Editor's Note: Literary and Material Culture in Republican and Augustan Rome

With the third of our four clusters on literary and material culture, we move from Hellenistic Greece to Rome before the empire. In the original call for papers, material culture was defined broadly as everything from economic, political, and social practices to the actual conditions for the production, distribution, and interpretation of texts. Literary culture was defined as the poetics (or prosaics) of conventional genres, the works of specific authors, or individual texts. This cluster devoted to Literary and Material Culture in Republican and Augustan Rome features three papers that examine a broad range of literary and material practices. They each represent in their own fashion the way in which the most exciting work done in philology today crosses the boundaries of the text, not to leave it behind, but to expand and enrich it.

The first paper, by Timothy J. Moore, "When Did the Tibicen Play? Meter and Musical Accompaniment in Roman Comedy" proposes a definitive answer to the question of the relation between the metrical structure of Roman comedy and the music that accompanied it. In this paper, he subjects the theories of Ritschl and Bergk to a thorough analysis in light of both recent scholarship and the corpus of comedy and its accompanying ancient commentaries. In the end, he demonstrates that the findings of these nineteenth-century philologists have remained remarkably resilient. Indeed their thesis that all meters other than iambic senarii were accompanied was even more powerfully and universally observed than they had conjectured.

With Tara Welch's "Horace's Journey Through Arcadia," we move from the performance practice of Roman comedy to the complex weave that constitutes the text of Horatian satire. On one level, what could be more replete with the artifacts of material culture than the wonderfully low mimetic world of Sermones 1.5, the journey to Brundisium? Of course, as every student of Roman satire knows, this oblique narration of Horace's journey with Maecenas to broker an agreement between Octavian and Antony is never quite as realistic as it pretends to be, founded as it is on the longer and even more low mimetic "Journey to Sicily" of Lucilius. Yet, as Welch demonstrates, Lucilian satire is hardly the only intertext haunting this poem. Echoes of Vergil's Eclogues saturate it as well, and those echoes point to another set of practices beyond either Lucilius's journey to his estates or Maecenas's diplomatic mission. They gesture instead to the world of epicurean philosophy and its particular practices of friendship and frank speech.

Anthony Corbeill in "Genus quid est? Roman Scholars on Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex" takes readers on a fascinating tour of the byways of Roman literature beginning with Varro and ending with the last grammarians of the empire. He shows us scholars and poets struggling with the gap that threatens to open between the abstract world of Latin grammar and the seemingly more concrete world of physical sex and social gender. The writers discussed are involved in a persistent effort to knit the linguistic and material world back together, to assure themselves of a coherent whole in which the hierarchies of power associated with gender are founded simultaneously in the body and the word. In this struggle, it is the poets of the republican and the Augustan age whose usage becomes authoritative, with Vergil holding pride of place.