The emergence of a systematic literature around land-surveying in the late first century AD affords an ideal opportunity to study the development of an ars within the scientific culture of specialized knowledge in the early Roman Empire. The variegated methods that belonged to the historical inheritance of surveying practice challenged the construction of a discrete and coherent disciplinary identity. The surveying writings of Frontinus and Hyginus evince several strategies intended to produce a systematic and explanatory conception of the ars. These include rationalizing explanations of key surveying terminology and practice with a view to natural first principles and an accounting of surveying methods in interdisciplinary perspective with astronomy, natural philosophy, and mathematics. While these earliest surveying works pose several unique challenges, they ultimately provide a precious window onto the challenges and opportunities that greeted the emergence of an ars in the fervid scientific culture of the period.

This chapter introduces the principal Roman authors and texts studied in this book and examines the relationship between the artes and the society and politics of the early Roman Empire. The development of the artes can be understood in terms of the “Romanization” of specialized knowledge, whereby the scientific and technical contents of the artes were suffused with the peculiar interests and prerogatives of Roman Empire. The chapter surveys several ways in which this process of Romanization was instantiated in the artes: by the refiguring of specialized knowledge in the artes as Imperial self-knowledge; by an expansive conception of Roman imperium as fueling the growth of scientific knowledge; by the mastering and elaboration of Greek specialized knowledge; by the fashioning of an ideal, elite Roman readership for the artes; and by technocratic approaches to the artes relating disciplinary knowledge to Roman Imperial government.

While no Latin ars of warfare survives from the early Empire, its development can be reconstructed with the help of Frontinus’ Stratagemata (Domitianic), a collection of military stratagems composed as a pendant to his (now lost) treatise on the scientia rei militaris, and with Onasander’s Stratêgikos (c. AD 49–58), a Greek theoretical treatment of generalship dedicated to a Roman general. Onasander’s treatise embodies a paradigm of specialized knowledge that puts precepts into an explanatory relationship with universal (natural) first principles, much in the spirit of the artes. This approach to the art of war was popular but seems also to have been fiercely criticized at Rome. Frontinus’ Strategemata responds to this criticism by eschewing generalized precepts and offering instead exemplary historical anecdotes for contemplation and imitation. The Roman art of war thus reveals significant generic diversification in reaction to pressures internal and external to the scientific culture of the artes.

In this chapter, König examines an array of ‘literary interactions’ in Pliny’s 10th book of Letters. She draws particular attention to the book’s ‘heteroglossia’ – the multiplicity of linguistic registers and literary genres that it evokes and adopts – and she shows how that heteroglossia enables Pliny to accrue increasing authority and expertise as the book progresses. Starting with letters 10.1-14, she first explores intertexts between Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan and other close-contemporary literature (in particular, the Panegyricus and Frontinus’ De Aquis). Her focus then shifts to Pliny’s incorporation of a range of specialist discourses (architectural, religious, legal, financial, hydraulic, etc.) across the rest of the book, discourses which gradually flesh out his credentials as an administrator with the ability to command many different areas of government. She ends by exploring Pliny’s interaction with Trajan via an allusion to Pliny the Elder’s address to Titus at the start of his encyclopaedic Natural History. In drawing attention to the range and impact of different kinds of intertexts across Letters 10 – from specific textual allusions to generic interdiscursivity – she underlines what this seemingly ‘administrative’ correspondence can teach us about Roman reading and writing habits and the blurred boundary between ‘literary’ and non/less-‘literary’ texts.

This chapter looks at two interconnected texts which were published within two or three decades of each other: Aelianus Tacticus’ Tactical Theory (addressed to Trajan) and Arrian’s Tactics, published two or three decades later under Hadrian. Both texts appear to draw on the same source material, and it is reasonable to suppose that Arrian was aware of Aelian’s earlier treatise, although there is no direct interaction between them. Their different approaches to the same material offer an opportunity to explore different models of literary and cross-cultural interaction, and also to examine our go-to metaphors and interpretative models for analysing them. While Aelian establishes a series of polemical comparisons between age-old Greek military theory and currently effective Roman military practice, Arrian hints at overlaps between Greek and Roman traditions, both by incorporating a section on Roman cavalry manoeuvres and by interacting with a speech delivered by Hadrian to the Roman army at Lambaesis in 128. Both approaches are equally tactical; and both are revealing of the complex dynamics of cross-cultural interaction, which took place on and off the page, and in literary and less literary forms of writing.

The reigns of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian are notable both for the technical and aesthetic developments in architecture, as well as the significant amount of building work undertaken in Rome and across the empire. However, as far as can be determined, this activity was not accompanied by a surge of interest in architectural writing among Latin authors of the second century CE, who give little attention to such matters. This chapter aims to demonstrate that while there were shared frameworks for how Roman writers received and commented on buildings, the most important connection between them is what they do not say. This argument is developed through considering the apparent difference with Greek literature of the period, which includes conspicuously more complex discussions of buildings and attention to architectural detail. The case is made that this contrast is not due to a lack of interaction, but is rather a deliberate opposition between how Latin and Greek authors handle the subject. Arguably, this disconnection that is observable in literature also reflects the differing perceptions of architecture in the respective societies more widely.