Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean

C L A S S I C A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S Don Fowler in the summer of 1999 (photo: Peta Fowler) Classical Construc...

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C L A S S I C A L C O N S T RU C T I O N S

Don Fowler in the summer of 1999 (photo: Peta Fowler)

Classical Constructions Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean

Edited by S . J. H EY WO RT H w it h P. G . F OW L E R a n d S . J. H A R R I S O N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Oxford University Press 2007 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–921803–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface 1 Don Fowler Laocoon’s Point of View: Walking the Roman Way 2 Phillip Mitsis Life as Play, Life as a Play: Montaigne and the Epicureans 3 Gordon Campbell Bicycles, Centaurs and Man-faced Ox-creatures: Ontological Instability in Lucretius 4 Alessandro Schiesaro Didaxis, Rhetoric, and the Law in Lucretius 5 Miche`le Lowrie Making an Exemplum of Yourself: Cicero and Augustus 6 Llewelyn Morgan Natura narratur: Tullius Laurea’s Elegy for Cicero (Pliny, Nat. 31.8) 7 Philip Hardie Contrasts 8 Joseph Farrell Horace’s Body, Horace’s Books 9 Stephen Hinds Ovid Among the Conspiracy Theorists 10 Ben Tipping ‘Haec tum Roma fuit’: Past, Present, and Closure in Silius Italicus’ Punica 11 Matthew Leigh Petrarch’s Lucan and the Africa

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39 63 91

113 141 174 194

221 242

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Contents

12 Deborah H. Roberts Translating Antiquity: Intertextuality, Anachronism, and Archaism 13 Andrew Laird Fiction, Philosophy, and Logical Closure 14 Stephen Harrison From Man to Book: The Close of Tacitus’ Agricola Consolidated Bibliography Bibliography of Don Fowler Index locorum Index rerum et nominum

258 281 310 320 349 361 364

Illustrations Frontispiece Don Fowler in the summer of 1999 (photo: Peta Fowler) Figure 1 Piero di Cosimo, The Forest Fire (c.1505) (by permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) Figure 2 Map of Cicero’s Cumanum and its environs (courtesy of Stuart Campbell) Figure 3 Endpiece from Pugin (1898) Endpiece Don Fowler’s grave in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford (photo: Peta Fowler)

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118 171

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Notes on Contributors Gordon Campbell is Lecturer in Ancient Classics at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; he is author of Lucretius on Creation and Evolution (Oxford, 2003) and Strange Creatures: Anthropology in Antiquity (London, 2006). Joseph Farrell is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is, most recently, author of Latin Language and Latin Culture from Ancient to Modern Times (Cambridge, 2001). Peta Fowler is Lecturer in Classics at Worcester College and St Hugh’s College, Oxford, was co-author with Don Fowler of the introduction to Melville’s translation of Lucretius, and has published further on Lucretius, as well as preparing much of Don Fowler’s last work for publication. Philip Hardie was Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford and is now a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His books include Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986), The Epic Successors of Virgil (Cambridge, 1993), and Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge, 2002). Stephen Harrison is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature in the University of Oxford. He is the author of the commentary Vergil Aeneid 10 (Oxford, 1991) and of Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (Oxford, 2000), and editor of several volumes, including Texts, Ideas, and the Classics (Oxford, 2001) and A Companion to Latin Literature (Blackwell, 2005). Stephen Heyworth is Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Wadham College, Oxford. He was editor of Classical Quarterly from 1993 to 1998, and is the editor of the forthcoming volume of Propertius for Oxford Classical Texts (2007), and the accompanying commentary Cynthia. Stephen Hinds is Professor of Classics and Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University of

Contributors

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Washington; he is author of The Metamorphosis of Persephone (Cambridge, 1987) and Allusion and Intertext (Cambridge, 1998). Andrew Laird is Reader in Classical Literature at the University of Warwick; his publications on Latin and Greek literature and literary theory include Powers of Expressions, Expressions of Power (Oxford, 1999), The Epic of America (London, 2006), and Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford, 2006). Matthew Leigh is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Anne’s College, Oxford; he is author of Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement (Oxford, 1997) and Comedy and the Rise of Rome (Oxford, 2004) Miche`le Lowrie is Associate Professor of Classics and Co-director of the Poetics and Theory Program at New York University. She is the author of Horace’s Narrative Odes (Oxford, 1997) and of a wide range of articles on Latin literature, and is currently working on a book entitled Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome. Phillip Mitsis is Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization at New York University. He is author of Epicurus’ Ethical Theory: The Pleasures of Invulnerability (Ithaca, 1988) and of a wide range of papers on ancient philosophy. Llewelyn Morgan is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford, and Lecturer in Classical Languages and Literature in the University of Oxford. He is the author of Patterns of Redemption in Virgil’s Georgics (Cambridge, 1999) and of a number of articles on Roman literature. Deborah H. Roberts is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Haverford College; she is co-editor of Classical Closure (Princeton, 1997) with Don Fowler and Francis Dunn and author of articles on Greek tragedy, Aristotle’s Poetics, and the reception and translation of classical texts. Alessandro Schiesaro was Professor of Latin at King’s College London, and is now at La Sapienza, Rome; his publications include Simulacrum et imago (Pisa, 1990) and The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama (Cambridge, 2003).

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Ben Tipping is Assistant Professor in the Department of the Classics, Harvard University. His Exemplary Roman Heroism in Silius Italicus’ Punica will appear soon from Oxford University Press, and he is working on Lucan’s De bello civili: The Politics of an Anti-Epic for Duckworth.

Preface Stephen Heyworth Don Fowler died on 15 October 1999, aged 46, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer in the spring of that year. Many of his friends from outside Oxford wished to come and see him, and thought was given to organizing a conference that summer to give a focus to such visits, and to celebrate in Don’s presence his achievements as a classical scholar. But it was soon clear that his health was too poor for him to bear the weight of such an occasion, even if he lived so long. Instead, many visited and spent the time talking privately, and gaining the comfort appropriate from their Epicurean friend. But after he had died, and those of us able to attend had endured the pain of the funeral at his college, Jesus, and later the pain and the delight of the memorial meeting in the university’s Examination Schools, it still seemed right to bring together as many as we could to commemorate Don with a symposium in which his friends could, through papers and discussion, reXect, and reXect on, the developments in the study of classical literature in which Don had played so signiWcant a part over the previous twenty-Wve years. With the advice and help of Peta Fowler and Stephen Harrison, and many others, I set about organizing a symposium which took place at Jesus, where Don was Tutor for nineteen years, on 21–23 September 2000. We invited contributions from a small selection of the many to whom Don had been important as pupil, teacher, colleague, and collaborator, concentrating in particular on younger scholars, especially his DPhil students. Financial assistance came from the Faculty of Literae Humaniores (of which Classics was still part); and Jesus was generous in providing hospitality. This enabled us to encourage participation by charging very little, especially for students, and consequently about a hundred attended. Besides those who chaired sessions, I am

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grateful to a number of then graduate students, Rebecca Armstrong, Bob Cowan, David Fearn, Jennifer Ingleheart, and others, who made sure things ran smoothly. Above all as a participant I was delighted by the high quality of the papers given at Jesus: in death as in life Don stimulated his friends to produce work of the highest accomplishment and interest. And though there was a persistent strain of reminiscence, and of celebration, there was no attempt in the papers or in the discussion to canonize Don’s views: his inspiration was properly dynamic, towards argument and debate. This was the programme: Lucretius and Didactic, chaired by Philip Hardie and Duncan Kennedy Phillip Mitsis, ‘Death and the Epicurean’ Gordon Campbell, ‘Bicycles, Centaurs, and Man-faced Ox-creatures: Ontological Instability in Lucretius, Empedocles, Flann O’Brien, and Piero di Cosimo’ Alessandro Schiesaro, ‘Didaxis, Rhetoric, and the Law in Lucretius’ Monica Gale, ‘The Story of Us: a Narratological Analysis of Lucretius’ De rerum natura’ ‘101 things to do with a Latin text’, chaired by Stephen Harrison Joseph Farrell, ‘Horace’s Body, Horace’s Books’ Llewelyn Morgan, ‘Natura narratur: Tullius Laurea’s Elegy for Cicero (Pliny, HN 31.8)’ Robin Nisbet, ‘On Writing Commentaries’ Women, chaired by Efrossini Spentzou Patricia Salzman, ‘Gaze, Gender, and Ekphrasis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ Juliane Kerkhecker, ‘Par aliud morum miserique innoxia proles Oedipodae (Stat. Theb. 8.608f)—the sisters in the Thebaid’ Roman Constructions, chaired by Alison Sharrock Miche`le Lowrie, ‘Making an Exemplum of Yourself: Cicero and Augustus’ Matthew Leigh, ‘Plautus and Hannibal’ Theory, chaired by Alessandro Barchiesi and Niklas Holzberg Andrew Laird, ‘ ‘‘Narrative is nothing’’: Fiction, Philosophy, and Logical Closure’

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Deborah Roberts, ‘Translating Antiquity: Archaism, Anachronism, Intertextuality’ Stephen Hinds, ‘Ovid Among the Conspiracy Theorists’ Closure, chaired by Stephen Heyworth Stratis Kyriakidis, ‘Quasi cursores uitai lampada tradunt: Closural Aspects of the Catalogues in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ Ben Tipping, ‘Haec tum Roma fuit: Past, Present, and Closure in the Punica’ The current volume contains ten of these papers. Four pieces included here were not given to the conference: a replacement essay by Matthew Leigh, papers by Philip Hardie and Stephen Harrison (who chaired sessions at the symposium), and the contribution mysteriously entitled ‘Laocoon’s Point of View’ by Don himself. This is an article that has circulated for some time in draft form, and as an increasing number of classicists wish to refer to it, it seems convenient to publish it as a highlight of this volume. Like a number of other papers here, it is more informal in style than is common in academic articles; we wish to oVer Don’s paper in as close a form as we can to that in which he left it. Other contributors too have chosen to recall the informality of delivery on an emotional occasion. In covering a wide range of Latin literature from Plautus to Tacitus the papers reXect Don’s own breadth; as he did, they go beyond those chronological conWnes in considering the reception of classical literature (for example, the papers of Mitsis and Campbell, which look at echoes of Lucretian concepts in the modern world; Roberts’s paper on translation; Morgan’s memorable visit to a neglected memorial). Repeated themes are exemplarity and Wction; indeterminacy and authority; intertextuality; how persistent modes of imagery determine modes of reading; the ways in which other interests impinge on the political in Latin (as in all) texts; and of course closure, the topic with which Don was especially associated even before the extraordinary reXections on pages 237–8 of Roman Constructions. A common thread is the interest of the contributors in considering the underlying rationale for their approaches; this unites papers as diverse as Stephen Hinds’s conspiratorial whisperings on Ovid and Joseph Farrell’s apology for counting words in Horace’s corpus. All

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are concerned, as Don was, with exploring how texts can be made to work for us, what stories we can tell about them. Don has been, and will continue to be, commemorated in a number of ways. Besides this volume, Middles in Latin Poetry, edited by Stratis Kyriakidis and Francesco de Martino (Bari, 2004), is appropriately dedicated to his memory; so was the Classical Association conference of 2000. Above all, there is the Don Fowler Memorial Fund, which sponsors an annual lecture under the rubric ‘New Approaches to Latin Literature’. The speakers so far have been Stephen Hinds, Gordon Campbell, Nelly Oliensis, Andrew Laird, Maria Wyke, and Denis Feeney: an inspiring sequence, which establishes a promising tradition. Any proWts from this book will be directed into the fund, and readers are also invited to make direct contributions, which should be sent to the Estates Bursar, Jesus College, Oxford, OX1 3DW. A long account of Don’s scholarly achievements seems less necessary now than it might have done immediately after his death: the breadth and excitement of his work has been communicated not simply by the famous Greece and Rome reviews and the scattering of fundamental articles on narratology, closure, intertextuality, and so on, but also now by the publication of his commentary on Lucretius 2.1–332.1 Those of us used to encountering Don’s learning in reading classes and seminars knew that the ground-breaking theoretical pieces were accompanied by a more traditional philological scholarship; fellow Lucretians knew of his enormous range and Wnesse as a philosopher; all three aspects of his intellectual greatness can be seen enshrined in a magniWcent volume. Moreover, we can read his own accounts of his reading, and writing, practices in the wonderfully personal prefatory sections in Roman Constructions. As memory of Don’s voice fades for me, I Wnd it a persistent consolation to turn to these utterances. What even these passages give only a Xeeting sense of is Don’s willingness to engage and debate, to help others to mould their ideas until they became excellent too: his work as a teacher and a colleague. I think of his turning to me in New College Lane to register his 1 All of these are listed in the bibliography of Don’s writings that Stephen Harrison has put together, with Peta’s help, which can be found on pages 349–58.

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excitement over J. Angelo Corlett’s ‘Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues’, which had just been published in Classical Quarterly (47 (1997) 423– 37). To me, as editor, this was a Wne piece I was delighted to have published, but Don knew how it mattered philosophically. I think of his masterly introductory session to what turned out to be a memorable reading class on the Achilleid in Oxford in Michaelmas Term 1996 (which he led in collaboration with Debra Hershkowitz): he urged us to be open to all kinds of interpretative possibilities, and equally receptive to textual alternatives too. I think of him as a host, orchestrating waves of laughter, and serving orange sorbet elegantly in orange skins, and then desperately microwaving them when they proved impenetrable. I think of him on a Sunday with Sophia, wandering in the Parks or swimming at Ferry pool. I think of dinner with Don and Peta less than a month before he died, and the delight he took in his food, and their willingness to bicker over trivialities with death so imminent. I think of a moment with my own family, driving away from Oxford after the funeral, and my daughter Harriet asking from the back of the car, ‘Did Daddy cry?’ A Propertian, not an Epicurean, I could only answer, ‘I wept buckets.’ ‘You threw buckets?’ How we wanted to share our laughter with Don. We always will. Stephen Heyworth Wadham College, Oxford June 2006

Figure 1. Piero di Cosimo, The Forest Fire (c.1505) (by permission of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

1 Laocoon’s Point of View: Walking the Roman Way Don Fowler

Prestige is never far from pose. Vigarello (1989) 178 The language of literary, grammatical and rhetorical analysis is also the language of sexual position. Kennedy (1993) 62 In upper-class Rome, traditional gravitas was very much admired and respected. Every kind of quick or impulsive behaviour was held to be superWcial or frivolous (levitas). For this reason, Augustus was not impressed by the quick responses of talented people, such as the brilliant lawyers Vinicius and Haterius. He was opposed to all hasty measures, and was amazed that Alexander of Macedon showed no respect for the dull routine of daily management. As opposed to Marinetti’s Velocizzare l’Italia, Festina lente was Augustus’ motto. Yavetz (1990) 33 I had a friend who claimed that Kirk was our Aeneas, incorporating all our ideals about leadership . . . After that horrendous last ST movie, where they replay the latest US–USSR developments, I found myself wondering when Kirk became so intolerant. They

I am grateful for help to Ed Bispham, Peta Fowler, Debra Hershkowitz, Andrew Laird, Matthew Leigh, Roland Smith, and EYe Spentzou.

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Don Fowler also played him as Spock’s emotional counterpart! I thought he was the golden mean between Bones and Spock. J. D. Muccigrosso, comment on classics email list, 19 March 1993

The type of knowledge that I want to talk about in this paper is a particularly concrete one, but I would like to begin with some very general remarks about epistemology.1 I want to set up an opposition between two ways of talking about what someone may be said to ‘know’. The Wrst approach, which I shall somewhat unfairly dub ‘Platonic’, takes as its central concern the need to distinguish real knowledge from other forms of belief. We have many beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, but knowledge is special. It is above all propositional: what I know can be expressed in a series of sentences, and the ability to so express it is one marker of true knowledge. Unless I can give an account of it—logon didonai, rationem reddere—I cannot really be said to know something. I may have a knack, an empeiria, but not knowledge. My knowledge maps onto the world, and aspires to the coherence that the world is seen as necessarily possessing: my mind may be in a turmoil and confusion, but it is the task of philosophy and science to reduce that confusion to order by reducing everything to the state of knowledge. Those aspects of personality which are outside the sphere of reason cannot of course be denied: but when we search for metaphors to use to talk about them, we inescapably Wnd ourselves literally marginalizing them. They are ‘underneath’ in our subconscious, ‘at the back of ’ our minds, a seething proletarian mass out of the limelight. The view that I want to contrast with this simply abandons the attempt to single out a group of our attitudes and beliefs as special. Propositional belief ceases to be privileged, and we abandon the search for a one-to-one mapping onto the world: in Lyotard’s great cliche´, incredulity towards metanarratives rules OK. To talk of someone’s knowledge is now a more complicated matter, because we can no longer aspire towards a set of master propositions: we are dealing with an uncomfortable democracy of beliefs, passions, prejudices, attitudes, fears, a mob no longer out of sight and out of mind. When 1 My binary formulation here originally owed nothing to Martindale (1993) 1 V.: now it does.

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we start to search for ways of representing this mass of mentalite´ in a non-hierarchical fashion, we typically Wnd ourselves thinking in terms of overlapping oppositions like nature and culture or male and female, alternately setting them up and taking them apart. We do so not merely because of our structuralist inheritance, but because our everyday experience of choice and avoidance is typically structured in this fashion. I may like order, or disorder, or I may feel torn between attraction to each: but it is as a binary system of opposed drives that I am likely to dramatize my feelings. My presentation of these two views of knowledge does not look very neutral: it looks like the po-mos have it all the way. In fact, I feel much more ambivalent than that would suggest about the Great Western Tradition of rationalism. We can view the brain either as a Turing machine or as a neural net, and both views have their own validity. In particular, descriptions of people’s knowledge in the second tradition may sometimes appear crude. To say that I have both a positive and a negative attitude towards chocolate ice-cream is less helpful than the proposition that I like chocolate ice-cream when the weather is warm and someone else is paying. Nevertheless, the second way of representing knowledge has many attractions, of which I single out two. First, it is more accommodating to the many aspects of knowledge which are only awkwardly represented propositionally—one of which will be my concern here. And second, it does not have the same aspirations to success as does the Platonic tradition. We take it for granted that the wise person will be at harmony with herself, that contradictions can at least in principle be resolved, even if in practice we are all sinners who fall short of this perfection. But why believe that one can talk coherently about what a historically situated person who is heir to a rich culture ‘knows’? Or even, that what she knows ‘works’? There is a strong strain within the Platonist tradition that stresses precisely the incoherence of everyday belief: perhaps we have to face the pessimistic prospect that it is right about that but wrong in thinking there is any chance of Wnding another, more powerful, revelation.2 I still have enough respect for coherence to hope that the relevance of these very general remarks to what I am going to say may become 2 Cf. Gallop (1988) 13.

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clear. But I want now to turn more directly to my main theme, which is, as I say, a peculiarly concrete form of knowledge in the ancient world. I want to take a look at what P. Connerton has called ‘incorporated knowledge’,3 at the way cultures store knowledge in the very bodies of their citizens, at the epistemological implications of posture, gesture, and gait in the ancient world. As Connerton remarks, ‘each group will entrust to bodily automatisms the values and categories they are most anxious to preserve’, so that ‘culturally speciWc postural performances provide us with a mnemonics of the body’;4 and in this process of incorporation the mirror of the visual and other arts is obviously important. This is a large subject, and I shall be able to touch on only a few aspects.5 It has recently been treated by M. Gleason and C. Edwards in connection with the construction of gender oppositions in Rome:6 accordingly I shall say less about gender and more about racial and status stereotyping, though all three areas are naturally connected, and the gender oppositions are arguably primary. I want to begin by imagining a Roman analogue to the scene with which Dodds began The Greeks and the Irrational.7 Dodds’s young interlocutor in the museum remarked that he was unmoved by the ‘Greek stuV’ because it was ‘all so terribly rational’. What would he have said about the ‘Roman stuV’? I think one thing he might have singled out in the Roman room—at least in a traditional museum—is the sense of immobility that all these statues give. Roman worthies encased in stone do not exactly ‘hang loose’: a bigger bunch of stuck-up, anal-retentive boors it is hard to imagine. Now one could, of course, take a young woman or man who felt like this round to one’s friendly neighbourhood classics department, 3 Connerton (1989) 72–104. 4 Connerton (1989) 74. 5 A good introduction is now provided by Bremmer and Roodenburg (1991), especially the opening essays by J. Bremmer and F. Graf. In recent classical scholarship, note particularly the work of Donald Lateiner (e.g. Lateiner (1992) with further references) and J. P. Holoka (e.g. Holoka (1983) esp. 3 n. 7; Holoka (1992)). The extensive work on the body in other disciplines may be sampled in Featherstone, Hepworth, and Turner (1991), especially the opening essays by Turner and Frank; Poyatos (1992); Portch (1985) 1–27 with Lateiner (1988); and above all in the three volumes of Feher, NaddaV, and Tazi (1989), with the extensive if unsystematic bibliography by Duden which closes the third volume. The brief remarks of Bourdieu (1984) 190–93 in relation to social class in modern Europe are worth noticing. 6 Gleason (1990), Edwards (1993). See now Gleason (1995). 7 Dodds (1951).


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where she could be introduced to Catullus with the help of the usual life-enhancing Latinists who hang out in such places. And I mean this without irony: most classicists as a profession are lively, Xexible people open to new ideas and of suitably liberal temper. But it must occur to many of us at times that the culture we work on is anything but so liberal and life-enhancing in popular perception. Yeats asked what the dusty Mr Chips of the old school would do if Catullus walked his way: but we all must at times have had the thought occur to us that if Cicero walked our way—well, he wouldn’t ‘walk our way’. He might get on quite well with those old German scholars whose faces peer out at us in wing-collars from the frontispieces of their Kleine Schriften—and perhaps even with some of our colleagues—but he would react with disgust to the sort of ex-hippy loafers who form most of my friends. As K. Thomas remarks in the introduction to Bremmer and Roodenburg, Cultural History of Gesture,8 the Western tradition9 of ‘gravity and impassivity’ as ‘evidence of self-control’ and marks of ‘rule and superiority’ has disappeared among the young: ‘The middle-class youth of western Europe and America has no apparent inhibition about eating in the street, exposing their bodies, gesticulating, shouting, or expressing their emotions in physical form.’ Now one might at this stage object that I have been eliding the diVerence between statues of the Romans and the Romans themselves. But in his impassivity and composure the Roman vir bonus might be said to aspire to the condition of a monument. The bodily postures and gestures of the young Roman were learned above all from his family, but statues and other images also played a part in this ‘education in composure’ as Marcel Mauss termed it.10 This was by no means only a Roman phenomenon: as Bremmer points out, in Greece too ‘proper male behaviour in public walking demanded a leisurely but not sluggish gait, with steps that were not too small, with the hands Wrmly held and not upturned, the head erect and

8 Bremmer and Roodenburg (1991) 10–11. 9 For the tradition after antiquity, as well as the papers in Bremmer and Roodenburg (1991), see e.g. Schmitt (1989), Vigarello (1989), and Bryson (1990). For the 19th c. see also Bennett (1992). 10 Mauss (1979) 121.

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stable, the eyes openly, steadfastly, and Wrmly Wxed on the world’,11 and in Athens especially there must have been many who, like the chorus of old men in Lysistrata, held themselves like Aristogeiton or other great heroes.12 But the ideal of immobile constantia was even more central to Roman conceptions of bodily stance. I oVer just two examples, from opposite ends of the period of Roman dominance, but many more could be given from classical times. First, Livy’s description in 5.41.8–9 of the fall of Rome to the Gauls in 390 bc: adeo haud secus quam uenerabundi intuebantur in aedium uestibulis sedentes uiros praeter ornatum habitumque humano augustiorem, maiestate etiam quam uoltus grauitasque oris prae se ferebat simillimos dis. ad eos uelut simulacra uersi cum starent, M. Papinius, unus ex iis, dicitur Gallo barbam suam, ut tum omnibus promissa erat, permulcenti scipione eburneo in caput incusso iram mouisse atque ab eo initum caedis ortum . . . Something akin to awe held them back at what met their gaze—those Wgures seated in the open courtyards, the robes and decorations august beyond reckoning, the majesty expressed in those grave, calm eyes like the majesty of the gods. They might have been statues in some holy place, and for a while the Gallic warriors stood entranced; then, on an impulse, one of them touched the beard of a certain Marcus Papirius—it was long, as was the fashion of those days—and the Roman struck him on the head with his ivory staV. That was the beginning: the barbarian Xamed into anger and killed him . . . (tr. de Se´lincourt (1960))

And second, Ammianus’ account (16.10.9–11) of the entry into Rome of Constantius II in ad 357: Augustus itaque faustis uocibus appellatus, non montium litorumque intonante fragore cohorruit, talem se tamquam immobilem qualis in prouinciis suis uisebatur ostendens. nam et corpus perhumile curuabat portas ingrediens celsas, et uelut collo munito, rectam aciem luminum tendens, nec 11 Bremmer and Roodenburg (1991) 23, cf. 26: ‘The presentation of the self in public, then, was often acted out according to the contrast of high (upright carriage) and low (sitting, prostration) . . . The opposition high–low is of course indicative of a society with strong hierarchies. In a democratic world, both high (thrones, higher seats for directors, etc.) and low (bowing, curtsying) are becoming less and less acceptable.’ 12 Lys. 633–4, ‘I’ll take my place in armour in the agora next to Aristogeiton j And stand like this beside him . . .’


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dextra uultum nec laeua Xectebat et (tamquam Wgmentum hominis) nec cum rota concuteret nutans, nec spuens, aut os aut nasum tergens uel fricans, manumque agitans uisus est umquam. quae licet aVectabat, erant tamen haec et alia quaedam in citeriore uita patientiae non mediocris indicia, ut existimari dabatur uni illi concessae. The emperor was greeted with welcoming cheers, which were echoed from the hills and river-banks, but in spite of the din he exhibited no emotion, but kept the same impassive air as he commonly wore before his subjects in the provinces. Though he was very short he stooped when he passed under a high gate: otherwise he was like a dummy, gazing straight before him as if his head were in a vice and turning neither to right nor left. When a wheel jolted he did not nod, and at no point was he seen to spit or to wipe or to rub his face or nose or to move his hand. All this was no doubt aVectation, but he gave other evidence too in his personal life of an unusual degree of selfcontrol, which one was given to understand belonged to him alone. (tr. Hamilton (1986))

To be—or to try to be—a Roman meant in a sense to become like a statue: a monument of grauitas, constantia, and auctoritas. Just as the Roman legions quietly stood their ground while the barbarian hordes rushed wildly on, so the Romans at home preserved an icy dignity. Entry into the Roman elite involved an unremitting care of the self with regard to every word and gesture, while emotional outbursts led to disaster.13 Every detail of comportment was relevant: the way you walked, the way you sat, the expression on your face.14 Control was all. The ramiWcations of this Roman monumentality are many, and cannot be explored in detail here. Gender is, as I say, central: if the Roman uir is stable and calm, ‘la donn’ e mobile j qual pium’ al vento’.15 The philosophical background in the Stoic sapiens demands 13 Narducci (1984) 207: ‘Si impone una prudenza constante, una precisa ponderazione di ogni parola e ogni gesto; il dominio di se´, la regolazione della propria emotivita`, la consoscenza dei propri simili divengono requisiti indispensabili a condurre con successo la vita sociale: le esplosioni emotive, le azioni inconsiderate, e non accuratamente programmate, sono condannate a sicura rovina.’ 14 Cicero, De Wnibus 5.57, ‘Quid? in motu et in statu corporis nihil inest quod animadvertendum esse ipsa natura indicet? quemadmodum quis ambulet, sedeat, qui ductus oris, qui voltus in quoque sit, nihilne est in his rebus quod dignum libero aut indignum esse ducamus?’ Cf. De oYciis 1.128 cited below. 15 Calpurnius Siculus 3.10 mobilior uentis o! femina. The Roman woman may of course have her own very diVerent monumentality: cf. Sharrock (1991), Fowler (1990) 53–4, with n. 50, Muecke (1984).

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investigation,16 as does what one might term the ‘Spartan’ model of male deportment.17 But I want to glance at what happens to these statuesque aspirations in the Augustan context. Augustan art, we are told, becomes increasingly classicizing as the old man sits more securely on his throne, and P. Zanker18 has encouraged us to see in that classicizing movement a more wide-reaching ideological change: a change summed up in the two cameos he reproduces on pages 96 and 97 of The Power of Images. In the Vienna agate intaglio of Octavian driven by hippocamps over the head of Sextus Pompeius, all is mannerism and movement: in the Boston sardonyx of Augustus drawn by Tritons, all is peace and calm.19 It is that heavy Augustan stability which is the target of that most Augustan of poems, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. At the end of the work, when Venus is concerned at the imminent murder of Caesar, Jupiter reassures her that all is in fact Wxed in the book of fate, all always already written (15.807–15): sola insuperabile fatum, nata, mouere paras? intres licet ipsa Sororum tecta Trium! cernes illic molimine uasto ex aere et solido rerum tabularia ferro, quae neque concussum caeli neque fulminis iram nec metuunt ullas tuta atque aeterna ruinas. inuenies illic incisa adamante perenni fata tui generis. legi ipse animoque notaui et referam, ne sis etiamnum ignara futuri. Child, do you mean, by your sole self, to move Unconquerable fate? You are allowed To enter the three Sisters’ dwelling. There A giant fabric formed of steel and bronze 16 Cf. Lucian, Hermotimus 18–19 (tr. Kilburn): ‘hermotimus: But you know, Lycinus, I did rely on myself as well as others. I used to see the Stoics walking with dignity, decently dressed, always thoughtful, manly in looks, most of them close-cropped; there was nothing eVeminate, none of that exaggerated indiVerence which stamps the genuine crazy Cynic. They seemed in a state of moderation and everyone says that is best . . . lycinus: . . . my dear friend, this test of yours from appearances is for statues.’ 17 Cf. Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians 3.5: ‘you would expect a stone image to utter a sound sooner than those lads; you would sooner attract the attention of a bronze Wgure; you might think them more modest even than a young bride in the bridal chamber’ (tr. E. C. Marchant: there is an interesting textual problem with the last phrase). 18 Zanker (1988); for criticisms, see below, and especially Wallace-Hadrill (1989). 19 See e.g. Zanker (1988), Wgures 81 and 82.


9

Will meet your eyes, the archives of the world, That fear no crash of heaven, no lightning’s wrath, Nor any cataclysm, standing safe To all eternity. And there you’ll Wnd Engraved on everlasting adamant The fortunes of your line. I read them there Myself and stored them in my memory: And I’ll declare them that you may not still Labour in ignorance of things to come. (tr. Melville (1986))

Nothing could be more opposed to the philosophy of change expounded by Pythagoras, and apparently endorsed throughout the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s work of course has its own permanence (15.871–9): iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iouis ira nec ignis nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere uetustas. cum uolet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius ius habet, incerti spatium mihi Wniat aeui: parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum. quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris. ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, si quid habent ueri uatum praesagi, uiuam. Now stands my task accomplished, such a work As not the wrath of Jove, nor Wre nor sword Nor the devouring ages can destroy. Let, when it will, that day that has no claim But to my mortal body, end the span Of my uncertain years. Yet I’ll be borne, The Wner part of me, above the stars, Immortal, and my name shall never die. Wherever through the lands beneath her sway The might of Rome extends, my words shall be Upon the lips of men. If truth at all Is stablished by poetic prophecy, My fame shall live to all eternity. (tr. Melville (1986))

Those lines may be read New Historically as inescapably recapitulating in their apparent revolt the very ideals of permanence that lay at the heart of Augustanism: or as oVering a diVerent endurance, one

10

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explicitly unmonumental and based on the game of constant rereading. You pays your money, you takes your choice.19 But modern sensibility is likely to be all on the side of Pythagoras. Nothing inspires one with a greater desire for cultural vandalism than the images of that pompous old monster Augustus that are dotted around our museums. To be precise, Augustus looks a right prat, and he establishes for his successors a style of prattishness which fully justiWes the disgust of our young person in the museum. If with Bergson in Le rire20 we have come to see humour in attitudes, gestures, and movements that are merely mechanical, these frozen statues are simply ridiculous: like the waxy death-masks of Eastern European functionaries,21 these Roman dignitaries just look stupid. It is as hard to resist laughter at an image of Augustus as at a photograph of Clement Gottwald. And the Romans themselves knew this: for every Vespasian with a look of earnest striving, there was a wit to suggest that it was really constipation that gave the face its distinctive Roman look.22 There is a suggestive scene in Plautus’ Poenulus, where the young lover Agorastocles runs on like a seruus currens and is exasperated with the slowness of the two aduocati he is bringing with him: and in reply they rightly point out that liberos homines per urbem modico magis par est gradu j ire: seruile est duco festinantem currere (522–3). But they are in fact also comic in their gravity—and Agorastocles ironically suggests that they learned their

19 Compare Hardie in this volume. molimine uasto conWrms what the general burlesque of the reassurance scene in Aeneid 1 suggests: Jupiter’s book is also the Aeneid, Big Daddy itself, the always already written history of Rome. I hope to explore this elsewhere in a paper on writing and epic (see also Fowler 1995). 20 Bergson (1899), e.g. 14: ‘Ce que la vie et la socie´te´ exigent de chacun de nous, c’est une attention constamment en e´veil, qui discerne les contours de la situation pre´sente, c’est aussi une certaine e´lasticite´ du corps et de l’esprit, qui nous mette a` meˆme de nous y adapter. Tension et e´lasticite´, voila` deux forces comple´mentaires l’une de l’autre que la vie met en jeu’; 22–3: ‘Les attitudes, gestes et mouvements du corps humain sont risibles dans l’exacte mesure ou` ce corps nous fait penser a` une simple mećanique.’ 21 Or indeed Roman imagines: but for some complications, see Dupont (1989). 22 Suetonius, Vespasian 20: ‘Statura fuit quadrata, compactis Wrmisque membris, uultu uelut nitentis; de quo quidam urbanorum non infacete siquidem petenti ut et in se aliquid diceret: ‘‘Dicam’’, inquit, ‘‘cum uentrem exonerare desieris.’’ ’ nitentis is usually translated ‘straining at stool’, but that anticipates the joke: rather take it generally of Vespasian’s look of striving and struggle.


11

digniWed walk in a chain gang.23 Not only for us, but within their own terms the Romans were ridiculous in their immobility. A society of psychotic walking statues is not a successful one—and this even seems to have dawned on the Romans themselves. This is the point, however, at which I have to complicate my nice simple binary opposition of immobility and Xexibility. Binary opposition is of course one way in which cultures deWne themselves: ‘stereotypes project onto target groups characteristics which are the opposite of qualities admired in the group creating the stereotypes.’24 Roman citizen men do not rush around like slaves, jump up and down like foreigners, or go all Xoppy like women: they are hard men. But equally common is the view of one’s culture as a mean between extremes—summed up in the Indian myth of the baking of men, where God Wrst overcooked the mixture to produce black people, then undercooked it to produce whites, until Wnally getting it right with the brown races. We English know that our culture is the golden mean between the excessive emotionality of the French and Italians and the cold rationality of the Germans: and American classicists know they represent the mean between the Germans and the British.25 Roman men were required not to walk too fast, or get out of breath: but equally they should not walk too slowly. A failure to hit that mean was the mark of a Catiline, with his ‘citus modo, modo tardus incessus’, or of a Tigellius in Horace Satires 1.3, who sometimes ran as if Xeeing the enemy, and sometimes painfully inched his way along ‘uelut qui j Iunonis sacra ferret’.26 The source for that passage of Horace is of course the Wrst book of Cicero’s De oYciis, where the concept of a mean between extremes is central to decorum: Nos autem naturam sequamur et ab omni quod abhorret ab oculorumque auriumque approbatione fugiamus: status, incessus, sessio, accubitio, vultus, 23 Cf. Alexis, PCG 265, with Arnott (1959) 259 n. 24, esp. Plato Charmides 159b; Taladoire (1951) 40–41, 116. 24 Hall (1989) 121. 25 Shorey (1919) 56–7. 26 Sallust, Cat. 15: ‘igitur color ei exsanguis, foedi oculi, citus modo, modo tardus incessus, prorsus in facie uoltuque uecordia inest’; Horace, Serm. 1.3.9–11: ‘nil aequale homini fuit illi; saepe uelut qui j currebat fugiens hostem, persaepe uelut qui j Iunonis sacra ferret . . .’

12

Don Fowler

manuum motus teneat illud decorum. quibus in rebus duo maxime sunt fugienda: ne quid eVeminatum aut molle et ne quid durum aut rusticum sit. (Cicero, OV. 1.128–9) Cauendum autem est ne aut tarditatibus utamur in ingressu mollioribus, ut pomparum ferculis similes esse uideamur, aut in festinationibus suscipiamus nimias celeritates quae, cum Wunt, anhelitus moventur, uultus mutantur, ora torquentur; ex quibus magna signiWcatio Wt non adesse constantiam. (Cicero, OV. 1.131) For ourselves, however, let us follow nature and avoid anything that shrinks from the approval of eyes and ears. Let our standing, our walking, our sitting and our reclining, our countenances, our eyes and the movements of our hands all maintain what I have called seemliness. In these matters we must avoid two things in particular: we should do nothing eVeminate or soft, and nothing harsh or uncouth. We must also beware of adopting too eVeminate a languidness in our gait, so that we look like carriages in solemn procession, or of making excessive haste when we are in a hurry. If we do that, we begin to puV and pant, our expressions change, and we distort our faces. Such things are a strong sign that we do not possess constancy. (tr. GriYn and Atkins (1991))

In his expansion of this passage in his own De oYciis, Ambrose makes explicit the link to the imagery of statues (1.73–4): Sunt etiam qui sensim ambulando imitantur histrionicos gestus et quasi quaedam fercula pomparum et statuarum motus nutantium; ut quotienscumque gradum transferunt, modulos quosdam seruare uideantur. nec cursim ambulare honestum arbitror nisi cum causa exigit alicuius periculi uel iusta necessitas. nam plerumque festinantes anhelos uidemus torquere ora; quibus si causa desit festinationis necessariae, naeuus iustae oVensionis est. sed non de his dico quibus rara properatio ex causa nascitur, sed quibus iugis et continua in naturam uertit. nec in illis ergo tamquam simulacrorum eYgies probo nec in istis tamquam excussorum ruinas. On the other hand, there are people who walk so slowly that they appear to be imitating the sort of contrived movements which actors make, or even the motions of statues nodding on litters at processions: with every step they take they look as though they are observing some vague, imaginary rhythm. Nevertheless, I do not think it is honourable to walk too hurriedly, either, unless it is essential to do so in some situation of danger or where there is


13

a legitimate necessity. So often we see people hurrying along, puYng and panting, their faces all distorted with the exertion they are putting themselves through. If there is no necessary reason for their haste, they are giving reasonable grounds for oVence. I am not speaking here about people who occasionally have good reason to hurry, but about those to whom constant and persistent haste has become second nature. So, on the one hand, I do not approve of people looking like statues, nor, on the other, of people virtually tripping over themselves in a mad rush to dash about their business. (tr. Davidson (2001))

Ambrose’s work has its own Christian context, but it is merely drawing out the obvious implications of Cicero’s prescriptions. The stress on the mean27 similarly dominates Quintilian’s celebrated prescriptions for the posture of the orator in Institutiones oratoriae 11.3.68 V.: praecipuum uero in actione sicut in corpore ipso caput est, cum ad illum de quo dixi decorem, tum etiam ad signiWcationem. decoris illa sunt, ut sit primo rectum et secundum naturam: nam et deiecto humilitas et supino adrogantia et in latus inclinato languor et praeduro ac rigente barbaria quaedam mentis ostenditur (68–9). rigidi uero et exerti aut languidi et torpentes aut stupentes aut lasciui et mobiles et natantes et quadam uoluptate suVusi aut limi et, ut sic dicam, uenerii aut poscentes aliquid pollicentesue numquam esse debebunt (76). ceruicem rectam oportet esse, non rigidam aut supinam (82). It is the head which occupies the chief place in Delivery (as it does in the body itself), both as regards the seemliness of which I have just spoken and as regards meaning. For seemliness, it must Wrst be upright and natural. If lowered, it indicates humility; if thrown back, arrogance; if inclined to one side, languor; if held stiV and rigid, a certain brutality of mind. And when the eyes do move, they become intent, relaxed, proud, Werce, gentle or harsh: these qualities should be assumed as the pleading demands. They must never be Wxed, popping out, languishing, sleepy, stupeWed, lascivious, shifty, swimming, voluptuous, looking askance, or (if I may say so) sexy, or, Wnally, asking or promising favours. The nape of the neck must be straight, not stiV or bent back. (tr. Russell (2001))

27 Cf. Schmitt (1989), Bryson (1990).

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Don Fowler

And when Ovid in the Ars amatoria comes to parody such prescriptions when writing of the walk of women, he similarly preserves the mean, albeit with a certain hint of Ovidian preference (3.299–306): est et in incessu pars non temnenda decoris: allicit ignotos ille fugatque uiros. haec mouet arte latus, tunicisque Xuentibus auras accipit, expensos fertque superba pedes: illa uelut coniunx Vmbri rubicunda mariti ambulat, ingentes uarica fertque gradus. sed sit, ut in multis, modus hic quoque; rusticus alter motus concesso mollior alter erit. pars umeris tamen ima tui, pars summa lacerti nuda sit, a laeua conspicienda manu. By carriage – it’s no little part of charm – The unknown male is lured or takes alarm. One sways her hips, to air with studied pose Her Xowing gown, and points her stately toes; Another, like a farmer’s red-cheeked mate, Walks with great strides and straddles in her gait. But here, as in so many things, between Clumping and mincing Wnd the happy mean. But on the left, where shoulder joins to arm, A glimpse of bareness gives an added charm. (tr. Melville (1990))

Again, it is not diYcult to multiply instances of a Roman taste for aurea mediocritas in posture and gesture: and this suggests that the picture of the stone-faced and anal Roman elite that I began by setting up is an inadequate one. The passage from Ovid’s Ars amatoria suggests a particular modiWcation in relation to Augustanism. Many modern scholars, especially Italians able to draw on the example of the alliance with Futurism that was peculiar to Italian Fascism, have tried to paint a very diVerent picture of the Augustan regime to the classicizing rigidity of Zanker’s cameo. One of the sections in M. Labate’s study of the Ars, L’arte di farsi amare, is entitled ‘Il modello della Xessibilita´’, and in that he tries to show how the decorum Ovid recommends throughout the Ars relates to the earlier Ciceronian prescriptions, carries them further, yet situates itself within a new Augustan context. The Ars functions as a labora-


15

tory of ideological experimentation: the Xexibility and variety that it encompasses and endorses can indeed be set against Augustanism, but it can also be seen as entirely in line with the new, and anything but inXexible, ideology of the court.28 We know, indeed, that Augustus had to make excuses for Tiberius precisely because he lacked appropriate bodily Xexibility: Incedebat ceruice rigida et obstipa adducto fere uultu, plerumque tacitus, nullo aut rarissimo etiam cum proximis sermone eoque tardissimo, nec sine molli quadam digitorum gesticulatione. quae omnia ingrata atque arrogantiae plena et animaduertit Augustus in eo et excusare temptauit saepe apud senatum ac populum professus naturae uitia esse, non animi. (Suetonius, Tib. 68.3) His gait was a stiV stride, and if he ever broke his usual stern silence to address those walking with him, he spoke with great deliberation and eloquent movements of the Wngers. Augustus disliked these mannerisms and put them down to pride, but frequently assured both the Senate and the commons that they were physical, not moral, defects. (tr. Graves (1957))

It is possible to construct a whole ideology of uis temperata for the principate, one in which not rigidity but controlled Xexibility is stressed at all levels from constitutional innovation to artistic production. We know that this is possible because Italian Fascism will do just that, and once more dramatize its own art and ideology as a mean between extremes.29 On this model, Augustanism is again seen as an intensiWcation of traditional Roman values, but Roman values very diVerently conceived. Will this then satisfy our young person in the museum? I personally hope very much that it will not, but I do not want to try here to adjudicate between these views of Roman and Augustan culture. 28 Labate (1984) 174: ‘Ovidio cerca cosi di inventare un equilibrio, anche precario: per cui l’elegia e` al stesso tempo una eccezione (la parentesi che puo` accogliere comportamenti sociali censurati), ma anche il laboratorio di comportamenti e esperienze indispensabili alla vita sociale moderna.’ 29 See especially the catalogue of the Mostra of 1932, AlWeri and Freddi (1933), e.g. 64–71 on the architects, Mario De Renzi and Adalberto Libera, and 207 on ‘Sala Q’ and its ‘scultura a vasta sintesi ugualmente lontana dal realismo meschino della statuaria accademica come degli astrattismo dispersi di certi cosı` detti avanguardismi’.

16

Don Fowler

I have been so brief in presenting these two views of Roman immobility and / or Xexibility because (to be frank) I am less interested in the details of them than in what happens next: what we do with them. In this sense, I am less concerned with the poetics of epistemology, than with its metapoetics. I began with the young person in the cast gallery, setting up an opposition between the frozen rigidity of Roman / Augustan classicism and the freedom of modern youth. Then I complicated the straightforward opposition with the notion of the golden mean, and showed how it was possible to produce a diVerent view of Roman, and speciWcally Augustan, society. Two further modern responses may be developed from this point. On the one hand, one may simply refuse to be satisWed with this so-called mean: mediocritas propagates the logic of the extremes that generate it, and to suggest a mean is to accept the terms in which the extremes are formulated. One may then come to see the Roman elite, in admitting the pull of both rigidity and adaptiveness, as unavoidably oVering itself up to be torn apart from the intensiWcation of those pressures. That is, one can refuse to make Roman society work.30 The abandonment of a naive functionalism is certainly one of the most liberating moves that a student of the ancient world can make. On the other hand, what societies do then ‘work’? Whose views are ever harmoniously and successfully integrated? Abandoning the Enlightenment search for the perfect society, one may try to Wnd a modern reformulation of the ‘successful’ mediation of immobility and motion, as Martindale attempted with the similar oppositions of the city and the country, the old and the new in the Aeneid: Virgil’s myth potently mediates, or massages, a necessary ‘contradiction’ within the spiritual ideal of Rome, which is simultaneously the caput rerum, the metropolis which Augustus found brick and left marble, and an idyll of primitivism and rural simplicity, sweet especial rural scene. On this reading there is not so much conXict as the (attempted) erasure of conXict, in the interests of Roman identity and Augustan ideology. Rome is both an empire of unsurpassed might and yet, at heart, a simple country community. (Compare some myths of modern America, at once superpower and land of the lone cowboy.) Ideologies, in other words, may hammer together energising ‘contradictions’, which are not then felt as contradictions.31 30 Cf. Barton (1993).

31 Martindale (1993) 51.


17

I still like the Wrst version more myself. What I want to do again, however, is to push the issue yet one further stage back, and to return to the general epistemological issues with which I began. Throughout this piece I have been careful to court the charge of confusing Roman reality and modern interpretation of it, because I do not think that the distinction holds. A naive historicist will believe that the propositions she formulates about antiquity are independent not only of her more general propositional beliefs but also of the mass of nonpropositional / non-cognitive feelings and attitudes she possesses as a historically situated individual. There will not be many of those about nowadays. A more sophisticated historicist will admit the inXuence on those propositions of her historical situatedness: but the tendency will still be to maintain a hierarchical distinction between what we think as scientiWc, objective philologists and the way we feel as people. The position I Wnd myself occupying, however, will not make the distinction in level at all between propositional ‘knowledge’ and the way the modern scholar feels—or stands. While we use theory to control our positions on the ancient world— whether Augustus was rigid or Xexible, say—what will be determining our choice of theory may well be simply the way we are, or want to become.32 Whether we set up an opposition, synthesize it, mediate it, or deconstruct it, ultimately it will have to take its place among our own postures and gestures, with the way we want to walk ourselves. Through all these Wgures and stances, we are taking up our own positions—not walking the Roman way.

32 Cf. Rorty (1992) 107 on the ‘encounter with an author, character, plot, stanza, line or archaic torso which has made a diVerence to the critic’s conception of who she is, what she is good for, what she wants to do with herself: an encounter which has rearranged her priorities and purposes.’

2 Life as Play, Life as a Play: Montaigne and the Epicureans Phillip Mitsis

In this sense Solon’s good advice may reasonably be taken. But inasmuch as Solon is a philosopher, one of those to whom the favours and disfavours of fortune rank as neither happiness nor unhappiness, and grandeurs and power are accidents of almost indiVerent quality, I Wnd it likely that he was looking further, and meant that this same happiness of our life, which depends on the tranquillity and contentment of a well-born spirit and the resolution and assurance of a well-ordered soul, should never be attributed to a man until he has been seen to play the last act of his comedy, and beyond doubt the hardest. In everything else there may be sham: the Wne reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain French, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot: At last true words surge up from deep within our breast, The mask is snatched away, reality is left. That is why all the other actions of our life must be tried and tested by this last act. It is the master-day, the day that must I am indebted throughout this paper to Don and Peta Fowler, Donald Frame, and David Konstan for their wisdom and friendship; the former, as Epicureans know, is a mortal good, but the latter an immortal one.

Life as Play, Life as a Play

19

judge all the others. ‘It is the day,’ says one of the ancients, ‘that must judge all my past years.’ I leave it to death to test the fruit of my studies. We shall see then whether my reasonings come from my mouth or from my heart. Montaigne, That our happiness must not be judged until after our death (tr. Frame)

There are many striking features about this passage from Montaigne’s Essays and the use that it makes of Lucretius, but the one I wish to concentrate on is its image of life as a play. For those with a more quizzical cast of mind, perhaps, life often can take on the appearance of a comedy; for others, it may well turn out to be a performance that provides more intermittent amusement. But for all of us without exception, our lives, at least in the logic of this passage, are like a living and breathing play—a play, moreover, in which our Wnal confrontation with death becomes the most crucial and self-revelatory scene that we are called upon to perform. To be sure, comparisons of life to plays or to the stage are very much a commonplace, as is the passage’s sentiment of Wnis coronat opus. But, as is often the case in the Essays, the way that Montaigne’s argument proceeds can make it extremely diYcult to follow such commonplaces to any smooth or expected conclusions. An immediate problem arises, for example, because of the intrusion of what might be described as an awkward and untimely Epicurean reminder about the relation between life and Wction, and hence illusion and reality. In discussing the nature and character of our Wnal action on life’s stage, Montaigne quotes the famous lines from the opening of DRN 3 (57–8) about those who, presumably for the beneWt of themselves and others, play-act and pretend to have no superstitious fears concerning death or an afterlife. nam uerae uoces tum demum pectore ab imo eiiciuntur, et eripitur persona, manet res.

In moments of adversity, Lucretius insists, such people will Wnd themselves unmasked when ultimately confronted by death itself. It is diYcult not to wonder, however, about the appropriateness of this particular Epicurean reXection at this juncture in the passage’s argument. Indeed, in many respects, this quotation seems rather more like an unfriendly objection from an opponent, since it interjects,

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somewhat incongruously, the notion that we might be unmasked both to ourselves and to others as we are acting out the Wnal and most important scene in our life’s play. What overall sense does it make to compare life to a play, one might plausibly wonder, if in the face of death and while acting in one’s most important scene, eripitur persona, manet res? By invoking Lucretius, Montaigne brings to our attention the threat that death might leave us helplessly stranded and unmasked on life’s stage, presumably witnessing our plays coming undone, together with their supporting dramatic illusions. By the same token, the kind of edifying ethical conclusions we might derive from the image of a Wnal dramatic scene in which we heroically take on death likewise threaten to come to naught. The passage thus appears to hold out a promise that the lives that we enact on life’s stage will include a Wnal scene or act of closure—a scene that we can turn into a heroic, Stoic-like gesture that clariWes and gives meaning to everything that has earlier transpired on our life’s stage. Yet at the same moment, it seems to hint that the very notion of life as a play, however heroic or metaphysically and ethically comforting, might be merely an illusion—an illusion that is quickly dispelled in the actual presence of death itself. On the face of it, we probably should not Wnd the apparent tensions in this passage particularly surprising, since the image of life as a play almost of necessity encompasses, along with the possibility of satisfying and heroic closure, the contrary imaginative possibility of the dramatic illusion being ruptured and of the players being unmasked. Nor should the fact that Montaigne’s text is alive to both of these alternatives evoke much surprise either. Indeed, if we wanted to engage in a bit of Renaissance Quellenforschung, more precise scholarly explanations for the dual commitments in this passage are not very far oV. It is fairly standard, for instance, to distinguish multiple and sometimes conXicting layers of thought or exposition in the Essays, since the text we have is the result of lifelong revision and rethinking on Montaigne’s part. Moreover, although it can be dangerous to generalize about the philosophical commitments of the Essays, one common, though obviously schematic, view of the development of Montaigne’s thought is that he moves from more straightforwardly Stoic concerns to a series of more sceptical assays of himself, and then on to a kind of


21

enlightened, eclectic Epicureanism.1 Thus, given that this is an early passage in the collection, it is not implausible to suppose that it initially was written while Montaigne was still strongly under the spell of Seneca, through whose writings and own evident preoccupation with the death of Socrates and Cato he came to view and interpret the heroic death of his friend E´tienne de La Boe´tie. A Stoic, or perhaps to be more precise, a quintessentially Senecan and Neo-Stoic, attraction to the notion of heroic death is clearly what is uppermost in his mind in this passage.2 The stray bit of Epicurean heckling, however undigested, perhaps can be explained as part of a later attempt to reconsider the notion of heroic death, or at the very least, it may be a hint of some Epicurean things to come. In any case, if the stitching strikes one as perhaps too loose, it should be remembered that it was precisely by means of such looseness that Montaigne’s thinking in the Essays was able continually to grow and develop. My intent here, however, is not to press any particular account of the sources responsible for the tensions in this stretch of the Essays or of their mutual relations. Rather, I am interested in the way that this passage gives voice to a deeper set of conceptual tensions that can be found in our thinking about death generally—tensions, for instance, between our expectations for complete lives and the suspicion that any such plans are likely to prove illusory, or tensions between the idea that we can self-consciously pattern our lives and experience into satisfying wholes and the contrary worry that such patterning is little more than wilful self-delusion. At the same time, laying aside this conceptual dimension, one can hardly fail to notice as well how utterly literary our deaths become in Montaigne’s hands. Even if we come to agree with Lucretius that death may unmask us at any time as we are play-acting, such an agreement still remains couched in terms that are relentlessly literary: for example, taking on a role, 1 See Villey (1908) for the classic statement of this developmental view, with the appropriate reservations of Brush (1966). 2 Seneca’s particular preoccupation with death and suicide is well known. Aristo uses the image of life as a play to support the non-orthodox claim for a Stoic that there are no relevant distinctions of preference to be made among the indiVerents. ‘The wise man he compared to a good actor, who, if called upon to take the part of a Thersites or of an Agamemnon will impersonate them both becomingly’ (D.L. 7.160, tr. Hicks).

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unmasking, and playing a Wnal scene. In an author such as Montaigne, whose life and reading become so self-consciously indistinguishable, such a view of life and death perhaps is understandable. But can we really hope to come to our own meeting with death armed with images that we might plausibly suspect are primarily suited to describing the structures and endings of literary works? Certainly, one might object, a moment’s reXection will serve to show that lives and plays are so diVerent in their structures and demands as to render any such comparison useless when the imminent threat of annihilation is actually upon us. Before attempting to address such larger issues, however, it might be useful to step back a bit and try to get our bearings on a few preliminary questions. It certainly comes as little surprise that Montaigne’s image of life as a play has a long and detailed literary and philosophical history.3 Indeed, it would be hard to Wnd a genre of Greek and Roman writing that does not avail itself of this image, beginning with its meta-theatrical use on the Greek stage, to its appearance in a whole range of ancient poetic and philosophical texts,4 and even, it seems, to its adoption in an emperor’s own self-consciously learned death scene. And calling for a mirror, he [Augustus] ordered his hair to be combed and his shrunk cheeks to be adjusted. Then asking his friends who were admitted to the room, ‘Do you think I have acted my part on the stage of life well?’, he immediately subjoined (in Greek) ‘If all be right, with joy your voices raise, in loud applause to the actor’s praise.’ Suetonius, Aug. 97 (tr. Thomson)

Yet, as with most images carrying the baggage of history, each of these instances individually raises as many questions as it answers and I am afraid that any attempt to trace out some of these intertextual connections might prove to be a matter of ignotum per ignotius, at least until we have come to terms with some further dimensions of 3 For some interesting suggestions about the way that this image enters the Epicurean tradition, see Warren (2002) 73–85. See Warren (2004) for a wide-ranging discussion of Epicurean arguments against the fear of death generally, esp. 109–60. 4 These are usefully collected and discussed by Curtius (1953), Jacquot (1957), Kokolakis (1960), and Christian (1987). On a related theme, Coleman (1990) oVers a fascinating account of Roman executions staged as mythological enactments.


23

the image itself. To be sure, one might expect the image of life as a play to occur in a variety of literary texts, in any case, if only because it seems a rather immediate and not overly subtle way of advertising the power of literary texts to capture what is essential about life, all the while endowing themselves with an aura of reality. If life is like a play, then plays are like life, after all. But the appearance of this image in philosophical writing—other than to be debunked, perhaps—is rather more surprising; so it may be helpful, or at least charitable, to start out with a kind of Aristotelian intuition that something real and important must actually be motivating the use of this image. Moreover, since it is an idea that has been repeated both by many for a long time and also by a few who are distinguished, as Aristotle wryly comments in another context, it is reasonable to hope that they have not missed the target entirely (compare Nic. Eth. 1098a 28 V.). Let me begin, therefore, with an observation by one of our most distinguished and clear-thinking contemporary philosophers. In a paper arguing that Epicureans fail to address what many would consider to be a central fear concerning death—the fear of a premature death5—Gisela Striker makes the following observation: Let me try to illustrate this point by a simple analogy. The eighteen year old who wants to continue living is like someone who has watched the Wrst act of an opera and is justiWably annoyed if the performance breaks oV at this point. He is angry, not because he had thought that he was going to spend three hours instead of only one, but because he wanted to see the entire opera, not just a part of it. . . . the analogy seems close enough to make us understand why some older people like Socrates, do not seem to fear death, or decide to end their lives if they discover they are terminally ill and would gain only a few weeks of intense suVering. A human life, like a drama or opera, has certain stages that we expect to live through, and since time is not reversible, our expectations become more limited as we grow older.6

At Wrst glance, Striker’s argument may seem to take us beyond the particular concerns of our passage from Montaigne. But I would argue that our views about what counts as the Wtting closure to a 5 For a rebuttal of this charge, however, see the elegant paper by Reinhardt (2002) 291–304. 6 Striker (1989) 325–6.

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life, as well as corresponding worries that such views may be delusive, rely quite directly on particular assumptions about what constitutes a complete life. Striker’s use of the image, to be sure, is properly cautious and she notes in passing, for example, that most lives are not like operas since they do not have a well-deWned Wnale at the end. What her comparison is meant to capture instead, I take it, is the very general intuition that complete human lives display a particular structure—a structure that we have come conventionally to expect and that consists of a series of fairly deWnite stages. It would be hard to deny, of course, that general intuitions of this sort are nowadays7 entrenched and widely shared; and if the analogy between lives and plays has any grip at all, it no doubt gains its support from such intuitions, however vague. It is much harder, however, to actually spell out what these intuitions about our lives amount to and to gauge the extent to which they can be captured by means of analogies to operas or plays. On the one hand, the notion that life has a structure like a play can become so elastic that it is meaningless, if it implies nothing more, say, than that lives are structured by a beginning, middle, and end. On the other hand, if the analogy is meant to suggest that we expect lives to have the kind of coherence and Xow of great drama, it is unclear to me that even the most rationally coherent and demanding lives possible, say, for example, that of the Aristotelian phronimos or Stoic sage, could begin to satisfy its requirements. Our expectations about the structure and Xow of our lives may vary widely; and it is perhaps the case that they do so in ways that are at times analogous to our expectations about dramatic performances and literary texts. But it may be important, I suspect, to keep track of both kinds of expectations more carefully—those having to do with life and those with plays— since what Striker oVers as a simple and theoretically innocent bit of common sense, quickly becomes anything but that, as soon as we 7 I am leaving aside here the obviously important question of whether this was an intuition shared by the Greeks. In Solon’s two tales about happiness (Herodotus 1.30–2), the Athenian Tellos (a signiWcant name) lives to see his children and grandchildren safe, his city prosperous, and then dies heroically in battle. Cleobis and Biton die young, but in their akme, that highest point that represents the perfection of the thing expressed. But this akme is almost an accidental moment in life and certainly does not come at the end of a series of expected stages in life.


25

realize that an image that evokes notions of literary structure and closure cannot help but be fraught with theoretical and conceptual diYculties. If we begin with the very minimum of expectations, for instance, all that we might wish for from a literary text or an analogous life is a beginning, middle, and end. No doubt it would be extremely hard to think of either texts or lives that do not satisfy such an undemanding requirement at least in a purely abstract sense. I take it, though, that this is much too slight a conception either of a life or a play to support the kinds of intuitions typically meant to be evoked by those who use the analogy. As soon as we start to build more structure and content into both sides of the analogy, however, there is suYcient slippage to call into question its continued plausibility. Let us consider, for example, by climbing a few rungs higher up on the ladder of life and art, the life of a contented hedonist, or what Plato calls the life of a jellyWsh. An analogous theatrical experience, I imagine, would be acting in a play that oVers pleasant entertainment for an unspeciWed amount of time. Not Sophocles or Chekhov, mind you, but a play that displays no formal structure, other than that it begins, continues, and at some point ends, and that consists solely of a series of pleasurable episodes with no, as it were, overarching telos or underlying unity, and with no conspicuous drive to a particular denouement. We can perhaps imagine lives and literary works of this sort. The Cyrenaics, for instance, argued that there is no telos inherent in life. Against the great majority of other philosophers in antiquity who argued that life has a telos and that our actions should be directed at fulWlling it, they claimed that any attempt to aim at a telos would undermine life’s pleasantness. We are better oV, in their view, just moving from one pleasant experience to another, with no concern at all about an overall structure to our experience and with no long-term expectations or fears about the future. Notice, though, that on such a view it becomes diYcult to postulate any future concern for one’s self or, indeed, even to postulate a continuous self passing through and unifying these episodes of pleasure. Certainly one possible interpretation of the Cyrenaics is that they give up the notion of a uniWed, continuing self in favour of a view that urges us to seize upon momentary pleasures without regard for long-term consequences, since those consequences, in any case, will turn out to

26

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be not for ourselves but for some future individuals for whom we have no special concern. The Cyrenaics oVer what is clearly a radical and deXationary view of the human self, but one of its consequences is that it renders the question of death nicely tractable, if not merely otiose. To the extent that we live only in momentary episodes of pleasure, there can be no sense in worrying about death in the conventional sense. When I worry that I may die, I am mistakenly worried, in their view, about someone in the future who in reality will no longer be me, but someone else. Any worry about death, therefore, is not actually a worry about my own death. To the objection that on this view we actually seem to be suVering death continuously, since our selves and our horizon of concern are extinguished after each new momentary episode of pleasure, the Cyrenaics can again insist that this form of death can become a matter of concern only if we make the mistake of postulating continuing selves with a prudential concern for some overarching goal. In their view, as soon as ‘I’ begin to worry about my death, ‘I’ am already gone, so my worry is not really a worry about my own death. These Cyrenaic claims are doubtless deeply counterintuitive, but as with most radically deXationary or sceptical views, it is extremely diYcult to oVer either bits of psychological data or ethical argument that can budge proponents of these claims from their position. But it is not really necessary to do so for our purposes, however, if we recall Striker’s motive for introducing the analogy between lives and dramas in the Wrst place. The point of her analogy was to suggest that complete human lives are in some sense parallel to complete plays because they go through various fairly deWned stages that have an overall structure. If the ongoing course of such a life or play is interrupted, we feel cheated because we think that it has ended prematurely and that we have missed an expected stage necessary for its completion. A Cyrenaic life, however, provides too thin a connecting structure to support any analogy to plays in this stronger sense, since it makes no sense to speak of deWned stages in such a life or of premature endings. A parallel problem arises with literary texts. We might imagine literary works, indeed very great literary works, in which characters move through a corresponding series of episodic, momentary pleasurable experiences and whose selves are ever changing. We are


27

perhaps given glimpses of such a possibility in the adventures and polytropia of Homer’s Odysseus8 or in Proust’s Marcel. But a life or a narration of merely episodic experiences fails to provide a suYciently rich notion of structural completeness or of an overall telos to explain what a premature interruption would mean or what harm it might cause. Nor can we hope, by appealing merely to the brute quantity of such episodic experiences, to provide such an explanation, since mere quantity similarly fails to explain completeness in the required sense for either of our analogues. To see this, it might be helpful to remind ourselves what our intuitions about duration actually can tell us. In one sense, of course, certain roughly shared conventions structure our expectations about the duration of lives or performances. I might feel cheated if a mindless bit of Hollywood XuV lasts only Wfteen minutes, but overwhelmed if it were to go on for six hours. In the same way, I might think that a life of three hundred years of episodic pleasure would be a bit overwhelming, whereas eighteen years would be too little. It is doubtful, however, whether such expectations can be grounded solely in intuitions about duration; rather, they rely on further teleological assumptions and expectations about the shape and endings of lives. The same holds, we should add, for the endings of literary works. Let me explain. If I were to adopt a rigorously Cyrenaic view of my experience, and exclude considerations connected to any developmental stages or telic structure in my account of the completeness of life, the duration of my experience would not be a matter of concern to me. Indeed, one might argue that, in a certain sense, I have eliminated any concern about death by eliminating the kind of structure that it could meaningfully interrupt. That is because there is no proper stopping point in what is merely a string of experiential episodes. Or to take a literary parallel, the text of the Odyssey, one might argue, holds out the possibility that there is no proper stopping point in Odysseus’ adventures and for that reason gives the appearance of his being able to go on endlessly cheating death. Cyrenaic lives and texts eliminate the threat of death and of closure to the extent, and only to the extent, that they are able to resist notions of developmental stages, of coherent selves, or of a telos. 8 See, for instance, the brilliant discussion of Pucci (1987).

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I hope that we are now in a better position to see why the analogy between lives and plays is by no means as innocent as it might Wrst seem, and that those who use the analogy typically must build a fair amount of structural coherence and teleological unity into both sides of the equation. They want, that is, both their plays and their lives to display coherent and connected actions that are moving towards a conclusion. But this creates a problem. We might be inclined to agree that if both lives and plays consist merely of a string of episodes in which there are no stages of development or actions with an underlying drive towards a telos—or in which duration itself does not fundamentally matter—the analogy between lives and plays might justiWably go forward, at least to the following extent. Granted, there are a host of undeniable diVerences between plays and lives; the relevant conception of completeness in both of these analogues is suYciently similar to sustain the analogy and allow it to go through. But as we have seen, the analogy holds only because this particular conception is so thin. As soon as we move up our ladder to more structured notions of lives and plays involving appeals to discrete periods of time, to the coherence of individual selves, to conceptions of causality and connections between actions, and so on, any relevant analogies, I would argue, begin to disappear. To see this, it might be helpful to turn to Aristotle, since one of the aims of his ethical theory is to bring precision to general intuitions about the structure of life and to provide an intelligible psychological and ethical framework for understanding them. There is a long tradition of ethical thought, which in many ways he exempliWes, that urges us to view our lives as a uniWed collection of successful activities and ongoing projects. In his view, in order to achieve the happiness that is our natural telos, we should aim to perfect a range of capabilities and to engage in the activities that best express them. Even if we demur in the face of some of Aristotle’s more exalted demands about the conditions of happiness and the kinds of activities we need to succeed in if we are to achieve it, we might still be attracted to some homelier versions of his theory. Few of us are cut from the same cloth as Aristotle’s phronimos, but the idea that we want to be successful at our work, try to make sure that our children grow up well, keep on amiable terms with our spouses, and maybe learn something about music or art in the company of friends—all


29

these might count as activities that we could be induced to include among the components of a happy life. There obviously are many others. But whatever the list, these are the sorts of common activities that can extend temporally across individuals’ lives and that can account for the particular directions and tensions in each person’s own particular pursuit of his telos, or happiness. How well we coordinate these activities and balance their particular demands is also something that Aristotle thinks we should come to care about, and whether we agree with him that a central part of our happiness is tied to an ability to organize our various activities prudentially, or with the Stoics that this ability is the only thing that should concern us, it seems intuitively plausible to claim that we will be more successful in our activities if we are able to pursue them in a way that is coherently organized. At this point, however, we should perhaps notice that as we build more activities and rational organization into our lives, we begin to leave ourselves more vulnerable to disappointment and frustration. Our children may not turn out that well, or our spouses may not be that easy to get on with. This holds in some key respects for our literary analogy as well. As our expectations become more and more demanding in terms of structure and content, more of our literary experiences may similarly turn out to be less satisfying. These are no doubt familiar points, but at the risk of labouring the obvious, I would like to return again to our analogy with these considerations in mind. Let me begin with the following banal observation that in some ways corresponds to Aristotle’s claim in the Poetics that plays should contain not all the events of a life, but only those that constitute a complete praxis. Our lives are not structured like a praxis and, hence, not like plays. Indeed, however rationally organized a particular life may be, even, say, that of Aristotle’s phronimos, I doubt that even short stretches of such a life, much less that life taken whole, can display anything like the coherence, intensity of compression, causal immediacy, and drive towards a denouement that we expect from even mediocre drama. By the same token, no drama worth its salt (or, perhaps, that used to be worth its salt) could content itself with actually mirroring the rhythms of even a minor stretch, however seemingly crucial or important, of the most organized of lives. Here, for example, I am

30

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put in mind of the Wrst reviews of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. While praising the play’s savage emotional power, the initial response of many critics was to complain about the continual repetition of bits of experience and arguments, the lack of economy in the dialogue, the stagnation in the play’s movement, the Wxity of the characters, the lack of a coherent impulse towards a particular resolution, and most of all, its length of more than four hours. One does not have to be Freudian to recognize the endless repetitions in real life, the pull of the past as opposed to some conspicuous impulse hastening us on to a future resolution, the diVuse and sporadic nature of our conversations or of our ongoing activities and cherished projects, and so on. Indeed, the coherence and compression of plays is of a magnitude so diVerent from lives that, when one speaks of similarities between the structures and endings of plays and those of lives, we might be tempted to suggest that terms from these diVerent contexts are being used merely homonymously. These observations are not intended by themselves to be conclusive, of course, but they do suggest why our expectations about interruptions in these two domains are likely also to be deeply disanalogous. When we enter a theatre or opera house, it is reasonable to expect that we will experience an entire performance, and under normal conditions, only a particular pathology would constrain someone to be worried that the performance itself might be interrupted. The contingency of theatrical performances is of a whole diVerent order from that of lives, as are our expectations about the possibility that either might be interrupted. It is just not the case that every performance, unlike each of our lives, will necessarily be interrupted at some point. Indeed, critics have often noticed the way that audiences, by the very fact that they often observe actions on stage from an ironic distance and with a kind of divine immunity, can be given a false sense of their superiority and safety from the vicissitudes of life. Players on stage no doubt have another kind of experience, but one equally protected from interruption and with clear knowledge of the denouement of their actions. They commonly repeat a highly structured set of words and actions which may explore life’s contingencies; but they are not themselves normally threatened by contingency and interruption—except perhaps in highly self-


31

conscious works whose purpose, we might say, is actually to make a point about the false security and artiWciality of life as it is depicted on stage. This is not to say, of course, that in individual instances, questions about the contingencies aVecting particular performances cannot come to inXuence our aesthetic judgements. There are those, for instance, who Wnd themselves particularly moved by the sound of allied bombs in the background of their Furtwa¨ngler recordings or by Lipatti’s laboured breathing in his Wnal recital at Besançon. If one Wnds these sounds poignant as opposed to merely distracting bits of noise, it is not, however, because one is focusing on the performance qua performance, but because one is being reminded (almost in the manner of our opening quotation from Lucretius) of the potential intrusion of death into the lives of the performers. But it is no part of the conception of a performance per se that it is contingent in this sense. We do not expect performances to be interrupted and this obviously aVects our attitude towards their completion. We justiWably take their completion merely for granted. Death is diVerent, however. Lives are contingent and the way that we structure them, no doubt, reXects our attitudes towards that contingency. The Aristotelian approach, as we noted, treats life a bit like a well-organized hamper. We stuV our life with activities and projects and we try to organize them so that we do not lose track of them; it is important as well, on this view, to hold them there in maximal readiness for those times when we have need to get back to them, admire them, magnanimously display the fruits of them to others, and so on. Sometimes, Aristotle’s argument gets extended in a way suggesting that the hamper itself is what we should be particularly anxious to look after and cultivate. Or, at any rate, I take it that those who talk about life itself being our ‘project’ must intend something along these lines.9 Viewing one’s life as a transcendental master project that one must oversee and cultivate is probably more deeply rooted in Romantic conceptions of the self than in Aristotle, however, and not only because of its emphasis on creative self-fashioning, but 9 We should diVerentiate this kind of view from the more plausible claim that Aristotle thinks that individual activities and projects are components of happiness. Such components are desirable both in themselves and as parts of the ultimate good, happiness. Our happiness just consists in the successful completion of these individual components; it is not some transcendental project over and above them.

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also because from the outset it builds in a notion of individuals striving after a completeness that can never come to fruition. It likewise contains the seeds, also deeply foreign to Aristotle, of a Romantic self-consciousness that views one’s projects as being merely one’s creations, and therefore perhaps illusions. For Aristotle, I would imagine, such self-conscious artistes are in danger of losing track not only of the contents of their hamper, but also of their happiness in general. Be that as it may, however, from the outset we at least readily can understand what it means to successfully complete an individual project or activity—one of the items in the hamper. I can make a tasty risotto and serve it or I can write a letter to a friend and mail it. Similarly, the Aristotelian notion that our lives serve as hampers that become more and more stuVed with completed and concurrent projects as we make our way through life also seems readily intelligible, at least if one is to judge by the detailed CVs of some of our more Aristotelian-minded colleagues. But the notion of life itself being our fundamental project seems almost a deliberate and selfconscious category mistake—hence, the attribution to Romanticism. Unless life is Wlled with individual activities and projects whose particular completion we can understand, a notion of failure, or at least of unending and unrequited striving, will be written into the basic description of every human life. This is because such a view stipulates that every life undertaken will be interrupted prematurely and that any successful completion of the master project of life is, necessarily, impossible. Since the successful completion of such an empty notion of life never can be achieved—it will always be spoiled by death—one always remains in a state of striving after what is unattainable. But this is clearly non-Aristotelian, and one sign of this is that Aristotle himself is quite content to add up the pluses and minuses of individual activities when assessing the overall happiness of lives. He thinks, for instance, that we can judge the happiness of Priam only after weighing up his failed individual projects (the deaths of his children, the destruction of his city) against the successes of his earlier individual activities. However, either account, whether in its Aristotelian or more Romantic form, builds the fear of death into its very foundations. It does not necessarily need to do so,


33

however, as an empirical claim or at the subjective level of individual psychologies. In the Rhetoric (1382a–b), for instance, Aristotle notices that people are not usually in a state of fear about their death, because it is not yet near to them. Rather, the point is to make an objective assessment of the damage that death does to projects and activities by interrupting them. Since death may interrupt individual activities and projects that are components of a complete life we have every reason to fear it, whether we actually do so or not. We have even more reason to fear it in the case of its inevitable interruption of our master project writ large, since its harm is both more assured and more global. It might even be, as some have argued, that death can threaten the objective beauty and value of activities and relationships that we now are engaged in, even before interrupting them, because of its menacing potential to render all of our projects incomplete. That is, unless we decide to face death squarely as Epicureans and without an actor’s mask. For Epicureans, all this talk of projects and of stuVed or transcendental hampers is merely a form of self-delusion and bad faith. They strongly doubt, therefore, that it will do anyone much good, when death is imminent, to show up armed with a tenpage CV. And their reasons for believing this bring us back to our original questions about the notion of life as a play. For Epicureans, the notion that life is like a play is deeply insidious and those in the thrall of this image need to engage in a kind of therapy of design. To begin with, one of its guiding assumptions is that life is relevantly similar to a performance, a performance in which any interruption is in some sense a surprising aberration that spoils the occasion. Moreover, the notion that our consciously lived experience is relevantly similar to the highly structured performance of a praxis on stage is likewise deeply misleading, not least because it seduces us into expecting a kind of denouement in our lives that can only be highly artiWcial and staged—Striker’s ‘well-deWned Wnale at the end’. And there is a Wnal important disanalogy between lives and plays in their view. Good manners, if nothing else, constrain us to wait until we have seen the ending of a play before judging it. But to admonish us to ‘look to the telos’ of a life before judging it, in the way that Solon recommends, amounts for the Epicurean to a form of ingratitude— ingratitude for the good things that we have already experienced in our past (compare Sent. Vat. 75). Lives do not have the structure of

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plays, however, and we need not wait for their endings to judge them. Death, as the Epicureans never tire of reminding us, can come at any time and does not wait for satisfying moments of expected closure. Such moments should be expected merely on the stage. When our masks are torn oV by the approach of death, Lucretius says, we are left with the reality about ourselves. But how are we to understand this Epicurean claim? One clue, I would suggest, is to be found in Epicurus’ deathbed letter to Idomeneus: On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual suVerings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could augment them; but over against them all I set gladness of mind at the remembrance of our past conversations. But I would have you, as becomes your life-long attitude to me and to philosophy, watch over the children of Metrodorus. (D.L. 10.22, tr. Hicks)

Epicurus remembers on his Wnal day a past conversation and its memory is suYciently pleasant to outweigh the pain of his Wnal suVerings. Philosophical deaths, no doubt, are diVerent from those of others and we certainly see no mask being ripped away in Epicurus’ Wnal moments, nor do we see a well-deWned Wnale. What we Wnd, instead, is an account of a passing memory. An intriguing parallel, I would argue, is provided by two of the great literary representations of our Wnal confrontation with death, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. As the main characters in both these works lie dying, they try to reXect in their last moments on what has been important in their lives. Both discover, as death takes away the mask, that what they actually are able to hold on to and Wnd valuable in their lives is captured in a few wisps of memory—a favourite toy as a child, their wedding day, the sound of mother’s voice. There are no nicely organized hampers to poke around in or video screens playing back Wlms of one’s greatest praxeis. In neither work, of course, are we seeing the death of a philosopher. But the Epicurean would urge us to generalize this kind of realization throughout our lives, since it is essential for us to recognize that such deathbed experiences are paradigmatic, not only of our Wnal moments, but of our lived experience generally. Indeed, we


35

would miss the philosophical import of Epicurus’ deathbed letter if we were to view it merely as a sentimental indulgence in nostalgic memory on the part of an old man. He remembers a past conversation with a friend and this gives him pleasure. But whether he is old or young, healthy or dying, his happy state of consciousness and technique of memory remain the same. For the Epicurean, the ideal way of living and of being happy is represented by Epicurus and we see him, as he is dying, achieving the telos of life. But this is not a telos in the sense of a concluding master-day or an end that he had been striving to attain. We are not being urged, that is, to take on a life full of activities directed towards a series of goals and projects whose successful achievement depends on them not being interrupted. Rather, Epicurus has achieved a telos that is taken to be an ideal state or condition of living. The Epicurean would argue that both Aristotle’s hamper view of life and the comparison of life to a play are deeply misleading precisely because they fail to capture our lives as they are actually lived and consciously experienced. At any moment, what we can hold on to is an inner subjective structure of consciousness that includes memories, present states of consciousness, and rational expectations for the future. But these have a structure and temporal rhythm diVerent from the directed praxis of a play. We could not hope to hold present in our consciousness a life-long series of connected virtuous actions. Such res gestae may be inscribed on public monuments, but they cannot be ordered and incised into a consciousness whose temporality and structure are more Xuid, sporadic, and imbued with diVerent causalities. The Epicurean, of course, does not need to make an extreme Cyrenaic claim about consciousness. Our past memories are still very much our own memories and we have concern for them. This is why memories of the past can give us pleasure. But the structure of subjective consciousness that is organized and cultivated by the Epicurean into an ideal way of living, or telos, is unlike the action of a play. Not only does our experience of the ongoing movement of a play fail to reXect the order and rhythm of inner life, but the actions that an audience witnesses and that actors enact are objectively and publicly ordered and experienced in a way foreign to the actual order and rhythms of subjective life. That is why deathbed memories, as opposed to a play, give better clues to the structure of life as we

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actually experience it. Nor is the point that this kind of deathbed realization can only be made as one is dying. If we were to seriously confront the facts of our mortality and reXect on what is not obscured by a mask, we would be left with a reality that many discover only at the approach of death. Perhaps, one is more likely to reXect on the course of one’s life in this way when death actually approaches and strips one’s mask away. But, for the Epicurean, it obviously would be better for us to come to realize what it is that really structures our lives as soon as possible, since no one is too young or too old for health of the soul (Men. 122). Two objections are commonly levelled against this Epicurean vision of the telos of life. First, it is claimed that the kinds of lives and activities that Epicureans can pursue must be unappealing and too restricted, since anyone who wishes to lead a complete life must engage in a series of activities that run the risk of being diminished and interrupted by death. At the same time, it is charged that Epicureans cannot really display the proper kinds of attitudes and commitments to life and its components. If I am committed to composing an opera, so the argument goes, and I am pursuing its composition in the right way, it seems counter-intuitive to claim that I should not be disturbed by the prospect of its interruption by death. To be sure, a lot will depend here on what we think is important about an activity when we are engaged in it. The Stoics, famously, thought that what was important in an action and what mattered for its success was the quality of the moral intention of the person performing it. I might try to perform a just action out of the most perfect moral intention, but the action might fail in its ordinary sense. Yet, the Stoics will reckon my action a complete success because all that matters to them in assessing both the success of an action and the strength of our commitment to it is the quality of our moral intention. Moreover, since there is nothing that death or the threat of death can do to diminish the moral excellence of my intentions, a Stoic’s indiVerence to death in no way diminishes the quality of his moral commitment or the character of his actions. The Epicurean account of pleasure, however, poses a problem. It seems hard to explain how we can take the proper attitude to pleasures if we are expected to be in no way disturbed by their interruption or potential loss. If I take pleasure in my conversations


37

with a friend, it seems intuitively plausible to claim that I will in some way be harmed if either those conversations, or indeed my friend, are lost to me. But the Epicurean must reject such intuitions. On the face of it, the Stoics may seem to have it easier on this score, because of what they Wnd crucial to the competition or the success of an action—its moral intention. When choosing between morality and pleasure, one is likely to Wnd one’s moral will an intuitively better candidate for being invulnerable to the harms of death than our pleasures and their sources, since our pleasures seem less strongly immune from outside interference and interruption. By the same token, the Stoics continually discuss and dissect the nature of one’s appropriate attitudes towards external things in the world. The Epicureans are much less forthcoming on this score. We hear about the sorts of desires we are supposed to fulWl, or how we are not supposed to regret our inability to fulWl certain unnecessary desires. But we hear precious little about the actual attitudes that we are supposed to display to those activities from which we are gaining pleasure, even while recognizing that we might have to replace them with others under certain conditions. Nor do we have much evidence detailing the precise psychological attitudes that underlie our ability to suddenly give up a desire or develop a new one, knowing full well that we might soon have to give it up in turn. Such mechanisms of detachment, commitment, and pleasure are consequently often assumed and required in Epicurean texts, but they are not explicitly spelt out, nor are they named. We can probably infer that they stem from a more general psychological attitude of ataraxia and are dependent both upon our reason and on our grasp of the telos of life. But I would like to suggest a parallel, which though not exact, is still perhaps instructive. The kind of attitudes that Epicureans are meant to display to their activities and the contents of their lives—detachment, commitment, unmasking, and pleasure or joy—are not unlike key elements in the literary criticism practised by Don Fowler, and the kind of irony he espoused in approaching texts generally and when asking particular questions about what makes them complete or how we are to respond to their endings. Now of course, the ancient Epicureans themselves would never have described their attitude to life and its actions as one of irony. This is because they associated irony with Socrates and thought that he was

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just an out-and-out liar. Nor would they subscribe to Don’s postmodern willingness to accept perspectival accounts, though they were prepared to espouse multiple explanations for some physical phenomena. But for all that, one cannot help but notice a certain overlap of attitudes and concerns between Don and his Epicureans. With this last analogy between literature and life, however, we have probably come full circle and we should return for a Wnal look at our opening passage from Montaigne. I have tried to distinguish some of the conXicting conceptions that might lead us to think of life either as a play or as the reality behind the mask. But it is now time to put them back together in our passage and ask the more diYcult question of what we are to make of their jarring oscillation—the kind of oscillation, I would argue, that Don Fowler characterizes as a literary gesture with potential both for negativity and for aYrmation, and hence for the sublime. Montaigne’s dual philosophical commitments in our passage function, I think, as a kind of sublime double vision that oVers us a way of taking seriously what we do while still retaining our detachment. Such a view is complex, no doubt, like Yeats’s wish to ‘hold justice and mercy in a single thought’. It is a view that many philosophers might dismiss as merely inconsistent or that some literary scholars might whisk under the rug by appealing to conXicts in Montaigne’s sources. The best that I can do at this point, perhaps, is to point to an exemplum. An elegant tension between detachment and commitment that always produced pleasure seems to me to be at the heart of the literary practice that Don Fowler perfected. I suspect it was a source as well for many of his Epicurean attitudes in life. All of us who knew Don experienced what I would call his sublime Epicureanism in one form or another during our visits at Jesus, and it displayed itself in the guise of a wry wit, spirit of play, and an exquisite virtuosity in balancing all the components of a very complete life with commitment and joy. Husband, father, classical scholar, teacher—these are the items mentioned on his tombstone. Many other things might have been mentioned as well. But it also reminds us that nil igitur mors. This, I suspect, is an acknowledgement that the Epicurean ironist can make without feeling either that it makes our literary criticism pointless or—I would add—our lives incomplete.

3 Bicycles, Centaurs, and Man-faced Ox-creatures: Ontological Instability in Lucretius Gordon Campbell

There is little doubt that the most important event in recent human evolution was the invention of the bicycle. Steve Jones, The Language of the Genes 1

The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 led to considerable psychological insecurity for many people over the place of humanity in the ‘scale’ of nature, and over our relationship to other creatures and to God. In this paper I shall concentrate on some links between ancient and modern expressions of such worries. Although Darwin was by no means the Wrst to put forward a theory of the evolution of humans from animals—the Chevalier Lamarck was the most outstanding of earlier evolutionists2—perhaps the majority of people in early- and mid-nineteenth-century Europe had become comfortable with the idea of a clear, God-given division between humans and animals. The two creation stories in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, although their accounts diVer considerably, I would like to thank Peta Fowler and Stephen Heyworth for their helpful comments and criticisms. 1 Jones (1994) 315. 2 Larmarck (1809) and (1835). For the theories of Lamarck see especially Burkhardt (1995). The essential diVerence between Lamarck’s and Darwin’s theories is that Lamarck relied not upon the extinction of species in a ‘struggle for life’, but upon the inheritance of acquired characteristics as its driving force.

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do agree at least on one point, that animals and humans were created separately, and that the divide between them was a deliberate part of the Creator’s plan. The great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus could state with conWdence in 1758: ‘There are as many species as originally fashioned by the creator.’3 Darwin’s theory of course destroyed any such notion; there was no longer any great diVerence between humans and animals, and humans were just another species of animal. This disruption of a comfortable orthodoxy inevitably led to a polemical reaction. Darwin himself was often caricatured with his head on the body of an ape; an image made more compelling by a certain unfortunate simian cast to Darwin’s features.4 In similar vein, the Bishop of Oxford, Bishop Wilberforce, famously enquired whether it was on his mother’s or his father’s side that Thomas Huxley was descended from an ape, and with greater wit Philip Egerton, in his ‘Monkeyana’ in Punch of May 1861, humorously complained about the lack of a clear human / animal divide in Darwin’s theory of evolution, and about the resulting ontological insecurity: Am I satyr or Man? Pray tell me who I am, And settle my place in the scale. A man in ape’s shape, An anthropoid ape, Or a monkey deprived of his tail?

Egerton’s Wrst description of a creature suVering from Darwinian human / animal boundary crossing is a Satyr, a classical compound creature, an ancient forerunner of the Darwin / orang-utang creature and, in another way, of Bishop Wilberforce’s disturbing vision of one of Huxley’s ancestors mating with an ape. Creatures such as satyrs, centaurs, and the Minotaur, compounded from human and animal components were, in the ancient world, and clearly still in the nineteenth century, symbols of the disastrous results of such a crossing of the human / animal divide, and also symbols of the triumph of

3 Quoted from Eldredge (1995) 10. 4 e.g. ‘A Venerable Orang-Outang: a Contribution to Unnatural History’, The Hornet, 22 March 1871.

Bicycles, Centaurs, and Man-faced Ox-creatures

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nature over culture, as has been well examined by Page Dubois in Centaurs and Amazons.5 I see in this use of classical compound creatures to attack Darwin’s theory interesting similarities with ancient criticisms of the ability of the atomic theory to account for the regularity of nature and the ontological integrity of species. The view that humans are animals would of course have been quite familiar to anyone in the ancient world who knew the ideas of the Presocratics and, later, of the Epicureans, and attacks upon their theories and upon Darwin’s tend to follow similar lines.6 The basis of ancient criticism of the Epicurean atomic theory is well expressed by the Stoic Balbus in Cicero’s De natura deorum 2.94: quodsi mundum eYcere potest concursus atomorum, cur templum, cur porticum, cur domum, cur urbem non potest, quae sunt minus operosa et multo quidem faciliora? But if the collision of atoms is able to produce a world, why is it not able to produce a portico, a temple, a house or a city, which are less laborious and much easier things to make?

If the random collision of atoms was able originally to form an entire world, with all its complexity, why does it not also create easier things today, like temples, houses, and cities? These things don’t appear out of nowhere. If the world did depend on atoms for its creation then, things would appear suddenly out of nowhere. Why do things stay the same, and then again, by extrapolation, why do we stay human, and why don’t we suVer disastrous ontological instability unless there is some reason controlling the order of the world?7 Lucretius on the 5 Dubois (1982), esp. 25–42. 6 Humans are animals: Anaximander DK 12 A30; Xenophanes DK 21 B27, B29, B33; Pythagoras DK 58 C6; Empedocles DK 31 B71; Anaxagoras DK 59 A1; Archelaus DK 60 A4; Democritus DK 68 A139; Epicurus, fr. 333 Us.; Lucretius, DRN 5.925– 1010; and Diodorus Siculus 1.7. 7 Balbus’ attack on the Epicurean atomic theory of creation consists of two parts. He Wrst appeals to the impossibility that random ordering of atoms could possibly account for the variety and complexity of nature: if we were to throw the letters of the alphabet randomly onto the ground, what would the chances be against their forming the Annals of Ennius (2.93–4)? Then he attacks the ability of the atomic theory to account for the regularity of nature. The former argument is reminiscent of Fred Hoyle’s calculation that the odds against DNA occurring by chance are 1040,000 to 1, and that random unguided evolution led to the variety and complexity of nature is as

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other hand, claims that only the atomic theory can account for the regularity of nature, as he says in DRN 1.159–66: nam si de nilo Werent ex omnibu’ rebus omne genus nasci posset, nil semine egeret. e mare primum homines, e terra posset oriri squamigerum genus et uolucres erumpere caelo; armenta atque aliae pecudes, genus omne ferarum, incerto partu culta ac deserta tenerent. nec fructus idem arboribus constare solerent, sed mutarentur, ferre omnes omnia possent. For if things came into existence from nothing, all kinds of things could be born from all things, and would need no seed. First, humans could arise from the sea, scale-bearing herds from the earth, birds could burst from the sky, and cattle and other herds and the whole race of wild beasts, with random birth, would live in Welds and deserts. Nor would the same fruits stay constant to the trees, but all would change: all trees might bear all fruits.

Without atoms, the tenet of Parmenides that Lucretius appropriates and inverts here—nothing can arise from nothing, and nothing can be destroyed into nothing—would be wrong, and anything could arise from anything.8 There would in short be no limit, no ‘law’ controlling nature, and no stability to the world. However, this is not the whole story and later in DRN 2.700–10 he argues that simply having atoms cannot on its own account for the ontological stability of creatures: a limit on the possible variety of atomic combinations is necessary; otherwise compound creatures and other impossibilities of hybrid species would exist: nec tamen omnimodis conecti posse putandum est omnia. nam uulgo Weri portenta uideres, semiferas hominum species exsistere et altos interdum ramos egigni corpore uiuo, multaque conecti terrestria membra marinis, tum Xammam taetro spirantis ore Chimaeras pascere naturam per terras omniparentis. likely as that a hurricane blowing through a junkyard will produce a 747 (see Hoyle and Wickramasinghe (1981)). 8 cf. Parmenides DK 28 B8.


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quorum nil Weri manifestum est, omnia quando seminibus certis certa genetrice creata conseruare genus crescentia posse uidemus. scilicet id certa Weri ratione necessust. However, it should not be thought that all atoms can be joined in all ways. Because then you would see monsters arise everywhere, half-bestial species of humans would spring forth, and sometimes high branches would grow from a living body, and many terrestrial forms would be joined with seacreatures, and then nature throughout the earth, the all-parent, would nourish chimaeras breathing Xame from their foul mouths. It is clear that none of this happens, for we can see that all creatures are born from Wxed seeds and from a Wxed parent, and can keep their own species as they grow. Obviously it must be that this happens according to a Wxed law.

If any atom could join with any other atom, then the critics would be right, and atomism would produce universal chaos at the phenomenal as well as the atomic level: chimaeras, centaurs, and suchlike creatures would be seen, and not simply the boundaries of genera and species but even the boundaries of the plant and animal kingdoms would be breached, and tree branches would grow from animal bodies.9 The basis of these atomic laws, the foedera naturae, that set such a limit on nature and ensure that species remain Wxed and unable to mutate into one another, may be reconstructed from Book 2 of De rerum natura. As Susan Blundell puts it: This theory of the Wxity of species was seen by Lucretius as a deduction from an atomic law of combination. Elsewhere he has argued that all compounds are made up of atoms of diVerent classes (that is of diVerent sizes and shapes), but that there is a limit to the combinations of classes which can be achieved: every class of atom is not capable of combining with every other class. If this were possible, you would see animals of mixed species coming into existence, but as it is, everything keeps to its own species, because every species is characterized by their distinctive atoms, which when brought together make distinctive arrangements and perform distinctive movements. In living things, these distinctive atoms are passed on from parent to child, and then they proceed to absorb compatible atoms from the nourishment that is consumed. But it is not just living things that conform 9 A picture of the world similar to that we see in Ovid’s Metamorphoses where chaos is the ruling principle of the universe. For chaos theory and the Metamorphoses see Lively (2002).

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to this atomic law: every atomic compound including the land, the sea, and the sky, is kept distinct by the limit on combination.10

The stability of nature at the macroscopic level, then, depends upon this limit of combinations at the molecular level: because there is a limited number of atomic shapes, only a limited number of types of molecule, and so a limited number of types of matter, can come into existence. At the genetic level, each creature preserves its ontological stability by inheriting a Wxed atomic essence that ensures it cannot mutate. Although, sadly, we have no other details of it, this is clearly a genetic code theory similar to DNA, but with the fundamental diVerence that in Epicurean genetics, there seems to be no Xexibility in the code to allow the sort of mutation that Darwinian evolution relies upon to produce new varieties. Indeed, the idea is put forward by Lucretius as an explanation for the obvious and apparent Wxity of species. This species Wxity was accepted nearly universally in ancient scientiWc thinking,11 and even today evolutionary mutation can only be observed by studying the fossil record, and so species Wxity was a perfectly reasonable supposition according to the apparent facts. To return to the modern world, before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species Lucretius was one of the chief targets for criticism by creationists for his theory of the chance creation of life and of species. Sir Richard Blackmore in his anti-Lucretian poem Creation of 1712, turns Lucretius’ own argument on the ability of atomism to ensure the stability of nature against him, putting it in what, I imagine, was its original form against atomism12—an argument Lucretius had already appropriated from critics of Epicurus, and turned to his own advantage. If Chance alone could manage, sort, divide, And, Beings to produce, your Atomes guide; If casual Concourse did the World compose, And Things from Hits Fortuitous arose, Then any Thing might come from any Thing, 10 Blundell (1986) 92–3. Epicurean sources: Epicurus, Ep. Hdt. 42–3; Lucretius, DRN 2.478–531, 2.700–29, 5.440–2, and 5.923–4. See also Long (1977), De Lacy (1969), Long and Sedley (1987) 1.56. 11 See Furley (1987) 98 and Campbell (2000). 12 For Sir Richard Blackmore and Lucretius see Fleischmann (1964) 228–34; for the 18th- and 19th-c. reception of Lucretius generally see Johnson (2000) 79–133 and Hadzsits (1963) 317–32.


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For how from Chance can constant Order spring? The Forest Oak might bear the blushing Rose, And fragrant Mirtles thrive in Russian Snows. The fair Pomgranate might adorn the Pine, The Grape the Bramble, and the Sloe the Vine. Fish from the Plains, Birds from the Floods might Rise, And lowing Herds break from the Starry Skies. (Creation, 3.161–72)

Later he goes on to argue that other mixed species would be possible under atomism if there were no divine guidance: And might not other Animals arise Of diV ’rent Figure, and of diV ’rent Size? In the wide Womb of Possibility Lye many Things, which ne’er may actual be: And more Productions of a various Kind Will cause no Contradiction in the Mind. ’Tis possible the Things in Nature found, Might diV ’rent Forms and diV ’rent Parts have own’d. The Boar might wear a Trunk, the Wolf a Horn, The Peacock’s Train the Bittern might adorn. Strong Tusks might in the Horse’s Mouth have grown, And Lions might have Spots, and Leopards none. But if the World knows no Superior Cause, Obeys no Soveraign’s arbitrary Laws; If absolute Necessity maintains Of Causes and EVects the fatal Chains; What could one Motion stop, change one Event? It would transcend the wide, the vast Extent, The utmost stretch of Possibility, That Things, from what they are, should disagree. (Creation, 5.131–50)

Blackmore is clearly unimpressed by Lucretius’ claim that the guiding hand of Providence designing creatures and keeping them in their distinct species can be replaced by a simple mechanistic limit on atomic combinations, which does the same job. For him unrestrained atomism would produce universal chaos: the stability of nature at the phenomenal level must surely arise from a parallel stability at the atomic level.

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Centaurs and other such monstrous hybrid creatures were such a good weapon against the Epicurean view of the world perhaps because, just as in Darwin’s system, there is no clear animal / human divide in the Epicurean world-view, and consequently the easiest way to imagine the consequences of the lack of such a boundary between humans and animals is, paradoxically, to picture a creature actually crossing the boundary: a centaur is both a walking illustration of a clearly deWned division between human and animal (where the horse joins onto the man) and also an illustration of the possibility that that boundary can be breached.13 But secondly, Lucretius also invites such criticisms by the closeness of his account of the origin of species to that of Empedocles. Both Empedocles and Lucretius explain the origin of species by having all possible creatures appear from the earth in a great burst of creation in the beginning, and in both Lucretius and Empedocles those creatures that were formed by chance so that they had the ‘correct’ attributes for survival, survived, but the others, nearly endless varieties of monsters, simply died out there and then. And so the formation of species is explained as the simple interaction of chance and necessity, without the need for divine guidance or any pre-existing pattern on which creatures and species may be formed:14 multaque tum tellus etiam portenta creare conatast mira facie membrisque coorta, androgynum interutrasque nec utrum utrimque remotum, orba pedum partim, manuum uiduata uicissim, muta sine ore etiam, sine uultu caeca reperta, uinctaque membrorum per totum corpus adhaesu, 13 Although it has been claimed that the earliest references to centaurs in literature are not to half-horse half-human creatures but simply to bestial hairy humans (e.g. Iliad 1.268, 2.743), and that the bi-formed centaur is a later development, the development of centaurs in art shows that the earlier depictions of centaurs are in fact of a less well-blended creature, with human torso and front legs and the horse body stuck awkwardly onto the back. Over time, a more smoothly blended creature develops, with horse front legs and human torso. Eventually, the creature becomes more homogeneous still and the human head grows from a horse neck. See Segal (1974), Kirk (1970) 152–62, Osborne (1994), Baur (1912). 14 See Furley (1970) 55–64, who sees DRN 5.837–48 as a paraphrase of Empedocles. Sedley (1998) 19–21 is dubious about the resemblances between the two passages. See now further Sedley (2003).


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nec facere ut possent quicquam nec cedere quoquam nec uitare malum nec sumere quod foret usus. cetera de genere hoc monstra ac portenta creabat, nequiquam, quoniam natura absterruit auctum, nec potuere cupitum aetatis tangere Xorem nec reperire cibum nec iungi per Veneris res. (DRN 5.837–48) At that time the earth also attempted to create many monsters which arose with amazing appearances and limbs: the hermaphrodite, between the two sexes, yet not either, sundered from both, and some bereft of feet, some again without hands, others were found also dumb without mouths, blind without faces, others bound by the adhesion of their limbs along their whole body, so that they could not do anything or go anywhere, or avoid danger, or take up what they needed. She created other monsters and prodigies of this type, in vain since nature prevented their growth, and they could not reach the desired Xowering of age, or Wnd food, or be joined by the works of Venus. ½ ø Ø ŒÆd I Z() ¥Æ Ø ½Æ Ø Œ æØ?, ½æH b Ø ı ½ ªŁº ‹½Æ F Ø ºØa ºØ Ø ½ŒØ?, F b ½i ŁæH OæØºªŒ ø Iª½ æ æ Y?, F I I½Łæø ı Æ, ½ F I IªæH? ÞØ æø ª Æ ŒÆd I º ½Æ æı?· KŒ H IłıB Œ ØÆØ æd ª Æ Æ ½ Łø· ZłØ ªaæ Ø ı ªŁº½: (Empedocles, Strasbourg fragment a(ii) 23–30)15 I will show you to your eyes too, where they [i.e. the elements] Wnd a larger body: Wrst the coming together and the unfolding of the stock, and as many as are now remaining of this generation, on the one hand among the wild species of mountain-roaming beasts, and on the other hand the twofold oVspring of men, and in the case of the produce of the root-bearing Welds and of the cluster of grapes mounting on the vine. From these accounts convey to your mind unerring proofs: for you will see the coming together and unfolding of the stock. (tr. Martin and Primavesi)

Fragments 57, 59, 60, and 61, describe the zoogony under love, when the separate limbs of creatures are combined: 15 Martin and Primavesi (1999).

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Gordon Campbell fi w ººÆd b ŒæÆØ IÆ Kº Æ, ªı d Kº æÆ hØ þ ø, Z Æ r ’ KºÆA Æ ø: (DK 31 B57)

Here many heads sprang up without necks, bare arms were wandering without shoulders, and eyes needing foreheads strayed singly. (tr. Wright) ÆP aæ Kd ŒÆ a E K ª Æ Ø Æ ø, ÆF ı Œ, ‹fi ıŒıæ ŒÆ Æ, ¼ººÆ æe E ººa ØŒB Kª : (DK 31 B59) But as god mingled further with god [i.e. the four elements], they fell together as they chanced to meet each other, and many others in addition to these were continually arising. (tr. Wright) ººa b I ØæøÆ ŒÆd I æ’ K , ıªB IææøØ æÆ, a ÆºØ KÆ ºº IæıB ŒæÆÆ, Øª Æ fi B b I IæH fi B b ªıÆØŒıB, ŒØæE MŒ Æ ªıØ: (DK 31 B61) Many creatures with a face and breasts on both sides were produced, manfaced ox-creatures arose and again ox-faced men, (others) with male and female nature combined, and the bodies they had were dark. (tr. Wright)16 ‘‘Nº IŒæØ ØæÆ’’ ŒÆd ‘‘ıªB IææfiøæÆ’’ (B60, Plutarch Adv. Col. 28. 1123b) ‘Roll-walking creatures with hands not properly articulated or distinguishable’,17 ‘man-headed ox-creatures’. (tr. Wright) 16 Compare Ovid’s version (of the Minotaur), Tr. 4.7.18: semibouemque uirum semiuirumque bouem; see Rusten (1982) 332–3 and Hardie (1995) 214. 17 ‘with hands not properly articulated or distinguishable’: thus also Bollack (1969), 3.2.419–21. Sedley (2003) 5 n. 13 points out that Nºı is an epithet of oxen (cf. Iliad 6.424, 9.466) and sees here another example of a compound species, perhaps of oxen and bears (e.g. ox-footed creatures with dense hands).


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The fundamental diVerence between Lucretius’ and Empedocles’ theories is that Empedocles uses compound creatures such as the ox-headed man-creatures to illustrate the unviable monsters that were randomly produced, while Lucretius’ monsters are wrongly assembled but without any mixing of parts from separate species.18 Of course, Empedocles’ ‘ox-faced man creatures’ and vice versa could play straight into the hands of critics of the anti-teleological view of the world: this is, they would say, what we would get if creation had occurred by such a random mechanistic process without divine guidance, and we would see such mythical creatures as the Minotaur and centaurs. Empedocles implicitly appeals to traditional myths of monstrous hybrids as leftovers from an earlier archaic world, as well as to modern-day monstrous births, which were commonly interpreted as the results of inter-species crossing; but while this may aid in the acceptance of his theory in accounting for the variety of nature, it may well also introduce a disturbingly metamorphic potential that subverts the stability of species’ integrity. Perhaps because of this connection between his and Empedocles’ theories then, and because the Epicurean theory is vulnerable to attack by centaurs, Lucretius in DRN 5.878–924 spends forty-seven lines arguing vehemently that centaurs and such compound creatures were never possible at any time. sed neque Centauri fuerunt nec tempore in ullo esse queunt duplici natura et corpore bino ex alienigenis membris compacta potestas hinc illinc par uis ut sat par esse potissit.19 (DRN 5.878–81) But Centaurs never existed, nor at any time can there exist creatures with a double nature and twin body, with their faculties put together from alien born limbs, equal on both sides, in such a way that their strength could be equal enough. 18 For a more detailed study of ancient theories of evolution see Campbell (2000). 19 The text of 5.881 is corrupt in manuscripts O and Q: hinc illinc parvis ut non sit [sat Q] pars esse potissit OQ. Many emendations have been suggested. Already in Lambinus’ edition of 1563–4 there were too many to list them all, but I list, e.g., par uis ut sat par (Giussani followed by Merrill and Costa), partis ut si par (Lachmann), partis ut sat par (Bailey), uisque ut non sat par (Munro). See Campbell (2003) ad loc.

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But at the end of his long defence, at DRN 5.916–24, we are given a glimpse of an anti-atomic argument to which I assume he is also replying: that some people claim that if there were very many productive atoms in the earth that produced creatures without any divine guidance in the beginning, then the resulting creatures would include centaurs: nam quod multa fuere in terris semina rerum tempore quo primum tellus animalia fudit, nil tamen est signi mixtas potuisse creari inter se pecudes compactaque membra animantum, propterea quia quae de terris nunc quoque abundant herbarum genera ac fruges arbustaque laeta non tamen inter se possunt complexa creari, sed res quaeque suo ritu procedit et omnes foedere naturae certo discrimina seruant. For the fact that there were many seeds of things in the earth at the time when she Wrst poured forth the animals is, however, no indication that mingled creatures were able to be created, or that the limbs of living creatures could be put together, since the species of grasses, crops, and fruitful trees which even now spring forth abundantly from the earth cannot, however, be created intertwined with one another, but each creature carries on in its own manner, and all preserve their distinctions by a Wxed law of nature.

It would seem that critics have picked up on the Epicurean argument Lucretius puts forward in DRN 2.581–660 that the earth contains a vast variety of diVerent atoms from which she creates all things, and have used it to argue that this would lead to instability in nature, and especially that originally it would have produced compound creatures. And so what starts as a refutation of the ‘man-faced oxcreatures’ component of Empedocles’ zoogony and an attempt to disassociate his own theory from such creatures, comes back round again to a defence of the ability of the atomic theory to account for the regularity of nature. The link between Empedocles’ zoogony, the atomic theory of the creative abilities of the earth, the atomic arguments in the latter half of Book 2 of DRN, and the scheme of the origin of species in Book 5, is now indicated by Lucretius’ use of part of Empedocles’ zoogony in DRN 2.1081 V.; it is now clear that


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Lucretius had Empedocles’ zoogony in mind in writing the atomistic passage in Book 2. We may set DRN 2.1081–2: inuenies sic montiuagum genus esse ferarum, sic hominum geminam prolem, . . . thus you will Wnd is the mountain-wandering race of wild beasts thus the twofold oVspring of humans

beside Strasbourg fragment a(ii) 26–7:20 F b [i] ŁæH OæØºªŒ ø Iª[æ æ’ Y?] F I’ I[Łæ]ø ı Æ on the one hand among the race of mountain-wandering wild beasts on the other among the twofold oVspring of humans (tr. Martin and Primavesi)

The speciWc argument in Book 2, in which the echo of Empedocles appears, is that there are other inhabited worlds, and this comes right after the proof of the inWnity of the number of worlds. Epicurus in the Letter to Herodotus 74 discusses the various diVerent shapes of the other worlds before going on also to argue that there are other inhabited worlds, and a scholion on Ep. Hdt. 74 tells us that the former topic, at least, comes from Book 12 of Epicurus’ On Nature. So it may be reasonable to suppose that the latter argument, that there are other inhabited worlds, was also found in Book 12. The other topics of DRN 2—the limited number of atomic shapes and so on—were found in Book 2 of On Nature as David Sedley has shown,21 and so it may well be that this overlap between the zoogonic topics of books 2 and 5 of DRN arises from a similar overlap in books 2 and 12 of On Nature. Epicurus’ discussion of the diVerent shapes of other worlds and other inhabited worlds in Ep. Hdt. 74, and presumably in Book 12 of On Nature, is based on atomic arguments, and so we could reasonably expect that Epicurus’ discussion of zoogony in Book 12 went into atomic detail. However, Lucretius avoids mentioning atoms in the zoogony of Book 5, except for the refutation in 5.916 of misunderstandings that arise from 20 See Martin and Primavesi (1999) ad loc.; Sedley (2003) 7; Campbell (2003) 101–9, 131–3. 21 Sedley (1998) 110–16.

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atomism itself, where discussion of atomism is unavoidable. The atomic background for the theory of the origin of species and genetics is found in Book 2 but does not appear where we should expect it in Book 5. I suggest, then, that Lucretius’ avoidance of atomism in his zoogony arises from his knowledge of the diYculties later Epicureans had experienced in defending the theory from attack and from his desire to avoid such attacks. He returns to Empedocles’ zoogony the better to illustrate the Epicurean theory at the macroscopic level, leaving out the atomic arguments on genetics he found in On Nature Book 12. Paradoxically, as I see it, this Empedoclean treatment has allowed even greater opportunity for criticism, and has in fact closed the circle between Epicurus and Empedocles.22 But Lucretius’ vehement defence in 5.878–924 was not successful in permanently removing centaurs from his prehistoric landscape, and they are always lurking on the fringes ready to invade his early world. A painter of the late Wfteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Piero di Cosimo, was fascinated by ancient mythological prehistories and especially by Lucretius’ prehistory, and in a series of three panels takes great pleasure in repopulating Lucretius’ prehistory with centaurs and satyrs, as can be seen from the two paintings, The Hunt, and The Return from the Hunt.23 An even more interesting detail appears in his The Forest Fire (Figure 1, p. xvi), a painting whose subject is more elusive, but which is also thought to be a Lucretian prehistory painting, combining disparate features from the prehistory in Book 5. The Wre itself, just as in the other two panels, is often thought to be a reference to Lucretius’ description of the forest Wre at 5.1241 V., and to the importance of Wre in human evolution, and also a reference to his primeval humans’ inability to control Wre. The animals rushing from the Wre on the left and leaping across the river echo Virgil’s argument with Lucretius in Georgics 3.209–83 over the civilizing eVects of love.24 Virgil here borrows the 22 It is possible, of course, that Epicurus used Empedoclean material in his account in On Nature Book 12, and also that Lucretius found a similar refutation of centaurs there. 23 See Whistler and Bomford (1999), Whistler (2003), E. Panofsky (1937–8) 12–20. 24 Cf. G. 3.242–4: omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque j et genus aequoreum, pecudes pictaeque uolucres j in furias ignemque ruunt: amor omnibus idem, where Virgil puts back together the two sorts of love Lucretius had carefully separated at DRN 4.1058: haec Venus est nobis; hinc autemst nomen amoris. For Wre as a metaphor for love see Whistler and Bomford (1999) 14–15, cf. the Selve of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92).


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Lucretian image from the proem to Book 1 of DRN, where the arrival of Venus in spring causes the animals to leap with joy, climb mountains, and cross rivers.25 Virgil uses the motif to illustrate an apparent tension between the positive picture of Venus in DRN Book 1 and the negative picture in DRN Book 4, arguing that love of any sort, and not just romantic love, is a kind of mania.26 He also takes issue with Lucretius’ picture at DRN 5.1011–27 of love as a powerful force in human evolution, softening and civilizing bestial people, and has tame animals become wild under the eVects of love, and wild animals become even wilder.27 The great variety of birds in The Forest Fire seems to allude to Lucretius’ frequent stress on the atomic theory’s ability to account for the variety of nature, in which he uses the motif of the variety of birds both as an illustration of the variety of nature and as an implicit proof of the natural plenitude of the atomic theory’s creative capabilities.28 The painting is divided in two by the tree in the foreground, and the left-hand half seems to depict an earlier world than the right. Note particularly the wild aurochs on the left of the tree and the modern domestic cow on the right, with the man chasing it holding a harness, perhaps referring to the domestication of animals in prehistory.29 The painting, then, seems to move from creation on the left to more modern times on the right, with the sawn-oV tree-trunk and cottage.30 The imagery is highly allusive and there are many other mysterious 25 See DRN 1.14–20 for the ‘swimming rivers’ and ‘climbing mountains’ motif, cf. G. 3.213, 252–4, 258–63, 269–70. 26 See Gale (2001), 96–100, 173–9. 27 G. 3.245–9, cf. Ovid Ars am. 2.473–7: tum genus humanum solis errabat in agris j idque merae uires et rude corpus erat. j silua domus fuerat, cibus herba, cubilia frondes j iamque diu nulli cognitus alter erat, j blanda truces animos fertur mollisse uoluptas. See Watson (1984). 28 Cf. DRN 5.801, and 1078 uariae uolucres; 825 aeriasque . . . uolucres uariantibu’ formis; 791–2 (of all living creatures) mortalia saecla creauit [tellus] j multa modis multis uaria ratione coorta. Generally Lucretius has a strong tendency to highlight the plenitude of nature, itemizing animal, bird, and plant species; a technique he inherits in part from Empedocles who also lists the diVerent kingdoms of nature as visual proof of the results of his zoogonic theories. Cf. the DK frs B21.9–12, B 23.5–8, and Strasbourg frs a(i) 8–a(ii) 2, a(ii) 26–8. See Sedley (2003) 6–9, Tre´panier (2003) 33–6. 29 Cf. DRN 5.860–70. 30 Cf. Virgil G. 1.143–5: tum ferri rigor atque argutae lamina serrae j (nam primi cuneis scindebant Wssile lignum), j tum uariae uenere artes . . . DRN 5.935–6, 5.1266–8, 5.1283–4. On the Wrst houses cf. DRN 5.1011; Vitruvius, De arch. 2.1.

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details, including the burning embers in the forest in the lower lefthand corner, which may suggest the remnants of a Wery creation,31 but the strangest is the detail of the human faces of the animals on the left. In The Hunt and The Return from the Hunt, Piero shows centaurs and satyrs Wghting beasts among the primeval humans, but there are no true centaurs or satyrs in The Forest Fire. But as an afterthought, as Xray examination of the panel has shown, Piero has added the human faces to the animals on the left, producing Empedoclean man-faced pig-creatures and man-faced deer-creatures; and so with this detail The Forest Fire more subtly subverts Lucretius’ theory of the origin of species than the other two paintings, where we see more ‘normal’ mythological beasts. This suggests strongly that Piero was aware of the connection between Lucretius’ and Empedocles’ theories of the origin of species. I do not know whether the idea was Piero’s own or perhaps that of a learned patron or visitor to his studio, but it does indicate at least that Lucretius’ connection with Empedocles’ zoogony was recognized in the early sixteenth century, and as the painting is of the spalliera type,32 intended usually to provide material for learned discussion, Piero perhaps would have expected the detail to be understood and appreciated by his patron and his patron’s friends. However, Piero’s fondness for fantasy and monsters and his taste for classical prehistory motifs suggests that the idea was his own. So far I have spoken about centaurs and man-faced ox-creatures, so now I must bring in the bicycles. Thomas O’Grady discusses the frequency of the bicycling theme in Irish literature, and says: Pre-eminent Joyce scholar Hugh Kenner has even argued that the many bicycle-riding Irishmen in Samuel Beckett’s novels—Molloy, Moran, Mercier and Camier, among others—are ‘Cartesian Centaurs’. Observing how the Greeks ‘united the noblest functions of rational and animal being, man with horse’ in imagining the race of Centaurs. Kenner observes further: ‘For many years, however, we have had accessible to us a nobler image of bodily 31 Cf. Empedocles DK 31 B62.1–3: ‘And now hear this—how Wre, as it was being separated, brought up by night the shoots of men and pitiable women, for the account is to the point and well informed’; Strasbourg fr. d 11–14; ‘when an inextinguishable Xame occurred . . . bringing upwards a mixture of much woe . . . beings capable of reproduction were engendered . . . even now daylight beholds their remains . . .’; DRN 5.805–6: tum tibi terra dedit primum mortalia saecla; j multus enim calor atque umor superabat in aruis. Cf. 5.416–508. 32 See Barriault (1994), Fermor (1993).


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perfection than the horse. The Cartesian Centaur is a man riding a bicycle, mens sana in corpore disposito [a sound mind in an orderly-arranged body].’33

So here we have a link between bicycles and centaurs in literature: Kenner sees the fusion of man and machine achieved in bicycle riding as a process parallel to that which produced Chiron and Pholus, the noble centaurs of Greek mythology. William Empson, however, in his poem ‘Invitation to Juno’ sees a more disturbing aspect to such hybridization and compares Lucretius’ rejection of centaurs to Johnson’s rejection of bicycle riding. Lucretius could not credit Centaurs Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous. ‘Man superannuates the horse; Horse pulses will not gear with ours.’ Johnson could see no bicycle would go; ‘You bear yourself, and the machine as well.’ Gennets for germans sprang not from Othello, Ixion rides upon a single wheel. Courage. Weren’t strips of heart culture seen Of late mating two periodicities? Did not once the adroit Darwin Graft annual upon perennial trees?34

For Empson, Johnson’s denial of the possibility of bicycle riding argues against Iago’s racist species-crossing metaphor in Othello.35 The punishment of Ixion, progenitor of the race of centaurs (for his attempted rape of Hera during which he raped a cloud instead), here becomes at once prophetic in its adumbration of the invention of the bicycle and at the same time stands as its negation: Ixion’s Wery 33 O’Grady (1998). 34 Empson (1935). I am grateful to Gillian Clark for this reference. 35 Othello i. i.118–25: iago Sir, you are one of those that will not serve God, if the devil bid you. Because we come to do you service, and you think we are Russians, you’ll have your daughter covered with a barbary horse, you’ll have your nephews neigh to you, you’ll have coursers for cousins, and gennets for germans. brabantio What prophane wretch art thou? iago I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs.

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unicycle, if given a traditional interpretation as the sun,36 forms an essential component of the mono-cyclical regularity of the cosmos. Darwin achieves the uniWcation and synchronization of disparate parts and faculties, but in doing so seemingly undermines Lucretius’ arguments against centaurs, upon which he relies to prevent his zoogony becoming chaotically productive of inter-species hybrids. If annual trees can be grafted onto perennial ones, Lucretius’ arguments based on the asynchronous growth rates of man and horse break down. The resulting ontological instability would also appear here to rebound upon Darwin’s system itself, in which such hybridization could also be disastrous.37 But the link between bicycles and centaurs is made perhaps most eVectively in Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman,38 not published until after his death in 1967 because it was considered too strange; and here we come back round again to the problems of atomism and ontological instability. Flann O’Brien brilliantly plays on the necessity for a ‘law’ to control nature. In the parallel universe of ‘the parish’, this law is personiWed by three policemen who attempt to control and set limits to the damaging eVects of the workings of the atomic theory, by using complicated and mysterious machinery. However, despite their eVorts to preserve the stability of the parish, as people ride their bicycles over the rocky roads, the atoms of human and bicycle become exchanged and people begin to exhibit characteristics of bicycle behaviour such as the inability to remain upright when stationary, and the tendency to prop themselves up with one foot resting on the kerb. Bicycles also begin to behave like humans: they are often found close to the stove in the kitchen even when they had been left outside the house, and mysterious piles of biscuit crumbs are found by their front wheels. And so Sergeant Pluck also takes more direct action to limit the damage done to people’s ontological integrity by bicycle riding. He steals their bicycles on a regular basis and then ‘Wnds’ them again after a few days. 36 See C. Lochin, LIMC 5.1: 857–62. 37 Paradoxically, Darwin’s choice of a blending theory of inheritance rather than a particulate one like the later Mendelian idea of discrete genes would tend to act against variation and thus prevent speciation, as such a blending would constantly dilute rather than preserve variety. See Fisher (1930). 38 See in particular Hopper (1995) 226–69, Spencer (1995), Kemnitz (1985).


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This theft limits people’s bicycle riding and so slows down their metamorphosis into bicycles, but of course, there are similar dangers involved in walking and horse riding, too. Sergeant Pluck’s greatgrandfather turned into a horse because of too much horse riding. He and the horse kept their outward appearances, as do the bicyclepeople and the people-bicycles, but the horse developed the worst behavioural characteristics of both horse and human, as we should expect in a centaur other than Chiron or Pholus, and eventually had to be shot.39 Of course it is a moot point whether it was the horse or the man who was shot: ‘The Atomic Theory’ I sallied ‘is a thing that is not very clear to me at all.’ ‘Michael Gilhaney’ said the Sergeant ‘is an example of a man that is nearly banjanxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?’. . . ‘Are you certain about the humanity of the bicycle?’ I inquired of him. ‘Is the Atomic Theory as dangerous as you say?’ ‘It is between two and three times as dangerous as it might be’ he replied gloomily. ‘Early in the morning I often think it is four times, and what is more, if you lived here for a few days and gave full play to your observation and inspection, you would know how certain the sureness of certainty is.’. . . ‘The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky road-steads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles.’. . . The Sergeant’s face clouded and he spat thoughtfully three yards ahead of him on the road. ‘I will tell you a secret’ he said very conWdentially in a low voice. ‘My great-grandfather was eighty-three when he died. For a year before his death he was a horse!’ ‘A horse?’ ‘A horse in everything but extraneous externalities. He would spend the day grazing in a Weld or eating hay in a stall.’. . . ‘I suppose your great-grandfather got himself into this condition by too much horse riding?’

39 Centaurs usually live in an all-male society, engage in constant hunting and Wghting, and are driven by their ultra-violent alcoholic lust to try and rape human females, especially at weddings. See Dubois (1982).

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‘That was the size of it. His old horse Dan was in the contrary way and gave so much trouble, coming into the house at night and interfering with young girls during the day and committing indictable oVences, that they had to shoot him . . . but if you ask me it was my great-grandfather they shot and it is the horse that is buried up in Cloncoonla churchyard.’ (O’Brien (1967), 72 V.)

In Flann O’Brien’s imaginary world, only the active intervention of an intelligent and guiding ‘law’ can maintain human ontological stability and prevent the people of the parish from becoming secret centaurs like the old horse Dan, or secret half-man half-bicycle centaurs like Michael Gilhaney. Flann O’Brien’s critique of the atomic theory may seem merely frivolous, but his humour should not blind us to the seriousness of his argument. As Sergeant Pluck says, if we were to give full play to our observation and inspection we would know how certain the sureness of certainty is, an epistemological view of reality that Lucretius would endorse, but one that Schro¨dinger and Heisenberg seek to demolish.40 Flann O’Brien seems to have been deeply interested in the relativity theories of Einstein and also in quantum mechanics. However, as Keith Hopper has argued in his excellent Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist, O’Brien was disturbed by the theory of relativity and by the indeterminacy of quantum theory and feared their consequences for the stability of the world, and perhaps also for the status of divine reason as a universal principle.41 So, much of the strange science of the parish arises from a sustained critique of the new physics, but further, as Hopper points out, much of the strangeness of the world of The Third Policeman derives more directly from ancient science. In particular the theory of the eccentric sage de Selby that the world is sausage shaped is based closely on the theory 40 Cf. DRN 1.146–8, 2.59–61, 3.91–3, 6.39–41. 41 Spencer (1995) 146 describes O’Brien’s contacts with the physicist Erwin Schro¨dinger, who was head of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Dublin during the war years and up until 1956. Writing as Myles na gCopaleen, O’Brien was sued for a libellous attack on Schro¨dinger, who in his Science and Humanism had claimed that there was no logical basis for a First Cause, and also for an attack on T. F. O’Rahilly, who had argued that two early Christian missionaries had been conXated into the one Wgure of St Patrick. O’Brien charged the institute with seeking to show that there were two St Patricks and no God. See Cronin (1989) 177.


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of Anaximander that the world is a cylinder three times longer than it is broad,42 and de Selby’s theory that night occurs because of an accretion of black air around the earth rather than because of the setting of the sun is a parody of the Epicurean theory of vision, in which the darkness of a dark room is caused by its being Wlled with atoms of dark air.43 Again, de Selby’s theory that names have a direct atomic relationship with their owners mocks the Epicurean theory that the names of things arise by nature and have a direct relationship with the things they describe. De Selby takes the Epicurean theory of names to ludicrous extremes in which entire racial groups are deWned by their names, and so racism is inadvertently given a scientiWc basis by the humane de Selby.44 42 O’Brien (1965) 81–2: ‘Standing at a point on the postulated spherical earth, he says, one appears to have four main directions in which to move, viz. north, south, east, and west. But it does not take much thought to see there really appear to be only two, since north and south are meaningless terms in relation to a spheroid and can connote motion in only one direction; so also with west and east . . . The application of this conclusion to his theory that ‘‘the earth is a sausage’’ is illuminating. He attributes the idea that the earth is spherical to the fact that human beings are continually moving in only one known direction (though they are convinced that they are free to move in any direction) and that this one direction is really around the circular circumference of an earth which is in fact sausage-shaped.’ Cf. Ps. Plutarch Strom. 2, Hippolytus Ref. 1.6.3: ‘He [Anaximander] says that the earth is cylindrical in shape, and that its depth is a third of its width. Its shape is curved, round, similar to the drum of a column; of its Xat surfaces we walk on one, and the other is on the opposite side.’ 43 O’Brien (1965) 101–3 n. 1, cf. DRN 4.337–52: ‘Not excepting even the credulous Kraus (see his De Selbys Leben), all the commentators have treated de Selby’s disquisitions on night and sleep with considerable reserve. This is hardly to be wondered at since he held (a) that darkness was simply an accretion of ‘‘black air’’, i.e., a staining of the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions too Wne to be seen with the naked eye . . . ‘‘the only straw oVered’’ to use Bassett’s wry phrase, is the statement that ‘‘black air’’ is highly combustible, enormous masses of it being instantly consumed by the smallest Xame.’ 44 O’Brien (1965) 35–6 n. 3: ‘De Selby (Golden Hours, p. 93 et seq) has put forward an interesting theory on names. Going back to primitive times, he regards the earliest names as crude onomatopoeic associations with the appearance of the object or person named – thus harsh or rough manifestations being represented by far from pleasant gutturalities and vice versa. This idea he pursued to rather fanciful lengths, drawing up elaborate paradigms of vowels and consonants purporting to correspond to certain indices of human race, colour and temperament, and claiming ultimately to be in a position to be able to state the physiological ‘‘group’’ of any person merely from a brief study of the letters of his name after the word had been ‘‘rationalized’’ to allow for variations of language. Certain ‘‘groups’’ he showed to be universally ‘‘repugnant’’ from other ‘‘groups’’. An unhappy commentary on this theory was furnished by the activities of his own nephew, whether through ignorance or contempt

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O’Brien’s subtle postmodernist technique of layering meaning and nonsense perhaps precludes a simple allegorical reading of The Third Policeman, but that ancient mechanistic physics is used to mock Einsteinian and other modern mechanistic readings of the world with, as O’Brien sees it, their dehumanizing and destabilizing consequences, seems to be one solid conclusion we can reach about a work of such shifting perspectives and meanings. Accordingly, O’Brien’s extrapolation of the consequences of atomism to such ludicrously metamorphic lengths is not simply a straight critique of atomism itself, but a reductio ad absurdum of all mechanistic theories that introduce the endless Xux of all things, from the Presocratics to Einstein and Schro¨dinger. Darwin, of course, may also be numbered among those who present a picture of the world in constant Xux, with no stability of species, since for Darwin, as Niles Eldridge puts it, species had no real existence but ‘became simply progress reports in the history of life’.45 Further, Darwin’s theories have also been used in a dehumanizingly reductionist way, especially in deterministic views of the evolution of behaviour which often seem to remove human free will by attributing all behaviour to evolutionary advantage. Lucretius could justiWably complain that such a use of Epicurean atomism to mock scientiWc determinism is unfair since Epicureanism goes to great lengths to rescue free will from the clutches of Democritean physical determinism; but Epicureanism is perhaps guilty of seeking to reduce the world to the interaction of atoms and void and chance and necessity.46 Further, O’Brien’s picture of ontological instability arising from the mingling of atoms of diVerent species, and even of the animate and inanimate, of human and machine, goes directly against Lucretius’ explicit claim that diVerent types of species and diVerent types of matter are kept distinct from one another because of limits imposed

of the humanistic researches of his uncle. The nephew set about a Swedish servant, from whom he was completely excluded by the paradigms, in the pantry of a Portsmouth hotel to such purpose that de Selby had to open his purse to the tune of Wve or six hundred pounds to avert an unsavoury law case.’ Cf. DRN 5.1028–90, Ep. Hdt. 75–6. See Everson (1994) 75–107. 45 Eldredge (1995), 10. 46 See Fowler (2002b), Kennedy (2002).


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at the atomic level, and so again O’Brien’s use of atomism to criticize the Darwinian view of the endless Xux of species could be considered unfair. On the other hand, O’Brien is under no obligation to accept Epicurean genetics at face value, and indeed he follows an ancient tradition in not doing so and ignoring the Epicurean theory of the atomically imposed laws of nature. If the science of Flann O’Brien’s parallel universe is weird it is because it is composed from elements drawn from Presocratic and Epicurean science, from Darwinian evolution, Einsteinian theories of relativity, and Schro¨dinger’s work on quantum theory. His criticism is more sophisticated than those of Balbus, the ancient critics of Epicureanism, Piero di Cosimo, or Sir Richard Blackmore, in that his new half-man half-bicycle creatures are not composed of disparate limbs, but are truly atomistic creations, mingled at the microscopic rather than the macroscopic level. In this O’Brien parallels the advance Epicurean genetics made on Empedoclean genetics: in Epicurean genetics embryology is explained at the atomic level, while in Empedocles tiny preformed limbs combine to form an embryo, just as the man-faced ox-creatures are formed.47 In doing so Flann O’Brien undoes the careful work of Lucretius who avoids atomism as much as possible in his theory of the origin of species, as I argue, deliberately in order to avoid such criticism. At the heart of the problem is the need for atomism to explain that creation by random chaotic collisions at the atomic level can account for both the variety of nature and for the stability and order of nature at the phenomenal level: always lurking in the background is the spectre of ontological chaos, threatening to throw the cosmos into disorder. Centaurs and half-men half-bicycles, then, are emblems of that nightmarish chaos. Italo Calvino quotes a passage of Cyrano de Bergerac which neatly illustrates this chaotic potential of atomism: You marvel that this matter, shuZed pell-mell at the whim of Chance, could have made a man, seeing that so much was needed for the construction of his being. But you must realize that a hundred million times this matter, on the way to human shape, has been stopped to form now a stone, now lead, now coral, now a Xower, now a comet; and all because of more or fewer elements that were or were not necessary for designing a man. Little wonder if, within an inWnite quantity of matter that ceaselessly changes and stirs, the 47 Aristotle Gen. an. 722b 17–30. See Balme (1992) ad loc.

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few animals, vegetables and minerals we see should happen to be made; no more wonder than getting a royal pair in a hundred casts of the dice. Indeed it is equally impossible for all this stirring not to lead to something; and yet this something will always be wondered at by some blockhead who will never realize how small a change would have made it something else.48 (tr. Patrick Creagh)

To allow the atomic theory to account for the variety of nature we must appeal to its powerfully metamorphic creative capabilities, but how far do those capabilities extend, and can atomic physics really provide guiding limits to prevent species mutations from getting out of hand? As J. L. Monod puts it: We know now what the nature of mutations is. We can even write chemical formulas for most mutations. We know that they are quantum events, that they occur at the level of single molecules, and that therefore they belong in the realm of microscopic physics – in the realm of events that by their very nature cannot be individually predicted and cannot be individually controlled.49

Epicurus himself made an advance upon Democritean atomism by introducing an element of indeterminacy into his system at the atomic level—the swerve of atoms50—and this indeterminacy brings the behaviour of his atoms close to that of subatomic ‘particles’ in quantum physics. Since, as I say above, Epicurean genetics have an atomic basis, and since Epicurus was right in seeing indeterminacy in the atomic world, then the Epicurean theory of the origin of species may come closer to modern evolutionary theories than we have realized, and may quite naturally share many of the problems that modern evolutionary theories face. 48 Cyrano de Bergerac, Voyage dans la lune, 1661 (Garnier-Flammarion edn), 98–9. Quoted from Calvino (1996) 21. 49 Monod (1975) 22, quoted from Ridley (1997) 393. 50 See Fowler (1983b).

4 Didaxis, Rhetoric, and the Law in Lucretius Alessandro Schiesaro

In this paper I propose to discuss certain constitutive features of Lucretius’ poem in connection with speciWc aspects of Roman culture in his times. This type of investigation has never been overly popular in the case of the De rerum natura, perhaps as a reaction to Benjamin Farrington’s rather extreme, if generous, promotion of Lucretius to the position of radical political champion.1 In more recent times the welcome, indeed dramatic, increase in our knowledge of Epicurus and Epicureanism has inevitably catalysed the interest of scholars. As a caveat, which I will elaborate at the end, I hasten to add at the beginning that I am not promoting a new politicization of the De rerum natura a` la Farrington, nor will I suggest that more focus on distinctly Roman features in the poem invalidates or weakens the fundamental relationship between Lucretius and his Greek teacher. E. J. Kenney remarked some thirty years ago that Lucretius was too often studied in a vacuum, and he then proceeded brilliantly to modify the then prevailing view of Lucretius’ poetic allegiances.2 I am grateful to Peta Fowler, Andrea Cucchiarelli, Michael Crawford, Jean-Louis Ferrary, Myrto Garani, Ingo Gildenhard, and Philip Hardie for their comments on a draft of this paper, and to audiences in Oxford, Lille, Milan, Pavia, Rome, and Thessaloniki for stimulating discussions. This paper, a preliminary French version of which has been published in A. Monnet, ed., Le jardin romain: Epicurisme et poe´sie a` Rome (Lille, 2003), should be read in conjunction with the author’s forthcoming contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, where some of the same issues are also discussed. 1 See esp. Farrington (1939), 172–216. 2 Kenney (1970).

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A similar complaint could still be made about Lucretius’ broader cultural and political background:3 it is clearly important to extend our understanding of which aspects of contemporary Roman culture Lucretius appears to be more directly engaging with in his project to make Epicurus’ message both understandable and attractive for a native audience.

T E AC H I N G P O S I TI O N S A promising starting point for our project is to analyse the relationship between master and teacher staged in the poem, and its underlying epistemic and didactic protocols. In recent years important insights have been gained about the role of the addressee and his function in didactic poetry.4 We have better focused, among other things, on the fact that the didactic situation itself is predicated on the existence and activity of the addressee, with whom the narrator engages in diVerent forms of dialectical encounter. Here I propose to concentrate especially on the form of the didactic encounter portrayed in De rerum natura, and oVer some parallels from other domains of Roman culture. The De rerum natura stages not one but two didactic situations. On the one hand, Lucretius portrays himself as Epicurus’ faithful disciple; on the other, he is Memmius’ teacher, and, by extension, our own. Although it is tempting to consider the latter relationship as closely modelled on the former, upon closer inspection meaningful diVerences do emerge. The most explicit characterization of the relationship between Epicurus and Lucretius is of course to be found at the beginning of Book 3, where the operative image is that of the footprints, uestigia (3.3–4): te sequor, o Graiae gentis decus, inque tuis nunc Wcta pedum pono pressis uestigia signis. you I follow, O glory of the Grecian race, and now on the marks you have left I plant my own footsteps Wrm.5 3 See now some interesting contributions in Algra, Koenen, and Schrijvers (1997). Cf. also Canfora (1993) and Hutchinson (2001). 4 See the essays collected in Schiesaro, Mitsis, and Clay (1993). 5 Translations from Lucretius in this paper are taken from Rouse, rev. Smith (1975).

Didaxis, Rhetoric, and the Law in Lucretius

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Lucretius declares his intention to place his feet over the master’s footprints, in a declaration of allegiance that seems to leave no space for individual initiative or, literally, for personal detours.6 He pictures himself and his poem as the most orthodox rendering, albeit in a diVerent language and medium, of his master’s aurea dicta, and this portrait is in itself fully consonant with the traditional Epicurean view of the master–pupil relationship, as discussed, for instance, in Philodemus’ De libertate dicendi.7 The image of clearly deWned footprints also appears to echo the Epicurean explanation of memory: objects literally imprint our minds as a seal would imprint a wax tablet, and the shape resulting from this operation guarantees that we recognize and remember.8 At quite another level, the elaborate image of footprint-matching seems to highlight a desire to reproduce almost physically the teacher’s own footprint, to match his actual body shape. The physicality of the image may be meaningful: we know from Suetonius (Aug. 64.5), for instance, that Augustus made sure his grandchildren’s handwriting was an exact imitation of his own, for the child must mirror his elder and better down to such external details if his legitimate status is to be apparent to all. Epicurus is, of course, the supplier of patria . . . praecepta (3.9–10) to his pupil, and the relationship between Lucretius and his teacher is undoubtedly similar to the traditional relationship that a Roman father would maintain with his son.9 The very word praecepta recalls similar prescriptive didactic works such as those that Cato the Elder addressed to his son, one of the early forms of didactic literature in Rome.10 As applied (in turn) to the relationship between Lucretius and Memmius, however, the image of uestigia undergoes a perceptible transformation. In a very important methodological passage in Book 1 (402–9), Lucretius alternately Xatters and cajoles his pupil: 6 A similar image returns at 5.55–6: ‘cuius ego ingressus vestigia dum rationes j persequor ac doceo dictis, quo quaeque creata j foedere sint, in eo quam sit durare necessum.’ (‘His steps I trace, his doctrines I follow, teaching in my poem how all things are bound to abide in that law by which they were made.’) 7 Note that adherence to the kathegetes’ teachings still leaves room for discussion between teacher and pupil, especially as the latter progresses. On Philodemus’ treaty see Gigante (1983), 55–113, esp. 97–8, Glucker (1978) 132. 8 On typos in Epicurean epistemology see Asmis (1984) 65–6. 9 Philodemus (Lib. dic. VII a 1–3) deWnes the kathegetes as pater: Glucker (1978) 132. 10 See later, p. 69 and n. 17.

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Alessandro Schiesaro uerum animo satis haec uestigia parua sagaci sunt per quae possis cognoscere cetera tute. namque canes ut montiuagae persaepe ferai naribus inueniunt intectas fronde quietes, cum semel institerunt uestigia certa uiai, sic alid ex alio per te tute ipse uidere talibus in rebus poteris caecasque latebras insinuare omnis et uerum protrahere inde.

But for a keen-scented mind, these little tracks are enough to enable you to recognize the others for yourself. For as hounds very often Wnd by their scent the leaf-hidden resting-place of the mountain-ranging quarry, when once they have hit upon certain traces of its path, so will you be able for yourself to see one thing after another in such matters as these, and to penetrate all unseen hiding-places, and draw forth the truth from them.

What he has provided so far, he states, are uestigia parua, which Memmius’ intelligence will be able to develop further, and use to persuade himself that the void does indeed exist. Here these uestigia certa are the traces that a dog would follow when hunting a quarry in the woods: if the initial trace is clear and safe enough, the dog’s own nose will lead to the quarry, even if this is hiding in a ‘leaf-hidden resting-place’ (405 intectas fronde quietes). The quarry is the truth (409 uerum) which the pupil will be able to bring out (409 protrahere) after insinuating himself into all the ‘unseen hiding-places’ (408). Lucretius, however, will watch over, and, if Memmius (who is addressed in 411) hesitates or deXects from his pursuit, will intervene again and overpower him with a veritable cascade of arguments and proofs. The image suggests a more interactive relationship between the teacher and the pupil, who is granted a certain degree of autonomy and self-initiative provided that he does not forget the initial uestigia certa and proves himself to be resourceful and determined enough. These uestigia, just as in the hunting image, are relatively small. At the end of Book 1 Lucretius oVers Memmius the certainty of attaining the extreme secrets of nature, the ultima naturai (1116), led by a parua . . . opella (1114), which is at the same time the relatively short poem he is writing and the relatively limited eVort which is requested of Memmius himself (1.1114–17): haec sic pernosces parua perductus opella; namque alid ex alio clarescet nec tibi caeca


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nox iter eripiet quin ultima naturai peruideas: ita res accendent lumina rebus. So you will gain a thorough understanding of these matters, led on with very little eVort; for one thing will become clear by another, and blind night will not steal your path and prevent you from seeing all the uttermost recesses of nature: so clearly will truths kindle light for truths.

This description of the process of knowledge does not mirror the one outlined in the case of Lucretius and Epicurus. This didactic relationship, more articulate and more mature, is the one the poet intends to establish with his general readership, not just with Memmius. In fact the essential principles of Epicureanism are relatively few, and on their basis a suYciently intelligent disciple–reader can work out the explanation of a fair number of phenomena. Especially in the later books of the poem, Lucretius presupposes precisely this kind of self-initiative,11 for instance when he invites the reader to reXect autonomously on certain aspects of meteorology (6.527–34), something he will be able to do since by now he has come to know well the basic properties of elements (534 cum bene cognoris elementis reddita quae sint): cetera quae sursum crescunt sursumque creantur, et quae concrescunt in nubibus, omnia, prorsum omnia, nix uenti grando gelidaeque pruinae et uis magna geli, magnum duramen aquarum, et mora quae Xuuios passim refrenat auentis, perfacilest tamen haec reperire animoque uidere omnia quo pacto Want quareue creentur, cum bene cognoris elementis reddita quae sint.12 The other things that grow above and are produced above, and those which collect in the clouds, all, absolutely all, snow, winds, hail, and cold frosts, and the great power of ice, that great hardener of the waters, that obstacle which everywhere curbs back the eager rivers, how all these are produced and why they are made it is very easy to Wnd out in spite of all and to see with the mind’s eye, when you have fully understood what qualities belong to their elements. 11 Cf. Clay (1983) 225. 12 Note even in this passage the totalizing ambition indicated by the repeated omnia: cf. p. 73 below.

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In yet another case, in Book 5.1281–2, Lucretius, even as he then proceeds to discuss the topic anyway, states that it would be easy for Memmius to work out by himself how the properties of iron have been discovered: nunc tibi quo pacto ferri natura reperta sit facilest ipsi per te cognoscere, Memmi. Now it is easy for you, Memmius, to recognize by yourself in what manner the nature of iron was discovered.

Even if the polemical aside at 5.1133–5 is speciWcally referred to politics, the contrast drawn there between, on the one hand, men whose ‘wisdom comes from the lips of others’ and who ‘pursue things on hearsay’, and, on the other, those who heed ‘feelings themselves’ (1133–4 sapiunt alieno ex ore petuntque j res ex auditis potius quam sensibus ipsis) underlines again, from a diVerent angle, the importance of individual, autonomous reXection. The diVerent types of relationship which Lucretius establishes with his teacher and his pupils reXect—at one level—diVerent power relations that he presupposes between the various actors in the dramatic setting of the poem (and at least in part outside it). Memmius, a patronus-like Wgure, is usually treated with respect and understanding;13 vis-a`-vis god-like Epicurus, on the contrary, Lucretius prefers to present himself as a faithful, obedient follower.14 But the coexistence of the two models of relationship which we have identiWed in the De rerum natura is also parallel to a gradual evolution which can be traced in other aspects of Roman culture, where two models of teaching and learning compete with each other in what is conventionally called the transition between the middle and the late Republican periods. In the more archaic model the value of the didactic utterance is inextricably linked with the personal authority of the speaker, a father or father-like Wgure who embodies and distributes unquestionable wisdom. In the model which gradually 13 Contra Mitsis (1993). 14 For a comparable sequence of thought see for instance P. Valerius’ prayer at Livy 3.17.6: ‘Romule pater . . . iube hanc ingredi uiam, quam tu dux, quam tuus ingressus exercitus est. primus en ego consul, quantum mortalis deum possum, te ac tua uestigia sequar.’


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emerges most notably between the end of the second and the beginning of the Wrst century bc we face a gradual shift towards a more detached relationship between speaker and utterance: the speaker must still be able to command considerable respect, of course, but what he says is also evaluated on its own merits as it conforms to rules of persuasion and argumentation which can both be taught and learnt. The transition between the two models can be traced with suYcient clarity in the development of Roman oratory and rhetorical education.15 In this Weld the patrilinear acquisition of knowledge and wisdom is eloquently exempliWed by Cato’s didactic writing addressed to his son Marcus, a repository of learning of quasiencyclopaedic aspiration, and at the same time the undisputable model to which Marcus should conform.16 Indeed, Cato’s work is referred to as a carmen or an oraculum by subsequent authors, and Cato refers to himself as a uates (signiWcantly, in the context of a sustained attack against Greek culture).17 The word carmen suitably captures the most relevant aspects of both form and substance:18 Cato’s are short, well-crafted sentences which can be easily memorized, but they also have the aspect and force of legal statements or sacramental formulas.19 Their absolute authority, conveyed in 15 In this section, I am indebted esp. to David (1992) 321–66, q.v. 16 Close adherence to the teachings of one’s elder and better was represented in spatial terms, as conveyed in the admonition nusquam discedere (Cicero, De or. 1.21.97, with Bretone (1984) 67 n. 6 for further examples). Cf. the use of sequor in Lucretius, DRN 3.3, quoted above, p. 64. 17 As reported by Pliny, Nat. 29.14 (hoc puta uatem dixisse). The title and structure of Cato’s work are uncertain, but, like the De agricultura, it contained short praecepta (Praecepta ad Wlium is one of the possible titles of the collection). See now Cugusi and Sblendorio Cugusi (2001) 1.77–8 and 2.424 n. (with 1.75 about the title). 18 Cato is also the author of a carmen de moribus, a guide for ethical living composed in rhythmic prose. See Cugusi and Sblendorio Cugusi (2001) 80–81, with further bibliography. On the style, language and contents of carmen see now Meyer (2004) esp. 44–72. 19 Seneca, Ep. 94.27 dwells on the connection between praecepta and responsa and their lack of explicit reasoning: ‘quid quod etiam sine probationibus ipsa monentis auctoritas prodest? sic quomodo iurisconsultorum ualent responsa, etiam si ratio non redditur. praeterea ipsa quae praecipiuntur per se multum habent ponderis, utique si aut carmini intexta sunt aut prosa oratione in sententiam coartata, sicut illa Catoniana.’ See also Ep. 95, where Seneca distinguishes between praecepta (simple indications of dos and don’ts) and decreta, more sophisticated philosophical discussions, for instance Lucretius’ (Ep. 95.11).

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an epigrammatic, forceful style, is unquestionable: they appear eVectively impervious to questioning, let alone confutation. This patriarchal model for the transmission of wisdom retains a signiWcant role among Roman elites even as an alternative one emerges and gradually acquires wider currency: we know, for instance, that Cicero himself was still responsible personally for educating his son and nephew.20 Elements of tension between the two models, each carrying important social and political implications, can be detected as early as 155 bc, when Cato argues for the quick dismissal of the Greek philosophers, guilty above all of having argued on two successive days two contrasting theses:21 they should go back to their schools to debate with their Greek pupils, but the Romans should continue to listen only to the laws and the magistrates.22 This is not just a case of resistance to foreign inXuences: it is, rather, a clear indication of resistance to a technicalization of eloquence which takes the responsibility for shaping the young away from their fathers and paves the way for sophistic changes of mind. To wit, an even more forceful reaction against a form of teaching which decouples technical proWciency from personal authority occurs half a century later, when the debate about the Hellenization of Roman culture is no longer as Werce. The circumstances surrounding the presence in Rome of the so called rhetores latini are a matter of dispute, but the edict of 92 bc shows a high degree of uneasiness about their role. Even if one does not accept a fully politicized reading of the episode (that the censors are reacting against the rhetores because of their leanings towards Marius), the fact remains that a swift moral reprobation follows the rhetores’ attempt to oVer a form of technical training entrusted to experts who are not themselves either patres familias or indeed patres.23 It is in this context, incidentally, that we must place Cicero’s attempt to preserve the humanistic dimension of eloquence while 20 Ferrary (1988) 530–31, David (1992) 330. 21 See the account in Cicero, Rep. 3.6.9. 22 In the words of Plutarch’s Cato (Cato maior 22.7). Cf. Garbarino (1973) 362–6. 23 A full discussion, and further references, in Kaster (1995) 273–4. See also Gruen (1990) 178–92. Calboli (1982) oVers a comprehensive overview of the relationship between rhetoric and politics in Wrst century bc Rome. On the relationship between politics and culture at this time see Gabba (1953).


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allowing for the development of a technical dimension to the orator’s background. To the old model, which sees oratory and eloquence as ingrained qualities of the authoritative politician, he opposes a new one where eloquence is indeed a technique, but its practitioner, the orator, is required to possess such a high degree of personal distinction and almost universal doctrine that he can still be seen to embody the higher wisdom and moral authority of the aristocratic pater familias of old.24 To return to the De rerum natura. In the diVerent construction of the relationship between Epicurus and Lucretius on the one hand, and between Lucretius and Memmius on the other, I propose to read an instance of the conXict between two models of wisdom and its transmission, comparable to the one we can trace in the cognate Weld of eloquence: the technicalization of knowledge endorsed by Lucretius marks the gradual unshackling from the absolute authority of tradition, and a move towards more rational forms of interpretation and understanding which allow disciples considerable intellectual freedom.25

FROM ARCHAIC KNOW LEDGE TO THE ‘ SC I EN TIF I C REVOLUTION ’ The main point of strength in the new form of wisdom which Lucretius proclaims in his poem is undoubtedly its general import. The general laws he asserts and explains are to be proved valid in each and every circumstance. The act of interpretation will therefore consist in understanding the relationship between individual phenomena and the general law that can explain them. There will be no need to know the speciWc answer to a speciWc question, no need for an itemized knowledge which applies to just one phenomenon at a time. This one-to-one relationship between phenomena is deeply rooted in Roman jurisprudence, the domain of Roman thought where, 24 Narducci (1997) esp. 19–76. 25 Further stages in the technicalization and professionalization of knowledge during the Empire will acquire diVerent, even opposite, connotations: see WallaceHadrill (1997).

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arguably, the most important epistemic changes of these times can be detected. Law is Wrst of all expressed in oral responsa which in their more archaic, yet enduring, form share three deWning characteristics: they are oral, narrowly focused, and unexplained. Orality is the constitutive form of juridical expertise.26 The iurisconsultus addresses the speciWc issue at hand, and whether his opinion is followed or not will depend on his personal authority and credibility rather than external social constraints. Precisely because of its oral shape, a responsum will have to be memorable, and couched, not unlike a carmen, in eVective words and rhythmical patterns. The responsum is also narrow in scope, in that it does not aspire to general validity or to abstraction, but aims to resolve one single problem at the time when it is raised. It can be remembered, and used later in similar circumstances, but its origin is, literally, as a precise answer to a precise question. Finally, the law expert will not (necessarily) have to explain the reasoning behind his utterance. His sources of wisdom and the ways in which he attains this semi-normative truth can remain largely opaque. Responsa prescribe, they do not always explain. The tradition of responsa stands as a parallel in the Weld of law to the form of traditional wisdom I have brieXy outlined above. SpeciWc issues require speciWc answers, which of course can then be re-used, by way of analogy or contrast, in other cases, but which stop short of any generalizing ambition. The author of praecepta, just as that of responsa, is endowed with superior authority, and his learning brooks no questions and no explanations. Even when it is eventually put down on paper, his teaching will clearly retain the traces of its oral origin. Traces of this question and answer pattern survive in certain characteristic expressive features of didactic poetry (as indeed in other texts which interact with a didactic model),27 but, again, with telling diVerences. In Lucretius the hypothetical question of the addressee is often used as an eVective way to further the argument,28

26 Bretone (1984) 66, Bretone (2000) 198–202. 27 Such as Horace, Serm. 2.1, a ‘consultation’ with the famous Trebatius Testa, or, diVerently, Serm. 2.5. 28 See, for instance, repeated expressions such as ne forte requiras, si forte putas, ne forte putes, which both presuppose and forestall a question on Memmius’ part.


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yet it is clear from the very beginning that the poem has a totalizing ambition, and its goal is nothing less than the complete explanation of the rerum natura as a uniWed, comprehensive set of phenomena all sharing well-deWned common causes. At the beginning of the Georgics, on the contrary, a string of indirect questions lists the speciWc topics which Maecenas is supposedly interested in, and the poet is willing to elucidate.29 Similarly, when at the end of the poem Proteus Wnally reveals the cause of Aristaeus’ misfortune, he replies to a speciWc question with the superior authority of a semi-divine Wgure. Praecepta and responsa are in fact the deWning forms of knowledge in the Georgics, a poem which eschews Lucretius’ generalizing certainties and reverts to a more archaic and narrowly deWned form of teaching and learning: there are no general laws that, carefully applied, can yield further insights into the nature of things.30 Responsa long remain a central feature of Roman law, surviving the emergence of written laws and the epistemic changes this phenomenon entails. Indeed, the detailed attention to the fact at hand is still paramount in the jurists who most actively work towards shaping a new form of legal knowledge. But the history of Roman law in the crucial half-century between approximately 110 and 60 bc can be seen in many ways as showing a gradual detachment from the traditional theory and practice of responsa and the emergence of a competing form of knowledge, keen on generalizing abstractions which seek uniformity of explanation behind apparently disparate phenomena. This evolution, which has aptly been labelled the ‘scientiWc revolution’ of Roman law,31 is, at least to our eyes, relatively sudden, but we are fortunate enough to be able to trace it with suYcient detail.32 Two scholars tower over all others: Quintus Mucius Scaevola, ‘the Pontifex’, and Servius Sulpicius Rufus. 29 Virgil, Geo. 1.1–5. 30 Schiesaro (1997). 31 Stein (1966) 26–48, Schiavone (1992), Frier (1985) 139–96, Crawford (2002). 32 We should nonetheless acknowledge, with Pomponius, that the origins of this process are rooted in an earlier phase of rapid acceleration and evolution of juridical thinking in the middle of the second century bc. According to Pomponius (Dig. 1.2.2.39), M. Manilius (cos. 149 bc), M. Iunius Brutus (pr. 142 bc), and P. Mucius Scaevola (cos. 133 bc, and father of Q. Mucius), fundauerunt ius ciuile : Frier (1985) 156–8. On the conXict between tradition and innovation in Roman law between the fourth and the second centuries bc see D’Ippolito (1986).

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Q. Mucius’ activity straddles the two centuries, since his birth is usually assigned to c.140 bc, and he died in 82 bc, a victim of the civil war. His main work, the eighteen books of civil law often regarded as the fundamental work of Roman jurisprudence, dates to the immediate background of Lucretius’ formative years. The importance of the libri iuris ciuilis is well captured by a later commentator, Pomponius, who in the second century ad pointedly sums up Q. Mucius’ approach in a few words: ius ciuile primus constituit generatim in libros decem et octo redigendo (Dig. 1.2.2.41). Q. Mucius, that is, is the Wrst to adopt a classiWcatory system based on diaeretics, or partitio, as the basis for his jurisprudence, and thus, most importantly, the Wrst to impress on Roman law a deWnite turn towards abstraction. Crassus’ speech at De oratore 1.186–91, where he presents his plan to organize ius into an ars,33 provides a very eloquent indication of the aims and trends of the increasing interest in abstraction as the foundation, in Rome, of a Hellenistic-style system of knowledge.34 Speaking in front of Q. Mucius himself in the Wctional debate Cicero dates to 91 bc, Crassus oVers an eloquent, almost lyrical praise of the virtues of a logical ordering of all aspects of knowledge (De orat. 1.187): omnia fere quae sunt conclusa nunc artibus, dispersa et dissipata quondam fuerunt; ut in musicis numeri et uoces et modi; in geometria liniamenta, formae, interualla, magnitudines; in astrologia caeli conuersio, ortus, obitus motusque siderum; in grammaticis poetarum pertractatio, historiarum cognitio, uerborum interpretatio, pronuntiandi quidam sonus; in hac denique ipsa ratione dicendi excogitare, ornare, disponere, meminisse, agere, ignota quondam omnibus et diVusa late uidebantur. Nearly all elements now forming the content of arts, were once without order or correlation: in music, for example, rhythms, sounds and measures; in geometry, lines, Wgures, dimensions and magnitudes; in astronomy, the revolution of the sky, the rising, setting and movement of heavenly bodies; in literature, the study of poets, the learning of histories, the explanation of

33 Cicero was the author of a monograph, De iure ciuili in artem redigendo, now lost (see Frier (1985) 170, with further references). 34 In general on the rationalizing impetus in this phase of Rome’s cultural history see esp. Moatti (1997) 217–53; on Cicero’s passage cf. Schiavone (1992) 38–9. Contra Watson (1974) 185–95, who doubts the impact of Greek thought on the development of Roman law in the last two centuries of the Republic, including the theory of genera (191–2).


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words and proper intonation in speaking them; and lastly in this very theory of oratory, invention, style, arrangement, memory and delivery, once seemed to all men things unknown and widely separate one from another.

Note that Crassus correlates the lack of systematicity with the limited diVusion of technical knowledge. Indeed, just a few lines earlier he had explicitly stated that ius is in itself easy to understand, but is considered a very diYcult subject in people’s minds mainly because ueteres illi, qui huic scientiae praefuerunt, optinendae atque augendae potentiae suae causa peruolgari artem suam noluerunt (De orat. 186), and also because, even after laws were Wnally revealed to the public, nulli fuerunt qui illa artiWciose digesta generatim componerent (186). Crassus’ project to order the whole of ius generatim (190) represents in a more comprehensive form what Q. Mucius had partially managed to achieve through his emphasis on categories or genera35 (in his work, as far as we can assess, logic and historical ordering, usus, coexist side by side). Note also, in Crassus’ exposition of the virtues of a logical ordering of phenomena according to genera, and, within them, to partes, each endowed with a clear deWnition, that is a breuis et circumscripta quaedam explicatio (189), a Lucretian-sounding element of pride and intellectual achievement mixed with sheer pleasure. The fruit of learning ius rationally and scientiWcally—as indeed the inner ratio of nature—is a mira . . . suauitas et delectatio (193).36 For our present purpose the most important aspect of Q. Mucius is his work on the law of contracts. In a passage of Pomponius’ commentary to Q. Mucius’ work, which is usually thought to preserve not just the contents but also the form of the original text, Q. Mucius puts forth a ‘symmetry principle’ of ground-breaking novelty, according to which ‘a contractual obligation is dissolved in the same manner it is contracted: re, litteris, consensu’37 (Dig. 46.3.80): In whichever way a contract be made, so it should also be resolved [prout quidque contractum est, ita et solui debet], so that if we contract by the delivery of a thing, it should be performed by the delivery of the thing. Thus, if we make a loan, the same amount of money should be repaid; and when we make a verbal contract, it can be discharged by delivery or by words – by words, if the promissor be given formal release, by delivery, if the 35 Frier (1985) 161–2. 36 Cf. DRN 3.28–9: diuina uoluptas j . . . atque horror. 37 Frier (1985) 162 and n.5, with further references.

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debtor give what he promised. Equally, if there be a sale and purchase or a letting [and hiring], since they can be entered into by bare agreement, they can also be dissolved by agreement to the contrary eVect.38

Q. Mucius’ contribution is twofold: Wrstly, he identiWes a general notion of contrahere39 which can be seen at work in a variety of practical instances; that is, ‘he Wnds a united conceptualization for a series of obligatory relationships which the actual development of the city’s legal practices . . . presented as distinct and faraway’.40 Secondly, he balances this general notion of contrahere with its opposite, soluere. This pair of concepts describes a norm of general import which paves the way for the creation of regulae iuris, general normative principles which ‘regulate in a unitary fashion, through a single concept, realities which may appear far from each other, and quite incomparable’.41 It is rewarding to observe the similarity between what we might call Q. Mucius’ general law of contracts and Lucretius’ formulation of the basic law of aggregation and disaggregation of compounds. In Lucretius’ world concilia result from the grouping together of atoms, and inevitably resolve back into their constituent components after more or less time. Nexus, a word to which we will return, is inevitably followed by discidium (1.220), since natura must eventually dissolve all atomic aggregates if the principle of nihil ex nihilo is to hold true forever. A second aspect of Q. Mucius’ work which is useful to mention in a Lucretian perspective, although I am not going to discuss it in detail here, is his original contribution to the notions of societas and consortium.42 In this Weld Q. Mucius innovates substantially on previous jurisprudence with an ingenious discussion of the relationship between pars and totum, and by positing the relevance to contract law of the concept of pars ‘pro indiuiso’, an ‘ideal part’, or notional portion of a whole, to which no physical object corresponds, as for instance in the case of shares (Dig. 50.16.25.1). With this

38 Translations of the Digest are taken from Watson (1985). 39 The use of contrahere (of which this may be the Wrst occurrence in a technical sense: Schiavone (1992) 57), is in itself more recent than the traditional agere, facere, or gerere. 40 Schiavone (1992) 54 (my translation). 41 Schiavone (1992) 58 (my translation). 42 Schiavone (1992) 63–8.


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discussion we can arguably compare Lucretius’ remarks at 1.599–614 about the existence of notional parts within an atom, which of course remains Wrmly indivisible in a material sense. Before I oVer some remarks about the relationship between the legal notions of coire, solui, pars ‘pro indiuiso’ and their possible Epicurean parallels, I would like to focus our attention, brieXy, on the other main representative of late Republican jurisprudence, Servius Sulpicius Rufus. Servius, who was consul in 51 bc, and died in 43 bc, was to Cicero’s eyes endowed with even more ars than his teacher Q. Mucius (Brut. 151). He may not have written all the 180 books of responsa that part of the tradition assigns to him, but it is certain that from approximately 75 bc to his death over thirty years later he was engaged in a systematic reworking of Roman jurisprudence. Cicero, a close friend, praises his litterarum scientia as well as his loquendi elegantia, subtilitas and diligentia (Brut. 153–4). Two letters which Servius addresses to him (Fam. 4.5 and 4.12) allow us a taste of his style and beliefs well beyond what we can generally do in the case of his fellow jurists, whose writings, invariably of a technical nature, are preserved, if at all, in much later excerpts.43 There are three aspects of Servius’ work which warrant a mention in this context. One of his opinions is preserved in the Digest, which relies in turn on the anthology of Servius’ responsa compiled by his pupil P. Alfenus Varus (Dig. 9.2.52.2):44 Some mules were pulling two loaded carts up the Capitoline. The front cart had tipped up, so the drivers were trying to lift the back to make it easier for the mules to pull it up the hill, but suddenly it started to roll backward. The muleteers, seeing that they would be caught between the two carts, leaped out of its path, and it rolled back and struck the rear cart, which careened down the hill and ran over someone’s slave-boy. The owner of the boy asked me whom he should sue. I replied that it all depended on the facts of the case [respondi in causa ius esse positum]. If the drivers who were holding up the front cart had got out of its way of their own accord and that had been the reason why the mules could not take the weight of the cart and had been pulled back by it, in my opinion no action could be brought against the owner of the mules. The boy’s owner should rather sue the men who had 43 On Servius’ philosophical background see Vernay (1909). 44 Schiavone (1992) 112–13, Bretone (2000) 203–9. On Servius’ responsa: Bretone (1984) 91–102, Frier (1985) 153–5.

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been holding up the cart; for the damage is no less wrongful when someone voluntarily lets go of something in such circumstances and it hits someone else. For example [ueluti si quis], if a man failed to restrain an ass that he was driving, he would be liable for any damage that he caused, just as if he threw a missile or anything else from his hand.

ThisfamouspassageembodiesServius’mostexplicitmethodological principle: ius in causa esse positum. To paraphrase, ‘the legal solution depends on the actual details of the case at hand’. Indeed, Servius’ reasoning and writing are characterized throughout by a close attention to detail, and an enviable ability to bring to life the speciWc case coupled with logical rigour.45 Note also his recourse to analogy, introduced by ueluti si quis ( . . . cum agitasset): events, captured in their immediacy, are the best guide to the underlying truth of ius, which, once revealed, nevertheless acquires a general validity. Equally important is a second aspect of Servius’ activity; he forges ahead towards an increased level of abstraction, following the path inaugurated by his teacher Q. Mucius. His, for instance, is the introduction of contractus as a noun, an additional step forward from contrahere as far as the underlying degree of abstraction is concerned.46 In aiming at abstraction Servius emphasizes how ius is possessed of a persistent internal ratio, and can be gleaned beyond the varieties of verba used to express it and the variable circumstances of individual cases. It is probably in this light that we should read Servius’ statement in one of his letters to Cicero (Fam. 4.12) that casus et natura in nobis dominatur, a conWrmation that random yet compelling laws are at work in the world. A striking incarnation of these principles and aspirations is to be found in a well-known passage in which Servius appears tantalizingly close to Lucretian doctrine (Dig. 5.1.76): The case was put that several of the judges appointed for the same trial had been excused after the case had had a hearing, and others had been put in their place. The question was whether the replacement of individual judges had resulted in the same case or a diVerent court. I replied that not merely if one or two, but even if all had been changed, the case and the court both still remained the same as they had been before. And this was not the only example of a thing being considered the same after its parts had been 45 Bretone (1984) 92, with further bibliography.

46 Schiavone (1992) 129.


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changed, but there were many others too [neque in hoc solum euenire, ut partibus commutatis eadem res esse existimaretur, sed et in multis ceteris rebus]. For a legion too was held to be the same although many of its members had been killed and others had been put in their place. A people too was thought to be the same at the present time as it had been a hundred years ago, although no one was now alive from that period. Likewise, if a ship had been repaired so often that no plank remained the same as the old had been, it was nevertheless considered to be the same ship. For if anyone thought that a thing became diVerent when one of its parts were changed, it would follow from this reasoning that we ourselves would not be the same as we were a year ago, because, as the philosophers said, the extremely tiny particles of which we were made up daily left our bodies and others came from outside to take their place. Therefore, a thing whose appearance remained the same was considered also to be the same thing [quod si quis putaret partibus commutatis aliam rem Weri, fore ut ex eius ratione nos ipsi non idem essemus qui abhinc anno fuissemus, propterea quod, ut philosophi dicerent, ex quibus particulis minimis consisteremus, hae cottidie ex nostro corpore decederent aliaeque extrinsecus in earum locum accederent, quapropter cuius rei species eadem consisteret, rem quoque eandem esse existimari].

In spite of some earlier suspicions, it is now agreed that what we read in Alfenus’ Digesta is more or less verbatim Servius’ own responsum.47 The overall argumentative structure, to begin with, is worth comparing with Lucretian arguments where similar combinations of analogy and reductio ad absurdum play a pivotal role. But the most interesting point of comparison is of course to be found in Servius’ direct reference to materialistic philosophy as a means to underline the abstract principles which sustain his reasoning. This passage testiWes not only to Servius’ philosophical interests, but, more importantly, to the interest Roman legal thought and philosophy share in the conceptualization of the notions of change and permanence in the context of a materialistic view of the world which emphasizes the eternal Xux of the matter in a limitless universe.48

47 Schiavone (1992) 132–3, Bretone (1998) 78. It should be noted, however, that P. Alfenus Varus was himself a pupil of the Epicurean teacher Siro, according to Servius on Virgil, Ecl. 6.13 and the Scholia Veronensia on Virgil, Ecl. 7.9. 48 The philosophical background of the responsum is disputed (see Horak (1969) 232 n. 24). Both Horak and Watson (1974) 190 doubt a speciWcally Epicurean inXuence.

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Behind Servius’ passage we can also discern the jurist’s interest in moving towards an abstract notion of res, a process which engages Roman jurisprudence for decades,49 and one with which Lucretius deals at length in 1.265–328, where he points out that visibility should not be considered a characteristic of bodies.50 At this stage in my investigation I should pause and, in truly Lucretian fashion, answer some potential questions. The Wrst and foremost is of course what type of relationship I propose to posit between the juridical discourse of which I have so far oVered some sketchy images and Lucretius’ own didactic project. I have argued elsewhere that Lucretius’ relationship with juridical oratory is not limited to the episodic sharing of formulas or other stylistic traits,51 but involves structural and argumentative features of a general import, for which parallels can be found especially in Cicero’s speeches. Several important aspects of Lucretius’ manner of argumentation would have struck Roman readers as distinctly familiar: it was the same manner of arguing and explaining they had been taught and saw practised in the forum. What juridical oratory had to oVer was a rich and Xexible repertoire of argumentative structures and formulas, which was thoroughly absent in the scant models of didactic poetry previously attempted in Latin, and in its extent and strength was probably unparalleled in Greek didactic poetry as well (Empedocles stands out as an exception). This fundamental feature of the De rerum natura was admirably summed up in a sharp remark by Goethe, who dubbed Lucretius ‘ein dichterischer Redner’, ‘a poetic orator’.52 Indeed. But behind juridical oratory there is, or at least there should be unless we are dealing with school exercises, ius ciuile itself, and I would now want to argue further, therefore, not only that Lucretius shares with juridical oratory the structure and many forms of his argumentation, but also that his exposition in Latin of Epicurus’ philosophy is partially predicated on contemporary advances in Roman legal thought, and as a consequence all the more readily 49 This issue is at the core of Bretone (1998). 50 A similar concern emerges in Philodemus’ On Signs (ch. 52), which also insists on the importance of understanding the nature of bodies per se, irrespective of mutable variations: cf. Schiesaro (1990) 34. 51 Schiesaro (1987). 52 Cf. Schmid (1946) 210.


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intelligible to a Roman non-philosophical audience. This does not amount to saying, of course, that Lucretius would not have been understood if Q. Mucius and Servius Sulpicius had not been writing just before and alongside him. But I would certainly want to argue that the Epicurean message he tries to get across would have been considerably more arduous for a Roman non-technical audience not yet familiar with phenomena such as a marked increase in the level of abstraction in juridical thought; the possibility of grouping disparate phenomena into a small number of genera; the belaboured emergence of the notion of res incorporalis; the growing awareness that a hidden ratio can be gleaned amid the confusing array of apparently diverse phenomena; the use of analogy to bridge the gap between phenomena and lead to a higher level of abstraction; the conWdence that a few, overarching principles of ius such as contrahere and soluere can oVer what we would now call general laws of societal bonds. As Lucretius distinctly shows, in his conceptual categories, an awareness of the process of evolution and abstraction that Roman juridical thought had been undergoing in recent times, it is also worth considering, if brieXy, whether a reverse process of inXuence can also be postulated. An exhaustive investigation of this issue would exceed the scope of this paper, and Wrm evidence may in any event be hard to pin down. There is no doubt, for instance, that Servius Sulpicius’ opinion at Dig. 5.1.76 deals in atomistic terminology, but it would be awkward to posit a direct dependence from a speciWc Epicurean source: similar problems may well arise in similar cases. At a more general level, however, it is worth pointing out that Lucretius’ poem must stand as the Wrst and foremost example of the extension of juridical concepts to the explanation and interpretation of the entire physical reality. We have so far focused on general conceptual categories which De rerum natura appears to be shaping in a dialogue with important aspects of contemporary legal thought; the next section will deal more speciWcally with the ‘laws of nature’, that is, the construction of a legal model for the universe. In both ways, then, Lucretius implicitly but eVectively shows that legal thought can aspire to explain and regulate more than human transactions, but can project its force onto the universe and provide a form of understanding for the whole cosmos.

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Alessandro Schiesaro A L EGAL M O DEL FO R TH E UNI V ERS E

I have deliberately refrained from arguing the relationship between Lucretius and juridical thought on the basis of shared linguistic usage. Use of legal expressions, even if appropriate and perhaps sophisticated, rarely says much about the structural relationship between a poetic work and the conceptual world of the law. Even a substantial presence of legal terminology in a Roman poet points to little more than his training in eloquence, as, for instance, in the case of Ovid.53 Thus even technically proWcient lines such as DRN 3.971, uitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu, are in and of themselves an aspect of langue, as it were, much as the contrast between mancipium and usus is eVective and to the point. What sets Lucretius apart from other Roman poets, and at the same time from his philosophic predecessors, is that metaphors drawn from the domain of the law and social institutions dominate his overall conception of the atomistic universe.54 Precedents for this phenomenon can be found, to be sure, in the Presocratics, who, for instance, indicate with isonomia the correct balance between diVerent elements.55 Empedocles uses words such as (‘assembly’) and ıæ ÆØ (‘to meet’) to describe the ‘coming together’ of the roots, as if in an assembly, under the inXuence of love, and so do, in diVerent contexts, Leucippus and Democritus, followed by Epicurus and Diogenes of Oinoanda.56 In the De rerum natura Lucretius describes and explains a universe organized according to principles and rules which are deWned with reference to speciWcally Roman practices: his universe is knit together

53 Kenney (1969). 54 In general see Cabisius (1985), a valuable article. I am not sure, however, that I can agree with Cabisius’s view of the connection between nature and atomic compounds as comparable to the one between Rome and her foederatae ciuitates. 55 Vlastos (1947). 56 : Empedocles B17.4, Leucippus A24.9, Democritus A49, Epicurus, Ep. Pyth. 108.5; ıæ ÆØ: Empedocles B17.7, Diogenes fr. 67.II.14 Smith. The speciWcally political connotations of concilium, however, are arguably stronger than those of . Important research in this area has been carried out by Garani (2005).


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on the basis of nexus, foedera, and leges. It would be wrong57 to strip nexus of the metaphoric legal meaning which it normally has at this time, and to see it used in a purely physical sense. Concilium,58 too, must retain its legal meaning (in Ciceronian times it always refers to deliberative assemblies), not the material one which the Thesaurus decides to assign to it.59 The Thesaurus’ uneasiness cannot simply be put down to what has been called, in Housmanian mode, its ‘perversity’,60 but does point to a problem of substance. Metaphors inevitably carry associations and implications, and the non-material use of words such as nexus or concilium could in fact import into the mechanistic world of Epicurean philosophy some potentially disturbing connotation of intentionality. If atoms can have no feelings and no intentions (they are not sentient entities), in what sense, then, can they enter into legally binding nexus or foedera, or contrarywise separate because of discidia? Also, is it possible to talk about the operation of laws in the workings of nature without necessarily positing the existence of a provident lawgiver responsible for their creation? The real question, then, is the meaning and signiWcance of the ‘laws of nature’ to which Lucretius repeatedly refers. The use of lex in De rerum natura is in several instances unproblematic, because it means little more than ‘the usual norm’. Thus, when in 3.687 we read that the soul is not ‘free from the law of death’ (leti lege soluta), but material and mortal, we assume that Lucretius is simply referring to the commonly perceptible truth that all material things come to an end as if obeying a ‘law’ of sorts, not quite the relationship between phenomena formalized in mathematical functions which we are now accustomed to calling ‘laws of nature’. Lucretius’ foedera naturae also appear to possess a strong empiricist foundation.61 Lucretius, who takes over from Aristotle a Wrm belief in the Wxity of species even as he rejects his consequent belief in

57 As Davies (1931–2) 36 usefully remarks. 58 On concilium and its connotations see Fowler (2002a), 185. 59 ThLL IV.45.39–41. The material use is found in Ovid and later authors. 60 Davies (1931–2). 61 Long (1977). Droz-Vincent (1996) rightly insists on the contractual nature of foedera.

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the eternity of the world,62 argues in Book 5 that fanciful mythical creatures such as the centaur could never have existed, because young and inexperienced as the earth was in the Wrst stages of creation, it could never have tolerated the existence of animals made up of diVerent genera of atoms. The importance of this belief is obvious if we think that the notion of reproduction generatim, that is, genus by genus, Wnds its way even into the proem to the whole work.63 How does this Wxity arise? In Epicurean terms, Lucretius seems to posit that the atomic structure of any given animal is such that the seed it produces will only assimilate those atoms which are compatible with the parent animal’s own. As Giussani rightly remarks,64 this rule must have applied even as the Wrst living creatures were produced, not by other living creatures but by the earth itself. What Giussani calls ‘the absolute power of the law’65 holds Wrm from the very beginning (DRN 5.677–9): namque ubi sic fuerunt causarum exordia prima atque ita res mundi cecidere ab origine prima, conseque¨ quoque iam redeunt ex ordine certo. For since the Wrst beginnings of causes have been so, and since things have thus befallen from the Wrst beginning of the world, with regular sequence also they now come back in Wxed order.

From this ‘absolute power of the law’ stems the certus ordo which still is, and always will remain, the deWning feature of the Epicurean universe. Lucretius, in the footsteps of his master, seems to be able both to achieve a very reliable notion of ‘law’, and yet to preserve, as he must, the strict indeterminacy and contingency of a mechanistic universe. ‘Laws of nature’ are the projection over the extent of time of the prevailing forms of association among compatible atoms that emerged at the very beginning of the world and that natural reproduction has inherited.66 As Lucretius states in 2.707–10, there exists a 62 Reich (1958) 124; Long (1977) 82 n. 40. 63 DRN 1.20 eYcis [sc. Venus] ut cupide generatim saecla propagent. SigniWcantly, the adverb appears for the Wrst time in prose with Cicero and Varro, in poetry with Lucretius. 64 Giussani (1896–8) 4.169–72. 65 Giussani (1896–8) 4.172. 66 Long (1977) 85.


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certa ratio which prevents the appearance, now as in the remotest past, of creatures such as the chimaera: quorum nil Weri manifestum est, omnia quando seminibus certis certa genetrice creata conseruare genus crescentia posse uidemus. scilicet id certa Weri ratione necessust.67 But that none of these things happen is manifest, since we see that all things bred from Wxed seeds by a Wxed mother are able to conserve from their kind as they grow. Assuredly this must come about in a Wxed way.

Clearly, the potential confusion between a material and an abstract sense of foedera (naturae) or nexus is not simply due to the Thesaurus’ ‘obtuseness’. What we now perceive as abstract principles of aggregation stem in fact from the combinatory possibilities which atomic compounds established at the outset. ‘Laws’ are yet another way in which we can describe, in Epicurean terms, the nonteleological order which governs the workings of nature. A few lines after this passage Lucretius comes closest to establishing the equivalence between lex and ratio (DRN 2.718–19): sed ne forte putes animalia sola teneri legibus hisce, eadem ratio res terminat omnis. But do not think that animals only are held by these laws, for the same principle holds all things apart by their limits.

This view of ‘natural laws’ is, metaphorically speaking, heavily historicist. These ‘laws’ do not exist outside and above the physicality of atoms, just as the soul does not exist on its own, but originates from the combination of speciWc atoms, each with its own properties. As the soul is not eternal and certainly not divine, these laws are equally not the gift of a provident lawgiver, nor do they obey a teleological project of any kind. ‘Natural laws’—foedera—crystallize post factum the workings of nature, and embody a ‘deeply Wxed’ (1.77 alte . . . haerens) terminus for each creature, a limitation of possibilities which prevents complete anarchy in the physical world.68 In Book 5, as he outlines the origin of laws in the human world, Lucretius depicts a 67 Long (1977) 83. See also G. Campbell’s paper in this volume. 68 Garani (forthcoming) fruitfully compares Lucretian foedera with Empedoclean ‘oaths’.

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diVerent scenario. At lines 5.1141–7 he explains how the excessive violence of primitive men made life extremely diYcult, and laws were recommended by some of them (1143 partim) as a remedy to this state of social anarchy: res itaque at summam faecem turbasque redibat, imperium sibi cum ac summatum quisque petebat. inde magistratum partim docuere creare iuraque constituere, ut uellent legibus uti. nam genus humanum, defessum ui colere aeuum, ex inimicitiis languebat; quo magis ipsum sponte sua cecidit sub leges artaque iura. So things came to the uttermost dregs of confusion, when each man for himself sought dominion and exaltation. Then there were some who taught them to create magistrates, and established law, that they might be willing to obey statutes. For mankind, tired of living in violence, was fainting from its feuds, and so they were readier of their own will to submit to statutes and strict rules of law.

Following a genuinely Epicurean evaluation of pros and cons (total freedom on the one hand, more limited risks on the other) men sponte sua fell under leges artaque iura (1147), and lived ever after under the shadow of guilt and punishment (1151 metus maculat poenarum praemia uitae). In the human world, therefore, historical laws emerge as an afterthought, as the somewhat random (and thus coherently Epicurean) product of speciWc social conditions. They do not enjoy the natural immediacy of foedera naturae. They represent external limits imposed by human beings on other human beings, and, helpful as they are, they also overshadow the potentially pleasurable freedom of a lawless society fully converted to Epicureanism.69 We should note, however, that well before these historical laws primitive men had already developed, with no prompting from any lawgiver, a basic social foedus which consisted in nec laedere nec uiolari (5.1020), and which clearly recommends itself as an essential form of protection, especially for women and children, within the very Wrst communities (5.1011–27). This ‘social contract’ displays the same natural immediacy of Epicurean ‘laws of nature’. 69 Fowler (1989b) 141–5.


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The analogy between foedera naturae and the vision of ius which we have reconstructed through Q. Mucius and especially Servius is potentially signiWcant. Ius ciuile, much as it can appear as a systematic and abstract account, is in fact nothing but the sedimentation of actual practices and obligations that run through the history of Roman society, and in which a iurisperitus can discern a ratio. Rules of law do not exist above and beyond social practices,70 just as foedera are in fact ‘preferred syncrises’71 of atoms which have acquired inXexible validity. Even in the face of a relentless rationalization and a fearless power of abstraction, Lucretius, and Epicureanism for that matter, never renounce their basic empiricist instincts. The task of the Epicurean poet is to uncover and announce the hidden ratio of phenomena: but the ratio is already there, and will always be. The structure of the poem, and, as Don Fowler has shown in one of his most engaging articles on the De rerum natura, even the structure and arrangement of individual lines or sentences, strive to mirror that ratio.72 Concepts such as the aggregation of atoms, their getting together into larger concilia, their coming to an end only to begin again: all these basic aspects of the Epicurean world order Wnd compelling parallels in the poem itself.73 I have so far avoided an explicit discussion of the possible political implications of my argument. It is tempting to consider the notion of individual atoms developing their own rules of association without any external ordering force, of a Natura libera . . . dominis . . . superbis (2.1091), as ‘republican’74 if not outright libertarian, but we should be mindful that epistemic models, philosophical aYliation, and

70 Bretone (1984) 97: ‘La formula, in cui una disciplina giuridica si e` riassunta o conglutinata, e` come inserita in un movimento circolare, che dopo averla ricavata dalla prassi ve la riporta e ne sperimenta la validita`.’ 71 This is eVectively the position stated by Reich (1958), who translates foedera as ‘Bu¨ndnis’ (‘bond’), as opposed to ‘Gesetz’ (‘law’). Reich’s explanation is only partially accepted by Long (1977) 81, according to whom the term foedera incorporates both a physical and an abstract meaning. 72 Fowler (1995). 73 Schiesaro (1994). 74 Momigliano (1941; repr. 1960) 387: ‘Book V of De rerum natura has faith not only in the deus ille, but in mankind. We must agree . . . that the idea of human progress is not to be found there logically, but is there as an aspiration. A Republic is an advanced stage of this progress.’ Cf. Canfora (1993) 96–8; Fowler (1995) passim.

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party politics do not overlap tidily in the turbulent mid-Wrst century bc.75 Lucretius is ready to agree that a utilitarian social compact shields men from violence and fear, and enables each individual to pursue what really matters (individual happiness), but the same utilitarian calculation recommends monarchy as an alternative to democracy, a complicated system which theoretically requires the active involvement of every citizen, and inevitably precipitates a generalized search for honours and electoral success. Then again, even if the De rerum natura is not quite the liberating gospel Farrington saluted, it is nonetheless a philosophy of empowerment conveyed in suitably empowering terms. The overall legibility of the universe made possible by the distinct intelligibility of natural laws endows Lucretius’ readers with a lasting and rewarding legacy: freedom from religious superstition, fear, and enslavement to hidden and mysterious powers. In this respect Lucretius is clearly aligning himself with the eVorts, dating back to the second century bc, to distinguish sharply between ‘sacral’ and ‘lay’ knowledge (especially in the legal Weld)76 and to promote rational understanding as an antidote to the traditional opacity of events and the unbridgeable diVerence in power which this opacity provoked and crystallized. The forms of demonstration Lucretius uses can to a signiWcant extent be paralleled with contemporary juridical usage, and they are crucial to his liberating programme. Analogy, for instance, does not just make distant and hidden phenomena understandable; it also ensures peace of mind because, as an open-ended method, it guarantees the comparability of new, unknown phenomena to others we have already grasped. Analogy was a method charged with explicit political sensitivities, as we can glean from the few tantalizing fragments of Caesar’s tract On Analogy, probably composed in 54 bc, and dealing with analogy as a grammatical concept.77 What we can safely 75 If ‘many of the most authoritative Epicureans were supporting Caesar in 45’, their attitude changed after his assassination, and ‘[e]nthusiasm for the Republic was in 44 bc widespread enough to inXuence also those Epicureans whose devotion to Caesar’s memory was stronger’ (Momigliano (1941; repr. 1960) 380, 382). 76 Stein (1966) 26–8. 77 See now Sinclair (1994). On analogy in grammar and law in the early Principate see Stein (1969); on the relationship between grammar and law in Labeo see Bretone (2000) 165.


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ascertain from the handful of lines handed down to us is that Caesar deWnes a contrast between analogy and predictability on the one hand, and uniqueness and anomaly on the other, perhaps as a reaction to Cicero’s claim, in De oratore, that consuetudo was the correct guide to speaking Latin.78 Anomaly based on consuetudo is exclusivist, because there are no rules to guarantee that similar words under similar circumstances will behave in the same way. One must know the speciWc correct usage, as of course do the urbani who, according to Cicero, already instinctively know what Latinitas and elegantia require without any need for further explanation (De or. 3.38–9, 150–51). Analogy, on the contrary, is predicated on the universal validity of Wxed rules, and thus makes it possible to face new words and new formations without undue worries. As far as language is concerned, this opposition is particularly important as it draws a line between insiders and outsiders, native Latin speakers steeped in the detailed knowledge of the language with its more idiosyncratic forms, and the provincials for whom Latin was an acquired habit and who could easily fall into mistakes. This contrast between insiders and outsiders is exactly the same as it applies to philosophical knowledge: if Lucretius is right, one need not be a pontifex maximus to understand the workings of nature and the role of gods. As I mentioned before we owe to Don Fowler a peculiarly lucid and brilliant article about some of the issues I have dealt with in this paper. Written in 1994, and published in the Russell Festschrift a year later, ‘From Epos to Cosmos: Lucretius, Ovid, and the Poetics of Segmentation’79 represents Don at his very best. There one Wnds together the keen scholar of Epicurean philosophy and the canny reader of poetry; provocative theory alongside technical prowess; an original and deep awareness of the historical dimension of literature. One also Wnds, as in several other works by Don, a clear understanding of the connection between the man, with his feelings and beliefs, and the scholar with his expertise and his mission. The tension between order and disorder, complexity and intelligibility, which he compellingly reconstructs in De rerum

78 Sinclair (1994) 93–4.

79 Fowler (1995).

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natura, clearly emerges also as a moral, personal issue, just as the ‘liberal individualism’ of Lucretius’ atoms is seen as a recipe for life in our society. Don planned to continue his work on this area in an article which he proposed to title ‘Lucretius’ Republican Poem’, which we will never read, but to which this paper is, if nothing else, a heartfelt tribute.

5 Making an Exemplum of Yourself: Cicero and Augustus Miche`le Lowrie

‘Exempla do not stop where they have begun, but in however small a path they have been received, make for themselves a way of wandering oV very far.’ So far, except for the metaphor, we could easily take this pronouncement as one of Don Fowler’s many warnings in a postmodern vein that we cannot control the process of creating meaning: things have a way of wandering oV on their own.1 The rest of the statement, however, runs in a moralizing vein that sounds less modern and less like Fowler: ‘and once one has wandered from the right way, it goes headlong, and no-one thinks foul for himself what was fruitful for another’. This is Velleius Paterculus on the example of Tiberius Gracchus, which he, and many modern historians, identify as the point where the Republic begins to go headlong (2.3.4): non enim ibi consistunt exempla, unde coeperunt, sed quamlibet in tenuem recepta tramitem latissime euagandi sibi uiam faciunt, et ubi semel recto This paper has beneWted greatly from the responses of audiences at the conference in memory of Don Fowler, at the University of Michigan, and at the Institute for Advanced Study. Thanks also to Paul Keyser, Christina Kraus, Phillip Mitsis, and Michael Peachin. 1 Gelley’s title, Unruly Examples (1995), also suggests the wilful independence of the Wgure. The volume is largely concerned with the philosophical status of the relation of the particular instance to the copiable model, especially in Kant’s aesthetic theory. Discussion with Charles Hedrick has made me realize the extent to which Velleius’ comment participates in a Roman tendency to link exemplarity to narratives of decline.

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deerratum est, in praeceps peruenitur, nec quisquam sibi putat turpe, quod alii fuit fructuosum.2

This paper looks at two points in this precipitous spiral where attempts were made to control exemplarity, and particularly to turn the person trying to do the controlling into an exemplum himself. The people are Cicero and Augustus. Certainly, the failure of Cicero to meet the example he sets himself, and the tendency of the examples he uses to turn against him show that he could control neither the examples he uses, nor his own exemplarity.3 Maybe Cicero cannot control his own example, but does Augustus’ political power make a diVerence in his degree of control? Ultimately, no, and I believe Velleius is right, but locally power certainly makes a diVerence. I here examine how the attempt to exercise control is made and the terms of its relative degree of success or failure. The question of whether you can turn yourself—successfully at any rate—into an example and exert control over this Wgure is related to the extent to which you can inXuence history, its representation, and its reception. The exemplum and its sister Wgure, the exception, are two Wgures around which historical action revolves.4 Either can be good or bad. You can follow precedent, and keep history moving in the same direction as before; you can act counter to the rules, and establish a new reality—these are simplifying extremes. Exceptional actions in fact become exemplary, hence imitable, so that history may incorporate radical change while following precedent.5 Of course you

2 Sallust’s Caesar oVers a parallel for both moralizing and the inability to control: omnia mala exempla ex rebus bonis orta sunt (Cat. 51.27), see Chaplin (2000) 27. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 1.46, applies Sallust’s dictum with approval to the collapse of republics. Goldhill (1994) explores in a theoretical vein the dissemination of exempla according to their contexts and frames, narrativity, and intertextuality. Velleius anticipates his argument about recontextualization. 3 This paper looks mostly at the rhetoric internal to self-exemplarity. For an analysis of the reception of Cicero as an exemplum in the 1st c. ad rhetorical schools, see Kaster (1998). Augustus is used extensively as an example in Seneca’s De clementia. 4 Agamben (1998) 21–2 analyses the similar logical structures of the exception and the example. Rambaud (1953) 39 notes the frequent use of the exemplum in justifying exceptional behaviour, especially punishments, honours, and special powers. 5 Kraus in Kraus and Woodman (1997) 56: ‘History does repeat itself; but understanding history, in Livy, means being willing to change.’ Miles (1995) ch. 3 analyses how appeals to exempla and the auctoritas maiorum in Livy establish a dynamic

Making an Exemplum of Yourself

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can also lie and claim to follow precedent while innovating. The establishment of the Augustan Principate is the extreme form of both adherence to exempla and the making of exceptions. In history, action can be exemplary, so that others may turn you into an exemplum (Livy on Romulus, say), but what Cicero and Augustus share is that each leaves behind a textual record in which he makes of himself an example. The historical actor and the historian meet in the domain of culture, where political and textual acts make equal though qualitatively diVerent contributions. I focus on three areas where the relationship of text and reality takes diVerent shapes. The Wrst two have to do with Cicero, the third with Augustus. Cicero himself served in many instances as both a positive and a negative example for Augustus.6 A fuller treatment would have to take into account Caesar, their intermediary. A comparison of the great Republican and the Wrst citizen of the Empire will reveal fundamental diVerences in the two men’s handling of their selfexemplarity. These depend on issues of style, but also have to do with their positions in history, and most especially in their diVering degrees of power.

LIFE IMITAT ES ART I MITATES LIFE Cicero’s First Catilinarian opens with a barrage of examples aiming to prove that Catiline should already have been led to death: Tiberius Gracchus, Spurius Maelius, Gaius Gracchus and Marcus Fulvius, Lucius Saturninus and Gaius Servilius (Cat. 1.2–4). This seems exemplary overkill—pun intended—except that the legal justiWcation for the argument about putting citizens to death without trial was tenuous, even with the backing of the senatus consultum ultimum.7 concept of history, and relates this to the contemporary context, particularly of Augustus as a refounder of the Roman state. 6 Many parallels can be found in Weinstock (1971) passim; Galinsky (1996) 73–4 denies that Cicero was a ‘role model’ for Augustus, but then shows substantial points of contact; for Horace’s covert exploration of parallels between the two, see Lowrie (2002). 7 For the tendency to pile up examples, and even suggest there is more, see Rambaud (1953) 48–9. Christina Kraus calls my attention to a list of similar examples

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Without going into the legal diYculties of the senatus consultum ultimum,8 let us examine these examples’ similarity. They follow the same story pattern: in a state of emergency, the good guys kill without trial, with varying degrees of state authorization, the bad guys, who are accused of disrupting the state. I say ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’ not out of commitment to either side, though Cicero had such commitments; rather, these are rhetorical slots that imply side-taking, and are consequently amenable to reversal. I also want to use terms as open as possible: ‘conspirator’ works for Cicero’s assessment of Catiline, but not for the Gracchi. If Catiline, according to Cicero, belongs in the ‘bad guy’ slot, Cicero as consul by implication Wlls the ‘good guy’ slot, except that the senate has not yet authorized him to put the ‘bad guys’ to death. When the Catilinarians, though not Catiline himself, are killed, they fulWl the story pattern. Although Cicero is able to make the Catilinarian narrative Wt that of the examples he adduces, he loses control of his examples in various ways in the aftermath of his consulship. The author of the pseudo-Aristotelian Rhetoric to Alexander remarks: ‘For most things are like each other in some respect and unlike in others. So that for this reason we will both have an abundance of exempla, and will refute those spoken by others without diYculty’ (8.14 ¼ 1430a 8–11). Cicero certainly had an abundance, but his beˆte noire, Clodius, had no diYculty refuting them, when he moved as tribune in 58 bc that anyone who had executed citizens without trial should be banished, and Cicero duly went into exile. The legitimacy of Clodius’ recontextualization is questionable, but his strategy has two aspects that will show how to turn an opponent’s exemplum around. One strategy is to maintain the exemplary structure, but switch the contents of the slots. This can be done through symbolic action as well as discursively. Clodius treated Cicero like Sp. Maelius: after Maelius was killed, his house was torn down and the area became a public open space called the Aequimaelium; while Cicero was in at Livy 6.17.1–2, including Sp. Maelius, as comparanda to Manlius, whose speech, she suggests, colours the plebs’ anonymous talk about him (Kraus (1994) ad loc.). Although the exempla appear positive, they backWre and ‘indirectly presage his death’. A further parallel to Cicero is Manlius’ self-exemplary rhetoric. 8 For which see Mitchell (1971), Lintott (1999), 89–93.


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exile, Clodius had Cicero’s own house torn down and a shrine to Libertas consecrated on part of the site. Cicero himself is the source for the parallel in his oration on his house. After mentioning Maelius, among others who underwent this punishment, he asks this question (Dom. 101): quam igitur maiores nostri sceleratis ac nefariis ciuibus maximam poenam constitui posse arbitrati sunt, eandem ego subibo ac sustinebo, ut apud posteros nostros non exstinctor coniurationis et sceleris sed auctor et dux fuisse uidear? Therefore will I undergo and put up with the same punishment as our ancestors thought could be imposed on accursed and criminal citizens, so that among posterity I will seem to have been not the extinguisher of the conspiracy and the crime, but their author and leader?

He expresses outrage that Clodius has manipulated him from the ‘good guy’ slot to the ‘bad guy’ slot: from being an Ahala, he has become a Maelius. Cicero, of course, reverses Clodius’ reversal in the same speech by realigning himself with C. Servilius Ahala.9 Just as Ahala, again among others, was recalled from exile, so was Cicero himself.10 Clodius’ other strategy exploits the availability of cultural conventions. Clodius accused Cicero of something latent in his own examples against Catiline. Cicero’s examples in the First Catilinarian all share something Cicero himself does not bring out: each was accused of regnum, with varying degrees of formality, contemporaneity, and plausibility.11 Cicero lets this similarity go to downplay the previous ‘bad guys’ threat to the state and to amplify the atrocity of Catiline’s behaviour, as he could not accuse him of regnum. By contrast, 9 Ahala mentioned with others: cum in exsilium profugissent . . . sunt in suam pristinam dignitatem restituti (Dom. 86). 10 There are further ironies of reversal in the stories about Cicero’s life and death. Valerius Maximus remarks that Gaius Popillius Laenas, who cut oV the ‘head of Roman eloquence’ (caput Romanae eloquentiae)—that is, Cicero’s—was carrying the head (caput) which had spoken on behalf of his own head (pro capite eius). See Richlin (1999) 194–5. 11 Maelius: de regno agitare (Livy 4.13.4); Ti. Gracchus: ‰ ºº Ø ÆØº Ø (on the grounds that he was going to become king) (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 14.2–3); C. Gracchus, with the support of M. Fulvius: ŒÆ Æº Ø f ıæı (to put down the tyrants) (Plut. C. Gracch. 14.3), also Velleius 2.6.2; Saturninus, with the support of C. Servilius Glaucia: in eo tumultu regem ex satellitibus suis se appellatum laetus accepit, Florus Epit. 2.4 (3.16).

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Tiberius Gracchus in Cicero’s words only ‘moderately made slip the state of the republic’ (Ti. Gracchum mediocriter labefactantem statum rei publicae, Cat. 1.3); Sp. Maelius, dismissed as mythic in a praeteritio, was intent on revolution (nouis rebus, 1.3); C. Gracchus was killed on ‘certain suspicions of sedition’ (quasdam seditionum suspiciones, 1.4), and this charge seems to extend to Saturninus. In the post-Ciceronian tradition, these Wgures were assimilated to one another through the charge of aspiring to rule (n. 11), and Cicero himself refers to Sp. Maelius as seeking regnum in the speech on his house (Sp. Maeli regnum adpetentis, 101). A year after Cicero’s consulship, Clodius drew out this commonality, turned it around, and threw it in Cicero’s face: ‘quousque’ inquit ‘hunc regem feremus?’ (Cic. Att. 1.16.10). He is of course citing the beginning of the First Catilinarian with quousque and the idea of toleration coming to its limit (quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?, Cat. 1.1). In addition to the Wrst strategy of reversing his opponent’s exempla and using allusion to heighten the eVect, Clodius further takes advantage of these examples’ openness to interpretation. Clodius draws out the accusation of regnum Cicero left implicit. It may be obvious that another person, particularly a political opponent, may reverse or transform our examples so that they acquire new meaning. Here we are dealing with the relation between action and discourse, between the world and its representations. Others may use our discourse to represent the world diVerently from the way we would.12 But maybe one can control examples within the closed world of literary texts—if we can pretend for a moment the world of literary texts is closed.

C I C E RO : T H E I D E A L O R ATOR ? gayatri spivak: De Man said that when a window is an example it’s not a window. stephen schiffer: Can’t it be both? 12 e.g. Galinsky (1996) 52 on the ability of political slogans to be applied in totally contradictory fashions.


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spivak: He said no. schiffer: But wouldn’t it be a better example of a window if it actually was a window? (Conversation reported to me by Ned Block)13 Exemplum derives from eximo: Ernout and Meillet say that an exemplum is ‘properly the object distinguished from others and set aside to serve as a model’. This ‘setting aside’ is at issue in the dialogue between Spivak, who has Wrm deconstructive roots, and SchiVer, a philosopher of mind. Can something ‘set aside’ actually be what it exempliWes? Samples of windows in display rooms do not actually separate inside from outside or open out onto anything—important functions even of interior windows. Conversely, how could an example exemplify anything without actually being it? The sample window could take on a window’s functions by being installed. In situ, however, it would cease being a sample. You could object that it is citation that takes the sample out of operation, but if you are showing how a window works to a person who does not know, the context of demonstration means that if you open it you have a diVerent purpose from that of opening it to let air in. Context either activates or deactivates the object or word’s functioning ‘properly’. Furthermore, exempla by deWnition occur in contexts of citation.14 This rhetorical conundrum, inherent in the structure of the exemplum, poses a question about Cicero’s self-representation. When he presents himself in his literary works as a politician, do we see him as 13 Spivak perhaps refers to De Man (1984) 276, from ‘Aesthetic Formalization: ¨ ber das Marionettentheater’: ‘But can any example ever truly Wt a general Kleist’s U proposition? Is not its particularity, to which it owes the illusion of its intelligibility, necessarily a betrayal of the general truth it is supposed to support and convey? From the experience of reading abstract philosophical texts, we all know the relief one feels when the argument is interrupted by what we call a ‘‘concrete’’ example. Yet at that very moment, when we think at last that we understand, we are further from comprehension than ever; all we have done is substitute idle talk for serious discourse. Instead of inscribing the particular in the general, which is the purpose of any cognition, one has reversed the process and replaced the understanding of a proposition by the perception of a particular, forgetting that the possibility of such a transaction is precisely the burden of the proposition in the Wrst place.’ 14 See Agamben (1998) 21–2 for an analysis of the example along these lines. It is indicative of the relation between citation and exemplarity that he chooses as his example a problem from performative discourse (‘I love you’), where quotation isolates the example.

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a politician or as a man of letters? Can he be both at the same time? He oscillates between source and material, engaged in action and distanced through letters. This split becomes conspicuous in the numerous places where he makes an exemplum of himself.15 In these, he tries to be both a functional and an exemplary window, so to speak, at the same time, but something holds him back from fully asserting his exemplarity in any one category without some distancing technique. Since Augustus understands, I think, how to circumvent Cicero’s problem, let us compare their techniques. In the De oratore, the question arises of the ideal orator. The speakers disavow the appellation for themselves, but Crassus and Antonius lay out the necessary qualiWcations, notably studium in addition to ingenium, and suggest that one day such a person will exist (De or. 1.79, 1.95). The distancing technique is the ‘thinly veiled hint’, since, in the words of Wilkins, ‘Cicero is here undoubtedly thinking of himself ’ (1.79, with ref. to 1.95).16 Another common distancing technique is putting the exemplum in another speaker’s voice, Quintilian’s aliena . . . persona (11.1.21).17 In the De legibus (3.14), Cicero, in the voice of Marcus, namely himself, cites Demetrius of Phalerum as the only man who excelled in both theoretical knowledge and practical experience in government. Atticus remarks that he thinks another such can be found among the three present, namely Atticus, Quintus, and Marcus. The most layered prosopopoeia of this sort is Quintus’ citation in the De diuinatione of Cicero’s poem on his consulship. At 78 lines it is our longest extant fragment of the poem, a prosopopoeia in the voice of Urania, ending with a description of Cicero’s life (De consulatu suo, fr. 2.71–8 Soubiran; Diu. 1.17). Such distancing techniques reveal something of the diYculty of self-exemplarity. It is simply not polite. It sounds too much

15 A habit noted by LitchWeld (1914) 6, with references to Sest. 48–50 and Planc. 90 (n. 2), and a parallel for the desire to be an example in Seneca: nos quoque aliquid et ipsi faciamus animose: simus inter exempla (Ep. 98.12). Kaster (1998) 256 notes the shift between Cicero’s valuation of his accomplishments as politics and his transformation into a man of letters in the rhetorical schools, and attributes the emphasis on Cicero’s simultaneous brillance and impotence to the role of oratory, similarly brilliant and impotent, under the Empire (262). 16 Wilkins (1888). 17 For the tradition, see Pernot (1998) 114.


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like boasting.18 Although Plutarch complains of Cicero’s tendency to self-praise (Cic. 24; On InoVensive Self-praise, Mor. 540), and Quintilian’s defence reveals it as an issue (Inst. 11.1.17–21), I do not think self-praise in itself is the problem. We easily read through the layer of distancing and realize that Cicero speaks of himself, but the oratorical ego may ground his utterance in the Wrst person to make it authoritative, like the lyric ego. The problem is rather that by making himself into an exemplum, he is acting as an author rather than as whatever he oVers himself as the exemplum of, orator or politician. Aside from the problems of the relation of the man of action to the man of letters, of laudandus to laudator in the poem on his own consulship—Cicero’s pleas to Archias and Thyillos to write such a poem show his awareness of these problems—the fragment in Urania’s voice, like the other instances of Cicero’s self-exemplarity, thematizes the conjunction of the two aspects of Cicero’s public persona: e quibus ereptum primo iam a Xore iuuentae te patria in media uirtutum mole locauit. tu tamen anxiferas curas requiete relaxans, quod patriae uacat, id studiis nobisque sacrasti. (fr. 2. 75–8 Soubiran; Div. 1.17) Your country snatched you already in the Wrst Xower of youth from and placed you in the middle of the enterprise of manly virtues. Still, relaxing your anxious cares in rest, you have devoted what is left over from your country to study and to us [the Muses].

Crassus sets genius against study, Marcus sets practical against theoretical knowledge, here the Muse distinguishes between politics and study. The structural problem of being an exemplum and the thing itself, of making yourself an exemplum at the same time as being it, manifests itself in the subject matter of these passages, which highlight the diVerence between theory and practice—a diVerence Cicero in every case both attempts to overcome, and nevertheless maintains. Theory and practice in these cases get in each other’s way. It does not need to be so. Caesar is the consummate historian of his own 18 Self-exemplarity overlaps with many of the issues of self-praise, for which see Marincola (1997) 175–82; Pernot (1998), who gives other parallels for Cicero as the ideal orator (107 n. 15); Lowrie (2002), 241 n. 46.

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deeds, and it is perhaps a response to this problem that he splits the Wrst person plural writer from the third person actor. Cicero’s high assessment of him as a writer (Brut. 261–2) matches his reputation as a general. But often there is an uneasy Wt between these roles.19 Quintilian’s praise of Domitian’s poetry appears to be an exception: quis enim caneret bella melius quam qui sic gerit? (‘For who could sing of war better than he who thus wages it?’ 10.1.91). The panegyric, however, makes it hard to determine the seriousness of Quintilian’s stance.20 The distinction between agent and author can create problems in both directions. If Cicero’s involvement in the practice of politics is what allows him to oVer himself as an example in these passages, his engagement compromises the objectivity of his theoretical works on oratory or politics. By the same token, the energies he pours into his more theoretical writings remove him from the role of active player. Let us consider both movements. First, Cicero’s political engagements impinge on his writing. Even outside the politically motivated speeches, the De oratore, De republica, and De legibus would allow us to assemble a defence of Cicero’s actions during his consulship, often speciWcally through the example of the Gracchi. The justiWcatory example of Tiberius Gracchus dominates the De republica, which is set in the aftermath of his murder. This is no objective or abstract political philosophy, but one that promotes Cicero’s interests and reputation. In the preface, Cicero lists examples of statesmen poorly treated by their states. He reproduces the arguments of those who think public service not worth the trouble. After the likes of Themistocles, we reach a familiar list: Servilius Ahala, Scipio Nasica, Opimius among others, and Cicero himself: ‘Now in truth they do not hold back from my name, and, I believe, because they think they were preserved in this peaceful life by my plans and at my peril, they complain even more strongly about my treatment and with more love.’21 Instead of a full-Xedged 19 Lowrie (2002) considers this split as understood by Horace; a piece on Cicero’s assessment of Caesar as both agent and author in the Brutus is forthcoming. 20 Sarah Danziger, a graduate student at New York University, is researching Quintilian’s view of the relationship between the man of letters and the man of action. 21 nec uero iam meo nomine abstinent et, credo, quia nostro consilio ac periculo sese in illa uita atque otio conseruatos putant, grauius etiam de nobis queruntur et amantius (Cicero, Rep. 1.5–6).


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prosopopoeia, we Wnd a nameless third person plural, but Cicero still inserts another voice between his own and his self-exemplarity.22 In addition to the aliena persona here, there is furthermore a thinly veiled hint. In the Somnium Scipionis, Scipio Aemilianus narrates a dream in response to a complaint by Laelius that no statues have been erected for Scipio Nasica to commemorate his murder of Tiberius Gracchus (6.8). Scipio Africanus shows him the heavens and reassures him there is a special place reserved for those who have governed their states rightly and preserved them from harm.23 We Wll in the analogy to the work’s author. Second, Cicero’s writing distances him from politics. While one might be able to defend theory as a kind of practice, Cicero himself does not. Philosophy aVords Cicero consolation when out of power and substitutes for politics.24 As soon as he can return to government, he does, and the alternations in his own life between periods of political engagement and powerless philosophizing accord with what he says. As in Urania’s speech in the poem on his consulship, literature is for leisure.25 For Cicero, the man of letters is not the same as the man of action, at least not at the same time.26 Or at least that is Spivak’s point. SchiVer’s point, however, must be accounted for. In a letter to Atticus, Cicero becomes the exemplum he makes of himself: he actually acts on the basis of his own example. The diVerence between being the thing itself and the exemplum thereof, between actor and theorist, short-circuits. In 60 bc, during 22 Zetzel remarks ‘likely to be Cicero’s own interpretation’ (1995) ad loc. 23 omnibus qui patriam conseruauerint, adiuuerint, auxerint, certum esse in caelo deWnitum locum, ubi beati aeuo sempiterno fruantur (Cicero, Rep. 6.13). 24 philosophiam nobis pro rei publicae procuratione substitutam putabamus (Cicero, Div. 2.7). I have not made a complete collection of these numerous passages. In the Brutus, the comparison of Marcellus to Cicero, particularly as an orator who has turned to philosophy as an alternative to politics, is representative of the topic (249–51). 25 See parallels in Pease (1963). 26 Cicero’s alternation between political and intellectual pursuits demonstrates more clearly than e.g. Sallust’s successive participation in the two (Cat. 4.1–2; Iug. 4.3–4), that a life can make sense of a wide variety of engagements, but that it is diYcult to hold these social positions simultaneously. Williams (1994) 405 lists a number of politicians who were also, or aspired to be, poets: Pollio, Cornelius Gallus, Messalla, Valgius, Maecenas, Iullus Antonius, and Augustus himself. Unfortunately, we cannot analyse the rhetoric by which they negotiated the relationship between their various social roles.

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the formation of the Wrst triumvirate, Caesar approached Cicero and asked him to join them (Att. 2.3.4). He is tempted by the allure of reconciliation with his enemies, peace with the multitude, tranquillity in old age, but resists with a citation from his poem on his consulship, another prosopopoeia by another Muse, this time Calliope. She exhorts him to stick to the path he has followed from youth and in his consulship, the path of virtue that seeks the praise of good men.27 In refusing to join with the Wrst triumvirate, Cicero put the convictions of his political philosophy before political advancement. His own self-exemplarity oVers the formulation of this refusal: he becomes what he has written about himself, and he writes again so as to represent himself in accord with his own example. As in Velleius’ formulation, Cicero’s example of himself develops a life of its own, where model and action reinforce each other in something of a spiral. Contrary to Velleius, however, the result in this case is the reinforcement of virtue. There was a political price to pay for this assertion of independence, and Cicero went into exile two years later.

AUGUSTUS: E XE MP LU M A N D E XC E P T I O N So far, we have looked at how the exemplum, a rhetorical Wgure, relates to reality. The examples Cicero unleashed in his treatment of Catiline and his followers return to bite him when Clodius takes them up. The examples structure the interaction, whether through Cicero’s analogies or Clodius’ appropriations thereof, but at any rate are formative. The relation of reality to textuality, however, is challenged when Cicero comes to make an exemplum of himself, less, I think, because of any deWciency in the truth of his assertions than through the problematic relation of the person creating the example to the person exempliWed: making an exemplum of yourself can detract from credibility because in asserting your exemplarity you occupy a diVerent role from the one claimed. Cicero is a great orator more because of the quality of his speeches than because he hints at 27 interea cursus, quos prima a parte iuventae j quosque adeo consul virtute animoque petisti, j hos retine atque auge famam laudesque bonorum (Cicero, Att. 2.3.4).


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the extraordinary nature of his skill in the De oratore. His value as a politician depends both on his commitment to republican values, and on his coming down on the losing side. There is other evidence against which to measure the way he fashions himself, even if largely supplied by his own writings. With Augustus, the rhetorical strategies of the Res gestae are analysable, but it takes more work. Students laugh at Cicero’s posturing, but we need a Tacitus or a Syme to see through Augustus. The relation of textuality to reality diVers. Why? Is this merely a rhetorical problem, or is his supreme power blinding? The sovereign rhetoric of the Res gestae remains, even when we know he omits and distorts. Is Augustus an exemplum with an army, as linguists say ‘a language is a dialect with an army’? Would he have been able to maintain this dignity if his autobiography had survived?28 Can we extricate rhetoric from power? Since I do not know the answers to these questions, let me make some comments about how Augustus turns himself into an exemplum in the Res gestae.29 The techniques vary greatly from Cicero’s since Augustus erases any trace of easily seen-through politesse. There are no hints, no alienae voces, no qualiWcations or apologies. Augustus through his style strips his account of what he did—not during a single consulship, as in Cicero’s poem, but during his entire career—of the rhetorical Xourishes that make Cicero such pleasurable reading, and entrench him in the category of man of letters. But the lack of Xourishes does not exempt the Res gestae from rhetorical analysis. There are two ways the document turns Augustus into an exemplum, the Wrst simply through the relentless focus on Augustus throughout, the second by one strange sentence. Ramage has analysed the overwhelming use of the Wrst person singular in the Res gestae and other techniques that keep the focus on Augustus, so that I need not go over the textual detail here. He Wnds eleven places where Augustus claims that he ‘has surpassed all predecessors or has done something for the Wrst time’ (1987: 31), 28 Yavetz (1984) 1–8 sees the abandonment of autobiography in the wake of the Cantabrian war (Suetonius, Aug. 85.1) and the switch to the Res gestae as a response to the lesser need for defensiveness in the latter stages of his career (4–5). Would that we could compare Augustus’ rhetorical strategies of defence to Cicero’s. 29 Chaplin (2000) ch. 6 oVers a comprehensive treatment of Augustus’ use of exempla.

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including his closing the gates of Janus three times, when before him in all of Roman history they had been closed twice (R.G. 13), and his being the Wrst and only one (primus et solus, R.G. 16.1) to have compensated the Italians for land conWscated for settling veterans. He uses several variations on the phrase ‘never before’ (R.G. 30.1, 31.1, 32.3). Augustus sets precedent repeatedly so that he appears, in Ramage’s phrase, as ‘a statesman never before seen’ (146), or, in Horace’s, nil oriturum alias, nil ortum tale (Epist. 2.1.17). As we all know, that is only half of the picture of Augustus, since he claims never to have done anything unconstitutional, or at any rate against the mos maiorum; his oYces always follow precedent.30 The clearest expression of this is Res gestae 6.1: nullum magistratum contra morem maiorum delatum recepi (‘I accepted no magistracy oVered against the usage of the ancestors’).31 We have now touched on the Augustan question: how does he manage to change everything while doing nothing new? Since many others have addressed this issue from a historical point of view, I would like to contribute only one rhetorical suggestion: that the structure of the Augustan Principate can be elucidated by the equally paradoxical structure of the exemplum, particularly if we take the exemplum together with its mirror Wgure, the exception. The exemplum is paradoxical in that it refers both to the ordinary— an example of a dog is any instance of a dog, so any old dog will do— and to the extraordinary—historical examples that establish actions to be avoided or imitated stand out from the crowd. An exemplum turns out to be either the most representative or the most singular instance. The same paradox is evident in the phrase primus inter pares. If all are really equal, how can one be excepted from the group to stand at its head? Augustus most stands out from the crowd in the extent to which he does things most according to the norm—at least in his selfrepresentation. His absolutely exceptional status derives from the concentration of honours rather than from anomalous ones. This logical equivocation of the exemplum magniWes over time. If it becomes part of the mos maiorum to kill citizens without trial 30 For the continuity within change, see Eder (1990); Galinsky (1996) 3–9. 31 Compare Augustus’ mot on Cato: quisquis praesentem statum ciuitatis commutari non uolet et ciuis et uir bonus est (Macrobius, Sat. 2.4.18); see Yavetz (1984) 15.


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under exceptional circumstances, do such circumstances remain exceptional, or do they become part of the norm? Quintilian oVers as an example of an exemplum that is ‘entirely similar’, that ‘Saturninus was killed rightfully, just like the Gracchi’ (iure occisus est Saturninus sicut Gracchi, 5.11.6). Cicero’s exempla are now banal. Suetonius reports that Augustus excerpted exempla from his reading and used them to try to persuade people that matters ‘were not Wrst noticed by him, but that they had already back then been a care to the ancients’.32 Do these things stand out in their singularity, or are they part of the norm? These issues come together in the Res gestae, in a sentence where Augustus uses the word exemplum twice: he recounts his own role in recuperating exempla that were in danger of being lost, and states overtly that he has himself handed down exempla. This latter statement carries the implication that his actions have been such as to be worthy of imitation. Legibus nouis me auctore latis multa exempla maiorum exolescentia iam ex nostro saeculo reduxi et ipse multarum rerum exempla imitanda posteris tradidi. (R.G. 8.5) By new laws carried under my authorship I brought back many exempla of our ancestors that were already dying out from our century and I myself handed down examples of many things to be imitated by later generations.33 32 etiam libros totos et senatui recitauit et populo notos per edictum saepe fecit, ut orationes Q. Metelli de prole augenda et Rutili de modo aediWciorum, quo magis persuaderet utramque rem non a se primo animaduersam, sed antiquis iam tunc curae fuisse (Suetonius, Aug. 89.2). Marriage legislation, with its implications for increasing the number of children, links Augustus’ use of Metellus’ speech as an exemplum to R.G. 8.5. Without children, there would be no posterity to hand exempla down to. McDonnell (1987) shows that there were two Metelli, uncle (Macedonicus) and nephew (Numidicus), both censors, who both gave speeches in favour of having children (in 131–130 and 102–101 bc); also Badian (1988 [1997]). Denis Feeney suggests to me that Augustus inscribes himself into this lineage as a third. This happens more textually than in procreation, since Augustus himself had only one daughter. For the intertextual history of these speeches and their citation, see Barchiesi (2001) ch. 8. 33 Exemplum tradere means ‘to set precedent’, as the parallel from Sallust, Hist. 1.55.25, discussed below, shows. The Greek translation of this sentence on the Monumentum Ancyranum takes further the idea that Augustus establishes himself as a precedent: ŒÆd ÆP e ººH æÆª ø Æ K Æı e E Ø Æ

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Historians refer this sentence to Augustus’ moral legislation, but what strikes a literary critic is the absence of content. This invites us to examine its structure. Augustus severs the Wction of the exemplum as strict repetition by diVerentiating between the old exempla he has brought back and the new ones he has himself established.34 The usual practice would be to highlight similarity: to justify the present on the basis of the past, as the Suetonius passage claims he does, in order to make history appear seamless, or, if not endlessly repeating, at least showing progression along similar lines. Augustus here emerges both as the champion of the old, and, at the same time, an innovator.35 Exceptional behaviour meets exemplary behaviour yet again. If we measure this sentence against the way Cicero makes himself into an exemplum, there are further surprises. Quintilian’s deWnition of the exemplum oVers three parts: quod proprie vocamus exemplum, id est rei gestae aut ut gestae utilis ad persuadendum id quod intenderis commemoratio (‘what we properly call an exemplum, that is, the recalling to mind of something done, or as if done, that is useful for persuading what you intend’, 5.11.6). There is the content, or res gesta; a function, namely persuasion; and the discourse, commemoratio (Lausberg 1960: 1.227–8). What hinders Cicero is his being on both sides of content and discourse. This matters less for Augustus. Why? It is simply that might makes right? Let me take a detour through the certainties of formalism. Res gestae 8.5 is conspicuously emptied of any res gesta—unless we want to make a probably unjustiWable leap and suggest that the Res gestae itself hands down exempla ÆæøŒÆ. Alfredo Buonopane suggests to me that the Greek version was speciWcally crafted for a non-Roman audience, who would Wnd the reXexive more palatable than would the Romans, but see Ramage (1987) 126–31 for controversies over the source of the ancient Greek text. I take iam with exolescentia because the Greek reads: ººa X H IæÆø KŁH ŒÆ Æºı Æ. 34 The Greek translation obfuscates the relation of the parts of the sentence, since it omits any word corresponding to exemplum in the phrase multa exempla maiorum exolescentia. Chaplin (2000) ‘Conclusion’ focuses on the double time-frame of exemplarity: past and present, present and future. 35 Chaplin (2000) 196 emphasizes Augustus’ awareness that exempla ‘are not Wxed and immutable, but subject to change over time’. Eder (1990) 82 emphasizes continuity along with innovation: the exempla from the past have not died out yet, as the present participle exolescentia shows.


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to posterity for imitation. Furthermore, the sentence does not actually make Augustus into an exemplum. It is a constative statement about how, by his authorship, he brought back and also established new exempla, that is, it is a report about his exemplarity and does not have the illocutionary force of making an exemplum. This sentence is not the commemoratio of res gestae, but the commemoratio of the commemoratio. Let me try now to link form to the inscrutability of power. Augustus claims authorship of exemplarity, and in Res gestae 8.5 auctor is a word with a complex relation to action and representation. The word’s close association with auctoritas would incline us to place it in Augustus’ case on the side of action and not letters, though we might think diVerently had his memoirs survived. It has a technical sense for someone who brings forward a law, but the law is a text, both a representational medium and words with eVects in the world: nouis legibus me auctore latis. But auctor also has a special relation to the exemplum in the Latin rhetorical tradition as the person whose word or action is cited to back up what the speaker is saying.36 exemplum est alicuius facti aut dicti praeteriti cum certi auctoris nomine propositio. ([Cic.] Rhet. ad Herennium 4.49.62) The exemplum is the statement of some past deed or saying with the name of a sure author.

The auctor ad Herennium identiWes both words and deeds as capable of citation in an exemplum. On the one hand, Augustus is author in the sense of writing the Res gestae and making the propositio as well as author of the laws. On the other, he is the author of the cited actions, such as the making of laws and whatever else he hands down to posterity to be imitated. He not only occupies a unique space at the fulcrum of history, between the exemplarity of the past, such as the auctor ad Herennium envisions, and the imitation he predicts of posterity, but also is author of both words and action. Any division between the man of letters and the man of action becomes opaque in this vertiginous and self-referential sentence. 36 In addition to this passage, Rambaud (1953) 38–40 cites Cicero Balb. 46; Orat. 169; Inv. rhet. 1.49.

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I have been speaking, for convenience’ sake, of reality and textuality as if we could separate between history the genre and history the events. As Don Fowler says in ‘On the Shoulders of Giants’: the opposition of textuality and history is a meaningless one since history is only accessible in discourse. Texts cannot relate to historical events or institutions but only to stories about those events and institutions, whether told by ancients or by moderns.37

Is there an hors texte? Maybe not, but there are diVerent kinds of texts, some more metaphorical than others, some more constitutive of reality than others.38 The law, for instance, constitutes reality more eVectively, say, than a treatise on political philosophy, which in turn constitutes reality diVerently from a love poem. I would say that as well as being a consummate politician, Augustus was a skilful rhetorician who knew how to break down the barrier between the person making the exemplum, as in the res gesta, and the person making the exemplum, as in the commemoratio. The relentless focus on himself and the rhetoric of being Wrst and only function diVerently from the sentence at Res gestae 8.5. In representing himself in such an inscription, Augustus takes to an extreme known topoi for Republican Selbstdarstellung. By signalling his identity as an exemplum at Res gestae 8.5, Augustus reaches a new level of self-consciousness. An important aspect of the Res gestae as a medium of communication is not only the inscription’s strong memorializing function, but also its posthumous publication. Death allows you to say certain things you could not while alive, and the diVerence in medium between such an inscription, set up on bronze tablets before Augustus’ mausoleum and copied and posted in the East at least in Galatia, 37 Fowler (1997a; repr. 2000) 120. Miles (1995) 68 makes a similar point about Livy, precisely in his discussion of the exemplum, where his language is reminiscent of Quintilian: Livy is concerned less with ‘the facts (the res gestae) that lie behind Roman tradition than with the tradition itself (memoria rerum gestarum)’. For this reason, ‘the reality of historical exempla was secondary to their role in dramatizing an ideologically true picture of Roman identity’ (63 n. 73). 38 Gallagher and Greenblatt (2000) 23: ‘as soon as you collapse everything into something called textuality, you discover that it makes all the diVerence what kind of text you are talking about’. I call the law a text because of the etymological association of lex with legere. See Svenbro (1993) 109; Ernout and Meillet (1939) 543. Magdelain (1978) 18–21 explains this textuality in relation to orality: the law was written down in order to be read aloud.


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and texts disseminated through papyrus scrolls during and after their author’s life helps shape the diVerences in their respective authors’ authority.39 The power Wgured by the inscription and tomb contributes to Augustus’ ability to persuade, but a closed life furthermore seems ipso facto more exemplary than one still in the process of formation. Cicero’s dialogues present their author as still living, even though we read them long after his death. Suetonius ends his biography of Augustus by recording the documents he had sealed and deposited with the Vestals: his will, funeral instructions, the Res gestae, and a Wnancial and military summary of the state of the empire (Aug. 101). The closural nature of the documents accords with their closural position in Suetonius’ narrative.40 If Augustus’ exemplarity in the Res gestae holds together better than does Cicero’s, an exemplum, however, can still run oV on its own. Authors cannot control intertextuality backwards or forwards. In Sallust’s Histories, Lepidus (the triumvir’s father) tries to persuade the Roman people to resist Sulla in language closely resembling Augustus’ sentence: quae si uobis pax et conposita intelleguntur, maxuma turbamenta rei publicae atque exitia probate, adnuite legibus inpositis, accipite otium cum seruitio et tradite exemplum posteris ad rem publicam suimet sanguinis mercede circumueniundam. (Sallust, Hist. 1.55.25) If you understand this as peace and calm, grant your approval to the greatest upheaval and destruction of the Republic, give your nod to the laws imposed, accept peace with slavery, and hand down to posterity an exemplum for circumventing the Republic with its own blood as recompense.41

Sallust makes of Lepidus a precursor to Catiline,42 and while Catiline may occupy the slot of ‘bad guy’, Sulla is no better an option. Besides 39 Yavetz (1984) 20: ‘The Res gestae would be much more impressive after his death.’ He quotes Horace, Odes 3.24.31–2, but Horace, Epist. 2.1.12 addresses Augustus directly: comperit inuidiam supremo Wne domari. 40 This can be gauged by comparison with Cassius Dio (56.33), who mentions the same documents (and one more), but since he is writing history and not biography, his account continues—funeral, succession, etc. Suetonius reverses the order of the narrative and puts the funeral before the documents. For the documents’ transmission (or not) see Gage´ (1935) 3–4. 41 For this translation see Pasoli (1974) 68. 42 Paladini (1967) 248.

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the close connection between new laws and handing exempla down to posterity, there is much here that touches on what Augustus would rather have us not remember about his own rise to power: the spilling of civilian blood, but also the price of peace. Tacitus combines otium and seruitium in the second paragraph of the Annales (1.2.1), where he describes how Augustus seduced all with peace (dulcedine otii) and worked on the nobles inclined to servitude (seruitio promptior) with the inducements of wealth and honours. This is quite a diVerent phenomenon from Clodius’ bringing out the cultural implications of Cicero’s exempla and turning them against their author. Sallust cannot and Tacitus is not—at least not here—deliberately turning Augustus’ words against him. Rather, the broader cultural context allows a later reader to assemble the pieces beyond Augustus’, or any author’s, control. Allusion more speciWcally allows for reinterpretation.43 Tacitus alludes to Res gestae 8.5 in the Annales, and similarly sets up the present as a turning point between posterity and ancestors. nec omnia apud priores meliora, sed nostra quoque aetas multa laudis et artium imitanda posteris tulit. uerum haec nobis maiores certamina ex honesto maneant. (Tacitus, Ann. 3.55.5) Nor were all things better among those who came before, but our age also has brought much praise and art to be imitated by those who follow. But may these things remain for us a source of honest rivalry with our ancestors.

His statement that not everything was better in the past, but that his own age has brought many things to be imitated by posterity brings out a latency in Res gestae 8.5: if things were ever perfect in the past, all that would be necessary would be its imitation, but instead, each age sees the need for the establishment of new exempla as well. 43 Ovid, Met. 15.833–4 gives his own version of the Res gestae and hits on many of the key words in short compass: legesque feret iustissimus auctor j exemploque suo mores reget. See Williams (1978) 95; Bo¨mer (1969–86) ad loc.; Hardie (1997b) 192; Wheeler (1999), 192. See also Ovid Tr. 2.233–4. Fairweather (1987) 193 speculates that similarities in language between Ovid and Augustus’ Res gestae point to a common source in the emperor’s autobiography. I analyse these passages at greater length in a chapter entitled ‘Reading and the Law’ in a forthcoming book called Writing, Performance, and Authority in the Augustan Age.


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Tacitus is a Wne reader of Augustus, because, in Woodman and Martin’s interpretation, he moves from the domain of morality—the preceding paragraph covers some of the same ground as Augustus’ moral legislation, also the subject of 8.5—to the literary. Tacitus, like Augustus, turns himself into an exemplum, since laudis et artium (Ann. 3.55.5) refers in a veiled way to his own literary accomplishment in his own age. We have to decide whether the two words are a hendiadys (‘artistic excellence’ in Woodman and Martin’s translation), or whether laus refers to action, and the arts to the sphere of representation. Does Tacitus keep the split between deeds and letters or conXate the two? The addition of arts at any rate redirects exemplarity from the moral to the literary and calls attention to Augustus’ own role not only as an auctor in the moral domain, but as author of the Res gestae, ‘an auctor in the literary sense’. Here Tacitus trumps Augustus: since his version of the Res gestae at Annales 1.10.1–3 indicts the emperor’s composition as a partisan document, he comes out in the category at issue (‘author’) as at least committed to telling the truth.44 Textual reception is, however, only one aspect of the imitability of exempla. Quintilian’s remaining category, persuasion, opens up the issue to the world. It is one thing to persuade someone something is the case, it is another to persuade them to imitate and thereby perpetuate an example. The question is who could imitate Augustus’ example in the Res gestae—not that of the marriage legislation written into law, but the example he sets for being princeps. Imitation and avoidance were prime aspects of the exemplum understood as a model for both morals and history, as we know from the famous sentence from Livy’s preface and from the moral import of Suetonius’ comment on Augustus (Aug. 89.2).45 Ramage notes the didactic function of the Res gestae for Tiberius: ‘Augustus becomes a model showing the kinds of things that the princeps must do and the attitudes he must have. Here also are the rewards for exemplary behaviour.’46 But one cannot control one’s imitators. Since, according 44 Woodman and Martin (1996) 408–13, esp. 410. 45 ‘hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omni te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu foedum exitu quod uites’ (Livy praef. 10). See Chaplin (2000) ‘Introduction’, esp. 1–5. 46 Ramage (1987) 115.

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to Quintilian, exempla fall into the categories of simile, dissimile, and contrarium (5.11.6), and furthermore, since they could either be positive or negative, to be imitated or avoided (as in Livy), this is a Wgure that can pretty much justify anything. We know that on 5 May 1938, during Hitler’s visit to Rome, Mussolini took him to see the great exhibit on Augustus.47 In one of his dinner conversations in 1941, he recalled the Duce: As I walked with him in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I could easily compare his proWle with that of the Roman busts, and I realized he was one of the Caesars. There’s no doubt at all that Mussolini is the heir to the great men of that period.48

Mussolini was following Augustus’ example in a way his ancient predecessor might have appreciated, even if some might rather judge that, to return to Velleius, he did not think foul for himself what was fruitful for another. Exempla can and will continue to go headlong. 47 Domarus (1992) 2.1101.

48 Trevor-Roper (1953) 9.

6 Natura narratur: Tullius Laurea’s Elegy for Cicero (Pliny, Nat. 31.8) Llewelyn Morgan

Our gaze on the past is always the ‘view from somewhere’. (Don Fowler)1 Saw ruins; fell on knees and uttered some enthusiastic words. (James Boswell)2

I Towards the beginning of Naturalis historia 31, a book devoted to medicinae ex aquatilibus, ‘remedies derived from things aquatic’, Pliny the Elder describes some springs at a villa that had once belonged to Cicero. The property was located in the volcanic region of Campania known as the Phlegraean Fields, and the springs had erupted shortly after Cicero’s death, by which time ownership had passed into the hands of an individual named Antistius Vetus. The spring water was known for its medicinal qualities (for eye Besides the obvious, overarching debt, this paper has beneWted from comments from Ed Bispham, Michael Reeve, Gregory Hutchinson, and Alessandro Barchiesi, and from the access to rare books kindly provided by Sarah Newton and the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 1 Fowler (2000) ix. 2 James Boswell’s response to the site of Horace’s villa, cited by Brown (2001) 16.

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complaints, speciWcally), and it is this which, ostensibly at least, motivates its presence in Pliny’s encyclopaedia. Much of Pliny’s account, however, is given over to an epigram by Tullius Laurea, a freedman of Cicero, which Pliny implies was displayed at the site. The burden of the poem is that the emergence of the springs is a mark of honour from the place to its former owner: the more readers Cicero has, the more eyes will be tired out with reading him, and the locus has responded to this need with waters speciWcally therapeutic for ophthalmic disorders. I quote the passage (Nat. 31.6–8) in full: iam generatim neruis prosunt pedibusue aut coxendicibus, aliae luxatis fractisue, inaniunt aluos, sanant uulnera. capiti, auribus priuatim medentur, oculis uero Ciceronianae. digna memoratu uilla est ab Auerno lacu Puteolos tendentibus inposita litori, celebrata porticu ac nemore, quam uocabat M. Cicero Academiam ab exemplo Athenarum. ibi compositis uoluminibus eiusdem nominis, in qua et monumenta sibi instaurauerat, ceu uero non in toto terrarum orbe fecisset. huius in parte prima exiguo post obitum ipsius Antistio Vetere possidente eruperunt fontes calidi perquam salubres oculis, celebrati carmine Laureae Tulli, qui fuit e libertis eius, ut protinus noscatur etiam ministeriorum haustus ex illa maiestate ingenii. ponam enim ipsum carmen, ubique et non ibi tantum legi dignum: quo tua, Romanae uindex clarissime linguae, silua loco melius surgere iussa uiret, atque Academiae celebratam nomine uillam nunc reparat cultu sub potiore Vetus, hoc etiam apparent lymphae non ante repertae languida quae infuso lumina rore leuant. nimirum locus ipse sui Ciceronis honori hoc dedit, hac fontes cum patefecit ope, ut, quoniam totum legitur sine Wne per orbem, sint plures oculis quae medeantur aquae. Now—by class—waters are good for sinews, or feet, or hips; others for dislocated or broken limbs; they clear bowels, cleanse wounds; they have eVect speciWcally on the head or ears, or in the case of the Ciceronian, eyes. It is worth recording the estate situated on the shore as one heads from Lake Avernus to Puteoli, known for its colonnade and grove, which M. Cicero, after the model of Athens, called the Academy. There he wrote the volumes of that same name, and in it also he left many memorials to himself, as if indeed he had not done so throughout the whole world. In the front part of this estate, shortly after Cicero’s death, when Antistius Vetus

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was in possession of it, there burst forth hot springs, extremely beneWcial for eyes, which have been celebrated by a poem of Laurea Tullius, one of Cicero’s freedmen: immediate proof that even his servants drank of that exalted mind. I shall quote the actual poem, which deserves to be read not only in that location, but everywhere: In the place where, most illustrious champion of the Roman tongue, your wood Xourishes, bidden to rise more strongly, and the villa honoured by the name of Academy Vetus now restores under better cultivation, here also are to be seen waters not discovered before, which, dripped on weary eyes, relieve them. Evidently the place itself gave this gift as an honour to its master Cicero, when it disclosed springs with such properties that, since he is read throughout the whole world without end, there may be more waters to treat eyes.

The literary merits of Laurea’s poem must remain a matter of debate. What made it seem a promising text to write about by way of homage to Don Fowler was partly its susceptibility to Don’s memorable ‘101 things to do with . . .’ rubric. My diverse, although rather fewer than 101, readings of Laurea’s poem will attempt to approach the text from a number of angles—literary-critical, sociohistorical, archaeological, literary-theoretical—but will all address what I Wnd its most striking feature, and that is its abnormally marked connection to physical nature. Pliny’s account implies that Laurea’s poem was some form of inscription—probably, as it turns out,3 a dipinto—and what complements the poem’s actual location in nature (qua inscription) is the high concern which the poem itself evinces for what might be termed physical ‘groundedness’. The poem opens by identifying the locus of Cicero’s villa, described in some physical detail, with the site of the new spring (1–6), then proceeds to attribute this coincidence to the initiative of the locus itself, paying honour to its former owner; and of course this locus was also the location of the poem itself. There thus follow three, or perhaps threeand-a-half (at a generous assessment) musings on the place of Tullius Laurea’s elegy in the landscape. There is another, self-evident reason for contributing to this of all collections a discussion of a memorial 3 Flavio Biondo describes the traces of poetry he saw at the site in 1452 as uersus picti: see p. 134 below.

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for a man whose work opened and exercised eyes across the world, and there is no need to labour it. It would be hard to argue that the current status of Laurea’s piece is anything but non-canonical, deWnitively so (and this is another good reason to give it an airing here). But at an earlier juncture in the history of Classics it did enjoy a certain vogue. I Wrst encountered Laurea in connection with a play published anonymously in London in 1651 entitled The Tragedy of that Famous Roman Oratour, Marcus Tullius Cicero, which seems to Wnd in the rise of the second triumvirate and murder of Cicero, who is constructed in the play as a quite literal embodiment of the free Republic, a focus for the anxieties of certain Englishmen in the face of the increasing militarism of the commonwealth government.4 In its dramatis personae the play features ‘Laureas—a poet’, one of ‘Marcus Cicero’s men’,5 a Wgure whom the author of Cicero need not necessarily have come across during a trawl through Pliny’s thirty-seven books, since the poem became quite early on a staple of collections of Latin epigrams and short excerpts composed by scholars such as Joseph Justus Scaliger.6 Here, 4 For attempts to contextualize Cicero in the politics of the early commonwealth see Randall (1991a) and (1991b), and Morrill (1991). Cicero is among a number of commonwealth plays published in Clare (2001). 5 As a name for an exemplary poet Wgure drawing inspiration from the master ‘Laurea’ must have seemed a gift to the author of Cicero, but that this really was his name is proved not only by Pliny but also by three Greek epigrams under the name Laurea or Tullius Laurea in the Anthologia Palatina (7.17, 7.294, 12.24). In fact the nomen is no more loquens than ‘Tiro’, ‘apprentice’ (cf. Cicero’s aVectionate play at Fam. 16.3.1): compare Varro on the arbitrariness of slave names (Ling. 8.21). Nevertheless, Michael Reeve has wondered out loud (personal communication) ‘what thoughts went through the mind of someone called Laurea when he wrote about Cicero’s lingua’, bearing in mind the famous verse from Cicero’s poem on his consulship, cedant arma togae, concedat laurea linguae—if that is what Cicero wrote: see Courtney (1993) 172. With Laurea’s Romana lingua compare the Latia lingua whose silence following the death of Cicero is deplored by the Augustan poets Sextilius Ena and Cornelius Severus (Seneca, Suas. 6.25–7; cf. Velleius Paterculus 2.66.2–3 on his uox publica); ‘tongue’, in connection with Cicero, is hard to dissociate from the story told at Dio 47.8.4, and vividly dramatized in Cicero, of Fulvia’s maltreatment of Cicero’s severed head, pulling out the tongue and piercing it with her hairpins. Laurea’s contrasting optimism is partly predicated on an interesting modulation from Cicero as speaker (Romanae uindex clarissime linguae) to Cicero as text (legitur), broadly paralleled in Velleius’ eulogy at 2.66. 6 A selection: Scaliger (1572) 215, Pithou (1590) 58, Burmann (1759) vol. 2 no. 156, Garrod (1912) no. 61.

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at any rate, in an attempt to reinforce Laurea’s return to scholarly visibility, and because it has a certain pertinence to the circumstances of this collection, is his Wnest moment in Cicero. Laureas is speaking after Cicero’s death to his fellow servant ‘Tyro—a great pretender to history’, a speech which alludes to M. Tullius Tiro’s composition of a biography of his former master (Asc. 48.25–6 Clark) and to the elegy of Laurea preserved by Pliny, and perhaps glosses Pliny’s ministeriorum haustus ex illa maiestate ingenii: laureas

Come, Tyro, since our day is set for ever, Wee’l live like owles, those Citizens of Night, Like Owles indeed, but like Athenian owles; Thou shalt sublime thy pen, and write the life Of our deceased Lord, that spotlesse life, Which Vertue’s self might make her meditation. Tyro, thou shalt, and I, poor Laureas, Will sit and sigh forth mourning Elegies Upon his death. He while he liv’d, good man, Delighted in my Muse, and now my quill Shall consecrate his name to th’ Muses’ hill. (Cicero 5.10)

‘Consecration’ of the name of Cicero, I shall suggest in this paper, is in fact precisely what Laurea’s poem helped to achieve.

II If location in nature is the issue, an appropriate place to start might be with a map (Figure 2). Unusually, we know pretty exactly where the estate of Cicero, the spring, and the poem stood,7 and the history of their survival will occupy us later in this paper. But to pre-empt 7 Annecchino (1938); M. W. Frederiksen, RE 23.2059.37–49 (s.v. ‘Puteoli’); D’Arms (1970) 198–200 (cf. 69–70, 172). The location is misidentiWed by Dahlmann (1982) 15–16 n. 16, who is unaware of D’Arms, and Courtney (1993) 182, who follows Dahlmann (despite also citing D’Arms).

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Figure 2. Map of Cicero’s Cumanum and its environs (courtesy of Stuart Campbell)

things a little, the villa in question was the one to which Cicero referred as his Cumanum, ‘estate at Cumae’,8 and it stood by the Lucrine lake and on the road which led from Lake Avernus (and ultimately from Cumae) to Puteoli, a road which the wording of Pliny (Nat. 18.111) suggests was treated as part of the Via Consularis Campana, the main road from the Phlegraean Fields to Capua.9 8 Among other things, this best explains Laurea’s allusion to Cicero’s Academica. The impulse to use an association with this text to glorify the place has to do with the prominence of the Academica among Cicero’s philosophical books, in his own view and others’: see MacKendrick (1989) 125. But Pliny is in fact wrong to say that either edition of the work was composed at the Cumanum: see Reid (1885) 28–38. Nevertheless, the Wctional location of the discussion was at least in the vicinity of the villa, at M. Varro’s villa on the Lucrine lake, and the Academica posteriora begins, in Cumano nuper cum mecum Atticus noster esset . . . . See also Fam. 9.8.1. 9 Pliny is describing the area known as Leboriae or the Phlegraean Fields, an area deWned uia ab utroque latere consulari quae a Puteolis et quae a Cumis Capuam ducit

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If ‘Cumanum’ seems a rather tendentious name to give a villa so far from the town of Cumae, Cicero was within his rights to do so since the property lay within the town’s territory, which extended right up to the outskirts of Puteoli. But as Catullus 44 reminds us, the naming of these tokens of high status, villas, was always liable to be tendentious in a Roman elite context, and there was an element of choice inherent in the naming of the Cumanum.10 The estate was close enough to Puteoli for Cicero to deWne it as part of the ‘Puteolanum’ (here in the sense of ‘vicinity of Pozzuoli’) when it suited his purposes (Fam. 5.15.2), but ‘Cumanum’ had more cachet, Cumae being by a distance the classier district. (‘Puteoli’ is, after all, ‘The Pits’.) It also, incidentally, had none of the potentially embarrassing associations which ‘Baianum meum’, ‘my place at Baiae’ (another perfectly accurate title for an estate on the Lucrine lake), might have had for the author of the Pro Caelio. As we shall see, the naming of this villa never stops being tendentious; it is instructive to note that it always was. Geographically Cicero’s villa was ‘obvious’, in the basic sense of the word. It stood on a busy road,11 and Cicero himself had either rejoiced in or complained about the constant visitors its position encouraged.12 Furthermore, Pliny tells us that the spring and its inscription were in the most accessible part of the villa, in parte (‘on either side by the consular road which leads from Puteoli and from Cumae to Capua’). This seems to describe a road from Capua which forks, one fork leading to Cumae and one to Puteoli, which would match our road nicely. If this was already regarded as a main road it might also explain why Statius’ account of the Via Domitiana, a road from Sinuessa to Puteoli which replaced a track as far as Cumae but between Cumae and Puteoli superseded this road, marks its end at Cumae (Statius Silv. 4.3.114–18), as if the real achievement of Domitian ended at the point where this (already well-established) road started. Alternatively, it is an indication of quite how far Cumae overshadowed Puteoli, Wguratively if by no means economically. Frederiksen (1984) 37 interprets Pliny’s words rather diVerently, and in such a way that they describe roads encompassing a much larger extent of territory. 10 Catullus 44.1–5 suggests that men have a choice of names for his fundus depending on their inclinations towards its owner. A villa described as Tiburtan is ipso facto ‘smarter’ than a Sabine farm. For the considerable status which accrued to the owner of a villa ‘at Cumae’ see D’Arms (1970) 199. 11 For the roadside position of the villa see Att. 10.4.8; 14.16.1; 15.1a.1. 12 Att. 5.2.2: habuimus in Cumano quasi pusillam Romam; tanta erat in iis locis multitudo; 14.16.1: o loca ceteroqui ualde expetenda, interpellantium autem multitudine paene fugienda!

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prima. It seems fairly clear from what Pliny and Laurea have to say that Vetus, the new owner of the villa, made of his private property a place for the public to visit, a monumentum for Cicero, of which the springs, seemingly converted into a bath building, were the focal point, marked as such by Laurea’s poem. The location of this monument on the main road to Cumae makes it a kind of very elaborate version of the standard, attention-seeking siste, viator roadside monument, such as the one honouring Pallas, freedman minister of Claudius, that Pliny the Younger found so oVensive (Ep. 7.29). Laurea’s poem, too, is a very much more elaborate text than would normally be attached to such monuments, but is as a consequence quite informative about the socio-political background to this act of commemoration. The poem is primarily concerned with Cicero, of course, but another individual is also given considerable prominence, and it is Vetus, whose work to restore the villa is evoked in the Wrst four lines, rather than the author Tullius Laurea. In fact, then, it is not only Cicero who is being commemorated and honoured by the poem, but Vetus also for his dutifulness towards the orator’s memory, and this impression of the inalienability of commemorator and commemorated must have been corroborated by the experience of visiting, as a member of the public, a monument to Cicero on the private estate of Vetus.13 Vetus is glossed as ‘Antistius Vetus’ by Pliny, and was almost certainly C. Antistius Vetus, suVect consul in 30 bc. What we can discover about this man’s life and career indicates both that there were grounds for the dutifulness that he displayed towards Cicero’s memory, but circumstances also that lent it a political signiWcance greater than might at Wrst be appreciated.14 Vetus became a close associate of M. Brutus in 43 bc, handing over HS2 million of state funds to him as he passed through Macedonia on his return from a governorship of Syria, and later operating as his legate. A sequence of letters between Brutus and Cicero show him entering Cicero’s acquaintance. Ad Brutum 1.11 is actually a letter from Brutus recommending Vetus to Cicero; by the time of 1.9.3 (which postdates 1.11) Cicero is talking in 13 Cf. Pliny Ep. 1.17.4 on Titinius Capito’s erection of a statue of L. Silanus, which brought as much credit to Capito as to Silanus: neque enim magis decorum et insigne est statuam in foro populi Romani habere quam ponere. 14 Shackleton Bailey (1980) at Ad Brut. 2.5, 16.1; PIR, 2nd edn, A 770.

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terms of ‘Vetus noster’; and at 1.12.3 (later still), a letter from Cicero sent with Vetus to Brutus, we Wnd: Veterem pro eius erga te beneuolentia singularique oYcio libenter ex tuis litteris complexus sum eumque cum tui tum rei publicae studiosissimum amantissimumque cognoui. Following your letter I have gladly made a friend of Vetus in view of his good-will and outstanding services to you; and I have found him most zealous and loyal to you and to the commonwealth.

This letter dates to July 43 bc, Wve months before Cicero’s proscription and death. When next we hear of Vetus, some time after Philippi (where Syme assumes he fought for Brutus),15 he is operating under Octavian’s command in 35 and 34 against the Salassi, an Alpine tribe (Appian, Ill. 17), as he does again in 25 against the Cantabri in Spain. In between these military campaigns he holds the consulship, as Octavian’s colleague, from the Kalends of July to the Ides of September 30 bc. So it is evident that there has occurred some sort of rapprochement between Vetus and the heir of Caesar, but the sequence of consuls into which Vetus falls in 30 bc suggests that compromise, as so often at the outset of the Principate, was ‘symmetrical’. The year 30 bc saw in total four consular colleagues for Octavian, and in each case the choice seems designed to communicate Octavian’s pluralistic inclusiveness in the face of Antonian tyranny. Vetus’ predecessor in the consulship (January to June) had been M. Licinius Crassus, on whom Dio comments (51.4.3): ‘this man was Octavian’s fellow-consul, even though he had not previously held the praetorship, and had actually been a supporter both of Sextus Pompey and of Antony’. His successor, even more suggestively, was M. Tullius Cicero, son of the orator (14 September to the end of November), with whose consulship Plutarch’s life of Cicero reaches a ‘uniquely satisfying’ conclusion, the reconciliation of Octavian and the line of Cicero, and the demonization of Antony that implied.16 The fourth and last suVect consul of the year, L. Saenius Balbinus (December), was also apparently a proscript who had served with Sextus Pompey (Appian B Civ. 4.50).17 15 Syme (1939) 206 n. 8. 16 Moles (1988) 201. 17 See Syme (1986) 35 n. 20 for the identiWcation of L. Saenius with Appian’s ‘Balbinus’.

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If the presence in the consular fasti of C. Antistius Vetus, erstwhile acolyte of Brutus and Cicero, might contribute to the impression of a Roman consensus led by Octavian, then there is a not dissimilar ideology being promulgated by the monument on the busy road to Cumae, glorifying Cicero and re-establishing him as a Roman exemplum18 rather as his son’s consulship had done, and advertising the role of Vetus, favoured Augustan aristocrat (a favour of which the gift of the villa may itself have been a tangible token),19 in that gloriWcation. The consulship of Cicero’s son rehabilitated Cicero, but in the process in obvious ways drafted the orator into an Augustan deWnition of what constituted Rome and its history. In Campania, too, Cicero was (literally) back on the map, visible, honoured, and exemplary, and there is a very Augustan quality to the comfortable, paradoxical pun of line 4 of Laurea’s poem: reparat . . . Vetus, ‘Old . . . restores’. But again, it is a map that bears the stamp of the princeps, and not only for Vetus’ presence on it. The view from Cicero’s villa over the Lucrine lake had changed dramatically since Cicero’s death. The pisciculos exultantes, ‘little Wsh leaping’, to which the protagonists of Cicero’s Academica had their attention drawn (frr. 71, 13) were likely to be overshadowed by the massive harbour works of the Portus Iulius, in preparation for which, notoriously, Agrippa had felled the forest around Avernus (Strabo 5.4.5: was this in fact the depredation from which Vetus rescued Cicero’s silua?). Frederiksen is clear that the extensive construction works undertaken under Octavian’s auspices in this area of Campania were mainly for show rather than any practical reason (the naval base was swiftly eclipsed by Misenum), but that merely reinforces the point that these structures in the Campanian landscape were designed above all to be seen: Octavian had . . . learnt from his adoptive father the uses in the quest for public attention of spectacular alterations of the physical environment. The feeling behind his massive corrections of nature in Campania is not in the least utilitarian. The project is designed to impress the beholder with the colossal power and awesome magnitudo animi of its creators.20 18 Cf. Cicero, Fin. 5.1–6 for the exemplary force of such physical vestiges of famous men. 19 See n. 29 below. 20 Frederiksen (1984) 334.

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These activities thus sought to mould this part of Campania into a recognizably Augustan environment.21 Obviously, giving names to places is an assertion of control. But in this case a particular interpretation of the landscape (Augustus’ control of it) was being promoted very vigorously indeed—permanent alterations to the environment such as the linking by canal of the Lucrine Lake and Avernus clearly imply an intention to ‘Wx’ this interpretation in indelible fashion. Vetus, for his part, did not alter the landscape so much as respond to the kind of natural alteration characteristic of volcanic regions, but otherwise his project was similar: to impress meaning upon raw nature. Between them, and others of course, the Phlegraean Fields were rendered a kind of text, one which spoke in its own way of the authority—and the subtleties—of the Augustan settlement. Cicero’s place in that landscape–text must have been as eloquent as the sight of his son on the sella curulis.

III Thus far I have tried to read Laurea’s poem as part of a process whereby political change found a reXection in the organization (or construction) of the Italian countryside. But it is also appropriate to consider it where we originally found it, in the text of Pliny’s Naturalis historia, and investigate at a little length some of the signiWcance of its presence there—of Pliny’s decision to quote it, in other words. Pliny leaves us in no doubt that he deeply approves of the sentiments of this poem; and it is not hard to come up with reasons why he might see in Laurea a sympathetic text, a model (in eVect) for his own undertaking. One point of connection we can point to is a cluster of allusions at this juncture of Pliny’s work to what Beagon calls Pliny’s ideal of ‘universal communication’,22 an ideal asserted 21 For the panegyrical possibilities of the ‘taming’ of the Phlegraean Fields see Propertius 2.1.39–42, 3.9.47–8, Virgil, Aen. 9.710–16 and Hardie (1994) at 715–16. If one mythological civilizer of the area was Zeus–Jupiter, another was Hercules: a Via Herculea, supposedly constructed by the hero, separated the Lucrine lake from the open sea and was reinforced by M. Agrippa. Cf. n. 50. 22 Beagon (1992) 229.

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throughout the Naturalis historia, but particularly prominent here. Thus Pliny’s grounds for recording the inscription are that it deserves the universal exposure which a unique inscription can only get from inclusion in his text (ubique et non ibi tantum legi dignum); but this virtue of worldwide communication is also what Laurea’s poem identiWes as Cicero’s great achievement (totum legitur sine Wne per orbem), and Pliny picks up on this element of the poem (in toto terrarum orbe). Quoted text and host text thus match one another in this assertion of the value of total communicative scope, and indeed host text bestows this capacity on the quotation. But another area of kinship between Pliny’s text and text of Laurea is more obviously related to my theme of place and nature. Laurea’s poem is a text in the landscape, an inscription in nature; it is also itself about the relation of text to nature: the ‘place itself ’ gives honour to Cicero and facilitates the reception of his writings. What the poem is, then, and what it is about correlate closely with each other, but also with some quite fundamental impulses of the Naturalis historia as a whole. A basic preoccupation of this work is the nature of the relationship between human creativity and the creativity of natura. The statement of the work’s topic at praef. 13, rerum natura, hoc est uita, narratur, implies that the essential nature of the universe, rerum natura, is closely bound up with the creatures that live in it (uita), man in particular: and it is always evident that man occupies the centre of Pliny’s natura. Nevertheless a fundamental tension—and dynamic—of the work is the issue, often fraught, of man’s precise role in nature, how far human shaping of the world, ars, is acceptable, and how far the initiative should be left to Pliny’s basically benevolent natura artifex. There is always a threat in the Naturalis historia that human intervention in nature may constitute a violation or perversion of the providential natural order. This is not to say that Pliny does not recognize and honour human achievement: we see him doing just that in our passage, and again in various ways his entire work itself embodies such aspirations. But Pliny inclines towards an ideal of the kind represented by the following passage from Nat. 12.9 concerning celebrated plane trees, one particularly well treated by Beagon:23 23 Beagon (1992) 82.

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nunc est clara in Lycia fontis gelidi socia amoenitate, itineri adposita, domicilii modo caua octoginta atque unius pedum specu, nemorosa uertice et se uastis protegens ramis arborum instar, agros longis obtinens umbris, ac ne quid desit speluncae imagini, saxea intus crepidinis corona muscosos complexa pumices, tam digna miraculo ut Licinius Mucianus ter consul et nuper prouinciae eius legatus prodendum etiam posteris putauerit epulatum intra eam se cum duodeuicensimo comite, large ipsa toros praebente frondis, ab omni adXatu securum, oblectante imbrium per folia crepitu laetiorem quam marmorum nitore, picturae uarietate, laquearium auro, cubuisse in eadem. In the present day there is a famous one in Lycia, allied to the attractiveness of a cool spring. It is located by the road, with a hollow cavity like a house inside it 81 feet across. Its top is a grove in itself, and it shields itself with huge branches as big as trees and covers the Welds with its long shadows. And so as to complete its resemblance to a cave, it contains within itself mossy pumice-stones in a circular rim of rock. So worthy was this tree to be regarded as a wonder that Licinius Mucianus, three times consul and recently deputy governor of that province, considered that it should be communicated to posterity that he held a banquet within the tree with eighteen of his retinue, the tree providing couches of leaves bounteously, and that he had slept in the same place, protected from every breath of wind, and happier with the delightful patter of rain through the leaves than he would have been with gleaming marbles, rich painting or gilded coVering.

The collision here of wonder at nature’s creativity and suspicion of the artiWcial generates a fascinating eulogy of a natural object in which the action of nature is explicitly preferred to the artes of men, but in which at the same time it is so very human and domesticated an artefact which nature is honoured for creating (just like a domicilium, conveniently close to the road, oVering, as if consciously, comfort and protection for a Roman governor, thrice consul . . . ). The initiative is to be left whenever possible to nature, yet nature does best, it seems, when it mimics man. It hardly needs to be spelt out how well the aquae Ciceronianae correspond to this complex Plinian ideal of harmonious acquiescence between nature and man—warm springs which Laurea interprets as a gift from within earth given up at the initiative of nature herself (there is no human violation of the earth’s surface to get at them),24 but marking human achievement and serving the beneWt of 24 Cf. Nat. 33.1–3.

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the higher human arts: the metaphor haustus which Pliny uses of the debt of Cicero’s servants to their master is particularly suggestive of this synthesis of human and natural processes. (Pliny might have been less sanguine about volcanic activity had he foreseen the circumstances of his own death in ad 79.) The general point would be sharper if we could accept Courtney’s reading of line 5, arte repertae for the rather superXuous ante repertae of the manuscripts: that is, ‘not discovered by the actions of man (but provided spontaneously by nature)’: an inspired emendation, but given that Courtney makes absolutely no reference to it one that looks horribly like a misprint.25 Nevertheless, and as Don would have insisted, that doesn’t make it any less acceptable. This tension and interplay between the artiWcial and the natural which pervades the Naturalis historia inevitably has resonance on more narrowly literary levels. The Nat. is a representation of natura: natura narratur is, as we have seen, one of the ways in which Pliny deWnes the theme of his work in the general preface. The larger context of this remark is an extended discussion, which constitutes a large part of the preface, of the literary status of Pliny’s undertaking. The preface is addressed to Titus, future emperor, and expends more than enough energy disavowing literary status to alert us to the relevance of that category. The two snatches of poetry he quotes in this preface are suggestive in a similar way, since both (from Catullus 1 and Lucilius’ preface to his satires in Book 26)26 ironically dispute their claim to any kind of elevated literary status. That Pliny cites poetry at all in the process of denying any aspiration to the status of literature is telling enough, but particularly so when he rewrites Catullus’ hendecasyllables for Titus’ amusement in line with the Flavian taste for an opening spondee (praef. 1). Passages like praef. 12–15 reveal an author not straightforwardly rejecting literary, or elevated, status for his project, but not comfortable with it either: Hutchinson notes the odd shift in this passage from apologetic selfcensure to an assertion of the nobility and glory of his undertaking, and remarks in general on the ‘complicated interplay, even on the level of style’, between the critical rationality displayed by Pliny and ‘his zeal for the wonders characteristic of nature’, his combination of 25 Courtney (1993) 182–3.

26 Warmington (1938) 200–1.

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‘scholarly reserve and the heightening of marvels, lowness and exaltation of language and of content’.27 The complexity has a lot to do with the ambivalent quality of Pliny’s natura itself, simultaneously the everyday and mundane, which communicates these subliterary values to the text which describes it,28 and the very highest principle in Pliny’s universe, his God, than which no higher literary topic is imaginable. We are not a million miles here from the ambiguous poetics of that other narrator, dear to Don, of the Nature of Things. Pliny does not often quote poetry, and given the practical values and suspicion of artiWce which characterize the text this is not surprising. If we sought to characterize the Augustan alterations to the Campanian landscape as the construction of a meaningful text, Pliny’s tendency is essentially in the contrary direction, downplaying the role which humans should play in the natural environment and emphasizing the agency (the authorship, perhaps) of nature. If Laurea’s poem found a place in the Naturalis historia partly for its message of harmony between nature and human endeavour, it is also partly for its ambivalent literary status, which coincides so closely with that of its host text. Laurea’s poem is an artiWce, but an artiWce that is both in Natura and of Natura. In it Pliny can reconcile (momentarily) the often contradictory impulses to narrate nature and to be an auteur.

IV For the next part of this paper I return to the issue of the precise location of the aquae Ciceronianae. As we have already seen, lines 1–4 of Laurea’s poem imply that Vetus restored the villa after a period of neglect,29 and it appears that Vetus converted the springs into some 27 Hutchinson (1993) 41 and n. 4. 28 See in particular the prefatory remarks on crops at Nat. 18.1–5, which see a modulation from condemnation of man’s corruption of the simple gifts of nature to an assertion of the value of his own text with its unelaborate (yet, in its way, honourable) content. 29 The process whereby Vetus came by the villa is plausibly proposed by D’Arms (1970) 68–70. Cicero himself identiWed estates in the spa region of Puteoli as among the prizes sought by Antony’s henchmen (Cicero, Phil. 8.9), and Appian (B. Civ. 4.5) talks of the triumvirs proscribing men because they possessed enviable country or

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form of bath complex, the centrepiece of his monumentalization of Cicero’s villa. Staggeringly, this Balneum Ciceronis persisted right through Antiquity and the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance,30 and did so ultimately as a consequence of Vetus’ decision, assisted by Tullius Laurea, to perpetuate the association with Cicero, thereby making a landmark of the villa and its baths. Cicero’s Cumanum was still a place for sightseeing in the later Wrst century ad, as Pliny shows,31 and it may well have corresponded to the iugera facundi . . . Ciceronis owned by Silius Italicus at the end of the century (Mart. 11.48) and e ˚ØŒæø F ÆºÆØF øæ near Puteoli, where a colloquy between Demetrius and Apollonius of Tyana supposedly took place at roughly the same time (Philostratus V. A. 7.11.1),32 although the situation is complicated by the existence of another villa (the Puteolanum) in the same vicinity which had also been in Cicero’s possession for the last two years of his life.33 The temporary burial place of Hadrian in uilla Ciceroniana Puteolis after his death at Baiae mentioned in the Historia Augusta might be either Cumanum or Puteolanum; the home where Tiro allegedly lived to the age of a

town houses (X Ø ŒÆd Øa Œºº KÆ ºø ŒÆd NŒÆ æªæ). From Velleius (2.14.3) we learn that Cicero’s town house on the Palatine came into the possession of the Antonian L. Marcius Censorinus (cf. RE 14.2.1554–5). As Syme puts it, Cicero’s ‘villas in the country and the palatial town house . . . cried out for conWscation’: Syme (1939) 195. Such conWscated property would ideally have been sold by the triumvirs to raise desperately needed revenue, but as D’Arms says, ‘there was more property than could Wnd buyers’ at this time of political and economic uncertainty. The natural conclusion is that the Cumanum remained in the possession of the triumvirs, in an increasing state of disrepair, and came to Vetus from Octavian in the context of the former’s reassessment of his loyalties after Philippi. 30 RE 23.2059.49–52 (Frederiksen): ‘Der na¨chste Eigentu¨mer, C. Antistius Vetus, baute es zu einem Badehaus um, und als solches bestand es das ganze Altertum und Mittelalter hindurch.’ 31 Nat. praef. 3, sexies consul, dates the completion of Pliny’s work to ad 77. 32 D’Arms (1970) 200. The plane tree under which Demetrius and Apollonius converse might suggest an Academy (cf. Pliny Nat. 12.9), but more likely an archetypal location for philosophical dialogue (cf. Plato, Phaedrus 229a). 33 This villa was part of a bequest from Cluuius, a Puteolan businessman; Cicero refers to it as the Puteolanum (Att. 14.7.1; 15.1b.1; Fat. 2), the horti Cluuiani (Att. 13.46.3; 14.16.1) or the Cluuiana (Att. 14.9.1). It has been tentatively located, by a combination of local tradition and inference from Cicero’s letters, to the immediate north-west of the ancient city of Puteoli: Schmidt (1899) 486–9; Annecchino (1938) 31; D’Arms (1970) 200.

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hundred was probably the latter.34 But it is certainly the Cumanum at issue when, in the late sixth century, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great mention one Fortunatus, associate of St Equitius and abbot of monasterii quod appellatur Balneum Ciceronis (1.3.5).35 There is a danger of over-interpreting specks of evidence such as this, but the reduction of Cicero from the rich cultural symbol of Vetus and Pliny to the simple topographical marker he is for the contemporaries of Gregory, denoting without (apparently) doing much connoting, is at least suggestive of the peculiar kind of sanctiWed obscurity that Cicero, along with much else of the classical world, entered as the Christian era advanced.36 The name hangs on. It even strikes a distant chord with Gregory, or so it would seem from the way he dwells momentarily over the title of this monastery. But the richer signiWcance of this act of attribution is long lost. Cicero’s status in the next text to mention the baths is quite hard to gauge, but he certainly remains marginalized. By the time of the De Balneis Puteolanis et Baianis of Peter of Eboli (c.1160–c.1220) in the early thirteenth century even the name Balneum Ciceronis has slipped from common use. Peter’s account of the bath entitles it ‘Balnea de Prato’, a Latinization of ‘Bagni di Prato’, ‘Meadow Baths’, as they now seem generally to have been called, and the association with Cicero (his precise relationship to the bath long forgotten) is referred to pretty much in passing as a local tradition: Est aqua quam populi de Prato balnea dicunt: j Creditur a multis hoc Ciceronis opus (‘There are waters which the people call the Meadow Baths: it is commonly believed to be the work of Cicero.’) Whether it be a matter of high medieval culture or didactic genre, this poem has little time for antiquarianism. As KauVmann puts it, ‘The poem is clearly written from a medical or practical viewpoint, rather than from one of 34 Tomb of Hadrian: SHA, Hadr. 25.7 (cf. 27.3). Suetonius 289, 14–16 Roth (Teubner), from Jerome’s Chronicle, has the notice, M. Tullius Tiro Ciceronis libertus . . . in Puteolano praedio suo ad centesimum annum consenescit. 35 Annecchino (1938) 40 lyrically imagines how ‘nel volger dei secoli le salmodie dei monaci rompevano il tragico silenzio, incombente sulle colonne mozze, sulle statue infrante, sugli stipiti divelti, su tutte quelle fabbriche in rovina, ancora echeggianti, tra sterpi, rovi ed ortiche, dei fasti del glorioso passato’. 36 Zielinski (1912) 130: ‘man lass ihn hin und wieder, man sprach von ihm mit grosser Achtung, auch wenn man nicht recht wusste, ob er ein Dichter oder ein Prosaiker gewesen ist, und ob er mit Tullius zusammenfalle oder von ihm verschieden sei’.

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antiquarian interest’,37 and in general, despite its classical form and occasional classical allusions, the ancient world rarely impinges on the poem. All of which makes the diVerence between Peter and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), who discusses the springs a century and a half later, both striking and symptomatic of bigger cultural processes. Boccaccio’s De montibus, syluis, fontibus, lacubus, Xuminibus, stagnis seu paludibus, de nominibus maris (c.1355–7) is an alphabetical dictionary of geographical features category by category modelled on Vibius Sequester. Under de fontibus we Wnd the following: Ciceronis fons haud longe a Puteolis est calidas euomens aquas quae aegris oculis plurimum conferunt. Et ideo Ciceronis uocant quia in uilla eius quam Academiam uocauerat ea in uia quae ab Annio [sic] lacu fert Puteolos est. Nec tamen eo uiuente fons erat, sed breui interposito post eius necem tempore illam Antistio Vetere possidente eius in parte prima prorupit; 37 KauVmann (1959) 12; cf. Novati (1926) 632: ‘composto o no da un medico, il De balneis puteolanis e` un poema medico’. On the poem see also Raby (1934) 2.166–70. From being one of the most popular texts of the late Middle Ages (witness the numerous illuminated MSS to which KauVman’s book is devoted), the De Balneis experienced a precipitate fall from grace, and is now very hard to Wnd. It is included in J. C. Capacius’ Historia Puteolana (Naples, 1604), and the subsequent vernacular editions of the work under the title La vera antichita` di Pozzuolo (and the name G. C. Capaccio), Wrst published in Naples in 1607. The passage on the Bagni di Prato runs in full:

Balneum quod de Prato dicitur Est aqua quam populi de Prato balnea dicunt: creditur a multis hoc Ciceronis opus. est via diYcilis quae ducit ad inferiora in quibus inveniet quam petit eger aquam. haec bene visceribus fertur conferre molestis; alleviat corpus quod gravat humor inhers. dicitur et duros mire mollire lacertos, et caput et scapulas ad sua iura trahit. lipposos oculos declarat et ulcera tergit; in toto pariter corpore praestat opem. in sudore madens fugiat pro tempore frigus nec potum sumat dum sua membra calent.

The So-called ‘Meadow Baths’ There are waters which the people call the ‘Meadow Baths’: this is commonly believed to be the work of Cicero. There is an awkward path which leads to a lower level, where the sick man will Wnd the water he seeks. This water is said to be very good for troublesome guts; it relieves the body weighed down by the sluggish humour. It is also said to relax stiV arms marvellously, and to restore the head and shoulders to their proper functions. It clears bleary eyes and cleanses sores: it provides relief in the whole body equally. Whilst dripping with sweat the patient should avoid cold and should not take liquid whilst his limbs are hot.

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quem etiam Laurenas [sic] Tullius unus ex libertis olim Tullii carminibus celebrem reddidit, ut appareret clarum hominem dum uiueret scientia sua mentalibus mortalium oculis praestitisse medelam et eius post nomen eo defuncto praestare corporeis. Cicero’s spring is not far from from Puteoli. It spews out warm waters which are of the greatest beneWt to diseased eyes. It is called ‘Cicero’s’ because it is in a villa of his which he had called ‘The Academy’ on the road which leads from Lake Annius [sic] to Puteoli. There was no spring while Cicero was alive, however, but a short time after his death, when Antistius Vetus was in ownership of the villa, it burst forth in its front part. Laurenas [sic] Tullius, once one of Tullius’ freedmen, rendered it famous in poetry, with the result that it appeared that the brilliant man whilst alive had provided a cure for the minds’ eyes of men by his wisdom, and thereafter his name, once he was dead, provided it to the eyes of the body.

Peter of Eboli presented his knowledge of the baths as a matter of empirical observation, peppering his accounts of the various baths near Puteoli and Baiae with statements of autopsy like quod proprio uidi lumine testor ego (‘Balneum quod Pugillus dicitur’) and rem loquor expertam proprio quam lumine uidi (‘Balneum quod de Arcu dicitur’). Boccaccio was the author of the Decameron, of course, but more importantly for our purposes a friend of Petrarch; and his account of the baths is in various ways characteristic of the style of humanism he represented. In contrast to Peter, Boccaccio seems to owe little to direct observation of the site, and a great deal to his reading of the texts of antiquity: all the material here, besides the concluding sententia, is derived directly, sometimes verbatim, from Pliny, and even the concluding sententia mimics the structure of Pliny’s account. Consequently the multifarious uses of the water testiWed to by Peter have narrowed to the only one which has the authority of Antiquity, the treatment of eye complaints, and a later reference to the baths by Gioviano Pontano in his (posthumous) Hendecasyllaborum libri of 150538 shows that the Renaissance interpretation of the bath continued to be so restricted. Cupid has angered Pallas, and been blinded as a result; he resorts to the Tulliana lympha, ‘water of Cicero’, for a cure.39 Here the ‘Awakening of 38 On this text, and Pontano’s contribution to the Catullan tradition in general, see Gaisser (1993) 220–33. 39 Pontano 2.37.80–98, in the edition of Monti Sabia (1978): Cumanos puer ut sinus peserrans

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Europe’ can actually be seen to be responsible for an impoverishment of the narrative of place (initially at least, before myth-makers like Pontano took a hand), the multiple functions of Peter’s bath (among which anything to do with eyes has only a small place) giving way to a simple awe of the name of Cicero exempliWed by Boccaccio’s odd formulation, eius post nomen . . . praestare corporeis. The most telling detail of Boccaccio’s account, however, is the corruption Annio lacu for Auerno lacu. That this originated with Boccaccio is proved by the presence of an Annius lacus in the De lacubus section of Boccaccio’s work. Boccaccio was not a textual critic. As PfeiVer puts it, he ‘stood Wrm to the pre-critical tradition’ in his recovery of the ancient inheritance, ‘satisWed with the recovery of the codices40 without attempting any feat of textual criticism’;41 and his response to the corruption of his text of Pliny is clearly one of pretty abject respect for the tradition. Presented with an Annius lacus, intravit placidos lacus et ipsis lavit fontibus ac calente lympha (ter ludens oculos puer lavabat, ter natans puer ora surrigabat), illi candida lux repente fulsit, fulserunt nitidae ad latus pharetrae, eVulsit nitor aureus metalli, fulserunt nitidi lacus sinusque, fulsit plus solito serenus aer et toto micuere litore undae. Tum felix Amor et puer deusque tinxit spicula fervidis in undis, mox laeto pariter salutat ore: ‘Salvete, o liquidi lacus et undae, salvete, o latices mihi salubres, o salve mihi, Tulliana lympha, de cuius merito resumo tela, cuius munere et hic resurgit arcus.’ When the boy, traversing the bays of Cumae, entered the calm lakes and bathed in the very springs and the hot water (thrice in play the boy bathed his eyes, thrice as he swam the boy splashed his face), suddenly his bright sight shone, the gleaming quiver at his side shone, the golden gleam of the metal shone, the gleaming lakes and bays shone, the clear sky shone even more than it usually does, and the waters glittered along the whole shore. Then Love, happy boy and god, dipped his arrows in the bubbling waters and then with joyful face and voice hails: ‘Good health, o limpid lakes and waters, good health to you, o liquid which brings me health, o I wish you good health, Ciceronian water, by whose kindness I take up my weapons again, by whose gift this bow also is restored.’ 40 For Boccaccio’s activities in this area see Reynolds and Wilson (1991) 132–4. 41 PfeiVer (1976) 23.

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and unprepared to interrogate the text, Boccaccio tried to Wnd it instead. Unsurprisingly, he is hard put to locate it: Annius lacus Puteolis uicinus est quem ego arbitror hodie Sudatorii lacum uocari a balneo quod in eius est margine, cum lacus alter praeter hunc in partibus illis innominatus sit. Lake Annius is close to Puteoli. I think that today it is called the lake of the Sweating Room from the bath which is located on its shore, since no other lake besides this one is mentioned in those parts.

The Balneum Sudatorium with which Boccaccio tries to identify Cicero’s bath is now the (wonderfully titled) Stufe di S. Germano, a steam bath on Lake Agnano, east of Puteoli. Boccaccio has some local knowledge, then, but it remains the kind derived from reading rather than immediate familiarity: innominatus seems to mean ‘not mentioned’ (that is, in a text). This humanist felt no strong need to consult real geography, then; his account of the fons Ciceronis fully exempliWes his infamous (albeit somewhat playful) remark at the end of the De montibus: mallem potius eorum autoritati quam oculis credere meis (‘I would rather believe the authority of ancient authors than my own eyes.’) With the ‘library-bound’ Boccaccio the geography of our part of Campania becomes almost exclusively a function of the classical literary tradition, and as a consequence the Balneum Ciceronis was lost, victim of scribal error in the text of Pliny which Boccaccio was consulting. But the development of humanism,42 not to mention better texts, eVected some form of reconciliation between place and text, and in the process the bath was rediscovered. The interest in antiquity of Flavio Biondo (1392–1463)43 took the particular form of a fascination for its surviving physical remains. In the Italia illustrata, ‘Italy revealed’ rather than ‘Italy illustrated’, composed between 1448 and 1458, Biondo set out to convey the continuing presence of the antique landscape in the contemporary. If Boccaccio marks an extreme case of viewing the landscape of Italy through the 42 On the limitations of Boccaccio’s engagement with the remains of Antiquity see Weiss (1969) 43–6. 43 On Biondo’s life and works see, succinctly, Weiss (1969) 66–73, 108. On the ‘antiquarian’ strand of humanism represented by Flavio Biondo, see Grafton (1996) 218–19. Cf. Moatti (1993) 36: ‘Poggio Bracciolini, Bernardo Rucellai, and especially Flavio Biondo were the Wrst to compare texts with inscriptions and remains.’

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Classics, Biondo’s perception of the Italian countryside was also structured in fairly obvious ways by his humanist preoccupations. Italy, in Biondo’s eyes, was an ancient landscape requiring to be rediscovered,44 and his apprehension of the landscape was consequently profoundly informed by ancient literature, thoroughly examined by him at the Wrst stage of composition of the Italia illustrata.45 But Biondo’s ambition to restore ancient Italy (Boccaccio’s aim was essentially the less ambitious one of elucidating ancient texts) drew him out of the library and into the landscape, and thus it was that in the spring of 1452, with his guide Prospero Camogli,46 an excited Biondo visited Cumae, Baiae, and the vicinity. He singles out one bath building of many:47 Sunt et aliae pene similes thermae illis propinquae, quarum conditoris et nominis notitiam habere nequiuimus. Sed balneum longe infra Avernum petentibus et Lucrinum est obuium, nedum aediWcii structuram sed et picturam quoque aliqua ex parte integram conseruans, in quo uersuum pars pictorum extat, ex quorum uerbis carptim lectis coniicere licet, id fuisse Ciceronis balneum, cui id carmen libertum eius adscripsisse Plinius asserit. There are other more or less similar hot baths close to these ones, knowledge of the builder and name of which we were unable to obtain. But there is a bath some distance below on the way to Avernus and the Lucrine which preserves intact not only the fabric of the building but also the decoration as well to a certain extent. On it survive the remains of painted verses; and from the words of them, read in bits and pieces, it is possible to infer48 that it

44 Cf. Moatti (1993) 36 on Biondo’s earlier, parallel work on surviving ancient monuments, the Roma instaurata: ‘The very title of Biondo’s book Roma instaurata (Rome restored ) revealed the aim of these new topographers : to rebuild Rome by scholarly evocation, which was just as important as physical restoration’; Weiss (1969) 66–7, also on the Roma instaurata : ‘[Roman remains] were irresistibly attractive to him, . . . as he saw in them a tangible proof, the still living part of the city’s ancient glory. . . . to abandon these relics now would have been tantamount to forsaking . . . what had been Roman civilization. . . . To see, but above all to show to others, what classical Rome had been, was in his view imperative.’ 45 See Clavuot (1990); and for a broader view of the ‘library-bound’ nature of humanist research see Grafton (1997). 46 Clavuot (1990), 50. 47 Italia illustrata (Basle, 1531) 414. 48 A coniectura, in Biondo’s Latin, means an ‘inference’ rather than a ‘guess’; cf. p. 413 on the Sibyl’s grotto at Cumae: cauerna . . . quam Sibyllae antrum fuisse socius

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was the bath of Cicero, for whom Pliny states that his freedman wrote up the poem.

The process of selection and interpretation of material in accordance with the viewer’s priorities is quite explicit here (Sunt et aliae . . . sed), and not only from Biondo’s omission of any reference to contemporary structures. Nevertheless, Biondo’s proto-archaeological method, it turns out, had rediscovered not only the bath of Cicero but also the inscribed poem of Tullius Laurea which Pliny had seen and copied there fourteen hundred years previously.

V I must confess to Wnding the notion of Biondo discovering the traces of Laurea’s poem there, on the wall, still extant a millennium and a half after its and their creation extraordinarily compelling. Don, I suspect, would have suggested that this was because Biondo’s discovery is a rather blatant reiWcation of the phantasy (as he would have it) which I share with much of the classical profession of the possibility of some kind of direct communion with the ancient world—the impulse to ‘ground’ interpretation of text, to Wnd meaning out there. Classics, according to this paradigm, is a process of searching and discovery, of the relocation of meaning; and Biondo’s stumbling upon this text etched on the wall of the Balneum Ciceronis makes a powerful metaphor for the classical project, as traditionally conceived. Don’s mantra was, on the contrary, that ‘meaning is constructed, not discovered’, but even more relevant in this connection is his piece on memorialization, ‘The Ruin of Time: Monuments and Survival at Rome’,49 and his discussion there of what he terms the ‘venatic paradigm’ in classical scholarship:

itineris nostri Prosper Camuleius uir doctus eam ingressus quibusdam coniecturis aYrmauit. In general Biondo makes a very reliable witness. It was not in his character to jump to conclusions: see Reeve (1996) 37–9 on his exposure of GeoVrey of Monmouth and other examples of his rigorous scholarship. 49 Fowler (2000) ch. 9.

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The two processes of cleaning and restoration—as boasted of by Augustus in his Res gestae—Wnd a common metaphorical centre in museology and archaeology, but they are also part of what Alfo¨ldy called ‘steinerne Detektivarbeit’, ‘stone detective work’. Beginning from the traces left us by antiquity, we solve the crime by following up the clues: what from a historical point of view is the end-point, the nail-holes left as the letters of history fall away, is for the modern scholar the beginning. The process was discussed in a famous essay ‘Spie’ or ‘Clues’ by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who tried to identify a particular historical moment in which the paradigm of the ‘clue’ came to the fore. He settled on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Wgures of Freud, Sherlock Holmes, and Giovanni Morelli, the art historian who pioneered the techniques of connoisseurship later familiar from the work of Berenson, and for classicists forever associated with Sir John Beazley. Central to the work of each Wgure was the venatic paradigm, by which from small clues we hunt down the truth: mud on the boots, a slip of the tongue, the shape of an ear, all these natural signs, if rightly interpreted by a master semiologist, enable our detectives to track down the truth. (200–1)

‘We all know by now’, Don continues, provocatively, ‘that it cannot be done.’ Well this classicist stills Wnds himself loath to abandon the venatic paradigm: indeed there is, it seems to me, a very ‘Holmesian’ quality to Biondo’s ex quorum uerbis carptim lectis coniicere licet . . . , several centuries before Freud, Morelli, or Conan Doyle. But what Don teaches me to recognize is the tellingly, richly arbitrary nature of the process of naming and description at the heart of the act of commemoration on which this paper has been concentrating. Hot water rises to ground level, a not unprecedented occurrence in the volcanic region of the Phlegraean Fields; Vetus and Laurea place it under the sign of Cicero, legitimizing the naming with not much more than the poetic conceit of lines 9–10 of Laurea’s elegy, and the fact that the naming rests so heavily on literary play (play, moreover, of debatable felicity) is bound to exacerbate our sense of its wild arbitrariness.50 Indeed, the very elaboration of this act of naming 50 There is perhaps something inherently odd about a bath acting as a monument to Cicero. The awkwardness of his association with something so essentially trivial comes across particularly strongly in a passage like that of Pontano. On the other hand, no less a Wgure than Hercules was associated with bath foundation, in the Phlegraean Fields and elsewhere—see Leigh (2000)—and emperors later followed his lead.

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bespeaks the absence of any true connection between springs and Cicero. Thereafter the history of the baths up to and into the Renaissance is in important respects an ongoing struggle to assert that name and interpretation and meaning of some warm, bubbly water in preference to any other. No easy task: ‘Nothing is more changeable than the meaning of a monument.’51 A passage of Greek poetry describing the springs preserved by Stobaeus,52 which makes no 51 Fowler (2000) 206. And thus Philip Hardie, G&R 48 (2001) 90 (from a review of Roman Constructions): ‘A monument aims to stabilize the past, but paradoxically is always the starting-point for new interpretations . . . In that sense this book is a monument, one that will stimulate and enable others to construct their own readings and interpretations, as Don Fowler so memorably did in life.’ 52 ‘Heliodorus’ (RE 8.15.49 V.) apud Stobaeus, Anth. 100.6 (III, p. 244 Meineke, 4.36.8 Wachsmuth and Hense) seems certainly to be referring to the Balneum Ciceronis. This is an excerpt from a Homerizing didactic text apparently entitled Æ æØŒa (since the MS reading ÆºØŒa would surely render the opening word of the passage redundant) ¨Æ Æ Æ or ¨ Æ Æ_ which describes waters good for eye complaints near Mons Gaurus (modern Mte Barbaro, a short distance north-east of the site of the Cumanum). Gowers (1993) 54, following Kiessling and Heinze (1921), ad loc., makes the extremely attractive identiWcation with Horace’s travelling companion in Serm.1.5. Her further suggestion that Horace’s ‘Heliodorus’ is not a man but a book, ‘a kind of ‘‘Companion Guide to Southern Italy’’ ’, can be retained even if Meineke’s emendation to Æ æØŒ is adopted. What more appropriate book than a kind of home health encyclopaedia for the hypochondriac satirist of 1.5, whose lippitudo (30–31) would have beneWted from a dip in Cicero’s springs? Æº P ººe æ Ø Œº ˆÆıæÆc æ Ø ›Ø ø Kd ºÆØa ŒŒºØ ÆØ, IæªÆ Øg u_ KŒ ƒ oøæ IØ¡ Ø ºÆ ØŒæe IÆFÆØ ØØ . ŒE ºı ıºØ æØÆØ ÆØ Iæ oøæ Zø ¼ºŒÆæ ıØ· › b º æE Æ ø Æh ø, ZæÆ Œ F K oÆ Ø ªıEÆ ŒÆŁæfi, OŁÆº f ºæØØ º IæÆæHØ ŒÆº łÆ ÆØ, ‰ ¥ Ø ÆæÆæ fi æŒ Yø ªæe Kd ªº· e ªaæ ¼ºª ÆY Ø K Ø. n Œ º æfi B ºfi ıŒÆ Z Iººfi O ÆØ, ŒæØÆ I d Ø HÆ r ØÆºØØ æØæØŁfi B ºØØ Œfiø ŒÆæØ K Ø ŒÆd IÆºb Z Æ ØBÆØ I b IŒºØ · ¼Ææ Ie AÆ ºŁ Łı ÆŒc O , ÞÆ ¼ºŁ ÆØ oÆ Ø F. In Italy, not far beyond the peak of Gaurus, a place slopes away to the left of travellers, white as snow. From it shoots water very bitter to breathe and drink. In that water the vine-rich men who live about have a protection for the eyes. He who wants a bath only in order to clean his limbs in the water covers his eyes with lids tightly shut before he

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mention of Cicero at all, is a good reminder of the ‘partiality’ of the name: either their author ‘Heliodorus’ did not make the connection with Cicero, or Stobaeus excerpted the piece in such a way as to omit what was (from his Greek, Wfth-century, pedagogical point of view) not a relevant detail. The situation is telling either way. Obviously, giving names to places is an assertion of control, I wrote earlier; but equally obviously, that control is automatically open to contestation: the city known as Derry or Londonderry or Doire stands out, but the contemporary examples are legion.53 It behoves me in turn to be conscious of the ideologies and power systems which have insisted upon the description ‘Ciceronian’ from Vetus’ day onwards: the Roman system of patronage, as it impacted on ex-slaves and junior aristocrats, and the peculiar twists it took on under the early Principate, which constructed the springs as Cicero’s in the Wrst place; the veneration of, and nostalgia for, the classical period among members of the imperial elite like Pliny and Silius,54 not to mention the Augustan elite (including Vetus) to whom Augustus’ rehabilitation of the memory of Cicero was playing, which maintained them as such through antiquity; the Neapolitan nationalism expressed through assertions of a special relationship between the Duchy of Naples and the vestiges of antiquity—be they the Byzantine Empire, the ‘tomb of Virgil’ (a Wgure also popularly credited with the foundation of baths in the Phlegraean Fields), or a ‘bath of Cicero’—which was presumably mainly responsible for preserving Cicero’s association with the location drenches himself, so that no liquid may pass inside the barrier to the eyeball: for that is a cause of pain. But whoever is distressed with pains, his eyes covered with a rheumy cloud, and whoever has swelling around the curved lower lids, hanging down with thick pus, for him it is appropriate and safe to wet the eye wide-open and unfastened. Forthwith all heart-biting pain is quite ended, and the disease is easily healed by the water. 53 Cf. Benvenisti (2000) esp. 11–54. Benvenisti describes the process whereby the newly established state of Israel replaced Arabic with Hebrew toponyms, and the ongoing Palestinian resistance to this assertion of cultural and political hegemony. More clearly than most such instances the new map of Israel encoded a perception of the ‘true nature’ of the landscape being described. 54 On the Neronian and Flavian construction of ‘Golden Age’ Latin literature as classics, see Mayer (1982) 317–18. Cf. Isager (1991) 223–9, esp. 229: ‘in spite of everything this is a laudatio of Rome, a clear signal of the coming new times and of the revival of ancient virtues that are being promulgated by the Flavian dynasty’; Conte (1994) 491–2 for the connoisseur Silius’ ‘museumlike conception of literature’; and Feeney (1991) 302.

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(just) through the Middle Ages;55 and the privileging of things ancient—Cicero and his works especially—by humanism which reasserted Cicero’s proprietorship so forcibly in the Renaissance; not forgetting myself, aspiring to compose a paper relevant and interesting for classicists, and to do appropriate honour to Don: they needed to be Cicero’s springs, not springs good for conjunctivitis, or sciatica, let alone plain volcanic phenomena without any meaning or useful function at all. The end comes for the baths, and this paper, on 29 September 1538, when geophysical processes in the vicinity of the Lucrine lake related to those that created the a_quae Ciceronianae in the Wrst place eVaced what remained of the Balneum Ciceronis, reduced the lake by more than half its size and in the course of a single day threw up a cone of ash still known, Wve hundred years after the event, as Monte Nuovo. And yet, and yet—ends, as Don has often shown, can never be so deWnite. Somehow the name of Cicero Xoated free of this catastrophe. Capaccio’s True History of Pozzuoli, originally written some seventy years after the eruption,56 talks of the villa of Cicero as something still substantially extant, something (crucially, for Capaccio’s purposes) of which the townspeople can still be proud: aediWcii amplitudinem id quod parietinarum reliqui est patefacit.57 In the subsequent Italian editions Capaccio supplements the description a little (pp. 143–4), but in a way which fails to convince that he has any real idea where the place is, or was. At any rate, the general map of the area to be found opposite page 84 in the 1652 edition, perhaps trying to make sense of Capaccio’s (deliberately?) vague topographical information, locates the villa at a safe distance from Monte Nuovo, nowhere near its true site.58 Utter physical annihilation, it seems, was but a blip in the history of Cicero’s villa, which has simply migrated a couple of miles down the coast. The confusion is probably, at least in 55 On the nationalistic dimension of the Neapolitan myths of Virgil, speciWcally, see Comparetti (1997) 283–5. It is worth considering whether Peter of Eboli’s suppression of such material might have something to do with his loyalty to the imperial cause, and suspicion of material associated with Neapolitan autonomy. For Peter’s politics, see Novati (1926). 56 For this text and its various editions see n. 37. 57 Historia Puteolana 46–7. 58 Maps and images of the contemporary topography of the Phlegraean Fields are available online at http://www.ulixes.it/

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part, a consequence of the conXation of the two Ciceronian villas in the area, the Cumanum and the Puteolanum, and this conXation is also behind Baedeker’s identiWcation of the villa ‘which the orator in imitation of Plato called his Academy, and where he composed his ‘‘Academica’’ ’ with ‘a few fragments’ of ancient buildings two miles east of Monte Nuovo, on the outskirts of Pozzuoli.59 But we hardly need a speciWc case of misidentiWcation or confusion like this one to appreciate the point that, so far as exiguous remains (those ‘few fragments’) such as Baedeker points out to his reader are concerned, the denotation of a place in nature is not the real issue: there isn’t, after all, very much to name. The truth is that the urge to deploy the name ‘Cicero’ is stronger than any impulse to identify a topographical feature, for an Augustan aristocrat, Victorian tourist, Renaissance humanist, or contemporary classicist. As recently as 1896 the tourist urge was drawing viewers to the Balneum Ciceronis, and its actual location didn’t much matter. To which Don’s response would certainly have been: ‘Did it ever?’ 59 Baedeker (1896), 97, and maps between pp. 92 and 93.

7 Contrasts Philip Hardie

In this paper I explore the history of a certain kind of literary criticism, with a view to raising questions about the origins, uses, and legitimacy of opposition and contrast as ways of constructing reading practices. The contrast is that between two authors, Virgil and Ovid, who have been the subjects of much of my own work. My Wrst book was on the Aeneid (1986), my most recent is on Ovid (2002). ReXecting on the diVerence between my own reading practices in these two books, I am conscious of the great debt I owe to Don and his work. An interest in the ways that texts construct and deconstruct authority, both literary and political; an awareness of the need to tell stories, and also of the contingency of such stories; an eye for the dynamics of closure and segmentation—these are some of the areas in which I am aware of having been sensitized by Don’s example. In recent years Ovid has emerged as perhaps the privileged author for Latinists of a post-structuralist and postmodernist inclination. Don, in fact, wrote relatively little on Ovid,1 perhaps too easy and obvious a target for his own po-mo criticism. One of the standard moves of recent criticism in its construction of a postmodernist Ovid The greater part of this piece is closely based on an inaugural lecture, delivered on 2 May 2003. The impulse to think through some of the issues relating to the contrastive criticism of Virgil and Ovid came from two conferences organized by Joe Farrell and Damien Nelis, one on Virgil, at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, the other on Ovid, at Trinity College Dublin in 2002. 1 With the notable exception of a brilliant Lacanian jeu d’esprit, ‘Pyramus, Thisbe, King Kong: Ovid and the Presence of Poetry’, in Fowler (2000) 156–67.

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has been to reformulate a long-standing contrast, and one that indeed goes back to Ovid himself, between Virgil and Ovid. What are the uses of this dichotomy, and what are its limitations? What factors precondition us to construct literary and cultural histories through binary oppositions? Should we resist the gravitational pull of such polarization? Modern binarisms bear the mark of the intellectual history of the twentieth century: the polarizations of structuralism; the two-party contests of ideological criticism. Literary-critical oppositions have been fed by the dichotomizing habits of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury art history, articulating an alternation between classical and mannerist, or classical and baroque, styles of representation. But contrast is one of the oldest modes of literary criticism, rooted in ancient practice in the literary contest, agon, and the literary comparison, syncrisis.2 This kind of criticism is particularly at home when directed at, or contained within, genres of literature themselves founded on themes and structures of contestation, such as epic and drama. Thus the, possibly fourth-century bc, Contest of Homer and Hesiod matches against each other the two outstanding representatives of early Greek hexameter poetry.3 When Rome came to match herself against the cultural achievements of a Greek world militarily her inferior, she naturally reached for Greek models of ‘compare and contrast’, lending to them a Roman colouring. In this translingual and transcultural contest, the archetypal pairing is of the supreme epic poets in each language, Homer and Virgil—the contrast with which Quintilian begins his comparative survey of Greek and Latin authors (Inst. 10.1.85–6). Professorial questions also formed part of pretentious dinner-table conversation, if we can believe Juvenal’s disgusted portrayal of the bluestocking (6.434–7): ‘Worse still is the woman who’s hardly settled for dinner before she starts praising Virgil, Wnds excuses for doomed Dido, matches and compares the poets, weighing up Virgil and Homer in opposite scales.’ (illa tamen grauior, quae cum discumbere coepit j laudat Vergilium, periturae ignoscit Elissae, j committit uates et comparat, inde Maronem j atque alia parte in trutina 2 Focke (1923) esp. 339–48 ‘Die literarische Kritik’. 3 Graziosi (2002) 168–80.

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suspendit Homerum.) Juvenal has already complained about women who take up gladiatorial exercise (246–67); the bluestocking now pits Virgil and Homer against each other in a Wgurative arena: the military sense of committit, ‘set together in a Wght’, activates a pun in comparat: literary-critical ‘comparison’ becomes a ‘matching’ of a pair, par, of Wghters or gladiators, giving a Roman colouring to the Greek practice of criticism by comparison.4 The two epic poets enter the lists like the heroes of whom they sing: in his Wrst satire Juvenal contrasts the danger faced by the satirist of retaliation by his victims with the easy life of the epic poet (162–3): ‘You can safely match Aeneas against Werce Turnus; no one is oVended when Achilles is the target.’ (securus licet Aenean Rutulumque ferocem j committas, nulli grauis est percussus Achilles.) par quod semper habemus, ‘the eternal gladiatorial pair’, as Lucan says (7.695), referring to the matching of Freedom and Caesar in the Wgurative amphitheatre of his epic on the Roman Civil War5—a very diVerent context for the gladiatorial image, but a context which, as I shall show, is not totally alien to literary matchings. The contrastive pairing of Homer and Virgil continues through the Renaissance. The palm is awarded to Virgil over Homer by the early sixteenth-century neo-Latin, neo-Virgilian poet Girolamo Vida, acclaiming the Latin poet’s hands-down defeat of the poets of Greece (De arte poetica 1.170–73): ‘this one poet through his outstanding genius and art far outstripped the divine bards of the Greek race, with his golden and immortal song. Greece herself, for all that she admires great Homer, 4 comparo: e.g. Cicero, Q. Fr. 3.4.2 cum Aesernino Samnite Pacideianus comparatus; Livy 30.28.8 Scipio et Hannibal, uelut ad supremum certamen comparati duces. committo: e.g. Propertius 2.3.19–22 (what it was about Cynthia that ensnared the poet) et quantum, Aeolio cum temptat carmina plectro, j par Aganippeae ludere docta lyrae, j et sua cum antiquae committit scripta Corinnae j carminaque Erinnae non putat aequa suis, a passage that was perhaps in Juvenal’s mind, especially given the prominent reference to Propertius’ Cynthia at Juv. 6.7. The bluestocking is a docta puella, an elegiac woman on top, taken to an extreme. Propertius Wnds this kind of literary match more sexy than does Horace: see below. At Mart. 7.24.1–4 cum Iuuenale meo quae me committere temptas, j quid non audebis, perWda lingua, loqui? j te Wngente nefas Pyladen odisset Orestes, j Thesea Pirithoi destituisset amor . . . the joke seems to be that literary-critical ‘matching’ is taken at the level of social amicitia. 5 Luc. 7.693–6 sic et Thessalicae post te pars maxima pugnae j non iam Pompei nomen populare per orbem j nec studium belli, sed par quod semper habemus, j libertas et Caesar erit.

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is amazed’ (unus hic ingenio praestanti, gentis Achivae j divinos vates longe superavit, et arte, j aureus, immortale sonans. stupet ipsa, pavetque, j quamvis ingentem miretur Graecia Homerum); and, with a gladiatorial animosity, by Julius Caesar Scaliger in the comparison of the two poets in his 1561 Poetics.6 The seventeenth-century Virgilian commentator Juan Luis de la Cerda observes that Scaliger rages against Homer as if he were an enemy (Scaliger, qui non tam in Homerum, quam in hostem aliquem videtur exarsisse). In these sixteenth-century authors the contest between Homer and Virgil is for supremacy on the Weld of epic poetry conceived as a single and continuous space. It was only with the advent of a properly historical criticism at the end of the eighteenth century that the diVerence between the two poets could be understood as a diVerence in the circumstances of production of the Homeric and Virgilian epics, and this coincided with a violent reversal of the relative valuation of the two poets, as part of a wider elevation of Greek over Roman culture. Henry Nettleship’s 1875 Suggestions Introductory to a Study of the Aeneid is an early example of a more sympathetic reading of Virgil; Nettleship observes that the ‘defects’ of Virgil are ‘forcibly dwelt upon by those critics who are mostly content with comparing Vergil (as the phrase is) with Homer’.7 The comparison with Homer continued to be the starting-point for criticism of Virgil long after the full rehabilitation of the Roman poet, for example in Brooks Otis’s inXuential Virgil, a Study in Civilized Poetry, or Georg Knauer’s deWnitive Die Aeneis und Homer, published close together in 1963 and 1964. From the latter part of the twentieth century, in a major reconWguration of studies of Latin poetry, the pair Homer and Virgil has been challenged for critical attention by the pair Virgil and Ovid. A marked rise in the valuation of Ovid’s poetry made possible a synkrisis of the two Augustan writers not in terms of quality, but in terms of what are claimed to be far-reaching diVerences in artistic goals and methods. 6 Scaliger (1561), reversing Poliziano’s judgement in his Oratio in expositione Homeri: dicturus de Homero vate, doctrinarum omnium atque ingeniorum auctore et principe. See Shepard (1961). De la Cerda subscribes to Scaliger’s judgement. On the eventual triumph of Homer see Finsler (1912). 7 Nettleship (1885) 101.

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For this a closer analogy in ancient literary-critical practice than the comparison of Homer and Virgil might be found in the agon in Aristophanes’ Frogs, the contest between the tragic poets Aeschylus and Euripides. Donald Russell has described this as ‘the Wrst evidence we have for this ‘‘consensus dichotomy’’ of types of writing . . . in a context which does not encourage us to take it too seriously’.8 Serious or not, this kind of dichotomy has been remarkably tenacious of life. The Aristophanic contest between Aeschylus and Euripides matches two poets whose lifetimes overlapped, in a clash of political and cultural values as much as of narrower literary values: the table of opposites that modern critics Wnd inscribed in Aristophanes’ agon includes: polis v. oikos, public v. private; inspiration v. technique; oldfashioned v. new-fangled; heroic, glamorous v. ‘unglamorized’; conventional v. rebellious; masculine v. feminine.9 In the words of one critic, Euripides embodies ‘the divisive and centrifugal forces of relativism, irresponsible rhetoric, and in general the new education, while Aeschylus stands for the staunch beliefs and public solidarity of the days of Marathon.’10 It has long been recognized that some of the Aristophanic contrasts between Aeschylus and Euripides are reproduced, probably through direct imitation, in the programmatic poetics of the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, whence they descend to the manifestos of the Roman ‘new poets’.11 We have learned not to underestimate the political and ideological content of either Hellenistic poetry or late Republican Latin neoteric poetry, but it is still fair to say that both in third-century bc Alexandria and mid Wrst-century bc Rome the contrasts of the Aristophanic agon are to an extent depoliticized, with a relative shift into the sphere of the aesthetic. When the late Republican opposition of old-fashioned versus new-fangled is reincarnated in the pairing oV of Virgil versus Ovid, the ideological charge of the Wfth-century Attic opposition between Aeschylus and Euripides is revived in all its force. Ovid achieves this partly through focusing the contrast on the single genre of epic. While it is true, as Stephen Harrison has put it, that most of Ovid’s oeuvre can be read 8 Russell (1981) 7. 9 Lada-Richards (1999) ch. 8. 10 Whitman (1964) 232. 11 PfeiVer (1968) 137–8; Hopkinson (1988) 89–91; Cairns (1979) 8–10.

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as the expansion and diversiWcation of elegy as a ‘supergenre’,12 it is also true that from the Wrst word of the Amores, arma (‘arms’), Ovid’s generic evolutions stage a constant matching of epic against elegy, and often against elegy-as-epic, elegy as the continuation of epic by other means. Ovid thus engineers a conXict within the genre of epic that will reach its logical conclusion with the composition of the Metamorphoses, the colossal hexameter poem that now matches itself against the Aeneid on its own generic, epic terms, in a relationship that mirrors broadly the Aristophanic contest within that other supremely political genre, tragedy, between Aeschylus and Euripides. On his way to the underworld where he will judge the contest between the two tragedians, Dionysus crosses an infernal lake and engages in a shouting match with the titular chorus of frogs, a parodic song competition that foreshadows the main agon of the Frogs. Pulling more and more energetically on the oars of his rowboat of comedy, the god of Attic drama outperforms the frogs in their refrain of brekekekex koax koax. The frogs, however, are not silenced, and continue to croak metapoetically in Latin poetry of the triumviral and Augustan period. In Satires 1.4 Horace tells us that the inventor of Roman satire, Lucilius, was entirely derivative of the Attic Old Comedians, Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes. The next poem, Satires 1.5, makes good this tendentious claim by casting Horace’s journey to Brindisi as a rewriting of the Aristophanic journey of Dionysus to the underworld in the Frogs.13 On his journey Horace is plagued by the sounds of obstreperous rivalries, kept awake at night by the croaking of swamp-dwelling frogs, ranae palustres, an accompaniment to the lowest form of human poetic contest, a drunken sailor and a passenger exchanging songs to an absent girlfriend. Later on, at dinner table in the villa of one of the politicians with whom Horace is travelling, the guests are treated to a slightly more elevated agon, a mock-heroic exchange (56 pugnam) of abuse between the buVoon (scurra), Sarmentus and Messius Cicirrus, in a satiric mishmash of Aristophanic animal masque,14 satyr play and 12 Harrison (2002) 79. 13 The following is indebted to Cucchiarelli (2001) ch. 1. 14 According to Hesychius ŒŒØææ means ‘cock’; Sarmentus compares Cicirrus to a wild horse or unicorn: is Cicirrus then a ƒÆºŒ æı, an Aeschylean beast (Ran. 935, followed by Euripides’ claim to have slimmed tragedy), confronting the

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paratragedy,15 and gladiatorial entertainment. We are on the borders of Campania, where it was the practice to invite pairs of gladiators to perform at dinner parties.16 Elsewhere Horace uses the gladiatorial image explicitly, and with distaste, to refer both to verbal contests of which he is a spectator,17 and to those in which he himself is a participant, but from which he would rather stand aloof. In a contest between a lyric poet and an elegiac poet (Epist. 2.2.97–8): ‘We receive blows and wear down our enemy with as many blows, gladiators in a duel dragged out until lighting-up time.’ (caedimur et totidem plagis consumimus hostem j lento Samnites ad lumina prima duello.) This distaste for the gladiatorial agon is of a piece with Horace’s aversion to the synkrisis, the binary comparing and weighing of authors, as a literary-critical procedure.18 ‘ ‘‘This arena is not to my liking’’, I cry, and ask for an intermission. This sport leads to an excited and angry contest.’ (‘displicet iste locus’ clamo et diludia posco. j ludus enim genuit trepidum certamen et iram) says Horace at the end of the Wrst book of Epistles (1.19.47–8), referring to the kind of competitive literary backbiting that encouraged this kind of judgement. Allusion by enclosure technique to the ludus of Epistles 1.1.3 ensures that we hear the gladiatorial in diludia, ludus, certamen. A suspicion of glib schematization and unshaded contrast is all-pervasive in Horace’s literary criticism and literary practice. Ovid has more of a taste than Horace for literary scraps, but he is also aware of their dangers. The sixth book of the Metamorphoses includes a number of stories about literary contests and contrasts. The last of these is a musical agon stripped to its barest essentials, the contest between Apollo and Marsyas (382–400). Of the contest itself we are told only that Marsyas was defeated; the narrative focuses on unglamorous—Euripidean—Sarmentus (sarmentum ‘brushwood’), of servile origin and low occupation, gracilis atque pusillus (69)? 15 The tragic connection, 63–4 pastorem saltaret uti Cyclopa rogabat: j nil illi larua aut tragicis opus esse cothurnis. 16 Gowers (1993) 65 n. 59: ‘Strabo C250 notes that the Campanians used to invite gladiators in pairs to perform at dinners.’ 17 The battle royal between Messius Cicirrus and Sarmentus is paralleled by the gladiatorial verbal sparring between Rupilius Rex and Persius in Satires 1.7.19–20 (Rupili et Persi par pugnat, uti non j compositum melius cum Bitho Bacchius). 18 On Horace’s dislike of syncrisis as a form of literary criticism see Feeney (2002a); see also Feeney (2002b) 178–9.

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the subsequent punishment inXicted by Apollo, the Xaying of Marsyas alive. Ovid goes beyond the routinely gladiatorial to an equation of literary detraction with a grotesque violation of physical integrity, in an extreme example of the writing of literary criticism on the body: ‘quid me mihi detrahis?’ shouts Marsyas, as his skin is ripped from him, proof that detraction directs its violence above all to the living.19 Within the sequence of tales in Book 6 of the Metamorphoses recollection of the story of Marsyas and Apollo is prompted by association with the previous tale about the boorish Lycian farmers who refused a drink of water from their lake to the goddess Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana, to whom she had just given birth. The punishment of the Lycian farmers is to be metamorphosed into brothers of the Aristophanic frogs, condemned to imitate in Latin the refrain of brekekekex koax koax (376): ‘Though under water, under water they still try to utter abuse.’ (quamuis sint sub aqua, sub aqua maledicere temptant)20 But we will understand that a deeper association connects the two stories of the Lycian farmers and of Marsyas, when we spot the metapoetic content of the story of the Lycian farmers, a parable about a churlishly exclusive Callimacheanism.21 Ovid’s combination of Aristophanic frogs and Callimachean poetics, with its implicit commentary on Callimachus’ use of Aristophanic poetics, is then followed by a story about a musical agon—as, in Aristophanes’ comedy, the quarrelsome chorus of frogs precedes the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides. The topics raised in the stories of the Lycian farmers and Marsyas are reXections of the much longer frontispiece to Book 6 of the Metamorphoses, the weaving contest between Minerva and Arachne 19 OLD s.v. detraho 8 ‘detract, disparage’. Prop. 3.1.21 at mihi quod uiuo detraxerit inuida turba; Ovid, Rem. am. 365–7 ingenium magni livor detractat Homeri: j quisquis es, ex illo, Zoile, nomen habes. j et tua sacrilegae laniarunt carmina linguae; cf. also Ovid, Met. 5.246–7, 13.270–71; Tr. 4.10.123–4. Cf. perhaps the image of Xaying at Aristophanes, Ran. 1106–7 Ia de† qetom ÆºÆØa ŒÆd a ŒÆØ. An example of the corpus pun: a poet’s opus is his own body. 20 sub aqua, sub aqua outdoes the onomatopoeia of Virgil, Geo. 1.378 et ueterem in limo ranae cecinere querelam–the querela of Old Comedy, renewed at Met. 6.381 limosoque nouae saliunt in gurgite ranae. Virgil adapts Aratus, Phaen. 946–7 (perhaps itself imitating Aristophanes, Ran. 211: see Kidd (1997) ad loc.). 21 Clauss (1989).

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(a pendant to the singing contest between the Muses and Pierides in the previous book), itself now routinely read as a poetological contest in the ‘weaving’ of poetry. Minerva’s tapestry, intended as a warning to the presumptuous girl Arachne not to match herself against the power of the Olympian gods, has for the subject of its central panel another contest, that between Minerva (Athena) herself and Neptune for the right to name the city that we know as Athens. The contest is adjudicated in favour of Athena / Minerva by the august authority of the supreme god Jupiter. ‘Victory crowns her achievement’, operis Victoria Wnis (82). Four symmetrically disposed subsidiary panels display four further contests, certamina, in which mortals are punished by a variety of metamorphoses, as Arachne herself will be, for daring to challenge the gods. The whole complex of scenes is framed by a border of olive foliage, mirroring on a formal level the closure and Wnality of the stories represented (101–2): ‘she runs the olive of peace round the outer border to mark its boundary, and she makes an end with her own tree’ (circuit extremas oleis pacalibus oras j (is modus est) operisque sua facit arbore Wnem.) Minerva’s olive tree writes peace as an ending to the stories of conXict. Arachne’s tapestry, by contrast, is a loosely strung-together series of images of the gods transformed into various animal, vegetable, and mineral shapes, in order to work erotic deception on mortal women. This is a series that could be extended indeWnitely, and it is arbitrarily concluded and conWned with a border of ivy and Xowers. Modern critics see in Arachne’s tapestry a miniature version of the larger poem that frames it, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with its delight in the erotic and its irreverent portrayal of the gods, obedient to a poetics of ludic disorder that cocks a snook at the formal and political hierarchies embodied in the tapestry of Minerva. Arachne, punished by an arbitrary exercise of divine power despite the Xawlessness of her art, is for some ‘a prototype of the exiled poet’ Ovid.22 The contrasts articulated in the descriptions of the two tapestries can be compared, in general terms (and I don’t want to go further than that) with some of the oppositions dramatized in the Aristophanic contest between Aeschylus and Euripides. But I do want to go a little further in another direction, and suggest that we might see in 22 Harries (1990) 65.

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the two tapestries opposing images of two speciWc poems, Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Minerva depicts a story about the foundation of a city. A diVerence between the Olympian gods is resolved by the authority of Jupiter. This is a world in which those whose furor (84 furialibus ausis) leads them to challenge the gods are punished. The main panel depicts a narrative that concludes with a deWnitive victoria, whose consequence will be a conclusive pax. Abstracting from the speciWcs like that, it is diYcult not to discern the plot line of the Aeneid. And one small detail: the genitive Mauortis occurs in the same metrical position both in the Wrst line of the description of Minerva’s tapestry, and in the Wrst line of Virgil’s description of the scenes of Roman history on the Shield made for Aeneas by the god Vulcan. Athens and Rome are both labelled as cities of Mars.23 In the weaving contest of Minerva and Arachne the aesthetic and stylistic contrasts of Callimachean and neoteric poetics have been converted back into diVerences operative on the theological and political planes; we can indeed sense the pressure exerted by ideological party lines on the maintenance of a literary distinction. The phrase augusta grauitas (73) applied to the image of Jupiter on Minerva’s tapestry, enthroned at the centre of the twelve Olympian gods, is not innocent—the adjective augustus never is innocent in the Augustan poet Ovid.24 We do not need to go as far as those who see in the punishment of Arachne a reXection, or prophetic anticipation, of Augustus’ punishment of Ovid himself, to sense in the arbitrary exercise of divine power to curtail artistic activity some kind of a statement about the limits of freedom in an autocracy. The most pungent commentary on those limits comes from the pen of Tacitus, who opens his history of the Principate with a contrast between positive and negative assessments of the career of the recently deceased Augustus (Annals 1.9–11). As a kind of experiment, whose 23 Met. 6.70 Mauortis in arce ; Aen. 8.630 fecerat et uiridi fetam Mauortis in antro. 24 The adjective augustus in the Met.: 6.73, 9.270 coepit et augusta Weri grauitate uerendus (the apotheosis of Hercules, anticipating Julian apotheoses), 15.145 augustae reserabo oracula mentis (Pythagoras, whose Xight of the mind traces a path to be followed by the skywards journey in the Epilogue of an Ovid who pits his vatic authority against the authority of Augustus).

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serious purpose is to reinforce the claim that a contrast between Virgilian and Ovidian poetics can embody, and be maintained by, major ideological tensions, I will apply a Virgilio-Ovidian reading to the syncrisis in the Tacitean obituary notice. [9] Multus hinc ipso de Augusto sermo, plerisque uana mirantibus . . . at apud prudentes uita eius uarie extollebatur arguebaturue. hi pietate erga parentem et necessitudine rei publicae, in qua nullus tunc legibus locus, ad arma ciuilia actum, quae neque parari possent neque haberi per bonas artes. multa Antonio, dum interfectores patris ulcisceretur, multa Lepido concessisse. postquam hic socordia senuerit, ille per libidines pessum datus sit, non aliud discordantis patriae remedium fuisse quam ut ab uno regeretur. non regno tamen neque dictatura, sed principis nomine constitutam rem publicam; mari Oceano aut amnibus longinquis saeptum imperium; legiones, prouincias, classes, cuncta inter se conexa; ius apud ciuis, modestiam apud socios; urbem ipsam magniWco ornatu; pauca admodum ui tractata quo ceteris quies esset. [10] Dicebatur contra: pietatem erga parentem et tempora rei publicae obtentui sumpta: ceterum cupidine dominandi concitos per largitionem ueteranos, paratum ab adulescente priuato exercitum, corruptas consulis legiones, simulatam Pompeianarum gratiam partium; mox ubi decreto patrum fascis et ius praetoris inuaserit, caesis Hirtio et Pansa, siue hostis illos, seu Pansam uenenum uulneri adfusum, sui milites Hirtium et machinator doli Caesar abstulerat, utriusque copias occupauisse; extortum inuito senatu consulatum, armaque quae in Antonium acceperit contra rem publicam uersa; proscriptionem ciuium, diuisiones agrorum ne ipsis quidem qui fecere laudatas. sane Cassii et Brutorum exitus paternis inimicitiis datos, quamquam fas sit priuata odia publicis utilitatibus remittere: sed Pompeium imagine pacis, sed Lepidum specie amicitiae deceptos; post Antonium, Tarentino Brundisinoque foedere et nuptiis sororis inlectum, subdolae adWnitatis poenas morte exsoluisse. pacem sine dubio post haec, uerum cruentam: Lollianas Varianasque clades, interfectos Romae Varrones, Egnatios, Iullos. nec domesticis abstinebatur: abducta Neroni uxor et consulti per ludibrium pontiWces an concepto necdum edito partu rite nuberet; yque tedii ety Vedii Pollionis luxus; postremo Liuia grauis in rem publicam mater, grauis domui Caesarum nouerca. nihil deorum honoribus relictum, cum se templis et eYgie numinum per Xamines et sacerdotes coli uellet. ne Tiberium quidem caritate aut rei publicae cura successorem adscitum, sed quoniam adrogantiam saeuitiamque eius introspexerit, comparatione deterrima sibi gloriam quaesiuisse. etenim Augustus paucis ante annis, cum Tiberio tribuniciam potestatem a patribus rursum postularet, quamquam honora oratione, quaedam de habitu cultuque et institutis eius iecerat quae

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uelut excusando exprobraret. ceterum sepultura more perfecta templum et caelestes religiones decernuntur. [11] Versae inde ad Tiberium preces. (Tacitus, Ann. 1.9–11) Then there was much discussion of Augustus himself . . . Intelligent people praised or criticized him in varying terms. One opinion was as follows. Filial duty and a national emergency, in which there was no place for law-abiding conduct, had driven him to civil war – and this can be neither initiated nor maintained by decent methods. He had made many concessions to Antony and to Lepidus for the sake of vengeance on his father’s murderers. When Lepidus grew old and lazy, and Antony’s self-indulgence got the better of him, the only possible cure for the distracted country had been government by one man. However Augustus had put the State in order not by making himself king or dictator but by creating the Principate. The empire’s frontiers were on the ocean, or distant rivers. Armies, provinces, Xeets, the whole system was interrelated. Roman citizens were protected by the law. Provincials were decently treated. Rome itself had been lavishly beautiWed. Force had been sparingly used – merely to preserve peace for the majority. The opposite view went like this. Filial duty and national crisis had been merely pretexts. In actual fact, the motive of Octavian, the future Augustus, was lust for power. Inspired by that, he had mobilized ex-army settlers by gifts of money, raised an army – while he was only a half-grown boy without any oYcial status – won over a consul’s brigades by bribery, pretended to support Sextus Pompeius, and by senatorial decree usurped the status and rank of a praetor. Soon both consuls, Gaius Vibius Pansa and Aulus Hirtius, had met their deaths – by enemy action; or perhaps in the one case by the deliberate poisoning of his wound, and in the other at the hand of his own troops, instigated by Octavian. In any case it was he who took over both their armies. Then he had forced the reluctant senate to make him consul. But the forces given him to deal with Antony he used against the State. His judicial murders and land distributions were distasteful even to those who carried them out. True, Cassius and Brutus died because he had inherited a feud against them; nevertheless, personal enmities ought to be sacriWced to the public interest. Next he had cheated Sextus Pompeius by a spurious peace treaty, Lepidus by spurious friendship. Then Antony, enticed by the treaties of Tarentum and Brundusium and his marriage with Octavian’s sister, had paid the penalty of that delusive relationship with his life. After that, there had certainly been peace, but it was a bloodstained peace. For there followed the disasters of Marcus Lollius and Publius Quinctilius Varus; and there were the assassinations, for example, of Aulus Terentius Varro Murena, Marcus Egnatius Rufus and Iullus Antonius.

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And gossip did not spare his personal aVairs – how he had abducted the wife of Tiberius Claudius Nero, and asked the priests the farcical question whether it was in order for her to marry while pregnant. Then there was the debauchery of his friend Publius Vedius Pollio. But Livia was a real catastrophe, to the nation, as a mother and to the house of the Caesars as a stepmother. Besides, critics continued, Augustus seemed to have superseded the worship of the gods when he wanted to have himself venerated in temples, with god-like images, by priests and ministers. His appointment of Tiberius as his successor was due neither to personal aVection nor to regard for the national interests. Thoroughly aware of Tiberius’ cruelty and arrogance, he intended to heighten his own glory by the contrast with one so inferior. For a few years earlier, when Augustus had been asking the senate to re-award tribune’s powers to Tiberius, the emperor had actually let drop in a complimentary oration certain remarks about Tiberius’ deportment, style of dressing, and habits. Ostensibly these were excuses; in fact they were criticisms. After an appropriate funeral, Augustus was declared a god and decreed a temple. But the target of every prayer was Tiberius. (tr. Michael Grant)

Tacitus works immediately from within historiographical and rhetorical traditions of compare and contrast, for example Sallust’s syncrisis of Caesar and Cato in the Bellum Catilinae, which culminates in an opposition between appearance and reality. Quintilian includes among the Wrst exercises for orators (Inst. 2.4.20–1) (a) ‘the praise of famous men, and the criticism of bad men’ (laudare claros uiros et uituperare improbos), and, deriving therefrom, (b) ‘the exercise of comparison, to judge who is the better, who the worse’ (exercitatio comparationis, uter melior uterue deterior). Tacitus’ comparison is not between two persons, but between two competing narratives of the career of a single individual. In the Wrst, laudatory, version we start from the core virtue, pietas, of the subject, who is forced by circumstances into painful and morally dubious activities (civil war), only to rise above the self-destructing vices of his colleagues and emerge as the unifying leader of a constitutional government. Unity and integrity at the centre are matched by the satisfying closure of the Empire by encircling bodies of water, and within those boundaries the instruments of government and control

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are harmoniously interrelated: cuncta inter se conexa, ‘everything was connected up’, like a providentially ordered cosmos or like a wellcomposed speech, both areas of meaning in which the participial adjective conexus, ‘connected, joined up’, is found.25 The Wnal sentence of this laudatio admits an element of disruption only to accommodate it within the greater whole: ‘Force had been sparingly used—merely to preserve peace for the majority.’ That is one way of reading the end of the Aeneid. The narrative of the detractors starts from the same point, ‘Wlial piety and national crisis’, but redeWnes these motives as pretence (obtentui). Ovid’s poetics of illusion, we might reXect, are easily applicable to the analysis of imperial appearance and reality. The young Caesar’s real motive is described as cupido dominandi, a boundless desire which leads to an interminable catalogue of crimes and murders. The attainment of peace provides no closure; if in the Wrst version violence was the necessary precondition to lasting peace, here peace itself is murderous, ushering in a renewed catalogue of disasters and crimes. The sorry tale concludes with Augustus’ choice of successor, Tiberius, acknowledging that narratives about kings are never complete, even on their death. There is always a next instalment.26 The very last point made by the critics relates to the fake piety of Augustus towards his adopted son, picking up their opening comment on his phony piety towards his adoptive father. More of the same: pietas towards family as obtentus for Augustus’ own gloria. Closure of this narrative is externally imposed, as the last sentence of the chapter switches out of the voice of the prudentes, ‘intelligent people’ (mouthpiece of both positive and negative assessments of Augustus), back to the voice of the narrator: ‘After an appropriate funeral, Augustus was declared a god and decreed a temple.’ Burial 25 Cosmic connection: Cicero, Nat. D. 2.97 inter se omnia conexa et apta, the sign of an ordering ratio; rhetorical: Quint. Inst. 9.4.7 tanto quae conexa est et totis uiribus Xuit, fragosa atque interrupta melior oratio. 26 In the previous sentence, as we come to the end of Tacitus’ exercise in comparing and contrasting, Augustus uses comparison for his ends, as the Wrst princeps is caught out for selecting Tiberius in order to show up his own relative acceptability, comparatione deterrima sibi gloriam quaesiuisse. Tiberius himself was self-conscious about odious comparisons with Augustus: Tacitus, Ann. 1.76 cur abstinuerit spectaculo ipse [Tiberius], uarie trahebant . . . quidam . . . metu comparationis, quia Augustus comiter interfuisset.

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(of the mortal human) and temple foundation (for the deiWed ruler) are two emphatic endings to the life on earth of Augustus, but no ending within the annalistic history of Rome, as the next sentence makes clear: ‘people’s prayers then turned to Tiberius.’ DeiWcation as the perfection of a providentially constructed regime is contradicted when the new god receives the burial that marks the arbitrary conclusion of any mortal life. uersae inde ad Tiberium preces: prayers to a god are replaced by, converted into, prayers to a mortal ruler, a reversal of the Metamorphoses’ concluding transformation of human ruler into god. Two closing remarks on this Tacitean passage. Firstly, while I would not want to suggest that Tacitus draws consciously on Virgilian and Ovidian narrative structures in these contrasting assessments of Augustus, Tacitus is steeped in the language and themes of the Aeneid.27 Furthermore, on either side of the obituaries Tacitus talks of the problem of the succession to Augustus in language strikingly close to Ovid’s account, at the beginning of the last book of the Metamorphoses, of the question of who is to succeed the Wrst king of Rome, Romulus. Tacitus might also have noticed that, later in the book, Ovid’s Jupiter appears to ‘quote’ the Res gestae of Augustus (or an earlier version of that text); the Tacitean detractors of Augustus begin with a malicious allusion to the opening of the Res gestae.28 Secondly, we should not too easily assume that the second, critical, account of Augustus is oVered by Tacitus to the reader as the truer version. Tacitus in fact is carefully even-handed in his framing of the two versions. Praise and detraction are both attributed to the prudentes, ‘intelligent people’. And both accounts are included under the general heading of multus hinc ipso de Augusto sermo (‘Then there was much discussion of Augustus himself.’). All of this is what ‘people say’, samples of the fama, the mass of rumour and report that envelops, and to some extent, shapes Tacitus’ imperial Rome, the fama which is also the sea of words and traditions from which emerge 27 See e.g. Baxter (1972). 28 Tacitus and the Res gestae: HaverWeld (1912); Met. 15 and the Res gestae: Hardie (1997b), 192. Tacitus as reader of Ovid: Woodman and Martin (1996) on Ann. 3.24.6 non senatus consulto, non lege pulsus, recalling Tr. 2.131–2 nec mea decreto damnasti facta senatus j nec mea selecto iudice iussa fuga est ; 3.34.2 Valerius Messalinus, cui parens Messala ineratque imago paternae facundiae: cf. Tr. 4.4.3–5 (to Messalinus).

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particular poetic narratives and particular ideological structures. In real life—and in ‘real’ texts—things are messier, the contrasts never so sharp. A preliminary list of the factors predisposing to contrastive descriptions in the material we have examined so far will include: the agonistic, adversarial set of much ancient literary criticism; the impulse to shape criticism according to the immanent form of the genre (the oppositional structures of epic and drama); poets’ tendentious inscriptions of their own versions of literary history; the pressure of extratextual, political and ideological, power structures and oppositions; more generally, the need to Wnd simple order in a complex world. It is only recently that the contrast between Virgilian and Ovidian forms of narrative and representation has moved to centre stage among classical Latinists. But the contrast is an important and recurrent feature of the pre-nineteenth-century reception of Antiquity, and, correspondingly, of modern studies of that reception. In this respect, then, students of medieval and early modern literature may have been ahead of the game in recognizing and developing the ways in which Virgil / Ovid contrast can be exploited. I now turn to look brieXy at three examples of the reception of the contrast. In the dream vision of the House of Fame the narrator GeVrey Wnds himself in the temple of Venus, playing the role of Aeneas in the temple of Juno at the beginning of the Aeneid, reading or viewing scenes from an earlier poetic history: the Epic Cycle’s narrative of the Trojan War in the case of the Virgilian Aeneas, and the Aeneid itself in the case of GeVrey (140–4): But as I romed up and doun, I fond that on a wall ther was Thus writen on a table of bras: ‘I wol now synge, yif I kan, The armes and also the man.’

The following ecphrastic summary of Virgil’s epic narrative is sidetracked at the point when it arrives in Carthage, turning into an extended lament by Dido at her betrayal by Aeneas. The Ovidian pretext for this expansion of the summary Virgilian narrative is Heroides 7, the Wctional epistle of Dido to Aeneas, the text in which Ovid exploits the faultline within the Aeneid to create an alternative female,

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elegiac view of Virgil’s epic world. Chaucer footnotes the competing authorities for the story of Dido at the end of his telling of it (375–9): And all the maner how she deyde, And alle the wordes that she seyde, Whoso to knowe hit hath purpos, Rede Virgile in Eneydos Or the Epistle of Ovyde.

The gravitational force of Ovid then pulls the narrator into an indeWnitely extendable catalogue of other false lovers, drawn from Ovid’s Heroides, before the authority of the Virgilian model is reinstated at 427–30: But to excusen Eneas Fullyche of al his grete trespas, The book seyth Mercurie, sans fayle, Bad hym goo into Itayle . . .

and in another forty lines we are brought smoothly to the end of the matter of the Aeneid. The contrast between Virgilian and Ovidian versions of the story of Dido and Aeneas in the Wrst book of the House of Fame is matched by the dichotomy that structures the third and last book of the poem, the description of the house of fame itself, to which GeVrey has been conveyed by a marvellous talking eagle. There are in fact two houses of fame. The Wrst is a fantastic castle, whose queen (1409) is the ‘Goddesse of Renoun or of Fame’ (1406), a being whose physical characteristics are those of the Virgilian personiWcation of Fama in Aeneid Book 4 (1368–92). Her palace is a place of authority and hierarchy, however arbitrarily exercised. But GeVrey does not Wnd here the ‘tidings’ (1888) that he seeks, and he is led out of the castle to another house, down in a valley, a whirling house of twigs, ‘that Domus Dedaly, j That Laboryntus cleped is’ (1920–21). This ‘cage’ full of unattributable tidings and rumours has as its primary model Ovid’s description of the House of Fama at the beginning of Metamorphoses Book 12. I stop at this schematic account of the contrastive dichotomies in the House of Fame, although the poem is a wonderfully complex and complicating exploration of poetic traditions and authority, which

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has moved to the centre of interest of recent work on medieval English literature for many of the same reasons that Ovid has now become a central author for classical Latinists. Here are a couple of quotations from modern scholars who reach for the Virgil / Ovid contrast when commenting on the House of Fame and its wider medieval context: These two Didonic voices, Virgilian and Ovidian, predominantly historical and predominantly erotic, exercise continuing and competing inXuences in the Troy story as it descends to the Latin and vernacular traditions of the high Middle Ages.29 Chaucer confronts the reader with the jagged incoherences of the narrative by reference to its contradictory classical sources [that is, Virgil and Ovid].30

I move down to the early seventeenth century, a time when the London stage comes to be the central cultural arena for the contestation of traditions and authorities. In Ben Jonson’s Poetaster the contrast between Virgil and Ovid is vividly realized through the introduction on stage of both authors as dramatic characters.31 Through an imaginative recreation of the circumstances of Ovid’s exile, in which the poet and his lover Julia (here the daughter of Augustus: cf. p. 215) are banished for their part in a banquet of the gods in which they impersonate the gods, poetry and politics are closely knit together. Ovid practises a poetic illusionism that results in his literal removal from the reality of Rome, whereas Virgil’s poetry creates a world of the imagination that marches in step with the political constructions of Augustus, the Roman ‘Jupiter’ at the centre of Rome. As in Chaucer’s House of Fame, the contrast between the two poets is expressed through an opposition between Ovidian and Virgilian constructions of fama. The play opens with Ovid composing the last poem in Book 1 of the Amores, the poet’s prophecy of his own posthumous fame. After the exile of Ovid, Virgil enters, and recites to Augustus the passage in Aeneid Book 4 describing the storm and the wedding of Dido and Aeneas, and the subsequent bruiting abroad of the union in the cave by the personiWcation of Fama. 29 Baswell (1995) 187. 30 Simpson (2002) 165. 31 This paragraph develops some aspects of the discussion of Poetaster in Hardie (2002a) 97–105.

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Jonathan Bate, in his Shakespeare and Ovid, comments: ‘A translation from the Aeneid pushes aside that from the Amores which began the play, replacing Ovid’s assertion of the love-poet’s immortality with an image of ill fame.’32 Where Ovid’s realistic prophecy of his own fame is powerless to preserve the poet in the here and now, Virgil’s fantastic image of Fama is immediately translated into contemporary Roman political reality with the appearance of an informer, bearing a false accusation, a fama, of libel against Horace (as the wedding-thatis-no-wedding of Dido and Aeneas is already a mythical reXection of the doomed love between Ovid and Julia). But there is an inversion of the Chaucerian opposition between the two types of fama: here it is the hierarchical and monumentalizing ‘fame’ that is associated with Ovid (but which Ovid is unable to control), and the unruly and uncontrollable ‘rumour’ that is associated with Virgil (who, however, by a dramatic coincidence is made to control the meanings of this Fama). The historical drama’s contest between Virgilian and Ovidian bids for fame serves Jonson’s own immediate purposes in his attempt to control the literary history of his own day, and to establish his own place within that history. Jonathan Bate points to the not-soconcealed judgement on the 1590s Ovidianism of such works as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. In fact the opposition in Poetaster between Ovid and Virgil is complicated by the presence of a third term. While the Wgure of Virgil speaks for some of Jonson’s own ambitions—his desire for a close relationship with the centre of power and his ideal of a selfenclosed personal autonomy—it is the character of the satirist Horace whose mask in the play most closely Wts Jonson himself. We might remember that Ludwig Traube’s famous periodization of the Latin Middle Ages is a tripartite series: aetas Virgiliana, aetas Horatiana, aetas Ovidiana.33 Horace Wts uneasily within dichotomizing schematizations of the Augustan period, partly because of the Protean and self-ironizing quality of his personae, and partly because the genre of epic is not as central to Horace’s self-positioning as it is to Virgil and Ovid. Richard Helgerson has analysed the problems encountered by Jonson 32 Bate (1993) 168–9.

33 Traube (1911) 113.

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in creating his own poetic self, his ‘laureate’ self as Helgerson puts it, problems that arose partly out of Jonson’s temporal location at a moment when it was no longer possible to fashion a self on the basis of an easy opposition between Virgil and Ovid, because that ground had already been occupied by the previous generation. In his book Self-crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System, published in 1983, Helgerson acknowledges his collaboration in ‘a collective project . . . engaging the energies of my generation of American literary scholars’, namely the ‘application [of semiotics] to the study of literary discourse’(17). Helgerson analyses the selfpresentation of his subjects in terms of a synchronic opposition of a system of diachronic diVerences, conscious of his own position at a particular moment of intellectual history. Spenser, the Wrst of his ‘self-crowned laureates’, deWnes himself in opposition to the existing class of Elizabethan amateurs, the ‘prodigal’ quick wits for whom poetry is a matter of levity, play, private delight, the product of a misspent youth to be repented of in maturer years. This is all rather reminiscent (unbeknownst, apparently, to Helgerson) of a familiar opposition in Latin literary history, between the playful and irresponsible neoteric poets and the serious and committed image of the poet as uates developed for their more public roles by Virgil and Horace. That opposition is mirrored in what used to be a standard construction of the relationship between Virgil, the Augustan poet, and Ovid, the rebel against the poet’s public role who reverts to a neoteric Alexandrianism. It is with Ovid, and the Ovidian Petrarch of the Canzoniere, that Helgerson aligns his ‘amateurs’, and with Virgil and Horace his ‘laureates’, arguing that an awareness of this contrast formed part of the Elizabethan poets’ own sense of the ancient literary past.34 The opposition between the self-crowned laureate Spenser and the selfprofessed amateur Sidney lines up neatly with the Virgil / Ovid dichotomy. Not only does Spenser, on whom Thomas Nashe bestowed the sobriquet of the ‘Virgil of England’,35 look to Virgil for a general model of vatic inspiration, he also, as is well known, 34 Helgerson (1983) 26. 35 Nashe (1966) 299, in Strange News (1592), in the context of another contrastive pairing ‘Chaucer, and Spencer, the Homer and Virgil of England’.

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models the progression of his own career on the pattern of the rota Virgilii, the medieval scheme that laid out the three main Virgilian works as a comprehensive progression through genres, styles, and ways of life. Spenser rises from the pastoral world of The Shepheardes Calender to the epic world of The Faerie Queene, whose proem is a rewriting of the Virgilian ille ego proem. Beside his laureates and amateurs, Helgerson introduces a third class of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, the ‘professionals’, that is the professional dramatists who depended on their pens to make their living; but he then reduces this tripartite to a bipartite system, collapsing the upper-class amateur and the lower-class professional into the single category of the non-serious, the frivolous—play: the professional after all writes ‘plays’, not ‘works’. The negative capability (although Helgerson does not use that phrase) of a great playwright like Shakespeare is contrasted with ‘the great constancy at the center of the laureate’s work’,36 a self-possession that is most intensively formulated by Ben Jonson, who in his own words resolves to ‘Live to that point . . . , for which I am man, j And dwell as in my center, as I can’.37 In Poetaster the character Ovid enters with a translation of the historical Ovid’s Amores 1.15; the character goes into exile after a balcony scene with his inamorata Corinna, identiWed as the emperor’s daughter Julia, in which Jonson rewrites not an Ovidian, but a Shakespearean love scene, the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Keats’s ‘negative capability’ is not a bad way of framing some recent approaches to Ovid that celebrate the lack of a centre, and Ovid’s ability to impersonate and ventriloquize. One of the most valuable observations in Garth Tissol’s The Face of Nature is his reminder of Dryden’s recognition that Morpheus, the dream god who embodies the poet’s own power of mimicry, is a stage actor.38 And for the ability of the author to disappear into his own work a powerful fable is provided by Christoph Ransmayr’s novel Die letzte Welt, in which Cotta’s journey to Tomis in search of his exiled friend Ovid leads not to the man himself but only to a town and a landscape 36 Helgerson (1983) 40. 37 Ben Jonson, ‘An Epistle Answering to One that Asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben’, 59–60. See Greene (1970). 38 Tissol (1997), 78–9.

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in which are to be found the animated and mutating body of the book of Ovid.39 Helgerson’s dichotomization between serious and playful poets has much in common with the dichotomy which underpins Richard Lanham’s inXuential rehabilitation of rhetoric, in The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (1976).40 Lanham distinguishes between serious and rhetorical views of the world, with two correspondingly contrasting constructions of subjectivity to which he gives the labels homo seriosus and homo rhetoricus. The patron saints for these two kinds of subjectivity are, respectively, Plato and Ovid, but from Lanham’s incidental contrasts between Ovid’s rhetorical playfulness and Virgil’s epic it is clear that for Plato one could equally well read Virgil (e.g. 49–50, 60). Plato and Virgil are explicitly paired in James Simpson’s study of two contrasting medieval poetic exercises in the ‘political imagination of the self’, on the one hand Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus (1181–3) and John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1390–3): Alan’s politics are Platonic, Virgilian, elitist, and rooted in the practice of the highest of the soul’s faculties (the intelligence); Gower’s politics are Aristotelian, Ovidian, much less strictly elitist, and rooted much ‘lower’ down in the soul, at the point where imagination and physical desire meet.41

The opposition in Poetaster between a Virgilian truth and an Ovidian false opinion anticipates, in the mode of realist drama, the schematic binarism of the Jonsonian masque and antimasque, the court entertainment in which, to quote from a recent study of the uses of Virgil in Jonson and Shakespeare: the universe of the anti-masque is a universe of multiple, particular heterogeneous voices . . . opposite and opposed to the total, closed and monovocal world of the main masque, the world of truth and unity which the antimasque Wgures threaten to disturb and profane.42

39 See Hardie (2002a), 331–7. 40 Lanham’s book is indeed quoted by Helgerson, but rather in passing (44–5). 41 Simpson (1995) 16. Incidentally Simpson’s use of a faculty psychology suggests the possibility of reconceptualizing Ovid’s negatively valued playfulness and Xippancy as the spacious freedom of the poet’s imagination (licentia uatum, Am. 3.12.41), a path that has not in general been followed by recent Ovidian partisans, perhaps because imagination has gone out of favour as a critical concept. 42 Tudeau-Clayton (1998) 111.

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Thus in Jonson’s Masque of Queenes of 1609, the main masque reveals the ‘glorious and magniWcent’ apparition of a House of Fame, whose lower columns bear statues of ‘the most excellent Poe¨ts, as Homer, Virgil, Lucan, &c. as beeing the substantiall supporters of Fame’. This is preceded by an antimasque of twelve witches, ‘sustayning the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, &c. the opposites to good Fame’.43 In his own marginal note to the text Jonson refers to the personiWcations who Xock to the Council of Furies in Claudian’s In RuWnum (1.27–34). But Suspicion, Credulity, Falsehood, Murmure all Wnd exact or close equivalents in the Ovidian House of Fame in the Metamorphoses (paruae murmura uocis (12.49), temerarius Error (59), dubioque auctore Susurri (61)). The antimasque of witches is designed, in Jonson’s words, as ‘a spectacle of strangeness, producing multiplicity of gesture’—in part this is an Ovidian ‘strangeness’ and ‘multiplicity’. In the Masque of Queenes the antimasque of witches disappears at a blast of music, to be replaced by the sudden appearance of the House of Fame. The spirit actors in Prospero’s masque for the betrothal of Miranda and Ferdinand in The Tempest vanish ‘to a strange hollow and confused noise’, at the moment when Prospero suddenly remembers the ‘foul conspiracy Of the beast Caliban and his confederates’. ‘The minute of their plot Is almost come’ (iv. i.141–2), where the pun on ‘plot’ hints at the ‘anti-masque’ that has suddenly replaced the masque. But the simple antitheses of the Jonsonian masque have a way of slipping from under the Wngers of critics of Shakespeare. For those Shakespearians these days who do have an eye on the classical sources of The Tempest, Virgilian and Ovidian models are central, but the contrast between the two Latin poets is played out as much in a disagreement between critics as within uniWed readings of the play itself. Is the ground of The Tempest Virgilian or Ovidian? Is Prospero a statesman-like master of the storm, guiding a providential plot to a Virgilian conclusion of dynastic marriage, and a dukedom restored to its rightful ruler 43 The full list of the ‘chain’ of personiWcations brought on by the Dame is (in Jonson 7 (1941) 287–8): Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, Falsehood, Murmure, Malice, Impudence, Slaunder, Execration, Bitterenesse, Rage, Mischeife (‘faythfull Opposites to Fame, & Glory’).

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after usurpation and exile? Or is he an Ovidian magician and fantasist, a master of poetic special eVects who knows both about the power of illusion and the necessity of disillusionment? What might be called the ‘New World’ school of reading The Tempest lays emphasis on the play’s deployment of the imperial themes of the Aeneid. Jonathan Bate, with a case to make for an Ovidian Shakespeare, is sceptical, and sees the play as ‘a romance-style reworking of epic material’.44 Epic / romance is another big literary-critical dichotomy that has increasingly been mapped on to the Virgil / Ovid contrast, and on which I have more to say below. For Bate, Shakespeare revises . . . Virgil’s imperial theme in the same way that Ovid does . . . What the imperial theme is subsumed into is a demonstration of the pervasiveness of change, and in this sense The Tempest is Shakespeare’s last revision of the Metamorphoses . . . ‘Sea-change’ is this drama’s principal motif.45

The contest between Virgilian and Ovidian readings can be continued right up to the end of the play. In the epilogue Prospero, uniquely in Shakespeare, speaks not as an actor in a play but as a character aware of his place in a Wction. The most ambitious modern study of The Tempest as a rewriting of the Aeneid, claims that Prospero’s self-deprecating tone is a stance regularly associated by Renaissance writers with Virgilian statements of poetic inadequacy in the Eclogues and Georgics.46 Now I am not in fact myself convinced that there is anything Virgilian here, so let me enter the lists with an Ovidian counterclaim. Prospero’s humble appeal to the audience contains elements in common with the superWcially very diVerent, self-conWdent, epilogue to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an epilogue imitated more directly in some of the Sonnets. Prospero’s Wnal request is for liberation: ‘Let your indulgence set me free’—the freedom that Ovid exultantly anticipates for himself and his poem on the death of his mortal body. ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails Must Wll’, Prospero tells the audience; two lines later he says ‘Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant’, where ‘spirits’, Prospero’s fairy sprites, also suggests Prospero’s own mental powers, breath of inspiration.47 44 Bate (1993), 244. 45 Bate (1993) 245–6. 46 Hamilton (1990) 135–7. 47 ‘Spirits’ pl. is used of ‘mental powers’ (OED s.v. spirit sb.) in Shakespeare’s time. From a later date cf. Dryden, Virgil’s Pastorals 4.66: ‘To sing thy praise, wou’d Heav’n

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Hereafter he—and the future reception of the play—will rely on the words borne on the breath of this and future audiences—the breath of kind words about the performance; the breath also of prayer, for after his display of magic arts, Prospero resorts to the Christian language of redemption. But he has not completely renounced the pagan Ovid. In the epilogue to the Metamorphoses Ovid claims ore legar populi (‘I shall be read on the lips of the people’), a boast that at the same time recognizes that the future success of the poet’s project is dependent on its perpetuation on the lips and breath of his readers.48 Having abjured the magic spells of the Ovidian Medea, Prospero / the play The Tempest relies on the power of Shakespeare’s words to spellbind audiences and readers; and in the last resort they always have the power to withhold their favour. Just so the continued lives of both Virgil and Ovid have relied on the power of their words to inspire rebreathings, rewritings, in the texts of later authors, but also on the willingness of those who come after to oVer blood to the ghosts. One of the attractions of the Virgil / Ovid dichotomy for poets like Spenser, Jonson, and Milton—and one might add Dante and Petrarch—whose works are guided by a strong drive towards an autobiographical construction, is precisely that the ancient poets oVer models not just for contrasting kinds of poetry, but also for contrasting kinds of poetic career. A number of factors encourage these autobiographical appropriations: in Virgil’s case, the formalization of what in retrospect seems the almost pre-scripted sequence of the three major Virgilian works in the medieval rota Virgiliana, the schema of the literary and social evolution upwards from the Eclogues to the Aeneid, based on the ancient lives of Virgil, together with the ille ego proem.49 In Ovid’s case, what one might call the ‘metaautobiographical’ statements in the pre-exilic works combine with the stunning invasion of the poetic career by the real biographical event of exile, which Ovid proceeds to present as a re-enactment of a my breath prolong, j Infusing Spirits worthy such a Song.’ (imitating Ecl. 4.53–4 o mihi tum longae maneat pars ultima uitae, j spiritus et quantum sat erit tua dicere facta). 48 See Hardie (2002a) 94–5. 49 On the rota Virgiliana see Theodorakopoulos (1997) 155. Spenser’s Virgilian career: Cheney (1993) 260 n. 27 (with further references); Webb (1937).

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turning point in the life of Virgil, namely Virgil’s death. The suggestions in Ovid’s own corpus that Ovid models his own career, directly or through inversion, on that of Virgil becomes a licence for later writers to shape their careers on either the Virgilian or the Ovidian model. As Raphael Lyne points out: ‘Many ‘‘Ovidian’’ works . . . show the inXuence of an idea of the poet as much as of an idea of the poem.’50 Modern academic careers can be built on the study of the antique poetic career structures. In his 1993 Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career, Patrick Cheney presents a revisionist account of the orthodoxy that Spenser follows a Virgilian career pattern—as Cheney puts it, Spenser reinvents the Virgilian wheel. This is followed by his 1997 Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counternationhood, in which Cheney argues that Marlowe plots his own career through a contestation of Spenser’s Virgilian pattern, using a particular construction of the Ovidian career to ‘counter’ the ‘oYcial’ Spenser. In this Latinists will recognize a standard way of reading Ovid and the Ovidian career against Virgil. Like recent students of allusion in the ancient Latin poets, Cheney is well aware that one of the standard strategies of the alluding writer is to operate with a conveniently partial and monolithic reading of the prior text: ‘If we wish to accuse Marlowe of being a ‘‘bad’’ reader of Spenser, we need to recall that the company he keeps is good, for both Ovid and Lucan were equally ‘‘bad’’ readers of Virgil.’51 The index reveals that Cheney has been reading Farrell, Feeney, Hardie, and Hinds. If in this case the Renaissance critic may not have anything very new to oVer the classicist, there is one area where a Renaissance agenda has signiWcantly reinvigorated classicists’ readings of the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses: the sixteenth-century debates over the diVerences between epic and romance, fuelled by criticism of the multiple plots and digressive structure of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Giraldi, in his 1554 Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi, defends Ariosto’s compositional practice by an appeal to Ovid who, in the Metamorphoses, abandoned the norms of Virgil and Homer, and ignored the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. Ovid, Giraldi says, was not 50 Lyne (2002) 289.

51 Cheney (1997) 15.

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criticized for going his own way. Ariosto’s digressions on ‘jousts, tournaments, loves, beautiful women, passions of the mind, landscapes and buildings’ are closer, Giraldi claims, to Ovidian than to Virgilian or Homeric practice.52 David Quint puts the tension between epic and romance at the centre of his book Epic and Empire (1993), in the service of a reading for the politics and ideology of generic form that both draws on recent work by classical Latinists and has itself fed back fruitfully into our own work on the ancient epic over the last ten years. Quint’s work is preceded by Patricia Parker’s Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (1979), a brilliant marriage of the sixteenthcentury critical discourse on epic and romance with the Yale school of post-structuralist literary theory. Here is Parker on Ariosto’s Ovidian divagations from an epic closure: ‘The enchantment of romance is in the constant Ovidian metamorphosis which keeps its Wction going and defers, like the storytelling of Scheherezade, the fateful moment of truth.’53 Parker sees in the parody of Dante’s Commedia in Astolfo’s journey to the moon in Canto 35 of Orlando furioso a parallel to the Ovidian reductio of the matter of the Aeneid in books 13 and 14 of the Metamorphoses.54 The sixteenth-century critics also use as a yardstick for the diVerence between epic and romance the diVerence between the Iliad and the Odyssey,55 a useful reminder of Richard Helgerson’s claim that it is the system of diVerences rather than any absolute and unchanging essences in texts themselves that determines our perceptions of those texts. The polarity that structures the comparison of Virgil and Ovid is always available to be applied to other pairs of works. How deeply embedded the dichotomizing habit is in the western literary consciousness is seen in the fact that the history of Greek literature begins with a pair of epics that oVer themselves so readily to neat polarizations of various kinds. Nor should we overlook the fact that recent Ovidian criticism has highlighted the ‘Odyssean’—or one could say ‘romance’—qualities of Ovidian narratives and Wctions; 52 Giraldi (1973) 70, 79. 53 Parker (1979) 37. 54 Parker (1979) 44–6. 55 Cf. Minturno (1563) ‘Odissea, alla quale e` piu` simile, che alla Iliada il Romanzo.’

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the picture in Ars 2.123–42 of Ulysses’ repeated retellings to Calypso of the Trojan War, together with visuals drawn on the sand, has been privileged by a number of recent Ovidians as an emblem of Ovid’s own narratings: ille referre aliter saepe solebat idem (128).56 In the sixteenth century the establishment of Orlando furioso as the central narrative classic of a particular kind, the romance, seems almost inevitably to call forth its balancing twin, in the shape of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.57 If Ariosto represents the romance, then Tasso’s poem reverts to the providential and authoritarian structures of the Virgilian epic. With this chronological inversion of the Virgil / Ovid, classicism / counter-classicism, sequence might be compared Ben Jonson’s practice of a stricter classicism in contrast to the ‘Ovidian’ fancies of Shakespeare, although at this point the dichotomies are developing in ways that could not be mapped back on to a Virgil / Ovid contrast (native British versus Mediterranean classical, naive, artless inspiration versus learned imitation).58 In the seventeenth century the relational position of Spenser undergoes a change under the pressure of the epic / romance dichotomy: ‘Milton formally rejected the genre of romance in favor of epic and implicitly the ‘‘faerie’’ example of Spenser for something higher.’59 Paradise Lost now becomes the English Aeneid, and The Faerie Queene looks decidedly more Ovidian. The success of Orlando furioso and its establishment as the classic of the genre of romance in turn fed back into a sharpened sense of the diVerence between the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses. Daniel Javitch has argued that ‘counter-classical strains in ancient poetry began to be more widely appreciated in Italy by the late sixteenth century, partly as a result of Ariosto’s inXuence.’ Javitch shows how the two major sixteenth-century Italian volgarizzamenti of the Metamorphoses adopt Ariosto’s ottava rima and remodel Ovid in other ways to conform to an Ariostan template, even to the extent 56 Sharrock (1994) 2, 78–83; Barchiesi (2002) 198–9. 57 Weinberg (1961) 983 ‘it could serve as one of the poles in the violent quarrel over the respective merits of the two Cinquecento poets.’ 58 Cf. Milton L’Allegro 131–4 Then to the well-trod stage anon, j If Jonson’s learned sock be on, j Or sweetest Shakespeare fancy’s child, j Warble his native wood-notes wild. 59 Parker (1979) 128.

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of mimicking the typographical layout of editions of the best-selling Furioso. Moreover, by making Italian readers aYliate the Metamorphoses with the counterclassical romanzo, these translations served to intensify the historical awareness that Vergilian norms of epic, recently challenged by the romanzo, had already been deWed successfully by the Metamorphoses almost as soon as they had been established by the Aeneid.60

But one might ask whether Javitch would have been able so clearly to ‘see’ the ways in which Ariosto challenges Virgilian norms had Javitch himself not been writing at a time when this view of the Metamorphoses was rapidly becoming the orthodoxy among classical Latinists: Javitch draws on, inter alios, Brooks Otis and Solodow, and he owes his use of the term ‘counter-classical’ to an inXuential 1970 article by Ralph Johnson.61 I have traced points in the long and continuing history of a tendency to conduct literary history through contrastive dichotomies, a strategy that is at once enabling and limiting, illuminating and blinkering. It is worth emphasizing once more the fact that it is not just a convenient way of making sense and seeing shape on the part of readers, but also a central aspect of the practice of intertextuality on the part of writers, who deWne their own relationship to their predecessors by constructing their own tendentious literary histories.62 Ovid, after all, is the Wrst literary historian who operates with the dichotomy of Virgil and Ovid. This brings its own dangers: Ovid has his own agenda, and the modern critic’s desire to impose patterns on the cultural products of the past may lead to a criticism that unreXectingly replicates oppositions constructed by the objects of its analysis: Richard Tarrant asks ‘whether by deWning himself in opposition to Virgil in matters relating to Augustus Ovid did not help to create the image of Virgil the pure ‘‘Augustan’’ that much recent criticism has been at pains to complicate’.63 The cultural, ideological, and psychological pressures that maintain the dichotomizing habit are in most cases readily visible. I will

60 Javitch (1981) 15. 61 Johnson (1970). 62 On which see Hinds (1998) ch. 3 ‘Literary history and its narratives’. 63 Tarrant (2002) 27.

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end by considering another source of literary-historical dichotomizing, one that has had a powerfully liberating eVect on twentiethcentury Latin literary criticism, but which, if unexamined, may itself turn into a straitjacket. The self-evidently subjective judgmentalism of, say, the nineteenth-century comparison of Homer and Virgil, or the earlier twentieth-century comparison of Virgil and Ovid, can itself be opposed to the use of contrast in the formalist aesthetics of the more ‘scientiWc’ art history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Value judgements are replaced by a view of the development of style in terms of an immanent process of oscillation between contrasting poles: for example, linear v. pictorial, subjective v. objective, rational v. spontaneous, classical v. romantic, geometrical v. naturalistic64— the pendulum rather than the scales of justice that Pugin used in his Contrasts to weigh the ‘noble ediWces of the Middle Ages’ against ‘the present decay of taste’ (Figure 3).65 Art history of this kind seeks to explain rather than to judge, to assess diVerences according to a natural logic of the psychological processes of artistic creation working within a sequence of historical time, rather than to award points for superior or inferior performances. The most inXuential product of this brand of art history was Heinrich Wo¨lZin’s Kunstgeschichtliche GrundbegriVe (1915), developing an approach already adumbrated in his Die klassische Kunst of 1899—the source of the two-slideprojector approach to lecturing on art history. Wo¨lZin’s art history was inXuential on the literary-historical thinking of Richard Heinze, the single most signiWcant Wgure, certainly in Germany, in the rehabilitation of Virgil after a period in which the scales weighing Homer and Virgil had tipped decisively in favour of the Greek poet. In his 1903 Virgils epische Technik Heinze set out to explain the Roman poet’s achievement in the Aeneid in terms of the aims and goals of this poet writing at this time in the political and cultural history of Rome, rather than appeal to an a priori set of evaluative criteria. In the chapter on Livy in his later book on Die augusteische Kultur (the text of lectures delivered in 1918) Heinze oVers a contrastive syncrisis of Livy’s account of the duel between Manlius and

64 See Hankiss (1972).

65 Pugin (1898).

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Figure 3. Endpiece from Pugin (1898)

the Gaul, and the fragmentary account of the same episode by the Republican annalist Claudius Quadrigarius, in order to highlight the artistic ideals of Augustan literature. Heinze then turns to his audience (German troops stationed in Bucharest in 1918): one or two of you, he says, may know Wo¨lZin’s book Die klassische Kunst (published four years before the appearance of Virgils epische Technik). What Wo¨lZin says about the diVerence between the art of the High Renaissance and that of the Early Renaissance is widely applicable, Heinze says, to the diVerence between Augustan and earlier Latin literature. Heinze claims that Wo¨lZin’s Die klassische Kunst is a book

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‘from which I have learnt more than from any philological work for the goals and methods of literary-historical research’.66 Somewhat later Eduard Fraenkel’s rehabilitation of Lucan’s baroque is also indebted to Wo¨lZin’s ‘scientiWc’ periodization of Renaissance and Baroque art.67 A hundred years on from Heinze, and we have freed ourselves from the evaluative comparison of Virgil and Ovid. But we may be in danger of elevating the contrast between Virgil and Ovid into one of those overarching Wo¨lZinesque oppositions: classical v. mannerist, or classical v. baroque, closed form v. open form. Ralph Johnson, for example, in his still inXuential article of 1970,68 saw in Ovid an example of the ‘counter-classical’, a ‘poetry of disenchantment’ in contrast to a classical aesthetic characterized by harmony and optimism. Wo¨lZin himself was aware of the arbitrary nature of the segmentation involved in his kind of art history: ‘Everything is transition and it is hard to answer the man who regards history as an endless Xow. For us, intellectual self-preservation demands that we should classify the inWnity of events with reference to a few results.’69 ‘Everything is transition and it is hard to answer the man who regards history as an endless Xow’: one such man was the Pythagoras of the last book of Ovid’s (Metamorphoses 15.177–80): ‘there is nothing in the whole world that endures. All is in Xux, each image comes into shape as it wanders along. Time itself glides in constant motion, just like a river.’ (nihil est toto quod perstet in orbe; j cuncta Xuunt, omnisque uagans formatur imago. j ipsa quoque adsiduo labuntur tempora motu, j non secus ut Xumen.) Ovid / Pythagoras is here talking about the lack of persistence in a temporal continuum and the instability of momentary formations. For an image of the lack of clear-cut distinctions in a spatial continuum, and the delusive impression of distance that is produced by a partial perspective we may return to the weaving contest of Minerva and Arachne in Metamorphoses Book 6, where the two sharply contrasting ecphrases are 66 Heinze (1930) 102. I owe the reference to Conte (2002) 132 n. 18. 67 See Schrijvers (1990) 8. The classical / baroque dichotomy is used at Fraenkel (1964) 237, 247. 68 Johnson (1970). 69 Wo¨lZin (1915; tr. 1932) 227.

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prefaced by a simile that suggests rather the impossibility of hard and fast segmentation (Met. 6.65–7): ‘although a thousand diVerent colours gleamed in it, the transitions between them escaped the beholder’s eye: so very alike were the adjacent shades, but the extremes were clearly diVerent’ (in quo diuersi niteant cum mille colores, j transitus ipse tamen spectantia lumina fallit: j usque adeo quod tangit idem est; tamen ultima distant). The simile applies to the shimmering and deceptive gradation of tones within the two tapestries, but the contrast between imperceptible transition and sharp diVerence, depending on one’s point of view, is one that could be transferred to other objects. If a literary-critical classiWcation (Aeneid versus Metamorphoses) is contained within the contrasting ecphrases of the tapestries of Minerva and Arachne, we are reminded that the sharpness of the contrast is the result of particular and contingent ways of reading the two poems of Virgil and Ovid. I leave the last word to Don: ‘The Ovidian viewpoint on segmentation is that it is inevitable and necessary, but it is wrong to think that one’s divisions are eternal, that there is one right way to segment phenomena.’70 70 Fowler (1995) 14. On segmentation see also Fowler (2000) 296.

8 Horace’s Body, Horace’s Books Joseph Farrell

I’d like to begin with an anecdote, one that would probably be familiar even if Tom Stoppard had not given it new currency in The Invention of Love.1 When asked whether an aspiring American classicist in the year 1920 should study in England or Germany, Housman reportedly said: Before the war an American student coming to Europe would go to a German University where the Professor would tell him to count the number of times that Cicero uses the word ‘et’. He will now come to Cambridge and go to Mr. Sheppard, who will tell him to write a thesis on ‘Thersites as the Hero of the Iliad ’, or ‘The Aeolus of Euripides in the light of the theories of Dr. Freud.’ I think he would be far better employed counting the number of times Cicero uses the word ‘et’.2

If we are speaking of things to do with a Latin text, counting the words is certainly one of them, and under some circumstances it can be among the most useful. The Housman anecdote suggests that counting and interpreting are antithetical activities or better, perhaps, that they are so diVerent as to have nothing to do with or say to one another. But here we should follow Don Fowler’s example; for what I value most about Don’s work is the way in which it puts practical philology into productive dialogue with criticism and 1 The anecdote was related in the production that ran at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia from 9 February to 17 March 2000. It does not appear in the published version of the script, Stoppard (1998). 2 Graves (1979) 209.

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theory.3 Characteristically, his work seeks to do more than to shine the light of interpretative approaches acquired from some other discipline onto classical material. One of Don’s great strengths is the way in which he uses his expertise as a classicist to advance interdisciplinary theoretical discussion, applying rigorous scrutiny to the theory as well as to the text. So in tribute to Don, I will try, impari passu, to do something of the same sort. By indulging myself in the humble activity of word-counting, and the very slightly more elevated technique of sorting, I will attempt to engage in a speciWc modiWcation of a well-known and widely subscribed-to theory about the representation of the human body in literature and the visual arts. And the Latin text with which I will do these things is that of Horace. The body of my title is not the physical body, but the discursive one that is capable of being represented in dichotomous modes. One mode commonly goes by the name ‘grotesque’, while the other is most often labelled ‘classical’.4 It is the use of the term ‘classical’ that makes this inquiry especially interesting to me; and my decision to interrogate the prehistory of this aesthetic canon in Horace is due to the fact that Horace himself is frequently regarded as one of the 3 For Don’s own none-too-reverential attitude towards Housman, see Fowler (1987) 93. 4 Those who use these opposing terms of reference frequently cite Bakhtin (1964). In their inXuential work on transgression, for instance, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White write that ‘At various points throughout this book we have turned to Bakhtin’s vocabulary of ‘‘classical’’ and ‘‘grotesque’’ in our exploration of high/low symbolism’ (Stallybrass and White (1986) 21). More recently, John Henderson, in an insightful essay on the dialogue between these opposing principles in ancient Greek vase painting (Henderson (1999) 43 n.2), cites Stallybrass and White as ‘the clearest exegesis’ of the opposition ascribed to Bakhtin. Bakhtin himself, however, is critical of the term ‘classical’ in this context, which can only create confusion by suggesting that the conception of the body that it designates is somehow characteristic of ‘classical’ (i.e. of a high-mindedly homogeneous ancient Greco-Roman) mentalite´. Bakhtin states clearly that this is not the case. Historically, he regards the ‘classical’ conception of the body as a product of the early modern period (‘In the oYcial literature of European peoples it has existed only for the last four hundred years’, 319); and accordingly, he opposes to the grotesque body not ‘the classical body’ but ‘the new bodily canon’ (320 and passim; my emphasis). The distinction that I draw in this paper is not between the ‘grotesque’ and either the ‘classical’ body or Bakhtin’s ‘new bodily canon’. Rather, I hope to show that while the satirical body of Sermones 1 corresponds rather well to Bakhtin’s grotesque body, the lyric body of Odes 1–3 in particular owes something to both of Bakhtin’s bodily categories.

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foundational theorists of ‘the classical body’—thanks speciWcally, of course, to the opening lines of the Ars poetica, where a well-designed poem is compared to a well-proportioned body.5 My suspicion that I would Wnd Horace’s poetic corpus a useful instrument for thinking about the classical body arose from an observation that I made in another connection. In working on the various ways in which Ovid represents his own body in passages of highly tendentious apologetics, I noticed some antecedents in the works of Horace.6 Hence my testing of assumptions about the classical body in the works of Horace will give rise to some observations about the way in which Horace represents his own body as well. But before I start promulgating and testing theories, I want to crunch some numbers. My procedure will be to compare two generically distinct and self-contained ‘publications’, (as it were) namely the Wrst book of Sermones and the Wrst three books of Odes.7 What sorts of bodies does Horace represent in these two collections? One might begin to answer this question in various ways. I will follow a lexical approach by collecting the diVerent body parts strewn throughout Horace’s oeuvre and assembling them into an aggregate Horatian body. This procedure shows that the works in question share a fairly large vocabulary pertaining to the body. In this respect they diVer little from one another and, probably, from most other Latin texts. The relative frequency of words pertaining to the body is also about the same in both works. Odes 1–3 is a corpus of about 11,000 words, and of these over 200 refer to the body in whole or in part. That is a frequency of about 2 per cent. Sermones 1 contains about 7,000 words, of which about 140 refer to the body—again, a frequency of about 2 per cent. So the sheer presence of bodies, so measured, is about the same in both texts. The number of discrete lexical items, too, is roughly comparable: Sermones 1 employs a 5 Horace Ars P. 1–12. 6 Farrell (1999). 7 This paper was Wrst written before the appearance of Hutchinson (2002), who argues that Horace did not originally conceive of Odes 1–3 as a uniWed collection, and opens the possibility that the individual books were published separately from about 26 to 23 bc. On the other hand, it is clear that in books 2 and 3 Horace worked to impose unity upon the collection as a whole, so that many of the arguments based on such a unity (of the sort represented most elaborately by Santirocco (1986)) can still, with due caution, be made. I will return to this point.


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lexicon of 54 words to denote the body and its various parts, while Odes 1–3 use a somewhat larger vocabulary of 64 words. If we were to go on this information alone, we would conclude that the discourse of the body is about equally important to the Sermones and to the Odes, or perhaps that it is slightly more important in the Odes, where we Wnd a somewhat larger vocabulary of body words. But besides the sheer frequency of words that refer to the body and its parts, it is important to notice what words and what parts get mentioned in each collection. I’ve said that the two collections share a large number of words that refer to the body. The total size of Horace’s lexicon of the body extends to some 83 words. Of these, 35—a bit less than half—occur in both collections. But the remaining 48 words tell a diVerent story. Of these, 19 occur in only in Sermones 1 and 29 only in Odes 1–3. (I notice again in passing the greater number of diVerent body words in the Odes.) What is more, if we examine the character of words that are conWned to one or the other collection, a clear distinction between the two works starts to emerge. Those words that are unique to the Sermones tend to involve organs associated with digestion, elimination of waste, copulation, and so forth. The organs concerned are sometimes designated by conventional euphemisms (as for instance inguina ¼ ‘groin’ and lumbi ¼ ‘loins’, both ‘penis’),8 sometimes named in plain, blunt, and even obscene language—e.g. uenter (‘belly’), cunnus (‘cunt’),9 clunes (‘buttocks’), uesica (‘bladder’), and so forth—or, occasionally, unmarked language names them metaphorically, as in the designation of the male sexual organs as testes caudamque salacem (Serm. 1.2.45). Cauda here is instructive: it happens to occur once in the Odes as 8 ‘The euphemistic use of inguen (¼ mentula or cunnus) was established in all types of Latin’ (Adams (1982) 47, citing inter alia Horace, Serm. 1.2.26, 116). ‘In sexual contexts lumbus (generally in the plural) for the most part occurs in descriptions of the movements of seduction or copulation. . . . In a few other places lumbus seems to be used of a vaguely deWned area within which the sexual organs might be situated, but not necessarily coterminous with them’, although ‘it might sometimes have been interpreted as a euphemism for a sexual organ’ (Adams (1982) 48). 9 ‘Cunnus was the basic obscenity for the female pudenda. . . . Such words occur in the speech of all classes when the speaker wishes to create an impact by using a word of strong taboo character. . . . Horace uses the word three times in the Wrst book of Sermones (1.2.36, 1.2.70, 1.3.107), but thereafter it is not found in satire’ (Adams (1982) 80–81).

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well, but the diVerence between the two passages is sharp.10 The word of course means ‘tail’, and at Odes 2.19.31 that is all it means: Cerberus’ tail, to be precise, which the infernal hound wags happily at the approach of Bacchus. There the word is, like Cerberus himself, insons. In the Sermones, the word is used in place of ‘penis’. The usage is metaphorical, but there is no question of Horace’s metaphor being euphemistically coy or polite. The epithet salacem (‘lewd’) makes the tone of the passage clear enough.11 In the Odes we encounter a rather diVerent image of the body. First, it is an image free of the base associations that we have just been discussing. It is an image in which (to quote Mikhail Bakhtin) ‘the leading role is attributed’ not to the nether regions, but ‘to the individual and expressive parts of the body: the head, face, eyes, lips . . .’.12 As in the Sermones, vocabulary Wxes the cardinal points on Horace’s anatomical chart of the lyric body. This body is dominated by the head and the various parts of the head (caput, ‘head’; frons, ‘forehead’; oculi, ‘eyes’; tempora, ‘temples’; uultus, ‘face’ or ‘expression’; supercilia, ‘brow’; etc.) which are the body parts most commonly mentioned in these poems.13 And of course the heads of those characters who appear in the Odes are never cudgelled, as they would be in the Sermones, but are rather constantly being adorned with garlands, perfumes, crowns, and other badges of honour, inspiration, or privilege.14 So, simply in terms of parts of the body that appear in the two collections, there is a decisive diVerence—such a 10 This example shows that bodily vocabulary common to the Sermones and the Odes cannot be taken as deWning a neutral, generically unmarked Horatian body. Rather, the same word in diVerent genres is attracted into the appropriate bodily register. 11 Horace’s use of cauda in this sense may have been an innovation: see Adams (1982) 36–7. 12 Bakhtin (1964) 321. Bakhtin is describing ‘the new canonical body’, which he regards as an early modern innovation. As I have stated previously (note 4 above), I regard the Horatian lyric body as an antecedent of Bakhtin’s new canonical body, but one with much closer ties to Bakhtin’s universal grotesque body. 13 caput, 1.4.9, 1.28.20, 2.8.7, 2.13.12, 3.5.42, 3.11.18, 3.24.8 (cf. 1.1.22, the source of a river); frons, 1.1.29, 1.7.7, 1.33.5, 2.5.16, 3.13.4, 3.29.16; vertex , 1.1.36, 1.18.15, 3.16.19, 3.24.6 (cf. 2.9.22, eddies in a river); oculi, 1.3.18, 1.32.11, 1.36.18, 2.2.23, 2.12.15, 3.24.32; tempora, 1.7.23, 3.25.20; supercilia, 3.1.8. 14 Cudgels, Serm. 1.5.21–3; garlands and crowns, Carm. 1.1.29, 1.4.9, 1.7.7, 1.7.23, 1.17.27, 1.26.8, 1.38.2, 2.7.7, 2.7.24, 2.14.17, 3.23.15, 3.25.20, 3.27.30, 3.30.15.16; perfumes, 2.14.17.


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diVerence, in fact, that we should really speak not of the Horatian body, but of two bodies, generically determined: the satiric body of the Sermones and the lyric body of the Odes. The diVerences between these bodies extends not just to the parts of which they consist, but to the character of each body as a whole. Generally, the satiric body is a suVering body, while the lyric body is more frequently a locus of pleasure.15 We see this diVerence clearly in the opening poems of the two collections, all the more strikingly because the two poems share certain structural and thematic features. Sermones 1.1 begins with the conceit of mempsimoiria, in which stock Wgures from various walks of life Wnd their lot wanting in comparison with others: the soldier envies the merchant’s lot and vice versa, the farmer and the city-dweller envy each other, and so on (Serm. 1.1.1–12). In Odes 1.1 this conceit is inverted: we Wnd a similar survey of diVerent walks of life, but with the diVerence that all the stock Wgures are basically content (sunt quos . . . iuuat . . . euehit ad deos 3–6; gaudentem patrios Wndere sarculo j agros 11–12; multos castra iuuant 23).16 Here then is one of the ways in which the two collections use similar motifs to diVerentiate themselves from one another. So too with the body. It is in this opening poem that we encounter the Wrst bodily image in the Sermones (1.1.4–5), where the soldier’s limbs are broken with the constant labour that his job requires: ‘O fortunati mercatores!’ grauis annis miles ait multo iam fractus membra labore. ‘O, those lucky merchants!’ says the soldier, heavy with years, his limbs now broken with much toil.

Similarly in the Odes the Wrst bodily image that we encounter occurs in the very Wrst poem, once again in a survey of diVerent careers, this time wedged between the examples of the merchant and the soldier; but the image of the body presented here is very diVerent (Odes 1.1.19–25): est qui nec ueteris pocula Massici nec partem solido demere de die spernit, nunc uiridi membra sub arbuto 15 I discuss the suVering of the lyric body below, note 22. 16 Santirocco (1986) 16–17.

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There is one who thinks it Wne to siphon oV cups of old Massic wine along with the best part of the day, his limbs now spread under a verdant arbutus, now by the gentle source of a sacred spring. Many revel in military camps and the cry of the trumpet and the horn and wars that are hateful to mothers.

Where the soldier’s limbs in the Wrst Sermo are broken by constant toil, those of the unnamed tippler in the Wrst Ode are spread out relaxing in the shade. Each of these passages eVectively sets the tone for what follows. The satiric body is one beset by labour, pain, disease, and want, while the lyric body is generally at ease, its needs few and ready to hand. This example points the way to some further observations about the satiric body: even those parts that it shares with the more noble lyric body are somehow tainted. As Bakhtin writes, ‘debasement is the fundamental artistic principle of grotesque realism; all that is sacred and exalted is rethought on the level of the material bodily stratum or else combined and mixed with its images’.17 Thus in the Sermones, those parts of the body that satire shares with lyric are brought down to the level of the lower organs. Consider the oath that the statue of Priapus takes at the end of Sermones 1.8 (37–9): mentior at siquid, merdis caput inquiner albis corvorum atque in me veniat mictum atque cacatum Iulius et fragilis Pediatia furque Voranus. If any of what I say is false, may my head be fouled with white crow shit and may Julius and fragile Pediata and thieving Voranus come to piss and crap on me.

Here the head, the uppermost and hence most prominent and characteristic part of the lyric body, is degraded through contact with those very waste products that emanate from the lower regions of the grotesque body. Similarly in Sermones 1.5.22 the head is equated with the lumbi, the hips or loins, as an opportune target 17 Bakhtin (1964) 370.


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for punishing blows. Consider as well the eyes. These luminous organs are in the Odes emblems of beauty, courage, or good sense;18 but in the Sermones they are primarily undefended areas through which disease may enter and attack the satiric body. Time and again we hear of this or that character as lippus, ‘blear-eyed’, the victim of a malady that was evidently common in antiquity and that is almost emblematic of the Sermones.19 This last point gives rise to another observation: in the Sermones, the body is presented as an accurate correlative of the soul. Time and again Horace will develop an argument on the care of the soul by analogy with obvious or commonly accepted truths about the care of the body. The blear-eyed man who does not see properly thus suVers from bodily malady; but he is the analogue of a man who is spiritually distressed and so does not think clearly.20 It is certainly not the case that this similitude between body and soul is ennobling to the former; rather, association with the grotesque body is degrading to the soul, which like the head befouled with excrement is deprived of any lofty status that it might have enjoyed and so is brought back down to earth. A further diVerence between these two collections lies in the fact that the satiric body is in general not presented as an aesthetic object, whereas the lyric body is constantly aestheticized. In the Odes, this is true both of the youthful male body, which occasionally provokes jealousy in the lyric speaker, and of the female body, of which the speaker presents himself as a great connoisseur. In the Odes, his appreciation reveals itself primarily through the epithets that adorn various parts of the lyric body.21 In the Sermones, however, the satirist sounds more like a careful shopper, particularly in poem 2, when he holds forth on the diVerences between streetwalkers and honest matronae—the main one being that the matronae wear long dresses, so you can’t be sure what you are really getting (77–105). The moral: caueat emptor!

18 Beauty: oculis nigris, 1.32.11, oculos fulgentes 2.12.15; courage: oculis siccis, 1.3.18; good sense: oculo irretorto, 2.2.23. 19 Serm. 1.1.120, 1.3.25, 1.5.30, 1.5.49, 1.7.3; cf. Epist. 1.1.29, 1.2.52. 20 Serm. 1.3.25–7. 21 e.g. Telephi j ceruicem roseam, cerea Telephi . . . bracchia (1.13.1–2), Glycerae nitor j splendentis Pario marmore purius (1.19.5–6).

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Not to labour the point, it is fair to distinguish between the Sermones and the Odes by associating them with two distinct images of the literary body. What I want to do now is move on the next point, which is perhaps more surprising. This is that Horace not only draws generic distinctions among the bodies of minor characters—most of whom exist only in either the Sermones or the Odes, but not in both collections—but also represents his own body diVerentially in the two collections in the very same way. This is strange for a simple reason. The fact that Horace repeatedly claims to make events within his own experience the subject of his poetry encourages us to imagine some stable point of reference behind the Wctive creations that we read. The poet’s life becomes the supposed matrix of his creativity, the source and inspiration of his verse, a sequence of events that, we are encouraged to believe, really did occur. If we accept some such view of the relationship between poetry and experience, we expect the poet’s body, at least, to be a relatively stable point of reference. In fact, however, the poet’s body is as subject to the vicissitudes of discursive construction as any other factor we may care to name. Horace’s body in the Sermones, just like all the other satiric bodies discussed above, is Wxed squarely in the realm of the grotesque. It is subject at all times to the same appetites and passions that beset the satiric body in general. It requires constant maintenance. It tends to misbehave and malfunction, suVering from bad digestion, bad eyesight, sexual incontinence, and other aZictions. Just listing these aZictions calls to mind some of the more infamous passages in the Sermones and particularly the journey to Brundisium, Sermones 1.5. No sooner is this journey underway than something in the water gives Horace an upset stomach, causing him to forgo the dinner that the rest of his travelling companions share (Serm. 1.5.7–9). While trying to sleep that night, he is kept awake Wrst by quarrelling, then by mosquitoes and bullfrogs, a serenade, and someone else’s snoring (9–19). At the next stop on the journey, Anxur, Horace Wnds that he has fallen prey to the dreaded malady that is so emblematic of his satiric world and become lippus, ‘blear-eyed’ (27–31). Later he informs the reader that his two ailments prevent him from accompanying Maecenas to some entertainment at Capua (48–9). After further lowjinks we are informed about the most embarrassing episode of the entire trip, the night at Trivicum, when a girl stood Horace up, causing him


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to retire late in great frustration and, as a result, to have an erotic dream that ruins his nightshirt and his sleep (82–5). One should not be too interested in whether any of this really happened. The point is not what Horace’s actual body looked like or how well it functioned, but is rather what kind of body Horace chose to inhabit in any particular work. In the Sermones, and particularly in the journey to Brundisium in Sermo 1.5, he provides himself with a body that is the very image of the grotesque. What then do we expect to Wnd about Horace’s body in the Odes? Here as well, Horace supplies himself with a body appropriate to his chosen genre. We do not Wnd Horace’s lyric body, like its satiric counterpart, blear-eyed, beset by erotic dreams, and plagued by gastrointestinal disorders. But Horace’s body in the Odes is not quite the ideal body, nor is it entirely free of the grotesque characteristics associated with the satiric body in Horace’s earlier work. The poet’s body feels sexual desire, is growing old, and so forth.22 This treatment by Horace of his own body may be in part a concession to realism—it would have been unwise for a man who reportedly looked like a jug to represent himself as Adonis, in any genre.23 It is 22 The lyric speaker of the Odes suVers from sexual passion and from jealousy (as in Odes 1.13.3–4 meum j feruens diYcili bile tumet iecur ; cf. 1.19.5 urit me Glycerae nitor) as do other characters in the Odes (e.g. 1.27.14–16 quae te cumque domat Venus j non erubescendis adurit j ignibus). For the most part, however, the speaker stands at some remove from the more violent eVects of passion, which he experiences vicariously and voyeuristically through the aVairs of the various young lovers whom he addresses or mentions in the Odes. This distinction is made programmatically at the beginning of Odes 4 (1.9–12 tempestiuius in domum j Pauli purpureis ales oloribus j comissabere Maximi, j si torrere iecur quaeris idoneum). Similarly, the speaker is no longer a youth, and the inevitability of death is a frequent theme in the Odes. But while the speaker does not hesitate to remind his addressees that they may die at any time (e.g. moriture Delli 2.3.4), death is nevertheless something that he himself has successfully avoided in the past (e.g. his survival of Philippi in 2.7; his nearly being struck by a tree in 2.13) and, signiWcantly, something from which he is at least partially exempt (see below on Odes 2.20 and 3.30). In general, the speaker occupies a position that is balanced between the eVects of youthful passion on the one hand, and senescence and death on the other. Interestingly, the bodily ‘harm’ that passion causes men is generally metaphorical in the Odes (‘roasted’ livers and the like), while the suVering thus incurred by the female body is more real (like Lydia’s bruises in 1.13). This distinction points to the fact that the relationship between sexuality and bodily debility and senescence operates diVerently in the case of Horace’s male and female characters: see Ancona (1994). 23 On Horace’s appearance see Suetonius, Vita Horatii 2, discussed below.

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also true, however, that Horace’s indulgence of his body’s passions is quite moderate in the Odes; its needs are represented, as I noted before, as few and easily satisWed. Nor does Horace’s lyric body ever place him in the embarrassing situations that we Wnd in the Sermones. Nevertheless, Horace’s lyric body is not so sharply diVerentiated from his satiric body as some theorists might lead us to expect. Against these theorists I would again cite Bakhtin, who notes that ‘the limited canon [of the ideal body] never prevailed in antique literature. In the oYcial literature of European peoples it has existed only for the last four hundred years.’24 The evidence of the Odes vindicates Bakhtin against those more numerous critics who make the Horace of the Ars poetica an early theorist of the so-called classical body. When we encounter this classical body, we are not dealing with a theory of the body explicitly derived from an analysis of classical literature, and it is questionable whether the concept even applies to classical literature. Certainly, in Horace what we Wnd is that the lyric body, which can be clearly distinguished, as we have seen, from the satiric body, nevertheless shares with the satiric body several characteristics of the grotesque. And it is to these characteristics, and their development in the Odes, that I now want to turn. In order to understand this development, we must pause to remind ourselves of a rather particular, but widely diVused, aspect of ancient discourse on the body. I refer to the image, extremely common in Antiquity, of the book as a kind of body, and speciWcally as the body of the author. Since I have addressed this topic before, I will just summarize here a few salient points.25 To begin again with words, it is a notable feature of the vocabulary used to describe the ancient book that many of its terms also denote the body, or parts thereof. For instance, the ancient book itself often came wrapped in a membrana—‘a piece of parchment’, but also of course a ‘membrane’, a word derived from membrum, ‘limb’.26 After unwrapping the book, the reader came upon the edge of the papyrus roll, which was called the frons—literally, the ‘face’ or ‘brow’ of the book. Reading to the end, he would eventually encounter the umbilicus, or ‘navel’—the rod around which the papyrus roll was wound. Finally, the umbilicus probably was decorated at either end by 24 Bakhtin (1964) 321.

25 Farrell (1999).

26 OLD s.v. membrana.


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cornua or ‘horns’. The ancient book, not unlike its modern counterpart with its ‘spine’, but more obviously so, was a collection of body parts. Moreover, the whole was a body: the Latin word for a collection of book rolls that together form a single work—a collection like Odes 1–3, for instance—was, precisely, corpus, or ‘body’.27 In respect of Horace, I mentioned before in passing that he is supposed to have been shaped like a jug. We learn this from Suetonius in a passage that is thoroughly informed by the idea of an equivalency between an author’s body and his book: habitu corporis fuit breuis atque obesus, qualis et a semet ipso in saturis describitur et ab Augusto hac epistula: ‘pertulit ad me Onysius libellum tuum, quem ego zut accusantemz quantuluscumque est boni consulo. uereri autem mihi uideris ne maiores libelli sint quam ipse es. sed tibi satura deest, corpusculum non deest. itaque licebit in sextariolo scribas, quo circuitus uoluminis tui sit OªŒø æ, sicut est uentriculi tui.’ (Suetonius, Vita Hor. 2) In stature he was short and stout, just as he is described both by himself in his satires and by Augustus in this letter: ‘Onysius brought your book to me, and . . . I like it, small as it is. I think you’re afraid of your books getting bigger than you are yourself. But you are light in satire, not in weight. You should write on a jug, so that the girth of your scroll will swell up, like that of your belly.’

What I Wnd notable about this passage is not the humour contained in Augustus’ joke, but rather the fact that the joke is so lame. Fraenkel in his excellent discussion of this anecdote tries gallantly to defend the princeps’ sense of humour, but even he admits that the joke ‘may to a modern reader seem somewhat laboured’ and concludes that ‘in a society not very touchy about personal remarks the witticism might be thought not too bad’.28 Fraenkel may be right, but I think we have to admit that the joke seems very obvious; and this is important because it suggests that the comparison between the author’s body and the material form of his writing, which as we have seen could be turned to poetic eVect, was also a commonplace of daily conversa27 OLD s.v. corpus 16a recognizes a deWnition close to the modern English use of a literary corpus, but misses the more basic meaning that extends to any multi-volume work (TLL 4:1020; Birt (1892) 36–43). 28 Fraenkel (1957) 20, 21.

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tion. I take this to mean that, however imaginatively Horace or any other poet may have handled the topos, he could count on his readers’ being familiar with the general idea, and thus ready and perhaps even eager to Wnd it deployed in subtle and unfamiliar ways. In the Sermones, we Wnd many instances in which the book is connected with, and even represented as, the author’s body. In one famous passage, Horace evaluates his predecessor, Lucilius, as a follower of the great poets of Old Comedy (1.4.1–13): Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae atque alii quorum comoedia prisca virorum est, siquis erat dignus describi , quod malus ac fur, quod moechus foret aut sicarius aut alioqui famosus, multa cum libertate notabant. hinc omnis pendet Lucilius, hosce secutus, mutatis tantum pedibus numerisque, facetus, emunctae naris, durus conponere versus. nam fuit hoc vitiosus: in hora saepe ducentos, ut magnum, versus dictabat stans pede in uno; cum Xueret lutulentus, erat quod tollere velles; garrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem, scribendi recte. The poets Eupolis, Cratinus, Aristophanes, and the others to whom Old Comedy belonged, with great freedom of expression identiWed anyone who deserved to be marked down as an evildoer or a thief, an adulterer, a murderer, or notorious in some other way. Lucilius depends on them entirely and is their follower, diVering only in feet and metres, witty, his nose clean, but a rough composer of verses. For this was his besetting sin: in an hour he would dictate two hundred verses, or as many as you like, standing on one foot ; though he Xowed right along in his muddy way, there was what you’d like to cut; he was chatty and too lazy to endure the labour of writing, of writing well.

This passage illustrates a number of points. First, it activates the relationship between the poet’s body and the body of his work by playing on the double sense of pes.29 Lucilius imitated the comic poets while changing the feet, or metres, in which he wrote; and he was a Xuent composer, often producing two hundred verses an hour 29 On this common pun see Barchiesi (1994), ‘Appendice: Sull’ uso di ‘‘piede’’ in contesti metaletterari’, 135–7.


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while standing on one foot. Second, lest we miss the point, Lucilius’ body is alluded to again in the phrase emunctae naris—he was sharp, or ‘keen scented’ as Niall Rudd puts it.30 But the idea is expressed in a colloquial phrase that means his nose was clean and that belongs Wrmly to the register of the grotesque body. Finally, note that composing poetry in this passage is closely tied to the business of writing. In fact, it is true throughout the Sermones—oddly, perhaps, in view of the conceit that this collection is nothing but a series of ‘conversations’—that poets are writers. Horace hints at this point with describi in line 3 and then drives it home with the repetition of scribendi in lines 12 and 13. The fact that Lucilius dictates his verses is not against this: dictating, which implies that somebody is transcribing what is said, is not the same as singing; and if anything, Lucilius’ problem seems to be that he would be a better poet if he would stop dictating (he is called too garrulous, 12), pick up his stylus, and submit to the sheer labour involved in writing well. This is a point on which Horace insists throughout the Sermones: that poetry is a matter of writing books, books that are the correlative of the poet’s own body. The point appears with even greater clarity later in this same poem (1.4.53–65): ergo non satis est puris versum perscribere verbis, quem si dissolvas, quivis stomachetur eodem quo personatus pacto pater. his, ego quae nunc, olim quae scripsit Lucilius, eripias si tempora certa modosque, et quod prius ordine verbum est posterius facias praeponens ultima primis, non, ut si solvas ‘postquam Discordia taetra belli ferratos postis portasque refregit’, invenias etiam disiecti membra poetae. hactenus haec: alias, iustum sit necne poema. nunc illud tantum quaeram, meritone tibi sit suspectum genus hoc scribendi. So it isn’t enough to write out your verse using correct diction if, should you put them into prose, would make anyone angry like a father in a play. If you were to remove the deWnite rhythms and metres from these things that I now 30 Rudd (1966) 88.

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and that Lucilius once wrote, and should put the Wrst word last in order and move the last ones earlier, you would not—as you would do if you made prose of ‘after dire Discord battered down the iron lintels and doors of war’—you would not Wnd here as well the limbs of a dismembered poet. But enough of that: in another place, I’ll discuss whether something is really poetry. Now what interests me is whether you are right to be suspicious of this genre of writing.

In this passage, which has been well discussed by Kirk Freudenburg, Horace goes so far as to describe the poet’s written words, after they have been shuZed, as the ‘limbs of a dismembered poet’—provided the passage you start with is, like the lines of Ennius that he quotes, real poetry to begin with, and not the sort of thing that Horace himself or Lucilius would write.31 Finally, in Sermones 1.10.64–71, Lucilius appears again as he would be if he had lived in Horace’s day: fuerit Lucilius, inquam, comis et urbanus, fuerit limatior idem quam rudis et Graecis intacti carminis auctor quamque poetarum seniorum turba; sed ille, si foret hoc nostrum fato delapsus in aevum, detereret sibi multa, recideret omne quod ultra perfectum traheretur, et in versu faciendo saepe caput scaberet vivos et roderet unguis. I say we admit that Lucilius was agreeable and urbane, and also more polished both than the untaught inventor of a genre that was untouched by the Greeks and than the crowd of elder poets; but if he were to Wnd himself transferred by fate to our time, he would rub out a lot and cut back everything that went beyond what Wnished work required, and in making his verse he would often scratch his head and bite his nails to the quick.

Here we Wnd Lucilius writing in earnest and belabouring his body as he does so—tearing his hair and biting his nails. All these passages show the various ways in which poetry in the Sermones means writing books, a process intimately connected to the image of the grotesque body—a body that suVers as it writes, that is metaphorically dismembered when words are rearranged on the page, the various parts of which bear the same names as the parts of the book that it writes. It is in comparison to this image of the poet’s body in the Sermones that we must understand the fate of his lyric body in the Odes. Rather 31 Freudenburg (1993) 146–9.


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than trace this theme in its entirety, we can focus on three crucial moments that outline its development over the three-book collection. Each of these moments represents Horace’s body as in a state of change, and thus links it to the grotesque. Not, however, to the grotesque body as it appears in the Sermones. The metamorphoses to which Horace subjects his poetic body are also linked to the sublime, culminating in an image that allows the poet to transcend his bodily existence and thus become immortal. In Odes 1.1, Horace states his ambition to enter the canon of lyric poets. He presents this ambition as a matter that is contingent on Maecenas’ judgement. The way in which Horace frames this ambition is especially telling: quodsi me lyricis uatibus inseres j sublimi feriam sidera vertice, ‘And if you place me among the lyric bards, I shall strike the stars with my towering head’ (35–6). Nisbet and Hubbard, citing convincing parallels chieXy from comic genres, explain the concluding image as involving not catasterism but gigantism: Horace grown in stature to gargantuan proportions.32 It is notable that the poet’s body forces itself so irresistibly upon the reader’s attention in this Wrst poem of the collection. But in addition to the idea implied by ‘striking the stars with one’s head’, there is another bodily image lurking here. Maecenas will express his approval by inserting Horace into the canon of lyric poets. Just how are we to imagine this act? Nisbet and Hubbard compare the verb inseres (35) with the Greek KªŒæØ, which they gloss as ‘to include among the classics’.33 But inseres seems to hint at something more than the intellectual judgement that Horace is worthy to be counted in the number of Sappho, Alcaeus, and the rest. Does the Latin verb not suggest that Maecenas will actually be placing a book—Horace’s book—on a particular shelf or in a particular capsa, the one that holds the lyric poets? And when Horace says quodsi me lyricis uatibus inseres, ‘And if you place me among the lyric bards’, is he not equating himself with this book? Here Horace identiWes himself, his body, with the three-book corpus of lyric poetry that he is presenting to his 32 Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 15 ad 1.1.35 quodsi (where the image of gigantism is distinguished from that of apotheosis in 1.30 dis miscent superis) and 15–16 ad 1.36 feriam sidera. 33 Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 15 ad 1.1.35 inseres.

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patron. With the verb inseres he expresses the hope that Maecenas will ‘Wle’ him—that is, his corpus—along with Sappho and Alcaeus among the lyricis uatibus, the acknowledged classics of his chosen genre. The poet’s body is equated with his book, and the favourable reception of that book in the eyes of his patron is what will give him the status to which he aspires.34 The image of the book, however, is extremely rare in the Odes. In fact, after the opening poem of the collection raises the issue of Horace’s reputation by conXating critical judgement with library science, the idea of writing books disappears from the Odes almost entirely. When writing does appear, as in poem 1.6 (Scriberis Vario), it is connected (again) with the patron’s desire for something produced by the poet that he himself can own: a physical book, a presentation copy. And signiWcantly, after the Wrst poem of the collection Horace does not imagine himself as writing at all. Throughout the Odes, poetry, and especially Horace’s poetry, appears not in the guise of books and writing, but as song, song composed and (usually) performed in the poet’s own voice. This observation brings us to the second transitional moment, the last poem of book 2. Here Horace predicts that he will not die, but instead will experience metamorphosis into a songbird. The conceit is handled humorously: details of the poet’s anticipated avian appearance are lovingly recorded, with particular attention given to the rough skin on his legs, the feathers sprouting on his Wngers—iam iam (9), ‘even now’, as if it were all happening before our eyes. But I agree with Nisbet and Hubbard that the poem is essentially serious.35 It ends with a command to the reader not to mourn or to erect meaningless monuments to the poet, who will live forever in song; for this is the point of the form that Horace will take, no matter how amusing the grotesque image of this transformation. He will be immortal because his poetry will live as song. Notice, too, what becomes of the patron in light of this change. non ego quem uocas, dilecte Maecenas, obibo, ‘I shall not die, my dear Maecenas, at your 34 It may also be that Horace’s address to Maecenas as atavis edite regibus casts the patron too as a kind of book, thus participating in the common strategy of assimilating patron to poet through a shared tertium comparationis. 35 Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) 327–37.


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beck and call’ (2.20.67).36 Horace’s transformation into a songbird signiWes transcendence of all those forces that place him at the whim of his patron. To leave behind his bodily form is to win freedom from such obligations. The distance between this ode and the opening poem of the collection is thus considerable. No longer does Horace’s poetic immortality depend on his patron’s decision to place a book in a particular capsa, nor is this transformation, like the earlier one into a colossus, contingent on another’s judgement: here Horace asserts that he will live forever not as a working writer, but as a songbird, free of all former constraints. By the end of Odes 3, the developments that I have traced from poem 1.1 to poem 2.20 reach their fruition. Maecenas is relegated to the last ode but one, where Horace speaks as a sage rather than a dependent; Zetzel and Santirocco have made clear the implications of this arrangement.37 The poet reserves the Wnal ode, the place of honour, all to himself. He speaks of his poetry no longer as a body of book rolls, but as a monument more lasting than bronze: a monument that will endure forever. This image, in which Horace’s monument is compared to the pyramids, at Wrst seems grossly material in its orientation. Horace invites this mistaken reading, but forces us to correct ourselves. His monument will last not because it is more substantial than bronze, but because it is less so—indeed, because it is entirely insubstantial. Along with the patron the book disappears as well. Horace’s poetry will last forever not because it is inscribed on any more or less durable material, but because it—or ‘he’—will be sung (dicar 3.30.10) forever. The trajectory that takes us from the image of the poet as client to that of the poet as utterly independent and almost immortal (non omnis moriar, 3.30.6) is thus paralleled by one that takes us from the image of the poem as book to that of the poem as song. There is a second parallel that involves the poet’s transcendence of his bodily state. When working in the ‘lower’ genres—the Satires, Epodes, and Epistles —Horace repeatedly insists that he is not writing poetry at all. At the same time, his body is a very inconvenient thing. It requires 36 ‘vocas implies a social inferiority’ (Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) 340, ad 2.20.6 quem vocas, with convincing replies to other interpretations). 37 Zetzel (1982), Santirocco (1984).

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feeding, exercise, and various other sorts of animal attention. It misbehaves; it is by turns fat, Xatulent, incontinent, impotent, subject in short to all the maladies that actual bodies occasionally experience, only a bit more so. In the Odes, however, the poet’s body is much better behaved and certainly less obtrusive than in the ‘lower’ genres. Over the course of Odes 1–3 we can even observe how the body is sublimated through metamorphosis into preferable, more digniWed metaphorical forms. This development is predicted in poem 1.1 when Horace equates his acknowledgement as a lyric poet with the motif of bodily transformation. We Wnd it again at the end of Book 2, where Horace playfully imagines his waxing reputation via bodily metamorphosis into the form of a bird. Finally, at the end of the Odes the poet’s body disappears altogether, giving place to a successor that is entirely insubstantial: the disembodied voice that will pronounce Horace’s poetry after his bodily death and down through the ages. To recapitulate: my Wrst point is simply that the image of the body that we encounter in Book 1 of the Sermones diVers sharply from the one that we Wnd in the Wrst three books of Odes. This diVerence appears clearly in the very diVerent sets of body parts that Horace sees Wt to name in the two collections. The satiric body is dominated by the bowels, the reproductive organs, and the excretory system, whereas the lyric body consists mainly of the head. But (my second point) Horace’s lyric body is not consistent with the so-called classical body, which some modern theorists have derived from his comments in the Ars poetica. Rather, the lyric body of the Odes retains an aYnity with what these theorists call the grotesque body, an aYnity strong enough to permit Horace to develop the image of his own body throughout the Odes in some remarkable ways. This development takes us from the truly grotesque image of the poet’s gigantic body in Odes 1.1 to that of a body that has evanesced in Odes 3.30. My third point is that this trajectory parallels one that moves from physical text to insubstantial song: for in Odes 1.1 Horace imagines his collection as so many books on Maecenas’ shelves, whereas in 3.30 it exists forever in viva voce performance. We may conclude from these three points that Horace’s poetry as a whole partakes in a discourse of materiality that associates the material with lower genres like satire, and that represents the higher


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forms, like lyric, as capable of transcending the limitations of the familiar, material world. This is true whether we speak primarily of Horace’s bodies or of his books. And so what began as a simple exercise in counting words takes us by steps to some rather large conclusions about Horace’s strategy for claiming the status of a poet for all time.

9 Ovid Among the Conspiracy Theorists Stephen Hinds

Whenever Don would arrive in the USA for a visit, it was his habit to plant himself at once in front of a TV, and to feed his omnivorous appetite for constructions of the world by searching out, via the remote-control button, the farther frontiers of extended basic cable. The televangelists, of course, persistently unLucretian, supplied his main diet; but when he touched down in Seattle one day in the mid1990s, I was able to point him to a more secular treat: viz. our local Public Access channel, the American city’s on-air equivalent of Speakers’ Corner. After the usual sequence of hemp-users, goddessworshippers, and militiamen, the programme line-up that evening culminated (as I had hoped it would) in a weekly documentary entitled Kurt Cobain was Murdered. In 1994, at the height of his career, the lead singer of the world-famous music group Nirvana was found dead in Seattle, a victim of suicide—or so the government and the global entertainment media complex would have us believe.

My commission at the memorial symposium for Don Fowler in September 2000 was to contribute to a panel on ‘theory’; Don would have noted with amusement my characteristic evasion. The ideas here were Wrst explored in a presentation at the University of Washington’s Walter Chapin Simpson center for the Humanities; I am indebted to the center and to our Royalty Research Fund for generous research support in 2000. The paper was improved at various stages in 2000–02 by the comments of audiences not just in Oxford and Seattle but at Victoria BC (joint CAPN / CACW meeting), Guelph, Minnesota, Brown, Boston University, and Holy Cross. In its Wnal form the paper owes much to generous readings by Mark Buchan, Joy Connolly, Alain Gowing, and Nelly Oliensis. The bibliographical cut-oV date is 2003; but for its general bearing upon my theme see now Pagań (2004).

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There were other theories; and every single week in the (now more than ten) years since Cobain’s death an intense young man has made his appearance on Seattle Public Access to report on his continuing investigation into the event—sometimes by oVering his own commentary, and sometimes by replaying endlessly looped video excerpts from the network coverage of Cobain’s life and death. The singer’s celebrity wife was early implicated, along with the local police, the mayor’s oYce, and several major media interests. As the years have passed, this weekly bulletin has gone on to connect successive news stories in the city and beyond (riots, anti-trust cases, Wnancial scandals) to its increasingly complicated master narrative of murder, corruption, and cover-up. I oVered Kurt Cobain was Murdered to Don on that evening as the kind of case study in the protocols of reading and interpretation that only an inveterate post-modernist could love; the present paper oVers a kind of sequel. For some time I have nursed a feeling that the widespread current rehabilitation of Ovid’s exile poetry has made that poetry too easy to read, by normalizing too many of its oddities, explaining away too much of its obsessiveness, and also by sanitizing the history of its reception. Scholarly treatments nowadays tend to regard it as bad form to speculate over much about ‘the mystery of Ovid’s exile’.1 perdiderint cum me duo crimina, carmen et error, alterius facti culpa silenda mihi. (Tr. 2.207–8) Though two oVences, a poem and an error, have brought me ruin, of my fault in the latter I must keep silent.

Whereas in the past the poet’s repeatedly advertised no-comment policy on his error was treated as a positive incitement to investigation, modern scholarship has tended to react by taking the Ovidian decorum of reticence at its word. As a result, the great murky corpus of conjectures about what kind of oVence against Augustus (besides the ten-year-old Ars amatoria) got Ovid into trouble, and where this 1 The title of J. C. Thibault’s (1964) book—to be discussed later. Key statements in the exile poetry concerning the carmen et error are collected at Thibault (1964) 27–32; for Ovidian reticence concerning the error cf. Luck (Heidelberg, 1977) on Tr. 2.208, with e.g. Pont. 2.2.59–60.

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unpleasantness may be hinted at in his oeuvre, is no longer part of the mainstream academic experience of engaging with the works from the Black Sea. My modest aim here is to stir up some of the murkiness of the exile poetry again, to blur the boundary between respectable and nonrespectable interpretation, and even to give a little of Ovid back to the conspiracy theorists.2 The approach will be oblique rather than head on: my paper is built around a reading of the only elegy in the Tristia which is not overtly concerned with the exiled poet’s own life—3.9. The myth of Medea is one which Ovid handled and rehandled more than any other in his career.3 In ad 8 Fate, or Augustus, added a new embellishment to this artistic association4 by banishing the poet to the very region in which that heroine was born and did some of her best work. It is a matter of some interest, then, that when for the Wrst (and only) time in the Tristia Ovid interrupts his characteristic mode of Wrst-person lament5 to frame in 3.9 a third-person narrative aition, his theme is Argonautic, and impia Medea (3.9.9) is centre stage: hic quoque sunt igitur Graiae—quis crederet?—urbes inter inhumanae nomina barbariae; huc quoque Mileto missi uenere coloni, inque Getis Graias constituere domos. sed uetus huic nomen, positaque antiquius urbe, constat ab Absyrti caede fuisse loco. (Tr. 3.9.1–6) Here too then do Grecian cities exist—who would believe it?—among the names of savage barbarism; hither too have come colonists sent from Miletus, and among the Getae have founded Grecian homes. But the old name of this place, more ancient than the foundation of the city, was derived (as all agree) from the slaughter of Absyrtus. 2 For a notable anticipation (speciWc to Tristia 2), see Barchiesi (1993) 158–9 and 178–9; Eng. tr. (2001) 85–6 and 100. 3 Cf. e.g. Hinds (1993) 9–47; Newlands (1997) 178–208; Curley (1999) 8–51. On the suggestiveness for Ovid of Medea as an exile see Claassen (1999) 41–7. 4 See Nisbet (1982) 51 n.22. 5 A few later elegies in Tr. and Pont., though framed in the Wrst person, include extended vignettes in which the ‘I’ fades into the background: most notably Pont. 3.2.43–96, on Iphigeneia among the Taurians, narrated by a ‘chance old man’; cf. Tr. 4.4.65–82 on the same theme; and see Nagle (1980) 172.


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Mobilizing a Greek etymology from temnein, ‘to cut’, the elegy explains that ‘Tomis’ or ‘Tomi’, Ovid’s place of exile, got its name from Medea’s bloody murder of her brother Absyrtus, and her compounding of the crime by slicing and dicing his limbs (into tomoi, ‘pieces’, ‘cuts’)6 to delay the pursuit of her angry father: protinus ignari nec quicquam tale timentis innocuum rigido perforat ense latus, atque ita diuellit diuulsaque membra per agros dissipat in multis inuenienda locis. neu pater ignoret, scopulo proponit in alto pallentesque manus sanguineumque caput, ut genitor luctuque nouo tardetur et, artus dum legit extinctos, triste moretur iter. inde Tomis dictus locus hic, quia fertur in illo membra soror fratris consecuisse sui. (Tr. 3.9.25–34) Forthwith while he in his ignorance feared no such attack she pierced his innocent side with the harsh sword. Then she tore him asunder, and scattered his limbs, torn asunder, throughout the Welds, so as to be found in many places. And, that her father might understand, she displayed upon a lofty rock both the pallid hands and the gory head, in order that her parent might be slowed by his fresh grief, and might be delayed, while he gathered the lifeless limbs, on his journey of sorrow. Thus was this place called Tomis, because in it the sister is said to have cut to pieces the limbs of her brother.

It is characteristic of Ovid to dramatize the outlandishness of his fate as an exile by associating it with mythic episodes characterized as barbarous, in both ethnological and ethical senses;7 the fact that the Medea myth has such a special place in Ovid’s career invites such an association here, even in the absence of an overt correlation with the poet’s own story. Indeed, one can argue that the very suspension of 6 For the etymology cf. [Apollodorus], Bibl. 1.9.24 (post-Ovidian, but probably recycling an earlier Greek source); Evans (1983) 186 n.20. On the elegy’s emphatic naming of the city of exile, ‘curieusement rare dans les Tristes’, and on the disingenuousness of constat in this area of contested mythological variants, see Videau-Delibes (1991) 171–3. On the name-forms Tomis -is (f.) and Tomi (-oe) -orum (m. pl.), both attested in 1st-c. ad references to the city, see OLD, s.v. 7 Evans (1983) 62. Here, an active paradox encodes the barbarous story in a Greek (i.e. non-barbarous) etymology: see Oliensis (1997) 186–90, on this ‘friction between civilisation and barbarity’ in Tr. 3.9.

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the Tristia’s otherwise invariable Wrst-person voice in this aetiological elegy constitutes a positive incitement to the reader to Wnd some relevance in this third-person narrative to the lamenting ‘ego’ whose agenda is temporarily suspended. On the recent reading of Ellen Oliensis (which will be a companion to my own throughout), Absyrtus is not the only victim in Tristia 3.9, Medea not the only perpetrator.8 Moreover (she suggests), a covert Latin etymology lurks within the overt Greek one (Tomis < tomoi) to encode the proposed subtext: in the derivation phrase ab Absyrti caede, the Latin gloss for the Greek ‘cut’ can to a suYciently suspicious reader suggest another ‘slasher’, by name ‘Caesar’, who will thus play Medea to Ovid’s Absyrtus in a new myth of mutilation at Tomis.9 The idea assumes familiarity with the proliferation of new takes on the traditional derivation of Caesar from caedere in this period: compare Ovid, Fasti 3.709–10, haec prima elementa fuerunt j Caesaris, ulcisci iusta per arma patrem (‘this was Caesar’s elementary schooling, his ABC, by righteous arms to avenge his father’), with Alessandro Barchiesi’s annotation: ‘the prima elementa of CAESar (the Wrst four letters of the name) come from the verb caedo, as any Roman etymologist could conWrm’.10 Now from the Wrst elegy of the Tristia onwards, Ovid has already made suYciently heavy and overt use of mythic victimology— the poet as Phaethon (1.1.79–82), as Icarus (89–90), as Telephus (99–100)—to give some circumstantial encouragement to the idea that all stories told in the exile poetry, including stories of bodily mutilation,11 are really about Ovid’s own relegation. The diVerence is

8 Oliensis (1997) 186–90, drawing on the useful but less nuanced Schubert (1990). 9 Oliensis (1997) 190 for the etymology. 10 See Maltby (1991) s.v. Caesar, for the traditional explanation in terms of ‘Caesarian’ birth; McKeown (1987– ) 1:54 for a clear hint at this association in Ovid’s abortion poem, at Am. 2.14.17–18. For variations of the Caesar/caedere etymology in Ovid see (as quoted) Barchiesi (1997) 128–9; cf. Ahl (1985) 80–1, 90, on Met. 1.201 and 15.840, along with Michalopoulos (2001) 46–7. 11 Tr. 1.3.73–6 (diuidor haud aliter . . . ) overtly (and not unproblematically) Wgures Ovid as Mettus Fufetius, dismembered by horses driven in opposite directions: the punishment, inXicted by an early king of Rome, was proverbial for its inhumanity (Livy 1.28; Varro ap. Nonius 443 L.); Mettus himself was no less proverbial for his treachery (Virgil Aen. 8.642–5).


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that the mythic analogies just instanced are overt, whereas the case of Absyrtus requires the reader to make a bold and hidden connection. I have just termed Oliensis’s reading suspicious, but I mean this in a good way. My own strategy in revisiting Tristia 3.9 will be deliberately to intensify the ‘suspiciousness’ which Oliensis and others have brought to recent readings of this poem, and then to go on to explore some of the issues at stake in such a suspicious reading practice. Let me begin by identifying a new and paradoxical argument for adding a ‘Caesarian’ edge to Medea’s murderous sword in poem 3.9: and that is that in the Wnal couplets of the previous elegy, 3.8, the poet has just been talking about his treatment by Caesar, and, more than that, has very precisely rejected the idea that Caesar would ever use a murderous sword as an instrument of punishment: cumque locum moresque hominum cultusque sonumque cernimus, et, qui sim qui fuerimque, subit, tantus amor necis est, querar ut cum Caesaris ira, quod non oVensas uindicet ense suas. at, quoniam semel est odio ciuiliter usus, mutato leuior sit fuga nostra loco. (Tr. 3.8.37–42) And when I behold the place, the habits of the people, their dress, their language, and when I recall what I am and what I was, I have so great a love of death that I complain of Caesar’s wrath, because he does not avenge his grievances with the sword. But since he has once exercised his hatred with mild civility, let my exile now be lightened by a change of place.

The penultimate line (41) must be read as placing Caesar’s ‘civility’— a loaded term here—in pointed antithesis with the inhumana barbaria which programmatically introduces poem 3.9 in the book’s very next couplet (Tr. 3.9.2); and—at least for the reader disposed to interrogate ab Absyrti caede in 3.9.6—the dissociation of Caesar from the sword in 39–40 would seem to make its point by simultaneously setting up and withholding the very etymology proposed eight lines below. This oddly precise foreclosing in 3.8 of the Caesarian subtext in 3.9 becomes still clearer if we switch our attention from murderer to victim. 3.9 is about the violation and graphically narrated dismemberment of an innocent body, that of Absyrtus. Critics have noticed

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(but without relating it to 3.9) that 3.8 culminates in an extraordinary concentration of somatic imagery; and in this case the body is the poet’s own: nec caelum nec aquae faciunt nec terra nec aurae; ei mihi, perpetuus corpora languor habet! seu uitiant artus aegrae contagia mentis, siue mei causa est in regione mali, ut tetigi Pontum, uexant insomnia, uixque ossa tegit macies nec iuuat ora cibus; quique per autumnum percussis frigore primo est color in foliis, quae noua laesit hiems, is mea membra tenet, nec uiribus adleuor ullis, et numquam queruli causa doloris abest. nec melius ualeo, quam corpore, mente, sed aegra est utraque pars aeque binaque damna fero. haeret et ante oculos ueluti spectabile corpus astat fortunae forma legenda meae. (Tr. 3.8.23–36) Neither climate nor water agree with me, nor land nor air: ah me! a perpetual weakness pervades my body. Whether the contagion of a sick mind aVects my limbs or whether the cause of my illness is in the region, since I reached Pontus I am plagued by sleeplessness, scarcely does my leanness keep my bones covered, and food becomes unpleasing to my lips. The hue that exists in leaves smitten with the Wrst cold in autumn, which the early winter has nipped – this is what holds my limbs. No strength relieves me, and I never lack cause for plaintive pain. I am no sounder in mind than in body; both alike are ailing and I suVer double hurt. And always close before my eyes there stands, like a visible body, the Wgure of my fate for me to scan.

Ovid’s body (corpora) is being weakened by exile (3.8.23–4); his limbs (artus, ossa, membra) are being threatened by disease (25–6), emaciation (27–8) and withering (29–31). Then in 35–6 a climactic vignette arrestingly Wgures Ovid’s fortuna as another body outside his skin, and as a corporeal spectacle which holds the poet’s gaze in a weird self-as-other surrogacy.12 What all this somatic imagery in the latter half of 3.8 builds up to is Caesar’s refusal to apply the sword blade to the poet’s emphatically 12 On this image, ‘unparalleled in Latin poetry’, see Lee (1949) 118–19.


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fragile body in the poem’s Wnal couplets, already quoted. In other words, Caesar is not Medea, and Ovid is not Absyrtus; but the poet has gone to a great deal of trouble to make the plots of Tristia 3.8 and 3.9 into a diptych, in which just as Caesar is deWned, precisely, as notMedea, so too the somatically imaged Ovid is deWned, precisely, as not-Absyrtus.13 To apply an aphorism of Frank Kermode’s, ‘In poetry all buts are partly ands, and an elaborate demonstration of the total diVerence between x and y is undertaken only if they are in some occult manner very alike.’14 Kermode is writing here of argument through poetic imagery in general; but what he says applies all the more when such an argument is beset by issues (also dear to Kermode)15 of narrative openness and secrecy. I have not yet exhausted an approach in terms of mutuality of mythic victimhood in Tristia 3.8 and 3.9. Several commentators have suggested that Medea’s dismemberment of Absyrtus at 3.9.27–8 resonates with the language in which Virgil describes the dismemberment of Orpheus, another victim torn apart in a wild northern landscape:16 atque ita diuellit diuulsaque membra per agros dissipat in multis inuenienda locis. . . . spretae Ciconum quo munere matres 13 Note here the ‘false’ but suggestive verbal parallelism between the verbs in 3.8.36 fortunae forma legenda meae and 3.9.31–2 artus / dum legit exstinctos. (This crossreference tends to support Oliensis (1997) 188, eliciting a self-reXexive hint at readerly activity from the latter passage’s juxtaposition of legit and triste moretur iter.) 14 Kermode (1971) 264. 15 Cf. my Wnal page below, with n. 53. 16 Tr. 3.9.27–8 shows further aYnities with the language of Ovid’s own postVirgilian treatment of Orpheus’ dismemberment in Met. 11: 50 membra iacent diuersa locis; cf. 35 iacent dispersa per agros, 38 diuulsere boves (anticipatory language of sparagmos applied to tools scattered and animals torn apart before Orpheus’ own demise). No less suggestively, another Ovidian couplet on the dismemberment of Absyrtus with a compositional date close to Tr. 3.9.27–8 shows even clearer aYnities with Virgil’s Orpheus at G. 4.522: Ibis 435–6 et tua sic latos spargantur membra per agros, / tamquam quae patrias detinuere uias (‘and may your limbs be scattered throughout the broad Welds, just like those which delayed a father’s journey’); cf. also Her. 6.129–30. This is an intriguing nexus: the verbal interactions of all these passages (including the Orphic ones) take place in a context of apparent common indebtedness to a virtuoso account of Absyrtus’ dismemberment preserved by Cicero from Ennius’ or Accius’ (?) Medea: N.D. 3.67 (¼ Trag. inc. 165 V. R2 ) with Pease ad loc.; Luck on Tr. 3.9.27 V.; and cf. Jocelyn (1967) 348 on the question of attribution.

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Stephen Hinds inter sacra deum nocturnique orgia Bacchi discerptum latos iuuenem sparsere per agros. (Virgil G. 4.520–22)

. . . slighted because of this tribute the Ciconian matrons, in the midst of their divine rites and nocturmal Bacchic orgies, tore the youth asunder and scattered him throughout the broad Welds.

There are two reasons why such an Orphic trace is of interest to suspicious readers like Oliensis or myself. First, any reverberation here of the fate of Greco-Roman culture’s archetypal poet (who is also, since Metamorphoses 10–11, the Ur-poet of Ovidian mythology itself) oVers a circumstantial prompt to Wnd the story of Ovid himself (another doomed poet) encoded in the story of Absyrtus; a student of conspiracy theory might refer to this as the laudes Galli eVect.17 And second, the Orphic trace tends in a broader sense to validate a typological approach to the Absyrtus narrative in 3.9: the reading which Wnds the fate of Orpheus inscribed in the fate of Absyrtus strengthens an interpretative invitation to Wnd the fate of Ovid inscribed in both. Now the previous poem again. 3.8 contains no archetypal Greek myth of dismemberment: but there is a near miss, which adds a new twist to 3.8’s Kermodean plot of Ovid as not-Absyrtus. Take a closer look at one of the key vignettes in which the poet presents himelf here as a body at risk (Tr. 3.8.29–31): quique per autumnum percussis frigore primo est color in foliis, quae noua laesit hiems, is mea membra tenet . . .

The comparison with distressed autumnal foliage comes up in many poetic contexts;18 but the present instance bears the strong verbal imprint of one of the most memorable images in Ovid’s own 17 I owe this splendid touch to Richard Thomas, in my paper’s Boston audience. For the notorious Servian rumour that the tale of Orpheus at the end of the Georgics supplanted earlier climactic ‘praises of Gallus’, removed under pressure from Augustus in the wake of the poet / prefect’s disgrace and suicide, see Servius G. 4.1, with Servius Ecl. 10.1. One need not believe the rumour to Wnd evidence in it for the typological suggestiveness of the Orpheus myth in relation to real poets’ lives. For background see Thomas (1988) 1:13–16; cf. Hardie (1998) 45–8. 18 For other Ovidian parallels to Tr. 3.8.29–30, see Bo¨mer (1969–86) on Met. 3.729; for an echo of Virgil Aen. 6.309–10, in particular, see Lee (1949) 117–18; the Aen. 6 passage also resonates (disturbingly) in Met. 3.729–31.


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Metamorphoses, which bizarrely aestheticizes a very particular act of violence: non citius frondes autumni frigore tactas iamque male haerentes alta rapit arbore uentus, quam sunt membra uiri manibus direpta nefandis. (Met. 3.729–31) No more swiftly are leaves, touched by the cold of autumn and now scarcely clinging on, snatched from the tall tree by the wind, than were the limbs of that man torn asunder by those impious hands.

Yes, the vignette here is one of dismemberment, and the body from which the limbs drop like autumn leaves is that of Pentheus, in the closing lines of Metamorphoses 3. The allusion in Tristia 3.8 is in perfect accord with that poem’s oddly precise rhetoric of non-dismemberment. In the Tristia passage, unlike in the metamorphic model, the autumnal image ends before the leaves actually fall from the tree : the poet’s membra, though weakened, remain attached to his body, and the text pointedly refuses to deliver a mythic type of Ovid-as-dismembered-Pentheus to balance the Absyrtus-asdismembered-Orpheus in the Tristia 3.9 half of the diptych. What are we to make of this obsessive tangle of dismembered and near-dismembered limbs in the environment of the aetiological myth of Absyrtus? One answer is to say that this kind of patterning is just what poets do—and especially what Ovid does, with his protoProppian tendency to allow morphologically similar myths to cluster and to interact with one another. However, a more intensely speculative line of interpretation may Wnd the encouragement it needs in yet another story of dismemberment which has been adduced and variously unpacked here. One detail in the Ovidian narrative of Absyrtus’ dismemberment is new to the Medea tradition: namely, the spectacular display by the murderer of the victim’s severed head and hands (Tr. 3.9.29–30): neu pater ignoret, scopulo proponit in alto pallentesque manus sanguineumque caput.

Here is E. J. Kenney’s note on the couplet: ‘probably an addition of Ovid’s [to the myth], suggested by the display of the murdered Cicero’s head and hands on the Rostra by Antony’s orders

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[43 bc]’.19 The Wfty-year-old Roman historical allusion, which may at Wrst seem far-fetched, becomes less so when one recalls that the circumstances surrounding the proscription of Cicero by the triumvirate had by now become a classic topic for debate in the rhetorical schools—with one of its attested virtuosi being Ovid’s own early mentor Porcius Latro, and with an obsessive Wxation upon the mutilation of the politically charged corpse (cf. Seneca, Con. 7.2; Suas. 6 and 7).20 Note too that Cicero, like Orpheus, exempliWes the pointed subcategory of the author-as-victim: according to Livy (as quoted in one of those Elder Senecan Suasoriae), the dead orator’s hands were severed by Antony’s soldiers in speciWc reprisal for being the instruments of his written attacks upon the triumvir: nec id satis stolidae crudelitati militum fuit: manus quoque scripsisse aliquid in Antonium exprobrantes praeciderunt. ita relatum caput ad Antonium iussuque eius inter duas manus in rostris positum. (Livy ap. Seneca, Suas. 6.17) The soldiers, in their stupid cruelty, were not satisWed. They cut oV the hands, too, in reproach for their written attacks upon Antony. The head was taken back to Antony, and, by his order, placed between the two hands on the rostra.

In a poetic context in which Ovid is ostensibly so concerned to stress the invariability of Caesarian clemency, it is perhaps unsettling to Wnd even a whisper of identiWcation with the death of an earlier Roman author whose violent victimhood (in the year of Ovid’s own birth)21 became an enduring symbol of the transition to a new world order. Antony it was, to be sure, who attracted the opprobrium of later generations for the execution of Cicero; but it did not escape notice (at the time or later) that this execution required the silent complicity of Antony’s fellow-triumvir Octavian: M. Cicero sub aduentum triumuirorum urbe cesserat, pro certo habens, id quod erat, non magis Antonio eripi se quam Caesari Cassium et Brutum posse. (Livy ap. Seneca, Suas. 6.17) 19 Melville and Kenney (1992) ad loc. 20 Cf. Richlin (1999) esp. 203–6; also Roller (1997) 109–30. For Latro and the topic of Cicero’s death, see Con. 7.2.1, 8–10, 14; Suas. 6.3, 6.8. 21 Oliensis (1997) 189.


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Marcus Cicero had left the city at the approach of the triumvirs, rightly regarding it as certain that he could no more be rescued from Antony than Cassius and Brutus from Caesar.

Here is how Oliensis unpacks the point: The shade of the endlessly proliWc Cicero, who like Ovid suVered the fate of exile, hinges Absyrtus to Ovid and points towards a political . . . interpretation of this mythic episode of dismemberment, with Augustus (following the example of his quondam ally Antony) in the role of Medea.22

So, too, Kenney’s annotations on this part of Tristia 3 quietly underscore the potential for some intertextuality with the declamatory tradition on Cicero’s martyrdom by juxtaposing the words of Quintus Haterius (ap. Seneca Suas. 7.1) on the inviolability of Cicero’s genius, ingenium erat in quod nihil iuris haberent triumuiralia arma (‘against your genius the weapons of the triumvirate had no power’), with the almost identical words of Ovid on the inviolability of his own—just two poems earlier:23 ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque: Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil. (Tr. 3.7.47–8) And yet I have my genius as my companion and my joy: over this Caesar could have no power.

Suspicious readings, both, to be sure: but the truth is out there.24 My own contribution to this part of the conversation is to suggest that Cicero’s may not be the only Wfty-year-old Roman ghost hovering around the corpse of Absyrtus / Ovid in Tristia 3.9. Let me corroborate the Ciceronian line of enquiry, but also render it distinctly odder, by taking my own suspicious look at the couplet immediately preceding the one currently under observation (Tr. 3.9.27–8): atque ita diuellit diuulsaque membra per agros dissipat in multis inuenienda locis. 22 Oliensis (1997), 189. 23 Melville and Kenney (1992) on Tr. 3.7.41–52. 24 More 1990s TV conspiracy with Don: the catch-phrase is quoted from Fox’s X-Files.

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The language of dismemberment here has Orphic resonances, as already noted;25 but the fact is that the closest verbal intertext for the pentameter here is Ovidian, involves a more immediately Roman story of poetic victimization, and occurs in a work which was probably being written at the same time as or shortly after Tristia 3, the Ibis. Throughout that long invective poem, Ovid treats the pseudonymous Ibis as a kind of evil twin, cursing him with a catalogue of mythological fates which often invite identiWcation with the terms in which the poet describes his own fate in the Tristia.26 So it is in Ibis 539–40, whose pentameter remakes—or premakes—the pentameter of Tristia 3.9.28: conditor ut tardae, laesus cognomine, Myrrhae, urbis in innumeris inueniare locis. (Ibis 539–40) Like the author of tardy Myrrha, harmed by a cognomen, may you be found in countless places of the city.

As for Absyrtus / Ovid in Tristia 3.9, so here for Ovid’s evil twin Ibis, a fate of dismemberment. Once again the palimpsestic limbs proliferate; and what comes into play is another Roman corpse, another post-Orphic story of the author-as-victim, and from the very same nexus of Wfty-year-old history as Cicero: a (real) poet this time, Helvius Cinna (neoteric author of the Smyrna), torn apart by a city mob through being identiWed as an anti-Caesarian conspirator ; or rather misidentiWed, since the actual conspirator against Julius Caesar was not him but his namesake Cornelius Cinna: plebs statim a funere ad domum Bruti et Cassi cum facibus tetendit atque aegre repulsa obuium sibi Heluium Cinnam per errorem nominis, quasi Cornelius is esset, quem grauiter pridie contionatum de Caesare requirebat, occidit caputque eius praeWxum hastae circumtulit. (Suetonius, Iul. 85) Immediately after Caesar’s funeral the populace ran to the houses of Brutus and Cassius with Wrebrands, and were repelled with diYculty. They slew 25 See above, with n. 16. 26 SigniWcantly, the catalogue of fates culminates in its Wnal couplet with the poet’s wish that ‘Ibis’ be forced to live and die among the peoples of the Black Sea: Ibis 637–8. Cf. Hinds (1999) 65.


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Helvius Cinna when they met him, through a mistake in the name, supposing that he was Cornelius Cinna, who had delivered a bitter speech against Caesar on the previous day, and for whom they were looking; and they carried his head all about, stuck on the point of a spear.

Of all the ‘types’ of dismemberment elicited from the present nexus, this allusively glimpsed Cinna is perhaps at once the most hard-won and the most tantalizing. A poet famous for his highly wrought verse on erotic and mythological themes—in eVect an Ovid avant la lettre27—is destroyed by the wrongful accusation that he conspired against a Caesar. His dismemberment and consequent dissolution into the ‘countless places of the city’ constitutes at once a parallel to and a pointed reversal of the fate of Ovid / Absyrtus, dismembered in the Welds of Pontus (per agros) and denied forever any location in the Urbs.28 The very fact that it is Cinna’s name which puts him in harm’s way, as a kind of rogue signiWer, contributes bizarrely to his aYnity with the poet of the Tristia, so programmatically obsessed in his own verse with the dangers that come from naming people’s names. If any of this is believable (an issue to be confronted in a moment), how odd it is that close attention to Ovid-as-Absyrtus in Tristia 3.9 should elicit two separate coded references to the same crisis in Roman history, the bloody aftermath of the Ides of March. What, if anything, is Ovid’s text trying to tell us? One story which one might tell about these typological parallels from 44 and 43 bc is that the poet is using these tales of entanglement in Caesarian intrigue to oVer, however Xeetingly, some coded reXections on his own entanglement in a later generation’s version of Caesarian intrigue. (Such a conXation of Caesarian moments would inaugurate a characteristic Roman imperial mindset: Lucan was to ground an entire epic in just such a negotiation of present Caesarism through past Caesarism half a century later.) Is the implication of the 27 In general, and in particular too: as one of the Oxford symposiasts remarked, Ovid himself is the author of the deWnitive post-Cinnan Smyrna / Myrrha (Met. 10.298–518). 28 Cf. Oliensis (1997) 189 on play between city and frontier in the case of the Ciceronian intertext: ‘But this recollection of Cicero’s dismembered corpse . . . [reveals] Tomis to be the very image of Rome. Far from being an exotic, barbarian phenomenon, the ‘‘inhumanity’’ of Medea is indigenous to the centre of what purports to be ‘‘civilised’’ order.’

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allusive parallel with Cinna that Ovid himself did become entangled in actual conspiracy against his Caesar in ad 8, just as has been speculated, both soberly and wildly, for centuries? The poet Cinna was falsely accused of conspiring against a Caesar, and was in fact completely innocent: did this happen to Ovid too? On the other hand, what if Cicero, and not Cinna, is the measure for Ovid’s involvement or lack of involvement in Caesarian intrigue? And does it corroborate this line of speculation, or merely add to its implausibility, if we put it together with the subsequent tease whereby Ovid ends the Tristia’s Wve-year vow of silence on addressees’ names by dedicating his new collection of Epistulae ex Ponto at beginning and end to a certain Brutus, in verses peppered with covert allusions to the historical resonances of that name, including a passage which (bizarrely in the context) proposes and then withdraws an explicit analogy between Ovid himself and his addressee’s anti-Caesarian namesake, the conspirator of 44 bc?29 Nomen omen, says the suspicious-minded Ovidian;30 ‘nonsense’, says the prosopographer.31 In such speculations as these, what blurs the line between literary criticism and conspiracy theory (in our modern terms) is that the application of all these ‘victim’ analogies to Ovid is not overt but covert, and in some cases so covert as to make a sane reader wonder if he or she is misreading the signs in seeing an analogy at all; the relentlessness with which I have pressed the interpretative hints may 29 On the historical memory of Brutus the conspirator of 44 bc, cf. the Augustan anecdotes reported at Plutarch Comp. Dion. et Brut. 5 and Suetonius, Gram. et Rhet. 30.5, with Kaster (1995) on the latter passage; more generally, Rawson (1986). My thanks to Alain Gowing for discussion of this point. 30 See Hinds (1986) 321 on ‘Ovid’s possible subversiveness vis-a`-vis the emperor in enclosing Ex Ponto 1–3 with a prologue and epilogue addressed to a friend whom he calls Brutus, and otherwise leaves undescribed’, noting how Ovid ‘[begins] the poem immediately after the prologue with an exercise in eliding another addressee (Fabius Maximus) into an earlier, more famous possessor of the same name (with Pont. 1.2.3–4 compare Fast. 2.235–42); and . . . the prologue-poem to Ovid’s friend Brutus actually makes reference in an exemplum to that earlier Brutus who killed a Caesar (Pont. 1.1.24).’ Cf. Oliensis (1997) 181. Another name-play between an actual Ovidian addressee (Sextus Pompeius, cos. 14 ad) and a more famous civil-war namesake, this time in the opening poem of Epistulae ex Ponto 4, is attractively elicited by Gowing (2002) 188–91. 31 For the prosopographical approach see Syme (1978) 80, reporting the tentative identiWcation of Ovid’s Brutus with the rhetor Bruttedius Brutus, named by the Elder Seneca.


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itself seem odd or unbalanced.32 But the diYculty experienced in pursuing allusive analogies like these may be part of the point: the very indirectness and encodedness of these narratives of victimhood may operate as a marked Ovidian statement about what Augustus did to him, and to language, in ad 8. More than this, the veiled allusions to the fates of Cicero, Cinna, and Brutus can perhaps be read as peculiar mythic thematizations of the dysfunctional discourse of the exile poetry itself. For Ovid and for his readers alike, whether guilty or innocent of hostile feelings towards Augustus, exile has created an atmosphere of reticence, suspicion, and obsessively paranoid reading. Conspirators is precisely what they must now become, communicating darkly and through secret signs, and living in constant fear of just or unjust reprisal—like those archetypal casualties of Caesarian Rome who lived and died through the aftermath of the Ides of March. It would be easy enough to end there, allowing a characteristic appeal to Ovidian discursive mastery to eclipse other ways of thinking about the issues raised by the preceding pages. Let me at least postpone this move, and broaden the terms of the discussion, by supposing for a moment that my fellow critics and I are completely wrong in arguing that Ovid meant to plant any of these unsettling associations here in Tristia 3.9. What then? Well, the fact is that at an important level the present argument for a kind of ancient and speciWcally Ovidian ‘poetic of conspiracy’ does not need to be framed as an intentionalist one. Even if the disgraced poet were not disposed (as I think he was) to open up his own exile poems to this element of ‘conspiratorial’ reading, there is every reason to think that the poems themselves would construct a ‘conspiratorial’ response among many of their readers anyway. For many Romans, the experience of reading Ovid’s poetry in the wake of Ovid’s exile will have felt quite diVerent 32 . . . or at least unidirectional. One available argument, withheld above, for reading an Ovid / Absyrtus analogy into Tr. 3.9 is that the cross-referentially suggestive 3.8 begins with a series of overt mythic analogies on the theme of winged escape, which in successive couplets Wgure Ovid as Triptolemus, as Medea, and as Perseus or Daedalus. A ‘conspiratorial’ reading is torn between embracing this corroboration of the mythic intertext in 3.9, and downplaying the disruption of the argument from mythic victimology which results from the double image of Ovid as Absyrtus and as Medea: on the speciWc point and on the issues involved see Oliensis (1997) 188–9.

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from before: not just because of the poet’s new ways of writing from the Black Sea, but because of the Ovidian reader’s own new sense of having to share discursive space with that demonstrably unsympathetic First Reader on the Palatine. It is surprising how reluctant some modern scholars are to acknowledge that, in particular contexts of imperial sensitivity, Augustus had just as much power to create microclimates of suspicion and paranoia as did his more tyrannical successors. We can learn something here from a bad moment experienced earlier in the Augustan period by Ovid’s rhetorical mentor Porcius Latro (to which my attention was drawn by Joy Connolly, in some Wne ongoing work on the politics of declamation under Augustus): in hac controuersia Latro contrariam rem non controuersiae dixit sed sibi. declamabat illam Caesare Augusto audiente et M. Agrippa, cuius Wlios, nepotes suos, Caesar adoptaturus diebus illis uidebatur. erat M. Agrippa inter eos qui non nati sunt nobiles sed facti. cum diceret partem adulescentis Latro et tractaret adoptionis locum, dixit: ‘iam iste ex imo per adoptionem nobilitati inseritur’ et alia in hanc summam. (Seneca, Con. 2.4.12–13) In this controversia Latro said something that was detrimental to himself rather than to his declamation. He was declaiming in the presence of Augustus and Marcus Agrippa, whose sons—the emperor’s grandsons— the emperor seemed to be proposing to adopt at that time. Agrippa was one of those who were made noble, not born noble. Taking the part of the youth and handling the topic of adoption, Latro said: ‘Now he is by adoption being raised from the depths and grafted on to the nobility’— and more to this eVect.

As the Elder Seneca tells the anecdote, Latro took up a stock adoption theme in one of his declamations, saying in defence of a bastard youth adopted by his grandfather, ‘Now he is by adoption being raised from the depths and grafted onto the nobility.’ Latro’s emphases were not unusual in themselves, but the context was: Augustus and Agrippa were present in the audience, it was the year Augustus was considering his grandsons by Agrippa for adoption, and (as we are reminded) Agrippa’s own relatively modest origins were a matter of some sensitivity. What, then (as the anecdote continues), was the reaction?


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Maecenas innuit Latroni festinare Caesarem; Wniret iam declamationem. quidam putabant hanc malignitatem Maecenatis esse; eVecisse enim illum non ne audiret quae dicta erant Caesar, sed ut notaret. (Seneca, Con. 2.4.13) Maecenas signalled to Latro that the emperor was in a hurry and that he should Wnish the declamation oV now. Some thought that this was malice on the part of Maecenas; he made sure not that Caesar failed to hear what was said but that he noticed it.

Mild in its consequences for Latro, the episode is devastating in its implications for the susceptibility of literary language to suspicious or paranoid appropriation in a politically charged context; interestingly, Seneca himself (just below in section 13) appears anxious to play it down. And what makes it all the more devastating is the evidently practised ease with which Maecenas anticipates and controls the moment. Whatever Latro’s own intent, the Augustan minister for culture reacts Wrst, with a minimal gesture which puts Latro at a disadvantage by simultaneously imputing to him and excusing him of a subversive intent which nobody else in the room, perhaps even Latro himself, has yet had time to formulate. A further excursus on political climatology might go so far as to argue that in the atmosphere of late Augustan Rome what makes Ovid’s exile poetry hospitable to a ‘poetic of conspiracy’ is not in the Wnal analysis any particular double meaning in any passage which might have been intended by the author, nor even any decorum of suspicion or paranoia which the exile poetry programmes in the reader, but rather the very construction of an exile discourse per se. For Ovid to talk about the sentence of exile in public is to introduce the possibility of an interpretative authority for the sentence of exile other than Augustus, and in one sense this is already itself an inherently insubordinate act, even before Ovid makes or encodes a single attack on or criticism of the princeps, and even if he were never to do anything but to agree wholeheartedly with the justice of the sentence (as, indeed, some modern readers believe to be the case). As will become clearer and clearer as early imperial Rome Wnds its Tacitean shape, unsolicited dialogue with a Caesar, or perhaps any dialogue with a Caesar, will always expose the interlocutor to charges of insubordination and conspiracy: history suggests that the closer the

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conversational access one has to a (Julio-Claudian) emperor, the more vulnerable one is to a fall from grace. To get a handle on the inherent dangers of dialogue with an emperor, it may be heuristically useful to consider the most extreme imaginable case of imperial control of public discourse. Enter the literary historian and psychoanalytic critic Alain Grosrichard, and his highly suggestive 1979 book Structure du se´rail (translated for a Zizek series as The Sultan’s Court), which reads European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fantasies of the oriental seraglio as a Lacanian laboratory in which power relations are theorized through the contemplation of ultimate despotic power. Grosrichard’s book (whose tactical usefulness was pointed out to me by Mark Buchan) includes an exploration of how ‘the despot is not spoken to’:33 The prohibition [sc. of any speech addressed to the despot] has nothing to do with the meaning, but with the very employment of speech. Taking the initiative, even in order to tell the master that one loves him or one is his slave, would already constitute revolt, since the subject is thereby Xaunting his claim to dispose likewise of the signiWer.

Unlike in the case of the (imagined) Sultan’s court, in Augustan and Julio-Claudian Rome, the princeps does (at least ostensibly) share the ‘signiWer’ with others, both in public and in private discourse. The point of using Structure du se´rail is not to suggest that it can be mapped in any literal way onto the power structures of the early Roman Empire, but that it theorizes an extreme test case of absolute power which is good to think with. In this context Ovid’s exile poems can perhaps be read as inherently insubordinate, as having the capacity to mobilize by their very existence a poetic of conspiracy. The very excess of interpretative possibility which poems like the Tristia open up, in their inherent textuality, represents the enabling condition of political, and conspiratorial, discourse. The presence of voices interpreting or even minimally repeating the Caesarian code, and thus forcing the language of power into polyphony, separating Caesar from his sign, is 33 For both quotations here see Grosrichard (1979) 79–80; Eng. tr. (1998) 62. At the end of the Wrst quotation, ‘thereby’ is my correction for the translator’s ‘therefore’: Fr. ‘. . . puisque le sujet aYcherait par la` qu’il pre´tend lui aussi disposer du signiWant’.


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what prevents an imperial monopoly on language, that is on power, from becoming absolute and uninterpretable—as it is in the case of Grosrichard’s imagined Ottoman despot: As for the despot himself, when he opens his mouth it is to make his voice heard, but never with meaning. Since it has no reference to anything other than itself, the word of the despot is not meant to be understood, veriWed or legitimated; with every instance it creates a new truth . . . That is why no dialogue is introduced between the despot and his subjects; there are no misunderstandings to be clariWed, no consequent meanings to interpret, no time for understanding.

What Ovid’s exile poems oVer is, most fundamentally, the ‘time for understanding’ precluded at the Sultan’s court.34 In developing this paper’s reading of Tristia 3.9, I have been building on two revisionary insights which energize an excellent collection of essays on the exile poetry (including that of Oliensis) in Ramus for 1997,35 and which both arise in the Wrst instance from Ovid’s wellknown policy of withholding the names of his addressees in the Tristia. The Wrst insight is that the whole tradition of scholarship which hopes to elucidate the Tristia by uncovering central facts about his exile deliberately withheld by the poet—the addressees of the Tristia, the nature of the charges against him—is a kind of near miss; instead, critics should focus on Ovid’s reticence as the main object of study in itself. On this reading, the poet’s repeatedly advertised silences36 constitute a calculated attempt to convey that a new atmosphere of concealment, suspicion and fear of denunciation exists at Rome in the wake of his banishment; and this blanket Ovidian selfcensorship has less to do with shielding speciWc friends or protecting himself than with casting broad aspersions on the dependability of Caesarian clementia. In John Henderson’s inimitable formulation:37 34 This seems the most promising angle from which to retheorize Ovidian subversiveness in the wake of Thomas Habinek’s valuable and provocative presentation of the exiled Ovid as imperial colonist—which gives short shrift (perhaps unnecessarily for his main thesis) to the idea of Ovidian political ambivalence: Habinek (1998) 151–69, esp. 165–7. 35 Williams and Walker (1997). 36 Silence about addressees’ names: e.g. Tr. 1.5.7–8, 4.5.9–14, 4.9.1–2. Silence about charges: e.g. Tr. 2.207–8, 3.5.45–50, 3.6.27–8. 37 Henderson (1997b) 152.

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Exactly, for this is Age of A******s discourse, lovingly preserved through the Tyranny of T******s, when Rome is getting used to invidious suspiciousness as a way of life, with elaborate protocols for writing and rubbing out palacevictims: No imago of X to accompany the corte`ge of descendants to come, no member of clan X to take up the traditional cognomen Y.38 While the imagines of a score of clans were toted in front of the procession . . . , ahead of them shone out Cassius and Brutus, for the very reason that their likenesses were not to be seen . . . 39

The second, related insight is that Ovid’s reticence about addressees’ names and charges, by thematizing a kind of self-censorship, both inherently and programmatically sharpens an invitation to read everything in the exile poetry ‘ultra-suspiciously’, as Sergio Casali puts it,40 so as to attend to what the poet may be hinting between the lines, even as he refuses to say certain things out loud. My own line of enquiry parts company with all this only in one respect. There is a danger of circularity here which these and other recent critics of the exile poetry have gone to a great deal of trouble to head oV: I would like on the contrary to embrace it. According to the second insight reported above, Ovid’s ostentatious withholding of certain key facts programmes the reader to seek secret meanings in the exile poetry; but according to the Wrst insight, those key facts themselves (that is, the addressees’ names and the charges) are not the proper object of that quest—even though they might seem to be high on the list of secrets in which a suspicious reader might be interested. For Casali, what prevents circularity here is that Ovid has deliberately programmed his poetry both for good readings, which are ‘ultra-suspicious’, and for bad readings, which are ‘too suspicious’: the bad readings—the pursuit of conspiracy theories—are what have dominated discussion of Ovid’s exile poetry for centuries; the good readings are the ones elicited by current revisionists (such as those represented in the Ramus volume). At this point it may be instructive (as well as entertaining) to dip for a moment into the actual history of Ovidian conspiracy theory, 38 Tacitus Ann. 2.32.1: prosecution (and suicide) of Libo Drusus for maiestas. 39 Tacitus Ann. 3.76.2: funeral of Junia, niece of Cato, wife of C. Cassius, sister of M. Brutus—a full 63 years after Philippi. 40 Casali (1997) 83, building from a reading of Tr. 1.1.21–2.


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with the help of J. C. Thibault’s 1964 compendium The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile.41 (One cannot read far in that volume without observing how centuries of speculation about the poet’s carmen et error have served to thicken the mystery with post-Tacitean imaginings of imperial court intrigue, and prurient Christian fantasies about pagan lifestyle.) First, here is a sample of the pre-modern testimonia tabulated by Thibault,42 beginning in late Antiquity with Sidonius Apollinaris, Bishop of Clermont: et te carmina per libidinosa notum, Naso tener, Tomosque missum, quondam Caesareae nimis puellae Wcto nomine subditum Corinnae.43 And languishing Ovid, famed for his lascivious poems and banished to Tomi, too much erstwhile the slave of Caesar’s daughter, whom he called by the feigned name of Corinna. iste [¼ Ibis] uero accusarat Ouidium de uxore Augusti, similiter de libro amatorio; quibus causis missus est in exsilium. alii dicunt quod noluit imperatricem stuprare ab illa rogatus; quae dolens de repulsa accusabat eum apud dominum suum.44 Indeed that man [¼ Ibis] had accused Ovid with regard to Augustus’ wife, and similarly with respect to his book on love. For these reasons he was sent into exile. Others maintain that he refused to cooperate with the empress when she solicited him and angered by the rejection, she reported him to her husband. quaeritur autem, cur missus sit in exsilium unde tres dicuntur sententiae: prima, quod concubuit cum uxore Caesaris Liuia nomine. secunda quod sicut familiaris transiens eius porticum uidit eum cum amasio suo coeuntem . . . tertia quia librum fecerat de amatoria arte, in quo iuuenes docuerat matronas decipiendo sibi allicere.45 41 Thibault (1964). For further surveys see Della Corte (1973) 2: 63–9; Green (1982); Verdie`re (1992). 42 Thibault (1964) 24–7; I quote text and translation of items 2, 5, 8, and 14 from his list. 43 Sidonius Apollinaris, Carm. 23.157–60 (5th c.). Cf. Ovid Tr. 4.10.59–60 mouerat ingenium totam cantata per urbem j nomine non uero dicta Corinna mihi (‘my genius had been stirred by her who was sung throughout the city, whom I called, by a Wctitious name, Corinna’). 20th-c. support for Elder Julia ¼ Corinna: Baligan (1959). 44 Scholia on Ibis in Codex Galeanus (12th c.). 45 Accessus Ovidii Tristium in Palatinus Lat. 242 (12th or 13th c.).

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However, the question is why he was sent into exile, and there are three answers: Wrst, that he slept with Caesar’s wife, Livia; second, that when he was passing through Caesar’s porch like one of the household, he saw Caesar having relations with his male lover; . . . the third cause is that he wrote a book on the art of love in which he had instructed young men how to attract matrons by deception. tres causae exsilii: scilicet liber de arte, Diana in balneo, Augustus cum puero.46 The three causes of his exile: namely, the book on the art of love, Diana in the bath, Augustus with a youth.

Diana in balneo: the reference in this last quotation (from a Wfteenthcentury manuscript) is to one of the most undeniably intriguing passages in the exile poetry, from Ovid’s extended apologia to Augustus in Tristia 2, in which the poet is heard almost, but not quite, telling us something important about the charges against him. Let us take a second sample here: cur aliquid uidi? cur noxia lumina feci? cur imprudenti cognita culpa mihi? inscius Actaeon uidit sine ueste Dianam: praeda fuit canibus non minus ille suis. scilicet in superis etiam fortuna luenda est, nec ueniam laeso numine casus habet. illa nostra die, qua me malus abstulit error, parua quidem periit, sed sine labe domus. (Tr. 2.103–10) Why did I see anything? Why did I make my eyes guilty? Why did I thoughtlessly take cognizance of a fault? Unwitting was Actaeon when he beheld Diana unclothed; none the less he became the prey of his own hounds. Clearly, among the gods, even ill-fortune must be atoned for; chance gets no pardon when a deity is oVended. On that day when my ruinous error undid me, my house, humble but stainless, was destroyed.

‘Conspiratorial’ readings of this passage have tended to Wxate on the following elements of speculation: Ovid saw something forbidden. Ovid saw something sacrilegious. 46 From a life in Codex Laurentianus XXXVI, 24 (15th c.).


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Ovid saw a naked woman. Ovid saw a naked woman having a bath, or having sex. Ovid saw a naked woman, goddess-like, and therefore of the imperial family, having a bath or having sex. Hence (with help again from Thibault) the following speciWc theories, all circulating in relatively recent times, in ascending order of ingenuity: 1. Ovid surprised the Empress Livia naked in her bath (Delville, in 1859).47 2. Ovid surprised the Younger Julia naked at a sex party (Alexander, in 1958).48 3. Ovid witnessed (and was perhaps privy to) a sexual liaison between the Younger Julia (naked) and a partner in treason, possibly Silanus, possibly within the precincts of a temple (Wright, in 1938).49 4. Ovid had a forbidden sight of the Empress Livia (naked, of course) at the female-only rituals of the Bona Dea, into which he had inWltrated himself with the intent of conducting Weldwork for his treatment of that December festival in Book 12 of his Fasti (Herrmann, in 1938, Wnding in the poet’s detection and discomWture the reason for the non-appearance of the Fasti’s last six books!).50 These are extremes: the latest extended intervention in Tristia 2.103– 10 by a more mainstream critic (Gareth Williams in his 1994 book Banished Voices) is very careful indeed to distance its own academically respectable scrutiny of the passage’s allusive hints and connections from such ‘absurd Wctions’.51 47 Cf. Thibault (1964) 73–4. 48 Alexander (1957–8); cf. Thibault (1964) 61–3. 49 Wright (1938) 215–16 (after Robinson Ellis, in 1881); cf. Thibault (1964) 97. 50 Herrmann (1938); cf. Thibault (1964) 95–112, setting this and the previous theory in their context of obsessive speculation about ancient mysteries and cults, with citation of scattered passages in Ovid himself about the profanation of mysteries: Ars am. 2.601–4, Pont. 1.1.51–8. 51 Williams (1994) 174–9, with distancing statements at 174 and 178 n.55. Contrast the combination of the ‘sane’ and the ‘arbitrary’ in Barchiesi (1993) 178–81 (Eng. tr. (2001) 100–2), perhaps the ideal reading of Tr. 2.103–10 in the present

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However (to return to the matter in hand), what I want to suggest is that, here and elsewhere, attempts by modern revisionists (such as Williams and Casali) to erect Wrewalls between their own ‘good’ readings of the exile poetry’s possible subtexts on the one hand, and on the other the fevered conspiracy theories of the religious, the prurient, and the biographically obsessed, from medieval to modern times,52 are ultimately doomed to failure: in the Wnal analysis we should allow the conspiracy theorists to set the agenda. In a large view of Ovidian reception and interpretation, it seems clear that the extratextual and intratextual ambience of the exile poetry requires us all to read not just ‘ultra-suspiciously’, as Casali suggests, but with the super-heated obsessiveness of conspiracy theorists. Just as Ovid programmes himself, the author, as an obsessive, locked into an endless rehearsal of the dark events of ad 8 which twists his trademark poetic variatio by imperceptible stages into a subtle form of madness, so he programmes us, the readers of the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, as obsessives too, twisting the learned reader’s characteristic search for suggestive images and intertexts by imperceptible stages into the obsessive pattern-hunting of the conspiracy theorist. Hence my title: Ovid has made conspiracy theorists of us all—and, I think, of himself in the Wrst instance. What I am arguing, then, is that there is no fundamental diVerence in kind between the raving of the conspiracy theorist who Wnds an Ovidian aVair with the Elder Julia in the pseudonymity of Corinna, or a naked Livia lurking in Tristia 2.103–10, and (on the inner side of the pale) the investigative work of supposedly respectable Latinists like myself who Wnd subtexts, and sub-subtexts, encoded in the dismemberment of Absyrtus in Tristia 3.9. We are all abnormal readers placing extraordinary pressure upon these poems to answer our questions on something—the mystery of Ovid’s exile—which paper’s terms. Recent critical interest centres on the passage’s intertextuality with the marked discussion of theodicy in Ovid’s Actaeon episode in Met. 3, and on its suggestive verbal echoes (uidi . . . me malus abstulit error . . . periit) of Virgil, Ecl. 8.41 ut uidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error. 52 Firewalls: cf. Green (1982) 202, echoing Syme (1978) 216: ‘The problem [i.e. the nature of Ovid’s mistake], as Sir Ronald Syme recently observed, ‘‘has long engaged the attentions of the erudite, the ingenious, the frivolous.’’ The last-named group . . . forms by far the largest category: no need to waste time on it here.’


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just seems too important not to be answered, however vatically, in the Ovidian text. In a symposium celebrating the critical interests of Don Fowler, it is appropriate to press the question of interpretative respectability a little further. What I have isolated in this paper is not just a crisis between respectable and non-respectable interpretation in the reading of Ovid’s exile, but a crisis between respectable and non-respectable interpretation tout court. Literary critics are always abnormal readers. To be a literary critic is to spend six months, or six years, or sixty years poring over the meaning of a text—or of an event, which is a kind of text—and this is an obsessive activity, not a normal one. And it is a kind of obsessiveness which we apply to all our poetic texts, not just to texts charged with the particular kinds of secrecy with which the texts of Ovid’s exile are charged. Let me invoke Frank Kermode again. Drawing attention to the intense literary critical speculation applied to the riddle of a man in a mackintosh who crops up from time to time in the pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kermode refers to it as ‘an aporia of the kind that declares itself when a text is scrutinized with an intensity normally thought appropriate only after institutional endorsement’. The quotation comes from The Genesis of Secrecy,53 a book in which Kermode pursues a thoroughgoing analogy between the kind of intense interpretation licensed by an institutional context of literary canons and academic interpreters, on the one hand, and the kind of intense interpretation licensed by the institutions of biblical exegesis on the other. In eVect, both kinds of institution protect and privilege modes of reading texts, and reading the world, which in other contexts might bring accusations of obsessiveness or insanity. (By geographical association with Joyce, I am reminded of the unlicensed and oddly dressed obsessives who used to come in oV the streets to attend public lectures from time to time in my undergraduate alma mater, Trinity College Dublin: the wild-eyed woman who found hidden references in every lecture to the doctrine of the virgin birth, and the solemn identical twins from Cork who would always ask searching questions—whatever the topic—about the Hittites. We treasured their quirkily intense interventions, precisely because they sounded so like the intense 53 Kermode (1979) 49.

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interventions of the licensed academics; and indeed occasionally one of them would be mistaken by a visiting speaker for the real thing.) Let me close my own foray into conspiracy theory, then, by borrowing the words used by Don to end an early published note in Classical Quarterly on Virgilian acrostichs, in which he teased his readers by looking across the Wne line that separates academic institutions from mental ones. ‘I await the men in white coats.’54 54 Fowler (1983a).

10 Haec tum Roma fuit: Past, Present, and Closure in Silius Italicus’ Punica Ben Tipping

The attraction of closure as a subject is that it combines issues of small-scale detail about the workings of texts with some of the largest questions about the boundaries and transgressions of our lives. (Don Fowler)1

IN T RO DUCT IO N My epigraph prompts me to apologize for autobiographical elements in this essay, and to emphasize praeteritically that the Punica raises a wide range of closural issues, few of which I shall explore here. Don Fowler’s work on the Punica is, unsurprisingly, Wrst-rate proof of my omissions in this essay.2 His primary focus in a paper entitled ‘Even Better than the Real Thing: A Tale of Two Cities’ is the relationship

I am extremely grateful to the organizers of Classical Constructions: A Symposium in Memory of Don Fowler and to the editors of this volume, especially Stephen Heyworth, for honouring me with an invitation to present and publish versions of this paper. Its most obvious debts, however, are to Don Fowler himself: debts that I hope will be deemed testimony and tribute to his inspirational scholarship. 1 Fowler (2000) 237. 2 See e.g. Fowler (1996), repr. in Fowler (2000) 86–107, and (1997a), repr. in Fowler (2000) 115–37, on the shoulders of which I stand in much of what follows.

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between art and text,3 but the discussion therein of Punica 6.653– 716,4 where Hannibal views and responds to temple (?) images at Liternum, points to interplay in this episode between past, present, and closure. Hannibal’s review of the Liternum images is itself evidently retrospective upon events from the First Punic War. It also looks ahead to events within and beyond the scope of Silius’ poem. Liternum, for instance, was the place in which, as it were postPunica, a politically disWgured Scipio Africanus Maior ended his days. Terms used of the images are further indicative of the connection between past and present in whose construction epic, particularly a historical epic such as Silius’, participates. Fowler renders the ‘crucially ambiguous’ word monumenta (6.655 and 716) as ‘records’,5 but it also connotes the instructive, admonitory role of such records,6 and so their function as commemoration of the past / present in order to condition the present / future. As Fowler points out, longus ordo (‘long series’) (6.657) strongly suggests the procession, a phenomenon whose centrality in Roman culture is reXected in Roman epic’s ‘lines of defeated captives and [ . . . ] pageants of ancestors’.7 The funeral procession in particular can readily be seen to enact the passing of past into present. The epic ordo (‘series’) is no less representative of that movement: ‘this is what history in a sense was for the Roman: a series of panels, longus ordo’.8 Furthermore, the richly suggestive ‘confusion of image and text’9 that Fowler Wnds in this episode not only underlines the status of the Liternum images as microcosm of the epic text that frames them, so anticipating the ‘present’ time of the Punica’s composition,10 but 3 Fowler (1996), repr. (2000) 86–107. 4 Fowler (1996) 63–74, repr. (2000) 93–107. 5 Fowler (1996) 64, repr. (2000) 94. 6 OLD s.v. monumentum 3b. Livy’s description of history as a monumentum at Praef. 10 is clearly relevant. See Ogilvie (1965) 28; Luce (1990); Moles (1993) 153; Kraus and Woodman (1997) 55–7; Chaplin (2000) 3 n. 7, 120–1, 129, 133–6, (165,) and 167. Cf. also Wiseman (1985) 20 with 20 n. 15 on the deWnition of monumentum at Festus 123 (Lindsay). 7 Fowler (1996) 64–5, repr. (2000) 95–6. 8 Fowler (1996) 65, repr. (2000) 96. 9 Fowler (1996) 64, repr. (2000) 94. 10 Wilson (1993) 230–3 cites instances of similarly anticipatory interplay between image and epic text elsewhere in the Punica to support his observation that ‘epic reopens the borders closing oV the present from the future and the past’.

Past, Present, and Closure in Silius Italicus’ Punica

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draws attention to a speciWc aspect of the episode’s interaction with past epic and points to a notable aperture in Silius’ poem. As Fowler shows, the ‘ ‘‘play of focalizations’’ ’ in this ecphrasis is ‘as usual complex’,11 such that ‘in a sense, what annoys Hannibal is the way Silius reads these pictures, the blatant propaganda of pollutas foederis aras [‘corrupted altars of the treaty’] and deceptumque Iovem [‘and Jupiter mocked / deceived’] in the text of the Punica’.12 As Fowler also demonstrates, however, ‘the possibility of a Punic view—which is also in a sense a Punic reading of the Aeneid—is not to be denied’.13 In this passage, then, as in the shield ecphrasis of Punica 2,14 Silius’ Roman epic is apparently open to a Punic point of view. Such aperture is widened, and a dimension added to the relationship between past event and the present / future moment of artistic memorialization, at 6.700–16, when Hannibal, as Fowler puts it, ‘dreams of a Punic epic and a Punic Hadrian’s column, in which their version of history will predominate’, then foresees ‘in full Sibylline style’ an even grander epic future for himself.15 Hannibal’s command, in the Wnal verse of Punica 6, to cast the pro-Roman pictures into the Xames is ‘a peculiarly intense closural moment of metapoetry’.16 But the resumptive interea (‘meanwhile’), with which, as Fowler points out,17 Silius begins Punica 7 and echoes (ironically?) Hannibal’s delimitation at 6.701 of his epic pretensions, recalls us in medias res and returns us to the Roman hero Fabius, so foreclosing on Hannibal’s attempt to eVect closure on (the story of) Rome and open up a Punic epic.18 Such a play of textual temporality, of aperture and closure, perhaps serves to re-emphasize that the

11 Fowler (1996) 67, repr. (2000) 99. 12 Fowler (1996) 71, repr. (2000) 103. 13 Fowler (1996) 71, repr. (2000) 103. 14 Pun. 2.395–456. On this ecphrasis, see Vessey (1975). 15 Fowler (1996) 72, repr. (2000) 104–5. 16 Fowler (1996) 73, repr. (2000) 106. 17 Fowler (1996) 72–3, repr. (2000) 105–6. 18 This foreclosure is perhaps reinforced by the fact that, as McNelis (2004) 275–8 and (2007) 97–100 points out, post-Ennian and Virgilian audiences are likely to associate the seventh books of Roman epics with beginnings. Punica 7 (re)commences Silius’ account of Fabius’ contribution to the Roman war eVort; this Roman here embodies, in fact, (the) whole epic(s) (on which, see Hardie (1993) 9; Tipping (1999) 167–8 and 188): in sese cuncta arma uirosque gerebat (‘he embodied all arms and men in himself ’) (Pun. 7.8).

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Punica is a tale told by a Roman victor. But it by no means wholly excludes Hannibal’s voice. The Liternum episode, which Fowler so brilliantly illuminates, may be seen to illustrate not only the Punica’s openness to a Punic point of view, but more broadly Silius’ limited power, as Roman epicist, over aperture and closure: his poetic celebration of Roman victory—or victories—cannot altogether contain the dominant Wgure of the enemy, who thus perhaps becomes this ‘Punic’ poem’s anti-hero,19 nor control the problematic lapse between Roman past and present, nor, indeed, determine how, or how much of, the Punica will be read.

INTERT E XT UAL IT Y AN D T IM E Silius’ epic variously invites us to consider past and present, aperture and closure, and the segmentation of time and texts. Perhaps most straightforwardly, however, it is a poem about the transgression and re-imposition of boundaries. Silius tells how exemplars of Roman Republican self-limitation set a limit to Hannibal’s excess.20 He 19 Hannibal is a dynamic and dominant, if demonic, presence in the Punica, a poem whose very title points to his centrality. Albrecht (1964) 21 n. 15 observes that Rossaeus (1661) 2 takes Hannibal for the Punica’s hero and reproaches its author for not beginning with arma uirumque (‘arms and the man’). Albrecht (loc. cit.) also observes the equivocation in the title Des C. Silius Italicus Punischer Krieg, oder Hannibal of Bothe (1855–7). For more recent arguments that Hannibal is the Punica’s ‘real hero’ or central protagonist, see Casale (1954) 88; Matier (1989); Conte (1994) 494. The power of Hannibal’s painted image to draw attention at Scipio’s closural triumph (see 17.643–4) brings sharply into focus, as it were, his constant potential to overshadow any exemplar of Romanity. (On Hannibal as a dominant Wgure in Scipio’s triumph, see Matier (1989) 15; Burck (1984) 145–6 argues strongly for Hannibal’s, rather than Scipio’s, dominance in Punica 17 as a whole.) Hannibal’s own selfreXexively poetic claims to fame at 17.606–15 remind us, moreover, of the extent to which, if the Punica is itself instrumental in securing fame for its Punic anti-hero, it is this Punic anti-hero that gives Silius his Punica. (Hannibal’s assertion of undying renown at 17.608–10 recalls those of Horace Carm. 3.30 and Ovid Met. 15.871–9; the passage from the Metamorphoses concludes Ovid’s own epic achievement.) 20 Cf. e.g. Hardie (1993) 9. For further perspectives on this opposition between Carthaginian transgression and Roman delimitation in the Punica, see Dauge (1981) 233, 388–9, 636, 690–1, 703; Santini (1991) 63–113.


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gloriWes Rome’s past greatness, when challenged by Carthage, in contrast to its subsequent enervation and proXigacy in peacetime, but he also asks ‘Where did it all go wrong? Where was the cut-oV point?’ Such historico-political concerns are, unsurprisingly, interwoven with the Punica’s status as a text and intertext. Silius focuses on the second of three Punic wars, but also, as we have seen, looks back on the Wrst, and, as I shall discuss, laments in striking prolepsis the loss of Carthage as an external enemy. If Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s De bello ciuili, and Silius’ Punica form a trilogy of Roman epics on Rome,21 then the Punica is a signiWcantly belated second instalment in that trilogy. Silius may idealize Rome’s past, but Lucan had already written of the coming decline into civil war. Echoes of the De bello ciuili in the Punica indicate the presence in the idealized Roman past of elements that would contribute (had already contributed) to implosive collapse.22 Silius’ exemplary Roman heroes prove themselves in a war against an external enemy, but, as for instance at Cannae,23 themes and motifs of strife at Rome intrude on his epic narrative. The poem’s very ‘epicization’ of Scipio Africanus Maior suggests at a speciWcally poetic level precisely the promotion of individualism that built and destroyed the Republic.24 The belated, benighted, Silver-Aged, seventeen-book Punica is (perhaps) itself an excessive work, a result (perhaps) of not knowing when to stop. But then it is also testimony to certain problems facing Roman epicists of 21 On the Aeneid, the De bello ciuili, and the Punica as a trilogy, see Boyle and Sullivan (1991) 297–8; Boyle (1993) 12–13. Cf. Fincher (1979) 153–4; McGuire (1997) 32–3. Kissel (1979) 222 argues that the Punica should not be seen as part of such a trilogy, but as an ‘historico-philosophical counter-representation to and historical missing-link between its predecessors’. I Wnd this view unconvincing. The second description, at least, surely renders Silius’ poem precisely a problematically belated middle part of a trilogy. For von Albrecht (1964) 166, Silius sees Virgil with the eyes of Lucan, and Lucan with the eyes of Virgil. Cf. McGuire (1985) 8; (1997) 83; Ahl, Davis, and Pomeroy (1986) esp. 2556. 22 See e.g. Ahl, Davis, and Pomeroy (1986) 2518–19; Tipping (1999) 107–12, 272–4, 276–8; (2004). For further discussion of intertextuality between the De bello ciuili and the Punica, see Steele (1922) 326–30; Meyer (1924); Pinto (1953) 224; Wistrand (1956) 14; Currie (1958); von Albrecht (1964) esp. 23, 75, 54–5, 165; Scho¨nberger (1965) 137; McDonald (1970) 147; Burck (1979) 278–80; Burck (1984) 175; Kissel (1979) esp. 109–11; Brouwers (1982); Ahl, Davis, and Pomeroy (1986) esp. 2501–4, 2556; Laudizi (1989) 148–50, 156; Hardie (1993) 9, 64, 80. 23 See e.g. Pun. 9.66–177 and 288–9, discussed in Tipping (forthcoming). 24 See Tipping (1999) 205–84.

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the imperial age: the story of Rome went on and the anxiety of inXuence presumably grew no less.25 And as more of us Wnd positive things to say about Silius’ poem, we are reminded that the story of literary criticism goes on and that the need to Wnd something about which to write doctoral theses grows no less. Which brings me back to Don Fowler, who originally put me to work on the Punica, and who in 1997 published a paper on intertextuality called ‘On the Shoulders of Giants: Intertextuality and Classical Studies’.26 In this,27 he discusses how, prompted by a paper on the Punica, he investigated the intertextuality of verses 10.657–8: haec tum Roma fuit. post te cui uertere mores si stabat fatis, potius, Carthago, maneres. Such was Rome then. If, Carthage, it was fated to change its ways in your wake, would that you remained.

I have already referred in passing to these words of regret. Fowler observes: books 9 and 10 of the Punica deal with the defeat at Cannae, and book 10 concludes with a description of the refusal of the Romans to ransom their prisoners and their punishment of those who had run away. If the price of the defeat of Carthage was the loss of this stern Roman morality, it would be better if Carthage still stood. . . . 28

Fowler’s exploration of the intertextuality of these verses includes consideration of their relationship to Aeneid 8.642–5, verses that describe ecphrastically the gruesome punishment of Mettus Fufetius. It also includes consideration of their relationship to Aeneid 2.54–6, where Aeneas laments Laocoon’s failure to save Troy, Aeneid 2.324–7, where Panthus laments Troy’s fate, and Propertius 2.8.7–10, where is asserted the susceptibility of everything to change, including the susceptibility of cities to rise and fall. Fowler’s discussion demonstrates how awareness of such intertextuality adds to a reading of

25 26 27 28

See Hardie (1993) esp. 1–19, 88–119; (1997); Fowler (1997a) 8, repr. (2000) 290. Fowler (1997a), repr. (2000) 115–37. Fowler (1997a) 20–4, repr. (2000) 123–7. Fowler (1997a) 21, repr. (2000) 123.


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Silius’ narratorial intrusion here, which laments, in a sense delays,29 but of course cannot prevent, the loss of a pristine Romanity. Fowler’s discussion also suggests the investigation of further intertexts for these provocative verses from the Punica, and helpfully lists a few. So I have followed his suggestion and now present (selectively) my results. I begin with Propertius 4.4.9–10: quid tum Roma fuit, tubicen uicina Curetis cum quateret lento murmure saxa Iovis? What was Rome then, when Cures’ trumpeter shook Jupiter’s nearby crags with long drawn-out note?

In Camps’s summary: ‘this elegy is formally an aetiological poem, like Elegy ii, purporting to explain the origin of the old name of the Capitoline hill, mons Tarpeius, or of the particular eminence of it that was still known as the saxum Tarpeium in historical times.’30 Propertius asks ‘What was Rome then?’ and proceeds to compare the topography of the settlement invaded by the Sabines with that of the modern city. But the focus swiftly shifts to Tarpeia’s sacrilegious, treacherous, and betrayed passion. For Camps ‘the real content of the poem, for which the aetiological motive serves as occasion, is an elaborately narrated tale of the guilty love of a Vestal Virgin. . . . This narrative is related to the origin of the place-name by the concluding couplet of the elegy.’31 Rather than demoting the aetiological to the status of mere ‘occasion’, though, we might see at work here the love elegist’s agenda of showing how far amor (love) is written into Roma (Rome). The interaction of aetiological and amatory has, moreover, the eVect of blurring the boundary between time zones. For in portraying past Rome as the substance of an amatory elegy, Propertius recoups it for the present, rendering it contemporary. I referred earlier to Fowler’s discussion of the intertextual relationship between Punica 10.657–8 and Propertius 2.8.7–10. The Propertian passage runs: 29 I am grateful to Stephen Heyworth for pointing out to me a possible word play in uertere mores (my emphasis). The basic meaning here is ‘change (its) ways’, but a hint of ‘delay’ (remora, remoror, Remora, remus) would coincide with a desire to hold back the years of Rome’s post-Carthaginian decline. 30 Camps (1965) 86. 31 Camps (1965) 86.

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Ben Tipping omnia uertuntur: certe uertuntur amores: uinceris aut uincis, haec in amore rota est. magni saepe duces, magni cecidere tyranni, et Thebae steterunt altaque Troia fuit.

All things change: certainly love changes. You are overcome or you overcome, that is love’s wheel. Often great leaders, great tyrants have fallen, and Thebes once stood and lofty Troy used to be.

Fowler notes the echo of Propertius’ uertuntur amores (‘love changes’) in Silius’ uertere mores (‘change (its) ways’).32 The Propertian idea of amor as subject to change is then intertextually associated with the Punica’s concerns about the changing moral shape of Roma. The presentation of amor in Propertius 4.9 conveys something diVerent: a sense, rather, of plus ¸ca change that will inform my rereading of Silius’ consternation at Rome’s transformation. Another intertext for Punica 10.657–8 is Ovid, Fasti 1.198. I quote that verse in context (Fasti 1.191–200): risit, et ‘o quam te fallunt tua saecula,’ dixit, ‘qui stipe mel sumpta dulcius esse putas! uix ego Saturno quemquam regnante uidebam cuius non animo dulcia lucra forent. tempore creuit amor, qui nunc est summus, habendi: uix ultra quo iam progrediatur habet. pluris opes nunc sunt quam prisci temporis annis, dum populus pauper, dum noua Roma fuit, dum casa Martigenam capiebat parua Quirinum, et dabat exiguum Xuminis ulua torum. He laughed and said: ‘Oh, how ignorant you are of your times, if you think that honey is sweeter than the receipt of cash! Even when Saturn reigned I hardly saw anyone to whose heart money was not sweet. In time, the love of possession grew: now it could scarcely go further. Riches are more esteemed now than in the olden days, when the people were poor, when Rome was new, when a small steading housed Quirinus, son of Mars, and river sedge provided the slightest of beds.’

Ovid has asked why gifts of money are given on 1 January and the god Janus here replies, contributing to the literary topos of the 32 Fowler (1997a) 23 with 23 n. 17, repr. (2000) 126 with 126 n. 18.


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growth of avarice.33 He claims that in contemporary Rome greed has got about as bad as it can get and distinguishes this grasping culture from that of nascent Rome.34 But Janus—a liminal deity in a liminal scene—also blurs the boundaries between past and present, claiming that Romans were keen on cash even in the age of Saturn.35 Such enthusiasm is notably absent from, say, Ovid’s characterization of the age of Saturn in his account of the Ages of Man at Metamorphoses 1.89–150,36 and raises the issue of reliability. On the passage from the Fasti, Frazer remarks that: ‘[Ovid’s] reference to the love of lucre even in the age of Saturn is no doubt satirical.’37 Is not Ovid’s Janus here just two-faced, however?38 Or is he being frank, ‘fessing up’ to a human, or more speciWcally, Roman greed that is antediluvian if not congenital?39 Again, the perspectives on the relationship between past and present Rome that emerge from these verses of the Fasti will inform my reconsideration of the Silian verses with which the phrase Roma fuit intertextually links them. That phrase also occurs at Lucan, De bello ciuili 5.29 and 8.127. The Wrst of these occurrences comes in Lentulus’ speech asserting that the senate’s strength is sustained irrespective of its geographical location: Tarpeia sede perusta Gallorum facibus Veiosque habitante Camillo illic Roma fuit. non umquam perdidit ordo mutato sua iura solo. When the Tarpeian sanctuary was burnt out by Gallic brands and Camillus living at Veii, Rome was there at Veii. This order has never lost its rights through changing its location.

33 For discussion and parallels, see Frazer (1929) ad Fast. 1.193; Bo¨mer (1957–8) ad Fast. 1.191, 1.195, and 1.211. 34 On tempore creuit amor (‘in time, the love of possession grew’) (Fast. 1.195), see Bo¨mer (1957–8) ad loc. 35 See Barchiesi (1997) 229–37 on Janus’ representation here of the relationship between past and present. 36 See Lee (1953) and Bo¨mer (1957–8) ad loc., who cite further descriptions of the Saturnian or Golden Age. 37 Frazer (1929) ad Fast. 1.193. 38 On this two-faced Janus, see esp. Barchiesi (1997) 231–2. See further Frazer (1929) ad Fast. 1.89; Bo¨mer (1957–8) ad Fast. 1.65, 1.89, 1.121. 39 On the reliability of Janus here, see Barchiesi (1997) 237.

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As Masters convincingly argues, however, Lentulus’ argument is unconvincing.40 In particular, Masters shows that invocation of Camillus as an exemplar of the Republic’s staying-power is patently ill-judged, because Camillus had been appropriated by imperial propaganda and become a model for the leadership of one man rather than of a Republican collective. Lentulus fails to demonstrate the senate’s authority, suggesting, albeit unwittingly, the dependence of the Republic upon powerful individuals: upon Pompey, in fact, whose individual weakness leaves the senate’s collective authority fatally vulnerable to Caesar and Caesarism. It is Pompey who utters the phrase Roma fuit at De bello ciuili 8.133, in commendation of Lesbos as temporary home to his wife Cornelia: tenuit nostros hac obside Lesbos adfectus; hic sacra domus carique penates, hic mihi Roma fuit. While Cornelia was hostage here, Lesbos held my love; here was my sacred home and my beloved hearth, here was my Rome.

For Pompey, Rome is where his heart is, not where the Republican senate convenes. Lentulus may regard him as the senate’s cipher, but, particularly in the wake of Pharsalus, Pompey’s preoccupation with a personal rather than Republican agenda is increasingly clear. There is a note of irony, perhaps even indignation, in Lucan’s observation earlier in Book 8, at verses 107–8, that Pompey’s eyes remained dry at Pharsalus but were Wlled with tears when he met Cornelia on Lesbos. Both these passages from the De bello ciuili are examples of how, in Lucan’s epic of civil war, Rome and Romanity fragment and their deWnitions become the subject of competing claims.41 If the Propertian and Ovidian intertexts I considered earlier call into question the relationship between Rome’s past and present, these Lucanian passages and, indeed, Lucan’s poem as a whole, render that relationship, and the identity of Rome, radically uncertain. Silius’ haec tum Roma fuit (‘such was Rome then’) at Punica 10.657, on the other hand, seems a conWdent assertion that Rome at the time of Cannae was

40 Masters (1992) 98–106.

41 On this, see esp. Henderson (1998) 165–211.


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characterized by a ‘stern . . . morality’,42 and that such severity was desirable, in contrast to a subsequent decline in standards of Romanity. His intrusive assertion of Rome’s moral strength in her darkest hour identiWes in the removal of a Punic foe disaster for Roman mores. But is Silius here thinking of the Carthage that went on to Wght a third Punic War with Rome, or that Hannibal led ad portas, or that inXicted the defeat of Cannae? Could it be that Cannae is the cut-oV point after which Romanity lost its edge? Silius so frames his description of Cannae as to lend support to that last possibility. At Punica 9.346–53, close to the start of his account of the battle, Silius apostrophizes the Roman people with the implication that they will bear future prosperity less well than adversity, and then suggests that they could not take further testing. He then addresses Rome itself, maintaining that the wounds of defeat will bring eternal glory, that Rome will never be greater, and that it will so sink in prosperity that only the renown of its defeats will preserve its name. The framing combination of these doom-laden verses with the similarly pessimistic comment at 10.657–8, which eVects closure both on the Punica’s account of Cannae and on Book 10, conveys the impression that this military nadir was simultaneous with Rome’s moral zenith. In suggesting this simultaneity, Silius casts a shadow over Roman military successes in the last six books of his poem. In a sense, Rome’s victory over Carthage is already part of a moral defeat.

S C I P I O T R I UM P H A N T Yet we cannot safely see in this a clear answer to the question of where, when, how, and why Rome’s glorious past came to an end. For the Punica does undeniably celebrate Roman military success at the height of the Republic. It also celebrates exemplars of Republican heroism. Ultimately, the focal point of such celebration is Scipio Africanus Maior, under whose dynamic leadership Rome emerges victorious from the conXict. Silius’ representation of the Republican

42 Fowler (1997a) 21, repr. (2000) 123.

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hero Scipio is, however, itself complicated by issues of temporality in ways that I propose to explore now. At Punica 10.480–1, in yet another instance of Roma fuit that Fowler notes,43 the Roman turncoat Cinna conWnes kingship and autocracy to Rome’s past: sub regibus olim j Roma fuit (‘Rome was once subject to kings’). Scipio displays the political self-restraint of an exemplary Republican at Punica 16.281–4, when he declines the kingship oVered him by Spanish chieftains and tells them that the very word ‘king’ is intolerable at Rome. Yet at times, Scipio is associated with regality, as, for instance, at Punica 17.625–8, in a summary of his achievements that we might expect to emphasize his status as exemplary Republican: mansuri compos decoris per saecula rector deuictae referens primus cognomina terrae securus sceptri repetit per caerula Romam et patria inuehitur sublimi tecta triumpho. The general [Scipio], possessed of a glory that would endure for generations, the Wrst commander to bear the name of a conquered country, and assured of authority, returned by sea to Rome and rode into his native city in a majestic triumph.

For Henderson, hic Wnis bello (‘here ended the war’) at Punica 17.618 signals the close of a conXict that belongs (not to Hannibal but) to Scipio. The name Africanus marks Scipio as not only the hero of the Second Punic War, but a new kind of hero within the competitive Republic of Rome: the Wrst, as 17.626 stresses, to bear a triumphal name.44 The Loeb translator, DuV, translates securus sceptri in 17.627 as ‘he had no fear for the empire of Rome’, which aVords Scipio a properly Republican concern to impose and uphold the dominion of the state he serves.45 The sense that Scipio’s very name raises questions about his status as an exemplary Republican hero is, however, intensiWed if we consider further occurrences of the term sceptrum in the Punica. McGuire notes that in Silius’ poem this word, singular or plural, usually denotes a king’s staV and / or the monarchical power it symbolizes. He also shows how in the four instances of the singular sceptrum before Book 17, the monarchical 43 Fowler (1997a) 24 n. 18, repr. (2000) 126 n. 19. 44 Henderson (1997a) 37–8. 45 DuV (1934) ad Pun. 17.627.


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power it signiWes is negatively presented.46 An instance of the plural occurs in Punica 13.605, where the Sibyl, describing for Scipio the punishment of tyrants in Tartarus, speaks of the sceptra superba (proud sceptres) that they wielded during life. As McGuire points out, Aeneid 6.548–627 are compressed into the description at Punica 13.601–12 of the posthumous punishment of tyranny, and in the latter passage, it is only tyrants who are punished.47 A sense of this focus on tyranny is reinforced if we note the emphatic position of regum (‘kings’) (Punica 13.602) and tyrannis (‘tyrants’) (612), and consider other intertexts for Punica 13.602, such as Seneca, Hercules furens 731–47 and Statius, Thebaid 8.21–65.48 The summary words with which the passage from the Punica ends are a truncated version of the moral warnings that bring the corresponding Senecan passage to a close.49 Silius’ focus on tyranny and its punishment, however, clearly recalls not only the admonition of the Hercules furens, but also that oVered at Aeneid 6.620: discite iustitiam moniti et non temnere diuos (learn, as you have been warned, to be just and not to scorn the gods). Those whose punishments provide an exemplary lesson in the verses that immediately follow this exhortation in the Aeneid include people guilty of crimes against society, but more speciWcally Roman society. One has sold his native land for gold, imposed a master upon her, and taken money to play fast and loose with her laws. To play tyrant oneself is a worse crime than to impose tyranny or make light of the laws for money, but all are similar crimes against the Roman state and so against Romanity. The warnings oVered in the Aeneid and the Hercules furens must to some degree address the potential or actual tyranny of the ages in which these works were composed.50 We may infer from the plural form discite (‘learn’) (Aeneid 6.620) an audience beyond Aeneas himself that could be the poem’s Roman audience suggested by Anchises’ Romane (‘Roman’; Aeneid 6.851). At this point in the 46 McGuire (1985) 153–63; cf. McGuire (1997) 95–103. 47 McGuire (1985) 157. 48 Reitz (1982) 85–9 does both. 49 See Reitz (1982) 89. 50 On the contemporary resonance of the crimes described at Aen. 6.621–2, see Austin (1977) ad loc.; Leigh (1996) esp. 172–3. On that of the crimes and their adjudication described at Her. F. 731–47, see Fitch (1987) ad loc.

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Punica, there is a similar sense of an audience beyond Scipio to whom the Sibyl’s moralizing words are spoken. The focus on kingship itself evokes a larger, speciWcally Roman, audience as recipients of this lesson by example. For, as we noted earlier, Scipio himself later tells Spanish chieftains that the very word ‘king’ (nomina regum) is intolerable at Rome (Punica 16.283–4). The Sibyl’s description of the punishment in store for tyrannical kings is, however, most obviously directed at Scipio, whose status as an emergent representative of the Republic aVords him a power that could be tyrannically abused. The suVerings described may thus be seen to serve as an example for Scipio and to remind him of the need for self-restraint. It is noteworthy then, and noted by McGuire, that Scipio admires Syphax as the holder of a sceptrum (16.248), and, during the funeral games for his father and uncle, allows two brothers to Wght pro sceptro (‘for royal power’) in a fraternal duel that is strongly suggestive of Roman civil war (16.527–36).51 The associations between the sceptre and monarchy in the Punica make more appropriate such translations of securus sceptri as those proposed by McGuire: ‘secure in his personal power’, and Henderson: ‘losing no sleep over a Royal sceptre’.52 There is, however, a further twist to the turn of phrase securus sceptri. For, as Henderson points out, the word scipio itself can have the same meaning as the Greek skeˆptron (‘staV’). The name Scipio then ‘attests to the Wlial piety of a Cornelius who became his blind father’s ‘‘cane’’ ’.53 Scipio as skeˆptron is, however, also suggestive of regal power, and Henderson concludes that: the Scipiadae were born rulers, even before Ennius (say) sublimated the skeˆptron which put Wre in Rome’s belly as the Jovian thunder-bolt, fulmen (‘bolt’, < fulge-men), bolstered by fulmen (‘something to lean on’, < fulcimen, as skeˆptron < skeˆpto . . . ).

Skeˆptron and fulmen are indisputably suggestive of royal or divine— speciWcally Jovian—authority. Attention may also appositely be drawn to the fact that fulmen has a Greek equivalent in the Greek 51 See McGuire (1985) 156–60. Cf. Ahl, Davis, and Pomeroy (1986) 2557. 52 McGuire (1985) 163; Henderson (1997a) 142 n. 49. 53 Henderson (1997a) 142 n. 49, citing Maltby (1991) 551 scipio.


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skeˆptos (thunderbolt). Two Scipiones are famously fulmina at Virgil Aeneid 6.842. It has been suggested that the realization within the Punica of the young Scipio’s legendary divine origins reaches a climax in the attribution to him of fulmina (15.404–5 and 16.143).54 Lucan’s Caesar, exemplar of the evils of nascent autocracy, is notoriously likened to a fulmen at De bello ciuili 1.151–7. The Scipiones themselves are, by deWnition, simultaneously bolt-bearing bolsterers of the Republican state, and, at least potentially, a threat to Republicanism. It seems, indeed, that the family may actually have emphasized the association between their name and the term sceptrum.55 The pun on Scipio as sceptrum perhaps also points, so to speak, to the following triumph, since the sceptre, though not therein mentioned, was standardly among the triumphator’s ‘props’.56 The Punica’s closing description (or depiction) of Scipio’s triumph itself reinforces his more general connection to kingship (17.645–54): ipse adstans curru atque auro decoratus et ostro Martia praebebat spectanda Quiritibus ora, qualis odoratis descendens Liber ab Indis egit pampineos frenata tigride currus, aut cum Phlegraeis confecta mole Gigantum incessit campis tangens Tirynthius astra. salue, inuicte parens, non concessure Quirino laudibus ac meritis, non concessure Camillo. nec uero, cum te memorat de stirpe deorum, prolem Tarpei, mentitur Roma, Tonantis. He himself, standing upright in his chariot and bedecked in gold and purple, gave the citizens a martial countenance to gaze on: he was like Liber, when he drove his vine-wreathed, tiger-drawn chariot, as he came down from the scented Indians; or Hercules, when he had slain the massive giants and walked upon the Phlaegrean plains, touching the stars. Hail, unconquered father, who will yield nothing in glory or deserving to Quirinus or Camillus. Nor indeed does Rome lie when it calls you divinely descended and the oVspring of the Tarpeian thunderer.

54 Fuccechi (1993) 45. 55 See Munro (1900) 2. 226; McGuire (1985) 163 n. 15. 56 See Versnel (1970) 60; McGuire (1985) 154.

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The sceptre and other regalia, such as that aVorded to the triumphant Scipio at Punica 17.645, associate any triumphator, Republican or otherwise, not only with Jupiter, greatest of the gods, but also with the early kings of Rome.57 And, in fact, at 17.651–2, Scipio is compared to Rome’s earliest king. I have noted that in the Punica, sceptrum typically denotes monarchical, often tyrannical, power, and is associated with civil war. Securus sceptri must at least to some extent reveal Scipio as king in a manner that renders ironic his magnanimous refusal of kingship in Punica 16. Scipio can rest secure in the knowledge that his individual achievement will be gloriWed by this epic triumph, but the implications of that gloriWcation call into question, as we shall see, his compatibility as an exemplary Roman with Republican ideology, according to which he should be a mere instrument of state authority.58 The triumph with which the Punica concludes has been well discussed by Hardie, who points out that despite ipse in 17.645, Scipio is here ‘anything but himself ’. Rather, ‘the series of imagines [‘likenesses’], similes and comparisons, substitutes for the historical man’, is symptomatic of the general absence from Virgilian and postVirgilian epic of a hero who is entire of himself.59 Hardie notes, for example, that ipse adstans curru atque auro decoratus et ostro (‘he himself, standing upright in his chariot and bedecked in gold and purple’) (Punica 17.645), the very verse that asserts Scipio’s real presence, recalls Aeneid 8.720, ipse sedens niueo candentis limine Phoebi (‘he himself sitting on the snow-white threshold of shining Phoebus’).60 This intertextually generated imperial co-presence recurs and is strongly reinforced, moreover, by the Wrst two exemplary Wgures to whom Scipio is compared, Bacchus and Hercules, who are compared to Octavian in Anchises’ prophetic praise of Augustus (Aeneid 6.801–5). The reference at Punica 17.625, a few verses before the passage quoted just above, to the title Africanus, which Scipio gained to commemorate his victory in Africa, and the subsequent description of his triumph, might in themselves prompt thought of another 57 See Versnel (1970) esp. 57, 71–2, 92. 59 Hardie (1993) 39. Cf. (1997) 159.

58 Cf. McGuire (1985) 163. 60 Hardie (1993) 39 with 39 n. 47.


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emperor, Domitian, his title Germanicus, and his associated triumphs, which Silius’ Jupiter has already mentioned (at Punica 3.607 and 614–15). The second of the Wgures to whom Silius’ triumphal Scipio is compared, Hercules, is also connected with Domitian, who seems to have cultivated a close association with the exemplary hero, to the extent of imposing his own features on Hercules’ cult statuary.61 This link between Hercules and Domitian is perhaps the more ‘live’ here, where the presence of imagines (‘likenesses’), overt in 17.644 and overtly invoked by qualis (‘like’) in 17.647, renders the text strongly visual. Both the ‘real’ representations here paraded and the virtual imagines imposed on Scipio invite a visualization not dissimilar to viewing a statue. So Silius’ Scipio is already somewhat regal, somewhat like an emperor, when, at Punica 17.651–2, he is compared to Romulus and Camillus: to Rome’s Wrst and controversial king, and to perhaps the greatest hero of the Republic, who, as I remarked earlier, was also a model appropriated by the propaganda of autocracy. Such comparison prompts at least the consideration that Rome was always ruled by individuals.62 61 Martial presents a syncrisis of Hercules and Domitian that alludes to the emperor’s own assimilation and emulation of the Hercules model. Epigrams 9.64 and 65 refer to a temple that Domitian dedicated to Hercules and to its cult statue of the god, which bore the emperor’s own features. The opening couplet of 9.64 makes comparison between the emperor who has so imposed his image and the hero upon whom he imposes it in such a way as to favour the former. This Xattering comparison is then continued, clariWed, and expanded at 9.64.6–8. Epigram 9.65 further extends this favourable comparison, telling the Hercules whom Domitian has graced with his own face that he is now worthy to be recognized by the Capitoline Jupiter as his son, and that he possesses a mightier and more commanding mien than he did during his labours. In 9.101, Appia, with whose name the poem begins and to whom its second verse attributes maximal fame, is swiftly capped by Domitian, the venerandus in Hercule Caesar (‘venerable Caesar in the shape of Hercules’), whose hallowing of her is here commemorated. And again, in this epigram, Domitian outdoes Hercules, as the deeds of the later and greater Hercules outdo those of the Wrst and lesser. The poem concludes with an echo of the opening verses of 9.65, in the form of an assertion that Hercules is unworthy to bear Domitian’s features, which would be more suitably transposed to Tarpeian Jupiter. On syncrisis of Hercules and Domitian, see further Anderson (1928) 54; Galinsky (1972) 141; Palagia (1986) 144–6; Hardie (1993) 68; Malamud and McGuire (1993) 211–12. As Liebeschuetz (1979) 172–3 pertinently puts it: ‘Domitian claimed for himself the imitation of Hercules which Silius had ascribed to the Roman leaders in the Hannibalic war.’ 62 Cf. Henderson (1998) 318.

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The Wnal sentence of Silius Italicus’ Punica begins salue, inuicte parens (‘Hail, unconquered father’) (Punica 17.651), a salutation from the narrator to the triumphant Scipio Africanus Maior. These words echo Scipio inuicte (‘unconquered Scipio’) (Varia 3 (Vahlen)), a fragment of Ennius’ Scipio. From Ennius’ extant treatment of Scipio, there emerges a Wgure who is, as here, unvanquished and unmatched in deeds, but who refuses to be rewarded with the commemoration of statuary.63 Instead, as we gather from words that fragments from the Epigrams apparently place in Scipio’s own mouth, he hopes for deiWcation.64 The word inuicte (‘unconquered’) serves to associate Scipio with Hercules, whose cult title was inuictus,65 and who provided a model for the reward of altruistic services with deiWcation. Elter adduces the Punica in support of his speculation that Ennius sought in his Scipio to deify the eponymous hero and so to present him as another Hercules.66 At Punica 15.78–83,Virtus cites Hercules and Romulus as protreptic examples for Scipio of virtue rewarded with deiWcation. Here at the end of the poem, Scipio is placed in this pattern, his own transcendent, semi-divine heroism asserted, and, in the Punica’s Wnal verse, his deiWcation strongly implied. It has been suggested that Scipio’s triumphal procession to the Capitol at the end of the Punica is a kind of apotheosis, like that of Hercules on Mount Oeta, and that here Scipio gains entry to the canon of demi-gods, exemplars of virtue’s reward.67

63 See further Var. 1–2, 6–8, 19–20 (Vahlen). 64 See Var. 23–4 (Vahlen). 65 On Hercules inuictus, see Galinsky (1972) 126–7, 162. On the adoption of this title at Rome, see further Weinstock (1957); Weinstock (1971) 92, 186–8. 66 Elter (1907) 2:1.40.3–41. Cf. Anderson (1928) 31–2. Cicero’s works have also been used to support this argument. See e.g. OV. 3.1–2, 3.4; Rep. 1.1, 3.4–6, 6.10, 6.15, 6.20–1, 6.26; Lactantius, Div. inst. 1.18.11–12, which records an important fragment from the De republica (Rep. fr. inc. 6 (Ziegler)). On the protreptic force of the Somnium Scipionis, see Zetzel (1995) 223. See also esp. Cicero, Sest. 143. Another key text is Horace, Carm. 4.8.14–34, where it is claimed that heroic achievements live on through poetry and Scipio’s and Hercules’ deeds are cited as the stuV of song. The key verses are 14–19, the authenticity of which is dubious (see Becker (1959)). As Weinstock (1971) 294 n. 11 remarks, however, ‘even if these verses are spurious . . . , the evidence they contain is valuable. . . .’ For further discussion of this (problematic) poem, see Harrison (1990a), esp. 40–41. Cf. Horace, Epist. 2.1.5–17 with Brink (1963–82) 3.39–57, esp. 39–42. 67 Bassett (1966) 273.


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The Punica concludes by aYrming Scipio’s divine ancestry and hinting at his celestial destination. The image of Hercules is suggestive of his departure from the world of men, and of his liminality,68 but it is Scipio who appears at the boundary of the poem. Our sense of an epic ending here and our sense of Scipio’s ending beyond this boundary are mutually inXuential. The Punica’s assertive closure, which transports Scipio from the realm of this poem to that of, say, the Somnium Scipionis, might well draw attention to the fact that there was, ultimately, no political space for Scipio at Rome. It also prompts me to make the following suggestion about poetic and political boundaries. Silius’ heroizing treatment of Scipio Africanus Maior in his epic of the Republic indicates that Roman epic, that Rome itself, Republican or otherwise, always celebrated and encouraged the spirit of emulative individualism so valuable to the state, but so dangerous to the stability of Republicanism. At De bello ciuili 8.871–2, Lucan looks forward to a time when Egypt’s claim to hold Pompey’s tomb will be disbelieved. Noting the intertextuality of these verses with the Wnal verse of the Punica, Hardie remarks that ‘in both cases the claim points to the superhuman pretensions of the hero, or, more correctly, to the power of fame, and of epic fama in particular, to elevate the great man to a more than human status.’69 The Punica ends with a triumph, and as Fowler observes, triumph is strongly closural.70 The Punica’s interaction in its last, assertively Wnal verses, with the De bello ciuili serves, however, to deny its audience the sense of an ending and, more speciWcally, to point to the way in which the Wgure of Africanus with which the poem closes is himself ‘unclosed’, the stuV of epic representation and its reception. I detect a further dimension to this undermined closure, again generated by intertextuality with the De bello ciuili.71 The Wnal, apostrophizing, couplet of the poem places the narrator among the citizens who watch Scipio’s triumph. The 68 Cf. Feeney (1986) esp. 52, 61–5, 75–9; Feeney (1991) 95–8. Silk (1985) 6 describes Hercules as ‘interstitial’, a term that, as Feeney remarks at (1986) 51 and (1991) 95, well captures Hercules’ liminality. 69 Hardie (1997a) 159–60. 70 Fowler (1997b) 15–16, repr. (2000) 298–9. 71 I think, in fact, that the very presence of multiple intertextuality here contributes to a sense that the Punica and its shape-shifting Scipio Africanus Maior remain

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narrator’s participation in his own narrative here also places him at a particular point in history, as if certain events, including, of course, Scipio’s political downfall, were part of a future still to come. It has been observed that Lucan’s main narrator frequently so positions himself, again with the eVect of presenting what is actually the past as uenientia fata, j non transmissa (‘destiny coming and not past’) (7.212–13), and thereby toying with the horrible inevitability of civil war and Caesarism.72 The Wnal assertion here that Scipio is the son of Jupiter is a counter not only to historiographical scepticism regarding Scipio’s relationship with the divine,73 but also, in a sense, to the paraquat poured by Lucan’s narrator at De bello ciuili 7.457–9 on the deiWcation of human beings in the shape of Caesars. Silius’ ‘on-the-spot’ narrator assures us that human beings really can become gods, oVering as testimony his own, as it were, unmediated view of Scipio, a triumphant demi-god, on the pattern of Hercules and Romulus. ‘open’. Spaltenstein (1986–90) ad loc. notes some echoes, and I am grateful to Stephen Hinds for drawing my attention to another: the recollection in the Punica’s closing verses of those with which Statius’ Achilleid opens. This echo reXects and extends implicit and explicit comparison between Scipio and Achilles in Silius’ epic. When Scipio encounters the ghosts of Homer and of more or less Homeric heroes at Pun. 13.778–805, he evidently regards Achilles, whose spirit he sees immediately after that of Homer, as an exemplar of how epic poetry can promote heroism, and expressly envies him his poet (13.793–7). Achilles’ example is, however, not altogether positive in the Punica (note 14.93–5 and 15.291–2), and at 15.275–82 Laelius deems Scipio to have outdone previous epic heroes such as Achilles not through martial deeds but through continence. Scipio’s response to the spirits of Homer and Achilles may suggest a desire for epic gloriWcation, yet even as the Punica’s Wnal verses perform precisely that gloriWcatory function they hint strongly at the deiWcation in favour of which his pre-Silian counterparts had, as I observe above, rejected earthly commemoration. The opening of the Achilleid plays on the idea that whatever epic tale it might go on to tell about its eponymous hero, heaven was always already closed to him. The Punica places Achilles not in heaven but in Hades, and at its end looks beyond immediate closure by asserting Scipio’s descent from Jupiter and indicating his divine destination. 72 Uenientia fata, non transmissa is the title, and Lucan’s narrative the subject, of Leigh (1993). Leigh (1997) is an updated version of this discussion. On Lucan as intrusive narrator, see further Syndikus (1958) 39–43; von Albrecht (1970) 273; Marti (1975); Ahl (1976) 151; Williams (1978) 234; Mayer (1981) ad Luc. 8.827; Johnson (1987) 7; Lausberg (1985) 1571; Masters (1992) 5. 73 See Polybius 10.2.12–13, 10.11.7–8; Livy 26.19.4–8 with Walsh (1961) 94–5; Scullard (1970) 25–7; Levene (1993) 18–19, 61–2; Feldherr (1998) 66–9; Kraus (1998) 279.


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The result of this response to Lucan is, however, to restore to the past that which, from the perspective of a narrative frozen in time, is the future. This has two clear consequences. In the Wrst place, Silius’ Punica ends, ostensibly, with a whisper of the immortality that may be won as a reward for service to mankind and more speciWcally, the Republic. Read through the Wlter of Lucan’s pre-written sequel, however, such deiWcation becomes contaminated with its role as marker for the emergence of more or less ‘superhuman’ individuals who will ultimately destroy that Republic. Secondly, and more speciWcally, the implied deiWcation of Silius’ Scipio in terms that recall Lucan’s critique of deiWed emperors makes him, once more, a forerunner for the emergent and dangerous individual. It reminds us, furthermore, that while the Punica’s apostrophe to Scipio may create the illusion of foreclosure on history, history had, as Silius raced to complete his epic, brought to pass not only the civil war and Caesarism of Lucan’s poem, but also the political demise of the controversially individualistic Scipio Africanus. The Punica’s representation of, and position in, history crucially aVect its portrayal of Scipio Africanus Maior as an exemplar of Romanity. Such issues as what Rome and Romanity were, or what they were at one time as opposed to another, absorb many classicists much of the time. The fact that pursuit of the question quid tum Roma fuit? (‘What was Rome then?’) as put by the Roman elegist Propertius leads into an amatory elegiac narrative is, moreover, a reminder that our own reading of the classical past, and the classical constructions we make, depend upon our present concerns and are determined by our own historical situatedness. I speak apropos of Propertius’ question rather than the Silian assertion haec tum Roma fuit (‘such was Rome then’) with which it is intertextual, but the interrogative form brings to the fore elements present in the Punica (and present, as I have argued, at the point of that assertion) no less than in the passages from Propertius, Ovid, and Lucan I discussed earlier. All pose questions about the identity of Rome, or Roman identity, or both, about past and present, and more broadly, about deWnitions, boundaries, and closure.

11 Petrarch’s Lucan and the Africa Matthew Leigh

IN T RO DUCT IO N The Africa is Petrarch’s epic on the Second Punic War and the glorious career of Scipio Africanus Maior. The very rumour of its composition was enough to gain for the poet the laurel crown bestowed on him by the city of Rome in 1341; but the poem itself, jealously guarded by its author, and perhaps Wnally abandoned as incapable of completion, was still unpublished and massively lacunose at the time of his death in 1374. The work, which Wgures itself as something greater than the Annals of Ennius, and which was expected by its author to be the greatest guarantee of his future fame, Wnally crept into publication in the 1390s, an inert curio as disregarded by the subsequent centuries as the Rime sparse were adored. Scholarship, in turn, is limited. A major critical edition of the poem was produced by Festa in 1926, and was the subject of a detailed review by Fraenkel, but subsequent criticism has been scant.1 Even the greatest students of Petrarch, for all that they cite certain parts of the Africa as witness to one stage in the development of his thought, appear to content themselves with reference to speciWc key passages in the poem. What follows therefore is an attempt This paper is dedicated to Don’s memory with gratitude and aVection. 1 Festa (1926); Fraenkel (1927a). All references to the Africa in this paper follow Festa’s readings except where dissent is explicitly expressed. The standard Englishlanguage account of the Africa remains the restricted Bernardo (1962), nor am I aware of any more recent monograph on the poem in any language than Colilli (1993).

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to make good some of what is lost in the process. The key to this investigation will be the presence of Lucan.2

T WO CL E M E N T RO M A N S The fourth book of Petrarch’s Africa is devoted to the account given by Laelius at the banquet of King Syphax of the extraordinary qualities of the young Scipio Africanus Maior. Much is made of his heroic conduct in the Spanish campaign and particularly of the glorious capture of New Carthage. At 4.308–20, Laelius reveals the intensity with which Scipio fought in the battle, the mildness which he displayed once it was done: multa sub hoc tempus micuerunt indole clara signa ducis manifesta noui, uir quantus in armis et quantus post bella foret. namque arma mouente milite ab aduerso non Mars uiolentior urget infesto themone Trachas, nec acerbior Hebro spumantes immergit equos. uerum arce reclusa, hostis ubi ad ueniam proiectis concidit armis, ilicet exstinctus cecidit furor, iraque cessit pulsa animo ferrumque manu. sic atra serenat nubila paciWco despectans Iupiter ore, continuoque silent uenti fugiuntque procelle, sol nitet, emergunt fuscis sua noctibus astra, et mundo sua forma redit. Around this time through his glorious nature there shone forth many clear markers of the new general, showing how great a man he would be in the Wght and how great after war was done. For when the enemy troops launch an attack, Mars does not press the Thracians more violently with his hostile chariot, nor more Wercely does he sink his foaming horses in the Hebrus. But when the citadel was laid open and the enemy, casting aside arms, fell before him beseeching pardon, immediately his fury was extinguished and fell away, and his anger receded driven from his mind, and his sword slipped 2 For the presence of Lucan in the Africa, see Brue`re (1961); Velli (1979) 5–6, 17–18. Fera (1984) 25 n. 2 emphasizes Petrarch’s debt to Lucan, and the Italian poet’s notes to himself, recorded in MS Acquisti e doni 441 of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana and here published for the Wrst time, fully bear out this claim.

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from his hand. Thus does Jupiter look down with paciWc countenance and bring serenity to the black storm-clouds, and immediately the winds grow silent, the squalls Xee, the sun shines, the proper stars come out at dark of night, and its proper form returns to the universe.

This emphasis on the clemency of Scipio should not perhaps surprise us. For the Africa is one of two major works devoted to the hero by Petrarch and the same virtue is also prominent in the prose life of Scipio which takes so gigantic a place within the De viris illustribus,3 and in particular in its account of the Spanish campaign.4 New Carthage, however, is another matter. For here Petrarch remains relatively faithful to his source in Livy, and Livy in turn must do what he can with the terrifyingly sanguinary version furnished by Polybius.5 Of this scarcely any trace remains. What takes its place is an encapsulation of much that Petrarch most prizes in his hero, and the interest of the passage derives as much from the Wgures it employs as it does from the concrete claims it makes. And what is perhaps most striking for the Lucanist is the way in which the equation of the clement general with the divinity who calms the storm and makes the sky serene so closely parallels the fourth book of the Pharsalia and its version of a quite diVerent Spanish campaign. For it is here that Afranius begs of Caesar the same pardon (uenia) which Scipio here grants the defeated foe, and his pleas are met with indulgence from no less serene a foe (at Caesar facilis uoltuque serenus j Xectitur atque usus belli poenamque remittit).6 In my study of the Pharsalia, I engage with precisely this passage and with the contention of various of my predecessors that Lucan’s portrait of the clement Caesar at Ilerda is entirely positive, and that this is evidence either of the poet’s inability to defame his villain at every possible turn or even of the fractured voice which oscillates between outspoken hostility to and favour towards this Wgure.7 My 3 All references to the Scipio follow the text of Martellotti (1964) I: 156–313. 4 Petrarch, Scipio I.4, I.14, II.6, IV.14, IV.17, IV.18, IV.27, IV.29, IV.31–2, IV.35–7. 5 Petrarch, Scipio II.2 ‘deditis hostibus omissa caedes et ad praedam tota urbe discursum est; que multiplex auri et argenti supraque Wdem uariarum rerum fuit’, cf. Livy 26.46.10 ‘quoad dedita arx est, caedes tota urbe passim factae, nec ulli puberum qui obuius fuit parcebatur; tum signo facto aedibus Wnis factus; ad praedam uictores uersi, quae ingens omnis generis fuit.’ Polybius 10.15.4–6 oVers the ugly original. 6 Lucan, Pharsalia 4.363–4; uenia in 343. 7 Leigh (1997) 53–68.


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claim was that the display of clemency towards one’s fellow citizens was not so much a virtue as a presumption; and that the serenity, inasmuch as it was a recognized attribute of the Virgilian and Ennian Jupiter, was evidence as much of autocracy as of aVability, and unstable in that the subject had no more control over the shifting mood of his monarch than any human being had over a change in the weather.8 Seneca in the De clementia had said as much.9 What therefore strikes me on reading the Africa is not so much the overlap here between Scipio and Caesar as that between my account of the intertexts which make Lucan’s language of serenity meaningful and the simile with which Petrarch closes his account. Petrarch had access to the same texts to which I refer. Did this most fervent annotator of his texts copy into the margin of his Lucan some or all of these passages and combine text and interpretation in his own reworking of the motif?10 Attractive but unveriWable genetic hypotheses may be set aside. Other considerations will, however, elucidate the issue. First, the serenity of Scipio is indeed a leitmotif throughout the Africa and the parallel instances often highly signiWcant. At 4.362, for instance, he is described as serene of face (ore sereno) as he resolves the dispute over who should gain the mural crown at New Carthage, and there is much here to suggest that his intervention averts a form of civil war.11 More important, however, must be 7.113 and the description of the general as smiling and serene of expression as he asks the legates of Hannibal whether they have yet seen enough of his camp (Scipio subridens placide uultuque serenus). What is striking here is the manner in which Petrarch combines the smile of the Virgilian 8 Virgil, Aen. 1.254–5 olli subridens hominum sator atque deorum j uultu quo caelum tempestatesque serenat, cf. Ennius, Ann. frr. 446–7 (Skutsch) ¼ Servius Auctus at Aen. 1.254 Iuppiter hic risit tempestatesque serenae j riserunt omnes risu Iouis omnipotentis. For the emergence of calm after storm as a sign of divine favour, see also Ennius, Scipio frs 9–12 (Vahlen). The passage—known to Petrarch through its citation at Macrobius, Sat. 6.2.26—describes the voyage of Scipio to Africa and is cited as the model for Virgil, Aen. 10.101–3. 9 Seneca, Clem. 1.7.1–3. 10 Much work on Petrarch has studied the making of his mind through the manuscripts which he owned and annotated. See esp. De Nolhac (1907); Ullman (1923); Billanovich (1947). 11 See esp. Petrarch, Africa 4.356 discordes.

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Jupiter with the serene countenance of Lucan’s Caesar. In the latter case, not just the phrase but also its metrical sedes are identical with Pharsalia 4.363.12 Later on in the same book, Petrarch’s God will respond to the anguished appeals of the personiWed Rome and Africa, and will calm the storms, with the same smile employed by Jupiter in Aeneid 1: subrisit uultu tacito stellantis Olimpi rector ad alterius tactus praesagia secli. tandem uerba parat – tremuit conterritus ether, conticuere poli, siluit tellusque chaosque. (Petrarch, Africa 7.661–4) The ruler of starry Olympus smiled with silent expression, touched by the presage of the second age. Finally he prepared words – the heavens trembled in terror, the poles grew silent, both earth and chaos were hushed.

And the next time that the winds fall silent and the storms subside, it will be as if they can feel the presence of the serenely smiling and victorious Scipio as he glides over the waves on the return journey to Rome: Scipio provectus pelago Romanaque classis iam placidum sulcabat iter. non rauca procellis equora feruebant; ventisque silentibus undas uictorem sensisse putes. tranquillior illis uultus erat, celo facies composta sereno. (Petrarch, Africa 9.1–5) Sailing forth over the sea, Scipio and the Roman Xeet were now cutting a placid course. The raucous sea did not seethe with squalls; and, the winds grown silent, you might think that the waves had felt the presence of the victor. Their expression was calmer, their appearance Wtted to the serene sky.

Should we care to follow him up the Capitol as he celebrates his triumph, we will Wnd that Scipio has the same damn smile on his face (facie subit ille serena).13 12 Fera (1984) 273 quotes Petrarch’s annotation attende nequis at v.7.113, and suggests Virgil, Aen. 1.254–6; Lucan, Pharsalia 4.363; Ovid, Tr. 1.5.27 as possible sources for the language employed. 13 Petrarch, Africa 9.338–41.


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The serenity of Petrarch’s Scipio reproduces that of his God and identiWes the mission of the one with the grand purpose of the other. The web of intertextual referents from which this is created takes in both the Ennian and Virgilian Jupiter and the suspiciously Jovian aspect of Lucan’s clement Caesar. What is at issue here may now be investigated by reference to two separate versions in Petrarch of the same passage of Livy. I refer to Livy 28.35.6–7 and the description of the impression made on Masinissa by his Wrst sight of the body of Scipio: ceperat iam ante Numidam ex fama rerum gestarum admiratio viri, substitueratque animo speciem quoque corporis amplam ac magniWcam; ceterum maior praesentis ueneratio cepit, et praeterquam quod suapte natura multa maiestas inerat, adornabat promissa caesaries habitusque corporis non cultus munditiis, sed uirilis uere ac militaris, et aetas erat in medio uirium robore, quod plenius nitidiusque ex morbo velut renouatus Xos iuuentae faciebat. Admiration for the man had already seized the Numidian thanks to the stories of his deeds, and he had also formed a great and magniWcent mental image of his body; but a greater reverence for the man seized him face-toface, and, apart from the fact that by his very nature he possessed much majesty, his long Xowing locks adorned him, as did the bearing of his body, unadorned with luxuries, but truly manly and soldierly; and his age was at the acme of physical strength, a strength which the Xower of his youth, as if renewed after his illness, made the more complete and the more brilliant.

What is striking about this passage is the description of Scipio in terms of veneration (ueneratio) and majesty (maiestas): all the attributes are in place to do what Scipio will do throughout his career and undermine the distinctions which separate god from mortal and citizen from king.14 Petrarch develops just this notion. At Africa 4.46–79, for instance, Laelius will describe the body of Scipio as one shining with ethereal splendour (ethereo corpus splendore nitescit); his eyes cast a thunderbolt (simul uibrant unum duo lumina 14 For Scipio’s divine charisma, see esp. Polybius 10.2.5–13, 10.5.4–8, 10.11.7, 10.14.11–12; Livy 26.19.3–9, 26.41.18–20, 26.45.8–9. 26.50.13. For Scipio’s kingly deeds and spirit but disavowal of actual kingly ambition, see Polybius 10.3.1, 10.5.6, 10.17.1, 10.17.6–8, 10.38.3, 10.40.2–9; Livy 27.19.3–6. For Scipio acting as if above conventional constitutional restrictions, see Livy 25.2.6–7, 28.38.4, 28.40.1–3 cf. 28.45.1.

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fulmen); he is taller and grander than anyone else and, even amid a thousand thousand men, clearly recognizable as king (licet inter milia mille j uideris hunc, uerum ualeas agnoscere regem); this beauty is indeed such as to surpass all mortal form and put Scipio on a level which Jupiter and Apollo will struggle to reach (pulcrior est etenim mortali corpore longe j atque hominem supra: vix illum fulgidus equat j Iuppiter aut puro pharetratus in ethere Phebus); should Syphax see his serene expression, he will appreciate that he is even lovelier to behold than words suggest (uultus fortasse serenos j ipse suos cernes, uerisque minora locutum j me dices). Serenity again is introduced by Petrarch in the context of one who has something about him of a god and, inasmuch as he is like a god, also of a king. Likewise Scipio IV.45 and Petrarch’s second version of the same motif. The correspondence with Livy 28.35 is even closer here in that Petrarch too is narrating the Wrst encounter between Scipio and Masinissa; noteworthy is the degree to which the later writer exposes the implications of divinity and of regality with which the language of Livy is pregnant. For here Scipio is not just more venerable and more majestic than report had pictured him as being but indeed more august and more serene: et quanquam rex ignoti uiri ex actibus, quos partim audiendo partim experiendo didicerat, ipse sibi et uultus et totius corporis augustissimam et serenissimam animoque simillimam Wnxisset imaginem, longe tamen augustiorem atque sereniorem repperit quam mente conceperat. Though the king, on the strength of his deeds (some of which he had heard of, some of which he had found out about by personal experience) had formed an image of the face and body of the man otherwise unknown to him that was most august, most serene, and most like his spirit, nevertheless he found him to be far more august and more serene than he had imagined.

The substitution of terms reveals much about Petrarch’s interpretation of his source. SCIPIO AND CAESAR To Petrarch the two greatest Wgures of ancient Rome were Scipio Africanus Maior and Julius Caesar. No better evidence exists for this than the prose work De viris illustribus, in which the lives of Scipio and Caesar so massively, indeed disproportionately, overshadow those of any other Wgure as to admit of no comparison save with


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each other. Yet Scipio and Caesar are not entirely comfortable peers. To the Florentine and Veronese humanists of the early 1400s, Poggio Bracciolini and Guarino da Verona, they become representatives of two opposed political systems and the celebration of the one necessarily implies the denigration of the other.15 Poggio’s contribution to this debate is striking for its ability to strip bare the monarchical aspect to Caesar’s clemency, and much sophisticated criticism is devoted to the interpretation of Cicero’s position when appealing for clemency in the Pro Marcello.16 Compared to an analysis of this level, Petrarch’s complaint in the De gestis Cesaris that he cannot see what Cato could possibly have to fear in accepting clemency and living on under Caesar bespeaks confusion if not bad faith.17 The opposition between Scipio and Caesar is also emphasized in scholarship devoted to the development of Petrarch’s thought. In this way, Scipio is the hero of Petrarch’s youth while Caesar Wgures as the hypocrite weeping over the head of Pompey in the profoundly Lucanian Rime sparse 44 and 102,18 as the destructively ambitious orchestrator of the civil war foreseen by the ghost of Scipio’s father in Book 2 of the Africa,19 or as the ancient forerunner of the Orsini and the Colonna expelled by Cola di Rienzo’s Brutus.20 From the early 1350s onwards, however, a new pattern emerges. Petrarch Wrst Wnds himself proposing that monarchy might be a better designation than 15 For discussion of this debate, see Oppelt (1974). 16 For criticism of clemency, see esp. Poggius Florentinus Scipioni Ferrariensi viro clarissimo S.D.P., Fubini (1964) 360: ‘id uero est in quo multi Caesarem extollunt, aVerentes extitisse illum clementiae singularis. uerum uidentur perverse nimium hoc nomine abuti. nulla est enim clementia, non trucidare eos qui patriae libertatem tuentes, tyrannidem recusabant.’ For analysis of and a summary of writing on the contribution of the Florentine humanists to political theory, see Grafton (1991). 17 Petrarch, De gestis Cesaris 24.46–7, Schneider (1827) 292–3. For a more sympathetic account of the political principles behind Cato’s suicide, see the reference to it in the 1347 exhortation to Cola di Rienzo and the Roman people at Petrarch Variae 48.416–20. All references to the Variae follow Pancheri (1994). 18 For discussion of the relationship between Rime sparse 44 and 102 and Lucan, see Fraenkel (1964) 263–4; Crevatin (1996); Leigh (1999). For the date and inXuence of Rime sparse 102, see Billanovich (2001). 19 Petrarch, Africa 2.228–40. 20 Petrarch, Variae 48.118–24. The superWciality even at this early point of Petrarch’s hostility to Caesar is, however, apparent from Variae 48.416–20: the claim that Cato so loved the fatherland that he committed suicide rather than see it enslaved or the face of the tyrant is properly Republican; less so the concessive clause describing Caesar as nevertheless ‘singularis et unici uiri’.

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tyranny for the rule of Caesar or suggesting to the somewhat autocratic Doge of Genoa that his rule is as valid a response to the horrors of civil strife as was the coming of the Principate to Rome. Later still, in the years from 1366 onwards, he devotes himself to the De gestis Cesaris, a work manifestly more sympathetic to the dictator and one in which Lucan is relegated to the status of a marginal authority, the unnamed if unmistakable purveyor of alternative versions which temporarily distract the author from the authoritative central narrative founded on Caesar and Suetonius.21 So Martellotti and Baron, though the explanations oVered for the process are tellingly diVerent: to the textual critic, this is the product of changes in Petrarch’s reading and, in particular, his new access to and careful study of Caesar’s Commentarii; to the historian, the crucial factor is Petrarch’s disillusion with the failure of Cola di Rienzo’s attempt to restore the Roman Republic and consequent decision to accept the patronage of a succession of tyrant courts of northern Italy through the last twenty years of his life.22 It is not the purpose of this paper to question the conventional account of Petrach’s intellectual development. There are, however, questions to be raised with regard to the signiWcance attributed to the Africa, and these may have some bearing on the image not so much of opposition as coalescence between Caesar and Scipio implied in the opening analysis. I begin with explicit reference to Caesar. What the Africa has to say of the career of Caesar and Pompey is restricted to Book 2 and the dream vision in which the dead father of Scipio Africanus Maior reveals to his son the glories and the fall of the Rome he seeks to defend. Lines 167–240 turn into a form of extended commentary on Lucan’s account of the motives of both great leaders at Pharsalia 1.125–6 (nec quemquam iam ferre potest Caesarue priorem 21 Petrarch De gestis Cesaris 21.29, Schneider (1827) 248 ‘fuerat, ut aliqui tradidere, nec dissimile ueri est, quidam utrinque in ipso pugnae principio pius torpor, qui strictos iam gladios contineret, nempe cum germani suos fratres ab aduersa acie, parentes Wlios et parentes Wlii uiderent, donec Crastinus hic praecipitanti rabie uocem tolleret pilumque torqueret’; cf. 22.2, Schneider (1827) 257 ‘atque Ilion, Romanae urbis originem, inuisit, ut quidam prodidere’. 22 Martellotti (1947); Baron (1968), cf. Baron (1966) 55–7, 121–3. For Petrarch’s friendship with Cola di Rienzo and enthusiastic support for the undertakings of 1347, see Dotti (1987) 108–10, 176–90.


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j Pompeiusue parem). Petrarch celebrates the military and imperial achievements of both men but also damns the egotism which drives them to take part in civil war. Lines 228–40 concern Caesar in particular and owe a great deal to Lucan: o felix si forte modum sciat addere ferro! nesciet heu! noletque miser; sed turbine mentis uictrices per cunta manus in publica uertet uiscera, civili fedans externa cruore prelia et emeritos indigno Marte triumphos; me tamen infami tam multa decora furore commaculare pudet. quam turpiter omnia calcat ambitus, ut totum imperium sibi uindicet unus, primus et exemplum reliquis, spolietque superbus erarium, miserosque novo legat ordine patres! hec et Pharsalicas mortes Ephireaque arma, Thapsonque et Mundam et Capitolia sanguine tincta, omnia pretereo. O happy man, if only he may know how to set a limit on the sword. Alas he will not know! nor will the wretch wish to; but in the fury of his mind he will turn hands victorious in every Wght against the guts of the fatherland, befouling his foreign battles with the blood of citizens and the triumphs he has earned with an unworthy Wght; yet it shames me to stain so many distinctions with infamous rage. How foully ambition tramples down everything that one man may claim absolute power for himself, the Wrst and an example for the rest, and arrogant may plunder the treasury, and select wretched senators in a new order! These things, and the slaughter of Pharsalus, the Wghting at Corinthian Dyrrachium, Thapsus and Munda and the Capitol stained with blood, I pass over them all.

To the Petrarch of the Africa, the sole motivation for Caesar’s participation in civil war is ambition, frenzied ambition. To the Petrarch of the De gestis Cesaris, the invasion of Italy will still be the most problematic aspect of Caesar’s career;23 the same violence against the guts of the fatherland will be deplored as in the Africa;24 but careful 23 Note esp. the opening to Petrarch, De gestis Cesaris 20.1, Schneider (1827) 205 et arma quidem Iulii Caesaris clara hactenus, gloriosa, magniWca. What follows will be more diYcult. 24 Virgil, Aen. 6.833 ‘neu patriae ualidas in uiscera uertite uiris’, cf. Lucan, Pharsalia 1.2–3 populumque potentem j in sua uictrici conuersum uiscera dextra. The reference to the victorious hands of Caesar at Petrarch, Africa 2.230–1 clearly points to Lucan’s

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study of the Commentarii will suggest what makes this decision almost to be pardoned if never Wnally approved25—signs once again of a development in Petrarch’s thought and acknowledged by all who study the issue. Yet, for all that it here owes to Lucan, the Africa provides no clear Republican critique of Caesar or Caesarism and its comments on later Roman history owe far more to what Baron aptly describes as a racially motivated nationalism.26 Of the emperors, for instance, Augustus will be hymned and his successors condemned without any questions being asked of the propriety of monarchical succession or the beneWts of autocracy.27 The father of Scipio prefers indeed to pass at pace over these unhappy episodes and reach instead the glorious conquest of Jerusalem on the part of Titus and Vespasian.28 The worst of the new age is not its constitution but the way that it will reduce Rome to a sink for all the dregs of the world and Wnally extend the imperial power to the Spaniard and the African, the soft Syrian and harsh Gaul.29 No accident perhaps that the epitome of Republican virtue, celebrated out of chronological sequence and in a special passage all his own, will be the Marius who sees oV the Teuton invader and conquers the Cimbri.30 The Caesar of the Africa oVers much to deplore and, as in the Rime sparse, the most eloquent voice in condemnation of his career is that which the De gestis Cesaris will seek to marginalize and to muZe: Lucan. Inasmuch as this is one thing which the poem does with Caesar and with Lucan, it would seem to conform to the concept of Petrarch’s youthful anti-Caesarism, even if the ideological underpinnings of that position seem disappointingly thin. Yet the poem version of the disaster. Petrarch, De gestis Cesaris 20.1, Schneider (1827) 205 talks of eadem arma impia et iniusta et in uiscera patrie miserabili alternatione conversa. 25 Petrarch, De gestis Cesaris 20 quamuis enim et hic magna non desit excusatio, uere tamen nulla suYciens causa est contra patriam arma moventibus. 26 The same may be said of Petrarch’s compositions in favour of the Roman revolution of 1347. See Petrarch, Variae 48.47–54, 70–8, 92–106 (quoting Juvenal 1.111 and Lucan, Pharsalia 8.354–6), 115–16, 391–4 for the charge against the Colonna and the Orsini that they are from Spoleto and the Rhine. 27 Petrarch, Africa 2.240–58, cf. 2.141–2, 259–66. 28 Petrarch, Africa 2.266–73. 29 Petrarch, Africa 2.274–8, 289–93, 305–7. 30 Petrarch, Africa 2.154–65. For similar sentiments, see Petrarch, Rime sparse 128.33–48.


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actually does many other things and Caesar has a disturbing tendency to break into the poem in one largely unnoticed way, that is as the poetic model for Scipio. This, at least, is one of the implications of the analysis of the language of clemency and serenity oVered at the opening of this paper, and there is more to consider. An ancillary argument in favour of my earlier claim, that Lucan’s Caesar at Ilerda oVered a model for the serenely clement Scipio at New Carthage, was that both episodes were located in Spain and that each took place in the fourth book of their respective epics. A similar observation may now be made with regard to the account of Zama and its immediate aftermath, which Petrarch places in the seventh and eighth books of the Africa just as the corresponding events at Pharsalus fall into Books 7 and 8 of the Pharsalia. Nor does the similarity end there. For a host of motifs link the two narratives and one consequence of this pattern is inevitable: if Petrarch’s characters are to play Lucanian roles, then Hannibal must necessarily become a Pompey and Caesar a Scipio. Some examples. In Livy’s narrative, the two generals meet before the battle for a private parley in which Hannibal attempts to warn Scipio of the mutability of fortune and urges him to avoid a Wght.31 Petrarch too includes this episode. His Scipio is unconcerned at the warnings and indeed takes the opportunity to reverse one of the most famous expressions of Lucan’s pessimism: where the narrator of the Pharsalia asks in desperation whether Jupiter will sit in heaven, a spectator, and allow the battle to take place, Scipio warns Hannibal of the inevitability of divine punishment, and assures him that God, the spectator of his crime and perWdy, for all that Hannibal dismisses him as a story, is in fact all too real.32 The generals depart and prepare for the Wght. Here Livy summarizes but does not give at length the exhortations delivered by the generals to their troops.33 Petrarch, by contrast, introduces the appeals to God of Rome and Africa, then adds his own version of the exhortations of the two generals. Here too the model must be Lucan. Where Lucan’s Caesar can judge from the expression of his troops that ‘you have won’ (quod si, signa ducem 31 Livy 30.30–1. 32 Lucan, Pharsalia 7.445–59, cf. Petrarch, Africa 7.374–9, cf. 7.1030–32. 33 Livy 30.32.5–11.

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numquam fallentia uestrum, j conspicio faciesque truces oculosque minaces, j uicistis), Petrarch’s Scipio infers from the tremulous aspect of the foe that ‘we have won’ (agnosco trepidantis turbida uulgi j murmura et ambiguos motus aciesque labantes. j uicimus).34 Where Lucan’s Caesar seems to gaze on rivers of blood, kings trampled down, the scattered body of the senate, and the peoples swimming in a gigantic pool of gore (uideor Xuuios spectare cruoris j calcatosque simul reges sparsumque senatus j corpus et inmensa populos in caede natantis), horrid slaughter, a torrent swollen and red, and huge piles of men lying dead in their own fatherland stand before the eyes of Scipio (statque horrida cedes j ante oculos, taboque tumens et sanguine torrens, j et cumuli ingentes patria tellure iacentum). Hannibal, like Pompey, will feign conWdence to his troops only Wnally to appeal to the city, the family which all stand to lose in defeat.35 The structure of the battle narrative also oVers notable parallels. Both sides at Zama are aware that the Wnal day has come (supremum uenisse diem) just as both sides at Pharsalus are conscious that the decisive day has arrived (aduenisse diem).36 In Lucan one side is excited by fear, the other by hope of monarchical power (metus hos regni, spes excitat illos); in Petrarch, one side is incited by terror, the other by hope (hinc igitur quoniam Terror, Spesque incitat illinc).37 In Lucan, the decisive struggle is introduced with the impersonal form of the verb uenire and a distinction between the foreign foe and those true Romans who Wght for Pompey (uentum erat ad robur Magni); the same construction in Petrarch announces the arrival at the Carthaginian core of Hannibal’s force (postquam est ad ueros perventum cominus hostes).38 In Lucan, the victorious Caesar resolves on an immediate assault on the enemy camp (protinus hostili statuit succedere uallo) and permits his men to plunder the foe; Scipio does just 34 Lucan, Pharsalia 7.290–92, cf. Petrarch, Africa 7.781–3. 35 Lucan, Pharsalia 7.292–4 and Petrarch, Africa 7.783–5. For the Wnal appeal, see Pharsalia 7.369–76, esp. 373 occurrere ; cf. Africa 7.903–15, esp. 913 occurrere. 36 Lucan, Pharsalia 7.131, cf. Petrarch, Africa 7.475. 37 Lucan, Pharsalia 7.386, cf. Petrarch, Africa 7.486. Note that the reading incitat is found only in M, and excitat in all other manuscripts. Festa’s decision to print incitat is criticized by Fraenkel (1927a) 492 but without any reference to the relevant parallel in Lucan. For Petrarch’s annotations indicating awareness of the presence of Lucan and Statius in Africa 7.486–99, see Fera (1984) 299. 38 Lucan, Pharsalia 7.545–50, cf. Petrarch, Africa 7.958–65.


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the same (et tamen hostili quam primum irrumpere uallo j uisum est).39 Where Pompey, intent on restoring his broken fortune, resolves to test the faith of the East (superest, Wdissime regum, j Eoam tentare Wdem), Hannibal sails oV to Asia Minor resolved on trying the faith of kings (stat regum tentare Wdem).40 The presence of Lucan in the Africa was long ignored or even positively denied by criticism,41 and it was left to Brue`re to oVer a detailed demonstration of the fallacy of this presumption.42 What Brue`re does not do, however, is to suggest the potential vigour of this intertextuality, and it is therefore all too easy to perceive the presence of the Pharsalia as something substantial but fundamentally inert.43 The implications of the pattern which I have attempted to demonstrate in books 4, 7, and 8 of the Africa are somewhat diVerent. For what emerges most clearly is the distinctive quality of the Africa as a Latin epic. Where Livy is a quite suYcient source for the prose biography of the Scipio and the hero represented is none too dissimilar from his Livian self, the same Wgure as epic hero must necessarily take on new dimensions. As Scipio sleeps and dreams and is treated to the prophetic vision of his lost father, he becomes something very close to the Aeneas of Aeneid 6; persistent allusion to the Ciceronian Somnium Scipionis and the commentary devoted to it by Macrobius blends easily with the Virgilian text, which itself owes so much to Cicero’s vision. At other times, however, the epic Scipio is imagined according to the terms suggested by the Pharsalia, and the epic hero whom he most clearly recalls is none other than Lucan’s Caesar. And this second factor must have some signiWcance for the tales which we tell about the development of Petrarch’s thought and the role which these two Wgures—Scipio and Caesar—play in it. In Book 9 of the Africa, Scipio and Ennius sail home together to Rome. As they lie out on deck at night, the poet tells of a remarkable 39 Lucan, Pharsalia 7.731–7, cf. Petrarch, Africa 8.12–18. 40 Lucan, Pharsalia 8.212–13, cf. Petrarch, Africa 8.301. 41 De Nolhac (1907) 195 infers, on the basis of the commentary in Corradini (1874), that Lucan is never imitated in the poem. Mustard (1921) acknowledges the presence of various Latin poets but not of Lucan. 42 Brue`re (1961). Most, if not all, of the parallels cited above for books 7 and 8 are already noted in this article. 43 Thus Bernardo (1962) 207.

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vision in which Homer comes to him and reveals the Florentine youth destined in time to come to perpetuate the fame of Scipio, to ascend the Capitol, and receive the laurel crown. Homer knows much of the verse of Petrarch and even knows that his poem will be called the Africa. He also knows something of his prose and of the coming of the De viris illustribus. Lines 257–63 are revealing: hic quoque magnorum laudes studiosus auorum digeret extrema relegens ab origine fortes Romulidas, uestrumque genus sermone soluto historicus, titulosque urbis et nomina reddet. in medio eVulgens nec corpore paruus eodem magnus erit Scipio; seque ipse fatebitur ultro plus nulli debere uiro. This man also in his literary work shall set out the glorious deeds of our great ancestors, gathering the brave sons of Romulus together from their most distant origin, and as a historian he shall tell in prose of your kin, the titles and the names of the city. Shining forth in their midst and no small part of the same body shall be great Scipio; and he himself shall freely confess that he owes more to no man.

These lines are indeed very famous, but previous criticism appears to have overlooked one important point. For the claim that Scipio will stand in the middle (in medio . . . j . . . erit Scipio) must remind the Latinist of the proem to the third Georgic and Virgil’s image of the coming Aeneid as a temple and a sacred games linking Greece and Rome.44 In the midst of all of this, says Virgil, shall be Caesar and he shall hold the temple (in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit).45 One more hint perhaps not so much at the opposition between Caesar and Scipio as at their interchangeability.46 44 The presence of Virgil in the Africa is otherwise well illustrated in Foster (1979). 45 Cf. Virgil, Aen. 8.675–6, 678–9 in medio classis aeratas, Actia bella, j cernere erat . . . hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar j cum patribus populoque, penatibus et magnis dis. As at Ecl. 3.40 and 46, the phrase in medio creates the spatial coordinates of the imagined artefact in a poetic ecphrasis. Striking therefore that Petrarch’s Wnal work on the De viris illustribus coincided with his supervision of their rendition as painted panels in Francesca da Carrara’s Sala Virorum Illustrium in Padua. For this project, see esp. Mommsen (1952); Wilkins (1959) 283–302. 46 Caesar here is, of course, Octavian, later Augustus Caesar, heir to Julius Caesar, and not the man himself. Lucan, Pharsalia 7.696, cf. 9.982, plays brilliantly on the ability of the name Caesar to suggest both the man himself and all the Caesars to come.


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To Baron the displacement of Scipio on the part of Caesar in the writings of the later Petrarch mirrors the author’s loss of faith in Cola di Rienzo’s Roman Republic restored and his growing acceptance of Caesarism as manifested in the tyrant courts of the northern Italy of the second half of the Trecento. If a potential fault-line may be identiWed in this position, it is in the account of Petrarch’s early views. For the explicit condemnation of Caesar’s actions in the Africa no more suggests a coherent Republican critique of Caesarism than do the allusions to his crocodile tears over the head of Pompey in the Rime sparse. At the same time, that which makes Scipio so glamorous a hero—his Xirtation with monarchy and the divine—also makes him an uncomfortable Wgure of Republican restraint. That is why Petrarch’s revisitations of the physique of Scipio are so signiWcant: to the De viris illustribus, he is most august and most serene; to the Laelius of the Africa, he stands out as a king even among a thousand thousand men. If Petrarch Wnds it easy to Wgure his poetic Scipio as a successor to Lucan’s Caesar, it is because what he Wnds most attractive in the Scipio of history is the degree to which he sets a precedent for the historical Caesar and all the Caesars to come.

12 Translating Antiquity: Intertextuality, Anachronism, and Archaism Deborah H. Roberts

In his essay, ‘On the Shoulders of Giants: Intertextuality and Classical Studies’, Don Fowler considers the nature and some of the implications of the contemporary shift from the language of allusion to the language of intertextuality in analyses of the relationship between texts. He suggests that classicists might do well to pursue ‘some of the wider—and wilder—implications of intertextuality’, that is, of a theoretical approach that situates the intertextual relationship not in the author’s mind but in the text as experienced by its readers, and makes it an inescapable feature of literary traditions (and semiotic systems in general) rather than a characteristic of individual works of literature.1 But he also notes that some critics are disconcerted by this more open-ended way of reading connections between texts. In particular, he observes: It is the possibility of reversing the directionality of intertextual reference— of accepting the inXuence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare—which is often seen as the worst of the horrors to which intertextuality can lead, and even those This paper is based on a talk given at the ‘Classical Constructions’ conference and on a later version given in the Department of Classics colloquium series at the University of Pennsylvania in March 2001; my thanks to the audiences on both occasions and to Stephen Heyworth for helpful comments and questions. Above all, I am grateful to have known and worked with Don Fowler, to whose memory the paper is dedicated. 1 Fowler (1997a), repr. (2000) 116 (hereafter references are to the reprinted version). Fowler provides a selective bibliography on intertextuality; cf. also recently Hinds (1998) and Edmunds (2001).

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who would be prepared to accept it tend to work wherever possible within a framework where source text precedes target texts.2

Readers of David Lodge will catch Fowler’s own intertextual reference to the novel Small World, in which the naive young hero, who has actually written a thesis about Shakespeare’s inXuence on Eliot, achieves recognition by an inspired reversal of his original topic.3 Fowler himself sees this kind of reversal as no horror and as an inevitability: we cannot, he suggests, avoid Wnding Virgil in Homer, Star Trek in the Aeneid, and traces of our own critical theories in all the texts we work on.4 Such traces of a later text are presences in a particular earlier text by virtue of both texts’ participation in a textual system and by way of our reading. But there is one way in which these traces are sometimes made more materially present, and that is when reading becomes (literally) writing, that is, in a translation. Translations themselves are, of course, of necessity later than the work they translate,5 and it is to this work that they have the strongest intertextual (or, in Ge´rard Genette’s terms,6 hypertextual) relation. There is no reversal here. But translators in their belatedness may read and therefore write a work as referring to still other texts, some of them not yet written at the time of the source text. In the world of translation, not only may Proust be found (or made) to quote Shakespeare in his title, rendered by Scott MoncrieV as Remembrance of Things Past; Homer can rephrase a line from The Godfather, Aeschylus can echo Edgar Allen Poe, and Euripides can quote an African-American spiritual. As with instances of intertextuality in general, anachronistic quotations will only play a role in interpretation where the reader knows the quoted text.7 Many readers will presumably take Robert Fagles’s Odyssey to be alluding to The Godfather when Hephaestus 2 Fowler (2000) 130. 3 Lodge (1984) 50–51. 4 Fowler (2000) 130. Cf. Edmunds (2001) xiv–xv, 159–63. 5 On this inevitable chronological relationship and its signiWcance see especially Steiner (1998) 351–71. 6 Genette (1997). In Genette’s terminology, the translation is the hypertext to the original’s hypotext. 7 See Edmunds (2001) for an extensive discussion of the reader as ‘the locus of a multiple referentiality’ (159).

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says (8.401 in the translation, 8.358 in the original): ‘Now there’s an oVer I really can’t refuse!’8 Fewer will realize that the opening words of Stanley Lombardo’s Odyssey, ‘Speak, Memory’, are borrowed from the title of Nabokov’s memoir, and fewer still that Lombardo is quoting Thomas Nashe in a simile at Iliad 16.306–9 (16.297–300 in the orginal).9 Sometimes a translator supplies the necessary information. In her preface to Hecuba, Marilyn Nelson tells us she has added two allusions in the chorus’s concluding lines (1852–68), one to Robert Hayden’s poem ‘The Middle Passage’, and one to the spiritual, ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’; she also tells us why she has done so.10 More playfully, Derek Mahon, in his version of Bacchae, marks a quotation as such without identifying its source. When he translates lines 441–2 (should read , P Œg j ¼ªø , —Łø ‹ ł KØ ºÆE)11 with the words ‘I’m just obeying orders’, the familiarity of this borrowed expression is underscored by the insertion in the text of the words—not present in Euripides—‘He laughed as if he’d heard that line before.’12 It may also be a combination of text and context that marks what is said as quotation. Is Gilbert Murray’s Aeschylus quoting Poe’s ‘The Raven’ in the second stasimon of the Agamemnon (which describes Menelaus’ longing for Helen) when we Wnd a repeated ‘nevermore’ for the Greek P Ł æ (‘not afterwards’) in lines 420–26? But a shape that is a dream, ’mid the breathings of the night Cometh near, full of tears, bringing vain delight: For in vain when, desiring, he can feel the joy’s breath Nevermore! Nevermore! From his arms it vanisheth As a bird along the windways of sleep.13

If the word itself (perhaps one of the few single words in English identiWable at once as quotation) is not enough, ‘nevermore’ accompanied by the image of a bird should surely do the trick, especially in a context that like Poe’s poem evokes a melancholy and dreamridden state brought about by the loss of a beloved woman. 8 Fagles (1996) 203. 9 Lombardo (2000) 1; Lombardo (1997) 313. 10 Nelson (1997) 75, 146; Hayden (1985) 54. 11 Literally: ‘Stranger, I bring you not of my own accord but by the orders of Pentheus who sent me.’ 12 Mahon (1991) 23. 13 Murray (1921) 18.


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It can of course be argued that this sort of translation by quotation is not radically diVerent in its slightly surreal anachronism from translation itself; after all, if Homer can speak twentiethcentury English, why can’t he quote Nabokov? Or—supposing we accept that the shift of language per se is by convention to be ignored—if the Greek tragedians can, in Murray’s versions, write choruses in the style of Swinburne, then why can’t they allude to Poe? A less perverse way to ask this question might be: if we can use all the linguistic and stylistic resources of our time to express what an earlier author says, why should the words of an author known to our time be excluded? But in fact such anachronistic quotations or echoes seem to lack the transparency (or what some would call the illusion of transparency) we otherwise grant to language and poetic idiom. It therefore seems more natural to Wnd such quotations in works that otherwise play freely with anachronism—such as many twentiethcentury translations of comedy—or that declare themselves to be something other than translation.14 Mahon’s play, for example, is entitled The Bacchae: after Euripides, and we Wnd in it not only other quotations from twentieth-century sources (‘It’s still the same old story j a Wght for love and glory’) but twentieth-century place-names (‘Saudi deserts’), terminology (‘clinical psychosis’), and sound eVects (‘Pow!’).15 Nelson’s Hecuba, described as ‘rendered freely into verse’, evokes in a number of places the parallels between the condition of the Trojan women and chattel slavery in the Americas.16 The presence or absence of anachronistic quotation has sometimes been taken as an index of the sort of version we are dealing with. Ezra Pound, although he had earlier described his ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ as a translation, reacted to criticism with a bluntly expressed (and obviously defensive) disavowal, declaring in a letter, ‘No I have not done a translation of Propertius. That fool in Chicago took the Homage for a translation, despite the mention of Wordsworth and 14 See for example J. Flavin’s translation of Acharnians and D. Slavitt’s of Thesmophoriazusae (Celebrating Ladies) in Slavitt and Bovie (1998) 1–72, 159–238. See also ScharVenberger (2002) 429–63 on W. Arrowsmith’s translations. 15 Mahon (1991) 11, 41–2, 62. The quotation is from Herman Hupfeld’s song ‘As time goes by’, Wrst performed in 1931 but best known from the 1942 Wlm Casablanca. 16 Nelson (1997) 71, 73–5.

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the parodied line from Yeats.’17 But in fact, as my examples from Fagles and Murray have suggested, the sorts of anachronistic intertextuality Pound here describes himself as engaging in may be found in a variety of kinds of translations, even if they are more unexpected (and thus either startle the reader or escape the reader’s notice) in some than in others. The eVects of such intertextuality are varied. In translations that freely engage in anachronism—such as many versions of comedy in the past few decades—the quotations, like other modes of anachronism, seem to serve primarily though not exclusively to bring the work into the translator’s own time, to make its preoccupations and its sense of humour accessible to contemporaries by not only speaking their language but also citing what they have read. Other translations— such as Nelson’s Hecuba and Mahon’s Bacchae—use anachronistic quotation to suggest a connection between the events of the original text and a later cultural context not necessarily contemporaneous with the translation (America in slavery times, the Second World War). Since something long ago is thereby identiWed with something recent, the anachronism serves in a sense both to mark and to collapse (for the reader) the diVerence in time. In Fagles’s Homeric allusion to The Godfather we have what might be called anachronism for its own sake or pure anachronism; the allusion, more playful than pointed, constitutes a kind of joke about chronology, a wink in the direction of the contemporary reader and of popular culture in a translation that generally eschews the anachronistic and the colloquial. In contrast, the fact that Murray and Lombardo are quoting works later than their author seems largely irrelevant, as well as relatively unobtrusive; what matters is the quotation itself and perhaps its source, but not in any obvious way the time of that source. Nevertheless we might see their practice as a mode of anachronism that signals the author’s capacity to play not so much with as in time, freely citing works from any period or place. 17 Pound, letter to Felix Schelling, no. 189 in Pound (1950) 178. The reference to Wordsworth is at XII.51 of the ‘Homage’, the parody of Yeats at IV.23; for these identiWcations see Ruthven (1969) 102, 124. (My thanks to Dan Hooley on this point.) See also Sullivan (1964) ch. 1, Hooley (1988) 29–30, and Comber (1998) 52–5.


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Anachronistic quotation, then, may ignore chronological sequence, joke about it, or collapse it in one of several ways. The conceptual and functional distinctiveness of these modes should perhaps make us wary of supposing that we have here a single literary practice, but in every instance the quotation entails some sort of play with time (whether overtly thematized or not), and in most it tends to close up the temporal distance between ancient writer and modern readers. It might therefore strike us as curious to Wnd an instance of such quotation in a translator like Murray, whose work is frequently marked (as in the passage here cited) by the use of archaizing language. On the face of it, archaism seems almost the reverse of anachronism. Where anachronistic quotation suggests either a disruption or an erasure of chronological sequence, the use of archaism underscores the antiquity of the source text relative to its translation, the distance of the original from its modern readers. It is the expression of this distance—or rather of some facsimile of it—that occupies many translators in the Victorian period, the heyday of archaizing translation.18 We thus Wnd Francis Newman (best known as the object of Matthew Arnold’s incredulous scorn in ‘On Translating Homer’) talking of his eVorts to resolve ‘the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity’ by the use in his Iliad of obsolete or archaic words and an antiquated sentence structure.19 We may, however, see archaism in translation as akin to, or as almost another species of, anachronistic quotation. Both, after all, entail a further element of intertextuality beyond the translation’s relationship to its original. The literariness of archaizing language is inescapable: if you are to translate a text into an earlier version of your own language, you can only have acquired that earlier version from other texts. In his 1861 ‘Reply to Matthew Arnold, Esq.’, Newman (misunderstanding one of Arnold’s criticisms) hotly declares that ‘to quote Shakespeare [he means even to the extent of using a 18 For three somewhat diVerent modes of archaizing, see (among many possible examples) Newman (1853), Newman (1856), Morris (1876), Lang, Leaf, and Myers (1914) [Wrst pubd 1882]. On 19th-century archaizing and on the Newman/Arnold controversy, see also France and Haynes (2006), especially the chapters by Matthew Reynolds and David Ricks. 19 Newman (1856) x. On Newman and Arnold in the context of Victorian translation, see Venuti (1995) ch. 3; Apter (1984) chs 2, 3; Hardwick (2000) ch. 2.

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Shakespearian compound word] . . . would be highly inappropriate in a Homeric translation’, but the archaizing vocabulary on which he relies to give the proper Xavour to his translation is taken from a variety of textual sources;20 indeed, as Lawrence Venuti notes in The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, Newman often uses older words used by contemporaries or near contemporaries who are themselves engaging in archaizing—Scott, Tennyson, Shelley.21 Furthermore, because Newman’s older English is of course later than Homer’s Greek, we Wnd ourselves still to some extent in the realm of anachronism: just as Mahon’s colloquializing Bacchae cites Casablanca, Newman’s archaizing Homer contains verbal echoes of old English ballads, or Robert Burns, or Walter Scott. Such anachronism is inevitable in archaizing translations of ancient literature into English.22 The practice of archaizing in translation now seems to us an antiquated one; classicists will think, for example, of many of the older Loeb Library versions, now being gradually replaced. In his 1962 monograph English Translators and Translations, J. M. Cohen speaks of Victorian and Edwardian eVorts ‘to convey the remoteness both in time and place of the original work by the use of a mockantique language’, and describes these eVorts as ‘a fundamental error’, now happily behind us.23 But some subsequent historians and critics of translation have thought otherwise, though not all for the same reasons, and a few translators have continued to experiment with archaism. In After Babel (1975, 3rd edn 1998), George Steiner not only devotes a large section of his chapter on the hermeneutics of translation to various modes of (and motives for) archaizing translation but sees what he calls ‘the archaic reXex’ as a pervasive feature of translation in general: The bulk of literary, historical, philosophical translation, even where it concerns Wction, political writings, or plays intended for production, 20 Newman (1914) 350; cf. also comments on 351, 370 (‘ ‘‘quietus make’’ would be nothing but an utterly inadmissible quotation from Shakespeare’); Venuti (1995) 124. See Venuti (1998) 14, where Venuti describes himself as ‘ransacking’ the works of Mary Shelley and Poe in order to translate the 19th-c. Gothic tales of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti. 21 Venuti (1995) 124. 22 Genette (1997) 217–18. 23 Cohen (1962) 24.


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shows symptoms of retreat from current speech. When we score a translation as being lifeless, as being cast in ‘translationese’, what we are usually condemning is the patina [of age].24

Where Steiner sees archaism as a widespread, almost unavoidable feature of translation in general, Venuti, a central Wgure in contemporary translation studies for his defence of the ‘foreignizing’ translation and his critique of ‘domestication’, identiWes archaism as a particular mode of translation, one that has historically resisted domestication and that may now too be usefully adopted to the same end.25 The agenda of Venuti’s ‘foreignizing’ translation is both to make more visible the act of translation in its own right and to avoid the assimilation of the translated work and its culture to the language and culture of the translation. He sees the history of translation as dominated by what he calls ‘the domesticating method’ and by the privileging of ‘Xuency’, and the heroes of his avowedly tendentious history of translation (The Translator’s Invisibility, 1995) are theorists like Schleiermacher,26 who wants the translator to bring the reader to the writer rather than vice versa, and translators who, like Newman, like Ezra Pound, and like Venuti himself, deploy a variety of linguistic resources in order to make their translations visible as translations and thus to maintain the foreignness of the source text. For Venuti, however, unlike many of his predecessors, a foreignizing translation is incapable of actually representing the true otherness of the source text; it can only signify that otherness by subverting the norms of the target language.27 As a result of his emphasis on foreignizing, the archaizing ‘translationese’ Steiner (and many others) see as lifeless Venuti sees (at least in some of its more energetic manifestations) as serving an important political and aesthetic purpose: if archaic, even stilted language makes us aware we are reading a translation, so much the better. Moreover, Venuti’s theoretical position means that for him anachronistic quotation (like other modes of anachronism) and archaism serve very similar functions, since both will disrupt the illusion of 24 Steiner (1998) 364–5. 25 Venuti (1995) ch. 3 and passim; see also Bassnett-McGuire (1980) 72–3; Apter (1984) 13–14. 26 Schleiermacher (2004) 49–63. 27 Venuti (1995) 20.

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Xuency and transparency and help prevent the domestication of the foreign text. In his own practice as a translator, Venuti, like Pound, makes use of both, sometimes in the same translation.28 I have noted that where Steiner sees archaism as pervasive, often unintentional and on the whole unfortunate, Venuti sees it as a particular choice with an often laudable agenda. But the contrast between Steiner and Venuti may be taken further still, for Steiner too sees archaizing in some instances as a practice with an agenda or agendas, and among the possible agendas Steiner ascribes to archaizing translators is something we would have to call a mode of domestication: The translator labours to secure a natural habitat for the alien presence which he has imported into his own tongue and cultural setting. By archaizing his style he produces a de´ja`-vu. The foreign text is felt to be not so much an import from abroad (suspect by deWnition) as it is an element out of one’s native past . . . Master translations domesticate the foreign original by exchanging an obtrusive geographical-linguistic distance for a much subtler, internalized distance in time.29

For Venuti, then, archaism has an alienating or ‘foreignizing’ eVect; for Steiner, it tends to domesticate; this diVerence between Steiner and Venuti is clearly a function of divergent theoretical perspectives rather than of the kind or degree of archaism used in a translation. But it is in fact misleading to speak, as I have been doing so far, as if there were only one sort of archaism. For if archaizing translations have in common the use of an older version of the target language, they may do so for reasons—and to eVects—that are quite diVerent, and that make their respective modes of archaizing conceptually if not materially distinct. (Recall that we found the same thing to be true of anachronistic intertextuality.) We need Wrst to distinguish translations in which archaism is merely an element in what is considered proper poetic diction from those in which it serves a particular purpose more directly associated in one way or another with its historical period of common use or with its belonging to another time from that of the translator. 28 See Venuti’s account of his own practice in Venuti (1998) 14–20. 29 Steiner (1998) 365.


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Arnold, arguing against Newman’s use of obsolete or rare words to translate Homer, says (in his eVort to have the last word in their dispute, pre-emptively if somewhat ominously subtitled ‘Last Words’) that a better analogue for Homer’s language than Newman’s ‘quaintness’ would be: our ‘poetical vocabulary’, as distinguished from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose: I mean, such expressions as perchance for perhaps, spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charme`d for charm’d, and thousands of others.30

It isn’t always easy to make such a distinction (especially at our remove, when Arnold’s poetical vocabulary has itself become archaic), and of course that poetical vocabulary was to some extent archaizing even in its own time. But we can see (in part from the reaction of Arnold and others to the work of Newman and those like him) that it was a distinction regarded as valid at the time when a more self-conscious mode of archaizing was common. We should further note at the outset that archaizing only occasionally entails an eVort actually to reproduce, accurately and in detail, the language of an earlier period; more often it involves a kind of suggestion of antiquity produced by a pastiche of period diction and speech, either consistent or intermittent.31 As Newman puts it in the introduction to his translation of the Iliad, ‘I am not concerned with the historical problem, of writing in a style which actually existed at an earlier period of our language; but with the artistic problem of attaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while remaining easily intelligible.’32 The methodological bases of archaizing translation can be divided into two main types (not always separate in practice), each with a number of variations.

30 Arnold (1914c) 390. This essay was, like the original ‘On Translating Homer’ series, Wrst given as a lecture at Oxford. 31 See Genette (1997) 217; Apter (1984) 10–18; Venuti (1995) esp. ch. 3; see also Steiner (1998) 357 on Rudolf Borchardt’s diVerent reading of what might be called pastiche. 32 Newman (1856) x. (Translators who, like Newman, introduce touches of archaism rather than archaizing better suit Venuti’s idea of foreignizing, since they introduce disruptive elements of what Newman calls ‘quaintness’.)

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In the Wrst type, which we might call archaizing proper, the point of the archaizing diction is to suggest in some sense the antiquity of the original work. This is pretty basic; but antiquity relative to what? There are several possibilities. The translator may simply, in some broad sense, want to suggest that there is a signiWcant distance between the original and his or her own time. This seems to be the aim of a number of Victorian translators; it is certainly part of what Newman suggests, with his ‘plausible aspect of moderate antiquity’, and we can Wnd a recent example in Venuti’s description (in The Scandals of Translation) of his practice as translator of the nineteenthcentury Italian novelist Iginio Ugo Tarchetti: ‘I determined that archaism would be useful in indicating the temporal remoteness of the Italian texts, their emergence in a diVerent cultural situation at a diVerent moment.’33 The translator may however be concerned rather—or in addition— to suggest the distance between the original and some subsequent vantage point other than the translator’s own time. Among Newman’s reasons for using what he calls ‘quaint’ or ‘antiquated’ language in translating Homer is that Homer would have seemed quaint and antiquated to Sophocles, ‘as every beginner must know’—a claim which Arnold Wrst describes (in ‘On Translating Homer’) as unprovable and then (in ‘Last Words’) vehemently attacks.34 Finally, the translator may conceive of the original as in some sense ‘absolutely’ or essentially archaic. The ‘absolutely’ here is Newman’s. In response to Arnold’s criticisms he asserts that the crucial question is this: is Homer absolutely antique, or only antiquated relatively, as Euripides is now antiquated? A modern Greek statesman, accomplished for every purpose of modern business, might Wnd himself quite perplexed . . . by the whole syntax of Euripides, as also by many special words, but this would never justify us in translating Euripides into any but a most reWned style. Was Homer of this class? I say, that he not only was antiquated, relatively to Pericles, but is also absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age.35 33 Venuti (1998) 14. 34 Newman (1914) 335; Arnold (1914b) 266; Arnold (1914c) 389–93. 35 Newman (1914) 343.


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Newman’s ‘absolutely’ tries to escape the unavoidable relativism of the concept of antiquity, but his use of tenses reintroduces that relativism in showing the diVerence introduced by his own presentday vantage point: the poet was once antiquated in a relative sense, but he is, now, antique. (Matthew Arnold, although he disagrees with Newman about Homer’s being antiquated, seems almost to share Newman’s view that a text could be antiquated already in its own time when he suggests that Shakespeare is sometimes ‘quaint and antiquated’ but can also write ‘in a language perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible’.)36 It isn’t always easy to tell which of these sorts of antiquity—relative to us, relative to an earlier reader, absolute—a translator has in mind. Browning, for example, in the preface to his startlingly literal translation of the Agamemnon, justiWes ‘the use of certain allowable constructions, which, happening to be out of daily favour, are all the more appropriate to archaic workmanship’.37 Archaic in precisely which sense? Many translators don’t take the trouble to specify, and others, like Newman, seem to have several diVerent senses in mind. I have described this Wrst type of archaizing as suggesting the antiquity or chronological distance of the original by the introduction of obsolete or dated words and syntax—chosen precisely because they are obsolete or dated—in the target language. But sometimes the translator tries to replicate (either consistently or intermittently) the language of a particular earlier period in the target language; translations such as these often belong to a second type, in which archaic language is used not because of its distance from the present but because of its appropriateness—for one of several possible reasons—to the source text. This second type, which we might call ‘archaizing appropriately’, is most obviously to be found in the work of those translators who choose a version of the target language that is contemporary—or nearly so—with the source language as used in the original, so that (for example) Dante is translated into medieval French. (George 36 Arnold (1914b) 267. 37 Browning (1882) ix. On the complex relationship between English and Greek in Browning’s version, and between Aeschylus’ workmanship and that of Browning’s own poetry, see Prins (1989).

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Steiner sees such translators as seeking ‘pure horizontality’, since the translation in its period clothing gives the illusion of belonging to the same era as the original and of diVering from it only culturally and linguistically, not temporally.)38 Other translators who seek to archaize in a manner appropriate to a particular text argue that an earlier idiom in the target language, though not necessarily one contemporary with the original, is simply better suited for one reason or another to convey the spirit or nuances of the original. In his 1931 translation of a sonnet of Guido Cavalcanti (‘Who is she that comes, makyng turn every man’s eye’), Ezra Pound rejects modern English, Victorianism, and English contemporary with Cavalcanti in favour of pre-Elizabethan English, which he describes as ‘of a period when the writers were still intent on clarity and explicitness, still preferring them to magniloquence and the thundering phrase’.39 Such an approach to translation might of course suggest that we should, where they are available, simply read translations written in the appropriate earlier idiom. (Note that with our Wrst type, ‘archaizing proper’, no such return to an actual older version would do, since it is crucial that the language of the translation not be of the time when it was written but of an earlier time.) Until recently the Loeb Library oVered as its translation of Apuleius a revised version of the sixteenth-century Adlington version; Gaselee, who did the revision, comments in his introduction: ‘We are fortunate indeed in possessing an Elizabethan translation of the Golden Ass, for the language of no other age of our literature could make any attempt to represent the exuberance of the original.’40 In a similar vein, a recent review of a reprinted eighteenth-century translation of Don Quixote (by Charles Jarvis) declares that this translation is in fact the best, not only for its own period, but also for modern readers. This is so, the reviewer argues, largely because of the particular qualities of early eighteenth-century English prose, which has in his opinion managed to get over earlier ‘uncertainties 38 Steiner (1998) 352. 39 Eliot (1968) 199–200; see also on Pound’s practice Venuti (1995) ch. 5, esp. 188– 209; Apter (1984) 21–2; and on his use of various idioms as a kind of role-playing Kenner (1969) 331–48. 40 Adlington (1919) viii.


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and excesses’ but is more capable than later English of reproducing Cervantes’ style. But this reviewer clearly considers his own recommendation of an older translation as quite distinct from any preference for archaizing translation as such, since he goes on to cite as a further reason for Jarvis’s success the fact that his version is written in ‘the living English of its time’ and to criticize J. M. Cohen for producing in 1950 ‘a translation which would not have been out of place in the eighteenth century, but which bears little or no relation to any form of modern English’.41 In his opinion, then, a twentiethcentury reader should read a translation written in the eighteenth century, because of its linguistic qualities, but not one written in the twentieth century in eighteenth-century language. The distinction the reviewer makes here inevitably recalls Borges’ Pierre Menard, who in the twentieth century rewrites a portion of the Quixote word for word and yet produces an entirely diVerent sort of work—in part because Menard’s Quixote uses an archaic Spanish where Cervantes’ work is written in the language of the author’s own day.42 These two types of translation—archaizing proper, which seeks to translate the old as old, and archaizing appropriately, which seeks to translate the old into a suitable idiom which is itself old—may of course coexist in the work of a single translator. They may also both be made to serve ancillary purposes as well. Two examples will suYce, one from each of the theorists I mentioned earlier. As Steiner notes, there are times when archaizing translation serves to assist a reappropriation of an earlier period in the target language.43 Emile Littre´, for example, translated Homer into medieval French not just because the French of that period seemed to him to suit Homer, or in order to suggest the antiquity of the Homeric poems, but because he wanted to demonstrate that medieval French was itself capable of representing the greatest of the ancients and was thus worthy of a respect that had been denied to it.44 (I suspect that we may see a similar urge to recuperate in Robert Bridges, whom Ezra Pound describes as having ‘commended every archaism [in Personae and 41 Terry (1995) 118, 120. 42 Borges (1962) 36–44. 43 Steiner (1998) 353–9. 44 See Littre´ (1869); see also Genette (1997) 161–2, 217–18, 410–11.

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Exultations] (to my horror), exclaiming ‘‘We’ll git ’em all back; we’ll git ’em all back.’’ ’)45 Venuti, on the other hand, suggests that most if not all archaizing translations are signiWcant not so much because they evoke the antiquity of an original or accurately convey certain features of the source language as because they remind the reader, by their subversion of contemporary norms, that what they are reading is just a translation. In the space that remains, I want to consider brieXy some of the particular problems or issues that arise in archaizing translation of classical texts and then to ask whether a return to some form of archaizing as a feature of Venuti’s foreignizing seems likely to emerge. I will conclude by returning to anachronistic quotation, paradoxically employed in the service of a mode of archaism. One of the obvious diYculties is that (as Genette observes in his discussion of translation in Palimpsests) there is no such thing as a ‘period’ translation of Greek or Latin into a modern European language.46 Those of us who speak, read, and write European languages are the successors of Graeco-Roman culture, and no amount of archaizing in our own languages can provide a precise analogue of the distance between our time and classical Antiquity or close up that distance with a Wction of contemporaneity between source and translation. The archaizing translator of Greek and Latin is therefore left either trying to give a general idea of antiquity or choosing some earlier idiom that seems particularly appropriate—as Newman (somewhat inconsistently given his professed lack of interest in historicity) insists on what he calls Saxo-Norman English and Emile Littre´ (for his Homer) on thirteenth-century French.47 And these choices, of course, bring along with them a great deal of unwanted baggage as well as simply making the translation less accessible for the modern reader. A more fundamental problem with archaism is that it isn’t clear whether one should be suggesting chronological distance in the Wrst place. We may be translating ancient authors, but should we be translating their antiquity? Objections to this take several forms:

45 Pound, letter to Felix Schelling, no. 189 in Pound (1950) 179. 46 Genette (1997) 217–18. 47 Newman (1856) vi, Littre´ (1869).


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(1) No work is ancient in its own time. This is certainly part of the reason for the turn away from archaizing in the second half of the twentieth century. It is also to some extent one of Arnold’s reasons for objecting to Newman’s translation, though he is chieXy concerned with the impression Homer makes on modern scholars and secondarily (in response to Newman) with the impression he would have made on Sophocles—not exactly Homer’s own time, but then, what is Homer’s own time?48 (2) The Classics are always new. Ezra Pound writes to W. H. D. Rouse in 1928 as the latter is translating Homer: ‘The chief impression in reading Homer is freshness. Whether illusion or not, this is the classic quality. 3000 years old and still fresh. A trans. that misses that is bad.’49 (3) Ancient literature—or at least some of it—is actually modern, in contrast with (for example) medieval or Renaissance literature. In his essay ‘Translating Medieval European Poetry’, Burton RaVel compares Catullus 85 with the beginning of Beowulf, and comments, ‘can anyone doubt that Catullus is in every way more ‘‘modern’’—in subject, poetic approach, use of language, sophistication of feeling, nature of feeling, and so on?’50 We Wnd something similar in Pound: ‘the point of the archaic language in the Prov. trans. is that the Latin is really ‘‘modern’’. We are just getting back to a Roman state of civilization, or in reach of it; whereas the Provençal feeling is archaic, we are ages away from it.’51 Pound’s own practice as a translator to some extent reXects his view here.52 His translations of medieval Italian and Provençal poetry almost always make some (though varied) use of archaism, but his translations of Latin verse tend rather to experiment with colloquialism and anachronism—except where he is translating late Latin, starting with late Antiquity, where he

48 Arnold (1914b) 266–7, Arnold (1914c) 389–93. 49 Pound, letter to W. H. D. Rouse, no. 297 in Pound (1950) 275. 50 RaVel (1989) 29. 51 Pound, letter to Felix Schelling, no. 189 in Pound (1950) 179. See also Sullivan (1969) 220–21. 52 On Pound’s changing practice as a translator and his inXuence see esp. Apter (1984); cf. also Venuti (1995) ch. 5.

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again turns to a degree of archaism.53 (It might at Wrst seem, given his archaizing version of Odyssey Book 11 in the Wrst Canto, that Pound regards only Latin poetry, not Greek, as modern, or that he like Newman sees Homer as peculiarly archaic, but what he is archaizing there is not in fact Homer’s Greek but a Latin translation of Homer by the Renaissance Latin writer Andreas Divus.54 Indeed, the only examples I have found in Pound of a thoroughly archaizing translation of ancient literature unmediated by late Antiquity or the Renaissance are the choruses in his versions of Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Electra, and here he is evidently trying to draw a contrast between choral lyric and the very colloquially rendered dialogue.)55 For some translators, then, particularly in the Victorian period, the Classics are always (though in a variety of senses) old, and should be so rendered; but to others, both before and after, they are (for various diVerent reasons) new, and our translations must keep them so. We may also Wnd translators who have tried, as it were, to deal with the problem of the Classics—being by deWnition somehow both old and new—by making use of what we might call a peculiarly privileged archaic intertext, the King James Bible. Arnold argues both that biblical English by its nature provides the ideal lexicon for the translator of Homer and that the language of the Bible provides an analogue to that of Homer in the sense that it is at once diVerent from the language of ordinary life and utterly familiar and comprehensible. ‘An Athenian no more needed to have Homer modernised, than we need to have the Bible modernised.’56 Victorian translators like Lang made use of biblical prose (though in fact Lang often seems rather to be writing in the style of Mallory); but Arnold’s views are reXected in as recent a translator as J. Enoch Powell, who adopts biblical English for his translation of Herodotus precisely because of its combination of familiarity and archaism: 53 Compare, for example, his translations of Catullus, Horace, and Martial with his translations of Namantianus and Navigero (Pound (1963) 406–10 Pound (2003) 1,200). There are touches of archaism in ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, but the diction is more often colloquial, and Pound’s version of both modes is idiosyncratic; see Pound (2003) 526–45. 54 Pound (1933); see also Pound (1968b) 249–75, esp. 259–67. 55 Pound (1957); Pound and Fleming (1989). 56 Arnold (1914c) 392; cf. also 390, and (on biblical language as a model for translators of Homer) Arnold (1914b) 301.


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I believe that the simple and Xowing language of Herodotus needs least remoulding for modern English ears if presented in the style and cadences rendered familiar by the Bible, and that a certain quaintness and archaism thereby imparted make an impression not dissimilar from that which the Ionic original must have made upon Attic readers in the twenties of the Wfthcentury B.C.57

Since Powell’s day, however, the Bible itself has been many times modernized and has in addition to some extent lost its privileged status and its place in general education, so that the language even of more recent renderings can no longer be said to have the familiarity for twenty-Wrst-century English speakers that Homer had for a Wfthcentury Athenian. If we have in fact jettisoned all supposition that archaism can actually recreate anything that characterizes ancient literature—its age, its peculiar stylistic virtues or quirks—might we still want to take up Venuti’s idea that a central function of archaism is to create the eVect of foreignizing? We do, in fact, Wnd among contemporary translators of ancient texts a growing resistance to domestication. Richard Janko’s version of Aristotle’s Poetics and Steven Lattimore’s recent translation of Thucydides both seek to maintain, even at the expense of Xuent English, the idiosyncrasies of their authors’ Greek.58 And in a more politically self-conscious mode, Ruby Blondell in the introduction to her translation of Medea declares that she has ‘tried not to erase the Otherness of the text and culture’.59 Her fellow translators in the volume Women on the Edge share this aim, and their general introduction criticizes earlier translators such as Rex Warner for disguising cultural diVerence and imposing modern values.60 Might such translators as these also adopt Venuti’s use of archaism? It seems on the whole unlikely. At the beginning of his chapter on Newman and Arnold, Venuti comments: ‘Since Newman developed 57 Powell (1949) iii. 58 Lattimore (1998); Janko (1987). 59 Blondell (1999) 168. 60 Blondell et al. (1999) xii–xiv. Cf. W. Arrowsmith’s concern in the general introduction to the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series to ‘undertake the complex and formidable task of transplanting a Greek play without also ‘‘colonializing’’ it or stripping it of its deep cultural diVerence, its remoteness from us’ and so ‘depriving the play of that crucial otherness of Greek experience’ (Arrowsmith (1974) vii).

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his foreignizing method with translations of classical texts, for him foreignizing necessarily involved a discourse that signiWed historical remoteness—archaism.’61 The substitution of ‘old’ for ‘foreign’ as a mode of otherness will seem most problematic precisely to those contemporary classicists who share Venuti’s concern with the dangers of assimilating the original to the culture of the translation. Furthermore, the fact that archaism in the translation of ancient literature necessarily brings along with it an anachronistic intertext is likely to make it seem to classicists just one more mode of imposition by the target culture on the source culture. Of course, Venuti would argue that such imposition is unavoidable, and that since we cannot in fact represent the original language or its culture in its imagined purity our only hope is to play games with our own language in order to unmask its role. His own archaizing, as he describes it, does not entail the consistent use of archaic language; instead, he combines selected archaisms with colloquialism and anachronism.62 And while archaizing translation has for good reason become problematic for translators of classical texts, it seems to me that past instances of archaizing translation, viewed as a species of (anachronistic) intertextuality and as an aspect of the reception of texts, may call for renewed attention at a time when we are increasingly attentive in our reading of ancient literature to intertexts and to contexts of reception. Indeed, such renewed attention might even suggest to the inventive translator novel modes of archaizing—piecemeal if not pervasive. I conclude by exploring (as possible examples of such inventive archaizing) two passages, drawn from two recent translations, that might be considered as instances both of archaism and of anachronistic intertextuality—in the strong sense, not just in the weaker sense in which (as I argued earlier) all archaizing translation of classical texts into later European languages constitutes a form of anachronistic intertextuality. Both passages use the language of an earlier time (one the Elizabethan period, the other the early eighteenth century), and both do so in quoting a poet of that earlier period. 61 Venuti (1995) 122. 62 Venuti (1998) 14–20. In this respect, Venuti is clearly working in the tradition of Pound, or rather of one of Pound’s varieties of translation; see also Venuti (2003).


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The Wrst of my passages (from Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad)63 will not immediately appear to be an instance of archaizing, since the language used by the translator is reasonably at home in modern English; Arnold would be perfectly happy with it, since it is obviously poetry without being obviously old. But the words, although joined seamlessly with what surrounds them, are the words of an Elizabethan poet. Translating a simile in Book 16 of the Iliad, Lombardo writes (Iliad 16.297–300; 305–9 in Lombardo): Zeus will at times rein in his lightning And remove a dense cloud from a mountain top, And all the crests and headlands and high glades Break into view, and brightness falls from the air.

The last Wve words here, translating Homer’s PæÆŁ ¼æ ææª ¼ ÆNŁæ,64 are taken from Thomas Nashe’s poem, ‘Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss’ (15–21): Beauty is but a Xower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us.65

Nashe’s words translate the Greek reasonably aptly if not literally (Lattimore’s rendering of the same phrase is ‘endless bright air spills from the heavens’), and the fact that they are a quotation does not force itself on the reader’s attention. But the allusion, if read as an allusion, works on a number of levels. Lombardo himself suggests that for those who know Nashe’s poem, the quotation ‘brings with it an added sense of the ominous’, foreboding Patroclus’ imminent fall.66 Given their historical context, Nashe’s words (like the anachronistic 63 Lombardo (1997). 64 In my colleague Joseph Russo’s rendering, ‘and from the sky above an indescribable brightness breaks out’. 65 The poem from which these lines are taken has been given a variety of titles but originally appeared simply as ‘The Song’ in Nashe’s comedy Summer’s Last Will and Testament published in 1600. See Nashe (1964) 129–31. 66 Lombardo, personal communication, 20 April 2001.

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quotations, discussed earlier, in Nelson’s Hecuba and Mahon’s Bacchae) also open a window between the world at war of the Iliad and a particular later moment in history: plague time in Elizabethan England. In doing so, however, they also open what is for Lombardo’s reader ‘an earlier poetic world’, and to this degree Lombardo is engaged in a kind of archaizing.67 To what eVect? The use of language from an earlier period in the English literary tradition might help to suggest the traditional diction of the Homeric poems; if we no longer (with Newman) regard Homer as ‘absolutely archaic’, we still describe his language as essentially traditional in a way that is hard for the written English of any period to capture. But this quotation, from a poetic world much earlier than that of the translation and much later than that of the original, also engages us in a kind of circularity. Lombardo’s Homer alludes to Nashe, who is already alluding to Homer, since he Wgures the universal mortality he sees realized in the plague by way of two Homeric exempla, his only speciWc exempla: ‘Dust hath closed Helen’s eye’, and in the next verse (22), ‘Worms feed on Hector brave’. An intensiWed version of such circularity may be found in my other passage, which is also more obviously archaizing and more obviously an instance of anachronistic quotation. In his version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, David Slavitt translates Polyphemus’ song to Galatea in Book 13 into archaic English—not, however, his own English, but (in what he calls an act of ‘expropriation’) the English of John Gay’s libretto for Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Wrst performed in 1732.68 Ovid is thus led to quote a later writer who is himself translating Ovid. Both metre and indentation set oV the lines in question from their context in Slavitt’s translation (13.782–805; 786–804 in Ovid’s text) : From far away, where I hid in the woods in my Acis’ arms, we could hear his baleful bellow and even make out the words: O ruddier than the cherry, O sweeter than the berry, O nymph more bright than moonshine night 67 Lombardo, personal communication, 20 April 2001. 68 Slavitt (1994) xi, 276–7; Gay (1926) 423–32.


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like kidlings blithe and merry. Ripe as the melting cluster, no lily has such luster; yet hard to tame as raging Xame and Werce as storms that bluster. O ruddier than the cherry, O sweeter than the berry, O ruddier than the cherry, O sweeter than the berry, O nymph more bright than moonshine night like kidlings blithe and merry. He went on that way for hours. Who can remember it all? It was altogether the usual kind of thing, but grotesque coming from him. I was ‘harder than oak, falser than water, vain as a peacock, deaf as a stone, sharp as a snake, crueler than Wre . . .’ You’d think he’d made this up on the spot.

Slavitt translates Ovid as quoting Gay who paraphrases Ovid. He has (like Nelson in her Hecuba) prepared us for this in his introduction; and (like Mahon in his Bacchae) he points to the quotation with the language that follows it, describing it as ‘altogether the usual kind of thing’. The colloquialism of the surrounding language further emphasizes the archaism of the quoted passage. Archaism is thus subsumed in anachronism, or anachronism disguised by archaism, and intertextuality is at the same time a form of textual self-reXection. Neither Slavitt nor Lombardo is generally given to archaism. Both (although to quite diVerent eVect) are more likely to make use of occasional colloquialism and anachronism in the service, as Lombardo says, of the creation of ‘living poetry’. But Lombardo’s comment that ‘a successful translation . . . must grow out of the poetic tradition of its own language’ also points to a possible place for a contained archaism and for the kind of experiments these translators engage in.69 Lombardo and Slavitt here suggest our distance from classical authors not so much by the mere use of earlier English, as by the quotation of earlier works that allude to or translate those authors. They thus evoke not the distance between the ancient

69 Lombardo (1997) xiii.

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poets’ own times and the time when we read them but the length of time in which Homer and Ovid have been perennially but diVerently present, distant yet near at hand, old yet new, at many diVerent times and to many diVerent readers.

13 Fiction, Philosophy, and Logical Closure Andrew Laird

Gratiano speaks an inWnite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice, his reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaV: you shall seek all day ere you Wnd them, and when you have them they are not worth the search. Merchant of Venice, i. i And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, v. i

‘Narrative is nothing,’ wrote George Meredith in one of his letters, ‘it is the mere vehicle of philosophy’. This nineteenth-century novelist, who championed social reform and advocated women’s rights, wanted his own Wction to serve a didactic purpose.1 Examples of narratives like Meredith’s, which more or less straightforwardly furnish a medium for philosophical messages, are legion in ancient and modern literatures. But what really diminishes the status of narrative—so elevated in the last four decades—is the magnitude I would like to thank Peta Fowler, Stephen Heyworth, Steve Nimis, and Peter Poellner for encouragement and help. Gregory Hutchinson, Doreen Innes, and Nick Zangwill each read earlier drafts, and each generously oVered many important criticisms and suggestions for which I am deeply grateful. Omissions and errors are bound to remain where I have not been diligent enough to follow their advice. 1 Jones (1999) is a biography of Meredith.

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and complexity of relations between the category of Wction and philosophical enquiry and speculation. The aim of this chapter is to illustrate some of the ways in which thinking about Wction directly involves central issues of philosophy, even touching upon the most central issue of all: what philosophy is. The Weld of enquiry here might have been designated ‘the philosophy of Wction’, if it were not for the fact that such a designation presupposes that philosophy is outside of, independent from, Wction. The Wrst part of this essay will put narrative in its place before considering how and why speculation about Wction has been so readily dismissed or marginalized by current thinking. The subsequent sections will seek to justify a conception of the essential relationship between Wction and philosophy from three diVerent perspectives: I shall introduce and brieXy examine the idea of ‘logical closure’, before going on to consider more general aspects of the relationship between invented Wction and philosophy. The Wnal part will look at how philosophy itself might be conceived as Wction and conclude by considering the implications of this for potential constructions of the relationship between Wction and philosophy in antiquity. Ancient sources may provide scant discussion of the novel—often for simple reasons of chronology—but there is no shortage of theorizing about Wction within Wctional and poetic texts themselves, as well as in Plato, Aristotle, the Hellenistic scholia, and elsewhere.2 Moreover, from their Wrst appearance in ancient literature, imaginary realms involve questions of epistemology, metaphysics, and logic, as well as issues of ethics and politics.3 The prominent role allegoresis 2 Bowie (1994) explains the bearing of dating on the paucity of discussions of the novel in antiquity; endeavours to construct ancient categories of Wction from texts which are de facto Wctional include Feeney (1991) 5–56 and the essays in Gill and Wiseman (1993), which include Gill’s excellent treatment of Plato on truth and Wction. On Plato’s own use of philosophical ‘myth’, see Morgan (2000). Trimpi (1971) and (1974), as well as Meijering (1987), oVer substantial surveys of ancient accounts of Wction from scholia and elsewhere. On representation in Plato, Aristotle, and beyond, see Halliwell (2002): Ole Thomsen’s forthcoming study entitled Øjets Lyst will oVer a rather diVerent perspective from Halliwell’s. 3 For views on the extent to which ancient Wction from archaic poetry onwards involves questions of epistemology as well as moral and political authority, see Laird (2001), (2002a), and (2002b).

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seems to have had in the early interpretation of Homer usefully illustrates this.4 The approach of this discussion may seem to be very modern, if only because the categories of Wction and philosophy—at least as they are presupposed here at the outset—are themselves modern.5 However, the overall picture presented here has been been more informed by classical literature than anything else. At the same time this is very much a theoretical paper, but it is an exercise of a theory in the lowliest sense: the suppositions put forward here have not been suYciently tested or explored. In order that a wider range of disparate ideas might be considered in conjunction with each other, the discussion to follow cannot claim to be very systematic or disciplined.

NAR R AT IV E IS N OTH I N G For the last forty years, literary theory and modern poetics have been emphasizing narrative. Narratology had its heyday among classicists in the 1980s, and its heuristic potential is still not completely exhausted.6 The role of rhetoric in narrative which has attracted the attention of classicists, moderns, and postmoderns is a related interest.7 The issues raised by ekphrasis and focalization, which Don Fowler has shown are as much ideological as they are narratological, debates about closure which Don, again, made a prominent issue in the current reception of classical literature, and even the problems of intertextuality (a thinly concealed revision of Bakhtin’s dialogism) have all really emerged from reXection on the nature of narrative.8 4 Ford (1999) and (2002). 5 These proposed categories are not of course hard and fast: see the ‘Endnote’ to this paper for just one idea of the extent to which they could be problematized. 6 See e.g. the essays in Herman (1999). 7 Woodman (1988) is an important landmark in alerting classicists to the centrality of ancient rhetorical theory to interpretation of historical narrative. Barthes (1970), Genette (1980) and (1982), Ricoeur (1984), Ducrot and Todorov (1979), and White (1987) are among key studies by inXuential modern theorists who have an evident interest in classical rhetoric, however their work is situated in relation to it. 8 See Fowler (2000) 115–37, and Laird (1999) 34–5, 308, on the relation between dialogism and intertextuality.

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There are obvious reasons for the prominence of narrative in all forms of cultural and literary theory. Within the realm of conventional literary studies, narrative is often tantamount to form. The conception of form presupposes a well-known distinction going back to antiquity: between uerba as expression on the one hand, and res or materia on the other, as the projected substance of a discourse. The impact of ancient poetics and rhetoric thus makes narrative a central area of concern for classicists in particular. But the notion of narrative has become supple and versatile to the point of being chimerical. Roland Barthes trumpeted the relevance of narrative to everything, from comics and mime to conversation and stained glass windows. ‘Narrative is like life itself,’ he cheerfully declared, before trying to devise his model of hypothetical description for narrative.9 Such endeavours helped to inXate the currency of the term as it became adopted in subsequent cultural theory. In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard termed monumental systems of explanation like Christianity and Marxism ‘grand meta-narratives’.10 The most pervasive feature of postmodern thinking in the humanities is an emphasis on discourse, textuality, rhetoric, and narrative, and a corresponding diminution of direct concern with ‘content’, whether that content be deemed true or false, art or science, fact or Wction.11 In spite all of this, narrative can hardly be billed as a popular attraction. My own students are nearly always repelled—at least initially—by invitations to think or write about the ‘narrative techniques’ of authors they study. They prefer to treat whatever they perceive to be the moral of a work, to apply personal judgements to the individuals and events it contains, to evaluate credibility and realism (without much reference to stylistic issues), and perhaps most of all to explore what really happened, if the work is historical— or even if it isn’t. The general impression given by this anecdotal evidence is conWrmed by J. A. Appleyard’s book Becoming a Reader, 9 Barthes (1967). 10 Lyotard (1983). 11 The account of ‘textualism’ in Rorty (1982) 139–59 is a helpful overview. Cohn (1998), Genette (1991), and RiVaterre (1990) approach the relationships between Wction and other forms of discourse in diVerent ways; CliVord and Marcus (1986) and Crapanzano (1992) exemplify the breakdown of Enlightenment divisions between art and science, while Sokal and Bricmont (1998) consider the threat postmodernism poses to scientiWc thought.


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an account of the way Wction is experienced from childhood onwards, drawn from Weldwork in New England.12 All in all, the enduring preoccupation people have with referentiality, with what texts are about, cannot just be attributed to the diYculties students encounter when they read texts in other languages or in diYcult English. Reviews of Wlms, plays, and novels in the arts sections of newspapers are just as prone to give priority to ‘what happens’. Intelligent popular critics and their readership are rarely concerned with narrative arrangement and style. Narrative (conceived as form) may not quite be nothing, but it is certainly not the whole story. The insistence that narratives are all we have, that underlying realities are only constructions—the tendency Rorty conveniently labels ‘textualism’—obviously poses a threat of some kind to the legitimacy of our everyday concern with ‘what really happened’. As a consequence, there has been an anxious scrabble to protect the dignity of history, and to secure some kind of special status for historiography.13 This is now usually done, as this excerpt from a recent discussion of Thucydides shows, by appealing to interpretative communities of readers: What distinguishes historical texts from Wction is the reader’s assumption that they relate ‘what actually happened’. Works of Wction may purport to relate that, and may call upon the discursive apparatus of historical texts to give their claims an air of plausibility, but these claims are seriously meant only by the narrator, not the author who belongs to a diVerent diegetic world. Readers of historical texts, by contrast, tend to identify author and narrator and to suppose an ‘ontological connection’ between the discourse and the events it signiWes.14

Fiction itself, though, does not get much of a look-in in these debates. Fiction is deemed neither complicated, nor a priority concern for 12 Appleyard (1991). 13 This was attempted by Trotsky: his 1923 essay ‘Against the Formalists’ (translated into English in 1925) appeals naively—at least in philosophical terms—to the ontological priority of events over the discourse presenting them: ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ Cf. Thompson (1978) and Momigliano (1984) 49. Attempts to distinguish the referents of factual narratives from those in Wctional narratives by appeals to philosophical realism, however, only lead back to debates prompted by Kant’s Critique of Judgement and Critique of Pure Reason: cf. Putnam (1981) and Goodman (1978). 14 Rood (1998) (my emphasis).

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foundationalists who believe, however misguidedly, that essentializing the facts is the best way to protect The Past from those who would deny the Holocaust. And while Wction has been the focus of some attention from the narrative-is-everything brigade on the opposite end of the spectrum, it is generally assumed to be relatively unproblematic.15 Indeed the popular use of the word ‘Wctionalization’ for the process of producing historical novels by manipulating historical facts shows how deeply the distinctions between ‘true’ and ‘false’ storytelling are rooted in our contemporary culture. At the same time the routine sense of the word ‘Wction’ has been questioned: The word [Wction] as commonly used in recent textual theory has lost its connotation of falsehood, of something merely opposed to truth. It suggests the partiality of cultural and historical truths, the ways they are systematic and exclusive. Ethnographic writings can properly be called Wctions in the sense of ‘something made or fashioned’, the principal burden of the word’s Latin root Wngere. But it is important to preserve the meaning not merely of making, but also of making up, of inventing things not actually real.16

For this writer, James CliVord, who is a social anthropologist, Wction, conceived etymologically as ‘fashioning’, is the straightforward control; ethnography or historiography are more troublesome and enigmatic variations. Another kind of thinking about Wction is reXected in the remarks below by an ancient historian. Like those in the earlier quotation above, they happen to be prompted by reXection on Thucydides: In contrast to Wction, in historiography the story really happened, or rather, historiography is composed and read with a view to establishing more closely what really happened, in a way that Wction is not. In Wctional narratives there is a temporary suspension of disbelief to which readers willingly submit themselves for the sake of the experience of the work, so that the audience of a tragedy, for example is prepared to accept an alternative version of the myth as ‘true for the purposes of the play’. But in a historical narrative, readers’ willingness to submit to the experience of narrative is more or less limited by their own experience of the historical story . . . The distinction 15 See for instance the summary disposal of the category of Wction at the beginning of Rimmon-Kenan (1983), an inXuential study of narrative theory. 16 CliVord (1986) 6.


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between Wction and history is not the object studied, but rather the method of regarding the object (so historical Wction is not history).17

But such current thinking requires a lot of unpacking. What exactly is the ‘temporary suspension of disbelief ’?18 Does it correspond to psychagogia? Or more particularly to the observation attributed to Gorgias that the spectator of a tragedy engages in a form of voluntary self-deception?19 How is such suspension of disbelief temporary and how temporary is it? Can it allow us to equate readers of Wctional narratives so neatly with the audience of a tragedy? And acceptance of alternative versions of myths cannot be the only obstacle to the suspension of disbelief. How does that acceptance relate to the acceptance involved in watching a play or reading a story in the Wrst place? And does experience of the historical story directly, or indirectly via testimony, really mean that our submission to the experience of historical narrative is diVerent from our submission to Wctional narrative, if we expect our Wctions to be plausible? It would be very unreasonable to expect anyone to answer all these questions, let alone the author of a piece about Thucydides: in that context there are obvious reasons for the slippage between Wctional narrative and tragedy. Even so, this second excerpt discussing Thucydides certainly shows how much we take for granted. By convenient happenstance, it compresses into just a few lines a number of burning issues about Wction. As I have noted, current debates, which emphasize questions of narrative, rhetoric, identity, and ideology in all kinds of texts, generally ignore the theory of Wction, which has become a sort of Cinderella. Speculation about the nature of Wction tout court is kept out of sight, perhaps because it too strongly evokes unfashionable considerations of reference, truth-status, and veriWability. It may not be very surprising that so-called ‘analytic’ philosophy has been more 17 Gribble (1998), 49 and n. 50 (my emphases). 18 Walton (1990) has a notion of ‘Wctional contracts’ which is more nuanced than a monolithic ‘suspension of disbelief ’. 19 The well-known attestation is in Plutarch, Moralia 348d: ‘[in tragedy] as Gorgias says, the deceiver is more just than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the undeceived. The deceiver is more just because he has fulWlled his promise; the deceived is wiser, because it takes a measure of sensibility to be accessible to the pleasure of literature.’

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concerned with the problems raised by Wction and Wctional propositions than continental European theory and thought. Inevitably, though, the tight focus of the analytic tradition of philosophy will not address the broader cultural and psychological signiWcance of Wction. To begin making sense of the category of Wction, to set about discovering anything worthwhile, it is necessary to be ecumenical in the application of theory and philosophy by involving ancient, continental, and Anglo-American systems of explanation.

LO GI CA L CLO SU R E The fundamental relationship between Wction and philosophy can be examined in terms of debates in analytic philosophy about ‘logical closure’: the philosophical problems that are raised by the very existence of Wction.20 But before coming to a deWnition of logical closure, it is perhaps easiest to start with the notion of a ‘story world’ to explain the pertinence of these debates. The very comprehension of Wction presupposes a story world, which corresponds to what Genette and others call a diege`se or ‘diegetic world’.21 A story world of space, time, characters, and events is generated by the narrative of a text, but at the same time would seem to be circumscribed by it. That is about as far as I would like to go. I used to go further, eVectively maintaining that we were not entitled to lift our noses from texts in any way at all and speculate about what could happen unless the narrator told us to. The trouble is that the endings of the Iliad and the Aeneid, endings everywhere else, and the wealth of issues raised by ‘closure’ in the wider sense all show that this is just not true: readers are bound to speculate about and posit outcomes and implications all the time.22 In spite of that, I used to persist in 20 See Deutsch (1985), Lewis (1978), essays in the 1983 issue of the periodical Philosophy and Literature, Lamarque (1983), Lamarque and Olsen (1994), and New (1999). Metaphor, a philosophically problematic category of language, also bears on this issue: see the ‘Endnote’ to this paper. 21 See now Lowe (2000). 22 Benjamin (1973) illustrates this well enough; see also the essays in Roberts, Dunn, and Fowler (1997).


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clinging to the view that ‘the world of a story is what is signiWed by the language of the narrative’, because that view was attractively tidy to someone who was narratologically inclined.23 I also clung to that view because I had failed to take two important things into account: texts have readers, and language is connotative, not denotative. In fact, the inevitable principle of intertextuality means that the story world of a text is going to be constructed and Xeshed out diVerently by each author and each reader in each reading and performance: this is especially obvious once the notion of character is taken into account.24 But that took a while for me to realize: the deWnite article I had myself placed in front of ‘story world’ initially seduced me and at Wrst I fell for its rhetoric: ‘The story world’, after all, sounded reassuringly deWnitive, exclusive, and Wxed. Don tried to temper my eagerness to adopt such an idealistic picture by appealing to reason, and pointing me in the direction of ‘logical closure’. This is the notion that the logical—and maybe a few more—consequences of propositions in a story must also be true in that story. His own characterization of logical closure is a usefully concise deWnition of the term: ‘The philosophical use of ‘‘logical closure’’ [is] deWned as the proposition that ‘‘the logical consequences of propositions true in a story must also be true in it’’.’25 Some observations about Anna Karenina from a recent introduction to the philosophy of literature by Christopher New illustrate the kinds of question that are raised by consideration of logical closure.26 After specifying some Wctional truths in the novel—that there was a person called Anna Karenina, that she was married, that she met Vronsky, that she threw herself under a train—Christopher New discerns two sorts of implication. The Wrst is ‘logical implication’. The fact that Anna had a vocabulary in Russian larger than two thousand words can be deduced logically, from the sentences attributed to her in the book. The second is what could be called ‘justiWed implication’: we are justiWed in thinking Anna had a heart and lungs, even though Tolstoy may neither say that, nor logically imply it. 23 Laird (1993) 153; cf. Laird (1999) 75, 79, 162. 24 I ended up discussing intertextuality in relation to the construction of character in Laird (1997) 287–91. 25 Fowler (1989a) 78 n. 13; repr. (2000) 242 n. 13. 26 New (1999) 108–10.

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Speculations about the ‘truth’ of propositions in Wction and of their consequences bear on some questions of epistemology. For instance if p entails q, q is justiWed and believed. But q cannot be true if it is entailed by p only, when p is false. Unfortunately, New’s examples drawn from Anna Karenina to illustrate his observations are not as helpful as they could be. Even in the realm of our own experience many speakers of languages do not have a vocabulary larger (or much larger) than the everyday vocabulary they deploy in their speech. It is safer to say that we can deduce logically from the sentences attributed to her in the book that Anna has a syntactic competence to say other things in Russian that she does not say in Tolstoy’s novel. The matter is further complicated by the fact that in the actual story many of Anna’s sentences, though reported in Russian, are supposed to have been delivered in French. And it seems to me all too likely Tolstoy does in fact say or logically imply that his heroine has a heart and lungs. Leaving aside these objections to New’s particular examples, speculations about the ‘truth’ of propositions in Wction are still worthy of investigation. Although such speculations have the capacity to annoy profoundly most people who enjoy reading (or even analysing) Wction in customary ways, the concerns they involve are in fact as old as poetics itself. As we shall see, Aristotle in his discussion of epic was concerned with what we make of q, if it is entailed by the false proposition p. But Wrst I want to raise questions about logical and justiWed implication—or at least the examples of them just considered. The justiWed implication given for Anna—that she had a heart and lungs—cannot be a standard for all Wctional characters. The curious biology of the Moon People in Lucian’s True Stories (1.22–6) shows this. Countless other justiWed implications may work for Anna—that she had hidden birthmarks, that she had schoolfriends, that being in Moscow she lived nearer to Omsk than Khabarovsk. Straightforward and tedious as such justiWed implications are, they actually depend on much more than rationalization, intelligent conjecture, and historical or geographical enquiry. They also depend on genre. Although the fantasies of Lucian and Lewis Carroll both play on and oVend expectations readers have from their own experience, there is still a clear sense in which assumptions that


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can be made about the story world of Anna Karenina cannot be made for Alice in Wonderland. The deduction that Anna Karenina had a Russian vocabulary of more than two thousand words, on the other hand, looks straightforward enough. But another passage from Lucian—in his dialogue The Cockerel—might give us pause for thought. A talking cockerel reproaches the human Micyllus for being amazed at its ability to speak. It says (2): ! Ø ŒE, t "Œıºº, Œ Øfi B IÆı rÆØ b IªøŒÆØ a ˇ æı Ø Æ Æ, K x ŒÆd › F `Øººø ¥ › ˛Ł ÆŒæa ÆæØ æÆ fiH æ Ø Œ K fiø fiH º fiø ØÆºª , ‹ºÆ ÞÆłfiøH, P uæ Kªg F ¼ı H æø. You strike me as utterly uneducated and you don’t even seem to have read Homer’s poems, in which Xanthus, the horse of Achilles, saying goodbye to neighing forever, stood still and talked in the middle of the Wghting, reciting whole epic verses, not speaking without metre as I am now.

The question raised by the cockerel—of whether Homeric characters speak to each other in hexameter verses in their heroic world—must have implications for Anna: how can we be so sure that she uses the vocabulary, diction, and prose Tolstoy’s narrator ascribes to her? This is a narratological issue really, but it shows that the boundaries around a story world are not so clear.27 In the end it is readers who have the Wnal say in determining how far words ascribed to a character in any text correspond to any hypothesized utterances. In fact, few general rules can be made for the consequences of Wctional propositions. Yet in spite of all this, a lot of us are still instinctively drawn to the idea of a Wctional world being somehow self-enclosed. Consider this account from a short story by Haruki Murakami of a character’s apprehension of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: After checking to see my husband was asleep, I would go sit on the livingroom sofa, drink brandy by myself, and open my book. I read Anna Karenina three times. Each time, I made new discoveries. This enormous 27 Borges (1986) has a retort to those who claim that Dante ‘believed in’ his Commedia: Dante would not have believed Virgil could speak in vernacular tercets. The boundaries of mise en abyˆme (or ‘embedded’) narratives are not always clear either: in performance or reading they can serve either to reinforce or to destabilize the boundaries of the story of the principal narrative, cf. Calvino (1987).

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novel was full of revelations and riddles. Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader. The old me had been able to understand only the tiniest fragment of it, but the gaze of this new me could penetrate to the core with perfect understanding. I knew exactly what the great Tolstoy wanted to say, what he wanted the reader to get from the book; I could see how his message had organically crystallised as a novel, and what in that novel had surpassed the author himself.28

The picture, oVered by the woman narrator, of Anna Karenina as a kind of doll’s house, a single universe full of fascinating miniatures, is very alluring. Even so, no normal reader of Tolstoy is really in a position to determine, as this narrator seems to, that the universe of Anna Karenina is extensive but Wnite, and ultimately comprehensible. But unusually for a Wrst person narrator, Murakami’s character perhaps can aYrm she was right to see the universe of Anna Karenina like that, because, as we discover at the end of this short story, she is dead herself, like Anna, and perhaps in a position to characterize her subsequent understanding of the book as ‘perfect’. How we deWne a Wctional world and what we are prepared to believe of it very much depends on how far we can deWne our own.29 Aristotle is more illuminating than many thinkers today on this sort of thing. In Poetics Book 24 he seems to see the inference of true propositions from false propositions as part of the creative process, of making Wction, not just reXecting on it. Gudeman and other commentators see Aristotle’s discussion of epic from 1460a as more concerned with what the poet should do rather than with the forms and parts of poetry itself.30 What Aristotle says is well worth quoting (Poetics 1460a 19–26): 28 Murakami (1993) 100–1. 29 Alternatively Murakami’s narrator could be implying that the Wctional worlds a reader apprehends are relative: one sees the work diVerently each time one reads it, so how can one know? This kind of relativism, raised by the interviews in Appleyard (1991) with people who reread a book long after they Wrst read it, must be worth adding to the commoner relativism based on diVerent reactions by diVerent readers. It is particularly relevant to Tolstoy: many people have read War and Peace and Anna Karenina twice. 30 Gudeman (1934). Aristotle’s move to an emphasis on what the poet should do anticipates the ars–artifex arrangement in the Ars poetica, as Lucas (1968) notes at 227. Cf. Halliwell (1987) 171–3.


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Æ b ºØ Æ … æ ŒÆd f ¼ººı łıB ºªØ ‰ E: Ø b F ÆæÆºªØ : Y ÆØ ªaæ ƒ ¼ŁæøØ, ‹ Æ ıd Z d fi q j ªØ ı ª ÆØ, N e o æ Ø, ŒÆd e æ æ rÆØ j ªŁÆØ· F K Ø łF: Øe E, i e æH łF, ¼ºº b ı Z IªŒ rÆØ j ªŁÆØ fi q, æŁEÆØ· Øa ªaæ e F NÆØ IºŁb k ÆæÆºª ÆØ % H % łıc ŒÆd e æH ‰ Z: ÆæØª Æ b ı e KŒ H ˝ æø. Above all Homer has taught other poets how to tell untruths as they ought to be told, that is, by false inference. If one thing exists or happens because another thing exists or happens, people think that, if the consequent exists or happens, the antecedent also exists; but this is not the case. Thus if a proposition were untrue, but there was something else which might be true or must happen if the proposition were true, the poet should supply the latter; for because we know that this is true, our soul falsely infers the truth of the original proposition. There is an example of this in the bath scene of the Odyssey.

That passage deserves more attention than it gets.31 For example, it explains why beginning a work in medias res is so eVective. This device is partly useful because it saves long-winded background explanation, as Horace was to make overtly clear in the Ars poetica. But beginning in medias res is also eVective in that it Wrst presents the reader or audience with a proposition q, which is entailed by a proposition p which is revealed next. It is obviously better (in the sense of inviting the reader’s credence) to begin by singing of the wrath of Achilles than by asserting Wrst that there was a man called Achilles and then that he became very angry.32 In fact Horace seems just as aware of that beneWt although he is less explicit about it: his 31 The sentence immediately after the passage quoted is puzzling, at least in the context of this discussion: æÆØæEŁÆ E I Æ Æ NŒ Æ Aºº j ıÆ a IŁÆÆ (‘One ought to prefer likely impossibilities to unconvincing possibilities’). Aristotle insists that poets should avoid putting things that contradict too near each other. Steve Nimis has suggested to me that this redeems the importance of narrative (which I sought to diminish in the Wrst section here), for maintaining consistency without prompting too many larger questions. As the passage from the Ars poetica quoted here will show, issues of logical closure have a bearing on plot structuring, but the latter might still have to pay heed to the exigencies of the former. Thus Halliwell (1987) 175 suggests that Aristotle’s maxim oVers a principle for ‘hard cases’, not a recommendation which applies to all poetic plots; after all the poet who can produce plausible possibilities must still prefer them to plausible impossibilities. 32 Cf. Genette (1991) 89–90.

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seamless transition from that discussion of epic beginnings to a consideration of epic verisimilitude in the Ars poetica is what proves this (146–51): nec gemino bellum Troianum orditur ab ouo: semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res non secus ac notas auditorem rapit, et quae desperat tractata nitescere posse relinquit, atque ita mentitur, sic ueris falsa remiscet, primo ne medium, medio ne discrepet imum. [Homer] does not begin the Trojan war from the twin egg; he is always making good speed towards the end of the story, and carries his hearer right into the midst of it as though it were already known. He leaves out anything which he thinks cannot be polished up satisfactorily by treatment, and thus tells lies, and mixes truth with falsehood, in such a way that the middle squares with the beginning and the end with the middle.

The last verse (151) underlines the point that achievement of verisimilitude is intimately bound up with the actual mechanics of construction of a plot. The paradeigma Aristotle highlights in Poetics 1460a.26—the ‘Bath episode’—refers to most of the nineteenth book of the Odyssey, in which the disguised Odysseus himself tells Penelope that he has seen Odysseus. Penelope believes this because he described his appearance accurately: thus she falsely infers the truth of the antecedent (that the ‘Stranger’ must have met Odysseus), from the truth of the consequent (that he could give an accurate description of him and his clothes). Scholars have remarked that this example is not particularly useful because the false inference here is made by one character about another, when the point Aristotle makes is supposed to be about how an epic audience is misled by the poet. There could be some method in this—one only needs to think of this biaxial role of false inference at work, as it pertains to characters and readers, in detective novels.33 Moreover, self-reXexive Wctions within Wctions are a frequently noted feature of the Odyssey. But the main point about 33 Character and audience being led by false inference will always be central to the construction of Wction: Binyon (1989) impressively outlines the relevance of Aristotelian poetics to the formation of the modern detective story. See also Most and Stowe (1983).


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false inference, or paralogismos, is that this is not something that can in the end be performed by the poet—it requires somebody else’s ‘soul’ to bring it to fulWlment.34 How easily can one talk about a false inference without specifying the circumstances in which it is made and the person who makes it? Again our view of a Wctional world and its logic entirely depends on how we view our own world and its logic: there is no such thing as Wction in uacuo. Aristotle also mentioned the Bath episode in his discussion of paralogismos in tragedy at 1454b.29, and interestingly at 1455a.13 (still on paralogismos in dramatic peripeteia), there seems to be the same slippage between characters drawing the wrong inference and the audience doing so.35 But I think a speciWc feature of the Bath episode involving Odysseus and Penelope may have prompted Aristotle’s fascination with this scene. That speciWc feature is Homer’s account of Odysseus’ method of lying in Odyssey 19.203: YŒ ł Æ ººa ºªø K ØØ › EÆ· He moulded all those falsehoods to resemble truth.

This verse is quoted by the Greek Augustan, Strabo, to exemplify Homer’s own method of achieving verisimilitude (1.2.9): o ø KŒE ÆE IºŁØ æØ ÆØ æ ŁØ FŁ, % ø ŒÆd Œ H c æØ, æe b e ÆP e º F ƒ æØŒF ŒÆd F a Z Æ ºª ºø: o ø c ºØÆŒe º ªª Æ ÆæÆºÆg KŒ ÆE ıŁØÆØ, ŒÆd c ˇıø º ‰Æ ø· KŒ e b IºŁF I Ø Œc æÆ ºªÆ P ˇ æØŒ: æ Ø ªæ, ‰ NŒ, ‰ ØŁÆ æ i o ø Ø ł Ø , N ŒÆ Æ ªØ Ø ŒÆd ÆP H H IºŁØH· ‹æ ŒÆd —º Ø Ø æd B ˇıø º KØØæH· ØF K d ŒÆd YŒ ł Æ ººa ºªø K ØØ › EÆ:} P ªaæ Æ Iººa ºº, Kd P i q K ØØ › EÆ. Homer added fable to real events, embellishing and adorning his style, but looking to the same end as the historian or dealer in facts. Thus he adds 34 The closing discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus considers the importance of the nature of an audience for persuading them to believe falsehoods. 35 Smith (1924) usefully examines the role of paralogismos and the way in which the misleading of the audience is conceived as following the processes of thought of the personages in the plays Aristotle discusses in Poetics 1455a.10. In the operation of anagnorisis in drama, a character’s recognition could facilitate audience recognition. Cf. also Rhetoric 1408a.20.

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fabulous elements to the real event of the Trojan war, and so also with Odysseus’ wanderings. Idle fantasy on no foundations of fact is not in Homer’s way. No doubt it occurs to one that lies are more convincing if truth is mixed with them; indeed Polybius says this in his attack on Homer’s wanderings. The line: he told many lies, resembling truth, points the same way—many lies, not all lies, for had it been all lies it could not have resembled truth.

The hexameter line quoted by Strabo, which does not occur elsewhere in the Odyssey, is the Urtext for the notion of a poet mixing fact and Wction which became such a commonplace in Antiquity.36 That verse’s indirect reception in the Roman Augustan Horace’s ueris falsa remiscet, given the context we saw in the Ars poetica—‘the poet carries his reader into the midst of things as though they were known’ (147–8: in medias res / non secus ac notas auditorem rapit) seems to conWrm that the business of logical closure is profoundly involved with the actual generation of Wction.37 The overview of logical closure oVered here has had to be highly selective. But two important things emerge from it. First, the fact that justiWed implication and logical implication cannot be applied inXexibly from one Wctional scenario to another. Thus Wction is not a uniform object, nor even a genre with a few essential properties. Just as we now know that space, time, and light change their properties and identity according to conditions of observation, so too with Wction. In many ways it is evident that perceptions of Wctional worlds are conditioned by the view we have of our own world—most obviously where ethical and other value judgements are concerned. But the extent to which our very sense of a delimited Wctional or diegetic world is determined by the epistemologies we apply to our own world is less often thought through. The case put by the

36 The locus classicus is of course the words of the Muses to the poet in Hesiod, Theogony 27–8: ‘we know how to tell many lies that resemble the truth, but we know also how to tell the truth when we wish.’ Cf. Polybius 34.4.1–4; Plutarch, De audiendis poetis 1 and 14; sch. Eur. Orestes 982. 37 The opening of Juvenal’s Wrst satire seems to challenge both the authority of epic narrative and to question the conviction of its hearers; cf. Satire 15.15 for an account of how Odysseus’ story might have been received less favourably by Alcinous.


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American philosopher David Lewis for possible worlds existing is salutary in this respect: what makes our actual world ‘actual’ is the fact that we are in it.38 Speakers who live in another world would call their world ‘actual’. The word ‘actual’ shows our provinciality. It thus becomes a mere indexical like litoribus nostris (‘to our shores’)—words enunciated by Virgil’s narrator in the Wrst verse of Aeneid Book 7.39 Among more strictly literary theoreticians, only those following the now neglected avenue of Althusserian Marxism have come close to articulating anything like an application of possible worlds theory to discourses of Wction. It is easy to see why: classical Marxism holds that our ‘actual’ world—or at least our ordinary ideological experience of that world—is an illusion.40 For Pierre Macherey, literature builds on this illusion and so transforms it, revealing the limits of our ideology: the literary work is always ‘de-centred’, producing an ever ongoing clash of meanings which emerge from its conXict with ideology or the world as we know it.41 Poststructuralist opponents to Macherey are bound to deride any attempt to claim that the realm of literature could be ontologically distinct from the realm of ideology. As John Frow puts it: ‘The question of the epistemological status of literary discourse is . . . the crucial problem for writers in the Althusserian tradition.’42 However, Macherey’s claim might be redeemed somewhat if it endeavoured to account for Wction, as outlined here, instead of literature (or ‘literary production’). More 38 Lewis (1978) and (1986). 39 Forms of this kind of argument can be used within Wction, particularly fantastic Wction in order to ‘naturalize’ a story (Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy moves from Oxford to some arguably less plausible worlds.) Deictic makers are very relevant to the construction of Wctional worlds as I hope to show in a forthcoming discussion of levels of performance in Virgil: the example from Aeneid 7.1 quoted here could possibly designate ‘our’ land of the living (on the frontiers with the realm described in Aeneid Book 6) but it is best and most commonly taken to show that the speaker presupposes that his audience, like himself, is Italian. 40 Gregory Hutchinson has pointed out to me the contrast between Kant’s use of Welt and Wittgenstein’s at the opening of the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 2001): ‘The world is everything that is the case.’ See Janaway (1994) for an accessible account of Schopenhauer’s conception of the world as ‘real’ and as perceived. 41 Macherey (1978): the discussions of the French original in Eagleton (1976), at 18–19 and 34–6, are helpful. Althusser himself (1971) 22 addressed the relationship between art and ideology. 42 Frow (1986) 25.

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importance could then be attached to epistemological questions about q being entailed by p—even if such questions appear pedestrian to those who are interested in poststructuralist theory. Logical closure is in fact central to current debates in epistemology which are concerned with justiWed belief. The parallels with Aristotelian paralogismos highlight the second major point to emerge from this discussion which can be dealt with far more brieXy: a form of reasoning is involved in the actual construction of Wction that can only be called philosophical. Thus, again, it is very important to emphasize that Wction is better regarded as a process, as a method of exploration or form of thinking, rather than as a genre, or as a stable object of enquiry.43 In this way it is analogous to philosophy. The analogy will be presented in a diVerent way at the close of this chapter, but now in the section to follow it remains to consider some broader aspects of the relationship between philosophy and Wction.44

PHILO SO PHY AN D FICT IO N The amusing but clever responses to John Locke’s theories of mind and language in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy show how profoundly philosophical thinking can determine the formation of Wction.45 The very Wrst European novel in a vernacular language, Blanquerna, was written in the 1260s by a philosopher: the Catalan logician and mystic Ramon Llull.46 Most important of all, Plato’s dialogues—not to mention the ‘myths’ or invented Wctions they contain—clearly have had a profound impact on the evolution of Wctional forms and 43 Cf. Margolin (1999). Fiction might also be analogous to rhetoric in this respect. See my discussion of rhetoric and the ancient novel in Whitmarsh (forthcoming). 44 Bibliography addressing this general relationship is obviously vast: in addition to the items cited elsewhere in these notes, Cavarero (1997), Costa Lima (1992), and LeDoeuV (1990) can be recommended as studies which in my view are as important for their generous suggestiveness as they are for what they contain. 45 Moglen (1975) is one of numerous studies of Locke’s inXuence on Sterne. 46 The chivalric hero of Blanquerna uses no weapons but achieves everything by reason and argument. See Soler i Llopart (1995) for texts of Llull’s prose Wction and Brenan (1951) 104–8 for a short general account.


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ideas, including, eventually, the modern novel.47 This is something which has long been recognized. ‘Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our day!’ exclaimed Friedrich Schlegel.48 Nietzsche, writing in the wake of this Romantic enthusiasm, is far more grudging (Birth of Tragedy §14): The Platonic dialogue was, as it were, the barge on which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself with all her children: crowded into a narrow space and timidly submitting to the single pilot, Socrates, they now sailed into a new world which never tired of looking at the fantastic spectacle of this new procession. Indeed, Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel—which may be described as an inWnitely enhanced Aesopian fable, in which poetry holds the same rank in relation to philosophy as philosophy held for many centuries in relation to theology: the rank of ancilla. This was the position into which Plato, under the pressure of the demonic Socrates, forced poetry.

In the past century, authors of Wction like Jean-Paul Sartre, Miguel de Unamuno, and Iris Murdoch have often subordinated their work to the communication, or even the development, of serious philosophical ideas. On the other hand, writers like George Meredith or even Tolstoy (though he did read Schopenhauer for the epilogue of War and Peace) were really engaging in a more general form of moral paideia. It is probably fair to say that philosophical signiWcance has been more convincingly attached to tragedy, in various phases of its historical development, than to the novel—and that this philosophical signiWcance, when discerned, has been less directly connected with tragedy’s Wctionality.49 47 On these myths see Gill in Gill and Wiseman (1993) and Morgan (2000). The Hegelian interpretation in Stewart (1905) is still of interest. It would be extremely hazardous to argue that the range of interpretations engendered by Plato’s mythical Wctions from antiquity onwards go beyond what their ‘proper’ historical or philosophical context permits: in my view this abundant variety of interpretation is best taken to indicate the philosophical richness of Wctional expression in general. Bakhtin (1981) 21–2 is a celebrated discussion of the relation between Platonic dialogue and the ancient novel. 48 F. Schlegel in Kritische Ausgabe II, Lyceum (1797), 26. The positions of Bakhtin (1981) and Rohde (1876) are probably derived from Schlegel: it is interesting that Rohde was a one-time friend of Nietzsche. The inXuence dialogue exerted on the formation of Wction in sixteenth-century Italy, examined in Snyder (1989), is analogous. 49 In the wake of Hegel and Nietzsche, Kaufmann (1968) oVers a good overview of philosophy and tragedy. Steiner (1961) and Eagleton (2002) are ambitious works, but

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The notion that Wction itself can be ‘philosophical’ in the sense of improving or educational has its direct roots, not in antiquity, but in the sustained defences of fabula oVered by the early Renaissance humanists.50 In his Genealogy of the gods, Boccaccio inXuentially deWned fabula (De genealogia deorum 14.9):51 sic non nulli consuevere fabulam diYnire: Fabula est exemplaris seu demonstrativa sub Wgmento locutio, cuius amoto cortice, patet intentio fabulantis. et sic, si sub velamento fabuloso sapidum comperiatur aliquid, non erit supervacaneum fabulas edidisse. So several are in the habit of deWning fabula like this: Fabula is a form of discourse which under guise of invention, illustrates or proves an idea. When its bark is removed, the intention of the storyteller lies revealed. So then if something sage is to be found under the veil of fable, it will not be otiose to produce fabulae.

There are of course ancient precedents for the notion of a muthos or fabula illustrating an idea.52 However, the tenor, tone, and Latin diction of this particular deWnition (perhaps deliberately) evoke discussions of scholastic philosophy. Although Boccaccio is eVectively concerned with allegory and verisimilitude in enumerating the Wrst two of his four-part schema of Wction, the third form of fabula marks a very signiWcant departure (De genealogia deorum 14.9): Species vero tercia potius hystorie quam fabulae similis est. Hac aliter et aliter usi poete celebres sunt . . . Comici honestiores, ut Plautus atque Terentius, hac confabulandi specie etiam usi sunt, nil aliud preter quod lictera sonat intelligentes, volentes tamen arte sua diversorum hominum mores et verba describere, et interim lectores docere et cautos facere. Et hec si de facto non fuerint, cum comunia sint esse potuere vel possent. both oVer very selective and partial surveys. Pace Eagleton (2002), Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life (originally published in Spanish in 1913) was a commendable attempt to distil a philosophical perspective from literary tragedy—a perspective which was also adopted in his Wction. Taplin (1986) has interesting implications for contemporaneous perspectives on the Wctionality of Athenian tragedy. 50 Nelson (1973) is an important study of Wction in the Renaissance. 51 A Latin text of Boccaccio, De genealogia deorum 14, is supplied by Reedy (1978). 52 See e.g. Rhetores Graeci 3.453 (ed. Spengel); Cicero, De inventione rhetorica 1.27, Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino 47; Quintilian, Institutio 2.4.2, as well as Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.13 (quoted in the following note) which Boccaccio knew.


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The third form is actually more similar to history than Wction. Famous poets have employed it in all sorts of ways . . . The more worthwhile comic poets, like Plautus and Terence, also used this form of constructing Wction, understanding nothing beyond what their lines say, yet they intend by their art to outline the habits and conversations of diVerent kinds of people, and incidentally to teach their readers and make them careful. Even if these things they portray have not actually happened, since they are common, they could have happened or could do so in the future.

The resemblance the last sentence quoted here has to parts of Chapter 9 of the Poetics is very striking, though Boccaccio did not know Aristotle and was probably prompted to think along these lines by a characterization of comedy in the Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.13: argumentum est Wcta res quae tamen Weri potuit, velut argumenta comoediorum.53 Realistic narrative (argumentum) recounts a Wctitious event, which yet could have occurred, like the plots of comedies.

Boccaccio was thus led to believe, like Aristotle, that poetry tells of the kinds of things that might happen (and thus considers it to be more philosophical than history) because it speaks of universals—the kinds of thing a certain type of person will say and do in a given situation. And Aristotle, like Boccaccio in his discussion of fabula quoted above, uses comic poetry to illustrate his point (Poetics 1451b):54 Kd b s B Œø fiøÆ X F Bº ªª· ı Æ ªaæ e FŁ Øa H NŒ ø o ø a ı Æ O Æ Æ ØŁÆØ. By now this distinction has become clear where comedy is concerned, for comic poets build up their plots out of probable occurrences, and then add any names that occur to them.

However, the diVerence I indicated between more strictly philosophical Wction and Wction in general begins to break down if we adopt 53 Caplan’s Loeb translation of the preceding sentences of Rhet. Her. 1.13 runs: ‘The kind of narrative based on the exposition of the facts has three forms: legendary (fabula), historical (historia), and realistic (argumentum). The legendary tale comprises events neither true nor probable, like those transmitted by tragedies. The historical narrative is an account of exploits actually performed but removed in time from the recollection of our age. Realistic narrative recounts imaginary events, which yet could have occurred, like the plots of comedies.’ 54 See n. 68 below.

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Boccaccio’s apparently enlightened method of reading. Boccaccio eVaces the diVerence between philosophical Wction and Wction in general because he is just as happy to tolerate the more fantastic myths in Ovid that contain deeper meanings as he is to read Plautus and Terence, whom he seems to interpret literally. It would seem that all forms of Wction can teach us something. So what could it be that Boccaccio holds against his fourth form of Wction, old wives’ tales, which, he maintains, contain nothing of value? What does he mean by these ‘stories of raving old women’? Although his phrase recalls the characterization of Cupid and Psyche as an anilis fabula in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, it is unlikely that he is referring to that tale speciWcally at this point in his work.55 Cupid and Psyche had a respectable tradition of Christian interpretation from Fulgentius onwards—to which Boccaccio himself contributed twice elsewhere in the compendious De genealogia deorum.56 No examples of his fourth form of undesirable Wction are given because, in my view, none exist. The fourth species of Wction is constructed by Boccaccio for purely rhetorical purposes. The defence of fabula in the De genealogia deorum is a humanist’s valiant attempt to justify pagan literature to a potentially hostile church. He cannot appear to be promoting all Wction indiscriminately. Boccaccio’s modern ‘liberal humanist’ successors have used the same trick (though with considerably less justiWcation) to secure legitimacy for their discipline. They deem some Wctions more capable than others of providing ‘insight on the human condition’, that commodity so meaningless and yet so vital to their professional interests. Pretending that a particular work of Wction is speciWcally philosophical can unfortunately become a pastime of lazy literati. But conceiving the converse, to regard philosophy as Wction, is much more productive. The Wnal section of my discussion will now attempt to defend this conception, and to show how recent notions of 55 Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.27: anilibusque fabulis (‘old women’s stories’); 6.25: illa narrabat anicula (‘the little old woman was relating a story’). The phrase leui ac fabuloso sermone et anilibus argumentis (‘with light and fable-Wlled talk and old wives’ reasonings’) is used in Seneca, De beneWciis 1.4 for the methods of those who would oppose the beneWts Seneca commends. There might be a common source: the myth in Plato’s Gorgias at 527a is characterized as ‘like that of an old woman’. 56 De genealogia deorum 5.22 (as well as later in 14.9). See Moreschini (1999).


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philosophy as Wction might prove a useful tool for (re)constructing some ancient categories and assumptions.

PHILOSOPHY AS FICTION The arguments and achievements of many philosophers depend on their ability, and that of their readers, to work with scenarios that can easily be called Wctional. From Thomas More’s Utopia to Thomas Nagel’s famous essay ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, there are numerous examples of this. The connections between ‘thought experiments’, which go back to pre-Socratic philosophy, and invented Wction are also obvious.57 Cicero recognized and commented on the usefulness of fabulae for philosophical investigation. After recounting Plato’s tale of Gyges’ ring, he roundly rebukes those who exhibit what Julia Annas calls the ‘realistic response’ to the ring story by arguing that debates about morality should not countenance fantastic examples (De oYciis 3.39):58 atque hoc loco philosophi quidam, minime mali illi quidem, sed non satis acuti, Wctam et commenticiam fabulam prolatam dicunt a Platone; quasi uero ille aut factum id esse aut Weri potuisse defendat! haec est uis huius anuli et huius exempli: si nemo sciturus, nemo ne suspicaturus quidem sit, cum aliquid diuitiarum, potentiae, dominationis, libidinis causa feceris, si id dis hominibusque futurum sit semper ignotum sisne facturus. Yet on this point, certain philosophers, people who are not at all bad (morally) but who are not very bright, say that the story proVered by Plato is Wctitious and fabricated—as if Plato himself would ever plead that 57 Rescher (1991) 31 deWnes a thought experiment as ‘an attempt to draw instruction from a process of hypothetical reasoning that proceeds by eliciting the consequences of an hypothesis, which for aught that one actually knows to the contrary, may well be false. It consists in reasoning from a supposition that is not accepted as true—perhaps is even known to be false—but is assumed provisionally in the interests of making a point or resolving a conclusion.’ Horowitz and Massey (1991) provide further accounts; see also Nails (1995) on the Derweni papyrus. Nick Zangwill pointed out to me the importance of thought experiment for Galileo’s challenge to Aristotelian physics. 58 Annas (1981) 69. See also Dyck (1996) 539–40 on De oYciis ad loc. Laird (2001) treats the relation of Cicero’s treatment of the ring story and Plato’s Republic in greater depth.

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it had happened or ever could have happened! The real force of that ring and of that illustration is this: if no one were to know or even to suspect when you did something for the sake of wealth, power, sovereignty or lust, and if that action were always to be undetected by gods as well as humans, would you do it?

In Cicero’s view, such opposition to fantastic examples comes from incompetent and stubborn philosophers who cannot distinguish between (1) how one should act in a given scenario, and (2) whether or not that scenario is possible. (It is worth remarking how closely Cicero’s phrasing ‘it . . . happened or ever could have happened’ (factum id esse aut Weri potuisse) resembles the rhetorical language of the Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.13 quoted earlier, although that phrasing here is serving a rather diVerent end.) Philosophy, though, does not wholly consist of entertaining exempla. Isolated myths or occasional fables like the story of Gyges do not, on the face of it, make a case for the whole of philosophy being Wction, or being like Wction. However, Richard Rorty has argued that there are no Wrm foundations which epistemology can use to discriminate between beliefs in general. For Rorty, this means that no belief is more fundamental than any other: The arts, the sciences, the sense of right and wrong, and the institutions of society are not attempts to embody or formulate truth or goodness or beauty. They are attempts to solve problems—to modify our beliefs and desires and activities in ways that will bring us greater happiness than we have now if we can come to see both the coherence and correspondence theories [of truth] as non-competing trivialities, then we may Wnally move realism and idealism. We may reach a point at which, in Wittgenstein’s words, we are capable of stopping doing philosophy when we want to.59

Philosophy therefore has no more Wnality than connoisseurish literary criticism. Philosophy itself becomes rather like a thought experiment, but one which does not need to make a point or resolve a conclusion. Philosophy is just like Wction. Rorty’s position, ‘neo-pragmatism’ as it’s known, is not without antecedents. An original pragmatist was the post-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger. In The Philosophy of As-if, written in 1876, 59 Rorty (1982) 17–18.


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Vaihinger maintained that, apart from sensations and feelings, all human knowledge (logic, metaphysics, religion, law) consists of what he called ‘Wctions’. We should not ask whether these Wctions are true because that will never be determined. Instead, Vaihinger wants us to ask whether it is useful to act as if they were true. C. K. Ogden who translated Vaihinger in 1924, also brought to light a treatise on the ‘Theory of Fictions’ by Jeremy Bentham which Ogden published eight years later.60 Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, which anticipated Vaihinger by more than a century, has sunk back into even greater obscurity. These two theories of philosophical Wctions are remarkably convergent. Yet even now, as Frank Kermode noticed nearly forty years ago, no one has seriously considered such theories of philosophical Wction in relation to theories of literary Wction.61 This is a pity because Vaihinger leads us towards a provisional conclusion. He pinpoints something which might be quite important for understanding the connections between philosophy and invented Wction in antiquity: The view that we can think, without thereby necessarily implying anything as to the nature of existence, and be able to obtain correct practical results, was one to which the ancients never attained.62

In other words the ancients believed that theoretical speculation always had to take you somewhere speciWc.63 Vaihinger continues: The Greeks made no clear-cut distinction between hypothetical and Wctional assumptions and that, as they expressed it at any rate, the confusion is undeniable, and the ambiguity cannot in every case be avoided. In so far as 60 Ogden (1932). 61 Kermode (1996) 36: ‘it is pretty surprising, given the range and minuteness of modern literary theory, that nobody, so far as I know, has ever tried to relate the theory of literary Wctions to the theory of Wctions in general’. 62 Vaihinger (1924) ch. 29: ‘Beginnings of a Theory of Fictions among the Greeks’, 139–40. 63 Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics 76b.39–42 implicitly exempliWes this tendency: ‘Suppositions (hypotheses) are items such that, if they are the case, then by their being the case the conclusion comes about. The geometer does not suppose falsehoods, as some people have asserted. They say that you should not use falsehoods but that geometers speak falsely when they say that a line [in a geometrical diagram] which is not a foot long is a foot long or that a drawn line which is not straight is straight.’ Other examples which might be capable of supporting Vaihinger’s claim are given by the works referenced below in n. 66.

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the expression ŁØ applies to Wctional assumptions, these always refer only to rhetorical or stylistic Wctions or to assumptions which provisionally provide the ground for a chain of argument and which may therefore be called syllogistic Wctions. True methodological Wctions in our modern sense are thereby excluded.64

If this claim is right, the Greeks might have had a similar diYculty in distinguishing categorically between the hypothesis (ŁØ) of a story—that is, what is supposed to happen in a Wction—on the one hand, and hypothesis in argument on the other.65 Or at least they conceived of such a distinction in a very diVerent way from the way in which it is conceived now. An alternative division made by Hermagoras of Temnos in the second century bc diVerentiated between general questions (theses) and speciWc questions (hypotheses).66 The former involve an abstract exposition, the latter generate a story. Quintilian, in Institutio oratoria 3.5.5–7, reports and illustrates that division as follows (general questions he calls ‘indeWnite’, speciWc questions are ‘deWnite’): Item conuenit quaestiones esse aut inWnitas aut Wnitas. inWnitae sunt, quae remotis personis et temporibus et locis ceterisque similibus in utramque partem tractantur, quod Graeci ŁØ dicunt, Cicero propositum, alii quaestiones universales ciuiles, alii quaestiones philosopho convenientes, Athenaeus partem causae appellat . . . Wnitae autem sunt ex complexu rerum, personarum, temporum, ceterorumque; hae ŁØ a Graecis dicuntur, causae a nostris. In his omnis quaestio uidetur circa res personasque consistere. Again it is agreed that questions are either indeWnite or deWnite. IndeWnite questions are those which are tackled one way or the other without reference to individual people, times, places, and other similar factors. These are what the Greeks call theses and what Cicero calls ‘propositions’. Others refer to them as ‘general questions bearing on the community’ and others again see them as ‘questions suitable for philosophical enquiry’; Athenaeus labels them ‘parts of a cause’. . . DeWnite questions on the other hand emerge from a conjunction of facts: speciWc people, times and other such factors. 64 Vaihinger (1924) 142 (my emphasis). 65 For a full and informative accounts of ŁØ in Greek poetic and rhetorical theory and its bearing on Wction, see Trimpi (1971), (1974), and Meijering (1987). 66 The assembled fragments of Hermagoras are in Matthes (1958). Hermagoras was a predominating inXuence on later rhetorical theory in antiquity; see P Oxy. 3708.


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The Greeks call these deWnite questions hypotheses and we call them ‘causes’: a question of this kind seems to turn on people and facts.

Here, once more, a modern reader is bound to think of Aristotle’s famous distinction in Poetics Chapter 9 between history (here corresponding to the ‘deWnite question’, or hypothesis) which ‘tells us what happened’ and poetry (corresponding to the indeWnite question, or thesis) which ‘tells us the sort of thing that would happen’. Poetry, as Aristotle goes on to say, is more like philosophy ‘though it attaches proper names’.67 But Quintilian’s use of the verb uidetur (‘seems’) in the last phrase of this quotation may well be signiWcant. This could conceivably hint that the distinction he has drawn between deWnite and indeWnite questions is merely apparent. Examples abound of ‘deWnite questions’ involving factually speciWc people, times, places—say the controversial hanging of James Hanratty in 1962 or the Columbine High School killings in 1999—which provoke or even turn into indeWnite questions.68 Conversely, theses or indeWnite questions have an alarming habit of becoming rather deWnite, as practice follows theory and life follows art. But another basis for Quintilian’s insecurity is his awareness that the common Latin word for the Greek hypothesis is causa (‘cause’).69 Notwithstanding its wide range of functions, this word is of course used, in a very similar sense to the rhetoricians’, by Roman poets, to denote their theme, or subject of inspiration.70 67 Poetics 1451b: % Ø O Æ Æ KØ ØŁ . Cf. Posterior Analytics 76b (n. 64 above) and also Sidney’s Defense of Poesie quoted in Feeney (1993) 233–4: ‘We see that we cannot play at chess but that we must give names to our chessmen; and yet methinks, he were a very partial champion of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of wood the reverend title of a bishop.’ Note too the second Shakespearian epigraph to this paper. 68 See Russell (1983) for the rhetorical tradition. It should be made clear here that the ancient rhetorical theories of ŁØ and ŁØ are not restricted to proper names. The present discussion here is speculative. 69 Vaihinger (1924) 145 remarks: ‘The Romans translated ŁØ sometimes by suppositio, sometimes by Wctio—so that here we Wnd a strictly logical distinction instead of the confusion of the Greek. The most natural translation of ŁØ is suppositio.’ Although perusal of Lausberg (1998) does indicate that suppositio has more currency in usage than Wctio, the notion of quaestio deWnita presents the most convincing correspondence. 70 On causa as motivation for poetic subject matter, see OLD s.v. causa, §15, which cites inter alia Ovid, Amores 2.17.34 and Propertius 2.1.12.

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The Latin word argumentum raises similar diYculties and issues for the Romans: an argumentum can refer to a Wctitious narrative, as well as to a conclusion based on inference or deduction.71 To uphold (as some might want to) that such homonyms in Greek and Latin are legitimately applied, that the argument of a Wctional work is to be identiWed with a philosophical or another kind of argument, could conWrm the views of those, like David Lewis, who literally believe in the reality of possible worlds.72 But more importantly, these ancient technical signiWcations such as hypothesis, causa, and argumentum always seem to take us back to the process of inference as it bears on the credibility of a story—and to logical closure as a fundamental principle of Wctional construction.73 This helps to show why, for Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Strabo, and others, the eYcacy of poetic Wction might well depend on the philosophical question of what we make of q following p.

ENDNOTE Consideration of the theory of metaphor has an important bearing on some questions raised in this chapter. This consideration is something I have deliberately left aside in order not to complicate further a discussion which is already wide-ranging and overloaded. But it is certainly worth asking what happens to ancient terms such as hypothesis, suppositio, argumentum, not to mention the modern 71 See Quintilian 5.10.9. The headings of the OLD on argumentum (with my emphases): ‘1. A fact or process of reasoning adduced as a ground for belief, a piece of evidence, proof argument. 2. A conclusion based on inference, deduction b (rhet.) the part of a speech devoted to a conclusion based on circumstantial or presumptive evidence. 3. The reason for a thing, motive, basis. 4. A symbolic representation, symbol. 5. The subject of theme (of a letter, speech etc.) b an event or circumstance portrayed in a work of art etc., a subject 6. A narrative, story; esp a Wcititious narrative, fable b a work of art designed to portray an event, a subjectpiece.’ Compare the gloss of argumentum in Isidore, Etymologies 6.8.16: argumentum . . . dictum quasi argutum, vel quod sit argute inuentum ad comprobendas res. (‘an argumentum is something said as if shown, or what might be clearly revealed for a state of aVairs to be proven’). 72 Notes 21 and 39 above. 73 Lausberg (1998) again collects ancient citations for all these terms.


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categories ‘philosophy’, ‘Wction’, ‘epistemology’, in the context of this discussion, if, say, metaphor is reduced to the predicative form X is Y, and the logical relations involved in the identity of X and Y are then interrogated. In an unpublished abstract for an essay entitled ‘The Metaphor of Metaphor’,74 which he did not live long enough to complete, Don Fowler wrote: ‘The most signiWcant approach to metaphor adopted has been the cognitive approach of George LakoV and Mark Johnson [Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980)], which emphasizes the importance of metaphor for structuring thought at a very low level.’ Don had planned to pursue this line of approach for the metaphors of metaphor itself, concentrating on ‘the implicit metaphorics of ancient terms for metaphor and the way in which metaphors of metaphor determine the nature of modern comment on these phenomena’. The under-theorized categories in my own discussion would yield much to this line of approach, even if they would not exhibit the same degree of recursiveness as the terms Don had proposed to examine. 74 Intended for G. Boys-Stones, ed., Metaphor, Allegory and the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions (Oxford, 2003).

14 From Man to Book: The Close of Tacitus’ Agricola Stephen Harrison

At the close of Tacitus’ Agricola, the author famously apostrophizes his dead father-in-law with high emotional intensity. The apostrophe begins at 45.3 (Tu uero, Agricola . . . ), with an account of Agricola’s death and burial from which the author was absent (45.3–5), and then concludes the work by stressing the consolatory function of Agricola’s greatness for his grieving family, and Agricola’s lasting fame (46.1–4) : [1] Si quis piorum manibus locus, si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore exstinguuntur magnae animae, placide quiescas, nosque domum tuam ab inWrmo desiderio et muliebribus lamentis ad contemplationem uirtutum tuarum uoces, quas neque lugeri neque plangi fas est. [2] admiratione te potius et laudibus et, si natura suppeditet, similitudine colamus: is uerus honos, ea coniunctissimi cuiusque pietas. [3] Id Wliae quoque uxorique praeceperim, sic patris, sic mariti memoriam uenerari, ut omnia facta dictaque eius secum reuoluant, formamque ac Wguram animi magis quam corporis complectantur, non quia intercedendum putem imaginibus quae marmore aut aere Wnguntur, sed, ut uultus hominum, ita simulacra uultus imbecilla ac mortalia sunt, forma mentis aeterna quam tenereet exprimere non per alienam materiam et artem, sed tuis ipse moribus possis. [4] Quidquid ex Agricola amauimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansurumque est I am most grateful to Stephen Heyworth, Chris Kraus, Chris Pelling, and the two OUP readers for their helpful comments. This piece is written with warm memories of Don’s teaching, support, and example over two decades.

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in animis hominum in aeternitate temporum, fama rerum; nam multos ueterum uelut inglorios et ignobiles obliuio obruet, Agricola posteritati narratus et traditus superstes erit. If there is any home for the shades of good men, if, as philosophers think, great souls are not extinguished together with the body, then rest in peace, and call us, your household, from our enfeebling loss and our eVeminate grieving to contemplate your manly virtue, which cannot justly be mourned or lamented. Let us rather worship you through admiration, through praise, and, if nature allows, through imitation: that is the true form of compliment, that is the true family loyalty of each closest relative. Let me also give this advice to your daughter and wife: so to venerate the memory of their father and husband as to turn over all his doings and sayings, and to embrace the shape and frame of his mind rather than his body. This is not because I would think it right to object to those images which are made from marble or bronze; but these representations of human features are just as inWrm and mortal as the features of humans themselves, while the form of the mind is everlasting, and you can grasp and express it yourself, not through the raw material and artistic skill of another, but through your own behaviour. Whatever we loved in Agricola, whatever we admired, lasts and will last, in the minds of men, in the eternity of time, through the fame of his deeds: for oblivion will overwhelm many of the ancients as if they lacked all glory and nobility, but Agricola, through being narrated and handed on to posterity, will survive.

This passage begins with what looks like an address to Agricola’s body resting in its tomb, a logical link with the death scene which it immediately succeeds. But by the end of the work, it could be maintained, a fundamental fusion has taken place between man and book: Agricola posteritati narratus et traditus refers both to the subject of the biography, and to the now completed biography itself. Here I want to argue closely for this movement of textualization, and to set it in the context of other aspects of book-personiWcation in Roman literature. Ancient literary books have some tendency to self-referentiality or self-personiWcation at their beginning or end.1 Examples of initial personiWcation of the book in Latin are Ovid, Tristia 1.1, where the exiled poet carefully directs his poetic book back to Rome, and the several books of Martial that are introduced by a poem addressed to 1 For a detailed account of book-address in ancient literature see Citroni (1986).

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the book itself (4.1, 8.1, 10.1, and 11.1).2 Concluding self-reference is also to be found—for example, the sustained personiWcation of the Wrst book of Horace’s Epistles in its last poem as a wayward slave-boy (Epist. 1.20), or the ending of Horace’s Wrst book of Satires, in which a slave is ordered to inscribe 1.10 as the last poem of the book (Serm. 1.10.92). Conclusions may also point more indirectly to identity between author and work: the poet Horace’s grotesquely literal metamorphosis into a bird in Odes 2.20 (1–16) also involves the Xight and dissemination of his odes throughout the known world (17–20), while the poet Ovid’s future survival of the ravages of time, climate, and imperial anger at the end of the Metamorphoses is presented as coextensive with the perpetual survival of the Metamorphoses itself (Met. 15.871–9).3 Though a good case can be made that the Agricola incorporates elements of conventional history and ethnography,4 and though biography in antiquity is a far from unproblematic category, its essential generic shape in focusing on the life of an individual can usefully be termed biographical. One central purpose of biography is to extend the life of the subject beyond its mere mortal span; but there is also an intuitive coextension between the shape of the work and the life of its human subject. Death is the natural closure of a biography, as for example in the biographies of Nepos and in related works such as Sallust’s Catiline; departure from that pattern for other literary and rhetorical purposes is itself a conscious artistic eVect.5 This natural coextension of the life of the biographical subject and the text of the biography itself is exploited in a particularly powerful way at the end of the Agricola, using language which applies to both man and book; in Agricola 46, the description of the man, through systematic linguistic ambiguity, can be seen as becoming increasingly 2 I have also argued in Harrison (1990b) that the Metamorphoses of Apuleius begins in just this way, the prologue to the work being spoken by the personiWed book itself. 3 On the post-exilic allusions to Augustus in this passage see e.g. Kovacs (1987) 463–4. 4 Cf. Marincola (1999) 320–2, Dihle (1987) 27–32. 5 For some good examples from Plutarch’s Lives see Pelling (1997); Chris Kraus points out to me that Sallust’s Iugurtha also presents a deviant ending (113–14) by closing with Iugurtha still alive (though soon to be executed) and with the focus on Marius’ future military career.

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identical with that of the biography itself, until at the end we Wnd a highly textualized Agricola posteritati narratus et traditus. The great individual’s life is extended through a homonymous but separate existence as a book: Agricola has in eVect become Agricola.6 Already in 46.1 the wish placide quiescas shows this ambiguity. Just as the opening doubt as to post-death existence (si quis . . . ) is a rhetorical commonplace,7 this thought is a version of a common sepulchral formula (‘R.I.P.’:8 compare especially CLE 467.8 manes placida tibi nocte quiescant), and quiesco is commonly used of the rest that comes with death (OLD s.v. quiesco, §3; compare especially CLE 541.12 hic ego sepultus iaceo placidusque quiesco). However, another reading is simultaneously possible: quiesco in the sense of ‘fall silent’ can also be used of the ceasing of a narrator’s narrative. At the end of his inserted narrative of Aeneid 2–3, Aeneas conticuit tandem factoque hic Wne quieuit (Aeneid 3.718), while Statius in describing the Tiburtine villa of Manilius Vopiscus asks quid primum mediumue canam, quo Wne quiescam (Siluae 1.3.34). Here the wish for peaceful rest for Agricola is matched by a wish for peaceful closure for the narrative of Agricola; Agricola is to be laid to rest both in the tomb and in an appropriately restful closure of his life story. To see the Agricola (and especially its very Ciceronian conclusion)9 as sharing some characteristics of a speech is not diYcult; Tacitus was of course one of the greatest orators of his own time, and critics have often remarked on the rhetorical tone of the work and its clear relation to the laudatio funebris.10 The quiet close wished by Tacitus for the Agricola itself is performed in the rhetoric of this conclusion; though it is emotionally intense, it is strongly cathartic after the harrowing account in 43.1–4 of Agricola’s early and much-lamented death, and in eVect oVers both Agricola’s family and the reader a form of consolation. This is achieved by the turn from (futile) lament 6 De vita Iuli Agricola is the subscriptio of the oldest MS E, and perhaps the nearest we can get to an ancient title. 7 See the good note of Ogilvie and Richmond (1967) 312, adding the additional material collected by Courtney (1995) 403. 8 See Ogilvie and Richmond (1967) 22, 312. 9 On the Ciceronian colour of the conclusion see Ogilvie and Richmond (1967) 22–3. 10 See Ogilvie and Richmond (1967) 12–13 and Dihle (1986) 27–32.

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to the (more comforting) contemplation of Agricola’s virtues (46.1 contemplationem uirtutum tuarum), rounding oV the larger frame beginning at 44.1 which employs many elements of the literary consolatio.11 The recording and examination of virtues is a key idea in ancient biography and historiography more generally. In the conclusion of the Agricola this idea provides a clear ring with the opening of the work and its self-justiWcation as the narrative of the triumph of virtue (Agr. 1.1 quotiens magna aliqua ac nobilis virtus vicit). It also matches Plutarch’s contemporary stress on the eVect on the biographer and reader of contemplating and recording virtue, for example at the opening of his Pericles (1.4): ‘These objects of contemplation lie in deeds resulting from virtue, which create in those recording them a certain zeal and enthusiasm conducive to imitation.’ Having dealt with the eVect on the author, Plutarch also goes on to outline the role of admiration in bringing about imitation of virtuous action in the readers of a biography (2.2): ‘But virtue shown in actions immediately brings about admiration for the deeds and a desire to emulate the doers.’12 Plutarch’s stress here on the biographical reader’s reaction of admiration and praise for, and imitation of, the great man’s virtuous deeds again matches Agricola 46.2 admiratione te potius et laudibus et, si natura suppeditet, similitudine colamus. I do not wish to press a direct intertextual link between the close contemporaries Tacitus and Plutarch; these ideas of the intellectual and moral virtue and value of writing, reading, and imitating the history of great men are in any case present in Livy’s preface and the introductions to Sallust’s Catiline and Iugurtha, more immediate sources for Tacitus, and in previous texts.13 11 See again Ogilvie and Richmond (1967) 301 and Dihle (1986) 27–32. 12 For a full discussion of the Pericles proem and its stress on the moral improvement of reading biography cf. DuV (1999) 34–44. 13 Cf. Livy, praef. 10, Sallust, Cat. 3.2, and Iug. 4.5–6; these ideas are also present in general form in the Greek historiographical tradition, cf. Thucydides 1.22.4, Polybius 2.61.3, Diodorus 1.1.2–4, and speciWcally repeated in Tacitus’ Annals (3.65.1 praecipuum munus annalium reor, ne uirtutes sileantur, utque prauis dictis factisque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit, cf. 4.33.2). On Sallustian echoes in the Agricola and Tacitus’ use of Sallust’s biographical form see conveniently Ogilvie and Richmond (1967) 23–7, though there it is argued that the central narrative portions are most Sallustian and the closure Ciceronian in style (23); for further literature see Ogilvie, Saddington, and Keppie (1991) 1719 n. 33.

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The central point here is that the exhortations of Agricola’s family to contemplate, honour, and imitate his virtues closely match wellestablished Graeco-Roman ideas on the function of biography for its readers and writers, and that now Agricola is dead and only Agricola remains, imitation of the life of the great man as seen in the commemorating biography is as important as, or even more important than, imitation of the life as seen at Wrst hand. It is through reading the Agricola, the living continuation of the dead man’s virtues, that Agricola’s family, and subsequent readers who did not know him personally, will contemplate and show the proper response to his greatness. The Wrst person plural colamus refers primarily to Tacitus himself and Agricola’s close family, but also to all subsequent readers. Tacitus himself can pay honour to Agricola both by imitating the great man’s virtues from the life (like his wife and mother-in-law) and (like Plutarch, but unlike his own wife and mother-in-law) by recording them as outstanding for posterity in his biography; but the later reader can do so only by reading and emulating the greatness of the dead man as written in the biography. For them, Agricola can always be only Agricola. The clause si natura suppeditet suggests primarily that the writer, already forty, is not sure of surviving long enough to be certain of imitating his father-in-law’s virtues—natura often means ‘natural life-span’; a clear parallel is found in the proem to the Historiae, again with reference to Tacitus’ future literary ambitions (Hist. 1.1.4 si uita suppeditet, principatum diui Nervae et imperium Traiani, uberiorem securioremque materiam, senectuti seposui ). But this phrase could also represent the common trope of authorial modesty; natura could suggest the natural talent of the writer himself (compare famously Juvenal 1.79 si natura negat, facit indignatio versum), while similitudo, referring primarily to the cultivation of resemblance of character through emulation of Agricola’s virtues, could also refer to the lack of bias and capacity to represent the truth demanded by the ancient historiographical and biographical tradition. This truthful representation of behaviour and character is markedly stressed at the beginning of the Agricola itself (1.2 ad prodendam virtutis memoriam sine gratia aut ambitione). The wish would then be that Tacitus himself may have suYcient natural ability to achieve a true

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representation of Agricola’s great virtues in writing the Agricola, as well as to imitate them in living his life. Such an expression of modesty might seem out of place in a conclusion which claims that a work will commemorate its subject for evermore; but it is especially appropriate to the encomiastic context in the Agricola, since it is clearly a form of the encomiastic topos ‘How can I praise you adequately?’14 As usual in contexts of authorial modesty, there is no real doubt as to the author’s capacity to do the job. Similarly ambiguous is the sentence enjoining Agricola’s family to venerate his memory: id Wliae quoque uxorique praeceperim, sic patris, sic mariti memoriam uenerari, ut omnia facta dictaque eius secum reuoluant. The stress on memoria as a response to Agricola’s virtues Wts not only family memory but also literary commemoration through biography; here the sense of memoria as ‘written record’ is surely relevant (OLD s.v. memoria, §8, TLL 8.675.56 V.); once again there seems to be an echo of a Sallustian preface (Iug. 4.1 memoria rerum gestarum, plainly referring to the writing of history). Agricola’s memory will be honoured through the imitation and perpetuation of his character, both in his family’s mimetic behaviour and in his son-in-law’s literary mimesis. This looks back again to the Agricola’s programmatic opening and its ideal of the good biographer’s (or historian’s) motivation in the commemoration of virtue (1.2): ita celeberrimus quisque ingenio ad prodendam uirtutis memoriam sine gratia et ambitione bonae tantum conscientiae pretio ducebatur. Likewise with omnia facta dictaque: this can be read as pious domestic recall of the late father and husband’s every deed and word, but it also echoes the content and function of history and biography in recalling the deeds of great men, again a notion found in the celebrated opening of the Agricola: Clarorum uirorum facta moresque posteris tradere (1.1). Agricola’s family are to contemplate his virtues through reading the Agricola’s account of his deeds and words, the deeds and words that are the natural material of ancient historiography (compare similarly Ann. 3.65.1 dictis factisque), which since Thucydides had recounted events and represented

14 Cf. e.g. Cicero, Phil. 5.35 quibusnam uerbis eius laudes huius ipsius temporis consequi possumus? and Virgil, Aen. 11.125 quibus caelo te laudibus aequem?

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likely speeches. Another conWrmation of this is the verb reuoluant: this can be used often in the sense of ‘revolve in one’s mind’, but the literal sense points to the unrolling of a papyrus scroll in order to read it (OLD s.v. revolvo, §2b; compare for example Seneca, Suas. 6.27 librum usque ad umbilicum reuoluere). Once again, Tacitus’ wife and mother-in-law, and by implication future generations of readers, are urged to read Tacitus’ book, now complete, as their means of recalling the lost great man’s deeds and sayings: Agricola is to be recovered through Agricola. Similarly metaliterary is the emphasis in the lines which follow on the importance of embracing Agricola’s mental qualities rather than his physical appearance (formamque ac Wguram animi magis quam corporis). The prizing of mind over body irresistibly recalls the opening of both Sallust’s Catiline and Iugurtha (Cat. 1.2, Iug. 3–4) and the formula points to a key element of ancient biography and history more generally, the way in which it claims to record the true achievements and characters of men, clarorum uirorum facta moresque (Agr. 1.1), a phrase which famously echoes the opening of Cato’s Origines.15 Further, the claim that accounts of a man’s mind are better and longer-lasting than mere physical representations clearly looks to the common idea that literature is more eVective at perpetuating greatness than the plastic arts;16 a particular source (once again) lies in a programmatic passage of Sallust (Iug. 4.5–6), where a similar claim is made for the superiority of historical writing over conventional mask imagines as an inspiring record of past great men. All this suggests that literary biography and not mere familial memory is at stake here; the memory of a man’s character will not last long if not written down, and can only surpass physical portraits in perpetuating an individual through the immortality of literature—that is (in this case) biography. In the course of its Wnal sentence, as I observed above, the Agricola seems to move from ambiguity between man and biography to

15 For the details see Ogilvie and Richmond (1967) 126. 16 This goes back at least to Pindar, Nemean 5.1–5; for Roman material cf. e.g. Horace, Odes 3.30.1, 4.2.19–20, 4.8.13–20, Brink on Horace, Epist. 2.1.248, Suerbaum (1968) 190–93. For the idea that textual images of men’s minds are superior to artistic images of their bodies see also Isocrates, Evag. 73–6, Cicero, Arch. 30.

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concern only with the biography; this is natural enough, since we are at the very moment when the man Agricola begins his second and more durable career as the book Agricola. This matches the other texts mentioned at the beginning of this piece which look forward at their end to their coming (or perhaps actual) reception by readers. But still ambiguity remains. Quidquid ex Agricola amauimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansurumque est in animis hominum in aeternitate temporum, fama rerum: does ‘Agricola’ here mean the man or the book? The sentence can be read as I have translated it: ‘Whatever we loved in Agricola, whatever we admired, lasts and will last, in the minds of men, in the eternity of time, through the fame of his deeds’; but those deeds can only be eVectively perpetuated in literature, in the very biography that Tacitus is writing. We can thus read the verbs as truly perfective and the sentence as referring to the work which we its readers (and Tacitus its writer) have just completed: ‘Whatever we have loved in Agricola, whatever we have admired in it, will remain in men’s minds because of the fame of his history.’ This ambiguity is helped by the ambivalent use of res here. The word clearly stands in this context for res gestae (compare OLD s.v. res, §7b), but like that phrase (and the English ‘history’ with which I just translated it) is notably vague between the actual achievements of a character and their inscription in a work of history or biography : Tacitus himself can refer to historians as auctores rerum (Ann. 3.3). Like many other Latin authors,17 Tacitus here at a closural point predicts fame and eternity for his work, and hence for the virtues of his great father-in-law. Many great men have been forgotten owing to inadequate commemoration, and it is only if the narrative vehicle of Agricola lasts that Agricola himself will last: Agricola posteritati narratus et traditus superstes erit. This not only incorporates a common topos on the perpetuating power of literature—that great men need great literary artists to ensure their fame18—but also encompasses a popular mode of poetic closure, looking to the future.19 The words 17 Largely poets at the end of works or individual books of works, another aspect of the very ‘literary’ texture of this conclusion: cf. e.g. Horace, Odes 2.20, 3.30, Ovid, Am. 1.15, Met. 15.871–9, Tr. 4.10.123–32, Statius, Thebaid 12.810–19. 18 Cf. famously Horace, Odes 4.9.25–9. 19 Called ‘aftermath’ in Roberts, Dunn, and Fowler (1997), see 303 for references.

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narratus et traditus mark the ultimate transformation of man into book: the Xesh and blood Agricola of history has indeed lasted almost entirely as the textual construct of Tacitus’ Agricola, the hero of a brilliantly commemorative work of literature.20 I hope it will be clear that this paper with its theme of the movement from man to book Wnds an especially Wtting place at the end of this volume. It analyses in metaliterary mode a passage which marks the closure of an ancient work, thus engaging with some of Don’s major critical interests; and the text it discusses laments the premature death of an admired and loved man. That text also suggests that a work celebrating and attempting to imitate a man’s character and achievements is a Wtting form of consolation and commemoration for those who remain and come after: quidquid ex Agricola amauimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansurumque est in animis hominum in aeternitate temporum. That is the rationale of this book. 20 Cf. Ogilvie and Richmond (1967) 1: ‘Outside his biography by Tacitus . . . Agricola is hardly known.’

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Bibliography of Don Fowler’s Published Works Compiled by Stephen Harrison (with the assistance of Peta Fowler)

1 Authored books The bracketed abbreviations are used in §3 below. Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin (Oxford, 2000) [RC]. Lucretius on Atomic Motion: A Commentary on Lucretius De rerum natura Book Two, lines 1–332 (Oxford, 2002) [LAM]. Unrolling the Text: Books and Readers in Latin Poetry (Oxford, forthcoming). 2 Edited books and journal special issues ed., with M. Labate: Studi sul romanzo antico [special issue Materiali e Discussioni 25] (Pisa, 1990). ed., rev., and tr., with J. B. Solodow and G. W. Most: G. B. Conte, Latin Literature: A History (Baltimore, 1994). ed., with D. H. Roberts and F. Dunn: Classical Closure (Princeton, 1997). ed., with S. Hinds: Memoria, arte, allusiva, intertestualita` / Memory, Allusion, Intertextuality [special issue Materiali e Discussioni 39] (Pisa, 1997). ed., with E. Spentzou: Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (Oxford, 2002). 3 Articles and book chapters References to RC and LAM relate to the authored books listed in §1 above. ‘Vergil, Aeneid 6. 392–4’, Liverpool Classical Monthly 7 (1982) 76. ‘An Acrostic in Vergil (Aeneid 7. 601–604)?’, CQ n.s. 33 (1983) 298. ‘Lucretius on the Clinamen and ‘Free Will’ (II 251–93)’, in G. Macchiaroli, ed., Syzetesis: studi sull’epicureismo greco e romano oVerti a Marcello Gigante (Naples, 1983) 1. 329–52 [repr. in LAM 407–27].

350

Bibliography of Don Fowler

‘Vergil, Aeneid 6. 392–4 Again’, Liverpool Classical Monthly 8 (1983) 77–8. ‘New Directions’, ZPE 59 (1985) 45–6. ‘Vergil on Killing Virgins’, in P. Hardie, M. Whitby, and M. Whitby, eds, Homo viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble (Bristol, 1987) 185–98. ‘Notes on Pighius and Valerius Maximus’, CQ n.s. 38 (1988) 262–4. ‘Taplin on Cocks’, CQ n.s. 39 (1989) 257–9. ‘Lucretius and Politics’, in M. GriYn and J. Barnes, eds, Philosophia Togata (Oxford, 1989) 120–150. ‘First Thoughts on Closure: Problems and Prospects’, Materiali e Discussioni 22 (1989) 75–122 [repr. in RC 239–84]. with E. H. Bispham: ‘Horace, Epistles 2. 2. 89’, CQ n.s. 40 (1990) 280–3. ‘Deviant Focalisation in Virgil’s Aeneid ’, PCPhS 36 (1990) 42–63 [repr. in RC 40–63]. ‘Narrate and Describe: The Problem of Ekphrasis’, Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991) 25–35 [repr. in RC 64–85]. ‘Response’ to P. R. Hardie, ‘Tales of Unity and Division in Imperial Latin Epic’, in J. H. Molyneux, ed., Literary Responses to Civil Discord (Nottingham, 1993) 73–6. ‘The Pagination of the Archetype of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Two Notes’, Tria Lustra, Liverpool Classical Papers 3 [special issue Liverpool Classical Monthly] (1993) 237–241. ‘Epicureanism’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 113 (1993) 169–74 [review article]. ‘Postmodernism, Romantic Irony and Classical Closure’, in I. J. F. de Jong and J. P. Sullivan, eds, Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature (Leiden, 1994) 231–56 [repr. in RC 5–34]. ‘Martial and the Book’, Ramus 24 (1995) 31–58. ‘From Epos to Cosmos: Lucretius, Ovid, and the Poetics of Segmentation’, in D. C. Innes, H. Hine, and C. Pelling, eds, Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on his Seventy-Wfth Birthday (Oxford, 1995) 3–18. ‘Horace and the Aesthetics of Politics’, in S. J. Harrison, ed., Homage to Horace: A Bimillenary Celebration (Oxford, 1995) 248–66. ‘Modern Literary Theory and Latin Poetry: Some Anglo-American Perspectives’, Arachnion 1. 2 (1995) [repr. in http://www.cisi.unito.it/arachne/ num2/fowler.html, accessed 10 December 2004]. ‘The Feminine Principle: Gender in the De rerum natura’, in G. Giannantoni and M. Gigante, eds, Epicureismo greco e romano (Naples, 1996) 813–22 [repr. in LAM 444–52]. with Peta Fowler: ‘Lucretius’, in S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, eds, Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford and New York, 1996) 888–90.


351

‘God the Father (himself) in Virgil’, PVS 22 (1996) 35–52 [repr. in RC 218–34]. ‘Moderne Literaturtheorie und lateinische Dichtung’, Anregung 42 (1996) 311–18. ‘The Virgil Commentary of Servius’, in C. A. Martindale, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997) 73–8. ‘Virgilian Narrative’, in C. A. Martindale, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997) 259–70. ‘Even Better than the Real Thing: A Tale of Two Cities’, in J. Elsner, ed., Art and Text in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 1996) 57–74 [repr. in RC 86– 107]. with Peta Fowler: ‘Introduction’, in R. Melville, tr., Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford, 1997) xi–xxvii. ‘Second Thoughts on Closure’, in D. H. Roberts, F. M. Dunn, and D. P. Fowler, eds, Classical Closure (Princeton, 1997), 3–22 [repr. in RC 284–308]. ‘Epicurean Anger’, in S. M. Braund and C. Gill, eds, The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge, 1997) 16–35. ‘On the Shoulders of Giants: Intertextuality and Classical Studies’, in D. P. Fowler and S. Hinds, eds, Memoria, arte, allusiva, intertestualita` / Memory, Allusion, Intertextuality [special issue Materiali e Discussioni 39] (Pisa, 1997) 13–34 [repr. in RC 115–37]. ‘Opening the Gates of War: Aeneid 7. 601–640’, in H.-P. Stahl, ed., Vergil’s Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context (London, 1998) 155–74 [repr. in RC 173–92]. ‘Criticism as Commentary and Commentary as Criticism in the Age of Electronic Media’, in G. Most, ed., Commentaries / Kommentare (Go¨ttingen, 1999) 426–42. ‘Catullus 68 and Propertius 1. 10’, in V. Bećares, F. Pordomingo, R. Corte´s Tovar, and J. C. Fernańdez Corte, eds, Intertextualidad en las literaturas griega y latina (Salamanca, 2000) 233–40. ‘Epic in the Middle of the Wood: Mise en abyme in the Nisus and Euryalus Episode’, in A. Sharrock and H. Morales, eds, Intratextuality (Oxford, 2000) 89–113. ‘The Didactic Plot’, in M. Depew and D. Obbink, eds, Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000) 205–20. ‘Philosophy and Literature in Lucretian Intertextuality’, RC 138–55. ‘Pyramus, Thisbe, King Kong: Ovid and the Presence of Poetry’, RC 156–67. ‘The Ruin of Time: Monuments and Survival at Rome’, RC 193–217. ‘Writing with Style: The Prologue to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses between Fingierte Mu¨ndlichkeit and Textuality’, in A. Kahane and A. Laird, eds,

352


A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (Oxford, 2001) 225–30. ‘Introduction’ to ‘Narrative’, in S. J. Harrison, ed., Texts, Ideas and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory and Classical Literature (Oxford, 2001) 65–69. ‘Masculinity under Threat? The Poetics and Politics of Inspiration in Latin Poetry’, in D. P. Fowler and E. Spentzou, eds, Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (Oxford, 2002) 141–60. ‘What Kind of a Reductionist was Epicurus?’, LAM 429–43. ‘Laocoon’s Point of View: Walking the Roman Way’, in S. J. Heyworth, ed., Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler (Oxford, 2007) 1–17. 4 Reviews review of W. Haase, ed., Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt, II. 30. 1: Sprache und Literatur (Berlin, 1983), in CR n.s. 34 (1984) 45–52. ‘Sceptics and Epicureans’, review of M. Gigante, Scetticismo e epicureismo (Naples, 1981), in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2 (1984) 237–67. Don Fowler wrote the demandingly regular ‘Roman Literature’ section, containing short reviews of recent books in the Weld, at the end of each of the sixteen biannual fascicles of the journal Greece and Rome for the period 1986–93 (volumes 33–40 of the journal); the review section of the journal was known as ‘Brief Reviews’ until volume 38 (1991), when it was renamed ‘Subject Reviews’. Don’s contributions here became something of an institution in Latin studies, and their publication was eagerly or fearfully awaited by his friends and colleagues for their jokes, learning, avowedly personal tone, commitment to the subject, and non-avoidance of controversy. The following list gives summary details of the 163 books reviewed by Don in these contributions; the latter not only show his remarkable range and reading across the whole Weld of Latin studies but also give a good insight into his scholarly views and personality. ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 33 (1986) 88–90. R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (Cambridge, 1985). N. W. Slater, Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of The Mind (Princeton, 1985). O. Skutsch, The Annals of Quintus Ennius (Oxford, 1985). J. Ferguson, Catullus (Lawrence, Kan., 1985). T. P. Wiseman, Catullus and his World: A Reappraisal (Cambridge, 1985). J. L. Butrica, The Manuscript Tradition of Propertius (Toronto, 1984).


353

P. Fedeli, Properzio: il libro terzo delle elegie (Bari, 1985). C. Renger, Aeneas und Turnus: Analyse einer Feindschaft (Frankfurt, 1985). J. P. Sullivan, Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero (Ithaca, 1985). ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 33 (1986) 206–10. W. E. Forehand, Terence (Boston, 1985). A. E. Douglas, Cicero: Tusculan Disputations, 1 (Warminster, 1985). C. Rambaux, Trois analyses de l’amour. Catulle: Poe´sies, Ovide: Les amours, Apuleé: Le conte de Psyche´ (Paris, 1985). W. G. Shepherd, Propertius: The Poems (Harmondsworth, 1985). F.-H. Mutschler, Die poetische Kunst Tibulls (Frankfurt, 1985). P. R. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986). D. E. Hill, Ovid: Metamorphoses I–IV (Warminster, 1985). F. Ahl, Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca, 1985). F. Verducci, Ovid’s Toyshop of the Heart: epistulae heroidum (Princeton, 1985). J. D. Bishop, Seneca’s Daggered Stylus (Ko¨nigstein, 1985). D. Henry and E. Henry, The Mask of Power: Seneca’s Tragedies and Imperial Rome (Warminster, 1985). N. M. Kay, Martial Book XI (London, 1985). J. J. Winkler, Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Berkeley, 1985). ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 34 (1987) 88–94. J. Barsby, Plautus: Bacchides (Warminster, 1986). P. B. Corbett, The Scurra (Edinburgh, 1986). C. J. Classen, ed., Probleme der Lukrezforschung (Hildesheim, 1986). D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero: Philippics (Ann Arbor, 1986). W. K. Lacey, Cicero: Second Philippic (Warminster, 1986). P. Heuze´, L’image du corps dans l’oeuvre de Virgile (Paris, 1985). M. C. J. Putnam, ArtiWces of Eternity: Horace’s Fourth Book of Odes (Ithaca, 1986). C. W. Macleod, Horace: The Epistles (Rome, 1986). M. Myerowitz, Ovid’s Games of Love (Detroit, 1985). A. D. Melville, Ovid: Metamorphoses (Oxford, 1986). M. Pulbrook, Ovid: Nux (Maynooth, 1985). O. Zwierlein, L. Annaei Senecae tragoediae (Oxford, 1986). J. Ku¨ppers, Tantarum causa irarum: Untersuchungen zur einleitenden Bu¨cherdyade der Punica des Silius Italicus (Berlin, 1986).

354


E. Courtney, Juvenal: The Satires (Rome, 1984). ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 34 (1987) 217–21. S. M. Goldberg, Understanding Terence (Princeton, 1986). T. N. Mitchell, Cicero: Verrines II. 1 (Warminster, 1986). J. GriYn, Virgil (Oxford, 1986). R. O. A. M. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford, 1987). W. V. Clausen, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry (Berkeley, 1987). A. J. Boyle, The Chaonian Dove: Studies in the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil (Leiden, 1986). R. A. Cardwell and J. Hamilton, Virgil in a Cultural Tradition: Essays to Celebrate the Millennium (Nottingham, 1986). F. Ahl, Seneca: Phaedra (Ithaca, 1986). F. Ahl, Seneca: Medea (Ithaca, 1986). F. Ahl: Seneca: Trojan Women (Ithaca, 1986). U. Knoche, Ausgewa¨hlte Kleine Schriften [ed. W.-W. Ehlers] (Frankfurt, 1986). L. Pepe, ed., Semiotica della novella latina (Rome, 1986). F. Cairns, ed., Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar, 5 (Liverpool, 1986). ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 35 (1988) 92–5. J. Godwin, Lucretius: De rerum natura IV (Warminster, 1987). D. O. Ross, Virgil’s Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics (Princeton, 1987). T. D. Papanghelis, Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (Cambridge, 1987). J. P. Sullivan and P. Whigham, Epigrams of Martial Englished by Divers Hands (Berkeley, 1987). L. A. Sussman, The Major Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian (Frankfurt, 1987). ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 35 (1988) 207–16. M. M. Willcock, Plautus: Pseudolus (Bristol, 1987). A. S. Gratwick, Terence: The Brothers (Warminster, 1987). J. N. Grant, Studies in the Textual Tradition of Terence (Toronto, 1986). N. Rudd and T. Wiedemann, Cicero: De legibus I (Bristol, 1987). D. H. Porter, Horace’s Poetic Journey: A Reading of Odes 1–3 (Princeton, 1987). P. J. Connor, Horace’s Lyric Poetry: The Force of Humour (Berwick, Victoria, 1987).


355

S. E. Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone (Cambridge, 1987). J. C. McKeown, Ovid: Amores, 1 (Liverpool, 1987). W. R. Johnson, Momentary Monsters: Lucan and his Heroes (Ithaca, 1987). O. Zwierlein, Senecas Phaedra und ihre Vorbilder (Stuttgart, 1987). R. Jakobi, Der EinXuss Ovids auf den Tragiker Seneca (Berlin, 1988). A. J. Boyle, Seneca’s Phaedra (Liverpool, 1987). G. Lee and W. Barr, The Satires of Persius (Liverpool, 1987). B. K. Gold, Literary Patronage in Greece and Rome (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987). ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 36 (1989) 100–09. A. J. Brothers, Terence: The Self-Tormentor (Warminster, 1988). J. G. F. Powell, Cicero: Cato Maior de Senectute (Cambridge, 1988). G. Luck, Albii Tibulli aliorumque carmina (Stuttgart, 1988). D. West, The Bough and the Gate (Exeter, 1987). J.-L. Pomathios, Le pouvoir politique et sa repre´sentation dans l’Eńeíde de Virgile (Brussels, 1987). J. B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988). K. M. Coleman, Statius Silvae Book IV (Oxford, 1988). U. Eigler, Monologische Redeformen bei Valerius Flaccus (Frankfurt, 1988). J. Delz, Silius Italicus: Punica (Stuttgart, 1987). W. H. Parker, Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God (London, 1988). ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 36 (1989) 234–41. R. D. Brown, Lucretius on Love and Sex (Leiden, 1987). R. F. Thomas, Virgil: Georgics I–II (Cambridge, 1988). R. F. Thomas, Virgil: Georgics III–IV (Cambridge, 1988). S. F. Wiltshire, Public and Private in Vergil’s Aeneid (Amherst, 1989). J. C. McKeown, Ovid: Amores, 2 (Leeds, 1989). C. D. N. Costa, Seneca: 17 Letters (Warminster, 1988). S. H. Braund, Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires (Cambridge, 1988). J. G. GriYth, Festinat senex (Oxford, 1988). N. M. Horsfall, ed., Vir bonus discendi peritus: Studies in Celebration of Otto Skutsch’s Eightieth Birthday (London,. 1988). A. J. Boyle, ed., The Imperial Muse, 1 (Berwick, Victoria, 1988). ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 37 (1990) 104–11. P. Veyne, Roman Erotic Elegy: Love, Poetry and the West (Chicago, 1988). F. Cairns, Virgil’s Augustan Epic (Cambridge, 1989). E. Henry, The Vigour of Prophecy: A Study of Virgil’s Aeneid (Bristol, 1989).

356


M. Armisen-Marchetti, Sapientiae facies: e´tude sur les images de Seńe`que (Paris, 1989). T. G. Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (Berkeley, 1989). J. Diggle, J. B. Hall, and H. D. Jocelyn, eds, Studies in Latin Literature and its Tradition in Honour of C. O. Brink (Cambridge, 1989). R. Herzog, ed., Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike, 5: Restauration und Erneuerung: die lateinische Literatur von 284 bis 374 n. Chr. (Munich, 1989). ‘Brief Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 37 (1990) 235–42. D. H. Garrison, The Student’s Catullus (Norman, Okla., 1989). M. Owen Lee, Death and Rebirth in Virgil’s Arcadia (Albany, NY, 1989). C. G. Perkell, The Poet’s Truth: A Study of the Poet in Virgil’s Georgics (Berkeley, 1989). N. Rudd, Horace Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones (Cambridge, 1989). J. T. Davis, Fictus adulter: Poet as Actor in the Amores (Amsterdam, 1989). E. Courtney, P. Papini Stati Silvae (Oxford, 1990). K. Wellesley, Cornelius Tacitus II. 1: Historiae (Lepizig, 1989). M. von Albrecht, Masters of Roman Prose from Cato to Apuleius (Leeds, 1989). W. Haase, ed., Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt, II. 33. 2: Sprache und Literatur (Berlin, 1989). ‘Subject Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 38 (1991) 85–97. S. Ireland, Terence: The Mother-in-Law (Warminster, 1990). G. Lee, The Poems of Catullus (Oxford, 1990). I. McAuslan and P. Walcott, eds, Virgil (Oxford, 1990). S. J. Harrison, ed., Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford, 1990). K. W. Gransden, Virgil: The Aeneid (Cambridge, 1990). C. J. Mackie, The Characterisation of Aeneas (Edinburgh, 1988). R. S. Kilpatrick, The Poetry of Criticism: Horace, Epistles II and Ars poetica (Edmonton, 1990). H. Isbell, Ovid: Heroides (Harmondsworth, 1990). M. CoVey and R. Mayer, Seneca: Phaedra (Cambridge, 1990). R. H. Martin and A. J. Woodman, Tacitus: Annals Book IV (Cambridge, 1990). ‘Subject Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 38 (1991) 235–47. O. Zwierlein, Zur Kritik und Exegese des Plautus, 1: Poenulus und Curculio (Mainz, 1990). A. Schiesaro, Simulacrum et imago: gli argomenti analogici nel De rerum natura (Pisa, 1990).


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C. Segal, Lucretius on Death and Anxiety (Princeton, 1990). R. A. B. Mynors, Virgil: Georgics (Oxford, 1990). D. West, Virgil: The Aeneid, a New Prose Translation (Harmondsworth, 1990). M. Gigante, ed., Virgilio e gli augustei (Naples, 1990). A. D. Melville, Ovid: The Love Poems (Oxford, 1990). N. W. Slater, Reading Petronius (Baltimore, 1990). ‘Subject Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 39 (1992) 84–98. J. Rabinowitz, Gaius Valerius Catullus’s Complete Poetic Works (Dallas, 1991). L. D. Reynolds, C. Sallusti Crispi Catilina, Iugurtha, Historiarum fragmenta selecta, appendix Sallustiana (Oxford, 1991). D. C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic (Oxford, 1991). M. Dewar, Statius: Thebaid IX (Oxford, 1991). A. J. Boyle, ed., The Imperial Muse, 2 (Bendigo, Victoria, 1990). E. Courtney, The Poems of Petronius (Atlanta, Ga., 1991). N. Rudd, Juvenal: The Satires (Oxford, 1991). W. Haase, ed., Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt, II. 33. 3: Sprache und Literatur (Berlin, 1991). ‘Subject Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome, 39 (1992) 223–35. R. C. Beacham, The Roman Theatre and its Audience (London, 1991). S. J. Harrison, Vergil: Aeneid 10 (Oxford, 1991). K. W. Gransden, Virgil: Aeneid XI (Cambridge, 1991). D. H. Garrison, Horace: Epodes and Odes, a New Annotated Latin Edition (Norman, Okla., 1991). G. Davis, Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse (Berkeley, 1991). B. Frischer, Shifting Paradigms: New Approaches to Horace’s Ars poetica (Atlanta, Ga., 1991). J. Booth, Ovid: Amores II (Warminster, 1991). W. V. Clausen, A. Persi Flacci et D. Iuni Iuvenalis Satirae (Oxford, 1992). J. P. Sullivan, Martial: The Unexpected Classic (Cambridge, 1991). W. Haase, ed., Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt, II. 33. 4: Sprache und Literatur (Berlin, 1991). W. Haase, ed., Aufstieg under Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt, II. 33. 5: Sprache und Literatur (Berlin, 1991). R. P. H. Green, The Works of Ausonius (Oxford, 1991). ‘Subject Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome, 40 (1993) 85–97. J. Godwin, Lucretius: De rerum natura VI (Warminster, 1991). C. Martin, Catullus (New Haven, 1992).

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D. R. Slavitt, Virgil (New Haven, 1991). L. Edmunds, From a Sabine Jar: Reading Horace Odes 1. 9 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992). G. Warmuth, Autobiographische Tierbilder bei Horaz (Hildesheim, 1992). J. F. Miller, Ovid’s Elegiac Festivals (Frankfurt, 1991). J. Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s ‘Bellum civile’ (Cambridge, 1992). V. Hunink, M. Annaeus Lucanus: Bellum civile Book III (Amsterdam, 1992). E. Fantham, Lucan: De bello civili Book II (Cambridge, 1992). S. H. Braund, Lucan: Civil War (Oxford, 1992). S. P. Bovie, C. Carrier, and D. Parker, Terence: The Comedies (Baltimore, 1992). D. R. Slavitt, Seneca: The Tragedies, 1 (Baltimore, 1992). W. T. Wehrle, The Satiric Voice: Program, Form and Meaning in Persius and Juvenal (Hildesheim, 1992). ‘Subject Reviews: Roman Literature’, Greece and Rome 40 (1993) 226–36. T. Woodman and J. Powell, eds, Author and Audience in Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1992). P. Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil (Cambridge, 1993). D. F. Kennedy, The Arts of Love (Cambridge, 1993). C. A. Martindale, Redeeming the Text (Cambridge, 1993). G. O. Hutchinson, Latin Literature from Seneca to Juvenal (Oxford, 1993). E. Gowers, The Loaded Table: Representation of Food in Roman Literature (Cambridge, 1992). O. Zwierlein, Zur Kritik und Exegese des Plautus IV: Bacchides (Mainz, 1992). A. D. Melville, Ovid: Sorrows of an Exile, Tristia (Oxford, 1992). A. D. Melville, Statius: Thebaid (Oxford, 1992).

Don Fowler’s grave in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford (photo: Peta Fowler)

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Index locorum This list contains only the most signiWcant of passages cited, in particular those where the discussion may help readers of the cited passage. Ambrose OV. 1.73–4: 12–13 Ammianus 16.10.9–11: 6 Apuleius Met. 4.27: 302 Aristophanes Frogs: 145–9 Aristotle Nic. Eth. 1098a: 23 Poet. 1451b: 301, 307 Poet. 1460a: 292–3 Post. An. 76b: 305 Rhet. 1382a–b: 33 Augustus R.G. 8.5: 105 Boccaccio De Genealogia Deorum 14.9: 300 Catullus 1: 126 44.1–5: 119 85: 273 Cicero Att. 1.16.10: 96 Att. 2.3.4: 102 Cat. 1.1: 96 Cat. 1.2–4: 93 Cons. fr. 6 Soubiran: 116 De Or. 1.79, 95: 98 De Or. 1.186–91: 74–5 Diu. 1.17: 98–9 Dom. 101: 95 Leg. 3.14: 98 N.D. 2.94: 41 OV. 1.128–31: 11–13

OV. 3.39: 303 Q.Fr. 3.4.2: 143 Rep. 6.8, 13: 101 [Cicero] Rhet. ad Her. 1.13: 301, 304 Rhet. ad Her. 4.49.62: 107 Digest of Justinian 5.1.76: 78–81 9.2.52.2: 77–8 46.3.80: 75–6 Dio, Cassius 47.8.4: 116 56.33: 109 Diogenes Laertius 10.22: 34 Empedocles DK 31 B57: 48 DK 31 B59: 48 DK 31 B60: 48 DK 31 B61: 48 Strasb. fr. a(ii) 23–30: 47, 51 Ennius Annales 446–7 Sk.: 245–6 Varia 3 V.: 238 Herodotus 1.30–2: 24 Hesiod Theogony 27–8: 296 Homer Iliad 16.297–300: 277 Odyssey 19: 294 Odyssey 19.203: 295–6 Horace Ars p. 146–51: 294

362 Carm. 1.1: 179–80, 189–92 Carm. 2.20: 190–1, 312 Carm. 3.30: 191–2 Carm. 4.8.14–34: 238 Ep. 1.19.47–8: 147 Ep. 2.1.12: 109 Ep. 2.2.97–8: 147 Serm. 1.1.1–12: 179 Serm. 1.4: 146 Serm. 1.4.1–13: 186–7 Serm. 1.4.53–65: 187–8 Serm. 1.5: 146–7, 182–3 Serm. 1.7.19–20: 147 Serm. 1.8.37–9: 180 Serm. 1.10.64–71: 188 Serm. 2.1, 5: 72 Isidore Etym. 6.8.16: 308 Juvenal 1.79: 315 6.434–7: 142 Livy praef. 10: 111 3.17.6: 68 5.41.8–9: 6 6.17.1–2: 94 26.46.10: 244 28.35: 247–8 30.28.8: 143 Lucan 1.2–3: 251 1.125–6: 250–1 3.363–4: 244–6 5.27–30: 229–30 7–8: 253–5 7.212–13: 240 7.457–9: 240 7.693–6: 143 8.107–8: 230 8.131–3: 230 8.871–2: 239 Lucian Gall. 2: 291 Ver. Hist. 1.22–6: 290

Index Lucretius 1.14–20: 53, 84 1.159–66: 42 1.402–9: 65–6 1.1114–17: 66–7 2.700–10: 42–3, 84–5 2.718–19: 85 2.1081–2: 51 3.3–4: 64–5 3.57–8: 18–19, 31, 34 3.830: 38 5.677–9: 84 5.837–48: 47 5.878–81: 49 5.916–24: 50 5.1133–5: 68 5.1141–7: 86 5.1281–2: 68 6.527–34: 67 Martial 7.24.1–4: 143 9.64–5, 101: 237 11.48: 128 Ovid Am. 1.1: 146 Ars 3.299–306: 14 Fast. 1.191–200: 228 Fast. 3.709–10: 198 Ibis 435–6: 201 Ibis 539–40: 206 Met. 3.729–31: 203 Met. 6.1–145: 148–50 Met. 6.65–7: 173 Met. 6.339–81: 148 Met. 6.382–400: 147–8 Met. 11.35–50: 201 Met. 13.786–804: 278 Met. 15.177–80: 172 Met. 15.807–15: 8 Met. 15.833–4: 110 Met. 15.871–9: 9, 312 Tr. 1.3.73–6: 198 Tr. 2.103–10: 216–18 Tr. 2.207–8: 195–6 Tr. 3.7.47–8: 205 Tr. 3.8: 199–202 Tr. 3.9: 196–207

Index Petrarch Africa 2.167–240: 250–2 Africa 4.46–79: 247 Africa 4.308–20: 243 Africa 4.362: 245 Africa 7–8: 253–5 Africa 7.113: 245–6 Africa 7.661–4: 246 Africa 9.1–5: 246 Africa 9.338–41 246 Pliny (elder) Nat. praef. 1: 126 Nat. 12.9: 124–5 Nat. 31.8: 113–40 Plutarch Moralia 348d: 287 Polybius 10.15.4–6: 244 Pontano Hend. 2.37.80–98: 131–2, 136 Propertius 2.3.19–22: 143 2.8.7–10: 226–8 4.4.9–10: 227, 241 Quintilian Inst. 2.4.20–1: 153 Inst. 3.5.5–7: 306 Inst. 5.11.6: 105–6, 112 Inst. 10.1.85–6: 142 Inst. 10.1.91: 100 Inst. 11.1.17–21: 99 Inst. 11.3.68–82: 13 Sallust Cat. 1.2: 317 Cat. 51.27: 92 Hist. 1.55.25: 109 Iug. 3–4: 317 Iug. 113–14: 312 Seneca p. Con. 2.4.12–13: 210–11 Con. 7.2: 204 Suas. 6–7: 204–5 Sidonius Apollinaris Carm. 23.157–60: 215

Silius 6.653–716: 222–4 10.480–1: 232 10.657–8: 226–31, 241 13.601–12: 233 13.778–805: 240 16.283–4: 234 17.618: 232 17.625–8: 232, 236 17.645–54: 235–8 Strabo 1.2.9: 295 Suetonius Aug. 64.5: 65 Aug. 89.2: 105, 111 Aug. 97: 22 Aug. 101: 109 Iul. 85: 206 Tib. 68.3: 15 Vesp. 20: 10 Vita Hor. 2: 185 Tacitus Agr. 1.1: 316–17 Agr. 1.2: 315–16 Agr. 46.1–4: 310–19 Ann. 1.2.1: 110 Ann. 1.9–11: 150–5 Ann. 1.10.1–3: 111 Ann. 3.24.6: 155 Ann. 3.55.5: 110 Hist. 1.1.4: 315 Velleius Paterculus 2.3.4: 91–2, 112 2.66: 116 Vergil Aen. 1.254–5: 245–6 Aen. 2.54–6: 226 Aen. 2.324–7: 226 Aen. 6.620: 233 Aen. 6.833: 251 Aen. 7.1: 297 Aen. 8.642–5: 226 Geo. 1.1–5: 73 Geo. 3.209–83: 52–3

363

Index rerum et nominum Absyrtus 196–202 Achilles 240 Aeschylus and Euripides 145–9 Agrippa 210 agon 142–73 Ahala, C. Servilius 93–5 allegory 282–3 allusion 258–62, 276–9 ambiguity 318 anachronism 223, 240, 258–80 analogy 78–81, 87–9 Anaximander 59 anxiety of inXuence 226 Arachne 148 archaism 263–80 argumentum 308 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso 166–9 Aristotle 28–32, 290–2, Arnold, Matthew 263, 267–9, arma 146 ars 125–6 atomic theory 41–62, 83–7 auctor 107, 111 augustus 150 Augustus 1, 8–10, 22, 65, 92–3, 98, 102–12, 122–3, 150–5, 209–11, 236, 256–7 consular colleagues in 30 121–2 joke 185 Res gestae 103–11, 136 autocracy 88, 211–13, 230–7, 240–1, 249, 252, 257 Bakhtin 175, 184, 283 barbaria 197, 199, 207 Beckett, Samuel 55 Bentham, Jeremy, ‘Theory of Fictions’ 305 bicycles 39, 55–8 binary opposition 2–4, 11–17, 89 Biondo, Flavio 133–6 Blackmore, Sir Richard 44–5 Boccaccio 130–4, 300

body diction and imagery 175–93, 200 posture 4–17 book, as body 184–93 personiWed 311–12 Borges 271 Bridges, Robert 271–2 Browning 269 Brutus 208 Callimachus 145 Camillus 229–30, 237 career 165–6 Carroll, Lewis 290–1 Carthage 221–6, 231 Casablanca 261 Cato (elder) 65, 69–70 Catullus 5 cauda 177–8 causa 307–8 centaurs 46, 54–7, 84 Cerda, de la 144 certainty 58 chance 41, 46, 49, 61–2, 78, 86 chaos 2–3, 43–5, 50, 56, 60–1 Chaucer, House of Fame 156–8 Cicero 5, 70, 77, 89, 92–110, 120–3, 129, 139 Academica 118 assassination 116, 203–5 villas and spring 113–40 Cicero 116–17 Ciceronian style 313–15 Cinna, Helvius 206–8 classicists 5 Clodius 94–6 closure 18–38, 109, 139, 221–4, 231, 238–41, 283, 288, 310–19 logical 288–98, 308 concilium 82–3, 87 conexus 154 consolation 313 conspiracy theories 194–220

Index constipation 10 contrahere 76–8 Cumae 118–19 CVs, ten–page 32–3 Cyrenaics 25–7, 35

Fascism, Italian 14–15 Wction 281–308 Xexibility 14–17 Xux 26, 35, 43–4, 61, 79 Fowler, Don passim

dark air 59 Darwin 40, 56, 60–1 death 18–38, 108, 183, 310–19 decorum 11–14 deictics, Wctive 297 detachment and commitment 37–8 dismemberment 188, 197–207 DNA 44 Dodds, E.R. 4 Domitian 237

Gallus 202 gender oppositions 4, 7–8, 183 generatim 75, 84 genres biography 312–18 Comedy, Old 146 contest of 142 didactic 64–73, 80 elegy 117, 227, 241 elegy v epic 146 epic 225, 239–40, 255, 296 epic v romance 166–9 history 283–7, 301, 313–17 lyric 178–93 philosophy 22–3 satire 146, 177–89, 191–2 tragedy 299 gesture and gait 4–17 Godfather, The 259–62 Gracchi 94–6, 100 Gregory the Great 129 Gyges 303

education 64–71 Egerton, Philip 40 Empedocles 46–54 Empson, William 55 Ennius 255–6 Epicurus/Epicureanism 21–3, 33–8, 51–2, 59–62, 63–90; see also atomic theory episodic structure 25–30 epistemology 2–4, 17, 290–8, 304 etymology; see also word play Caesar/caedere 198 fulmen 234–5 sceptrum/Scipio 234–5 (cf. 6) Tomi(s)/tomoi 197 euphemism 177 Euripides and Aeschylus 145–9 evolutionary theory 39–41, 62; see also Darwin exempla 21; 38 (Don Fowler); 91–112 (historical); 122 (Cicero); 198–9, 208 (victims); 209 (winged escape); 303–4, 314–16, 319; see also analogy expectations 290 eyes 114, 131–3, 181 fabula 300–3 Fagles, Robert Odyssey (tr.) 259–62 Fama 155–9, 239 fantasy 297

365

Hannibal 223–4, 253–5 Hayden, Robert 260 Heinze, Richard 170–2 ‘Heliodorus’, Iatrica 137–8 Hercules 236–9 Hitler 112 Horace 159, 175–93 Housman 174–5 hybrids 39–62, 84–5 hypothesis 306–8 imagines 10, 214, 222, 236–7, 317 immobility 4–17 immortality 191–3, 224, 238–41, 256–7, 312–19 in medias res 293–6 in medio 256 individualism 90, 225, 241, 251–2 insanity of critics 218–19 inserere 189

366

Index

interea 223 interruption 20, 30–3, 36–7 intertextuality 224–31, 239–40, 243–57, 258, 276, 283, 289 irony 37–8 Ixion 55–6 Janus 228–9 Jarvis, Charles Don Quixote (tr.) 270 Jonson Masque of Queenes 163 Poetaster 158–61 Julius Caesar 99–102, 122, 235, 244–57 de Analogia 88–9 jurisprudence/law 71–90 lacus Auernus/Annius 132–3 Lampedusa, The Leopard 34 Latro 210–11 laughter 10–11 laus 111, 314 lex 83–6, 108 life ¼ a hamper 31–4 ¼/6¼ a play 18–38 lingua 116 lippitudo 114, 130, 137, 181 Livy 92–3, 108 Lodge, David 259 Lombardo, Stanley Iliad (tr.) 277–80 Odyssey (tr.) 260 Lucan 225, 243–7, 251–7 Lucilius 186–8 Lucretius 63–90, 127 Maecenas 189–93, 210–11 Maelius, Sp. 93–6 Mahon, Derek, Bacchae 260–1 Marius 252 Marsyas 147 Medea 196–9 medicinal waters 113 mediocritas 11–16 Memmius 64–8, 71–2 memoria/memory 34, 65, 106–8, 125, 236–7, 240, 310–19 Meredith, George 281–2

metamorphosis 43, 49, 190–3 metaphor 83, 308–9 Metelli 105 Mettus Fufetius 198, 226 modesty, authorial 316 Montaigne 18–23, 38 monumenta 5–10, 35, 114–17, 120, 128, 134–7, 191, 222, 317 mos maiorum 104 Mucius, Q. 74–8, 87 Murray, Gilbert Agamemnon (tr.) 260 Murakami, Haruki, ‘Sleep’ 291–2 Muses Calliope 102 Urania 98–9 Mussolini 112 names, signiWcant 24, 59–60, 116, 119, 123, 136–8, 207–8, 236–7, 256 narrative 281–308 Nashe, Thomas 277 nationalism 139, 252 natura 75–8, 113–40, 315 fecundity 53 order 41–5, 50, 61, 83–9 Nelson, Marilyn Hecuba (tr.) 260–1 Nettleship 144 Newman, Francis 263–9, 272 O’Brien, Flann 56–61 O’Neill, Eugene Long Day’s Journey into Night 30 obscenity 177–80 Odyssey 27, 167 old wives’ tales 302 onomatopoeia 148 opening 223–4, 311, 315–16 Orpheus 201–3 Ovid and Vergil 141–73 exile, causes of 195–6, 214–20 exile poetry 195–220 narrative in 196 reticence in 209–14 Metamorphoses 43 reception 141–73

Index paideia 299 Pentheus 203 Peter of Eboli 129–31 Petrarch 242–57 Pharsalus, battle of 253–5 Philodemus, de Libertate dicendi 65 philosophy 281–308 susbtitute for politics 101 Phlegraean Fields 113–40 Piero di Cosimo 52–5 Plato 162, 298–9 pleasure/happiness 28–38 Poe, ‘The Raven’ 260 Poggio Bracciolin 249 Portus Iulius 122–3 Pound 270–4 Homage to Sextus Propertius 261–2 Powell, J. Enoch Herodotus (tr.) 274–5 Priam 32 processions 222 proscriptions 127–8 Pugin 170–1 Puteoli 118–19, 128–33 quiescere 313 ratio 75, 81, 85–7 republicanism 87–90, 116, 230–2, 235–6, 239–41, 249, 252, 257 res 80, 318 responsa 72–3 reuoluere 317 rhetores Latini 70 rhetoric 69–71, 80, 92–4, 99, 102–3, 108, 283–4, 306–8 Romanticism 31–2 Rome/Romanitas 5–7, 11–17, 122, 221–41, 252 contrasted with Greece 4, 70, 143 Romulus 237 Rorty, Richard 304 rota Virgiliana 161, 165–6 Sallust 101, 314–17 Scaliger 144 sceptrum 232–6 Schro¨dinger 58–60 Scipio 222–5, 231–41, 243–57

segmentation 173 self–exemplarity 99–109 serenity 245–8 Servius Sulpicius Rufus 77–81, 87 sexual passion 183 Shakespeare Othello 55 The Tempest 163–5 Silius 221–41 Slavitt, David Metamophoses (tr.) 278–80 social contract 86–8 Socrates 21, 37–8 Solon 18, 24 Spenser 160–1, 166, 168 Star Trek 1 statues 4–8, 12, 120 Steiner, George 264–6, 271 Sterne, Tristram Shandy 298 Stoicism 7–8, 20–1, 29, 36–7 Striker, Gisela 23–5 suspension of disbelief 287 syncrisis, literary 142–73 Tacitus, Agricola 310–19 Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata 168 television, cable 194–5 telos 25–38 time 23–4, 35, 224–32 Tiro 116–17, 128–9 Tolstoy Anna Karenina 289–92 The Death of Ivan Ilych 34 topography 117–20, 133–40 translation 259–80 triumph 239 uates 69 uestigia 64–6 unity 24–5, 28–9 Vaihinger, Hans 304–6 venatic paradigm 66, 135–6 Venuti 263–8, 272, 275–6 Vergil and Homer 143 and Ovid 141–73 Georgics 73 in Silius 236

367

368 Vergil (cont.) reception 139, 142–73, 255–6 verisimilitude 294 Vetus, C. Antistius 114, 120–3, 127–8, 136–40 Vida 143

Index word–counting 174–7 word play 122 amor/Roma/mora 227 writing v speech/song 116, 190–3 X–Files 135, 205

window 96–7 Wo¨lZin, Heinrich 170–2

Zama, battle of 253–5

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