Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Prologue
- Acknowledgements
- 1 HORACE'S BIRTHDAY AND DEATHDAY
- 2 AMICVS CERTVS IN RE INCERTA CERNITVR: Epode I
- 3 DREAMING ABOUT QUIRINUS: Horace's Satires and the development of Augustan poetry
- 4 BIFORMIS VATES: the Odes, Catullus and Greek lyric
- 5 THE ODES: just where do you draw the line?
- 6 A WINE-JAR FOR MESSALLA: Carmina 3.21
- 7 FEMININE ENDINGS, LYRIC SEDUCTIONS
- 8 THE UNIQUENESS OF THE CARMEN SAECVLARE AND ITS TRADITION
- 9 SOLVS SAPIENS LIBER EST: recommissioning lyric in Epistles 1
- 10 POETRY, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS AND PLAY: Epistles 1
- 11 HORACE, CICERO AND AUGUSTUS, OR THE POET STATESMAN AT EPISTLES 2.1.256
- 12 VNA CVM SCRIPTORE MEO: poetry, Principate and the traditions of literary history in the Epistle to Augustus
- 13 EPILOGUE
- Notes
- Abbreviations and bibliography
- Indexes
5 - THE ODES: just where do you draw the line?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Prologue
- Acknowledgements
- 1 HORACE'S BIRTHDAY AND DEATHDAY
- 2 AMICVS CERTVS IN RE INCERTA CERNITVR: Epode I
- 3 DREAMING ABOUT QUIRINUS: Horace's Satires and the development of Augustan poetry
- 4 BIFORMIS VATES: the Odes, Catullus and Greek lyric
- 5 THE ODES: just where do you draw the line?
- 6 A WINE-JAR FOR MESSALLA: Carmina 3.21
- 7 FEMININE ENDINGS, LYRIC SEDUCTIONS
- 8 THE UNIQUENESS OF THE CARMEN SAECVLARE AND ITS TRADITION
- 9 SOLVS SAPIENS LIBER EST: recommissioning lyric in Epistles 1
- 10 POETRY, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS AND PLAY: Epistles 1
- 11 HORACE, CICERO AND AUGUSTUS, OR THE POET STATESMAN AT EPISTLES 2.1.256
- 12 VNA CVM SCRIPTORE MEO: poetry, Principate and the traditions of literary history in the Epistle to Augustus
- 13 EPILOGUE
- Notes
- Abbreviations and bibliography
- Indexes
Summary
How did ancient readers of poetry books, working their way through Callimachus or Cercidas or Catullus, know when they had reached the end of a poem? Scribal conventions offered some visual aid: the conclusion of a long lyric poem might be marked by a big wiggly koronis in the left margin, while shorter epigrams were separated by the more economical paragraphos, the same ‘dash-mark’ which was used to indicate change of speaker in dramatic texts. If the book were an anthology like the Garland of Meleager, a new name would mark both change of authorship and change of poem. Yet such external graphic signals were subject to the hazards of careless transcription, and might be omitted or misplaced; errors would propagate themselves throughout subsequent copies.
Internal evidence offered surer clues to the reader. Just as play-scripts, lacking stage-directions, were designed to be self-sufficient (‘But who is this I see approaching? – surely not Tiresias again?’), so poets deployed a regular set of termination-routines, of which ring-composition is perhaps the most familiar. Writers drew on a common stock of cues, and could rely on their readers to pick them up. A fan of Pindar or Propertius would soon develop an instinct for their favoured pointers. And even if the reader of a text unequipped with sigla failed to spot an ending as it passed, an immediately following strongly marked opening-formula, combined with a sharp change of subject, ought to have corrected the error in most cases.
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- Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace , pp. 65 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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