This is the first of two volumes of critical essays on Latin literature of the imperial period from Ovid to late antiquity. The focus is upon the main postclassical period (A.D. 1-150), especially the authors of the Neronian and Flavian principates (A.D. 54-96), several of whom, though recently the subject of substantial investigation and reassessment, remain largely unread, at best improperly understood. The change which took place in Roman literature between the late republic/early Augustan period and the post-Augustan empire, between the ‘classicism’ of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy and the ‘postclassicism’ of Seneca, Lucan, Persius, Tacitus is conventionally misdescribed (albeit sometimes with qualifications) as the movement from Golden to Silver Latin. The description misleads on many counts, not least because it misconstrues a change in literary and poetic sensibility, in the mental sets of reader and audience, and in the political environment of writing itself, as a change in literary value. What in fact happened awaits adequate description, but it seems clear that the change began with Ovid (43 B.C. to A.D. 17), whose rejection of Augustan classicism (especially its concept of decorum or ‘appropriateness’), cultivation of generic disorder and experimentation (witness, e.g., Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses), love of paradox, absurdity, incongruity, hyperbole, wit, and focus on extreme emotional states, influenced everything that followed. Ovid also witnessed and suffered from the increasing political repression of the principate; he was banished for — among other things — his words, carmen. And political repression seems to have been a signal factor, if difficult to evaluate, in the formation of the postclassical style.

The aim of this essay is to confront some ageing generalisations about Ovid which seem to have survived the latest close readings of his poetry intact. Most of the critics who have recently been casting new light on particular poems and passages have been too cautious to use their very specific findings to call explicitly into question long-established overviews of the Ovidian oeuvre. However, an attempt of some kind should be made. Today's generalisation is nothing more than an accretion of yesterday's particular readings; and reassessment of it can come only when it is tested against a new generation of particular readings. My focus, therefore, will be on specifics, but with an untimid eye towards overviews.

A like absence of timidity will also be found in my specifics themselves. Writers of ‘general’ articles tend to eschew difficult or controversial interpretations of particular passages, lest some overall balance in their presentation of an author be upset. I shall have few such qualms: one of my aims is precisely to destabilise — however slightiy — the terms of reference within which Ovidian poetry is usually read. Indeed, I shall risk beginning with what will probably be the most controversial reading in my essay.

Although a great deal of energy has been devoted in recent years to the critical examination of the pastorals of Theocritus and Virgil very little (comparatively speaking) has been expended by way of literary study on their immediate successor, the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus. This may be due to ignorance — some theoreticians betray no knowledge of his existence — or to prejudice — Calpurnius belongs to the age of silver (or even worse). And yet, since he is the first poet to inherit pastoral as a fully formed genre, one would expect that his work might command critical attention. It is my intention in this study to examine the way in which Calpurnius handles the medium he inherited from Virgil and his treatment of those issues with which he is principally concerned. It is not my intention to examine his relationship to a specific historical and political context — a perilous task given the lack of hard evidence concerning his biography.

Latin literature would be the poorer if the Satires of Persius had not survived. Many of course do not like his work because of a certain perceived incoherence or lack of shape or unity in his Satires, and many are of the opinion that their author was a student of books rather than of life: ‘an ideal example of an arrogant and spiritless young man wrapped up in poetry.’ As a merely academic poet, it is believed, Persius could do no more than depend heavily on poets who had gone before, and especially on Horace, reminiscences of whose work thickly lace the lines of Persius' satires. Furthermore, it is widely believed, Persius' ideas and the language in which they are expressed are often so obscure that it is impossible to interpret their meaning. The poet openly espoused a system he called iunctura acris, ‘the harsh collocation’ or ‘the surprising or illogical collocation’, by which he referred to a certain harsh, even violent, yoking together of ideas or images or words. The recent and most useful commentary by R. A. Harvey consistently interprets phrases by identifying them directly as iunctura acris, and a count of the occasions this definition is utilised (or resorted to) would be instructive. Persius' iunctura acris is evidently based on Horace's well-known callida iunctura, ‘the clever collocation’ (AP 47f.); but the changes wrought by Persius on this ‘shared’ phrase unequivocally mark the special characteristics of Persius' poetry, which are a sharp ferocity of expression and a certain aggressively extravagant imagination.

I begin by stating what Senecan tragedy is not. Senecan tragedy is not a series of declamations cast into dramatic form, as Leo claimed. It is not purely verbal drama divorced from the inner psychological realities of character, as Eliot claimed. It is not character-static drama, incohesive, structureless, lifeless and monotonously versified, as Mackail and others have claimed. It is not Stoic propaganda, as Marti claimed. It is not recitation drama, if by recitation drama is meant drama to be recited by a single speaker and essentially unstageable, as Zwierlein claims. It is not a tissue of hackneyed commonplaces, as Ogilvie claimed, nor an artificial imitation of Greek tragedy, as Beare claimed; nor is it contemptible as literature, as Summers and most nineteenth and early twentieth century critics have claimed.

What is Senecan tragedy? This essay presents twelve propositions, each of which isolates a characterising property of Senecan tragedy important for the understanding of it as literary and cultural artefact. These twelve propositions constitute neither an exhaustive list of such properties nor an analysis of genre. The latter question, however, I leave not to contemporary theory, but to the Codex Etruscus and the Elizabethans.

(Ep. 59.6)

I find metaphors in your writing, but not uncontrolled and so self-defeating. I find there the use of images. If anyone denies us the right to employ images in our prose by decreeing that they are allowed only in poetry, then he seems to me unfamiliar with our early prose authors whose language was not yet governed by the need to please good opinion. In expressing themselves naturally with a direct view to proving their point, they are full of these forms of comparison. I consider such devices indispensable, but not for the same reasons as do the poets. They work as a buttress for human weakness and they are effective in engaging both author and audience with the central issue at hand.

Dickinson (c. 1858)

Calvino (1979)

1.1. Since ‘World War War 2’ the study of Lucan's rhetoric has made successful, if sporadic and contested, advances on many fronts; much remains to be done for his poetic. It is likely that the ‘unassuming’ exegetical form of attention traditionally represented in classical scholarship by the former has favoured its development: you may identify a crazy (ab)use of, say, metalepsis without committing yourself to a particular valuation of a text; whereas the axiomatically enthusiastic valuation embodied in the study of poetics must soon come hard up against the trench-lines of hierarchies of sensibility and taste. Just how good is Lucan — I mean, as ‘a poet’? The often unspoken gloss is nearly always the (sub)agenda (The answer is, still: ‘Quite good: Silver.’). Those who have steadied their sights have made out a poet's design, a fight to achieve a strong identity over against his inheritance, working through and against the traditional battery of schemata.

For forty years a debate has raged in Petronian studies between the moralists and, for want of a better term, the anti-moralists. From Highet in the 1940's to Bacon and Arrowsmith in the 1950's and 60's, the moralists held a certain advantage. Whatever important divergences there were among these critics, all agreed on a Petronius who stood in some critical relation to his society. The dissenting voices have grown much louder of late. Ironically, the literary brilliance of Arrowsmith's New Critical reading of the Satyricon helped to turn the tide against the moralist viewpoint. The more apparent the literary sophistication of the Satyricon has become, the less willing late twentieth century readers have been to see a programmatic moral critique as its main purpose. Sullivan's view of Petronius as a ‘literary opportunist’ has come to dominate the field.

With Graham Anderson's book, Eros Sophistes: Ancient Novelists at Play, the retreat from the position of Highet is now complete. We have finally reached the logical, New Critical conclusion that the Satyricon is an entirely self-contained literary game without any message whatsoever; in effect we are told that, like any serious piece of literature, the Satyricon ‘should not mean, but be’. Anderson is eager to disavow ‘the unproven conviction that every work must have a message, however diffusely or perversely expressed’.

Martial presents a critical problem. On the one hand, there was his undeniable popularity and literary influence on European literature from the Renaissance to at least the end of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, there is the obvious embarrassment he presents to modern literary historians.

The two viewpoints are easily contrasted. Pliny the Younger in the famous letter written about 102 had expressed doubts about Martial's literary survival, but gave him generous credit for his talent, sharp wit, candour, and mordancy. (Erat homo ingeniosus acutus acer, et qui plurimum inscribendo et satis haberet etfellis, nec candoris minus, Ep. 3.21.1.) Nevertheless Martial's work survived the wreck of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages handsomely, and with the Renaissance, he came into his own as a poet. Angelo Poliziano described him as ingeniosissimus, ‘very talented’, and argutissimus, ‘clever’ (Miscellan. 6); such judgements were echoed by Jovianus Pontanus (De sermone 3.18) and Julius Caesar Scaliger, who claimed that many of his epigrams were divina, praising their sermonis castitas, ‘purity of speech’ (Poet. 3.126). Festivissimus, ‘most witty’, and lepidissimus, ‘charming’, were the adjectives used by Adrianus Turnebus (Advers. 8.4; 13.19). Only a few critics, such as the censorious Andrea Navigero and Raffaele Maffei (Volaterranus), objected to him on moral grounds. His reception among English poets was equally enthusiastic. Sir John Harington stated firmly ‘that of all poems, the Epigram is the pleasantest, and of all that write epigram, Martial is counted the wittiest.’

It is a common observation that Latin literature of the imperial period is highly rhetorical. Usually this claim is made with reference to the elaborate and overwrought nature of the language (a function of elocutio) or to the recurrence of certain conventional themes, images, and topoi (a subdivision of inventio). But to the Romans, rhetoric was something larger and deeper. It involved an approach to any situation, not just the composition of literature, that paid attention to the needs and biases of one's interlocutor, the constraints of tradition and form, and, of course, the aims and purposes of the speaker. ‘The art of rhetoric would be an easy and paltry affair if it could be contained in one brief set of rules,’ writes Quintilian. ‘But with cases and circumstances, opportunity and necessity, all is changed about; and so the crucial qualification for an orator is judgement (consilium), because he directs himself in various ways, and in accordance with the circumstances of the situation (ad rerum momenta)’ (I.O. 2.13.2). This rhetorical, or situation-oriented approach to literature and to life was seen by the Romans as distinguishing themselves from the Greeks, who had their own obsessions with esoteric truths and hair-splitting sophistry. Alongside the satirist's contrast between the Graeculus esuriens (‘hungry Greekling’) and the upright Roman, there is an equally common, if less frequently observed contrast between the quick-witted Greek, good at dialectic and analysis, and the sensible Roman, concerned with the moral and practical dimensions of any situation. When Fannius and Scaevola ask Laelius at the outset of the Ciceronian dialogue named after him, if he can please discourse on friendship, he replies that he is no Greek, capable of debating pro and contra on the spur of the moment, but a Roman who can and will give them sound and efficacious exhortation on the significance of loyalty in human affairs.

Pliny, Tacitus, and Juvenal were all released by the death of Domitian in A.D. 96 and the succession of Nerva, then of Trajan in 98 to embark on their separate careers of public and literary life. While Pliny reflects a happy present time, Tacitus and Juvenal look back on earlier times with disgust and indignation. But that, too, could well imply that, secure with the Trajanic Era, they were seeking more dramatic material for their comfortable audiences. When Trajan died in 117, Juvenal had published two books of poems consisting of what we call Satires 1 to 6. Trajan's successor, Hadrian, was a considerably different man, not only a capable soldier and administrator but a person of culture, widely travelled, fond of architectural experimentation, with a life-style that included both a wife and a handsome Bithynian named Antinous. Life was not so predictable under Hadrian for anybody. Pliny had already died, and Tacitus may not have survived very long into the new reign, but Juvenal was still alive and writing after 127.