Talk Description:

For centuries, Roman literary culture was defined by the coexistence of Greek and Latin within a shared elite milieu. By the fourth century C.E., however, the seams holding together the Roman east and west were beginning to fray. This talk uses an apocryphal collection of correspondence attributed to the Apostle Paul of Tarsus and the philosopher Seneca as a lens for understanding the collapse of Rome’s long-standing bilingual literary system in late antiquity. The Christianisation of the Roman elite began to fundamentally reshape Roman conceptions of literature: in the west, Homer and the Athenian classics were replaced at the center of the canon by the Christian Bible (in Latin translation) and Greek was displaced as a necessary component of elite education.

I argue that that the letters of Paul and Seneca are an illustrative document of how Latin literature became detached from its Greek counterpart, and how Christianity provided the conditions for Latin to begin to imagine itself as a self-sufficient literary tradition. By placing Seneca within a Christian textual framework and Paul within a Latin one, the letters exemplify the cultural realignments through which Roman literature ceased to be bilingual, giving birth to the monolingual, Christianized Latin traditions of the medieval west. These developments in late antiquity continue to distort dominant understandings of Rome and its literature to this day, where Latin is often taken as a defining aspect of Romanness despite the survival of a Greek Roman (Byzantine) state for a millennium after Rome’s collapse in the west.

Short Bio:

Paul Johnston is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and a Lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Classics. He received his Ph.D. in Classical Philology and Comparative Literature from Harvard University and his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His first book project argues that the extant Greek and Latin texts of the Roman world are the product of a single, bilingual literary culture associated with the structures of the Roman state. It reframes the literary world of the Roman republic and early empire, from Polybius and Cato to Crinagoras and Propertius, and beyond, as an interconnected system where texts in both languages circulated among overlapping networks of patronage and readership. In addition to his work on Roman literature and culture, he has published articles on Greek tragedy, ancient Greek onomastics, and the reception and translation of the classics in the 20th century.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.