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Learning to read is always a matter of learning to read something. Late ancient grammarians formed their discipline by teaching their students how to read the classics—or rather, by teaching their students how to read in a way that created classics. A wealth of material survives from late ancient grammatical culture, and the reading practices described in this material had a profound eVect on late ancient ideologies of literacy and literature. Although the speciWc connection between these practices and ideologies is seldom studied,1 the idea of a shared literary culture was constructed and maintained in the technologies of language that grammarians produced.2 In this chapter, I consider how late ancient modes of reading Latin contributed to the imagination of uniWed sets of linguistic acts and mores, sets that not only positioned readers within a social network but also placed these readers within a temporal progression from the republican past to the late ancient present. I am interested in how grammatical education set the conditions for late ancient Latin readers to think of themselves in relation to a supposedly uniWed cultural tradition, and in how nonnarrative technical texts made it possible for these readers to think narratively about their imagined selves and their communities.3 Thus I take the surviving artes grammaticae, the body of technical treatises deWning correct Latin grammar, as examples of a speciWc and relatively consistent genre of educational writing in late antiquity.4 These artes span easily 150 years of grammatical writing, from the mid-fourth century to the early sixth, and I do not claim to do them justice as individual works situated in individual historical contexts ; for the purposes of this discussion, it is more important to be able to examine the characteristics that they have in common.5 The persistence of such characteristics reveals, I think, the persistence of certain habits of reading, or at least certain habits of thinking about reading, that were in place for readers of the artes throughout this period. Despite diVerences in many aspects of the artes, there are two familiar verbal gestures that are fundamental to the teaching of reading, as it is 2 Imagining Classics conWgured in each of them. The Wrst is the quotation of earlier texts as exempla. The second is the making of lists. Both of these gestures are at once destructive and productive, in that they tend to break up narrative sequence, or interrupt Xows of argument, and to introduce expansion.6 Illustrating a grammatical point with a line of Virgil both interrupts the grammarian’s voice and expands the point into another text; the quoted line is likewise interrupted and expanded to include grammatical meaning. Lists of words, for example of verb conjugations, similarly both interrupt the Xow of grammatical argument and expand it through illustration. These are techniques that have important eVects, as they are deployed by late ancient grammarians in the construction of a Latin literary tradition. In the Wrst part of this chapter, I consider the uses to which quotation is put in the formulation of a literary past; in the second, I consider the uses to which lists are put in the articulation of a relationship between that imagined past and the grammarian’s imagined present. Grammatica dividit It would be diYcult to trace out a history, either on an individual or a cultural level, of how people physically perceive words and their component parts, but the artes grammaticae of the mid-fourth to early sixth centuries provide one essential, and consistent, piece of information in this regard.7 The basic technique for approaching Latin reading in late antiquity was verbal fragmentation: grammatica, as Sidonius Apollinaris tells us, dividit.8 One of the typical arrangements of the ars grammatica begins with sound and pronunciation, moving on to letters, combinations of letters, and syllables , before considering whole words as parts of speech. So, for example, Donatus’ Ars Maior opens with the following six sections: de voce, de litteris, de syllaba, de pedibus, de tonis, and de posituris, and then the parts of speech.9 This is the arrangement as early as Dionysius Thrax, and it is observed by Charisius, Donatus’ Ars Maior (and hence “Sergius” and Pompeius, who follow Donatus), Priscian’s Institutiones, and Asper. The other typical arrangement of the ars begins with the parts of speech, analyzing each separately, and then moving to letters and their subsequent formation into syllables. Remmius Palaemon may have followed this order, and Donatus’ Ars Minor, Diomedes, Cledonius, and...

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