Author Unknown

The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome

Tom Geue

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780674988200
• eBook ISBN: 9780674242401
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: Literature

An exploration of the darker corners of ancient Rome to spotlight the strange sorcery of anonymous literature.

From Banksy to Elena Ferrante to the unattributed parchments of ancient Rome, art without clear authorship fascinates and even offends us. Classical scholarship tends to treat this anonymity as a problem or game—a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. Author Unknown is the first book to consider anonymity as a site of literary interest rather than a gap that needs filling. We can tether each work to an identity, or we can stand back and ask how the absence of a name affects the meaning and experience of literature.

Tom Geue turns to antiquity to show what the suppression or loss of a name can do for literature. Anonymity supported the illusion of Augustus's sprawling puppet mastery (Res Gestae), controlled and destroyed the victims of a curse (Ovid's Ibis), and created out of whole cloth a poetic persona and career (Phaedrus's Fables). To assume these texts are missing something is to dismiss a source of their power and presume that ancient authors were as hungry for fame as today's.

In this original look at Latin literature, Geue asks us to work with anonymity rather than against it and to appreciate the continuing power of anonymity in our own time.

Notes

Introduction

1. Even in periods most invested in individual authorship and solitary genius—such as the romantic—authorial kenosis remains an active fantasy. Cf., for example, Keats’ definition of the poet with “no identity” (Bennett 2004: 65).

2. Although this could paradoxically be understood as a return of the self too: see Bennett 2004: 65; cf. also 71, 127. The feel for anonymity was shared by many a modernist (see Ferry 2002: 198–199)—indeed one of Virginia Woolf’s last pieces of work was plotted as a hymn to it (Silver 1979).

3. On the New Criticism as a reaction against the overbiographizing of the previous guard, see Bennett 2004: 74.

4. Bennett 2004: 73, 112. Authorship is also a key concept in Roman literary history: the beginnings of a literature in Latin was almost coterminous with the advent of nameable individual authors (cf. Goldberg 2005: 27; cf. Feeney 2016: 227 on Livius Andronicus). The move from “anonymity” to “authorship” is often how we tend to picture the emergence of literature: see Woolf in Silver 1979: 385; cf. Ferry 2002: 196.

5. See North 2017: 1 and passim.

6. Cf. Hinds 2010: 371; North 2017: 142 on the misplaced metaphor of the pendulum.

7. See Bennett 2004: 89–93.

8. For the bias of classical scholarship toward synchronic over diachronic historicist approaches, see Roller 2010: 244–245.

9. The founding question of Barthes 1968; on Barthes’ answer, “we cannot know,” see also Bennett 2004: 12.

10. Classics has a particular sensitivity to the problems of projecting contexts (see Roller 2010: 240). For comparable problems of an unarticulated concept of context in art history, see Tanner 2000: 22. For a critical account of the totem of context in literary studies, see Felski 2015: 151–185; cf. Attridge 2015: 180–203.

11. Sedgwick 2003: 123–151; Felski 2015; North 2017. For a brilliant new challenge to contextual reading visited on literary modernism, see now Bronstein 2018.

12. The language of context as a straitjacketing, confinement, or imprisonment shows up in both Felski (2015: 155–157, 182–184) and North (2017: 182).

13. Whitmarsh 2017.

14. Indeed the earliest times: cf. Goldberg 2005: 62–68, 84–85 on the earliest Roman attempts to fix Plautus as individual and corpus, assign him an author function, and discipline him into legibility within elite literary culture. We could take the enterprise back to Hellenistic scholarship even (see, e.g., Pfeiffer 1968: 128n6 and the note’s addenda). On ancient Echtheitskritik, see Speyer 1971: 112–128.

15. This scholarly distaste for anonymity shines through most, perhaps, in the almost complete absence of treatments of it as a means of literary categorization in antiquity (bar Bardon 1952 and perhaps, at a stretch, the very focused application of the concept in my own Geue 2017).

16. E.g., Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Chanson de Roland, the Nibelungenlied, Njal’s Saga—thanks to David Levene for getting me to think comparatively here.

17. Such ascription of agency to works of literature is all over criticism: see Attridge 2015: 242–243 (the move has a particular lineage in classics); and Zanker 2013: 844–849 and Zanker 2016 (chapter 6).

18. See Rose 2017: 161, 172–173.

19. See Richards (1924) 2001: 15–16; North 2017: 31. Cf. Felski 2015: 178, and Attridge’s (2015) conception of the work of art as an “event” rather than an “object.”

20. For a brief suite of examples of historical motives for anonymous publication, see Griffin 1999: 885.

21. Peirano 2012: 5–6, 38–39; cf. Higbie 2017: 140; cf. Speyer 1971: 40.

22. Talk of a social turn in recent scholarship on Latin literature often has this in mind: “social” meaning “social performance,” “self-fashioning,” “competition”; see the paradigmatic overview in Lowrie 2010, e.g., “The aesthetic creates symbolic capital for its creator in a world governed by elite competition” (289). It has become a bit of a scholarly habit to assume that all Latin authors do is strategize for self-glorification—if not overtly, then covertly. See for example Riggsby 1988: 88; R. Gibson 2003: 251–252. Note the related obsession with “self-fashioning” (e.g., Dugan 2005; Pagán 2010). Some authors attract this more than others: Tacitus has traditionally been the reticent antitype to Plinian self-magnification (see Syme 1958: 113).

23. Although Martial’s brand is underwritten by a strong strand of materiality: see Roman 2001. On self-naming as part of a Roman poet’s repertoire of immortalizing moves, see de la Durantaye 2007: 71–72.

24. Ubiquitously—but, in particular, see Ep. 9.23, on Pliny’s wish for his name to be well known (see R. Gibson 2003: 249).

25. On “Homer” as a retrospective act of reception, see Graziosi 2002 (and on his name, see esp. 51–89); cf. Nagy 1996: 92 and Bennett 2004: 34. Bennett also points out (35) that named authorship is often a retrospective phenomenon.

26. Cf. Peirano 2013: 267–268 on Homeric anonymity as marking authenticity. Such modesty grates against the kleos-seeking of Homer’s internal characters (bar Odysseus—on whose anonymity see Van Nortwick 2009: 45–64).

27. Lauwers (2011: 237) reads this as a superficial point—but it was a big part of the Homer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraphs
• Introduction: Literature Unmastered
• I. The Power of the Name
• II. The Universal No-Name
• III. Whence and When
• Conclusion: Unknowing Literature
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• General Index
• Index Locorum