Patrick J. Burns

Research Associate at Harvard Human Evolutionary Biology | Formerly Quantitative Criticism Lab, ISAW Library | Fordham PhD, Classics | CLTK contributor

Latin Literary Acrostics as Information Technology

Abstract for 2021 Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS2021)

Abstract

Acrostics—and related literary features such as telestichs and mesostichs—are ordered lists of letters or letter groups (Fowler and Fowler 2012). While a great deal has been written in the last decade about Latin literary acrostics—concerning in particular the discovery of individual instances of this poetic feature with accompanying arguments in support of the plausibility of each (see Robinson 2019a; Robinson 2019b; Rick 2019; Kronenberg 2019; Danielewicz 2019; Mitchell 2020a; Mitchell 2020b; Kearey 2020; Hosle 2020; Hejduk 2020 in just the last two years)—the 2019 publication of Andrew Riggsby’s Mosaics of Knowledge, with its reappraisal of the role of lists in Roman information technology, calls for fresh look at acrostics in Latin literature. Using Riggsby’s work as a framework, this paper concentrates on “imperfect” acrostics like the signature in the opening lines of the Ilias Latina (Scaffai 1982; Kilpatrick 1992; see also Jacques 1955: 20 nn. 266–74 on similar problem in Nicander). Rather than insist on a modern standard of literal exactness which requires the philological reconstruction of the V in ITALIC*S (a manuscript reading † protulerant † replaced by, say, the conjecture ut primum tulerant; see Baehrens 1879: 8), I will argue in this paper that such close-enough, unamended readings may be sufficient by the standards of Roman information technology. The paper makes two contributions to the study of Latin poetics: 1. acknowledgement that Latin literary acrostics are ordered lists and so then, by extension, they need to be examined not only in relationship to other types of literary devices and wordplay, but also in relationship to other lists and related aspects of Roman information technology; 2. following from the first point, recognition that like other kinds of Roman information technology, acrostics should not be read with (modern) assumptions about completeness and accuracy, but rather with the understanding that “much of what is both true and interesting lies in a zone of broad similarity or likeness, not in absolute identity or absence” (Riggsby 2019: 210).

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