Variety in Roman Literature and Thought

Classical culture is often thought to be governed by ideals of order, decorum and unity, but this would be to neglect the importance of variety as a value and as an aesthetic principle. This study examines the significance of variety both as a concept in Roman thought and as a phenomenon in Latin literature. The different value that might be attributed to variety in different spheres of activity tells us much about Roman culture and its areas of dispute, while the character of Latin literature is decisively affected by the pursuit of variety. The first part of the study considers the concept of variety in Roman thought, while the second and third parts focus on variety in Latin literature, first in relation to particular genres and then in the miscellaneous collections (of poems, letters or essays) which are such an important feature of Latin literature. In literary genres which feature a first-person speaker, the speaking subject may be characterized by the way in which that subject confronts a varied world. In collections of varied individual units (poems, essays, letters) variety constructs a particular kind of world, and the principle of variety is used to different effect in each case. Little has been written on variety, partly because it seems too broad and elusive as a concept or too obvious as an aesthetic principle to be worth pursuing. The object of this study is to bring it into focus and, in the final chapter, to consider how the Roman concept of variety survives, functions and changes in European thought from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century and beyond.

This book is intended to be a contribution to the understanding of Roman thought and literature, but it is obviously a topic which has considerable importance for our own culture, in which experience is variegated, distracted and heterogeneous and concepts such as 'choice' and 'diversity' play a significant role. My recent book on Martial drew attention to the relevance of Martial's epigrammatic world to our own, and the relation between ancient and modern has been a preoccupation of mine over the last ten years. I have been working on a book intended for a general audience that will present Latin literature as a corpus through which we can reflect on contemporary issues at a distance. The project on variety is intended for a scholarly audience, but its findings will make their way into the other book intended for a wider readership. Of course, a great deal of specialist scholarship impacts the non-academic world through a string of intermediaries rather than directly, but in this case I will myself be converting the products of my research into a book I am writing myself.