Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome

by Tom Geue

Overview

An exploration of the darker corners of ancient Rome to spotlight the strange sorcery of anonymous literature.

From Banksy to Elena Ferrante to the unattributed parchments of ancient Rome, art without clear authorship fascinates and even offends us. Classical scholarship tends to treat this anonymity as a problem or game—a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. Author Unknown is the first book to consider anonymity as a site of literary interest rather than a gap that needs filling. We can tether each work to an identity, or we can stand back and ask how the absence of a name affects the meaning and experience of literature.

Tom Geue turns to antiquity to show what the suppression or loss of a name can do for literature. Anonymity supported the illusion of Augustus’s sprawling puppet mastery (Res Gestae), controlled and destroyed the victims of a curse (Ovid’s Ibis), and created out of whole cloth a poetic persona and career (Phaedrus’s Fables). To assume these texts are missing something is to dismiss a source of their power and presume that ancient authors were as hungry for fame as today’s.

In this original look at Latin literature, Geue asks us to work with anonymity rather than against it and to appreciate the continuing power of anonymity in our own time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674988200
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Tom Geue is a Classicist who writes about Latin literature from Virgil to Juvenal. He is Lecturer in Latin at the University of St Andrews and the author of Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Literature Unmastered 1

I The Power of the Name 27

1 Name Power 31

2 Tongue Ties: Ovid's Ibis 53

3 A Play without Names: Octavia 80

II The Universal No-Name 115

4 Phaedrus by Name 117

5 Poet Seeks Patron: An Open Letter from Me to You, Or Numerosa Laus 143

6 The Timeless Pastoral of Calpurnius Siculus 164

III Whence and When 199

7 Whence: Sources, Frames, Contexts 201

8 Historical Transcendence 235

Conclusion: Unknowing Literature 272

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 281

References 329

General Index 353

Index Locorum 359

Editorial Reviews

In this engaging book, Geue inventively repositions uncertain authorship as a feature that adds, rather than detracts, from the richness of ancient texts. You may not immediately notice how thoroughly he subverts some of the most basic assumptions about the centrality of historical context in Classical Studies.

Donna Zuckerberg

What is a text without context? Can we separate the art from the artist? How does the signature of an artist shape the ways in which we hate, love, or even forget an object? This innovative and sophisticated book engages with an array of imperial Roman works—from graffiti art to epic poetry—and asks us to embrace literary anonymity, in antiquity and in our own time. With disarming directness, Geue has challenged us to rethink our urge to uncover the ‘real’ author of ancient texts.

Sarah E. Bond

Geue mounts a powerful and meticulous case for a poetics of the unknown, setting up not just a new agenda for ancient texts, but an updated ethics for literary history itself.

Irene Peirano

Geue homes in on the many post-Augustan texts that rail against traditional modes of self-memorialization, and turn towards anonymity not just as a survival strategy and tool for political satire under autocracy, but also as a creative experiment in deliberate decontextualization, and a means of exploring class power, authority and the status of knowledge…[A] provocative book.

Times Literary Supplement - Victoria Rimell