Ordering, Constructing, Empowering: Fragments of the Roman Republican Antiquarians

ongoing

This project will radically transform our understanding of Roman Republican culture by establishing a new framework for the elaboration of knowledge and the religious and institutional structures of the Roman Republic. We will do so through the first systematic and comprehensive account of a group of Republican writers, who laid out a new way of ordering knowledge, and in the process, described the world for their contemporaries as well as for us. This knowledge revolution re-shaped the Roman intellectual horizon and was understood until the 19th century as a distinctive ‘antiquarian’ moment. Scattered through inaccessible collections of legal, historical, grammatical material, the knowledge revolution of the period is masked, as is the magnitude of the Roman innovation. The project’s objectives are: to broaden scholarly debates on the construction of knowledge and the political and religious culture of the Republic by collecting and making widely accessible a body of critically significant texts that have never been seen in their entirety; to transform our understanding of the intellectual life of the Roman Republic and fully explore its connections with the political and religious world of the time. By drawing on a systematic analysis of what might be considered ‘antiquarian’, we will chart the dynamics of the intellectual, political, institutional, and religious spheres at the very moment of their creative mutual interdependence. Bringing historical, linguistic, legal, religious, and philosophical expertise to bear on a close philological investigation of the source texts, we will produce the first ever edition of all the surviving ‘antiquarian’ fragments of the Republic. Supplied with analytical insights in the commentary, introduction, and related monographs, FRRAnt’s ambition is to launch the study of these texts as a major new departure for the study of ancient world and of classical tradition from the Renaissance onwards.