| The term "encyclopedia"---or rather its neo-Greek and Latin predecessors---was not used as a generic descriptor until the late 15th century CE. Classical scholars nevertheless frequently speak of encyclopedias in Greco-Roman antiquity in reference to the compilations of technical and scientific information that appeared, in particular, from the Roman Republican Period onward. This dissertation asks: In what sense did encyclopedias exist in antiquity? What are their common features? How do they differ from each other?;I argue that we can speak of a culture of "encyclopedism" in Imperial Rome and by implication elsewhere if we shift our understanding of the encyclopedia from a generic type to a trans-generic mode of thinking, viewing, and writing based around the drive to limit and control an unlimited body of information. This drive is, however, marked by frustration: the desire to totalize, eternalize, and objectify knowledge is inevitably maned by incompleteness, obsolescence, and subjective coloring. In examining how ancient texts navigate these paradoxes, this study reveals a wider variety of approaches to the encyclopedic ideal than has previously been recognized.;In this dissertation, I assess how three authors---Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, and Artemidorus---approach the goal of writing a comprehensive and authoritative body of knowledge. What emerges is a sense that, in addition to compiling information, these authors sought to convince their readers through appeals to intellect, ideology, and aesthetics that their presentation of information is the best organized, the most complete. Their texts are contested space, where claims to knowledge are defended and, in some cases, rejected in an act of protest. |
