Colesanti - Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture

This volume is dedicated to Luigi Enrico (Chico) Rossi (19332009), inspiring and devoted teacher, who taught Greek literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza with relentless enthusiasm and founded a thriving forty year tradition of seminars.

We would like to thank all the contributors to this volume for having supported our endeavour with trust and encouragement; particular thanks to Andrea Ercolani, who has the merit of having proposed the theme of submerged literature for a series of seminars.

We are very grateful to Bar Zecharya: this volume owes much to his generosity in finding time for reading, commenting, and improving it. We wish to thank Bob Fowler for his valuable suggestions.

We should also like to express our thanks to Serena Pirrotta, Florian Ruppenstein, and Johanna Wange of de Gruyter, who have followed this volume with great attention throughout its different stages.

G. C. and M. G.

All translations in this volume are by Mattia Bilardello, except for: Introductory Notes (English original by Manuela Giordano), Submerged Literature in an Oral Culture (trans. Richard Bates), Beyond the Canon: Hellenistic Scholars and Their Texts (English original by the author), Comedy outside the Canon: from Ritual Slapstick to Hellenistic Mime (trans. by Anita J. Weston), Out of Athens. Ritual Performances, Spaces, and the Emergence of Tragedy (English original by the author), By Way of Conclusion (trans. by Mattia Bilardello, Manuela Giordano, Anita J. Weston). The final editing of the English text is by Mattia Bilardello with the assistance of Anita J. Weston.

Giulio Colesanti, Manuela Giordano

The theme and definition of submerged literature stems from the writings of the late Luigi Enrico Rossi, common teacher to most contributors to this volume. In particular, in a set of unpublished notes from 1995, Rossi proposed

to initiate a recensio of that part of Greek literature which never received publication (although this description is inaccurate for anything predating the fourth century BCE: which never received poly-centric distribution, we may better say). Literature of this kind never enjoyed the protection of either the polis or any other authority with institutionalized let us say literary credentials.

Rossi stimulated a discussion of this idea among his pupils and in 2000 published a paper with a few pages dedicated to the subject, where submerged literature served as a label encompassing mainly those texts that were not protected during their transmission by social contexts and institutions and were therefore excluded by the circuits of transmission, but that can nonetheless be reconstructed. Luigi Enrico Rossi did not develop his project any further.

As an ideal continuation of his project, a research group of Rossis pupils

This is not to say literature should be altogether dispensed with as a conventional term of reference, although one should be aware of the potential misapprehensions resting with a notion that is ill-suited to represent a properly emic point of view.

As a working definition, we propose to understand literature for the purposes of this volume as a concept covering the whole range of texts produced for a socially relevant occasion; that is, all the texts that contributed to configure and articulate Greek culture as we know it from written and material sources, with the additional proviso that the term literature be used as a non-evaluative term. This definition implies a reassessment of the term literature and its extension to include, alongside preserved and lost texts, those texts we may reconstruct circumstantially, by way of investigation, regardless of their having been conceived for transmission. In this respect, reflecting upon submerged literature may provide a new way and a new model to understand texts and cultural history. Within the scope of submerged literature we may therefore take into account texts ranging from the religious to the legal or anthropological domains, from forensic speeches to choral odes, from mystery cult texts to lullabies. This does not mean that the term literature, under this definition, can be foisted upon any variety of distinct textual types: in our perspective, on the contrary, whether a certain text is a literary text is no longer an informative question; our assumption, rather, is to regard Ancient Greek texts as a unified and interrelated province.

This book, moreover, reflects an approach to Greek texts as context rather than text, that cropped up early on in our investigation, an approach that bestows primacy to occasion and hence performance, and follows the lead of a In this direction, the investigation on submerged literature endeavours to tackle the occasions as well as the contexts, the spaces, and the conditions of transmission and diffusion of Ancient Greek texts, benefiting from anthropological and archeological hermeneutics as well. The picture that we offer in this volume criss-crosses dynamics of synchrony and diachrony, and explores the twilight area dividing lost and submerged texts. The essays contained here deal with questions of hermeneutics, philology and methodology as well as with epic Cycles, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, satyr play, and mime. In dealing with these genres from the point of view of submerged literature, the book attempts to provide a more precise contextualization of the texts in the ancient Greek system of communication and performance, mapping those texts individually and by typology together with the occasions of their performance.

This volume is a collaborative and shared work, as it sprouts from continual, intense, and rewarding discussions of the research group: each paper has been thoroughly discussed, scrutinized and commented upon in informal meetings by all the contributors to this volume. In this respect the volume rather represents a common undertaking than a set individual achievements, leading to final conclusions bearing the authorship of the entire research group.

This climate of lively and engaged scholarly conversations as well as the practice of putting es meson the issues at stake is the beautiful and standing legacy of our teacher, who often remarked that discussion is the essential part of any seminar.

The volume intends to encourage further extensive investigation that will hopefully foster a new understanding of ancient Greek culture and envisage its unique dynamics of orality and literacy under a new hermeneutic frame. To be sure, this first volume cannot aspire to completeness: it is our aim to pursue a more thorough treatment of the subject, from different angles, in two forthcoming volumes of the series we here inaugurate. It should at this point be apparent that the objective of this first stage in the research was to state a case (albeit broadly framed), rather than to supply all of the answers.