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Vandalising Epic1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Martha Malamud
Martha Malamud*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Buffalo
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Extract

William Levitan concluded a study of the fourth century poet Optatian with the sentence, ‘The marble bones of Rome itself were chopped for a thousand years to raise the buildings of Europe.’ The theatres, baths and other edifices constructed by the Romans never wholly perished; they served the local populations for centuries as quarries for building materials. The writers of late antiquity treated the Latin literary tradition the same way that later inhabitants treated the ruins of Roman buildings, as a source for appropriate building blocks. The dismemberment of magnificent structures, whether architectural or literary is, to be sure, a kind of vandalism, but perhaps in the post-modern, resource-hungry world of the mid-1990's we can bring ourselves to think of it as something more positive, as an attempt to salvage and recycle valuable material.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , 1993 , pp. 155 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1993

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Footnotes

1.

A version of this paper was first presented at the Pacific Rim Roman Literary Conference (The Roman Song: Before and After Vergil) at the University of Southern California in 1991. I would like to thank the seminar participants, and Anthony J. Boyle, Martha Davis, Carolyn Dewald, Molly Ierulli, Micaela Janan, Donald T. McGuire jr., Amy Richlin and Roger Woodard for bibliography, criticism and improving suggestions.

References

2. Levitan, William, ‘Dancing at the End of the Rope: Optatian and the Field of Roman Verse’, TAPA 115 (1985), 245–69Google Scholar.

3. Zürli, L. (ed.), Aegritudo Perdicae (Leipzig 1987)Google Scholar, summarises the opinions of various editors of the Aegritudo Perdicae. Most scholars, including David Bright, the author of the only book-length study of Vandal poetry (The Miniature Epic in Vandal Africa [Norman and London 1987]Google Scholar), agree that the text was probably written in Africa around the time of Dracontius; G. Ballaira (n.11 below), on the other hand, thinks it was written in the seventh century in Spain under the Visigoths by an imitator of Dracontius. The text survives in only one fifteenth century manuscript, Codex Harleianus 3685. See also Hunt, J.M.The Aegritudo Perdicae, Ed. with Translation and Commentary (Diss. Bryn Mawr College Pennsylvania 1970)Google Scholar; Shackleton Bailey, D.R, ‘Towards a Text of the Anthologia Latina’ (Cambridge 1979), 72–75Google Scholar. See Zürli, xii-xiii, for bibliography on the very vexed state of the text. For the purposes of this article, where my arguments do not depend on readings of individual lines, I have relied with gratitude on Zürli’s edition, but readers should be forewarned that many of the textual problems in the Aegritudo Perdicae remain to be debated and will, perhaps, never be resolved.

4. Christian Courtois, , Les Vandales et I’Afrique (repr. Darmstadt 1964)Google Scholar, remains the best comprehensive work on the history and politics of the Vandals in Africa. This paper concentrates on literary issues to the unfortunate exclusion of much contemporary history—a procedure I do not endorse and hope to rectify in the future.

5. Bright (n.3 above), 15–18, reviews the career of Dracontius and suggests that he might have had a Roman father and a Vandal mother, arguing that Gunthamund’s relative clemency (imprisoning him rather than killing him) indicates that the poet was likely to have been linked by blood to the ruling Vandals.

6. Bright (n.3 above), 12f.

7. Bing, Peter, The Well-Read Muse: Past and Present in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets (Göttingen 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. See Hardie, P., The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge 1993), 14f.Google Scholar, and Chapter 4 on allusion and repetition; see also A.J. Boyle, in Boyle, A.J. and Sullivan, J.P. (eds.), Roman Poets of the Early Empire (Harmondsworth 1991)Google Scholar, esp. 154ff., 217ff., 270ff. and 297ff.

9. See Malamud, M., A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and Classical Mythology (Ithaca 1989)Google Scholar, Chapter 1, for further discussion of the poetics of the Psychomachia.

10. For relevant discussions of post-Vergilian Latin epic writers, see Hardie (n.8 above), passim, and Feeney, D., The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (Oxford 1991)Google Scholar. For different views on Jate antique poetics in general, see Levitan (n.2 above), Nugent, S.G., ‘Ausonius’ “Late Antique” Poetics and “Post-Modern” Literary Theory’, in A.J. Boyle (ed.), The Imperial Muse: Flavian Epicist to Claudian (Bendigo 1990), 236–60Google Scholar; Roberts, Michael, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca 1989)Google Scholar.

11. See Ballaira, G., ‘Perdica e Mirra’, RCCM 10 (1968), 219–40Google Scholar, and Bright (n.3 above), 232f.

12. Janan, Micaela, ‘Incest and Influence in Metamorphoses 9’, Arethusa 24 (1991), 239–56Google Scholar.

13. This is made explicit in Aen. 4.78f.: Iliacosque iterum demens audire labores/exposcit pendetque iterum narrantis ab ore (‘she in her madness demands to hear again the story of Troy and again hangs on his lips as he tells it’).

14. The list Cupid presents here is itself a cliché—these episodes are also featured on Arachne’s tapestry in Met. 6.103–13 (see Boemer’s commentary ad loc.) and catalogues of Jupiter’s loves were commonplace. They also appear in Aetna 88ff. and—contemporary with the Aegritudo Perdicae—Dracontius’ Hylas 2.22ff.

15. With fusi per gramina terrae, 75, cf. fusique per herbam, Aen. 1.214; with tunc aliger ille/paruit officio mutatusque ore Cupido, 77f., cf. faciem mutatus et ora Cupido, Aen. 1.658, and aligerum…Amorem, Aen. 1.663; with dulcia dona Lyaei, 76, cf. laticemque Lyaeum, Aen. 1.686.

16. See Colton, R., ‘Some Greek and Latin Poets on the Abduction of Hylas’, CO 20 (1979), 107f.Google Scholar; Malamud, M. and Jr.McGuire, D.T., ‘Flavian Variant: Myth. Valerius’ Argonautica’, in A.J. Boyle (ed.), Roman Epic (London 1993), 192–217Google Scholar, for a discussion of echoes and allusions in treatments of the Hylas myth; Osmun, G., ‘The Abduction of Hylas—Again’, CB 59 (1983), 59fGoogle Scholar.

17. Nugent, S.G., ‘The Sex which is Not One: De-Constructing Ovid’s Hermaphrodite’, Differences 2 (1990), 160–85Google Scholar; Rosati, G.Narciso e Pigmalione: Illusione e spettacolo nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio (Florence 1983)Google Scholar; Brenkman, John, ‘Narcissus in the Text’, Georgia Review 30 (1976), 293–327Google Scholar.

18. As Bright notes (n.3 above, 23).

19. The text used is Vollmer, F. (ed.), Fl. Merobaudis reliquiae, Blossii Aemilii Dracontii carmina, Eugeni Toletani episcopi carmina et epistulae (Berlin 1905)Google Scholar. Also cited by Bright (n.3 above), 25f.

20. Dracontius clearly had the proem to De Rerum Natura in mind, for in line 74 he calls Cupid hominum divumque voluptas. See Bright (n.3 above), 26, for more on Dracontius’ use of Lucretius.

21. Bright (n.3 above), 223–38, has conveniently collected sources of and influences on the Perdica story.

22. Cf. Cupid’s arrow in line 47, exhausted by inspiring so many loves in Jupiter (iam fessa sagitta est).

23. This recalls Myrrha, who, when her father asks her what kind of husband she wants, replies similem tibi (‘one like you’, Met. 10.364); similarly, when Cinyras asks the nurse to describe the girl (Myrrha herself) she has arranged for him to sleep with, she says par…est Myrrhae (‘she’s Myrrha’s equal’, Met. 10.441).

24. Semantic determinism is my own term for a common feature of late antique poetry, the tendency of characters in a text to enact the meanings of their names.

25. Perdica’s slenderness, with its literary implications, is another quality he shares with Cupid, the parue puer who problematically inspires the poem in line 1—thanks to A.J. Boyle for noting this final echoing correspondence. The following essays open up interesting possibilities for thinking through the connections the Aegritudo Perdicae makes between incest, writing, exhaustion and emaciation, as well as for poetic diagnosis and self-therapy: Henderson, John, ‘Persius’ Didactic Satire: The Pupil as Teacher’, Ramus 20 (1991), 123–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which offers a suggestive approach to reading (some) poetry as a technique of ‘the care of the self’ (citing, among other things, Foucault’s, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume 3 [London 1988]Google Scholar); Gowers, Emily, The Loaded Table (Oxford 1993)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 1, ‘An Approach to Eating’, for a stimulating discussion of food and food metaphors in Roman culture; and Barton, Carlin, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton 1992)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 2, ‘Desire’, a strikingly impressionistic essay on excess and askesis as complementary tendencies in Roman thought.