Han Lamers and Lorenzo Maria Ciolfi study how texts, objects, and ideas from Greek and Roman antiquity are reworked and acquire new meanings in new contexts. Han Lamers is Professor of Classics at the University of Oslo and Director of the Norwegian Institute in Rome. Lorenzo Ciolfi is Associate Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and one of the institute’s four affiliated researchers.
Most of what we know about literature and culture does not come from reading every great work in full. We pick things up in other ways: from plot summaries and school anthologies, from famous quotations and proverbs, from timelines and diagrams in textbooks, from striking images on book covers and clever one‑liners repeated in lectures or on social media. Much of our cultural knowledge reaches us in condensed form.
The same was true in the past. Very few Renaissance readers, for instance, could devote their lives to studying Homer, Demosthenes, or the Greek medical writers in their entirety. Yet Greek heritage was almost everywhere: invoked as a model of eloquence, a storehouse of wisdom, and a key to understanding history, politics, and ethics. Faced with an overwhelming body of texts, readers, teachers, and scholars had to develop ways of managing this abundance – through selection, reduction, and rearrangement that we might today call “knowledge management”.
It is this art of making that overwhelming material digestible that stood at the centre of the international workshop Condensing the Classics: Small Forms in the Reception of Greek Heritage, held at the Norwegian Institute in Rome on 27-28 April 2026. The event brought together participants from Cyprus, Italy, Norway, Spain, and the United States.
The workshop’s starting point was a simple observation with broad implications: throughout history, most readers encountered Greek heritage not directly in full‑length works, but through a host of “small forms”. These include epitomes, anthologies, lists, proverb collections, question‑and‑answer manuals, diagrams, maps, notebooks full of excerpts, and images that condense complex ideas into a single emblem or scene.
Rather than treating these as mere by-products or “derivatives”, the workshop asked what happens if we make them our main object of study. What kinds of “Greek heritage” do these small forms construct? What forms, strategies, and rules structure them? How do they shape what is remembered and what is forgotten, what is presented as central and what disappears at the margins?
To ask these questions, we proposed a broad, flexible notion of condensation. In our working definition, condensation refers to any cultural process that compresses larger bodies of material – whether a single text, an author’s whole oeuvre, or an expansive field of knowledge – into smaller, more accessible forms. A chronological table that turns centuries of history into a page of names and dates, a collection that distils ancient Sparta’s ethos into a handful of pointed maxims, a frontispiece that turns a philosophical argument into an image: all are examples of condensation.
The workshop’s chief aim was to investigate both on the forms that condensations take and the strategies that underpin them. A useful starting point came from linguistics, which distinguishes four basic operations: generalisation, deletion, compression, and aggregation (or recombination). These offered a first framework for thinking about how complex material is cut down and rearranged. At the same time, insights from cognitive science served as a reminder that condensation is not just a literary or scholarly technique of the past, but a basic feature of how we think: we cannot retain everything we read, hear, or see, so we constantly condense, silently deciding what matters and what can be left aside.
The historical case studies revealed further strategies at work – above all, translation from one medium into another. A dense philosophical commentary, for instance, might be “translated” into a single visual image or emblem, or a long prose treatise recast in concise verse – shifts that not only make a message more compact, but also reshape how it is read and remembered.
Indeed, the discussions made it clear that condensation is as much about transformation as about reduction. When a text is condensed, something is always lost – but something is also created. A short selection of “beautiful sentences” from a classical author can redefine that author for new generations; an image on a title page can colour the interpretation of the text that follows. Condensed forms select and shape: they highlight certain elements, mute others, and often introduce new connections. They are not neutral containers but active interventions in the transmission of knowledge.
This raised some new questions, discussed vividly in the closing round table. For example: to what extent do condensed forms end up replacing the works they ostensibly summarise? How often has cultural memory preserved a tradition primarily through its abridgements, anthologies, and visual distillations, rather than through the “originals” themselves? And if this is the case, what does it mean for our understanding of originality, influence, and reception history?
Many questions remain open, but the workshop at least helped to formulate them more clearly. One central issue was historical change: are some periods more inclined than others to condense and repackage the Greek past – and if so, why? Do periods marked by crisis, reform, or “rediscovery” – such as the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, or the age of print and humanism – give rise to new small forms and new criteria for what counts as the “essence” of Greek heritage?
We look forward to pursuing these questions further in follow‑up workshops and collaborative projects. This workshop has been a splendid starting point. By bringing together specialists of different periods, genres, and media, Condensing the Classics showed that small forms are anything but marginal. For students and scholars alike, it offered a timely reminder that this history cannot be written only through complete texts and authoritative editions. It also runs through epitomes, lists, diagrams, handbooks, images, and notebooks: the modest, everyday tools through which generations have made the classics their own.
The workshop’s programme is available here. A fuller report of the conference will be published in this year’s issue of the journal Estudios bizantinos.
