Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FRRAnt (Ordering, Constructing, Empowering: Fragments of the Roman Republican Antiquarians)
Reporting period: 2022-05-01 to 2023-10-31
The aim of the project is to transform radically our understanding of the Roman Republican world by establishing a new textual and contextual framework for the elaboration of knowledge and the establishment of the religious and institutional system, and its Greek philosophical underpinnings, in the Republic. This, in turn, will have an enormous impact on the study of those later periods, which look back at Rome as a focal point of cultural reference.
The project aims to do so through the first systematic and comprehensive account of Roman Republican antiquarians, who, writing in prose, laid out a new way of ordering knowledge, and in the process, described the world for their contemporaries as well as for us. By antiquarian we mean those works united by a family resemblance in the way they approached the past: contrary to the chronological approach of narrative history writing, they were tied to a synchronic arrangement and appeared at first sight to collect all evidence for a given phenomenon without explicitly evaluating its relevance to a particular problem. By adopting a philological method, they moved from the present to reconstruct the past. Their subject matters focused on political institutions and laws, religion, private life and customs, topography, and language. Contrary to the assumption that the antiquarians operated in a detached world of scholarly endeavours, these guardians of knowledge and traditions were not only restorers, but also innovators of the world around them. In setting up their works as the object of enquiry, FRRAnt seeks to trace the ways in which these Romans not only thought about their past, but also constructed their present and laid the foundation for their future.
Their works are preserved in a fragmentary way, through quotations in later authors, often in texts of a completely different nature, and later scholarship has tended to divide up this material in subfields of knowledge (for example, grammar, law, history), and so obscuring its deeper continuities and undermining their collective contribution to the re-shaping of the Roman intellectual horizon.
By excavating, editing, translating, and interpreting for the first time the complete surviving evidence about the antiquarians of the Republic and making widely accessible a body of critically significant texts that have never been seen in their entirety, as well as by publishing co-edited volumes and a series of analytical studies, FRRAnt’s aim is not only to transform our understanding of the intellectual life of the Roman Republic, but also to provide our contemporary society with a viable intellectual resource to think again and with some perspective about the way we conceptualise the world around us.
The project aims to do so through the first systematic and comprehensive account of Roman Republican antiquarians, who, writing in prose, laid out a new way of ordering knowledge, and in the process, described the world for their contemporaries as well as for us. By antiquarian we mean those works united by a family resemblance in the way they approached the past: contrary to the chronological approach of narrative history writing, they were tied to a synchronic arrangement and appeared at first sight to collect all evidence for a given phenomenon without explicitly evaluating its relevance to a particular problem. By adopting a philological method, they moved from the present to reconstruct the past. Their subject matters focused on political institutions and laws, religion, private life and customs, topography, and language. Contrary to the assumption that the antiquarians operated in a detached world of scholarly endeavours, these guardians of knowledge and traditions were not only restorers, but also innovators of the world around them. In setting up their works as the object of enquiry, FRRAnt seeks to trace the ways in which these Romans not only thought about their past, but also constructed their present and laid the foundation for their future.
Their works are preserved in a fragmentary way, through quotations in later authors, often in texts of a completely different nature, and later scholarship has tended to divide up this material in subfields of knowledge (for example, grammar, law, history), and so obscuring its deeper continuities and undermining their collective contribution to the re-shaping of the Roman intellectual horizon.
By excavating, editing, translating, and interpreting for the first time the complete surviving evidence about the antiquarians of the Republic and making widely accessible a body of critically significant texts that have never been seen in their entirety, as well as by publishing co-edited volumes and a series of analytical studies, FRRAnt’s aim is not only to transform our understanding of the intellectual life of the Roman Republic, but also to provide our contemporary society with a viable intellectual resource to think again and with some perspective about the way we conceptualise the world around us.
The PI, the post-doctoral researchers and the project members of UCL Research Software Development Group and the Centre for Advanced Research Computing have worked very closely to build FRRAnt database, a state-of-the-art digital platform, currently working as FRRAnt’s shared research tool, which, at the end of the project, will be transformed into an open access database. UCL ARC has already made some of its most innovative features available to the wider Digital Humanities community on GitHub. The platform has enabled the research team to piece together the complex network of relationships between fragmentary texts via the user interface on the website. This currently host the works of 139 authors (about 50 more than those previously known) and 3341 fragments.
The PI organised a research seminar series (15 seminars in total) to discuss important topics of antiquarian relevance as well as themes of central importance to the FRRAnt’s edition, such as the citing practices of later authors. The PI also organised a reading group (8 meetings) where team members discussed key texts with invited experts to explore the issue of definition. In addition, the PI organised two meetings with the Academic Advisory Board to present the project and discuss philological innovations and questions, the edition’s chronological framework and issues of inclusion/exclusion.
The research team has been reading and scrutinising the citing sources to identify and record fragments and related material, some of which was previously unknown, and we have also started to analyse the data, carrying out five pilot cases to test the devised methods.
The PI has established collaborations with related projects and institutions, which gave rise to three workshops and one international conference. In addition, plans for two more workshops and an international conference in Rome are currently under way.
The project and its research have been presented at 49 conferences, seminars, workshops, and training sessions. The code behind the project database is open-source and available on GitHub.
To date, 6 papers have been published, a further 14 are forthcoming (publication delay mainly connected to the Covid-pandemic), and 10 are in preparation. A major volume, co-edited by the PI and one of the post-doctoral researchers, is in preparation and will be published by Cambridge University Press.
The PI organised a research seminar series (15 seminars in total) to discuss important topics of antiquarian relevance as well as themes of central importance to the FRRAnt’s edition, such as the citing practices of later authors. The PI also organised a reading group (8 meetings) where team members discussed key texts with invited experts to explore the issue of definition. In addition, the PI organised two meetings with the Academic Advisory Board to present the project and discuss philological innovations and questions, the edition’s chronological framework and issues of inclusion/exclusion.
The research team has been reading and scrutinising the citing sources to identify and record fragments and related material, some of which was previously unknown, and we have also started to analyse the data, carrying out five pilot cases to test the devised methods.
The PI has established collaborations with related projects and institutions, which gave rise to three workshops and one international conference. In addition, plans for two more workshops and an international conference in Rome are currently under way.
The project and its research have been presented at 49 conferences, seminars, workshops, and training sessions. The code behind the project database is open-source and available on GitHub.
To date, 6 papers have been published, a further 14 are forthcoming (publication delay mainly connected to the Covid-pandemic), and 10 are in preparation. A major volume, co-edited by the PI and one of the post-doctoral researchers, is in preparation and will be published by Cambridge University Press.
The building of the first ever database of Roman Republican Antiquarians goes in itself beyond the current state of the art. By enabling the gathering, editing, translating, and interpreting of the complete surviving evidence of the Roman Republican antiquarians for the first time, it makes widely accessible a body of critically significant texts that have never been seen in their entirety and enables the delineation of a phenomenon of great importance also for later centuries. The dataset so far gathered is already enabling new research in numerous fields, such as, for example, philosophy of language, constitutionalism, religion, and knowledge formation, as attested in FRRAnt’s 31 published and forthcoming analytical studies. This work, which will be consolidated and extended in the remaining life of the project, has established new editorial methods to capture the distinctive richness of this tradition in a way that is both philologically rigorous and historically transformative, while the new digital tool is enabling cross-analysis in the most effective manner.
To a certain extent unexpectedly, new authors have been identified (so far 139 against the 90 originally identified), and previously unknown fragmentary texts have been brought to light. At the end of the project, we expect to contribute significantly to a more general understanding of fragmentary texts, to the reception of Republican works in imperial and late antique periods, and to the ancient (and by extension early modern and modern) antiquarian phenomenon, which is the primary objective of the overall project.
To a certain extent unexpectedly, new authors have been identified (so far 139 against the 90 originally identified), and previously unknown fragmentary texts have been brought to light. At the end of the project, we expect to contribute significantly to a more general understanding of fragmentary texts, to the reception of Republican works in imperial and late antique periods, and to the ancient (and by extension early modern and modern) antiquarian phenomenon, which is the primary objective of the overall project.