![]() ![]() Plausibility ( verisimilitude) and implausibility are terms better suited to explain the literary sensibilities of a rhetorically trained and accustomed audience than modern ideas of fiction and nonfiction as a contrast between imagination and fact. Footnote 8 The ubiquitous use of prose in late antiquity makes the historical analysis of the relationship between texts and reality much more complicated, with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction often seeming blurred. Around 29 BCE, the last classical drama was staged in Rome, thereby introducing the looming turn from poetry to prose onto the theater stage. Slowly but surely classical poetry went out of fashion in late antiquity. Nevertheless, others, such as the anonymous author of the poem “Aetna,” tried to preserve the didactic merits of metrical language to describe natural phenomena – a topic which, on account of its content, would be classified today as nonfiction. Indeed, in the early imperial period, some authors began to criticize poetry as a medium used to impart false truths. Footnote 6 In a certain sense, this division may be compared to the contemporary distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Roman librarians appear to have made the same basic distinction in that they mostly separated poetry from prose texts. Footnote 5 Ancient Greek taxonomies of texts, then, focused on the mode of a text, its use of language. Metrical language, in its different manifestations, was reserved for texts that related in a different way than others to truth and reality. While contemporary classification aims to cover every type of text, Plato’s and Aristotle’s classifications cover only poetry, that is, texts that make use of a metrical language. Yet there is a major difference between contemporary and ancient classification regarding the range of texts being classified. ![]() Footnote 4 This alignment of contemporary and ancient genres may imply a certain overlap and continuity. In antiquity, Plato distinguished between lyric poetry, epic, and tragedy, while his student Aristotle differentiated between epic, tragedy, and comedy. Today, the major categories into which literary works are divided are poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama. Rather than firm and scientifically explorable categories, genres are social conventions negotiated in mutual, yet time- and culture-bound, agreements between authors and readers. Not only do these different criteria already seem confusing and imprecise, but they are additionally “usually understood to be distinct from genre.” Footnote 2 Still, libraries, bookstores, and their customers seem to be comfortable and successful with the assignment of genres for customers’ use. The difficulties with defining a “genre” start with the fact that every text contains several characteristics that may prompt its identification with a certain genre, as the assignment may be based on form, mode, or content. By adding symposiac literature as an insightful comparandum to the range of literary forms usually compared with the Talmud, I will argue that the Talmud is best classified as a commentary in form, an encyclopedia in content, and a symposiac work in its literary mode. ![]() For this purpose, the chapter first surveys the modern genres mostly associated with the Talmud, namely, the commentary and the encyclopedia, and proceeds to explore the imperial period and late antique structural counterparts of these genres. Navigating between our present need to classify a text and the fact that ancient texts tend to evade any such classification, this chapter engages a conversation between modern and ancient ways of classifying texts. This, in turn, will support a historical model to answering the seminal question of how the Talmud was produced, and that will be discussed in the next chapters. Accounting for classification is important since it facilitates, but also decisively governs, “the way read a text, the expectations form of it, the questions pose to it, and the sort of information deem it will yield.” Footnote 1 Discussing the genre of the Talmud will, then, not yield a precise historical answer but will allow us to situate the work in the literary landscape of its time. ![]() These questions about the work’s genre will be posed with the recognition that they are ahistorical and originate from our contemporary way of classifying books. This chapter asks whether and how the Babylonian Talmud could be integrated into the literary culture of the late antique Mediterranean world by looking at the work’s genre from a comparative point of view. ![]()
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