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The Birthday Present: Censorinus’ De die natali
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2020
Abstract
This paper contextualises and interprets a text seldom addressed in Anglophone scholarship: De die natali (‘On the birthday’), written by Censorinus to celebrate his patron Caerellius’ birthday in 238 c.e. By exploring both gestation (natalis) and time measurement (dies), the work seeks to elucidate and isolate Caerellius’ birthday in time; it is the ultimate guide to his dies natalis. Despite a seemingly narrow focus, De die natali is best understood as part of a broad ‘spectrum’ of encyclopaedic texts, exemplifying the ‘totalising’ impetus of knowledge ordering in the Roman Empire, while simultaneously exposing the limits of such efforts. An interlocking set of tensions underlie the text, which resonate with other encyclopaedic projects — tensions between unity and plurality, centre and periphery, and the relationship between nature and culture. De die natali is both a product of, and commentary on, the conditions of human knowledge and the Empire's cultural diversity in the early third century.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
Footnotes
I am grateful to Frederic Clark, Henry M. Cowles, Aileen R. Das, Ian Fielding, Ellen Muehlberger, Thomas M. Miller, Calloway Scott and Brent D. Shaw, who provided thoughtful and generous feedback on this piece at various stages of its development. Thanks are also due to Celia E. Schultz and Robert A. Kaster for sharing their expertise, as well as to Jérôme Bonnin and Kai Brodersen, who kindly sent me unpublished work and other resources when the pandemic shuttered libraries at the University of Michigan. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the Editor of JRS, Christopher Kelly, and the four anonymous reviewers, whose thorough, creative suggestions strengthened my argument and its expression. All errors are mine alone.
References
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