Ancient World Seminar: Casper de Jonge (Leiden) – “Greek Scholars in Rome: Cultural Interaction in Rhetoric and Literary Criticism”

Parthenius of Nicaea, Philodemus of Gadara, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Caecilius of Caleacte and (Pseudo-)Longinus: in the first century BC and AD many Greek scholars came to Italy, where they taught Roman students and wrote scholarly treatises on style, poetry or rhetoric. Modern scholars who study these Greek authors and their literary theories usually present them as part of a Greek tradition: their views are typically interpreted by relating them to earlier — Greek — observations of Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, the Stoics, or the Alexandrian grammarians, in whose tradition they clearly stand. But how are the texts of these Greek critics related to contemporary texts in Latin? This paper will discuss various types of interaction between Greek literary criticism and Latin texts, including both rhetorical theory (Cicero, Quintilian) and poetry (Virgil, Horace). Such Graeco-Roman interactions cast new light on the literary and intellectual discourse of Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome.

Casper C. de Jonge is Lecturer of Ancient Greek at Leiden University. He received his PhD from the same university in 2006. He was a visiting research fellow at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies (2008) and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies in Princeton (2012). His research focuses on ancient Greek rhetoric and literary criticism, the history of grammar and scholarship, and Greek intellectuals in Rome. He received grants from the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) for projects on ‘The Sublime in Context’ (2010-2013, Veni) and ‘Greek Criticism and Latin Literature’ (2014-2019, Vidi). In 2008 he published Between Grammar and Rhetoric. Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature (Leiden / Boston: Brill). He was the editor of the Dutch classics journal Lampas (2009-2015). With Piet Gerbrandy he published a Dutch translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (Groningen 2017).