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43 results

Page 1 of 3

  • DEFICIENCY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION: LACKING THE VITRUVIAN MAN

  • Tom Geue
  • Journal:
    Ramus / Volume 52 / Issue 2 / December 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    27 May 2024, pp. 163-177
    Print publication:
    December 2023

  • Vitruvius is a full-figured text. Bodies proliferate endlessly—as touchstones of measurement, as images of ideal proportions, as analogies for building, empire, discipline, or text—and they dance just as deftly around the scholarship. If we had to pick a metaphor by which Vitruvius lived in writing, we could do no better than corpus. He is perhaps antiquity's greatest embodiment of body. But what I would like to argue in this article is that the Vitruvian body is not uniform; not alone; not ideal; and as an instrument of scientific discovery, it is not enough. It is lacking—and it needs to lack.

  • RUSH JOB: SLAVERY AND BREVITY IN THE EARLY ROMAN PRINCIPATE

  • Tom Geue
  • Journal:
    The Cambridge Classical Journal / Volume 68 / December 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 May 2022, pp. 83-111
    Print publication:
    December 2022
    • Article
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  • The upswing in brief forms of literature in the early Roman principate is marked. From Ovid to Velleius Paterculus, Phaedrus to Valerius Maximus, this aesthetic trend seems to transcend genre. Such a phenomenon has thus far been understood as arising from either the pressures of literary tradition or the transformations in the organisation of elite knowledge. This article disagrees. It posits a new prospective causality behind the eruption in brevity, namely the state of slavery and its time-conscious way of being in the world. The article performs a close comparative reading of Phaedrus’ Fables alongside Velleius Paterculus’ Compendium of Roman History to show how brevity and its suspension can be understood as formal constraints, acts of service and redemptive aesthetic coping modes – all determined by the historical conditions of enslavement. It concludes with a coda on the general association of poetry with bondage and constraint in the late Republic and early Empire.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Tom Geue, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Elena Giusti, University of Warwick
  • Book:
    Unspoken Rome
    Published online:
    03 September 2021
    Print publication:
    16 September 2021, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    An introduction to reading Latin literature through the prism of textual absence. It places the volume’s aims and objectives within the broader panorama of Latin literary studies, introduces the volume’s contributions and sketches some possible future avenues for the topic.

Unspoken Rome
  • Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception
  • Edited by Tom Geue, Elena Giusti
  • Published online:
    03 September 2021
    Print publication:
    16 September 2021
  • Latin literature is a hotbed of holes and erasures. Its sensitivity to politics leaves it ripe for repression of all sorts of names, places and historical events, while its dense allusivity appears to hide interpretative clues in a network of texts that only the reader's consciousness can make present. This volume showcases innovative approaches to the field of Latin literature, all of which are refracted through this prism of absence, which functions as a fundamental generative force both for the hermeneutics and the ongoing literary aftermath of these texts. Reviewing and working with various influential approaches to textual absence, the contributors to Unspoken Rome treat these texts as silent types, listening out for what they do not say, and how they do not speak, whilst also tracing the ill-defined borders within which scholars and modern authors are legitimized to fill in the silences around which they are built.

  • Chapter 9 - Keeping/Losing Records, Keeping/Losing Faith

  • from Part II - Imperial Infrastructure: Documents and Monuments
  • Edited by Alice König, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Rebecca Langlands, University of Exeter, James Uden, Boston University
  • Book:
    Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96–235
    Published online:
    28 April 2020
    Print publication:
    30 April 2020, pp 203-222

  • Summary

    The mushrooming bureaucracy of the Roman empire made much of documents. These written records – rescripts, inscriptions, edicts, among other things – became a gold standard of authority within a certain ideological schema. But the system was also open to ruffling. This chapter looks at how two seemingly unrelated authors – Justin Martyr and Suetonius – lodged their respective challenges to the authority of the imperial document. First, it examines how Justin manages to be parasitic on the fidelity of the document to find an authorised imperial home for Christianity, at the same time as he devalues the cold culture of official writing against the hot Christian culture of orality and immediacy. Second, it explores how Suetonius stages a movement in his Caesars from faith in the imperial written bureaucracy to disenchantment with documents, and to a concomitant investment in oral forms of knowledge. Most importantly, this epistemological drift actually explains the infamous ‘decline’ of the Caesars from dutifully documented, bureaucratically robust biography to glorified gossip column. The discourse of the document provides a new language of interaction to conduct this meeting of disparate texts.

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