Representations of Intellectual Community in Plutarch, Pliny the Younger and Aulus Gellius Jason König
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Representations of intellectual community in Plutarch, Pliny the Younger and Aulus Gellius Jason König To cite this version: Jason König. Representations of intellectual community in Plutarch, Pliny the Younger and Aulus Gellius. Archimède : archéologie et histoire ancienne, UMR7044 - Archimède, 2019, La République “ gréco-romaine ” des lettres : construction des réseaux savants et circulation des savoirs dans l’Empire romain, HS N°1, pp.54-67. halshs-02091584 HAL Id: halshs-02091584 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02091584 Submitted on 5 Apr 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. REVUE , RCHIMeDE ARCHÉOLOGIE ET HISTOIRE ANCIENNE HO, RS SERIE REPRESENTATIONS OF INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY IN PLUTARCH, PLINY THE YOUNGER AND AULUS GELLIUS Jason KÖNIG Professor of Greek University of St Andrews School of Classics [email protected] ABSTRACT Cet article montre que la période comprise entre la fi n du Ier siècle et le IIe siècle ap. J.-C. a été témoin d’im- portantes expériences visant à explorer diverses façons This chapter argues that the late fi rst and second de représenter des communautés intellectuelles. Les century CE was a period which saw important experi- Propos de table de Plutarque sont envisagés en premier ments with diff erent possibilities for representing intel- lieu : la communauté sympotique qu’il décrit est liée lectual community. I look fi rst at Plutarch’s Sympotic par un mode de conversation partagé, qui consiste à Questions: his sympotic community is tied together by engager un dialogue avec les auteurs du passé. Elle a shared style of conversation, which involves entering est aussi représentée comme une communauté pro- into dialogue with the authors of the past; it is also fondément grecque, notamment en ce que nombre represented as a strongly Greek community, not least des discussions rapportées par Plutarque se déroulent in the fact that so many of the conversations Plutarch lors de fêtes helléniques. Les Lettres de Pline le Jeune records are set at festivals. Pliny’s Letters are closely off rent un parallèle avec le projet de Plutarque : si les parallel to Plutarch’s project: there is not enough témoignages ne permettent pas d’établir avec certitude evidence to demonstrate mutual infl uence between une infl uence mutuelle entre les deux œuvres, Pline the two works conclusively, but Pliny does conjure an construit lui aussi l’image d’une communauté d’élites image of an elite community that shares the scale and d’une ampleur et d’une diversité comparables à celle variety of Plutarch’s work, although with the diff erence que décrit l’œuvre de Plutarque, bien que Pline vise that Pliny is much more interested in the portrayal of bien davantage l’élaboration du livre comme objet phy- the book as a physical object, for example in his por- sique, par exemple dans sa description d’une culture trayal of recitation culture. For Gellius too Plutarch’s de la récitation. Pour Aulu-Gelle, enfi n, les Propos de Sympotic Questions is an table de Plutarque constituent également un important important point of comparison, élément de comparaison. Plutarque est à vrai dire in fact Plutarch is one of the l’une des principales inspirations de cette œuvre, mais main inspirations for his work, l’auteur, davantage encore que but he too, even more so than Pline, accorde une place très Pliny, gives great prominence importante à l’acte de la lec- MOTS-CLШS to the act of reading; the elite ture. La communauté d’élites KEYWORDS community he presents also Plutarch, qu’il présente ne mentionne Plutarque, Pliny the Younger, has far fewer named fi gures, que quelques personnages, Pline le Jeune, Aulus Gellius, and that diff erence refl ects his ce qui refl ète son intérêt pour Aulu-Gelle, intellectual community, interest in solitary engagement la confrontation solitaire avec communauté intellectuelle, networks, with the writings of the past les écrits du passé comme réseaux, reading, lecture, symposium, as an essential complement to complément indispensable de symposium, recitation. learned conversation. la conversation érudite. récitation. Article accepté après évaluation par deux experts selon le principe du double anonymat 54 ARCHIMÈDE ARCHÉOLOGIE ET HISTOIRE ANCIENNE HORS SÉRIE N°1 2018 - p. 54 à 67 In any history of representations of intellectual examined together in any detail before. What I am community within western culture, the period from to show here is that the distinctive features of Pliny the late fi rst to the early third century CE, with its and Gellius come more clearly into view when we set explosion of prose writing in both Greek and Latin, them against the markedly Greek, Plutarchan alter- would have to play a prominent role. It is a common natives that were in circulation as they were writing. stereotype that much of that literature looked back Plutarch’s vision of philosophical community in turn to the past, and that is true especially for sophistic becomes more sharply defi ned when we view it in rhetoric in Greek, but it is also striking that a large the light of the Latin literary practices that he must proportion of it deals with scenes from contemporary have been familiar with. For all their similarities, as intellectual culture. In what follows I look at two par- we shall see, they ultimately off er quite diff erent ways ticularly important landmarks from the beginning of of imagining elite, intellectual community. this period: Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions and Pliny’s Letters. I also look at a third text from half a century or so later, Gellius’ Attic Nights, which demonstrates the importance and enduring attraction of the ways PLUTARCH of thinking about community that those two earlier writers pioneered. Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions is a collection of That is of course not to say that the idea of intel- learned conversations (95 in total, in nine books) lectual community was an invention of the late fi rst from a large number of symposia which stretch right century. The Socratic dialogues of Plato and Xenophon across Plutarch’s adult life. They cover a huge range are crucial models for Plutarch, as we shall see, as are of subjects, including literary, musical, mythological, Cicero’s Letters for Pliny; and the elite institutions of scientifi c, philosophical, historical and sympotic topics. symposium and recitation discussed below were of Each of the books opens with a preface which gives course very old ones. [1] Nevertheless, recent work moralizing recommendations for sympotic conduct on Latin literature in particular has shown that the and sympotic conversation. Clearly one of Plutarch’s reigns of Nerva and Trajan and Hadrian saw a new primary goals in this work is to conjure up a powerful interest in literary interaction, involving an increase fantasy image of intellectual community. No doubt that in the phenomenon of cross-fertilisation between image (like the parallel images conjured up by Pliny contemporary texts, and also (particularly important and Aulus Gellius) to some extent refl ected and also for the purposes of this chapter) a heightened inter- infl uenced real-life practices of intellectual conversa- est in portraying social as well as literary relations tion and literary activity and elite conviviality. But I between contemporary authors. [2] My argument should stress from the start that my primary focus here, in line with that broader picture, is that each in what follows is the images themselves rather than of these three authors experiments in original and their value as historical sources or the precise detail infl uential ways with the shared resources of com- of their relationship with that wider social and cultural munal self-representation they inherit from earlier context. Plutarch is off ering us an idealized portrait of Greek and Latin literature. There has been quite a lot a very distinctive style of social and literary interaction. of work now on each of these three texts individually, To what extent is he original in that? Clearly sym- but remarkably, they have not to my knowledge been potic literature had from the start presented images [1] The Roman institution of the recitation is said to extends their conclusions to the Greek literature of this have been founded by Asinius Pollio in 39 BCE: see period too by giving attention to Plutarch. For a related WHITE 1993: 59-63 on that early history and its later discussion of images of community in this period, see development in Augustan poetic culture. ESHLEMAN 2012, who deals also with early Christian texts; her account focuses above all on strategies for [ 2] See KNIG & WHITTON 2018 for the general point; community defi nition, and on the distinction between that volume, which arises from a St Andrews project on insiders and outsiders, whereas my main focus in what “Literary interactions under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian”, follows is on the social and literary practices that tied focuses on Latin literary interactions; the current chapter elite communities together. 55 Representations of Intellectual Community in Plutarch, Pliny the Younger and Aulus Gellius of learned, elite community. Plato’s Symposium and For a typical example one might look at Sympotic Xenophon’s Symposium in particular had projected Questions, 2, 2. Here we have a close-knit group of memorable pictures of the philosophical community Plutarch’s friends and family speaking together within around Socrates and of the conversational inclina- a relatively playful atmosphere.