The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip

The DNA binding specificity of the basic region of the yeast transcriptional activator GCN4 can be changed by substitution of a single amino acid.

The X-ray structure of a GCN4 DNA complex (1) shows, that specific DNA binding of the GCN4 basic region is mediated by a complicated network of base pair and DNA backbone contacts. According to the X-ray structure, alanine -14 of the basic region of GCN4 (we define the first leucine of the leucine zipper as +1) makes a hydrophobic contact to the methyl group of the thymine next to the center of the GCN4 binding site 5' ATGACTCAT 3'. We tested the DNA binding properties of the nineteen derivatives of GCN4, which carry all possible amino acids in position -14 of the basic region. Substitution of alanine -14 of GCN4 by either asparagine or cysteine changes the DNA binding specificity. Serine in this position broadens the specificity for position 1 of the target, whereas other amino acids either retain or decrease GCN4 specificity