Editing

This essay investigates the role played by enslaved editors in Roman literary discourse. In extant sources, textual editing is a locus for authors’ anxiety about integrity, authority, autonomy, and adulteration: the application of another’s literary and linguistic sensibilities to, and their power to force change on, the author’s text. However, the enslaved editors who actually enacted a large part of this work are excluded from these spheres of social exchange and literary signification. This essay turns instead to two metaphors of slavery that underlie the discourse of editing: on the one hand, the editor imagined as an enslaved worker, and on the other, the editor as an enslaver and the text as enslaved. What happens to these metaphors when they collide with the realia of editing in Rome? Moving through case studies on Tiro and Cicero, Martial, and Petronius, the essay argues for a paradigm of “masterly” and “slavish” editing in Roman antiquity.