Enrica Sciarrino's monograph is presented as an intervention in debates about early Latin literary literature, but it is ultimately much more than that. In effect S. reorients the study of Latin verbal culture to encompass the subject positions of producers and consumers understood as recoverable perceptual, cognitive, and pragmatic regimes. Although argued in terms familiar to the philologist, and fully (and respectfully) engaged with a wide range of classical scholarship, the book derives its energy from an understanding of ‘being in the world’ that owes as much to phenomenology and cultural studies as it does to any prior work on Latin literature. By invoking embodied subjectivity as her governing trope S. is able to situate the production of literature in history without relying on narrow or unsustainable claims concerning intention. And by continually understanding mental and perceptual activity as embodied, she transcends simplistic dichotomies between oral and written or form and experience. As she observes near the outset of the book, ‘I understand generic inclinations, formal choices, thematic preferences, and modes of textual construction as practical manifestations of a shared sense of reality and as clear indicators of the authors’ different experiences of limitations and options’(1). With this shift in focus, S. is able to explore what we might call, with Nelson Goodman, the ‘world-making ways’ of early Roman writers and artists. The result is nothing less than a new cultural history of late third- and early second-century b.c.e. Rome, one that pays equal attention to prose and poetry, ritual and writing, slave and free, migrant and indigene, body and soul.
The opening chapter situates Cato the Elder and the poet Ennius as alternative models of the relationship between embodied experience and literary subjectivity. Ennius’ famous reference to his three hearts (tria corda) illuminates Cato's advice against absorbing (perdiscere) Greek letters. In both instances, language activates and promotes scenarios that work to correlate social subjectivity and cultural agency. A second chapter examines the ‘migratory subjectivity’ and translational expertise of early Roman writers. Although their ability to convert others’ cultural productions into Roman possessions was key to their success, writers like Naevius, Livius Andronicus, Terence, and even Cato never quite abandoned their own bi- or multi-culturality. In S.’s view, even the familiar phenomenon of metatheatricality, especially in the plays of Plautus, can be linked to an interest in ‘bestowing power on multiple perceptions of reality’ (60). Ch. 3 offers a new interpretation of familiar evidence concerning rivalry and disapproval (Naevius and the Metelli, Ennius and Naevius, Cato and the poets) in terms of conflicting scenarios for literary production centred on different imaginings of conviviality and spectacle. The chapter culminates in a compelling discussion of the eroticization of Terence as an instance of the ‘possessive love that Roman elite males felt toward their “others”’ (116).
Having constructed a framework for analysing the relevant textual remains, S. turns in chs 4 and 5 to the subject promised by her title: Cato's invention of Latin prose literature. For many readers, these will be the most immediately useful sections of the book, for they demonstrate beyond doubt the importance and value of integrating prose into early Latin literary history. Like poetry, prose is an embodied practice constituted by particular, historically-situated subjectivities, and like poetry it can be analysed in terms of a dynamic of appropriation and differentiation with respect to the cultural productions of others. Cato's oratory and his encyclopaedic project (including De Agricultura) in different ways sought to authorize élite Roman males as autonomous users of linguistic, epistemological, and material resources. On S.’s telling, Cato's experience as censor links various sections of his literary output, from ethical judgement in the oratorical fragments, through advice on ritual in De Agricultura, to the ordering of Italian history in Origines. In an ambitious discussion drawing on archaeological, historical, and philological research, S. argues that Cato's representation of writing as transcription of a prior, ritualized performance fosters an ideal of textuality as a moveable yet inalienably élite possession. The ‘loosening’ implicit in the Roman identification of prose as verba soluta thus becomes a release not just from metrical constraints, but also from the social subordination or secondariness that, under pressure from prose, came to characterize poetry.
This is a complex and demanding book. The structure of the argument is not always clear, and there is an occasional tendency to digress. Less overt engagement with other scholars might have left more room for S. to develop and exemplify her own deep and carefully theorized approach. Yet the result of her intellectual generosity is to show that strident disagreements are sometimes due to different targets of attention and different modes of explanation rather than to genuine disagreements over the significance of the textual remains. S. suggests that there is more consensus than is usually acknowledged, but also that there are deep and pervasive misconceptions about the place of literary practice within embodied cognition and social interaction that must be revised before new types of understanding are possible. The book is a must-read for Latinists, whatever their period of specialization, and highly recommended for anyone interested in the problems and prospects of writing the cultural history of Rome.
