Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome

LYRIC TEXTS AND LYRIC CONSCIOUSNESS LYRIC TEXTS AND LYRIC CONSCIOUSNESS The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to A...

Author: Paul All Miller

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LYRIC TEXTS AND LYRIC CONSCIOUSNESS

LYRIC TEXTS AND LYRIC CONSCIOUSNESS The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome

Paul Allen Miller

London and New York

First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1994 Paul Allen Miller All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Miller, Paul Allen Lyric texts and lyric consciousness/Paul Allen Miller. p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index. 1. Classical poetry—History and criticism. 2. Lyric poetry —History and criticism. I. Title. PA3019.M55 1994 884′.0109–dc20 93–21184 ISBN 0-203-97461-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-10518-8 (Print Edition)

To Ann Tess, Livia, and John

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vi

1

THE SUBJECT OF THE TEXT

1

2

EPOS AND IAMBOS OR ARCHILOCHUS MEETS THE WOLFMAN

9

3

DE GENERIBUS DISPUTANDUM EST

37

4

THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS: CATULLUS AND THE BIRTH OF THE COLLECTION

53

5

A POET’S PLACE: SAPPHO AND THE MELIC DISCOURSE OF ARCHAIC GREECE

79

6

SAPPHICA PUELLA: THE TRIPLE-FACETED OBJECT OF CATULLAN DESIRE

101

7

ROME, ALEXANDRIA, AND THE POLITICS OF LYRIC

119

8

HORACE, MERCURY, AND AUGUSTUS

139

9

CONCLUSION: OF WRITINGS AND SUBJECTS

167

Appendix I

177

Appendix II

181

Notes

183

References

213

Index

233

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book could not have been written without the help of far more people than it would ever be possible to mention here. Still, I must try and give credit to those debts which appear most outstanding. Three mentors in particular have helped form my thoughts about this project and guide my intellectual progress for a number of years, Professors Wayne Rebhorn, Carl Rubino, and Barbara Gold. Without their patience, encouragement, and remonstrations, I would have never left the gate. Two other formative influences on my thoughts about literature, theory, and philosophy must also be acknowledged: Professor Leonard Schulze, who first introduced me to literary theory and whose lasting influence on my work is greater, I am sure, than either he or I is fully aware; and the late Professor E.D.Francis, who first impressed upon me the decisive importance of book structure in the interpretation of Hellenistic and Roman poetry. Thanks need also to be given to Professors Douglass Parker, Ramón Saldívar, and Jean-Pierre Cauvin, who served valiantly on a dissertation committee unlike any other; to Professor David H.J. Larmour for reading parts of this book, discussing it with me, and, in his role as managing editor of Helios, for making available to me the page proofs of a forthcoming edition on Catullus; to Professor Susan Stein for reading and discussing Chapter 5 with me; to Professor Charles Platter my friend and collaborator; to Professors Wendy McCredie, Kim Robertson, William Hutton, Elizabeth Vandiver, and to C.Gordon Vincent, Rino Pizzi, and all the members of the CP and BBQ for countless evenings of listening to me rave like a madman about this project; and to my parents for supporting all my educational endeavors. Debts of gratitude are also owed to Texas Tech University for a Research Enhancement Grant which helped me complete this book; and to Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, Maryland) for allowing me to reprint portions of my articles “Horace, Mercury, and

vii

Augustus, or the Poetic Ego of Odes 1–3,” from the AmericanJournal of Philology 112.3 (1991), as part of Chapter 8, and “Sappho 31 and Catullus 51: The Dialogism of Lyric,” from Arethusa 26.2 (1993), as parts of Chapters 5 and 6. They also kindly granted permission to reproduce portions of Frank Nisetich’s translations of “Pythian 11” and “Olympian 5” from Pindar’s Victory Odes (1980). The translations of Sappho 1, 16, 31, and Alcaeus 308 and 338 are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Loeb Classical Library, Greek Lyric (vol. 1), translated by D.A. Campbell, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, © the President and Fellows of Harvard College 1982. The translation of Archilochus 5 is reprinted by permission of the publishers, GreekLyrics, translated by Richmond Lattimore, Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago Press, © 1949, 1955, and 1960. Havelock, Eric; TheLiterate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences, © Princeton University Press 1982, reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Every effort has been made to reach copyright holders for all materials used. The author would appreciate any further information which might be available. My greatest debt is owed to my wife, Ann Poling. She has proofread various versions of this text countless times. She has put up with sleepless nights and nameless anxiety. She has listened to me drone on when she would have rather been doing almost anything else. I could never have done it without her. All remaining faults are, of course, my own.

viii

1 THE SUBJECT OF THE TEXT

Between the generality of the meaning of words…and… the uniqueness of the acoustic event which occurs when an utterance is proffered, there takes place a process that permits the linkage of the two, which we call enunciation. This process does not suppose the existence of two physical bodies…but the presence of two (or more) social entities…. The time and the space in which enunciation occurs also aren’t purely physical categories, but a historical time and social space. (Todorov 1984:39–40) The poet’s audience, the readers of a novel, those in the concert hall—these are collective organizations of a special type, sociologically distinctive and exceptionally important. Without these distinctive forms of social intercourse there are no poems, no odes, no novels, no symphonies. Definite forms of social intercourse are constituent to the meaning of the works of art themselves. (Bakhtin/Medvedev 1985:11) The purpose of this work is to present a model for studying the history of lyric as a genre. My specific claim about the nature of lyric poetry is that what is now generally considered lyric—a short poem of personal revelation, confession or complaint, which projects the image of an individual and highly self-reflexive subjective consciousness (see among others Schelling 1913:1–3; Lukács 1973: 63–64; Frye 1971:249– 50; Culler 1975:164–70)—is only possible in a culture of writing. Indeed it is the lyric collection which spawns the lyric consciousness as we know it. For only the collection, with its inherent potential for

2 LYRIC TEXTS AND LYRIC CONSCIOUSNESS

building up complex relational structures of reading and rereading, possesses the necessary flexibility in the temporal patterns of its reception to project the image of a self which is not merely a character in a presumed narrative, but rather the source of all possible narrative projections that would seek to account for a given set of texts. In this sense, the lyric collection would be the opposite of tragedy as Aristotle defines it, for in the lyric collection it is the projection of selfhood, , which makes the action, , possible, and not the other way around (Poetics 1450a 23–4). I shall also argue that this projection of a peculiarly interiorized and articulated consciousness, which defines the genre, is a historical phenomenon, that the precise nature of its structure will vary from period to period according to the ideological patterns on which it is based, and finally that there are certain periods when the projection of this consciousness is completely absent. This projection of a complex and unique image of consciousness is only possible, as noted above, within the multi-referential and multitemporal system which writing, by allowing recursive modes of reading, makes possible. For lyric subjectivity exists not as a linear narrative, nor as a mirror of what physicists call the arrow of time, but rather as an interrelated series of temporal loops moving at various speeds and levels of consciousness. It proceeds not one day at time, but moves forward and back simultaneously, compulsively analyzing and reinterpreting the same multivalent experiences, even as it adds to them.1 The link between the initial projections of such a consciousness and the shift from an essentially oral and ritualized presentation to the later graphic form was first noted by Northrop Frye: The kind of formulaic, half-improvised poetry that, we are told, lies close behind the Homeric poems is a poetry of pure continuity…. If the poet does not read or write, the poem exists only in the one dimension of pure continuity in time, because such a poet is not thinking of lines on a page. If the poem is written, it appears in two spatial dimensions, across and down a page, as well as in time, and the crucial term “verse,” with its associations of turning around or turning back, becomes functional. The poem may still be continuous, but in “verse,” where we keep coming to the end of a line and then starting another, there is a germ of discontinuity. The more this sense of the discontinuous increases, the more closely we approach the lyrical area. (Frye 1985:31)

THE SUBJECT OF THE TEXT 3

In this context, it is significant that it was not until the fifth century BCE that Greek schools began to teach reading and not until its last decades that mention of a book trade is made. Thus, although one can argue about when poets first began to compose with the aid of writing or produced written copies of poems composed orally, the actual diffusion and reception of poetry remained almost exclusively an oral and aural phenomenon2 till the mid-Hellenistic period, when the first scholarly editions of the archaic poets were compiled. It is these late compilations, arranged generally according to metrical category or occasion of first performance by much later editors, which form the basis of the texts we have today of Archilochus, Sappho, Pindar, and the other poets of the archaic and early classical periods (Rösler 1983:18; Thalmann 1984:xx; Santirocco 1986:6; Graff 1987:9, 26; Harris 1989: 29, 47–49, 57–59, 78–79, 84–85; Thomas 1989:19–23, 30–31; 1992:3, 6–8, 13, 50, 62, 92–93, 115). By the same token, the first archive was founded in Athens only at the end of the fifth century, while authoritative versions of the great classical tragedians were not established by Lycurgus until the second half of the fourth century, and even then the primary mode of their diffusion was for the secretary of the polis to read them out to the actors (Thomas 1989:15, 38–41, 49; 1992: 48, 91). Publication and preservation of poetic texts during this period was assured by the public performances of professional rhapsodes and the private singing of young aristocrats at symposia who had committed the works to memory. The ability to transmit, largely intact, vast amounts of oral poetry is something we moderns find difficult to imagine, but as the tradition of Vedic transmission seems to indicate, it is possible to preserve a fixed text literally for centuries using only the mnemonic techniques that are available to an oral tradition (Harris 1989: 49; Nagy 1990a:23, 54–55, 435–36; 1990b: 38, 40–41; Tedlock 1991:6– 7). In this regard, it is also important to recall that the most commonly , used term for poet in the classical and archaic periods was not , “singer” (Sperdutti 1950:220). Hence, my or “maker,” but contention will be that lyric, as most moderns think of it, does not begin with the archaic Greek lyrists such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, nor with the Hellenistic poets, but rather in the Roman period, more particularly the first century BCE.3 The archaic categories of iambic, monody, and choral lyric were, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 5, quite distinct phenomena. Thus my argument is that the ego of Catullus, just as the “Je” of “Je est un autre” or the “self” of “Song of Myself,” must be rigorously of the distinguished in both its content and poetic function from the


archaic poets of Greece. Consequently, lyric as I have defined it is the re-presentation not simply of a “strong personality,” but of a particular mode of being a subject, in which the self exists not as part of a continuum with the community and its ideological commitments, but is folded back against itself, and only from this space of interiority does it relate to “the world” at large.4 To borrow the terminology of Bruno Gentili, we might say that the subjectivity presented by the early Greek lyrists is an “open field of forces,” whose boundaries separating it from the social world are extremely porous and fluid, while the consciousness of the lyric collection is a private space, whose relations with the external world are more overdetermined and discontinuous (Gentili 1984:98; Ong 1982:69). Thus, though we may feel the presence in Pindar, Theognis, or Alcaeus of a unique poetic voice and personality, it is nonetheless, in the first instance, a public or paradigmatic one and not lyric in the sense we have defined it.5 Their poetry does not lack individuality in the sense of being interchangeable with that of another poet, but only in the sense of not projecting this image of a profoundly articulated interiority, with its internal complexities, ambivalences and contradictions. Nor could it project such an image, since the reception of oral poetry is necessarily linear and sequential. It is not possible to refer back to a previous passage, to reverse course and read the first poem in terms of the second or the second in terms of the first (Derrida 1976:85; Ong 1982:39, 99– 100; Zumthor 1983: 40, 126–27; Peradotto 1992:9). However, in a written collection it is. As Terry Eagleton writes: Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair…. We read backwards and forwards simultaneously, predicting and recollecting, perhaps aware of other possible realizations of the text which our reading has negated. Moreover, all of this complicated activity is carried out on many levels at once, for the text has “backgrounds” and “foregrounds”, different narrative viewpoints, alternative layers of meaning between which we are constantly moving. (1983:77–88) Likewise, Wolfgang Iser has given the following detailed descrip tion of the process of reading and re-reading, which the written text implies: In every text there is a potential time sequence which the reader must inevitably realize, as it is impossible to absorb even a short


text in a single moment. Thus the reading process always involves viewing the text through a perspective that is continually on the move, linking up the different phases, and so constructing what we have called the virtual dimension. This dimension, of course, varies all the time we are reading. However, when we have finished the text, and read it again, clearly our extra knowledge will result in a different time sequence; we shall tend to establish connections by referring to our awareness of what is to come and so certain aspects of the text will assume a significance we did not attach to them on a first reading, while others will recede into the background. (Iser 1980:56)6 The audience of an oral poem does possess a capacity to recall major themes and memorable phrases, but that capacity is necessarily so limited in comparison to the capability of the reader of a written text to reverse course and move backwards and forwards at will as to produce a qualitative change in the nature of the subjectivities the two types of poetry are able to project. The sort of tightly constructed, highly allusive poetry familiar to modern readers of poets such as Mallarmé or Eliot would be impossible in an oral society (Lord 1991:17–18; Edmunds 1992:46). The audience of an oral poem must quickly be able to perceive the gist of each passage, possessing neither the time nor psychic distance necessary to reflect on abstruse or idiosyncratic formulations. Private perceptions which do not correspond to shared social norms remain largely unintelligible (Adkins 1972:5; Finnegan 1977:129; Thalmann 1984: 28; Gentili 1984:52; Kay 1991:170)7 It should also be remembered that, within a largely oral society, poetry’s function is not only to provide aesthetic entertainment, but also to serve as virtually the sole medium for that society to store and preserve its necessary information (Havelock 1963:29, 94; Thalmann 1984:32; Gentili 1984:53; Nagy 1990b:41; Rose 1992: 57). Oral poetry, with its rhythmical chanting and recitation, becomes the primary means of education and social cohesion (Zumthor 1983:224; Gentili 1984:74; Nagy 1990a:404; Lord 1991:2).8 The object of the archaic Greek lyric poet was not to represent to his or her audience the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, recollected in tranquility, but to provide both entertainment and paradigms of personal behavior, the forms of , and inadequacy (Johnson deviance and the norm, of excellence, 1982:31; Zumthor 1983:179; Bauman 1984:15–16, 43–44; Gentili 1984: 3; Nagy 1990a: 368, 430).9 His or her task was, in short, the integration


of the individual into the collectivity (Zumthor 1983:235, 252; Gentili 1984:4–5, 75). Consequently, it would be a mistake to argue that the presence of the first person pronoun or the projection of an “individual voice” is sufficient grounds on which to label a poem lyric, in the modern sense of the term (Zumthor 1983:231). Neither of these guarantees the production of the requisite discontinuity and interiority. Likewise, neither of these is a sufficient condition for the projection of what I shall henceforth call “lyric consciousness.” Thus, though the Vergilian and Homeric narrative voices are both unique, and in that sense personal, neither Homer nor Vergil is a lyric poet. Even more fundamental than writing to the production of this multileveled interiority, which allows the projection of a lyric consciousness, is the advent of the poetry collection and the poetry book. Early poets composed for particular occasions, and performed their work in particular contexts, the individual poems existing largely in isolation from one another. It is only once the composition of ensembles begins that poems begin to refer back and forth to one another in terms of their collective participation in a complex and multifaceted whole, With the advent of the written reproduction of texts and the creation of a reading public, poetry gains a new measure of autonomy, and comes to exist as an entity separate from the religious and communal practices which before constituted its primary “raison d’être” (Fraenkel 1957:41; Finnegan 1977:28; Zumthor 1983:40, 147, 268; Rösler 1983:10; Kurke 1991: 1). Indeed, Rosenthal and Gall have recently made an analogous claim for the poetic sequence and the creation of a lyric self, but have claimed it to be a new genre which arises out of late Romanticism (1983:1–24). My argument is that the modern poetic sequence does not represent a new genre, but the lyric genre per se, though as it exists under modern conditions of subjectivity. Lyric, as we know it then, is dependent upon the existence of certain social and technical conditions, and hence is not the spontaneous outburst of song or the primal language of men, as it has been characterized since Vico, but a complex grid of writing and reflexive referentiality which makes the projection of a virtually autonomous, deeply interiorized consciousness possible through the advent of the lyric collection (de Man 1983:168; Ong 1982:78–105). It is for this reason as well that this study has not concerned itself with the subjectivity projected by inscriptional poetry of the classical and archaic periods in Greece, a project admirably begun by Svenbro. These epigraphic poems, while certainly written, do not form part of a


collection but are individual and site specific. Moreover, as Svenbro’s analysis has shown, the place of the ego in these poems, especially in the archaic period, is not that of the author or the author’s persona, but that of the object actually bearing the inscription. Moreover, this objectego is only given life by the reader, who lends his (and readers at this time were almost exclusively men) voice to the inscription, making it come to life for his largely illiterate bystanders. The ego then is in no sense private or idiosyncratic, but very precisely paradigmatic, in that it is assumable by anyone capable of making it sound forth. As Svenbro remarks: This use of the first person, of course, should not run up against a metaphysical conviction on the part of the receivers of the message, namely the conviction that the first person necessarily implies an inner life and voice. The very action of reading these egocentric objects encourages us to deconstruct that conviction. (1993:42) What the “I” of the inscription denotes is not psychic depth, but positionality or “hereness.” The first person pronoun, in Roman Jakobson’s terms, is a mere “shifter,” not the indicator of a consciousness, and the inscription itself, in Svenbro’s memorable phrase, “is a machine designed to produce kleos [audible renown]” for the dedicator and/or dedicatee (Svenbro 1993:61–62; Jakobson 1990: 388–89). Finally, the limitations of this study do not allow for the demonstration of the applicability of this thesis to texts after the classical period. Nonetheless studies of book arrangement in premodernist lyric poetry are numerous, though generally concerned only with the architecture of the arrangement and not with its impact on the issue of genre or on the forms of subjectivity projected by the work.10 I have also published two studies elsewhere in which the principles outlined in this present study are applied to the texts of Sidney and Baudelaire (Miller 1991; 1993b). Likewise there is a large and growing literature on the subjectivity of Medieval oral verse, the findings of which parallel in significant respects those presented here for the poetry of archaic Greece (Zumthor 1972:39, 43–44; Eagleton 1976:52–53; Coleman 1981:157–60; Kittay and Godzich 1987:9). Indeed as Chaytor first noted in 1945:


The whole technique of chanson de geste, roman d’aventure, and lyric poem presupposed…a hearing, not a reading public. When culture had reached that stage at which the individual read to himself for his own enjoyment, a different kind of literature was in demand. (1945:13; see also Finnegan 1977:21)11 Under such conditions, the notion that a given oral performance by a travelling jongleur was indicative of the deeply interiorized consciousness of the poem’s “author” would have never occurred to the audience. Rather, the poem was inseparable from its performance. As with rhapsodic, symposiastic, and cultic performances in archaic Greece, the text was less an artifact than an event (Chaytor 1945:11; Zumthor 1972:37–38, 69; Bec 1977:17–18; Duggan 1986:758; Kittay and Godzich 1987:23, 39; Kay 1991:132, 153, 161–63). Before investigating actual examples of the lyric collection, it will first be necessary to provide a theoretical statement in which a general definition of genre will be formulated. Such a theory is required in order to give my understanding of lyric poetry greater definition, since in the past the term has been applied to a wide variety of heterogeneous material, and to insure that the theoretical assumptions which underlie it are not ad hoc but possess a wider, more general applicability. Such a statement is also necessary in order to meet the objections which certain strands of contemporary criticism have launched against genre theory as a whole. Before embarking on this theoretical investigation, however, it will be useful to examine a concrete example of that pre-literate Greek poetry which is often said to be the archetype of subsequent lyric discourse in the Western tradition. This is important for two reasons: first, to show more concretely how the ancient Greek phenomenon differs from what is currently regarded as lyric; and second, to reveal the essentially metaphysical and nonempirical underpinnings of the traditional position that lyric poetry as we think of it begins with the Greeks.

2 EPOS AND IAMBOS OR ARCHILOCHUS MEETS THE WOLFMAN

He turns from the faraway, of which he has only heard, to the present, which he has himself experienced. Here again we can see the upheaval in thought which produced the transition from epic to lyric. Archilochus decisively seizes upon the first and nearest data of the individual: the now, the here, the I. (Fränkel 1975:139) For they say when Archilochus was still young that he was sent by his father, Telesikles, to the field and to the city of the people called the Leimones, and that he ordered him to take the ox for sale early one night, when the moon was shining, and drive it to the city. When he came to the place called Lissides, he thought he saw a group of women. Believing them to be leaving their work and heading to the city, he began to mock them as he approached. They received him with jesting and laughter, and they asked if he was taking the ox for sale. When he responded, they said that they would give him a worthy honor. And when they had spoken these things, the ox vanished and he, panic stricken, saw a lyre before his feet. After a short time, he understood that the Muses had appeared to him and that they had given him the lyre. (Mnesiepes inscription, E1 II 14–57, original text in Bonnard 1958: cv; my translation) The assumptions behind the traditional understanding of the birth of lyric can be briefly stated: the classical genres of epic, lyric, and drama evolved in sequential order, so that each genre represented a distinct


stage in human beings’ coming to self-consciousness. Within this paradigm, the shift from epic to lyric represents a shift from a communal to an individual consciousness. This thesis lies at the foundation of three of this century’s most influential works on the history of Greek literature and civilization: Bruno Snell’s TheDiscovery of the Mind, Werner Jaeger’s Paideia, and Hermann Fränkel’s Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy. From these works, this concept of the parallel evolution of literary genres and human consciousness has been disseminated throughout the discipline, until today it constitutes the standard narrative of Greek literary history (Snell 1953:41; Fränkel 1975:133; Will 1969:82; Jaeger 1945:115–16).1 The traditional paradigm, however, not only has been influential among ancient scholars, but has had a profound impact on the study of literature as a whole. Thus we find the philosophical assumptions which undergird it most forcefully articulated, not in the work of Snell, Jaeger, or Fränkel, but in Georg Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel: [T]he Greeks travelled in history itself through all the stages that correspond a priori to the great forms; their history of art is a metaphysico-genetic aesthetic, their cultural development a philosophy of history. Within this process, substance was reduced from Homer’s absolute immanence of life to Plato’s likewise absolute yet tangible and graspable transcendence; and the stages of the process which are clearly and sharply distinct from one another (no gradual transitions here!) and in which the meaning of the process is laid down as though in eternal hieroglyphics—these stages are the great and timeless paradigmatic forms of world literature. (Lukács 1973:34–35) Lukács, however, is not presenting an original apperception, but summarizing a section from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, entitled “The Spiritual Work of Art.” Thus, the basis of the conventional position as articulated by Lukács, Fränkel, Jaeger, and Snell may well owe as much to Hegel’s philosophy of history as to any precise understanding of the poems themselves (Hegel 1977: 439–53).2 This chapter will argue that the traditional narrative of generic development does not, in fact, correspond to what is currently known about the history of archaic Greek literature. Rather, it reflects an ideological commitment to the autonomous subject and a teleological vision of history, which makes the present the promised fulfillment of

EPOS AND IAMBOS OR ARCHILOCHUS MEETS THE WOLFMAN 11

the past. From this perspective, Archilochus represents a form of subjectivity whose constitution is essentially no different from our own, only at an “earlier” stage of development.3 To reach a position more consonant with the evidence, though, it will be necessary to abandon neither the concept of genre nor the concept of historical change. What will be required is to turn Hegel on his head and re-embed these notions in the social world of their becoming. To begin, it should be noted that, despite its impressive tenacity, the classical narrative of generic development has been subject to strong criticism (Finnegan 1977:249; Johnson 1982:74–75). Since the wide acceptance of Parry’s work on the oral nature of the Homeric epics, it has been realized that what was once thought to be the first lyric poetry in the Western tradition—that of Archilochus, Sappho and Alcaeus— was simply the first to be written down and preserved.4 As Havelock observes : In oral societies, “musical” ability, meaning the ability to improvise versification and accompaniment, is more widely distributed than in literate ones, and a vast body of oral “lyric” must have circulated which had ephemeral value. The scraps that we have represent the work of those poets who were lucky enough to live late enough to be inscribed and whose manuscripts were deemed worthy of preservation. Their oral ancestry must have been as sophisticated as that of Homer. (Havelock 1982:17) Nonetheless, the traditional theory of the historical succession of generic forms does not lack adherents (Kirkwood 1974:ix; Podlecki 1984:xii–xiii), and even those who now acknowledge the implausibility of this narrative often unconsciously fall back on its assumptions.5 The reason for this unwillingness to give up the traditional narrative is, I believe, that its founding theoretical assumptions have yet to be explicitly articulated and challenged, and so they continue to exercise a determining influence on the work of even those who would never dream of calling themselves Hegel’s heirs. To begin the process of questioning those assumptions, we need to look more closely at the poet who is often said to be the father of modern lyric and, indeed, of the autonomous ego, Archilochus.6 This thesis—that Archilochus founded lyric subjectivity—was perhaps most forcefully stated by André Bonnard in his 1958 introduction to the Budé edition of the fragments. Here he argued that the conquest of a personal


lyricism first appears in the work of Archilochus, and that lyric poetry sprang fully formed from the very beginnings of his verse (xxx–xxxi; see also v). This position is not in any way exceptional, but rather has been repeated by any number of commentators both before and since (Fränkel 1975: 150–51; Snell 1953:46; Campbell 1967:136; Will 1969: 39, 84–85, 88–91; Kirkwood 1974:23; Rankin 1979:1; Podlecki 1984: xii–xiii; Brown 1987:262). Prior to proceeding with a close examination of Archilochus, though, a more technical problem must first be addressed. Some may object that Archilochus is not a lyric poet at all. For the term “lyric,” in the Greek system of genres, in no way implies personal poetry, but simply refers to songs sung to the lyre, or composed in meters generally sung to its accompaniment. That is to say, there is no inherent restriction in manner, theme, or speaking voice. Genre is a function of meter and performative context.7 Archilochus, inasmuch as he did not compose in those meters, is not therefore in the Greek sense a lyric poet, and for that reason was not listed as such in the Alexandrian canon. He is, in fact, an iambist, not a singer of lyrics. In the classical period, his poetry, like Homer’s, was recited from memory by rhapsodes, rather than sung at public occasions or private symposia, like that of the lyrists.8 In most cases, this objection that Archilochus is not a lyric poet has been met with the assertion that, even if his poems are not lyrics in the technical sense, their matter, inasmuch as it is a direct expression of his personal feelings, is similar to that found in such early monodists as Sappho and Alcaeus (Snell 1953:45–46; Campbell 1967:136; Kirkwood 1974:2–3). Therefore, it is argued, Archilochus’ poems should also be regarded as examples of early lyric. Such a position, however, is begging the question, since it is precisely this perceived unity of subject and subject matter which is at issue. Thus, what at first seemed a technical and pedantic problem becomes one of real substance. Do these poets, in fact, present a unique, individualized subjectivity, or are we simply projecting our own categories onto a social and poetic context alien to the historical assumptions with which those categories are laden (Havelock 1982:19; Zumthor 1983:231)? Indeed the question arises, if Archilochus and Sappho were not recognized as belonging to the same poetic genre, i.e. lyric, though they seem to be to us, was there to the Greek mind even such a thing as “lyric,” in the sense we now use of personal or private poetry? Did they, in any recorded form, recognize the degree of the subject’s personal investment in the text as a significant generic determinant?


The answer is no.9 The Greeks never explicitly acknowledged the existence of a peculiarly first person type of poetry, although this distinction has often been attributed to them. Plato did, of course, differentiate between three types of poetry—drama, epic, and dithyramb —and it was long assumed that the dithyramb corresponded to lyric, both because it was sung and because it was given to metaphorical flights of fancy. Yet, as Genette has shown, the dithyramb, as described by Plato, was a narrative poem linked to the cult of Dionysus, in which the poet retold the deeds of a mythological hero (Genette 1986:89–107).10 It was distinguished from epic and drama on the grounds that it presented a pure, “unmixed” narrative voice. Paradoxically, if there is any room in Plato’s system for lyric poetry, it would appear to belong under the same category as epic. As Bruno Gentili explains: Plato…elaborates (Resp. 3, 392d–394c) a theoretical typology of narrative which allows a triple division of poetry into categories based on internal structure: (1) “simple” narrative in the third person, (2) mimetic narration with dialogue, and (3) “mixed” narration. To the first category belongs dithyramb, conceived as choral narration of mythical events; to the second, dramatic poetry, both tragedy and comedy; to the third, epic and other genres that associate and alternate narration and dialogue. It is obvious that by “other genres” Plato means specifically all those forms of iambic, elegiac, and lyric poetry containing a mixture of dialogue and narration. This is confirmed by the further division into subtypes which the grammarian Diomedes set forth by way of elaboration on Plato’s basic system. His categories are narrative-exegetic, dramatic or “active,” and “common.” The last is the mixed type, and within it Diomedes includes, in addition to epic, lyric poetry as exemplified by Archilochus and Horace. (Gentili 1984:49)11 Genette argues that later generations projected their own understanding of the lyric onto the dithyramb, because the Platonic schema was reductive, in that it concerned itself wholly with the representation of events and neglected expression: “He leaves… out of consideration all non-representational poetry, and thus chiefly what we call lyric poetry” (Genette 1986:96).12 As such, the Platonic schema was unable to distinguish between, on the one hand, individual literary genres, and, on the other, the three basic modes of enunciation which, Genette argues, form the linguistic


grounding of any given work of literature. According to Genette, these three modes of presentation exist ahistorically and can be derived from the three possible speaker relations inherent in any singular verb. Thus the lyric mode corresponds to the first person, drama to the second, and narrative to the third. The result of this failure to distinguish between genres and modes was a mixture of the two realms, which led later generations to try and square the three basic modes of enunciation with the genres they then possessed. The theoretical assumptions behind Genette’s argument have been criticized by Derrida on the grounds that ahistorical, non-contingent systems are logically impossible (Derrida 1980:176– 201). It may also be criticized on historical grounds as well. For Genette can only assert that his system of modes is inherently more reflective of the founding moments of poetic discourse than that of Plato if he assumes a social and signifying world where the difference between an individual and his community is the governing device distinguishing and enabling the various recognized forms of speech, a world in which the distinction between I, You, and She/He are the fundamental moments in any discourse. This, however, was not necessarily the case in ancient Greece. As late as the mid-fourth century, a good three hundred years after Archilochus, there was as yet no clear formal distinction between ethics and politics, between an individual’s relation to himself and to his community (Grant 1885:vol. 1, 45). Indeed, Aristotle himself, at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics, describes his subject as being that of “politics” (I. ii. 8), thus echoing Plato’s position in the Republic, “that the individual is inseparable from the state,” and in the Euthydemus, that politics is “the science of human happiness” (Grant 1885:vol. 1, 140). In the same vein, Foucault has argued that the essence of Greek moral education was self-knowledge not in the sense of elaborating an epistemology “enabling the individual to recognize himself in his singularity as a desiring subject,” but rather in the sense of creating a self-relation which was “isomorphic” with the relations of submission and domination one had with one’s fellow citizens. “Generally speaking, anything that would contribute to the political education of a man as a citizen would also contribute to his training in virtue; and conversely, the two endeavors went hand in hand” (Foucault 1986a: 76, 83, 89).13 In this light, the difference between first person and third person was a secondary matter, since the individual would have been regarded as inseparable from his or her position in the community (recall Svenbro’s remarks on the subject of inscriptional poetry discussed in Chapter 1).


The founding moment of a given text was not its characters, but its . Genette concedes as much when he observes action or plot, its in a footnote: It is clear that Aristotle makes no distinction between the dignity (or morality) of a work’s characters and that of its actions. Without a doubt, he considered these things to be indissociably linked and treated characters only as vehicles for the action. (Genette 1986:99)14 It is in this context, then, that verses such as the following from Alcaeus should be read:

(Campbell 1982: frg. 360) For as they recount Aristodemus to have once wisely said in Sparta, “money is the man.” No poor man is in any way good or honorable.15 Likewise, it is this same context that allows Theognis to use the terms and (“good” and “noble”) to refer to his own party of and (“evil” and “worthless”) to refer to the aristocrats, and commoners (Grant 1885: vol. 1, 61; Nietzsche 1956: 160–64; Knox 1989b:101; de Sainte Croix 1989:125). Peter Rose has recently argued that Alcaeus’ lines and those of Theognis should be read as expressing the ressentiment of the traditional aristocracy toward those who were achieving power and status in the newly emergent money economies of sixth century Greece (Rose 1992: 77, 94, 140, 145–47; Knox 1989b:102), and this is quite probably true as far as it goes. But in each case, the crux of the problem is a question of who really has just claim to the title agathos, the old landed wealth of the inherited aristocracy or the new moneyed classes of the era of colonization.16 Social disruption may have produced uncertainty as to whom this title justly belonged, but the concepts of goodness and nobility at no point became pure ethical markers separate from their homology with social and class categories. The pure abstractions of


goodness per se and baseness per se are seldom in question; rather it is a matter of which social group shall be recognized as having claims to being considered base or noble (Cobb-Stevens 1985:157–65).17 Thus, whereas we would assume that ethical attributes such as “noble” or “honorable” refer to an individual’s conduct regardless of his class position in society, for the culture of archaic Greece these two spheres were inseparable.18 It is natural for us, then, to interpret terms such as “good” and “evil” as moral or ethical absolutes which accrue to individuals in accordance with whether their behavior conforms to a given set of abstract norms, just as it is natural for us to infer from the presence of the first person pronoun a consciousness similar to our own, acutely aware of its own uniqueness and self-consciously alienated from the social structures governing its daily life. But the elaboration of pure, “second degree” abstractions (inasmuch as naming itself implies an initial level of abstraction), and the consequent ability to establish moral absolutes separate from communal norms, through the process of speculative abstraction (leading to an objective idealism such as that found in Plato), is a form of thought which appears generally alien to oral culture. For by its very nature this kind of thought implies a recursive temporality and consciousness, which allows the mind to hold a given set of data in suspension, while conclusions are drawn from it, compared with others of the same order, and then formalized as the premises required for deductive reasoning (Goody and Watt 1968:53; Ong 1982:49–57; Zumthor 1983:40; Lazere 1987:239–40; Lentz 1989: 4; Vollrath 1991:102–11; Near 1993:320–331).19 Oral culture, however, is generally linear and action oriented, stories being easier to remember than abstract arguments. It uses moral and paradigmatic narratives, which can be encoded in poetry or other mnemonic structures, in place of abstract deduction and reasoning from general definitions to particular instances (Luria 1976:91; Ong 1982: 140; Zumthor 1983:126–27). It does not, then, elaborate a set of criteria by which to evaluate a person’s behavior separate from the concrete instance in which that behavior is represented as having occurred (Havelock 1963:181–83).20 Nor can it therefore elaborate an abstract notion of the self, separate from its immediate experience, as A.R.Luria confirmed in his field work in the central Asian republics of the USSR in the mid-1930s.21 Hence, concepts of goodness and honor, separate from their immediate social and political context, or of the autonomous, interiorized ego on which such concepts are predicated, appear difficult if not impossible. Thus, Charles Taylor has recently argued that the first


articulation of the concept of a unified, autonomous self is found in Plato (mid-fourth century), but even it lacks a sense of interiority and is seen as conterminous with reason itself (Taylor 1989: 117–24). The predominantly oral nature of archaic Greek society, therefore, both in its phenomenal reality and in its status as a sign of the more general level of social, technological, and political development present in the culture, mitigates against the attribution of the kind of complex lyric consciousness, described above, to Archilochus or any of the archaic lyrists.22 It is important in this regard to recognize that literacy, of course, never occurs in a vacuum. It is but one variable in a much more complex social totality. Thus as A.B.Lord succinctly observes, “writing does not always imply written literature” (Lord 1991: 18–19). Likewise, Derrida notes: No one has ever thought writing…was the sufficient condition of science….but it is true, and one cannot ignore it, that the appearance of certain systems of writing three or four thousand years ago was an extraordinary leap in the history of life. (Derrida 1976:130–31) Consequently, I shall be arguing throughout this book that, while literacy is required for lyric consciousness, as we know it, to appear, writing does not produce that consciousness ex nihilo (for more on this, see Chapter 7). Rather, in Luria’s terms, all language development, including literacy, shapes consciousness, but linguistic development itself cannot be separated from the conditions operative in the society which gives rise to it (1976:xiv–xv, 9–11, 79). Nonetheless, we are naturally inclined to translate the normative ideals expressed in archaic Greek poetry into a system of values founded on the precepts of modern liberal thought. Yet, as Benveniste underlines in the case of Homer, such interpretations fundamentally misconstrue the relation of the individual to the community in archaic Greek society: It is necessary to recall that…all the vocabulary of moral terms is heavily loaded not with individual values but with relational ones. What we understand as a psychological, affective, and moral terminology in reality denotes relations between the individual and the members of his group. (Benveniste 1966: vol. 1, 340)23


What we would most readily interpret as individual moral qualities are, in fact, representations of social relations.24 Thus modern theorists did not, as Genette argues, project the tripartite scheme of modes onto the Greeks because such a scheme was more logical or inherently better able to account for the varieties of literary discourse. They did so because their historical universe was no longer that of the Greeks, because theirs was no longer the world of small, closely knit religious and political communities which defined the classical and archaic polis. Consequently, their conceptions of the relation between private and public, interior and exterior, on which our modern notions of individuality are founded are far more absolute than were those of Archilochus’ auditors, for whom our concept of the individual, autonomous ego did not exist (Will 1969:68). As Russo observes: Life in the ancient world, as in any society that has not undergone the social and personal dislocations of our own industrial age, was very much bound by the structure of the community or group to which the individual belonged. The expression of one’s individuality was never without a wider social context. In the composition and performance of poetry, this means, for example, that Sappho’s personal poetic statements, or those of Alcaeus, were not created primarily for that of a literary public unseen by and unknown to the poet, but for presentation to a group of fellowinitiates. (Russo 1973–74:709–10) It was for such a world that Archilochus too sang. Consequently, the fact that he was not regarded as a lyric poet should not be written off to an obsessive Alexandrian concern with form; it should alert us to the fact that the criteria by which we determine a poem to be lyric were not operative in archaic Greece. This being granted, two important questions remain: why, in more precise terms, have past commentators read Archilochus as a lyric poet; and if he is not, what is he? To answer these questions it will be necessary to examine the relation between Archilochus’ poetry and that of Homer. It will be shown that these two types of poetry, though in the past often thought of as antithetical to one another, are closely related. I will argue that Archilochus, in fact, draws from a storehouse of themes and motifs common to both the iambic and epic traditions, and that consequently the conventional interpretation of Archilochus as the spokesman for a


new individualistic consciousness, as opposed to the older communal and heroic consciousness of the epic poems, is untenable. The first of these questions, why have past commentators read Archilochus as a lyric poet, is the easiest. One need only examine the poetry and imagine how it must have appeared to scholars who had yet to consider that these poems were quite probably orally composed and certainly aurally consumed. To them, a fragment such as number 5, the famous shield poem, must have seemed a rebellion against the dominant ethos of the heroic era and the beginning of a new “lyric age”:

Some barbarian is waving my shield, since I was obliged to leave that perfectly good piece of equipment behind under a bush. But I got away, so what does it matter? Let the shield go; I can buy another one equally good. (frg. 5)25 Symptomatic of this desire to see Archilochus as the father of a new, lyric subjectivity are André Bonnard’s comments, “There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of Archilochus’ misadventure. The light tone with which he reports it, so different from that of Homeric epic, confirms it.” He continues by noting: The theme of the abandoned shield was then treated again by Alcaeus (428 Lobel), Anacreon (51 Diehl), and Horace (Odes 2. 7). It is not reasonable to think that this cascade of shields left in Archilochus’ wake…is anything other than mere literature. (Bonnard 1958:5–6)26 At this point, Bonnard’s argument self-destructs in two ways. First, the only reason to assume that Archilochus’ poem is the original and the others copies is the untenable assumption that his work represents a kind of absolute beginning for first person poetry. Before him, there is only impersonal epic, and so any resemblance between his work and that of later poets can only be accounted for by direct imitation of his text. Second, it is no more reasonable to assume that Archilochus would stand before a crowd of his compatriots and openly confess his


“cowardice” than that Alcaeus and Anacreon would.27 If we are to assume that this poem represents a personal confession, as the traditional interpretation dictates, then we must also account for how such a revelation would have been received by the poet’s peers. This aspect of the poem’s public reception takes on particular importance when dealing with archaic poetry, since at this time there was no book trade and consequently no widespread circulation of manuscripts.28 A poet’s words would have achieved currency and been preserved only if his auditors deemed them worthy of memorization and transmission (Thomas 1989:8; 1992:51).29 As such, Archilochus’ verses could hardly have been viewed as anti-social, but must have represented, in some sense, a shared communal code. As W.R.Johnson observes, “Ancient classical lyric was…concerned with worlds that were at once inner and shared, with the ceremonies and the habits of feeling of small, closed communities” (Johnson 1982:77). Thus a truly personal confession of cowardice or less than honorable behavior seems unlikely. Another explanation for this fragment must be sought, another hermeneutic context elaborated. What, though, if Alcaeus and Anacreon were not imitating Archilochus, but all three were working from a common source which possessed universal cultural prestige? How would one then evaluate the provocativeness of Archilochus’ poem? On what ground could it be said to be a faithful reporting of his “individual” feelings? These queries are not founded on mere speculation. Rather, two lines of argumentation can be used to show that they go to the very heart of the Archilochus controversy. First, Bernd Seidensticker has noted that a thematic precedent for Archilochus’ shield poem exists in the Odyssey. Thus, the content of Archilochus’ poem is not original, but would appear to be part of a larger tradition. The context is the Cretan tale Odysseus tells Eumaios, the swineherd. Here, he recounts how he was surprised by a superior military force during a raid on Egypt, and saved himself by putting aside his weapons and his shield, as Archilochus had done, and surrendering to the Egyptian king:


I dashed the wrought helmet from my head, I threw down the shield from my shoulder, the spear from my hand; I ran to meet the king’s chariot and I touched and kissed his knees. He had compassion and rescued me, gave me a place in his own chariot and took me in tears back to his palace. (Odyssey 14.276ff; Seidensticker 1978:11)30 Other correspondences between Archilochus and Odysseus have also been established. For example, Odysseus begins the tale by relating a fictional autobiography in which he claims to be the son of a rich and respected man from Crete, but of a slave mother (14.199ff; Seidensticker 1978:12). The same is true for Archilochus, who in one fragment (295) claims to have been the son of a respectable father and a slave named Enipo, or “blame.” It is probably not mere coincidence that Enipo also happens to be an appropriate title for the iambic genre (West 1974:28; Van Sickle 1975:151; Nagy 1979:247–48), which was known in antiquity for its biting satire and the lethal effects it could have on the poets’ enemies or “ekhthroi.” Thus Lycambes, the target of much of Archilochus’ poetry, was said to have hanged himself because he was so shamed by the lampoons the poet launched against him. The same was also said of Bupalus, the victim of Hipponax (Horace, Epodes 6.13–14).31 As we shall see, such speaking names are widely found in Archilochus’ poetry and the legends which surround it. Odysseus also claims that, after the death of his father, his brothers granted him only a very small part of the inheritance; nonetheless, he managed to win the daughter of a rich man for his wife (211ff). Afterwards, his life was that of a pirate and mercenary, who made his living from fighting and raiding (Seidensticker 1978: 12). Again, the same is true of Archilochus, who was said to have been promised the hand of Neoboule, the daughter of Lycambes, but was then doublecrossed and later became a mercenary. Yet when Archilochus speaks of these events, we are told that he is expressing his private thoughts and feelings, narrating the events of his life, though when compared with the story of Odysseus, and when one considers the implications of the name Enipo in the genre he is practicing, it would appear that both Odysseus and Archilochus are making use of a common fund of motifs which belonged to a pre-existing oral tradition. Seidensticker’s perceptions are corroborated by other evidence as well. First, Denys Page has argued that much of Archilochus’ poetry contains oral formulae derived from the same tradition as epic (Page 1963:125–61; Johnson 1982:32). This would seem to indicate that the


two types of poems were viewed as complementary rather than antagonistic. Second, there is the widely attested ancient tradition of pairing the two authors, beginning with Heraclitus, who said that both should be banned from rhapsodic competitions. Likewise, Socrates in the Ion pairs Archilochus with Homer (531 A), as does Antipater of Salonika in a late epigram, while “Longinus” explicitly labels Archilochus Homer’s imitator. Heraclides Ponticus—the student of Plato, Speusippus, and sometimes Aristotle—is known to have written a treatise in two volumes, entitled On Archilochus and Homer. Perhaps most interesting, though, is a short papyrus text of unknown origin which features a colloquy between Homer and Archilochus in which the latter trades an analogous trimeter for the former’s every hexameter.32 Finally, Jaeger himself points out that there is a strong thematic resemblance between Odysseus’ famous self-address in the Odyssey (20. 18ff) and Archilochus’ fragment 128 (Jaeger 1945:125). These considerations on Archilochus’ relation to the Homeric tradition bring us to our second line of argument: the fictional nature of the traditional life of Archilochus. Mary Lefkowitz has argued that the ancient biographies of Archilochus, on which the traditional claims of his recounting the events of his own life are based, were late-Hellenistic compilations derived from the poetry itself (Lefkowitz 1976:181–82; 1981b:viii–ix, 25–31). This in turn would indicate that any defense of the biographical content of Archilochus’ poetry is entirely circular. For the records of Archilochus’ life, on which the traditional biographical interpretations of his poetry are based, would themselves have been derived from that very poetry. New papyrus discoveries have also cast doubt on how much of Archilochus’ poetry was even presented in the form of a direct statement by the author. The longest complete poem we possess, the “Cologne Epode” (198a), is, in fact, a framed dramatic dialogue between a character thought to represent the persona of Archilochus and a young woman thought to be the sister of Neoboule, daughter of Lycambes. It is in no sense a confessional poem, but a small comic drama of seduction, in which the persona of the poet plays a part. In addition, the dramatic site of the poem has been identified by several scholars as a temple of Hera. This observation, when combined with the seduction of the young maid, which leads to the poet’s satisfaction but falls short of full intercourse, seems to point to a sacral context related to fertility and the rites of puberty (Nagy 1979:251–52; 1990a:399–400; Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:133–34; Reckford 1987:481; Brown 1987:237).33 Such a context mitigates strongly against seeing Archilochus’ poetry as


autobiography, and places his work firmly in a communal context. By the same token, this sort of identification by the poet with the characters he presents is common in oral poetry and does not imply any existential equivalence between poet and persona.34 Moreover, since the rest of Archilochus’ poetry is fragmentary, often consisting of no more than a few lines, and since it has been established that the poems’ mode of utterance was at times dramatic rather than personal, it becomes impossible to contend that the first person pronoun always represents Archilochus speaking in his own person. Thus, Jenny Strauss Clay has recently argued that fragment 23, which presents a character speaking in the first person to a woman about to rule a city and gain fame with her spear (a description that in the past has been viewed as an erotic metaphor), is a dramatic dialogue between Gyges and the wife of the Lydian king, Candaules (Clay 1986:7–17). Similarly, we know that Archilochus also made use of animal fables featuring dialogues, which he defines as a form of ainos: figurative speech designated for a specific social group, which seeks to praise or blame.35 In light of these considerations, it becomes progressively more difficult to see Archilochus as a rebel against the impersonal epic tradition and the advocate of a newly found individuality. He approximates much more closely the model of a communal, oral poet whose work is embedded in a rich, pre-existing tradition.36 Gregory Nagy has taken this criticism of the biographical tradition a step farther and argues that the biographical and poetic traditions both have their foundations in cultic practice. He bases this determination on a fact which is often ignored, that on the island of Paros, the poet’s traditional home, a hero cult to him was in existence from at least the fifth century and probably much earlier. Nagy’s reading of an inscription surviving from the third century, which tells the tale of Archilochus’ miraculous poetic initiation (see the second epigraph to this chapter) and his later death at the hands of Korax (“Crow”), allows him to conclude that the “Life of Archilochus tradition is deeply rooted in the realia of cult…[and] is not only derived from the poetic tradition of Archilochus but also parallel to it” (Nagy 1979:301–4; 1990a: 363).37 The tradition of oral performance, moreover, would have implied, at least in its early stages, a gradual process of recomposition through those performances, so that the original author’s personal connection would have gradually eroded as his life and work became integrated into the very poetic tradition from which the latter was originally derived. “To put it it another way: the person of the poet by virtue of being a transmitter of tradition, can become absorbed by the tradition”


(Nagy 1990a: 79).38 In this context, it thus becomes impossible to envision poetic biography as anything but the reenactment of the tradition itself. As Nagy argues in Pindar’s Homer: Once the factor of performance slips out of the poet’s control — even if the performers of the poet’s poetry have traditional comments about the poet as composer—the poet becomes a myth, and the myth-making structure appropriates his or her identity. Such is the case with the poetry of a Homer or a Hesiod or an Archilochus, as performed by rhapsoidoi “rhapsodes” like Ion of Chios. (Nagy 1990a: 80; see also 435–36; bold print in Nagy’s text) This mythological appropriation of the poet’s identity would in turn be supported by Seidensticker’s argument that the tradition from which Archilochus draws substantially predates his own existence, and this tradition can therefore be assumed to have played a substantial role in the communal life of the people who saw fit to retain and transmit it. As such, this poetic tradition must have played a significant part in the maintenance and reproduction of the society’s ideology and values (Althusser 1971:127–34, 162–77; Foucault 1971:23, 46),39 which in turn would argue for its serving a religious as well as a more narrowly social function at this historical moment. In this light, the traditional vision of Archilochus as the first individual, baring his soul to his fellow citizens, is no longer tenable. If the poetry of Archilochus has its origins in cult, then the appropriate hermeneutical context for an alternative reading of that poetry would now have been found. His is not a lyric consciousness, but a communal and cultic one. In line with this, Martin West has already shown that the poetry of Archilochus is rooted in a long tradition of ritual abuse, or “blame” poetry. Thus, the word iambic itself would appear to refer not only to the poet’s choice of meters, but to the set of occasions for which this type of comic, abusive poetry was deemed appropriate (West 1974:23; Dover 1963:189; Nagy 1979: 243).40 Semus, the Delian antiquarian, confirms this reading when he refers to iamboi alternatively as the witty sorts of sayings and abuse recited by ivy crowned (and hence Dionysian) jesters, or as the jesters themselves. Similarly, the goddess Iambe, who presumably served as both the divine projection of the genre’s self-understanding and as its religious justification, is closely associated with ritual jesting, and is


depicted in the Homeric Hymn toDemeter as distracting the earth mother with humorous clowning during her search for Persephone (11. 201–4). Ritual abuse also was directly associated with the cults of Demeter and Dionysus through festivals such as the Haloa, the Stenia, the Thesmophoria, and the initiation rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries (Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:22–24, 112–16; Rösler 1986:36–37; Reckford 1987:464–65; Brown 1987:22, 94, 197, 199; Rosen 1988b: 4). That such ritual humor and abuse as that which was designated by the word iambos is associated with Demeter and Dionysus, a god and goddess of fertility, is not surprising. Indeed, to those familiar with Mikhail Bakhtin’s studies of folk comedy and its relation to the tradition of carnival celebrations in ancient and medieval times, this would be expected (Bakhtin 1968:1–58; Calame 1977:246; Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:15–16; Reckford 1987:466; Nagy 1990a:397–98).41 Returning to the poet’s family as depicted in the ancient biographical tradition, one sees that it and Archilochus both appear to have strong associations with the cults of Demeter and Dionysus, who, as we have seen, are themselves associated with iambic tradition. Thus, Paros, the traditional birthplace of Archilochus, is listed in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as the second most important center of the goddess’s cult after Eleusis, while the grandfather of Archilochus, Tellis, whose name seems to have been derived from the word telea or “the sacrificial rites of Demeter,” is said to have been one of those who first brought the cult to Paros. Similarly, Archilochus’ father was named Telesikles, which means “glory” of Tellis. Since Archilochus, the iambic poet, was the son of “Blame” and “Glory-of-the-Sacrificial-Rites-of-Demeter,” his genealogy appears to have referred not to an empirical reality but to the mythic empowerment of his poetry, and the communal basis which insured its preservation (Pausanias 10. 28. 3 in Edmonds 1931:82–83; West 1974:24; Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:72; Nagy 1990a:431). Archilochus’ own connection to the cult of Demeter is further confirmed by a fragment of a festival song in epodic meter containing the words [“honoring the high festival of sacred Demeter and Kore”] (West 1974: , provides in 24, citing frg. 322). The title listed for this song, turn a link between these rites and those of Dionysus. It is a name appropriate to a band of people whose exarchos, or “song leader,” cries [“Ho Bacchoi, Ho Bacchoi”], as Dionysus does in Euripides’ Bacchae (1. 577) (West 1974:24; Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:113). Moreover, in fragment 120, Archilochus openly asserts his abilities to serve as exarchos, or “chorus leader,” in a


dithyramb

for

Dionysus:

[“I know how to lead the beautiful dithyrambic song of lord Dionysus, thunderstruck with wine”]. Likewise the Mnesiepes inscription at the shrine to Archilochus on Paros contains an explicit reference to his abilities as a leader of dithyrambic and hence communal, cultic song. The fantastic events which the inscription narrates clearly show the mythic and religious nature of this function (Pickard-Cambridge 1962:94; Will 1969:27; Calame 1977: 394–95; Nagy 1990a:363–64).42 As Martin West explains: [T]he gist seems to be that at a certain festival Archilochus improvised some verses and taught them to a chorus. They mentioned Dionysus, grapes and figs (with sexual doubleentendre?), and Oipholios “the Screwer,” probably a title of Dionysus. The city found this too “iambic,” and the poet was put on trial. But before long the men were afflicted with impotence. They sent to Delphi to discover the cause, and were told to [honour] Archilochus. They realized their mistake and [introduced a new form of service to] Dionysus. (West 1974:25)43 Similarly, the late grammarian, Marius Victorinus, attributes the invention of the ithyphallic meter to Archilochus himself (Gr.Lat. 6. 1. p. 85 K, in Edmonds 1931:88). As Reckford notes, “We begin to see… that Archilochus’ famous iambus was a public performance; it was connected with or at least derived from a ritual occasion, in honor of Demeter or Dionysus; and it was produced for the entertainment of a group” (Reckford 1987:480–81, emphasis his). Furthermore, the dithyrambos, as a type of ritual song praising Dionysus, is directly related to the iambos, both of which pertain to a larger linguistic family that includes such terms as thriambos,ithumbos, and the Latin term, triumphus. The common element in all these words, the root -amb- (as in the English, “ambulatory”), most probably means something like “dance” or “step” (Pickard-Cambridge 1962:8). Thus the term ithumbos, for example, referred either to a dance performed at a Dionysiac festival, or to a humorous and abusive poem, or to the jester who performed them both.44 Taken together, these terms point to the central place occupied by poetry in the ancient, Indo-European society. The poetry of this earliest period, as Georges Dumézil has shown, was divided into two


overarching categories—praise and blame—which, whether they appeared together or separately, performed a well defined regulatory function in society, by promoting or discouraging certain types of behavior and sanctioning both individual political leaders and their acts.45 Furthermore, Mikhail Bakhtin has argued that this pairing of praise and blame, or the comic and the serious, was a common feature throughout preclassical and early classical culture. Thus, the Athenian festival of Dionysus always included a satyr play at the end of each group of tragedies. The earliest forms of the Roman triumph exhibited this same duality, including “on almost equal terms the glorifying and the deriding of the victor” (Bakhtin 1968:6).46 On a more theoretical level, Aristotle in the Poetics divides poets into two essential types, those who praise the worthy and those who deride the base, thus reproducing this traditional division of labor (Poetics 1448b 4–34; Gentili 1984:142). And Pindar, the epinician praise poet, directly contrasts his own poetry with that of his polar opposite, Archilochus, whom he refers to as “a man full of censure who fattened himself on heavy-worded hatreds” (Pythian 2.55– 56; Kurke 1991:100–1). Both of these forms —the poem of praise and the poem of blame—were in turn associated with a single social institution, the komos, whose processions provided the occasion of their performance and which gave its name to two of the later embodiments of these larger categories, the enkomion and the komoidia (Nagy 1979: 250; Reckford 1987: 486).47 It was from these public processions that the choruses of later theater developed. Significantly, another word sharing the -amb- root with iambos is the proper name Lycambes, meaning “wolf dancer.” West argues on this basis that Lycambes was not a living contemporary of Archilochus, but a stock character in a traditional entertainment, most likely a procession featuring animal dancers such as those found in Old Comedy, in the Wasps, the Frogs, and the Birds. It will be recalled that Aristotle, in the Poetics (1448b–1449b), traces the origin of Attic comedy to earlier iambic blame poets whose work was performed in the context of the revels of the komos, and that Aristophanes’ contemporary, Cratinus, wrote a play called the Archilochoi and was known as a follower of Archilochus. At the same time Attic comedy, like iambic poetry, had strong ties with the cults of Demeter and Dionysus, and this was often represented in the plays themselves. Thus, West’s interpretation of the origin and meaning of Lycambes’ name is of a piece with what is known of the generic and ritual evolution of the poetic tradition, linking the archaic iambic poetry of Archilochus with the later classical comedy of Aristophanes. Likewise, an archaic tradition of animal dancers and


totemic rites is found in many cultic traditions in Greece. In the komos of the boukoliastai at Syracuse, for instance, the revelers wore wreaths and stag’s horns as they sang, while at the festival of the Brauronia, the young initiates underwent a period of ritual segregation in which they became “bears.” It should also be remembered that Archilochus himself made use of the animal fable or ainos, and that the man who was said to have killed him in battle was named Korax, “Crow” (West 1974:26; Nagy 1979:242, 248–50; 1990a:141; Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:53; Rösler 1986: 38; Reckford 1987:446, 485–88, 543 n. 57; Rosen 1988b: 3–5, 28, 40–42). Thus, while there are substantial historical and theoretical problems with seeing Archilochus’ poetry as the mere expression of personal animus against a concrete individual, another vital hermeneutic context offers a valid alternative. It sees both poet and antagonist as products of a complex poetic and ritual tradition, directly embedded in the fabric of archaic society. In addition, the use of speaking names, as we have seen in the case of Archilochus’ mother, father, and grandfather, was not uncommon in iambic poetry. West’s reading of Lycambes is also corroborated by the name of his supposed daughter, Neoboule, who was supposed to marry Archilochus, and whose name meaning “new counsel” symbolized their broken engagement.48 It seems incredible that such a fortuitous conjunction of names would be pure coincidence. In addition, Louis Gernet has established that the wolf figure was frequently used to symbolize the outsider or outlaw in both the Greek and wider IndoEuropean traditions, and thus appeared in cultic dances which featured animal costumes and masks (Gernet 1982:201–23).49 Consequently, it is perfectly understandable that Lycambes is the only individual whom Archilochus relates to as an ekhthros, that is to say, as one who is not philos, and so outside the bounds of the recognized social group (frg. 295(d)).50 Thus, when Pindar wishes to describe what it means to be ekhthros, he gives what is in essence a gloss on Lycambes’ name:

May I be a friend to a friend but being an enemy to my enemy I will run in the manner of a wolf, stepping now here, now there on a crooked path. (Pythian 2.83–85)51


This passage implies, moreover, that one responds to the ekhthros by being ekhthros, one responds to the wolf by playing the wolf. Thus, the obscene trickster can only be combated by the obscene trickster. In this sense, Archilochus and Lycambes are not only opposites, but also complementary (Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:55; Rosen 1988a:37 n. 29).52 At this point the hermeneutical circle would appear to be nearing closure, for the figure of the wolf also plays an important role in the myth of Odysseus, whose maternal grandfather was Autolycus or “A Very Wolf.” It is possible then, and in the context of an oral tradition highly probable, that Archilochus had chosen to imitate Odysseus in the shield poem and elsewhere, not for aesthetic and psychological reasons, but to enact a common tradition, exemplified in the figure of the wolf, stretching back to the earliest strata of Greek, Mycenaean, and Indo-European myth and culture. To show how close and complex these relations are and how the Archilochus/Lycambes pairing reflects a simplified version of the more ambivalent Autolycus/ Odysseus pairing, it will be necessary to examine briefly Odysseus’ relations with his grandfather. Autolycus was a thief and trickster, famed for his lying, and protected by Hermes, who was sometimes said to be his father (Odyssey 19. 394– 96; Clay 1983:82–83; Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983: 53–54; Peradotto 1990:129; Rose 1992:115). He was in this sense a double for the manyOdysseus, whom he named (Stanford 1950:46–48). wiled Autolycus’ words, when he chooses the hero’s name, explicitly label Odysseus as his double, [“Since I have caused odium among many before I arrived here, let him be named Odious after me”] (19.406–9). The pun, on which this passage is based, is now generally conceded to be a product of folk etymology, and the consensus seems to be that the original root of Odysseus’ name was -oλυ-, not -oδυ- (whence we get Ulysses). In fact, the -δ- is unattested outside the context of Ionic epic (Bolling 1906:65–67; Thompson 1914:17–18; Kretschmer 1940:253– 54; Chantraine 1974: tome 3, 775–76). It has thus been proposed that the original form of Odysseus’ name was Olukios; that is to say, essentially the same as that of Autolycus. Indeed, there is an entire side of Odysseus which seems to allude to a parallel or pre-epic tradition of him as a liar and trickster, which W.B.Stanford refers to as the Autolycan element in his nature (Stanford 1954:8–24) and is symbolized by Athena’s mention of his use of poisoned arrows in


Odyssey 1.255–64. By the same token, Odysseus himself announces to Alcinous and the Phaeacians that he is famous among men for tricks and that this fame reaches the sky (9.19–20). The most famous of these tricks is of course the Trojan horse itself. He is thus to a certain extent outside the mainstream of heroic culture, representing the triumph of metis, or “cleverness,” over the brute strength of bie. His is not the world of single, face to face combat, but of the night raid, the ambush, the ruse (Clay 1983: 28, 33, 72, 95–96, 101–2, 107, 184; Vidal-Naquet 1986:122; Segal 1988a:131). Paula Philippson has argued that this trickster aspect of Odysseus’ character is a direct result of his connection through his grandfather to the nighttime and chthonic world of Hermes. Hence, Odysseus would have originally been a double of the trickster-wolf who was his grandfather, but in later traditions, as he was assimilated to the world of heroic epic his image was cleaned up and another etymology supplied for his name, one which nonetheless preserved the tradition of his having been named after Autolycus, though in a more attenuated form.53 As Jenny Strauss Clay observes: The evolution of the figure of Odysseus can be summed up in the change in the meaning of Odysseus’ name from the primitive Autolycan sense of trickster…to the Odyssean Odysseus who is above all the long suffering victim of the undeserved and excessive anger of the gods. [Clay 1983:70; see also Segal 1988a: 132) The trickster Odysseus is, of course, not absent from the later tradition. In the cyclical epics, Pindar and Euripides, on pottery from Boeotia, Apulia, and Attica, as well as in Vergil, Odysseus appears as a thoroughly disreputable figure, known for lies and thievery (Nemean 8.23–27; Aeneid 2; Clay 1983:187). On the vases, in particular, he is depicted as a comic, carnivalesque figure, noted primarily for his pot belly, large phallus, and ever present pilos, a small conical cap. This figure reproduces, with the exception of the pilos, the normal costume of the fifth century comic actor, as well as the depictions of early komoi, found on vases. It also parallels what appears to be the costume of Hipponax when he performed his iambic verse (Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:38– 39; Reckford 1987:487; Rosen 1988b: 4 n. 16). Thus the figure of Odysseus reproduces within himself, in the form of his comical/blameworthy and heroic/praiseworthy manifestations, that same species of doubleness,54 as has been already observed


between him and Autolycus, and which is also reminiscent of the two major poetic categories outlined above.55 This multiplication of doublets is, in turn, a common feature of oral folklore traditions. As Bakhtin observes, when looking at much the same evidence: In the folklore of primitive peoples, coupled with the cults which were serious…were other, comic cults which laughed and scoffed at the deity (“ritual laughter”); coupled with serious myths were comic and abusive ones, coupled with heroes were their parodies and doublets. (Bakhtin 1968:6)56 One incident is particularly illustrative of Odysseus’ dual nature and original cultic connections with Autolycus; that is his and Diomedes’ night expedition to the camp of the Trojans in Book 10 of the Iliad, also known as the “Doloneia.” This episode forms part of a larger cycle of stories in which Odysseus and Diomedes go on various expeditions, frequently of a disreputable nature.57 The title for this book comes from its main Trojan character, Dolon, whose name means “guile,” and who is thus a trickster figure in his own right. His name also reproduces one of the formulaic epithets which was used to characterize Odysseus in [“insatiable of tricks and the oral tradition, toils”].58 This episode has attracted a lot of attention, and it has been suggested by many that it represents an interpolation into the original poem. One of its more unusual features, and one which appears to date it to a very early period, is the fact that all the main characters don totemic animal skins. Agamemnon (10.23–24) and Diomedes (177–78) become lions, Menelaus a panther (29–30), and Nestor an unnamed woolly animal (134).59 Most interesting are the disguises of Dolon and Odysseus. Dolon wears a wolf skin, and in the version of the story found in the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus crawls on all fours. In the dramatic version, he too, like Autolycus, is said to enjoy the protection of Hermes.60 Dolon, however, is outfoxed by the true heir of Autolycus, Odysseus, who is wearing a helmet decorated with boar tusks, a type of gear known to date back to at least Mycenaean times, and probably the beginning of the second millennium (Borchardt 1972:18–37, 47–52). This helmet, as it turns out, was at one time Autolycus’, who had stolen it from Amyntor. Furthermore, the boar’s tusks make reference to the famous scar Odysseus bears from a wound he received while hunting with Autolycus. It is this scar which allows his nurse, Eurykleia,61 to recognize that he is not the beggar from Crete, as he had told Eumaios


(see pp. 20–22 of this chapter), but the Lord of Ithaca. It is also this episode which introduces the tale of how he acquired his name. The boar’s tusk helmet is not just a simple curiosity, but a “concrete emblem of the relation between Autolycus and Odysseus,” a sort of familial totem (Clay 1983:81; Carver 1973:167). It is not surprising then that Dolon, the impostor descendant of Autolycus, is tricked by Odysseus, who after Diomedes slays the Trojan receives the wolf skin, which he dedicates to Athena upon his safe return to the Greek camp (Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:56–57).62 Likewise, it is significant to note that it is in the passage describing the boar’s tusk helmet that the first known mention of the pilos, which would become Odysseus’ distinguishing mark in later iconography, is found. It too, of course, belonged to Autolycus. Interestingly enough, the boar’s tusk helmet does not pass directly to Odysseus, but comes to him through Meriones, a Cretan. This, in turn, provides the final link back to Archilochus. For it will be remembered that it was in the course of Odysseus’ telling of the Cretan tales to Eumaios that we first noted the parallels between him and Archilochus’ persona in the shield poem. Furthermore, in all of these tales, Odysseus portrays himself as having a close relationship with Idomeneos, as does Meriones. Both Odysseus and Meriones are known for their skill in ambush and their use of archery. Indeed, in the very passage where Odysseus receives the boar’s tusk helmet, he also borrows a bow from Meriones. Moreover, in the same Cretan tales told to Eumaios, Odysseus recounts a night ambush outside the walls of Troy, a situation analogous to that found in the Doloneia. It will also be recalled that Odysseus tells this tale to Eumaios in order to coax him out of a cloak. As Clay observes, “The piquancy of the ploy is enhanced if we remember that, in the remarkably similar setting of the Doloneia, Odysseus alone of the heroes goes forth without a cloak but acquires at the end the wolf pelt of Dolon.” Finally, Plutarch (Life of Marcellus 20) records that there was a temple in Sicily built by Cretans which jointly displayed the helmets of Meriones and Odysseus, thus showing evidence of an extra-literary ritual tradition linking the two heroes (Clay 1983:86–89). Consequently, the same passage which shows Odysseus most clearly to be the true heir of Autolycus, in which he not only slays the impostor but dons the wolf pelt and receives his grandfather’s helmet, also demonstrates substantial ritual and poetic links with the Cretan tale that most clearly links the poetic tradition of the Odyssey with that of Archilochus.


This very tale is described by Eumaios himself (14.508) as an ainos, the same generic term Archilochus employs to describe his use of animal fables (Nagy 1990a: 424). This fact, in turn, calls to mind a third element linking Odysseus, Meriones, and Archilochus. For Plutarch, in The Slow Vengeance of the Deity (17), records that after Korax slew Archilochus he was accused by a priestess of having killed a man sacred to the Muses. When Korax asked how he might expiate this crime, he was told to go to the home of the cicada to appease the poet’s ghost. “This was Taenarum, where they say Tettix [“Cicada”] the Cretan came and founded a city and dwelt by the shrine of the psychopompos .”63 We have in this passage a return to the world of the beast fable or ainos (the crow must go to the home of the cicada), and a specific linkage of that with Crete, the home of Meriones and setting of Odysseus’ Cretan tales. Moreover, “psychopompos” is Hermes’ title in his capacity as escort for the souls of the dead. Hermes, it will be recalled, was also the patron of both Autolycus and Dolon, and he alone of gods and men shares Odysseus’ epithet, polutropos. He also figures prominently in Hipponax’ iambic poetry as his partner in crime.64 At the same time, in fragment 223, Archilochus directly compares himself to the cicada. Cicadas, according to the tale recounted in Plato’s Phaedrus (259 b–c), were once a race of men who, because of their love of song, neglected food and drink and so were transformed into beings whose job was to sing all their days and to report to the Muses on which men honored them the most. Thus the whole narrative recounted by Plutarch is neither idle fantasy nor historical narrative, but a recapitulation of the poet’s cultic status as hero, as servant of the Muses (frg. 1), and as both product and producer of a poetic tradition which stretches back to the most fundamental elements of the Indo-European oral tradition, and is common to both epos and iambos.65 To summarize the complex relations which obtain between Archilochus and Odysseus, we have identified four basic doublings of Odysseus in the Greek poetic tradition: with Autolycus; with his own comic representation; with his persona in the Cretan tales; and with Dolon. In each case we see a pairing between the praiseworthy hero and the trickster figure or outsider. Which figure occupies which position at a given point is dependent upon the perspective from which he is viewed, on whether he is ekhthros or philos. This same doubleness or duplicity can be seen in the figure of Archilochus. In later antiquity, he was frequently depicted as a disreputable layabout, of low birth and questionable mores,66 though he was worshipped as a hero on his home island and frequently treated as the equal of Homer, or as his imitator. At


the same time, he attacks Lycambes, or the “wolf dancer,” as ekhthros before those other members of the community with whom he himself was philos. Lycambes, in turn, can also be seen as a properly comic reduplication of Archilochus himself when he plays his role as poet and jester, the concrete manifestation of the goddess Iambe, in the rites of Demeter and Dionysus. In this sense, Lycambes can be said to represent the same side of the equation as Autolycus, Dolon, the Cretan and the comic Odysseus, while the heroic Odysseus can be equated with the side of Archilochus embodied in his hero cult. The full implications of this complex pattern of heroes and their doubles, with its ambivalences and layers of overdetermination, cannot be completely unfolded here, but what must be noted is how far we have moved from the original notion of private, lyric expression in the poems of Archilochus into a realm of communal myth and ideology, whose full import has yet to be fathomed. The figure of Archilochus, far from representing the awakening of the individual consciousness once the mists of epic have cleared, is of a piece with the same oral tradition as that found in heroic poetry, though he is practicing a different genre whose function is parallel but not opposed to epic. His was the task of ratifying social bonds by establishing the boundaries of the community, its accepted areas of deviation, and its solidarity before the outside and the other. In this context, we may cite Jaeger himself: The general course of development followed by the iambic in early Greek poetry after Archilochus makes it certain that, when an iambic poet criticizes a person, an opinion, or a tendency, which has for any reason attracted public attention, he is not voicing a casual dislike of his own, but speaking as the representative and teacher of his fellow citizens. (Jaeger 1945:123) When Archilochus leaves his shield on the field of battle, far from rebelling against the heroic sensibility of Homer and oral epic, he is, through imitation, reaffirming the deep ties between them. The trickster of tradition reaffirms the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, by bringing the latter within the confines of the former. The ekhthros is identified among the philoi and cast out. The enemy/other ceases to threaten the community by being articulated within it, thus reestablishing the hegemony of that society’s rules and customs. The trickster’s symmetrical and complementary antagonist functions as a scapegoat or pharmakos, who must be driven from the


community in order to ratify the preeminence of its boundaries, laws, and ritual norms. He represents both the enemy of the community and the moment of its originary constitution in the gesture of his exclusion (Jaeger 1945:8, 400; Miralles and Pòrtulas 1983:12; Rosen 1988b: 21– 22; Brown 1987:218).67 His is not the voice of a complex and highly interiorized lyric subjectivity, but that of comedy and carnival fulfilling its most profound social functions. To establish a more precise framework for understanding the complex and complementary relation ship between epos and iambos, as well as to lay the groundwork for examining the emergence of what is today considered lyric poetry and the birth of the lyric collection, it will now be necessary to return to the larger question of genre itself.

36

3 DE GENERIBUS DISPUTANDUM EST

All literary production, in fact, belongs to that ideological apparatus which can be provisionally termed the “cultural.” What is in question is not simply the process of production and consumption of literary texts, but the function of such production within the cultural apparatus. (Eagleton 1976:56) Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These may be called speech genres. (Bakhtin 1986:60) The contrasts between the figure of Odysseus as he appears in epic and that of Archilochus as portrayed in iambic poetry bring the question of genre to the fore. The ancients, of course, recognized generic distinctions, just as we do. Today’s college catalogs regularly list courses on “The Modern Novel,” “Latin Lyric,” or “French Classical Tragedy.” These generic concepts are part of the everyday equipment of literary study, yet they are far from being precisely understood.1 As we have already seen, the term “lyric” has been applied to a wide variety of heterogeneous material, from Archilochus to Pindar to Mallarmé. Moreover, this very lack of precision has been in part to blame for the grouping together of disparate sorts of texts under a single name, on the assumption that they must somehow be representative of a common phenomenon. For this as well as other more sophisticated reasons, the entire concept of genre has come under increasing suspicion, and is now either considered illegitimate or avoided by many influential practitioners of


literary criticism and theory. To take only one of the more prominent examples, Fredric Jameson, before attempting to elaborate his own theory of genre in The Political Unconscious, observes that this sort of criticism has been “thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice” (Jameson 1981:105).2 It will be necessary, therefore, to address this issue directly, before continuing our investigation of the origins and development of lyric poetry, and to formulate a new definition of genre which will meet the serious challenges which have been launched against more traditional notions. In a recent article, Ralph Cohen has given a good account of the current status of the theoretical debate on the problem of genre (Cohen 1986a:203–18). The basic objections to genre theory have generally been of three orders: that genre theories are necessarily essentialist, and thus both ahistorical and prescriptive; that genre theories, such as those proposed by Frye or Lukács, tend to be teleological, and thus posit a covert metaphysics and an essentially deterministic model of development; and that interpreting a given work in light of its generic background ignores that work’s fundamental indeterminacy, and so does violence to the individual work in the name of a normative abstraction which cannot be shown to exist wholly in any one of its exemplars. These objections have been raised by a wide variety of critics, perhaps most powerfully by Paul de Man and others associated with the former Yale school of deconstruction. By examining the most distinguished example of this work on genre, de Man’s “Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric,” one can easily see the difficult situation to which American deconstruction has led (de Man 1984: 239–62). In the article, de Man is left in the paradoxical position of contending that there is no such thing as lyric or genre, even as he must use those categories to undermine them. Though his argument is both complex and condensed, for my limited purposes it can be summarized as follows. Beginning with Baudelaire’s celebrated poem “Correspondances,” de Man argues that its pairing with the later sonnet “Obsession” undermines these poems’ claim to a pure lyric voice, by the way in which “Obsession” enacts a compulsive repetition of what de Man labels a nonexperiential, purely grammatical gesture in “Correspondances.” In other words, the illusion of song, of lyrical spontaneity, in the second poem is found to be dependent, not on the poet’s experience, but upon writing, upon the rhetorical and grammatical relationships which link the second poem to the first. Thus, the lyrical/experiential nature of the second poem is an illusion created by its position within the collection

DE GENERIBUS DISPUTANDUM EST 39

and made possible by writing, rather than by experience or inspiration. From this observation, de Man draws the unwarranted conclusion that the very notion of genre itself is a defensive gesture, an hypostatization of literary forms which blocks the reader from understanding the structural and material relations which make those genres possible. The notion of genre, then, becomes a sort of mystification, a covert metaphysics of literary and experiential types. de Man’s objections, however, only have weight if one seeks to defend the Romantic notion of lyric poetry as unmediated, personal expression—as the presence of a “voice,” rather than the signifying absence of the material letter—and if one views this expressive moment as constitutive of the notion of genre as a whole (de Man 1982:xix; 1985:56, 69).3 Yet this is precisely the position this book is opposing. By contrast, if we were to found genre studies on a reading of the same types of figural relations as de Man detects in Baudelaire’s poetry, genre would then cease to be a gesture of mystification and instead become the necessary instrument for beginning to understand the history of the types of figurative relations which structure our literary understanding. As Todorov puts it: [F]ailing to recognize the existence of genres is equivalent to claiming that a literary work does not bear any relationship to already existing works. Genres are precisely those relay-points by which the work assumes a relation with the universe of literature. (Dubrow 1982:93, citing Todorov, The Fantastic, 1973:8) By proposing to study lyric consciousness, not as the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion but as a determined effect produced by a certain structure of writing in a specific historical context, we can not only vitiate the force of de Man’s criticisms, but take them as the basis of our own definition of the lyric genre. Indeed, the projection of a complex, variegated image of subjective experience by a lyric poem is not opposed to the work’s grammatological nature, but a function of it. The lyric consciousness is an absent presence which is constantly effacing and reconstituting itself across the multitemporal movement of the lyric collection.4 Genres in general, and lyric in particular, neither name a set of a priori experiences nor reflect moments of absolute presence. Instead, they refer to certain recurring structures of signification which can be profitably compared and contrasted with one another.


Genre studies, consequently, need not be viewed as incompatible with the demands of contemporary literary theory, but rather as its logical extension. Indeed, if one examines another deconstructive text, Derrida’s “La loi du genre,” the necessity of such studies becomes clear. For while he maintains that no utterance can be wholly subsumed within a genre—since every assertion of generic self-consciousness also reveals the trace of an absent pregeneric moment5—this statement must be interpreted in light of his corollary claim that speech is only intelligible to the extent that it is the product of repetitive forms, and is thus itself generic. Derrida, then, does not deny the validity of genre as a concept, but rather supplies a mandate for the creation of a new, open, and historical genre theory (Derrida 1980:176–85).6 From this perspective, the concept of genre would not provide a comprehensive explanation of literary discourse, nor a prescriptive typology, but would begin to articulate that structure of historical repetition which makes literary and artistic discourse distinct and intelligible. In Morson and Emerson’s tight formulation, “Genres form not by legislation but by accretion” (Morson and Emerson 1990:292–93). To that end, I shall argue that genres first and foremost exist as usage patterns, the sedimented forms of speech and thought which pervade all language (Jameson 1981:140–41; Morson and Emerson 1989:22–23; 1990:290; Todorov 1990:17–18); and that these patterns, when stratified into the “dialects” common to the different groups and classes that make up a given society, become the constitutive codes of that society’s ideology. Ideology is defined here, not in the narrow sense of false consciousness, but in the broader Bakhtinian and Althusserian sense of a social group’s collective as well as individual forms of selfrepresentation.7 Likewise, to the extent that these codes themselves can be seen as the forms whereby a given society, through its division of labor, segments and renders intelligible the manifold of the phenomenal world (Eco 1979: 73–91; Frow 1986:65–66), then genres become ways of seeing, forms of power, and modes of representation which possess historical, social, and gender specific accents and patterns of distribution (Morson and Emerson 1990:276, 281–83, 291–92, 370). Consequently, in as much as these relatively stable codes represent the ways in which we constitute the world as an object of thought or feeling, then each new usage, each new utterance, in some however miniscule way, alters both the content of these codes and, in a real sense, the world itself. Thus, the relations between society and the individual, ideology and the social formation, words, things, and discursive practices must remain in a constantly self-transforming dialectic, whose


motive force is the unresolvable conflict between those repeated generic forms which make language and the world intelligible and the unrepeatable contexts of enunciation in which they are deployed (Eco 1979:61–68; Bauman 1984: 43; Todorov 1984:80; Bakhtin 1986:60, 65; Morson and Emerson 1990:277–78, 291). The total dynamic or system of genres which characterizes this dialectic for a given society, in turn, only becomes theorizable as a system at a considerable historical remove; its synchronic totality can never be seen from within (Bynum 1981: 48–49). Meaning is thus always already socially constituted, so that in each of our utterances it is history and the other who speak at least as much as we do. For as Bakhtin, in “Discourse in the Novel,” observes, “Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions” (Bakhtin 1981:292; see also Morson and Emerson 1990:71); or in Sartre’s more elegiac formulation: Words live off the death of men, they come together through men; whenever I form a sentence its meaning escapes from me, is stolen from me; meanings are changed for everyone by each speaker and each day; the meanings of the very words in my mouth are changed by others. (Sartre 1982:98) Thus, the import of the word, as well as the concepts which are inextricably bound to it, is constantly subject to modification through practice, both our own and that of the world around us, while at the same time we only truly exist through the presence of the word. For it is discourse itself which makes subjectivity possible, as a nodal and relational confluence between the conflicting forces of biological necessity, perceptual data, linguistically and ideologically motivated desire, and the socially available means of satisfying it—in short as both history and will. Subjectivity exists not as a thing, but as a series of internal “micro-dialogues,” debates, reflections, and expressions of desire which proceed at various levels of consciousness. Its degree of internal articulation or dispersal, of self-reflexivity or immediacy, will never then be a simple given, but a determined fold or weave within the social text as a whole, a fold which nonetheless as a member of an aggregate is also constitutive of that text (Volosinov 1973:12–15; Dowling 1984:91; Morson and Emerson 1990:157, 163, 200–10, 221– 22, 275, 343; Moxey 1991: 990). As Volosinov writes:


The reality of the inner psyche is the same reality as that of the sign. Outside the material of signs there is no psyche; there are physiological processes…but no subjective psyche as a special existential quality fundamentally distinct from both the physiological processes occurring within the organism and the reality encompassing the organism from outside. (Volosinov 1973:26; see also Luria 1976:9) We are, in short, creatures of meaning, and our existence is predicated on the intersubjective world of the sign. Ideology, and the patterns of usage it comprises, can thus be said to be constitutive of experience, but experience and the material world which we posit as its object are, in turn, constitutive of that ideology. The dialectical tension between these poles cannot be prematurely resolved in either direction without rendering either meaning or the world a mere epiphenomenon of another more basic reality, be it matter or the ideal (Jameson 1988:142). It is in this sense alone that the mode of production can be said to be the final instance on which all ideological determinations, and thus consciousness itself, rest. For patterns of linguistic usage only exist within the intersubjective space of human social life; and human social life only continues to the extent that people enter into relations of production, which until this point in time have always been characterized by the exercise of power and domination. Nonetheless, the relation between a given social formation and that complex of codes which interprets and re-presents it is not a univocal or metaphysical one. That is to say, I do not here assume that these social relations constitute an ideal notion which expresses itself everywhere and always in a homologous manner at all levels.8 Rather, the very fact that these dialects or speech genres are of necessity based on preexisting usage patterns implies that they are inherently determined by their own history as well as their present circumstances.9 As Bakhtin observes, “A particular function (scientific, technical, commentarial, business, everyday) and the particular conditions of speech communication give rise to particular genres, that is certain relatively stable thematic, compositional, and stylistic types of utterances” (Bakhtin 1986:64; see also Morson and Emerson 1990:275). Moreover, each individual usage is itself not a passive reflection of the context of enunciation, but an active, transformative response to it (Foucault 1986b:71).


Aesthetic genres would, then, be only a special case of that phenomenon of repetition in normal speech which makes intelligibility and communication possible. Their particular qualities would be to reflect upon the implications of speech itself in all its varied genres and hues.10 Literary genres would, in a sense, be genres raised to the second power—a means whereby society represents its own ideological and linguistic assumptions to itself, investigates their possible consequences, muses upon their contradictions, and proposes new formulations. Hence, literature would constitute a particular segment of a given culture’s ideology. Within that segment, there would exist a series of types or forms, which possess different paradigmatic and syntagmatic rules, as well as more broadly defined formal characteristics, that allow them in different fashions to represent ideology, conflate its various levels, and in some cases lay bare its contradictions, or, in the more suggestive terminology of Paul de Man, its aporias (Eagleton 1976:77; Fine 1984:61; Frow 1986:100; Brown 1986:223; Thalmann 1988:28; Miller 1992:465–66).11 Such patterns of usage in aesthetic/poetic forms can be shown to preexist any explicit theorizing of their nature or of their hierarchical relations to one another, as in the case of Archilochus. Thus, the Greeks divided poetry into categories such as dactylic hexameter, dactyloepitritic, aeolic, elegiac, and iambic, categories which, as shown above, denoted not merely metrical, but also stylistic, cultic, and social divisions. Nor is this simply an idio-syncrasy of Greek culture. The same phenomenon appears in the basic distinction between poetic and casual speech, found in preindustrial communities around the world, as well as in finer distinctions between songs of prayer, songs of celebration, and songs recalling the epic deeds of heroes past. The link between these various modes and specific dialectal and ethnic communities, as well as with particular communal and festal occasions, reveals genre as a cultural and linguistic given to be interpreted, not a critical fiction to be unmasked. In Todorov’s terms, “There has never been a literature without genres; it is a system in constant transformation” (Todorov 1990:15; see also Schaeffer 1989:181–82). Once the historical nature of these patterns of usage is understood, there is no need to fall back upon essentialist definitions of genre which try to determine logically the nature and order of the basic literary types (Cohen 1986a:207; Jameson 1981:107, 109; Jauss 1986:48–49). Genres can now be seen as variable, linguistic responses to the changing conditions of communal life, which derive their evolutionary and recombinatory possibilities from the set of accepted patterns of usage


available to a given socio-cultural grouping at a particular time.12 Consequently, there can be no question of doing violence to a work by reading it in light of its generic background, because that background constitutes the very linguistic and material base which makes the work itself possible. The indeterminacy of the work is thus already necessarily encoded in the history of discursive practices which make up the genre, and the changing forms of that indeterminacy, as well as the disappearance of older forms and the appearance of new forms of indeterminacy, constitute the field that genre theory studies (Cohen 1986a: 213; 1986b:229). Indeed, any reading of a text which recognizes that discourse is not homogeneous, but shot through with a variety of competing and interpenetrating currents, levels, and forms, must always assume a theory of genre; and to the extent that such a theory will not simply be an ideological ploy which seeks to assure the legitimacy of one particular level, or group of levels, of discourse, and the people who use them, then that theory must be comparative and historical. On a more practical level, a major problem which has long plagued genre theory is the lack of a clear definition of its object. How does a dramatic tragedy relate to a tragic novel? At what level of abstraction does the concept of genre come into play and distinguish those affinities between works which are primary from those which are secondary? Are sonnets and odes genres or forms? What is the relation between the verse epistle and the epistolary novel? These problems, as involved as they may appear, are not insurmountable and can be resolved in a fashion consonant with the strictures laid down above. The key provision is to recognize that our traditional terms are largely inadequate, and that what has been called genre is not a simple phenomenon, but a complex and evolving one. Hence, a series of distinctions must first be made. To begin, I would contend that all genres—which I define as the presentation of a unique dialogical situation—can be analyzed in terms of four interpenetrating, mutually conditioning structures: protogeneric elements; myths; subgenres; and forms. The first two of these constitute the basic structural elements of any given text, while the final two relate to more circumscribed historical and literary conventions. Thus, I shall initially examine how the first two, beginning with protogeneric elements, constitute a given text. I will then discuss in more detail what it means to define genre as the presentation of a unique dialogical situation. Finally I will investigate the ways in which this matrix of protogeneric elements, myths, and dialogical situations interacts with the system of


literary and social conventions that are the province of subgenres and forms. Turning to our first structure, protogeneric elements represent the basic syntagmatic forms that a society develops to manage the sign slippages which, according to Lacan, are inherent in signification itself. The arbitrariness of the sign has as its consequence an inevitable inadequacy in the relation of signifier and signified, so that slippages, wherein a plurality of signifieds can come to be denoted by a single signifier, necessarily occur in any linguistic system, allowing unconscious and “unintended” meanings to undermine the rules whereby a given society constitutes itself (Lacan 1966:251–61; Derrida 1976:7, 20–23, 43, 49–50; Edmunds 1992:116). Literature, in this light, can be viewed as a strategy whereby a given society attempts to control this process, by providing paradigms of intelligibility in the midst of this potential chaos of signification. Protogeneric elements are modelings of such slip-pages, which can potentially allow the audience or reader some resolution, or at least representation, of the problems these slip-pages pose. These elements can be found at a variety of levels of magnitude within a given work—from the single word, to an entire character, to the plot itself. The most obvious case is the pun, or play on words, as defined by Freud in Wit and Its Relation to theUnconscious, in which a single linguistic vehicle gives rise to two or more heterogeneous meanings. What literature in particular does, then, is take up the range of standard deviations within a given society and allow them to be interpreted. Thus, an ideologically charged term like “father” elicits certain expectations from a work’s readers. When a father deviates from those expectations, we see the embodiment of a sign slippage, which once encoded in a series of protogeneric elements and embodied in a work of literature allows this seemingly opaque moment to become intelligible. The elements themselves can range from representations of extreme violations of communal linguistic or social norms to more moderate and less threatening deviations. These violations, in turn, may appear as triumphant comic celebrations of disorder, as in Ionesco, or as the necessary moment of conflict and ambiguity preceding the establishment of new normative and semiotic values, as in Beaumarchais or Molière, or even as those intolerable sorts of excesses which engender tragic punishments and stringent corrections, as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Shakespeare’s King Lear. In between, we find an entire continuum of less extreme situations. In all cases, however, the role of these elements is to provide a space of intelligible


semiotic movement, which neither degenerates into chaos nor hardens into a static set of mandated correspondences that refuse to recognize the possibility of deviation. As a set, these protogeneric elements can be represented schematically in terms of the four cardinal points of Greimas’ semiotic rectangle. Thus, the triumphant comic excess of the signifier over the signified would represent one pole, and the tragic recuperation and repression of excess, the ultimate triumph of the transcendental signified, would represent the other, while the unfunny and non-tragic (or the verisimilar and the banal) would represent their respective simple contraries (Jameson 1981:108). Consequently, these terms can be said to constitute a complete signifying system (Greimas 1970:135– 55; Jameson 1981:46–49, 82–83). By the same token, middle positions can be envisioned. Between comedy and tragedy would fall tragicomedy, between tragedy and the banal, the pathetic, between the verisimilar and the comic, the comedy of manners, and between the banal and the verisimilar, the drama or narrative of everyday life. Nor are these the only positions possible, but other combinations and permutations may also be envisaged, other modelings of the relations between signifier and signified. The purpose of using the semiotic rectangle is not to impose a rigid typology of literary kinds, but to demonstrate the model’s flexibility and internal coherency, as well as the central role such protogeneric elements play in the creation of what might be called literary tone. In this light, the comic and the tragic are in themselves semiotic, not generic, phenomena. The comic is predicated on the triumph of the materiality of the signifier, whether as embodied in the belly of Falstaff or in the ambivalence of the pun.13 The tragic, on the other hand, reduces all ambivalence, all deviation, to the ruthless triumph of a transcendental norm.14 Moreover, as syntagmata, these protogeneric elements can appear either in their relatively pure state or in chains, where various sets of their possible values are allowed to succeed one another in accordance with the conventions of plot operative in the culture at a given time. A novel will often mix comic, tragic, and pathetic or untragic elements together in successive sequences. It is in this sense that it is possible to talk about a tragic character within a novel, as opposed to a tragedy per se. Thus, in Balzac’s Père Goriot, a character who begins as a comic father is ultimately encoded as pathetic and almost tragic. In no case, however, would these elements in themselves suffice to create a literary text. Rather, they represent the product of a certain formal reduction, which must be dialectically completed by our second


structural element in genre, myths. Myths are that set of primal stories within a given culture which return again and again, and can be variously encoded through a variety of protogeneric elements.15 Thus the Ulysses story, as we have seen, has been played out time and again, as heroic epic, as comedy or farce, and as tragic drama. Yet the mythic core of isolation, wandering, and homecoming remains. The Oedipus myth, as Lévi-Strauss observes, continues to resonate in our culture, whether it is encoded as Sophoclean tragedy or Freudian family romance. Myths, then, represent that set of narratives which a culture repeats over and over, and through which it defines its own self-image, whether they are the tales of the heroes who fought at Troy, the story of Horatio Alger receiving his due in the world of industrial capitalism, or the ultimate and necessary triumph of the proletariat and the beginning of true communism.16 Genres can then be defined as the dialogical situations in which these protogeneric elements and myths are made manifest. According to Mikhail Bakhtin the dialogical situation is the representation of a particular configuration of voices in dialogue with one another or with themselves, which at the same time elicits an active responsive understanding from the reader (Bakhtin 1981: 280–82, 332–35; 1986:91, 95–96). Such a notion of genre obviously embraces the traditional tripartite division of literature into lyric, drama, and epic or first person, second person, and third person presentation, but is also capable of making much finer distinctions (Viëtor 1986:10–12; Jauss 1986:39; Genette 1986:142). For a genre’s “dialogical situation” is not merely synonymous with its radical of presentation and hence its character deployment, but is also concerned with the internal structuring of those characters as speaking subjects and the sort of responsive understanding they elicit. Thus, for the term “character,” it might be preferable to substitute the alternative denotation, “dialogical subject,” and to propose that generic distinctions be made on the basis of the structure and interaction of the dialogical subjects in a given work.17 The term “dialogical subject” is chosen to emphasize that what we are talking about here is not a static entity, but a structured, temporal movement of dialogized understanding, involving both the speaker’s relation to himself or herself and the reader’s responses to that relation. The reason for using this terminology, as opposed to the more traditional sort, can be clearly seen if we think of the example of a lyric poem versus a formal verse satire. In each, a single character speaks, or at least is the primary speaker, yet the radically different internal structures of their respective speaking voices insure that the dialogical


resonances of their discourses will elicit very different responses from their readers.18 Thus the typical stance of the satirist is that of someone engaged in a diatribe or harangue. His or her words ask for a responsive understanding from the reader which is primarily social and only secondarily and reflexively personal and subjective. The reader, therefore, can only begin to construct a profile of the satirist’s poetic persona in light of the nature of his attacks on others. In the properly lyric poem, this situation is reversed. For, as noted above, if a poem is to be recognized as lyric, its first qualification must be the projection of an image of a complex, highly interiorized subjectivity, which is only secondarily social. Thus, though satire and lyric each speaks in the first person, the nature of those persons and the responsive understanding or mode of reading they demand are very different. Hence, traditional notions of speakers or characters are inadequate to portray those differences.19 By the same token, this new terminology of dialogical subjects allows us to see with more clarity that the type of recursive reading implicitly required of the reader of a lyric collection—by changing the parameters of the dialogical situation in which reader and speaker interact—necessarily alters the projected image of the speaking subject’s relation to itself from that found in earlier modes of oral poetry. The very possibility of re-reading, of returning to an earlier passage or poem and correlating it with a later passage or poem, must alter radically the temporal complexity of the image of consciousness produced. Consequently, although in traditional terms only one character speaks in both oral and written “lyric,” as in the case of lyric poetry and satire, it would be inappropriate to analyze these two separate phenomena in identical terms. I shall distinguish between these two genres by terming the written mode, lyric, and the oral, monody— basing the distinction on the fact that though each speaker represents itself as “I,” they project two very different images when thought of as dialogical subjects. Hence, I would argue that the responsive understanding required to read the iambic poetry of Archilochus, based as it is on a shared oral and mythic tradition made up of stock characters and situations, is fundamentally different from that required of the reader of the Odes of Horace. In the next chapter, I shall try and formulate what the nature of that difference is in a more thorough and theoretically rigorous manner, taking the poetry of Catullus as my primary example. Returning, however, to the elements of genre, having already dealt with those which make up its internal structural components, let us now


briefly look at the final two elements—subgenres and forms—which denote a given genre’s relation to the literary practices current in its particular historical and cultural situation. First, subgenres: subgenres represent those conventional patterns of usage wherein a certain set of protogeneric and mythic elements become associated with certain dialogical situations. Examples of subgenres would include the Latin love elegy and the Renaissance sonnet sequence. Thus, in the Latin love elegy, a certain form of love-sick speaker, first elaborated by Catullus, becomes associated with a series of stock situations, encoded within a restricted range of protogeneric elements. The conventions of this subgenre are later reappropriated by the writers of Renaissance sonnet collections and reinterpreted in light of the ideological norms of that time. Other examples of subgenres, such as Greek New Comedy, the modern situation comedy, or the dime store romance, are not hard to find. Forms, finally, represent those purely abstract methods of organizing the presentation of literary works, such as rhymed or elegiac couplets, sonnets, the ballad, or the epistolary novel, and can be profitably compared with Eco’s concept of the “s-code” (Eco 1979: 37–38). Forms too can become associated with certain subgenres in particular historical situations. Accordingly, one could say that during the Renaissance the sonnet represented both a form and a subgenre, in that a certain stock content became associated with that form in the wake of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse. By the time one reaches the later occasional sonnets of Milton, such as “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” however, the sonnet has returned to being just a form. This of course does not prevent a later poet from reusing such a form and deliberately evoking the subgeneric connotations that it once possessed. One example of this resurrecting of a form’s past connotations would be John Berryman’s Sonnets. Nor is this a phenomenon limited to the sonnet form. Similar types of observations can be made on the uses of the elegiac couplet in antiquity or the heroic couplet in seventeenth and eighteenth century English literature. The theory of genres presented here has two advantages. First, it in no way presumes a finite or a priori set of generic forms, and so is neither teleological nor prescriptive. Instead, it sees genre as a variable response to a given writer’s historical situation, without reducing either the writer or the response to a flat reflection of that situation or of the literary tradition which precedes him or her. At the same time, unlike de Man and poststructuralist critics of genre theory, it does not, in the name of indeterminacy or the specificity of the text, deny the manifest existence of genres, thus putting us in the position of arguing that when


Racine or Shakespeare thought they were writing tragedies they were merely deluded. Second, this theory does not, in the name of “tradition” or the canon, remove literature from the daily life of men and women, but neither does it simply dissolve these highly wrought, complex aesthetic objects into the categories of the mundane. It allows the aesthetic object a certain distance from the world, while nonetheless anchoring the work firmly within it. In sum, this theory allows genre to become a real tool in literary history, rather than a sterile typology or a prescriptive ban. It permits the fates of the various, great historical genres to be traced over long periods of time. It brings to light the constant dialectic between relatively stable linguistic and aesthetic codes and the ever changing contexts of their enunciation, and thus makes possible the study of the mutual modifications of both that this dialectic necessarily produces. From this perspective, then, genre becomes a barometer of the historical destinies of both social and literary forms alike. For genres function as “literature’s organs of memory,” and, in doing so, reveal the basic categories of thought and feeling present in the societies which produce, receive, and preserve them (Jameson 1981:105; Cohen 1986a: 213–16; Brown 1986:227; Todorov 1990:19–20; Morson and Emerson 1990:89, 271, 280, 371). To return briefly to Archilochus, then, we can now say that his poetry represents a subgenre—termed iambic monody—wherein the dialogical subject of the discourse is determined by its participation in a communal body of myth, historically linked to the character of Odysseus. Unlike lyric as we know it, the first person speaking voice of the poet was, in fact, the projection of a socially ratified, mythic subjectivity, and its dialogical situation was oriented primarily towards that tradition, rather than any representation of its own experience. In the next chapter’s reading of Catullus, the first of the truly lyric poets I will discuss, just the opposite is true. Rather than relying on a pre-existing body of communal lore, the poet will present a variety of personal confessions, dramatic monologues, and amusing anecdotes which purport to represent his actual experience. Between the various single incidents presented in the poems, a variety of potential narrative relations is possible, so that any one poem in the collection could appear in multiple narrative sequences, and ultimately can only be interpreted in terms of its dialogical relations with the other poems of the collection. Thus, any one of the poems on the poet’s affair with Lesbia must be interpreted in light of all the other poems on Lesbia. This series, however, intersects with both the political poems in the collection and


those relating to the death of the poet’s brother. At the center of this complex network of dialogical and narrative relations is the figure of Catullus himself, and it is the image of his subjectivity as the unifying moment behind the collection which makes all these potential relations possible. Such a collection and the projection of so complex and internally articulated a consciousness would have been impossible in the performative situation necessary to oral lyric. Consequently, as the next chapter will show, the poetry of Catullus could only appear in a culture of writing.

52

4 THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS Catullus and the birth of the collection

Strange that this hysterical, foul-mouthed young man should have become, since the fourteenth century, when his oeuvre was recovered from oblivion, one of the special lyric darlings of Europe. (Johnson 1982:108) Valerius Catullus, scriptor lyricus, Veronae nascitur olympiade CLXIII…. Amavit hic puellam primariam Clodiam, quam Lesbiam suo appellat in carmine. Lasciviusculus fuit et sua tempestate pares paucos in dicendo frenata oratione, superiorem habuit neminem. In iocis apprime lepidus, in seriis vero gravissimus extitit. Erotica scripsit et epithalamium in Manlium. Anno vero aetatis suae XXX Romae moritur elatus moerore publico. (First printed edition of Catullus, 1472: cited by Wiseman 1985:207) As defined in the preceding chapter, the lyric collection is a genre capable of containing a variety of protogeneric elements and myths as well as appearing in various subgenres and forms. Contrary to common opinion, lyric poetry has little to do with spontaneous outflowings of emotion, or with song per se, but is rather founded upon the type of complex, responsive understanding made possible by the birth of the poetic collection. Accordingly, this chapter will examine the work of Catullus as the first extant example of a true lyric collection, and argue that a qualitative break separates his work from that of the earlier Greek monodists. The nature of this qualitative break is historically dependent upon the introduction into Mediterranean civilization of a culture of writing, as

54 THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS

well as upon a variety of other cultural differences between first century Rome and archaic Greece, which will be discussed in more detail later.1 Nonetheless, as regards the lyric text’s projection of the speaking subject, one need not determine precisely the causes of this historical break in order to describe how Catullus’ poetry differs from its oral predecessors. Indeed, this description must necessarily precede any such determination. One can only speak of the historical conditions which make a given phenomenon possible once that phenomenon has been convincingly identified. To that end, the specific difference between lyric and monody can be portrayed in purely formal terms, as a fundamentally new relationship, within the poetry itself, between what Benveniste has labeled distributional and integrative elements. The use of this terminology allows us to describe very precisely the nature of the structural difference between the two genres. Though Benveniste’s terms were originally designed to describe non-literary linguistic phenomena, Roland Barthes has applied these categories to the analysis of literary texts, and his work has been continued by Jonathan Culler (Benveniste 1971:101–11; Barthes 1982:251–60; Culler 1975:203–4). Barthes and Culler argue that there are two types of elements which constitute any discourse: those which are contingent upon its temporal sequence—the distributional—and those which serve to integrate these elements into larger, more complex structures of meaning—the integrational. Thus, in a given passage, the reader might see character A commit action B, which leads him or her to encounter character C, the whole of which is, in turn, labeled an example of paradigmatic situation D. Within this passage, then, A, B, and C would be examples of distributional elements, inasmuch as they name moments which exist in pure sequentiality, having no essential status outside of the diachronic moments in which they appear, while D would be an example of an integrative element. By the same token, it is the knowledge of A, B, and C’s relation to D which makes them meaningful parts of a whole, and not simply a set of random occurrences. In poetry of the predominantly oral mode, the subject, to the extent that it is individualized, appears almost solely as a distributional element, which is given form or meaning (two integrational functions) by factors operating outside its depicted experience. These factors consist generally of a communally accepted body of mythological lore, which supplies the performance’s assumed context. Thus the represented in Archilochus’ poetry depends upon its audience’s responsive understanding to provide the paradigmatic ritual or mythic

LYRIC TEXTS AND LYRIC CONSCIOUSNESS 55

context wherein the episodes it describes become meaningful. The poetic ego itself cannot fulfill this function, because it only exists within the episodic structure of the poem’s performance. To the extent that that ego has resonances outside the moment of its enunciation, it must refer to a body of communally recognized narrative, such as the Ulysses myth discussed in Chapter 2. Thus, in the oral text, it is the pre-existence of socially recognized narrative paradigms which make the represented ego possible, even as those narratives represent and mediate between the sometimes conflicting voices of the community. (For examples of such conflicts, see both the reading of Theognis and Alcaeus in Chapter 2, and the reading of Pindar and Sappho in Chapter 5.) As we shall see, in written lyric it is the relation between the episodes themselves, in which the ego is represented, that produces the possibility of narrative understanding. What I am offering here is a somewhat revised version of Dowling’s interpretation of Jameson’s argument that narrative is a fundamental epistemological category: [A]nything (a structure, a form, a category) that presents itself as existing outside the boundaries of some story can only do so through a kind of fiction. Thus lyric, for instance, which in discussions of literary genre is usually opposed to narrative on the grounds that it tells no story but simply shows a moment in which a single speaker utters his thoughts, must ultimately be viewed as a narrative mode. For not only do the speaker and his thoughts have a history (that is, they are part of a larger history assumed by the lyric moment) but we are able to infer a good part of this prior history if any lyric is to be comprehensible. (Dowling 1984:96–97) This statement is true as far as it goes. But as we shall see, the lyric collection does not allow itself to be reduced to any one urnarrative, but rather generates a plurality of possible narrative explanations and temporal relations which seek to account for the poems themselves. In the written text, the depicted subject may in fact appear in both the distributional and the integrative categories. Indeed, the same passage can occupy a variety of positions, so that a single poem both may be the statement of a theme or paradigm and hence an integrative element and at the same time occupy different temporal positions in two or more possible narrative sequences, so that it also fulfills multiple distributional functions. Yet, in all cases, these proposed narratives will


not pre-exist the text, as they do in oral poetry, but will be generated by it, as possible explanations for the experiences the poems portray. The reader of the collection is led from one poem to another, constantly posing the questions: what is the relation of this poem to those which came before and those which will follow after; are these experiences related to one another; what is the nature of the subjectivity projected by these poems that integrates them into a meaningful whole? The collections may admittedly participate in certain abstract mythic structures (see Chapter 3), as is common in subgenres such as Roman love elegy; nonetheless, they each create their own, individual systems of narrative possibilities, which at best bear only a general morphological resemblance to those paradigmatic structures. The Propertian Monobiblos plays upon the audience’s assumed knowledge of certain conventions derived from Catullus, Gallus, and the Alexandrians, but the narrative possibilities of Propertius’ affair with Cynthia cannot be reconstructed from any source other than the poems themselves. The multiple temporal relations between the collection’s individual poems and passages project the image of a highly selfreflexive consciousness which, while clearly reminiscent of other members of the same subgenre, is nonetheless uniquely its own. The sort of phenomenon we have been discussing, in which a single passage can fulfill multiple distributional and integrative functions in a collection, appears frequently in the poetry of Catullus, where a given poem, according to one reading, can appear to describe a state logically prior to that described in a second poem, but, in another equally plausible reading, describe a state logically posterior to the identical poem. At the same time, the first poem can also be seen as stating a general theme (love, friendship, commitment, etc.) which organizes the collection as a whole. None of these readings, though, is privileged. None of them inherently possesses any more explanatory power than its counterparts do. Instead, all three depend upon the possibility of the others, for each of them names only one out of many possible, though unstated, relations between a given poem and the collection as a whole. Indeed, were there not a certain inherent undecidability in these poems’ logical and temporal relations to one another, though individual poems may profit from specific, planned juxtapositions, they would not be lyric poetry at all, but straightforward, linear narrative. For, it is precisely this potential for multiple, complex dialogical relations between the individual poems that makes the projection of a unique, multilayered subjectivity possible.


Likewise, these separate readings qualify one another in such a way that the speaker’s projected experience is constantly recycled as a paradigm of that experience’s own intelligibility. Each moment is always interpreted in light of the others known to the reader. Thus the action or sentiment described in one poem frequently only becomes fully intelligible in light of the actions or sentiments described in another poem and vice versa. Take, for example, Catullus’ poem 109: Iucundum, mea vita, mihi proponis amorem hunc nostrum inter nos perpetuumque fore. di magni, facite ut vere promittere possit, atque id sincere dicat et ex animo, ut liceat nobis tota perducere vita aeternum hoc sanctae foedus amicitiae. My Life, you propose love to me, joy for us eternally. Grant, oh gods, that she may truly speak her heart, promise sincerely, so we may live our lives in the eternal bonds of a sacred alliance.2 On a first reading, this unpretentious little epigram might appear to be nothing more than a sentimental trifle, indistinguishable in its essential content from scores of similar poems written by other poets before and since. It is, as Catullus refers to his poetry in the opening lines of poem 1 (line 4), a nuga, a triviality. What ultimately changes this impression and gives this poem its particular poignancy and resonance to the reader familiar with the collection, however, is not a discovery of its intrinsic merit as an autonomous poetic experience, but rather a recognition of its unique position within the collection, the dominant theme of which is the poet’s love for Lesbia. For poem 109 is the last out of a collection of 116 poems to refer directly to that affair. Consequently, readers have long seen it as occupying a crucial position within the narrative of the affair. Those same readers, however, have also argued for a variety of possible reconstructions of the affair, and hence have failed to agree on exactly what single position this poem should be seen as occupying within it. This lack of unanimity need not, however, suggest that one or the other of these reconstructions is necessarily closer to the “truth” of the affair or the “truth” of the author’s intention than all the others, though clearly some of these readings are more or less plausible in their attempts to account for the text as it stands. Yet, what is most telling in examining the multiplicity of narrative reconstructions which have been advanced over the years is


the continuing sense of the appropriateness of such strategies in generation after generation of Catullus’ readers. The will to construct a narrative which would account for the affair, and consequently for the collection as a whole, would seem not to reside just in the critics, but to have been programmed into the text itself.3 And by examining how certain features of the text have encouraged and, indeed, required that such strategies be employed, even as those same features have frustrated the users of those strategies in their attempts to construct a final narrative, we can begin to see more clearly how the poems of Catullus differ decisively from their Greek antecedents. To make this rather complex argument clearer, let us examine some of these reconstructions and how they interpret poems 109 and 11 in light of the other poems in the collection, and then go on to compare what we have learned with a reading of the poems of Sappho in Chapter 5. Catullus, of course, was familiar with Sappho’s poetry and one of his most famous poems, 51, is a translation of one of her few poems that survives intact. Through a comparison of poem 51 with Sappho’s original in Chapter 6, we will be able to see how two poems with essentially the same text can take on very different meanings when the dialogical situations projected by their individual contexts of enunciation are shown to be radically disparate. This reading of Sappho will also allow us to specify how her methods of integrating an oral text into a set of communal narratives differ from those observed in the case of Archilochus.

We can begin our examination of poem 109’s position within the Catullan corpus by looking at the work of T.P.Wiseman. Wiseman’s views are of particular interest, in that he contends not only that the Catullan collection is a consciously constructed whole, but also that the poems are meant to be read only in the order they appear. Consequently, he argues that those commentators who do not follow these strictures are overstepping the bounds of their authority (Wiseman 1985:136–75). In accordance with this view, Wiseman sees poem 109 as representing the poet’s final comment on the affair with Lesbia. Thus, he maintains that the poet ends the collection on a deliberately ambiguous note: Lesbia has come back to Catullus and accepted his conception of love as an eternal personal commitment, but the poet leaves the reader unsure as to whether her words are to be believed, “di magni, facite ut vere promittere possit,/ atque id sincere dicat et ex animo” [Grant, oh gods, that she may truly speak her heart, promise sincerely] (109.3–4; Wiseman 1985:174–75).


The matter becomes more complex, as Wiseman notes, when it is recognized that 109 is not the sole poem on this topic but instead represents a final sober reflection on a situation which had already been described in poem 107: Si quicquam cupido optantique optigit umquam insperanti, hoc est gratum animo proprie. quare hoc est gratum nobis quoque carius auro quod te restituis, Lesbia, mi cupido. restituis cupido atque insperanti, ipsa refers te nobis. o lucem candidiore nota! quis me uno vivit felicior, aut magis hac est optandus vita dicere quis poterit? If ever anything happens to anyone who wishes and desires but does not expect it, that person is pleased in his heart. Thus is it also pleasing to me (more precious than gold) that you have returned, Lesbia, to me who desires. You have returned to one who desired but did not expect it, you return to us. O day marked by a brighter stone! Who lives who is luckier than I? Who could say he wishes for more than this life? The poet, then, has presented two closely juxtaposed versions of what appears to be the same episode. In so doing, he has provided the reader with a multilayered and temporally complex image, which includes, in addition to the episode itself, the process of the speaker’s reflection on it. Yet, what exactly is the reader to make of the relation between these two poems? The poet does not specify. Are they to be imagined as representing two separate moments occurring in rapid succession, or as a single moment viewed simultaneously from two different levels of consciousness? Some might argue that such a question represents too modern a perspective to have been possible for Catullus, but as poems such as 85 (“odi et amo” [“I hate and I love”]) and 72 (“iniuria talis/ cogit amare magis, sed bene velle minus” [“such a crime forces one to love more, but to esteem less”]) point out explicitly, this ability to project a consciousness divided against itself is one of Catullus’ most distinctive traits, albeit a characteristic which, one expects, he would have explained in other terms, if he could have explained it at all. Still another possibility is that poems 107 and 109, separated as they are by a savage invective poem on the impure morals of the otherwise unknown


Cominius,4 should be interpreted as representing two scenes divided by a substantial distance in time, in which Catullus, in the intervening period, has been given reason to doubt the veracity of Lesbia’s promises, perhaps even to suspect a liaison with the wretched Cominius. It is even possible that these interpretations depict different aspects of a truth which is not in any strict sense factual, but a representation of the conflicts present in the Catullan lyric psyche. The complexities involved in reading even so simple a poem, however, do not end there. They extend to poem 109’s relations to other poems in the collection as well. For example, one could say that in 109 Catullus doubts Lesbia’s ability to promise truthfully because he has already experienced how false her promises can be. Thus, in poem 70 the poet tells us “mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,/ in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua” [“what a woman says to a desirous lover,/ should be written in the wind and rapid water”], while in poem 58 we are shown Lesbia committing acts of unmitigated sexual depravity, a picture confirmed by 37’s evocation of the “salax taberna” [“sleazy bar”] and by the final stanzas of poem 11. Likewise, lines 135–40 of poem 68 refer to the necessity of Catullus’ not acting like a boor by harping excessively on Lesbia’s infidelities. In any case, 109’s hesitation about whether Lesbia can be believed, as well as its consequent ambiguous relation to poem 107, have been well prepared for by its predecessors in the collection. Nevertheless, if one ignores Wiseman’s prescription on reading the poems only in the order in which they appear, it can be said that poems 70 and 58 logically come after poem 109, since they show a greater level of disillusionment. The narrative scenario for this kind of reading would run something like the following: poems 107 and 109 represent a reconciliation between the lovers after an initial separation; poem 70, consequently, inasmuch as it depicts a situation which is “logically” posterior to that of 107–109, portrays a lover who has been burned twice and so knows exactly what Lesbia’s promises are worth. Accordingly, it is this completel disillusioned final stage of the affair which is then portrayed in such other poems as 72, 75, and 76, where the poet writes: nunc te cognovi: quare etsi impensius uror, multo mi tamen es vilior et levior. I know you now, and though I burn still more, you are to me a cheaper and a more trivial thing.


(72.5–6) ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias, nec desistere amare, omnia si facias. So that now it is not possible to wish you well, if you became the best of women, nor to stop loving you, no matter what you might do. (75.3–4) non iam illud quaero, contra me ut diligat illa, aut, quod non potis est, esse pudica velit. I do not seek this, that she love me, or what is not possible, that she wish to be pure. (76.23–24) For, according to the argument we have just been outlining, these passages show the poet convinced that any reconciliation between himself and Lesbia would be impossible, and, as such, they must represent a time posterior to that of 107 and 109, although they appear before those poems in the collection. Still another complicating factor in taking 107 and 109 as the last poems on the Lesbia affair is the fact that poems 70 and 72 have the same sort of temporal relation to one another as do 107 and 109, in that 70 appears to be a somewhat earlier version of the same essential situation as that described in 72. Thus, poems 70 and 72 have almost identical opening couplets, the primary difference being the latter’s use of the imperfect tense, as opposed to the former’s use of the present: Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat. My woman says she’d rather marry no one more than me, not if Jupiter himself should ask her. (70.1–2) Dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum, Lesbia, nec prae me velle tenere Iovem.


Once you said that you knew only Catullus, Lesbia, and that you did not wish to hold Jupiter before me. (72.1–2) Indeed, this double image of the same essential situation or theme is a common device in Catullan poetics (see poems 2 and 3, and 5 and 7). At the same time, between 70 and 72 is the invective poem, 71, on a certain Rufus whose amorous adventures are thwarted by both a rival and a smelly goat which inhabits his armpits. This same Rufus is also discussed in 69. Thus the pair 70, 72 is paralleled by that of 69 and 71, as well as 107 and 109 (Wiseman 1985:166–67; 1969:28).5 Moreover, in each case, the second poem in the group is concerned with infidelity, although in 69 and 71 the tone is obviously lighter. What we see then is the poet analyzing the same set of problems over and over again from disparate angles. Poems 70 and 72, which focus on the problem of whether Lesbia’s declarations of love can be believed, are paralleled by 107 and 109, while each of these pairs of poems features an intervening invective on a third party (71 on Rufus, and 108 on Cominius). Hence, the three pairs of poems, 107 and 109, 70 and 72, and 69 and 71, invite simultaneous comparisons to one another in a way that ultimately vitiates any univocal attempt to establish the priority of one pair over the others, as they each become paradigmatic moments in the interpretation of each other. Still another reading of the collection which does not accept 109 as the last poem on the affair represents something like the orthodox position taken in Catullan studies, as opposed either to the more daring position advanced by Wiseman or the more overdetermined position we have begun to outline. The cornerstone of the conventional interpretation, as it appears in the writings of its most distinguished exponent, Kenneth Quinn, has always been that poem 11, not poem 109, has to be the last poem on the affair, inasmuch as its final stanzas appear to constitute an irrevocable dismissal of Lesbia, which is to be carried to her by Catullus’ “comites,” Furius and Aurelius (Quinn 1972: 93; 1973:125; Wheeler 1934:94–95; Fordyce 1961:124; Fredricksmeyer 1983:63–88):6 pauca nuntiate meae puellae non bona dicta. cum suis vivat valeatque moechis quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,


nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium ilia rumpens; nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem, qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratroest. Tell my girl a few unkind words: may she live and prosper with her adulterers whom she holds in her embrace three hundred at a time, loving none truly, but busting their groins again and again. And let her not look for my love which has perished by her fault, just as a flower at the edge of the meadow when touched by the passing plough. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that 11 is one of only two poems in the Catullan corpus written in Sapphic meter. The other, poem 51, a translation of an original poem by Sappho, has generally been considered to be the first poem Catullus wrote to Lesbia. Thus, there is a sort of symmetry in the Catullan collection, according to this hypothesis, wherein the first and last poems of the central love affair are the sole poems written in Sapphic meter (a fact which gives the choice of Lesbia as the beloved’s pseudonym an added poignancy).7 This symmetry is, in turn, underlined by the poet through the use of verbal and thematic echoes. Accordingly, in both poems 11 and 51, we find the only occurrences in the corpus of the relatively rare adverb identidem, in the same position and the same line of separate stanzas— the penultimate word of line 3, stanza 5 in 11, and of line 3, stanza 1 in 51 (Du Clos 1976:78; Quinn 1973:243).8 Likewise, on the thematic level, Du Clos has also noted that the opening images of poem 51 “have been deliberately reversed” in the next-to-last stanza of poem 11. Thus he writes: The first stanza of c. 51 creates a picture of quiet enchantment yet distance…. What has happened to this distant enchant ment in c. 11? Lesbia is now shown in the closest possible proximity, not to one godlike admirer, but to hundreds of adulterers constantly (identidem, 19) performing upon them all sexual acts. (Du Clos 1976:78)


Furthermore, the position of poem 11, as the last poem on the affair in the collection, would appear to be ratified by the numerous reminiscences of other poems which have also been identified in it. Thus 11, for example, marks the end of an opening sequence, which is almost universally acknowledged to have been arranged by the poet,9 and provides a brief synopsis of the affair. Let us look more closely at this sequence and 11 ‘s imbrication in it, as well as at the ways in which Catullus creates multiple and complex relations between the individual poems within it. We can begin by noting that most readers have seen in poems 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 11 a capsule summary of the affair with Lesbia, which on an initial reading seems to move from beginning to end (Barwick 1958: 314; Williams 1968:169–70; Segal 1968b:311–13; Quinn 1972:40; Schmidt 1973:217–19; Skinner 1981:23; Wiseman 1985: 147; Ferguson 1986:3). Thus, poem 2, on Lesbia’s sparrow, represents the poet’s first admiring glance, as he wishes that he could replace the bird in her affections. Poem 3 announces the death of the sparrow and opens the possibility that Catullus’ wish may be granted. In 5, the first of the famous kiss poems, the poet and his beloved are shown in the early moments of their affair. Wholly absorbed in one another, they are oblivious to the disapproving world around them (Barwick 1958:312– 14; Quinn 1972:62–63). In 7, the kiss theme is carried forward, but now with a sense of ironic detachment, as Lesbia asks the poet when his desire will be sated, and he responds with a series of Callimachean adynata (Segal 1968a: 299; Quinn 1973:111; Skinner 1981:40; Wiseman 1985:141). Poem 8 confirms this sense of distance and announces Catullus’ intention to break off the affair, although his desire appears stronger than his resolve (Segal 1968b:310–11; Quinn 1973: 114–18). And poem 11’s “pauca non bona dicta” signal an irremediable break. Poem 11 ‘s role as the final work in the opening sequence is underlined by several reminiscences of poems 2 through 8 contained within it. Thus, “vivat valeatque” [“let her live and prosper”], at the beginning of stanza 5, is an ironic recollection of poem 5’s “vivamus atque amemus” [“let us live and love”], and Lesbia’s three hundred adulterers echo Catullus’ demand in poem 5 for hundreds of kisses (Ferguson 1985:43). Fredricksmeyer also notes that Lesbia’s three hundred lovers could be read as a reminiscence of her “one or two hundred” lovers at the “salax taberna” [“sleazy bar”] (37.7–8), and that “nullum amans vere” [“loving none truly”] recalls Catullus’ protestation at 87.1–2 that Lesbia had been amata vere [“loved truly”] by him


(Fredricksmeyer 1983:63–88; see also Du Clos 1976:79–81; Wiseman 1985:145–46). The theme of an outlandish number of kisses is taken up again in poem 7, where for the first time the idea of infidelity is introduced (7.8 “furtivos hominum… amores” [“stolen loves of men”]), only to be brought to an ironic climax in 11’s image of Lesbia’s monstrous embrace. Poem 7’s mention of infidelity also prepares the way for 8, the collection’s first exercise in critical self-analysis, explicitly introducing the possibility of parallel temporalities—that of the naive consciousness which experiences events, and that which reflects on and analyzes those events: “Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,/ et quod vides perisse perditum ducas” [“Wretched Catullus, cease to play the fool,/ and count as lost what is lost”] (8.1–2; Johnson 1982:4). This poem, then, prepares the way for the other poems of the collection in which Catullus reflects upon the earlier stages of the affair and tries to clarify for himself what happened and what his reactions should be. This sort of self-conscious recollection is a phenomenon which, as W.R.Johnson observes, is new to Western literature and alien to the oral context of Catullus’ Greek predecessors: To write about oneself and one’s life, that was not new; but to write about inner conflicts and divisions, about the fragmentations of self that could barely be glimpsed, never truly understood; to try to grasp these opaque inward alienations and to dramatize the attempts to grasp them—that was, very probably, new for lyric poetry. (Johnson 1982:122; see also Veyne 1988:170) At the same time, another layer of self-reflexivity is superimposed on top of this one, when poem 8 itself is recalled in 11. As Wiseman notes: In poem 8 she led and he followed, or ran and he pursued, now it is no use her looking back…he won’t come running anymore. At 8.15 he called her scelesta but he did not say what her scelus was; now he defines her crime (culpa) as the killing of his love. (Wiseman 1985:145–46) Poem 8 also recalls the kiss theme of 5 and 7, when the poet asks the question “quem basiabis? cui labella mordebis?” [“Whom will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite?”] (8.18), even as number 8 points forward to the rupture announced in 11 (Segal 1968b:316).


Poem 8, in lines 3 and 8 (“fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles” [“Once bright suns shone for you”]), also recalls the contrast between day and night, which in 5 is equated with that between life and death. The groundwork for this equation has already been laid in poem 3’s evocation of the “malae tenebrae/ Orci” [“The foul shadowland of Orcus”] (3.13–14), while number 3 itself is a continuation of poem 2. Moreover, in 7, the second kiss poem, “night’s quiet” is portrayed as the time when “the stars gaze down on the stolen loves of men” (7.7–8) (Segal 1968a:288; Wiseman 1985:143). The repetition of this nocturnal/ diurnal motif is purposeful. For the gradual darkening of both solar imagery and amorous atmosphere in poems 5 and 7 prepares the reader for 8’s recollection of the nocturnal/diurnal motif in the perfect tense. Bright suns once shone for Catullus and Lesbia, but that time is past. The shadow of infidelity has now been cast across Catullus’ love, and those suns will shine no more. A more subtle use of the same motif can be found in the opening stanzas of poem 11, where Catullus presents a list of journeys he might embark upon with Furius and Aurelius. The catalogue begins in India and proceeds from east to west, finishing in Britain. The poet’s hypothetical travel plans thus parallel the path of the sun (Sweet 1987:521), a fact emphasized by his use of the word Eoa (11.3), a term derived from the Greek Eos, or “dawn.” By the same token, as the poet travels from east to west in his text, he comes to the second half of his poem which features both the monstrous image of Lesbia embracing three hundred lovers at a time and that of the flower cut down by the plough. Hence, at that point in poem 11 when the poet’s journey should lead him to the land of the Hesperides, we find not the isles of the blessed, but evocations of death and infidelity, both of which are associated with night and darkness in poems 5 and 7, two texts which in hindsight can be seen to have foreshadowed both 8 and 11. Poem 11 thus not only provides an end term to the series begun in 2, but also contains concrete reminiscences of those poems. This “intratextuality,” in turn, establishes the presence of still more complex levels of consciousness or temporality, complicating the already elaborate maze of (1) a quasi-linear narrative progression from 2 to 11; (2) a critical reflection on that progression in poem 8; and (3) an implicit consummation of 8’s reflection and a critique of its lack of resolve in poem 11. Poems 5, 7, 8, and 11 thus reflect on one another in terms of their use both of the kiss theme and of the day versus night motif, so that frequently an earlier poem in the sequence can only be fully appreciated in light of a later poem, and vice versa. Moreover,


these early poems, through their concrete connections with poem 51 and other poems on the affair, become implicated, both as a group and individually, in ever more complex networks of reading and interpretation. In this way, the poet creates an infinite vortex of circling levels of reflection which can no longer be resolved into a linear sequence, and to which no end point can be assigned. By the same token, if poem 11 contains reminiscences of poems 2 through 8, among others, and these recollections lead up to the climactic image of Lesbia as a sexual monster, devouring the loins of three hundred lovers at a time, which is then resolved in a second image of Catullus as a flower destroyed by Lesbia’s plough—a death which is also a defloration—how can this not change our understanding of the poems read before it? How can we not begin to look for ominous anticipations of this morbid denouement in the poems which precede it? A second reading of the first eleven poems reveals darker elements which were not initially apparent. This second reading, however, does not abolish the first, but coexists with it in a complex dialogical unity.10 Thus poem 2, while on one level a naive introduction to Catullus’ love for Lesbia, showing him admiring her from afar, on another level is an erotic text with troubling undertones. To demonstrate the force of such a reading, let us begin by examining line one, “Passer, deliciae meae puellae.” Passer is a word with multiple meanings. In its simplest terms, it is the common sparrow. Yet the sparrow is the bird of Aphrodite, as shown in Sappho 1, and hence a symbol of eros. Passer is also a slang term for penis, as exemplified in Martial (11.6.12–16) (Horváth 1966:155–56; Genovese 1974:121–22; Giangrande 1975:137– 38; Skinner 1981:12; Sienkewicz 1981: 37–40; Johns 1982:70; Arkins 1982:82–83; Ferguson 1985:10; Hooper 1985:162–64; Thomas 1993). H.D.Jocelyn has, of course, registered strong objections to this reading of passer. And while rightly criticizing certain overly schematic elements of Giangrande’s and others’ interpretations of the poem, his general rejection of a strong erotic presence in poems 2 and 3 is flawed on several counts. First, Jocelyn rejects the reading of Martial’s use of the word passer as a double entendre for penis because “the pretty boys of antiquity …expected a material gift” before “anal penetration” (Jocelyn 1980:423). This position ignores the fact that not every homoerotic poem in antiquity featured the offer of a gift, and that we are not in this context dealing with a Greek eromenos, but with a Roman slave whose master could take him whenever he felt the urge (cf. Horace, Satires 1.2.116–18; and Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 4, proem 10). Second, is it credible to say, as Jocelyn does, that since


Martial only explicitly asks for kisses, any notion of a bolder sexual encounter is the product of an overheated imagination? It seems naive indeed to assume that most Roman masters contented themselves with foreplay. Certainly, no such restraint is implied by Catullus’ kiss poems, to which Martial directly alludes. Third, the claim that “The strong mix of wine which Martial had earlier requested was to aid his poetic rather than sexual powers,” reflects an astonishing innocence with regard to the effects of both alcohol and erotic poetry on the well primed libido (Jocelyn 1988:424). Catullus 16.8–11 shows the poet himself well aware of the potential tonic effects of erotic poetry: si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici, et quod pruriat incitare possunt, non dico pueris, sed his pilosis qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos. If my verse is a bit loose and sensually soft, it can arouse an itch not just in adolescents, but in hairy old men who can’t even move their calcified groins. Fourth, Jocelyn’s rejection of the possibility that poems can have more than one level of meaning is arbitrary, counter to the nature of literary discourse, and inadequate as a theory of language, even for understanding daily conversation (Jocelyn 1980:426).11 Fifth, Jocelyn bases his unitary theory of meaning on the equally unsupported assumption that Catullus wrote his poems exclusively for individual recitation (Jocelyn 1980:428). This allows him to ignore the effect that a poem like 8 or 11, let alone one such as 58 or 63, would have on the reader of Catullus’ corpus when he or she encountered poems 2 and 3 on a second or third reading. With Jocelyn’s objections having been answered, we may now return to line 1 of poem 2. Here, the second word, deliciae, while on one level denoting a pet, also carries the meaning of “love-making,” and is so used by Catullus in two other poems (45.24; 74.2) (Quinn 1973:92; Adams 1982:171, 196–97; Ferguson 1985:10). Amy Richlin also records numerous instances of this word being used in poems and epitaphs to denote slaves who provided their masters (and mistresses) with sexual services (Richlin 1983:223; Genovese 1974:123; Arkins 1982:82). Catullus’ use of the term for Flavius’ scortum [“slut”] in 6.1, and for Ipsitilla in the salacious context of poem 32, confirms this observation. Such a meaning is also contextually appropriate, since a close reading


of poem 2 shows the sparrow serving as a sexual substitute. Lesbia is said to “play” with it in her sinus, meaning “her lap,” but also “the space between her legs,” while the word ludere, “to play,” has clear erotic connotations both here and throughout Latin poetry (see, for example, 68.17) (Rankin 1972:745; Quinn 1973:92; Genovese 1974: 123; Commager 1974:5; Giangrande 1975:144; Lyne 1980:1–2, 12, 65; Adams 1982:90–91, 162–63; Arkins 1982:82; Ferguson 1985:10). Even Jocelyn concedes that “in some contexts sinus could function like cunnus” (1980:427). Lines 3 and 4 of poem 2 may even refer, as Ferguson points out, “to manual and oral stimulation of the sexual organ” (1985:10–11). At the same time, the end of line 4, “incitare morsus,” anticipates the less ambiguously erotic “cui labella mordebis” of 8.18, which rounds out the basia sequence (Genovese 1974: 123). Most telling, though, is line 8 of poem 2, where Catullus explains the effect of Lesbia’s playing with the sparrow, “ut tum gravis acquiescat ardor” [“so that then her pressing passion grows calm”]. Ardor is of course a loaded word, implying the flames of passion, while gravis, as Rankin notes, “is a strong expression with physical overtones. It suggests a powerful sexual temperament like that of the beloved in 11 who breaks the loins of her crowd of lovers” (Rankin 1972:745; see also Giangrande 1975:144). The implication is clear. The passer is a sexual substitute— whether slave, lover, or masturbatory device—which allows Lesbia to relieve herself in a way that excludes Catullus. To the objection that Catullus would have never written a poem with such salacious overtones so early in the affair, one can only reply, “Exactly!” For while on a first reading this poem is certainly meant to be seen as a text from early in the affair, since it is the first Lesbia poem in the collection, Skinner has demonstrated, through Otto Skutsch’s pioneering work on Catullan metrics, that poem 2 was in fact written late in Catullus’ career. Indeed, it appears to have been written after poem 5, and may very well postdate 11, rather than precede it (Skutsch 1968:38; Skinner 1981:21– 24, 34 n. 6; Ferguson 1986:5). In sum, a close reading of either the poem’s own positive meaning, or its relationship with other poems in the sequence, or its prosodic characteristics, allows it to occupy a different position in any possible narrative derived from a reading of the poems themselves. Each of these readings, moreover, represents a decision which opens new paths of interpretation as a result of that decision, yet no one path can claim undisputed hegemony over all the others.


There are, then, at minimum two poem 2s: one, a naive declaration of love from the poet, who stands at a distance; and the other, an ironic meditation on the beloved’s easily appeased passions, her bestial lust, which leaves him complaining “tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem” [“if only I could play with you as she does”] (Ferguson 1985:11). Each of these poem 2s, in turn, is reflected on in different ways by poems 8 and 11, raising the number of possible levels of consciousness exponentially. Nor does this reading of 2 exhaust those possibilities. There is, in addition, fragment 2B which compares the poet’s situation to that of the newly deflowered maid Atalanta. Whether we see this text as the finale of poem 2, positing a transitional passage which has dropped out, or as an intervening work between 2 and 3, it clearly brings the issue of sexual intercourse to the fore, while simultaneously anticipating the more brutal image of defloration and death found at the end of poem 11. Fragment 2B also features a switch in expected genders, since Catullus compares himself to Atalanta. This not only foreshadows poem 11 and its casting of Lesbia in the phallic role of the plough and Catullus in the feminine role of the flower, but also signals the presence of a disequilibrium in the Roman sexual hierarchy of dominance and submission (Segal 1968b:309–10; Hubbard 1983: 229; Ferguson 1985: 11; Skinner 1989:17).12 Thus 2B opens the door to still other levels of reflection, which would examine Catullus’ experiences from the perspective of Roman sexual and social norms. Our second reading of 2 also creates new possibilities of interpretation for other poems in the sequence. Poem 3, the companion piece of 2, has its own sexual overtones (pipiare, for example, recalls the word pipinna for “small penis,” while the passer did his peeping in Lesbia’s lap, gremium; compare 67.30, “ipse sui gnati minxerit in gremium” [“he pissed/ejaculated in his own son’s lap”]) (Adams 1982:92; Ferguson 1985:14–15). In line 4, poem 3 also repeats the sexually ambiguous first line of poem 2. At the same time, the second sparrow poem introduces the theme of death, which will be developed more fully in 5’s carpe diem motif, 7’s mention of Battus’ tomb, and 11’s image of the flower and the plough (Rankin 1972: 745). The theme of physical love is continued in a lighter and more pleasant vein in poem 5, but is contrasted implicitly with two more troubling realities—the flight of time and the social stigma attached to Catullus’ and Lesbia’s elicit love. This stigma, in turn, recalls the violation of social norms implied in the disequilibrium of gender relations featured in 2B and 11 (Segal 1968a:289; 1968b:310; Rankin 1972:747; Ferguson 1985:21–22).


The notion of elicit love, moreover, brings poem 6’s role in the sequence into focus, allowing it to mediate between 5’s relatively uncomplicated joy and 7’s distanced irony. For 6 is a poem about raw sexuality and Flavius’ dalliances with a “febriculosum scortum” [“feverish little slut”]. She too is referred to as deliciae, just as Lesbia’s passer, while the request that Flavius display his “latera ecfututa” [“fucked out loins”] clearly anticipates 11’s “ilia rumpens” [“busting their groins”]. Thus, 6 introduces a deliberately biting image of sexual indiscretion, preparing the way for 7’s association of “furtivos… amores” [“stolen loves”] with night, as well as with death in the form of Battus’ tomb. Likewise, 7’s oracle of burning Jove recalls 6’s “febriculosum scortum” (Segal 1968a:295–96; 1968b:311; Skinner 1981:49–50; Hubbard 1983:227–28; Wiseman 1985:142; Ferguson 1985:27–28; 1986:3; 1988:13).13 The transition to the sexual monstrosity and critical self-reflection of 11 and 8 is logical, but no longer linear. As the reader moves forward, she is relentlessly tracing her steps back, reading each poem as a commentary on the others (Segal 1968b:311–16; Hubbard 1983:230). This deliberate collocation of texts, in such a way that they reflect and refract one another, leads us to another level of consciousness no longer associated with the Lesbia affair at all: Catullus’ will to artistry. For parallel to these texts’ status as representations is their existence as works of art. This too implies a consciousness, but one devoted to the shaping of material rather than its understanding. This distinction may be an oversimplification, in that no firm dividing line may be drawn between the two, but it is useful nonetheless. For as we have seen, Catullus did not merely arrange his poems in a logical order, he established between them an over-determined series of images and thematic links which make of them an aesthetic unity. Thus the sparrow of poem 2, the first Lesbia poem, recalls Sappho 1, as mentioned earlier, yet Sappho’s text is not part of the experience per se (Wiseman 1985:138). It is formally relevant, however, because poem 11, the last poem in the sequence, is written in Sapphic meter. These twin recollections of Sappho, therefore, bracket the sequence so as to emphasize its aesthetic completeness, while portraying Catullus’ affair with Lesbia, herself named for Sappho’s home island, against the background of the Greek poetic tradition. By the same token, these allusions to Sappho, in a context filled with gender inversions, may very well be meant to recall her own ambiguous sexuality. Poem 1, however, which has no role in the Lesbia sequence, can be said to represent the voice of the aesthetic consciousness per se.


Chronologically, it postdates the other poems in the sequence, yet logically it is prior. It thus represents a split consciousness which functions on two levels simultaneously. It introduces the sequence, but also recalls it. Hence, the terms poem 1 uses to describe the book recur throughout the collection. Most important for our purposes is lepidus, meaning “elegant.” This is a word which in the context of the opening poem is meant to display the poet’s Callimachean affinities and so his debt to the later Greek tradition. Lepidus recurs in 6, both in the negative (“illepidae”), referring to Flavius’ tart, and in the positive (“lepido”), in reference to poetry’s power to immortalize both Flavius and his whore (6.17) (Elder 1966:143–49; Levine 1969:212; Cairns 1969:154–55; Wiseman 1969:9–12; Quinn 1972:216; Commager 1974: 8, 46; Skinner 1981: 51). Poem 6, then, functions on the erotic and the aesthetic level as a key point in the opening sequence, serving as the sexual mediating link between 5 and 7, while adumbrating the aesthetic commentary begun in poem 1, the Callimachean nature of which becomes clear in 7’s reference to Battus’ tomb (Commager 1965:85; Wiseman 1969:12). The dual moral and aesthetic commentary continues in poem 10 with Varus’ scortillum [“little slut”], whom Catullus describes as “non sane illepidum” [“not wholly inelegant”] (Skinner 1981:50; Ferguson 1985:39). This litotes completes a pattern which began with Catullus’ book in poem 1 (lepidus), continued in poem 6 with a “scortum” (illepidus), who through the power of poetry could be made lepidus, and finished with 10’s “scortillum,” who is halfway in between.14 At this point, our earlier, provisional distinction between artistic and representational modes of consciousness ceases to be valid, not because it was initially ungrounded, but because the multiple intersections between these modes are so multi-faceted and overdetermined that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends. They each are engaged in a constant dialectic of mutual determination and self-reflection. Poem 10 is also one of the poems which deals with Catullus’ illfated stint on the staff of Memmius, governor of Bithynia. This fact not only brings Roman political life into the equation, but also ties poems 4 and 9 into the sequence. Poem 4 relates the story of Catullus’ homecoming from Bithynia, as told by the yacht which brought him, and poem 9 expresses the poet’s joy at the return of his friend Veranius from a similar journey to Spain (Segal 1968b: 318; Wiseman 1985:99, 144). By the same token, 10 prepares us for the first three stanzas of 11, which discuss Catullus’ hypothetical travel plans with Furius and Aurelius.15 Moreover, poem 10’s portrayal of the governor’s


mistreatment of his staff as a form of forced sodomy (10.10–13), and its analogous portrayal of the scortillum (10.24) who catches Catullus in a lying boast as a cinaedus [“receiver of anal penetration”], not only recalls the raw sexuality of poem 6 and its scortum, but also anticipates Lesbia’s three hundred lovers in 11 (Segal 1968b: 316–19; Skinner 1981:49; 1989:17)—the final poem on the affair, both in the opening sequence and, according to the conventional interpretation, in the collection as a whole. In sum, according to the conventional interpretation, as put forward by Quinn and rejected by Wiseman, poem 109 could not be the last poem of the collection on the affair and the poet could not have meant to leave the reader in a state of uncertainty as to the affair’s future outcome, because number 11 is the final poem. Moreover, the poet, having left so many signposts as to how the two poems in Sapphic stanzas (11 and 51) are to be read, must have expected his readers to read the poems several times through and establish the narrative relations between them in retrospect. This reading also finds corroboration in 11 ‘s role in the capsule summary of the affair provided by poems 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8. The poet may indeed have juxtaposed certain poems in sequence to create a special effect, such as 107 and 109, 70 and 72, 5 and 7, or 2 and 3, but none of these juxtapositions, according to the orthodox interpretation of poem 11, dictates the narrative as a whole. Wiseman, too, it should be pointed out, argues that Catullus aimed his work at a sophisticated reading public who could be expected to read the work several times. He, of course, argues that re-reading, rather than fostering the desire to rearrange the poems in a narrative order other than that in which they appear, actually deepens the reader’s appreciation of the strong sequential links which bind the poems in their present order. Catullus was a subtle poet, and we need not expect the message to be an obvious one; but we are not entitled just to take out poems irrespective of their context and arrange them in what looks like a plausible biographical sequence. (Wiseman 1985:136) The act of re-reading, of course, not only mitigates against any one schema of arrangement, but shows the reader to be now involved in a fundamentally different position than that of a member of the audience of an oral community, even if the consumer of the written text is having


that text read to him by a slave, which was a common practice in the period. These two competing readings, the one represented by Wiseman’s choice of 109 as the final poem on the affair, and the other by Quinn’s selection of poem 11, would appear to be mutually exclusive. Yet the problem for the reader is not so simple as a mere choice between two theories of the narrative relations obtaining between the poems. For, in fact, there can be no final choice. On the one hand, Wiseman makes a compelling argument that the poet has taken great care in the order in which he has placed the poems, producing different cycles which come together in progressive sequences. Indeed there now exists a substantial secondary literature by a variety of scholars which has proven these claims to many people’s satisfaction.16 Yet, on the other hand, the observations of Quinn and his followers on the relation between 11 and 51 are equally convincing. Since Catullus’ poems come to the reader without instructions, it is fundamentally impossible to choose between these competing theories. Indeed, the same opening sequence of poems, which confirms poem 11’s role as announcing an irremediable break, also undermines our ability to come to any final conclusion on that very question. For, as we have seen, the relations between poems 1 through 11, both those concerning the Lesbia affair and those concerning their companion pieces, are so complex and overdeter mined as to defy reduction to any unitary, sequential logic. Instead, the reader is forced to posit the presence of multiple possible temporal relations, multiple layers of consciousness operating simultaneously. For what makes Catullus’ poems a lyric collection is precisely the way they demand to be read in terms of one another, so that all the other poems become paradigms for interpreting the poem that happens to be under the reader’s gaze at that particular moment. Thus, it is precisely those forms of intratextual reference and writing that we cited de Man, in Chapter 3, as arguing proved there was no such thing as lyric or genre, which make the lyric genre, as we know it, possible. Poem 109 cannot be understood separately, not only from 107, but also from 11, 51, and even from such poems as 101, on the death of Catullus’ brother, and 31, on his return to Sirmio. Although the latter poems, in themselves, have nothing to do with the affair, they deepen our understanding of the speaker and of the context in which the affair took place. It is this interdependent nature of Catullus’ poetry, then, which reveals it as fundamentally different from the poetry of Archilochus. For in Catullus, the projection of the poet’s experience serves as both an integrational and a distributional element.


His ego thus appears not only as the speaker in a variety of poetic situations, but also as the interpretive context which makes those poems part of a meaningful whole. These poems, then, can be thought of as a series of asymptotic lines converging only at a point in infinity—the presence of the poet’s lyric subjectivity—a point whose absence is that which binds them together into a collection. That subjectivity itself, however, is the dialogical product of the complex set of relations which exist between each of these poems and all the others, even as it is the paradigmatic moment which makes those relations possible. By contrast, the Archilochian subjectivity is but a moment in a larger narrative of communal self-definition. Thus, the two readings of Catullus 11 and 109 which we have examined as competing hypotheses are, in fact, not two theories between which the reader must choose, but rather the natural consequence of the various temporal patterns of reading and responsive understanding inherent in the collection. Each poem can fit into a variety of narratives, no one of which is necessarily the single correct one, but all of which have as their center the projection of an ego which exists in and between the individual poems themselves, and which is the true ground of all these potential narratives. This ego is not the historical Catullus, but rather is a function of the reader’s engagement with the collection.17 Consequently, we are here in the presence of a phenomenon radically alien to the performative context of oral poetry. This solution to the problem of the nature and order of the Catullan collection also has one other advantage: it offers a new answer to the vexing question of whether Catullus was the final editor of all three parts of his collection. For though critical opinion has in recent years come more and more to view the objections to Catullus’ having actually arranged the poems in the corpus as fallacious, the position I am proposing does not need to assume this to be true. It need only show that the poems themselves require, for their proper understanding, to be read in terms of one another. The question of whether every last poem now stands in exactly the order in which Catullus intended it to stand then becomes of secondary importance, though I personally believe that what we have is substantially in line with what he intended.18 What is of first importance, though, is the way in which the poems themselves, in order to achieve their full poetic impact, presume the reader’s knowledge of other poems within the corpus. Inasmuch as we have already shown that to be the case with poems 109, 11, and 51, and will provide further examples in Chapter 6, then the question of the actual


order of the poems and their arrangement in books to a large extent becomes moot. Finally, the attempt to categorize in neat groups the various strands of Catullus’ tightly woven text which produce this radically new lyric consciousness would, in itself, be an act of folly. For all these strands, all these interpretive paths, exist and interact with one another in a virtual time which allows multiple levels of consciousness, multiple temporalities to operate simultaneously.19 In this, Catullus’ collection reminds one of nothing so much as Borges’ story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which we are told of a novel of the same title, written by the chief protagonist’s ancestor, Ts’ui Pên. In that novel, whenever a character makes a decision, all possible outcomes are envisaged. The result is a labyrinthine text, which although at first seems to contain no linear plot, in fact possesses a plurality of them. As the novel unfolds, these multiple temporal trajectories, or parallel universes, diverge from and intersect with one another,20 leading the sinologist Stephen Albert to explain: The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false image of the universe as Ts’ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. (Borges 1964:28) Ts’ui Pên’s novel, I would argue, can be seen as a metaphor for the complex and multitemporal lyric consciousness projected by Catullus in his Carmina. For in Catullus’ labyrinth, like that of Ts’ui Pên, there is no Ariadne’s thread, no master narrative to guide us; rather the more one reads the more each interpretive path intersects with every other. With each trope, the poet creates another inward turning which leads us deeper into the maze. The result may at first appear to be random and chaotic, yet what the reader experiences is not an absence of order, but its overabundance. Indeed, this multileveled, internally articulated temporality is something we all experience, but rarely recognize. The linear time of Newton, Schopenhauer, and the realist novel is not that of our innermost selves, but a radical reduction of sense experience—as Bakhtin, Freud, and Einstein have taught us. Thus, Morson and Emerson write in relation to Bakhtin:


Because the mind is never whole and experience is always heterogeneous, innerly persuasive voices always differ from each other in unpredictable ways. “Our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions, and values” (DiN, p. 346). Not only is this intense struggle an effect of the innerly persuasive voices, it is also the consequence of the very structure of the innerly persuasive word. “The semantic structure of an innerly persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean” (ibid.). (Morson and Emerson 1990:222)21 The temporality of the lyric collection, and of our own divided psyches, is fundamentally other than the linear time of Newton, and fantastically complex. We are each an internally articulated set of ongoing, often warring dialogues, moving at various speeds and various degrees of consciousness. It is this time, the obsessive and repetitive time of our innermost selves, that Catullus was the first to explore.

78

5 A POET’S PLACE Sappho and the melic discourse of archaic Greece

The formal problem facing Sappho was to find a way of presenting the female persona as an erotic subject. Culturally acceptable models presumably did not include woman’s pursuing man. Sappho’s solution, to direct the erotic impulse toward other women, was perhaps a traditional one. On the social plane quite possibly girls before marriage were encouraged to cultivate female poetry, friendships, liaisons, and among them Sappho may have found her audience. (Stigers 1981:45) Another way for the voice of the khoregos to be activated can be found in the “I” of a personality like Sappho, whose persona speaks as khoregos both to and about members of an aggregate of female characters who are bound together by ties that correspond to the ties that bind a chorus together. (Nagy 1990a:370; bold print in his text) Of course, there is more to Catullus’ poetry than just his affair with Lesbia. There are the poems of political invective, social commentary, and literary criticism, the Alexandrian set pieces, the epithalamia and the mythical narratives. All of these different types of poems reflect upon one another, so that the poems which deal directly with the affair both qualify and are qualified by those which do not. Thus the epithalamia, for example, as well as those political poems which inveigh against the sexual excesses of Caesar’s henchmen, form a commentary on the poems of the affair, describing both the sexual mores of the time

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and Catullus’ relation to them. The precise way in which these different levels of meaning interact with one another, as well as their social and historical significance, will be taken up in Chapters 6 and 7. For the moment, though, what is of primary importance is to contrast this outline of the interdependent nature of the Catullan collection with the relative autonomy that characterizes poems written for oral performance, such as the poems of Sappho. Sappho is important in this regard as much for her position in classical scholarship as for her actual influence on Catullus. For, like the poetry of Archilochus, Sappho’s verse is often viewed as one of the first and foremost examples of unmediated lyric expression (as, paradoxically, was Catullus’ until the mid-1960s).1 Snell thus writes of Sappho’s “deeply emotional confessions” (Snell 1953:52–59) and Bowra of her “remarkable intimacy and candour” (Bowra 1961: 178). More recently, Eric Gans has referred to her poetry as the birthplace of the “feminine lyric self” (Gans 1981:33–43).2 In responding to these traditional interpretations, there is no need to recapitulate our earlier arguments on the social nature of oral poetry. It is enough to note, with Rosalind Thomas, that archaic “poets were in an important sense the preservers and transmitters of their cultural heritage…. In a world where anything important was in verse, poetry was a better way of preserving for posterity and communicating to the Greeks of the present” (Thomas 1992: 116–17; Zumthor 1983:34, 46, 179, 252, 261). Given the memorial function fulfilled by poetry in the archaic polis, it is unlikely that Sappho’s songs were primarily a vehicle for self-revelation or personal confession. Rather, as was the case with Archilochus, we would expect her poetry to have participated in that larger social institution of oral verse, whose primary task was to record and preserve the information necessary for the culture’s survival (Nagy 1990b: 41).3 One would expect, then, Sappho’s poetry to be in many ways more like Archilochus’ than Catullus’. Nonetheless, the way Sappho’s poetry relates her poetic ego to the values of the community, and thus reinforces those values, is fundamentally different from that of Archilochus and in some respects more transparent. This difference in the manner in which the speaking subject is integrated into the community’s semiotic and ideological systems is only natural, since, as was noted above, Sappho and Archilochus did not, in Greek terms, practice the same poetic genre and so were not called upon to serve the exact same function. Hence, it is only natural that the first person speakers featured in the two forms would be constituted in separate ways.


Sappho was, of course, a lyric poet in the ancient sense, that is, a composer of songs for the lyre, while Archilochus was an iambist. Sappho’s poetry, as such, should be more closely related to that of her fellow lyrists—such as Alcaeus, Alcman, or Pindar—than to that of Archilochus, and less concerned with the kinds of trickster figures who inhabit iambic verse. Thus, Greek melic poetry, as those songs sung to the lyre are often called, is essentially concerned with integrating the contingencies of lived experience into what claim to be the timeless communal paradigms of ritual and myth which constitute the society as a self-perpetuating whole (Segal 1986:68; Nagy 1990a:31; 1990b:8, 10). This function is separate from, though clearly not opposed to, that patrolling of the community’s ideological borders which characterizes the poetry of Archilochus. In addition, as Calame has shown, the melic poets preserved the community’s traditions not only by transmitting them to the singers’ audiences, but also by initiating the young people who participated in the performance of these pieces into the narrative and religious practices which defined the polis and its heritage (Calame 1977:36–38, 385–89, 394–95, 400). We have no reason to believe that this was ever the iambist’s role. Nonetheless, Greek melic poetry, as understood by modern scholarship, is not all of one piece. Indeed, since the nineteenth century, it has been common practice to divide it into two sub-genres: choral lyric, such as that produced by Alcman, Bacchylides, and Pindar; and monody, or solo song, such as that produced by Sappho and Alcaeus. This division, however, is not a simple description of ancient poetic practice, devoid of ideological underpinnings or bias. For the assumption has long been that whereas choral lyric was reserved for public festivities and voiced public sentiments, monody represented the true feelings of the poet as an individual. Thus Bowra writes: Though the choral poets often speak in the first person and are by no means shy of voicing their opinions, they are less intimate and personal than the writers of monody, who speak without reserve of their innermost feelings and do not attempt to identify themselves with their company, or to speak for anyone but themselves. (Bowra 1961:7)4 Consequently, Sappho, generally considered a monodist (although few would contest that her epithalamia were intended for choral performance), has often been judged to practice a poetic genre which is

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closer to what modern poetry thinks of as lyric than that produced by her choral counterparts. This strict division between choral lyric and monody, however, does not stand up under scrutiny. Two different types of arguments can be marshalled against it. First, on a purely theoretical level, the use of the first person pronoun, as we have already shown, is no guarantor that the poems in which that pronoun appears recount, as Bowra phrases it, “the innermost feelings” of the poet. Indeed, as the second chapter has already shown at some length, the I/thou distinction, so central to modern liberal thought, did not have the same force for the archaic Greeks as it does for us. Rather, the self was closely identified with its place in the community. Consequently, a reader must not assume that sentiments which are voiced in the first person are, in fact, those of the poet as a private individual, rather than as a representative of a given social group (Havelock 1963:199–200; Zumthor 1983:56, 231; Kurke 1991:1; Thomas 1992:112). Indeed, when one considers the necessarily public and oral nature of these poems’ performance, in order for them to have achieved wide popularity and thus survived to the present, they would have had to appeal to thoughts and feelings which were widely (although not necessarily universally) shared within the community, and not just to those sentiments which were peculiar to the poets themselves (Thomas 1989:6, 8; 1992:51, 105). As Havelock notes: Archilochus and Sappho are appropriate examples to cite, if only because they are the favorite authors of those historians who would see in Greek lyric the emergence of a purely private poetry of the personal consciousness. The impression is fostered by the fact that the verse is often, though by no means always, spoken in the first person, and perhaps addressed to a second person. But the psychology of composition cannot be understood within the limits set by personal pronouns. (Havelock 1982:19) What often appears to be private is, in fact, public and paradigmatic. The “I” in the world of monody does not, and indeed cannot, signify the private idiosyncratic world of a single individual, but rather is one possible embodiment of the shared or the communal (Calame 1977:436– 38). These poets fulfilled not only the didactic and informative functions alluded to earlier, but also had to present their work in a manner which was both directly intelligible to and enjoyable for the listening audience (Thalmann 1984:32).


This seemingly simple statement can, in fact, have profound consequences for our understanding of oral verse. Take, for the moment, the example of the choral poets. Over the last thirty years, it has become clear that the much vaunted obscurities of Pindar are as much a product of our ignorance of the conventions governing his poems’ performance as they are of his own peculiar genius (Kurke 1991:10). In Elroy Bundy’s now famous programmatic statement: We forget that this is an oral, public, epideictic literature dedicated to the single purpose of eulogizing men and communities; that these eulogies are concentrated upon athletic achievement; that the environment thus created is hostile to an allusiveness that would strain the powers of a listening audience, hostile to personal, religious, political, philosophical and historical references that might interest the poet but do nothing to enhance the glory of a given patron…hostile in short to all the characteristics of style and temperament that we ascribe to Pindar. (Bundy 1986:35) Indeed, if Pindar’s poems were as baffling to his ancient audience as they are to the average modern reader, what patron would have paid him to create them? The fact is that these poems were not the creation of an errant bard whose flights of fancy carried him high above the understanding of mortal men, but rather they were the product of a language game whose codified rules and structures were at one time widely shared, but have since become obscure. Those ticks of style, which were once thought of as evidence of Pindar’s own idiosyncratic nature, are now widely seen as the marks of his mastery of a set of conventions which governed the order and nature of everything he said, and which, more importantly, subordinated his genius to the primary purpose of praising the poem’s addressee—the athletic victor—and the poet’s patron (often one and the same) (Bundy 1986:92; Newman and Newman 1984:29). This understanding of the conventional nature of the genre also means that, when Pindar volunteers his opinion on a given subject, the extent to which that opinion can be truly said to be “his” is always in question. Thus, David Young has shown that in one of the best known cases of Pindar’s stating a personal view (Pythian 11.52–53), the poet is not in fact voicing a private opinion, but rather citing a traditional topos recalling the need for moderation in all spheres of life. As Young notes:

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The preconception that Pindar speaks in these lines as a private citizen rather than as a poet…that the ego is narrow and personal rather than impersonal, choral, or poetic, is directly contrary to the evidence of this poem and of others. (Young 1968:4, 9–12) By the same token, Charles Segal has examined Sappho’s poetry in light of the conventions operative in an oral setting, observing that many poems, which often to the modern reader seem to be personal confessions, ought in fact to be read as dramatic enactments of normative situations: In an oral culture…formalized and ritualized patterns are the natural medium…. They cast the private and idiosyncratic into the mold of the universal and generic. Hence Sappho’s reliance upon a fairly stable and well-defined “vocabulary” of erotic motifs and symbols: the wish to die, memory, roses, garlands, perfumes and unguents, the sheltered grove, the moon. (Segal 1974:139–60) In this light, the notion that monody is inherently more personal than choral lyric becomes less persuasive. Both, in fact, are the product of the conventions necessary to a sustained oral culture, and the differences which do exist between them, at this point, would appear to be largely those of form. The second objection to the traditional dichotomy between monody and choral lyric is of a more factual and historical nature. In its most basic form, the argument is that this traditional division of the genre is as much a critical fiction, rooted in nineteenth century philology and aesthetics, as it is a description of poetic practice in ancient Greece.5 Mary Lefkowitz has recently argued that the terms themselves have, in fact, no firm foundation in ancient thought. Rather than there having been a strict division between monody and choral lyric, there was at best a hazy line between songs both sung and danced by a chorus, those songs sung by a single singer but danced by a chorus, and those sung by a single singer with no chorus. Furthermore, Lefkowitz argues that what determined the method of performance may have had less to do with the generic mode in which the poem was written than with the resources available to the community on a given occasion. Thus, in the case of many of Pindar’s victory odes, it is probable that a single chorus


leader would have sung the poem while the chorus danced behind him (Lefkowitz 1987; 1988:1–11).6 Lefkowitz’s position is corroborated by Rudolph Pfeiffer, who directly addresses Bowra’s assertion that there was an inherent difference between monody and choral song as to their respective personal and private natures, and demonstrates that this interpretation was based on a misreading of Plato’s Laws (764 D-E): This is a traditional mistake. Plato was actually speaking of the training of solo-singers and chorus-singers in the course of a discussion of musical education. The two terms are not used by him or any other ancient writer for theoretical classification. (Pfeiffer 1968:282–83) Likewise, Nagy argues that the “basic difference between monody and choral lyric” is less likely to be found in the inherent nature of the poems themselves than in their actual circumstances of performance. “Whereas monody accommodates [but does not mandate] a single performer, choral lyric requires a group” (Nagy 1990a: 340–41). The distinction, then, is not between public and private, but between solo and group performance, with many poems able to be performed in either fashion. Hence, it should not surprise us if Sappho’s poems, even in their formal dimensions, turn out to be in many ways closer to choral song than to what we normally think of as lyric. Indeed, it is my contention that the poetry of Sappho has been deformed by modern readers through their failure to grasp its public and performative nature. In order to demonstrate the validity of this thesis, the rest of this chapter will be devoted to a comparison of three of Sappho’s poems (Lobel-Page 1, 16 and 31) with the basic structure of the Pindaric ode, in order to show how the poetic ego in her verse functions analogously to the figure of the athletic hero in Pindar’s poems. More precisely, I shall argue that the “I” in Sappho’s poetry serves as a communal ego, whose experience is given form and meaning only to the extent that it can be reinscribed within a commonly accepted body of ritual and mythic lore. We shall then, in Chapter 6, compare Sappho herself to the use Catullus makes of her in his own poetic collection. Let us begin by examining one of Pindar’s epinician odes. An epinician is a poem generally written in dactylo-epitritic or Aeolic meters and sung on the occasion of a patron’s or a patron’s favorite’s victory in an athletic contest, such as the Olympian or Pythian games.7 The basic structure of an epinician ode falls into three parts. The poet

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begins with a naming complex, in which the victor, patron, home city, and victory are named, then moves to the poem’s center, which relates a myth that in some way reflects on the victor’s achievement, and finally returns to the victor himself and his community.8 The poem’s function, as Leslie Kurke has admirably demonstrated, is to reintegrate this outstanding individual into the collective ideological and semiotic worlds of family, class, and city. Thus the epinician strives to resolve potential conflicts between those semiotic worlds through specific, public appropriations of the communal mythic past (Kurke 1991:5–7, 258). A simple example of such an ode is the fifth Olympian, celebrating the victory of Psaumis of Kamarina in the mule cart race at Olympia in 460 BC. The poem consists of three groups of three stanzas each containing three lines apiece, thus reproducing the triadic structure at all levels. In the first stanza, Psaumis, the contest, and the event in which he competed are all named. In the second stanza, Kamarina, the town he has honored with his victory, is announced. And in the final stanza of the opening section, we are told that he has also won glory for his father, Akron, as well as the community at large (Kurke 1991:188–89, 197, 206–7). The middle section narrates briefly Psaumis’ return from Olympia to Kamarina in terms of a mythically saturated geography which interprets Psaumis’ journey not only as one through space, but also as one through the heroic past connoted by the mythic heros Pelops and Oinamaos. Pelops, in addition to having been the father of Atreus and grandfather of Agamemnon and Menelaus, also had competed for the daughter of Oinamaos, Hippodameia, in a chariot race which was believed to have been the origin of the Olympic games: He comes from the lovely grounds of Oinamaos and Pelops, singing, Pallas Polias, of your sacred wood, of your stream Oanos and the lake nearby, of Hipparis, whose channels bring pure water to this city; raising her houses as a lofty grove, he swiftly lifts his people back into the light from their ruin.9


Finally, in the last stanza, the poet prays to Zeus “to adorn this town in the splendor of her brave men” and to let Psaumis enjoy his victory and not envy the gods. In doing so, the poem has reinscribed Psaumis’ individual experience in the timeless paradigms of myth, thereby affirming that experience’s transpersonal significance, while at the same time firmly anchoring it in the world of the polis. For, the purpose of choral lyric in general, and epinician poetry in particular, was to “collectivize” experience, to “reintegrate” the outstanding or extraordinary individual into the communal fabric of shared ritual, myth, and tradition, which constituted the unity of the polis (Segal 1988b:131; Nagy 1990a:140–42, 192–93, 339, 427; Kurke 1991:57, 155, 158–59; Rose 1992:162). Admittedly, the fifth Olympian is a shorter poem than most of Pindar’s, and its structure is simpler. Others required more effort on the audience’s part, demanding that they reach deeper into the collective fund of myth and legend preserved by the oral tradition and make comparisons and contrasts which the poet leaves implicit. Such poems often have a structure similar to a riddle, itself a familiar oral genre, so that the audience had to divine the relation obtaining between the myth recounted in the center of the poem and the victor celebrated by it. One such poem is Pythian 11. It begins with an invocation of the mythical heroines of Thebes, the home city of the victor, Thrasydaios. It then moves on to the naming complex, pointing out that the Pythian games were celebrated in the homeland of Pylades, the constant companion of Orestes. This seemingly inconsequential bit of information allows Pindar to slip into the mythical section of the ode with virtually no transition: Thrasydaios victorious in the rich plow-field of Pylades, friend of Lakonian Orestes, whose nurse Arsinoa saved him from the murderous hands and cruel treachery of Klytaimestra that day she cut his father down…. (15–18b) The next nineteen lines of the poem are wholly concerned with the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The audience is never explicitly told

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how this tragic myth glorifies the victory of Thrasydaios: rather, it is their task to find that relation and to engage in the effort to interpret the present moment in light of the unchanging paradigms of a mythic past (Finley 1987:13–14; Havelock 1963:170–71). In fact, the relation between the victor and the myth in this poem is a negative one. It is not Thrasydaios’ likeness to Agamemnon or Clytemnestra which is significant, but rather the opposite. For while the tragedy of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon was, in part, a product of their high positions within their community and the envy which accompanied those positions, the poet speaking for Thrasydaios declares at the poem’s end, “Having searched into the city’s ways, and having learned that moderation blooms with a longer happiness, I have no fondness for the tyrant’s lot.” The poet thus distances the victor from the negative image he has created (Young 1968:19–20). At the same time, he uses the mythological paradigm to absolve young Thrasydaios of any tyrannical political ambitions, with which athletic competition and expenditure were often associated. In doing so, Pindar shows the flexibility of his appropriation of the mythic past, as well as his ability to adapt that heritage to the specific political circumstances in which he is composing (Kurke 1991:202–3, 215, 224, 260). Finally, it should be emphasized that even though the poet makes his statement of eschewing tyranny in the first person singular, he is not stating a personal opinion. Rather, he is employing a specific convention of the epinician genre, the gnomic climax, whose function is to aid the audience in its ability to recognize the relation between the myth and the moment it was intended to celebrate.10 The gnome, then, provides “the moral of the story” and allows the poet to direct the audience’s attention back to the occasion at hand. Thus, the ego of the poem’s speaker and the ego of the athletic victor become closely identified, and together they are given form and meaning only to the extent that the audience is able to integrate them into that wider hermeneutic context symbolized by the myth of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (Havelock 1982:16–17; Snell 1953:44–45; Calame 1977: 446). Much the same can be said of Sappho, although, in her case, it is the image of the poet’s personal ego that occupies the initial and final position in the poem, rather than that of the athletic victor (Kirkwood 1974:106, 123, 149).11 This poetic ego, however, is rarely highly individuated. The reader is given few details about its life, nor do those details become implicated in a series of possible narrative relations as we saw with Catullus. Rather, like the athletic hero, the Sapphic speaking


self exists as a single moment in a larger mythological and often ritualistic structure, which is by nature not personal but communal and paradigmatic. The Sapphic ego is a distributional not an integrational element. It does not, as in the poetry of Catullus, provide its own context of interpretation, but rather is dependent upon a pre-existing narrative structure. The Sapphic ego, then, exists not for itself, nor even in itself, but rather as an exemplary image through which is revealed the recurring patterns that gave individual lives in archaic Greece their wider significance.12 Thus, where Catullus presents us with a sequence which demands narrative interpretation even as it resists it, Sappho presents us only with significant, emblematic moments. As Charles Segal observes: It is not necessarily the unique, but the recurrent and universal features of her experience of love which Sappho seeks to present. The formalized patterns of her language may, in fact, have served to link her own emotional life to situations of frequent and repeated occurrence in the culture or sub-culture to which she belonged. (Segal 1974:152) Her poetry, as such, was unavoidably of a social and frequently religious nature,13 and if it was to retain its audience and fulfill its public function, it had to promote values which were congenial to the interests and desires of her fellow citizens (Havelock 1982: 128–29; Zumthor 1983:34, 40, 126). In addition, Lesbos in the late seventh and early sixth centuries, like Sparta, appears to have been a sexually segregated society (McEvilley 1978:8–9; Hallet 1979:450; Gentili 1984:101–10). Thus, the circle of young women gathered around Sappho would presumably have had an institutional sanction of a religious and educational nature (Calame 1977:390–91).14 In addition, such a circle, or “thiasos,” would have probably had a substantial role in preparing these women for the specific social and sexual roles they were expected to assume (Calame 1977:372, 401–2; Friedrich 1978: 109–10). Indeed the evidence on oral poetry in general and women’s poetry in particular (scant as it may be), points to the religious and social functions of these art forms (West 1970:460; Hallet: 1979). As Judith Hallet has pointed out: That Sappho’s verses were basically intended as public, rather than personal, statements, that they were aimed at instilling

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sensual awareness and sexual self-esteem in young women, and that even those written in the first person may not express her own feelings seem more obvious if we consider other examples of poetry from a similar social and cultural milieu written in the generation prior to hers. The maiden songs of Alcman, a Spartan male poet of the mid-seventh century BC, were composed for delivery by a chorus of young unmarried women in a sexually segregated society which like Sappho’s Lesbos, apparently encouraged greater sexual expressiveness than did other societies in ancient Greece…. Scholars in the past…have ignored the similarities between Alcman’s maiden songs and Sappho’s lyric largely because they regard the former as choral public works by a serious male artist, the latter as personal, privately voiced statements by an eccentric female…. Yet recent literary scholarship arguing that even Sappho’s apparently monodic lyrics were designed to be presented—perhaps by more than one person —at some sort of cultic ceremony, and recent studies in women’s social history, which have likened the role of women in archaic Lesbos to that of women in archaic Sparta, provide other reasons for considering the work of Alcman and Sappho together. (Hallet 1979:461–64)15 Far from being a poet whose work reminds us of Catullus’ probing of the subject’s most private thoughts and feelings, Sappho presents a very different image, that of a communally sanctioned chorus leader and bard. With these considerations in mind, no longer does she stand before us as a naive confessional poet, instinctively moved to song, but as “a poet with an important social purpose and public function” (Hallet 1979:450; see also Segal 1974:153; Calame 1977: 396). As Winkler has pointed out, the public, performative nature of Sappho’s poetry does not mean that it therefore addressed all groups in the same fashion. Indeed, its communal function, according to Hallet, appears to have been largely a gynocentric one. Thus, of necessity, Sappho must have always addressed two publics at once: the community of women and adolescent girls which constituted her immediate audience; and Lesbian, patriarchal society at large, which provided the more general social sanction for her song. Likewise, it is only natural that at times there were tensions between these two audiences’ needs and desires. Yet as we have just seen with Pindar, the melic poet’s function was to provide imaginary (if sometimes doublevoiced) solutions to real contradictions, to integrate that which was


standing outside the bounds of the community back into the common fold (Winkler 1990:164–65, 174–75, 181, 187; Jameson 1981:77–80; Fine 1984:64–65). This was Sappho’s task as well. Let us turn now to Sappho’s poem 1, commonly known as the Hymn to Aphrodite (a complete text and translation can be found in Appendix 1). The poet’s ego in this poem, as noted above, like that of the athletic hero in the Pindaric ode, appears only at the beginning and end of the poem, and surrounds a central mythic section which, in realistic or personal terms, would seem to have little relation to Sappho’s predicament. Such a descriptive role, however, is not its function. Rather, it is there to provide its audience with a hermeneutic context through which that experience can become intelligible and significant (Kirkwood 1974:113–14). The majority of the poem, in fact, is not concerned with the particularities of Sappho’s situation (we never so much as learn the name of her beloved). The true focus of the poem is Aphrodite herself (Carey 1973:370–71; Nagy 1990b: 259). What, for example, have the sparrows’ whirling wings, as they pull Aphrodite’s chariot, or the golden home of Zeus to do with Sappho’s personal difficulties (Winkler 1990:170–71)? Are these difficulties in any real sense personal? Indeed, as the repetitions of the adverb deute make clear, Sappho’s pretext for invoking the goddess is but one example out of many such incidents in a recurring pattern, so that the poem itself labels her experience not as unique but typical.16 This normative aspect of the poem becomes clearer once it is realized that it belongs to an identifiable subgenre, the “cletic” hymn. And though it is unclear if the poem was ever part of a formal religious observance, inasmuch as no particular festal occasion is mentioned, nonetheless the social realm of communal ritual practice to which it alludes is clear, and, as such, the audience would have been provided with an immediate and familiar context within which it could interpret the poem (Segal 1974:145). A further consequence of this generic identification is that the ego depicted in the poem would have been expected to represent an experience which the audience could then interpret in light of those standards of behavior commonly understood to be designated by the worship of Aphrodite. Anything less would have been not only sacrilegious, but largely unintelligible. Thus, in the same way as it would be amiss to read the central mythic portions of Pindar’s odes as mere metaphors of the victorious athlete’s achievements, it would also be amiss here to construe the descent of Aphrodite as a metaphor for the poet’s private experience (Segal 1974: 140; Nisetich 1980:12; Johnson 1982: 62–63). For such an

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interpretation assumes that these myths and epiphanic moments were regarded as mere rhetorical figures by the poets and not as real occurrences which also had, in addition to their literal significance, an emblematic or paradigmatic value.17 In other words, this position would assume that the poets did not believe in the reality of the events they were narrating.18 There is no compelling reason to accept this position, however. Rather, the surviving evidence points to a continuing strong respect for the traditional cults of archaic Greece, at least until the late fifth century (Dodds 1951:116–17; Gentili 1984:110–11). Consequently, the central section of poem 1 does not merely represent, in a figurative manner, an experience which had occurred to Sappho. Instead, it presents the possibility of such an experience as proof of the eternally present power of Aphrodite (Snell 1953:57; Segal 1974:153; Snyder 1989:15–16).19 Even so committed a partisan of the traditional view of early Greek lyric as Bruno Snell admits, “Sappho’s treatment of love is purely ‘mythical’: love is not an emotion which breaks forth from within [for Sappho], but the intervention of a deity” (Snell 1953:53).20 Love then is an external, not internal, phenomenon. And as such, the ego of Sappho’s hymn is no more personal to her, in the sense of revealing a unique and complex subjectivity, than is the ego of David in the twenty-third Psalm. At the same time, the double-voiced nature of her address to her different audiences (male and female) is apparent precisely in those parts of the poem where she is most traditional in her appropriation of the heroic past. Thus, a number of scholars have remarked on Sappho’s extensive use of Homeric vocabulary and imagery within the poem. Rissman, for example, notes the parallels between Sappho’s use of the words pai Dios, meidiaisaisa, and khrusion in reference to Aphrodite and “the three major Homeric epithets for the goddess Dios thugatêr…, filommeidês…, and khruseê” (Rissman 1983:2). Likewise, in stanza 2, Sappho uses a traditional prayer formula in her address to Aphrodite which recalls Diomedes’ appeal to Athena in Iliad 5.115–17 (Winkler 1990:167). And the goddess’s chariot flight in stanzas 3 and 4 evokes Diomedes’ aristeia and the wounding of Aphrodite, also in Book 5 of the Iliad. This last recollection, however, occurs on at least two distinct levels. On the one hand, these stanzas bring to mind the descent of Athena and Hera in their golden chariot to aid the wounded Diomedes (5.722, 724, 730–32, 781). On the other, there are specific parallels between stanza 3 and Aphrodite’s escape in the chariot of Ares as well as her seeking of succor from Dione after she was wounded by Diomedes himself (5.358–73).


The double voicedness of this evocation of the epic tradition is most evident in the fact that Sappho is seen here playing two roles. She is both Diomedes, the wounded mortal in whose aid goddesses descend in a golden chariot, and Aphrodite, the wounded female “seeking a goddess’ consolation” (Winkler 1990:167, 170; Rissman 1983:9–10, 14– 15; Di Benedetto 1973:121–23; Page 1955:7). The central mythic section of the poem thus enacts both her identification with—as well as her usurpation of—the public, heroic tradition, and at the same time her necessary estrangement and exclusion from its narrow, androcentric focus (Winkler 1990:169). The poem, therefore, embodies simultaneously two opposed positions vis-à-vis the masculine ideology of heroism, with each of those positions finding its poetic justification within the tradition of Homeric epic. Consequently, Sappho’s evocation of Aphrodite, like Pindar’s own mythic centers, effects a reconciliation of two potentially conflicting ideological moments—the androcentric world of the heroic poetic tradition and the more specifically gynocentric function her poetry fulfilled in Lesbian society. This poem succeeds in articulating a specifically feminine appropriation of the poetic tradition, while at the same time acknowledging that tradition’s authority. The next poem I would like to look at is fragment 16 (a complete text and translation can be found in Appendix 1). In an article in Helios, Eric Gans has argued that this poem represents the founding moment of female subjectivity in Western poetry and that it shows an individual who places the satisfaction of her own desires before those traditionally accepted by the male power structure within the community. Yet a closer reading of the poem will show that almost the opposite is true, that what this poem really shows is how individual (distributional) moments of deviance are reintegrated within the communal body of mythic lore and only there attain intelligibility. Again, the analogy with Pindar is applicable. For it is the mythic center of the poem which mediates all claims of separateness—of being extra-ordinary—and reintegrates them within that main body of legend through which the community identified itself as part of a single culture, the one truly panHellenic form of poetry, the Homeric epos (Calame 1987:217, 223). The traditional interpretation of fragment 16 sees it as a declaration of independence on the part of the individual. Such a reading is based almost exclusively on the poem’s first stanza:21

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Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves.22 On the one hand, there are those who love the military world of the Homeric epic, and on the other, there is Sappho in love. Yet if one reads the next few stanzas carefully, what at first appears to be a nonconformist declaration, in fact becomes an all the stronger reassertion of traditional values, inasmuch as the possibility of their transgression has now been envisioned. As Havelock explains in the case of Homer himself: Even when tales, in order to heighten dramatic interest, describe situations which violate [the society’s] norms—the reflections of Achilles as he withdraws from war in Book 9, or the illegal rapacity of the suitors in the Odyssey are conspicuous examples— the listener is still reminded all the more forcefully of what the basic paradigms are. (Havelock 1982:132)23 Thus, at the beginning of the second stanza, Sappho purports to be explaining what the real meaning of the previous gnomic strophe was. In doing so she invokes the example of Helen, the heroine whose refusal to conform to the role society had given her led precisely to the archetypical situation wherein the warlike Homeric ethos is defined, the Trojan war:


It is perfectly easy to make this understood by everyone: for she who far surpassed humankind in beauty, Helen, left her most noble husband and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all for her child or dear parents, but (love) led her astray.24 This is no innocent example. For Sappho’s entire audience could have been expected to know the Homeric poems by heart, and the nature of early Greek education was such that they would have been trained to interpret the world through the paradigms those poems provided (Rissman 1983:13; Thalmann 1984:37; Frow 1986:179). Consequently, as soon as her auditors would have heard the name Helen they would have thought not only of her legendary beauty, but also of her adulterous love for Paris, the destruction of Troy, as well as the ten years of war and death her “misdeed” engendered.25 Moreover, as Leah Rissman points out, the implied comparison of Anactoria to the Lydian armies in itself invites a Homeric understanding of the poem, inasmuch as what once was “Troy was [now] part of the Lydian empire” (1983: 30–46). Yet since it is Anactoria who has left Sappho, presumably to join her newly married husband in Lydia, it is in fact she who, by the end of the poem, occupies the position of Helen, not Sappho (Calame 1987:219). Thus as in poem 1, Sappho again seems to occupy two positions at once. Initially, we naturally identify the first person of the opening stanza as the analogue to Helen in the mythic illustration which follows. This rapid identification is what has led previous critics to see the poem as a simple evocation of the superiority of the claims of individual desire to the normative standards of the group. But not only does the mythic center recuperate this moment of incipient transgression within the dominant cultural paradigm, it also shows the truth of that paradigm by putting Sappho in the position of Menelaus, the abandoned lover. And while in Sappho’s case that abandonment does not result in the destruction of both lives and family, through the violation of the sanctity of the patriarchal household (compare Alcaeus 283.7–10 in Campbell 1982)—indeed it is the establishment of such a household which is the probable cause—Sappho’s evocation of Menelaus does dramatize the pain of separation in a way which the poem’s Homeric resonances make intelligible to all. Altogether, then, the picture Sappho paints in stanzas 2 and 3 is not necessarily a positive one, and the appearance of the word paragage (“led astray”) shows clearly that Sappho depicts Helen’s actions as wrong. The pattern becomes even clearer if we compare Sappho’s

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description of Helen to that of Ibycus (Campbell 1991: frg. 282), who terms the war the “often sung strife over blonde Helen” and cites Aphrodite as the cause of Troy’s destruction (Rissman 1983:40). Likewise, in Alcaeus 42 and 283 (Campbell 1982)—poems which Sappho’s text could either have influenced, imitated, or shared a common genealogy with—Helen is described as causing the death of Paris’s brothers and the destruction of Troy, as well as begetting evil for Priam through her deeds (Rissman 1983: 26 n. 8, 58 n. 26). There are also clear verbal echoes between Alcaeus’ haunting evocation of the “black earth” of the Trojan plains holding the brothers of Paris (283.12– 13) and Sappho’s use of the same phrase in stanza 1. The common source of the formula, just as the common source of these mythic stories, is, of course, the oral tradition of Homeric epos (Du Bois 1978: 89). None of this is to say that Sappho is simply echoing her male counterparts. Clearly the accent in poem 16 is different from that found either in Ibycus or Alcaeus. The primary emphasis here is not on blaming Helen and her violation of the bonds of patriarchal marriage for the destruction of Troy, but rather to dramatize and render intelligible the pain of Sappho’s—and by metonymy her community’s—separation from Anactoria through the appropriation of the mythic past. By the same token, as Page Du Bois has pointed out, Helen, in Sappho’s poem, is an active player and not merely a passive object traded between men, as she is in Ibycus and Alcaeus (1978:96). The illogical combination of both passivity and being the source of all evil is, of course, all too common in patriarchal depictions of women. At the same time, this stanza also effectively emphasizes the power of love—and hence Aphrodite—over the individual (Kirkwood 1974: 108). In no way does it naively celebrate the foundation of a new private, female subjectivity. Its terms are still firmly ensconced within the dominant, traditional paradigm, and indeed, are only intelligible against that background. What the comparison of Sappho’s poem to Homer, Alcaeus and Ibycus shows is both the values those terms traditionally connoted and the expectations Sappho’s audience would have brought to her poem (Calame 1987: 214–15). Thus, what at first appeared to be an individual’s attempt to separate herself from the tradition by which she and her culture defined themselves is reinscribed in that same tradition.26 Sappho’s poem does not so much initiate a rupture with the hegemonic culture as find a set of terms which allows potentially conflicting sets of expectations to be articulated within a single shared paradigm (Rissman 1983:38; Rose 1992:55).


The last poem at which I would like to look is Sappho 31 (a complete text and translation can be found in Appendix 1). To understand this poem, the reader must begin by asking what sort of performative context would have been required for such a poem to have had a public meaning on the island of Lesbos; that is to say, on what sort of occasion could such a poem have been appropriately sung to a public which was well acquainted with the poet, and indeed constituted her friends, neighbors, and potential political allies and enemies in this small island community (Rösler 1983:12, especially n. 12; Lasserre 1989:147).27 Or to put these questions in terms of the theoretical framework elaborated in Chapter 3, what is the nature of this poem’s dialogical situation? This is very different from the question posed by the traditional romantic understanding of lyric: what is the poet trying to express? Rather, in this sort of dialogic analysis, it is the relation of “responsive understanding” between poet and public which is foregrounded (Bakhtin 1986: 95–96; 1984:87–88; Morson and Emerson 1990:129–30). The most obvious performative context which comes to mind for Sappho 31 is a wedding, since it is difficult to imagine, in Lesbos’s sexually segregated society, many other occasions where a man and woman would be publicly seated together in close converse. Indeed, 31 is the sole text in Sappho’s corpus to show a woman and a man in an intimate conversation (Griffith 1989:59).28 This interpretation of the poem was, of course, standard until the mid-1950s, having been first advanced by Wilamowitz and later vigorously defended by Snell (Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1966:58; Snell 1931:71–90). In 1955, it was to many people’s minds decisively refuted by Page, who termed it a “theory…based on nothing but a preconceived notion about Sappho’s moral character” (Page 1955:30–33). Kirkwood, thus, refers to Page’s having “demolished” a view which could only appeal to the “sentimentally inclined,” and which was designed to repress Sappho’s homoeroticism (Kirkwood 1974: 121–22; see also Snyder 1989:20). Yet such an indictment is little more than an ad hominem attack, and in this reader’s case it is not applicable on the count either of sentimentality or of homophobia. More importantly, McEvilley has persuasively shown that both Snell’s and Wilamowitz’s major theses were more correct than even they realized. He makes three major points: first, the term aner (“man”) in Sappho always refers to a husband; second, the direct comparison with a god only occurs in marriage poems; and third, Lesbos, in all the surviving literature, would appear to have been so sexually segregated as not to have allowed the sort of public interaction between a man and woman portrayed in the

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poem, except in the context of marriage (McEvilley 1978:1–9).29 Ruth Neuberger-Donath has also demonstrated, by using comparative evidence gathered from the Homeric poems, that any time a man and woman are shown to be sitting enantios to one another, they are necessarily philos to one another. It can thus be assumed, she concludes, that the couple celebrated in Sappho’s poem were, in fact, man and wife and probably recently so (Neuberger-Donath 1977:199– 200).30 This reading is also a tempting solution because Sappho wrote numerous epithalamia. Moreover, Gregory Nagy has recently argued that Sappho’s role as a singer was that of a khoregos, a publicly sanctioned poet/educator comparable with Alcman in his “Partheneia” or Pindar in his epinician odes: We may add the testimony of Cologne Papyri 5860, where Sappho is described as the “educator” of the aristai, the female élite, of Lesbos and Ionia. To say that Sappho is an “educator” is a prosaic way of saying that her assumed role, through her lyric poetry, is that of khoregos, “chorus leader,” speaking both to and about members of an aggregate of female charac ters who are bound together by ties that correspond to the ties that bind a chorus together. (Nagy 1990a:435; italics and bold print in Nagy’s text) Her expression and probable practice of homoerotic love was thus, like that of her male counterparts, a form of paideia, not the public expression of a private desire.31 It is, of course, impossible to prove whether this poem was actually sung at a wedding(s) or not, but the attempt to formulate a response to the question of the poem’s performative context goes a long way toward elucidating the concrete nature of its dialogical situation. For it makes clear the radically different nature of Sappho’s poetry from the vastly more privatized verse which is read and written today, while affirming its essential solidarity with that of her choral counterparts, Pindar and Alcman. As of yet, there have been no other satisfactory performative contexts envisioned, and those who have opposed this interpretation have generally chosen to ignore the question altogether, leading to anachronistic interpretations in which Sappho is read more as an author composing books of poetry than as an archaic singer performing orally before her peers.32


At any event, the poem could hardly have been intended to be heard by the citizens of Lesbos as a purely personal confession. Its focus is not the moi, but the toi and the kenos (Snell 1953:52). Indeed, this poem, which could be read as not having the same Pindaric structure as the previous two, since it lacks a central mythic section, is in many ways the most Pindaric of the lot. For the initial naming complex focuses not on the speaking voice’s ego, but on that of the addressees:

This man seems equal to the gods, that sits opposite you and listens close by to your sweet voice. (Translation mine) The feelings of the speaking subject are only present to the extent that they can be directly expressed in an objectified and externalizing catalogue of symptoms (Page 1955:26–27; Fränkel 1975:176). In fact, the poetic ego, through its enactment of a universalizing symptomology, functions as an analogue to the central mythic section of a Pindaric ode. It renders public and understandable a unique experience which otherwise would be purely personal and thus meaningless to the public at large. As Kirkwood says, “Sappho used herself as the illustrative equivalent of a simile or myth” (Kirkwood 1974:122; see also West 1970:314–15).33 We find out next to nothing about the poet herself, or the persona she wishes to project; instead, we are invited to marvel at the devastating effect of the woman’s beauty, even as this unnamed, godlike man sits before her, seemingly unfazed. What we have is a poem of praise, directed, in the first instance, to the young woman, and in the second, to the man sitting across from her (Burnett 1983:236; Rissman 1983: 103–4; Lasserre 1989:157).34 As Sarah Kay remarks, in the analogous context of orally performed troubadour lyric, “The performance becomes one moment in a dialogue, where the performer emerges as the spokesman of a pre-established community of praise. All right-thinking listeners become collaborators in the song’s ‘sincerity’” (Kay 1991:166). In sum, Sappho’s poetry represents a radically different phenomenon from that found in Catullus. Far from embodying a complex meditation on the ambiguities and contradictions of subjective experience, her

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monody seeks to reintegrate that experience within the bounds of communally accepted norms. In this, her poetry is at one with that of Pindar, Alcman, and other writers of choral lyric. Indeed, as we have seen, although some poems might more easily lend themselves to choral or solo performance, there is no fundamental, generic distinction dividing the types of poems, which the Greeks called melic, into groups that would correspond to the traditional division between choral and thus public, and monodic and thus private, lyric. If anything, the differences between choral lyric and monody represent a division between two (or more) subgenres, since both participate in the same essential dialogical situation but also exhibit differences in form and, in the case of the epinician odes, thematic occasion. Finally, choral lyric and monody as a group can be differentiated from iambos in terms of the functions these two types of poetry perform. For while melic poetry seeks to integrate the contingencies of individual experience into the eternal paradigms of communal myth and legend, iambos seeks to define who or what is philos, and thus a member of the community, and who or what is ekhthros, and thus an external threat. Iambic, trickster poets must always straddle the border between inside and outside, in order to reaffirm the existence of that border, while a Pindar, a Sappho, or an Alcman is ever seeking to resolve contradictions and find the ideological center of the polis, and thus of their audiences’ and patrons’ homes.

6 SAPPHICA PUELLA The triple-faceted object of Catullan desire

Sappho had written two stanzas more but they were too literal to express his love. It was not his trembling body [Catullus] cared to recall. It was the bewilderment of soul that startled him and that he wished to write out for himself…. (Frank 1928:17) Catullus is, so far as we can judge, the first poet in Greek or Latin who decided to write about a particular love-affair in depth in a related collection of poems…. a profound, systematic, and continuing exploration of a single relationship through poems which relate to and illuminate each other…. It is not in any poet’s manner or nature before Catullus. (Lyne 1980:21) Sappho 31 is, of course, the work Catullus later translated in his poem 51. As noted in Chapter 4, this poem plays a crucial role in the Catullan collection. Often considered the first poem of the Lesbia affair, it was meant to be read in conjunction with poem 11, the only other poem composed in Sapphic stanzas and itself often thought to be the last poem of the affair. Sappho’s original, naturally, has no such structural connections with the other poems of her corpus, nor, given the fact that they were written to be performed orally, could they have maintained anything like the complex intratextual relations seen in Catullus (Burnett 1983:230). Thus, although in many respects, when one first reads Sappho’s and then Catullus’ version of this poem, they appear to be two renderings of the same text, nothing could be further from the truth. For texts are not simply marks on a page, nor the semantic


“content” to which those marks allude, but rather the total context in which those marks, those semantic contents, and the conventions which govern them, exist for a consuming public.1 They cannot be understood separately from the dialogical situation which constitutes their context of enunciation. Consequently, two texts which appear to say exactly the same thing can, in fact, because of the radically different environments in which they exist, “say” two very different things. Genre, thus, as we have defined it, is not merely an empty typology of forms, but is directly constitutive of meaning itself. With these considerations in mind, let us now turn to Catullus’ translation of Sappho 31 (a translation and complete text can be found in Appendix 2). Leaving aside the final stanza, to which I will return in Chapter 7, the two poems appear to be substantially alike, except for the seemingly minor difference that Catullus names his addressee Lesbia.2 Now, there is no great mystery as to whom the name Lesbia referred. Apuleius tells us in his Apology (10) that it was a woman named Clodia, who is generally thought to have been either Clodia Metelli or one of her sisters. A more important question, though, is: what is the poetic significance of this particular pseudonym? The answer is twofold. First, and most obviously, Lesbia is the metrical equivalent of Clodia, so that if Catullus chose to circulate a private manuscript the actual name could have been easily substituted. Second, and more important for our purposes, Lesbia is the Latin adjective denoting a woman from Lesbos, in this context obviously Sappho (Fredricksmeyer 1983:69). In Sappho’s original, however, she is the one who is tongue-tied; she is the singer of the poem, not its recipient. Yet in Catullus’ version, the woman named with an adjective which alludes to Sappho is in the opposite position. She is now the object, not the subject. She is the woman sung about, not the singer (Skinner 1981: 88; 1993:109). There has been an inversion of roles, which, as we shall see, will have reverberations throughout the collection, and which necessarily calls the poet’s double relation to both his reading public and his predecessors into question. For each of these relations is now mediated by the other and can only be understood from within the other’s perspective. The poem is neither a simple presentation of an event to the reading public, nor a univocal reproduction of Sappho’s original, but a complex mixture of both, situated within the larger context of Catullus’ portrayal of the affair as a whole. The point is a somewhat obvious one, though it has yet to be fully considered. For in the very act of self-consciousness this alteration supposes, Catullus’ poem comes to free itself from the

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moment of its enunciation and enters into a new and more complex series of dialogic and narrative relations which ultimately center around the multi-voiced and often conflicting intentions of the Catullan poetic ego, as they are revealed in poem 51’s relations with the other poems in the collection.3 There is, then, in this one name, Lesbia, a measure of conscious self-reflexivity, which is alien to Sappho’s original. This seemingly innocent substitution of Lesbia for Clodia opens a whole range of questions about artistic intent and self-conscious literary (as opposed to mythic or traditional) intertextuality, which would be difficult to imagine in Sappho’s predominantly oral culture. Are we, for example, to assume, given the use of the name Lesbia in the context of a poem by Sappho, that there is a reciprocity of symptoms between Catullus and his beloved, so that not only is Catullus Sappho (i.e. poet and speaker) but also the woman who bears the Sapphic epithet? Or has there been a mere inversion of roles? From the beginning, we are in a quandary as to what precise parts Catullus and Lesbia/Clodia/Sappho are going to play, and as to what levels of conscious intent the triple-faceted object of Catullus’ desire corresponds. Moreover, what does it mean to send Lesbia/Sappho a reinscription of her own poem into another language, another alphabet, especially when this Lesbia/Sappho is only Sappho and not Clodia through a trick of orthography, through a private code made possible by writing? No simple answers can be supplied to these questions. What is interesting is the fact that we have now entered into a new genre of poetry whose radically different context of enunciation makes those questions not only possible, but necessary. For they show we are now in a complex and sophisticated world of literary allusions, artistic selfconsciousness, and psychological ambiguity, a cosmopolitan and Hellenistic world alien to the predominantly oral culture of archaic Lesbos. They show we have now moved into lyric. Nonetheless, this reading of 51 has only scratched the surface of the complexities and circuitous routes of responsive understanding that this poem contains. For, in this same alteration of Sappho’s original can also be seen still another motif of Catullus’ poetry, which can be tracked throughout the collection and which constitutes one of the primary thematic elements organizing it as a whole: that of sex-role reversal (Rubino 1975:294). A precise parallel to Catullus’ intertextual alteration of expected sex-roles in 51 can thus also be seen in poem 70’s relation to its original, Callimachus’ eleventh epigram (Page 1975:93), wherein the passive and active roles played by Catullus and Lesbia respectively in 70 are reversed in Callimachus’ original (for a complete text and


translation, see Appendix 2). There, the man, Callignotis, is active, and the girl, Ionis, is passive. Likewise, in poem 68, Catullus compares his own need to overlook Lesbia’s infidelities with that of Juno’s ignoring the “omnivoli plurima furta Jovis” [“the numerous stolen loves of all desiring Jupiter”].4 This thematic and thus integrational element of the collection, in turn, can be seen as adding yet another ironic level to Catullus’ use of the name Lesbia for Clodia, inasmuch as it was widely thought in antiquity (probably correctly) that Sappho was a Lesbian in both senses of the word. As such, she could have easily been thought of as usurping the masculine role (did not Horace refer to her as “mascula Saffo” in Epistles 1.19.28?),5 and hence, within the binary logic of conventional Roman sexual relations, if Catullus was on the receiving end of Lesbia’s infidelities he would thus naturally be in the woman’s, or at least the effeminate, position (Wiseman 1985:10–14). Given the recurrent nature of this motif of sex-role reversal in the Catullan collection, it is perhaps not accidental that another important example of this same phenomenon can be found in the final strophe of poem 11, the only other poem in the collection written in Sapphic stanzas: nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem, qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est. And let her not look for my love which has perished through her fault, just as a flower at the edge of the meadow when touched by the passing plough. As it turns out, the particular sex-role reversal found in the poem appears to be a direct imitation of still another fragment attributed to Sappho (105c), thus seeming to confirm the thesis that 11 and 51 are to be read as a diptych (Quinn 1972:163; Du Clos 1976:86). Yet there is more to this stanza than a simple imitation of Sappho, or another example of sex-role reversal. Indeed, by means of its brutal imagery, the reader gains admittance into a realm of associations, which lead him or her into the darkest and least conscious depths of the Catullan poetic ego, into images of mutilation and disease such as Attis’ self-castration in 63 or 76’s reference to the Lesbia affair as a “pestis perniciesque” [“a ruin and a plague”].6 At the same time, through this double image of the flower destroyed by the plough, the collection demands another even

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more complex reading, which links all these poems in a further set of associations, ultimately producing an image of artistic selfconsciousness and deliberate intertextuality and intratextuality unimaginable in an oral performative context. The reader thus has a sense of being let into the secret reaches of the Catullan soul, even as he/ she recognizes that it is through that soul’s conscious will to artistry that this very insight is possible. The plough of poem 11’s final stanza is of course a common symbol in ancient literature for the masculine phallus, while the flower often signifies an unmarried woman. In Catullus’ first epithalamium, for example, the bride is referred to as flos or floridus four separate times. Hence, Catullus, in at least a figurative sense, portrays himself here as deflowered by the phallus of “mascula Lesbia.” Moreover, this same conjunction of images, the flower and the plough, is also found in Catullus’ second epithalamium, where it is made unmistakably clear that the flower represents the still virgin bride-to-be and the plough the ravishing male (Putnam 1974a: 79–80; Fredricksmeyer 1983:73; Ferguson 1985:44): Ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis, ignotus pecori, nullo convolsus aratro, … sic virgo, dum intacta manet, dum cara suis est; cum castum amisit polluto corpore florem, nec pueris iucunda manet, nec cara puellis. As a solitary flower which has been born in a walled garden, unnoticed by the herd, and yet to be plucked by the plough …so the young maid, while she remains untouched, is dear to her family; yet once she has lost the chaste flower and her body is befouled, she remains neither a joy to the boys, nor dear to the girls. (62.39–47) In addition, it will also be recalled that Sappho’s poem 31, the original for Catullus 51, was itself probably created for a wedding, so that if Catullus could count on his readers recognizing the wedding background of Sappho’s original, then the creation of an ironic contrast between 51 and 11, as poems of marriage and divorce, would have been evident. Thus Sappho herself, through her poetry and its various erotic themes, becomes the unifying subtext, uniting what have often been


read as the first and last poems of the affair into a complex dialogical unity, in which each poem’s meaning is relativized by the reading of the other and by the way in which both of these poems are read by other texts in the collection, such as the epithalamia, poem 63’s imagery of castration, and 76’s reflections on the affair as a “pestis perniciesque” (Quinn 1972:56; Du Clos 1976:78; Wiseman 1985:153; Ferguson 1988: 14). Yet the ironic relation obtaining between 11 and 51 is raised to an even higher power when it is realized that poem 11’s imitation of Sappho (105c), which in 62 functions as a symbol of intact virginity, here is transformed into an image of Lesbia’s insatiable lust (Quinn 1972: 162). Taken as a totality, this set of poems (11, 51, 61, 62, 63, 76) and their Sapphic recollections allude to the full gamut of Catullus’ emotions, ranging from dumb-struck awe, to fear, loathing, and obsessive images of defloration and castration. This complex set of both intertextual and intratextual dialogical relations, in which Catullus 51 necessarily becomes embedded because of its role within the Catullan collection, would be alien to the performative context of its Sapphic original.7 Rather than illustrating the linear temporal movement of a performance, which must first and foremost be construed in its immediate communal and cultural context, the Catullan poem becomes part of a complex dialogue which moves forward and backward within the Catullan collection itself, as well as back and forth between its literary sources. It is only from within this complex textual network that the individual poem starts to refer to the larger world of Roman and Hellenistic culture in which it was produced. Each individual moment of the Catullan ego, as presented within the collection, becomes a dialogical nexus which communicates with all the others. In the Catullan corpus, the reader always participates in a multifaceted dialogue constituted first by the poems themselves and only secondarily by its reading public. Yet the limits of that dialogue can never be fully mapped, never completely exhausted. The process of rereading and interpretation within its bounds are ultimately infinite. For a poetry of oral performance the process of interpretation is also, properly speaking, infinite, but the hermeneutic circle it describes is not in the first instance the internal dialogue of the poet, but his or her dialogue with both the (oral) poetic tradition and the collective ideological and social world in which it is performed. Nowhere is this difference between the two genres more apparent than in the long poems which make up the central part of the collection as it has come down to us. This statement may seem paradoxical, at first, because the majority of these longer poems are not in any

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conventional sense lyric, but extended narrative poems whose stories are largely mythological. Nonetheless, they are intimately connected with Catullus’ more traditional lyric poems through three thematic elements, marriage, “divorce” or separation, and sex-role reversal—as well as through direct verbal reminiscences. As such these long poems themselves become lyricized, in the sense that they become allegories of the Catullan ego. Thus, David Ross observes that poems 64 and 68 “present more than ideas or generalized human emotions; the figures from myth in these poems respond to the emotions and conflicts of the poet himself” (Ross 1975:17; Putnam 1961:167–80; Wiseman 1969:20; Martin 1992:174). More interestingly, Michael Putnam has observed that 64’s evocation of Achilles in the epithalamium for Peleus and Thetis, sung by the Fates at the end of the poem, contains a reminiscence of that same image of the flower and plough that we have already seen in 11 and 62: He is like a reaper (64.353–55)…. We may indulge a parallel between Achilles the hero as reaper who, though not even physically present, demands chaste beauty as the ultimate sacrifice, and Lesbia whose valor consists in holding three hundred lovers in one embrace, the non-human plough that automatically fells flowers. Each is an extension through symbol of a coarseness the exacting poet loathed, whether it be discovered in the property-devouring politician or the versifier who overwrites. (Putnam 1974a:84) Thus 64, through this indirect recollection of Sappho, possesses a direct connection with poems 11, 51, and 62. Poem 64, however, has a much more explicit relation to the other poems in the collection. The marriage song sung by the Fates at its end clearly recalls the two epithalamia which begin this central section. At the same time, it will be recollected that these poems both contain concrete reminiscences of poems 11 and 51, the latter based on a poem by Sappho presumably sung at a wedding. Yet, whereas the epithalamia in 61 and 62 are primarily positive in tone, the Fates’ evocation of the slaughter which will be wrought by Achilles lends an ironic tone to their song of celebration (64.338–80), rendering it a subversion of the epithalamial genre, rather than an instantiation:


currite ducentes subtegmina, currite fusi. testis erit magnis virtutibus unda Scamandri, quae passim rapido diffunditur Hellesponto, cuius iter caesis angustans corporum acervis alta tepefaciet permixta flumina caede. currite ducentes subtegmina, currite, fusi. denique testis erit morti quoque reddita praeda, cum teres excelso coacervatum aggere bustum excipiet niveos perculsae virginis artus. … currite ducentes subtegmina, currite, fusi. quare agite optatos animi coniungite amores. accipiat coniunx felici foedere divam, dedatur cupido iam dudum nupta marito. Run, shuttles, run, drawing the thread. The wave of Scamander which flows far and wide to the swift Hellespont will witness his great feats. He’ll narrow its course with piles of murdered corpses and its deep waters he’ll warm, when mixed with blood. Run, shuttles, run, drawing the thread. Finally, the spoils given after he’s dead, will be a witness, when his rounded grave, piled high in a mound, will receive the snowy limbs of the virgin struck down. … Run, shuttles, run, drawing the thread. So come, join those deeply desired loves. Let the groom receive the goddess in a happy union. Let the bride be given to the desiring groom without delay. (64.356–74) This ironic reading of 64’s epithalamium is confirmed by the poem’s other long set piece, the ekphrasis on the coverlet of Peleus and Thetis’ bridal bed, in which the story of Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus is recounted (52–248). Here, when Ariadne cries out, “sicine me patriis avectam, perfide, ab aris,/ perfide, deserto liquisti in litore, Theseu?” [“Thus, Theseus, do you leave me, deceitful man,/ carried from my paternal altars, thus, liar, on the deserted shore?”] (64.132–33), we have an inverse image of the promised love both of Peleus and Thetis and of Manlius Torquatus and his bride, who are celebrated in poem 61. Hence, the acknowledgement that the wedding of Peleus and Thetis will

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produce a great but ultimately ill-omened offspring, according to the epithalamium sung by the Fates, is itself preceded by a lengthy description of an anti-wedding or abandonment (Putnam 1961:176; Newman 1967:58; Daniels 1972:97–115). In this sense, it could be said that 64’s wedding hymn, in the context of the poem as a whole, stands in the same relation to Catullus’ other essays in the epithalamial genre (61 and 62) as does poem 11 to poem 51. Like poem 11, 64 evokes and calls to mind its counterparts, but subverts their celebratory tone by presenting their inverse image: death and desertion. Nonetheless, the dark tone of 64’s ironic wedding has been anticipated by the preceding poems that make up this central section, beginning with 62, in the same fashion as our rereading of the collection’s opening sequence, in Chapter 4, showed that poem 11’s images of death and defloration had been foreshadowed by 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8, although, on a first reading, these poems too appeared lighter and more celebratory in tone. Indeed, a close examination of 62’s epithalamium of Sapphic origins reveals troubling undertones. The bride, here, must be cajoled and reminded of her parents’ authority before she tacitly consents to giving up her virginity. Even so, her surrender to the young man is envisioned, not as the moment when youth’s promise is brought to its adult fruition, but as a form of rape. The chorus of maidens cries out: Hespere, quis caelo fertur crudelior ignis? qui natam possis complexu avellere matris, complexu matris retinentem avellere natam, et iuveni ardenti castam donare puellam. quid faciunt hostes capta crudelius urbe? Evening star, what crueler light is borne through the heavens? You who are able to tear a daughter from her mother’s embrace, to tear away a daughter clinging to her mother’s embrace, and give the pure young girl to a passion-roused youth. What enemy behaves more cruelly when a city is captured? (62.20–24) At the same time, poem 62’s later image of the ravishing male as the plough deflowering the young maid, when taken in conjunction with poem 11, highlights the implicit brutality of this “blessed occasion.” Granted, the formal framework of poem 62, that is, its imagined ritual context and Greek literary antecedents, contributes to our refraining, at


first, from taking these protestations at face value. They can be read as ceremonial rather than real. And the avowedly literary nature of the exercise helps insure that we keep our emotions in check (Fordyce 1961: 254–55; Quinn 1972:260–61; 1973:275–76). But to ignore these protestations and the imagery accompanying them is to ignore the poem’s context of enunciation. For immediately following 62 is one of the collection’s most disturbing works, poem 63, the story of Attis. Carl Rubino has pointed out numerous areas of resemblance between the figure of Attis in poem 63, who castrates himself in his excessive devotion to the great mother goddess Cybele, and Catullus, in his emasculating relationship with Lesbia (Rubino 1974:156–57; 1975:294; Sienkewicz 1981:42–43; Skinner 1993: 109, 118). It is also instructive to note that after Attis’s self-castration, he is consistently referred to in the feminine gender, thus dramatizing the binary nature of Roman sexual ideology. Within this paradigm, there are but two classes of people: men and not men. Woman is always conceived of as a castrated male, l’hommemanqué. This notion casts considerable light on the phenomenon of gender inversion in the Catullan corpus. For, inasmuch as Catullus identifies himself with Attis and occupies the passive, female position with regard to Lesbia’s rapacious phallic aggression, it is only logical that in poems such as 2b, 11, 51, 68, and 70, to name just those we have explicitly discussed, Catullus plays what Roman ideology identified as the female role (Irigiray 1985:36; Kofman 1985: 82–89; Cixous 1986:64, 100; Goux 1990:90, 222–23, 231). Moreover, the comparison of the flower and the plough at the end of poem 11, which is repeated in poem 62, and has links to Sappho and her own ambiguous sexuality, takes on an even greater importance, because Catullus comes to occupy, from this perspective, at least momentarily, the position of the soon to be ravished bride in 62. Her cries become his cries, and the poem in which they are featured is followed immediately by 63’s story of total devotion, castration, isolation and abandonment. The story of Attis, in turn, presages 64’s evocation of Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus, in which her position is analogous to that of Catullus abandoned by Lesbia, and so also to Attis—now violently shorn of his home, family, and friends, as well as his manhood—in this swirling vortex of mutual identifications, all of which take place within the territory delimited by the Catullan poetic ego. Both Michael Putnam and Gerald Sandy have pointed to numerous verbal reminiscences and thematic recollections between Attis’s speech in 63, Ariadne’s lament in 64, and the marriage hymns 61 and 62 (Putnam 1961:166–71; Sandy 1971:185–95). Likewise Charles Martin argues that 63 not only

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establishes parallels between Attis and Cybele, Theseus and Ariadne, and Catullus and Lesbia, but has clear connections with 68 and 76: In poem 63, the theme of Lesbia is explored as the myth of Cybele, and it seems likely that the tableaus in poem 64 of Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne on Dia and her tearful complaint against his betrayal represent yet another treatment of the theme, casting Ariadne as Catullus and Theseus as Lesbia. The thematic cross-dressing is similar to that in poem 68 where Catullus becomes Juno and Jove Lesbia. Ariadne’s complaint ends in a prayer to Jove, a cry for revenge against Theseus, and… poem 76 ends in a prayer to the gods in which Catullus beseeches them to end the long sickness of his love affair. (1992:55; see also Skinner 1993:119) Thus, by the time we reach the wedding song of the Fates in 64, we are fully prepared for its subversion of the wedding theme (Martin 1992: 154). This slide, from genuine epithalamial celebration in 61 to its morbid inversion in 64, stands as an allegory of Catullus’ own love affair, a mythic illustration of the path traversed between poems 51 and 11. Catullus as the emasculated Attis—the flower to Lesbia’s plough—is able, if only momentarily, to occupy the position both of the brutalized bride in 62 and of Ariadne in 64, the jilted lover who, like Attis, ultimately yields to an ecstatic union with a violent and demanding deity (Putnam 1961:167, 170, 180; Quinn 1971:50; Wiseman 1985:182; Ferguson 1985:44). As Barbara Pavlock notes: The persona that Catullus has created in the corpus of his personal poems seems very close to Ariadne, whose feminine nature provided a means of comprehending the experience of loss and betrayal, the problem of callous, insensitive behavior, and the complex emotions that result in the “victim.” (1990:129) Poems 61 through 64, then, function as allegories of the conflicted Catullan consciousness, whose image has already been elaborated both in the polymetrics (1 through 60) and the epigrams (69 through 116). These long poems are given a meaningful place in the collection through their ability to reflect upon and illuminate aspects of that consciousness unavailable for more direct inspection. The topics of death, mutilation, castration, and gender inversion, as well as marriage,


are able to be developed at a length and depth which otherwise would have been difficult in the ideologically conservative world of late republican Rome. The prominence of the marriage theme in poems 61 through 64 is now clear, as is that of “divorce” or separation, and gender inversion. These themes are, in turn, more directly related to Catullus’ own situation in poems 65 and 68 (Quinn 1972:29–30, 260–61; Lyne 1980: 59; Wiseman 1985:161–65). These last two poems introduce a new variation on the theme of separation, which will be picked up again in 101 on the death of Catullus’ brother. Poem 65 is a letter of apology introducing 66, Catullus’ translation of Callimachus’ “Lock of Berenice.” In it, the poet explains that he has not been able to write because of his grief over his brother’s tragic death: Etsi me assiduo confectum cura dolore sevocat a doctis, Ortale, virginibus, nec potis est dulcis Musarum expromere fetus mens animi, tantis fluctuat ipsa malis— namque mei nuper Lethaeo gurgite fratris pallidulum manans alluit unda pedem, Troia Rhoeteo quem subter litore tellus ereptum nostris obterit ex oculis … sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Ortale, mitto haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae…. Hortalus, although worry calls me—overwrought with constant pain—away from the learned maids, and my spirit’s mind is not able to bring forth the sweet child of the Muses, it is tossed about by so many evils (for lately the dripping wave of the whirlpool of Lethe washed the pale, precious foot of my brother, whom, torn from our eyes, the Trojan earth crushes under the shore of Rhoeteum…) but nonetheless Hortalus, I, in such sadness, send to you these translated poems of the son of Battus [Callimachus]…. (65.1–16) The place of his brother’s death, the coast of Troy, is itself poetically significant. This is where Achilles laid waste to the Trojan army in 64, as well as where Laodamia’s husband will meet his fate in poem 68. Thus, these two mythological exempla take on personal resonances,

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allowing them to color Catullus’ own depiction of loss both here in 65 and in the following passage from 68 (Block 1984: 50–54): Troia (nefas!) commune sepulcrum Asiae Europaeque, Troia virum et virtutum omnium acerba cinis, quaene etiam nostro letum miserabile fratri attulit. Foul Troy, the common grave of Europe and Asia, Troy the bitter ash of all men and valor, who brought wretched death also to my brother. (68.89–92) Catullus ends poem 65 with a comparison between his sending his translation of Callimachus (poem 66) to Hortalus and a young girl spilling an apple from her dress, which had been secretly given to her by her beloved. Here, not only do we have Catullus again putting himself in the position of the virginal maid, but also the imagery of the rolling apple which deliberately recalls that used in 2B to describe the loosening of Atalanta’s girdle (Skinner 1993: 109). This imagery of purity about to be lost leads us directly into poem 66, which in a witty and allusive Hellenistic style tells the story of an act of devotion by the newly wed Queen Berenice. Thus, these two poems, which function as a set, return to the obsessive categories of the Catullan collection— marriage, abandonment, and gender inversion—while at the same time making explicit the equation between Catullus and the various mythological characters who speak in his place. Finally, 66 anticipates 68’s story of Laodamia and Protesilaus by having Berenice dedicate a lock of hair to her husband on the occasion of his having to leave for battle immediately after their marriage (Wiseman 1969:21).8 It is for this same reason, in 68, that Protesilaus must leave Laodamia for the plains of Troy never to return, just as Catullus’ brother and, one presumes, Lesbia never return. Moreover Berenice’s husband, following Ptolemaic tradition, is also her brother. The themes of separation from both a lover and a brother are thus conjoined here, linking 66 again with both 65 and 68, in which the poet also mourns the loss of his brother and, as in 65, cites his grief as the reason for not being able to fulfill a friend’s request for a poetic composition (while nonetheless writing a poem) (King 1988:387–88). Poem 68’s tone and imagery are more harsh than that found in 66. It is a poem of heartbreak over both the death of the poet’s brother and the


agonies, as well as the early glories, of his love for Lesbia. The shift in tone is accomplished through the satire of the intervening poem, number 67. This text features Catullus in a dialogue with a door in Verona, behind which lives a woman about whom there has been no small scandal. It seems that the woman had claimed to be a virgin when she came to the house, although she had previously been married. Her first husband, it turns out, was impotent and unable to penetrate the maidenhead. Nonetheless, the door tells Catullus, the young man’s father had deflowered her, so that her virginity was, in fact, feigned. The tale does not stop there, however. We find out that she also carried on adulterous affairs with a certain Postumius and a certain Cornelius. Thus, 67 returns to the themes of marriage, betrayal as a form of abandonment, and the castrated/impotent man who is no longer a man— and so, within the binary logic of Roman sexual life, a woman—giving those themes a distinctly jaundiced turn (Martin 1992:179). At the same time, a sense of aesthetic coherence is created between poem 66, which is narrated by Berenice’s lock of hair, and poem 67, through having each poem feature a loquacious inanimate object (King 1988:388). As a consequence of the shift in mood accomplished by 67’s modulation from the Hellenistic wit of poem 66 to its own dark satire, we are fully prepared for the more somber emotions which characterize 68. Poem 68 is also important because it features a return to a lyric discourse in the first person, more reminiscent of that found in the polymetrics than the ostensibly impersonal poetry of 63, 64, or 66. Catullus establishes the governing tone of the poem when he informs his friend Mallius: tempore quo primum vestis mihi tradita pura est, iucundum cum aetas florida ver ageret, multa satis lusi: non est dea nescia nostri, quae dulcem curis miscet amaritiem. Ever since the pure toga of manhood was first given to me, when the bloom of life was in its joyous spring, I have played around plenty. Not unknown to me is the goddess who mixes a sweet bitterness with cares. (68.15–18) The perspective here is reflective and nostalgic in its recollection of past joys and cares and its vivid evocation of innocence lost. We are

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firmly in the realm of the personal in this poem and on the threshold of what would become the subgenre of love elegy. Poem 68 is a long, complex, and much debated work.9 For our purposes, though, what is most important is not the poem’s internal structure, but its relation to the other long poems and to the collection as a whole. Those relations can be summarized under two headings. First, 68 is the only poem in Catullus” collection directly to associate the two greatest losses in his life, the death of his brother and his affair with Lesbia.10 Second, 68 makes an implicit comparison between the beginning of the affair and a wedding, allowing this poem to function as a sort of epithalamium for Catullus and Lesbia. The epithalamial character of the poem is made apparent in two ways. On the one hand, the language used to describe Lesbia’s entrance into the house, which Catullus’ friend Allius had loaned to them, deliberately recalls that used in poem 61 to describe the coming of the bride. On the other, Catullus explicitly compares Lesbia’s arrival to that of Laodamia, immediately following her marriage to Protesilaus: “coniugis ut quondam flagrans advenit amore/ Protesilaeam Laudamia domum/ inceptam frustra” [“so once Laodamia aflame with love for her husband/ came to the home of Protesilaus/ a home begun in vain”] (68.73–75, see also 131–34). The phrase “incepta frustra” [“begun in vain”], however, might well serve as a tag line for the Lesbia and Catullus affair itself, and the fact that Lesbia steps on, rather than over, the threshold reveals this too to be an ill-omened match (68.71–72) (Wiseman 1969:23–24; 1985:161–64; Quinn 1973:385, citing Sheridan Baker, “Lesbia’s Foot,” Classical Philology 52 (1957), 171–73; Lyne 1980:59). In 68, as in 64, we are ultimately dealing with an ironic epithalamium. Like 64, the negative impact of that epithalamium is increased by its juxtaposition with another tragic passage in the poem, this time on the death of Catullus’ brother, rather than on Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus (Putnam 1961:177, 181). Unlike, however, the purely mythological stories found in 64, which are implicitly read as allegories of Catullus himself, here the use of the myth of Laodamia and Protesilaus is explicitly deployed to illustrate the depth, pain, and complexity of Catullus’ reflections on his own experience. Thus, where 64 functions as an extended metaphor for the complex and contradictory hopes, fears, and obsessions of the Catullan lyric consciousness, in 68 the rhetorical status of the myth is that of a simile (Putnam 1961:187). Finally, in 68 we return to the theme of gender inversion. We have already made reference several times to Catullus’ comparison of his forgiving Lesbia’s infidelities to Juno’s doing so for Jupiter (68.138–


40), but the Laodamia and Protesilaus episode offers another, more complex example of this same phenomenon. For while this extended simile begins and ends by explicitly comparing Lesbia to Laodamia, in fact the latter’s plight, as W.R.Johnson has noted, far more resembles that of Catullus than his beloved’s. Thus, it is Catullus, not Lesbia, who is abandoned. “It is Catullus, not Lesbia, who resembles Laodamia in her passion and her whole-heartedness, her fides, in the futile, ruinous purity of her love: Catullus, once more the victim, once more the psyche in despair” (Johnson 1982:161; see also Skinner 1993:109). Yet again, we see the same set of recurring, obsessive themes we have throughout this central section: marriage, abandonment, and gender inversion. Each time, they receive a new dialogical inflection.11 Each time, they reveal new layers of the Catullan poetic psyche, and call forth new readings of the long poems and the collection as a whole. With each new enunciation, they engender a multitemporal process of responsive understanding which is properly infinite. In some ways, this central portion of the Catullan collection might be said to resemble the central mythic sections of the Greek lyric poems examined in Chapter 5. Like them, this group of poems provides illustrative exempla and added resonance to key moments of individual experience. Unlike the mythic sections of Pindar’s and Sappho’s odes, however, the longer poems are not fundamentally necessary for Catullus’ collection to retain either its meaning or its intelligibility for its reading public. For, the basic elements of the narrative of the affair, in poems such as 11, 51, 107, and 109, exist independently of this central section, and have been read separately from it in the past. Thus Pindar’s and Sappho’s poems might well seem pointless exercises in rhetoric without their mythic cores, which serve the function of raising those merely contingent elements of individual experience, recounted in their initial and final stanzas, to the realm of universal significance, by invoking the shared communal paradigms of the oral, poetic tradition. In the poetry of Catullus, however, it is precisely the private, personal elements in his collection which have been most easily appreciated and the complex, mythological narratives whose significance has been most readily lost. In fact, it was once common practice to argue that there were two Catulluses—a spontaneous and primitive child of nature who burst forth in song whenever his emotions overtook him and a degraded, artificial pedant who created the long narrative poems, which were considered little more than copies of lost Hellenistic originals.12 The long poems have only come to be appreciated as the important works they are, now

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that the many parallels between them and the shorter poems have been finally perceived. Moreover, the subtlety and complexity of this central section’s multiform relation to the poems which surround it would have been impossible to sustain in an oral context. In no way do the threads of significance tying Catullus’ text together pass directly from the first of the polymetrics, through the long poems in the center, to the last of the epigrams. Rather the intricate web of allusion, cross referencing, and implied narrative, which keeps the reader of the Catullan collection ever charting new paths of interpretive meaning, is defiantly nonlinear, and ultimately resists all spatial metaphors in its temporal complexity. Thus poem 51 recalls both 62, the Sapphic epithalamium, and 11, the only other poem in Sapphics in the collection, while poem 11 not only contains a reference to 62’s image of the flower and the plough, it is also deeply implicated in the collection’s opening sequence. Moreover, 11’s own brutal imagery, and its specific variation on the theme of gender inversion, recalls poems 63 and 68, while its vision of the end of the affair has clear affinities with poems such as 75 and 76. These poems, in turn, are part of a sequence beginning with 70 and 72, and so necessarily bring with them those latter poems’ relations to 69, 71, 107, 108, and 109, as outlined in Chapter 4. Indeed, any given poem or passage within the collection is but one point in a complex and multitemporal dialogical unity which necessarily includes all the other poems and passages as both integrational and distributional moments in the construction of the Catullan lyric psyche. Nothing comparable exists in the work of Sappho, Pindar, or any of the other Greek lyrists, nor given the temporal constraints of oral performance could it . In addition, unlike the mythic sections of Pindar’s and Sappho’s odes, none of the relations tying the long poems to the shorter polymetrics and epigrams in Catullus are dependent on their occupying the center of the collection. Even if one were to change the position of the long poems, moving them to the front or back of the corpus, the multiple concrete relations tying them to the rest of the collection would still exist. All that would be lost is a certain sense of aesthetic balance. Indeed, although we analyzed the long poems in the order in which they appear, and most of the scholars we have cited agree there is good reason to do so, nevertheless, if one were to rearrange the order of these poems, the majority of the relations which we identified between them would still exist. The main loss would be in the elegance of transition from one poem to the next. Nonetheless, the most important distinction between Catullus’ use of mythology and that of his archaic Greek predecessors is that while in


Sappho and Pindar these narratives constitute a body of communal lore which gives form and meaning to individual experience, precisely the opposite occurs in Catullus. It is not because he is another Ariadne that his experience has meaning for us. Rather, Ariadne’s lament evokes our interest precisely because it gives vent to emotions and sensibilities already familiar to us from the other, more obviously personal elements in the collection. It is the projection of the highly interiorized and internally articulated Catullan ego that provides the chief interpretive paradigm giving form and meaning to the whole of the collection, including the narrative poems of the central section. The long, mythological poems merely provide further layers of depth and symbolic complexity to what is already a multi-faceted and deeply interiorized dialogical unity. Finally, neither the story of Attis, nor that of Peleus and Thetis, provided active religious and moral paradigms for the sophisticated literary population of first century Rome, whereas the mythological stories invoked by Sappho and Pindar were an active part of their audience’s mental and spiritual lives. For Catullus, as for the Greeks of Alexandria, these tales were literary devices, the resources at hand of an urbane, sophisticated, and highly literate society (Newman and Newman 1984:24; Green 1990:176). As Callimachus writes in one of his epigrams:

Charidas, what of the things below? Ch. Vast darkness.—And the ways out? Ch. A lie.—And Pluto? Ch. A story.—We are destroyed. (31.3–4, in Page 1975) Writing and the birth of the poetic collection were not, however, sufficient causes for the birth of a truly lyric subjectivity. The nature of the historical circumstances at Rome that allowed this genre to be born and how Catullus’ innovations prepared the way for the elegists, Horace, and what we today recognize as lyric poetry will be examined in Chapter 7.

7 ROME, ALEXANDRIA, AND THE POLITICS OF LYRIC

The poetry book seems to be a Hellenistic phenomenon. Before that time (and even to some extent afterward) literature arose out of a specific social context, either ritual, agonistic, or sympotic, and was intended for performance within that social setting rather than for individual reading. (Santirocco 1986:6) [T]he Hellenistic age failed to secure the link between poetry and the ruling classes of society that brought about the emergence, from Catullus on to Horace, of the poet as an independent worthwhile personality. In this sense the Alexandrian age of Roman poetry did not come until Nero. (Quinn 1971:26) How is it that the Catullan lyric collection and the lyric/subjective space it connotes were first produced? What was the ideological and historical context which permitted their emergence? What were the social and technical conditions that made this new art form possible? Though such broad questions cannot be exhaustively answered, nonetheless it can now be stated with confidence that one of the most important social and technical innovations allowing the creation of this new genre was the spread of the culture of writing. By the middle of the first century before the common era, literacy had become more widespread than ever before, and an organized publishing industry had begun to emerge (Graff 1987:28). An indication of the gap separating this period from archaic and classical Greece can be seen in the fact that Catullus never mentions oral performance in his poetry, though he most likely did read his poems on occasion to his friends. Catullus speaks of poetry only in terms of written works, either


individual poems on wax tablets, on which they were first composed and distributed to friends and colleagues, or collected groups of poems on scrolls, in which form they were found on the bookseller’s shelves (Wiseman 1982:38–39; Gold 1987:50). The same can be said of Horace (Edmunds 1992:45–46). In one sense, then, the spread of writing, as the previous chapters have shown, can be said to have made the lyric genre possible. The weaving together of separate poems into a single multilayered text, capable of projecting complex and overdetermined images of poetic subjectivity, could not have occurred without it. Nonetheless, both writing and planned poetic collections did exist before Catullus. In particular, these can be found in Alexandria where the court of the Ptolemies had established a library, and where scholars and poets throughout the Greek world came to edit, catalogue, and produce scholarly editions of the great works of the past, as well as create their own distinctive literature. This literature, however, while far removed from the oral performative poetry of its archaic predecessors, was equally removed from the kind of intensely personal lyricism of Catullus and the later, more stylized Latin love elegists. Thus before continuing our examination of the Latin lyric collection and the conditions under which it arose, it will be necessary to take a brief look at the momentous historical changes separating the world of Sappho and Pindar from that of Catullus. As noted in Chapter 2, the city state or polis was the characteristic political, religious, and social entity of classical and archaic Greece. Whether organized along democratic, oligarchical, or tyrannical lines, the polis was characterized by a high degree of cultural cohesiveness, and individual citizens founded their material and spiritual identities on their relation to it (Peters 1970:186). It is helpful in this context to remember that our word idiot, derived from the same root as idiosyncratic, referred originally to that which was private as opposed to public, and therefore strange, unusual, or peculiar. Citizens were considered to have fulfilled their duty and achieved their potential only to the extent that they became involved in public affairs (Green 1990:56). In this period, the primary mode of literary production and consumption was through public oral performance, and consequently, as Eduard Fraenkel has noted, the early poetic genres “were primarily an address to the people, arising out of a special occasion and serving a practical purpose” (Fraenkel 1957:38). The notion of poetry as something essentially personal and private would have seemed strange and perverse.


All this was to change, however, in the latter half of the fourth century. Alexander the Great’s consolidation of his holdings in Greece and his subsequent conquest of Egypt and Asia forever altered the basic structure of Greek political and cultural life. Upon his untimely death in 323 BCE, this vast empire was split up into large bureaucratic kingdoms governed by his former generals and their descendants. The main center of literary activity shifted from Athens to Alexandria.1 It was here, in this artificial world of the cosmopolitan and bureaucratic state, that for the first time in Western history poets produced self-conscious collections of poems and arranged them according to broad architectural and aesthetic principles. A cult of technical skill and antiquarian knowledge grew up, as scholars for the first time had access to a large body of texts from different historical periods and ethno-geographical regions, and as poetry itself became ever more alienated from the communal and social life of the city (Johnson 1982:77; Green 1990:52–53). Commager summarizes the impact of these changes as follows: To the poet of the fifth-century, the city-state or polis offered an imaginative as well as physical center. His poetry, like the sculpture on the Parthenon, made explicit its glory. The Alexandrians, living by and large in an adopted city, felt no such allegiance. The Muses had emigrated from Helicon to a new home in the… Museum, which now became the quickening source upon which poets drew. All were official members, maintaining themselves by the patronage of the Ptolemies…. Writers cultivated a learned coterie, for under a dictatorship their work was necessarily divorced from public affairs. (Commager 1967:24–25; see also Green 1990:85) The fundamentally public and communal character of Greek poetry was forever changed. Writers began to view literary works as a collection of texts to be preserved and manipulated for an audience of private readers (Havelock 1982:10; Green 1990:202). As Bulloch notes: the position of the writer had changed fundamentally by the third century: poetry in particular was no longer written… to serve the needs of religious festivals and competitions or ceremonial occasions, and its audience no longer looked to it necessarily for the discussion of social issues and instruction. …Poetry now


became for the first time properly Literature for selective private circulation…. (Bulloch 1985:543) The scope of civic life was dramatically diminished for large portions of the Greek-speaking world, particularly Egypt. At the same time, the interest expressed in the internal dynamics of private life increased— presumably as a form of psychic compensation (Peters 1970:185–87; Anderson 1974:51). The isomorphic structures that had characterized individuals’ self and social relations in classical Greece gave way to a new sense of disjunction between public and private life. And, while these two spheres were not seen as wholly independent of one another, they were no longer thought of as homologous, in the way Plato had described them in the Republic (Foucault 1986b:71–78, 95). Much of Hellenistic literature, then, is, not surprisingly, introspective and subjective to a degree previously unknown in the West, as the conjunction of writing and an alienating social environment combined to create a sense of distance from the self, unfamiliar to earlier periods (Havelock 1982:25). This is, for example, the moment of the first great flowering of pastoral poetry, a highly sophisticated genre written by self-consciously urban poets. Pastoral pretends to an extreme naiveté, as it abstracts human beings from their social and historical environments in order to focus upon their purely personal sentiments in a hypothetically pristine setting. Shepherds and Cyclopes in love become topics of serious poetic interest, as do singing contests between goatherds. Thus Adam Parry notes: Pastoral poetry might be described as a cover in an age of irony. It arose in Greece at a time when writers felt it impossible to deal with strong emotion directly, and when literary works with reference to immediate experience were for that reason slight. (Parry 1959:14; see also Green 1990:233) This same period also produces poems such as Callimachus’ Aetia, in which abstruse historical and mythological learning, made possible by the library’s collection, combines with a focus on individual characters’ psychological reactions in the course of truncated retellings of traditional myths. Within this environment of psychological exploration, however, we find next to no lyric, and indeed very little first person poetry at all, aside from highly formalized epigrams (Quinn 1971:50; Ross 1975:17). For


while within the new cultural realities of the Alexandrian world there was nothing but private life for most citizens, that private life had no real communal or social significance. The poets themselves, as citizens, had no substantive claim to write or speak, no designated space within the communal discourse (Green 1990:53). Indeed, the communal was held actively in contempt, as writers tried to divorce themselves from the swirling urban masses of the new Hellenistic megalopolises, so that Callimachus in his second epigram writes: [“I hate everything connected with the people”] (Page 1975).2 Thus, while private feelings and emotions had become more important than ever before in Greek literature, the locus of those feelings was constantly displaced onto either a third person narrative or a first person voice so clearly and thoroughly stylized that its fictive roots were immediately evident (Lyne 1980:61; Veyne 1988: 20, 22). It was also in Alexandria, as noted above, that we find the first evidence of poets systematically writing poems to be read in the context of a collection. Elaborate systems of arrangement have been found in Callimachus’ Iambi and Aetia, and perhaps also in Theocritus’ Coan pastorals (Dawson 1950:140–49; Van Sickle 1980:14; Santirocco 1986: 6–9). In these collections, individual poems no longer relate just to the background of accepted tradition or to the immediacy of public ritual, but also directly to one another as an articulated ensemble. It was this tradition of Greek poetry that the Roman poets of the first century BCE inherited most directly. Catullus, thus, imitates and alludes to Callimachus on several occasions in his collection, even translating his “Lock of Berenice.” Propertius goes so far as to claim to be the Roman Callimachus (Catullus 7.6, 66,116.2; Propertius 4.1.64; Wiseman 1969: 12; 1985: 183–85). Similar phenomena can also be found in the work of Horace, Tibullus, Vergil, and Ovid (Clausen 1964:181–96). The Romans were by and large the direct descendants of the Alexandrian tradition. The poetry of Sappho and Pindar was, in fact, as far away in time for them as that of Chaucer is for us. Yet the Latin society which inherited the Hellenistic tradition of the poetry book was substantially different from Alexandrian Egypt. Rome in the mid-first century was still a republic, possessing a highly codi fied class structure and a strong public ideology firmly rooted in its past as a city-state, not dissimilar to the Greek polis, but straining under the burden of having become the seat of empire. To resume, then, the example of Alexandria shows that the invention and dissemination of writing was a necessary but not sufficient cause for the birth of the lyric collection. A certain social and cultural


environment was also required which would permit the peculiarly egocentered dialogical situation that defines lyric to come into being. Genres, as noted in Chapter 3, are not universal categories of literary production, tying all peoples and cultures together, but rather distinct historical phenomena, demanding the presence of particular sets of both social relations and technical means of literary production in order, first, to come into existence and, then, to continue as viable types of discourse (Volosinov 1973: 116; Eagleton 1976:56; Cohen 1986a: 210).3 They require, in short, a particular literary mode of production (Eagleton 1976:47; Frow 1986:107). These conditions were met in first century Rome. More specifically, the lyric genre requires a society with a group of educated people who possess sufficient standing in the community to lay claim to a voice in its collective discourse but who do not, at the same time, occupy so high a rank that their interests are perceived as being identical to those of the state. The existence of such a group implies the presence of a complex and highly evolved society, within which one could find a series of well defined social strata, whose interarticulation would be such as to allow this sort of class fraction to arise and be capable of commanding attention.4 Moreover, in order for these conditions to be such as would permit the emergence of the lyric genre, this attention must be focused on the poets as individuals and artists, not as representatives of their particular group, or of the society’s ruling class. The lyric voice is thus always an ambiguous voice, straddling the line between public importance and private reflection. In the late republic, as well as in the early years of principate, the group most nearly occupying the social position demanded by lyric was the equestrian order. The equestrians, or knights as they are sometimes called, stood in the second rank of Roman society immediately behind the senators. The chief requirements for admittance to the order were free birth and the possession of capital worth 400,000 sesterces, enough to allow a man to live off his interest and rents without actually having to work (White 1978: 88–89). Hence, the equestrians as a group were both financially and personally independent; that is to say, they were indebted to no authority outside themselves for their subsistence, and were possessed of that “leisure” or otium which the pursuit of a career in the artes liberales required. In addition, the equestrians held substantial political influence, though they were not themselves the holders of high public office (Nicolet 1966:708–10, 727; de Sainte Croix 1989:115, 198–201). It was from this order that all the important


poets of the late republican and early Augustan periods were drawn (Taylor 1925:161–70; 1968:469–86; Nicolet 1966:441–56; White 1978: 88; Wiseman 1985:100; Santirocco 1986:153). Indeed, all the lyric poets of Rome, as well as the vast majority of other acknowledged masters of the genre, have occupied similar positions within their own societies’ class structures. And while some may have individually fallen on hard times or risen from initially modest circumstances, they were almost all drawn from or recruited into a class fraction which was neither that of the ruling elite, nor that of the manual laborer, peasant, or craftsman, but representative of an economically autonomous, highly educated group between those two extremes. Such a social description fits well what is known of Catullus’ background. He appears to have been the son of a wealthy, provincial family which possessed mercantile interests in Spain and a taxfarming concession in Asia Minor (Wiseman 1985:100–5). Nor was his position untypical of that held by the other major poets of this period. As Kenneth Quinn writes: The phenomenon [was] perhaps primarily a social one. From this point onwards in Roman literature, until at any rate the end of the Augustan age, poets ceased to be the craftsmen-protégés of sophisticated noblemen…. Being independent, poets could now expect the community to be interested in them and their doings as people. If the community was not interested, they were in a position not to care and to go on writing all the same. [Poets] were not any more anonymous mouthpieces of the community, but individuals determined to set, not simply to accept, the standards of the community; or, if they could not, to defy the community. (Quinn 1971:24–26)5 This situation was not unique to the poets of first century Rome, however. In fact, an analogous pattern can be seen time and again. Whether the poets in question are from late republican Rome, the Renaissance, or the Romantic and Modern periods, they are all people with sufficient standing in the community to be able to claim a right to speak, but not so identified with the ruling elite as to appear to speak for the state itself.6 On an aesthetic and ideological level, this class aspect of the lyric genre might be said to exercise a limiting influence on its vision, causing it to avoid direct and sustained political engagement and to take small notice of the masses of people whose daily labor makes it and


other genres possible. Such an analysis, while oversimplified, is not entirely false. Even so, this same sociological foundation of the genre can also be said to have produced no small part of its continuing appeal. For the utopian investment of lyric always entails a commitment to a vision of a libidinal subject who needs no justification, of a free standing individual who is neither ground down by constant labor nor stands as the concrete embodiment of the social apparatus organizing and controlling that labor. As such, lyric is always somewhat subversive. It separates the individual from his or her communal ties and responsibilities, and examines his or her most intimate thoughts and feelings, in the process lifting a corner of that veil of socially useful repression which allows us to interact with one another in a reasonably civilized manner (Freud 1961:23–27, 42, 55; Marcuse 1966:16, 48, 57, 85; Jameson 1988: 105). Indeed, as Julia Kristeva writes, poetic language, in its function of seeking to provide ideal satisfactions to those real desires which daily life cannot accommodate, “is necessarily the place of inscription of the pleasure elements left unsatisfied by the relations of production and reproduction [in a society], or by the ideologies which claim to represent them.” As a result, one of the functions of the aesthetic is to serve as a marginal or even subversive element which, depending on historical circumstances, can act as a calming release valve and/or a force for change (Kristeva 1975:19). This subversive aspect of the poetic, in turn, becomes all the more destabilizing when the unsatisfied “pleasure elements” are inscribed within the space defined by the unique temporality of the individual —and so to some degree alienated— written ego, as opposed to that of the more collective subject of orality. This positive, utopian investment in the vision of a “free standing individual” is, of course, only one side of lyric, since the genre is also always inextricably tied to precisely those social processes and productive relations from which it would appear to be free (Benjamin 1969:256; Jameson 1981:286–89). For lyric, like all ideological structures, is necessarily dependent upon the economic system that allows the society in which it arises to survive, whether that society is founded on slave labor, as in Rome, or on the late feudalism and mercantile capitalism of the Renaissance.7 Nonetheless, when conditions are such that the lyric voice can arise, the power of this utopian vision of unfettered subjectivity accounts for no small part of the genre’s resilience, as well as its underlying tensions with the ideological apparatuses of the society in which it is born.


The equestrians of late republican Rome, from whom the major poets of the period were drawn, were then not the governing elite, that was the senatorial order, but the judicial, administrative, and large-scale mercantile class, who profited greatly from the growth of the Roman empire.8 Their position granted them a substantial place within the Roman hierarchy; they were guaranteed certain seats at the theater and gladiatorial bouts and were allowed to wear a thin purple stripe on their togas, signifying the inviolability of their persons (Syme 1960:13–15; Brunt 1971:69–73; Scullard 1976: 9–10). Not surprisingly, the equestrians by and large accepted the governing, senatorial ideology encoded in such highly charged words as foedus (“compact”), amicitia (“friendship”), fides (“good faith”) and negotium (“busyness,” literally “non-idleness”) (Nicolet 1966:700, 721– 22). These terms, in their traditional sense, referred primarily to political and social relations between the members of the families constituting the top two layers of Roman society, and not to personal sentiment. For Rome at this period, like the Greek polis, was largely a public society in which words implying value judgements, such as “honor” or “goodness,” had principally political or class denotations (Nicolet 1966:721; Foucault 1986b:42).9Thus, ostensibly ethical terms, like boni or optimates (“the good men” or “the best men”), referred, not to individuals’ characters, but to membership in either the equestrian or the senatorial orders. As Skinner observes: In the competitive Roman status system, acquiring wealth— preferably if not exclusively, by socially approved means— was the precondition for elite mobility. Rank and its concomitant privileges were explicitly defined by the amount of one’s fortune. Financial resources also served as a stable foundation of moral authority: like the newly rich freedman, the financially strapped gentleman was thought to violate both class protocols and norms of right conduct. (Skinner 1989:12; see also Jameson 1988:87) In a similar fashion, a term like amicitia (“friendship”) pointed either to a political alliance between two or more members of the ruling elite, with no necessary connotation of mutual affection, or to the relation of reciprocal obligation which bound a powerful patron to his client. Yet, while in ruling circles these words had primarily a political content, in the poetry of Catullus and his successors, the Love Elegists, they became metaphors of interiority. Amicitia in Catullus ceases to be a


word denoting a political alliance between two ruling families, or a relation of mutual obligation between patron and client. Instead it becomes a metaphor for the reciprocal relationship he hoped for between himself and Lesbia. The reason Catullus uses terms drawn from political life is not difficult to find. Up to the middle of the first century, Latin possessed no other means of describing interpersonal relationships. The world of politics, as the privileged arena for selfvalidation among the Roman elite, was also the only realm that had a precise descriptive vocabulary. There was as yet in Rome no discourse pertaining specifically to the private subject (Syme 1960:12–13; Ross 1969:81–88; 1975:10–14; Lyne 1980:24–25; Saller 1982:11–15; Veyne 1987:95). The purely personal existed only as a rewriting of the social. Consequently, in traditional Roman morality, a strong amorous attachment, because it implied a withdrawal from communal life, was generally considered a disease, and not a fit topic for serious thought or discussion (Lilja 1965:100–9; Veyne 1988:56). More specifically, love was considered an affliction because it distracted men from the important negotium (“business”) of power and politics and caused them to waste their lives in an otium (“idleness”), which was thought destructive to the body politic. A marriage or any other strong commitment to a woman, for purposes other than cementing a political alliance or providing children for the state, was considered improper and perverse (Lilja 1965:43–44; Wilkinson 1974:116–18; Pomeroy 1976:116; Shelton 1988:37–44; Miller 1989:47–79). For, as Roman ideology implicitly understood, the world of intense, erotic involvement is one which excludes the public and political, whereas that of marriage and family reaffirms the primacy of the social in the very heart of the personal (Freud 1961:55). Thus, Catullus, in order to produce his poetry, had not only to write and arrange the poems in his collection, but also to perform a feat of linguistic and ideological engineering unprecedented in the history of Western poetry (Nisbet 1991:136). He had, through and for his poetry, to create a radically new subjective and lyric space within a pre-existing ideological environment fundamentally hostile to his intent. At the same time, though, it was a feat that his unique social and historical position made possible. The creation of this sort of lyric discourse would have been unimaginable in the oral world of his Greek predecessors. The social and technical conditions did not exist for such a genre to be intelligible. Of course, Catullus did not undertake this task singlehandedly. He appears to have been a member of a group of poets variously referred to


as the neoterics, the poetae novi, or the new poets, many of whose names appear in the Catullan collection (Valerius Cato, Calvus, Cinna the poet, Furius Bibaculus, Cornificius). Whether these individuals were part of a formal school of poetry or merely a group of young men of letters who knew one another and shared similar interests has been the topic of much inconclusive debate. What seems apparent is that they shared a general adherence to Alexandrian principles of brevity, technical polish, and wit (see for example poems 14, 22, 35, and 36), as well as an intense curiosity directed toward what might be termed psychological “limit experiences.”10 In this light, Catullus 63, on the self-castration of Attis, comes to mind, as does Cinna’s Zmyrna, discussed in Catullus 95, on the incestuous passion of Smyrna for her father which led to the birth of Adonis (Clausen 1964:188–91; 1983:4– 6; Newman 1967: 53; Quinn 1971:44–49; 1972:214–16). The fact is, however, that almost none of these other poets’ work survives. Their fragments have been collected and preserved by Quinn in a mere three pages (1971:110–13). Whether any of them wrote collections comparable to Catullus’, we shall probably never know. Thus, Catullus stands before us as the first true lyric poet whether or not he was the genre’s actual empirical inventor. The question of the authorial origin of the genre is, for all that, of secondary importance compared with that of the historical conditions which made lyric. Whether alone or in tandem with others, the author of the Carmina Catulli was engaged not only in a feat of literary engineering, but also in intense ideological struggle. The final result of this complex and overdetermined process of historical change and cultural combat, which gave birth to the Catullan collection and so to lyric consciousness itself, was the creation of a poetic space filled with an ambivalence and sense of contradiction indicative of the opposed forces which led to its birth. A good example of this tension can be found in poem 76. As the poem begins, the reader finds Catullus praying for justice from the gods for the wrongs he has suffered at the hands of Lesbia. Catullus begins his prayer by defending the integrity of his own virtue and by claiming to have never betrayed any foedus (“compact”): Siqua recordanti benefacta priora voluptas est homini, cum se cogitat esse pium, nec sanctam violasse fidem, nec foedere nullo diuum ad fallendos numine abusum homines,


multa parata manent in longa aetate, Catulle, ex hoc ingrato gaudia amore tibi. (76.1–6) If there is any pleasure reserved for a man recalling past kindnesses he has performed, and who considers himself to have fulfilled his moral obligations and neither to have violated any sacred trust, nor in any compact to have sworn by the gods for the purpose of deceiving other men, then great joys await you in the years to come, Catullus, for this love which has brought no return. The word foedus or “pact” is one of those mentioned above and traditionally bore a heavy ideological charge in Roman politics. In fact, a foedus grounded in sancta fides [“sacred trust”] was the foundation for an amicitia, or “political alliance.” In the present context, though, foedus is not used by Catullus to refer primarily to a political alliance, but rather to serve as a metaphor for his relationship with Lesbia (compare 109.6). This act of poetic misappropriation, however, while in part successful, is unable to suppress fully the usual meaning of the term. For Catullus’ relationship with Lesbia, inasmuch as it is acknowledged in poem 68 to have been adulterous, was itself founded on an original betrayal of a public foedus (this time in the sense of a “marriage contract”), and was hence illegitimate (see 64.373). Thus, by means of a deferred return of the repressed, which liberates the commonly understood meaning of this highly charged ideological term—a return made possible by rereading 76 in light of the collection as a whole—the public meaning of foedus reemerges and betrays Catullus’ claim to ethical purity (Quinn 1973:407). More importantly, it is only through the recognition of the determining presence of these highly charged ideological words’ primary social significance—hidden in the text’s “political unconscious”— that the reader becomes aware of how the traditional terms of Roman ideology, in the course of the social upheavals played out in the final years of the republic, were made vulnerable to certain determined appropriations; and how the semiotic slippages engendered by these same appropriations both undermined and created the space necessary for the birth of lyric consciousness. The vocabulary of intimate commitment that Catullus developed was, then, constantly threatened by the very public realm it attempted to exclude. The ego his poetry projects was able to exist only in a constant and uneasy tension with that hegemony of public values to which it was


opposed. It was constantly in danger of dissolving back into the highly charged political world from which it had come. As Carl Rubino writes: Catullus…realizes that a rejection of the Roman cultural system must engender a new discourse which exists apart from that system if that rejection is to be successful. But this perception is accompanied by the perception that the erotic world which he has created is itself trapped within the very system it pretends to reject. The necessary presence of [Lesbia’s] husband betrayed is in this sense the aperture through which the Roman cultural system reenters the elegiac universe. (Rubino 1975:293; see also 291) Despite this tension within the very language he was forced to employ, Catullus, as a member of the equestrian class, was well positioned to create a new space in which a truly lyric consciousness could emerge. Educated and prosperous, the equestrians occupied a position outside the ruling class that allowed them to maintain a certain distance from public affairs and the dominant ideology of public life. This distance, in fact, counted as one of their jealously guarded prerogatives (Cicero, Pro Cluentio 56.153). There is evidence, in fact, of a number of individuals refusing promotion to senatorial rank on the grounds that they did not want to disturb their private quies [“peace and quiet”], or otium [“idleness,” “disengagement from political affairs”]. Three of the most famous were Cicero’s friend, Atticus, Augustus’ confidant and dispenser of imperial patronage, Maecenas (Gold 1982:101–8), and the poet Ovid. Catullus, however, was to redefine the traditional otium of the equestrians in a radical, new way. For the orthodox view of equestrian otium did not entail a complete withdrawal from public life, let alone an exclusive devotion to love and poetry, but rather a refusal to seek public office, a decision to pursue a calmer life in the judiciary, tax-farming, or large-scale mercantile exchange. As Nicolet explains: The otium of the knights is defined not strictly as retirement, but as an absence of public honors, of those things which one seeks by means of a vote of the people…. It is a certain kind of activity in the city: the judiciary and publica…. Tranquilitas equestris is the political motto of a group of men linked by their professions, [and] anxious to erect a barrier between them and the group of political officeholders…the government of the senators. (Nicolet 1966:704)11


Paradoxically the traditional otium equestre was defined in such a fashion as to allow one to continue to pursue his private negotia, that is to say, his personal legal, business, and financial interests. It was not otium in an absolute sense, but a mere disengagement from direct participation in electoral politics. In Catullus’ hands, however, otium becomes something more intimate. Catullus’ revolutionary contribution to the development of Roman poetry was not simply a new frankness, but a rejection of all public commitment (Rankin 1975:74). Catullus’ verse represents a subversive move that sought to rewrite the traditional understanding of what both poetry and otium were meant to be (Hubbard 1973:4; Lyne 1991:216). Indeed, before Catullus’ time, writing poetry was largely considered an occupation unworthy of a Roman knight. Aristocrats might try their hand at turning the occasional Alexandrian epigram into acceptable Latin verse, but the pursuit of poetry as a full-time career was left to lower class artisans and freed slaves who attached themselves to the household of a patron and produced made-to-order verse to suit the political needs of their benefactors (Ross 1975:5).12 The proper place for a member of the aristocracy was in the forum or attending to his estates (Bayet 1956:18–19; Shelton 1988:129–30, 151–54; Lyne 1991: 217). At the end of the second century, this situation began to change, however, with the emergence of a new group of socially prominent and financially independent poets, for whom literature was something more than an occasional leisure time diversion. One such poet was Lucilius. His satires, all written in the first person, record his views on a variety of subjects, from the correct spelling of the Latin language to the major political figures of the day. A man of great personal wealth and an equestrian, he could freely express his opinions without fear of recriminations (see Horace, Satires 1.4.1–13). Lucilius did not, of course, write the same kind of poetry as Catullus. A lyric text, such as Catullus’, demands that its readers constantly try and reconcile the temporal movement of their own consciousnesses as readers and rereaders with that of the conscious and unconscious processes of the poet. It compels them to make ever subtler and deeper associative connections between the various poems, so that the image of the poet’s essential subjectivity appears always to flicker on the edge of their interpretive horizon. Everything the poet touches seems to turn into a metaphor of interiority (Rankin 1975:71)—a metaphor which nonetheless constantly reasserts the very materiality of the signifying substance (and hence its external and socially determined nature), as the


process of re-reading the collection produces ever new levels of interpretation, new images of lyric subjectivity. This was not the case, however, with Lucilius. Nonetheless, the emergence of such a figure illustrates that a fundamental change in the social position of poetry at Rome had taken place (Quinn 1971:75; Wiseman 1985:126, 133; Gold 1987: 54). It was becoming respectable. As the expansion of the empire poured ever greater wealth into the coffers of the upper classes in general, and the equestrians in particular, they became progressively relieved of the necessity to devote themselves to the pursuit of their private and familial negotia, and could instead turn their attention to otium itself. As David Ross observes: Roman society was changing rapidly, and it is partly due to social change that an entirely different sort of poet emerged toward the middle of the first century. Catullus was a fulltime poet of independent means: it is highly unlikely that even a few decades earlier a man of good social standing and ambition would have come to Rome with any intention other than to enter upon the legal and military ladder to political prominence; yet Catullus as far as we know, never argued a case in a court of law, never ran for office, and only half-heartedly joined the retinue of a provincial governor. (Ross 1975:5; see also Maltby 1980:4) Catullus and his contemporaries, then, exploited their social and financial independence to a degree unknown to their predecessors. Their work, consequently, is largely unconcerned with political or social affairs per se, but is obsessed instead with the twin poles of love and poetry, as both are made concrete in lyric (Segal 1970:27; Lyne 1980:67–68). This repudiation of governmental and legal affairs, as well as of the pursuit of public office, is more radical than it might seem, for it was a subversion of the very ideological foundation of traditional Roman life. Self-validation, according to these poets, was no longer to be sought exclusively through public accomplishment in the political or financial worlds. It could also be sought through a new inwardness stressing personal commitment and artistic elegance, as expressed in words such as venustus (“refined”), lepidus (“elegant”), and doctus (“learned”). This set of terms—stressing style over substance and the pursuit of individual gratification over the good of the state, the family, and one’s


class—is in direct contrast to the externally oriented traditional political connotations of the first set of words we examined: foedus, fieds,negotia, and amicitia (compare Cicero, De Officiis 1.54–57). This second set of inward and aesthetic terms is in addition conterminous with the operative principles of Alexandrian poetry, yet the poetry of Callimachus was impersonal and innocuous, both socially and politically. In the Egypt of the Ptolemies, it could be nothing else. In Catullus’ poetry, these terms represent a rejection of public life by a member of one of society’s most prestigious and influential social classes. As Jean Bayet observes, “The very words that he uses to refer to his poetry reveal …a self-consciousness much richer than what is found among the Greeks: the virtues of opposition and struggle” (1956: 19–20).13 This is not to say that Catullus completely ignored the political realities of his time. There are, for instance, a number of invective poems in the collection about the leading personalities of the day, but these poems are almost entirely devoid of any true program matic political content, instead expressing a personal animus. One such example is poem 94, which lampoons one of Julius Caesar’s henchmen, Mamurra, under a thinly veiled, obscene pseudonym: “Mentula moechatur. Moechatur mentula? Certe./ Hoc est quod dicunt: ipsa olera olla legit” [“Prick’s an adulterer. The adulterer’s a Prick? Sure. You know what they say: you are what you eat”] (Quinn 1973:430).14 Clearly, Catullus did not care for the man, but why is never explained. The poem could have just as easily been written about a rival poet as a politician. This attitude of indifference to political life was to be converted into one of open hostility by Catullus’ successors, the elegists of the Augustan period. Indeed, the elegists launch a systematic assault against the traditional notion that the individual should sacrifice all to the good of the republic, and provide children to fight in the wars of the Sullas, the Caesars, and the Pompeys of the years to come. Thus, Propertius in 2.7 says: unde mihi Parthis natos praebere triumphis? nullus de nostro sanguine miles erit. … tu mihi sola places: placeam tibi, Cynthia, solus: hic erit et patrio nomine pluris amor. Why should I offer my sons to swell Parthian triumphs? No one of my blood will be a soldier…. You alone please me: may I


alone please you, Cynthia: and this will be worth more to me than the name of father. (2.7.13–14, 19–20)15 The elegists instead sacrifice themselves to their mistresses, the emblems of their personal and poetic satisfaction (Lilja 1965:65, 89–90; Quinn 1971:57; Sullivan 1972:19; Lyne 1980:61–69; Veyne 1988:104–5). The attitude of Catullus and his successors toward love and poetry was thus diametrically opposed to that of traditional Roman ideology, which took for granted the primacy of the public over the private and viewed duty to the reproductive family as inseparable from duty to the state (Cicero, De Officiis 1.54–57). Hence, while Catullus and the elegists put forth a utopian vision of love and poetry as a private world removed from the dangers of political life and constant civil war (see for example Propertius 1.11 and 2.7), the majority opinion regarded such trivial pursuits as proper only to adolescents and positively noxious in adults. Love was a suitable occupation of youthful otium. It was emphatically not negotium (Segal 1970:28; Rankin 1975:72; Lyne 1980:12). With these factors in mind, let us now return to the long deferred final stanza of Catullus 51 and examine just how it reveals the ambivalent nature of Catullus’ position. Poem 51 presents a peculiarly stark presentation of the two horns of Catullus’ dilemma. On the one hand, the poem itself does not dispute the validity of the basic terms of traditional Roman ideology, but on the other, neither does it deny the reality of Catullus’ contesting of that ideology. Rather, the poem both acknowledges the power of Catullus’ utopian vision of love and poetry, as shown in his translation of Sappho in the first three strophes, and then sharply juxtaposes that vision with the very traditional ideological formulation found in the final stanza: otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est: otio exsultas nimiumque gestis: otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes. Idleness, Catullus, is bad for you: in idleness you run riot and act in excess: idleness has in the past destroyed both kings and wealthy cities.


As Wiseman notes, “The impulse to give all for love was one part of his personality; another…was an old-fashioned respect for traditional values. The two voices of poem 51 express the conflict between them” (1985:155). Indeed, the force of Catullus’ use of otium here, with all its traditional negative connotations, can be judged by the fact that this stanza has often been considered a late addition to the original. For, unlike the first three, it seems to offer a recantation of Catullus’ original, revolutionary position, and “a return to the scruples of Roman seriousness” (Segal 1970:30). The problem of double-voicedness in poem 51, however, is not so easily solved. The intervention of this paternal, rational voice, reminiscent of the one in poem 8 telling the poet he must break off the affair (8.1),16 is further dialogized by the presence of still another perspective on this same issue. Thus in the poem immediately preceding 51, otium has a very different valuation. In poem 50, otium is viewed in an unreservedly positive light and is intimately tied to the composition of poetry itself: Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi multum lusimus in meis tabellis, ut convenerat esse delicatos: scribens versiculos uterque nostrum ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc, reddens mutua per iocum atque vinum. Yesterday, Licinius, over the course of a lazy afternoon, we amused ourselves with my notebooks, as it was a good day for such diversions. The two of us swapped light verse and we played around first with one meter and then with another, passing them back and forth over jokes and wine. (50.1–6) Otium here has an antithetical set of connotations to those found in the last stanza of 51, with the immediate juxtaposition of the two poems highlighting the tension between those connotations, as well as the ambiguous position of the Catullan ego in regard to its society (Segal 1970:25). Moreover, this same ambivalence, as we have just noted, is reproduced within 51 itself, so that the picture Catullus presents in these two poems is an overdetermined one, which resists any reductive effort to view him either as a radical individualist or a conservative conformist. Rather, the image Catullus presents of himself is predicated


on the very act of semiotic slippage which makes both of these meanings possible.17 Indeed, it is the fact that this particular signifier, otium, as well as others, can continue to oscillate between the fields of meaning designated by these two opposed but related signifieds (the private leisure necessary for poetic composition, and the public idleness that leads to civic ruin), which makes possible the emergence of the Catullan lyric consciousness within Roman society. Without this semiotic slippage, the efflorescence of the lyric consciousness within the bounds of Roman ideology either would have been repressed, so that its affirmation of the personal could have existed only to the extent that it was conterminous with the political, or would have remained a moment of incomprehensible madness, incapable of being encoded in the linguistic paradigms which constituted Roman ideology. Nor are the slippages we have detected within 50, 51 and 76 the sole examples of such ambivalences and contradictions in the Catullan corpus. Similar tensions can be found throughout the collection. Thus in the final lines of poem 72 we read: nunc te cognovi: quare etsi impensius uror, multo mi tamen es vilior et levior. qui potis est, inquis? quod amantem iniuria talis cogit amare magis, sed bene velle minus. Now I have known you, so that though I burn more strongly, nonetheless you are to me cheaper and more frivolous. How can that be, you ask? Because such an injury forces the lover to love more, but to wish well less. (72.5–8) The key word here is iniuria, which not only means “injury,” but is also the conventional term for describing when one member of an amicitia, or “political alliance,” has done dirt to another. The accusation of iniuria is usually grounds for the formal dissolution of such an alliance. But, inasmuch as the word amicitia is also cognate with the verb amare [“to love”], Catullus’ claim that Lesbia’s iniuria causes him to love her even more functions as an oxymoron of sorts. For the nature of the amicitia that Catullus has with Lesbia is such that, while iniuria, or “infidelity,” destroys the almost paternal affection which Catullus claims as the distinguishing feature of his love for Lesbia (“dilexi tum te non tantum ut vulgus amicam,/ sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos” [“I loved you not as the common man his mistress, but as father loves his


sons and sons-in-law”], 72.3–4),18 the knowledge of that infidelity only heightens the power of his erotic imagination. Therefore, since the poetry of Catullus is internally fractured by two opposed but necessarily interdependent levels of signification—that of the public and that of the private— then the amicitia existing between him and Lesbia is, in this poem, both publicly denied and privately reconstituted as amor or “erotic intensity.” At the same time, this internal, ideological fracturing of the Catullan poetic ego is itself both symptomatic of and a contributing factor to that internal complexity and inner articulation which we have labeled as the defining characteristic of the lyric genre. Thus, in the end, Catullus’ use of amicitia as a metaphor for a love in which the emotive and sexual interests of both partners are served, and in which respect and affection are mutual, collapses into an aporia. The inevitability of this final disintegration is, as we have seen, encoded in the contradictory ideological tendencies that inhabit the very language on which it is founded. Nonetheless, Catullus’ attempt to construct and describe a space in which this sort of life and poetry could exist remains a potentiality that will haunt the work of the next two generations of Roman poets. The tension between public significance and private desire, which for Catullus is encoded in the word amicitia, will become one of the central tropes structuring the work of both the elegists and Horace, although expressed in different terms.

8 HORACE, MERCURY, AND AUGUSTUS

[I]n the late fifties, when Horace was in his teens, life in Rome was disrupted by riots and gang warfare. The political atmosphere grew steadily more oppressive until the storm of civil war broke in 49 BC. After Caesar’s assassination Horace joined Brutus and saw the carnage at Philippi “when bravery was smashed” (Odes 2.7.11). He returned to Italy under a general amnesty to find that his father had died and the family home had been confiscated. (Rudd 1983:75) However congenial Horace found the elegists’ allegiance to Alexandrian aesthetics, he repeatedly deprecated their preoccupation with personal affairs to the neglect of everything else, their obsessive self-absorption, and their failure to integrate public and private values in their lives and art. (Santirocco 1986:73) In the thirty years separating the publication of Horace’s Odes in 23 from Catullus’ death, life changed dramatically at Rome. The republic collapsed. Julius Caesar seized power and was assassinated. Thousands were killed in the civil wars, their property confiscated and distributed to the victorious veterans; and Augustus established the principate, granting himself effective political control while preserving the forms of republican government. This last phenomenon, the retention of traditional political institutions under the principate, had a greater impact on literary history than has generally been recognized. It allowed the discursive practices of traditional Roman public life to be


maintained, even as the actual political impact of those practices was carefully circumscribed (Ogilvie 1980:161). It was in this twilight time, between the republic and the empire, that the great works of Horace, Vergil, and the love elegists were written, and the Golden Age of Latin literature was born and died. It was a phenomenon that could not continue. As the years passed, it became evident that Augustus would bequeath his auctoritas (“informal political power”) to his chosen heir, thereby creating a dynasty. It also became clear during this transitional period that libertas (“aristocratic freedom of speech”) and meaningful political life were finished for most Roman citizens (Syme 1960:483; Ogilvie 1980:164). The Augustan revolution had restructured society in such a way that the great senatorial families, who previously had claimed access to political power as their birthright, were displaced by the growth of the imperial administration. Power and patronage would now pass through the hands of the emperor and the bureaucracy. In this new world, there was no place for a Julius Caesar, a Pompey, or a Marc Antony. The Pax Augusta strove to abolish both war and politics, the sole arenas of self-validation for the scions of the great families of the republic (Syme 1960:504, 508). The equestrians, as the administrative and mercantile order, had thus, in a sense, won the Roman revolution. But in the process, as the class structure of the society was transformed, the traditional modes of relating the self to the collectivity were also restructured, and the ideological importance of equestrian otium was reduced. As in Alexandria, the individual’s relation to himself became more and more important, even as the public status of that self-hood was reduced, so that otium lost its class specificity. There could be no withdrawal from a public life which no longer existed. As Foucault writes of this period: We need to think in terms of a crisis of the subject, or rather a crisis of subjectivation—that is, in terms of a difficulty in the manner in which the individual could form himself as the ethical subject of his actions, and efforts to find in devotion to self that which could enable him to submit to rules and give a purpose to his existence. (Foucault 1986b:81–95; see also Veyne 1987:36–37) Nonetheless, this crisis of “subjectivation” was able to be deferred for as long as the traditional discursive practices of Roman life survived. It was possible to pretend that a revolution had not occurred, but rather

HORACE, MERCURY, AND AUGUSTUS 141

one had been put down. Augustus had not razed the republic, but revived and purified it. In a sense, it was this pretense of the Augustan restoration of the republic and the accompanying sense of ambiguity and tension which it engendered that made the literature of the Golden Age possible. For it allowed the simultaneous production of a sense of continuity with the past and a sense of rupture, both of which characterize the great works of the period. More specifically, the literary and historical importance of Augustus’ attempt to combine authoritarian government with cultural forms founded on traditional republicanism can be seen in what happened to Rome’s lyric production once the fig-leaf of a republican “restoration” was dropped. It died. Symptomatic of this death of lyric is the poetry of Ovid’s exile. In the first few books it retains the confident irony which was the hallmark of his pre-exilic work. The poems, however, darken as Ovid comes to realize that Augustus will not pardon him, that he will not return from exile, and that he has no say in his own future. With the accession of Tiberius, the poems become little more than abject pleas (see, for example, Epistulae ex Ponto 4.9). Caesar was no longer just princeps, “first among equals,” but now numen and deus, “godhead” and “god.” The time when an individual could command and hold the public’s attention was over. When Augustus’ heir, Tiberius, became emperor, the last vestiges of traditional republicanism fell away and a monarchy was established. Many of the old republican forms would linger: the senate would meet; consuls were elected; the sons of senatorial families entered the cursus honorum. But real power lay with the emperor. Trials for treason became frequent under Tiberius and his successors, and even before the succession, in the last crabbed years of Augustus’ life, book burnings had begun (Ovid, Tristia 2.8, 303; Epistulae ex Ponto 1.1.12; Suetonius, Life of Tiberius 57–65; Syme 1960:486–89, 505–7, 516; Scullard 1976:284). The voice of the lyric collection was now all but silent. It would be heard again only at the beginning of the Renaissance. Some thirty-one years before Ovid’s exile, however, what might well be labeled antiquity’s premier achievement in the lyric genre, Horace’s Odes, appeared. Historically speaking, they are poems of transition. Caught between the worlds of the republic and the empire, they negotiate a middle path between public engagement and private withdrawal (Johnson 1982:144). To understand the nature of that path, this chapter will examine the Odes as a crucial moment in the history of lyric, in which the new model of autonomous poetic subjectivity created by Catullus, and founded on Alexandrian aesthetics, was partially


reintegrated into the communal and political life of Rome. In particular, it will examine how Horace used structural and thematic elements in the collection to recast personal, political, and poetic problems in terms of one another, engendering an open-ended dialectic between the poems themselves, their social context, and the reader who strives to understand them. In this way, Horace allows the private world of lyric to engage the public and political realms, without denying the relative autonomy of each. Key to this understanding is the assumption that the Odes are a planned poetic collection and that the links between poems are as important as the individual odes themselves.1 The links themselves can be either thematic or formal. This chapter, however, will concentrate on those represented by Mercury, Augustus, Maecenas, the Sabine farm, and the fusion of the Latin and Greek literary traditions. In terms of the collection itself, I shall contend that while the abstract schemata found by some writers may have the virtue of showing the conscious care that went into crafting the Odes, these rigid patterns have little interpretive significance in themselves. Too often they represent more the reader’s will to fix a variegated and diverse group of poems within the confines of a preconceived pattern than the real complexity of Horace’s collection.2 Indeed, there are virtually as many patterns of arrangement operative in the Odes as there are trajectories of reading. For each re-reading is also a restructuring of the collection: not because the links the reader perceives between the various poems are “subjective,” but rather because the relays between them are so numerous, so subtle, and so overdetermined that they can never all be present to his or her mind at any one moment. They exist, instead, in a constant process of realignment and reinterpretation at each point that the reader engages the text. Through this process, Horace creates an ever more complex image of the poetic ego projected by the Odes, an image which is, nonetheless, never fully present in any one reading (Reckford 1969:16–17; Johnson 1982:142; Witke 1983:15; Edmunds 1992:46).3 It is for this reason that the Odes are an unending source of intellectual stimulation and aesthetic refreshment. Poems 1.9 and 1.10 will serve as our entrance points to the collection. Both are modeled on poems by Alcaeus. Poem 1.9, also known as the “Soracte Ode,” is taken from fragment 338 of Alcaeus (Heinze 1930:48; Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:116–17):


Zeus sends rain, a great storm comes from the heavens, running waters are frozen solid…. Down with the storm! Stoke up the fire, mix the honeysweet wine unsparingly, and put a soft fillet round your brows.4 Poem 1.10, the “Hymn to Mercury,” is from fragment 308 (Porphyrion and Acro 1966:40; Heinze 1930:53; Fraenkel 1957:161; Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:125–28):

Greetings, ruler of Cyllene—for it is of you that I wish to sing: you whom Maia bore on the very mountain tops, having lain with Zeus, son of Cronus, king of all.5 In their original oral performative context, it is unlikely that these two poems by Alcaeus would have had any relation to one another. Fragment 338 is symposiastic in character and was meant to be sung at a drinking party attended by Alcaeus’ fellow nobles from Lesbos (Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:116; Johns 1982:119–37). As such, its primary function would have been to serve as a reaffirmation of the class solidarity which existed between like-minded members of the local aristocracy. It would also have had a determined political content, in so far as the majority of those nobles opposed the tyrant, Pittacus, and his efforts to reach an accommodation with the lower classes (see frgs 129, 141, 306, 348, and 429) (Gentili 1984:56–57; Grant 1988:179–80; Edmunds 1992:55). Thus, fragment 338 would have had little in common with 308, the “Hymn to Hermes,” and indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a situation in which the two would have been sung together, or what possible poetic connection could have existed between


them. Rather, for Alcaeus’ poems, as for Sappho’s, the primary interpretive paradigm would have been defined by the social and ideological worlds of their audiences and the mythic tradition in which those worlds were encoded, not by their relation to one another (Fraenkel 1957:38). Such is not the case, however, with the Odes. The differences in dialogical situation and genre which separate Odes 1.9 and 1.10 from their Alcaean models are apparent on several levels. First, and foremost, poems 1.9 and 1.10 occupy a determinant position within a larger poetic ensemble, as fragments 308 and 338 do not. Consequently, these poems exist in a very different relationship to one another than their Alcaean models did, because their appearance in sequence was the product of a conscious poetic decision. As such, their relation to one another, even if it is not immediately apparent, demands to be interpreted. It stands as an index of the poetic will which brought them together. It implies the “presence” of a poetic self-consciousness, a sort of lyric meta-text, that exists over and above the form and content of the poems themselves. Not only, however, do poems 1.9 and 1.10 belong to a planned collection, they also occupy a crucial position within that collection, marking the end of its opening sequence known as the “Parade Odes.” The name of the sequence alludes to the fact that the first nine poems of the collection are all composed in different meters; together they form a sort of procession, the function of which is to introduce the Odes’ unprecedented metrical variety (Johnson 1982: 123–24; Witke 1983:12; Santirocco 1986:14–41). Poem 1.10, as the poem that marks the end of the “Parade Odes,” is thus the first poem in the collection to repeat a meter already used in the collection. The point of this show of technical virtuosity ought not be lost on the modern critic. Horace was the first to bring many of these Greek meters into Latin poetry, and his success at adapting the Latin tongue to the rigors of Greek metrics constitutes an important aspect of his artistic achievement. For the value of a literary work in first century Rome was in large part measured by what it owed to its Greek predecessors, inasmuch as it was the Greeks who first produced a developed literature capable of being circulated outside the bounds of the community which had produced it. Greek literature to the Roman mind was literature itself (Ogilvie 1980:68–71, 148; Veyne 1987:2–3, 18–21). The significance Horace attached to this tour de force can be seen in the last poem of the collection, where the poet describes himself as “ex humili potens/ princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos/ deduxisse modos” [“Rising to prominence from humble origins, as the first to have translated Aeolian


song into Italian rhythms”] (3.30.12) (Porphyrion and Acro 1966:378– 79; Commager 1967:158; Johnson 1982:124; Rudd 1983:81).6 This act of translation sanctifies him as a poet, crystalizing his vocation into an act of cultural cross-fertilization, which, in itself, synthesizes a moment of pure aesthetic will with a deep sense of cultural nationalism. In these lines, Horace not only underlines the nature and difficulty of his accomplishment, but also proclaims Rome the cultural equal of Greece. Finally, Horace’s use of Greek meters also underlines the literate and self-conscious nature of the collection, for these meters were in no sense the native rhythms of Italian song. They placed demands on the language which it could not always easily accommodate, upsetting the natural word order and creating a poetry which, even within the confines of the individual poem, existed not so much as direct, linear oral expression, but as a visual and spatial ordering, inviting multiple readings, multiple temporalities (Wilkinson 1963: 218–20; Johnson 1982:125–26)7 The meters then become an index of the presence of an inward turning, of a conscious rupture with orality’s sense of immediacy and communal context, even as they also speak the language of appropriation, of Rome’s political and cultural hegemony within the Mediterranean world. Other indications of the significance of the positions of poems 1.9 and 1.10 can easily be found. One is Horace’s choice of meter. Poem 9 is the first poem in the collection written in Alcaic strophes. The reason for using this form in the final poem of the “Parade Odes” would appear to be honorific, alluding to the special place Alcaeus occupies in the collection. For it is Alcaeus whom Horace sets forth as his primary model and the Alcaic strophe is statistically the most common meter in the collection, so that when grouped together with the Sapphic, also used by Alcaeus, it accounts for about 63 percent of the poems in the Odes (Epistles 1.19.28–29; Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:xii–xiii; Moritz 1976:169–70; Santirocco 1986:19, 41).8 Poem 10, in turn, is in the Sapphic meter and the pairing of these two poems, both derived from Alcaeus and both in Aeolian meters, would appear to be a programmatic statement not only announcing Horace’s literary genealogy, but also providing a foretaste of the remainder of the collection. Thus the first half of the second book of the Odes is made up entirely of alternating poems in Sapphic and Alcaic stanzas, while the “Roman Odes,” the first six poems of Book 3, are written wholly in Alcaic stanzas (Santirocco 1980:51; Porter 1987:12–13). Confirmation of this reading can be found in the opening and final poems of the collection, in which Horace specifically defines his lyric vocation as a continuation of the tradition


of Sappho and Alcaeus (1.1.34; see also 1.26.11, a poem in Alcaics, preceded by one in Sapphics, and followed by another in Alcaics). Finally, it should be noted that poem 1.10’s position as the first poem to repeat a meter in the collection has yet a further significance. For the meter it repeats is the same meter as the second poem in the collection. This second poem, however, is in another sense the first poem of the opening sequence, since poem 1.1 by virtue of its meter and its programmatic function can be said to stand outside the “Parade Odes,” inasmuch as it and the last poem of the collection are the only odes in the collection in the First Asclepiadean meter. Together they form a sort of frame which both announces Horace’s lyric vocation and celebrates its successful consummation (Santirocco 1980:50; 1986:81; Porter 1987: 3).9 Thus poems 1.2 and 1.10 stand as the beginning and end of the opening sequence, bracketing it with Sapphic strophes. This formal connection between 1.2 and 1.10 is also recapitulated on the thematic level. Where 1.2 ends with the princeps being envisioned as an earthly manifestation of Mercury, poem 10 is a hymn to Mercury himself. Their use of the god, however, is not identical. In poem 2, Mercury is the last in a catalogue of deities, and as Augustus, he is invested with a clear political significance. In poem 10 he stands alone and is celebrated in a thoroughly Greek setting as a patron of poetry and the arts, with no mention of Roman political life (Santirocco 1986:23, 43; Porter 1987:15). This linking of 1.2 and 1.10, because they share a common meter and the figure of Mercury, would appear to be confirmed by the fact that the third poem in Sapphics in the collection is a hymn to Augustus. Thus the reader sees a pattern form: 1.2 presents Augustus in the guise of Mercury; 1.10 is a hymn to Mercury himself; and 1.12 a hymn to Augustus (Santirocco 1986:44–46). This conjunction of poetry and politics constitutes one of the primary motifs of the collection and one of the crucial axes around which the Horatian poetic ego revolves. It points not only to Horace’s personal interest in politics and his conversion to the side of Augustus from the republican cause championed by Brutus and Cassius, but also to the patronage he received from Maecenas, the princeps’ trusted advisor and regent in his absence. This connection with Maecenas is not merely based on an inference gathered from the interplay of Horace, Augustus, and Mercury in this sequence of Sapphic poems, however, but forms an integral part of the collection itself. For Maecenas too has a series of poems which are dedicated to him, and these poems, in turn, intersect with both this first Sapphic sequence and several others in the collection. Thus 1.1, the opening poem of the collection, ends with the name


Maecenas, while the first word of 1.2 is Caesar, so that the close connection between these two men and their relation to both Horace’s lyric aspiration and his personal welfare is evoked at the collection’s very beginning. By the same token, both 1.2 and 1.1 owe a large debt to Pindar, and so point the astute reader to the fact that he or she might well be on guard for other more substantive relations between them as well. The personal, political, and poetic relation between all three of these men is in turn alluded to again in 1.3, which is dedicated to Vergil, Horace’s friend and the man who had introduced him to Maecenas. Finally it is not accidental that the collection’s fourth poem in Sapphics, 1.20, coming after 1.2, 10, and 12, is itself addressed to Maecenas. Nor is it insignificant that 1.20 occupies the exact mid-point of Book 1, as do two other poems on Maecenas, 2.12 and 3.16, in their respective books (Santirocco 1980:52; 1986: 24–25, 132; Porter 1987: 13). Thus the first four poems in Sapphics in Book 1 would appear to make up a coherent sequence, which in turn intersects with other groups of poems throughout the collection. Additional evidence that these four poems do indeed constitute a sequence can be discovered in Book 3, where a similar linking of the first four poems in Sapphics to one another can be found. The first is 3. 8, a poem addressed to Maecenas, celebrating the anniversary of Horace’s having been spared from an otherwise fatal blow by a falling tree on his Sabine farm, itself a gift from Maecenas. The second is 3.11, which begins with an invocation of Mercury in his role as inventor of the lyre, while the third poem, 3.14, celebrates Augustus’ victorious return from Spain. The fourth poem, 3.18, shows Horace in a rural setting making an annual sacrifice to Faunus, the son of Mercury, who has connections both with Maecenas and the near fatal run-in with the tree (Fraenkel 1957: 187, 259, 290; Santirocco 1986:52, 127–31, 141, 160; Porter 1987: 43). Thus the opening sequence of Sapphic poems, 1. 2, 1.10, 1.12, and 1.20, featuring Augustus, Mercury, and Maecenas, is paralleled by an analogous group in Book 3–3.8, 3.11, 3.14, and 3.18— on Maecenas, Mercury, Augustus, and Faunus, Mercury’s son. Finally, before moving on to a close a reading of poems 1.9 and 1.10, it would be useful to address, in general terms, why Horace chose Alcaeus as his primary model for the Odes. While scholarship on this question remains somewhat divided, a general agreement about Horace’s desire to reinvent the ancient sense of communitas that lay behind archaic lyric and was lost in Alexandria seems to be shared by most readers (Hubbard 1973:12). Horace wished to reinvent the life of the public poet who was an open participant in the life of the


community and a voice for what he considered its better elements. But to do this in the context of the early empire, Horace had to reinvent Alcaeus himself (Santirocco 1986:71–72). He had to ignore the ancient lyrist’s agitation against Pittacus and his open hostility to those who, like Horace, the son of a freed slave, had risen from the lower ranks of society to prominence and respectability (Rudd 1983:81–82). Moreover, Horace was both unwilling and unable to participate in the communal oral culture upon which archaic lyric thrived. On the one hand, he was not prepared to give up the isolation from the masses and the self-conscious mode of composition that his Alexandrian inheritance demanded (Odes 3.1.1–2 and Satires 1.10.72–76). On the other, the social context of Alcaeus’ orality no longer existed. As Fraenkel observes, “For Horace there exist no singers, no festival ceremonies, no tradition which he can follow” (1957:284–85). Alcaeus, thus, becomes Horace’s ideal predecessor only by not being Alcaeus. In the language of Harold Bloom, it could be said that a clinamen or determinant misreading separates Horace’s work from that of his idealized predecessor (Bloom 1975: 14). That misreading, however, is not motivated by a Romantic or agonistic “anxiety of influence,” but by the incommensurability of time and place, of social and technical contexts, which make the real Alcaeus and his ancient orality as inaccessible to Horace as his ability to integrate the public and private makes him desirable (Fraenkel 1957:30, 36; Nisbet and Hubbard 1970: xii; Johnson 1982:144). Alcaeus, as he appears in the Odes, then, has had all his historical and ideological specificity removed. In the person of Horace, he has become the public spirited citizen (1.32.5), patriotic but unwilling to disturb his otium to become involved in Augustan politics (Fraenkel 1957:174–75, 213–14). An example of this withdrawal can be seen in 2.16, where, after saying that all the world seeks otium, Horace continues: non enim gazae neque consularis summovet lictor miseros tumultus mentis et curas laqueata circum tecta volantis. … mihi parva rura et spiritum Graiae tenuem Camenae Parca non mendax dedit et malignum spernere vulgus.


For neither riches nor the consul’s lictor clear the mind of its wretched agitation nor do panelled ceilings of the cares which fly round them…. To me though, Fate has granted a modest acreage and the slender inspiration of the Greek Muses, as well as the ability to spurn the vicious crowd. (2.16.9–12, 37–40)10 Yet even in this ostensible withdrawal from public life which separates Horace from Alcaeus, politics maintains its omnipresence. For the modest acreage Horace talks about here is his Sabine farm, a gift from Maecenas. This farm was particularly important to Horace because it reestablished his financial independence after it had been lost in the civil war, when he had fought with Brutus against Octavian (soon to be Augustus) at Philippi and his father’s estate was confiscated. Yet it was a financial independence which was in the last instance dependent upon his having won the favor of Maecenas, and this favor itself was dependent in turn upon his poetic talents, so that the topics of politics, public involvement, financial security, private independence, and poetic practice become indissolubly linked to one another. Thus for Horace public life was not the antithesis to poetic and private independence, as it was for Catullus and the elegists, but its necessary precondition. This linkage is perhaps most clearly made in poem 3.4, one of the “Roman Odes,” where Horace directly addresses the past, present, and future of Rome itself. He begins the poem by telling a fantastic story of his early childhood: how he was protected by certain deities who in the form of doves carried him to Mt Volture and wrapped him in myrtle leaves, signifying his consecration as a poet. In the sixth strophe he identifies his protectors as the Muses (Camenae), and explicitly links them to his later acquiring the Sabine farm, as well as to his being saved from the falling tree and rescued at the battle of Philippi. Horace knows that the leisure he enjoys at the Sabine farm and at the other resorts he mentions is owed in the first instance to the Muses, and in the last to Maecenas and Augustus (Holoka 1976:41–46). vester, Camenae, vester in arduos tollor Sabinos, seu mihi frigidum Praeneste seu Tibur supinum seu liquidae placuere Baiae.


Yours, Muses, yours, I am carried to my farm in the Sabine hills, or should it be my wish to cool Praeneste, or sloping Tibur, or to clear Baiae. (3.4.21–24) As such the Sabine farm will occupy a privileged place in Horace’s lyric discourse signifying at one and the same time his rejection of a traditional Roman political career and his necessary attachment to the most powerful people in Rome. It is simultaneously the place of poetic engagement and private withdrawal, and consequently shows Horace’s fundamental and unbridgeable personal and cultural differences with the world of Alcaeus, as well as the historical gulf separating him from Catullus. Having now established the general place of poems 1.9 and 1.10 within the collection as well as their engagement with the problematic of public and private life, let us examine their more immediate relation to one another. On this level, the initial point of interest is the observation that together these two poems describe a circular pattern, moving from old age to youthful vigor in the first poem, and from birth to death in the second. Thus it can be said that they exist in a complementary relationship to one another and that as a unit they describe the full cycle of human existence. In poem 1.9, this circular aspect of the poem is not immediately apparent, and so I shall begin with it. To understand the poem, it is necessary to realize that literal and figurative levels of meaning coexist in it, inviting multiple readings. These readings allow 1.9 to interact with other poems in the collection on a number of planes simultaneously.11 Nonetheless, the profoundly polysemic nature of the poem has not always been recognized. Indeed, the notion that it might be read in other than a straightforward, literal manner was long rejected and only gradually won favor because of its ability to explain certain internal inconsistencies which were thought to mar the poem. The poem begins with a scene of Mt Soracte in winter, and then moves to a drinking party indoors, whence follows a brief exhortation to the poet’s companion to enjoy life while he still can. It ends with an open air scene of young lovers exchanging pledges (pignera) in the shadows. The difficulty consists in how we get from the winter landscape which begins the poem to the open air, summertime activity which brings it to an end. Fraenkel puts the problem as follows:


We have to admit that as a whole the poem falls short of the perfection reached by Horace in many of his odes. Its heterogeneous elements have not merged into a harmonious unit. Line 18 nunc et campus et areae [“now the campus Martius and the piazzas”] and what follows suggest a season wholly different from the severe winter at the beginning. This incongruity cannot be removed by any device of apologetic interpretation. (Fraenkel 1957:177) Yet “devices of apologetic interpretation” are precisely what have revived interest in this poem. This revival began some ten years before Fraenkel, when L.P.Wilkinson argued that the poem should be read “symbolically,” noting that the first stanza called to mind old age and by inference death, while the last two evoked youthful vigor. This reading with some minor modifications has remained the dominant one to the present day (Wilkinson 1946:131–32; Shields 1958:171–73; Commager 1967:271–73; Esler 1969:300–2; Moritz 1976:174–75; Santirocco 1986: 44).12 According to this interpretation, the central moment of the poem is lines 15–18 (“nec dulcis amores/ sperne puer neque tu choreas,/ donec virenti canities abest/ morosa” [“Neither spurn sweet loves nor fail to join in the dance, boy, while the enfeebled white hair of age is still absent from your green youth”]). In particular the conjunction of canities (“grayish-whiteness; hoariness; age”) with virens (“verdant; vigorous; flourishing”) is of great import. This collocation, made possible by a slight disturbance of normal word order, highlights the contrast between youth and age, and demands that strophe 1 be read in a new light. More specifically, it calls attention to a new understanding of the role of Mt Soracte, which Horace describes as candidus (“dazzling, white”) with deep snow. Candidus is, of course, cognate with canities, so that the link between the description of the mountain in lines 1–2 and the concept of old age is made explicit (Cunningham 1957:101; Shields 1958:168–69; Edmunds 1992:17). This new reading of strophe 1 is confirmed by a close examination of its diction, in particular its use of terms which imply cold and paralysis such as laborantes to describe the trees bent over with the snow. There is also a marked contrast between the frigid immobility described in lines 3–4 (“geluque/ flumina constiterint acuto” [“the streams are frozen with bitter cold”]), the loosening signaled by the imperatives of strophes 2 and 3 (dissolve, “dissolve”; deprome, “to bring out”; permitte,


“allow”),13 and the youthful movements implicit in the poem’s last verb, repetantur [“let be sought”].14 By the same token, it seems clear that Mt Soracte must have largely a figurative rather than literal sense in the poem. For, as Niall Rudd has pointed out, it would have been impossible to see it from a Roman house, inasmuch as they did not possess outward facing windows. Consequently, its sense must be sought in other spheres than that of straightforward literal description. It must function poetically. This is confirmed by the fact that Soracte itself, as Servius in his commentary on Vergil notes, was sacred to the dead, and so already possessed a conventional literary status related to the themes of old age, paralysis, and frozen cold (Rudd 1960: 391; 1983:100; Edmunds 1992:8, 26). Thus at the beginning and end of the poem, the reader finds a series of oppositions between old age and youth, death and life, stasis and movement, cold and warmth, winter and summer, which the middle stanzas mediate, and which find their poetic center at line 17’s juxtaposition of virens with canities. To sum up, then, these oppositions can be said to describe an arc which begins at old age and ends at youth. Poem 1.10, on the other hand, moves in precisely the opposite direction beginning with Mercury’s ancestry, progressing through the deeds of his childhood, and ending with his role as psychopomp, the leader of the souls of the dead to Hades. In this manner, 1.10 completes the curve started by 1.9, allowing the two poems to form a circle and reinforcing the sense of them as a set, a sense already implied by their being modeled on poems by Alcaeus, and by the importance of their meters and position in the collection. As a set they testify to a new predominance of artistic selfconsciousness over the Alcaean predominance of occasion and social context, and project the image of a Horatian ego which exists not only as the content of its discourse but also as “a will to style,” itself dependent on the presence of certain social, historical and technical conditions, and embodied in the poet’s relation of patronage to the political forces of his day (Voit 1982:486).15 To pursue this investigation further, though, we must now examine an even more complex level of self-consciousness, visible in these poems when they are read as part of a larger dialectic between Greek and Latin culture which extends throughout the Odes, and which we have already noted constitutes an important part of Horace’s selfdefinition as a poet. One of the ways Horace leads us into this examination is by beginning 1.9, an essentially Greek poem making direct reference to a text by Alcaeus, with the image of Mt Soracte, a


well known piece of Italian geography. This concrete detail instantly localizes the poem, even as it identifies it as a cultural hybrid. Yet this is only the most obvious level on which this phenomenon is in evidence. For the opening stanza, in conjunction with a more overt reference in strophe 2, also leads us to think of the Sabine farm, and hence of the role Horace’s mixing of Greek and Latin poetic elements played in establishing his personal and political position in the early principate. The path leading to these reflections is not an obvious or direct one, but the cumulative evidence is quite strong. We can begin with the observation that it is reasonable to infer from Horace’s mention of Soracte and the description of the frozen trees and rivers which surround it that the setting is rural. The exact view of the mountain that is being described is not specified and probably, as Nisbet and Hubbard argue, is not supposed to correspond to any precise referential context (1970:116–17). The next move is to ask: what is the commonly assumed referent when a rural setting is mentioned in the Odes? The answer would have to be the Sabine farm. It matters little that Mt Soracte itself was probably not visible from what is thought to have been the farm’s location, for as was already noted one could not see Soracte from any Roman home anywhere and the mountain itself has primarily a figurative rather than a literal function in the poem. What is important, however, is to recognize that Horace himself knows that he need only mention the countryside and his readers will think of the Sabine farm. This is shown in the final stanza of 2.16, where the mere mention of parva rura (“a modest farm”) has led most commentators to assume (and there is no reason to think otherwise) that the reference is to the Sabine farm (Bennett 1981:294; Syndikus 1972:452–53; Nisbet and Hubbard 1977:270; Quinn 1980:231). More importantly, though, the Sabine farm has a largely figurative function in the Horatian corpus and is directly related to Horace’s poetic inspiration as embodied by the Graia Camena or “Greek Muse” also found in the final stanza of 2.16. What is significant to note for the moment, however, is how certain definite associations are suggested with just a mention of a rural setting, even if after careful reflection the reader comes to realize that Mt Soracte might not be literally visible from Horace’s estate. For Mt Soracte serves in its figurative sense as a memento mori. By the same token, the Sabine farm itself often functions as a symbol of Horace’s contentment with his lot in life, his refusal to seek wealth and power, and hence his acceptance of the limits of mortality. This can be seen specifically in the sequence of poems 2.13–18, which begins with Horace telling a humorous story in Alcaic stanzas of how one day


when wandering about his Sabine farm a tree fell and nearly killed him. This mention of death allows Horace to modulate into a vision of the underworld in which a crowd of surrounding shades is seen listening in silent awe to Sappho and Alcaeus, and to envision poetic immortality in the person of those two Greek poets whom he claims as his models. Poems 2.14 and 2.15, in turn, deal individually with the themes of mortality and greed, juxtaposing his own awareness of the necessity of death with that of the foolish man who wastes his life in the vain pursuit of private wealth as opposed to public virtue (2.15.10–14) (Santirocco 1986:157–59). In 2.16, Horace contrasts himself and his contentment with his Graia Camena and his parva rura with the man who pursues ostentatious wealth and political power, unaware that “Abstulit clarum cita mors Achillem” [“Swift death took away even famed Achilles”]. In 2.17, Horace assures Maecenas, after his recovery from a grave illness (mentioned in 1.20), that the great man will not die before the poet, and proceeds to tell how it was Faunus, the son of Mercury, who saved Horace from the tree on the Sabine farm, a feat which is later credited to the Muses (Camenae, 3.4.27). Finally in 2.18, Horace’s possession of the Sabine farm (“satis beatus unicis Sabinis,” 14), his poetic genius, and his refusal of direct participation in the public and political life of Rome are contrasted with the life of the avarus [“greedy man”], who in his pursuit of personal power and riches destroys the livelihood of his less fortunate fellow citizens (21–28). He thus displays a failure to understand his own limits, since he is every bit as subject to death as the lowest slave (29–40). As Commager writes, “The poem rests upon a series of antitheses, the principal one being between the figurative house of death and the house of the avarus, with a further contrast lying between the house of the avarus and the Sabine farm” (1967:84–89).16 Thus 2.13 through 2.18 place directly before us Horace the poet, keenly aware of his own mortality, the beneficiary of the patronage of the powerful but seeking no power for himself. Nonetheless, the message presented by this sequence and the figurative role the Sabine farm plays in it is not as simple as it seems. In 2.18 Horace not only contrasts the parva rura of the Sabine farm with the palatial villa of the avarus, he also tells us that the rich and powerful seek him out because of his “fides et benigna ingeni vena” [“good faith and fruitful vein of genius”] (10–11). Later in 3.30, he claims to have made the transition from humble origins (ex humili) to a position of power and importance (potens). Yet that importance does not consist in political power as conventionally understood, but in his having been the first to have brought Greek lyric meters into Latin poetry (13–14). It is precisely this


moment of artistic self-consciousness, of will, which has allowed him to rise to a position of poetic immortality (“exegi monumentum”), of transcending time itself. Thus in a paradoxical sense the Sabine farm comes to stand as the symbol of his acceptance of the limits of mortality on normal human existence, even as it also stands as an earthly token of the poetic immortality yet to come. This immortality can, nonetheless, be situated in a determined historical, social, and technical context, as the Sabine farm in all its varied symbolic and political dimensions displays, as well as in the context of a conscious fusion of the Latin and Greek poetic traditions. Returning to 1.9, this complex web of associations becomes even more important in understanding the significance of the first strophe’s rural setting when direct reference to the Sabine region is made in the second strophe, the last two lines of which end with the words Sabina and diota, in emphatic final position. Collectively, they refer to a wine bottle which Horace’s companion Thaliarchus is supposed to be opening, “Dissolve frigus ligna super foco/ Large reponens atque benignius/ Deprome quadrimum Sabina,/ O Thaliarche, merum diota” [“Put another big log on the fire, dissolve the cold, and bring out the mellower four year old wine in the two-handled Sabine bottle”] (5–8). Yet this is a very strange wine bottle, since it is bilingual. For the word diota is not Latin but Greek, and thus strictly a Sabina diota could never exist. Indeed, not only has archeology turned up no examples of such a Sabine jar, but this passage is the sole example of the use of the word diota in extant Latin.17 The word must, then, have some further significance than simply reference to an actual physical object and, in part, function as an emblem of the poem’s own hybrid nature. Like Mt Soracte in strophe 1, it represents that conflation of Greek and Latin cultures which comes to define Horace’s poetic vocation. The very word diota in its root meaning of “two-eared,” and so “two-handled,” is emblematic of its own doubleness and figurative role in the discourse (Edmunds 1992:11–12). Nor is this conflation of Latin and Greek elements limited to 1.9. In fact, it is a theme and a rhetorical figure which runs throughout the collection. Thus in 1.1, immediately after referring to the “Lesbian lyre,” Horace addresses Maecenas and says that he would reach the pinnacle of success if Maecenas were to include him in the ranks of the “lyricis vatibus.” Here again the phrase is “two-eared.” For, though it can be translated simply as “lyric poets,” such a rendering fails to capture the phrase’s real significance, because while lyricus is derived directly from Greek, vates is an exclusively Latin word which is not strictly equivalent


to the Greek poeta, but implies a mythical prophetic power rooted in the deepest recesses of early Italic religion and culture (Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:15; Quinn 1980:121; Santirocco 1986:22). As such, the phrase lyrici vates and the poetic program it announces represent a conflation of languages and terms very similar to that found in Sabina diota (Moritz 1976:171). Moreover, the lyrici vates are directly linked in the preceding line to the Lesboum baribiton (“Lesbian lyre”), which first announces Horace’s program of imitating Alcaeus and Sappho, and is picked up again in 1.32, another poem written in Sapphics, with the phrase “age dic Latinum,/ barbite, carmen,/ Lesbio primum modulate civi” [“Come then lyre, first tuned by the Lesbian citizen, and sing a Latin song”] (3–5). A similar phenomenon can be seen in the collection’s last poem as well, where Horace claims to have been the first (“princeps,” a jesting glance at Augustus) to have “Aeolium carmen ad Italos/ deduxisse modos” [“to have translated Aeolian song into Italian meters”]. The conflations here are numerous. Beginning with Aeolium carmen, carmen is an exclusively Latin word for “song” unrelated to the Greek word poema, so that in a strict sense an Aeolium carmen would be a contradiction in terms, just like a Sabina diota or a lyricus vates. Second, the modos or “rhythms” Horace used were not Italian, but Greek, so that the idea of translating Aeolium carmen into Italos modos would appear to raise the paradoxical nature of Horace’s rhetoric to the second power, inasmuch as the linking of the two multiplies the layers of conflation exponentially. Third, the verb deduxisse is itself a reference to another level of Greek influence mediated through Latin, as Ross observes, making reference to Vergil’s deductum carmen in the recusatio at the beginning of Eclogue 6, a manifesto for Alexandrian and Callimachean poetics. Moreover, the conjunction of these two levels of Greek influence, with the acknowledgement of the Italic element, also situates Horace’s discourse within the current political environment in Rome, by acknowledging that, while using the same Alexandrian aesthetics as the neoterics, he and Vergil are able to discuss matters of central importance to the people of the Italian peninsula (Ross 1975:134–36; Quinn 1980:296–97). Finally, in the last strophe of 2.16, we can see that these rhetorical conflations signifying the amalgamation of Greek and Roman elements in the Horatian collection are directly linked to both the Sabine farm and Maecenas himself. Of particular interest is the link Horace makes between the Graia Camena and his own parva rura, or between the “Greek Muses” and the Sabine farm:


… mihi parva rura et spiritum Graiae tenuem Camenae Parca non mendax dedit et malignum spernere vulgus. To me Fate has granted a modest acreage and the slender inspiration of the Greek Muse, as well as the ability to spurn the vicious crowd. (2.16.37–40) Camena is an exclusively Latin word for the goddess whose inspiration brings forth poetry, which, like the examples just adduced, has no direct relation to its Greek counterpart, Musa. Thus the notion of a Graia Camena is also “two-eared.” In this case, however, like the verb deduxisse from 3.30, it is also linked to Alexandrian poetics through the phrase tenuis spiritus, or “slender inspiration,” which alludes to Callimachus’ emphasis on small, highly polished compositions and on a learned, literate style (Ross 1975:149). Camena is also the term used to identify the Muse in the passage from 3.4 looked at earlier in relation to Horace’s receiving the Sabine farm, and it is no accident that Horace’s Greek inspirations, both archaic and Alexandrian, are again linked to the farm, for it is the successful melding of the Roman, the Greek, and the Hellenistic which in large part defines Horace’s artistic accomplishment in the Odes (Fraenkel 1957:176). Moreover, in 2.16 Horace’s parva rura also function as a metaphor for his style of life, his concentration on simplicity, and his withdrawal from the pursuit of public honors and vast wealth, so that in contrast to the wealthy Grosphus, the poem’s addressee, Horace says, “vivitur parvo bene, cui paternum/ splendet in mensa tenui salinum” [“that man lives well with little, for whom the ancestral salt cellar shines on his slender table”] (13–14). Yet as can be seen from the use of the adjective tenuis in this context as well as in the final strophe where it characterizes the poet’s Callimachean inspiration, Horace’s life and poetry are viewed as reflecting one another. As Santirocco observes, “This is made explicit in 2.16 where the poet’s simple fare (mensa tenui, 14) corresponds to his simple Muse (spiritum Graiae tenuem Camenae, 38)” (Santirocco 1986:80). By the same token, the parvus of lines 13–14 also picks up the parva of parva rura in the final strophe, so that the Sabine farm itself becomes a symbol of Horace’s poetry, his satisfaction with his lot in life, and hence of his personal independence.


Yet, the Sabine farm, while evoking that independence, is also the sign of his most visible and immediate connection to Roman political life. It is no accident that the poem (2.17) immediately following this mention of Horace’s parva rura is an address to Maecenas. Poem 2.17 also has direct connections to 1.10, through its naming of Horace as a Mercurialis vir and its mention of Faunus—the son of Mercury—as the deity who saved Horace from the falling tree on the Sabine farm.18 More importantly though, poem 2.17 is thematically linked to another poem in the collection (1.20), which openly alludes to the Sabina diota of 1.9: “Vile potabis modicis Sabinum/ cantharis, Graeca quod ego ipse testa/ conditum levi, datus in theatro/ cum tibi plausus,/ care Maecenas eques” [“You will drink cheap Sabine wine in modest tankards, which I myself put up and sealed in a Greek jar, when you were cheered in the theater, dear Maecenas, the knight”] (1–5). Here again the Greek jar filled with Italian wine is a transparent metaphor for Horace’s poetic practice, which at the same time recalls Horace’s receiving the Sabine farm from Maecenas (Santirocco 1986:156). Furthermore, the occasion when Horace put up this wine is the same as that recalled in 2.17: that is, when Maecenas, after a long illness, returned to the theater and was greeted with loud applause. As was just noted, 2.17 also links Horace to Mercury, who, in turn, is identified with Augustus in 1.2, and in Satire 2.6 is credited with Horace’s acquisition of the Sabine farm. In addition, 1.20, as noted above, is the fourth poem in Sapphics in Book 1, following 1.2, 1.10, and 1.12, so that a coherent pattern linking Horace, Maecenas, Augustus, the Sabine farm, the mixture of Greek and Latin elements in Horace’s poetry, and the god Mercury emerges. Returning to 1.9, we see sandwiched between Sabina and diota the name Thaliarchus, a Greek word meaning “master of the revels.” It is a name which can be read in two different fashions. If we assume that this ode despite its Roman coloring is basically a Greek poem, then Thaliarchus stands as a sort of archetypical sympotic host, a “master of the revels” whose sole purpose is to allow Horace, the Roman, to make certain quasi-philosophical statements, in an otherwise Greek context, on the inevitability of age, death, and the necessity of enjoying life while it is possible. If the context is Roman, the reading of the poem changes dramatically. As Nisbet and Hubbard point out, the tasks Thaliarchus is asked to perform were those of a slave (Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:117). Given that most middle and upper class Romans had Greek house slaves, the average Roman reader would have automatically assumed that the Greek who was asked to perform these domestic chores was anything but the “master” of the revels. The issue


of slavery, of course, had a special relevance to Horace, the son of a freed slave, and it was the Sabine farm which most definitively separated him from that past, confirming him as a member of the landed aristocracy. This reading of Thaliarchus as referring to a slave gains strength when in strophe 4 Horace addresses him as puer or “boy.” One possible meaning of this term is, of course, to denote the youth of Thaliarchus when compared to Horace and hence as part of the movement from old age to youth which characterizes the poem as a whole. Yet puer was also a common form of address to slaves just as boy was in the American South. Horace himself uses the term in that sense at 3.14.17 in a similar context, and any Greek addressed as puer in a Roman home and asked to build a fire and pour the wine would have certainly been a slave. Thus it becomes possible to read 1.9 in at least two ways. On the one hand, it can be read as an exercise in literary imagination, in which case the Greek elements in the poem stand as the marks of literature itself, as the definitive dividing line which separates the poem from social life. Or, on the other, 1.9 can be read as a poem taking place in a Roman setting, in which case Thaliarchus, a slave, would stand as an instantiation of the class nature of the society. Neither of these readings excludes the possibility of the other; rather they coexist in an expanding dialectic. Consequently, in addition to the opposition of age and youth, as well as that between Greek and Roman culture and public and private life, there exists within the confines of 1.9 the possibility of a further freeman/slave opposition, and with it the question of the social structure of Rome itself. The relation between these various levels of reading cannot be fixed in any definite hierarchy; rather they remain unstable, existing in a sort of kaleidoscopic relation to one another which changes according to the context in which the poem is read. At the center of these shifting levels, however, remains the figure of Horace himself, no longer a mere abstract will to artistry, but now marked by a rich set of historical determinations, an identifiable set of social connections, and a personal history which at once is derived from the text and provides the paradigm under which it becomes intelligible. Turning, then, to the “Hymn to Mercury,” one last important question remains: what purpose is served by placing a strictly literary (i.e. having no connection to actual cultic practice) hymn to Mercury in this prominent position in the collection? Or more specifically, why Mercury? One answer is that Mercury as inventor of the lyre is a god of poetry and of culture generally (1.10.6 and 3.11.1–4). Horace thus addresses him as “Mercuri, facunde nepos Atlantis, / qui feros cultus


hominum recentum/ voce formasti…” [“Mercury, eloquent grandson of Atlas, you who civilized the wild ways of primitive men by giving them speech”]. Likewise, through his equation with Hermes, Mercury was commonly related to the Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of writing and grammar. By the same token, Faunus, the son of Mercury, was also directly connected to poetry both in the mythological tradition and in the Odes themselves (Putnam 1974b:215–17; Neumeister 1976:187; Cremona 1982:124; Voit 1982:487–88, 497; Johnson 1982:48). Thus in 2.13, where Horace recounts his run-in with the tree, from which he later credits Faunus with saving him (2.17), the incident introduces a vision of Sappho and Alcaeus. Faunus also appears in poem 1.17 where the god’s yearly progress from Arcadia to the Sabine farm is recounted, immediately before a strophe (1.17.13–14) recalling 3.4’s “vester, Camenae, vester in arduos tollor Sabinos” [“Yours, Muses, yours, I am carried to my farm in the Sabine hills”] (3.4.21–22), and which in turn precedes another evocation of archaic Greek lyric in the person of Anacreon. There follows a return to the wine metaphor in strophe 6, when Horace promises Tyndaris that she will sample pocula Lesbii— either “cups of Lesbia wine” or “wine drunk from Lesbian cups,” depending on whether the emphasis is placed on form or content—if she will only visit Horace on his Sabine farm, which in Satire 2.6 we are told Horace received from Mercury (Fraenkel 1957:205–7; Johnson 1982:140–42). Thus, as Kenneth Reckford notes, “It is not by chance that the god Mercury plays such a significant role in Horatian poetry. [He] perceived this god as a related being and grasped him as a felicitous symbol of his own kind” (1969:194). Yet it is not just because of Mercury’s relation to poetry and the arts that Horace chose to put 1.10 in this particular position in the collection. Other reasons can be cited. For example, 1.10 is the first hymn to appear in the Odes. It thus subtly recalls the Alexandrian edition of Alcaeus that began with the poem on which 1.10 is based (Santirocco 1986:21). This, however, is not the first poem in the collection to allude to Alcaeus’ hymn; that is 1.2, the poem in which Augustus is said to be a manifestation of Mercury. Poem 1.2 can also be thought of as a kind of hymn, although it lacks the traditional form, and as the first poem in the collection after the proem it too recalls the position of Alcaeus’ hymn. This relation between 1.2 and the hymn by Alcaeus, of course, only becomes apparent in retrospect. The reader must have read 1.10 before she/he can see this aspect of 1.2. It would seem, then, that if we want to discover the motivation behind 1.10, we must also understand its relation to 1.2. More specifically, we must


understand what this relation between Mercury and Augustus might mean to Horace himself. In this regard, a number of possible connections between Horace, Augustus, and Mercury can be found in poems throughout the collection. In 2.7, for example, Horace credits Mercury with saving him at the battle of Philippi (9–13). The context here is important, since Horace tells this story after welcoming back Pompeius, a friend from his youth who unlike Horace had continued his oppo sition to Octavian after the defeat of the Republican army. The parallel between Pompeius’ situation and that of Horace a few years earlier is explicit. Although both fought against Augustus at Philippi, Horace had since been rehabilitated, and Pompeius, having finally submitted to Augustus, was now to receive the same treatment. In another poem, 2.17, Horace labels himself a Mercurialis vir and credits Mercury’s son, Faunus, with having saved him from the tree, the story of which is told in 2.13. Poem 2.13 in turn also shares certain definite traits with 2.7, so that the falling tree and Horace’s being saved at the battle of Philippi both participate in the same matrix of concerns. Both are written in Alcaic strophes, both involve miraculous escapes from certain death through divine intervention, and both make open allusions to the archaic Greek poetry on which Horace so often bases his own. Finally, both of these miracles are, in turn, later credited to the Muses in 3.4, showing that what really saved Horace on both occasions was not Mercury or his son but poetry. Even here, though, it is not just poetry as an abstract aesthetic experience, but poetry in the context of a patronage system grounded in the new social and political realities of Rome. The chief difference between 2.7 and 2.13 then, as Santirocco notes, is that “in C. 2.7 the escape is from politics with a hint of the power of poetry, whereas in C. 2.13 the context is poetic with a hint of politics” (Santirocco 1986: 87–90; see also Neumeister 1976:186). The final clue to solving the riddle of the function of Mercury in the Odes is found in Satire 2.6.1–5, where Horace credits Mercury with having provided the Sabine farm. The connection between these various aspects of Mercury and how they relate Horace to both Maecenas and Augustus is not hard to find. Horace needed the Sabine farm precisely because he had fought on the wrong side at Philippi against Augustus. It was his poetry which saved him from the consequences of this act, and he received the farm because of his poetry (Commager 1967:171 n. 23; Neumeister 1976:191; see Rudd’s related argument, 1983:104).19 Other, more historically determined links between these poems and the figure of Mercury can also be found, beginning with poem 2.17.


Thus while Fraenkel argues that Horace’s reference to his being a Mercurialis vir represents nothing more than Horace’s catering to Maecenas’ astrological beliefs, such a reading does not exclude that the same poem could also participate in the overall matrix of concerns which I have just outlined. Indeed, this reading reinforces such an interpretation. For, as Ludwig Voit points out, Mercury in his astrological aspect is responsible for “orators, philosophers, architects, and musicians.” Furthermore, Fraenkel’s reading also ignores the presence of Faunus, who like Mercury, is suggestive of poetry, but played no role in astrology (Fraenkel 1957:164; Voit 1982:482; Santirocco 1986:104, 158). Mercurialisvir, however, would also have had another sense to most Roman readers, that of “merchant,” since Mercury was the god of trade and commerce, as well as of thievery and of passage from the realm of the living to that of the dead. His province was, in fact, the entire realm of exchange whether verbal, monetary, or metaphysical. Mercurialis thus appears in Satire 2.3 as the cognomen of a successful merchant, Damasippus, who went bankrupt (25–27) (Putnam 1974b:215; Voit 1982:484, 490). While Horace is in large part being ironic in this allusion to Mercury’s more mercenary aspect, it should be noted that Mercury, as the inventor of the lyre and writing, was also responsible for Horace’s merces (“wage, income, rent”) in the form of the Sabine farm. This mercantile aspect of the god also plays an important role in the vision of Augustus as Mercury in 1.2, where his twin aspects as both the god of trade and the patron of eloquence come together in the image of a beneficent ruler who will bring peace to Rome after decades of turmoil. Thus, Horace begins 1.2 with a series of images describing natural disasters, metaphorical storms of civil strife, and impending foreign conflicts. He then asks what god can he call upon to save the city from disaster. The answer of course is Mercury in the form of Augustus. In this context, as Fraenkel notes, Mercury is Augustus’ ideal counterpart (Fraenkel 1957:247–49; Cremona 1982:124–25; Voit 1982: 490–93). The comparison, however, is not quite that simple. Augustus was “the restorer” of the republic, but he was also the faction leader who had avenged the assassination of his uncle, and who along with Marc Antony and Lepidus had placed on the proscription lists the names of hundreds of citizens who were to be executed and have their property confiscated. Consequently, even though Horace’s Odes were written some twenty years later when Octavian was no longer a young terrorist but Pater Patriae, it is possible to detect an admonitory note in the


circumlocution by which Mercury and Augustus are equated in 1.2: “almae/ filius Maiae patiens vocari/ Caesaris ultor” [“son of nurturing Maia who allows himself to be called the avenger of Caesar”] (42–44). The implicit message is clear. Augustus is to be a healer not an aggressor, to use reason not force. This same theme is later taken up in 3.4 where Horace specifically draws a connection between Augustus’ self-restraint and his accepting the counsel of the Muses, alluding thus to still another aspect of Mercury, and one which figures prominently in 1.10, that of the inventor of the lyre: “Vos Caesarem altum, militia simul/ fessas cohortis addidit oppidis,/ finire quaerentem labores,/ Pierio recreatis antro./ Vos lene consilium et datis et dato/ gaudetis, almae” [“You refresh great Caesar, when he has dispersed his exhausted men in various towns and seeks a respite from his labors in the Pierian cave. Oh nurturing Muses, you give gentle counsel and cause him to whom it is given to rejoice”] (3.4.37–42). The connection between 1.2 and 3.4 becomes even stronger in the lines which follow. Here Horace recounts the Giants’ assault on Olympus and how Jupiter repelled them.20 The lesson he draws is clear. The giants had great strength, but that was all. They lacked precisely that lene consilium [“gentle counsel”] which the Muses, and implicitly Horace, provide: “Vis consili expers mole ruit sua” [“Force untempered by counsel falls beneath its own might”] (3.4.65). As Commager writes: The line is at once the poem’s official moral and an epitaph for the giants…. Where the Olympians affirm a stable order (45–49), their opponents threaten an unnatural confusion. Uprooting mountains and forests in their struggle (51–56), they represent the same disruptive force as did the rain, hail, and floods of C. 1.2. (Commager 1967:199–207; see also Fraenkel 1957:281–82; Holoka 1976:43; Babcock 1979:7; Cremona 1982:125) Mercury in 1.2 represents Caesar, not as he is, but as he should be. And the way he reaches that plane is by listening to the leneconsilium of the almae Musae, the same Muses who earlier in the collection in the guise of Mercury or Faunus are credited with saving Horace from the battle of Philippi (2.7) or from the tree on his Sabine farm (2.13 and 2.17). Consequently, Mercury as the god of exchange, of discourse, of free passage from one world to the next comes to stand not just for the lyre, nor for the benefits Horace reaps from it, but for the total realm of


poetry in a Roman context, for its ability to modulate from public to private and back again. Horace would not have had his parva rura were it not for Mercury, for his Graia Camena, his alma Musa. And the cultivation of the Muse presumes the quiet and isolation, the withdrawal into selfhood and the refining of the aesthetic will which the Sabine farm in both its literal and figurative aspects provides. By the same token, this inward turning to produce a discourse which ultimately leaves its private enclave and enters the public realm without becoming the discourse of the state or its apparatus requires that set of social, technological, and political conditions which were present for a brief instant in Latin literature’s Golden Age. It requires that the poet and his audience be literate, that the form of the poetic collection be established as a normative mode of poetic reception, and that there exist a class of people with sufficient standing within the society to be able to command the community’s attention while still speaking in their own person. Finally, to produce the Odes themselves, it requires the disruption in normal social relations that the Roman revolution produced, so that the relations of the individual to the collectivity are in flux and the line between public and private is no longer clear. To rebel against politics itself became a political move, yet there was no longer any meaningful political life to engage in. All of these phenomena, as well as their multiple mediations, are included in the figure of Mercury. For not only does he metamorphose into other figures—the Muses, Augustus, Faunus—but he also displays a variety of aspects within his own godhead. He is poetry, oratory, commerce, psychopomp, the messenger of the gods, and the concrete embodiment of a fusion of Greek and Latin poetic and religious traditions. At the center of all this, however, remains the figure of Horace, and it is only through him and the projection of his ego and experience that we can begin to bring these various realms together. This ego, however, because it is endlessly fragmented and endlessly recontextualized within a variety of possible trajectories of reading, can never be fully present. It can never dictate a single univocal interpretation either of the individual poems or of the collection as a whole. Rather the lyric consciousness of the poet exists as a series of possible narrative sequences which together reflect and refract a finite series of historical, political, and personal issues in an infinite variety of ways. What emerges from this analysis is a complex, self-reflexive consciousness, which exists as a variety of possible temporal sequences that are both endless and recursive. Thus we see that ultimately the


complex social and technological processes involved in the transition from orality to literacy, and from literacy to the birth of the lyric collection, have not produced merely a change of expressive media but a fundamentally new genre, making possible a fundamentally new poetic experience which could not have existed before. It is not simply the form that has changed, but the content of form itself. It is not that a new mode of expression has been created, but expression itself has been forever changed.

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9 CONCLUSION: OF WRITINGS AND SUBJECTS

Thus the word teaches LAU-d and RE-vrence, whenever anyone calls you, O Lady worthy of all reverence and honor; except that perhaps Apollo is incensed that any morTA-l tongue should come presumptuous to speak of his eternally green boughs. (Petrarch 1976: Rime Sparse 5.9–14) The contamination by writing, the fact or the threat of it are denounced in the accents of the moralist or preacher by the linguist from Geneva…. This tone began to make itself heard when, at the moment of already tying the epistémè and the logos within the same possibility, the Phaedrus denounced writing as the intrusion of an artful technique, a forced entry of a totally original sort, an archetypal violence: eruption of the outside within the inside, breaching into the interiority of the soul, the living self-presence of the soul within the true logos, the help that speech lends to itself. (Derrida 1976:34) In many ways, the history of the study of the lyric genre is at one with the history of the role of writing in the production of truth, as described above by Derrida. Lyric has traditionally been presented as spontaneous, as essentially akin to music in its direct expression of inner truths, and as the unmediated expression of authentic selfhood. Writing has at best been a vulgar necessity for preserving the lyric moment once the inspiration has passed. It has never been seen as directly constitutive of lyric consciousness. This popular if no longer completely scholarly definition of lyric, which still echoes in discussions of poetic voice,1 is, I would argue,


produced by the rough suturing together of two different moments in the history of Western poetry. One half of this suturing operation is represented by the world of Greek melic poetry, particularly its monodic strains. This poetry, like that of the troubadours in the Middle Ages, is in fact essentially musical. Indeed these monodic poems—i.e. those of Sappho and Alcaeus to name only the ones discussed in this book— were termed lyric in Greece because they were written in meters meant to be sung to the lyre. Yet as we have seen, these poems do not present the same sort of temporally complex and highly self-reflexive images of subjectivity which we have come to associate with lyric. Rather, as I have argued at some length in Chapter 5, from the ancient point of view, the difference between monody and the more obviously public subgenre of choral lyric was as much a matter of the circumstances of performance as it was a question of the essential nature of the poetry performed. This point is crucial. For, with the difference between the supposedly public nature of choral lyric and the private, confessional nature of monody reduced to a question of performative contingencies, so that the same poem can be sung in one fashion one time and in another another, the distinction which first allowed monody to appear as spontaneous romantic song dissolves into a false problem created by nineteenth century philology. In addition, the world of monody itself is internally divided. Archilochus is often considered a monodist, and is indeed so labeled here, because he (or at least the tradition of Archilochian verse) produces first person poetry for a single speaker. Yet as we argued in Chapters 2 and 3, he is to be regarded as an iambic and not a melic monodist. He does not practice lyric as the Greeks defined it, either in terms of meter or method of performance. Iambic poetry was recited by rhapsodes, rather than sung to the lyre. Likewise, the role of the poetic subject in iambic poetry, that is, its status as a trickster figure occupying the liminal position between philos and ekhthros, between member of the community and hostile outsider, is fundamentally different from that of the subject in Pindar’s and Sappho’s verse, the task of which is to render intelligible the contingencies of individual experience by interpreting them through the paradigms of communally sanctioned mythic lore. Thus the first half of the material used in this suturing operation, constituting the traditional, popular understanding of lyric, embodies the musical performative element, but not the aspect of profound interiority normally associated with the genre. The orally performed poetry of the Greek tradition presents, as we have argued, communal and

CONCLUSION: OF WRITINGS AND SUBJECTS 169

paradigmatic forms of subjectivity which meet specific generic and subgeneric criteria. This poetry performs a necessary function in the social and ideological life of the community by preserving, presenting, illustrating, and often problematizing the socially constituted norms of conduct necessary to the group’s continuing cultural identity. The remaining half of this rough piece of intellectual stitchery which makes up the common definition of lyric is the highly interiorized and temporally complex poetry first illustrated by the Carmina of Catullus. It is this poetry which comes closest to the contemporary understanding of the genre. For while the ritual gesture towards music and the voice is often invoked in modern discussions, it is also recognized that these attributes are no longer a functional part of lyric verse, a fact often noted with much nostalgia. Musicality, then, is not understood as an actual, empirical element in lyric. Rather, it functions as a marker, signifying spontaneous, unmediated emotional display, a probing of one’s innermost thoughts and feelings, unaffected by the artificialities of selfconscious technique. Ironically, the poetry that most nearly approximates this ideal of “lyricality” (witness Havelock’s The LyricGenius of Catullus) is that which I have argued most decisively relies on technological mediation, the poetry of the lyric collection. Thus the establishment of both Catullan and Horatian lyric consciousness is, as I have shown in Chapters 4, 6, and 8, a function of the complex temporal relations between the individual poems in their collections, relations which are built up in the process of reading and rereading. In each instance, recurrent themes and formal elements in those collections produce complex images of consciousness that return again and again to certain obsessive topics, examine them from multiple perspectives, and then recycle the moments of their own, individual experiences—portrayed within the collections—as paradigms of the intelligibility of that experience itself. To recall the terms introduced at the beginning of Chapter 4, the same poems and passages serve as both distributional and integrational elements within the collections and their constructions of lyric subjectivity. It is thus writing and the collection that make the lyric consciousness possible in those societies in which the necessary social conditions (outlined in Chapter 7) obtain. This is perhaps nowhere made clearer than in this chapter’s first epigraph from Petrarch. Here, in one of the opening sonnets of what clearly stands as one of the great lyric collections in Western poetry, the poet, in a grammatological meditation on the Latin version of his beloved Laura’s name, Laureta, simultaneously signals his commitment to a true speech and to one


which can only come into being through the mediation of the letter. For in his games with Laura’s name, the poet not only acknowledges a playful awareness of the priority of the material signifier, but also alludes to the name’s phonetic resemblance to the laurel, the tree of Apollo, god of poetry. Apollo in turn stands as the concrete embodiment of the classical poetic tradition for this early Renaissance poet, a tradition the poet knows only through writing, through the laborious process of copying manuscripts by hand that preserved the classical literary tradition for over a thousand years and made these poems possible. Moreover, Apollo’s relation to Laura and the laurel is itself drawn from Ovid’s rendition of the story of Daphne and Apollo in the Metamorphoses, which is specifically alluded to both in Petrarch’s next poem (6) and throughout the collection. Thus, the archetypical love story of post-classical lyric is found to be thoroughly structured by writing: through the play of the material signifier as manifested in the passage quoted above; through the intertextual relation to ancient poetry subtending the collection as a whole; and through the intratextual relations between the poems as demonstrated by poem 5’s relation to poem 6’s evocation of the Apollo and Daphne story. Few would dispute Petrarch’s status as a lyric poet, but that status, I would argue, has very little to do with spontaneity or “musicality.” To return, then, to the passage from Derrida cited at the beginning of this chapter, writing in the history of the study of lyric has always had the status of an intruder, “breaching into the interiority of the soul, the living self-presence of the soul within the true logos.” The expulsion of writing from lyric, in turn, as I argued at the beginning of Chapter 2, is part and parcel of a strong ideological investment in the metaphysics of the autonomous individual as the true telos of historical development, a narrative which finds its most masterful articulation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, but whose latter-day bards include scholars such as Snell, Jaeger, and others too numerous to mention. I have argued that neither the lyric collection nor the more public poetry of oral performance can be seen as pure and unmediated. Rather each is inhabited by its own particular set of contingencies, whether it be those of performance, in a largely pre-literate society, or those of the lyric collection, in a society featuring a class of individuals able to command the attention of their fellows without being seen primarily as representatives of their class or the state. These different sets of contingencies, different contexts of enunciation, produce different figurings of the subject. The dialogic situations these subjects inhabit are radically heterogeneous; consequently, so are their internal


constitutions. Each of these genres gives rise to a different “writing” of the subject, which is neither spontaneous and unmediated nor pure. Writing, thus, in the sense of a fatal fall into mediation and the lack of self-presence has always been a part of the poetry of the subject. It is the need to deny this fall into contingency which has produced the rough suturing together of these two disparate phenomena—oral song and lyric collections—into an uneasy unity. Future directions for the work begun in this volume would essentially be three, two synchronic and one diachronic, all of which have been alluded to at various points throughout the text. First, on the synchronic level, using the concepts developed here on the nature of oral poetry and the differences between Greek melic and iambic verse, it should be possible with greater precision now to examine these bodies of poetry in depth; to better distinguish the forms of subjectivity they imply; and to discriminate between the poetic subjectivities projected by different practitioners of the same form. One obvious question that comes to mind would be whether melic and iambic poetry in archaic Greece constitute two separate genres occurring in fundamentally different dialogic situations or merely two different subgenres, implying the use of different formal and mythic elements in the same essential dialogic situation. At this point, I would argue for the former, inasmuch as Archilochus adopts the persona of a character in a traditional mythic narrative (identified with that of the trickster Odysseus), and from this perspective narrates his participation in certain dramatic actions such as those recounted in the “Cologne Epode.” Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, on the other hand, invoke the authority of a variety of mythological precedents and socially sanctioned norms in order to provide general paradigms of communal intelligibility for the contingencies of individual experience (not always represented as their own).2 Greek poetry, however, is not the sole field calling for more investigation. A second synchronic area, Latin love elegy, also demands additional research. Here we are dealing with a distinctive subgenre, constituted not only by formal identity in metrical practice, but also by a standard mythology of recurring themes: the beloved as domina; the lover as both servus amoris [“slave of love”] and praeceptoramoris [“professor of love”]; the avowed rejection of normative Roman moral and political values; the adherence to an Alexandrian aesthetics; and the systematic rejection of epic poetry. Nonetheless, each poet manages, in what today are generally admitted to be carefully planned poetic collections,3 to create the projection of a unique subjectivity whose multiple narrative possibilities are only able to be reconstructed from a


careful reading and rereading of the collections themselves. Yet while a great deal of scholarly work has been done on the architectural arrangements featured in these collections, these discussions generally confine themselves to descriptions of structure. When questions of interpretation are broached, they are limited to how one poem’s “meaning” is discernible from its relation to others in the collection. Little work has been done on how the arrangement actually affects the reading process, and even less on the multitemporal patterns of reception the arrangement engenders in the course of interpretation, and the internally articulated images of subjectivity these patterns, in turn, produce. In this light, applications of the procedures advocated in this book would seem to recommend several lines of inquiry. In the case of Tibullus, two specific sets of questions present themselves. First, given the elegist’s complex temporal technique within individual poems— allowing one set of images to succeed another in almost a dream state, so that there is less a set of well defined incidents than a series of intertwined associations—how are we to interpret the temporal relations between poems? Should each poem’s series of associations be interpreted as a unified whole, which only relates to other poems in the collection as one totality to another, or can groups of images or verbal themes be detached from their immediate contexts and compared with one another? I would suggest a middle course, relying on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams as a theoretical model. Recurrent images, to the extent that they appear within the framework of the collection, can be said to originate from a single lyric consciousness and thus can and should be compared with one another. Their specific meanings, however, will never be ascertainable outside the context of their immediate appearance. The hermeneutic relationship between individual examples of recurring thematic elements (the myth of the Golden Age, the poet’s relation to his patron Messalla, etc.) is thus overdetermined by the material context of those elements’ poetic form, that is, their appearance in a planned collection (Bakhtin 1986:92). Individual images, motifs, and words will gain their true value only when compared with others bearing a distinct family resemblance. At the same time, that comparison is only meaningful in the context of the significance accruing to them at their moment of enunciation. Tibullus thus engenders an endless oscillation between the particular and the general, which creates ever more complex sets of relations both within and between the individual poems. This phenomenon would appear to be particularly acute within the Tibullan corpus given the ambiguous


temporal relations between the parts of individual poems. The same problem is raised to a higher order when we consider the relation between the poetic egos depicted in the first and second books of the Tibullan oeuvre. A second set of questions would examine the social constitution of the Tibullan subject. It is at this point that the pastoral thematics of Tibullus’ work become a pressing issue, which ultimately cannot be separated from the question of his relation to his patron Messalla. Tibullus’ refusal to engage explicitly the political questions of the day, except in terms of the most general ethical topics, appears to parallel his poetic theme of withdrawal from urban life to the pastoral landscape of the country, as well as his avoidance of the officially sponsored poetic circle of Maecenas (and implicitly Augustus) in favor of the independent patronage of Messalla. As in Catullus, it is this rejection of the public realm that allows Tibullus’ poetic world to come into being. Nonetheless, this consciously articulated absence—the world of warfare, politics, and commerce— always threatens to reemerge in the Tibullan poetic consciousness and disrupt the poet’s much sought after tranquility. In contrast, the political constitution of the Propertian subject takes the form of a more explicitly articulated rejection of the political realm, thus implying the subject’s necessary engagement with it. Propertius’ elaborate recusationes (2.1, 3.8), deliberate evocations of the horrors of the civil wars (1.21 and 1.22), celebration of the repeal of Augustan moral reform legislation (2.7), and deliberate juxtaposition of the phrases “Arma deus Caesar dites meditatur ad Indos” [“Caesar, the god, contemplates taking up arms against the wealth of India”] and “Pacis Amor deus est, pacem veneramur amantes” [“Love is the god of peace, we lovers worship peace”] (3.4.1 and 3.5.1) reveal his profound and problematic implication in the political. His stance is always explicitly related to that which it strives to expel in order to constitute its own unique specificity. Thus when the poet in the fourth book all but drops the subject of love and turns his attention to political and mythological subjects, it is in fact no real surprise. The public engagement of the poet has been part of his lyric consciousness all along.4 In the case of Ovid, the social constitution of his poetic subjectivity is profoundly intertwined with the way in which he refashioned the Amores from an initial episodic series of five books into a single coherent collection of three (McKeown 1987:90–103). In his work, the rejection of public life has become the contempt of the political (1.15.1– 8), a fact which paradoxically results in its omnipresence. Reduced to


the choice between participating in Augustus’ system or refusing public life altogether, Ovid depicts himself as choosing the latter. Yet in a society that no longer offered any real space for sanctioned opposition, the political seeps into even those chambers most sealed against it. Ovid’s rejection of politics, then, is a political choice. In many ways, Ovid’s Amores are a continuing meditation on the subject’s position in a variety of games of power and domination: social, sexual, military, literary, and legal. Beginning with 1.2’s usurping of the imagery of the triumph and continuing with 1.3’s use of the thematics of booty, enslavement, and sexual predation (see 1.3.1 praedata [“having been taken as booty”], picking up 1.2.19’s praeda [“booty”]; 1.3.5 deserviat [“be a slave to”] which recalls 1.2.18’s servitium [“slavery”]; as well as the stories of Jupiter’s rapes of Io and Europa in 1.3.21–24), Ovid tells a series of tales in which at one moment he is subjected (1.2), at another he is subjecting (1.7),5 and at still another he is pleading with a slave, only to then invoke the power of his superior social rank (2.2 and 2.3). Throughout the collection, he employs the language of right and law (manus 1.4.39–40; ius 1.4.63– 64; 1.7.29–30, etc.) to assert his claims on Corinna, while denying those of her vir (her “man” or “husband”), and appropriating the moral and ideological authority of the soldier (1.9) for his less than reputable exploits in love. Moreover, each of these moments of ideological intervention contextualizes and reinterprets all the others. The elucidation of their interaction, throughout the whole of the Amores, is a task that remains to be undertaken. Finally, it was in Ovid that the space of lyric—opened by Catullus and elaborated by Horace—comes to closure. The poems of exile demonstrate with clarity and brutality the way in which the ideological opening that produced lyric subjectivity was absorbed back into the authoritarian structures of Roman society. This final act in the history of the elegiac subgenre demonstrates the paradox that the private world of lyric is always dependent on a public space. Thus Ovid, who is in some ways the least politically involved of the elegists, ironically is the most political. His early love poetry is suffused with those images of power and domination that we associate with the imperial social world in which he lived, and the poetry of exile is all the more thoroughly politicized, due both to the constant necessity of addressing the poet’s persecutors and to the latter’s own stony silence. The death of lyric in the ancient world brings us to the last area of further research pointed to by this volume, the one I have termed diachronic. The task, in this case, would be to apply the model


elaborated here to the poetry of the post-classical period and to determine what alterations that application would necessitate. An indication of how this operation could be carried out can be found both in the brief reading of Petrarch performed earlier in this chapter and in the outline found in Chapter 1 of how the findings of research into medieval oral poetry corroborates my work on archaic Greek verse. A tentative effort in this direction has been made in my readings of Sidney and Baudelaire, published elsewhere (Miller 1991; 1993b). Nonetheless, what is required is a full-scale investigation, taking up the history of lyric from the end of the Augustan era and tracing both the development of troubadour song in the Middle Ages and the emergence of the sonnet sequence as the dominant form of the lyric collection in the Renaissance and beyond. This is a project which I hope will come to fruition in the not too distant future. In the end, there are many more things I could have mentioned, and many things I should have. The nature of all such essays in literary history is to be tentative and provisional. If in the process of writing this book I have helped to clarify the nature of what is meant by lyric, to establish the constitutive roles of writing and a discrete set of social conditions in the production of lyric consciousness, and to argue the case for an open and historical genre theory, applicable both in this field and others, then my labor has not been in vain.


APPENDIX I

The following texts and translations of Sappho are all taken from Campbell (1982). 1

178 APPENDIX I

Ornate-throned immortal Aphrodite, wile-weaving daughter of Zeus, I entreat you: do not overpower my heart, mistress, with ache and anguish, but come here, if ever in the past you heard my voice from afar and acquiesced and came, leaving your father’s golden house, with chariot yoked: beautiful swift sparrows whirring fast-beating wings brought you above the dark earth down from heaven through the midair, and soon they arrived; and you, blessed one, with a smile on your immortal face asked what was the matter with me this time and why I was calling this time and what in my maddened heart I most wished to happen for myself: “Whom am I to persuade this time to lead you back to her love? Who wrongs you Sappho? If she runs away soon she shall pursue; if she does not accept gifts, why, she shall give them instead; and if she does not love, soon she shall love even against her will.” Come to me now again and deliver me from oppressive anxieties; fulfill all that my heart longs to fulfill, and you yourself be my fellow-fighter. 16

APPENDIX I 179

Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves. It is perfectly easy to make this understood by everyone: for she who far surpassed humankind1 in beauty, Helen, left her most noble husband and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all for her child or dear parents, but (love) led her astray…lightly…(and she?) has reminded me now of Anactoria who is not here; I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians’ chariots and armed infantry. 31

180 APPENDIX I

He seems as fortunate as the gods to me, the man who sits opposite you and listens nearby to your sweet voice and lovely laughter.Truly that sets my heart trembling in my breast. For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying. But all can be endured, since…even a poor man….

APPENDIX II

The text of Callimachus’ eleventh epigram is taken from Page’s Epigrammata Graeca. The translation is from Brooks Otis’ Vergil:A Study in Civilized Poetry (Otis 1963:102–3), except for the final line where I have chosen a more literal version.

Swore Callignotus to his Ionis Never to leave her for boy or for girl. He swore, but oaths of lovers, it is well said Do not reach up to the ears of the gods. Now he’s inflamed by a boy. Of the poor girl Ionis, as of the Megarians at Delphi, there is no count nor reckoning. “Catullus 51” Ille mi par esse deo videtur, ille, si fas est, superare divos, qui sedens adversus identidem te spectat et audit dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te, Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi

182 APPENDIX II

… lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus flamma demanat, sonitu suopte tintinant aures, gemina teguntur lumina nocte. otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est: otio exsultas nimiumque gestis: otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes That man seems to me to be equal to a god. That man, if it is lawful to say so, seems to surpass the gods, who, sitting in front of you, again and again watches and hears you sweetly laughing, a deed which steals all sensibility from miserable me. For as soon as I have set eyes upon you, Lesbia, nothing is left to me…. But my tongue is paralyzed, a thin flame seeps beneath my limbs, my ears ring with their own sound, my eyes are shrouded in night. Idleness, Catullus, is bad for you. In idleness you run riot and act to excess. Idleness in the past destroyed both kings and wealthy cities.

NOTES

1 THE SUBJECT OF THE TEXT 1 On literary form and understanding as necessarily temporal in nature see Roberts (1989:126–27). He is working from de Man’s “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism” (1983:20–35). 2 On the validity of this definition of orality, see Finnegan (1977:21); Rösler (1983:9–10); Zumthor (1983:1); Kay (1991:133); Thomas (1992: 6, 38). 3 See Chapter 7 for a fuller discussion of why the Hellenistic kingdoms produced no substantial body of lyric poetry as we have defined it. 4 We are not here speculating about the ontological nature of the image of consciousness projected by the lyric collection, nor about whether it is a mere epiphenomenon of certain material and semiotic structures, or somehow corresponds to a reality of the self which pre-exists the collection. Rather, we are interested in how certain forms of self-relation and relation to the community are re-presented by this poetic genre, as opposed to those other forms of self-relation and relation to the community which are found in other genres. For the notion of studying the history of forms of self-relation as depicted by certain types of discourse and texts, see Foucault (1986a:6). 5 On the distinction between choral lyric and monody, see Chapter 5. Note also the following important formulation by Edmunds (1988:91): “If, as is widely held, the poems of Theognis were recited at symposia, then each recitation was a reenactment of that role. Someone would take it upon himself to re-present the teaching of Theognis. Under such conditions of performance, what seems to us the banality of much of the gnomic advice would not have been felt. What to us are merely gnomes would have been, in the sympotic setting, the reaffirmations of certain reactions to certain political misfortunes or necessities. Indeed, it is only the impersonation of the role of Theognis defined in his poetry that can

184 NOTES

free the symposiasts from the suspicion of brainless repetition. The poetry of Theognis is hardly personal in the sense in which it is usually so described. This poetry defines a highly generalized self that is available for many men in the city who will need to reassert this claim to being the esthloi, the true/noble ones.” 6 Compare Riffaterre (1978:4–6): “As he progresses through the text the reader remembers what he has just read and modifies his understanding of it in light of what he is now decoding. As he works forward from start to finish, he is reviewing, comparing backwards.” 7 For a discussion of Pindar’s supposed obscurities, see Chapter 5. 8 See also Havelock (1982:186): “a nonliterate culture is not necessarily a primitive one…. Once this proposition is taken seriously, one has to ask: in the absence of documentation in a preliterate society, what was the mechanism…for the storage of…information—that is, for the continuous transmission of that body of religious, political, legal, and familial regulation which already constituted…the Greek way of life? This information could be carried only in the form of statements imprinted upon the memories of individual brains of living Greeks. How, then, could these statements preserve themselves without alteration, and so retain their authenticity? The solution…is supplied if they are cast in metrical form, for only as language is controlled by rhythm can it be repeated with anything like the uniformity that is available in documentation. The shape of the words and their place in the syntax are fixed by the rhythmic order.” Havelock’s work, of course, is not without flaws. As Rose has recently remarked, “his analysis, for all its importance, runs the risk of a certain undialectical technologism in attributing…sweeping consequences solely to a development [i.e. literacy] that is itself as much a symptom of change as a cause” (1992:116 n. 44; see also Thomas 1989: 17 n. 2; 1992: 17). The present study, while granting an important role to the development of the technology, not only of literacy but also of the poetry book, in the production of lyric consciousness, will also rigorously maintain that these technologies, while necessary, are never sufficient causes for the emergence of the lyric genre. (But see Havelock 1982:57; and 1986:68, where he demonstrates a greater awareness of these issues than his critics often concede to him.) Thus Chapter 7 of this book examines the question of why the highly literate culture of Alexandria, while producing poetry books, produced no great lyric collections. At the same time, the desire to avoid an overly simplistic technologism can also lead to a devaluing of the importance of the means of literary production in making possible certain kinds of poetic experiences. Different material practices do produce different effects, as the computer revolution in our own time has made abundantly clear, although those effects never occur in a vacuum. In this light, Havelock’s work continues

NOTES 185

to mark a pivotal juncture in the study of Greek culture (Gentili 1988: x; Cole in Gentili 1988: xii-xiii; Foley 1988:62; Thomas 1989:3; Lentz 1989:11–34; Kurke 1991:88; Svenbro 1993:1). For more on the continuing importance of mechanical causality, even in highly sophisticated cultural models, see Jameson (1981:25–26). 9 For an analogous oral tradition, which is still active, see Opland’s very informative discussion of Zulu and Xhosa poetry in Southern Africa and its resemblance to what is known about pre-literate Indo-European verse (1980:19–27). 10 Among the more important of these studies, which do not concern the authors dealt with here, are Dawson (1950:130–49), Bellenger (1981: 35– 46), and Mossop (1961). See also Arethusa 13.1 (1980) for a special issue devoted entirely to the importance of the poetry collection in Augustan Rome. 11 This is not to say that the scriptoria attached to monasteries did not create collections of poetry. They were not, however, the kind of collections we are examining but anthologies of favorite poems taken from the works of classical antiquity. Indeed, as Janet Coleman has pointed out (1981:171–72, 177), the existence of one of the most common types of these anthologies, the florilegia, far from disputing the thesis that medieval culture was a predominantly oral one, actually reinforces it, since it points to a culture which regarded discourse as being composed of a series of traditional formulae, substantially analogous to those found in Homeric epic and Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. Later, anthologies of Provençal, goliardic, and medieval French lyrics were collected, but almost always after the fact by scribes and jongleurs, not by original authors intent upon producing a consciously articulated lyric collection. See Zumthor, Essai de Poétique Médiévale (1972:41). One well known example of such an anthology in English is the Harely Lyrics, which appears to date from 1340 and exemplifies, according to Coleman, “no unifying principle of selection beyond the personal whim of the compiler” (79). See Auerbach (1965:267, 279, 288).

2 EPOS AND IAMBOS ORARCHILOCHUS MEETS THE WOLFMAN 1 On the widespread influence of this position, see Russo (1973–74:709); Johnson (1982:74–75); Fowler (1987:7); Nagy (1990a:2); and Kurke (1991:164–65). Although questioned today, it remains a force in shaping the questions we ask about lyric and its history. See Kay (1991:3) for an explanation of how an analogous claim for the “discovery of the individual” in the scholarship on medieval lyric was

186 NOTES

2

3

4

5

6

7

common until recently. The parallels between medieval and archaic lyric are striking not only in themselves, but also in their scholarship. Jaeger shows a good knowledge of Hegel and of the Phenomenology, not only in his direct mentions of the philosopher, but also in his description of the dialectic between subject and object in Archilochus (1945:117, 152, 282, 304, 404, 435–36 n. 3, 464 n. 63). Fränkel exhibits similar tendencies in his theory of historical progress (1975:133). See Rose (1992:23 n. 41) citing Fowler (1987:4) for more on the essentially Hegelian viewpoint of Fränkel and Snell. This position is profoundly anti-materialist, even spiritualist in essence. It envisions subjectivity as an isolatable essence which can be extracted from the material and social circumstances in which it finds itself. Consequently, it is in its most important aspects deeply ahistorical, for it argues that all subjects are essentially the same and that only accidental or contingent circumstances change. It is also imperialist, because it implies my consciousness can put itself in the place of any other and judge accordingly. The first to advance this thesis was Dover in a review of Treu’s VonHomer zur Lyric (1957:322–23), “We naturally treat extant lyric as a representative sample of lyric from the seventh century onwards—we have no choice—but we dismiss too readily the possibility that it may be equally representative of the unwritten lyric of the preceding centuries.” See also Russo (1973–74:709); Whitman in the foreword to Nagy’s Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (1974: x–xi); and Nagy (1979:71–72). For Parry, see The Making of Homeric Verse: TheCollected Papers of Milman Parry (1971), especially “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I. Homer and Homeric Style” (266–324) and “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. II. The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry” (325–64). See, for example, Johnson (1982:37), “At the heart of Greek lyric, and of its beginnings with Archilochus, is the imagination of personality,” or Easterling and Barron (1989:76), where they say Archilochus “is the first Greek to take his material almost entirely from what he claims to be his own experience and emotions rather than from the stock of traditions,” although no such self-consciously programmatic statement is to be found in the corpus and they list no examples. Compare also Latacz (1985:69). Fowler (1987:4): “Generations of students and teachers have regarded it as axiomatic that human beings ‘discovered the mind’ during Archilochus’ lifetime.” Finley (1970:135–36): “Archilochus…. The variety of his metrical forms indicates that behind him lay a long experience in popular song, which coexisted with the epic tradition. This kind of poetry the world over is customarily linked with an occasion, whether a drinking party, a village harvest dance or a great public festival, and more often than not it is also

NOTES 187

8

9 10 11 12

13

14

15 16

17

linked with song…. The occasion helped determine not only the style and subject-matter but also the conventions appropriate to particular kinds of poetry.” See also Abrahams (1981:193–96); Nagy (1990a:8–9, 362–63 n. 127); and Kurke (1991:1). See Nagy (1990a:19–26, 29, 53–55, 363), where he argues that by the sixth century rhapsodes were performing hexameter, iambic and elegiac poetry from memory. They thus represent a departure from the earlier period of oral recomposition and improvisation, but this process of canonization, which Nagy sees as part of the increasingly pan-Hellenic nature of the poetic tradition, does not imply the use of written copies. “There is no compelling reason to believe that the medium of writing had anything to do with the tradition of the rhapsodes. In fact there is positive evidence that their mnemonic techniques were independent of writing.” Snell himself concedes that the ancients recognized no such distinction (1953:45). On dithyramb and the cult of Dionysus, see Pickard-Cambridge (1962: 1– 7). The translation is by Cole from Gentili (1988:37). “Il laisse…hors du champ toute poésie non representative, et donc par excellence ce que nous appelons la poésie lyrique.” All translations of Genette are mine. For a parallel case found in the troubadour lyric of Guillaume IX d’Aquitaine, see Nichols (1991:153): “Poetic voice, in Guillaume’s lyrics, thematizes the emotional range of desire as a correlative of political and secular power.” “De toute evidence, Aristote ne fait aucune difference entre le niveau de dignité (ou de moralité) des personnages et celui des actions, les considerant sans doute comme indissociablement liés—et ne traitant en fait les personnages que comme des supports d’action.” For the generality of this view in archaic poetry, see Gentili (1984:57). In many ways this conflict is reminiscent of that in the early modern period between the noblesse de robe and the noblesse d’épée. For a general discussion of the role of the landed aristocracy in ideology and production throughout the ancient world, see de Sainte Croix (1989: 113– 33). On another level, Rose appears to have somewhat oversimplified the issue by implying that Theognis represents an aristocratic individual’s point of view. Nagy points out that the text of Theognis contains references to events too widespread in time to be encompassed by a single individual’s lifetime, and that not only does this corpus contain direct borrowings from other poets (i.e. Solon and Mimnernmus), but it also reflects the tradition of the lawgiver/poet as exemplified in figures like Solon, Lycurgus, and others from the broader Indo-European tradition. From these observations and from evidence of oral formulaic

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composition within the corpus, Nagy argues that the Theognidea represents not the work of a single individual, but a tradition of poetry which originated in Megara and then grew to pan-Hellenic status (Nagy 1985:33–36, 38–41; 1990a:368; see also Knox 1989b:96). For similarities between the Theognidea and Alcaic poetry, see Nagy (1985: 81 §79 n. 1). For more on Theognis’ poetry representing a panHellenically assumable subject position for a threatened aristocracy, see Chapter 1 of this book, note 5. 18 See Thalmann (1988:15) on “the Greek tendency to regard physical appearance as a correlate of moral worth, and to relate both to social class (aristocrats, of course, being both good and handsome)”; and Ong (1982:136). 19 See also Derrida: “the very idea of science was born in a certain epoch of writing…writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science but possibly its object—but first, as Husserl in particular pointed out in The Origin of Geometry, the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity. Before being its object, writing is the condition of the epistémè” (1976:27, as well as 88). Thomas (1992:22, 54–55; 1989:25–26, 33–34) has rightly criticized Havelock, Ong, and Goody and Watt for presenting an oversimplified picture of the effects of writing. She correctly points out the ethnocentric bias that all these writers exhibit in privileging alphabetic writing over other scripts, and demonstrates that the kind of abstract rationality we are discussing here cannot be a product of writing alone. She also criticizes the overly simplistic definition of cultures as either simply oral or literate. Nonetheless, she is careful to point out, “That is not to say that writing does not have certain advantages—advantages that enabled Goody to connect literacy with the development of rational thought. It is important not to go to the other extreme and imply that written communication offers no advantages at all.” In short, the relation of writing and other technologies to a given culture is always dialectical, and the privileging of either pole at the expense of the other leads to distortions. Perhaps Harris put it best when he said (1989:41), “One writer has pleasingly observed that the acquisition of literacy is like drinking a bottle of wine: the effects may be dramatic or insignificant, according to circumstances and the physiology and psychology of the individual. Anyway bottles of wine do sometimes have effects.” On the hazards of logocentrism and its corollary, phonocentrism, see Derrida (1976:9–10, 25–26, 83–84, 91). 20 See also Havelock (1982:8): “A visible artifact…could be rearranged, reordered, and rethought to produce forms of statement and types of discourse not previously available…. If it were possible to designate the new discourse by any one word, the appropriate word would be conceptual. Nonliterate speech had favored discourse describing action;

NOTES 189

21

22

23

24

25 26

the postliterate altered the balance in favor of reflection. The syntax of Greek began to adapt to an increasing opportunity to state propositions in place of describing events”; and Goux (1990:172). Luria (1976): on the effects of literacy and cultural development on color and shape perception, see pp. 15–43; on the predominance of narrative, situational thinking over analytical and logical modes of thought, see pp. 49–77; on the inability to follow syllogistic reasoning or recognize abstract universals, see pp. 114–15; on the inability to pose hypothetical questions, see pp. 140–41; on the lack of a well defined concept of the self and the restructuring of consciousness that literate education produces, see pp. 148–59. A good summary statement of Luria’s results can be found on p. 98: “The material we examined demonstrates the modes of generalization that typify the thinking of people who have been shaped by social, economic, and cultural conditions unlike our own. The evidence assembled indicates that the processes used to render abstractions and generalizations does not assume an invariable form at all stages of mental growth. Such processes are themselves a product of socioeconomic and cultural development.” The book was published forty years after the original research was done because it was feared that its results might inflame nationalist passions. Kay, in the parallel case of troubadour lyric, argues that the subject position of the speaker is “dependent on [a] collective participation in the construction of meaning” in which the audience functions as “co-subjects with the singer.” What is produced is not an “individualized” but a “generalized” subjectivity whose “autobiography” is ultimately a “social experience” (1991:6, 161–62, 165, 167, 170). “Il faut se rappeller que…tout le vocabulaire des termes moraux est fortement impregné de valeurs non individuelles, mais relationnelles. Ce que nous prenons pour une terminologie psychologique, affective, morale, indique, en réalité, les relations de l’individu avec les membres de son groupe….” The translation is mine. I am not saying that individual moral qualities do not themselves reflect social values, but rather that they do so only through an elaborated concept of the individual and his or her unique interiority, which itself is dependent on a theoretically identifiable set of social, historical, and technical conditions. This and all further citations of the iambic poets are taken from West (1971: vol. I). The translation is from Lattimore (1960:2). “Il n’y a pas de raison de douter de la mésaventure d’Archiloque. Le ton léger dont il la rapporte, si étranger a l'épopée homérique, en confirme l’authenticité,” and “Le theme du bouclier abandonné a été repris par Alcée (428 Lobel), par Anacréon (51 Diehl) et par Horace (Odes 2.7). Il n’est pas raisonnable de penser que cette cascade de boucliers lâchés, a la

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27 28

29

30

31

32

33

34

suite d’Archiloque…soit autre chose que littérature.” The translation is mine. For evidence of the public recitation of iambic poetry see Aristotle, Politics 1336b20 and Athenaeus 620c. Harris (1989:85–88, 92–93) records that the first known private library, Euripides’, is not mentioned until 405, that a substantial inter-city booktrade does not appear until 370, and that the beginning of the establishment of a written canon can be traced to about 330, when Lycurgus orders the establishment of an official text of the three tragedians. Thus, even in the late classical period, he concludes, “The main way people got to know literary texts was still oral.” Havelock (1982:17–18): “These poets were not read in their own day but listened to. In order to achieve any degree of what we think of as ‘publication’ their ‘works’ had to be not written but performed before audiences, large or small…. The composer’s fame, frequently commemorated as a treasured objective, rested solely on this condition…. The social occasion therefore, whether public or restricted, furnished an essential condition without which important lyric could not exist.” See also Page (1963:162–63) on the possibility that Archilochus’ poems were never written down in his lifetime. Translation by Shewring (1980). For another example of a poem often thought to be anti-Homeric but in fact Odyssean, see Russo (1974: 139ff). This part of the Archilochus and Hipponax legend is now generally conceded to be mythic even by those who would try and salvage the biographical tradition. See, for example, Carey (1986:60). For more on this topic, see Hendrickson (1925:102–3, 111, 122–23); Rosen (1988b: 14); Knox (1989a:118). This same motif of the target of invective committing ritual suicide is found in the larger Indo-European tradition, most notably in Ireland, cf. Hendrickson (1925:126) and Reckford (1987:473–74, 477). Hanging motifs are also common in ancient fertility rituals, which, as will be shown, are related to iambic poetry, see Clark (1979:128–29). Rosen (1988b:12–13); Heraclitus, frg. 42 in Diels (1964); Jaeger (1945: 142); and Will (1969:65, 69, 82, 127 n. 3), who incorrectly describes the Homer and Archilochus colloquy as a debate, when their statements are in agreement; “Longinus,” On the Sublime, 13.3, in Edmonds (1931: 94); and Treu (1959:6, 174–75). Treu’s notes provide additional evidence for the ancient pairing of Archilochus with Homer. See also Brown (1987:235), where he cites Dioscorides’ epigram (AP 7. 351=1565–1574 Gow-Page HE) in which the daughters of Lycambes deny that they ever “saw” Archilochus in the precinct of Hera. See Dover’s observations on the common practice of assuming a persona in early song, so that the use of the first person pronoun cannot be equated with the person speaking, but rather his or her role in a type of

NOTES 191

song (1963:197, 205); and Easterling and Barron (1989:77). For an application of this principle to the wider Greek tradition, see Lefkowitz (1976:181). On the necessity of reconceptualizing the oral literary text in terms of its concrete and empirical relation to the social context of its performance, as opposed to a priori abstract categories, see Bauman (1984:40). Note Rösler (1985:131–44), who argues for a middle position between the older biographical tradition, which he characterizes as typical of German philology, and an emphasis on the speaker as a mere character playing a role, which he sees as an outgrowth of Anglo-American New Criticism. Instead, he argues for an attempt to reconstruct the actual context of performance (see also 1983:7–28). While clearly some middle ground needs to be found between a crude biographical historicism and an ahistorical aestheticism, there are several problems with Rösler’s thesis. First, it is not at all clear that scholars like Dover, or Rösler’s primary example, West, were strongly influenced by Anglo-American New Criticism, as opposed to traditional British, historicist philology. Second, the ability to reconstruct the actual context of performance ignores the fact that, for any of these poems to have survived, they must have been performed more than once. Rösler’s solution to this difficulty is to assume that the original context was recalled at subsequent performances, but this in no way explains why those performances were meaningful to later listeners and performers (1983:14–16). A poem which could not remain significant outside its initial moment of enunciation would have never been preserved. Thus, when speaking of a poem’s performative context, we are never describing a concrete, individual event, but rather the kinds of situations in which such poems could have been suitably and logically performed. A similar tendency toward reconstructing the individual context of a poem’s first enunciation can also be found in Gentili’s otherwise remarkable work (1984:233–56). For a critique of the theoretical basis of Rösler’s work, see Latacz (1985:67–74) and Danielewicz (1990:16–17). For the links between Gentili and Rösler, see Latacz (1985:68). On Gentili’s tendency toward “a certain native divinatio” and “a certain amount of speculative reconstruction,” see Cole (in Gentili 1988:xiv–xv). 35 See fragments 172–81 for the ainos of the fox and the eagle, and 185–87 for the ainos of the fox and the monkey as well as references to ainos as a form of coded message. Ainos is also the root of epainos which characterizes Pindar’s epinician poetry of praise. See Nagy (1979:222– 23, 238–39; 1990a:148–50, 392) and Rosen (1988b:31). 36 Thus, Miralles and Pòrtulas (1983:155–56): ‘The in the poem is neither empirical nor biographical (in a historic sense), it is representative; its background lay either in rites or in tales, depending

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37

38

39

40

41

42

43 44 45

upon the degree of secularization of Archilochus’ models. Both rites and tales were well known to the audience.” See also Will (1969:88). Other evidence for the poet’s death at the hands of Korax is found in Heraclides Pol. 8 and Dio Chrysostomus, 33, p. 397 M as printed in Edmonds (1931:90–93). See also Rosen (1988b:13–14). He continues, “Thus for example, when Heraclitus (22 B 42 DK) says that Homer and Archilochus should be banned from contests in poetic performance, agones, what is really being said is that rhapsodes should not be allowed to perform Homer and Archilochus” (bold print in Nagy’s text). See Svenbro (1993:116–17), where he discusses the way in which the laws of Charondas, which were composed in verse, were sung at symposia; and Nichols’ discussion of the way in which Guillaume IX d’Aquitaine’s troubadour lyric “hails” (an important term in Althusser) his audience as fellow nobles, thus constituting them as a group (1991: 139). See also fragment 125. I will not attempt to resolve the undecidable argument about which came first, the metrical or thematic connotations of the term, though Nagy’s contention (1974) that formulaic language precedes the elaboration of metrical formulae in the Indo-European oral tradition leads me to lean toward the thematic. For a summary of common assumptions on the origins of comedy, dithyrambic song, and the komos in fertility rituals, see Sypher (1980: 214–26). For more on Bakhtin and archaic Greek literature, see Newman and Newman (1984: “Pindar and Carnival Style”) and Rösler (1986:25– 44). For a more sophisticated explanation of Bakhtin’s failure to deal with Aristophanes than that offered by Rösler, see Platter (1993: 201–16). For another example of Archilochus serving as exarchos, see fragment 121, See also Svenbro’s delineation of the equation between a nomoidos (“lawchanter”) or exegetes (a person called upon to cite the appropriate laws or religious sanctions applicable in a given situation) and an exarchos “who leads the Dionysiac chorus,” thus demonstrating the complex, overdetermined relationship between law, poetry, and ritual at work in archaic society (1993:117–18, 121). On this passage and the previous fragment’s confirming Archilochus’ and his poetry’s role in the community, see Nagy (1990a:394–95). The thriambos is likewise defined as a “merry hymn” to Dionysus (West 1974:23). For a comparative study of how this tradition reveals itself in Latin, Irish, and Vedic cultures, see Dumézil’s, Servius et la fortune (1943: 56–80, 230–37); for a comparison of the Irish tradition to Archilochus, see Hendrickson (1925:124–25); and for Greek and pre-Greek society, see Detienne (1967:20–27).

NOTES 193

46 See also Gentili (1984:143) and Brown (1987:152–53). 47 On the close link between these ceremonies and Dionysus and Demeter, as well as with bawdy and insulting verse, see Herodotus 5.67 and 5.82– 83, and How and Wells (1928:vol. 2, 46–47). 48 On Neoboule, see Van Sickle (1975:152) and Miralles and Pòrtulas (1983:151). For additional instances of speaking names in the poetry of Archilochus and the iambic poets, see Nagy (1979:244, 291; 1990a : 431) and Rosen (1988b:26; 1988a:30, 38). For etymological readings of the names Achilles, Patroklos, and Achaeans, as well as their cultic significance, see Nagy (1979:69–170). 49 See also Miralles and Pòrtulas (1983:56) on the cognate tradition of the luperci in the Roman Lupercalia, who “indulged in obscenity, slander and all kinds of oral aggressions, with a clear purpose; by means of attack, which implies sacrifice, the victim’s blood, ritualistic laughter, whipping and insult, they tried to promote fertility.” 50 For Lycambes as ekhthros, see Nagy (1979:242–44). For philos, see Benveniste (1966:335–53). 51 This is the same poem as cited above for its allusion to Archilochus’ function as a blame poet. 52 This same concept of reciprocal treatment is articulated by Archilochus in 23.14–15. On the commonness of complementary oppositions in Greek ritual thought, see Vidal-Naquet (1986:114); and on tricksters serving to unite positive and negative elements, see Jameson (1972:165). 53 Philippson (1947:8–22); note particularly p. 13: “Man kennt die magische, wesenbannende Kraft der : ausgesprochner Name und Wesen sind eins…. Mit dieser Begrundung benennt Autolykos, der in seinem eigenen Namen den schweifenden raubenden Wolf zu tragen scheint, den Enkel.” See also Thompson (1914:18): “Odysseus and Autolycus are therefore apparently only two slightly varying names for the same god or hero named of the wolf”; Bolling (1906:65–67); and Svenbro’s chapter, “The Child as Signifier: The ‘Inscription’ of the Proper Name” (1993:64–79). For more evidence linking the Odysseus cycle to Hermes, see the odd archaic myth recorded at Herodotus 2.146.4, where we are told that Pan, himself a trickster, was the illegitimate son of Penelope and Hermes. Servius, in his commentary on Georgics 1.16, records that this myth was also to be found in a passage from Pindar which is now lost. 54 Clay (1983:70): “The doubleness of Odysseus pervades his poem.” 55 See Bakhtin (1968:30–31): “Grotesque imagery is an extremely ancient type…. During the classic period the grotesque did not die but was expelled from the sphere of official art to live and develop in certain ‘low’ nonclassic areas: plastic comic art…. Humorous vase decorations present the image of grotesque ‘doublets’ (the comic Heracles and Odysseus), scenes from comedies and symbols of fertility.”

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56 For a list of doublets occurring in the Trojan cycle of oral epic poems, see Fenik (1964:38–39). 57 For a catalogue of Odysseus’ and Diomedes’ joint expeditions, as well as a list of Odysseus’ own nighttime (thus exhibiting cunning and guile) excursions, see Fenik (1964:12–13). Diomedes also has connections with both wolves and ritual suicide. After the Trojan war he is said to have been “carried by a tempest to the Libyan seashore where he fell into the hands of Lycos” (“Wolf”). The hero is saved by the wolfman’s daughter from certain death, but later abandons her, whereupon she commits suicide by hanging. Her fate thus parallels that of Neoboule, the daughter of Lycambes. Miralles and Pòrtulas (1983:57–59). 58 For how the formation of this epithet “raises Odysseus to the level of the main heroes of the epic while specifying the exclusive field of his insatiability,” see Pucci (1987:60–61). 59 See Owen Carver’s very useful dissertation (1973:166). 60 In the Iliad, he is said to be the son of a godlike herald, which if one pursues the possible parallel with Autolycus, “the wolf himself,” could represent an attenuated version of the myth which states that Odysseus’ grandfather was in fact the son of Hermes, the herald of the gods. 61 It is tantalizing to note that Eurykleia, meaning “wide-fame,” referring to that kleos which was the poetic and religious due to those celebrated in hero cults, can be interpreted as meaning exactly the opposite to the name of Autolycus’ daughter and Odysseus’ mother, Antikleia, whose name if translated on the model of Antinoos, the head of the suitors, would mean, “in place of” or “opposed to fame.” This need not be the only interpretation of Antikleia, but if it is accepted, then the doublet nurse/ mother would reproduce that of praise/blame, in which case it would be no coincidence that it is Eurykleia who recognizes Odysseus as the hero returned. 62 Philippson views Odysseus’ connection with Athena as the heroic counterpart to his less reputable descent from Hermes, through Autolycus (1947:8–22). 63 Reprinted in Edmonds (1931:90). Edmonds and Lidell and Scott both translate “the place of Ghost-Raising,” which obviously is not inappropriate to the context. I, however, have translated it as “shrine of [Hermes] the psychopompos” on analogy with “shrine of the Muses.” The two meanings are not incompatible, and, inasmuch as is a cult title for Hermes, the latter seems preferable in this context. 64 On see Clay (1983:29–32). For Hermes in Hipponax, see fragments 3, 3a, 32, 35, 47, 54, 79, 177. 65 For a series of related considerations, see Nagy (1979:279–81, 302, 307– 9).

NOTES 195

66 Thus, Valerius Maximus records that the Spartans banned the books of Archilochus as indecent (6.3. Ext. 1, reprinted in Edmonds 1931: 86–87), and Critias, the sophist, reproaches Archilochus for leaving behind nothing but “slander and scuttlebutt” about his own cowardice, adultery, and low birth (cited by Will 1969:66–68 from Aelian’s VariaHistoria 10. 13). 67 Hipponax refers to pharmakoi and the rituals surrounding them in fragments 5–10, 26A, 34, 92, 104. For an excellent discussion of the significance of the pharmakos, see Derrida (1981:130–33), particularly, “The ceremony of the pharmakos is thus played out on the boundary line between inside and outside, which it has as its function ceaselessly to trace and retrace. Intra muros/extra muros. The origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and projected. Beneficial insofar as he cures—and for that, venerated and cared for—harmful insofar as he incarnates the powers of evil—and for that, feared and treated with caution. Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed. The conjunction, coincidentia oppositorum, ceaselessly undoes itself in the passage to decision or crisis.”

3 DE GENERIBUS DISPUTANDUM EST 1 For an analogous situation in folklore studies, see Ben-Amos (1981a: x– xiii). 2 For a similar evaluation of the current state of genre studies, see Colie (1973:1); Ben-Amos (1981a:xiii–xiv); Jauss (1986:59); and Dubrow (1982:8). 3 de Man’s 1985 essay explicitly refers the reader to “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” (56 n. 1). The first of these two essays (1982) contains portions which were later included in the second. Where there is overlap, I have cited the passage as it appears in the second essay (1985). 4 Stoekl argues that de Man’s strategy of rhetorical reading ultimately leads to an ideology of pure performativity, in which all moments of reference, representation, or responsibility are revealed as mystifications of language’s power to evade human control. Yet, the very fact that de Man chooses certain texts rather than others on which to perform these operations reveals the continuing force of the moment of reference, even if it is always already bracketed by the insistence of the material letter. de Man, thus, is incapable of reading his own work, of explaining the rationale behind his choice of texts. Neither of these moments (the referential or the performative) is possible without the other, nor can one ever be reduced to the other (Stoekl 1992:233–60). Consequently, the concept of genre continues to have force and to demand a reading even after its deconstruction.

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5 This pregeneric moment can be understood as what Jameson calls “History” and Lacan the “Real” (Jameson 1988:104–8). 6 On the necessity of a simultaneously synchronic and diachronic or historical approach, see Derrida (1982:254). On genre as a historical phenomenon, see Jauss (1986:42–43) and Jameson (1981:107). 7 On the stratification of language, see Bakhtin (1981:271–72) and Frow (1986:67–68). On ideology, see Volosinov (1973:10, 19); McGee, in Bakhtin (1986: 101 n. 3); Bakhtin/Medvedev (1985:14); Althusser (1971:158–77); Frow (1986:64); Dowling (1984:82–83); and Moxey (1991:987, 989). 8 See Jameson on Althusser’s critique of expressive causality and his formulation of the more subtle and flexible concept of structural causality in its stead (1981:23–43). 9 Bakhtin (1981:279): “every extra-artistic prose discourse…cannot fail to be oriented toward the ‘already uttered,’ the ‘already known’…and so forth. The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is, of course, a property of any discourse…. Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped this dialogic inter-orientation.” For a good discussion of the dialectic between the constraints placed on the development of genres by their own histories and the relative openness of their developmental paths at any given moment, see Frow (1986:110–11, 114). 10 Bakhtin (1986:61–62): “Secondary (complex) genres—novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, major genres of commentary, and so forth —arise in more complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication…. During the process they absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres….” See also Bakhtin/ Medvedev (1985:22–25); Frow (1986:70, 127); Moxey (1991:987–88); and Patterson (1985:158). 11 On paradigmatic and syntagmatic rules, see Barthes (1968:70); and Eco (1979:90), who uses the terms “correlational” and “combinational.” 12 Bakhtin (1986:65): “Utterances and their types, that is, speech genres, are the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language. There is not a single new phenomenon (phonetic, lexical, or grammatical) that can enter the system of language without having traversed the long and complicated path of generic-stylistic testing and modification. In each epoch certain speech genres set the tone for the development of literary language.” 13 See Sarah Kofman’s stimulating reading of Freud on this subject in Pourquoi rit-on? (1986:17–19, 45, 64–76); as well as Bergson’s Laughter (1980:135), “Once our attention is fixed on the material aspect of a metaphor the idea expressed becomes comic”; and Sypher (1980:213, 221–26).

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14 See Sypher (1980:218–19), “Tragedy demands a law of necessity of destiny…tragic action needs to convey a sense of destiny, inevitability, and foreordination”; as well as Jameson (1981:116). On the semiotic difference between comedy and tragedy, see Eco (1979:64). 15 This conception of myth obviously owes no small amount to Northrop Frye’s conception of “mythos” as “plot formula” (1971:51–52), which in turn is derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, 1450a 23–24. 16 For more examples, see Ben-Amos (1981b: 218). 17 On the inadequacy of traditional notions of character in light of the historical and generic variability of the forms of subjectivity, see Jameson (1981:112–13, 121–25) and Foucault (1986a:63, 71; 1986b: 39). 18 On inner speech as dialogue rather than monologue, see Volosinov (1973: 33–38); for consciousness as “verbally constituted” (1973: 12–19). 19 For the applicability of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism to poetry, see Miller (1993a:183–85).

4 THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS:CATULLUS AND THE BIRTH OF THE COLLECTION 1 Writing is a necessary but not a sufficient cause for the birth of lyric poetry. As we shall see in Chapter 7, a peculiar social configuration is also necessary. Thus, while writing was the dominant mode of literary production in Alexandria, it did not produce a substantial body of lyric poetry. This lack, as I will argue, was due to the social structure of Alexandrian civilization. 2 This and all other citations of Catullus’ text are from Mynors (1958). All translations are mine. 3 See Pedrick’s illuminating comment, “Audience response is also a part of the corpus as a whole, since the individual poems contain so many intertextual references among themselves that it becomes easy (and prudent) to imagine the audience listening in or paying attention across the whole range of poems, making connections that enhance their understanding of the situation in any one poem” (1993:189, n. 4). 4 For a good summary of the speculation on his identity, see Fordyce (1961:396). 5 For more on the Rufus series (69, 71, and 77) and its connections with the Lesbia poems it parallels (70, 72, 75, and 76), see Pedrick (1993: 177– 80). 6 For Wiseman’s strong disagreement with this reading of 11, see (1985: 175). 7 Quinn (1972:56), “The name Lesbia seems to have been invented for poem 51.” See also Wiseman (1985:153).

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8 It should also be pointed out that Wiseman does not fundamentally disagree with these observations; he simply believes that the sequence of the poems in the collection is the dominant ordering device within the collection and does not approve of attempting to show that 11 is the last poem in the affair when it is not the last poem on the affair in the sequence (Wiseman 1985:154). 9 On the consensus that at least this part of the present collection was arranged by the author, see Skinner (1988:337). Among those who believe that the collection as a whole is the work of the poet are Ellis (1979:1–5), with some minor rearrangement of the long poems; Wiseman (1985:136–37; 1969:30); Quinn (1972:9–20, 38–50); Schmidt (1973:215– 42); Skinner (1988:338 n. 2), where she revises her earlier claim (1981) that only 1–51 were arranged by the author; Ferguson (1986:2; 1988:12– 13); Minyard (1988:343–53); Dettmer (1988: 371–81); Arkins (1987: 847–48). For 1–14 alone or in possible combination with larger units, see Hubbard (1983:218–37) and Dettmer (1989:375–77). For 2–11 alone or in possible combination with larger units, see Barwick (1958:312–16); Segal (1968b:305–21); Rankin (1972:744–51); and Ferguson (1985:9). 10 On Catullus’ expecting multiple readings, see Wiseman (1985:137). For a fine exploration of how the process of rereading builds up a complex and multi-faceted interpretation within the confines of a single poem, see Sweet on poem 11 (1987:513–16, 522–23, 526) and Edmunds on Horace 1.9 (1992:23). 11 See also his unprovable assertion, “Nothing…would lead a sober student to suppose that [poems 2 and 3] were not at one time elegantly lucid and straightforward. Certainly that is how the ancients read them” (Jocelyn 1980:441). For a firm refutation of Jocelyn’s reading of the post-Catullan evidence, see Nadeau (1984:861–68). On literary language, see Barthes (1971:228–29). I owe this citation to Professor Carl A. Rubino. On ordinary language, see Crystal (1987: “Semantics,” 100–7, among many other passages). 12 On the flower and plough as symbols of virginity and the phallus respectively, and on gender confusion as a motif in other Catullus poems, see Chapter 6. 13 For more on 5, 6, and 7 as a coherent sequence, see Forsyth (1989: 94– 97). 14 For other “verbal reminiscences” between poems 6 and 10, see Dettmer (1985:29–30). 15 For the entire sequence of Veranius and Fabullus poems as well as the rest of the Furius and Aurelius sequence, see Barwick (1958:315–16); Segal (1968b: 316); Schmidt (1973:219–21); Quinn (1972:45–46); Skinner (1981:48–50); Ferguson (1986:3); Sweet (1987:524–25).

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16

17

18

19

20

21

A good example of the kind of movement toward narrative reconstruction which Catullus’ collection engenders can be found in Fredricksmeyer’s attempt (1993) to reconcile the obviously insulting tone of the rest of the poems on Furius and Aurelius with the poet’s use of the term “comites” [“traveling companions”] in poem 11. To do so he posits an elaborate narrative which allows for an initial friendship, followed by a rupture, and then a final reconciliation. This looks suspiciously like the sort of narrative often offered to account for poems 107 and 109. Ironically, Fredricksmeyer advances this interpretation in the context of defending the intrinsic unity of each Catullan poem, when what he demonstrates is its dependence on how the critic constructs its relation to the other poems in the collection. See note 9, plus Wiseman (1969:1–31); the substantial work of Forsyth (1972:175–77; 1977:445–50; 1979:403–8; 1984:24–26); and Dettmer (1983b:19). On the Carmina Maiora, see Sandy (1971:185–95) and Block (1984:48–59). 1 am not arguing that there is no connection between Catullus and his poetry, but simply that the author himself was not his text. It would be a mistake, then, to claim that his text and his self were identical, or even homologous. Their connection is historical and social, not in any precise sense genetic. The evidence for this now seems strong, though it remains contested in some quarters. See, for example, Clausen’s argument in The CambridgeHistory of Classical Literature (1983: vol. 2, part 2, 21–22). Clausen’s position is wholly dependent upon that advanced by Wheeler (1934: 1–32), which is based upon the notion that since the dedicatory poem of the collection refers only to one libellus, and the number of lines contained in the Catullan corpus is too great to have been accommodated on a single papyrus roll, then the poems we have must represent the efforts of a later editor, and not the collection as Catullus conceived it. For direct refutations of this view, see Quinn (1972:9–20); Wiseman (1969:1–31; 1985:136, 265–66); and Minyard (1988:343–53). For other evidence of the Catullan corpus’ being a collection, see note 9. For the concept of the virtual and its relation to literary texts, see Iser (1980:50). I owe this citation to Professor Wendy McCredie. For another application of this notion to a classical text, see Edmunds (1992: 28). “In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork” (Borges 1964:26, his emphasis). On Einstein and the relation of his discoveries to literature and the humanities, see Morson and Emerson (1990:240, 254). On Bakhtin and

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post-Einsteinian physics generally, see Rubino (1993:150–54). On Freud, see Holquist (1990:53).

5 A POET’S PLACE: SAPPHO AND THE MELIC DISCOURSE OF ARCHAIC GREECE 1 See, for example, Kroll (1929:vii); Munro, “With Catullus there is no putting together of the pieces of a mosaic: with him the completed thought follows at once upon the emotion, and the consummate form and expression rush to embody this thought for ever” (1938:231); Sellar (1889:413); Duff (1932:322), who speaks of Catullus’ “artlessness of spirit”; Highet (1957:4–5). For the most part, this view was swept aside in the 1960s as New Criticism became the preferred method of approaching Roman poetry. An understanding of the fundamental difference between the poetry of Catullus and his Greek predecessors did not emerge at this point, however, but an appreciation of his artistry did, which led readers to question whether Catullus was simply expressing himself or “practicing his craft.” See Steele Commager’s ground breaking article, “Notes on Some Poems of Catullus” (1965:83–110). 2 See also Jaeger (1945:116); Fränkel (1975:133); Podlecki (1984:xii–x– iii). This is the view which has been recorded in the standard reference works. See, for example, the entry under “Sappho” in the OxfordClassical Dictionary (1970). For a genealogy of this romantic view of Sappho, see DeJean (1989:12–24). 3 Of course, by Sappho’s time there was a good deal of craft literacy for keeping records of financial transactions, but there was still very little “literature.” See Harris (1989:7). 4 See also Kirkwood (1974:10) for a more recent restatement of this position. 5 Davies (1988:58–61) has shown how this distinction first appears in the lectures of the brothers Schlegel, and from there passes into general currency through K.O.Müller’s influential History of the Literature ofAncient Greece. 6 See also Harvey (1955:159 n. 3), “The modern division into ‘choral’ and ‘monodic’…is of no particular value. It was unknown to antiquity or the Renaissance”; Faerber (1936:16); Fowler (1987:132 n. 51); Davies (1988: 52–64); and Calame (1977:436, especially n. 174). None of this should be construed as denying the obvious differences between the meters and dialects employed in the poems of Pindar and Sappho. 7 See Nisetich (1980:1): “Pindar’s odes, in their original form and purpose, are different from anything modern readers have encountered as poetry before. They are not private, personal, or spontaneous. Pindar received money to compose his poems; he wrote them to be performed …and he

NOTES 201

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

was required to mention various matters that he might not have mentioned if he were free to follow his inspiration. He certainly had no knowledge of the kind of book now in the reader’s hands.” See also Nagy (1990a: 114) and Calame (1977:172). For this aspect of Pindar’s style (i.e. ring composition, which appears in much Greek poetry) as a technique to promote oral recall, see Havelock (1982:140) and Thalmann (1984:28). Kamarina had been forced to be abandoned by Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse, in 485. It was restored in 461, the year before Psaumis’ victory (Nisetich 1980:99). All translations are from Nisetich . Cf. Gentili (1984:61): “L’episodio mitico diviene l’esemplificazione di una norma di un aforismo o di un aforistico preamblo (Priamel) oppure la vicenda esemplare di un’azione lodevole o nefasta in rapporto all’ occasione e alla situazione del canto.” As for Kirkwood’s contention that, in addition to this sort of poetry, “Sappho may have written a good deal of poetry…of simple, personal communication” (1974:131), he admits that these speculations are based only on short fragments of poems which “tell nothing of the character of the poem from which they are torn.” It is very risky to posit the existence of an entire genre of poems based on a few isolated lines. Whole stanzas might well have existed which would give those lines a very different meaning from what they have when viewed in isolation. See W.R.Johnson’s very apposite warning, “This habit of restoration of a given fragment moves easily after a while into fantasizing the existence of a poet and an oeuvre, then into the illusion that the entire ghost, Greek Lyric itself, has been totally retrieved” (1982:26). See also Lefkowitz (1976:181). See Snell (1953:44): “The majority of the early Greek lyrics which have come down to us are poems composed for various festivals in honour of gods or men; their purpose is to make the present significant over and above the hic et nunc, to lend an air of permanence to the joy of the moment. The ways in which this is achieved, apart from the fixed traditional form which serves as a stabilizing factor, are chiefly two: myths and maxims.” On the ways in which the performative tradition emphasized and accelerated the impersonal tendencies of Greek lyric, see Nagy (1990a:349, 433). The dividing line between these two spheres would not have seemed as clear to the citizens of ancient Lesbos as it does to us. See Segal (1974: 141, 152) and Nagy (1990a:30). The ancient sources on Sappho are scant, but see Suda, Σ 107 (iv 322s. Adler), quoted in Campbell (1982:4–7); and Ovid, Tristia 2.363–65, also in Campbell (42–43). Gentili likewise makes the comparison with Alcman (1984:102–8); as does Segal (1974:141) and Dover (1978:179, 181).

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16 Page (1955:12–18) has argued that this stressed adverb, in fact, shows that Sappho in this passage is being ironic. This interpretation, he says, is confirmed by the beginning of the sixth stanza which he translates as, “if today she is running away from you, tomorrow you will be running away from her.” Thus, he argues that Sappho is engaging in self-mockery by showing that she continually seeks Aphrodite’s help, only to turn around and refuse it once it is offered. This reading is problematic on several levels. First, Kirkwood (1974:112, 249 n. 23) has argued that deute is common in the love poetry of the period, showing the paradigmatic nature of the experience depicted, its infinite repeatability. It does not in itself show that this poem should be read as an exercise in self-conscious irony, unless one would want to claim the same for the parallel passages Kirkwood lists. Second, and more significantly, Anne Giacomelli (1980: 135–42) has offered convincing evidence that Page’s reading of the first line of the sixth stanza is faulty. It does not say that Sappho will run away from her beloved once that beloved starts to pursue, but rather that if her beloved now flees, someday she will pursue. It does not specify that Sappho will be the one who runs away, but says simply that Sappho will receive the satisfaction of observing her beloved in the same predicament as she herself is in now. The pursued could well be a third young woman. Giacomelli offers several convincing parallel passages from male, homoerotic poetry showing that this is a standard sentiment and represents an instance of the lover pleading for dike, or distributive justice, wherein the offender is supposed to suffer the same offense as he or she has committed. 17 This attribution of both a literal and a figurative significance to a traditional story is not unusual in ancient religious thought. Compare the early church fathers’ reading of the Old Testament, wherein the events which are recorded there are regarded as being both historically true and figurative anticipations of the birth and life of Christ. 18 For a demonstration that this line of interpretation assumes a culture of writing, see Havelock (1963:168–69). 19 For the special role Aphrodite played in Sappho’s function as an educator of young women, see Calame (1977:400–1). 20 See also p. 65: “This new personal soul is not yet by any means the foundation for all feelings and emotions; it is merely the source of the reactions which set in when the feelings are blocked. Love is not a passion which swells up within but a gift of Aphrodite.” 21 See, for example, Johnson (1982:44); and Race, who in an article which argues that Sappho is best viewed as a proto-romantic individualist, claims that this first stanza “reveals the sophistic basis of her logic” (1989:24 n. 19; see also 19). For a firm rebuttal to any suggestion that Sappho’s poem endorses a sophistic relativism, see Calame (1987:212). In the same article, Race treats Sappho’s poems as if they were part of a book,

NOTES 203

22 23 24 25 26

27

28

29

ignoring their oral performative context (1989:25, 32). For a strong refutation of this, which still assumes a greater degree of literacy than I feel the evidence merits, see Winkler (1990:166); as well as Thomas (1992:114), who reflects my own view. On the idea that the opening contrast in stanza 1 has been interpreted in an overly personal light, see Wills (1967:438). This and all translations of Sappho by Campbell (1982:67). See also Zumthor (1983:264); Calame (1977:245); and Roland Barthes’ concept of “La vaccine” in Mythologies (1970:238–39). I have slightly altered Campbell’s translation. See Rose (1992:179) on the function of analogical thought in Pindaric contexts. Indeed, Casadio (1983:21–22) has argued that the opening stanza itself, far from being simply a declaration of independence from Homeric tradition, is modeled on several passages from the Odyssey. On Sappho’s possible political problems, see the reference to her having been exiled during the reign of the tyrant Pittacus, Marm. Par. Ep. 36 (p. 12 Jacoby), reprinted in Campbell (1982:8–9); on oral poetry’s always being meant for a small, relatively homogeneous social group, see Zumthor (1983:40). On Rösler’s limitations, see Chapter 2, note 34. Race’s statement (1989:31) that the situation presented at the beginning of 31 is “ordinary” is anachronistic in its assumption of routinized commerce between unrelated members of the opposite sex. Burnett (1983:237), while not supporting the wedding thesis, points out that traditionally the comparison of a living man with a god (makarismos) is reserved “only [for] marriage or victory at the games,” which nicely underlines our thesis on the relation between Pindar’s victory odes and Sappho’s monody. Kurke has recently shown how this parallel was directly exploited by Pindar in his use of wedding imagery (Kurke 1991:124). Rissman, in turn, has demonstrated that all comparisons of gods to mortals in Sappho are hymenal (Rissman 1983: 93); as has Svenbro (1993:153). Note also the occurrence of this same comparison in fragment 44, Campbell (1982) ‘The Wedding of Hector and Andromache,” lines 21 and 34, and [“like the gods” and “godlike”]. In addition, Lasserre has argued persuasively against McEvilley’s suggestion that the wedding scene evoked by the poem might be imaginary (1989:150–51). See, however, Latacz’s (1985:77–92) argument that Sappho is envisioning a possible future wedding for one of the young women in her circle. According to this line of reasoning, the poem is then assimilated to a series of other types of songs fashioned for this community. Its particular function would be to express the anguish of loss at the eventual departure of the group’s various members when they get married. Why it is preferable to have Sappho sing about

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imaginary weddings is unclear, aside from Page’s assertion that the sentiments expressed in the poem would be unacceptable at a real wedding—an interpretation which assumes that they would be seen as exclusively Sappho’s own, and which is still grounded in the view that her poems are essentially confessional. The other basis of Latacz’s argument is that the phrase kenos ottis, on analogy with the Homeric usage of ekeinos hostis, refers not to a real individual or set of individuals, but to a purely fictive personage (i.e. the hypothetical future bridegroom), created by Sappho’s speech act (1985: 83). This interpretation appears tenuous at three essential points. (1) The fact that Sappho uses the demonstrative kenos argues for an indexical function for the pronoun, even if the identity of the individual remains undefined. (2) The use of the phrase oner (i.e. o aner) between kenos and ottis emphasizes the definiteness of the person in the situation, leading Page (1955:20) to prefer the reading “That man, whatever his name may be, who is sitting opposite you….” (3) The fact that Sappho uses the indicative mood and ottis, rather than hos an plus the subjunctive, argues for a real (if perhaps generic) situation and not merely the evocation of a hypothetical, future possibility (Smyth 1956:2508, 2569a). This point was first made by Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1966:58), as Latacz himself observes. His response is to cite three passages, one from Theognis and two from Hesiod, which he argues are similar and use the indicative. In all three of these cases, though, there is no hint that poets are creating fictions; rather they are describing real but recurring sorts of behavior. Only the passage from Theognis actually includes keinos as well as hostis. The other two are lacking Sappho’s demonstrative force. The syntax of Sappho’s poem, thus, argues for viewing the situation described in stanza 1 not as fictive but as real, although not necessarily unique. Indeed I would argue that what the use of the indefinite relative pronoun ottis shows is not the necessarily imaginary nature of the situation depicted, but its potentially infinite repeatability, as different godlike men sit before different girls, each of whom would take Sappho’s breath away (see our reading of deute in poem 1). As Goodwin notes, the use of hostis plus the indicative in “general condition relative sentences” refers to an individual example of a case, which can occur generally, “as if it were the only one” (1965:534). It treats a general condition as if it were a specific case. The generic nature of the situation thus evoked actually reinforces the notion that this poem was a song sung on particular festal occasions, like a wedding—a singular instance of a regularly recurring situation. At the same time, this kind of reading avoids the pitfalls of an overly narrow historical reconstruction, such as that proposed by Rösler, against whose thesis of the realistic reference of pronominal and other forms of “deixis” in oral lyric Latacz directed this article (see Chapter 2, note 34).

NOTES 205

30

31

32

33

Our interpretation, in contrast, does not depend on identifying the single moment which first gave rise to this song, but rather strives to determine the situations in which its performance would appear reasonable and meaningful to the larger community. Even if one accepts Latacz’s arguments, though, we are still left with a song which imagines a wedding and which serves the public function of formalizing the sense of loss experienced by Sappho and the young women gathered around her when one from their number leaves. It thus expresses a paradigmatic rather than idiosyncratic or personal sentiment. Wiseman (1985:153) also accepts the Wilamowitz thesis, finding support for it in Catullus. For more corroborating views, see Griffith (1989:59– 61); Lasserre (1989:149–52); Veyne (1988:173); Fränkel (1975:176); and Treu (1954:178–79). Foucault (1986b: 224) also cites an interesting passage from PseudoLucian where the act of sitting face to face and engaging in conversation clearly implies both an erotic relationship and the desire to share each other’s lives. See also Nagy (1990a:345, 370–71), especially “It should be clear that I understand the monodic form not to be antithetical to the choral but rather predicated on it. A figure like Sappho speaks as a choral personality, even though elements of dancing and the very presence of a choral group are evidently missing from her compositions. Still, these compositions presuppose or represent an interaction, offstage, as it were with a choral aggregate.” This is another way of saying the performance implies an immediate and formalized dialogic relationship with the listening public. See also Calame (1977:88, 126–27, 369, 421–34); Lefkowitz (1981a:51–52); Stigers (1981:45); Winkler (1990:186); and Kurke (1991:252). On distinctions between the sexual nature of male and female pederastia, see DeJean (1989:21). Race (1983:92–93) argues that while Wilamowitz’s wedding hypothesis solves the historical problem of the performative context it “creates a literary one,” since the word marriage is never mentioned. But the dichotomy is false. Literary problems are always simultaneously historical ones, inasmuch as works of literature are profoundly dialogized utterances which presume a relation of responsive understanding between themselves and their audiences or reading publics. Literary questions are thus inevitably social and historical questions as well. Svenbro (1993:145–59) has recently argued that this poem may show a consciousness of writing, although not of the lyric collection nor of the lyric ego as I have defined it. Indeed, he accepts that these poems were composed for oral presentation and that this was their primary mode of transmission (146–48). He bases his argument in favor of evidence of a consciousness of writing on a comparison of Sappho’s use of the first,

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second, and third persons with similar usages found in inscriptions from the period. His key point is that such inscriptions always imply the reanimation of the dead letters inscribed on the object by the voice of the reader. Thus the object itself assumes the stance of the first person, the “I,” through the voice of the reader, who in turn is in the position of the second person in relation to the inscription itself. By the same token, just as in daily conversation, these positions are reversible. The inscription is also the second person in relation to the reader’s first person. From this perspective, Svenbro argues that, since Sappho envisions her own silence in the middle of this poem, she also envisions her eternal reanimation through the voice of the reader/reciter. Thus, the poem becomes the “you” who is always “sweetly laughing” in another’s presence, by virtue of the writer’s absence. “The poem is a kore ‘girl’ with the power to set off the voice of a reader, a voice instantly appropriated by the kore herself, who now ‘speaks’ and ‘laughs.’ The fact is the poem occupies the place of the ‘you,’ from the point of view of the one who writes it, as well as from that of the one who reads it” (154–55). Although I am not sure how much we really disagree and how much there is merely a difference in emphasis, I have two responses to Svenbro’s reading. First, the relationship between speaking subjects here is not unique to writing. Whether I have learned the poem from hearing another recite it or by reading it aloud to myself (and Svenbro insists on the oral quality of all archaic reading), I am still lending my voice to the words of another, now absent. The “I" which speaks is always the “I" of the poem, whether that poem is inscribed on stone, papyrus, the vibrating air, or the tablets of memory. Thus, it is hard to see how this situation is unique to writing, since what is crucial is the act of vocalization. Second, the fact that each reciter of the poem (and each listener is a potential reciter) becomes the “I” in the act of enunciation demonstrates very precisely the paradigmatic nature of that “I.” It is infinitely appropriable by its audience. Its universalizing function is exactly that of Pindaric myth, and it in no way implies the kind of temporally complex, idiosyncratic ego projected by the multiple possible narrative relations inscribed in the Catullan collection. 34 For a very different view, see DeJean (1989:51): “The man is evoked in order to demonstrate his superfluousness: the erotic experience concerns the two women alone, united by bonds that are purely personal, with none of the sociocultural function associated with triangular desire.” This position seems to ignore completely the poem’s performative context.

6 SAPPHICA PUELLA:THE TRIPLE-FACETED OBJECT OF CATULLAN DESIRE

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1 Cf. Bakhtin’s important observations on the constitutive role of the addressee in any utterance (1986:95–96); Spivak’s analysis of Derrida’s critique of “meaning as portable property” in Of Grammatology (Derrida 1976:lvii–viii); as well as Ben-Amos (1981b:235) and Fine (1984:63). 2 For recent discussions of the close relations between the two texts, see Vine (1992:251–58) and Wiseman (1985:152–53). 3 Thus Fredricksmeyer (1983:66–68) has noted Catullus’ use of the word identidem (“again and again, habitually”) as one of the parallels linking poems 11 and 51. It has no analogue in Sappho’s original and changes what was a particular occasion in the original into a constantly recurring one. Professor Charles Platter has pointed out to me that this adverb may also be making reference to the common recurrence of the adverb deute in archaic lyric. See Kirkwood (1974:112, 249 n. 23) and Sappho 1. Note also Commager’s interesting observation (1965:87): “Where [Sappho 31] has two verbs to describe the action of the girl and one for the spectator, Catullus reverses the emphasis, also adding the adjective misero. The alterations, admittedly minor, suggest that the poem will be even more self-centered than Sappho’s.” 4 For a fuller examination of these issues, see Miller (1988:127–32). 5 See also Porphyrion’s commentary on this passage, reprinted in Campbell (1982:18–19). 6 For a detailed series of parallels between the final stanza of 11 and poem 63, see Martin (1992:59). For 76 as “a sort of summary and model for the entire elegiac and erotic segment of the Catullan oeuvre,” including specific reminiscences of poem 51, see Rubino (1975:289); and Commager (1965:97–98); Quinn (1972:102); Wiseman (1985:170–71). 7 Ferguson (1988:14) has noted that 51 and its evocation of Sappho also participates in a series of poems centered on the use and abuse of literary talent beginning at poem 49. 8 On the relations between poems 63 and 66, see Martin (1992:175–76). 9 It is sometimes printed as two poems. For a discussion of the issues involved, see Quinn (1973:373–74, 381–82) and Fordyce (1961: 341– 44), both of whom print the poem as one text, though not without reservations. For more on 68, see Hubbard’s very interesting “Catullus 68: The Text as Self-Demystification” (1984:29–49). 10 The passages relating to his brother are 19–24 and 89–100. 11 For more on poems 65 through 68 anticipating the content of the epigrams and for poems 65 and 116 as framing the elegiac portion of the corpus with explicit Callimachean references, see King (1988:386–87, 390). 12 For one of the most thorough demolitions of this view, see Quinn (1971: 30) as well as Havelock’s early attempt to contest this traditional mode of interpretation (1939:73–86).

7

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ROME, ALEXANDRIA, AND THE POLITICS OF LYRIC 1 Of course work of interest continued to be done in places such as Sicily, and later in Pergamum. 2 See also Callimachus’ “Hymn to Apollo” (11. 108–12) and the preface to the Aetia (11. 22–28). 3 See Anderson’s interesting observations on the relations between technological change and social conditions in antiquity (1974:79–80). 4 By “class fraction,” I am referring to the phenomenon of a clearly delineated subgroup within a class as traditionally defined, that is, a social group whose position is defined by its relation to the expropriation of surplus value within a concrete mode of production. For a detailed discussion of these issues in the context of the ancient world, see de Sainte Croix (1989:31–69). 5 See also Quinn (1972:215): “The idea that one could lead a life of leisure was still comparatively novel in a society upon which at one end poverty weighed heavily…and, at the other end, extreme social constraint, the need (expressed through family pressure, or simply through the pressure of convention) to serve the republic….” 6 To be more precise, we should say that the poet must occupy this subject position in the discourse whether his actual life coincides with that position or not. See Frow (1986:74). In historical terms, however, the correspondence is all but invariable. 7 On all concepts of freedom and equality in the ancient world being based on the simultaneous assumption of the presence of slave labor, see Green (1990:384). 8 See Nicolet on the growth of the publica (“tax revenues” collected by contracting out to private citizens, who put up the money the state required and then used their own employees to collect both the tax and their profits) at the end of the second century, and the legal exclusion of the senatorial class from participating in these enterprises (1966:699, 701, 716–17). See also Scullard (1976:183–84) and de Sainte Croix (1989:41–42). On the social distinction between large scale commerce and the operations of a small time merchant, see Cicero, De Officiis, 41. 150–51. On the equestrians as publicani (“tax farmers”), see Cicero, Pro Plancio, 9.23. 9 For a comparison of Roman practice with the Greek phenomenon and its basis in orality, see Chapter 2. 10 For more on this term, see James Miller’s The Passion of MichelFoucault (1993: passim). 11 “L’otium des chevaliers se définira ainsi au sens étroit non comme une retraite, mais comme l’absence des honneurs politiques, de ceux que l’on brigue par les suffrages du peuple…. c’est celui d’une certaine forme d’activité dans la cité: la judicature et les publica…. La

NOTES 209

12 13

14

15 16 17 18

tranquilitasequestris…. c’est le mot d’ordre politique d’un groupe d’hommes liés par leurs fonctions, soucieux de dresser une barrière entre eux et le groupe des magistrats…le gouvernement des sénateurs.” The translation is mine. On the “anonymous” style of these older poets, see Quinn (1971:57). “Les mots mêmes qu’il emploie pour designer ses petites poésies révèlent…une prise de conscience beaucoup plus riche que chez les Grecs: vertus de l’opposition, de la lutte.” The translation is mine; see also Pucci (1961:249–54) and Maltby (1980:4–5). For other Mentula/Mamurra poems, see 29, 41, 43, 57, 105, 114, and 115. On this sequence and its relation to others in the corpus, see Quinn (1972: 41–43, 48–49). See also Tibullus 1.1.1–6. I owe this formulation to the suggestion of one of my anonymous readers. On the concept of sign slippages and their crucial role in literature and its relation to society, see Chapter 3. Pater is cognate with patronus and hence not alien to the traditional public conception of amicitia as describing both a political alliance and patron-client relations. See also the phrase patres conscripti, for members of the senate.

8 HORACE, MERCURY, AND AUGUSTUS 1 That Horace’s Odes constitute a consciously composed collection is not in doubt. Two recent works have addressed this subject. Best known is Matthew Santirocco’s Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes (1986). Santirocco does not claim to have found any one overarching schema organizing the Odes. Instead, he detects a number of smaller, more provisional structures, which situate each poem in a complex and overdetermined relation with its fellows. See William Nethercut’s review (1987:64–80). The other major work on this topic is David H. Porter’s Horace’s Poetic Journey: A Reading of Odes 1–3 (1987). It too is valuable, but generally presents its readings in a less rigorous manner. It also encourages a common fallacy of reading ancient texts which argues that these works could only be read in the order they were written on the scroll. See Van Sickle (1980:5–6), though even he acknowledges that as the reader scrolled back when he/she had read a book through, he/she would gain an enhanced awareness “of the similarities and contrasts among the segments…of what makes the content of the roll an articulated ensemble.” Witke (1983:13–15) has shown that skipping around was possible and that the collections demanded to be “imaginatively reordered.”

210 NOTES

2 See, for example, the fold-out chart at the end of Dettmer’s book, Horace: A Study in Structure (1983a). 3 For Horace saying that he wished his poems to be not only read but carefully reread, see Satires 1.10.72–74. 4 This and all other texts and translations of Alcaeus are from Campbell (1982). 5 Pausanias 7.20.4 tells us that Alcaeus went on in the poem to tell how Hermes stole the cattle of Apollo. 6 “Aeolian” refers to the dialect used by Sappho and Alcaeus. These important and polysemic lines will be examined more fully later. 7 See Nietzsche’s famous evaluation of Horace cited by Commager (1967: 50). 8 Horace, of course, would not have known about the immense gulf separating his written mode of literary production from the oral one of Alcaeus and Sappho. The memory of orality faded quickly as writing became the primary mode of textual transmission. 9 For an examination of the way poem 1.1 anticipates the rest of the entire collection through thematic and verbal echoes, see Fraenkel (1957:230) and Gold (1992:175–85). 10 All passages from Horace are taken from Wickham and Garrod’s 1901 edition. 11 The coexistence of the literal and the figurative, as well as the notion that a single poem might contain multiple readings, is not an exclusively modern idea, but was recognized in the critical practice of late Hellenistic and Roman antiquity; see Cunningham (1957:102). 12 Those who refuse to accept the necessity of a figural reading are forced to make assumptions not derivable from the text. Thus Catlow (1976: 74– 81), assumes “a slight break in the dramatic movement between stanzas two and three, while Horace’s wants are satisfied,” and asserts with no supporting argumentation that “Horace is obviously Thaliarchus’ guest.” In short, he reduces the lyric text to pure narrative. Connor (1972:102–12) opens his article by assuming that “the poem presents two real persons,” and denies its grammatological nature by asserting the control of a “speaking voice.” 13 This sort of mediating position between paralysis and movement is also occupied by the other verbs in strophe 3. Thus we find the verb stravere (“to calm,” from sterno, recalling line 1’s stet, with its suggestion of “fixity”) in conjunction with “ventos aequore fervido/ deproeliantis” [“the winds battling over the boiling sea”], so that the notions of agitation and calm tend to balance and negate each other. The same can be said of the phrase “nec cupressi/ nec veteres agitantur orni” [“neither cypresses nor ancient elms were shaken”]. 14 For a fuller explanation of this verb, see Bennett (1981:212). 15 Many thanks to Jeff Grossman for his help with the German.

NOTES 211

16 Poem 1.9 itself can also be said to develop these topics, first presented in 1.4 and more explicitly dealt with in 1.11; see Santirocco (1986:24, 44) and Porter (1987:17). 17 Edmunds (1992:11, 31) points out that the word may well have been used in the spoken language, in which Greek technical terms were common, and that there were certainly pottery workshops in Sabine territory. Nonetheless, this is clearly a peculiar poetic collocation. 18 Likewise, Horace plays on the fact that Maecenas’ name is almost an anagram for Camenas in Epistles 1.1, where he asserts that Maecenas himself has always been his chief inspiration and Muse, “Prima dicte mihi, summa dicende Camena,/ spectatum satis et donatum iam rude quaeris,/ Maecenas, iterum antiquo me includere ludo?” [“My first and last Muse, Maecenas, do you ask me whom you have already approved and discharged to once again enter the lists?”] (Epistles 1.1.1–3) (Oberhelman and Armstrong 1988). 19 A version of this thesis was first put forth by Heinze (1930:52–53). It was long considered refuted by Fraenkel (1957:163–65). Heinze, however, had weakened his case by assuming that Horace had a personal relationship with Mercury and that he functioned as the poet’s guardian angel. Fraenkel rightly argued that this was an “interpolatio Christiana.” Yet, when responding to Heinze’s central point that the poems which feature Mercury prominently should be read in terms of one another, Fraenkel’s response is inadequate. “Surely Horace did not expect the reader of his hymn to search the volumes of Q. Horati Flacci opera on the chance of discovering some passages from which it could be inferred that the poet looked on Mercury as his special patron.” Yet, the Odes invite just this sort of re-reading. More importantly, Fraenkel refutes his own argument, for throughout the book he adduces numerous Greek texts which Horace echoes in one place or another. Are we really supposed to believe that these Greek parallels would be recognized by the reader, but not those derived from the poet’s work? The only reasonable solution is to agree with Neumeister that “To deny that the recurrence of Mercury in a series of poems is significant, as Fraenkel does, is willful blindness” (1976:185). 20 This story is also given in capsule form at the opening of 3.1, where it is specifically tied to Jupiter’s possessing imperium over earthly rulers and hence being in a position analogous to that of Augustus (5–8).

9 CONCLUSION: OF WRITINGS AND SUBJECTS 1 I shall never forget one of my professors charging me at my PhD defence with having “neglected” the essentially musical nature of lyric.

212 NOTES

2 Such an interpretation would appear to find corroboration in the dramatic consistency of character evinced by Hipponax in his own iambic poetry. 3 See, among many others, Nethercut (1961:389–407); Barsby (1973:18); King (1975:108–24); Ross (1975:74–84); Leach (1980:79–96); Putnam (1980:97–113); Skinner (1981:106); Dettmer (1983a:ch. 1); McKeown (1987:90–103). 4 On the notion that books 1 through 3 constitute a subjective unity, see Putnam (1980:110–11). For a contrary view, see Veyne (1988:50–51). 5 Here too the triumph and praeda themes of 1.2 and 1.3 are recapitulated (1.7.35–38, 44).

APPENDIX 1 1 I have slightly altered Campbell’s translation.

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INDEX

abstraction, process of, 15 Achilles, 93, 106, 107, 112, 153, 192 Aeschylus, 45 aιns, 22, 27, 32, 190, 191 Alcaeus, 2, 3, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 19, 19, 54, 81, 94–96, 141–48, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 160, 168, 170, 209; frg. 42: 94–95; frg. 283: 94–95; frg. 308: 142–46; frg. 338: 142–46; frg. 360: 14–15 Alcman, 81, 89, 97, 98, 99, 100, 201 Alexandria, 12, 17, 55, 77, 117, 118– 22, 122, 123, 128, 131, 133, 138, 140, 141, 147, 156, 157, 160, 171, 184, 197 Althusser, 23, 39, 191, 195 amicitia, 126, 127, 129, 133, 137, 138, 208 Anacreon, 19, 19, 160 androcentrism, 92 Aphrodite, 66; in Sappho, 90–96, 201 Apuleius, 102 archaic Greece, 7, 15, 17, 53, 77, 88, 91, 120, 170 Archilochus, 2, 8, 10–28, 32–34, 35, 42, 48, 50, 54, 58, 74, 80, 81, 81, 168, 170, 185, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194;

Mnesiepes inscription: 8, 23, 25; frg. 1: 33; frg. 5: 19–20, 32, 34; frg. 23: 22, 192; frg. 120: 25; frg. 121: 191; frg. 125: 191; frg. 128: 21; frgs 172–81: 190; frgs 185–87: 190; frg. 198a, the “Cologne Epode”: 22, 170; frg. 295: 20; frg. 295d: 28; frg. 322: 26 Ariadne, in Catullus, 107, 109–11, 115, 117 aristocracy, 14, 131, 142, 158, 187 Aristophanes, 191 Aristotle, 2, 13, 14, 21, 26, 27, 189, 196 Atalanta, in Catullus, 69, 112 Attis, in Catullus, 104, 109–11, 117, 128 Augustus, 131, 138–44, 145–52, 155, 158, 160–67, 172, 173, 211 Autolycus, 28–33, 192, 194 Bacchylides, 81 Bakhtin, M. 24, 26, 30, 35, 39, 41, 41, 46, 76, 96, 172, 191, 192, 195, 196, 199, 206 233

234 INDEX

Bakhtin/Medvedev, vii, 196 Balzac, 46 Barthes, R. 53, 196, 198, 202 Baudelaire, 7, 38–38, 174 Beaumarchais, 45 Benjamin, W. 126 Benveniste, E. 16, 53, 192 Berenice, in Catullus, 111–14, 122 Berryman, J. 49 blame, poetry, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 192, 194 Bonnard, A. 11, 19 book trade, 2, 19, 189 Borges, J. 75, 76, 199 Bundy, E. 82 Callimachean influences on Roman poetry, 63, 71, 156, 157, 207 Callimachus, 103, 111, 112, 117, 121, 122, 133, 157, 207 carnival, 24, 30, 35; see also Bakhtin, M. Catullus, 2, 48, 50–80, 85, 88, 89, 99, 100–21, 122, 124, 127–41, 141, 148, 149, 168, 172, 173, 197, 198, 199, 205, 206, 207; epigrams, in Catullus: 111, 116, 117, 207; long poems: 106, 111–18, 197, 198; polymetrics, in Catullus: 111, 113, 116, 117; poems vii–13:197; poems 2–11:197; poems 65–115:207; poem 1: 56, 71; poem 2: 61, 63, 65–70, 71, 72, 108, 198; poem 2B: 69–70, 109, 112; poem 3: 61, 63, 65, 67–70, 72, 108, 198; poem 4: 72; poem 5: 61, 63, 69–71, 72, 108, 198; poem 6: 68, 70–72, 198;

poem 7: 63–66, 70–71, 72, 108, 122, 198; poem 8: 63–66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 108, 135; poem 9: 72; poem 10: 71–72, 198; poem 11: 58, 59, 61–70, 72, 74– 75, 100, 103, 105–7, 108–11, 115– 17, 197, 198, 206; poem 14: 128; poem 16: 67; poem 22: 128; poem 29: 208; poem 31: 77; poem 32: 68; poem 35: 128; poem 36: 128; poem 37: 59, 65; poem 41: 208; poem 43: 208; poem 45: 68; poem 49: 207; poem 50: 135–38; poem 51: 58, 62, 66, 72–75, 100, 102–7, 108–11, 115–17, 135–38, 206, 207; poem 57: 208; poem 58: 59, 67; poem 61: 104, 105, 107, 108, 110– 12, 114; poem 62: 104, 105, 106–8, 108– 12, 116; poem 63: 67, 104, 105, 109–12, 113, 116, 128, 207; poem 64: 106–9, 109–12, 112, 113, 114–16, 129; poem 65: 111–14, 207; poem 66: 111–14, 207; poem 67: 70, 113, 207; poem 68: 59, 68, 103, 106, 109– 17, 129, 207; poem 69:61, 116, 197; poem 70: 59–61, 72, 103, 109, 116, 197;

INDEX 235

poem 71: 61, 116, 197; poem 72: 59–61, 72, 116, 136–39, 197; poem 74: 68; poem 75: 60, 116, 197; poem 76: 60, 104, 105, 110, 116, 129–32, 136, 197, 207; poem 77: 197; poem 85: 59; poem 87: 65; poem 94: 134; poem 95: 128; poem 101: 73; poem 105: 208; poem 107: 58–61, 72, 74, 115–17, 198; poem 108: 59, 61, 116; poem 109: 56–61, 72–75, 115–17, 129, 198; poem 114: 208; poem 115: 208 choral lyric, 2, 12, 81–84, 86, 89, 98, 99, 168, 182, 205; see also epinician poetry; Pindar; praise, poetry of Cicero, 130, 131, 133, 134, 208 class, social, 14, 15, 39, 85, 118, 123– 29, 130–35, 140, 142, 158, 159, 170, 187, 207, 208 Clay, J. 22, 29–32, 192, 194 Cohen, R. 38 Cominius, in Catullus, 59, 61 communal code, 19 confessional poetry, 22, 89, 168 Culler, J. vii, 53 Demeter, 24–27, 33, 192 Derrida, J. 3, 13, 16, 39, 44, 165, 169, 187, 188, 194, 195, 206 deute, 90, 201, 204, 206 dialectic, 41, 41, 46, 49, 72, 141, 152, 159, 184, 185, 188, 196

dialogical situation, 43–44, 46–48, 50, 58, 96, 98, 99, 102, 123, 143, 170; see also Bakhtin, M. dialogical subject, 47–50; see also Bakhtin, M. Diomedes, 30–31, 92, 194 Dionysus, 12, 24–27, 33, 186, 191, 192 distributional elements, 53–55, 74, 88, 93, 116, 168 dithyramb, 12, 25, 186 Dolon, 31–34 double-voiced, 90, 91, 135; see also Bakhtin, M. drama, 8, 12, 13, 22, 46, 83, 170, 196, 211 Du Bois, P. 95 Dumézil, G. 26, 191 Eagleton, T. 3, 7, 35, 42, 123 Eco, U. 39, 41, 48, 196 educator, Sappho as, 97–98, 201 Einstein, 76, 199 Enipo, in Archilochus, 20–21 epic, or epos, 8, 12, 19–22, 29, 33–35, 42, 46, 92, 93, 95, 171, 185, 186, 192, 194 epinician poetry, 26, 85–87, 97, 99, 191; see also choral lyric; Pindar; praise, poetry, of epithalamia, 77, 97, 105–9, 110, 114, 116, see also wedding hymns equestrians, 123, 126, 130–34, 140, 208 Eumaios, 19, 31, 32 Faunus, in Horace, 146, 147, 153, 157, 159–67 festivals, 24–27, 120, 147, 186, 200 fides, 115, 126, 129, 133, 154 Finnegan, R. 4, 5, 7, 11, 182

236 INDEX

flower, imagery in Catullus, 62, 65, 66, 69, 70, 103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 116, 198 foedus, 126, 129, 130, 133 form, as a category of generic analysis, 17, 43–44, 48, 49, 51, 83, 144, 145, 160, 170, 171, 174, 184, 186, 200, 205 Foucault, M. 13, 14, 23, 42, 121, 126, 140, 182, 196, 205, 208 Fraenkel, E. 5, 120, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, 150, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 209–9 Fränkel, H. 8, 10, 12, 98, 185, 199, 205 Freud, S. 44, 46, 76, 125, 128, 171, 196, 199 Frye, N. vii, 2, 38, 196 Furius and Aurelius, in Catullus, 62, 65, 72, 198 Gallus, the poet, 55 Gans, E. 80, 92 gender inversion, in Catullus, 71, 109, 111, 112, 115, 116 Genette, G. 12–14, 17, 46, 187 Gentili, B. 3, 4, 5, 12, 26, 88, 91, 142, 184, 187, 190, 192, 200, 201 Gold, B. 120, 131, 132, 209 Greimas, A. 45 gynocentrism, in Sappho, 90, 92 Hallet, J. 88–90 Harris, W. 2, 188, 189, 199 Havelock, E. 4, 11, 12, 15, 81, 87, 88, 93, 120, 121, 168, 184, 187, 188, 189, 200, 201, 207 Hegel, G. 10, 11, 169, 185 Helen, in Sappho, 94–95 Hermes, 29, 31, 33, 142, 159, 192, 194, 209, see also Mercury Hesiod, 23, 204 Hipponax, 20, 30, 33, 189, 194, 211

Homer, 2, 5, 185, 189, 190, 191, 202, 204; in Archilochus, 10–12, 16, 19, 21, 23–24, 33–34; in Sappho, 91–97,; Iliad 5: 92; Iliad 10: 30–32; Odyssey 1: 29; Odyssey 9: 29; Odyssey 14: 20, 32; Odyssey 19: 29; Odyssey 20: 21; “Hymn to Demeter”: 24 homoerotic love, in Sappho, 97, 98, 201 Horace, 12, 19, 20, 48, 103, 118, 118, 120, 122, 138–67, 173, 198, 209, 210; Epistles 1.1: 210; Epistles 1.19: 103, 144; Epodes 6: 20; “Parade Odes”: 143–48; “Roman Odes”: 145, 148; Odes 1.1: 145, 146, 155, 209; Odes 1.2: 145–50, 157, 160, 162– 66; Odes 1.3: 146; Odes 1.4: 210; Odes 1.9: 141–48, 147, 149–42, 209–9; Odes 1.10: 141–50, 149, 151–55, 157, 159–67, 210–10; Odes 1.11: 210; Odes 1.12: 145–50, 158; Odes 1.17: 160; Odes 1.20: 146–50, 153, 157–61; Odes 1.26: 145; Odes 1.32: 147, 155; Odes 2.7: 19–19, 138, 160–64, 163; Odes 2.12: 146; Odes 2.13: 153–57, 161, 163; Odes 2.14: 153–57; Odes 2.l5: 153–57;

INDEX 237

Odes 2.16: 148, 152–57, 156–60; Odes 2.l7: 153–57, 157–61, 160, 161–65, 163; Odes 2.18: 153–57; Odes 3.1: 147, 211; Odes 3.4: 148–52, 153, 157, 160, 161, 163; Odes 3.8: 146–50; Odes 3.11: 146–50, 159; Odes 3.14: 146–50, 158; Odes 3.l6: 146; Odes 3.18: 146–50; Odes 3.30: 144, 154, 155–60; Satires 1.2: 67; Satires 1.4: 132; Satires 1.10: 147, 209; Satires 2.3: 162; Satires 2.6: 158, 160, 161 Iambe, 24, 33 iambic, or iambos, 2, 12, 19, 20, 24– 27, 30, 33, 34–35, 42, 48, 50, 81, 99, 168, 170, 186, 189, 192, 211 Ibycus, 95–96 identidem, in Catullus, 62, 63, 206 ideology, 23, 34, 39–42, 92, 109, 123, 126, 127, 130, 134, 135, 136, 187, 195 individual, and individuality in lyric poetry, vii, 5, 3, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 24, 34, 41, 53, 81, 81, 85, 86, 88, 93, 95, 96, 99, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 125, 133, 134, 140, 140, 164, 168–73, 185, 187, 188, 189, 204 iniuria, 137 integrational elements, 53–55, 74, 88, 103, 116, 168 interiority, of lyric consciousness, 3, 5, 16, 127, 132, 165, 168, 169, 189; see also lyric consciousness, ego, or subjectivity

interiorized, nature of lyric consciousness, 2, 6, 7, 16, 47, 117, 168; see also lyric consciousness, ego, or subjectivity intratextuality, 66, 74, 100, 104, 105, 169 Ionesco, 45 Iser, W. 3, 4, 199 Jaeger, W. 10, 21, 34, 169, 185, 189, 199 Jameson, F. 38, 39, 41, 43, 45, 49, 54, 90, 125, 126, 127, 184, 192, 195, 196 Jocelyn, H.D. 66–68, 198 Johnson, W.R. 5, 11, 19, 21, 51, 65, 91, 115, 120, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147, 159, 160, 185, 186, 200, 201 Kirkwood, G. 11, 12, 88, 90, 96–97, 99, 199, 200, 201, 206 Korax, 23, 27, 32, 191 Kristeva, J. 125 Lacan, J. 44, 195 Laodamia, in Catullus, 112, 114–16 Latacz, J. 204 Lefkowitz, M. 21, 83, 84, 190, 200, 205 Lesbia, in Catullus, 50, 51, 56, 58–73, 77, 100–11, 113–16, 127, 129, 130, 137, 197 Lesbos, 88, 89, 96, 97, 98, 102, 102, 142, 201 liberal thought, 16, 81 libraries, 120, 121, 189 literacy, 16, 118, 165, 184, 188, 202; craft literacy, 199; culture of writing, vii, 50, 118, 201 lore, communal and mythic, 50, 54, 84, 93, 117, 168 love elegy, 48, 55, 114, 170–77

238 INDEX

Lucilius, 132 Lukács, G. vii, 10, 38 Luria, A.R. 15, 16, 41, 188 Lycambes, in Archilochus, 20, 27–28, 33, 190, 192, 194 lyric collection, vii, 2, 3, 6, 7, 35, 38, 47, 51, 54, 74, 76, 118, 120, 123, 140, 165, 168, 169, 174, 182, 185, 205 lyric consciousness, ego, or subjectivity, vii, 2, 5, 11, 16, 19, 24, 25, 38, 74–76, 115, 118, 129, 130, 132, 136, 164, 165, 168, 171, 173–77, 184, 205 Maecenas, in Horace, 131, 141, 146– 52, 153, 155–61, 161, 172, 210 Mallarmé, 4, 35 Mamurra/Mentula, in Catullus, 134 de Man, P. 6, 38–38, 42, 49, 74, 182, 195 Martial, 66–67 materiality of the signifier, 38, 45, 132, 195 melic poetry, 81, 99, 168 Memmius, governor of Bithynia, in Catullus, 72 Mercury, 141, 142, 145–50, 151, 153, 157–67, 210, 211; see also Hermes Meriones, 32–33 Milton, 48 Miralles and Pòrtulas, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 191, 192, 194 Molière, 45 monody, 2, 48, 50, 53, 81, 81, 83, 84, 89, 99, 168, 182, 202, 205 myths, as categories of generic analysis, 30, 43–46, 51, 91, 121 Nagy, G. 2, 4, 5, 20, 22–25, 27, 32, 77, 80, 81, 84, 86, 90, 97, 98, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 194, 200, 201, 205

narrative, 2, 13, 15, 46, 50, 54–58, 59, 66, 69, 72–74, 76, 77, 81, 88, 102, 106, 115–18, 164, 170, 171, 198, 206, 210 negotium, 126–29, 135 Neoboule, in Archilochus, 20, 22, 27, 192, 194 neoterics, 128, 156 New Criticism, 190, 199 Odysseus, 19–21, 28, 29–34, 35, 50, 170, 192, 194 Ong, W. 3, 6, 15, 187 orality, 125, 144, 147, 165, 182, 208, 209 oral tradition, 2, 21, 28, 31, 33, 34, 86, 95, 184, 191 otium, 124, 131–34, 135–38, 140, 147– 51 Ovid, 122, 131, 140, 169, 173–77, 201 Page, D. 21, 92, 97–98, 189, 201, 202, 204 paradigmatic, sentiments and/or statements, 3, 6, 81, 88, 91, 168, 201, 205, 206 passer, in Catullus, 66–68, 70 pederasty, 205 Peleus, in Catullus, 106–9, 117 performative context, 12, 75, 96, 98, 104, 105, 142, 190, 202, 205, 206 Petrarch, 48, 165, 168–72, 174 phallic, 69, 109 phallus, 30, 104, 198 Pindar, 2, 3, 26, 28, 30, 35, 54, 81–88, 90–93, 97–100, 115–18, 120, 122, 146, 168, 170, 184, 191, 192, 200, 202, 206; “Nemean 8”: 30; “Olympian 5”:85–86; “Pythian 2”: 26, 28; “Pythian 11”: 82–83, 86–88

INDEX 239

Plato, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21, 33, 84, 121 plough, imagery in Catullus, 62, 65, 66, 69, 70, 103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 116, 198 Plutarch, 32–33 polis, 2, 17, 80, 81, 86, 100, 120–22, 123, 126 praise, poetry of, 22, 26, 30, 33, 99, 191, 194; see also choral lyric; epinician poetry; Pindar Propertius, 55, 122, 134, 172 Protesilaus, in Catullus, 112, 114–16 protogeneric elements, 43–46, 48, 51 Putnam, M. 104, 106, 108, 110, 115, 159, 162, 211 Quinn, K. 61–63, 68, 71–73, 103, 105, 109, 110, 111, 114, 118, 122, 124, 128, 130, 132, 134, 153, 155, 156, 197, 198, 199, 207, 208 Racine, 49 Renaissance, 48, 125, 126, 140, 169, 174 rhapsodes, 2, 12, 23, 168, 186, 191 Richlin, A. 68 Rissman, L. 92, 94–96, 99, 202 Rose, P. 4, 14, 29, 86, 96, 184, 185, 187, 202 Rösler, W. 2, 5, 24, 27, 96, 182, 190– 92, 202, 204 Rubino, C. 102, 109, 130, 198, 199, 207 Rufus, in Catullus, 61, 197 Russo, J. 17, 185, 186, 189 Sabine farm, in Horace, 141, 146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 160–67 de Sainte Croix, G. 14, 124, 187, 207, 208

Santirocco, M. 2, 118, 122, 124, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 153, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 209, 210 Sappho, 2, 11, 12, 17, 54, 58, 62, 66, 71, 77–85, 88–106, 109, 115, 116, 117, 120, 122, 135, 143, 145, 153, 155, 160, 168, 170, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209; frg. 1: 66, 71, 84, 90–92, 94, 175– 79, 206; frg. 16: 84, 92–95, 177–80; frg. 31: 84, 96–99, 100–3, 104, 105, 178–81, 202–5, 207; frg. 44: 202; frg. 105c: 103, 105 Sartre, J.P. 41 Segal, C. 29, 30, 63, 65, 69, 70, 72, 81, 83, 86, 88, 89, 91, 133, 135, 136, 197, 198, 201 Seidensticker, B. 19–20, 23 senator, Roman, 123, 126, 130, 131, 140, 140, 208 sexual roles, 89 Shakespeare, 45, 49 Sidney, 7, 174 Skinner, M. 63, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 102, 109, 110, 112, 115, 126, 197, 198, 211 slave, 20, 67, 68, 73, 126, 131, 147, 154, 158–62, 173, 208 slave of love, 171 slippage, sign or semiotic, 44, 130, 136, 208 Snell, B. 10, 12, 80, 88, 91, 97, 98, 169, 185, 186, 200 social change, 132 Soracte, Mt, 142, 150–56, 155 subgenres, 43–44, 48, 51, 55, 81, 99, 170 subjectivity, 3, 5–7, 10, 12, 41, 47, 50, 55, 56, 74, 91, 92, 96, 120, 126, 141, 168, 168, 170, 171, 173, 185, 188, 196;

240 INDEX

speaking subject, 46–47, 53, 80, 98, 206; see also lyric consciousness, ego, or subjectivity; individual, and individuality in lyric Svenbro, J. 6, 14, 184, 191, 192, 202, 205, 206 technology, 16, 164, 168, 184, 207 temporality, in lyric, 15, 66, 76, 125; arrow of time, 2; multitemporal nature of lyric, 2, 38, 76, 115, 116, 171 Thaliarchus, in Horace, 154, 158–62, 210 Thalmann, W. 2, 4, 42, 82, 94, 187, 200 Theocritus, 122 Theognis, 3, 14, 54, 182, 187, 204 Theseus, in Catullus, 107, 109–11, 115 Thetis, in Catullus, 106–9, 117 Thomas, R. 2, 19, 80, 81, 182, 184, 187, 202 Thoth, 159 Tibullus, 122, 171–75, 208 Todorov, T. vii, 38, 39, 41, 42, 49 troubadour, 99, 168, 174, 187, 188, 191 Vedic, poetic tradition, 2, 191 Veranius, in Catullus, 72, 198 Vergil, 5, 30, 122, 140, 146, 151, 156 virtual, concept of the, 4, 75, 199 Volosinov, V. 41, 123, 195, 196 wedding hymns, 96, 98, 104–7, 108, 110, 114, 202, 204, 205; see also epithalamia West, M. 20, 24–25, 27, 89, 99, 189, 190, 191 von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, U. 97, 204, 205

Winkler, J. 89–90, 92, 202, 205 Wiseman, T. P. 51, 58–59, 61, 63–65, 70–73, 103, 105, 106, 110–13, 114, 120, 122, 124, 132, 135, 197, 198, 199, 205, 206, 207 Zumthor, P. 3–5, 7, 12, 15, 80, 81, 88, 182, 185, 202

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