This is a small book about small things. But not really. In The Small Stuff of Roman Antiquity, Emily Gowers explores the seemingly small and mundane in Roman life to reveal that small stuff, although often dismissed as marginal and unimportant, actually captures the Roman imagination far more than we might expect and offers us surprising insight into what the ancients valued and prioritized in life. Much like the Roman poet Catullus, whose poems appear trifling but nevertheless display remarkable artistic and emotive depth, Gowers has produced a libellus that is quirky and playful but always erudite and thoughtful.
The book is based on the lectures Gowers delivered in 2021–22 during her term as Sather Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Conceived amid Covid, the topic of smallness felt “timely and predictable … even comforting” to its author. The result is five rather loosely connected chapters on “the small” that provide Gowers ample opportunity to exercise her considerable skills in literary and historical deconstruction and interpretation.
Chapter One, “The Good of Small Things,” argues that humanists have wavered on the topic of smallness, recognizing that microanalysis can be “nuanced” and “precise” but also “over-specific,” “parochial” and “safe.” Given this reality, Gowers reminds us that the Romans provided useful tools for thinking about small things, whether through the “big” fields of philosophy and science or the “smaller” genres of Latin lyric and elegiac poetry, epigram, fable and satire, as well as the condensed epitome, which satisfied the Roman predilection for compressing big topics into small packages for easy consumption. For Gowers, the scale and value of small things are important to recognize but so too are the reality effects that small details can provide, such as the hiccup scene in Plato’s Symposium, which has the effect of providing an illusion of “being in touch with the past.” At the same time, small things can prompt feelings of nostalgia and loss among the ancients, as confirmed by the survival of the miniature temples, houses and ivory dolls of childhood and, most pointedly, the Penates, those miniature statues of Roman household gods which Aeneas originally carried to Italy from the smoldering ruins of his fallen Troy. For Gowers, these are relics of the Romans’ former selves and she rightly wonders if, by holding on to these small relics of antiquity, we likewise “superimpose on them small lost pasts, both the Romans’ and our own.”
In Chapter Two, entitled “Sallust’s Salient Snails,” the seemingly inconspicuous inclusion of snails in Sallust’s narrative about the war against the North African rebel king Jugurtha in the first century BCE serves as a springboard for considering microhistory and the meaning of time within historical narrative. Here, the focus is upon a Ligurian auxiliary soldier who, while searching for water, discovers a group of snails that eventually lead him to the enemy fort. What might Sallust mean by including this seemingly unimportant detail within this account? Is it to create a “robust reality effect?” To mark out the chronicler as a “natural historian,” open to organic forms? Might the snails signify a kind of “slow history,” signifying Sallust’s own approach to historiography? Or, is the creature’s lowly status meant to signify that the historian’s work runs a similar risk of being overlooked or underrated? To be sure, this seems like a lot to pin on a group of lowly snails, and Gowers certainly recognizes the danger of over-interpretation. Even so, her focus on the small, slow, and seemingly meaningless prompts us to think in fresh ways about the role of detail and temporality in Roman historical writing.
Chapter Three, “Brief Lives,” turns from snails to humans, most notably to the life of a certain C. Sallustius Crispus, best known to us through a brief paragraph preserved by the biographer Suetonius. A two-time consul who was also married twice, both times to women related to the emperor Nero, Crispus is best known for his witty reply of “not yet” to Nero’s query about whether he had slept with his own sister (as the emperor had with his). Gowers interprets this response not only as a clever quip but as a template for understanding Crispus’ own life of “not yet-ness,” that is, of a man who had lived on the margins of accomplishment, a follower rather than a leader, but whose quips and one-liners can still provide a virtual commentary on the emperor’s escapades through the eyes of a keen observer of imperial court life. A small life, smally preserved can still have value.
The ways in which Roman writers, primarily Cicero, rely upon the minor annoyances of everyday life to help in constructing identity, both literary and social, is the focus of Chapter Four, “Tiny Irritants: Itching Eyes, Stones in Shoes, and Other Annoyances.” Here, the irritants enumerated in the chapter title become more than epistolary small talk between Cicero and his friend Atticus. In effect, they are opportunities for the orator to burnish his identity as a pre-eminent Roman by sharing those common annoyances that slow down daily progress while humanizing all of us at the same time. Much like the earlier snails, these occurrences are easy to overlook but Gowers argues that in the case of Cicero at least, paying attention to the role of minor annoyances and the small and superficial feelings they provoke can deepen our understanding of human nature in general, and in the case of Cicero in particular, help us to know a bit better a man who was perhaps not entirely comfortable in his own skin.
The final chapter, “Diminishing Returns,” provides a loosely constructed overview of the strategic use of diminutives in Latin poetry and prose. This is Gowers at her best as the incisive reader of Latin literature interested in exploring the expressive power in diminutives themselves and how, for example, they convey nuance and emotion or reveal and shape identity. They may be affective and sentimental, as in the poems of Catullus, or scathing and disparaging, as in Cicero’s assessment of Greek philosophy as ratiunculae, that is, characterized by “fussy syllogisms.” Like the earlier chapters, there is much to absorb and ponder here through Gowers’ careful and creative analysis, but the point is that, like objects and people, language, too, can traffic in smallness, and its impact can be powerful.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut is credited with saying that we should enjoy the little things in life because one day we’ll look back and realize that they were also the big things. Gowers would likely agree, at least from a literary perspective. And while we may question the little things that do not appear in this book, like jewelry or coins, or we may struggle from time to time with analysis that strikes us as over-interpretation, The Small Stuff of Roman Antiquity remains an idiosyncratic but highly learned study of a fascinating aspect of the Roman world that has received very little attention. In this way, Gowers’ little volume stands as a unique contribution that will serve scholar and student alike. Gowers claims that small things can be an inspiration, but they can just as easily provide an invitation, in this case to explore and reimagine how notions of size and scale can reflect social and personal concerns in ways that leave us better informed about the past and ourselves.