Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
How did Roman authors think about their books and writing instruments? And how can scholars today chart the 'history of the book' for a period and a place from which so little evidence for everyday writing survives?
Empire of Letters tells the story of writing in Rome, from the first origins of the alphabet in the Bronze Age to the flowering of classical literary culture in the first centuries BCE and CE. It explains how writing media and the alphabet itself became the roots of 'figures of thought' in the Roman imagination: Lucretius's analogy of atoms to letters in his description of the natural universe by way of the composition of poetry; the belief of Roman orators like Cicero and Quintilian that the mind created memories like a hand writing on a waxed tablet; Catullus's likening of his poems to the very papyrus bookroll that held them; and Horace's famous portrayal of his poetry as "more lasting than a monument."
Uniting close readings of major authors of the late Roman Republic and early Empire, including Virgil, Livy, Cicero, Lucretius, Horace, and Ovid, with the careful analysis of the very material forms that ancient texts took-papyrus scrolls, waxed tablets, and monumental inscriptions in stone and bronze-Empire of Letters examines how Romans thought about the world, their work, and their own identities through those very forms. This study provides new ways of imagining the relationship between material objects and literary texts in the pre-modern world, demonstrating that writing was essential to Roman beliefs and practice, from the exercises of the schoolroom to the speeches of the Forum. Empire of Letters transforms our appreciation of the humble Roman alphabet and its significance to the history of big ideas from antiquity to today.
Synopsis
Shedding new light on the history of the book in antiquity,
Empire of Letters tells the story of writing at Rome at the pivotal moment of transition from Republic to Empire (c. 55 BCE-15 CE). By uniting close readings of the period's major authors with detailed analysis of material texts, it
argues that the physical embodiments of writing were essential to the worldviews and self-fashioning of authors whose works took shape in them. Whether in wooden tablets, papyrus bookrolls, monumental writing in stone and bronze, or through the alphabet itself, Roman authors both idealized and
competed with writing's textual forms.
The academic study of the history of the book has arisen largely out of the textual abundance of the age of print, focusing on the Renaissance and after. But fewer than fifty fragments of classical Roman bookrolls survive, and even fewer lines of poetry. Understanding the history of the ancient
Roman book requires us to think differently about this evidence, placing it into the context of other kinds of textual forms that survive in greater numbers, from the fragments of Greek papyri preserved in the garbage heaps of Egypt to the Latin graffiti still visible on the walls of the cities
destroyed by Vesuvius. By attending carefully to this kind of material in conjunction with the rich literary testimony of the period, Empire of Letters exposes the importance of textuality itself to Roman authors, and puts the written word back at the center of Roman literature.