Book Details

Greek culture matters because its unique pluralistic debate shaped modern discourses. This ground-breaking book explains this feature by retelling the history of ancient literary culture through the lenses of canon, space and scale. It proceeds from the invention of the performative 'author' in the archaic symposium through the 'polis of letters' enabled by Athenian democracy and into the Hellenistic era, where one's space mattered and culture became bifurcated between Athens and Alexandria. This duality was reconfigured into an eclectic variety consumed by Roman patrons and predicated on scale, with about a thousand authors active at any given moment. As patronage dried up in the third century CE, scale collapsed and literary culture was reduced to the teaching of a narrower field of authors, paving the way for the Middle Ages. The result is a new history of ancient culture which is sociological, quantitative, and all-encompassing, cutting through eras and genres.

How many authors were there in antiquity? Where did they work? How was the 'canon' made? This book provides an account of ancient culture in terms of such quantifiable questions. The end result explains why the Greeks were unique in creating a culture based on pluralistic debate.

Reviel Netz is the Patrick Suppes Professor of Greek Mathematics and Astronomy at Stanford University, California. He is a prolific author in many fields, from verse through literary theory to modern environmental history, and his core field is the history of the ancient exact sciences. He has pursued a more cultural, cognitive and literary approach to the history of science and has published a series of studies, beginning with The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics (Cambridge, 1999). He is also the translator and editor of the Cambridge editions of the works of Archimedes, two volumes of which have been published to date, and one of the main contributors to the study of the Archimedes Palimpsest, on which he co-authored (with William Noel) The Archimedes Codex (2007), which has been translated into eighteen languages.