The Transformations of Autocracy in Postclassical and Early Christian Literature

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This project focuses on the ‘spatial pragmatics’ of the Greek and Roman imperial literature. The term ‘spatial pragmatics’ is used in the sense of a combination of cognitive mechanisms and cultural practices that enable a society to project a coherent self-image and to orient itself in the political space in accordance with that idealized template. Literature is treated as one of such cultural practices that serve to endow geography with purposeful structure. The goal of this project is to compose the third part of a trilogy that investigates the links between the transformations of the political geography of the Mediterranean and the history of Greek and Roman literature. Part I, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2022, investigates the links between the development of Greek literature from Homer to Theocritus and the shifts in the political geography of Greece from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. Part II, currently in progress, applies a similar approach to the history of Roman poetry from Catullus to Ovid. The proposed third part will extend this approach to the development of Greek and Roman literature in post-Augustan Rome. It will trace the impact of contemporary images of Rome as an autocratic universal empire both on the post-classical heirs of the classical literary tradition and on the emergence of Christianity – a critical alternative not only to imperial ideology but also to the classical canon. The resulting trilogy will make a plausible case not only for the view of ancient literature from Homer to Augustin as an instrument/product of spatial pragmatics but also for the use of spatial pragmatics as a toolkit applicable in other areas of cultural studies.