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.

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.

(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.

This article comprises a discussion of four separate passages in Homer and some of the critical problems which each involves. My intention is not to produce a blueprint or set of rules for the interpretation of Homer, but rather — a more limited aim — to increase attention to the complex texture of the poetry of the Odyssey, and to the need for a critical practice alive to such complexity. The four passages are the speech of Amphimedon's ghost; the recognition scene between Odysseus and Argus; the story telling of Menelaus and Helen; and, finally, Odysseus' first speech to Nausicaa. Each passage opens questions about how Homer is read, and, in particular, about how what is often referred to as Homer's juxtapositional technique interrelates with the role of the reader in the activity of interpretation.

The received wisdom about Hesiod's poetics is simple: he is no Homer. His poetry is supposedly rough, awkward, unsophisticated, repetitive, disjointed, a second-best versifier's striving after effect. Too often the rhetoric even of those who respect Hesiodic poetry damns it with faint praise. Readers of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—to take just one easily available reference that students might consult—learn that Hesiod's ‘didactic epics’ were meant for

the peasant of Boeotia rather than the Ionian aristocrat, being concerned with the morality and beliefs of the small farmer toughly confronting a life of ceaseless labor and few rewards. While they cannot be compared to Homer's works in scope or genius, they often display much poetic power.

The Orestes is the most Euripidean of all Euripidean plays, reflecting his typical techniques, emphases, interests, and outlook. All the familiar signs are present and perceptible: for example, novelty of plot, rapidity and multiplicity of action, sensationalism and theatrical virtuosity, lyrical experimentation, increase in the cast of characters on stage, comic and melodramatic elements, the illusion-reality game, the ergon-logos paradox, the use of cliché and rhetoric, a focus on the phenomenon of alienation, on the psychopathology of characters, their natural victimage and their subsequent retaliatory reflex, the secularization of myth, the questioning of inherited values, and compensatory themes of philia and sōtēria, etc. etc.

What marks the difference in this play is the extent to which these implications are carried out, the outer limits to which these techniques are pushed; it is a question of intensification, escalation, a question of a relentless drive towards the achievement of a theatrical ‘style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders on its own caricature,’ to quote Borges' definition of his own baroque technique. Yet the aesthetic boldness of the play's excesses moves it out beyond any formal definitions and limitations, beyond parody, beyond outrage into another mode, one might say, to a new level of self-consciousness and authorial extravagance that does not seem to have existed before. And it is a play whose surface of seeming incoherence, instability and chaos is, in reality, under that kind of artistic control that brings about that fusion of form and content we call art, even as it always seems to be trying to escape from it.

In his review of the first edition of Brooks Otis's Ovid as an Epic Poet, William Anderson challenges the notion that structural symmetry is the principle that governs Ovid's narrative design. To propose an alternative view of Ovidian aesthetics, he takes for his example the weaving contest of Arachne and Minerva in Book 6. Minerva's tapestry which depicts her own victory in the contest for the naming of Athens is arranged in a completely symmetrical design. The judging gods stand six on either side of Jupiter; the disputants likewise stand on opposite sides. Each corner of the tapestry contains a panel showing the punishment of mortals who in one way or another have challenged the gods, and the whole is framed with an ornamental border of olive leaves. “The goddess,” as Anderson says, “produced a perfect piece of Classicistic art, structurally balanced and thematically grandiose, in support of the established order.” With this monumental and authoritarian piece of work, the tapestry of Minerva's rival Arachne contrasts in every way. It is flagrantly asymmetrical and lifelike:

Despite some notable recent essays in the rehabilitation of the Latin epic of the first century A.D., there remains a prejudice that post-Virgilian epicists are slavishly imitative in a way that Virgil (and his contemporaries in other genres) are not. The following three studies, in Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus, are contributions to an argument, currently being conducted on a wide front, that imitation, even of a very close kind, may behave in a dynamic and creative way; in particular I wish to show how the epigone may function as an implicit literary analyst or critic, anticipating the results of twentieth-century criticism. My three examples take their starting-point from what I see as a general modern consensus about the nature of Virgilian epic, but the direction could be reversed, that is, we might use post-Virgilian epic as a critical aid to our reading of Virgil.

I take individual passages from the Flavian epics in which two (or more) passages of the Aeneid are laid under contribution; analysis of such passages reveals that the later poets were reading Virgil with an eye to structural correspondences or contrasts, and to image-structures reaching from the small scale of the ‘multiple-correspondence simile’ to the large scale of patterns that arch over the whole text, features that have been at the centre of much modern Virgilian criticism. Repeated reading of the Aeneid reinforces the impression of a vast structure of self-allusion and self-comment aiming for a maximal transparency of the text to itself, in so far as the prima materia of language will allow, and demanding a ‘simultaneous reading’ that is more spatial than temporal. The fragmentary state of previous large-scale Hellenistic poetry makes it difficult to judge of the originality of Virgil in this extreme extension of the features of repetition and self-allusion that characterize all literary works; but, for example, every increase in our knowledge of Callimachus' Aitia makes it seem more likely that it was constructed in a similar way.

Fasti is Ovid's prime exilic work. Begun at the same time as Metamorphoses it is yet the last of Ovid's poems, rewritten in exile to juxtapose past and present, centre and periphery, tradition, religion, time and their ideological appropriation and abuse. Ovid's carmen ultimum, it joins Epistulae ex Ponto in straddling the principates of Augustus and Tiberius and bearing witness with Epistulae to the factuality of dynastic succession and the consolidation of imperial power. There is no evidence that any of Fasti was recited, or otherwise made public, before Ovid's departure for Tomis; indeed the only reference to Fasti outside itself is the second Tristia's description of the rupturing of the work (opus ruptum, Tr. 2.552) by Ovid's exilic ‘fate’ (sors). Pre-exilic and exilic strata exist in the poem, as many critics have too frequently noted, but, since they were never read in separate contexts but always within the frame of Ovid's exile, their dynamic interplay serves only to enrich and to deepen the exilic nature of Fasti's discourse.

The Germania, as its full title de origine et situ Germanorum implies, is about Rome. This is clearest from passages couched almost entirely in negative terms, as in chapter 19—

When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognised conventions for its production, according to which woman is the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia's unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’. For Amy Richlin, Sulpicia breached a double barrier, both the ‘male job’ of writing and the ‘male genre’ of elegy. With reference to Sulpicia, I also labelled Augustan elegy as ‘male-oriented verse’ that constructs a ‘male narrative perspective’. While it is evidently the case that, with the notable exception of Sulpicia, the biological sex of all the authors of Roman elegy is male, I would now argue that the genre of elegy itself is not unequivocally ‘masculine’ and that to engender elegy unproblematically as ‘male’ fails to do justice to the genre's crucial play with Roman categories of gender.

Horace's Epodes are seldom considered as a whole. On the face of it, there would seem to be good reason for this fact. It is generally agreed that the poems were written over a period of ten years (from after Philippi to after Actium), during which time there was a great deal of change in the Roman world and in Horace's circumstances. Furthermore, the collection contains a considerable diversity of themes, genres and what, for lack of a better expression, one must call levels of reality. The Archilochean persona maintained in several of the poems is a unifying factor, of course, but it has not seemed pervasive enough to have allowed a systematic interpretation of the whole collection, and even within the Archilochean group scholars have tended to separate the political poems from the invective poems.3 Attempts to find some principle of arrangement for the collection have not been very enlightening, since they have rarely amounted to more than classifying each of the poems by type or theme (usually a completely unsystematic mixture of both), and then putting them into groups, which reveals structural patterns that have a no more than decorative function, or else simply displays Horace's penchant for variatio.

In Propertius 4.5 the lena (‘procuress’) Acanthis gives advice to nostra arnica (‘my girlfriend’, 63), almost certainly Cynthia, to cultivate rich lovers and avoid the poet who offers only verses. For Georg Luck the purpose of Propertius' ‘caricature’ of Acanthis is a moralizing condemnation of Rome's decadent demi-monde. According to Judith Hallett, ‘Propertius and his ideals are vindicated’ when at the close of 4.5 ‘Acanthis dies penniless and unmourned.’ Gordon Williams remarks on the poem's ‘vividness and drama’, the active effort it demands of the reader, through ‘the gradual revelation of the lena's death and the realization that the poet is actually standing on her grave’. Margaret Hubbard rightly challenges the overly dramatic readings made by many scholars and insists that the point of the poem is not ‘a genre picture of a bawd’ but an expression of ‘the lover's reactions’, his fear of Acanthis' powers conveyed by the lines leading up to her speech (1-20) and his relishing of her death at the poem's close (63-78).

The interpretation of Ovid's epic that is argued here has three related parts that have not been drawn together before:

I. Ovid's panoramic presentation of myth, the Metamorphoses, presents provocative reflections in dramatic guise concerning human psychology, society, and art. Ovid is an engaged poet as well as an amusing one.

II. The Metamorphoses include, under the mantle of myth, pointed criticisms of the Emperor Augustus and his program of social, spiritual, and religious reform.

III. Stories about artists in the Metamorphoses were invented or elaborated by Ovid in order to illustrate the primacy of art and its spiritual value. Respect for love, truth, and human wisdom counts for more than fealty to the artifice of the new Rome.

The relevance of these parts to each other and their consequences will be made clear in the Conclusion (IV), which examines the function of art in life for Ovid and his hopes for permanence in a world of transitions.

Alongside Catullus and Ovid, Martial is the Latin writer who tells us most about the ancient book, and he receives detailed treatment in most histories of ancient book production: he has a chapter to himself, for instance, in Roberts and Skeats' The Birth of the Codex. Books and reading are a central concern of his poetry from his very first publications: around 10-15% of the epigrams deal with this theme. The topic has received, however, much less attention from literary critics than from scholars interested in the Realien of ancient book production, and those who have paid attention to it have tended to play down the importance of the published books compared to the ‘occasional’ reception of the epigrams either through recitation or through informal pamphlets (the so-called ‘libelli’ prominent in the important work of Peter White). Even John Sullivan, who was more aware than many of the importance of the book in Martial, sees the published books as ‘open-ended collections, to which material could be added as it became available or necessary’ and declares that ‘Martial is less careful about the endings of his books…than about their beginnings and general structure’. I have suggested elsewhere that, on the contrary, the endings of Martial's books may be seen as possessing particularly ingenious effects of closure, and in general it seems to me that the engagement with reception in book-form shown by Martial's epigrams is extremely sophisticated.

In 65 CE, a Spanish writer appointed himself Virgil's heir and stepped into a breach that did not really exist. L. Iunius Moderatus Columella chose to attach to his self-styled prose ‘monument’ of agricultural instruction an ornamental didactic poem on gardening, to fill the gap apparently left by Virgil at the start of Georgic 4. The result has been regarded for the most part as a misguided experiment, an uninspired pastiche of clippings and half-lines from a greater poet. Yet in recent years, as part of the wholescale rehabilitation of ‘second-rate’ Latin literature, it has begun to be considered in its own right. Why is this forgettable poem worth another look? Partly because it exists and is average: it tells us how Virgil himself was read in antiquity, and how one middling writer responded to a particular task with its own set of rules. But it is also a surprisingly ambitious poem, a showpiece in which Columella concentrates all his resources, to give his immediate readers Silvinus and Gallio a ‘taste’, in his own words, of his poetic gifts. He takes an unpromising subject and overcompensates by making something new and monstrous out of it. It is not often that artichokes and cucumbers are forced into such lurid focus.

The position of the polis in the Iliad and the Odyssey is equivocal. Because there is a great span in time between the formal subject material of the poems (ca. 1250 BC) and the time of their composition (ca. 750-700 BC, by convention), the poems present a hybrid world picture with varying and occasionally contradictory systems of social organization. As much as the poems are part of a long epic and formulaic tradition which looks back to an ancestral Mycenaean past, they also have been adapted to the conditions of Homer's lifetime. In political organization, the Iliad and the Odyssey look back through the small tribal groupings and warrior aristocracy of the Dark Ages, to a highly centralized and bureaucratic society governed by divinely ordained kings; but they also look forward to that form of social organization which Homer saw emerging about him — the polis. With this wide disparity in socio-political orientation apparent in the poems, one scholar can say, ‘For Homer and his audience the polis is regarded as the typical form of human community’, whereas another can argue that the significance of the polis is masked and superseded by that of the oikos (the means of social unification preeminent in the Dark Ages). And even if the polis were agreed to be the typical form of human habitation, it is nevertheless argued that the focus in the poems upon the individualistic warrior aristocracy prevents the polis from playing a significant dramatic role in the poems as a higher coercive power: ‘die Stadt habe für die fuhrende Schicht nur an der Peripherie des Daseins gestanden.’ More extensively the same critic writes (p. 164):

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.