Assembling scholars of the Roman imperial period and slightly beyond working in a wide range of subdisciplines, this volume asks how the explosion of ‘record-keeping and state archives’ under the Roman empire affected the ‘documentary consciousness’ (pp. 1 and 15) of Roman imperial culture. To help access the agency, materiality and flexibility of documents, the contributors consider the theory proposed by the philosopher M. Ferraris in response to the internet's recording capacity that documentality is ‘the sphere in which social objects are generated’ (Documentalità [2009]). Several chapters productively use Ferraris's exhortation to attend to the social acts behind documents, and the volume concludes that the divide modern scholars assume between literature and document was more fluid in the Roman world. Yet, it also highlights the limits of Ferraris's work for ancient evidence, as the first chapters show. Indeed, M. Corbier's epilogue, which reflects on the role of scholars in constituting documents, rightly advises historians to absorb the perspectives of modern theory but adapt them to historical methods. As often, specific cultures are more useful than grand theories for understanding historical evidence, and the contributions are most exciting when they reveal what we might call ancient document theories.
J. Bodel inaugurates the essays by tracing how the social laws enacted by the Julio-Claudian emperors introduced a new documentary consciousness to the Roman world that did not, however, dislodge the traditional attribution of authority to oral testimony, especially that from high status Romans of good character. While these laws never required documents, inhabitants of the empire who saw themselves as affected by them hurried to create documentary proofs whose profusion necessitated official attempts to establish the authenticity of documents. This ebb and flow of social law, voluntary document generation and pronouncements upon evidentiary validity began with the lex Aelia Sentia (4 ce) and the lex Papia Poppaea (9 ce), but, as Bodel argues, Roman society never granted these documents full authority, thus contradicting Ferraris's teleological claim that the introduction of documents promotes social developments. For Bodel Roman documents reflect Roman society; they do not shape it.
Arthur-Montagne considers the copying exercises that provided the foundation for Graeco-Roman education within the framework of the documentary trace developed by E. Terrone in response to Ferraris. This framework proposes a five-fold spectrum that Arthur-Montagne shows can liberate scholars from simplistic definitions. Indeed, school exercises are usually discussed within papyrology, whose system of documentary, literary and subliterary texts has not developed much from its instantiation as a necessary organising principle at the field's birth and whose raison d’être and negative consequences are addressed later by J.-L. Fournet. Arthur-Montagne's discussion of copying exercises as tools for instilling ‘a library of mental documents’ (p. 76) raises the question of how such texts and other excerpts and anthologies used at later stages of literate culture intersect with complete books of the literary canon. As Fournet points out, literature is characterised by a textual tradition. When deemed canonical, a literary work is copied and read over centuries, ideally forever, while documents are ephemeral, even if they maintain force and relevance over generations. Yet, as noted by DiGiulio and Fournet, some ostensibly ephemeral documents were preserved in prestigious libraries and edited collections if their authors happened to be, say, a senator or a bishop. As emerges from several chapters, class is a key issue as always in Roman culture, and the line between documentary and literary seems most permeable at the highest end of imperial society, both social and cultural. In the villages of Roman Egypt, scribes standardised documents as veritable forms with blank spaces and other symbols to guide officials of varying degrees of literacy through the writing and reading required by bureaucratic procedures; a document's stable form thus promoted wide engagement with the documentary world (P. Schubert, Literacy in Ancient Everyday Life [2018], pp. 335–50). Someone with high fluency in language or state procedure, however, would not be derailed by fluidity and might revel in it.
The volume features two studies on Lucian. First, K. ní Mheallaigh analyses three inscriptions from True Histories, a metaliterary play on everything. She shows how Lucian's fictional documents provide new opportunities for literary allusions through their materiality as ‘artifactual intertexts’ (p. 99) and explores how the narrator's epitaph erected in the Isle of the Blessed on an enormous gemstone points to the documentary elements of ancient books. Kuin continues by juxtaposing Lucian's exposition of plausible but unreliable inscriptions in texts such as Alexander and Dialogues of the Courtesans with his use of inscriptions in texts like True Histories and Parliament of the Gods to substantiate impossible worlds. This comparison is made to access the perspective of illiterates in the Roman Empire, but we may wonder whether Lucian is providing a warning about the unreliability of documents or satirising those who are unable to negotiate the written world.
Turning to geography, P. Schneider surveys the sources used by figures such as Strabo and Pliny the Elder, juxtaposing their range to modern definitions of documents. He finds that, while Michael Buckland's capacious theory of documents as ‘any source of information, in material form, capable of being used for reference, or study, or as an authority’ (p. 144) encompasses ancient geographical evidence, particularly living specimens, the notion of the document is anachronistic. Like Bodel, Schneider emphasises that inhabitants of the Roman Empire assessed evidence according to its source's status. While historians and geographers evaluated sources in similar ways, observations in the footnotes point to a more particular vetting process. For example, although writing in different circumstances, Agatharchides and Pliny the Elder both rate information collected by government employees as more reliable than that provided by merchants.
Considering inscribed civic decrees as ‘social objects’ (p. 153), S.M. Kamphorst compares the publication strategies of Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Augustan periods by means of two case studies: an honorary decree for foreign judges from Priene (IK.Priene 107) and a decree establishing honours for Augustus from Mytilene (IGR IV.39). This study is designed to explore the striking spike in inscribed decrees from Greek cities between 300 and 150 bce and to interrogate the decline in such inscriptions under Rome despite the Empire's epigraphic habit. Kamphorst's choice of case studies is brilliant. The Priene decree proposes a complex scheme for publishing the honours for the foreign judges in Priene and the judges’ home cities, while the Mytilene decree desires the inscription of its honours for Augustus in Mytilene and a set of cities ringing the Mediterranean that were important to the Greek world and Augustus. It culminates in a charmingly naïve request for Augustus to have inscriptions made in his home and the Capitolium. In the Hellenistic period, Kamphorst argues, such decrees were inscribed in an urban network to establish a technical kind of common knowledge and cement relationships between cities to create stability while the Hellenistic monarchies bickered. In the early Roman period Mytilene tried to adapt this strategy to the new organising power and the expanded Graeco-Roman world. Whether it was successful is unclear; indeed, many of the inscriptions in the Mytilene decree may be as imaginary as those in Lucian's True Histories. Kamphorst's piece tantalisingly hints at how the changed political order of the Roman empire impacted the document theory of the Greek cities.
DiGiulio examines letters and inscriptions as sources within Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, arguing that Gellius does not distinguish between the letters of Cicero, Augustus and Seneca the Younger, two prestigious Latin inscriptions at Rome (for Pompey's theatre and Trajan's Dacian monuments) and the literary sources he cites as evidence for correct Latin usage and style. To my mind, this analysis presents an opportunity to explore class and documentality. For instance, as Gellius reports, prestigious documents like the edicta veterum praetorum were held in the library of Trajan's temple. Likely starting from Julius Caesar's plan to edit the laws in the Atrium Libertatis and to combine them with Greek and Latin books in a public textual repository, several of Rome's monumental buildings became multifunctional ‘information centers’; for example, cases could be heard in spaces with easy access to copies of both laws and famous orations (R. Neudecker, Ancient Libraries [2013], pp. 312–31). Individuals in Egypt kept ‘literary’ and ‘documentary’ papyri together, and we may wonder whether documents stored in provincial cities and villages shared space with literature. Perhaps the texts appropriate to people at different levels of the empire were stored together, regardless of their literary or documentary status. The complex system of document storage in Roman Egypt may suggest not, as far as my current knowledge extends, although these depositories were called βιβλιοθῆκαι, replacing Hellenistic institutions such as καταλοχισμοί (F. Burkhalter, Chiron 20 [1990]). At any rate, not every document would be stored in the prestigious Roman fora – indeed not every book, as Ovid attests (Tr. 3.1). The letters and inscriptions cited by Gellius are written by (mostly) literary Romans of high political status, and it may be the authors’ identity and not the nature of the texts that mattered.
Two studies on late antiquity from a papyrological perspective follow. Fournet uses the immediately recognisable form of the petition to explore the permeable boundary between pragmatic documents, historical texts and literary language, juxtaposing examples ranging from genuine pleas on papyrus, to episcopal documents cited in ecclesiastical history, hagiography, local history and epistolary collections. The argument's climax is the sixth century ce archive of Dioscorus of Aphrodite, a lawyer in Egypt who studied model petitions and wrote encomiastic petition poems. Dioscorus’ florid poetry exemplifies the breakdown of barriers between document and literature; he exhorts a local official with the hymnic κλῦθι. Yet, Fournet's argument that the prose and the poetic versions of a petition would be submitted jointly as the prose was legally valid while the poetry gained the authorities’ favour demonstrates that a pragmatic distinction remained. Finally, Y. Amory explores the overlap of documentary, literary and oral as epistolography evolved, reminding us of the messengers who often delivered the most sensitive part of a communication orally and could thus be called ‘living letters’ (pp. 237–41). Two groups in particular de-emphasised the informative function of the material letter: Christians applied their special relationship to the word to develop the idea of the believer as ‘epistle of Christ’ while elite correspondents drained the informative function from letters by treating them as ceremonial, rhetorical ‘gifts’. Still, administrators and lower status people continued to use letters for real communication.
These forays into Byzantine evidence are important for suggesting how the documentality of later periods can illuminate Roman imperial questions. For example, we might extrapolate from the processes of collecting episcopal petitions discussed by Fournet something about the practices that deposited praetor's edicts in the Bibliotheca Ulpia. Comparison with other moments of bureaucratic intensification with comparatively similar technologies of documentation might reveal more about imperial Roman documentality and especially the role of the political order in changing attitudes and practices. For example, the right of documentary ‘accountability’ for society vis-à-vis state administration was born in the French Revolution, and Saint-Just, a deputy of the Terror, lamented the proliferation of paperwork, wondering ‘how Rome and Egypt governed without this resource’ in a speech that resulted in ‘suspending the new constitution’ (B. Kafka, Demon of Writing [2012]). Yet, even under Caligula, Rome maintained a custom of posting copies of some government decisions in public places for people to copy, and excavation in Egypt has revealed the huge tip of a paperwork iceberg. We may thus ask if document practice in the Roman empire was paradoxically revolutionary or just crushingly banal.
