Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture

A history of ancient literary culture told through the quantitative facts of canon, geography, and scale.

Reviel Netz (Author)

9781108481472, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 February 2020

902 pages, 13 b/w illus. 30 maps 82 tables
23.5 x 16.3 x 4.4 cm, 1.54 kg

'This volume is an amazing achievement, a commanding synthesis, a vast compendium of pages, an argument that demands to be contested. Every Classicist should read it.' Ja? Elsner, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Greek culture matters because its unique pluralistic debate shaped modern discourses. This ground-breaking book explains this feature by retelling the history of ancient literary culture through the lenses of canon, space and scale. It proceeds from the invention of the performative 'author' in the archaic symposium through the 'polis of letters' enabled by Athenian democracy and into the Hellenistic era, where one's space mattered and culture became bifurcated between Athens and Alexandria. This duality was reconfigured into an eclectic variety consumed by Roman patrons and predicated on scale, with about a thousand authors active at any given moment. As patronage dried up in the third century CE, scale collapsed and literary culture was reduced to the teaching of a narrower field of authors, paving the way for the Middle Ages. The result is a new history of ancient culture which is sociological, quantitative, and all-encompassing, cutting through eras and genres.

Acknowledgments
General introduction
Part I. Canon: 1. Canon: the evidence
2. Canon in practice: the polis of letters
Part II. Space: 3. Space, the setting: the making of an Athens-against-Alexandria Mediterranean
4. Space in action: when worlds diverge
Part III. Scale: 5. A quantitative model of ancient literary culture
6. Scale in action: stability and its end
Coda to the book
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]