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  • Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons: The Generation of the Text by Sarah Culpepper Stroup
  • Ryan Wei
Sarah Culpepper Stroup. Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons: The Generation of the Text. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. XIV + 308. US $99.00. ISBN 9780521513906.

The title of Stroup’s recent publication, Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons: The Generation of the Text, is slightly misleading. The book is not about the interplay between Catullus and Cicero, nor is it really about the people who wrote and produced the material Stroup is analyzing in her study. Indeed, outside of the authors in the title, and the monograph leans much more heavily towards Cicero than Catullus, something which Stroup freely admits, there is little mention of any other member in this “society of patrons”. The exception to this is a helpful appendix containing a prosopographical index of potential participants of the society, but few of these individuals are ever incorporated into the main body of Stroup’s work. This is also not a book about (literary) patronage and the individuals who engaged in this practice in the Late Republic. Stroup makes references to what she terms ‘patronal-class Romans’, people of aristocratic background who most probably acted as patrons in a variety of capacities, but her interest lies in the fact that it was this class of individuals who produced texts in this period, rather than the act of patronage and its social consequences. Stroup makes an effort to establish all this in her introductory chapter, as if she herself was aware of the potential for confusion.

What this book is about then is text—not just any text, but more specifically the dedicated text. By focusing on works that were intended to be dedicated to other participants of the ‘society of patrons’ rather than published to the wider public (although how Stroup manages to make the distinction in the historical sense is never made clear), Stroup tries to approach the question of literary production in the Late Republic from a new perspective. And what Stroup does with this material is rather interesting: she argues that writing and the written text developed and were popularized during the chaotic years of the Late Republic, and that Catullus and Cicero were consciously aware [End Page 456] of their contribution to this process. Furthermore, it was the dedicated texts that motivated literary production in this period, since to compose a text for someone was to demand reciprocation, a task on which this “society of patrons” gladly embarked.

Stroup’s book is divided into three parts, which are then subdivided into chapters. The first three chapters are listed under the heading of ‘How to Write about Writing’, and these explore what Stroup calls the ‘when, what and where’ of the textual process. She focuses on the usage and development of three terms, otium, munus and libellus, from the comedies of Plautus down to the Late Republic, and contends that all three take on nuances that are specific to the evolution of the text. Otium, beyond just signifying an occasion for aristocratic leisure, was reformulated by Cicero and Catullus to denote more precisely a time for writing, a time for engaging in literary reciprocation; munus then becomes the symbolic gift that both satisfies an obligation and demands a worthwhile return; and the libellus is the ultimate physical product of the exchange, expressed in the diminutive because of the anxiety the authors experienced in the face of wider distribution, outside of the “society of patrons”. This section of the book makes for a fascinating read, and the investigation of the terms yields some interesting results; the overall effect of this section is, however, unfortunately minimized because the rest of the book rarely engages with the conclusions presented here.

Part Two, “The Textualization of Display”, is again divided into three chapters. This section discusses the progression of authorial activity from public, oratorical display to an emphasis on the written text partly because of the historical circumstances of the Late Republic, and partly because of a growing interest in engaging with the more intellectual (i.e. reading) audience. The first chapter of this...

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