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.

Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture

Mendaian as chalkidian wine

Scale in Action

Space in Action

Space, the Setting

The myth is well known: it is dispersed throughout the apocryphal texts of the Hippocratic Collection, the Letters, Decrees and Speeches (Littre, 1861, IX, pp. 308–428; Hercher, 1871, pp. 289–318; and Putzger, 1914): the king’s invitation, the patriotism of Hippocrates, the story of his relation to Democritus,1 the role he played at the time of the plague in Athens. The Hippocratic fervour that this heroic and scientific gesture aroused has not entirely dissipated since contemporary works for the public at large — perhaps exclusively francophone — retain significant aspects of it or weave new fantasies alongside these themes (see Joly, 1966, p. ff.).

Robert Joly

Papers

Hippocrates and the School of Cos