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Grammatical imagination changed the landscape of the Roman Empire. Classicizing and Christianizing writings about grammarians and the uses of the ars grammatica located religious and cultural diVerence in Roman places through the language of space and geography.1 As we have already seen, patristic writers’ use of the trope of spoiling the Egyptians, and their conWguration of pagan learning as foreign, imply a spatial removal of Christianity from the classical, although they do not exploit the language of space fully: they neither claim that certain geographical locations are more Christian or pagan than others nor suggest that Christian removal from the classical necessitates a literal removal from one place to another.2 Instead, the use of spatial and geographical language to describe both educational and religious diVerence occurs more prominently in writings of a more personal nature, in descriptions of individual persons and places, and especially in letter writing, itself a genre with concrete connections to space and removal. These texts allow their writers to explore the spatial aspects of literary and religious diVerence through appeal to speciWc locations and through the conXation of literal locations with symbolic places.3 More speciWcally, spatial language in texts about grammar constructs space for the classical world, imagined through the practices of textual fragmentation and expansion, and at the same time creates space for its Christian counterpart. These spaces serve two purposes: Wrst, they reinforce the idea that the classical and the Christian are real entities, occupying space in the literal Roman Empire; and, second, they suggest the existence of classical and Christian utopian space—that is, they create ideal places of purely classical or purely Christian signiWcation that are entered through particular reading and writing practices.4 Allusions to, and quotations of, traditional Roman literature and the Bible are uniWed into territories that particular readers and writers can then be seen to inhabit or not to inhabit.5 The use of grammatical techniques, and of grammarians themselves, to project landscapes in which all things are classical or Christian is one of the 6 Grammar and Utopia fundamental ways in which ideologies of the classical and the Christian are produced and set in opposition. This productivity is suggested partly by the status of the artes themselves as products of cross-territorial movements. Few of the grammarians who wrote the surviving artes were native to the cities in which they taught, or to the later centers of the empire: Priscian, a “Caesarean,”6 made his name in Constantinople, as, probably, did Charisius, although it may not have been his native city.7 Pompeius was North African, and Donatus, although most renowned for his teaching at Rome, may also have been from Africa.8 Augustine’s attempts to further his career by leaving North Africa for Rome and Milan are well known; Jerome’s Wrst educational period in Rome was presumably paid for by his family in Stridon, in Dalmatia; and RuWnus, his fellow student in Rome, arrived there from Aquileia. That so many Wgures central to the understanding of grammar in the fourth and Wfth centuries pursued Latin grammatical studies through changes of territory is revealing. It suggests the practical extent to which grammar homogenized literary and linguistic culture in the later Roman Empire;9 it also suggests the conWguration of the empire as a linguistically delineated space.10 There are thus two productive acts involved in the meeting of grammar and territory : the turning of imagined space into physical space, and the turning of physical space into imagined space. These acts are not contradictory but complementary. The conversion of real territory into imagined space is especially visible in the presence of homogenizing grammar and grammarians in the less central parts of the empire, like North Africa. From the number of easily recognizable names in grammatical writing who are thought to have hailed from the southern rim of the Mediterranean (Donatus, Pompeius, Priscian, Augustine, Martianus Capella, Fulgentius the Mythographer), it is clear that North Africa possessed a rich Latin grammatical culture in the late ancient period, but Augustine’s worry over his accent11 also suggests the persistent marking of provincial Latin as undesirable. The erasure of provenance in the artes, however, and the literal movement of grammarians away from Africa make possible the entry of what might otherwise be seen as “African” (and hence not “Roman”) into a united Latin cultural space. This sort of cultural elision contributes to the noncontradictory inclusion of a series of potentially “non-Roman” places in Roman territory. Priscian...

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