Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome

Classical scholarship tends to treat anonymous authorship as a problem or game—a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. But anonymity can be a source of meaning unto itself, rather than a gap that needs filling. Tom Geue’s close readings of Latin texts show what the suppression or loss of a name can do for literature.

Table of Contents:
Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Epigraphs Introduction: Literature Unmastered I. THE POWER OF THE NAME 1. Name Power 2. Tongue Ties: Ovid’s Ibis 3. A Play without Names: Octavia II. THE UNIVERSAL NO-NAME 4. Phaedrus by Name 5. Poet Seeks Patron: An Open Letter from Me to You, Or Numerosa Laus 6. The Timeless Pastoral of Calpurnius Siculus III. WHENCE AND WHEN 7. Whence: Sources, Frames, Contexts 8. Historical Transcendence Conclusion: Unknowing Literature Acknowledgments Notes References General Index Index Locorum

Review :
Geue homes in on the many post-Augustan texts that rail against traditional modes of self-memorialization, and turn towards anonymity not just as a survival strategy and tool for political satire under autocracy, but also as a creative experiment in deliberate decontextualization, and a means of exploring class power, authority and the status of knowledge...[A] provocative book. -- Victoria Rimell Times Literary Supplement Geue mounts a powerful and meticulous case for a poetics of the unknown, setting up not just a new agenda for ancient texts, but an updated ethics for literary history itself. -- Irene Peirano, author of The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake What is a text without context? Can we separate the art from the artist? How does the signature of an artist shape the ways in which we hate, love, or even forget an object? This innovative and sophisticated book engages with an array of imperial Roman works--from graffiti art to epic poetry--and asks us to embrace literary anonymity, in antiquity and in our own time. With disarming directness, Geue has challenged us to rethink our urge to uncover the 'real' author of ancient texts. -- Sarah E. Bond, author of Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professionals in the Roman Mediterranean In this engaging book, Geue inventively repositions uncertain authorship as a feature that adds, rather than detracts, from the richness of ancient texts. You may not immediately notice how thoroughly he subverts some of the most basic assumptions about the centrality of historical context in Classical Studies. -- Donna Zuckerberg, author of Not All Dead White Men