For the artist, obscenity is an aesthetic, not a legal, problem. I wish to analyze the uses to which Catullus puts obscenity and comment on the nature of obscenity in poetry. Catullus comments on his obscene subject matter in three poems. These furnish a starting point for an anatomy of the obscenity of Catullus. Poem 50 describes an afternoon of light verse composition (versiculi) with a friend. ‘We played around a lot, each toying in verse’ (lusimus, ludebat) suggests competition, also banter and ridicule (cf. Cic. de Orat. 1.12.50). Lepor in speech is wit more than charm or pleasantness (Cic. Brut. 38. 143; also, iocum and facetiae). No doubt, then as today, a fine insult or obscenity was more immediately appreciated than a magnificent simile or compliment. No mention is made of versifying obscenity in 50, but we learn of Catullus' attitude towards writing light, and probably passionate, poetry. It is fun (lusimus), it is metrically exciting (numero modo hoc modo illoc, ‘now in this metre, now in that’), it is competitive (tuo lepore/incensus, ‘aroused by your charm’), it encourages audacity (audax), and it can leave one physically aroused.

In poem 104, Catullus claims to have been unable to insult (maledicere) his love. To ensure that no one might think him unable to write nasty, obscene poems, the fourth line insults the unknown addressee: Sed tu cum Tappone omnia monstra facis (‘But you perform every monstrosity with Bozo’).

‘Closure: Get Over It’
Miss Manners 12/6/98

‘I know, it probably doesn't have the sense of closure that you want, but it has more than some of our other cases.’
Agent Dana Scully on ‘The X-Files’

Thebaid 12 is a problematic ending to a disturbing poem. Part of the problem is the unsatisfactory nature of the final book. Book 12 is itself concerned with the processes of ending and its problems. The main narrative of the Thebaid is the story of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, and their battle over the throne at Thebes. Their final confrontation occurs in Book 11. This ending is full of closural allusions and very closely linked to the ending of the Aeneid and its final battle between Aeneas and Turnus. If the poem is ‘over’ after Book 11, why does Statius write the final book? It's not enough to say—as critics have—that it's just badly structured poetry.

In a discussion of the rhetorical styles of Caesar and the early principes, Fronto formulates the maxim that imperium…non potestatis tantummodo uocabulum, sed etiam orationis (‘’command’…is a word connoting not only power, but also oratory’ [p.123.16-17 van den Hout]). This essay will explore the political background and implications of trends and shifts in Roman ways of thinking about language and oratory in the transition from Republic to Principate. The word declension in my title functions in two senses: literally, in the case of Caesar's discussion of the nature of the Latin language (in De Analogia) and his rivalry with Cicero's views on oratorical style; and figuratively, in the perception of decline in oratory expressed by the elder Seneca and other writers of the early Principate. I hope to be able to present a new approach to, and understanding of, both these aspects.

exulis haec uox est: praebet mihi littera linguam,
et si non liceat scribere, rautus ero.
Epist. ex Pont. 2.6.3f.

This is the exile's voice; the written word gives me a tongue,
and if writing is forbidden, I shall be dumb.

Ovid's exilic persona reveals itself over the course of his correspondence as a literary pastiche of other texts and identities. We hear the narrator's voice in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto echoing that of Horace and Propertius, Homer's Odysseus and Vergil's Aeneas. These allusions to canonical works are widely recognised and catalogued. But equally crucial to Ovid's self-presentation are allusions to his own previous masterpieces. I interpret his choice of the letter form for the exile poems as not only an allusion to, but also an authorial statement of identification—on some level—with his earlier epistolary work, the Heroides. The Heroides may be read as letters from exile, epistulae ex exilio in which Ovid pursues his fascination with the genre of letters and the subject of abandonment through literary characters; the Tristia take that fascination one step further as the author himself, in letters to loved ones, writes from the position of an abandoned hero of sorts.

It is a commonplace of literary criticism that the criteria to be used in the understanding of a poem are internal. What counts as evidential in respect of poetic intent and meaning is what the poet actually says in the poem, and the only methodology worth serious attention is a careful, detailed and critical analysis of the poem itself. Despite this platitude biographical assumptions and postulates have exerted, and are still exerting, a disconcerting influence upon the criticism of ancient literature, most notoriously, perhaps, in the case of Virgil's epic, the Aeneid. All too frequently Virgil's life has been taken as the datum, the fact, to which his epic has had to be accommodated. This is not the occasion to take up arms against the biographical approach to Roman poets; I wish only to assert that, while it is important to place a poem such as the Aeneid in its historical context, it is equally important (indeed, more important) not to allow the historical context to dictate the interpretation of the poem. The poem, after all, is not a postulate; it is a determinate thing, present in a way in which a historical context is not. It must be given primacy, and any attempt to supplant this primacy with biographical hypotheses about the working of a poet's mind during the third decade B.C. based upon ambiguous external criteria would be the antithesis of the procedures of serious (that is to say, intelligent and relevant) criticism.

Catullus described a full emotional circle in his short life from delight in unconstrained aesthetic sensuality free of socially-defined patterns (cc. 5, 6, 13 for example) to longing for a stable bond in the relationship of man to woman. He pictured such a bond as placed within the traditional Roman frame of marriage and home, but cast in a personal mold; he wanted to preserve his aesthetic and sensual response to a woman while combining it somehow with the stability and intimacy appropriate to friendship (amare and bene velle). Poems 72 and 87, for instance, directly express the ideal in acknowledging its absence from Catullus' relations with Lesbia.

Catullus liked to feel that the possibility of complete union was what he offered Lesbia. Perhaps it was his inability to fashion a compelling synthesis of sexual intimacy and friendship with her that led him to write a series of poems exploring attempts, mainly failures, at full reciprocal love. The successful attempts are idyllic or mythic (Septimius and Acme, Peleus and Thetis, neither unambiguously positive). The failures come, in Catullus' portrayal, when union founders on the obstacle of the narcissistic personality, the man or woman unable to forfeit autonomy, desirous of holding others in thrall without being himself held. Catullus' highly developed sensitivity to narcissism must be a reaction to its prominence in the character of a certain kind of sexually attractive individual, the one who is alluring but uncapturable, the kind of woman, like Lesbia, with whom Catullus sought union. Catullus conveys the quality of narcissism in such a character in part through the image of the flower (appropriately, considering the source of the modern name for it).

The opening poem of Propertius Book 4 famously contains a programmatic statement which presents not amor (love or desire)—the staple of Roman elegy through the 20s and into the 10s BCE—as the ruling theme of the collection, but Roman aetiology:

Roma, faue, tibi surgit opus, date candida ciues
omina, et inceptis dextera cantet auis!
sacra diesque canam et cognomina prisca locorum.
(4.1.67-69)

Rome, lend your support. This work arises for you. Citizens, grant bright
omens—and may the bird of augury sing favourably!
Of rites and days I will sing, and of the ancient names of places.

The focus on Roman origins in poem 1 itself specifically involves a comparison between the early history of Rome (the mythic past) and the poet's present (what we have come to know as ‘Augustan’ Rome). This comparison is introduced in the very opening lines of the poem:

hoc quodcumque uides, hospes, qua maxima Roma est,
ante Phrygem Aenean collis et herba fuit;
atque ubi Nauali stant sacra Palatia Phoebo,
Euandri profugae procubuere boues.
fictilibus creuere deis haec aurea templa,
nec fuit opprobrio facta sine arte casa.
(4.1.1-6)

Whatever you see here, stranger, where now is great Rome,
was hills and grassland before the coming of Phrygian Aeneas.
Where the Palatine shrine of Naval Phoebus now stands,
the cattle of Evander once lay down as refugees.
These golden temples grew from clay gods,
and there was no shame in an artless dwelling.

Anthropologists and sociologists have demonstrated the vital role which myths of origin, such as the poet here purports to represent, play in the formation, maintenance and expression of ethnicity in many cultures, ancient and modern. A.D. Smith even goes so far as to call such myths the sine qua non of ethnic identity. It seems reasonable to suggest, then, that the representation of Roman origins projects Roman identity. Indeed, some scholars have recently argued for this in the case of Propertius Book 4. What is more, as I will argue here, Propertius Book 4 accentuates the complexities inherent in the particular picture of Roman identity which Roman myth transmits, and dramatises them in such ways as to challenge the unitariness of that identity at the very moment of its assertion.

In 1948 Winnington-Ingram made what is still the most eloquent feminist evaluation of Clytemnestra. He concluded that the Oresteia is based on conflict between the sexes; that Clytemnestra hates Agamemnon for being a man and wants his power; and that in his strong portrait of Clytemnestra and purposely inconclusive trial scene of Eumenides, Aeschylus protests the ‘personal tragedy’ of Athenian women. In 1941, Thomson had claimed the opposite: that the trilogy proves Aeschylus' support for the status quo of economically based male superiority. More recently Jones has interpreted the trilogy as the tragedy of the (largely economic) wastage of the oikos, the House of Atreus, by the sexually deviant Clytemnestra, with Aeschylus favoring the status quo. And in a perceptive literary analysis Vickers concluded that Aeschylus ‘evidently shared the Greek attitude to the lesser sex’ and that his ‘exorcism’ of Clytemnestra in Eumenides is a ‘sustained concentration of moral disapproval rarely equalled in literature.

The stage setting of Euripides' Hekabe is a sinister place. Its denizen is an ogre-like king who masquerades as an ally of the Greeks and a friend of the Trojans. He is a host who takes in a xenos (‘stranger/guest’) along with his golden hoard, both of which he promises to keep safe within his house. Site of death, site of thesaurization, Polymestor's locale bears an uncanny and parodic resemblance to the house of Hades and he to the form of that death god called Plouton. Paradoxically, the names of the victims who die there, the one he killed (Polydoros) and the one whom others sacrificed (Polyxena), sound like those ironic and euphemistic epithets of that underworld deity, who both gives and receives. This is also a place haunted by ghosts, one of whom appears on stage and speaks the prologue (Polydoros) and the other, Achilleus, who transmits his demand for the sacrificial gift of a ‘bride of death’ (Polyxena). In the end, there is a ‘house of Hades’, but it will be Hekabe's and not Polymestor's, and it is Polymestor and his children who will be lured into her secluded tent, following a path, as the chorus says, that leads thanasimon pros Haidan (‘to deadly Hades’, 1031f.; cf. 1021f.). He will later call the avengers (Hekabe and her women) Bacchants of Hades (1077).

The heart does hurt.
And that's no metaphor.

The feeling is
that ‘throbbing muscle’ you can't say—
since that's ‘steel comic sex meat’.

But it does hurt
top-mid-left
under my shirt with its atrocious beat.

‘Didactic Poetry is poetry which is primrily intended to instruct. Most commonly, the label is used for poetry which teaches a moral. It can also refer to poetry which conveys factual information.’ Classicists will take issue with such a definition: that ‘also’ is provocative, and so are the priorities it signals; the wedge that is being driven between poetics as ‘moral’ as against poetics as ‘factual’, those terms—… Besides, what weight is to be placed on the opposition ‘teaches’ vs. ‘conveys… information’? What concept of ‘teaching’ can there be that stands proud of ‘conveying… information’?

This is the subject of the present essay. If we put this question—these questions—to the Satires of Persius, we will find in them both: (1) a strategic manoeuvre within the developing construction of imperial subjectivity within Roman discourse that has been strangely overlooked in the recent burst of critical attention devoted to this area; and also (2) a paradigmatic response to repressive encroachment on individual and collective liberties from the ‘defensive’ writer who contrives from the very constriction of the civic voice a vindication of the freedom to mean. Our freedom… to dissemble(,) dissent. Reflection of and on bur predicament: ‘meaning’ in the meaning-fullness of emphasis, the protocol of reading that problematises the containment of reading this side of the Diktat of Power/Knowledge. Hoc ridere meum (1.122).

The 20 poems collected together as the lithika of Posidippus, the first surviving poems on a papyrus roll only published in 2001 and dating from the third century BCE, offer a range of spectacular new evidence for a series of issues in Hellenistic history, art and literature. The standard view is that Posidippus was probably author of all the epigrams in the roll known as P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, although this has been contested and by no means need certainly be the case. For my purposes here, I do assume that the interconnected poetics of the poems in the lithika do imply a single poet who is quite likely to be Posidippus, since poem 15—independently anthologised in antiquity and known through a manuscript tradition—was attributed to Posidippus in the twelfth century by the Byzantine poet and grammarian John Tzetzes. Historically speaking, the fact that so many of these poems focus on gems from the east gives remarkable insight into the interchange between Hellenistic and Achaemenid cultures: specifically, they signal the prestige of treasures from the east in the Hellenistic courts. In the history of collections, they represent a very early example of exoticism in elite collecting, of the accumulation of valuables in what we may assume was a royal and non-sacred Schatzkammer, of the need for an aesthetic response (in this case through short poems) to ‘label’ and valorise the precious items in the collection. In the history of ancient Wissenschaft, the poems’ use of late Classical gem-lore (exemplified in texts like the On Stones of Theophrastus) offers a vivid instance of the ways theoretical knowledge circulated at least in elite contexts around the royal circle.

Time will say nothing but I told you so

Time only knows the price we have to pay

If I could tell you I would let you know

‘History is one of the most harmless products ever elaborated by the chemistry of the intellect.’ Siesta hammock of History, that ancient ‘bunk’ — ‘an old man pipes icing of concordance: oneiric cake of ungrasped memories’ …

But when the historian exorcises his work from his passions, the ira et studium of commitment, pastoral care, life-time, it gives pause: Why? — Why write procul habeo — the vatic hekas hekas of the voice that means to speak the sacred ‘word’ of the community (1.1.)? The gesture does not simply seal Tacitus from implication in his Annals behind the impassive modality of the annalistic genre and a double safety-door of assassination and end of Dynasty. No, the formula invites inspection of its rhetorical role: disarming … disavowal, yes but/so challenging … conscription: any citizen ‘can’ and ‘must’ join this project, brought near to readers of Latin by the distance-annulling homoeostasis of affective discourse, that programme already spelled out by the opening text, Urhem Romam … et cetera. ‘Rome’ is, ahistorically, ‘the near’ the ‘here’ the ‘now’ the ‘us’ — the ‘wor(l)d’ that was in the beginning.

The fourth-century Latin poet, Ausonius, enjoyed in his own time considerable prestige and success. Our witnesses for this reputation are by no means inconsiderable figures. In a letter, the emperor Theodosius proclaims that his admiration for the poet could not be greater. He equates Ausonius with the poets of the Augustan golden age and concludes that, although Augustus might have esteemed these authors as highly as Theodosius does Ausonius, he could not possibly have loved them more. In another fascinating document, Symmachus, one of the most influential and learned men of the age, playfully castigates Ausonius for the fact that, despite their friendship, he hasn't received a copy of the poet's latest best seller. The work in question is Ausonius' poem in praise of the Moselle river; copies of it, Symmachus punningly protests, are circulating everywhere, but they have glided right past him. Still, he has managed to obtain a copy to read, and the praise he lavishes on the work is boundless; he proclaims that the Moselle has become more famous than the Tiber and does not blush to conclude by holding up Ausonius to the master himself, Vergil: ego hoc tuum carmen libris Maronis adiungo (‘I class your poetry with Vergil's’).

I start with four quotations: (1) ‘That all European poetry has come out of the Provençal poetry written in the twelfth century by the troubadours of Languedoc is now accepted on every side.’ [The writer is talking of love poetry.] (2) The passion and sorrow of love were an emotional discovery of the French troubadours and their successors.’ (3) ‘French poets in the eleventh century discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth.’ (4) ‘The conception of romantic love which has dominated the literature, art, music, and to some extent the morality of modern Europe and America for many centuries is a medieval creation.’ Those words come from a Frenchman, a German, and Englishman and a Scot — namely Denis de Rougemont, E. R. Curtius, C. S. Lewis, and Gilbert Highet — a distinguished quartet, not lacking in knowledge or influence. The view they represent has met with little opposition and is, in fact, so widely held that it may be regarded as orthodox. The layman finds it all the easier to accept in that ‘romantic love’ is readily connected with the first definition of ‘romance’ given by the Oxford English Dictionary, namely The vernacular language of France as opposed to Latin’.

For almost all present-day readers, Catullus is a compelling love poet; for Quintilian, he was a master of the savage political lampoon. These two views of the same author are not mutually exclusive. Yet a natural wish to establish Catullus as a great ‘lyric poet’, as twentieth-century scholars understand the term, has sometimes trapped his admirers into a false dichotomy: his invectives are denied any claim to artistic merit, and the Roman rhetorician's preference for them is dismissed as an odd lapse of taste. Such a pronouncement hardly does justice to Quintilian's aesthetic judgment. Nor does it give due recognition to Catullus' noteworthy achievements in the iambic mode. Even in the harshest of his lampoons, modern techniques of literary analysis reveal a level of sophistication as high as in any of the famous love lyrics, together with an equivalent degree of emotional complexity. In this paper I intend to support that thesis through an exploration of one significant characteristic of certain pasquinades: the use of standard invective topoi as condensed metaphors of political corruption.

Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their physical form suggests. From earliest times since, the genre has dealt, centrally, with themes of metamorphosis, transubstantiation, the fundamentally permeable nature of the self. The solid material aspect of the novel often masks a central preoccupation with the fluidity of identity.

In the compass of this article, I want to explore the central role accorded by Heliodorus, arguably the greatest of ancient novelists, to questions of perceptual deception, to seeing and seeming; and in particular, I want to explore the role of artworks within Heliodorus' narrative economy. The narrative turns, as is well known, on the amazing paradox of an Ethiopian girl born white. Charicleia's skin colour is a visual trap, an illusion. Given that her freakish pigmentation is the result of her mother's glancing at an art-work at the moment of conception, Charicleia can almost be said to be a walking ekphrasis, an embodiment of the illusory traps of the unreal.

‘sophos’ uniuersi clamamus et sublatis manibus ad cameram iuramus Hipparchum Aratumque comparandos illi homines non fuisse…
(‘Fantastic!’ we all cry, and raising our hands to the ceiling we swear that not even Hipparchus and Aratus could have been put on a par with him.)
Petronius Satyricon
This then is the visible work of Menard, in chronological order….I turn now to his other work: the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the peerless.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’

The Flavians needed a poet. When Octavian established the Julio-Claudian dynasty he had in his hands a usefully exploitable victory over the forces of chaos and oriental despotism, a spin on Actium and its aftermath that was given full epic representation in the Aeneid's description of Aeneas' shield (Aen. 8.671-713); Antony was compromised by Cleopatra and years of propaganda, and it all took place far enough away for the final act in what everyone knew was a civil war to be portrayed as defeat of a foreign power and celebrated as such in the traditional manner (Caesar triplici inuectus Rotnana triumpholmoenia…, ‘Caesar, borne within the walls of Rome in triple triumph’, Aen. 8.714f.). By contrast the Flavian ascendancy was achieved through assault on these selfsame walls, and involved the desecration and burning of the Capitol (Tac. Hist. 3.69-74, who remarks id facinus post conditam urbem luctuosissimum foedissimumque rei publicae populi Romani accidit, ‘this was the most deplorable and outrageous crime to befall the republic of the Roman people since the foundation of the city’).

Medea has dwarfed her ‘human fly’ of a husband. She plans poisoned gifts of Colchian gold for Jason's bride, inaugurates murderous rites (568-78). Despair and alarm for Jason's safety stir in the men of Corinth at the spectre: ‘Ode 3 is at the bridge between Medea the wife of Jason, Medea the human being, and Medea the manifestation of Hecate’, Bishop observes. The moment at the close of Medea's exchange with Jason is clearly critical, as she sees in a flash of certainty her route to revenge: sic natos amat? / bene est, tenetur, uulneri patuit locus (‘Does he love his sons so? / Splendid, he's mine, his weak spot exposed for my strike!’, 549f.). And we are caught still in the dramatic suspense demonstrated by Pratt which keeps spoken certainty of revenge specifically through infanticide back within the text until 924f., liberi quondam mei, / uos pro paternis sceleribus poenas date (“Children, once my children, / you pay the price of your father's wickednesses!). But already we must hesitate: did Seneca's Medea really start out in the play as a ‘human being’? Herington's phrase ‘Cloud of Evil’ is surely nearer the mark: ‘the raging sorceress Medea will shake the light from heaven as easily as she will shake the marriage torches from the hands of her enemies’ — and this is to translate lines 27f. from the play's prologue, manibus excutiam faces / caeloque lucem …

The true subject of the Iliad, Simone Weil famously wrote, is force. Time and again, ‘the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to’. Force turns men, perpetrators of violence and its victims alike, into things: objectification is its bane. Homer's clarity about the moral degradation of war, that machine of force, is what makes him, in Weil's accounting, not just the first but the greatest of poets.

Simonides once called painting silent poetry and poetry articulate painting. Comparing the two ‘sister arts’ in the sixth or fifth century BCE, he wrote the first chapter of a story which, even if one thinks only of antiquity, is a rather long one, and in which many of the issues raised seem tremendously complex. In addition, many ancient authors wanted to add their own passages to this story, and quite naturally different writers arrived at very different conclusions about the two arts' respective relationships. Yet however different these conclusions were, no writer, as a writer, could avoid agreeing with Simonides on a basic thing: any statement about the visual arts is inevitably a hermeneutical effort to make the visual speak, and in doing so it equally inevitably implies a deficit of the visual arts: namely, that art cannot speak and needs some form of ‘translation’ to be communicated. Discussing art in written texts, then, cannot but entail implicitly a statement about writing's hermeneutical superiority; this is the case even if the statement may explicitly deny any such superiority. It has been argued that this deficit in art is real and that there does exist a ‘Hermeneutic Gap’ in painting; whereas verbal discourse, so the argument goes, operates with a ‘hermeneutic of understanding’, painting, by contrast, is bound to a ‘hermeneutic of calculated misunderstanding’. Certainly there are paintings for which such a statement is correct—but there may be as many cases in which a text only construes such a gap and uses it as a good opportunity to establish its own hermeneutic superiority by contrasting itself with an image which is supposedly less precise in communicating meaning.