Chiara Graf, University of Maryland
Imperialism often asserts itself through an encyclopedic impulse: the drive to collect, evaluate, and classify a wide range of knowledge in a centralized archive (Mbembe 2002; Padilla Peralta 2020, 157). In Rome, this archival drive powered a panoply of intellectual practices, from the sweeping collection of facts and anecdotes in works such as Pliny’s Natural History; to practices of cross-cultural literary citation that might also be understood as a form of “spoliation” (Haimson Lushkov 2018). Ancient authors place rhetorical emphasis on the orderly organizational schemes of such collections (e.g. Vitr. 4. Praef.1; Var. L. 10.1), implicitly presenting themselves as powerful “guardian[s]” of knowledge, afforded “the hermeneutic right” to both “recall the law… and impose the law” (Derrida 1995, 10).
The imperial archive, in all its schematized orderliness, is haunted by a destabilizing threat: that of the hoard. While its most systematic iterations reinforce the dominance of the Roman subject, imperial plunder—whether of knowledge or material goods—also gives rise to anxieties about luxurious excess, disorder, and effeminacy (Loar, MacDonald, and Padilla Peralta 2018, 6). Latin authors across genres frequently invoke imagery of heaping--using words such as acervus, strues, and agger--in order to describe such morally corrupting hoards (e.g. Tib. 1.1.1; Pers. 2.44; Sen. Ben. 7.9.2).
This paper will examine two instances in which the word acervus (“heap”) is used to describe the literary collections of exempla. Posed as an alternative to the meticulous archival practices described at the opening of this abstract, the heap is fundamentally ambivalent: although it evokes the destabilizing disorder outlined above, I argue that it also hints at alternative modes of thought, which are usually excluded from the systematic encyclopedic drive of empire. Frontinus initially disavows heaping as an organizational strategy, preferring the careful selection of exempla to the confused acervi of his predecessors (Str. 1. Praef. 2.5); however, he later invites his readers to build upon his collection, heaping up (suggerere, adstruere) their own contributions in an open-ended collaboration. This cooperative heaping not only foregrounds intersubjective processes of knowledge-production that cut against the sovereignty of the masterful imperial subject, but also makes room for the boundlessness foreclosed by the (inherently exclusionary) archive.
Next, I will treat Valerius Maximus’ invocation of the acervus from the midst of his chapter on diligence (8.7.ext.9). Valerius uses heap metaphors to describe his own archival practice, as well as the diligence of his exemplary figures, whose lack of natural talent forces them to painstakingly gather together shards of knowledge in a sort of hard-earned clump. Rather than the top-down organization of imperial knowledge, Valerius foregrounds a bottom-up scraping together of ability. Furthermore, Valerius’ heaping is facilitated by the ambiguously gendered figure of personified Industry, who both spurs on military rigor and “nourishes” (nutriuntur) skills in her “bosom” (sinu) (8.7.Praef.). Ultimately, the heap does not only represent the fear of deviating dangerously from the systematicity of the imperial archive; it also glimmers with longing for the configurations of thought and subjectivity that exist outside of the latter.