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Ordering, Constructing, Empowering: Fragments of the Roman Republican Antiquarians (FRRAnt) is an ERC-funded research project that aims at reconstructing in full, for the first time, the phenomenon of Roman Republican antiquarianism.
It will do so by establishing the texts and contexts of the Roman Republican antiquarians, writers whose construction of the past shaped Roman cultural identity and the religious and institutional system of the Republic. Their works constituted a revolutionary new genre that re-shaped the Roman intellectual horizon and was understood in the 19th century as a distinctive ‘antiquarian’ moment. By making available for the first time a synoptic view of Roman Republican antiquarians, FRRAnt will transform our understanding of Roman Republican culture. 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.
This project will produce the first-ever complete critical edition of the fragments of the Roman Republican antiquarians, which will be philologically rigorous and historically transformative. Supplying this edition with English translation, commentary, and introductions to each author, as well as with a series of accompanying volumes, FRRAnt’s ambition is to launch the study of these texts as a major new departure for the study of the ancient world and of the classical tradition from the Renaissance onwards.
This project, will radically transform our understanding of Roman Republican culture by firmly 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. Professor Valentina Arena
The first aim of FRRAnt is to produce the first-ever complete critical edition of the fragments of the Roman Republican antiquarians, which will be philologically rigorous and historically transformative, both as a printed edition and an online database. Supplying this edition with English translation, commentary, and introductions to each author, as well as with a series of accompanying volumes, FRRAnt’s ambition is to launch the study of these texts as a major new departure for the study of the ancient world and of the classical tradition from the Renaissance onwards.
The printed edition will be accompanied by an online database.
This electronic system will allow not only collecting, sharing and querying the research data by the project team, but also transforming the data into formats for external use. These data stored in the database will also be linked with pre-existing material, thus the database will contain a higher quantity of information pertaining to issues of both content and text than the printed edition. This would benefit in particular those researchers who are not interested in Republican antiquarianism per se, but rather in related fields.
The advantages of the online database will be to provide the user with the opportunity not only to access this material in translation, but also to order it as preferred, making the most of ‘breaking free of the impossibility of assigning fragments to books’ by allowing users to arrange the material according to their judgment and explore more widely the intellectual landscape of the Republic.
There are two main issues in dealing with the production of the antiquarians: first their works are mainly preserved in a fragmentary way, through quotations in later authors, often in texts of a completely different nature, and secondly, later scholarship has tended to divide this material in subfields of knowledge and so obscuring its deeper continuities, and undermining their collective contribution to the political and philosophical debate in ancient Rome.
Considering the enormous – almost constitutive – influence of antiquarian studies over the course of early modern and modern cultural history, it is remarkable how little attention has been paid to the nature of these works in their original context of ancient Republican Rome. One of the most authoritative scholars in the field, Arnaldo Momigliano, in his study ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ published in 1950, first established the field of antiquarian studies by referring to changes introduced by disciplinary knowledge and in relation to history. However, Momigliano’s brilliant essay has also tended to constrain subsequent scholarship. Building on the Saussurean distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic, Momigliano advocated that ancient antiquarianism was characterised by a distinctive interest in remote changes along a synchronic axis. However, this distinction is overstated, and created too sharp a dichotomy between history and antiquarianism, setting up the historian against the antiquary. As a result, two main consequences in the investigation of different ways of recording and narrating the past followed: first, a focus on the issue of the definition of antiquarianism vis-à-vis history; the second a disregard of the pivotal role played by philology in the development of antiquarian studies.
Not only did textual exegesis combine philology with an understanding of the history of religion, legal practices, and literary works, but also classical lexicography took precisely the form of the study of etymology. Whether investigating Roman history, language, family genealogy, jurisprudence, religious lore, or political procedure, antiquarian tools were historical research and etymology, a genealogical-reconstructive method which was substantially inductive and aimed to work back from the present.
Events
International Conference, ‘Antiquarianism: Ancient and (Early) Modern’, Rome, 18-21 June 2024
Workshop on ‘Antiquarian Grammarians or Grammarian Antiquarians?’, with Alessandro Garcea, Javier Uría Varela, Ramon Gutiérrez and Costas Panayotakis), Paris, dates to be confirmed
Workshop on ‘Verse and Prose in dialogue: an Antiquarian Affair’, UCL, dates to be confirmed
FRRAnt International Conferences
‘The Hellenistic World of Roman Republican Antiquarianism’, UCL, 2-4 February 2023.
FRRAnt Research Seminars, UCL
A. Zago (Pisa), Ordering, Constructing, Empowering the Latin Language: the survival of Republican sources in Latin Grammarian, 26th June 2023
I. Morelli (La Sapienza, Rome), Cassiodorus and his Manuscript Tradition, 25th Nov. 2022
Peter van Nuffelen (Ghent), Antiquarianism in Late Antiquity, 22nd Nov. 2022
Gillian Clark (Bristol), ‘“Varro admits…”: how Augustine cites Varro’, 16th March 2022
Irene Leonardis (Potsdam), ‘Reading Plato’s Laws to understand Varro’s Antiquarianism: Possible New Evidence for Reconstructing the De gente populi Romani’, 18th February 2022
Alessio Ameduri (Turin), ‘Tanta uarietas et historiarum confusio (Serv. ad Aen. 4,427). Varronian authorship about the encounter between Aeneas and Diomedes in Italy’, 24th January 2022
Christa Gray (Reading), ‘“I could not be without my library”: Jerome’s antiquarianism in context’’, 17th December 2021
Federica Lazzarini (Oxford/Naples), The etymology of the Roman antiquarians: theory and methods’, 23rd Nov. 2021
A. Pittá (FRRAnt), ‘Ex reconditis antiquitatum libris: not so certain Varronian quotations by the Early Church Fathers’, 22nd October 2021
Domenico Giordani (FRRAnt), ‘Gods of Doors’, research seminar, 9th October 2021
Martina Farese (FRRAnt), ‘Varro on the creation of the world and the ages of mankind’, 29th July 2021
A. Pittá (FRRAnt), ‘Saecula compara, Vetustas. Antiquarianism in Statius’ Silvae, Book 1’, 2nd July 2021
Stephen Bliar (FRRAnt), ‘Italian prehistory in Ennius’ Euhemerus’, 25th June 2021
R. Marshall (FRRAnt), ‘Reconstructing the lost De philosophis of Suetonius from Themistius Euphrades’, 11th June 2021
G. Manuwald (UCL), Discussion on the design of FRRAnt’s edition, 27th April 2021
Adam Gitner (Münich), On the virtues of ThLL, 26th April 2021
Meetings with FRRAnt Academic Advisory Board, UCL
4th March 2022 on the design of FRRAnt edition -- with presentations on the project (Arena), database (Marshall), Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Pliny (Blair), Solinus (Pittá), Tertullian and Augustin (Farese), Hieronymus and John the Lydian (Giordani)
2nd February 2023 on issues of inclusion and exclusion and digital presentation – with presentations on project updates (Arena), database (Giordani); Varro’s Hebdomades (Pittá), Varro’s Disciplinae (Farese), Alexander Polyhistor (Marshall), on Caesius (Blair)
FRRAnt Reading Groups, UCL
Daniel Vallat (Lyon) in dialogue with Martina Farese (FRRAnt), 8th July 2022 - on Servuis
Nino Luraghi (Oxford) in dialogue with Stephen Blair (FRRAnt), - on Castor of Rhodes (17th June 2022)
Leonfranc Holford-Strevens (Oxford) in dialogue with Giorgio Piras (FRRAnt) 28th April 2022 – on ‘Pliny an antiquarian?’
Adam Gitner (Münich, ThLL), in dialogue with Antonino Pittá (FRRAnt) – on Solinus ‘auctus’ 1st April 2022
Rosalind Thomas (Oxford) in dialogue with Richard Marshall (FRRAnt), 10th March 2022 – on Alexander Polyhistor Wolfgang de Melo (Oxford) in dialogue with Martina Farese (FRRAnt), 25th February 2022– on Varro’s de lingua Latina
Ed Bispham (Oxford) in dialogue with Domenico Giordani (FRRAnt), 11th February 2022 – on Varro’s Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum
Tim Cornell (Manchester) in dialogue with Stephen Blair (FFRAnt), 28th January 2022- on C. Sempronius Tuditanus, M. Iunius Congus ‘Gracchanus’, and Atticus.
FRRAnt Workshops
‘When The Antiquarians meet Laughter’, with M. Deufert and his team (Leipzig) (10th September 2021) and (31st March 2022)
Workshop 1: FRRAnt presentations by A. Pittá, ‘The citing practices of Tertullian and Solinus: some problems’, by Blair, ‘Tertullian’s self-revision (ad nationes and apologeticum)’, and by Marshall, ‘Varro and the de opificio Dei’
Workshop 2: FRRAnt presentations by Giordani, ‘Varro’s Quaestiones Plautinae’ and by Farese, ‘Artes poeticae and literary canons: the Antiquarians' contribution to the reception of Roman Comedy’’
‘Antiquarian Encounter between Greece and Rome: Greek and Roman Antiquarian Fragments, a conversation with Brill’s New Jacoby’ with Stephan Schörn and his team (Leuven), 25th Nov. 2022: FRRAnt presentations on Festus by Blair and Farese; on Augustine’s de musica and Pliny/Solinus by Pittá, on the indices of Pliny’ by Marshall
Project Team
Professor Valentina Arena, UCL
Principal Investigator
Valentina Arena is Professor of Ancient History at University College London, UK. Her work focuses on the history of ancient ideas and ancient political thought as well as the wider intellectual landscape of the Roman Republic. She is the author of Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the late Roman Republic (Cambridge 2012) and the editor of Liberty: an Ancient Concept for the Contemporary World (special issue of Journal of the History of European Ideas 2016, republished by Routledge Liberty: Ancient Ideas and Modern Perspectives 2021).
Alongside the Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic (forthcoming, 2021), she has co-edited two volumes on Varro and the antiquarian tradition, Varronian Moments (special issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2017) and Reconstructing the Republic: Varro and Imperial Authors (special issue of Res publica Litterarum 2018).
Dr Stephen Blair, UCL
Research Fellow
Stephen Blair’s research centres on the fragmentary remains of the earliest Roman historical literature in prose, epic and drama. He received his PhD in Classics from Princeton University in 2019 and joined FRRAnt as a postdoctoral research fellow in December 2020. His current monograph project is a thematic study of the methods and interests of Republican ab urbe condita historians, whose choice of a narrative form stretching from the earliest traditions to the authors’ own day enabled them to negotiate ruptures and continuities between a malleable antiquity and a changing present.
Dr Richard Marshall, UCL
Research Fellow
r.m.a.marshall@ucl.ac.uk
Richard joined UCL in 2020 as a Research Fellow of FRRAnt. His work focuses on the scholarship of Republican and early Imperial Rome, its philosophical and ideological underpinnings, and its fate at the hands of subsequent ancient readers and early editors. He has allied interests in ancient historiography and pedagogy, the history of the book, and ancient mathematics. He is currently working on an edition of the mathematical texts transmitted with the corpus of Roman land-surveying treatises, with future plans to edit the fragmentary remains of Suetonius.
Before joining UCL, Richard also worked on the 'Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators' project at the University of Glasgow, and has lectured at Oxford, Glasgow, and the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Dr Domenico Giordani, UCL
Research Fellow
domenico.giordani@lmh.ox.ac.uk
Domenico Giordani holds a DPhil in Classical Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford (St John’s). He worked as Language Instructor at the Faculty of Classics at Oxford and as Lecturer in Latin at Lady Margaret Hall (Oxford). His research interests gravitate around textual criticism, early Latin metre, socio-linguistics, and the application of interpretative frames drawn from anthropological research to the study of ancient societies.
Domenico joined UCL in October 2021 as a Research Fellow of FRRAnt. In his capacity as a member of the FRRAnt team, he contributes to the editing and commenting of the scattered remains of antiquarian works from the Republican period. His other projects include a critical edition with commentary of Titus Maccius Plautus’ Trinummus (in progress for Oxford University Press) and a monograph on silence and marginality in Roman culture.
Dr Antonino Pitta’, Universitá Cattolica (Milan)
FRRAnt Visiting Expert and UCL Honorary Lecturer
Antonino Pittà is an Honorary Lecturer at UCL and postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan). He holds a PhD in Latin Philology from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
His research interests include manifold aspects of Latin literature and material culture, at different stages of their historical development: Roman Antiquarianism and its transmission, with special attention to Varro’s fragmentary works; late-antique Lexicography and its relationship with Early and Late-Republican literature (esp. Nonius Marcellus and the lex Lindsay); the manuscript tradition and early reception of Virgil’s works; poetry of the Imperial Age (mainly Statius, along with Ovid and Lucan); style and content of technical prose (Varro, Pliny, Solinus). He has published two critical editions with a commentary (Varro’s De vita populi Romani and Statius’ Silvae Book I: Domitian’s poems).
As a member of the Advisory Board, he takes part in the survey of ancient sources, which is aimed at reviewing and editing the fragments of Roman Republican Antiquarians. He contributes to the general research activity of the Board and takes part in collateral initiatives such as workshops and seminars concerning Republican Antiquarianism.
Professor Giorgio Piras, La Sapienza University (Rome)
FRRAnt Senior Visiting Expert and UCL Honorary Lecturer
Giorgio Piras is a Professor of Classics (“Filologia classica”) at the Department of Classics at La Sapienza, Rome University. His work has focused particularly on Varro’s De lingua Latina, including the publication ofVarrone e i ‘poetica verba’. Studio sul settimo libro del ‘De lingua Latina’ (Bologna 1998). He is currently working on a new critical edition of Varro’s text for the ‘Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Latinorum Teubneriana’, as well as preparing a comprehensive study on the manuscript tradition and a complete commentary on the text. Giorgio has also carried out research on the history of grammatical ancient theories, the transmission of classical and humanistic texts, and the history of classical scholarship. He has authored and edited several volumes and articles on these subjects. Giorgio has previously been a member of the Academic Senate and is currently the editor in chief of the journal Scienze dell’Antichità and Head of the Department of Classics at La Sapienza. Giorgio is also Member of FRRAnt Editorial Board and Academic Advisory Board.
Dr Daniel Vallat, HiSoMA Laboratory and Université Lumière Lyon 2
FRRAnt Senior Visiting Expert
Dr Daniel Vallat is lecturer in Latin and Greek, member of the HiSoMA laboratory, Honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), class of 2014, and Managing Editor of the online journal Eruditio Antiqua. His field of expertise is Latin poetry and late antique commentaries, Greco-Latin philological erudition and Greco-Latin literary onomastics. He is the author of numerous publications, amongst which include: Onomastique, culture et société dans les Epigrammes de Martial ; Poétique(s) des commentaires antiques, co-edited with S. Clément-Tarantino and J.-Ch. Jolivet ; Servius, Commentaire sur l’Enéide de Virgile, Livre 1, co-edited avec M. Vallat-Béjuis. He is currently working on the edition (with translation and commentary) of the Latin Anthology and on the Scholia Veronensia to Virgil.’
Dr Martina Farese, La Sapienza University (Rome)
FRRAnt Visiting Expert and UCL Honorary Research Associate
Martina is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at “La Sapienza” University in Rome and she joined the FRRAnt project in 2021 as a Visiting Fellow. She holds a PhD in Latin Philology from “La Sapienza” University, where she conducted research on Varro’s Menippean Satires, investigating, in particular, their relationship with Roman Comic Theatre.
She has also collaborated on various projects, working on sources on ancient italic civilizations and on Roman legal texts. Currently, her work focuses on the depiction of Nature and italic landscape in Roman Antiquarianism. Her main research interests are Varro, scholarly tradition and Roman Antiquarianism, as well as Roman satirical writing and ancient Menippean Satire.
Professor Christopher Smith, University of St Andrews
FRRAnt Editorial Board Member and CEO of the AHRC
Professor Christopher Smith is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews and was Director of the British School at Rome, the UK’s leading humanities and creative arts research institute overseas, from 2009 to 2017.
Professor Smith’s research explores constitutionalism and state formation with particular emphasis on the development of Rome as a political and social community, and how this was represented in ancient historical writing and subsequent political thought. He is the author or editor of over 20 books, including a major edition of the Fragments of the Roman Historians, and is advisor to a project on The Fragments of Republican Roman Orators.
Jessica Clarke, UCL
Administration and Research Support - Project start until 2023.
Jessica joined the FRRAnt Team as the project administrator and research support for the FRRAnt project. She has previously worked on multiple research projects associated with the British Museum, including two recent exhibitions. She is also currently a PhD student in the UCL History department, where her esearch examines the relationship between theatre and political culture in the late Roman Republic and early Imperial period. Taking a new approach to the well-studied literary sources on this topic, Jessica’s research explores the visual record, aiming to re-evaluate the role of theatre within Roman socio-political culture. Jessica finished her role as Project Administrator and Research Support mid 2023 to focus on the finalisation of her PhD.
Melanie Horstead, UCL
Project Administrator and Research Assistant 2023 -
Melanie took over the Project Administrator role for the FRRAnt Team in 2023. Melanie is a project management professional and conference organiser at UCL (University College London). She helps establish and develop projects from concept through to operation and delivery and liaises with teams to help produce post-project impact reports. She works directly with external partner organisations, and is adept at partnership management and building relationships with individual stakeholders and teams alike. She has extensive experience of managing and orchestrating bi-lingual conferences in English and French as part of her Project Administrator roles at UCL. She manages and oversees project budgets and deals with the logistics of various systems and processes for research projects at UCL. She is also responsible for website content management. Melanie holds a Masters in 'Africa and Development' from the University of Birmingham.
Dr Tom Couch, UCL
Senior Research Software Developer
Tom joined UCL in 2013 as a Research IT Facilitator where his job was to help researchers to use IT in their research through training, writing documentation, and direct support. Over time the direct support increasingly involved writing code, so in 2021 he joined the ARC collaborations team as a Research Software Developer. FRRAnt was his first project in this role, and he has loved helping to enable the platform to evolve and support the research team ever since.
Amanda Ho-Lyn, UCL
Research Web Application Developer
Amanda joined UCL ARC shortly after completing her masters in 2021. She joined FRRAnt in 2022 and she has found it to be both fulfilling and challenging in (mostly) equal measures. Amanda has really enjoyed working with the team and she looks forward to crafting new features and solutions for them.
Dr Jonathan Cooper, UCL
Head of Research Software Engineering
Jonathan leads on the Software Engineering aspects of Project FRRAnt and leads Research Software Engineering work at UCL, supporting researchers in developing high quality software to improve the reproducibility, sustainability and impact of their research. His research in this space is focused on designing the career structures and ways of working to allow these and other research technology professionals to flourish, and so maximise the effectiveness and impact of research, both at UCL and internationally.
Previously he has worked on the application of software engineering to computational biology, mostly using domain-specific languages to describe mathematical models of biology, and developing the tools required to make these more usable for researchers.
Project FRRAnt Academic Advisory Board
Professor Tim Cornell (University of Manchester); Professor Wolfgang de Melo, (Wolfson College, University of Oxford); Professor Mario De Nonno (University of Roma3); Professor Marcus Deufert (Leipzig University); Professor Carlotta Dionisotti (King’s College London); Professor Alessandro Garcea (Sorbonne University, Paris); Professor Adam Gitner (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität); Professor Dario Mantovani (Collège de France); Professor Gesine Manuwald (UCL); Professor Claudia Moatti (University Paris 8- University of Southern California); Professor Glenn W. Most (University of Chicago, and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin); Professor Christopher Smith, (University of St. Andrews, Society of Antiquaries Scotland, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Society of Arts; Professor Catherine Steel (Glasgow University); Professor Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt University); Dr Benet Salway, (UCL); Professor Christopher Smith, (University of St. Andrews, Society of Antiquaries Scotland, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Society of Arts; Professor Katharina Volk (Columbia University, New York).
The European Research Council
Funded/Co-funded by the European Union (ERC, FRRAnt, 866400). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
The European Research Council (ERC) awards Consolidator Grants of up to €2 million for 5 years to excellent researchers in their field.
The ERC’s mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, on the basis of scientific excellence. In the long term it looks to substantially strengthen and shape the European research system.