Roman Literary Culture: From Plautus to Macrobius by Elaine Fantham (review)

When I was a graduate student, a mentor cautioned me against reviewing books I could not write myself. Had I heeded this advice, I would not dare to evaluate the second edition of Elaine Fantham’s Roman Literary Culture: From Plautus to Macrobius( RLC). Enormously ambitious and just as successful, RLCis a triumphant synthesis of decades of thinking, offering a rigorous account of how, and why, some Romans produced texts and others consumed them.

RLC’s most provocative section is its introduction, in which Fantham sets out her methodology and motivations for writing a social history of Latin (not Roman) literature, one that mutatis mutandismobilizes the tools of reception studies to interrogate how author, audience, and medium interact to create the primary Roman reception of a text. As Fantham herself readily admits, this project has its own strict limitations: RLC“does not try to be a literary history” (xvii) for two reasons. First, that task is too large, and second, the publication of an updated and expanded English translation of Gian Biagio Conte’s Latin Literature: A Historyrenders it dilatory. Indeed, Fantham reminds her readers that her book is intended as a “companion volume” to Conte’s (xvii), and I agree; RLCworks best when the reader has Conte at hand to fill in factual gaps that are outside RLC’s scope. As well, in order to have the time and space to tease out various primary receptions, RLC“must renounce analysis and interpretation of individual works, leaving literary criticism for other, more specific discussions” (1). Rather, RLCpositions itself as a way of helping scholars deepen their understanding of the rapidly changing social contexts in which particular authors wrote, and in this way, RLCwonderfully supplements the history and literature a reader already knows, even if its short treatment of particular texts or authors often left me eager for more.

Before I review the contents of individual chapters, I want to offer an apology of sorts. Roman Literary Culturecontains multitudes, discussing such a great number of authors, topics, themes, and historical elements that there is no way I can faithfully review it all, or even come close. Hence, in what follows I only scratch the surface.

In the first chapter, Fantham takes us from Livy’s account of the origins of Roman drama, through the fluorescence of comedy, the instantiation of the tragic tradition and historical writing, and up to Cato, Lucilius, Catullus, and Lucretius. Her discussion of Naevius, Plautus, and Terence, authors who have suffered the disregard of a tradition that has not consistently honoured comedy, is most arresting. Arguing that “we can extrapolate from the excerpts of these lost playwrights as much as from the many surviving scripts attributed to Plautus” (18), Fantham advances a deft reconstructive analysis of the text, composition, and staging of Naevius’s The Girl of Tarentum.

Chapters Two and Three address Rome’s gradual absorption of Greek and Ptolemaic literary culture (libraries, book production and reproduction, popular reading habits) and the growing role of amateur readers and professional scholarship. The extended treatment of Roman education is of greatest interest. This section’s discussion of what we know, and largely don’t know, about the workings of the Roman classroom, lesson plans, and pedagogy fascinates. At what age did wealthy Roman boys start to learn Greek? How did Romans approach second language acquisition, or written versus oral proficiency? In what way did the presence of multilingual immigrants shape the experience of second-language learning? Although I did not find all of Fantham’s answers completely convincing (the argument consistently appeals to the uneasy coexistence of French and English in Quebec, without considering other latter-day examples that could shed light on the issue, such as the emergence of “business English” in Korea, China, and Japan, or the ubiquity of native-level English among local-language speakers in Vietnam, Indonesia, or Thailand, but my own biases show), the picture she...