Where does a text start and where does it end? Novels and nonfiction books welcome the reader with a wealth of texts around the 'actual' text. In the practice of the modern book market, these paratexts, as Genette called them, include graphically designed covers with information about title, author, and content. If one opens the book, further, partly identical partly supplementary information follows, such as year of publication, edition, author's name, title, subtitle, table of contents, dedication, acknowledgement, preface, interpreface, etc. Footnotes and other forms of additional information also belong in this list of possible paratexts (Grafton 1997). "For us, accordingly, the paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public." It is "a threshold, or ... a 'vestibule' that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back. It is an 'undefined zone' between the inside and the outside" (Genette 1997: 1–2). At the end of the book, the paratextual framework concludes with epilogue, index, bibliography, etc. Ancient material book culture placed narrower limits on such practices from the outset. Many titles of ancient works do not go back to the original design, but were added later in the process of transmission by editors and copyists, not seldom on the basis of catchy wordings in the first lines of the work (Schröder 1999). Two types of paratexts can be distinguished: in addition to peritexts, which are materially connected to the main text in one form or the other, there are epitexts, which revolve around the main text in a wider orbit. In the modern book market, these include e. g. publishers' catalogues, book reviews, author interviews, or bestseller lists. These public epitexts are accompanied by those of a more private nature, as in the case of letter correspondences and diaries. Similarly, ancient authors such as Cicero make reference to their literary work in their letters (e.g., Ad Atticum 13.32.3) Peri- as well as epitexts can originate from the author himself or be allographic. Texts that are even more distant and more loosely related to the 'actual' text and thus leave the paratextual orbit, as is the case, for example, with literary pretexts, are captured by the notion of intertextuality.

Among the most important paratexts is the preface or proemium. In ancient texts, proemia are often not formally detached from the main text. This is true, for example, of the ancient epic, in which – from Homer to Apollonius Rhodius, Vergil and Ovid to later authors – the first hexameter lines constitute the proem. Famous and formative is the proemium of Herodotus' Histories, which not only lists theme and intention, but at the same time integrates the author's name and origin ('This is the work of Herodotus from Halicarnassus ...'). In collections of poems, the function of the proem often is fulfilled by the first piece, as in Catullus' Carmen 1 ('To whom shall I dedicate this elaborate little book?') or in Ovid's Amores 1.1. In addition, there is the practice of imprinting a seal (sphragis) on a collection via the last poem, as Horace does at the end of the third book of his Odes. Comparable techniques are also found in prose texts; Pliny's Letter 1.1. forms the introduction to the following collection, though its scope –the first book or all nine books? – is debatable. The breadth of possibilities is illustrated by some of the poetry books of Martial and Statius, in which a formally detached prose text serves as preface (Johannsen 2006).

If one understands 'text' in a broader sense with Knape – "Here, text is understood as a bounded, ordered complex of signs arranged with communicative intention according to the expanded conception of text found in the semiotic theory of textuality" (2013, 198) – the notion of paratext can be applied to a number of other media manifestations. These include book illustrations, such as those found in scientific writings (Weitzmann 1970). In medieval and modern times, this tradition continues in manuscripts and prints; among their prominent examples are the print illustrations to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Huber-Rebenich et al. 2014). In this broader sense, this also applies to the phenomenon of widespread book luxury and its critical-ironic reflection by ancient writers. Thus, in Tristia 1.1, the exiled Ovid has his personified book travel to Rome in a conspicuously shabby getup to lend a meaningful mirror to his fate. In his epigrams, Martial mocks, not without self-irony, the excessive book luxury of his time.

back