Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism 9780521769556, 6720158090, 0521769558

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half-title page......Page 3
Title page......Page 5
Copyright page......Page 6
Dedication......Page 7
Epigraph......Page 8
Contents......Page 9
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Abbreviations......Page 13
Introduction: Dreams of order......Page 15
1 Mimesis, style, and the spaces of metaphor......Page 42
2 Rural resources: Hesiod, Pindar, and establishing poetic dominion......Page 80
3 On the road: Charting the path of literary judgment in Aristophanes......Page 118
4 Rural retreats: Staking philosophy’s terrain in Plato......Page 160
5 Diaspora: Journeys and idylls in Hellenistic poetry......Page 199
6 On the road again: Demetrius and fellow travelers on aesthetic re-routings......Page 236
7 In Plato’s garden: Reordering the retreat in Cicero and Dionysius of Halicarnassus......Page 280
Epilogue: Dreaming in the garden with Proust......Page 328
Bibliography......Page 339
General index......Page 360
Index locorum......Page 371

Citation preview

Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism

This study explores a previously uncharted area of ancient literary theory and criticism: the ancient landscapes (e.g., the Ilissus river in Athens, Mount Helicon) that generate metaphors for distinguishing styles, which dovetail with ancient conceptions of metaphor as itself spatial and mobile. Ancient writers most often coordinate stylistic features with country settings, where authoritative performers such as Muses, poets, and eventually critics or theorists view, appropriate, and emulate their bounties (e.g., springs, flowers, rivers, paths). These spaces of metaphor and their elaborations provide poets and critics with a vivid means of distinguishing among styles and an influential vocabulary. Together these figurative terrains shape critical and theoretical discussions in Greece and beyond. Since this discourse has a remarkably wide reach, the book is broad in scope, ranging from archaic Greek poetry through Roman oratory and “Longinus” to the reception of critical imagery in Proust and Derrida. nancy worman is Professor of Classics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of articles and books on style, performance, and the body in Greek literature and culture, such as Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 2008). Most recently she has published articles on the aesthetics of tragic embodiment and co-edited Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture (with Kate Gilhuly, Cambridge, 2014).

Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism nancy worman

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521769556 © Nancy Worman 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Worman, Nancy, 1963– Landscape and the spaces of metaphor in ancient literary theory and criticism / Nancy Worman. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-76955-6 (hardback) 1. Literature, Ancient – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 2. Metaphor in literature. 3. Landscapes in literature. 4. Place (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title. PN621.W67 2015 8090 .01–dc23 2015012201 ISBN 978-0-521-76955-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my garden-loving mother Eugenia Cuyler Worman

When I saw the flowers I was thunderstruck! You should not have been – Tulips, she said and smiled. William Carlos Williams, from “Paterson” Then dream of gardens, of bluish horizons, Of jets of water weeping in alabaster basins, Of kisses, of birds singing at dawn and at nightfall . . . John Ashbery, “Landscape (After Baudelaire)”

Contents

Acknowledgments page [viii] List of abbreviations [xi]

Introduction: dreams of order

[1]

1. Mimesis, style, and the spaces of metaphor [28] 2. Rural resources: Hesiod, Pindar, and establishing poetic dominion [66] 3. On the road: charting the path of literary judgment in Aristophanes [104] 4. Rural retreats: staking philosophy’s terrain in Plato

[146]

5. Diaspora: journeys and idylls in Hellenistic poetry [185] 6. On the road again: Demetrius and fellow travelers on aesthetic re-routings [222] 7. In Plato’s garden: reordering the retreat in Cicero and Dionysius of Halicarnassus [266] Epilogue: dreaming in the garden with Proust

[314]

Bibliography [325] General index [346] Index locorum [357]

vii

Acknowledgments

viii

This book has been a long time in the making. During an early phase of its development I was on a Loeb Fellowship and visiting at Harvard University (2007–2008), and I am grateful for the support of that institution as well as helpful colleagues in the Department of Classics, especially Christopher Krebs, Betsey Robinson, and Richard Thomas. While there I also met Katherine Deutsch, whose interest in discursive metaphors intersects in many places with my own and whose dissertation sparked many fruitful conversations. During this same time Kate Gilhuly and I started formulating ideas for a workshop on place, space, and landscape, applying for and receiving a Mellon SIRT Grant that, together with additional funding from a Barnard College Mini-Grant, paid for participants’ attendance at the workshop hosted at Wellesley College. We developed the papers from the workshop into an edited volume that was published in 2014 (Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture, Cambridge). I learned a lot from working with Kate, and I am supremely grateful to her for her wit and determination in seeing the volume through to its completion. I want to thank Barnard College for research and travel support in the form of further Mini-Grants during the years of work on the book that followed. I also thank my Barnard colleagues who have been such kind supporters and friends over the years, especially Elizabeth Castelli, Pam Cobrin, Rachel Eisendrath, Helene Foley, Janet Jakobsen, Monica Miller, and Kristina Milnor. I am grateful to my Columbia colleagues Francesco De Angelis, Marcus Folch, Elizabeth Scharffenberger, Deborah Steiner, Katharina Volk, Gareth Williams, and James Zetzel for fruitful conversations. Special thanks are due to the students in my graduate seminars at Columbia and Harvard on ancient literary criticism and ancient aesthetics, for their many contributions to my thinking on these topics. In addition I am grateful to colleagues at the following institutions for inviting me to deliver papers on topics related to the book: The Center for Hellenic Studies, Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, The Institute of Classical Studies (University College London), Princeton University, Rutgers University, Stanford University,

Acknowledgments

University of Cambridge, University of Chicago, University of St Andrews, University of Toronto, and Yale University. Many colleagues at these institutions and at conferences hosted by them were very helpful in formal and informal discussions: Egbert Bakker, Victor Bers, Joshua Billings, Anna Bonifazi, Charles Brittain, Carol Dougherty, Chris Eckerman, Lowell Edmunds, Andrew Ford, Milette Gaifman, Simon Goldhill, Emily Greenwood, Jon Hesk, Brooke Holmes, Richard Hunter, Brad Inwood, Lucy Jackson, Lynn Kozak, Chris Kraus, Leslie Kurke, Miriam Leonard, Pauline LeVen, Michèle Lowrie, Richard Martin, Gregory Nagy, Sarah Nooter, Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, Irene Peirano, Hayden Pellicia, Verity Platt, Tim Power, Alex Purves, Pietro Pucci, Tim Rood, Seth Schein, Daniel Selden, Gisela Striker, Phiroze Vasunia, Nicolas Wiater, and Jennifer Whiting. Among these I single out Simon Goldhill, Sarah Nooter, Alex Purves, and Phiroze Vasunia for their intellectual companionship and many kindnesses. I also thank Thorsten Fögen and Mirelle Lee for inviting me to contribute to their volume, Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (De Gruyter, 2009), a piece that represents some of my earliest thinking around the topics discussed here (”Bodies and Topographies in Ancient Stylistic Theory”). I thank as well Pierre Destrée, for inviting me to contribute to the volume he is editing with Penelope Murray, A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics ((Blackwell, forthcoming), a chapter entitled “The Aesthetics of Ancient Landscapes,” which represents in condensed form a more recent formulation of the general parameters of this book. I owe a special debt to Victoria Wohl, dear friend and favorite interlocutor, whose intellectual generosity and humor are invaluable to me. My thanks as well to other friends with wise and kind ears, especially Alastair Blanshard, Joy Connolly, Jonathan Massey, Diane Moroff, Marc Norman, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Anthony Schneider, Andrea Schulz, and Michael Strevens. I thank Michael Sharp, the classics and history editor at Cambridge University Press, for his careful adjudication of the revision process, as well as the anonymous readers, for their attention to both the presentation of the whole and the painstaking details. The book has been vastly improved due to their hard work. I thank also the classics editor Elizabeth Hanlon and production editor Bronte Rawlings, for their attentive shepherding of the publication process in its later stages; and Simone Oppen, who composed an impressive Index Locorum. Thanks as well to Nigel Hope, whose well-paced copy-editing made the process more orderly and streamlined than I have ever experienced.

ix

x

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my mother, to whom this book is dedicated, for her abiding love of gardening – an inspiration for getting your hands dirty in the right way. Finally, I thank Iakovos Vasiliou, always and for everything. The chapter in the edited volume mentioned above (A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics) covers in very condensed form material that overlaps somewhat with discussions in the Introduction as well as in Chapters 2, 4, and 7. Chapter 3 of my book is an expanded and revised version of the chapter that I contributed to the volume mentioned above that I edited with Kate Gilhuly. Some material from another volume chapter, “Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophistic Style,” in The Blackwell Companion to Euripides edited by Robin Mitchell-Boyask (forthcoming), also contributed to the development of this same chapter.

Abbreviations

AJA AJP AP BICS CA CCJ CJ CP CQ CR CW D–K EG Gow G–P G&R GRBS HSCP JHS K–A LIMC L–P MH OSAP PCPS Pf. PMG PMLA QUCC REA RhM

American Journal of Archeology American Journal of Philology Anthologia Palatina Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Classical Antiquity Cambridge Classical Journal Classical Journal Classical Philology Classical Quarterly Classical Review Classical World H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 12th ed. Berlin, 1966–67 D. L. Page, ed. Epigrammata Graeca. Oxford. 1975 A. S. F. Gow, ed. and comm. Theocritus, 2 vols. Cambridge, 1965 A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, eds. and comm. The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams, 2 vols. Cambridge, 1965 Greece & Rome Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Journal of Hellenic Studies R. Kassel and C. Austin, eds. Poetae Comici Graeci, vols. i–ix. Berlin, 1983– Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae. Zurich, 1981– E. Lobel and D. L. Page, eds. Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta. Oxford, 1955 Museum Helveticum Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society R. Pfeiffer, ed. and comm. Callimachus, vols. 1–2. Oxford, 1949–53 Poetae Melici Graeci, ed. D. L. Page. Oxford, 1962 Proceedings of the Modern Language Association Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica Revue des études anciennes Rheinisches Museum für Philologie

xi

xii

List of abbreviations

SCO SEG SO TAPA TrGF W2 YCS ZPE

Studi classici e orientali J. J. E. Hondius, ed. Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Leiden, 1923– Symbolai Osloenses Transactions of the American Philological Association B. Snell, R. Kannicht, and S. Radt, eds. Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Göttingen, 1971–2004 M. L. West, ed. Iambi et Elegi Graeci, 2nd ed. Oxford, 1989–92 Yale Classical Studies Zeitscrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

Introduction Dreams of order

It was, this “Guermantes,” like the setting in a novel, an imaginary landscape I could picture to myself only with difficulty and thereby longed all the more to discover, set amid real lands and roads that would suddenly become immersed in heraldic details, a few miles from a railway station; I recalled the names of the places around it as if they had been situated at the foot of Parnassus or of Helicon, and they seemed precious to me as the physical conditions necessary – in topographical science – for the production of an inexplicable phenomenon. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way1

This is a book about metaphors of place and spaces of metaphor in ancient literary theory and criticism. It traces the power of figuration to shape, in Shakespeare’s famous phrase, “a local habitation and a name” and demonstrates the ways in which rural landscapes emerge in ancient convention as central to literary judgment and theorizing.2 Writers ranging from archaic poets to rhetorical theorists trace journeys to special places, stage scenes of viewing and appreciating the lay of the land, match inhabitants to their settings, discriminate among landscape features, and by means of imitation and emulation appropriate and reshape famous terrains. They engage in all of this elaborate spatial ordering primarily to delimit styles – first of poetry and later on of prose, predominantly oratory. But their discriminations also spring from and reinforce broader aesthetic and cultural hierarchies, so that their stylistic schemes have a more extensive reach than it may initially appear. 1

2

“C’était, ce Guermantes, comme le cadre d’un roman, un paysage imaginaire que j’avais peine à me représenter et d’autant plus le désir de découvrir, enclavé au milieu de terres et de routes réelles qui tout à coup s’imprégneraient de particularités héraldiques, à deux lieues d’une gare; je me rappelais les noms des localités voisines comme si elles avaient été situées au pied du Parnasse ou de l’Hélicon, et elles me semblaient précieuses comme les conditions matérielles – en science topographique – de la production d’un phénomène mystérieux” (Proust [1922] 1987–89: II.314; tr. Treharne 2003: 8). “The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, | Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; | And as imagination bodies forth | The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen | Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing | A local habitation and a name” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.14–19). On Shakespeare’s “habitation,” see further below, section 2.

1

2

Introduction

I have two primary contentions: first, that rural settings, as well as pilgrimages to them, are central to the development of ancient literary theory and criticism and coincide with a sense of metaphor as spatial and mobile. Ancient writers on rhetoric follow Aristotle in conceiving of metaphors as traversing and delimiting remote places – sometimes even as strangers crossing over from distant realms and bringing things from far away up close (e.g., Po. 1457b6–7; Rhet. 1405a8, 1411b23; cf. 1411a26–35).3 My second and parallel contention is that representations of rural landscapes shape theory because the metaphorical spaces that they delimit are so deeply rooted in poetic convention and in famous places of pilgrimage and invention with many layers of cultural accretion. These places thus emerge in critical discourse as already received and represented, so that they serve the stylistic topographies as the provocative remnants in language of the real sites that they never can be and yet that always beckon as such.4 I want to propose as well that although scholars have tended to use the phrase “ancient literary criticism” to encompass the many different kinds of texts and arguments usually included under that rubric, in fact “theory and criticism” better captures its range – from, for example, the drama of critical judgment in Aristophanes’ Frogs to Cicero’s analyses of rhetorical invention and style.5 In addition, for the purposes of this study in particular, “theorizing” in the sense of observing, reordering, and gaining conceptual ground captures a central aspect of the process by which landscapes and spaces of metaphor come to structure and be absorbed into critical-theoretical discourse. Literary critical and theoretical discourse is thus shaped by shared conventions and framed from the outset as poetic and metaphorical. That is, “style in writing” (tenor, ground, target) takes shape as a figurative 3

4

5

On Aristotle’s use of metaphors for metaphor, see esp. Derrida [1972] 1982; also Ricoeur 1978a, [1975] 1978b, 1996, Lloyd 1996, and further below (section 1) and in ch. 1.2. I am using the term “metaphor” in the most expansive, Aristotelian sense, as coextensive with figuration more generally. The status of metaphor as the essential figure of thought vs. as one among many modes of ornamentation has a complicated history; see further in ch. 1 (introductory section). I.e., never real within language, since the settings are shaped and reshaped by layers of representation – cf. Jacques Derrida’s influential formulation of these as “traces.” It may be significant for my purposes that the French word can also mean “track,” encompassing a sense of “footprint” and thus (past) movement; see Spivak’s introduction to Of Grammatology (Derrida [1967] 1976: xvii). The term “critic” (kritikos) is apparently Hellenistic; the grammarian Crates may have laid claim to it as more encompassing than grammatikos (see Asmis 1992a; cf. Schenkeveld 1964). Scholars have also debated the relationship between rhetorical theory and literary criticism (e.g., Rhys Roberts 1963; Meijering 1987; Classen 1995).

Introduction

discourse, as, say, a straight or winding “path” (vehicle, figure, source). Before it is analyzed in itself, it is expressed as metaphor.6 Further, as ancient poets such as Pindar show so effectively, metaphors can render close and conspicuous ideas that are not easily accessible through the senses. The striking image achieves envisioning and insight, when the match made brings the metaphorical term into vivid proximity with its new ground, as with a phrase like the Homeric “path of song,” an image picked up by Pindar and Aristophanes and developed by later ancient literary and rhetorical theorists. These poets and prose writers all clearly appreciate the visualizing capacity of metaphorical language and appropriate it accordingly, although the theorists often express concern about the dangers of metaphorical usage that is too poetic and outlandish.7 Modern accounts of metaphor also tend to recognize as potentially problematic the “something extra” that metaphor imports and often take as given its powers of envisioning.8 This is certainly the case with the terrains of literary theory and criticism, where this visualizing capacity arises from the fact that so many of its tropes and images are deliberately situated in familiar topographies that beckon tantalizingly as if from a distance. Their aesthetic coordinates (e.g., springs, mountain paths, flowers), like Proust’s “heraldic details,” stand out as capturing essential aspects of familiar places, as they come to be in their envisioning and reordering. These places include, most notably, Delphi and Mount Parnassus, the springs on Hesiod’s Helicon and the Valley of the Muses below, and the Ilissus and Cephisus rivers in Athens. The Boeotian mountains were celebrated as famous sites of pilgrimage, inspiration, and cultic activities, while sanctuaries (including one to the Muses) and parkland retreats such as the Academy graced the areas along 6

7

8

This is true of any new field of knowledge, namely, that its discourse is initially shaped by means of metaphors, the vehicles of which fade in the course of its theorization (e.g., as Greek prose begins to define itself over and against poetic expression). See Harriott 1969: 62–63, who quotes William Empson (1947: 25) on dead metaphors. For the terminology, see Richards (1936) (tenor-vehicle), McLuhan (1967) (ground-figure), and Lakoff (1980) (target-source). See also Black (1962); Franke 2000. See further in ch. 1.2. Bad metaphors can result in stylistic “frigidity” (τὸ ψυχρόν, Rhet. 1406a32–34) or “crude and elaborate expressions” that make the language sound poetic (cf. τῶν φορτικῶν καὶ περιέργων αὐτὸν οἴεται ζηλωτὴν γενέσθαι λόγων καὶ τὸ ποιητικὸν διώκειν μᾶλλον τὸ ἀληθινόν, DH, de Lysia 14 [= test. Theophr. 692 F]; cf. Arist. Rhet. 1405b11). Moran (1996: 385) remarks, “The concept of the metaphorical is originally devised for application to the discourse of others. It is a rhetorical weapon.” Cf. Leidl 2003: 53; also Davidson’s prosaic “Metaphor makes us see one thing as another” (1978: 45). But cf. Todorov, who recognizes this visualizing as a special feature, as the “visibility of discourse” (Ricoeur’s paraphrase, 1978a: 142). See Moran 1989: 90 on the traditional relation between metaphor (or figuration more generally) and seeing images.

3

4

Introduction

Athenian rivers.9 Hesiod and Pindar both orient their poetics by means of identifiable landscapes, which come to resonate as programmatic indicators in the literary critical geographies of Hellenistic and Roman poets. Plato’s Phaedrus lays the groundwork for mapping rhetorical criticism as site-specific and ritually significant, tracing the interlocutors’ progress along the banks of the Ilissus just outside the walls of Athens, where shrines to Pan, the river god Achelous, and the Nymphs were situated. Aristophanes’ Frogs utilizes nearly the same lay of the land, although in a more adumbrated manner, to trace the path of literary judgment. This focus on landscapes and those who view and/or inhabit them may seem to constitute a narrow rubric with which to analyze the heterogeneous texts that modern scholars have treated as contributing to ancient literary criticism, but it is in fact a central means by which literary critical and theoretical ideas are formulated in the ancient discussions. We can witness already in Pindar’s odes how the poet-performer celebrates ritual centers such as Olympia and Delphi as received landscapes laden with sensory pleasures, cultural pride, and economic evaluations, as well as how these settings shape his poetic program and ground his aristocratic affiliations.10 Because of the embodied, place-specific quality of poetic invocation, this tradition develops originally in Greek literary contexts; but heavily accreted places in Boeotia and Attica also serve as settings in Greek and Roman reception for reviewing the aesthetic and cultural significance of certain landscapes and their features. Even less renowned areas such as the bank of the Ilissus river in Athens give this impression. In the Phaedrus Socrates appreciates the lay of the land like a man of leisure as well as a connoisseur of the conventions of the locus amoenus, wryly casting its beauties in terms that recall encomiastic rhetoric and engaging a long poetic tradition that associates such settings with divine inspiration.11 Centuries later theorists such as Cicero and Dionysius of Halicarnassus take up this same setting as a means of highlighting their control of Greek conceptual territories – that is, the conventions governing ideas 9

10 11

On Boeotia see Schachter 1981; Berman 2004, 2007; Robinson 2012; on Athens see Wycherley 1978. On Pindar’s Delphic coordinates, see Eckerman 2014. Although the phrase locus amoenus is Ciceronian in origin, there is little question that Plato appropriates this poetic commonplace when he has Socrates exclaim, as he looks upon the chosen spot beside the Ilissus, “By Hera, the resting place is certainly delightful [καλή γε ἡ καταγωγή]” (Phdr. 230b2) (cf. Cic. Verr. 6.80; Mur. 13; de Fin. 2.107 [=one among many pleasures of the body in a discussion of Epicureanism]; Att. 12.19.1; de Orat. 2.290; Epist. 7.20.2). On the locus amoenus more generally, see esp. Curtius 1953; also Hass 1998. On the way the passage tropes on the setting in wry emulation of poetic and rhetorical conventions, see ch. 4.2a.

Introduction

about beauty, leisure, and sensory response pegged to features of famous terrains. They react to this imagery like the intellectual tourists they are, reordering celebrated topographies and recalibrating their symbolic references. Further, these two settings – one quite rural, the other more suburban – offer the tradition their familiar details as distinguishing coordinates. The mountainside of Helicon with its springs in later tradition evokes a poetic and critical mode (e.g., slight and refined), while garden and meadowland spaces along the Ilissus offer the critical remove, the flowering idyll, that writers oppose to more rigorous urban styles. These places thus have specific identities, organizing principles, local practices, and known denizens (e.g., poets on the mountain, philosophers in the garden); and they accumulate long-held aesthetic and ethical associations as such.12 The aesthetics of ancient landscapes, then, embraces contentious reevaluations of cultural settings as they are familiarly viewed, coordinating more urban compass points such as the Athenian Agora or the Roman Forum, or internationally celebrated sanctuaries like Delphi and Olympia, in relation or contrast to the rural locales that most centrally orient scenes of literary judgment. The sustained use of these famous spaces affords literary critical discourse a purposeful terrain, a layered reception of topographies that gives palpable shape to the emerging theoretical idiom. The flank of Helicon and the bank of the Ilissus, even as they are always “Helicon” and “Ilissus” in literary representation and critical accretion, retain their draw as sites of pilgrimage (or “pilgrimage”) and invention: witness Propertius at the spring, Cicero in the grove.13 This intellectual tourism itself reiterates the appropriation of rural settings and their celebrated features for use in literary critical and theoretical ventures. I want to emphasize as well that my discussion is very far from a historical or archeological study of actual topographies, even as it frequently highlights the intersection of figurative space and real place (i.e., that staged as “real” within literary representation). In so doing it uncovers within the literary realm a mode parallel to the semiotics of landscape that has received such lively attention in art history and landscape architecture.14 Just as artists in later traditions trace topographies whose classicizing lineaments refer most meaningfully beyond the actual lay of the land, so ancient poets and critics exploit the natural features of familiar 12 13

14

See Leidl 2003; on latter-day pilgrimage and Pausanias, see Rutherford 2001, 2013. Prop. 3.3.1–16, which reproduces “up on Helicon”; Cic. De orat. 1.7.28; De leg. 1.4–7, which reproduces “down along the Ilissus.” See further in chs. 6 and 7. E.g., Hunt and Willis (eds.) 1988; Pugh (ed.) 1990; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Roskill 1997.

5

6

Introduction

settings in order to shape an evolving stylistic vocabulary (e.g., purity [mountain springs], fluidity [smooth-running rivers], roughness [mountain paths], decoration [flowering idylls]). They thereby contribute to the crafting of a shared set of place references that not only map distinctions of vocabulary and usage in literary composition but also attach to hierarchies of taste and attitude within the social realm. The resulting stylistic vocabularies thus have cultural and socio-political import, insofar as they conjoin ideas about particular spaces and places with claims to power and authority as well as civic attitudes and behaviors. That said, the emerging critical discourse does not depend on real artifacts or spaces for its significance and impact so much as on their reproduction within literary representation.15 As such it crafts a rigorously drawn and increasingly influential emblematic topography that effectively partitions the world and its inhabitants by taste and inclination. Scholars of ancient literature have studied the cultural molding and representation of Greek and Roman landscapes, and there have been many distinctive studies on various aspects of landscape imagery, largely as they occur in poetry. Some of these focus on settings in relation to poets’ scenes of divine inspiration and initiation, others attempt to characterize and categorize the different features symbolically.16 Discrete studies also treat path and road metaphors and/or springs and water imagery.17 A few scholars have looked explicitly at river imagery; others at Greek landscapes more generally; and still others at the topos of the locus amoenus in particular.18 Again, most of these studies focus on poetry and/or the ancient novel; and although some do make reference to imagery in theoretical treatises, they usually treat it as secondary.19 The one exception to this privileging of poetic landscapes is the ever-evolving treatment of the setting of Plato’s Phaedrus, which most recently includes that of Richard 15

16

17

18

19

Cf. lieux de mémoire (“sites of memory”) and their cultural accretions in studies such as those of Pierre Nora (e.g., 1989) and Simon Schama (1995). On Dichterweihe see Kambylis 1965; Harriott 1969; also Sperduti 1950; Murray 1981, 1992, 1996. E.g., Becker 1937 (paths in poetry); Crowther 1979 (springs and drinking in Alexandrian and Roman poetry); Steiner 1986 (paths and gardens in Pindar); Asper 1997 (paths and waters in Callimachus); Nünlist 1998 (paths and “flow” imagery in early poetry). E.g., Fenno 2005 (sea and river in the Iliad), Jones 2005 (rivers in Roman literature); Snell 1955 (ch. 16), Parry 1957, and Elliger 1975 (landscapes in Greek poetry); Buxton 1992, 1994, Romm 1992, Thalmann 2011 (literary geographies); Curtius 1953 (ch. 10), Schönbeck 1962, and Hass 1998 (the locus amoenus); Saïd 1997 (landscapes in bucolic poetry); Forehand 1976, Zeitlin 1990, Alpers 2001, Calame 2007 (gardens in Longus). Asper (1997: 23 and n. 8), for instance, claims (following Van Hook 1905) that paths imagery is largely restricted to poetry.

Introduction

Hunter, whose extensive work on ancient literary programs and criticism stands out for repeatedly drawing attention to significant poetic landscapes and their connections to critical traditions.20 No one, however, has pursued the means by which certain inhabited landscapes become central to ancient literary practices that range from programmatic and critical gestures in poetry to more fully developed stylistic theories in rhetoric, or recognized the enduring impact of this widespread orientation.21 And yet the coordinating of bodies and topographies in the staging of literary judgment extends not only from archaic poetry through to Attic comedy, but also from Platonic dialogue to Ciceronian oratory, Roman poetry, and the novel, as well as to the writings of literary theorists such as Demetrius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and “Longinus.”22 Since these schemes have their roots in Greek literary conventions, my discussion concentrates for the most part on the Greek beginnings and various elaborations of these topographies, while also indicating and occasionally discussing at some length their most influential Roman developments. In what follows I first offer in brief some modern theoretical coordinates for orienting the landscape dynamics that form the core of my discussion, as well as their mimetic and metaphorical underpinnings. These dynamics, which the second section surveys in the longer tradition, often initiate in scenes of viewing and reproducing aesthetic topographies, and as such engage in actions central to ancient critical practices: theorizing (i.e., observing and contemplating, theōrein) and emulating (i.e., mimesis, mimeisthai). These actions drive the aesthetic practices as a whole; they are most prominently worked out in Plato, whose ideas about viewing beauty in and out of rural settings influence later theory. In the third section I focus in more detail on particular landscape features and those who transform them, highlighting the various angles from which 20

21

22

Hunter 2012: 10–18 and ch. 4; cf. Hunter 2003, 2006, 2008b. On the Phaedrus setting, see (e.g.) Wilamowitz 1919: 450–88; Murley 1940; Lebeck 1972; Elliger 1975: 289–94; Nussbaum 1986: 203–29; Ferrari 1987 passim. Until recently scholarship on ancient literary criticism has been dominated by work on the analytical categories and arguments that ancient theorists employed. But, following Ford’s important book (The Origins of Ancient Literary Criticism, Princeton 2002), scholars are beginning now to explore the complexities and significance of the images used by these writers, with the result that critical texts are being read with the philological precision and sensitivity to language that has so enriched studies of the literature they analyze. See also the introductory section to ch. 6. This extends to later literary landscapes as well, many of which have literary theoretical/critical turns (as in, e.g., Shakespeare, the Romantic and Parnassian poets, and modernists such as Proust and Virginia Woolf).

7

8

Introduction

individual chapters of my study address both. These features and their transformations are internal to the given setting and sometimes follow on the initial viewing, as the poet or theorist enters the scene and makes use of its resources by mimesis and reordering.

1. Overview: theorizing landscapes This study encompasses notions of place, space, and landscape, the theoretical framing of which centers on an understanding of metaphor as spatial and mobile. Let me address the latter first, precisely because it underpins and motivates the sustaining of space and landscape as central to critical discourse about styles. Jacques Derrida is perhaps the most prominent theorist to pursue Aristotle’s conceptualization of metaphor as movement, recognizing it not only as transport (his French translation of Aristotle’s ἐπιφορά, Po. 1457b7) but also as the way around, as marking “the moment of the turn or of the detour (du tour ou du détour).”23 As I discuss in detail in Chapter 1, this spatialization of metaphor constitutes a crucial aspect of its double role in the ancient imagery, since landscape metaphors both serve as indicators of style and are themselves envisioned as creating spaces and moving from one place to another. Further, because in ancient theory metaphor, mimesis, and style all work by means of likeness – that is, by matching, emulating, and imitating – poets and prose writers tend to connect all three, sometimes themselves working at their intersections.24 Thus (for instance) a rhetorician may emulate landscape metaphors prominent in poetry to distinguish oratorical styles and in so doing engage in what I am calling mimetic theorizing. This theorizing happens when the rhetorician’s argument takes its shape from reformulating mimetic landscapes by reorienting their metaphors to match writers’ styles.25 Indeed, one of the most curious phenomena in ancient literary theory and criticism, and one that modern scholars are well positioned to misunderstand or dismiss, is the mode of analysis that exploits similarity, the pursuit of likeness that lies at the heart of figurative expression.26 Despite the scruples about mimetic effects expressed repeatedly by Plato and to a lesser extent 23 24

25 26

Derrida [1972] 1982: 231, 241. See also Ricoeur 1978a, [1975] 1978b. Derrida emphasizes this falling together of metaphor, mimesis, and style in Aristotle’s thought ([1972] 1982: esp. 237–41. Again, see further in ch. 1. Not so Derrida, however, whose own critical modes engage similar tactics; see further in ch. 1.

1. Overview

by Aristotle, ancient literary theorists often use explanatory styles that exploit likeness. They imitate the effects they analyze, adopting and adapting poetic imagery as metaphors for invention and style. Mimesis, metaphor, style: all interrelated, all operating, insofar as they work at all, by means of likeness, matches made in the mind’s eye. From this angle as well we can see that the term “theory” (in the sense of observing and contemplating, theōrein) comes closer than “criticism” (i.e., judgment, krinein) to capturing the process of discernment and reordering of conceptual coordinates that I argue fosters literary and rhetorical analysis. Such strategies depend on the relationship between metaphor and mimesis, and may originate in ancient ideas that both are lodged in nature and thus mirror the order of things. The metaphorical terrains with which I am concerned here tend to combine notions of natural correspondences with spatial orientations (e.g., inside/outside, urban/rural, on and off stage), and specifically designated places, both “concrete” and symbolic (e.g., the Theater of Dionysus, the locus amoenus), with particular landscapes, typological and “real” (esp. up the mountain [Helicon], down along the river [Ilissus]). In the past half century or so theorists have thought and rethought the parameters of such terms (especially space as opposed to place), the underlying assumptions of which emerged over the decades as confrontations opposing (e.g.) an abstract sense of space and a focus on embodied practices. A central transformation occurred when the poststructuralist dismantling of space as abstract and objective confronted and in some cases converged with notions of place inspired by the rise of identity politics.27 The representative strategies with which I am concerned here sit at the intersection of this apparent conflict, frequently conjoining famous places and more abstract schemes. The notion of landscape, which is in many ways most useful for capturing a sense of place as received terrain, has a somewhat different history. Modern scholars of art and literature have emphasized that the term is freighted with historical, cultural, and aesthetic meaning. Landscape is never mere topography. Rather, it marks the layered accretion of social, political, and artistic perspectives onto spaces viewed from a particular vantage point and as such helps to orient the history of aesthetics and representation. It is also a form of evaluative negotiation, as W. J. T. Mitchell has emphasized. In the introduction to his influential edited volume, Landscape and 27

E.g., Lefebvre [1974] 1991; Tuan 1975; de Certeau 1984; vs. Harvey 2001; Cresswell 2004. See also Olwig 2002. I am more sympathetic to and influenced by the work of post-structuralists, because their treatment of space as both embodied and oriented by abstract coordinates often better captures the types of literary patterns and strategies on which I focus.

9

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Introduction

Power, Mitchell urges the need to address the ways in which, as he phrases it, “landscape circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus for the formation of identity.”28 Such formulations suggest contention and struggle, not so much over the territory itself as over a way of seeing, an organizing scheme that is aesthetic and value-laden and that carries enough force to appear to be reality rather than interpretation.29 Cultural geographers have also helped to further an understanding of the conceptual layers that impose aesthetic contours on the lay of the land. From this angle it emerges that the actual landscapes in which poets claim that literary judgment initiated shape and are themselves shaped by emblematic topographies that organize ethical attitudes in relation to beauty and pleasure. As Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove observe, “A landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring, or symbolizing surroundings.”30 Such “iconographical” readings of topographical or geographical phenomena emphasize that landscape is a constructed entity, one shaped by its representation as a meaningful organization of elements that symbolize political and aesthetic values.31 Prominent denizens of landscapes invoke such values as they inhabit significant spaces in ancient cities and their surrounding countrysides. These fantasies of imposing order on an unruly world achieve an artistic dream (like Ashbery’s “gardens”) if not a social or political reality. Indeed, the one usually exceeds or overturns the other, since aesthetic elaborations calibrate and recalibrate social hierarchies, while political engagements demand action and actuality.32 In this critical discourse there is no aesthetics without ethics, which is to say that social and economic forces 28

29

30 31

32

Mitchell describes this dynamic as follows: “Landscape as a cultural medium . . . has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site” ([1994] 2002: 2). Cf. Cosgrove on Ruskin in Cosgrove and Daniels [1988] 2002: 5; also Cosgrove 1985, 1998. Cf. again Nora 1989, whose influential work on “places of memory” (lieux de mémoire) advances a sense of how significant settings accrete associations that formulate identities and thereby distinctions of style, lifestyle, and socio-political orientation. Cosgrove and Daniels [1988] 2002: 1. Cosgrove and Daniels discuss Ernst Panofsky as the inspiration for the layered effect of reading “iconographically” ([1988] 2002: 1–7). Cf. Williams (1973: 128): “Like the landscaped parks, where every device was employed to produce a natural effect, the wild regions of mountain and forest were for the most part objects of conspicuous aesthetic consumption.” See, e.g., Rancière [2000] 2004: 17–19. He remarks, “the tragic stage . . . simultaneously carries with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy and the power of illusion.” But Rancière also repeatedly emphasizes the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, since from his perspective art is not isolated as such before the modern period (2004: 20–24).

1. Overview

help to shape responses to and figurative uses of particular locales. In his study of the forces influencing the representation of country and city in English literature, Raymond Williams remarks, “There is also, throughout [the pastoral tradition], an ideological separation between the processes of rural exploitation, which have been, in effect, dissolved into a landscape, and the register of that exploitation, in the law courts, the money markets, the political power and the conspicuous expenditure of the city.”33 While Williams recognizes that ancient Greek and Roman social hierarchies and economies are distinct in kind, he also underscores repeatedly how embedded the literary discourse is in these concrete social and economic relations to the fields, hills, roads, and towns that shape a community’s everyday life. By way of indicating the relevance of these relations, we can compare (as Williams does, though only in passing) Hesiod’s depiction of the narrator’s attention to the seasons and the land versus his brother Perses’ taste for the strife and wrangling of the market town.34 In a similar vein Stephen Greenblatt has theorized appropriations and misrecognitions such as those Williams traces in pastoral poetry (i.e., the dissolving of exploitation into an aesthetic object, a landscape) as “the reproduction and circulation of mimetic capital.”35 Greenblatt focuses instead on early modern narratives that use the discourse of wonder and the marvelous as a mask for colonialist domination of the “New World”; from this Marx-inflected perspective, mimesis is “a social relation of production,” in which “the images that matter” are those that proliferate and come to dominate traditions, fetishizing territories as “other” and exotic while also asserting dominion over them.36 Although I emphasize more the politics of aesthetics rather than the social aspects of production, understanding the extent to which these are mutually implicated is essential to my analysis. As this sensitivity to concrete places, forces, and practices suggests, how one deploys vocabulary, phrasing, tone, and content (conceived primarily as stylistic choices in the ancient discussions) is directly correlated to where 33

34

35

36

Williams 1973: 46; the study is a powerful critique of the socio-economic forces that underlie rural–urban divides in pastoral literature. See, e.g., Volk 2010 on the discourse of “water rights” in Roman poetry; and further in the introductory sections to chs. 2 and 5. See Detienne 1963, who emphasizes rural poverty (e.g. 20–22); Pucci 1977: 127–31 following up in a more literary mode; and Brooke-Rose 1958 on metaphor more generally. Cf. Harriott 1969: 20–24 on the ways in which archaic poets situate the Muses in relation to significant locales. Cf. Purves 2010 for an approach more attentive to literary schematics. On “misrecognition” (méconnaissance), i.e., masking what are essentially economic relations as social niceties, charming prospects, etc., see Bourdieu 1977: 4–6. Greenblatt [1991] 2003: 6.

11

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Introduction

and how one comports oneself within deliberately marked settings and what authority and control one assumes over them. Here we can see that Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about what he calls bodily hexis help to illuminate the ways in which postures and attitudes communicate class and political valuations.37 Thus the Athenian Agora, like Hesiod’s marketplace, is a mercenary space orchestrated by and fit for verbal wranglers and idlers, while fertile (e.g., inspirational), erotic, feminized, or by contrast “wild” talkers inflect and belong in meadowland and riverside spaces. If for the Greek elite the urban scene almost always carries the tarnish of calculation and business, Roman writers such as Cicero reclaim this territory, treating the countryside retreat as feminized and Greek and opposing it to urban, public spaces of manly Roman domination. The performative and evaluative character of the settings in which literary theoretical and critical discourses developed foreground features that are body- and site-specific and thus closely related to ideas about poetic sensibilities on the one hand and citizen attitudes and appetites on the other.

2. Long view: claiming critical terrains All this, in some sense, begins with Hesiod. Pietro Pucci is right to notice that even Homer characterizes persuasive speech as a “bending” (ἐπέγναμψεν, Il. 2.14), but he also recognizes that it is Hesiod who situates the notion of the straight or crooked path of logos within the specific landscape of Helicon and its agrarian economies.38 Hellenistic and Roman poets make nostalgic use of this setting as the founding site of poetry (or rather of particular poetic styles), resituating the Valley of the Muses there instead of below (Homeric) Olympus.39 While Aristophanes lays the path of literary judgment through countryside that recalls at least on one level the suburban Ilissus, and while Plato retraces that riverside setting for his critique of rhetoric, the backward glances of later critics 37

38

39

Bourdieu 1991: 81–89; see also Worman 2008: 14–15, 67–68 (e.g.). For this reason Lefebvre’s articulating of space as coordinated by the warm life of the body has also informed my focus on the ways in which deportments and settings come to share features (Lefebvre [1974] 1991: 194–96; also Simonsen 2005). Pucci 1977: 17. Pucci is not so interested in the actual Boeotian setting in any detail; but cf. chs. 4–5, where he points to the connections between justice and agriculture, as well as the economy of trade cultures with their alienable property and thus troubled ties to the land (esp. 127–29). See also Detienne 1963: 20–31. See Alcock 2002 on Greek landscapes more generally; also Zetzel 1980 on Helicon; Buxton 1992 on mountains; and Robinson 2011 on Heliconian topographies in association with Peirene and poetic economies.

2. Long view

reproduce and supplement this setting with rivers of their own. Dionysius of Halicarnassus uses turgid river images suggestive of the Tiber to delineate Isocrates’ otiose style, and “Longinus” invokes the great Danube and Nile as support for appreciation of the “sublime” style. Again, within this set of conventions how one speaks is tied firmly to where one speaks; the poet (and eventually the literary theorist or critic) cements his authority by situating his literary sensibility within familiar spaces and topographies and demonstrating his mastery of them. Ancient landscape aesthetics thus develops well-sustained and farranging tropes that emerge in Homeric poetry and Sappho and ramify through Plato, Demetrius, Longus, Shakespeare, Proust, and Virginia Woolf, to name only a few significant stops along the way. Many of the scenes that I think central to understanding these aesthetic schemes in ancient literature share the dynamics mentioned above: they stage a scene of viewing, offer an evaluative detailing of the scene, characterize the sensory reaction, and lay claim to the conceptual terrain. Usually this involves some form of awe and/or pleasure and often it encourages comparison and emulation, mimetic gestures that poets and prose writers reinscribe in the telling. The described landscapes in their features index metonymically qualities prized by the genre and, at least to a certain extent, by the surrounding culture. Further, the appreciative gazing staged in these scenes models for its audience this very appreciation – that is, the features that ought to be valued as beautiful, awe-inspiring, or otherwise impressive. Elaine Scarry, in her provocative two-part study On Beauty and Being Just, begins by asking and answering one central question: What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication.40

In this first section Scarry elaborates on the idea that moments of viewing and apprehending beauty, what she calls “visual events,” inspire mimetic gestures, even as the perception of this beauty may also urge on us the notion that it is like nothing else. By way of example she offers Odysseus’ response at the sight of Nausicaa in book 6 of the Odyssey. First he declares that he has never seen the like of her, then immediately finds her analogy: the young palm that he once viewed beside Apollo’s altar at Delos (Od. 6.160–65). Scarry emphasizes the generative energy that lies in such acts of 40

Scarry 1999: 3–4. On beauty and art, see also Nehamas 2007.

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Introduction

viewing and reproducing or emulating, and most of the examples she uses are natural: she especially finds trees and flowers inspiring of comparison and mimesis.41 As Scarry’s example indicates, a sophisticated understanding of landscape as a valued and evaluative medium bound up with status, mimesis, and desire existed from very early moments in the ancient literary record. In Homeric epic and archaic lyric, scenes that pivot around the aesthetic appreciation of significant landscapes indicate, sometimes in precise terms, particular cultural hierarchies and values.42 Take, for example, the idyllic setting of Calypso’s cave that Hermes looks upon admiringly (Odyssey 5) and Aphrodite’s precinct that the speaker celebrates (Sappho, fr. 2): in both cases the viewing of fertile details calls attention to the beauty and distinctiveness of the poetic styles. The Homeric setting is rich and elaborate, with its birds, tall trees, miraculous springs, and blooming meadows (5.59–74). The narrator claims that even a god, when approaching and viewing this remarkable setting, would gaze at it in wonder and delight in his heart (Od. 5.73–74). Only when Hermes has looked to his heart’s content does he enter the cave. Hermes’ wonder and enjoyment in looking upon Calypso’s cave encourages a high appraisal of its aspects, even as the scene also suggests that there may be something vaguely menacing in the magical quality of their combination. In addition, this staging urges a more general awareness of aesthetic pleasures, including those of the poetic performance (or, eventually, prose explication) under way. In this instance the richness of the cave’s features calls attention not only to Calypso’s high status but also to the special qualities of Homeric imagery, with its luxurious real estate and aristocrat’s leisured appreciation of visualizing elaborations and plentiful details. The depiction urges the prizing of richness and fullness over, say, austerity, simplicity, and restraint – attributes that characterize ethical and economic values as well as aesthetic ones. And in fact later critics and theorists tend to emphasize the rich bounties of Homer’s setting, imagery, and style.43 A further layer of suggestion underpins this pleasurable viewing, one that is gendered and erotic in its extensions. As many scholars have explored, most of the landscapes emphasized in early poetry are rural, 41

42 43

Cf. Scarry 1997; on flowers and/of metaphor, see further in chs. 1.2b–c, 2.3b, and the Epilogue, section 1. See Edwards 1993; Giesecke 2007: chs. 1 and 2. I return to this passage in more detail in ch. 4. For the reception of Homer’s style, see further in chs. 6.2 and 7.2b.

2. Long view

sensual, and related to elite female sexuality and rites of passage.44 When Sappho calls upon Aphrodite to join in girls’ festivities at her own lovely precinct with its rose blossoms and flowing water, she invokes in concise, luminous language the setting and the pleasures of its inhabitation (e.g., the scents of rose branches and sounds of flowing water, fr. 2.5–6). Her invocation affectively creates the space in which the goddess’ party will take place, cordoning off by ritual utterance – as the song achieves and reiterates practices – an exclusive setting in which select young women celebrate. It is scenes such as this that encourage Plato’s Socrates to invoke Sappho’s influence early on in his inhabitation of the idyll in the Phaedrus (235c8–d1) and the Hellenistic critic Demetrius to make Sappho the avatar of a charming style (De eloc. 132, cf. passim 133–73). For Demetrius this charming mode turns especially upon sensory effects, giving off a keen sense of floral and feminine delights.45 The prologue of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe reflects a similar focus on the pleasures of viewing beautiful settings, adding an artistic representation of the setting as another mimetic layer. The narrator relates how in a grove of the Nymphs he viewed a lovely setting full of flowers and flowing water, as well as a painting within it that was even more delightful (1.1). He offers this mise en abyme as the motivation for his tale: he declares that he is so pleased that it inspires him as he looks to “write back” to the painting (1.2).46 Longus’ introduction of his novel is thus bound up not only with the pleasures of reproducing flowering spaces but also with the long tradition of orienting literary style by means of the coordinates of the locus amoenus.47 Like other later dramatists and novelists who revisit style’s original setting, Longus does not center his story on literary critical concerns; but such scenes reveal the breadth and endurance of this landscaping tradition. Indeed, the reception of these aesthetic landscapes in modern plays, novels, and poetry indicates their centrality to the staging of mimetic 44

45 46

47

See (e.g.) Padel 1974; Bremer 1975; Stehle 1977; Cairns 1997; Calame 1999: 165–67; Rosenmeyer 2004; Swift 2009a, 2009b. For a more detailed analysis of Demetrius’ reception of Sappho, see ch. 6.4. See Zeitlin 1990; see also Forehand 1976; O’Connor 1991; Edwards 1997; Calame 2007. Cf. the ecphrasis in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon of a painting depicting a colonnaded locus amoenus that also includes Eros; the narrator reproduces the setting at the outset of his tale. Hunter 2008b: 784–86; see also Trapp 1990:145. Cf. Cic. Orat. 37–39; DH Comp. Verb. 23.1; cf. 22.35; Quint. 12.10.58; Herm. Peri id. 2.4.87–90. In subsequent chapters I argue that flowers have an intricate and multifaceted role to play in the development of literary theoretical discourse, one mystery of which is where they fall along the stylistic continuum; see further in chs. 2.3b and 6.4; on slight, smooth, and mixed or middle styles, see chs. 3.1–2, 5.1 and 4, and 7.2a –3a. I return to this passage at the end of ch. 4.

15

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Introduction

events with literary theoretical orientations, as well as appropriating and outstripping their territorial reach. Again, Greenblatt’s argument that such claims to aesthetic terrain consolidate “mimetic capital” is useful here. While he focuses his attention on early modern notions of the marvels associated with the “New World,” from the standpoint of my study certain appropriations of ancient landscapes stand out, such as Shakespeare’s use of the Athenian woodland (“the palace wood | a mile without the town,” 1.2.83–84; cf. 1.1.165) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.48 This rural setting frames an erotic romp that ends in the comical staging by “rude mechanicals” (i.e., Athenian craftsmen) of an ancient lover’s tragedy (Pyramus and Thisbe), complete with the mocking commentary of an aristocratic audience dominated by Theseus, “Duke of Athens” (5.1.108–339). Like Plato before him (cf. Phdr. 245a), Theseus groups together “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” (5.1.7) and in one of the drama’s most meta-theatrical passages dismisses the central action of Shakespeare’s play itself. He signals his disdain for poetic effects in a compact mimesis at the scene’s opening that captures in miniature the whole of the drama’s actions and effects. Elegantly encompassing the misprisions of the various dreams and manias that have shaped the play, he dismisses the night’s amorous adventures as mere imaginings, products of the poet’s “fine frenzy,” which “gives to airy nothing | a local habitation and a name” (5.1.12–17). Theseus thus looks askance at the erotic woodland drama from his palace prospect within the city and sets himself up to mock the craftsmen’s crude entertainment as well. And yet it is precisely this rural setting, with its fairies, lovers, and “mechanicals,” that establishes the frame for both the play’s central action and the mise en abyme that calls for literary theoretical reflection. And in fact Theseus’ own richly imagined metaphors give the lie to his dismissal, so that his critique instead fashions a theory of art’s elaborations as intricate dreamwork.49 Centuries on in English literature, a scene from Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room (1922) offers a more direct and wryer vision of the cultural domination that accompanies this colonizing of ancient territory. On the verge of going to war and roughly educated in the upper-class and masculine mold that Woolf often ironizes, the main character and his pal ramble and talk (75–76):

48

49

Greenblatt [1991] 2003: 6. On colonialist representations in Shakespeare’s play, see Hendricks 1996. See Grady 2008 on the “meta-aesthetics” of the play.

2. Long view The Greeks – yes, that was what they talked about – how when all’s said and done, when one’s rinsed one’s mouth with every literature in the world, including Chinese and Russian (but these Slavs aren’t civilized), it’s the flavour of Greek that remains. Durrant quoted Aeschylus – Jacob Sophocles . . . Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing. And surveying all this, looming through the fog, the lamplight, the shades of London, the two young men decided in favour of Greece.

While these two privileged samplers of literary “flavours” stroll through the streets of London, in Jacob’s imaginings they are “the only people in the world who know what the Greeks meant” and are “making the flagstones ring on the way to the Acropolis,” about to encounter Socrates, who is sure to greet them amiably (76). If entire civilizations are “flowers ready for picking,” the literatures of the world are wines with which the Englishmen rinse their mouths as if sampling from different vineyards. And these cultural terrains that lap “at their feet” are viewed as if from on high – that is, from Haverstock Hill50 and the lofty prospect of British dominion. Woolf thus fashions, within this urban setting, a kind of dream terrain, one that swims into view “when the moon floats among the waves of hills” (76), an open, magical, and privileged vista that serves throughout her work as a metonymy for Greek culture and Greece itself.51 As the Epilogue explores in greater detail, Proust’s novel is a prominent exception to modern works that foreground aesthetically significant landscapes but do not center their stories and plots on the literary critical endeavor. In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) does in fact revolve around aesthetic judgment and literary production; and the first section of the first volume repeatedly deploys the trope of “reading in the garden” at Combray. Proust offers this as a unique prospect from which to view the mundane to-and-fro-ing of the village’s denizens and thus as a frame for the narrator’s fanciful meditations on literary aesthetics. At the moment of initially activating this space of dreaming and contemplation, the narrator reorders it as “the sacred grove” (”le bois consacré”) surrounding the scullery, which he also antiquates as a “little temple of Venus” (”un petit temple à Vénus”) (I.71). Proust’s reader in reverie thus organizes his special place in the garden by associating it with ancient lyric and pastoral convention, with its repeated invocation of the sacred grove of poetry, and 50 51

“What is Greek if not to be shouted from Haverstock Hill in the dawn?” (Jacob’s Room, 76). E.g., Jacob’s Room, 159–60, 175; Mrs. Dalloway, 24–25; “On Not Knowing Greek,” 24–26; “A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus,” 64–68. On Woolf’s uses of the pastoral mode, see Alter 2005; on her use of Greek literature and Greece, see Koutsoudaki 1980, Phillips 1994, Fowler 1999, Levenback 1999, Froula 2005.

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Introduction

by setting it adjacent to the bounteous goddess of love.52 Even this lightly drawn initial gesture underscores the centrality of landscapes and their flowery or fertile metonymies to the imaginative space that the narrator as artist-critic inhabits. From here this highly sensitive figure for the author culls the stuff of his literary aesthetics and so frames his world as a mimesis of marveling perceptions and archaizing styles. That the space is also emphatically one of bourgeois privacy and leisure undergirds the narrator’s territorial reach, since the jaunts of his reveries are made possible precisely by the privilege and education that his secluded milieu secures. Proust’s renegotiation of literary mountainsides, meadows, and gardens as a contained space of inner cultivation renders him a latter-day Longus, whose final garden scene in Book 4 of Daphnis and Chloe charts nostalgic yearnings for aesthetic order and yet also erotic play, while serving as a showcase for the writer’s own elaborate representation. This garden, like that of Proust’s narrator, carries an artificial overlay of preserved images – here in the form of the metonymic clusters of grapes saved for city visitors, so that they can indulge in the “image and pleasure” of the harvest (4.5.2).53 That this walled garden is the perfectly ordered preserve of its wealthy landowner and effectively set up in artistic imitation of more natural (if also cultivated) land use reinforces the sense that it is the representation that matters, a sense reproduced by the lush details of Longus’ mimesis. While, as Froma Zeitlin argues, Longus may earlier in the narrative explicitly align his aesthetic project with an older, more authentic bucolic tradition (i.e., Philetas’ garden in 2.3-8), his narrator is also a city dweller who offers up this rich man’s garden as a dream of aesthetic order that reproduces the four-part ordering of Longus’ tale.54 Once again, elite territorial dominion fosters the broad ambitions of the artist’s landscaping and thus his aesthetic reach, so that Philetas’ less ornate garden described earlier in the narrative is superseded by this grander scheme. Viewed from the prospect of this European colonizing of ancient landscapes and urban/urbane nostalgia for Arcadian pasts, American writers 52

53 54

E.g., Pind. O. 3.17–24, 8.9; Callim. HDem. 25–30; Propert. 3.1.1–6, also 2.13.1–8; Hor. Od. 1.1.29–32; Ovid Amor. 3.1.1–14. On the ancient conventions see Hunter 2006: ch. 1. On Proust’s landscapes and modern flower imagery, see Fardwell 1948; Knight 1986. Proust also invokes this rustic setting when distinguishing the homosexuality of Vergil’s and Theocritus’ pastoral poetry from that of modern aesthetes, notably the Baron de Charlus (III.710; cf. 343– 44; for associations of this sensibility with Plato, III.727, IV.324–25, 386). See further in the Epilogue, section 1. See Zeitlin 1990: 444–46. Cf. Zeitlin 1990: 448. See below for Foucault on the garden as a “heterotopia,” a “counter-site” to real spaces that serves as a microcosm of the world (1986: 25–26).

2. Long view

take up distinctively energetic stances, pitched between urban and pastoral, new cities and “old” nature. They tend to sound peculiarly American notes, propelled at least in part by Walt Whitman’s enthusiastic pastoral inclusiveness, in which “Mannahatta” rears up over its wild verges, both aboriginal and ever young.55 Whitman was influential among such masters of the (sub)urban pastoral as William Carlos Williams, whose epic poem Paterson runs along these verges but also opens out onto much older vistas, at least in literary terms.56 At a Sunday afternoon picnic in the park, “the air of the Midi and old cultures intoxicates” the revelers, so that wine leads to suggestions of sex and “the satyr – (Priapus!).”57 That is to say, following ancient conventions: if parkland, then erotics. Williams is also famously sensitive to the critical paths that natural settings and their plant life offer the contemplative poet. He is especially interested in (indeed, “thunderstruck!” by) the minute details, writing one of the longest poems ever focused on a single flower (“The Crimson Cyclamen”) as a meditation on what Scarry has termed the “perceptual mimesis” that takes the flower as its perfect object.58 Williams locates an intricate aesthetics in floral patterning, finding it “miraculous | that flower should rise | by flower | . . . as though mirrors of some perfection.”59 He shares with Proust an attention to floral unfurling as well as its mimetic density; as I discuss in Chapter 1 and again in the Epilogue, for such writer-critics as these, flowers have a stunning visual impact and semiotic expansiveness, containing within themselves this mimetic perfection and metaphorical concatenations, as well as the past and future of their blossoming. They thereby lend a chronotopic aspect to landscape aesthetics, as time unfolds in miniature and miniature objects signal (as with metonymy) or stand in for (as with metaphor) the spaces that set the coordinates of styles’ differentiations.60 As these few widely dispersed examples from prose, drama, and poetry make clear, the viewing and reordering of landscapes tend to converge on locus amoenus or garden settings, shaping a trope in ancient and later reception that is central to conceptions of how aesthetic terrains 55

56 57

58 59 60

Whitman [1888] 1986: 485–86. “Mannahatta” (“land of many hills”) is the name given the island by the Lenni Lenape tribe, whose territory it was. On Whitman’s influence on Williams, see Breslin 1967; Saunier-Ollier 1978. Williams [1946–58] 1992: 57–58. McNamara and Gray note that Williams is here conflating Priapus and Pan (McNamara and Gray 2014: 259 n. 21). Williams [1946–58] 1992: 419–26; Scarry 1997 (on which see further in ch. 1.2b). Williams [1946–58] 1992: 419. On the chronotope, see Bakhtin 1981: ch. 3. As Derrida notes in his essay on Aristotle and metaphor, flowers also indicate female sexuality in ancient and modern convention; see ch. 2.3a and the Epilogue.

19

20

Introduction

consolidate cultural and political meanings. Other significant topographical features intersect with this space, most importantly springs, streams, and rivers that differentiate full-flowing from slight and pure styles; and roads and paths that distinguish the circuitous or crooked from the straight way, or the high, rough, and difficult style from the easy and smoothsloping. Again, these tropes also frequently indicate “urban” as distinct from “rural” styles, separating out overly refined or decadent modes from ones more “fertile” but also sometimes feminized. In addition, they most often isolate the rural setting as the paradigmatic literary theoretical space, the space in which stylistic and generic differentiations must initially be formulated. This discursive trend thus reveals the workings of reception that underpin literary theory and criticism in a very palpable manner, since stylistic discriminations are repeatedly pegged not only to broader aesthetic and ethical values but also to landscaped visions of cultural ascendancy.

3. Outline: landscapes with figures I have organized the chapters of this book in roughly chronological order, which entails that the landscape features central to critical-theoretical discourse recur in various forms as this discourse develops and ramifies. I indicate how and where this happens in the descriptions below; but I should emphasize first that my primary goal in exploring these intersecting terrains is to demonstrate how an initially dispersed and inchoate cluster of metonymies indicating rural landscapes (e.g., trees, flowers, water, paths) incrementally consolidates, so that by the Hellenistic period highly attuned poets – usually with only a few lines or a single image – chart a relatively coherent set of stylistic coordinates that later theorists repeatedly engage and reorder. As I have pointed out, however, some trends have already emerged: the highlighting of the locus amoenus as a site of literary inspiration, emulation, and pleasure; the tendency (therefore) to situate scenes of literary judgment in rural locales; and the association of certain styles (e.g., rough versus smooth) with distinct terrains. As Chapter 1 demonstrates, ancient mimetic strategies and notions of likeness tend to portray formal analogies as natural ones, so that spaces of metaphor and landscape coordinates fall together in literary or theoretical conceptions. This chapter also establishes the influence of Plato and Aristotle on the conceptual parameters and figurative practices for theorizing metaphor, mimesis, and style. The metaphors they craft pick up on

3. Outline

poets’ conventions and provide later theorists with critical “resources” – that is, the metaphors (vehicles such as paths, transport, flowers, etc.) for asserting stylistic distinctions and thereby demonstrating authority, critical insight, and a sense of order. Subsequent chapters reveal in detail the varying ways in which these special settings are inhabited and mastered by figures who can harvest, harness, or properly utilize the stylistic resources, whether they are the clear waters of the shepherd’s mountain spring or the life-sustaining wheat of the farmer’s field.61 Poets and other inhabitants of these topographies (e.g., deities, maidens) may take up styles suggested by the metaphors that turn on their features. While this confluence of bodily and topographical shaping is not always a clear aspect of the imagery I discuss in each of the chapters, writers do tend to seize on it especially when poetic, dramatic, or oratorical performance is a dominant focus. Chapter 2 explores the ways in which Hesiod and especially Pindar deploy inhabited pastoral and other rural topographies in a clearly programmatic manner, as a means of distinguishing their aesthetic sensibilities from others’ and thereby asserting their status, authority, and territorial scope. The spring and its dancing Muses with which Hesiod opens the Theogony emerges explicitly as pastoral inspiration and stylistic purity for Hellenistic and Roman poets with critical agendas, as Chapter 5 in particular shows, as well as the “flow” of certain styles in the writings of Demetrius, Dionysius, and Cicero (Chapters 6 and 7). The dappled precinct with flowering trees and babbling brook to which Sappho calls Aphrodite in fr. 2 is, again, a precursor of the literary theoretical locus amoenus, which serves as a central topos and trope for Plato (Chapter 4), Hellenistic poets (Chapter 5), Demetrius and Horace (Chapter 6), and Cicero and Dionysius (Chapter 7). And Pindar’s coloratura harvesting of “flowers of song” from the Graces’ garden (which prefigures later discussions of metaphor and “flowery” styles) provides a crucial starting point for the shaping of ideas about literary composition in the writings of Demetrius and Dionysius (again, Chapters 6 and 7).62 These settings 61

62

The two images are both from Dionysius, one regarding Plato, the other Demosthenes. The water metaphor comes from Hesiod and what the Hellenistic and Roman poets make of him (see chs. 2.2 and 5.4); the field metaphor is harder to locate narrowly, but Aristophanes’ and Dionysius’ deployments of meadow tropes suggest connections between such spaces and a “fertile” style (see chs. 3.1c and 2a, and 7.3a). Hes. Th. 1–8 (the Muses dancing around the springs on Helicon), 22–35 (the Muses handing over the branch of poetic authority to the shepherd poet); Sapph. fr. 2 (the poetic idyll); P. O. 9.26, P. 6.1–2 (the poet as gardener); P. O. 9.47, 1.110, etc. (the path of words/verse), cf. Hes. WD 287–92 (the path of virtue and knowledge).

21

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Introduction

delineate both the what and especially the how of invention and composition (i.e., its style) by means of metaphors that envision poetic language as a palpable, performed, place-specific engagement. This emphasis on inhabited landscapes is very influential, carefully mapped for literary critical effect in Aristophanes and Plato, appropriated for programmatic formulations in Hellenistic poetry, and used by rhetorical theorists to distinguish writers’ styles in both Greek and Roman settings. I should also emphasize again here what I elaborate on in Chapter 5, namely that there is a central turning point in the development of these discursive landscapes, since the Hellenistic period is the first in which inhabited settings shape an overtly critical idiom, in which pastoral features signaling stylistic discriminations are crucial to framing the invention and judgment of poetry. The images explored in Chapter 2 indicate as well that in earlier poetry these dynamics are often clearly inflected by gender, as the male poet culls resources offered up by female entities. These entities are usually divine, and not always obliging, but they nearly always function as the assistants of or even the medium for the poet’s mastery. Later chapters reveal the varied ramifications of these dynamics, which tend to involve some performanceoriented engagement in which male inhabitants cull stylistic elements in settings that stand in some gendered relation to urban–rural distinctions. Thus many significant formulations engage what we might call a “figures in a landscape with figures” model: they delineate civic or (more often) rural spaces inhabited by male subjects who belong in and therefore have the authority and ability to take up and reconfigure the features of those spaces (i.e., reorder or reshape them as metaphors) – which are usually marked as in some way feminine. The tropes shift from chapter to chapter, and since I have organized the chapters by period and loosely by genre, the discussions also develop interlocking arguments that aim to show how these spatially oriented, gendered dynamics change emphases across periods and settings. Thus, as Chapters 3 and 7 reveal, Aristophanes’ comedies and Cicero’s writings on rhetoric share a wry attention to the body and its deportments that arises at least in part from the fact that they are writing for and about performances in urban settings, where there are plenty of arenas for viewing examples of artfulness and inclination gone wrong. Both also align embodied styles along an urban–rural divide, associating softer, more fluid styles with spaces of retirement and thus feminized and/or rustic settings. Chapter 4 argues that Plato, also writing in Athens and pursuing another type of performance-oriented enactment, sustains an attention to physicality and the gendering of its stylistic affinities, as well as an awareness of

3. Outline

the sharp distinctions between city and country. In Chapter 5 I consider the ways in which poet-critics such as Callimachus and Theocritus highlight the refined, honeysweet remove of pastoral spaces and their inhabitants, taking the urban center of Alexandria as their implicit other term.63 While these types of stylistic embodiment are not always prominent in the writings of some later theorists, in Chapters 6 and 7 I urge an awareness of how Demetrius (most likely a late Hellenistic author whose milieu is obscure) and Dionysius (who is writing in Rome after Cicero) both make steady use of sensory effects and tropes indicative of live performance. This performance-oriented, place-specific troping is not, of course, alone in rendering literary theoretical and critical ideas situated, visualizable, and inflected by taste and inclination. Indeed, in ancient critical discourse, metaphors that indicate distinctions among styles of composition run the gamut from the sensory and appetitive (which I treat especially in Chapter 3) to the sculptural and painterly (which I address in briefer compass in Chapters 1 and 7).64 Further, the concepts that these figures target are just as variable. Earlier tropes tend to address larger aesthetic and ethical concerns, associating pleasure and rigor with different terrains, and mapping distinctions of taste and inclination onto the urban–rural divide. Later theorists devise landscape metaphors that describe prose rhythm and periodic style; others contrast, for example, succinct versus amplified usage, and many address the deployment of figurative language itself. A key example that illustrates the variation and yet increasing coherence of landscape tropes is the “path” (ὁδός, οἶμος, κέλευθος) of words, a metaphor whose centrality to literary inspiration and emulation extends from Homeric epic to Roman rhetoric.65 As Chapter 2 demonstrates, paths in Hesiod’s and Pindar’s poetry serve to yoke aesthetic and ethical ideas to rigorous terrains, where travelers must labor to reach their destinations. Chapter 3 focuses on how this emerges in Aristophanes’ Frogs as the path out of the city – on which its irresolute tourist Dionysus makes many missteps in stylistic and ethical assessment – to a meadowland space bordering the scene of literary judgment. In Plato’s Phaedrus and Republic this rural path becomes that of dialectic, which Chapter 4 argues is forged arduously (if ironically) by Socrates’ pursuit of good mimetic 63

64

65

Selden has argued that Callimachus’ pastoral tropes in fact target the cosmopolitan city, the displacement that metaphor achieves being itself a comment on life in an urban center of immigrants (Selden 1998: 304–5). See further in ch. 5.1. E.g., the discussions of analogies to visual arts in chs. 1.1b and 7.1. On embodiments of styles, see also Worman 2008, 2009. See Meuli 1935: esp. 172–73; Becker 1937: 41–49; Steiner 1986: 76–86; Asper 1997: 21–107; and Nünlist 1998: 228–83.

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Introduction

practices. In Chapter 5 distinctions among paths finally emerge as clearly indicating stylistic choices; and Chapter 6 addresses how literary theorists such as Demetrius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus develop the imagery further, connecting hiker to hike and envisioning (for instance) Homer scaling Cyclopean cliffs and Thucydides stumbling up mountain paths. Although this imagery is least prominent in Chapter 7, the stylistic theories of Cicero as well as Dionysius engage a precise calibration of its conventions while focusing more on the locus amoenus as the endpoint of the stylistic choices involved in taking this path out of the city. The scope of this project is, then, unusually broad in chronology, geography, and genre, since it takes up imagery ranging from poets such as Hesiod, Pindar, Aristophanes, Theocritus, and Horace, to less canonical prose writers such as Demetrius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as well as Plato, Cicero, and “Longinus.” And yet it is also tightly focused thematically. It pays special attention to the rural settings and their inhabitants that together lead to the formulation of certain stylistic characteristics, such as the female dancers around springs and in meadows in early poetry that I discuss in Chapter 2, which Aristophanes and Plato make subtle use of in their different mappings of extra-urban spaces and styles, as Chapters 3 and 4 reveal. Chapter 6 on Demetrius and Chapter 7 on Cicero and Dionysius demonstrate the ways in which later theorists then reconfigure these as charming, fluid, and sometimes feminine styles. Chapters 3 (on Aristophanes) and 7 also attend to the deportments in urban spaces that stage distinctions between, for instance, the “twistings” of new or elaborate styles and “straighter” or more austere and manly styles.66 All of the chapters reveal the extent to which bodies and topographies are mutually implicated: thus the imagery of twisting or winding may extend from deportments to rivers, connecting certain verbal styles; while tropes of softness and flowering can yoke gendered inclinations and meadows – both of which, again, yield further associations among styles. Finally, I should emphasize that despite my contention that rural or borderland spaces provide the most central features for literary criticism and theory, the individual chapters of my study reveal their variety as well. One of the many difficulties that arise in attempting to organize these spaces by productively flexible categories is choosing among terms such as 66

Both Pucci 1977: 16–21 (on Hesiod) and Steiner 1986: 83–84 (on Pindar) note the use from early on in Greek literature of terms such as orthos to conjoin ideas about “straight” talk, straight paths, and (in the case of Pindar) upright deportment. The imagery of twisting or bending is prominent in Attic comedy and taken up by Plato and Aristotle to describe the effects of decadent musical styles. See Csapo 2004; Porter 2010: pt. 4; and Franklin 2013.

4. Dreams of order

“pastoral,” “bucolic,” “rural,” and “rustic.” I have tried to use them with some precision, to designate discrete spaces outside of the city walls, but within the literary tradition, from the suburban to the more fully rural. Since stylistic vocabularies pick out details of different types of natural landscapes, features of spaces distinguished as mountainside or meadowland, river’s edge or garden, may overlap but usually also have certain special features (e.g., springs on the mountain, flowers in meadows or gardens). On the other hand, while scholars have argued about “bucolic” (cf. βούκολος) versus “pastoral” (cf. pastor) as generic labels, my focus encompasses a more inclusive discursive space, which runs from epic to prose and from mountain paths to city limits.67 Thus gardens (cultivated spaces that may be remote or essentially suburban), meadows (the edges of cultivated lands), shepherds’ paths (mountainside husbandry), and farmers’ fields (cultivated rural spaces) may not all signify in the same ways but do fall under a general interpretive distinction of non-urban spaces that are conceived of in tradition as natural or rural but also marked by human use. For my purposes “rural” is the most useful general term, since it can include pastoral (i.e., mountainous herding) terrains, meadowland and riverside settings, and sometimes even gardens. I have used “rustic” more sparingly, since it operates on a different register, suggesting a style of life rather than the lay of the land. In ancient usage some terms bridge this difference, most problematically (as noted) “pastoral” and “bucolic,” which has necessitated further glossing in individual instances.

4. Dreams of order Michel Foucault has argued that every culture creates what he calls “heterotopias,” spaces that may exist as actual places but that serve primarily as fantasy counter-sites to disorderly realities. He names gardens as a central example of such fantasy spaces, because they have served as neatly arranged microcosms of the world since early antiquity.68 The landscapes of literary theory and criticism operate like this, repeatedly reproducing elsewheres in which, as Foucault says, regular places “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”69 Both the dream and its manifestation: these constructed settings thus capture a range of meanings of the ancient term phantasia – imagining and appearance, cultural organizing 67 69

E.g., Halperin 1983; more recently Fantuzzi 2006. Foucault 1986: 24.

68

Foucault 1986: 25–26.

25

26

Introduction

and reproducing, the vibrant effects of which are achieved by metaphor. That critics and theorists recognize the centrality of such envisioning to good composition is not only evident in their own uses of lively tropes. For instance, while Aristotle consigns all aspects of style and delivery to appearance (phantasia, Rhet. 1404a11–12), he nonetheless highlights metaphor among stylistic effects for its power to bring things “before the eyes” (pro ommatōn, Rhet. 1411b23, cf. 1411a26–35), a metaphor that does what it describes. The critic “Longinus” regards phantasiai (“visualizations”) as essential to the enthralling effect (ekplēxis) of poetry and vividness (enargeia) in oratory (De Subl. 15.2; cf. 15.11).70 And one of the primary examples he uses is that of Euripides’ “journey” across the heavens in his play Phaethon, when the poet depicts in vivid detail the hero’s father Helios urging him on his way. “Would you not say,” the critic enthuses, “that the soul of the writer is stepping onto the chariot and, sharing dangers with the horses, taking flight with them?” (15.4).71 As Longinus envisions Euripides’ soul on the wing he emulates the movement of both Phaethon and the poet’s imagery, so that explanation and mimesis converge. Like the envisioned settings that Proust coordinates with locales by means of heraldic metonymies and place names, the details of these ancient spaces operate simultaneously on two or sometimes three planes. The “real” landscapes in this scheme always have a fictional cast and their figurative contours are shaped and reshaped by critical reception. As for Proust, Helicon is always “Helicon” – an emblematic place that beckons from afar, an effect that further elevates the mysterious, recondite atmosphere with which the ancient Guermantes family imbues the landscape that anchors the first volumes of his novel. As Proust’s impressionable, fastidious narrator is describing this phenomenon, he becomes the ancient poet on a pilgrimage whose sensitivity gives him special access to the literary resources of the place. He thus wryly aligns himself first with Pindar, whose verses are littered with place-specific scenes of inspiration and for whom Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi, on the southwestern slope of Mount Parnassus, was poetry’s hallowed ground. Proust also summons Hesiod, whose audience with the Muses on the flank of Mount Helicon led in the Hellenistic and Roman periods to the establishment of a cult of the Muses in the valley below, international contests and celebrations, and 70

71

Halliwell argues that Longinus’ focus on phantasiai includes recognition of poetry’s ecstatic effects (2011: 347–48). ἆρ’ οὐκ ἂν εἴποις ὅτι ἡ ψυχὴ τοῦ γράφοντος συνεπιβαίνει τοῦ ἅρματος καὶ συγκινδυνεύουσα τοῖς ἵπποις συνεπτέρωται;. For this type of mimetic theorizing, see esp. chs. 1.2b, 6.3a and b, and 7.3b.

4. Dreams of order

pilgrimages of the imagination by Greek and Roman poets. But the image of Parnassus also conjures for Proust the eponymous circle of writers in mid-nineteenth-century France. These “Parnassians” deploy Hellenizing pastoral imagery to promote “art for art’s sake” attitudes as a critique of the Romantics’ own Philhellenic poetic and scholarly practices, including their attachment to natural settings of inspiration.72 Perhaps because of the stunning extent of the cultural accretion that imbeds the ancient settings in literary critical reception, Proust evokes the heraldic details of these settings to chart the coordinates of his coordinates – that is, the aesthetic and critical orientation of his own literary landscape. In this way he imbeds the Guermantes Way itself in this same tradition, so that its heraldic details also pick out a distinctive aesthetic topography. I take up Proust’s landscaping intermittently in the chapters that follow and most fully again in the Epilogue, since his knowing critical gestures form a uniquely resonant instance of the long trails spun out from the representational strategies of ancient poets, critics, and theorists. These strategies themselves constitute another terrain that beckons from afar: it emerges, shaped by figures in rural landscapes, as the earliest criticaltheoretical discourse in western tradition. 72

Canat 1951; Knight 1986.

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1

Mimesis, style, and the spaces of metaphor

Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Friedrich Nietzsche1

A pivotal moment in “White Mythology,” Jacques Derrida’s essay on philosophy’s metaphor, addresses an equally pivotal moment in Aristotle’s theory of metaphor. Aristotle argues that analogy (ἀνάλογον, Po. 1457b9) is a type of metaphor involving the substitution of one metonymic item for another, as when one calls a wine goblet the “shield of Dionysus” or a shield “the cup of Ares” (τὴν φιάλην ἀσπίδα Διονύσου καὶ τὴν ἀσπίδα φιάλην Ἄρεως, 1457b20–22). A few lines later he asserts further that Ares’ shield could also be called a “wine-less cup” (φιάλην ἄοινον, 1457b32–33). Derrida remarks that in this second turn a proper reference is lacking (i.e., Ares), so that “the figure is carried off into the adventure of a long, implicit sentence, a secret narrative [in] which nothing assures us [that it] will lead us back to the proper name.”2 Derrida treats this example as indicating the bottomless capacity of metaphor to catalyze what he terms just before it “the wandering of the semantic.”3 Aristotle’s theory of metaphor hinges on this movement but does not acknowledge it – indeed, cannot acknowledge it, given his reliance on what he apparently takes to be a relatively neutral analytical language. Hence Derrida’s “white mythology” – western thought’s yearning for an unmarked language “natural” to “man” (both ironized terms for him) turns out to be founded on nothing so much as the movement of metaphor. For Derrida this movement lies at the heart of how language continuously makes and remakes meaning, which is why he privileges this aspect of Aristotle’s theory while questioning the core assumptions that underlie it. 1 2

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3

Second Preface to The Gay Science: ([1887] 1974: 38). Derrida [1972] 1982: 243. Translation amended: “la figure est emportée dans l’aventure d’une longue phrase implicite, d’un récit secret dont rien ne nous assure qu’il nous reconduira au nom proper” (290). Derrida [1972] 1982: 241.

Mimesis, style, and the spaces of metaphor

And then there is Plato, who may not address metaphor directly, but whose entire metaphysics is couched in its terms, as in a step-by-step route through (methodos) that moves from metaphor to metaphor, Socrates makes his way to the Forms. Wandering, journeys, paths: one of the many complications in addressing ancient landscape metaphors lies in the workings of metaphor itself, which inspires Aristotle to handle “metaphor” (metaphora) as a metaphor, as a carrying over of terms distant from each other that thereby renders things “before the eyes” (pro ommatōn) – language that reverberates in later Greek and Roman discussions of style. As I discuss below, ancient literary theorists reiterate and play off of Aristotle’s metaphors for metaphor, emphasizing their movements in agonistic negotiation of style’s terrains. For our purposes, then, the traveling and territory mapped by metaphor’s metaphors (in its ancient conceptions, at any rate) share their essential features with the metaphorical landscaping on which this book focuses. Metaphor thus operates at a number of different levels in relation to figurative terrains – those “dreams of order” that I surveyed in the Introduction. This is not only because ancient theorists conceive of metaphor as spatial and mobile, as well as bound up with visualization, appearance, surface effects, and even fantasy. Metaphor also gives shape to the stylistic distinctions that I am analyzing (e.g., rough roads, fertile fields, etc.) and constitutes a feature of styles that poets and theorists often depict figuratively (e.g., as adornment, decoration, flowering). Together these underpin the entire metaphorical enterprise as involving both moving across far reaches and viewing vibrant correspondences close up; in the epigram quoted above this would be right there at Nietzsche’s “fold” – what Derrida theorizes as “the fold of physis” – where figuration does its work.4 If metaphor achieves transport to remote spaces, also bringing “the whole Olympus” close by means of visualization, then the figuring of metaphor itself also retraces this exciting journey. This expansive notion of metaphor, which is first formulated by Aristotle but reflects earlier usage, understands it as coextensive with figuration more generally. Modern theorists of metaphor have tended to treat this expansive view as the opposite of later conceptions of metaphor as decoration, as one feature among others suited to mixed or elaborate styles.5 But in fact from early on Greek poets treat lyrical language in 4

5

Derrida’s discussion treats as central Nietzsche’s ideas about the relation between truth and metaphor; his use of the metaphor of the “fold” ([1972] 1982: 237, 241; Fr. pli, 288) may thus follow Nietzsche’s [Ger. Falte]. See section 3 below. See Franke 2000, with bibliography.

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general as decorative and flowery, perhaps especially in laudatory modes. For instance, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Simonides use floral metaphors for their poetry (e.g., ἄνθεα ὑμνῶν, P. O. 9.48; ἀοιδᾶν ἄνθεα, Bacch. fr. 4.2; ἄνθος ἀοιδῶν, Sim. fr. 127), the repeated images suggesting that figurative expression crucially underpins modes that are blossoming, fertile, and/or decorative.6 Later in the ancient rhetorical tradition, and developed more fully by Medieval and Renaissance scholars, such connections between the floral and the metaphorical are distinguished as “flowers of rhetoric.” Following Cicero, who declares in De oratore that nothing makes oratory “more flowery” (florentior) than metaphor (3.166), theorists and teachers defined, classified, and collected tropes regarded as most illustrative in rhetorical bouquets reminiscent of Hellenistic and Roman “anthologies” that gathered poetic epigrams.7 These collections suggest the enduring centrality of figurative usage to rhetorical instruction, rather than its reduction to surface effect. In ancient convention, at any rate, the process of figuration reiterates and continuously reorders figures in landscapes, meaning both the metaphors formulated from these landscapes and the figures moving to and within them – the inspirational Nymphs, the performing poets, the contentious philosophers. Modern philosophers and theorists from Nietzsche to Derrida and Paul Ricoeur pick up on these ancient conceptions, emphasizing metaphor as itinerant, embodied, envisioning, and constitutive. Early on in “White Mythology” Derrida quotes Nietzsche’s description of truth as “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymics, anthropomorphisms,” lively attendance to which Nietzsche treats as enriching human perception, especially for those in a state of what he terms “mythical arousal.” Because of their heightened sensibility where dreams and waking life flow together, the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche claims, occupied a world in which “every tree can speak like a nymph.”8 We may recall here as well Scarry’s sense that the “visual event” inspires emulation, generating metaphors with a kind of mimetic enthusiasm, and the primary example she offers: Odysseus envisioning Nausicaa as a young palm tree beside the altar of Apollo at Delos.9

6

7

8 9

See McCraken 1934, who notes that the majority of Pindar’s odes contain tropes on plant-life; also Steiner 1986; Patten 2009. E.g., The Garden of Eloquence, published by Henry Peacham in 1577; but there are earlier classifications and collections, such as the one entitled simply Flores rhetorici, dated to the 1170s (Camargo 1992: 167). Nietzsche [1873] 2009: 257, 262. Od. 6.160–65; Scarry 1999: 3. Cf. discussions in the Introduction (section 2) and ch. 4 (introductory section).

Mimesis, style, and the spaces of metaphor

Derrida himself critiques Aristotle’s sense of metaphor as similarly centered on assumptions about natural ties between nature and “man” and thus human signification: The power of truth, as the unveiling of nature (physis) by mimēsis, congenitally belongs to the physics of man, to anthropophysics. Such is the natural origin of poetry, and such is the natural origin of metaphor.10

Derrida emphasizes that Aristotle has frequent recourse to natural metaphors tied to human life, such as Homer’s representation of old age as a “withered stalk.”11 From this perspective metaphor – or what Nietzsche terms “the splendor of metaphorical intuitions”12 – effectively emerges from anthropocentric notions of nature, especially as embodied in human form. Compare Ricoeur, who begins a well-known essay on metaphor by noting that Aristotle says that style (lexis) and therefore metaphor make speech appear as one thing or another (e.g., Rhet. 1411b23–30). Ricoeur connects this to the metaphor of the “figure,” arguing that in metaphor “discourse assumes the nature of a body” giving a shape and “face” to it, making it palpable. He emphasizes as well the puzzles inherent in the ancient conceptions of metaphor as “transfer in a kind of space,” a deviance that operates on the basis of resemblance, which Derrida also treats as rooted in ancient assumptions about the natural groundings of human perception (his “anthropophysics”), as the quotation above indicates.13 We can notice with Derrida that when Aristotle talks about language and style, he identifies the creation of apt metaphors as the poet’s most important talent (πολὺ δὲ μέγιστον τὸ μεταφορικὸν εἶναι), because it signals the presence of a natural capability (μόνον γὰρ τοῦτο οὔτε παρ' ἄλλου ἔστι λαβεῖν εὐφυΐας τε σημεῖόν ἐστι) – that is, an eye for perceiving likeness (τὸ γὰρ εὖ μεταφέρειν τὸ ὅμοιον θεωρεῖν ἐστιν) (Poet. 1459a5–8). Thus the perception of resemblance arises from a special (”natural”) human attunement to nature, to the order by which it secures meaning for language. Derrida highlights this proto-humanist claim on nature as underpinning Aristotle’s emphasis on resemblance, which is sustained as a central conceit of western philosophy.14 10

11 12 13 14

Derrida [1972] 1982: 217, 237 (Fr. 283): “Le pouvoir de vérité, comme dévoilement de la nature (physis) par la mimesis, appartient congénitalement à la physique de l’homme, à l’anthropophysique. Telle est l’origine naturelle de la poésie et telle est l’origine naturelle de la métaphore.” Aristotle, Rhet. 1410b13–14, from Odyssey 14.231; see further below (section 3). Nietzsche [1873] 2009: 264. Ricoeur 1978a: 142–43; for more on Derrida’s discussion, see further below (section 3). See also Derrida [1972] 1982: 234–35.

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Mimesis, style, and the spaces of metaphor

As Derrida’s multifaceted engagement with Aristotle suggests, the latter’s focus on likeness should not be merely treated as insufficiently subtle or expressive of how metaphor operates more generally. This is not only because Aristotle’s characterizations of it do clearly influence ancient thought about figuration and the literary theoretical and critical discourse that follows after. In addition, his envisioning of metaphor as movement and as a kind of seeing, his emphasis on natural correspondences and capacities, and his conviction that metaphor and mimesis both depend on the appreciation of likeness, also point up the central conundrum that lies at the heart not only of signification but also of philosophy – namely, that philosophical thought hinges on metaphor and cannot be expressed except in its terms. So goes Derrida’s critique of the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition, in any case. While his essay in its central sections focuses on Aristotle’s treatment of metaphor in the Poetics and Rhetoric, Plato’s metaphysics also underlies this claim, as passing references to him indicate (see esp. p. 242). Plato’s background role is essential here, since he treats the intelligible realm as only accessible by mimesis and metaphor, which means that the theory of the Forms itself turns on, is articulated in, a series of metaphors (i.e., the sun, the line, and the cave in Republic 6–7). Again, this is Derrida’s contention; and it is a primary reason why his critique is so useful for my analysis. While most scholars who address central aspects of Platonic metaphysics such as the sun, line, and cave focus on the nature of the intelligible realm and the Forms, I am only interested in Socrates’ formulations of the approach toward this realm – that is, the crucial metaphors that model a way forward.15 For Plato and his followers, including Aristotle, the “real” can only be reached by metaphors but ultimately lies beyond such analogies. Thus while Aristotle and Plato appreciate the significance and problems inherent in the fact that the apprehension of likeness lies at the heart of mimesis and metaphor, it is Plato who formulates this metaphysics via metaphors that must always fail to satisfy and Aristotle who criticizes his teacher’s reliance on metaphorical expression to indicate its operations, as Derrida also points out.16 If Plato regards such figurative work as necessary but ultimately to be abandoned, once one comes face to face with the Forms, Aristotle treats metaphor 15

16

For this reason I am setting aside the welter of secondary literature on Platonic metaphysics and only treating scholarship that addresses this advancement. But see the essays in the edited volume of Barker and Warner, especially those of McCabe and Tecusan (1992); also Nehamas 1982; Belfiore 1984; Janaway 1995; Murray 1996; Burnyeat 1999; Halliwell 2002: ch. 1; Pender 2003; Moss 2007; Vasiliou 2008: chs. 7 and 8; Morgan 2010; Halliwell 2011: ch. 4. Arist. Met. A9, 991a20, M5, 1079b25. Derrida [1972] 1982: 238.

Mimesis, style, and the spaces of metaphor

like mimesis as a fundamental underpinning of the intellectual endeavor as a whole, since he regards analogical thinking as central not merely to artistic composition but also to rational argument (cf. Poet. 1451b4–7, Rhet. 1410b12). This comes back to conceptions of natural capacities: for Aristotle it is natural to humans to recognize and take delight in perceiving similarities, which are also undergirded by nature.17 Ancient theorists more generally follow Plato and Aristotle in this: they treat metaphors as traversing distances and achieving visualization by means of resemblances perceived as natural correspondences, core operations that metaphors share with mimesis and style.18 In conceptualizing likeness in this manner these writers are in some ways merely following literary convention. A poet may devise metaphors for his own poetic crafting by laying claim to a similarity between tenor and vehicle (i.e., between the thing or concept indicated and the indicator) – as, for instance, when Pindar culls song from meadows and gardens in order to craft a poetic crown.19 Mimesis also aims at achieving a match, as when Socrates plays Nymph-seized poet in the Phaedrus in order to harness poetry’s mimetic powers for philosophy. That the work of likeness also underlies ancient conceptions of style may sound more tendentious but it is in fact also imbedded in literary traditions: from Homer on poets highlight appropriateness of style as central to achieving authority and aesthetic impact.20 Plato, Aristotle, and the later theorists all follow suit, emphasizing that effective style depends on suitability, that is, on matching style to subject matter, setting, and occasion, and thereby speech to audience. Nietzsche’s appreciative “Oh!” propels the insight that Greek thinkers view style, like mimesis and metaphor, as hinging on appearance and surface effects – what Aristotle terms phantasia in his discussion of style in the third book of the Rhetoric. However enthusiastic Nietzsche may take this aesthetic attentiveness to be, the ancient theorists exhibit a certain ambivalence about such effects, namely that all three may be essentially decorative, feminizing, and in need of proper policing (cf. Rhet. 1404a11–12).21 Thus even as these theorists emphasize the visualizing powers of metaphor and style, they also caution against the attractions of both while their figurative formulations closely associate them. Indeed, when these theorists treat metaphor as decorative and involving a kind of 17 18 20

21

Arist. Po. 1448b5-9. Cf. Derrida [1972] 1982: 238–29 and section 3 below. 19 Again, cf. Derrida [1972] 1982: 237–41. See further in ch. 2 below. Cf., e.g., the Homeric notion of speaking kata kosmon (“in fitting order”) and Pindar’s use of kosmos as “fitting decoration of words”; see Worman 2002: ch. 1. See further below, section 2a.

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viewing or seeing, they often frame it as a key aspect of style’s own relationship to appearance and sometimes use overlapping imagery that further analogizes the two.22 While such analogizing may take the different thinkers working in this tradition in different directions, since they have distinctive targets in mind, they all participate to greater and lesser extents in theorizing the intersection of mimesis, metaphor, and style around resemblance. As might be expected, the ways in which Plato and Aristotle handle mimesis and metaphor and the ways in which Aristotle and later theorists treat metaphor and style similarly converge around core notions of likeness, some shared by all of the thinkers and some advanced by one or another. These notions of likeness centrally influence the incremental transformation that evolves from reorganizing earlier poetic scenes of inspiration and invention as a coherent critical discourse about style grounded in significant settings. Let me emphasize at the outset, however, that the influences of Plato and Aristotle on this transformation are quite distinct in character. Plato depicts Socrates addressing mimesis as behavioral emulation and style that affects the soul (Republic 3), elsewhere treating mimesis as an imitation of the real (e.g., Republic 10, Sophist). But in other places (e.g., key moments in the Republic, the Sophist, and the second half of the Phaedrus) Socrates or a stand-in also envisions theoretical advancement as a pursuit of the course of likeness, highlighting this advancement by means of the metaphor (i.e., “pursuing a path”) and using similes and metaphors as stepping-stones to the truth. While Plato never directly addresses metaphor itself, at moments like these he seems to be indicating what work he thinks figurative language can do within the dialectical process. In contrast to Plato’s imagistic mode, Aristotle, with characteristic directness, emphasizes metaphor as a central component of good style, envisioning it as crossing distances between a thing and its likeness to render a vivid and therefore effective match. These two latter ways into conceptualizing likeness and the valuable uses to which it may be put (i.e., metaphors forging a path to truth, metaphors as spanning distances) dovetail around ideas about movement through and across spaces. As I discuss briefly below and in greater detail in subsequent chapters, theorists such as Demetrius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Cicero make use of aspects of both of these conceptual intersections, emphasizing and 22

As I discuss below, Plato coins the term “appearance-making” (phantastikē) when distinguishing types of mimesis, which suggests the interconnectedness of mimesis and style.

Mimesis, style, and the spaces of metaphor

sometimes themselves reproducing in their own representational strategies the mobile, visualizing power of metaphor to forge persuasive styles. This chapter lays the groundwork for a fuller understanding of how the theoretical discourse that Plato, Aristotle, and later theorists develop in relation to mimesis, style, and metaphor both orients and is itself oriented by the tropes and terrains that shape distinctions among styles. This double movement helps to explain the central role that figuration itself and landscapes with figures together play in the development of certain central images in poetry and prose into a dominant critical discourse. I want to emphasize here as well that mimesis, metaphor, and style never operate in or as neutral territories, no matter how abstract some of the theorizing of and through them may appear. Matchmaking in this sense is always involved in a negotiation of values and always lays claim to a better path, most often by recourse to nature itself.23 This is how certain configurations of aesthetic and ethical values come to be misrecognized as natural and true and thus come to dominate in cultural representation, fostering gendered hierarchies of taste and inclination that communicate across centuries the ways in which bodies and topographies ought to coordinate. In the sections that follow I first pursue three different moves among the ancient theorists. Plato has a profound influence on one of these: the wryly framed use of mimesis and metaphor as generative, creative tools to open a path forward that leads eventually to the Forms. Aristotle dominates another: the conceptualizing of the space and movements of metaphor as powerful and in need of careful monitoring, which appears to give rise to a gendering of some of its capacities, including figuration as “flowering.” This leads into a further intersection between metaphor and nature, which Derrida thinks essential and which, again, assumes familiarity with Platonic metaphysics, especially as set forth in the Republic. At the end of this last section I also consider what it means for literary theory that metaphor and mimesis lead the way to Plato’s metaphysics and that Aristotle treats both as natural, generative capacities. The central (though different) roles that mimesis and metaphor play in the thinking of each encourages in later writers a mimetic theorizing that works by emulation and iteration, exactly the mode that Derrida takes up as a means of pursuing the concatenations that metaphor initiates, rather than straining to put a stop to them and fix meaning in its rightful place. While I am not claiming that ancient critics were post-structuralists avant la lettre, theorizing knowingly about the play of signifiers, they do seem aware to varying 23

Again, see Mitchell [1994] 2002: 2.

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degrees of metaphor’s capacity for mobility and hence play, and of how mimesis engages in the emulation and reproduction of stylistic effects.

1. Plato on mimesis and the course of likeness In order to understand Plato’s unique dominance of this conceptual terrain – especially confounding given that for the most part he treats mimesis negatively and never directly addresses figuration – we need to look more closely at the ways in which he characterizes and makes use of the mimetic process in some key dialogues. While the aspect of mimesis that centers on educational modeling (i.e., the inculcation of good behavior) may intersect with later theorists’ ideas about the emulation of good rhetorical practices, it does not have as much to do with the type of matchmaking that I am isolating as the work of likeness in Plato’s own theorizing – again, both describing the method as pursuing a path forged by true similarities and himself (or rather Socrates and others) pursuing this path on the way to the intelligible realm.24 Accordingly, I concentrate here instead on what Jacques Rancière calls Plato’s “ethical regime of images.” In a discussion on the politics of aesthetics, he has this to say of Plato: “[T]here are true arts, that is to say forms of knowledge based on the imitation of a model with precise ends, and artistic simulacra that imitate simple appearances.”25 Rancière’s distinction helps us understand why certain of Plato’s metaphors become so central to ancient theory and criticism, since his positive uses of mimesis and metaphors influence in important ways later theorists’ discussions of styles, even when those discussions may have more mundane aims (i.e., good prose composition). Below I address a few crucial places in which 24

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The behavioral imitation that Republic 3 focuses on does, however, share an emphasis on emulation with the process outlined in the Phaedrus by which the lover’s soul views beauty, rises up to liken itself to divinity, and fosters this likening in the beloved. Elsewhere Socrates regards this type of likening as something of a life practice. He suggests in the Republic that the philosopher emulate (μιμεῖσθαι) the things that are (i.e., the Forms), likening himself (ἀφομοιοῦσθαι) to them (500c2–7). I return to mimesis as behavioral emulation in ch. 4.3. See Halliwell 2002: 65–67, 75–81, who largely focuses on the process in Rep. 3 from the angle of audience psychology; also Morgan 2010: 56–63, who emphasizes this type of emulation as inspired and “living” (62–63); cf. Murray 1992. I am setting aside here the aspects that make Plato’s prose “mimetic” for, e.g., Kurke 2006, not because impersonation is not relevant to the dialogic form but because the mimetic modes that I am pursuing at this stage in my discussion involve the image/likeness end of this spectrum. Rancière [2000] 2004: 20–21. Rancière locates ethical regimes of images in cultures that do not isolate art as such, but rather treat images as objects with origins and ends and arts as “ways of doing and making.”

1. Mimesis and the course of likeness

Plato’s conceptions and uses of mimesis and figuration center on artistic practices and the path of dialectic. As these examples indicate, even in relatively abstract discussions Plato frequently engages with metaphors that evoke movement through spaces, usually as the pursuit of a long and upward path, with visual metaphors providing the step-by-step analogizing that moves one along toward the Forms. Thus while many scholars have focused on what it is to be there looking upon these “Forms” (eidē or ideai, i.e., incorporeal objects such as beauty and justice), I aim to track instead what one must do on the ground, following the long, rough road that leads eventually upward and is mapped incrementally by means of resemblances.26 This is the course of likeness, determining true matches that both depict elevation and help to attain it – such as, say, the metaphors of the line in the Republic, the ladder in the Symposium, or the wings in the Phaedrus – and thereby approximating, as best one can, the nature of the Forms or intelligibles. In the Symposium and Phaedrus especially, this work is achieved by viewing beauty in the world, harnessing the erotic dynamics it catalyzes, and via mimetic and dialectical analogizing forging a path upward toward its Form.27 Only a few can determine good likenesses and thereby follow the right route upward, but the mimetic work of the dialogues themselves suggests that Socrates may be one of them, even though he repeatedly demurs in this regard. The goal is obviously not craft-oriented: the ascent gained through this careful analogizing ends in contemplation on high, far above an applied emulation of models in the sensible world that we see in the works of more didactic theorists of rhetoric such as Dionysius and Longinus. The progress of argument in the Republic centers on the most famous path of all, the one that leads out of the cave. This is both the most vivid of paths and also the metaphor most pivotal to the dialectic process; and the trope in general is crucial to Plato’s metaphysics – again, it maps the central route to the Forms. As a route made of metaphors as well as itself a metaphor, in the Republic as well as the Sophist it lends visual aids and 26

27

But see Berg 1903; Tecusan 1992; Janaway 1995; Pender 2003. On the dialectical path, see further in ch. 4.4. On the soul’s flight upward and its spatial features in the Phaedrus and Symposium, see further in ch. 4.3. See Pender 2003: 60–61, although she casts this connection between the use of images and dialectic in more negative terms. Platonic discussions of how mimesis operates often use the language of likeness (e.g., eikos/eikones and homoio- terminology): Phdr. 248a1–2 and 252d2–3, 253b4–c2; Rep. 510b4–5, 532a1–d1; cf. Soph. 235d6–36c7, Tim. 39d7–e7, Crat. 432b1–d9. On the terminology, see Pohlenz 1935; McCall 1969: 1–18. That is to say, Plato’s usage reflects the sense of image that the Greek eik- terms capture – not only general ideas about representation or appearance but more specifically likeness and emulation (IE root = *ik-: ikelos, eikō, eoika, eikos, eikōn, eikasia, etc.). See Bryan 2012; also Burnyeat 2005.

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mobility to dialectic. I thus take it up here in order to highlight where it shares features with other writers’ ideas about metaphor as visualizing and as movement. I fill in further details in Chapter 4, where the path imagery dovetails with that centered on the most influential locus amoenus in ancient critical and theoretical discourse: the scene in Plato’s Phaedrus.

a. Matchmaking and the upward path Well into the discussion of poetry and education in Republic 3, Socrates clarifies that mimesis in education can only proceed in an ethically supportable manner if one has knowledge of the forms of virtues, as well as their opposites and images (402b–c). He introduces this assertion by reference to learning letters, noting that one could not recognize images (εἰκόνας) of letters in water or mirrors (ἐν ὕδασιν ἢ ἐν κατόπτροις) unless one knew “the things themselves” (αὐτά) (402b5–7).28 It follows (says Socrates) that those truly educated in the arts (μουσικοί) must have knowledge of the forms (τὰ . . . εἴδη) of prudence, courage, and so on, and so be able to recognize both “them themselves and images of them” (αὐτὰ καὶ εἰκόνας αὐτῶν) (402b8–c8). This moment serves as punctuation to the discussion of mimesis and education in poetry and music, and comes well before the introduction of the transcendent Forms.29 For our purposes it constitutes an important hinge between the discussion of mimesis and what will come to be theorized as these Forms; it also indicates Socrates’ reliance on analogies between forms of things and their images or reflections, which has its most elaborate unfolding in the allegory of the cave (e.g., 516a5–b2, cf. 532b–d). Here at this early stage Socrates merely points to the analogizing necessary for grasping forms of virtue by introducing two types of copies, more broadly construed: image and reflection.30 This suggests that human mimesis (i.e., metaphorical analogizing and imagemaking) should follow nature’s version (i.e., reflecting, shadowing) in hopes of identifying forms of virtue, a process that Socrates or another Platonic interlocutor often depicts as forming a path to the truth by means of like images. 28

29

30

Socrates uses the analogy to letters at a critical juncture earlier, when he suggests that, as with matching big to small letters, they pursue their question about justice by first proposing an ideal city rather than ideal individuals (Rep. 368c8–69a4). See Vasiliou 2008: 227–32, who argues that although this passage foreshadows the theory of the Forms developed in books 5–7, the necessary distinctions are not yet in place. Socrates frequently has recourse to natural reflections as analogies for correspondences that are true and thus lead to the intelligible realm (cf., e.g., Phd. 99d4–6, Rep. 509e1–10a1, 510e2–3, Tht. 206d3–4, Soph. 239d6–8, 239e7–8, and further below).

1. Mimesis and the course of likeness

The middle books of the Republic, which famously make use of mimesis and metaphor to approach the intelligible realm, fittingly contain the fullest account of how the different stages in the process work. Again, I am not concerned here with the metaphysical claims set forth in these books, but rather with the analogizing practices by which Socrates forges a path forward and upward, while also characterizing this route forward by the metaphor of moving on a path. The metaphors are, as we might expect, arranged hierarchically and by means of dominant analogies formed from the images of the sun, the line, and the cave. Plato undertakes some complex theoretical maneuvers in the framing of these images, and some of the most crucial ones in the Republic gesture toward the visual arts as a means of characterizing how figuration itself ought to function in pursuit of the truth. These central books indicate that the two activities of viewing images and pursuing a path must be taken together as necessary parts of the same process. When, for instance, at the beginning of book 4 Adeimantus challenges the vision of the ideal city that Socrates has been describing, he replies that if they “follow the same path as before” (τὸν αὐτὸν πορεύμενοι) they will discover the answer (420b3–4). He then introduces painting the parts of a sculpture as an extended simile (cf. ὥσπερ ἂν εἰ, 420c4–5) for the composing of the different citizens that make up the ideal city. While at this early stage Socrates’ simile takes the form of an analogy to conventional crafting, dictated by realism and attention to beauty, the point to emphasize is that he responds to the challenge by declaring that they are on the right path and offering an analogy, as if as proof that this is the case.31 The journey upward to the Forms will eventually emerge as more rigorous than this, but the conjunction of progressing along a path and likeness-making sets the stage for the later ascent. Some decades ago Charles Segal, in a typically dense and wide-ranging article, situated the journey in the Republic as an Odyssean one into Hades that starts with Socrates’ descent to Piraeus – ”I went down” (κατέβην) being the dialogue’s opening phrase – and ends with an ascent via the myth of Er. While he does not emphasize the importance of perceiving similarities in this process, he does take something like this to be central to Plato’s

31

Again, this is the figure that Aristotle identifies as analogy (A is to B as C is to D, Po. 1457b9). On realism: the idea is that while the eyes are the most beautiful of the body’s parts, they must be rendered as they are rather than enhanced by the most beautiful color (Rep. 420c5–8). On art images as central to Plato’s theory of imitation, see (e.g.) Keuls 1978; Belfiore 1984; Janaway 1995; Halliwell 2002.

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envisioning of a passage from corporeal sight to true vision.32 As Segal puts it, “The act of beholding will not be the idle pastime of a day’s excursion, but a lifetime activity of the deepest seriousness.”33 We see this in action in book 5, when Glaucon asks Socrates who the true philosophers are and he replies, “Those who love the sight of truth” (lit. “sight-lovers of the truth,” τοὺς τῆς ἀληθείας . . . φιλοθεάμονας, 475e4), which leads directly into Socrates’ first elaboration of forms as non-sensible unities (i.e., as Forms). Sight-lovers of other kinds, those distracted by the dash and color of beautiful things down on the ground (i.e., in the sensible world), are distinguished from the philosophers looking elsewhere: upward toward beauty itself. At the beginning of book 6, Socrates identifies this type of person as “keen sighted” (ὀξὺ ὁρῶντα), as opposed to the blind who are without a “distinct model” (μηδὲν ἐναργές . . . παράδειγμα) in their souls and who thus cannot – as a painter can – look to what is most true (μηδὲ δυνάμενοι ὥσπερ γραφὴς εἰς τὸ ἀληθέστατον ἀποβλέποντες), study it, and attempt to capture it exactly (484c5–d1).34 A little further on, as Socrates approaches the central images of ascent (the sun, line, and cave), Adeimantus mocks his method of pursuing piecemeal analogies and a step-by-step process, objecting to the whole thing as misleading. He declares that, since all of Socrates’ interlocutors are inexperienced in advancing in this way, they are led astray bit by bit (σμικρὸν παραγόμενοι) and because of the crowding together of these little moves, at the end “a big stumble” (μέγα τὸ σφάλμα) emerges, which is the opposite of where they started out (487b1–7).35 When he asks how it could be, then, that philosophers, who are so useless, could emerge as the proper guardians for the city, Socrates claims that this question calls for a simile (ἐρώτημα δεόμενον ἀποκρίσεως δι’ εἰκόνος λεγομένης). To this Adeimantus replies sardonically, “And I know that you aren’t accustomed to speaking through similes!” (δι’ εἰκόνων λέγειν). Socrates responds that he knows he is being teased (σκώπτεις . . . με) and that he does indeed “greedily make likenesses” (γλίσχρως εἰκάζω) (487e4–488a2). He highlights his own image-crafting further, when he declares that the relationship is so difficult (χαλεπόν) to represent that he has to combine elements “like those who paint goat-stags” (οἷον οἱ γραφῆς τραγελάφους καὶ τὰ 32 34

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33 Segal 1978: 323–35. Segal 1978: 324. See Monoson 2000: 212–28, esp. 220–21; Nightingale 2004: 74–83, esp. 78–79; Vasiliou 2008: 240–44; and further discussion in ch. 4.3a. Cf. Rep. 451a1-4, where Socrates worries that he might slip from the truth and take down his friends with him (μὴ σφαλεὶς τῆς ἀληθείας οὐ μόνον αὐτὸς ἀλλὰ καὶ τοὺς φίλους συνεπισπασάμενος κείσομαι, 451a1–4).

1. Mimesis and the course of likeness

τοιαῦτα μειγνύντες γράφουσιν) (488a6–7).36 He then goes on to describe a ship, its ignorant owner, its sailors, those they choose as leaders, and the captain with real knowledge, as a multifaceted analogy for the city’s attitude toward philosophers (cf. 401b1–3, 509a9–10). And so Socrates offers a likeness for his likeness, in this case a simile for his extended metaphor (again an analogy). The mocking tone of the exchange comes to a point in the simile, given that the mischievous image is straight out of Aristophanes. In Frogs Euripides teases Aeschylus for his elaborate style, saying that at least he does not craft “horse-cocks or goat-stags” (οὐχ ἱππαλεκτρυόνας . . . οὐδὲ τραγελάφους, 936).37 In the Republic, Socrates turns the joke to his own purposes: in keeping with his tendency for self-irony and demurral, he suggests that his metaphor, while hybrid and elaborate, may make for easy understanding, at least among able interlocutors like Adeimantus (489a4–6). In fact, he tells Adeimantus to pass it on (like a good joke), offering it to anyone who does not grasp the difficulty of rule by philosophers. Leading up to the images of the sun and line in book 6, Socrates engages Adeimantus in envisioning the “sketch” (cf. διαγράψειαν) of the city and its citizens and drawing an analogy to “painters who use the divine model” (οἱ τῷ θείῳ παραδείγματι χρώμενοι ζωγράφοι, 500e3–4; cf. 484c3–d1). These “painters” would, Socrates says, make such a careful mixing and blending (συμμειγνύντες τε καὶ κεραννύντες) of the different ways of life in the city that they would render a form like that which Homer called “the divine form and image” (θειοειδές τε καὶ θειοείκελον, 501b4–7; cf. Il. 1.131).38 This time Socrates does not offer the analogy to visual arts in a playful manner, instead focusing on the careful process by which the good painter would attend to his model and seek its likeness. Once again, then, Socrates’ simile adduces painting, for Plato a centrally problematic mimetic art, as Republic 10 reveals. Despite the critique developed most fully there, Socrates’ parallelisms in these central books between mimesis 36

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Cf. Gorg. 493c5–6, 517d5–6. See Ford 2002: 192 and n. 15, who points out that simile making (eikazein) was a sympotic game, citing Athenaeus on Ion of Chios’ story about Sophocles’ wit at symposium (13.603c–604f); cf. Ar. Vesp. 1308–18, Av. 801–08, Ran. 906. See also Hesk 2007 on eikasmoi (“comparisons”) and capping in Aristophanes; and Morgan forthcoming, who regards the goat-stag image as central to the “painting” of the philosopher-kings. Pietro Pucci has suggested (discussion, February 2012) that this is how Aristophanes himself highlights figurative usage, as outlandish and a source of jokes (cf., e.g., the wordplay around “paths” in Frogs and further discussion in ch. 3). For the sense of χαλεπόν as “difficult to represent,” see Tim. 19d7–e2. On this use of the eikōn as a stop-gap measure, see Tecusan 1992: 73–78, although it should be clear by this point that I do not agree with her negative characterizing of the use of images. As at 484c5–7, here too Socrates uses the painter as a positive (rather than merely neutral) analogy; see Vasiliou 2008: 269.

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in language and in the visual arts models a type of analogizing that is presented as useful for advancing toward the truth and better understanding. It thus points to a way in which mimetic arts may offer up objects of contemplation that, if taken metaphorically and sometimes as images of images, have the capacity at least to indicate a right direction. And this appears, at the level of the theorizing of Plato’s own process, to be an important thing for him to convey, since he positions these artistic practices strategically on the way to the Forms. While at this point in the progression the analogy to sketching or painting is not highlighted as a particular mode or method, it is later on, when Socrates declares that they would get the best view (κάλλιστα αὐτὰ κατιδεῖν) if they take “another longer road” (cf. ἄλλη μακροτέρα περίοδος, 504b2, cf. 504c9 vs. 506c7–9), which he explains would furnish a “full account” (τελεωτάτην ἀπεργασίαν), as opposed to the sketch or outline (ὑπογραφήν) that they have managed thus far of (504d6–8).39 What this full account would consist in appears to involve dialectic; although it is not directly identified as such at this stage, the subsequent elenchus suggests as much. Toward the end of book 6 – that is, just after Socrates offers the analogies of the sun and the line to indicate upward movement and just before the cave narrative – he uses the image of the line to divide the visible and intelligible realms. The visible realm contains things in the world and their images; in the intelligible realm, some investigative procedures depend on hypotheses arrived at by taking things imitated before (i.e., things in the world) as images (τοῖς τότε μιμειθείσιν ὡς εἰκόσιν, 510b4), while more advanced ones “proceed from a hypothesis and, without images, make their way from the Forms themselves” (ἐξ ὑποθέσεως ἰοῦσα καὶ ἄνευ τῶν περὶ ἐκεῖνο εἰκόνων αὐτοῖς εἴδεσι δι’ αὐτῶν τὴν μέθοδον ποιουμένη, 510b7–9).40 In the lower realm the soul, Socrates says, cannot “travel up to the first principle” (οὐκ ἐπ’ ἀρχὴν ἰοῦσαν) nor “step outside of its hypotheses” (οὐ δυναμένην τῶν ὑποθέσεων ἀνωτέρω ἐκβαίνειν) without 39

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Cf. Socrates’ reference to “another longer and fuller road” (ἄλλη . . . μακρότερα καὶ πλείων ὁδός, 435d2–3) when the interlocutors are approaching the question of the parts of the soul. On paths imagery in the Phaedrus, see further in ch. 4.4. Elsewhere in Plato it does seem to be the case that one can imitate (μιμούμενος, μιμεῖσθαι) rhetorical exempla and argumentative strategies (respectively, Phdr. 264e5–6 and Phd. 105b5-6, Tht. 148d4–5, Phl. 13d3, Alcib. I 108b5; Hipparch. 231a2–3, Hp. Mai. 287a3–4). Such instances may gesture toward a kind of mimetic theorizing, although they often come close to sounding like encouragements to behavioral modeling (cf. Euthd. 303e7–8, Prt. 348a3–4, Rep. 539b4–5, c6–7). The distinction matters for my larger purposes, since later theorist-critics use the language of mimesis to indicate imitation within the art form or technical idiom, primarily to encourage the emulation of rhetorical techniques. On behavioral modeling, see further in ch. 4.3.

1. Mimesis and the course of likeness

using images (511a5–7). And even at the more advanced level the hypotheses not dependent on images are still themselves only “stepping stones and forays” (οἶον ἐπιβάσεις τε καὶ ὁρμάς, 511b6 cf. 506e1–3) to the first principle and the Forms. In this account, then, the images fulfill a need, as they do very prominently for Socrates at this stage in the argument. In the extended metaphor of the cave, Socrates describes the path out of the shadow world and upward to the light as “rough and steep” (διὰ τραχείας τῆς ἀναβάσεως καὶ ἀνάντους, 515e6–7), a trek directly parallel to the hard upward route of dialectic (cf. 435d, 504b). Socrates draws this connection explicitly soon after when, in reference to the cave analogy (which he now also identifies as a simile) he says, “Now, Glaucon, this simile as a whole (ταύτην . . . τὴν εἰκόνα . . . ἅπασαν) must be fitted together (προσαπτέον) with what we said before” – meaning analogies generated by the images of the sun and the line. He explains that the visible world is the cave and the “upward path and view of the things above” (τὴν δὲ ἄνω ἀνάβασιν καὶ θέαν τῶν ἄνω) should be analogized to (lit. “set against”) “the place of thought and the upward path of the soul” (εἰς τὸν νοητὸν τόπον τῆς ψυχῆς ἀνοδοντιθείς) (517a8–b6). Even if, as he also demurs, “God only knows whether [the image] is true” (θεὸς δέ που οἶδεν εἰ ἀληθὴς οὖσα τυγχάνει, 517b6–7), this is how he sees it. And he suggests that what he sees is secured by the good, which gives birth to light and its source in the visible realm (ἔν τε ὁρατῷ φῶς καὶ τὸν τούτου κύριον τεκοῦσα) and to truth and knowledge in the intelligible realm (517b1–c4). A bit later in the discussion Socrates describes the approach to the Forms as reaching “the end of the intelligible” (τῷ τοῦ νοητοῦ τέλει). He then asks Glaucon, “Don’t you call this the path of dialectic?” (οὐ διαλεκτικὴν ταύτην τὴν πορείαν καλεῖς;) and immediately turns once again to the upward journey (ἐπάνοδος) out of the cave as moving from the visible realm to “divine images” (φαντάσματα θεῖα) (532a5–d1). In response to this lofty excursion Glaucon requests that they finally pursue “the argument itself” (lit. “song,” αὐτὸν δὴ τὸν νόμον ἴωμεν) – namely, the domain of dialectic – as if he were weary of all the analogizing (532d6). He sustains Socrates’ metaphor nevertheless, inquiring what forms dialetic takes and which roads (κατὰ ποῖα δὴ εἴδη διέστηκεν, καὶ τίνες αὖ ὁδοί;), as well as optimistically declaring that such roads will lead to a “rest stop” (ὥσπερ ὁδοῦ ἀνάπαυλα) and the end of the journey (τέλος τῆς πορείας, 532e1–3).41 Socrates replies that in fact Glaucon will not be able to follow him further 41

Cf. Laws 625b3, 653d2 for two more practical senses of anapaula (respectively, a literal resting place on the long walk that the interlocutors take in the course of the dialogue, and the rest from labors that festivals provide). See ch. 6.2a for Demetrius’ use of the “rest-stop” image.

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at this stage, since he (Glaucon) will be looking upon not the image (εἰκόνα) but the truth itself (533a1–3). That is, Socrates’ figurative signposting will give way at journey’s end to this direct viewing; and yet – what is most important for my focus – without the images, the path could not be pursued at all.42 Only dialectic takes this route (ἡ διαλεκτικὴ μέθοδος μόνη ταύτῃ πορεύεται, 533c8–9, cf. 533a10–b2), so that when “the eye of the soul is really buried in a sort of barbaric bog” (τῷ ὄντι ἐν βορβόρῳ βαρβαρικῷ τινι τὸ τῆς ψυχὴς ὄμμα κατορωρυγμένον), dialectic gently pulls it out and upward (533d1–3). Something very striking emerges in these passages: even if Socrates eventually confirms that the “upward path” is forged by dialectic, he can only indicate the kind of way it is by means of analogies (e.g., the path out of the cave). And even if we find out, when Glaucon asks for the “argument itself,” that this involves other techniques of determining similarities and differences such as collection and division, these also work by determining likenesses and seem inextricably bound up with metaphorical correspondences. Thus while dialectic may pull the soul’s eye out of the bog, the metaphor itself shows the way (i.e., out of the “mud” of the sensory world and “upward” toward the Forms). And indeed at this point Socrates seems impatient with Glaucon’s request for setting forth exactly what dialectic consists in, offering only summary examples of the relations he has been emphasizing between the sensible and intelligible worlds. But in fact his summary further confirms our sense of how closely he associates dialectic and metaphorical processes: as intellect is to opinion, Socrates says, so is knowledge to belief and thought to image (διάνοιαν πρὸς εἰκασίαν), a process he refers to as “analogy and division” (ἀναλογίαν καὶ διάρεσιν) (534a4–6). While there is no question that such proportions set up imagemaking as the inferior activity, the one mired in the world, Socrates states bluntly not long before this that it is necessary to forming hypotheses. And not only this: here he directly conjoins analogy with division, establishing the processes as complementary and mutually supporting. Thus seeing by means of like images is analogous to but not the same as looking on the Forms, in that the latter does not involve the actual seeing of things in the world but still can be approached at least initially by means of images. The most important point for our purposes is that Socrates both argues for and demonstrates that figuration and dialectic together forge a path to the intelligible realm. From this prospect we can better appreciate 42

Cf. also Tim. 40d2–3 for the impossibility of communicating the gods’ movements without “imitations through sight” (δι’ ὄψεως τούτων αὖ τῶν μιμημάτων) and Tim. 47b–c for sight leading to imitating divine movements.

1. Mimesis and the course of likeness

the tenor of Derrida’s contention that Plato’s metaphysics depends on metaphor, since this is precisely what Socrates incrementally reveals. The final step comes at the end journey, however, when one drops all aids and turns to the Forms. This is where, for Plato at any rate, mimesis and metaphor – indeed, sign systems themselves – have no purchase, since there is nothing like the Forms.

b. Pursuit and the net of words The Sophist introduces terms and distinctions that place it in useful relation to other more influential dialogues, especially the Republic and Phaedrus. In fact, some of its central imagery dovetails so closely with that of Republic 10 that one could argue that it serves as a supplement to the preceding discussion, insofar as the next step in a broader argument would have to take on the conflict between treatments of mimesis, and painting in particular, in earlier books and their critique in book 10. Although this is beyond the scope of my argument here, a consideration of analogizing in the Sophist sustains a focus on the path of dialectic while taking some account of this critique. As in the Republic, the Sophist both addresses likeness-making and itself uses analogies and metaphors of movement and pursuit to advance toward the core philosophical puzzle of the dialogue (whether something false can exist). Further, the dynamics of the discussion between Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger (a Parmenides-like figure) about sophistic image-making afford a stunning example of the imbricated quality of Plato’s treatment of mimesis and likeness, as well as underscoring the pursuit of the truth as movement, in this case chasing down and entrapping a “beast” (i.e., the sophist). As at other crucial strategic points addressing the likenesses that constitute Platonic metaphysics, the Platonic interlocutor introduces metaphors and analogies as aids to understanding and thereby advancing the argument, while also depicting this process by means of metaphors (again, usually involving matchmaking as pursuing a path, i.e., as advancing in argument). Early on in the dialogue, the Stranger settles with Theaetetus on a way into the definition of a sophist, suggesting that they first take an easier way in (μέθοδον), since “the sophist’s kind is difficult and hard to catch for those leading the hunt” (χάλεπον καὶ δυσθήρευτον ἡγησαμένοις εἶναι τὸ τοῦ σοφιστοῦ γένος). “Unless,” he adds, “you can name a smoother path somewhere” (εἰ μὴ σύ ποθεν εὐπετεστέραν ἔχεις εἱπεῖν ἄλλην ὁδόν) (Soph. 218d3–6). The Stranger then offers the example (παράδειγμα) of an angler (ἀσπαλιευτής) as a simpler kind to determine and they proceed to define

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his craft knowledge (technē) (218d–19a). An elenchus follows that demonstrates to which class of hunting the angler belongs, a discussion that serves not only to secure this definition but also to introduce hunting itself – the topic that will become the dominant trope of pursuit in the dialogue. Leading up to the central discussion, the Stranger seeks a clearer example (παράδειγμα) of what the sophist is claiming about his knowledge. He introduces the possibility of someone who could “make” (cf. ποιεἰν . . . ποιήσειν, 233d9–233e8) everything, including the interlocutors themselves as well as plants and animals. Theaetetus asks what sort of making he is talking about (τίνα δὴ λέγων τὴν ποίησιν), noting that it cannot just be that of a gardener (γεωργόν) (234a1–2).43 The Stranger elaborates with a cosmic inclusiveness involving a fast and mercenary type of making and Theaetetus responds scornfully that it sounds like a child’s game (παιδιὰν . . . τινά). The Stranger agrees that it does sound like a game, but then asks Theaetetus if he knows of a form of play (παιδιᾶς . . . εἶδος) that takes more skill or is more enjoyable (τεχνικώτερον ἢ καὶ χαριέστερον) than “the mimetic” (τὸ μιμετικόν) (234a3–b2). Thus we have mimesis introduced as quick and dirty, playful manufacturing, itself presented as an example for better understanding what the sophists do. This example includes in turn its own examples of likeness makers, starting with those who by means of the craft of drawing/painting (τῇ γραφικῇ τέχνῃ) may trick stupid children into thinking that the images are real things if they are shown from far off (πόρρωθεν) (234b5–10). So also with words, continues the Stranger: when the young stand even farther away from the truth of matters, it is possible to enchant (γοητεύειν) their ears by making a display of verbal images (εἴδωλα λεγόμενα) (234c2–7).44 Here the analogy is pointedly synaesthetic, combining modes of representation, while the sophist is like a tricky master of arts who achieves his effects from far off. When over time the sophist’s hearers have matured, however, they draw in closer (προσπίπτοντας ἐγγύθεν) and are forced by experience to grasp things as they are (ἐφάπτεσθαι τῶν ὄντων), the moving in and up-close handling itself compelling them to revise their understanding (234d2–6). Theaetetus estimates that he is still standing far away from the real (οἶμαι δὲ καὶ ἐμὲ τῶν ἔτι πόρρωθεν ἀφεστηκότων εἶναι, 234e3–4). The Stranger also represents this movement – here the process of determining where in the work of image-making (τὴν εἰδοποιικήν) the 43

44

As ch. 4 demonstrates, the metaphor of the gardener is central to the Phaedrus’ conception of a good kind of persuasion. Again, the language closely echoes that in Republic 10 (598b6–d5); see Tecusan 1992; Halliwell 2002: 62–66.

1. Mimesis and the course of likeness

sophist operates – as the pursuit of a beast into its trap (235b10–c7). This is a net-like contraption made of words (ἐν ἀμφιβληστρικῷ τινι τῶν ἐν τοῖς λόγοις . . . ὀργάνων, 235b1–2), which works by definition and division. Even if, the Stranger says, the sophist “slips off somewhere into the corners” of the craft of imitation (κατὰ μέρη τῆς μιμητικῆς δύηται πῇ), they will pursue and trap him there (cf. συνακολουθεῖν, ληφθῇ) (235c3–4). This brings the interlocutors to the difference between likeness-making (τὴν εἰκαστικήν, 235d6) and appearance-making (φανταστικήν, 236c4). Theaetetus follows this as best he can, and the Stranger remarks on just how very difficult it is to find the right way to talk about appearance and seeming (236d9–237a1). He then quotes Parmenides as warning that one should not suppose that what is not can be, but rather “in searching keep thought far away from this path” (ἀλλὰ σύ τῆσδ’ ἀφ’ ὁδοῦ διζήμενος εἶργε νόημα, 237a9, repeated at 258d6). Theaetetus requests of the Stranger that he consider what language to use (τὸν δὲ λόγον), follow it, and lead him also down that path (κἀμὲ κατὰ ταύτην τὴν ὁδὸν ἄγε) (237b4–6; cf. 237b5– 6, 242b7–8). This is argument as pursuit, as searching along a path (or avoiding one), by means of the central dialectical techniques mentioned in the discussion of the Republic: collection and division. While this way of progressing in argument is very prominently foregrounded in the dialogue as a whole, for our purposes the most relevant aspects of it are those that depend on metaphor and analogizing. These include differentiating between types of image-making, favoring true likenesses, worrying over whether language can properly express appearance and falsehood without contradiction, and thereby edging toward a true account. The metaphors of pursuing a path or moving ahead, as well as hunting and chasing, are sustained throughout the dialogue, such that, for instance, when the Stranger claims that by their careful pursuit they may finally “tie up” (ἐνδήσωμεν) the sophist, Theaetetus complains about how hard he is to hunt (δυσθήρευτον) and about the “roadblocks” (προβλημάτων, following White’s translation45) that he throws in their way when they try to get close (cf. ἐπ’ αὐτὸν ἀφικέσθαι) (261a6–9). The Stranger responds that anyone who is able to move forward, even if little by little, should take heart (θαρρεῖν . . . χρὴ τὸν καὶ σμικρόν τι δυνάμενον εἰς τὸ πρόσθεν ἀεὶ προϊέναι, 261b5-6). In the end, the Stranger proposes that they “bind” (συνδήσομεν) the sophist by definition: his is an imitation of an insincere and unknowing kind that belongs

45

White 1993 ad loc.

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to image- and appearance-making. And that’s the absolute truth (τἀληθέστατα) (268c8–d5). In this way Plato makes use of and also analyzes the step-by-step pursuit of truth by means of likenesses – here analogies, metaphors, and mimesis. Even gods make likenesses (i.e., in nature: shadows, reflections, Soph. 266b–c; Rep. 532b–c); and the Stranger’s own interweaving (itself a dominant metaphor in the dialogue for how language works) of metaphor and mimesis into his argument indicates a means of likening that straddles topic and practice. Again, while Plato never directly addresses theories of metaphor, as Aristotle does in the Rhetoric and Poetics, he repeatedly addresses mimesis and models likeness-making more generally, at key moments envisioning this as movement along a path or as pursuit.46 And when Plato depicts Socrates or others offering figures for his figures, he usually draws upon the visual field, using either natural examples (e.g., images in water) or the visual arts.47 He shares his reliance on painting in particular with Aristotle; for both the work of mimesis and metaphor involves a kind of seeing, the visualization that vivid matches achieve.48 However that may be, when Socrates engages in what we can recognize as mimetic strategies, including fictional and metaphorical paths, his commitment to such strategies is clearly limited, since even “neutral” uses of the language of likeness designate a practice lower down in the hierarchy of perception (cf. Phdr. 248d–e, Rep. 509–10) than direct interaction with the Forms and the intelligible realm. This use of emulating imagery may be necessary to bridge the gap between the realms (divine– human, visible–intelligible), but it can also be distracting (e.g., Rep. 510d– 511a) and most who use it do not know what they are talking about because they do not possess true knowledge. This is a very familiar and recurrent theme in the dialogues that deal with sophists, rhetoric, and/or education – not only in the Republic but also in the Gorgias, Protagoras, Phaedrus, and 46

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As Stanford notes (1936: 4) while flagging a discussion in the Theaetetus (180a) that mocks, by means of metaphor, the metaphors of the Heracliteans. Cf. McCall 1969: 11–18; Kirby 1997: 528–31. Elsewhere in Plato it does seem to be the case that one can imitate (μιμούμενος, μιμεῖσθαι) rhetorical exempla and argumentative strategies (respectively, Phdr. 264e5–6 and Phd. 105b5–6, Tht. 148d4–5, Phl. 13d3, Alcib. I 108b5; Hippar 231a2–3, Hp. Mai. 287a3–4). This at the least points to emulation within a given idiom, although the latter often comes close to sounding like an encouragement to behavioral modeling (cf. Euthd. 303e7–8, Prt. 348a3–4, Rep. 539b4–5, c6–7). The distinction matters for my larger purposes, since later theorist-critics do use the language of mimesis to indicate imitation within the art form or technical idiom, primarily to encourage the emulation of rhetorical techniques. On behavioral modeling, see further in ch. 4.3. Cf. again Longinus’ conception of phantasiai (De subl. 15).

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Symposium. I point to it here in order to underscore once again the frequency with which this knowledge involves advancing, as on a path, looking at the right things (as a good painter does), and taking one’s analogizing and mimetic cues from them. Just because most painters – not to mention poets and sophists – do not do this does not mean that one cannot attempt to gaze in the right way and thereby fashion images that lead in the right direction. Again, Plato and Aristotle approach the powers and puzzles of likeness from different directions and with different aims. Plato’s modeling of the path of likeness initiates a process that has thrilled and puzzled his readers since antiquity, since he is famously suspicious of mimesis as both emulation and simulation. Further, his ideas about and uses of likeness point the way toward a metaphysics that appears to have little engagement with theories of literary expression and style in writing – and thus with the development of ancient literary critical or theoretical ideas. And yet Plato also fashions a landscape for mimetic theorizing, most fully set forth in the Republic and Phaedrus, that turns out to be very influential among theorists and critics (again, on the Phaedrus see further in Chapter 4 as well as 6 and 7). What Plato does not do, however, is theorize explicitly about the spaces and movements of metaphor or style, which I take to be a necessary extension of his ideas about likeness. For this we must turn to Aristotle.

2. Aristotle and others on the spaces of metaphor It may well be that Plato’s treatment of analogies as steps forward on a path turns a poetic convention to novel use, since from early on Greek literature evidences awareness of metaphor both as visualizing and as movement. As I discuss in more detail in chapter 2, this can be witnessed most prominently in Pindar’s poetry. He uses path imagery usually to distinguish his poetic endeavors, as with his warning against the “worn-out Homeric highway” (Ὁμήρου [δὲ μὴ τρι]πτὸν κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν | ἰόντες, Pai. fr. 52h.10). Floral and other rich images often carry a sense of metaphor’s capacity for visualization, as when Pindar describes the work of the Muse as an elaborate, bedewed thing made of gold, ivory, and the “ocean’s lily flower” (i.e., coral, Μοῖσά τοι | κολλᾷ χρυσὸν ἔν τε λευκὸν ἐλέφανθ' ἁμᾶ | καὶ λείριον ἄνθεμον ποντίας | ὑφελοῖσ' ἐέρσας, N. 7.77–79). Ancient and some modern theorists emphasize the extent to which metaphor in its operation creates a sense of things at a distance being brought near – a movement that works within what Gérard Genette calls

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the “inner space of language.”49 In the Poetics and to a lesser extent in the Rhetoric Aristotle focuses on the capacity of metaphor to do what its name suggests, to “carry over” (metapherein) a term by a kind of natural conveyance to another setting in which it does not strictly belong (μεταφορὰ δέ ἐστιν ὀνόματος ἀλλοτρίου ἐπιφορά, Po. 1457b6–7).50 The Rhetoric emphasizes instead what looks like something almost opposite to this: the capacity of good (i.e., close-in but not too familiar) metaphors to render things vividly “before the eyes” (πρὸ ὀμμάτων, Rhet. 1410b33–35, 1411a24–35, 1411b22–25, etc.).51 Thus metaphor effectively pulls terms (i.e., vehicles) into close range while preserving a sense of their remoteness, the same combination of effects that I mention at the outset of this chapter. Among later theorists Cicero makes the most of this combination when in De Oratore Crassus’ discussion of metaphor leads him to conjoin an emphasis on traversing distances with metaphor’s capacities for visualization. He first notes that metaphors and “foreign” terms give everyone more pleasure than the proper names for things (omnes translatis et alienis magis delectentur quam verbis propriis et suis, 3.159). And he hypothesizes that it is a particular mark of natural brilliance (ingenium52) to reach for a metaphor when a common term is at hand – or, as he puts it, “to leap over things lying at one’s feet and take up other things at a far remove” (transilire ante pedes posita et alia longe repetita sumere). This leads him to claim that pleasure comes most of all because metaphors appeal to the senses, and especially to sight, which is the sharpest sense (maxime oculorum, qui est sensus acerrimus) (3.160). In fact, Crassus says, visualizing metaphors “effectively place in the soul’s view” (paene ponunt in conspectu animi) things that we are not able to perceive and see (quae cernere et videre 49

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Genette 1966. See Ricoeur 1978a: 145. This awareness even seems present in Homer, where the use of similes very clearly and concertedly imports other spaces or worlds. De Certeau (1984: 115) comments on the functional similarities of story patterns and metaphorae (i.e., public transportation) in modern Athens: “[N]arrative structures have the status of spatial syntaxes.” Cf. also Genette’s idea that in Proust metonymies initiate an “enchaining” forward movement (enchaînement, Genette 1973: 63). Lloyd 1996 discusses Aristotle’s use of this and other metaphors in relation to his own exegetical style; see further below in section 3. The notion of “carrying over” has seemed to many modern scholars to be a less than satisfying account of the workings of metaphor, since they tend to view it as holding both the literal and figurative meanings in suspension. See, e.g., Brooke-Rose 1958 and many of the articles in Sacks (ed.) 1978, in contrast to Ricoeur (1978a, 1978b); also Moran 1989, who rightly emphasizes the visualizing capacity of metaphor, as well as its ancient origins (89 n. 3); Foeglin 1988, 1994; Kirby 1997 (with bibliography); and the volume edited by Boys-Stones (2003). Cf. Rhet. 1412a11–13, regarding the capacity to see likeness in things “very far apart” (τὸ ὅμοιον καὶ ἐν πολὺ διέχουσι θεωρεῖν εὐστόχου). Cf. Arist. Poet. 1459a5–8 and the discussion in the introduction above.

2. The spaces of metaphor

non possumus) (3.161). This emphasis on the special capacities of sight follows not only Aristotle’s metaphor of bringing things before the eyes but also Plato’s emphasis on it as the most perspicuous of our senses.53 Further, the intimation of travel across distances that characterizes Aristotle’s conception of metaphor as well as those of theorists after him also colors how he and they conceive of style. In general Aristotle treats style as ornamental in nature, an add-on that is all performance effect (φαντασία) aimed at the audience, but powerful and necessary (Rhet. 1404a5–12). Style, and secondarily delivery, shows its special powers from far off, as it were; in large public forums for poetry and oratory, those who make the most striking, artistic use of stylistic elements win prizes and sway their audiences (Rhet. 1403b31–1404a1, 1404a16–19).54 Again, effective style is also “foreign” (ξένην), since people and things from far away inspire wonder, and this wonder gives pleasure (Rhet. 1404b8–11): ὥσπερ γὰρ πρὸς τοὺς ξένους οἱ ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρὸς τοὺς πολίτας, τὸ αὐτὸ πάσχουσιν καὶ πρὸς τὴν λέξιν· διὸ δεῖ ποιεῖν ξένην τὴν διάλεκτον· θαυμασταὶ γὰρ τῶν ἀπόντων εἰσίν, ἡδὺ δὲ τὸ θαυμαστόν ἐστιν. For humans experience the same in relation to strangers and fellow citizens as they do in relation to style. Thus it is necessary to make the discourse strange; for styles from far off are wondrous, and the wondrous is pleasant.

Directly after this claim, Aristotle notes that poetry has recourse to many more modes that can achieve such distancing (e.g., meter and rhythm), while prose has relatively few (1404b12–14). He also notes that the speech must suit the speaker, with elevated language being more suited to lofty types (1404b15–18). Somewhat curiously, he next introduces the point that such effects should be concealed (δεῖ λανθάνειν ποιούντας, 1404b18), so that the speech not appear artificial. He then expands on his point about poetry’s abundant resources, explaining that while poetry may have recourse to foreign words and other elaborate usage, literal and proper words and metaphor alone are most effective in prose (τὸ δὲ κύριον καὶ τὸ οἰκεῖον καὶ μεταφορὰ μόνα χρήσιμα, 1404b31–32), since everyone uses plain terms and metaphor. He sums up the necessary elements as follows: “Should someone compose well, [the style] will have a foreign air, possibly escape detection, and be clear” (ἅν εὖ ποιῇ τις, ἔσται τε ξενικὸν καὶ λανθάνειν ἐνδέξεται καὶ σαφηνιεῖ, 1404b35–36). 53 54

See the introductory section above, section 3 below, and further in ch. 4.3a. Cf. the evocative cadence of Roland Barthes, “Style is a distance, a difference” (1971: 6).

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This leads Aristotle into a discussion of metaphor more generally. Pointing out that he has laid out the various types in the Poetics, he finally makes a general claim that clinches the connection between the pleasures of metaphor and distancing effects. “Metaphor above all,” he says, “affords clarity and sweetness and strangeness” (καὶ τὸ σαφὲς καὶ ἡδὺ καὶ ξενικὸν ἔχει μάλιστα ἡ μεταφορά, 1405a8–9). He emphasizes that metaphors must be appropriate, which will come from attention to analogy (ἔσται τοῦτο ἐκ τοῦ ἀνάλογον); otherwise they will appear inappropriate (ἀπρεπές), because it is when the terms of comparison (i.e., tenor and vehicle) are placed next to one another that they seem most opposite (τὸ παρ’ ἀλλῆλα τὰ ἐναντία μάλιστα φαίνεσθαι, 1405a11–13). He then poses an analogical puzzle as a metaphor for this process: “But it is necessary to consider, as a red cloak is fitting for a young man, what is for an old one, for the same clothing does not suit both” (ἀλλὰ δεῖ σκοπεῖν, ὡς νέῳ φοινικίς, οὕτω γέροντι τί, οὐ γὰρ ἡ αὐτὴ πρέπει ἐσθής, 1405a13–14). The analogy to draw from the analogy posed is that style and metaphor are cloaks or drapery for plain language, an idea that other theorists express more directly.55 The passage as a whole suggests that metaphor, while exciting and thus desirable, must be carefully cloaked in order to escape detection as the stranger it is. When the tenor (i.e., the metaphorical term) is drawn close by the act of comparison, its proximity to the vehicle (i.e., the proper term) and to the surrounding discourse should be striking – but it may also raise alarms. In the case of Aristotle’s analogy, for instance, we could ask why, in the course of a relatively abstract discussion about style, we are suddenly talking about a young man’s red cloak. And, bemused by the turn to clothing, we may find ourselves carrying this analogy further than the text explicitly indicates, extrapolating an idea of style as foreign dress and metaphor as its special fabric. This dovetails with the sense of metaphor as a kind of import–export operation in which its usage is envisioned as travel, as movement across or to distant spaces. As such it also opens out onto adjacent concerns that traveling raises, such as the perils of the road or visitors who may not behave appropriately. Although Aristotle recognizes in metaphor a powerful tool, he warns of its dangers, initiating another chain of metaphors about metaphor in the critical tradition. Since the figure directly conjoins two entities without the more decorous interstice of “like” or “as,” if metaphors come from “too far away” (ἂν πόρρωθεν) the effects can be 55

E.g., Isoc. 5.25–27; cf. Pl. Gorg. 465b4–5. Later theorists also make use of the analogy (e.g., Cic. Orat. 78–79; DH Dem. 18.35–41, Isoc. 12.22, 13.4–7, 15.15; Anaxim. Ars rhet. proem 2.2).

2. The spaces of metaphor

murky and overly poeticizing (ἀσαφεῖς δέ; ποιητικῶς γὰρ ἄγαν) (Rhet. 1406b5–11; cf. 1404a35–37). This occurs, presumably, because the very strangeness of the style may impede the recognition of what is being said.56 Demetrius, whose treatise shows clear Peripatetic influences, echoes Aristotle directly in discussing the use of metaphor. He recognizes the pleasure that metaphors afford but warns against those that are too dense or that are “imported from too far away” (πόρρωθεν μετενηνεγμέναις, De eloc. 78). This importation can make for some hard traveling: Demetrius also repeatedly uses the language of danger and safety (kindunōdēs, asphalēs) to characterize the proper handling of metaphor, since the sheer proximity of tenor and vehicle can be jarring (De eloc. 78–85).57 He also remarks, however, that common usage (συνήθεια) expresses almost everything in metaphorical terms, but these are hardly noticed on account of being “safely” carried over (διὰ τὸ ἀσφαλῶς μεταφέρειν, 86).

a. Ladies on the move The metaphors that Aristotle and other theorists sustain to capture the nature of metaphor and style – travel to foreign lands, visitors entering the house, and danger and modesty – develop Aristotle’s sense of metaphor as movement to encompass an embodied passage through lands. Very interesting for this discussion, this potentially dangerous travel also develops feminine trappings in the later writers, perhaps as yet one more series of extrapolations from Aristotle’s use of gendered and domesticating language to designate proper usage (e.g., “at home,” oikeion; “master,” kurion) versus the foreign qualities of metaphor and good style. The feminizing of this journey through space may have been further catalyzed by the simple gender of the nouns (metaphora, translatio), but is also likely the result of conceiving of style at its more decorative (i.e., metaphorical) as vaguely emasculating because of its capacity to charm. Thus Cicero conceives of style (eloquentia) as a modest virgin (virginem) who must be kept chastely (caste) within the house of her custodians (domi repudiemus tueamurque eam saeptam liberali custodia) like a 56

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Cf. Aristotle’s claim that when orators use poetic language, they take ornament as substance; Alcidamas, for instance, uses epithets “not as seasoning but as a proper dish” (οὐ γὰρ ἡδύσματι χρῆται ἀλλ’ ὡς ἐδέσματι, Rhet. 1406a18–19); cf. DH Dem. 15. Demetrius uses here an example from Demosthenes’ most celebrated speech: “the orator Python was then a rushing torrent against you” (τότε τῷ Πύθωνι τῷ ῥήτορι ῥέοντι καθ’ ὑμῶν, De eloc. 80, quoting De cor. 136). Plato, by Demetrius’ measure, is also not sufficiently cautious, since he uses metaphors more than similes, the expanded forms of which Demetrius argues are less daring (80).

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fetching maiden beset by suitors (Brut. 330).58 For Dionysius it is Attic style in particular that is the chaste wife (ἐλευθέρα καὶ σώφρων γαμετή, Anc. orat. 1), an image that echoes Cicero’s characterization of this style in the Orator as slender and restrained. These theorists treat metaphor as in similar need of policing and restraint. According to the testimony of Philodemus, Aristotle’s student Theophrastus expressed metaphor’s movement and the distance from which it comes by extending the imagery of travel and perhaps also its dangers. Metaphor is a visitor, a (feminine) presence that “resembles in fact some foreigner as if entering a house” (οἷαν προσήκει δή τιν' ἀλλοτρίαν, ὥσπερ οἰκίαν εἰσίουσαν).59 In the third book of Cicero’s De Oratore Crassus takes this sense of the importuning female visitor even further, envisioning a kind of verbal escort in the form of “so to speak” (ut ita dicam) and the like. “In fact,” Crassus explains, “metaphor ought to be modest, as seeming to be led into another’s place, rather than having burst in; and seeming to have come upon invitation, not by force” (etenim verecunda debet esse translatio, ut deducta esse in alienum locum, non inrupisse, atque ut precario, non vi, venisse videatur) (De orat. 3.165). As Cicero, who often professed to follow Theophrastus in literary theoretical matters, elaborates in a letter, a metaphorical phrase (tralatio) can remain decent (verecunda) as long as its excursions (migrationes) into other territories are well policed (e.g., by Theophrastus, quo modo Theophrasto placet) (Ad fam. 16.17.1). This gendered scheme marks the ways in which ancient literary theorists conceptualize metaphor and stylistic distinctions so often that it verges on convention. That these theorists seek effectively to domesticate this feminine setting – as in an extrapolated rite of passage they envision the female “initiate” traversing alien spaces – only speaks further to the challenges to masculine mastery and order that its charms present.

b. Floral thinking In contrast to this inclination to view metaphor as mobile, feminine, and thus to be controlled, even shut up indoors, poets and theorists also frequently conceive of the “place” of ancient metaphor as lying at a decorative remove: in meadows or gardens with beautiful features that 58

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As ch. 7.3a discusses, Cicero uses similar imagery to capture the “philosophical” style, especially that of Plato, envisioning it as soft and retiring (cf. Orat. 63–64). Philod. De rhet. 4 (= test. Theophr. 689A Fortenbaugh); cf. also Arist. Rhet. 1405a6–b11; Demetr. De eloc. 78–80; Cic. Ad fam. 16.17.1 [= test. Theophr. 689B F]; Cic. Orat. 92. See Stanford 1936: 6–12. For the history of terminology and types of figures, see Innes 2003.

2. The spaces of metaphor

entice the eye. Such may be the far-reaching ramifications of the locus amoenus, with its softening pleasures and dangers, since this topos gives rise to the most variegated proliferation of stylistic tropes and as such itself functions as the space of metaphor.60 As noted, Pindar’s imagery suggests that metaphor is itself a “flower,” an ornamental, fertile blossoming that the poet gathers from meadows and gardens for his creative efforts (P. O. 6.104–05, O. 9.48–49). This notion of metaphor as a poetic flowering is likely very old, having its roots in fertility rituals, choral poetry, and young girls’ rites of passage.61 In post-classical usage, as prose stylists sought to distinguish modes as elaborate versus plain, floral imagery comes to indicate not only metaphors themselves but also stylistic categories. Retracing the coordinates of this space apart, theorists such as Demetrius and Dionysius characterize a flowering and fluid style as if it were culled directly from the pleasurable, fertile spaces of Sappho’s own poetry.62 Demetrius considers Sappho the avatar of a charming mode that centers on eros and gardens full of floral and feminine delights (De eloc. 132, cf. passim 133–73), while Dionysius singles out Sappho, Euripides, and Isocrates as representatives of this style, which he characterizes as smooth, soft, and “maiden-faced” (παρθενωπά, De comp. verb. 23.16–17). This floral, feminine mode is not without its weaknesses and thus its dangers, of course. Elsewhere Dionysius criticizes Isocrates for his excessive deployment of figures, an inclination of those wishing to “enflower” (ἀνθίσαι, Isoc. 13) their styles. In the shaping of literary theoretical discourse, then, style and metaphor are associated with visual and spatial effects and come to be gendered as feminine, a later development that may nevertheless be influenced by early poetic depictions of male actors viewing (and often supervising) female movement in significant settings.63 Further, if such feminine spaces provide the ornaments or “flowers” for the (predominantly masculine) crafting of powerful expression, then those settings that offer up rural riches as metaphors for stylistic distinctions would have particularly recommended themselves to ancient literary theorists. In making use of such resources, these theorists are, of course, reproducing and reordering early poetic 60 61

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On the “space of metaphor” in the Phaedrus, see further in ch. 4.3. See Harriott 1969: 127–29; on girls’ rites of passage, see Calame 1999: 165–70, also 2007, and further in chs. 2.1 and 3.1c. Scarry (1997) argues that flowers are the perfect object of the aestheticizing imagination; see further in ch. 2.3b and the Epilogue. On the imagery, see further in chs. 6.4 and 7.2. Cf. Orat. 96, where Cicero identifies a middle style as “flowery” (florens); also Quint. 12.10.58. See esp. Pindar’s imagery and the discussion in ch. 2.2–3. Calypso’s cave also fits this pattern. On the mimetic power of such “visual events,” see again Scarry 1999.

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performances that “cull” and deploy floral decorations, insofar as their programmatic gestures become the theorists’ stylistic tools.64 i. Modern florists. As I note at the outset of this chapter, modern theorists of metaphor have often viewed this later treatment of metaphor as reducing its reach and force to mere decoration, an elaboration on the literal and the true. Again, Aristotle comes closest among ancient thinkers to recognizing and attempting to theorize metaphor’s incredible capacity for visualization and revelation – that is, its power as a concept that works by means of resemblance and yet that is conventionally understood to turn on the difference between the literal and the figurative. Following not only Derrida but also Ricoeur and Ernst Cassirer, this dependence on metaphor as likeness has been critiqued and metaphor has been reconceived variously as a (and sometimes even the) fundamental structure of language that works not by similarity but rather difference.65 From this vantage point the generative capacity of metaphor’s very conceptualization – that is, the powerful movement of likeness (in antiquity) or difference (in the modern era) – always fosters further “travel,” further conveyance from vehicle to vehicle, as “flowers” may signal figures which signal female bodies which signal softness, charm, virginity . . . In an article entitled “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Elaine Scarry claims that there is something special about flowers that makes the analogy to poeticizing language so apt. While Scarry’s discussion does not, admittedly, focus on the nature of metaphor so much as on the workings of mimesis and the imagination, she articulates a process that underpins figuration. She argues that the image of the flower, unlike many other objects of the imagination, marks what she calls “[imagination’s] willful re-encumbering of itself, its anchoring of itself in the ground.” Following John Ashbery’s notion that “our ancestors” deployed floral imagery by way of offering the best, most grounded analogy to the pleasures of poetry, Scarry finds in the flower the perfect sensory object.66

64

65 66

Plato seems to recognize this when he depicts Protagoras arguing that Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides are sophists disguised as poets (Prt. 316d3–7). Cassirer 1953; Ricoeur 1978b. See also Moran 1989; Franke 2000. Scarry 1997: 90–93 (citing Ashbery’s “Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are,” 1985: 319–21); she adds here that flowers form the center of what she terms the “vegetative life” of Proust. See further in the Epilogue, section 1.

2. The spaces of metaphor

In “White Mythology” Derrida is very sensitive to the centrality of floral imagery to thinking about metaphor, both highlighting this fertile capacity and reiterating how it unfolds. He engages the ancient convention of conceiving metaphors as “flowers of rhetoric” by using it in one of his signifying frames: the discussion of metaphor begins with “flowers” and Anatole France’s The Garden of Epicurus (209–10), a central section is entitled “Flowers of Rhetoric: The Heliotrope” (245–57), and the essay ends (almost) with the image of a dried flower that is Proustian in effect (271). And as with the ancient theorists, if flowers, then gendering and sex: some of the opening quotations of the “Flowers of Rhetoric” section are from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, in which he treats Aristotle’s emphasis on grasping similarities as being about condensation in dreams (i.e., metaphor), giving the example of flowers for female virginity. Freud notes that the dreamer speaks of the flowers as a “center-piece,” and that she adds as if in passing, “there is a gap, a little space in the flowers.”67 Derrida follows these quotations by remarking, “Metaphor, then, is what is proper to man,” noting that Aristotle uses the term kurion to designate “proper” usage – or rather, in Derrida’s terms, “the propriety of a name in its dominant, master, capital sense.”68 Derrida’s flowers thus trace among other things the gendering of metaphor’s movements, its slipping away from and out of this (masculine) regime – the “inevitable detour,” a wayward mobilizing that is also “in complicity with what it endangers,” at least insofar as it operates as a “re-turn guided by the function of resemblance.”69 He considers the emphasis on similarity to be a central conceit of the ancient philosophical tradition that opposes metaphor to truth; and so he pursues the “wandering” metaphor as necessitating the inevitable mobility of signification itself, which disrupts this opposition between metaphor and truth by continuously proliferating meaning. Derrida also recognizes that this theory of metaphor as a potentially risky detour is itself implicated in the discourses of philosophers and other theorists. As he puts it at the end of his essay, the flower of/as metaphor “always bears its double within itself,” 67 68

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Freud, SE IV: 376; Derrida [1972] 1982: 246. Derrida [1972] 1982: 246–47 (fr. 294). Note that Derrida is translating and extrapolating precisely on the term kurion, which (as noted above) Aristotle uses to identify “proper” (i.e., literal) language: “Bien que la différence entre kurion et idion ne soit jamais thématiquement exposée, il semble que la première notion, plus fréquente dans la Poétique et dans la Rhétorique, désigne la propriété d’un nom utilisé dans son sens dominant, dans son maître sens, dans son sens capital. N’oublions pas que ce sens de souveraineté est aussi le sens tuteur de kurion.” See also Lloyd 1996: 207–11. Derrida [1972] 1982: 270. See also Harrison 1999.

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and so can be overcome, superseded, can “always become a dried flower in a book.” In fact, he says, “There is always, absent from every garden, a dried flower in a book.”70 This past and future flowering has obvious Proustian echoes, in particular the lime blossoms in the beginning of the second section of Combray, on which Proust’s narrator fixes his fascinated gaze. Their semiotic and affective density reveals how Proust’s floral aesthetics encapsulates this future-in-the-past movement as essential to metaphor. The narrator describes the dried flowers used in Aunt Léonie’s infusion with figurative curlicues that mimic the flowers themselves. They possess a whimsical trelliswork (capricieux treillage) in whose interlacings (dans les entrelacs duquel) the pale flowers opened (s’ouvraient les fleurs pales), as if a painter had arranged them (comme si un peintre les eût arrangées), posing them in the most ornamental way (les eût fait poser de la façon la plus ornamentale).71 As such they embody a staged artfulness, a combination of beaux-arts elaborations and the painter’s still-life technique whose ornamental qualities the narrator emulates to synaesthesic effect. And as with William Carlos Williams’ “Crimson Cyclamen” (cited in the Introduction to this book), Proust’s lime blossoms also confirm Scarry’s notion that flowers encourage a special “perceptual mimesis.” Like Williams’ cyclamen, they open up a chronotopic prospect, invoking the parkland spaces of their spring blossoming.72 They thus capture in themselves both other places and other times, the past of their own being – in Derrida’s terms, they are their own death, double, and supplement. They hint to the narrator of their flowering past in the park and its future, a space-time gone but reanimated and gone again, recalled in full and elaborating detail and yet an intricate memento of that absence. As Proust’s floral proliferation suggests, language cannot contain or control this “anthology,” as Derrida terms it, since it continuously generates the supplement that “endlessly displaces its closure, breaks its line, opens its circle.”73 From this perspective, whatever dangers Aristotle and his followers might identify in metaphor, their own language cannot reduce the poetic and oratorical effects that they analyze to pure explanation (whatever that would look like); rather, it generates further metaphors because that is the way linguistic signs work, by association and the enchaining of signifiers. Hence the final line of Derrida’s essay, which 70 71 72 73

Derrida [1972] 1982: 271: “Il y a toujours, absente de tout jardin, une fleur séchée dans un livre.” Proust [1922] 1987–89 (I.50), 2003 (Davis trans. 53). Scarry 1997; again, on the chronotope see Bakhtin 1981: ch. 3. Derrida [1972] 1982: 271.

3. Mimesis in/as nature’s fold

turns from this latest floral image to note that “heliotrope” is also the name for a precious stone. In its abrupt pivot to the lapidary and in its unprecedented invocation of names for things, this ultimate gesture effects a perverse jolt, as it paradoxically reaches out beyond the semiotic refrain to attach to that most thing-like of things: the stone. Startlingly, Williams prods a similar conjunction to assert his poetic program in “A Sort of A Song”: Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. – through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

Williams first dismantles the initial claim that the snake under his weed and the “writing . . . of words” have nothing to do with each other, using serpentine metaphors for verbal agility and then invoking metaphor baldly as itself the “reconciliation,” the hinge between snake and word.74 After a pair of succinct apostrophes, he offers his own special solution, another stone-flower: Saxifrage, “rock-breaker.” This is the same term that Cicero uses at the end of Crassus’ discussion of metaphor introduced at the beginning of this section, as an example of a “made word” (factum verbum, De oratore 3.167).75 And indeed, Williams does not just offer this word in some typically stark modernist style but also glosses it, as a triumphant shattering of natural bonds by the power of metaphor.

3. Mimesis in/as nature’s fold Which brings us back to nature. As the foregoing discussion indicates, not always but often, rural settings provide images (e.g., streams, meadows, plants, paths) that shape descriptions of the process by which one sees and 74 75

Williams [orig. 1941, collected 1950–51] 1986: 55 see Nemerov 1974: 33–35; Franke 2000: 142–43. As Mankin notes (2011, ad loc.), this is a very unusual term in Republican Latin, but by the first century ce it is used for the plant Adiantum, sometimes called Maidenhead. Williams’ final image seems sufficiently erotic as to suggest awareness of this.

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reproduces true similarities, suggesting that the rural detour is somehow necessary to it. Chapter 4 demonstrates in detail that this is true for Plato as well; and, again, the stroll into the countryside that frames the discussion in the Phaedrus is very influential among later theorists. Further, Aristotle’s sense that nature and its order undergird the movement of metaphor is central to Derrida’s critique of what Aristotle claims as the work of mimesis and figuration more generally. For Derrida, the notion that mimesis is nature’s double, that it constitutes “the fold of phusis” where metaphor does its work, itself generates a rich and riveting set of assumptions about (philosophical) truth versus fiction (i.e., mimesis, metaphor).76 Take Aristotle’s example of “withered stalk” for old age (τὸ γῆρας καλάμην): he argues that this offers a lesson and recognition through a shared category (μάθησιν καὶ γνῶσιν διὰ τοῦ γένους), since both have lost their bloom (ἄμφω γὰρ ἀπηνθηκότα) (Rhet. 1410b13–14).77 He thus explains the metaphor by recourse to another one (”having lost the bloom,” ἀπηνθηκότα), an enchaining that indicates both a dependence on the “natural” (i.e., allegedly literal) meaning and the inevitability of metaphorical movement to bridge the gap. A few sections later, when introducing what he means by asserting that metaphor brings things “before the eyes” (πρὸ ὀμμάτων), Aristotle offers “blooming” (τὸ ἀνθοῦσαν) itself as an example of a metaphor that has “vividness” (ἐνέργεια) (Rhet. 1411b23–30). It is here at the fold that the sensuous detail, which is rooted, like Aristotle’s “withered stalk” or its converse “blooming,” in the natural setting, generates “good” metaphor, and thus operates as both a challenge to and a compulsion of philosophical discourse. Metaphor is the difference and the detour: again, in Derrida’s terms, it “opens the wandering of the semantic,” the movement of which nevertheless rests upon a trust in likeness and connects it directly to mimesis.78 In highlighting similarities Derrida is following Aristotle’s discussion of mimesis in the Poetics, where Aristotle underscores that humans enjoy viewing likenesses, even when these are of repellent things such as corpses, because they learn by means of the match (1448b10–17).79 For Derrida this pleasure arises from the fact that metaphor and mimesis hinge on likeness rather than identity, which means that they mark an absence (i.e., of the object, person, idea, etc. indicated) that the perceiver takes delight in pursuing. Deeming this “the elliptical syllogism of mimēsis,” it is also where metaphor does its work, in the detour or turning away from proper or natural designation (e.g., “stalk” for actual plant shaft, a name for a thing).80 76

77 79

Again, fold = Fr. pli, and may follow on Nietzsche’s idea that the Greeks “stop courageously at the surface, the fold [Ger. Falte].” As Derrida ponders ([1972] 1982: 238–39). 78 Derrida [1972] 1982: 237–40. Cf. Rhet. 1371b4–10; Derrida [1972] 1982: 238–39. 80 Derrida [1972] 1982: 240–41.

3. Mimesis in/as nature’s fold

For Aristotle and Plato, in contrast, mimesis and metaphor depend upon the binding power of true similarities and the vivid connections that this secure figuration should achieve, as both an inherently problematic means of pursuing truth and yet one that is necessary and grounded in nature.81 Consider a crucial moment in the Republic mentioned briefly above, when Socrates explains to Glaucon that as the sun is to human sight, the best and most piercing of the senses (lit. “most sun-like,” ἡλιοειδέστατον, Rep. 508b3), so is the Form of the good to knowledge and truth – it is other, Socrates says, and more beautiful still (ἄλλον καὶ κάλλιον ἔτι, 508e5–6). And unlike the eye and the sun, the connection between these most beautiful things is itself even closer than formal likeness, since the sun is “an offspring of the good, which it generated as an analogy to itself” (τὸν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἔκγονον ὃν τἀγαθὸν ἐγέννησεν ἀνάλογον ἑαυτῷ, 508b13).82 This bold metaphor aims at securing a natural – indeed, a supernatural (i.e., metaphysical) – grounding for the Forms, since if they themselves generate true likenesses in the world, these similarities would serve as guideposts for those who can perceive them. The fact that Socrates makes such a claim in the midst of all this analogizing suggests as well that good metaphors may somehow formulate deep correspondences, serving as genuine likenesses rather than being mere fancies of language. We can thus note once again that for Socrates metaphors fulfill a need, even if this need is one that is difficult to acknowledge more than in passing or obliquely, and one that will be eventually transcended – a moment always yet to come in the dialogues. From Derrida’s perspective, this whole operation depends on the fantasy of nature as ordering and securing meaning in a hierarchical orientation that places the sun at its center. In an aside that is easy to miss, for all its importance to his scheme, Derrida points to these same passages in the Republic. As he puts it, Plato’s metaphor “sun” “figures the Good of which the sensory sun is the son: the source of life and visibility, of seed and light.”83 The unique figurative role that Plato assigns to the sun in all of its centrality helps to explain, for Derrida at any rate, why Aristotle uses the sun’s “sowing” (τὸ σπέρειν) its rays as an example of a metaphor arising out of the lack of a term (ἀνώνυμον) but whose analogy to sowing seed is obvious, as if the unique centrality of the sun itself secured the connection (Po. 1457b26–29). Directly after this we find the example of the “wineless cup,” which for Derrida signals that we are facing an essential ellipsis, an 81 82

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Again, see Moran 1989: 90; Ricoeur 1978a: 142. See Tecusan 1992: 79–81, especially the suggestion that the image of the sun indicates how rather than what the good is. Derrida [1972] 1982: 242.

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absence generated by the workings of language, the movement from vehicle to vehicle in which the object designated slips away and is lost. For Plato especially, but perhaps for Aristotle as well, it is as if nature offers up to language its own operations, a stable set of deep connections that must underlie how the world is put together. Thus, for instance, Plato’s Timaeus shares the notion of channeling and watering among the earth’s waterways, the human body’s systems, and social nurturing, which must have suggested to later writers the unusual reach of this imagery.84 Within this tradition the inhabitants who order and activate specific locales also share their features, so that (as another instance) the flowing of desire that makes for fluid speeches in Plato’s Phaedrus does not merely reorganize the locus amoenus setting but also shares its watering. The Presocratic poet-philosopher Empedocles may have influenced Plato’s emphasis on likenesses that are naturally grounded, since he associates cosmogonic and compositional patterns, featuring images of mixture and paths or passageways.85 At the outset of his poem on natural philosophy (entitled Peri phuseōs in Diogenes Laertius’ list), Empedocles calls upon the gods to “channel a pure stream from holy mouths” (ἐκ δ' ὁσίων στομάτων καθαρὴν ὀχετεύσατε πηγήν, fr. 3.2 D–K) as an aid to his composition. And when he is describing the central vortex that began the mixing of elements in the cosmos, he declares, “But I shall turn back to the path of song that I traced before, channeling one discourse from another” (αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ παλίνορσος ἐλεύσομαι ἐς πόρον ὕμνων, τὸν πρότερον κατέλεξα, λόγου λόγον ἐξοχετεύων, fr. 35.1–2 D–K). Empedocles’ cosmogonic and physiological explanations thus foreground systems of paths and passages that dovetail with those of inspiration and composition, as if world formation and poetic crafting could really fall together in this way. This would suggest as well that the philosophical assumption about nature’s grounding of metaphor that Derrida regards as a central conceit of western philosophy has its roots in metaphorical reference in the archaic and early classical periods. If philosopher-poets aligned verbal styles with topographical features not only because of the centrality of rural settings of divine inspiration to celebration and ritual but also because cosmic theories argued for unified systems that explained, for instance, both the hydration of the earth and that of the body, then ideas about verbal cadence and punctuation may well have been originally bound up with those about the living, breathing body in a manner not taken to be metaphorical. This is not to say that archaic poets did not also perceive and make use of figuration as itself, but rather that some likenesses may have been 84 85

On irrigation tropes, see further in chs. 4.3b and 6.2b. Cf. frs. 3.11–12, 35.11–12, 83.10–12, 100.1–5.

3. Mimesis in/as nature’s fold

understood as grounded in natural correspondences between bodies and topographies. Post-classical usage, on the other hand, does not give any indication of sustaining such a deep notion of likeness; for the critics Demetrius, Dionysius, and Ps.-Longinus “floral” (e.g.) is clearly a metaphor when applied either to a writer’s style or to metaphor itself. That said, ancient theorists who make use of mimetic strategies effectively reproduce this sense of deep connection, insofar as they combine stylistic imitation of the compositions they are analyzing with images that pick out confluences of styles and natural features. Such strategies have mundane roots in educational modeling (e.g., learning to compose like Homer), but in the hands of theorists such as Plato this analogizing has profounder ramifications. Again, mimesis and metaphor – together with dialectic – lead one step by step to comprehension of the Forms. While later writers such as Demetrius and Dionysius may not follow Plato on the “upward path” that underlies his ideas about and deployment of mimetic practices, they consistently take up similar matches in order to chart, and usually themselves to model, the mimetic practices of and stylistic distinctions among earlier avatars of fine composition. They demonstrate the correctness of their arguments and the efficacy of their theoretical models by this emulative process, in which their own stylistic choices (of vocabulary, phrasing, etc.) adopt and reorder those of the authors they analyze. Sometimes their mimesis of the style they are assessing involves closely turned elaborations on natural imagery and phrasing, in which the stylistic impact of the passage is directly reproduced or analogized, as Demetrius does with both Homer and Plato (see Chapter 6, sections 2 and 3). At other times they appropriate whole passages and redistribute their key vocabulary as newly formulated rubrics for judging the style of the passage and author, as Dionysius does when using imagery from Plato’s Phaedrus to fashion a new stylistic domain for contrasting his and Demosthenes’ styles (see Chapter 7, section 3b). The mimetic strategies of these theorists suggest how much exegetical work they think emulating this natural analogizing – and the reordering process of emulation itself – can achieve. In apparent contrast to such strategies, Aristotle may emphasize the power and centrality of metaphor (and secondarily mimesis and style), but he also cautions against its use in dialectic and philosophical discourse more generally, as his objections to Plato’s use of it indicates (e.g., Arist. Met. A9, 991a20, M5, 1079b25).86 G. E. R. Lloyd puzzles over the conflict 86

Again, Derrida notices this ([1972] 1982: 238).

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between Aristotle’s opposition to metaphor in philosophy and his own use of it in his theoretical treatises, concluding that the “practical” philosophical setting may allow for such laxity.87 His conclusion itself points to the influence of Aristotle’s assumption that, as Derrida highlights, “proper” philosophical discourse is somehow normative, natural, and thus neutral, the opposite of metaphorical crafting. Of course, as I have noted, Aristotle also seeks to secure metaphor and mimesis as natural. Thus, for instance, he emphasizes that mimesis is a crucial human capacity: the matching of like to like forges metaphors, makes mimesis possible; and humans are specially attuned to its generative pleasures, being the most mimetic of creatures (Arist. Poet. 1448b5–9). But in his lectures (or whatever they are), while he appears at least to attempt to adhere to a relatively neutral language when discussing metaphor, mimesis, and/or style, his own metaphorical usage has an unsettling effect on his arguments, as Derrida emphasizes and as the young man’s red cloak (e.g.) indicates. While critical or philosophical language, on this “Aristotelian” view, would aim to set forth patterns and principles in as plain a style as possible, theorists take up Aristotle’s imagery as if it were central to his argument, so that in the example above his own analogy of the “red cloak” fosters metaphors of style as fancy or foreign dress. This iterative play conflicts with the fantasy of an unmarked language, a language directly expressive of thought because of “man’s” natural capacity to see and express true likenesses. From this perspective mimesis and metaphor ought simply to follow nature and do its bidding, since they are contained within and controlled by it. Classical scholars have usually assumed that subsequent critics and theorists aimed to follow Aristotle’s supposedly neutral exposition and thus have tended to dismiss their mimetic practices.88 Since these theorists do not maintain a distance from the language they are analyzing, they appear delinquent, insufficiently critical, and inadvertently sullying of the analytic clarity they supposedly seek to sustain. And yet such strategies may only look strange to post-Romantic readers – that is, to those trained in traditional philosophy and philology, which depend upon the conceit of an objective, “white” discourse. The mimetic mode thus constitutes a distinctive type of theoretical 87 88

Lloyd 1996. But see, e.g., Battisti 1997; Fornaro 1997; Ford 2002; Hunter 2008a, 2012; Halliwell 2011. In the history of modern literary theory and criticism only those trained in deconstructive and post-structuralist approaches have broached this question, since convention so values the idea of an objective analytic method using impartial language (see esp. Derrida 1972 [1981]; 1972 [1982]).

3. Mimesis in/as nature’s fold

engagement, which we may also want to think of as a way into and out of metaphor – traversing its spaces, following its detours. And this all begins not only with Plato but also, and in some places more influentially, with Aristotle. In subsequent chapters I thus aim to encourage positive attention to the mimetic strategies of the ancient theorists, both their awareness of the visual event as the spur for mimesis (in the sense of creative reproduction) and their own reconfiguring of the tropes, vocabulary, and rhythms of the texts they analyze. In the discussions that follow I highlight the points at which the critical gesture becomes mimetic and thereby serves as an aesthetic interstice between the original composition and its spectator/ reader. I should emphasize, however, that this is not the sole mode among the theorists; unsurprisingly, they also make use of more straightforward exegesis. But frequently the more vibrant confluences of composition and style appear to require of these theorists a mode that mirrors this vibrancy effectively. This chapter has aimed to set forth a general conceptual framework for understanding the centrality of Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of mimesis, metaphor, and style to landscape imagery in theory and criticism. It also highlights significant receptions of these ancient ideas, most crucially in modernist and post-structuralist innovations that center on metaphor and aesthetic response. Subsequent chapters address these theoretical concerns from narrower and more detailed perspectives, as poets and theorists repeatedly reorder figures in mimetic terrains in distinct combinations, reproducing but also innovating on the conventions that precede them and thereby establishing their authority over new territory. Many of these performances of status and power are very successful, so that the landscapes to which they lay claim become the figurative grounds for championing some styles (usually more manly ones) and denigrating others. Thus, for instance, in the emulating orchestrations of later theorists Euripides and Plato both end up in the garden, feminized by their associations with a Sapphic, flowery style. Homer and Demosthenes, in contrast, ford rushing streams and scale the heights, the poet mastering nature’s forces while the orator forges manfully on.

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Rural resources Hesiod, Pindar, and establishing poetic dominion

Oh for a beaker full of the warm South! Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stainèd mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim . . . John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”

In an introductory discussion in The Green Cabinet, his influential book on ancient pastoral poetry, Thomas Rosenmeyer rejects the notion that Hesiodic poetry is pastoral, despite its long reception as such by Wordsworth and many others in the English literary tradition. In contrast to those who would merge workaday labor with the rustic idyll, Rosenmeyer distinguishes Hesiod’s focus on the land as agrarian and activist (i.e., aimed at a particular practical purpose, the persuasion of Perses).1 While Rosenmeyer’s focus is Hellenistic poetry, his distinction offers a useful means of differentiating among the multiple conceptions of landscape in earlier poetry as well. Pietro Pucci has also emphasized the agrarian model in Hesiod; and this poetic economy helps to shape some key attributes of the landscapes that influence later programmatic as well as literary critical and theoretical scenes.2 In both prose and poetry, these scenes clearly reproduce and reorder earlier poets’ pastoral, meadowland, garden, and riverside settings, and many are marked distinctly as dreamy, leisured scenes, very much at a remove from toil.3 And yet, like Keats’ “blushful Hippocrene” they carry the traces of the original setting, as if Hesiod’s mountain spring were a necessary touchstone.

1

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2

Rosenmeyer 1969: 20–29. Cf. Calame’s distinction between “I-landscapes” (those introduced as inhabited for use) and “they-landscapes” (those described in narrative) (Calame 2007: 47–52). On the usefulness of this distinction for the Roman reception of Hellenistic gardens, see Uden 2010. For the most part I address the convergence of these perspectives, namely, the points where description becomes appropriation and inhabitation. On the poetic tradition see also Hunter 2006: 7–41. 3 Pucci 1977: 51–55, 127–35. See my discussion of the range of settings in the Introduction.

Rural resources

I am thinking here especially of the locus amoenus, the earliest example of which may well be Homer’s description of Calypso’s cave in book 5 of the Odyssey.4 As the Introduction as well as sections of subsequent chapters discuss in some detail, this type of scene organizes its elements in such a way as to foreground sensory pleasures and invite relaxation, in contrast to the more diverse rural settings in which poets meet up with or discover the resources of the Muses, Graces, or Nymphs.5 Both types of setting often involve pilgrimage to remote (or at least somewhat removed) topographies. The latter, however, usually requires additional effort on the part of the shepherd- or farmer-poet, with the presence of helpful female attendants or resources with female origins mitigating the toil. Indeed, as noted in the Introduction, in early Greek poetry and especially in Pindar one gets a strong sense of the sharply gendered cast of these scenes, in most of which the male poet masterfully arranges, culls, or drinks – and thereby appropriates – what bounties female entities offer up.6 Sometimes, to be sure, these females are more high-handed than obliging, as most notoriously in the shepherd-poet’s mountainside interaction with chastising Muses in Hesiod. But their waters and flourishing branches still serve the poet’s creative needs, as do the Nymphs’ spring, Aphrodite’s meadow, and the Graces’ garden in Pindar, who culls his natural metaphors from these feminine sources in order to flatter his male clientele. This chapter addresses the contributions of earlier Greek poets to literary critical and theoretical discourse. Unlike Chapter 3 on Aristophanes’ Frogs and Chapter 5 on Hellenistic poetry, it does not lay claim to these poets as critics in another idiom, since they predate the development of critical conventions.7 Instead I aim here to explore the remarkably various rural terrains that poets conjure as ways of establishing their aesthetic and ethical sovereignty, because these terrains have a significant impact on the development of literary and theoretical landscapes. Hesiod and Pindar are the most influential poets in this regard, but they foreground distinct territories and thus set forth aesthetic schemes with different emphases and orientations. Between them they map most of the topographies that dominate in later poetry and theory, with Sappho contributing some contrasting details. The reception of these settings

4 5

6 7

So Schönbeck 1962, Hass 1998. On the salient features of these locus amoenus or meadowland settings, see chs. 3.2, 4.2, 5.2–3, 6.4, and 7.3 and further below in section 3. On “fertile field” metaphors and the like, see duBois 1988; Calame 1999. But see Young 1983 on Pindar’s critical gestures.

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reproduces their significant features while reorganizing them in relation to the poets’ stylistic affinities. For example, Hesiod may depict his poetic persona as a rugged shepherd and initiate the trope of the “high, rough road” as a metaphor for moral toughness, manliness, and aesthetic restraint, but later poets and theorists associate his poetry primarily with a gentler style apparently suggested by the fluidity and purity of the mountain springs that open the Theogony. Pindar’s stylistic profile also emerges as complicated by its reception, since his elaborate vocabulary and dense imagery align him with grand, fulsome styles, while his penchant for floral imagery would seem to link him to softer, more feminine modes. Hesiod’s rustic setting thus generates two primary sets of images, which later poets and critics employ in different ways to indicate moral, cultural (including educational and/or socio-economic), and stylistic proclivities: the high mountain spring or stream (Th. 1–8) and the rough path or road (WD 216–19, 287–92). Although Hesiodic poetry is really only pastoral in its invention (i.e., as poetry generated by a shepherd-poet), it has contributed essential features to tropes that shape later poetic, literary critical, and theoretical scenes as pastoral in a more extended sense, and so is received as inflected in this way by Hellenistic and Roman poets. This is true of Pindaric poetry as well: while it was never treated by tradition as pastoral (as indeed it is not in any narrow sense), its cultivated topographies – especially meadows and gardens – had a similarly marked influence on the later poets and theorists. Further, Hesiod and Pindar both situate their poetics in identifiable but essentially heraldic landscapes, remote or quasi-remote spaces that are usually idyllic, to which poets journey (or “journey”) and from which they gain resources, authority, and claims to cultural territory. These also come to resonate as programmatic and ultimately stylistic indicators in the figurative geographies of literary critics and theorists. The Boeotian poets fashion settings as sites of inspiration, invention, and mimetic reproduction that combine concrete indicators of ritual and socio-economic practices with their symbolic or metaphorical extensions. To put it more concretely, when Pindar enters a rural setting or drinks from a spring sacred to the Nymphs, this affords him and his poetry both some claim to divine authority and a “landscape” (i.e., a resource for the metonymic indicators of his special status and wisdom). This landscape is more dream than reality, although actual topographies and local practices are frequently indicated; it is depicted as containing features significant to and culled by the poet-narrator who then claims knowledge and mastery of the terrain.

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These landscapes are, again, heraldic in Proust’s sense: place names and topographical details indicate ties to localities and claims for their special benefits and qualities, while they also serve as metonymic standards for the poets’ aesthetic, cultural, and/or political allegiances and foster metaphors for their poetry. As literary places (in the sense of topoi and topography) they both celebrate particular settings and serve as spaces of metaphor, in the sense explored in Chapter 1. That is, they offer up discrete figures and themselves configure spaces of mimesis and transport. These are spaces of such resonance and long tradition that like a good Alexandrian poet even a latter-day lyricist may follow metaphor’s movement, call for a “beaker full of the warm South,” and drink one’s fill of the pastoral convention. Earlier poets highlight specific scenes as spaces of ritual and thus as if real, but they also fashion what I am calling spaces of metaphor – spaces, that is, of poetic inhabitation and transport. Pindar, unlike Hesiod, does not restrict himself to his home turf; instead the precisely calibrated symbolism with which he imbues famous localities across the Greek world (e.g., Delphi, Syracuse) fashions a deliberate and indeed profitable place-presence as he makes his rounds.8 This stands in sharp contrast to the Alexandrian poets, who inhabit (at least some of the time) an urban center marked by cultural multiplicity and diaspora and yet fashion tropes that invoke rural lands at a distance, crafting a space apart in the midst of the busy city.9 All of these poets, however, lay claim to cultural terrain that is often pegged to actual territory in order to assert their aesthetic orientations, shaping a dominion sustained by superior aesthetic orientation and thus style. We may better grasp the impact of such assertions by recognizing anew that these landscapes are usually grounded in places that have associations and practices familiar to their audiences. The poets’ invocations of ritual settings and mastering of territories would have tied aesthetic programs to concrete topographical reference points, especially pilgrimage sites such as mountain sanctuaries or sacred gardens. Between poet and audience, then, there emerges a shared space that is molded by this familiar territory but forged by the mind’s eye, a space of phantasia – both dream and appearance. In keeping with the overall emphasis of this study, this chapter focuses on imagined spaces ordered by the figurative conventions of 8

9

See Nagy (1990b: 146–98); Kurke (1991: 85–107, 163–94); and Nicholson 2005:1–12 on poetic economies; Morgan 2007 on patronage; Felson (1999) on “vicarious transport”; Mackie 2003 and Wells 2009: 129–45 on poetic register; Eckermann forthcoming on the cultural geography; also Nünlist 1998: 135–41 on the imagery. See Selden 1998 and further in ch. 5.1.

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ancient landscapes that come to influence literary critical and theoretical ideas about styles. And yet it is crucial to recognize with theorists such as Raymond Williams and Stephen Greenblatt that these tropes are also regularly inflected by social orientations attached to actual places.10 Because of the embodied, place-specific quality of poetic invocation, actual places in Boeotia and Attica also become received settings in which poetic and critical schemes are orchestrated. As highlighted in the Introduction, the most notable of these are Delphi and Mount Parnassus, the springs on Hesiod’s Helicon and the Valley of the Muses below, as well as the spring Dirce in Thebes and the Ilissus and Cephisus rivers in Athens. All of these places provide crucial starting points for the shaping of ideas about literary expression and composition. Hesiod and Pindar deploy these inhabited rural topographies in a clearly agonistic manner, as a means of distinguishing their aesthetic sensibilities from others’ and thereby asserting the interrelationships among knowledge, control of place, and poetic authority. Hesiod’s violet spring with its local Muses places a high value on and signals command of ritual spaces, as does the blossoming, well-watered sanctuary to which Sappho calls Aphrodite.11 Similarly, when Pindar harvests “flowers of song” from the Graces’ garden or “plows” Aphrodite’s field, he asserts his harnessing of feminine bounty as well as his status as master of highly valued lands.12 These places of divine power and cultic practice also effectively underwrite the force of the metaphors they generate, giving them and their inhabitants special resonance and compass. Further, if the “place” of ancient metaphor was often envisioned as rural and local, Pindar’s figurative schemes that (for instance) highlight poetic expression and metaphor in particular as “floral” may well emerge from older practices tied to fertility, the display of young female beauty, and the circulation of women.13 Arnold van Gennep emphasized more than a century ago that the literary situating of occasional events within civic and rural spaces is bound up with ritual.14 In any given ancient landscape, such spaces are demarcated as sacred and associated with certain ritual practices. Obvious 10 11

12 13

14

Williams 1973; Greenblatt 1991. I should note that Sappho’s use of the fertile space differs sharply from that of the male poets, as might be expected; see further below, section 3a. E.g., the fertile plain of Krisa below Delphi, fought over for centuries. P. O. 2.50–51, O. 4.1–3; see Harriott 1969: 127–29. On performance settings, see the edited volume of Mackie 2004; on Pindaric details, see Lefkowitz 1963; Mackie 2003; Carey 2007. Van Gennep 1909 [1981]; see also Calame 1977, 1992, 1999: 153–74, 2007; and further below in section 3a.

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examples are temple precincts, sacred groves, and the like; but there are also spaces that become ritually reinscribed every time passage is made through them or to them (e.g., roads along which shrines are situated and processions take place, meadows in which choral dances are performed). Claude Calame has illuminated the double process by which such ritual spaces are inhabited poetically by performance gestures that achieve the initiatory stages they describe.15 In the emerging literary critical and theoretical discourse, the rituals that seem most often to underlie the literary images are female rites of passage (which van Gennep emphasized), as the carefully choreographed imagery of Sappho, Alcman, and the Homeric Hymns (esp. HDem. and HAp.) suggests and as Aristophanes takes up in Frogs.16 This space-in-performance makes of the locus amoenus a place (and a topos) of danger and sex: young girls not only pluck flowers there, but this gesture signals the inevitability that they will be “plucked” themselves.17 Other rituals may have to do with fertility in a more extended sense, including pilgrimages or processionals that mark agrarian cycles and the worship of geographical features (e.g., rivers), elements of which surface in Pindaric odes, Plato’s Phaedrus, and Hellenistic poetry. In accordance with this emphasis on fertility, while the ritual elements recede in later literary theory and criticism, some of the stylistic distinctions that materialize have a gendered cast, as is clear from Demetrius’ and Dionysius’ association of Sappho with a decorative, charming, “garden” mode.18 Again, even the lay of the land has its gender differences, and if for Demetrius the “rough road” of Thucydides’ prose is clearly masculine in its rigor, often features such as flowering meadows and winding rivers represent metaphorically styles that are languid, pleasurable, and (at least implicitly) feminine.19 From this later perspective, the “flower” of poetry (i.e., metaphor) itself evokes a realm that highlights the decorative and seductive aspects of this soft and fertile style – say, the aesthetic effects of

15

16

17

18 19

Calame 2007; also 1999: 165–70. On the gendered settings more generally, Gentili 1988; Stehle 1997; Klinck 2001; and further below; on poetics and rites of passage, cf. Moorton 1989 and further in ch. 3.3. See Calame 2007: 48–50 on how Sappho fr. 2 achieves this performative situating within the shaded grove of Aphrodite. On the rites and dangers of the flowering meadow, see Motte 1973: 38–47: Calame 1992: 106–08; Bremer 1975; Cairns 1997. Demetr. De eloc. 106, 127, 140–49, 165–66; DH De comp. verb. 23.1, Dem. 40.43–5. Demetr. De eloc. 48; DH, Thuc. 24.10–13, Dem. 5.8–9. Cf. Cole 2004: 21–29 on the gendering of ancient Greek landscapes. Calame (1999: 153–74) has discussed the poetics associated with such rural spaces as an erotic mapping of meadows and gardens in relation to sex and the marriage bed.

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eroticized images such as blooming young girls in meadows picking flowers. In archaic poetry ideas about poetic authority and knowledge are inevitably bound up with the Muses. However one understands the relationship between poet and Muse (a complicated topic beyond the scope of this chapter20), it is clear that the poet’s abilities and inspirations come from the Muses, and that these together with his craft constitute the poet’s wisdom.21 The set of associations that I want to emphasize, however, is more site specific. Decades ago Rosemary Harriott suggested that the two sources for the images that poets use to highlight their wisdom and authority are: (1) cultic practices involving the Muses and (2) craft metaphors. The former is earlier and found especially in Pindar; the latter is later and Aristophanes makes the most elaborate use of it. While the recognition that the Muses were deities with local cults is not unique to Harriott, her emphasis on cultic practice as a source for poetic and ultimately literary critical imagery offers a means of understanding why a poet might need, say, a laurel branch (often depicted with the leaves still on) to consolidate his authority and thus why rural settings might have originally been the necessary spaces for poetic resources.22 Since the most prominent and influential references to the wisdom, special knowledge, and/or poetic authority located in rural settings can be found in the works of Hesiod and Pindar, I discuss the metaphorical and cultural coordinates of their topographies in some detail below. First, however, I want to acknowledge a complicating and more obscure element that may lurk behind some of this conventional emphasis on natural settings: the figure of Orpheus. As later tradition attests, if there is any ancient figure that embodies the intersection of poetic enchantment and nature (as a semi-divine force), it is Orpheus. Along with other more clearly genre-bound figures such as Linus and Daphnis, Orpheus is the ur-poet of song crafted in and by natural settings. While we have only scant evidence (and that in strange quasi-literary settings such as the Derveni 20 21

22

But see Havelock 1963; Harriott 1969; Walsh 1984; Murray 1996, 2002. Note that the vocabulary of sophia appears for the most part later in epic and lyric poetry; Hesiod does not use soph- terminology at all, Homer does so only rarely (namely, once, Il. 15.412, regarding Athena). It is used twice in the HHerm. (483, 511), regarding Hermes’ poetic skills; and of the lyric poets only Pindar uses (e.g.) sophia with any frequency, although Ibycus’ reference to the “skilled Muses” (μοίσαι σεσοφισμέναι, 282.23 PMG) suggests that we may be missing the range of this vocabulary. Homer and Hesiod both primarily use phrases like “doing things knowingly” (ἐπισταμένως) and “having phrēn” (ἐχέφρονες) (e.g., Th. 87–88). See Verdenius 1983: 37–44. Harriott 1969: 5, 20–23, and passim; on Dichterweihe see Kambylis 1965; on inspiration Sperduti 1950; Tigerstedt 1970; Murray 1981, 1992.

1. Moral and aesthetic paths

papyrus) of archaic or classical treatments of his figure, Hellenistic pastoral offers Daphnis as his descendant or analogue and Roman mythographers tell his stories.23 Charles Segal has argued that Hellenistic writers regarded Orpheus as a fertility deity, whose poetry fostered what he calls “a resonant harmony” with the natural world.24 Given the scanty amount of archaic and classical evidence for Orpheus, it is difficult to know what to do with his figure beyond acknowledging its likely influence on ideas about the necessary connections between poetic power and the natural world. In addition, since Orpheus is connected with descent narratives, he may also serve as an implicit subtext for Aristophanes’ Frogs – which is to say that he may well function as another figure for poetic authority in the natural setting from the archaic period through to the moment when the first overtly literary critical contest was staged.25 What follows is not by any means an exhaustive catalog of landscapes and their features in archaic and early fifth-century poetry. Rather, I emphasize the images and tropes that are most predominant and that contribute to the most influential features in critical and theoretical discourse. The sections below thus each take up the most dominant features within these natural (”natural”) terrains: paths and roads, springs and streams, and fertile settings, from mountainside to garden.

1. Moral and aesthetic paths Perhaps the oldest and most prominent landscape image in early poetry is one that seems near “dead” in certain contexts, only to become fully invigorated in others: the path (ὁδός, οἶμος, κέλευθος) of words. It is usually deployed as a means of indicating aesthetic orientation, moral direction, and/or qualities associated with either.26 While in the long span of its development the path metaphor comes to conjoin ethics and aesthetics, the earliest examples of its deployment treat one or the other. Homer, for 23

24 25 26

Fragments from Ibycus, Simonides, Aeschylus, etc. are collected in Kern 1922; vase depictions start in the late archaic period (LIMC 7). See Edmonds 2004: ch. 2; Hunter 2006: 24–28; also Henry 1986 on the Derveni commentator as literary critic. Segal 1989: 10 also argues that Orpheus was parallel to Dionysus in this role. Cf. Edmonds 2004: ch. 3. See Becker 1937: 5 vs. Snell 1955: 320–32 and Harriott 1969: 65. Snell is largely interested in the Scheidewege as an aporetic image (following Panofsky 1930; see ch. 6.2 on Heracles at the crossroads). Cf. Nünlist 1998: 228–83 for an exhaustive treatment of Wegmetaphern in early poetry; he conceives of the “way” in the broadest sense, including movement through space rather than just paths. Also Asper 1997: 23–26, though his discussion is ultimately oriented toward Callimachean imagery.

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example, makes rather casual use of the “path of words” idiom to refer to poetic invention and authority, since one would thereby find a way and know where to go. The Homeric poet refers to an apparently well-known variant of the klea andrōn about a dispute between Achilles and Odysseus as a “path” (οἴμης, Od. 8.74; cf. 8.481, 22.347); in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes Apollo similarly calls the poetry that the Muses inspire “the shining path of song” (ἀγλαὸς οἶμος ἀοιδῆς, 451).27 Although scholars have disagreed on whether in Homeric epic these terms very strongly envisioned a particular poetic mode or story as a “way,” the vocabulary of beginnings and movement certainly points in this direction. Hesiod instead invokes the “rough path” of virtue, which initiates an adjacent but distinct tradition of tropes involving moral, educational, and aesthetic tracks. In Works and Days the didactic narrator is definite about distinguishing a move that we may recognize as taking the high road – the path that leads straight to justice (ὁδὸς ἑτέρηφι παρελθεῖν κρείσσων ἐς τὰ δίκαια, WD 216–17). This road, the path of dikē, opposes that of “crooked judgments” (σκολιῇσι δίκῃσιν, 219), which the narrator warns his errant interlocutor to avoid. Some lines later, taking a cue from his rough mountain setting, he offers a slightly different distinction between paths (WD 287–91): τὴν μέν τοι κακότητα καὶ ἰλαδὸν ἔστιν ἑλέσθαι ῥηιδίως· λείη μὲν ὁδός, μάλα δ' ἐγγύθι ναίει· τῆς δ' ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάροιθεν ἔθηκαν ἀθάνατοι· μακρὸς δὲ καὶ ὄρθιος οἶμος ἐς αὐτὴν καὶ τρηχὺς τὸ πρῶτον Baseness comes in abundance, easily; the road is smooth, and she lives nearby. But before Virtue the immortal gods placed sweat; the path to her is long and steep and rough at first.

Ethics and aesthetics are intertwined here, in the association of low morals with ease and smoothness and high with, effectively, “high roads.” Virtue is prefaced by exertion, by a path that goes straight up and has tough patches, especially early on.28 Thus not only are principles mapped onto a human, inhabited landscape, but the sensory suggestions thrown off by “smooth” 27 28

Cf. Ar. Ran. 897 and further in ch. 3.1c. Cf. Sim. fr. 74 PMG: ἔστι τις λόγος | τὰν Ἀρετὰν ναίειν δυσαμβάτοισ’ ἐπὶ πέτραις | †νῦν δὲ μιν θοὰν χῶραν† ἁγνὸν ἀμφέπειν· | οὐδὲ πάντων βλεφάροισι θνατῶν | ἔσοπτος, ὧι μὴ δακέθυμος ἱδρὼς | ἔνδοθεν μόληι, ἵκηι τ’ ἐς ἄκρον ἀνδρείας. While Simonides does not directly invoke the path, he does envision virtue as residing on high cliffs (lit. “hard-to-scale rocks”: δυσαμβάτοισ’ ἐπὶ πέτραις) that will not be looked upon by the hiker who has not suffered “heart-cramping sweat” (δακέθυμος ἱδρὼς) from the climb. We can note as well that, in keeping with

1. Moral and aesthetic paths

versus “rough” initiate an influential ethical scheme, captured in its most celebrated form as Prodicus’ tale of Heracles at the crossroads deliberating between female divinities (i.e., Virtue and Vice) and their paths, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 6. The distinction also gives rise to a stylistic scheme developed later on by theorists, especially Demetrius. As baseness is ready at hand like a neighbor and virtue remote, at the end of a long, difficult hike, Demetrius conceives of the lofty style of Thucydides as a rough road, while plainer modes are easier, offering plenty of “rest-stops” along the way.29 Parmenides employs a comparable set of associations, when he depicts the narrator of his poem as riding in an immortal chariot along the “very famous path” (ὁδὸν . . . πολύφημον, fr. 1.2) to Justice, where he will learn the heart of “well-rounded truth” (Ἀληθείης εὐκυκλέος, 1.29).30 In another fragment Parmenides distinguishes between the path (κέλευθος) of Persuasion, which attends on Truth, and one that is “indiscernible” (παναπευθέα . . . ἀταρπόν, fr. 2.6). This association of persuasion with truth may seem odd and, given all the suspicion generated in Greek literature around persuasive techniques, counterintuitive; but notions of clarity and indeed a clearly discernible path become central to ideas about periodic style in oratory, as Demetrius’ imagery in particular reveals.31 The “virtuous path” is a familiar image in Pindar as well, but in his settings it frequently signals a poetics, an attendant set of socioeconomic implications, and perhaps choral modes as well.32 Unlike the Hesiodic trek Pindar’s paths repeatedly knit together a complex and varying conjunction of superior aesthetics (e.g., the path of his song, cf. ἐπίκουρον εὑρὼν ὁδὸν λόγων, O. 1.110) and moral fortitude (e.g., τιμῶντες ἀρετάς | ἐς φανερὰν ὁδὸν ἔρχονται, O. 6.72–73; cf. P. 3.103, N. 7.51). One may play wolf and tread “crooked paths” (ὁδοῖς σκολιαῖς) with one’s enemies, but the straightspeaking man prospers in any polity (ἐν πάντα δὲ νόμον εὐθύγλωσσος ἀνὴρ προφέρει) (P. 2.83–86). The righteous path of words is one of gleaming virtue (φαενναῖς ἀρεταῖς ὁδὸν κύριαν λόγων, N. 7.51); unlike Hesiod’s hard slog, this virtuous route gives the impression of a straight road, shiny as gold. For Hesiod the choice between paths is in the first place a stringent moral one, and the contrast is clearly traced in nearby surrounds. For Pindar the aesthetic

29 31

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conventions aligning attitudes and/or deportments with the lay of the land, the poet matches the hiker’s moral disposition (i.e., his “peak of manly courage”) to the topography. 30 For Thucydides’ “rough road,” see further in ch. 6.2a. Cf. Emped. D–K 3.3–5, 35.1–3. For Demetrius’ tropes, see ch. 6.2; also ch. 3.1c on Aristophanes’ use of atrapos to lampoon dithyrambic styles. See Mullen 1982 on the centrality of dance to Pindar’s odes.

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choice – that is, the highly valued glories of fine poetic style and its rewards – predominates, and the right modes necessarily convene with righteousness. Think, for instance, of the image from Olympian 9, in which Pindar reframes his “clear-sounding path of words” (ἐπέων . . . οἶμον λιγύν, 47) by tracing the outer reaches of poetic efforts to which the upright man must strive. At the end of the poem, he concludes that while some paths extend farther out than others (ἄλλαι | ὁδῶν ὁδοὶ περαίτεραι) and wisdoms are “steep” (σοφίαι μὲν | αἰπειναί), he can master even this difficult terrain, offering up his prize song and shouting aloud the victor’s glories (τοῦτο δὲ προσφέρων ἄεθλον | ὄρθιον ὤρυσαι θαρσέων) (104–09).33 This mastery takes some striving, obviously, and those not properly attendant to the Muses can get lost along the way. In a fragment from a paean Pindar also conjoins wisdom and/or poetic skill with pursuing the right path, with the Heliconian deities offering direction (Pai. fr. 52h.18–20): τ]υφλα[ὶ γά]ρ ἀνδρῶν φρένες, ὅ]στις ἄνευθ’ Ἑλικωνιάδων βαθεῖαν ἐμ[πα]τῶν ἐρευν[ᾶι σοφίαις] ὁδόν. For the minds of men are blind who of them without the Heliconian Muses tramps and searches out the high path of wisdom/skill.

This declaration follows on a fragmentary section that refers to flowering crowns and shoots (of plants or youths?), in which the speaker urges his singers not to follow the “worn highway of Homeric song” (Ὁμήρου [δὲ μὴ τρι]πτὸν κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν | ἰόντες) but to switch horses (ἀ[λλ' ἀλ]λοτρίας ἀν’ ἵπποις) and mount the winged chariot of the Muses (π]τανὸν ἅρμα | Μοισᾶ[ν, Pai. fr. 52h.10–14). Thus one way lies up Helicon, a way that is steep but has high-status guides; the other is a well-worn track that presumably needs little special knowledge. Further, the one is Hesiodic, the other Homeric.34 This notion of avoiding the much-traveled wagon trail 33

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For further examples see Becker 1937: 50–100, who demonstrates the breadth and complexity of the Pindaric imagery; also Steiner 1986: 76–86; Asper 1997: 39–46; Nünlist 1998: 228–54. Asper argues that Pindar’s chariot imagery signals elevated modes (1997: 36–37; cf. Nünlist 1998: 255–64), but surely the contrasting paths also distinguish discerning elites from the masses and thus “high style” (Stilhöhe) from pedestrian. Cf. Harriott 1969: 63, who also cites Bacch. 5.176–78, 10.51–52, 19.1–8. That said, there are many problems with the Greek, not the least of which is that the conjecture τρι]πτόν fashions an adjective unattested before Callimachus, suspiciously enough, since it is he who most famously uses paths imagery to distinguish styles. See Asper 1997: 66–69; Nünlist 1998: 246–47. The latter offers another set of conjectures that would make the connection to Homer a positive one; but this fits oddly with the distinguishing of the Heliconian Muses a few lines later as those who show the way.

1. Moral and aesthetic paths

has a considerable impact on Hellenistic and Roman poets, and helps to initiate the stylistic differences between Homer and Hesiod that later poets and critics emphasize.35 Isthmian 2 also looks to the Muses of Helicon for proper direction, but finds a smoother road in the praise of men of high repute. There the singer declares, “It is not a rocky hill or a steep path, if someone brings the honors of the Heliconian Muses to the homes of famous men” (οὐ γὰρ πάγος οὐδὲ προσάντης | ἁ κέλευθος γίνεται | εἴ τις εὐδόξων ἐς ἀν- | δρῶν ἄγοι τιμὰς Ἑλικωνιάδων, I. 2.32–34). An ancient commentator remarks on the latter image, “The road is not rough for those praising famous men, but on the contrary easy and sloping; for they offer starting points to the ones praising” (οὐ τραχεῖα, φήσιν. ἡ ὁδὸς γίνεται τοῖς τοὺς ἐνδόξους ἐπαινοῦσιν ἄνδρας, τοὐναντίον δὲ ῥᾴδιος καὶ εὐεπίφορος· αὐτοὶ γὰρ ἀφορμὰς εἰς τοὺς ἐπαίνους διδόασι, schol. I.2 47a). The commentator thus teases out the distinction between routes by recourse to topographical characteristics, complete with guides that indicate a “way” of composition. We can compare here Pythian 4.246–48, where the narrator breaks off his tale about Jason with an aside: “It is too far for me to travel on the highway, since time presses and I know a shortcut; and I lead many others in the craft” (μακρά μοι νεῖσθαι κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν, ὤρα | γὰρ συνάπτει καί τινα | οἶμον ἴσαμι βραχύν· πολ- | λοῖσι δ’ ἅγημαι σοφίας ἑτέροις). As subsequent chapters reveal in some detail, the language of paths, especially high and steep or rough versus easy and short or sloping, is repeatedly picked up by literary critics and theorists, who use it to distinguish different ways (e.g., of argument or education) or styles and their attendant affinities, which are usually ethically inflected – that is, tied to ideas about behaviors and inclinations. Thus high, rough roads are reserved for grand, bold styles and manly hikers, while slighter styles and their softer attendants take easier paths, with many stops along the way.36 Prodicus’ tale of Heracles choosing between the paths of Virtue and Vice clearly follows Hesiod’s lead, while steep and narrow paths orient programmatic assertions of Hellenistic and Roman poets, where like mountain springs they are deployed as means of separating out genres and styles.37 As Chapter 3 explores in some detail, 35 36

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On the paths tropes, see further in chs. 5.1, 5.2a, and 6.2. This differentiation is especially prominent in Demetrius’ treatise On Style; see further in ch. 6.2. Most famously Callim. Aet. 26–28. See further in chs. 4 and 5. As far as I know, while both earlier and later poetry offer plenty of examples of scenes narrating trips to idyllic spaces with flowing water, before Callimachus only Simonides may have conjoined the imagery of paths directly and densely to that of flowing (honey, water, words), although the fragment is challenging: Μ[ούσαις δ’ἱμερόεντα λιγὺν π[ροχέοιμί κεν οἷμον] | ἀρτι[επέα] νωμῶν γλῶσσαν ἀ

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Aristophanes’ Frogs serves here as an important critical juncture, since it not only conjoins ideas about style with those about education but also introduces the notion of literary judgment as a space that must be traveled to, along a path that offers various challenges in settings inhabited by distinctly oriented denizens and their signature modes. In addition, Plato gives Hesiod’s “virtuous path” passage a prominent place in the Republic, not only quoting it but also refiguring its procedural claim (i.e., the rough road is a better one) as the careful work of dialectic.38

2. The poetics of flow There are numerous types of “flowing” images highlighting inspiration, authority, and style in early Greek poetry. While scholars have discussed these, especially in relation to later conventions, they have tended not to focus in any detail on the stylistic indications of the original imagery. Most famously, Hellenistic and Roman poets claim to drink from Hesiod’s springs on Helicon as a means of indicating allegiances of genre and style, but many such claims are less than explicit about (and perhaps not so interested in) what the Theogony itself offers by way of stylistic guidance. In this section I gather some central starting points for what emerges in theory and criticism as parameters for the poetics of flow, which eventually evolve into stylistic determinations. Hesiod’s poem sets out from a scene of Muses dancing around a high mountain spring and washing themselves in the waters. The scene’s prominent position suggests its power as place, poetic resource, and space of transport (i.e., of both metaphor and divine inspiration) (Th. 1–8): Μουσάων Ἑλικωνιάδων ἀρχώμεθ' ἀείδειν, αἵ θ' Ἑλικῶνος ἔχουσιν ὄρος μέγα τε ζάθεόν τε, καί τε περὶ κρήνην ἰοειδέα πόσσ' ἁπαλοῖσιν ὀρχεῦνται καὶ βωμὸν ἐρισθενέος Κρονίωνος· καί τε λοεσσάμεναι τέρενα χρόα Περμησσοῖο ἠ’ ῞Ιππου κρήνης ἠ’ Ὀλμειοῦ ζαθέοιο

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[πὸ στόματος (Eleg. 22.17–18 W2). This would translate as something like: “With the Muses’ [help] I would pour forth a lovely, clear path, directing the fine-speaking tongue of my mouth.” Nünlist accepts the reading and cites it under both “Fließen” and “Weg” (1998: 182, 252). If the conjectures are correct, Simonides would be drawing together sensory details reminiscent of the locus amoenus, as if commanding in this small compass all the elements of journeying to and enjoying the idyll. Pl. Rep. 364c6–d3 = WD 287–89, with alterations; Rep. 435d, 504b, 532a–e, 515e6–8; also Phdr. 272d–273c. On the “path of dialectic,” see further in chs. 1.1a and 4.4.

2. The poetics of flow ἀκροτάτῳ Ἑλικῶνι χοροὺς ἐνεποιήσαντο, καλοὺς ἱμερόεντας, ἐπερρώσαντο δὲ ποσσίν. Let us begin to sing from the Heliconian Muses, who hold the great and holy mountain of Helicon and around the deep-blue spring with delicate feet they dance and around the altar of very powerful Zeus; and washing their delicate skin in the Permessus or the Hippocrene or the divine Olmeius on the peak of Helicon they make their dances lovely and desirable, and skip nimbly on their feet.

No one drinks from the springs in Hesiod’s scene, but the fact that the Muses conduct their ritual dances around one spring and bathe in all three indicates the means by which they become sacred mediums for poetic inspiration, invention, and troping. The emphasis on depth of color, softness, delicacy, and light movement – not to mention the repeated flash of feet – offers stylistic metonymies that later poets and critics take up and develop as slight, tender, and sometimes feminine modes. The scene further emphasizes the naming of deities and detailing of rituals, indicating that the poet’s invention and authority also hinges on knowledge of cultic practice (Th. 9–12): ἔνθεν ἀπορνύμεναι κεκαλυμμέναι ἠέρι πολλῷ ἐννύχιαι στεῖχον περικαλλέα ὄσσαν ἱεῖσαι, ὑμνεῦσαι Δία τ’ αἰγίοχον καὶ πότνιαν Ἥραν Ἀργείην, χρυσέοισι πεδίλοις ἐμβεβαυῖαν . . . From there rising up, veiled in a great mist, they move at night, sending forth a lovely voice, hymning aegis-bearing Zeus and lady Hera the Argive, stepping forth in golden sandals . . .

There follows a list of deities with their conventional epithets, which together with the nighttime song and dance calls to mind girls’ rituals such as we see in partheneia (”virgins’ hymns”).39 In pointing out that Hesiod begins his epic poem from lofty mountain practices that emphasize, as do partheneia, features of female beauty in motion, I am not, of course, claiming that he is deliberately distinguishing his poem as a girls’ song. Rather, the fact that the scene is inflected with such details offers a glimpse of early practices that I think influenced later conceptions of stylistic categories. That is to say, Hesiod’s 39

See Alcman 1.62 PMG; Sapph. fr. 30 L–P; Pi. P. 3.77–79. See Calame 1977 and Stehle 1997 on the genre; and further below, section 3a.

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poem may not be a traditionally female song (since it soon subordinates the Muses to Zeus), but later poets and theorists show their awareness that more refined or slender styles, some of which acquire a feminine cast, have their grounding high up on Helicon, in the foot-flash and bathwater of the Muses. Hesiod’s scene also offers a distinctly calibrated picture of how poetic invention evolves: from the setting on the side of Helicon to its metaphorical extensions (coloration, delicacy, vibrancy), from the actual spring to its inspirations (i.e., the poem itself). Further, if it is right to regard the Muses as local deities in a sense closer to Nymphs, as having jurisdiction over and being embodied in certain rural settings, then the poetic knowledge claimed by Hesiod arises directly from the divinely animated landscape, which is then enacted and established as such by means of performance.40 The landscape thereby serves as a central source of poetic knowledge, inspiration, and invention, as well as what these afford: proper rhythm and phrasing, fitting images and coloration. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Pindar’s place in literary critical reception lies for the most part at the grander, more elaborate end of the stylistic continuum, while the metaphors of flow tend to characterize smoother or purer modes. The elaborate character of his imagery suggests why this may be the case; but the sheer proliferation of natural features and the lively sense of rural settings that Pindar orchestrates clearly contributed central tropes to subsequent conventions of landscape aesthetics, as well as fostering its broad reach. His deictic gestures that evoke the inhabitation of spaces, together with his masterful harnessing of their resources as metaphors, promote a sense of multiple connections among poetic, social, and natural orders, a conjunction that sustains archaic poets’ claims to authority while advancing more ambitious claims to command over cultural and aesthetic territory. Unsurprisingly, Pindar’s usage is especially rich and various. It includes notions of “pouring” by the poet or the Muses and “watering” by Graces (e.g., respectively, P. 10.55–59, I. 8.56–58, I. 6.63–64), which indicates not only sympotic mixing and ritual libation but also an aspect of gardening, so that it intersects with details of the locus amoenus discussed in the next section.41 Consider, for instance, the hybrid metaphor with which Pindar warns that humans are forgetful of poetry that “does not reach the 40

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Cf. Kurke 2005: 83–84, who (following Bell 1992) identifies this ritualization as a form of “misrecognition,” since the poetic performance attributes to settings and divinities powers that it itself establishes. Rather than focusing on the nature of religious belief, I am urging attention to aesthetic practices whereby poets make claims to command powers that they represent as arising directly from the particular features of these settings. See esp. Asper 1997: 128–34; Nünlist 1998: 178–205.

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highest flower of wisdom yoked to glorious streams of words” (σοφίας ἄωτον ἄκρον | κλυταῖς ἐπέων ῥοαῖσιν ἐξίκηται ζυγέν, I. 7.18–19). This particular figure (i.e., the “stream of words”) has a long and influential unfolding. Callimachus famously develops this combination by invoking the culling of “Demeter’s bees” and by drawing out its suggestions of a clear mountain stream: “a pure and unsullied spring trickles from a sacred font, a small stream that is the finest peak [of waters]” (ἥτις καθαρή τε καὶ ἀχράαντος ἀνέρπει | πίδακος ἐξ ἱερῆς ὀλίγη λιβὰς ἄκρον ἄωτον, HAp. 110–12). An emphasis on the stream as indicating a sparkling and quickmoving style emerges as well, especially in the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes. Centuries later Dionysius of Halicarnassus characterizes the smooth (glaphuros) style of composition as “lively and rapid, like streams running down a hillside” (ἐπιτρόχαλος . . . καὶ καταφερὴς . . ., ὥσπερ κατὰ πρανοῦς φερόμενα . . . νάματα), associating it with instrumental music and song, soft and fine sounds (μαλακόφωνα καὶ λεῖα), and light chatter (πολὺ τὸ κωτίλον ἔχοντα), as of women or birds (Dem. 40.43–50). As exemplars of this style Dionysius names Hesiod, Sappho (40.64–66), and elsewhere Euripides – but not Pindar (De comp. verb. 23.33–34).42 Thus smooth or sparkling styles would seem to be among those that emerge from Pindar’s more densely woven modes, and his frequent reliance on the resources of Muses or Nymphs may contribute to these styles’ feminine associations. But since later poets and theorists inevitably treat Pindar’s own style as grand and elaborate, things are not quite this schematic; there is no direct discursive thread that runs from Pindar’s poetics of flow to the lighter, slighter end of the stylistic continuum. Rather, included among Pindar’s intricate figurative combinations are watery metaphors and metonymies that ultimately separate out as indicating refinement and purity or smoothness and delicacy. In some contrast, later writers capture Pindar’s own style as the opposite of this slight, sparkling stream: it is a great flood or roiling river, overwhelming in its power and complexity.43 The vibrancy of Pindar’s metaphors thus does not center on fine discriminations so much as on the forceful channeling of resources that makes for poetic grandeur. When, for instance, Pindar makes use of the trope of drinking from springs as a source of poetic invention and authority, the poet-performer’s claims to skill and knowledge appear to arise directly from a natural setting that also has a high-status genealogical source. This is Olympian 6, in which the speaker follows up a characterization of his 42

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See chs. 3.2a, 5.3, 6.3, and 7.3 for further discussion of the various tropes that poets and theorists use to characterize slight, smooth, or fluid styles. On the reception of Pindar’s “flooding” style, see below and further in chs. 5.4 and 6.3c.

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poetic skills as coming from the breezes with the tracing of his poetic sources to a spring, this one overseen by a nymph to whom he claims a familial connection (O. 6.82–86): δόξαν ἔχω τιν’ ἐπὶ γλώσσᾳ λιγυρᾶς ἀκόνας ἅ μ’ ἐθέλοντα προσέρπει καλλιρόαισι πνοαῖς. ματρομάτωρ ἐμὰ Στυμφαλίς, εὐανθὴς Μετώπα, πλάξιππον ἃ Θήβαν ἔτικτεν, τᾶς ἐρατεινὸν ὕδωρ πίομαι, ἀνδράσιν αἰχματαῖσι πλέκων ποικίλον ὕμνον. I have a reputation for a clear, keen-edged tongue, which comes to me as I wish by sweet-flowing breezes. My mother’s mother was a Stymphalian nymph, blooming Metope, who bore horse-driving Thebe, whose lovely water I drink, weaving my embroidered song for spear-carrying men.

A few commentators have sought to determine the specificities of the aesthetic claims underlying such statements, attempting to tease out how the image of the whetted tongue fits together with the fluid breeze and stream.44 With his typical concentration of images Pindar weaves here a set of interconnections among high-status genealogy, a famous place, and his own elaborate poetic style. While the speaker makes no direct assertion that it is the drinking of these waters that gives rise to the poetry, both place and material seem to bear an essential connection to his poetic craftsmanship. The speaker establishes and effectively achieves his creative identity by grounding it in this setting, opening his poet’s mouth to its bounty, and carrying forward this lovely fluid by its reproduction in song. Once again, the gendering of the scene and its resources works in the service of its male inhabitant, as the poet lays claim to his grandmother’s watery progeny and its transformation into art. Pindar’s mimesis so directly engages the details of place that they appear as if absorbed in and thereby making up the very stuff of his poetry. The process works by a kind of transfusion, with the female substance as the medium, an emulative technique that later theorists reproduce when they take up and transform the tropes of the writers they analyze. Sometimes the poet may instead offer this drink to the object of praise, as if the poetry has already achieved this absorption of resources and 44

E.g., Beattie 1956 and esp. Dover 1959.

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can thereby slake the thirst of the celebrated man, as he and the singer effectively stand at the side of another Theban stream, the river Dirce. At the end of Isthmian 6, for instance, after praising the victors as “watering [the family] with the Graces’ finest dew” (τὰν Ψαλυχιαδῶν δὲ πάτραν Χαρίτων | ἄρδοντι καλλίσται δρόσωι), Pindar compliments their father Lampon as a follower of Hesiod (63–67) and goes on to finish with an enumeration of his virtues.45 At the end of the poem he declares (73–76): πίσω σφε Δίκας ἁγνὸν ὕδωρ, τὸ βαθύζωνοι κόραι χρυσοπέπλου Μναμοσύνας ἀνέτειλαν παρ’ εὐτειχέσιν Κάδμου πύλαις I shall give him the holy water of Dirce to drink, which the deep-girdled daughters of golden-robed Mnemosyne made to flow forth beside the well-built walls of Cadmus.

The water comes directly from the Muses, who – elegantly dressed like their mother – perform a gleaming act of origination that grounds the drinking scene at its Boeotian source. They offer up the inspiring substance, which the poet shares with his patron, like gentlemen at a symposium served by high-class attendants. While Hesiod does not, again, portray himself as drinking from the Muses’ fountain, Pindar does clearly influence the later development of this trope, which in Hellenistic and Roman reception appears to conflate the Hesiodic setting with the Pindaric drinking. That said, there are a few moments in archaic and classical poetry and prose that associate fluids and poetry, sometimes even as a drink of sorts. Hesiod’s famous image of the Muses pouring sweet dew on the tongue of the good leader (τῷ μὲν ἐπὶ γλώσσῃ γλυκερὴν χείουσιν ἐέρσην) so that his words flow like honey (τοῦ δ’ ἔπε’ ἐκ στόματος ῥεῖ μείλιχα) (Th. 83–84) joins fluids (if not water) to utterance.46 In Plato’s Ion Socrates crowds together many of the conventional elements joining poetry, springs, and bees in a caricature of poetic inspiration: the poets, he says, claim that they are “reaping from the honey-flowing springs of some Muses’ gardens and glens and they carry verses to us as do bees” (ἀπὸ κρηνῶν μελιρρύτων ἐκ Μουσῶν 45

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Note that this ode also juxtaposes the image of the whetstone (ἀκόναν, I. 6.73) to that of flowing waters, which suggests that both may be essential elements of stylistic refinement and polish. Murray thinks the imagery of fluidity is dominant because fluency is crucial to oral composition (1981: 95), but this does not account for its long afterlife, which has more to do with poets’ and critics’ harnessing this powerful trope to make claims about stylistic impact.

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κήπων τινῶν καὶ ναπῶν δρεπόμενοι τὰ μέλη ἡμῖν φέρουσιν ὥσπερ αἱ μέλιτται, Ion 534b1–3).47 While neither of these images speaks directly to style, they are absorbed into the tradition as if they did, since fluidity and sweetness come to distinguish smoother or finer modes along the stylistic continuum. The comic poet Cratinus appears to lay claim to the opposite end of this same continuum, when his protagonist boasts that he has fountains of words, a twelve-springed mouth, and an Ilissus in his throat (τῶν ἐπῶν τῶν ῥευμάτων. | καναχοῦσι πηγαί, δωδεκάκρουνον τὸ στόμα, | Ἰλισσὸς ἐν τῇ φάρυγι·, fr. 198 K–A) – a verbal flood that comes from consuming vast quantities of wine.48 By the Hellenistic period poets not only differentiate styles as drinking from particular springs but also oppose water to wine, a distinction that has its roots in the symposium setting and archaic poets’ claims about the inspirational powers of wine (which the comic poets lampoon).49 Hellenistic and Roman poets formulate distinctions along similar lines, envisioning poets whose poetry is conceived of as a grand “flood” (e.g., Homer, Archilochus) as wine drinkers and those who engage slighter styles (e.g, Hesiod, Callimachus) as sipping from purer sources.50 But among these poets the images are complicated and perhaps even contradictory, such that the Hellenistic poet Hedylus can claim that wine is the path to delicate (leptos) composition (HE 5 Gow–Page; Athen. Deipn. 11.45.11–13), while Propertius can put Ennius (writer of epic and tragedy) up there on Helicon, drinking from the Hippocrene spring (3.3.1–6). 47

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For the imagery, cf., e.g., Pi. N. 7.11–12: μελίφρον’ αἰτίαν | ῥοαῖσι Μοισῶν ἐνέβαλε; also a fragment that may be Simonides as paraphrased in Plutarch: αἱ δὲ πολλάκις ἴων καὶ ῥόδων καὶ ὑακίνθων διαπετόμεναι λειμῶνας ἐπὶ τὸν τραχύτατον καὶ δριμύτατον θύμον καταίρουσαι καὶ τούτῳ προσκάθηνται “ζανθόν μέλι μηδόμεναι” (De recta rat. aud. 41f). Plato’s purpose here is not so much dismissive as appropriative; see further in ch. 4.1. The fragment is from Cratinus’ Putinē (Wine Flask); cf. Aristophanes’ Knights, where Cratinus is depicted as a drunkard and a flood (524–36). On Cratinus’ style and rivalry with Aristophanes, see Sidwell 1995; Biles 2002; Ruffell 2002; Bakola 2010. Cf. Euripides' Cyclops, in which the bibulous Silenus characterizes Odysseus' wineflask as a “spring” (κρήνη, Cyc. 148), which suggests its bountiful properties as well as similarly merging flowing water and wine. I have discussed elsewhere water and wine drinkers in the Cyclops as well as comedy and oratory (Worman 2008: 115–17, 129–30, 138–39, 248–49); and see further in chs. 3.4 and 5.3. E.g., Archil. fr. 120 W2; Alc. frs. 333, 335, 338 L–P; Anacr. frs. 373, 396 PMG. Cf. the dithyrambist Philoxenus of Cythera: “Multi-voiced wine is an inventor” (εὐρείτας οἶνος πάμφωνας, Athen. 35d6–7 [2.2.10–11 K]); vs. Phrynichus’ negative judgment of Lampras as a water drinker (ὑδατοπότης, fr. 74 K–A). For the symposium imagery, see Nünlist’s collection of quotations (1998: 199–205). E.g., Callim. Aet. 1, fr. 544 Pf. (cf. Pi. I. 7.18–19); AP 11.20 (Antipater of Thessaloniki) and 11.24 (Antipater of Sidon); Propert. 2.10, 3.3; cf. Hor. Epist. 1.19.1–11; Pers. 1.1–7. See Kambylis 1965: 118–22; Crowther 1979 for a fuller picture; also Knox 1985; Asper 1997: 128–34; Koning 2010: 333–41; and further discussion in ch. 5.4. An unpublished paper by James Zetzel (1980) advanced my understanding of this imagery.

3. From mountainside to garden

Some theorists also take up the challenge of delineating bibulous styles. Demetrius describes those who use too “close turning” a style (i.e., too tightly periodic, καταστραμμένη) as “light-headed, like people drunk on wine” (οὐδ' αἱ κεφαλαὶ ῥᾳδίως ἑστᾶσιν, ὡς ἐπὶ τῶν οἰνωμένων). Meanwhile, their listeners behave like overindulgent symposiasts: they are rendered seasick (ναυτιῶσι) and rambunctious, loudly voicing their familiarity with the periods and shouting out how they end (ἐκφωνοῦσι τὰ τέλη τῶν περιόδων προειδότες καὶ προαναβοῶσι, De eloc. 15).51 This would not be a desirable state to elicit from an oratorical audience. Demetrius associates the rhythms that give rise to it with (among others) Homer as well as Gorgias, the most famous proponent of a chiming periodic style that imitates the cadences of poetry. Cicero similarly envisions the grand stylist who has no slighter modes as a heated, mad, and drunken bacchant (Orat. 99).

3. From mountainside to garden In the paradigmatic scene of poetic inspiration and authority, Hesiod’s shepherd narrator, while tending his flocks under the mountain peak, receives the poet’s skēptron from the Muses. This is handed over with some teasing about his rustic, all-belly status and a clear statement of the Muses’ control of knowledge (Th. 22–34). The skēptron is a blooming branch of laurel (σκῆπτρον δάφνης ἐριθηλέος ὄζον) that the Muses have culled (δρέψασαι) from the tree sacred to Apollo, the poets’ loftiest divinity.52 There are clear class implications here in the Muses’ mocking engagement with the narrator. The hardworking shepherd, whose hungry belly serves as a crude metonymy for his struggling existence, meets up with some high-status females who denigrate him and threaten to withhold knowledge from him.53 But the shepherd-poet and his Muses are also this 51

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Cf. Longinus, who claims that Theodorus used the term “thyrsus-wielding” (παρένθυρσον, i.e., fake bacchanalian) for a misplaced and overly emotional style in which the writer behaves “as if drunk” (ὥσπερ ἐκ μέθης) (De subl. 3). Cf. West 1966 ad loc., who details the arguments for δρέψασαι versus δρέψασθαι; the latter would indicate that the poet-shepherd plucks the branch for himself. West argues for the former, on the grounds of usage; and certainly the narrator’s relationship with the Muses (which differs sharply from that of Pindar, e.g.) is scarcely one of partnership. Cf. Proclus on whether this is a dream or hard-working reality, whereby the shepherd-poet “reaps a great renown” (μεγάλην καρποῦται τὴν εὔκλειαν); he also compares his lowly status to that of Socrates and others (Scholia in Hesiodum prol. proc. 6). See further in ch. 5.1. Cf. Archilochus’ encounter with the Muses as he is walking to town to sell a cow (SEG 15.517, 3rd c.). In its emphasis on teasing and struggling for the upper hand the scene also recalls Odysseus’ meeting with Athena on Ithaca (Od. 13.250–310), the Homeric hero being another figure for the poet in low-status guise.

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mountain scene’s paradigmatic denizens, and the branch he receives from them as his poet’s wand is the most fitting implement of creative invention in a local cultic mode. As scholars have argued, the proem of the Theogony (1–115) has a clear hymnic structure; it is also possible that the scene frames the poet in relation to daphnēphoroi, laurel-bearing attendants of Apollo in ritual celebrations.54 Taken together with the setting that opens the poem – Muses dancing around a mountain spring – this handing over of the poet’s flourishing branch to a rustic inhabitant who can wield its poetic powers appropriately shares some features with topoi and tropes that we can recognize as belonging to the locus amoenus. These spaces are various in their features, and their distinctive residents range from woodland divinities to the poets themselves. The fact that in the ancient reception of this scene poets and scholars often treat it as a dream only further underscores its special qualities as a space of transport.55

a. Pan’s terrains, girls’ meadows A figure who operates at the outer edges of this rustic poetic territory but who seems central to its early formulation is the Arcadian god Pan. While he is more fully a divine extension of the wild mountain scene than Orpheus and his fellow nature poets, he is also absorbed into the poetic tradition as a necessary metonymy for rustic modes (esp. pipe-playing). The Homeric Hymn to Pan shows why this might be the case, since it praises the god by means of a romp on the mountainside.56 All the elements of the locus amoenus are there, up among the mountain crags, and it is a space for music and dance (HPan 14–26): τότε δ' ἕσπερος ἔκλαγεν οἶον ἄγρης ἐξανιών, δονάκων ὕπο μοῦσαν ἀθύρων νήδυμον· οὐκ ἂν τόν γε παραδράμοι ἐν μελέεσσιν ὄρνις ἥ τ' ἔαρος πολυανθέος ἐν πετάλοισι θρῆνον ἐπιπροχέουσ' ἀχέει μελίγηρυν ἀοιδήν. σὺν δέ σφιν τότε νύμφαι ὀρεστιάδες λιγύμολποι φοιτῶσαι πυκνὰ ποσσὶν ἐπὶ κρήνῃ μελανύδρῳ 54

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On the proem as hymn, see Walcot 1957; Minton 1970. On Hesiod and Archilochus as local cult poets, see Nagy 1990a: 47–61. For the associations between daphnēphoria and Apollo’s laurel temples at Delphi and Eretria, see Sourvinou-Inwood 1979. Cf. Pindar’s daphnēphorica, cultic poems for and sung by young men and women (e.g., fr. 94b). See also Scodel 1996. Again, we find this in Proclus (Scholia in Hesiodum prol. proc. 6); but cf. also the mountainside dreaming of Callimachus, Horace, and Propertius and further in ch. 5.1 and 4. For the dating (likely mid fifth century), see Allen and Sykes [1904] 1936: 402; Lehnus 1979; Faulkner 2011.

3. From mountainside to garden μέλπονται, κορυφὴν δὲ περιστένει οὔρεος ἠχώ· δαίμων δ' ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα χορῶν τοτὲ δ' ἐς μέσον ἕρπων πυκνὰ ποσὶν διέπει, λαῖφος δ' ἐπὶ νῶτα δαφοινὸν λυγκὸς ἔχει λιγυρῇσιν ἀγαλλόμενος φρένα μολπαῖς ἐν μαλακῷ λειμῶνι τόθι κρόκος ἠδ' ὑάκινθος εὐώδης θαλέθων καταμίσγεται ἄκριτα ποίῃ. Only at evening, as he returns from the chase, does he sound forth, playing a sweet song on his reed pipes: not even she could surpass him in melodies – that bird who in flower-laden spring pouring forth her lament voices a honeyed song amid the leaves. Then the clear-singing mountain Nymphs are with him and move with nimble feet, singing by some dark-watered spring, while Echo rings out on the mountain-top, and the god on this side or that of the choirs, or at times slipping into the midst, leads nimbly with his feet. On his back he wears a tawny lynx-pelt, and he delights in clear-pitched songs, in a soft meadow where crocuses and hyacinths, sweet-smelling and flourishing, mingle at random in the grass.

Like the Muses at Hesiod’s spring high on Mount Helicon, the scene is one suggestive of cultic practices in the mountains, as well as clearly marking out the aesthetic parameters of Pan’s mode.57 His signature sound is honeyed and clear, like that of the Muses, and even sweeter than that of the nightingale singing out from her flowery retreat.58 The god’s accompanying Nymphs dance around a dark spring, making music with him. The dancing ground is a meadow scattered with flowers – soft, blooming, and vaguely erotic (cf. καταμίσγεται, 26). As its clustering of details and images suggest, Pan’s recondite space hosts a sweet, fluting, and soft musical style, the “rustic” setting foregrounding a sense of its own special refinements. Some fragments from Pindar that may form parts of a partheneion – again, a song performed by girls in celebration of a deity and of their own blossoming – supports the idea that the Hymn to Pan indicates in some loose sense particular cultic practices and the song types that go with them.59 The fragments offer a few aesthetic features similar to the Pan 57

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In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos and Euripides’ Bacchae, Pan is a denizen of Mount Cithaeron (OT 1100–101; Bacch. 951–52). For the nightingale’s song as pouring forth from within the leaves, cf. Hom. Od. 19.518–21; Hesiod depicts the cicada in similar guise (WD 582–84). There is a reference in the scholia on Pi. P. 3.139a that may ascribe this fragment to “the parts of the Partheneia” (τὰ κεχωρισμένα τῶν Παρθενείων). On partheneia more generally, see Calame 1977;

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song: that it is at least associated with a female chorus (here Graces, σεμνᾶν Χαρίτων μέλημα, fr. 95.4 Maehler) and may be honeyed (τὸ σὸν αὐτοῦ μέλι γλάζεις, fr. 97).60 Pindar’s hymn, however, also invokes Pan as a companion of the mother goddess (Ματρὸς μεγάλας ὀπαδέ, fr. 95.361). Details from his poetry, the scholia, and a Life suggest that Pindar claimed a special relationship with Pan and this mother goddess, the latter of whom appeared to him in a vision or a dream (schol. P. 3.137b; cf. Vita Dr. 2.6– 8). In Pindaric reception Pan even shares Pindar’s role as poet-performer: the Ambrosian Vita relates that the god was once seen between Mounts Cithaeron and Helicon singing the poet’s paean (ὁ γοῦν Πάν ὁ θεὸς ὤφθη μεταζὺ τοῦ Κιθαιρῶνος καὶ τοῦ Ἑλικῶνος ᾄδων παιᾶνα Πινδάρου62). Pindar himself in Pythian 3 calls upon both deities at a shrine where girl choruses sing in nightlong rituals (ἀλλ’ ἐπεύξασθαι μὲν ἐγὼν ἐθέλω | Ματρί, τὰν κοῦραι παρ’ ἐμὸν πρόθυρον σὺν | Πανὶ μέλπονται θαμά | σεμνὰν θεοῦ ἐννύχιαι, P. 3.77–79).63 All of these details reinforce a sense of Pan as having aspects bound up with fertility and female rituals, and of Pindar as fashioning a mode suitable to the “virginal” quality of the songs that establish these rites. Indeed, a moment in Pindar’s critical reception indicates a sharp distinction between his usual style and this occasional one: in his treatise on Demosthenes Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes that partheneia require a distinct mode, one less austere but still preserving an antique patina (ἀρχαῖον φυλάττουσα πίνον, Dem. 39.44–46). This “patina” (pinos) is a quality that Dionysius attributes to charming and sweet styles, including that of Plato at his more “flowery” (cf. Dem. 5.12–16); it suggests a mode that has peculiarly feminine qualities, tied up as it originally seems to have been with maiden songs and rituals.64

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the fullest extant example is Alcman’s Partheneion, which may celebrate the Spartan Helen. While some have argued that this Helen was originally a tree goddess, the extant poem contains no references to meadows or other landscape features except for the river Xanthus, which has a swan singing on its banks (100–101). In an appendix Calame gathers evidence indicating that the generic label is likely a Hellenistic invention, but this is not of course to deny that the formal characteristics of the occasional song type were formulated in the archaic period. I should note, however, that this last bit (fr. 97) is only conjectured to be part of the same poem; also, μέλι is an emendation (for μέλος): “μέλος : Wil. (μέλι [μέλη codd.] τὰς ᾠδὰς ἔλεγον Σ)”. Given variously as Demeter or Mater Dindymene, apparently a Boeotian fusion of Cybele with Rhea (schol. P. 3.137b, Paus. 9.25.3; Ambrosian Vita, ed. Drachmann [1903] 1969: 2.6–10); see Haldane 1968: 19–20. Vita Dr. 2.2–4. These details may all come from Pindar’s poetry (or be extrapolations of the claim at P. 3.77–79), since Vitae often cull claims and stories from the poets’ own works. The scholia on this passage claim that Pindar dedicated a shrine to Demeter and Pan; see also Pausanias 9.25.3. Cf. DH De comp. verb. 11.4–9. This distinction is somewhat complicated, however, by Dionysius’ association of the austere style’s aural effects achieved by word combinations with a kind of floral

3. From mountainside to garden

Certain scenes from lyric poetry and Euripidean tragedy bring together affinities to maiden songs, their ritual settings, and erotic appeal or threat. The Roman poets also indicate their adherence to such affinities by inserting themselves into familiar settings of poetic remove and delicacy. These scenes contribute in their different ways to our understanding of a trend discussed in Chapter 1 (section 2a) – namely, that key literary theorists come to cast metaphor and style as feminine, flowery, and in need of careful handling or protection, as well as associating certain poets and prose writers with delicate, feminine modes that may require some chastening. Because the scenes share details and add others that cumulatively advance the sense that the theorists are following convention when they locate certain styles in rural settings, I review a few in some detail. Consider the parodos of Euripides’ Helen, which takes the form of a kommos (i.e., the protagonist sings a lament with the chorus65), points up the darker side of this association with Pan, of fertility or marriage rituals, and of the locus amoenus or “young girls in meadows” tropes and topos: rape.66 Helen, in this drama chaste and abandoned in Egypt, opens the ode by invoking the Sirens and Persephone as suitable leaders of her lament, and naming the proper instruments for accompaniment (Hel. 167–78). The chorus responds with a domesticating scene that matches her aural metonymies with visual ones, in a highly colored and startling juxtaposition of lyric beauty and violence (179–90): κυανοειδὲς ἀμφ' ὕδωρ ἔτυχον ἕλικά τ' ἀνὰ χλόαν φοίνικας ἁλίωι †πέπλους χρυσέαισιν αὐγαῖς θάλπουσ'† ἀμφὶ δόνακος ἔρνεσιν· ἔνθεν οἰκτρὸν ὅμαδον ἔκλυον, ἄλυρον ἔλεγον, ὅτι ποτ' ἔλακεν < > αἰάγμασι στένουσα νύμφα τις οἷα Ναῒς ὄρεσι †φυγάδα γάμων† ἱεῖσα γοερόν, ὑπὸ δὲ

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beauty (cf. ἐπανθῇ τις αὐταῖς χνοῦς ἀρχαιοπινὴς καὶ χάρις ἀβίαστος, Dem. 38.34–35). But its rhythmic effects offset this, being manly (ἀνδρώδεις) rather than soft (μαλθακούς) (39.5–7). See also Hermogenes’ Peri ideōn 2.4.87–90, where both Plato’s locus amoenus from the Phaedrus and Sappho are associated with “sweetness” (γλυκύτης). For variations on the meadowland or floral tropes that distinguish styles, see further in chs. 3.2, 5.2–3, and 6.4. Cf. Arist. Poet. 1452b23–24. Poetic and visual representations do not differentiate rape or seizure very strongly from marriage. On meadows and gardens, see Motte 1973: 38–47; Bremer 1975; Calame 1992: 106–08; Cairns 1997.

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While the chorus of captive Greek women depict the seizure of Helen as like that of a nymph in the mountains, it also takes place as lament, as song, thereby fusing the violent event and ritual practice to the making of poetry. Further, it offers details suggestive of class and gender rankings that frame the scene as involving aristocratic females, befitting of an older lyric age in which women’s work closely borders high-status alliances.67 That in this version of Helen’s story she is taken by Hermes, who snatches her away for safekeeping, does not alter the nature of the action as reinforcing female desirability and defenselessness. Nor does it make it any less like a virgin’s tale, with its bright clothing and vivid riverside setting, or any less of a piece with hymns and odes centering on the rapes in meadows of girls, Nymphs, or female deities (e.g., Io, Oreithyia, Europa, Korē).68 As Jan Maarten Bremer has shown, lyric poetry (including tragic lyric) tends to include in such settings certain shared elements that we can recognize as connecting these spaces: flowers, running water/irrigation, and relevant deities such as Aphrodite or Eros.69 A central example of this type of setting is the invocational hymn that Sappho addresses to Aphrodite (fr. 2 L–P): δεῦρύ† μ' ἐκ Κρήτας ἐπ[ὶ τόνδ]ε ναῦον ἄγνον, ὄππ[αι τοι] χάριεν μὲν ἄλσος μαλί[αν], βῶμοι δὲ †τεθυμιάμενοι [λι]βανώτῳ· 67

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The most famous scene of this sort is Odyssey 6, where the poet frames Nausicaa as engaged in this domestic task while also readying herself for marriage appropriate to her elite status. Respectively, Aesch. Prom. 651–54; Soph. fr. 956 TrGF; Aesch. fr. 99 TrGF; HDem. See Bremer 1975; Cairns 1997; Swift 2009a. Bremer 1975: 271.

3. From mountainside to garden ἐν δ' ὔδωρ ψῦχρον κελάδει δι' ὔσδων μαλίνων, βρόδοισι δὲ παῖς ὀ χῶρος ἐσκίαστ‘, αἰθυσσομένων δὲ φύλλων κῶμα † καταίρει· ἐν δ' λείμων ἰππόβοτος τέθαλεν †ἠρίνοισιν† ἄνθεσιν, αἰ δ’ ἄηται μέλλιχα πνέοισιν . . . [6 lines missing] ἔνθα δὴ σὺ στέμ ἔλοισα Κύπρι χρυσίαισιν ἐν κυλίκεσσιν ἄβρως ὀμμείχμενον θαλίαισι νέκταρ οἰνοχόαισον Come to me from Crete, to this holy temple where lies your lovely grove of apple trees,70 and altars smoking with incense; And here cool water echoes through the apple boughs, and the whole place is shaded with roses, and from the shimmering leaves slumber tumbles down; And the meadow, horse-nurturing, flourishes with spring flowers, and the breezes blow sweetly . . . Coming here now, Kupris, with your garlands, and gently in golden serving bowls pour out like wine the unmixed nectar for our celebration.

The scene embraces at once the grove dedicated to eros, flowing water, flowers, the meadow, and gentle breezes – that is, both the locus amoenus and its sensual extensions, both the idyll and meadow, with its sexual promise and (elsewhere) its threat. Various groupings of these elements turn up repeatedly in the lyric tradition, tracing a continuum that runs from an emphasis on the divinely imbued garden or meadow and erotic love71 to the Pindaric grove or garden, also divinely imbued, that frames the physical adornment (often with flowers) and the quasi-erotic admiration of athletes. But Sappho’s poem is 70

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The word μηλέα/μῆλον refers to the produce of any fruit-bearing tree; commentators usually alternate between “apple” and “quince.” E.g., Arch. 196A W2; Alc. frs. 296 and 347 L–P; Anacr. frs. 346 and 417 PMG; Ibycus frr. 286 (on which see further below) and 288 PMG.

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unique in the close, tactile surround that its details create, which for all their economy nonetheless engage, in performative evocation, all of the necessary features of these spaces. Further, the poem is distinct for its calling forth of a deity who then effectively joins in the party, thereby offering up her resources (including both grove and nectar) for the poet’s use in a more equalizing gesture than is usual in male-authored poems.72 It is not that Sappho fails to make of the setting and its riches a fertile source of poetic expression, as do the male poets, but rather that her use of them engages the deity and her sanctuary in joint celebration. Ibycus paints a scene that is similar in some ways, although unlike Sappho’s tranquil erotic setting, Ibycus’ stands in contrast to love’s crushing meteorology (fr. 286 PMG): ἦρι μὲν αἵ τε Κυδώνιαι μηλίδες ἀρδόμεναι ῥοᾶν ἐκ ποταμῶν, ἵνα Παρθένων κῆπος ἀκήρατος, αἵ τ’ οἰανθίδες αὐξόμεναι σκιεροῖσιν ὑφ’ ἕρνεσιν οἰναρέοις θαλέθοισιν· ἐμοὶ δ’ ἔρος οὐδεμίαν κατάκοιτος ὥραν. †τε† ὑπὸ στεροπᾶς φλέγων Θρηίκιος ϐορέας ἀίσσων παρὰ Κύπριδος ἀζαλέαις μανίαισιν ἐρεμνὸς ἀθαμβὴς ἐγκρατέως πεδόθεν †φυλάσσει† ἡμετέρας φρένας In spring the Cydonian quinces are watered by flowing streams, in the untouched Maidens’ garden and the burgeoning vine blossoms flourish under shadowy branches; but for me Eros rests in no season, and the Thracian north wind, shot with lightning, darts down with scorching spasms from Aphrodite; dark and untamed, it ambushes73 my heart powerfully from the ground up. 72

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Nünlist includes this scene under “Inspirationsflüssigkeit,” but the passage does not tie the imagery of pouring explicitly to poetic inspiration or expression, as Nünlist’s discussion implicitly acknowledges (1998: 197); on the other hand, one could argue that the pouring of nectar is a metaphor for poetic flow. Or “will crush,” taking Tortorelli’s conjecture of φλάσει for φυλάσσει; he argues that the latter does not make much sense and makes for more difficult colometry (Tortorelli 2004: 373).

3. From mountainside to garden

Ibycus here draws a sharp contrast between the untainted girls’ garden, which flourishes in its calm seclusion seemingly safe from love’s travails, and his own sorry topography, open to attack by weather that is brutal in the extreme. This may follow archaic lyric distinctions in its vision of the garden as a protected space, unlike the flowering meadows where young girls cavort imprudently beside streams.74 At the other end of this convention we find that this virgin’s setting has undergone a kind of stylistic transvestism. Catullus, for instance, completes the Sapphic stanzas of poem 11 by refiguring her image of the trampled hyacinth, likely a metaphor for lost virginity in a wedding song (epithalamion, fr. 105c L–P). In Catullus’ poem the field-edge flower (prati | ultimi flos, 22– 23) cut down by the passing plow becomes an image of the narrator’s tender and now ruined love as well as the poet’s slender, refined style. Compare also Propertius, whose “little wheels” (parvis . . . rotis, 3.3.18) run through the soft meadows of girls’ songs and to whom Apollo indicates a “new footpath” (nova semita, 26) to a cave that contains metonymic symbols of some mainstays of Latin pastoral (e.g., Pan’s hymns, satyrs’ songs75). As should be clear from the scene above, Euripides is especially interested in this rural topos and the tropes it generates, from which he fashions lyric styles that echo archaic maiden songs. We can see here another reason to think that Dionysius’ regarding of both Sappho and Euripides as exemplars of the smooth, possibly “flowery,” and “maiden-faced” style (e.g., γλαφυρά [καὶ ἀνθηρά], de Comp. Verb. 23.1; παρθενωπά, 23.16–17; cf. 22.35) has its roots in the rural spaces eroticized by young girls’ rites of passage and their occasional poetry.76

b. Pindar’s flowers Among archaic and early classical poets, Pindar offers the fullest and most multifaceted inhabitation of the flourishing meadow or garden setting. Not only does the imagery of fertile, thriving things reinforce the richness of the poet’s language, but budding plant-life (especially flowers) also prominently picks out the figurative texture of his style.77 Further, the garden and other fertile places point precisely to metaphors themselves as decorative 74

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See Padel 1974; Stehle 1977; Cairns 1997; Calame 1999: 165–67; Rosenmeyer 2004; Swift 2009a, 2009b. Cf. Verg. Ecl. 6, e.g. On Propertius’ tropes, see further in ch. 5.4. Cf. also Orat. 96, where Cicero characterizes the charming sophistic style as florens . . . et expolitum; also Brut. 285, where he terms the style of Demetrius of Phalerum “more flowery” (floridior) than that of Hyperides; cf. Quint. 12.10.58 and further in ch. 7.3a. Again, see McCracken 1934, who notes that the majority of Pindar’s odes contain tropes on plant-life; also Lefkowitz 1963; Stoneman 1981; Segal 1986; Steiner 1986; Patten 2009.

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elements central to this style. As noted, the use of floral imagery as poetic decoration is likely conventional and bound up with ritual settings; and while poets and prose writers draw on other analogies to indicate linguistic adornment (e.g., honey, jewels, etc.), images of flourishing and especially of flowers sustain central connections between natural topographies in all their fertile beauty and the burgeoning of creativity in language. We may recall here Scarry’s notion that flowers are perfect mimetic objects; the predominance of floral tropes in Pindar’s poetry suggests that they are central to his aesthetic ordering. His blooming, lush landscapes both directly portray and run parallel to the movements of aesthetic response and their grounding by means of metaphor (i.e., journey to a setting, inhabitation of it, deployment of its features). In the victory odes in particular, Pindar often spans geographies, invoking travel to special, flowery settings, a movement usually achieved by vivid metaphors and the strategic deploying of deictic markers that Nancy Felson has termed “vicarious transport.”78 This transport also runs parallel to how metaphor traverses the space between the familiar target and its “foreign” gloss, to recall Aristotle’s metaphors for the workings of metaphor (see Poet. 1457a7, 1458a22–23; Rhet. 1404b8–12).79 Further, this parallelism or matching of effects between the nature of metaphor (as decoration, as movement) and the flowers and remote spaces in poetic depictions effectively conjoins poets’ settings for and images of the performance of elaborate song with the poets’ inhabiting of landscapes as spaces of perceptual mimesis and articulation, spaces that in their figurative details aim especially at aesthetic and stylistic discriminations. Pindar’s floral images thus lay claim to inspiration and authority and are its result; they achieve the transport at the heart of the metaphorical process and in their prominence draw the audience to the vibrant pleasures of the images. This transport and attraction is effectively the flowering of metaphor, the proliferation of effects that may well be the central figure for the elaborate style that Pindar made both famous and notorious among ancient poets and literary critics. And although these images point up the multifaceted skills of the poet, the rich proliferation of such decorative effects in Pindar’s poetry suggests that it is the flower that matters. Pindar’s depictions of poetic skill on rural paths and in fertile fields or flowering, spring-fed spaces of inspiration and celebration sometimes also include the Muses, the Hours, the Graces, or Nymphs. These settings also serve as figurative intersections with the victors’ home cities and perhaps especially the actual spaces of celebration, fashioning what Proust might have recognized as a “heraldic” overlay for them. These heraldic gestures 78

Felson 1999.

79

See further in ch. 1.2.

3. From mountainside to garden

often deploy metonyms evoking the sanctuaries in which the games and sometimes the victory celebrations took place, so that the spaces delimited by the individual poems are notably hybrid and enact (or reenact) cultic practices. They are usually fertile, flowering places for poetic creativity and festive occasion, often in or near meadows, groves, and flowing water, or captured in miniature in the victor’s flourishing crowns. That is, they participate, especially via their invocation of cultic settings, in a tradition that associates the locus amoenus with pilgrimage and performance. In these scenes flowers often fuse the poet’s celebration with the victor’s crown (e.g., O. 2.48–51, 7.80) and/or with images of fertility such as the earth’s purple-red bounty and heaven’s burnished glory (e.g., I. 4.36–38, O. 2.70– 74).80 The details evoke lofty fantasies of wealthy and elite lives. In Olympian 2, which celebrates the victory of Theron of Acragas, the poet heralds the lovely end of life for good and noble men on the isles of the Blest (O. 2.70–74). There flowers burn bright on the surrounding waters, on the trees, and on the wreaths and crowns that entwine the hands of the Blessed ones (2.70–74): ἔνθα μακάρων νᾶσον ὠκεανίδες αὖραι περιπνέοισιν· ἄνθεμα δὲ χρυσοῦ φλέγει, τὰ μὲν χερσόθεν ἀπ' ἀγλαῶν δενδρέων, ὕδωρ δ' ἄλλα φέρβει, ὅρμοισι τῶν χέρας ἀναπλέκοντι καὶ . . . [κεφαλάς Pauw.] There the breezes, daughters of Ocean, waft around the Island of the Blest; and flowers flame golden, some on the land from glorious trees, others the water nourishes; they entwine their hands with garlands and [place?] on their heads . . .

This remarkable scene, which overlays the victor’s Sicilian home with the most hallowed island setting, offers flowers as the unique and gleaming adornment of heaven, the perfect emanation of the sacred place. Further, because the imagery shares significant features with other scenes graced by goddesses where poetic ability is more clearly in play, it resonates with implications of authority and skill. In Nemean 7, for instance, the speaker claims that the weaving of the victors’ crowns is a light task (εἴρειν στεφάνους ἐλαφρόν, 80 81

See Nünlist 1998: 206–23 for the range of images. See Mackie 2003: 47–54 on Pindar’s handling of the Muses.

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ἀναβάλεο), while the work of the Muse is rich and miraculous.81 She joins gold and pale ivory, together with the “ocean’s lily flower [i.e., coral] sprinkling it with dew” (Μοῖσά τοι | κολλᾷ χρυσὸν ἔν τε λευκὸν ἐλέφανθ' ἁμᾶ | καὶ λείριον ἄνθεμον ποντίας | ὑφελοῖσ' ἐέρσας, 77–79).82 While Pindar may call for Pythia’s flowering crown to be conferred on the athletes (cf. εὐανθέα καὶ Πυθόϊ στέφανον, I. 7.72), the poet’s own floral offering is a far more wondrous thing. Note the richly crafted quality of the poetic object, which echoes that of more tangible objects in the victor’s privileged surroundings. Garden settings crucially frame poetic skill and wisdom as fertile flowering. In Olympian 9, to which I return shortly, the poet hopes that he may pluck his song directly from the Graces’ garden, a culling that links pleasure to wisdom (26–29). Other poems, including both victory odes and paeans, offer further details of the associations among poetic knowledge, art, and inspiration, the Muses (or Hours, Nymphs, etc.), and the harnessing of rural resources. In Olympian 7, a celebration of Diagoras of Rhodes, Pindar seems also to offer his ode as if from a divine garden, coupling poetic abilities with fruit and nectar (7.7–9): καὶ ἐγὼ νέκταρ χυτόν, Μοισᾶν δόσιν, ἀεθλοφόροις ἀνδράσιν πέμπων, γλυκὺν καρπὸν φρενός, ἱλάσκομαι, I too, sending flowing nectar, the gift of the Muses, the sweet fruit of the mind, to prize-winning men, seek the gods’ favor . . .83

A similar phrase from a fragment warns that some may harvest an imperfect crop (ἀτελῆ σοφίας καρπὸν δρέπειν, fr. 209.1), however.84 The culling of the fruits of wisdom is a delicate business, involving a careful tending that parallels rural cultivation.85 In the brief sally that is Olympian 10 (11) (for Agesidamus of Locri), Pindar begins by evoking the bounties of wind or rain (11.1–2); and while those toiling in contest may need different boons, the poet’s metaphors sustain a somewhat rural cast. The poet’s tongue “shepherds” (ποιμαίνειν) his words to declare that the “blooming” of his poetic skill comes from the gods (ἐκ θεοῦ δ’ ἀνὴρ σοφαῖς ἀνθεῖ πραπίδεσσιν 81 82 83

84

85

See Mackie 2003: 47–54 on Pindar’s handling of the Muses. Race conjectures that this “lily flower of the ocean” is a periphrasis for coral (1997 ad loc.). Cf. Aesch. Sept. 592–94: οὐ γὰρ δοκεῖν ἄριστος ἀλλ’ εἶναι θέλει,/ βαθεῖαν ἄλοκα διὰ φρενὸς καρπούμενος, ἐξ ἧς τὰ κεδνὰ βλαστάνει βουλεύματα. A lemma from Stobaeus claims that Pindar said this of “discoursers on nature” (τοὺς φυσιολογοῦντας) (2.1.21). The phrase is wittily troped by Plato in the Republic as a criticism of ignorant laughter: ἀτελῆ τοῦ γελοίου καρπὸν δρέπειν (Rep. 457b2-3); see further in ch. 4.1.

3. From mountainside to garden

ὁμοίως, 8–10). His sweet-sounding clamor fashions an adornment for the victor’s olive crown (κόσμον ἐπὶ στεφάνῳ χρυσς ἐλαίας | ἁδυμελῆ κελαδήσω, 13–14); and he promises the Muses that the members of his Locrian audience are well situated for this lofty performance, since they reach peaks of skill and battle (ἀκρόσοφόν τε καὶ αἰχματὰν ἀφίξε- | σθαι, 19–20). In Olympian 13 (for Xenophon of Corinth) it is the flowerbedecked Hours who tossed many ancient skills into human hearts (πόλλα δ’ ἐν καρδίαις ἀνδρῶν ἔβαλον | Ὧραι πολυάνθεμοι ἀρ- / χαῖα σοφίσμαθ’, 14–15), while the sweet breath of the Muses blooms in the city (Μοῖσ’ ἁδύπνοος | . . . ἀνθεῖ, 22–23). As an image of poetic practice, the “flower of song” metaphor (e.g., O. 9.48, P. 2.62, Pai. fr. 52m.4–5) may occur in poems that deploy multiple and intersecting metaphors for the poet’s skill and authority. Olympian 9 is a good example of this proliferating figurative style, while Pythian 6 instead forges a carefully grounded intersection between the cultic setting and the special skills of both the poet and the victor’s son. Given the complexities of their images, I next consider each of these odes in some detail. Olympian 9 celebrates one Epharmostus of Opous, who won a wrestling match. Opous, a Locrian city north of Delphi, was founded by Deucalion and Pyrrha; its people are born from stones, earth-bound and originary. Details from rural settings (e.g., springs, rivers, gardens, paths) surface intermittently in the ode, tying this rustic origins narrative (beginning in the second antistrophe) to a cluster of figures for poetry and the poet’s skill. Pindar starts with an arrow metaphor, depicting his craft as coming straight from the Muses’ bow (ἑκαταβόλων Μοισᾶν ἀπὸ τόξων, 5), by which he will praise the tree-clad (ἀγλαόδενδρον, 20) city of Opous. A pair of watery metonymies heralds the fame of the city: both the Castalian spring (i.e., Delphi) and the river Alpheus (i.e., Olympia) “bloom” (θάλλει) with Opous’ victories (16–18), while the city itself has a leafy splendor (ἀγλαόδενδρον, 20). Images of fire, horses, and sailing deploy in quick succession metaphors for the poet’s skill, but they culminate in a scene where the poet with his destined art tills the exclusive garden of the Graces (εἰ σύν τινι μοιριδίῳ παλάμᾳ | ἐξαίρετον Χαρίτων νέμομαι κᾶπον·, O. 9.26–27). From them comes delights (τὰ τέρπν’); and divinity fosters good and wise men (ἀγαθοὶ δὲ καὶ σοφοί) (28–29).86 In keeping with this image, Pindar declares as he begins the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha that 86

Cf. an anonymous ancient commentator on the opening of Hesiod’s Theogony: συγκατοικεῖν δὲ τὰς Χάριτας ταῖς Μούσαις φησὶ διὰ τὸ χαρίεν καὶ ἐπιθυμητὸν τῆς σοφίας (p. 373.15).

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unlike wine the “flowers of song” must be new (ἄνθεα δ’ ὕμνων | νεωτέρων) (48–49). And we should recall here as well that at the end of the poem, the image of the long, steep path underpins the poet’s final meditation on his task: some paths have further boundaries (ὁδοὶ περαίτεραι) and wisdoms are “steep” (σοφίαι μὲν | αἰπειναί) (105–08).87 The ode as a whole thus presses on familiar connections between a cultivated poetic flowering and special knowledge, here framed by the leafy locale from which the victor comes. Pythian 6, which purports to celebrate the victory of Xenocrates of Acragas but actually focuses on the youthful glories of his son Thrasybulus, is much more clearly focused on the cultic setting. The victory song is processional, marking passage toward the temple of Apollo at Delphi in part by means of a “house of poetry” metaphor (lit. the “treasure house of songs” ὕμνων | θησαυρός, 7–8).88 But Pindar also frames the ode with three vibrant rural images, which bind the poet’s skill to that of the victor’s son, in whom the poet perceives a shared sensibility. The first of these images opens the poem: Ακούσατ'· ἦ γὰρ ἑλικώπιδος Ἀφροδίτας ἄρουραν ἢ Χαρίτων ἀναπολίζομεν, ὀμφαλὸν ἐριβρόμου χθονὸς ἐς νάϊον προσοιχόμενοι·. . . Listen! For truly are we plowing the field of glancing-eyed Aphrodite or of the Graces, approaching the sacred navel of the loud-roaring land . . .

While the poet plows this field, the depiction of which associates an erotic grace with epinician skills, his friend Thrasybulus “leads his wealth with understanding, culling his youth without injustice or arrogance and his wisdom in the valley of the Pierian Muses” (νόῳ δὲ πλοῦτον ἄγει, | ἄδικον οὔθ’ ὑπέροπλον ἥβαν δρέπων, | σοφίαν δ’ ἐν μυχοῖσι Πιερίδων, 47–49). Not only this, but Thrasybulus’ mind is sweet and responds to the “fretted work of bees” (i.e., the poet’s well-worked song89) among friends at symposium (γλυκεῖα δὲ φρὴν | καὶ συμπόταισιν ὁμιλεῖν | μελισσᾶν ἀμείβεται τρητὸν πόνον, 52–54). 87

88

89

Empedocles uses a similar image of wisdom on high at the outset of his poem Peri phuseōs: μηδέ σέ γ’ εὐδόξοιο βιήσεται ἄνθεα τιμῆς | πρὸς θνητῶν ἀνελέσθαι, ἐφ’ ὧι θ’ ὁσίης πλέον εἰπεῖν | θάρσεϊ – καὶ τότε δὴ σοφίης ἐπ’ ἄκροισι θοάζειν, fr. 3.5–7 D–K). In Pythian 1, another ode that starts with a vibrant invocation of the Delphic setting, divine hearts are charmed by the wisdom (σοφίᾳ) of Apollo and the “deep-valleyed” (βαθυκόλπων) Muses. As Kurke 1990: 101 argues; this is her translation for μελισσᾶν . . . τρητὸν πόνον.

3. From mountainside to garden

If flowers, then bees: the bee-poet or performer appears to be a familiar hymnic and lyric trope, turning up not only in Pindar but also in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and Bacchylides (Pi. P. 10.53–54; HHerm. 553–66; Bacch. 10.10).90 Honeysweet voices in epic belong to leaders and poets (e.g., Hom. Il. 1.249; Hes. Th. 81–103). Bacchylides invokes the “sweetened Muses” (γλυκειᾶν | Μουσᾶν) of Hesiod as inspiration to adhere to the path (κελεύθου) of praise, since from such praise shoots of good men flourish (πυθμένες θάλλουσιν ἐσθλῶν), guarded by the great father/gardener Zeus (Bacch. 5.191–97). We can also recall here the paean in which, after a fragmentary section involving flowering crowns, ringing songs, and the Muses, Pindar draws a similar connection between Hesiod’s Muses and the high path of wisdom (ὅστις ἄνευθ’ Ἑλικωνιάδων | βαθεῖαν [. . .] ἐρευνᾷ σοφίας ὁδόν, Pai. fr. 52h.20; cf. σοφίας ὁδόν, 52k.4). In these poems wise men possess the skills that are tended by and flourish from the poet’s art, the rustic metonymies asserting a connection between the Muses high up on Helicon and the floral, honey-sweet gifts given to leader and poet alike. Later on in the fifth century such images have come to possess the patina of age. Aristophanes treats the metaphor of the bee-poet feeding on meadows as something of a cliché, attached to Phrynichus and an earlier rustic mode (Ar. Av. 748–50; Ran. 1003). This stands in contrast to Euripides’ smooth, polished, overly modulated styles, for which Aristophanes reserves the most piquant imagery. Certain tragic lyrics situate poetic authority in rural settings, most strikingly Euripidean choruses that invoke Eros, the Graces, or the Muses (e.g., Med. 1085–89, Bacch. 395–411, IA 543–67).91 Further, in a move that anticipates Plato’s suburban retreat, Euripides supplies the scene that perpetuates the lyric association of eros and wisdom with the rural (or quasi-rural) setting.92 In the ode from the Medea celebrating Athens, which follows Medea’s securing of sanctuary from Aegeus, the king of Athens, the chorus takes up an archaizing, Pindaric mode. The ode depicts Aegeus’ Athenian ancestors as at least bee-like if not bees, stepping lightly through the upper air and grazing on wisdom (Med. 90 91

92

On the “bee maidens” in the HHerm., see Scheinberg 1979; see also Richardson 2010. This is as opposed to the vocabulary of technical devices and their possessors (e.g., sophisma, sophistēs), which the lyrics never use whereas the episodes do so frequently. Cf. Ar. Nub., where the chorus sings about “towering wisdom” and the “prudent flower” that adorns the words of the park-loving older Logos (1023–26): ὦ καλλίπυργον σοφίαν | κλεινοτάτην ἐπασκῶν, | ὡς ἡδύ σου τοῖσι λόγοις | σῶφρον ἔπεστιν ἄνθος; and Ar. Ran., where the chorus calls upon the Muse to enter the chorus of Initiates, where myriad wisdoms reside (673–76): Μοῦσα, χορῶν ἱερῶν ἐπίβηθι καὶ ἔλθ’ ἐπὶ τέρψιν | ἀοιδᾶς ἐμᾶς, | τὸν πολὺν ὀψομένη λαῶν ὄχλον, οὗ σοφίαι | μυρίαι κάθηνται.

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824–44). Thus the Medea, a play whose protagonist is unquestionably clever and skilled, situates an older knowledge in a parkland setting in Athens, the city that will serve as sanctuary for her (Med. 835–48):93 ΧΟ. Ἐρεχθεΐδαι τὸ παλαιὸν ὄλβιοι καὶ θεῶν παῖδες μακάρων, ἱερᾶς χώρας ἀπορθήτου τ' ἄπο, φερβόμενοι κλεινοτάταν σοφίαν, αἰεὶ διὰ λαμπροτάτου βαίνοντες ἁβρῶς αἰθέρος, ἔνθα ποθ' ἁγνὰς ἐννέα Πιερίδας Μούσας λέγουσι ξανθὰν Ἁρμονίαν φυτεῦσαι· τοῦ καλλινάου τ' ἐπὶ Κηφισοῦ ῥοαῖς τὰν Κύπριν κλήιζουσιν ἀφυσσαμέναν χώρας καταπνεῦσαι μετρίας ἀνέμων ἡδυπνόους αὔρας· αἰεὶ δ' ἐπιβαλλομέναν χαίταισιν εὐώδη ῥοδέων πλόκον ἀνθέων τᾷ Σοφίᾳ παρέδρους πέμπειν Ἔρωτας, παντοίας ἀρετᾶς ξυνεργούς. Erechtheus’ offspring were prosperous of old, both children of the blessed gods and from a holy, indomitable land, grazing on most renown wisdom, and always stepping gently through the gleaming air, where once they say the nine Pierian Muses gave birth to golden Harmonia; and by the streams of the lovely-rushing Cephisus they proclaim that Aphrodite, drawing water, breathes sweet-scented, cooling gusts of wind over the land; and that always crowning her hair with a fragrant wreath of rosy flowers, she sends forth Loves as companions of Wisdom and helpers in every sort of virtue.

This flowery style fashions a luminous sensual space, framing Aphrodite and her setting (a soft, scented locus amoenus); and again, it affects a quasiPindaric mode, complete with a meter to match (dactylo-epitrite). The scene also evokes the Academy, a park on the banks of the Cephisus that the philosophers would soon claim as their own.94 Euripides casts this parkland setting as a place of sensuous contemplation and conversation, 93

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Allen (1900 ad loc.) remarks, “The σοφία is thought of as a natural product of the country.” Aphrodite “in the Gardens” (en kēpois) had a temple that was likely somewhere along the Ilissus; also note that the Academy was near the Cephisus. See further in chs. 3.3 and 4.2. The park was named after the Athenian hero Academus; cf. Theogn. 995–1002, which addresses Academus and sketches a similar scene.

3. From mountainside to garden

one that in its riverbank locale and erotic associations sets the scene for the Phaedrus. While Plato situates the Phaedrus along Ilissus, which flowed just south of the city walls (where some scholars also locate the temple of “Aphrodite in the Gardens”), the Cephisus is the river that ran past the Academy.95 In Clouds the Stronger Argument envisions the Academy as a space of dreamy parkland play, where young men disport themselves under flowering trees (1005–08). And as Chapter 4 discusses at length, in the Phaedrus Plato depicts Socrates as a denizen of the urban setting who nevertheless seeks a new kind of inspiration and authority, initially in a form resembling Pindaric transport, along the flowering, shady riverbank. Later generations of poets sustain the bits and pieces of this rural, grazing mode in a negotiation with Hesiod, Pindar, and their poetic settings. As Chapters 5 and 6 discuss in more detail, Callimachus and Horace deploy the image of the bee-poet as a metonymy for their refined lyric styles. Both fashion oppositions between grand and slight styles, following distinctions that have a long and dominant tradition. Callimachus’ bees of Demeter, who draw water only from the purest of springs and thereby combine (implicitly floral) culling with the imagery of flow (H.Ap. 110–12), influenced later poets’ and theorists’ discriminations among stylistic features. Horace depicts himself as a bee among the riverbank thyme, as opposed to Pindar, whose poetry he figures as a great, roiling river and the poet a soaring swan.96 I am not, of course, claiming that all of these poets’ images mean the same thing or are precisely commensurate. Rather, they all participate in an interconnected set of landscape features that are pastoral or rural; and these features gesture toward different but interconnected poetic styles and genre associations that later form a coherent pattern in literary critical and theoretical discourse. The poets’ invocations of spaces marked by human culling of the land’s resources, including pasturing or grazing, gardening or watering, and path-forging serve to indicate variously their mastery of or affinities with certain genres and styles. And since these rural metonymies frequently pick out features of cultic spaces and practices or are interwoven with these, they contribute to their depictions’ deictic power, which enlivens the audience’s sense of place and/or brings specific environs before the mind’s eye.97 This vibrant mapping of stylistic effects is a central reason why earlier poets’ and 95

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On Aphrodite and meadows of love, see Calame 1999: 170–74; also Motte 1973: 121–37; Bremer 1975. Cf. Horace: ego apis Matinae | more modoque | grata carpentis thyma per laborem | plurimum circa nemus uvidique | Tiburis ripas operosa parvos | carmina fingo (Od. 4.2.27–32). See further in chs. 5.3 and 6.3c. See Felson 1999; Eckerman 2014.

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especially Pindar’s landscape metaphors come to play such a central role in the development of a critical vocabulary. The pastoral or rural modes explored in this discussion range from grander ones clearly associated with Pindar himself (e.g., elaborate, fertile vocabulary and metaphors) to modes more lucid and refined (as suggested by bee and water imagery). The distinctive resonances of all the lyric tropes and settings – the high path, the mountain springs, the locus amoenus, the flowering fields or gardens – encourage later poet-critics and literary theorists to orient stylistic schemes by means of their coordinates. The chapters that follow reveal, for instance, that the high or rough path tends to be a manly tramp and mode, best suited to the likes of Homer, Pindar, and Thucydides, as opposed to wending one’s way along the shady banks of a river like Socrates in the Phaedrus and thereby charting a mode that takes its features in addition from the locus amoenus and the river’s flow. While Pindar largely remains a metonymic figure for a lofty, metaphorrich style, Hellenistic and Roman stylistic theorists such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Cicero locate a soft, fluid, floral style as “lyric,” “mixed,” and even “Greek,” associating it with Hesiod, Sappho, and Euripides.98 These distinctions would appear to have a strongly gendered cast, but – again – Pindar’s style at least is not generally aligned with the more feminine end of their range, despite his penchant for the watery and floral. This may be one result of a cultural shift, marked in part by a shift in venue, from the archaic and early classical to the later classical periods. Earlier poets composed largely for occasions that included their songs as enacting or in fact sometimes establishing community rituals. Even Pindar’s victory odes can be included in this category, since, despite their more attenuated connections to local rituals, the poet repeatedly invokes these as a means of asserting his and his patrons’ wide-ranging dominion. Thus the rural or sanctuary settings in which many (or perhaps most) of these rituals took place had yet to be supplanted by urban spaces and practices, most notably the Athenian Agora and Theater of Dionysus. Once this shift was fully felt, poets began to align themselves in relation to the urban–rural divide, often distinguishing their orientations from those of others in negative and gendered terms. As the next chapter demonstrates, comic poets associate country settings with older and cruder modes (both behavioral and stylistic), as opposed to the refinements of the city, and Euripides in particular receives ambiguous attention both for being a polished, urban creature 98

Cic. Orat. 42, 228–29; DH Dem. 5.12–16, 39.44–46; cf. 5.48–51. See further in chs. 6.2 and 7.4.

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and for fashioning a lyric space apart that is sometimes feminine and often floral. That said, style matters most: some earlier poets compose in more fulsome, metaphorical modes and are received as doing so – this is true of not only of Pindar but also of Archilochus and Aeschylus if not Hesiod.99 Since poets ground the original sources for poetic wisdom and power in rural settings and show themselves mastering their features, which are frequently feminine by source or association, most remain largely immune from the implications of, say, the Maidens’ garden. It is this potentially unmanning but essential rural landscape that Aristophanes interrogates in Frogs and that Plato takes up and transforms, in order to lay claim to an authority somehow equal to that of the path-treading, spring-drinking, branch-wielding, flower-culling poets. 99

Homer is a special case; see further in chs. 6.3b and 7.2b.

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3

On the road Charting the path of literary judgment in Aristophanes

With creative relish, [the intellect] muddles up metaphors and shifts the boundary stones of abstraction, describing a river as a moving road that carries man to places to which he normally walks. Friedrich Nietzsche1

Aristophanes is among the first of the ancient Greek writers to address literary styles directly. Unlike the writers of technical treatises on rhetoric such as Gorgias and Prodicus, however, the comic genre in which he composed entailed that any discussion of styles necessarily extended to parody of citizen tastes and behaviors. His influence is thus at least twofold: in Frogs he mocks genre and stylistic affinities in order to set forth an oppositional paradigm (Aeschylus vs. Euripides, grand vs. slight); and there as well as in other plays he calibrates stylistic distinctions to bodily habits.2 Most significant for our purposes here are the ways in which he maps these styles and inclinations onto the terrain of Athens and its environs, in Nietzsche’s terms he thereby “shifts the boundary stones of abstraction,” reordering the lay of the land and crafting fantasy spaces (which often have their nightmarish aspects) as a means of showing Athenians where they have gotten to in the scheme of things.3 In Aristophanes’ Frogs, as elsewhere in Attic comedy, the multilayered semiotics of theatrical space and situation complicates this in multiple ways, which means that it is often unclear where one is, as well as with whom and to what end. So, for instance, an ancient audience might find itself on the “Acropolis” and on the Acropolis, as happens in Thesmophorizusae.4 Nick Lowe has traced how the comic orchestration 1 2 3

4

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“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” [1873] 2009: 263. See O’Sullivan 1992; Worman 2008: ch. 2. As Halliwell notes, this does not mean that Frogs offers any clear, concrete answers to the problem of poetic judgment, since the comic genre itself precludes them (2011: 98). See the end of section 3 below. Of course, dramatic enactment quite generally entails that any referential or deictic gesture indicates a here and now that is fictional, mimetic of some other time and place, as well as resonating with the actual space of the theater. On theatrical referencing and semiotics, see Ubersfeld 1977; Elam 1980; Issacharoff 1981.

On the road

of fictional space frequently fashions a wild ride for its heroes, from down on the ground to the upper air, from up on the Acropolis to down in the town, and from city to country.5 Aristophanes’ Birds, for instance, begins with Euelpides and Peisetaerus wandering in some thicketed space out of town, where they have gone to find themselves an avian place apart. From this first moment they thus demarcate, within the confines of the Theater of Dionysus, a non-urban, non-Athenian setting that is characterized, at least initially, by bushes and birdsong. Their anti-civic yearnings have led them on this search for a non-Athens, a peaceful place separate from the busy (and busybody) activities of the city. In spatial terms, however, the play ultimately orchestrates a kind of whiplash, as toward its end Peisetaerus mounts the Acropolis in order to wed the goddess Basileia, whom some have associated with Athena Polias. We may find Foucault’s concept of “heterotopias” useful here, since he formulates these constructed places as “capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible”; and he names the theater as such a place.6 The comic reorderings of place and space map familiar figures onto topographies that are usually well known – indeed, that are often all but buried under layers of cultural accretion – and that help to orient a distinctive enactment of aesthetic, ethical, and spatial schemes. Since Attic comedy targets the bodies that occupy these topographies in unique ways, often posing them in absurd coordination with spaces in and out of Athens, this discussion treats both the received landscapes of Athens and its “landscapes with figures,” fantasy terrains with specially attuned denizens that Aristophanes dramatizes in order to reflect upon and critique Athenian civic practices and the aesthetics associated with them. I thus address the dynamics created by interactions among the concrete stamp of culture on actual spaces, their place within dramatic literature in relation to poetic conventions, and their shaping by onstage semiotics as value-laden settings inhabited by profane arbiters of style and inclination. Though primarily fictional and only directly referential within the theatrical space, these settings are not abstract spaces in any true sense; rather, they are deeply rooted in the ground of civic practices, organized and assigned value in relation to recognizable transactions by distinctive figures in familiar places. But they are also dream spaces fashioned by the interactions of the poet’s envisioning and audiences’ familiarity with local landscapes. Together they establish heraldic coordinates that both elevate these spaces 5

Lowe 2006; see also Revermann 2006.

6

Foucault 1986: 25.

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symbolically, so that they exceed the limits of the real, and yet peg them to distinct places in and out of downtown Athens. While the action of Birds begins when its characters have already left the city and dramatizes a political and intellectual terrain of “lofty” proportions, Frogs traces the route to literary judgment as the passage of a crabby, distracted traveler through a jumble of local settings, fashioning a comic patchwork of aesthetically and religiously important rituals. With its constantly changing settings and focus on poetic judgment, the play serves a unique function in explorations of space and place in Greek drama. At the outset of Frogs the audience is offered the inside joke of “paths” on the comic stage – namely, that there are paths and “paths” – ways in and out of life and modes of making poetry, an inclusive image that since Homer indicates ethical and aesthetic orderings and styles.7 In addition, within the semiotics of the dramatic stage, there is the path through mimetic space, which maps the “Athenian landscape” within the Theater of Dionysus; there are also the ritual spaces that the play’s mimesis dramatizes, which accrete symbolic significance through this fictional mapping.8 And finally, since this is comedy, there is the protagonist as pilgrim, here the god of dramatic poetry – Dionysus in his own precinct – whose physical complaints and constant changes of costume suggest his weakness, lack of perspective, and irresolution. The action of the play first conflates modes of leave-taking (”getting to Hades,” i.e., dying) with a literal path from Heracles’ house, across a marsh, and into the countryside. Scholars have usually highlighted the ritual significance of the play’s changing spaces, and many regard its signposts as pointing importantly to features central to the Eleusinian Mysteries.9 I do not dispute such connections; they may well be vital to understanding the ritual shaping of Dionysus’ journey to the Underworld. But Frogs is the only extant Attic comedy that features this particular Athenian processional, which encourages a focus on the intersection of the changing ritual 7 8

9

For earlier paths imagery, see ch. 2.1. Williams (1973) emphasizes repeatedly the imbeddedness of the literary discourse in concrete social and economic relations to the fields, hills, roads, and towns that shape a community’s everyday life. See also Buxton 1994; Schama 1999; and Cosgrove and Daniels [1988] 2002 on the imprint of culture on topography. Segal 1961 has been influential, although he does emphasize that Aristophanes also intertwines local rituals such as the Anthesteria and Lesser Dionysia; cf. Moorton 1989; Bowie 1993; Lada-Richards 1999; Edmonds 2004. As earlier scholars such as Tierney 1934 have emphasized, wartime impediments to the Eleusinian procession make it unlikely that Aristophanes would directly lampoon this prominent ritual, the loss of which must have been sharply felt by his Athenian audience. Note as well that the play never directly references Eleusis or the Eleusinian Mysteries.

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localities mimed onstage and the play’s primary target, literary judgment. Since the literary, ritual, and topographical signposts together indicate the path that Aristophanes charts from city to countryside, I consider in detail the spaces of the first half of the play. The discussion juxtaposes stylistic conventions and the play’s ritual references (i.e., “rituals” within the dramatic fiction) that appear to indicate elements of local dramatic and fertility celebrations, some of which may have taken place in riverside spaces outside the city walls, such as along the Cephisus and the Ilissus. The latter becomes the more significant space in literary critical and theoretical convention, and it cannot be happenstance that the landscape references in Frogs suggest that Aristophanes associates a burgeoning literary critical discourse, complete with its own easily sidetracked judge, with this riverside setting. In fact, his dramatization of this stylistic landscape proved influential, since Plato and later literary critics situate their stylistic discussions in relation to this same terrain and offer deprecating assessments of its likely denizens.10 Why this discourse and its discoursers belong here in particular results, I think, from the clustering effect of ritual practices, emblematic landscape features, and poetic traditions, which together come to shape a fitting path for the comic enactment of literary judgment. As I show, along this route from city to (quasi-) countryside, irreverent and mock-lofty choral songs that invoke local rituals call attention to the familiar aspects of their styles, which in turn illuminate the significance of different spots on the way, prefiguring later distinctions between the two tragic poets in relation to the urban–rural divide, to old and new figures and modes, and to gender allegiances. In the sections that follow I first explore how Aristophanes’ critical schemes frame his favorite targets, lampoon their deportments, and situate them in their typical locales. Here I consider as well Plato’s engagement with them, since his dialogues show an early critical development around particular embodied styles. Next, I turn to Frogs and highlight the features along the path out of the city that shape differences between choral modes and the poets’ styles. I then consider the intersection of ritual practices and landscape details from the prospect of the Theater of Dionysus, the mimetic spaces of which resonate with the terrain beckoning just south of the theater, the familiar accretions of which would have been easily accessible to an Athenian audience. Finally, I focus on the landscape 10

Most evident in Plato’s Phaedrus, Cicero’s De oratore, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On the Style of Demosthenes.

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metaphor that fosters the aesthetic coordinates that in turn ground Aristophanes’ intervention in this literary critical tradition: the river of words.

1. Bodies and topographies in Aristophanes and Plato The literary critical journey that Aristophanes traces in Frogs takes its most prominent cue from poetic and topographically ensconced ritual traditions that situate inspiration and fertile proliferation outside of the city walls, down along valley streams, in meadows, or up mountainsides.11 As Chapter 2 sets out, early poets indicate their aesthetic orientation, status, and authority by means of their mastery and deployment of rural features such as rough paths, flowing springs, and meadows in flower. The spaces and their inhabitants often indicate clearly gendered dynamics and sometimes contrast rural and urban settings (e.g., Hesiod’s scorning of the agora, WD 26–32; cf. Alcaeus missing the agora, 130.18 L–P), but this contrast is not nearly as prominent as it becomes in the classical period. Athenian writers repeatedly make such distinctions, and Attic comedy in particular marks out the urban–rural divide by differentiating – in sharply funny and suggestive terms – bodily deportments and inclinations, as well as where these belong in and out of the city of Athens. I note at the end of Chapter 2 a shift that I would identify as essentially stylistic is evident in classical culture, which is likely due at least in part to the fact that the literature of the period is mostly Athenian and as such focuses largely on polis culture and spaces of civic performance (e.g., the Agora, the courts, the theaters). The shift reflects this move to the urban spaces, so that (to put it in overly polarizing terms) countryside and marginal spaces accrete associations attached to older and cruder modes or ones that are feminized and romantic, while urban spaces foster lowbrow wrangling on the one hand and polished refinement on the other. Again, because of this focus on the city and civic performance, poets and prose writers often locate stylistic distinctions in relation to the body, as it can be viewed in meaningful postures and places in the urban scene.12 11

12

For these different settings and the poetic and ritual conventions associated with them in archaic poetry, see ch. 2. Bourdieu’s arguments about how deportments, modes of verbal expression, etc. constitute a “lifestyle made flesh” (1991: 86) help to illuminate my focus on the body in this chapter and in ch. 7. As I note in the introduction to ch. 7, this focus on the body also orients Cicero’s treatises on style, perhaps in part because he is also writing for and about performance in urban settings.

1. Bodies and topographies

Things are never quite this simple or schematic, of course, both within the confines of Greek literary representation and in regard to the topography of the ancient city. Athens has its “suburban” spaces (e.g., sanctuary and parkland areas just outside of the city walls) and its “outside inside” cult places and practices (e.g., Aphrodite “in the Gardens” and the cave of Pan on the Acropolis).13 Correlatively, the most interesting players in this stylistic scramble are ambivalent and many-sided, engaging modes that merge features from different settings and slipping in and out of the city. That said, I want to isolate two trends here that I find most helpful for understanding what happens to stylistic topographies in Athens in the late fifth century and into the fourth. One trend concerns a set of negative associations grounded, I think, in earlier notions of straight or twisted paths/morals (e.g., Hes. WD 216–21; Pi. P. 2.84–88), which emerge in the Athenian setting as embodied in deportments that indicate styles of song or argument, as well as spatial affinities. The other trend is the more overtly gendered aspect of such inflections and converges on the figure of Euripides, who is most clearly innovative in relation to and aligned with “feminine” styles and mimesis.14

a. Socrates and straight versus twisted styles In early Greek poetry heroes and victors are upright and straight-striding, deportments that broadcast their moral qualities; they are also brave, enduring, and judicious. Homeric poetry indicates clearly how this kind of evaluation works: the heroes are ranked according to certain characteristics, many of them aesthetic ones. They tend to be tall, swift, and gleaming; and if, like Odysseus they are stockier than the ideal, this carries its own distinction in its suggestion of stalwartness and firm command (e.g., Il. 3.195–98). High-status female characters also may exhibit some distinctive shimmer, though special qualities such as this tend to be reserved for Helen and the goddesses, especially Aphrodite.15 Others are not so blessed – take Thersites, for instance, the notoriously abusive and abused haranguer of Iliad 2, who exhibits a thoroughly unheroic body, being pointy-headed, round-shouldered, and lame (Il. 2.217–19). The Homeric

13 14 15

Plato’s dialogues sustain a similar (and often comic) attention to the physical. See further in Worman 2008: Introduction as well as chs. 2 and 4. See further below, section 3. See esp. Zeitlin [1981] 1996b; also O’Sullivan 1992; Worman 2008: ch. 2. See Vernant 1989; Goldhill 1998: 105–06; Worman 2002: 83–84.

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aesthetic is comparatively uncomplicated in this regard: heroes are upright and noble (unless they are in disguise) and others are not. Pindar’s odes offer a scheme that is more clearly aligned with the lay of the land, celebrating tall, straight bodies and matching these with lofty morals and straight paths, while often cashing out these rankings overtly in relation to aristocratic terrains and economies, as well as descent and dominion. Take, for example, the Sicilian Theron, winner of the chariot race at Olympia in 476: he is “just in his regard for guests, the bulwark of Acragas, the finest city-pillar of illustrious ancestors” (ὄπι δίκαιον ξένων, | ἔρεισμ’ Ακράγαντος, | εὐωνύμων τε πατέρων ἄωτον ὀρθόπολιν, O. 2.5–7). Because of his qualities as prop and defense of the city, the singer asks Zeus, as ruler over Olympus, the festival lands of Olympia, and the river Alpheus, to be cheered by the hymns and so preserve the sovereignty of Theron’s family over their lands in Sicily (2.11–15).16 A different calculation is offered to the aptly named Timodemus of Acharnae, winner of an earlier Nemean contest (485): since “the life that guides him straight on the path of his fathers” (πατρίαν | εἰπερ καθ’ ὁδόν νιν εὐθυπομπός | αἰών) has offered him as an “adornment” (κόσμον) to Athens, he will swiftly “reap the finest flower” (δρέπε-| σθαι κάλλιστον ἄωτον) of the Isthmian games and take victory at the Pythian (N. 2.6–9). And then there is the boxer Diagoras of Rhodes, a straight-fighting giant of a man (εὐθυμάχαν . . . πελώριον ἄνδρα) who has been crowned beside the Alpheus and the Castalian spring – that is, at both Olympia and Delphi (παρ’ Ἀλ- | φειῷ σταφανωσάμενον . . . | καί παρὰ Κασταλίᾳ) – among many other places (O. 7.15–16, cf. 80–86). He “pursues a straight route on a road that hates arrogance, knowing clearly what the upright minds of his noble ancestors wanted for him” (ὕβριος ἐχθρὰν ὁδόν | εὐθυπορεῖ, σάφα δαεὶς ἅ τε οἱ πατέρων | ὀρθαὶ φρένες ἐξ ἀγαθῶν | ἔχρεον, 7.90–92). This straight striding provides a contrast to those whose minds “a baffling cloud of forgetfulness drags from the path of upright actions” (cf. λάθας ἀτέκμαρτα νέφος | καὶ παρέλκει πραγμάτων ὀρθῶν ὁδόν | ἔξω φρενῶν, 7.45–47). Bodies, mentalities, and topographies are not so smoothly aligned and misrecognized in late fifth-century Athens, where measures of citizen status and stature are constantly applied and challenged.17 This is particularly evident in Attic comedy, which gleefully sets up schemes that run directly counter to received values; but some of these schemes turn up in fourth-century prose as well. Much of the imagery involves Socrates, a 16 17

See Kurke 1991: 85–107. On the concept of “misrecognition” (méconnaissance) – that is, treating what are essentially economic relations as, say, guest–host – see Bourdieu 1977: 4–6.

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figure who so eludes categorization that his fellow citizens delight in juxtaposing him – to (other) sophists, to his favorite haunts, and to his style of argument.18 Unsurprisingly, much of the troping on these denigrated types revolves around articulating the opposite of the upright warrior or victor, with his straight paths and morals. These are twisted folk; and like Thersites they irritate and excite other loftier sorts to outrage or nervous laughter. In Clouds, for instance, Socrates tells Strepsiades (”son of Twister”?) that the Cloud chorus nourishes (βόσκουσι) many sophistic types, including “tune-twisters” (ᾀσματοκάμπτας) and sky-gazing quacks (μετεωροφένακας) (Nub. 331–33). Strepsiades applauds the idea that through Socrates’ training he will become both bold and smooth talking (Nub. 445: θρασύς, εὔγλωττος), as well as impressively pliant (e.g. Nub. 449–50: μάσθλης [“supple”], γλοιός [“slippery”], στρόφις [“twisting”]). The connections that he draws between postures and oral dexterity shape a creature of suspect flexibility with a sly and contorted linguistic style that wanders idly around civic spaces meant for vigorous action.19 Later on in Clouds the older Logos argues against a whole range of such questionable modes and deportments, such as “twisting” (κάμψειεν) a tune,20 crossing the legs (ἴσχειν τὼ πόδ’ ἐναλλάξ), and chattering overly refined phrases in the Agora (στωμύλλων κατὰ τὴν ἀγοράν τριβολεκτράπελ’) (Nub. 964–83). Similarly, in his speeches against Demosthenes the manly Aeschines portrays his opponent as a soft and shrill type, including a dismissive description of him “pirouetting” around the bēma (κύκλῳ περιδινῶν . . . ἐπὶ τοῦ βήματος) during an Assembly speech on Macedonian policy (Aeschin. 3.167).21 The figure of Agathon in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae helps to clarify how these associations of bodies, spaces, and practices work. In the first scene of the play Agathon’s servant comes out of the poet’s house and announces pompously to Euripides and his old relative (called Mnesilochus in some manuscripts) that the younger poet is in the process 18 19

20

21

Again, see Worman 2008: ch. 4. For Aristophanes’ stylistic vocabulary, see further in O’Sullivan (1992); on the comic body and its appetites, Dover 1978, Davidson 1997, and Foley 2000. Many of the metaphors that Aristophanes and others use to describe (and usually lampoon) this style involve the vocabulary of bending or twisting (i.e., cognates of kamptein and strephein); later in Frogs “twisting” is a technique that Euripides teaches (στρέφειν ἐρᾶν, 957; cf. Ran. 775, Nub. 331–34, Thesm. 53–62). See further in Worman 2008: ch. 2. Cf. Ps.-Demades, who describes Demosthenes as a “bitter sycophant” (πικρὸς συκοφάντης) who “debases the subject by twisting it with his cleverness” (διαστρέφων τὸ πρᾶγμα τῇ δεινότητι τῶν ῥημάτων διέβαλεν) (fr. 79.2 de Falco).

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of “twisting the new ties of words” (κάμπτει δὲ νέας ἁψῖδας ἐπῶν), “turning some and welding others” (τὰ δὲ τορνεύει, τὰ δὲ κολλομελεῖ), as well as “rolling and casting” (γογγύλλει | καὶ χοανεύει) them. Although this vocabulary clearly references crafts such as boatbuilding and statue-making, the gleefully crude relative finishes the image with a verb that indicates oral penetration (καὶ λαικάζει) (57).22 He declares that he will “roll and twist” (συγγογγυλίσας καὶ συστρέψας) both the poet and his servant around and “cast in this here penis” (τουτὶ τὸ πέος χοανεῦσαι) (61–62). Whipping out his comic phallus (note the deictic τουτί),23 he also aggresses the bodies of his interlocutors by this verbal transference, so that the scene furthers suggestions from earlier poetry that twisted or crooked “paths” match up with the sensibilities of those who walk them. In the fourth century Aristotle and especially Plato sustain some of these equations between aesthetic or ethical modes and bodily deportments. Aristotle’s Politics contains a warning about the dangers of training in music (mousikē): exposure to the wrong sorts can make the young citizen effeminate and even vulgar (φορτικός) (1339a–b), his soul “twisted” (παρεστραμμέναι) like the melodies of decadent strains (1342a). In this logos-loving city, however, the delights of such indulgence are not limited to the arts narrowly construed. Aristotle makes clear in the Rhetoric (1403b) that artful (i.e., too poetic) oratorical styles may skew the focus and purpose of the hearer (e.g., παραλογίζεταί τε γὰρ ἡ ψυχή, 1408a20), indulging his already corrupt instincts and leading him further astray (cf. φορτικότητα, 1395b1–2; τοῦ ἀκροατοῦ μοχθηρίαν, 1404a8). His squeamish attitude toward poetic or dramatic aspects of oratorical performance echoes Plato’s concerns in the Republic that training in mousikē alone (i.e., without gumnastikē) can render the citizen soft and decadent (Rep. 410d–e).24 Other dialogues feature interlocutors who regard Socrates himself as the source of such bad training. In the Gorgias the haughty Callicles depicts Socrates’ penchant for philosophizing as having a distorting effect on his soul. Whoever indulges in it avoids the public spaces of the city (τὰ μέσα τῆς πόλεως καὶ τὰς ἀγοράς), “crouching” (κατεδεδυκότι) and “whispering” (ψιθυρίζοντα) in corners with a few young men, never uttering anything noble and lofty and worthwhile (ἐλεύθερον δὲ καὶ μέγα καὶ ἱκανὸν

22

23 24

On the vocabulary, see Jocelyn 1980; also Henderson [1975] 1991: 153; Dover 1978: 142. On the vocabulary of crafting, see Austin and Olson 2004 (ad 56). The deictic indicates the comic body that Euripides’ relative sports; cf. Foley 2000. On Plato’s tropes for this effect and Demetrius’ critique of them, see ch. 6.3a.

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μηδέποτε φθέγξασθαι) (Gorg. 485d4–e2).25 Further, in Callicles’ estimation, Socrates’ noble soul is “twisted” (διαστρέφεις26) by this “boyish” style (μειρακιώδει τινί . . . μορφώματι) (Gorgias 485e7–8). And not only this, but Socrates’ suspect deportment also seems to parallel the ways in which he argues. At Gorgias 511a4–5, for instance, when Callicles has become thoroughly exasperated with Socrates’ seemingly perverse arguments about how unjust acts harm the soul, he complains that Socrates “twists the argument up and down” (στρέφεις ἐκάστοτε τοὺς λόγους ἄνω καὶ κάτω).27 As comedy suggests, this image is particularly associated with sophists, and more generally with arts practitioners whose techniques are viewed as being of questionable value and integrity.28 In Platonic dialogue Socrates himself brings it as a charge against sophistic wranglers such as the brothers in the Euthydemus, whom he compares to Proteus, “the Egyptian sophist” (τὸν ᾈγύπτιον σοφιστήν, Euthyd. 288b8). In the Ion Socrates directs the same analogy at the rhapsode’s tactics, declaring that Ion is a veritable Proteus, “twisting himself up and down” (ὥσπερ ὁ Πρωτεὺς παντοδαπὸς γίγνῃ στρεφόμενος ἄνω καὶ κάτω, Ion 541e7) – a very ironic attribution, in this case, since Socrates has led Ion around by the nose.29 While I address the imagery of circuitous routes (of argument, of pilgrimage) in the Republic and Phaedrus in Chapters 1 (section 1a) and 4 (primarily section 4), a moment in the Phaedo reveals the implicit conjunction of such “twisted” tactics with the lay of the land. Here Socrates declares that those who spend their time studying contradiction (i.e., sophists) come to think that there is no soundness or solidity (οὐδὲν ὑγιὲς οὐδὲ βέβαιον) to any argument, but they all simply “twist up and down as if [caught] in the Euripus” (ὥσπερ ἐν Εὐρίπῳ ἄνω κάτω στρέφεται, Phaedo 90c3–5).30 The reference is to the tricky currents of the strait between Euboea and mainland Greece, an association with topographical

25

26

27 28

29 30

While Socrates is notorious for hanging out in public spaces, Callicles’ use of the plural (Gorg. 485d5: ἀγοράς) suggests spaces for public speaking and citizen engagement, rather than what he considers idle talk. This is a textual crux; Dodds 1959 ad loc. has διαπρέπεις, but this makes little sense in relation to what follows. See also the discussion in Worman 2008: 191–99. Cf. again Socrates in Clouds, Agathon in Thesmophoriazusae, as well as Euripides, who in Frogs prays to the “hinge of his tongue” (892: γλώττης στρόφιγξ). Note also that Euripides’ In-law likens Agathon’ trills to the formless tracks of ants (Thesm. 100: μύρμηκος ἀτραπούς, ἢ τί διαμινύρεται;). See sections 1a–1b below. Cf. also the end of the Euthyphro (15d2). Cf. Plato, Phdr. 278d9 and Lach. 196b1; also Isoc. Phil. 75.3.

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features that elsewhere in Plato’s dialogues and later writing on rhetoric function as tropes for describing verbal styles.31

b. Euripides and style’s gendering As we can see from the foregoing section, sophists and other “quacks” have a bad reputation in Attic comedy. In Aristophanes’ Clouds the new-fangled sophistic education renders young men louche, soft, and prone to like Euripides; a fragment of Cratinus addresses those who have dived into a “nest of sophists” (σοφιστῶν σμῆνος, fr. 2.1); and in Eupolis’ Flatterers, a play that includes Protagoras and Socrates’ associate Chaerephon, sophists are boasters and idling prattlers (fr. 157 K–A; cf. frs. 352, 353 K–A; Ar. Nub. 102, 449, 1492).32 Their word-smithing and wisdom-hawking activities implicitly place them in the agora, where demagogues, market women, and other lowlife hucksters (agoraioi) go busying about their undignified tasks (e.g., Ar. Eq. 218, Pax 750, Lysis. 457, Ran. 1015). For Aristophanes most of these features and a few notable others converge around the figure of Euripides, whose comic character uniquely captures the range of associations that runs from overly clever word-mongering to a mercantile or feminizing focus on the stuff of life: clothes, food, sex.33 Of course, the comic idiom does this to all conceptual concerns – namely, renders them the detritus of daily life, as Frogs famously dramatizes in relation to poetry. But for Aristophanes at least, Euripides has a special relationship to such effects, since it is he above all who made of tragedy a ragged, pedestrian affair. While, like other comic poets Aristophanes devoted plays to rhetoric, education, and sophists (or “sophists”34), and lampooned Socrates as such, he appears to have been alone in the extent of his fascination with Euripides.35 This unusually sustained focus on a fellow poet affords us 31

32 33

34

35

For Plato’s use of the locus amoenus and paths as tropes indicating styles and discursive techniques, see further in ch. 4.2 and 4.4; for stylistic “rivers,” see esp. section 4 of this chapter as well as ch. 6.3 and ch. 7.2. See Carey 2000 on the distribution of these and other traits. As Roselli has pointed out, in Acharnians Dicaeopolis’ borrowing of Euripides’ props suggests that the poet’s own “stuff” (i.e., the components of his plots and style) can be reduced to common items accumulated like goods in the marketplace (Acharn. 430–79; Roselli 2005: 22–23). “Sophists” includes those like Euripides and Socrates whom comedy mockingly associates with sophistic activities and education, even though they are not sophistai in the narrow sense (i.e., teachers of rhetoric). Other comic poets target Euripides as a clever type and/or associate him with Socrates (e.g., Cratinus 307 K–A; Teleclides frs. 39–40 K–A; Strattis fr. 1 K–A), but Aristophanes’ level of commitment to lampooning this tragic poet appears to be singular (cf. Cratinus’ stylistic conflation of the two: Εὐριπιδαριστοφανίζειν, fr. 342). Three of Aristophanes’ extant plays bring

1. Bodies and topographies

singular access to a complex phenomenon. The accretion of distinct details offers up Euripides’ comic profile as a unique assemblage, the broad range of which anticipates later ideas about certain styles as feminizing, smooth, and/or fluid. Aristophanes’ multifaceted mockery of Euripides, and especially his use of gendered innuendo, colors the treatment of the tragic poet’s style and those of related figures in the plays. In Aristophanic comedy metaphors targeting the appetites – especially sexual – isolate particular styles of speech and writing at the slighter, softer end of things.36 These metaphorical intersections contribute to a burgeoning literary critical tradition whose close-shaving, subtle practices themselves occupy the slighter end of the stylistic spectrum. In addition, these modes are subsumed in later tradition as the “soft and shady” middle style purveyed by Greek sophists and philosophers idling in the garden. For Cicero and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, such Greek styles are smooth, fluid, and vaguely effeminate, rather than properly vigorous and exercised. Thus in the stylistic continuum that from Aristophanes on runs from forceful, lofty, and “grand” (megaloprepēs, deinos) to slight and delicate (ischnos, leptos), Euripides and his fellow word-polishers start out at the slighter end of things but end up in later reception somewhere in the soft and fluid middle. Aristophanes lampoons styles that range from the refined to the rather elaborate, encompassing Euripidean polish, Socratic small talk, and Agathon’s flowery mode.37 Although in comedy the stylistic and bodily inclinations of this mode are often configured at the ass-end (via terms like euruprōktos, katapugōn, etc.), it is difficult to glean a coherent stylistic category from the tastes and behaviors that these terms comprise. They tend to indicate such inflections as subtle, chatty, and fine and thus what we might call (following Kenneth Dover’s cheeky vocabulary) a “bumsy” style.38 Most of them are mocked as soft and submissive, as opposed to

36 37

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him on stage (Acharnians, Thesmophorizusae, and Frogs); and many others engage with his plots and stylistic tendencies. The fragments suggest further engagement, with scattered phrases characterizing Euripides’ clever style and/or connecting him with the sophists (e.g., frs. 376, 471, 580, 638 K–A). See, however, Bakola 2010, who argues that Cratinus’ mockery of poets (esp. Aeschylus) indicates a more innovative, varied, and richer literary range. My point here is only that Aristophanes concentrates his critical energies on “sophistic” strategies and particularly on Euripides more than other comic poets. See Worman 2008: ch. 2. Agathon’s mode also verges on the Gorgianic, so even thin-grand distinctions do not dovetail in any clear way with the “soft sophist” category (see O’Sullivan 1992: 130–34; Worman 2002: 151–54). Dover 1978: 75.

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chaste and upright modes, although representatives of the latter are understandably sparse in comedy. The comic metonymies that distinguish certain characters also peg them directly to gender references. If Euripides’ place in the mimetic and stylistic scheme of things was at least intermittently feminized, Agathon and Socrates hold down either end of the gendered spectrum that Aristophanes and Plato fashion between them.39 For instance, Aristophanes depicts Agathon as the truly effeminate poet, while in Plato’s Symposium he serves as the soft and flowery representative of tragedy. And yet, as Froma Zeitlin remarks, “In this ‘feminization’ of Greek culture, Euripides was, above all, a pioneer, and Aristophanes perhaps correctly perceived that Euripides’ place was indeed with the women.”40 That is to say, Aristophanes portrays Euripides’ style as romantic and bound up with mimesis and illusion, which are themselves associated with the feminine, as Zeitlin also shows. For our purposes we can recall as well that this romantic coloration often abuts rural modes – that is, flowering, meadowland spaces associated with Aphrodite, where lovers and other soft, idling types may reside.41 As I discuss in Chapters 6 (section 4) and 7 (section 3), this setting, or something like it, emerges as important for distinguishing broader categories of style and sensibility. To put it in provisional terms, in later rhetorical theory pallid, tender (Greek) sophist-philosophers languidly polish their cadences in shady gardens and parklands, while manly politician-orators work out their vigorous rhythms in the glaring sun of battlefield and forum.42 For Aristophanes, Euripides’ style is feminized because it inclines too much to “women’s” plots involving exotic locales and romantic devices. This style is also “bumsy” in that its prattling, lounging appeal encourages idle talk to the detriment of more manly activities. In Frogs Euripides claims for his style light and fine measures, perspicuity, and cleverness, as well as “twisty” and technical effects (λεπτῶν τε κανόνων εἰσβολὰς ἐπῶν τε γωνιασμούς, νοεῖν, ὁρᾶν, ξυνιέναι, στρέφειν ἐρᾶν, τεχνάζειν, κάχ' ὑποτοπεῖσθαι, περινοεῖν ἅπαντα, 954–58). Aeschylus, in contrast, disdains Euripides’ poetry as “utterly sat on by Aphrodite (ἐπὶ σοί τοι καὶ τοῖς σοῖσιν πολλὴ πολλοῦ ᾿πικαθῆτο, 1046), since he works so hard for her in his plays. He also teaches young men to chatter and gossip, which empties the 39

40 41 42

Zeitlin [1981] 1996a. Socrates does not fit this scheme; elsewhere Zeitlin notes that while he subsumes the feminine as the philosophical midwife, he is a figure of manly endurance ([1985] 1996a: 372–73). Zeitlin [1981] 1996b: 416. On these spaces and their denizens, see further in ch. 2.3 and section 3.2 below. Cf. Gleason 1995 and Gunderson 2000. On Proust’s joli langage and soft or “floral” types, see O’Brien 1965 and further in the Epilogue, section 1.

1. Bodies and topographies

wrestling rings and wears down the rumps of gossipy youths (εἶτ' αὖ λαλιὰν ἐπιτηδεῦσαι καὶ στωμυλίαν ἐδίδαξας, | ἣ ᾿ξεκένωσεν τάς τε παλαίστρας καὶ τὰς πυγὰς ἐνέτριψεν | τῶν μειρακίων στωμυλλομένων, 1069–71; cf. στωμύλματα, 92). Similarly in Clouds the idle quibbling inspired by the Weaker Argument, whose instruction leads one to love Euripides, fills the baths and agora with prattlers and empties the wrestling schools (τῶν νεανίσκων . . . λαλούντων | πλῆρες τὸ βαλανεῖον ποιεῖ κενὰς δὲ τὰς παλαίστρας, 1053; cf. στωμύλλων κατὰ τὴν ἀγοράν, Nub. 1003).43 In Frogs Euripides celebrates the fact that his abilities center on the empty air, the pliable mouth, and the sharp nose: when he prays before the contest, he invokes his “airy” tastes (lit. “air, my food,” αἴθηρ ἐμὸν βόσκημα), the “hinge” of his tongue (γλώττης στρόφιγξ), as well as intelligence and his “keen-scenting” nostrils (καί ξύνεσι καὶ μυκτῆρες ὀσφραντήριοι, 892–93), the light, mobile, and sharp images further accentuating his gratuitously polished style. In Aristophanes’ depiction, this airiness, flexibility, and polish imply not only smooth, supple talk but also physical pliability and even weakness and indulgence. In Knights the timid slave whom some manuscripts call “Nicias” (after the cautious Athenian general) fashions a special term for this style: “How,” he despairs, “can I possibly speak with Euripidean polish?” (κομψευριπικῶς, 18). He says he has no “guts” (ἀλλ' οὐκ ἔνι μοι τὸ θρέττε, 17), and can only resort to wordplay that makes use of the rhythm of masturbation (ὥσπερ δεφόμενος, 25; cf. 21–26). Socrates, in contrast, does not really fit this pattern. In Aristophanes’ portrayal there is something rough and even brutal about the more manly end of this “sophistic” style. When Strepsiades finally persuades his son Pheidippides to undertake Socrates’ instruction, he creates a monster who defends his actions with dialectical tricks borrowed from the Weaker Argument. Although Pheidippides declares his love of Euripidean poetry (1377) and scorns his father’s old-fashioned taste for Aeschylus’ bombast, delighting in “delicate phrases, words, and thoughts” (γνώμαις δὲ λεπταῖς καὶ λόγοις . . . καὶ μερίμναις, 1404), he also beats his father. This new-fangled style thus seems to coincide with violent 43

Cf. Εὐριπίδης δ’ ὁ τὰς τραγῳδίας ποιῶν | τὰς περιλαλούσας οὗτός ἐστι τὰς σοφάς (Ar. fr. 376 K–A). In Frogs, the chorus calls the sophistic Euripides a “mouth-worker” (στοματουργός, 826). They describe his tongue as smooth (λίσπη | γλῶσσ’, 826–27), and declare that he is a verb shaver and subtle word-reckoner (ῥήματα δαιομένη καταλεπτολογήσει, 828). The bold and blustering Aeschylus adds to this imagery by deeming his opponent a “gossip gatherer” (στωμυλιοσυλλεκτάδη, 841), a label that more directly associates Euripides with women’s chatter. See O’Sullivan 1992: 130–49 on the parameters of this vocabulary; also Worman 2008: 96–107.

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proclivities; glib talk and clever argument turn out to be corrupting, since they free one to do what one pleases, as the Weaker Argument boasts in Clouds. In the midst of all this familiar imagery, we should pause for a moment to consider what the styles of these “sophists” actually look like. The point here is not, of course, only how we might describe the actual style of Euripides’ plays, or the styles of Socrates or Agathon, could they be determined. Rather, I am interested in how the combined effects of their own modes (insofar as these exist) and the depictions of these modes by other writers influence their receptions. For Socrates we have only these depictions, of course, but together they shape a portrait of a small-talking, mock-modest interlocutor that is somewhat consistent and largely in keeping with stylistic inclinations at the “thinner” end of the spectrum.44 The most dominant comic attributes of this mode are, again, slightness and subtlety, captured largely by the term leptos, as well as the embodying of it by its pallid purveyors.45 This slight style shares features with the profiles of the “sophistic” Euripides and Agathon, and their profiles in turn contribute more fully feminizing details to its repertoire. Aristophanes’ and Plato’s depictions of Agathon’s style delimit a quite elaborate mode, one that is flowery, feminine, and tenderly self-regarding. In the Symposium Plato slyly echoes some features of Aristophanes’ Agathon, portraying Agathon’s speech on Eros as adorned with poetic references, delicate imagery, and specious sophistic reasoning (Symp. 194e3–197e8).46 More essential for us, the speech depicts Love as beautiful, young, delicate, soft, and belonging among the flowers (195a5–196b3).47 This is a match for Agathon only in the coyest sense (who is likely in his early thirties by 41648), but it promotes the style of his speech as delicate and flowery – a veritable locus amoenus of effeminizing indications. Softness is particularly emphasized in Plato’s mocking ventriloquism; Agathon uses the words hapalos (tender, soft) and malakos (soft) a total of fifteen times in about as many lines. At the end of the speech, he declares 44

45

46 47

48

This is how Plato depicts Socrates characterizing his own style, at any rate; this is further ironized by the fact that in the action of the dialogues he tends to give long speeches and dominate discussions. See further in Worman 2008: ch. 4. O’Sullivan 1992: 137 points out the repeated use of leptos etc. to characterize the style associated with Socrates in Clouds. See Emlyn-Jones 2004: 395. Agathon may have just won a prize for his play “Flower” (Anthos or Antheus) (Zeitlin [1985] 1996a: 372). Emlyn-Jones 2004: 395 points out that Agathon may be portrayed as boyish in the sense of remaining Pausanias’ beloved and thus effeminized.

1. Bodies and topographies

Eros the father of “luxury, daintiness, delicacy, charms, desire, and longing” (τρυφῆς, ἁβρότητος, χλιδῆς, χαρίτων, ἱμέρου, πόθου πατήρ, 197d6– 7), as if glossing his own mode. While the accuracy of such depictions is difficult to determine, given the sorry cluster of fragments remaining from Agathon’s poetry, most of those preserved point to a style marked by a chiming, antithetical mode often identified with Gorgias.49 Scholars have tended to treat Gorgias and therefore these features as occupying the grander end of the stylistic spectrum, but this may be an oversimplification.50 In any event, since the Agathon fragments resemble most closely a collection of near-rhyming maxims, they may mislead in their stylistic emphasis.51 In fact, the consistency of Aristophanes’ and Plato’s imagery, as well as that of its reception, suggests that Agathon was generally regarded as a beautiful, softly “boyish” man who composed in a finely crafted, charming style that shares more traits with Euripides’ modes.52 Beyond his association with Agathon, Euripides’ style exhibits many elements that would themselves have influenced its being taken as slight and womanly. His emphasis on the body and its affects, his highlighting of the female or feminized body in particular, plus his choral combinations of rural settings and tender young women, all likely contributed to this reception. If we consider these together with Aristophanes’ emphases on the polished urbanity, multiple subtleties, and resulting delicacy of this style, we can begin to see how these elements all work toward transforming a variegated cluster of received imagery into more fixed and influential stylistic designations. In Frogs Euripides famously lays claim to slimming down the fat lady that was tragedy by putting her on a diet of little works, walks, and juice pressed from slender, chatty books (941–43).53 And yet it remains unclear what features the designation “slender” picks out in Euripides’ work, beyond more common vocabulary and simpler syntax. Richard Hunter has recently argued that Euripides engages what he terms a “practical” mimesis – that is, one taken up with literary critical and sophistic 49 50

51

52

53

Rhys Roberts 1900. See Norden [1915] 1958: 63–79, still a useful assessment of Gorgianic “grand” features (e.g., poetic rhythms, chiming maxims) and those associated with them, including Agathon. So Emlyn-Jones 2004: 394, who notes of the fragments that “in their very truncated form, [they] give an over-rhetorical impression.” Cf. Luc. De paedag. 11 and further in ch. 6.2c. See Rhys Roberts 1900: 51, who cites Poet. 1456a25–32 and Symp. 196e. O’Sullivan 1992: 135–38 notes the comic association of the slender style with a writerly, bookish care.

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questions, which assume forms in late fifth-century debate that would have been judged (from, e.g., Aeschylus’ perspective in Frogs) “febrile.”54 The over-heated refinement associated with this questioning mode may thus color the styles of Euripides and Socrates in such a way that they appear less than manly: the critical measuring, itself an activity linked to daytime affairs, is effectively domesticating, even (especially for Euripides) feminizing.

c. Dionysus and stylistic paths Frogs opens with an en route critique of typical comedies as full of clichéd physical humor, bandied as Dionysus and his slave Xanthias are approaching Heracles’ house on foot (cf. βαδίζω, 23).55 The god of the theater is dressed, rather ineffectually it seems, as Heracles, who cannot control his laughter when he sees Dionysus’ layering of lion skin and club over the yellow dress and the high boots of tragedy (ἀλλ’ οὐκ οἱός τ’ εἴμ’ ἀποσοβῆσαι τὸν γέλων, | ὁρῶν λεοντῆν ἐπὶ κροκωτῷ | . . . τί κόθορνος καὶ ῥόπαλον ξυνηλθέτην;, 45–47). From Heracles’ manly perspective, the “real” Dionysus wears garb with feminizing and lofty pretensions, and this, in combination with his “Heracles” costume, renders him weak and ridiculous.56 Indeed, this is the hodgepodge and ineffectual dress-up that Dionysus later soils out of fear when in the midst of his journey he thinks he sees an Empousa (304–06), and that he seeks to pawn off on Xanthias when he is anxious about “Heracles’” reception by the doorkeeper of Hades (482–97). Gwendolyn Compton-Engle has argued acutely that Dionysus’ inability to control his costume indicates his failure as a judge, and especially a judge of theater.57 I would add that despite his conventional comic body (cf. γάστρων, 200), he is not much of a comic protagonist, the character that in Aristophanes is often a schemer and ingenious manipulator. Dionysus instead is out of shape (128), given to complaining (236–37), 54 55 56

57

Hunter 2008a: 17–25. This section and those that follow overlap in places with Worman 2014. While, as Dover points out, the tragic dress is both typical women’s wear and Dionysus’ traditional garb, he has feminine attributes also in tragedy. This is clear not only in the Bacchae, which Dover notes may have been produced around the same time as Frogs and with which the latter may engage, but also in Aeschylus’ Edonians, from a scene in which Lycurgus questions Dionysus’ effeminate dress (cf. “sissy,” γυννίς, fr. 61.136 TrGF) (Dover 1993a: 37–40). The details are quoted early on in the Thesmophoriazusae (e.g., τίς ἡ στολή; | . . . τί βάρβιτος | λαλεῖ κροκωτῷ;, 136–38), and Agathon’s outfit may be in imitation of it (see Austin and Olson 2004 ad 136). Compton-Engle 2003: 524–32.

1. Bodies and topographies

and less resourceful than his own slave. Compton-Engle also points to a tendency among scholars to over-generalize Zeitlin’s insight that Greek drama envisions mimesis and theatricality itself as feminized, noting that Greek literature does not generally treat disguise as associated with the female.58 But if tragic convention involves male citizens dressing up as female characters, and Aristophanic comedy repeatedly lampoons this as amusing drag (because of exaggerated female body-costumes as well as male-to-female transvestism), Dionysus appears to be unconventional in this regard as well, since he tries to don a masculine guise over his dress.59 From the outset, then, comedy mocks tragedy in the badly dressed and effeminate figure of the god; and if we can see this as a poke at the Bacchae, it mocks Euripides in particular, here once again a source of embarrassing costumes.60 Fittingly, then, Dionysus tells Heracles that he was suddenly heartstruck by a yearning (ἐξαίφνης πόθος | τὴν καρδίαν ἐπάταξε, 53) for Euripides, which seized him when reading the Andromeda aboard ship (ἐπὶ τῆς νεὼς ἀναγιγνώσκοντί μοι | τὴν ᾿Ανδρομέδαν, 52–53).61 Heracles, man of appetites that he is in comedy, does not understand what this desire could be, until Dionysus offers him the analogy of a yearning for pea soup (63). Once he grasps that Dionysus is suffering from a literary crush, the manly Heracles scoffs at Dionysus’ tastes as trashy and his aim to bring Euripides back from Hades as a desire of the moment, in keeping with their debasing exchange about sex and food. Heracles questions why Dionysus is not satisfied with poets who are still alive and Dionysus responds with a set of distinctions that illuminate his preferences, predominant among which are that Euripides is roguishly up for anything (πανοῦργος, 80) and fertile (γόνιμος, 96).62 While both Heracles and Dionysus associate Euripides with chatter and wordiness (cf. λαλίστερα, 91; στωμύλματα, 92, cf. 930ff.) – labels, again, that Aristophanes uses to lampoon styles he finds effeminized and decadent – Dionysus regards this 58 59 60

61

62

Compton-Engle 2003: 520–24; cf. Zeitlin [1981] 1996b. On the comic body and its dressing, see also Foley 2000. The seeking out of a poet, particularly Euripides, for help with costumes and plot is a ploy Aristophanes resorts to repeatedly: cf. Dicaeopolis’ pursuit of Euripides (or rather his props) in Acharnians, Trygaeus’ appropriation of a Euripidean plot at the opening of Peace, and Euripides’ own recourse to Agathon in Thesmophoriazusae for a suitable woman’s disguise. See Halliwell 2011: 102–06 on the intersection between desire/pleasure and judgment in the scene. I.e., like a comic protagonist? On the γόνιμος ποιητής, see Woodbury 1988: 181–82, who argues that this new coinage denotes not merely creativity but especially novelty; also Padilla 1992: 365–67. On panourgos types, see Worman 1999; at Ran. 1015 Aeschylus associates marketplace (ἀγοραίους) and trashy sorts (κοβάλους) with them.

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feature as evidence of stylistic boldness.63 Without Euripides around, he says, there is no one who “might bark out a noble phrase” (ῥῆμα γενναῖον λάκοι, 97). For Dionysus this is a gloss on gonimos, as is his designation “whoever utters this sort of daring thing” (ὅστις φθέγγεται | τοιουτονί τι παρακεκινδυνευμένον, 98–99), which he follows with some choice figures of speech, including one that sounds like an echo of a phrase from the Bacchae, as commentators have noted.64 Heracles mocks these, calling them “tricks” (κόβαλα, 104) and “utterly base” (παμπόνηρα, 106), but Dionysus is adamant in his support. Thus before Heracles tells Dionysus where to go, he effectively tells him where to get off, opposing his decadent taste for Euripides with a tough guy’s commitment to more traditional styles. But countering this staunch rejection is the enthusiast’s love of novelty: Dionysus asserts a new-fangled profile for his favorite poet, which combines boldness, invention, and a “fertile” mode. As careful readers of these terms have noticed, this is a hybrid and unusual combination; for instance, a phrase like ῥῆμα γενναῖον sounds more suited to the elder poet Aeschylus’ elevated modes, just as a label like gonimos would seem a fitting label for his fulsome style.65 But Aristophanes’ apparent realignment of terms offers the possibility of a new type of daring, fertile style, one that he and Euripides share.66 This mini-debate, the first of the literary critical contests in the play, anticipates important distinctions not only in the contest in Hades but also in Dionysus’ iambic competition with the Frogs and sing-along with the Initiates. As a debate on the fly, en route to other rural and Mysteriesinfused settings, it serves to initiate the action as a series of literary critical engagements grounded in specific postures and places. When Dionysus asks Heracles to show him the way to Hades, he envisions the journey as one that follows a particular path through literal spaces (cf. ὁδούς, 113, 117). Heracles jokingly treats the path to Hades as a metaphor, and offers Dionysus a number of ways to commit suicide. Dionysus plays along, rejecting various modes as physically uncomfortable and confirming that he needs a quick route, not being much of a walker

63

64

65 66

This vocabulary is typically used to categorize Euripides and his sort (e.g., Socrates, Ran. 1492; cf. 826–27, 841, 917, 943, 954, 1071). See O’Sullivan 1992: 131–33; Worman 2008: 96–110). Lossau 1987: 239–41 emphasizes the contrast as one of “light” vs. “heavy” (leptos vs. barus). E.g., Stanford and Dover ad loc. This notion of a style being daring or dangerous is influential; cf. Arist. Rhet. 1405b5–11; Demetr. De eloc. 80; DH Dem. 2.28–31; Ps.-Long. 32.3. See, e.g., Lossau 1987; Lada-Richards 1999: 242–47. See further below and in section 4. Woodbury 1988 recognizes the redefinition, but draws different conclusions from it.

1. Bodies and topographies

(ὡς ὄντος γε μὴ βαδιστικοῦ, 128; cf. 134). Lazy critic and hiker though he is, he finally requests the path that Heracles himself took, and the hero tells the god of drama in Athens precisely how to go in “real” (i.e., mimetic) space, though he warns him that it is a “massive passage” (ὁ πλοῦς πολύς, 136).67 Dionysus must, Heracles says, take the road (cf. 135) that goes through a big and bottomless marsh (λίμνην μεγάλην . . . ἄβυσσον) (137–38), a path that the Frog chorus that greets him deems the precinct of “Dionysus in the Marshes” (Διόνυσον . . . ἐν λίμναισιν, 216–17). After dithering and complaining, the god does successfully cross the limnai, accompanied by the Frogs’ jocular reference to the “hangover crowd” invading the precinct during the Anthesteria celebration (cf. ὁ κραιπαλόκωμος | τοῖς ἱεροῖσι Χύτροις χω- | ρεῖ κατ' ἐμὸν τέμενος λαῶν ὄχλος, 218–19). After this crossing, he arrives at flowering meadows for processional dances by new choruses of male and female celebrants that appear to be engaging in Mysteries “play” (παίζειν, 376, 392, 443, 452). Finally, he knocks on the door of “Hades,” which eventually opens out onto the famous contest between the tragic poets Euripides and Aeschylus. Frogs thus fashions a discriminating route for Dionysus by means of one of the oldest and most prominent metaphors in ancient literary conception. As I trace in Chapter 2, this path (ὁδός, οἶμος, κέλευθος) of words is usually deployed as a means of indicating aesthetic and/or moral direction.68 This kind of ethical landscaping initiates an adjacent tradition of tropes that mark the intersection of aesthetic and morally instructive tracks. And again, both the “path of song” image and that of the “virtuous path” are familiar from Pindar (e.g., Ol. 1.11, 6.72–73, P. 3.103, N. 7.51). Other plays of Aristophanes use idioms such as the “path of words” (ὁδὸς λόγων), which sometimes parallel a sense of place (on stage, in “life”).69 His characters make mocking reference to the “path of argument/song” (Eq. 1015, Pax 733, Av. 1374), and the dramatic action often foregrounds “roads/ways” (ὁδοί) as a means of “getting somewhere” (e.g., in argument, in plotting, in utopian endeavors).70 Markus Asper argues that 67 68

69

70

On the rhyming humor of the phrase, see Stanford [1958] 1983 ad loc. See Becker 1937: 5 vs. Snell 1955: 320–32 and Harriott 1969: 65; also Asper’s discussion (1997: 23–26); and further in ch. 2.1. This is a dominant image in Birds, where the action begins with a pondering over which path will lead to a better polity underpinned by a “finer” ethical sense. This is especially prevalent in Knights (demagogic plotting, 72, 253, 291, 621), and Birds (utopian planning, 4–29 passim, 994, 1004). Streets (ὁδοί) are also of course public stages, where citizens disport themselves in various embarrassing or manly postures (e.g., swaggering, clowning: Eq. 348; Nub. 362, 964;Vesp. 542).

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Aristophanes’ use of path metaphors most often takes aim at the “new music,” that is, the dithyrambic poets whom he depicts as indulging in overly modulated, elaborate cadences.71 Such degenerate aesthetics render the poetry like ants’ tracks: minutely articulated and thus difficult to discern, as Euripides’ In-law complains of Agathon’s effeminate trilling in Thesmophoriazusae (μύρμηκος ἀτραπούς, Ar. Thesm. 100; cf. frs. 31 and 155 K–A).72 Asper’s arguments encourage us to recognize that Dionysus’ very search for the path to Hades may itself come from a decadent desire for new-fangled styles, embodied in Frogs especially by Euripides. In Frogs variants of ὁδός roughly match occurrences in other dramas of Aristophanes, but here the “path” emphasized repeatedly at the outset of the play ultimately marks out “ways” of literary judgment, no matter how misguided these may be.73 While many plays engage in parodic critique of poets and their poetry (esp. Euripides in Acharnians, Clouds, Thesmophoriazusae), only Frogs stages the journey of the god of dramatic poetry as a wayward, over-dressed protagonist to a contest between dramatic poets whose parameters he barely comprehends. As if in misdirected celebration, the chorus initiates the agōn by declaring that they are eager to hear what fierce path the poets will pursue (τίνα λόγων | . . . ἔπιτε δαΐαν ὁδόν, 897), a metaphor that reverberates sardonically with earlier poetic convention, such as Apollo’s description of the poetry that the Muses inspire in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (ἀγλαὸς οἶμος ἀοιδῆς, 451). This may in fact be the only extant moment in Attic comedy where the path is clearly that of literary critique rather than poetic mode, even as it wryly echoes the earlier poetic trope. The irony reverberates, given that the play targets poetic judgment itself as a fraught and debased practice, placing the contest alongside other rituals related to fertility that appear to represent a turn toward older sensibilities and to offer a rural corrective. Thus the route out of the city also charts an implicit politics, one that at a certain level contrasts an earlier, more rustic, and conservative perspective on civic virtues with a latter-day, urbane, and dissolute one.74 In this scheme the city, to put it in reductive but clarifying terms, is a corrupting space of dissembling, overly clever argument, while the country remains a reminder 71 72 73

74

Asper 1997: 39–46. But cf. Nub. 75–76, where ὁδοῦ μίαν . . . ἀτραπόν denotes merely a clever plan. From the extant plays and fragments it seems that Aristophanes does not use many other terms from archaic poetry for paths and roads (e.g., keleuthos appears only once: Thesm. 1100). But cf. atrapos cited above (Ar. Thesm. 100, Nub. 75–76, frs. 31 and 155 K–A), the archaic form of which is used in Od. 13.195 (also Pi. fr. 52.5; Sem. fr. 14.3). See, e.g., McGlew 2002.

1. Bodies and topographies

and source of simpler, more manly pursuits (e.g., farming, fighting). That said, the contrasts that frame the action of Frogs extend beyond the familiar one between city and country to include innovations on older poetic models, since their cumulative effect ultimately indicates a hybrid figure not present on stage. This is the poet-critic who might possibly lay claim to a novel mode, which accretes stylistic features from various stops along the way. Frogs is not alone among Aristophanes’ plays in offering up the journey out of the city as a distancing that helps to reveal contrasts among city players and that thus would give the traveler (were he suitably aware) his ethical and aesthetic bearings. But what of Dionysus? If rural spaces traditionally afford inspiration and increased artistic authority, the countryside does not seem to offer him much, since he remains a buffoonish figure throughout the play.75 As the god of both dramatic poetry and fertility and thus a central figure in poetic and life-cycle rituals (including the Lenaea, the Anthesteria, and the local Mysteries), Dionysus should be a fitting pivot between these realms and thus bound to make much of his rustic surroundings. Similarly, the rituals that structure so much of his passage out into the country and down to Hades should underscore the importance of the pastoral or other rural settings for the poetic contests. In aesthetic terms, Dionysus is the art’s internal measure, passing through but in some ways coincident with the rural spaces shaped by the play. He is also the one on the move, literally and figuratively; and so he should be able to realize the long view needed for effective critical judgment. And yet, as so often in Attic comedy, the play instead offers up a loosely interconnected clutch of comic adventures that do little to inform the god’s aesthetic understanding, and neither of the tragic poets really survives the contest unscathed. Because comedy thrives on repeatedly upending established attitudes, no clear path of judgment emerges. The god of tragedy, though playfully ensconced as judge and tastemaker from the outset of the action, makes a poor master of critical idioms. In the end it is comic enactment itself that achieves the critique – not so much of dramatic poetry but of its sorry judges. 75

As both Stanford and Dover have noted: Stanford [1958] 1983: xxix–xxx; Dover 1993a: 39, 42–43; see also Habash 2002; Halliwell 2011: ch. 3. This is against those who see some growth in Dionysus, as a result of ritual (esp. Segal 1961: 209–11) or character development (e.g., Silk 2000). See also Bowie 1993: 228–53; Lada-Richards 1999; and Edmonds’ correctives (2004: 113–17). Further, this “initiation of Dionysus,” while it may map stages of the Mysteries on a “rites of passage” model, does not account very well for how the journey and the contest fit together. See Moorton 1989 for an attempt to read the Frogs as a drama that illustrates van Gennep’s stages of initiation.

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2. The marsh and the meadowland If I am correct in arguing that literary critical discourse originates at least in part in Hesiodic and Pindaric judgments that differentiate poetic paths and identify sites of inspiration as rural, Aristophanes’ use of such metonymies would be conventional in a general sense. His turns on the critical terrain, on the other hand, are subtle and innovative, especially in the vocabulary that he foregrounds to differentiate stylistic categories. Insofar as it makes certain central stylistic claims, the opening debate also initiates questions as to where the fertile and roguish Euripides belongs in this passage out of the city, past the Frog chorus’ suburban chant, and through the flowering meadows of the Initiates, singing their anthems. And what about old Aeschylus, for whom Dionysus initially has not a thought? Or, to put it another way, what does the marshy river setting have to offer stylistically, as opposed to the meadowland in flower?

a. Euripides and watery styles When Dionysus crosses the marsh, the Frog chorus parades its rural, ur-poetic status. It is beloved of the Muses and fosters the reeds that furnish parts for the instruments of Pan and Apollo: Ἐμὲ γὰρ ἔστερξαν εὔλυροί τε Μοῦσαι καὶ κεροβάτας Πάν, ὁ καλαμόφθογγα παίζων· προσεπιτέρπεται δ' ὁ φορμικτὰς Ἀπόλλων, ἕνεκα δόνακος, ὃν ὑπολύριον ἔνυδρον ἐν λίμναις τρέφω. For the well-lyred Muses love me and horn-footed Pan, the player on the reed; and Apollo with his phorminx delights still more, for the sake of the reed, which watery lyre-bridge I nourish in the marshes. (229–34)

The setting of the chorus’ song and the content of its claims are marshy and patently rustic. The “watery lyre bridge” (ὑπολύριον | ἔνυδρον, 233), which is echoed in the second strophe by the “watery dance” in the swampy depths (ἔνυδρον ἐν βυθῷ χορείαν, 247), marks this style as one outside of the city and belonging to the range indicated by rivers and streams. This mode is light, bubbly, and playful rather than full flowing – that is, it is in keeping with both Aristophanic and Euripidean styles.76 And yet it is also a “country” mode: the reeds go to make the shepherd’s pipes of the woodland Pan and 76

See Biles 2002; Ruffell 2002.

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Apollo’s phorminx, the instrument that Hermes made from a tortoise that he found outside the door of his mountain home (cf. δόνακας καλάμοιο, HHerm. 47; φόρμιγγα, 64). What could this possibly have to do with Euripides, who is represented later in Frogs as quintessentially urban? First, the song that the Frogs sing is metrically reminiscent of Euripides’ preference for simple iambs and trochees, with a high degree of resolution and some “lekythia” endings, which give the lines a sing-song effect.77 Second, both of the Frogs’ strophes contain echoes of Euripidean choral odes, and one depicts the Frogs’ melodic style as overly modulated (i.e., too quickly moving up and down the scale), which is how Aeschylus lampoons Euripides’ lyric modes in the agon (e.g., as “twelve-toned,” cf. ἀνὰ τὸ δωδεκαμήχανον | Κυρήνης μελοποιῶν, 1309–63) and how (again) Aristophanes mocks those of the “new music.”78 Let us consider this cluster of effects in more detail. It is a curious mix, with its bubbly modulations and sing-song endings, precisely those for which Aeschylus will later tease Euripides, as finishing off his iambs with domestic ditties: “a little sack, little bottle, little fleece” (καὶ κῳδάριον καὶ ληκύθιον καὶ θυλάκιον | ἐν τοῖς ἰαμβείοισιν, 1203–04). Some scholars have seen a sexual joke here, one more suggestion in this play full of them that Euripides’ style is lacking in manly force.79 But we could also call this meter sparkling and bubbly, like a babbling brook rather than a rushing river. It thus helps to shape a watery poetics that one might be inclined to call “fertile” (cf. γόνιμος, 96), given that its tutelary deities are the riverside Muses,80 a rustic Apollo, and the horned Pan, playing on his reed pipes. The figures that consolidate the Frogs’ claim to this watery poetic authority feature also in some Euripidean choral odes that associate a sparkling style with young women’s rites of passage in grassy precincts. This locating of a particular song and dance type is especially vibrant in odes from Euripides’ Ion (492–505) and Iphigenia in Tauris (1125–31) that describe ritual spaces on slopes of the Acropolis. The Ion offers the fullest scene: ὦ Πανὸς θακήματα καὶ παραυλίζουσα πέτρα μυχώδεσι Μακραῖς, ἵνα χοροὺς στείβουσι ποδοῖν 77 78

79

80

See Parker 1997: 465–66. Despite Segal 1961: 22, who thinks that the compounds suggest an affinity with Aeschylus. Cf. Radermacher [1921] 1954: 171–73; also Wills 1969. So Dover 1993a ad loc., citing ληκᾶν; cf. O’Sullivan 1992: 110, 150 on the complications of the imagery (the lekythos sound may be deep and resonant elsewhere, e.g. Call. fr. 215 Pf.), but this does not at all fit the scene, despite O’Sullivan’s careful relating of it to the “bombast” of tragedy (110). Pausanias (1.19.5) reports that the Muses celebrated by the river were called “daughters of Ilissus”; see further below in section 3.

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On the road Ἀγλαύρου κόραι τρίγονοι στάδια χλοερὰ πρὸ Παλλάδος ναῶν συρίγγων ὑπ’ αἰόλας ἰαχᾶς {ὕμνων} ὅτ’ ἀναλίοις συρίζεις, ὦ Πάν, τοῖσι σοῖς ἐν ἄντροις, ἵνα τεκοῦσά τις παρθένος μελέα βρέφος Φοίβῳ . . . O seats of Pan and the rock abutting the cave-pierced Long Cliffs, where the three daughters of Aglauros tred the dances with their feet in the green courses before the temple of Athena, when you, O Pan, with the sparkling cries of the syrinxes’ [hymns] pipe in your sunless caves, where a certain maiden unhappily bore an infant to Apollo . . .(Ion 492–505)

Here we have Pan piping, the daughters of Aglauros dancing and singing on green courses (στάδια χλοερά), and caves associated with both Pan and Apollo. The ritual topography is centrally located and heavily accreted with cultural meaning: that of the area below the Erechtheion on the north slope of the Acropolis, where there were caves dedicated to Pan and Apollo and a sanctuary of Aglauros (cf. Ion 936–38), as well as of Aphrodite.81 Compare also a strophe from Iphigenia in Tauris, which reiterates the central theme and players: συρίζων θ’ ὁ κηρόδετος Πανὸς οὐρείου κάλαμος κώπαις ἐπιθωύξει, ὁ Φοῖβός θ’ ὁ μάντις ἔχων κέλαδον ἑπτατόνου λύρας ἀείδων ἄξει λιπαρὰν εὖ σ’ Ἀθηναίων ἐπὶ γᾶν. 81

Wycherley 1978: 176–79. On the significance of the Acropolis and Aphrodite, see further below in section 3. Cf. E. Hel. 179–90, where Pan’s rape of a nymph by the waterfall serves as an analogy for Helen’s snatching by Hermes. The Bacchae, the play with which many scholars think Frogs is intricately engaged, also contains choral imagery tracing outside erotic spaces, especially 403–16, which invokes Aphrodite, the Erotes, the Charites, and Pothos.

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Piping, the wax-bound reed of the mountain Pan will shout a beat for the oars, and Apollo the seer, holding the din of the seven-toned lyre, singing will lead you [Iphigenia] happily to the shining land of the Athenians.(1125–31)

Again the featured figures are the woodland, piping Pan (with his waxbound reed) and Apollo with his echoing seven-toned lyre, both deployed as the Athenian welcoming committee – as facilitating, like the Frogs, passage to and from Athens. Figures such as Pan in particular conventionally function as metonyms for older rustic modes that have been domesticated (i.e., brought inside the city) for ritual use.82 While the actual terrain is not the same, both the Euripidean odes and the Frogs’ song herald these rural deities as crucial to a vibrant transitional mode. The Frogs themselves are more fully hybrid: they may lay claim to Pan’s pipe, but their own style is a mobile mix jumping at the lively urban edge. The second strophe of their ode, in which trochees (a “running” meter) dominate the iambs and lekythia, furthers the impression of a “rural,” light, and lively mode. The frogs’ song is one with “many diving melodies” (πολυκολύμβοισι μέλεσιν), “sparkling dance” (χορείαν | αἰόλαν) – recall the “sparkling” [ἀιόλας] cries of the syrinx in the Ion ode quoted above – and “multi-bubblings” (πομφολυγοπαφλάσμασιν) (244–49).83 All of these elements point to a vivacious and tripping style; and while the meter is more regular, the metaphors suggest those featured in the “new music” of the dithyrambic poets Timotheus and Cinesias, as well as Euripides’ later lyrics.84 Again, critics of these new melodies (including Aristophanes) depict them as decadent and effeminizing; by activating images suggestive of rural erotics, Aristophanes’ bubbly melodies use old lyric metonyms to trace a novel, fluid, and animated style.85 82

83

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Cf. Wilson 1999 on the aulos as a “wild” instrument tamed for urban rituals. Moorton 1989: 314 considers this echo of the IT ode part of Aristophanes’ overall parody of Euripidean style; he emphasizes, however, that the Frogs accompany the opposite passage (i.e., away from Athens). Note also that Plato’s Ilissus setting in the Phaedrus includes Pan, the Nymphs, and the Muses; see Rosenmeyer 1962 and Wycherley 1963; cf. also Bacch. 951–52. On Pan in Athens, see Borgeaud [1979] 1988: 140–41, 151–56; on his ties to Demeter, 141–50. Cf. the “Platonic” epigram, in which the frog is termed a “rain-loving, watery poet, servant of the Nymphs” (Τὸν Νυμφῶν θεράποντα φιλόμβριον ὑγρὸν ἀοιδόν, Epigr. 21 Page EG). For connections to Euripides and the “new music” see Defradas 1969; Campbell 1984; Moorton 1989: 313–14; also Csapo 2004 and Franklin 2013 for more general observations and Power 2010 for the associations with cithara music. Note that Sappho is invoked later in the literary critical tradition as representative of the glaphuros (“smooth, polished”) style, which may share some features with this one (e.g., it is

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If it is accurate to regard the Frogs as singing a song that is at least somewhat “Euripidean,” this would mean that the poet’s style in certain crucial aspects connects to rural modes – those that in Athenian ritual signal erotic adventure, passages from inside of the city walls to suburban as well as extra-urban spaces, and the incorporation of outside as “outside” within the city and/or within civic ritual.86 I say this despite the fact that Aristophanes usually figures Euripides as an urban type, in Frogs and elsewhere, and while recognizing that Aristophanes’ critical discourse – with which Euripides is strongly associated – clearly has an urban (and distinctly Athenian) source. Again, it may well be not only streetwise “day in the life” inflections that mark Euripides’ style, but also his more elaborate choral turns on rural spaces, which are absorbed into the tradition as representing flowery, polished styles. The chorus in the Bacchae, for example, offers a dreamy depiction of the far-off spaces of Aphrodite’s Cyprus, “where Loves dwell, enchanters of human minds, in Paphos which the hundred-mouthed flows of the alien river waters without rain” (ἵν’ οἱ θελξίφρονες νέμον- | ται θνατοῖσιν Ἔρωτες | Πάφον, τὰν ἑκατόστομοι | βαρβάρου ποταμοῦ ῥοαὶ | καρπίζουσιν ἄνομβροι, 404–08). This is a Euripidean “escape-prayer,” as E. R. Dodds points out (ad loc.), in which the chorus envisions an elsewhere at the edges of the Greek world (e.g., Hipp. 732–51, Hel. 1478–86). While Dodds claims, by way of explaining what Aphrodite is doing in the ode, that such spaces of repose often conjoin Aphrodite, the Graces, and desire, the examples he gives (and we know no others) are from Aristophanes (Acharn. 989, Peace 455). We could thus go further and say that Euripides and Aristophanes share a penchant for these visions of far-off and usually rural places, wistful alternatives to the beleaguered and corrupting city. Euripides, then, serves as a mediating figure between city and country, just as this urban and urbane critical discourse makes use of rural details to show, with full comic irony, why Aeschylus’ older, staunchly rustic modes may be valued more than the subtle, discerning style that Euripides shares with critical techniques themselves. Aristophanes’ association of Euripides with this space in between is both innovative and perspicuous, since if this is the space of criticism, Euripides is its perfect denizen, embracing as he does not only the rationalizing, refined mentality emphasized later in the

86

charming and “lively” [ἱλαρος, Demetr. De eloc. 128] as well as fluid [cf. ὥσπερ τὰ ῥέοντα, DH De comp. verb. 23.1]). See further in chs. 2.3a and 6.3a. Again, I use the term “rural,” despite its vagueness, to avoid the literary valence of “pastoral” and “bucolic,” terms that usually indicate a genre that scholars take to initiate with the Hellenistic poets and especially Theocritus. See further in the Introduction, section 3.

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play (cf. Ran. 954–58, 1101–07) but also the feminized, agile, and “fertile” aesthetics that constitute this space’s more subtle offerings. The mocking verses, supposedly taken from Euripides’ choral odes and monodies, with which Aeschylus teases Euripides in the agon (1309–63) exaggerate these features to entertaining effect. In Aeschylus’ ventriloquism, Euripides’ lyric verse and monody share a spiraling mode and image: the lyric strophe leaps from chattering kingfishers on the waves to the spider’s web in the corner of the roof (1309–15), while the monody swirls from Hades to river’s edge to the twirling motions of spindle and skein (1348–50). With their mobile melodies and domestic images, they bridge natural and domestic settings, from spider’s web to spindle.

b. Aeschylus and meadowland styles Euripides’ style may share features with bubbly, loosely feminine modes, and thus seem a paradoxical, new-fangled creature (i.e., a literary critical poet), but Aeschylus firmly represents an older, grander, and more natural source of creativity. As Segal notes, the chorus and his interlocutors associate him with the Initiates and Mysteries ritual, and he follows suit. The Initiates’ parodos, during which Dionysus travels with them through mimetic space, foreshadows Aeschylus’ later invocations of Demeter and the Mysteries, as well as his use of elevated, hymnic modes and silent, pious entrances.87 If we can detect a ranking between these two stops along the way, the Frogs’ marshy setting may foster the reeds for the instruments of (rural) poetry, but the Initiates occupy the flowering meadows between the stream of “Acheron” and the door to “Hades,” a paradise of a patently bucolic sort located close by the poetic contest. The Initiates invoke the meadows repeatedly (344, 374, 449, 374; cf. 35188), sing a hymn to Demeter (384–93), and do so in an ionic meter with a feature (anaclasis) used by Aeschylus.89 Thus while the chorus may not retain their identity as initiates throughout the play, they do serve at this point in the action as decorous 87 88

89

See Segal 1961: 218; Dover 1993b; Lada-Richards 1999: 247–54. I.e., they seem to be moving through a number of flowery meadows in the course of the parodos. Dover (1993a ad loc.) compares the flowering meadows of Pindar’s “paradise” (Ol. 2.70–75. fr. 29.3–5), but note that the hymnic strophes are answered by those full of comic play (skōptein, paizein used repeatedly, e.g., 374, 375, 393, 414, 417, 443, 452, vocabulary that infiltrates the “elevated” strophes by 440ff.). Thus language demarcates the space more as one of ritual procession (from marsh to meadow, meadow to grove, etc.), complete with play and aischrologia, important in fertility rituals involving Dionysus and Demeter (including the Eleusinian Mysteries). See Foley 1994: 45–46. Parker 1997: 468.

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conductors of the god of poetry through the meadows and groves to Hades. The chorus calls upon Iacchos (the local Mysteries’ ritual name for Dionysus) as the one who can complete the “long road” (πολλὴν ὁδόν, 402) of their ritual song and dance, a characterization that for some scholars must point to Eleusis. But, as we know from Hesiod, the “long road” may also suggest elevated modes, both stylistically and morally, that would match with the more formal aspects of Aeschylus’ grand style. By the end of the parodos the Initiates have entered meadows full of flowering roses where they “play” (παίζοντες) in the most noble choral style (τρόπον | τὸν καλλιχορώτατον) (448–53). They also declare that they have sustained a pious manner (εὐ- | σεβῆ . . . τρόπον, 456–58), the repetition of the word τρόπον linking poetic and religious practice (as well as song and dance styles) in a lofty mode. The second half of the play confirms the sense that it is Aeschylus who belongs in the older, more traditionally celebrated rustic setting, while Euripides serves as the more transitional figure. Despite the scheme that marks out the path of literary judgment and situates both poets’ styles in quasi-rural spaces, the distinctions that the characters and chorus invoke in the agon indicate that Euripides’ style also has low, urban features, while Aeschylus’ is lofty and “shaggy,” imposing and a little wild (e.g., 822–25, 836– 39). Just as the Initiates’ hail the “seats” (ἕδραις [i.e., precincts]) of Iacchos, of Korē, and of Iacchos himself as “much honored” (polytimētos, 324, 337, 398), before the agon Dionysus addresses Aeschylus as polytimētos (851). This is in direct contrast to Euripides, whom he greets as “O mischievous one” (ὦ πονηρ’), an epithet that suits the later poet’s roguish (panourgos) type (851– 52; cf. 921).90 Good citizen of Eleusis that he is, Aeschylus then prays to Demeter, “nourisher of [his] mind” (ἡ θρέψασα τὴν ἐμὴν φρένα), that he might be worthy of her Mysteries (886–87). Euripides offers instead the suitably new-fangled prayer noted above (section 1b), one to air, tongue, intelligence, and nose (αἰθήρ, ἐμὸν βόσκημα, καὶ γλώττης στρόφιγξ, καὶ ξύνεσι καὶ μυκτῆρες ὀσφραντήριοι, 892–93). Their very distinct prayers are fully in keeping with differences that the chorus and Euripides himself have already indicated between the “mouth-working, (feminine) tester of words” with his polished tongue (στοματουργὸς ἐπῶν βασανίστρια91 λίσπη | γλῶσσ’, 826–27) and his “wild-crafting, stubborn-mouthed” elder (ἀγριοποιὸν αὐθαδόστομον, 90 91

This is noticed by Lossau 1987: 236–37 and Lada-Richards 1999: 248–49. Note that Aristophanes uses the rare feminine form of the agent noun (cf. βασανιστής). This is in keeping the the term stomatourgos, which suggests oral penetration and thus weakness and/or effeminacy (see O’Sullivan 1992: 130–49; Worman 2008: 96–107; cf. n. 43 above).

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83792). Later the chorus claims that Aeschylus composes “the greatest and most noble verses” (πλείστα | καὶ κάλλιστα μέλη) and deems him “the Bacchic lord” (τὸν βακχεῖον ἄνακτα) (1254–59), associating his fulsome modes and raging demeanor with the god’s inspired frenzy.93 Euripides treats this wild style with disdain, declaring it weighty and overblown (οἰδοῦσαν ὑπὸ κομπασμάτων καὶ ῥημάτων ἐπαχθῶν, 940). This follows on a claim that Aeschylus’ tactics aim at deceiving spectators who were already “fools raised in the school of Phrynichus” (μώρους λαβὼν παρὰ Φρυνίχῳ τραφέντας, 910), thus impugning older poetic styles as fostering simple-minded citizens.94 Elsewhere in Aristophanes, Phrynichus, Aeschylus’ poetic predecessor, represents earlier honeyed and/or meadowland modes (e.g. Vesp. 220, Av. 748–50). Here in Frogs Aeschylus himself invokes Phrynichus in order to oppose his own rustic style – using the familiar lyric metaphor of the poet as a bee feeding in the meadow (λειμῶνα, 1300)95 – to Euripides’ trashy urban Muse whose instrument is the castanet, which makes Dionysus think of Lesbian modes and wonder whether she is a prostitute (τοῖς ὀστράκοις | . . . κρότουσα; οὐκ ἐλεσβίαζεν, 1306–08).96 Euripides, in this scheme, is quintessentially citified: he chatters with Socrates in the Agora and encourages young men to do the same (1068–71, 1491–92). He is, again, also a “twister” (892, 957) who slims down the tragic Muse (937–47), favoring a slender, “peripatetic” style (ἐπυλλίοις καὶ περιπάτοις, 942).97 We might recognize, however, that this mobile, slimming mode is the urbane sister to the feminized charms of erotic lyric and the lively modulations of the Frogs. The agon features a set of embodied styles that reconfigure and supplement the distinctions established along the path to Hades. Now Aeschylus emerges as not only of the Mysteries’ meadows but more belligerently “natural,” while the Frogs’ “many-diving melodies” that recall Euripides’ choral odes are capped by his light, feminized, and capricious monodies, as these are lampooned by Aeschylus. 92 93

94 95

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On Aeschylus’ “sound-portrait” see Scharffenberger 2007. See Lada-Richards 1999: 242–47; Bakola 2010: 26. This is, of course, one of the many places where Aristophanes echoes the Bacchae. See, e.g., Rosen 2006; Worman 2008: 110–15. Note that Aeschylus emphasizes his rural innovation: this is not the same meadow as his predecessor Phrynichus. Cf. Bacch. 10.10; Pi. P. 10.53–54; Ar. Av. 748–50; Pl. Ion 534b. Among the comic poets lesbiazein indicates oral sex in particular, which is certainly fitting for Euripides’ profile here (cf. above with n. 43); see especially Gilhuly forthcoming; also Dover 1978: 182–84; Henderson [1975] 1991: 183; Hallett 1996: 129–30 and n. 18. Henderson treats this as also referring to the Lesbian citharodist Terpander, since in the mocking verses that follow Aeschylus sings in a similar style. Zeitlin [1985] 1996a: 366 emphasizes the gendered aspects of these distinctions.

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Euripides would thus appear to be both a “fertile,” fluid poet and yet one very much versed in the close-shaving modes of the city. Elements from Mysteries rituals and rural styles seem to converge especially upon the figure of Aeschylus, and this fits nicely with the more positive aesthetic judgment that that the older poet eventually achieves. Yet, as noted above, most scholars of Aristophanes’ literary critical and paratragic gestures notice that he is more interested in (and himself more stylistically similar to) Euripides.98 Both younger poets are also much more engaged with the discourse of literary criticism than is Aeschylus; and this discourse itself often draws on rural settings. While the association between the Frogs’ imagery and rhythms and those of Euripides contrasts somewhat with his urban polish, it is also the case that Frogs frames certain rural spaces and their denizens as “rural” – that is, as appropriated by the urban discourse as metaphors or metonymies for critical interventions within the civic sphere. While this study is primarily concerned with this type of engagement with space and landscape – that is, with the metaphorical spaces of criticism and theory – the Frogs presents a tempting puzzle to anyone curious about how the play orients its “heraldic” compass points in relation to the spaces of the ancient city. Because of the help it provides in sorting out the stylistic puzzles posed above, in the next section I deviate somewhat from my predominantly literary analysis and take a look at another type of cultural refraction that has left its mark on the comic plot: ritual landscapes.

3. Theatrical space and ritual plotting While all of Aristophanes’ extant plays reveal his bold and flexible use of mimetic space, Frogs achieves a shifting from place to place that is singular. In the first half of the play the mimetic scheme alters continuously, as Dionysus makes his way out of the city and through marsh and meadow to Hades, the scene of poetic judgment.99 The stage space is thus repeatedly overlain with adjacent fictional landscapes; and this changing topography brings together ritual practice, spatial “progress,” and fitful glimpses of a literary landscape that highlights essential stylistic differences between the tragic poets. Although readers of Frogs have not shown much interest in arguments that the play may also map familiar spaces leading out of the city, the vibrant landscape details clearly point in this direction as well. I should, 98 99

See esp. Biles 2002, Ruffell 2002. Russo [1962] 1994: 209–13 notes that this journey is unique in extant comedy and that it involves a continuous relabeling of the stage space.

3. Theatrical space and ritual plotting

however, emphasize once again that these coordinates always orient figurative landscapes, with “real” ones existing as traces within the comic scheme.100 In addition, which route we are talking about remains somewhat mysterious. The one that Aristophanes traces bears relatively few indications of Eleusinian topographies, the path that many scholars have favored. This journey would follow the road from Athens to Eleusis, and thus a route out of Athens along the Sacred Way (Odos Hiera) to the northwest and across the Cephisus river. The Frogs’ altercations with Dionysus may be reminiscent of the “bridge insults” hurled at Initiates as they passed over the Cephisus, although the scene’s dynamic does not match very closely what we know of the ritual.101 The choruses of Initiates (Mystae) also support the importance of Eleusis; but the landscape features that surround them urge attention to the confluence in local spaces of ritual and literary engagement.102 More significantly, the marsh scene bears no apparent relation to the Eleusinian Mysteries, while it does evoke a local celebration. Thucydides identifies the area south of the Acropolis as part of the oldest ancient settlement and locates there the sanctuary of Dionysus Limnaeus and the Anthesteria (Hist. 2.15–16). In the classical period this area along the Ilissus was a suburban district littered with temples, dedicatory altars, and shrines, including those to the Muses, Aphrodite, Pan, and the Nymphs.103 It also housed springtime rituals and rites of passage, such as those that took place at the precinct of Demeter and Persephone at Agrae and possibly that of “Aphrodite in the Gardens,” although determining the site of the latter has proved difficult.104 The Frogs’ trip through the marshes and to the flowery meadows of “Hades”105 repeatedly evokes the fertility 100

101

102 103

104 105

For arguments in favor of this scheme see Gerhard 1858; Tucker 1904; Hooker 1960; Guarducci 1982; Slater 1986. Tierney 1934, Segal 1961, and Dover 1993a offer support for the prominence of local rituals in the play but do not think a particular topography is indicated, although many of Dover’s remarks emphasize Eleusis. See Richardson 1974: 214; O’Higgins 2003: 57. But cf. Tierney 1934: 200–201, who points out that the Initiates themselves engage in insults, rather than serving as targets; Segal 1961: 235, who associates the gephurismos with the country (Lenaean) Dionysia; also Burkert [1977] 1985: 287, who thinks the “bridge insults” occurred closer to Eleusis. Cf. Edmonds 2004: 126 n. 36. See also Moorton 1989; and again Edmonds 2004. On Pan in Athens, see Borgeaud [1979] 1988: 140–41, 151–56; on Nymphs, Dionysus Limnaeus, the Ilissus, and Agrae, see Larson 2001: 127–29. For some of the relevant details see Wycherley 1963, 1978; and further below. While Rogers went so far as to characterize the katabasis scenes as “loosely tacked on” (1919: xvi; cf. Russo [1962] 1994: 206–08), Segal 1961: 236–37 argues for connections between cultic practice and the dramatic festivals, most notably the Lenaea; in this he follows Tierney 1934. The theme of descent may itself augment the ties between rural spaces and poetry, since both Dionysus and Orpheus – the rural poet par excellence – make journeys to Hades.

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rituals of the Lesser Mysteries and the Anthesteria, which included rites at the sanctuary of Dionysus Limnaeus, as well as aspects of the Lenaean festival itself, in which the play was performed.106 Scholars have interpreted the landscapes charted in mimetic space onstage in various ways, some dismissing the idea that Aristophanes depicts anything more particular than “symbolic space” (e.g., flowering meadows = paradise). But were we to attempt to trace a route by way of its heraldic details – its emblematic particularities – it would look something like the following. Dionysus visits Heracles at his “house,” either at Kynosarges, just outside of the south walls and close to the Diomeian Gate, or farther to the north, at the temple of Heracles Alexikakos on the eastern slope of the Hill of the Nymphs.107 He then proceeds to his own sanctuary “in the marshes,” which some scholars thought referred to an area between the Pnyx and the Acropolis but that most locate close to the Ilissus.108 Dionysus successfully crosses these marshes (limnae), accompanied by Frogs who invoke the drunken celebration of the Anthesteria. After this crossing, he arrives at flowering meadows for the “play” associated with Lesser Mysteries rituals, amid blooms suggestive of the Anthesteria.109 Finally, he knocks on the door of “Hades,” perhaps at Agrae, a district on the south side of the Ilissus that housed the temple of Demeter and Persephone, where the Lesser Mysteries were celebrated and where some scholars locate the Lenaean theater.110 Others doubt the existence of a 106

107

108

109 110

These occurred in late February and involved the drinking of “pitchers” (choai), some seasonal appreciation (i.e., the new vintage and the transition to the festival of flowers [the Anthesteria proper]), and offerings of pots (chytroi) of seeds to the dead. See Segal 1961: 219–20; Moorton 1989: 314–16; Hamilton 1992; Parker 2005. On the connections to the Lenaea, see especially Tierney 1934: 206–12. For Kynosarges, see DL 6.1.13. Wycherley 1978: 229–30 discusses possible locations and the site’s use as a gymnasium; see also Judeich 1931: 419; Hooker 1960. A scholion to Ran. 501 locates the temple of Heracles Alexikakos in Melite, a district that some think included the eastern slope of the Hill of the Nymphs (see Tucker [and Harrison] 1904: 418; Wycherley 1959; Lalonde 2006: 86–87). This is in keeping with Thucydides’ placement of the sanctuary to the south of the Acropolis (πρὸς νότον, Hist. 2.15–16), and no other area around Athens was known as marshy. He also identifies this area as the setting for the “Older Dionysia” in the the month of Anthesterion; Ps.-Demosthenes (Ag. Neaera 76) confirms the temple’s antiquity and its connection to the Anthesteria. See Bates 1899; Tucker (and Harrison) 1904; cf. Tierney 1934: 204. Also Hooker 1960; Dover 1993a ad 216f.; Slater 1986. Wycherley 1963, 1978: 169–74 charts Socrates’ path in the Phaedrus as slightly upriver from this area; note that Socrates also mentions Agrae (229c1–2). As opposed to the Eleusinian rituals, which took place in the fall, when meadows would be dry. Travlos 1971 places the temple of Demeter and Kore in Agrae, across the Ilissus above Kynosarges. Slater 1986 thinks the Frogs journey ends at the Lenaean Theater in Agrae and has more to do with comic rituals. This has proved impossible to determine; while it is not even clear that there was a separate theater, many readers of the evidence think that there must have been and that it would have been either in the Agora (e.g., Tierney 1934: 204) or outside the

3. Theatrical space and ritual plotting

separate theater, however, and most assume that Frogs was performed in the Theater of Dionysus.111 If Aristophanes did in fact present Frogs on the south slope of the Acropolis, and this terrain along the Ilissus is at least one of those suggested by the play’s action, then it may also have had a curious meta-dramatic significance. The area indicated lay just south of the Theater of Dionysus in the general direction of the audience’s gaze, beyond the city walls toward the Ilissus and Agrae – which also again, faces the Athenian district where the Lesser Mysteries and the Anthesteria were celebrated.112 Since Frogs was produced for the Lenaea of 405, and thus in the winter festival that fell between the Lesser Mysteries and the Anthesteria, it seems likely that the journey onstage is oriented to intersect with the ritual settings familiar and easily envisioned beyond the walls toward which the theater prospect was oriented.113 The Dionysus of Aristophanes’ play would thus be guided onstage along the local route that these celebrations would take. For the original audience, then, the play effected on one level at least a witty conflation of mimetic, ritual, and emblematic spaces, implicating the various Dionysiac rituals across one variegated landscape with the god himself as mystified participant. The connections between the Frogs’ imagery and that of Euripides’ choral odes introduce an additional ritual constellation, one also connected to fertility, but via young girls’ rites of passage. While we should not make too much of the Euripidean echoes in Aristophanes’ vocabulary and token deities, the Frogs’ strophes do deploy elements of Euripides’ choral odes that depict “rural” song and dance involving young women in transition, young women dramatized by Euripides whose plights resemble Persephone/Korē, whose story was central to the Mysteries. The Mysteries thus intersect with rural imagery in lyric poetry through their core legend, that of a girl plucking flowers in a meadow, getting snatched by a god, descending to the Underworld, and eventually establishing the

111

112

113

city walls. It may also be relevant that half of the responsibility for running the Lenaea fell to the same officials that oversaw the Mysteries, which indicates at the least that the socio-economic arrangement assumes an institutional coherence between the comic agōn and the rites of Demeter (Dover 1993b: 183). In addition, Tierney points to evidence that the Lenaea was ritualistically bound up with the Dionysus of the Mysteries (Tierney 1934; also Segal 1961: 219–20). Again, see Slater 1986; vs. Pickard-Cambridge 1927; Stanford 1957, [1958] 1983: x–xi; Segal 1961: 239–40 n. 75. This depends, of course, on how high the seats were in the fifth century; for the argument that the theater was smaller then, see Csapo and Goette 2007. See especially Moorton 1989: 316.

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cycle of seasons.114 Further supporting the idea that a local ritual constellation is being engaged here, Philippe Borgeaud has argued that the Athenian Pan – which, again, Aristophanes’ and Euripides’ odes both celebrate – has important ties to the rites of Demeter.115 The presence of elements that recall archaic lyric and perhaps especially eroticized rural spaces not only suggests an association of Euripides’ modes with these spaces but also crafts a connection between that style and a particular aspect of the Eleusinian Mysteries: Persephone’s “plucking the flower.”116 As Claude Calame notes, this kind of imagery is central to archaic lyric and indicates passage through the “meadow” of young girls’ burgeoning sexuality into the civic sphere.117 An additional element in this variegated topographical scheme may further connect ritual landscapes and what Calame calls “the metaphorical spaces of love.” The sanctuary of Aphrodite “in the Gardens,” which some scholars locate on the banks of the Ilissus, had ritual ties to that of Pandrosus (on the north side of the Acropolis next to the Erechtheion) in the form of practices regulating young girls’ fertility that included a nocturnal descent into the garden precinct.118 Within the larger context of rural (or “rural”) scenes of inspiration and judgment, this heavily trafficked area along the Ilissus is unique in its association with both fertility rituals and elements related to poetry and aesthetic judgment. Not only did it house sites dedicated to deities connected to poetic production in rustic settings, including an altar to the Muses in their guise as “daughters of Ilissus” (Paus. 1.19.6); it is also one of the precincts that later become well known and accrued significance in the literary critical tradition.119 To put it in schematic relation to the spaces 114

115 116 117

118

119

Cf. Calame 1999: 153–74, 2007. The monodies of Helen (Helen) and Creusa (Ion) depict their rapes as from among the flowers, next to waterfalls. The imagery of the Frogs’ song contains some echoes of the stasimon in the Ion in which the chorus depicts the rape of Creusa. Borgeaud [1979] 1988: 141–50. Cf. also Eur. Med. 824–44, 1085–89; Bacch. 395–420; IA 543–67. E.g., Archil. fr. 196A W2 [Cologne Epode]; Anacr. frs. 346, 417 PMG; Sapph. frs. 96, 105b L–P. See Calame 1999: 165–67; also Swift 2009a, 2009b. On the gendering of ritual space, see Cole 2004. On Euripides’ engagement of this imagery from earlier poetry, see also in ch. 2.3a. Paus. 1.27.2–3. See Calame 2007 on “gardens of love”; also Calame 1999: 170–74. There are many problems with both the understanding of the rituals and the situation of the sanctuary; see also Wycherley 1963: 94, 1978: 172; Travlos 1971: 228; Motte 1973: 121–37; Brulé 1987: 84–90. See Wycherley 1963: 90. Although Pausanias’ descriptions may not constitute facts about the classical landscape so much as ancient reception of famous spots, this label suggests common knowledge. On his “nostalgia,” see Porter 2001. Other such locales are, again, Helicon and its Valley of the Muses (as mentioned), Olympus’ Pierian vale, Delphi and Parnassus, Olympia, and the Acropolis and Hymettos caves of Pan and the Nymphs.

3. Theatrical space and ritual plotting

and their poetic inhabitants: the comic Dionysus fords the marshy expanse to the beat of a frog chorus that claims a special role in the fostering of riverside poetry; he then witnesses the chorus of Initiates singing among and about flowering meadows that are traditional metonyms for erotic rural modes in lyric poetry;120 finally, somewhere out there in the countryside he enters Hades, the nether realm associated with the nature poet Orpheus, where the tragic poets do battle at least in part by situating themselves along the urban–rural divide.121 Further, Frogs employs “suburban” settings and more rural landscapes, both of which host Athenian fertility rituals and intersect with the route to the testing of tragedy. That is, these spaces and their details mediate between city and country modes, Euripides and Aeschylus, and ultimately tragedy and comedy. We could, then, recognize in Frogs an innovative appropriation of rural settings as the mapping of a new kind of criticism – call it “fertile” judgment. From this perspective a central means for assessing poetic worth would involve judging its capacity for civic renewal through rural rites, perhaps such as those more closely connected to the older fertility rituals of which the Lenaean festival and its dramatic competition is an offshoot. The path through the marshes and fields outside of the city walls also emerges as the proper “path” or mode of judgment, since it ultimately gets the journeyer to the space and perspective from which he can hope to assess clearly what the city needs. One further factor may account for this emphasis on the rural setting: the tendency in Attic comedy to send protagonists out into the countryside to fix what has gone wrong with the city. While it is difficult to determine how dominant this pattern was among other comic poets, Aristophanes makes frequent use of it, especially in Acharnians and Birds but also in the background of Knights, Peace, and Wealth. When Aristophanes launches his assessments of Athens’ ills, he usually opposes old, rural, bean-chewing ways (cf. Eq. 41, 805–08) to new-fangled, urban ones. These distinctions can take sophisticated forms: think of the parkland idyll in the Academy that the Stronger Logos offers dreamily in Clouds (1002–08), versus the urbane symposium for which 120 121

Cf. esp. Sapph. fr. 2 L–P; Anacr. fr. 417 PMG; Ibyc. fr. 286 PMG; HDem. See Sperduti 1950: 213–17; Segal 1961: 221, 1989: 8–10, who points to the Hellenistic roles of Orpheus and Dionysus as fertility deities; as well as Bowie 1993: 230–34, who emphasizes the similarity in Eleusinian and Orphic settings. In the case of Orpheus, this aestheticizes earlier Orphic writings that depict the poet’s song as calming and ordering nature, what Segal calls “a resonant harmony” (1989: 10). Although Frogs does not explicitly refer to Orpheus, narratives of katabasis inevitably recall him, as Edmonds (2004: 10) has argued, following Tierney 1934: 218 and n. 74 and Bowie 1993: 230–32. See also Whitman 1964: 228–31 and Padilla 1992 on the relevance of Heracles to such themes.

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Bdelycleon tries to polish his rustic (agroikos) father in Wasps (1131ff.; cf. 1320).122 Such contrasts suggest that, despite its denizens’ muchlampooned crudeness, the country may offer an older and more morally stalwart context from which to judge the city’s foibles, both aesthetic and ethical.123 Dionysus would, from this perspective, represent a version of the typically rustic comic protagonist whose unsophisticated literary tastes match his recourse to rural retreats for information and resolution. Things are not quite this simple, of course: Dionysus initially has an aesthetic crush on the urbane Euripides; he is not very obviously cut in the “old country” mold; and he is not much of a student. But to the extent that Dionysus’ character is more hybrid than the typical buffoonish hero, he matches in semiotic complexity both the critical idiom and its representative, Euripides, whose stylistic mélange includes both the more girlish elements associated with the meadowland and the mouth-working modes of the urban scene. Since the resolution of Frogs must be achieved in literary critical (as opposed to, say, strictly political) terms and since literary convention offers up semi-rural settings as “rural” – that is, as sites for the culling of poetic imagery for what are essentially urban uses – it makes some sense that this poetry-loving protagonist would trek outside the city walls in search of a solution to his dilemma. This may explain why, even though elsewhere Aristophanes more firmly associates critical practices with Euripides, the Agora, and city activities, in Frogs he places them and the poet in the countryside. And, again, one of the routes indicated seems to pass along the Ilissus, the riverside setting that Plato uses to frame the action of the Phaedrus, a dialogue that appropriates the imagery of poetic inspiration and “nympholepsy” for use in judging the proper dynamics of philosophical persuasion.124 Like Aristophanes, Plato wryly depicts this quasi-rural setting as enhancing artistic sensibility and thus as a spur for and even necessary to the process of critical judgment. Both comic poet and philosopher treat their rural topographies with an engaged and delighted irony, but they also effectively establish such spaces as discursively central to their critical orientations. Later theorists do not miss this emphasis: 122

123

124

Wycherley 1978: 220 notes Aristophanes’ portrait and emphasizes the Academy’s park-like aspects. Cf. also the staunch critique of the “rural” Dicaeopolis in Acharnians; see Rosen 2006 on the mockery of agroikia. For the setting see Wycherley 1963; Lind 1987. On the links between nympholepsy and prophecy see Connor 1988.

4. What rivers can mean

for Cicero and Dionysius of Halicarnassus in particular, the details of the Ilissus setting are symbolic of and provide crucial distinctions for the terms of critical judgment.125 Further, the fact that the Phaedrus is staged in this same general area suggests that the highlighting of this quasi-rural space, with its shrines to the Nymphs and the Muses, may serve as a fitting frame for the developing contentions among literary critics, rhetoricians, and philosophers about which practices have or ought to have civic benefits and which involve a retreat from the city and its corrupting concerns. Frogs and the Phaedrus both suggest that poetry may in comic representation still be called upon for its civic wisdom, but the practices by which its own value is assessed are faulty and in need of rustic correction. The reinvigoration of poetry may demand a return to country scenes of inspiration and authority, but in Aristophanes and Plato alike these settings have very ambiguous effects on critical judgment. Euripides and Socrates both bridge this divide, since they practice the deflationary, close-shaving measures of the Agora and yet bring into play the feminized spaces of ritual and erotic enactment beyond the city walls.

4. What rivers can mean Landscape features such as rivers underscore these distinctions, charting stylistic continua that run from fluid and fertile to rough and roiling. A river’s smooth flow may indicate a mode dissimilar to other bodies of water; and the Ilissus itself suggests a range of characteristics within the stylistic scheme, sometimes linking poetic modes with a watery fertility, at other times pointing to excess. In a dry climate water really is best, in that it alone gives life to dry land; but in the realm of poetry and literary criticism this fluid bounty is recognized as potentially too much of a good thing. As earlier and later chapters in this study reveal, poets and critics often deploy water imagery to highlight a fluidity of phrasing and word order, which may be likened to a clear or smooth and flowing stream (usually welcome) or to a full and rushing river or flood (impressive but overwhelming). In the last quarter of the fifth century the distinction between the great flood and a more restrained flow centers at least in part on an aesthetic and ethical debate between Aristophanes and his senior competitor Cratinus; and it combines the notion of the big flood with drinking.126 125

126

Cic. De orat. 1.28–29, 2.12–24; De leg. 1.1–4; De fin. 5.1–9; DH Dem. 5.5–17. See further in ch. 7.3. For the reception of this set of distinctions, see, e.g., Crowther 1979; Dunn 1989.

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Aristophanes depicts his elder poet as marked by an unleashed, overly flowing style (Eq. 526–28): εἶτα Κρατίνου μεμνημένος, ὃς πολλῷ ῥεύσας ποτ' ἐπαίνῳ διὰ τῶν ἀφελῶν πεδίων ἔρρει, καὶ τῆς στάσεως παρασύρων ἐφόρει τὰς δρῦς καὶ τὰς πλατάνους καὶ τοὺς ἐχθροὺς προθελύμνους. Then [he says that he] remembers Cratinus, who flowing with abundant praise, flooded the open plains and, sweeping them from standing, carried off oaks and elms and enemies, roots and all.

Aristophanes joins this image to that of a gabbling, bibulous old age, so that “flooding” and “drinking” (i.e., wine in excess) are stylistically associated. Scholars have taken a fragment from Cratinus’ Putinē (Wine Flask) to be a rambunctious, self-mocking response to this unflattering portrait.127 Here the speaker depicts a character overwhelmed by this superabundance of words (fr. 198 K–A): ῎Αναξ Ἄπολλον, τῶν ἐπῶν τῶν ῥευμάτων. καναχοῦσι πηγαί, δωδεκάκρουνον τὸ στόμα, Ἰλισσὸς ἐν τῇ φάρυγι· τί ἂν εἴποιμί σοι; εἰ μὴ γὰρ ἐπιβύσει τις αὐτοῦ τὸ στόμα, ἅπαντα ταῦτα κατακλύσει ποιήμασιν. Lord Apollo, fountains of flowing words splash out, his mouth has twelve springs, an Ilissus in his throat – what can I say? If someone doesn’t stopper his mouth, he will flood the whole place here with verses.

Cratinus famously claimed that drinking water alone would foreclose any creativity (fr. 203 K–A), a contrast that seems to have enjoyed a piquant afterlife among the orators, especially in criticisms of Demosthenes’ careful, polished style.128 This volubility presumably contrasts with Aristophanes’ restrained orifice (στόμαθ' ἡνιοχήσας) at Wasps 1022, the drama that Aristophanes produced in the following year and that may respond at least in part to Cratinus’ Putinē.129 With his drunken creativity and flood of words 127

128 129

Putinē was produced for the same festival as the first version of Clouds, which must have made this stylistic/didactic rivalry all the more pointed; see esp. Biles 2002 and Ruffell 2002. See Worman 2008: 108, 248–49. Biles 2002: 189–201 focuses especially on the figure of Philocleon, in whose drunken behavior at the symposium he sees a lampoon of Cratinus. See also Sidwell 1995; Rosen 2000; Lada-Richards 2002: 85; Ruffell 2002; Bakola 2010: 20–33.

4. What rivers can mean

Cratinus resembles Archilochus, whose stylistic heir he claimed to be and whose reception echoes this association; he also resembles his favorite tragic target Aeschylus, whom the chorus in Frogs encourages “boldly to release [his] fountain” (θαρρῶν τὸν κρουνὸν ἀφίει, 1005).130 The marshy riverside setting in Frogs is clearly in dialogue with this convention, offering a new turn on what the “watery” style might be. While the bibulous, full-flowing admirer of Aeschylus can boast that he has an Ilissus in his throat, the slighter mode of the Frogs, of Euripides – and indeed of Aristophanes – can lay claim to a different aspect of this river’s fluid aspects. Although late in the drama Aeschylus’ addition of “river” (ποταμέ, 1383) to the line he enters upon the scales of poetry gives it weight, as Dionysus explains (ὅτι εἰσέθηκε ποταμόν, 1386), this may not be the kind of fertile source the discerning critic is after.131 The early scenes of Frogs, like the opening of Plato’s Phaedrus, suggest lighter associations for the Ilissus and its aesthetic qualities: again, that of the sparkling, fineflowing stream versus the roiling river. The waters of Frogs, insofar as they may toy with the actual setting of the Ilissus, foreground the marshy qualities of a river overflowing its banks in springtime, while the gentle, cooling waters of the Phaedrus setting clearly represent a trace nod to the Ilissus in the heat of summer, when its waters would be lower and easily fordable (cf., e.g., Phdr. 238c5–d3). But neither the play nor the dialogue emphasize the thunderous qualities of a rushing river; rather, in both watery elements indicate fluid, lighter styles. Within this scheme Euripides’ style falls on the side of sparkling brooks and smooth streams, while Aeschylus’ is embodied by the full and weighty river that he so proudly offers up in his winning line. Aristophanes’ drama of the path to Hades for the judgment of poets thus orchestrates a critical practice that is site-specific and ritually infused. As Dionysus takes his trip in search of the dexterous and fertile Euripides, both his poetic modes and those of Aeschylus acquire the tactile qualities of topographies inhabited by celebrants of the ritual spaces through which 130

131

Cf. also Archil. fr. 120 W2 regarding the creative powers of wine, as well as Cratinus’ dismissal of the creative potential of the water drinker (fr. 203 K–A). The testimony 17 K–A seems to suggest that Cratinus consciously fashioned his poetic persona and style after Archilochus. The careful and restrained Horace uses the image of the unleashed flood to denigrate his predecessor Lucilius’ style (Serm. 1.4.21, 1.10.50); but later Longinus (33.5) approvingly compares Archilochus’ style to it. Lada-Richards 1999: 242–47, 2002: 85 aligns gonimos with Cratinus’ and Aeschylus’ “flood” of words; but, again, the Aristophanic aesthetic revises such equations by associating Euripides and a lighter style with fertile modes.

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the god passes. In this way the critique accumulates significant details as the journey progresses. While Dionysus remains irresolute, easily distracted, and taken in by cheap theatrics, the literary critical process emerges by turns as distinguishing and combining poetic styles pegged to ritual processions through distinctive spaces along the urban–rural divide. Perhaps it is only by means of the “distance” (conceptually and within mimetic space) created by the trip through the marshes and meadows that the proper literary judge can emerge: the comic didaskalos, with his quasirural roots, connections to suburban fertility rituals, and hybrid critical discourse. If poetic contests reveal themselves as flawed, as often based on silly criteria and assessed by foolish, ignorant judges, the play gestures toward the possibility of more discerning critical practices (e.g., well“grounded” literary judgment) that might offer civic enrichment and renewal. Plato, a great admirer of Aristophanes, highlights the attraction of such rural correctives, when he envisions in the Republic how young citizens’ constant exposure to the overabundance of art forms that characterize the lively city may be cured by a trip into the countryside. Socrates uses a “healthy meadow” topos to argue that the young should be “pastured” in a place where they will be exposed only to good impressions. Thus like welltended cattle they will not run the risk of “grazing” on bad images coming from many different sources (ἵνα μὴ ἐν κακίας εἰκόσι τρεφόμενοι ἡμῖν οἱ φύλακες ὥσπερ ἐν κακῇ βοτάνῃ, πολλὰ ἑκάστης ἡμέρας κατὰ σμικρὸν ἀπὸ πολλῶν δρεπόμενοί τε καὶ νεμόμενοι). Instead, as with breezes that blow from a healthy setting, the young citizens will be nurtured from all directions if they are surrounded by examples of good actions, which would waft over them visually or aurally (ὥσπερ ἐν ὑγιεινῷ τόπῳ οἰκοῦντες οἱ νέοι ἀπὸ παντὸς ὠφελῶνται, ὁπόθεν ἂν αὐτοῖς ἀπὸ τῶν καλῶν ἔργων ἢ πρὸς ὄψιν ἢ πρὸς ἀκοήν τι προσβάλῃ, ὥσπερ αὔρα φέρουσα ἀπὸ χρηστῶν τόπων ὑγίειαν) (Rep. 401b1–d2). In keeping with the moral topography of Frogs, Socrates’ analogies place the finer, nobler civic values and modeling for the young outside of the city, so that the rustic imagery configures a purer, simpler space and time. This fantasy space, which Frogs frankly recognizes as such, Plato takes up as a future ideal. Aristophanes’ literary critical journey to the space of judgment enacts a fusion of dramatic and Mysteries rituals to innovate on an old poetic convention that situates knowledge and authority in rural settings. It thereby fosters a long tradition in philosophy and rhetorical theory of the political, ethical, and aesthetic refreshment that this trip out of the city affords. Further, it grounds in concrete and influential ways an emerging

4. What rivers can mean

set of distinctions between grand, imposing styles and light, subtle ones. Hellenistic and Roman writers elaborate on these stylistic differences frequently by supplementing classical landscape features with some of their own, so that rural imagery continues to signal delicacy at one end (e.g., flowering gardens, pure springs) and grandeur at the other (e.g., rough mountains, roiling rivers). Aristophanes’ emphasis on these rural spaces also encourages among the later critics the insight that natural settings offer the most vibrant indicators of stylistic differences. What Frogs establishes, then, is not only that proper critical judgment necessitates a mimetic retreat (i.e., “retreat”) from urban spaces, but also that all styles may have their rural roots. Thus even Euripidean dash and polish share features with the sparkle and flow of the river’s stream, while the styles of older poets like Aeschylus and Phrynichus – that old meadowland bee – hail from farther afield.

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Rural retreats Staking philosophy’s terrain in Plato

In an article from 1957 on the depiction of landscapes in Greek poetry, Adam Parry credits Plato with the invention of pastoral poetry. He cites an epigram from the Greek Anthology traditionally attributed to Plato, in which the poet calls upon the landscape – with its trees, rocks, springs, and sheep – to be silent, since Pan is piping and the Nymphs dancing (‟Plato” 16 EG, 9.823 AP): Σιγάτω λάσιον Δρυάδων λέπας οἵ τ' ἀπὸ πέτρας κρουνοὶ καὶ βληχὴ πουλυμιγὴς τοκάδων, αὐτὸς ἐπεὶ σύριγγι μελίσδεται εὐκελάδῳ Πάν, ὑγρὸν ἱεὶς ζευκτῶν χεῖλος ὑπὲρ καλάμων· αἱ δὲ πέριξ θαλεροῖσι χορὸν ποσὶν ἐστήσαντο Ὑδριάδες Νύμφαι, Νύμφαι Ἁμαδρυάδες. Let the Dryads’ leafy crag be silent and the springs down from the rocks and the varied bleating of the lambs, since Pan himself is playing on the clear-sounding pipe, putting his dewy lip to the joined reeds; and around the dancing space with lively feet stand the Water Nymphs, the Nymphs with-Dryads.

While not everyone had attributed this epigram to Plato and no one does any longer, a few scholars have explored the connections between the setting of Plato’s Phaedrus and the development of bucolic imagery, which supports the notion that Plato (or at the least this opening scene) is somehow crucial in the unfolding of the genre.1 But as Parry and other readers of ancient pastoral recognize, the image of the idyllic rural retreat is 1

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In any case, the ascription of this epigram to Plato attests the ancient association of his imagery (and esp. the opening scene of the Phaedrus) with the development of pastoral. E.g., Wilamowitz 1919: 456 n. 1 credits an unknown Hellenistic poet but emphasizes Plato’s use of and engagement with poetic and especially pastoral idiom (453–60); Murley 1940 mentions “Plato’s” pastoral poetry; see also Pearce 1988, Vara 1992, and Page 1981: 175, who remarks that the ascription is “unexpected but not inappropriate,” citing Phdr. 230b. Rosenmeyer 1969: 12 rejects the idea that the epigrammatic form (including epigrams from the Greek Anthology) shares anything with Theocritean idyll; on the other hand, he repeatedly cites Plato as influential on the latter. On the Platonic setting as a locus amoenus, contrast Elliger 1975: 289–90, who thinks that in order for the topos to be in play it must have a Golden Age cast.

Rural retreats

very old and its elaboration very extensive.2 Although the phrase locus amoenus is Ciceronian in origin,3 there is little question that Plato appropriates this poetic commonplace when he has Socrates exclaim, as he looks upon the chosen spot beside the Ilissus at the outset of the Phaedrus, “By Hera, the resting place is certainly delightful” (νὴ τὴ Ἥραν, καλή γε ἡ καταγωγή, 230b2).4 As Chapter 2 (especially section 3) emphasizes, archaic poetry clearly marks this type of rural space as one of inspiration and contact with the divine. And as noted in the Introduction (section 2), a prime example of such idylls is the site of Calypso’s cave, with its birds, tall trees, miraculous springs, and blooming meadows (5.59–74). Consider again what the Homeric poet highlights when Hermes approaches and sees this remarkable setting: “There and then,” he says, “even an immortal, coming upon and seeing it, would gaze in wonder and delight in his heart” (ἔνθα κ' ἔπειτα καὶ ἀθάνατός περ ἐπελθὼν | θηήσαιτο ἰδὼν καὶ τερφθείη ἐν φρεσὶν ᾖσιν, Od. 5.73–74). He offers his audience a roster of pleasures that the god’s appreciative viewing punctuates: the scent of burning cedar and sweetwood wafts from far off (τηλόθι δ’ ὀδμὴ | κέδρου καὶ εὐκεάτοιο θύου τ’ ἀνὰ νῆσον ὀδώδει | δαιομένων); within the cave the Nymph sings in a lovely voice (ἡ δ’ ἔνδον ἀοιδιάουσ’ ὀπὶ καλῇ); the meadows around bloom soft with violets and parsley (ἀμφὶ δὲ λειμῶνες μαλακοὶ ἴου ἠδε σελίνου | θήλεον) (59–73). Interwoven with these sensory effects are multiple delights for the eye (e.g., the flourishing trees [63–64], the long-winged birds [65–67], the gleaming cave with its swag of grapevines [68–69], the sparkling water leaping in four directions [70–71]). The poet’s elaborate description, like “Plato’s” epigram, is rich in sensual details, offering its audience a pleasure that the god’s appreciative viewing punctuates. Homer underscores this moment by repeating the verb θεάομαι (”gaze in wonder”) twice more (5.77–80); and only when Hermes has looked to his heart’s content (πάντα ἑῷ θηήσατο θύμῳ, 5.76) does he enter the cave. For Plato such moments of viewing beauty, and especially youthful male beauty, are essential aspects of the process by which one engages aesthetically in order to make one’s way toward true knowledge – an 2

3

4

Schönbeck (1962) identified elements such as these with the topos of the locus amoenus, as more recently has Hass (1998). As Hass points out (1998: 3–4), although Schönbeck cites many elements, he restricts himself to those instances that show the greatest number of these. Verr. 6.80; Mur. 13; De fin. 2.107 [=one among many pleasures of the body in a discussion of Epicureanism]; Att. 12.19.1; De orat. 2.290; Epist. 7.20.2. The entire setting of De oratore is framed as a Platonic locus amoenus (1.28), as Hass 1998: 34 notices. See the discussion in ch. 7.3a. This is a Platonic hapax; de Vries 1969 ad loc. argues that the word is elevating.

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advancement he charts in central dialogues by means of elements drawn from rural or quasi-rural settings such as gardens and suburban riversides. Sarah Monoson has emphasized the importance of viewing in relation to Plato’s conception of philosophical engagement, tying it especially to the experience of the theater spectator (theatēs). Andrea Nightingale, by contrast, has argued that pilgrimage and viewing play a central role in fourth-century philosophy more generally; she highlights the importance of these activities in Greek culture and the role of the theōros (eyewitness) at famous rituals such as those that took place at sanctuaries like Delphi and Olympia, as well as revelatory ones like the Mysteries celebrations.5 The emphasis that both Monoson and Nightingale place on civic engagement and public viewing is important for my argument that the landscape settings are so central to critical discourse because they serve as fitting spaces that offer relevant resources (i.e., metaphors) for performances of one sort or another. As suggested at the end of Chapter 3, Plato follows Aristophanes in drawing sharp distinctions between types of citizens as well as urban and rural settings. His Socrates is a quintessentially city-bound type whose rare forays out of his favorite urban haunts (the Agora, the gymnasia) are disorienting and marked by physical details that signal discomfort or suspicion. And yet as I argue in Chapter 1 (section 1), Plato’s staging of Socrates and others in significant settings – despite all his talents for dramatic effect – aims at pursuing an elevated philosophical route that ultimately abandons the physical environment and embodied performance. Unlike Aristophanes (or, for that matter, Aristotle or Cicero), Plato takes as his starting point and target not civic engagement in public settings but rather a retreat, sometimes fashioned, as intermittently in the Republic and more fully in the Phaedrus, as a trip to the countryside (or “countryside”). Plato couches this aesthetic engagement in rustic terms often enough that certain landscapes appear essential to its unfolding. While his aims are novel, he nevertheless shares the path and other landscape tropes not only with Aristophanes but also with archaic and early classical poets. If Hesiod, Sappho, and especially Pindar deploy the sensual details of rural topographies in a more clearly programmatic manner, as a means of distinguishing their aesthetic sensibilities from others and thereby asserting their poetic authority, Plato’s rural details aim instead eventually to reorient their perceiver. They urge a need for moving beyond the physical environment and its metaphorical 5

On theōria in Athenian culture and in Plato, see Monoson 2000: chs. 4 and 8; for a more concerted focus on the conjunction of journeying and theōria, see Nightingale 2004: ch. 1.

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extensions while making use of the same means (i.e., vivid metaphors, resonant settings) in order to get past mere embodiment and approach the intelligible realm. This chapter makes its way ultimately to the setting in the Phaedrus, an especially rich corner of Plato’s figurative terrain and not only itself a significant turning point in ancient literary theory and criticism but also a very influential topos among later writers on style. The idyllic locale of the Phaedrus, the impact of which is initiated by Socrates’ gazing upon it and offering a paean to its lovely details, exploits poetic resources to foster a novel metaphorical terrain. Plato appropriates the familiar imagery of streams and paths to use as a frame for the transformations of the philosophical process: beauty streaming, the mousikos soul’s watering and growth, erotic cultivation through speeches, and dialectical paths and plantings. The rural-inflected dynamics of the dialogue converge around the search for a new kind of rhetoric and its necessary supplement, dialectic. The success of the search depends at least in part on a better understanding of how to harness poetic imagery to expose similarities – reproduced in language by mimetic and figurative usage – that more accurately approximate the truth about the relationship between sensible and intelligible realms.6 This also means that when Socrates imitates earlier poetic and rhetorical expression, he reproduces it in altered forms, so that his metaphors both reproduce and augment the older figures. The process by which he achieves this transformation is famously complex. Because it centers on mimetic strategies – that is, the emulation of poetic and older rhetorical styles, including invocation and encomia, metaphorical language, and rural imagery – I first take up again my general argument in Chapter 1 about Plato’s use of mimesis and metaphor to forge a “path” of argument, in order to consider where such routes belong in relation to his larger theoretical scheme as well as his use of the locus amoenus in the Phaedrus. As I demonstrate in this and subsequent chapters, it is not merely that this locus amoenus is very influential; other scholars have noticed and discussed this.7 Rather, Plato’s theoretical perspective and his handling of the mimetic process come together in the rural setting, since the one lays claim to a deep natural grounding for the other. This intersection has, I think, a broader effect on the literary theoretical tradition than the influence of the Phaedrus alone can explain. As noted in Chapter 1, later theorists and critics may not follow Plato on the path up to 6 7

Again, see ch.1.1 for a general discussion of the path of mimesis and approaching the Forms. Especially Trapp 1990; also Fornaro 1997: 120–27; Hunter 2012: ch. 4.

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the Forms, but their emulation of his imagery and analogizing suggests how much exegetical work they think this kind of mimetic theorizing can achieve. That Plato grounds these dynamics in vivid, sensually charged settings draws attention to an apparent conflict in his attitudes toward mimesis and figuration. On the one hand he appears apprehensive about the fact that we are stuck in the realm of likeness and can for the most part only explicate the real (i.e., the Forms, the intelligible realm) by metaphor and analogy.8 On the other, he most of all emphasizes what Scarry calls “visual events,” the perception of beauty as generative, creative, and elevating, moments that lead to the production of images and arguments. This is, again, an initial movement at the heart of ancient literary theory – this viewing of beauty, determining its likeness, and fostering its reproduction – and we owe its formulation to Plato.

1. Mimesis and literary theory in the Ion, Republic, and Protagoras I want first to consider how a few central scenes in Plato’s dialogues orient theoretical discussions by means of mimesis and metaphorical landscaping, in order to frame a fuller discussion of the Phaedrus. Some of these dialogues situate poetic, rhetorical, and in special cases philosophical knowledge and expression in landscapes familiar from early poetry, many details of which are pointedly natural. Taken together they suggest that a crucial element in Plato’s transformations of traditional uses of mimesis and metaphors are their original source materials: their grounding in natural settings. Older poetic inspiration may take place in such settings, but the Republic in particular makes clear that Socrates regards poets’ claims to wisdom and authority as suspect. Thus Socrates (and Plato himself) must both set aside and surpass poetic mimesis, as well as its conventional reception by rhapsodes and critics, at least in part by invading these traditional territories and appropriating their claims to knowledge. It is this rural knowledge that Socrates takes up and tropes on in order to lay claim to an authoritative use of mimesis that is somehow deeper,

8

Cf. the notion of the “likely tale” (eikōs logos or muthos) in the Timaeus; Cornford 1937: 27–32 calls that dialogue a “poem” and connects this notion of the plausible tale to archaic and pre-Socratic poetry (30–31). See also McCabe 1992: 62–66; Zeyl 2000: xx–xxv, xxviii–xxix with bibliography; Bryan 2012: ch. 3.

1. Mimesis and literary theory

closer to the true composition of the world, than that of the poets and their critics. At a crucial and vivid moment in the Ion, Socrates unspools in quick succession a set of interlocking metaphors in order to delimit the poets’ abilities as god-given and the result of possession. In the course of the argument he fashions the metaphor mentioned in Chapter 2: that of the bee-poet culling from the gardens of the Muses. The image is embedded in a more elaborate metaphor that seeks to demonstrate the similarity between a magnet’s powers and those of divine inspiration; this forges a chain of attraction that extends from the god through the Muses to the poet and ultimately the rhapsode. In the midst of all this magnetism, Socrates draws an additional analogy between those divinely possessed such as Corybants and bacchants, and poets. He attributes the latter analogy to the lyric poets, and then adds the one mentioned, that of the honeygathering bee, which he also attributes directly to the poets: λέγουσιν γὰρ δήπουθεν πρὸς ἡμᾶς οἱ ποιηταὶ ὅτι ἀπὸ κρηνῶν μελιρρύτων ἐκ Μουσῶν κήπων τινῶν καὶ ναπῶν δρεπόμενοι τὰ μέλη ἡμῖν φέρουσιν ὥσπερ αἱ μέλιτται, καὶ αὐτοὶ οὕτω πετόμενοι· καὶ ἀληθῆ λέγουσι. For as you know, the poets tell us that, culling from the honey-flowing springs in certain gardens and glens of the Muses, they bear to us their verses, just as bees do, and they themselves also are winged in this way – and they speak the truth. (Ion 534a7–b3)

The poet, Socrates adds wryly, is a slight thing, as well as winged and holy (534b3–4). The passage as a whole is densely layered, purposefully poetic in its vocabulary and multiplying imagery. It is also curiously pitched, combining as it does a claim about the nature of poetic inspiration as lacking mind (nous, cf. 534b6) with a claim about the sources of poetic knowledge that is attributed to the poets themselves and identified as true. Scholars have often treated such passages in Plato as engaging ironic emulation, usually in order to dismiss the importance of their claims.9 But while Socrates’ tone here is recognizably wry (as it often is at such moments), this carefully assembled metaphor – here an elaborate analogy with a central pun (μέλη/μέλι) and simile (ὥσπερ αἱ μέλιτται) – points to a central idea that is in keeping with traditional poetic wisdom and thereby advances Socrates’ own ideas about mimesis and its effects. In attributing to the poets themselves claims about the inspired, winged 9

This is also true of Socrates’ enthusiasm about the Phaedrus setting; but see Murray 1996, 2002; Morgan 2010; Halliwell 2011: 171–79; Hunter 2012: 89–108.

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character of their “culling,” Socrates attaches his imagery and ideas to poetic tradition. The central image appropriates the “bee-poet” trope that lyric poets made famous, especially Bacchylides and Pindar, and that Aristophanes deploys in Frogs as a lampooning means of distinguishing between the older, more rustic Aeschylus and the younger, more urbane Euripides.10 In lyric convention the bee is holy and prophetic – a figure not merely for the poet but also for his sources of inspiration: Apollo and the waters associated with ritual purity. Pindar calls Apollo’s Pythia the “Delphic bee” (μελίσσας Δελφίδος, Pyth. 4.60–61); and since in the broader tradition the bee is regarded as especially pure, Demeter’s attendants, who carry holy water for the goddess, are called bees, an association that Callimachus exploits as a figure for his poetic style.11 For the earlier poets, again, the figure is part of a larger network of metaphors that associates poetic inspiration and authority with rural settings. These settings feature flowing springs, mountain paths, and flowering meadows or gardens, and at least in Pindar the one possessing a poetic sensibility culls his beautiful words directly from them.12 Scholars have puzzled over Socrates’ use of the bee-poet trope and most have decided that it is in keeping with his sardonic, mock-modest treatment of poetry more generally.13 That is, as in the Phaedrus, it appears to serve as a means of taking over and turning traditional (usually poetic) images so that they reveal themselves as jejune and deficient. And yet both here and in the rural framing of the Phaedrus, Socrates engages traditional metaphors from poetry in order to address the nature of inspiration, including poetic, rhapsodic, rhetorical, and (in the Ion implicitly) philosophical motivations. The targeted topic is, not surprisingly, less inspiration simply construed and more true knowledge or understanding. Socrates’ fanciful dalliances in rural settings thus constitute a central means by which the Platonic dialogues position him in contention with the poets over the possession of this knowledge. If these archaic bards portray their power and authority as coming from the countryside settings they inhabit, in order for Socrates to face them down he must meet them where they live. 10

11

12 13

See Liebert 2010a on Plato's use of honey and bee imagery in the Republic; and further in chs. 2.3 and 3.2. For an analysis of literary criticism in the Ion more generally, see Liebert 2010b. Schol. Pi. P. 4.106a–c; Eur. Hipp. 73–77, schol. ad 73; Callim. HAp. 110–12. See Cole 2004: 136–45; and further on the bee, water, and meadows imagery in chs. 2, 3, and 5. On Pindar’s bee and flower tropes, see further in ch. 2.3b. E.g., Sperduti 1950; LaDrière 1951; Murray 1992, 1996.

1. Mimesis and literary theory

That said, in asserting that these rural associations underlie the Platonic images I am not ignoring the negative attitude Socrates frequently takes toward poetry, nor overlooking the fact that the essential idea in the Ion passage is that the poets themselves possess no true knowledge or understanding, since they are out of their minds when they compose. But if the poet is indeed a thing “light and winged and holy” (κοῦφον . . . καὶ πτηνὸν καὶ ἱερόν, 534b3–4), so also is the soul in the Phaedrus (cf. κουφίζεται, 248c2; τὸ τῆς ψυχὴς πτέρωμα, 246e2 and passim), the only entity in mortals that has any uplift at all. Poets, being imitators (mimētai) in a conventional sense, may in the Phaedrus rank fairly low in the hierarchy of souls, but as the preliminaries there make clear, Socrates wants something from them. One may still wonder what, exactly, this something could be, since the bee-poet in his rustic scene hardly seems a suitable stand-in for the intellectual proclivities of Plato’s stubbornly urban Socrates. And yet, while Plato’s Socrates may not be fond of the actual countryside, he does avow some of its simpler values and seems partial to the metaphors that it generates. He often characterizes himself as a comically crude sort, using terms straight out of Aristophanes such as “countrified” (agroikos).14 In fact, the Kallipolis that Socrates envisions in the Republic is such a rustic vegetarian’s delight that Glaucon exclaims with disgust that its diet is fit for “a city of pigs” (ὑῶν πόλιν, Rep. 372d4). And as the image from the Ion suggests, Socrates has a penchant for “reaping” or “culling” vocabulary that has also its roots in earlier poetry. At the end of the Euthydemus, for instance, he dismisses certain politically oriented pretenders to knowledge by saying that they “reap the fruits of wisdom” (καρποῦσθαι τὴν σοφίαν) while disdaining to enter into argument (305e2). This phrase is (almost) straight out of Pindar, who in an elegant instance of hypallage (i.e., transferred epithet) disdains those who “reap the unripe fruit of wisdom” (ἀτελῆ σοφίας καρπὸν δρέπειν, fr. 209.1). In the Republic we find the phrase even more closely pursued and prodded, when Socrates offers a witty turn on it in order to criticize ignorant laughter at the sight of women exercising naked. As if to safeguard his bold recommendation by recourse to a traditional maxim, he claims that anyone who mocks “reaps the unripe fruit of laughter” (ἀτελῆ τοῦ γελοίου καρπὸν δρέπειν, Rep. 457b2–3). In fact, the Republic and especially the Phaedrus make strategic use of harvesting vocabulary. We should recall here the vibrant instance noted at 14

See Worman 2008: 178–79, 183, 196; also Kurke 2006 and 2011: 241–64 on Socrates’ connection to the lowly Aesop.

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the end of Chapter 3, when in book 3 of the Republic Socrates makes use of another elaborate metaphor to highlight the attraction of rural correctives. To combat young citizens’ constant exposure to mimetic effects in the lively city he offers a trip into the countryside, where they will not run the risk of “grazing” (τρεφόμενοι), like cattle on “bad fodder” (ὥσπερ ἐν κακῇ βοτάνῃ), on the many images culled and harvested from many sources (πολλὰ . . . ἀπὸ πολλῶν δρεπόμενοί τε καὶ νεμόμενοι). Instead, breezes like those in a healthy setting (ὥσπερ ἐν ὑγιεινῷ τόπῳ) will nurture them, while examples of good actions waft over them like fresh air (ὥσπερ αὔρα φέρουσα ἀπὸ χρηστῶν τόπων ὑγίειαν) (Rep. 401b1–d2). For all that he may oppose poets’ claims to knowledge by invading their rural settings, however, Plato’s Socrates famously does not profess direct access to wisdom, knowledge, or authority of any kind. The paradigmatic scene in the Apology in which he questions the experts (including poets and politicians) lays out his stance toward such claims: they think that they possess wisdom (sophia) but do not, while he knows that he does not (21e3–22c8). The Protagoras stages a more elaborate literary critical interaction, but one that shares significant emphases with the Apology’s assessment of poetic knowledge. Socrates and his companion first glimpse the famous sophist waltzing around the courtyard, enchanting everyone with his voice like Orpheus, ur-poet of the woodlands (κηλῶν τῇ φωνῇ ὥσπερ Ὀρφεύς), followed by a chorus of young men (οἱ δὲ κατὰ τὴν φωνὴν ἕπονται κεκηλημένοι, ἦσαν δέ τινες καὶ τῶν ἐπιχωρίων ἐν τῷ χορῷ) (Prt. 315a5–b2). Socrates deliberately frames the sophist as a quasi-mystical nature poet with cult followers, emphasizes his power to charm, and wryly delights in the choreography inspired by the spell he casts.15 The portrait shares features with the elaborate magnet metaphor in the Ion (533d1–e5, 535e7–536b4) that Socrates offers as a means of indicating how poetry exerts such powers of attraction on those who are drawn to the Muse. There, as in the Apology and as here in the Protagoras, poetic inspiration is cast as possession rather than knowledge, and all who fall under its sway – including in the Ion dramatic poets and choruses (535e9–536a7) – are drawn along by this power rather than by understanding. The Ion also portrays Socrates identifying Orpheus as a primary example of one who is enchanted and enchanting in this way. In archaic poetry as in Socrates’ depictions, this is a natural power, one drawn from rural settings where contact with the Muses is at hand. 15

See Segvic 2009: esp. 38–40 on how the Protagoras models its action on Odysseus’ journey to the underworld. This would also align it with Orphic narratives and with the Frogs; see further in ch. 3.3.

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It is not, however, an empowering association for Protagoras, as Socrates’ piquant description makes clear. Not only does he look like an Orpheus, and thus not like a philosophically minded interlocutor; his critical judgment also turns out to be rather conventional – that is, more like old poetic wisdom and thus not true knowledge. When Socrates asks him prodding questions about whether wisdom and other virtues should be equated, Protagoras introduces a poem of Simonides by claiming that the only true education consists in being clever about poetry (ἐγὼ ἀνδρὶ παιδείας μέγιστον μέρος εἶναι περὶ ἐπῶν δεινὸν εἶναι). What he means by this is, apparently, a much more narrowly literary critical knowledge than Socrates is interested in. As Protagoras sets it forth, one must be able to understand what the poets say (i.e., content) and how well they put together the things they express (i.e., composition), and know how to interpret and answer questions about them (i.e., exegesis) (ἔστιν δὲ τοῦτο τὰ ὑπὸ τῶν ποιητῶν λεγόμενα οἷόν τ’ εἶναι συνιέναι ἅ τε ὀρθῶς πεποίηται καὶ ἅ μή, καὶ ἐπίσταται διελεῖν τε καὶ ἐρωτώμενον λόγον δοῦναι, 339a1–3).16 Socrates takes up the sophist’s cue with disconcerting alacrity, demonstrating his knowledge of Simonides, turning the poet’s words to his own uses, and then dismissing the entire exercise as a shallow pastime – an amusement typical of the “agora crowd” (δοκεῖ μοι τὸ περὶ ποιήσεως διαλέγεσθαι ὁμοιότατον εἶναι τοῖς συμποσίοις τοῖς τῶν φαύλων καὶ ἀγοραίων ἀνθρώπων, 347c3–4).17 Socrates proposes that instead of focusing on poetry like hoi polloi, they emulate (μιμεῖσθαι) more noble types (cf. καλοὶ κἀγαθοί, 347d3) and engage in the give-and-take of conversation, in order to test the truth and themselves (τῆς ἀληθείας καὶ ἡμῶν αὐτῶν πειρᾶν λαμβάνοντας) (Prt. 348a3–6). In this way a certain kind of mimesis, here essentially a good kind of modeling, is aligned with nobility, dialectic, and truth, while conventional literary criticism is relegated to the random opinings of the badly educated.18 Rachel Barney has argued that this kind of agonistic move on Socrates’ part is an attempt to achieve for philosophical inquiry a status unlike other types of inquiry, and especially unlike literary interpretation.19 From our vantage point its most salient aspect is its engagement with, indeed emulation of, these rival modes; and it is this emulation that makes 16

17 18

19

Cf. Morgan 2000: 147: “Protagoras considers himself the heir of the great poet-educators of the past.” On agoraioi, see Worman 2008: (e.g.) 108, 151, 158–59, 174–75. Cf. Kurke 2006, who historicizes the characterization of prose as a lowly genre in comparison to poetry; Socrates would here be pointedly inverting this hierarchy. Barney 1998: 82–83.

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possible the move forward, into dialectic and toward truth. Socrates’ interaction with the rhapsode Ion pursues a similar pattern. He engages him in a series of questions about the nature of his expertise, questions that the expert, traditionally trained as he is, can barely follow. In the course of explaining to a master of poetic performance that he has no knowledge and is in fact out of his mind when he performs, Socrates makes use of a series of highly poeticized images, quotes Homer repeatedly while preventing Ion from uttering more than a few hexameters, and claims in the end that the rhapsode is either a bad man or a mad one (lit. “unjust or inspired,” ἄδικος ἀνήρ . . . ἢ θεῖος, 542a7). Faced with this pair of predicates, Ion chooses the latter.

2. Re-placing the locus amoenus In the Phaedrus, as one might expect in such a setting, images of streams, meadows, culling, and gardening abound. Take, for instance, the metaphor that provides the ostensible reason for the trip into the countryside: the “fruit” (κάρπον, 230d7) that Phaedrus dangles in front of Socrates, who being the logos-loving creature that he is must follow Lysias’ speech out of town.20 In Socrates’ second speech not only does the lover’ “divert” his desire like an irrigating farmer; he also “culls” (καρποῦται) sweet pleasure (Phdr. 251e3–52a1).21 This metaphor is coupled at the end of the dialogue with that of sowing, when the philosopher plays farmer and plants words in the soul of his listeners that are “not unfruitful” (οὐχὶ ἄκαρποι) (277a1). I return to these tropes below, but let us notice at this juncture that it advances a larger purpose. In a more extensive manner than the Ion and the Republic, the rural imagery in the Phaedrus aims at clearing the way for the philosopher’s transformation of poetic mimesis on the one hand and conventional rhetoric’s conceits on the other. In what follows I trace how Socrates exploits the features of the familiar poetic setting, turning it to articulate the intersection of the soul’s fostering and that of good logoi, which depend for their integrity on the pursuit of true similarities. These are set up in Socrates’ speeches and engaged more deliberately in the dialogue’s second half, so that the seductive “poetics of flow” that helps to shape the framing and imagery of the speeches is supplemented by the careful path of dialectic.22 20 21 22

Cf. Phdr. 260c10–d1: ποῖόν τινα οἴει μετὰ ταῦτα τὴν ῥητορικὴν καρπὸν ὧν ἔσπειρε θερίζειν; Cf. Phdr. 240a6–8 vs. Rep. 586e6–87a1; and see further below in sections 3 and 4. Cf. ch. 2.2.

2. Re-placing the locus amoenus

a. The country retreat In contrast to their treatment of Aristophanes’ Frogs, scholars have taken the setting of the Phaedrus very seriously and sought to map its excursion onto the ancient topography. While this may seem perverse, given the metaphorical proliferation that the setting effuses as well as Plato’s playful treatment of chronotopic indicators more generally, the specific coordinates the dialogue offers have proved too tempting. As Richard Wycherley and others have it, Socrates and Phaedrus leave Epicrates’ house near the Olympieion, exit the city (presumably through the Aegeus or Diomean Gate23), and take their ramble outside the city walls. They then ford the Ilissus (walking downstream) and find a place to settle on the south bank.24 However accurate such tracking may be, for our purposes what matters is that this is essentially the same locale as Aristophanes’ Frogs, the mimetic richness of which, together with the Phaedrus, secures it as a central topos and place of troping for later criticism and theory. This focus on the place as a topos is immediately evident in Socrates’ enthusiastic response to the scene. Indeed, Phaedrus has carefully chosen a spot along the river that is such a perfect combination of natural elements that it sends Socrates into poeticizing transports. He remarks that the waters there seem “delightful and pure and clear” (χαρίεντα γοῦν καὶ καθαρὰ καὶ διαφανῆ τὰ ὑδάτια φαίνεται, 229b7–8), exclaims that the plane and agnus trees offer lovely shade (τὸ σύσκιον πάγκαλον), and the flowers of the latter fill the place with perfume (ὡς ἂν εὐωδέστατον παρέχοι τὸν τόπον). The stream (πηγή) that flows under the plane tree is most delightful for its cool water (χαριεστάτη ὑπὸ τῆς πλατάνου ῥεῖ μάλα ψυχροῦ ὕδατος). He notes the presence of statues of the Nymphs and of Achelous, highlighting the setting’s connection to river-cult practice and rural scenes in archaic poetry. Cicadas sing overhead, themselves quintessentially rural poetic creatures, as Socrates’ later story about them confirms (cf. 258e6–259d8). Most exquisite of all (κομψότατον) is the meadow, the soft slope of which is perfect for reclining (230b2–c5). As I have said, the Phaedrus passage clearly appropriates the setting of the locus amoenus from archaic poetry. But what is the status of this rustic space, exactly, in Plato’s dialogue? Again, there is little question that rather than recording an actual walk, it highlights and reproduces a topos – that is, a thematic commonplace, as Socrates’ language itself may anticipate 23

24

Wycherley 1963: 91 thinks the former; Robin 1933 (following Judeich 1931) the latter. Cf. Plut. Thes. 12.3. So Wycherley 1963: 91–92.

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(τόπον, τόπου, 230b5, c1) – within the conventions of poetry and rhetoric. But I think that it also functions as an elaborate trope (i.e., a figurative usage that redirects its literal application), perhaps even a central trope in Plato for the space of metaphor. Echoing earlier poetry, here too the setting offers up its bounty and the adept “gardener” works the ground, turns it to new effect. In a discussion of ancient ideas about metaphor, Christoph Leidl points to the influence of Plato’s use of the shady retreat as a setting for philosophical eloquence in opposition to the public wrangling of oratory.25 In my terms the locus amoenus opens up both a space for philosophical activity and one for the work of metaphor, since the idyllic setting affords precisely the figurative resources that the poets have traditionally exploited. Socrates’ poeticizing transports thus take on the trope of metaphor itself; and since this like-imaging mode is the only way one can speak of lofty topics (246a4–6), he needs to master its elaborations.26 Phaedrus reacts dramatically to Socrates’ excessive praise, remarking with some tartness (230c6–d2), Σὺ δέ γε, ὦ θαυμάσιε, ἀτοπώτατός τις φαίνῃ. ἀτεχνῶς γάρ, ὃ λέγεις, ξεναγουμένῳ τινὶ καὶ οὐκ ἐπιχωρίῳ ἔοικας· οὕτως ἐκ τοῦ ἄστεος οὔτ’ εἰς τὴν ὑπερορίαν ἀποδημεῖς, οὔτ’ ἔξω τείχους ἔμοιγε δοκεῖς τὸ παράπαν ἐξιέναι. You really appear to be the oddest [lit. most “out of place”] sort, my remarkable friend. The way you talk makes you seem like a stranger to these parts and not a local. Such is the way you leave the city neither to go to a foreign city nor, as far as I at least can see, do you to go outside the city walls at all.

Phaedrus clearly does not know what to make of Socrates’ new mode; and Socrates does not help matters when he replies that he is a lover of learning (φιλομαθής) and that the countryside and trees do not want to teach him (τὰ μὲν οὖν χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα οὐδὲν μ' ἐθέλει διδάσκειν, 230d4), while the men of the city do.27 This scorning of the country setting would seem to conflict directly with his use of the rural idyll as means of dramatizing the search for a good kind of rhetoric. And accordingly, scholars have either attempted to explain it away as an accurate description of Socrates’

25

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27

Leidl 2003: 40–41, esp. n. 28; see also the whole volume in which this essay appears (Boys-Stones 2003). E.g., Cic. De orat. 1.28; Orat. 63–64; De leg. 1.1–5. On Cicero’s use of the topos, see Zoll 1962; Benardete 1987; Görler 1988; Krebs 2009. See further in ch. 7.3a. Cf. also Phdr. 250a6, regarding the lover’s recognition of the beloved’s likeness to the form of beauty (τῶν ἐκεῖ ὁμοίωμα ἴδωσιν); cf. Richardson Lear 2006. Proust’s “Marcel” echoes this sentiment upon returning from yet another sanitorium, when in his melancholy he feels he has lost his sensitivity to nature’s beauties: “‘Trees,’ I thought, ‘you have nothing more to tell me’“ (“Arbres, pensai-je, vous n’avez plus rien à me dire”, IV.433).

2. Re-placing the locus amoenus

penchant for the ad hoc conversations that spring up in urban settings or hailed it as a further example of irony.28 As in the Homeric scene at Calypso’s cave discussed in the Introduction and above, the highlighted features of the locus amoenus indicate aesthetic valuations reflected in the vocabulary of the description, even if these overtly ironize elite appreciation of the countryside. Socrates, who is famously indifferent to conventional trappings (e.g., creature comforts, fancy talk), indulges in high-flown language to stage a mimesis of the setting’s charms (including the flowing water, the grassy meadow, and the sweetness or desire associated with these), ambitiously fashioning a conventional rustic setting for this suburban space just outside the city walls. Such terms as, say, ἀγαπητόν and ἡδύ (”lovely,” “sweet/pleasant,” 230c1–2) may have an ambiguous status in a philosophical dialogue focused on rhetoric – as may Socrates’ feminine oath “by Hera” (νὴ τὴν Ἥραν, 230b2), and his references to the Nymphs, the Muses, and (later on) Pan (263d5–6) – but they also connect his sensibility to that of the poets, and in a manner that is not merely ironic.29 As in poetry, then, here in the Phaedrus also the features of the locus amoenus together point to the special knowledge only available to one with an ability to “cull” from a divinely imbued natural setting. As scholars have emphasized, Socrates’ transports about the rural setting are couched in elevated language, an elegant arabesque complete with a metaphor for its own style (κομψότατον). But this is not merely arch ventriloquizing: the features of the landscape are essential to Socrates’ ambitious embrace of the rural setting.30 Thus he first reorders the 28

29

30

Respectively, Rowe 1986 ad loc. and Parry 1957: 3. See also de Vries 1969: 55–56; Elliger 1975: 290–91. Ferrari 1987: 4–25 tries for a more subtle approach, sometimes at the expense of clarity. Hass 1998: 33–34 recognizes that Socrates’ customary self-irony confronts the “finer irony” of the centrality of such imagery to the erotics that Plato wants for his philosophical rhetoric. Scholars react to this frame with varying sensitivity, but see esp. Wilamowitz 1919: 450–88; and Lebeck 1972. Also Elliger 1975: 289–94; Burger 1980 (though she is more interested in the food metaphors); Griswold 1986: 33–36; Nussbaum 1986: 203–29. Cf. the opening of Theocritus’ first idyll, which sets the rustic stage with many similar elements (e.g., sweet air, springs, shade, Nymphs, also Pan); see further in ch. 5.2. Wycherley discusses the discovery of a shrine to Pan (1963: 95; 1978: 172–73 [with plate]) on the southeast bank of the Ilissus across from Kallirhoe. A number of scholars locate the site of the dialogue there, as Wycherley notes (1963: 95–96), with objections; see also Lind 1987. Rosenmeyer 1962: 43 argues that the topographical details are wholly symbolic (i.e., that they make metonymic reference to the Academy). Note as well Plato’s later analogy to the “gardens of Adonis” (276b1–8) and cf. Theocr. 15.113; see further below, section 4. Some think Socrates is making fun of Hippocratic exegeses as well (e.g., Ferrari 1987). Kompsos is a stylistic buzz word, made common currency by Euripides and Aristophanes. See O’Sullivan 1992: 131–33; Worman 2008: 133–35. Elliger (1975: 291) notes the usage and characterizes it as ironic “Spiel mit rhetorischen Stilelementen.” Note that Ficino thinks that the

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traditional locus amoenus so that the flower-filled space providing source materials for poetic metaphors becomes a wry city man’s collection of stylistic attributes that characterize sophistic rhetoric and particularly its most elaborate stylist, Gorgias. That is to say, Socrates’ initial mimetic strategy not only forges a likeness of Pindaric resources; it also converts these into the grand stylist’s palette.31 As I discuss in detail below, later on these same features are put to more intellectually elevated use, laid out carefully like the seasoned gardener’s plot as grounding for Socrates’ account of how the soul that is attentive to true beauty ascends upward by means of wings and toils to occupy the heavenly “plain” or “meadow” (πεδίον, λειμῶνος, 248b6–8). The wings of the soul grow from viewing the beautiful beloved, which inspires love’s warmth and flow (251a–d, 253b, 255c–d), the details of which invoke mountain streams and a garden’s watering.32 It may be assembled piecemeal, but here are the pleasures and erotic attractions of the locus amoenus reordered so that they form a philosophical idyll. Later still, however, Socrates will distance himself from this lofty conceptual space as well, characterizing his speech as inspired by the Nymphs and Pan, worrying that he got a little carried away, and hedging about its style: “We playfully offered a sort of mythic hymn, but moderately and piously” (μυθικόν τινα ὕμνον προσεπαίσαμεν μετρίως τε καὶ εὐφήμως, 265c1–2). The Phaedrus’ pastoral frame is thus simultaneously fitting for a competition among speeches about love (a favorite bucolic pastime, as later poetry confirms) and a wry nod at the eulogizing of brook and tree enjoyed in elite and leisured settings. From Socrates’ lowbrow, modern, “outsider’s” perspective, poetic exclamation and rhetorical encomia may well appear jejune activities, pleasant enough but essentially old-fashioned, indulgent of aristocratic proclivities, and even a little silly. And yet Socrates quickly moves beyond mere lampoon, taking a double turn: first he makes the poetic topos and tropes rhetorical, then he indicates a new theoretical mode and a new type of perception associated with and described by means of resources drawn from this same idyllic remove. Thus while Socrates’ customary irony distances him from conventional rhetorical critique, his appreciation and reanimation of the idyll pegs the philosophical pursuit

31 32

presence of Pan signals facundia (eloquence) ([1496] 2008: ch. 53) and that Olympiodorus fashions Plato as a Nestor (cf. Il. 1.249) or a Pindar (cf. P. 10.53–54) by relating a story in which bees fill his infant mouth with honey (In Alcib. 1.2.24). This is the move that Dionysius reproduces in On Demosthenes; see further in ch. 7.3b. Lebeck (1972) notices the imagery and argues that it borrows techniques of depiction from lyric poetry.

2. Re-placing the locus amoenus

of beauty directly to the features of the rural setting, establishing a new conceptual space and landscape that aims to transcend conventional elite hierarchies. I want to ground this claim in the dialogue’s own topographies, in the space it offers for the consideration of metaphor’s utility. In an article from 1940 Clyde Murley compiled parallels between the Phaedrus and Theocritean pastoral, emphasizing the Sicilian setting. He pointed to the mimes of Sophron (which Plato was said to have admired) as a possible influence, noted the focus on the Sicilian sophist Teisias (and secondarily Gorgias), and recalled the argument that Plato spent some years in Sicily during the time in which he might have written the Phaedrus.33 One could hypothesize, then, a Sicilian background for Plato’s mime of an agōn between two rhetors (i.e., “Lysias” and “Socrates”). They sit on a hillside at midday, promise each other prizes that both mock bucolic poetry’s programmatic gestures – and, more proximately, the Sicilian sophist Gorgias (i.e., the joke of the gold statues, 235d8–236b4) – and engage in a contest framed by the song of the cicadas.34 Kathryn Gutzwiller, following Thomas Rosenmeyer’s cue, has contended that Plato’s Socrates is modeled on the herdsman figure in archaic poetic tradition, comparing Hesiod and the Muses on Helicon, as well as Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops, the original Sicilian shepherd.35 On this reading Plato would be participating in a set of essentially Sicilian literary topoi, although we cannot see the beginnings of this bucolic mode clearly and thus have some difficulty assessing his reception and transformation of them.36 But in the mimetic topography of the Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus are sitting beside the Ilissus, the river that our literal-minded commentators locate as just outside the Diomean gate and flowing southeast from the walls of Athens to the sea. Archeologists have identified the actual site of their conversation with one frequented by humble sorts such as laundresses, since a dedication from them to the Nymphs was found in the vicinity. While this would conform to Socrates’ lowbrow, “shepherd’s” guise, once again I want to emphasize the locale instead as significant 33 34

35

36

So Rudberg 1924, with criticisms from Shorey 1925. Cf. esp. Theocr. 1.7. See Murley 1940; also Pearce 1988. The gold statues jokes clearly constitute another reference to Gorgias, since he dedicated a gold statue of himself at Delphi (Cic. De orat. 3.129; Paus. 10.18.7; Athen. 11.505d–e); and another was erected at Olympia, dedicated by his nephew (Paus. 6.17.7–8). See Morgan 1994. Gutzwiller 1991: 73–79. Cf. later encounters such as the story of Archilochus and his cow (from the third century bce, SEG 15.517); also Pearce 1988: 282–87 and Clay 2004. See, e.g., Aelian’s claim that Stesichorus was the first to compose bucolic songs about Daphnis’ sufferings (test. 102 PMG); but cf. Lehnus 1975.

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literary critical territory, and not only because of its Aristophanic echoes.37 The opening scenes of the Frogs may well stage a route through rural (”rural”) settings offered as a possible corrective to the excesses of the city, with its oratorical wrangling and crude literary sensibilities. But because of the influence of the Syracusan sophists Teisias and Gorgias, Athenian writers also treated the technē of rhetoric as coming predominantly from Sicily, which they also depicted as a place of urbane decadence and indulgence.38 It is not difficult to expect a similarly sophisticated deployment of meaningful topographies in the dialogue of Plato (whose debt to Aristophanes many scholars have noticed39), one that takes another double turn: a rustic poetics, the traditions of which may themselves be rooted at least in part in conventions associated with rural Sicily, mediates the Athenian reception of Sicilian rhetoric – that paradigmatic urban excess.

b. Socrates’ inspirations I argue above that Socrates’ taste for rural metaphor and its ideal setting functions as a corrective to general ignorance and, more narrowly, to the mistaken moves of conventional literary criticism. We may notice also that in dismissing the speech of Lysias as lacking, Socrates claims to take his cue from earlier writers, saying that he has been filled up like a pail (ἀγγείου) from the springs (ναμάτων) of such poets as Sappho and Anacreon (235c8–d1), the springs suggesting the type of cue he has in mind.40 Then when he offers his first entry in the speech contest, he deploys a typical element of the locus amoenus, contact with the divine, calling on the Muses to inspire him: “Come now, you piercing-voiced [λίγειαι] Muses” (237a7).41 Socrates also tempers this commitment to older modes by offering an etymological joke, hypothesizing that the origins of the epithet might come from some association of Muses with the Ligurians 37

38 39 40

41

See Gutzwiller 1991: 74, although this dedication is likely later than the dialogue (Wycherley 1978: 170). Again, on Aristophanes’ terrain, see Hooker 1960; Slater 1986. Cf. Wycherley 1963, 1978. Again, the topography suggested by Frogs overlaps significantly with that of the Phaedrus, a fact that (together with the significant presences of shrines to Pan and the Nymphs) suggests a purposeful situating on Plato’s part of Socrates in familiar literary critical territory. E.g., Aristophanes and middle comic poets as well as Plato; see Wilkins 2000. See Worman 2008: 154 with bibliography. Cf. Hes. Th. 1–4; also Pindar I. 6.74–75, O. 6.85–88. Again, see Barney 1998: 72–73; also Fortenbaugh 1966. Again, see Paus. 1.9.16 on the “Ilissian Muses”; sometimes Graces or Nymphs are invoked. Hass (1998) does not include this scene.

2. Re-placing the locus amoenus

(237a7–8).42 As with his earlier remarks about Boreas and other mythic figures (229b4–230a7), this is another gesture mocking traditional storytellers (mythologoi) and the sophists’ fondness for such explanations. The adjective that Socrates prods (ligus/liguros), on the other hand, is one that has a high profile in archaic and early classical poetry, linking speechmaking to poetic utterance and poetic utterance to the Muses and natural phenomena. In Homer the honey-tongued Nestor is a “piercing orator” (λιγύς . . . ἀγορητής, Il. 1.248–49, 4.293); and this is a familiar epithet for the Muses (or the poet’s Muse-inspired song) in Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and lyric poetry, including Pindar.43 Natural elements such as the wind can sound like this in the Homeric poems, but so can musical instruments and the song of the Sirens; Hesiod adds the Hesperides to this list and – in a lushly rendered locus amoenus – the Homeric Hymn to Pan adds Nymphs.44 The fragments of Sappho and Bacchylides suggest that both poets use the adjective to characterize the voices of human singers and other creatures (e.g., birds, cicadas, bees), as well as musical instruments.45 Hesiod also identifies this quality as what distinguishes the song of the cicadas, which pours from under their wings in the heat of summer (WD 582–84), an image that Alcaeus closely reproduces (fr. 347b). In his appreciation of the spot by the Ilissus Socrates reiterates this detail, although, with another wry affectation, he terms the cicadas a “chorus” (cf. τῷ τῶν τεττίγων χορῷ, Phdr. 230c2).46 Pindar predicates this piercing clarity of the “path of words” (ἐπέων . . . οἶμον λιγύν) (Ol. 9.47; cf. 6.82), a usage that couples the adjective with a central image for poetic expression and thereby suggests that this sound quality is crucial to verbal arts generally.47 Socrates would thus appear to be introducing his first speech by overtly signaling its place in an old poetic tradition, as if he meant to follow sophists such as Gorgias and carry on its aesthetics.48 More precisely, he seems to be looking toward an old poetic mode that is both elevated and rural, since it embraces (e.g.) both the Muses’ vocal quality and the cicadas’ song. Furthering this perception is the 42

43

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45

46 48

See Yunis 2011 ad loc., who notes that there is little evidence that the Ligurians have an association with the Muses. P. Paean fr. 58o.32; cf. H. Od. 24.62; Hes. WD 658–60, Scut. 205–06; HDem. 2, HDiosc. 1, HHeph. 1; Alcm. frs. 14a1, 28.1.1 PMG; Sapph. fr. 103.8–10 L–P (with the Graces); Stes. fr. 101.1 PMG. H. Od. 12.44–45, 12.183; Hes. Th. 275 and 518 (Hesperides), fr. 150.33 (Sirens); HPan 19 (Nymphs), on which see further in ch. 2.3a. Sapph. frs. 30.8, 58.12, 70.11, 71.7, 103.10 L–P; Bacch. 5.23, 10.10, 14.14, Paean. fr. 1.57, Encom. frs. 3.2, 5.1; cf. Alc. fr. 347b L–P. See Yunis 2011 ad loc. 47 For the “path of words” see further in chs. 2.1 and 3.1c. See Gorg. Hel. 9–10. Dionysius disapproves of this high-flown style (DH Dem. 7.11–14), likening it to Pindar; see further in ch. 7.3b.

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fact that at one particularly poeticizing moment in the speech, when Socrates breaks off to exclaim that he seems to be gripped by a “divine emotion” (θεῖον πάθος), Phaedrus responds that a remarkable fluency (lit. “fine flow,” εὔροια) does appear to have come over him. Socrates then takes up Phaedrus’ metaphor for his fluid style as if it were a topographical reference (i.e., one to the stream beside them), exclaiming that the spot in which they are sitting does seem to be a divine one (θεῖος ἔοικεν ὁ τόπος εἶναι).49 He warns that he may become possessed by Nymphs (νυμφόληπτος); and as it is he is almost uttering dithyrambs (οὐκέτι πόρρω διθυράμβων φθέγγομαι) (238c5–d3).50 But when Socrates finishes this first speech, he is distressed by its style, which he now swears has passed over from the dithyramb into a more elevated mode: epic (ἔπη φθέγγομαι; cf. the hexameter in 241d1).51 He claims that he has indeed been possessed by Nymphs, blaming Phaedrus for his exposure, and declares that he will cross back over the Ilissus (τὸν ποταμὸν τοῦτον διαβάς) before his speech-loving friend forces him into a worse transgression (241e1–242a2). In keeping with this continued emphasis on the rural setting, Phaedrus protests that he should not go back in the heat of the day, but wait until it is cooler.52 But Socrates is out of his element (cf. ἄτοπος, ἀτοπότατος, 229c6, 230c6), uttering rhythmic periods in praise of love, forced by the rural setting, its tutelary deities, and his bewitching friend (cf. διὰ τοῦ ἐμοῦ στόματος καταφαρμακευθέντος, 242e1) into a mode that he claims not to recognize. What has gone wrong? Socrates’ first speech is in fact well ordered and clear, not particularly elaborate in its images or bold in its argument, but a carefully worked piece of epideictic rhetoric.53 On the other hand, it

49

50

51

52

53

The metaphor of “flow” is a common stylistic indication in poetry; see further in chs. 3.4 and 5.4. I.e., poems in honor of Dionysus, the later writers of which are often lampooned in Aristophanes for their new-fangled styles; see the volume of Kowalzig and Wilson (eds.) 2013 for the range of performance settings and associations. This might be another nod to Frogs; cf. Socrates’ knowledge about the spot from which Oreithuia was snatched by Boreas (229b4–c3; and note the reference to Agrae as well). As mentioned below, theorists on style frequently reference the “dithyrambic” style as one overly poeticizing (e.g., too figurative and/or rhythmic). On nympholepsy, see Connor 1988. This is the line that Rosenmeyer 1962: 41 considers to be the beginnings of pastoral poetry: ὡς λύκοι ἄρνας ἀγαπῶσιν, ὣς παῖδα φιλοῦσιν ἐρασταί. The reference to the heat of the day echoes Hesiod and Alcaeus’ characterizations of the season of cicada’s song (Hes. WD 582–84, Alc. fr. 347b L–P; cf. ch. 5.3). This reference is echoed at the juncture between the first and second halves of the dialogue, with the cicadas as a thematic hinge. See Yunis 2011: 3 and ad loc.

2. Re-placing the locus amoenus

argues against love and yet is punctuated by references to and examples of an enthused, poeticizing style, not only the signature quality invoked by ligus but also a divinely inspired “flow” and a heightened rhythmic quality. If such modes traditionally shape more impassioned utterance, its form would not seem to match its content very well. This divine inspiration or seizure has apparently driven its recipient to recite verses, first dithyrambs and then a hexameter – the former being the meter warned against by literary theorists as fostering in prose an excessively poetic style, which may indicate that the move to hexameter represents a more stately stylistic mode.54 Thus this first speech is framed as if it resembles poetic expression aesthetically and formally, when in fact this resemblance is relatively superficial. This cannot be what Socrates wants from poetry, given that it precipitates a crisis of methodology so severe that he is ready to abandon the project altogether. And then, just as he is about to cross the river and head back to the city and perhaps to a more familiar mode of speaking, his tutelary daimōn stops him. He quotes Ibycus on the hazards of winning praise for offenses against the gods (242d1–2) and explains that he must recant (242b8–243b7). This recantation is, of course, another poetic gesture, a palinode inspired by Stesichorus, so that the second speech Socrates delivers is also framed by an explicit nod to poetic tradition. And not just any poetic tradition: Stesichorus is the Sicilian poet credited by many with influencing Theocritean pastoral.55 Unlike Homer, Socrates says, Stesichorus was “Muse-inspired” (μουσικός, 243a6), a word that in the Phaedrus designates someone versed less in the Muses’ arts than in the practice of a properly “soul-leading” rhetoric (cf. Phdr. 248d7–e2; ψυχαγωγία, 261a7–8, 271c9).56 Socrates then begins this second speech by declaring that, unlike the first one, which came from Phaedrus, this one comes from “Stesichorus, son of Euphemos, from Himera” (Στησιχόρου τοῦ Εὐφήμου, Ἱμεραίου, 244a2). As scholars have pointed out, whatever the accuracy of the attribution, heralding the poet as “son of AuspiciousSpeech,” from a city whose name looks like an adjective derived from the word for desire (himeros), contributes to framing this second speech as incorporating both divine inspiration and eros in the appropriate manner.57 54 55

56 57

Demetr. De eloc. 78; DH Dem. 7.34–51, Thuc. 29.22–24. Murley 1940: 283; Snell 1955: 375–77. Cf. again Aelian’s claim that Stesichorus was the first composer of songs about Daphnis (105 P) and contrast Lehnus 1975. Phdr. 248d7–e2; on psychagogic rhetoric see Yunis 2011: 10–14 and ad loc. See esp. Foley 1998: 44–49; also Moss 2012 on eros as a unifying theme in the dialogue.

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To be mousikos, then, must be a disposition distinct from those of earlier composers of verse, and perhaps especially composers of verses on the eros invoked through rural inspiration, since poetry’s formal trappings do not foster the right kind of speech. Nor, later, is the “poetic man or some other of those involved in mimesis” (ποιητικὸς ἢ τῶν περὶ μίμησίν τις ἄλλος) very high up in the hierarchy of souls suited to rise up to view beauty in its essence. The type of soul most drawn upward, eventually to look upon the Forms, is that of the wisdom-lover, the beauty-lover, or the man who is mousikos and devoted to love (φιλοσόφου ἢ φιλοκάλου ἢ μουσικοῦ τινος καὶ ἐρωτικοῦ) (248d2–e3). “Muse-inspired,” then, now indicates a new aesthetic and intellectual mode, one that fuses beautyinspired love with a deeper understanding of the world in its proliferation, one that makes possible the contemplation of a rhetoric that would reflect this truth in its construction.58 At the level of style, this new rhetorical mode is built through metaphors, and metaphors of natural growth and flow are most crucial to it. In his Sicilian-inspired palinode Socrates fully interweaves these images with the philosophical argument, lodging them so deep in the natural order of things that they become essential to the new understanding achieved by this novel kind of rhetoric. They thereby both address the soul-leading capacity of rhetoric (psychogōgia) and model it. Rather than offering stylistic clues that constitute a formal framing for a self-contained speech, Socrates now engages a mimetic mode that turns poetic figuration to a new task: philosophical investigation. Now his figurative usage serves an additional function, since he continues to deploy rural topographical images throughout the rest of the dialogue, so that they articulate a path – definitely the long way around – that passes through the modeling of psychogogia to its fuller explication, which is also that from rhetoric to dialectic.

3. Socrates’ cultivations The second speech on love, the one hailed by readers from Ficino on as containing some of the most profound imagery in all of philosophy, reveals the subtle and elaborate means by which Plato achieves this shift in modes. Socrates first signals that he can only discuss the immortal realm (and thus 58

Murray has been particularly effective in distinguishing Plato’s treatment of the Muses and the notion(s) underlying the term mousikos from those of the poets; see Murray 1981, 1996, 2002.

3. Socrates’ cultivations

the nature of the soul) by means of metaphor, prefacing his speech by declaring that when one addresses sacred topics such as the nature of the soul, resemblance must be employed (ᾧ δὲ ἔοικεν, ἐοικέτω) (246a4– 6; cf. ἀπεικάζοντες, 265b5–6). The loftier the subject, the more one is relegated to the realm of likeness, so that one can only approximate truth by this circuitous path. One pursues such approximations by being so mindful of beauty that the soul struggles up to the “back” (νώτῳ, 247c2) of the world, where the gods promenade, to look upon the truly beautiful in its being, a process that Socrates narrates with extraordinary grace (Phdr. 246d5–248c2).59 Overtly taking his cues from lyric poetry (cf. 235c–238c), he offers a series of rural metaphors to describe the process of the soul’s “growth” through Muse-inspired (mousikos) love. First, however, he traces the ascent by means of elevating imagery. The realm that souls struggle for a glimpse of, which Socrates describes first as ordered by Zeus in his winged chariot (πτηνὸν ἅρμα, 246e4), is “hyper-heavenly” (ὑπερουράνιον) and divine, scaled easily only by the gods. It is also, Socrates claims, a place that no poet has yet hymned nor will ever hymn in a worthy manner (τόπον οὔτε τις ὕμνησέ πω τῶν τῇιδε ποιητὴς οὔτε ποτὲ ὑμνήσει κατ’ άξιαν) (247c4–5). This is because being that is truly being is colorless and shapeless and untouchable, eluding any perception but that of the mind alone (ἡ γὰρ ἀχρώματός τε καὶ ἀσχημάτιστος καὶ ἀναφὴς οὐσία ὄντως οὖσα, . . . μόνῳ θεατὴ νῷ) (247c6–8). Hence the need for metaphor, but not just any old images will do, or presumably poets might be able to achieve sufficiently apt likenesses. Since only the soul that most likens itself to the divine (ἡ μὲν ἄριστα θεῷ ἑπομένη καὶ εἰκασμένη) can see even a little of this realm, it stands to reason that most could not hope to describe it accurately – that is, identify and utilize properly the metaphors that best approximate the “space beyond” (cf. τὸν ἔξω τόπον) (248a1–2). Again we see the double move of likeness, which I argue in Chapter 1 underpins Plato’s notion of natural or true metaphor and mimesis. The soul pursues likeness to the divine and the mousikos orator-philosopher pursues the same in his rendering of the process. Only then might his model match the truth and lead upward and outward, to the realm of the purely intelligible. And again, the best match for this divine topos appears to be rural: the meadow or plain of erotic and lyric poetry. Socrates says that most souls 59

See also Socrates’ discussion of the Form of the good in book 6 of the Republic, esp. 506d and following. Cf. Pender 2003 on Plato’s ideas about likenesses (eikones); although she does not discuss how figurative usage sometimes actually forges components of Plato’s theoretical schemes, she does note that this is the case (81).

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leave the struggle to view being at the outer rim unsatisfied (lit. “uninitiated,” ἀτελεῖς), and there is great eagerness to look upon this plain of truth (ἡ πολλὴ σπουδὴ τὸ ἀληθείας ἰδεῖν πεδίον οὗ ἐστιν), the pasture that has the grazing most suited to the best part of the soul (ἥ τε δὴ προσήκουσα ψυχῆς τῷ ἀρίστῳ νομὴ ἐκ τοῦ ἐκεῖ λειμώνος τυγχάνει οὖσα), thus nourishing the wings that lift it up (ἥ τε τοῦ πτεροῦ φύσις, ῷ ψυχὴ κουφίζεται, τούτῳ τρέφεται, 248b4–c1). Over time most souls forget what they have seen, despite this good food, but some preserve enough of the experience that beauty in the world may serve as a reminder of it (249c–250b). These few may perceive through images the true nature of the likeness (ὀλίγοι ἐπὶ τὰς εἰκόνας ἰόντες θεῶνται τὸ τοῦ εἰκασθέντος γένος), since the beauty viewed was radiant then (κάλλος δὲ τότ’ ἦν ἰδεῖν λαμπρόν), when those following Zeus in a “happy chorus” looked upon this blessed and divine sight (ὅτε σὺν εὐδαίμονι χορῷ μακαρίαν ὄψιν τε καὶ θέαν) 250b1–5). Unlike the stragglers who leave the upper realm unsatisfied, these are the initiated (ἐτελοῦντο τῶν τελετῶν) (250b6–c1), who have revelations like those in celebrations of the Eleusinian Mysteries (cf. μυούμενοί τε καὶ ἐποπτεύοντες, 250c3; ὀργιάσων, 252d8).60 We may note that the confluence of allusions in these passages – the rural setting, choral references, and Mysteries language – also resembles that in Aristophanes’ Frogs. Most commentators regard the Mysteries language as in keeping with Socrates’ emphasis on psychagōgia, which seems reasonable as far as it goes.61 But Socrates also interweaves Mysteries vocabulary (esp. teleō and cognates) with that of mania, the possession that seizes poets and lovers alike, although that of the lover of beauty constitutes the best kind of possession (πασῶν τῶν ἐνθουσιάσεων ἀρίστη [μανία], 249e1).62 The description of the lover’s reaction to beauty uses imagery from archaic poetry (esp. the soul’s “fluttering,” ἀναπτερούμενος, 249d6; ἀναπτερῶσαν, 255c6), fashioning an overlap between poetic and erotic possession necessary to the delineation of the soul’s heightened sensibilities. The soul-bird develops as if by a garden stream. The strength of its wings is dependent on the warmth and watering (251a–d, 253b) that come from viewing the beauty of the earthly beloved, the imagery of which 60

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Note that at Symp. 210a Diotima uses the same imagery to describe the means by which the lover of beauty makes his ascent to look upon the Forms. Cf. Demetr. De eloc. 101 for a use of Mysteries imagery to indicate the complexities of figurative language, discussed in the introduction to ch. 6. See Yunis 2011 ad 250b4–c5, who cites also Riedweg 1987. On poetic possession see esp. Ion 533e5–34e5, 536a7–d7. See Nightingale 2004: 83–93 on Mysteries imagery in the Symposium and Phaedrus as examples of “private theōria.”

3. Socrates’ cultivations

strongly recalls bucolic elements (sunlight, plants, flowing water). As the lover looks upon the beloved’s beauty its “effluence” (ἀπορροήν) warms and waters (ἄρδεται) his soul, so that his wings take root and send out shoots (ἐπιρρυείσης δὲ τῆς τροφῆς ᾤδησέ τε καὶ ὥρμησε φύεσθαι ἀπὸ τῆς ῥίζης ὁ τοῦ πτεροῦ καυλός) (251b1–7). The flowing stream is particularly prominent in this process. The lover’s soul finds its element when he has established a routine with his lover (which includes conversation and gym practice, cf. Rep. 410e10–411a3), and then the springs of desire, so named by Zeus himself, begin to flow in earnest (ἡ τοῦ ῥεύματος ἐκείνου πηγή, ὃν ἵμερον Ζεὺς Γανυμήδους ἐρῶν ὠνόμασε). Some of these streams flow down into him (ἡ μὲν εἰς αὐτὸν ἔδυ), others flow over, as he is filled full (ἡ δ’ ἀπομεστουμένου ἔξω ἀπορρεῖ). Like wind or an echo, this stream of beauty (τοῦ κάλλους ῥεῦμα) flows back to its source through the eyes; and once there it waters the roots of the beloved’s wings as well (τὰς διόδους τῶν πτερῶν ἄρδει) and makes them grow into fullness (255c1–d2). Further, the “harvesting of pleasure” that marked the compulsive lover of Socrates’ first speech (τὸ αὑτοῦ γλυκύ . . . καρποῦσθαι, 240a8) in his second speech is a momentary fixation (ταύτην γλυκυτάτην . . . καρποῦται, 252a1) in the process by which the soul grows its wings, becomes a bird of Zeus, and makes its way to knowledge. Note here again that this watery process comes from viewing beauty, which stirs desire (cf. 251c5–d1). But this desire, if properly channeled, is not for the object of beauty itself; rather, it urges the need for reproducing. The lover, having emulated the god that he follows as much as possible (ἐκεῖνον τιμῶν τε καὶ μιμούμενος εἰς τὸ δυνατόν), then seeks to foster the same emulation in his beloved, training him in the pattern and form of the god (μιμούμενοι αὐτοί τε καὶ τὰ παιδικὰ πείθοντες καὶ ῥυθμίζοντες εἰς τὸ ἐκείνου ἐπιτήδευμα καὶ ἰδέαν ἄγουσιν) (253b4–5). Socrates emphasizes repeatedly the importance of this fostering of resemblance: the lover wants to draw the boy “into likeness with himself and the god” (εἰς ὁμοιότητα αὑτοῖς καὶ τῷ θεῷ, 253c1); and only by long practice of this erotic mirroring (cf. 255d4) can the lovers grow “like plumage” (ὁμοπτέρους, 256e2). At one crucial point the likening process falls together fully with that of watering, when those who draw inspiration (lit. “draw water,” ἀρύτωσιν) from Zeus seek like Bacchants to “shower” it on the soul of their lover (ὥσπερ αἱ βάχκαι ἐπὶ τὴν τοῦ ἐρωμένου ψυχὴν ἐπαντλοῦντες) and thereby make him as like as possible to their god (ποιοῦσιν ὡς δυνατὸν ὁμοιότατον τῷ σφετέρῷ θεῷ) (Phdr. 253a5–7).63 63

Cf. Rep. 491a1-2, regarding those who liken (μιμουμένας) their souls to philosophy; also 500c5.

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a. Beauty streaming This beauty-nourished love, Socrates says at the very end of his own speech, makes possible the lover’s creating a life amidst philosophical speeches aimed at Love (πρὸς Ἔρωτα μετὰ φιλοσόφων λόγων, 257b6). The active matching or intersecting achieved in the dynamics of viewing the beautiful beloved for Plato depends on the nature of the eyes and vision – or at least, this is what the Timaeus (e.g.) seems to indicate. There Timaeus explains that the eyes are “light-bearing” (φωσφόρα) like fire, that vision is a “smooth and dense” (λεῖον καὶ πυκνόν) stream, and that whenever the “stream of vision” (τὸ τῆς ὄψεως ῥεῦμα) finds its match in daylight, it flows out, “like to like” (ὅμοιον πρὸς ὅμοιον) (Tim. 45b2–c6).64 As the Phaedrus makes especially clear, gazing upon beauty and the streaming it initiates is crucial to the process by which the lover elevates his soul – thereby getting closer to true beauty – and brings his beloved charge to a state similar to his (Phdr. 253a–c; cf. Tim. 29e–30a).65 Because sight is the sharpest of senses, beauty comes “glittering very distinctly” (στίλβον ἐναργέστατα66), providing a lucid vision lacking to other virtues such as wisdom, which has no “distinct image” (ἐναργὲς εἴδωλον) (Phdr. 250d1–7).67 In the Republic, by contrast, Socrates claims that most people do not possess the better “sight” that brings knowledge of the Forms, because they have “no distinct model” (μηδὲν ἐναργές . . . παράδειγμα) in their souls and so cannot like a painter use this to determine the truth.68 This model would allow for the capacity to move beyond the merely visible to “look upon the most true thing” (εἰς τὸ ἀληθέστατον ἀποβλέποντες) and thereby be able to determine what earthly conventions are truly beautiful, just, and good (Rep. 484c6–d3; cf. 532b6–d1).69 As in the Phaedrus, here in the Republic the philosophers achieve this special kind 64

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See Nightingale 2004: 10–11 on this passage as a support for the active quality of Greek notions of theorizing (in the sense of viewing, learning, and conceptualizing). The image of beauty streaming (τοῦ κάλλους ῥεῦμα) may refashion Empedoclean theories of vision, as Lebeck (1972: 274–75) thinks (also de Vries 1969 ad loc.); contra Rowe 1986 ad loc. Archaic poetry sometimes conjoins love with fluidity, which may be visual; most vibrantly, Hesiod declares that the Charites “drip love from their eyes that are flashing” (τῶν καὶ ἀπὸ βλεφάρων ἔρος εἴβετο δερκομενάων, Th. 910). Other poets emphasize the power of looking in love’s dynamics (e.g., Alcm. fr. 3 PMG; Sapph. frs. 16, 31 L–P; Ibyc. fr. 7 PMG; Anacr. frs. 15, 72 PMG. See also Eur. Hec. 441–43, IA 583–86 for the compelling quality of Helen’s gaze. This “glittering” recalls Paris in the bedroom (Il. 3.391–92), the dancers on Achilles’ shield (Il. 18.595–96), and Odysseus polished by Athena (Od. 6.236–37). See Nightingale 2004: 162–65, who emphasizes Socrates’ depiction of the lover’s making an agalma (“divine image”) of his beloved (Phdr. 251a5–6, 252d6–7). See further in ch. 1.1a. See Vasiliou 2008: 269; here the analogy to painting seems to be positive.

3. Socrates’ cultivations

of viewing not only from the soul’s paradeigma (the word that the Timaeus uses for the original form from which the cosmos emerged) but also from being a lover of the truth (τὴν δ’ ἀλήθειαν στέργειν) and erotically inclined (ἐρωτικῶν, ἐρωτικῶς) (Rep. 485b5–c8). In the Symposium Diotima also emphasizes to Socrates the work that looking upon beautiful things does, but leans heavily on the metaphor of philosophical midwifery: “giving birth in beauty” (τοῦτο τόκος ἐν καλῷ, 206b3–4).70 This birth comes about from gazing upon beautiful boys, then loftier things such as crafts and types of knowledge, until one finally ascends to view Beauty itself (210a–211e). Turning from individual objects to contemplate “the vast sea of the beautiful” (ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ πέλαγος τοῦ καλοῦ τετραμμένος), the lover while so viewing (καὶ θεωρῶν) gives birth to many beautiful – even magnificent – speeches and thoughts (πολλοὺς καὶ καλοὺς λόγους καὶ μεγαλοπρεπεῖς τίκτῃ καὶ διανοήματα) (210d3–6).71 He thus makes use of beautiful things in the world “like rising stairs” (ὥσπερ ἐπαναβασμοῖς χρώμενον, 211c3) in order to ascend to knowledge of beauty itself.

b. Desire’s diversions In some contrast to the Symposium’s sea of beauty, in the Republic as in the Phaedrus strong desires lead to a channeling in one direction, so that, like a diverted stream (ὥσπερ ῥεῦμα ἐκεῖσε ἀπωχετευμένον), the philosopher’s energies flow toward learning and the pleasures of the soul (πρὸς τὰ μαθήματα καὶ πᾶν τὸ τοιοῦτον ἐρρυήκασιν, περὶ τὴν τῆς ψυχης . . . ἡδονήν) rather than those of the body (Rep. 485d6–e1). As mentioned in Chapter 1, the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles may have influenced Plato’s emphasis on likenesses that are naturally grounded, since he associates cosmogonic and compositional patterns, featuring images of mixture and paths or passageways.72 The fact that Empedocles’ cosmogonic and physiological explanations foreground systems of paths and passages that dovetail with those of inspiration and composition may have spurred

70

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See esp. the discussions of Nussbaum 1986: 176–83 and Halperin 1990: 113–52; with emphasis on seeing, Nightingale 2004: 83–86. Note that Phaedrus oversees the speeches on Eros here in the Symposium, just as he does in the Phaedrus. Since this is the activity that Socrates identifies in the Phaedrus as that which true lovers of wisdom (i.e., philosophers) engage in (Phdr. 257b5–6), it appears that Phaedrus is at least making an attempt in this direction, though his own critical sensibilities are relatively conventional. Cf. frs. 3.11–12, 35.11–12, 83.10–12, 100.1–5.

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Plato to treat good metaphors as grounded in natural rather than formal correspondences.73 In any case, Plato uses the irrigation image repeatedly, to indicate processes that range from the fully figurative (e.g., the proper channeling of the appetites as an aspect of education and social order, Phdr. 251e3–252a1, Gorg. 493e5–494a1, Leg. 736a7–b4) to the more tangible (e.g., bodily respiration and blood flow, Phd. 112c4–8,Tim. 77c8–d6, 78c4–d1, 79a2–3, Crit. 117b5–c1, Leg. 844a1–7). For the purposes of this discussion the most important of his tropes comes, unsurprisingly, from the Phaedrus and involves the viewing of beauty and the “channeling” of desire. In his central speech Socrates describes how the sensitive soul, while looking (ἰδοῦσα) upon a beautiful beloved, diverts his desire (ἐποχετευσαμένη ἵμερον) and so loosens the hold of his love pangs (Phdr. 251e3–252a1). I discuss in Chapter 6 (section 3b) the centrality of this irrigation imagery to later literary theory and criticism; here I want to mark its prominence in narrower relation to Plato’s ideas about likeness. His combination of natural and artificial flows, of turning nature’s fluids by channeling and watering, and his distribution of this imagery across the earth’s waterways, the human body’s systems, and social nurturing must have suggested to later writers the unusual reach of the imagery. In this case bodies do not merely inhabit topographies but instead share their irrigations; the locus amoenus does not merely frame love’s nurture by the flows that spring from viewing beauty but instead shares its watering.74

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See further in ch. 1.2b. Aristotle also uses the vocabulary of irrigation (i.e., ὀχετ- cognates) in his writings on natural philosophy, a fact that may have contributed to this imagery entering the critical idiom. Unlike Plato, however, his usage is most often flagged as figurative by means of ὥσπερ, οἷον, and the like (e.g., De gen. anim. 746a17–19, 781b7–9, Hist. anim. 492b15–17, 515a23–25). That said, one important passage illustrates the difficulty of determining to what extent natural likeness is being claimed: Ἔοικε δ’ ὥσπερ ἔν τε τοῖς κήποις αἱ ὑδραγωγίαι κατασκευάζονται ἀπὸ μιᾶς ἀρχῆς καὶ πηγῆς εἰς πολλοὺς ὀχετοὺς καὶ ἄλλους ἀεὶ πρὸς τὸ πάντῃ μεταδιδόναι, καὶ ἐν ταῖς οἰκοδομίαις παρὰ πᾶσαν τὴν τῶν θεμελίων ὑπογραφὴν λίθοι παραβέβληνται διὰ τὸ τὰ μὲν κηπευόμενα φύεσθαι ἐκ τοῦ ὕδατος, τοὺς δὲ θεμελίους ἐκ τῶν λίθων οἰκοδομεῖσθαι, τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον καὶ ἡ φύσις τὸ αἷμα διὰ παντὸς ὠχέτευκε τοῦ σώματος, ἐπειδὴ παντὸς ὕλη πέφυκε τοῦτο (De part. anim. 668a11–19; cf. Pl. Tim. 77c6–9). Although ὥσπερ marks the analogy, the end of the passage suggests a natural likeness (“and nature channels the blood through all of the body, since matter as a whole is naturally this way”). Cf. also Theophrastus, for whom the vocabulary is commonplace for describing either natural or artificial streams by which plant life is hydrated (e.g., Hist. plant. 1.7.1, 3.1.5, 7.5.2, 7.6.3, 9.3.2). Theophrastus does, though, highlight “channeling” terms as figurative when using them to chart plant systems (e.g., De caus. Plat. 3.7.6, 4.10.3, 5.6.7, 5.12.5). The difference here may arise at least in part from what natural history demands of such language (largely description) versus what natural philosophy does (explanation).

3. Socrates’ cultivations

c. Bird’s eye view The philosophical lover of beauty – erotic, Muse-inspired, and a bit mad – thus takes up the mantle of poets and rhapsodes, turning rural resources to new uses. Drawing novel analogies, matching like to like in an unprecedented manner, he reinhabits the locus amoenus as a transformed landscape. Here the streams that flow are those born of a divinely inspired, erotic mania, which provide water for a new bird: the winged soul. Once properly nourished, the soul-bird, remembering its glimpse of beauty on high, works through love to match earthly beauty to this divine form. As the keen, enthused soul can make the proper match between the beauty it sees in a beloved and beauty in permanence in the hyper-heavenly space, so must the mousikos maker of speeches accurately match likenesses, finding in bucolic, choral, and Mysteries language his appropriate materials. As Socrates both describes and models the process by which the soul rises up, he sometimes uses the first person plural, implying an experience of and participation in the viewing and reproducing of like images that closely translates the divine realm and thus makes good rhetoric. Now, like any divinely inspired poet, Socrates follows the divinity to which he is most suited (Phdr. 250b5, 252d2–3; cf. Ion 536b1–c7). From the literary theoretical perspective, this intersection with rustic metonymies and divine choruses suggests an additional connection, not only to poetic traditions but more importantly to the burgeoning theoretical discourse. Plato critiques poetic sensibility, finds it useful but lacking, and supplements it with elements from its most ancient resources (e.g., the rural haunts of Muses) and elevated religious practices. By means of like images he indicates a distinctly refined perception, one that ultimately eludes all analogies. And yet the process is, as he notes in this dialogue and elsewhere, dependent for most of its “path” on the mimetic gesture – on the shaping of discourse by metonymy, metaphor, analogy.75 Indeed, choral and especially rural references together build the primary means by which the soul rises up to achieve this refined perception. If in Hesiod poets are followers of Zeus and the Muses, in the Phaedrus the philosophical soul is Zeus’ bird and “chorus-member” (χορευτής, 252d1). As oracular creatures, figures for poetry, and inhabitants of many a locus amoenus, birds offer Plato a brace of critical images: the quasi-divine flight of the soul in love and the burgeoning of this power within the natural setting through viewing beauty and reproducing it in love.76 By 75 76

See above regarding e.g. Rep. 532–33. Bird metaphors appear central to the poetics that Plato is turning to his use. Birds regularly inhabit the locus amoenus as natural denizens of such spaces and as essential metonyms for

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transforming metaphors for poetic speech in this way, Socrates fosters a new verbal mode, one that follows lyric poetry’s emphasis on sensation and the moment of perception but looks to imbed this dynamic in the process by which the soul rises up, abandons the physical realm, and views beauty in its essence. This palpable figurative mode thus structures at a deep and constitutive level arguments that make for “soul leading” rhetoric (cf. ψυχαγωγία διὰ λόγων, 261a7–8).77 Plato thereby claims metaphor (itself structured by matching like to like) for the theoretical discourse that both shapes and sustains speeches that make proper use of similarity. We have come full circle. Contrary to Socrates’ protestations (or rather, in keeping with his mock-modest disclaimers), the countryside does have something to teach him: namely, how to channel poetic inspiration and its figuration – which are both in some direct sense produced by that landscape – in a new direction, to describe and foster a new kind of perception. The poet’s meadow, in which young girls dance while eros and danger bloom, becomes the one preserved for a lofty kind of male homoerotic love that nourishes the soul’s growth, fed by streams of divine desire. And this desire is itself fed by viewing, emulating, and reproducing, both in self and lover and in the philosophical logos. The medium is, then, deeply mimetic and full of metaphors; and while it may run the risk of sounding like something close to poetry, as Socrates worried about his first speech, if properly placed where it belongs – lodged deep in the true order of things – this mimetic medium captures what sheer argument cannot. This is what Socrates gets from poetry and its country setting: the locus amoenus becomes the site of and figure for the rural intuitions that underpin a truer kind of rhetoric and help to shape the dialogic reflection that follows.

4. The dialectical path Although beauty may be a powerful motivation on the path forged by likeness that leads to understanding, it can also cause concern in the more careful parts of the process. In the Republic at least, seeing is no simple

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poetic style. Like poets, they sing in clear, piercing voices; they also move through the upper air and thus would seem to have more direct contact with the divine. Swans were sacred to Apollo and Zeus, the divine king of poets in Hesiod. For this “holy bird,” see, e.g., Alc. 26 PMG; P. O. 2.87–88; Bacch. Epin. 5.14–23 (also in a charming setting). For nightingales in similar settings, see HPan. 16–18; E. Hel. 1107–12, frs. 88, 773.23–34 TrGF; cf. Theocr. Id. 7.130–41. Cf. also Sapph. fr. 31.6 L–P; Alc. fr. 283.3 L–P. See Yunis 2011: 10–14 and ad loc; also Moss 2012 and further in the following section.

4. The dialectical path

matter, and often leads one in the wrong direction, if one is counted among the “sight-lovers” (i.e., lovers of spectacle, φιλοθεάμονες) and thus mistakes the exciting likeness for the thing itself (475d1–76c7).78 Yet many passages in the dialogues also make clear that analogies to sight, especially the seeing of beautiful things, forge a necessary step on the path to better knowledge of the truth. We have on the one hand the gazing between lover and beloved that is like flowing water channeled in the right directions, a trope that takes shape especially in the Phaedrus. On the other hand we find the path of dialectic, which is prominent also in the Republic, as I discuss in Chapter 1. As noted, both Monoson and Nightingale demonstrate the ways in which Plato appropriates this emphasis on spectacles and pilgrimage as a means of conceptualizing the philosophical process. The narrative of the way down into and up out of the cave in the Republic is the most famous example of such formulations (again, see ch. 1); but clearly similar treks are prominent elsewhere in the dialogues as well.79 While these scholars are focused on a general notion in Plato of journeying, on getting somewhere in a moral or epistemological sense, I am more concerned with the characteristics of the paths themselves. What the Phaedrus in particular makes clear is that the more difficult and deliberate aspects of these paths belong not merely to analogy and likeness-making (as the Republic appears to indicate) but rather to the dialectical process more generally, which includes argument shaped by the parallel techniques of collection and division.80 Although Socrates’ journey down to the Ilissus initiates a movement that shapes the palinode speech, as it charts the soul’s journey up to the “back” of the world and down again, the dialogues’ second half offers supplemental indications of how to chart a path in language that leads toward true understanding.81 For the plot of the Phaedrus a further step remains, then: a conversation, overseen by the cicadas, the denizens of rural spots heated by the midday sun. They approve of those who talk their way through the warm lull of the afternoon, when lesser creatures sleep; but like Sirens their song is seductive and so the space they inhabit must be navigated carefully 78

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See Monoson 2000: 212–28, esp. 220–21; Nightingale 2004: 74–83, esp. 78–79; also Vasiliou 2008: 240–44. Cf. the discussion in ch. 1.1a. Monoson 2000: 222–23 notes that Plato does not use theatrical imagery of the viewing in the cave; rather this clusters around the philosopher’s journey out and back. Again, see Segvic 2009: 38–40 and note the parallelism with Aristophanes’ Frogs. This process also involves perceiving likeness, and Socrates sometimes closely associates it with analogy; see the discussion in ch. 1.1a and further below. This is my solution to the Phaedrus’ supposed problem with unity; cf., e.g., Werner 2007; Moss 2012.

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(259a6–b2). Cicadas are also beloved of the Muses, former humans who were so struck by poetry’s pleasures that they forgot to eat and drink (Phdr. 259b5–c2). Socrates and Phaedrus thus enter upon their dialogue while still under the auspices of rural elements but now with a more careful navigation of the setting, given the manifest dangers imbedded in the attractions of their lovely details. The wary interlocutors therefore reject traditional rhetoric as practiced by those ignorant of good and bad, which leads it to “harvest a crop” (καρπὸν ὧν ἔσπειρε θερίζειν) that Phaedrus deems “not very suitable” (οὐ πάνυ γε ἐπιεικῆ). This provokes Socrates to ask whether they are “abusing the art of speaking more rustically than necessary” (Ἆρ’ οὖν . . . ἀγροικότερον τοῦ δέοντος λελοιδορήκαμεν τὴν τῶν λόγων τέχνην) (260c10–d4). The play of countryside imagery is very subtle and distinctive here: conventional rhetoric may harvest an unsuitable crop, but Socrates’ wry question indicates that one may need a certain rusticity (cf. ἀγροικότερον) in order to propel forward a properly rigorous course of inquiry.82 This course is not itself a straightforward one; even dialectical engagement involves a certain number of playful turns as well as circuitous plodding. Here the imagery fosters a sense of needing to get somewhere by means of a careful process, a hodos or methodos (lit. “following after”) that is pursued by small steps (Phdr. 269d6–7, 271e1). When Socrates declares the rhetorical technē to be a “type of soul-leading through speeches/ arguments” (ψυχαγωγία τις διὰ λόγων, 261a7–8; cf. 271c9), the phrase together with its surrounding dynamics indicates advancement, as if through a landscape, by means of recognizing similarities, including appropriate images and collection and division. In order to make his way, Socrates first calls upon the arguments that may advance their understanding of what kind of art rhetoric is – those “noble creatures” (θρέμματα γενναῖα), tripping along like curious ponies to help them (260e2–261a5).83 One must, for instance, determine the fork in the road (δεῖ ταῦτα ὁδῷ διῃρῆσθαι) when addressing topics (e.g., madness) in order to grasp the character of each kind (εἶδος), including those in relation to which the majority “wanders” (τὸ πλῆθος πλανᾶσθαι) (263b6–8).84 This is a 82 83

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On the comic character of Plato’s agroikos imagery, see Worman 2008: 178–79, 183. Cf. Socrates’ wry example of knowing the difference between horses and donkeys just before this at 260b–c. Cf. Phaedrus’ πλανώμεθα (263b5) as he despairs of the task; also Lys. 213e3 with the same sense. At Rep. 532e1 Socrates uses the image of the divided road(s) to characterize the dialectical process (κατὰ ποῖα δὴ εἴδη διέστηκεν, καὶ τίνες αὖ ὁδοί). Prodicus’ “Choice of Heracles,” discussed in ch. 6.2, is one of the more famous tales centering on this fork in the road.

4. The dialectical path

dialectical kind of forward movement, of which Socrates deems himself an erastēs, declaring that he follows any man who can do it well, “in his footsteps like those of a god” (κατόπισθε μετ’ ἴχνοιν ὥστε θεοῖο, 266b785). This soul-leading is on the one hand dependent on advancing by the small steps (κατὰ σμικρὸν μεταβαίνων, 262a2) taken when determining similarities, which one can do only with knowledge of the truth (262a5–b1). This painstaking way seems to be in keeping with the matching work described in the palinode speech, but now Socrates points to a difficulty with it: deception, since the small steps by which one advances in argument may escape detection and thereby lead others astray (ἀπατήσειν, 262a5).86 On the other hand there is the knowledge that must underpin both: how to match speeches to souls, a simple speech for a simple soul and a complex for a complex one. The soul-matching necessary to mastering the power of speech (λόγου δύναμις, 271c9) is also an extended and difficult task, but cannot be otherwise, as Phaedrus agrees somewhat grudgingly (ἀδύνατόν που). He then adds that it is no small task (καίτοι οὐ σμικρόν γε φαίνεται ἔργον, 272b5). This is what Socrates (echoing Hesiod) deems the “long, rough path” (πολλὴν . . . καὶ τραχεῖαν, 272c2), the one paved by pursuing true similarities rather than the lazy man’s route, the “short, easier” and “slight, smooth” path (ῥάιων καὶ βραχύτερα; ὀλίγην τε καὶ λείαν, 272c1–3) of eikos arguments.87 He thus opposes the true work of likeness – of separating out and properly characterizing types and then matching them with speeches whose styles match these – to orators’ profligate deployment of probability (to eikos). The way of this work, essentially the dialectical process of collection and division as well as analogizing, can only be pursued by those with this special knowledge: τοῦτο τὸ εἰκὸς τοῖς πολλοῖς δι’ ὁμοιότητα τοῦ ἀληθοῦς τυγχάνει ἐγγιγνόμενον· τὰς δὲ ὀμοιότητας ἄρτι διήλθομεν ὅτι πανταχοῦ ὁ τὴν ἀλήθειαν εἰδὼς κάλλιστα ἐπίσταται εὑρίσκειν. This “probability” occurs to many by means of a similarity to the truth; but we were explaining just now in respect to similarities that in every case the one knowing the truth understands best how to discover these. (273d3-6)88

85

86 87

88

Cf. Hom. Od. 2.406: ὁ δ’ ἔπειτε μετ’ ἴχνια βαῖνε θεοῖο, of Telemachus following Athena on his way to the shore. Cf. Adeimantus’ outburst in book 6 (Rep. 487b1–7), discussed in ch. 1.1a. Cf. Rep. 328e2–4, where the road that is “rough and difficult or smooth and easy” (τραχεῖα καὶ χαλεπὴ ἢ ῥᾳδία καὶ εὔπορος) refers to the path of life. Cf. Phdr. 229e2–4, 237c4–5.

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Traditional rhetoricians like the Sicilian sophist Teisias take the easier, shorter path, which aims only at determining what will seem likely (as opposed to truly like) and thus be convincing to the crowd (272d–273a). For Socrates, then, there is a perception of likeness that is adjacent to the truth, that can only be reached by the long way around, by the slow, careful work that leads one to see how things truly are. “And so,” he says as if to Teisias, “if the way is a long one, do not be surprised; it must be traveled in the service of great things” (ὥστε εἰ μακρὰ ἡ περίοδος, μὴ θαυμάσῃς· μεγάλων γὰρ ἕνεκα περιιτέον, 274a3–4). The setting and action of the Phaedrus obviously offers the topographical parallel to this methodological trek, as if the walk down to the river were necessary to better understanding. It is not that other dialogues do not begin with a chance meeting and/or a walk; many do, including most prominently the Symposium, Lysis, Protagoras, Republic, and Laws. Some of these dialogues also make conspicuous use of path images to indicate methodological and sometimes moral ways. For instance, at Sophist 229e1–230b5, the “rougher road” (ἡ . . . τραχυτέρα . . . ὁδός) also designates a dialectical type of inquiry, a method that the Stranger claims corrects the “wandering” (πλανωμένων) resulting from “smoother” (λειότερον) and more conventional process of inquiry. In the Lysis, which begins like the Phaedrus with a walk outside the city walls, here from the Academy to the Lyceum (203), the “difficult road” (χαλεπὴ . . . ὁδός) on which Socrates and his interlocutor “wander” (ἐπλανώμεθα) is a dialectical mode of inquiry ironically deserted in favor of considering the wisdom of the poets (σκοποῦντα [τὰ] κατὰ τὰς ποιητάς) (Lys. 213e3–214a1). As discussed in Chapter 1 and noted above, paths are central to the course of the Republic. Indeed, in his speech detailing conventional poetic wisdom on moral education, Adeimantus quotes Hesiod’s image of the long rough road to virtue (Rep. 364c6–d3 =WD 287–89, with alterations) as confirmation of the poets’ moral misguidance, which stands in contrast to some very significant paths in later books of the dialogue.89 As in the Phaedrus Socrates’ most sustained use of the long or rough road image in the Republic indicates the slow, careful work of dialectic (e.g., 435d, 504b, 532a–e). As I discuss in Chapter 1 (section 1a), the most famous parallel to this difficult progression occurs in the allegory of the cave, where the rough path is that which leads outward and upward, toward viewing the Forms (Rep. 517a–b). Later on it seems that the easy path may be reserved for philosophers and gods (Rep. 619ed7–e5); and at the end of the Republic 89

Again, cf. Rep. 328e–4, where Socrates uses similar vocabulary to talk about the “road of life.”

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the “upward path” (τῆς ἄνω οδοῦ) pursued by practicing justice clearly and clinchingly indicates the right choice of roads (Rep. 621c4–6). Thus in the Republic at least the path functions as an essential part of the most famous metaphor for philosophical practice that properly reflects metaphysical realities. The difficult trek in the Phaedrus centers on careful analysis of the speeches that came before the conversation. Socrates now declares that in fact both of his speeches could be regarded as an example of how one who knows the truth may “act playfully with his speeches and mislead his listeners” (ὠς ἂν ὀ εἰδὼς τὸ ἀληθὲς προσπαίζων ἐν λόγοις παράγοι τοὺς ἀκούοντας, 262d1–2).90 He then attributes his own rhetorical “gift” (τὸ γέρας) to the “gods of the place” (τοὺς ἐντοπίους θεούς) and the “devotees of the Muses” (i.e., the cicadas, οἱ τῶν Μουσῶν προφῆται) (262d2–4). What are we to make of this characterization, which also seems decidedly playful? First, Socrates’ language echoes Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, which emphasizes the power of logos to deceive and sway the listener (e.g., ἀπατήσας, 8) and ends with the speaker calling his own composition “my plaything” (ἐμὸν δὲ παίγνιον, 21).91 Like the elaborate praise of the kalē katagōgē at the beginning of the dialogue, the gesture implicitly indicates the famously elaborate Sicilian sophist while explicitly invoking rural divinities. And it again trumps rhetoric’s traditional connections to poetic expression while harnessing the danger and power therein: deception, enchantment, and speeches with mysterious origins that seem to spring from the setting itself. In fact, a moment later Socrates once more credits the local deities (i.e., the Nymphs and Pan, 263d4–5) with inspiring his ability to compose a speech properly, since it is they (he says) who, being “more artful than Lysias” (τεχνικωτέρας . . . Λυσίου), helped him order his speech properly, while he was enthused (ἐνθουσιαστικόν) by them (263d2–7). Gorgias may assert that rhetoric has a power adjacent to poetry (Hel. 8–10), but Socrates lays claim to its sources. He does not, however, endorse these unequivocally. As he leads Phaedrus to think about the process of collection and division that underpins the ability to perceive likenesses and thus define a thing properly, Socrates reiterates in slightly different terms the playful nature of his speech. Now he describes the process of composition as follows: 90

91

There has been some confusion among commentators as to which “two speeches” (τὼ λόγω, 262c8) Socrates is referring to here, but as Dominic Scott has shown, they must be his own (Scott 2011). So also Yunis 2011 ad loc. Cf. Pl. Soph. 234a3–b2; Pol. 288c6.

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Rural retreats . . . ἐρωτικὴν μανίαν ἐφήσαμέν τε ἀρίστην εἶναι καὶ οὐκ οἶδ’ ὅπῃ τὸ ἐρωτικὸν πάθος ἀπεικάζοντες, ἴσως μὲν ἀληθοῦς τινος ἐφαπτόμενοι, τάχα δ’ ἂν καὶ ἄλλοσε παραφερόμενοι, κεράσαντες οὐ παντάπασιν ἀπίθανον λογον, μυθικόν τινα ὕμνον προσεπαίσαμεν μετρίως τε καὶ εὐφήμως . . . . . . [W]e declared that erotic madness is best, likening it to some sort of passionate emotion, perhaps grasping some truth but possibly getting carried away, whipping up some not entirely implausible argument, we playfully offered a sort of mythic hymn, but moderately and piously . . . (Phdr. 265b5–c1)

The preponderance of hedging language (i.e., “sort of,” οὐκ οἶδ’ ὅπῃ, τινος, τινα; “perhaps,” ἴσως, τάχα δ’ ἄν; also the litotes “not entirely implausible” οὐ παντάπασιν ἀπίθανον) indicates the extent to which Socrates cannot straightforwardly support his own rhetorical mode.92 There is good in it (e.g., it is a moderate and pious hymn), but it also uses images (ἀπεικάζοντες), can only grasp at some truth (ἴσως μὲν ἀληθοῦς τινος ἐφαπτόμενοι), and is merely plausible (οὐ παντάπασιν ἀπίθανον). Such is the nature of rhetorical mimesis, indeed of determining and deploying likenesses more generally, though some are better than others. Dialectic, in addition, may be more precise and exacting in its interrogations, but it also makes use of metaphors, analogies, and figurations along the way. The most important knowledge for the philosophical speechmaker or dialectician, however, is still what Socrates’ second speech indicates: that of the soul. Although he now playfully disparages aspects of the speech, he sustains both its imagery and, ultimately, its focus on the soul. As well as one more thing: the emphasis on likeness. The good orator must know about souls in order to divide up their kinds accurately and match each with a speech that suits it (271c9–d6). This is, as Socrates admits, a tall order – in fact, this laborious process lies at the core of the “long way around” (272b5–c3). Late in the Phaedrus, at the end of the day, Socrates offers another analogy for this careful labor. As he explains to Phaedrus, the window boxes that people cultivate during the festival of Adonis cannot compare to the fertile bounty of the farmer’s well-sown field (276b1–8). The one offers quick but passing enjoyment, the other long, prudent tending and sustained returns. The “farmer” who has wisdom (νοῦς) will take those seeds he wants to grow fruit (ἔγκαρπα βούλοιτο) and will be serious in his planting. Turning his “watering” (i.e., writing) to good use, he will sow a “garden of letters” (ἐν γράμματι κήπους), reminders to help foster growth 92

On the utilities of hedging language, see Bourdieu 1991: 85; he attributes the phrase to a Lakoff interview from 1973.

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in his students by planting in the soul speeches accompanied by knowledge (σπείρῃ μετ’ ἐπιστήμης λόγους). These words of wisdom are not without fruit but have a seed (οὐχὶ ἄκαρποι ἀλλὰ ἔχοντες σπέρμα) (276d1–277a4), producing other plantings. And so it grows: Socrates culls the metaphors, fostering his own garden by both written speeches and – within the action of the Phaedrus – conversation, dialectic. These also model, for Phaedrus and for external audiences, what he describes: the path of like images that leads toward the truth. The dialogue thus combines in a unique and urgent manner rural metaphors that have ramifying meanings in literary tradition. If the Nymphs, cicadas, and flowing water of the locus amoenus indicate the poetic inspirations that, with its elements appropriately transformed, shape compelling, philosophically informed speeches, then the “rough road” of the dialogue’s second half is its dialectical counterpart. As the Republic passages reveal, this second metaphor is a pointed appropriation of Hesiod, so that the Phaedrus’ turning of both the pleasant spot and the path is poised to resolve the moral and aesthetic shortcomings of poetry and conventional rhetoric. This is why Socrates repeatedly invokes the Muses and credits them, in concert with rural deities such as Pan and the Nymphs, as the source of his speeches. In the process, by increments, he fixes this old poetic gesture. First he calls directly upon the Muses, but adds a mock-grandiose etymological tag (ligus or “Ligurian,” 237a7–9). Next, in his analysis of types of mania, he associates them in unusually positive terms with poetic inspiration (245a; cf. 265b2–4). Then he links them to the cicadas, as those who oversee not only song but conversation (259b–d). In the course of this conversation he attributes his playful speechifying, if not his knowledge, to the Muses (262d2–5); compare 263d6–7 for a parallel crediting of the Nymphs and Pan.93 Socrates moves, then, from ventriloquizing mockery to mock-modest adoption, which cements his inhabitation of his novel setting and mode. Socrates adds another turn to this incremental appropriation when he deems the verbal categories constructed by Gorgias’ follower Polus, apparently a writer of technai in his own right, “galleries of speeches” (μουσεῖα λόγων), mocking the overly fancy formations of such figures as “doublet-expression,” “maxim-expression,” and “image-expression” (διπλασιολογίαν καὶ γνωμολογίαν καὶ εἰκωνολογίαν) (267c1–2). This term (mouseion) is Euripidean; indeed, it comes from divine invocations 93

For the Nymphs’ influence, see also Phdr. 238d1, 241e3–4, although note that it appears initially to be more problematic. On Socrates’ connection to Pan, see Rosenmeyer 1962; Clay 1979: 347; Belfiore 2006: 204.

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and choral odes with markedly rural imagery: birdsong, thickets, flowing water.94 But that is not all. The phrase also turns up as part of an early stylistic gambit in Aristophanes’ Frogs, when Dionysus, attempting to differentiate between Euripides and those whom Heracles thinks of as his stylistic successors, rejects the latter as “galleries of swallows” (χελιδόνων μουσεῖα, Ran. 93). Thus underlying Socrates’ mocking of Polus’ rhetorical techniques are not only choral pastoralia but also its stylistic lampoon; and Plato follows Aristophanes in his playful turning of such images to good literary critical and theoretical use, appending a further ironic twist at the end of the dialogue. There Socrates advises Phaedrus to tell Lysias (as well as Homer and Solon) that they came down to the spring of the Nymphs (ἐς τὸ Νυμφῶν νᾶμα) and “heard a gallery of words” (μουσεῖον ἠκούσαμεν λόγων) that commanded them to test others along the lines (or path) they had followed (278b5–d2). Despite this late and gentle mocking of their speechifying, Socrates’ declaration to Phaedrus suggests that they had to go down to the river to be in a position to assess others’ rhetorical capabilities. Indeed, among Platonic dialogues the Phaedrus alone insists that this journey, both the fictional path out of the city and its figurative extensions as a new and inspired theoretical process, was necessary.95 “Beauty,” Scarry claims, “brings copies of itself into being.” This reproducing takes place through the “clear discernibility” that the viewed object of beauty sustains; and its experience incites deliberation. Indeed, as Scarry describes it, “Hymn and palinode – conviction and consciousness of error – reside inside most daily acts of encountering something beautiful.” The viewer draws near a redbud tree and “lurches awkwardly around it,” trying for analogies, for a bit of understanding, apologizing for wrong moves.96 This attempting and deliberation over beauty’s nature and likeness offers, as in Plato’s dialogues, some approach to knowledge; and though it does not get one all the way there it provides the central process by which one moves forward on the long and arduous path. And it seems crucial that natural objects (e.g., trees, flowers, bodies) anchor these discussions of beauty and its likeness. Scarry mentions Plato only in passing, but it is clear that his conception of how beauty works in the world underlies much of her thinking. It is, again, not a very practical conception, 94

95 96

Hel. 174, 1107–09; Bacch. 409–11; fr. 88 TrGF. Yunis (2011 ad 267c1–3) remarks on the sophistic slur and the connection to the Muses and poetry. Again, see Nightingale 2004 on Plato’s use of the imagery of pilgrimage and theōria. Scarry 1999: 3, 31–32.

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since what one should do in the face of its mandates remains difficult to determine and, as Phaedrus says, no small task. What is clear, however, is that Plato’s ideas about narrative and exegetical strategies that employ likeness and emulation revolve around a few central dynamics. First, there is an important juncture in the Phaedrus and Republic between images of artful landscaping and the mimetic process. The route by which one climbs up to see more than visible things or their images is a strenuous one. And presumably a theorist may himself deploy like images that are nurtured by love’s flow and lead on the right path only if he has undergone such exertions and keeps his eye on the truth. That would leave out most people, but it helps to explain why Socrates may have a special ability to fashion likenesses that are truly instructive, hesitant and selfmocking though he may be in the act of crafting them. Second, the Timaeus holds out the possibility that this special capacity depends on the understanding of likeness as something imbedded in the way the world is put together. If the cosmos is a divinely forged copy of the original model, emulation, matching like to like, is a dynamic central to how things work, both in the earthly realm and in the linking of it to the intelligible, the model/ Forms, and the divine.97 From this perspective figurative analogies such as metaphor would signal connections that are not merely formal; rather, when they are forged in the right ways they illuminate deeper, more natural ties between things. Thus, for instance, the soul’s watering in the Phaedrus would point to the fluid nature of perception, and the body’s irrigations in the Timaeus match in some real way those of the earth. Whoever recognizes that the world is composed in this way, then, should be able to deploy likenesses that are not merely apt but indicative of the true state of things. The prologue of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe reiterates the Phaedrus’ connections among viewing beautiful rural scenes and erotic pleasures but with more emphasis on the mimetic process. As noted more briefly in the Introduction, the narrator relates how in a grove of the Nymphs he “saw the most beautiful sight [he] had ever seen” (θέαμα εἶδον κάλλιστον ὧν εἶδον). The grove itself was lovely – tree-filled, flowering, well watered (πολύδενδρον, ἀνθηρόν, κατάρρυτον) – but the painting within it was “more delightful” (τερπνότερον) still (1.1). The narrator offers the painting as the motivation for his tale: he declares that he is so thoroughly infused with erotic pleasures (πάντα ἐρωτικά) that it inspires in him “looking and wondering” the desire to “write back” to the painting (ἰδόντα με καὶ θαυμάσαντα πόθος ἔσχεν ἀντιγράψαι τὴν γραφήν) (1.2). He 97

See further in ch. 1.2b.

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dedicates his narrative mimesis of the painting to Eros and the requisite rural deities: the Nymphs and Pan (1.3). As Froma Zeitlin has argued, this and other gardens within the narrative reiterate in different forms the relationships among the locus amoenus, desire, and imitation, so that the narrative as a whole is structured in central ways by them.98 The scene also stages a tourist’s appreciation of cultivated nature and its representation, one whose knowing gestures indicate with some pride the long tradition underlying the intricate and carefully stratified mimesis. Further, Longus presents the motivations of his story as aesthetic at their core and perhaps even narrowly engaged with literary critical ideas about style. Indeed, Richard Hunter argues that Longus sets up his prologue specifically as entering upon the locus amoenus of Plato’s Phaedrus and that his grove serves as a metonym for the style of the whole: flowering and smooth, characteristics of slighter or more middling styles that have sweetness and charm.99 Later literary theorists, and most elaborately Dionysius of Halicarnassus, also take up the challenge presented by Plato’s use of rural imagery to frame his conceptions of likeness, which thereby shape in central ways his own mimetic perspective and practice. Largely dispensing with the metaphysics, Dionysius and his fellow theorist-critics transform rustic topographical metaphors into a stylistic calculus, invoking, reproducing, and recalibrating these in order to emphasize the power of mimesis to foster further beauty: gracefully shaped theory that aims to produce fine speeches. As Chapters 6 and 7 explore, these writers appear fully committed to demonstrating their mimetic skills in their analyses of the techniques employed by those whom the ancient critical tradition hailed as the avatars of fine style: Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes. But since Plato’s use of rural images also constitutes a central example of the Athenian reception of modes that reemerge in the Theocritean idyll, I turn first to the extant beginnings of bucolic poetry and assess the Hellenistic tropes that most centrally order the literary critical terrain. 98 99

Zeitlin 1990; see also Forehand 1976; O’Connor 1991; Edwards 1997; Calame 2007. Hunter 2008b: 784–86; see also Trapp 1990:145. Cf. Cic. Orat. 37–39; DH Comp. verb. 23.1; cf. 22.35; Quint. 12.10.58; Herm. Peri id. 2.4.87–90.

5

Diaspora Journeys and idylls in Hellenistic poetry

Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade . . . Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”1

Marvell’s lines highlight an essential innovation of pastoral poetry: that of the world made all “green” for composing poetry in a rustic strain, a strain shaped by the clear, sweet styles for which features of rural settings serve as the guiding metonymies.2 While it may be less generally understood that Plato’s Phaedrus advances a literary critical trend that situates literary judgment in rural settings, the literary and scholarly reception of Hellenistic poetry has often centered on its use of rural or pastoral elements, as Marvell’s poem confirms. From the Callimachean shepherd’s “slender Muse” to the Theocritean singers’ rustic contests, this is well-charted territory. The present chapter thus contributes little to the discussion of poetic programs, the scholarship on which has in recent years thoroughly explored the thematic and stylistic innovations crafted by Hellenistic poets, as well as those they influenced. Instead I turn the discussion in a more concertedly literary-critical direction. I analyze the conventional literary terrain that Hellenistic poets reorder and occupy anew as the next development in the mimetic territory that Plato surveyed and that later theorists take up as a central topos in their stylistic analyses. I thus treat what in scholarly parlance is typically referred to as imitatio or intertextuality as a critical tool, since programmatic moments in which Hellenistic poets emulate earlier topographies clearly reshape their features as distinctions among generations, genres, 1

2

William Empson quotes these lines in Some Versions of Pastoral (1950), by way of introduction to his meditation on what he calls the “Orpheus idea” – namely, that delight in nature gives humans mastery over it. In ch.2 (introduction) I suggest that Orpheus might have been influential in the connections that the developing literary critical discourse forges between poetic authority and the natural setting. For the Hellenistic poets this figure may be superseded by the ur-bucolic lover Daphnis on the one hand and the poetic ego on the other, both of which demonstrate variously their resonant sensitivity to the details of the rural or pastoral scene. Rosenmeyer (1969: vii) notes in explaining his title that “green” is not a common adjective in ancient pastoral (indeed, color terms are rare); like him I am only using the term in a metaphorical sense.

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and styles. Because this constitutes a striking turn toward overtly critical and stylistic discriminations, my discussion centers on the most crucial points at which these poets’ programs reorient discursive figures springing from the lay of the land. Although the sketchy evidence of Hellenistic critical and theoretical debates reveals limited engagement with contemporaneous poets on their own terms, and thus with their poetic landscapes, Hellenistic poets themselves transform the beginnings of a pastoral program for literary judgment discernible in Hesiod and Pindar and creatively expanded upon by Aristophanes and Plato into a more fully articulated space of critique.3 Even if some of these poets were also critics in their own right (e.g., Philetas, on whom see further below, section 3b), it is their poetic production and reception that develops mimesis of familiar landscapes as spaces of and for literary criticism. By emphasizing that these poets not only responded to poetic mandates but also advanced literary critical ones, I can isolate more effectively the ways in which they evolve and refine the stylistic distinctions that frame ancient criticism and theory as a pastoral project.4 Thus as in my discussion of archaic poets and Pindar (Chapter 2), here as well I am not aiming at an exhaustive study of landscape images among the Hellenistic poets, but rather selecting those tropes that are most central to the developing critical discourse that I have been tracking in previous chapters. My discussion ultimately hinges on a few over-treated but crucially programmatic passages, focusing on the distinctive ways in which they advance the burgeoning critical dynamic of journeying to a rural scene – travel that, as in the Frogs and the Phaedrus, is made for the sake of literary judgment. I also highlight poetic moments that are not necessarily pastoral in the fuller sense, when the poet deploys rustic images to delineate distinctions between his authorial style and that of others. These are moments that I consider to be literary critical in their essence, because they comprise a conscious activation of pastoral figuration (i.e., the rural scene, its constituent elements and inhabitants) to articulate judgments about poetry and the aesthetic choices that must follow from them. The most famous of these gestures come from Callimachus, but others from Theocritus and Roman poets such as Propertius and Horace prove to be engaged in similar sorts of projects and make use of similar tropes. 3 4

See, e.g., Montanari 1995; Rengakos 2000. See also Hunter 2006, 2012 for similar literary critical intersections, although he only intermittently focuses on landscape imagery.

Diaspora

These tropes, as one might expect, span the usual topographies, from mountain springs and paths to meadows and gardens, with the pastoral locus amoenus (or “pleasance”5) serving as a central setting. It is important to emphasize, however, that these trips to rural elsewheres took novel forms in Hellenistic settings, since they reflect a new scholarly and critical awareness of archaic and classical Greek literature as distanced and different, in part as a result of a cultural diaspora and cosmopolitanism unparalleled in the classical period. In what follows I first underscore the Hellenistic interventions as a central turning point in the development of the landscapes of literary critical discourse, setting out the most significant ways in which these poets reorder the terrains explored thus far. I then separate out two primary strands of these innovations, turning discussions of familiar tropes to more clearly literary critical ends. I thereby reframe these as gestures that, while various in their focus and import, all overtly and insistently render the rural or pastoral setting as uniquely suited to literary production and judgment. Again, it is with the advent of Hellenistic poetry that this setting becomes the essential place for such activities, as well as itself a space of figuration – now completely, always, and only such. Three interlocking images dominate in Hellenistic and Roman poetry as tropes for critical distinctions among styles: paths and journeys (1) to springs or flowing water (2), which are often features of the bucolic idyll (3) – namely, a revisiting of the locus amoenus. These landscape elements tend to be deployed by poets in order to delineate a refined, delicate, often sweet style (hēdus, leptos, etc.), as opposed to one grander, and perhaps cruder or harsher. While this reworks fifth- and fourth-century differentiations between “slight” (ischnos) and “grand” (megaloprepēs) styles, which likely take shape in the sophistic manuals (technai) of speech techniques and which Aristophanes picks up on in Frogs, the Hellenistic writers celebrate precisely the types of styles that are suspect in classical settings for their soft and effeminate associations.6 Given my claim that Proust is unique in his discursive engagement with ancient landscapes, it is striking that he turns to the pastoral poetry of Vergil and Theocritus when attempting to distinguish between the aesthetic and erotic sensibilities of their shepherd-poets and the cultivated decadence of modern-day aesthetes

5

6

Curtius (1953: 195) uses the term in his seminal study, to distinguish grove from garden; cf. Rosenmeyer 1969: 22–23. On the emergence and development of stylistic discourse more generally, see O’Sullivan 1992; Worman 2002.

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like the Baron de Charlus.7 While Proust’s focus foregrounds the erotic more than the aesthetic inclinations, the way in which he frames the shepherds’ songs for their lovers fosters this same sense that the Hellenistic and Roman poets promoted slight pastoral modes as refined rather than soft or effeminizing. The ancient theorists distinguish among styles by means of increasingly elaborate plans (i.e., more categories and details about rhythm, phonetics, etc.), but we can see some traces of Hellenistic aesthetics in, for instance, Dionysius’ grouping of poets such as Sappho and Euripides under the “polished, flowery” (glaphuros, anthēros) style.8 Thus the Hellenistic poets serve as an important link between earlier and later critical schemes, not only for their use of the pastoral setting as the central trope for literary production and critique, but also for their promoting of one end of the stylistic spectrum, despite (or even in the face of) the gendered coloration of its features. Although Hellenistic poets do not inflect their imagery very precisely in relation to technical details such as rhythm and lexical choices, their vocabulary does invoke an aesthetic scheme by means of tastes, sounds, and textures that further flesh out ideas about slighter styles. And as with Aristophanes’ embodied styles, this delicacy yokes the idyllic, refined setting and the tender poet himself, a connection between bodies and topographies that should by this point seem all too familiar.9

1. Dreaming of elsewhere As Mark Payne has argued, the world of bucolic poetry is crafted as what he calls “fully fictional” – that is, one must enter it completely, on its terms, since it only makes references, comparisons, and critiques within this fictional frame.10 He emphasizes as well that these pastoral fictions offer a new kind of mimetic modeling, in that they stage song performances and their emulation, encouraging others to follow suit. Payne also notes that one aspect of the self-contained quality of these fictions is the representation of audience reception internal to their framing.11 I would urge that we recognize in bucolic poetry’s singing herdsmen who judge each 7

Proust, III.710; cf. 343–44; for the association of this sensibility with Plato, III.727, IV.324–25, 386. See further in the Epilogue, section 1. 8 De comp. verb. 23.1; cf. 22.35; cf. Demetr. De eloc. 183. Hunter (2006: 20) notices this. See further in ch. 7.2b. 9 Cf. Keith 1999; Hunter 2006: 34–36; Worman 2009. Hunter compares the scene with Agathon in Thesmophoriazusae; cf. Worman 2008: 106–07. 10 11 Payne 2007: 1–5 and passim. Payne 2007: 92–99.

1. Dreaming of elsewhere

other’s songs the ordering of literary, and particularly stylistic, critiques. This would mean that, especially in the case of Theocritus’ pastoral odes, the scenes of competition and performance renegotiate the staging of literary judgment that moves from city to country in Aristophanes’ Frogs and Plato’s Phaedrus in order to highlight urbane cultural hierarchies by displacing them to a rural setting. A review may be useful here, to advance our awareness of the ways different genres engage mimesis, here in the sense of dramatic enactment, within the fictional frame. Earlier poetry, especially hymns but other forms as well, usually reproduce in their celebratory, occasional themes invitations to, the channeling of, and/or direct engagement with divine presences – most often with the assertive male poet making use of female resources (e.g., Hesiod and his branch from the Muses, Pindar and his spring of the Nymphs). These earlier poems thus in effect do as they announce, so that they present themselves as outgrowths of the poet’s and performers’ embodied engagements with the settings invoked. Insofar as earlier poetry initiates self-reflection and critique, this typically occurs in tandem with scenes of poetic inspiration and invention or claims to fame for both patron and poetry.12 Dramatic poetry, in some contrast, coordinates enactment in a fuller sense, while the connections to deities as well as direct assertions of poetic power and distinctive style are more adumbrated and complex. Because, however, classical drama (both tragic and comic) directly stages characters that embody different tastes and gendered affinities (e.g., Euripides’ associations with refined, feminine modes), stylistic distinctions and judgments arise in the course of their agonistic interactions, which emphasize physicality and visual effects as important elements in the judgment.13 The dialogue form, at least as Plato elaborated it, frames interactions among characters as if in dramatic enactment, but minus the element of actual performance (as far as we know). Sometimes the dialogues are directly recorded and sometimes related by a narrator, but either way they usually include a sharp sense of the characters’ inclinations, as well as characterizations of physical attributes and deportments – so that, again, they are presented as if staged. The dialogues either directly address ideas about style and mimesis, as when a character (often Socrates) takes up a topic for argument; or these may emerge through dynamics centered on control of the setting and/or argument (e.g., the Nymph-seized Socrates 12 13

For the latter, see (e.g.) Ibyc. 282 PMG; Sim. 19–20 W2; and passim in Pindar (see ch. 2.2–3). See Zeitlin [1981] 1996b; Foley 2000; Worman 2008: ch. 2, 2012; and cf. Perceau 2011, although her focus is largely on the voice and bodies in lament.

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chanting dithyrambs), representational strategies that more closely resemble those of drama. As Payne notes, in the Hellenistic genres, one can find a similar sort of performance being formulated in Callimachus’ Hymns, in which the audience is directly engaged by the speaker’s addresses and invocations.14 Scholars have never reached any consensus on whether these hymns were actually performed; and like Theocritus’ Idylls they give a strong sense of engagement with earlier poetic performance, so that the implied enactment itself suggests a means of “reading” older genres.15 But Hellenistic poets contribute a novel sensibility to the conventions of performance when they stage rural performances that are concertedly marked as elsewhere – as far away from and yet fully engaged with urban intellectual concerns. The Hellenistic world is a well settled and travelled one, so that even topographies that poets clearly mark as rural (e.g., Theocritus’ Sicilian and Coan hillsides, Callimachus’ Helicon) operate as urbane conceits rather than rustic realities.16 Of course, this is true of any literary representation (i.e., that its places are all “places”), as I emphasize repeatedly in the course of this study; the point here is that these poets create settings that not only insist on their status as spaces of metaphor but also point to their others and opposites. In this sense they are always already heterotopias, dream spaces, perfect elsewheres.17 This new remove (or “remove”) is clearly in play at well-known moments in Callimachus’ poetry, especially the Aetia prologue and the end of the Hymn to Apollo, both of which I discuss in more detail below (this section and section 3). In a comprehensive article on Callimachus’ cultural and social milieu, Daniel Selden offers a nuanced understanding of the prominence of pastoral scenes and their aesthetics in his poetry. He argues that the poet’s repeated reliance on figurative gestures rooted in country settings does not constitute, as scholars have tended to assume, a retreat from the contemporary urban setting in which Callimachus wrote, but rather the reverse, in that his engagement with rural tropes heightens awareness of contrasts to the urban setting in which he and his fellow poets were writing.18 For Selden such distancing figurative gestures are part of an aesthetics of displacement (what he also terms “the order of the 14

15

16 17

18

Payne 2007: 53–55; on the possibilities of performance, see 54 n. 15 for the debate and bibliography. But see Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 22–23 on the private and public performance settings in Hellenistic Alexandria. See Selden 1998; Thalmann 2011: 198–215. Again, Foucault’s “heterotopias” are spaces fashioned as “counter-sites,” in which real spaces are “simultaneously represented, contested and, inverted” (1986: 24). Selden 1998: 302–07.

1. Dreaming of elsewhere

alibi”). Further on he notes that the Hellenistic epigram is marked by its placelessness or “wandering,” even as poets (and not only writers of epigram) play upon the multiplying place names and aetiologies that make up their culturally diverse milieus.19 This is an insight that, as Selden recognizes, obtains for poetry generally and for vivid prose styles (according to Aristotle), the latter of which may in fact run the risk of appearing to be too poetic or elaborate.20 The importance of this figurative mode for my discussion emerges when one considers how the Hellenistic poets advance the tropes that classical writers had begun to activate. As we can see in nascent form in Aristophanes and Plato, this “turning away” (trepein) from the urban scene centers on a conscious, archaizing inhabitation of rustic spaces that earlier poets took for granted as their natural settings, likely in part because their occasional poetry assisted in reinforcing rural cult practices. This is all the more clearly the case for the Hellenistic poets and later for Roman poets such as Horace and Propertius, whose programmatic claims, in reaching back to Hesiod’s Helicon for their scenes of inspiration and shaping distinctively rustic tropes, enter the critical idiom as vivid interventions in an urbane program of literary judgment.21 While this figurative turning to a rural elsewhere as a means of highlighting literary critical concerns is clearly at play in the fictional dramas staged by Theocritus, his bucolic scenes also contribute overtly the element of competition and judgment so central to critical convention, since they most often take the form of a competition or exchange in this newly ordered but familiar locale. Not only does Theocritus’ Idyll 7 likely echo the setting and action of the Phaedrus, but Payne also contends that the staging of lowbrow characters in rural settings reaches back to the trials of the beggar Odysseus, particularly his time in the countryside.22 His encounter with the goatherd Melantheus has further interest for our purposes, since (as Payne notes in passing) it occurs as Odysseus and his country steward, the pig farmer Eumaeus, are on the path outside of town, at a spot with a spring, grove, and altar to the nymphs (Od. 17.204–11): Ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ στείχοντες ὁδὸν κάτα παιπαλόεσσαν ἄστεος ἐγγὺς ἔσαν καὶ ἐπὶ κρήνην ἀφίκοντο 19 20

21

22

Selden 1998: 316–18; see also 355–59 and further below. I.e., these remarks are focused on distinguishing poetic and prose styles: Po. 1457b6 and 31, 1459a5; Rhet. 1404a26–35, 1406a32–34; Cicero, De orat. 3.173–76, Orat. 162–67. We may think of this as an aesthetics of diaspora as much as displacement (cf. Selden 1998: 358). Murley 1940; Halperin 1983: 224–27; Payne 2007: 93, 120–22; see also Goldhill 1991: 227–28.

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Diaspora τυκτὴν καλλίροον, ὅθεν ὑδρεύοντο πολῖται, τὴν ποίησ’ Ἴθακος καὶ Νήριτος ἠδὲ Πολύκτωρ· ἀμφὶ δ’ ἄρ’ αἰγείρων ὑδατοτρεφέων ἦν ἄλσος, πάντοσε κυκλοτερές, κατὰ δὲ ψυχρὸν ῥέεν ὕδωρ ὑψόθεν ἐκ πέτρης· βωμὸς δ’ ἐφύπερθε τέτυκτο νυμφάων, ὅθι πάντες ἐπιρρέζεσκον ὁδῖται· But just as they were walking down the rocky mountain path near town, they came to a spring, well-built and lovely-flowing, from which the townspeople got their water, which Ithaca and Neritus and Poluctor made. And around there was a grove of water-nourished poplars, stretching in a circle, and cool water flowed down from the rock above; and an altar to the Nymphs was built over this, where all the passersby made offerings.

The description neatly combines the natural features common to a locus amoenus and those signaling human husbandry and habitation. It is a space between country and city, situated on a high rough path and in a grove, but the trees stand tidily in a circle around the spring, which was made by the island’s original inhabitants and which serves goat herders and townspeople alike.23 Further, the delightful features of the setting highlight the beggarman Odysseus’ contest with the goatherd in this special space outside, thereby marking it as a first challenge among many to the hero’s verbal and physical dominance. As Chapter 4 emphasizes, the setting in the Phaedrus is similarly adjacent to the city, essentially suburban, near altars to the Nymphs and the like, and framing a contest. While in these later books of the Odyssey and in the Idylls we encounter staged contests between lowbrow and somewhat comic characters, in the Phaedrus Socrates plays the rustic to Phaedrus’ urbane but easily swayed aesthete.24 I return to Idyll 7 below; here I merely call attention to the emergence of the Hellenistic displacement of urban critical concerns onto this lowly rustic scene as a novel turn on the conventions discussed in previous chapters that shaped the staging of initiations and contests among rustic characters (e.g., shepherd poets) or between rustic characters and divinities in pastoral settings.25 We may want to include the adventures of Aristophanes’ comic protagonists in the accretion of dramatic details 23 24

25

Cf. Edwards 1993. Cf. also Frogs, which mocks Dionysus as the latter. On Socrates as Odysseus, see Loraux 1995: 169–70; Gutzwiller 1991: 73–79; Worman 2008: 168–69; also Segal 1978: 321–23. Cf. again Archilochus’ encounter with the Muses as he is walking to town to sell a cow (SEG 15.517, 3rd c.); see West 1964 for a prosaic response; also Clay 2004.

1. Dreaming of elsewhere

around such encounters, since they so often go out into the countryside to obtain knowledge and/or solidify their plans. And they frequently engage in agonistic struggles with those they meet or witness an actual contest between poets, as does Dionysus in Frogs.26 Thus Hellenistic poetry that is oriented by means of pastoral settings, while it may be less directly engaged than comic drama in actual performance, encourages a pervasive awareness of stylistic and more broadly aesthetic values that take their shape from the transformative environment achieved by this rustic remove. More pointedly than earlier performances (and “performances”) the characters that visit or inhabit these settings embody taste inclinations as well as class and gender affinities that contribute to the investing of styles with ethical perspectives and that initiate their critique.27 Even if we start out, in the familiar manner, from the Hesiodic echoes in the fragmentary Aetia prologue, we can estimate (despite the sketchy nature of what is extant) the importance of the Hellenistic interventions in the development of topographies and their inhabitants as critical tropes. In Aetia fr. 1, when the poet-narrator first sets his writing tablet on his knee he encounters the Lycian Apollo, who calibrates his poetic injunction to the shepherd’s livelihood: “Raise your offering to be as fat as possible, my good man, but foster a slender Muse” (τὸ μὲν θύος ὅττι πάσχιστον | θρέψαι, τὴ]ν Μοῦσαν δ’ ὠγαθὲ λεπταλέην, Aetia fr. 1.23–24 Pf.). The god also reassesses his country surrounds as stylistic guidance: πρὸς δὲ σε] καὶ τόδ’ ἄνωγα, τὰ μὴ πατέουσιν ἅμαξαι τὰ στειβειν, ἑτέρων ἴχνια μὴ καθ' ὁμά δίφρον ἐλ]ᾶ ̣ν μηδ' οἷμον ἀνὰ πλατύν, ἀλλὰ κελεύθους ἀτρίπτο]υ ̣ς, εἰ καὶ στε⌊ι⌋ν ̣οτέρην ἐλάσεις. And I bid you this: where wagons do not pass, go there; do not drive your [chariot] in the tracks of others nor on a broad road, but rather on [untrodden] paths, even if you will drive it on a narrower one. (fr. 1.26–28 Pf.)28

26

27

28

While Dionysus is a deity, Aristophanes transforms him into a fairly typical comic character – cultivated but also something of a buffoon. See, e.g., Krevans 1983 on Theocritus’ use of significant geographical-literary coordinates in Idyll 7. On the state and organization of the fragments, see Pfeiffer 1949–53 and the new edition of Harder 2012, with commentary in vol. 2. For further discussion see Acosta-Hughes and Stephens 2002; Hutchinson 2003; Asper 2004; Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: ch. 2. Cf. Call. Epig. 28.1–2: οὐδὲ κελεύθῳ | χαίρω, τίς πολλοὺς ὦδε καὶ ὦδε φέρει·.

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The second fragment of the Aetia replays the meeting of the Muses with Hesiod and his sheep as occurring beside the Hippocrene spring on Helicon (fr. 2 Pf.), while an epigram from the Palatine Anthology (7.42) and the Florentine scholia provide evidence that the poet-narrator repeated the adventure, but in a dream.29 The epigram recounts how “in a famous dream” (περίπυστον ὄνειαρ, 7.42.1) “Callimachus” was transported from Alexandria to Helicon and there learned from the Muses “the Origins of ancient gods and heroes” (ὠγυγίων ἡρώων | Αἴτια καὶ μακάρων, 8). As noted in Chapter 2, the Neoplatonist Proclus’ introduction to the Works and Days offers the possibility that Hesiod’s own meeting with the Muses was a dream, a vision that came to him when he was resting from his shepherding.30 Selden contends that Callimachus’ dream may well be fashioned after that of the lesser-known poet Epimenides, who also wrote a Theogony and who depicts himself as meeting Truth, Justice, and other divinities while dreaming in Zeus’ Dictaean cave on Crete (fr. 1 D–K).31 More important for my discussion, Selden considers Callimachus’ dream journey evidence of “displacement as fundamental to invention,” since he not only relocates his poetic persona spatially and temporally but also reiterates a bit of the Hesiodic event (Aetia fr. 2.1–5). Hesiod’s original encounter is thus filtered through the later development of scenes of poetic inspiration that take place as dreaming in poetic elsewheres – pastoral settings that signal a novel mode of invention and a distinctive aesthetic orientation. Propertius and Horace carry forward this dreaming of and in a pastoral elsewhere as pivotal to establishing their authority and poetic terrain.32 As these scenes indicate, with the advent of Hellenistic aesthetics we encounter the first strongly positive assessment of the slighter, “narrower” end of the stylistic continuum. Now the polished refinement for which Aristophanes mocked Euripides is celebrated for its slimness and situated more overtly in a pastoral locale. And as with the pastoral cast of Callimachus’ stylistic mandates, Theocritus’ bucolic singers may sustain rustic, manly guises (e.g., beards, shaggy pelts), but their refrains are usually sweet and delicate. Thus a new set of stylistic parameters emerges: 29

30

31 32

Scholia Florentina II.16–18. See Selden 1998: 355–58; Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 44–45; Harder 2012: 93–98. Note that Proclus records this as a debate, offering the other possibility: that he was awake and shepherding, meditated, proclaimed aloud, applied himself, and through all this labor “reaps a great renown” (μεγάλην καρποῦται τὴν εὔκλειαν, Scholia vetera partim Procli, prol. 6.12). See Selden 1998: 356. Cf. Lucr. DRN 4.2–3, Hor. Ep. 1.3.10–11; Prop. 3.3. On Propertius’ dream, see further below in section 4; on Horace’s, see ch. 6.4a.

1. Dreaming of elsewhere

rustic and yet refined, the fantasy of rural remoteness only serving to highlight the polished urbanities of (e.g.) Hellenistic Alexandria. Although we may expect that a narrow route would be a rough and long one, not for tender feet, this new path can take one to remote spaces of dreamy contemplation. Proclus also compares Hesiod’s humble origins to those of Socrates, among others, as if the working man’s prospect were crucial to the inspired visions to be had in rural settings (schol. vet. 6.17–23). This follows the Callimachean pattern, as his scene in Aetia fr. 1 stages divine stylistic instructions that are dictated, paradoxically, by the mountain setting and the shepherd, so that the lowly inhabitant and his pastoral space set the parameters for the critique. It is not merely that, as earlier chapters detail, this image of a choice of paths, as well as of the “path” of poetry and prose, has a long history. While Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar use such tropes to suggest poetic modes and/or moral choices and Aristophanes plays with both notions, Callimachus’ rustic scenes distinctly advance the notion of different paths as a stylistic choice: “broad” for grand versus “narrow” for slight, with a clear indication of the aesthetic and ethical superiority of the latter. That this city poet’s moment of judgment takes place in a pastoral setting that refashions the Hesiodic scene of inspiration as a meeting with Apollo (fr. 1), and that it is followed up by a dream encounter with the Muses (fr. 2), reinforces the sense that literary critical and theoretical discourse evolves as a renegotiation of the urban–rural divide. Callimachus’ emphasis on style (more than on genre, as Alan Cameron has established33) achieves the transference of the focus on content in Hesiod’s meeting (e.g., lies vs. truths) to aesthetic concerns. Further, the scene telescopes earlier ideas about poetic and moral paths into a focused moment of literary judgment. And indeed, as the stylistic metaphors of Demetrius and to a lesser extent those of Cicero and Dionysius indicate, prose styles may be envisioned as different “paths,” the details of which tend to differentiate high mountain tracks from easier journeys. That is, Callimachus’ distillation of aesthetic and moral choices into one essential scene insures that later discussions will share this double implication. Lucian’s parodic turn on the choice of (educational) paths capitalizes on the long history of this critical intersection.34 33

34

Cameron puts it flatly: “Callimachus is comparing styles, not genres” (1995: 328). In his larger discussion (315–31) Cameron argues that Callimachus follows Aratus in embracing leptos as a positive stylistic term, comparing Aristophanes’ Frogs 814. For a treatment of the topic that is Callimachean in its economy, see Cameron 1992. For Demetrius and Lucian, see ch. 6.2; for Cicero and Dionysius, see ch. 7.3.

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It should not be surprising that Callimachus’ imagery would prove such a crucial juncture in the history of criticism, nor that this vivid and refined troping on the scene of inspiration and judgment would emerge as an essential juncture in ancient literary criticism and theory. Hellenistic and Roman writers inhabited an intellectual environment steeped in critical sensibilities.35 Unlike the Hesiodic and lyric predecessors to whom they pay tribute in their poetry, these writers composed in a world in which the critical idiom was available for response and appropriation. While Hellenistic poets such as Callimachus and Theocritus would have been aware of the Platonic and Aristotelian forays into literary analysis, the Roman poets were likely engaged with the stylistic debates of such critics as Philodemus (also Posidonius, Panaetius, and Caecilius) as well.36 To be clear, I am not claiming that the Hellenistic bucolic idiom and programmatic gestures cast in rural or pastoral terms are really just literary criticism masked as poetry. Rather, the fact that the pastoral setting is, as Rosenmeyer once noted, a trope in and of itself calls attention to it as one of poetic production in a novel manner, a manner that is critical and discriminating in its essence.37

2. Setting as style The opening scene of Theocritus’ first Idyll is a useful example of what this novel troping on the pastoral setting means for landscape aesthetics and criticism alike, since it is both well known and engages with some central elements of the emerging critical discourse. First, it has all the elements of a locus amoenus: trees moving in the breeze, a spring’s flowing water, sweet sensations, a sensual cast. Pan, Muses, and Nymphs are invoked, as is Aphrodite in the embedded song.38 Two herders, Thyrsis 35

36

37

38

As Selden notes regarding Callimachus: “The exposition of poetics was a major target of Callimachus’ literary publications, and it is clear that he envisaged for his work an audience which would participate in the type of rigorous close reading that this entails” (1998: 354; cf. 355 on the sensory images of Aetia fr. 1: “Callimachus obviously understands poetics here to be a recurrent designatum of such representations”). See section 4 below. Nassal 1910: 162–63; van Wyk Cronjé 1986: 70–72 (who also discusses Panaetius). There was a style–content debate among Hellenistic writers (e.g. Neoptolemus of Parium [3rd c.], Philodemus [b. 110]), which some scholars think, following a comment by Porphyry on the Ars poetica, influenced Horace’s ideas about poetics (cf. Brink 1963-82: vol. 2, Rudd 1989: 23–27), as well as the rhetorical theories of Cicero and Dionysius (e.g., de Jonge 2008). Rosenmeyer 1969: 278–279; cf. Segal 1981: 33. However, Rosenmeyer earlier denies the setting the status of a trope (196), likely because of his engagement with Empson. On this emphasis in Hellenistic aesthetics, see Fowler 1989: 23–31.

2. Setting as style

and an unnamed goatherd, engage in counterpoint tale and song, first establishing the details of the pastoral scene as metonyms for the aesthetics of their engagement. The poem begins with the word “sweet” (ἁδύ), the adjective Thyrsis uses to compare the pines that whisper above the spring to the goatherd’s piping. The goatherd responds in kind, claiming that Thyrsis’ song is even “sweeter” (ἅδιον, 7) than the water flowing down the rocks. The setting thus does not merely frame their exchange; rather, it embodies it. The entire scene serves as a trope for bucolic poetry, even as it frames the performance of that poetry in a distinctively commensurate manner.39 The song that Thyrsis ultimately sings, a lament for the dying Daphnis, serves as a paradigm of the genre. It is pastoral, agonistic, erotic, and (again) inhabited by Pan, the Muses, and Aphrodite. Its stylistic features, like the framing ecphrasis of the famous ivy cup, are fluid and sweet. The Idyll as a whole thus does not just set forth a programmatic instance of bucolic poetry; it also articulates a signature style (”naturally” sweet and melodious) that is made up of the very setting itself. The distinctiveness of this setting-as-style can be more clearly discerned if one considers both what it has in common with other scenes in literature of poetic and speech performance and how it differs from them. Most are merely conventional: for instance, in the Odyssey Phemius and Demodocus sing where and when elites expect to be entertained. While such scenes may indicate something about the status of poetry within the depicted culture and the genre itself, they are not themselves symbolic of poetic production except in a fairly straightforward manner. In depicting the epic performance, they highlight its constituent elements and players and organize these in a scheme that is symbolic in this narrow sense (i.e., standing for all poetic production in this mode). Conversely, while many literary settings point beyond themselves to various relata, as for example in Aeschylus’ Oresteia we might understand that Agamemnon’s halls serve as a metonym for the House of Atreus and thus for entrapment in the family curse, such scenes have little if anything to do with poetic production. Cassandra may “read” the terrible family narrative in the façade of the palace as a monstrous cluster of metaphors, and this may indicate the visceral quality of the drama’s symbolic scheme as well as pointing to the nature of dramatic spectacle itself, but her prophetic style and its images do not, in their essence, address tragic poetry (or even poetic production more generally) as a whole. And although Attic comedy is 39

One of the best recent discussions of Idyll 1 is Payne 2007: 24–28, esp. regarding the aesthetics of the scene and the absorption of the audience within the fictional frame.

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consistently metatheatrical, its attentiveness to dramatic form centers both on the poetry as such and on Athenian civic institutions, of which comedy is the one that targets the others and thereby takes them on as the stuff of comic play. The pastoral or bucolic landscape, whether deployed in circumscribed fashion for programmatic purposes or inhabited more fully as a traditional poetic scene, is not only all about and for the making of poetry, it also fabricates an entire world for its production. That is to say, it is neither merely a conventional setting (despite anthropological readings that claim original folk influence), nor is it incidental to the primary activity it frames and embodies. This is what the setting is for, this is where song must arise. And if in this deployment of the scene as its own metaphor pastoral takes some cues from Pindar and his poetic meadows and gardens (or flowers and wreaths), bucolic poetry seems to be alone in sustaining this figuration as permeating and essential. In contrast to Pindar, then, this rural scene is not there for the culling, for the application of “flowers” to decorate, say, an athlete in a cultic setting. Instead the rural scene is both source and application. It is worth emphasizing once again what this means for my study: that the Hellenistic period is the first in which the figurative settings this study has been exploring emerge as central to an overtly critical idiom, in which the pastoral scene is treated as crucial to the production and the contestation or judgment of poetry. Not all bucolic settings are so explicitly programmatic, however. The late fourth-century poet Anyte, for example, wrote a number of epigrams that celebrate natural settings with elements that invoke the locus amoenus tradition.40 A telling example is epigram 16 G–P (= AP 9.313), which tempts the panting passerby with a description of shade and a drink: Ἵζε’ ἅπας ὑπὸ καλὰ δάφνας εὐθαλέα φύλλα ὡραίου τ’ ἄρυσαι νάματος ἁδὺ πόμα ὄφρα τοι ἀσθμαίνοντα πόνοις θέρεος φίλα γυῖα ἀμπαύσῃς πνοιᾷ τυπτόμενα ζεφύρου. Sit, anyone, under the lovely blooming leaves of the laurel and draw a sweet drink from the spring that flows in season, so that, panting from summer’s toils, you may rest your dear limbs, buffeted by the west wind’s breeze.

40

Anyte’s dates are a problem; Degani argues for the late fourth to the early third century (see entry in Der Neue Pauly), although other scholars place her floruit later. On the development of bucolic epigram, see Rossi 2001: 29–62; also Harder, Regtuit, and Wakker (eds.) 2002 on Hellenistic epigrams more generally.

3. Style’s diaspora

And yet while the scene is clearly not overtly about poetry, it does reiterate its delights in a manner close to programmatic effect. That is, the epigram offers both verses and setting as an idyll for the traveler, effectively embodying for the reader the pleasures of the locus it describes. The epigram also participates in a focus on the rural locale that in ancient bucolic functions as its one recurrent gesture that could be considered extra-poetic (i.e., not essentially about poetry). As has been repeatedly discussed by scholars, the poems of Theocritus and Vergil typically draw contrasts between city and country and emphasize an Epicurean (or “Epicurean”) otium behind which lurks (especially in Vergil) the menace of hardship and labor.41 This contrast does not necessarily characterize programmatic gestures in bucolic poetry more generally, nor later pastoral, which often engages in heavy symbolism (whether Christian or metaphysical). That said, even these urban–rural contrasts are centrally about poetic production, since they make possible the geographical and temporal displacement in which it can take place and offer the poetry itself as central to the pleasures of “retreat.”

3. Style’s diaspora Although my opening quotation, if taken with Empson’s turn, may seem to suggest otherwise, ancient pastoral does not tend to romanticize in a general sense the power of humans over nature. When I speak of “harnessing” natural forces, I am thinking narrowly of poets and their claims to authority and territory, as well as how these tropes are taken up by the literary critics and theorists. The bucolic idyll (again, the Hellenistic version of the locus amoenus) is a scene set up primarily for a select few personages and activities; it thus does not consist of “all that’s made” but rather, as Rosenmeyer emphasizes, of a highly selective set of props.42 That said, in keeping with the critical scheme that emerges in the Hellenistic period, this setting is various, conceived of in flexible topographical terms, embracing not merely a semi-wild and private spot like that in the Elizabethan garden (hence the usage “pleasance” in older scholarship on bucolic poetry) but also grove and hillside or mountainside settings. As scholars of Hellenistic and Roman poetry have demonstrated in a variety of ways, multiple overlapping landscapes contribute elements to the 41 42

Rosenmeyer 1969: 20–26; cf. Serrao 1977; Fantuzzi and Papanghelis 2006: vii–xi. Rosenmeyer 1969: 186–87; see also Serrao 1977; Saïd 1997.

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conceptual space of the pastoral locus amoenus. Groves and mountainsides, for instance, may delimit the special status of the poet as a priest of the Muses; Arcadia, with its rustic associations with Pan and Nymphs, may help to isolate the space for poetry as a rustic utopia, the retreat as displacement that calls attention to poetic engagement as critical at its core.43 Flowering meadows occasionally appear here too, as erotic spaces, the liminal qualities of which suggest the delicate negotiation of “wild” spaces by poets and initiates alike.44 Some of these settings are resonant with characteristics of Golden Age narratives (e.g., ease and plenty); others are vaguely ominous, overshadowed by hard labor as well as potential violence and loss. Although Hellenistic and Roman poets follow the establishment of a cult center at the base of Helicon in invoking Hesiod’s mountain and springs as the crucial site of poetic inspiration, Pindaric imagery also clearly underlies the later poets’ programmatic nods to the pastoral setting, as well as to the Nymphs and other divinities (e.g., Aphrodite) that inhabit it.45 We may recall, for instance, how Pindar (O. 9.28–29) fashions a garden of poetic resources that is lightly interwoven with moralizing: εἰ σύν τινι μοιριδίῳ παλάμᾳ ἐξαίρετον Χαρίτων νέμομαι κᾶπον· κεῖναι γὰρ ὤπασαν τὰ τέρπν'· ἀγαθοὶ δὲ καὶ σοφοὶ κατὰ δαίμον' ἄνδρες ἐγένοντ'·. . . If with some destined skill I harvest the exquisite garden of the Graces; for they grant pleasures; but by divine will men become good and wise . . .

The alternation here between the garden’s pleasures on the one hand and wisdom and goodness on the other occurs in the midst of a series of such statements, which tack vividly back and forth from art and skill to knowledge. And then there is Pythian 6, which opens with a celebration of the rural scene that frames arrival at Delphi, cultic center of poets: “Listen! For truly are we plowing the field of glancing-eyed Aphrodite or of the Graces” (Ακούσατ'· ἦ γὰρ ἑλικώπιδος Ἀφροδίτας | ἄρουραν ἢ Χαρίτων | ἀναπολίζομεν, 6.1–2). The ode also focuses at points on the understanding 43

44 45

See Hunter 2006: ch. 1; also Rosenmeyer 1969: ch. 11. But we should be careful here: the use of Arcadia as the dominant pastoral topos is largely a Renaissance invention; see Jenkyns 1989. Cf. e.g. the meadows in Frogs. See also Fowler 1989: 23–24. See Schachter 1981–94: 2.146-79; Robinson 2012.

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of good men, especially his patron’s son, who “culls his wisdom in the valley of the Pierian Muses” (δρέπων, | σοφίαν δ’ ἐν μυχοῖσι Πιερίδων, 6.47–49). As I discuss in Chapter 2, Pindar’s situating of skill and knowledge within such fertile topographies helped to establish them as central to poetic mastery and control of conceptual territory, and it is this terrain that Hellenistic poets occupy anew and reorder to distinguish their aesthetic perspectives and styles. An epigram of Theocritus (= AP 6.336; 5 Gow) conjures a poetics that combines the celebrated scenes of Hesiod and Pindar as resources for rural inspiration, while emphasizing stylistic rather than moral coloring: Τὰ ῥόδα τὰ δροσόεντα καὶ ἁ κατάπυκνος ἐκείνα ἕρπυλλος κεῖται ταῖς Ἑλικωνιάσιν· ταὶ δὲ μελάμφυλλοι δάφναι τίν, Πύθιε Παιάν, Δελφὶς ἐπεὶ πέτρα τοῦτό τοι ἀγλάισεν . . . The roses, the dewy ones, and that densely growing thyme are dedicated to the Heliconian Muses; but the dark-leaved laurel is yours, Pythian Apollo, since the Delphic rock sanctifies this for you . . .

The geography stretches from Boeotia to Phocia, so that the epigram spans in the briefest compass the two mountain sanctuaries that grandly instantiate archaic poetics and rituals, sketching Hellenistic economies of style and metaphor.46 This is itself a manifestation of slight and delicate styles: the metonymies for the signature spaces of poetry are elegantly discrete and succinctly predicated (dewy roses, bushy thyme, shadowy laurel), and include the barest suggestion of a stylistic difference between Helicon and Delphi in the more imposing implications of Apollo’s dark leaves and rock. The light sketching of landscape gives a further sense of topographies transformed, as the spaces once realized and still celebrated by community ritual and embodied engagement are telescoped and transformed into a space of metaphor. Hunter has emphasized that the grove serves the Hellenistic and Roman poets as a crucial setting for the culling of poetic resources and knowledge – that is, the site where inspiration and authority are consolidated as the poets lay claim anew to the literary landscape.47 Witness Theocritus’ fourth epigram (= AP 9.437, 20 Gow), for instance, which describes the setting in which a statue of Priapus resides (4.5–10): 46

47

See Rossi 2001: 121–29 on whether the epigram should be considered bucolic (likely not). Note that Theocritus also invokes the Delphic setting at the end of Idyll 7 (148–50), which I discuss in section 3a. Hunter 2006: 14–28.

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Diaspora σακὸς δ' εὐίερος περιδέδρομεν, ἀέναον δέ ῥεῖθρον ἀπὸ σπιλάδων πάντοσε τηλεθάει δάφναις καὶ μύρτοισι καὶ εὐώδει κυπαρίσσῳ, ἔνθα πέριξ κέχυται βοτρυόπαις ἕλικι ἄμπελος, εἰαρινοὶ δὲ λιγυφθόγγοισιν ἀοιδαῖς κόσσυφοι ἀχεῦσιν ποικιλότραυλα μέλη. A sacred precinct encircles it, and a spring ever-flowing from the rocks flourishes in all directions with laurels and myrtle and sweet-smelling cypress. There a grape-bearing vine cascades all around in a spiral, and in spring with sharp-voiced tunes blackbirds ring out their intricate-trilling songs.

Aphrodite flanks the grove on one side as Priapus does on the other (4.4 and 13), which highlights both the erotic element vital to bucolic and the elegant but fertile style that the poetry celebrates and embodies.48 Further, since birds (especially nightingales), cicadas, and sometimes bees typically inhabit the locus amoenus, it is important to highlight what they contribute to this stylistic scheme. While Theocritus’ trilling birds may seem to be simply symbolic of song in general and/or a metonym for the (bucolic) poet, other more narrowly programmatic moments suggest that these creatures, like cicadas, pick out the sweet, clear, delicate end of the stylistic spectrum. Cicadas especially signal the aesthetic of a rural purity or clarity. If Plato deems them central to his rural scene, as figures symbolic of poetic enchantment (and ultimately philosophical engagement), they also serve him as metonyms for what we might call a summery style. They are crucial to his setting, embodying as they do both the attractions and the dangers of a rustic, Nymph-inspired poetic mode. Perhaps encouraged by their central role in the Phaedrus, bucolic singers also herald cicadas as a metonym for their sweet, clear style of singing. The Goatherd of Theocritus’ first Idyll declares that Thyrsis surpasses the cicada with his singing (146–48): πλῆρές τοι μέλιτος τὸ καλὸν στόμα, Θύρσι, γένοιτο, πλῆρες δὲ σχαδόνων, καὶ ἀπ' Αἰγίλω ἰσχάδα τρώγοις ἁδεῖαν, τέττιγος ἐπεὶ τύγα φέρτερον ᾄδεις. Fill your noble mouth with honey, Thyrsis, fill it with honeycomb, and eat your fill of figs from Aigilos, since you sing better than the cicada. 48

Saïd 1997: 22 regards this epigram and Idyll 7 as portraying what she terms “paysages-sommes,” or pastoral settings that include all the elements of the bucolic locale. See also Rossi 2001: 157–63 and further below.

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The cicadas that appear at the end of Idyll 7, a poem that I discuss further below, are essential elements there as well, since they most of all “represent the habitual accompaniment of the shepherds’ song,” as Fantuzzi and Hunter have put it.49 Callimachus would seem to be making a more precise stylistic gesture when in the Aetia prologue he offers the cicada as an indicator of the more refined style that Apollo advocates for the poet-narrator, in contrast to the braying of his competitors: “For we sing among those who love the pure resonance of the cicadas, not the din of asses” (τεττίγω]ν ἐνὶ τοῖς γὰρ ἀείδομεν οἳ λιγὺν ἦχον | θ]όρυβον δ’ οὐκ ἐφίλησαν ὄνων, fr. 1.29–30). The adjective ligus conventionally designates a clear, carrying quality; it usually refers to tone and perhaps by extension to a lucid, direct style more generally (e.g, one marked by simple lexical and syntactical usage); it is also a conventional epithet for cicadas.50 Callimachus, in offering the clear-voiced cicada as a signature metonym for his style, effectively appropriates both the pastoral image and the mode for his new stylistic turn. That is, as with many crucial stylistic moments in Hellenistic poetry, the stylistic gesture depends on the pastoral setting for its specificity and impact. Theocritus’ first Idyll also makes use of another traditional generic and ultimately stylistic gesture: that of filling the mouth with honey. From Homer on the “honeyed” speaker is one who possesses a special authority and charming effectiveness: Nestor’s speech flows sweeter than honey; similarly, honey flows from the mouth of Hesiod’s good leader, a man whom the Muses love and on whose tongue they pour sweet dew.51 The epigram’s exhortation to the sweet singer Thyrsis to fill his mouth with honey echoes not only or not so much Hesiod’s image as it does the stories told of Pindar and later Plato, whose mouths the Muses’ bees filled with honey.52 As Chapters 2 (section 3) and 3 (section 3) discuss, bees are figures for pastoral and/or sweet-voiced poets in lyric poetry and its reception from Aristophanes to Horace. Callimachus fashions a typically distinctive turn on this imagery when in the Hymn to Apollo (110–12) he composes the image of “Demeter’s bees” carrying water from an unsullied spring as a figure for his style (I return to this passage in section 4 below). If this is Callimachus’ special “water,” then he is a bee, whereby he takes over the lyric imagery of Bacchylides, Pindar, and perhaps Simonides and likely 49 50 51

52

Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 144. E.g., Theocr. Id. 1.138; cf. Hes. WD 582–84; Alc. 347 L–P. On the ramifications of the adjective, see further in ch. 4.2. Hom. Il. 1.249: καὶ ἀπὸ γλώσσης μέλιτος γλυκίων ῥέεν αὐδή; Hes. Th. 83–84: τῷ μὲν ἐπὶ γλώσσῃ γλυκεὴν χείουσιν ἐέρσην | τοῦ δ’ ἔπε’ ἐκ στόματος ῥεῖ μείλιχα. Paus. 9.23.2–3; cf. Antip. 7.34 AP, Aelian. VH 12.45, Philostr. Im. 2.12.

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also offers a nod to the famous image of the bee-poet from Plato’s Ion.53 This bee poetics also inspires later writers, especially Horace, to craft a clearly delineated metonym for a light, delicate, refined style.54

a. Theocritus on the country journey I have framed my discussion by arguing that the conceptual territory of pastoral is literary critical in its essence – that in foregrounding rural or pastoral settings as spaces for poetic invention and judgment it lays claim to a particular aesthetics over and against others. Although this is in many ways familiar territory (e.g., that of the “narrow track” and the “purest springs”), the details of the locus amoenus topos and trope illuminate how the Hellenistic poet-critics help to forge a unique bond between distinctive landscapes and those who dominate them, in order to promote not only a stylistic or aesthetic agenda but also a discriminating, critical one. A look at Theocritus’ most famously meta-bucolic poem may help to bring into sharper relief the symbolic significance of this poetic locale, as well as its engagement with dramatic and literary critical devices.55 In Idyll 7 two singers meet on the road (ὁδόν, 10, cf. 31, 35, 131): Simichidas comes from town with two companions to attend a rural festival for Demeter; Lycidas, the “traveller” (ὁδίταν, 11) they encounter, possibly comes down from herding his goats on the mountainside, as is suggested by his clothing and aspect but not made explicit. They offer each other compliments and little songs, Lycidas’ a gentle tale of good wishes for his lover’s travels and bucolic entertainment, Simichidas’ a contentious, mocking challenge of Pan to give his friend the lover he desires. Lycidas pledges his olive crook as a prize, which he hands over as they part ways amicably; Simichidas ends his journey with his companions at the festival, a setting clearly described as a bounteous locus amoenus. Simichidas narrates this eventful journey, which (again) begins with leaving town, spans in the course of the songs far-flung, learned geographies, and ends in the rural pleasance. Idyll 7 has long been recognized as not only programmatic in a general sense but also possibly indicative of an authorial aesthetics that sets itself apart from older modes in part by innovating on conventional scenes of 53 54

55

As Hunter points out in a brief note (1989: 1). The crucial passage is Hor. Od. 4.2.25–32, but see also Ep. 1.3.20–22. I owe better understanding of the reception of the bee-poet motif to a seminar paper by Philip Pratt (Harvard University, May 2008). This poem has been much discussed; for the readings most relevant to my focus, see Krevans 1983 (with earlier bibliography); Hunter 2003; Payne 2007: 116–45.

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inspiration. Again, this is the Idyll that Murley argued has very strong ties to Plato’s Phaedrus, which he thinks functions as an essential juncture in the development of the pastoral mode but that I am claiming is also central to the development of critical and theoretical discourse. Hunter has urged that Theocritus’ entire poem engages with some of the stylistic distinctions that help to shape literary critical tradition.56 Many scholars have recognized the centrality of the locus amoenus to the idyll’s aesthetic claims, and most have noticed that the topos described at the poem’s end is a veritable Golden Age bounty.57 Developing critical conventions encourage emphasis on two points: first, that this most programmatic of Theocritean Idylls is staged, like Aristophanes’ Frogs, as a journey from city to country, the central event of which revolves around literary judgment; second, that it effectively offers the locus amoenus as its final, capping scene – the bounteous prize for and fashioned from the best of bucolic poetics.58 If Hellenistic poetry more generally appropriates various elements of the pastoral setting for the delineation of a new style marked by delicacy, polish, and/or casual refinement, then the journey into the country and the locus amoenus offered at the end may also be undergoing transformations. As scholars have noticed, this “on the road” moment stages an encounter with poetic authority that is bucolic and even Hesiodic in its origins. The scene of initiation and judgment is playfully framed as a contest of older versus newer styles, while the locus amoenus at the end offers a crystallization of this newer aesthetic in the casually rendered lushness of the scene. Its remarkable bounty caps the scene of judgment with this joyous, fertile place, full of resources right there for the plucking. While Simichidas’ song on the road may be a relatively loose, “low” affair, the conceit of the final scene is that this style comes from a rich rural source. The dualistic structure of the Idyll has encouraged readers such as Segal to articulate its aesthetic scheme in part by means of binary categories (e.g., country–city, mountains–plain, Muses–Nymphs), although he does rightly assert that the two characters cannot be simply divided as “high” (Lycidas) versus “low” (Simichidas). Similarly, Hunter’s nuanced exploration of stylistic distinctions would nevertheless seem to depend on 56

57

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Murley 1940; Hunter 2003; see also Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004. See further discussion in ch. 4.2a. See esp. Segal 1981: 148–53; also Rosenmeyer 1969; Halperin 1983: Berger 1984; cf.; Goldhill 1991: 244–46. Segal emphasizes the centrality of the journey to the poem but does not regard it as literary critical in nature (1981: 116–17, 160–61). See Payne 2007: 132–35 on this performative “meta-fiction.”

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regarding the two singers as fundamentally opposed in their aesthetics.59 But if Hunter and earlier readers are right that Simichidas represents this more modern mode, then the contest would be less agonistic than it is contrastive, exposing a development, which may be generational, of the pastoral and mimiambic elements that underlie the bucolic idiom at its putative beginnings. Again, many scholars have regarded the scene as clearly one of Dichterweihe, a poetic initiation modeled on that of Hesiod on the hillside.60 From this perspective Lycidas represents the ur-poet of the bucolic genre, the “real” goatherd-singer from the mountains, while Simichidas is a city boy who only plays at such knowledge on his way to a picnic. So what are we to make of this new trip into the countryside? Theocritus has clearly staged this meeting en route as an innovation on famous journeys, not only, as most scholars have recognized, other initiation tales (e.g., Segal also compares Archilochus and the Muses), but also, as I think, both Aristophanes’ Frogs and Plato’s Phaedrus.61 While Segal and others emphasize the centrality of the journey motif to the poem, he stops short of claiming literary critical significance for it. And while Hunter appreciates (even to the point of overplaying) the extent to which the stylistic distinctions indicated in the songs participate in broader literary critical categories, he does not fully appreciate the significance of the trip to this critical discourse. From the perspective of my larger discussion, if Idyll 7 constitutes Theocritus’ most direct statement of aesthetic and generic purpose, it makes all the sense in the world that he frames this signature moment as a journey from the town to a rural locale. While the important work of aesthetic demarcating and contrasting takes place on the way to the locus amoenus, it seems essential that it is the travelers’ destination, as Segal emphasizes.62 Segal regards the Thalysia setting as at least in part the city poet’s comparatively tame but nevertheless fulsome and exuberant capping of the contrast between his urban, iambic mode and Lycidas’ mountainside, pastoral one. I would argue instead that both the encounter on the road and the final festive spot (a heterotopia if there ever was one) articulate aspects of poetic origins and loyalties. That is, many earlier readings (including Segal’s) tend to treat the characters of Simichidas and Lycidas as full-blown singers in their own right, as

59 60 62

Segal 1981: 153–55 vs. 136–37; Hunter 2003: 225–29. Cf. van Groningen 1959, Lohse 1966. 61 Puelma 1960: 156–58; van Groningen 1959: 30ff.; Segal 1981: 112. Segal 1981: 127–29. Segal 1981: 148–64.

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near-real personalities within the Coan landscape.63 But these figures are both crafted by Theocritus for a literary and literary critical purpose: that of staging in witty, eventful form the stylistic components that make up bucolic poetry and establishing the metonymies that peg these to a topographical hierarchy (e.g., high up the mountain vs. down in the town). In fact, by including in this “contest” both the pastoral Daphnisinvoking goatherd-on-a-hillside mode embodied by Lycidas and the playful, knowing mimiambic mode of Simichidas Theocritus effectively spans his own literary output, which runs the gamut from the “urban mimes” of Idylls 2 and 15 to the numerous pastoral songs (e.g., 2, 3–6, etc.), which themselves also include iambic elements. In addition, this journey is a new one in its emphasis on craft and casual refinement and in the significance of the fact that this gentle ramble into the countryside is fabricated from within the Alexandrian social and cultural scene. As Selden has emphasized in relation to Callimachus, the effect of the Hellenistic diaspora on poetic figuration is such that this literary critical journey becomes all the more vibrantly “placed” precisely because it is such a familiar Alexandrian elsewhere.64 The stagey remoteness of the setting renders its figurative impact distinctive and paradoxically close, bringing it “before the eyes” (as Aristotle might say) of a knowing urbane audience. This vivid figuration would, then, stand in some contrast to that shaped by the Boeotian literary settings of Hesiod and Pindar on the one hand and the Athens of Aristophanes and Plato on the other, since these are in their various ways pointedly tied by local rituals and familiar topographies to chartable journeys. This Hellenistic trip instead calibrates the constitutive elements of a country setting (whether Sicilian or Coan) as a new style, a “country-in-the-city” style – loose, simple, and purportedly humble but in actuality literarily aware, finely crafted, and delicately detailed. If Plato may have lightly mapped points of Sicilian reference onto the banks of the Ilissus, Theocritus takes this hybrid topographic gesture further, stepping out of the city and its environs entirely in order to bring the new scene that much more literarily close and definitive. 63

64

Cf. not only discussions of bucolic topographical references and “realism” (e.g., Zanker 1980, 1983) but also Reitzenstein’s (1893) contention that Theocritus’ shepherd-poets were essentially masks for his literary circle; see also Gow 1965: 129–30; Serrao 1977; Bowie 1985. E.g., some of the poets are from Sicily and Cos, as is one of the Ptolemies (Philadelphus). Cf. Plato’s use of Sicily as a familiar “elsewhere,” likely deployed to tie his conceptual terrain to the Sicilian sophists and poets; see further in ch. 4.2.

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The language of Idyll 7 pointedly indicates the extent to which Lycidas, as the more rustic, originary figure of bucolic poetry, is effectively crafted for the urban scene. Upon meeting him on the road, Simichidas names him and declares not only that he is a goatherd, but that no one who saw him could miss the fact that he “seemed very like a goatherd” (αἰπόλῳ ἔξοχ’ ἐῴκει, 14). He goes on to descibe Lycidas’ goatherd guise in lively detail, down to the milky smell of the shaggy skin slung over his shoulder (15–19). The goatherd is not merely who he is, a self grounded in the socioeconomic realities of country life, which across many genres of Greek poetry is usually conceived of as representing older practices and attitudes. Rather, he seems to be like that original goatherd, seems to be who he is to a pointedly theatrical extent, effectively dressed for the part and camping it up for an urbane audience.65 The song that he offers is in keeping with the metonymic role that his character plays in relation to the bucolic mode: it was “worked out on the mountain” (ἐν ὄρει . . . ἐξεπόνασα, 51) and includes a scene of rustic festivity vaguely reminiscent of an earlier pastoral figure, the Cyclops of Attic satyr plays and comedy.66 While the song as a whole is a type of “bon voyage” poem (propemptikon), it hopes for safe passage from the prospect of the singer’s mountain retreat, where he will recline crowned with wild flowers amid herbs, drinking wine and roasting chestnuts (63–70). Two shepherds will play their pipes for him, and another bucolic poet (Tityrus) will sing of the sorrows of Daphnis, that original singing shepherd in love for whom the very trees and hills mourn (71–77). Lest this poem not seem densely crowded enough with signature details of the bucolic mode, Lycidas adds the stories not only of Daphnis but also of Comatas, another original bucolic singer: “Thus the snub-nosed bees, flying from the meadow to him in the sweet cedar chest, fed him with soft flowers, because the Muse had poured sweet nectar into his mouth” (ὥς τε νιν αἱ σιμαὶ λειμωνόθε φέρβον ἰοῖσαι | κέδρον ἐς ἁδεῖαν μαλακοῖς ἄνθεσι μέλισσαι | οὕνεκα οἱ γλυκὺ Μοῖσα κατὰ στόματος χέε νέκταρ, 80–82). Comatas stands in relation to Lycidas as Lycidas does to Simichidas – that is, as, like Daphnis the more legendary bucolic singer in relation to whom the narrator indicates his own claims to bucolic stature. Further, the reference to bees, and indeed the story type of bees feeding the 65 66

See Goldhill 1991: 227–28; Payne 2007: 120–21. Halperin 1983: 121–24 does not consider either song pastoral (nor really bucolic, even in Theocritus’ loose sense of the term); Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 135 regard the songs as sympotic and the description of the locus amoenus at the end “the first real performance of the new bucolic poet.”

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Muses’ honey to a poet or prose writer suggests an appropriation of the bee-poet trope from Bacchylides and Pindar, as detailed above and in Chapter 2 (section 3). When a poet is thus nourished, his authoritative status is established as not only beloved of the Muses generally but also, I would argue, of the Muses in their archaic capacity as local deities in rural settings who guarantee the poet’s ability to cull resources from them. This need not make him a pastoral poet (or a bucolic one, for that matter), but it does indicate what ancient rhetorical theorists would regard as his powers of invention. Theocritus’ use of the image, then, claims for the bucolic mode a capacity granted in the classical period only to older styles, while he follows certain classical authors (especially Aristophanes and Plato but also Euripides) in his staging of this capacity as mystically powerful and yet potentially available to less lofty denizens of the literary domain. Simichidas’ song counters Lycidas’ references to Daphnis and the beepoet Comatas by invoking Pan, taking up a lighter and more contentious erotic mode. Scholars have tended to emphasize the “urban” trappings of the singer, which suggests to most that he has need of the rustic Lycidas to validate his claims to be able to sing in the bucolic mode.67 But Theocritus depicts Simichidas as coming to the encounter already equipped with this capacity. He declares that he is blessed by the Muses with a resonant voice (καπυρὸν στόμα, 37), but also taught while herding in the mountains by Nymphs (Νύμφαι κἠμὲ δίδαξαν ἀν’ ὤρεα βουκολέοντα, 92). While such claims could be witty indicators of Simichidas’ tendency to boast, they do constitute a traditional point of poetic contention – again, claims to resources, authority, and terrain. Further, as in other Idylls that center on pastoral subjects and scenes, the Nymphs appear to be Simichidas’ primary source of inspiration (91–93, cf. 136–37, 154–55).68 This would suggest that although Lycidas and his song are framed as older, more rustic, and “truly” bucolic (even though the song at least bears a strong resemblance to sympotic lyric), Simichidas’ mocking, mimiambic style also forms an essential stratum of what Theocritus took to constitute the bucolic mode.69 Fantuzzi and Hunter point to the likelihood that this eclectic, dialogic mode has its roots in Sicilian mime, which would further tie it to Platonic dialogue and support the idea that like the Phaedrus this lively, 67

68

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Segal 1981: 116–18; Halperin, 1983: 124. Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004: 135) use quotation marks to designate Simichidas a “town poet,” thereby (I take it) flagging the performative nature of the designation. Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004: 152–56) argue that Nymphs are the more central inspirers of pastoral poetry than the Muses, who are largely relegated to standing for a mythic past. As Halperin argues (1983: 121–23).

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stagey “contest” deploys a casual mode for its own refined purposes: literary dominion and judgment.70 Simichidas’ poetic riposte, denigrated though it and he have been by many readers, serves to indicate the parameters not so much of a newer bucolic form as of a new aesthetic claim: the assertion of a light, apparently offhand, learned mode as the preferred end of the stylistic continuum. His invocations of the Erotes and Pan, with their nonchalant references to obscure rituals and locales (e.g., 106–08, 115–17), as well as the song’s simple vocabulary and syntax and loose structure, sketch some of the parameters of this new style. On the other hand, the richly detailed locus amoenus that functions as the capping point of the poem would seem to belie this claim to a newer, looser, more unadorned style. Scholars have tended to regard it as demonstrating Simichidas’ new-found ability, courtesy of his encounter with Lycidas, to sing in a pastoral or bucolic mode, but why would contact with the mountain goatherd prompt such a clearly agrarian scene?71 Only if we consider all of the stylistic elements offered by the poem to be indicative of the bucolic mode can we begin to appreciate the broad, eclectic claims of Theocritus’ critical program. The rustic herder from the mountains, the sympotic scene about which he sings, the playful erotics of Simichidas’ song, the casual inclusion of esoteric points of geography in both songs, the Golden Age atmosphere of the final scene: all of these make up Theocritean bucolic. Some elements, such as the festive moments in Lycidas’ song and at the Idyll’s end, point emphatically to earlier poetic traditions and make a play for their stature and influence; others, like the witty, seemingly informal style that characterizes the Idyll as a whole, signal innovation.72 Further, in offering up the locus amoenus with its vibrant details as its final moment, Idyll 7 asserts the bucolic mode’s claim to the richly sourced settings that tradition has established as the terrain crucial for the poet (or, with Plato, the prose writer), as well as for his aesthetic and ethical agenda. While the stylistic metonyms of rivers or springs and paths or roads also furnish prominent coordinates for the stylistic schemes of the Alexandrian poets, the locus amoenus topos and trope address the setting as a whole. In itself it serves as a figure for pastoral modes, but it also 70

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Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 133; they also discuss the similarities between certain Idylls and the Phaedrus to help delineate the semi-idealized nature of Theocritus’ rustic locales (143–48). Cf. Segal 1981: 124–25, 129–31, 148. Even modern scholars have had difficulty with this newness, often appearing to be slightly irritated by its relaxed eclecticism and by Simichidas as the embodiment of this (e.g., Segal 1981: 118; Hunter 2003: 228).

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contains elements such as flowering or shading trees and flowing water, which then configure a further set of distinctions. Hunter has argued that, as with springs imagery, the focus on the shady grove also emerges from a notion of sacred spaces.73 In this the figurative landscapes of Hellenistic poetry not only echo earlier cultic settings, but also look forward to later settings in the form of spaces for “retreat” in philosophical literature.74 In addition, this new ordering of the locus amoenus takes on a heraldic function, as when Horace uses it to signal a “purple patch” in the Ars poetica. Thus if in Pindar the garden (e.g.) is where one harvests poetic tools, especially a refined wisdom and figurative “flowers,” if in Aristophanes the meadows are the spaces of cultic poetry and knowledge, and if in Plato the kalē katagōgē lends its inhabitants some kind of inspired, sacred insight, the Hellenistic idyll sustains this trope of the “special space,” but with a more overtly generic, stylistic, and metaphorical coloring. The notion of retreat may have its ethical dangers, as suggested by the fact that the locus amoenus can sometimes signal an overly delicate or elaborate style (e.g., the softies lounging in the shade in Aristophanes, Cicero, and Dionysius75). For the Hellenistic poets and the Roman poets whom they influence, however, the taint of softness that accompanies this retreat, and that the rhetorical tradition interrogates and tends to mock, is taken up as a positive aesthetic. As Selden has emphasized, they do this not for the purpose of turning away from the complexities of an effortful urbanity, but in order to engage with it all the more fully.

b. Philetas in the garden One figure whose work was clearly treated in antiquity as bridging the gap between criticism and poetry is the Coan writer Philetas, a scholar-poet from the generation before Theocritus, most of whose writings are lost.76 Apparently well known in antiquity for his work on dialect and usage entitled “Miscellaneous Glosses” (Ataktoi glōssai77), he lives on primarily in his ancient reception as a novel combination of pastoral poet and scholar. The poet Hermesianax of Colophon depicts him as a singer of love songs under a plane tree who is worn out by words: 73 74 75 76

77

Hunter 2006: 116–20. This may begin with the Phaedrus; Cicero certainly treats it this way. See chs. 3.1 and 7.3a–b. Strabo terms him “at once poet and critic” (ποιητὴς ἅμα καὶ κριτικός, 657C); on his status as grammarian-critic, see Spanoudakis 2002: 29; Whitmarsh 2005: 146. Bing 2003 argues for translating the title “Unruly Tongues,” which would certainly give more color to a collection of glosses from Homer on down.

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Diaspora Οἶσθα δὲ καὶ τὸν ἀοιδόν ὃν Εὐρυπύλου πολιῆται Κῷοι χάλκειον στῆσαν ὑπὸ πλατάνῳ Βιττίδα μολπάζοντα θοήν, περὶ πάντα Φιλίταν ῥήματα καὶ πᾶσαν τρυόμενον λαλιήν. And you know the singer whom the Coan citizens Of Eurypylus set up in bronze under the plane tree – Philetas, singing of agile Bittis, worn out By all the phrases and speech forms. (Leontion 75–78)

Peter Bing notes that some scholars have argued that Bittis (or Battis78) is, like Horace’s Lalage (Odes 1.22), a stylistic metonymy – effectively “Chatterer,” a personification of his wordy orientation and companion to his woodland setting, here complete with his own plane tree (i.e., Socrates’ idyll refashioned).79 The word-worn professor is, of course, a variant of the cicada trope from the Phaedrus – that is, those who so love song that they waste away and take up residence among the leaves (Phdr. 259b–d; cf. Callim. Aet. fr. 1. 32–35).80 In Idyll 7, Theocritus demurs jocularly that he could only rival Sicelidas of Samos and Philetas “as a frog would crickets” (βάτραχος δὲ ποτ’ ἀκρίδας, 41), a nod that seems to innovate minutely on the cicada trope, as well as suggesting that Philetas was known for his mastery of pastoral modes. As I discuss in more detail in the following section (4), in a well-known programmatic poem (Elegies 3.1) Propertius asks Callimachus and Philetas for help in crafting his refined poetic style and pastoral themes. In another poem (3.3) he refashions the Hellenistic trope of drinking from inspirational sources as sipping “Philetas’ water” from Calliope’s spring (3.3.51–52).81 In addition to these indications of his pastoral associations, some scholars have claimed that Philetas had a cult following on Cos, which would suggest his prominence in the Hellenistic and Roman periods as a poeta doctus.82 Some centuries later Longus fashions a character on the model of this scholarly trope in the form of a knowledgeable old shepherd-gardener 78

79 80

81

82

Ovid couples a “Battis” with Philetas twice (Tr. 1.6.1–3, Pont. 3.1.57); see Spanoudakis 2002: 31–32; Bing 2003: 340–42. Bing 2003: 340–42, citing Kuchenmüller 1928. On Horace and Lalage see ch. 6.3a. Cf. also Woolf’s wry turn on the trope: those who master Greek become cicadas like the classics don Edward in Years (“He had the look of an insect whose body has been eaten out, leaving only the wings, the shell,” 405). Cf. also Prop. 4.6.12. This is the Muse that Plato in the Phaedrus identifies as “the most eminent” (τη δὲ πρεσβυτάτῃ Καλλιόπῃ), who with Ourania is “concerned with discourse about heaven and about divine and human affairs” (περί τε οὐρανὸν καὶ λόγους οὖσαι θείους τε καὶ ἀνθρωπίνους) (259d1–5). For Propertius Calliope is elegy’s Muse, but her philosophical associations may also be in play here as a nod to Philetas’ scholarly reputation. See Hardie 1996; Hollis 1996.

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named Philetas, who offers Daphnis and Chloe instruction in the meaning of eros.83 It seems crucial to Longus’ reordering of the original setting of literary judgment that this wise man be a gardener whose idyll combines elements from Homer, Pindar, and Plato: Nymphs and Pan, blooming flowers and burgeoning fruit trees, flowing waters, birds – and, of course, pleasure and eroticism. The garden setting resembles a grove (ἄλσος, 2.3.5), a designation that by the time Longus is writing has well-established implications of sacredness, retreat, and poetic refinement.84 The knowledge Philetas offers the lovers thus essentially comes from this garden setting and is shaped by its stylistic coordinates. He relates a tale of meeting up with Eros that is hedged around with features by now familiar as indicating a cultivated, tender style: as the fountain flows in three directions, the winged god himself appears, plucking his fruits and charming the old man into asking for a kiss (2.4–5). Eros claims that the garden is beautiful because he bathes in the waters that nourish it (2.5.4). In the end he darts away from Philetas, hopping up the branches of a myrtle tree like a young nightingale. Philetas tells the lovers that Eros is the author of all that flourishes and flows, reaffirming Eros’ claim and offering another source for his own wisdom: nature fostered by love.

4. Springs of emulation In Hellenistic and Roman poetry the figurative uses of springs imagery become much more engaged and elaborate, and center for the most part on the Hesiodic landscape, especially the springs on Mount Helicon. Presumably this reflects not only the burgeoning tradition of landscape metaphors in literary critical and programmatic articulations, but also the increasing prominence of the Valley of the Muses at the foot of Helicon. In the Hellenistic period this cult center was fast becoming another Delphi, hosting poetic and athletic contests and serving as a pilgrimage destination for many aspiring writers and culture hounds.85 Most scholars of Hellenistic and Roman poetry are uninterested in the question of whether the poets who so enthusiastically divide up the springs of Helicon according to their generic associations ever actually visited the cultic center.86 From the perspective of this study, the historical record 83 84

85

See Hunter [1977] 2008b; Whitmarsh 2005. On the poet’s grove as a locus amoenus and sacred space, see Hunter 2006: 16–20; on this grove as such, O’Connor 1991. Again, see Selden 1998: 313–18 on the retreat as an urban “alibi.” 86 For details see Schachter 1981; Robinson 2012. See, e.g., Crowther 1979; Knox 1985.

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is far less relevant than the fact that these later poets represent themselves returning to the Boeotian landscapes of Hesiod and Pindar in order to confirm the sources of their inspiration and authority. And whether it is due to the vibrancy on which successful metaphors depend or the enthusiastic detailing of the “pilgrim,” the poets elaborate colorfully on the “springs of inspiration” trope and thereby sustain its effectiveness in the literary critical vocabulary. It all starts with Hesiod, familiarly, with the beginning of the Theogony and its depiction of the Heliconian Muses. I quote it again for the vivid details (Th. 1–4): Μουσάων Ἑλικωνιάδων ἀρχώμεθ' ἀείδειν, αἵ θ' Ἑλικῶνος ἔχουσιν ὄρος μέγα τε ζάθεόν τε, καί τε περὶ κρήνην ἰοειδέα πόσσ' ἁπαλοῖσιν ὀρχεῦνται καὶ βωμὸν ἐρισθενέος Κρονίωνος· Let us begin to sing from the Heliconian Muses, who hold the great and holy mountain of Helicon and both around the violet-colored spring with delicate feet they dance and around the altar of very powerful Zeus . . .

Hesiod clearly offers the scene of Muses dancing around a spring as a cultic locale and an indication of his dominion, so that it functions as a source of poetic authority as well as a metonym for both the local inhabitation of this divine mountain setting and the modes practiced there. While the spring is only one of the places where the Muses dance, in Hesiod’s description it is manifestly a central point for ritual activity and thus a place from which a poet might derive expressive power. It is not named, although in the lines that follow directly on these, Hesiod does identify the three springs in which the Muses bathe (καί τε λοεσσάμεναι τέρενα χρόα Περμησσοῖο | ἠ’ ῞Ιππου κρήνης ἠ’ Ὀλμειοῦ ζαθέοιο, Th. 5–6). As Chapter 2 (section 2) suggests, Pindar is most likely responsible for the convention that merges drinking particular waters and the authoritative crafting of poetry, since he claims in a few important places to engage in some very lofty drinking (O. 6.84–86) or to share it with his patron (I. 6.73–76). In Isthmian 6 Pindar’s waters derive their special status from a Nymph to whom he claims a familial connection, which one might expect would be tempting to later poets as a figure that merges inspiration, poetic status, and territorial reach. But it is Hesiod’s setting that takes hold, likely because of the appeal of the scene itself, as well as the influence of Callimachus. He and poets after him identify one of Hesiod’s springs (the Hippocrene) as the central source and fashion scenes of inspiration out of a combination of this setting and the one twenty lines later in which Hesiod

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receives his branch from the Muses. Callimachus is thus responsible for moving the scene of inspiration up the mountain; he may also have envisioned Hesiod drinking from it, although the fragment in which this all occurs leaves that unclear (Aetia, fr. 2).87 As discussed in the first section of this chapter, from other sources it seems that at the end of the Aetia prologue Callimachus claims that he had met the Muses on Helicon in a dream; the only remaining fragment describes Hesiod’s meeting, with its reference to the Hippocrene spring, which may in its original state have included not only a similar contrast between purity and refinement versus an undiscriminating “grand” style, but also the additional detail of Callimachus drinking from the Hippocrene. As Selden notes, later versions of this scene suggest that Callimachus depicted himself thus.88 Callimachus’ image of Demeter’s bees carrying the purest water from a sacred spring (noted in section 2) suggests a purposeful combination of the water, bee, and honey images that Pindar uses to characterize his poetic sources and power, a vivid conflation that Callimachus may owe to Plato.89 In Apollo’s aesthetic scheme, this pure water opposes that from a great, muddy river (Hymn to Apollo 108–12): Ασσυρίου ποταμοῖο μέγας ῥόος, ἀλλὰ τὰ πολλά λύματα γῆς καὶ πολλὸν ἐφ' ὕδατι συρφετὸν ἕλκει. Δηοῖ δ' οὐκ ἀπὸ παντὸς ὕδωρ φορέουσι μέλισσαι ἀλλ’ ἥτις καθαρή τε καὶ ἀχράαντος ἀνέρπει πίδακος ἐξ ἱερῆς ὀλίγη λιβὰς ἄκρον ἄωτον90 . . . Great is the flood from the Assyrian river, but it drags much debris from the earth and much trash in its water. And Demeter’s bees do not bear water from everywhere, but from a pure and unsullied spring that trickles from a sacred font, a small stream that is the finest peak [of waters] . . .

The image has been much discussed. Scholars have claimed that, like Callimachus’ tropes of the “slender Muse” and “narrow path” from the Aetia prologue, it is intended to differentiate his small-focus, shortercompass poems from the messy grandiosity of epic.91 As noted at the 87

88 90

91

See Selden 1998: 357; also Crowther 1979. Hesiod does drink in an epigram of Alcaeus of Messene (AP 7.55), though not from the Hippocrene; that occurs in an epigram of Archias (AP 9.64) and later in another by Antipater of Thessaloniki (AP 11.24). 89 Selden 1998: 355–58. See Hunter’s note (1989:1). The phrase ἄκρον ἄωτον is, again, Pindaric: in Isthmian 7 the singer connects this “finest peak” of song with “glorious streams of words” (κλυταῖς ἐπέων ῥοαῖσιν) (I. 7.18–19); see further in ch. 2.2. As Cameron points out (1992: 309), the phrase “continuous poem” (ἄεισμα διηνεκές, Aetia 1.3) seems to have distracted scholars; see also Harder 2012; Hunter 2006: 14–15. Cf. Rossi 1971; Clayman 1980; Halperin 1983; Hutchinson 1988.

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outset of this chapter, Cameron has successfully dispelled some of the misapprehensions involved in this focus on epic, demonstrating decisively that Callimachus’ many figures for his own composition as opposed to those of others target style rather than genre.92 Selden assumes that Callimachus’ focus is on style, highlighting the fact that in the Aetia and elsewhere he casts his program in figurative terms that appropriate famous tropes from established literary conventions, such as Hesiod’s “honeyed words” and Aristophanes’ “fat tragedy.”93 While the Hymn to Apollo does not sustain this focus on allegorizing stylistic distinctions, we can see, as Selden does, that its image of the pure spring versus a “Big Muddy” may indicate something about the reference to Hesiod’s Hippocrene spring that is all but lost in the fragmented state of the Aetia prologue (fr. 2).94 The distinction between the great flood and a more restrained flow, like Aristophanes’ fat lady tragedy, owes something to Attic comedy and perhaps particularly to Aristophanes’ competition with Cratinus. As I note in Chapter 3 (section 4), their barbs merge the notion of the big flood with drinking, in this case water versus wine (e.g., Crat. fr. 198 K–A; Ar. Eq. 526–28). In the comic idiom and its reception the flood of words stands in contrast to polished artistry. While the origins of this contrast may not lie with Callimachus, it is clear that his appropriations of and novel turns on it were influential in ancient poetic and critical reception. Critics such as “Longinus” counter the Hellenistic influence by promoting the grandeur of the Homeric “ocean,” but earlier writers like Cicero and Dionysius, who were more likely to be affected by the impact of Hellenistic aesthetics, tend to be equivocal in their judgments. Dionysius, for instance, makes elaborate use of water imagery, including turgid, meandering rivers, full floods, clear running springs, and bubbling fountains, to differentiate styles that he finds too fulsome (esp. Isocrates’) from those like Plato’s, the light and lively flow of which can be effective.95 Horace is similarly circumspect in his treatment of predecessors such as Pindar, with whom he wishes to associate his poetic authority and power but from whom he must distinguish his style. In Odes 4.2 he depicts himself as a flitting “bee” with its own special territory (27–32): 92 93

94 95

Cameron 1992, 1995: 315–31. Hes. Th. 83–84 (Callim. Epig. 27); Ar. Ran. 941. “From the outset . . . Callimachus’ audience is asked to read [the Aetia] as an allegory of its own composition” (Selden 1998: 355). See also Acosta-Hughes and Stevens 2002: 246–48; Harder 2012 ad loc. In Pfeiffer 1949–53: n. 84 1:3. See further in ch. 7.2b. The imagery is especially marked in Dionysius’ essay on Demosthenes (e.g., Dem. 4.29–32, 5.6–10, 18.15–16, 19.29, 28.32–34, 40.43–51); cf. De comp. verb. 24.17–18 (= Il. 21.196–97). Demetrius also associates Plato with fluidity; see ch. 6.3a.

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ego apis Matinae more modoque grata carpentis thyma per laborem plurimum circa nemus uvidique Tiburis ripas operosa parvos carmina fingo. Now in the guise of a Matinean bee who harvests welcome thyme through hard work around the groves and banks of fertile Tibur, I craft labored songs on slight themes.

This bee buzzing around the hilly countryside of Tibur (modern Tivoli), in antiquity a wealthy enclave northeast of Rome full of brooks and waterfalls, stands in contrast to Pindar’s soaring “swan” (cycnum, 25). If bee-poets quietly cull honey brook-side, soaring birds go together with rushing waters: Horace begins the ode by depicting Pindar’s “mouth” as like a swollen river whose unrestrainable flood rushes over its banks (Hor. Od. 4.2.5–8). Pindar himself uses “flowing” metaphors for his own poetry (e.g., κῦμα ρέον, O. 10.10, ῥοαῖσι Μοισᾶν, N. 7.12, cf. I. 7.19). But he also depicts praise poetry like his as a bee’s activity (O. 10.53–59), suggesting that the image originally indicates his affiliation with this type of occasional poetry. This connection may have begun to shift in the classical period, since Aristophanes treats the bee as a metonym for an older lyric and pastoral mode (Frogs 1300), while Plato lampoons all poets as claiming to be bees culling from the Muses’ gardens (Ion 534b1–4). If Callimachus’ combined image in the Hymn to Apollo reorients both Pindar’s bees and his untainted spring in order to indicate a refined style, Horace takes on Pindar directly, transposing the Callimachean critique to the well-watered hills of Tivoli and sharply distinguishing his style from that of the impressive, powerful, but overly full-flowing Pindar. He thereby distances himself from Pindar as well as Callimachus, since in his hybrid, border-crossing way he labors not high up on the mountain but rather in the well-settled hills, an upland (“Matinae”) bee among Tivoli’s thyme.96

96

A note on topography: Matina is a spur of the Monte Gargano near Venusia, the town in southern Italy where Horace grew up; Tibur, in contrast, is a rich enclave where Horace himself had a villa. On Horace’s situating of his poetic identity at the borders of social groups, see Oliensis 1998; Spencer 2006.

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Callimachus’ transplanting of Hesiod’s initiation influences other poets, most expansively Propertius.97 As mentioned above (2b), in Elegies 3.1, he asks both Callimachus and Philetas for some instruction in navigating the landscape of inspiration (3.1.1–6): Callimachi Manes et Coi sacra Philitae, in vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus. primus ego ingredior puro de fonte sacerdos Itala per Graios orgia ferre choros. dicite, quo pariter carmen tenuastis in antro? quove pede ingressi: quamve bibistis aquam? Shade of Callimachus and shrines of Coan Philetas, allow me, I beg, to enter your grove. I first approach as a priest to render from the pure fountain Italian mysteries through Greek dances. Tell me, in what cave did you both slim down your song? On what foot did you advance? What water did you drink?

The language that Propertius deploys to orchestrate the setting, its inhabitants, and the poet-traveler who wants to join in, all pivot between the traveler’s implied movement through familiar topography and the poet’s orientation in the (sacred) space of poetry. The speaker begs to enter, claims to approach, asks where to go, how to walk, what to drink. As he moves he calls out the coordinates of his location: the grove, the spring, the cave; also Greece to Rome.98 The coordinates are, of course, more importantly aesthetic: Hellenistic artistry, pastoral remove (or “remove”99), fluid purity, Greek performance, slender and retiring Muse. Some of the formal details remain unresolved: which “foot” (i.e., meter) to take up and which “water” (i.e., style). In 3.3 Propertius gets some answers. Here he follows Callimachus in narrating his inspiration and stylistic orientation as initiating in a dream of visiting the springs of Helicon. In this reverie he was reclining in the soft shade of Helicon, by the Hippocrene spring (Visus eram molli recubans Heliconis in umbra, | Bellerophontei qua fluit umor equi, 3.3.1–2), meditating on epic topics and drinking from Ennius’ spring. Apollo spies him from the grove across the way (i.e., from Parnassus, me Castalia speculans ex 97 98

99

The scene also surfaces regularly in Hellenistic epigram (AP 7.55, 9.24, 11.64). On the generic and stylistic orientation of these coordinates, as well as the priestly tone, see Shackleton Bailey 1956: 135–36; Luck 1957; Baker 1968; Dunn 1989; Lyne 1998; Hunter 2006: 7–16. On the evolution of the meaning of poetic grove (ἄλσος, nemus) from Greek locus amoenus to Roman sacred space of poetry, see Hunter 2006: 16–20.

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arbore Phoebus, 13) and shoos him from the spring and apparently down the mountain, telling him that his place is in “soft meadows” (mollia . . . prata, 18), and pointing out to him a way as if along the shore (alter remus aquas alter tibi radat harenas, 23). The dreamer enters a cave in which he sees implements of the Muses’ revels, a cast of the father satyr Silenus, and the pipes of Pan; Venus’ doves are there, as are the Muses (Puellae, 33). Calliope emerges from among them and gives the poet further instruction, finally drawing from her spring and wetting his lips with “Philetas’ water” (lymphisque a fonte petitis | ora Philitea nostra rigavit aqua, 51–52; cf. 3.9.43–44).100 All of these coordinates (Apollo’s grove, the soft meadows, the cave with its rustic accoutrements) have implications for Propertius’ claims to a particular stylistic terrain. Scholars tend to treat Propertius as not very interested in actual settings and original practices, so that his aesthetics would be essentially Callimachean – grounded in artifice, in a landscape forged by programmatic displacements rather than by actual topographies.101 While I am not so concerned to insist on the reality of Propertius’ vision (whatever that would mean), his fantastical journey with its stylistic coordinates marks out a hybrid but discriminating orientation. His “little wheels” (parvis . . . rotis, 3.3.18) run through the meadows of girls’ songs and along the seashore, another marginal space; Apollo indicates to him a “new footpath” (nova semita, 26) to a cave that contains metonymic implements indicating some mainstays of Latin pastoral (e.g., Pan’s hymns, satyrs’ songs102); and his drink comes not from Helicon but from Cos. The latter is, we might remember, where Theocritus sets his most engaged literary critical narrative (Idyll 7) – an island that is a familiar elsewhere in Greek geography but likely conceived of from a Roman perspective as more distinctively Hellenistic in stylistic associations than Delphic groves or Boeotian mountain settings. And since Calliope also warns the dreamer not to “stain the Boeotian grove with Mars” (i.e., epic, nec Aonium tingere Marte nemus, 3.3.42), it is clear that we have entered a special geography, one ordered by Apollo from within his Castalian grove and pitched between Philetas’ island setting and Hesiod’s woodland, in a cave full of pastoral metonymies and Muses. 100

101

Cf. Philetas’ “ivy crown” (Philiteis corymbis, 4.6.3). The satiric poet Persius explicitly rejects this dream topography (Prologue 1–7): Nec fonte labra prolui caballino, | nec in bicipiti somniasse Parnasso | memini, ut repente sic poeta prodirem; | Heliconiadasque pallidamque Pirenen | illis remitto, quorum imagines lambent | hederae sequaces. See Crowther 1979; Zetzel 1983. 102 Cf. esp. Verg. Ecl. 6.

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Among topographical metaphors the flowing water tropes have received the most discussion in the scholarship, especially that on Roman poetry. Scholars have addressed the “springs of inspiration” tradition in particular, while related metaphors involving flowing water, rivers, and the connection to wine have also garnered attention.103 These discussions focus only secondarily on the extensions of the ancient imagery – that is, the literary critical judgments that emerge from the poets’ stylistic distinctions. I want to reemphasize here that most if not all water images distinguish a clear, delicate, type of poetry over and against larger, grander, more common or accessible modes. Demetrius, Dionysius, and Cicero all pick up in different ways on the clear stream imagery, so that it enters the critical idiom and is then transformed into more precise schemes in order to capture, for instance, specific rhythms or word sounds. The poets, in some contrast, use springs or flowing water imagery to differentiate styles in a broader sense (e.g., big vs. small, rough vs. delicate), but their imagery is no less influential for its lack of technical application. Callimachus’ image of the narrow, untrodden path that I discussed at the beginning of this chapter serves as the heraldic coordinate par excellence, since it captures in fitting miniature the innovative nature of the Hellenistic topographies. First, Callimachus’ path metaphors offer a subtle convergence of the archaic “path of words” and Hesiod’s “path of Virtue,” as well as succinctly slipping Pindar’s “chariot of praise” onto these routes. Second, it offers the Pindaric routes a new discrimination, so that the narrow path versus the highway clearly indicates stylistic choices as opposed to authorial claims to masterful invention. Third, its terrain is first and foremost literary and critical, in that it reorders earlier routes that already themselves operate primarily as cultural coordinates rather than geographical ones. Callimachus’ imagery thus reaches back to archaic and classical tropes more generally and forward into later critical usage, but his contribution of the narrow, untrodden path as a figure for a refined style is unique and influential.104 The Roman poets elaborate variously on it: Horace, for instance, scorns stepping in the footprints of others (Ep. 1.19.21–22); and Ovid offers a new twist by reframing Heracles’ choice of paths from Prodicus’ story as told in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Amor. 3.1).105 Lucian transforms both images into a witty send up of educational choices; I take up this and other paths in Chapter 6. 103

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E.g., Kambylis 1965; Crowther 1979; Zetzel 1980; Knox 1985; Asper 1997: 128–34; Nünlist 1998: 178–205; Jones 2005: 54–59. Cf. Timoth. 791.202, 796 PMG; Antip. Sid. AP 7.409.5; Lucr. 4.1; Prop. 3.1.14ff. See Hunter 2006: 32–41; and further in ch. 6.2.

4. Springs of emulation

We may want also to recall here at chapter’s end that by this point in our discursive chronology Aristotle has initiated metaphors for metaphor that center on movement through space and that become influential, likely beginning in the late Hellenistic period.106 In the turns from theorists to poets to theorists again, it is worth emphasizing how sustained the meta-referencing and mimetic theorizing are in both poetic and prose critique. Callimachus’ “water-carrying bees,” for instance, not only indicate a refined style but model it in their light touch and mobility. The image thus emulates the effect indicated (i.e., the delicate, slight style) as well as suggesting its own mobility – that is, the carrying over of metaphor itself. The final chapters of this study pursue more fully elaborated mimetic gestures, since they address the creative ways in which Hellenistic and later theorists pursue both metaphor’s discursive moves and the stylistic terrains that they delimit. 106

While, as I discuss in Chapter 6, Demetrius’ dates are uncertain, his conceptual orientation and his metaphors follow Aristotle quite closely, which supports scholars’ arguments for this earlier date.

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On the road again Demetrius and fellow travelers on aesthetic re-routings

Where intuitive man, as for instance in ancient Greece, wields his weapons [i.e., his metaphors] more powerfully and more victoriously than his opponent, if conditions are favourable, a culture can evolve and the rule of art over life establish itself. Friedrich Nietzsche1

In the treatise entitled On Style (Περὶ ἑρμηνείας), the writer to whom it is attributed (one Demetrius) argues that the obscurity brought about by figurative expressions is central to the grand (megaloprepēs) style. As an example of the heightened atmosphere achieved by indirect expression he offers the Mysteries, which “are spoken in allegories to produce shock and shuddering, as do darkness and night” (ἐν ἀλληγορίαις λέγεται πρὸς ἔκπληξιν καὶ φρίκην, ὥσπερ ἐν σκότῳ καὶ νυκτί). “In fact,” he adds, “allegory is like darkness and night” (ἔοικε δὲ καὶ ἡ ἀλληγορία τῷ σκότῳ καὶ τῇ νυκτί) (De eloc. 101). This point in On Style rounds out a discussion of figurative language more generally. The metaphors and brief allegories that Demetrius himself employs not only suggest that grand diction resembles a Mysteries procession; in composition the grand style, with its long clauses, use of hiatus, avoidance of smooth sounds, and striking word arrangements (i.e., figures) is like a mountain hike or travel on a rough road with few inns along the way (45–47, 48, 52, cf. 246). The elegant, charming (glaphuros) style, in contrast, resembles and itself often turns upon the garden setting with its nymphs and flowers (132–33, 163–66, 174, cf. 185). We are thus in familiar territory, so to speak: high up on a mountain, say, or down along a dark path headed toward a Mysteries celebration, or in the garden. More overtly than the writers discussed in the preceding chapters, Demetrius turns topographical analogies to stylistically specific use, as well as showing a fondness for references to familiar coordinates of Greek geography in his choice of examples. Unlike the landscape metaphors charted by the poets and Plato, however, most of the figurative images found in Demetrius cannot be tied to any particular topography, unless the 222

1

“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” [1873] 2009: 264.

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author himself indicates the connection by means of example. When he does not, placing his landscape references in relation to actual settings is even more difficult than doing so with those of Hellenistic poets, because the date and authorship of the treatise On Style is so uncertain. Although since the Renaissance some scholars thought that this Demetrius must be none other than the Hellenistic rhetorician Demetrius of Phalerum, this is clearly not the case. In his influential introduction to the Loeb translation of the text, published at the turn of the last century, W. Rhys Roberts argued, with Ludwig Radermacher, that the text was in fact not even Hellenistic, offering a first-century ce Stoic background as the most likely possibility.2 More recently consensus has converged around a late Hellenistic date, most scholars placing the work in the first century bce, and acknowledging heavy influence from the third and second centuries. Although this helps not at all with identifying the unique individual tagged with a common name like Demetrius, scholars have argued that terminology, structure of argument, and stylistic details encourage this dating and indicate ties to Aristotle and the Peripatetics.3 In fact, the treatise is most strongly marked by Aristotelian influence, including apparently the elaborations on style of his student Theophrastus.4 From my vantage point this Aristotelian influence and a distinct penchant for topographical and geographical references are equally important, because in Demetrius we may well encounter the first prose treatise on rhetoric that consistently employs landscape tropes with the explicit purpose of discriminating among styles. Scholars have noticed the dominance of Plato and especially Aristotle in Demetrius’ text, and some note as well that Homer and Plato are quoted most frequently, usually with strong approbation.5 Most have not, however, paid much attention to his metaphors, despite their piquant qualities; and no one has addressed the frequent recourse to topographical figures and examples.6 This lack of attention represents a striking difference between the imagery addressed in the previous chapters and this one, and likely reflects the chasm that 2

3

4 5

6

Radermacher 1901: xii–iv; Roberts 1902: 49–64. Roberts also thinks that the first century bce is possible, as does Schenkeveld 1964. Chiron 2001 argues for the first century bce; his analysis is in general careful and trenchant, and Innes’ brief but lucid overview in the Loeb edition lends some support (1995a: 312–21). See also Lombardo 1999. See Solmsen 1931; Innes 1985; Fortenbaugh 1992; and further below, section 1. The 1935 dissertation of Apfel compiles the evidence. The ranking (in descending number of quotations and references) is: Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Thucydides. Grube 1961: 55 remarks on this as an argument for an early date. Regarding Homer and Plato, see further below, sections 2 and 3. An exception is the compilation of metaphors in van Hook 1905.

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has existed between scholarly attitudes toward and work on poets and prose writers such as Homer, Plato, and Callimachus versus “hacks” like Demetrius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. From a more conventional point of view this is as it should be, since the metaphors of ancient poets and prose writers on which the theorists lavish their attention can then be distinguished as rich and precisely turned, versus the theorists’ own purportedly slack and undiscriminating reiterations. If instead we take these later writers to be making meticulous use of familiar metaphors and thus advancing “the rule of art,” in Nietzsche’s terms, as a means of mimetic engagement and theoretical explication, we should be able to come to a fuller understanding of the ways in which figurative elements and their repeated reordering can achieve conceptual evolution. Demetrius’ analysis is in fact rife with discriminations invigorated and clarified by colorful references, not only to the Greek landscape but also to the body and its appetites, sufferings, or deportments. We can recall from Chapter 2 (section 2), for instance, the effects of certain periods: Demetrius describes those who use too densely periodic a style as having trouble keeping their heads straight, like people drunk on wine (οὐδ' αἱ κεφαλαὶ ῥᾳδίως ἑστᾶσιν, ὡς ἐπὶ τῶν οἰνωμένων), while their listeners are rendered seasick (ναυτιῶσι) and rowdy, loudly voicing the ends of phrases they anticipate and shouting them out beforehand (ἐκφωνοῦσι τὰ τέλη τῶν περιόδων προειδότες καὶ προαναβοῶσι, 15).7 Similarly, when discussing forcefulness (deinotēs), Demetrius quotes Homer‘s characterization of Prayers as “lame and wrinkled” (χωλαὶ καὶ ῥυσαί, Il. 9.502–03) because they are so slow and long (ὑπὸ βραδυτῆτος, τούτεστιν μακρολογίας). So too, he adds, are old men long-winded (μακρολόγοι) out of weakness (ἀσθένειαν) (De eloc. 7). Contrast Spartans, who are brief and forceful in speech, and whose terse phrases are coiled like wild beasts (ὥσπερ τὰ θηρία συστρέψαντα) (7–8). Demetrius also conjoins the rounded figure of the racetrack with that of the orator’s tones and gestures, which gives us the best sense of how bodies and spaces fall together in his conceptual scheme (De eloc. 11; see further below in section 2b). While he does not engage the strongly gendered images that Dionysius and especially Cicero use, he does repeatedly enliven his theoretical points with this type of embodied scheme.8 In Demetrius’ treatise features of landscapes form a common set of stylistic analogies, especially when connected to the human inhabitation 7 8

Cf. Arist. Rhet. 1404b8–21; Plut. 4.661. See Worman 2008: 292–93 on the imagery. For Cicero’s highlighting of gendered tropes, see the discussion in ch. 7.3a.

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of and/or interaction with them. All of these the author deploys as a means of giving vivid access to the “feel” of, for instance, periodic rhythm or poetic diction. Indeed, Demetrius’ images highlight such an embodied, sensory approach to stylistic elements that performance seems always close at hand. Thus although like Aristotle Demetrius does not emphasize or often address directly performance (e.g., by discussing delivery styles), his figurative resonances – again like Aristotle’s – call forth precisely this realm of embodiment and inhabitation.9 Dirk Schenkeveld has argued that the treatise was written for the training, by means of classroom lectures, of advanced students of rhetoric, in the increasingly systematic instruction of Hellenistic education.10 This may help to account for the analogies to typical sense experiences and reliance on familiar literary images. Schenkeveld also recognizes, however, that even if On Style is not a theoretical work written for peers – that is, even if it is unlike Cicero’s Orator or Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Composition – it makes use of literary critical reflections in the service of rhetorical theorizing and instruction. On Style thus advances in important ways the figurative conventions that I explore in previous chapters, since it brings to a new setting an expansive set of literary critical and theoretical reference points that incorporate traditional images in a novel scheme. Again, these coordinates do not usually chart real-world topographies except in what we may recognize as a tertiary sense (i.e., as a topos of a topos of a place), since their purpose is the precise mapping of particular styles. As with many landscape metaphors in Hellenistic poetry, Demetrius’ indicate an archaizing engagement with received topographies, in this case largely classical Athens and other settings made famous in Greek cultural tradition by the literary record, including depictions of ritual, contest, and/or warfare. Thus paths and other images highlighted by Demetrius are either entirely generic or lent some particularity by means of their connection to the given ancient author and spaces that she or he highlights as significant. For example, Demetrius essentially reorders Aphrodite’s precinct (Sappho fr. 2 and cf. e.g. fr. 94) to fashion the flowery cast of the poet’s style, but his metaphors do not refer to cultic settings in Lesbos (see further in section 4). Similarly, the rough road of Thucydides’ prose suggests mountain paths more generally, and recalls the familiar caution of Hesiod about the rough path of virtue. But, as I discuss in more detail below (section 2a), the example that 9

10

Theophrastus may have also influenced this focus on the body in performance, since he wrote a treatise on delivery; see Fortenbaugh 1985. Schenkeveld 1991.

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Demetrius uses also situates the reader in relation to the winding path of the Achelous, the longest and one of the most famous rivers in Greece, the cultural importance of which is signaled by its veneration as a deity.11 Thus Demetrius’ stylistic topography is one steeped in literary and cultural traditions. It uses sites famous in Greek poetic and cultural geography as heraldic references – that is, as metaphorical coordinates mapped onto topographies – in order to set stylistic parameters by means of these legendary settings. In the sections that follow I begin by considering the development of ideas about style in prose discussions, since this is the first chapter to focus on a literary theoretical treatise in the strict sense of that term. I situate the stylistic model that Demetrius proposes and his literary judgments in relation to other similar works, in order to sketch the general trends that underpin this type of ancient scholarship. With this framework in place I then consider the specific points at which landscape imagery serves as a crucial means of indicating elements of given styles, highlighting in particular the rough mountain road of the grand (megaloprepēs) style and including a section on similar metaphors in Dionysius. Demetrius shares his interest in the coursings of both the grand and the polished (glaphura) styles with another critic about whom very little is known: “Longinus,” whose imagery I also consider in some detail.12 I then turn to an exploration of the stylistic parameters of the charming garden that further delimit polished or smooth expression and composition, debating in brief where it dovetails with the spaces of lyric modes, especially in Horace’s Odes. I should emphasize again that I am pursuing one cluster of metaphors out of the many that these theorists use. While I am not claiming that the “landscape with figures” cluster is the only dominant one, it is central to the formation of an increasingly coherent set of stylistic categories.

1. Stylistic models and literary judgment One of the distinct oddities of ancient discussions of style in rhetorical theory is their freedom of quotation. In treatises from Aristotle’s Rhetoric on, writers quote liberally from the poets, especially Homer, as well as the 11

12

Cf. De eloc. 6, where Demetrius approves of Xenophon’s matching of the short clause (kōlon) to a small river (the Teleboas, “Far-sounder”) as an instance of charm (charis). Scholars are no longer even convinced that the author of On the Sublime (Peri hupseōs) is one of the Longinuses about which we know, but they now tend to place the author in the mid to late first century ce. See Russell 1981; Innes 1995b, 2002.

1. Stylistic models and literary judgment

historians, philosophers, and logographers. They also quote orators and other rhetorical theorists, but these are treated as of a piece with the consideration of examples from poetic and prose works. In book 3 of the Rhetoric, an influential instance, Aristotle is much more likely to have recourse to the poets and earlier sophists than to his contemporary orators and theorists (e.g., he never once mentions Demosthenes); and this seems to have initiated a distinctly literary trend in rhetorical theory. In fact, this tendency is a central reason why such treatises are usually taken together with more clearly literary critical works such as Horace’s Art of Poetry, since they make just as much use of literary judgment as a means of establishing what elements are necessary to producing fine oratorical styles.13 For our purposes this tendency to treat all types of literary production as relevant to discussions of good oratorical style opens up a helpful vantage point from which to make sense of the endurance of certain images in scenes of literary judgment. That is to say, because of it more narrowly rhetorical and more broadly literary critical traditions are sufficiently intertwined that conceptual schemes and their illustrative tropes are shared between them. Further, since ancient poets and prose writers from early on conjoin ideas about style with ethical judgments, how one performs verbally is regarded as intimately connected with one’s character and inclinations. In relation to significant settings this means that style is assessed by indicators such as cadence and vocabulary but also by the places with which one associates oneself and/or to which one turns for instruction and inspiration. To talk about style at all, one needs at the very least some contrasting elements, or better yet, clear distinctions and organizing principles. I have argued elsewhere that before the late fifth-century development of technical manuals (technai) addressing aspects of prose composition (e.g., those of Thrasymachus and Polus), poets invariably address style when they make programmatic or more obviously literary critical gestures. They do so, however, without the technical and theoretical apparatus that calls attention to the discussion as such and establishes analytic (and thus transferable) concepts and vocabulary.14 And again, they repeatedly conjoin aesthetic and ethical choices, which is still clearly a central concern in Aristophanes’ Frogs and Plato’s Phaedrus. Although among Aristophanes’ extant plays the Frogs provides the most information about his engagement 13

14

For the relationship between rhetorical theory and literary criticism, see Meijering 1987; Classen 1995. Worman 2002: 7–12.

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with late fifth-century conceptions of style, Plato’s stylistic model, if such it can be termed, is most directly and thoroughly set forth in book 3 of the Republic, as part of a discussion about the ideal education of young citizens destined to lead the city. In keeping with a discussion of the dominant developments in stylistic theory before Demetrius, and because he is so intimately engaged with passages central to its unfolding, I have saved discussion of Republic 3 for this chapter.

a. Plato on the simple, virtuous style I argue in Chapter 1 (section 1a) that despite Socrates’ famous critique of mimesis, both it and metaphor may be put to positive use, when – at least in part by means of analogy to mimetic arts such as painting – the careful dialectician makes his way toward the intelligible realm. But, as scholarship on the Republic has long emphasized, Plato’s handling of mimesis largely centers on very specific criticisms of the arts, especially poetry that is imitative in the sense of enacting or dramatic, and painting, which is a copy of an appearance.15 On this view mimesis, which embraces behavioral modeling at the one extreme and artistic imitation at the other, is a potentially dangerous activity, since there are many practices and modes of representation in the city that detract and distract from the chaste, disciplined, and upstanding life (whence Rancière’s use of the phrase “ethical regime of images”).16 This suspicion of mimesis is closely bound up in Plato’s analysis with his ideas about style, because, in Republic 3 at least, mimetic activities involve first and foremost imitation of different modes, especially poetic and dramatic ones. The ones that give the most pleasure are the most various, which may be aesthetically gratifying but are also ethically corrupting. The discussion in book 3 thus stands in sharp contrast to the ways in which Socrates himself makes use of mimetic theorizing to advance on the dialectical path, perhaps because it primarily focuses on style in the sense of behavioral modeling (i.e., education) rather than types of argument. Here Socrates promotes what I would call an aesthetics of oneness, which values simplicity, consistency, and purity, and dovetails in important ways

15

16

E.g., Phdr. 252d2, 253b5; Rep. 509–10, 532; Tim. 40d, 548e, 50c, 51b; cf. the type of poetry that the Republic directly rejects, esp. at 394–97, cf. also 598–601. Halliwell emphasizes the diversity of Plato’s treatment of mimesis (cf. 2002: 1). On painting see esp. Keuls 1978; Moss 2007: 417–22. Rancière [2000] 2004: 20–21; see further in ch. 1.1.

1. Stylistic models and literary judgment

with his ideas about the stable and unchanging realm of the Forms.17 As with the difference noted in Chapters 1 and 4 between Plato’s metaphysical focus and later theorists’ more craft-oriented ones, here too we see a unique vision of style, one that centers on character and behavior rather than on more technical aspects such as vocabulary, figurative usage, and composition. In book 3 of the Republic Socrates alerts Adeimantus to a change of topic in their discussion of the guardians’ education, from content to considerations of style (τὸ δὲ λέξεως, 392c6). When Socrates explains what he means, he does not at first talk about different modes in the typical sense (e.g., variegated vs. plain) – that is, in a sense that because of Aristophanes’ Frogs and a few testimonia (including Platonic ones) about fifth-century technai we might assume to be familiar to a fourth-century audience.18 Instead he distinguishes between narrative and direct impersonation (διηγήσει ἢ διὰ μιμήσεως, 392d5), categories that preserve a focus on both education and emulation and that come to dominate literary critical discussion of form and genre among ancient scholiasts.19 For Socrates mimesis is troubling because it involves emulation and repetition without distinguishing the moral status of that which is imitated; but he acknowledges its place in conventional education, while seeking to restrict its stylistic range. He thus offers another set of distinctions that relate primarily to musical modes (397b6–400c6) and that are more recognizably stylistic (i.e., varied and pleasurable vs. simple and consistent). These are assimilated to the different imitative modes, or rather, to the modes involving more and indiscriminate imitation versus those involving little imitation and only that of good, manly behaviors (cf. 395b8–397b5). In the section on rhythms Socrates argues that certain metrical styles are especially harmful to the hearer: eastern meters (e.g., Ionian and Lydian) are pleasurable and too “relaxed” (χαλαραί) (398e1–10). The equation between poetic or musical styles and deportment, which Plato employs to fashion the hard-body aesthetics suited to guardians, converges with the diegesis–mimesis distinction that also differentiates genres (394c1–3). This means that some poetic modes are more questionable than others (as Adeimantus understands, 394d6), since they involve not only more 17

18

Cf. Socrates’ remarks on divine goodness: if the god is good, he must be simple and true and unchanging (379a–380e). Segal 1978: 316–17 notices the dominance of simple–variegated distinctions in the Republic, connecting them to the democratic city and to poetry, but without emphasis on style as such. Cf. Moss 2007: 426–28 on the poikilos character and style; she argues that this informs the rejection of mimesis in book 10. See also Nehamas 1982; Janaway 1995: 96–103; Burnyeat 1999; Halliwell 2002: 61–71. 19 On embodied styles in Aristophanes, see further in ch. 3.1. See Nünlist 2009: 94–98.

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imitation but imitation of questionable characters. Thus when Socrates turns to the kinds of people and things that should not be imitated (or only in moderation), some are obviously reminiscent of epic and tragedy, some of iambos and comedy, others of dithyramb (395d5–396b6). Style for Plato is directly related to moral status; a gentleman (kalos kagathos) only imitates behaviors worthy of him, and if he is moderate (metrios) he knows when and to what extent he can stray from these. If he does indulge in mimesis of shameful people, behaviors, or circumstances, he does so only for the sake of play (παιδιᾶς χάριν, 396e1). Socrates also extends his equation of stylistic simplicity with manly moral stature from verbal mimesis to musical modes and rhythms (398c1–400e7). Polychordal music (esp. Lydian, 398e2) is lax and suited to the drinking party; the Dorian and Phrygian modes, in contrast, are soldiering, stalwart modes, since, as Socrates points out, the more mixed style is sweet, pleasurable, and for the crowd (397d5–7). But if the aesthetic of consistency and unity is to be sustained, the poet capable of all sorts of variegated effects (cf. παντοδαπὸν γίγνεσθαι καὶ μιμεῖσθαι πάντα χρήματα, 398a1–2) will be respectfully asked to leave the city, in favor of a harsher and more unpleasant sort (τῷ αὐστηροτέρῳ καὶ ἀηδεστέρῳ ποιητῇ, 398a8). Instruments that produce the variegated modes must thus be tossed out, including especially the aulos (399d2–5); this leaves the lyre and kithara for the city and the syrinx (Pan pipes) for the country (399d7– 9).20 Socrates defends his ousting of the aulos by preferring Apollo to Marsyas, which Adam (ad loc.) notes aligns him with the Muses’ judgment (Apollod. 1.4.2). Meters must also follow this pattern: one must avoid the elaborate and varied (μὴ ποικίλους αὐτοὺς διώκειν μηδὲ παντοδαπὰς βάσεις) and pursue the rhythms that follow on an orderly and manly life (βίου . . . κοσμίου τε καὶ ἀνδρείου) (399e8–400a1). And lest we fail to understand the point, Socrates explicitly draws together the equations: the simple rhythms and modes must follow on a simple style, which itself follows on a simple character (εὐηθεία, 400e1). By the conclusion of the discussion strictly on a lexis, Socrates has cobbled together a theory of style that nails it unavoidably to moral status, while (playfully?) acknowledging that the stringent poetry that would remain does not make for a very pleasant educational path. In a later extension of this discussion we get a vivid figurative elaboration of the effects of certain musical modes, a stunning analogical metaphor that illuminates Plato’s concerns in the Republic that training in 20

See further below (section 2a) for Demetrius’ assessment of Plato’s style in this passage.

1. Stylistic models and literary judgment

mousikē alone (i.e., without gumnastikē) can render the citizen soft and decadent (Rep. 410d–e). 'The modes that Socrates earlier identifies as feminine, soft, and sympotic (398e1–10) he eventually depicts as affecting the hearer as if physically. They flow into the ear as through a funnel (ὥσπερ διὰ χώνης); if indulged over time they may “melt and liquefy” (τήκει καὶ λείβει) the spirit of the listener, unstringing his soul (ἐκτέμῃ ὥσπερ νεῦρα τῆς ψυχῆς) and rendering him a “soft spearsman” (μαλθακὸν αἰχμητήν) (411a6–b4; quoting Il. 17.588).21 We should not miss that the effects of Socrates’ metaphor for these modes, including his reading an embodied insult from the Iliad as figurative, constitute a style that is itself by turns elaborate and fluid.22 In this way he reorients battlefield abuse, since the Iliad scene depicts Apollo rousing Hector by insulting his enemy Menelaus as a “soft spearsman” (μαλθακὸν αἰχμητήν), so that the passage itself engages in a (characteristically wry) transposition of Homeric invective to critique musical modes. Given Socrates’ focus here on the dangers of certain mimetic effects that his own language reproduces, this seems a contrary way to caution his audience about them. And yet, as so often in the Republic, the captivating analogy also constitutes an implicit nod – made explicit in the Phaedrus – to the fact that since we are all mired in the mimetic realm, we can only gesture toward the truth by means of like images.23 Thus the mimetic strategies of Socrates’ metaphors show directly how this music works, since they reproduce their very effects. The image also turns out to possess its own echo effects: Demetrius, Dionysius, and Longinus pick up on the mimetic power of the image, reproducing it in their analyses of Plato’s and Isocrates’ styles.24 For Plato, then, much of the difficulty with the mimetic aspects of cultural education in downtown Athens has to do with young citizens’ constant exposure to the overabundance of art forms that characterize the lively city. We should recall that here as in Frogs the cure for urban ills is figured as a trip into the countryside, since Socrates argues that the young should be “pastured” in a healthy country setting, so that like well-tended cattle they will not run the risk of “grazing” on bad images coming from many different sources (Rep. 401b1–d2). For all that this scene constitutes a striking departure from the city into a rural setting, we might notice that 21

22

23 24

Cf. the portrayal of certain indulgent meters as “pastry” in Rep. 3; also Pl. Theat. 144b5. The image of fluidity was very popular with later critics: cf. Demetr. De eloc. 183; DH Dem. 20.39–43; Longinus 13.1. See further below (section 3a) and ch. 7.2a–b. As Demetrius emphasizes (De eloc. 50, 183–85); he applauds this matching of effect to topic and seeks to reproduce it. See Phdr. 246a4–6 and the discussions in chs. 1.1a and 4.3. See further below (sections 3a–b).

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it is also in keeping with the figurative analogies for style that Socrates deploys earlier in its maintenance of notions of the simple and singular pursuit of the fine and the noble. The rustic imagery, again as in Frogs, conjures a purer setting from an earlier period. Plato’s extended metaphor of the trip into the country highlights a central peculiarity of his theorizing: that his own style is at odds with his recommendations for simple, pure modes. The reception of his style only further complicates the contrast, since some later theorists both caution against Plato’s more elaborate metaphorical modes and yet emulate them themselves. When discussing the grand (megaloprepēs) style, for instance, Demetrius considers Plato’s preference for metaphors over similes “risky” (ἐπισφαλές, De eloc. 80), a judgment in keeping with the metaphors of danger and safety that he uses when assessing figurative usage in his larger discussion (78–86). As noted in Chapter 1 (section 2), Demetrius follows Aristotle in acknowledging the pleasure and power of metaphors while warning that if they are too closely packed they verge on the dithyrambic or if “imported from too far away” (πόρρωθεν μετενηνεγμέναις) they strain comprehension (78). Plato, by this measure, is often too bold in his usage, a judgment that Dionysius (for example) reiterates in highly metaphorical language. He argues that Plato’s penchant for tropes often “catches him in a storm” (χειμάζεται περὶ τὴν τροπικὴν φράσιν), stiffening his style (cf. σκληρά) and rendering it Gorgianic (Dem. 5.27–35). Those theorists who are less cautious about grand stylistic effects, on the other hand, indulge in the metaphors without the warnings. In the Brutus Cicero has this to say of Plato’s style: “Who is richer in style than Plato? The philosophers say that so Jove would speak, if he were to speak Greek” (Quis enim uberior in dicendo Platone? Iovem sic aiunt philosophi, si Graece loquatur, loqui).25 And as I discuss further below, Longinus offers an enthusiastic metaphor with a long literary history when he enthuses that Plato makes an especially rich diversion of Homeric imagery by “drawing off ten thousand channels from the Homeric spring” (ἀπὸ τοῦ Ὁμηρικοῦ κείνου νάματος εἰς αὑτον μυρίας ὅσας παρατροπὰς ἀποχετευσάμενος, De sublim. 13.3). Thus it appears that one of Plato’s main influences on later discussions of style is the paradoxical relationship between his recommendations for stylistic restraint and his own bold mimesis, as writers either reproduce this contrast in their analyses or promote and imitate his metaphorical style. 25

See further in ch. 7.3b. Cf. Cic. Brut. 120–21. Dionysius also emphasizes that Plato’s style is considered “especially formidable” (μάλιστα δεινὸς ὁ Πλάτων εἶναι δοκεῖ) in its metaphorical usage (κατὰ τὸ τροπικόν) (Dem. 32.21–22), echoing Cicero’s quip at Dem. 23.12–15.

1. Stylistic models and literary judgment

b. Aristotle on stylistic “virtues” While Aristotle’s stylistic model in the Rhetoric is also a unified one (i.e., it aims at characterizing a single good style), his approach to the relationship between mimesis and style, and therefore to style itself, is very different from Plato’s. On its surface, his treatments of these topics in the Poetics and Rhetoric appear relatively pragmatic, mechanical, and even superficial. In contrast to Plato’s entertaining and heated discussion of the dangers of mimetic practices such as dramatic poetry and the difficulties of adhering to the single and simple style that will make one a good and well-integrated citizen, Aristotle regards mimesis as central to all human activity and invaluable to learning and cognition, as noted in Chapter 1. Mimesis is not bad or dangerous, but rather natural, educational, enjoyable, even syllogistic (Poet. 1448b4–9, 15–17): Ἐοίκασι δὲ γεννῆσαι μὲν ὅλως τὴν ποιητικὴν αἰτίαι δύο τινὲς καὶ αὗται φυσικαί. τό τε γὰρ μιμεῖσθαι σύμφυτον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἐκ παίδων ἐστὶ καὶ τούτῳ διαφέρουσι τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων ὅτι μιμητικώτατόν ἐστι καὶ τὰς μαθήσεις ποιεῖται διὰ μιμήσεως τὰς πρώτας, καὶ τὸ χαίρειν τοῖς μιμήμασι πάντας . . . διὰ γὰρ τοῦτο χαίρουσι τὰς εἰκόνας ὁρῶντες, ὅτι συμβαίνει θεωροῦντας μανθάνειν καὶ συλλογίζεσθαι τί ἕκαστον, οἷον ὅτι οὗτος ἐκεῖνος· Two causes seem to have engendered poetry and these are natural. For it is natural for humans from childhood to engage in mimesis and in this they differ from other creatures, because the human is the most mimetic creature, and through mimesis he fashions his lessons from the beginning; and [it is also natural] that everyone delights in imitations . . . In this way people enjoy seeing images, because it happens that those spectating learn and reason out what each thing is, such as that this man is that one.26

In Aristotle’s scheme, then, mimesis is a natural, relatively innocuous, and even beneficial type of human activity. Both the Poetics and the Rhetoric associate mimesis directly with expression in poetic convention and performance, and this too is natural: “The poets first began to innovate [stylistically], as is natural; for words are mimetic, and the voice is the most mimetic of our faculties” (ἤρξαντο μὲν οὖν κινῆσαι τὸ πρῶτον, ὥσπερ πέφυκεν, οἱ ποιηταί· τὰ φὰρ ὀνόματα μιμήματα ἐστίν, ὑπῆρξεν δὲ καὶ ἡ φωνὴ πάντων μιμητικώτατον τῶν μορίων ἡμῖν, Rhet. 1404a21–22, cf. Poet. 1447a10–15). Thus how one imitates (i.e., the style in which one forges a mimesis) should also be relatively “natural,” especially if it is poetic in kind. This turns out not to be the case, which unsettles Aristotle's 26

This is likely a reference to the plot of Oedipus Tyrannus, one of Aristotle’s favorite examples.

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attempts to salvage mimesis as grounded in human nature.27 Although style (lexis) in the Poetics is treated almost as an afterthought, the Rhetoric sets forth why it may raise concerns for anyone aiming to address a topic in an unvarnished manner.28 In book 3, where Aristotle addresses style in more detail, lexis is intimately bound up with delivery (hupokrisis). Both are tricky to handle within the oratorical setting, since they are the province of poetry and phantasia (cf. Chapter 1, section 2a). That is, while style is generally superficial and aimed at the hearer (ἀλλ' ἅπαντα φαντασία ταῦτ' ἐστὶ καὶ πρὸς τὸν ἀκροατήν, 1404a11), “poetic” modes, the type used by such elaborate stylists as Gorgias, are laughable and outdated (γελοῖον μιμεῖσθαι τούτους οἳ αὐτοὶ οὐκέτι χρῶνται ἐκείνῳ τῷ τρόπῳ) (Rhet. 1404a24–28, 35–39). Not only this, but performance itself is distracting: Aristotle claims that in his time both actors and those adept at speeches win more favor, because the audience members have corrupt tastes (καὶ καθάπερ ἐκεῖ μεῖζον δύνανται νῦν τῶν ποιητῶν οἱ ὑποκριταί, καὶ κατὰ τοὺς πολιτικοὺς ἀγῶνας, διὰ τὴν μοχθηρίαν τῶν πολιτῶν). Indeed, even the study of style is a latecomer and appears “vulgar” (τὸ περὶ τὴν λέξιν ὀψὲ προῆλθεν· καὶ δοκεῖ φορτικὸν εἶναι) (Rhet. 1403b31–1404a1).29 As Chapter 1 (section 2a) argues in more detail, this sense of style as superficial, potentially laughable, and a late interloper influences later theorists’ characterizations of it and, by extension, its most distinctive feature (i.e., metaphor) as a female traveler in need of supervision. Given such concerns, it is necessary to take a chastening approach to style. For Aristotle there is only one way to insure a fine style: one must adhere to three “virtues” (aretai) – that which is clear (saphēs) and fitting (prepousa), as well as properly ornamented (kekosmēmenē) – in the right combination for the right topic and occasion (Rhet. 1404b1–11).30 Here

27

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29 30

Cf. the discussion in ch. 1 and Derrida's critique of Aristotle's emphasis on mimesis and metaphor as natural (introduction and section 3). As are lyric expression (melopoiia) and spectacle (opsis), since Aristotle regards plot (muthos), thought (dianoia), character (ethos) as much more central to the discussion of what constitutes good dramatic writing. Style is merely listed as the fourth element and glossed as “expression through word choice” for both poetry and prose (τέταρτον δὲ τῶν μὲν λόγων ἡ λέξις· λέγω δέ, ὥσπερ πρότερον εἴρηται, λέξιν εἶναι τὴν διὰ τῆς ὀνομασίας ἑρμηνείαν, ὃ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἐμμέτρων καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν λόγων ἔχει τὴν αὐτὴν δύναμιν) (Po. 1450b13–20); (cf. Halliwell 1987: 97). See further in Worman 2008: 287–93. See Solmsen 1941: 43–44. The full passage runs as follows: Ἔστω οὖν . . . ὡρίσθω λέξεως ἀρετὴ σαφῆ εἶναι (σημεῖον γάρ τι ὁ λόγος, ἐὰν μὴ δηλοῖ οὐ ποιήσει τὸ ἑαυτοῦ ἔργον), καὶ μήτε ταπεινὴν μήτε ὑπὲρ τὸ ἀξίωμα, ἀλλὰ πρέπουσαν· ἡ γὰρ ποιητικὴ ἴσως οὐ ταπεινή, ἀλλ’ οὐ πρέπουσα λόγῳ. τῶν δ’ ὀνομάτων καὶ ῥημάτων σαφῆ μὲν ποιεῖ τὰ κύρια, μὴ ταπεινὴν δὲ ἀλλὰ κεκοσμημένην . . . τὸ γὰρ ἐξαλλάξαιποιεῖ φαινεσθαι σεμνοτέραν.

1. Stylistic models and literary judgment

too Aristotle’s language gives a sense of moralizing, now as if in relation to female dress, at least with the latter two categories; and again, later theorists pick up on his cues, even though his unified model turned out to be only somewhat influential.31 His student Theophrastus follows closely, however, identifying four virtues (aretai) of good style that preserve Aristotle’s three and add purity of language (Hellenizein) (Cic. Orat. 79), while the “virtues” together suggest that he too promotes the type of demure, slender style that later on so lends itself to gendered discriminations.32 Demetrius departs somewhat from the unified theory of style, with its three or four virtues; but he also offers a model that seems to merge the three-categories theory with the four virtues. He argues that there are four basic styles (charaktēres): grand (megaloprepēs), slight (ischnos), elegant (glaphuros), and forcible (deinos) (De eloc. 36). The Peripatetic virtues are divided up among these, so that clarity (e.g.) is a signature element of the slight style, metaphor and neologism of the grand style, and so on. Demetrius also acknowledges that except for the opposite styles (grand and slight) these may be used in combination. As commentators have noticed, this, together with the treatment of stylistic virtues, affords a flexible model more like Aristotle’s than later categorizations.33 He organizes his treatise, accordingly, by the stylistic categories and their aspects, beginning with the grand style (assessed in relation to thought, diction, and composition). An introductory discussion sets forth the nature of clauses (kōla) and periods (periodoi), which indicates the overarching attention to composition that dominates the treatise. Because Demetrius clearly attends with impressive detail and precision to word placement and periodic style, the discussion as a whole gives a sense of language as a traceable and inhabited topography, with individual features that one 31

32 33

See further ch. 1.2a and cf. ch. 7.2a–b as well as below (section 2a). While Aristophanes’ Frogs offers what was likely the model dominant in the late fifth century of two main styles (grand and refined), fragmentary evidence also suggests that Aristotle may have been arguing against both this and a triadic model (with a middle or “mixed” style); see Grube 1952; Gotoff 1980. Dionysius claims that Theophrastus credited Thrasymachus with inventing a tripartite model as an innovation on the binary distinction: slight (ischnos, Dem. 2.1); mixed (miktos, 3.1); and grand (megaloprepēs, 4.14). On Theophrastus’ model, see Innes 1985; also 1995a: 324–27. Grube 1961; O’Sullivan 1992: 10–13. Demetrius would appear to be hewing close in some ways to Peripatetic schemes, including his analyzing of the four styles in relation to subject/thought (pragma/dianoia), diction (lexis), and composition (sunthesis) (37). Pragma and dianoia belong to the “what” category, which we would (following Plato and Aristotle) understand as the content or topic addressed. There was, it appears, a style–content debate among Hellenistic writers (e.g. Neoptolemus of Parium, Philodemus); and although their terminology is not evident in Demetrius, he does show an awareness that content can influence style (see Porter 2010: 213–26; and further below in section 4).

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comes upon in sequence, like a traveler experiencing the multiple bearings of a landscape.

2. On the road As noted in earlier chapters, the rhetoric of paths is among the most prominent landscape tropes in Greek literary convention. Since it is also one that Demetrius is especially fond of, I recall here a few important examples, by way of orientating his topography.34 Especially relevant is Hesiod’s high, rough road in Works and Days. While badness can be had in abundance and easily (τὴν μὲν τοι κακότητα καὶ ἰλαδὸν ἔστιν ἑλέσθαι | ῥηιδίως), the path to Virtue is sweaty (ἰδρῶτα), long and steep (μακρὸς δὲ καὶ ὄρθιος), and rough (τρηχύς) at the beginning (WD 287–92). Hesiod’s diverging paths only implies a hiker sweating on the hill, but later writers – Demetrius included – reorder stylistic differences with more attention to bodies and deportments. Think, for instance, of Aristophanes’ paths and “paths” jokes at the outset of Frogs, where Dionysus declares he is not much of a walker, fears the long way around, and while rowing his way there complains of his aching ass (cf. also Clouds, Thesmophoriazusae). The fifth-century sophist Prodicus takes up Hesiod’s diverging moral routes and turns them to a more fully elaborated moral purpose with his story of Heracles’ famous choice between paths. As told in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, “Heracles at the crossroads” highlights the connections among style, ethical training, and the body.35 In his young manhood the hero retreats to an isolated spot, in order to contemplate whether he should pursue the path of virtue or of vice (εἴτε τὴν δε' ἀρετῆς ὁδὸν τρέψονται ἐπὶ τὸν βίον εἴτε τὴν διὰ κακίας, 2.1.21). Two female figures approach him: one carries herself in a manner “adorned with moderation” (κεκοσμημένην . . . τὸ δὲ σχῆμα σωφροσύνης) and is dressed in white, the other is plump, wearing make-up, and pliantly coquettish. She repeatedly checks her dress and looks about (ἐπισκοπεῖν), in order to ascertain her effect on others (22). She runs ahead and offers Heracles the easy and short road (cf. ῥᾳδίαν καὶ βραχεῖαν ὁδόν, 29), which she describes as full of pleasures. When asked her name, she says that her friends call her Happiness (Εὐδαιμονίαν, 26) 34 35

See chs. 2.1, 3.1c, 4.4, and 5.3a for discussions of earlier “paths” tropes. Again, on Aristophanes’ imagery see Worman 2008: ch. 2. Prodicus’ story, which Xenophon presents as paraphrased by Socrates (Xen. Mem. 2.1.21–33), became a popular scene in Western art. See Snell 1955: 324–30 on the Scheideweg as an image of aporia. For more on the stylistic implications, see Worman 2002: 35–39; Gunderson 2000; Hunter 2006: 32–36.

2. On the road

but admits that others call her Kakia. The second woman hails Heracles as well brought up and thus likely to tread the path to her house (εἰ τὴν πρὸς ἐμὲ ὁδὸν τράποιο, 27), since she is Virtue (Arete). She acknowledges that this path is one of exertion, but claims that the gods grant nothing without labor and care (οὐδὲν ἄνευ πόνου καὶ ἐπιμελείας, 28).36 Kakia has on offer “entrées of pleasure” (προοιμίους ἡδονῆς, 27), as Arete calls them, sensory delights that her appearance intimates. Arete's rigorous speech, in contrast, urges moral necessities and duties to city and self (e.g., εὐεργετητέον; ὠφελητέον; πειρατέον; θεραπευτέον, 28). That is to say, one path is “smooth” in its indulgence of appetites, including the appetite for verbal ease; the other is rigorous in both its sense of duty and its syntax. The lofty tone of Virtue is achieved by a painstaking accumulation of arguments carefully bolstered by specific examples, with the periods tightly controlled by a series of parallel constructions (30–33), while Kakia’s languid speech does not even bother with the details (e.g., τί ἂν κεχαρισμένον ἢ σιτίον ἢ ποτὸν εὕροις, ἢ τί ἂν ἰδῶν ἢ τί ἀκούσας τερφθείης, 24). The choice of tracks, with their stylistic and ethical contrasts, has its reflection in Alexandrian and Roman poetry and prose treatises on style. Think again of Callimachus’ narrow path (Aet. fr. 1.26–28 Pf.), or Propertius’ “little wheels” rolling over soft meadows and the mossy new footpath that Apollo indicates to him (3.3.18, 26). Writers on rhetoric pursue the geographical contrasts suggested by such distinctions. As this section explores, Demetrius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Lucian all deploy images – which like Prodicus’ are often clearly gendered – that bridge the hiker and the hike (or the orator and his setting), drawing distinctions among writers’ styles that are as vivid as live performance.

a. Demetrius on the rough road Demetrius’ use of topographical references makes something of a virtue out of the rough road, but largely in the narrower, Aristotelian sense of stylistic virtues. This road results in grandeur (megaloprepeia/megethos), which while not in itself always an appropriate mode, can be effective and may be achieved by the effort that comes of traveling longer and more difficult distances. This notion of the impressive as conjoined with worthwhile effort merges ethics and aesthetics in familiar ways, but Demetrius’ metaphors, here and elsewhere, sustain a distinct emphasis 36

Note that in the Politics, Aristotle glosses the maxim πάθει μάθος with the claim that learning only comes with pain (μετὰ λύπης γὰρ ἡ μάθησις, 1339b).

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on the experiences of particular topography by the “travelers” (i.e., both writer/speaker and audience), such as sensations of weariness or stumbling. This topographical analogizing reveals as successful that which achieves a certain impact, so that the audience receives the “landscape” of a particular style as well situated and effective or pleasurable. Unlike other topographical coordinates, the imagery of paths has almost entirely to do with composition, as might be expected, since the orator shapes the way of language by means of the ordering, molding, and placement of words, clauses, and periods, which the listener then pursues. Demetrius’ assessment of grand periodic usage suggests that more drawnout styles may lack the forceful topography of consistency, detail, and concision. Long clauses produce magnificence (ποιεῖ δὲ καὶ τὰ μήκη τῶν κώλων μέγεθος, 44), such as those Thucydides employs in introducing his history. Indeed, Thucydides is Demetrius’ best and favorite example of the means by which the extended, rough road accomplishes daunting effects. Building upon such long clauses, the “going around” (περιαγωγή) of periodic composition achieves an even greater sense of expansion; in his periods, Demetrius says, Thucydides “scarcely allows any pause for himself or the listener” (ἐκ τοῦ μόγις ἀναπαῦσαι αὐτόν τε καὶ τὸν ἀκούντα, 45). He chooses as his illustration of this linguistic endurance Thucydides’ description of the course of the Achelous (45, quoting Thuc. 2.102.2): ὁ γὰρ Ἀχελῷος ποταμὸς ῥέων ἐκ Πίνδου ὄρους διὰ Δολοπίας καὶ Ἀργιανῶν καὶ Ἀμφιλόχων, ἄνωθεν παρὰ Στράτον πόλιν ἐς θάλασσαν διεξιεὶς παρ' Οἰνιάδας, καὶ τὴν πόλιν αὐτοῖς περιλιμνάζων ἄπορον ποιεῖ ὑπὸ τοῦ ὕδατος ἐν χειμῶνι στρατεύεσθαι. For the Achelous river, flowing from the mountains of Pindos through Dolopia and [the land of] the Argianians and Amphilochians, passing by the city Stratos empties into the sea near Oineadae, and surrounding the town with a marsh, makes it impassable for campaigning in winter because of the floods.

The choice is a pointed one: the extended period, with its drawn-out clauses, traces the extent of the longest river in Greece. In sharp contrast to this lengthy ride down a long river, the insertion of many “rest-stops” (πολλὰς ἀναπαύλας), which one may achieve by rearranging the words and breaking up the clauses, lessens a style’s grandeur (46). We should notice that Demetrius frames Thucydides’ river of prose with the language of roads, forging such an unusually close conjunction between these schemes that his intervention seems particularly knowing and reflective. His use of the word anapaula points the way: it can mean “inn,” as it does in Aristophanes’ Frogs, with some similar play on the

2. On the road

nature of the journey (Ran. 113; cf. 185, 193). And perhaps more adjacently, in book 7 of the Republic Glaucon comes up with this same image, following Socrates’ lead on the step-by-step journey paved by instructive similes and metaphors to the Forms. This, we can recall, is the “path” of dialectic, which leads from shadows to “divine images” (φαντάσματα θεῖα) and on to what Glaucon likens to a “rest stop” on the road (ὥσπερ ὁδοῦ ἀνάπαυλα) and end of the journey (τέλος τῆς πορείας) (532e1–3). For Socrates this is where one must leave the road altogether in order to contemplate the Forms, but Demetrius has a more practical trek in mind. In charting his way toward good composition, he explains that segmenting a sentence into manageable clauses can have the effect of providing “resting places” (or “lodgings,” καταγωγαί) along the “roads” of long periods (47): καθάπερ γὰρ τὰς μακρὰς ὁδοὺς αἱ συνεχεῖς καταγωγαὶ μικρὰς ποιοῦσιν, αἱ δ' ἐρημίαι κἀν ταῖς μικραῖς ὁδοῖς ἔμφασίν τινα ἔχουσι μήκους, ταὐτὸ δὴ κἀπὶ κώλων ἂν γίγνοιτο. Thus the resting places spaced regularly make long journeys short, while deserted stretches, even when the roads are short, have the appearance of length; and the same is true of periods.

While Plato’s vibrant katagōgē in the Phaedrus serves as a more extensive and loftier metaphor, it does also provide Socrates with stylistic inspirations, most of which turn out to be sapping or dampening of effect – until, that is, they are transformed into figures for the soul’s ascendance. Compare as well Socrates’ promotion of the rigors of the “long road” of dialectic and analogizing in the Republic and second half of the Phaedrus.37 In his discussion Demetrius offers, and in fact emulates by expressing in simple, brief clauses, a prosaic version of what the rest stop can do: make the journey more accessible to all, though it may then be less strenuous and exhilarating. Thus just as deserted stretches even on short journeys feel longer, so do extended clauses contribute to the impression of length and elevate the tone. Later in his treatise Demetrius emphasizes that shorter clauses and periods suit the slight (ischnos) style, which directly opposes the grand. This punctuating of the sentence’s path makes for greater clarity, “just as some roads have many signs and many resting places” (ὥσπερ ἂν αἱ πολλὰ σημεῖα ἔχουσαι ὁδοὶ καὶ πολλὰς ἀναπαύλας) (202).38 In order to illustrate this contrast, Demetrius returns again to Thucydides’ description of the 37 38

See, e.g., the language in Phdr. 262–66 and 272–72; and further in chs. 1.1a and 4.4. Cf. Arist. Rhet. 1409a31–32 on “seeing the end” (τὸ τέλος . . . καθορᾶν); see further below.

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Achelous, but now to demonstrate how one might “make a break and give the listener a rest” (ἀπολήγειν καὶ ἀναπαύειν τὸν άκούοντα) in a long series of phrases. As with roads, so with sentences: one ought to provide both rest stops and signs if one wants to achieve lucidity in the journey. “Signposts are like guides” (ἡγεμόσι γὰρ τὰ σημεῖα ἔοικεν), Demetrius declares; without them the road will seem monotonous and hard to follow, even if it is a short one (ἡ δὲ ἀσημείωτος καὶ μονοειδής, κἂν μικρὰ ᾖ, ἄδηλος δοκεῖ) (202). Thus the speaker pursuing clarity rather than elevation should aim for the easy, well-posted path with many places to pause and look about. Elevation, in contrast, calls for the rugged climb, the rough road with few if any stops and perhaps no signs at all. The grand road, then, is manifestly not an easy one; and one might well be eager for those “inns” while laboring along its lengths. Returning to the earlier discussion and considering the original sentence in its fullness, we can notice that Thucydides describes the course of the Achelous in a series of clauses that are governed by participles dependent for their impact on the final phrase. Emulating the long course of the river itself, his sentence effectively flows forward without pauses, finally decanting in the floods that punctuate its end. There is a mimetic rigor to this phrasing, a delaying of gratification and sustaining of energy over long “stretches.” If the listener may find the ride or trek a long one, so too – in Demetrius’ conception – does the writer. Indeed, he remarks that Thucydides always seems to be “stumbling somehow, as do those traveling on rough roads” (τι προσκρούοντι, ὥσπερ οἱ τὰς τραχείας ὁδοὺς πορευόμενοι) (48). Demetrius’ treatment of Thucydides thus shows an appreciation of the hardiness and difficulty of his style, while also acknowledging its discomforts. One may achieve grandeur by a “ruggedness” of vocabulary as well as phrasing (ὥσπερ γὰρ ὄνομα τραχὺ μέγεθος ἐργάζεται, οὕτω σύνθεσις, 49), as opposed to the “smoothness and evenness” (cf. τὸ λεῖον καὶ ὁμαλές, 48) of what must by implication be the easy path. i. Dionysius on Thucydides’ hike. While I discuss the central features of Dionysius’ stylistic landscapes in Chapter 7, it seems useful to address one point of convergence here. Dionysius takes up hiking imagery similar to that of Demetrius in his essay on Thucydides’ style, written late in the first century bce, when he seeks to capture the historian’s word arrangement by means of adjectives that suggest a particular gait and route.39 Thucydides’ 39

On Dionysius on Thucydides, see Grube 1950; Pritchett 1975.

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style, he says, is “dignified, severe, compact, firm-footed, and rugged” (τὴν ἀξιωματικὴν καὶ αὐστηρὰν καὶ στιβαρὰν καὶ βεβηκυῖαν καὶ τραχύνουσαν) rather than melodious, soft, polished, and without clashing sounds (ἀντὶ τῆς λιγυρᾶς καὶ μαλακῆς καὶ συνεξεσμένης καὶ μηδὲν ἐχούσης ἀντίτυπον) (Thuc. 24.10–13). This implicitly gendered contrast conforms more or less to distinctions traditionally drawn between grand and middling or slight styles, so that Thucydides resembles a strapping warrior or hiker moving across expanses rather than, say, the idling Isocrates, whose style “seems enervated and too slow moving” (κατασκελὴς καὶ βραδυτέρα τοῦ μετρίου, Isoc. 2.13– 14). As we learn from On Composition, Thucydides’ is the austere style, which is itself firm and broad-striding: “it loves to cover great distances with big, straddling words” (μεγάλοις τε καὶ διαβεβηκόσιν εἰς πλάτος ὀνόμασιν ὡς τὰ πολλὰ μηκύνεσθαι φιλεῖ, 22.11–12). Further, in characterizing Thucydides as firm-footed rather than stumbling, Dionysius seems to be responding directly to Demetrius’ imagery and contesting the deportment that indicates its effects. He retains Demetrius’ emphasis on harshness and ruggedness, but he gives this a more positive turn by aligning it with a sure carriage. Dionysius’ assessment generally, however, indicates some hesitancy around the success of such effects. He worries that Thucydides’ style requires a lot of energy, which sometimes deserts the historian before he reaches his goal (οὐ παραμείναντος μέχρι πάντων τοῦ τόνου), while the speed of the narrative renders the style unclear (διὰ τὸ τάχος τῆς ἀπαγγελίας ἀσαφής τε ἡ λέξις γίνεται). This occurs, Dionysius claims, because Thucydides is not sufficiently aware of when to use unusual and embellished language, as well as “how far to go without stopping” (καὶ μέχρι πόσου προελθόντα πεπαῦσαι) (Thuc. 24.66–72). He also allies Thucydides’ difficult style at the outset of the essay with innovation, asserting that in his organization of material Thucydides “wished to forge a new and untrodden path” (καινὴν δέ τινα καὶ ἀτριβῆ τοῖς ἄλλοις πορευθῆναι βουληθεὶς ὁδὸν, 9.19–20). But he is not a fan of the result, since this novel orchestration leads to obscurity. In keeping with this sense that such rough roads make trouble for the traveler, Dionysius criticizes Thucydides’ use of figures by remarking that their preponderance often render his prose “tortuous and difficult to follow” (σκολιὰ καὶ δυσπαρακολούθητα, 29.1–2). This can in its elaborations verge on the dithyrambic (29. 22–23). Bear in mind that “dithyrambic” is a strikingly common stylistic contrast or attribution among theorists on style, with possible roots in fifth-century critiques of the “new music” (which often focused on writers of dithyrambs), as well as in Socrates’ arch claim about his own heightened style in Plato’s Phaedrus discussed in

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Chapter 4 (section 2).40 As I treat further in Chapter 7 (section 3b), Dionysius picks up on this trend and warns of such dangers in the grander phrasing and rhythms of Plato as well (Dem. 7.20–51). Demetrius is also among those who associate dithyrambic modes with this type of stylistic excess: in distinguishing usage suited to the grand style, he cautions that while metaphors beyond all other elements can make for impressive diction, one ought to avoid crowding them together, lest one end up writing dithyrambs (μὴ μέντοι πυκναῖς, ἐπεί τοι διθύραμβον ἀντὶ λόγου γράφομεν, De eloc. 78).41 Thus the rugged path may – by virtue of its extended clauses, penchant for figures, and too rhythmic phrasing – become a perversely arduous route, not merely lofty and hard to scale but obscure and impeding.

b. Demetrius on hiker and hike In his traversing of the spaces of metaphor Demetrius often highlights the walker more than the walk. In these cases as well the emphasis falls on how certain lexical choices and/or rhythms are shaped by the writer and affect the listener, and here as well the images run from the grander to the slighter ends of the stylistic scale. When addressing word order suited to megaloprepeia, for instance, Demetrius describes how Homer describes the Cyclops, appropriating the poet’s own “ascent” from the huge creature to the mountain top (De eloc. 52): Καὶ Ὅμηρος δὲ ἐπὶ τοῦ Κύκλωπος ἀεὶ ἐπαύξει τὴν ὑπερβολήν, καὶ ἐπανιόντι ἐπ’ αὐτῆς ⟨ἔοικεν⟩, οἷον οὐ γὰρ ἐῴκει ἀνδρί γε σιτοφάγῳ, ἀλλὰ ῥίῳ ὑλήεντι, καὶ προσέτι ὑψηλοῦ ὄρους καὶ ὑπερφαινομένου τῶν ἄλλων ὀρῶν. And Homer, in describing the Cyclops, keeps augmenting the hyperbole and seems to climb ever higher with it: “For he was not like men who eat bread, but like a wooded summit,” and further [the summit] of the highest mountain and one towering over the other mountains. 40

41

E.g., Arist. Rhet. 1406b2, 1409a25; Cic. De orat. 3.185; Hor. Od. 4.2.10; DH Dem. 7.20–22; Pl. Phdr. 238d3. Note, however, that Demetrius’ reference focuses only on lexical/phrasing choices and not on rhythm, which both the Platonic passage and that of Dionysius seem to include. Demetrius does find another poetic rhythm suited to the grand style: the metrical unit known as the paean (De eloc. 38–40).

2. On the road

The lines that Demetrius is paraphrasing from Homer, “[the peak] of the highest mountains, which appears without equal among the others” (ὑψηλῶν ὀρέων, ὅ τε φαίνεται οἷον ἀπ’ ἄλλων, Od. 9.192), sustains this sense of scaling heights step by step, which Demetrius’ own language echoes. And in keeping with Demetrius’ notion that the grand style appropriately treats large, weighty topics, the massive Cyclops is effectively scaled in a deliberately incremental and sustained manner by Homer’s tracing of a topography that is singularly imposing. Redoubling this, Demetrius marches his topic, the grand style, up the path of a similarly incremental and sustained periodic style. Here a sense that likeness makes for good style pervades all aspects of the mode, so that the theory approves the poetic style that matches the topic using the measure of scale, and the theoretical mode itself retraces this lofty terrain. Vividness (enargeia), a desirable effect for more refined styles, and forcefulness (deinotēs) also have their paces, and Demetrius echoes these as well in his own deliberate pacing or rushing tempo, reproducing the latter by means of the simile of running downhill.42 Thus one may achieve vividness in simpler modes by “moving gradually and step by reluctant step”43 (καὶ κατὰ μίκρον καὶ κατὰ βραχὺ προιὼν μόλις, 216) before revealing a shocking point. Or, in contrast, writers may be “swept along by the subjects themselves, like those running down a slope” (ὥσπερ οἱ τὰς καταβάσεις τρέχοντες, ὑπ’ αὐτῶν ἑλκόμενοι τῶν πραγμάτων, 248); this can achieve forceful phrasing. Pacing depends largely on the shaping of periods, and Demetrius envisions periods generally as giving contour and rhythm to prose by means that are repeatedly analogized to the body’s movements. Near the beginning of his treatise, Demetrius adduces Aristotle’s description of the shape of the period as a track in which the runners see the goal before their eyes at the outset (ὥσπερ οἱ δρομεῖς ἀφεθέντες· καὶ γὰρ ἐκείνων συνεμφαίνεται τῇ ἀρχῇ τοῦ δρόμου τὸ τέλος).44 Demetrius’ basic definition underscores not just the running but also the path: “Hence it was called ‘period,’ being an image of paths that have a circular shape and go round” (ἔνθεν καὶ περίοδος ὠνομάσθη, ἀπεικασθεῖσα ταῖς ὁδοῖς ταῖς κυκλοειδέσι καὶ περιωδευμέναις) (De eloc. 11). Further, he conjoins the shape of the path with that of the “runner’s” body, urging that the “compact and circular” (συνεστραμμένον . . . καὶ κυκλικόν) shaping

42 43 44

See Nünlist 2009: 194–98 on the importance of the concept of enargeia for the scholiasts. This is the Innes translation (1995a). Cf. Arist. Rhet. 1409a31–34. Note that Aristotle is discussing what he terms the “free-running style” (λέξιν . . . εἰρομένην, 1409a24); he notes, “Everyone likes to see the stopping place” (τὸ γὰρ τέλος πάντες βουλούνται καθορᾶν, 1409a31–32).

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of words should be reiterated in the deportment of the speaker: his well-rounded mouth and hand gestures should echo the rhythm of his periods (καὶ δεόμενον στρογγύλου στόματος καὶ χειρὸς συμπεριαγομένης τῷ ῥυθμῷ) (19). Much later on, when discussing forcefulness (deinotēs), Demetrius introduces a periodic cadence that he calls the “ladder” (κλῖμαξ), in which the sentence “almost seems to be climbing higher and higher” (σχέδον γὰρ ἐπαναβαίνοντι ὁ λόγος ἔοικεν ἐπὶ μειζόνων μείζονα) (270), the phrase μειζόνων μείζονα again imitating this rung-to-rung movement. He instances Demosthenes’ On the Crown (179) in which the speaker seems to be advancing step by step through his past actions, so that critique and example perform as one.

c. Lucian’s parodic turn At the opening of his treatise on oratory Quintilian remarks that those who strive for heights have a better chance of reaching the summit than those who despair at the outset. This finds its insouciant echo in Lucian’s parodic portrait of educational tracks, which like Prodicus’ tale of Heracles’ choice more overtly conjoins the nature of the path and the deportment of the hiker.45 In his “dialogue” A Teacher of Orators, Lucian depicts the choice of programs as that between decidedly different roads (ὁδούς, 1). The one is “rough, steep, and sweaty” (τραχεῖάν τινα οὐδὲ ὄρθιον καὶ ἱδρῶτος μεστήν), laborious (καματηράν), and basically hopeless (ἀπεγνωσμένην) – the path that, as Lucian notes, Hesiod already pointed out very well (ἤδη Ἡσίοδος εὖ μάλα ἀποδείξας αὐτήν).46 The other is short and sweet (ἡδίστην τε ἅμα καὶ ἐπιτομωτάτων), a leisurely, even luxurious jaunt along a well-shaded, sloping bridle-path through flowering fields (ἱππήλατον καὶ κατάντη σὺν πολλῇ τῇ θυμηδίᾳ καὶ τρυφῇ διὰ λειμώνων εὐανθῶν καὶ σκιᾶς ἀκριβοῦς σχολῇ) (3). As Aristophanes does in Clouds, Lucian highlights the visible contrasts between those on different educational tracks. The guide on the rough road has a manly stride, a hard body, and a dark tan (ὑπόσκληρος, ἀνδρώδης τὸ βάδισμα, πολὺν τὸν ἥλιον ἐπὶ τῷ σώματι). He is also a fool (μάταιος) who talks a lot of twaddle (λήρους τινάς) (9). The guide on the easy road is a terribly clever and completely gorgeous man (πάνσοφον τινα καὶ πάγκαλον ἄνδρα), with a mincing gait, a slender neck, a womanly glance, 45

46

Quint. Inst. orat. 1.18–20: Altius tamen ibunt qui ad summa nitentur quam qui praesumpta desperatione quo velint evadendi protinus circa ima substiterint. Lucian’s coordination of these effects is spread across Rhet. praec. 1–7. Cf. Luc. Menip. 4.18–20; Hermot. 2.17–19.

2. On the road

and a honeyed voice (διασεσαλευμένον το βάδισμα, ἐπικεκλασμένον τὸν αὐχένα, γυναικεῖον τὸ βλέμμα, μελιχρὸν τὸ φώνημα). Though he hasn’t much of it, he carefully arranges his curly, black hair (ὀλίγας μὲν ἔτι, οὔλας δὲ καὶ ὑακινθίνας τὰς τρίχας εὐθετίζονται).47 He is, the speaker claims, “a perfect Agathon – that charming writer of tragedies” (αὐτὸν Ἀγάθωνα, τὸν τῆς τραγῳδίας ἐπέραστον ἐκεῖνον ποιητήν) (11). Lucian’s educational tracks and their hikers, more vividly than the stylistic paths that Demetrius and Dionysius chart, highlight terrains and deportments that indicate a dubious realm of appetite and indulgence. Verbal habits fall together with the topography of paths, in part through posing bodies along routes in ways that reiterate comic patterns. What emerges ultimately is a something like a demographics of style, which tracks the characteristics and distributions of bodies in relation to both urban and rural geographies. It should be a familiar notion by now that inhabitants are matched to particular landscapes, and not only by their abilities to master their resources. They may also embody aspects of these settings and/or be vulnerable to their charms. Think especially of how Aristophanes and Plato orchestrate meaningful convergences of particular landscapes with style and bodily inclination – so that, for instance, the grand and earthy Aeschylus belongs in his lofty meadow, while the city-loving Socrates tries to resist country pleasures.48 As I discuss above, Prodicus’ tale of Vice and Virtue fashions out of Hesiod’s contrasting moral paths more explicit intersections of bodies, topographies, and verbal styles. These are the conjunctions that Demetrius and Dionysius turn to analytical use; and it may well be the accretion of “instructional” coordinations of hiker and hike that encouraged Lucian’s parody. A striking modern turn on this imagery takes place in The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Proust’s novel, which reiterates the trope from Swann’s Way (vol. 1) of paths taken or not. The Baron de Charlus, whom many regard to be Proust’s most colorful character, appears first in the second volume (Under the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower). There, when the young narrator observes the baron languishing self-consciously outside his hotel, he thinks that his outlandish look and contrived nonchalance 47

48

The portrait recalls Archilochus’ picture (fr. 114 W2) of the swaggering general with the elaborate facial hair vs. the plain man of firm step whom the poet admires. Cf. also Pl. Rep 540c3–4, where Glaucon says that Socrates has made his philosopher-kings “completely gorgeous” (παʋκάλους). Note that the schemes may also be inverted. In Clouds, for instance, the image of the soft meadow with fragrant trees is invoked by the Stronger Logos (who should be the more upright and tough) in his dreamy description of the parkland setting of the Academy (Nub. 1004–08). Thus the old educational system is situated in a softer and more gently appealing setting but makes bodies tough, as opposed to the new system more oriented by urban coordinates, which fosters brutal attitudes but enervating habits. See further in Worman 2008: ch. 2.

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indicates that he is a thief.49 In The Guermantes Way Charlus, who by this point has become a figure of fascination for the narrator, tells him that he prefers to cultivate the “human plant” (“arbuste humain,” II.581). A bit later in this same conversation, Charlus offers the narrator a choice that he terms “like Heracles at the crossroads” (“comme Hercule . . . au carrefour de deux routes”), although he also jokes that his young friend may not have the “musculature” for it (“vous ne me semblez pas avoir la forte musculature”) (II.592). The choice is that of himself as suitable guide and companion in society. The narrator later describes Charlus’ inclinations as those of a homosexual aesthete with none of the virtues of ancients like Plato and Theocritus, a makeup-wearing dandy of overly refined sensibilities but many artistic talents (III.710–12). Despite Charlus’ joke about muscles, then, the route he offers the narrator would appear to be the easy path, the one offered by Prodicus’ Kakia and Lucian’s “perfect Agathon.”

3. Going with the flow As previous chapters reveal, the metaphors that illuminate notions of inspiration and verbal fluidity are quite varied in their sources. Most are derived from some aspect of water: think of the Muses’ dew in Hesiod (Th. 84), the Nymph’s spring in Pindar (O. 6.84–85), Cratinus’ river of words (fr. 198 K–A), and Callimachus’ pure stream (HAp. 110–12). As these images suggest, “flow” metaphors frequently conjoin nature’s waters (rivers, springs, floods, etc.) with those who might drink them or who, already having done so, pour forth smoothly or powerfully. Sometimes honey or wine comes in, on analogy with or in contrast to water’s effects, as in Hesiod the Muses’ dew makes for honeyed speech and in Cratinus the verbal flood bursts forth like wine from an unstoppered flask. Other metaphors center more fully on the natural setting, as do Callimachus’ stream and similar tropes in Plato and later theorists. As discussed below, Plato also adds oil to this mix (Tht. 144b5), as well as shifting the organ receiving this flow: the ear (Rep. 411a5–6). Unsurprisingly, Plato’s use of this metaphor and that of irrigation (also addressed below) are reanimated by the theorists. Although I save some of my discussion of flowing styles for Chapter 7 (section 2), since Cicero and Dionysius make extensive use of metaphors derived from streams and 49

Proust [1922] 1987–89: II.111. The references that follow are to this volume.

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rivers, below I take up the images that more explicitly coordinate bodies with style’s fluidity. Most of the troping on fluidity among the theorists aims at distinguishing smooth, elegant “streams” from roiling or sluggish “rivers”; here I focus on instances in which the metaphors are more attuned to human inventions such as funneling and irrigating as well as those natural flows that parallel them.

a. Demetrius on Plato’s rhythmic flow As the previous section demonstrates, for Demetrius periodic pacing may embrace both phrasing and the body, whether actual (by evoking delivery styles) or figurative (by analogies to running, walking, and climbing). This pacing also involves rhythm, but largely that which lies in the shaping of clauses rather than in syllabic metrics, since this would bring prose too close to poetry. This Demetrius makes clear at the outset of his treatise: “Just as poetry is organized by metrical units . . . , so is prose expression organized and divided by what are called clauses” (Ὥσπερ ἡ ποίησις διαιρεῖται τοῖς μέτροις . . . οὕτω καὶ τὴν ἑρμηνείαν τὴν λογικὴν διαιρεῖͅ καὶ διακρίνει τὰ καλούμενα κῶλα, 1). We can notice, however, that the paean’s meter seems to be one exception to this restriction, since Demetrius regards it as suited to the grand style (De eloc. 39). And further on, in discussing how elegance (to glaphuron) may come from composition, a process that, he says, is not easy to describe, he argues that integrating metrical units into clauses may produce pleasure and charm (central effects of the elegant style), but not if they are apparent in the flow of the sentences (οὐ μὴν ὥστε φαίνεσθαι αὐτὰ μέτρα ἐν τῷ συνειρμῷ τῶν λόγων, 180). The charm of this device is surreptitious, since it “steals over” (παραδύεται) the listener; it is a favorite, Demetrius remarks, with the Peripatetics and Plato (181). An example from Aristotle’s student Dicaearchus begins the series of examples: ἐν Ἐλέᾳ . . . τῆς Ἰταλίας πρεσβύτην ἤδη τὴν ἡλικίαν ὄντα (‟In Elea in Italy, when he was already old in years”). This phrasing has a “certain metrical shape” (μετροειδές τι), which is masked by the smooth flow of the words (ὑπὸ δὲ τοῦ εἱρμοῦ καὶ τῆς συναφείας κλέπτεται μὲν τὸ μετρικόν) (182). Demetrius, accordingly, applauds Plato’s smooth effects, when he describes how his elegance often comes from the rhythm itself (αὐτῳ τῷ ῥυθμῷ γλαφυρός ἐστιν), since his clauses “seem to have a certain slipperiness and to be neither metrical nor unmetrical” (οἷον ὀλίσθῳ τινὶ ἔοικε τὰ κῶλα, καὶ οὔτ’ ἐμμέτροις παντάπασιν οὔτ’ ἀμέτροις). His prose rhythm is drawn out (ἐκτεταμένῳ), though not “heavy or long” (οὔτε ἕδραν . . . οὔτε

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μῆκος) (183). This measured drawing out of phrases contrasts with the weight and length that are the preserve of the elevated style, while this leisurely rhythm has a kind of liquid charm. Demetrius’ examples are revealing, and in keeping with his tendency – shared, again, by other theorists – to reproduce the effects of the writer he is discussing, as well as sometimes their subject matter.50 Thus in the discussion on Plato’s smooth rhythms (De eloc. 183–85), and at a significant juncture earlier on (De eloc. 50), Demetrius invokes the passage from the Republic in which Plato disparages certain musical styles as too lax and fluid (398e, 411a). In the earlier discussion addressing the grand style, Demetrius also makes use of Plato’s description of musical effects. He argues that this impressive mode ought to be vivid (ἐναργῆ); “otherwise,” he says, “we will seem to have lost vigor [and as it were collapsed from strength into weakness]” (εἰ δὲ μή, δόξομεν ἐξησθενηκέναι [οἷον καταπεπτωκέναι ἀπὸ ἰσχυροτέρου ἐπὶ ἀσθενές], 50). This is a complex maneuver: Demetrius’ metaphor and its extension (likely by a scholiast) convert Plato’s image of the unstrung music lover (cf. χαλαραί, Rep. 398e10) into a stylistic judgment that furnishes a negative contrast to Plato’s own effects.51 As opposed to the “weakened” style he warns against, Demetrius finds rigorous Plato’s use of a second more vivid verb in a clause from the Republic passage, “when a man lets music play over him and flood into his soul through his ears as through a funnel” (ὅταν μέν τις μουσικῇ παρέχῃ καταυλεῖν καὶ καταχεῖν τῆς ψυχὴς διὰ τῶν ὤτων ὥσπερ διὰ χώνης, Rep. 411a5–6).52 An additional example reinforces the point: “But when the flood fails to stop and enchants him, at that point he melts and liquefies” (ὅταν δὲ καταχέων μὴ ἀνῇ, ἀλλὰ κηλῇ, τὸ δὴ μετὰ τοῦτο ἤδη τήκει καὶ λείβει, 411b1–2). From Demetrius’ perspective, Plato’s positioning of the verbs demonstrates his mastery of a grand effect, a vibrant contrast with the philosopher’s own criticism of smooth, flowing musical styles. But when Demetrius addresses Plato’s own fluid rhythms (183–85), his choice of adjectives and examples leans precisely on phrases in Plato’s critique that demonstrate the extent to which he shares in this smooth, flowing style. First we can notice that Demetrius emphasizes some different 50

51

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E.g., Dionysius exploits the imagery of Homer and Plato in this way; see further in ch. 7.2b and 3b. The phrase that the editors bracket is in the manuscripts; though it is likely a gloss, it nevertheless indicates an ancient awareness of the implications of ἐξησθενηκέναι as a metaphor for style. Demetrius’ quotation is a little off, but not importantly so: he writes ἐπάν for ὅταν; and omits τῆς ψυχής.

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phrases, and one in particular that echoes the kinds of charming effects that he has been discussing: “warbling and radiant with song he passes his whole life” (μινυρίζων τε καὶ γεγανωμένος ὑπὸ τῆς ᾠδῆς διατελεῖ τὸν βίον ὅλον, De eloc. 184, quoting Rep. 411a8–9). Second, in demonstrating elegant rhythm, Demetrius quotes not only from this same passage but also from one slightly earlier (and also mentioned above, section 1a), in which Socrates argues that the ideal city has need only of simpler instruments: the lyre and kithara in town and the pipes in the country (λύρα δή σοί, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, καὶ κιθάρα λείπεται καὶ κατὰ πόλιν χρήσιμα. καὶ αὖ κατ’ ἀγροὺς τοῖς νομεῦσι σύριγξ ἄν τις εἴη, De eloc. 185, quoting Rep. 399d7–9). The phrases from both passages address musical effects; and in both Demetrius imitates the sound while slightly altering the cadences of Plato’s phrasing. Note, for instance, the way Demetrius’ phrase τινὰ ἦχον σύριγγος maintains the long notes of Plato’s (σύριγξ ἄν τις εἴη), as he is arguing that Plato’s own language imitates the instruments he discusses by its “stretching and lengthening” (i.e., of the clause and syllables: τῇ γὰρ ἐκτάσει καὶ τῷ μήκει πάνυ χαριέντως μεμίμηται τρόπον τινὰ ἦχον σύριγγος, 185). Thus the critique emulates the effects that are its subject, itself reproducing Plato’s mimetic technique. Plato may warn against the dangers of such effects, but Demetrius’ aim is to reveal how they are achieved, indicating his knowledge of this by echoing them. Rather than accuse Demetrius of obtuseness, I would argue that his use of Plato’s vivid language to demonstrate both grand and smooth modes is in keeping with the sense that good composition should carefully intermix styles. As far as Demetrius is concerned, Plato’s style, by turns forceful and fluid, serves as an efficient mimetic tool for setting forth his ideas about music and musical styles; and thus his own imitation of Plato’s (musical) style should be effectively rhythmical and fluid as well. Hence the supplementary movement that this imitative troping generates: Demetrius’ bold mimesis produces additional metaphors, as with the “slippery” phrases and “stretched” clauses or syllables, which play on Plato’s images of slackening, funneling, and melting without precisely repeating them. I want to recall here as well that in “White Mythology” Derrida recognizes what Demetrius puts into practice, which is that the theory of metaphor as a potentially risky detour is itself also implicated in the discourse of the theorist. As Derrida puts it, the workings of metaphor always throw off the supplementary image that cannot be reduced to plain language.53 Whatever dangers Aristotle and Demetrius themselves might 53

Derrida [1972] 1982: 271.

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identify in metaphor, their own language does not strip away the poetic and oratorical features that they analyze; rather, it generates further parallel features. i. Longinus and Dionysius on slippery effects. Pindar calls kicking against the goad a “slippery path” (ὀλισθηρὸς οἶμος, P. 2.95), and although Demetrius approves of Plato’s “slipperiness” (cf. olisthos at De eloc. 183), there are some indications among ancient theorists and critics that the fluid, elegant style can have troubling consequences, as the imagery addressed in Chapter 7 (section 2) also reveals. Like Demetrius, Longinus depicts Plato’s techniques by recourse to the imagery of flow, making use of the trope of irrigation on the one hand and slippery or oily fluidity on the other. The two metaphors point in different directions stylistically, but it seems useful to consider them one after another here, since they each highlight a distinct aspect of the same continuum. The first image is one that picks up on Demetrius’ description of a smoothly gliding style: Plato’s words, says Longinus, “flow in a sort of noiseless stream” (τινὶ χεύματι ἀψοφητὶ ῥέων, 13.1). This metaphor, again, comes directly from Plato; not only does Socrates suggest it in the passage discussed above (Rep. 411a, see also below), but more directly in the Theaetetus he likens the eponymous young man’s learning process favorably to the inaudibly smooth flow of oil (οἷον ἐλαίου ῥεῦμα ἀψοφητὶ ῥέοντος, 144b5). The Republic passage, in contrast, depicts this type of fluid effect as distracting and softening; but while it uses the imagery of flowing, funneling, and melting, it does not directly reference oil. In Homer olive oil is a positive image, denoting rich stores and the lavish care of one’s body and possessions.54 The theorists appear to press instead on the turn Plato gives the substance, emphasizing its fluidity and imperceptible movement, but this quality of richness may also subtend the stylistic implications. That is to say, while for these writers on style there are many different types of flows, including rushing rivers and floods, this oily stream indicates a mode that is perhaps a little too luxuriant, smooth, and subtle. Accordingly, many of these implications concern not Plato but Isocrates, whose signature feature is fluidity. As I discuss more fully in Chapter 7, Cicero describes his style as sweet, loose, and flowing (dulce . . . et solutum et fluens Orat. 42, cf. 39). For Dionysius as for Cicero it is his periodic style that especially echoes the effects of both waterways and oil’s imperceptible flow. Isocrates’ lack of conciseness can make his periodic rhythms like a sluggish river; but these may also be smooth and soft (λεῖον καὶ μαλακόν) 54

E.g., Il. 23.281; Od. 2.339, 6.79, 7.107.

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as well as languid (ὑγρά), since they flow into the ears of the audience like oil (ὥσπερ ἔλαιον) (Dem. 20.39–43).55

b. Demetrius and others on style’s diversions The second metaphor involves a singularly well-sustained trope of fluidity that Demetrius shares with other stylistic theorists. It comes directly from Homer, and as such is a superb example of the mimetic theorizing that I am tracing here. In a moment of intense drama toward the end of the Iliad, when Achilles is running from the onslaught of the river Scamander, whose waters he has glutted with Trojan corpses, the poet stills the forward rush of the action with a domesticating simile (Il. 21.257–62): ὡς δ' ὅτ' ἀνὴρ ὀχετηγὸς ἀπὸ κρήνης μελανύδρου ἂμ φυτὰ καὶ κήπους ὕδατι ῥόον ἡγεμονεύῃ χερσὶ μάκελλαν ἔχων, ἀμάρης ἐξ ἔχματα βάλλων· τοῦ μέν τε προρέοντος ὑπὸ ψηφῖδες ἅπασαι ὀχλεῦνται· τὸ δέ τ' ὦκα κατειβόμενον κελαρύζει χώρῳ ἔνι προαλεῖ, φθάνει δέ τε καὶ τὸν ἄγοντα· As when a man drawing off from a dark-watered spring guides the flow of water among his plants and garden plots holding a pick-axe in his hand, tossing obstructions from the channel; and from the flow of water all the pebbles are swept away, and swiftly the trickle rushes forth in a steep spot, and overtakes even the one directing it . . .

Unlike many more famous Homeric similes, this one appears to furnish later writers with a particular critical distinction: that of the contrast, and indeed contest, between the full-rushing, natural stream and the human hand that attempts artificially to divert it. This is a remarkable moment in the poem. The placement of the pause itself suggests the trope of the poet as gardener, in that it demonstrates his attempt at controlling the turn that the simile effects in the “natural” flow of the plot.56 This pointed moment of human artifice may be reflected in Pindar’s likening of his song to a wave that sweeps pebbles along (O. 10.9–12, νῦν 55

56

For Dionysius, the austere style represents the opposite of “imperceptibly slipping into the ear”: οὐδ’ ἔστιν εὐεπὴς καὶ μαλακὴ καὶ λεληθότως ὀλισθάνουσα διὰ τῆς ἀκοῆς, De comp. verb. 22.26– 28. See Hunter 2012: 7 on the image that he terms the “silent stream”; cf. also 156–58. Vergil transforms Homer’s simile into a simple description of agricultural process (Georg. 1.104–110), closely translating the passage and, according to Thomas 1986: 178–79, assuming that his audience will recall the context of the simile and thus understand that his description also indicates that man is in a warlike struggle with nature.

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ψᾶφον ἑλισσομέναν | ὁπᾷ κῦμα κατακλύσσει ῥέον, | ὁπᾷ τε κοινὸν λογον | φίλαν τείσομεν ἐς χάριν) and of the poet’s promise to direct the flow of his victor’s reputation (N. 7.62–63, ὕδατος ὥτε ῥοὰς φίλον ἐς ἄνδρ' ἄγων | κλέος ἐτήτυμον αἰνέσω), but these connections are more tenuous than others.57 I point out in Chapters 2 and 4 that the Presocratic philosopherpoet Empedocles appears to be the main thinker – counting the poets, sophists, and philosophers before Plato – who inclines toward the imagery of irrigation as a means of invoking inspirational forces and indicating technical choices in poetic composition. And in fact some of his language does resemble Pindar’s. As mentioned in Chapter 1 (section 3), Empedocles begins his poem on natural philosophy by calling upon the gods to “channel a pure stream from holy mouths” (ἐκ δ' ὁσίων στομάτων καθαρὴν ὀχετεύσατε πηγήν, fr. 3.2 D–K) to help along his composition. This prefaces an invocation to the Muses, Pindaric-sounding references to “flowers of well-received honor” (εὐδόξοιο ἄνθεα τιμῆς) and sitting on wisdom’s “heights” (σοφίης ἐπ’ ἄκροισι θοάζειν) (3.3–7), and an injunction to trust whatever path of understanding (ὁπόσηι πόρος . . . νοῆσαι) seems most lucid (3.8–12).58 Later on, when describing the central vortex that led to the initial mixing of elements in the cosmos, he introduces it by declaring, “But I shall turn back to the path of song that I traced before, channeling one discourse after another” (αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ παλίνορσος ἐλεύσομαι ἐς πόρον ὕμνων, | τὸν πρότερον κατέλεξα, λόγου λόγον ἐξοχετεύων, fr. 35.1–2 D–K). As Chapter 4 indicates, Plato’s figurative and descriptive uses of such images forge a crucial link between the poets and the theorists, in the process by which the imagery of the former becomes the critical vocabulary of the latter. These theorists engage with the cluster of “watering” effects in different ways. Demetrius directly quotes Homer’s irrigation passage, as an example of how inclusive description can make for the vividness effective in slight (ischnos) styles (De eloc. 209): “For this [passage] has vividness from relaying all the details and leaving nothing aside” (τὸ γὰρ ἐναργὲς ἐκ τοῦ πάντα εἰρῆσθαι τὰ συμβαίνοντα καὶ μὴ παραλελεῖφθαι μηδέν). Demetrius’ notion, blandly expressed as it is, nevertheless seems prompted by the Homeric scene’s emphasis on sweeping everything up in the forward rush of the stream. His introduction of this passage to indicate a 57

58

See Hardie 1891: 191. On the diversion imagery in relation to poetry more generally, see esp. Nünlist 1998: 186–89; on Longinus, see Russell 1964: 116. On the “land rights” cast of Roman diversions, see Volk 2010. See chs. 1.2b and 4.3b on Empedocles’ broader importance for Plato’s sense of natural orderings.

3. Going with the flow

technique for slight styles, however, clashes somewhat with the crowded, forward rush of the simile as well as with the tendency of the other writers to associate diverting with richness of imagery and therefore grandeur. But for Demetrius the vividness of the passage appears to come from the abundance of tangible details that the simile offers, as opposed to the extravagant phrasing and figurative expressions that mark grand styles. An example from Plato’s Protagoras shows the difference: a few sections later Demetrius quotes Socrates’ opening narrative, when he is awakened by his companion Hippocrates and, in questioning him about his motives in going to see Protagoras, notes, “He was blushing, for there was already a first glimmer of daylight to reveal him” (ἐρυθριάσας, ἤδη γὰρ ὑπέφηνέν τι ἠμέρας, ὥστε καταφανῆ αὐτὸν γενέσθαι, Prt. 312a2–3).59 Demetrius remarks, “The vividness is the result of his careful use of words” (ἡ δ’ ἐνάργεια γέγονεν ἐκ τῆς φροντίδος τῆς περὶ τὸν λόγον) and being mindful that it was night (De eloc. 217). As Chapter 7 explores in more detail, in On Imitation Dionysius uses a generic image of irrigation for a more clearly Empedoclean notion of inspiration and emulation. His portrayal of the writer’s mimetic engagement attempts to rival his predecessors in their representing it as a gardener’s job: “gathering from many springs his own particular flow, he diverts this into his soul” (καὶ καθάπερ ἐκ πολλῶν ναμάτων ἕν τι συγκομίσας ῥεῦμα τοῦτ' εἰς τὴν ψυχὴν μετοχετεύσῃ, fr. 31.1.12–16). We can recognize that the image of drawing off from springs as sources of inspiration is also in the Phaedrus (235c8–d1), but Dionysius does not directly implicate Empedocles or Plato as his own source of “irrigation.” In the treatise on Demosthenes, he uses a slightly different trope to tease Plato for his stylistic failings. When he considers a passage in which he thinks Plato falls flat, he exclaims archly, “Gods and demons! Where is the rich Platonic fountain that bubbles out great elaborations?” (ὦ θεοὶ καὶ δαίμονες, ποῦ τὸ Πλατωνικὸν νᾶμα τὸ πλούσιον καὶ τὰς μεγάλας κατασκευὰς καχλάζον;). This is, of course, itself a suitably elaborate (and wryly Socratic) image, which Dionysius follows up with a pointed literary critical reference to the comic poet Cratinus’ famous self-description of his abundant eloquence (ῥεῖ τὸ δωδεκάκρουνον ἐκεῖνο στόμα τοῦ σοφοῦ, Dem. 28.35).60 Longinus further revises diversion metaphors when promoting mimesis and advancing Plato as the consummate imitator. For Longinus, Plato is 59

60

Cf. DH Lys. 7.1–2, where Lysias’ vibrancy comes from his use of details that appeal to the senses (αὕτη δ’ ἐστὶ δύναμίς τις ὑπὸ τὰς αἰσθήσεις ἄγουσα τὰ λεγόμενα, γίγνεται δ’ ἐκ τῆς τῶν παρακολουθούντων λήψεως). Crat. fr. 198 K–A; cf. Ar. Ran. 526–28. See further in ch. 3.4.

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the one author who indicates “another path” (ἅλλη ὁδός) to grandeur: imitation and emulation of the great poets and prose writers of the past (τῶν ἔμπροσθεν μεγάλων συγγραφέων καὶ ποιητῶν μίμησίς τε καὶ ζήλωσις). And in a direct echo of Empedocles, he envisions this process as a fluid one: “Streams of a sort are borne from the holy mouths of the ancients into the souls of the emulators” (εἰς τὰς τῶν ζηλούντων ἐκείνους ψυχὰς ὡς ἀπὸ ἱερῶν στομίων ἀπόρροιαί τινες φέρονται) (13.2).61 As mentioned, Longinus also identifies Plato as the consummate diverter of Homeric streams: the great epic poet may have similarly inspired other writers, but Plato “drew off ten thousand channels from the Homeric spring” (ἀπὸ τοῦ Ὁμηρικοῦ κείνου νάματος εἰς αὑτον μυρίας ὅσας παρατροπὰς ἀποχετευσάμενος, De sublim. 13.3). Further along in his treatise Longinus demonstrates a very significant way in which Plato amply displays the rich results of channeling such resources. The champion of the grand style defends a fulsome deployment of metaphor, against Aristotle’s, Theophrastus’, and Demetrius’ cautions about its dangers. Longinus maintains that if metaphors, even many of them, are used with timely, strong emotions and a genuine sublimity (τὰ εὔκαιρα καὶ σφοδρὰ πάθη καὶ τὸ γενναῖον ὕψος), these very figures “by the surge of their movement naturally sweep and propel everything else along” (τῷ ῥοθίῳ τῆς φορᾶς ταυτὶ πέφυκεν ἅπαντα τἆλλα παρασύρειν καὶ προωθεῖν) (De sublim. 32.4). Longinus’ best examples of this forward rush are, very nicely for us, the passages from the Timaeus in which Socrates envisions the body by turns as a city with alleyways and buildings, and as a rural space with streams, a garden, and a system of irrigation (De sublim. 32.5, paraphrasing Tim. 85e): διωχέτευσαν τὸ σῶμα, τέμνοντες ὥσπερ ἐν κήποις ὀχετούς, ὡς ἔκ τινος νάματος ἐπίοντος, ἀραιοῦ ὄντος αὐλῶνος τοῦ σώματος, τὰ τῶν φλεβῶν ῥέοι νάματα.62 [The gods] irrigated the body, just like runnels in gardens, so that the body being a narrow conduit, the streams of the veins could flow as from a forward-flowing stream.

For Longinus, then, Plato’s style perfects an irrigation system in which streams are artfully diverted from the source and transformed into 61

62

Note that it is also a contentious one: Plato wrangles with Homer like an eager agonistēs (13.3), an image that recalls the competition and striving contained in the ancient notion of “criticism.” The Timaeus passage does not, as might be expected, repeat νάμα in this awkward manner: τὸ σῶμα αὐτὸ ἡμῶν διωχέτευσαν τέμνοντες οἷον ἐν κήποις ὀχετούς, ἵνα ὥσπερ ἐκ νάματος ἐπιόντος ἄρδοιτο (77c7–9).

3. Going with the flow

something both seamless and forceful. Although Longinus then acknowledges that like “all the other beautiful features of style” (τἆλλα πάντα καλὰ ἐν λόγοις, 32.7) metaphors can charm writers into overuse, his language clearly echoes the Homeric passage while his crowd of metaphors has itself the effect of a rushing stream. He thus demonstrates by his own usage that which he explicates: the beauty embedded in composition, here the force and sublimity of metaphor. All three critics regard Plato’s style as polished, fluid, and at times elaborate and bold; and all three indicate in their different ways their awareness of the irrigation imagery and its relevance to distinguishing styles. Together they make up a full complement of critical reception. Demetrius directly implicates the ultimate source, Homer’s superbly placed simile, in his stylistic scheme, urging that vibrancy depends on the details and including Plato in his examples. Dionysius directly draws from the “springs of inspiration” and the “channeling” imagery in Empedocles and Plato’s Phaedrus to model the mimetic process. Finally, Longinus directly paraphrases Plato’s irrigation imagery as a sublime example of the philosopher’s “channeling” of Homer, which he then demonstrates by reproducing its grand effects. Once again Demetrius seems to me to make the influential move, by calling forth the Homeric simile in the first place as an instance of stylistic vibrancy. This, in combination with his emphasis on Plato’s fluid rhythms, sets up effects among which later theorists can draw more pointed connections.

c. Horace, Quintilian, and Longinus on deep waters Because of his focus on the sublime, which aligns in some loose way with the grand style, Longinus also makes use of the imagery of flow that dovetails with the larger tradition, as indicated by his flood of metaphors rushing things along. We can recall here again other rushing rivers and floods, such as those invoked in the rivalry between Aristophanes and Cratinus, in which the younger abuses the older poet for his “flood of words” and the older poet celebrates its abundance and power.63 As Chapter 3 discusses, Aristophanes Frogs connects older tragic style with this “rushing river” trope; and in fact from the classical period on an “eldering” convention that separates grand styles from plainer or more refined styles comes to dominate some literary critical trends.

63

E.g., Eq. 526–28, Ran. 1005; Crat. frr. 198, 203 K–A. See further in ch. 3.4.

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While Aristophanes lampoons Cratinus’ verbal flood and the older poet embraces this abundance, considering himself an heir of Archilochus,64 Horace connects his elder satirist Lucilius with comic tradition more generally (Sat. 1.4.1–8).65 Thus Horace transforms Aristophanes’ careful differentiation between his own more subtle style and that of his rival poet into a generalized sense of “comic style” as rambunctious and unrestrained. Further, Horace’s notion of the stylistic flood is redirected by the Alexandrian distinction between the big muddy river and the pure mountain stream. Like the poets whom Callimachus disdains as drawing their “water” from this river full of silt and debris (Hymn to Apollo 108–09), the prolific Lucilius in Horace’s conception “flows muddily” (flueret lutulentus, Sat. 1.4.11; cf. 1.10.50). While Horace, emulating refined stylists before him, seeks like Aristophanes first of all to set himself off from his elder and rival poet, in Satire 1.10, Lucilius is not alone. The Tuscan Cassius’ genius, Horace adds, is “more roiling than a rapid river” (rapido ferventius amni / ingenium) – Cassius, who wrote so many books that his funeral pyre was reportedly built of them (1.10.62–64). Elsewhere, when composing lyric poetry, Horace uses this roiling river as a trope for Pindar’s grand, elaborate style, also emulating in his vocabulary and rhythms the older poet’s effects (Od. 4.2.5–8): Monte decurrens velut amnis imbres quem super notas aluere ripas, fervet immensusque ruit profundo Pindarus ore. Running down a mountain like a rain-swollen river that washes over its customary banks great Pindar roils and rushes with unfathomable mouth.

As discussed in Chapter 5 (section 4), the poet-narrator is in contrast a “mountain bee” (apis Matinae). Knowingly appropriating Pindar’s bee-poet image (P. 10.54, fr. 152) and transposing Hellenistic aesthetics, he labors quietly brookside in the hills of Tibur, keeping to more refined modes (parvos | carmina fingo) (Od. 4.2.31–32).66 64 66

65 Crat. test. 17 K–A: κατὰ τὰς Ἀρχιλόχου ζηλώσεις. See Scodel 1987; Schlegel 2000. For the bee-poet in Pindar, see ch. 2.3b; for the Callimachean background, see ch. 5.4. Although Horace is not as overtly engaged with Alexandrianism as his contemporary poets, his aesthetics are subtly bound up with it (Thomas 2007). On Horace’s literary criticism, see, e.g., Brink 1963–82; Rudd 1989; Rutherford 2007.

3. Going with the flow

Quintilian expands on Cicero’s use of river imagery when he envisions the grand style as “whirling rocks along” (saxa devolvat) as well as “great and torrential” (multus et torrens) (Inst. orat. 12.10.61), although he names only orators (i.e., no poets) as avatars of this impressive, rushing mode (e.g., Appius Caecus, Cicero). Quintilian then quotes Cicero’s image of Antony as the roiling eddy that was Charybdis, carrying forward the mimetic effect of the original in his characterization of the stylistic category.67 Longinus explicitly places Archilochus and Pindar in the same category within his stylistic scheme: both are pliers of poetic grandeur (μέγεθος) (De sublim. 33.1). Using a different mimetic mode than Quintilian, Longinus reproduces something of the effect he is describing when he declares that Archilochus “rapidly sweeps many jumbled things along” (πολλὰ καὶ ἀνοικονόμητα παρασύροντος), while Pindar (and Sophocles) set fire to the landscape (πάντα ἐπιφλέγουσι) (33.5).68 Unlike those who employ modes that avoid taking risks or scaling the heights (τὸ μηδαμῆ παρακινδυνεύειν μηδὲ ἐφίεσθαι τῶν ἄκρων), these bold poets charge ahead, incurring dangers (cf. ἐπισφαλῆ) and often taking a fall (πολλάκις καὶ πίπτουσιν) (33.2–5). For Longinus, Homer and Plato are the primary masters of this daring mode, as his characterization of the latter’s “flood of metaphors” suggests. Again, Demetrius and other theorists often conceive of figurative usage as bold and dangerous, as spanning great divides, scaling heights, or sweeping along.69 We might also remember that while abundant and audacious metaphors tend to characterize the grand style, those who are hailed as creative geniuses – Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes – are unusually versatile (e.g., De sublim. 36.270). Writers on style characterize them by means of their own most extravagant metaphors, reproducing the drama of their techniques as either the grandeur of natural effects or as these masterfully turned or tamed. That said, in literary critical reception Homer remains legendary and uniquely vast: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, quoting the Iliad, envisions him as the ocean, “the source of all rivers and

67

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69 70

Quintilian follows Cicero in his penchant for river images. Cf. Quint. Inst. orat. 5.14.31, 9.4.7, 12.2.11; also Cicero on his own youthful “overflowing” style (extra ripas diffluentis, Brut. 316); and further in ch. 7.2a. Sophocles famously holds the middle ground in Aristophanes’ Frogs (cf. DH De comp. verb. 24.19–29), but unlike Euripides he is not cited often enough by later stylistic theorists to gain a clear sense of whether it was common to adduce his verses as examples of the grand style. I.e., Theophrastus and Aristotle. See above (section 1) and ch. 1.2a for further discussion. See also DH De comp. verb. and Dem.; and further in ch. 7.2b and 3b.

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every sea” (ἐξ οὗ περ πάντες ποταμοὶ καὶ πᾶσα θάλασσα | καὶ πᾶσαι κρῆναι, De comp. verb. 24.17–18; = Il. 21.196–97).71 Longinus tells us what to make of this alignment of the poet’s stylistic skills with the earth’s grander waters (De sublim. 35.4): ἔνθεν φυσικῶς πως ἀγόμενοι μὰ Δί' οὐ τὰ μικρὰ ῥεῖθρα θαυμάζομεν, εἰ καὶ διαυγῆ καὶ χρήσιμα, ἀλλὰ τὸν Νεῖλον καὶ Ἴστρον ἢ Ῥῆνον, πολὺ δ' ἔτι μᾶλλον τὸν Ὠ κεανόν . . . Thus somehow guided by nature we do not, god knows, admire the small streams, even if they are limpid and useful, but rather the Nile, the Danube, and the Rhine – and far more still the Ocean . . .

Earlier on in his treatise Longinus offers a modulation on the trope, conceiving of Homer’s style as eventually settling down from a rougher, more exciting watery expanse. He claims that the Odyssey, which he (following ancient convention) thinks of as the later poem, does not show the same verve as the Iliad (9.13): . . . οὐδὲ τὴν πρόχυσιν ὁμοίαν τῶν ἐπαλλήλων παθῶν, οὐδὲ τὸ ἀγχίστροφον καὶ πολιτικὸν καὶ ταῖς ἐκ τῆς ἀληθείας φαντασίαις καταπεπυκνωμένον· ἀλλ' οἷον ὑπο χωροῦντος εἰς ἑαυτὸν Ὠκεανοῦ καὶ περὶ τὰ ἴδια μέτρα ἠμερουμένου. . . . Not the same sort of outpouring of emotions one after another, nor the versatility and actuality dense with images from real life; but it is as though the Ocean retreated into itself and became tamed within its own boundaries.

Longinus admits, with a quick slip between stylistic metaphor and narrative content, that the Odyssey has its share of storms (χειμώνων) and exciting adventures, but this does not make up for the “ebbing tide of [Homer’s] grandeur” (τοῦ μεγέθους ἀμπώτιδες) nor the “wandering” (πλάνος) among the fabulous and unbelievable (9.13–14).72 And yet, even if Homer is here figured as an ebbing ocean, he operates on a scale that runs deep and wide. So will it be, says Longinus, quoting the Phaedrus: “So long as the rivers run and the

71

72

Cf. Quintilian 10.1.46, who turns the quotation into an indication of Homer’s exhaustive talents, which run from grand (richness of images) to slight (economy of phrasing); and see Romm 1992: 176–83. This slippage is in fact not such an unusual technique among these critics; at one end it looks like an aspect of mimetic theorizing, since it often involves using the poet’s or orator’s imagery to characterize his style. See further below (section 4) and in ch. 7.3b.

4. In the charming garden

tall trees flourish and grow” (ἔστ’ ἂν ὕδωρ τε ῥέῃ καὶ δένδρεα μακρὰ | τεθήλῃ, 36.2).73

4. Demetrius in the charming garden As I discuss in Chapters 2 and 3, in the Greek imaginary meadows are erotic spaces, particularly in relation to the rites of passage – often including violation – of young girls.74 They overlap in the notional or figurative (if not always the literal or topographical) scheme of things with idyllic spaces such as the locus amoenus and with gardens. Lyric poetry (including tragic odes) tends to include in such settings certain shared elements: flowers, running water/irrigation, and relevant deities such as Aphrodite or Eros.75 Chapter 2 highlights especially Sappho’s fr. 2, which offers in a slight but comprehensive compass the erotic grove, the stream, flowers, the meadow, and breezes – that is, both the locus amoenus and its sensual extensions. Various combinations of these elements turn up repeatedly in the lyric tradition, tracing a continuum that runs from the divinely imbued garden or meadow and erotic love76 to the poet’s grove or garden, also divine by extension, that frames the physical adornment and the quasierotic admiration of athletes. But Sappho’s poem is unique in its concise but encompassing movement, which touches upon all of the signature elements of these fertile spaces. Again, this cluster of effects surfaces pointedly in the lyrics of Euripides, who seems more interested than his fellow tragic poets in those spaces on the edges of culture and the urban setting where various types of erotic and enchanted play are situated.77 Thus Creusa in the Ion and Helen in the Helen both describe being seized while gathering flowers in a meadow (Ion 887–90, Hel. 244–45). Helen’s companions at the riverside hear her cry “like some Naiad Nymph” (Νύμφα τις οἷα Ναΐς, 187), one utterance among many in the ode that characterizes young female voices in distress. Both are

73

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75 76

77

Cf. Phdr 264d4–7. This is supposedly from Midas’ epitaph, which Plato mocks as indifferently composed, so that any line could come at any point. Longinus clearly ignores the critique and goes for the lofty sentiment. See Motte 1973; Foley 1994; Calame 1999; also Bremer 1975. For such spaces as “heterotopias,” see Foucault 1986. See Bremer 1975: 271. See also in ch. 2.2–3. E.g., Archil. fr. 196A W2; Alc. frs. 296 and 347 L–P; Anacr. frs. 346 and 417 PMG; Ibyc. frs. 286 (on which see further below) and 288 PMG. See further in chs. 2.3a–b and 3.2a.

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snatched by gods; and while Hermes’ abduction of Helen is a chaste inversion of the rape scene (since she is taken away for safekeeping), Euripides clearly devises his abduction on the same model. But what kind of stylistic resource can such a setting, with its central dark event, possibly offer to poets and, subsequently, rhetorical theorists? There is, to be sure, an aestheticizing movement from early on in Greek poetry around such scenes of erotic seizure; and the sheer accumulation of appealing imagery (e.g., bird song, flowering meadows, tender young women) may well provide enough pleasure to spur its ultimate appropriation as a distinct stylistic palette. This is certainly what Demetrius seems to make of Sappho’s contributions to this set of images and effects. For Demetrius Sappho is the avatar of a charming mode (ὅλη ἡ Σαπφοῦς ποίησις, De eloc. 132, cf. passim 133–73), the content (πράγματα) of which includes erotic and garden imagery, while the style (λέξις) reproduces its sensual pleasures especially by “beautiful words” (καλὰ ὀνόματα), including those that delight the eye (πρὸς μὲν τὴν ὄψιν ἡδέα, 173).78 This charming mode turns especially upon sensory effects, giving off a keen sense of floral and feminine delights. Demetrius introduces his discussion of the polished, elegant (glaphuros) style by glossing it as “speech with charm and a light touch” (χαριεντισμός ἐστι καὶ λόγος ἱλαρός, De eloc. 128). He notes that charm can run the gamut from more dignified locutions to witticisms; and while he recognizes a number of its sources, the one he returns to repeatedly as closest to its heart is the matching of lovely content and appealing word choice that he associates most strongly with “divine Sappho” (127). Indeed, in a move that shares a type of critical mimesis with other theorists, Demetrius reproduces imagery from the poet as metaphors for the style generally.79 Sappho thus serves as a metonymic figure for it; both Demetrius and Dionysius associate the glaphuros style with a flowering and fluidity that seems culled directly from the charming gardens and sanctuaries for which her poetry is famous. As Chapter 7 explores in more detail, in On Composition Dionysius characterizes this style as polished and perhaps “flowery” (γλαφυρά [καὶ ἀνθηρά], De comp. verb. 23.1; cf. 22.35), attributing it to (among others) Sappho, Anacreon, and Euripides. It has flowing and soft (εὔρους τις λέξις καὶ μαλακή) qualities (23.100) and is marked by euphony, as well as a vocabulary that is smooth, soft, and “virginal” 78

79

I address Sappho’s fr. 2, a central text for this style, in more detail in ch. 2.3a; cf. the Phaedrus setting as discussed in ch. 4.2. Cf. esp. Dionysius’ techniques in ch. 7.3b.

4. In the charming garden

(εὔφωνά τε εἶναι βούλεται πάντα τὰ ὀνόματα καὶ λεῖα καὶ μαλακὰ καὶ παρθενωπά, 23.16–17).80 Demetrius makes the connection to Sappho more explicit. The necessary match between style and content, and the extent to which content may make for stylistic attribution, motivates the recognition that charm may lie in subject matter (De eloc. 132): εἰσὶν δὲ αἱ μὲν ἐν τοῖς πράγμασι χάριτες, οἷον νυμφαῖοι κῆποι, ὑμέναιοι, ἔρωτες, ὅλη ἡ Σαπφοῦς ποίησις. τὰ γὰρ τοιαῦτα, κἂν ὑπὸ Ἱππώνακτος λέγηται, χαρίεντά ἐστι, καὶ αὐτὸ ἱλαρὸν τὸ πρᾶγμα ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ. There are charming elements in subjects, such as the gardens of the Nymphs, marriage hymns, Loves, the whole corpus of Sappho. For these sorts of things, even if they are uttered by Hipponax, are charming, and the subject is similarly graceful in and of itself.

This matching of style and content offers us yet another way in which theorists ground stylistic metaphors in the “real” details, especially in significant landscapes. While in Pindar flowers tend to indicate stylistic adornment like metaphor and thus features that come to be associated with grander styles (such as his own), for the literary theorists flowers and gardens are not only sources for an elegant poetic style but are also themselves constitutive of that style. Both the poet and the theorists, however, share the use of floral imagery as a kind of double figure. Their very invocation serves equally as a metonym of and a metaphor for a certain kind of flowery style; flowers and gardens signify as a part for the whole style and also stand in for its charming attributes. For Demetrius as for Dionysius, word choice and combination constitute essential components of the Sapphic or elegant style. It is not enough for the setting to offer the images: these must catalyze vocabulary and composition that reproduces, reduplicates, the loveliness inherent in the place. “This is why,” Demetrius says, “Sappho, singing of beauty, is beautiful-worded and pleasure-giving . . .; and every beautiful word is woven into her poetry, and some she herself fashioned” (διὸ καὶ ἡ Σαπφὼ περὶ μὲν κάλλους ᾄδουσα καλλιεπής ἐστι καὶ ἡδεῖα . . ., καὶ ἅπαν καλὸν ὄνομα ἐνύφανται αὐτῆς τῇ ποιήσει, τὰ δὲ καὶ αὐτὴ εἰργάσατο, De eloc. 166). On first glance this may seem a rather mechanical observation, namely, that pretty things must have their pretty expression. But if we take Demetrius’ mimetic language (e.g., περὶ μὲν κάλλους ᾄδουσα καλλιεπής 80

Cf. Orat. 96, where Cicero too identifies a middle style that he associates with the sophists and Plato as polished and “flowery” (florens); cf. this image in Quint. 12.10.58 and further in ch. 7.2.

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ἐστι καὶ ἡδεῖα) to spring from a more profound source, we might recognize – with, for instance, Scarry – that beauty calls out for its replication.81 Ancient theorists from Aristotle on are firm on this point: style must suit content. And the closer the vocabulary, imagery, and phrasing conform to the subject, the more persuasive and compelling the composition. This urge to emulation catalyzes precisely what I would identify with the critical instinct, that is, the impulse to bring forth comparisons, other examples to match the beauty just now before one’s eyes. As discussed in the Introduction, to illustrate this impulse Scarry uses the example of Odysseus, whose figure I have elsewhere argued is deeply bound up with issues of likeness, that concept so central to rhetorical argumentation.82 When the hero comes suddenly upon the lovely Nausicaa, sparkling and youthful at the edge of the strand, he declares that he has never yet seen her like (οὐ γάρ πω τοιοῦτον ἴδον βροτὸν ὀφθαλμοῖσιν) and that awe has laid hold of him as he looks (σέβας μ’ ἔχει εἰσορόωντα). But then he adds that he did once come upon similarly startling beauty in a young palm tree that he saw by Apollo’s altar at Delos (Od. 6.160–64). Scarry first notes, “Odysseus’ speech makes visible the structure of perception at the moment one stands in the presence of beauty”; but soon she adds, “Odysseus startles us by actually searching for and finding a precedent.”83 Demetrius seems struck by a similar need; in the face of what Sappho has wrought, he apprehends beauty’s necessary replication in terms of fitting style. His repetition of words for beauty and pleasure aims to convey and itself to reproduce how closely Sappho’s words are bound up with her subject matter. Indeed, perhaps it is because the style under consideration centers on beauty that, in this discussion especially, the mimetic effect is essential to the explication. Many of Demetrius’ examples of this charming style are floral in content and flowery in phrasing, such as “the earth is embroidered with garlands of flowers” (ποικίλλεται μὲν γαῖα πολυστέφανος, De eloc. 164). Sometimes the words themselves offer a kind of visual pleasure (πρὸς μὲν τὴν ὄψιν ἡδέα), such as “rose-colored” (ῥοδόχροον) or “flowery lawn” (ἀνθοφόρου χλόας) (174). Demetrius’ engagement here with floral imagery as a crucial double figure – again, as the metaphor for and object of the visualizing pleasure afforded by the style – further supports Scarry’s claim that flowers are the perfect objects of mimesis.84 81 84

Scarry 1999: 1–8. 82 Worman 2008: 166–72. Scarry 1997: 90–93; see further in ch. 2.3b.

83

Scarry 1999: 22–23.

4. In the charming garden

a. Horace on the erotic retreat As I note above, the stylistic metaphors that Demetrius and some of his fellow theorists (e.g., Cicero, Dionysius) share with Hellenistic and Roman poets sometimes address elements that are more strictly stylistic (e.g., rhythm, vocabulary choice, composition) and sometimes these overlap with those that are not (e.g., subject matter, genre). Once again Horace, master of metapoetics that he is, makes some of the most revealing uses of the charming retreat. This he associates with an erotic garden or woodland mode that tends to center on feminine inhabitants, figures of inspiration and stylistic identification. Take, for instance, the grotto in which Pyrrha teases her suitor (Odes 1.5), whose figure in its floral frame and delicate embrace (Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa, 1) is a “simply elegant” (simplex munditiis, 2) metonymy for Horace’s style.85 Similarly, in Odes 1.22.9–12, the poet-narrator rambles far afield, protected by his rustic refrain: namque me silva lupus in Sabina, dum meam canto Lalagen et ultra terminum curis vagor expeditis, fugit inermem . . . For in the Sabine woods a wolf – while I was singing my “Lalage” and wandering beyond the border free from cares – fled me although I was unarmed . . .

That the object of his love and subject of his ode is a Greek girl named “Chatterer” suggests a playful nod to poets such as Philetas with his Bittis or Theocritus, who also fashions his country songs as a displacement, a “remote” space made only for erotic pastoral.86 At the end of Horace’s ode, the speaker declares that wherever in the far reaches of empire he is sent, he will love his Lalage, “sweetly laughing, sweetly talking” (dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo |dulce loquentem, 23–24). This pair of expressions is, of course, an expansion of Catullus’ more fraught viewing of his beloved (spectat et audit | dulce ridentem, c. 51.4–5), which is itself a “translation” of Sappho’s famous crisis of love (ἆδυ φωνεί- | σας ὐπακούει | καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν, fr. 31.3–5 P). While he echoes Catullus’ phrase directly, with an agile inversion Horace restores Sappho’s emphasis on her beloved’s 85

86

Cf. Cicero on Attic styles (elegantia modo et munditia remanebit, Orat. 78–79); see Keith 1999 and further in ch. 7.3a. See the discussion in ch. 5.3b. Cf. also Verg. Ecl. 1.

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responses (i.e., rather than the lover’s observation). Although the poetnarrator wanders in the woodland, his reverberating image reinforces a sense that his lyric space shares features with Demetrius’ elegant, charming style, with its “gardens of nymphs and Loves” (De eloc. 132, 163) and Sappho as its paradigmatic stylist. In both Odes 1.22 and 3.4 Horace artfully places the poet-narrator at a woodland remove, a vantage point from which he can safely tend his refined urban Muse, even as his topics stray over territories spanned by Roman military exploits. That is, these odes offer a challenge to the conventional match between content and stylistic setting, since Horace (i.e., “Horace”) may speak of war and city affairs from within his peaceful retreat.87 Thus Odes 3.4 is addressed to Calliope – for Propertius the Muse of elegy with pastoral associations – and relates the poet-narrator’s “birth” as a singer in a lofty mode. He establishes at the outset a scene that has obvious affinities with locus amoenus settings: while he rambles “through holy groves in which pleasant waters and breezes flow” (pios | per lucos, amoenae | quas et aquae subeunt et aurae, 6–8), he tells a story that transfers the Hellenistic revisiting of settings of inspiration to a Roman terrain. As a boy, he says, he climbed into the Apulian mountains, fell asleep, and awoke covered with laurel and myrtle leaves (i.e., the poet’s crown: fronde nova, 12–13; lauroque conlata myrto, 19) woven by wood doves (palumbes | texere, 12–13), attendants of Venus. Protected by this blanket of erotic lyrics, bears and snakes do not harm him. He offers this rustic sanctuary to Caesar, enjoining his own woodland Muses (21) to “let him relax in their Pierian cave” (Pierio recreatis antro, 40). The Propertius elegies discussed in Chapter 5 indicate that caves lie at the center of many latter-day rustic retreats. As I suggest in the Introduction and explore further in Chapter 4, the convention of the locus amoenus may even begin in one: Calypso’s, that “polished” (γλαφυροῖο, Od. 5.68) haven so admired by Hermes.88 Again, caves are where Nymphs and Pan dwell, and the long-accumulating set of conventions signaling rural spaces and modes runs through Homeric epic and 87

88

This is not an unusual move for Horace, but these two poems offer good examples of the contrast between lyric style and epic content conceived of as a rustic remove (see also Od. 4.3.1– 16), rather than the more conventional trope of the grove as a place of poetic inspiration: cf. Od. 1.1.29–32, 2.19.1–4, 3.25.1–8. On the imagery of the grove more generally, see Hunter 2006: 28–32; on the contrast between city and country, Harrison 2007; also Spencer 2006. Gods are born and/or protected in caves on mountain tops (Zeus, Hermes); and an early conception of the mountain retreat as the place of poetry is not only Hesiod’s encounter with the Muses but also, and with lustrous detail, Pan’s Arcadian romp (HPan.); see further in ch. 2.3a.

4. In the charming garden

hymns, choral lyric, and bucolic poetry.89 In Greek and Roman reception, these are the haunts of the woodland ur-poets Orpheus, Linus, and Daphnis.90 Sappho dwells here as well: in Ovid’s Heroides she wanders among groves and caves, lamenting her lost love Phaon (Epist. Sapph. 25.137–60). Caves thus effectively serve as cathecting devices, since as densely aesthetic-cum-emotional spaces they bring together within their protecting, polished walls erotic or pastoral styles and love’s dangers and losses. While I am not, obviously, claiming that Horace’s woodland retreat is in direct dialogue with the charming garden that captures Demetrius’ polished, “Sapphic” style, the poet’s programmatic reference points pick out a space of rustic remove that is analogous in its aesthetics. Horace’s imagery also offers a window on how genre and style intersect, on why one style in particular belongs in the countryside: the one that shares features with erotic lyric or bucolic genres, even as it is often “mixed,” a hybrid mode that may incorporate loftier elements, as do the best of stylists. I trace above a reordering and claiming of terrains that establishes what we can recognize as a kind of stylistic dominion. As Chapter 7 reveals as well, Homer and Plato command the greatest reach, their stylistic virtuosity stretching from mountainside to meadow. Sappho’s domain is more restricted, but its lush seclusion makes it compelling and influential. Thus a thread running through the imagery of paths, streams, and gardens separates stringency and effort from pleasure and ease, and masterful reach from the charming retreat. In Demetrius’ discussions and those of other theorists, in relation to periodic style this scheme may distinguish the “rough road” and tough hiker from the road with “rest-stops” more suited to slighter types. In relation to rhythm and expression it can differentiate the rushing rivers of grand stylists from the languid flow of those more refined. Such distinctions have a slightly gendered coloring, which becomes more pronounced when focused in on the floral qualities of polished, charming styles, where Sappho sets the measure. As the following chapter demonstrates, such stylistic divergences emerge in more overtly gendered terms in the Roman setting. These stretch from Aristophanes’ characterizations of Euripides to that of Dionysius, who regards the dramatist as sharing with Sappho a certain flowery mode. 89 90

E.g., Od. 13.103–08; HHerm. 24–26 and passim; Eur. Ion 492–505; Theocr. Epigr. 3, 5. E.g., Theocr. Epigr. 3.5; Verg. Ecl. 6.64–73; Propert. 2.13.1–8; Long. 1.4.1–3; see Hunter 2006: 24–26.

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In Plato’s garden Reordering the retreat in Cicero and Dionysius of Halicarnassus

The powerless emperor makes himself dull writing poems in a garden while his armies kill and burn. William Carlos Williams, “The Hard Listener”1

This study repeatedly considers inhabitation as a crucial element of critical and theoretical terrains – that is, the ways in which the various styles and inclinations indicated by the lay of the land intersect with embodied aesthetics. Thus, for instance, Aristophanes attaches to Aeschylus and Euripides styles not in their abstractions but in their graphic distillations, as bodily inclinations share affinities with discrete rural spaces. Similarly, Plato’s Socrates must get himself out of the city, into the shaded grove along the Ilissus, so that – in the company of the enthusiastic Phaedrus – he can play Pan-worshipper and forge a path toward a new kind of philosophical rhetoric. Even the adumbrated settings of Demetrius show tendencies to align spaces and physical attributes, so that, for instance, the softness and charm of Sappho’s poetry belongs with Nymphs in the garden. The Roman context brings such associations to the foreground, especially in Cicero’s writings on rhetoric. While the stylistic palette of Dionysius of Halicarnassus clearly gives ethical and at times sharply gendered coloring to the postures and behaviors that belong in certain settings, it is Cicero who most vibrantly charts such equations and gives them their impressive new (Roman) order and territorial reach. In De oratore, for instance, in the company of the statesmen-intellectuals whom Crassus has gathered at his Tusculan estate Catulus and Crassus have an exchange about their being seated in the palaestra. While Catulus approves of this setting, Crassus ironizes it by mocking Greek philosophers’ habits of using spaces for exercise as their conversational retreats (2.20–22). But this contrast reverses itself in 1

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Williams [1950-51] 1986: 463. Williams’ image captures a “Roman” fear of the enervating effects of Greek “gardens.”

In Plato’s garden

the Roman context, as it turns out that theoretical discussion is hard work (gravissimae . . . utilitati), as opposed to the pleasures of exercise (delectationem; cf. exercitationis et delectationis, 2.21). Since the company is at leisure (otium), they should not work too hard. The joke is on the Greek philosophers, whose discussions the athletes immediately desert for the discus and the oil flask; the Romans, in contrast, understand that in order to engage in such discussions in the right way they must make a “sport” of their theoretical labors like proper gentleman at rest.2 Cicero’s entire dialogue is framed as a latter-day Phaedrus with Crassus in the role of Socrates, which means that this realignment is not a simple one. Not only do the Roman interlocutors reconfigure philosophical idling as a well-exercised pleasure, but such shifts are also colored by centuries of the shaping of philosophy’s image, in contradistinction to those of literary efforts and oratorical displays. Thus, for example, one could capture the Academic philosopher by his walks in the parkland, the Stoic philosopher by his haranguing from the porch, and the Epicurean by his retreat to the garden.3 These settings and their inhabitants operate as ethical and stylistic shorthand, as both metonymies for and enactments of the distinctive values and modes of the philosophical schools. From this perspective the urban spaces of downtown Athens constitute Socrates’ special scene, so much so that Phaedrus does not know what to make of Socrates’ willingness to walk in the country – or even the “country,” to more accurately capture the suburban terrain along the Ilissus. Thus the Phaedrus already offers the turn on the rural setting as in fact a “countrified” space, a high-culture collage of influences and inclinations. So what is a latter-day theorist of rhetoric to do, when confronted with this long and knowing history of philosophy’s reception? The answer is, of course, multifaceted and nuanced by the different aims and backgrounds of the theorists. While both Cicero and Dionysius highlight specific topographies and turn the figurative language they generate to discriminate ethically inflected styles, and while both make especially elaborate use of the Phaedrus, they do so in different ways and with distinct aims. Cicero as an active statesman and orator (and a wouldbe philosopher), depends on the performance-oriented combination of bodies and settings to enliven stylistic differences, in the process tracing all rhetoric back to the spaces of Plato’s Academy.4 Dionysius, the teacher 2

3 4

On the delicacy of this maneuver, see Zetzel 2003; also Zoll 1962, Görler 1988, and further below, section 3a. On Ciceronian “images of the world” more generally, see Vasaly 1993. See Caizzi 1993; Leidl 2003. Contrast this integrated approach with the distinctions emphasized in the anonymous treatise Ad Herennium; and see Corbeill 2002.

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of rhetoric, finds in Plato’s Phaedrus the consummate grounding for his stylistic theory, but champions the vigorous oratory of Demosthenes. As scholars have noticed, many of their images echo programmatic gestures from Hellenistic poetry and engage with neoteric aesthetics, but Plato looms large for both theorists.5 Cicero is only interested in some features of the dialogue’s riverside setting (esp. the plane tree), but he repeatedly conjures up Plato’s idyll as a framing device for discussions that are put to rhetorical or literary critical use, and his stylistic lexicon adapts and redeploys related images. In his essay on Demosthenes’ style, Dionysius takes this reception of Plato’s retreat in a more precisely turned literary critical direction, troping on riverside features from the Phaedrus to forge indicators for analyzing Plato’s style. Although the tropes generated by Plato’s setting had already influenced the stylistic vocabulary of critics and poets alike, Cicero and Dionysius contribute innovations that establish the Phaedrus as a central theoretical frame and literary critical resource. The mimetic strategies that I argue stem from Plato’s work on likeness and that I highlight in Demetrius’ treatise help to shape the theorizing of Cicero and Dionysius as well – although, again, they do so in different ways. As I explore in the first section below, both writers deploy a story about the creative process of the classical painter Zeuxis to indicate how they understand the workings of mimesis in rhetorical composition; and this in turn informs the ways in which they take up and emulate sources in their own conceptualizing of invention and especially style. While much of Cicero’s envisioning of stylistic distinctions centers on the performing body, both theorists also orchestrate familiar topographies that intersect in informative ways, particularly in relation to ideas about stylistic flow. After addressing how Cicero and Dionysius treat viewing beauty in relation to style (section 1) and how they differentiate among flowing styles (section 2), I take up the central aspect of my discussion: the theorists’ reordering of familiar landscapes to delimit new stylistic terrains (section 3). Cicero’s use of Plato’s setting generates a masterful means of associating his theoretical aims with and distinguishing them from those of Plato. His discussions of style are always shadowed by the philosophical retreat and often by the gendered contrasts between his own man-made setting and Roman oratorical orientation on the one hand and philosophers lounging in the comparatively “rustic” topography of the shady riverbank. Dionysius’ imagery focuses on more specific details of the 5

See Walsdorff 1927; Trapp 1990: 145; North 1991; Fornaro 1997; Fantham 2004: 65–69; Mankin 2011: 19–23; Hunter 2008b, 2012: ch. 4.

1. Mimesis as painterly invention

setting, elaborately recalibrating the aesthetic pleasures of Plato’s garden as a set of stylistic features. This constellation of effects centers on new visions of cultural dominance that are underpinned by actual territorial control (i.e., Roman dominion) – new schemes that also recast the model “figures in a landscape with figures,” which has an ethical coloring as well. As Chapter 4 in particular sets forth, this includes the viewing or visualizing of bodies in significant spaces, focusing at times more on the bodies and at others more on the settings, which catalyzes the emulation and re-envisioning of distinct features of these spaces and/or their inhabitants.

1. Mimesis as painterly invention Plato is obviously the confounding figure in any history of mimesis, since he is both the chief denigrator and the most adept deployer of mimetic effects. Unlike Aristotle, who does not appear to find the perception of beauty especially resonant, Plato crafts an idealizing narrative of beauty and its generation that elevates a purified form of mimesis and analogizing. For Plato, we may recall, mimesis is predominantly a debased process of likeness making; and while such image production can have a positive and quite central role to play in advancing toward understanding, for the most part Plato does not grant images, representations, or figurative expressions any reality that matters. That is, he tends to regard these as shadow play, copies of the flimsiest sort, sometimes even fantasies. Thus, as Chapter 1 sets forth, if anything can be salvaged from the mimetic process, it must be undergirded by the perception of natural alliances that comes from love of true beauty and attachment to the real (i.e., the Forms). As such Plato’s notion of this reproduction is distinct from those that follow it, since the better-known of these (at least) emphasize techniques of imitation in the service of rhetorical composition: namely, invention and stylistic analysis. As later theorists work up images for the type of modeling that ought to govern good composition, they follow Plato in his reliance, especially prominent in the Republic, on analogies to the visual arts (including sculpture, painting, sketching, wax modeling, etc.). Their mimetic encouragements, however, in keeping with their aims, largely avoid the metaphysical and aesthetic complexities of Plato’s models. If, for instance, we had the full text of Dionysius’ On Imitation (Peri mimēseōs), the more mundane aspects of this emphasis on perceiving beauty and reproducing effects would likely be more evident. Extant fragments from book 1 highlight the viewing of beautiful bodies as an analogy

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for the inspired reproduction of stylistic effects; and book 2 appears to indicate by means of concise stylistic distinctions when and how different classical modes of composition ought to be imitated.6 This may be a transformation that Aristotle helps to initiate, since his analogies to painting, unlike Plato’s, aim at taxonomy and technique rather than at metaphysical insight. In the Poetics, Aristotle effectively balances his downplaying of beauty and visual effects in tragedy by finding a useful supplement in examples from painting. Although his references do not stoop to the vulgar detail, he introduces the painter Zeuxis into his discussions as a model for certain aspects of representation. In a passage treating impossibility (τὸ ἀδύνατον), which may arise out of poetic necessity, idealization, or popular belief (1461b10–11), Aristotle draws an analogy to painting, crediting Zeuxis with ideal depictions (cf. βέλτιον), “since,” he says, “the paragon ought to be superior” (τὸ γὰρ παράδειγμα δεῖ ὑπερέχειν) (1461b12–13).7 This is the model that Cicero pursues at the beginning of the second book of De inventione, when he introduces the story of Zeuxis choosing the five virgins of Croton, in order to construct out of their various admirable parts a perfectly beautiful Helen (2.1–3). In his telling of this episode Cicero emphasizes the need for selection, since perfect beauty does not normally exist in nature (quod nihil simplici in genere omnibus ex partibus perfectum natura expolivit, 2.3).8 His version is also quite chaste in its tacit recognition that admiring well-exercised male bodies in public competition is one thing, but assessing beauty in the female body quite another. Thus the Croton citizens parade young men, offering them as evidence of the outstanding qualities of the young women who are their sisters (cf. horum . . . sorores, potes ex his suspicari, 2.2). Zeuxis then requests that the citizens themselves make the selection of the young women, “while,” as he declares, “I paint that which I promised you, so that truth may be transferred from a living example to an altered image” (dum pingo id, quod pollicitus sum vobis, ut mutum in simulacrum ex animali exemplo veritas transferatur, 2.2). So also with the selection of sources from which he crafted his own discussion, says Cicero: he did not merely take examples 6

7

8

As suggested by book 2, which exists only as a corrupt epitome. That this type of modeling is a prominent tool for later authors has been noticed most recently by Nicolas Wiater, who argues that mimesis serves Dionysius as a means of “re-enacting the past” (2011: 77–92). See also Battisti 1997: 12–17; Hunter 2008a: 107–27. On Dionysius’ aesthetics more generally, see also Bonner 1939; Costil 1949; Damon 1991. The other passage is Poetics 1450a23–29, which addresses character and seems less relevant to this discussion. Grube (1962) notices the story; cf. Fantham 1978 on rhetorical imitation in De oratore book 2.

1. Mimesis as painterly invention

from one writer, but rather gathered them together and chose their best features (2.4). And unlike Zeuxis, who restricted his choice to one town and five girls, the rhetorical theorist can make his selection from writers of any time in the past and from any vicinity (2.5). Aristotle and Cicero, despite their different focuses, emphasize the idealizing aspects of the painter’s process – Aristotle as an analogy for the elevated nature of tragedy and thus its appropriate mimesis, Cicero to demonstrate the dignified process of selection and combination that underpins good speech composition (starting with his own). Dionysius, by contrast, foregrounds the potentially salacious aspects of producing beauty. He adduces the Zeuxis narrative as second in a pair of stories that offer this pragmatic image for reproduction and serve as crude analogies for the actual mimetic process in which the good student of rhetoric ought to engage. Both of these are told in the fragmentary treatise On Imitation, one right after the other, as if they illustrated the same point. Both also parade conventional gender biases, which may contribute to our sense of a debased model. In the first an ugly farmer gives his wife beautiful images to look upon while he impregnates her, so that she in turn gives birth to beautiful children. So also with speeches, says Dionysius, if one emulates the beautiful, combining “ancient springs” into one flow and diverting this into one’s soul (ἐκ πολλῶν ναμάτων ἕν τι συγκομίσας ῥεῦμα τοῦτ' εἰς τὴν ψυχὴν μετοχετεύσῃ, De imit. fr. 31.1.1).9 As an example of this process Dionysius offers the other story, the one that Cicero tells, in which Zeuxis chooses the most beautiful body parts of different girls to make a painting of a perfectly beautiful Helen. His version, in racy contrast to Cicero’s modest narrative, claims that the painter sought to depict Helen in the nude, and therefore assessed the five Croton virgins similarly naked (καὶ αὐτῷ τὴν Ἑλένην γράφοντι γυμνὴν γυμνὰς ἰδεῖν τὰς παρ’ αὐτοῖς ἐπέτρεψαν παρθένους, De imit. fr. 31.1.1). Dionysius compares this assessment to viewing bodies in the theater, from which the wise emulator may “cull” (ἐπανθίζεσθαι), as with flowers, the best aspects for crafting a thing of immortal beauty (ἀθάνατον τέχνης κάλλος) (fr. 31.1.1). Like Cicero Dionysius emphasizes art and its perfecting, to which he adds the spice of sex and naked beauty as well as interweaving natural analogy and the fineness of craft.10 As I address further below, Dionysius likes to use nature imagery for describing styles and 9

10

Dionysius’ unexpected juxtaposition of the farmer’s tale with the imagery of flow and diversion suggests that by this time it had become a familiar trope (see chs. 4.3b and 6.3b and section 2b below). Nicholas Wiater, in an unpublished paper, has termed this gaze “pornographic.”

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their fashioning, something that he himself culls directly from Plato’s Phaedrus.11 But what do such stories indicate about the mimetic process? In a recent discussion, Richard Hunter suggests that these stories say basically the same thing and that they obviously engage with Plato’s ideas in the Symposium about mimesis and reproduction.12 While the Symposium may in some attenuated sense be one text behind the Zeuxis stories (although it does not mention painting of any kind), Dionysius’ dovetailing of these stories may be more complicated than this.13 His first scene foregrounds the “visual event” as generative and reproductive and seems to have to do with invention. And despite Cicero’s placement of the second story at the head of a chapter in a treatise on invention, both he and Dionysius emphasize discernment and collection, which suggests that these scenes bear more directly on composition. Further, while the mimetic models that Cicero and Dionysius employ here do appear to hinge at least in part on Platonic imagery, their pragmatic aims are in keeping with Isocrates’ and Aristotle’s more mundane concerns with emulation and education, rather than with the soul’s flight up to the back of the world.14 In fact, this may be a significant juncture at which critical traditions part ways: Plato’s dramatic narratives of viewing beauty lift the soul up and out of any particular practice, while later theorists’ more prosaic stories focus on its implication in method and production. That said, a full appreciation of the intricate engagement with Platonic vocabulary and images by Dionysius and other later theorists is essential to understanding how this type of theoretical mimesis works.

2. Stylistic rigors and currents While the painterly model for rhetorical mimesis bears only a tenuous connection to the landscape imagery on which this study focuses, it does open up once again ideas about beauty, mimesis, and reproduction, which together animate the chronotopes of the aesthetic landscape by means of what Gérard Genette calls enchaînement: metaphor retrieves the times 11

12 13

14

Cf. Symp. 175d4–e2, where the flowing imagery has more to do with the symposiastic setting in which it occurs. Hunter 2008a: 109–11. Hunter emphasizes the “pregnant with beauty” connection. See, in contrast, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus 10.1, which Hunter discusses later on (2008a: 119) and which does introduce Zeuxis’ painting, again of a beautiful woman. Socrates contrasts viewing this painting with getting to know a truly virtuous woman. See Haskins 2000.

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

and places and metonymy sets these in motion.15 Further, Dionysius’ interweaving of natural and artistic imagery indicates that for the later theorists at least fine composition depends on their confluence. Cicero and Dionysius both give color to particular styles by highlighting artistic authority and tastes on the one hand and the landscape features that echo or fulfill them on the other. In fact, that these theorists categorize styles by means of analogies calibrating tastes and bodily deportments to the turn of the river suggests that such intersections have become conventional by this point. And, again, it seems to be a direct result of models that coordinate styles either with bodily habits and inclinations (Dionysius) or with live performance, where the body’s breath and rhythms coincide with or reproduce the ebb and flow of airs and waters in particular places (Cicero).16 Both Cicero and Dionysius are particularly interested in the imagery of flow (especially of rivers and streams); and for Cicero this imagery at significant junctures falls together with bodily deportments and appearances. Parallel to the trope of the path, which tends to bear directly on composition and sometimes indicates a hiker as well, that of the stream or river primarily highlights the ways in which word placement and phrasing creates rhythms and forward movements such that one can lose oneself in the flood. These flowing cadences may be either effectively propulsive or overwhelming for speakers (whose speeches need to be well exercised) and for hearers (who get swept along). As previous chapters also show, the imagery of flow often highlights aesthetic judgments (i.e., power and forcefulness vs. purity and refinement). Where power frequently spills over into excess and indulgence, the thin trickle can indicate a paucity of imagination or weakness, so that aesthetic choices may reveal moral proclivities. That said, the range of these water tropes is less broad, less overtly suggestive of moral distinctions, and more ambiguous in its valuation. We should recall here one more time the “flood of words” that Aristophanes lampoons as his rival poet Cratinus’ uncontrolled style, as well as their rejoinder: the fountains of words with which he will flood the place.17 These voluble styles in their coloration bridge the gap between body and land: those who take in floods (i.e., who are drinkers of wine) also 15 16

17

Genette 1973: 63; see further in the Epilogue. Note that like Cicero Dionysius also emphasizes the ear’s pleasure (cf., e.g., Philod. De poem. Col. 21.23–25); see Asmis 1992a; de Jonge 2008: 193–96, 200–202; Porter 2009, 2010: 494–509. Cf. Hippocratic notions of how physical types reflect and respond to the lay of the land (as in, e.g., Airs, Waters, Places). See DH Dem. 28.35, quoting Cratinus; and further in ch. 3.4. Also Ruffell 2002; Worman 2008: 116–17.

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release the same, while those who are abstemious and drink only water send forth with care only a small stream.

a. Cicero on stylistic force and fluidity Cicero’s stylistic models are extraordinarily complex and intersecting, encouraging in their range and vibrancy an appreciation of the refined and comprehensive forms that critical reception can achieve. I should note first that he makes repeated use of gestures toward Plato and Socrates as tutelary figures, from the framing of De oratore as a latter-day Phaedrus to identifying his own intellectual training as taking shape in the “grounds of the Academy” (Orat. 12).18 Despite the more clearly technical uses to which Cicero puts his indications of Platonic aesthetics, it does seem to be important to his overall theoretical goals that Platonic ideals be understood to ground his arguments. It is particularly interesting that in Orator he introduces early on the classical sculptor Pheidias’ artistic process as a very Platonic analogy for developing the notion of the ideal orator. Cicero envisions the perception of Plato’s Forms by analogy to the sculptor, who looks not to any likeness in the world but rather fixes on the pure form of beauty in his mind (sed ipsius in mente insidebat species pulchritudinis eximia quaedam). Thus, says Cicero, do we see the form of perfected style with our minds and seek out its copy with our ears (sic perfectae eloquentiae speciem animo videmus, effigiem auribus quaerimus) (Orat. 9).19 While Cicero may not be engaging here in any profound sense with Plato’s theory of Forms, since he seems really to be talking about mental images, it is interesting and useful for us that he does appear to be situating his discussion of the ideal orator in explicit connection to a central type of Platonic analogy for indicating the intelligible realm. As I demonstrate in Chapter 1, this is especially dominant in the Republic, where the theory of Forms is set forth. It is likely that Cicero is in fact echoing quite precisely Socrates’ analogy in book 6 of the Republic to painters who make use of the “distinct” or “divine” model within (ἐναργές παράδειγμα, 484c5–d1, τῷ θείῳ παραδείγματι, 500e3–4) and thereby produce true likenesses.20 Given this development, it is hard not to find it both meaningful and

18

19 20

But cf. De orat. 3.56–62, where Cicero blames Socrates for destroying the original unity of wisdom by separating rhetoric from philosophy. See the discussion of Degl’Innocenti Pierini 1979; also Jahn and Kroll [1913] 1964 ad loc. Cicero may also be thinking of the paradigm-copy dynamics in the Timaeus, which he translated (see Burnyeat 2005).

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

amusing that the interlocutors in Brutus (written just before Orator) sit in a garden under a statue of Plato (24). In their details, however, Cicero’s treatments of rhetorical styles take their lead more from Aristotle, Theophrastus, and lesser-known Hellenistic theorists such as the Stoic Panaetius.21 Like Aristotle, Cicero offers individual orators as proponents of different styles, and he favors a unified notion of what makes for an ideal orator – an orator, that is, who is master of all styles and knows when to use them. Because of this emphasis on unity Cicero understands suitability (to prepon, decorum) as central to what makes for good style, which underpins his sense of the best orator as one who can alternate styles to suit topic and occasion.22 The unified model also indicates something deeper, however – namely, connections between character and style, since the good orator would also communicate his beneficence and right thinking by means of his performance.23 This connection between aesthetics and ethics operates at many levels in Cicero’s writing on rhetoric, but those with which I am most concerned suggest distinctions along class and gender lines. At this point in our discussion it should come as no surprise that bodies and their settings do not serve as neutral elements in an objective orchestration of stylistic differences. Rather, these are clearly measured in relation to values such as manliness and nobility, which in the Roman context ultimately entails a subtle denigration of certain (though not all) Greek people and places. Cicero discusses style in oratory mainly in three treatises: the third book of De oratore (55 bce), as essential details of the history of rhetoric in Brutus, and as the primary focus in Orator (both 46 bce). Brutus operates largely on a bifurcated model that opposes plain styles to grand and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Roman orators along these lines, with a strong prejudice for grander modes.24 But in the other two works we find what is essentially a three-pronged model for analyzing oratorical modes, characterized by clear references to earlier stylistic distinctions putatively formulated by Thrasymachus (i.e., plain, mixed, and grand) but dominated also by Aristotle’s emphasis on stylistic unity and Theophrastus’ refinements of it.25 Since the third book of De oratore and the first half of Orator focus most fully on stylistic issues, these offer 21 23 24 25

22 Pohlenz 1933; Narducci 2002b. Cf. Cic. De off. 1.107; Panaet. fr. 97. Narducci credits especially Panaetius with this move from aesthetics to ethics (2002b: 432). Again, see Wisse 1995 and Narducci 2002a on the Brutus as an “anti-Atticist” polemic. As noted in ch. 6.1b, Cicero himself tells us that Theophrastus also recognized four virtues of good style: clarity (sapheneia), purity of language (Hellenizein), appropriateness (to prepon), and ornamentation (kosmos) (Cic. Orat. 79; cf. De orat. 3.37–55).

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the best evidence not only for stylistic distinctions more generally but also for how Cicero navigated these by means of imagery comprising the body and natural settings. Cicero sets forth his most integrated stylistic model in Orator, where he matches different modes to the “duties” (officia) of the orator, combining the three styles to serve one unified set of capabilities (Orat. 69): Erit igitur eloquens . . . qui in foro causisque civilibus ita dicet, ut probet, ut delectet, ut flectat. Probare necessitatis est, delectare suavitatis, flectere victoriae: nam id unum ex omnibus ad obtinendas causas potest plurimum. Sed quot officia oratoris, tot sunt genera dicendi: subtile in probando, modicum in delectando, vehemens in flectendo; in quo uno vis omnis oratoris est. That man will be eloquent . . . who will speak in the Forum to civil cases in such a way that he proves, pleases, and sways. For to prove is necessary, to please sweet, and to sway makes for victory: for this alone of all things most often has power for winning cases. But as many as are the duties of the orator, so many are the types of speech: the subtle in proving, the moderate in pleasing, the vehement in swaying – in which alone lies all the strength of the orator.

Again, Cicero hews quite close to Aristotle’s scheme, emphasizing the speech’s suitability (70), the relationship it fosters between style and content (71), and the three components involved in its delivery (subject, speaker, audience, 71–72). And while, as mentioned, he follows Aristotle in pursuing what is essentially a unified model, his discussions of styles also engage with distinctions from the classical period between plain and grand modes, which in this Roman setting take the form of recent controversies over the “Attic” (plain) versus the “Asiatic” (grand) styles.26 Cicero is famously a proponent of the grand style, but in his writings on rhetoric he labors to balance out this predilection by starting out from the principle of unity on the one hand and a sense on the other that the range of styles have their strengths and that each therefore has contributions to make to the overall power of the persuasive composition. The various images by which Cicero gives color and shape to the styles that he characterizes in order to demonstrate effective rhetoric are entertaining in their range and diversity but usually quite precise in their emulation of features of the styles in question. As with other theorists, we can discern a loose kind of coherence in the repeated transference of analogies from bodily features and deportments to significant spaces or landscape details and back again. Again, the model is frequently centered on performance, but this does not capture fully the extent and complexity 26

See Wisse 1995; Narducci 2002b.

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

of the figurative and mimetic scheme that Cicero deploys. For now let us begin with one of the most dominant confluences in this scheme: that between bodily decoration or deportment and the imagery of flow. As the passages below reveal, Cicero’s stylistic recommendations suggest that he is more suspicious than Dionysius of a certain kind of soft fluidity, but his defense of this judgment revolves for the most part around bodily dispositions. Cicero’s earlier discussion of style in the third book of De oratore makes vivid use of the body in performance, especially as a tool for indicating how ornament (ornatus) of both style and content ought to be deployed.27 When, for instance, he has the statesman Crassus suggest how properly to employ ornament (the purview of middle and especially grand styles, 3.96–103), we see very clearly the ways in which a “manly” style underpins aesthetic distinctions, as well as implicit ethical ones. Cicero draws contrasts between ornamentation reminiscent of a victorious athletics to one either overly sweet or theatrical. The good orator’s style ought to be “weighty” (gravis) and “gentlemanly” (liberalis), qualities that should belong not to its individual “limbs” (singulorum articulorum) but highlight its “body” as a whole (in toto spectantur haec corpore). As if sprinkled in distinct parts with “flowers” of words and sentiments (quasi verborum sententiarumque floribus), the speech should be highlighted the way a public place is picked out by decorations and lights (ut sint quasi in ornatu disposita quaedam insignia et lumina) (3.96).28 A decade later, when delineating the ideal rhetorical mode in Orator, Cicero attributes a similarly grave and ornate style to Demosthenes’ On the Crown. This weighty type of ornamentation is like lights (quasi lumina) and decorations on stage or in the Forum (scaenae aut fori appellantur insignia), which is why in describing such styles one may speak of “the lights and as it were decorations of eloquence” (orationis lumina et quodam modo insignia) (Orat. 134–35). In contrast to this masculine, public decoration are soft and delicate (molliores . . . et delicatiores) modes of ornamentation, which in De oratore Crassus likens to the use of trills (flexiones) and falsettos in song (3.98). 27

28

See Fantham 1972: 165–73 on speech as a clothed body in action and 166–67 on ornatus as a theatrical term, in the sense of costuming; also Mankin 2011: 184–96 (ad De orat. 96–108) for the details of how the concept of ornatus works (in relation to both style and content). Mankin tracks with great precision Cicero’s use of familiar vocabulary (much of which he shows verges on conventional rhetorical terminology). For more general discussions of performance and self-fashioning in Cicero, see Gunderson 2000; Dugan 2005. Mankin 2011 ad loc. notes that the flower imagery is likely Greek; see further on Dionysius’ probable use of it in section 2b below; and Cicero’s in 3a.

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As with the overindulgence of any of the senses, the “curls and rouge” (cincinnis ac fuco) of the orator or poet who deploys such charming devices lead quickly to disgust in the audience (3.100). Indeed, ornament itself must be like a manly body: austere and solid (austeram et solidam) rather than sweet and overcooked (dulcem et decoctam) (3.103).29 While we might recognize in some of these images an aversion familiar from Republic 3 to artifice and sweets, Crassus envisions more emphatically different public arenas for staging performances, with a clear preference for, say, military parades over stage songs. Later on in book 3, when summarizing his discussion of the different styles and their suitability to different settings, Crassus emphasizes more fully the contrast between a soft and artificial theatrical style and one more fully athletic. Different styles he again treats as if they possessed bodies, one full and rounded, another slender but vigorous, and a third that combines these. To achieve a good “complexion” (color) for all of them, Crassus urges that while the orator ought to shape his style by means of rhythm, vocabulary, and word order, this ought not to be smeared on like make-up but diffused in the blood (non fuco inlitus, sed sanguine diffusus, 3.199–200), so that the style is effectively “flushed” if properly exercised.30 He must also practice “grace of movement” (venustate moveantur) in his phrasing like those trained in fencing or boxing (3.199–200). Crassus’ recommendations for delivery also follow this rigorous program: the orator should not indulge in stagey gestures (ab scena et histrionibus) but rather throw out his chest manfully like a parading soldier or even a wrestler (ab armis aut etiam a palaestra) (3.220). In an essay on literary critical vocabulary familiar from Hellenistic and Roman poetry, Alison Keith argues that in Brutus and Orator Cicero’s use of bodily metaphors to talk about oratorical styles responds to the Alexandrian promotion of slenderness and delicacy.31 If we orient this observation in a slightly different direction, we can see that Cicero’s imagery also aims at combating any imputations of effeminacy that

29 30

31

Cf. Horace Serm. 2.1.74; Persius 1.123–25. Cf. De opt. gen. orat. 8: viris lacertos sanguinem quaerunt, quondam etiam suavitatem coloris. Fantham 2004: 256–57 argues that Theophrastus influenced Cicero’s colorful use of analogies to perfume and paint, since the former wrote on such topics, and compares Cicero’s claim that he embellished his memoirs with Isocrates’ unguents and Aristotle’s paints (totum Isocrati myrothecium etiam Aristotelia pigmenta, Att. 2.1.2). See also Innes 1988 on Cicero’s treatment of metaphor more generally. Keith 1999; see also Fantham 1972: 172–73 for the “slim body” of oratory and comparable imagery in De oratore as well.

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

might attach to the ornate, Asiatic styles that he advocates.32 Indeed, in Cicero’s envisioning of what constitutes effective style, regulation of the performative body and therefore its speech rhythms appropriately counters the excesses inherent to any style. The plain style may be too loose (solutum, Orat. 77) and lax in composition, the middle style too smooth and fluid (solutum, Orat. 42, liquitur, 92), the grand style too full-flowing (cf. extra ripas diffluentis, Brut. 316). The cure for such looseness or abundance is, apparently, a ladylike restraint for more slender styles and manly exercise for more robust ones. It is in his repeated emphasis on regulation and control that we see most clearly the unique juncture that Cicero forges between the body and landscape features, in this case the river’s flow. Thus at one extreme the plainness of Attic style may lead to lax rhythms, which can be controlled by a crafted casualness that rejects decoration and obvious “make-up,” like a woman renouncing her jewels (removebitur omnis insignis ornatus quasi margaritarum . . . fucati vero medicamenta cadoris et ruboris omnia repellentur). But this combination retains a quiet elegance (elegantia modo et munditia remanebit), since it is pure, proper, and lucid (Orat. 78–79). As Keith notices, Cicero’s vocabulary engages with metaphors for neoteric modes in Catullus and clearly anticipates that of Horace’s famous Pyrrha ode (1.5).33 In keeping with this stylistic restraint, the Attic style of delivery does not allow for theatricality (actio non tragica nec scaenae), favoring rather a “moderate movement of the body” (modica iactatione corporis) (86). Despite obvious differences in strengths and inclinations, this discipline recalls the embodied control achieved by the athleticism of grander modes. This type of regulation, however, belongs to the tenuis orator (Orat. 81), what would seem to be the precise opposite of the muscular, ornate mode. His style is at times graceful, amusing but not audacious in its use of jokes and figures;34 and while this “slender” orator tends to be sparing in his use of figures, he also makes free with rustic turns of phrase. These follow farmers’ simple metaphors: thus are the vines bejeweled, the fields thirsty, and crops happy, and the fruits luxuriant (gemmare vitis, sitire agros, laetas esse segetes, luxuriosa frumenta, Orat. 8; cf. De orat. 3.155). The fabricated simplicity and rusticity recall Hellenistic and bucolic poetry, contrasting 32 33

34

Cf. Gunderson 2000: 124–32. Cf. Hor. Od. 1.5 (simplex munditiis) and Cat. Carm. 14, 16, 22, 50, etc. Note the emphasis on elegance (Orat. 81, 84) and other neoteric values (e.g., sales, facetiarum, 87; lepores, 96); see Keith 1999. E.g., “salts” (i.e., witticisms) are sprinkled on it (aspergentur . . . sales) (86).

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sharply with the emphatic urbanism of Roman oratory. The rural settings and their inhabitants highlight distinctions between the more fulsome modes and the “slender” verse of the poets who advocated it. If these delicate stylists repeatedly invoke remote country settings with narrow paths and the pellucid streams, Cicero’s manly orator masters urban spaces like a wrestler in the ring.35 The Hellenistic imagery may itself have influenced such critics as Dionysius (who advocates the purity of Attic styles), while Cicero in his critique of this Greek refinement carefully navigates the metaphors that elaborate its pleasant fluidity. But complications abound. Because it is fulsome and ornate, the forceful style that Cicero tends to promote may share vulnerabilities with the flows that often mark plain or middle styles. Although the ample, grand style may be like a noisy, coursing river that everyone attends to and admires (hanc eloquentiam, quae cursu magno sonituqe ferretur, quam suspicerent omnes, quam admirarentur, Orat. 97),36 Cicero remarks in the Brutus that in the excesses of his youth, his own river of words “overran its banks” (extra ripas diffluentis) and had to be controlled by training (Brut. 316). Indeed, as Cicero makes clear in this discussion of the grand style, it is most given to excess and must be very carefully handled; the orator who can only speak grandly and copiously will seem like a raving madman among the sane and a drunken one among the sober (furere apud sanos et quasi inter sobrios bacchari vinulentus videtur, Orat. 99).37 In a shift from the tendency common among Greek writers on rhetoric to associate flowing styles with polish, Cicero in De oratore argues that a flux of verbiage can be overwhelming and crude. Asserting a connection with Peripatetic stylistic models, he claims to be following Theophrastus in finding polish and shape (polita atque facta) only in fluid styles whose rhythms are appropriately managed, attributing the difference to dithyrambic innovation, which introduced a freer and more diffuse mode (3.184).38 For Cicero it is the voice that provides the natural regulatory function and thus that ideally prevents excessive fluidity. Speech will be thought rough and lacking polish if it is too continuous and flowing (si rudis et impolita 35 36

37 38

Cf. esp. Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo 105–12. See Zetzel 1980, 1983: 93–94. See below in this section and in section 3a regarding the palaestra style. Cf. Hortensius, the paradigmatic Asiatic orator, whose style is flowing as well as decorated and witty (nec flumine solum orationis, sed etiam exornato et faceto genere verborum, Brut. 325). Cf. Archilochus, Cratinus, and “drunken” poetic styles; see further in ch. 3.4. De orat. 3.185: “Thus he [Theophrastus] says that the dithyramb flows more freely and richly, since its limbs and feet, as he also says, are expanded in all rich expression” (inde ille licentior et divitior fluxit dithyrambus, cuius membra et pedes, ut ait idem, sunt in omni locupleti oratione diffusa).

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

putanda est illa sine intervallis loquacitas perennis et profluens), because nature itself modulates the voice for human ears (quod hominum auribus vocem natura modulatur ipsa) (De orat. 3.186). That is to say, the body’s rhythms control and shape the forward flow of speech; and this is, again, where bodies and their settings fall together – namely, in the natural rhythms that humans possess to regulate their environments. Late in the Orator, when discussing rhythm and periodic style, Cicero again indicates that one may check this excessive fluidity by the control that more rigorous modes adopt. And once again Theophrastus leads the way, now accompanied by his teacher Aristotle. As proponents of a mixed style both are rightly wary of a flood of words that courses on without the natural syncopation resulting from adherence to rhythm. Here it seems that the ornate style, given its full-flowing features, has special need of such regulation (228): Hanc . . . adhibere necesse est, si ornate velis dicere, non solum, quod ait Aristoteles et Theophrastus, ne infinite feratur ut flumen oratio, quae non aut spiritu pronuntiantis aut interductu librari, sed numero coacta debet insistere, verum etiam quod multo maiorem habent apta vim quam soluta . . . It is necessary to apply this [rhythmical control], if you wish to speak in an ornate manner, not only (as Aristotle and Theophrastus said) that the speech not flow on like a river without end, unpunctuated by pronunciation’s breath or the copyist’s mark, but it ought to be controlled by rhythm, since in truth measured speeches have far more force than those that are fluid . . .

Without such careful molding of periods by means of rhythm, speech runs on in an unmarked manner that is flaccid and loitering, like men lacking proper training in the palaestra: Ita qualis eorum motus quos ἀπαλαίστρους Graeci vocant, talis horum mihi videtur oratio qui non claudent numeris sententias, tantumque abest ut . . . enervetur oratio compositione verborum, ut aliter in ea nec impetus ullus nec vis esse possit. Thus the sort of movement the Greeks call “unexercised,” that sort seems to me to be the oration of those who do not punctuate their thoughts with periodic rhythms; and a speech is so far . . . from being weakened by the arrangement of words, that without it there can be neither any forward movement or force.

Notice that Cicero here again merges the imagery of the flowing river with that of the body’s dispositions, so that his model conjoins setting and performance.39 His refinement essentially brings together a Peripatetic 39

Cf. Orat. 52–53, where the Academics’ “soft and tender eloquence” (oratio mollis et tenera) is “so flexible and effectively follows wherever you turn” (ita flexibilis ut sequatur quocumque torqueas) that it results in undifferentiated flow – a “river of words” (flumen . . . verborum).

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concern for appropriate stylistic regulation with a statesman’s rejection of Hellenistic “slender” aesthetics (and by extension Attic styles). Cicero’s is a discourse of mastery and control of territories and bodies alike, in which one may embrace the big, rushing river, as long as one knows how to channel it. And one may champion the force and power of the grand style as long as proper exercise gives it a muscular discipline that takes over Greece and its palaestra. This aesthetic orientation will always value the manly wrestler over the slender aesthete, and the rush of words over the small, limpid streams of the Hellenistic poets and their followers, such as Atticizing Romans like Brutus.

b. Dionysius on stylistic flows Dionysius, like Cicero, was a follower of Theophrastus’ stylistic theories, or at least certain aspects of them, as well as a proponent of a tempered combination of stylistic virtues. Dionysius’ focus on composition also leads him to refine the three categories of grand, middle, and plain. Writing in the decades after Cicero’s death, he sustains a focus on the ways in which the different styles might combine to make for the greatest eloquence, which is for him as for Cicero embodied by Demosthenes. Dionysius is not, however, himself an orator (or at least not at this point), which may help to account for why his conceptualizing of rhetorical styles lacks the vibrant focus on the performing body that orients Cicero’s models. Instead he takes his metaphors from landscape features on the one hand and the arts on the other, in keeping with the mimetic models provided by the Zeuxis stories discussed above. When he does foreground the body it is largely as a receiver of sensations – that is, as the responsive body of an audience member. Thus while Cicero focuses most on the dynamics of the performer’s breath and gestures and secondarily his effects on the ear, Dionysius scarcely mentions performance and privileges the ear as the organ of aesthetic reception (e.g., De comp. verb. 11–14).40 Dionysius’ most distinctive use of stylistic landscaping reveals a fondness for water imagery, particularly the envisioning of rivers and streams for elaborating aspects of the mixed or middle style.41 These take shape in 40

41

In discussing phonetics Dionysius does mention the mouth, but only by way of specific instruction, not as an organ of aesthetic judgment. As noted (n. 16 above), the emphasis on the ear as the measure of aesthetic excellence can be traced to Hellenistic debates about content vs. form and about euphony; see Asmis 1992a; de Jonge 2008: 193–96, 200–202; Porter 2010: 115–18, 228–30. For a survey of Dionysius’ metaphors, see Lockwood 1937.

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

his discussions that make prominent use of stylistic categories, namely On the Composition of Words (Peri suntheseōs onomatōn) and On the Style of Demosthenes (Peri tēs Dēmosthenous lexeōs). Again, Dionysius shares with Cicero his support for the idea that the best orator will blend aspects of different styles, but the terms he deploys to distinguish styles differ a bit, depending in part on whether he is focusing on composition (sunthesis or harmonia) or diction/expression (lexis).42 The treatise on Demosthenes shows the extent to which “styles of composition” (charaktēres suntheseōs or harmonias) and “styles of expression” (charaktēres lexeōs) overlap, especially in the terms Dionysius uses to distinguish different characteristics. For instance, cognates indicating softness and pleasantness (e.g., malaxai/malakē; hêdunai/hēdeia) turn up in discussions of “mixed” (miktē) expression and “polished” (glaphura) composition (Dem. 4, 18, 40; De comp. verb. 23). In addition, the third terms in both categories – ‟well-blended (eukratos) composition” and “mixed (miktē) expression” – obviously fall together conceptually. And On Demosthenes indicates that Dionysius may employ the second term (miktē) for both (compare Dem. 3 and 41); or indeed both terms may be paired to characterize style of composition when its reach includes word order, arrangement of clauses, and rhythm of periods (e.g., τὴν μικτὴν ἁρμονίαν . . . καὶ μέσην, 43.67–68). Further, an extended section of On Demosthenes and another in On Composition indicate that Dionysius can use lexis and sunthesis or harmonia more or less interchangeably, in addition to charaktēr, a more general term that points up qualities or distinguishing features, individually or of the style as a whole (Dem. 40–41; De comp. verb. 22–23). Since Dionysius aims to promote mixed modes of composition and diction, much of his critical energy, like that of Cicero, centers on characterizing and discriminating among the most prominent masters of middle styles: Isocrates, Plato, and Demosthenes. Ultimately Dionysius’ goal is to demonstrate Demosthenes’ vast superiority, which means showing how the styles of Isocrates and Plato are both lacking. All are examples of the “well-mixed” style (εὔκρατος, Dem. 3.54) that he champions, but for Dionysius as for Cicero Demosthenes is its avatar. While both theorists work hard to promote the unified, mixed mode as the best, they each have 42

See Grube 1952; Donadi 2000: 49–62; de Jonge 2008: 204, with further bibliography. This emphasis on composition (sunthesis, compositio) is Epicurean in origin (though it goes back to Aristotle) and is reflected in Philodemus’ writings (and possibly also Cicero’s). It encourages a focus on word placement rather than (e.g.) to word choice and opposes Stoic ideas about the significance of eklogē. Those who focus on sunthesis often employed the technique of metathesis to demonstrate the importance of composition over diction etc. (e.g., DH de Comp. 3–7; cf., e.g., Demetr. 51, 185); see Damon 1991.

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their stylistic inclinations. As a proponent of Atticism and therefore of lucidity and precision rather than fulsomeness and ornament, Dionysius is most negative about features of mixed or middle styles that tend toward excessive smoothness, balance, or euphony (a shortcoming of Isocrates’ style), or a proclivity for mingling styles too jarringly and indulging in creative figurative usage (which troubles him in Plato’s style).43 Both theorists give some indication of concerns about this feature; although Cicero does not register anxiety at Plato’s abundant and varied metaphors, in the Orator he notes that some consider Plato’s writing to be more like poetry because of its use of rhythm and figurative adornment.44 Dionysius is also compelled by Plato’s vivid figurative language – even, as I explore below, to the extent of using it to delimit a novel stylistic terrain; and he is yet more uneasy about its effects. The different concerns Dionysius raises in his assessments of Plato’s and Isocrates’ styles are reflected in the ways in which he characterizes them. When focusing more on expression and/or summarizing stylistic categories, he takes Isocrates and Plato together as examples of middle styles (e.g., Dem. 3–5, 16). When characterizing the smooth (glaphura) style of composition, however, he invokes Isocrates as its primary (and masterful if flawed) exploiter (De comp. verb. 23; Dem. 40). Plato is thus a more worrying contender as the master of the middle or mixed style, since like Demosthenes and Homer before him he is a virtuoso of aesthetic and persuasive effects. Isocrates shows himself again and again to be too concerned with achieving a soft, smooth, pleasing mode, but Plato follows Homer in his artful range. As Dionysius works to isolate where both middling stylists go wrong, he lights upon distinctions that recall Cicero’s gendered hierarchies, which intersect in curious ways with imagery drawn from natural settings. In On Composition, for instance, Dionysius characterizes the compositional style that is polished and possibly “flowery” (γλαφυρά [καὶ ἀνθηρά], De comp. verb. 23.1; cf. 22.35) as privileging verbal movement (κεκινῆσθαι βούλεται τὴν ὀνομασίαν) and swiftly carrying forward “like currents that never cease” (ὥσπερ τὰ ῥέοντα καὶ μηδέποτε ἀτρεμοῦντα) (23.9–10).45 It is also marked by euphony, as well as a vocabulary that is smooth, soft, and 43 44

45

On Dionysius and Atticism, see Donadi 2000: 7–16. Orat. 67 (incitatius feratur et clarissimis verborum luminibus utatur). Cf. amplitudo Platonis (Orat. 5) and, again, the characterization from the Brutus: Quis enim uberior in dicendo Platone? Iovem sic aiunt philosophi, si Graece loquatur, loqui (Brut. 120–21). Note that Quintilian also records the Greek term for the middle style as floridum (ἀνθηρόν, 12.10.58–59).

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

“maiden-faced” (εὔφωνά τε εἶναι βούλεται πάντα τὰ ὀνόματα καὶ λεῖα καὶ μαλακὰ καὶ παρθενωπά, 23.16–17).46 Sappho, Anacreon, and Euripides as well as Isocrates are some of its chief proponents (23.43–49); Dionysius quotes Sappho’s ode to Aphrodite in full as an example of its charms. He emphasizes its smoothness of sound and musical forward movement, summarizing the style as flowing and soft (εὔρους τις λέξις καὶ μαλακή), because “the rhythm of the words does not make waves in the sound” (τῆς ἁρμονίας τῶν ὀνομάτων μηδὲν ἀποκυματιζούσης τὸν ἦχον, 23.100–101). In On Demosthenes Dionysius describes the polished style of composition as sharply clear (λιγυρά, 36.29, 40.39, 43.82) and “theatrical” (θεατρική, 40.1; cf. 36.29, 39.24, 43.82) and suited to addressing a large crowd. This adjective has not only to do with effective display but also with an overemphasis on pleasure (ὡς τῆς ἡδονῆς ἅπαν ἐχούσης ἐν λόγοις τὸ κράτος), so that those like Isocrates who promote it put a premium on “flowery and theatrical” language (ἀνθηρὰν καὶ θεατρικήν . . . τὴν διάλεκτον) (18.31–33). The vocabulary itself seems in this passage to lead Dionysius forward into a Ciceronian scene that analogizes bodies wrapped in fancy clothes to words decked out in pleasing sounds (Dem. 18.35–41): ἔστιν ὥσπερ σώμασι πρέπουσά τις ἐσθής, οὕτως καὶ νοήμασιν ἁρμόττουσά τις ὀνομασία. τὸ δ’ ἐκ παντὸς ἡδύνειν τὰς ἀκοὰς εὐφώνων τε καὶ μαλακῶν ὀνομάτων ἐκλογῇ καὶ πάντα ἀξιοῦν εἰς εὐρύθμους κατακλείειν περιόδων ἁρμονίας καὶ διὰ τῶν θεατρικῶν σχημάτων καλλωπίζειν τὸν λόγον οὐκ ἦν πανταχῇ χρήσιμον. Just as certain dress is suitable for certain bodies, so is certain language fitting for certain thoughts. To please the ear always by choosing nice-sounding and soft words, to deem everything worthy of being wrapped in the rhythmical balancing of periods, to decorate a speech in showy figures, is not always useful.

As I argue in Chapter 1 (section 2), the language that Aristotle employs in theorizing about mimesis and metaphor is influential on both Cicero and Dionysius; and here Dionysius seems to be picking up on his analogy to the young man’s red cloak in Rhetoric 3, which (again like Aristotle) relate to his criticisms of Gorgias and Isocrates. As Dionysius’ references to theatrikē in his treatise on Isocrates indicate, the latter follows his teacher Gorgias in his penchant for this showy adornment (e.g., Isoc. 12.22, 15.15; cf. Dem 4).47 But Plato may also fail in this way, imitating Gorgias’ theatrical effects (τὰ θεατρικὰ τὰ Γοργίεια) by adorning (κοσμεῖ) his 46

47

In the Orator Cicero does go so far as to attribute a “virginal” character to Plato’s style (casta et verecunda, virgo incorrupta quodam modo, 64); see also ch. 1.2b and further below in section 3a. On the analogy between style and dress, see Arist. Rhet. 1405a13–14 and the discussion in ch. 1.2.

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discourse with the “prattle” (λήρων) of antitheses and balanced clauses (Dem 25.20–25) or dressing up his language with luxurious and elaborate figures (τρυφεροῖς καλλωπίζει καὶ περιέργοις σχήμασι τὴν φράσιν, 26.18– 19). In the latter case, though, Dionysius’ criticisms seem forced, since his need to find something to criticize in Plato in comparison to Demosthenes leads him to focus on the speeches crafted for the dialogues or as set pieces, and thus to ignore Plato’s ventriloquism and irony. Dionysius finds something showy and “adolescent” (ὥσπερ τὰ μειράκια) in this turn to the effects of parallel figures and the like, a criticism he levels repeatedly at Isocrates as well (μειρακιώδη, Dem. 20.48, 21.92; cf. Isoc. 12.14, 12.22, 13.29, 14.46). As I discuss further below (3b), Dionysius also finds something vaguely feminine in Plato’s style, as if participation in stylistic dress-up and flowery modes rendered him unfit for more public, manly displays.48 He associates musicality with middle or mixed styles, which contributes to a sense of their artfulness as well as the gendered implications of the soft, the ornamental, and the pleasurable. When discussing the “polished, theatrical” compositional style, Dionysius suggests first that it is “the sort that chooses decoration over dignity” (τὸ κομψὸν αἱρουμένη πρὸ τοῦ σεμνοῦ τοιαύτη, Dem. 40.2). It thus seeks out the smoothest and softest forms of words (ὀνομάτων . . . τὰ λειότατα καὶ μαλακώτατα), because “it pursues euphony and musicality and the pleasure that comes from them” (τὴν εὐφωνίαν θηρωμένη καὶ τὴν εὐμέλιαν, ἐξ αὐτῶν δὲ τὸ ἡδύ) (40.2–5).49 As a result of this style’s inclination for smooth movement and musicality, its “flow of words is lively and rapid, like streams running down a hillside with nothing impeding them” (ἐπιτρόχαλος δή τις γίνεται καὶ καταφερὴς ἡ ῥήσις τῆς λέξεως, ὥσπερ κατὰ πρανοῦς φερόμενα χωρίου νάματα μηδενὸς αὐτοῖς ἀντικρούοντος, Dem. 40.43–46).50 Indeed, it “flows into the ears somehow pleasantly and in a welcome fashion” (καὶ διαρρεῖ διὰ τῆς ἀκοῆς ἡδέως πως καὶ ἀσπαστῶς), no less than the musical sounds that come from singing and instruments (τὰ δι’ ᾤδης καὶ ὀργάνου μουσωθέντα κρούματα καὶ μέλη) (40.46–48). In this later passage Dionysius is focusing particularly on word choice and placement that create smoothness, but his description also engages in mimetic effects. That is, here he reproduces the image from Republic book 48

49 50

E.g., on Plato’s “blooming” style: καὶ λεληθότως ἐπιτρέχει χλοερόν τέ τι καὶ τεθηλὸς καὶ μεστὸν ὥρας ἄνθος ἀναδίδωσι (Dem. 5.12–14). Cf. ἡδίους καὶ μαλακωτέρας, Dem. 40.24; μαλακούς, 40.33; ἡδεῖαν, 40.39. Note again that although Cicero similarly deems Isocrates’ style “lucid and fluid” (solutum et fluens) he does not approve of the “unimpeded river” – i.e., periods that lack proper punctuation (cf. ne infinite feratur ut flumen oratio, Orat. 68).

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

3 discussed in Chapter 6, of poetic meters that flow into the ear as through a funnel, a characteristic of styles that are, from Socrates’ perspective, so smooth and fluid as to be weakening and softening (Rep. 411a6–b4). We may also recall that in his denigration of such modes Socrates quotes Iliad 17.588, where Apollo rouses Hector by insulting Menelaus as a “soft spearsman” (μαλθακὸν αἰχμητήν), turning Homer’s battlefield insult to theoretical use. As I discuss in chapter 6, Demetrius, Dionysius, and Longinus all engage mimetically with Plato’s images of fluidity; and both Demetrius and Dionysius indicate the ways in which the flowing qualities they depict represent middle styles and indeed Isocrates’ or Plato’s own. The Republic passage, with its emphasis on softness and its use of battlefield insult, encourages the gendered cast that such associations lend these styles; and this, as I emphasize below, is also of a piece with the imputations that Cicero levels at philosophical styles and Dionysius at Plato’s in particular. Mimetic strategies often have this reflexive outcome, especially those that engage with Plato, no doubt because later theorists tend to find themselves in contention with him most of all over mimesis, metaphor, and style. Elsewhere Dionysius explicitly endorses such mimetic effects when describing how in the hands of a master like Homer mixed styles of composition have utmost flexibility and thus can, effectively, run like anything from the gentle stream to the roaring river. This has its roots, conventionally enough, in nature (ἡ φύσις), the “great source and teacher” (μεγάλη . . . ἀρχὴ καὶ διδάσκαλος) (De comp. verb. 16.11–14): ἡ ποιοῦσα μιμητικοὺς καὶ θετικοὺς ἡμᾶς τῶν ὀνομάτων, οἷς δηλοῦται τὰ πράγματα κατά τινας εὐλόγους καὶ κινητικὰς τῆς διανοίας ὁμοιότητας. who makes us imitative and adept coiners of words, by which things are made clear through certain resemblances that are reasonable and appealing to thought.51

Apparently natural and reasonable likenesses make it the case that letters, syllables, and words are beautiful; they in turn make the language beautiful (καλὴν . . . λέξιν) and pleasurable to the ear by means of their affinity (ἐκ τῶν ἡδυνόντων τὴν ἀκοὴν γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ παραπλήσιον) (16.30–34). Dionysius’ emphasis on beauty here, while something of an interjection, aims at claiming for natural resemblances an appeal that encompasses a broad range of sounds, as long as they suit the topic and context.52 Thus 51

52

Here again Dionysius is clearly echoing Aristotle on the natural sources of mimesis (cf. Poet. 1448b4–9). Cf. the style-content debate among Hellenistic writers (e.g., Neoptolemus of Parium, Philodemus); see Asmis 1992b, Porter 2010: 115–18. Although their terminology is not evident

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Homer can render the beauty of Penelope or Nausicaa, which brings delight (καλλὸς ἡδονής ἐπαγωγόν53), by choosing a gentle arrangement of letters that flows painlessly into the ear (πραεῖαν δέ τινα ποιήσει τὴν ἁρμονίαν τῶν γραμμάτων καὶ ῥέουσαν ἀλύπως διὰ τῆς ἀκοῆς) (16.48–50). Or, in contrast, he can in effect ford a different stream, as when he wants to imitate in his style the flowing together of rivers in one place and the noise of them mingling (ποταμῶν δέ γε σύρρυσιν εἰς χωρίον ἓν καὶ πάταγον ὑδάτων ἁναμισγομένων ἐκμιμήσασθαι τῇ λέξει βουλόμενος) by using strong and resounding words (ἰσχυρὰς καὶ ἀντιτύπους) (16.65–68). Or, again, when Achilles forces his way forward against the river Scamander’s current (πρὸς ἐναντίον ῥεῦμα ποταμοῦ), sometimes losing his footing, Homer introduces “clashing syllables, delays in the rhythm, and blockages of letters” (εἰσάγων ἀνακοπάς τε ποιήσει συλλαβῶν καὶ ἀναβολὰς χρόνων καὶ ἀντιστηριγμοὺς γραμμάτων) (16.71–74).54 Note that in this case it is not so much that Dionysius’ own language emulates Homer’s as that the theorist makes use of the poet as a primary example of the power of mimetic composition – that is, of composition that itself reproduces the effects of the narrative event. Dionysius’ foregrounding here of flowing words and then flowing rivers, each of a different sort, suggests the centrality of such imagery to his stylistic scheme. From his strongly aestheticizing emphasis on sensory mimesis, not only can soft words themselves make for the gentle forward movement that streams smoothly into the ear; but, conversely, striking or clashing words can reproduce the sense of splashing water or violent currents. For Dionysius this strong correlation has its roots in nature, which means that the power of the mixed style is that it can match by its mimetic language both the fluidity of Penelope’s beauty and the Scamander’s roar. It also suggests another means by which bodies and natural features fall together, one that differs from Cicero’s emphasis on the body’s breath and verbal flow. Dionysius instead builds upon Socrates’ image of metered language flowing into the ear so that it becomes a positive

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in Demetrius, some scholars think, following a comment by Porphyry on the Ars poetica, that they influenced Horace’s ideas about poetics (cf. Brink 1963–82, Rudd 1989: 23–27). A central emphasis that supposedly originated with Neoptolemus is a division of poetics into poēsis (content/plot), poēma (style/craft), and poētēs/poeta (poet) (Philod. de Poet.). See also Asmis 1992a on Philodemus and Crates, who likely influenced Cicero and Dionysius in their emphasizing of aural aesthetics. I.e., descriptions of Penelope and Nausicaa in the Odyssey (quoting Od. 17.36–37, 6.162–63). As the discussion on irrigation imagery in ch. 6.3b indicates, theorists are drawn to this aspect of Achilles’ battle with the elements.

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

indication of the natural affinities among objects, images, and aesthetic pleasure. Unsurprisingly, then, images of flowing water constitute a prominent way in which Dionysius gives color to his stylistic critique of the primary representatives of the middle, mixed, or polished style – namely, Isocrates and Plato. Although he depicts the periodic rhythms and lexical choices of both as resembling flowing water, Isocrates’ is most often a meandering river while Plato’s has the fresh flow of a spring. Early on in On Demosthenes Dionysius praises Plato’s style when at its simplest as “limpid” (διαυγής), “like the clearest of streams” (ὥσπερ τὰ διαφανέστατα τῶν ναμάτων) (Dem. 5.8–10).55 This rural, fresh-flowing quality that Dionysius advocates in Plato’s style echoes in a loose sense Apollo’s spurning in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo of Envy’s broad and muddy river in favor of the purest water from the smallest spring (HAp. 111–12).56 One might expect, then, that a similar kind of stylistic purity would characterize Plato’s style, but being mixed – and thus in Plato’s case sometimes tainted with inappropriately grand or showy features – it does not adhere to this simpler plan. And though a good negotiator of this middle ground might also engage more figurative, striking usage, Dionysius does not approve of the means by which Plato does so. In Dionysius’ essays as in Cicero’s and other later theorists’, some of the language of flow captures aspects of grander styles, as other chapters also argue. At first glance the imagery can seem confused, as inflections captured in the clear stream trope appear to merge with the sluggish river and even with greater floods such as the ocean. For Dionysius, however, this is a result of the fact that mixed styles can include a range of features, so that it is distinctive especially for its richness and variation. This concertedly inclusive model allows Dionysius to regard Homer as a master of the mixed or middle style of composition and to use his own verse to characterize his poetry as the ocean, a font feeding all stylistic genius: “The source from which all the rivers flow and the whole sea and every spring” (ἐξ οὗ περ πάντες ποταμοὶ καὶ πᾶσα θάλασσα | καὶ πᾶσαι κρῆναι, De comp. verb. 24 [quoting Il. 21.196–97]). Similarly but more critically, Dionysius likens Plato to a “rich fountain that bubbles out great elaborations” (νᾶμα τὸ πλούσιον καὶ τὰς μεγάλας κατασκευὰς καχλάζον, Dem. 28); and since he is here mocking Plato’s failure to choose appropriately lofty phrasing for 55

56

Cf. Quintilian’s characterization of the middle style as “gentle, like a river that is clear but shadowed by green banks on either side” (lenior tamen ut amnis lucidus quidem sed virentibus utrinque ripis inumbratus, 12.10.60). As ch. 5 discusses, this is a very influential distinction.

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an august topic, the elaborate quality of Dionysius’ image mimics this and thereby furthers the critique.57 In somewhat similar terms but with different emphases, the fluid qualities of Isocrates’ style also range somewhat from the lively stream to the winding river. Dionysius approves of Isocrates’ mix of clarity and loftiness, and when discussing composition hails him as an example of the polished (γλαφυρά) style, which (again) may have an energetic and rapid movement, like streams running down a hillside (Dem. 40.43–46). But earlier in On Demosthenes, when characterizing Isocrates’ style of expression (λέξις), Dionysius targets an emphasis on beauty as its central weakness, which appears to weigh it down and impede its flow. Isocrates abandons the lucidity of which he is very capable, Dionysius says, when he wants to stun his audience with the beauty of his own phrasing (καταπλήξασθαι τῷ κάλλει τῶν ὀνομάτων), which leads him to indulge in an overly ornamental, Gorgianic dependence on figures and antitheses (Dem. 4.18–23). In pursuing verbal beauty (τὴν εὐέπειαν διώκουσα, 4.25–26) to a detrimental extent, he effectively slackens his pace and lingers in fulsome periods, which “follow . . . a deep-running, meandering, and curving course like a river with many inlets” (διώκει . . . ὑπαγωγικήν τινα καὶ πλατεῖαν καὶ πολλοὺς ἀγκῶνας, ὥσπερ οἱ μὴ κατ’ εὐθείας ῥέοντες ποταμοὶ ποιοῦσιν, ἐγκολπιζομένην, 4.29–32; cf. κεκολπωμένα, 19.29). This style when thus distended (μακροτέραν) becomes apathetic and lifeless (ἀπαθῆ τε καὶ ⟨ἄψυχον⟩58), and so more suited to ceremony than debate (πανηγυρικὴν μᾶλλον ἢ ἐναγώνιον) (4.33–35).59 As sometimes happens at significant junctures in Dionysius’ treatises, here we witness once again where setting and implied embodiment fall together: the languid river would by extension sap its traveler, leaving him enervated and unfit for action. Dionysius returns to the river image later on, declaring that Isocrates’ lack of conciseness can make his language like a sluggish river: flaccid, winding, and overflowing with thoughts (ὑπτία γάρ ἐστι καὶ ὑπαγωγικὴ καὶ περιρρέουσα τοῖς νοήμασιν, 18.15). While Dionysius is careful to acknowledge Isocrates’ abilities, as a rhetorical theorist with Attic leanings he is not a great advocate of this dilatory style, with its valuing of elaborate figures, aesthetic pleasure, and sleek fluidity over all. As noted in Chapter 6 (section 3a), he finds his style of expression smooth and soft (λεῖον καὶ μαλακόν) as 57

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Hunter relates this part of the critique to other imagery of “the ‘stream of language’ ” (e.g., Cratinus, Longinus) (2012: 157–58). See also chs. 3.4 and ch. 6.2b–c. Sadée’s supplement. Cf. Cic. Orat. 42: pompae quam pugnae aptius, gymnasiis et palaestrae dicatum, spretum et pulsum foro; and further below, 3a.

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

well as languid (ὑγρά), since it flows into the ears of the audience like oil (ὥσπερ ἔλαιον) (Dem. 20.39–43).60 This is not an unfamiliar image in Dionysius (cf. Dem. 40.46–48), but here there is more positive emphasis on the ear’s pleasure. If we take these passages together with On Composition, however, it emerges that the ear’s enjoyment of this soft, well-oiled flow is not entirely a good thing.61 Despite Dionysius’ emphasis early in that treatise on aiming at effects that appeal to the ear, he also indicates in the austere style (austēra harmonia or lexis) a gendered or even generational superiority. This is an older, tougher, more masculine style: Dionysius’ language connotes good soldiering, as words “stand up steadily and hold strong positions” (ἐρείδεσθαι βούλεται τὰ ὀνόματα ἀσφαλῶς καὶ στάσεις λαμβὰνειν ἰσχυράς). This style may also use combinations that are rough and resounding (τραχείας τε . . . καὶ ἀντιτύπους) (De comp. 22.2–8); and it “loves to cover great distances with big, straddling words” (μεγάλοις τε καὶ διαβεβηκόσιν εἰς πλάτος ὀνόμασιν ὡς τὰ πολλὰ μηκύνεσθαι φιλεῖ).62 This is the style of an earlier generation of poets, including Empedocles, Pindar, and Aeschylus; Dionysius names Thucydides and Antiphon as the prose writers who carry it forward. As his treatise on Thucydides indicates, he is most interested in the historian’s style. Here he makes clear that it avoids precisely what the polished modes aim to achieve, since “it is not attractive and soft and slipping imperceptibly into the ear” (οὐδ’ ἔστιν εὐεπὴς καὶ μαλακὴ καὶ λεληθότως ὀλισθάνουσα διὰ τῆς ἀκοῆς) (De comp. verb. 22.227–28). Instead Thucydides’ verbal effects are “striking and rough and harsh” (ἀντίτυπον καὶ τραχὺ καὶ στρυφνόν) as well as rugged (ἀπηνῆ) (22.229, 238).63 Such distinctions are familiar from Chapter 6: think of Demetrius’ notion of the “rough road” of Thucydides’ prose (De eloc. 48–49), as well as Lucian’s colorful contrast between the manly hiker on the rough path to good rhetorical training versus the delicate dandy on the easy route (Rhet. praec. 1–11).64 Like Cicero, and more overtly than Demetrius, Dionysius’ stylistic distinctions indicate intermittently the soft and perhaps 60 61 62

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The image is from Pl. Theat. 144b5; also Rep. 411a5–8. Cf. Cic. Orat. 38: Isocrates . . . ad voluptatem aurium scripserat. Cf. Porter 2010: 507–08, who emphasizes the building imagery in the passage; words like διεβεβηκόσιν indicate broad straddlings or great striding movements across space, like those of warriors (e.g., Hector, Il. 12.50, 458; Archil. fr. 114 W2). Cf. Thuc. 22.24.10–13; and further in ch. 6.2. Contrast Cicero’s characterization of Thucydides’ style as contributing nothing for “forum and public use” (nihil . . . ad forensem usum et publicum), since his speeches “contain so many obscure and recondite sentiments as to be scarcely intelligible” (ita multas habent obscuras abditasque sententias vix ut intellegantur) (Orat. 30).

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even idle pleasures that may attend smoothly flowing styles. Their aesthetic techniques seduce the ear, which is generally desirable but can be also problematic, since showy and overly pleasurable techniques are childish and vaguely effeminizing. Stylistic elegance may invoke the perfumed delights of the symposium, say, or the river’s meander in which one happily loses one’s way, but such amiable associations carry some ethical compunction, the ear’s pleasure being both desirable and suspect. Ethical distinctions more overtly shape the contrasts drawn between styles in earlier periods; but we can recall that Horace disparages Lucilius in a manner that implies a moral failing as well as a stylistic one (i.e., a lack of restraint, as if his verbosity paralleled other indulgences of appetite).65 The Greek critics are similarly concerned with taste and – at least in the case of Demetrius and Dionysius – stylistic restraint. But this focus on aesthetics itself encompasses a retreat from civic concerns and as such is different from both Athenian and Ciceronian emphases. In the classical period in Athens stylistic choices are cast as choices of habit and appetite – so that one’s contorted phrasing (e.g.) pointed directly to whether one was, in the words of Prodicus’ Arete – well brought up (τὴν φύσιν τὴν σὴν ἐν τῇ παιδείᾳ, Xen. Mem. 2.1.27) and thus properly moderate and vigorous. Interestingly, Dionysius’ use of the bright, rapid stream running down a hillside as an image for Plato’s style has its echo in Quintilian’s contention that Attic styles are not restricted to the slight brook running through pebbles (qui tenui venula per calculos fluent, Inst. orat. 12.10.25). This not only indicates further connections between Attic styles and Plato’s reception but also the repeated tacking in these treatises between “slender” modes and slight flows. In his brief introductory treatise On the Ancient Orators Dionysius characterizes the Asiatic style that Cicero sometimes advocates as indulging in a kind of lexical opulence, which he equates with the presumptuous appropriation of the “household” by a luxury-loving and mindless concubine (ἑταίρα δὲ τις ἄφρων, Anc. rhet. 1).66 Distracting listeners with its theatricality and vulgar ornamentation (cf. θεατρικῇ and φορτική, 1), this Asiatic style threatens the status of the “freeborn and chaste wife” (ἐλευθέρα καὶ σώφρων γαμετή, 1) that is the Attic mode. Thus both writers contend for the claim to stylistic restraint. For the Roman orator opposed to Hellenistic delicacy this manifests itself

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See Schlegel 2000: 94–97; on the imagery see the discussion in 6.3c. Cf. Leidl 2003; Hidber 1999.

2. Stylistic rigors and currents

in a hard-body aesthetic, which may offset the effeminizing aspects of Asiatic indulgence.67 For the Greek teacher from Asia Minor it entails the chaste wife’s rejection of her luxurious, whorish counterpart. Although Prodicus’ Arete embodies ethical rather than stylistic choices, she too shows her worth in her stringent deportment and chaste dress, which itself goes with the straighter or rougher path. While I do not mean to suggest that this embodied ethical style – or Cicero’s “hard-body” oratory for that matter – directly parallels the discourse of paths and “flow,” both sets of tropes do clearly dovetail around the same or similar issues. The decorousness of Dionysius’ Attic “wife,” much like the ways in which Cicero characterizes Attic styles in Orator, offers a clearly gendered alternative to the rough work of public speaking at Rome – call it the “Greek” style, a retiring, modest mode not suited to the Forum. That said, this retreat from the political or at least the civic arena does not ring true as a characterization of Dionysius, who was a teacher of rhetoric at Rome, a disputant in the debate previously dominated by Cicero over the virtues of Attic versus Asiatic styles of rhetoric, and who seems to have conceived of himself as a descendant of Isocrates in his social role as a trainer of public speakers.68 That said, Dionysius may well have trained more writers than speakers, and his sense of political efficacy may have been somewhat diminished by his foreignness and even more particularly his Greekness. Although we know essentially nothing about theorists such as Demetrius and Longinus, we can notice a few dominant tendencies that run effectively from the late classical through the late Hellenistic period, and from there into Republican Rome and beyond. In the language of stylistic flow, the middle or mixed way is best, but it also carries with it dangers most evident in features of the polished mode of composition. The clear, smooth-running stream gives pleasure, of a sort that offers some sensual appeal in its limpidity and sheen, while the meandering river of prose that swells to overflowing can drag down its hearers, sweeping them away or losing them in cul-de-sacs. Further, in its smoothness and softness this fluid mode lacks the stalwart, upstanding qualities more evident in the austere style, the absence of which lends it an aura of decorative and pleasurable femininity.

67

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Cf. Aul. Gell. Noct. Att. 1.5.2–3, who reports that Hortensius, the orator whom Cicero champions in the Brutus, was lampooned by his contemporaries as an actor and dancing girl for his overly elegant and fulsome style. See Gunderson 2000. See Schultze 1986.

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3. In Plato’s garden One of the primary difficulties in setting forth how Cicero and Dionysius organize stylistic distinctions in relation to deportments and the settings they match arises, I think, from the nature of the central landscape that underlies their discussions: the kalē katagōgē of Plato’s Phaedrus. Because it is a riverside setting, it naturally calls up sensory associations with its flowing waters; but because it is also a rural (or “rural”) setting, flowers and tender, trilling creatures (here cicadas) help to shape its aesthetics. Since, however, in the writings of both theorists the imagery of flow entails many complex distinctions and extends far beyond this setting, I attempt to lay out above the parameters of how Cicero and Dionysius deploy such images, reserving for last the garden details that fence around their reception of the Phaedrus with shade trees, floral scents, and shrill song.

a. Cicero on soft and shady styles Cicero’s idyllic setting for De oratore suggests that the topos of the locus amoenus had particular resonance for writers of philosophical rhetoric. He deploys the locus amoenus very pointedly in three distinct places and in three ways: as a prominent frame for the discussion of rhetoric in De oratore, as the setting for a literary critical chat at the opening of De legibus, and as a spot for intellectual tourism in book 5 of De finibus.69 Each setting is carefully calibrated to the content of the works in question; and only De oratore refers explicitly to the Phaedrus (1.7.28–29).70 De legibus combines expatiation on grove and oak with an oblique reference to Plato’s dialogue, echoing Phaedrus’ question to Socrates about the site of the rape of Oreithuia (1.1.3; cf. 1.4.15). Book 5 of De finibus, in some contrast, is oriented by a peripatos through to the Academy, where the company of interlocutors converses on its paths. Here Piso invokes the “little gardens of Plato” (cuius illi horticuli, 5.1.2), while Pomponius declares that he is “very much with Phaedrus in the gardens of Epicurus” (sum multum quidem cum Phaedro . . . in Epicuri hortis, 5.1.3).

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Again, on Cicero’s use of the topos, see Zoll 1962: 96–100, 133–34; Benardete 1987; Görler 1988 (with earlier bibliography); Zetzel 2003; Fantham 2004: 63–71, and Krebs 2009. The entire setting of De oratore is framed as a Platonic locus amoenus (1.28), as Hass 1998: 34 notices. Cf. Cic. Verr. 6.80; Mur. 13; De leg. 1.1–4; De fin. 2.107 (cf. bk. 5); Att. 12.19.1; De orat. 2.290; Epist. 7.20.2. Note that both concern discussions of rhetoric set forty years earlier.

3. In Plato’s garden

The junctures at which Cicero deploys these significant topographies, though each has its particular turn, and though the topics of the dialogues are different, all have a similar cast. As scholars have explored in relation to both De oratore and De legibus, these are knowing, conversational frame narratives in which the interlocutors appear somewhat bemused by their place in a long and august intellectual tradition that stages philosophical dialogue by reference to idyllic retreats with shared features. Although both De legibus and De finibus 5 are important to a fuller sense of Cicero’s treatment of the topos, I restrict myself here to some points about De oratore, in order to highlight the importance of Cicero’s reception of this setting for direct rhetorical purposes. On the first morning of the discussions staged in De oratore, Scaevola walks out into Crassus’ garden at Tusculum,71 accompanied by his host (and son-in-law), the orator Antonius, and two younger protégés (Cotta and Sulpicius). “Why don’t we,” he says, “imitate that Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus” (cur non imitamur . . . Socratem illum, qui est in Phaedro Platonis). Scaevola claims that Crassus’ plane tree (platanus, 1.28) suggested this comparison to him, since it is no less broadly shading than that in Socrates’ setting. He adds with a shrewd turn on the generative qualities of Plato’s space that Socrates’ tree seems to have grown not so much from the stream beside it (non tam ipsa acula) as from Plato’s own diction (quam Platonis oratione crevisse). Scaevola concludes that surely the grass that Socrates’ tough feet enjoy may be offered to his own feet as well. Crassus improves upon this natural pillow, his provision of actual cushions for his guests implying that their feet are softer and thus in need of more luxurious care. They then sit down upon the seats under the plane tree (1.28–29).72 This agile set of metonymies indicates not only that the setting is suitable for a rhetorical chat; it also cleverly inverts the Platonic conceit, so that the philosopher’s language generates the lovely setting. Cicero’s turn on the original scene further suggests that the dialogue will unfold in a latter-day, perhaps more “cultured” and lavish mode (hence the private garden setting, with its cushions and seats), but one that is similarly wittily engaged with the contemplation of a good kind of rhetoric. The book concludes with a punctuating reference to the heat of the day, recalling the argument that Phaedrus uses to keep Socrates talking under the plane tree (De orat. 1.265; cf. Phdr. 242a3–6). When juxtaposed to the topographical 71

72

Görler 1988: 222–23 notes the fictional setting and date (91 bce); he thinks that this is likely a mimesis of Cicero’s estate. On the significance of the “pillows,” see Zetzel 2003.

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coordinates of De legibus and De finibus 5, it appears that Cicero embraces the “parkland” idyll as suited to philosophical (if not more actively rhetorical) modes, while his repeated use of the locus amoenus as a framing device intimates that these discussions are ultimately to be put to theoretical use. Accordingly, in book 3 of De oratore Crassus blames Socrates for the separation of rhetoric from philosophy, and thus eloquence from wisdom (3.59–73). Among the Greeks this led first to pursuits leading away from governance and to a life of tranquility and sweetness (tranquillitatem et . . . suavitatem) because of the sheer delight of philosophical investigation (56). This turning away from matters of state, Crassus explains, fostered such different styles of engagement that those with the philosophical knowledge did not possess the rhetorical abilities for public speaking. As with his focus on the body in performance discussed above (section 2.1), here Crassus envisions this incapacity in terms that sketch physical features and inclinations. Thus the Epicurean mode languishes in its little gardens (in hortulis quiescet suis), reclining in softness and delicacy (recubans molliter et delicate) (63), while the Stoics speak in a manner that may be subtle and is certainly precise (fortasse subtile et certe acutum), but is also thin, odd, and foreign to the ears of the crowd, not to mention obscure, empty, and barren (exile, inusitatum, abhorrens ab auribus vulgi, obscurum, inane, ieiunum) (66). This leaves only the Peripatetics and Academics. These Crassus groups as Plato’s followers, singling out Arcesilaus, whose philosophical skepticism is matched by a charming manner of speaking (lepore dicendi) and then Carneades, whose style was more fulsome (copia dicendi) (68). Crassus caps off this characterization of the philosophical schools as garden-loving or meager, and at their best charming, by envisioning the separation between philosophy and oratory as a mountainous watershed. In this conceptual geography, philosophy flowed east into the Ionian sea with its nice harbors (philosophi tamquam in superum mare Ionium defluerunt Graecum quoddam et portuosum), while oratory slid down westward into the rough, rocky and teeming Tyrrhenian sea (oratores autem in inferum hoc, Tuscum et barbarum, scopulosum et infestum laberentur), where even Ulysses lost his way (in quo etiam ipse Ulixes errasset) (69). Thus the philosophers get the easy, welcoming route of chatting about lofty topics in retreat from public wrangling, while the orators are left with the reefs and monsters of the courts and Forum.73 73

On the imagery see Fantham 2004: 249–51.

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Toward the end of the discussion in book 3 on the orator’s knowledge, Crassus turns to address how the eloquent orator determines and shapes his topoi, the sources that Antonius addressed in book 2 and that Crassus here terms a “forest of materials” (silva rerum, 118; cf. 93, 103). He cautions that one cannot properly determine such a range during a morning stroll or afternoon rest, such as they have enjoyed on his Tusculan estate (3.121). He goes on to envision the undertaking as their own giant holding (nostra est . . . possessio), threatened by invaders (i.e., writers of trivial handbooks) but rich with wellsprings for the drinking (fontis ex eis hauriemus) and a tremendously vast field for freely wandering (tanto tam immensoque campo . . . vagari libere) (123–24). Not only does his imagining clearly recall Hellenistic and neoteric claims to inspiration and authority (e.g., drinking from the pure mountain spring74), but it grandiosely caps Plato’s streamside dialogue, with its final vision of the philosopher-farmer in his field (Phdr. 276b1–8, 276d1–277a4).75 The vast reach of Crassus’ figurative territory effectively dominates and outstrips the Greek terrain in a lavish assertion of Roman dominion. The politics of his aesthetic reach thus captures the space of metaphor and transforms it into a site for dominance and control. Such distinctions among settings and inclinations resurface when Cicero addresses rhetorical style in the Orator (and secondarily in the Brutus). Once again he emphasizes mastery and domination, orchestrating contrasts between the stylistic metonymies generated by Plato’s rural setting with more urban, rigorous oratorical modes practiced by those capable of grand styles. This latter style serves as a necessary and weighty (cf. gravis, 97) counter to middling styles marked by “fluid” or “flowery” modes (i.e., figurative usage, rounded periodic rhythms, smooth sounds). Despite Cicero’s embrace of the rural retreat in De oratore and the easy flow of conversation it inspires, certain styles are not really suited to public settings.76 And yet if the pleasures of some styles must ultimately be bolstered by more energetic and muscular modes, they also shape Cicero’s own intellectual lineage as presented in the Orator. Shortly after his avowal of a Platonic attention to the Forms in his search for an ideal orator, Cicero depicts his discussion of oratorical styles as having a parkland source. His training, he says, derived from the “spacious grounds” of the Academy (ex Academiae spatiis exstitisse), where he trod 74 75

76

See ch. 5.4. For the significance of this trope, see ch. 4.4 and further below, 3b. On countryside and agricultural imagery in Roman rhetoric more generally, see Connors 1997; Videau 1997. Zoll 1962: 96–100, 133–34.

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in footsteps first imprinted by Plato (Platonis primum sunt impressa vestigia) (Orat. 12). Cicero also takes from this Platonic reference metaphorical terms that appear to link the Platonic locus amoenus with neoteric values. The philosophers left public arguing (forensis) to “the more rustic Muses” (agrestioribus Musis reliquerunt); and yet from the Platonic source, Cicero claims, come all fruitfulness and every “raw material of speaking” (omnis enim ubertas et quasi silva dicendi ducta) (Orat. 13). His conception shares vocabulary and stylistic implications with such didactic bucolic settings as Vergil depicts in the opening of his Eclogue 6, which was probably written only a few years later than Orator.77 Since the philosophers spurned it, Cicero claims, the “Forum style” found its own modes of impact, but the result was another schism, in which learned men lacked popular eloquence and skillful speakers refined thought (ita et doctis eloquentia popularis et disertis elegans doctrina defuit) (13).78 Thus oratory needs philosophy as the actor needs the gymnasium (adiuvet ut palaestra histrionem, 14); in Cicero’s analogy, philosophical exercise offers to crude oratory knowledge and refinement. He accordingly points out that in the Phaedrus Socrates claims this fertile source for the eloquence of Pericles (Phdr. 269e4–270a8), since he was a student of Anaxagoras.79 He also asserts that one can hear in Demosthenes’ letters that he was a frequent auditor of Plato (Orat. 14; cf. Brut. 121). Thus the Roman statesman Cicero, in listening to the philosophers, would seem to be in the very good company of the Greek politicians he admires. With this sylvan frame as figurative grounding, Cicero reorders metonymies coming from the locus amoenus setting, mainly so that he can address middle or “philosophical” styles. Thus he depicts Herodotus’ narrative as lacking rough patches like a calmly flowing river (sine ullis salebris quasi sedatus amnis, Orat. 39). This leads him to Isocrates, and to Socrates’ remarks at the end of the Phaedrus on the young Isocrates’ talents, which he quotes as a frame for delineating his style in its development. Taking up this resonant recommendation against detractors, Cicero praises Isocrates’ style by evoking the dialogue’s perfumed, stream-side scene: “This type of eloquence,” he says, “is sweet, loose, and flowing” (dulce . . . et solutum et fluens, Orat. 42, cf. 39). A contrast emerges, 77

78

E.g., silvas in line 2 and the deductum dicere carmen of line 5. Cf. silva rerum, De orat. 3.93, 103, 118. Cf. Brut. 118–20; also 259 suggests that such imagery is usually attached to a “rustic” style (e.g., subagreste quiddam planeque subrusticum); Cicero depicts Cotta’s diction as “as if treading an uncultivated and woodland path” (quasi inculta et silvestri via). 79 Note again the neoteric doctus and elegans. Cf. Brut. 44.

3. In Plato’s garden

however, between its “riverside” features and the settings in which it belongs, which appear not to include the shady retreat. Rather, Isocrates’ style represents an appropriately middle ground between the garden and the orator’s arena, being more suited to parades and gymnasia than the tumult of the Forum (pompae quam pugnae aptius, gymnasiis et palaestrae dicatum, spretum et pulsum foro, Orat. 42). In the possibly spurious De optimo genere oratorum we find again this positive reference to Isocrates in the Phaedrus, but now qualified by an opposition between real combat and sport: he lacks experience of “the battle and the sword” (nec acie versatur nec ferro), so that “his oratory parries as if with foils” (quasi rudibus eius eludit oratio) (17). Later on in the Orator, Cicero portrays the smooth, flowery, polished style, with its weave of appealing elements, as a product of the philosophical schools and sophistic sources. He envisions the influence of this style as itself a flowing stream, thus reiterating one of its main features (Orat. 96): Est enim quoddam etiam insigne et florens orationis pictum et expolitum genus, in quo omnes verborum, omnes sententiarum inligantur lepores. Hoc totum e sophistarum fontibus defluxit in forum, sed spretum a subtilibus, repulsum a gravibus in ea de qua loquor mediocritate consedit. This is in fact a distinctive and flowery, embroidered and polished style of speaking, in which all the charms of language and thought are intertwined. This all flowed down from the springs of the sophists into the Forum, but scorned by the plainer types and rejected by the weighty, it settled into the middle ground that I am discussing.

Addressing the middle style more fully (cf. medius, Orat. 98–99), Cicero again emphasizes its “sweetness” and “charms” (suavitatis, 91, 99; lepores, 96), a tender appeal that it shares with the plainer Attic styles. And he again associates this mixed mode with the Greeks and in particular Demetrius of Phalerum, whose style possesses a placid fluidity as well as an effective use of tropes and allegory (Orat. 92): In qua multi floruerunt apud Graecos, sed Phalereus Demetrius meo iudicio praestitit ceteris, cuius oratio cum sedate placideque liquitur, tum inlustrant eam quasi stellae quaedam translata verba atque immutata. In [this middle style] many flourished among the Greeks, but in my judgment Demetrius of Phalerum stands out from the rest; his speech not only flows sedately and placidly, also certain metaphors and neologisms light it up like stars.

We can compare here a passage in the Brutus that attributes to this same Demetrius the “modulating” of oratory, which made it soft and

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pliant, as well as sweet rather than harsh (inflexit orationem et eam mollem teneramque reddidit et suavis . . . videri maluit quam gravis).80 This tender style is, like that of Isocrates, more suited to the gymnasium than the battle (non tam armis institutus quam palaestra), and Cicero claims that it emerged directly from “the shadows of Theophrastus” (e Theophrasti . . . umbraculis) rather than the soldier’s tent (e militari tabernaculo) (Brut. 37–38). Although this may sound as if it were a fairly well “exercised” mode, we know from the Platonic dialogues that gym practice is in keeping with “shady” philosophical pastimes, which for later theorists fall short of the stringency of both the plain style and the full-bodied eloquence of the grand style.81 Later on in the same dialogue, prodded by Brutus’ inclination to Atticism, Cicero uses vocabulary that imitates a perfumed garden to distinguish Demetrius’ style. Athens itself, he says, seems to have the scent of Demetrius’ orations (redolere), while his style is more “flowery” (floridior) than that of Hyperides (Brut. 285). Indeed, when he later takes up this “philosophical” style again, he promotes it as one mode among others that the ideal orator must adapt. This is Plato’s style, which aims at calming rather than exciting the spirit (sedare animos malunt quam incitare) and addresses tranquil topics (de rebus placidis ac minime turbulentis) in order to teach rather than captivate (Orat. 63; cf. Brut. 121). Cicero deems the mode “soft and shady” (mollis est . . . et umbratilis), a characterization that wryly echoes both the Phaedrus’ pleasant setting and the bad training that Socrates sketches in the Phaedrus in his first attempt at countering Lysias’ speech (Phdr. 239c5–d1). Despite Cicero’s earlier claims that philosophical engagement offers oratory a kind of palaestra training (Orat. 14), this is clearly a style more in keeping with philosophical chat and languishing under plane trees. Like the excessively casual modes that plain styles may adopt, it lacks a kind of tight control, unequipped as it is with thoughts or language for the masses; nor is it bound by rhythms, but more freely loose (nec sententiis nec verbis instructa popularibus nec vincta numeris, sed soluta liberius, Orat. 63). This retiring mode – soft, slack, and made for the shade – unsurprisingly has a feminine cast. Rather than being sharp and sometimes violent or outrageous as is public oratory, the philosophical, Platonic style

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Isocrates has a similar effect at Orat. 40: dilatare verbis et mollioribus numeris explere sententias. Cf. the “biceps” (lacerti) of Lysias’ style (Brut. 64). Cicero’s depiction also reflects Isocrates’ writerly mode and emphasis on the shared benefits of physical and mental exercise (e.g., Antid. 184–86, 266). See Gunderson 2000; Dugan 2005; Connolly 2007.

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is chaste and modest, like an unsullied virgin (casta et verecunda, virgo incorrupta quodam modo, 64).82 Cicero’s contrasts, polite though they largely are, foster certain lessthan-complimentary oppositions: muscular versus slack, male versus female, and Roman versus Greek. The Platonic idyll may provide Cicero with a charming, cultured frame for his philosophical discussions, but the shady and soft philosophical style on the one hand and the fluid, flowery, or feminine styles on the other (which sometimes converge) cannot stand up in the public venues of downtown Rome. Philosophers, it appears, belong in their gardens, Greeks more generally belong up a lazy river, and women belong in the home.83 With the special exception of Demosthenes, Romans alone belong in the Senate and Forum, wrestling with the issues of the day by means of their muscular styles. For all that, the fact remains that Cicero has a fond regard for the rural frame and that his handling of the fluid style that has traditionally functioned as its natural extrapolation is respectful. Some of Cicero’s equivocations around this “Greek” mode may arise from the profound value that he attributes to Greek philosophy and the serious labor that he takes it to be. This, in combination with the fact that critics in general are at pains to praise the mixed or middle modes that by definition mediate the extremes of the plain and ornate style, may account for the deference with which Cicero treats the “philosopher’s” style. But he is clearly also seeking to delineate the superiority of his favored ornate style by associating some middle and plainer modes with suggestively tender, pliant imagery. And while Plato does not himself differentiate Socrates’ newfound bucolic “flow” as delicate or feminine, its connections to poetic inspiration, to lyric and especially Sappho, and its deployment of the flowers and trilling cicadas that serve as its other central metonymies, trace connections that come for Dionysius to distinguish the ambiguous charms of the middle style.

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As discussed in ch. 1.2a, Brut. 330 depicts oratorical style (eloquentia) more generally as a maiden who must be kept within the house of her custodians (i.e., Cicero and Brutus, domi teneamus eam saeptam liberali custodia) like a modest virgin beset by suitors (procos repudiemus tueamurque ut adultam virginem caste). Cf. also his characterizing of good metaphor as verecunda (De orat. 3.165, Ad fam. 16.17.1). And note again that Dionysius sets up the chaste Attic “wife” versus the Asiatic “whore” to promote simpler styles of composition (Anc. rhet. 1). Cf. Orat. 83–84, 89 for imagery of thrift and the humble domestic setting.

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b. Dionysius on the stylistic idyll From the foregoing discussion on Dionysius’ use of the imagery of flow we may conclude that Isocrates is more easily set aside in the contest with Demosthenes, as a primary purveyor of the polished style, which is in Isocrates’ hands artful but too otiose and “overflowing.” Plato, in some contrast, appears to be a more complicated rival, since he like Demosthenes (and Homer!) plies the mixed style, the best of all possible modes. Scholars have noted how pointed and careful Dionysius’ treatment of Plato is in On Demosthenes and attempted to trace the debate over his style back through Caecilius and Posidonius to Aristotle (cf. Rhet. 1404a26–35).84 My aim here is somewhat different, since the mimetic strategies that Dionysius employs reveal an impressive elaboration of the discursive conventions traced in this study. My focus on the ways in which landscape imagery fosters stylistic categories leads inevitably to the most complex instance of this in Dionysius’ writings: his use of the opening of the Phaedrus to distinguish Plato’s own style. While the few scholars who have spent time on this passage have appeared to find the mimetic process that motivates it unremarkable, merely in keeping with Dionysius’ traditional approach to teaching by means of fine models, I propose that he is undertaking something more adventurous.85 Dionysius’ use of mimetic strategies to characterize Plato’s style exposes anew the relationship between mimesis and metaphor, while his reconfiguring of the Phaedrus imagery advances our understanding of how this type of explanation works. As such, his use of the setting has a different impact than Cicero’s aesthetic politics, in that it lacks the Roman emphasis on domination and dominion. Instead Dionysius tinkers with the details of Plato’s scene in such a way as to remold the aesthetics of the retreat into a critical tool for advancing Demosthenes’ style. If the distinctions he crafts also have their politics and gendering, these are less firmly situated in relation to Roman territories and domains. However that may be, for Dionysius as for Cicero, the stylistic implications of the Phaedrus’ idyllic setting foster a sense of Plato’s style as at its best a charming but transient enjoyment. In highlighting this aspect first Dionysius echoes the increasingly contentious, gendered imagery that writers on style deploy when opposing the rural retreat (whose flowering 84 85

Nassal 1910: 162–63; Bonner 1939; van Wyk Cronjé 1986: 70–72 (also Panaetius). But see Fornaro 1997: 121–27 on the mimetic aspects of the passage as it is repeated in DH Ad Gn. Pompeius. See also Trapp 1990; Hunter 2012: ch. 4; Battisti 1997: 14–17 on mimetic literary practices.

3. In Plato’s garden

meadows and sweet breezes sometimes call to mind virginal softness and delicacy) to the manly atmosphere of such arenas as the battlefield and the Forum. Certain aspects of Dionysius’ imitation of Plato’s details articulate the ways in which he ramifies this stylistic landscape to further such gendered rankings, while also exposing the contentiousness of the metaphors and of the mimetic process itself. That is to say, if Hunter is right that On Imitation reveals Dionysius’ debt to Plato in his placing of beauty and its reproduction at the center of rhetorical training, On Demosthenes reveals the extent to which this debt weighs on him. The entailments of mimetic strategies compromise the strategist, since his imitation means that he carries forward not only his model’s images but also influences later mimetic gestures by his own reordering of the model. Unlike more objective, distanced forms of theory and criticism, the engagement (or indeed entanglement) with the earlier images demands of the emulating theorist a more diverse and circuitous approach to his subject. While Plato’s metaphors dominate Dionysius’ stylistic critique, in taking up these images he also takes on the burden of their complexities and implications – the back story of their first applications, their history as metaphors. In the process of struggling to divest himself of all these extensions, repeatedly chastising the philosopher for his failings, and trying to create a space for his critique, Dionysius finds a way to make these metaphors new, to turn them to novel uses. Dionysius initially takes on the Phaedrus imagery at an early point in On the Style of Demosthenes, when he devotes a substantial section to a critique of Socrates’ speeches in the dialogue and borrows his stylistic vocabulary directly from its opening (Dem. 5–7). He first frames his critical setting by stating rather tendentiously that while Platonic dialogue “wishes to be a mixture of each of these modes, both grand and plain” (βούλεται μὲν εἶναι καὶ αὐτὴ μῖγμα ἑκατέρων τῶν χαρακτήρων, τοῦ τε ὑψηλοῦ καὶ ἰσχνοῦ), it is not equally successful in both styles, which means that Plato ultimately fails at the blended quality of the best styles. The urgency of his need to find something lacking in Plato’s style leads Dionysius to make claims that suggest a willful misreading of the dialogues’ stylistic dynamics – although these are, admittedly, intricate and subtle. While he delays citing any passages until after he has offered his verdict, he lavishes praise on what he takes to be Plato’s more lucid modes (Dem. 5.5–12): ὅταν μὲν οὖν τὴν ἰσχνὴν καὶ ἀφελῆ καὶ ἀποίητον ἐπιτηδεύῃ φράσιν, ἐκτόπως ἡδεῖά ἐστι καὶ φιλάνθρωπος. καθαρὰ γὰρ ἀποχρώντως γίνεται καὶ διαυγής, ὥσπερ τὰ διαφανέστατα τῶν ναμάτων, ἀκριβής τε καὶ λεπτὴ παρ’ ἡντινοῦν ἑτέραν τῶν [εἰς]

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But Dionysius’ mimetic gestures give the lie to his claim about the simplicity of this style, since it sends him into his own place-specific transports, as if he himself were standing on the banks of the Ilissus, right where Socrates indulged in his Gorgianic scene-setting. Not only does Plato’s style when at its simplest become pure, sparkling, and clear – like that of a fine Hellenistic poet, for instance (Dem. 5.8–9); it also has a little of the patina and film of early styles (ὅ τε πίνος αὐτῇ [καὶ ὁ χνοῦς] ὁ τῆς ἀρχαιότητος), which “imperceptibly steals over it and lends it a certain freshness and bloom and beauty in full flower” (ἠρέμα καὶ λεληθότως ἐπιτρέχει χλοερόν τέ τι καὶ τεθηλὸς καὶ μεστὸν ὥρας ἄνθος ἀναδίδωσι, Dem. 5.12–14). Lest we miss the patent echoes of his similes and metaphors, Dionysius adds that Plato’s style is such that it “gives off a pleasant breeze, like the most fragrant meadows” (ὥσπερ ἀπὸ τῶν εὐωδεστάτων λειμώνων αὖρά τις ἡδεῖα ἐξ αὐτῆς φέρεται).86 And like the cicadas and Socrates’ own Muses, this style is marked by “piercing clarity” (τὸ λιγυρόν); like the grassy bank so perfect for reclining, it also possesses elegance (τὸ κομψόν) (5.15–17).87 While here Dionysius wants to claim such features for a slight (ischnos) style, we should recall that fluidity usually characterizes mixed styles and the polished (glaphuros) style of composition in particular. Indeed, later on in the treatise when addressing melodic expression (τὴν εὐφωνίαν . . . καὶ τὴν εὐμέλειαν), Dionysius urges that a polished harmonizing of phrases will also be “pleasant and clear” (ἡδεῖαν καὶ λιγυράν, Dem. 40.49; cf. 36.28, 43.81) and make for elegance (τὸ κομψόν, 36.28–30, 40.1–2). So far it appears that the pleasures afforded by such bucolic features comport with good style, as long as one does not drift into such idle elaborations as the overuse of metaphor or rhythms that imitate poetry (5.18–35). These indulgences Dionysius attributes to Plato’s love of 86

87

Cf. Pl. Phdr. 230b5, c2. Cf. also Plut. De rect. rat. aud. 41f.; De comp. Arist. et Menan. 854b11–c4, where he compares Menander’s style to a flowering field. On the details of the imitation of Plato’s setting, see Fornaro 1997: 121–27. Cf. Pl. Phdr. 230c2–3, 237a7. The language evokes not just the rural idyll of Plato’s Phaedrus but also imagery from archaic lyric, perhaps especially that of Sappho, as well as Hellenistic poetry; cf. chs. 2.3a and 5.4.

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Gorgianic and Thucydidean artifice (τῆς Γοργίου καὶ Θουκυδίδου κατασκευῆς ἐρασθείς, 5.25–26; cf. Γοργιείοις, 5.34). Thus at the same time as Dionysius is forging his own set of metaphors taken directly from the rural scene of the Phaedrus, he ignores the elaborate mimesis of the dialogue’s setting and focuses his criticisms on what he must consider Plato’s own more metaphorical styles. He finds that his use of verbal ornament muddies the waters, as it were (lit. “darkens what is clear,” μελαίνει τε τὸ σαφές) and “drags on, stretching out the meaning” (ἕλκει τε μακρὸν ἀποτείνασα τὸν νοῦν) (5.21–23).88 In contrast to the opening of the Phaedrus, which Dionysius judges so simple (including, apparently, Socrates’ elaborate praise of the locus amoenus), he characterizes Socrates’ speeches as marked by stylistic excesses, arguing that Plato’s fondness for figurative language often “catches him in a storm” (χειμάζεται περὶ τὴν τροπικὴν φράσιν), stiffening his style (cf. σκληρά) and rendering it Gorgianic (Dem. 5.27–35).89 Although Dionysius later acknowledges that Plato’s style is considered “especially formidable” (μάλιστα δεινὸς ὁ Πλάτων εἶναι δοκεῖ) in its metaphorical usage (κατὰ τὸ τροπικόν) (Dem. 32.21–22), as an advocate of more mixed styles he cannot endorse elaborate or abundant figurative ornament or other poeticizing techniques. For instance, Socrates’ appeal to the Muses before his speech comes upon the critic with the force of a sudden squall: “Like a wind bursting out of the calm and still air, [Plato] disrupts the purity of the phrase by entering into poetic vulgarity” (ὥσπερ ἐξ ἀέρος εὐδίου καὶ σταθεροῦ πολὺς ἄνεμος καταρραγείς, ταράττει τὸ καθαρὸν τῆς φράσεως ἐς ποιητικὴν ἐκφέρων ἀπειροκαλίαν, 7.11–14). Thus in Dionysius’ own stylistic drama, poetic excesses shatter the tranquility of the locus amoenus, disrupting the charms of the blooming, limpid, pleasant mode – that is, the “simple” style that he claims for the opening passages of the Phaedrus. He characterizes Socrates’ disruptive apostrophe and its high-blown verbiage as dithyrambic excesses. 88

89

Note that Dionysius condemns the miming of a grand style, such as the mock funeral oration the Menexenus (Dem. 23–30), since it suits his purposes to treat the speech as a straightforward example of praise rhetoric. Cf. Dionysius’ mocking of Gorgias’ style by quoting Socrates’ exclamation in the Phaedrus that he has reached such heights in his speech that he is “not far from uttering dithyrambs” (οὐκέτι πόρρω διθυράμβων φθέγγομαι, Phdr. 238d3; DH Lys. 3.18–21). In his discussion of the use of metaphor in the “grand” (megaloprepēs) style, for instance, recall that Demetrius remarks that Plato’s preference for metaphor (rather than simile) seems “risky” (ἐπισφαλές, De eloc. 80). Again, this is presumably because metaphor sounds more poetic and less clear, insofar as it collapses the distance between the image and its target. Cicero similarly calls Gorgias intemperatius for indulging too much in chiming cadences (Orat. 52.175), even though he himself often advocates fulsome styles.

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Purposefully misreading Socrates’ joke about becoming dithyrambic in the middle of his first speech (Phdr. 238d2–3), Dionysius offers it as evidence that Plato noticed his own tendency toward “vulgarity” (τῆς ἰδίας ἀπειροκαλίας, 6.20–22). At these moments Plato is “infatuated with the sheer noise and emptiness of dithyrambs” (διθυράμβων ψόφους καὶ λήρους ἠγαπηκότες, 7.34–35). In fact, Dionysius argues, if one just added meter and music (μέλη καὶ ῥυθμούς) to this and similar passages (now adducing Phdr. 246e4–247a7), Plato would sound like Pindar (7.48–51).90 Pindaric poetry, of course, constitutes a prime example of high-blown, grand modes, and like the styles of Gorgias and Thucydides its excessive figures and recondite usage render it unsuitable for and unpersuasive in public settings. This reordering of vocabulary from the opening of the Phaedrus in order to critique its style and find it at least partially lacking opens up many questions, not only about stylistic categories and their coherence but also about how metaphors for style function and what, exactly, is achieved by this kind of critical mimesis. As is obvious, the vocabulary that Dionysius transforms into a stylistic lexicon comes almost entirely from Socrates’ exclamatory speech describing the kalē katagōgē where he and Phaedrus settle to talk. As Chapter 4 details, Plato fashions this panegyric to their locus amoenus – the style of which, again, scholars have characterized as Gorgianic – as a wry nod to poetic conceits and rhetorical conventions. Dionysius transforms its features into a set of stylistic distinctions counterposed precisely to Gorgianic excesses, thereby distancing himself from Plato’s own critique and its aims. Just as Demetrius effectively turns the course of Socrates’ critique of fluid meters by celebrating how Plato’s own language reproduces its effects, here Dionysius reorients the stylistic implications of Plato’s locus amoenus by praising as his simpler mode the very language – while echoing this same language – that Plato used to mock the elaborations of Gorgias and the poets before him. It is a contentious and daring move, one that both champions the brilliance of the original metaphors and then makes something else of them: a recalibrating of the landscape that captures a fluid, charming, but simpler mode. The mimesis maintains the connection to the original, indeed makes more of it than an objective description might, but its new turn also creates distance between imitator and imitated, thereby refining the model. 90

Cf. Dem. 26; also the Ion’s elaborate Pindaric image of the poet as a bee in the garden (534a7–b3).

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The trope of the locus amoenus thus turns out to be very useful indeed, providing Dionysius with the stylistic vocabulary to distinguish Plato from Demosthenes. He turns the frame of the dialogue against its speeches (as well as others), willfully ignoring their stylistic play. This allows him to claim that Plato’s rhetorical style fails where his theory does not, since the stylistic metaphors that shape his arguments remain dominant and persuasive. In fact, it may be precisely because Dionysius wants to demonstrate Plato’s faults as a speechwriter in contrast to Demosthenes, and yet also to indicate his own affinity with Plato as a theorist, that he adopts Plato’s vocabulary as a means of asserting Demosthenes’ preeminence. But like Cicero he struggles with the hierarchy, seeking a means of defending philosophical modes while also championing those more suited to public settings. Dionysius’ negotiation of this hierarchy is so intricately calibrated that at one point he adapts the language that Plato uses to characterize aspects of poetry and rhetoric in order to distinguish the effects of Isocrates’ speeches from those of Demosthenes. Reading Isocrates, Dionysius says, makes him feel serious and achieve a great tranquility of mind (σπουδαῖος γίνομαι καὶ πολὺ τὸ εὐσταθὲς ἔχω τῆς γνώμης), like those listening to slow, spondaic music (Dem. 22.1–5). Demosthenes’ speeches, in contrast, transport him and lead him here and there (ἐνθουσιῶ τε καὶ δεῦρο κἀκεῖσε ἄγομαι); he experiences all kinds of emotions and feels like a celebrant of Corybantic rites and similar ecstasies (διαφέρειν τε οὐδὲν ἐμαυτῷ δοκῶ τῶν τὰ μητρῷα καὶ τὰ κορυβαντικὰ καὶ ὅσα τούτοις παραπλήσιά ἐστι, 22.7–13).91 Dionysius’ description is a collage of Platonic judgments, from the meters he praises in the Republic (399a–c); to Alcibiades’ witty characterization of Socrates’ effect on him in the Symposium (cf. μᾶλλον τῶν κορυβαντιώντων ἥ τε καρδία πηδᾷ καὶ δάκρυα ἐκχεῖται, Symp. 215e1–2); and on to Socrates’ own likening of the poet’s frenzy to Corybants in the Ion (cf. ὥσπερ οἱ κορυβαντιῶτες οὐκ ἔμφρονες, 534a1). Finally, the opening of the Phaedrus itself again offers the image, when Socrates mocks Phaedrus’ frenzy for speeches and his eager accosting of his friend as “finding a fellow Corybant” (συγκορυβαντιῶντα, 228b7). Dionysius’ judgment pits Isocrates against Demosthenes, and Demosthenes comes out the winner, but Plato sets the terms. As Dionysius’ study progresses, then, he becomes increasingly embattled with Plato, occasionally even addressing him as an interlocutor who must be carefully handled but also nudged toward an understanding of his own 91

See Wooten 1989 on Dionysius’ treatment of Demosthenes’ style more generally.

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failings.92 For instance, before analyzing the Menexenus and finding it lacking, Dionysius states explicitly that while he delights in and is in awe of (ἄγαμαί τε καὶ τεθαύμακα) Plato’s skills in crafting dialogue, he finds tasteless (cf. τῆς δ’ ἀπειροκαλίας) his introduction into political discussions themes suited to the forensic mode (κατηγορίας τε καὶ ἀπολογίας ἐπιχειρῇ γράφειν) (23.21–26). To illustrate his point, Dionysius quotes Zeus’ dismissal of Aphrodite in the Iliad as an analogy for Plato’s unfitness for writing political speeches (Dem. 23.28–34; quoting Il. 5.428–29): Κἀμοί γε πολλάκις ἐπῆλθεν εἰπεῖν ἐπὶ τῶν τοιούτων αὐτοῦ λόγων, ὃ πεποίηται παρ’ Ὁμήρῳ πρὸς τὴν Ἀφροδίτην ὁ Ζεὺς λέγων· Οὔ τοι τέκνον ἐμὸν δέδοται πολεμήια ἔργα ἀλλὰ σύ γ’ ἱμερόεντα μετέρχεο ἔργα γάμοιο . . . Σωκρατικῶν διαλόγων, ταῦτα δὲ πολιτικοῖς καὶ ῥήτορσιν ἀνδράσι μελήσει. It has frequently occurred to me to say about his speeches of this sort, what Homer has Zeus say to Aphrodite: Not to you, my child, are given the works of war but you have a share in the delightful works of marriage . . . “Socratic dialogues [are for you, Plato,] but let these [speeches] be a care to political and rhetorical men.”

The implications of the quotation, its emulation, and the analogy it generates are obvious: the philosopher is similarly unfit for more manly pursuits and styles (cf. πολιτικοῖς καὶ ῥήτορσιν ἀνδράσι, 23.34), which belong to those who labor in public arenas. Dionysius later underscores this contrast by means of a more direct imitation of the Phaedrus that carries with it some damning implications. After adducing a moment from the end of the Menexenus (which he needs not to recognize as a parody) and comparing a long, rousing passage from On the Crown (199–209),93 Dionysius contrasts Demosthenes’ stylistic tactics with Plato’s by means of similes that, more overtly than Cicero’s characterization of the “soft and shady” style, echo Socrates’ first speech in the Phaedrus. The techniques of the orator are as different, Dionysius declares, as “real from ceremonial weapons, actual sights from images, bodies trained by labors in the sun from those pursuing ease in the shade” (διαλλάττει πολεμιστήρια μὲν ὅπλα πομπευτηρίων, ἀληθιναὶ δὲ ὄψεις εἰδώλων, ἐν ἡλίῳ δὲ καὶ πόνοις τεθραμμένα σώματα τῶν σκιὰς καὶ 92 93

E.g., 8, 23, 24, 30 plus repeated questions in 23–30. Though he claims not to endorse such tactics (Dem. 23.37–41). It may be important for Dionysius’ contrast that the Menexenus is not only a set piece but also a funeral oration (i.e., an example of epideictic rhetoric), as opposed to the forensic character of On the Crown.

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ῥᾳστώνας διωκόντων, 32.4–7). Socrates’ first speech, which he later repudiates with a dramatic poetic gesture, identifies what Bourdieu terms bodily hexis (τὴν δὲ τοῦ σώματος ἕξιν94) as a site of necessary supervision and lays out even more explicitly these same contrasts, in the process reactivating Aristophanic jokes on Socrates’ own pallid, unexercised practices (Pl. Phdr. 239c5–d1): ὀφθήσεται δὴ μαλθακόν τινα καὶ οὐ στερεὸν διώκων, οὐδ’ ἐν ἡλίῳ καθαρῷ τεθραμμένον ἀλλὰ ὑπὸ συμμιγεῖ σκιᾷ, πόνων μὲν ἀνδρείων καὶ ἱδρώτων ξηρῶν ἄπειρον, ἔμπειρον δὲ ἁπαλῆς καὶ ἀνάνδρου διαίτης . . . [The lover] can be seen pursuing someone soft and not tough, who has been raised not in full sunlight but in the dappled shade, inexperienced in manly labors and sweaty exertion, experienced instead in the gentle and unmanly way of life . . .95

Dionysius sets up these contrasts not only to disdain the philosopher’s shady retreat, but also, again like Cicero, to imply that it harbors a feminizing disinclination for the hardy labors of oratory.96 This is the trope of the pallid, idling chatterer embodied most prominently by Socrates, Euripides, and their followers; familiar since Aristophanes’ Clouds and Frogs, in some incarnations it gets associated particularly with rural settings.97 The fact that the contrast is sustained by later writers on style – such as, most notably for us, Cicero – speaks to its continuing centrality as a flashpoint for aesthetic and ethical conflicts between the hard-body qualities of oratory and the shady philosophical retreat.98 Thus the long tail of Aristophanes’ joke on poets and philosophers runs something like this: in Clouds Socrates and his followers are characterized as pallid softies who languish in the shade of the Academy, doing nothing but talking; in the Phaedrus, in a speech he later recants, Socrates characterizes the lover (who necessarily puts pleasure before good) as pursuing those who practice the softy’s way of life; and in On Demosthenes Dionysius characterizes Plato’s style as pallid and languishing. It is not merely that Dionysius reiterates the Aristophanic judgment; rather, Plato’s intervention already sets up the gendered contrast in a knowing repudiation of its 94 95

96 97

98

Bourdieu 1991: 81–89. Cf. Nub. 1015–19: ἣν δ’ ἅπερ οἱ νῦν ἐπιτηδεύῃς, | πρῶτα μὲν ἕξεις | χροιὰν ὠχραν, ὤμους μικρούς | στῆθος λεπτόν, γλῶτταν μεγάλην, | πυγὴν μικράν . . .; also 1171: ὡς ἥδομαι σου πρῶτα τὴν χροιὰν ἰδών. Cf. Callicles at Gorg. 484–86 and Worman 2008: 194–96. Nub. 505, 931, 1003; cf. Ran. 1492; Ach. 429, 705; Eq. 1381. Re: paleness, see above n. 81 and Nub. 103, 119–20, 198–99. This retreat may be associated with Epicureanism perhaps most especially (e.g., Cic. De orat. 3.63); but cf. again Brut 37–38, Orat. 63–64. See Leidl 2003.

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claims. The lover will not, of course, pursue bad practices, ennobled as he is by his experience; and the philosopher is no softy, as the all-enduring, barefoot hexis of Socrates himself makes clear.99 Once again, then, Dionysius turns Plato’s own judgments against him, now finding his style to embody precisely the affects and inclinations that he has Socrates reject. Dionysius’ distinctions also bring together a contrast that sounds Ciceronian (i.e., πολεμιστήρια μὲν ὅπλα πομπευτηρίων [”real from ceremonial weapons”]) with one that could be a debased version of Platonic metaphysics (i.e., ἀληθιναὶ δὲ ὄψεις εἰδώλων [”real sights from images”]). The pastiche is effective: Plato’s style falls on the side of the ceremonial (cf. Isocrates), the imagistic (cf. Gorgias), and the shady (cf. philosophers), a collocation that is damning in the sheer variety of its ramifications. For Dionysius, as for Cicero and the “shady style,” these differences between bodies are also reflected in their favored settings. He follows up his disdain for those pursuing leisure in the shade by opposing the “flowery meadow offering pleasant rest” (ἀνθηρῷ χωρίῳ καταγωγὰς ἡδείας ἔχοντι) that characterizes Plato’s style to the “rich and fertile field” (εὐκάρπῳ καὶ παμφόρῳ γῇ) of Demosthenes’ (Dem. 32.10–15). The one offers a perfumed but transient entertainment (τέρψεις ἐφημέρους), the other lacks neither the true sustenance (τῶν ἀναγκαίων εἰς βίον) of the farmer’s welltended plot nor its luxuries (τῶν περιττῶν εἰς τέρψιν).100 Plato should have left it to more vigorous writers to tend the hearty vegetation of public speeches (cf. πρὸς ἀγῶνας, 32.19), although his readers may take pleasure in the less substantial resources to be found in his rural retreat. We may be back in Socrates’ kalē katagōgē, but this is a space whose metaphors have a new orientation, turned as they are to associate Plato with his rival Isocrates and with Gorgias, the elder sophist whose life work he mocks. And once again, mimetic engagement crafts the judgment. Dionysius’ figurative contrasts reverse his stylistic ranking, since these images also come directly from the Phaedrus.101 As Chapter 4 notes, toward the end of the dialogue Socrates employs an analogy to differentiate traditional from philosophical rhetoric: the window boxes that people cultivate during the festival of Adonis, which cannot compare to the fertile bounty of the farmer’s well-sown field (Phdr. 276b1–8). The one offers quick but passing 99 100

101

See Worman 2008: 96–99, 157–66. Cf. Quint. Inst. orat. 12.10.25, when arguing that one should not deny richness to Attic styles (si quod in iis finibus uberius invenierint solum fertilioremve segetem negaturos Atticam esse). Note as well that Cicero uses a similar but more negative set of images in characterizing his own lack of “fertility” after the death of Hortensius (Brut. 15–16).

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enjoyment, the other long, careful tending and sustained returns. The “farmer” who has wisdom will take those seeds he wants to grow fruit, sow them carefully, and turn his “watering” (i.e., writing) to good use, so that they produce other plantings (276d1–277a4). For Socrates this writing is secondary, only a tool for memory, which means that Dionysius has again deliberately turned Plato’s differentiation between a more superficial kind of rhetoric and philosophical investigation, so that the philosopher’s own style falls on the side of the window boxes: it is pretty but temporary, a festival adornment. It is unlikely, then, that Plato would have countenanced Dionysius’ particular “planting,” but such is the insouciance of the theorist’s troping on the philosopher’s garden. How, though, should we understand this opening up of the Platonic language? Does it in fact expose something about how mimesis and metaphor foster, or themselves constitute, explanation? By way of a partial answer, we might return to Scarry’s ideas about “visual events” in which beauty inspires its emulation, since surely Dionysius expects that his clever readers will find their own garden views enriched by his refraction of the Phaedrus’ setting. In effectively gazing on the beautiful spot and turning to novel uses the elements that contribute to its charm, Dionysius models how the pursuit of likeness generates new terms and thus new emanations, while also revealing the difference that theorizing makes. There is mimetic encouragement here, as well as agonistic judgment. Plato is not, after all, as fine a stylist as Demosthenes. The mimetic mode itself thus constitutes a distinct theoretical engagement, which we may also want to think of as a way into and out of the text – or down to and up from the river. In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida’s notorious essay on the Phaedrus, he prods the details of this setting, urging that the site shapes the argument, demarcates its movement: “[T]he fable of the cicadas would not have taken place,” he says, “would not have been recounted, Socrates would not have been incited to tell it, if the heat, which weighs over the whole dialogue, had not driven the two friends out of the city, into the countryside, along the river Ilissus.”102 We can note first that Derrida’s cadence echoes that of the Platonic scene, with Socrates’ step-by-step recounting of their movement along the river and the details of their resting place. That is, the scene also sets in motion Derrida’s own proliferating movement through the Platonic text. Second, the progress along the river unfolds for Socrates the possibility of an unconventional type of investigation, the language of which Derrida 102

Derrida [1972] 1981: 69.

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seizes upon as a way into the metaphors at the heart of the dialogue.103 This imitative pursuit of the path along the river thereby opens out onto other vistas: the settings and movements of metaphor. Dionysius’ unique adaptation of Plato’s kalē katagōgē for use in differentiating his style from Demosthenes’ confirms the extent to which its rural metaphors had become familiar vocabulary for Greek and Roman critics, due at least in part to Plato’s introduction of them into the rhetorical idiom. Thus by the first century bce the rural setting had entered the critical idiom as both a topos for philosophical rhetoric and as a source for contentious tropes distinguishing more flowing, flowery styles from those more “manly” and rigorous. And as Cicero’s idyllic setting for De oratore would seem to indicate, the topos of the locus amoenus had particular resonance for writers of philosophical rhetoric. But it is equally clear that the tropes afforded by this setting had become shorthand for stylistic distinctions crucial to literary theorists and critics, including some poets.104 Thus if for Cicero this “idyllic” style may be simply too fluid and unmanly, for Dionysius’ contemporary Horace (by way of one more example) the locus amoenus signals a “purple patch” (purpureus, AP 14) – with its introduction of grove, temple, and rushing water – that one would do better to avoid. We can recognize as well that Dionysius is engaged in a singularly close calibration of Platonic mimesis and style. While Plato fashions a poeticizing philosophical rhetoric out of the trope of the locus amoenus, and Cicero re-envisions it as the space of soft and shady “philosophical” or fluid middle styles, Dionysius ramifies the specific details of the trope of the Phaedrus so that its own features pick out a floral, pleasant mode in keeping with the rural retreat that generated it, but now re-envisioned as a simple (pure? old-fashioned?) style. As in Cicero’s discussions, one can appreciate this gentler mode in Plato while querying its ultimate worth, especially in comparison to the rigors of Demosthenes. Unlike Horace or Cicero, however, Dionysius takes up this rich trope as a tool for distinguishing and denigrating both Gorgianic grandiosity and Platonic “simplicity.” Even if we were to doubt Dionysius’ subtlety (and I do not think that we should), we cannot ignore his value as an innovative transformer of such stylistic calibrations and a master of the mimetic agōn. Cicero 103 104

I.e., the concatenation of pharmakon/pharmakeia/pharmakos; see [1972] 1981: 69–70. Dionysius, like Aristotle and Cicero, emphasizes genre distinctions at different points in his discussions of style, but he nevertheless adduces examples for contrasting styles from poetry and historical writing, as well as oratory. And although he never mentions Cicero or Horace, he sometimes seems to quote the former (Nassal 1910: 161; van Wyk Cronjé 1986: 70–72).

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makes overt mimetic gestures toward the Phaedrus, the details of which serve as innovative frames for his larger discussion; Dionysius instead moves effectively inside the scene, fashioning a closely focused and intricate stylistic terrain out of Plato’s brilliant locale. Derrida terms Plato’s setting “this theatrical geography”; and like Dionysius before him, he riffs on the Phaedrus’ fertile imagery, following Socrates, as he says, “out of his customary track and path.”105 And so, reading at the end of the dialogue, Derrida reiterates Socrates’ opposition between a kind of false writing, writing as simulacrum, and true writing, writing on the soul: “On the one hand, we have the patient, sensible farmer; on the other, the Sunday gardener, hasty, dabbling, and frivolous. On the one hand, the serious; on the other, the game and the holiday.”106 Derrida is not, of course, focused primarily on Plato’s style, but it is essential to his infiltration and reproduction of the dialogue’s language and imagery that it be so fertile, so welcoming of a suggestive proliferation of effects. What makes this movement possible is, again, both the activation of likeness and then the detour, the “fold of physis” where mimesis and metaphor do their work. As it exploits the rich ground of mimesis, and the flowering that is metaphor, this emulative mode sets in motion the core process of stylistic discernment, matching like to like, taking what Socrates recognizes as the long way around. 105

Derrida [1972] 1981: 69–70.

106

Derrida [1972] 1981: 150.

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Epilogue Dreaming in the garden with Proust

The Introduction begins with a peculiarly apt example of the broad reach of the literary critical landscapes explored in this study: the terrain that Proust identifies as “heraldic” at the beginning of The Guermantes Way. In a transport of romanticizing snobbery, the narrator registers its details “as if they had been situated at the foot of Parnassus or Helicon” (“comme si elles avaient été situées au pied du Parnasse ou de l’Hélicon”1) – as if, that is, his heightened senses resembled those of poets making pilgrimages to Greek mountains famous in antiquity for their associations with divine inspiration and song.2 With this marveling look at a familiar but magical landscape, Proust’s narrator offers a wry turn on his own ambitions, which by this point in the narrative are clearly literary critical and deeply engaged with aesthetics. An author must get his inspiration somewhere, whether he is a poet singing victory songs for elite audiences or a reclusive author-critic with a bemused attachment to aristocratic salons. For both ancient poet and modern novelist, the establishing and consolidation of authority is dependent on the place names and topographical features that demarcate their notional territory. Proust indulges in some grand gesturing on behalf of his narrator and would-be writer, tying his own territorial embrace to the ancient poets by means of their famous settings. And his metonymic mapping singles out the two poets – Hesiod and Pindar – first associated with these locales as sites for poetry and thus for the beginnings of pilgrimages that shape later poets’ programs and eventually literary critical discourse. Such “heraldic” gestures thus do not situate one culturally in relation to the actual French countryside; rather, they coordinate it with a much broader territory, effectively colonizing the ancient mountains and their poets for a modernist and French aesthetic. 1

2

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Proust [1922] 1987–89: II.314. Cf. II. 831–33, where the narrator emphasizes the aesthetic pleasure he takes in envisioning the Guermantes genealogy as a blossoming tree and its descendants around him in the salon as flowers. On the later tourism that reiterated this hallowed tradition, see Rutherford 2001; also Porter 2001.

Epilogue

This may sound too bold and aggressive a scheme for Proust and his retiring narrator, whose attachment to the lay of the land often appears very localized and intimate. Combray, the first book of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, may well seem bound up primarily with the narrator’s childhood fascination with the country landscape around his grandmother’s village and its two “ways” (of walking, of thinking: the Méséglise and the Guermantes). But the final book in Swann’s Way (Noms de pays: Le nom) also indicates that a grander plan is in motion, as it offers an extended meditation on places and how they settle in the consciousness, marking time, making meaning: The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.3

With this totalizing and yet deliberately piecemeal sense of how minds and places (or bodies and topographies) coordinate, the narrator takes the entire world into his compass. The purview is unusually expansive and yet melancholic, intrepid and yet intimate. It marks out external and internal territories, linking memory’s chronotopes (again, time-space coordinates) to heraldic entities, but now only by suggestion, offering generic metonymies (”roads, avenues”) for named places. This part-forwhole seriation is what Genette terms enchaînement: “Without metonymy, no enchaining of memories, no narrative, no novel. For it is metaphor that retrieves the Time Lost, but it is metonymy that reanimates it and puts it back in motion . . .”4 And of course the movement of metaphor itself traverses the space between the familiar target and its “foreign” gloss, to follow once again Aristotle’s metaphors for the workings of metaphor (Poet. 1457a7, 1458a22–23; Rhet. 1404b8–12).5 The intimate but aesthetically ambitious landscapes of the narrator’s meditated world thus come into play first in Combray and also, to different effect, in the second volume, as the title itself suggests: In the Shadow of 3

4

“Les lieux que nous avons connus n’appartiennent pas qu’au monde de l’espace où nous les situons pour plus de facilité. Ils n’étaient qu’une mince tranche au milieu d’impressions contiguës qui formaient notre vie d’alors; le souvenir d’une certaine image n’est que le regret d’un certain instant; et les maisons, les routes, les avenues, sont fugitives, hélas, comme les années.” (([1922] 1987–89: I.419–20). Cf. The final passage of the novel, in which the narrator opposes the place (i.e., standing?) he has given his characters to the space they “actually” inhabit; he has, he says, made them monsters, giants ([1922] 1987–89: IV.625). 5 Genette 1973: 63. See the discussion in ch. 1.2.

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Young Girls in Flower (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur).6 It is in Combray especially, though, that momentous landscapes and floral images chart the unfolding of the narrator’s critical awareness and thereby the novel’s emerging aesthetic. Floral metaphors and metonymies proliferate here, helping to shape not only the space of memory but also a stylistic and literary theoretical agenda. Further, many scenes in these books deploy garden spaces, fanciful journeys, and flowers in such a way as to arouse in the reader an awareness of metaphor itself as marking dreamy detours to elsewheres lush with decorative effects. These may begin with actual gardens and flowers (i.e., real within the fictional frame), the spaces and features that extend the real by juxtaposition and association, reaching out toward those that are fully fantastic and/or metaphorical. Flowers may initiate a perceptual reverie that transforms them into aestheticizing metonymies, a garden may frame a scene of reading one’s way into (other) fictive floral landscapes, and blooms may crowd a character’s speech simultaneously as metaphors for other natural wonders and indicators of the speaker’s florid style.7 The intersections between the lush landscapes of ancient literary critical discourse and the baroque texturing of Proust’s places offer fertile ground, so to speak, for pondering the transformations across centuries of literary critical and theoretical settings, but more besides. Like the ancient poets and theorists before him, Proust orders his movement through significant spaces in such a way as to highlight the connections between landscapes and notional terrains, as well as between real (or “real”) pilgrimages and figurative travel. Further, the shared imagery effectively conjoins the means by which ancient poets and critics shape settings for and images of rural styles and their assessment with Proust’s exploration of how consciousness inhabits landscapes and transforms them into spaces of perceptual articulation, spaces that appear in their figurative details to aim especially at aesthetic and stylistic discriminations. Proust’s emphasis on journeys to or through landscapes that are literarily consecrated is in keeping with his own devotion to the English writer John Ruskin, about whom he wrote and two of whose essays he translated. He combined these efforts at translation with “pilgrimages” (which were actually cures) to Ruskin’s favorite French sites and advocated in his essays 6

7

E.g., Proust’s narrator describes himself as like Hercules or Telemachus among the Nymphs (“pareil à Hercule ou à Télémaque j’avais été en train de jouer au milieu des nymphes,” [1922] 1987–89: II.302, cf. 387). As the editors note (ad 387), Proust has his details wrong, but the simile is the point. See Scarry 1997 and further in ch. 2.3b.

Epilogue

that others do the same. In an introduction to a collection entitled On Reading Ruskin that includes Proust’s translations of Ruskin’s “The Bible of Amiens” and “Sesame and Lilies,” Richard Macksey remarks, “Overtly and covertly [the acts of reading and translation] implicate much of the metaphorics of Proust’s fiction.”8 Proust’s landscapes are aesthetic tools for orienting an intellectual adventure: the process by which the “days of reading” (journées de lecteur) in Combray, which take his narrator up and out of his aunt’s garden to other lands, become the urge to translate and then to write.9 Proust does not appear to have conceived of this translating work as a journeyman’s task; rather, he writes of it as if it were consonant with his “travels” as a reader, critic, and author. It should thus come as little surprise that in one of his essays on reading he deems journeying in a classical text to be like pilgrimage to ancient sites.10 Such moves should sound very familiar by now, since in ancient critical discourse “travel” to rural settings and troping on their features so often aid in isolating aesthetic schemes. I am not, however, merely suggesting an interesting juxtaposition between the modernist novelist and the ancient poets and theorists. Rather, I hold that Proust’s uses of travel and landscape imagery is, like those among the ancient writers, a purposeful set of aesthetic and usually more narrowly literary critical or theoretical gestures. Further, his deployment of such imagery is archly classicizing.11 The indirect Pindaric reference (i.e., using Parnassus as a metonymic indicator), for instance, serves Proust as a means of signaling his critical attachment to literary landscapes and pilgrimage. Further, Proust, like Pindar, makes of metaphor a bold, sensual tool, so that the figurative world becomes the world of fullest inhabitation. This is the fantasy space of aesthetic ordering and discrimination, where Proust’s narrator-critic lives. Reading in the garden may seem very far from the performanceoriented modes of ancient poets and orators, which aim to bring the far off near, before the eyes of their audiences, or to render the spaces of inspiration, invention, and critique tangible. And yet the Proustian narrator shares this persistent, pointed annexation of notional pilgrimage and the 8

9 11

Macksey 1987: xiv. As Macksey shows, the fact that Proust’s engagements with Ruskin and his translations of his essays take place during mountain cures is shadowed by Ruskin’s more robust excitement at the Alps’ grandeur (xx–xxiii). Note as well that for Proust the act of translation is a kind of travel; but writing itself may also be an act of translation. As Proust’s narrator remarks, the essential book is not something that a great writer invents; rather he “translates” (traduire) what already exists within ([1922] 1987–89: III.469). 10 See further below, section 2. Proust [1906] 1987: 126–27. Bowie (1998: 97–105) argues that Proust deploys Homer as a lost, past, but resonant metonymy for the epic reach of his own narrative.

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flowering of metaphor with ancient poets and critics engaged in literary judgment.

1. Florid stylists Proust, in scenes that are quasi-Aristophanic in their witty critical tone, deploys floral and often ornate imagery to mark styles adjacent to the authorial as well as to shape a space of contemplation and literary imagining. The more picaresque turns of his novel suggest that perceptual and aesthetic judgment lie at its dramatic core, but also that this judgment depends for its bite on a certain willful innocence and ignorance. The tone is quite hybrid, however, as these narrative moments may include distinctly lyrical images that are frequently also floral in coloration and connection.12 These moments represent aestheticizing pauses among the jumble of affects and shallow chatter that marks the social interactions that Proust satirizes. Frequently they serve to transport the narrator elsewhere, into a more fully inhabited sensual world that runs parallel to the mundane one of physical habitation, but that is nonetheless made possible by the body’s senses. Like ancient rural spaces of mimesis and figuration, Proust’s floral spaces also offer entrance into the world of metaphor, its metonymic activation, and the aesthetic critique it sustains. For both ancient and modern aestheticians, this literary realm so rife with figuration is an achievement, a proud indication of authority, creative power, and territorial reach. Floral or garden settings also, as in the ancient tradition, serve to distinguish stylistic inclinations as modes of language and life. Some of Proust’s most lyrical images pick out a speaking style that is affected, having pretensions to delicate literary and aesthetic sensibilities. Certain scenes in the middle of Combray dramatize hilariously and yet somehow tenderly the association of flowers with a “floral,” chatty style. The most emphatic embodiment of this mode is the florid snob Legrandin, whose acrobatic physicality and comically ornate speeches deploy flowers or other natural effects as their central metaphorical vehicles. Like the protayals by other comic writers before him, Proust’s unfolding of Legrandin’s character matches an overly flexible deportment with a precious, writerly 12

For landscapes in Proust, see Fardwell 1948; for flowers, Knight 1986; Mölk 2008; on Proust’s metaphors more generally, Chenoufi 1994; Billerman 2000. And again, on the “perceptual mimesis” that flowers inspire, see Scarry 1999.

1. Florid stylists

style.13 Not only does he disport himself with a craven alacrity, but he is also flagged at first introduction as one of many figures against which the would-be author-critic surreptitiously measures himself. Legrandin, the narrator notes wryly, has “a certain reputation as a writer” (”une certaine réputation comme écrivain,” I.66 [68]14). While the family admires his chatty, refined style, the narrator’s grandmother is critical only of the fact that, according to her, Legrandin talks “a little too well, a little too much like a book” (“Ma grand’mère lui reprochait seulement de parler un peu trop bien, un peu trop comme un livre,” I.68 [69]). Legrandin, for himself, takes a liking to the young narrator, telling him that he has a “lovely soul” (”une jolie âme,” I.67 [69]). Later he goes into flowery transports about the flower of his youth: “Like a bouquet sent to us by a traveler from a country to which we will never return, allow me to breathe from the distance of your adolescence those flowers that belong to the springtimes which I too traversed many years ago” (I.124 [128–29]).15 Legrandin follows this with a comically baroque catalogue of literarily significant “flora,” including Balzac’s “bouquet of love” (”Venez avec le primevère, . . . le sédum dont est fait le bouquet de dilection de la flore balzacienne,” I.124 cf. 127 [129; cf. 131]). Although this is, in the mouth of a late-century Parisian, an affected cliché, it is also lyrical in its turn, a clear echo of the anaphoric, elaborated language of poetry. That is, to be poetic and metaphorical in the midst of a social encounter is to mark oneself stylistically (and socially) as recherché and effete. In the event, Legrandin does not merely reference flowers; he also highlights them in literary and metaphorical ways (e.g., “la glorieuse vêture de soie du lis digne de Salomon,” I.124), as he is inviting the young man to dinner. This style, the cloying quality of the invitation, in combination with the shocked glimpse that the narrator has of the “ardent muscular wave” (”onde fougueuse et musclée”) that Legrandin’s ass effects as he snaps up from his bow to the aristocratic Mme. Cambremer, suggests that this man might be “entirely different than we knew” (”tout différent de celui que nous connaissions,” I.123 [127]).16 His flowery transports and overly literate, often classicizing references mark him out, like his physical fluidity, as some unstated other. As in Aristophanes’ comic scheme, this 13 14

15

16

See Worman 2008: chs. 2 and 5. The in-text citations for this section are to Proust [1922] 1987–89, with the English translation of Davis 2003 in square brackets, unless otherwise indicated. “Comme le bouquet qu’un voyageur nous envoie d’un pays où nous ne retournerons plus, faites-moi respirer du lointain de votre adolescence ces fleurs des printemps que j’ai traversés moi aussi il y a bien des années.” On the body and literary form in Proust, see Finn 1999.

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“other” is vaguely effeminate, his mobile ass-end indicating suspect inclinations in both speech and life.17 Scenes in later books highlighting a similarly literary, metaphorical style repeat the word causeur (“fluent type,”18) and sensual, precious images, as if to join these by virtue of the idle pleasures they indulge. This is what the narrator terms a “charming style” (joli langage, I.127); and he first uses it to draw distinctions among Legrandin’s various poses and verbal conceits, as signaling speaking styles that are witty, elaborate, and “artistic.” That this refined sensibility and its attendant styles of expression may also be effeminizing, may in fact indicate homosexuality, is explicitly addressed in a later volume of Proust’s novel, in the figure of the Baron de Charlus. In Sodom and Gomorrah Proust’s narrator captures this aesthetic turn by associating Charlus’ artistic, intellectual, and amorous inclinations with Vergil’s pastoral singers and Plato’s students (III.344). Only later on does he distinguish the ancient philosophers and pastoral poets (Socrates and Plato, Theocritus and Vergil) as participating in aesthetic and erotic conventions that emerge in the modern-day homosexual in what the narrator claims he considers a perverted form (III.710).19 From the vantage point of the present study, that Proust situates such flowery, “soft” styles by reference to ancient pastoral settings is very striking, as he pegs his metonymic figures for stylistic distinctions to both familiarly rustic landscapes and erotic proclivities. It is all the more interesting, then, that such associations ultimately appear to indicate the narrator’s wry characterization of his own style. This becomes more intricate as the novel progresses, while the narrator (now christened “Marcel”) mocks it in the mouths of others, as when in The Prisoner (La prisonnière) his lover Albertine credits him with her new ridiculously elaborated talk (III.635–57). In an article on Proust’s joli langage, Justin O’Brian characterizes this style in the following manner: “The distinguishing devices are numerous and prolonged metaphors, subtlety of sense perceptions, personification, synaesthesia, literary and artistic references – all presented in a complex but well articulated syntax.”20 It thus matches in many respects Charlus’ style and that of other aesthetes, as well as what turns out to be not only the narrator’s style but also, as the plot unfolds, increasingly that of the novel itself. Yet Proust’s floral style is not so much like Pindar’s, that ancient flowerlover, except in its ambitions; rather, in keeping with ancient reception, this 17 18 19

Cf. Aristoph. Clouds (the Weaker Argument), Frogs (Euripides), Thesm. (Agathon). E.g., Proust [1922] 1987–89: I.67, 98, 127, 542, 545. Cf. Proust [1922] 1987–89: III.727 and IV.324–25, 386. 20 O’Brien 1965: 265.

2. The space of reading

“flowery” style runs the risk of being judged soft and effeminate. This is a Sapphic, Euripidean mode, one caught up in erotic transports and rural scenes.21 The grand Pindaric style, in contrast, interweaves floral imagery with baroque clusters of adjacent metaphors; and for all its rural referencing and erotic implications it never comes to stand for, in antiquity or beyond, delicacy or lack of manliness. This may be due to the sheer complexity and abundance of Pindaric images, to their power to open out onto multiple figurative vistas seemingly all at once. Most interesting and confounding for us is the fact that despite the “softy” implications of the joli mode, Proust’s deployment of floral imagery often shares in this Pindaric abundance. If flowers sometimes delimit the space of effete articulation and reverie, the densely ramifying work they perform in the novel encourages a suspicion that there is a grander scheme in motion.

2. The space of reading In Proust’s novel the space of memory is also often crowded with flowers, as well as with other features of the country landscape (e.g., Combray, chs. 1–2). Such images serve as sources of inspiration and creativity as well as indicators of style. Consider again the lime blossoms in the beginning of the second section of Combray, on which the young narrator fixes his gaze. Not only do they indicate metonymically the affective and chronotopic density of Proust’s aesthetics more generally; but their floral arts also serve an additional purpose, which binds them to Proust’s central figure for sensory memory: the madeleine. The lime blossom infusion makes up part of its taste, underscoring how flowers saturate perception and memory, as well as embodying styles. In fact, as Chapter 1 notes, the desiccated lime blossoms connect all these: they are a figure not only for a sensual, delicate style but also for the loss over time that this minutely focused, tactile mode seeks to overcome. As the blossoms’ intricate patterns trace a ghostly echo of their own flowering past, which the narrator reinvigorates in full detail, they are also a delicately calibrated memento of that absence, like the narrator’s own meticulous description of his sense-memory. And as the “twilight of flowers” (”le crépuscule des fleurs,” I.51), these dried husks open out onto a far broader prospect, evoking not only their parkland blooming and springtime scent but multiple terrains of floral elsewheres. 21

E.g., Pl. Phdr. 235c2–9; Cic. Orat. 63; Demetr. De eloc. 174; DH De comp. verb. 23.16–17, 43–59, Dem. 32.10–15.

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Landscapes that the narrator inhabits within the fictional frame may also border on other fictive ones, which bring him while reading up and out of his own setting, transporting him to a dreamland more vibrant than the space in which he sits, usually itself a garden.22 This layered quality seems to ground both the narrator’s contemplative world and the rich texture of Proust’s mimesis. As noted in the Introduction, the trope of “reading in the garden” at Combray frames daily interactions among the village’s denizens as well as conversations and meditations on literary aesthetics. Again, the narrator christens the area surrounding the scullery “the sacred grove” (“le bois consacré”), itself a “little temple of Venus” (”un petit temple à Vénus”) (I.71). Proust’s fanciful reader thus inhabits a very special setting, one keyed like the Guermantes Way to ancient coordinates that have significance for pastoral and erotic poetry in particular.23 So he reads in the garden of his great-aunt’s house, and many things happen while he lingers there (”pendant ma lecture au jardin,” “Tandis que je lisais au jardin,” I.96, 99) – that is, while he is effectively elsewhere. Although he finds the actual garden rather mundane, through reading he makes off for other fantasy spaces full of blossoms and eros, following flower to flower and dreaming of “a woman who would love [him]” (I.85 [87]).24 The paradoxical effect of this juxtaposition of real and imagined spaces is that, within the sensual pastiche of the narrator’s remembering and thus of the Proustian text, the garden at Combray becomes a sacred space. As he explains, this garden, “carefully emptied by me of the ordinary incidents of my own existence” (“soigneusement vidés par moi des incidents médiocres de mon existence personnelle”), precisely because of his readerly transport, takes on a luminous shape in recollection. Addressing the chronotope itself (i.e., “[b]eaux après-midi du dimanche sous le marronnier du jardin de Combray”), his mimetic rhythms give it its full sensual cadence: “in the crystalline succession, slowly changing and spanned by leafy branches, of your silent, sonorous, redolent, and limpid hours” (“dans le cristal successif, lentement changeant et traversé de feuillages, de vos heures silencieuses, sonores, odorantes et limpides” (I.87 [89]).

22

23

24

Note that in an essay entitled “On Reading” Proust characterizes the act of reading as “lingering in those flowery and out of the way roads” ([1906] 1987: 111). E.g., Callim. HDem. 25–30; Propert. 3.1.1–6, also 2.13.1–8; Hor. Od. 1.1.29–32; Ovid Amor. 3.1.1–14. Again, on Proust’s landscapes see Fardwell 1948; on modern floral imagery, Knight 1986. The fictional flowers are purple and red (“fleurs violettes et rougeâtres,” I.85); cf. P. I. 4.36–38: νῦν δ’ αὖ μετὰ χειμέριον ποικίλα μηνῶν ζόφον | χθὼν ὥτε φοινικσιν ἄνθησεν ῥόδοις | δαιμόνων βουλαῖς.

2. The space of reading

This readerly moment thus opens out onto an extended meditation on the space and time of reading and contemplation. A similar moment occurs later (96–99), which instead bookends a literary critical or at least aesthetic conversation, since it is Swann who interrupts the reading and they speak of Bergotte. This is a writer with whom the young narrator is obsessed, whom Swann claims to know and with whom he (and the narrator) may share stylistic attributes. Bergotte’s style in the narrator’s aesthetic scheme is adjacent to the flowery Legrandin’s but also to Swann’s: “‘Like Swann,’ they said about Bergotte: ‘He’s quite enchanting, so individual, he has his own way of saying things which is a little overly elaborate, but so pleasing’” (I.97 [101]).25 The narrator also calls appreciation of Bergotte’s style an “an ideal and universal flower” (“fleur idéale et commune”) and describes it as characterized by a “melodic flow” (“flux mélodique”) and “old-fashioned expressions” (“expressions anciennes”) (I.94 [96]), which from the prospect of this study sounds reminiscent of how ancient theorists describe certain softer styles.26 And in the remarkably elaborate and self-referential critical scheme that Proust orchestrates, Bergotte has by this point already been identified as another possible self for the young would-be author-critic: “[W]hen by chance I happened to encounter in one of his books a thought that I had already had myself, my heart would swell as though a god in his goodness had given it back to me.”27 The narrator finds in Bergotte’s pages things he often wrote himself to his family members, things he comes to write as a novelist and critic, and portraits that remind him of his own rendering of Legrandin (I.98). The tight circularity of this critical pondering on a delicate, witty style, framed as it is by the garden setting, shapes an exclusive realm for the retiring (or “retiring”) reader and critic. To the classicist’s eye this circularity is also crucially programmatic and literary critical: like the able ancient poet or critic, Proust ties his authorial voice to particular settings, sensibilities, and styles, fashioning a world of literary judgment and crafting that operates both within and without the narrative frame. Like pastoral poets who cite their famous songs while singing another tune, the narrator offers up Proust’s own portrait of Legrandin, that paradigmatic florid stylist, as an indication 25

26 27

“‘Comme Swann,’ ils disaient de Bergotte: ‘C’est un charmant esprit, si particulier, il a une façon à lui de dire les choses un peu cherchée, mais si agréable’.” Cf. esp. Dionysius on Plato (Dem. 5.5–14). On Bergotte’s style see Bales 2001: 188–91. “[Q]uand par hazard il m’arrive d’en rencontrer, dans tel de ses livres, une que j’avais déjà eue moi-même, mon Coeur se gonflait comme si un Dieu dans sa bonté me l’avait rendue” (I.94 [97]).

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of fine style, a style shared by Bergotte, Swann, and the narrator himself. There is a long tradition of idling in the garden, and although Pindar’s vigorous invocations of such spaces and its flowers do not themselves encourage the delicate elaborations that later poets and philosophers would claim for these retreats, his imagery does spawn it. In the ancient reception of Pindaric terrains, flora, and bee poets, pastoral styles range from the vigorous, abundant, and place-specific to the soft, erotic or contemplative, and refined. While Proust’s wry archaizing clearly attaches his spaces of literary creativity and judgment to such ancient settings, he also fashions a rich, eclectic scheme out of the rural pleasance that effectively embraces the entire ancient spectrum. Proustian flowers thus perform miraculous metonymies by virtue of their mimetic perfection, signaling perceptual sensitivity and the style that matches it. They also indicate the vibrancy and authenticity within the fictional frame while opening out into the world of critical contemplation that makes possible, indeed that in Proust even makes, the creative space of writing. In In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower the narrator muses once again on Bergotte’s style, now at a dinner party with the very man: “True variety,” he recognizes, exists in that fullness of genuine and unexpected ingredients, in the branch overloaded with blue flowers shooting forth against all expectation, from the springtime hedge that already looked full to bursting; whereas the purely formal replica of variety (one could say the same of all the other features of style) is nothing but vacancy and uniformity.28

That is to say, even at the dinner table we find that Proust’s space of critical reverie may engage a rural mimesis – in which stylistic impact is floral – as opposed to the “merely formal” mode he rejects. If this moment represents, once again, the flowering of metaphor, it also lays claim to the real, rivaling it, as Scarry says, in all of its vivacity. 28

“La vraie variété est dans cette plénitude d’éléments réels et inattendus, dans le rameau chargé de fleurs bleues qui s’élance contre toute attente, de la haie printanière qui semblait déjà comblée, tandis que l’imitation purement formelle de la variété (et on pourrait raisonner de même pour toutes les autres qualités du style) n’est que vide et uniformité” (I.541 [126]). The translation is my own.

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Bibliography Trapp, M. 1990. “Plato’s Phaedrus in Second-Century Greek Literature.” In Antonine Literature, ed. D. A. Russell. Oxford. 141–73. Travlos, J. 1971. Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens. New York. Tuan, Y.-F. 1975. “Place and Space: Humanistic Perspective.” Progress in Geography 6: 211–52. Tucker, P. G. 1904. “The Mysteries in the Frogs of Aristophanes.” CR 18.8: 416–18. With a postscript by J. E. Harrison. Ubersfeld, A. 1977. Lire le théâtre. Paris. Uden, J. 2010. “The Vanishing Gardens of Priapus.” HSCP 105: 189–219. Van Hook, L. 1905. The Metaphorical Terminology of Greek Rhetoric and Literary Criticism. Chicago. Vara, J. 1992. “The Sources of Theocritean Bucolic Poetry,” tr. J. Weatherby. Mnemosyne, 4th ser., 45.3: 333–44. Vasaly, A. 1993. Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory. Berkeley. Vasiliou, I. 2008. Aiming at Virtue in Plato. Cambridge. Verdenius, W. J. 1983. “The Principles of Ancient Literary Criticism.” Mnemosyne, 4th ser., vol. 36: 14–59. Vernant, J.-P. 1989. “Dim Body, Dazzling Body.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 1, tr. A. Wilson (New York). (Orig. “Corps des dieux,” Le temps de la réflection, vol. 7 [Paris, 1986].) Videau, A. 1997. “Fonctions et representations du paysage dans la literature Latine.” In Les enjeux du paysage, ed. M. Collot. Brussels. 32–53. Volk, K. 2010. “Literary Theft and Roman Water Rights in Manilius’ Second Proem.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 65: 187–97. Walcot, P. 1957. “The Problem of the Prooemium in Hesiod’s Theogony.” SO 33: 37–47. Walsdorff, F. 1927. Die antiken Urteile über Platons Stil. Berlin. Walsh, G. B. 1984. The Varieties of Enchantment. Chapel Hill. Wells, J. B. 2009. Pindar’s Verbal Art: An Ethnographic Study of Epinician Style. Washington, DC. Werner, D. 2007. “Plato’s Phaedrus and the Problem of Unity.” OSAP 32: 91–137. 2012. Myth and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus. Cambridge. West, M. L. 1964. “The Muses Buy a Cow.” CR n.s. 14.2: 141–42. 1966. Hesiod: Theogony. Oxford. White, N. P. 1993. Plato: Sophist (Eng. tr.). Indianapolis. Whitman, C. 1964. Aristophanes and the Comic Hero. Cambridge, MA. Whitman, W. [1888] 1986. The Complete Poems. New York. Whitmarsh, T. 2005. “The Lexicon of Love: Longus and Philetas Grammatikos.” JHS 125: 145–48. Wiater, N. 2011. The Ideology of Classicism: Language, History, and Identity in Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Berlin. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von. 1919. “Ein glücklicher Sommertag.” In Platon: Leben und Werke, vol. 1. Berlin. 450–88.

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346

Academy, 3, 100, 178, 274 in Aristophanes, 139 in Cicero, 297 Achelous in Demetrius, 226, 238, 240 in Plato, 157 Acropolis, 128, 135, 138 in Attic comedy, 104–5 in Euripides, 127 Aeschines, 111 Aeschylus, 116 in Frogs, 131–34, 143 Oresteia, 197 aesthetics in Aristophanes, 105 of displacement, 190–96, 199 and ethics, 291 hard-body Hellenistic, 194–95, 282 in Lucian, 244 of oneness, 228 pastoral, 196–99 in Plato, 228–32 in Propertius, 218 in Proust, 318–21 in rhetorical theory, 272–74 Agathon, 116 in Aristophanes, 111–12 in Lucian, 245 in Plato, 118–19 agora, 108 in Aristophanes, 111, 117, 133, 140 Athenian, 108 in Attic comedy, 114 Agrae, 135, 136, 137 Alcaeus, 163 Alexandria, 207 in Callimachus, 194 Anacreon in Plato, 162 analogy Aristotle on, 28, 52, 61 in Aristotle, 52 in Plato, 38, 39–44

Anthesteria, 135, 137 Anyte, 198 Aphrodite, 70, 109, 116 in Aristophanes, 116 in Euripides, 100, 130 in the Gardens, 135, 138 in Sappho, 14–15, 90–92 in Theocritus, 196, 202 Apollo, 85, 126, 127–29 in Callimachus, 193, 203, 215 in Propertius, 218 Arcadia in Hellenistic poetry, 200 Aristophanes, 3, 81, 216, 255, 266, 319 Birds, 105 Clouds, 101, 111, 114, 117, 139, 309 Frogs, 4, 41, 78, 99, 116, 119, 162, 182, 205, 227 Knights, 117, 141 on styles see styles style of see styles Thesmophoriazusae, 104, 111–12 Wasps, 140, 142 Aristotle, 276 in Cicero, 281 in Demetrius, 223 Derrida on, 28–29, 31, 57, 59–63 on metaphor see metaphor Poetics, 28–29, 31, 50, 60, 64, 233, 270 Politics, 112 Rhetoric, 33, 50, 51–53, 60, 112, 226 on style see style style of see styles on styles see styles Ashbery, J., vi, 10, 56 Asper, M., 123 Athens, 3, 22, 110, 135 in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 15–16 in Aristophanes, 104–08, 126–31 in Attic comedy, 105 in Euripides, 99, 129 in Plato, 267 ritual spaces of, 134–41

General index

Bacchylides, 30, 99, 163, 209 Balzac, H. in Proust, 319 Barney, R., 155 beauty and emulation, 262, 303 Demetrius on, 261 in the Phaedrus, 170–71 in the Republic, 39–40 streaming, 170–71 in the Symposium, 171 viewing of, 13–15, 147, 150, 175, 182, 269 bees bee-poet, 99, 101, 133, 152, 204, 209, 217, 256 Demeter’s, 81, 101, 152, 203, 215 as metaphors see also metaphors Muses’, 203 in Plato, 151–53 birds in Aristophanes, 182 in Euripides, 182 in Homer, 14, 147 in the Hymn to Pan, 87 in Plato, 168, 173–74 in Theocritus, 202 bodies in Aristophanes, 120–21 in Demetrius, 224 and topographies, 109–14, 240–46, 266–69, 274 Borgeaud, P., 138 Bourdieu, P., 12, 309 Bremer, J. M., 90 Calame, C., 71, 138 Callicles, 112 Callimachus, 81, 190–96, 214 Aetia prologue, 193–96 Hymn to Apollo, 215, 217, 289 in Propertius, 218 Calliope in Horace, 264 Cameron, A., 195, 216 Cassirer, E., 56 Catullus, 263, 279 c. 11, 93 c. 51, 263 caves Calypso’s, 14, 67, 147, 264 Plato’s, 43, 178 in Propertius, 219 and Sappho, 265 Cephisus, 3, 100, 135

chronotope, 19, 157, 272, 315, 321, 322 cicadas in Alcaeus, 163 in Callimachus, 203 in Hesiod, 163 and Philetas, 212 in Plato, 157, 163, 175, 179, 181, 202 in Theocritus, 202 Cicero, 4, 12, 85, 141, 272, 274–82, 284, 294–301, 312 Ad familiares, 54 Brutus, 53, 232, 275 De finibus, 294 De inventione, 270 De legibus, 294 De oratore, 30, 50, 54, 59, 266–67, 277–78, 294–97 Orator, 250, 266–67, 274, 276, 277 Phaedrus imagery in, 266–67 style of see styles on styles see styles Cinesias, 129 Cithaeron and Pindar, 88 Combray in Proust, 17–18, 317, 322 Compton-Engle, G., 120 Corybants in Dionysius, 307 in Plato, 307 Cos in Propertius, 219 in Theocritus, 207 Cosgrove, D., 10 Cratinus, 84, 141, 216, 255 Wine Flask, 142 Cyclops in Demetrius, 242 in Homer, 242 Daniels, S., 10 Daphnis, 185 in Theocritus, 197, 208 Delphi, 3–5, 26, 110 in Pindar, 200 in Theocritus, 201 Demeter, 131, 138 and Persephone, 135 Demetrius, 15, 71, 75, 266 on dithyrambs, 242 identity and dating of, 223 on metaphor see metaphor on paths see paths

347

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in Frogs, 126–31, 140 Helen, 89–90, 259 Ion, 127, 259 Iphigenia in Tauris, 128 Medea, 99–101 Phaethon, 26 style of see styles

Demetrius (cont.) On Style, 222–26, 237–44, 247–51, 252, 260–62 on styles see styles stylistic categories in, 235 Demetrius of Phalerum, 223, 299 Demosthenes, 111, 142, 282 On the Crown, 308 style of see styles deportment, 109–14 Derrida, J., 2, 8 on Aristotle see Aristotle on metaphor see metaphor on Plato, 45 “Plato’s Pharmacy”, 311 and white discourse, 64 “White Mythology”, 28–29, 57–59, 249 on Socrates, 311 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 4, 71, 141, 184, 266, 272, 282–93 On the Ancient Orators, 54, 292 On the Composition of Words, 241, 283, 291 On Demosthenes, 302–11 On Imitation, 253, 269, 271 Phaedrus imagery in, 267, 302–11 On the Style of Demosthenes, 232, 250, 253, 283, 289 on styles see styles stylistic categories in, 282 On Thucydides, 240–42 Dionysus, 106, 143 in Frogs, 120–25, 140 in the Marshes, 123, 135 Dodds, E. R., 130 Dover, K., 115 dress in Frogs, 120–21 and style see style

Fantuzzi, M. and R. L. Hunter, 203, 209 Felson, N., 94 flowers Derrida on, 57–59 and fertility, 71 and metaphor see metaphor as metaphors see also metaphors in Pindar, 93–99 in Proust, 58, 316, 318–24 in Sappho, 55, 90–92, 260–62 Scarry on, 56, 94, 262 of song, 30, 97, 98 in Williams, 19, 58–59 fluidity, 78–85, 246 Cicero on, 279 Demetrius on, 247–51, 287 Dionysius on, 216, 287 in Hesiod, 83–84 Longinus on, 287 in Pindar, 80–83, 217 in Plato, 156, 168 Plato on, 164, 248 Ford, A., 7 Forms (Platonic), 32, 37–38 in Cicero, 274 in the Republic, 40–45, 61 Forum (Roman) in Cicero, 298 Foucault, M., 25, 105 France, A., 57 Freud, S., 57

Eleusinian Mysteries see Mysteries Eleusis, 132, 135 Empedocles, 62, 171 Empson, W., 185 Ennius, 84 Epimenides, 194 Eros, 90 in Longus, 213 Eupolis Flatterers, 114 Euripides, 81, 321 in Aristophanes, 111, 114–20 Bacchae, 121, 130

gardens in Cicero, 294 Foucault on, 25 Graces’, 70, 96, 97, 200 in Longus, 18, 213 and metaphors see also metaphors Muses’, 151 in Philetas, 211–13 in Pindar, 93, 96–97, 200 in Plato, 160, 180, 254 in Proust, 17–18, 316, 321–24 Genette, G., 49 on enchaînement, 272, 315

General index

Gennep, A. van, 70 geography cultural, 10 Gorgias, 119 in Aristotle, 234 Encomium of Helen, 179 in Plato, 160, 161 style of see styles Graces, 67, 130 in Pindar, 80, 83 Greenblatt, S., 11, 16, 70 groves, 211 in Hellenistic poetry, 200, 201 in Horace, 264 in Longus, 183 in Propertius, 218 Gutzwiller, K, 161 Hades, 122, 131, 139, 143 Harriott, R., 72 Hedylus, 84 Helen, 109 in Cicero, 270 in Dionysius, 271 Helicon, 3–5, 12, 200 and Pindar, 88 in Callimachus, 194 in Hesiod, 70, 78–80, 85–86 in Pindar, 76 in Propertius, 218 in Proust, 26, 314 in Theocritus, 201 springs of, 78–80, 213 Hippocrene, 66, 214, 216 Hellenistic poetry landscapes of see landscapes Heracles at the crossroads, 75, 77, 236, 246 in Frogs, 120–23, 136 Hermes, 14, 147 Hermesianax of Colophon, 211 Hesiod, 12, 66, 67–68, 70, 132 in Callimachus, 194 Proclus on, 194, 195 Theogony, 78–80, 83, 85–86, 203, 214 Works and Days, 74, 163, 194 heterotopia, 25, 105, 206 hexis, 11–12, 309 Homer, 63 Iliad book 1, 163, 203 book 5, 308 book 17, 231

book 21, 251 in Dionysius, 308 Odyssey, 197 book 5, 14, 67, 147 book 6, 13, 262 book 9, 243 book 17, 191 style of see styles Homeric Hymn to Pan, 86–88 Horace, 101, 216, 256, 279, 312 Odes, 263–65 Hours, 97 Hunter, R. L., 7, 119, 184, 201, 205, 211, 272, 303 Ibycus, 92–93 in Plato, 165 idyll see locus amoenus Ilissus, 3–5, 107, 135, 138 in Cratinus, 84, 143 and Frogs, 137, 140 in the Phaedrus, 101, 147, 157, 161, 304 and styles, 141 image-making, 45–48 invention in Hesiod, 80, 86 in Pindar, 81 poetic, 2, 194 rhetorical, 270 irrigation in Aristotle, 172 in Empedocles, 62, 252 in Homer, 251 in Longinus, 232, 253 as metaphor see also metaphors in Plato, 62, 171–72, 252 Isocrates style of. See styles Keats, J., 66 Keith, A., 278 landscape aesthetics of, 3–5, 13, 67, 105, 148, 159 and embodiment, 22–23, 24, 62, 109–14, 208, 266–69 figures in, 22, 30, 105–06, 226 gendering of, 22–23, 67, 137–38, 259–60 and inspiration, 151–53 and literary criticism, 185–88, 317 and literary judgment, 122–25, 205 and literary theorizing, 15–18 and meadowland styles, 131–34

349

350

General index

landscape (cont.) metaphors of see metaphor and pilgrimage, 67 theories of, 9–12 and watery styles, 126–31, 141–43 landscapes in Aristophanes, 126–31 colonizing of, 16–17, 269, 297, 314 comic, 104 dream, 10, 16, 17, 25, 30, 86, 190, 194, 215, 218 erotic, 212 heraldic, 3, 68–70, 94, 105, 226, 314 pastoral, 193–99 philosophical, 149–50, 266 poetic, 68–70, 185–88 reception of, 15–18 ritual see spaces rural, 2, 59, 143–45, 166, 176 urban vs. rural, 122–25, 139–41, 190, 191, 199, 204, 231 viewing of, 7, 15, 147–48 Lefebvre, H., 12 Leidl, C., 158 Lenaea, 136 theater of, 136 likeness, 8, 34–35, 269 in the Phaedrus, 177, 180 in the Republic, 39–45 in the Sophist, 45–48 literary criticism and Callimachus, 196, 220 and Hellenistic poetry, 185–88, 198, 204–11 and Philetas, 211–13 in the Protagoras, 155 and rhetorical theory, 225, 226–28 literary theory in Aristotle, 28–35, 270 in Cicero, 268, 270 and criticism, 2 in Demetrius, 226 in Derrida, 28–35 in Dionysius, 268, 271 in Plato, 32–33, 149–56, 269 in the Phaedrus, 173–74 spaces of, 266–69 theōrein, 7, 9 Lloyd, G. E. R., 63 locus amoenus, 4, 55, 67, 91, 146–47, 198, 205, 259–60, 294 and metaphors see also metaphors in Hellenistic poetry, 199–204 in Homer, 192

in Horace, 263–65 and Pan, 86–88 in Plato, 149–50, 156–63, 173–74 in Theocritus, 196, 210 Longinus, 13, 26, 63, 216 on styles see styles On the Sublime, 232, 250, 253–55, 257 Longus Daphnis and Chloe, 15, 18, 183, 212 Lowe, N., 104 Lucian A Teacher of Orators, 244–46 Lysias in Plato, 162, 179 Macksey, R., 317 Marvell, A., 185 metaphor, 2–3, 8–9 as movement, 2, 28–29, 34–35, 49–51, 52–53, 57, 60, 94, 221, 315 Aristotle on, 2, 8, 28–35, 52–53, 56, 59–63, 64, 315 Cicero on, 54, 274–82, 294–301 Demetrius on, 53, 55–56, 222–26, 232, 237–42, 247–51, 260–62 Derrida on, 28–29, 30–33, 56, 57–63 as detour, 8, 316 Dionysius on, 55–56, 302–11 feminization of, 53–54, 55–56 and flowers, 29–30, 54–56, 94 as foreign travel, 53–54 in Hellenistic poetry, 199–204 and landscape, 2, 8–9, 12–13, 20–21, 30, 33, 54–56, 150, 222–26 and mimesis see mimesis and nature, 31, 59–63 and place, 2, 9 in Plato, 32–33, 36, 61–62, 149–50, 158, 166, 173–74 in the Republic, 39–45 in the Sophist, 45–48 Longinus on, 254 metaphora, 50, 52 modern theorists on, 56 place of, 54, 70 spaces of, 2, 5, 8–9, 69, 158, 242, 297 streams of, 254 and style see style Theophrastus on, 54 translata, 50 translatio, 54 and visualization, 9, 26, 29, 33–34, 50, 55, 60

General index

metaphors bees, 83, 99, 133, 204 flowers in Pindar, 93–99 in Sappho, 90–92, 260–62 fluidity see fluidity gardens, 294 in Cicero, 300 Demetrius on, 260–62 in Dionysius, 310 irrigation, 251–55 the locus amoenus Cicero on, 294–301 Dionysius on, 302–11 in the Phaedrus, 159, 162–66 meadowlands Dionysius on, 304, 310 in Frogs, 131–34 in Propertius, 219 mountains, 243, 296 oceans, 257, 289 paths in Aristophanes, 122–25 Demetrius on, 237–42 racetracks, 243 rest-stops, 75, 238–40 rivers, 141–43, 255–59 Cicero on, 280, 298 Dionysius on, 288, 289 springs, 78, 81–84, 213–20 Cicero on, 297 streams, 80–81, 126 Dionysius on, 81, 286, 289, 292 wine drinking, 84–85, 141 Demetrius on, 85, 224 metonymy in Cicero, 295 in Horace, 263 Pan as, 86 in Propertius, 219 in Proust, 315 in Theocritus, 207 mimesis, 8–9, 269–72 Aristotle on, 60, 233 Derrida on, 60 in drama, 189 and dramatic enactment, 189–90 in earlier poetry, 189 feminization of, 116 in Hellenistic poetry, 188, 190 and metaphor, 33–36, 47, 64, 94, 158, 303, 306, 313, 318 mimeisthai, 7 mimetic capital, 11, 16

mimetic space. See space mimetic theorizing, 8–9, 221 in Aristotle, 63–65 in Demetrius, 63, 243, 249, 262 in Derrida, 311 in Dionysius, 63, 287, 302–11 and nature, 60, 233 perceptual. See Scarry, E. Plato on, 36, 149–50, 155, 228–32 in Platonic dialogue, 189 in the Sophist, 46 vs. diegesis, 229 and rest stops, 43 and viewing, 7, 13–15, 271 Mitchell, W. J. T., 9 Monoson, S., 148, 175 mountains in Hellenistic poetry, 200 in Hesiod, 85–86 as metaphors see also metaphors in Propertius, 218 in Theocritus, 201, 209 mousikos Plato on, 166, 167 Murley, C., 161, 205 Muses, 67, 70, 72, 138, 141, 209 in Aristophanes, 126 in Callimachus, 194 in Hesiod, 78–80, 85–86, 87, 214 in Horace, 264 in Pindar, 76, 80, 81, 83–84, 99 in Plato, 151, 154, 159, 162, 181 in Propertius, 219 in Theocritus, 196 Valley of, 213 Mysteries, 137 in Aristophanes, 134 in Demetrius, 222 Eleusinian, 106, 135, 138, 168 Lesser, 136 rituals of, 131 Nausicaa, 13 Nietzsche, F., 28, 29, 30–31, 33, 104, 222 Nightingale, A., 148, 175 Nymphs, 67, 146 Hill of, 136 in the Hymn to Pan, 87 in Longus, 183 in Pindar, 81 in Plato, 157, 160, 164, 179, 181 in Theocritus, 196, 209

351

352

General index

O’Brian, J., 320 Odysseus, 13, 109, 191 Olympia, 4, 110 oratory vs. philosophy, 311 Cicero on, 298 Plato on, 156–63 styles of see styles Orpheus, 72–73, 86, 185 in Plato, 154 painting in the Poetics, 270 in Proust, 58 in the Republic, 39, 41–42, 269, 274 in the Sophist, 46 Pan, 86–88, 127–29, 138, 146 in Aristophanes, 126 in Euripides, 89 in the Homeric Hymn to Pan, 86–88 in Plato, 159, 179, 181 in Propertius, 219 in Theocritus, 196, 204, 209 Parmenides, 47, 75 Parnassus, 3, 26 in Proust, 314 Parry, A., 146 pastoral poetry, 161 path of argument, 149 of dialectic, 43–45, 174–82, 239 of literary judgment, 122–25, 139–41 of song, 3, 74, 123 as style, 3 of words, 23, 73, 123, 163 paths, 73–78, 122–25, 236–37 and composition, 238 in Aristophanes, 236 in Callimachus, 220 in Demetrius, 237–44 in Dionysius, 240–42 in Frogs, 106–8 in Hesiod, 74–75, 236 long vs. short, 177, 178, 180 in Lucian, 244–46 as metaphors see also metaphors in Pindar, 75–77 in Plato, 36–45, 174–82 in Proust, 245, 315 pursuit of, 46–48 rough vs. smooth, 75, 177 in Theocritus, 204–11 Payne, M., 188, 191

Persephone, 137 Persius, 219 phantasia, 26, 33–34, 69 Aristotle on, 234 in Aristotle, 51 and dream-scapes, 25–26 Pheidias in Cicero, 274 Philetas, 211–13 in Propertius, 218 Phrynichus in Aristophanes, 99, 133 pilgrimage, 2, 3, 5, 69, 148 in Hellenistic poetry, 213 in Plato, 175 in Proust, 26, 316 in Theocritus, 204–11 Pindar, 3, 4, 26, 30, 33, 49, 67–68, 70, 75–77, 80–83, 93–99, 153, 163, 198, 200, 209, 214, 252, 317, 320 bodies and topographies in, 110 flowers in. See flowers in Horace, 216 Isthmian 2, 77 Nemean 7, 95 Olympian 2, 95 Olympian 6, 82 Olympian 7, 96 Olympian 9, 76, 97 Olympian 10, 96 Olympian 13, 97 Paean fr. 52h, 76 and Pan, 87–88 partheneion of, 87 paths in see paths Pythian 3, 88 Pythian 4, 77 Pythian 6, 98 style of see styles place, 3–4, 5, 9 in Proust, 315 Plato, 29, 63, 266, 269, 274 Apology, 154 in Cicero, 298 Derrida on, 61–62 Euthydemus, 113, 153 Gorgias, 112–13 Ion, 83, 113, 151–53, 156 Lysis, 178 Menexenus, 308 and metaphor see metaphor on mimesis see mimesis and pastoral poetry, 146

General index

Phaedo, 113 in Proust, 246, 320 on style see style on styles see styles Phaedrus, 4, 15, 101, 140, 146, 149–50, 192, 202, 205, 209, 212, 239, 267 Athenian setting of, 156–63 beauty in, 170–71 in Cicero, 294–97, 300 Derrida on, 311 in Dionysius, 302–11 inspiration in, 162–66 locus amoenus in, 156–63 and metaphor, 166–69 and paths, 174–82 and the soul’s cultivation, 166–69 soul-bird in, 173–74 Protagoras, 154–56, 253 Republic, 37–45, 61, 144, 153, 170, 174, 178, 228–32, 239, 248, 274, 287 Sophist, 45–48, 178 style of see styles Symposium, 116, 118–19, 171, 272 Theaetetus, 250 Timaeus, 62, 170 pleasance see locus amoenus poetic inspiration, 214 in Hesiod, 80 in Pindar, 94 in Plato, 83, 151–53, 154, 162–66, 181 Polus in Plato, 181 Priapus in Theocritus, 202 Proclus, 85 Prodicus, 75, 77, 236, 293 Propertius, 84, 93, 212, 218–19 Protagoras in Plato, 154 Proust, M., 314–24 “The Bible of Amiens,” 317 Combray, 17–18, 58, 315, 318, 321–24 flowers in see flowers The Guermantes Way, 1, 26–27, 245, 314 and heraldic details, 3, 69, 94, 314 In Search of Lost Time, 17–18, 315 In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 316, 324 On Reading Ruskin, 317 The Prisoner, 188, 246, 320 “Sesame and Lilies,” 317

Sodom and Gomorrah, 188, 320 Time Regained, 188, 320 Pucci, P., 12, 66 Quintilian, 244 Institutio oratoria, 257, 292 Radermacher, L., 223 Rancière, J., 10, 36, 228 Ricoeur, P., 31, 56 rites of passage female, 15, 70–71, 88, 127, 137–38 ritual in Frogs, 106–7, 134–41 spaces of. see spaces roads. See paths Roberts, W. Rhys, 223 Rosenmeyer, T., 66, 161, 196 Ruskin, J., 316 Sappho, 67, 163, 263, 266, 321 fr. 2, 14–15, 70, 90–92, 259 Ode to Aphrodite, 285 in Plato, 162 style of see styles Scamander in Homer, 251, 288 Scarry, E., 13, 182, 262 on perceptual mimesis, 19, 56, 58, 94 on visual events, 13, 30, 150, 311 Schenkeveld, D. M., 225 Segal, C. P., 39, 73, 131, 205 Selden, D., 190, 194, 207, 215, 216 Shakespeare, W. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1, 15–16 Sicily, 161 in Pindar, 95 simile in the Republic, 40–41 Simonides, 30, 74 Socrates, 116 in Aristophanes, 117–18 in Cicero, 295, 298 in Dionysius, 303 in the Ion, 151–53 in the Phaedrus, 33, 147, 156–69, 173–74, 175–78 in Plato, 148 in the Protagoras, 154–56 in the Republic, 39–45, 61, 144, 170, 228–32 in the Symposium, 171 sophists, 114 in Plato, 46–48

353

354

General index

Sophron, 161 space, 9 in Attic comedy, 104–08 of literary criticism, 130 mimetic, 106, 134–41 and place, 105–06 spaces in Birds, 105 borderland, 192 floral, 55, 324 gendering of, 116 of metaphor see metaphor pastoral vs. bucolic, 24 ritual, 134–41 rural, 24 rustic, 25, 87, 192 and styles see styles urban vs. rural, 5, 12, 22, 108–09, 266–69 springs, 83 drinking from, 81–84, 213–20 in Hellenistic poetry, 213–20 in Hesiod, 78–80 of inspiration, 213–20 as metaphors see also metaphors in Pindar, 81–84 in Plato, 169 in Roman poetry, 213–20 Stesichorus in Plato, 165 streams, 80–81 in Cicero, 299 as metaphors see also metaphors in Plato, 169 style and appearance, 33–34 Aristotle on, 51, 112 in Callimachus, 216 charaktēr, 283 Cicero on, 53 and composition, 240, 283 and delivery, 234 as dress, 52, 64, 234, 285 eloquentia, 53 and embodiment, 22–23, 115, 225, 243, 273, 275, 277, 282, 301, 308–10 and erotic threat, 89–93 feminization of, 53–54, 55–56, 133, 235 as “foreign,” 51 landscape metaphors and, 5–6, 14, 33, 69–70, 199–204, 261, 272–74 lexis, 31, 230, 234, 283 and literary judgment, 227 and metaphor, 31, 55–56

and mimesis, 312 and nature, 281, 287 and ornamentation, 277 periodic, 243 and place, 227 Plato on, 228–32 and rhetorical theory, 226–28 in Theocritus, 204–11 unified model of, 235, 275, 276, 283 virtues of, 234, 282 styles Aeschylus’ (in Frogs), 131–34 Archilochus’ Longinus on, 257 Aristophanes on, 104 Aristophanes’, 134 Aristotle on, 112 Aristotle’s, 63–65 Attic, 279, 284, 290 Dionysius on, 54 Attic vs. Asiatic, 276, 292 “bumsy,” 115 charming, 260–62 Cicero on, 278, 296, 299 Demetrius on, 55 Dionysius on, 285 in Proust, 320 Cicero’s Quintilian on, 257 Demosthenes’, 65 Dionysius on, 282–93, 302–11 and Dionysus, 120–25 dithyrambic, 165, 241, 305 Euripides’, 65, 102, 309 Aristophanes on, 99, 114–20, 121–22, 126–34 Dionysius on, 55, 81, 93 feminine, 71, 79–80, 81, 89–93 Dionysius on, 88 and Euripides, 114–20 and Pindar, 87–88 fertile (gonimos), 122, 127–29, 131 flowery, 29–30, 55–56, 71–72, 118, 130, 184 Cicero on, 300 Dionysius on, 93, 188, 260, 284 Proust on, 318–21, 323 flowing, 78–85, 197, 246, 247–51, 273 Cicero on, 274–82 Dionysius on, 282–93 effects on the ear, 286, 291 forceful (deinos), 243 and the Frog chorus, 126–31 gendering of, 55, 71–72, 102–03, 245, 320 in Aristophanes, 114–20

General index

in Cicero, 274–82, 301 in Dionysius, 282–93 Gorgias’, 234 Demetrius on, 85 Dionysius on, 285, 304–06 grand (megaloprepēs), 222 Greek vs. Roman, 301 hard-body, 309 Cicero on, 278, 293 in Hellenistic poetry, 187 Herodotus’, 298 Hesiod’s, 102 Dionysius on, 81 Homer’s, 65, 102 Demetrius on, 85, 223, 243 Dionysius on, 257, 287, 289 Longinus on, 258 honeyed, 83, 87, 99, 163, 203 Isocrates’ Cicero on, 250, 298 Dionysius on, 55, 250, 282–93, 307 judgment of in Frogs, 121–22 Lucilius’ Horace on, 256 metrical, 231, 247 in Plato, 229 middle or mixed, 275 Cicero on, 298, 299 Dionysius on, 282–93 mimetic vs. diegetic, 229 Nestor’s, 163, 203 of new music, 124, 127, 129, 241 pastoral, 196–99 and the Phaedrus, 266–69, 302–11 philosophical, 296, 300, 307 piercing, 87, 162–64, 203 Dionysius on, 304 Pindar’s, 102 Dionysius on, 306 Horace on, 256 Longinus on, 257 Plato on, 112–14, 228–32 Plato’s, 65, 232 Cicero on, 300 Demetrius on, 223, 247–51, 253 Dionysius on, 253, 282–93, 302–11 Longinus on, 250, 253–55 refined, 195 rural, 101–02 rustic, 202, 279 Sappho’s, 65, 71, 102, 265 Demetrius on, 55, 225, 260–62 Dionysius on, 55, 81, 93, 285

simple vs. mixed, 230 slight (ischnos) vs. grand (megaloprepēs), 115–16 slight (tenuis) vs. ornate (ornatus), 278, 300 slight vs. grand, 131–34, 188, 193–96, 215, 237–44, 252 slippery, 250 smooth (glaphuros), 81, 188, 222, 247, 260, 284, 290, 304 Socrates’, 309 Aristophanes on, 110–11, 117–18 in Plato, 112–14 in the Phaedrus, 162–66 soft and shady, 115, 300, 308–10 theatrical Cicero on, 277, 279 Dionysius on, 285 Thucydides’, 71, 102 Demetrius on, 225, 237–42 Dionysius on, 240–42, 291, 305 twisted, 110–11, 112–14 urban vs. rural, 102–3, 108–09, 127–29, 207 Cicero on, 297 vivid (enargês), 243, 248, 252 Teisias in Plato, 161, 178 Theater of Dionysus, 105, 106, 137 Theocritus, 161, 191, 199 in Cicero, 280, 300 Epigram 5 Gow, 201 Epigram 20 Gow, 201 Idyll 1, 196, 202 Idyll 7, 191, 203, 204–11 in Proust, 246, 320 Theophrastus, 235, 275, 282 Thersites, 109 Thrasymachus, 275 Thucydides, 75, 135 style of see styles Tibur (modern Tivoli) in Horace, 217, 256 Timotheus, 129 Tusculum in Cicero, 295 Vergil, 199, 298 in Proust, 320 Whitman, W., 19 Williams, R., 11, 70 Williams, W. C., vi, 19, 266

355

356

General index

Woolf, V. Jacob’s Room, 16–17 Wordsworth, W., 66 Wycherley, R. E., 157 Xenophon Memorabilia, 236

Zeitlin, F. I., 18, 116, 184 Zeus in Plato, 168 Zeuxis in Aristotle, 270 in Cicero, 270 in Dionysius, 271

Index locorum

Aeschines Against Ctesiphon, 111 Alcaeus fr. 130 L–P, 18, 108 fr. 347b, 163 Anyte epigram 16 G–P, 198 Apollodorus 1.4.2, 230 Aristophanes Acharnians 989, 130 Birds 748–50, 99 748–50, 133 1374, 123 Clouds 102, 114 331–33, 111 445, 111 449, 114 449–450, 111 964–83, 111 1002–08, 139 1003, 117 1005–08, 101 1053, 117 1377, 117 1404, 117 1492, 114 fr. 31 PCG, 124 fr. 155 PCG, 124 Frogs 23, 120 45–47, 120 52–53, 121 53, 121 63, 121 80, 121 91, 121 92, 117, 121 93, 182 96, 121, 127 97, 122

98–99, 122 104, 122 106, 122 113, 122, 239 117, 122 128, 120, 123 134, 123 135, 123 136, 123 137–38, 123 185, 239 193, 239 200, 120 216–17, 123 218–219, 123 229–34, 126 233, 126 236–37, 120 244–49, 129 247, 126 304–6, 120 324, 132 337, 132 344, 131 351, 131 374, 131 376, 123 384–93, 131 392, 123 398, 132 402, 132 443, 123 448–53, 132 449, 131 452, 123 456–58, 132 482–97, 120 822–25, 132 826–27, 132 836–39, 132 837, 133 851, 132 851–52, 132 886–87, 132 892, 133

357

358

Index locorum

Aristophanes (cont.) 892–93, 117, 132 897, 124 910, 133 921, 132 930ff., 121 936, 41 937–47, 133 940, 133 941–43, 119 942, 133 954–58, 116, 131 957, 133 1003, 99 1005, 143 1015, 114 1046, 116 1068–71, 133 1069–71, 117 1101–07, 131 1203–04, 127 1254–59, 133 1300, 133, 217 1306–8, 133 1309–63, 127 1309–63, 131 1383, 143 1386, 143 1491–92, 133 Knights 17, 117 18, 117 21–26, 117 25, 117 41, 139 218, 114 526–28, 142 526–28, 216 805–08, 139 1015, 123 Lysistrata 457, 114 Peace 455, 130 733, 123 750, 114 Thesmophoriazusae 57, 112 61–62, 112 100, 124 Wasps 220, 133 1022, 142 1131ff., 140 1320, 140

Aristotle Metaphysics 991a20, 63 1079b25, 63 Poetics 1447a10–15, 233 1448b4–9, 233 1448b5–9, 64 1448b10–17, 60 1448b15–17, 233 1451b4–7, 33 1457a7, 94, 315 1457b6–7, 2, 50 1457b7, 8 1457b9, 28 1457b20–22, 28 1457b26–29, 61 1457b32–33, 28 1458a22–23, 94, 315 1459a5–8, 31 1461b10–11, 270 1461b12–13, 270 Politics 1339a–b, 112 1342a, 112 Rhetoric 1395b1–2, 112 1403b, 112 1403b31–1404a1, 51, 234 1404a5–12, 51 1404a8, 112 1404a11, 234 1404a11–12, 26, 33 1404a16–19, 51 1404a21–22, 233 1404a24–28, 234 1404a26–35, 302 1404a35–37, 53 1404a35–39, 234 1404b1–11, 234 1404b8–11, 51 1404b8–12, 94, 315 1404b12–14, 51 1404b15–18, 51 1404b18, 51, 1404b35–36, 51 1405a8, 2 1405a8–9, 52 1405a11–13, 52 1405a13–14, 52 1406b5–11, 53 1408a20, 112 1410b12, 33 1410b13–14, 60 1410b33–35, 50

Index locorum

1411a24–35, 50 1411a26–35, 26 1411a26–35, 2 1411b22–25, 50 1411b23, 2, 26 1411b23–30, 31, 60 Athenaeus Deipnosophistae 11.45.11–13, 84 Bacchylides 5.191–97, 99 10.10, 99 fr. 4.2, 30 Callimachus Aetia fr. 01 Pf. 23–24, 193 26–28, 193, 237 29–30, 203 32–35, 212 Aetia fr. 02 Pf., 194, 215, 216 01–5, 194 Hymn to Apollo 108–9, 256 108–12, 215 110–12, 81, 101, 203, 246 111–12, 289 Catullus c. 11.22 –23, 93 c. 51.4 –5, 263 Cicero Ad familiares 16.17.1, 54 Brutus 24, 275 37–38, 300 121, 232, 298, 300 285, 300 316, 280 330, 54 De finibus 5.1.2, 294 5.1.3, 294 De inventione 2.1–3, 270 2.2, 270 2.3, 270 2.4, 271 2.5, 271 De legibus 1.1.03, 294 1.4.15, 294 De optimo genere oratorum 17, 299

De oratore 1.7.28–29, 294 1.28, 295 1.28–29, 295 1.265, 295 2.20–22, 266 3.56, 296 3.59–73, 296 3.63, 296 3.66, 296 3.68, 296 3.69, 296 3.93, 297 3.96, 277 3.96–103, 277 3.98, 277 3.100, 278 3.103, 278, 297 3.118, 297 3.121, 297 3.123–24, 297 3.155, 279 3.159, 50 3.160, 50 3.161, 51 3.165, 54 3.166, 30 3.167, 59 3.184, 280 3.186, 281 3.199–200, 278 3.220, 278 Orator 8, 279 9, 274 12, 274, 298 13, 298 14, 298, 300 39, 250, 298 42, 250, 279, 298, 299 63, 300 64, 301 69, 276 70, 276 71, 276 71–72, 276 77, 279 78–79, 279 79, 235 81, 279 86, 279 91, 299 92, 279, 299 96, 299

359

360

Index locorum

Cicero (cont.) 97, 280, 297 98–99, 299 99, 85, 280, 299 134–35, 277 228, 281 Cratinus fr. 2 1, 114 fr. 198 K–A, 84, 142, 216, 246 fr. 203 K–A, 142 Demetrius De elocutione, 261 1, 247 7, 224 7–8, 224 11, 224, 243 13.1, 250 15, 85, 224 19, 244 36, 235 39, 247 44, 238 45, 238 45–47, 222 46, 238 47, 239 48, 222, 240 48–49, 291 49, 240 50, 248 52, 222, 242 78, 53, 232, 242 78–85, 53 78–86, 232 80, 232 86, 53 101, 222 127, 260 128, 260 132, 15, 55, 260, 264 132–33, 222 133–73, 15, 55, 260 163–66, 222 166, 261 173, 260 174, 222 180, 247 181, 247 182, 247 183, 248, 250 183–85, 248 183–85, 248 184, 249 185, 222, 249

202, 239 209, 252 216, 243 217, 253 246, 222 248, 243 270, 244 Demosthenes De corona 179, 244 199–209, 308 Dionysius of Halicarnassus De antiquis oratoribus 1, 54, 292 De compositione verborum 11–14, 282 16.11–14, 287 16.30–34, 287 16.48–50, 288 16.65–68, 288 16.71–74, 288 22–23, 283 22.2–8, 291 22.035, 260 22.11–12, 241 22.227–28, 291 22.229, 291 22.238, 291 22.35, 93, 284 23, 283, 284 23.1, 93, 260, 284 23.9–10, 284 23.16–17, 55, 93, 261, 285 23.33–34, 81 23.43–49, 285 23.100–101, 285 23.100, 260 24, 289 24.17–18, 258 De Demosthene 3–5, 284 3, 283 3.54, 283 4, 283, 285 4.18–23, 290 4.25–26, 290 4.29–32, 290 4.33–35, 290 5.8–10, 289 5.12–14, 304 5.12–16, 88 5.15–17, 304 5.18–35, 304 5.21–23, 305 5.25–26, 305

Index locorum

5.27–35, 232, 305 5.34, 305 5.5–12, 303 5.8–9, 304 5–7, 303 6.20–22, 306 7.11–14, 305 7.20–51, 242 7.34–35, 306 7.48–51, 306 16, 284 18, 283 18.15, 290 18.31–33, 285 18.35–41, 285 19.29, 290 20.39–43, 251, 291 20.48, 286 21.92, 286 22.1–5, 307 22.7–13, 307 23.21–26, 308 23.28–34, 308 23.34, 308 25.20–25, 286 26.18–19, 286 28, 289 28.35, 253 32.4–7, 309 32.10–15, 310 32.19, 310 32.21–22, 305 36.28, 304 36.29, 285 39.24, 285 39.44–46, 88 40, 283 40.1, 285 40.2, 286 40.1–2, 304 40.2–5, 286 40.43.50, 81 40.43–46, 286, 290 40.46–48, 286, 291 40.49, 304 40–41, 283 41, 283 43, 283 43.81, 304 43.82, 285 De imitatione fr. 31.1.1, 271 fr. 31.1.12–16, 253 De Isocrate 2.13–14, 241

12.14, 286 12.22, 285, 286 13, 55 13.29, 286 14.46, 286 15.15, 285 De Thucydide 9.19–20, 241 24.10–13, 241 24.66–72, 241 29.1–2, 241 29.22–23, 241 Empedocles fr. 3.2 D–K, 62, 252 fr. 3.3–7 D–K, 252 fr. 3.8–12 D–K, 252 fr. 35.1–2 D–K, 62, 252 Epimenides fr. 1 D–K, 194 Eupolis fr. 157 K–A, 114 fr. 352 K–A, 114 fr. 353 K–A, 114 Euripides Bacchae 395–411, 99 404–08, 130 Helen 167–78, 89 179–90, 89 187, 259 244–45, 259 1478–86, 130 Hippolytus 732–51, 130 Ion 492–505, 128 505, 127 887–90, 259 936–38, 128 Iphigenia at Aulis 543–67, 99 Iphigenia in Tauris 1125–31, 127, 129 Medea 824–44, 100 835–48, 100 1085–89, 99 France, A. The Garden of Epicurus 209–10, 57 245–57, 57 271, 57

361

362

Index locorum

Gorgias Encomium of Helen 8, 179 8–10, 179 21, 179 Greek Anthology 9.823, 146 Hedylus 5 G–P, 84 Hermesianax of Colophon Leontion 75–78, 212 Hesiod Theogony 1–115, 86 1–4, 214 1–8, 68, 78 5–6, 214 9–12, 79 22–34, 85 81–103, 99 83–84, 83 84, 246 Works and Days 26–32, 108 216–17, 74 216–19, 68 216–21, 109 219, 74 287–89, 178 287–91, 74 287–92, 68 287–92, 236 582–84, 163 Homer Iliad 1.131, 41 1.248–49, 163 1.249, 99 2.14, 12 2.217–19, 109 3.195–98, 109 4.293, 163 5.428–29, 308 9.502–3, 224 17.588, 231, 287 21.196–97, 258, 289 21.257–62, 251 Odyssey 5.59–74, 14, 147 5.68, 264 5.76, 147 5.77–80, 147 6.160–64, 262

6.160–65, 13 8.74, 74 8.481, 74 9.13, 258 9.13–14, 258 9.192, 243 17.204–11, 191 22.347, 74 Homeric Hymn to Hermes 47, 127 64, 127 451, 74, 124 553–66, 99 Homeric Hymn to Pan 14–26, 86 26, 87 Horace Ars poetica 14, 312 Epistles 1 19.21–22, 220 Odes 1 5, 263, 279 22, 212, 263 22.23–24, 263 Odes 3 6–8, 264 12–13, 264 19, 264 21, 264 40, 264 Odes 4 2.5–8, 217, 256 2.25, 217 2.27–32, 216 2.31–32, 256 Satires 1 4.1–8, 256 4.11, 256 10.50, 256 10.62–64, 256 Ibycus fr. 286 PMG, 92 Longinus De sublimitate 13.2, 254 13.3, 232, 254 15.2, 26 15.4, 26 32.4, 254 32.5, 254 32.7, 255 33.1, 257 33.2–5, 257

Index locorum

33.5, 257 35.4, 258 36.2, 257, 259 Longus Daphnis and Chloe 1.1–2, 15, 1.1–3, 183 2.3.5, 213 2.3–8, 18 2.4–5, 213 2.5.4, 213 4.5.2, 18 Lucian Rhetorum praeceptor 1, 244 1–11, 291 3, 244 9, 244 11, 245 Ovid Amores 3 1, 220 Epistles Sappho 25.137–60, 265 Palatine Anthology 6.336, 201 7.42 1, 194 8, 194 9.313, 198 9.437, 201 Parmenides fr. 1 D–K 2, 75 29, 75 fr. 2 D–K 6, 75 Pausanias 1.19.6, 138 Philetas Ataktoi glōssai, 211 Pindar fr. 52h 10, 49 10–14, 76 18–20, 76 fr. 95 Maehler 3, 88 4, 88 fr. 97 Maehler, 88 fr. 152, 256 fr. 209 1, 96, 153

Isthmian 2 32–34, 77 scholion 47a, 77 Isthmian 4 36–38, 95 Isthmian 6 63–64, 80 63–67, 83 73–76, 83, 214 Isthmian 7 18–19, 81 19, 217 72, 96 Isthmian 8 56–58, 80 Nemean 2 6–9, 110 Nemean 7 12, 217 51, 75, 123 62–63, 252 77–79, 96 Olympian 1 11, 123 110, 75 Olympian 2 5–7, 110 11–15, 110 48–51, 95 70–74, 95 Olympian 6 72–73, 75, 123 82, 163 82–86, 82 84–85, 246 84–86, 214 104–05, 55 Olympian 7 7–9, 96 15–16, 110 45–47, 110 80, 95 80–86, 110 90–92, 110 Olympian 9 5, 97 16–18, 97 20, 97 26–27, 97 26–29, 96 28–29, 97, 200 47, 76, 163 48, 30, 97 48–49, 55, 98

363

364

Index locorum

Pindar (cont.) 104–09, 76 105–08, 98 Olympian 10 9–12, 251 10, 217 53–59, 217 54, 256 Olympian 11 1–2, 96 8–10, 97 13–14, 97 19–20, 97 Olympian 13 14–15, 97 22–23, 97 Paian fr. 52h 20, 99 Paian fr. 52k 4, 99 Paian fr. 52m 4–5, 97 Pythian 2 62, 97 83–86, 75 84–88, 109 95, 250 Pythian 3 77–79, 88 103, 75, 123 scholion 137b, 88 Pythian 4 60–61, 152 246–48, 77 Pythian 6 1–2, 200 1–3, 98 7–8, 98 47–49, 98, 201 52–54, 98 Pythian 10 53–54, 99 55–59, 80 Vita Dr. 2.2–4, 88 2.6–8, 88 Plato Apology 21e3–22c8, 154 Critias 117b5–c1, 172 Euthydemus 288b8, 113 305e2, 153

Gorgias 485d4–e2, 113 485e7–8, 113 493e5–94a1, 172 511a4–5, 113 Ion 533d1–e5, 154 534a1, 307 534a7–b3, 151 534b1–3, 84 534b1–4, 217 534b3–4, 151, 153 534b6, 151 535e7–536b4, 154 535e9–536a7, 154 536b1–c7, 173 541e7, 113 542a7, 156 Laws 736a7–b4, 172 844a1–7, 172 Lysis 203, 178 213e3–214a1, 178 Phaedo 112c4–8, 172 90c3–5, 113 Phaedrus 228b7, 307 229b4–230a7, 163 229b7–8, 157 229c6, 164 230b2, 147, 159 230b2–c5, 157 230b5, 158 230c1, 158 230c1–2, 159 230c2, 163 230c6, 164 230c6–d1, 158 230d4, 158 230d7, 156 235c–238c, 167 235c8–d1, 162, 253 235d8–236b4, 161 237a7, 162 237a7–8, 163 237a7–9, 181 238c5–d3, 143, 164 238d2–3, 306 239c5–d1, 300, 309 240a8, 169 241d1, 164 241e1–242a2, 164 242a3–6, 295

Index locorum

242b8–243b7, 165 242d1–2, 165 242e1, 164 243a6, 165 244a2, 165 245a, 16, 181 246a4–6, 158, 167 246d5–48c2, 167 246e2, 153 246e4, 167 246e4–247a7, 306 247c2, 167 247c4–5, 167 247c6–8, 167 248a1–2, 167 248b4–c1, 168 248b6–8, 160 248c2, 153 248d2–e3, 166 248d7–e2, 165 248d–e, 48 249c–250b, 168 249d6, 168 249e1, 168 250b1–5, 168 250b5, 173 250b6–c1, 168 250c3, 168 250d1–7, 170 251a–d, 160, 168 251b1–7, 169 251c5–d1, 169 251e3–252a1, 156, 172 252a1, 169 252d1, 173 252d2–3, 173 252d8, 168 253 a–c, 170 253a5–7, 169 253b, 160, 168 253b4–5, 169 253c1, 169 255c–d, 160 255c1–d2, 169 255c6, 168 255d4, 169 256e2, 169 257b6, 170 258e6–259d8, 157 259a6–b2, 176 259b5–c2, 176 259b–d, 181, 212 260c10–d4, 176 260e2–261a5, 176

261a7–8, 165, 174, 176 262a2, 177 262a5–b1, 177 262d1–2, 179 262d2–4, 179 262d2–5, 181 263b6–8, 176 263d2–7, 179 263d4–5, 179 263d5–6, 159 263d6–7, 181 265b2–4, 181 265b4–c2, 180 265b5–6, 167 265c1–2, 160 266b7, 177 267c1–2, 181 269d6–7, 176 269e4–270a8, 298 271c9, 165, 176, 177 271c9–d6, 180 271e1, 176 272b5, 177 272b5–c3, 180 272c1, 177 272c2, 177 272c3, 177 272d–73a, 178 273d3–6, 177 274a3–4, 178 276b1–8, 180, 297, 310 276d1–277a4, 181, 297, 311 277a1, 156 278b5–d2, 182 Protagoras 312a2–3, 253 315a5–b2, 154 339a1–3, 155 347c3–4, 155 347d3, 155 348a3–6, 155 Republic 364c6–d3, 178 372d4, 153 392c6, 229 392d5, 229 394c1–3, 229 394d6, 229 395b8–397b5, 229 395d5–396b6, 230 396e1, 230 397b6–400c6, 229 397d5–7, 230 398a1–2, 230

365

366

Index locorum

Plato (cont.) 398a8, 230 398c1–400e7, 230 398e, 248 398e1–10, 229, 231 398e10, 248 398e2, 230 399a–c, 307 399d2–5, 230 399d7–9, 230, 249 399e8–400a1, 230 400e1, 230 401b1–3, 41 401b1–d2, 144, 154, 231 402b5–7, 38 402b8–c8, 38 402b–c, 38 410d–e, 112, 231 410e10–411a3, 169 411a, 248, 250 411a5–6, 246, 248 411a6–b4, 231, 287 411a8–9, 249 411b1–2, 248 420b3–4, 39 420c4–5, 39 435d, 43, 178 457b2–3, 153 475d1–476c7, 175 475e4, 40 484c3–d1, 41 484c5–d1, 40, 274 484c6–d3, 170 485b5–c8, 171 485d6–e1, 171 487b1–7, 40 487e4–488a2, 40 488b6–7, 41 489a4–6, 41 500e3–4, 41, 274 501b4–7, 41 504b, 43, 178 504b2, 42 504c9, 42 504d6–8, 42 506c7–9, 42 506e1–3, 43 508b13, 61 508b3, 61 508e5–6, 61 509–10, 48 509a9–10, 41 510b4, 42 510b7–9, 42 510d–511a, 48

511a5–7, 43 511b6, 43 515e6–7, 43 516a5–b2, 38 517a8–b6, 43 517a–b, 178 517b1–c4, 43 517b6–7, 43 532a5–d1, 43 532a–e, 178 532b–c, 48 532b6–d1, 170 532b–d, 38 532d6, 43 532e1–3, 43, 239 533a10–b2, 44 533a1–3, 44 533c8–9, 44 533d1–3, 44 534a4–6, 44 619ed7–e5, 178 621c4–6, 179 Sophist 218d–219a, 46 218d3–6, 45 229e1–230b5, 178 233d9–233e8, 46 234a1–2, 46 234a3–b2, 46 234d2–6, 46 234e3–4, 46 235b10–c7, 47 235b1–2, 47 235bc2–4, 47 235d6, 47 236c4, 47 236d9–237a1, 47 237a9, 47 237b4–6, 47 237b5–6, 47 242b7–8, 47 258d6, 47 261a6–9, 47 261b5–6, 47 266b–c, 48 268c8–d5, 48 Symposium 194e3–197e8, 118 195a5–196b3, 118 197d6–7, 119 206b3–4, 171 210a–211e, 171 210d3–6, 171 211c3, 171 215e1–2, 307

Index locorum

Theaetetus 144b5, 246, 250 Timaeus 29e–30a, 170 45b2–c6, 170 77c8–d6, 172 78c4–d1, 172 79a2–3, 172 85e, 254 Proclus Scholia vetera 6.17–23, 195 Propertius Elegies 3 1, 212 1.01–6, 218 3.01–2, 218 3.01–6, 84 3.13, 219 3.18, 93, 219, 237 3.26, 93, 219, 237 3.33, 219 3.42, 219 3.51–52, 212, 219 9.43–44, 219 Proust, M. In Search of Lost Time I.51, 321 I.66 [68], 319 I.67 [69], 319 I.68 [69], 319 I.71, 17, 322 I.85 [87], 322 I.87 [89], 322 I.94 [96], 323 I.96, 322 I.96–99, 323 I.97 [101], 323 I.98, 323 I.99, 322 I.123 [127], 319 I.124, 319 I.124 [128–29], 319 I.124 [129], 319 I.127, 320 I.127 [131], 319 I.419–20, 315 II. 581, 246 II.314, 314 II.592, 246 III.344, 320 III.635–57, 320 III.710, 320 III.710–12, 246 Quintilian

Institutio Oratoria 12.10.25, 292 12.10.61, 257 Sappho fr. 2, 225, 259 5–6, 15 fr. 2 L–P, 90 fr. 31 P 3–5, 263 fr. 94, 225 fr. 105c L–P, 93 Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.165, 16 1.2.83–84, 16 5.1.7, 16 5.1.12–17, 16 5.1.108–339, 16 Simonides fr. 127, 30 Theocritus Epigram 5 Gow, 201 Epigram 20 Gow 4, 202 5–10, 201 13, 202 Idyll 1 1, 197 7, 197 146–48, 202 Idyll 2, 207 Idyll 3–06, 207 Idyll 7, 219 10, 204 11, 204 14, 208 15–19, 208 31, 204 35, 204 37, 209 41, 212 51, 208 63–70, 208 71–77, 208 80–82, 208 91–93, 209 92, 209 106–08, 210 115–17, 210 131, 204 136–37, 209 154–55, 209 Idyll 15, 207

367

368

Index locorum

Thucydides Histories 2 15–16, 135 12.2, 238 Vergil Eclogue 6, 298 Williams, W. C. “A Sort of A Song,” 59 “The Crimson Cyclamen,” 19 Woolf, V. Jacob’s Room

75–76, 16 Xenophon Memorabilia 2.1.21, 236 2.1.22, 236 2.1.24, 237 2.1.26, 236 2.1.27, 237, 292 2.1.28, 237 2.1.29, 236 2.1.30–33, 237