Where did Romans think their books came from? Each of these volumes, in its own, builds on the recent interest in understanding the written word as a social phenomenon of Roman culture to explore Roman rhetorics of literary process. McGill advertises at the outset his disinterest in tracing a phenomenon over time, establishing his subject as a timeless one. An opening methodological chapter confronts two major challenges: first, the inherent risks of seeking an anachronistic subject, and second, the fact that any and all evidence for ancient literary plagiarism as a practice or as an idea is necessarily evidence of its representation. The book is accordingly divided into accusations of (prefaces, Martial) and defences against (Terence, Seneca, Vergil) plagiarism. In the absence of ‘verifiable cases’ (4), this is not a book about Roman plagiarism but about Roman claims of plagiarism. M. demonstrates clearly the use of furtum in literary contexts to connote plagiarism. While commendably sensitive to the range of registers in which one might jokingly accuse another of theft, this raises a question: why is it that Latin did not have a word that, like English ‘plagiarism’, connotes authorial theft exclusively and without recourse to activating a special sense of a more common word? Perhaps this alerts us to a problem with identifying plagiarism as an ancient idea unto itself under the rubric of furtum.
A chief contention is that talking about plagiarism is useful to promote one's own writing. This emerges most clearly from his survey of plagiarism's place in Latin prefaces: Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, Manilius, Seneca the Elder and Priscian. Authors accuse others of plagiarism in their prefaces so as to praise themselves, but indeed, what else are prefaces for? M.’s approach is generally that of guided close reading; so, in the discussion of Pliny, he offers a block of text, then traces the important words and ideas that join it to the rest of the preface (although Pliny's famously vexing assertion that ‘sors fiat ex usura’ is given regrettably short shrift). The discussion necessarily also involves aemulatio, citations and footnoting, writerly labor and self-advertisement: in short, plagiarism is an inextricable component of such prefatory agendas.
Then to the world of denials: in Terence too we see that plagiarism overlaps messily with adaptation, with genre topoi, and with novelty and originality. M. wades boldly into Terence's prefaces, which offer many valuable case studies in what it means to have an original idea at Rome. Meanwhile, the diverse plagiarism denials preserved by Seneca the Elder do much to illustrate plagiarism as an idea — a phenomenon that can exist in the minds of readers or hearers rather than in the writer or text (intent, as in law, mattering as much as deed). The chapter on Vergil surveys those later responses which accused Vergil of failing to innovate on his models and so ‘laps[ing] into plagiarism’ (192). The discussion focuses on the character of Albinus in Book 6 of Macrobius’ Saturnalia, who seeks to preempt accusations of plagiarism against the great poet. Absent here is a discussion of the kinds of model-based reading of Vergil that would allow for such accusations: reading Vergil against Homeric or Hesiodic (or other) models was a productive activity for Imperial readers (and as usual, Macrobius himself gets no attention). Instead we focus on the response Albinus is made to give to now-lost ‘furta literature’. ‘Misreading is a part of the history of reading’, M. observes (209): much of the ancient afterlife of canonical literature involved not simply admiration, intertextual homage and canonization, and ‘reception’ was very much about disputing the merits of texts and the psyches of authors. But what is most revealing about this study is not that plagiarism existed as a concept in Roman antiquity, but that it did not exist on its own: it is always part of larger system of possibilities in both arguing about and theorizing textual creativity. Could this fact be just one part of the answer to a differently framed question?
Gurd, by contrast, argues strongly for the diachronic development of the revision motifs he considers, and for their idiosyncrasy as ancient phenomena. The volume is unapologetic about its interest in critical theory, as G. — reflecting aloud on his own compositional process — explains its genesis in genetic studies, that approach to texts which adumbrates the drafts, notes and other evidence of the creative process to which modern literary scholars, thanks to archives and collections, are often privy. But the writing is fresh and engaging. ‘Too much energy has been expended on the question of whether authors dictated or composed by hand’, G. writes (9) refreshingly, focusing instead on writing as a conceptual and cognitive act.
Perhaps the most important idea to emerge from ch. 2's survey of rhetorical theory in Isocrates, Plato and Quintilian, which does much heavy intellectual lifting to set the stage for the rest of the volume, is an ancient revision radically different from our own, with three tenets: that revision need not aim to produce a ‘perfect text’, that revision of text is a desirable activity transferable to other parts of life, and that revision can be seen as symptomatic (rather than a precondition) of mastery of an art form. Revision, for orators, was a way of practising the skills that meant one would need no revision. The rehearsal of social thinking that it involved was an important bonus.
Ch. 3, on Cicero, elucidates clearly the social nature of revision in Cicero's work process, and argues that it constituted political action. Here, the endless fount of Republican political intrigue distracts from history of literary practice: the social is political, and the political is anti-Caesarian. The most tenuous part of the otherwise well-argued chapter concerns the disjunction between Phliuntioi at De re publica 2.8 in the surviving manuscript, and the note to Atticus accepting the emendation to Phliasioi in Att. 6.2.3. Atticus notes that Phliuntioi is formed incorrectly by analogy; for G., considering Caesar's De analogia, this can only be political. He speculates that ‘our copy comes from a reader more militantly analogist than Cicero’. But perhaps it simply descends from a copy made before Atticus received Cicero's correction — the difficulty of reconstructing actual genetic material is undeniable. This case seems to have far more to say about how error-prone Roman books were as a medium. Indeed, one of the most uniquely Roman forms of revision, that done by the careful reader who corrects scribal errors in his own books, is regrettably absent from this discussion. Nevertheless revision as a way of building a community and engaging it in discourse is a fascinating textual corollary to the conventional view of Roman discourse as oratorical and oral, and does much to free the work of Cicero and others from their imprisonment in a modern idea of pristine, finished work produced in brilliant solitude. But while sharing drafts is one kind of performance, writing letters about sharing your drafts is another: so how can we be sure we have escaped the hall of mirrors that is Ciceronian self-representation?
G.’s simple chapter titles (‘Cicero’, ‘Horace’, ‘Pliny’) belie the book's deep historical grounding. Ch. 4, on Horace, opens with a sweeping survey of Hellenistic rhetorics of revision that thinks carefully about why Hellenistic poets did not allude nearly so often as Romans to that act. The chapter's close readings of Horace form a fine complement to the previous one on Cicero, focusing on the way his image of poet as censor joins the morality of composition and revision with its aesthetics, and finding in Horace's tortured relationship with shameful but necessary revision an example of Hellenistic values of composition being digested by Augustan literary culture. It cannot be quite right that ‘Rome was conditioned in the legal and social sphere by referral to written charters’ (100–1), and, with a nod to formation of canon under Augustus, the political again weighs heavily on the discussion. But there is much of interest and value here on Horace and revision.
Genetic reading returns in the chapter on Pliny and his idea of the public. Here G. deftly steps back to trace from Ovid, through Martial, the developing idea of a public, and to draw out from Pliny's letters two reading publics: the genetic, who have been privy to the process of composition, and the general, among whom the final product circulates. The former serve as a model for the latter. This is a new and interesting take on the well-trodden ground of Pliny's letters on recitatio. G. is careful (and right) to note that Pliny's idea of the general public is most important as a rhetorical construction, ‘articulating a … legitimacy that comes from being general, from the illusion of speaking to and for all’ (125) — but by talking so much about his genetic readers, he in fact mandates them as a model for the general public to aspire to.
Roman accounts of their own writing have long been either neglected as secondary to a high literary project, or mined for historical accounts of technology and practice. What G. shows is that the motifs and rhetorics around composition were not only vital to the social functions that literature performed as a cultural practice, but that they could be closely aligned with fundamental ethics and politics of the context in which the literature was created and consumed. Where this volume succeeds (and it frequently does) it is because questions prompted by modern critical theory have been answered with carefully historicized close readings.
In this sort of cultural study, which proceeds by taking a modern concept and searching for it in antiquity, it is hard to know who is luckier: the scholar who finds her anachronism exactly, or the one who finds in its absence a productive revelation about what the ancients had in its place. Both volumes take this approach, with misses among the hits, but together they significantly advance our awareness of the extent to which processes of textual creation were theorized and explicated by Roman authors. In the study of ancient literary and book production this approach is perhaps the most attractive, and also most laced with pitfalls: consumption and production of text are, after all, what we do, and just as it is a great labour to shuffle off the preconceptions of the ebook and the industrially printed codex and really think oneself into the mindset of the volumen and codex, so Gurd and McGill apply themselves to the great labour of thinking their way into ancient ideas of authorship, composition and finished-ness very different from our own. Both should now be standard works on their subject, and neither — as each acknowledges — will be the final word.
