3 - Studying Ancient Miscellanism

Summary

‘Miscellany’ is not an ancient genre name. When scholars use the term, they are often vague about the definition and boundaries of the genre, and rely on well-known ‘examples’ that are treated as paradigmatic. Two scholars have sought to define the ‘miscellany’ more closely: Teresa Morgan gave a broad, inclusive definition grounded in the history of educational praxis; William Fitzgerald gave a narrower definition, focusing on the rhetorical characteristics of an elite, literary strand of miscellany-making. Fitzgerald's approach shall be our starting point as we investigate how and why Clement artfully deployed rhetorical tropes, imagery and metatextual observations to thematise his intentional participation in a wider discourse of learned literary miscellanism. But we must also situate his work in relation to particular examples of early imperial prose miscellanies, otherwise we risk lapsing into generalities about an irreducibly diverse group of texts. Plutarch’s Table Talk; Pliny’s Natural History; Gellius’ Attic Nights and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists are introduced alongside Clement’s Stromateis,as appropriate for comparative study.