simultaneously with ‘‘Sallust’’ and with one’s contemporaries. Thecom-
binationof inquiry and discussion is what makes the text enduringly vital
to the community—what makes the text a ‘‘classic.’’^10 Finally, there is the
negotiation of the intellectual challenge that Favorinus mounts to the
text. The text cannot be interrogated unless it has an advocate to speak
for it: who, then, will interpret and defend the text? Favorinus’s attention
first falls on Gellius; asectatortries unsuccessfully to step in; a learned
companion is then found willing to engage. One has the clear sense of
a pecking order among the entourage, and of a continual vying to maintain
or better one’s place. Personal competition for status forms one of the
principal bounds within the community. Because the community defines
itself in bookish terms, that competition plays out in relation to texts and
to the masters of texts.
When one looks at what the group gets together to do, much of the
behavior seems driven by the negotiation of authority with reference to a
particular group of texts. For reasons that are partly idiosyncratic
11
and
partly ideological, the ‘‘classics’’ that this community looks to are in the
main the archaic texts. The urgency, as Gellius depicts it, is to determine
who can act as a proper spokesman for these texts; in what ways are the
texts properly discussed; and how much one can properly extract from
them. This can get down to seemingly trivial matters—whether, for
instance, the use of a word likepraeterpropterin one of these ‘‘classics’’ is
enough to qualify it for refined society. TheAttic Nightsis packed with
commentary on what are the right ways to speak, to think; who are the
right voices from the past to attend; who are the arbiters—commentators
and masters—of this rightness. At a remove, the commentary on com-
mentators may seem tiresome, and the wrangling overminutiaeabsurd;
but in its context this sort of learned disputation is critical, because the
battle over these details determines who will be the cultural gatekeepers
for the society. TheNightsitself, by my reading, is self-consciously advo-
cating its own circle as those gatekeepers—gatekeepers, again, not simply
of trivia, but of the right ways, as a ‘‘proper’’ Roman, of speaking and
thinking and behaving and remembering the past.
LITERATURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE
READING COMMUNITY
In looking at some typical reading events in this ancient community,
I have tried to highlight the cultural and sociological encumbrances.
- On what made a ‘‘classic’’ in antiquity, see Porter 2006.
- Perhaps going back to the oddball literary tastes of Hadrian, who famously preferred
‘‘Cato to Cicero, Ennius to Vergil, Caelius to Sallust’’ (SHA Hadr. 16). It should be noted
that Fronto (and others: e.g., Apuleius) did not share Gellius’s celebration and advocacy of
archaism.
Constructing Elite Reading Communities in the High Empire 327