Jeremiah Coogan (University of Oxford)
How did enslaved labor influence the composition of literary texts in the Roman Mediterranean? This paper attends to the role of enslaved labor in order to reimagine what compositional practices we imagine as possible and, thereby, to enable a better reading of how ancient texts employ their sources. Conventional wisdom has long held that authors of Greek and Latin prose narratives used only one source at a time (Luce 1978 on Livy; Pelling 1979 and 1980 on Plutarch). These arguments often reflect careful reading of literary relationships, but also sometimes depend on physiological and technological assertions about plausibility: Authors are assumed not to be able to access multiple bookrolls at once. This assumption rules out so-called ‘micro-conflation’ (tightly interweaving multiple sources in the same passage of a new composition). As a result, scholars must contort the evidence in order to avoid this perceived impossibility. Yet the assertion of implausibility is problematic because it assumes an individual author working alone. Ancient authors often utilized enslaved workers both to read aloud and to transcribe texts (Starr 1991; Blake 2012). Modern scholars thus continue to reproduce the ancient erasure of enslaved labor (Fitzgerald 2000), even as they attempt to reconstruct the material practices by which ancient texts were produced. By contrast, attending to the presence of enslaved labor enables a fresh reading of literary relationships in a number of specific cases. I analyze several sets of data where one can observe the granular interweaving of multiple prior source texts. In addition to re-reading examples from Livy and Plutarch discussed by Luce and Pelling, I offer further examples of micro-conflation from Galen’s In Hippocratis De acutorum morborum victu and the New Testament Gospel according to Luke. Recognizing the unacknowledged role of other individuals—most likely enslaved or servile—in these compositional contexts invites us to reconsider assumptions about singular authorial agency in ancient textual production more broadly.