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Frustration of Anticipation in Vergil, Eclogue vi?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2015
Extract
When your friends within and without the A.S.C.S. were invited to contribute to the Festschrift planned in your honour, my Hellenistic Muse blanched at the fields chosen, Cicero and Vergil. It was, moreover, not enough to have new thoughts; they must, at least if the thinker had profited from your guidance at Melbourne both as student and colleague, make an effort to measure up to the quality of that guidance. Now in more co-operative mood my Muse, quae sera tamen respexit inertem, offers you some methodological comments, speculative in the nature of things, but I hope not too remote from a poetic application of your oft-voiced injunction to ‘Follow the argument’, which stood me in good stead from the Phaedo to the De Officiis.
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References
1 Soph. Ant. 582. Cf. Alkm. fr. 1. 37 ff. Page, Theogn. 1013 f., Eur. Hec. 627 f., Schol. Eur. Med. 1228.
2 Ter. Hec. 418. Dirichlet, De veterum macarismis (Giessen, 1914), p. 58 n. 1:CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘Saepissime is beatus praedicatur, qui maris pericula vitat’. He compares Theogn. 1375, Eur. Bacch. 902, fr. 793, Kail. fr. 178. 32 ff. Pf. See also Hor. Epod. 2. 1 ff.
3 Catulli Veronensis Liber (Leipzig/Berlin, 1908), p. 378.
4 Latomus xxvii (1968), 13–32.
5 Hellenistic methods may be particularly important for Ecl. vi, for there is a scholarly temptation to regard the Pasiphae episode with its 16 lines (45–60) as necessarily more significant to the poet than, say, Atalanta with her single line (61). This notion is central to Brooks Otis’ thinking, for example. But we should remember that in any concatenation of elements there was an aversion from forging links of identical size. In the formal aspect the difference in the treatment of Pasiphae and Atlanta seems to me the difference between a poet’s developed, and his terse style. Contrast, for example, the Britomartis-Minos story at Kall, Hy. 3. 189 ff.Google Scholar with the terse treatment of the four legends in 260–7. What Vergil chooses to develop is in accord with Hellenistic interest in the morbid and grotesque, particularly in sexual irregularities. The use of the Proetides as a digression contrasting with the main theme is characteristic of the epyllion; cf. Aktaion as the foil to Teiresias in Kall, Hy. 5. 107–18Google Scholar and Guy, Lee’s remarks in Ovid: Metamorphoses I (Cambridge, 1953), p. 15.Google Scholar Servius’ information that a virgo infelix (52) occurs in Calvus’ epyllion, Io, has been rightly seen to point to a neoteric element in Ecl. vi. The Greek equivalent, ἂ δειλή or δειλα ίη),had already been brutally parodied by Kallimachos (Hy. 6.83 δειλαία φιλότεχνε, τί δ’ούκ έψεύσαο, μίτερ; of a queen covering up for her anti-social son. I suspect that here, in his Hymn to Demeter, Kallimachos is humorously emending the verb of a Hellenistic line more properly descriptive of the goddess’ pathetic search for Persephone. Cf. Nonn. Dion, vi 90 Δημήτερ φιλότεχνος).
6 The Eclogues of Vagil (Berkeley, 1942), p. 102.
7 Rev. Phil, xxxvii (1963), 23–40.
8 For metamorphosis in Roman poetry, and the Cycnus story in particular, see now Kidd’s, D.A. treatment of Hor. Od. ii 20 in Aumla 35 (1971), 5–16.Google Scholar
9 Cf. Wilkinson, L.P.Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955), p. 208.Google Scholar
10 Ad Ov. Met. ii 367 ff. = p. 638 Magnus.
11 Cf. Paus. i 30. 3 Λιγύων των Ηριδανού πέραν ύπέρ γης Κελτικής. Bubbe, W.De Metamorphosibus Graecorum capita selecta (Halle, 1913), p. 49,Google Scholar attractively suggests that the association of Cycnus with the Ligyrians derives from λιγύς (λιγύφωνος) Λίγυες, comparing the play on λιγύς and Λίγυες in Plat. Phaedr. 237 A.
12 The Emathides, the nine daughters of Pieros, acquired feathers from their encounter with the Muses (Ant. Lib. 9, Ov. Met. v 300–678); the Sirens under similar circumstances were denuded of theirs (Paus. ix 34. 3).
13 Kall. Hy. 4. 252.