amounts of otherwise lost ancient literature, and the depictions of scholarly activity throughout the work have led some to see in Gellius a kindred spirit-a Classicist avant la lettre. Yet, the NA is a fascinating work of literature in its own right, depicting the intellectual and literary culture at the height of the Roman Empire and offering invaluable evidence for the evolution of Latin prose as a literary form in the Antonine period. In contrast to previous scholarship that looks past the randomness of the NA, this book argues that the conceit of disorder enabled Gellius to probe the nature of reading in the second century CE. Gellius' central preoccupation is articulating a distinct set of "ways of reading" that may be employed to navigate the web of literature in the Roman Empire. In turn, each of these ways of reading-through material framing devices, focal characters, recurrent citations in dialogue with one another, and allusive references to other near-contemporary works-can be used to examine Gellius' collection and appreciate its literary qualities. Incorporating inter- and intratextual analysis alongside narratology-informed approaches, this book investigates the strategies used by Gellius to innovate within the Latin literary tradition and provides a framework for interpreting his varietas on its own terms"--

Nox Philologiae

Nox Philologiae PDF

Author: Erik Gunderson

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2009-01-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0299229734

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In this strikingly original and playful work, Erik Gunderson examines questions of reading the past—an enterprise extending from antiquity to the present day. This esoteric and original study focuses on the equally singular work of Aulus Gellius—a Roman author and grammarian (ca. 120-180 A.D.), possibly of African origin. Gellius’s only work, the twenty-volume Noctes Atticae,is an exploding, sometimes seemingly random text-cum-diary in which Gellius jotted down everything of interest he heard in conversation or read in contemporary books. Comprising notes on Roman and classical grammar, geometry, philosophy, and history, it is a one-work overview of Latin scholarship, thought, and intellectual culture, a combination condensed library and cabinet of curiosities. Gunderson tackles Gellius with exuberance, placing him in the larger culture of antiquarian literature. Purposely echoing Gellius’s own swooping word-play and digressions, he explores the techniques by which knowledge was produced and consumed in Gellius’s day, as well as in our own time. The resulting book is as much pure creative fun as it is a major work of scholarship informed by the theories of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius PDF

Author: Leofranc Holford-Strevens

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2003-11-06

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 9780191514685

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Aulus Gellius originated the modern use of 'classical' and 'humanities'. His Attic Nights, so named because they began as the intellectual pastime of winter evenings spent in a villa outside Athens, are a mine of information on many aspects of antiquity and a repository of much early Latin literature which would otherwise be lost; he took a particular interest in questions of grammar and literary style. The whole work is interspersed with interesting personal observations and vignettes of second-century life that throw light on the Antonine world. In this, the most comprehensive study of Gellius in any language, Dr Holford-Strevens examines his life, his circle of acquaintances, his style, his reading, his scholarly interests, and his literary parentage, paying due attention to the text, sense, and content of individual passages, and to the use made of him by later writers in antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and more recent times. It covers many subject areas such as language, literature, history, law, rhetoric, medicine; light is shed on a wide range of problems in Greek as well as Latin authors, either in the main text or in the succinct but wide-ranging footnotes. In this revised edition every statement has been reconsidered and account taken of recent work by the author and by others; an appendix has been added on the relation between the literary trends of Latin (the so-called archaizing movement) and Greek (Atticism) in the second century AD, and more space has been given to Gellius' attitudes towards women, as well as to recurrent themes such as punishment and embassies. The opportunity has been taken to correct or excise errors, but otherwise nothing has been removed unless superseded by more recent publications.

Roman Literary Culture

Roman Literary Culture PDF

Author: Elaine Fantham

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1421409275

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This new edition broadens the scope of Fantham’s study of literary production and its reception in Rome. Scholars of ancient literature have often focused on the works and lives of major authors rather than on such questions as how these works were produced and who read them. In Roman Literary Culture, Elaine Fantham fills that void by examining the changing social and historical context of literary production in ancient Rome and its empire. Fantham’s first edition discussed the habits of Roman readers and developments in their means of access to literature, from booksellers and copyists to pirated publications and libraries. She examines the issues of patronage and the utility of literature and shows how the constraints of the physical object itself—the ancient "book"—influenced the practice of both reading and writing. She also explores the ways in which ancient criticism and critical attitudes reflected cultural assumptions of the time. In this second edition, Fantham expands the scope of her study. In the new first chapter, she examines the beginning of Roman literature—more than a century before the critical studies of Cicero and Varro. She discusses broader entertainment culture, which consisted of live performances of comedy and tragedy as well as oral presentations of the epic. A new final chapter looks at Pagan and Christian literature from the third to fifth centuries, showing how this period in Roman literature reflected its foundations in the literary culture of the late republic and Augustan age. This edition also includes a new preface and an updated bibliography.

The Roman Paratext

The Roman Paratext PDF

Author: Laura Jansen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-03-20

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1107024366

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The first synoptic study of the interplay of frame, texts and readers in classical studies.

The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius

The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius PDF

Author: Peggy L. Chambers

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13:

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This classroom-tested, accessible text will motivate second-year Latin students to continue their study. Aulus Gellius, a well-educated nobleman, began his observations during the long winter nights spent in Attica. These selections touch on diverse aspects of Roman culture and can be easily understood and translated by intermediate students.

Ancient Libraries

Ancient Libraries PDF

Author: Jason König

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 1107244587

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The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.