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Modern disciplinary boundaries separate literary history from religious history, and the study of language from the study of belief. For premodern readers, these distinctions did not apply. We have already seen that ancient linguistic practice took literature as both its beginning and its end. It did the same, we will see, with religion. The grammarian’s practices of breaking down texts and of listing performed two complementary tasks: Wrst, the creation of abstract bodies of knowledge and, second, the implication of subjects in relation to those bodies. In the previous chapter I examined the primary relationship between the projected subjects and bodies of knowledge as a relationship of time, the relationship between the grammarians’ antiqui and nos. In this chapter, I consider the ways in which grammatical texts, and more prominently texts about grammarians,1 construed this relationship as one of obligation. The two crucial imaginative movements that follow from this construction are the movement from obligation to piety, and the movement from piety to religion.2 The construction of temporal lines in late ancient grammatical work, I argue, entailed a discourse of obligation that was “ethical” both in the traditional sense, in that it related to virtuous or vicious behavior, and in the sense that it called into being an ethos for the linguistic actor by virtue of her or his linguistic acts. In writings about grammar outside of technical grammatical literature, this discourse of obligation became aligned with literary, and ultimately religious, pietas. The texts I have found most useful for considering this alignment are Ausonius’ Parentalia, Macrobius’ Saturnalia, particularly book 3, and two of the texts surrounding the literary career of Marius Victorinus, namely, Julian the Apostate’s letter 36, against Christian teachers, and Augustine’s account of Victorinus’ conversion in the eighth book of the Confessions.3 In these texts, narratives about the relation between a homogenized past and a readerly present ultimately become narratives about piety, conversion, and Christianization. 3 From Grammar to Piety Duty and the Art of Grammar In very general terms grammatical education in late antiquity, as in earlier periods, was understood to produce a particular kind of social and cultural actor, or more broadly, to contribute to the maintenance of a subject’s educated ethos.4 Literary knowledge was construed as (and was, in many cases) the standard accompaniment to elite social standing, as is clear from Diomedes’ comment describing grammar as “work by which we are known to surpass the unlearned . . . as much as the unlearned surpass their Xocks.”5 Other grammarians voiced similar opinions on the relation between literacy and social status, and the sentiment is clear from nontechnical grammatical sources as well.6 Beyond the marking of social levels, however, these notions implicate the grammatically trained reader in a certain ethos: the literate person ought to be urbane, selXess, knowledgeable, and virtuous.7 This picture is the same as that promoted in rhetorical education, and it seems to have been common at earlier stages of literacy training as well, if the copying of moral maxims by schoolchildren is any indication.8 Grammatical ethics are part of an established trope of the values that educated persons more generally were supposed to hold. The characters produced by literary education are also inserted into a temporal framework that is particularly clear in writing about grammar and grammatical activities. Most obviously, readers are learning from earlier writers, as Priscian’s patron Julianus is said to do, “whose mind [Priscian holds] consists as much of the spirit of Homer as of Virgil.”9 In addition, students of grammar are commonly conWgured as children who are to receive the learning of their elders. While it is true that students sent to a grammarian were typically children,10 there is also a speciWc rhetoric of childhood at work here. The practice of fathers dedicating educational treatises to sons was not new to late antiquity, but it continued as a trope throughout this period, with Wgures like Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Charisius dedicating their works to their sons.11 Sons might act as their fathers’ literary executors, as Symmachus’ sons did,12 or textual work might be passed down within a family, as was notably the case with Macrobius’ commentary on the dream of Scipio, edited in the Wfth century by a later Symmachus and a Macrobius Plotinus Eudoxius.13 That a generational literary connection might be expected is made clear in, for example, Symmachus ’ letters to his father,14 or Ausonius’ use of father-son...

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