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Greek culture matters because its unique pluralistic debate shaped modern discourses. This ground-breaking book explains this feature by retelling the history of ancient literary culture through the lenses of canon, space and scale. It proceeds from the invention of the performative 'author' in the archaic symposium through the 'polis of letters' enabled by Athenian democracy and into the Hellenistic era, where one's space mattered and culture became bifurcated between Athens and Alexandria. This duality was reconfigured into an eclectic variety consumed by Roman patrons and predicated on scale, with about a thousand authors active at any given moment. As patronage dried up in the third century CE, scale collapsed and literary culture was reduced to the teaching of a narrower field of authors, paving the way for the Middle Ages. The result is a new history of ancient culture which is sociological, quantitative, and all-encompassing, cutting through eras and genres. '... this work opens a new path for future scholarship. This engaging ... volume deserves a wide audience among classicists.' P. E. Ojennus, Choice

Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture

Acknowledgments; General introduction; Part I. Canon: 1. Canon: the evidence; 2. Canon in practice: the polis of letters; Part II. Space: 3. Space, the setting: the making of an Athens-against-Alexandria Mediterranean; 4. Space in action: when worlds diverge; Part III. Scale: 5. A quantitative model of ancient literary culture; 6. Scale in action: stability and its end; Coda to the book; Bibliography; Index.