Chapter 5 takes up the work’s beginnings: why did Cicero choose Marcus Cornelius Cethegus as the first Roman orator? Appius Claudius Caecus made much more sense, and Cicero’s reasons for excluding Caecus from his canon tellingly reveal his literary-historical principles. The literary history presented ultimately justifies his own role as a literary historian and confirms his prejudices about the past, present, and future of oratory. His manicuring of the past emerges prominently in the perplexing “double history” of Greek oratory (26–51), which is a methodological template for Roman oratorical history, and in Ennius’ special place as a literary historian (57–9).

Giambattista Vico’s maxim – ‘Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat’ – offers sound advice for studying emerging literatures. Unfortunately, medieval studies did not choose to heed this counsel during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. Vainly seeking literary origins, medievalists focused on theories rather than on artefacts themselves – their material nature and sociohistorical context. They erred in not recognizing the indissoluble bond between emergent vernacular languages, historical context, and the literary expressions that gave them shape and identity. The DNA of literary artefacts reveals temporally sensitive components – language, narrative form, and consciousness of social, linguistic, and cultural heritage – in evolutionary flux. Unsurprisingly, then, European medieval literatures evolved under widely varied conditions. For example, northwest Europe was the seat of Charlemagne’s Empire from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Early on, the Empire divided linguistically between Old Gallo-Romance on the left bank of the Rhine, and Old Franconian on the right. Soon thereafter, we find political and literary documents written in those vernaculars. Two examples offer enlightenment: the ‘Strasbourg Oaths’ (842 CE), and Valenciennes 150, a ninth-century manuscript containing among the earliest literary works in Old Gallo-Romance and Old Franconian.

To speak about ‘literary beginnings’ we need to acknowledge the range of texts considered ‘literary’. These are imaginative works that can be classified variously by: the medium in which they were composed (orally or in writing), their place of origin, historical time frame of their composition, subject of the composition, and/or the genre to which they belong. The twenty-first-century present from which we are pondering medieval literature is particularly exciting because it includes not only canonical texts as well as non-canonical ones, but also the systematic scrutiny of marginalia and such forms as literary fragments – some accidental, others by design. If beginnings represent originality and innovation in the context of already extant material, where do we start a literary history of medieval Spain? With the Arab invasion of 711 and the strophic poetry of Arabic or the Hebrew muwashshahs? After all, Hebrew was represented on the Iberian peninsula since Roman times, and Iberian literature, like the culture itself, was neither monolingual nor monocultural. Or should we start with the proto-Romance vernacular that was conflated with Latin – a ‘language’ that would ultimately turn into Castilian? This chapter ponders the first two generic ‘beginnings’: the subjectivity of lyric and the objectivity of epic.

Chapter 5 takes up the work’s beginnings: why did Cicero choose Marcus Cornelius Cethegus as the first Roman orator? Appius Claudius Caecus made much more sense, and Cicero’s reasons for excluding Caecus from his canon tellingly reveal his literary-historical principles. The literary history presented ultimately justifies his own role as a literary historian and confirms his prejudices about the past, present, and future of oratory. His manicuring of the past emerges prominently in the perplexing “double history” of Greek oratory (26–51), which is a methodological template for Roman oratorical history, and in Ennius’ special place as a literary historian (57–9).

First words, we know, matter. The Iliad’s mênin, ‘wrath’, the Odyssey’s andra, ‘man’, set the thematic focus of the narrative to come, the central question of each epic. What is more, the Odyssey’s silence in its opening sentence about the name of its hero and its periphrastic concealment and revelation of its subject is itself programmatic, in its form, for its hero’s performative strategies of deception as well as the narrative’s engagement with the ethics of identity.1 Homer’s beginnings are echoed and transformed throughout Greek writing. Sophocles’ Antigone – tragedy is a machine for rewriting Homer for the fifth-century polis – opens with Ô koinon, ‘O shared’: and the play goes on obsessively to dramatize not just the conflicting claims of commonality in the city and family, but also the dangerous power of the appeals to such commonality.2 Euripides memorably starts his Medea, eith’ ôphelon mê, ‘If only not’, and the play never escapes the lure of the counterfactual narrative, the wishing things were otherwise.

The chronological outline of the principal events and phases of the uprising serves as guideline and contextualization for the more topical discussions in subsequent chapters. This chapter discusses the origins of the Caste War in the strife between two Yucatecan political factions in 1847 and describes the advance of the rebels up to mid 1848, their retreat to the southeast of the peninsula due to internal discord and the arrival of government troop reinforcements. Particular attention is given to the most intense combat period that saw a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign lasting until the mid 1850s. The rebels were indomitable, however, and created independent polities whose autonomy endured until 1901, when Mexican forces finally crushed rebel resistance in a massive military offensive.

This short chapter first reviews the argument of the book, then goes back to beginnings. The Institutio opens with strong generic positioning, situating Quintilian’s project against Cicero’s Orator and Sallust’s Jugurtha. Pliny’s cover note (Epistles 1.1) operates more discreetly, but reveals itself, through precise reworking of Quintilian’s cover note to Trypho, as an infrared invitation to read this collection of letters as ‘Quintilian in Brief’. Further traces of Quintilian’s first and last prefaces (Institutio 1.pr. and 12.pr.) in Epistles 1.2 and 9.1-2 offer final, open-ended confirmation that the Insitutio is hard-wired into the Epistles from start to end: Latin prose imitation, in Pliny’s hands, is a very fine art.