Hello everyone,
We are excited to invite you to the second talk of the Spring 2025 semester!
Thomas Biggs (University of St Andrews) will give his talk entitled
One is the Loneliest Number: Gnaeus Naevius and Livius Andronicus
The talk will occur on Tuesday, April 8th, at 4:10 p.m. EDT in Hamilton 702, in person and on Zoom. The reception will follow.
If you would like to receive a Zoom link, please email Holly Axford (ha2694@columbia.edu). The Zoom link will be circulated the day before the talk.
One is the Loneliest Number
Gnaeus Naevius and Livius Andronicus
Abstract:
This lecture explores intertextuality at the beginnings of Latin literature. Its broader interests are in simultaneity and sequence: the circulation of literary works without clear priority relations, the scholarly desire to order texts, and the ways in which style, trends, and vibe relate to temporal and often spatial coexistence. Following the conventional chronology, it is Naevius who reacted against and availed himself of Livius Andronicus’ development of a poetics in Latin inflected by Greek epic and dramatic forms. There are, however, alternative ways of conceptualising the interaction between these poets, which include notions of authorship that privilege the collaborative, collective, and distributed. The Middle Republic was a fluid period of mobility, contact, and convergence. Andronicus’ dates were even contested in antiquity, and the details of all authorial biographies from the era are unreliable on such matters. If compositional timelines are more entangled than is typically allowed in histories of Roman literature, opening the modes of interpretation can only offer greater understanding of the ways these texts generate meaning. Accordingly, the second half of this paper untethers the fragments from chronology and embraces the fact that they were composed and first received within the same moment. The paper concludes with the productive power of indeterminacy. It suggests that scholars of early Latin poetics should adopt concepts like interaction and interdiscursivity alongside more entrenched notions of literary reference and allusion that depend on sequence.