Current Research Project in Classics
Andrew MORRISON, ‘Ancient Letter Collections’
(AHRC-funded Project 2016-24)
Nearly 50 letter collections survive in Greek or Latin from before A.D. 400, including letters by or attributed to some of the most famous figures from classical antiquity, including Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, Plato, Themistocles and Socrates, as well as foundational Christian letters such those in the New Testament and those of Ambrose, Augustine and Basil. The project examines the orders and arrangements of these letter collections as found in the manuscripts of the letters, in order to establish how ancient letter collections were ordered and read. A good number of the surviving collections are available only in standard modern editions which have abandoned the distinctive ordering found in the ancient manuscripts. For example, Cicero’s Letters to Friends show ordering by addressee or theme in the manuscripts; but modern editors have re-ordered these letters to privilege chronology, thus obscuring the format in which the letters were read for first 1,500 years of their history.
Project outputs
The main output will be a monograph (of some 400,000 words, under contract with Oxford University Press) gathering the data on orders and arrangements and other relevant aspects of the collections. This ‘critical review’ will contain a distinct entry for each of the collections, presenting: (i) key information on the senders and addressees of the constituent letters, the dating of the collection, the number and length of the letters, and the main arrangements in the manuscripts; (ii) surveys of the main characteristics of the collection as found in the main arrangements, the publication history of the collection and the other texts with which the collection tends to be transmitted in the manuscripts; (iii) a list of the relevant reference edition and other key items of bibliography.
Example of a Letter: Cicero, Letters to Friends 4.5
And if she had not met her appointed final day at this time, in a few years nevertheless she would have had to die, since she was born human. Even you must call your mind and thoughts away from these things; remember rather things which befit your personality: that she lived as long as she needed to and existed while the republic was alive, and saw you, her father, become Praetor, Consul, Augur, and was married to leading young men. Almost every good thing she enjoyed, and when the republic perished, she departed her life. (4.5.4-5)
- This letter was written by Cicero’s friend, Servius Sulpicius Rufus in 45 BC, to console Cicero for the death of his daughter Tullia (who was in her early thirties). She died in childbirth. It shows the intersection between politics, history and personal life: Sulpicius consoles Cicero with the thought that Tullia did not live to see the end of the Republic, but did see her father fill many of the most important political offices of the time.
Example of a letter collection: Cicero's Letters to Friends (Ad Familiares)
- Main correspondent: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC).
- 435 letters in total.
- 356 letters sent by Cicero himself, ten of which are sent jointly with other family members.
- One letter co-signed by Cicero’s wife (Terentia) and daughter (Tullia): the only letter to feature women as senders in the extant Ciceronian corpus
- Around 90 individuals receive letters, mostly Cicero’s fellow senators.
- Only two addressees are women: his wife Terentia receives twenty-four letters (i.e. Book 14), two of them with their daughter Tullia (14.14, 14.18) and five with Tullia and son Marcus (14.1-4, 6).
Costas PANAYOTAKIS, ‘Fragments of Latin farce: identity, diversity, and colonisation in Roman drama’
(Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2023-24)
Latin comedy was powerful in shaping Roman national identity; yet we know little about Italian theatrical culture and how the Romans appropriated it. My project fills this gap by providing a new critical edition and the first-ever translation and comprehensive commentary on a hugely important but neglected strand of Latin drama known as “Atellane comedy”. Atella was a small town in Campania in west central Italy, and its relationship with the Romans, who eventually confiscated its territory, was greatly turbulent. Atellane comedy—a distant ancestor of the celebrated Italian commedia dell’arte—was viewed (already in antiquity) as a type of uncouth native-Italian farce associated with Campanian culture. It seems to have existed at least from the fourth century BC, but it is only three centuries later that it acquires literary features and a central position within Roman culture and society. None of the literary Atellane farces survives complete, and all we know about the genre are the pieces of information we are given by non-dramatic authors who refer to it rather condescendingly, a few pieces of material culture (a handful of inscriptions and two Pompeian masks), and the “fragments” of the genre—namely, short literary verse quotations, about 270, incorporated for mainly linguistic reasons within the texts of non-dramatic prose authors of the Imperial era. Scholars have neglected Latin farce because of its non-canonical “popular-culture” character and the difficulties in accessing its textual/archaeological material. But its study illuminates important colonising narratives in the complicated Rome/Italy divide, where class- and diversity-stereotypes about subordinate Italians were exploited to strengthen Rome’s hegemony.
Project outputs
This will be a substantial monograph entitled Fabula Atellana: The Literary Fragments. The work will systematically reassess all the literary, textual, socio-historical, and material-culture evidence about Atellane farce, and make original contributions to scholarship by offering a thoroughly revised Latin text of the fragments, their first-ever English translation, and a large-scale commentary that explains their meaning, clarifies their tone, style, and dramatic implications, and provides the basis for future research in the field. The introduction to the volume will discuss: the position of Atellane comedy within the history of performances in the Roman Republic; the origins of the genre; its importance as evidence for diversity and social variation in Roman society and literature, and for representing the notions of “centre and periphery” in the Roman cultural imagination; the history and fortunes of the scripts; the material culture associated with this type of spectacle; the language and metres of the quotations; the ways in which the authors who preserved the fragments cited and used them; the editorial history of the corpus; and its reception—especially in connection with the later drama known as commedia dell’arte.
Catherine STEEL, ‘The Senate of Republican Rome: a new history’
(Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, 2023-26)
Rome’s transformation into a huge and enduring empire in the second and first centuries BCE took place through a political system that is still not fully understand. Recent transformative research on magistrates and the Roman people in the Republican period has not yet explained how Rome’s institutions underpinned its political and geopolitical successes and failures. This project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust via a Major Research Fellowship, argues that the missing element is the Senate. It shows how the Roman Senate transcended its limited formal role to become Rome’s government, and driver of astonishing expansion; it also argues that a senatorial power grab from 121 BCE onwards radically destabilised the Roman Republic and led ultimately to autocracy.
Project outputs
The main output will be a monograph for Oxford University Press; some more technical aspects of the research will be published separately as journal articles and chapters in edited volumes.