Recent years have seen an increasing number of works exploring the connections between the various literary cultures of the Roman Empire (e.g. K. Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire [2012]; J. König, Saints and Symposiasts [2012]; J. Madsen and R. Rees [edd.], Roman Rule in Greek and Latin Writing [2014]). The present volume, the second to come out of the ‘Literary Interactions under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian’ project based at the University of St Andrews (after A. König and C. Whitton [edd.], Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian [2018]), is the latest contribution in this trend. Whereas the earlier volume elaborated a model of textual interaction between (predominantly) Latin works that looked beyond intertextuality, this collection of fifteen essays highlights a range of connections across the empire and beyond. In examining a variety of languages, religions and cultures, the contributions challenge preconceived notions that these different communities operated in isolation from one another and encourage readers to consider points of contact between them, even in the absence of lexical parallels.
As the editors note, their aim is ‘to look beyond familiar labels and simple, polarizing binaries’ with the goal of ‘illuminat[ing] a deeper connectedness between texts and writing communities across the vast space of the Roman empire; to explore how the meaning and significance of texts shift through greater awareness of their myriad relationships with each other; and to expose the impact which literary interactivity itself had on identity and community formation (or distancing), at macro and micro levels’ (p. 2). This approach requires broadening literary interaction (pp. 10–18) to embrace genres of text infrequently subjected to literary study (e.g. oral anecdotes, imperial acta and technical works); and to utilise a more capacious theoretical model, incorporating allusion and intertextuality as well as the more nebulous interdiscursivity (‘the aspect of a speech event that depends for its meaning on a reference to a discourse known to both participants’, p. 16) and extratextuality (which cleaves close to interdiscursivity in its assumption of an orally transmitted archive of knowledge). These last concepts, which were developed at greater length in the 2018 collection, are best taken as a complement to Kristevan intertextual approaches, helping to flesh out the literary world of the second century and shedding new light on previously obscure points of contact.
By way of illustration, the editors compare three iterations of the narrative of Arion by Favorinus, Fronto and Clement of Alexandria (pp. 28–33). There is little to indicate direct allusion between these texts, yet they draw upon the same shared set of literary and rhetorical tropes; their individual purposes become clear by considering how each responds to this particular discourse. While this conclusion may seem natural independent of models of interdiscursivity (it should be no surprise that different authors use the same material for different purposes), at its heart this theoretical paradigm encourages the reader not to focus on narrow lexical correspondence, but to probe the interstices between texts, authors and cultures in search of their underlying relationships. In presenting such relationships as their unifying theme, the editors challenge us to look beyond cultural or linguistic siloes in examining the world of the High Roman Empire.
The authors rise to this challenge in contributions organised across three thematic sections, with extensive cross-referencing between the various chapters. The first, ‘Refiguring Roman and Greek Interactions’, pushes back on traditional assumptions about the relationships between Greek and Latin authors throughout the second century. M. Lavan begins by problematising the very idea of ‘the Romans’, building upon E. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum (2005), to argue that the binary of ‘Romans’ and ‘Others’ fails to account for the realities of the long second century. By surveying authors and their differing uses of the label in both Greek and Latin, Lavan demonstrates the inconsistent nature of the term as a category, destabilising a key modern assumption about the polarisation of the imperial world and setting the stage for many of the comparisons and textual interactions to come. Each of the remaining chapters in this section interrogates different Greek and Roman interactions to highlight aspects of imperial literary culture and the ways in which these authors responded to common tropes and discursive models. Uden explores the shared rhetoric of deliberate speech and the sound of language in Tatian and Fronto and their use as tools of self-definition in distinct, albeit contemporary, communities. Langlands juxtaposes Plutarch's model of ethical development in the Progress in Virtue with the Latin tradition of exempla to reveal the influence of the latter on the former, predicated upon the connection between aemulatio and Platonic mimesis. D. Fields compares Pliny the Younger and Plutarch's representations of social inequality and patronage systems of the early second century to reflect embedded Greek and Roman ideas about hierarchy. A.M. Kemezis highlights common patterns in the narrative techniques of Florus, Appian and intriguingly the novelist Chariton, gesturing towards (though never outright positing) a Bakhtinian interpretation of each. To end the section, König investigates the ways in which Aelianus Tacticus and Arrian represent the interactions between Greek and Roman traditions in their military handbooks, with the latter in particular building bridges between Hellenic theory and imperial practice.
The second section, ‘Imperial Infrastructure: Documents and Monuments’, focuses in particular on the documentary habits of the second century. K.E. Shannon-Henderson, building on ideas of pseudo-documentarianism in imperial Greek, highlights the challenges to documentary authority posed by Phlegon of Tralles and his discussion of paradoxa. L.S. Nasrallah uses Justin Martyr's inclusion of a purported imperial rescript at the end of the First Apology and the Aphrodisias ‘archive wall’ to emphasise connections between the ways both use documents as representations of imperial power and authority. T. Geue, closely in dialogue with Nasrallah, compares the role of orality and documentary authority in Justin Martyr's Apology with Suetonius’ Lives, in which various imperial documents increasingly disappear as the bureaucracy expands and texts decreasingly come from the hand of the emperor himself. Each of these contributions focuses on questions of authority inherent in documents, including how such authority could be co-opted by authors; they are successful in this respect, though they could potentially be enriched through incorporation of modern theorisations of the document (for instance, M. Ferraris, Documentality [2013]).
J.A. Harrill's contribution shifts from documents to the physical environment, demonstrating that Ephesians draws heavily on the Roman ekphrastic tradition and using this conclusion to resolve a core exegetical question in the epistle. C. Siwicki, by contrast, focuses on the stark absence of descriptions of buildings’ actual appearances in Latin sources despite their presence in other languages, suggesting that such descriptions were considered foreign and beneath elite Roman authors, despite the centrality of architecture to the imperial project. C. Davenport concludes the section by comparing the use of trial scenes in the Acta Alexandrinorum, Christian martyr narratives and varied Jewish sources; such scenes all share common themes and tropes, while simultaneously evincing distinctive cultural features that emerged over the course of other contributions through this section (particularly Nasrallah and Geue on the authority of documents).
The third and final section, ‘Cultural Translation and Transformation’, extends the scope of the volume to its broadest point by looking to Graeco-Roman interactions with the eastern boundaries of the Roman empire. N. Andrade examines the contact between the late-second- to early-third-century Syriac author Bardaisan and his circle and the Greek and Latin ethnographic traditions; he suggests that, despite purported direct knowledge of India, much of the material preserved in the Syriac Book of the Laws of the Countries shows closer interaction with existing Greek and Latin discourse on India (demonstrated partly through a commentary on Bardaisan's extant Greek fragments) and by extension with the Roman empire itself. J. Haubold details the remaking of the Chaldean system in the Antonine period, noting the close dialogue between this philosophy and the Greek schools during its development, and arguing that the ascendancy of Platonism in the second century provided the greatest impetus for change while becoming an essential interlocutor for those reforming Chaldeanism. Last, S.D. Smith brings many of the volume's threads together in his discussion of the Gilgamesh narrative in Aelian's History of Animals, which Aelian assimilates to the myth of Perseus and Akrisios and uses to probe questions of the authority of myth and the relative primacy of Greek, Roman and Mesopotamian cultural traditions. The volume is capped by N.B. Dohrmann's afterword addressing the apparent isolation of rabbinic texts, despite the size of this corpus in the Antonine period. This recusal, with its deliberate elision of Roman authority and political realities, nevertheless reflects many of the same discursive practices as other texts of the long second century and the broader imperial world.
This volume embraces a broad range of material, and individual chapters will certainly be of interest to specialists, but the greatest strength of this volume is the carefully-signalled cross-referencing between the essays themselves. Virtually every essay connects with at least one other in the collection in meaningful ways that reward reading extensively, whether through shared authors, cultural discourse or methodological framework. Similarly, the willingness of the contributors to challenge preconceived notions of interactivity and to bring texts from different cultures into dialogue enriches our understanding of the increasingly interconnected world of imperial Rome. While intertextual traditionalists might desire more direct lexical correspondence to be fully convinced by some of the arguments, the more expansive models of interaction on offer provide compelling cases for such juxtapositions. The Roman empire reached its height in the second century, bringing new peoples and ideas into contact within a larger shared cultural system, which in turn generated significant cross-cultural dialogue and experimentation. This volume demonstrates the richness of these exchanges in the fabric of the Roman world, whose strands may be accessed by broadening our approaches to textual interaction. By bringing together scholars working in the different literary and cultural traditions of the second century, the volume illuminates the interconnectedness of the communities in the Roman empire. These communities did not exist in isolation from one another, but instead cross-pollinated in striking ways; taking a cue from antiquity, the volume likewise demonstrates the scholarly potential inherent in crossing disciplinary lines, which will engender fruitful new debates and lines of inquiry.
