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.
