| In this essay, I provide a synoptic look at the literary practices of eight different Greco-Roman groups active under the Late Republic and the Empire up to roughly the third century. The dissertation comprises five chapters, each of which centers on the literary habits of a group devoted to a particular set of texts. The first four chapters treat philosophical schools, namely, Stoics, Epicureans, Aristotelians, and Platonists; Jews and Christians are the subject of the final chapter, which is divided into four parts. Philo Judaeus is examined as a representative of Judaism in Alexandria; this is followed by a section on the Qumran Sectarians, and another on scribal culture elsewhere in Palestine. Finally, I treat Christian uses of scripture prior to the codification of the New Testament.; To speak more precisely about degrees of similarity and difference in the "bookishness" of these groups, I have examined several distinct literary practices. Corpus organization is one such activity; written commentary is another. Some groups encouraged their members to cast their texts into altered or simplified forms such as epitomes, paraphrases, and collections of excerpts; other groups frowned on this practice. In some cases, the texts of a School were expanded and re-written. I build on this formal analysis by analyzing explicit remarks about the use of books in teaching environments. Here, I focus on the details of textual performance by teachers and students, and reflect on the distinctive pedagogical strategies of the individual groups. Finally, I have proposed a schema that characterizes the various ways in which teachers and texts were related in ancient book-centered groups. |
