Reading Greco-Roman Egypt

Who read the Iliad in antiquity (and how much of it)? Which plays of Euripides did people read the most? They say that the Greek novel was a popular genre: was it? And if so, which ones were people reading? What can we say about how people read Greek literature from the manuscripts that remain, as well as the various summaries, glosses, and commentaries that were read alongside them? It should go without saying that people did not read only what survived to be canonized in later periods as the “classics” of ancient Greek literature: how did all the other literary texts they read affect the way we think they read our “classics,” or, conversely, how and to what extent did our “classics” influence the literature that they read but failed to make the leap to our subsequent manuscript tradition?

One can look on the papyri that survive from Greco-Roman Egypt as a literary Burgess Shale: it preserves an entire literary ecosystem, including both the ancestors of medieval manuscripts and a mass of textual fossils--and even whole genres--that were, from a literary history perspective, evolutionary dead-ends. This class explores the literary and sub-literary texts that survive from Greco-Roman Egypt with the aims of (1) reconstructing something of the literary ecology of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, and (2) reintegrating canonical classical Greek authors and works in the context of that ecology in which they were copied, read, studied, taught, and performed. In its fully realized expression, such a project of reconstruction and reintegration would take into account not only Greek literary and sub-literary production, but also all the texts in other languages and scripts (e.g., Egyptian, Latin, Aramaic, etc.) that once roamed the literary landscape, including Christian theological and documentary texts. There is, however, good reason to believe that the Greek literary graphomene of Egypt (as well as other regions of the
Greek East) was in fact relatively self-contained, almost an island sub-ecology, and as such represents a coherent and profitable object of study.

The course will begin with an introduction to Greco-Roman Egypt and what we know about books, book production, literacy, education, libraries, and the reading culture(s) of the region. We will then take the case of the Homeric epics as a case study in reconstructing how a specific author, text or genre was read in antiquity, before devoting individual sessions to some of the following topics: occasional