Although the focus of this study lies almost entirely on the dedicated and “dedication-minded” texts of Catullus and Cicero, it will be good to say a word about the scope of the broader Society in ...which these exchanges were taking place. In what follows I provide a brief survey of those individuals – first the “probable,” then the “possible,” and finally two likely influential forerunners – whom we might identify as participants in this Society, as suggested by our textual evidence from the Republic (this is especially the case for the “probable” participants) and that which would come later.To attempt a concrete reconstruction of a textual Society that was by all evidence a highly plastic one – shaped and reshaped by artistic, social, and intellectual debates, inside jokes and real enmity, newly formed alliances and stiff competition (and thus not too foreign to the world of academia) – would be both artificial and misleading, and so is not my goal. The survey that follows is certainly not exhaustive, nor does it claim excessive detail in either its prosopography or bibliography. While many of the individuals included below are well-known figures from the Republic, little or nothing survives of their dedicated work, and our knowledge of titles and subject matter is often rather tenuous (the latter usually derived from the former).
Epilogue Stroup, Sarah Culpepper
Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons,
04/2010
Book Chapter
In examining the terminological, rhetorical, and sociopractical intersections between Catullus and Cicero, we have been able to uncover a bit more of the textual story of the late Republic. And yet, ...mapping the textual practices of the late Republic onto the ongoing continuum of ancient textual culture and the “textualization” of culture as a whole, leaves us with one further question: what happened next?There is of course no monolithic answer to such a monolithic question. What happened to the text and the textual world in later periods? To a certain extent I would respond that the Principate of Augustus, and the resultant blooming of textual culture in the Principate and early Empire, is what “happened” to the text and the textual community that fostered it. As isonomic textual prestation seems to have all but disappeared in this later period – it might indeed be argued that under the social and political structure of the Principate textual isonomy had become well-nigh impossible – there arose an immensely productive system of the sort of hierarchically organized literary patronage investigated by White and others. Yet as much as the textual efflorescence of the Principate and Empire may seem to have little in common with the practices of the earlier periods, the disjuncture between these two periods is not so great. Indeed, the Augustan textual world has its roots firmly planted in the soil of the Republic, and the points of contact and lines of continuity suggested in this study will, I think, be useful for ongoing investigations into these later periods.
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT WRITING Stroup, Sarah Culpepper
Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons,
04/2010
Book Chapter
Cui dono lepidum nouum libellumarida modo pumice expolitum?Corneli, tibi…Cat. 1.1–3To whom do I give this charming, new work–Just now polished up with dry pumice-stone?Cornelius! To you…In his ...dedication of a small collection of poetry – a collection that would mark Catullus' brief career as much as it would ‘make’ the poet for generations of readers to come – Catullus asks a deceptively simple question: To whom do I give this charming new work? Two lines later the poem provides its own answer – the libellus will be dedicated to the historian Cornelius Nepos – but the question and its implications remain for the poet, the recipient, and the readers who have encountered it since. On closer inspection this simplest of inquiries becomes only more complex, more difficult to decipher, and more demonstrative of the anxieties of textual exchange and the author's desire to remain a subject even as he becomes, through his text, an object. Who will understand what the gift of a text means? Who will make sure that the right people read it? Who will be able to read it as it was intended to be read and who will, perhaps, make a gift in kind? What, at last, does it mean to entrust one's text – one's persona – to the care of another, and how does one write about this meaning?
“THE GAZE CRAMPS MY FREEDOM”By the final years of an increasingly display-driven Roman Republic, forensic oratory was the only profession of ritualized and secular public display that was both ...suitable for the privileged classes and fixed within the system of liberal-political and civic hierarchy. As both Edwards and Barton have argued, active participation in theatrical and gladiatorial display – the “pleasure industries” of both the Republic and subsequent years – was in this period confined almost exclusively to foreigners and the lower social strata. These types of display were illiberal by definition and operated at a social, geographical and ideological remove from the discourse of the privileged classes. Members of the cultural elite were allowed to patronize or produce these performances; but they were discouraged from becoming part of a performance itself. They could attend the theater, but only as viewers and not, strictly speaking, as the viewed. There was a problem with liberal performance in the late Republic – this problem is the focus of the following section – whereby the patronal classes were driven to engage in the forms of public display around which the Republic was built, but they did so at the risk of making the status that allowed this display vulnerable to critique or derogation.
Preface and acknowledgments Stroup, Sarah Culpepper
Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons,
04/2010
Book Chapter
At many places in the writing of this book – a book about texts, and about textual culture, and about the peculiarly and painfully self-conscious sort of writing by which these texts are dedicated ...and this culture is defined – I have not been entirely sure what it is I need to do (or rather, to write) in order to make my point. This, I am happy to say, is not one of them (I attribute this fortuity to the fact that I have read several books myself). This is the part of the book where I am, first, to write of the deeply personal origins of this work. This is the part of the book where I am, second, to detail for you the ways in which these origins blossomed into the text you hold in your hands. This is the part of the book where I am, third, to thank solemnly the many people who saw this work to its fruition. This is the part of the book where I am, fourth, to express my deep affection for the many people in my life whose friendship, advice, and patience saw me through this work. In other words, this is the part of the book where I am to engage in a process of dedication. And so this is what I shall do.
