Latin Poetry and Its Reception: Essays for Susanna Braund 0367549026, 9780367549022

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Part 1 Roman kingship
1 Homeric kingship theory in archaic Latin poetry
2 The good king according to Virgil in the Aeneid
3 The nature and nurture of kingship in Virgil’s Georgics and Seneca’s De Clementia
4 Rege sub uno: on the politics of Statius’ Achilleid
Part 2 Genre crossing
5 The return of the tibicines in Livy and Ovid
6 Phaedrus in the forum: Plautus’ Pseudolus and Plato’s Phaedrus
7 When mortals meet gods in classical and contemporary contexts
8 Tacitean inflections of sincerity
Part 3 Imperial intertexts
9 The burial of Misenus and Lucan’s De Bello Ciuili
10 Mens Humilis vs. Superbia in Prudentius’ Psychomachia
11 Keeping the faith: allegory in late antique panegyric and hagiography
Part 4 Modern receptions
12 Gavin Douglas’s cranes and other classical birds
13 After Strada: English responses to Strada’s Nightingale (Prolusiones 2.6), with texts of four previously unprinted versions
14 Gibbon and Juvenal
15 Into the maw: Melville and the classical tradition
16 Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex: the libretto
17 Muted voices: Marina Tsvetaeva’s and Anna Akhmatova’s classical heroines
18 Translating friendship: My Brilliant Friend and the Aeneid
Index

Citation preview

Latin Poetry and Its Reception

This volume offers 18 new studies reflecting the latest scholarship on Latin verse, explored both in its original context and in subsequent contexts as it has been translated and re-imagined. All chapters reflect the wide research interests of Professor Susanna Braund, to whom the volume is dedicated. Latin Poetry and Its Reception assembles a blend of senior scholars and new voices in Latin literary studies. It makes important contributions to the understanding of kingship in Hellenistic and Roman thought, with the first four chapters dedicated to exploring this theme in Republican poetry, Virgil, Seneca, and Statius. Chapters focusing on the modern reception include case studies from the 16th to the 21st century, with discussions on Gavin Douglas, Edward Gibbon, Herman Melville, Igor Stravinsky, and Elena Ferrante, among others. No comparable volume provides a similar range. Latin Poetry and Its Reception will appeal to all scholars of Latin poetry and classical reception, from senior undergraduates to scholars in Classics and other disciplines. C. W. Marshall is Professor of Greek at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Latin Poetry and Its Reception Essays for Susanna Braund

Edited by C. W. Marshall

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, C. W. Marshall; individual chapters, the contributors The right of C. W. Marshall to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-54902-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-55272-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09269-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

for Susanna nec tibi cura canum fuerit postrema Virgil, Georgics 3.404

Contents

List of contributors Preface

x xii

PART 1

Roman kingship 1 Homeric kingship theory in archaic Latin poetry

1 3

J O S E P H FA R R EL L

2 The good king according to Virgil in the Aeneid

25

A L I S O N K E I TH

3 The nature and nurture of kingship in Virgil’s Georgics and Seneca’s De Clementia

43

J AY N E K N I G H T

4 Rege sub uno: on the politics of Statius’ Achilleid

56

A L E S SA N D RO B ARCH IE SI

PART 2

Genre crossing 5 The return of the tibicines in Livy and Ovid

75 77

M A RC U S W I L SO N

6 Phaedrus in the forum: Plautus’ Pseudolus and Plato’s Phaedrus C H R I S TO P H E R S. VAN DE N B E RG

91

viii

Contents

7 When mortals meet gods in classical and contemporary contexts

107

PAU L A J A M E S

8 Tacitean inflections of sincerity

124

V I C TO R I A E MMA PAGÁ N

PART 3

Imperial intertexts 9 The burial of Misenus and Lucan’s De Bello Ciuili

135 137

C I L L I A N O ’ HO GAN

10 Mens Humilis vs. Superbia in Prudentius’ Psychomachia

149

A N D R E W M. MCCL E L L AN

11 Keeping the faith: allegory in late antique panegyric and hagiography

163

P H I L I P H A R DIE

PART 4

Modern receptions

177

12 Gavin Douglas’s cranes and other classical birds

179

CA RO L E N E WL A N DS

13 After Strada: English responses to Strada’s Nightingale (Prolusiones 2.6), with texts of four previously unprinted versions

192

S TUA RT G I LL E SP IE

14 Gibbon and Juvenal

216

J O S I A H O S GO O D

15 Into the maw: Melville and the classical tradition

230

B I L L G L A D HIL L

16 Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex: the libretto S TE P H E N H ARRISO N

251

Contents 17 Muted voices: Marina Tsvetaeva’s and Anna Akhmatova’s classical heroines

ix 263

Z A R A TO R L O NE

18 Translating friendship: My Brilliant Friend and the Aeneid

285

C O R I N N E PACH E

Index

296

Contributors

Alessandro Barchiesi is Professor of Classics at New York University, USA. Joseph Farrell is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Stuart Gillespie is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK. Bill Gladhill is Associate Professor of Classics at the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, Canada. Philip Hardie is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Honorary Professor of Latin Literature, University of Cambridge, UK. Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK. Paula James is a retired senior lecturer in classical studies and continues as a research associate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Open University, UK. Alison Keith is Professor of Classics and Director of the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, Canada. Jayne Knight is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. C. W. Marshall is Professor of Greek at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Andrew M. McClellan is the Stepsay Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics at San Diego State University, USA. Carole Newlands is Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. Cillian O’Hogan is Assistant Professor of Medieval Latin at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Contributors

xi

Josiah Osgood is Professor of Classics and Chair of the Classics Department at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, USA. Corinne Pache is Professor of Classical Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, USA. Victoria Emma Pagán is Professor of Classics at the University of Florida, USA. Zara Martirosova Torlone is Professor of Classics and on the core faculty of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, USA. Christopher S. van den Berg is Associate Professor of Classics at Amherst College, USA. Marcus Wilson is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Preface

The eighteen studies in this collection are offered in tribute to the career and scholarship of Susanna Braund, on her retirement. Susanna has been a colleague, collaborator, and friend to the contributors, and this recognition for her excellence as a Latinist and as a human being represents a small offering for her. After completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, Susanna Braund taught in the United Kingdom for sixteen years before moving to Yale (2000–2004), Stanford (2004–2007), and then the University of British Columbia (2007–21) as Canada Research Chair in Latin Poetry and Its Reception. She has distinguished herself academically in many ways, in recent years as a Killam Research Fellow (2016–18) and in being elected as a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2018), and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2019). This collection’s title therefore is lifted from the parameters Susanna Braund established for her own research. It is ambitious and far reaching, and inevitably this collection cannot cover the full range of these interests, or meet the promise of the title. Susanna’s work on the satirist Juvenal began with her book Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires (CUP 1988). Her survey Roman Verse Satire (OUP 1992) remains an indispensable starting-point for the study of the genre. Her commentary on Juvenal’s Satires book 1 (CUP 1996), and her edition and translation of Juvenal and Persius in the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard UP 2004), are both foundational for the academic discussion of these authors. A Companion to Persius and Juvenal (Blackwell 2012) was co-edited with Josiah Ober, a former doctoral student and one of this volume’s contributors. Her work on Lucan was established when she provided the first verse translation of the epic poet in modern English (OUP 1992). This pedagogical emphasis was reinforced when she published a short Latin reader of selections from Lucan (Bolchazy-Carducci 2009), inaugurating a new series of readers to be used in senior undergraduate Latin courses. She is also a distinguished scholar of Seneca the Younger. Her text, translation, and commentary on De Clementia (OUP 2009) is the first full commentary on the text in English and the most detailed commentary on this important work in any language. She has written a wide-ranging

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introduction to Seneca’s tragedy Oedipus (Bloomsbury 2016) and provided translations of Oedipus, Agamemnon, and Phoenician Women for a complete translation of Seneca’s works (Chicago UP 2016). In addition to these works, her research has been pursued in dozens of articles and chapters, too many to describe here. Her scholarly interests have drawn her to other Latin authors, and she has provided an important survey of Latin literature (Routledge 2002, revised 2017). In articles and in edited volumes, she has contributed substantially to the understanding of emotional and psychological states as can be inferred from ancient sources. Her co-edited volumes on Passions (CUP 1997), Disgust (Johns Hopkins UP 1998), Love (CUP 1999), and Anger (CUP 2004), with additional articles on Forgiveness and Fairness, anticipate her later work on Mercy in Seneca. Her most recent scholarship is on the poet Virgil. Building on her presidential address to the Virgil Society (published in 2004), Susanna has pursued an understudied niche in the reception of the author since the Renaissance. Looking at translations of Virgil in many languages, she draws particularly on her knowledge of French and Russian. An edited volume on Virgil (OUP 2018) was co-edited with another contributor to this collection, Zara Torlone. Susanna’s own magisterial translation history, A Cultural History of Translations of Virgil: From the Eleventh Century to the Present, will appear from Cambridge University Press in 2021. The impact of this scholarship cannot be adequately measured. Her name is encountered by most classics undergraduates among essential readings in a wide range of literary subjects. She remains an incredibly generous scholar, giving generously of her time to colleagues, students, and to those who email her out of the blue. It would be insufficient, however, to mention only her published output. She has served as a mentor to a wide range of students and junior scholars, whose names are found on her c.v. as co-authors, doctoral students, co-organizers of conferences, etc. Almost every one of these instances reflects an intense relationship where she as a senior scholar has worked with, and learned alongside, a junior one. At the same time, she remains active in charitable causes and volunteering in her community. Her friends know her as a dedicated player of the electric bass, an enthusiastic participant in the organization of her local community, and a devoted companion and caretaker to many wonderful and appreciative dogs over the years. The chapters assembled here have been grouped into four sections. They begin with a collection of four studies concerning the idea of ‘kingship’ in Roman literature. This focused examination provides a rich interlocking case study that shows how previous literature shapes the interpretation of Latin poetry. In Chapter 1, Joe Farrell traces the influence on Hellenistic discussions of kingship on early Latin poets. Hellenistic theories drawing on readings of Homer had begun to deplore Achilles for his intransigence. This discussion traces the impact of this influence on earlier Roman authors in shaping Virgil’s understanding of leadership. In Chapter 2, Alison Keith

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extends this analysis to the Aeneid. She shows how the Hellenistic philosopher Philodemus exerts particular emphasis in a rich analysis of books 1 and 4 of the epic. The analysis demonstrates that it is necessary to appreciate not only Hellenistic kingship theory and the precedent of Homer, but also the influence of Epicurean philosophy. In Chapter 3, Jayne Knight explores the analogues between Virgil’s Georgics and Seneca’s De Clementia in acknowledging the newly established power of Augustus and Nero respectively. In this practical way, these texts explore the risks associated with sole rulership. At the same time, Seneca’s direct quotation of Georgics allows him to use Augustus as an exemplum. Finally, in Chapter 4, Alessandro Barchiesi extends the analysis to the Flavian period with a study of Statius’ Achilleid. By positioning itself as a kind of prequel to the Iliad, Statius’ unfinished poem engages with the opposing characterization of Achilles and Ulysses. Effective leadership, as seen throughout the Flavian epic tradition, requires continued military aggression. The second section assembles four chapters that juxtapose ancient sources, examining how reception of literary texts and of ideas in Latin literature can work across genre boundaries. The sequence of these chapters is less tightly linked, but in each case literary form is crucial in the reception of a particular text. In Chapter 5, Marcus Wilson examines an event in Rome’s early history when professional musicians (tibicines) withdrew their participation from public worship, festivals, and games. He discusses the contrasting descriptions of this event in the historian Livy and Ovid’s Fasti, and illuminates the confused manuscript tradition recording the event. In Chapter 6, Chris van den Berg explores the philosophical underpinnings of Plautus’ comedy, Pseudolus. In addition to drawing specific connections between the play and Plato’s Phaedrus, he provides a context for understanding the associations of the clever slave with the Greek philosophical tradition and Socrates in particular. On Chapter 7, Paula James describes the dynamics of theophany in Roman literature, drawing on specific examples from Ovid and Apuleius. While divine appearances extend back to the earliest Greek literature, the pattern seen in the Latin texts can be traced to modern television examples, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Finally, in Chapter 8, Victoria Pagán defines the qualities by which we might measure sincerity in the dedications found in Latin authors. With examples from Ovid, Lucan, and Pliny, she provides a deep consideration of the sincerity of Tacitus, and concludes with an examination of the address to Domitian in Statius’ Thebaid. The third section provides three chapters that examine intertextual reference in Imperial hexameter verse. In Chapter 9, Cillian O’Hogan takes the cremation and burial of Misenus in Aeneid 6 and identifies its influence on two separate moments in Lucan’s Civil War. He argues that the shared intertext of the two moments in Lucan expect the reader to consider them against one another. In Chapter 10, Andrew McClellan traces Virgilian influences on

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xv

Prudentius’ Psychomachia, with particularly dense evocation of the Aeneid in the central combat between Mens Humilis and Superbia. By drawing on foundational moments in Rome’s mythic history, Prudentius over-writes the understanding of the Roman state through a Christianizing lens. Finally, in Chapter 11, Philip Hardie considers the use of allegory in two fifth-century poets, Honorius and Paulinus of Nola. He demonstrates how the allegorical practices of these poets shape the reception of earlier Latin literary history. The seven chapters in the final section consider the modern reception of Latin literature, with chapters offering insight into the reception in each of six centuries, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first (with two chapters for the twentieth century). In Chapter 12, Carole Newlands provides an avian examination of Gavin Douglas’s sixteenth-century translation of the Aeneid into Scots, focusing particularly on the prologues he wrote to books 7 and 12. She shows how the description of birdcalls and the wider soundscape shows Douglas’s awareness of Lucan and Ovid, and the broader epic tradition. In Chapter 13, Stuart Gillespie presents a Latin poem of the seventeenth century by Famiano Strada, which also focuses on birdsong, that of the nightingale. In addition to identifying seventeen translations and adaptations of the poem into English by 1800, he isolates four versions that have not previously been printed, and presents them in a new edition here. In Chapter 14, Josiah Osgood traces how the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon uses and understands the satirist Juvenal. Juvenal both prompts Gibbon to make specific historical associations and helps him frame his understanding of the moral failings of the Rome he describes. In Chapter 15, Bill Gladhill reveals the rich layering of classical references that weave themselves throughout Herman Moby-Dick. Drawing on annotations in Melville’s books and the indications of his voracious reading, the imagery of jaws runs throughout the nineteenth-century novel. The twentieth century is represented in this collection by three Russian authors. In Chapter 16, Stephen Harrison provides a detailed description of the Latin libretto of Igor Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. The influence of Jean Cocteau, Catholic liturgy, intellectual currents at the Sorbonne, Senecan tragedy, and Roman pantomime are all identified as roots of the unusual nature of the libretto. In Chapter 17, Zara Torlone explores the way two Soviet poets, Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, present the plights of classical heroines such as Phaedra, Ariadne, and Dido. The articulation of female voice in these poems provide a new vector for understanding the classical poetics of these two, very different, authors. The final chapter brings us to the present day, with its consideration of the quartet of Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante. In Chapter 18, Corrinne Pache demonstrates how the presentation of female friendship in Ferrante draws particularly on Aeneid 4, and how a layer of classical learning pervades the series. The index was prepared by Emma Hilliard. Many of the chapters adopt the personal voice, in deference to Susanna’s own practice as a pioneer in the use of the personal voice in classical

xvi

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scholarship, and many make reference to popular culture, be it music or television or cinema. Together the chapters bring together new studies on many of the research interests that have occupied Susanna’s career. They demonstrate the appeal of her wide-ranging investigations and the deep questions that they have provoked. These concerns will continue to challenge scholars for years to come, and the work of Susanna Braund will continue to be seen as indispensable to those who pursue them.

Part 1

Roman kingship

1

Homeric kingship theory in archaic Latin poetry Joseph Farrell

The reception of Greek theories of kingship in Latin poetry is not as fully appreciated as it should be.1 This is especially true of poetry written before Philodemos’ treatise On the Good King According to Homer, which is assumed to have been known to the philosopher’s literary acquaintances, including Virgil and Horace.2 But there is reason to think that important ideas had been absorbed even by the earliest figures we can date. In this chapter, I am concerned with evaluations of Homer’s principal heroes, Achilles and Odysseus, that considered the former highly problematic on account of his emotional, intransigent, and violent nature, while valuing Odysseus as a paragon of endurance, restraint, intelligence, and adaptability.3 The existence of these attitudes has been well documented, but their impact on archaic Latin epic and tragedy remains especially underappreciated. I will argue that this impact was substantial and that it forms an important part of the horizon of expectations with which poets and readers of the late Republic and afterwards regarded Odysseus and Achilles as paradigms of heroic virtus, the one quite positive and the other much less so.4 To those who know the two heroes mainly from canonical literature, this line of argument may seem paradoxical. In Greece down to the end of the fifth century BCE, it was more or less taken for granted that Achilles, however difficult a personality, is Homer’s greatest example of heroic andreia. At the same time, Odysseus is likely to be openly disparaged, in tragedy very often playing the role of a “stage villain,” as W. B. Stanford memorably showed.5 More generally, Rome’s earliest epic and tragic poets took their bearings from Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and, in the eyes of most critics, departed from their models only as necessary to render them comprehensible to the supposedly unsophisticated Roman public. It is also true that later Romans celebrated the Middle Republic more for its military than its cultural achievements and habitually contrasted the straightforward valor of Roman warriors with the shiftiness of the Carthaginians, their principal adversaries during this time.6 Accordingly, one would expect Latin epic and tragedy to be dominated by ethical attitudes similar to those found in archaic and early classical Greek literature, not those of late classical and Hellenistic philosophy. Finally, the nature of our evidence is such

4

Joseph Farrell

that we cannot point to many instances in which Roman poets are likely to have drawn on a particular element of Homeric kingship theory. These are not entirely lacking, however, and the frequency with which Roman poets choose to adapt texts that present Ulysses in a more favorable light than Achilles raises the question of why, in spite of all of the other factors mentioned previously, this might be so. I infer that the most likely explanation is that they were, in fact, guided by attitudes characteristic of contemporary kingship theory. The implications of this argument are significant not only for our estimate of archaic Latin epic and tragedy, but also, as noted earlier, for our understanding of how their work might have influenced later Latin poets.

Epic virtus To begin, I ask (as many have done before) why Livius Andronicus chose to translate the Odyssey instead of the Iliad.7 In addition to the factors mentioned earlier that might have recommended an epic of war rather than one of travel, it is the Iliad that was regarded, throughout antiquity, as the greater of Homer’s masterpieces. Papyrological evidence suggests that it was also the more widely read.8 Moreover, it contained Rome’s foundation myth in Poseidon’s prophecy to Aeneas.9 What caused Livius to translate the Odyssey instead? In answer, I refer to a recent paper in which I argue that Livius was influenced by an interpretation of Odysseus as an ethical hero advanced by Antisthenes, a younger friend of Socrates and an older contemporary of Plato.10 The scholia to Odyssey 1.1 cite Antisthenes’ argument that Homer, by calling Odysseus andra . . . polytropon, equates courage or manliness (andreia) with versatility (polytropia) and skill in dialectic.11 We have long known that the scholia contain other information that was available to Livius.12 It is therefore easy to understand his treatment of virum . . . versutum as endorsing Antisthenes’ redefinition even more emphatically, thanks to the sonic similarity created by Livius’ lexical choices and the fact that the entire first line of Livius’ poem is framed by the phrase. Furthermore, where Antisthenes had likened Odysseus to a dialectician, Livius makes Ulysses a version of the poet/translator – who himself, we may suppose, inherits Homer’s mantle as the source of all wisdom.13 Livius no doubt had additional reasons to choose the Odyssey over the Iliad as his model of the first Homeric epic in Latin. The fact is, though, that the hero of the Iliad simply did not, either in his Homeric form or in his subsequent reception, afford him possibilities like these. It would in fact be surprising if Livius’ choice had not been informed by ethical considerations. One would expect the same of Naevius; and indeed, Scevola Mariotti considers it obvious that The Punic War, for the poet and his contemporaries, “represented the national poem of Rome corresponding to the Iliad, the first example of any warrior epic.” Mariotti makes this

Homeric kingship theory

5

point, however, after stating that Naevius’ intention was to combine both Homeric epics into a single poem.14 Moreover, in the course of his discussion, he notes that the first half of the Bellum Poenicum is largely taken up by the story of Aeneas’ voyage to Italy and the foundation of Rome, within which he finds numerous specific correspondences with the Odyssey; but in contrast, he notes, “one cannot point out analogous similarities between the story of the Punic war and the Iliad.”15 It may be that Naevius was motivated by a spirit of aemulatio to surpass his predecessor by combining both Homeric epics into one. It nevertheless seems striking that it is the Odyssean portion of his poem that seems the more specifically Homeric. One reason for this may be that Aeneas was the most important individual character in the poem, both as the ultimate heroic ancestor of the Roman people and as an example of Odyssean endurance, adaptability, and wisdom. It is hard to see who in the Punic War narrative might have rivalled Aeneas in these respects, since it appears (quite understandably) that no single figure remains on the scene for long, while the remains of the narrative emphasize the mishaps and sheer violence of war more than any grandeur or glory that it confers. With Ennius’ Annals a much clearer picture comes into view. The poem has a good deal to say specifically about kings while making Homer a constant point of reference. Regarding kingship theory as such, a passage attested for book 11 says kings tend to get carried away by good fortune. A second, attested for book 16, states they devote enormous effort and resources to perpetuating their own memory. None of this sounds complimentary, which is hardly surprising: the general field of reference in these later books includes contemporary potentates who are enemies of Rome, as we shall see. Thus, actual kings do not often come off well in the Annals.16 There are exceptions.17 A fragment attested for book 1 deplores reflexive preference for violent combat as a bestial tendency; another censures someone’s failure to protect the state, perhaps specifying that he should do so by strategy rather than by force. Editors since Terzaghi have linked these fragments, which Skutsch prints as follows:18 nam ui depugnare sues stolidi soliti sunt; ⟨cui data cura uiro regnum populumque tuendi⟩ ⟨astu non ui⟩ sum summa⟨m⟩ servare decet rem.

Ann. 1.52 (96) Sk Ann. 1.53 (97) Sk

For stolid swine are wont to settle disputes by force; ⟨as for the man given responsibility for protecting his kingdom and his people,⟩ it is right that he guide the state ⟨by strategy, not force.⟩

If this (or something like it) is correct, then the number of passages dealing with such themes attested for book 1 is reduced, but their signifcance is multiplied. The most prominent king in this book must have been Romulus.19 He may have spoken these words himself or, perhaps more likely, heard

6

Joseph Farrell

them from a counselor. His shrewdest stratagem was the Rape of the Sabine Women, to which another fragment attested for book 1 almost certainly pertains.20 As one of Romulus’ most familiar exploits, it is easily taken for granted; but if Ennius used it early in the poem to emphasize prudence over bellicosity – specifcally in Romulus, of all possible rulers – that is quite signifcant. Evidence about Romulus’ successors is too fragmentary to permit inferences of this sort, but Romulus’ mirror image is found in Pyrrhus, king of Epirus and one of the most fascinating characters in the Annals. In book 6, Ennius presents Pyrrhus as the very type of the worthy foe. Not merely a king (and emphatically so: nauos repertus homo, Graio patre, Graius homo, rex, “a vigorous man was found, a Grecian man from a Grecian father, a king,” 6.2 [165] Sk), he is also a lineal descendant of Achilles: Ennius even calls him “Aeacides,” as Homer frequently calls Achilles himself.21 Here if anywhere we should be entitled to look for the influence of ethical exegesis of Homer, as in the following passage: . . . stolidum genus Aeacidarum: bellipotentes sunt magis quam sapientipotentes

Ann. **6.14 (197–8) Sk

Stolid is the race of the Aeacidae: they are powerful in war rather than wisdom. This characterization of the Aeacidae as bellicose but none too clever clearly pertains to Pyrrhus, and it exploits the contrast between biē and mētis (or vis and sapientia) that is familiar from ethical discussions of Achilles and Odysseus. Further, it gains explicit connection to Homeric kingship theory as an evaluation of Achilles’ regal descendant.22 True to his lineage, Pyrrhus is not only a man of biē, but is also stolidus.23 Recall that in book 1 bellicosity is typical of stolidi sues. In book 6, Pyrrhus’ Roman opponents were not kings, but senators and magistrates; but theorists had long defned the “king” (basileus) very fexibly with reference to politically involved citizens and leaders within many different constitutional forms. Were Ennius’ Roman Republican leaders, then, aligned with Odyssean wisdom against Pyrrhus’ Achillean force? If so, was this a consistent theme in the Annals? A lengthy fragment attested for book 8 depicting a breakdown of civil order is worth quoting in full: proelia promulgantur pellitur e medio sapientia, ui geritur res; spernitur orator bonus, horridus miles amatur; haud doctis dictis certantes nec maledictis miscent inter sese inimicitias agitantes; non ex iure manu consertum sed magis ferro rem repetunt regnumque petunt, uadunt solida ui

Ann. 8.1 (247–53) Sk

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battles are promulgated . . . good sense is driven from view, by force are affairs managed, the honest advocate is spurned, the uncouth soldier loved, not striving with learned speech nor with insulting speech do they contend among themselves, stirring up hatred; not to lay claim by law, but rather by the sword – they press their claims and seek mastery – they rush on with force unchecked.24 The context of this fragment is uncertain, and it is full of mixed metaphors and hyperbole. Its language should not be pressed too hard. Still, its structure involves sharp antitheses between legal process and civil unrest, speaker and soldier, word and deed, all of which are based on a more fundamental opposition between sapientia and uis. Its general tenor, once again, is in favor of the former. If it relates to a crisis early in the Second Punic War, as most editors have believed, then Ennius’ denigration of the miles in contrast to the orator is especially striking; but it also makes perfect sense. It was by wise counsel, after all, rather than main force that Rome was saved. A fragment attested for book 12 looks back to this time in celebrating the enormously important theme of the “one man,” here Q. Fabius Maximus, who saved the state by his delaying tactics (unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem, 12.1 [363] Sk). The later historiographical tradition compared the prudent Fabius to the tricky Hannibal, treating each general as a consummate strategist.25 One could conjecture that it was Hannibal’s fate, at the hands of Roman writers, to attract opprobrium for his shiftiness and treachery while Fabius basked in approval for his patience, prudence, and restraint. But Fabius was just one in a succession of individual leaders who served Rome with their wisdom, and not their appetite for battle. Later in the same war, P. Sempronius Tuditanus and M. Cornelius Cethegus served together as censors in 209 and again as consuls in 204. Cethegus was evidently not much of a soldier.26 Instead, Ennius praises him as “an orator of mellifuent speech” (orator . . . suauiloquenti | ore) who was called by his fellow citizens “the choicest Flower of our people and the marrow of Persuasion” (Flos delibatus populi Suadaique medulla).27 This opinion attests a better state of affairs than had obtained earlier in the war. No longer is the bonus orator spurned and the miles horridus beloved, as in the previous passage discussed. Electing the eloquent Cethegus marks the return of good sense to the body politic. If Fabius and Cethegus are both singular men of wisdom, Ennius launches book 10 by inverting the unus homo theme in a virtuoso passage that celebrates the communitarian ethos responsible for Rome’s success in the Second Macedonian War (insece, Musa, manu Romanorum induperator | quod quisque in bello gessit cum rege Philippo, “Say, Muse, what each commander of the Romans | accomplished in the war with King Philip,” Ann. 10.1 [322–3] Sk). To invoke the Muse at some crucial moment is common

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in the Iliad. Sometimes the device opens an episode of aristeia, in which a single hero mows down so many opponents that the narrator requires divine assistance to recall the details.28 Ennius’ problem is almost the converse of this: his challenge is to recall not the victims, but the many Roman commanders whose combined efforts defeated Philip V. This is more than just a sophisticated inversion that emphasizes the magnitude of an accomplishment.29 Rome prevailed over Macedonia because its strength derived from many, not from one. Nevertheless, even if the frame of reference is Iliadic, the passage is obviously intertextual with the opening of Livius’ Odyssey.30 As such, it comports with a passage attested for book 9 that compares someone to Homer’s Polyphemus extending his belly by gobbling up Odysseus’ men (Cyclopis uenter uelut olim turserat alte | carnibus humanis distentus, “Just as the Cyclops’ belly had once swelled high, | stretched tight with human flesh,” Ann. 9.15 [319–20] Sk). Ennius’ Cyclops simile may derive from a satirical epigram by his near-contemporary Alcaeus of Messene, also directed against Philip, but both poets were working within a wider context.31 One-eyed megalomaniacs – including Philip’s ancestor, Philip II, Antigonus Monophthalmos, and Hannibal – had been remarkably plentiful for centuries, so that comparing them to Homer’s one-eyed cannibal had become a commonplace.32 For Ennius to compare Philip V to Polyphemus, making the Roman generals who defeated him so many avatars of Odysseus, is easily interpretable in terms of Hellenistic kingship theory with reference to Homeric prototypes. It is in book 15 that Ennius offers two of his most explicitly Iliadic imitations. In one, a pair of enormous Istrian brothers reprise the roles of Leonteus and Polypoetes, the gigantic twins who defend the Greek ships from Hector’s assault in Iliad 12. In the other, an unnamed military tribune defends the Roman camp just as Ajax had defended those same Greek ships in Iliad 16.33 These striking Iliadic imitations might seem out of tune with my reading of Homeric exemplarity in the Annals – both the Romans and their enemies are compared to Homeric Greeks, and a Roman tribune is compared to Ajax, of all people, the most “stolid” of the Aeacidae. However, Ennius’ principals in these passages are not generals, but are drawn from the lower ranks. It seems to me that such passages present Roman soldiers facing brutish foes of more than human capacity, comparable to figures that even in Homer are out of proportion to normal men, and that to defeat them they themselves must be like the strongest and most stubborn of Homer’s heroes. That said, the other passages we have examined recommend the general conclusion that these qualities would be of no avail if Iliadic fighters were not commanded by leaders of Odyssean wisdom.

Tragic uirtus Much as the epics of Livius, Naevius, and Ennius are informed by late classical and Hellenistic ethical preferences, so are their tragedies and those of

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their most influential successors, Pacuvius and Accius.34 The Roman playwrights typically adapt those few fifth-century Greek scripts that are more favorable than most to Odysseus, while presenting Achilles himself and his would-be successors in an especially skeptical light. These tendencies are evident in a Livian passage featuring a complaint that someone is acting “not at all like him whom Chiron taught on craggy Pelion” (haut ut quem Chiro in Pelio docuit ocri).35 The didactic relationship between Chiron and Achilles was emblematic of princely instruction in antiquity.36 Mentioning the pair in a tragedy activates the self-referential theme of theater as a form of civic edification. We are therefore considering a passage very much aligned with the concerns of kingship theory. But who is being addressed? When other heroes are compared to Achilles and found wanting, the point of reference is Achilles himself at the height of his powers; here it is Achilles as a boy.37 A reasonable inference is therefore that the speaker is contrasting an older Achilles with his younger self.38 Emphatic reference to Pelion’s wild, “craggy” nature (in Pelio . . . ocri) suggests that lessons in physical courage – precisely the kind of uirtus for which Achilles is famous – are what he has forgotten.39 The hero could most plausibly be accused of this during his retreat to Scyros, where he tried to avoid going to Troy, forsaking manliness almost literally by disguising himself as a girl among the daughters of King Lycomedes.40 It is Odysseus who saw through this ruse. Therefore, it is a good bet that in this fragment Ulysses is chastising Achilles and reminding him that he is a man of vis (biē), and not (like Ulysses himself) of sapientia (mētis). Achilles’ misguided attempt in effect to imitate Ulysses, against his own nature, by resorting to a stratagem, fails just as surely as his battlefield exploits will prove a terrible success.41 The Livian fragment, illustrating a point I made at the end of the previous section, thus dramatizes Odyssean mētis guiding Achillean biē, with Ulysses and Achilles themselves appearing in their signature roles. A different form of selectivity appears in plays that adapt episodes of the Iliad itself. Pantelis Michelakis writes that Aeschylus’ Achilleid, a trilogy consisting of Myrmidons, Nereids, and Phrygians or Ransom of Hector, explored the tensions and ambiguities between a powerful individual and his society . . . recast[ing] the protagonist of the Iliad as an early fifth-century aristocrat who displays his self-destructive power in front of, and for the sake of, the collective audiences of the Achaeans and the Athenians.42 Such was the impact of the Achilleid, as Michelakis further observes, that it inhibited later tragedians from restaging the central episodes of the Iliad.43 Roman playwrights, however, turned to these episodes more frequently than did their Greek predecessors.44 In their versions, Achilles remains his intransigent self even while resorting to tactics that one would hardly expect of him.

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Above all, the Roman plays emphasize the problematic nature of Achillean uirtus. In Accius’ Myrmidons, Achilles debates Antilochus to defend his withdrawal from battle: tu “pertinaciam” esse, Antiloche, hanc praedicas, ego “peruicaciam” aio et ea me uti uolo; nam peruicacem dici me esse et uincere perfacile patior, pertinacem nil moror. haec fortis sequitur, illam indocti possident. tu addis quod uitio est, demis quod laudi datur. Accius, trag. 108–13 Dangel Antilochus, you call this obstinacy, but I say it’s steadfastness that I want to practice; for if it’s said that I’m steadfast and that I prevail, I grant that with no diffculty, but for obstinate I have no time. The one quality attends brave men, while even boors possess the other. You give me what is like a criticism, and remove what is granted as praise. The debate is not about Achilles’ treatment by the Achaeans but about his character, specifcally his “stubbornness.” One is reminded of Ennius’ stolidum genus Aeacidarum; but it is disorienting to fnd Achilles parsing his stubbornness with such hair-splitting, logic-chopping sophistry.45 This cannot refect anything in Aeschylus, but instead suggests how familiar Roman playwrights had become with philosophical themes and motifs in late classical and Hellenistic discussions of Homeric ethics. The same is true of the contrast Achilles draws between “brave men” (fortis) and “boors” (indocti) and of the inference that his own stubbornness is an expression of uirtus. It would be more honest to admit that his stubbornness stems from his anger. Instead, it is almost as if Accius’ Achilles were trying to equate uirtus with unphilosophical ira in a perverse imitation of Antisthenes’ redefnition of Odyssean polytropia as philosophical andreia. This inference is supported by a more straightforward passage attested for the same play in which someone begs Achilles, “rein in your anger, block your emotions, check your arrogance.”46 But anger continues to drive the hero: in preparing rejoin the fghting in Battle for the Ships, before he has received his divine armor, he goes so far as to declare, “I am suffciently armed when I go in anger, as I do now.”47 With this treatment of Achilles we may contrast Accius’ representation of Ulysses in Night Sortie. The Iliadic “Doloneia” and the Rhesus tragedy based on it had been attacked by ancient critics on ethical and other grounds.48 Accius’ version unapologetically represents the main characters, Diomedes and Ulysses, as paragons of uirtus deserving of laus.49 Thus one unidentified character remonstrates with another, saying of Diomedes and Ulysses, “it was their own manliness that made them do it; do you make light of the

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praise that is theirs?”50 Since no one in Iliad 10 disparages Odysseus and Diomedes, it seems likely that disapproval of them expressed in Night Sortie served as a metatheatrical representation of criticism leveled at the ethics of Accius’ Greek sources and that it was voiced by some spokesman for traditional heroic ethics, such as Ajax or even Achilles himself. Accius’ Iliadic scripts, then, in keeping with philosophical kingship theory, brood over Achilles’ obstinacy and anger while praising Ulysses for his uirtus. Accius’ plays on post-Iliadic episodes follow suit, as do those of Pacuvius. Both poets dramatized The Judgment of the Arms, an episode central to the themes of heroic succession and ethical exemplarity.51 Happily, the relatively plentiful remains provide an unusual opportunity to assess the dialogue between these influential poets. Pacuvius’ play opened with a proclamation of ludi, the funeral games of Achilles (including the armorum iudicium), which is another metatheatrical flourish. The Latin word denotes not only “festivals” and the “plays” performed at them, but also “schools.”52 The proclamation thus reminds the audience that the poet’s notional purpose is to serve the state by teaching its citizens. This comports with a subsequent announcement by Agamemnon that the contest will determine which of the Greeks, after Achilles’ death, is supreme in virtus: qui sese adfnes53 esse ad causandum uolunt, de uirtute is ego cernundi do potestatem omnibus fr. 22 Schierl to all those who wish to be partakers in this trial, I grant them the opportunity of competing about uirtus These same words can equally well describe a contest of uirtus and one to decide what uirtus is.54 Of course, Agamemnon has effectively determined the outcome by making it a contest of words. Ajax instead presents himself as Achilles’ rival in manliness (uirtuti aemulus) and maintains that the “fair” thing (aecum, i.e. aequum) would be for him to have Achilles’ armor.55 Crucially, Ajax has not learned the hard-won lesson voiced by Achilles himself in Ennius’ Ransom of Hector, that ius and aequum are different from and even superior to uirtus.56 Indeed, he has a simplistic conception of aequitas, which he seems to think means “equivalency.” Believing himself Achilles’ sole equal in uirtus, he considers it aequum that he be awarded the fatal armor.57 This is wrong: aequitas is a principle of balance that does not recognize single, absolute standards, but takes into account competing claims within a heterogeneous ethical world. Ajax, recognizing nothing but simple, absolute standards, wonders how anyone can think Ulysses worthy (dignum) of the contest.58 Accius’ engagement with his predecessor’s treatment of the story is precise and pointed. In Pacuvius, when Agamemnon announces a contest for

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anybody who wishes to “possess” Achilles’ arms, he strikingly uses the verb uescor (“to feed upon” in classical Latin) as a synonym for utor or potior (“to enjoy, have use of” or “possess”).59 Accius goes further, exploiting this odd usage to make an issue of Ajax’s character and motivation: “he longs so to possess (uesci) Achilles’ famous armor that he thinks all the most splendid prizes cheap in comparison.” In the manuscripts, “all the most splendid prizes” is ea optima, which many editors emend to (e.g.) ⟨cuncta⟩ op[t]ima.60 If this is right, then Accius is alluding to that consummately Roman battle prize, the spolia opima, the armor that only a Roman general could win by stripping it from the corpse of his enemy counterpart after defeating him in single combat. Accius would thus be putting the contest over Achilles’ arms in a peculiarly Roman light.61 At the same time, he would suggest that Ajax would welcome a fight to the death against Ulysses; but the fight is to be one of words, and the ultimate result will be the death of Ajax. Ajax, blind to all this, deems Ulysses an unworthy opponent, asking, “What reason is there why you would dare compare yourself to me or me to you?”62 Ironically, Ulysses better represents a traditional heroic ethos when he observes, “for my taking the trophy from a brave man is a handsome thing; but if I should be defeated, there is no disgrace for me in losing to such a man.”63 This chivalrous view of the matter is not shared by Ajax. He is as truculent and inflexible as Achilles ever was, “a man of obstinate and unchanging mind,” and thus Ulysses’ polar opposite.64 Indeed, the word I have rendered as “unchanging” (auorsabilis) is the antonym of “versatile” (uorsutus/uersutus), Ulysses’ defining epithet since the time of Livius; and Ajax is nowhere more inflexible than in defining uirtus. This was the point of Pacuvius’ play, and it remains the point of Accius’ rendition: when Ajax takes leave of his son before committing suicide, he hopes that the boy may be his father’s equal in uirtus, but not in fortune.65 Ajax’s leave-taking of Eurysaces raises the theme of the son as successor to his father. This question is fundamental to the myth of Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, the title role in a play by Accius in which Ulysses fetches the young man from Scyros to Troy, as he had earlier fetched his father in Livius’ Achilles.66 Again, the issue of succession involves Achilles’ arms. His mortal armor proved fatal to Patroclus and to Hector, and his divine armor did not save Achilles’ own life. Ajax longed for this divine armor, and killed himself in disgrace after Ulysses won it.67 But Ulysses never wore it, having learned that Achilles’ son must do so if Troy were to fall. Thus he commends the young man as deserving to wear it: “as I have said, made greater by these weapons, make greater your father’s uirtus.”68 Just as Odysseus had once recalled Achilles to his native uirtus by showing him weapons, Ulysses entices Neoptolemus into battle by decking him out in his father’s gear.69 To accomplish this, the Ithacan evidently had to overcome his reputation: someone in the play, probably Deidameia, Neoptolemus’ mother, refers explicitly to Ulysses’ shiftiness.70 Another passage suggests, however, that Ulysses prevails not by

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trickery, but by means of acuity linked to the force of truth.71 A third makes him a clear-sighted realist who will not put up with willfulness or sloppy thinking.72 In the end, either Deidameia or perhaps Neoptolemus gives way to reasonable aequitas.73 It is overwhelmingly likely that the agent of this resolution is Ulysses. Accius’ Ulysses cannot be seen as exploiting Neoptolemus: the armor was not fatal to the young hero, because he was fated to wear it. He departed from Troy in victory. Accius again acknowledges the need for powerful warriors who may not themselves be wise, and for a strategist to direct the efforts of such men. Achilles’ real successor must be not someone like him, but the one hero as different from him as it is possible to be. At the same time, Neoptolemus cannot escape his own character. In an unspecified Ennian tragedy, Neoptolemus famously declares, philosophandum est paucis; nam omnino haud placet (“One must do philosophy, but in moderation; for it does not please completely,” trag. 28 Jocelyn = TrRF 147).74 Ancient readers who quote or allude to this sententia generally agree with Gellius’ paraphrase, that it is all right to have a taste of philosophy, but not gorge oneself on it.75 They are probably correct; but it is remarkable that the Ennian Neoptolemus would show any interest at all in philosophia, sapientia quae perhibetur, “love of wisdom, which is called knowledge” (Ann. 7.2 [211] Sk). He is, after all, one of the “stolid” Aeacidae, who are bellipotentes rather than sapientipotentes. The fragment therefore probably does not attest any real enthusiasm for philosophy. Neoptolemus may even be resisting sound advice offered by some other character, in which case the young hero is simply being true to his nature.76 Thus in Accius’ Neoptolemus it is clear that the son, before receiving the father’s armor, had already inherited his character: as someone complains, “hardly anyone can tolerate his bitterness.”77 Still another passage simply enumerates his defining qualities: “violence, ferocity, vehemence, savagery, anger, bitterness.”78 These traits pursue him after his victory at Troy. The philosophical reception of these plays by Cicero, who follows Plato and other Greek thinkers in using tragic figures as ethical exempla, drives home just how familiar the lessons of kingship theory had become by the mid-first century. In Tusculan Disputations, for instance, Cicero speaks of Achilles in Accius’ Ransom of Hector as “having come to his senses at last.” The Latin phrase, aliquando sapiens, uses a very loaded word, especially in a philosophical context, and especially in discussing this hero.79 Achilles, who has been abusing Hector’s corpse, finally realizes that there is no further revenge that he can inflict on a dead body. Cicero contrasts Achilles’ sudden insight with the benighted attitude of another character (either Andromache or Hecuba) whom he reproves for lamenting Achilles’ abuse of Hector’s corpse “as if (she considered it) the most bitter experience possible” (sicut acerbissimam rem maeret). “But what ‘Hector’?” Cicero asks, “Or how long will he remain ‘Hector’?”80 And with that, Cicero turns again to Accius and the words of his Achilles, who realizes that he has taken Hector away, and given Priam back

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nothing more than a body (immo enim uero corpus Priamo reddidi, Hectora abstuli). Cicero then goes on to comment on the effect of apparitions in other tragedies, pointing out how absurd it is that a ghost should fear having his corpse eaten by animals rather than consumed by fire.81 He writes that “when such passages are delivered to the accompaniment of low, mournful music that brings gloom over entire theaters, it is difficult not to think that those who lack burial are to be pitied,” a comment that harkens back to the Platonic Socrates’ criticisms of Homer and the tragic poets for presenting heroes who fear death as if it were the worst thing that could befall a man.82 At other moments, however, Cicero can be seen as arguing implicitly that some poets took these criticisms to heart and acted on them. Again in Tusculans (2.21.48), Cicero praises Pacuvius for his presentation of the wounded and dying Ulysses in “The Washing Scene” (Niptra).83 He does not immediately name the hero, but simply calls him “that wisest man of Greece” (ille sapientissimus Graeciae) and praises his restraint in response to pain, writing: Pacuvius managed this better than Sophocles: for in Sophocles, Ulysses complains ever so mournfully about his wound. But in Pacuvius, as he groans gently, even those who carry the wounded man, beholding the dignity of his character, do not hesitate to say: You, too, Ulysses, although we see you gravely wounded, are almost too calm, being used to spending your life under arms. The insightful poet understood that practice in bearing pain is a teacher not to be taken lightly.84 Modern critics, and for that matter ancient ones, seldom think of Roman tragedians as having surpassed their Greek models. For this reason alone, Cicero’s comment on Pacuvius’ bettering of Sophocles is of interest. Signifcantly, it is not in poetic expression, plot management, or any other technical or literary aspect that Pacuvius has surpassed the master, but in representing Ulysses’ character, and not in a realistic but in an ideal sense. Pacuvius, says Cicero, represents the hero in pain as he should be, as a morally edifying example to the playwright’s students, his audience of fellow citizens. Cicero may be justifed in thinking that the Roman poet can see farther than his predecessor, because both Pacuvius and Cicero have beneftted from centuries of rigorous literary and philosophical debate. The argument is in a sense self-serving, and not without an element of national pride; but it should not for those reasons simply be dismissed. Far from misrepresenting the passage, Cicero is in fact bringing out possibilities of interpretation that may not be explicit, but that are important, thus enhancing his reader’s appreciation of Accius’ achievement.

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Conclusion Against the background of archaic epic and tragedy, certain characteristics of late Republican poetry begin to look less revolutionary and much more continuous. Lucretius, for instance, in promulgating the philosophy of Epicurus seeks to distract Memmius from the pursuits of warfare to those of philosophy. In the process, he openly disparages most of the Greek heroes who fought at Troy. He even declares that the Trojan War, which set in motion the founding of Rome, and the Second Punic War, which effectively ensured Rome’s hegemony in the Mediterranean world, are nothing to us. Meanwhile, Lucretius praises Epicurus as a victor who brought spoils back from the ends of the earth after vanquishing religious superstition. Epicurus is, however, an intellectual warrior and a wanderer, like Odysseus, because he traversed the universe in his own mind, and because the spoils that he brought back in victory are those of sapientia.85 By the same token, Catullus’ extraordinary disparagement of Achilles in poem 64 has been seen as a revolutionary denunciation of an entire value system rigorously maintained by the Roman governing elite. In light of the evidence that we have been examining, however, Catullus’ condemnation of Achilles, even if it is more forceful, is quite congruent with ethical concerns about the hero’s behavior that are reflected in earlier Roman poetry. So is the fact that Catullus aligns himself with Odysseus, not only as a traveler but also as someone who has grown wiser through with experience.86 This dichotomous treatment of Homer’s principal heroes as ethical paradigms would continue into the next generation of poets, as one sees with particular force and clarity in Horace’s letter to Lollius Maximus on the ethical lessons that Homer teaches (Epist. 1.2.1–31). The Iliad, Horace writes, is from start to finish a tragedy of kingly malfeasance, with leaders on both sides of the conflict unable to act on any basis except that of their own passions and appetites; while the Odyssey, in contrast, teaches how a man of good sense, by keeping these same passions and appetites in check, can save himself even when everyone surround him succumbs. What we have seen is ample evidence that such perspectives on Achilles and Odysseus are not late arrivals to Roman literary culture. The archaic epic and tragic poets did not simply translate their Greek models in the most straightforward possible way, nor did they depart from them merely to clarify foreign elements for the benefit of untutored Roman audiences. Rather, their versions of Greek epic and tragedy reflect ethical interpretations of Achilles and Odysseus in particular that had begun to arise only after their poetic models had been written and that eventually coalesced into a coherent branch of ethical philosophy known as kingship theory. Against any expectation based on the well-attested self-conception of the Romans as a nation of uncouth warriors, their poetry from the very beginning shared this movement’s preference for the wise Odysseus over the powerful Achilles, stressing the necessity that strength be guided by wisdom and the belief that

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strength alone is the lesser of the two uirtutes. I have no space to pursue the matter further here, and no need, since others will do so in this very volume.87 I will therefore conclude with gratitude for the opportunity to offer this chapter in tribute to Susanna Braund for her pioneering work in the three areas of poetry, kingship theory, and translation with which I have been concerned.

Notes 1 This is the case only because Susanna Braund has focused her attention on later periods. I am delighted that she has thus opened an opportunity to explore the prehistory of three of her principal interests – namely kingship theory, Latin literature, and poetic translation as a form of reception – and the intersections between them. To date, Cairns (1989) is exceptional in making kingship theory central to his interpretation about the Aeneid, but now see the contributions to this volume of Alison Keith and, on the Georgics, Jayne Knight. 2 Gigante and Capasso (1989). 3 In general, see Richardson (1975), Murray (1965), (1984), and (2008). On Achilles, see King (1987) and especially Michelakis (2002). Montiglio (2011) is an excellent analytical survey of attitudes towards Odysseus especially in Greek literature and philosophy. On the Roman reception of Odysseus, see Perutelli (2006). 4 On the rapidly changing nature of Roman conceptions of virtus from the Middle to the Late Republic see McDonnell (2006). 5 Stanford (1963, 102–17), Montiglio (2011, 1–19). 6 Later Romans remembered those days in terms that recall the martial ethos of the Iliad more than the fantasy world of the Odyssey; see, e.g. Gellius, NA 17.21. 7 My answer to this question is not meant to exclude others; see, variously, Solmsen (1986), Malkin (1998, 178–209), von Albrecht (1999, 38), and Biggs (2018 and 2020). 8 Hunter (2018, 4–7). 9 Il. 20.307–8. 10 Farrell (2020, 000–000); cf. Montiglio (2011, 20–37). 11 Σ EQ, HMQR pp. 9.16–11.9 Dindorff; cf. Pucci (1982, 53–6), Montiglio (2011, 23). 12 Fränkel (1932, 306–7). 13 Hinds (1998, 61–2). 14 Mariotti (1955, 13–14). Naevius’ poem would thus anticipate the bipartite structure of the Aeneid as it has traditionally been understood; cf. Buchheit (1963, 23–53). 15 Mariotti (1955, 20). He goes on to say that such pointed correspondences can easily be imagined on the basis of Ennius’ later practice; but in fact the number of specifically Iliadic episodes in the Annals is small, as I discuss later, to say nothing of the lack of rigor behind such an assumption. 16 Jupiter is king of the universe, but even he seems to have come to power through violence and palace intrigue: see Farrell (2020). The first mortal king to be named is probably Priam (Ann. **1.12 [14] Sk; on this method of citation see Damon and Farrell [2020, 22]), whose fall stands for that of his entire kingdom. On Pyrrhus of Epirus and Philip V of Macedon, see later. 17 The first may be the unnamed king of Alba Longa (Ann. **1.26 [31] Sk), with whom Aeneas negotiated a peaceful settlement in Latium, according to the persuasive arguments of Fabrizi (2012, 32–71).

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18 A connection between the two was first suggested by Terzaghi (1924). I cite the exempli gratia reconstruction of the context by Skutsch (1985, 243); cf. Skutsch (1968, 46–50 = 1960, 188–92). Translations of Ennius are from the excellent version of Goldberg and Manuwald (2018), with a few modifications as noted. 19 Elliott (2013) has made it harder to state such things with confidence. Romulus’ name occurs in five fragments, one of which (Ann. 1.47 [75] Sk, the augury passage) is attested for book 1. Cicero (Rep. 1.64) says that another (Ann. †1.61 [105–9] Sk) followed Romulus’ death and places it in book 2, but Skutsch puts it in book 1 as well. 20 Ann. 1.54 (98) Sk. Ennius was also, according to Julius Victor (p. 402, 30 Halm) author of (presumably) a praetexta entitled Sabinae: see Jocelyn (1972, 82–8). 21 Ann. **6.4 (167) and **6.14 (197) Sk. The patronymic is equally applicable to a pair of Achilles’ would-be successors, his cousin Ajax and his son Neoptolemus (himself also called Pyrrhus). 22 Is this comment a criticism of Pyrrhus (Skutsch [1985, 358–9]; Flores et al. [2000–2009, 2.148–52]) or a boast by him (Gratwick [1987, 169])? 23 Commentators have tended to invoke Ajax rather than Achilles as the point of this comparison (e.g. Skutsch [1985, 358]), reluctant, perhaps, to acquiesce in a characterization of Achilles as stolidus; but see n. 44 later. 24 In general I follow the interpretation of Skutsch ad loc., who notes that rem reptere is a legal expression for an attempt to recover property by lawsuit; but in view of regnumque petunt, the meaning of rem (publicam) or (summam) rem seems clearly to be present, as well. In addition, Skutsch takes regnum to mean “mastery” rather than actual “rule,” but this does not seem to me to solve the problem; still less the parallel he alleges to decisions de regno with reference to line 186. 25 Plut., Fab. 23. 26 As praetor in 211 and again as consul in 204, Cethegus was assigned provinces that had to be put back in order to consolidate the military achievements of his predecessors (Broughton [1951, 1: 272–3, 305–6). That he was chosen censor before he had been consul is remarkable. He is not known to have triumphed. As an egregie cordatus homo, he is a type of Ennius himself: see Gowers (2007). 27 Ann. 9.6 (304–8) Sk. 28 So for the aristeía of Agamemnon (Il. 11.218–20). 29 The passage may be related to a commonplace by which the Roman military under a seemingly endless supply of great leaders is contrasted with the shortlived accomplishments of famous foreigners: see (e.g.) Cic. Rep. 2.2; Livy 9.17– 19; Hor. Carm. 4.4; Labate (2013). This collective, Republican ideology was perhaps already represented by the absence of a unique hero in the historical portion of Naevius’ epic, as was discussed earlier. 30 We owe both fragments to Gellius’ discussion of the correct orthography of insece (rather than inseque) at NA 18.9. Already in Livius’ time the verb was felt to be archaic, and so highly marked (Mariotti [1955, 28]); only more so for Ennius, whose Musa tacitly “corrects” Livius’ Camena (cf. Ann. sed. inc. 15.40 [487] Sk), though Hinds (1998, 61–2) mounts an interesting challenge to the concept of “correction” in this instance. 31 Skutsch (1985, 496), Walbank (1942 and 1943). 32 Skutsch (1985, 496). 33 Ann. 15.4, 15.5 (391–8) Sk; cf. Il. 12.127–45, 16.102–11, Virg. Aen. 9.672–83, 806–14, Macrob. Sat. 6.2.30, 6.3.2. 34 Pejorative attitudes towards Ulysses are occasionally expressed. In Ennius’ Ransom of Hector, someone perhaps urging silence upon Priam as he makes his way

18

35 36

37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44

45

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Joseph Farrell to Achilles’ tent (Jocelyn [1967, 303]) cautions, “We should be quiet: we both know Ulysses” (nos quiescere aequum est: nomus ambo Vlixem, 58 TrRF ≈ 170 Jocelyn). See nn. 66 and 69 later. All of these passages are spoken by characters who have personal reason to hate Ulysses and whose understanding of the situation they are in is limited. Livius trag. 35 Ribbeck2 ≈ inc. 27 TrRF. Achilles’ education was the subject of a poem ascribed to Hesiod, Precepts of Chiron (Merkelbach and West [1967, 143–5]), and is frequently mentioned by other authors (e.g. Hom. Il. 11.832; Pindar N. 3.40–66; A.R. Arg. 1.553–8; Hor. Epode 13.11–18; Ovid, F. 5.379–414; Statius, Achill. 1.95–7, 2.86–167). On Chiron and the archaic genre “education of princes,” see Martin (1984 and 1992), Cingano (2009, 100, 128–9), and, in relation to philosophical kingship theory, Farrell (2018). Cf. Priam’s bitter denunciation of Pyrrhus’ moral degeneracy in comparison to Achilles at Aen. 2.540–43. Bickel (1937, 5–7). Ribbeck (1875, 25). The rare ocris is a favorite of Livius (four instances attributed by Festus 192 Lindsay ≈ trag. 31–35 Ribbeck2), but there are no other known occurrences. On this basis, Bickel (1937) attributes the fragment to Livius’ Achilles, which he argues was based on Euripides’ lost Scyrians. It is worth noting that in Aeschylus’ Myrmidons someone (probably Phoenix) evidently accused Achilles of cowardice (kakandria, fr. 132a4.1.2) in a papyrus fragment first published in 1941 (POxy 18: 2163) and so unknown to Bickel. Accius, however, later adapted Myrmidons (see n. 43 later), a fact that reduces (though it does not eliminate: see the following note) the likelihood that Livius had already done so. In any case, Bickel’s reading of the fragment remains persuasive: cf. Waszink (1972, 891); Spaltenstein (2008, 132). Both Livius and Naevius are credited with a Trojan Horse (TrRF 1: 47–8, 84–5). Whether the ancient attribution was disputed or confused, or there were two such plays, the ethical orientation of the story would presumably favor Odyssean cleverness. Thus Cicero opens a letter with the words, in “Equo Troiano” scis in extremo “sero sapient,” “You know at the end of The Trojan Horse, ‘their wisdom will be too late?’” Shortly afterwards in the same letter he quotes an octonarius, possibly from the same play, also focusing on sapientia: usquequaque sapere oportet: id erit telum acerrimum (adesp. 30 TrRF), “one should be wise always and everywhere, (for) that will be the sharpest weapon.” It is difficult not to take this as an endorsement of Odyssean brain over Achillean brawn. Michelakis (2002, 22). Michelakis (2002, 15–16). Ennius is credited with a Ransom of Hector, Accius with a Myrmidons (very likely the same play as his Achilles: see Barbarino [1956]; Dangel [1995, 289–91]), a Battle for the Ships (Epinausimachia), probably a version of Aeschylus’ Nereids, and a Night Sortie (Nyctegressia), a dramatization of the Homeric “Doloneia.” Nonius (432.31 Lindsay) cites this passage to show that pervicacia is sometimes good but pertinacia is always bad; however, OLD s.v. pertinacia (b) contradicts this simple distinction. Σ Aesch. PV 436 states that in Phrygians (which the note mistakenly attributes to Sophocles instead of Aeschylus), Achilles maintained a long silence out of obstinacy (δι᾿ αὐθάδειαν), which encourages the inference that Accius’ focus on Achilles’ stubbornness develops an aspect of his model. Yet another fragment, attested for Accius’ Achilles (see n. 43 earlier) and obviously referring to the title character, deplores seething anger (iracundia) and its adverse effects on the soul (nedum cum feruat pectus iracundia⟨e⟩, “all the more when his breast seethes with anger,” trag. 107 Dangel).

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47 ut nunc cum animatus iero, satis armatus sum, trag. 147 Dangel, cited by Nonius (233.19 Lindsay) to show that anima ≈ iracundia or furor. This passage must have come near the end of the play after Hector had slain Patroclus and stripped him of Achilles’ mortal armor and before Thetis and her sister nymphs bring Achilles the divine armor forged by Hesphaestus: see n. 43 earlier. 48 The surviving fragments of Accius’ play find no close correspondences in the Rhesus that is transmitted along with the plays of Euripides, and we know of no other Greek tragedy on this theme. In addition, Accius follows Homer by beginning the action of the episode in the Greek camp, while Rhesus begins among the Trojans. 49 When Homer’s Diomedes is allowed to choose a companion for this dangerous mission, he asks, πῶς ἂν ἔπειτ’ Ὀδυσῆος ἐγὼ θειοῖο λαθοίμην; (“How then could I ever forget about Odysseus?” Il. 10.243), and Odysseus bravely repays his confidence by joining his mission. Likewise, Accius’ Diomedes asks, an ego Vlixem obliuiscar umquam aut quemquam praeponi uelim? (“Could I ever forget Ulysses or wish to place anyone ahead of him?” trag. 133 Dangel). 50 illos suapte induxit uirtus, tu laudem illorum leuas, trag. 135 Dangel; cf. trag. 137 Dangel, aut ego illum eripiam ⟨a⟩ut illi poenas sufferam! “I’ll either take him or face the consequences at his hands!” 51 The title is firmly attested for both Pacuvius and Accius: see Schierl (2006, 131). 52 Immensely attractive but unprovable is the suggestion that Q. Fabius Maximus Aemilianus and Scipio Aemilianus commissioned Pacuvius’ Judgment of the Arms and Paullus, a praetexta, for performance along with Terence’s Adelphoe and a revival of Hecyra, which the Terentian didascalia tell us they presented at the ludi funebres of their birth father L. Aemilius Paullus in 160: see Bilinski (1962, 52–4); Reggiani (1986–1987, 63). Bilinski argues further that Pacuvius first presented the tragedy Antiopa, in which the brothers Amphion and Zethus debate the relative merits of the musician and the warrior (i.e. of the vita contemplativa and the vita activa) in the previous year. 53 Either adfinem or ad finem mss; adfines, a conjecture by Adriaan de Jonghe (a.k.a. Hadrianus Junius), an early editor of Nonius, is accepted by most editors, but Schierl (2006, 142 and 144) obelizes the word on the grounds that none of these readings is grammatically acceptable. 54 This is all the more true in that the verb Pacuvius uses for “contend,” cernere, more usually means “to decide,” as indeed it does elsewhere in this very play: see n. 55 next. 55 aperte fatur dictio, si intellegas: tali dari arma, qualis qui gessit fuit, iubet, potiri si studeamus Pergamum; quem ego me profiteor esse: me est aecum frui fraternis armis mihique adiucarier uel quod propinquus uel quod uirtuti aemulus. The oracle’s response speaks plainly, if you have understanding: it commands that the arms be given to such a man as him who bore them, if we are interested in taking Pergamum; which I declare myself to be: for me to have use of my cousin’s arms is the equitable thing, and for them to be awarded to me, whether as his relative or his rival in courage. (fr. 23 Schierl) The speech is cited in the Rhet. ad Herenn. (2.26.42) as an example of wrongly basing an argument on a premise that is not generally accepted. 56 Ennius, Hect. lytra 71 Jocelyn: melius est uirtute ius: nam saepe uirtutem mali | nanciscuntur, ius et aecum se a malis spernit procul, “better than manliness is the

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58

59 60

61 62 63

64 65 66

67

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Joseph Farrell law: for often bad people acquire manliness; the law and what is right dissociate themselves far from the bad.” Elsewhere in Judgment of the Arms, Pacuvius’ Agamemnon deems it “both equitable and right” that the judges swear an oath before they decide the matter (et aecum et rectum est (id) quod postulas: | iurati cernant (fr. 28 Shierl)). Again (cf. n. 44 earlier) virtus seems to be equated with fearsome character: feroci ingenio, toruus, praegrandi gradu (“of fierce character, grim, and of enormous stature” fr. 32 Schierl); cum recordor eius ferociam et toruam confidentiam (“when I recall his fierceness and his grim self-assurance” fr. 33 Schierl). an quis est, qui te esse dignum quicum certetur putet? (“Is there anyone who thinks you are worth competing against?” fr. 24 Schierl). It is worth noting that Ajax scores a palpable verbal hit in one of the longer fragments (fr. 29.5 Schierl) by attributing greater perspicacity and prudence (perspicax prudentia) to Palamedes, who saw through Ulysses’ attempt to avoid serving at Troy by feigning madness. This is the point of Nonius’ citation (p. 670 Lindsay), which includes Pacuvius 21 Schierl and Accius trag. 161–2 Dangel; cf. OLD s.v. uescor 1. Though vescor is guaranteed by Nonius’ citation, almost everything else in this fragment is questionable. As transmitted (sedit Achilli inclutis [or incletis] armis uesci studet | ut ea optima Achilli inclito [inclyto, induto] leuia prae illis putat), it does not scan or make grammatical sense. Most editors emend it as a pair of iambic senarii and follow Mercerus (i.e. Jean Mercier, 1583) in changing ōptĭmă to ŏpīmă (sed ita Achilli armis inclutis uesci studet | ut cuncta opima leuia iam prae illis putet, Acc. trag. 145–6 Ribbeck2 ≈ 145–6 Klotz, 283–4 Franchella). Dangel instead devises a pair of trochaic septenarii retaining optima: ⟨dicto⟩ sedit ⟨ita⟩ Achilli; armis incletis uesci studet | ut cuncta optima atque illata leuia ⟨iam⟩ prae illis putet! (Arm. iud. fr. 1, trag. 161–2). In another fragment, the arms are called a “trophy” (tropaeum): see n. 55 earlier. quid est cur componere ausis mihi te aut me tibi? (trag. 164 Dangel). nam tropaeum ferre me a forti uiro | pulcrum est; si autem uincar, uinci a tali nullum ⟨mi⟩ est probrum (trag. 166–7 Dangel). Macrobius, our source for this passage (Sat. 6.1.56), compares it to Aen. 10.449–50, aut spoliis ego iam raptis laudabor opimis | aut leto insigni. sed peruico Aiax animo atque avorsabile (trag. 173 Dangel). With peruico, cf. Achilles’ comments on his own stubbornness discussed in n. 45 earlier. uirtuti sis par, dispar fortunis patris, trag. 171 Dangel; cf. Soph. Ajax 550–1, Virg. Aen. 12.435–6. The theme of replacing Achilles was evidently represented both in the mission to fetch Neoptolemus and also in the matter of Deidameia’s prospective remarriage (quid si ex Graecia | omni illius par nemo reperiri potest? “What is from all of Greece no one can be found to equal him?” trag. 181–2 Dangel; sed quem mihi iungent? cui, quae cum illo fuerim, dignabor dari? “But to whom would they marry me? To whom shall I deign to be given, having been with him?” trag. 189 Dangel). The title character of Accius’ Philocteta regards this a travesty: heu, Mulciber! | arma ergo ignauo es inuicta fabricatus manu, “Ah, Mulciber! With invincible hand, then, you made weapons for a knave,” trag. 233–4 Dangel). His opinion is belied, however, by the extraordinary parodos this play, the longest fragment of it we have, in which the chorus extols Ulysses in extravagant terms (trag. 195–211 Dangel), suggesting that he must have been very different in this play from the villainous figure familiar from Sophocles. tu, ut dixi, macte his armisque macta uirtutem patris! (trag. 192 Dangel). Bothe’s conjecture macta (in place of a second macte), which Dangel accepts, seems guaranteed by Nonius’ lemma (“mactare” est “magis augere”), but it seems preferable

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70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83

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to take the first macte as vocative (and not adverbially, as Dangel [1995, 308 n.] suggests). decorare satius est, quam uerbena et taeniis, “It’s preferable to dress you (thus) instead of in foliage and ribbons” (trag. 193 Dangel, with Haupt’s uerbena for the mss’ urbem e but without Dangel’s supplement ⟨te limo⟩ at the head of the fragment). Another fragment attributed to Accius but to no specific play (cum uirginali mundo clam patre, “with girlish attire, unbeknownst to (his) father,” trag. 716 Dangel) could belong to a speech by Ulysses telling Neoptolemus about Achilles’ misadventure on Scyros. satin astu ac fallendo callet? (trag. 184 Dangel), “Is he quite clever at trickery and deception?” Dangel (1995) 307 suggests that the speaker may be Deidameia, unsure whether she ought to receive Ulysses. ueritatis uis atque acritas (trag. 188 Dangel), “the penetrating force of truth.” satis iam dictum est, neque ego errantiae animi praue morigerabor (trag. 190 Dangel), “Enough talk! I am not going to put up, wrong-headedly, with aberrant thinking”; see Ribbeck (1875, 405), Dangel (1995, 308). ubi nihil contra rationem aequam habuit, adsensit silens (trag. 191 Dangel), “when s/he had nothing (to say) against equitable logic, s/he said nothing and gave assent”; see Ribbeck (1875, 405), Dangel (1995, 308). Jocelyn (1967, 87–9, 234, 252–3) assigns this fragment to Andromacha; TrRF places it among the incerta. qui [i.e. Neoptolemus] degustandum ex philosophia censet, non in eam ingurgitandum (NA 5.16.5; cf. 5.15.9, Apul. Apol. 13). This interpretation had been laid down by Cicero (De or. 2.155, Rep. 1.30), who also cites the passage when he insists that one must go into philosophy thoroughly (Tusc. 2.1). Cf. Romulus in Ennius’ Annals as discussed earlier. haut quisquam potis est tolerare acritudinem (trag. 187 Dangel). vim, ferociam, animum, atrocitatem, iram, acrimoniam (trag. 186 Dangel). Tusc. 1.44.105, melius Accius et aliquando sapiens Achilles: “immo enimvero corpus Priamo reddidi; Hectora abstuli!” “Accius and his Achilles, come to his senses at last, say it better: ‘No, indeed, I gave Priam back a corpse; Hector I took quite away!’” (trag. 160 Dangel). If this passage really belongs to the Epinausimache, then the play effectively covered the entire plot of Iliad 15–24; some editors, doubting that this is possible, relegate it to the incerta. See the preceding note. Apropos of the murdered Polydorus in Pacuvius’ Iliona (frr. 143–60 Schierl). Cf. Aristotle’s disparagement of spectacular element in dramatic production (Poet. 1450b). It is unclear how the foot-washing episode (fr. 191 Schierl) that gives the play its name (which comes from Odyssey 19, in which Eurykleia washes Odysseus’ feet, 361–475) relates to Telegonus’ arrival on Ithaca and wounding of Ulysses, which form the background to the passage that Cicero is discussing. Pacuvius hoc melius quam Sophocles (apud illum enim perquam flebiliter Vlixes lamentatur in vulnere); tamen huic leviter gementi illi ipsi qui ferunt saucium, personae gravitatem intuentes non dubitant dicere: Tu quoque, Vlixes, quamquam grauiter cernimus ictum, nimis paene animo es molli, qui consuetus in armis aeuom agere . . .

intellegit poeta prudens ferendi doloris consuetudinem esse non contemnendam magistram (Tusc. 2.49). 85 Similarly at 5.22–54 Lucretius contrasts Epicurus with Hercules as an alexikakos: where the latter travels to places where no one ever goes to vanquish

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monsters that do not really exist, the former conquers the forces that threaten everyone’s psychological well-being. 86 On Catullus’ critique of Iliadic heroism, see (e.g.) Konstan (1977), Fitzgerald (1995, 161–6); on Catullus and Odysseus, Conte (1986, 32–9); Fitzgerald (1995, 187–9). 87 I build on these observations in Farrell (forthcoming).

Works cited Barbarino, G. 1956. “I Myrmidones di Accio.” In Ἀντίδωρον U. E. Paoli oblatum. Genoa: 57–72. Bickel, Ernst. 1937. “Die Skyrier des Euripides und der Achilles des Livius Andonicus.” RM 86: 1–22. Biggs, Thomas. 2018. “Odysseus, Rome, and the First Punic War in Polybius’ Histories.” In Polybius and His Legacy, ed. N. Miltsios and M. Tamiolaki. Trends in Classics Supplementary Volume 60. Berlin: 381–99. ———. 2020. The Poetics of the First Punic War. Ann Arbor. Bilinski, B. 1962. Contrastanti ideali di cultura sulla scena di Pacuvio. Wrocław. Broughton, T. Robert S. 1951. The Magistrates of the Roman Republic. 2 vols. New York. Buchheit, Vinzenz. 1963. Vergil über die Sendung Roms: Untersuchungen zum Bellum Poenicum und zur Aeneis. Heidelberg. Cairns, Francis. 1989. Virgil’s Augustan Epic. Cambridge. Cingano, Ettore. 2009. “The Hesiodic Corpus.” In Brill’s Companion to Hesiod, ed. Franco Montanari, Christos Tsagalis, and Antonios Rengakos. Leiden: 91–130. Conte, Gian Biagio. 1986. The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and other Latin Poets. Trans. from the Italian. Ed. Charles Segal. Ithaca. Damon, Cynthia and Joseph Farrell. 2020. Ennius’ Annals: Poetry and History. Cambridge. Dangel, Jacqueline. 1995. Accius: Oeuvres (Fragments). Paris. Elliott, Jackie. 2013. Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales. Cambridge. Fabrizi, Virginia. 2012. Mores veteresque novosque: rappresentazioni del passato e del presente di Roma negli Annales di Ennio. Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Pavia, 125. Pisa. Farrell, Joseph. 2018. “The Genre of Princely Instruction in Classical Antqiuty.” In I volti del Principe, ed. Fabio Finotti. Padova: 19–46. ———. 2020. “The Gods in Ennius.” In Damon and Farrell, eds.: 63–88. ———. 2021a. “Latin” In How Literatures Begin, ed. Denis Feeney and Joel B. Lande. Princeton: 000–000. ———. 2021b. Juno’s Aeneid: A Battle for Heroic Identity. Princeton. Fitzgerald, William. 1995. Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position. Berkeley. Flores, Enrico, ed. 2000–2009. Quinto Ennio, Annali. Vol. 1. Annali, libri I – VIII: Introduzione, testo critico con apparati, traduzione. Enrico Flores, ed. 2000. Vol. 2. Annali, libri I – VIII: Commentari. Enrico Flores, Paolo Esposito, Giorgio Jackson, Domenico Tomasco. 2002. Vol. 3. Annali, libri IX – XVIII: Introduzione, testo critico con apparati, traduzione. Enrico Flores, ed. 2003. Vol. 4. Annali, libri IX – XVIII: Commentari. Enrico Flores, Paolo Esposito, Giorgio Jackson, Mariantonietta Paladini, Margherita Salvatore, Domenico Tomasco. 2003. Vol. 5. Annali,

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Frammenti di collocazione incerta: Commentari. Giorgia Jackson and Domenico Tomasco. Con un’Avvertenza di Enrico Flores. 2009. Naples. Fränkel, Hermann. 1932. “Griechische Bildung in altrömischen Epen.” Hermes 67: 303–11. Gigante, Marcello and Mario Capasso. 1989. “Il ritorno di Virgilio a Ercolano.” SIFC 7: 3–6. Goldberg, Sander M. and Gesine Manuwald, ed. and trans. 2018. Fragmentary Republican Latin. Vol. 1. Ennius: Testimonia, Epic Fragments. Vol. 2. Ennius: Dramatic Fragments, Minor Works. Cambridge, MA. Gowers, Emily 2007. “‘The cor of Ennius.’ In Ennius Perennis: The Annals and Beyond, ed. William Fitzgerald and Emily Gowers.” Cambridge Classical Journal Supplement 31: 17–37. Gratwick, A. S. 1987. “‘Sicuti fortis equos.’ Review of Skutsch 1985.” CR 37: 163–9. Hinds, Stephen. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Hunter, Richard. 2018. The Measure of Homer: Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Cambridge. Jocelyn, H. D. 1967. The Tragedies of Ennius. Cambridge. ———. 1972. “Ennius as a Dramatic Poet.” ANRW I, 2. Berlin: 39–95. King, Catherine Callen. 1987. Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages. Berkeley. Konstan, David. 1977. Catullus’ Indictment of Rome: The Meaning of Catullus 64. Amsterdam. Labate, Mario. 2013. “Constructing the Roman Myth: The History of the Republic in Horace’s Lyric Poetry.” In Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic, ed. Joseph Farrell and Damien P. Nelis. Oxford: 205–27. Malkin, Irad. 1998. The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Mariotti, Scevola. 1955. Il Bellum Poenicum e l’arte di Nevio: Saggio con edizione dei frammenti del Bellum Poenicum. Roma. Martin Richard P. 1984. “Hesiod, Odysseus and the Instruction of Princes.” TAPA 114: 29–48. ———. 1992. “Hesiod’s Metanastic Poetics.” Ramus 21: 11–33. McDonnell, Myles. 2006. Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic. Cambridge. Merkelbach, R. and M. L. West. 1967. Fragmenta Hesiodea. Oxford. Michelakis, Pantelis. 2002. Achilles in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Montiglio, Silvia. 2011. From Villain to Hero Villain: Odysseus in Ancient Thought. Ann Arbor. Murray, Oswyn. 1965. “Philodemus on the Good King According to Homer.” JRS 55: 161–82. ———. 1984. “Rileggendo Il buon re secondo Omero.” Cronache ercolanesi 14 (1984): 157–60. ———. 2008. “Philosophy and Monarchy in the Hellenistic World.” In Jewish Perspectives on Hellenistic Rulers, ed. T. Rajak, S. Pearce, J. Aitken and J. Dines. Berkeley: 13–28. Perutelli, Alessandro. 2006. Ulisse nella cultura romana. Florence. Pucci, Pietro. 1982. “The Proem of the Odyssey.” Arethusa 15: 39–62. Reggiani, Renato. 1987. “Rileggendo alcuni frammenti tragici di Ennio, Pacuvio e Accio.” In Atti del I seminario di studi sulla tragedia romana (Palermo 26–27 ottobre

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1987), ed. Giuseppe Aricò. Quaderni di cultura e di tradizione classica, 4–5. Palermo: 31–88. Ribbeck, O. 1875. Die römische Tragödie im Zeitalter der Republik. Leipzig. Richardson, Nicholas. 1975. “Homeric Professors in the Age of the Sophists.” PCPS 201: 65–81. Schierl, Petra. 2006. Die Tragödien des Pacuvius: Ein Kommentar zu den Fragmenten mit Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung. Berlin and New York. Skutsch, Otto. 1960. “Enniana, III.” CQ 10: 188–98. ———. 1968. Studia Enniana. London. ———. 1985. The Annals of Quintus Ennius. Oxford. Solmsen, F. 1986. “Aeneas Founded Rome with Odysseus.” HSCP 90: 93–110. Spaltenstein, François. 2008. Commentaire des fragments dramatiques de Livius Andronicus. Collection Latomus 318. Brussels. Stanford, W. B. 1963. The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero. 2nd ed. Oxford. Terzaghi, Nicola. 1924. “Sulla composizione del primo libro degli Annali di Ennio.” Atti della Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. 2, Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche. 60: 49–60. von Albrecht, Michael. 1999. Roman Epic: An Interpretive Introduction. Leiden. Walbank, F. W. 1942. “Alcaeus of Messene, Philip V, and Rome.” CQ 36: 134–45. ———. 1943. “Alcaeus of Messene, Philip V, and Rome (Concluded).” CQ 37: 1–13. Waszink, J. H. 1972. “Zum Anfangsstadium der römischen Literatur.” ANRW II.2: 869–927.

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The good king according to Virgil in the Aeneid Alison Keith

Virgil’s debt to Hellenistic philosophy1 has been little explored in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship, despite the biographical tradition of his association with the Epicurean teacher Siro at Naples (Servius ad Buc. 6.13; cf. Cat. 5, 8) and the light that the Herculaneum papyri have shed on his relations with the Epicurean teacher Philodemos.2 Probus reports that Virgil ‘lived for several years in wealthy leisure, as a follower of the sect of Epicurus, enjoying outstanding harmony and friendship with Quintilius, Tucca and Varius’ (uixit pluribus annis . . . liberali in otio secutus Epicuri sectam, insigni concordia et familiaritate usus Quintili, Tuccae et Vari), and the poet’s interest in Greek philosophy, especially Epicureanism, is richly corroborated by other ancient sources. In this study, I explore the evidence of Virgil’s continuing engagement with philosophical questions in connection with the shifting presentation of ‘the good king’ in the Dido episode of Aeneid 1–4. I ask what it might have meant to a Roman poet, writing in the aftermath of a century of civil wars between Roman strongmen, to engage seriously with current questions of philosophy and politics, and what kind of impact a commitment to philosophical study could have had on the way he approached his relationships not only to literary models but also to contemporary politics and politicians. The question of ‘the good king according to Virgil’ was first explored by Francis Cairns in his 1989 study of Virgil’s Augustan Epic.3 There he reviews kingship theory across the extensive Hellenistic literature of political philosophy and synthesizes the attributes most commonly attributed to the good king. He privileges three neo-Pythagorean texts on kingship, which (as he acknowledges) may well postdate Virgil’s composition of the Aeneid, by ‘Diotogenes’, ‘Sthenidas’, and ‘Ekphantus.’4 Yet among Philodemos’ many treatises, preserved in fragmentary form amongst the papyrus texts recovered from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, his discussion of ‘On the Good King According to Homer’ holds particular promise for insight into Virgil’s foray into Homeric composition in the Aeneid. For Virgil has been identified as one of the four addressees of Philodemos’ Περὶ Κολακείας (‘On Flattery’), part of his major work on Vices and their Corresponding Virtues dated to the middle of the first century BCE.5 Particularly

26 Alison Keith important is a still extant papyrus (P.Herc. Paris. 2), with a fragment of Philodemos’ treatise listing his four Roman addressees as Plotius, Varius, Virgil, and Quintilius: ὦ Πλώτιε και Οὐά-| ρ[ι]ε καὶ Οὐεργ[ί]λιε καὶ Κοιντ[ί-| λιε. Virgil is here addressed in the company of the same Epicurean comrades mentioned by Probus, thus confirming not only that Philodemos knew Virgil but making it highly likely that the Epicurean master viewed the budding poet as a promising student of Epicurean philosophy. Philodemos addressed his work on kingship theory to his patron, the Roman politician L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (cos. 58 BCE), and many critics have remarked its relevance to contemporary Roman politics in the waning years of the Republic.6 Indeed, as scholars have repeatedly observed, Philodemos’ explicit focus in the treatise, on what makes a Homeric king good, implicitly addresses the question of what makes a Roman political leader good. In this he may well have followed the example of Epicurus himself, who authored a treatise on kingship, Περὶ βασιλείας (Diog. Laert. 10.28), no longer extant. In his discussion of Homeric kingship, Philodemos looks for ‘starting points for correction’ that are assumed to have contemporary relevance (col. 43.16–20):7 ‘of the starting points, Piso, which it is possible to take from Homer for the correction of positions of power, and of the examples.’ Philodemos’ procedure can be paralleled in the extant writings of the other Hellenistic philosophical schools, and was widespread in the tradition of Greek education too, with or without a philosophical underpinning. Scholars agree, however, that Philodemos has structured his discussion according to the conventions ‘of a political theory treatise: he discusses the duties of a king separately from leisure-time activities, and he treats different attributes in succession, with a discussion of their relative importance in various circumstances.’8 Virgil offers sustained exploration of kingship in the contrast between Aeneas and Dido in the first half of the epic, where his portraits of kings (and queens) frequently appear in close conjunction with the citation of philosophical doctrines. Virgil emphasizes the theme of kingship in the opening book of his epic:9 Juno (‘queen of the Gods’, regina deum 1.9) pursues her vendetta against Aeneas in his capacity as ‘King of the Teucrians’, i.e., Trojans (Teucrorum regem, 1.38), while Jupiter, the ‘father of gods and king of men’ (diuum pater atque hominum rex, 1.65) confirms that Aeneas will rule in Latium for three years (tertia dum Latio regnantem uiderit aestas, 1.265). Virgil’s Jupiter exemplifies that freedom from the epic passion of anger, which Philodemos identifies as characteristic of the good king (coll. 27–9). Philodemos praises the Homeric Zeus for denouncing Ares as a quarrelsome lover of war and battle, and Agamemnon for denouncing Achilles’ anger (col. 27): Χρὴ τοιγαροῦ[ν φιλό]νικον εἶναι τὸν ἀ[γαθὸ]ν δυνάστην, ἀλλ[ὰ μὴ φιλ] οπόλεμον μη[δὲ φιλόμ]αχον . . . [ὅ]πω[ς μὴ τοῖς ἀ]ναγκαίοις [ἀ]τάκτου[ς ἐπ] άγωσι θορύ[βο]υς. οἴομαι δὲ καὶ τούτοις προσβεβληκέναι τὸν ποιητήν. οὐ

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γάρ ἄν ποτε ὁ μἐν τῶν θεῶν αὑτῶι βασιλεὺς τὸν Ἄρη τῶν θεῶν, ὁ δ[ὲ] τῶν βασιλέων τὸν Ἀχιλ[λέ]α τῶν μονάρχων [καὶ λί]αν ἔλε[γεν]. It is necessary for a good ruler to be a lover of victory, not a lover of war or a lover of battle . . . in order that they may not bring on disorderly uproar in matters of necessity, and I think that the poet also paid attention to this. For the king of the gods would never have [called] Ares ‘[most hateful] to him of the gods’ [Il. 5.890], nor would the king of the kings have [called] Achilles ‘[most hateful]’ [Il. 1.176] of monarchs. Virgil extends Philodemos’ philosophical lesson about Homer by introducing his own god Jupiter as a divine exemplar of Epicurean ataraxia, ‘calm/ tranquility’ (1.223–6): cum Iuppiter aethere summo | despiciens mare ueliuolum, terrasque iacentes, | litoraque, et latos populos, sic uertice caeli | constitit, et Libyae defxit lumina regnis. (‘When from the sky’s summit Jupiter looked forth upon the sail-winged sea and outspread lands, the shores and peoples far and wide, and looking, paused on heaven’s height and cast his eyes on Libya’s realm.’) The supreme god here reviews the damage done by the storm that scatters Aeneas’ ships from the lofty vantage of the Epicurean sage, unmoved by the sight of an ocean gale, at the opening of De Rerum Natura 2 (1–10):10 Suaue, mari magno turbantibus aequora uentis, e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem; non quia uexari quemquamst iucunda uoluptas, sed, quibus ipse malis careas, quia cernere suaue est. per campos instructa, tua sine parte pericli, suaue etiam belli certamina magna tueri: sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere, edita doctrina sapientum, temple serena, despicere unde queas alios passimque uidere errare, atque uiam palentis quaerere uitae;

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It is pleasurable, when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person; not that anyone’s distress is cause of agreeable pleasure; but it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt. It is comforting also to witness mighty clashes of warriors embattled on the plains, when you have no share in the danger. But nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life. In Virgil’s actualization of Lucretius’ metaphor, Jupiter surveys the wreckage of Trojan Aeneas’ feet, addressed as ‘great king’ (rex magne, 1.241) by his daughter Venus. Although she is the very goddess who calms the storm

28 Alison Keith winds in the proem to Lucretius’ poem (DRN 1.6–7), she appears in altogether different case here, deeply emotionally engaged in Aeneas’ travails. Jupiter, however, responds to her tears and reproaches her with the Epicurean serenity Lucretius praises in the proem to his second book (Aen. 1.254–5): olli subridens hominum sator atque deorum | uultu, quo caelum tempestatesque serenat (‘smiling at her, with the mien by which he calms sky and storms, the progenitor of men and gods’).11 The Virgilian Jupiter’s first words (parce metu, 1.257) also strike an Epicurean note, for in counselling Venus to lay aside her fear, Jupiter echoes Lucretius’ adjuration to enjoy the mental serenity that comes from the removal of fear and care (DRN 2.16–19: nonne uidere | nil aliud sibi naturam latrare, nisi utqui | corpore seiunctus dolor absit, mente fruatur | iucundo sensu cura semota metuque? [‘Do you not see that nature barks after nothing else for itself than that pain be absent, separated from the body, and that it enjoy a mind with pleasant sensation, removed from fear and care?]).12 In his interaction with Venus in Aeneid 1, the Virgilian Jupiter thus seems to accept Philodemos’ advice (col. 24) ‘to practice mildness, fairness, royal gentleness, and harmony of disposition to the greatest extent possible.’13 The king of the gods also instills this Epicurean mindset in mortals, dispatching Mercury to Libya to soften the Carthaginians’ ferocity (Aen. 1.297–9): et Maia genitum demittit ab alto, | ut terrae utque nouae pateant Karthaginis arces | hospitio Teucris (‘And he sent Maia’s son down from on high, in order that the lands and the new citadels of Carthage might lie open to the Trojans in hospitality’). Virgil’s Jupiter exemplifies Philodemos’ interpretation of the supreme Homeric god Zeus, in his representation of Jupiter as ‘best among the gods’,14 though it must be admitted that Jove’s interest in terrestrial affairs is entirely at odds with Epicurus’ teaching about the gods’ detachment in the intermundia (cf. Hor. Serm. 1.5.100–3). The figure most associated with royal rule in Aeneid 1 is, in fact, Dido, who is called ‘queen’ (regina) eleven times in the book,15 beginning in this very passage (1.302–4): . . . ponuntque ferocia Poeni | corda, uolente deo; in primis regina quietum | accipit in Teucros animum mentemque benignam (‘and the Carthaginians laid aside their savage hearts, as the god willed. The queen especially received a calm disposition and kindly mind towards the Trojans’). The initial portrait of Dido’s mental attitude towards the Trojans is both Epicurean (in its mildness and gentleness) and un-Epicurean (in its divine provenance). When the Carthaginian queen actually enters Virgil’s narrative, moreover, she appears in markedly Epicurean guise (1.496–508): regina ad templum, forma pulcherrima Dido, incessit magna iuuenum stipante caterua. qualis in Eurotae ripis aut per iuga Cynthi exercet Diana choros, quam mille secutae hinc atque hinc glomerantur Oreades; illa pharetram fert umero gradiensque deas supereminet omnis

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The good king according to Virgil (Latonae tacitum pertemptant gaudia pectus): talis erat Dido, talem se laeta ferebat per medios instans operi regnisque futuris. tum foribus diuae, media testudine templi, saepta armis solioque alte subnixa resedit. iura dabat legesque uiris, operumque laborem partibus aequabat iustis aut sorte trahebat.

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Queen Dido, most beautiful in appearance, entered the temple surrounded by a great throng of youths. Just as Diana leads the dancers on the Eurotas’ banks or over the ridge of Mt. Cynthus, whom thousands of mountain – nymphs follow in attendance on this side and that; she carries her quiver on her shoulder and as she walks, she towers over all the rest (joy pervades Latona’s silent breast): so Dido appeared, so she carried herself happily through their midst, urging on the work and her rising kingdom. Then at the doors of the goddess’ temple, in the midst of the vault, she took her seat, reclining on a high throne surrounded by armed men. She was dispensing justice and laws to men, she was distributing the work of their tasks in just portions or allocating them by lot. Beauty is a common attribute of kings in political philosophy, as is a godlike appearance, and Philodemos strongly approves ‘the “godlike” appearance of Homeric kings’ (col. 37): [. θεο]ειδεῖς πο[ιεῖν] τοὺς βασιλεῖς, ἀρεστῶς ἐμοί γε· καὶ γὰρ τοῦτο πρὸς τὸν χυδαῖον ἔχει τι καταπληκτικὸν καὶ τοῖς κρατίστοις, οὓς χρή μιμεῖσθαι, παραπλήσιον. διὸ καὶ θεοειδεῖς καὶ θεοεικέλους αὐτοὺς προσαγορεύ[ει and . . . make the kings godlike, which pleases me at any rate. For this strikes awe into the base and makes [kings] similar to the best [beings], whom it is necessary to imitate. That is why he [i.e., Homer] calls them godlike and god-resembling. Elizabeth Asmis explains Philodemos’ belief in the propriety of Homer’s description of kings as ‘godlike’ as deriving from two reasons: ‘this sort of appearance impresses common people, and it makes kings approximate the “best” – the gods – who should be imitated.’16 We may note Philodemos’ ‘emphatic personal approval’ of Homer’s practice and observe, with Asmis, that this position ‘clearly has a basis in his Epicureanism’ because ‘the Epicureans held that the gods have superior strength and beauty, as well as perfect happiness, which should be imitated by humans as much as possible.’17 Of particular interest is Virgil’s description of Dido performing a good ruler’s duty in dispensing justice equitably to her citizens (Aen. 1.507–8; cf. 1.426). Her concern for justice and law aligns broadly with Hellenistic conventions of kingship theory, as also with Homeric precedent. Philodemos

30 Alison Keith too flags these virtues in his discussion, early in his little treatise, of the good king according to Homer (col. 4): ὅς τε] θε[ου]δὴς εὐδικ[ίας] ἀ[νέχηισι], καὶ διὰ τοῦτ᾽αὐ[τῶι φέρη]ι δαψιλῶς ἡ γῆ πυροὺς καὶ κριθάς, βρίθηισι δὲ δένδρεα καρπῶι, τίκτηι δ᾽ἔνπεδα μῆλα, θ[άλασ]σα δὲ παρρέχηι ἰχθῦ[ς εξ] εὐ[η]γεσίης, ἀρετῶσι δὲ λαο[ὶ ὑπ᾽αὐ]τοῦ· ‘Whoever, god-fearing, . . . upholds just decisions’ [Od. 19.109–11], and because of this, the earth bears for him in abundance ‘wheat and barley, and the trees are heavy with fruit, and the flocks give birth continuously, and the sea provides fish because of good leadership and the people prosper under him.’ [Od. 19.111–14] Philodemos here illustrates the rewards of political harmony and peace in his citation of the disguised Odysseus’ words to Penelope in Odyssey 19 about ‘the king whose piety and justice are rewarded by prosperity’;18 and he reiterates these lines in application to the Phaeacians, with whom Odysseus stays in Odyssey 6–12, later in his treatise, emphasizing that the Phaeacians ‘enjoy the rewards of strife-free justice in the same way that Ithacans did when ruled by Odysseus’19 (col. 30): καὶ παρὰ Φαίαξιν οἱ [λιμέ]νες καὶ τὰ τείχηι καὶ [οἱ ν]αοὶ καὶ ἀγοραὶ . . . παρέστανται [δὲ δι᾽] ἔτους τὰ δένδρα κα[ρποφο]ροῦντα. καὶ παρ᾽ Ἰ[θακησί] οις δὲ τοῖς ὀρειν[ὴν] . . . καὶ τ[ῶ]ι μετ᾽ [ἐπιει]κεία[ς] καὶ μετ᾽ εὐδ[ι]κίας βασιλεύοντι φέρειν ο[ἴε]αι τὴν γῆν· πυροὺς καὶ κριθὰ[ς] καὶ [βρί]θειν δένδρεα καρπ[ῶι]. also among the Phaeacians the harbors, walls, temples, and marketplaces . . . the trees stood alongside bearing fruit throughout the year. And among the Ithacans who . . . mountainous. . . . He thinks that for the person who is king with decency and ‘justice, the earth bears wheat and barley, and the trees are heavy with fruit.’ [Od. 19.111–12] The Odyssean context of Philodemos’ discussion is obviously relevant to the Odyssean frst half of the Aeneid, and especially to Aeneas’ sojourn in Dido’s Carthage, which was recognized in antiquity as modeled on Odysseus’ stay on the island of Phaeacia. Pamela Gordon has well discussed the rich interrelationship that long endured in the Greek philosophical and literary imaginary between the Epicureans and the Phaeacians, which was often celebrated within the Epicurean tradition but comprehensively reviled by their many opponents.20 We

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can see Philodemos participating in the former tradition, treating Scheria in his little treatise ‘as an exemplum not of luxurious living but of peace, goodwill and friendly communion.’21 For example, in the next column (col. 31), Philodemos argues ‘that only those who train for war can enjoy a secure peace’:22 πολέμων . . . εὐθὺ παρα[κ]ειμέ[νους π]άσης ἀσκή[σεως ἀφί]στασθαι· τοῖς γάρ ἐκπονου[μ]ένοις οὐ[κ] εἰώθασιν . . . ὥστε ὄντι πολὺν χρόνον ἀπολά[υ]ειν τῆς ἡσυ[χ]είας· τοὺς δὲ . . . φυλακ[τ]οὺς ἀναγκάζ[ου]σι πολεμεῖσθαι, π[ο]λλούς τε, καὶ θέλοντας ἀν[α]παύ[εσθαι, δι᾽] ἥν προείρηκεν αἰ[τίαν], ἕλκουσιν [λυ]πηρῶς, [ὡς κ]ἀν ταῖς ἀνέσεσι[ν] τὰ [σ]ώματα καὶ π[ρὸ]ς ἰσχ[ὺ]ν καὶ πρὸς τὸ κινδ[υ]νεύει[ν]. καὶ πᾶς ἐν ἐγχειρ[ίαι] δε[ινὸς] ἀεὶ καὶ [πρ]οσέ[χων σπουδαίως] καθ᾽ ἑκάστων [τῶν εἰς] πόλεμον ἀνηκόν[των.] πάλιν και συνέδριον [. . . σκ]οπούμενος ἢ . . . [κοι]νῶν οὐδέν τοι[ῦτον φρ] άζοντες ἢ . . . [παρ]εστώτων ὡς κα[ὶ . . . εἰ]ρηνικῶ[ς] τοῖς . . . δὲ πάνυ . . . ἐφ᾽ ὁδῶν προσδο[κ] . . . καὶ ἕωθεν ὁ Ἀλκ[ί]νο[ος ἔξ]εισιν· εἰς βουλή[ν, ἵ]να μ[ιν κά]λεον Φαίακες ἀγα[υ]οί· wars . . . lying beside . . . refrain from all exercise. They are not accustomed . . . those who take pains . . . so that in reality they enjoy quiet for a long time . . . they force watchmen to fight, they painfully drag many who wish to have a rest, for the reason he previously gave, so that even in times of relaxation . . . bodies both for strength and for risking danger. And everyone is always skillful in handling [weapons] and seriously attentive to all things pertaining to war. In turn, a counsel . . . watching . . . saying nothing of this sort . . . standing alongside . . . peacefully . . . on roads. . . . At dawn Alcinous comes out ‘to a counsel, where the honored Phaeacians called him.’ [Od. 6.55] Elizabeth Asmis has observed that this description of this training fits Homer’s description of the Phaeacians. After they have dined and listened to song, Alcinous enjoins them to ‘make trial of all contests’ (Od. 8.100–1), and then numerous Phaeacians run, wrestle, throw the discus, and box.23 She therefore concludes that ‘by giving the Phaeacians credit for achieving peace through a rigorous program of physical exercise, Philodemus challenges the stereotypical view of the Phaeacians as self-indulgent idlers.’24 We should note, however, that besides requiring physical training, Philodemos ‘demands good policy’, which we can see exemplifed in the rule of the Phaeacians’ king Alcinous. From the outset of his Dido narrative, Virgil activates a relationship between the Carthaginian queen Dido and the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, for the simile describing Dido’s beauty in terms of the goddess Diana

32 Alison Keith closely recalls Homer’s comparison of Nausicaa to the goddess Artemis in Odyssey 6 (cf. Aulus Gellius 9.9). In drawing on the Phaeacia episode of the Odyssey to colour his account of Dido’s royal reception of the hero Aeneas, moreover, Virgil condenses the three most prominent members of the Phaeacian royal family: Nausicaa, her father Alcinous, and his wife Arete. ‘Dido at moments looks like Nausikaa, stands in for Arete, and speaks like Alcinous.’25 Virgil’s opening portrait of Dido thus invites interpretation of the Carthaginian queen as a virtuous Phaeacian ruler in Epicurean guise, especially in her practice of conciliatory justice, good policy, and mildness. These qualities are fully on display in the welcome she accords the shipwrecked Trojans, granting them freedom to speak (copia fandi, 1.520)26 and allaying their fears ‘soluite corde metum, Teucri, secludite curas’ (1.562) (‘Free your hearts of fear, Trojans; put away your cares.’) Here Dido, like Jupiter in his response to Venus’ entreaty earlier, counsels the Trojans in the goal of Epicurean psychology (cf. DRN 2.16–19). The disjunction between Dido’s philosophical advice and the political context ‘could be said to represent the tension between Lucretius’ poem and Roman practice’, but in the light of Philodemos’ contemporary Epicurean treatise ‘On the Good King according to Homer’, it may be possible to understand Dido, at least in Aeneid 1, as a queen ruling according to the most capacious definition of Epicurean kingship, with Virgil here refining Lucretius’ teachings by setting them in dialogue with those of Philodemos. Certainly, the rest of Dido’s speech confirms her as a paradigm of conciliatory justice and mildness, as she offers to support the Trojans whether they decide to continue on to Italy and Sicily or to join her and settle in North Africa (1.569–74). Dido’s banquet is another moment of overdetermined Phaeacian orientation in Aeneid 1 that carries with it a continuing Epicurean perspective on the quality of her royal rule. Her palace (Aen. 1.637–42) is not just ‘patently Homeric’,27 but pointedly Phaeacian (Od. 7.100–2) in its luxurious accoutrements.28 If the regal interior of Dido’s palace (Aen. 1.697–700, 725–7) would never pass muster with Lucretius, who ‘explicitly banish[es] gold, silver, ornate paneling, and other Phaeacian luxuries from the ideal Epicurean gathering (2.23–8)’,29 her Phaeacian-style banquet, with its hospitality of wine (Aen. 1.724–37), food (1.701–6), and song (1.740–8), can be interpreted as an exemplary instance of the leisure activities of good kings according to Philodemos, who explicitly addresses the question of royal parties in his treatise (coll. 16–19): XVI . . . περὶ τ[ῶ]ν συμποσί[ων . . . XVII . . . ποτήριον . . . πλῆρες . . . καὶ φιλοπό[της] . . . πίει . . . γεγο[νέν] αι . . . το]ὺς δὲ μηστῆρα[ς] καὶ παρα[κ]όπους· ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ παρὰ τούτοις ἔμ[φ]ασις οἰνοφλυγίας· ἀλλὰ [τ]αῖς αὐτα[ῖς] καὶ ἐπιτιμῶν, [το]ὺς παρα[φ]ρονο[ῦ]ντ[α]ς . . . XVIII καὶ παρὰ τοῖς Φα[ία]ξιν, [οὐ]χ ὅταν μόνον κηλ[ῶν]ται τῆς Ὀδυσσείου διηγήσεως ἀκούοντες, ἀλλὰ καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἄλλην

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συμπεριφοράν, καὶ παρ᾽αὐτοῖς [δ]ὲ τοῖς μν[η]στῆρσι, τά γε πολλὰ σιγῆ[. κ[αὶ] ὃς τ[οί]νυν εὐταξία . . . XIX .  .  . ἄ[μει]νον ἢ παιδ[ιᾶι] προσεοικέ[ναι τὸ] γινομέ[νο]ν· οὐ γὰρ μ[ό]νον νη[φό]ντων ἄδειν ῾κλέα ἀνδρῶν’, ἀλλὰ καὶ πινόντω[ν], οὐδὲ παρὰ μόνοις τοῖς αὐστηροτέροις, ἀλλὰ καὶ παρὰ τοῖς τρυφεροβίοις Φαίαξι. Col. 16: . . . about parties . . . Col. 17: . . . drinking cup . . . full . . . lover of drink . . . But the suitors . . . even deranged. But not even among them is there any indication of drunkenness. But reproaching the same women . . . people out of their senses . . . Col. 18: . . . among the Phaeacians, not only when they are enchanted in listening to Odysseus’ narrative, but also in the rest of their social life, and among the suitors themselves, mostly in silence. And the person who with good order . . . Col. 19: . . . [better than] to compare what happens to play. For it belongs not only to the sober, but also to those drinking, to sing the ‘glories of men’ [Il. 9.189]; nor [does this happen] only among the more severe, but also among the luxurious Phaeacians. The drinking cup mentioned in column 17 probably belongs to Nestor, whose enormous drinking cup (Hom. Il. 11. 632–7) was notorious in antiquity30 and who earns the epithet φιλοπότης from Eustathius in his commentary on Homer. Yet Nestor and Odysseus are the two heroes of Philodemos’ treatise, celebrated for their conciliatory justice and wisdom, and Virgil’s Epicurean teacher is likely here to be exonerating the old hero ‘from the charge of being a drunkard.’31 It has been suggested that in this section of his treatise, Philodemos is contrasting Penelope’s suitors, deranged by alcohol, ‘with the Phaeacians, who exercise self-restraint while enjoying an abundance of drink and food.’32 Columns 18 and 19 then treat the recital of heroic exploits in particular, and ‘good order’ in general, at parties. An excellent parallel for Philodemos’ views in his little treatise can be found in his famous epigram (27 Sider) inviting his patron Piso to a simple meal in celebration of Epicurus day, ‘the twentieth of the month’:33 αὔριον εἰς λιτήν σε καλιάδα, φίλτατε Πείσων, ἐξ ἑνάτης ἔλκει μουσοφιλὴς ἕταρος εἰκάδα δειπνίζων ἐνιαύσιον· εἰ δ᾽ ἀπολείψεις οὔθατα καὶ Βρομίου Χιογενῆ πρόποσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἑτάρους ὄψει παναληθέας, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπακούσῃ Φαιήκων γαίης πουλὺ μελιχρότερα. ἢν δέ ποτε στρέψῃς καὶ ἐς ἡμέας ὄμματα, Πείσων, ἄξομεν ἐκ λιτῆς εἰκάδα πιοτέρην.

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34 Alison Keith Tomorrow, friend Piso, your musical comrade drags you to his modest digs at three in the afternoon, feeding you at your annual visit to the Twentieth. If you will miss udders and Bromian wine mis en bouteilles in Chios, yet you will see faithful comrades, yet you will hear things far sweeter than the land of the Phaeacians. And if you ever turn an eye to us too, Piso, instead of a modest feast we shall lead a richer one. Here too Philodemos rejects the clichéd association of Phaeacia with luxury and excess in food and drink, to realign the banquets of the Phaeacians with the Epicurean pleasures of friendship and philosophical conversation, the latter mediated through the Phaeacians’ delight in the songs of the bard Demodocus (Od. 8). Virgil’s treatment of Dido’s banquet is suggestively similar. Good order is maintained throughout her banquet (Aen. 1.701–6, 723–48), the toasts succeeding the banquet in due order (with the exception of a single overzealous Carthaginian drinker, Bitias, 1.737–9), and Iopas’ philosophical song following on thereafter (1.740–6),34 leading into the varied conversation (1.748) approved by Philodemos in his invitation epigram. As is well known, however, Virgil sounds a number of ominous hints throughout the closing movement of the first book that foreshadow Dido’s subsequent disastrous royal career. The unhappy queen fixates on Aeneas’ young son and the gifts that the Trojan hero has brought her (1.712–14), with a thoroughly un-Epicurean emotional engagement. Virgil’s language at the end of Aeneid 1 is especially resonant of Lucretius’ diatribe against love: a grave illness inflames Dido as she gazes at Iulus and the Trojan gifts (ardescit tuendo, 1.713), just as Lucretius describes the lover’s breast ‘blazing the more with dread desire’ (tam magis ardescit dira cuppedine pectus, DRN 4.1090) and he excoriates lovers’ inability to sate their desire by looking at their beloveds’ bodies (DRN 4.1102). Virgil recalls the Epicurean poet’s chilling account of the insidious progress of love-sickness (DRN 4.1068–9): ulcus enim uiuescit et inueterascit alendo | inque dies gliscit furor atque aerumna grauescit. (‘For the wound starts to live and grow old by nourishing it, and every day the madness increases and trouble grows heavy.’) In the fourth book of the Aeneid, Virgil will confirm these hints by showing how amor (Aen. 4.1–5) and religio (4.56–67), two of the chief causes of human misery according to Epicurean philosophy, fatally undermine Dido’s rule. It is Aeneas, fittingly, to whom the word ‘king’ (rex) is most frequently applied throughout the Aeneid. Although he enters the poem as an Odyssean hero (arma uirumque cano, 1.1) of Herculean stature (insignem pietate uirum, tot adire labores | impulerit, 1.10–11), he is the first individual of whom the word ‘king’, rex, is used in the epic, in Juno’s angry reflections on her inability to keep him from Italy (1.38): nec posse Italia Teucrorum auertere regem!35 The first test of his kingship, moreover, is his public response to the storm at sea early in the first book (1.180–1, 184–5, 187–90, 191–7). Virgil highlights Aeneas’ assured leadership in this scene, from his ascension to a height from which to survey the sea for survivors (1.180–1, 184), just

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as Jupiter views the wreckage from on high (1. 223–6); through his provision of food for his ship-wrecked comrades (1.184–97); to the short speech (1.198–207), with which he aims to soothe their grieving hearts (et dictis maerentia pectora mulcet, 1.197). In this scene we watch him put into practice the kingly virtue of the Roman orator calming a raging mob (1.148–55), to which Neptune’s storm-quelling intervention is compared in the first simile of the epic (ille regit dicis animos et pectora mulcet, 1.153). Aeneas’ actions in this first scene epitomize those of the wise kings Nestor and Odysseus, whom Philodemos repeatedly holds up as models of kingship in Homer. They are the ‘wisest of the Greeks’ (col. 29) who exemplify the Epicurean virtues of moderation, prudence, and ‘a magnanimous, conciliatory justice’,36 which Philodemos identifies as the most crucial concerns for a king (col. 24): let us advise serious [concerns] for a king: to hate a severe, harsh, and bitter [character], and to practice mildness, fairness, royal gentleness, and harmony of disposition to the greatest extent possible, as leading to a stable monarch and not to a despotic exercise of power by fear. The model of Odysseus is especially strong for Aeneas in the opening sequence of storm and soliloquy (~ Od. 291–332 + 10.80–132), quelled by divine intervention (~ Od. 281–7) and followed by arrival on shore, with deer-hunt and soothing speech (~ Od. 10.133–202),37 and this model is especially salient for our assessment of the Latin epic hero’s kingly virtues because it implies the alignment of Virgil’s representation of Aeneas with Philodemos’ assessment of Homer’s representation of Odysseus’ kingly virtues. Indeed, in this regard, we might also note that while Aeneas’ repression of passion in his execution of duty throughout the epic is normally interpreted as a Stoic feature of his characterization as an ideal king,38 Philodemos explicitly credits both Nestor and Odysseus with freedom from the passions anger and envy (col. 29): ‘´Oμηρος συνεχθαίρει τοὺς πολ[έμο]υ καὶ τοὺς ἔριδος φίλο[υς] καὶ φησιν· ὀλίγην [μ]ὲν τὰ πρῶτα κορύσσεσθ᾽ αὐτήν, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα οὐρανῶι στ[ηρί]ζειν κάρη καὶ ἐπὶ χθονὶ βαίνειν, καὶ ἐπαρᾶταί τις ἔκ τε θεῶν ἔκ τ᾽ἀνθρώπων ἀπολέσθαι. καὶ τὸ ζηλότυπον [δ]᾽ ἀπεῖναι δεῖ καὶ . . . καὶ μεγ[ά]λας [ἀνα]ιρεῖ διαφοράς· ὥστ᾽εἰκότως οἱ φρονιμ[ώ]τα[το]ι τῶν [Ἑλλ]ήν[ω]ν Ὀ[δ]υσσε[ύς τε καὶ] Νέστωρ, τοσούτω[ι καὶ ἀφεισ]τήκεσαν τῶν παθ[ῶν τούτ]ων, ὥστε· οὔτέ ποτ᾽[ἐν πο]λέμωι δίχ᾽ἐβάζετον οὔτε ἐνὶ βουλῆι

36 Alison Keith ἀλλ᾽ἕνα θυμὸν [ἔχο]ντε ν[ο]ωι [φρ]άζον[τ᾽Ἀργείοισιν] ὅπως [ὄχ᾽] ἄριστ[α γένοιτο. Homer hates at once the lovers of war and of strife [Il. 4.442–3]. It is also necessary for envy to be absent . . . removes great disagreements, so that it is reasonable that Odysseus and Nestor, the wisest of the Greeks, were so far removed from these passions that ‘neither’ in war ‘did they walk apart nor in counsel, but having a single purpose they told the Argives how it might be best.’ [Od. 3.127–9] In keeping with the Epicurean goal of tranquility [ataraxia], Philodemos praises Nestor and Odysseus for their freedom from the mental perturbation that violent emotion provokes. Thus, when Aeneas suppresses his own grief while soothing that of his comrades (Aen. 1.208–9), he acts in accordance with the strictures of Epicurean emotional therapy as much as those of Stoic principle. There may even be glancing reference to Epicurean doctrine in Aeneas’ suggestion that the Trojans could someday recall even this setback with pleasure (forsan et haec olim meminisse iuuabit, 1.203)39 and his promise of a quiet future settlement in Italy (tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas | ostendunt, 1.205).40 Aeneas’ kingly virtue is further confirmed during the Trojan ambassador Ilioneus’ appeal to Dido for Carthaginian assistance, where he describes the Trojans’ absent king as foremost in justice, piety, and war (1.544–5): rex erat Aeneas nobis, quo iustior alter | nec pietate fuit, nec bello maior et armis (‘Our king was Aeneas: none more righteous than he in goodness, or greater in war and deeds of arms.’) Virgil’s participation in the theoretical discourse on kingship is implicit in the first word of the description, rex (1.544), which parallels regina as the first word of the passage that introduced Dido earlier (1.496). Ilioneus here credits Aeneas with several of the standard philosophical attributes of the good king: justice, piety, and courage.41 It seems particularly significant, however, that the Virgilian Ilioneus leads with Aeneas’ justice and piety, rather than his martial exploits, when we consider the muted praise Philodemos offers for the good king’s martial valour. He emphasizes Homer’s denunciation of warmongers (col. 27, quoted earlier), and lauds instead the good king’s avoidance of conflict both in counsel and on the battlefield (col. 28): Πόλεμ[ον τ]οῖς ὑπο[τετα]γμέν[οις . . .] πρὸς αὐτοὺς . . . πᾶμ πονηρεύεσθ[αι κ] αὶ βλακεύειν [μ]έντο[ι φη]μιστέον, εἰ νομίζει τὴν ἀρχὴν οὕτως ἀσφαλεστέραν ἕξειν, ὡς καὶ τῶν ἰ διωτῶν τινες εὐκταῖον ὑπονοοῦσιν· οἰκετῶν εἶναι στάσιν, κακῶς εἰδότες ἑκάτεροι, διότι καὶ πρὸς ἀπώλειαν τῶν οἴκων καὶ τῶν δυνα[στ]ειῶν κ[αταστροφὴ]ν, [ο]ὕτω σ[τ]υγερόν, [οὐδέν ἐστι]ν ἐπιφέρειν. ἐπ[ιδηλοῖ δ]ὲ κα[ὶ] ταῦτα [. . . Ὅμηρ]ος·

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ἀφρήτω[ρ, λέγων,] ἀθέμιστος, ἀνέ[στι]ός ἐστιν ἐκεῖνος ὃς πολ[έμο]υ [ἔ]ραται ἐπιδημ[ίου ὀ]κρυόεντος καὶ τὸν Ν[έ]στορα παρεισάγων σπεύ[δ]οντα λύειν τὴν στάσιν [Ἀχιλλέω] ς πρὸς Ἀγ[α]μέμνονα, κἀν ταῖς τῶν πρέσβεων ἐντολαῖς, κἀν τῆι Πατρόκλου παρακλήσει . . . [Ὀδ]υσσέα δὲ καὶ κατὰ . . . Col. 28: .  .  . to bring war to their subordinates. .  .  . He must be [thought] completely depraved and stupid if he thinks that he will have his rule more secure in this way, just as some individuals in private life surmise that one should pray ‘that there be discord among the slaves’ [Menander fr. 784]. Both sides fail to know that [it brings about] the destruction of houses and the [overthrow] of power .  .  . [Homer shows] this when he says, ‘Clanless, lawless, without a hearth is he who loves bloody civil strife’ [Il. 9.63–64], and brings in Nestor hurrying to dissolve the quarrel of Achilles with Agamemnon, and in the instructions to the ambassadors, and in the admonition to Patroclus . . . Odysseus In her response to Ilioneus, Dido recognizes Aeneas as a king like herself (rex ipse . . . Aeneas, 1.575–6), and she promises such material assistance to the stranded Trojans as to make Aeneas and Achates eager for release from the mist that conceals them (1.579–85). When, at this juncture, Aeneas is fnally revealed amongst the Carthaginians, his kingly stature is fully evident in his divine appearance (1.588–93): restitit Aeneas claraque in luce refulsit, os umerosque deo similis; namque ipsa decoram caesariem nato genetrix lumenque iuuentae purpureum et laetos oculis adfarat honores; quale manus addunt ebori decus, aut ubi fauo argentum Pariusue lapis circumdatur auro. Aeneas stood forth, gleaming in the clear light, godlike in face and shoulders; for his mother herself had shed upon her son the beauty of flowing locks, with youth’s ruddy bloom, and on his eyes a joyous lustre; even as the beauty which the hand gives to ivory, or when silver or Parian marble is set in yellow gold. Virgil’s explicit comment on his godlike appearance (deo similis, 1.589) confrms Aeneas’ regal stature even here, at the nadir of his fortunes. His profession of gratitude (1.595–610) and generous gifts to Dido on the occasion of her banquet (1.647–55), show him equally well versed in the conventions of epic alliance and hospitality as the Carthaginian queen.

38 Alison Keith Neither Dido nor Aeneas comes off well in Fama’s report of their dealings with one another in Aeneid 4 (193–4: nunc hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fouere | regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos.) ‘Now they spend the winter, all its length, in luxury together, heedless of their realms and enthralled by shameless passion.’ Sunk in the Phaeacian lust and luxury denounced by Lucretius (but still, perhaps, holding some attraction to both Aeneas and his poet, expressed in the characterization of Carthage as dulcis terras, 4.281), they both abandon kingly virtue, though Aeneas redeems himself in his determination to correct his course. This is signalled especially clearly in Virgil’s recurrent descriptions of Aeneas repressing his feelings when informing Dido of his decision to leave Libya (4.393–6):42 At pius Aeneas, quamquam lenire dolentem solando cupit et dictis auertere curas, multa gemens magnoque animum labefactus amore, iussa tamen diuum exsequitur classemque reuisit. But dutiful Aeneas, though longing to soothe and assuage her grief and by his words turn aside her sorrow, with many a sigh, his soul shaken by his great love, yet follows the gods’ bidding and returns to the fleet. By contrast, Dido’s indulgence in passionate grief is repeatedly censured by Virgil, and fnds an interesting parallel in Philodemos’ censure of the Achilles’ excessive grief for Patroclus in Iliad 19 (col. 13): [. . . γυ]ναικῶν δέ τις . . . ἐπὶ τοῖς ἐν τῶι πο[λέμωι] πρ[ο]πίπ[του]σιν . . . ταφῆς . . . ἥπερ [κ]αθώς . . . ἀλλοτρίω[ν ἄχος αὔ]ξ[ε]ται καὶ ταύτηι . . . τ[οι]οῦτο μέ[τ]ρ[ον τῆς λύπης περισ]τέλλοντα[ς Τρῶα]ς κ[αὶ] ροιὰς τὰ λεί[ψανα τῶ]ν τεθνεώτω[ν] κ[η]δεμονικῶς οἷον εἰ[πεῖν] τὸ χρονίζειν ἐ[ν ταῖς λύ]παις ἀσχέ[τοι]ς ο[ὐκ εἶναι] τόδ᾽ὅταν γνωμικῶς, ὅτ[ι·] χρὴ τὸν ἔγραψεν, καταθάπ[τειν, ὅς κε θά]νηισι, νηλ[έα θυμὸν ἔ]χοντας, ἐπ᾽ἤ[ματι δακρύ]σαντας· ὅσσ[οι δ᾽ ἂν πολέμοιο] περὶ στ[υγεροῖο λίπων]ται, μεμ[νῆσθαι πόσιος καὶ] ἐδητύος· κα[ὶ γ]αστ[έρι δ᾽] οὔπως ἔστι νέκυν π[εν]θῆσαι. someone of the women . . . in the case of those who fall in war . . . burial . . . such a measure of grief, the Trojan men and women arranging the remains of the dead caringly, so as to say that to spend a long time in unbearable grief . . . when . . . he wrote in the form of a maxim that ‘it is necessary to bury the dead, with a hard spirit, weeping for the day; but

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all who have survived hateful war must remember drink and food’ [Il. 19.228] and ‘it is in no way possible to mourn a corpse with the belly.’ [Il. 19.225] More interesting still is Aeneas’ suggestion that Dido acts out of envy in trying to keep him from leaving Carthage (quae tandem Ausonia Teucros considere terra | inuidia est?, 4.349–50), for Philodemos explicitly condemns envy in the would-be virtuous king (col. 29, quoted earlier). Cairns draws attention to Aeneas’ sympathy for Dido throughout this scene, and his posture is, again, consistent with the good king’s mildness and gentleness, praised by Philodemos. The story of Aeneas’ royal virtues thus conforms with Philodemos’ Epicurean account of kingship in the Homeric epics. This exploration of the figure of the good king according to Virgil in books 1 and 4 of the Aeneid suggests just how fruitful it can be to measure his epic rulers by the standards of contemporary Italian Epicurean philosophy. There is still, of course, much to be investigated in the rest of the Aeneid – Aeneas’ leadership capacity both in the battle for Troy in Aeneid 2 and on the voyage around the Mediterranean in Aeneid 3, in particular, demands assessment according to these measures.43 But these ethical standards might also be usefully applied to the Trojan leader and his Italian (and Greek) counterparts Latinus,44 Evander, Turnus, and Mezentius in the second half of the Aeneid. I hope, therefore, that these first tentative steps inspire more work in the interpretation of kingship in the Aeneid against the standard not only of Hellenistic kingship theory, as Cairns has done, or the standard of Homeric precedent, as numerous scholars have shown, but also of Epicurean philosophy.

Notes 1 I offer this paper to Susanna Braund on the occasion of her retirement out of admiration for her work on Latin literature, ancient philosophy, and the classical reception tradition. Her scholarly integrity and generous friendship have been a continuing source of inspiration. 2 On Virgil’s early training in Epicurean philosophy, see Armstrong et al. (2004), Davis (2012), Freer (2014 and 2019), and Keith (2020), with full bibliography. 3 Fish (2004) and Freer (2014) also discuss Virgil’s engagement with Philodemos’ ‘On the Good King According to Homer’ in some depth. 4 Cairns (1989, 1–84), drawing on Delatte (1942) and Thesleff (1961). The omission of any sustained discussion of kingship in Adler (2003) is especially to be regretted. 5 Cavallo (1983, 41 and 54–5); cf. Capasso (1989, 175–6). 6 Momigliano (1941, 153); Paolucci (1955, 203); Murray (1965, 177–82, and 1984); Grimal (1966); Dorandi (1982, 42–5); Asmis (1991, 1). 7 I cite the text of Philodemos’ ‘On the Good King According to Homer’ from Dorandi (1982); translations are quoted from Asmis (1991). 8 Asmis (1991, 24). 9 Cairns (1989, 1–2). 10 I quote Lucretius from the text of Bailey (1922); translations are those of Smith (2001).

40 Alison Keith 11 Hardie (2009, 162); but cf. his caution there (162 n. 31) about Jupiter’s simultaneous impassivity and emotional engagement in 1.227: atque illum tales iactantem pector curas. 12 Tr. Dyson (1996, 206). 13 πραό|τητα διασκεῖν κ[αὶ δ᾽] ἐπιεί|κειαν καὶ τὸ βα[σιλέ]ως ἥ|μερον καὶ σ[χέ]σ[εως ἁρ] μο|νικόν, εφ᾽ ὅσον πλεῖστον. 14 Asmis (1991, 24), of Philodemos’ assessment of Homer’s Zeus: ‘Zeus is best among the gods: he hates the lover of war, Ares, and tries to keep peace among the gods by ignoring slander.’ 15 Aen. 1.303, 389, 454, 496, 522, 594, 660, 674, 697, 717, 728 (collected by Cairns [1989, 2]). Cairns (1989, 2) notes that Dido’s ‘royal status is stressed in other ways too: regit, 340; regni nouitas, 563; regnis, 572; regia . . . | tecta, 631–2; regali . . . luxu, 637; and regalis . . . mensas, 686.’ 16 Asmis (1991, 43). 17 Asmis (1991, 43). 18 Asmis (1991, 35). 19 Asmis (1991, 41). 20 Gordon (1998). 21 Gordon (1998, 193). 22 Asmis (1991, 41). 23 Asmis (1991, 41). 24 Asmis (1991, 41). 25 Gordon (1998, 198). 26 Cf. the Epicurean emphasis on parrhesia, ‘frankness of speech’, exemplified, e.g., in Philodemos’ treatise ‘On Frank Criticism’ (on which see Konstan et al. [2007]). 27 Dyson (1996, 208). 28 Gordon (1998, 199). 29 Gordon (1998, 199). 30 Dorandi (1982, 146–7). 31 Asmis (1991, 35). 32 Asmis (1991, 35). 33 Text and translation from Sider (1997). 34 On the philosophical undertones of Iopas’ song, and its relation to the songs of Demodocus on Phaeacia, see Hardie (1986, 52–66), Brown (1990), Farrell (1991, 258–62), Nelis (2001, 96–112), and Adler (2003, 9–16). 35 Strictly speaking, Virgil’s first use of the noun is in application to the Roman people, again in angry reflections focalized through Juno (Aen. 1.21–2): hinc populum late regem belloque superbum | uenturum excidio Libyae. Cf. reget (1.153), of the senior Roman statesman calming the stormy crowd (1.148–53) in the first simile of the epic. 36 Asmis (1991, 26). 37 Knauer (1964, 372–4). 38 Cairns (1989, 32–3) reviews the theory of a ‘Stoic’ Aeneas and a ‘Stoic’ Aeneid, though he argues that Virgil is indebted rather to cynic philosophy in his characterization of Aeneas ‘as a suffering and toiling king’ (1989, 33–8, quote at 33). 39 Cf. Diog. Laert. 10.22, in which are recorded the dying Epicurus’ words to his friend Idomeneus that ‘a counterweight to all this [his physical suffering from the kidney stone that killed him] is the joy in my heart when I remember our conversations.’ 40 Cf. Diog. Laert. 10.10–11, where Epicurus’ quiet life on his property outside Athens is recorded. 41 Cairns (1989, 29). 42 Virg. Aen. 4.332: obnixus curam sub corde premebat; 4.360: desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis.

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43 Fish (2004) is an important discussion of Philodemos’ ‘Good King’ in connection with the Helen episode of Aeneid 2. 44 Cowan (2015), building on the discussion of Cairns (1989, 1–84), offers a compelling account of Latinus as a weak king (along with Aeolus in Aeneid 1).

Works cited Adler, E. 2003. Virgil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid. Rowman & Littlefield. Armstrong, D., Fish, J., Johnston, P. A., and Skinner, M. B. (eds.). 2004. Virgil, Philodemus and the Augustans. University of Texas Press. Asmis, E. 1991. ‘Philodemus’s Poetic Theory and “On the Good King According to Homer.”’ CA 10.1, 1–45. Bailey, C. 1922. Lucreti De Rerum Natura Libri Sex, 2nd edn. Oxford. Brown, R. D. 1990.‘The Structural Function fo the Song of Iopas.’ HSCP 93, 315–34. Cairns, F. 1989. Virgil’s Augustan Epic. Cambridge. Capasso, M. 1989. ‘Primo supplemento al Catalogo dei Papiri Ercolanesi.’ Cronache Ercolanesi 19, 193–264. Cavallo, G. 1983. Libri scritture scribe a Ercolano. 1st suppl. to CronErc 13. Naples. Cowan, R. 2015. ‘On the Weak King According to Vergil: Aeolus, Latinus, and Political Allegoresis in the Aeneid.’ Vergilius 61, 97–124. Davis, G. 2012. Parthenope: The Interplay of Ideas in Virgil’s Eclogues. Leiden. Delatte, L. 1942.  Les traités de la  royauté d’Ecphante, Diotogène, et Sthénidas. Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège 97. Liège-Paris. Dorandi, T. 1982. Filodemo: il buon re secondo Omero, edizione, traduzione e commento. Naples. Dyson, J. 1996. ‘Dido the Epicurean.’ CA 15, 203–21. Farrell, J. 1991. Vergil’s Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic: The Art of Allusion in Literary History. New York and Oxford. Fish, J. 2004. ‘Anger, Philodemus’ Good King, and the Helen Episode of Aeneid 2.567–89: A New Proof of Authenticity from Herculaneum.’ In Armstrong et al., 111–38. Freer, N. W. 2014. Virgil and Philodemus. PhD. Dissertation, University College, London. ———. 2019. ‘Virgil’s Georgics and the Epicurean Sirens of Poetry.’ In B. Xinyue and N. W. Freer, Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil’s Georgics. London, 79–90. Gordon, P. 1998. ‘Phaeacian Dido: Lost Pleasures of an Epicurean Intertext.’ CA 17, 188–211. Grimal, P. 1966. ‘Le “bon roi” de Philodème et la royauté de César.’ REL 44, 254–85. Hardie, P. 1986. Cosmos and Imperium. Oxford. ———. 2009. Lucretian Receptions. Cambridge. Keith, A. 2020. Virgil. London. Knauer, G. N. 1964. ‘Vergil’s Aeneid and Homer.’ GRBS 5, 61–84. Konstan, D., Clay, D., Glad, C. E., Thom, J. C., and Ware, J. (eds.). 2007. Philodemus, On Frank Criticism. Atlanta. Momigliano, A. 1941. ‘Review of B. Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient World.’ JRS 31, 149–57.

42 Alison Keith Murray, O. 1965. ‘Philodemus on the Good King According to Homer.’ JRS 55, 161–82. ———. 1984. ‘Rileggendo il buon re secondo Omero.’ CronErc 14, 157–60. Nelis, D. 2001. Vergil’s Aeneid and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Cambridge. Paolucci, M. 1955. ‘Note sulla datazione del Περὶ τοῦ καθ᾽ Ὅμηρον ἀγαθοῦ βασιλέως di Filodemo.’ Aevum 29, 201–9. Sider, D. 1997. The Epigrams of Philodemos: Introduction, Text, and Commentary. New York and Oxford. Smith, M. F. 2001. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, translated, with Introduction and Notes. Indianapolis. Thesleff, H. 1961.  An Introduction to the Pythagorean Writings of the Hellenistic Period. Acta Academiae Aboensis: Humaniora 24.3. Åbo.

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The nature and nurture of kingship in Virgil’s Georgics and Seneca’s De Clementia Jayne Knight

As Susanna Braund observes in her commentary on De Clementia, Seneca employs organic imagery to illustrate a symbiotic, natural relationship between a ruler and his subjects.1 Images and vocabulary drawn from the natural world (animal, agricultural, and meteorological) instruct Nero on the nature of his absolute power as princeps and suggest to him how it should be exercised. At Clem. 1.4.1, Seneca famously quotes Georgics 4.212–13 about the beehive’s devotion to its ‘king’ (rege incolumi mens omnibus una, | amisso rupere fidem) to bolster his argument that the safety of ruler and ruled are intertwined. Seneca’s direct quotation of the Georgics in his philosophical works has been noticed, but the subtler ways in which he engages with the poem’s ideas and imagery in De Clementia have not been fully appreciated.2 I propose that both the Georgics and De Clementia participate in what Matthew Roller calls the ‘dialogical, contested thinking-out and shaping of the principate.’3 My approach is influenced by readings of the Georgics that have foregrounded the poem’s engagement with its contemporary political context, and in particular its didaxis to Octavian.4 A focus on the politico-historical features of the Georgics facilitates a parallel analysis with Seneca’s treatise, which itself is framed as an inaugural work addressed to the young Nero upon his accession. An investigation of the intersections between the two works brings the ways in which both texts contribute to the development of Roman kingship theory more clearly into view.

Seneca and Virgil Seneca’s engagement with the Augustan poets, and in particular Virgil, is evident throughout his corpus. In the philosophical epistles and dialogues, he deploys Virgilian quotations and intertextual allusions to illustrate concepts, support arguments, and evoke elements of Augustan ideology and culture.5 James Ker explains that ‘the truth that Seneca discovers in Virgil’s poetry is not philosophical as such: it is the kind of truth that emerges through the sublime poet’s insights into specific kinds of human situations.’6 The human situation that Virgil found himself in after Actium was life under an incipient autocracy – this is the contemporary context of the finished Georgics.7 This

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context made what the poem has to say about Octavian’s power particularly relevant for Seneca, whose ostensible task in De Clementia is to instruct Nero on the right way to rule. But what do the Georgics have to say about autocracy? The poem is notoriously ambiguous. As Richard Thomas puts it, the ‘openness of the ideological fabric’ of the poem precludes a singular interpretation of its worldview.8 Some readings detect hopefulness about Octavian’s ability to usher in a new Golden Age for Rome, while others view the poem as darkly pessimistic about the future.9 Interpretations have traditionally polarized into optimistic and pessimistic camps, with recent studies tending to explore the multivalence of the poem.10 But the Georgics’ apparent ambivalence about its contemporary political context (and about nature and life itself) may have facilitated Seneca’s multifaceted use of the text in his philosophical works. Themes and quotations drawn from the Georgics do not come burdened with cemented meaning, making them ripe for (re)appropriation. Of course, much of the Georgics does not overtly address politics or leadership. But ancient readers11 including Seneca saw the poem as more than a practical manual for farmers (see his famous comment in Ep. 86.15), and current scholarly consensus rejects the idea that the poem is merely or even primarily utilitarian in nature.12 The presence of Georgic material in De Clementia confirms that Seneca considered parts of the poem applicable to his pedagogical and philosophical contexts. These elements add depth to Seneca’s lessons about the nature of kingship, and the works can be rewardingly read together as examples of early imperial kingship theory. In the pages that follow, I will present two case studies which showcase important points of contact between De Clementia and the Georgics. I will first read the proem to Book 1 of the Georgics alongside opening chapters of Book 1 of De Clementia. This first case study represents what could be called ‘indirect engagement’ between the texts, as Seneca does not quote directly from Virgil’s poem in these sections, but engages in similar discourse. Second, I will examine Virgil’s description of bee society in Georgics 4 together with Seneca’s direct quotation of G. 4.212–13 at Clem. 1.4.1.

Divinity and uncertain beginnings The rhetoric of godhead is a standard feature of Hellenistic kingship treatises which resonates in both the proem to Georgics 1 and the opening of De Clementia.13 Angelos Chaniotis explains that Hellenistic kings were given honours equal to the gods14 (isotheoi timai) because they possessed the godlike power of offering protection to human beings.15 The mortality of kings distinguished them from gods – their power was considered divine, but they themselves were not. Virgil uses the future tense to keep Octavian on the mortal plane in the proem to Georgics 1.16 Seneca, on the other hand, has Nero imagine himself as the gods’ chosen representative on earth. The

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ways in which both authors navigate the association between human leadership and divinity should not be viewed solely through the lens of Greek precedents, however. As David Levene argues in an article on Latin panegyrical oratory, ‘the ambiguities between divine and human, and between divine action on the ruler’s behalf and the natural workings of the world, are less securely assimilated into the conceptual system of Latin culture.’17 The balance between human and divine that Virgil and Seneca attempt to negotiate is to some extent anchored in the distinctively Roman context of the political ambiguity of the early Principate. Virgil and Seneca extend this theme of ambiguity by embedding uncertainty about their addressees’ absolute power into their apparently laudatory discourse. Virgil captures the uncertainty surrounding the style of Octavian’s leadership and the nature of his power in the aftermath of Actium in the striking proem to Georgics 1, in which he contemplates what kind of god Octavian will eventually become. After invoking a range of deities relevant to agricultural and pastoral life in lines 5–23,18 Virgil turns to address Octavian directly: tuque adeo, quem mox quae sint habitura deorum concilia incertum est, urbisne inuisere, Caesar, terrarumque uelis curam, et te maximus orbis auctorem frugum tempestatumque potentem accipiat cingens materna tempora myrto; an deus immensi uenias maris ac tua nautae numina sola colant, tibi seruiat ultima Thule, teque sibi generum Tethys emat omnibus undis; anne nouum tardis sidus te mensibus addas, qua locus Erigonen inter Chelasque sequentis panditur (ipse tibi iam bracchia contrahit ardens Scorpius et caeli iusta plus parte reliquit); quidquid eris (nam te nec sperant Tartara regem, nec tibi regnandi ueniat tam dira cupido, quamuis Elysios miretur Graecia campos nec repetita sequi curet Proserpina matrem), da facilem cursum atque audacibus adnue coeptis, ignarosque uiae mecum miseratus agrestis ingredere et uotis iam nunc adsuesce uocari. You equally, Caesar, though we don’t yet know which cohort of the gods will soon enroll you – whether you’ll wish to keep cities safe and care for our lands, so the great circling world will take you as source of earth’s fruits and master of seasons, placing Venus’ wreath of myrtle around your temples; whether you shall come as god of the vast sea, and sailors worship only your holy spirit, Ultima Thule bow down to you,

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Jayne Knight and Ocean’s wife spend every wave to buy you for her daughter; whether you shall add yourself to the long summer months as a new star in the place that has opened mid Virgo and the clutching Claws (fery Scorpio himself has now pulled back his arms and left you more than a fair share of heaven): whatever you shall be (Hell does not hope for you as king, nor may such ominous passion to rule overwhelm you, although Greeks admire the Elysian felds and Proserpina, called back, does not take the trouble to follow her mother), grant me smooth passage, assent to this work boldly begun, and with me feel compassion for country people unaware of their way. Enter and promise even now to hear our prayers.19

Virgil presents a range of possibilities for the means by which Octavian will acquire godlike status and what duties he will assume before issuing some directives specifc to the poet and contemporary Rome: make way for the poet and approve of his work, show compassion toward ignorant farmers, and grow accustomed to being called upon in prayer. It is frequently observed that Octavian receives as many lines here as all of the other gods combined, and that Jupiter, important as bringer of rain and king of the gods, is conspicuously absent from the prayer.20 Octavian appears to assume some of Jupiter’s traditional roles, such as control over weather (potestas tempestatum) and the ability to grant a favourable nod (adnue).21 This has been interpreted to suggest that Octavian is taking Jupiter’s place, or that he is being represented as a parallel to Jupiter on earth.22 The connection between the king of the gods and human kings has a long poetic history – in Hesiod and Homer, regal authority is granted by Zeus, and as a result kings assume some of the god’s characteristics, such as the ability to make good judgments.23 But Nappa stresses that this opening prayer is ‘not ornamental fattery but a real political statement to and about Octavian.’24 It prompts Octavian and the readers of the poem to contemplate possible political futures, both positive and negative. On the negative end of the spectrum, Virgil’s aside about Octavian not becoming king of the Underworld evokes the dangers of tyranny and Roman unease about reges.25 Nappa further argues that Virgil’s placement of Octavian among the gods urges the princeps to consider the effects that his actions as an absolute ruler will have on his subjects: the distance created by this particular discourse not only exalts Octavian but also renders him remote and isolated from a direct experience of human concerns. Awareness of this isolation is itself an important lesson for the princeps, since he will live with it for the remainder of his life, and he must learn to accept it if he is to be an effective ruler. In accepting the power and status Vergil’s deification gives him, Octavian must also

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accept the distance that will always separate him from other human beings, even as he must try to bridge it with pity and compassion.26 De Clementia shares a concern with the impact of the ruler’s behaviour on the ruled, and its thoughts on the subject are expressed with divine language and natural comparisons with nature.27 Seneca presents the gods as exempla for the princeps, noting that they are judicious about using their thunderbolts to punish wrongdoers (1.7.1). The stability of the Principate is imagined in terms of weather: ‘the look of a calm and civilised empire is precisely the same as the look of the sky when it is clear and cloudless,’ and ‘a cruel reign is stormy and dark with shadows’ (1.7.2–3).28 In the same chapter, Seneca stresses the different standards of behaviour to which Nero will be held as emperor (1.7.4). Soon after he describes how rulers’ emotions and actions create shockwaves among their subjects (1.8.5): irasci non potes nisi ut omnia tremant, quia neminem adfligere nisi ut quidquid circa fuerit quatiatur. ut fulmina paucorum periculo cadunt, omnium metu, sic animaduersiones magnarum potestatum terrent latius quam nocent, non sine causa; non enim quantum fecerit sed quantum facturus sit cogitatur in eo qui omnia potest. You cannot get angry without everything trembling, because you cannot strike anyone without everything around him shaking. Just as the fall of thunderbolts is dangerous to a few but terrifying to everyone, so the punishments imposed by mighty powers cause more widespread fear than damage, and not without reason. The concern about a person of absolute power is not the extent of his past actions but the extent of his potential actions. Both texts imagine the princeps as a kind of force of nature. These examples show how the natural world and divine realms furnished ways of thinking about and speaking to autocratic power during the early Principate. Turning now to the opening sections of De Clementia, we see Nero survey the scope of his powers in a remarkable prosopopoeia (1.1.2): egone ex omnibus mortalibus placui electusque sum, qui in terris deorum uice fungerer? ego uitae necisque gentibus arbiter; qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, in mea manu positum est; quid cuique mortalium Fortuna datum uelit, meo ore pronuntiat; ex nostro responso laetitiae causas populi urbesque concipiunt; nulla pars usquam nisi uolente propitioque me floret; haec tot milia gladiorum, quae pax mea comprimit, ad nutum meum stringentur; quas nationes funditus excidi, quas transportari, quibus libertatem dari, quibus eripi, quos reges mancipia fieri quorumque capiti regium circumdari decus oporteat, quae ruant urbes, quae oriantur, mea iuris dictio est.

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Jayne Knight Have I of all mortals proved good enough and been chosen to act as the gods’ representative on earth? I make decisions of life and death for the world. The prosperity and condition of each individual rests in my hands. Fortune announces through my mouth her intended gifts to each human being. Peoples and cities find reasons for delight in my pronouncements. No region on earth flourishes without my will and favour. These myriads of swords now restrained by my peace will be drawn with a nod from me. I have the power to decide which nations should be annihilated and which relocated, which granted liberty and which deprived of it, which kings should become slaves and whose heads should be crowned with royal glory, which cities shall fall and which cities shall rise.

By beginning with a question (egone), Seneca adds a hint of uncertainty to this exposition of the nature of Nero’s power.29 Seneca refers to uncertainty again (albeit past uncertainty) a few sections later when he says that ‘great was the risk the Roman people were facing so long as it was unclear what direction that high-born disposition of yours would take’ (1.1.7). Seneca makes clear what Virgil implied: Nero is not a living god, but he possesses godlike power and infuence. Jupiter is once again in the background. Seneca calls the god to mind with his focus on the themes of judgment and justice and his reference to Nero’s all-powerful nod (nutus meus). As Braund has observed, nulla pars usquam nisi uolente propitioque me foret recalls Virgil’s description of Octavian as auctor frugum (originator of crops) in the opening of the Georgics.30 Recall that Virgil’s expressed hope that Octavian will not desire to rule Tartarus, despite the potential appeal of the role, added a hint of darkness and admonition to the proem (G. 1.36–9). Seneca’s opening engagement with the rhetoric of divinity also takes a detour into negative territory. Nero’s self-reflection includes the statement ego uitae necisque gentibus arbiter – ‘I am the arbiter of life and death for nations.’ The negative connotations of this phrase are difficult to reconcile with Seneca’s panegyrical stance.31 For Cicero, rulers who have this power are tyrants (Rep. 3.23): sunt enim omnes, qui in populum vitae necisque potestatem habent, tyranni, sed se Iovis optimi nomine malunt reges vocari. For all who have the power of life and death over the people are in fact tyrants; but they prefer to be called kings, a title which belongs to Jupiter the Best.32 This comment suggests that tyrants like to imagine themselves as kings in the style of Jupiter – and this is essentially what Seneca has Nero do in the opening of De Clementia. Seneca later returns to the concept of absolute power over life and death in a chorus in his Thyestes which warns rulers to avoid hubris (596–612):

The nature and nurture of kingship uos quibus rector maris atque terrae ius dedit magnum necis atque uitae,33 ponite infatos tumidosque uultus: quidquid a uobis minor expauescit, maior hoc uobis dominus minatur; omne sub regno grauiore regnum est.

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You to whom lord of sea and earth Gave great power of death and life Doff those proud, tumescent looks. What an underling fears from you You’re threatened by mightier lord. All thrones lie beneath greater throne.34 Here human kings are reminded of their place in the mortal-divine hierarchy and given a harsh warning about the fckleness of fate. In De Clementia, Seneca takes a softer approach to admonition: he has Nero proclaim the extent of his power in order to set up his argument in response that such great power requires great restraint. The announcement ego vitae necisque gentibus arbiter in the prosopopoeia suggests therefore that Nero could easily become a tyrant (and suffer the associated consequences) given the nature of his power, but Seneca’s advice about the necessity of restraint can help him avoid that fate. Seneca argues that rulers ensure their personal safety by maintaining control over their power and mitigating it with the virtue of clementia. By contrast, Virgil’s poem periodically provides stark reminders of the diffculty of maintaining control, for instance in the famous images in Georgics 1 of the rower being pushed downstream and the charioteer losing control (1.199–203; 511–14).35 Both texts betray an anxiety about social and political stability, but the fear of slipping into chaos is more palpable in the Georgics, positioned as it is at the end of a long period of civil war. The issue of socio-political stability is paramount to my second case study, to which I shall now turn.

Bees and uncertain beginnings Virgil’s depiction of bee society in Georgics 4 has generated countless interpretations. One of many debates concerns the extent to which the poet presents bees as a model of and for human society.36 I will focus my discussion on the book’s treatment of kingship, as Seneca directly engages with this material in De Clementia. Seneca’s quotation of the poem and his use of language drawn from it in his exposition of ideal kingship indicates that he viewed the symbiotic relationship between ruler and ruled in Virgil’s bee kingdom as an instructive model for the Roman Principate. The fact that Seneca’s interpretation diverges from those of many critics of the Georgics may be suggestive of ideological differences concerning kingship between

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the Octavianic and Neronian periods. It is reasonable to expect that attitudes about monarchy changed significantly during the 85 years between the publication of the works, and that the Georgics references may have been largely stripped of their original meaning and context when injected into Seneca’s treatise. But I would like to consider the possibility that material drawn from the poem adds depth to Seneca’s lesson to Nero by activating the historical memory of its original context. In Georgics 4, Virgil endows the ‘king’ bees with human (and Roman) leadership qualities.37 The king bees are depicted as generals in civil wars between hives. They are little heroes with ingentes animos (4.83). As Nappa and many others have remarked, the ‘bees’ civil wars cannot avoid evoking Rome’s own civil wars.’38 The battle of swarms finally ends with a handful of dust, and Virgil advises the beekeeper to kill the defeated king bee so that he will not harm the hive (4.88–90). This suggestion has a political charge, perhaps alluding to Octavian’s proscriptions and lack of clementia during the civil wars.39 For many critics, the bees’ participation in civil conflict prevents them from being understood as models for human behaviour.40 The victorious king bee is represented as integral to the health of the hive; without him it cannot function or even survive – bee society is fragile in this way. Bees are entirely devoted to their ruler out of necessity.41 Virgil seems to praise the bees’ extreme loyalty, presenting the hive as a miniature model of a society under absolute rule (210–18). He avoids inflaming the Roman disdain towards reges by relating the bees’ service to their king to the subservience of foreign peoples (4.210–12): praeterea regem non sic Aegyptus et ingens Lydia nec populi Parthorum aut Medus Hydaspes observant. Moreover, neither Egypt nor mighty Lydia, nor the peoples of Parthian rivers or the Persian Hydaspes honour their king in this way.42 By giving his discussion of kingship a foreign favour and keeping it frmly grounded in bee society, Virgil avoids direct commentary on contemporary politics – a prudent move for his time.43 But elsewhere in the poem, the poet appears to accept and even promote autocracy as a viable solution for a Roman world in chaos. For example, the imprecation in Book 1 concerning Octavian’s potential role as saviour of Rome suggests the necessity of sole rule in the post-Actian climate (1.500–1): hunc saltem euerso iuuenem succurrere saeclo | ne prohibete, ‘do not prevent this young man from saving an age turned upside down.’ For imperial readers like Seneca, the bee kingdom provided a model for the shape that Roman society ultimately took. Perhaps for Virgil’s audience, autocracy, although an inherently fragile form of government, seemed inevitable in the aftermath of years of civil war. The lesson

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of the bee monarchy is that devotion to a ruler is preferable to the alternative: socio-political disorder.44 But for Nappa, the ‘tendency of the hive to destroy itself upon the death of its king’ is the best evidence for why the bee society cannot be a model for Rome.45 Nappa’s view is antithetical to Seneca’s position in De Clementia – he quotes Virgil’s lines about the interdependence of king bee and hive to support his argument about the mutual dependency between a ruler and his people (1.4.1):46 rege incolumi mens omnibus una; amisso rupere fdem. When their king is safe, they act with one mind. When he has gone, they break their pact. Seneca follows this quotation with a shocking image of the destruction of the Roman empire: if the symbiotic relationship between ruler and ruled is not maintained, ‘this unifed fabric of the greatest empire will fragment into many particles, and the end of this city’s obedience will be the end of her domination’ (1.4.2). For Seneca, the fragility of the bee kingdom is precisely what makes it instructive. The extreme sensitivity of the populace to the ruler’s presence and actions is central to the thesis of De Clementia. A settled sense of comfort and self-assured certainty about the future is always fatal to an absolute ruler – this was the lesson of the chorus in Thyestes. Perhaps this was one of the lessons that the social structure of Virgil’s bee kingdom conveyed to the contemporary audience of the Georgics, including Octavian. Both Octavian and Nero would have benefitted from reflecting upon the transience of their power, their dependence upon the Roman people for their own safety, and their role in keeping the Roman people safe. By including a well-known quotation drawn from the Georgics in De Clementia, Seneca activates his audience’s collective historical memory of the uncertainty and political fragility of the early 20s BCE. The care that Octavian later took in managing his relationship with his people, and in his deliberate cultivation of a persona that was marked by the performance of virtues like clementia, made him a useful model for Nero upon his accession. This is reflected in Seneca’s explicit presentation of Augustus as an exemplum domesticum later in the treatise (1.9.1), but the Georgics quotation about the fragility of bee society conjures the earliest years of Octavian’s dominance, which are instructive in a different way. Further evidence for Seneca’s association between the interconnectedness of the bee kingdom and Octavian’s establishment of the Principate is found at the end of the chapter in which the Georgics is quoted. Here Seneca provides an intriguing comment about a ruler’s relationship to the state (1.4.3):

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Elsewhere in the treatise, Seneca uses Octavian’s honorifc cognomen Augustus to refer to the frst princeps, but the absence of the cognomen here and his use of the adverb olim may indicate that he wishes to specify Octavian prior to his frst settlement. This passage evokes the moment of no return, when Octavian’s victory at Actium transformed Rome into a state whose survival would depend upon the actions of a single man.

Conclusion This chapter has explored two modes of Seneca’s engagement with themes and ideas shared with the Georgics in De Clementia, taking the inaugural timing of the two works as a starting point. My first case study considered how Virgil and Seneca use similar strategies to address newly established autocracy. Although the Georgics’ primary goal may not have been to theorize kingship, it seems to have furnished some ideas for Seneca’s treatise, especially concerning the conceptualization of the godlike nature of absolute power in a Roman context. My second case study suggested that Seneca’s direct quotation of the Georgics activates historical memory of the poem’s contemporary political context. Seneca draws heavily upon the exemplum of Augustus’ reign in his treatise, but his subtle engagement with the Georgics enables him to point specifically to Octavian and the uncertainty which surrounded his first years in power. This prompts readers of De Clementia, including Nero, to consider the inherent fragility of monarchy, and the related importance of nurturing a good relationship with subjects during the crucial early years of a new reign.

Notes 1 Braund (2009, 55, 58, 69). I owe thanks to Susanna Braund for teaching a stimulating graduate seminar on the Eclogues and Georgics at the University of British Columbia in 2012, and for writing her indispensable commentary on De Clementia. I am also grateful to the attendees of the 33rd Pacific Rim Roman Literature Seminar in Newcastle who heard an earlier version of this chapter. 2 See for example Thibodeau (2011, 237–8). 3 Roller (2001, 6). Roller’s book focuses on texts produced later in the JulioClaudian period (in particular those by Seneca and Lucan) but the Georgics would have served as a useful launching point for Roller’s analysis of autocracyshaping discourse in the early Principate. 4 Representative political readings include Boyle (1979), Miles (1980), and Morgan (1999). Morgan (1999, 1) views the Georgics as ‘a thoroughgoing exercise in Octavianic propaganda.’ For didaxis to Octavian, see especially Nappa (2005) and Xinyue (2019).

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5 See Ker (2015, 109–21). 6 Ker (2015, 114). 7 Conte (1994, 272) notes that the Georgics can be considered the first piece of imperial Latin literature due to the poem’s engagement with Augustan ideology. 8 Thomas (2001, 121). Arguments about the outlook of the Georgics have traditionally fallen into one of three camps: optimistic, pessimistic, or ambivalent. 9 Representative examples of optimistic and pessimistic readings include Morgan (1999) and Putnam (1979), respectively. 10 See Batstone (1997, 125): ‘the diversity of compelling interpretations is part of the Georgics’ larger value and meaning.’ Nappa (2005) and Kronenberg (2009) highlight how the poem presents multiple understandings of the world to the reader. Perkell (1989) reads the poem as meditative rather than strictly didactic (this removes the need to isolate a singular lesson or message). 11 See Chapters 9–10 on Columella and Servius’ responses to the Georgics in Freer and Xinyue ed. (2019). 12 In Ep. 86.15, Seneca remarks that Virgil aimed to please the reader rather than teach the farmer. See Putnam (1979, 7), who says we must ‘eradicate from our minds any lingering notions that the poem is utilitarian.’ 13 See Cowan (2015, 99–104) on kingship theory in the Aeneid. Cowan notes that ‘the virtues of kingship theory tend to be those that counterbalance the inherent tendency of monarchy towards the excessive exercise of its absolute power’ (2015, 100). 14 Seneca claims that the goal of Stoic philosophy is to become equal to god; see Ep. 48.11: hoc enim est quod mihi philosophia promittit ut parem deo faciat. ‘For this is what philosophy promises me – to make me equal to god.’ 15 Chaniotis (2003, 433). In an article on kingship in the Aeneid, Cowan discusses the emphasis of Hellenistic kingship theory on the king’s protective function and notes that ‘with regard to his relationship with his own subjects, the virtues of kingship theory tend to be those that counterbalance the inherent tendency of monarchy towards the excessive exercise of its absolute power’ (2015, 100). 16 See Wissowa (1917) for a detailed discussion of the religious aspects of the proem, including its Hellenistic influences. 17 Levene (1997, 100). 18 Nappa observes that the gods Virgil chooses to mention are those associated with agricultural innovation and those with pastoral associations (2005, 26–8). 19 Translation by Lembke (2005, 4). 20 Wissowa (1917, 100–1) identifies the Hellenistic practice of counting a ruler among the gods as influential here. See Chaniotis (2003, 434–7) for the historical development of Hellenistic ruler cult. 21 See Xinyue (2019, 94). 22 For the former, see Xinyue (2019), Thomas (1988, 68), Nelson (1998, 111), and Morgan (1999, 93–4); for the latter see Nappa (2005, 33). The association with Jupiter is further developed in Book 4 with Caesar fulminat (G. 4.560–1). 23 See, for example, Hesiod, Theogony 81–7; 96. 24 Nappa (2005, 30). 25 See Nappa (2005, 32): Thus, in inviting Octavian to consider a variety of roles, including that of ‘King of the Underworld,’ the poet reminds him that no Roman king will survive in this world for long. In choosing his role among the gods, Octavian must remember how easily he might overstep the bounds of safety and lose everything. It is a warning the end of Book 1 will recapitulate in particularly memorable ways. 26 Nappa (2005, 31).

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27 Braund (2009, 69) observes that Seneca draws upon natural analogies deployed in earlier political theory to justify kingship, and that these cohere well with Stoicism’s emphasis on living in harmony with nature. 28 Translations of De Clementia are by Braund (2009). 29 Braund (2009, 159) notes that the wondering tone of the opening question (and the use of prosopopoeia itself) helps Seneca avoid the impression of outright flattery. 30 Braund (2009, 163). 31 See Braund (2009, 160–1); Boyle (2017, 309). 32 Translation is my own. 33 The rector maris atque terrae is probably Jupiter. See Boyle (2017, 308). 34 Translation by Boyle (2017, 45). 35 Cf. Boyle’s (1979, 66) description of the final scene of Georgics 1: ‘man’s instinct for conflict, aggression and war rages perverted, out of control, unholily across the world. In the social and moral distemper of Rome the enunciated tendency of all things to collapse into disorder receives dreadful and contemporary confirmation.’ 36 For a survey of some views, see Griffin (1979, 63–4). 37 The ‘king’ bee is what we now know is the queen bee. 38 Nappa (2005, 170). 39 Ross (1987, 189) notes that some readers have thought that the two king bees explicitly refer to Octavian and Antony. See Otis (1964, 183); Wilkinson (1969, 180–1); Nadeau (1984, 72–3); Powell (1992, 143). Seneca refers explicitly to Octavian’s youthful lack of clementia during the civil wars at Clem. 1.11.1. 40 Commentators have pointed to other characteristics that make the bees impossible models for humans, such as their lack of individuality and sexual passion. See Davis (1979, 29–30). 41 The poet explains that if the bees swarm without reason, cutting the king’s wings will cause them to stay still, for no bee would dare fly upwards without the king (4.106–8). 42 Translation is my own. 43 Virgil is also being ahistorical; see Mynors (1990, 284) on G. 4.201–11. According to Mynors, these examples are ‘intended merely to evoke Oriental despotism.’ 44 Cf. Nappa (2005, 184–5): Rome has reached a dangerous, but nonetheless promising, point in history, when an individual leader has more chance of success in creating unity and peace than the fractious remnants of the Republican system, which civil strife has long since destroyed. 45 Nappa (2005, 184). 46 See Braund (2009, 214) on 1.4.1.

Works cited Batstone, W. W. 1997. ‘Virgilian Didaxis: Value and Meaning in the Georgics.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. C. Martindale, 125–44. Cambridge. Boyle, A. J. 1979. ‘In Medio Caesar: Paradox and Politics in Virgil’s Georgics.’ Ramus 8.1, 65–86. ———. 2017. Seneca: Thyestes. Oxford. Braund, S. M. 2009. Seneca: De Clementia. Oxford. Chaniotis, A. 2003. ‘The Divinity of Hellenistic Rulers.’ In A Companion to the Hellenistic World, ed. A. Erskine, 431–45. Malden, MA.

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Conte, G. B. 1994. Latin Literature: A History. Baltimore. Cowan, R. 2015. ‘On the Weak King According to Vergil: Aeolus, Latinus, and Political Allegoresis in the Aeneid.’ Vergilius 61, 97–124. Davis, P. J. 1979. ‘Vergil’s Georgics and the Pastoral Ideal.’ Ramus 8.1, 22–33. Griffin, J. 1979. ‘The Fourth “Georgic”, Virgil, and Rome.’ Greece & Rome 26.1, 61–80. Ker, J. 2015. ‘Seneca and Augustan Culture.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Seneca, ed. S. Bartsch and A. Schiesaro, 109–21. Cambridge. Kronenberg, L. 2009. Allegories of Farming from Greece to Rome. Cambridge. Lembke, J. 2005. Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation. New Haven and London. Levene, D. S. 1997. ‘God and Man in the Classical Latin Panegyric.’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 43: 66–103. Miles, G. B. 1980. Virgil’s Georgics: A New Interpretation. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Morgan, L. 1999. Patterns of Redemption in Virgil’s Georgics. Cambridge. Mynors, R. A. B. 1990. Virgil: Georgics. Oxford. Nadeau, Y. 1984. ‘The Lover and Statesman: A Study in Apiculture (Virgil, Georgics 4.218–558).’ In Poetry and Politics in the Age of Augustus, ed. T. Woodman and D. West, 59–82. Cambridge. Nappa, C. 2005. Reading After Actium: Virgil’s Georgics, Octavian, and Rome. Ann Arbor. Nelson, S. A. 1998. God and the Land: The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil. Oxford. Otis, B. 1964. Virgil: A Study in Civilised Poetry. Oxford. Perkell, C. 1989. The Poet’s Truth: A Study of the Poet in Virgil’s Georgics. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Powell, A. 1992. ‘The Aeneid and the Embarrassments of Augustus.’ In Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus, ed. A. Powell, 141–74. London. Putnam, M. 1979. Virgil’s Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics. Princeton. Roller, M. B. 2001. Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in JulioClaudian Rome. Princeton. Ross, D. O. 1987. Virgil’s Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics. Princeton. Thibodeau, P. 2011. Playing the Farmer: Representations of Rural Life in Vergil’s Georgics. Berkeley. Thomas, R. F. 1988. Virgil: Georgics. Cambridge. ———. 2001. Virgil and the Augustan Reception. Cambridge. Wilkinson, L. 1969. The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey. Cambridge. Wissowa, G. 1917. ‘Das Prooemium von Vergils Georgica.’ Hermes 52: 92–104. Xinyue, B. 2019. “Divinization and Didactic Efficacy in Virgil’s Georgics.” In Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil’s Georgics, ed. N. Freer and B. Xinyue, 93–103. London.

4

Rege sub uno On the politics of Statius’ Achilleid Alessandro Barchiesi

‘I’m a member of Amnesty International too’, writes Susanna Braund1 in her thought-provoking paper on the ending of Statius’ Thebaid.2 Her target is a trend typical of late 20th-century classical studies, where the critic, usually a liberal and a member of the academic community, just like so many of us even today, tries hard to enlist Roman authors, and to show that they participate in anti-authoritarian and progressive ideologies, the dominant atmosphere in Western campuses. In the case of Statius’ Thebaid, this interpretive strategy requires demonstrating that the poem should be read as an indictment of monarchical power and a warning about the evils of tyranny. Susanna Braund resists this trend, and shows that the final victory of Theseus, leader of free Athens and icon of Attic drama, is inseparable from Roman Imperial ideology. For example, when the Athenian king and general effectively puts an end (for now) to Greek civil war, he is still soaked with Amazon blood: his assertion of clementia against sectarian violence is not only a violent act in itself, but it is empowered by a previous triumph over Northern barbarians. The epic’s end and closure should be seen as a vindication of clementia, the scariest (I think) of Imperial virtues.3 The best reward of this approach is that it allows us to focus on what the engagement with the plots of Greek epic and Greek tragedy can do for a Roman Imperial audience, and to defer the nagging question on the political intentions of the author.4 In this chapter, I propose to adopt a similar perspective for Statius’ Achilleid, a poem that due to its incomplete status has not been mentioned frequently in this context. The differences between the Thebaid and what remains of the Achilleid are very clear and should not be forgotten: the new poem features a single hero, a more constrictive intertextual scenario (Homer and the Epic Cycle instead of the hazy memories of Theban epic),5 and an international war6 instead of a civil war. There are also continuities, sometimes underrated by critics. The heroes of this new epic tend to be imagined in Classical mythography and genealogy as the next generation after the story of the Seven and the same generation as the Epigoni.7 The Trojan Cycle is a successor to the previous Theban Cycle, and some moderns seem to forget that ‘Epic Cycle’ in antiquity is not exclusively the narrative sequence formed by the Trojan saga and the Returns (cf.

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Weintritt 2018 for the evidence). Aeneas in the Virgilian underworld (Aen. 6.479–80) sees Greek heroes of the Theban war before he starts encountering characters from the Trojan Cycle or the Aeneid itself (Braund 2006). The killing fields of Thebes in the Statian poem allow only one survivor, the king of Argos Adrastus ‘the Inescapable’, and Argos will be the core of the Greek army at Troy (Homer’s ‘Argive’ corresponds to ‘Greek, Hellenic’ in later sources on the war). The heroes and leaders listed by Statius at Aulis (1.467–72) are actually seven, so for a while at least we see the new war as a ‘Seven against Troy’ (Feeney 2004, 87); two of the seven, Diomedes and Sthenelos, are in fact children of two of the Seven against Thebes (Parkes 2008), and are attested as members of the coalition of the Epigoni.8 Unusually for an epic poem, unless we take into account the pre-proemium of the Aeneid (a text certainly earlier than Statius), the proemium explicitly quotes the previous work by the same author (cf. 1.10–13); note also the punning address to Apollo, fronde secunda | necte comas (1.9–10), where for a moment we expect secundus to mean ‘propitious’ until we realize that it means ‘a second garland, after the first awarded for the Thebaid.’ So, what is Statius up to? It is worth considering whether the two poems are in a sense their own Cycle, a Roman Imperial Cycle, although composed by Greek sagas.9 Now we come to the crucial link, as far as Statius is concerned. The Thebaid is a story of Greek division and unavoidable civil war; the Achilleid deals with unification of the Greeks against a foreign enemy. The theme is powerfully stated in the surviving Achilleid on one occasion only, when the Greek army sans Achilles congregates at Aulis:10 Coetus ibi [sc. Aulide] armorum Troiae fatalis, ibi ingens iuratur bellum, donec sol annuus omnes confceret metas. tunc primum Graecia uires contemplata suas; tunc sparsa ac dissona moles in corpus uultumque coit et rege sub uno disposita est. Sic curva feras indago latentes claudit et admotis paulatim cassibus artat. Illae ignem sonitumque pavent diffusaque linquunt auia miranturque suum decrescere montem, donec in angustam ceciderunt undique uallem; inque uicem stupuere greges socioque timore mansuescunt: simul hirtus aper, simul ursa lupusque cogitur et captos contempsit cerua leones. (1.454–65) It was the place [at Aulis] where the gathering of armies fatal to Troy happened, where the mighty war was sworn, until the sun completed its annual path. This was the first time when Greece surveyed her force, when the dispersed and dissonant mass was united into one body and

58 Alessandro Barchiesi face, and was organized under a single monarch. So the circle of hunters traps in the hiding beasts, and constrains them in nets drawn tighter and tighter. Shocked by fire and noise, they leave their scattered haunts and wonder that their mountain is shrinking, until they have descended into a vale that gets narrower on every side. Now the herds are amazed, looking at each other, and are tamed by a shared fear. The bristling boar, the bear and the wolf are corralled together, and the stag despises the captive lions. One generation after the previous epic, Greece is still divided, but there seems to be a process of unifcation going on: a Greek monarchy, a Greek empire, shaping up in the Homeric coalition against Troy.11 This is of course very much a Roman Imperial view, and we can fnd analogies for example in the way Valerius Flaccus retells the old saga of the Argonauts, and more generally in the well-studied tradition of the Succession of Empires.12 Agamemnon receives a strong emphasis in this frst presentation of the theme: it is the only appearance of it in the extant text, but presumably to be developed in the rest of the epic project: rege sub uno (‘under one king’) is the driving force for the ‘rise of a Greek empire’ (just as anachronistic as the one in the 2014 Hollywood movie, 300: Rise of an Empire). Remarkably, given the subject of this poem, the leader will not be Achilles, who is signaled already in the frst line of the epic as the one who was dreaded even by Jupiter as a potential successor.13 On the other hand, we know that he is ‘the best of the Achaeans.’ How are we to combine this traditional idea with the political scenario – Roman and Imperial – that we begin to discern in the narrative? Remember that the Thebaid has been a triumphal consummation of the Roman obsession for civil war, projected into a mythical narrative. Now the civil war leads to unifcation, but what if unifcation produces more civil violence and strife? In a political system such as Rome, a unique system where there was no rational and institutional approach to the idea of succession, and violence was de facto encouraged and expected (Scheidel forthcoming, with the interesting title The Emperor’s New Blood), the emergence of a charismatic military leader is enough to rattle the Imperial machine. This is why the Homeric Achilles might have been a promising subject for the new epic of Statius after the Thebaid, an epic that, as Susanna Braund has been one of the first to demonstrate, is a mythological theater for Imperial ideology and a test area for contemporary political obsessions. If we approach the text this way, another clue is provided by the highly stylized proemium: Magnanimum Aeaciden formidatamque Tonanti progeniem et patrio uetitam succedere caelo . . . (1.1–2) Of great-souled Aeacides [Achilles, descendant of Aeacus] and the offspring feared by the Thunderer and denied succession to his father’s heaven . . .

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The whole life of Achilles, the bold topic of this new poem, announced in a sublime style, is the result of Jupiter’s machination to protect himself against the threat of violent succession. The extant text keeps Jupiter in the background after this promising hint: in fact, the Achilleid is one of very few Greek and Roman epics where there is no major Jupiter episode in the frst book (counter-examples include canonical and infuential mythological poems such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Cypria, Livius Andronicus, very possibly Naevius, and then Ennius, Virgil, Valerius Flaccus, the Thebaid, and Nonnus,14 while the absence of Zeus-Jupiter from book 1 happens in poems where the divine apparatus diverges from the mainstream, such as Apollonius of Rhodes, Lucan, and Silius Italicus). Magnanimum as a first word of an Achilles epic sounds like a meaningful substitute for the Homeric incipit ‘wrath’ or ‘anger’, mēnis, and it is of course a regular identifying feature for the hero, a rendition of Greek megathymos or megalopsychos. In fact, one of the most typical traits of Achilles’ ‘soul-greatness’ is, to quote Aristotle, ‘intolerance of insult’ (cf. Post. An. 97b15–26). So the first word of what must have been projected as a long epic focuses on the quality of Achilles that not only makes him famous and recognizable as a prototype, but specifically motivates his clash with Agamemnon. Small wonder that the rest of this memorable hexameter indicates that he even posits a threat to the power of Jupiter. A Roman note is provided by the heavy four long syllables of formidatam, a reminder of a textbook example of Roman Imperial panegyric, et formidatam Parthis te principe Romam (Hor. Ep. 2.1.256, “and Rome feared by the Parthians under your principate”).15 Statius’ political revisiting of Homer’s Iliad should not be seen in a vacuum. There is of course a rich history of adaptations of Homer to the evolution of political discourse, but we should be alert to what function specifically is being attributed to the Homeric model, and even more to the contingent realities of the political context. For instance, the elusive On the Good King according to Homer by Philodemus is not really an essay on monarchy: the discussion of the Iliad and the Odyssey is oriented towards triumviral Rome, and Philodemus presumably provides indirect or suggestive advice for a society where powerful men, or generically dynasts, strive for domination, not for Hellenistic kings or even less Roman first-century-style emperors (cf. Murray 1965 on the interpretation and dating of Philodemus; Keith in this volume, on its influence on the Aeneid). There is in fact just about one line in the Iliad that could actually be quoted as an explicit statement in favor of monarchy (however limited the grasp of monarchy is in Greek and Roman culture as compared to a number of other societies, and especially Persia and Egypt). When Statius refers to the monarchic character of Agamemnon’s leadership as rege sub uno (1.458), he is alluding to the only Homeric line that can be directly appropriated to some kind of political ideal of monarchy, and it is a line about Agamemnon. At Il. 2.204, Odysseus (Statius’ Ulysses, who appears as a promoter of Agamemnon’s propaganda) declares in the assembly “the idea of having many leaders is wrong: there ought to be just

60 Alessandro Barchiesi one ruler, just one king [eis basileus].” Notoriously, a Homeric basileus is no emperor, but we know that a quotation of this line played a part in one key moment of the transition of Rome from republic to one-man rule. In a delicate juncture of the foundation of his autocratic power, Octavian was pondering the problem of what to do with Caesarion, and one counselor, the despicable Greek philosopher Areius, had mentioned the Homeric line as innuendo, suggesting the elimination of the young king of Egypt.16 Again we should be interested in the link with the Thebaid. There is a strong surprise when the political focus of the story is now rege sub uno, the One (cf. Hardie [1993, 3–11]) instead of the obsession with the Two, doubleness, splitting, twinning, typical of the Thebaid (as argued in Braund [1997 and 2006]); but there is also a sense that the new epic truly is a successor to the older one. Unusually for an ancient epic, the Achilleid has an explicit and substantial quotation of a previous publication, the Thebaid, in the proemium (1.8–13).17

Inescapable empire The army at Aulis represents a coalition of Greek leaders, but this unification happens under compulsion. The coalition is figuring out how to be ‘Greece’ (Graecia),18 but the leaders are learning the hard way. They are imagined, in a surprising variation of Homeric animal similes, like a bunch of different wild animals trapped by a hunting party: they end up in a narrow space and begin a process of domestication enforced by fear. In a separate paper (Barchiesi 2017, in Italian), I have argued that the claustrophobic imagery – curua . . . indago (1.459 “curving line of hunters”), in angustam . . . undique uallem (1.463 “into a vale narrower on every side”) – is influenced by ideas about the arena: the animals are not going to by killed by hunters, as in Homeric hunting, but they are being captured for the amphitheater, and they are shocked and stunned. This creates a connection in Statius between the arena and the formation of a Greek monarchy,19 and the catalyst of the connection is the Imperial ideology of the arena, a Roman institution that was widely perceived as the embodiment of empire, a controlling order, good and evil at the same time, but unavoidable and made visible by practices of ordering (the spectators), viewing (the show, and being viewed by the eyes of the emperor), and controlled violence mixed with domestication and humiliation. The Greek heroes of Statius are (to quote one of Susanna’s favorite rock bands) “lost in a Roman wilderness of pain” and in fact (to quote The Doors again) “No one here gets out alive.” The Trojan War will be a good match for the staggering body-count of the Theban saga. This is a well-known fact if one looks at Homer and the Cycle, but the Roman poet uses additional tragic irony. We begin from the proemium, where Statius has an invocation of Apollo (1.8–11), not just of the Muse (1.3). Apollo is natural choice for a poet, but one wonders if there is a special connection: the mention of the Thebaid hints that Apollo is one main god at Thebes and the god of Delphi,

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so that Statius in his Theban epic truly is an Apolline vates.20 If we look at the plot of the epic, the life of Achilles, it is poignant that Apollo did not sing about Achilles at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus because he refused to take part (at least according to Catull. 64.299–302), and in the end the same god was the slayer of Achilles.21 So, the poem starts from a god who will in the end annihilate the titular hero. Not unusually in Statius, the epic justifies its epigonal existence by becoming a theater of cruelty. The poet worships the creative god who will eventually strike down the ‘life of Achilles’ that forms his subject. Later on, Calchas (1.509–29, 552) is the mouthpiece of Apollo in revealing the hideaway and identity of Achilles; in the meantime, the poem’s first simile (1.165–6) has shown the analogy between Achilles and Apollo the hunter: the simile focuses on the ‘cruel quiver’ of the god, the source of Achilles’ future destruction, and the first epiphany of the Iliad. Even in the limited extant section of the text, this is not the only spotlight of dramatic irony. The first mention of Agamemnon in the poem (1.399– 400) points out, with sarcasm, that he is even keener than Menelaus on revenge for Helen’s rape, although he is the brother “whose wife is at home”, cui nupta domi; the irony is doubled by the fact that the anonymous ‘wife’ is in fact Clytemnestra, the future ruin of Agamemnon. In the extant text, the action is dominated by Thetis the protective mother, and there is no direct representation of the divine agents of destruction in the Homeric plot, Zeus Apollo and Athena. The atmosphere of doom is very present, but it is focalized through the anxious and horrified gaze of Thetis. The whole project is an experiment of epic ‘before’ Homer, but unlike other ‘prequel’ projects, such as the Argonautic epics of Apollonius and Valerius, the plot is actually leading us straight into the Iliad: it is like watching a raft headed for a waterfall. Statius experiments with a Homeric plot that is now coming ‘after’ not only the Cypria but also Greek tragedy, for example Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis and Skyrioi. He has a chance to narrate the many events that are prior to the Iliad, where they somehow surface in brief mentions and tantalizing allusions. Take for example the raiding of 23 different cities before the clash with Agamemnon; in the Iliad, this is a fleeting, but impressive allusion (Il. 9.325–9, a speech where Achilles surpasses even the poet in the language of raids and violence: “sleepless nights, days of blood, I spent, fighting people because of their women, sacking twelve cities of men with my ships, eleven by storm”). We know that this happened ‘before’ the Iliad, but is it relevant to the quarrel of Homer’s book 1?22 How many times did Achilles resent being exploited by Agamemnon and protest against the unequal distribution of work and profit, before the clash that starts the Homeric song? A poem on the entire life of Achilles was bound to confront those narrative options.

Landing at Aulis My other move is even more speculative. It is about the next episode of the Achilleid in book 2 after the extant text – an episode that Statius may have

62 Alessandro Barchiesi never written, for all we know. It is logical to think that the project involved an episode at Aulis. The gathering at Aulis has been announced with great fanfare back in book 1, and there has been no hint that the Greek army has been able to sail to Troy in the meantime. Ulysses and Diomedes have been dispatched from Aulis to Scyros, and the reader expects them to bring Achilles to the eagerly awaiting coalition of Agamemnon in Aulis. At 2.37–9, the young hero performs a sacrifice (an unusually polemical one) for Thetis (his mother and protector of sailors) announcing that he is joining the “Argive navy”: bella ad Troiana ratesque | Argolicas quaesitus eo (2.18–19, “I go seeking the Trojan wars and the Argive ships”). When our text breaks off, Achilles is on the ship and has just been charged with war fury by Ulysses with the typical hawkish argument “what would you do if someone snatches Deidamia away under your very eyes?” (Ach. 2.81–3). The first response to this for readers acquainted with Homer is to think about Briseis, with good reason: in Statius we focus on the hand of Achilles quickly reaching for the hilt (2.84), and we see this very movement continued in the Iliad, when Achilles has the impulse to slay Agamemnon for the abduction of Briseis in front of the whole Greek assembly (1.193–5 “he was drawing the big sword from the sheath, when Athena came dawn from the sky”). It will take the power of Athena to stop Achilles from avenging the abduction of a concubine. However, the ship with Achilles on board is presently heading for Aulis, not Ilion.23 There is no Iphigenia in Homer and only indirect testimony for the sacrifice in the Cycle,24 but for Roman readers, familiar with Aeschylus, Euripides, Lucretius, and Virgil, Aulis without Iphigenia would be like Hamlet without the prince. In other words, Achilles will suffer the abduction of a concubine in the Iliad, but also the loss of a fiancée at Aulis, both times because of King Agamemnon. If this is along the right lines, Statius had a plan to stage a first conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, based, like in Euripides, on the promise of Iphigenia as a new bride for Achilles, followed by her sacrifice. Now, there are some reasons to think that Statius would have been interested in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. The first has to do with his intertextual modus operandi as an epic poet. Throughout his preserved epic work, the Thebaid and the torso of the Achilleid, Statius has never stopped hijacking his epic projects in the direction of tragic models, Seneca in particular, Sophocles occasionally, but overwhelmingly Euripides. This is so obvious that it requires no demonstration here, but it bears repeating since there has been some resistance to the connection with tragedy in the past.25 Regarding the Achilleid, one formal feature makes the connection even clearer: the extant text is full of direct speech, and there are reliable indications that Statius was aiming not only at written circulation (surely a main venue for this kind of hyper-learned epic) but also at recitation; if we think of recitationes of the Achilleid, the analogy with public readings or performances of Seneca’s mythological dramas must have been perceived.26

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A bare list of tragic intertexts for the Thebaid (e.g. Euripides, Phoinissai and Hypsipyle, Aeschylus, Seven, Sophocles, various Theban plays, and Euripides’ Suppliants as a coda; plus the possible influence of Roman adaptations) may suffice, but it is also important that most of Achilleid 1 has as a main thematic model the text, lost but partly recoverable, of Euripides’ Skyrioi (see the excellent discussion in Fantuzzi 2012, 29–39). So my claim that book 2 was planned as a response to Euripides’ Iphigenia has some plausibility.27 The tricky oratory that Statius lends to Ulysses at 2.50–85 is a good fit for many recreations of Ulysses in Euripides, and for the mainstream process of interpretation and reception of Homer in the Classical and Hellenistic age (a process accessible through oratory, philosophy, and scholiastic literature). In the dialogue between Achilles and Ulysses on the ship, it sounds like Statius has grounded his text in the traditional polarity between polytropos and tricky Ulysses versus Achilles the direct, simple, noble, and obviously aristos hero, a construction that we see emerging from early instances in the Platonic Hippias Minor and in the extant fragments of Antisthenes.28 My second argument is based on the other details of the conversation at the start of book 2, a conversation that also includes Diomedes. The other main topics here, besides fake news and manipulative propaganda about the Trojan War, are the education of Achilles as a warrior, and his deep, supernatural connection to his weapons (a theme that had been central to the dramatic recognition scene at 1.852–6). Now, those same ideas have an important role to play in Euripides’ IA. In fact, when they surface in Euripides (Michelakis [2002, 124]), they generate a frustration of expectations. After a meaningful indication by Achilles, who says to Clytemnestra “don’t you see the men carrying my weapons” (Eur. IA 1359), we realize that one aspect of tragic irony in the play is that the events are taking Achilles, the only one who could stop the horror, by surprise, and are too early in his heroic career. Right after landing in Aulis accompanied by his talismanic weapons (the weapons mentioned almost as magical objects in the anagnorisis scene of the Achilleid, and also presumably in Euripides’ Skyrioi), Achilles will find himself not yet fit to oppose Agamemnon and the entire Greek army. He has not yet grown into his future fame, as shown in the Iliad and also in Aeschylus’ Myrmidones and other Trojan dramas. The effect in Statius would have been empowered by the entire dynamics of the story until the break at 2.167: the evolution from cross-dressing in book 1 to the virile style of the on-board conversation with Diomedes and Ulysses would make a functional backdrop for a recreation of the Euripidean plot at Aulis, with Achilles still wavering between adolescence and the performance of adult masculinity. The narrative of Statius, just before the landing at Aulis, focuses on the exceptional circumstances of Chironian education. The child grows motherless, in a men’s world devoid of female figures; the men are in fact half-men half-horses; there is a rigorous and austere heroic code. His pedagogue is

64 Alessandro Barchiesi none other than his great-grandfather, a bizarre version of the Roman obsession for mos maiorum and exemplary ancestors.29 Now Iphigenia at Aulis is also interested in this view of the education of Achilles, because it works well as a dramatic motivation for the immediate and unavoidable conflict with the world of the Atreidai and of Odysseus. The momentous arrival of Achilles (the only character on stage in this drama who is not part of Agamemnon’s family and entourage) is highlighted by this presentation: “as fast as the wind, born from Thetis, raised by Chiron” (Il. 16.206–9; later on in his intertextual life, the Myrmidons will attack him saying “your mother nursed you on gall [cholos],” 16.203). In Statius, Achilles proclaims right at the end of the text (scit cetera mater, “my mother knows the rest,” 2.167) that he rejects maternal influence and the gyneceum of Scyros, and embraces the manly values of Chiron. This choice will be tested immediately, at Aulis, if we use Euripides as a supplement.

The causes of the war for Troy Another detail connects the surviving text to the IA. In order to “fan his wrath” (2.48), Achilles begs Ulysses to give him a short resumé of the origin of the Trojan War. In response, Ulysses behaves like a narrator who wants to produce a version of the events narrated in the early books of the Cypria,30 and pave the way to the Achilles we know from the Iliad. The response by Ulysses is of course very smart, but, as often happens in Attic drama and Classical prose, as also in Steve Bannon’s career, Ulysses opportunistically creates a ruse that will backfire later. He insists that the mobilization leading to Aulis was a spontaneous outcry for revenge: rumor having spread, the avengers gather without external pressure, as dictated by spontaneous indignation (2.66–7 dato . . . rumore . . . inexciti . . . sponte coimus, “rumor having spread . . . unsolicited . . . a spontaneous gathering”).31 In the context, he argues that nobody in history has ever accepted the abduction of women without taking action: certainly not the Asian people, as shown by the aggressions unleashed by Agenor after the rape of Europa, and Aeetes after the abduction of Medea (cf. 2.72–7). This looks like a good argument, but on the surface only: cognoscenti of myth soon realize that both Agenor and Aeetes had sent out a search party, not an army bent on invasion and genocide. Equally important, the Ulyssean version of the past events is in glaring contradiction with the well-known ‘Persian version’ that opens the universally famous Histories of Herodotus: the Persians criticize the Trojan war because they have never overreacted to the kidnapping of Asian women to Europe, and quote precisely the examples of Europa and Medea: “wise men do not heed this kind of incident” (Hdt. 1.4). A bigger problem is that Ulysses’ first-person account of the origins of the Trojan expedition flatly contradicts a point made by the narrator back in book 1. Homeric-style narrators do not use flash-backs in their own voice, but their direct account of the events has full authority, while characters of

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course are prone to Trugreden. So it must be important that at 1.397–406, the first account of the mobilization in the poem, the narrator attributes to Agamemnon, in free indirect speech, arguments totally parallel to those used by the spin doctor Ulysses in book 2 – Asians cannot be trusted, deceit has been used against divine and human law, they will come for your women too if you do not take action – but adds a fundamental comment in the first person: Europe is all fired up by the frenzy of war but also by the kings begging for help (almost on their knees: supplice regum conquestu, “suppliant lament of kings”, 1.397) and in particular by Agamemnon, who spreads fake news about the crime of the Trojans (facinusque relatu | asperat Iliacum, “exaggerates Trojan crime in his report”, 1.400–1) and mounts a political campaign (ambit Atrides, “Atreus’ son makes canvass” 1.399). Ambit is effective in terms of Roman political language, with suggestions of canvassing, ambition, and grassroots campaign, but we know where this whole approach to the Trojan War comes from. Again there is a connection to Euripides, and in particular the IA. In the first part of the drama, Menelaus, who like in Statius is not the main instigator and beneficiary of the expedition, uses polemically against Agamemnon the familiar language of Athenian democracy, to show that the present situation is a result of his brother’s cynical manipulations (337–46): Let me tell you of your faults, Agamemnon! And I’ll list them all, if you don’t start getting angry or begin to deny them. Believe me, I won’t be exaggerating. You know very well how humble you were during the days you wanted to be the leader of the Trojan expedition. Well, you pretended you didn’t want the job but you did. During those days you shook the hand of everyone you came across and, whether they wanted it or not, your doors were always wide open and ready to receive everyone. You’d greet anyone and everyone, hoping with this behavior to gain their approval and thus become their leader. Then, the moment you became one, all this nice behavior changed and you had turned your back on all your friends. You locked yourself up indoors and became totally unapproachable to everyone. In any case, the Statian Ulysses is using a dangerous argument, particularly if one remembers Iliad 1 but also Iliad 9, where the scholia comment that Agamemnon was either wrong or silly: if abducting a woman was a joke, he was silly to launch the Trojan War; if it is a serious matter, he was wrong to seize Briseis (cf. Hainsworth 1993 on Il. 9.335–43). One of the key arguments used by Achilles is relevant here: “is it only the Atridae who love their women?” (Il. 9.340–1). Again we see that (i) Statius’ Achilleid is confronting the Iliad plus the history of its reception, presumably also in teaching and in stage culture (Statius’ father was a professor of Greek, and his job was commenting on Greek epic and drama; Greek-style agones were important in Naples and also, increasingly, in Rome), and (ii) unavoidably faces

66 Alessandro Barchiesi the typical problems of a prequel: the text is by necessity impacted by the Iliad, but it also affects our reading of the Iliad, and it exploits many points where the Iliad itself projects potential prequels or suggests their possible existence. The fact that there were so many Trojan tragedies circulating (in Greek and in Latin) is another active presence in this poetics of sequels and prequels. The Statian Ulysses manipulates memories, and constantly emphasizes words over deeds: already in the tragic tradition and in Roman epic he is a trope for the whole epic tradition, where deeds are dependent on words to be reactivated (see Peirano [2019, 203]). This is particularly suggestive because Ulysses is the poster boy for rhetorical grand style, and his speeches in the Achilleid are a testimony and a confrmation of that tradition.32 Let me draw together the various threads of my reading. Statius has put together a plot that largely derives from traditional elements, but enjoys a special resonance if we think of a Flavian context for his epic, and especially of political ideology in contemporary Rome: 1

2

3

The Trojan War should be seen as a war between Europe and Asia,33 and its political motivation is the unification of the Greeks under Agamemnon, and the launch of a Greek empire (from a land proverbial for its strife and competition for power, see the Thebaid). In the Greek epic tradition war is strife; in the Roman revised tradition it is unification, while strife is something that can erupt in one’s camp. The Trojan War represents the start of a Greek empire, with hints of panhellenism, but also one chapter of a story connecting Europe and Asia, a prologue to the global Roman empire. Both Agamemnon and Achilles are significant figures in the appropriation of the Homeric saga to Roman political ideologies. Agamemnon is available as a trope for the Roman emperor, and so is, from another point of view, Achilles, who is styled magnanimus at Ach. 1.1 after Domitian had been represented as magnanimus in his appearance as a reader of the Theban epic of Statius at the end34 of the Thebaid 12.814. The confrontation of the two ‘Greek emperors of Rome’, one reigning, one potential, in the Greek camp is something to look forward to in terms of Imperial politics. The Trojan War in the Epic Cycle was seen as the product of Strife, Eris (Cypria, fr. 1 West “Zeus . . . in his complex mind resolved to relieve the all-nurturing earth of mankind’s weight by fanning the great eris of the Trojan War, to void the burden through death,”35 followed by the operations of Eris at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis), so that the discord between Achilles and Agamemnon is not entirely dissimilar from the conflict between Trojans and Greeks. In the Roman poem, the Trojan War is an international conflict between empires, Greece and Troy, and even a geopolitical conflict between Europe and Asia: the impending emergence of Strife in the Greek camp is a result of this process of unification.

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The power of Agamemnon, like the power of a Roman emperor, requires constant military aggression, religion and prophecy, and savvy propaganda; it is potentially threatened by strife and division. Achilles is, even more than in Homer (although this looks like a tall order), ‘the best of the Greeks’ (cf. e.g. 1.467–90): he is even invulnerable, since his skin has been armored by Thetis.36

The upshot of this scenario is clearer if we think of a text whose composition runs roughly parallel37 to that of the Achilleid, and which is not often mentioned in connection with Statius. Like the Achilleid,38 it belongs to the genre of biography: Tacitus’ Agricola. If we allow for multiple differences in style, seriousness, and politics, the plot in Tacitus has one important element in common with the plot I am trying to reconstruct for the Achilleid. In Tacitus, it is impossible to ‘be best’ (to quote a slogan made famous by Melania Trump) if one is working for the emperor. This is in a nutshell the problem of Agricola under Domitian: “It is safe only for the emperor to be a ‘good’, i.e. successful, imperator, and for others it is particularly dangerous when the princeps is a malus princeps”;39 “Agricola’s fame is a threat to himself because it is a threat to the emperor.”40 Of course, already in Homer we know that old Peleus had urged the child Achilles to become the best (11.783–4). Yet Statius has made his Achilles even more exceptional than he is in the Iliad. Homer’s Agamemnon has to deal with the best of the Achaeans, and it will not be easy: but Statius’ Agamemnon, the epic version of a Roman emperor, will have to deal with Robocop.

Conclusion: generalizing about imperial epic This reading can only remain partial and conjectural, given the state of the text. We cannot, as Alan Cameron (2009, 22) once wryly remarked, write the about-10,000 lines that Statius never published or (more likely) never wrote.41 Yet the approach can do something for us. If we look at the entire extant library of Roman Imperial epic, we have a choice between using ‘Imperial’ as a loose chronological marker or taking ‘Imperial’ in a more serious and deeper way. If we prefer the second route, it is not difficult to agree that all the surviving epics42 have at least one major thematic feature in common: they are all narratives about societies that keep producing continuous cycles of empire and civil war: empire breeds civil war, and civil war breeds empire.43 The ideology that goes with this kind of imagination is there to be guessed, propaganda or subversion, but this should not paralyze interpretation. The point is that the cycle keeps producing empire and that empire is constantly threatened by the return of civil war, so that the memory of civil war is the main factor in what we may call the ideology of ‘inescapable empire.’ People make civil wars, and civil wars make bigger Leviathans, until a new cycle of strife breaks out. Then strife generates the

68 Alessandro Barchiesi need for security, and an even bigger Leviathan44 – the Roman Epic Cycle, one might say. This insight is important if we want to try to stop dividing works according to polarities: opposition and propaganda, pessimism and optimism, and so on. It also has the advantage of explaining how it happened that hackneyed themes and forms, epics about the sagas of Thebes, Troy, and the Argonauts, enjoyed a comeback under the Flavian emperors. The other major thematic feature that makes the work of Lucan, Silius, Valerius, and Statius substantially homogeneous is the staggering amount of violence and cruelty, and we can argue that those two concepts of epic are profoundly connected. Just like the cycle of civil wars and empire-building, the neverending display of violence and destruction is part of the amphitheatrical ideology of ‘inescapable empire.’ Joy Connolly (2016) powerfully reminds us that cities of the United States are destroyed at least seventeen times a year in Hollywood movies nowadays, and that it does not look as if this mesmerizing spectacle works in favor of social and political criticism of the current state of things. Yet others may prefer a dissonant reading, where the Leviathan cycle and the spectacular violence are indications of dissent, or perhaps criticism of failed regimes of the past (see especially, for this alternative approach, Rebeggiani 2018). What really matters to me now is that if we read Imperial epic this way, the texts become a vital participant to the discourse of empire, no matter if their topic is Roman or Greek.45 This discourse is always to some extent an ideological justification of Empire: the emperor is not necessarily a good king, fit to lead and able to perform for the common good, but he is what stands between peace and the return of the civil wars. This return must constantly be felt as a possibility if the ideology needs it, and the spectacle of the arena, just like epic poetry, is a mise en scène of it. My intention in this discussion has been to attempt to show that the Achilleid too, in spite of its fragmentary nature and deviant, original thematization,46 relates to the discourse of Imperial ideology. And yet, ‘in spite’ is not the right idea. The sexual ambiguity and generic impurity so typical of the poem, and so central to contemporary readings, has a political dimension, just as imaginations of monarchy and diarchy have implications for the politics of gender.47 But this should be the topic of another paper.

Notes 1 I dedicate my contribution to Susanna’s unforgettable presence at Stanford, which included hanging out with colleagues at a very cool lounge in Half Moon Bay, where we used to get fresh air and live rock music (hence a few allusions to rock culture later in the essay). For more nuanced discussions of some parts of my topic, see also my papers in Italian, Barchiesi (2017 and 2020). 2 Braund (1997, 23 n. 60). Her paper, rather isolated in its time, has anticipated some of the richest recent readings of the Thebaid, its ending, and its ideology, such as especially Bessone (2011) and Rebeggiani (2018). 3 For a summa of her work in this area of Imperial ideology, see conveniently Braund (2009).

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4 The work on Philip Hardie on Roman epic has been one of the main foundations for this reading strategy. 5 For now, I only mention epic predecessors, but as will be clear later I believe that Attic tragedy is a crucial intertext for the poetry of Statius, in the Achilleid no less than in the Thebaid. 6 Statius even conceptualizes the Trojan War as a clash between Asia and Europe, cf. 1.81–2 (prophetic speech by Neptune); 730 (Ulysses speaking), 2.64 (Ulysses again). On the significance of mentions of the Hellespont and Dardanelles in the poem, note Feeney (2004). For mentions of the Trojan war as Europe vs. Asia, see e.g. Catullus 68.89–90. A couple of significant parallels are offered by the slightly earlier epic by Valerius Flaccus, the Argonautica. At a crucial junction of the plot, just before the extant text breaks off, the Argonauts are scared that Medea becomes “the Fury who for the first time pairs Europe and Asia in a conflict” (8.396). In Apollonius, there are just vague intimations that someday the Colchians may invade Greek lands as a revenge; the language in Valerius is reminiscent of Aeneas’ curse on Helen, “the Fury shared between Troy and her own fatherland” (Aen. 2.573), but the opposition in Valerius is geopolitically bigger and more systematic than just ‘Greece’ versus ‘Troy.’ The poem is one of our first direct Roman responses to Sarmatian incursions. 7 The story of the new Seven against Thebes is not very popular in modern scholarship, but it has received more attention after the discovery of a fragment of Sophocles’ Epigonoi (POxy 71.4807). 8 Feeney (2004, 87) also notes that in the catalogue the famous shield of Ajax is made of ‘seven kings’, septem . . . reges (1.470–1), that is seven bulls, meaning the seven layers of ox-hide. Sthenelus and Diomedes are singled out (468–9) as the ones who compete, with greedy valor, against the renown of their fathers. This idea is partly recuperated at 1.732–3, where a nice Homeric allusion has escaped many commentators. Ulysses introduces his companion Diomedes to King Lycomedes with this impressive claim: “hic tibi, quem tanta meliorem stirpe creauit | magnanimus Tydeus, Ithaces ego ductor Ulixes.” What is the relationship between Diomedes and Tydeus here? Among recent translators G. Nuzzo (“che rese migliore con lui un sangue già grande”) thinks that Tydeus has been improving the bloodline; G. Rosati (“che ha generato come il migliore di una stirpe così grande”) suggests that Diomedes is the best of the Aetolians. The exact nuance of the comparative melior can be grasped by looking at Hor. Carm. 1.15.28 (a poem very present to Statius during the composition of the Achilleid): the Tydides is melior patre. But the two Latin texts are precise quotations of a single Homeric passage. At Iliad 4.370–410 a tense discussion on military valor develops among Agamemnon, Diomedes and Sthenelus. Agamemnon scolds Diomedes as someone who is inferior (χέρεια, 400) in battle to his father Tydeus, and better (ibid. ἀμείνω) only as a speaker. Sthenelus, who is presumably hot-headed, as the son of someone who taunted Zeus and challenged his thunderbolt on the walls of Thebes, jumps in and retorts ‘we are proud of being better than our fathers’ (405 ἀμείνονες). After all, the Epigoni have succeeded in breeching the walls of Thebes, and the fathers, especially Tydeus and Capaneus, have succumbed to their own blind fury. In Homer, there seems to be a feeling of competition: after all the Epigoni epic seems to have been the underdog of the Epic Cycle, constantly outperformed by Trojan epics and by Theban epics about the older generation. In Statius, the allusion has one additional point, one that shows the special ambition of his foray into the Greek epic tradition. The prowess of Tydeus singled out by Agamemnon in his speech, a Tarantino-esque epic cameo where the hero single-handedly fights an ambush of 50 assassins and spares only one who lives to tell the story, is in Homer just a side-glance to the rival Theban songs; but in Statius it is a

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9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25

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self-quotation, since ‘Tydeus vs the 50 Assassins’ is the money shot of book 2 of the Thebaid (527–681). Note also the importance of reading the start of the Achilleid in continuity with the epilogue of the Thebaid, a strategy well argued for by Bessone (2014). Note that the place traditionally functions as the harbor of Thebes. The importance of this passage is well established by Moul (2012). See also Barchiesi (2017). Zissos (2008, 314–15), with bibliography, is helpful on the connection between Valerius and the historical tradition. On the importance of succession themes in Roman Imperial epic, cf. Hardie (1993). For Cypria, Livius, Naevius, Ennius this is an inference, but a safe one based on the fragments and the indirect tradition (‘book one’ for some of those authors refers to how the poems would appear after their non-authorial, but canonical, division into books). ‘Major Jupiter episode’ typically means either a divine council or divine dialogue or both, and always with a function of disclosure: destiny, divine plan, et sim. Brink (1982, 257) attractively suggests for Horace the formal model of the ‘self-panegyric’ of Cicero, poet. FPL 17 Morel o fortunatam natam me consule Romam (for the ambiguity of this allusion, cf. Barchiesi [2001, 83–4]). King, or at least potential successor, since Cleopatra had been dead a few days: cf. Plut. Anton. 81.4; for other appearances of the line in contexts of Imperial ideology, cf. Dio Chr. 3.46; Suet. Cal. 22.1. As we saw, the operation corresponds functionally to ps.-Virgil’s pre-proemium to the Aeneid, the notorious Ille ego qui quondam, a text that is already in circulation in the Flavian age. This non-emic ethnonym is not Homeric, but in Roman epic it is already found in the third-century-BCE adaptation of the Odyssey by Livius Andronicus (fr. 13 Morel; the Homeric original (Od. 4.495–8) has “bronze-clad Achaeans” who have returned home, the Latin text talks about “returning to Graecia”). Trojan dramas in Attic tragedies are of course full of references to emic equivalents such as ‘Hellenes’ and ‘Hellas’, and Euripides IA is particularly emphatic in this respect. The connection is in itself a form of cultural imperialism, since the arena is by definition a Roman not a Hellenic institution. On Valerius Flaccus, Apollonius, and Apollo see Barchiesi (2000, 327). Well pointed out by Feeney (2004). For this intriguing question, see Taplin (1986). Dilke (2005, ad loc.) is uncertain whether the ship may be going to Aulis or to Ilion, but in 1.474–559 there has been a clear emphasis that the Greek army at Aulis is waiting for Achilles, and at 551 Ulysses announces that he will discover the hero and will be back with him (1.551 aderit mecum): this is more naturally taken as a reference to the army at Aulis. The fact that the story of Iphigenia is not Homeric is no counter-argument, since the plot of Achilles at Scyros is also un-Homeric, and also presumably not in the Cypria, yet it forms the best part of the Statian narrative as we have it. Cf. West (2013, 110–11); Kullmann in Fantuzzi and Tsagalis (2015, 121); Currie in Fantuzzi and Tsagalis (2015, 291–2). After starting my project, I noticed important changes to this situation, e.g. Augoustakis (2014), Heslin (2008). Tarrant’s claim (1976, 10) that Ovid “is perhaps the last Roman poet with a wide and deep knowledge of Greek tragedy” is now in need of revision. The absence of Jupiter as a character in the Achilleid could be significant in this perspective: Zeus is never seen on stage in what remains of Attic tragedy (cf. Taplin [1976, 451–3]), and is frequently evoked by characters and by other, lesser divinities. At 1.684–8 he is present in a very indirect, although authoritative,

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28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35

36 37

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way: his orders forbid Thetis to alter the fate of Achilles by destroying the ship of Ulysses. Here the narrator confirms the drastic message of Neptune in a parallel situation, at 1.81–3 about Jupiter, fate, and the war. My emphasis on tragedy is not an attempt to reduce the importance of wellstudied models of the Achilleid in Virgil and Ovid (on Ovid as a model there are illuminating discussions e.g. in Hinds [1998, 135–43], Heslin [2005, 2016], and Fantuzzi [2012, 87–9]), as well as in Greek epic, Pindar, Roman elegy, Hellenistic poetry, and more. The presence of tragic intertexts in Statius is frequently related to character and plot construction, and does not exclude other influences. Statius is clearly aware that Attic tragedy is frequently a continuation of many plots from the epic Cycle (the Trojan Cycle being the single most important source of tragic plots according to Sommerstein [2015]); if he was planning a new version of the Iliad in the Achilleid project, he must have been aware that Aeschylus had turned the Iliad into a trilogy, where apparently Achilles was even more central than in Homer, and the conflict with Agamemnon was the dramatic core of the action (for reconstructions see Sommerstein [2015, 461], Michelakis [2002, 1–21]). Note that the title used as a default in modern discussion of the trilogy is in fact Achilleid. See the lucid discussion in Hunter (2016). One should read the emphasis on magnanimum . . . Aeaciden at the incipit of our poem as a precise counterpart to andra . . . polytropon at the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey. This is for example the genealogical information in the D-scholia to Il.16.14; according to Σ Pi. Nem. 5.7, Chiron’s daughter Endeis was the mother of Peleus. Cf. McNelis [2015, 594]: “Intriguingly, Odysseus relates, in nearly linear fashion, events from the Cypria that were omitted or mentioned allusively in the earlier part of the Achilleid,” while the Cypria as far as we know did not acknowledge the story of Achilles in drag at Scyros (see the important discussion of Fantuzzi [2012, 26]), the story that Achilles is at pains to erase from memory in his conversation on the ship. Ulysses also conveniently omits reference to the binding, preventive oath sworn by Helen’s suitors and reported with emphasis both in Hesiod’s Catalogue and in the Cypria. For a similar rhetoric, cf. 1.788 ultro iurauit, where the allusive wording, and the reversal, is even clearer. Cf. Barchiesi [2005] on Ulysses’speech at 1.867–74, and on Quintilian’s famous mention of Ulysses (12.10.61–3) in a programmatic representation of the power of grand style in oratory. For repeated emphasis on Europe and Asia, see 1.82, 1.397, 1.410, 1.730, 1.788, 2.64 (cf. Catull. 65.89). On reasons for reading the two poems as a ‘cycle’ of some sort, see earlier. West (2003, 82) translates eris as ‘conflict’, which rather obscures the point I wish to make. I do not need to discuss the complex issues of causation in the early Greek tradition of the Trojan War: my observation is simply that in the view of Zeus in early Greek epic Eris is a force behind the entire plot of the Trojan war, while in Statius Jupiter has a global plan about Asia and Europe, and Eris develops internally in the two opposite fields. On the importance of this motif, unprecedented in epic, for Statius, see Heslin (2016). For the argument that the first idea of the biography goes back to the death of Agricola in 93 CE, and that the composition started before the fall of Domitian in 96, see Woodman (2014, 6). The composition of the Achilleid is usually placed by consensus between 94 and 96. The poem is in fact unique in the entire surviving epic tradition from Homer to the Flavians in being a complete biographical account of a hero. Hardie (2012, 278).

72 Alessandro Barchiesi 40 Kraus (2014, 237). 41 Hinds (2016, 318) offers the best succinct statement of where research on the Achilleid leaves us if we take seriously the idea that the text is incomplete: the poem was meant at the same time both to challenge and to reinforce essentialist views of heroic epic. 42 The fact that Lucan and Valerius Flaccus are visibly incomplete does not make a difference at this level of generalization. 43 This is less evident if we focus on the Punica, and Silius is also in other ways the odd one out: but if I had time, I could argue in favor of the Roman civil wars being a substantial, if at times repressed, preoccupation in the poem. On metus hostilis, Silius, and the theme of civil war, see Jacobs (2010). 44 This is not so far from the global thesis of Morris (2014), an exercise in comparative history. 45 Again it is vital to remember that civil violence is a part of collective memory in the Empire, but also that it is so to speak always already inscribed in the unwritten constitution of Imperial Rome (cf. Scheidel forthcoming); ps.-Seneca’s Octavia is largely based on this concept. 46 I have intentionally left aside the aspects that make the text so interesting and relevant to contemporary discussions (a thread to which I have contributed among many others, see e.g. Hinds [1998, 135–42], Heslin [2005], Barchiesi [2005], Hinds [2016], and the balanced introductions to the poem of Rosati [1992] and Cowan [2005]): the thematization of gender trouble and the eroticization of epic, the combination of gender-bending and genre-bending. 47 It is enough to think for a moment of the importance of Nero as a cultural icon in the Flavian age (one important issue for Rebeggiani [2018] when he discusses the politics of the Thebaid and of the Silvae).

Works cited Augoustakis, A. (ed.). 2014. Flavian Poetry and Its Greek Past. Leiden. Barchiesi, A. 2000. ‘Genealogie letterarie nell’epica imperiale.’ In L’histoire littéraire immanente dans la poésie latine, ed. E. A. Schmidt. Vandoeuvres and Genève, 316–62. ———. 2001. Speaking Volumes: Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Roman Poets. London. ———. 2005. ‘Masculinity in the 90s. The Education of Achilles in Statius and Quintilian.’ In Roman and Greek Imperial Epic, ed. M. Paschalis. Rethymno, 47–75. ———. 2017. ‘Eroi come animali nel circo: perplessi.’ In A Maurizio Bettini, ed. A. Romaldo. Milan, 35–40. ———. 2020. ‘Testo e frammento nell’ Achilleide di Stazio.’ In Opus Imperfectum, ed. M. Papini. Rome, 287–300. Bessone, F. 2011. La Tebaide di Stazio. Epica e potere. Pisa and Rome. ———. 2014. ‘Polis, Court, Empire. Greek Culture, Roman Society, and the System of Genres in Statius’ Poetry.’ In Augoustakis 2014, 215–33. Braund, S. 1997. ‘Ending Epic: Statius, Theseus and a Merciful Release.’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 42, 1–23. ———. 2006.‘A Tale of Two Cities: Statius, Thebes, and Rome.’ Phoenix 60, 259–73. ———. 2009. Seneca: De Clementia. Oxford. Brink, C. O. 1982. Horace on Poetry: Epistles Book II. The Letters to Augustus and to Florus. Cambridge. Cameron, A. 2009. ‘Young Achilles in the Roman World.’ JRS 99, 1–22.

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Connolly, J. 2016. ‘A Theory of Violence in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile.’ In Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry (Festschrift F. Ahl), eds. P. Mitsis and I. Ziogas. Berlin and New York, 273–98. Cowan, B. 2005. ‘Introduction.’ In Dilke 2005, vii–xxv. Dilke, O. A. W. 2005. Statius, Achilleid. Bristol. Fantuzzi, M. 2012. Achilles in Love: Intertextual Studies. Cambridge. ——— and Tsagalis, C. (eds.). 2015. The Greek Epic Cycle and Its Ancient Reception. Cambridge. Feeney, D. 2004. ‘Tenui . . . Latens Discrimine: Spotting the Differences in Statius’ Achilleid.’ Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 52, 85–105. Hainsworth, B. 1993. The Iliad: A Commentary, III, Books 9–12. Cambridge. Hardie, P. 1993. The Epic Successors of Virgil. Cambridge. ———. 2012. Rumour and Renown. Cambridge. Heslin, P. J. 2005. The Transvestite Achilles. Cambridge. ———. 2008. ‘Statius and the Greek Tragedians on Athens, Thebes and Rome.’ In The Poetry of Statius, eds. J. J. L. Smolenaars et al. Leiden, 111–28. ———. 2016. ‘Ovid’s Cycnus and Homer’s Achilles’ Heel’, in Repeat Performances: Ovidian Repetition and the Metamorphoses, eds. L. Fulkerson and T. Stover. Madison and London, 66–99. Hinds, S. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: The Dynamics of Appropriation. Cambridge. ———. 2016. ‘Essential Epic: Gender and Genre from Macer to Statius.’ In Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Flavian Epic, ed. A. Augoustakis. Oxford, 292–318. Hunter, R. L. 2016. ‘The Hippias Minor and the Traditions of Homeric Criticism.’ Cambridge Classical Journal 62, 85–107. Jacobs, J. 2010. ‘From Sallust to Silius Italicus: Metus Hostilis and the Fall of Rome in the Punica.’ In Latin Historiography and Poetry in the Early Empire: Generic Interactions, eds. J. F. Miller and A. J. Woodman. Leiden and Boston, 123–39. Kraus, C. 2014. ‘Long Ago and Far Away . . . The Uses of the Past in Tacitus’ Minora.’ In Valuing the Past in the Greek and Roman World, eds. Ch. Pieper and J. Ker. Leiden, 219–42. McNelis, Ch. 2015. ‘Statius’ Achilleid and the Cypria.’ In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2015, 578–95. Michelakis, P. 2002. Achilles in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Morris, I. 2014. War! What Is It Good For? New York. Moul, V. 2012. ‘Quo rapis? Tone and Allusion at Aulis in Statius’ Achilleid.’ Classical Quarterly 62, 286–300. Murray, O. 1965. ‘Philodemus’ On the Good King According to Homer.’ Journal of Roman Studies 55, 161–82. Parkes, R. 2008. ‘The Return of the Seven: Allusion to the Thebaid in Statius’ Achilleid.’ American Journal of Philology 129, 381–402. Peirano, I. 2019. Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Rebeggiani, S. 2018. The Fragility of Power. Oxford. Rosati, G. 1992. ‘L’Achilleide di Stazio, un’epica dell’ambiguita.’ Maia 44, 233–66. Scheidel, W. forthcoming. ‘The Emperor’s New Blood.’ Sommerstein, A. 2015. ‘Tragedy and the Epic Cycle.’ In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2015, 461–86. Taplin, O. 1976. The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford. Tarrant, R. 1976. Seneca. Agamemnon. Cambridge.

74 Alessandro Barchiesi ———. 1986. ‘Homer’s Use of Achilles’ Earlier Campaigns in the Iliad.’ In Chios: A Conference on the Homereion in Chios 1984, eds. J. Boardman and C. E. Vaphopoulou-Richardson. Oxford, 15–19. West, M. L. 2003. Greek Epic Fragments. Cambridge, MA and London. ———. 2013. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford. Woodman, A. J. 2014. Tacitus: Agricola. Cambridge. Zissos, A. 2008. Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica Book 1. Oxford.

Part 2

Genre crossing

5

The return of the tibicines in Livy and Ovid Marcus Wilson

Cornelius Nepos in the preface (1–3) to his biographies requests his Roman readers not to be prejudiced against some of the Greek political leaders whose lives he records, just because they were trained in music.1 In his life of Epaminondas (2), he repeats the point after recording that Epaminondas had been taught to play the lyre, to sing, to dance and to perform on the tibia. Nepos comments that these accomplishments, according to Roman customs, were levia et potius contemnanda (‘trivial, or to be more precise, contemptible’), whereas they were considered prestigious in Greece. At around the same time, Sallust in his Catiline (25), after setting out Sempronia’s positive qualities, that she was of aristocratic birth, beautiful, married, and a mother who was, additionally, well read in literature, then undermines this catalogue of attributes with the damning comment that she was expert in playing the lyre to a level that was inappropriate for any respectable Roman woman (elegantius quam necesse est probae). As these well-known examples show, the Roman attitude to music and musicians was, to say the least, ambivalent.2 The most famous attempt to acclimatise Roman mores to musicianship as a cultural asset was that of Rome’s most famous musician, the emperor Nero. Yet when he was looking to divorce his wife Octavia and needed to accuse her of a particularly disgraceful love affair, he chose as her co-accused a popular ‘flute player’3 by the name of Eucaerus (Tac. Ann. 14.60). What this clearly shows is that even Nero, a dedicated musician himself, was not above stereotyping music as a morally dubious activity. His own spectacular fall from power demonstrates that, even in the middle of the first century ce, the picture of an emperor attempting a musical career was a public relations catastrophe in the eyes of the Roman Senate and, more crucially, the Roman military. Playing the fiddle while Rome burned represented forevermore the epitome of imperial irresponsibility. Yet the Romans needed music and musicians, and Roman life could not go on without them. For one thing, the Roman army needed loud musical instruments for communication in the camp and in battle.4 While there seems to be nothing in Roman history quite like Joshua’s use of music as a weapon of war in the conquest of Jericho, there does seem to have been at least one battle involving the Roman army that was won by the band,

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the capture of the fort at the river Muluccha by Marius in the war against Jugurtha (Sall. Jug, 93–4). This previously impregnable stronghold was only taken when Marius had his musicians scale a sheer cliff, carting their trumpets and tubas with them, and surprise the enemy by blasting away on their instruments at the rear of the enemy camp, throwing them into panic and confusion. Even more important was the role of music in religious ritual, especially at sacrifices, festivals, and funerals. In the libatio and sacrifice scenes on Trajan’s Column, musicians are always shown in attendance. Romans were uniquely fastidious about following the precise order of service in all matters of religion, so when music was prescribed, there had to be music if the gods were to be kept happy.5 This is why the legendary musicians’ strike was noted in Roman cultural tradition as an unprecedented crisis.6 Livy gives us the standard account of the events (9.30.5–10) setting them in 311 bce. In his version, the implied context connects them to the activities of Appius Claudius as censor.7 He, or he and his colleague, Gaius Plautius Venox, decided to ban the guild of tibicines8 from holding their traditional feast in the Temple of Jupiter.9 We are not told why. Perhaps there had been unruly behaviour and noise control issues, or perhaps it was just anti-musician bias.10 Whatever the cause, the musicians took collective industrial action and withdrew their labour. In fact, they removed themselves from Rome altogether and migrated to the town of Tibur. This left the Romans in a terrible quandary, since they could not perform their ceremonies properly. They were effectively paralysed from following the dictates of their own religion.11 The Senate, disturbed particularly by the interruption of religious practice, took action to restore music to the city. They called in their highly placed friends in Tibur and concocted a plot with them to repatriate forcibly the dissident musicians to Rome. The trick was accomplished by various wealthy Tiburtines scheduling several big parties all on the same night, with live music and an open bar for the musicians.12 The tibicines being musicians, a breed with a well-known propensity for indulgence in intoxicating substances (as Livy points out, uino, cuius auidum ferme id genus est), all drank far too much and one by one collapsed in a drunken stupor. They were loaded on to wagons (plaustra) and carted through the night back to Rome, where they woke up next morning with the mother of all hangovers (in Livy’s evocative phrase plenos crapulae) back in the forum. That was the end of their short-lived rebellion, and the event sometimes referred to as the ‘secession of the tibicines’ was over. This is about as close to a funny story as Livy gets. It interrupts the sequence of wars (which are reintroduced immediately after the episode) and political developments that are the proper material of Roman historiography. He even apologises to the reader for recounting the musicians’ strike, pointing out that it is only the implications for religion that qualified it for inclusion (rem dictu paruam praeterirem, ni ad religionem uisa esset pertinere).13 The

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account is self-contained and detached from both the previous and succeeding narrative, which is a potential problem since his reference to the censors as the authorities who prohibited them from feasting in the temple (prohibiti a proximis censoribus) suggests they acted in unison, though previously he has described how Plautius resigned from the censorship in disgust at the excessive severity of his colleague, Appius Claudius.14 The stereotyping of the musicians is outrageous, portraying them as natural party animals, banned from acting out their revels in the sacred precinct, then easily duped by their uncontrolled appetite for wine. The recapture of the errant musicians is attributed to the superior cleverness of the senators, who set about their task in the manner of a military strategem: they line up their allies, the Tiburtines; they take advantage of the specific weakness of the enemy; they prepare the logistical support in the form of wagons and people to drive them; they set a trap; and they attack before dawn, when the enemy is unwary and confused.15 But there is a fundamental incoherence in Livy’s interpretation, even on the evidence he provides. He wants us to believe the Senate won out and the musicians surrendered. But look at the results. The tibicines recovered the right to feast in the temple (restitutumque in aede vescendi ius). Not only that, but they won the right to hold a three-day music festival during which they had the freedom of the city in which to wander, playing music and behaving with licentia, exactly what the censors were supposed to suppress: datum ut triduum quotannis ornati cum cantu atque hac quae nunc solemnis est licentia per urbem uagerentur. (Livy 9.30.10) They were granted permission to roam about the city for three days every year, dressed up, playing music, and behaving in a licentious manner, subsequently ritualised. One of these concessions, glossed over vaguely by Livy’s use of the word ornati, is that they were given the right to dress in a particular costume. For the details, we need to go to Valerius Maximus (2.5.4), who states that this costume consisted of masks (personis) and colourful robes (uariaque ueste). Ovid is even more informative (Fasti 6.654), also mentioning the masks (personae) and specifcally designating the garment as a stola, a long dress, otherwise worn by women.16 The result of the industrial action, if we flter out Livy’s spin on it, is outright victory for the musicians. Livy also notes that the ordinary populace of Rome was pleading with the tibicines to stay, even congregating in a crowd in the forum (concursus populi factus, impetratoque ut manerent). It seems the musicians’ union forced the Senate and the censors to back off and admit defeat. Any historical reality behind this story is beyond recovery. Even the century to which Livy assigns the events is contradicted by other ancient

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sources: Plutarch serves as witness to a tradition that placed the story almost a century and a half earlier during the rule of the Decemvirs (Roman Questions 55). On the other hand, the historiographic and literary treatments of the story carry variations in their narrative details that reveal much about their authors’ ways of thinking, especially about Roman cultural change. Valerius Maximus (2.5.4) gives a shorter version of the story that in outline agrees with Livy’s. His one addition is the significance he tries to attach to the wearing of masks, that the tibicines continued ever after to hide their faces in embarrassment at the entrapment of their professional ancestors while they were under the influence of strong liquor. That seems ludicrous, a desperate attempt to point a moralistic message to the episode. For a very different take on the event, we might turn to the poet Ovid. Ovid’s version is to be found close to the end of the Fasti, where he seeks to explain the festivities occurring around the Ides of June. His account differs from Livy’s in so many particulars it might be thought to have been written for the purpose of contradicting it. The general outline matches: the tibicines suffer restrictions in Rome and decamp en masse to Tibur. They get drunk and are returned to Rome in wagons (or in this case, a single wagon: plaustro. . . plaustro, 6.679–80)17 but win rights to hold a festival, to play music through the city and to clothe themselves transgressively. Added to their officially sanctioned licentia is the right to compose humorous new lyrics to be sung to traditional tunes: canere ad ueteres uerba iocosa modos (6.692). Ovid feels no compulsion to apologise for the story. It is presented as entirely fitting for his genre, a didactic poem on the Roman calendar, unlike Livy’s nervousness about its incongruity in a work of history. Ostensibly, Ovid treats the story as an aetiological myth to explain features of the festival known as the lesser Quinquatrus, under the divine patronage of the goddess Minerva. Cur uagus incedit tota tibicen in urbe? quid sibi personae, quid stola longa uolunt? (Fasti 6.653–4) Why is it that the tibicen goes about at large throughout the city? What is the signifcance of the masks? And the long gowns? Since it is not pretending to be a historical record, details can be omitted or left to the imagination.18 The narrative is more impressionistic in mode, and there is no attempt to adopt a detached or objective tone.19 The explanation is in the form of a speech, and the voice is that of Minerva herself, so it represents a god’s eye view of events, rather than the Senatorial view we get from Livy and which Livy probably found in his own sources.20 What are the main differences in Ovid’s version? First, he gives a different account of the causes of the dispute at lines 661–4. He does not mention the cancelling of the feast in the temple, though some scholars have suggested a lacuna after the end of line 662, partly on the assumption that Ovid must

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have referred to this because it is in Livy.21 Rather, the cause that is emphasised is the one given in lines 663–4, that a limit was imposed on the number of musicians who could be part of the procession at a funeral.22 adde quod aedilis, pompam qui funeris irent, artifces solos iusserat esse decem. (Fasti 6.663–4) Add the fact that the aedile had imposed a limit of ten to the number of musicians permitted to play at a funeral. This has important implications because it suggests the real confict here was one within the Roman aristocratic class and arises from an attempt at sumptuary regulation of the public display of wealth. The punitive effect on the musicians and their source of income was collateral damage, not the direct target of the measures of control. They were caught up in an internal confict within the patrician class. Secondly, Ovid gives a very different account of the process that saw the musicians return, and after their physical return, of their adoption of the costume and customs that typify the festival (669–92). There is no involvement of the Senate or collusion of the Roman senators with their wealthy allies in Tibur. Ovid is at pains to stress that the return was engineered by a freed slave (669) but one whose character made him the equal of anyone of whatever formal status.23 He puts on the party specifically for the musicians (671–2) and, after plying them with wine, uses a clever ruse to induce them to leave, pretending that his former master is on his way for a visit.24 Then the musicians, or at least those left behind after the others have departed (morantes, 679), are put in a wagon, but they can’t see where it is going not just because some of them are sleepy and tipsy, but because the sides are enclosed by wickerwork walls (680). Once in Rome, according to the standard modern text, it seems that they have a collaborator of some note in the former censor Plautius (685, though the actual name is an ‘emendation’ that looks ahead to the reference to his collega in 690, who, scholars deduce, must be Appius Claudius). Together, Plautius and the musicians cooperate in subverting the surveillance of the Senate (685) and the censor Appius Claudius (690), by sowing confusion around their numbers and identities. It is apparent from this that Ovid, in comparison with the historiographic account, has toned down the stereotyping of the musicians as passive, unalert, and manipulable, and reduced the superior competence of the organs of government to the point where they are the ones who are outwitted and outmanoeuvred.25 These musicians are too smart for the Senate. The third feature on which Ovid, or rather Minerva, gives a radically different explanation concerns the adoption of the masks and long flowing female attire (685–690). Masks are not an obvious accoutrement of musicians who have to blow through the lips and control their embouchure.26 Minerva claims this innovation was specifically designed to disguise the

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identities and the number of tibicines active in the city, and to prevent them being identified by their gender; in other words, to enable female musicians to play in the band (687).27 The implication is that this was the occasion when women first began to play in public, and this was made possible by the adoption of a policy by the tibicines of suppressing the visible markers of maleness. A fourth addition to the story introduced by Ovid is the theme of exile (exilio. . . exilium, 665–6). This is absent from Livy and Valerius Maximus, and the depiction of the withdrawal to Tibur (which was only a few hours down the road by wagon) as exile is a little forced, though Ovid manages it cleverly by adding the personal exclamation in line 666, as if he is surprised to discover that in those distant times even Tibur was considered far away. It is not too far fetched, I think, to see an allusion here to Ovid’s own exile, since the Fasti was being worked on and revised after he was banished to Tomi, as we know from the revised dedication, originally to Augustus but in the surviving version rewritten to address Germanicus.28 Arguably, there is a parallel between the situation of Ovid and that of the musicians as he presents it, both caught up in a situation that was not really about them, but scapegoated because they were easily portrayed as symptomatic of moral degeneration. As a historical exemplum, Ovid transforms the story from one that displays the superior wisdom of governmental authority to one that displays the overstepping, by those in power, of moral policing, and an overstepping that backfired and was reversed. The story is recast as a foundation myth for the successful returning of exiles and their subsequent integration into and enrichment of Roman culture.29 Whether this is better viewed as wishful thinking on the poet’s part, or a veiled appeal for his banishment to be rescinded now that Augustus is dead, readers must decide for themselves, a not uncommon effect of such ambiguous Ovidian comments. The focus shifts slightly in the last line from music to words, verba iocosa, which might seem to allude to Ovid’s repeated defence in his exile poetry, that Augustus has failed to attend to the witty and parodic tone of Ovid’s early erotic verse. The example of the musicians is one that asserts a history of institutionalised tolerance at Rome for iocosa verba that are no threat to the social or moral order.30 Minerva’s speech seems to be concerned to remind the reader: don’t forget you Romans used to have a sense of humour.31 How many drunk musicians can you fit on a wagon? Six? Ten? I would think a maximum load would be a dozen, if packed in like sardines in a tin. Whereas Livy, Valerius Maximus, and Plutarch all refer to multiple wagons, Ovid twice refers to a wagon in the singular (6.679–80). It hardly seems sufficient to transport an orchestra, let alone the entire Musicians’ Union. There are other jarring incongruities in Ovid’s account, or at least in Ovid’s account as it has been tampered with by editors and textual critics. In modern editions we read the following. Plautius, ut posset specie numeroque senatum fallere, personis imperat ora tegi,

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admiscetque alios et, ut hunc tibicina coetum augeat, in longis uestibus esse iubet; sic reduces bene posse tegi, ne forte notentur contra collegae iussa redisse sui. (Fasti 6.685–90) Plautius, so as to mislead the Senate as to their identity and number, instructs them to hide their faces by masks, mixes others in and orders the wearing of long gowns so female musicians can be integrated into the troupe. In this way their return could be concealed, avoiding criticism for returning against his colleague’s orders. The presence of the name ‘Plautius’, referring to Gaius Plautius Venox, at the start of line 685 is particularly incongruous since he was not exactly a household name, even for Romans; nor is this the sort of historical reference one would expect from Minerva unless she has been reading Book 9 of Livy with minute attention. In fact, prior to this point, Minerva has been meticulously imprecise about the dating of the event she recalls, as befts an aetiological as opposed to a historiographic treatment: temporibus ueterum. . . auorum (‘in the times of your early ancestors’, 6.657). This is placed outside any defnite chronological markers, the general antiquity of the episode being the essential information conveyed. In his 2005 book Murgatroyd fnds fault with the goddess because she is ‘vague over names’ and has not done enough to explain Plautius’ standing. The whole account in the Fasti is condemned by him as ‘disappointing – rather dry and dull, and also unclear.’32 For this, though, if we are to assign blame, it should be laid at the door of Pighi rather than with Minerva, let alone Ovid. The name ‘Plautius’ does not appear in any manuscript of the Fasti. It was inserted in 1615 by Pighi (his name Latinised as Pighius), in his work the Annales Romanorum, and it has remained there ever since through all the major editions up to and including Littlewood in 2006. The arguments used to justify the emendation are strained and unconvincing.33 The principal claim is that it is required in order to make sense of collegae (colleague) in line 690, which is taken as a reference to Appius Claudius, the other censor. But collegae is itself a variant for the better attested reading collegii (as printed currently in the Teubner edition).34 These two textual choices are wholly interdependent and, if one of them is untenable, they both are. Otherwise there is no reference to censors at all in Ovid’s account, where the only reference to any offcial magistrate is to an unnamed aedile in line 663. These same dubious readings are also the sole justifcation for the proposed lacuna at the end of line 662, which has been hypothesised on the grounds that there is no mention of the censors in the reasons given for the departure of the tibicines where historically oriented scholars think there should have been one. Ovid’s account has been doctored, with the best of historical intentions, to make it compliant with the details supplied by Livy. That Minerva sought to assign agency

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for the customary observances of her festival to the censor Gaius Plautius Venox is extremely unlikely, and there is no compelling argument for inserting him or Appius Claudius into her aetiological explanation. There are further problems with the misreadings imposed on the passage. Plautius is miscast in the role of a more liberal-minded censor counteracting the harsh strictures of Appius Claudius. But Plautius resigned from the position of censor, horrified at the revisions of Claudius which gave access to the Senate to types he considered unworthy, including the descendants of freedmen (Livy 9.29.6–8; 30.1–2; 46.10–12). This is not a person likely to instigate deception of the Senate and promote the interests of recalcitrant musicians among the lower orders. Even more illogical is the idea that Appius Claudius (as the collega in line 690) forbade the tibicines from returning to Rome. This idea is not just absent from Ovid, but from Livy and all those other sources for the incident, which portray the absenting of themselves from Rome as a rebellious action on the part of the musicians, never as an expulsion by the Roman authorities who, as Livy and others claim, undertook extraordinary measures to bring them back. The orders against their return (690) cannot be attributed to the Senate or any Roman official without contradicting every witness we have to the historiographic record. It is only by restoring the best attested manuscript readings in lines 685– 90 that we may discern a more coherent and meaningful narrative sequence, unadulterated by officious historicising interventions. Callidus, ut posset specie numeroque senatum fallere, personis imperat ora tegi, admiscetque alios et, ut hunc tibicina coetum augeat, in longis uestibus esse iubet; sic reduces bene posse tegi, ne forte notentur contra collegii iussa redisse sui. (Fasti 6.685–90) A clever one, so as to mislead the Senate as to their identity and number, instructs them to hide their faces by masks, mixes others in and orders the wearing of long gowns so female musicians can be integrated into the troupe. In this way their return could be concealed, avoiding criticism for returning against the orders of the guild. The word callidus (‘clever’ or ‘inventive’) makes far more sense than the intrusive Plautius.35 This is more in keeping with the style of the rest of Minerva’s narrative which identifes participants by role rather than name: an aedile (aedilis, 663); a former slave (quidam servierat (669); a messenger (nuntius, 674); the former master (auctor uindictae. . . tuae, 676). It also preserves the focus of the tale on persons of relatively low status, like the freedman. And it maintains the continuity from the previous line, as the

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jarring and intrusive Plautius does not, since the callidus is obviously one of the tibicines who were as of the previous line (684) newly arrived back in the Roman forum. Instead of collegae in line 690, supposedly referring to Appius Claudius, we can return to the best attested manuscript reading collegii, which would refer to the guild of musicians. For a parallel, it is worth looking at the account of Valerius Maximus (2.5.4), where it is the guild (Tibicinum. . . collegium) that is made the primary subject of the discussion. The musicians continue to perform in Rome contrary to the instructions of their guild. If we discontinue expecting Ovid to supplement and corroborate Livy, he seems to me to tell a different story, but one that makes good sense in its own terms. There are no censors or banning of feasts in the temple. Official limitations on work at Rome make the city unprofitable for musicians (661–4), and the guild of the tibicines decides to relocate to Tibur (665). The motivation is a lack of work rather than official measures to curb their indulgence in feasting in a temple. Also omitted by Ovid from the Livian version are the Tiburtine leaders who work with the Senate to stage-manage the return of the musicians to Rome. The freed slave invites the tibicines to a party and fakes the imminent arrival of his former master to get them to leave. Those who linger (morantes, 679), being more intoxicated, are bundled into a wagon and taken to Rome. Through the ingenuity of one of their number (callidus, 685), they adopt the masks and female dress to evade the scrutiny of the Senate (685) and the musicians’ guild (690) whose policy is to blacklist Rome. The generic paradigm here, I suggest, is not historiography,36 with its celebration of great politicians, generals, and moralists, but comedy. There are enough clues: masks, changes of costume, confused identity, humorous lyrics (iocosa verba, 692) set to music, themes of authority subverted, and a cast of character types drawn from ordinary urban life. There are two ‘trickster’ characters, first the exslave who gets the musicans drunk and sends them home in a wagon carefully designed to prevent the passengers seeing where they are going (680); and, secondly, the clever musician (callidus, 685) who saves the day by a sort of metatheatrical invention, costuming his associates so as to set aside their earlier identities. There is a classic role reversal when those who were tricked become in turn the more effective users of trickery. The plot authorises the carnivalesque aspects of Minerva’s lesser Quinquatrus festival. Among the other functions of tibicines in Ovid’s day was their prominence in the Roman theatre.37 Not only in terms of manuscript authority but also with regard to narrative coherence, the word callidus in line 685 is wholly apt. It is only by means of unwarranted and unjustified textual interference that the Roman censors have been awarded any role at all in Ovid’s account of the ‘secession’ of the tibicines. Inserting Livy’s censors into the version of the story in the Fasti requires that one of these guardians of conformity, Plautius, be cast as the instigator of non-conformity, subversive behaviour, the deception

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of authority, concealment of identity, and cross-dressing. Ovid’s purpose is not Livy’s. After 400 years since Pighi, it is surely time to cease viewing Fasti 6.651–92 as a second-string historical source and to pay due honour to Minerva’s generous provision of the more entertaining story the historians have been at such pains to rewrite.

Notes 1 It is with gratitude that I acknowledge the dedicated and unstinting assistance of Katie Logan in completing the research for this chapter. 2 On the Romans’ use of music and treatment of musicians in general, see Vincent (2011). 3 In fact, a trained tibicen (canere tibiis perdoctus, Tac. Ann. 14.60). Being a reed instrument, the tibia sounded nothing like a modern flute. 4 Horace, Ars Poetica 202–3, tibia non ut nunc orichalco uincta tubaeque | aemula, sed tenuis simplexque . . . suggests that the tuba, with its military associations, is a higher-class sort of instrument than the tibia, and that by emulating the more practical instrument the tibia is getting above itself. 5 According to Pliny the Elder (Naturalis Historia 28.11), a tibicen played during official prayers in order to prevent anything else from being heard, since an ill-omened sound could ruin the prayer and the sacrifice to follow. Valerius Maximus (1.1.5) records an exemplum of a mouse-squeak during a sacrifice causing the current dictator and master of horse to resign, showing how seriously the Romans took (or were meant to take) this propriety. The continuing importance of music in religion is shown by Apuleius’ procession of Isis (Met. 11.8–17), where musicians mark off the inner group of cult members from the wider procession and spectators (Rüpke [2001, 93]). Littlewood (2006, 194–5) adds the use of tibicines at the Ludi Scaenici and the census. Cicero (de Haruspicum Responso 11.23) says that if the tibicen suddenly stops playing, then the ludi have not been celebrated properly and must be repeated. 6 Sometimes referred to as the ‘Secession of the Tibicines’ on the analogy of the Secession of the Plebs. 7 Though this is the standard interpretation, Palmer (1965, 309–10) argues that proximis censoribus would not refer to the current censors (App. Claudius and Plautius) but rather the previous pair, and points out that Claudius is not mentioned at all in Livy’s story. But no individual is mentioned in Livy’s story, which could be taken as an attempt to gloss over facts which he didn’t know, such the names of the censors who actually effected the ban (Palmer 1965, 310) or the exact year when the event occurred. Oakley (2005, 3.399), however, notes that the tibicines could hardly have been on strike from Rome for the six years since the previous censors were in office, and proximis could serve to remind the readers of the present censors, since they had not been referred to in the last two paragraphs. 8 Conventional English translations of tibicines as ‘fluteplayers’ or even ‘pipers’ misalign the ancient instruments with dissimilar modern instruments. For this reason it is better to retain the Latin term. 9 Twice a year, there was a public sacrifice to Jupiter and Ludi Scaenici followed by an Epulum Iovis. According to Littlewood (2006, 193), the public sacrifices were accompanied by tibicines who were then allowed to join the priests in the banquet. 10 Feasting on public sacrificial meat (ius publice epulandi) was a carefully protected privilege for magistrates, ex-magistrates and public priests and one’s share

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and priority depended on social status (Rüpke 2001, 144–8); the censors might have been attempting to regulate this privilege by expelling the low-class fluteplayers from it. Habinek (2005, 41) cites relief carvings from early Italy to show that while images of feasting established hierarchies between elites and nonelites, musicians blurred the boundary between the two positions, sometimes depicted standing and sometimes reclining. Littlewood (2006, 193–4) notes that this would be consistent with Appius Claudius’ other actions involving religion, such as opposing the opening of priesthoods to plebeians and transferring the cult at the Ara Maxima from the Potitii to the state. On the other hand, Palmer (1965, 312) argues that the censors (who in his opinion were not Appius and Plautius) did not actually have the power to create such legislation on religious matters, suggesting that their actual action was to exclude the Italian tibicines from the roll of citizens in the census. Two tibiae, double reed instruments of sometimes great complexity, were played at a time. ‘Circular breathing’ was probably employed so that the player did not stop to take breaths (especially useful in rituals where continuity of sound was required). Tunes were for the most part memorised or improvised (Moore [2012, 36, 39–45, 136–9]). These considerations suggest that, in the absence of professional tibicines, it would be very difficult to find anyone with the necessary skill to keep playing throughout a sacrifice without stopping or emitting ill-omened squeaks. Furthermore, there was a lot of pressure on musicians to get it right: Julius Obsequens (42) reports a tibicen being stoned to death by the people for ceasing to play during a sacrifice. Epularum and die festo suggest sacrificial banquets, as does Ovid’s word dapes (epulum was a public food offering to a god and daps a private one, Rüpke [2001, 102–3]). Perhaps the tibicines were invited to accompany sacrifices and eat the proceeds afterwards, ironically the very privilege from which they were expelled at Rome. Oakley (2005, 3.398) notes that Livy was particularly conscious of the dignity of his genre in this passage. He (Oakley) takes haec inter duorum ingentium bellorum curam gerebantur (9.30.10) as a note of sarcasm, complaining that such trivial matters must be attended to while there are great ones threatening. Livy uses a similarly apologetic tone in 7.10.5, when he reports that the Gallic champion was sticking his tongue out at the Romans, alluding to his main source for the passage, Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius. Plautius was not disgusted at Claudius’ severity: 9.29.7–9; 9.46.10–14. He seems to have resigned in shame at his partner’s debasing of the political system of Rome. Levene (1993, 230–2) takes this story as a continuation of Appius Claudius’ impiety in the Ara Maxima incident; together they serve to build up religious tension in parallel with military threat. Livy links this digression to the bigger picture with haec inter duorum ingentium bellorum curam gerebantur (9.30.10) and later unites the themes with the consul calling upon the gods in an ultimately successful battle against the Samnites (9.31.10–13). Similarly, Littlewood (2006, lxxx) considers that Livy included the story of the tibicines as another example of Appius Claudius’ interference in religious matters. Livy’s vocabulary supports this: the Roman Senate sends legatos to Tibur; the Tiburtines adgrediuntur; the tibicines are vinctos and eos . . . oppressit as if they were prisoners of war. Oakley (2005, 398) credits Livy’s elision of the details about the costume to his awareness of history’s dignity, on the principle that transvestism has no place in his genre. In Plutarch’s version (Roman Questions 55), the tibicines get back to Rome having somehow managed to swap most of their clothes with the women at the freedman’s party, and so take up the custom of walking around in women’s clothes on that day. He does not mention masks.

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17 The use of plaustra at 6.684 appears to be a poetic substitution of plural for singular. 18 Murgatroyd (2005, 59–61) criticises the story in the Fasti as wholly vague and confusing, indicating that Minerva is not at all interested in the story she is telling due to her antipathy to the particular musical instrument. He appears to be combining the questionable methodology of comparing Ovid’s poetic version to the more historical accounts in Livy and Plutarch and inevitably finding it wanting in detail, with an uncritical attitude to the readings of the Fasti text. Also, when taking Ovid to task about not naming enough characters, he fails to notice that Livy, Plutarch, and Valerius Maximus only name a single individual between them, and that is King Numa; the detail simply might not have existed. 19 Littlewood (2006, lxxx–lxxxi) suggests that Ovid was specifically adapting and embellishing Livy’s account to create a lively social comedy. One can go further and suggest that Ovid was deliberately subverting the historiographic treatment of the event. 20 Palmer (1965, 311) suggests that Ovid’s (and Plutarch’s) account may reflect the oral tradition of the tibicines themselves, while Oakley (2005, 3.398) ascribes Livy’s version to an antiquarian tradition which at some point was incorporated into annalistic history. Neither has any specific evidence for these speculations. Assuming that Ovid was aware that his version differed from Livy’s, we might interpret his description of Minerva as a doctae. . . deae (656) as implying that his own version is the true one, since the teller is both learned and divine. 21 Littlewood (2006, 198–9) argues that the restriction on the number of tibicines at funerals would be insufficient motivation for a strike, so adde quod . . . must refer back to the more serious restriction on their feasting. Elsewhere (lxxx) she suggests that this passage may have been revised after Tiberius’ accession, with a couplet referring to the harsh edict of the emperor’s ancestor redacted. However, the importance of the restriction on numbers has already been asserted: dulcis erat mercede labor (661) implies that the tibicines need the salary for their work, so it was a serious blow for the use of their professional skills to be dwindling and for their employment at funeral processions to be limited. The tibicines in Ovid’s account are not standing on their dignity as they did in Livy but are taking action to defend their livelihoods. 22 This was a law of the 12 Tables (Cicero, de legibus 2.23.59), which the aedile presumably started to enforce more strictly at this time; it suggests that Ovid, like Plutarch (Roman Questions 55.1), is envisaging this event occurring in the time of the decemvirs (Oakley 2005, 3.397). 23 Plutarch (Roman Questions 55) also says that it was a freedman who promised to bring the musicians back. Ovid does not attribute the messenger’s story to the Tiburtine officials as mentioned by Livy. The anticipated arrival of the former master was a ruse (praecomposito, 674) devised, it seems by the freedman himself. Littlewood (2006, 200–1) takes the view that the story gains in humour if the freedman, who is characterised in her eyes as a careful status-builder in lines 669–70, was manoeuvred by the officials of Tibur into ‘engaging a band of classy Roman pipers’ (200); they then interrupted the party with a story calculated to make him panic and had a cart and driver conveniently standing by. This is not very convincing given the complete omission of the officials from the account, and calling the freedman dominus (679) suggests that he was in control of the situation. We have to assume it is the freedman’s own cart and driver. 24 Frazer (1929, 5.310) suggests that the freedman feigns fear that his master is coming to enslave him again. This is somewhat unrealistic (for one thing, there would be no reason for him to get rid of the tibicines before fleeing himself). Much more likely is a situation similar to a modern teenage party when the host’s parents arrive home early: ‘Quick, I’m not meant to be having a party, everyone out!’

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25 The reading callidus (as opposed to Plautius, 685) is even better for this interpretation: it was the musicians by themselves who deceived everyone, with no help from a member of government. The authority of the Senate is also somewhat undercut if one reads collegii at line 690 thereby suggesting that the tibicines are more worried by what their own guild would think than by the Senate. 26 Tibicines and the Greek equivalent, auletes, are often depicted with their cheeks puffed out, perhaps due to use of circular breathing (Moore [2012, 42–5]). This would obviously not be conducive to wearing masks in performance. However, the wearing of masks might also be related to the tibicines’ association with the theatre, and some surviving visual depictions show them wearing masks. 27 Littlewood (2006, 203–4). She also adds that the tibicinae found in Roman literature were employed for private parties and possibly funerals, but not sacrificial playing. Newlands (1995, 197) suggests that the inclusion of tibicinae may have been intended to circumvent the aedile’s restriction on the number of tibicines. 28 Ovid also mentions Tibur as the furthest place of exile for ancient Romans in Ex Ponto 1.3.81–2, in contrast with Pontus’ bleakness and distance from Rome. There are also similar ‘edits’ throughout the Fasti, e.g. at 1.540: felix exilium cui locus ille fuit! Littlewood (2006, 199). 29 The final couplet of Minerva’s aetiological explanation (691–2) emphasises the successful mixing of old (ueteres modos) and new (cultuque nouo). It evokes a positive view of cultural change. 30 Indeed, these particular iocosa verba have been considered apotropaic, similar to the songs sung by soldiers at triumphs. Littlewood (2006, 294). 31 The general response to the innovation is one of approval: res placuit (691). 32 Murgatroyd (2005, 60). 33 For the arguments on the text, see Frazer (1929, 5.306, 310–11); Bömer (1957,1.290–1, on line 685); Palmer (1965, 310); Littlewood (2006, 203). Frazer adduced coins issued around 45 bce by a later member of the Plautius family (L. Plautius Plancus) supposedly showing a mask, but on inspection it becomes immediately obvious that these images are of Medusa heads and bear no resemblance to a mask, let alone one that might be worn by a tibicen. The name Claudius is found in some later manuscripts where the modern texts print Plautius. Wiseman and Wiseman (2011, xxxi, 147) prefer to read ‘Claudius’, though their reasoning is not explained. This is even more problematic since it is equally unlikely that Appius Claudius would have assisted in deceiving the Senate so as to benefit the musicians, and the reference to his collega in line 690 would be yet more obscure even for an ancient reader. All of this desire for a proper name in line 685 follows on from several dubious assumptions: that Ovid based his story on the same annalistic tradition as was used by Livy (though Livy himself mentions neither censor by name); that there were not already widely differing variants of the story in antiquity; and that Ovid’s version of the story cannot make sense unless it includes a role for the censors (though they are also unmentioned by Valerius Maximus or Plutarch). 34 Alton, Wormell and Courtney (1978). 35 Another less common manuscript reading is cautius (‘a cautious one’). But this makes little sense when the actions proposed are so risky and unconventional. 36 On the Fasti’s play with generic expectations, see the comments of Boyle and Woodard (2000, l–liv). 37 In fact, the whole story as Ovid tells it would make a splendid and easily staged script for a re-enactment by jesting street performers or, if I may make the suggestion, for a mime. It is a prime candidate to be added to the lists of episodes from Roman literature bearing an evident affinity with performance compiled by Wiseman [2002 and 2015].

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Works cited Alton, E. H., Wormell, D. E. W., and Courtney, E. 1978. P. Ovidi Nasonis Fastorum Libri Sex (Biblioteca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana). Leipzig. Bömer, F. 1957. P. Ovidius Naso: Die Fasten: Herausgegeben, übersetz und kommentiert. 2 volumes. Heidelberg. Boyle, A. J. and Woodard R. D. 2000. Ovid, Fasti. London. Frazer, J. G. 1929. Publii Ovidii Nasonis Fastorum Libri Sex: The Fasti of Ovid: Edited with a Translation and Commentary. 5 volumes. London. Habinek, T. 2005. The World of Roman Song: From Ritualised Speech to Social Order. Baltimore. Levene, D. S. 1993. Religion in Livy. Leiden. Littlewood, R. J. 2006. A Commentary on Ovid’s Fasti, Book 6. Oxford. Moore, T. J. 2012. Music in Roman Comedy. New York. Murgatroyd, P. 2005. Mythical and Legendary Narrative in Ovid’s Fasti. Leiden, 59–61. Newlands, C. E. 1995. Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti. Ithaca. Oakley, S. P. 2005. A Commentary on Livy Books VI–X. Vol. 3: Book IX. Oxford. Palmer, R. E. A. 1965. ‘The Censors of 312 B.C. and the State Religion.’ Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschiscte, 14: 293–324. Pighi, S. V. 1615. Annales Romanorum. Antwerp. Rüpke, J. 2001. The Religion of the Romans. Translated and edited by Gordon, R. 2007. Cambridge. Vincent, A. 2011. Les musiciens professionnels au service de la cite (fin de la République – Haut-Empire). Dissertation to Aix-Marseille Université. Wiseman, A. and Wiseman, P. 2011. Ovid: Times and Reasons. A New Translation of the Fasti. Oxford. Wiseman, T. P. 2002. ‘Ovid and the Stage.’ In Ovid’s Fasti: Historical Readings at Its Bimillennium, ed. G. Herbert-Brown, 275–99. Oxford. ———. 2015. The Roman Audience: Classical Literature as Social History. Oxford.

6

Phaedrus in the forum Plautus’ Pseudolus and Plato’s Phaedrus Christopher S. van den Berg

The festival performances of comic plays (ludi) may be among the last places in Roman literature to which we would automatically turn to find considered engagement with Greek philosophy. The tragic and comic plays put on at the ludi certainly offered opportunities to transform well-known Greek works into new Latin creations, and Roman playwrights eagerly drew on their Greek forerunners in inventive ways with considerable poetic license. At the same time, most extant accounts of Roman intellectual activity in the late Republic reflect an underlying hostility – or at least anxiety – towards Greek intellectual inquiry. Cicero’s de Oratore, for example, stresses the importance of Greek learning while at the same time insisting that Greek philosophy was alien to the forum, tainted (it is claimed) by the stain of intellectual nitpicking and unserious leisure (otium).1 The mediation of Greek ideas about moral conduct, at least as they appeared in philosophical rather than poetic works, seemed to warrant circumspection and scepticism. The anxiety is best reflected symbolically in Cicero’s deliberate choice to stage several dialogues, rhetorical or philosophical, outside of Rome, comfortably sheltered away from the censorious gaze (and earshot) of ambitious Romans conducting public business (negotium). This does not mean of course that philosophy didn’t make its way to Rome in various venues (including the plays of tragedy) and at various stages. Much less does it mean that the producers or consumers of dramatic performances at Rome did not have at least some knowledge of the world of Greek philosophy.2 This chapter considers one early instance of the adaptation of Greek philosophy, the reception of the Platonic tradition in Plautus’ Pseudolus. The words “reception” and “tradition” are selected here because they indicate just two of the many areas in which this volume’s honoree, Susanna Braund, has made signal contributions to the study of Latin literature. They may, however, seem to promise more than the examination of Plautus’ comedy, put on at the ludi Megalenses in April 191 BCE, can ultimately bear. The aims of this chapter are modest insofar as it considers a small group of stereotyped images and ideas about Socrates and Platonic philosophy in Plautus’ Pseudolus. The examination of the commonalities in several passages of both works need not, however, indicate significant intertextual engagement with the Platonic corpus by Plautus. It also need not necessarily

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sustain arguments for or against the educational status of the Roman audience (whatever one understands by “the Roman audience”) or the literary contours of the comic genre at Rome.3 Those broader arguments, founded on typically ambiguous or elusive evidence – will remain beyond the remit of this piece, which instead considers two distinct yet overlapping facets of Platonic philosophy in Pseudolus. First, it considers how stereotyped ideas about Socrates and his philosophical practices are embedded, to good comic effect, into the play. Second, it looks at how central ideas about eros, writing, deception, and memory are playfully adapted from Plato’s Phaedrus.

Locating Socrates Like few figures of philosophy before or since, Socrates as a personality and cult figure stands out prominently in the philosophical tradition he left behind: insistent questioning (even of the reluctant or unwilling), oral philosophizing via elenchus without a self-authored legacy of texts, shabby dress (including often going barefoot), notorious ugliness, or endurance of physical discomfort (including near-immunity to the effects of alcohol). And there is, of course, the famous phrase “Know Thyself” (γνῶθι σεαυτόν), which is not only associated with Socrates, but has in many respects become almost a kind of tag for all of Greek wisdom, one of the first things that students new to the study of ancient Greece are likely to learn. Its centrality to a long tradition of ancient ideas about philosophical knowledge was enough to prompt the writing of an entire dissertation in the early 20th century.4 Like so many Greek ideas, it acquired several meanings over time, predates Socrates and Plato, and is associated with a mythical or religious context; the phrase (or a variant of it) was one of dozens of inscriptions at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Several elements of the traditional Socratic pose emerge in the course of Pseudolus, which, when taken together, outline a general picture of Socrates and his famous activities as a philosopher. Versions of “Know Thyself” appear twice. Pseudolus, the slave of Calidorus and Simo (the play’s adulescens and senex, respectively), seeks to help Calidorus recover Phoenicium, the prostitute held by the pimp Ballio: PSEV: BAL:

PSEV: BAL:

nosce saltem hunc quis est. iam diu scio. qui fuit: nunc qui sit ipsus sciat. At least recognize who this is. I’ve known for a while who he’s been: let him now know who he is. (Plaut. Pseud. 261–2)5

As in other moments of the play, this one already carries some of the key features suggested by the maxim in its comic context: an initial reference

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to “identifying” someone (noscere/scire) is playfully turned into a philosophically freighted statement about knowledge of an individual in moral terms (se noscere/scire). Ballio, with all the moral callousness of a comic pimp, makes the underlying point that Calidorus should know himself, which means that he should understand the moral turpitude of his involvement with the likes of prostitutes and their purveyors (Ballio included). The remark also refects a general pattern in the use of Platonic/Socratic material in the play: a traditional comic motif is subverted or recast into a different form by reference to Plato’s ideas. The statement about “knowing thyself” on its own in a comic play would hardly be little more than witty banter of the kind we expect from low-brow characters, a vague one-off reminiscence of an entrenched cultural cliché, not so unlike what we find in Plautus’ Stichus, the only other immediately obvious reference (as far as I am aware) to the tag in the Plautine corpus outside Pseudolus. Panegyris says to Antipho that the wisest woman is the one “who can still know herself in favorable circumstances” (Quae tamen, cum res secundae sunt, se poterit noscere, Stich. 124). The idea resurfaces, however, in Pseudolus, and the second instance can hardly be understood as anything but an evocation of the Delphic or Socratic version. Pseudolus has dressed up the slave Simia to pose as Harpax, the errand-boy of the Macedonian soldier Polymachaeroplagides. The ploy involves delivering a letter and five minas to Ballio in order to trick him into giving Phoenicium to Simia. Pseudolus will then deliver Phoenicium to his master Calidorus, reuniting the two lovers. Simia, dressed up as Harpax and unknown to Ballio, encounters the pimp outside his house while Pseudolus eavesdrops: SIMI: BAL: SIMI:

ecquem in angiporto hoc hominem tu nouisti? te rogo. egomet me. pauci istuc faciunt homines quod tu praedicas, nam in foro uix decumus quisque est qui ipsus sese nouerit. PSEV: saluos sum, iam philosophatur. SIMI: Do you know anyone in this alleyway? BAL: I know myself. SIMI: Few men do what you’re talking about, you see, in the forum hardly one out of ten men knows himself. PSEV: I’m saved, he’s already philosophizing. (Plaut. Pseud. 971–4) Again the common motif of identifying a person, so crucial to the twists and turns and scenes of recognition and deception in comic plots, immediately takes a playful philosophical turn. Unlike in the earlier passage, Plautus relies on a character’s intervention (Pseudolus’ characterization of the exchange) to clarify the philosophical meaning and provenance of the utterance.6 The comedy is sustained or advanced even as Plautus deftly incorporates philosophical material into the drama as it unfolds.

94 Christopher S. van den Berg An explicit reference to Socrates in the play, accompanied by playful reenactment of a dialogue-style exchange, offers an even more overtly philosophical scene. Simo says of Pseudolus that “you’ll soon be done in by his words, such that you’ll think you’re talking not to Pseudolus, but Socrates” (conficiet iam te hic uerbis ut tu censeas | non Pseudolum, sed Socratem tecum loqui, 464–5). This is the only use of the name “Socrates” in the Plautine corpus and the earliest recorded use in Latin. What precisely the audience will have understood it to mean is a tantalizing question (and one beyond our immediate purposes). At the very least, the name’s uniqueness in Plautus and combination with other philosophical elements suggests how central Socrates and his connection to philosophy are to the play. Simo’s identification of Pseudolus as a Socrates figure leads to mock elenchus in which Pseudolus answers Simo’s queries with pat Greek responses, much as Socrates would submit himself to the questioning of his interlocutors. Pseudolus begins, however, by first comparing himself to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi: SIMO:

ego ne quid noceat cauero. sed quid ais? quid hoc quod te rogo? PSEV: siquid uis roga. quod scibo Delphis tibi responsum dicito. SIMO: aduorte ergo animum et fac sis promissi memor. quid ais? ecquam scis filium tibicinam meum amare? PSEV: ναὶ γάρ. SIMO: liberare quam uelit? PSEV: καὶ τοῦτο ναὶ γάρ. SIMO: ecquas uiginti minas per sycophantiam atque per doctos dolos paritas ut a me auferas? PSEV: aps ted ego auferam? SIMO: ita, quas meo gnato des, qui amicam liberet? fatere, dic ‘καὶ τοῦτο ναί.’ PSEV: καὶ τοῦτο ναί. CALL: fatetur. SIMO: dixin, Callipho, dudum tibi? CALL: memini. SIMO: I’ll make sure he does no harm. Now what do you say? What about what I’m asking? PSEV: Just ask if you want something. And say that I’ve given Delphic responses for what I know. SIMO: Pay attention and do be mindful of your promise. So, do you know that my son loves some flute-player? PSEV: That’s certain.

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SIMO: PSEV: SIMO:

And wants to free her? That’s certain too. And you’re preparing to take away twenty minas from me through trickery and learned wiles? PSEV: Me take them away from you? SIMO: Yes, to give them to my son so he can free his girlfriend? Admit it, say “That’s certain too.” PSEV: “That’s certain too.” CALL: He admits it. SIMO: Wasn’t I just saying that, Callipho? CALL: I remember. (Plaut. Pseud. 478–90)7 Like the lone use of the word Socrates, this is the only time Plautus mentions the Delphic oracle explicitly, underlining not only the singularity of the topic for the play but also confrming the provenance of the play’s two instances of “know thyself.” In addition, Plautus hereby adds conceptual depth to the work’s larger, metatextual exploration of truth and fction. Pseudolus, a name which evokes falsehood (Gr. Ψευδ-) and, perhaps, trickery (dolus) is likened to Socrates, the philosopher known for his dogged pursuit of the truth.8 The contrast is only heightened by reference to the Delphic oracle, famously known for telling obscure or misleading truths. The dialogue exchange between Pseudolus and Callipho replays the alltoo-common scenarios of inquiry and response, elenchus, so marvelously on display in the dialogues of Plato. The use of Greek is itself a wry comic touch, given that the actors are speaking Latin at Rome while playing native Greeks resident in Athens (and may themselves have been native or multilingual speakers of Greek).9 On the model of Socratic dialogue, the questioning continues until the interlocutor is capable of carrying his point through the dialectical steps of confirmation or refutation (at least, in theory). Simo in this case triumphantly elicits the truth from his interlocutor. Plautus, however, inventively combines the Socratic elenchus with yet another of the famous features of oracles and Greek mythology generally, that those who try to escape the often-ambiguous divine predictions ultimately fail to escape them, despite and sometimes because of their best efforts. Rather than hide his planned trickery, Pseudolus openly admits it, confirming his general plans for Simo. Yet despite Simo’s knowledge and Pseudolus’ confirmation, the predicted trick will eventually come to fruition, as Pseudolus successfully wins the girl from Ballio and gives her to Calidorus. In summary, the play’s references to Socrates are both general and obvious – almost over the top – suggesting a kind of composite image of a famous figure and drawing on some of the most notable features of that image. As much as the play links Pseudolus with Socrates, it also creates a philosophical ambience in the play as a whole. Plautus injects into the play several

96 Christopher S. van den Berg Socratic elements that are easily recognizable, and just in case the audience fails to recognize them, he deftly integrates several explicit cues.

The Phaedrus in Pseudolus: identification and writing The twin theme of identification, that is, both knowing who people are and knowing what kind of person they are, is integrated as well into to the play’s intense emphasis on writing and written objects. Written objects and the implements to produce them are repeatedly inserted into the play in order to playfully touch on ideas and inquiries characteristic of philosophical investigation. Underlying many of the passages are topics central to one of Plato’s masterpieces, the Phaedrus, and several connections will be explored in what follows. Like no other play of Plautus, writing implements and letters are central not just to the progression of the comic plot, but also to various comic scenes throughout the play. References to writing and the physical implements of written communication abound: tablets (tabellae), wax (cera), wood (lignum), letters (litterae), a letter (epistula and libellum) with a seal bearing an image of its author (symbolus, signum, imago), a calamus and stilus, a book (liber), and even writing as an inventive means for punishing a slave.10 The central trick of the play involves getting a sealed letter from Harpax, the errand-boy of Polymachaeroplagides, in order to give the letter to the pimp Ballio, along with the outstanding payment of five minas, in return for Phoenicium (more on that letter soon). But even before this comic plot device, one of the recurring themes of the play involves an exchange of letters and playful puns that accompany that exchange. In the opening scene, Pseudolus presses Calidorus to explain the state of his sorrow. He’s been miserable for days, crying over letters (tabellae, 10) in his possession. The tablets are even fetishized through wordplay, connecting them etymologically to Calidorus’ sufferings: cape has tabellas, tute hinc narrato tibi | quae me miseria et cura contabefacit, Plaut. Pseud. 20–1). Plautus has Calidorus speak as if the letters were the material cause of his suffering. Sustained wordplay soon comes thick and fast, in a scene whose jokes continue to vex its interpreters: PSEV:

immo enim pellegam. aduortito animum. CALI: non adest. PSEV: at tu cita. CALI: immo ego tacebo, tu istinc ex cera cita. nam istic meus animus nunc est, non in pectore. PSEV: tuam amicam uideo, Calidore. CALI: ubi ea est, opsecro? PSEV: eccam in tabellis porrectam: in cera cubat. PSEV: No I’ll read them.

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Give me your attention. It’s not here.

Then summon it. No, I’ll be quiet, you summon it from the wax. My heart’s there now, not in my chest. PSEV: I see your girlfriend, Calidorus. CALI: I’m begging you, where is she? PSEV: Outstretched in the tablets: she’s lying in the wax. (Pseud. 31–6) The humor of the exchange rests on the pun contained in the word animus, both the “attention” that Calidorus is capable of giving to Pseudolus (animum advertere), and his “soul” or “darling” (animus) contained in Phoenicium’s letter. In the absence of stage directions or better knowledge of props, the concluding punchline remains unclear, and recent interpretations have suggested either that the tabellae contain an image of Phoenicium or that Pseudolus mockingly pretends that Phoenicium is lying down (unconscious?) and pretends to revive her.11 Whatever form the joke took, encapsulated in it is a pun referring to a long-standing topic of identity: the idea that people can be thought to be in a letter. The motif of presence and absence is a mainstay of ancient epistolography, and the careful wordplay only complicates the motif, not only by suggesting the presence of the letter-writer in the letter, but also by identifying Calidorus with his beloved and thus displacing him into the letter, as if he and his beloved are trapped there, despite the fact that we (and they) are well aware that a letter is nothing more than a means of representation.12 Writing and letters are immediately the vehicle for another sustained pun that recurs throughout the play. Pseudolus reads the letter, in which Phoenicium “offers salutation and requests salvation from you” (salutem impertit et salutem ex te expetit, 43). Calidorus responds to Phoenicium’s wordplay, in which salus is used as the standard epistolary greeting (“salutation”), and also means “salvation,” that is, saving Phoenicium from being sold to Polymachaeroplagides. Calidorus’ response leads to further jokes: CALI:

perii! salutem nusquam inuenio, Pseudole, quam illi remittam. PSEV: quam salutem? CALI: argenteam. PSEV: pro lignean salute uis argenteam remittere illi? uide sis quam tu rem geras. CALI: I’m done for. I can’t anywhere find salvation to send her, Pseudolus! PSEV: What salvation? CALI: In the form of silver. PSEV: You want to send her salvation (salus) in silver in return for a greeting (salus) in wood? You better watch what you’re doing. (Plaut. Pseud., 31–6)13

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The series of jokes run throughout the play and will return in the letter written by Polymachaeroplagides to the pimp Ballio in order to secure Phoenicium. Simia, who is adlibbing his responses as the scene progresses, tells us that the letter explicitly withholds the greeting (salus) because it is the soldier’s custom to offer a greeting in person (manu salutem mittunt, 1006). The letter itself, when read, gets in a further dig at Ballio along the same lines, stating that one sends greetings (salus) to those who deserve them, but Ballio doesn’t, a neat comic coincidence, given that the earlier letter from Phoenicium and the later letter from Polymachaeroplagides otherwise have no connection to one another in the dramatic fction (1013–4). Writing and the problems of how the written communicates, or fails to communicate, are central topics of Plato’s Phaedrus, and it is in light of the Platonic precedent that the playful focus on writing in Pseudolus seems to take shape. There are several similarities of scenario, language, and idea between Plautus’ Pseudolus and Plato’s Phaedrus. Although Socrates’ connection to the Delphic oracle’s “Know Thyself” is an inextricable part of his image generally, it does not appear in all of Plato’s texts, and its appearance in the Phaedrus is inherently connected to writing.14 Early in the dialogue Socrates explains to Phaedrus why he has no interest in rationalizing explanations of inherited myths: “I can’t yet – as the Delphic inscription goes – know myself: and so it seems to me laughable to consider other matters while still not knowing this one” (οὐ δύναμαί πω κατὰ τὸ Δελφικὸν γράμμα γνῶναι ἐμαυτόν: γελοῖον δή μοι φαίνεται τοῦτο ἔτι ἀγνοοῦντα τὰ ἀλλότρια σκοπεῖν (229e5–230a1). Socrates’ claim that it would be “laughable” (γελοῖον) to consider other matters may well have offered a stimulus to Plautus as an author of comedy constantly in search of a good laugh. Further stimulus could be found in explicit mention of the comic genre in the Phaedrus: You’ll have to speak as best you can so that we’re not forced to produce some vulgar thing of the comedians, bantering back and forth; take care and don’t make me say “Oh Socrates, if I don’t know Socrates then I’ve forgotten myself” and “though he wanted to speak he was being coy.” ῥητέον μὲν γάρ σοι παντὸς μᾶλλον οὕτως ὅπως οἷός τε εἶ, ἵνα δὲ μὴ τὸ τῶν κωμῳδῶν φορτικὸν πρᾶγμα ἀναγκαζώμεθα ποιεῖν ἀνταποδιδόντες ἀλλήλοις, εὐλαβήθητι καὶ μὴ βούλου με ἀναγκάσαι λέγειν ἐκεῖνο τὸ εἰ ἐγώ, ὦ Σώκρατες, Σωκράτην ἀγνοῶ, καὶ ἐμαυτοῦ ἐπιλέλησμαι, καὶ ὅτι ἐπεθύμει μὲν λέγειν, ἐθρύπτετο δέ. (236c1–7) Within the Phaedrus this is a moment of wry, self-referential comedy, since shortly before this Socrates had used the same language to tease Phaedrus for pretending not to know the speech of Lysias about which he was so passionate (228a). The dialogue engages in precisely the comic banter it claims to reject. The Phaedrus is in this respect a text that real authors of comedy might at a later time find especially appealing. Pseudolus (or any later

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comedy) could humorously build on the Phaedrus, perhaps tacitly acknowledging the dialogue’s playful reference to the genre of comedy while ignoring or inverting Socrates’ injunction against comic jibes. The Phaedrus and Pseudolus also evince several commonalities in their setting and central topics (speech, writing, deception, identity). Writing and speech are central to the Phaedrus, and Pseudolus begins right away by emphasizing writing and speaking: Pseudolus remarks that Calidorus is rendered nearly mute (te tacente, 3) because of the letter (tabellae, 10) from Phoenicium and is encouraged to speak (eloquere, 12). Both works begin with a trio of figures, two real and one made present via writing: Socrates/ Phaedrus/Lysias and Calidorus/Pseudolus/Phoenicium. In both, one figure reads out the writings of the absent person to the other (Phaedrus reads Lysias to Socrates, Pseudolus reads Phoenicium to Calidorus).15 The first set of puns and jokes surrounding the letter focuses on Calidorus’ animus (discussed earlier), while a central concern of the Phaedrus generally is the relationship between language and the ψυχή (mind, understanding, spirit: I don’t wish to suggest that animus is a translation of ψυχή, but the terms overlap considerably). The topic of the initial writings in both texts is love, even though the situations are understandably tailored to their local text: an examination of eros and the lover/beloved relationship in the Phaedrus and the concerns of the beloved for her own salvation in Pseudolus. Although the two works offer vastly different representation of love and eros, Pseudolus could be read as a humorous response to at least one idea found in the Phaedrus. In the speech of Lysias, it is said that lovers, because of all that they suffer and do, “think that they have long since given sufficient favor to those they love” (ἡγοῦνται πάλαι τὴν ἀξίαν ἀποδεδωκέναι χάριν τοῖς ἐρωμένοις, 231b1–2). The idea runs contrary to Roman comedy’s far more pragmatic amorous economy. The exchange between Ballio and Pseudolus also explores the relationship between lover and beloved: BAL: PSEV:

eadem est mihi lex: metuo credere. credere autem!

eho an paenitet te quanto hic fuerit usui? BAL: non est iustus quisquam amator nisi qui perpetuat data. det, det usque: quando nil sit, simul amare desinat. BAL: I always observe the same law: I hesitate to grant credit. PSEV: Credit indeed! Man, aren’t you ashamed of how much you’ve used this guy? BAL: The only just lover is the one who gives endlessly. Let him give and give again: Then, when nothing’s left, let him stop loving. (Pseud. 304–7)

100 Christopher S. van den Berg The scene is tailored to the comedic scenario, highlighting the conficting interests of the pimp and the adulescens. Yet Plautus gestures as well towards moralizing philosophical discourse, including a general rule of thumb (lex) by Ballio, a defnition of the “just lover” (iustus amator), and an explanation of his expected conduct. Related to the amorous considerations of both works are references to children. Plato’s Phaedrus is intensely interested in genealogies of thought and the words produced in the soul as “legitimate children” through dialectic. The theme of paternity and (re)birth begins with the Palinode’s myth of the rebirth(s) of human souls. Later in the myth of Theuth and Thamus, Theuth is dubbed the father of letters (πατὴρ ὢν γραμμάτων, 275a2). One of several complaints against writing in the dialogue is that it requires a father (the author) to defend it when it cannot answer for itself to the challenge of an interlocutor (275e3–4). As part of the examination of writing’s effects, Socrates asks Phaedrus about the differences between writing and dialectic: “Can we envision another speech that is the legitimate brother of this one [i.e. writing], both in how it is born and in the extent to which it is by nature better and more powerful than this one” (ἄλλον ὁρῶμεν λόγον τούτου ἀδελφὸν γνήσιον, τῷ τρόπῳ τε γίγνεται, καὶ ὅσῳ ἀμείνων καὶ δυνατώτερος τούτου φύεται, 276a1–2). Socrates extends the familial analogy by claiming that only the words present in the soul are a speaker’s legitimate offspring (υἱεῖς γνησίους, 278a6) and that it produces descendants or brothers in the souls of others (ἔκγονοί τε καὶ ἀδελφοὶ, 278b1–2).16 The idea that writing can produce offspring occurs as well at the outset of Pseudolus, but is just as quickly defused with a lascivious joke: “These letters [letter/writing] are seeking children for themselves, climbing on top of one another” (quaerunt litterae hae sibi liberos | alia aliam scandit, Plaut. Pseud. 23–4). Despite its brevity in comparison to the Phaedrus’ sustained analogizing between writing and paternity, the passage suggests a general pattern and allows us to draw some conclusions about the reworking of the Socratic material to suit the Roman context. It is, of course, not necessary that you know Plato’s Phaedrus to get this or any of the jokes, but knowing the Platonic text potentially adds yet another comic layer, including the self-satisfied knowledge of a reader who could discern the pastiche of Platonic elements. We are still worlds away from the hardcore intertextual dependence that will emerge so powerfully in subsequent Roman authors. The connections reflect a stage of allusion and intertext that anticipates the complexity we find in full force by the end of the Republic and among the Augustan poets and well beyond.17 Central to the Phaedrus is its famous rejection of writing as a means of transmitting and producing knowledge, an idea underlying the emphasis on dialectic as creating true intellectual offspring (discussed earlier). Socrates insistently turns to the question of what kind of knowledge writing and rhetoric can possibly create, and his answers invariably stress the various failures of writing and the promotion of dialectic as the only true means of

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inquiry. One key criticism in the Phaedrus is the fact that writing cannot address who it should or avoid addressing those it shouldn’t: letters cannot function as humans do in the world (276a7–8). This way of figuring the silence that attends the written word is emphasized in the letter given to Ballio by Harpax (discussed further earlier). The letter, again via puns on the word salus, remarks on the gap between the reality of an individual offering a greeting in person and a letter that can only do so in absentia. The exchange offers what amounts to a literalist reenactment of the Platonic concerns: the letter explicitly calls attention to its inability to be present, to address someone as it should. Through the letters, the play incessantly draws attention to the gap between the written and the spoken and the potential insufficiency or failure of writing as a medium of communication. The failures of writing in the Phaedrus emerge most strongly in Plato’s famous myth of Theuth and Thamus on the invention of writing (274c1–275e7). Socrates tells Phaedrus the story of the divine Egyptian inventor Theuth, who, in addition to discovering numbers, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, also invented letters. Theuth thought that writing would make the Egyptians wiser by improving memory. Yet Thamus, king of the Egyptian gods, objected that letters only provide a false image of knowledge, because those who entrust their knowledge to writing will no longer exercise the faculty of memory and thus will not actually possess the knowledge they claim to have. Socrates’ objections to writing, as presented in Plato’s written text, are reflected in several ways in Pseudolus. The deceptive nature of letters/a letter is the central mechanism of Pseudolus’ trick: using the purloined letter to convince Ballio to hand over Phoenicium. The play perfectly captures in comic form the Platonic idea that letters are merely forms of trickery, misleading us into thinking we know something when we do not. The Phaedrus’ opposition between knowledge created by direct discussion (dialectic) and knowledge falsely transmitted by letters is only sharpened by the same opposition in Pseudolus: Ballio has been told in person about Pseudolus’ plot, and yet this knowledge communicated is no match for the false knowledge produced by the misleading proof of the letter. Pseudolus comically displays the workings of the opposition between writing and speech that were so central to the Phaedrus, not necessarily to register agreement with the Platonic criticism, but rather to adapt and subvert its terms to comedic ends. The Phaedrus’ emphasis on the visual aspects of writing is likewise reflected in Pseudolus, with its several mentions of eyes, seeing, and visual representation. There are constant references to oculus throughout the play, signaled quite deliberately early on, when Pseudolus oddly changes a standard proverb: “as far as this matter is concerned, sleep on whichever eye you wish” (de istac re in oculum utrumuis conquiesceto, 123).18 Calidorus calls our attention to the substitution: “Eye, don’t you mean ear?” (oculum? anne in aurem?, 124).19 Pseudolus is twice described with the adjective graphicus (519, 700), an appropriate-enough adjective for clever slaves, but which also

102 Christopher S. van den Berg perfectly captures the visual aspect of “writing,” as γράφειν can mean both to write and to paint. One usage is combined with the Greek term εὑρητής (inventor), not coincidentally the term used to describe Theuth, who Plato says discovered (εὑρεῖν) various arts. Calidorus remarks: nimium est mortalis graphicus, εὑρητής mihi est (“he’s a whipsmart mortal, my inventor,” 700). The use of language must have been striking not for its content but for who speaks: this is the only example of a iuvenis in the Plautine corpus who engages in the code-switching otherwise associated with slaves.20 The letter presented to Ballio is itself defined in patently visual terms, and scholars are right to have noted a tension: it is not the letter and the message it contains that is central to Pseudolus’ trick, but rather the seal it bears, at times called the symbolus.21 This symbolus is expressly defined in terms of the imago it depicts: miles hic reliquit symbolum, expressam in cera ex anulo suam imaginem, ut qui huc afferret eius similem symbolum cum eo simul me mitteret. The soldier left here a token The image from his ring pressed into wax So that he [sc. Ballio] will send me along with the man Who brings here a token like that one. (Pseud. 55–8) The letter is treated peculiarly throughout the play, fetishized as a physical object whose status as an object is more important than the message it reports. All we learn of its contents, in fact, is that it continues the frst letter’s jokes about greetings (salus). The emphasis on the visual elements throughout the play began already with the frst letter and Pseudolus’ claim to see Phoenicium in the letter: the play in this regard literalizes the analogy present in the Phaedrus, which had claimed that writing was like a painting that could not offer any response when spoken to (275d4–9). Lastly, one of the strongest conceptual connections to the Phaedrus involves the criticism of writing because it destroys individual memory. These ideas from the Phaedrus are referred to obliquely in Pseudolus. In what amounts to a Latin tongue twister, Simia pushes back against the promptings of Pseudolus about his plans: potin ut taceas? memorem immemorem facit qui monet quod memor meminit. teneo omnia, in pectore condita sunt, meditati sunt mihi doli docte. Can’t you be silent.A guy who reminds a mindful man of what he remembers Makes him forget what he remembers.

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I’ve got everything stored up in my chest; I’ve thought out My schemes smartly. (Plaut. Pseud. 941–2) Although the contexts are quite different, the core ideas and even some of the etymological wordplay (memor- and μνη-) are the same in both works. In the Phaedrus, Thamus criticizes writing because it means that people “cannot recall knowledge on their own from within themselves” (οὐκ ἔνδοθεν αὐτοὺς ὑφ᾿ αὑτῶν ἀναμιμνῃσκομένους, 275a5–6). Theuth, he continues, has “discovered not an elixir of memory but of reminding” (οὔκουν μνήμης ἀλλ᾿ ὑπομνήσεως φάρμακον ηὗρες, 275a6–7). Despite their clearly different aims and genres, Pseudolus and the Phaedrus share much in common. The Phaedrus is a highly self-conscious rhetorical work in written format, ironically criticizing in writing the rhetorical and written nature of Athenian rhetoric. Again, it would probably be wrong to say that Plautus in Pseudolus is reworking Plato with the sort of fine-grained linguistic adaptations that we eventually find in the late Republic. Cicero’s rewriting of Plato in the de Oratore, for example, is far more complex, and even agonistic, than Plautus’ casual reminiscences. And by the time we reach the Augustan poets, the sustained series of meaningful and complex allusions to earlier poets is constantly on display in a manner which is clearly demonstrable. In Pseudolus, by contrast, several motifs and ideas about Socrates and Plato’s Phaedrus crop up in the course of the play. Rather than necessarily serve as a central strand in the work’s fabric they seem to be woven in subtly at various points. And in no single adaptation does it seem to be the case that an understanding of a passage – a joke or turn of phrase – is directly dependent on having the Phaedrus in mind. Knowledge of a pre-text enhances but does not necessarily determine the comedy as it unfolds. All the same, Plautus seems to make good use of the philosophical material at hand, only occasionally allowing Plato or Socrates to peer out from behind the comedic mask.

Notes 1 Cf. Zetzel (2003) on the topic. 2 Gruen (1992), Hutchinson (2013), and Feeney (2016) on Roman Hellenization. 3 On venues and audiences, see Goldberg (1998, 2005, 87–114, and 2018), Marshall (2006, 73–82). They argue for a fairly homogeneous comic audience, as does Richlin (2017, 1–67). Richlin criticizes the emphasis in Fontaine (2010) on the elite orientation of Plautine texts (cf. Sharrock [2009]). She also builds on the arguments for group improvisation (and hence, potentially, authorship) in Marshall (2006). McCarthy (2000) and Stewart (2012) read Plautus’ corpus as reinforcing elite dominance even as Plautus probes subversive possibilities. An informative overview of several scholarly directions (through about 2010) can be found in Goldberg (2011). 4 Wilkins (1917). She identifies one instance in Pseudolus; 262 is overlooked presumably because Plautus uses scire rather than noscere. Stehle (1984, 246–7) briefly touches on Socrates in Pseudolus. Cf. Chiarini (2007).

104 Christopher S. van den Berg 5 For the Latin text, I rely on de Melo’s Loeb Classical Library edition (2012). Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 6 Pseudolus capped his earlier soliloquy with sed iam satis est philosophatum (687). The play accounts for two of the four uses of philosophari in Plautus; cf. Capt. 284, Merc. 147, and the interjection, philosophe, Rud. 986. 7 The use of Greek in this passage deserves comment in the light of the Socratic coloring. Though καὶ τοῦτο ναί is found elsewhere in Plautus (Persa 484), it appears not to be a distinctive Socratic or Platonic idiom. 8 I do note the powerful arguments against the name as a Greek-Latin composite at Fontaine (2010, 30–3), who urges the spelling Pseudylus. My analysis rests on the first half of the name, Ψευδ-. The two puns on dolus and the name Pseudolus/ Pseudylos (1205 and 1244) show that the character’s name could be thought of in connection to dolus. Sharrock (1996) and Stewart (2008) on deception in the play. Note too that Simo calls Pseudolus meus Ulixes (1063) – a figure also famous for verbal artistry and deception. 9 Feeney (2016) illuminates the multi-lingual cultures of early Latin literature and its producers. 10 Pseudolus suggests the possible punishment of himself to Simo: “just as letters are written with a reed-pen in a book, write all over me with elm-wood styluses” (quasi in libro scribuntur calamo litterae | stilis me totum usque ulmeis conscribito, Plaut. Pseud. 544a–5). On writing, its instruments in Pseudolus, see Clark (2001–2002), Slater (2004), and Marshall (2006, 197–202), and some of the epistolary jokes discussed later in this chapter. 11 On the first interpretation, see O’Bryhim (2010), on the second Fontaine (2012). 12 Barbiero (2014) is excellent on epistles in Plautus. 13 The pun is virtually impossible to render in English, and I’ve simply opted for a literalist translation. De Melo offers one possibility, using “dearest wishes” (salutations) and “dearest wish” (salvation). The wordplay clearly had an afterlife: Cicero must have had this passage (or the wordplay in general) in mind when writing the Brutus in 46 BCE. At Brut. 13 he asserts that Atticus’ litterae (the liber Annalis) contained a salutatio (“greeting”) that brought Cicero salus (“salvation”). Cicero attests to a performance of the play, reporting that his defendant, the famous actor Roscius, played the pimp Ballio (Rosc. com. 20). Toph Marshall nicely suggests to me “you want her to be hale through silver in return for ‘hail’ on wood.” 14 The phrase or versions of it appear in a handful of Plato’s works. See Wilkins (1917, 101–4) for references. 15 A hardcore intertextualist might see a further connection in the references to laying down and standing up. Socrates lies down to listen to Phaedrus’ recitation (230e). Pseudolus jokes that Phoenicium is lying down (eccam in tabellis porrectam: in cera cubat, 36; discussed earlier). Furthermore (and assuming that the two-line prologue to Pseudolus is authentic), the audience is asked to stand up before the performance, as if reversing the Phaedrus’ opening performance for which Socrates lies down: exporgi meliust lumbos atque exsurgier, Plaut. Pseud. 1). Even if the prologue is a later insertion, its author could be engaging precisely with the motif of standing/sitting. The physical position of individuals (sitting, standing) is used in Roman dialogue as part of a generic nod to the tradition, in part because of its centrality to the narrative of the Phaedrus. Cicero meaningfully begins the discussion of de Oratore by having the characters sit on pillows. See Zetzel (2003). The locus amoenus of the Phaedrus became a point of reference for later authors, especially Hellenistic poets; cf. Yunis (2011, 96) with Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004, 141–52). 16 The depiction of arguments as offspring explains Socrates’ initial summoning of “noble creatures” to persuade “beautifully childed Phaedrus” (Πάριτε δή, θρέμματα γενναῖα, καλλίπαιδά τε Φαῖδρον πείθετε, 261a3).

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17 Roman plays are a complex mixture of Greek forerunners, although sourcehunting often overshadowed the inventiveness and creativity of Roman authors reworking their Greek predecessors and adding to them. See Goldberg (1986, 91–122) and Germany (2016) on Terence; Telò (2019) more generally. 18 Cf. Ter. Heaut. 342 for the standard version. 19 Cf. Simo’s response, “knock my eye out [if I give you the money]” (excludito mi hercle oculum, 510). The obscure phrase at 301 id vendito oculata die (“sell it for cash”) was selected for its connection to oculus. 20 Adams (2003, 351–3). 21 Jenkins (2005); Barbiero (2014).

Works cited Adams, J. N. 2003. Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Oxford. Barbiero, E. A. 2014. Reading Between the Lines: Letters in Plautus (diss. Univ. of Toronto). Chiarini, G. 2007. ‘Sed Iam Satis Philosophatumst: Sospensione Della Comicità in Plauto.’ Dioniso 6, 214–29. Clark, J. R. 2001. ‘Early Latin Handwriting and Plautus’ Pseudolus.’ Classical Journal 97, 183–9. Dinter, M. T. (ed.). 2019. The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy. Cambridge. Fantuzzi, M., and R. L. Hunter. 2004. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry. Cambridge. Feeney, D. 2016. Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature. Cambridge, MA. Fontaine, M. 2010. Funny Words in Plautine Comedy. Oxford. ———. 2012. ‘The Jokes at the Start of Plautus’ Pseudylus (Pseudolus).’ Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 102, 89–94. Germany, R. 2016. Mimetic Contagion: Art and Artifice in Terence’s Eunuch. Oxford. Goldberg, S. M. 1986. Understanding Terence. Princeton, NJ. ———. 1998. ‘Plautus on the Palatine.’ Journal of Roman Studies 88, 1–20. ———. 2005. Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic. Cambridge. ———. 2011. ‘Roman Comedy Gets Back to Basics.’ Journal of Roman Studies 101, 206–21. ———. 2018. ‘Theater without Theaters: Seeing Plays the Roman Way.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 148, 139–72. Gruen, E. S. 1992. Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome. Ithaca. Hutchinson, G. O. 2013. Greek to Latin: Frameworks and Contexts for Intertextuality. Oxford. Jenkins, T. E. 2005. ‘At Play with Writing: Letters and Readers in Plautus.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 135.2, 359–92. Marshall, C. W. 2006. The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy. Cambridge. McCarthy, K. 2000. Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy. Princeton. O’Bryhim, S. 2010. ‘Phoenicium in the Wax (Pl. Ps. 20–37).’ Mnemosyne 63, 635–9. Richlin, A. 2017. Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy. Cambridge. Sharrock, A. R. 1996. ‘The Art of Deceit: Pseudolus and the Nature of Reading.’ Classical Quarterly 46, 152–74. ———. 2009. Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence. Cambridge.

106 Christopher S. van den Berg Slater, N. W. 2004. ‘Staging Literacy in Plautus.’ In Oral Performance and Its Context, ed. C. Mackie. Leiden, 163–77. Stehle, E. M. 1984. ‘Pseudolus as Socrates, Poet and Trickster.’ In Classical Texts and their Traditions: Studies in Honor of C. R. Trahman, eds. D. F. Bright and E. S. Ramage. Chico, CA, 239–51. Stewart, R. L. 2008. ‘Who’s Tricked: Models of Slave Behavior in Plautus’s “Pseudolus.”’ In Role Models in the Roman World: Identity and Assimilation, eds. S. Bell and I. L. Hansen. Ann Arbor, MI, 69–96. ———. 2012. Plautus and Roman Slavery. Oxford and Malden, MA. Telò, M. 2019. ‘Roman Comedy and the Poetics of Adaptation.’ In Dinter 2019, 47–65. Wilkins, E. G. 1917. “Know Thyself” in Greek and Latin Literature (diss. Univ. of Chicago). Yunis, H. 2011. Plato: Phaedrus. Cambridge. Zetzel, J. E. G. 2003. ‘Plato with Pillows: Cicero on the Uses of Greek Culture.’ In Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome: Studies in Honour of T.P. Wiseman, eds. D. Braund and C. Gill. Exeter, 119–38.

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When mortals meet gods in classical and contemporary contexts Paula James

Prologue I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. Shakespeare, Sonnet 130.11–l2

I embarked upon this chapter with some trepidation, and as an atheist I had no recourse to divine inspiration. This is the downside of being a nonbeliever because for a heartfelt homage to a wonderful Classics scholar I needed all the help I could get. Thanks are due to Dr. Lynette Watson, who brought my attention to the significance of a goddess’s gait and walking the walk as well as talking the talk on both sides of the epiphanic equation.1 The light yet regal step of the stranger is an indication that one is in the presence of a deity; prompt recognition is always a sensible call as fear, trembling and respect are part of the etiquette that ensures a good result for the mortal honoured with a visit or visitation. A study of the ancient world can teach us some life lessons. Following in the footsteps of Professor Susanna Braund is an honour, and re-engaging with her body of work has been educational. It is refreshing to hear the personal voice in her publications, and this chapter owes its tone and timbre to Susanna’s bold moves in making academic observations both analytical and empathetic. I am also indebted yet again to the insightful work of Jane Michèle Keen (Miller) who shared her thoughts and analyses of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with me when we were both students in the Southampton University Classics Department in the early 1980s. Under the expert tutelage of Professor Frederick Williams, Keen listed the common features of the divine encounter in her thesis chapters on Perseus in Ovid and the assistance bestowed upon him by Minerva in his quest for the head of the gorgon Medusa. Keen itemises essential elements of an epiphany which usually occurs at a time of crisis for the mortal or for his community, time and place being specified, usually dawn, dusk, midday and midnight. There is sometimes a landmark, and the encounter often takes place on the road with the destination

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of the human also revealed. The god can ask a searching question but already knows the answer, and his or her divine insight can reveal to the mortal that this is a supernatural interlocutor. Fear follows, and reassurance is usually forthcoming from the deity. Other aspects to the meeting can be a supernatural light, and the god can make a sharp exit after conferring a gift upon their favourite.2 The Perseus section of the Keen thesis (sadly still unpublished) has supplied my starting point and prompted me to look at departures from the motifs in the genre scene within the Latin literary tradition. This is how I would characterise the conventions of ‘god meets hero’ who is invariably a mortal with supernatural qualities, and allegedly one of his parents is usually a god. The characteristics of such encounters featured in Greek literature and culture have received a detailed survey in Petridou.3 Williams’ articles also reference the work of earlier scholars on this theme. My selection starts with Virgil but goes on to highlight the satirical spin Latin authors Ovid and Apuleius have subjected such scenes to while a nod to screen realisations of gods classical and hybrid may (or may not, depending on one’s scholarly attitude to reception in mass culture) enliven the debate about the impact of epiphanic moments in the classical corpus.

Testing the theory In book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid (314–24), Venus, dressed in hunting garb, accosts Aeneas, her son, and asks if he and his companions have seen her company. The goddess of love seems to relish imitating the virgin goddess, Diana, when it suits her, and a little later at 1.494–504 queen Dido is compared to the divine virgin with her nymphs. So the encounter with his Olympian mother is opportune for Aeneas, soon to meet the ruler of a nascent city, and it follows the formulaic intervention from above. Time and place are specified, and Aeneas is in need of information and guidance about a strange and potentially inhospitable land. Venus supplies essential context and background about Dido, who is building a new nation for the Phoenician refugees. However, illustrating the formula laid out in Keen, Virgil has the goddess prefacing her helpful back story about Dido with questions to her son; of course, she already knows the answers. In fact, she cuts him off in rather a peremptory manner when Aeneas mourns the misfortunes of his Trojan band. Aeneas has already sensed that this is no mortal girl and actually asks if the stranger is the sister of Phoebus or at least a nymph, fairly sure that he and his companions are in the presence of someone divine (327–30). His mother declares herself unworthy of such an honour but, as noted, she quickly takes control of the situation. Eventually, Venus reveals herself by her gait as she prepares to return through the upper air to Olympus and the hero tries to clasp her as he had done with the ghost of his lost wife, Creusa.4 We shall discover during Aeneas’ spell-binding narration to Dido and her

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court that Venus appeared to her son during the fall of his city, in order to show him the gods busy destroying Troy and to reinforce the advice Hector had given about fleeing the city with his family and sacred statuettes.5 The close encounter of Aeneid 1 seems to tick all the boxes for a standard epiphany, but the subsequent meeting with Dido slightly derails the formula as she is not a goddess and yet is compared to one by the Diana simile. Both powerful females (divinity and queen) sport a bow and have a devoted entourage. The reader or external audience of the text are led into the illusion of the queen as divinely comparisoned, while the Trojans within the epic react as if she is in loco numinis. The ruler of Carthage even utters the comforting words associated with a divine encounter, ‘banish fear from your heart’ (soluite corde metum, 1.562), to the foreign visitors. Aeneas, bowled over by her beauty, will follow his men’s plea for refuge with vows of undying gratitude, encouraged by his reading of the war scenes depicted on the temple of Juno which he has seen as sympathetic to the Trojan fate. Neither Venus nor Dido is Diana, and mistaken identity is a dangerous situation for mortals to find themselves in whether they are the viewer or the viewed, the human onlooker or the faux divinity, as gods are sensitive about being recognised. A compromising or expropriating of their essential attributes diminishes them. There are several cautionary tales in Ovid’s epic poem along these lines.6 Jupiter may like to play the mimicry game (he too has masqueraded as Diana, in order to seduce Callisto, as told by Ovid in Book Two with characteristically cruel humour, particularly the deception at 425–40), but woe betide any lesser being who wittingly or unwittingly becomes a Doppelgänger for a deity. (This is the dilemma faced by Psyche in Apuleius’ famous fable, of which more later.)

Entrapment Gods with good intentions may intervene when a favourite is in trouble or crisis and offer support, showing the way towards success. They usually start off in disguise, something that is also true when a vengeful visitation is planned by an Olympian. Again, Ovid is a fruitful source and plays the paradoxes and ironies to the hilt. For instance both Juno and Minerva don the disguise of venerable old women, with the queen of the gods, in the form of the nurse Beroe, encouraging Semele to ask Jupiter, her lover, to appear before her in all his glory complete with thunderbolt and lightening. Jupiter is unwise enough, in his haze of passion, to swear an oath on the river Styx (binding even for the father of Olympus) to Semele that he will grant her wish, and she makes the fateful and foolish request only to end up as a pile of ashes. Juno never lets the mortal mask slip, and her appeal to Semele’s own nagging doubts as to the true identity of her seducer ensures the success of her ruse. Minerva simply masquerades as an anonymous but wise crone advising caution to Arachne who boasts of her unparalleled skill in weaving and

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denies the kudos the goddess of weaving herself should expect when a humble practitioner shows a divine-like artistry in her creative crafting.7 The denial of one essential aspect or characteristic of a deity (their elemental selves and attributes are frequently indistinguishable from their bodily identities) invites the corresponding loss or diminution of self for the hubristic human, and so it is with Arachne. The tearing up of her tapestry by an incensed goddess does look like self-harming if Minerva is truly the fount of such wondrous works of weaving. As a spider, Arachne becomes a living loom, rather like Marsyas, who is painfully punished at the hands of Apollo by a death that renders his skeletal structure into the shape of a lyre, the chosen musical instrument of the god.8 Both Juno and Minerva could be viewed initially as gods come to earth to steer mere mortal women onto a safer course. Minerva is giving Arachne a chance to be humble as befits her origins, but the headstrong girl contemptuously asks why the goddess is not accepting her challenge to a contest. The low-born weaver does not see the signs of an epiphany and has the grace to blush when the goddess reveals herself. Nevertheless, Arachne does not submit to respectful fear and trembling once her situation is clear. The weaving contest begins, and by the end Arachne has framed her accomplished tapestry with ivy, a very in-your-face insult to Minerva as this is Bacchus’s sacred plant, the one with which he had previously entwined and occluded the Minyades’ woven text at 4.388–415. The tale-telling daughters of Minyas had stayed at their looms in deference to the goddess rather than joining the Bacchic revels described in Books Three and Four. Arachne, too, will see her stories (she depicts a catalogue of crimes by lustful and spiteful gods) and her artistry destroyed, so Minerva is having her revenge upon the newly minted god Bacchus as well as punishing a proud and puny human. Even so, the goddess herself does not come out of the confrontation well.

Rewards and punishments Other humans fail the tests that the gods set them. Baucis and Philemon are the elderly couple who alone of all their neighbours treat Jupiter and Mercury well when the gods pose as passing travellers. The whole village and its inhabitants are destroyed by a flood, but the hospitable Darby and Joan (the archetypical aged happy couple of English popular culture) survive and are granted a wish to die together by being transformed into an entwined tree by the small cottage that has metamorphosed into a temple to the two deities.9 The theme of mortals as contemptores superum (those disdainful of the gods) finds realisation in an earlier narrative from Book Three, an episode told to King Pentheus by Bacchic acolyte Acoetes, whom he has taken prisoner. Acoetes relates how a crew of amorous sailors fails to recognise a tipsy and disorientated Bacchus and only their helmsman and captain, the narrator himself, advises caution as they carry off the pretty youth under the

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pretence of seeing him safely home (3.582–691). Acoetes is giving a lesson that Pentheus will not learn, and he refuses to accept that he really is in the presence of a god. This is understandable: the young ruler is desperately trying to keep some order and decorum in Thebes after the disruptive deity arrives on the scene. He is, in fact, right to do so, but, as ever, the true tragedy lies in the limitations of humans who do not see the bigger picture and understand the need to dispense with norms in abnormal situations. We could call this the essence of the tragic condition, that you cannot be right for being right. Acoetes could well be Bacchus himself, although if this is a divine encounter it is merely suggested. The spontaneous opening of doors and loosening of chains are clues to Acoetes’ supernatural skills or the proximity of the god during the capture of the acolyte and his imprisonment. In an excellent commentary on the episode,10 John Godwin mentions but sidelines this possibility (the identification of Acoetes with Bacchus, while noting that Euripides in his tragedy Bacchae has the god dragged in chains to the king). Michaela Janan11 boasts a subtle and thorough exegesis on the polarisation between king and god in all its ramifications. She focuses upon the ‘intuition of Bacchus’ divinity as feminine in the Lacanian sense.’ Her Acoetes is aligned with an affirming and empowering concept of woman as a sceptic when it comes to rules of reason which favour the Symbolic and its universalist claims. The story of the sailors has its ironic moments, particularly the false comfort offered by the sailors to the god. They reassure him with the words, ‘put away your fear’ (pone metum at 3.634), which is what one would expect the Olympian to say to mortals who sense they are in the presence of greatness.12 The lascivious sailors are turned into dolphins, and the ship is entwined with tendrils of ivy, just as the palace room of the Minyades will be occluded along with their weaving when the story of Salmacis (related in Book Four) is finished. Pentheus undergoes a much more violent death at the hands of his nearest and dearest; the price of not listening is that the denier of divinity is not heard; rather he is brutally silenced at a crucial moment.

Overlooked and lesser divinities When it comes to the recognition of something numinous, the modern mind is not always attuned to an animistic world or the importance of giving corporeality to concepts and abstracts. For instance, in Ovid’s Pygmalion narrative the full import of reuerentia (modesty) which is the apparent brake upon the carved girl from reacting physically or sexually after she has been shaped from ivory could well be a minor deity in the form of a statue standing in her way. It is of course reasonable to interpret Reuerentia as the subjective element in the scene or the feeling transferred to the sculpture by Pygmalion himself as technically the statue has no business being alive to anything, from the eager courtship the sculptor has embarked upon to a sense of decorum about a compromised virginity.

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The etymology of the word re-uerentia has been cleverly explored and exploited by Alison Sharrock,13 who breaks it down into its component parts. However, there is another way of responding to the passage, and it is the visualisation route.14 When Venus appears to sanction the union between vivified ivory and the maker of the piece, she is both facilitator in a problematic happy ending and part of the tableau suggested by the narrator (Orpheus after all does have the magical gift of bringing the inanimate to life) and in which the petrified Propoetides play their part as a group of frozen and flawed women in close narrative proximity to the statue. There seems to be a number of implicitly petrified females in the story. Pygmalion had prayed to Venus’ golden statue, and Ovid’s placing of the goddess beside the ivory carving shortly afterwards produces a chryselephantine composite familiar to an ancient readership.15 It has been mooted by scholars that the beautiful artifice produced by Pygmalion is a likeness of the Love deity and thus the story unites myth and ritual (the marriage of the king of Cyprus to a simulacrum of Venus), but as ever with Ovid this is not the end of the story. The tragic experience of Myrrha and her limbo-like status by the end of episode compromise the content and trajectory of her forebears’ coupling as has been noted on a number of occasions.16 Myrrha’s child grows up to be an exceptionally handsome boy with whom Venus is smitten and then left grief-stricken at his untimely death. That this is payback time for Adonis’s mother and her suffering through misplaced sexual passion is spelt out by Ovid. If Cupid denied his part in her attraction to her father (10.311–12), then Venus has to take the blame in her representational form. Thus the presence of a god does not need to be palpable but invisible and elemental: iam iuuenis, iam uir, iam se formosior ipso est | iam placet et Veneri matrisque ulciscitur ignes. ‘Now he is a youth, now a man and more alluring than he has ever been. And in that moment he attracts Venus and avenges the passion his mother felt’ (10.523–4). It is quite possible that detecting divine entities in peculiar places in Latin texts becomes a less than magnificent obsession, but whether seeing too much or not enough the 21st-century scholar is surely right to ask questions of loaded words in the original.17 Scholars have noted that Ovid’s afternoon of unexpected delight fulfils a fantasy about an erotic encounter with his beautiful and very possibly fictional girlfriend, Corinna, in Amores 1.5. Corinna, whom Ovid introduces to the reader in a series of poems and in both flattering and unflattering moods and guises, arrives during his siesta. There are distinct indications that this is an epiphanic experience. Time and location are specified, and Corinna is compared to a smooth and unblemished statue. The ambience is numinous, and the poet clearly feels privileged to have such ecstasy bestowed upon him. He prays for a repeat performance, and this becomes the Groundhog Day of sexual fantasy.18 It has its resonances of Aphrodite visiting Anchises. Corinna has not come to help in a crisis or to further an heroic quest, and this is a wordless encounter. There is

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power and initiative in her actions, and yet the dream-come-true for the poet might also suggest that this mistress is a written or artificial construction.19

Gods, mortals and in-betweeners in Apuleius The elevation of a mere mortal to a heavenly plane brings me on, not quite seamlessly, to the assumption that Psyche is Venus in Apuleius’ much mulled over and critiqued fable from The Golden Ass – Metamorphoses 4.28–6.25. Psyche is a royal princess but with no claim to divinity; however, her beauty is supernatural in its effect upon the onlookers.20 They kiss their hands towards her as if she were the sculpture of Venus and start to worship her in earnest. This is bad news for the ruling family as the goddess does not take kindly to the unintended impersonation. The transfer of her honours to a mere mortal who will age and die, thus compromising Venus in the eyes of her human followers, associates an Olympian with something earthly and vulgar. The fact that she feels moved to recite a selfie hymn accessing her literary history and reframing Lucretius’ dedication to the goddess at the start of De Rerum Natura has not gone unremarked (Golden Ass 4.30).21 Venus acts vindictively towards her human rival. Cupid is charmed in a semi-seduction scene by his mother and agrees to find Psyche an ill-matched suitor, the lowest of the low, but he seems to voluntarily shoot himself and fall in love with this mortal beauty whom he carries off in secret (Cupid’s confession comes at 5.24). Apuleius through the unpromising medium of a drunken old woman as storyteller demonstrates his skills of penning purple passages in the description of Psyche’s salvation and arrival at a palatial home. She is treated right royally in the luxurious surroundings and becomes acclimatised to the nightly visits of an invisible lover. The oracle had foreseen her fate quite differently but the monstrous other turns out to be the beauty not the beast. Psyche has had an inkling and intuition that she is in the presence of something supernatural during her time in the blessed prison (carceris beati 5.5), and aspects of divinity cling to her person, as her envious sisters recognise when they visit Cupid’s palace against the god’s better judgement, sic est hercules, sic se gerebat ferebatque. iam iam sursum respicit et deam spirat mulier. ‘That’s the way of it, by Hercules, thus she deports and bears herself. She looks upwards and she is a woman breathing as a goddess’ (5.9). Fuelled by envy, their mischief making is effective, and simple Psyche swallows the lies they tell her about a huge serpent enthralling her by magic and being ready to eat her up when her pregnancy is full-term. However, the lamp reveals Cupid’s true identity, and Psyche drops the murder weapon, a razor, and hot oil burns the god of flaming arrows as the heroine falls hopelessly in love with Love. There is a mixture of fear and delight in Psyche’s response to seeing Cupid in all his glory. Braund describes this moment of revelation with an impressive and close textual and linguistic analysis, bringing out its detailed visual and aural

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impact.22 She expands upon the observations of the late Ted Kenney, who concluded that the ‘the living god is treated as a work of art’ (her chapter appears in a book to honour Kenney’s contribution to Classics as he approached his 70th birthday). We are bound up with Psyche’s gaze, and through her the reader is treated to a blazon of the god’s gorgeous physique. The mortal girl bestows ecstatic kisses upon him. She is intrigued by the weapons of love next to her husband and the sensuous fluttering of his wings. Her handling of the bow and arrows reinforces the eroticism of the episode and simultaneously highlights the danger of meddling with divine accoutrements.23 However, it is Cupid who is accidentally injured by her lamp, receiving a taste of his own medicine with burning oil dropped upon his shoulder, which seems to be a metaphorical ejaculation of delight from this inanimate object. Once Psyche has compromised her special status as the spouse of Cupid and mother of his unborn child, she is forced to supplicate him from a distance as any mortal would do a god.24 She will fail to convince the goddesses she meets to plead her cause with him or soothe the ire of Venus against her, and has to submit to the strategy advised by Pan in a chance encounter, viz. to pray to Amor if she is lovelorn (5.25). The meeting with this rustic minor deity, who can be quite dangerous if one finds him in an aggressive mood, is as informal as the previous sightings of big players from Olympus have been. Pan is reflected in his surroundings, and if the textual tradition F is discarded he is embracing a simulacrum, Echo (montanam), when Psyche stumbles upon him. The stream that refuses to drown her deposits her on his bank, and he immediately recognises her outstanding beauty. Pan modestly declares himself to be a mere rustic or shepherd with limited knowledge, but Apuleius has created a pastoral vignette in which Pan plays a brief but telling part.25 This conversation with Pan fulfils the criteria of an epiphanic interlude during which the human receives good advice from the supernatural being, and in the case of Pan his general advice, without knowing the strange particulars of Psyche’s case, is sound. Thus we have come full circle in that Apuleius allows subsequent creatures and organic objects from ants to a talking tower to stand in for the denizens of Olympus and become part of the support system for a treasured mortal. They are the helpers26 who send the hapless human on her way and assist her in seemingly impossible tasks. The un-cooperative goddesses appearing as themselves to Psyche are not as obliging as Pan, preferring to keep to the rules of sisterhood where Venus is concerned. Their refusal to assist Psyche and their loyalty to the goddess of Love are quirky in the general divine scheme of things where rivalry and discomfiting each other are frequently the order of the day amongst deities on Olympus (6.1–4). To be fair, Ceres and Juno have attempted to reason with Venus and hint she is over-reacting to Cupid’s misdemeanour (5.31).

Cupid and Psyche in the wider world of Lucius Of course, Apuleius’ prose narrative is peppered with mis-couplings (human, divine and monstrous) and mystic meetings from the hero’s journey on the

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way to Hypata27 to his disastrous meddling in magic and subsequent metamorphosis into something bestial when he had hoped for something celestial. Lucius is restored to manly shape by Isis after she has appeared to him as the moon goddess and takes him every step of the way through the actions he must perform as an ass to shed the thick animal skin that has hidden his human essence from view. This is a divine encounter in which the goddess rather than obscuring her magnificent self parades her many heavenly names and attributes. Lucius can be in no doubt that he is in the presence of greatness. He is not only restored to his former body but apparently given wealth, success and some sort of immortality as a priest of Osiris by the end of Book 11. Psyche in the embedded fable is also elevated after much suffering and becomes the eternal wife of Cupid, but this is fantasy land where the flighty god of love settles down and does no more damage with his weapons of passion. The subsequent fate of Charite who along with the ass hero hears the story of Psyche is testimony to the continuing power and the tragic effects of Amor that unbridled lust embodies. Cupid continues to be a wayward and destructive boy in the mainframe fiction of The Golden Ass, and the nature of the fable as a fantastic concoction is underlined, shadows in a cave indeed. The sweetest beast with angelic wings (5.22) is the devourer of happiness outside the confines of the old wives’ tale.

Down to earth For a depiction of majesty and malevolence, I turn to the modern screen, where narratives acknowledge the spectrum upon which gods may stand or sit in relation to the mortals beneath them. There are also supernatural and demonic forces prone to bursting from beneath the hapless humans who have settled above portals and hell mouths. The readers of this chapter may wring their hands at movies I have missed, but the following is a focus on two favourite cinematic and television moments of mine. Screen history has a large supply of creative re-workings when it comes to classical reception in mass culture. For a 12-year-old seeing the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts (directed by Don Chaffey) at ‘the pictures’ as my family always called movie theatres in Southampton, the scene in which Michael Gwynne as Hermes drew himself up to his full godly height and pocketed pint-sized Jason (Todd Armstrong) was truly spectacular. He certainly stands over the mortal as the divine encounter demands. Hermes has masqueraded as a frail and elderly seer, and his exchange with Jason certainly adheres to the conventions of a deity stepping in at a key moment, establishing that the hero is at a loss and close to despair. Jason needs some timely advice and assistance.28 Enter the messenger of the gods ready to demonstrate to the mortal that the gods are alive and kicking, that he needs divine direction and that he is not entirely insignificant even when he faces the denizens of Olympus in all their glory.

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There is not space to outline the intelligent script which follows Jason’s arrival on Olympus and his refusal to be part of the board game Zeus (Niall MacGinnis) and Hera (Honor Blackman) are engaged in. The hero speaks up as a brave man, not a pliable chess piece, but he has to accept the terms of the quest the ruler of the gods sets for him and for his immortal wife. There is a flirtatious frisson between Jason and Hera, who will be slightly put out by the end of the film, not to say jealous, as she views her favourite and an attractive Medea (Nancy Kovak) kissing after they escape Colchis with the golden fleece. Those familiar with the legend know that this happy ending is temporary and everything turns sour in the end. The immortals may foresee, but they do not determine the course of events,29 a view that some classical philosophers have pronounced to be an unsatisfactory fudge in the ethical scheme of things. Hesiod relates his own divine encounter with the Nine Muses on the mountains at the opening of his Theogony and reports in his famous Dichterweihe that the divinities are rude and riddling in their statement about base mortals (field-dwelling herdsmen) unable to distinguish between the truth and lies they receive from the demi-goddesses. Stoddard30 produces a compelling critique of the episode which teases out the superiority of the gods in seeing the world as it is in all its infinite variety, ‘the eternal truth of the cosmos’ (11),31 akin to my earlier laconic observation about human limitations in Athenian tragedy. It is then simplistic to imagine the creatures of the classical pantheon as lawless and capricious along the lines of Shakespeare’s misleading but persuasive perception ‘as flies to mortal boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport’ (King Lear 4.1.42–43). In Jason and the Argonauts, Zeus does not brook disobedience, but he follows a set of rules in his pronouncements and does not act altogether autonomously. Also, articulating certain motivations and implying that with great power comes great responsibility endow the gods portrayed on screen in this movie with a problematic morality. Seeing the denizens of Olympus as flawed but wise and prophetic constitutes a daring strategy and one that demystifies these supernatural creatures while not compromising their glory. Ovid centuries before was not averse to depicting the gods on their home territory, relaxing at leisure time, and this he did in the story of Tiresias (Met. 3.16–338) with a distinctly cautionary note as a bit of divine banter between Jupiter and Juno turns into a punishment and reward (a deprivation and a gift) for the human in question. It looks as if Ovid is extending the claim that insider knowledge might be granted to bards by the Muses as Hesiod typifies and Homer before him, and implies that such a gift as well as allowing the poets special status includes the privilege of portraying the gods in intimate circumstances. It is fanciful but fun to suggest that a movie director and his company of skilled technicians may be bold enough to follow in the hallowed footsteps of ancient poets by revealing their re-creation of the gods on Olympus to the viewer at the cinema. A 20th-century artist with remarkable powers of bringing

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the gods to life and to earth headed the special effects team on Jason and the Argonauts, namely Ray Harryhausen, and the results were very impressive. In a number of scenes, we see the gods in their natural habitat. The elevation of Jason to Olympus is a lesson for him as he has wondered on the cusp of Hermes’ transformation whether the Olympians have any place in his world especially as he sees their statues and temples neglected. His despair and disillusion at the early point in his adventures and quest make the metamorphosis of the priest even more startling. Even so, Jason remains an exceptional hero who will later say that men need to learn to do without the gods sometime in the future. Fifty-five years later, this persistent cynicism of Jason (a contemptor superum of the cinematic narrative) could conceivably function as a metaphor for the modernisation of techniques that bring fantasy to the screen. Like the gods of old can such old-fashioned special effects continue to be wondrous to the onlookers. My five-year-old grandson (in 2019) when watching Jason begs for replays of Hermes revealed in all his glory, of Talos, the huge bronze guardian moving from his static position as guardian of the gods’ treasure, and the Harpies tormenting blind prophet Phineus, all achieved the laborious pre-digital way with models and camera ingenuity. Models and stop-motion animation were used in the age before digital technology, a feature that in itself raises questions about the nature of illusion and the methods by which it is achieved for an audience. For experts in such dream factories, the old techniques are not to be dismissed even in our current century of virtual reality. The sculpting of small-scale likenesses for the Olympians and deities and demons of other cultures has a quirky claim to authenticity, and working with modeling materials rather than in the shadow factory of screen swiping and sketching is perhaps the more palpable and creative craft.32

Other ways of seeing Television and its restricted production values – at the turn of this century at any rate – might come across as shoddy and unconvincing when introducing monsters, demons and gods. Nevertheless, a strong narrative arc and an imaginative twist can elevate a series about the fantastic. Notwithstanding limited resources, Joss Whedon’s now-iconic Buffy the Vampire Slayer managed real menace with the demonic god Glory/Glorificus in Season Five. Whedon’s team offered a pick and mix of cultural references and strategies ensuring that viewers were spellbound and kept guessing at the deployment of plot swerves and consistently astute characterisation.33 Glory has hurtled from a Hell dimension, as a new girl on the block, to the suburbs of Sunnydale, and Buffy has to contend with another ‘strong little woman who isn’t me’ as she rather exasperatedly says in confronting super-strong robot April in the episode entitled ‘I Was Made To Love You’ (Season 5, episode 15). The demon Glory is actually a lawless and demonic

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divinity expelled from her own world for outrageous behaviour. Glory has two human forms, a petite fashion-conscious blonde who morphs uncontrollably into a socially aware and caring young doctor called Ben. As the two uncomfortably share a body, they are bonded forever, a quirk of the crossover between dimensions, a warp in identities and bizarre duplication that breaching a portal brings about. There is a very disturbing scene (Season Five, episode 13, ‘Blood Ties’) in which Dawn confesses to sympathetic listener Ben that she is the Key telescoped into a human form and this/she is what Glory needs to get home (with attendant chaos as dimensions will bleed into each other as she crashlands back to her universe). Dawn was launched upon fans at the opening of Season Five as Buffy’s surprise (for the viewers) sister, who wait for a few disorientating episodes before Buffy finds out that Dawn is a light force who must be hidden from Glory and protected by Buffy. Dawn, like the fictional family and friends of the Buffyverse who have had false memories foisted upon them, believes she is a real girl and behaves as such in these initial episodes. Once she realises her true nature, Dawn is distraught and confides in Ben. He can feel the morphing of his body into Glory and cries out, ‘she is coming; she’s here,’ and a rapid transformation takes place. The words Ben has uttered and the advent of the murderous god echo Ovid’s use of vocabulary in the Bacchus episode in Metamorphoses 3.528 when the apprehensive excitement of the Thebans is reflected in the cry ‘he is coming, he is here’ about the advent of the god. The terms ‘uenit, adest’ may or may not have implanted itself within Joss Whedon’s psyche while he had a brief educational sojourn at Winchester College and surely encountered Ovid, but this arrival of a capricious and cruel supernatural force in Season Five of Buffy is a moment of menace and excitement comparable to Ovid’s strategy in the exclamation of the Thebans about the arrival of Bacchus in the city.34 Thus we find that brief encounters of the supernatural kind can cause the viewers to sit on the edge of their seats and that a representation of a divine presence for modern times might mimic the frisson of fear felt by Ovid’s readers at the advent of the god. After all, Ovid’s audience had the suspense of knowing that Bacchus in Thebes would spell the slaughter of Pentheus, its young king. The myth was well known and had been the stuff of tragedy, so Ovid is inducing recognition and foreboding. Equally, the fans of BtVS could expect Glory to be ruthless in killing Dawn to obtain her key should she discover the teenager’s true nature. This scene on a relatively low budget and armed with a simple technological sleight of hand is packed with tension. It is a scary epiphanic moment in which it is yet again illustrated that no one at this stage realises the connection between Ben and Glory. The difference is that the disguised god is not in control of her mortal male other and the elaborate fiction is not necessarily a ploy to wrong foot the lesser beings around the supernatural creature, even though it frequently does.35

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Last words In this sketchy survey of close encounters with divinities, I have ranged over a few telling vignettes from Latin authors and indicated that there may be more to the gods and their relationships with earth dwellers than meets the eye. Formulaic scenes of epiphanies can be subverted but also enriched by creative poets. A view of the divine might be explicit for contemporary classical world readers and be manifest to a modern recipient, but the full impact when a god appears can also be occluded, especially when we are many centuries away from the cultural contexts of the ancient world. Nevertheless, it is a source of endless delight to academics in the business of classical reception and adaptation studies that mass culture in the 21st century can connect with Greco-Roman texts and mises-en-scène. Coupled with close linguistic critiques of classical authors from such skilled scholars as Susanna Braund, the screen language of gods meeting mortals mirroring the visualisation we find in Latin literature becomes a heady and timeless experience.

Notes 1 See the discussion on divine walks and fancy footwear from Virgil to Sidonius Apollinaris in Watson (1996, 68–9). 2 Keen (1983, 81). She notes that these features of an epiphany or divine encounter are part of the meeting between Perseus and Athena/Minerva in William Morris’ Earthly Paradise. Ovid was the inspiration for the 19th-century poem, but the Latin poet starts his mini epic in Book Four of the Metamorphoses at a later point in the story. Morris must have drawn on more than one classical tradition to locate the visitation of Athena in helper capacity to the favoured mortal. Burne-Jones who illustrated the work shows the goddess standing over the adolescent hero as her true identity comes to light. Williams elaborated upon epiphanic memes discussed in learned commentators. See his ‘Scenes of Encounter’ (1978) and ‘A Theophany in Theocritus’ (1971). 3 Georgia Petridou (2016). Thanks are due to my editor for reminding me of Aphrodite’s protest that she is neither numinous nor divine in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (53–201). This poem portrays the goddess in teasing mode as she seduces Aeneas’ father Anchises. He is initially cautious and anxious, but she weaves an elaborate fiction about her mortal provenance. This episode is packed with the pitfalls and pleasures of intimacy when a divine creature lusts after an heroic human. 4 incedo is the word applied to Juno in the context of her regal walk as queen of heaven and sister/wife of Jupiter (Aeneid 1.46). She is bewailing the fact that slights to her self-image can go unpunished. Clasping Creusa and trying to have contact with Hector, Aeneas exhibits a similar shock and awe at the presence of spirits as he does with his elusive Olympian mother. 5 There is a problem with this Venus scene in that some scholarly opinion judges it an interpolation and not genuine Virgil. Whatever the authorship, this epiphany does set Aeneas on the destined road since he was failing to accept that all was lost, something that the apparition of Hector had made mournfully clear. 6 See James (1986) on crises of identity amongst the gods in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 7 The echo of the unknown god and melior natura as he moulded the world (glomerauit in orbis 1.35) in Arachne’s glomerabat in orbes at 6.19, shaping her yarn into a ball, was first observed by James (1986, 25) and subsequently discussed in Feeney (1991, 191–4).

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8 Two readings of the Marsyas episode, intertextual and intratextual, ideological and cultural are offered in Feldherr and James (2004). 9 See Feeney (1991, 229–32) for the placing of this story within the epic but also Green on the fable which is, as ever with Ovid, many-layered and full of false signposts (2003, 39–56). Green’s excellent exploration of the gods acting out of character and the role of the narrator in interpreting the walkabout on earth of Jupiter and Mercury as ethically motivated has informed my approach in more ways than one. Gowers (2005, 331–65) also produces stimulating observations on the human couple’s relationship to their surroundings, and the architectural dimensions of the story. She recognises the realisation of the two-in-one metaphor that resonates through earlier narratives. 10 Godwin (2014, 52). 11 Janan (2009, 212–17). 12 I noted this irony in a footnote (James 1991–3, 85) along with an admission that Acoetes himself is never revealed as Bacchus per se, but he possesses the helmsman’s necessary skill of recognising celestial bodies when steering by the stars. The appearance of Bacchus has time and place specified, and the god certainly teases the sailors with his masquerade as an unworldly (how true!) boy. 13 Sharrock (1993, 174). 14 In an elegant summary of Pygmalion and its function as a metaphor for the artist in Ovid, Braund foregrounds images by Burne-Jones, whom I found to be a very fruitful and subtle visual interpreter of the text (filtered through William Morris). See Braund (2002, 211–16, and 2017, 166–71). 15 A more extensive discussion of how to visualise Ovid appears throughout in James 2011, republished 2014 and reprised in James (2018, 73–5). 16 Notably in Leach, who observes that Myrrha is condemned for an incestuous passion for her father in contrast to Pygmalion who has sex with his creation, the ivory girl (1974, 123). 17 I have wondered whether Juvenal’s first Satire in which he claims Indignatio compels him to write his excoriating verses (and of course the ‘go-to’ scholar of Juvenal is Susanna Braund, see Braund 1988, 1996) is a clear suggestion that this abstract emotion or notion is his muse. Would that we could uncover a temple in Rome to a sense of justifiable Wrath! 18 It is irresistible to cite the iconic movie of that name directed by Harold Ramis in 1993 in which actor Bill Murray, trapped in a time warp that forces him to re-enact February 2nd every day, wishes he could have a wonderful chance encounter over and over with a girl he met on a beach holiday: ‘We made love like sea otters!’ 19 Sharrock (1991, 49) makes the connection between Ovid’s production in his love poetry of a proactive partner who knows how to please and the hopes and dreams the king of Cyprus has for his ideal artifice in the narrative of Pygmalion and the statue in Metamorphoses 10. 20 Divinely beautiful heroines feature in the Greek Romances. On Epiphany and Narrative in the Greek novels, see Cioffi (2014, 1–42). 21 Kenney (1990, 121–2) pointed to Apuleius’ debt to Lucretius in this hymn that Venus addresses to herself. There is much in Apuleius’ poetic passages that echoes Greek literature and its Latin filters. 22 Braund (1999, 180–4). 23 Psyche is intrigued and seduced by the god’s bow and arrows, but her touching these only underlines that affairs with the denizens of Olympus are dangerous liaisons. Semele suffers the full impact of Jupiter’s weaponry. There are times, however, when Psyche has the upper hand in her relationship with a god. See the next endnote.

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24 This is particularly hard for Psyche, who has been able to influence the gorgeous god with flattering blandishments. The Beauty and the Beast afterlife of the fable brings the power of the girl over the monster to the fore (James 2019, 336–49) and is rather quirkily picked up by the character of Oxana/Villanelle, in the Luke Jennings’ novel, successfully adapted for UK television as Killing Eve. The antiheroine (actually one of three intriguing females on screen) is the beautiful, psychopathic assassin, who, when she looks at the Louvre sculpture Psyche revived by Cupid’s kiss (by Canova), sees the mutual manipulation, either Cupid on the cusp of raping Psyche, or Psyche controlling the god, ‘by pretending to be passive and feminine’ (2017, 41). 25 The positive influence of Pan is discussed in James (1987, 153–6). 26 See Deacy (2008) on Athena in her helper role (the Routledge series on gods and heroes) and the theories of Greimass applied to Apuleius by Frangoulidis (2001, 105) for the ass as helper, but Greimass informs his critique at every turn. 27 In fact, the god of Laughter Risus celebrated at Hypata, and to whom Lucius falls victim is another instance of an abstraction embodied in a minor deity. At 2.31 Lucius’ aunt Byrrhena urges her handsome nephew to provide raiment for this local god by providing the community with some comic material, and he unwittingly does so. In his discomfiture at being the butt of a cruel prank and then paraded in the theatre, Lucius witnesses an audience rent with ‘risus’ at his total humiliation (Met. 3.10). 28 The movie makes Hera, the goddess, responsible for throwing Pelias from his horse so that Jason can lose a sandal in rescuing him from the river. She actively holds the usurper king under the water, but in the Greek version of the myth she disguises herself as an old woman whom Jason has to carry across the ford, and this fulfils the significance of missing footwear and the prophecy of the onesandaled man come to overthrow Pelias. For lost shoes and heroic actions as a significant connection, see the Stephen Frears’ movie Accidental Hero (1992; also known simply as Hero), starring Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis. 29 E.R. Dodds gave this explanation to problematise the accusation of determinism in the concept of omniscient (on the surface) gods, in a now canonical article ‘On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex’ (1966, 37–49). 30 Stoddard (2005, 1–28). 31 In fact, Stoddard’s discussion of the gods favouring shepherds for communication channels on earth (6–9) and yet their contempt for these symbolic intermediaries between beasts and divinities is instructive and deserves a place in the formula for divine encounters set out at the start of this chapter. 32 The choice Wolf Peterson made (the movie Troy in 2004) to exclude the gods from an ancient legend made famous by Homer was discussed in Winkler (ed. 2007) by Shahabudin (114–16) and Ahl (2007, 172–4). 33 There is a huge output of academic work published online and in many hardcopy volumes which has been inspired by the now 20-year-old Buffy series and subsequent Whedon television productions. The Slayage conference continues every year. Tellingly, the last episode of the final series of The Big Bang Theory (aired in 2019) featured Buffy actor Sarah Michelle Gellar, in the audience of a prestigious award ceremony with chief SF devotee Sheldon (Jim Parsons) exclaiming during his speech on the platform, ‘Is that Buffy the Vampire Slayer?’ 34 I made this observation as an aside in James 2009, 251. It was embedded in a footnote, so it is gratifying to free it from obscurity 10 years later! 35 Vampire Spike can see through the supernatural cloud surrounding the two personae, and it becomes a cause of his comic exasperation that mortals are so blind to the connection. I highly recommend Marshall (2007), in which the execution of Glory/Ben is analysed for its adherence to a Roman Virgilian model.

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Naomi Alderman, before penning her acclaimed SF novels, also wrote on the classical and Dionysiac nature of Glory on the same website in 2001.

Works cited Ahl, F. 2007. ‘Troy and Memorials of War.’ In Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood Epic, ed. M. M. Winkler, 163–85. Malden, Oxford. Alderman, N. 2001. ‘Those Whom the Powers Wish to Destroy, They First Make Mad: The Classical Roots of Madness in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’ Slayage 1.3.3, 1–13. Braund, S. 1988. Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires. Cambridge. ———. 1996. Juvenal Satires Book One. Cambridge. ———. 1999. ‘Moments of Love.’ In Amor, Roma: Love and Latin Literature, ed. S. Braund and R. Mayer. Cambridge, 174–98. ———. 2002. Latin Literature. London, New York. ———. 2017. Understanding Latin Literature. London, New York. Cioffi, R. L. 2014. ‘Seeing Gods: Epiphany and Narrative in the Greek Novels.’ In Ancient Narrative 11, ed. G. Schmeling and S. Harrison, H. Hofmann, M. Fusillo, R. Nauta, S. Panayotakis, and C. Panayotakis. Groningen, 1–42. Deacy, S. 2008. Athena (Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World). London, New York. Dodds, E. R. 1966. ‘On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex.’ Greece and Rome 13.1, 37–49. Feeney, D. C. 1991. The God in Epic: Poets and Critics in the Classical Tradition. Oxford. Feldherr, A. and James, P. 2004. ‘Making the Most of Marsyas.’ Arethusa 37.1, 75–104. Frangoulidis, S. 2001. Roles and Performances in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Stuttgart. Godwin, J. 2014. Ovid Metamorphoses III An Extract: 511–733. London, New York. Gowers, E. 2005. ‘Talking Trees: Baucis and Philemon Revisited.’ Arethusa 38.3, 331–65. Green, S. J. 2003. ‘Collapsing Authority and “Arachnean” Gods in Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon (Met. 8.611–724).’ Ramus 32.1, 39–56. James, P. 1986. ‘Crises of Identity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.’ Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 33, 17–25. ———. 1987. Unity in Diversity: A Study of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Hildesheim. ———. 1991–3. ‘Pentheus Anguigena – Sins of the “Father”.’ BICS 38, 81–93. ———. 2009. ‘Crossing Classical Thresholds: Gods, Monsters and Hell Dimensions in the Whedon Universe.’ In Classics for All: Reworking Antiquity in Mass Culture, ed. D. Lowe and K. Shahabudin, 237–60. Newcastle-upon-Tyne. ———. 2011. Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen: In Pursuit of the Perfect Woman. London, New York. ———. 2018. ‘Statues, Synths, and Simulacra: The Ovidian Contours of Screen Pygmalions.’ In Locating Classical Receptions on Screen: Masks, Echoes, Shadows, ed. R. Apostol and A. Bakogianni, 69–94. New York. ———. 2019. ‘Beauty and the Beast as a Myth and Metaphor in the Contemporary World: Looking Forward with the Tale of Cupid and Psyche.’ In Cupid and Psyche: The Reception of Apuleius’ Loves Story since 1600, ed. R. May and S. Harrison, 336–49. De Gruyter Reception series.

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Janan, M. 2009. Reflections in a Serpent’s Eye: Thebes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Oxford. Jennings, L. 2017. Killing Eve: Codename Villanelle. London. Keen, J. (aka Miller). 1983. The Perseus and Pygmalion Legends in Later Nineteenth Century Literature and Art. with special reference to the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Thesis, Southampton University. Kenney, E. J. 1990. Apuleius Cupid and Psyche. Cambridge. Marshall, C. W. 2007. ‘Aeneas the Vampire Slayer: A Roman Model for Why Giles Kills Ben.’ Slayage 9, 1–4. Morris, W. 1868–70. The Earthly Paradise. Petridou, G. 2016. Divine Epiphanies in Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford. Shahabudin, K. 2007. ‘From Greek Myth to Hollywood Story: Explanatory Narrative in Troy.’ In Winkler 2007, 107–18. Sharrock, A. R. 1991. ‘Womanufacture.’ Journal of Roman Studies, 36–49. ———. 1993. (with J. Elsner) ‘Reviewing Pygmalion.’ Ramus 20, 149–81. Stoddard, K. B. 2005. ‘The Muses and the Mortal Narrator: How Gods Relate to Humankind in the Theogony.’ Helios 32.1, 1–28. Watson, L. 1996. ‘Hallowed Words or Melting Pot? Sidonius Apollinaris’ Use of the Poetic Tradition.’ In The Reception of Classical Texts, ed. L. P. Hardwick and S. Ireland. Milton Keynes, 57–74. Williams, F. J. 1971. ‘A Theophany in Theocritus.’ Classical Quarterly 21, 137–45. ———. 1978. ‘Scenes of Encounter in Homer and Theocritus.’ Museum Philolologum Londinense 3, 219–25. Winkler, M. M. 2007. Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood’s Epic. Malden, MA.

8

Tacitean inflections of sincerity Victoria Emma Pagán

Latin literature of the imperial age is rife with moments when the sincerity of the author has been notoriously difficult to gage. From the end of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the beginning of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile to moments throughout Pliny’s Panegyricus, passages resist sure-footed interpretation. The praise of Octavian in the invocation of the Georgics (1.24–42) is read with skepticism such that subsequent poets who adopt the trope of comparing the princeps to the almighty Jupiter are open to charges of exaggeration and flattery, even if that princeps brought ‘very real relief.’1 Ovid, whose career followed a different trajectory from Virgil’s, compares Augustus to Jupiter thus: Iuppiter arces temperat aetherias et mundi regna triformis, terra sub Augusto est; pater est et rector uterque. (15.858–60) Jupiter controls heavenly fortresses and the realms of the tripartite world, But earth is under Augustus’ sway; each is father and ruler. In her masterful overview of the works of Ovid, Carole Newlands assesses this slippery comparison: The immediate context is encomiastic, with Augustus granted global reach and equivalent power and status to Jupiter on earth. Yet this division of power can also be read as oppressive in the overall context of the Metamorphoses, with its often angry and lustful Jupiter, and its abusive and foolish fathers; Jupiter has not proved an enlightened model for governance.2 Equally evasive is the encomiastic – in its immediate context – passage at the beginning of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile (1.33–66). Here is Susanna Braund’s translation:

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But if the Fates could fnd no other way for Nero’s coming, if eternal kingdoms are purchased by the gods at great cost, if heaven could serve its Thunderer only after wars with ferocious Giants, then we have no complaint, O gods; for this reward we accept even these crimes and guilt; though Pharsalia fll its dreadful plains, though the Carthaginian’s shade with blood be sated; though the fnal battle be joined at fatal Munda; though added to these horrors, Caesar, be the famine of Perusia and the struggles of Mutina, the feets overwhelmed near rugged Leucas, and the slave wars under burning Etna, yet Rome owes much to citizens’ weapons, because it was for you that all was done. You, when your duty is fulflled and fnally you seek the stars, will be received in your chosen palace of heaven, with the sky rejoicing. Whether you choose to wield the sceptre or to mount the faming chariot of Phoebus and to circle with moving fre the earth entirely unperturbed by the transference of the sun, every deity will yield to you, to your decision nature will leave which god you wish to be, where to set your kingdom of the universe. But choose your seat neither in the northern sphere nor where the torrid sky of opposing south sinks down: from these positions you would view your Rome with star aslant. If you press on either side of the boundless ether, the sky will feel the weight: maintain the mass of heaven poised in the sphere’s mid-point; let that part of the clear ether be wholly empty, let no clouds bar our view of Caesar. Then may humankind lay down its weapons and care for itself and every nation love one another; may Peace be sent throughout the world and close the iron temple-gates of warring Janus. But already to me you are a deity, and if I as bard receive you in my breast, no wish have I to trouble the god who has control of Cirrha’s secrets or to distract Bacchus from Nysa: you are enough to give me strength for Roman song.3 The price of civil war, though high, was worth it, if in the end it meant that Nero would be emperor. Upon death, the heavens will yield to Nero’s apotheosis; he need only choose which quadrant of the sky in which to dwell. If he should lean on one part of the universe, the axle of the sphere will be weighed down; he should therefore maintain the equipoise of heaven by remaining at the center of the system. On that day strife will cease. But to Lucan, Nero is already divine; if he should enter the poet’s breast, there would be no need to trouble Bacchus or Apollo. Nero alone is suffcient inspiration.

126 Victoria Emma Pagán Really? Well, why wouldn’t Lucan seek Nero’s patronage? Don’t the contemporary verses known as the Einseideln Eclogues, the Laus Pisonis, or the poetry of Calpurnius Siculus also praise a Golden Age? Or perhaps if the Pisonian conspiracy had been a success, these detachable lines would have been excised and replaced with Lucan’s own praise of Gaius Calpurnius Piso. On the other hand, little else in the Bellum Ciuile is as celebratory as this proem; in a story of the fall of libertas there is little scope for the virtues of any Caesar. As early as the 10th century, a scholiast pointed out that Nero was fat and squint-eyed and had one big foot. Lucan was ridiculing the emperor.4 Then again, Susanna reminds us that effusive encomium that makes modern western readers uncomfortable was part of a literary tradition, even if that tradition itself engendered skepticism.5 Long after the demise of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the long year 69, and the assassination of the last of the Flavians in 96, when the clouds part and the sun shines anew, Jupiter is once again a god you can finally count on, and Trajan emerges as the kind of emperor you can straight up tell the truth about: Wherefore, mighty Jupiter, once the founder and now the preserver of our realm, it is my right and proper duty to address my prayers to you; grant, I pray you, that my speech prove worthy of consul, Senate, and princeps, that independence, truth, and sincerity mark my every word, and my vote of thanks be as far removed from a semblance of flattery is it is from constraint. (Pan. 1.6)6 Shadi Bartsch’s analysis of the Panegyric is convincing: Pliny unveils a new age, free from double-speak, theatricality, and private transcripts.7 But even Pliny is stuck, for how can he mention Jupiter after Ovid and libertas after Lucan without falling into the language of fattery? In engaging with earlier texts, any author risks activating more than he may have anticipated and more than he can control. Thus, even Pliny’s overt statement of sincerity is suspect. In contrast to these well-worn passages in which sincerity is obfuscated, consider this small notice from the Annals of Tacitus, in which Tiberius, the arch-typical tyrant, has no trouble discerning the difference between false flattery and sincerity: His tam adsiduis tamque maestis modica laetitia intericitur, quod C. Cominium equitem Romanum, probrosi in se carminis conuictum, Caesar precibus fratris qui senator erat concessit. quo magis mirum habebatur gnarum meliorum, et quae fama clementiam sequeretur, tristiora malle. neque enim socordia peccabat; nec occultum est, quando ex ueritate, quando adumbrata laetitia facta imperatorum celebrentur. (Ann. 4.31.1–2)

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Amid events so constant and so sorrowful, a measure of happiness was interspersed, in which Tiberius pardoned Gaius Cominius, a Roman knight convicted of an abusive poem against him, because of the entreaties of his brother, who was a senator. It was considered the more miraculous because although he was aware of better measures and of the reputation that attends clemency, he preferred measures more hostile. For he didn’t make this mistake out of any intellectual shortcoming; nor is it hard to tell when the deeds of rulers are being celebrated sincerely versus when the happiness is merely feigned.8 If this passage does not fgure regularly in discussions of sincerity in imperial Latin literature, it is perhaps because Tacitus essentially invites the reader to boredom, amid events so routine and unpleasing as to be overlooked. Unlike the envoi of the Metamorphoses or the invocation of the Bellum Ciuile, situated in privileged positions in their poems, this episode, tucked in the middle of the frst hexad of the Annals, is purposely negligible, which to my mind makes it a more normative indicator of elite attitudes and assumptions about sincerity – with Susanna’s caveat, of course, that ‘it is an inescapable fact that, even when we feel that we are dealing with real personalities and real individuals, the literariness of Latin literature . . . intervenes to complicate our quest for “real lives”.’9 So although a scene as mundane as this is arguably as carefully crafted as a passage of hexameter poetry, nevertheless it provides a slightly different point of view to complement a study of sincerity. Gaius Cominius was the family poet, but clearly his brother was the more eloquent since he was possessed of the rhetorical skills needed to convince Tiberius to pardon Cominius (who is, no surprise, otherwise unattested). It would seem Juvenal was justified in his perennial complaint that compels him to take up satire; hack poets with axes to grind had been a problem for decades.10 However, Tacitus is less interested in the poet per se and more interested in Tiberius’ personality. The case proves that Tiberius knew how to react to criticism and he knew the benefit of reacting with clementia, even if he normally reacted with hostility. Elsewhere I have tried to show that Tacitus engages with Seneca’s De Clementia, although whether in sympathy or criticism, we cannot discern.11 Armed with Susanna’s commentary, we are able to perceive the long reach of the concept of clementia, from the late Republic deep into the principate. In our passage, clementia reminds us ‘that the emperor’s word was law and that the entire community was dependent upon his choice to preserve rather than destroy his citizens.’12 When Tacitus adds that it isn’t hard to tell when the deeds of rulers are being celebrated sincerely versus when the happiness is merely feigned, the statement is part of a causal clause explaining Tiberius’ character. But the repetition of the noun laetitia should give us pause, for it is qualified in two distinct ways. Tacitus introduces the case as a modica laetitia, a measure of happiness, but then he also speaks of adumbrata laetitia, feigned happiness.

128 Victoria Emma Pagán Surely the adjectives are meant to distinguish Tacitus as one who writes with the former (measured happiness) and not the latter (feigned happiness). The indicative impersonal occultum est makes it easy to extract a generalizing sententia, applicable beyond the immediate context. So, is it? Is sincerity – that is, honesty expressed ex ueritate – easy to spot? The answer to that question depends on two factors: the qualifications of the poet and princeps, and the contexts in which the sincerity is produced and consumed. The unequal relationships of power and the status asymmetry that typify the principate influenced and even strained perceptions of sincerity, such that whatever else we may glean about sincerity from Latin literature, it is definitely socially situated and status-dependent. Sincerity is produced by poets of varying degrees of talent and consumed by emperors of varying degrees of intellect. If the poet is bad, then the flattery or criticism is so poorly expressed that it does little damage to the image of the emperor. And if the princeps is a dullard, then presumably he perceives neither the flattery nor the criticism. No harm, no foul. However, if the poet is good (like Ovid) and the princeps is intelligent (like Augustus), then the honesty of expression is perceptible but veiled so as to put the burden of proof on the princeps, who, if he is intelligent enough to know when he is being implicitly criticized, is also intelligent enough to know that he cannot take explicit action. Exile makes sense in a situation like this. However, when the talent of the poet and the intelligence of the princeps are asymmetrical, the stakes rise. For example, if the poet is good (like Lucan) and the princeps not so intelligent (like Nero), the insult is compounded when others more astute than the princeps are able to perceive an honesty of expression that he cannot. For Nero, the situation was neatly resolved by the betrayal of the Pisonian conspiracy, which provided a convenient pretext for getting rid of the potentially offending poet.13 In opposition to this example of Neronian cruelty, Tiberius’ clementia is the result of reversed asymmetry. Tacitus gives every indication that Cominius was a bad poet; he was a mere equestrian; he wrote just one abusive poem (carminis is singular); he needed his brother for help. Tiberius, on the other hand, is described with a litotes (neque enim socordia peccabat, ‘he didn’t make this mistake out of any intellectual shortcoming’) that underscores his intelligence all the more. In such a situation, the honesty of expression is obvious (or at least not hidden, nec occultum est). Sincerity also depends on historical context. When Pliny delivered the Panegyricus to the senate in the year 100, he stated that ‘Times are different, and our speeches must show this; from the very nature of our thanks both the recipient and the occasion must be made clear to all’ (Pan. 2.3).14 Political circumstances changed from – and even within – the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, and even Trajan. Thus, in 24 CE, at that given moment in the reign of Tiberius, Cominius’ abuse was easy to spot. In 69 CE, on the other hand, ‘truth was broken in several ways’ (Hist. 1.1.1). The sententia of Annals 4.31.2 is therefore a powerful means for Tacitus to expose his own context of production, for in addition to generalizing and elevating

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the sentiment it also exposes his means of revealing a truth that had been hidden. The repetition of laetitia signals that under Trajan, Tacitus is able to compose his works ex ueritate. Thus, while Pliny’s declarations of sincerity tend to reproduce the language of ‘past reigns from which Pliny is so eager to distance himself and his praise,’15 Tacitus uses the very same word (laetitia) to carve the distance between Tiberius and Trajan. In addition to the specific historical context, we ought to consider the narrative context in which Tacitus inserts the story of Cominius. According to Sir Ronald Syme, ‘Book iv of the Annales, it may be asserted, is the best that Tacitus ever wrote.’16 At the beginning of Annals 4, Sejanus is on the rise, and by book’s end, Tiberius will have retired to Capri, never to return to Rome. In the year 23, Drusus, son of Germanicus, is a victim of the regime. The following year, 24, is artfully arranged: the narratives of two sets of trials are separated by foreign affairs. First, Gaius Silius committed suicide before his trial came to a verdict; his wife Sosia was sent into exile. The charges were specious; the root cause was friendship with Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder (Ann. 4.18–20). The trials of Silius and Sosia are followed by three further trials. Tiberius endured the earlier insults of Calpurnius Piso (the so-called augur and consul in 1 BCE), but eventually anger prevailed, and Piso was accused of holding secret conversations against Tiberius’ sovereignty; of keeping poison at home; and of entering the curia armed with a sword. More accusations accrued, but he escaped punishment because of his timely death (ob mortem opportunam, Ann. 4.21.2). Next is the exiled Cassius Severus, whose books had been burned under Augustus; his continued antagonisms against Tiberius guaranteed his permanent exile on Seraphos (Ann. 4.21.3; his situation may be compared to that of Ovid; both were talented writers who offended Augustus and lived in exile). Third is Plautius Silvanus, the praetor who defended himself against the charge of defenestration by pleading temporary insanity; Tiberius himself investigated the bedroom and referred the matter to the senate. Silvanus’ grandmother saw the writing on the wall and sent him a dagger, which he was too cowardly to use; he needed a slave to sever his veins. And when it was all over, his former wife, accused of administering potions and casting spells to cause derangement, was acquitted. The three trials thus form a descending tricolon, from imperial politics to sordid intrigue (Ann. 4.22). Foreign affairs and a slave revolt intervene (4.23–7) before Tacitus returns to the relentless trials. Vibius Serenus, ‘a terrible example of pitifulness and savagery’ (miseriarum ac saevitiae exemplum atrox, Ann. 4.28.1), was dragged back from exile smeared with mud and filth and was led into the senate bound in chains. His son (elegantly dressed, we are told) accused him of conspiring against Tiberius with a praetorian guard, who consequently took his life. Serenus, on the other hand, asserted his innocence on the grounds that one would not contemplate the assassination of the princeps with only one conspirator. In response, the son named two close friends of Tiberius; however, the one was too old, the other too weak to be credible.

130 Victoria Emma Pagán On further investigation of the father’s slaves (by torture, surely), the son was found guilty of attempting parricide. He attempted to flee the penalty but was dragged back from Ravenna and punished accordingly, even though Tiberius harbored more hatred toward father than the son, because of some remarks he had made eight years before that were ‘more truculent than was safe in the haughty ears of one inclined to be affronted’ (addideratque quaedam contumacius quam tutum apud aures superbas et offensioni proniores, Ann. 4.29.3). Thus, the brief mention of Cassius Severus and the abbreviated episode of Vibius Serenus, with their allusions to freedom of expression, set the scene for the trial of Cominius, and all three foreshadow the high-profile case of the senatorial historian Cremutius Cordus the very next year. He was charged under the law of treason with publishing a history that offended Tiberius. After defending himself in the senate, Cremutius took his own life. Following his death, the senate decreed that his books be burnt, in one of the most important episodes of freedom of speech in Roman history (4.34–5).17 The suicide of Fulcinius Trio in the year 35 provides one of the last opportunities for Tacitus to chisel the portrait of Tiberius as one who can not only discern false flattery but can tolerate honest expression. Trio was the notorious delator who accused Libo Drusus on fabricated charges of conspiring to assassinate members of the imperial household and leading senators (Ann. 2.28). Trio was also part of the team that prosecuted Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, alleged murderer of Germanicus (Ann. 3.10). For these trials, he was rewarded with the consulship in 31, the year that Sejanus fell from power. Trio accused his colleague Memmius Regulus of being soft on the henchmen of Sejanus (Ann. 5.11). The rhetoric backfired, because the next year both consuls were accused of conspiracy, since neither had pursued the accusations (Ann. 6.4). The matter was ignored until four years later, when Tiberius was still bent on punishing those connected to Sejanus. Anticipating a bad outcome, Trio committed suicide, but not before drawing up a will in which he accused Macro (Sejanus’ successor) and Tiberius’ freedmen and called Tiberius a feeble old man in virtual exile. ‘These charges, suppressed by his heirs, Tiberius ordered to be read out, showing off his toleration of another’s free speech’ (quae ab heredibus occultata recitari Tiberius iussit, patientiam libertatis alienae ostentans, Ann. 6.38.3). Within the historical context of the reign of Tiberius and the narrative context of Tacitus’ characterization of the emperor’s descent into tyranny, the sententia, that it is not hard to tell when the deeds of rulers are being celebrated sincerely versus when the happiness is merely feigned, establishes the overarching continuity of the problem of sincerity while simultaneously underscoring the political changes from Augustus to Trajan. Furthermore, the sententia is delivered in the context of several trials that concern freedom of expression and that contribute to Tiberius’ character. The Metamorphoses, Bellum Ciuile, and Panegyricus provide examples from the politically distinct Augustan, Neronian, and Trajanic periods; but what about Flavian

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literature written in the wake of civil wars brought to an end by Vespasian and eventually composed under the tyranny of Domitian? As should be clear by now, this investigation owes a considerable debt to Susanna’s monumental contributions in the field of Latin literature that derive in no small part from her unquestioned sincerity as a scholar and a friend. Susanna and I first met in 1998, at the Statius Conference convened by Kathleen Coleman at Trinity College Dublin. After I delivered my paper with much trepidation, Susanna generously assumed that I would publish it, and she suggested the clever phrase ‘mo(u)rning after’ for the title. Because I was at the beginning of my career, I did not adopt the punctuation, fearing I’d appear pretentious and not serious. Now I see that she was right, and such punctuation seems so natural that I’ve been known to mis-cite the article myself. As I began my career under her guidance with a study of the end of the Thebaid, it is fitting to honor her retirement with a return to the beginning: tuque, o Latiae decus addite famae quem noua maturi subeuntem exorsa parentis aeternum sibi Roma cupit, licet artior omnes limes agat stellas et te plaga lucida caeli, Pleiadum Boreaeque et hiulci fulminis expers, sollicitet, licet ignipedum frenator equorum ipse tuis alte radiantem crinibus arcum imprimat aut magni cedat tibi Iuppiter aequa parte poli, maneas hominum contentus habenis, undarum terraeque potens, et sidera dones. tempus erit, cum Pierio tua fortior oestro fata canam: nunc tendo chelyn; satis arma referre Aonia et geminis sceptrum exitiale tyrannis. (1.22–34) And you, glory added to Latium’s fame, whom, as you take on your aged father’s enterprises anew, Rome desires as hers for eternity: though a narrower path move all the planets and a radiant tract of heaven invite you, free of Pleiades and Boreas and forked lightning; though the curber of the fire-footed horses himself set his high-shining halo on your locks or Jupiter yield you an equal portion of the broad sky, may you remain content with the governance of mankind, potent over sea and land, and waive the stars. A time will come when stronger in Pierian frenzy I shall sing your deeds. For now, I but tune my lyre; enough to recount Aonian arms, scepter fatal to twin tyrants.18 Carole Newlands has argued carefully and convincingly against the longheld assumption that Statius was commissioned by Domitian to write praise poetry. In the proem to the Thebaid, the refusal to write about Domitian’s

132 Victoria Emma Pagán contemporary exploits ‘differentiates Statius’ epic poetics from mainstream imperial ideology.’19 Statius appears to be capable of producing poetry independent of political infuence. Although the idea that the Jupiter will yield a portion of the sky to Domitian (1.29–30) is a pointed allusion to Lucan’s proem of the Bellum Ciuile (1.50), the previous passage need only convey Statius’ current preference for the mythological over the historical. The Tiberian sententia holds: since it is not hard to tell when the deeds of rulers are being celebrated sincerely, there simply isn’t anything here that needs Domitian’s pardon. However, in the Histories Tacitus takes a pointed swipe at Flavian historiographers at the end of Book 2, as the Flavian dynasty begins its ascent: Scriptores temporum, qui potiente rerum Flauia domo monimenta belli huiusce composuerunt, curam pacis et amorem rei publicae, corruptas in adulationem causas, tradidere. (2.101.1) The historians of the period, who during the ascendancy of the Flavian family composed the chronicles of this war, have in the distorted representations of flattery assigned as the motives of these men a regard for peace and a love of their country.20 This suggests that the Flavian historians were unaware of their shortcomings and their propensities toward fattery (it also seems to discount Tacitus’ own admission that he owed his career to the Flavians, Hist. 1.1.3). Nearly all Flavian historiography is lost; testimony itself derives from Tacitus: Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus, Pliny the Elder. Vipstanus Messalla (one of the speakers in the Dialogus) is named as a direct source (Hist. 3.25); the Flavian partisan Licinius Mucianus wrote a memoir; the poet Silius Italicus was a witness to the agreement between Flavius Sabinus (elder brother of Vespasian) and Vitellius in the Temple of Apollo, when Vitellius agreed to cease hostilities on certain (untenable) conditions (Hist. 3.65.3). It is reasonable to believe that Flavian historians may have been infuenced by the ascendancy of the Flavian dynasty. Could the same be said of Flavian poets? Frederick Ahl detects ‘tensions between Statius and Tacitus (whose social circles overlapped) because Statius did not maintain silence but wrote copiously and successfully in Domitian’s reign,’ and Statius probably alludes to these tensions in the prefatory epistle to Silvae 4.21 It would seem that Tacitus is more offended by patent flattery than Domitian by potential criticism. Once again, Susanna provides a useful model. In her contribution to the volume Free Speech in Classical Antiquity, she analyzes passages of Roman verse satire in which the speakers criticize and disparage others while simultaneously disclaiming the attacks. The result is what she calls metasatire: ‘satire using satire to talk about the processes of satire.’22 Perhaps, then, the Tiberian sententia is by analogy an instance of metasincerity, an opportunity

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for Tacitus to talk about the process of sincerity, which, like satire, resists interpretive closure or resolution – while simultaneously disclaiming any sincerity on his own part. Ideologies change; contexts change; even meanings change; but words stay the same. So does Susanna.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Thomas (1988, 73). Newlands (2015, 93). Braund (1992, 4). Ahl (1976, 35–54). Braund (2009b, xi). Translations Radice (1969, 323–4). Unattributed translations are my own. Bartsch (1994, 148–87). Translation adapted from Woodman (2004, 136). Braund (2002, 156). Braund (1996, 110–21) is the starting point for any discussion of the tension between morality and hypocrisy in the poem. 11 Pagán (2012, 85–7). 12 Braund (2009a, 44). 13 Braund (1992, xvi): It seems that Lucan lived contentedly and wrote prodigiously under Nero until, late in 64 or early in 65, something impelled him into the ‘Pisonian conspiracy.’ Whether this was simply Nero’s ban or broader political issues will always remain unclear. 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

See also Braund (2009b, xi). Translation Radice (1969, 325). Bartsch (1994, 162). Syme in Birley (1984, 1031). On this famous case, see most recently Wisse (2013). Translation Shackleton Bailey (2003, 43). Newlands (2012, 24, 49). Translation Church and Brodribb (1942, 536). Ahl (2015, 253). Braund (2004, 426).

Works cited Ahl, F. 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca. ———. 2015. ‘Transgressing Boundaries of the Unthinkable: Sophocles, Ovid, Vergil, Seneca, and Homer Refracted in Statius’ Thebaid.’ In Brill’s Companion to Statius, ed. W. J. Dominik, C. E. Newlands, and K. Gervais, 240–65. Leiden. Bartsch, S. 1994. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, MA. Birley, A. R., ed. 1984. Ronald Syme: Roman Papers, vol. 3. Oxford. Braund, S. 1992. Lucan: Civil War. Oxford. ———. 1996. Juvenal: Satires Book I. Cambridge. ———. 2002. Latin Literature. London. ———. 2004. ‘Libertas or Licentia? Freedom and Criticism in Roman Satire.’ In Free Speech in Classical Antiquity, ed. I. Sluiter and R. Rosen. Leiden, 409–28.

134 Victoria Emma Pagán ———. 2009a. Seneca: De Clementia. Oxford. ———. 2009b. A Lucan Reader. Mundelein. Church, A. J., and Brodribb, W. J. 1942. Complete Works of Tacitus. New York. Newlands, C. 2012. Statius, Poet Between Rome and Naples. London. ———. 2015. Ovid. London. Pagán, V. E. 2012. Conspiracy Theory in Latin Literature. Austin. Radice, B. 1969. Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA. Shackleton Bailey, D. R. 2003. Statius: Thebaid, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA. Thomas, R. 1988. Virgil: Georgics, vol. 1. Cambridge. Wisse, J. 2013. ‘Remembering Cremutius Cordus: Tacitus on History, Tyranny, and Memory.’ Histos 7: 299–361. Woodman, A. J. 2004. Tacitus: The Annals. Indianapolis.

Part 3

Imperial intertexts

9

The burial of Misenus and Lucan’s De Bello Ciuili Cillian O’Hogan

Lucan’s De Bello Ciuili constantly engages with two towering predecessors: Caesar’s De Bello Ciuili and Virgil’s Aeneid.1 These two influences are always in the background throughout Lucan’s text, and take corporeal form in the figure of (the character) Caesar, an anti-hero who aspires to be a successor of Aeneas but who is repeatedly frustrated by prosaic facts. In this chapter, I give an example of how Lucan uses Virgilian echoes to depict Caesar as a failed epic hero. This is achieved by splitting into two an exemplary epic trope: the felling of a colossal number of trees in order to facilitate an epic burial. Lucan exaggerates this trope to the point of grotesqueness, by incorporating the tree-felling episode (with explicit verbal recollection of Aeneid 6) into his account of the massive preparations needed to besiege the city of Massilia in Book Three. However, the expected burial scene is absent: instead, it is not until Book Eight that we find a conclusion to the scene, in the aborted cremation of Pompey, which draws on the burial of Misenus in the sixth book of the Aeneid. But whereas Aeneas exemplifies his key characteristic, pietas, by taking the lead in burying Misenus, in the De Bello Ciuili it is not Caesar who takes up this task but rather an otherwise unknown character, Cordus. While the two passages have been studied extensively by themselves, looking at them together, as the divided allusion to the burial of Misenus in Aeneid 6 suggests we should, leads to a richer understanding of the depiction of Caesar as a character in a hurry to get ahead of his author and rush ahead to the historical fact of his victory.

Massilia and the sacred grove In all extant sources apart from Caesar and Lucan, Massilia features as a relatively insignificant moment in the Civil War – a brief diversion before the battle of Ilerda. In contrast, in Caesar’s own account, the importance of Massilia is emphasised. Caesar learns that the Pompeian general Domitius is in Massilia and that preparations are underway for a siege, and he asks the Massilians not to resist him (Caesar, De Bello Ciuili 1.35). The Massilians

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reject his request, and so the siege begins. Lucan follows Caesar in making Massilia into a major episode in his poem, but also makes some radical alterations to Caesar’s narrative.2 Two major changes are the complete removal of Domitius from the passage and the depiction of the assault on Massilia as an act of unprovoked aggression.3 This contributes to the characterisation of Caesar as a reckless megalomaniac.4 Moreover, the removal of Domitius has the effect of focusing the reader’s attention on the Massilians, and indeed the depiction of the besieged citizens is particularly important for the interpretation of the episode as a whole. Although Massilia is a city founded by Greeks (Lucan 3.301–3), it is nonetheless made to represent uetus Roma, since it exemplifies the traditionally Roman virtue of fides.5 Massilia becomes the last refuge of old Rome, the only place where Republican values still hold out. It is, paradoxically, in this Greek city that we find what was lacking in the Rome depicted earlier in Lucan, a Rome that capitulates immediately upon the arrival of Caesar.6 The Massilians are also identified as Pompeians, as Rowland notes, by Lucan’s conflation of the Phocaeans of Massilia and the Phocians of Greece as one and the same. By referring to Phocais . . . iuuentus at 3.301, Lucan recalls Phocaicas . . . manus at 3.172 – the first nation mentioned in the catalogue of Pompey’s forces.7 The assault on Massilia is thus an attack on Pompey (despite the Massilians’ protestations of neutrality), and anticipates the battle of Pharsalus. In preparation for the siege, Caesar chops down a vast quantity of trees near Massilia (Lucan 3.394–8). This does not suffice, however, and so Caesar turns his attention to a nearby sacred grove. This episode is almost certainly an invention by Lucan.8 The passage takes as its principal model the eighth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Erysichthon desecrates a grove sacred to Ceres.9 Lucan introduces his grove in terms recalling the Ovidian grove, signalling the imitation from the outset: ille etiam Cereale nemus uiolasse securi dicitur, et lucos ferro temerasse uetustos (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.741–2) His axe once violated Ceres’ grove, His blade profaned her ancient holy trees. lucus erat longo numquam uiolatus ab aeuo (Lucan 3.399)10 A grove there was, never profaned since time remote There follows an extended imitation of Metamorphoses 8.751–76, combining verbal parallels and structural patterning. Both Erysichthon and Caesar order their subordinates to destroy the respective groves (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.751–3, Lucan 3.426–8), then, exasperated by the hesitation they

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see, they exclaim aloud as they themselves fell the frst tree (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.753–64, Lucan 3.429–39). Both passages culminate with a description of the wide-scale destruction of the grove (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.774–6, Lucan 3.440–5). Caesar is thus presented in terms which strongly recall Erysichthon’s hubris. Ovid presents Erysichthon’s actions as Gigantomachic in nature.11 Lucan depicts Caesar’s tree-felling as a similar challenge to the gods, albeit one which is not taken up (Lucan 3.445–9), since the gods do not intervene in Lucan’s epic world. Like Erysichthon, Caesar openly declares his contempt for the sanctity of the grove, and draws attention to the impiety of the deed. However, while Erysichthon is unable to convince his slaves to continue the desecration he has begun, Caesar’s actions strike such fear into his men that they judge it more expedient to obey him. They are more afraid of Caesar than they are of the gods (Lucan 3.439). Lucan combines this imitation of Ovid with a topos taken from martial epic: the tree-felling figure found in the Aeneid, Ennius’ Annales, and the Iliad.12 In three lines, Lucan lists five types of trees – just as Virgil does in the sixth book of the Aeneid: procumbunt piceae, sonat icta securibus ilex fraxineaeque trabes cuneis et fssile robur scinditur, aduoluunt ingentis montibus ornos. (Virgil, Aeneid 6.180–2) Pines toppled, holm oaks echoed to the ax. Wedges split beams of ash and fssile oak, And giant mountain ash rolled down the slope. procumbunt orni, nodosa inpellitur ilex, siluaque Dodones et fuctibus aptior alnus et non plebeios luctus testata cupressus (Lucan 3.440–2) Down fall the ash-trees, the knotty holm-oak is overthrown; and Dodona’s wood and alder, more ft for the waves, and cypress, witness to no plebeian grief. The frst line of both catalogues begins and ends with the same words, procumbunt and ilex. Moreover, both passages mention the mountain ash, the oak, and the holm-oak.13 These three trees are also present in Ennius’ version of the topos, itself a model for Virgil (Annales 6.175–954): incedunt arbusta per alta, securibus caedunt, percellunt magnas quercus, exciditur ilex, fraxinus frangitur atque abies consternitur alta, pinus proceras peruortunt: omne sonabat arbustum fremitu siluai frondosai.

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Cillian O’Hogan They proceed through the lofty trees, they cut them down with axes, They strike down great oak trees, the holm-oak is cut down, The ash tree is destroyed and the lofty fr is thrown down, they topple the high-topped pines: all the forest resounds with the crash of leafy trees.

The Virgilian topos occurs in the course of the preparations for the funeral of Misenus, while the Ennian fragment possibly refers to the mass cremation of the dead after the battle of Heraclea.14 The Homeric passage which is a model for both Ennius and Virgil (Iliad 23.114–28) comes from the account of Patroclus’ funeral.15 Lucan breaks with tradition, then, by using this topos in a non-funerary context. By presenting it as part of Caesar’s preparations for war, Lucan inverts the topos – this tree-felling precedes death instead of following it. Lucan’s use of this topos implicitly compares Caesar and Aeneas. Both men initiate the tree-felling (primus, Aeneid 6.183, Lucan 3.433), and both exhort their comrades to aid in the task (Aeneid 6.183–4, Lucan 3.432–9).16 If the imitation of Ovid helps bring out Caesar’s hubris, the Virgilian imitation shows how far removed we are from the epic world of the Aeneid, and how far Caesar falls short of his ancestor and epic predecessor. Whereas Aeneas’ actions result from his sense of pietas, Caesar, driven almost entirely by his ira, is much closer to Erysichthon in his unprovoked attack upon the sacred grove.17 There should be no doubt about the impiety of Caesar’s actions. Treefelling always brought with it the possibility of offending a woodland deity,18 and both the texts used as models for Lucan’s grove exhibit unease about the practice. In the Metamorphoses, Erysichthon’s desecration of the grove of Demeter results in divine retribution in the form of an all-consuming hunger. And even in the Aeneid, tree-felling is at best a morally ambivalent action.19 Yet Caesar’s actions go unpunished, despite the hopes of the Massilians. Instead, Lucan shows here that the gods no longer care about such sacrilege, at least when it is perpetrated by Caesar.20 He is favoured by the gods (uictrix causa deis placuit, 1.128), despite his contempt for them. Thomas’ reading sees tree-felling in the Aeneid as part of the greater process of civilisation which is underway in the poem, and suggests that the ambivalence present in the scenes he discusses indicates unease at the “necessary sacrifice” required for the greater good. For Lucan, there is no such ambiguity: Caesar’s actions are entirely uncivilising.21 The tree-felling is necessary to launch an attack on Massilia, which symbolises Roma antiqua. The defiling of the landscape and the assault on the city are also in keeping with Lucan’s overall poetic concern of presenting Caesar as a destructive, uncivilising force.22 We have also seen how the Massilians are portrayed in terms recalling vetus Roma, and also as Pompeians. With regard to the grove scene, it has frequently been noted that the oak tree Caesar fells first symbolises Pompey.

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This tree imagery, in fact, runs throughout the poem, beginning in Book One. The desecration of the grove thus symbolises the imminent destruction of the Pompeians, both at Massilia and later at Pharsalia.23

Misenus and Pompey Lucan gives us the tree-felling passage in Book Three, but we have to wait until Book Eight for the resolution with a funeral scene. After Pompey’s execution, his body is abandoned on the shore of Egypt, where it is discovered by Cordus, a figure who appears only for the purpose of attempting to bury Pompey. At the very beginning of the passage, Lucan says of Cordus infaustus Magni fuerat comes (“He was the unfortunate companion of Magnus”, 8.717). This recalls the description of Misenus in Aeneid 6.166: Hectoris hic magni fuerat comes (“This one was the companion of great Hector”).24 This parallel is hard to miss, and it calls the reader’s attention to the fact that this is an epic burial scene, following in the tradition of the Misenus episode, and signals that further parallels are to follow. Just as in Book Three, where Lucan closely follows the structure of his Ovidian model, here too the poet patterns the funeral of Pompey on an epic predecessor. Lucan gives us a sustained reworking (both structural and verbal) of Virgil designed to draw attention to the stark contrast between the lavish burial of a relatively minor character in the Aeneid and the scant rites paid out to one of the three main figures in the De Bello Ciuili. The structural parallels are as follows. Both passages begin with an arrival on the beach. Aeneas and Achates, lost in conversation, come upon Misenus almost by accident (Aeneid 6.156–63). Cordus, on the other hand, is on a mission to find Pompey, and strains to see him in the surf (Lucan 8.712–23). After the introduction of Misenus, there follows a brief digression identifying him as the former comrade of Hector, and giving an account of his death (Aeneid 6.164–74).25 Misenus lies above the water-line, and there is thus no difficulty in recovering his body – something which is not described by Virgil. Pompey, on the other hand, is being buffeted by the waves, and Cordus struggles to rescue his corpse (Lucan 8.723–6). Subsequently, the Trojans take a mere line and a half to mourn Misenus and then hasten to make preparations for his cremation, while Cordus’ lament for Pompey occupies fourteen lines (Aeneid 6.175–82, Lucan 8.726–42). The tree-felling scene, so central to the passage in the Aeneid, is omitted by Lucan. There is a further parallel between Cordus’ prayer and subsequent acquisition of fire, and Aeneas’ prayer and subsequent discovery of the Golden Bough (Aeneid 6.183–211, Lucan 8.743–54). In both accounts, there follow passages describing preparations for the cremation. Virgil then proceeds immediately to an account of the cremation itself, while in the De Bello Ciuili Cordus delivers another speech before beginning the cremation (Lucan 8.759–75). Virgil’s account from this point to the end is a description of funeral rites carried out perfectly – the ashes

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are gathered in an urn, and the mourners are then ritually purified (Aeneid 6.212–31). Conversely, Cordus’ attempt to cremate Pompey is disturbed, and he is later forced to bury the general’s half-burnt remains without completing the ritual (Lucan 8.776–89). In both passages, a final memorial is left to mark the burial-place – Aeneas plants Misenus’ equipment upon the tomb (Aeneid 6.232–3), while Cordus leaves a stone on Pompey’s shallow grave, inscribed ‘Here lies Magnus’, hic situs est Magnus (Lucan 8.793). Finally, Virgil mentions the nearby mountain, which will preserve Misenus’ name (Aeneid 6.234–5). This is recalled in Lucan’s apostrophe to Cordus, when the poet implies a contrast between Misenus’ mountain and Pompey’s stone: si tota est Herculis Oete et iuga tota uacant Bromio Nyseia, quare unus in Aegypto Magni lapis? (Lucan 8.800–2) If all of Oeta belongs to Hercules and all of Nysa’s ridges make room for Bromius, then why has Magnus a single stone in Egypt? It should be clear from the preceding that Lucan’s account of Pompey’s burial closely follows that of Virgil’s account of Misenus’ burial on a structural level, the link having been signalled by an explicit verbal allusion at 8.717. One further parallel can be identifed with reasonable confdence. In line 722, Lucan describes Pompey’s body as discolor. The poet is somewhat fond of this word, using it four times in the poem (8.293, 10.128, 6.654, and here). It occurs only once in Virgil, however, and is used there to describe the Golden Bough (Aeneid 6.204), foregrounded passage that interrupts the account of the burial of Misenus. Otherwise it is not found in epic before Lucan, and it seems likely that in this passage it is intended to recall the Virgilian usage.26 As I have shown, Lucan is actively engaging with the Virgilian passage here. Furthermore, the contexts are similar – both Aeneas and Cordus are looking for something, and in both cases the discovery is facilitated by the appearance of the object and its contrast with its surrounding environs. Aeneas recognises the Bough because it is discolor, just as Pompey’s body stands out among the waves due to its colour. Finally, the association of Pompey and the Golden Bough is particularly apt given the tendency in the poem to associate Magnus with trees and tree-related imagery.

From Massilia to the shores of Egypt The two passages of Lucan I have looked at, in Book Three and Book Eight, both clearly signal that they are drawing on the Misenus passage in Aeneid 6. In the Massilia episode, the topos of tree-felling unmistakeably follows the Virgilian and Ennian tradition, while in the Pompey

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episode, the reference to Cordus in terms reminiscent of Misenus alerts the reader to the structural similarities between the two passages. There are still further grounds for reading the two passages together, however.27 First, the death of Pompey is prefigured in the grove scene at Massilia. Pompey is compared to an oak tree early on in Book One (Lucan 1.136–43): qualis frugifero quercus sublimis in agro exuuias ueteris populi sacrataque gestans dona ducum nec iam ualidis radicibus haerens pondere fxa suo est, nudosque per aera ramos effundens trunco, non frondibus, effcit umbram, et quamuis primo nutet casura sub Euro, tot circum siluae frmo se robore tollant, sola tamen colitur. Like in a fruitful feld a lofty oak, bearing the people’s spoils of old and generals’ hallowed dedications; clinging with roots no longer strong, by its own weight it stands frm, and spreading naked branches through the air, it makes shade with trunk, not foliage; and though it totters, ready to fall beneath the frst Eurus, though all around so many trees upraise themselves with study trunks, yet it alone is venerated. Pompey is the aged, lofty oak which is venerated even though it is weak, despite its size. The grove at Massilia is a similarly ancient site of worship, and it is a “lofty oak” that frst falls to Caesar (aeriam . . . quercum, Lucan 3.434).28 In addition, the mention of the winds which threaten the oak in the simile (Lucan 1.141) is recalled by Caesar in his response to the speech of the Massilian ambassadors (Lucan 3.362–3, 365): uentus ut amittit uires, nisi robore densae occurunt siluae, spatio diffusus inani . . . sic hostes mihi desse nocet As the wind loses strength and is dissipated in empty space unless the forests thick with timber block its path . . . so lack of enemies hurts me . . . In Book One, Caesar is likened not to the winds, but to a thunderbolt (1.151– 7). Here, however, Caesar chooses a different image for himself, recalling the winds that buffet the oak in Pompey’s simile: challenging Lucan’s efforts to keep Pompey and Caesar apart through divergent similes in Book One, Caesar instead sets up an anticipated showdown between the pair, when, demolishing “so many trees” (tot siluae, 1.142) in the Massilian grove, he chops down an oak tree (3.434), symbolically killing Pompey.29

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Lucan gets his revenge, however, when the real Pompeian oak is felled while Caesar is off-stage. In Book Eight, Pompey is cut down and dismembered just as a tree is hacked to pieces.30 He is even referred to as a truncus at 8.698, recalling the prophecy of the frenzied matron at 1.685.31 This prophecy, which concludes Book One, alludes to the description of the body of Priam in the second book of the Aeneid: hunc ego, fuminea deformis truncus harena qui iacet, agnosco . . . (Lucan 1.685–6) Him I recognize, lying on the river sands, an unsightly headless corpse. iacet ingens litore truncus, auulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus (Virgil, Aeneid 2.557–8) On the shore a tall corpse Lies nameless, with its head ripped from its shoulders. As Hinds has noted, the passage in the Aeneid is itself an allusion to the death of Pompey, and so in Book One Lucan looks both forward to the eighth book of the De Bello Ciuili and backward to the second book of the Aeneid.32 Book Two of Lucan also ends with a reference to Pompey’s fate, describing his fight from Italy and including the pronouncement that “the sands of Pharos are condemned to be his grave” (Phariae busto damnantur harenae, Lucan 2.733). And as in the frst two books, the last few lines of Book Three, in which the aftermath of the naval battle at Massilia is described, anticipate the climax of the poem at the end of Book Eight (Lucan 3.756–61):33 quis in urbe parentum fetus erat! quanti matrum per litora planctus! coniunx saepe sui confusis uoltibus unda credidit ora uiri Romanum amplexa cadauer, accensisque rogis miseri de corpore trunco certauere patres. What weeping of parents there was in the city! What loud lamentation of mothers along the shore! Often a wife embraced a Roman corpse, its features mangled by the wave, believing it her own husband’s face; and by blazing pyres unhappy fathers fought over a headless body. The bodies cremated on the shore look forward to Pompey’s own cremation, and indeed the key word trunco can be seen as anticipating the general’s

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dismembered body. There is also a contrast, however: the Massilian shoreline is crowded and full of bodies which are mistaken for one another, unlike the lonely beach in Egypt where Pompey lies dead. Finally, both passages are set on the coost, further linking them both to the discovery of Misenus’ body on the Cumaean share Aeneid 6. Central to both passages is a sense of things left unfinished. Caesar does not chop down the entire grove, but only half-finishes the job. Similarly, Cordus is forced to abandon the cremation of Pompey halfway through and to bury the half-burnt remains. Caesar’s unfinished work in the passage that symbolically kills Pompey necessitates an unfinished burial of Pompey later in the poem.34 Caesar’s hastiness and urgency to rush through Lucan’s poem results in an epic that is partial and off-centred, one that is recognisably Virgilian but nonetheless distorted: the stock epic scene of a funeral is thus split across the poem. In both passages, the figure of Aeneas is prominent. In the Massilia episode, the tree-felling topos and the mention of Caesar as primus call to mind Aeneas at the forefront of the preparations for the burial of Misenus. As I have already shown, Caesar is thus characterised by a negative exemplar: his motives differ greatly from those of Aeneas. In the Pompey scene, it is Cordus, the insignificant quaestor, who is placed in the role of Aeneas, but without others to help him he fails hopelessly in his task. An interesting rolereversal occurs in this passage, as the minor character who is buried in the Aeneid becomes the one who buries in the De Bello Civili. In his discussion of Lucan’s “fractured voice”, Jamie Masters suggests that Lucan is at war with himself, drawn in different directions by his Caesarian desire to write down the Civil War, and by his horror at what is unfolding. He further suggests that Lucan attempts to combat his Caesarian side by the use of morae, delaying techniques.35 Lucan makes Massilia (in reality a relatively insignificant episode in the Civil War) into a mora and distorts history by removing Caesar’s just cause for complaint. Caesar’s response can be viewed as an attempt to speed up the narrative. By felling trees on such a large scale, he attempts to move the narrative forward to the death of Pompey, the mighty oak of the Republicans (Lucan 1.135–43) which is symbolically pre-enacted at Massilia when Caesar attacks the oak tree in the grove (Lucan 3.432–5). Caesar momentarily takes control of the text, and brings in the tree-felling topos that should, by rights, occur in the context of a funeral. But Lucan intervenes, Caesar is frustrated, and leaves the grove half-chopped. The divided allusion reflects the “fractured voice” of the poet and his internal conflict.36 We have already seen how Pompey is likened to the Golden Bough of the Aeneid through the use of the adjective discolor. Aeneas’ first sighting of the Bough is described as follows by Virgil (Aen. 6.201–9): inde ubi uenere ad fauces graue olentis Auerni, tollunt se celeres liquidumque per aera lapsae sedibus optatis gemina super arbore sidunt, discolor unde auri per ramos aura refulsit.

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Cillian O’Hogan quale solet siluis brumali frigore uiscum fronde uirere noua, quod non sua seminat arbos, et croceo fetu teretis circumdare truncos, talis erat species auri frondentis opaca ilice, sic leni crepitabat brattea uento. (Aen 6.201–9) But when they reached Avernus’ reeking throat, They shot up, then soared down through limpid air, Then perched on what Aeneas sought, the contrast Of fashing gold among the tree’s green branches; Just as the mistletoe in dead of winter Grows a fresh leaf, its own and not its host’s, And rings the smooth trunk with its yellow shoot; So the gold leaves stood out against the darkness Of the oak. Their foil was jangled in the light wind.

The Golden Bough is a rare shimmer of light in a dark, eerie grove, one not unlike that at Massilia. If the tree-felling episode in Book Three puts us in mind of Aeneid 6, perhaps we should see Caesar’s actions as a frustrated search for his own Golden Bough.

Notes 1 I’m pleased to offer this piece to Susanna as small thanks for her support and encouragement over the past decade. Thanks also to Michael Dewar, Alison Keith, and Jonathan Tracy for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Translations are taken from the following editions: Lucan from Braund (1992); Virgil from Ruden (2009); Ovid from Melville (1986). 2 For Lucan’s engagement here with Caesar, see Masters (1992, 11–42). On the Massilia scene in Lucan generally, see Panoussi (2003) and Saylor (2003). 3 Masters (1992, 22); cf. Hunink (1992, 141–2). 4 Cf. Ahl (1976, 190–230). 5 Rowland (1969, 205). 6 Lucan makes use of verbal echoes of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in Book One in the description of his march on Massilia, as noted by Rowland. 7 Hunink (1992, 107, 145). 8 Cf. Hunink (1992, 168); Phillips (1968, 299); Masters (1992, 21–5). On the passage generally, see Santini (1999). 9 Phillips (1968). 10 Phillips (1968, 298) notes that Lucan 3.399 also recalls Cadmus’ grove at Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.28 (silua uetus stabat nulla uiolata securi) and Faunus’ grove at Fast. 4.649 (silua uetus nullaque diu uiolata securi). Aygon (2010) sees the grove passage as the clearest example of an ekphrasis topou in the De Bello Ciuili. Cf. also Radicke (2004, 252). 11 Griffin (1986). 12 Masters (1992, 26–7). Ovid is himself engaging with Virgil in the Erysichthon episode, as Nadeau (2010) notes. 13 Thomas (1988, 268–9, 2001, 85–6). 14 Skutsch (1985, 341) argued for this based on the similarity with Silius 10.529– 34 (the mass cremation after Cannae). Elliott (2013, 290) is more guarded;

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nevertheless, Virgil’s reuse of the Ennius passage sets the tone for future instances of the tree-felling topos in Latin epic. See Williams (1968, 263–7) for further discussion of this topos. Cf. Thomas (2001, 85). Thomas also identifies Aeneid 12.766–7 and Georgics 2.205–11 as additional passages imitated here by Lucan. Hunink (1992, 157, cf. also 159). Cf. Cato, Agr. 139, and see further the examples collected in Thomas (1988, 263–4). Thomas (1988). Fantham (2003). Cf. Thomas (2001, 86). Cf. Hardie (1986, 381). Rosner-Siegel (1983), Masters (1992, 41). Brennan (1969, 104), in both instances the phrase occupies the first four feet of the line. Misenus has already been mentioned in passing at Aeneid 3.239–30. On colour imagery, and particularly the contrast of colours, in Lucan and Virgil, see Narducci (1979, 86–9), who quotes this passage at 89. On internal correspondences in the De Bello Ciuili, see generally Penwill (2009) and Esposito (2010). Rosner-Siegel (1983, 175–6). On the character Caesar’s poetic aspirations in the De Bello Ciuili, see Seidman (2017); for the avoidance of head-on conflict in Lucan’s similes, see Braund (2017, 86–7). Rosner-Siegel (1983, 177). Hinds (1998, 8–9). Hinds (1998, 8–9). On the intertextual nature of Pompey’s death more generally, see Scarcia (1996). This link is noted by Esposito (1996, 111 n. 38). The notion of leaving things unfinished could also, of course, be applied to the question of the completeness of the De Bello Ciuili itself – cf. Masters (1992, 216–59, especially 247–50): do Caesar’s actions at the grove reflect Lucan’s poetic agenda? Tracy (2011) is the most recent serious engagement with the question of the poem’s completeness, arguing that the abrupt conclusion represents an anti-Caesarian literary strategy. Masters (1992, 3–10, 87–90, and passim). On Lucan fighting Caesar, see also Henderson (1998, 183–4, 187–8).

Works cited Ahl, F. 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca. Aygon, J.-P. 2010. ‘L’insertion de quelques descriptiones locorum dans la narration chez Lucain: le jeu avec la tradition épique.’ In Devillers and Franchet d’Espèrey 2010, 43–54. Braund, S. 1992. Lucan: Civil War. Oxford. ———. 2017. Understanding Latin Literature. Second edition. London. Brennan, D. B. 1969. ‘Cordus and the Burial of Pompey.’ Classical Philology 64: 103–4. Brugnoli, G. and Stok, F. 1996. Pompei exitus: variazioni sul tema dall’antichita’ alla controriforma. Pisa. Devillers, O. and Franchet d’Espèrey, S. 2010. Lucain en débat: rhétorique, poétique et histoire: actes du colloque international, Institut Ausonius (Pessac, 12–14 juin 2008). Paris. Elliott, J. 2013. Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales. Cambridge.

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Esposito, P. 1996. ‘La morte di Pompeo in Lucano.’ In Brugnoli and Stok 1996, 75–123. ———. 2010. ‘Riprese e corrispondenze interne nel Bellum Civile di Lucano.’ In Devillers and Franchet d’Espèrey 2010, 33–42. Fantham, R. E. 2003. ‘The Angry Poet and the Angry Gods: Problems of Theodicy in Lucan’s Epic of Defeat.’ In Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen, ed. S. Braund and G. W. Most. Cambridge, 229–49. Griffin, A. H. F. 1986. ‘Erysichthon – Ovid’s Giant?’ Greece and Rome 33: 55–63. Hardie, P. R. 1986. Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium. Oxford. Henderson, J. 1998. ‘Lucan: The Word at War.’ In Fighting for Rome: Poets and Caesars, History and Civil War. Cambridge, 165–211. Hinds, S. E. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Hunink, V. 1992. M. Annaeus Lucanus Bellum Civile Book III: A Commentary. Amsterdam. Masters, J. 1992. Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. Cambridge. Melville, A. D. 1986. Ovid: Metamorphoses. Oxford. Nadeau, Y. 2010. ‘Naulochus and Actium, the Fleets of Paris and Aeneas, and the Tree-Felling of C. Iulius Caesar Erysichthon.’ In Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 15, ed. C. Deroux. Brussels, 219–39. Narducci, E. 1979. La provvidenza crudele: Lucano e la distruzione dei miti augustei. Pisa. Panoussi, V. 2003. ‘Virgil and Epic Topoi in Lucan’s Massilia.’ In Being There Together: Essays in Honor of Michael C.J. Putnam on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. P. J. Thibodeau and H. Haskell, 222–39. Afton, MN. Penwill, J. L. 2009. ‘The Double Visions of Pompey and Caesar.’ Antichthon 43: 79–96. Phillips, O. C. 1968. ‘Lucan’s Grove.’ Classical Philology 63: 296–300. Radicke, J. 2004. Lucans poetische Technik: Studien zum historischen Epos. Leiden. Rosner-Siegel, J. A. 1983. ‘The Oak and the Lightning. Lucan, Bellum civile 1.135– 157.’ Athenaeum 61: 165–77. Rowland, R. J. 1969. ‘The Significance of Massilia in Lucan.’ Hermes 97: 204–8. Ruden, S. 2009. Virgil: The Aeneid. New Haven. Santini, C. 1999. ‘Lucan 3.399–455: lucus horridus e codice etimologico in Lucano.’ In Interpretare Lucano: miscellanea di studi, ed. P. Esposito and L. Nicastri. Naples, 207–22. Saylor, C. 2003. ‘Open and Shut: The Battle for Massilia in Lucan, Pharsalia III.’ Latomus 62: 381–6. Scarcia, R. 1996. ‘Morte e (in)sepoltura di Pompeo.’ In Brugnoli and Stok 1996, 125–47. Seidman, J. 2017. ‘A Poetic Caesar in Lucan’s Pharsalia.’ Classical Journal 113: 72–95. Skutsch, O. 1985. The Annals of Quintus. Ennius. Oxford. Thomas, R. F. 1988. ‘Tree Violation and Ambivalence in Virgil.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 118: 261–73. ———. 2001. Virgil and the Augustan Reception. Cambridge. Tracy, J. 2011. ‘Internal Evidence for the Completeness of the Bellum Civile.’ In Brill’s Companion to Lucan, ed. P. Asso, 33–53. Leiden. Williams, G. W. 1968. Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry. Oxford.

10 Mens Humilis vs. Superbia in Prudentius’ Psychomachia Andrew M. McClellan

The slaughter of Superbia (‘Arrogance’) by Mens Humilis (‘Humility’)1 – the fourth and central duel in the poem2 – represents a dense amalgamation of Virgilian death scenes. Scholars, ever watchful for Virgil’s epic residue in the Psychomachia, have spotted many of these allusions,3 but none has explored (or assumed) a deeper significance or interrogated Prudentius’ agenda. I take Paola Franchi’s comment as a point of departure: ‘Si tratta, come si vede, di materiale di repertorio, impiegato sia in scene memorabili sia in passaggi poco significativi; tuttavia ci si può chiedere secondo quali criteri il poeta tardoantico l’abbia selezionato e assemblato.’4 What follows is a (speculative) stab at grappling with her question here, presupposing there is indeed value in exploring these intertextual clues beyond ornamental reference for its own sake.5 I start with a lexical examination of Virgilian allusions in the scene, before panning out to consider some of the ways in which Prudentius’ engagement with Virgil’s as well as Old and New Testament biblical scenes and themes fit into the larger scope of the Psychomachia. A quick word on Prudentian poetics and audience upfront. As Paula Hershkowitz details most extensively – through examination of the artistic/ iconographic record, archaeology, literature, ritual activity and behaviour, etc. – Prudentius’ immediate and target audience in Hispania and Southern Gaul’s villa-based communities at the end of the fourth and early fifth centuries existed in a largely non-Christian (or residually ‘pagan’) cultural environment.6 Like Prudentius, who cut his teeth on secular literature (Gennadius De uir. ill. 13: Prudentius uir saecularis litteraturae eruditus), his Hispano-Gallic audience was likely trained in traditional schools of rhetoric and grammar and thus highly attuned to his often-labyrinthine allusions to and imbrication of literary classics and Greco-Roman mythological materia. Prudentius’ work is explicitly proselytizing, but its Christian message is administered through the shared cultural currency of a pagan literary tradition. There was nothing inherently incongruous about this amalgamation, or at least no more so than a fourth-/fifth-century Tarragonic tomb pairing the pagan dis manibus with a Chi-Rho.7 This was a state (spiritually, culturally, politically) in transformation; Prudentius’ poetry reflects/mirrors this.

150 Andrew M. McClellan The scene of Mens Humilis’ slaying of Superbia is brutal. After galloping brazenly over the battlefield, Superbia accidentally falls into a stealthily hidden pit (269: foueae . . . furta malignae) set up by her own villainous comrade Fraus (‘Treachery’). The episode, in effect, dramatizes Proverbs 16:18 Vulgate: contritionem praecedit superbia et ante ruinam exaltatur spiritus, ‘pride goes before grief and the spirit is exalted before a fall.’8 Seemingly content with the humbling fall of the haughty Vice, Mens Humilis looks on, masking her joy with a look of ‘kindness’ or ‘elegance’ (277: comi . . . uultu). She hesitates (278: cunctanti) before she’s snapped back to action by the intervention of Spes (‘Hope’), who ‘hands her an avenging sword and breathes into her a love of glory’ (278–9: offert | ultorem gladium laudisque inspirit amorem). This does the trick (280–3): illa cruentatam correptis crinibus hostem protrahit et faciem laeua reuocante supinat, tunc caput orantis fexa ceruice resectum eripit ac madido suspendit colla capillo. She drags the blood-stained enemy seized by her hair and, with her left hand drawing her back, bends her face upward, then, while she’s pleading, slices off her head, cut from her bent neck and holds the severed head by its dripping hair. The deathblow itself comprises a cluster of Virgilian vignettes that either indicate explicitly or hint at decapitation. Most obvious are Prudentius’ borrowings from two scenes in quick succession from Aeneid 10. At 10.554–5, Aeneas slays the Latin warrior Tarquitus, severing his head mid-plea before boasting over his truncated corpse (tum caput orantis nequiquam et multa parantis | dicere deturbat terrae, ‘then while he’s pleading in vain and trying to say many things he hacks his head to the ground’). Prudentius modifes the demonstrative adverb (tum ~ tunc), but the collocation caput orantis in the same sedes clinches the allusion. Both decapitations precede a euchos (‘boasting speech’): Aeneas delivers his own, promising to leave Tarquitus’ corpse to scavenging animals (Aen. 10.557–60); Spes harangues Superbia and others (more broadly) over-stuffed with ‘arrogance,’ while also citing (as a sort of exemplary biblical metatext) David’s slaying and decapitating of Goliath (Psych. 285–304; cf. 1 Samuel 17:49–51; Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes had been invoked earlier in Pudicitia’s slaying of Libido [‘Lust’], a non-decapitation: Psych. 58–65). Moments earlier, Aeneas dispatched the suppliant Magus, bending and twisting his neck back with the left hand only to deliver a piercing blow against the expectation of decapitation (Aen. 10.535–6): galeam laeua tenet atque reflexa | ceruice orantis capulo tenus applicat ensem, ‘he holds the helmet in his left hand and with the neck of the begging man bent back, he drives the sword in up to the hilt.’ The scene of Magus’ death replays Pyrrhus’ earlier slaying of Priam at 2.550–3,9 which similarly sets up the oddity

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of a death blow toying with the expectation of decapitation before casting it aside: trementem | traxit . . . | implicuitque comam laeua, dextraque coruscum | extulit ac lateri capulo tenus abdidit ensem, ‘[Pyrrhus] dragged him trembling. . . . He grabbed his hair with his left hand and with his right drew his glittering sword and buried it up to the hilt in his side’ (cf. 12.302–3).10 The oddity is amplified by the fact that Priam is ultimately (like Superbia) decapitated (2.557–8), though Virgil conspicuously ‘expurgates’ the scene from his narrative. I’ll return to Virgil’s account of Priam’s death shortly, since I think it casts a sizable shadow over Prudentius’ articulation of Superbia and her demise. There are additional allusions to Virgilian decapitations. Prudentius’ phrase suspendit colla (with further blood-soaked imagery) recalls Turnus’ treatment of the brothers Amycus and Diores: after killing the two Trojans, Turnus ‘suspends their severed heads dripping with blood’ from his chariot (Aen. 12.511–12): curruque abscisa duorum | suspendit capita et rorantia sanguine portat. Both Turnus and Mens Humilis put their victim’s severed head on display. The scene also shares lexical and general commonalities with Nisus’ decapitation of Rhamnes and his acolytes during the botched night raid at Aeneid 9.331–2: ferroque secat pendentia colla; | tum caput ipsi aufert domino, ‘he severs the hanging heads with his sword; then he snatches away the head of the leader himself.’ And the phrase eripit . . . caput (Psych. 282–3) hints at Virgil’s collocation caput abstulit (Aen. 10.394, 12.382) of Pallas’ beheading of Thymber and Turnus’ of Phegeus (respectively). There are extra-Virgilian nods to decapitation scenes in Ovid (Met. 4.784–5) and Valerius Flaccus (6.619) too, yet the Aeneid material stands out for its conspicuous remodelling here. But why? At the most basic level, this is a virtuoso (and rather braggadocio) display of what Philip Hardie has called ‘combinatorial imitation,’ wherein a successor poet alludes simultaneously to multiple scenes from a single predecessor.11 What connects these scenes is an emphasis on heads and necks: their twisting, bending, severing, etc. The combination of Virgilian decapitations or quasi-decapitations has the feel of a cento, a patchwork of fragmentary units linked by their association with disunity in the form of physical rending. Prudentius is having fun stitching together Virgilian lexical membra (severed from Virgil’s corpus) from scenes of dismemberment, in his own multifaceted scene of dismemberment. But I want to pull on one particular allusive thread here and see where it leads (Prudentius invites this sort of investigation by blending so many scenes from the source-text and daring us to pursue any number of them for potential interpretive value).12 Of the myriad borrowings from the Aeneid, the spectral presence of headless Priam stands out most powerfully in Prudentius’ scene – it’s the ‘most memorable’ of the Virgilian passages Prudentius collates here, to recall Franchi’s comment, and might contain added import in this respect. It is, probably, the locus classicus of epic decapitation scenes, and its massive influence on post-Virgilian poetry must not be

152 Andrew M. McClellan undervalued. It’s also, curiously, an unnarrated decapitation, as I’ve mentioned: Priam is killed by Pyrrhus via a blow to the ribs, and then suddenly his headless corpse is bobbing on the Sigean shore. hoc dicens altaria ad ipsa trementem traxit et in multo lapsantem sanguine nati, implicuitque comam laeua, dextraque coruscum extulit ac lateri capulo tenus abdidit ensem. haec fnis Priami fatorum, hic exitus illum sorte tulit Troiam incensam et prolapsa uidentem Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum regnatorem Asiae. iacet ingens litore truncus, auulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.

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Saying this [Pyrrhus] dragged him, trembling and slipping in the copious blood of his son, to the altar itself. He grabbed his hair with his left hand and with his right drew his glittering sword and buried it up to the hilt in his side. This was the limit of Priam’s destiny, this death took him by lot, seeing Troy in fames and Pergamum’s collapse, 555 a man once the proud ruler for so many people and lands of Asia. He lies a huge trunk on the shore, a head ripped from his shoulders and a corpse without a name. Virgil relegates much to narrative silence and asks his audience to fll the ellipsis with our own imaginations, as Servius articulates ad Aen. 2.558 (deploying a critical scholiastic stock-phrase to indicate story elements left ‘in silence’ or ‘implicit’ by the poet and requiring participation on the part of the reader to ‘fll’ the narrative gaps): avulsumque umeris caput hoc est quod κατὰ τὸ σιωπώμενον accipi debet.13 I’ve written much about this elsewhere and won’t belabour the points here, but suffce it to say, this narrative lacuna offered considerable hermeneutic space for epic successors to explore, most dramatically (and famously) Lucan in his tortuously agonizing account of Pompey’s decapitation which effectively flls Virgil’s descriptive gap with grisly hypertrophic detail and specifcity (Luc. 8.667–711).14 Prudentius is doing similar things in the scene of Superbia’s decapitation. Like Pyrrhus, Mens Humilis drags her victim by the hair with her left hand and bends her head back to expose the neck; the lexical cues make clear Prudentius’ indebtedness to Virgil’s scene. What happens next marks a jarring transition from the events of Priam’s slaying. While Virgil relegates the physical act of decapitation to silence, Prudentius amplifies it with a superabundance of imagery from additional Virgilian decapitation scenes in the Aeneid, as if to highlight the awkwardness of the narrative gap in the account of Priam’s beheading. This is, in other words, a sort of heavyhanded ‘correction’ of Virgil’s treatment of Priam’s demise. Prudentius has ‘filled in’ the narrative gap in Virgil’s account with nods to Virgil’s own

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poetry, jettisoning the staggered elements of post mortem abuse by narrating a decapitating death-blow. In addition, Spes’ reference to David’s slaying of Goliath (Psych. 291–300) helps blend the biblical account with the pagan: like Priam, Goliath’s decapitation is explicitly post mortem (1 Samuel 17:51), a feature, again, elided in the case of Superbia. But the larger scene also recalls another famous moment in the Aeneid, indeed the most famous: Aeneas’ slaying of Turnus at the poem’s close. Mens Humilis’ conspicuous ‘hesitation’ before her wounded enemy (278: cunctanti) hints at Aeneas’ notorious hesitation before the wounded Turnus (Aen. 12.940: cunctantem). In each case, external factors sway the hero’s hand: Spes’ inspiration and ‘avenging sword’ (Psych. 279: ultorem gladium) drive Mens Humilis to action; Pallas’ sword-belt inspires vengeance in Aeneas for Turnus’ killing of Pallas (Aen. 12.941–4). Superbia earlier complained about having to face such a ‘chorus of girls’ (Psych. 242: uirgineis choreis), pleading exasperatingly to ‘Mars and [her own] self-conscious virtue’ (240: o Mauors et uirtus conscia), which both recalls crude effeminizing attacks aimed at Aeneas and the Trojans in the Aeneid (e.g. 4.215–17, 9.617–20, 12.99), and also borrows Virgil’s description of Turnus’ emotional state at Aeneid 12.668: furiis agitatus amor et conscia uirtus, ‘love fired by fury and self-conscious virtue.’ The allusion sets up the impending duel between Mens Humilis and Superbia as a reformulation of the duel between Aeneas and Turnus,15 actualized ultimately by Mens Humilis’ pre-death-stroke hesitation. The personified figure of ‘arrogance’ or ‘haughtiness’ itself points to Priam and Turnus vis-à-vis Virgilian formulations. Priam is, in Virgil’s famous epitaph, the ‘once haughty ruler’ of Asia Minor (2.556–7: quondam superbum | regnatorem), the very embodiment and antecedent of Prudentius’ allegorical Vice.16 And Spes’ subsequent euchos (and warning) reads like a dramatization of Virgil’s sombre requiem on the collapse of a once-great-ruler and his once-mighty-empire (Psych. 285–6): desine grande loqui; frangit Deus omne superbum, | magna cadunt, inflata crepant, tumefacta premuntur, ‘enough boastful talk; God shatters all arrogance, great things fall, puffed up things fracture, swollen things deflate’ (filtered through biblical exegetic warnings of the dangers of haughtiness: e.g. Matth. 23:12; Luke 1:52).17 But, as Sabine Grebe indicates,18 Prudentius’ audience will likely also have in mind Anchises’ netherworld warning to Aeneas at Aeneid 6.851–3: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. You, Roman, remember to rule the people with authority (these will be your arts), and to make a habit of enforcing peace, to spare the conquered and to bring war upon the proud. She suggests that this allusion helps to validate Prudentius’ equivalency of Superbia and Roman paganism (and pagan aristocratic ideology) in confict

154 Andrew M. McClellan with the upstart Christianity in the form of Mens Humilis. But of course the speech itself is massively proleptic of Aeneas’ slaying of Turnus at the end of the epic, which has elicited a (rather furious) barrage of scholarship explicating the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of Aeneas’ actions. Turnus is both subiectus and superbus, as Superbia is, intrinsically, and here (tmestically) after her fall at Psych. 275: sub morte iacentis. What of these allusions then? Is there any larger macroscopic interpretive value we can tease out of Prudentius’ references in the duel between Mens Humilis and Superbia to Virgil’s climax of the Iliou Persis in Aeneid 2 and the climax to his poem in book 12? One way to approach this might be to start by looking more closely at the figure of Superbia. She is described curiously as wearing her hair high like a crenelated crown (Psych. 183–5: turritum tortis caput adcumularat in altum | crinibus, extructos augeret ut addita cirros | congeries celsumque apicem frons ardua ferret, ‘she had heaped up on her high head a turret of braided hair, having piled up curls en masse to increase the height, and so her high brow should make a towering crown’). Danuta Shanzer suggests this is one of Prudentius’ ‘spontaneous imaginative details’ and dubs the hairdo one of Babylonian pretention (i.e. the polos crown’s origins in ancient Anatolia).19 But of course the description here and the adjective/epithet turritus, -a, -um point unmistakably to Roman-era descriptions of the ‘turreted’ goddess Cybele (e.g. Aen. 6.785, cf. 10.253: turrigerae . . . urbes; Prop. 4.11.52; Ov. Met. 10.696, Fast. 4.224, etc.; OLD s.v. turritus b), who came to embody the polos crown both in literary accounts and artistic renderings. Further, Superbia drapes her horse with a lion’s skin (Psych. 179–80), which might recall Hercules but is also the animal sacred and indelible to the Idaean goddess.20 Superbia’s entrance onto the battlefield signals a major reworking of Virgil’s description of the Trojan warrior Chloreus (Aen. 11.768–77), who is a priest of Cybele.21 And the Vice’s fall into Fraus’ pit hints at the venue of the taurobolium Prudentius describes at Peristephanon 10.1011–50, a warping of the devotional baptism in blood in obeisance to the goddess. The scene, in other words, is littered with allusions to Cybele, from Hellenistic times the deity considered celestial patron and protector of Troy and, thus, goddess of the ‘mother’ city of Rome – her cult was transferred from Asia Minor to Rome at the end of the Second Punic War (204 bce), coincident with Rome’s growing interest in its legendary association with Troy.22 She’s Iliacae Matris at Contra Symmachum 1.628, Troy personified, and inextricable from Rome’s famed ancestral stock. Virgil’s famous simile likening the ‘turreted mother’ (Aen. 6.784–5: mater . . . turrita) and her sway over Phrygia to Rome’s imperial expanse captures Cybele’s dual association with Troy and Rome (6.781–7), a point Ovid expands upon when he suggests Cybele ‘nearly followed Aeneas when he brought Troy to Rome’ (Fast. 4.251–2: cum Troiam Aeneas Italos portaret in agros, | est dea sacriferas paene secuta rates), and when he has Attalus claim the goddess for both Phrygia and Rome simultaneously (272: nostra eris: in Phrygios Roma refertur auos).23

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Reading Prudentius’ scene through the lens of Aeneid 2, Superbia’s decapitation symbolizes Trojan (and proto-Roman) civic collapse via allusions to Troy’s turret-crowned patroness. This symbolism is filtered through Prudentius’ nods to the slaying of Priam in the Aeneid, whose death, similarly, is synecdoche for the fall of Troy in Virgil’s poem (Priam’s fate and Troy’s are also inextricable, as Richard Heinze recognized long ago).24 Superbia herself frames the intervention of the Virtues in terms of an Achaean-like ‘invasion’: the upstart Virtues hail from ‘unknown shores’ (228: ignotis . . . ab oris), they’re ‘foreigners’ (210: aduena), and the poem’s mental terrain is the Vices’ long-held territory (220: nostra . . . sede).25 But the Virtues are also cast analogically as post-war Trojan ‘exiles’ (230: exul), Superbia’s speech (206–52) borrows heavily from both Numanus Remulus’ and Juturna’s antiexilic-Trojan screeds at Aeneid 9.595–620 and 12.229–37 (respectively),26 and the Vice describes an agrestic ‘landscape’ of the soul that both recalls Evander’s pre-Trojan Pallanteum while also espousing an imperialist agenda with echoes of Jupiter’s futuristic vision of Rome’s ‘empire without end’ (Aen. 1.279: imperium sine fine dedi; Psych. 209–10: laetos et gramine colles | imperio calcare dedit, ‘[the Vices] have been permitted by supreme authority to trample hills rich with grass’).27 The imagery looks backward and forward in Roman mytho-historic time, amplified by Superbia’s complaint that a ‘plebeian soldiery’ (206: plebeio milite) matches itself against ‘famous rulers’ (206–7: claros . . . duces), recalling Republican-era class divisions (and perhaps social divisions in Prudentius’ own time).28 Allusions to the deaths of both Priam and Turnus in the slaying of Superbia, moreover, actualize the structural/functional linkage Virgil constructed around the climax of war in Troy and Italy: just as Priam’s death clinches the fate of Troy and brings the war to a close, so Turnus’ death clinches the fate of Italians and exiled Trojans, bringing that war (and the poem) to a close. Priam dies with his Troy burning around him (2.555: Troiam incensam); Turnus’ fate is sealed as he spies the ‘turret’ (12.673–4: turrim . . . turrim) he himself had built at Laurentum engulfed in flames (12.672–5). The Virgilian imagery activated by Superbia’s death clusters around evocations of invasion and destruction, first at Troy and then in Italy, linked by way of reference to the turreted goddess, symbol of both Troy and Rome, at the heart of Rome’s legendary pagan mytho-history. We can go further. Imagery of the destruction and collapse of pagan cities and symbols recurs throughout Prudentius’ descriptions of the Vices and their deaths. For example, the toppling of Veterum Cultura Deorum (‘Worship of the Old Gods’) evokes the razing of a physical structure (31: labefactat; 32: solo adplicat), and the Vice dons pagan priestly head-gear (30: phalerataque tempora uittis, ‘temples adorned with fillets’). Libido is explicitly associated with the lustful and doomed city of Sodom (42: Sodomita Libido), and the ‘wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah’ serve as the venue for Lot’s capture in the analogical Praefatio to the poem (Pf. 16–17: criminosis urbibus | Sodomae et Gemorrae). Luxuria (‘Indulgence’) is ‘western’

156 Andrew M. McClellan in her lasciviousness (310: occiduis mundi de finibus), and a clear Sallustian and Juvenalian metonymous figure for Roman indulgence, buffeted by her resemblance to the ‘Babylonian Whore’ of Revelation 17, a metaphorical standard bearer for pagan Rome.29 Discordia (‘Discord’: a liminal figure somewhere between paganism and non-orthodox Christian, e.g. Arian/ nontrinitarian) is torn to pieces collectively by the Virtues brutally mimicking her role in tearing the orthodox Christian church apart at the seams (Psych. 719–25); her sparagmos sharply juxtaposes the subsequent communal construction of the Temple of Wisdom at the poem’s close, signifying the end of psychic ‘discord.’ Even Spes’ curious inspiring of Mens Humilis with a ‘love of glory’ (279: laudisque inspirit amorem) borrows from Ovid’s simile comparing sea storm waves crashing upon Ceyx’s ship to the sacking of a city (Met. 11.525–8): et ut miles, numero praestantior omni, cum saepe adsiluit defensae moenibus urbis, spe potitur tandem laudisque accensus amore inter mille uiros murum tamen occupat unus. And as a soldier, more outstanding than all the rest, when he has repeatedly leapt upon a city’s defensive walls, fnally attains what he hoped and, fred by a love of glory, though alone, takes hold of the wall among a thousand men. The context of Ceyx’s eventual wave-battered corpse in a scene punctuated by allusions to Virgil’s dead Priam also helps tie the imagery together in Prudentius’ rendering.30 The poem is flled with imagery of the destruction of ‘barbarous’ cities and religious structures as symbolic substratum of the duels between Christian Virtues and non-Christian Vices. But like the Aeneid, the Psychomachia counters destruction with the promise of renewal. The poem as a whole dramatizes the creation of a Christian spiritual/conceptual divine ‘city’ (a heavenly New Jerusalem à la Revelation 21) in the communal building of the Temple of Wisdom at the poem’s close, spawned from the destruction of (allegoricalized) pagan and non-orthodox constructs: this will be a Christian temple in the ‘city of the (human) body purged’ of Vices (818: purgati corporis urbem), inspired by the First Temple of Solomon (805–7), which was similarly a symbol of peace born of war and blood (809–10: sanguine nam terso templum fundatur et ara | ponitur auratis Christi domus ardua tectis, ‘for a temple is built after blood is wiped clear and an altar is set up with golden walls as the lofty home of Christ’). This doubles as the rejection of the physical and corporeal for the spiritual and, in effect, ethereal, a reworking or reimagining of the (unfulfilled) telos of the Aeneid in the founding of a physical Rome out of the ashes of Troy and proto–civil war in Italy.31 In both poems, war proves ultimately necessary for establishing peace;32 and in both poems this is emblematized symbolically through acts of (religious) construction. Aeneas’ sacrificial and

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‘foundational’ slaying of Turnus neatly clinches the promise of the proem (Aen. 1.5: dum conderet urbem, ‘until he should build a city’; 12.950: ferrum aduerso sub pectore condit, ‘he buries the sword under his adversary’s chest’), while his narratively unfulfilled promise to build a temple to Apollo and Diana (6.69–70) will be actualized historically by Augustus’ building of a temple to Apollo on the Palatine to commemorate victory after Actium and the end of internecine war, a symbol of the Pax Augusta (noted in Aeneas’ futuristic shield at 8.720–2). Prudentius’ temple signals the end of the internal/internecine ‘Soul-Battle,’ and the description of the temple’s construction is suffused with the language of Roman Republican restoration after civil war.33 All of the cities and city-like temples that Prudentius evokes allusively and symbolically in his Temple of Wisdom function, in theory, as peace-bringing structures signalling the end of war and destruction: Rome’s, and ultimately Augustus’, rise necessitates Troy’s collapse and the subsequent war in Italy (mytho-historically and in Virgil’s own time); Solomon’s temple symbolized peace after the war-plagued reign of his father David (Psych. 805–6: regni . . . pacifier heres | belligeri, ‘the peace-bringing heir of a warring kingdom’); and John’s vision of the heavenly New Jerusalem in Revelation follows a cosmic world war of sorts (in the narrative) which also must be read in the context of the destruction and desecration of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by Roman siege forces in 70 ce (John, who likely witnessed the initial siege, began writing around 90 ce after fleeing Judea for the island of Patmos). But while these are all contextually similar ‘buildings,’ the Christian constructions in Revelation and the Psychomachia are, unlike their pagan and Jewish parallels, importantly intangible and not subject to inevitable cyclical destruction. Like Troy, the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem lay in ruins in Prudentius’ day; the Second Temple’s collapse in 70 was tragically paired with the destruction of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol in Rome a few months earlier (both a consequence of Roman aggression).34 Prudentius’ Rome was teetering on account of persistent Gothic invasions and would finally, a year or so after he penned the Psychomachia, fall to Alaric in 410.35 The allegorical Christian temple is everlasting and an implicit challenge to pagan and Jewish religious emblems always (potentially) subject to destruction. Prudentius had levelled a similar – but more direct/explicit – challenge in his vitriolic Apotheosis (c. 400 ce), the residue of which lurks in the background of the more subtle articulation of temple construction in the Psychomachia. He imagines a personified ‘Romulean Capitol’ (Apoth. 444: Capitolia Romula) mourning her pagan temples ruined at the command of Christian emperors (445–6: destructaque templa | imperio cecidisse ducum). Christ himself is pictured seizing the Capitol and toppling the statues of the pagan gods (508: simulacra deum Tarpeia subegit). Concomitantly, infelix Iudaea (504) and the Jews of Jerusalem must suffer the Temple of Solomon in ruins because it was an ill-fated human-made structure destined to perish

158 Andrew M. McClellan (515–16: iure solutum est | et iacet, in nihilum quoniam redit omne politum, ‘it has justly been destroyed and lies in ruins, since everything elegantly made returns to nothingness’). Prudentius contrasts these fallible, perishable monuments with the Christian temple ‘made from the Word of the Lord’ (524: Verbo factum Domini), a temple that is ‘eternal’ and ‘without end’ (526: hoc templum aeternum est, hoc finem non habet). This allegorical Christian temple replaces and eclipses the Jewish Temple(s) of Solomon and ‘makes a tomb’ of pagan rites now left in ruins (537: tua congestae tumulant holocausta ruinae).36 The Christian temple’s supremacy and efficacy come at the expense of antiChristian monuments, which must by necessity crumble and be replaced; or rather, which actively must be destroyed to make way. The images of Christ toppling pagan statues on the Capitol and Solomon’s temple in ruins bookend a description of Christ’s ‘avenging virtue’ (uirtus . . . ultrix) symbolically ‘trampling’ the ‘vane superstition’ of pagans and Jews (509–11): disce tuis, miseranda, malis, quo uindice tandem | uana superstitio lex et carnaliter acta | plectatur, cuius uirtus te proterat ultrix, ‘learn from your evils, miserable one, by whose vengeance at last vane superstition and law exercised sensually are punished, whose avenging virtue tramples you.’ The imagistic violence here prefigures the allegorical duels Prudentius constructs between capital ‘V’ Virtues and Vices articulating the upstart Christianity’s victory over the old and crumbling superstitiones of yesteryear. The ‘newness’ of Christianity contrasted to aged, decrepit religious ‘others’ is at issue in the Apotheosis (esp. 545–9), as it is in the Psychomachia and other Prudentius poems. The first battle of the Psychomachia pinpoints this explicitly: the sprightly Fides (‘Faith’) squares up against Veterum Cultura Deorum, who symbolizes, in effect, ‘Old Paganism.’ Paganism (identically ueterum .  .  . deorum, Contra Symm. 2.1) is figured as an ‘ancient disease’ infecting the personified Roman state (1.2: antique . . . morbi; cf. 1.7: antiquo Romam squalere ueterno), and Emperor Theodosius (Christlike) enters Rome to purge the city of its perishable pagan relics (in stone, plaster, cement, bronze), ‘ancient trifles’ (433: ueteres . . . nugas), and replace them with the invincible symbol of the cross (433–41, 464–9). Pagan Rome is old, decayed; a newly Christian Rome is made instantly youthful again and un-aging (541–3; cf. 2.655–60).37 And, of course – to try to bring this full circle – in her harangue Superbia contrasts the young Virtues (Psych. 210: aduena, ‘foreigner’ but also ‘newcomer’; 236: tirones, ‘young soldiers’) with the old Vices (208: ueteres; 211: antiquos . . . reges, ‘ancient rulers’), a juxtaposition underscored by David’s (heavy-handed) youthfulness matched against Goliath in the subsequent biblical analogue (292: inualida manu; 292: puerilis; 298: pueri . . . parui; 299: teneris . . . annis; 300: puer). Working within traditions (both poetic and scriptural) obsessed with the concepts of foundation and renovation, Prudentius places Christianity in a line of succession: it’s the ‘new’ religion replacing ‘old’ anti-Christian systems rendered inadmissible. But he’s at pains to articulate this succession

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not as smooth, but rather violent and destructive on multiple planes. The old physical and psychic structures need to be destroyed in order to make way for Christian spiritual-cum-cultural ascendancy. While this is a thematic feature of much of Prudentius’ poetry, I think the duel between Mens Humilis and Superbia spells this out most intricately, particularly in its Christianizing appropriation of Rome’s legendary pagan origin story canonized in the Aeneid. At the level of intertext, Prudentius casts Mens Humilis as a Christian figure insinuating herself allusively into major foundational moments in the Aeneid and, thus, Roman mytho-history: the slaying of Priam and Turnus which metonymously stand for the fall of Troy and the defeat (and ultimately amalgamation) of the Latins, respectively; these are destructive events necessary for Rome’s eventual rise. By implanting the Christian Mens Humilis as an instrumental figure in Roman mytho-history, Prudentius is trying to rewrite Rome’s foundational story in a Christian light; or better, he’s trying to ‘overwrite’ the non-Christian elements of Rome’s legendary past by demanding that paganism’s hold on Roman history, identity, and futurity (as a product of ‘antiquity’) is not unimpeachable or, indeed, unseverable, despite Superbia’s boastful claims to precedence.38 Superbia champions paganism’s everlasting imperium (Psych. 210: imperio calcare dedit), in a psychic landscape replete with Virgilian imagery of Troy and Rome, via allusion to Jupiter’s prophecy of pagan Trojan–Roman supremacy at Aeneid 1.278–9 (noted earlier). The Psychomachia proves the falsity of this claim. Roman imperium sine fine is indeed assured, but it’s the purview, rather, of the Christian, as individual and state, as Theodosius demonstrates in the earthly Rome by appropriating the same prophecy after cleansing the city of its pagan past at Contra Symmachum 1.541–3: denique nec metas statuit nec tempora ponit: | imperium sine fine docet, ne Romula uirtus | iam sit anus, norit ne gloria partam senectam, ‘indeed he set up no limits nor put down a set duration of time: he taught empire without end, lest Rome’s virtue grow old, or the glory she won know old age.’39 The Contra Symmachum as a whole is a defiant savaging of traditional pagan belief and traditional Roman history; it’s a ‘rewriting’ of the past in which the pagan gods are lies and misconceptions, supplanted by the true Christian God long pulling strings behind the scenes.40 The Psychomachia plays out a similar Christianizing of Roman history, only more subtly at the level of allegory and allusion in a complex dialogue with pagan Rome’s national epic.

Notes 1 I’d planned to include an epilogue in my PhD dissertation on Prudentius’ Psychomachia. This never happened (nor, I should say, did about four other chapters from my initial prospectus). I put him on the backburner for about a decade. Susanna likes Prudentius. I casually pitched the embryonic idea for this paper to her a couple years ago at a conference. She said I should write it up. Here it is, less than it might have been had I not been forced to conceal it from her editorial eyes.

160 Andrew M. McClellan 2 As Nugent (1985, 35) indicates, this marks a transition ‘decisively from the shorter battles to the longer, from the simpler oppositions to the more complex.’ 3 E.g. Mahoney (1934, 56); Schwen (1937, 20–1); Magazzù (1975, 22); Lühken (2002, 305); Franchi (2013, 267) and ad locc. 4 Franchi (2013, 267): ‘It is, as we can see, repertory material, used both in memorable scenes and also in passages of little significance; however, one may ask according to what criteria the late antique poet selected and assembled it.’ 5 E.g. Roberts’ (1989) ‘jeweled style’ or Pelttari’s (2014, 115–60) emphasis on ‘nonreferential allusion’ (and others) which have a tendency to take late antique poetry too far adrift of the complex interpretive dynamics it demands of readers (to my mind). See now Hardie (2019) – which was published after I completed the draft of this chapter – for similar sentiments regarding intertextuality in late antique poetry. 6 Hershkowitz (2017). 7 Hershkowitz (2017, 71). Christian and pagan symbols appear organically and unobtrusively alongside one another in the areas in and around Prudentius’ home town of Calagurris in northern Hispania. 8 Translations are my own. 9 Harrison (1991, ad Aen. 10.535–6). 10 On the oddity, see Horsfall (2008, ad Aen. 2.552): ‘Pyrrhus’ actions are not altogether easy to follow, for he grasps Priam’s hair, only to plunge his sword into the king’s side. No beheading in the narrative.’ 11 Hardie (1989, 3). See Pelttari (2014, 138–43) on fragmentary ‘juxtaposed allusions’ in a specifically late antique poetic context. 12 Malamud (1990, 276): Prudentius’ poetry ‘begs to be decoded.’ 13 On the phrase and its implications for a sort of proto-Iserian reader-response system, see Nünlist (2009, 157–73). 14 See McClellan (2019, 53–7, 68–79) with further bibliography. 15 Noted by Lewis (2002, 87). 16 I read the loaded and ambiguous word superbus here pejoratively: see Fowler (1990, 47–52) on the nuances in Virgil. 17 See Mastrangelo (2008, 214–15 n. 53). In the Psychomachia’s Praefatio, Abraham – who stands allegorically for all Virtues to come in the poem proper – is praised for having conquered the ‘arrogant kings’ (Pref. 27–8: reges superbos) who captured Lot. 18 Grebe (2008, 30). 19 Shanzer (1989, 351). 20 Noted by Lewis (2000, 102). 21 Mahoney (1934, 50–1, 55); Franchi (2013, ad locc.); Lühken (2002, 48–9): ‘Obwohl die Bezüge auch hier aus verschiedenen Abschnitten der Aeneis stammen, dominieren doch die Anklänge an die Beschreibung des Trojaners Chloreus Aen. 11,768–77, wie schon am Anfang der recht langen Passage deutlich wird.’ 22 See Roller (1999, 263–86); Rose (2013, 211) with additional bibliography. 23 See Wilhelm (1988) for more details about Cybele in the Aeneid and in Rome (particularly Augustan Rome). 24 Heinze (1993, 23–4). 25 On the ‘physical’ landscape of the Psychomachia see O’Hogan (2016, 94–7). 26 Schwen (1937, 17–19); Smith (1976, 289); Lühken (2002, 62–3); Franchi (2013, ad locc.). 27 See Franchi (2013, ad 209–10), hesitantly, on nods to Jupiter’s prophecy. Nugent (1985, 38), Lewis (2000, 103) and (2002, 86) on colles as an allusion to Rome’s topography. 28 Nugent (1985, 38); Lewis (2002, 86); Franchi (2013, ad 206). Grebe (2008) on the projection into Prudentius’ own time period. 29 See Lewis (2000, 112–14 and 2002, 87–90) for details.

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30 See McClellan (2019, 121–2). 31 See Hardie (2019, 201–2) for a succinct discussion of city and temple imagery in the Psychomachia. Deproost (1995, 67–73) is a more expansive examination, which includes the suggestion that Prudentius’ temple recalls the description of interior space in the scene of Priam’s death through the perspective of Aeneas in Aeneid 2 (68). 32 Prudentius is pointedly heavy-handed (769: pax . . . pax, 770: pax 771: pace . . . pace, 772: pace, 778: pax, 785: pacem, 805: pacifier, 821: pacis). 33 Mastrangelo (2008, 130–32, 225 n. 53). See Hardie (2019, 192) on Prudentius’ allusions to ‘the Virgilian sequence of temples of Apollo’; also Mastrangelo (2008, 23–4). 34 Moralee (2018, 179–80). 35 Shanzer (1989) for the dating of the poem. 36 See Mastrangelo (2008, 143–4); Moralee (2018, 177–8). 37 Hardie (2019, 54–7). 38 See similarly Lewis (2002, 87). 39 See Hardie (2019, 56–7) on the allusion to Jupiter’s prophecy in the passage from C. Symm. 40 Pollmann (2017, 164–70); Hardie (2019, 57–9).

Works cited Deproost, P. A. 1995. ‘L’intériorisation des espaces épiques dans la Psychomachie de Prudence.’ In Descriptions et créations d’espaces dans la littérature, ed. E. Leonardy and H. Roland. Louvain-la-Neuve, 53–75. Fowler, D. 1990. ‘Deviant Focalisation in Virgil’s Aeneid.’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 36, 42–63. Franchi, P. 2013. La battaglia interiore: Prova di comment alla Psychomachia di Prudenzio. Diss., Wien. Grebe, S. 2008. ‘The End Justifies the Means: The Role of Deceit in Prudentius’ Psychomachia.’ In Laster im Mittelalter, ed. C. Flüeler and M. Rohde. Berlin, 11–44. Hardie, P. 1989. “Flavian Epicists on Virgil’s Epic Technique.’ Ramus 18, 3–20. ———. 2019. Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry. Berkeley, CA. Harrison, S. 1991. Vergil: Aeneid 10. Oxford. Heinze, R. 1993. Virgil’s Epic Technique, trans. H. Harvey, D. Harvey, and F. Robertson. Berkeley, CA. Hershkowitz, P. 2017. Prudentius, Spain, and Late Antique Christianity: Poetry, Visual Culture and the Cult of Martyrs. Cambridge. Horsfall, N. 2008. Virgil: Aeneid 2. Leiden. Lewis, J. E. 2000. Gender and Violence in Prudentius’ Psychomachia. Diss., UCLA. ———. 2002. ‘Reading Rome in Prudentius.’ Psychomachia.’ New England Classical Journal 29, 82–93. Lühken, M. 2002. Christianorum Maro et Flaccus: Zur Vergil- und Horazrezeption des Prudentius. Göttingen. Magazzù, C. 1975. ‘L’utilizzazione allegorica di Vergilio nella Psychomachia di Prudenzio.’ Bollettino di Studi Latini 5, 13–23. Mahoney, A. 1934. Vergil in the Works of Prudentius. Washington, DC. Malamud, M. 1990. ‘Making a Virtue of Perversity: The Poetry of Prudentius.’ In The Imperial Muse: Ramus Essays on Roman Literature of the Empire: Flavian Epicist to Claudian, ed. A. J. Boyle. Bendigo, 274–98. Mastrangelo, M. 2008. The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul. Baltimore.

162 Andrew M. McClellan McClellan, A. M. 2019. Abused Bodies in Roman Epic. Cambridge. Moralee, J. 2018. Rome’s Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity. Oxford. Nugent, S. G. 1985. Allegory and Poetics: The Structure and Imagery of Prudentius’ Psychomachia. Frankfurt am Main. Nünlist, R. 2009. The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge. O’Hogan, C. 2016. Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity. Oxford. Pelttari, A. 2014. The Space that Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity. Ithaca, NY. Pollmann, K. 2017. The Baptized Muse: Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority. Oxford. Roberts, M. 1989. The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity. Ithaca, NY. Roller, L. E. 1999. In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele. Berkeley. Rose, C. B. 2013. The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy. Cambridge. Schwen, C. 1937. Vergil bei Prudentius. Diss., Leipzig. Shanzer, D. 1989. ‘Allegory and Reality: Spes, Victoria, and the Date of Prudentius’ Psychomachia.’ Illinois Classical Studies 14, 347–63. Smith, M. 1976. Prudentius’ Psychomachia: A Reexamination. Princeton. Wilhelm, R. M. 1988. ‘Cybele: Great Mother of Augustan Order.’ Vergilius 34, 77–101.

11 Keeping the faith Allegory in late antique panegyric and hagiography Philip Hardie

This chapter looks at the use of allegory by two contemporary poets of late antiquity, Claudian and Paulinus of Nola. Allegory has a history going back to the beginnings of ancient literature and of ancient literary criticism, but it becomes increasingly dominant as a literary and doctrinal mode in late antiquity.1 My purpose in what follows is twofold: firstly, to ask how the allegorical practices of two poets writing in the early fifth century ad can be understood in relation to the reception of earlier Latin poetry; and, secondly, to ask what joins, and what separates, the uses of allegory by poets writing on non-Christian subjects (here Claudian) and poets writing from within a Christian world view (here Paulinus). I hope that Susanna, who has contributed so much to the study of the reception of Latin poetry over a wide range of centuries, will find something of interest in what follows.

Claudian Omnia, quae sensu uoluuntur uota diurno, pectore sopito reddit amica quies. uenator defessa toro cum membra reponit, mens tamen ad siluas et sua lustra redit. iudicibus lites, aurigae somnia currus uanaque nocturnis meta cauetur equis. furto gaudet amans, permutat nauita merces et uigil elapsas quaerit auarus opes blandaque largitur frustra sitientibus aegris irriguus gelido pocula fonte sopor. me quoque Musarum studium sub nocte silenti artibus assuetis sollicitare solet. namque poli media stellantis in arce uidebar ante pedes summi carmina ferre Iouis; utque fauet somnus, plaudebant numina dictis et circumfusi sacra corona chori. Enceladus mihi carmen erat uictusque Typhoeus: hic subit Inarimen, hunc grauis Aetna domat.

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Philip Hardie quam laetum post bella Iouem susceperat aether Phlegraeae referens praemia militiae! additur ecce fdes nec me mea lusit imago, irrita nec falsum somnia misit ebur. en princeps, en orbis apex aequatus Olympo! en quales memini, turba uerenda, deos. fngere nil maius potuit sopor, altaque uati conuentum caelo praebuit aula parem.

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All the desires that our waking minds ponder by day, these does friendly sleep bring back to us when once our spirits are lulled in slumber. When the huntsman lays down his weary limbs upon his bed, all the same his mind returns to his familiar coverts and the woods. Judges dream of lawsuits, and the charioteer of his chariot as with his horses of the night he steers safely past a phantom turning-post. In stolen delights the lover finds his joy, the merchant barters his goods, and, on waking, the miser seeks in vain the riches that have slipped from his grasp, while to poor mortals stricken by thirst sleep streaming in lavishes – but all in vain – pleasing draughts from cool springs. Me too in the silence of the cool devotion to the Muses commonly troubles with my accustomed craft. For I seemed to find myself in the very heart of the citadel of the starry heavens, bringing my songs before the feet of Jupiter the Most High. And, such is the flattery of dreams, the gods applauded what I sang, and so also all the sacred throng that stood around. Enceladus was my theme, and Typhoeus conquered (one lies beneath Inarime, the other weighty Etna holds in subjection); and how joyful was Heaven when, the war concluded, it welcomed Jupiter, receiving the spoils of battle on the fields of Phlegra! See how confirmation is now granted me, and my vision has not played me false, nor has the deceitful Gate of Ivory sent dreams that come to nothing. Behold our Prince, behold the world’s pinnacle made level with Olympus! Behold the gods as I remember them, a venerable host! Sleep could imagine nothing greater, and this lofty hall has shown the bard a gathering that is the peer of heaven. (transl. Michael Dewar) Claudian, Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of Honorius, Praefatio In the Praefatio in elegiacs to his last panegyric, on the inauguration of the emperor Honorius as consul in January 404, Claudian recounts a dream which proves to be true in waking reality.2 The content of the dream, he tells us, is pre-determined by his waking activities, according to a standard ancient view on the nature of dreams, but instead of a literal vision of what Claudian does when awake, produce poetry, the dream is an allegorical vision of that same activity. The Praefatio offers a sophisticated commentary on fguration and fction, and on the relationship of allegory to reality and truth.

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Waking desires (uota) are the subject of dreams, Claudian tells us (Praef. 1–2). To the hunter, judge, charioteer, lover, sailor, greedy man, and thirsty man, dreams offer empty phantoms of waking reality (6 uanaque nocturnis meta cauetur equis, 8 et uigil elapsas quaerit auarus opes, 9–10 blandaque largitur frustra sitientibus aegris | irriguus gelido pocula fonte sopor). These are the delusive simulacra of the Lucretian dreamer (De rerum natura 4.962–1036). Claudian continues, me quoque Musarum studium sub nocte silenti | artibus assuetis sollicitare solet (11–12). But in Claudian’s dream, his craft is not practised in his customary waking environment. He sees himself in the starry heavens, presenting his poetry at the feet of Jupiter, a song of Gigantomachy, Jupiter’s victory over Enceladus and Typhoeus. The last three couplets offer an interpretation of the dream, beginning with a couplet which asserts the truth-value of the sleeping vision, in the language of Virgil,3 Horace4 and Ovid (21–2): additur ecce fdes nec me mea lusit imago, irrita nec falsum somnia misit ebur. This is not a delusive image or a false dream, but something with ‘credibility’, fdes. nec me mea lusit imago: like Narcissus, who recognizes the reality of what he sees, Met. 3.463 nec me mea fallit imago ‘my image does not deceive me,’ but unlike Narcissus in that the realization of the truth also brings him his heart’s desire.5 Narcissus is disillusioned of his belief that his refection is another person (fallo in an epistemological sense), but continues to be cheated of, disappointed in, what he desires (fallo in erotic sense). Michael Dewar takes imago here as ‘dream’, with a possible second sense of Epicurean eidōlon, atomic ‘image.’ We could also take it of an artistic imago, either a visual or a verbal image. In the former (visual) sense, the point would be not that the image is not a delusively lifelike representation,6 but that it is not a representation of a reality other than the one to which the poet awakes, with the repeated en of enargeia, 23–4 en princeps, en orbis apex aequatus Olympo! | en quales memini, turba uerenda, deos! As a verbal image, imago could be taken in the rhetorical-grammatical sense of ‘comparison’: ‘my simile, comparison (of Olympus with the Palatine) has not deceived me.’ But this is now a step away from strict equivalence, to likeness. The Praefatio concludes, 25–6, fingere nil maius potuit sopor, altaque uati | conuentum caelo praebuit aula parem. The comparative nil maius suggests the hyperbolical synkrisis (‘comparison’): when compared to Olympus, Honorius’ court is found to be just as great, the equal (parem) of Olympus. What is really at issue, however, is not equality in the sense of sameness, but a comparison, a simile, or allegory: this is clear both from the synkrisis implied in nil maius, and from another Ovidian passage, the poet Ovid’s comparison of Jupiter’s palace to the Palatine House of Augustus, Met. 1.168–76, which anticipates the first formal simile in the Metamorphoses, which again establishes a correspondence between divine and Roman

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ruler in a comparison of the uproar in the palace of Jupiter to the uproar on earth at an assassination attempt on Caesar (Met. 1.199–206).7 Claudian’s Praefatio anticipates the extended assimilation of Rome to, or allegorization of Rome as, a celestial city in the main panegyric that follows. If the dream comes true, it is allegorically, connecting on the vertical axis the levels of heaven and earth, which are also connected by the fiction of imperial apotheosis (Theodosius’ posthumous ascension to the heavens is narrated at length by Claudian in Panegryic on the Third Consulship of Honorius, 162–84).8 The notion of the allegorical dream is an addition to the Lucretian substrate of the passage, and it anticipates by some years Macrobius’ pairing of discussion of the meaning of dreams and of allegoresis in his commentary on the Somnium Scipionis. The poet realizes his self-regarding and narcissistic desire (uotum) to be received on ‘Olympus’ and to have the performance of his poetry applauded. He also realizes his ambition of producing a poetry that creates a persuasive illusion of the (allegorical) equation of the mythological gods and their starry arx with the court of Honorius. In other words, the poet turns dream into reality, the work of Ovid’s Morpheus, whose operation is that of fingere.9 As a Morpheus, Claudian is also a master of metamorphosis, changing Jupiter and his Olympian entourage into the likeness of Honorius and his court. What a poet dreams of might indeed have as much (or as little) reality as his waking compositions, images and words seen or spoken in dreams having as much substance and meaning as those seen and spoken while awake. This marks a difference from the activities of the other dreamers, which can only be empty simulacra of the waking equivalents.10 This extensive allusion to the Ovidian thematization of poetic illusion and the suspension of disbelief registers an awareness on Claudian’s part that his panegyric operates in a sphere of poetic ludus. Panegyrical poetry such as that of Claudian, even in its ‘waking’ form, is a tissue of comparisons and equations which operate with a gap between poetic representation and reality, which is also the gap between the two levels of allegory. Fritz Felgentreu, in his book on Claudian’s Praefationes, refers to their ‘gleichnishaftallegorischer Stil.’11 This is one of the ways in which the Praefatio to the Sixth Consulship of Honorius is programmatic for the hexameter panegyric that follows.12 Additur ecce fides13 are the words with which Claudian announces that his dream has come true. The various senses of fides, ‘trustworthiness, honesty’, and ‘plausibility, credibility’, are the subject of frequent play by Ovid, and form a central part of the Ovidian poetics of illusion on which Claudian draws repeatedly in this Praefatio.14 In Claudian’s day, fides was also a foundation stone and central virtue of Christianity, the Christian faith, a faith buttressed by what was by the late fourth century ad a highly developed exegetical tradition in which allegory played a major part. I do not think that one could exclude the possibility that Claudian’s audience, at the

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very Christian court of Theodosius and his son Honorius, would overhear a playful, but not necessarily disrespectful, hint of the Christian sense in Claudian’s self-interpreting allegorical Praefatio, exploiting a theology of imperial power that implicitly acknowledges its status as founded on nothing more substantial than a poetics of illusion (and so no threat to the Christian orthodoxy of the court).

Paulinus of Nola I turn now to a poet whose interpretive and allegorical flights are firmly grounded in a conviction of the truth-value of the Christian faith, Paulinus of Nola. In the last exchange of the famous correspondence in which Paulinus answers, and resists, his old teacher Ausonius’ plea that he return to Gaul, and return to his comfortable life as a wealthy land-owner, engaged in a playful life of letters, Paulinus had dismissed the dreams and fictions of classical poetry in his response (Poem 11) to Ausonius’ Epistle 24. Ausonius had concluded that verse letter with a hopeful quotation of the line in which the lover of Virgil’s Eclogue 8 asserts, or imagines, the return of the beloved, as Ausonius looked forward to the return home of Paulinus, credimus? an, qui amant, ipsi sibi somnia fingunt? ‘Do I believe [the signs of his return]? Or do lovers invent dreams for themselves?’ (Ecl. 8.108). Paulinus had replied with a confident assertion of the true presences guaranteed by a Christian fides and credulitas (in the sense ‘faith’, which the word often has in Christian writers), very different from the flattering dreams of the Virgilian lover and the credulitas ‘credulity’, or suspension of disbelief, called for by Ovidian poetic fictions.15 The goals of the Christian poet are immune from the uanitas, emptiness, unreality, that dogs the ambitions and wishes of the classical poet. Paulinus often uses uanus and uanitas of the vain pursuits of non-Christian culture. Cutting his ties with his former life, Paulinus moved to Cimitile in Campania, near Nola, where he devoted the rest of his life to the service of St. Felix and his shrine. There he turned his poetic talents to a copious output of poems on Christian subjects, including an annual series of Natalicia, poems on the anniversary of the death of St. Felix, the saint’s ‘birth’ to his celestial home. The language of vanity is used to assert the truth-content of Christian images in the ecphrasis of the paintings of biblical subjects at Cimitile, described for the benefit of a distinguished visitor, Bishop Nicetas of Remesiana, in the ninth Natalicium (403), Poem 27.514–18: qui uidet haec uacuis agnoscens uera fguris non uacua fdam sibi pascit imagine mentem. omnia namque tenet serie pictura fdeli, quae senior scripsit per quinque uolumina Moyses.

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These are not empty images, but containers of solid nourishment for the minds of the faithful. From Poem 28 (on which more later), we learn that at Cimitile there were series of paintings from both Testaments. One of the ways in which linked images from Old and New Testaments reinforce fdes, Christian faith, is through the typological exegesis by which events in the Old Testament are fgures, fgurae, of events in the New.16 Paulinus gives a sample of a different kind of exegesis, one that also reinforces Christian faith, when in the ecphrasis in Poem 27 he comes to the image of the Book of Ruth, 531–3 breuis ista uidetur | historia, at magni signat mysteria belli, | quod geminae scindunt sese in diuersa sorores ‘It seems a short account, but it depicts the symbolism of the great confict when the two sisters separate to go their different ways.’ Ruth and Orpha stand respectively for those who follow the path of fdes and of perfdia, a disagreement (537 discordia) that still characterizes the whole world, divided between those who follow God and those who plunge into the world. The two sisters are types, or symbols (mysteria), not of New Testament characters but of whole classes of people in the world today. In Poem 27, Paulinus’ Biblical ecphrasis is allusively contrasted with incomplete or delusory Virgilian ecphrases. Nicetas, Paulinus’ addressee, will have time to look up at the paintings, reclinato dum perlegis omnia uultu ‘while you read through everything with face tilted back’ (513), unlike Aeneas, who is called away by the Sibyl from a complete survey of the scenes carved by Daedalus on the doors of the temple of Apollo at Cumae (scenes which are themselves broken off by Daedalus’ inability to sculpt the death of his son), Aen. 6.33–4 quin protinus omnia | perlegerent oculis ‘the Trojans would have gone on gazing and read the whole story through [had not Achates returned bringing the Sibyl].’ The real nourishment which Nicetas’ mind, fortified by his Christian faith, will derive from the images (non uacua fidam sibi pascit imagine mentem) is in contrast to the empty solace that Aeneas takes from the scenes of the Trojan War in the temple of Juno in Carthage, Aen.1.464 animum pictura pascit inani ‘he feeds his mind on the empty images.’ As recent discussion of the Virgilian ecphrasis has brought out, these are empty simulacra, which can be interpreted in different ways, including as ‘types’ of the destruction of cities in the future, by different viewers, with no shared and stable interpretive ground. The absent presences of Claudian’s imperial Rome may be contrasted with the physico-spiritual presences of Paulinus’ building projects at Cimitile, the small settlement which for Paulinus is a kind of substitute for Rome, both as home, and as pilgrimage centre, drawing in diverse peoples from the surrounding territory. Natalicium 13 (Poem 21, Jan. 407) talks about the water

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supply and a restored aqueduct at Cimitile, and Natalicium 10 (Poem 28, Jan. 404) describes new buildings at Cimitile. Both poems weave material buildings and artworks into a Christian allegoresis of the world and the Christian’s place in the world. Catherine Conybeare offers a penetrating and sympathetic account of the ‘multidimensional weaving’ of Paulinus’ meditations in his prose Letters.17 Similar readings are possible for the poems, but with one major difference: Paulinus writes his prose letters as a tissue of scriptural language, in which the scriptural floscules are subjected to allegorical readings, often of an idiosyncratic kind, providing stepping-stones in a proliferating sequence of spiritual readings. Incorporation of this kind of scriptural exegesis is only occasional in the poems. In the Praefatio to On the Sixth Consulship of Honorius, Claudian asserts that he does not experience the frustration of Narcissus deluded by an empty image, or of the dreamer whose thirst cannot be quenched by dreams of drinking water, but his claim that the imago of Olympus corresponds to the reality or Rome demands from us the suspension of disbelief. In Poem 21, Paulinus speaks of the literal quenching of thirst offered by the restoration of the aqueduct from Abella to Nola, a material reality on earth that is a figure for the spiritual refreshment of the heavenly waters that flow from the rock of Christ, an image that is based on Paul’s typological reading of the water struck out of the rock for the Israelites by Moses (Exodus 17:6; 1 Cor. 10:4). Reversing the direction of imagery in Ovid’s Narcissus narrative, where the quenching of a physical thirst is followed by a psychological thirst that cannot be quenched (alluding to the frustrations of the Lucretian thirsty dreamer),18 the ‘thirsty prayers’ of the Nolan congregation are answered with the literal water supply that is immediately dissolved into a figuration of the everflowing fountains of Christ (669 non est tracta diu nostri sitis arida uoti ‘the dry thirst of our prayers was not long kept waiting’). This literal and figurative stream of water flows into the words of the poet himself, in a Christianization of the classical water imagery of poetic production: the name of Christ is on Paulinus’ lips, and a drop from the river of the Word will moisten the poet’s mouth and make his own words flow more abundantly (21.699–703).19 Natalicium 13’s account of the restoration of the aqueduct from Abella to Nola is an earthy and realistic narrative that is the launchpad for flights of spiritual and Christological allegory. Paulinus’ Natalicium 10 (Poem 28: ad 404) also takes its starting-point from the description of new building work, in this case the restoration of an old church at Cimitile, and the building of a new one, together with the construction of new porticoes and courtyards, and a new baptismal chapel. Paulinus also describes the painted decoration of the two churches, with scenes from both the Old and New Testaments. This ecphrastic poem which guides the visitor round the physical buildings at Cimitile then develops into an extended allegorical meditation on the opposition of old and new, with reference to the several, and interconnected, levels of 1. Biblical history, the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Christian theology:

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2. the making new of the individual through the waters of baptism, and 3. the eschatological making new of the body at the general resurrection of the dead, then at the Last Judgement (223 redeunte resurgere uita ‘to rise again as life returns’); and 4. the spiritual teaching of the need to renew ourselves now by clearing the thorns and rubble from the soul in order to build within ourselves the fabrica diuini moliminis ‘fabric of God’s structure’ (307).20 The symbolism of Christian architecture and architectural adornment (sculpture, painting, stained glass) is developed intensively from the time of Constantine through into the Middle Ages.21 But there are precedents in preChristian literature: for example, Seneca’s comparison of the ageing process in his own body and in his old country villa (Ep. 12).22 Paulinus’ extended comparison at Poem 28.258–325, which takes the building works as an exemplum and simile for the edification of the soul,23 has precedent in the extended comparisons of Roman comedy, and in particular the adulescens Philolaches’ comparison (introduced as an exemplum, 90) of his own sorry life-history to the history of a new house that becomes dilapidated with time and neglect, Mostellaria 85–156. Both the Senecan and Plautine dwell on ageing and dilapidation. Paulinus’ emphasis is all on novelty and renewal, themes that Paulinus’ Poem 28 shares with much other late antique poetry, on both Christian and nonChristian subjects.24 It seems very likely that the elaborations of an imperial ideology of renouatio, and of a Christian theology of the renewal of history and the renewal of the individual human being, were not totally independent of each other in their forms of expression. Claudian’s Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of Honorius is an example of the rhetoric of novelty in imperial panegyric. Every consular inauguration is an instantiation of novelty, the installation of the new consul(s) at the beginning of the new year, the cliché with which the last paragraph of the panegyric opens, 640 (Honorius) iamque nouum fastis aperit felicibus annum ‘and now he opens for the happy calendar a new year.’ The novelty of the new year and of the new consuls is also a repetition of the old, as January the first comes round again every twelve months: the point is made in Claudian’s first consular panegyric, for Probinus and Olybrius, 6–7 iam noua germanis uestigia torqueat annus | consulibus ‘now let the year bend its new steps for the consul brothers’: ‘new steps’, but always planted in the footsteps of previous years. With the annual renewal of the consulate, On the Sixth Consulship of Honorius combines the renewal enjoyed by the city of Rome when the emperor Honorius returns to the ancient capital after an absence of many years. In another version of the Praefatio’s equation of the Palatine with the dwelling-places of the gods, the effect on Rome of Honorius’ return is compared to the effect on Delphi of Apollo’s return from the land of the Hyperboreans, 35–8 ecce Palatino creuit reuerentia monti . . . atque suas ad signa iubet reuirescere laurus ‘See how the reverence owed to the Palatine mount has grown . . . and it commands the bays that are its own to grow green again, for our standards.’ The renewed growth of the laurels on the

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Palatine marks the renewal of Rome and her military strength, the rebirth with Honorius of the power of Augustus, who first placed the laurel-trees in front of his house on the Palatine, and, through allusion to Jupiter’s restoration of the world after the disastrous chariot-ride of Phaethon (Ovid, Met. 2.407–8 . . . laesasque iubet reuirescere siluas ‘he bids the damaged woods to grow green again’), the rebirth of the wider Roman world. Roma complains that, because of the emperor’s long absence, her palace is in a state of senile decrepitude, 409–10 cur mea quae cunctis tribuere Palatia nomen | neglecto squalent senio? ‘Why do my Palaces, which gave their name to all the others, lie desolate in neglect and decay?’ Senility is followed by rejuvenation, as Honorius approaches Rome, her beauty enhanced by the newly refurbished walls of the city (restored in ad 401–2), 531–6 addebant pulchrum noua moenia uultum audito perfecta recens rumore Getarum, profecitque opifex decori timor, et, uice mira, quam pax intulerat bello discussa senectus erexit subitas turres cinctoque coegit septem continuo montes iuuenescere muro: The new walls but recently completed at the rumour of the Goths’ approach increased the beauty of her face, and fear was a craftsman working to her enhancement, and, by a strange reversal, the creeping age that peace had brought upon her was scattered by war, and raised towers all of a sudden and compelled the seven hills, now girt by one unbroken wall, to grow young again.25 Michael Dewar, commenting on line 531, draws attention to Paulinus of Nola’s scepticism as to the efficacy of the newly restored walls of Rome in his eighth Natalicium (Poem 26, January 402), responding to anxieties about Alaric’s invasion of Italy, 103–5 fidant legionibus illi, | perfugioque parent reparatis moenia muris, | nulla salutiferi quibus est fiducia ‘Let those who have no confidence in Christ, who brings salvation, put their faith in legions, and let them repair their walls as a defence prepared for refuge.’ This is not the kind of renovation in which the Christian faithful will put any trust. It is just two years later, in 404, that Paulinus interweaves his meditation on the various applications of old and new in the tenth Natalicium. The first line of Poem 28 establishes the recurrent contrast of old and new in the context of the performance occasion of the Natalicium itself, introducing the teleology of Christian history and the history of the Christian soul within the cyclical time of the annual celebration of the ‘birthday’ of St Felix: In ueteri nobis noua res adnascitur actu, | et solita insolito crescunt sollemnia uoto ‘As we perform our old practice, a new element is introduced, and the usual celebrations are enhanced by the completion of an unusual vow.’ In providing material for Paulinus’ song, at the same time

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as amplifying the birthday of the saint, the new buildings license a poetics of novelty.26 The novelty lies not least in the fact that the old continues to coexist with the new: there are paintings of both Testaments, of the New Testament in the old buildings, of the Old Testament in the new buildings. Architecture and Christian history both unite old and new (the Old Testament is not superseded by the New). The conceit breaks down when it comes to the theology of baptism, in which the old man must die to give way to the new, but Paulinus manages to work in the coexistence of old and new into his account of the new baptismal chapel, which ceases to be new once it has been inaugurated in its use for making new those coming for baptism, 193–5 nam fons ipse semel renouandi missus in usum | desinit esse nouus; sed tali munere semper | utendus numquam ueteres renouare facesset ‘When once the font has been used for renewing life, it ceases to be new, but since it will be used always to bestow this gift, it will never cease to give new life to the old man.’ This is an Ovidian poetics (In noua fert):27 Ovidian transformation is a matter of Dauer im Wechsel,28 continuity through change. In making the transition from old and new as those adjectives pertain to the buildings, and to the reformation of the individual both in this life and at the general resurrection, Paulinus uses paradoxical formulations that bring into sharp focus central aspects of Ovidian metamorphosis, 218–20 suntque simul uetera et noua, nec noua nec uetera aeque, | non eadem simul atque eadem, quae forma futuri | praesentisque boni est ‘At the same time they are old and new, neither equally new nor equally old. They are the same yet not the same, as they represent the shape of future and present blessings.’ The language of change soon appears, firstly with reference to resurrection, 225–6 qui super inlustri carnem perfusus amictu | seruilem domini mutabit imagine formam ‘he whose flesh is covered with a shining garment will change his slavish shape for the shape of the Lord’; and secondly in drawing out the lesson for audience in the here and now of the new buildings, 229–31 haec eadem species ueterem deponere formam | et gestare nouam monet et retro acta abolere | inque futura dei conuersam intendere mentem ‘This same appearance [of the church] warns us to put aside our old shape and wear a new one, to erase our past deeds, and to direct our changed minds to a future which lies with God.’ These lines anticipate the concluding call to audience and readers to undergo metamorphosis, putting the old behind us and taking on the new, triggering a series of paradoxes of life and death. The coexistence of old and new now leads to a tearing apart, discordia not concordia: 316–17 peior enim scissura29 nouo ueterique coactis | redditur, et noua uina nouos bene dantur in utres ‘For when old and new are forced together, the rent becomes worse, and it is good to put new wine in new bottles.’ Here a passage of Scripture is woven into the imagistic web: Matthew 9:16–17 nemo autem inmittit commissuram panni rudis in vestimentum vetus; tollit enim plenitudinem eius a vestimento et peior scissura fit ‘And nobody putteth a piece of raw cloth unto an old garment. For it taketh away the fulness thereof from

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the garment, and there is made a greater rent’ (followed by the verse on putting new wine in old bottles). The last four lines combine the language of image and of metamorphosis (322–5): terrena intereat, subeat caelestis imago, et Christo uertatur Adam; mutemur et istic, ut mutemur ibi; qui nunc permanserit in se idem, et in aeternum non immutabitur a se. Let our earthly image die and our heavenly image replace it. Let Adam be changed into Christ. Let us change ourselves here, so that we may also be changed there, in heaven. He who persists in being the same in himself, will likewise not be changed for eternity. Before this conclusion, Paulinus has repeatedly emphasized the harmonious coexistence of old and new, and the unity in diversity of the buildings and their adornments. This ‘equality in variety’ (21 par in uario . . . gloria sexu) is also a principle of the multiplicity of allegorical levels with which Natalicium 10 operates, unifying different times, yoking the material world of building works and craftsmanship to the spiritual world, joining heaven and earth.30 But at the end of the poem, Paulinus suggests that we should transcend entirely the terrestrial. The terrena and caelestis imago of line 322 refers immediately to the individual’s image or form,31 but it can be read as having more general applicability, calling for the supersession of the terrestrial imagery that has pervaded and given unity to the poem up to this point. In contrast, the caelestis imago conjured up by Claudian in the Praefatio to his Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of Honorius is one that the panegyrist wishes to keep frmly anchored to the earthly city of Rome.

Conclusion Claudian’s imperial panegyric and Paulinus of Nola’s poetry advertising the shrine of St. Felix at Cimitile and in praise of Christianity are based on belief systems of very different kinds, but the kinds of imagery and allegory deployed in each have much in common, due in large part to the fact that both poets (and all other poets of the period) draws on previous classical traditions. Paulinus’ renunciation of the Muses, proclaimed in the correspondence with Ausonius, was in practice far from total (as we have seen). The interpretive vocabulary and procedures shared by Claudian and Paulinus both bridge and reinforce the divide between Christian and non-Christian.

Notes 1 For a more extensive study of allegory in late antique poetry, see Hardie (2019, 188–222, ‘Allegory’).

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2 For full discussion of the Praefatio and the traditions on which it draws, see Dewar (1996 ad loc.). On Claudian’s Praefationes see Perrelli (1992), Felgentreu (1999), Ware (2004), Harrison (2017). The first part of this chapter, on Claudian’s Praefatio, is a lightly revised version of part of a chapter on ‘Allegorical Absences: Virgil, Ovid, Prudentius and Claudian’, in Geue and Giusti (forthcoming), where it forms part of a different argument. 3 Aen. 6.895–6, the ivory gate of Sleep which sends falsa insomnia to the world above. 4 Dewar (1996) on line 21 cites Hor. Odes 3.27.37–41 uigilansne ploro turpe commissum, an uitiis carentem | ludit imago | uana, quae porta fugiens eburna | somnium ducit? ‘Am I awake, deploring a crime I have committed? Or am I innocent, mocked by an empty vision bringing a dream from the gate of ivory?’ 5 In context, after allusion to Lucretius on dreams, Claudian also signals the Lucretian intertext for Ovid’s Narcissus: see Hardie (2002, 150–63). 6 For a classic example of Ovidian artistic illusion, cf. Met. 6.103–4 Maeonis elusam designat imagine tauri | Europam ‘The Lydian girl [Arachne] portrays Europa deceived by the likeness of a bull.’ 7 See Feeney (2014, 221–2). 8 On the connection between these lines and the language of pagan consecratio, see MacCormack (1981, 138–44, 332 n. 214, 334 n. 223). 9 See the language of Juno’s address to Somnus at Met. 11.626–8 somnia, quae ueras aequant imitantia formas . . . Alcyonen adeant simulacraque naufraga fingant ‘dreams, which are matching imitations of true shapes . . . let them approach Alcyone and forge the likeness of a shipwrecked man.’ 10 With the possible exception of 7 furto gaudet amans: cf. the final examples in Lucretius’ list at 4.1026–36, wetting the bed while dreaming of urinating, and erotic wet dreams, 1035–6 ut quasi transactis saepe omnibus rebus profundant | fluminis ingentis fluctus uestemque cruentent ‘with the result that often, as if the whole business had been completed, they pour out huge floods of liquid, and stain the bedclothes,’ unlike the frustration of dreaming of imbibing water to satisfy a thirst. There is something doubly ‘stolen’, ‘furtive’ about sexual satisfaction in one’s sleep. Line 11 sub nocte silenti perhaps hints that it makes little difference whether the poet is in fact awake or asleep, this being the time for the agrupnia, ‘sleeplessness’ of the uigil ‘wakeful’ poet: cf. Lucr. 1.142 (of the poet Lucretius) noctes uigilare serenas ‘keep watch through the calm nights’ (although 15 utque fauet somnus is unambiguous). This might help explain the ambiguity at 8 et uigil elapsas quaerit auarus opes: see Dewar (1996) ad loc. 11 Felgentreu (1999, 212). 12 Dewar’s commentary registers some of the connections between Praefatio and poem. 13 Cf. Ov. Met. 15.361 siqua fides rebus tamen est addenda probatis ‘if any trust is to be placed in things that can be tested.’ 14 Hardie (2002, index s.v. fides). 15 Ovidian credulitas: Am. 3.12.44; Met. 12.59 (personified in the House of Fama). For a detailed reading of the correspondence between Ausonius and Paulinus, see Hardie (2019, ch. 1). 16 On typology in Paulinus, see Trout (1999); Conybeare (2000, 113–19). 17 Conybeare (2000): ‘Imago terrena and imago caelestis: the earthly and the heavenly image’ (91–110) and ‘Imagines intextae: images interwoven in the text’ (111–30) are two stages of an enquiry into Paulinus’ figuralism. 18 Met. 3.415 dumque sitim sedare cupit, sitis altera creuit ‘while he longs to slake his thirst, another thirst arose.’ 19 Cf. the conventional water imagery (poetry as seafaring) in Claudian De raptu Proserpinae 1 Praefatio, on which see Harrison (2017).

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20 For a similar development of the building image of the spiritual self, see Paulinus, Letters 32.22 (on the new buildings at Cimitile). See Brown (2012, 230) on Paulinus’ unprecedented ‘drenching every detail of his new building in a torrent of mystic words.’ On the buildings at Cimitile, see Kiely (2004); Herbert de la Portbarré-Viard (2006); Goldschmidt (1940). 21 See e.g. Patricios (2014). 22 Sen. Ep. 12.1: ueneram in suburbanum meum et querebar de impensis aedificii dilabentis. ait uilicus mihi non esse neglegentiae suae uitium; omnia se facere, sed uillam ueterem esse. haec uilla inter manus meas creuit: quid mihi futurum est, si tam putria sunt aetatis meae saxa? I visited lately my country-place, and protested against the money which was spent on the tumble-down building. My bailiff maintained that the flaws were not due to his own carelessness; ‘he was doing everything possible, but the house was old.’ And this was the house which grew under my own hands! What has the future in store for me, if stones of my own age are already crumbling?

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24 25

26 27

The imagery of building and agriculture is common in Paulinus’ Letters (see Walsh 1966, i. 17). Exemplum: 259–60 capiamus ab ipsis | aedibus exempla ‘let us take examples from the buildings themselves’; simile: the contrast (261–2) between the work of hands, the buildings, and the works of fides, spiritual building, is summed up at 265 dissimiles simili specie concurrere formas ‘dissimilar types of activity are in harmony by their similar form.’ On what might be described as a late antique obsession with novelty and renewal, see Hardie (2019, 135–62 = ‘Innovations of late antiquity’). On the late antique topos of the rejuvenation of Rome, see Dewar (1996, 533–6); Hardie (2019, 150–3). Cf. also 403–4 restituat priscum per te iam gloria morem | uerior ‘through your deeds may a truer glory [than glory won in civil war] now restore the customs of antiquity.’ See Hardie (2019, 156–7) on Paulinus, Poem 28 (briefly). Although Ovid himself does not thematize the contrast of uetus and nouus in the Metamorphoses, except at 15.156–9 corpora, sive rogus flamma seu tabe vetustas | abstulerit, mala posse pati non ulla putetis: | morte carent animae semperque priore relicta | sede novis domibus vivunt habitantque receptae As for your bodies, whether the burning pyre or long lapse of time with its wasting power shall have consumed them, be sure they cannot suffer any ills. Our souls are deathless, and ever, when they have left their former seat, do they live in new abodes and dwell in the bodies that have received them.

28 See Hardie (2015, on Ovid, Met. 15.252–3). 29 Cf. also 1Cor. 11:18 primum quidem convenientibus vobis in ecclesia audio scissuras esse ‘For first of all I hear that when you come together in the church, there are schisms among you’; Prud. Psychom. 756–7 (sermon of Concordia) scissura domestica turbat | rem populi, titubatque foris quod dissidet intus ‘division at home upsets the common weal, and difference within means faltering abroad.’ scissura is very rare in pre-Christian Latin, very common in Christian Latin. 30 Conybeare (2000, 91–110 = ‘Imago terrena and imago caelestis: the earthly and the heavenly image’). On the ontology of Paulinus’ webs of images, see Conybeare (2000, 130): through his use of images Paulinus ‘translates the literal and mundane into the spiritual; [this is] how he moves towards the transcendent. His imagistic catenae represent his ongoing effort to realize the mysteries at the heart of Christianity.’

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31 Cf. Paulinus, Letter 30.2, declining Sulpicius’ request for a portrait of himself, qualem cupis ut mittamus imaginem tibi? terreni hominis an caelestis? ‘What kind of image do you want me to send you? One of the earthly, or the heavenly, man?’ For discussion, see Conybeare (2000, 102–5).

Works cited Brown, P. 2012. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. Princeton and Oxford. Conybeare, C. 2000. Paulinus Noster: Self and Symbols in the Letters of Paulinus of Nola. Oxford. Dewar, M. 1996. Claudian. Panegyricus de Sexto Consulatu Honorii Augusti. Oxford. Feeney, D. 2014. ‘First Similes in Epic.’ TAPA 144: 189–228. Felgentreu, F. 1999. Claudians Praefationes: Bedingungen, Beschreibungen und Wirkungen einer poetischen Kleinform. Stuttgart. Geue, T. and Giusti, E. (eds) forthcoming. Unspoken Rome. Cambridge. Goldschmidt, R. C. 1940. Paulinus’ Churches at Nola. Amsterdam. Hardie, P. 2002. Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion. Cambridge. ———. 2015. Ovidio Metamorfosi. Vol. vi. Libri XIII-XV. Rome. ———. 2019. Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry. Oakland, CA. Harrison, S. 2017. ‘Metapoetics in the Prefaces of Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae’ In The Poetics of Late Latin Literature, ed. J. Elsner and J. Hernández Lobato. Oxford, 236–51. Herbert de la Portbarré-Viard, G. 2006. Descriptions Monumentales et discours sur l’édification chez Pauline de Nole: le regard et la lumière. Leiden. Kiely, M. 2004. ‘The Interior Courtyard: The Heart of Cimitile/Nola.’ JECS 12: 443–97. MacCormack, S. 1981. Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. Patricios, Nicholas N. 2014. The Sacred Architecture of Byzantium: Art, Liturgy and Symbolism in Early Christian Churches. London. Perrelli, R 1992. I proemi claudianei tra epica ed epidittica. Catania. Trout, D. E. 1999. Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems. Berkeley and London. Walsh, P. G. 1966. Letters of Paulinus of Nola, 2 vols. New York and Ramsey, NJ. Ware, C. 2004. ‘Claudian: The Epic Poet in the Prefaces.’ In Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry, ed. M. Gale. Swansea, 181–201.

Part 4

Modern receptions

12 Gavin Douglas’s cranes and other classical birds Carole Newlands

In late spring this year, I was on the Outer Hebrides and I heard the corncrake.1 I did not see the corncrake, for it is a notoriously reclusive bird that hides among reeds and bushes. But from evening to early morning, its distinctive loud mating song, “krek, krek,” often described as a comb scraping over sandpaper, filled the night air. The corncrake survives now in Britain only on Scottish islands, thanks to traditional farming practices that preserve its habitat and encourage a profusely flourishing birdlife. In the spring, it flies north from Africa to the Hebrides in order to find a mate and breed. The stubborn survival of this rare migratory bird on the northwestern edge of Europe made me reflect on how rich the soundscape of the sixteenth-century Scottish poet Gavin Douglas (c. 1474–1522) must have been.2 Douglas’s great achievement, the complete translation in 1513 of Virgil’s Aeneid into vernacular Scots, the Eneados, gives an important role to birds and their voices, especially in the prologues that introduce each of the thirteen books of his poem.3 Bird song of course is an ancient symbol for poetry. Douglas makes the song of a variety of birds perceptible, thus drawing attention to the richness and complexity of his own poetic voice as it is modulated in the process of translating Virgil’s hexameters into Scottish verse.4 In this chapter, therefore, I wish to emphasise an aspect of Douglas’s landscape poetry in his prologues that critics do not often taken into account, namely sound. Attention to Douglas’s local soundscape, in particular to the sound of birds, brings his descriptions to life in a vibrant mediation between the local and the classical. Birdsong provides the note and pitch for the auditory poetics of Douglas’s work. My focus will be Douglas’s prologues to Books 7 and 12 of his Eneados. In these two prologues the poet, embedded in his work, reflects on the process of translation.5 Drawing on Gérard Genette’s (1987) study of paratexts, Seuils, Irene Peirano (2014, 226) has described the prologue to a literary work as “the threshold of a poetic book” that both belongs to and does not belong to the inner text that follows. Douglas’s prologues provide a transition between one translated book and the next. While also serving as an introduction to the new book, they are a hybrid space that facilitates a crossing between classical Latin and early sixteenth-century Scottish culture.

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In addition, they perform a function often ascribed to the sphragis, the concluding, personalised “seal” to a work, in that they are the site of authorial self-definition. As Cillian O’Hogan comments in his discussion of modern Irish versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, localism is crucial for Irish translators of classical poetry (2018, 399): language choices in Irish translations of Virgil help to gesture towards an alternative classical tradition, one that moves away from the shadow of British classically infused literature by stressing the localized and the particular . . . to produce a distinctively Irish style of reception. Much the same can be said of Douglas’s distinctively Scottish version of Virgil’s poem. In 1490, some twenty years before Douglas’s Eneados was completed, William Caxton’s workaday translation of the Aeneid into rather lacklustre English prose appeared in print in London, based not directly on Virgil’s poem but on a late medieval French paraphrase of it. Caxton’s version infuriated Douglas, who strongly believed in maintaining fdelity to the classical source text (Braden 2018, 83–5), and who also had a high regard for the maturity and richness of his native tongue. Aspiring to a major place in the British literary tradition, Douglas translated Virgil’s epic poem into the Scottish vernacular in an assertion of the superior capacity of the Scots tongue to rival the eloquence of the Latin text. Josephine Balmer has argued that even if translators’ refections on the process and medium of translation are a neglected part of literary history, they are an invaluable source for how writers and their cultures have interacted with texts over the ages.6 In the prologues to Books 7 and 12 of his Eneados, Douglas places his refections on the process of translation not just in a specifcally Scottish landscape but also in the respective seasons of winter and spring. The birdsong of his home region plays an important role in actualising his ideas and enhancing the local resonances of his new text. Most of the birds named by Douglas are also classical birds, ones that have important metapoetic functions in ancient literature and that are here repurposed in a vividly realised contemporary setting. Moreover, the classical and mythological associations of the birds named in the prologues provide us with an idea of which classical poets, in addition to Virgil, were important to Douglas in his translation. Ovid and Lucan stand out in this regard.7 By studying Douglas’s birds, we are afforded important insight into his concept of translation as a process that not only mediates between the classical and the contemporary world but also validates the power of his native tongue to accommodate Virgil’s epic in a new cultural context. Whether in name, appearance or sound, Douglas’s birds dovetail with the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid itself in demonstrating both the authority of the classical text and the richly connotative capacities of the Scottish vernacular tongue.

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In his book on auditory poetics, Dissonance, Sean Gurd (2016, 45) has commented that “birdsong was a common seasonal soundmark.” Birdsong is usually associated with spring or high summer, not with winter. Yet in Douglas’s description of winter in the prologue to Book 7, almost as many birds are heard in the Scottish landscape as are mentioned in the prologue to Book 12, which is set in spring.8 Moreover, this hibernal prologue is unusual in late medieval English and Scottish poetry for devoting such length and detail to the description of winter (Bawcutt [1976, 183]). There is no comparable description in Virgil’s Georgics, a poem which, it has been argued, influenced Douglas’s description of the natural world (Bawcutt [1976, 176– 89], Fowler [2012]). But Virgil’s poem largely eschews the winter months outside a conventional and exaggerated description of the Scythian frozen North (G. 3.349–83). Douglas’s description of winter is neither idealised nor conventional; indeed, the soundscape of his imagined Scottish winter night is surprisingly diverse. While Douglas huddles in bed trying to sleep, the moon gleams through the window the entire night (94–101). Then he hears the “eldritch screech” of the owl (105–8), followed by the “clacking” of the geese as they glide above the poet’s home city at night (109–10). The latter are migratory birds, a sign therefore of the passage of time. For two lines the poet is asleep, but then again is aroused by the piercing sounds of the rooster, not only crowing but also clapping his wings (113–14): “Phebus crownyt byrd, the nyghtis orlager, | Clapping his weyngis thryss had crawin cleir” (Phoebus’s crowned bird, the night watch, clapping his wings thrice, had crowed clearly). This couplet is typical of Douglas’s hybridising style, as the first line is composed in a high style with a mythological reference and the French word “orlager,” while the second is vigorously alliterative and relies on vernacular diction. The alliteration on “k” (“crownyt,” “clapping,” “crawin cleir”) links the two lines together. Characteristically, Douglas ennobles the rooster with the conventional classical epithet “Phebus,” thus indicating its association with the dawn, while the bird’s bright comb or “crown” makes a visual play upon the Sun God’s diadem. But the rooster is also given robust vernacular sound that rudely wakens the poet and brings classical myth into Scottish time and place. The rooster introduces other birds that keep the poet awake with various tonalities (118–26): And kays keklis on the ruyf aboyn; Palamedes byrdis crowpyng in the sky, Fleand on randon, schapyn like ane Y, And as a trumpat rang thar vocis soun, Quhois cryis bene pronosticatioun Of wyndy blastis and ventosities; Fast by my chalmyr, in heich wysnyt treis,

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Carole Newlands The soir gled quhislis lowd with mony a pew: Quhar by the day was dawyn weil I knew. And jackdaws cackle on the roof above; Palamedes’s birds croaking hoarsely in the sky fly at random, in the shape of a Y, and the sound of their voices rang out like a trumpet, cries that foretell blasts of winds and “ventosities.” Close by my chamber, in a tall wizened tree the brown kite whistles loudly with many a “pew,” so that I knew the day was dawning.

The poet is surrounded by a multiplicity of harsh, piercing sounds from a variety of locations: jackdaws on the roof; cranes across the sky; a kite on a wizened tree outside his bedroom. Strikingly, Douglas individualised the cry of the different birds through alliteration and onomatopoeia (thus posing a challenge for the translator into modern English). Jackdaws “cackle”; the cranes “crowp” or croak hoarsely and also sound out like a trumpet, while the kite “whistles loud,” the word “pew” being specifc to this particular bird.9 All these birds are native to Scotland.10 The Scottish, sonic diversity of the birds is interwoven with a high style of diction, exemplifed by the doublet of line 123 where the French word “ventosities” acts as a gloss on “windy blastis,” while the Latinate “pronosticatioun” suggests a broad, learned audience as well as a local one for the morning chorus. The harsh sounds are unwelcome to the poet not only because he wants to stay warm and asleep in bed. In midwinter and at the midpoint of his translation of the Aeneid, the poet/translator represents himself as cold and weary with his great project (147–8): “and wolx ennoyt sum deill in my hart | Thar resttit oncompletit sa gret a part” (and I grew somewhat annoyed in my heart that there remained such a large part uncompleted). The birds’ natural sound amplifies the noise of the winds outside, representing the poet’s internal turbulence but also acting as a prompt to him to return to his labours. Time and the work of translation are here emotionally conjoined. The crane in particular is here associated with the poet’s conflicting emotions as he struggles to rekindle his literary ambitions. The recondite reference to the cranes as “Palamedes birds” alludes to their long epic heritage.11 After the noisy, rumbustious rooster, the cranes serve as a reminder that Douglas is writing in epic mode. They therefore place Douglas in a distinguished literary tradition. They are also germane to his practice of translation, the accommodation of the classical world to a Scottish audience and to a Scottish soundscape that incorporates not only vernacular diction but the very sound of its birds – a common metaphor for poetry. The crane is a special, complex figure for the conflicted poet of this prologue, immersed in doubt about the viability of his translation. Cranes appear in epic poetry at the start of the Iliad 3.3–6 when the battle cry of the Trojan army rushing upon the Greeks is compared to clangorous cranes escaping the winter for Africa:

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As when the clamour of cranes goes high to the heavens, when the cranes escape the wintertime and the rains unceasing and clamorously wing their way to the streaming Ocean, bringing to the Pygmaian men bloodshed and destruction. (tr. Lattimore 1951) As Stephen Harrison notes (1991, 143), the sound of cranes was proverbially loud and raucous. Gurd comments (2016, 29) that from the start of the Iliad, natural sound and martial uproar are therefore prominent in the epic, all the more so as the cranes are not only migrating, they are about to attack the Pygmies of Africa, a popular theme of ancient literature and art (Kirk 1985, 264–5). Virgil draws on Homer’s simile in the Aeneid, but the context is a joyful one. The beleaguered Trojans shout with relief when they see Aeneas sailing down the Tiber with his Etruscan allies (A. 10.263–7): clamorem ad sidera tollunt Dardanidae e muris, spes addita suscitat iras, tela manu iaciunt, quales sub nubibus atris Strymoniae dant signa grues atque aethera tranant cum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo. From the walls the Trojans raise a shout to the stars, and the added hope stirs up their wrath and they hurl weapons by hand, as under dark clouds Strymonian cranes give their signals and noisily traverse the sky, fleeing the storm winds with their glad cry.12 As in Homer, Virgil’s cranes are feeing south, Strymon being a reference to the northern river of Thrace. Elena Manolaraki (2012, 293–4) observes a more “humane” quality in this simile compared to Homer’s, for there is no mention of marvels or of bloodshed in Africa. And although the cranes’ military associations are emphasised with the expression dant signa, their cry is glad (clamore secundo). According to Manolaraki, Virgil’s cranes validate the coming triumph of Aeneas in Italy and signify the glorious future of Rome. Like Homer and Virgil, Douglas emphasises the clangorous sound of the cranes, “crowpyng” with voices like a trumpet blast that are reminiscent of the martial signals given by the cranes in Virgil’s simile (A.10.266). The Latin word for “cranes” (grues) replicates their hoarse, rattling cry, and sonitu with clamore suggests raucous sound (Harrison [1991, 143]). But Virgil’s passage is not as strongly resonant as Douglas’s. (And when this simile again appears in Douglas’s translation proper (10.c.5.114–29), it is greatly expanded from its Virgilian original with more attention paid to sound through onomatopoeia and alliteration.) Moreover, the sounds of the Scottish cranes are not glad; rather, they augment the ferocity of the winter storm raging outside. And the birds are late in migrating. Our chief classical

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sources emphasise that cranes migrate in autumn (II. 3.4; A. 10.265–6; Capponi [1979, 2808–4]), but earlier in the prologue we are told that the description is set in midwinter, “brumaill” (14), or precisely, December 15, since the poet writes on the third morning after the Sun has entered Capricorn (Bawcutt [1976, 184]). Douglas may be stretching his temporal parameters at 123–4 by following a passage in Virgil’s Georgics (1.370–5) in which cranes are signs of bad weather and seem not to leave until winter rather than autumn.13 Their appearance in a Scottish midwinter, however, emphasises their metapoetic function. Placed within an autobiographical context, “the trumpet sound” of the cranes serves to rouse the reluctant poet/translator to his lectern. At the same time, by flying at random in the sky, they also represent his own internal confusion as he perceives with heavy heart that he is nowhere close to finishing his translation. This detail of the cranes’ arbitrary flight brings us to the Neronian poet Lucan. Lucan refers to cranes three times in his epic poem Bellum Civile (3.197–200; 5.709–16; 7.832–5).14 The second reference takes the form of an epic simile and will concern us here. The winds that disperse Antony’s fleet as he tries to cross over to Epirus are compared to the winds that break up the cranes’ orderly formation (5.711–16): Strymona sic gelidum bruma pellente relinquunt poturae te, Nile, grues, primoque uolatu effngunt varias casu monstrante fguras; mox, ubi percussit tensas Notus altior alas, confusos temere inmixtae glomerantur in orbes, et turbata perit dispersis littera pinnis. Thus cranes driven by the onset of winter leave the icy river Strymon to drink you, Nile, and in their first flight form various shapes taught by chance; soon, when a more powerful wind has struck their outstretched wings, they cluster at random, mixed into confused groups, and the letter they formed, disturbed by their wings as they scattered, is destroyed. Douglas’s text seems to allude to Lucan’s simile at line 120, Fleand on randon, schapyn like ane Y. The idea that the cranes fee “at random” comes from Lucan’s casu (713) and from the simile’s fnal two lines, where the birds are arbitrarily thrown into confusion. Lucan refers to the resemblance of the birds’ formation to a letter of the alphabet (littera, 716), but he does not specify the Greek capital “upsilon” or “Y,” probably because its identity was well known. As Cicero observes, commenting on Aristotle’s observation, the basic form made by cranes is a triangle, basis autem trianguli quem effcient grues (ND 2.49; Capponi [1979, 281]). With littera, Lucan alludes to the tradition that Palamedes, a Greek hero from the Odyssey, had reputedly discovered several letters of the Greek alphabet, in particular the letter “Y,” from observing the fight of cranes.15 The confusion of Lucan’s cranes in the natural world refects the confusion of civil war. As Manolaraki comments

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(2012, 301), Lucan’s simile reverses Virgil’s main point, the cranes’ evasion of stormy weather. The distorted temporality and the dissipation of the “letter” emphasise a lack of direction in Antony’s feet and refect, furthermore, the poem’s pessimistic view of heroism. The cranes’ confusion in Douglas’s simile thus owes much to Lucan. The Neronian poet’s littera is glossed in Douglas’s prologue by the specific reference to the “Y” shape and by the naming of the cranes as “Palamedes byrdis” (119); the orderly shape that they make on their journey is similarly disrupted. The flight of the cranes parallels the lack of direction in the poet/translator who hesitates to resume his translation on a frigid midwinter dawn in acute awareness that he still has half the work to complete. Manolaraki (2012, 301) interprets the cranes metapoetically as evidence of Lucan’s failing epic voice. However, Lucan’s cranes are silent, whereas Douglas’s are full of clangorous sound. Thus, while representing the poet/ translator’s inner turmoil, they also offer him a voice and a way forward. To add to these literary associations, Douglas may tap here into another tradition, according to which the Pythagorean letter “Y” figured the contrasting paths to virtue or to vice. According to Paul White (2013, 187–93), this moral interpretation was popular in medieval and early humanist thought. It was strongly promulgated by Badius Ascensius, whose text and commentary were used by Douglas as the basis for his translation (Bawcutt [1976, 99–100]).16 Douglas concludes his prologue to Book 7 by half-jokingly complaining that the prologue itself “smellis new cum furth of hell” (smells as if it has come fresh from hell, prol. 7.163). He here refers to the previous book he has translated, Book 6, in which Aeneas descends to the Underworld. With this comment, the world of Virgil’s narrative spills directly into Douglas’s present world. The poet/translator’s metaphorical journey and act of composition incorporate live sensory experience as epic poetry and myth are imbued with the grim realities of a Scottish winter. But the wry complaint also suggests the need for a new path forwards, away from “hell.” The “trumpet blast” of the cranes has perhaps Biblical as well as Virgilian connotations, an awakening of the dead to judgement and ascent as in the Book of Revelation. The cranes thus are not only epic birds; they are birds intimately associated both with writing and with ethics. Indeed, the cranes inscribe in the night sky the figure of moral and literary choice. At the midpoint of Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, the clangour of cranes in a turbulent winter landscape eventually stirs the poet/translator to action and to make the right decision (prol. 7.155–7): And thocht I wery was, me list not tyre, Full laith to leif our wark swa in the myre, Or yit to stynt for bitter storm or rane. And though I was weary, it did not please me to tire; I was very loath to leave our work in the mire like this, or yet to stop because of bitter storm or rain.

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Like the cranes who, in Douglas’s scenario, endure the winter storms in order to reach the warm South, Douglas will persevere with his own literary journey, regardless of the physical or mental hardships that he has to endure. It is thus in the context of a broad response to seasonality, temporality and human ethics that Douglas’s prologue links auditory attention to practical and literary virtues. By contrast to the winter prologue, in the spring prologue to Book 12 the poet-translator is woken not by hail blattering against the window and the harsh cry of birds, but by a chorus of birds welcoming the sun (prol. 12. 252–3): “Welcum the lord of lycht and lamp of day, | Welcum fostyr of tendir herbys grene” (Welcome, the lord of light and lamp of day, Welcome, fosterer of tender green herbs). At the end of their song, in which each line (apart from the last) begins with “Welcum,” the poet-translator jumps out of bed to complete his translation (prol. 12.269–72): On fut I sprent into my bair sark, Wilfull fortill compleit my langsum wark Twichand the lattyr buke of Dan Virgill Quhilk me had tareit al to lang a quhile. On foot I jumped into my undershirt, eager to finish my lengthy work concerning the final book of Lord Virgil, over which I had tarried too long a time. Unlike in the prologue to Book 7, where the poet-translator wearily made his way to his lectern, he is now eager to fnish his work and jumps to the task, the soft spring weather permitting him to pull on only an undershirt. The chorus of birds (252–66) acts as his muses, prompting him to fnish his translation. Three birds, however, are excluded from the chorus, for they have finished their songs, a gesture towards the closure of Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s epic. Moreover, unlike the dawn chorus of undifferentiated “small birds” (251), these birds are named and have tragic associations. They are common British birds but also birds of Ovidian myth, Procne, Philomela, and Aesacus (prol. 12.282–7): For Progne had or than sung hir complaynt, And eik hir dreidfull systir Philomeyn Hyr lays endyt, and in woddis greyn Hyd hir selvyn, eschamyt of hir chance; And Esacus completis hys pennance In ryveris, fudis, and on every laik. For Procne had by then sung her complaint, and also her fearful sister Philomela had ended her songs and had hid herself in green woods, ashamed of her lot;17 and Aesacus completes his penance in rivers, waters, and on every lake.

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From Homer on, the nightingale was a symbol of sublime poetry, particularly lament (Od. 19.518–23). In Ovid’s narrative in Book 6 of the Metamorphoses (424–676), Philomela, metamorphosed into a nightingale, a secretive bird, hides in the woods to escape from her predatory brotherin-law Tereus, but Douglas introduces a moralising note. Philomela hides out of shame (285), thus suggesting not only her humiliation over her rape but also her remorse for the murder of her young nephew, an emotion not found in Ovid’s version, where she is a joyful participant in his killing; there too she gleefully hurls the child’s bloody severed head at his father (Met. 6.657–60).18 When Douglas awakes from his sleep, Procne and Philomela have ended their laments (“hyr lays endyt,” prol. 12.284). They are thus fgures of closure for what had become a burdensome undertaking; they also anticipate the conclusion of epic strife in Book 12 of the Aeneid. With their silencing, Douglas emphasises his new mood of optimism and joy for his own literary ending. In the spring prologue, as the work moves towards its closure and a sense of achievement, tragedy and the hard graft of the translator’s song seem to be over.19 Like the crane, he has left behind the storms of winter in exchange for the relaxing warmth of spring. With Aesacus, Douglas refers to the cormorant, a common seabird of the Scottish coasts with a guttural voice, but an unusual mythological figure who, before his metamorphosis, was one of the sons of Priam, king of Troy. In Douglas’s early poem The Palice of Honour, Aesacus’s story is referred to, despite its obscurity, as one of the important Ovidian myths of Troy (1204–6). In Roman literature, however, his story is told only in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and there it is often overlooked in discussions of the poem and its many disturbing narratives of rape (Met. 11.749–95).20 Yet Aesacus stands out in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the only sexual aggressor to feel remorse for the attempted rape of a young woman, Hesperia by name, who dies in the course of his sexual pursuit (Met. 11.777–82): amplectitur amens exanimem clamatque ‘piget, piget esse secutum! sed non hoc timui, neque erat mihi uincere tantum. perdidimus miseram nos te duo: uulnus ab angue, a me causa data est. ego sum sceleratior illo, qui tibi morte mea mortis solacia mittam.’ Out of his mind, he embraces the dead girl and cries, “I am revolted, revolted that I followed you. But I did not fear this, and conquering you was not worth, I believe, such a high price. We two have destroyed a wretched girl: the wound was given by the snake, but by me the cause was given. I am more wicked than that snake, and I will give you consolation for death by my death.” In recompense, Aesacus attempts suicide by throwing himself off a rock into the sea. However, he is metamorphosed into a diving bird, probably a

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cormorant, condemned to repeat his wish for death over and over and suspended in endless guilt. Like Tantalus, his wish can never be fulflled. Now why is this the last Ovidian character to be mentioned in the prologue to Book 12? And could Douglas’s main source be not Ovid’s Metamorphoses but Boccaccio’s De Genealogia Deorum (6.32)?21 Douglas refers to Boccaccio fairly frequently in the Eneados. Boccaccio has only a perfunctory summary of the well-known tale of Procne and Philomela (12.75), but his narrative of Aesacus is fairly detailed. However, he rationalises Aesacus’s metamorphosis into a diving bird by arguing, for instance, that a drowning person often reappears above the water several times before sinking. More importantly for our purposes, Boccaccio does not ascribe guilt or remorse to Aesacus. In place of the speech of Ovid’s Aesacus to the dead girl, we are told that Aesacus is simply “struck by bitter sorrow,” acri dolore concussus. Aesacus’s words at Met. 11.779, “conquering you was not worth, I believe, such a high price” (neque erat mihi uincere tantum), are unique within the aggressive male world of sexual conquest in the Metamorphoses. Like Ovid, Douglas keeps the focus on Aesacus’s unusual acceptance of responsibility for Hesperia’s death. But he also goes farther than Ovid with the theme of remorse. For the Romans, remorse, in the sense of deep concern for the impact of one’s harmful actions on another, was a rare emotion (Kaster 2005, 77–83). But Douglas as a Christian writer transforms remorse into the Christian act of penance. Moreover, unlike the Ovidian character, in Douglas’s text Aesacus is not caught in an endless loop of self-hate, but he has finally completed his penance: “and Esacus completis hys penance” (286). With the word “completis,” Aesacus, like Philomela and Procne, becomes a closural figure for Douglas’s Eneados, a mythological character who, unlike other Ovidian male predators, experiences moral growth. Douglas thus shows himself a careful, astute reader not only of Virgil’s poetry but also of Ovid’s, possessing the confidence to appropriate Ovidian characters for his own poetic and ethical purposes. His eclectic use of myth demonstrates his confidence in repurposing major classical epic texts; it also suggests an understanding of translation as verbal, cultural and physical transformation – in short as a very Ovidian process.22 The adoption of the unusual figure of Ovid’s Aesacus emphasises the approaching closure of his Eneados. Like the crane, but in different literary circumstances, Ovid’s Aesacus, I suggest, is associated with the poet/translator himself. Translating the Aeneid was represented in the prologue to Book 7 as not so much an honour as a burden. Although Ovid’s Aesacus suffers perpetual guilt, in the prologue to Book 12 Douglas reinterprets Ovid’s Aesacus as freed from that burden, a figure of poetic closure and of poetic freedom. He approaches the end of his work by celebrating the dawn chorus and then allowing it to lapse into virtual silence. Closure brings cessation of bird song.23 To conclude, in the prologues to Books 7 and 12 of his Eneados, Douglas constructs the “thresholds” to his translation as autobiographical spaces that serve as platforms for his ideas about translation. As Bawcutt (1976,

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166) comments, the prologues involve us as readers in the process of composition and give us a sense of progress. Nowhere is that observation more true than in the prologue to Book 7, which offers an intimate view of the translator/poet struggling to carry on with the arduous task of translating the entire Aeneid. Here the natural world itself is involved in the poet’s labours. And while the harsh winter weather hampers his resolve to proceed, it is the cranes who act as summons, whose temporal order and indeed disorder encourage choice and continuation. Douglas’s cranes call attention to the hybridising process of translation and its difficulties, dissolving the boundaries not only between the classical and contemporary worlds but between written text and voice.24 They mirror the poet/translator’s uncertainty about his stamina and the value of his work. Through assertive sound and writing in the sky, the cranes dramatise the choice between the stasis of “hell” (or writer’s block) and progress and completion of the journey. The reader might expect the frozen winter landscape of Scotland to be silent except for the noise of the wind. The rich soundscape of winter that Douglas creates here shows him as a poet full of surprises, especially attentive to his local, natural environment, and equally at ease with the worlds of vernacular poetry and of classical learning. There has long between debate over whether “the nature prologues” are composed largely from conventional tropes or do indeed relate to the real, observable world while drawing also on Virgil’s descriptions of nature in the Georgics (Bawcutt 1976, 176– 89; Fowler 2012). In the prologue to Book 7 in particular, the sound of the crane breaks down the walls between bookish learning and lived experience, and between “threshold” and “translated text,” as classical culture becomes incorporated into an acoustically vibrant Scottish landscape. Birdsong is crucial to the sonic, Scottish identity of the Eneados. As a migratory bird, the crane serves as a particularly fitting metonym for the poet/translator of the Aeneid, itself the great poem of transcultural migration now rendered into the thrumming sounds and rhythms of the Scottish tongue.

Notes 1 I wish to thank Susanna Braund for her friendship and support over the years and for our recent valuable exchanges about Gavin Douglas. 2 I take the term “soundscape” from Shafer’s classic (1974) work. 3 Douglas includes Maphaeus Vegius’s 1428 Supplement to the Aeneid (often known as Book 13), as was common in Latin texts at that time. 4 Scots was a Northern dialect of Middle English. Sixteenth-century Scotland was multi-lingual, with Scots, French, Latin and Gaelic widely spoken, the latter in the Highlands particularly. 5 Prologues 1 and 13 also concern the process of translation but are outside the spatial scope of this paper. 6 Balmer (2013, vii–viii, 3–18). 7 We have very little idea of the contents of early Scottish libraries. See Durkan and Ross (1963) for information about printed book collections owned by Scottish noblemen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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8 For a detailed discussion of the prologue to Book 7, see Bawcutt (1976, 180–6). A catalogue of spring songbirds appears at prol. 12.229–51. Unlike the winter birds, they sing harmoniously and melodiously. 9 See for “pew” A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, hereafter DOST. 10 Cranes were hunted to extinction in Scotland a century after Douglas. They have been reintroduced recently to the British Isles in south-east England. 11 On the crane as a bird of epic poetry from the Iliad on, see Manolaraki (2012). 12 As Harrison comments (1991, 144), Notos cannot mean South Winds here but storm winds in general, since the cranes are migrating southwards. 13 Capponi (1979, 284) suggests that Virgil is referring here to an anomaly, cranes that had failed to join the migratory group in a timely fashion perhaps because they were too weak to fly on high. For a discussion of the ancient sources on the crane, see Capponi (1979, 279–86). 14 The first two references incorporate the migration of cranes into the narrative of civil war. The last takes the form of a direct, horrific apostrophe to the cranes who, after the battle of Pharsalia, violate natural order by staying on into winter to feast, with other birds, on the battlefield dead (7.832–5). See Manolaraki (2012, 295–301) on all three of Lucan’s references to the cranes. 15 See for instance Mart. 9.13.7 (nomen) quod pinna scribente grues ad sidera tollant (the name that cranes raise to the stars with scribbling wing), with Henriksén (1998, ad loc); Mart. 13.75; Manolaraki (2012, 301); Woodford (1994, 165). 16 Bawcutt (1976, 99–102) identifies Douglas’s working text as the first edition of Ascensius’s very popular edition of Virgil, first published in Paris in 1501. 17 According to DOST, “dreidfull” can mean either “causing dread” or “fearful.” Possibly both meanings are in play here. 18 sicut erat sparsis furiali caede capillis, | prosiluit Ityosque caput Philomela cruentum | misit in ora patris nec tempore maluit ullo | posse loqui et meritis testari gaudia dictis (Philomela sprang forward, just as she was, hair dabbled with mad slaughter, and hurled the boy’s bloody head at his father’s face; at no other time would she have preferred to be able to weep and to testify to her delight in merited words, Met. 6.657–60). 19 Douglas will, however, add after Book 12 a translation of Maphaeus Vegius’s Supplementum to the Aeneid, Book 13. 20 Newlands (2020). 21 Regius’s popular school commentary on the Metamorphoses, printed by Ascensius in 1501, has little to say about the Aesacus myth beyond bare summary and pays no attention to Aesacus’s repentance. 22 In Scotland, Ovid did not enjoy the popularity that greeted his works in sixteenthcentury England. But Douglas’s unusual Ovidian turn, incidentally, anticipates an Ovidian turn in Scottish literature today, for instance, in the “seasonal” works, of author Ali Smith: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer. See Ranger 2019. 23 While the swallow, the nightingale and the diver (or cormorant) are absent from the morning chorus, Douglas closes the prologue to Book 12 with one particularly joyful singer, the dove, referred to by the classical name of Peristera (288–9): “And Peristera byddis luffaris awaik: | ‘Do serve my lady Venus heir with me.’” He does not, however, describe her song but anthropomorphises her, making her the vehicle for the human voice. 24 On the problematisation of the simple binaries popular in the language of translation theory, see Braund and Torlone (2018a, 4–5).

Works cited Balmer, J. 2013. Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry. Oxford. Bawcutt, P. 1976. Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study. Edinburgh.

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Braden, G. 2018. ‘The Passion of Dido: Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700.’ In Braund and Torlone 2018b, 80–96. Braund, S. and Torlone, Z. M. 2018a. ‘Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil.’ In Braund and Torlone 2018b, 1–19. ——— eds. 2018b. Virgil and His Translators. Oxford. Capponi, F. 1979. Ornithologia Latina. Geneva. Durkan, J. and Ross, A. 1963. Early Scottish Libraries. Glasgow. Fowler, Alastair. 2012. ‘Windlestraes.’ Times Literary Supplement 56 (April 27): 3–5. Genette, Gérard. 1987. Seuils. Paris. Gurd, S. 2016. Dissonance. New York. Harrison, S. ed. 1991. Vergil Aeneid X. Oxford. Henriksén, C. ed. 1998. Martial Book IX A Commentary. Uppsala 1998. Kaster, R. 2005. Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome. Oxford. Kirk, G. S. 1985. The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume 1: Books 1–4. Cambridge. Lattimore, R. 1951. The Iliad of Homer. Chicago. Manolaraki, E. 2012. ‘Aeriae Grues: Crane Migrations from Virgil to Statius.’ Classical Journal 107: 290–311. Newlands, C. 2020. ‘Aesacus and the Rhetoric of Remorse.’ Arethusa, forthcoming. O’Hogan, C. 2018. ‘Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics.’ In Braund and Torlone 2018b, 399–411. Peirano, I. 2014. ‘Sphragis: Paratextual Autobiographies.’ In Paratextuality and the Reader in Roman Literature and Culture, ed. L. Jansen, 224–42. Cambridge. Shafer, M. 1974. The Soundscape. Rochester, New York. White, P. 2013. Jodocus Badius Ascensius. Oxford. Woodford, S. 1994. ‘Palamedes Seeks Revenge.’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 114: 164–9.

13 After Strada English responses to Strada’s Nightingale (Prolusiones 2.6), with texts of four previously unprinted versions Stuart Gillespie Famiano Strada’s Prolusiones academicae, oratoriae, historicae, poeticae first appeared in a Cologne printing of 1617.1 The Italian Jesuit’s book offered a wealth of observations, anecdotes, stories, and exercises on style and rhetoric for advanced students and teachers of Latin. It went through many editions, including an early English printing (Oxford, 1631), until well into the eighteenth century. One of the essays was a description of an imaginary poetic contest in which distinguished writers of Strada’s day champion their favourite ancient poet by composing a Latin poem modelled on his style. Among these exemplary compositions of Strada’s, at least one proved to have strong appeal for his English readers: Prolusiones 2.6, in the style of Claudian (understood as a high style). It is a narrative in fifty-eight Latin hexameters, telling of a musician, who, playing in the open air, vies with a nightingale which begins to repeat his melodies in song from a nearby tree. Upwards of twenty different English versions of this poem had been composed by the end of the eighteenth century, an average of more than one per decade. This is a remarkable rate for a Latin poem which is too long to be tackled casually, and particularly striking today, when, if the neo-Latin verse of the continental Renaissance is generally unfamiliar, less still is known about its reception in the Anglophone world. What follows is a discussion of creative English responses to Strada’s poem in the form of translations, imitations, and adaptations of it.2 The wide range of ways in which the Latin poem was reworked in English, it will be suggested, raises questions about the traditional taxonomy to which such terms belong. In Strada’s poem, the nightingale and musician are protagonists in the long-running contest between nature and art. When the musician finds his playing is being emulated by the bird – something real nightingales have been known to do3 – he engages in what English imitations often call a ‘contest’ or ‘duel.’ The nightingale mimics the musician very successfully at first, but as the musician plays ever faster and more furiously, the bird is eventually exhausted by its efforts, and sings itself to death. Strada’s poem falls into several musico-poetic traditions, notably the hyperbolic praise of musical performers and the mythical celebration of Philomela as nightingale symbolically bemoaning the violence done to her, but the most important of them

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is the understanding of the nightingale, and of birds generally, in Augustine and many other medieval writers, as the type of natural as opposed to artificial music. Yet this can be inflected in a variety of ways: if Strada’s own theme is one of ‘the nightingale as pathetic over-reacher’, some translators make her ‘a little heroine of musical expression’ (Hollander 1961, 226).4 We shall see a little of the variety in what follows. Before we reach some of the English handlings of Strada’s composition, it should also be explained why the musician is sometimes called a harpist, at other times a lutenist, even a ‘fiddler.’ The reason is that Strada’s terms cithara and fidicen were used in Renaissance Latin for, respectively, any stringed instrument, and a performer on one. It is easy enough to account for some of the interest Strada’s composition elicited. Many of the English readers involved here will have encountered the poem in the course of learning Latin. The Prolusiones aimed at providing good models of Latin style, and were recommended as such, from soon after their first appearance, in sources like Richard Holdsworth’s ‘Directions’, an informal outline of a course of study for Cambridge undergraduates composed at some point before Holdsworth became Master of Emmanuel College in 1637. Following its early reception primarily in relation to the teaching of rhetoric at university level, Strada’s work made its way into secondary education contexts later in the seventeenth century, and there is a more specific route by which 2.6 will have come to the attention of many learners: through its appearance in anthologies of Latin poems for use in schools. Not long after the start of the eighteenth century, one of our authors labels his work ‘a translation of one of Famianus Strada’s epigrams as it is inserted among some select epigrams for the use of Eaton School.’5 Near the century’s end, in 1788, we find an English verse translation itself printed in a school text.6 The writers and translators with whom we are concerned are mostly not juveniles, however, and the purpose of putting the poem in front of schoolboys would have been to improve their expressive abilities in Latin; translation was not the procedure in view. It is a fair guess, though, that some of the writers and translators we are about to meet will have come across Strada’s poem later in life (whether or not for the first time) as they browsed an old school textbook on their shelves. But many other Latin poems were available in textbooks, and hence the availability of this one in this form does not explain why so many creative responses to it can be found, over such a long period, from such a number of individual writers. For this, it is necessary to delve into the responses themselves. For reference, Appendix 1 lists the versions I have located which appeared in print down to 1800. A further range of unprinted translations are extant today only in manuscript copies. Appendix 2 supplies transcriptions of four of these (and others are available),7 and I shall address them after dealing with the printed ones. Readers who would like to peruse a version of the poem before going on might wish to turn to one of these now, perhaps the first and plainest of them, beginning on p. 204.

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As its uses in teaching contexts imply, Strada’s poem itself is far from plain. It was felt to be a model of elegance and refinement (‘elegans et dignum’ is how the Eton Epigrammatum presented it), and was used for the purpose of illustrating rhetorical figures. It was even pronounced nearly untranslatable in Alexander Tytler’s well-known Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), on account of the ‘minute distinctions’ in its ‘descriptions’: ‘He that should attempt a translation of this most artful composition’, wrote Tytler, ‘dum tentat discrimina tanta reddere, would probably, like the nightingale, find himself impar magnanimis ausis’ (‘unequal to the brave attempt’) (Tytler 1797, 333, 336). At bottom, the poem was understood as a shorthand both for a particular topos and a particular style. It is didactically serious in being intended to convey, and help its readers remember, the distinctive qualities of Claudian’s verse. My listing in Appendix 1 shows the first printed English ‘version’ of Strada’s 1617 poem appearing in 1646. But an allusion to it, containing a kind of summary, had already been offered to English audiences by the playwright John Ford. It is incorporated into a dramatic work, Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (printed 1629). Ford’s play has never been felt fully successful, but this particular episode, which occurs in the first scene, has been highly praised. The contention between musician and bird is reported by one of Ford’s characters as something he chanced to witness in the forest, and his words make fully explicit the theme Strada does not: ‘I heard | The sweetest and most ravishing contention, | That Art or Nature ever were at strife in.’ By way of underlining the point, his interlocutor responds: ‘I cannot conceive, what you inferre | By Art and Nature’, and is quickly enlightened: Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last Into a pretty anger, that a bird Whom Art had never taught Cliffs, Moods, or Notes, Should vie with him for mastery, whose study Had busied many hours to perft practise: To end the controversie, in a rapture, Upon his Instrument he playes so swiftly, So many voluntaries, and so quicke, That there was curiositie and cunning, Concord in discord, lines of diffring method Meeting in one full Center of delight. (Ford 1629, 6; Act 1, scene 1) One aspect of Ford’s handling of Strada’s narrative in this passage, his use of more or less specialized musical terminology (‘cliffs’ are ‘clefs’), will be found in many later English responses. Almost a third of the Ford passage has already been quoted now, meaning that it is much too summary a treatment to be called by any of the terms we use when a poem is given a new embodiment in a new language: it is not a translation or an imitation,

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although individual lines and phrases are translated.8 What should it be called? An old-fashioned term like ‘extended allusion’ might not be inappropriate, but conveys nothing very specifc. Moving chronologically forward from Ford in 1629, we next arrive at something more recognizable as a ‘version’ of Strada’s poem. One simple reason for this is that it forms a stand-alone poem itself. Richard Crashaw’s 1646 Music’s Duel is the best known of all the English handlings of Strada’s composition, and not only because Crashaw’s is a familiar name in the history of English verse. Crashaw’s Victorian editor, Alexander Grosart, commended this as one of the two ‘truly great’ poems among Crashaw’s translations (his word), in which medium, he affirms, ‘the genius of Crashaw shines with its fullest splendour.’ But Grosart adds: ‘We have only to read critically the Latin of Strada, from whence it is drawn, to discern the creative gift of our Poet’, since ‘such word-painting as in these lines belongs to Crashaw, not Strada.’ To enforce the point, he quotes Crashaw’s nineteenthcentury biographer R. A. Willmott: ‘We shall seek in vain in the Latin text for the vigour, the fancy, and the grandeur of these lines’ (Crashaw 1872, II, lxxix–lxxx). The first of the lines Grosart gives by way of illustration, italicizing Crashaw’s augmentations, are these: and streightway she Carves out her dainty voyce as readily and Through the sleeke passage of her open throat A clear unwrinckled song; (Crashaw 1872, II, lxxx) Crashaw’s poem, in other words, is replete with baroque fourishes having no counterpart in Strada’s Latin. Evidently it is precisely these additions which commend it to some (like Grosart and Willmott), which seems necessarily to mean they attach more importance to its attractiveness, or perhaps its period quality, as an English poem, and less to what it tells us about Strada’s Latin one; in fact, Grosart contrasts the ‘pale, empty literality’ (‘literalness’) of Ford’s earlier response. And indeed, given its length of 168 pentameter lines (as against Strada’s ffty-eight hexameters), there is more than one reason to question whether Crashaw’s composition really functions as a translation, or even an imitation. By what generic term, then, ought this performance to be described? Crashaw’s poem has been commended by many others both before Grosart and since. Perhaps surprisingly, given the different aesthetic of another era, it was quoted admiringly by the doyen of eighteenth-century translators, Alexander Pope.9 Nor are such commendations confined to the distant past. John Hollander reads it as ‘a high point in the history of seventeenth-century

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poetical representations of the doctrine of the affections’, while seeing Strada’s poem as being concerned with the quite different topic of Art vs. Nature (Hollander 1961, 238). Thomas Healy’s more recent study of Crashaw judges his version the best in English, and follows Grosart far enough to use the word ‘improvisation’ for Crashaw’s approach. Although Healy argues nevertheless that ‘Strada’s work is never lost sight of’, and that Crashaw stays within Strada’s ‘framework’, his overall conclusion is that ‘the true contest actually revealed by the poem seems to be between Crashaw and Strada’ (Healy 1986, 54, 56). To all these commentators, it would appear, Crashaw’s achievement lies in what he adds, not what he preserves. Instead of reproducing the effect of Strada’s poem, he repurposes the poem. This is much closer to the early modern idea of imitation than to our own ideas of translation, and implies fundamental questions about what a reader or critic should be looking for in such a response. While it is expansive, at 168 lines Crashaw’s is by no means the longest of English responses. In this respect, it is put into the shade by a twenty-page booklet of 1671. The headnote to this text refers back to Crashaw, but its writer is aware of only one other predecessor, and does not refer to a further three (additional to Ford) listed in Appendix 1: Stradas Musical Duel, IN LATINE; First imitated in English by Mr. Crashaw, then by Mr. Hinton;10 and now by a third Hand so enlarg’d, and the whole Frame of the Poem so alter’d, that little of Strada is preserv’d, save onely the Scene, and Issue of the Duel. (Anon 1671, sig. A3r) Anon’s performance, as this headnote implies, is indeed remarkably little indebted to Strada. ‘Little of Strada is preserv’d’ sounds like a boast, not an apology, which once again makes us realize that ‘preservation’, or ‘fdelity’, is not the objective. Instead, ‘enlarged’ and ‘altered’ are the selling points: Anon has gone one better (the note implies) than the ‘imitations’ that precede him. Again this makes one feel the usual terminology of translation is ill suited to such works. This does not necessarily mean this response is a successful composition in itself, however, typically proceeding as it does through rather empty antitheses which by the end have become tedious: The Soul too, frst retriv’d, anon retir’d Into the Harp; which sweetly thus inspir’d Needs no more Fill of other Vocal Tone: It self is Voice, and Instrument in One. And so at Once both Rings the Fun’eral Peal, And Sings the Requi’em of sweet Philomel. (sig. C2r) Let us wind back to the three printed responses not known to Anon 1671. Sir Francis Wortley (or perhaps his printer) titles his 1646 version a ‘paraphrase’

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(see Appendix 1); as verse, it is close to doggerel. Robert Vilvain’s of 1654 is no doubt rightly identified by Thomas Healy as the printed translation which gets closest to the elevated Claudian manner Strada’s composition was intended to illustrate. It is also a line-for-line version, which as usual leads to some strain on the English syntax: Surely the Minstrel blushd, and in ferce mood, Thou shalt not triumph, Chantress of the Wood; Or vanquish’d (said) I’le break my Lute: streight wais He strains his instrument to matchless Lays: His hand fies o’re the strings now here, now ther In diffring numbers, laboring every wher (Vilvain 1654, fol. 178r) At this point, then, we might ask about the balance of three priorities. Responses may prioritize an equivalent style or manner, or the capturing of meanings, or the creation of an effective English poem; these objectives may not all be compatible. Finally, Anon 1671 cannot be blamed for not knowing of a third predecessor buried within a volume of meditations by John Flavell, ‘Minister of the Gospel’, according to the title page, ‘in Devon.’ I would not have known of Flavell’s reference to Strada in the ‘occasional meditations’ appended to his Husbandry Spiritualized, 1669, were it not for the search facilities offered by the now-standard database for pre-1700 English printed books, Early English Books Online (EEBO). The version Flavell presents is embedded within one of these discourses, or meditations, and has two remarkable features. First, he uses it for the very odd purpose of moralizing on hypocrisy. He follows up the closing lines on the nightingale’s death (‘So far even little souls are driven on | Struck with a vertuous emulation’) with the reflection: ‘And even as far are hypocrites driven on by their ambition and pride, which is the spur that provokes them in their religious duties’ (Flavell 1669, 236). This is eccentric indeed. Second, this West Country vicar has borrowed his translation (or taken it without acknowledgement) from an unprinted manuscript. Although he does not attribute it to anyone in particular, it is a rather fine version by William Strode (c. 1602–1645), the poet and Public Orator of the University of Oxford. All Strode’s verse, it is thought, belongs to the 1620s, and it circulated widely, but went unprinted for a very long time – the first collected edition of his poetical works was published in 1907. A search of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century databases suggests that Flavell’s obscure collection of meditations represents the only printing of Strode’s Nightingale before the nineteenth century. It should be underlined that Strode has the distinction of being one of the two first imitators of Strada’s poem in English, even if his version went unprinted.11 It was clearly well known through the wide circulation Strode’s verse achieved in manuscript copies, and is particularly commended by Robert Vilvain, the line-by-line translator of 1654. ‘The Author Strada’, Vilvain

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explains in a note to his own version, ‘framed this Fancy in 58 Heroic Hexameters: which Dr. Strode of Christ-Church at Oxford, elegantly translated into 80 English metres; being 22 mo then the Latin.’ Vilvain goes on to contrast his own version, ‘rudely rendred in equal numbers or measures vers for vers, and very neer the letter, according to my plain Pedantic garb or guise, who never drank at Parnassus’ (Vilvain 1654, sigs. 177v–178r). This gives us yet another term: ‘rend[e]red.’ Strode’s version is indeed accomplished and elegant, notwithstanding some arcane vocabulary: With rolling hand the Lutinist then plies His trembling threads; sometimes in scornful wise He brushes down the strings and keemes them all With one even stroke; then takes them severall And culles them ore again. His sparkling joynts (With busy descant mincing on the points) Reach back with busy touch: that done hee stayes, The bird replies, and art with art repayes. (Strode 1907, 17) ‘To keeme’ is a variant of ‘to comb’ and is evidently used here to mean ‘strum’, although the sense is not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘To cull’ is familiar enough when applied to fruits or fowers, as in Milton’s ‘Culling their potent herbs’ (Comus, 10), and clearly means ‘pluck’, but OED (v.2) does not note any application to the plucking of stringed instruments. A ‘point’, or more fully ‘point of imitation’, is ‘a short motif or theme, especially one suitable for imitative treatment in a contrapuntal composition’ (OED, ‘Point’, n. 1, 7b). This musical terminology looks precise and authentic, though some of it has escaped the record. This feature of English versions of Strada’s poem is there from the start, then. A further version perhaps sheds a little light on the free hand used by many of Strada’s English respondents towards their source. William Pattison, a Cambridge don and minor poet whose Collected Works appeared following his death in 1728, first published his response in 1725, accompanied by a headnote to the effect that he ‘could not forbear’ composing an ‘imitation’ ‘in justice to [his] own admiration’ for Strada’s work. ‘A Translation’, he goes on, he ‘durst not aim at’, lest he ‘fall . . . short’ (Prior et al. 1725, 110). It sounds as though Pattison feels his choice of mode puts him under less pressure, imitation allowing more leeway than translation. Agreeable as it might be to continue this tour with remarks on the successive responses listed in Appendix 1, it is possible to bring to a point some of the questions I have been asking and implying by discussing just one more, by the popular eighteenth-century poet Ambrose Philips. Philips’s Pastorals made his reputation, and his Fifth Pastoral of 1709 involves conspicuous use of Strada’s Nightingale. Commentators usually decline to call Philips’s work a translation, perhaps because of its very obvious departures from Strada,

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perhaps because it has always been clear that it is designed as a tribute to the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, and perhaps because material deriving from Strada is mixed with, and set within, other material (for instance, the ending is drawn mainly from the ps.-Virgilian Culex). Examples could be provided from this single composition of perhaps all the types of transfer operation we have seen so far, using all the labels mentioned. A line like ‘From note to note in haste his fingers fly’ can straightforwardly be described as a translation.12 But when we find that the musician at this point is not playing a stringed instrument but instead a pipe, or ‘fife’, it is clear that Strada’s material is being adapted for the purposes of homage to Spenser, here depicted as a shepherd figure replacing Strada’s anonymous performer (who is not a shepherd). The transposition of time and place often associated with imitation (under definitions such as Dryden’s) is found here in Philips’s poem too: we are in ‘Eliza’s reign’, when shepherds, apparently, sing tales of ‘the trade of wizards’ and ‘Merlin’s skill’ (19, 15). Thus far it might be possible to agree, all the same, with those critics and editors who suggest that the Spenserian tribute is what dictates the departures from Strada. ‘Philips’, writes one, ‘follows his model closely, introducing only such changes as his main theme, eulogy of Spenser, demanded, or the pastoral form necessitated’ (Philips 1937, 174). This, I am afraid, will not do: Philips’s refashioning is considerably more comprehensive. To untwist just one strand: the musician may start by playing a Spenserian pipe, but once he finds himself bested by the nightingale in this phase of the contest, he moves to another instrument: Then Colin threw his ffe disgrac’d aside; While she loud triumph sings, proclaiming wide Her mighty conquest . . . What could Colin more? A little harp of maple-ware he bore: The little harp was old, but newly strung, Which, usual, he across his shoulders hung. (73–5, 77–80) The reader will notice the degree of detail in the description of the harp. We are meant to see that this is a poem about eclogues. The old harp is the eclogue form, and the new strings represent the native, Spenserian element which Philips wished to reintroduce. The nightingale – earlier characterized as ‘a nightingale of fame, | Jealous, and fond of praise’ (35–6) – is intended to represent the classical eclogists, whom Spenser challenges and triumphs over.13 It could be suggested that Philips’s poem is what today we have begun to call an ‘aftering’ – a poem ‘after’ Strada. The same could be said of several of the others we have glanced at, but Philips makes this relationship more obvious through the several levels on which he steers his work away from

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his model. Afterings, it might be argued, rely on the reader being aware of two things. The first is the poem which stands behind them. This is often not true of translations, because many translations are designed for readers who are unfamiliar with the original, and even with the language in which it is written; for such readers they do not supplement but replace it. The second thing the reader must understand is that afterings stake their claims as original English works, and not at all as representations of previous works. The language of ‘fidelity’ or ‘accuracy’, ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’, is irrelevant in describing or assessing them. Even if some other term is preferred to ‘aftering’, it seems important to register this category of response. To the best of my knowledge, although the mode is now regularly invoked by contemporary writers with classical interests (‘After Sappho’), it has received very little attention in historical scholarship. The responses Strada’s Nightingale elicits over time are but one example which goes to suggest we could pay it more. *** I now briefly introduce four further responses, appearing in print for the first time here. The recovery of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English versions of Greek and Latin works of (especially) poetry and drama which survive only in manuscript texts is a scholarly endeavour which has been pursued with increased determination in recent years, but it has been confined almost entirely to versions of ancient works. What follows in Appendix 2 is intended partly as a reminder that English versions of much later Latin compositions are also abundant in extant manuscripts of this era. While I have suggested that some of the printed responses to Strada’s poem cannot usefully be called ‘translations’, the four manuscript versions presented here seem to fall fairly comfortably under that heading, with the third of them being a more expansive example. But this is not enough to explain their raison d’être. Why did their authors choose to spend their time creating an English version of Strada’s poem, in most if not all cases with no expectation it would reach print? One answer can be inferred. Strada’s Prolusiones provide models of Latin style, in this instance an elevated style for verse. It can safely be assumed that many of Strada’s readers will have gone on to write neo-Latin poems of their own. Some, however, wanted to know what a corresponding English style would look like. Each of these four manuscript versions makes a shot at an approximation, an equivalent. It may seem surprising, then, that they range from the merely dignified to the self-consciously ornate and Latinate in both syntax and vocabulary, as can be seen from the four openings alone: Now the declining Sun his height had past, And milder fames his fery tresses fed The sun had pass’d the Meridian Line, And now with gentler heat began to shine

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Refulgent Sol his course did westwards bend And now approached his daily journey’s end When faming Sol on his Etherial Way Declining smote the Earth with gentler Ray An explanation for at least some of this divergence could be sought in the chronology. These compositions belong to various generations of English verse, from the 1620s to c. 1726, over which period of time, naturally enough, stylistic norms moved on very signifcantly. It is a thought-provoking refection, all the same, that all their authors were probably attempting exactly the same thing: an English style like Claudian’s.

Appendix 1 Printed versions of Strada’s Nightingale to 1800

Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated. Richard Crashaw (1646). Music’s Duel, in Steps to the Temple (‘Now westward Sol had spent the richest beams’) Sir Francis Wortley (1646). A Paraphrase on the Verses made of the lutanist [sic] and Philomel in contestation, in Wortley’s Characters and Elegies (‘When past the middle Orbe the parching Sun’) Robert Vilvain (1654), Epig. LII. Aemulatio musica, in Enchiridium epigrammatum Latino-Anglicum. An Epitome of Essais Englished out of Latin (‘The Sun now from the Heavens mid-day line’) William Strode (1669, written 1620s). Untitled, in John Flavell, Husbandry Spiritualized, or, the Heavenly Use of Earthly Things (‘Now the declining Sun did downward bend’) Anon. (1671). Strada’s Musical Duel (‘The sun the youthful morn, and mid-aged day’) Anon. (1676). Strada’s Nightingale in Imitation of Claudian’s style, in Ludus Scacchiæ: A Satyr against unjust Wars (‘Now the prone Sun stooped to his Western way’) Mr Wilson (1685). Strada’s Nightingale, in Poems by Several Hands, and on Several Occasions (Tate’s Miscellany) (‘Past his Meridian was the Sun, each Beam’) B.D. (1694). Strada’s Nightingale, Gentleman’s Journal, 3 (June), 170–1 (‘The Western Sun now shot a feeble Ray’) Ambrose Philips (1709). The Fifth Pastoral, in Poetical Miscellanies: The Sixth Part (Tonson’s Miscellany) (‘The Sun, now mounted to the Noon of Day’) William Tunstall (1716). The Duel betwixt a Master of the Lute and a Nightingale, in Ballads and some other Occasional Poems (‘The Sun was, now, declining to the Sea’) Mr B---- (1721). The Duel of the Musician and the Nightingale, in The Grove (‘Now, turning from the sultry Noon, the Sun’) William Pattison (1725). The Nightingale, in A New Collection of Poems on Several Occasions. By Mr Prior, and others (‘As Phoebus darted forth a milder Ray’). Revised in Pattison’s Poetical Works, 1728 (‘‘Twas when the Sun diffus’d a milder Ray’) Anon. (1742). The Fiddler and Nightingale. Translated from the Latin of STRADA, London Magazine, 11, no. 5 (May), 250–1 (‘Prone to the sea the sun declin’d a-pace’) Ralph Hulse (1750). ‘The Lyrist and the Nightingale’, British Magazine, 5, no. 12 (December), 488–9 (‘Once on a time, if ancient fame says true’)

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Thomas Gibbons (1767). The Contest between the Musician and the Nightingale, in Rhetoric; or, a View of its Principal Tropes and Figures (‘Now, from the height of heav’n the sun declin’d’) Rev. Mr Robson (1770). The Contest of a Musician and Nightingale. From Strada’s Imitation of Claudian, in A Collection of Original Miscellany Poems and Translations by the Reverend Mr Coates (‘The rapid sun now past meridian height’) [T. Bancroft] (1778). Fidicinis et Philemela certamen, in Prolusiones poeticæ. Chester (‘Now Sol, descending from his mid-day blaze’)

Appendix 2 Four newly recovered translations of Strada’s Nightingale

The headnotes to each of the four texts presented here text give basic details of the manuscript from which they are taken, and, where identified, the translator. The system used for glossing words not used in a standard modern sense is self-explanatory. Editorial intervention extends to revision of punctuation where this clarifies meaning; manuscripts of this era can be minimalist in this respect.

1. Anon.: Betwixt a Lutenist and a Nightingall In the manuscript source used here, Bodleian MS English poetry c. 50, fol. 62r-v, this anonymous translation of Strada’s poem is paired with another English translation under the common heading ‘Betwixt a Lutenist and a Nightingall: There sweet expressions of musicke in a shady Groue. Translated by two Friends.’ The first of the friends is named as William Strode. Strode’s version of Strada’s poem is thought to belong to the 1620s. It can be inferred from the numerous surviving manuscript exemplars that it enjoyed considerable circulation in manuscript, and it was eventually printed. But its partner is known only from this copy. Its style belongs to the same era as Strode’s, in or near the 1620s, a date making these two attempts the earliest known versions of Strada’s composition. Now the declining Sun his height had past, And milder fames his fery tresses fed, When a Musician did his cares assuage With his Lute’s sound, and the hot season’s rage Allay, defended by an Oak, that near To Tiber his green Canopy did rear. A Nightingale whom the next Grove had made Muse, Siren harmless, Siren of their shade, Him heard, and, fying near, with leaves hid, sate 10 Deeply noting the sound, and doth relate It to her self, and with her throat the same

After Strada

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Returns, that he doth with his fngers frame Her imitation. The Musician spies, And with the bird to sport is pleas’d; then tries His Lute with fuller touches, and to bring Some trial of their future war; each string With a soft stroke runs o’er. But sweet-voic’t she, Nor with less speed, nor less variety, With thousand different Accents of her tongue Sets out a proof of her ensuing song. Then the Musician, ’mongst the trembling strings Guiding his hand (now as disdaining˚), brings His strokes about; and the stiff cords doth strain With touches drawn in length equal and plain.˚ Now severally each string he doth apply,˚ Making his dancing fngers through all fy˚ With swift short accents,˚ and then quick replays, Then silent stood, when she as many ways Replies; and against Art like˚ Art doth bring. Now as untaught, or doubtful how to sing, Long strains she frames, and doth a time assay˚ With no change˚ mixable, but in one key. Her voice gives liquid passage from her breast, Now with division14 and shortest rest. She chants them all, repeats with quivering throat So various melody. So sweet a note He wonders from so small a Throat should spring; By turns strikes with strange Art, whilst treble shrill Her doth divide, and basses shake with painful skill, And high and low sounds makes together fall, As if the noise dull minds to war did call. The Nightingale this also sings: and while With melting Throat she accents doth compile Sharp, sweet, and shirll˚, all in just measures wound, She suddenly, low warbling, hurleth round Within her breast quick murmurs; and doth raise Her voice, now clear, now shrill, then it allays With noises bass and hollow, as she meant Of dreadful war to sound some Instrument. Here the Musician blushes, and angry, says This at the least (wood’s Lutenist) thy lays Shall not have power t’express; or here my lute Shall, thy skill’s Trophy, broken lie, and mute. Not saying more, he from his instrument Inimitable concords doth present.

205

indignantly [unharmonized, unornamented ply, wield stresses . . . [repeats the same attempt modulation, [key change

shrill

206

Stuart Gillespie

For with his hand upon the strings he fies, And many measures, many Harmonies At once produce he15 doth, and severally Doth labour, on each cord then mutually 60 Strong and high sounds doth with soft warble join, And each note proudly raising, doth them twine With often change: and at once all parts plays, Then what the emulous bird would answer stays,˚ Expecting. But poor she, though rough and dry Her throat was now, through former melody, Impatient yet to be o’ercome, doth strain Her forces all at once, but strives in vain, For of so many strings she diverse tunes,16 While she with plain and native voice presumes 70 To sing, and with small organs great things speak, Too weak for her great enterprise, too weak For her great grief, she faints, and then, her life Forsaking in that last and greatest strife, Unto the victor’s lute, a ft tomb, fell; So much even little souls desire t’excel.

waits for

2. Anon.: The Nightingale and the Lute-Master; from Strada: in imitation of Claudian’s Stile This translation is an unattributed work found in Bodleian MS Rawlinson D. 391, fol. 25r-v. The volume in which it appears has been assembled from a wide variety of shorter manuscripts, bound together for convenience many years after the date range within which the components were composed or copied out, and the bifolium on which this composition appears does not seem to be connected with any other constituent element. This translation is very likely to remain anonymous. Various features, from style to spelling, suggest it might have been composed in the later seventeenth century. The sun had pass’d the Meridian Line, And now with gentler heat began to shine, When an Artist sate on Tiber’s Banks, to Play; The Heat, and far more scorching Cares to allay: Shelterd with a shady Oak, among scenes Of Nature’s sweetest, Nature’s virgin Greens. A Nightingale lodg’d in a Neighboring Wood, The Grove’s sweet, harmless siren, listening stood. And coming nearer straight herself convey’d 10 Among the spreading Leaves; and as he play’d, Warbling within her Tuneful Breast each strein He touch’d, she render’d it him back again.

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Finding her eccho thus to tempt his skill, He tries to show some sport to Philomel: And as a Prelude to th’ approaching Fray, And Trial, who shou’d bear the Palm away, Boldly his sounding˚ Lute to prove˚ begins; Swift fy his Fingers thro’ the trembling Strings. As nimbly she runs thro’ a thousand notes, As if she had a Thousand various Throats; Which his shrill tuneful Pipes as sweetly strein; The glorious ensuing victory to gain. Then, in disdain he gives some scornful stroaks, And scornfully the quivering strings provokes: Now, quick as Jove’s Lightning, urges all the Chords And in nice descant charming Notes affords: Then stops. Melodious Philomel, as quick, Makes the like answer, and shows Trick for Trick: Now, as unskill’d, or as she had forgot, ⎫ She trolls˚ the very same continu’d Note, ⎬ Thro’ the harmonious liquid˚ way, her Throat: ⎭ Then runs division17 this shrill Chorister; Holds out˚ a Note, and shakes˚ upon’t as clear. He wonders, that such various musick came, And strong, from Organs of so small a frame, And trying a nobler fight, with wondrous Art Varies the Harmony of each Key apart: The Bass, the Treble he strikes; the fat, the acute˚ Sweetly he tempers˚ on his well-tun’d Lute, As if with drum and trumpet’s various sound He wou’d urge some Coward to maintain his ground. This he performs, and whilst he carols out So clear, so shrill, each equal, tuneful note, All on a sudden, she now stormy grows; Now, in soft, thrilling, silent murmurs fows: And then with various humor both repeats, The loud, the still: as Martial Music beats. The Lutenist blush’d: and with wild fury mad, Thou fddling Chorister of the Groves, he cried, If thou canst imitate this following strein, Ile break my Lute, and never Play again! Then, inimitable streins his Hand inspire, Which plies his almost animated Lyre; Through all the Strings his sparkling Fingers fy; Now this, now that; with skilful Touches try. All Musick’s Force he proudly musters up, To show his Foe a formidable Troop:

207

resonant . . . [test

trills pure, clear sustains . . . [vibrates

sharp blends

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Now prides himself in lofty sounding Airs, And now, with gentler sounds affects the ears: 60 Then, runs He a swift division; and now, A fnishing Chorus accosts his Foe; As one consummate, one resistless Blow: Then, stopping, waits the rival of his Fame, To hear what she wou’d answer back again. Who, tho’ her voice with such great Toil was hoarse, Yet, like true Courage, rallies all her force, Impatient of Disgrace; but whilst in vain She tries her plain and native airs to strein To the vast Pitch of all his artful sounds 70 And set her Pipe to all his various Grounds, She sinks beneath the brave attempt, and dies: And on the Conqueror’s Lute a Victim lies: What ftter Tomb cou’d be? Thus, oft, we fnd In puny Bodies a majestick mind.

3. Thomas Warton the Elder: The Contest between the Nightingale and Musician Warton (1688?–1745) became Oxford Professor of Poetry, largely, it is said, because his Jacobite sympathies made him popular in the university. He wrote occasional verse but published no collection of it. His son edited such a collection after his death, in 1748, but it did not include his Strada version even though other poems translated from Latin originals are found in it. This text is taken from a manuscript in the Brotherton Collection, Leeds (MS Lt33, pp. 138–43). It is undated, but all Warton’s other verse is thought to belong to the years 1706–25. The contest between the Nightingale and Musician being a translation of one of Famianus Strada’s Epigrams as it is inserted among some select epigrams for the use of Eaton School – Iam sol a medio pronus deflexerat Orbe &c. Refulgent Sol his course did westwards bend And now approached his daily journey’s end, Was milder grown and kindly did abate The torrid vehemence of noonstide heat; When near old Tyber by a mur’mring brook Screen’d from the sun by an old spreading oak, On a green bank of moss a Harper sat Enammeld with the rural violet.

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And on his tunefull Lyre began to play, ⎫ 10 To ease his greifs and all his cares allay ⎬ Whilst the too tedious hours stole silently away. ⎭ This heard the nightingale that chirping stood Sweetly complaining to the neib’ring wood, The nightingale that all the summer was The siren, harmless siren, of the place, And muse of all the Grove, who from afar When she the Harp’s harmonious sound did hear, Extended strait her little wings and few, And to the skill’d Musitian nearer drew. 20 Where ‘mongst the leaves her station having got, ⎫ To her self chirp’d a while, and every note ⎬ His instrument perform’d, she answer’d with her throte. ⎭ The Artist heard her, and perceiv’d by that That the shy bird his Harpe did imitate. Strait to himself he smil’d, it pleas’d him well That he could please the little Philimell. His harp he therefore turn’d, and better set,˚ adjusted First to begin the musical debate Then with a nimble hand each string assay’d 30 And upon all the strings at once he play’d. Nor did the featherd songstress with less art Variety of Harmony impart. A thousand diff’rent ways to sing she strove, As he a thousand ways the speaking strings did move. This the melodious warbler meant should be An instance of her future harmony. And now the skilful Harper frst begins His fngers wander o’re the trembling strings, As if unskilful now he only plays 40 Some easy, rambling, inconsistent˚ lays. discordant Now some few strings he lightly touched upon, And here and there harp’d pinkingly18 alone. Now plays the same that he play’d last again, And answered echo-like his own sweet strain. And what he sweetly play’d she sweetly sings. The notes the same, no difference at all, But artifcial his, hers naturall. [at one time . . . As if unskilful onewhile˚ she tones out˚ intones Some rambling rural lesson˚ thro’ her throat, piece of music 50 Now high, now low that key assays,˚ tries Then mingles the shrill treble with the base. Then sings the same, and with a quiv’ring voice

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She answers echo-like her own sweet noise. It ravish’d strait th’ amazed Musician’s ear Such sweet melodious harmony to hear. He wonder’d, since so small a voice she had, She such variety of musick made. Resolv’d to conquer, he strikes up again, And now begins a harder, nobler strain. With wond’rous art the Treble now he plays And straitway falls into the hoarsest base. Strikes hard, and all the base strings plays at large, As when the martial Trumpet sounds a charge. This too she did: for having tun’d her voice Unto the soft and pleasing Treble’s noise, She fell from it, and a deep base strait sang Like the lowd murm’ring Martial Trumpet’s clang. At this the Harper blush’d for shame to see That he could not th’ excelling Victor be. Poor little chirper (said he), angry grown, ⎫ I’ll try once more, and if thou’rt not out-done ⎬ I’ll straitway break my harp and get me gone. ⎭ He said no more, but took his Lyre and plaid, An harmony inimitable made. Each tinkling string his skilful hand did move, ⎫ Now here, now there, his jumping fngers rove, ⎬ With nice expecting,˚ ev’ry note to prove.˚ ⎭ anticipation On ev’ry string he labour’d, and then leant [. . . try His well pleas’d head upon his instrument. Then up and down he casts his tuneful head, And listn’d well to ev’ry note he play’d. Now the high treble, now a base he plays, ⎫ Louder and louder then to play assays, ⎬ And ended with a deep, a grave, majestick base. ⎭ Silent then stood the skill’d Musitianer˚ musician His little sweet Antagonist to hear, She (tho’ her voice was hoarse and almost gone) Not bearing to be by the Harp out-done, Whets up her bill and bustles up again, ⎫ And strove to sing with all her might and main. ⎬ She strove, ‘tis true, but ah! She strove in vain. ⎭ For whilst she with her nat’rall voice do’s try To make such various sorts of harmony And through her narrow throat would imitate The loudest soundings of the base and fat,

After Strada Unable to perform what she desir’d The noble-minded bird in the attempt expir’d. And as she died upon the harp fell down, The harp by which she then had been outdone, 100 The harp a proper tomb for her to ly upon. So far the power of æmulation stings The mighty spirits of such little things.

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⎫ ⎬ ⎭

4. Richard Roach: The Harper and the Nightingale, from Strada’s Prolusions Roach (1662–1730) was educated at Merchant Taylors School, then St. John’s College, Cambridge. Following his BD and a fellowship at the college, he took orders and became rector of Hackney, Middlesex, 1690–1730. Later he became head of the ‘Philadelphian Society’, established by disciples of Jacob Böhme. Six volumes of Roach’s diaries survive, as do two folio volumes of miscellaneous papers including many verse compositions, often occasional in character, but very few translations. The position this one occupies within Bodleian MS Rawlinson D. 832, from which this text is taken (fols 249r–250r), suggests a date of c. 1726. When faming Sol on his Etherial Way Declining smote the Earth with gentler Ray, By Tyber’s Flood a Bard, of Thracian Mien, Beneath a spreading Oak, in verdant Scene, Reliev’d his aestuant˚ Heat, his Amorous Cares Sooth’d and deluded with soft Lycian Airs. All Ear attentive Philomela stood, Quean-Songstress, Syren of the neighbouring Wood, Innocent Syren: lur’d and hither fed, 10 Midst the thick Leaves she perches ore his Head: Catches the Sound, and gently murmuring Returns in Voice what he exprest on String. The Artist, pleas’d to hear her mimic Tone, Resolv’d to give her Scope, and lure her on. He moves the strings with somewhat louder Quill,˚ Preludious to the Tryal of their Skill: Touches the chords of various Harmony; And makes a sprightly fourish in the Key. The chalange she Accepts: Returns her Part, 20 With equal nimbleness, and equal Art. Varies her notes with Tone as full, and strong;

burning

plectrum

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Stuart Gillespie And Symphonizes˚ to her Future Song. The Lyric then frst sweeps the trembling strings With loose and careless Touch; then livelier springs, And all the Concords of the Scale runs ore, In Tinkling Tone, respondent back and fore. And now, with rougher crowded Tone and Hum, Whisks all the strings at once in Spanish Thrum. Then stands expectant. She as many ways Models˚ her voice, and Art with Art repays. Now, as if rude and Inexpert of Song, Plain artless notes she forms; and holds ’em long. Now she Divides, and Subdivides still less,19 With Gruppos,˚ Trills, and Graces˚ numberless. With wonder struck, the Apollonian Bard Such varied Tones from Pipe so slender heard; Exerts afresh; new Moods and Measures tries: Now in Division swift as Lightning fies. Now Imitation works in various key, This too she wrought, and run˚ as fast as he. The Contest he renews with Different grace; And points his notes in the alert˚ Vivace. And further stroke of Mastership to show, He skips in ludibund˚ Arpeggio. Now in soft Accents he incites to Love, Now rougher sounds that martial Prowess move. All this she renders; and in tuneful Play ⎫ Now swells, now falls, now melts and dies away; ⎬ Then springs again all Life, all Air, all Gay. ⎭ And on a sudden, scarce th’ Acute˚ exprest, She rumbles from the Hollow of her chest; And Tones so intermingles, that you’d swear She beat the Drum, and sounded Point of ˚ war. He blush’d. Then summond all his Art, and Fire; Resolv’d he’d Conquer, or he’d Break his Lyre. And rising to Inimitable strains Thro’ the whole Scale triumphant rides, and reigns. Back, fore, and interchang’d Divisions run, And various Fuges and Parts combin’d in One. Thus with the noble Canon’s sound he swells: Resumes, alternates, echoes, Ritournels. With notes thro’ every Mood and Movement˚ shot: Adagio, Grave, Allegro and Gavot. Now strong as every stroke wou’d wound the Air;

harmonizes

makes similar

runs . . . [grace notes

ran animated playful

high note

signal for

tempo

After Strada Then softning with a new surprizing Air;20 His stroke unheard; all in a charming Ring, As of his untouch’d and self-moving String. Still to more vehement emphatic Fire ⎫ He spurs his Fancy with his emulous Ire; ⎬ 70 Labours, and puts his Soul into his Lyre. ⎭ And lastly every Chord and Tone˚ and grace˚ Comprizes in full-Choral Thorough Bass. Ev’n this too cramm’d, to make his Conquest sure, With Discord in Concordant Sciochature.21 This done, his silent nerves attentive lye For his argute˚ Antagonist’s Reply. When to respond, with all her might and main, She stretch’d her little throat; but stretch’d in vain; To such superior Strains of Music’s Chief 80 Unable to Aspire, or bear her Grief, Heartless˚ she sunk, and fell upon his Lyre; In its yet ringing sound, ft Tomb t’expire. In little Souls thus Emulation springs; And they too wou’d be Conquerers, and Kings.

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note . . . [grace note

shrill

dejected

Notes 1 I am grateful to Victoria Moul for comments and suggestions on this chapter, and to Katherine Heavey for practical help in acquiring copies of manuscript material appearing in Appendix 2. This chapter has as a background Susanna Braund’s late-career foray into neo-Latin verse in the form of Maffeo Vegio’s supplement to Vergil’s Aeneid, resulting in Braund (2018), a piece of work with which I was pleased to be able to provide some assistance. 2 So well known a work also prompted more incidental responses which will not be dealt with here: it influenced English poems by, for example, Abraham Cowley, Edward Benlowes, and perhaps Milton (L’Allegro). 3 The first live broadcast transmitted by the British Broadcasting Corporation, on the evening of 19 May 1924, contained a performance by a then prominent cellist, Beatrice Harrison. She had noticed that a nightingale would sing in tune when she played in her garden, and persuaded Lord Reith to have his engineers bring their equipment. It worked: both cello and birdsong were broadcast and recorded. 4 This paragraph draws on the short discussion of Strada’s poem in Hollander (1961), and I briefly return to his pages later. 5 Thomas Warton the Elder; see his version in Appendix 2, item 3. The book will be the Epigrammatum Delectus ex omnibus tum veteribus, tum recentioribus Poetis accuratè decerptus, 1683 and much reprinted. It was specified for use at Eton from the second edition of 1686 onwards. 6 For details, see Appendix 1.

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7 For an anonymous version first printed from a British Library manuscript in 1872 (‘Nowe had greate Sol ye middle orbe forsooke’), see Crashaw (1872, I, 203–4). 8 The most recent editor of Ford’s play notes, as well as the ‘markedly different’ formats, several significant changes in content from Strada to Ford: Ford (1985, 4–5). 9 Letter to Henry Cromwell, 11 November 1710; Pope (1956, I, 103). 10 For all the superior resources of our time, I have not traced the version by ‘Mr Hinton’, but it is possible that, like those in Appendix 2, it did not receive the printer’s attentions. 11 ‘One of the two first’: see Appendix 2, item 1, for a contemporaneous version described as being composed by a friend of Strode’s. 12 The Fifth Pastoral, 61; Philips is quoted by line number from Philips (1937, 66–70). 13 This interpretation was offered long ago in Jones (1925, 48). 14 division: ‘A rapid melodic passage . . . , a florid phrase or piece of melody . . . esp. as a variation on a . . . theme’ (OED, 7a). 15 he: ms ‘she.’ 16 tunes: ms ‘times’; speculative emendation. 17 See note 14. 18 pinkingly: This word is very clear in the ms, but is not recorded by OED or found within EEBO. 19 Now . . . less: ‘Now she performs with divisions, and still smaller divisions’; a division (see note 14) was originally thought of as the dividing of the long notes in a sequence into several short ones. 20 Air: A repeated rhyme word would usually suggest mistranscription, but no alternative seems to fit here. 21 Schiocature (= ‘Schiocatura’): ‘where the Discords between the Concords are Touch’d; but soon die off, leaving the Concords to sound by themselves’ (translator’s note).

Works cited Anon. 1671. Strada’s Musical Duel. London. Braund, S. 2018. ‘Thomas Twyne’s Appropriation of Thomas Phaer’s Æneidos: “Worke unperfyt” Perfected?’ Translation & Literature, 27: 287–305. Crashaw, R. 1872. The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw, edited by Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols. Blackburn. Flavell, J. 1669. Husbandry Spiritualized, or, the Heavenly Use of Earthly Things. London. Ford, J. 1629. The Lover’s Melancholy, second edition. London. ———. 1985. The Lover’s Melancholy, ed. R. F. Hill. Manchester. Healy, T. F. 1986. Richard Crashaw. Leiden. Hollander, J. 1961. The Untuning of the Sky: Idea of Music in English Poetry, 1500– 1700. Princeton, NJ. Jones, R. F. 1925. ‘Eclogue Types in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century.’ JEGP, 24: 33–60. Philips, A. 1937. The Poems of Ambrose Philips, ed. Mary G. Segar. Oxford. Pope, A. 1956. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. Oxford.

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Prior, M., et al. 1725. A New Collection of Poems on Several Occasions: By Mr Prior, and Others. London. Strode, W. 1907. The Poetical Works of William Strode (1600–1645), ed. Bertram Dobell. London. Tytler, A. F. 1797. Essay on the Principles of Translation, second edition. London. Vilvain, R. 1654. Enchiridium Epigrammatum Latino-Anglicum. London.

14 Gibbon and Juvenal Josiah Osgood

In the middle of January of 1756, young Edward Gibbon made a resolution ‘to read in sequence all the Latin classics,’ beginning with the historians and then continuing with poets, orators, and philosophers in turn.1 Over the subsequent years, he stuck to the plan with varying success, distracted now by other intellectual pursuits, now by personal affairs. To make better use of his time, in 1761 he started keeping a journal that noted down, among the other events of his life, his daily reading.2 But the journaling, too, proved intermittent. Feeling that his discipline was slipping, in August of 1763, living for a second time in Lausanne, Gibbon began again to keep a daily record, in French. ‘Il faut se remettre au travail,’ he admonished himself in the first entry of August 17th. The next day he could record that he had read all of Juvenal’s Third Satire. Over the next month or so, Gibbon proceeded to read and reread the remaining poems in Juvenal’s corpus and record his observations on them. (Presumably he read the First and Second Satire before he began the new journal.)3 Through his often-detailed entries, we gain a good sense of Gibbon’s initial encounter with most of Juvenal’s poetry. Concerned especially with the aesthetics and the moral stance of the Satires, Gibbon offers a series of judgments still interesting today. There is the added interest, too, of seeing what insights Gibbon thought Juvenal might offer the historian of Rome. Gibbon only embarked on the preliminary research for Decline and Fall several years after he read Juvenal, but by 1763 he had written some antiquarian essays and was at work on his Recueil géographique of ancient Italy, and he also had been contemplating possible subjects for historical treatment. In the rest of this chapter, I first explore Gibbon’s initial responses to Juvenal in his journal. While Gibbon had much to criticize, he predicted that the satirist would become one of his favorite authors, and Gibbon cites or quotes Juvenal around thirty times in Decline and Fall. In the second part of this chapter, I show how Gibbon draws on Juvenal to illustrate the society and culture of the Roman Empire. References are particularly prominent in Gibbon’s Chapter 2, which gives a sketch of the culture of the Antonine Empire, and Chapter 31, which recounts events surrounding the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410. The satiric flavor of Gibbon’s narrative, I will

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suggest, owes a debt to Juvenal and certainly puts him in a tradition with Juvenal. While, in keeping with Gibbon’s conception of history, his tone is statelier than Juvenal’s, the historian believes that the vivid descriptions of satire can enliven historical prose.4

Gibbon thinks Juvenal overdoes it Gibbon’s reaction to Juvenal’s Third Satire, set down in the journal entry for August 18th, proves typical of his response to the poet overall. He admires the opening of the poem, and the way its setting suits its themes: ‘the good Umbricius’ stops in the woods of Egeria, in a sacred monument of the early Romans that is now inhabited by ‘wretched Jews,’ and then complains about the foreign ways that have inundated Rome (Bonnard 1945, 3–4).5 Gibbon relishes the contrast between ‘the humble but clumsy character’ of Umbricius’ fellow citizens and the ‘art and suppleness of those foreigners who made themselves slaves to become masters.’ The evocation of place, the ironic gulf between past and present, and the paradox of the master slave all appeal to Gibbon, and we shall see these qualities in Decline and Fall. But Gibbon has a criticism to make as well: ‘I would have wished that after such beautiful pictures, Juvenal had not dwelt so long on the little inconveniences and disorders common to all great cities and rather unworthy of the serious indignation which he expresses against them’ (Bonnard 1945, 4). Gibbon, in other words, is troubled by a lack of proportion in Juvenal. More recent critics have shared something of Gibbon’s perception here, but they note that it is, of course, the character Umbricius making the complaints, and the long, excessive performance raises questions about his credibility: along with such jarring scenes as Greeks from Sicyon to Alabanda taking over the houses of the great Romans, this tension enlivens the poem.6 As he kept reading beyond the Third Satire, Gibbon continued to admire what he calls Juvenal’s ‘serious indignation’ and ‘energy of expression’ while also regretting its excesses (Bonnard 1945, 8). He finds force, richness, and variety in the poetry, and especially notes Juvenal’s skill in creating vivid pictures to illustrate his themes. It can be no surprise that the future historian would find the account of Sejanus in the Tenth Satire ‘perfect’: ‘never was an elevation more extraordinary, never a fall more striking. The levity of the people who hurry to smash statues they had just worshipped makes a complete picture’ (Bonnard 1945, 19). Gibbon likes Juvenal’s descriptions when they are swiftly and sharply drawn. He holds up for praise the picture of the upright veterans of Rome’s earliest wars, content to receive a few acres in return for many wounds: saturabat glebula talis patrem ipsum turbamque casae, qua feta iacebat uxor et infantes ludebant quattuor, unus uernula, tres domini; sed magnis fratribus horum

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Josiah Osgood a scrobe uel sulco redeuntibus altera cena amplior et grandes fumabant pultibus ollae. (Juv. 14.166–71) A clod of earth like that was ample for the father himself and the crowd in his cottage, where his wife lay pregnant and four children were playing, one a home slave and three of them masters. But when their big brothers got back from the ditch or the furrow, a second, larger dinner was waiting for them and huge pots steaming with porridge.7

Here is Gibbon’s appreciation: in five lines, by selecting the most characteristic circumstances, the poet sets before your eyes the simplicity of the ancient Romans, their love of work, their domestic happiness, the fertility of their women, their simple diet, and their aversion to a large number of foreign slaves. (Bonnard 1945, 33) In Satire 12, he relishes the description Juvenal offers of the legacy-hunters: ‘The picture which he draws of them is lively and far superior to his description of the tempest, which is tedious, languid, and confused, the work of a declaimer, and sometimes a schoolboy’ (Bonnard 1945, 23). Gibbon misses the fun the poet is having in his account of the poetica . . . tempestas (Juv. 12.23–4), but the judgment again points to what he sees as an overall strength of the poet – while also underscoring Gibbon’s own tastes. Beyond Juvenal’s descriptions, Gibbon praises further aspects of the poetry. He recognizes Juvenal’s talent for creating bold images, for instance the likening of the father who has inculcated avarice in his son and goes from being spectator of the son’s crimes to their victim to the lion tamer whose training makes his beast so ferocious that he ends up tearing the tamer apart: ‘with a loud roar the lion whom you’ve reared will destroy his trembling teacher in his cage’ (trepidumque magistrum | in cauea magno fremitu leo tollet alumnus, Juv. 14.246–7; Bonnard 1945, 33). Perhaps not coincidentally, Gibbon also relishes the passage in the Seventh Satire in which the selfish patron is willing to spend money on his mistress and a tamed lion but not a poet: ‘I suppose a beast costs less and a poet’s guts hold more’ (constat leuiori belua sumptu | nimirum et capiunt plus intestina poetae, Juv. 7.77–8). Gibbon finds the unexpected comparison here of poet and beast the definition of wit (Bonnard 1945, 13). Gibbon often savors the satirist’s humor. While he thinks Juvenal overindulges his talent for declamation in the Fifteenth Satire, he loves ‘the witty description of the worship which the Egyptians paid to animals and even plants’ that starts the poem, with one part of ‘crazy Egypt’ (demens . . . Aegyptos) venerating a crocodile, another quaking at the ibis, entire towns worshipping cats or a

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river fish (Bonnard 1945, 37). Gibbon’s amusement is not surprising: he was to send up such ‘superstitions’ as veneration of the saints and their relics in Decline and Fall: Their [the Christians’] devout kisses were imprinted on the walls and pavement of the sacred edifice; and their fervent prayers were directed, whatever might be the language of their church, to the bones, the blood, or the ashes of the saint. (II, 96)8 Or: ‘she [the empress Eudocia] enjoyed the conscious satisfaction of returning to Constantinople with the chains of St. Peter, the right arm of St. Stephen, and an undoubted picture of the Virgin, painted by St. Luke’ (II, 267). Gibbon fnds Satire 9 as a whole amusing, too, for the gap it creates between Naevolus’ outrage and the seediness of his own existence as ‘un miserable pathique’ – a gap recognized by the reader but not Naevolus himself (Bonnard 1945, 17–18). Finally, in his last journal entry on Juvenal, Gibbon remarks that ‘Juvenal’s versifcation appears to me to be superior to that of most Latin poets. . . . His poetry is fowing, harmonious, and animated’ (Bonnard 1945, 40). So, although he professes to fnd Juvenal declamatory, overall Gibbon appreciates the fow of his verses. While Gibbon devotes much of his praise to the texture of Juvenal’s poetry, he also commends the satirist for a commitment to liberty and a hatred of a tyranny. Gibbon makes this point most fully in his verdict on Satire 8: Juvenal speaks, from one end of it to the other, the language of an ancient Roman. I perceive throughout, not only the voice of a true censor . . . but also a republican, whose soul submits with difficulty to the new constitution, the sworn enemy of tyranny, and the friend of a mild and equitable monarchy, more through necessity than inclination. This love of liberty, this loftiness of mind distinguishes Juvenal from all his fellow poets who lived after the establishment of the Empire: Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Martial, Statius, Valerius Flaccus. All sang the ruin of their country, and the triumph of their oppressors. (Bonnard [1945, 16]) This judgment almost seems to turn Juvenal into Tacitus, but there is something to it: the narrator of Juvenal’s poems does come across as deeply alienated from the political establishment.9 The judgment reveals even more about Gibbon. For him, no attack on tyranny could be too ferce. Thus, while Gibbon fnds complaints about city life in Satire 3 overdrawn, he thinks the subject of Satire 4, Domitian’s council – or, more truly, Domitian’s tyranny – perfectly suited to Juvenal’s talents; here the satirist’s ‘seriousness of indignation’ was exactly right (Bonnard [1945, 8]). In Gibbon’s Juvenal, we see the historian to come: ‘He never misses an opportunity of arraigning

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the folly and tyranny of those masters of the world and their deputies’ (Bonnard [1945, 16–17]). But when not skewering emperors or their ministers, Juvenal troubles Gibbon with his excess. The satirist’s fondness for declamation is not just a stylistic flaw; it reveals a deeper malignity and misanthropy. In his discussion of Satire 6, Gibbon resumes points he made on Satire 3: ‘He perpetually confounds invective with satire. All women are guilty, and guilty of the most hideous crimes. You find a Clytemnestra in every street’ (Bonnard [1945, 12]). More or less quoting an actual line from the satire (Clytaemestram nullus non uicus habebit, 656), Gibbon well captures the tone of the speaker of this poem, even if we choose to see some of the humor in the very excess – just as Gibbon sees humor in the irascibility of Naevolus. Gibbon finds fault with Juvenal in part because so jaundiced a view seems untrue even to Juvenal’s Rome: it might have been the most profligate age ever, but there were ‘vestiges of the ancient virtues,’ as he believes for example Pliny’s letters show (Bonnard [1945, 12]). Figures who resist the decline all around them are notable in Decline and Fall and, while creating brilliant chiaroscuro effects, also speak to a human vitality Gibbon thinks it is hard totally to suppress; Gibbon regrets their absence in Juvenal.10 Gibbon also finds fault because he believes that Juvenal’s satire could be more effective if it were not so unremitting. Discussing Satire 15, he observes: One should never equate the fixed and permanent character of a nation with those moments of madness and fury. Juvenal once again is a little too much of a declaimer. He thinks he is aggravating the crime of the Egyptians; he in fact diminishes them through his arguments. (Bonnard [1945, 36]) Without the occasional heroic fgure to light up the blighted scene, if only the satirist himself, satire ceases to be edifying. In the summer of 1763, then, Gibbon was particularly interested in the aesthetics of Juvenal’s satire and the relation between aesthetics and morality. In thinking about Satire 6, he ponders whether Juvenal’s graphic exposés might stem from ‘the secret pleasure’ he takes in them (Bonnard [1945, 12]). In assessing Satire 10, he posits in Juvenal ‘a refined and accurate philosophy, built on the most solid principles of morality,’ but wishes the satirist had distinguished between desires that are bound to make us miserable and those that only might make us unhappy: absolute power is the first sort, old age the second (Bonnard [1945, 18–19]). In 1763, a reading of Juvenal did also prompt some historical reflections on Gibbon’s part. On August 26th, he went to the library ‘to consult a treatise by M. de Bochat on the worship of the Egyptian Divinities at Rome – so often mentioned by Juvenal’ (Bonnard [1945, 10]). No doubt his curiosity was prompted by his first reading on August 25th of Satire 6 in particular, with its vivid account of the Roman matron’s mad devotion to Isis that

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leads her to cross the whole Field of Mars on bloody knee (522–41). Gibbon returns to the subject in his remarks on Satire 15, creating his own satiric picture of the ‘crowded assemblies, in which distinctions of age, rank, and sex, were concealed under the veil of mystery and night, open[ing] a door to the most unbridled debauchery’ (Bonnard [1945, 36]).11 Elsewhere, Gibbon considers Juvenal as evidence for the diffident view Romans took of their gods and any possible existence beyond death and also for the manners of the Romans at table in Juvenal’s day (much grosser than those of even the most insolent contemporary banker!); he considers, too, Satire 16 – which he judges probably not authentic Juvenal – as evidence for the privileges of Roman soldiers (Bonnard [1945, 8, 20, 22, 37–8]).12 Superstition, luxury, and the power of the army: the preoccupations of the early chapters of Decline and Fall are already here. Finally, and again of some importance for his later work, Gibbon also tries to situate Juvenal in time. Rejecting dubious traditions handed down from antiquity, he considers what firm indicators there are in Juvenal’s text as well as a fact even more decisive for him, ‘Juvenal’s liberty of speech.’ ‘He lived under a good prince,’ Gibbon concludes, ‘a Nerva or a Trajan, at a happy period when one was allowed to state what one thought’ (Bonnard [1945, 17]). Any tyrant would recognize himself even in an account of one of their predecessors, claims Gibbon: a compliment to Juvenal and an indication of Gibbon’s own view of the stakes of history.

The satirical historian Given Gibbon’s systematic reading of Juvenal in 1763, it is not surprising that the historian made use of him as he wrote Decline and Fall. At a number of moments, Juvenal is cited, at least ostensibly, as a source. In Chapter 2, ‘On the Union and Internal Prosperity of the Roman Empire, in the Age of the Antonines,’ Gibbon cites, in this order, Satire 15 for ‘obscure traces of an intolerant spirit . . . in the conduct of the Egyptians’ (I, 57); Satire 13 on a decline in the belief that perjury is punished by the gods (I, 59); Satire 8 on the regular despoiling of temples by provincial governors (I, 59); Satires 3 and 15 on the ‘slothful effeminacy’ of the Syrians and the ‘sullen ferociousness’ of the Egyptians (I, 66). Juvenal is a source, but these citations together pit the generally positive portrayal of the Antonine empire with some blemishes.13 In later chapters, Gibbon again cites Juvenal as a source, but the references cannot help but add a satiric tinge. Consider this passage, describing the dayto-day life of emperor Alexander Severus: His table was served with the most frugal simplicity; and whenever he was at liberty to consult his own inclination, the company consisted of a few select friends, men of learning and virtue, amongst whom Ulpian was constantly invited. Their conversation was familiar and instructive; and the pauses were occasionally enlivened by the recital of some

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Immediately following this quotation comes a footnote, ‘See the 13th Satire of Juvenal.’ This is surely a mistake for the ‘11th Satire,’ but the signifcant point here is how the reference to Juvenal functions in part as a source to illustrate – by contrast – Alexander Severus’ habits, but also in part to evoke for the reader yet more generic scenes of decadence: ‘dancers, comedians, and gladiators’!14 Or consider the account of the power of the eunuchs that opens Chapter 19. Gibbon begins with a wonderful paradox: The divided provinces of the empire were again united by the victory of Constantius; but as that feeble prince was destitute of personal merit, either in peace or war; as he feared his generals, and distrusted his ministers; the triumph of his arms served only to establish the reign of the eunuchs over the Roman world. (I, 684) Gibbon proceeds to sketch out the rise to power of the eunuchs, ‘those unhappy beings,’ which coincided exactly with the establishment of monarchy at Rome. A footnote cites the example of Posides, ‘a freedman and eunuch of Claudius, in whose favour the emperor prostituted some of the most honourable rewards of military valour’ (I, 684). Gibbon then adds that Posides ‘employed a great part of his wealth in building’ and quotes in Latin a line from Juvenal 14: ‘Ut Spado vincebat Capitolia nostra Posides.’ Gibbon is, once again, attempting to use Juvenal as a source to add depth to his history; but the quotation also intensifes the satirical description of the triumph of the eunuchs, ‘skilled in the arts of fattery and intrigue’ (I, 685). At a couple of moments in Decline and Fall, Gibbon not only cites or quotes Juvenal but explicitly relies on him for descriptions he acknowledges for their vividness. Recounting how Commodus fought as the type of gladiator known as secutor, ‘armed with an helmet, sword, and buckler,’ Gibbon describes the combat of the secutor against the retiarius as ‘one of the most lively scenes in the bloody sports of the amphitheatre’ and then, after borrowing details from Juvenal, adds in a note: ‘Juvenal, in the eighth satire, gives a picturesque description of this combat’ (I, 119). Similarly, an ecphrasis of the harbor of Ostia cites among other sources ‘the lively description of Juvenal, Satir. Xii. 75, &c.’ (II, 196). Two descriptive passages where Juvenal is cited and that have a particularly Juvenalian coloring occur in the long account Gibbon offers of the city of Rome in Chapter 31. The first describes the Circus: The impatient crowd rushed at the dawn of day to secure their places, and there were many who passed a sleepless and anxious night in the

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adjacent porticos. From the morning to the evening, careless of the sun, or the rain, the spectators, who sometimes amounted to the number of four hundred thousand, remained in eager attention; their eyes fixed on the horses and charioteers, their minds agitated with hope and fear, for the success of the colours which they espoused; and the happiness of Rome appeared to hang on the event of a race. (II, 185) Gibbon in a note cites the lively passage in Juvenal 11 (lines 193–204) that includes such humorous exaggerations as ‘today the whole of Rome is inside the Circus’ (totam hodie Romam Circus capit, 197). If the Greens lose the race, the satirist says, the astonishment and grief would be ‘as when the consuls were defeated in the dust of Cannae’ (ueluti Cannarum in puluere uictis | consulibus, 200–1). In the second passage of Book 31, Gibbon describes the tall and rickety apartment houses of Rome and, in addition to quoting lines from Satire 3 (199–202) in a note, brings Juvenal into the main text: ‘Juvenal laments, as it should seem from his own experience, the hardships of the poorer citizens, to whom he addresses the salutary advice of emigrating, without delay, from the smoke of Rome’ (II, 187). What a range of housing there was, ‘from the marble palace of the Anicii, with a numerous establishment of freedmen and slaves, to the lofty and narrow lodging-house, where the poet Codrus, and his wife, were permitted to hire a wretched garret immediately under the tiles’ (II, 188)! Gibbon’s earlier reservations about the excessive indignity of this satire are gone, and he has taken details from it and transmuted them into history.15 We shall turn in a moment to the satiric dimensions of Chapter 31 as a whole, but first should say a few more words on Gibbon’s sense of the liveliness of satire. Already in 1763 Gibbon admired Juvenal’s scenes such as the fall of Sejanus, and we see some of Juvenal’s qualities in the passages from Decline and Fall just mentioned – the use of vigorous action verbs for instance (‘the impatient crowd rushed’) and sharp scene-drawing (‘a sleepless and anxious night in the adjacent porticoes’ or ‘the marble palace of the Anicii’).16 Without referring to Juvenal specifically, Gibbon at one point in Decline and Fall mentions the prevalence of legacy-hunting in Rome and remarks: ‘the whole city, according to the lively descriptions of satire, was divided between two parties, the hunters and their game’ (I, 184). Satire is lively because it is picturesque and also, he is hinting, because it stretches the truth for effect: ‘the whole city . . . was divided.’17 Satire is a caricature, exaggerating real features of a person or situation so they can be recognized immediately. The whole palace of the Anicii is not literally marble, but that is its key feature.18 While Gibbon rejects Juvenal’s coarser language and more extreme statements – there is not a Clytemnestra on every street in Gibbon’s Rome – he respects Juvenal’s vivid descriptions.19 He capably uses such language himself even when moving beyond the decadence of imperial Rome, as in this picture of the early monks: ‘They sunk under the painful weight of crosses and chains; and their emaciated limbs were confined by

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collars, bracelets, gauntlets, and graves, of massy, and rigid, iron’ (II, 426). The caricature is somehow more lifelike than a more prosaic statement of reality would be. In choosing to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon was committing himself to produce satire. He was not going to write a tragedy; rather he would take ample opportunity to arraign, as Juvenal did, ‘the folly and tyranny of those masters of the world and their deputies.’ Gibbon’s own notorious definition of history in Decline and Fall shows the kinship: ‘history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’ (I, 102). In Book 1, the narrative of emperors from Commodus onwards allows him to recapitulate satiric accounts he found in Cassius Dio, Herodian, and the Historia Augusta; he can fill later books with scenes of court intrigue, in which scheming ministers secretly determine the fate of the empire as feeble princes look on helplessly; he also can write satirically of the Christians and especially the historians who treated them.20 The whole question of Gibbon’s role as a satirist and of satirical historiography more generally, from antiquity onwards, deserves far more study.21 Here we can look a little more at Chapter 31 of Decline and Fall and its Juvenalian references. In Chapter 31, Gibbon reaches what one might think should be a moment of high pathos in his narrative, the sack of Rome by Alaric in AD 410.22 Yet while he does evince some sympathy for the city’s suffering, he emphasizes far more unflattering contrasts between the vigor and swiftness of the Gothic invader, on the one hand, and the fecklessness of the court at Ravenna and the inhabitants of Rome, on the other. While the ministers of Ravenna expected, in sullen silence, that the Barbarians should evacuate the confines of Italy, Alaric, with bold and rapid marches, passed the Alps and the Po; hastily pillaged the cities of Aquileia, Altinum, Concordia, and Cremona, which yielded to his arms, and so on (II, 167). Without encountering any opposition, ‘he advanced as far as the edge of the morass which protected the impregnable residence of the emperor of the West.’ As if these ironies were not enough, Gibbon goes on to imagine Alaric – now in rich Umbria – encamped on the banks of the Clitumnus where he ‘might wantonly slaughter and devour the milk-white oxen, which had been so long reserved for the use of Roman triumphs’ (II, 168). This sets up the contrast Gibbon then draws between Alaric and Hannibal, who had to retreat from Rome – a comparison that neatly marks Rome’s decline, like the Circus fans’ grief recalling the gloom after Cannae in Juvenal. The comparison, in turn, neatly leads to an account of the boastful genealogical claims made by the senators of early ffth-century Rome who traced their lineage back to ‘the Scipios, Aemilius Paulus, and the Gracchi’ (II, 169). This is to go even a step beyond Juvenal in his eighth satire (on nobility): not only is the gap between the late antique senators and their ‘ancestors’ almost obscene, the genealogies themselves are bogus.

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With utter originality, Gibbon postpones the account of Alaric’s first siege of Rome still further in order first to ‘produce an authentic state of Rome and its inhabitants’ – a long description of the senate and the ordinary people that ‘translates’ two extended passages from Ammianus Marcellinus, a historian who ‘has mixed with the narrative of public events, a lively representation of the scenes with which he was familiarly conversant’ (II, 174–5). The creativity of Gibbon’s ‘translation,’ which Gibbon himself called ‘not literal indeed, but faithful and exact,’ has been well studied (II, 175).23 Worth noting here is that Gibbon recognizes that Ammianus was, at least in part, writing satire, for as Gibbon writes in note 48: ‘This satire is probably exaggerated’ (II, 180). Indeed, Ammianus himself already has had a good joke by claiming (28.4.14) that the only books the corrupt senators of his day read were the satires of Juvenal and the lurid imperial biographies of Marius Maximus – in which, evidently, they fail to recognize themselves and the figures of their time, as Ammianus did. Also worth noting here is that after the ‘translation’ of Ammianus comes Gibbon’s own account of the people of Rome with the scenes of the thronged Circus and the ‘lofty and narrow lodging-house’ that evoke Juvenalian decadence (II, 188). Juvenal is also cited for the ‘indelicate custom’ of the sportula, and lines from the Third Satire on the torrent of foreigners engulfing Rome are quoted (II, 179, 182). While in Chapter 2 Juvenal’s references darken a seemingly more positive picture, here they enrich the satire, or what one might even call his caricature of decline.24 But to say that Gibbon is using Juvenal uncritically is largely to miss the point. Gibbon is striving for an artistic effect – to make the fall of Rome not pitiful but bathetic. This is how hundreds of years of decline ends; this is what it looks like, or should look like. While Gibbon treats Rome to a lengthy set-piece description, he also punctuates Chapter 31 with scathing accounts of the court at Ravenna, ‘a scene of weakness and distraction, of corruption and anarchy’ (II, 195). With Honorius an utterly useless emperor, the most unsuitable ministers make the most unsuitable decisions imaginable. A characteristic figure is Olympius, a religious fanatic who refused to listen to the desperate envoys sent by the senate in Rome and sent 6000 legionaries to their death, ‘a sacrifice to ministerial folly’ (II, 193). Before long, ‘his power was undermined by the secret intrigues of the palace.’ And yet: The exile, or escape, of the guilty Olympius reserved him for more vicissitudes of fortune; he experienced the adventures of an obscure and wandering life; he again rose to power; he fell a second time into disgrace; his ears were cut off; he expired under the lash; and his ignominious death afforded a grateful spectacle to the friends of Stilicho. (II, 194) Gibbon does not see everyone as subject to ‘the vicissitudes of fortune’ to the same degree: the name of Stilicho is a reminder that some of the fgures in his history have vision and strength. The historian is not so nihilistic a

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satirist as the Juvenal of later books, but he has the Juvenalian taste for greatness brought visibly low. Gibbon makes this clear in a footnote to a brief mention of Pompey’s great conquests: ‘Few men have more exquisitely tasted of glory and disgrace; nor could Juvenal (Satir. X.) produce a more striking example of the vicissitudes of fortune, and the vanity of human wishes’ (II, 686). As Pompey is only referred to in a few of lines in the poem (283–6), Gibbon’s comment testifies to how well he knew the satirist. It was this familiarity that allowed the historian to make use of Juvenal through Decline and Fall, as we have seen. And he did so because Juvenal’s ‘lively scenes’ of Rome could enliven his own history with tottering buildings, dancers in the dining room, cheering crowds at the Circus, and the like. Yet Gibbon seems to owe an even deeper debt to Juvenal. More than any classical author, Juvenal creates tangible juxtapositions of the one-time greatness of Rome and its ruin, and these juxtapositions fill Decline and Fall too. In Juvenal, the ancient grove of Egeria is overrun by Jewish beggars; the Temple of Isis towers over the ancient Saepta; the Senator Lateranus hurtles past the ashes of his ancestors in a speeding chariot; another aristocrat forges will in the temples built by his grandfather; and the eunuch Posides tries to top the Capitoline. Gibbon clearly admired passages like these, and is endlessly inventive in creating his own – Alaric camped on the Clitumnus, or Gothic warriors vandalizing ‘the villas, and gardens, once inhabited by Lucullus and Cicero’ (II, 211), or ‘the narrow institution of six Vestals . . . eclipsed by the frequent monasteries, which were seated on the ruins of ancient temples, and in the midst of the Roman Forum’ (II, 414). The fall of Rome is the most truly striking example of the vicissitude of fortune, and Gibbon’s satirical, rather than tragic, conception of it puts him in a tradition with Juvenal and Juvenal’s heir Ammianus.

Epilogue It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.25 So Gibbon would write in his memoirs many years after completing his masterpiece, towards the end of his life. It is a highly wrought passage, with a season and time suggestive of decline, and a scene that evokes ruin.26 In reality, Gibbon could have seen nothing of the temple of Jupiter, the hill was adorned with Michelangelo’s dazzling piazza, and the friars would have sung Vespers in the Aracoeli church, not among ruins.27 There is a certain poignancy to the vivid account, brought out especially by the word ‘musing.’ But the scene is also satirical: the caricature friars are, simply, ‘barefooted.’ It is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that a reading of Juvenal helped

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Gibbon to craft this all-too-lively tableau, as it certainly helped him in writing Decline and Fall. The month or so in 1763 spent studying Juvenal, ‘with pleasure and with care,’ was time well spent for the satirical historian.28

Notes 1 Craddock (1982, 89–95); Gibbon’s resolution was written while he was in Lausanne and was in French; I quote from Craddock’s translation. I am pleased to offer this paper to Susanna Braund in friendship and gratitude for wise mentoring, robust scholarship, and a sparkling example of the ars vitae. For comments on an earlier draft, I am indebted to Tommaso Astarita, Ron Bleeker, Cathy Keane, Carole Sargent, and James Uden. I also thank Sarah McNamer and David Collins for help. 2 Bonnard (1945, vii–x); Craddock (1982, 155–6). For the journal entries through January 28, 1763, see the edition of Low (1929), and for the subsequent Lausanne journal of 1763 and 1764 see the edition of Bonnard (1945). 3 Cf. Craddock (1982, 174). In his later Memoirs, Gibbon delicately alludes to what he was up to at the time: ‘the habits of the militia and the example of my countrymen betrayed me into some riotous acts of intemperance’ (quoted from Bonnard [1969, 131]). 4 Parker (2018, 181) discusses Gibbon’s ‘stately’ style. 5 In this and subsequent entries, I cite the page number(s) from the edition of Bonnard (1945). My translations are based, often closely, on those in Sheffield (1837). 6 See for example the discussion of Braund (1996, 230–6) and Uden (2015, 104–16). 7 This and subsequent translations of Juvenal are from Braund (2004). 8 References to Decline and Fall are to the three-volume edition of Womersley (1994), with volume number and page given. 9 Keane (2012) discusses the connections between Juvenal and Tacitus. 10 Cf. Craddock (1989, 29): ‘Only those who attempt to preserve or restore the idea of Rome gain credit with Gibbon for delaying its fall.’ Gay (1974, 42) notices the chiaroscuro. 11 Cf. the scathing account in Decline and Fall of ‘[t]he Egyptian superstition, of all the most contemptible and abject’ (I, 60). 12 On August 22nd, Gibbon dined at the house of a banker, Jacques Grand, ‘un gros cochon, qui ne connoit d’autre plaisir que la bonne chère’ (Bonnard [1945, 7]). 13 In discussing the decline of literary genius at the very end of the chapter, Gibbon claims that despite ‘the most liberal rewards,’ little of merit was produced, and he quotes lines from Satire 7 (20–1), ‘a morose satire, which in every line betrays his own disappointment and envy’ (I, 83). 14 Juv. 11.162–82 focuses on racy Spanish dances (Gaditana). 15 It is worth noting here that in working his way through Nardini’s study of the topography of Rome in September and October of 1763 – just after his study of Juvenal – Gibbon took up in some detail the questions of the population and housing of Rome as well as the numbers the Circus could accommodate (Bonnard [1945, 47–50, 66–69]). While in a lengthy journal entry he reaches the conclusion that the number of spectators in the Circus given in many ancient sources was exaggerated and should only be about 150,000 – and Juvenal’s line totam hodie Romam Circus capit was hyperbole (Bonnard [1945, 69]) – in Decline and Fall he accepts 400,000. 16 Kenney (2012, 127–33) discusses Juvenal’s penchant for ‘vivid description’ and comments (127): ‘No ancient writer has conveyed a more immediate impression of contemporary Roman life.’ 17 On Gibbon’s use of the word ‘lively,’ see Garrison (1978, 168–9).

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18 One might compare Gibbon’s ‘marble palace’ with the marmorea . . . villa of Juv. 4.112. I suspect that Gibbon’s description of Gyarus as a ‘little island, or rather a rock, of the Aegean sea, destitute of every necessity of life, and inhabited only by a few wretched fishermen’ (I, 181) may unconsciously recall Juvenal 10.170: Gyarae . . . scopulis. 19 Gibbon takes his cue from Tacitus: ‘Tacitus fairly calls him [the emperor Vitellius] a hog; but it is by substituting to a coarse word a very fine image’ (I, 104). Gibbon, of course, does quote naughty bits of Latin in his footnotes, e.g., in his account of Elagabalus: ‘A dancer was made praefect of the city, a charioteer praefect of the watch, a barber praefect of the provisions. These three ministers, with many inferior officers, were all recommended, enormitate membrorum. Hist. August. p. 105’ (I, 168). 20 Clive (1977) collects examples of and appreciates Gibbon’s humor. On the satire of Gibbon’s footnotes in particular, in which he sharply characterizes the historians who preceded him, see Garrison (1978) and Palmeri (1990). On court intrigue as a favorite subject of eighteenth-century Anglophone writing and political discourse, see the interesting paper of Wood (1982). 21 A key figure is Ammianus Marcellinus, discussed more later, who arguably carried on the Roman tradition of verse satire but in historical prose: see Sogno (2012, 372–7). Keane (2012) explores Juvenal’s original contribution of ‘historical satire.’ See also White (1973, 230–64) for history as satire and Griffin (1994, 115–32) for an interesting discussion of the entangled relationship of the two genres. 22 Pocock (2015, 354–70) shows how Gibbon engages with, while also resisting, earlier treatments – going back to the sack’s immediate aftermath – that give the sack a cosmic significance beyond its practical impact. Edwards (2018, 68–70) discusses Gibbon’s treatment of Rome in Chapter 31. 23 Womersley (1988, 169–74). 24 Womersley (1988, 173) suggests that Gibbon’s simplified version of Ammianus worked ‘almost sensationally to accentuate’ the ‘magnitude’ of decay. 25 Quoted from Bonnard (1969, 136). 26 For this and the next sentence, see Edwards (2018, 62–3). Bonnard (1969, 304–5) discusses Gibbon’s different versions of the sentence in different drafts. See also Craddock (1982, 222), and Craddock (1984), showing how ruins and Rome are intimately connected in Gibbon’s mind. 27 I thank Father Benedikt Mertens for advice on this point. 28 In a journal entry for December 31st of 1763, Gibbon records reading Juvenal ‘a poet I still only knew by reputation’ twice, ‘with pleasure and with care’ (Bonnard [1945, 190]).

Works cited Bonnard, G. A. 1945. Le journal de Gibbon à Lausanne: 17 Août 1763–19 Avril 1764. Lausanne. ———. 1969. Edward Gibbon: Memoirs of My Life. New York. Braund, S. M. 1996. Juvenal: Satires Book I. Cambridge. ———. 2004. Juvenal and Persius (Loeb Classical Library). Cambridge, MA and London. Clive, J. 1977. ‘Gibbon’s Humor.’ In Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. G. W. Bowersock, J. Clive, and S. R. Graubard, 183–91. Cambridge, MA and London. Craddock, P. B. 1982. Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters. Baltimore and London.

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———. 1984. ‘Edward Gibbon and the “Ruins of the Capitol.”’ In Roman Images, ed. A. Patterson, 63–82. Baltimore and London. ———. 1989. Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772–1794. Baltimore and London. Edwards, C. 2018. ‘Gibbon and the City of Rome.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon, ed. K. O’Brien and B. Young, 62–77. Cambridge. Garrison, J. D. 1978. ‘Lively and Laborious: Characterization in Gibbon’s Metahistory.’ Modern Philology 76.2: 163–78. Gay, P. 1974. Style in History. New York. Griffin, D. H. 1994. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington, KY. Keane, C. 2012. ‘Historian and Satirist: Tacitus and Juvenal.’ In A Companion to Tacitus, ed. V. E. Pagán, 403–27. Malden MA and Oxford. Kenney, E. J. 2012. ‘Satiric Textures: Style, Meter, and Rhetoric.’ In A Companion to Persius and Juvenal, ed. S. Braund and J. Osgood, 113–36. Malden MA and Oxford. Low, D. M. 1929. Gibbon’s Journal to January 28th, 1763. London. Palmeri, F. 1990. ‘The Satiric Footnotes of Swift and Gibbon.’ The Eighteenth Century 31.3: 245–62. Parker, F. 2018. ‘Gibbon’s Style in The Decline and Fall.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon, ed. K. O’Brien and B. Young, 167–83. Cambridge. Pocock, J. G. A. 2015. Barbarism and Religion Volume VI: Religion: Triumph in the West. Cambridge. Sheffield, J. 1837. The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq. London. Sogno, C. 2012. ‘The Transformation of Satire in Late Antiquity.’ In A Companion to Persius and Juvenal, ed. S. Braund and J. Osgood, 363–85. Malden, MA and Oxford. Uden, J. 2015. The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome. New York. White, H. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, Baltimore and London. Womersley, D. 1988. The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Cambridge. ———. 1994. Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 3 vols. London. Wood, G. S. 1982. ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century.’ The William and Mary Quarterly 39.3: 401–41.

15 Into the maw Melville and the classical tradition Bill Gladhill

Show us an arc of the curve, and a good mathematician will fnd the whole fgure. We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect intelligence that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book, but time and like-minded men will fnd them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? Of Montaigne? Of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, ‘They are published and not published.’ ‘Bully for Emerson! – Good.’1 Melville’s marginal note in his edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, page 1312 I see that Mardi has been cut into by the London Atheneum, and also burnt by the common hangman in the Boston Post. However the London Examiner & Literary Gazette; & other papers this side of the water have done differently. These attacks are matters of course, and are essential to the building up of any permanent reputation – if such should ever prove to be mine. – ‘There’s nothing in it!’ cried the dunce, when he threw down the 47* problem of the 1st Book of Euclid – ‘There’s nothing in it! –’ – Thus with the posed critic. But Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve ‘Mardi.’ Letter to Lemuel Shaw written April 23rd, 18493

Any classicist who reads the works of Melville for the first time is struck by such a diverse and dizzying array of evidence of classical reception that any total interpretative synthesis is frustratingly impossible. Melville wrote a lot (books, poems, letters, journals, essays). His works are replete with classical references, both on their surface as well as deep in the structure of their narratives. And Melville read a lot. Only a fraction of the thousands of books is listed in Sealts and the subsequent addenda.4 And only a fraction of a fraction of these books is collected in the various archives and on-line databases.5 Melville was not a passive reader. His books show the scrawls, markings, underlines, references, and reminiscences of other authors, sometimes with opinionated responses (‘Bully to Emerson!’). On one occasion, Melville became a priest of Satan, as we read on the rear flyleaf of the seventh volume

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of his seven volume set of Shakespeare’s dramatic works: Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti – sed in nomine Diaboli [‘I do not baptize you in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit – but in the name of the Devil’], a phrase found in a letter to Nathanial Hawthorne (Horth [1993, 196]) and in Moby-Dick (spoken by Ahab in Chapter 113, ‘The Forge,’ an episode wholly in dialogue with divine armor-making episodes in classical literature).6 Melville the writer is a function of Melville the reader. And when the reader and writer merge, Melville becomes reception incarnate. This chapter evaluates a few instances of Melville’s engagement with classical texts and themes in Moby-Dick. My work here is very much a footnote to the studies by Gerard Sweeney (1975), Gail Coffler (1985), Eva Hänssgen (2003), and Tamara Treichel (2009), each of which has shown the foundational and complex influence authors such as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, and Virgil had on Melville’s extraordinarily allusive art. I simply hope to facilitate what Melville called ‘Time’ in his letter to Shaw quoted earlier and solve a few riddles (or perhaps fashion new ones) with the help of a few of Melville’s books. Let us begin with Melville the reader before we mess with the writer. Frustratingly for classicists, Melville’s Harper’s Classical Library, which was purchased in 1849 and included Dryden’s Aeneid and Metamorphoses7 in addition to Pope’s Iliad (not to mention translations of Xenophon, Caesar, Demosthenes, Sallust, Cicero, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Horace, Phaedrus, Thucydides, Livy, Herodotus, Persius, Juvenal, Pindar, and Anacreon) is lost.8 While Melville had an early introduction to classics both as a student at Albany Academy and through his family’s habit of nightly reading, he was hardly an ace Latin and Greek student.9 He had been exposed to Plato early on and had most likely been reading him voraciously while working on Mardi.10 He had also purchased Dacier’s translation of Plato’s Phaedon in 1849 (more on this later).11 All of this is to say that at the moment Melville was beginning work on Moby-Dick (published in 1852), he was closely and actively reading a vast store of classical literature, to say nothing of Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Dante (to gesture to only a few), in addition to the mass of works on whaling and cetology.12 Suffice it to say, while we lack his Harper’s Classical Library (though volumes of it appear for auction now and again),13 its influence on Moby-Dick is complex and ubiquitous. Even a decade later in 1858, when he purchased Chapman’s translation of the Iliad and Odyssey (Sealts 277), texts that show copious marks and underlines, the majority of the marginal annotations are comprised of direct quotes from Pope’s translations, likely made from memory.14 Melville’s Harper’s Classical Library and Dacier’s Phaedon are lost, so any investigation of Melville’s creative reading of classical works must be approached through the marginalia of books which can be consulted. While we cannot assess how he read the classics, there is enough evidence to suggest some of Melville’s general interpretive approaches to texts and their influence on his own narrative craft. In Thomas Warton’s The History of

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English Poetry (Sealts 547a), published in 1778 and 1781 (it is unclear when Melville may have consulted this, though he likely found it in the Brooklyn Public Library prior to his writing Moby-Dick),15 we see that in Chapter 34 (‘A digression on the origin of the Mysteries,’ 540–1) Melville marks William Browne’s 1620 poem The Charme, which depicts Circe’s casting a spell to drive sleep away from a snoozing Odysseus: Sonne of Erebus and Night! Where consorte none other fowle Where, upon the lymber gras, Where fowes Lethe, without coyle, Hye thee thither, gentle Sleepe! Hye away, and aime thy fighte, Than the batte and sullen owle: Poppy and mandragoras, Hange for ever droppes of dewe: Softly like a streame of oyle. With this Greeke no longer keepe. Thrice I charge thee by my wand, Doe I touch Ulysses’ eyes, Thrice with moly from my hand And with th’ iaspis. Then arise Sagest Greeke! This passage (from a much longer piece, The Inner Temple Masque) exhibits an admixture of Homer’s Odyssey, Hermes from Met. 1.668–721, and pastoral poetics. Melville notes Warton’s suggestion that The Charme is reminiscent of Milton’s (literarily complex) masque Comus (1634), if not its direct inspiration. We cannot know if Melville recognized the sophisticated interplay of classical and English texts here. We can only note that Melville literally traces a link from Browne’s reception of Circe and Odysseus from Homer to Milton’s response to The Charme as suggested by Warton. What strikes Melville is the literary development and relationship among these texts from Homer, to Browne, to Milton. We see this again at Chapter 49 (769–77), where Melville engages with Sackville’s Induction (1559), a poem that moves from a poetics of winter with then ‘Sorrow’ composing a wholly classical, ekphrastic underworld, including a detailed description of the Shield of War, which depicts ‘deadly Debate,’ Darius, Xerxes, Troy’s fall, the rape of Cassandra, and the death of Priam. The poem is a tour de force. Warton notes that Spenser in 1579 alluded to the Induction in one of his pastorals as well as in the Faerie Queene. Nearly the whole poem and Warton’s keen analysis (with Milton written in the margins on pages 770 and 775) strongly attracted Melville’s pencil. Again, what appears to have interested Melville the most was textual interplay and literary tradition, as Warton formulated it.16

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One lesson that can be gleaned from Melville’s reading of Warton’s Browne and Sacksville (both instrumental writers in the history of classical reception) is the process of transmission of Greek and Roman texts into English. In Chapter 36 (607), Melville marks Warton’s short biography on William Lily (1462–1522), who became the first teacher of Greek in England, after studying in Rhodes and Rome. Melville also marks Robert Stanyhurst’s 1583 translation of the first four books of the Aeneid in English hexameters (883) and Arthur Golding’s 1565 translation of the first four books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (890), and Christopher Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Elegies (‘the obscenities of the brothel,’ i.e., the Amores), later ordered burned in 1599 by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Again, Warton’s entire discussion of the process of translation of Horace has the trace scrawl of Melville’s pencil over three pages (900–2). Suffice it to say that Melville also notes the translators Timothy Kendal (905), Christopher Marlowe (906), and George Chapman (911–12, including many marks on his stylistic decisions of translation). One can glean from these markings (if one can glean anything from them) that Melville showed an interest in the transmission of Greek and Roman literature into English. To put it another way, he showed interest in the process of reception itself. There was a history to this process, and Melville understood that he was becoming part of this history. There was more at stake, though, in Melville’s reading of Warton. On page 613, Warton writes the following: The enlarged conceptions acquired by the study of the Greek and Roman writers seem to have restored to the human mind a free exertion of its native operations, and to have communicated a certain spirit of enterprise in examining every subject: at length to have released the intellectual capacity of mankind from the habitual subjection, and the servility to system, which had hitherto prevented it from advancing any new principle, or adopting any new opinion. Melville takes from Warton the idea that classics are a form of resistance against religious authority (Warton’s ‘habitual subjection’), an idea wholly realized in Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti – sed in nomine Diaboli. We even see him capture a similar thought in his marginalia to Paradise Lost 9.700–5 (‘not just, not God; not fear’d then, nor obey’d: Your fear itself of death removes the fear. | Why but to keep ye low and ignorant, | His worshippers’) where Melville writes, ‘This is one of the many profound atheistical hints of Milton. A greater than Lucretius, since he always teaches under a masque, and makes the Devil himself a Teacher & Messiah.’ When Warton discusses Shakespeare (879), Melville underlines the following: ‘Shakespeare was only a reader by accident.’ On the next page he underlines, ‘Shakespeare was above the bondage of the classics,’ and a little later on the same page he marks, ‘[T]hese were the classics of Shakespeare,’ meaning the translations of Homer, Musaeus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and

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Martial, all published prior to 1580. Like Warton’s Shakespeare, Melville was a ‘reader by accident,’ which is to say he read and incorporated into his work the books he happened to chance upon. That Moby-Dick gravitates more to themes of classical epic and drama than some of his other works is very much a function of his study of his Harper’s Classical Library during this period of artistic production. But like Shakespeare, too, Melville did not write under the bondage of the classics, but the classics themselves allowed him to resist ‘habitual subjection.’ There is no single reason why Melville marked or annotated a passage in his collection (let alone erased a marking, of which there are abundant examples). The passages he marks exhibit a broader sense of reception as an ancient author undergoes translation into English, and then is incorporated into works by other English poets. Even when Warton does not mention this sort of transmission (and Warton’s point is that the act of translation – the attempt to render the poetry and to situate it within a poetic meter – was a vital and foundational element of the development of English literature and poetry), one can see Melville attempting to situate Milton (among others) in a broader literary history. A similar argument can be posed when examining the marginalia of Melville’s two-volume copy of Bell’s edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.17 The vast majority of his annotations are gestures to authors like Poe (5.1.6), Milton (5.1.12, 5.5.12, 5.10.25; Two Cantos of Mutabilitie 6.21), and Keats (7.31 in Two Cantos of Mutabilitie). At line 349 of Spenser’s Ruines of Rome (‘to build with level my lofty stile’), Melville notes ‘build the lofty rhyme Milton,’ in reference to line 11 of ‘Lycidas.’18 Pharsalia is written in the margins to lines 429–30 of the RR (‘Though only cause, O civil Fury! Art, | which sowing in th’ Aemathian fields they spight’), clearly in reference to Lucan 1.1. When turning to Milton’s Paradise Lost, we see a similar annotative aim. Next to lines 1.14–16 (‘That with no middle flight intends to soar | above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues | Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’), Melville writes ‘Tasso’ and ‘Ariosto’ in reference to the openings of Jerusalem Delivered and Orlando Furioso, respectively.19 At 2.602–3 (‘Immovable, infix’d, and frozen round, | Periods of time; thence hurried back to fire’), Melville wrote ‘Dante,’ perhaps in reference to Inferno 3.81–2. ‘Dante’ again is written at 3.628–9 (‘on some great charge employ’d | He seem’d, or fix’d cogitation deep’), most likely a reference to Inferno 9.100–3. At 4.265, Melville writes ‘The account of the old travelers, on which Johnson founded Rasselas,’ a reference to Samuel Johnson’s novel The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, while at 4.351 (‘fill’d with pasture gazing sat’) Melville writes ‘“Full of the pasture” in As-You-LikeIt.’ Beside 5.310–11 (‘seems another morn | Ris’n on mid-noon’) Melville wrote Dante (perhaps a reference to Purgatory 12.81–3). In reference to 6.105–10, Melville wrote ‘the deadly space between Campbell,’ gesturing to Thomas Campbell’s The Battle of the Baltic. Then at 7.4 (‘above the flight of Pegasean wing’) he wrote ‘Tasso’s invocation.’ ‘Dante’ is written beside 10.511–15, most likely in reference to Inferno 25, which describes Satan’s

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metamorphosis into a ‘monstrous serpent.’ At 10.523–30, where Milton describes the various serpents that follow Satan, Melville wrote ‘Lucan,’ in clear reference to Pharsalia 9.696. And at 10.890–1 (‘the novelty on earth, this fair defect | Of nature’), Melville wrote ‘So Sir Thomas Browne – also Byron somewhere’ in reference to Browne’s Religio Medici and Lord Byron’s Don Juan. At 11.767–78 (‘let no man seek | Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall | Him or his children’), Melville quotes from Alexander Pope’s translation of Aeneid 6.1200–1 (‘Seek not to know the ghost replyed in tears the sorrows of thy sons in future years Virgil’). Melville does offer occasional interpretation of Milton’s meaning in the margins in the final book of Paradise Lost, but by and large, when examining his marginalia for Paradise Lost (in addition to the marginalia surrounding Milton’s other works), Melville exhibits a keen interest primarily in authorial allusion and reception.20 But there is more at stake than simply allusion or poetic interdependence as we see at Paradise Regained 4.346–62,21 where Melville writes in the margins: This comes rather unhandsomely from Milton, disparaging the Greeks thus in complement to the Jews; – especially as he himself was so Greek in spirit, & so much indebted to the Greek genius. Milton got nothing from the Jews but a subject; but from the Greeks he got style – sublimity – inspiration – melody. While we can only guess at Melville’s reading of his Harper’s Classical Library, it could be expected that his margins would have shown evidence of allusion and intertextuality, as is the case in his copies of Spenser and Milton. In addition, it is likely that he would have read these classical texts through the lens of the history of English literature (as Warton did). For Melville, he was not reading Homer and Virgil; he was reading Pope’s Homer and Dryden’s Virgil. While the lack of clearer textual evidence of Melville’s reading of classical literature is frustrating, this only results in the loss of evidence that might be used to filter the constant stream of references to the classical tradition found in his work. Even a summary glance through Gail Coffler’s Melville’s Classical Allusions: A Comprehensive Index and Glossary shows the ubiquitous engagement with classical literature, art, and history.22 Nearly 40 percent of the pages of Moby-Dick have at least one classical reference (often with multiple references on a single page). These surface-level gestures to antiquity are also matched by a deeper incorporation of classical texts and themes.23 It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that Moby-Dick is a katabasis, and that Ahab and other characters move in and out of classical referents, such as Prometheus, Narcissus, and Oedipus.24 The classical tradition moved through Melville the reader and wholly shaped the narratives of Melville the writer. His work shows signs of deep and careful structuring and allusion to the classical tradition. Sometimes this structuring is emphatic, while at other

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times it is nebulously allusive, as we will see later in my Virgilian reading of ‘Call me Ishmael.’ For example, in Chapter 1, ‘Loomings,’ Ishmael’s description of the crowd along the harbor25 is reminiscent of Virgil’s description of the souls waiting to cross the river Styx in Aeneid 6, aligning the Ocean to the underworld.26 This underworld, though, is realigned upon Melville’s iconoclastic ekphrasis of the Pequod in Chapter 16, ‘The Craft,’ of which only a small portion is quoted here: All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. Jaws become a leitmotif throughout Moby-Dick. Jaws are referenced 30 times in the work. The jaws of whales, the jaws of the Pequod, and the jaws of death merge, all becoming part of the syntax of katabasis in the course of the poem. It is likely that Melville had noticed a similar theme in Dryden’s Aeneid as jaws and death become singularly aligned.27 The serpents at Aen. 2.279 (‘And lick’d their hissing jaws’), Scylla at Aen. 3.541 (‘But Scylla from her den, with open jaws’), the entrance to the underworld at Aen. 6.384 (‘Just in the gate and in the jaws of hell’), the mouths of Cerberus at Aen. 6.569 (‘His greedy grinning jaws’), the Hydra at Aen. 6.779 (‘Whose jaws with iron teeth severely grin’), Allecto at Aen. 7.586 (‘Sunk are her eyes, and toothless are her jaws’), and the jaws of the underworld again at Aen. 7.786 (‘And opens wide the grinning jaws of hell’). This is the stuff of Aliens with the double-jawed Grim Reaper or Jaws itself, let alone Stoker’s Dracula (Dracula, 355), or Milton’s devil (Paradise Lost 10.629–37), or Dante’s Satan (Inferno Canto 34. 55–60). While the idea of a ‘Hell Mouth’ is overtly present in Virgil (and its implications there have more to do with Roman conceptions of death than in literary history), Melville, like Dryden, instead makes much of jaws.28 They are gnashing mouths of demons as well as entry points into the underworld. The Pequod is both.29 It crosses the Oceanic Styx as it consumes whales. In response, the whales are themselves jaw-formed entrymaws into the underworld. That the entire narrative is a katabasis transforms Ishmael, our guide, both into Virgil’s Sybil and Dante’s Virgil. The catalogue of ships in Iliad 2 and the catalogue of troops in Aeneid 7 serve as the basis for the martial catalogue in the epic tradition.30 Melville, too, includes an epic catalogue of troops, that at one instant is remarkably familiar, while at another is profoundly innovative. In Chapters 26 and 27, both entitled ‘Knights and Squires,’ Melville catalogues the first mates and their harpooners. Chapter 26 is a detailed description of Starbuck. In Chapter

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27, Stubb is the main focus with then brief sketches of Flask, followed by the introduction of the harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggo, and the ‘residue of the Pequod’s company’ with only Pip being named among this company.31 Once the ‘Knights and Squires’ are catalogued, Melville introduces Ahab over four chapters: 28 (‘Ahab’), 29 (‘Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb’), 30 (‘The Pipe’), and 31 (‘Queen Mab’). They all function as an extended introduction and description of Ahab, his character, and his command over the knights and squires. Three knights with three squires command three boats. Ahab, though, stands alone, and it is only during the first whale hunt (Chapters 47–48) that the catalogue finishes. At the end of the ‘Mat Maker’ (Chapter 47), Melville writes: ‘But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.’ The katabatic implications of their arrival are more emphatically pronounced at the beginning of Chapter 48: The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain’s, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. The description of Fedellah here (Ahab’s harpooner) is a Charonic continuation of the catalogue.32 Chapters 26–31 introduce the principle knights, squires and Ahab(s) with then the catalogue form apparently becoming completed at Chapter 48 at the very instant the frst epic battle between men and whales occurs. The epic convention is clear, but Melville’s catalogue is a more thorough interrogation of physiognomic and psychological disposition of his soldiers than what we fnd in Homer or Virgil. But the most profound innovation is found in Chapter 32, ‘Cetology,’ where the semitraditional epic catalogue is wholly fipped. The ‘Cetology’ is a continuation of the traditional catalogue of troops, simply describing the enemy cohort: the Sperm Whale, Right Whale, Fin-Back, Hump Back, Razor Back, Sulphur Bottoms, the various Octovoes and Duodecimoes. Melville is emphatic here that the diffculty of cataloguing his whales is modelled on Homer’s gesture to the limitations of his voice to recount the Greek forces in Iliad 2.484–93. Books replace orality; oceans (in this case, lived experience) replace Muses. Since earth’s wide regions, heaven’s umneasur’d height, And hell’s abyss, hide nothing from your sight, (We, wretched mortals! lost in doubts below,

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Bill Gladhill But guess by rumour, and but boast we know,) O say what heroes, fred by thirst of fame, Or urged by wrongs, to Troy’s destruction came. To count them all, demands a thousand tongues, A throat of brass, and adamantine lungs. Daughters of Jove, assist! inspired by you The mighty labour dauntless I pursue; What crowded armies, from what climes they bring, Their names, their numbers, and their chiefs I sing. (trans. Pope, 2.571–85) But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. ‘Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain!’ But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try.

But just as with the catalogue of men on the Pequod, the Homeric catalogue of whales is not completed until Chapter 41, ‘Moby Dick,’ and Chapter 42, ‘On the Whiteness of the Whale.’ Just as Ahab, though, stood alone in the catalogue, along with his phantom harpooner, Melville delays the introduction of Moby Dick. The catalogue emphatically asserts that Moby-Dick is a martial epic, an epic between men and whales, between Dark Ahab and the White Whale.33 But whereas Homer required the assistance of the Muses to sing his catalogue, Melville required books, libraries, and oceans. A number of other episodes of Moby-Dick show their origins in a Roman epic tradition. For example, in Chapter 73, ‘Stubb and Flask kill a right whale,’ Melville describes two whale heads hanging from each side of the Pequod in the following way: As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. In Chapter 75, ‘The Right Whale’s Head,’ Melville reframes these philosophical decapitations in terms of Stoicism and Platonism: I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head’s expression.

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See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. My Latinist mind cannot help but think that had we access to Melville’s translation of Dryden’s Aeneid, these two passages from Aeneid 9 would have had been marked: One was their care, and their delight was one: One common hazard in the war they shar’d, And now were both by choice upon the guard. Then Nisus thus: ‘Or do the gods inspire This warmth, or make we gods of our desire?’ (trans. Dryden 9.232–6=Aeneid 9.182–5) This done- to give new terror to his foes, The heads of Nisus and his friend he shows, Rais’d high on pointed spears- a ghastly sight: Loud peals of shouts ensue, and barbarous delight. Meantime the Trojans run, where danger calls; They line their trenches, and they man their walls. In front extended to the left they stood; Safe was the right, surrounded by the food. But, casting from their tow’rs a frightful view, They saw the faces, which too well they knew, Tho’ then disguis’d in death, and smear’d all o’er With flth obscene, and dropping putrid gore. (trans. Dryden 9.618–29=Aeneid 9.465–72) The Nisus and Euryalus episode begins with a brief philosophical question on the nature of desire (is it human or divine?), which is then followed by the decapitation of the two warriors and the presentation of their heads to the Trojans.34 Melville merges the philosophical and the corporeal, as the heads themselves become emblems of philosophical codes: Locke/Stoicism and Kant/Platonism. We can also gesture to Chapters 112 (‘The Blacksmith’) and 113 (‘The Forge’), in which a Hephaestus-like crippled blacksmith makes for Ahab a harpoon that recalls the Cyclops’ manufacturing of Jupiter’s lightning bolt,35 a passage clearly modelled on similar epic weapon-making scenes (e.g. trans. Dryden 8.563–70=Aeneid 8.426–32). In Chapter 119, ‘The Candles,’ Ahab holds onto the harpoon as it is struck by lightning: [B]ut dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to

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Bill Gladhill transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope’s end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay.

Later, in the fnal chapter, Melville emphatically compares Moby Dick to Jupiter in the myth of Europa:36 A gentle joyousness – a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam. The description is uncannily close to Dryden’s Metamorphoses (2.1091– 1100=Met. 2.870–75): He gently march’d along, and by degrees Left the dry meadow, and approach’d the seas; Where now he dips his hoofs and wets his thighs, Now plunges in, and carries off the prize. The frighted nymph looks backward on the shoar, And hears the tumbling billows round her roar; But still she holds him fast: one hand is born Upon his back; the other grasps a horn: Her train of ruffing garments fies behind, Swells in the air, and hovers in the wind. Melville also seems to have gestured to the Dira in Aeneid 12 (trans. Dryden, 12.1237–58=Aeneid 12.855–66) with the sky-hawk in the fnal chapter of Moby-Dick.37 These instances are only some of the more obvious examples of Melville’s engagement with Pope and Dryden that I notice. Throughout Moby-Dick, we see echoes and resonances to a classical epic tradition filtered through the great English translators of previous generations.38 The allusions are sometimes emphatic and other times subtle, if not merely the fiction of the critic’s analysis. While Melville insinuated a broad range of texts in an allusive network that resists a linear or analogic assessment, the texture of his allusions is web-like, if not labyrinthine. The entire epic topography, along with the ships and whales that sail upon or exist within it, is wholly aligned to a structured system of maw-swallowing descents. Catalogues becomes cetologies. Heads of beautiful boys are replaced by decapitated crania of philosophic whales. Jupiter-like (in erotic form) Moby Dick is hunted by Jupiter-like Ahab (in gigantomachic form). The epic universe is at war with itself. Throughout, the analysis of the text is continually confronted by Melville’s books. Potential allusions become hazardous. For example, there is a

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good argument that the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg (among other things) is filtered through a particularly innovative epic poem in the Roman tradition – Catullus 64.39 Surely Melville would have had access at some point to G.F. Ottey’s 1827 translation of Catullus 64, The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis: A Poem. For example, in Chapter 4, ‘The Counterpane,’ we see an admixture of marriage, textiles, and Cretan labyrinths (‘You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure’).40 The coalescence of the counterpane and Queequeg’s labyrinthine tattoos, both of which envelop Ishmael, echo, albeit faintly, the ‘rosy curtains, for the bride divine. | The curtains’ broider’s work the deeds disclos’d | of warrior men of old’ (Ottey, stanza 5), which depicts ultimately a weeping, abandoned Ariadne. Catullus fills out the rest, including the Cretan labyrinth (‘his steps directing by the slender thread | Lest the beguiling maze should baulk his wandering thread,’ Ottey, stanza 11), which is later incorporated into Daedalus’ doors in Aeneid 6.41 The imagery is suggestive, but hardly conclusive. Later in the book after the embarkation of the Pequod, Ishmael and Queequeg in Chapter 47, ‘The Mat-Maker,’ are analogized to the three weaving Fates: I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance – aye, chance, free will, and necessity – no wise incompatible – all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course – its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in

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Bill Gladhill its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.

Could Melville be gesturing to Ottey, stanzas 33–41, or to Catullus 64, more generally? Later, in Chapter 72, ‘The Monkey Rope,’ the next time we see the two heroes together, they are intertwined, perhaps recalling Theseus and Ariadne: For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed. Queequeg and Ishmael are connected by a thread, or rather a ‘hempen bond.’ The purpose of this passage – as the two heroes sail upon a katabasis, as the text becomes lost in the mystery of the whale itself – is brought to realization in the epilogue where Queequeg’s coffn, itself now inscribed with Queequeg’s Cretan labyrinth (see note 42), saves Ishmael from the ‘closing vortex.’ Each time Melville’s narrative brings Ishmael and Queequeg together, intimations of Catullus 64 apparently appear. Of course, this could simply be coincidence. If Melville happened upon Ottey or another translation of Catullus 64 while writing Moby-Dick, then the text crept in somewhere and somewise, perhaps here.42 Another tantalizing text that we know Melville read is Plato’s Phaedo. While Catullus 64 is at one instant apparently present in Moby-Dick and then just as instantly absent, scholars have noted the deep influence Plato had on Melville; Plato is ubiquitous.43 There is a strong argument that Melville structured significant elements of Moby-Dick on Plato. The allegory of the cave in Republic 10 is foundational and seemingly organizes the poem as a whole. Likewise, Melville conveys a complex relationship with mimetic arts in the text that could be understood in Platonic ways. Phaedo too is paramount. The suicidality of Ishmael is emphatically pronounced at the beginning of the book (‘then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon the sword; I quietly take to the ship’). The philosophical flourish here is the Phaedo, which Cato had supposedly been reading before he pulled out his intestines (see Plutarch’s Life of Cato 68.1–70.10).44 To this end, ‘taking to the ship’ is analogized to Socratic and Catonian suicide. Moby-Dick is a sequel to Plato’s Phaedo.

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In a letter to Duyckinck, dated April 5, 1849, Melville writes: I bought a set of Bayle’s Dictionary the other day, & on my return to New York intend to lay the great old folios side by side & go to sleep on them thro’ the summer, with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brown in the other. The Phaedon in his hand was Madame Dacier’s (1849), which included an introduction by Fenelon to which ‘is added the opinions of ancient, intermediate, and modern philosophers and divines on the soul’s immortality,’ as the title page words it (the book is dedicated to ‘Those who Think’). Rather than map out the particular literary outcomes Plato had on Melville, I would like to suggest that Dacier’s text provided Melville with more than simply Platonic philosophy. Melville read from cover to cover. This is clear from his marginalia. He would have been as interested (if not more interested) in the collection of extracts on the immortality of the soul which followed the Phaedo than in the Phaedo itself. Pages 210–38 form a collection of quotes on the soul’s immortality. They are striking, as we move from spiritual beliefs culled from Greek and Roman authors (or rather their English translations), then from Jewish texts, to the beliefs of Druids, opinions of various philosophers, ‘Mexican or American Indians’ beliefs,’ and fnally ending at ‘scriptural proofs.’ While it has been suggested that the opening medical extracts in books like Robert Southey’s The Doctor are the ultimate inspiration for the marked opening of the extracts of whales in Moby-Dick, I think it is far more likely that Melville was struck by the extracts on the immortality of the soul included in Dacier’s Phaedon.45 Given the semantic depth of Melville’s whale, there is a natural coincidence between Dacier’s extracts and his own. Dacier’s Phaedon ends with extracts on the soul; Melville’s sequel to the Phaedo begins with extracts on whales. It would require another paper to tease out the influence of this material on Melville. Suffice it to say that there is suggestive evidence in ‘Mexican or American Indians’ beliefs’ to complicate one’s assessment of a number of episodes near the end of the novel. Chapter 114, ‘The Glider,’ Chapter 115, ‘The Bachelor,’ Chapter 119, ‘The Candles,’ Chapter 132, ‘The Symphony,’ and the last three chapters of the ‘Chase’ (including the epilogue) appear to be moving through the various metaphysical and spiritual planes in Mexican and Indian belief in Dacier’s text. We move through ‘the house of the Sun’ where the dead led a life of endless delight; where every day, at the appearance of the sun’s rays, they hailed his birth with rejoicings and with dances, and the sound of voices and instruments accompanied him to his meridian; then they met with the souls of women, and with the same festivity accompanied his setting. (231)

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Elements of this passage are found in ‘The Glider,’ ‘The Bachelor,’ and ‘The Symphony.’ ‘The Candles’ takes on a whole new meaning when read through the following: ‘The souls of those struck by lightning, or those who died by disease, went with the souls of the children sacrifced to Tloloc, to a place called Tlalocan, the paradise of that God. This was a cool, shady place’ (232). The narrative then moves to Mictlan, or hell, ‘which they consider to be a place of utter darkness, in the centre of the earth, but where, however, there was no other kind of misery than the darkness just mentioned’ (232). We even read later about the serpent Tlaloc, [T]his serpent was, at other times, supposed to inhabit a cave sacred to the water God, in the country of the Mistecas. The entrance was concealed . . . it was necessary to crawl . . . then to walk through a path. . . . [T]he ways of the cave were so intricate, that many who unwarily bewildered themselves in, perished, and were said to have been eaten by the serpent. (232) Melville was presented with more than Phaedon when he opened Dacier’s translation, and he engaged with it all. I would like to end this chapter with another potential engagement by Melville with the classical tradition. The first line of the epic is famous, to say the least: ‘Call me Ishmael.’46 The narrator addresses himself again in the book in Chapter 41, ‘Moby Dick,’ where he begins, ‘I, Ishmael.’ The choice of language is marked: ‘me, Ishmael’ and ‘I, Ishmael.’ I (Ich) would like to suggest that Melville is making a bilingual pun here, between me, ‘I’ and ‘Ich.’ Could Melville be gesturing to the German ‘Ich’ in Ishmael through twice referring to the first-person pronoun in English? If we are meant to hear the German ‘Ich,’ could Ishmael’s name actually mean I (Ish/ Ich) Mael, ‘I male’?47 Of course, rather than male, Melville could have meant mail, as in ‘armor.’ Could Melville be alluding to arma uirumque cano in ‘Call me Ishmael,’ or to spell it out more expansively, ‘Call me, “I arms and the man”’? Melville would have noted the first words of Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dryden’s Aeneid, and Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘Achilles,’ ‘The Man,’ ‘Arms (and the Man),’ ‘Of Man’s (first disobedience).’ ‘Mael’ may be a synonymous allusion to this tradition; Ishmael is essentially Epic incarnate, as we see him merge wholly with his own literary work in Chapter 102, ‘The Arsacides’: The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then

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composing – at least, what untattooed parts might remain – I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale. The evidence previously discussed moved from the concrete to the less than concrete, if not to total and complete fction. But Melville’s reception of the classical tradition does not take one form, and Time, in any case, will solve all riddles.

Notes 1 And Bully for Susanna! Thank you for everything. Anything good in this paper belongs to you, and anything bad is mine. The paper reflects Susanna’s work on literary criticism, translation, and reception. I am sure if Melville were alive now, his marginalia would be sprinkled around her texts. I would like to thank my RAs Michaela Drouillard and Donald McCarthy for their help on this paper. Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported the research of this work. 2 Sealts (1988, 204). 3 Horth (1993, 130). Melville published Mardi in 1849, a critical failure. 4 See Sealts (1988) and Olsen-Smith (2004) for a complete (and continually updated) list of Melville’s books. 5 My consultation of Melville’s marginalia was limited to the on-line database melvillesmarginalia.org. To that end, the discussion here on Melville’s marginalia is conditioned on the texts accessed there. 6 The entire scribblings read: It is better to laugh & not sin than to weep & be wicked. – ten loads of coal to burn him. – Brought to the stake – warmed himself by the fire. Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti – sed in nomine Diaboli. – Madness is undefinable – It & right reasons extremes of one – Not the (black art) Goetic but Theurgic magic – seeks converse with the intelligence, Power, the Angel. The first phrase is from Thomas Roscoe’s The German Novelists (Sealts 428b.1). The phrase ‘Theurgic magic’ highlights Melville’s particular inclination to Platonic spiritual communion and away from an Old Testament, Goetic model. 7 It must be noted here that Melville also read Dryden’s Preface (A Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry) to and translation of du Fresnoy’s de arte graphica (Sealts 191a), which also includes a ‘Short account of the most eminent painters, ancient and modern,’ published in 1695. Horace is quoted on the title page: ut pictura poesis erit. On Melville’s impressive engagement, understanding, and reception of art, ancient and modern, see the collection of essays in Sten (1991). 8 See Sealts (1988, 147 and 167–8). The only text of ‘Virgil’ that is accompanied by Melville’s markings is the Gnat, which was included as a dedication in Melville’s copy of Bell’s edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. On page 225 (‘now in the valleys wandring at their wills’) Melville writes, ‘how W.W. must have delighted in this stanza,’ in reference to William Woodsworth. Of the 28 pages of the Gnat, Melville has marked 11. 9 Note that on page 331 of Matthew Arnold’s essay ‘On Translating Homer’ (Sealts 17), Melville underlines and places a number sign beside the English translation

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13 14 15 16

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of Aeneid 12.435, which has been footnoted on the bottom of the page. The Latin in the body of the text is left untouched. See Sealts (1988, 39–42). Sealts (1988, 45). On Melville’s engagement with Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, see Wright (1960), Cambon (1966), Pommer (1970), Moses (1989), Newman (1993), Sheldon (2002), to name only a few. For the collection of cetological and whaling texts that informed Melville, see Madison (2016). Euripides, The Tragedies, vol. 3 (Sealts 147, 207a vol.3) and Juvenal and Persius, The Satires (304.1) were purchased for $106,250 on October 10, 2019. The annotations to Chapman’s Iliad 9, 10, 12, 13 and Odyssey 4 include marginal quotes of Pope’s translation. The annotations in Iliad 1 and 22 gesture to Milton, while in Iliad 3 ‘Ulysses sat tall’ is written in the margins. Sealts (1988, 12). It is notable that the vast majority of Melville’s markings are connected to tracing literary history. He marks titles like an ‘old anonymous comedy’ the Merrie Devil of Edmonton and Weever’s Ancient Funeral Monuments (679) or Brunetto Latini’s ‘old forgotten’ poem Tesoretto, which Warton argues served as a model for Dante’s Divine Comedy (779). See melvillesmarginalia.org and commentaries ad loc. for all the cross-references gestured to here. In Melville’s copy of Milton, Spenser is written in the margins of Lycidas 11. It is notable that his copy of Milton also included footnotes to authors to whom Milton is alluding. It is notable that none of Milton’s Latin poems have any of Melville’s marginalia. Will far be found unworthy to compare With Sion’s songs, to all true tasts excelling, Where God is prais’d aright, and Godlike men, | The Holiest of Holies, and his Saints; Such are from God inspir’d, not such from thee; Unless where moral vertue is express’t By light of Nature, not in all quite lost. Thir Orators thou then extoll’st, as those The top of Eloquence, Statists indeed, And lovers of thir Country, as may seem But herein to our Prophets far beneath, As men divinely taught, and better teaching The solid rules of Civil Government In thir majestic unaffected stile Then all the Oratory of Greece and Rome. In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so, What ruins Kingdoms, and lays Cities flat; These only with our Law best form a King. Coffler (1985). Sweeney (1975) and Treichel (2009). We can add to these Braswell (1940), Sealts (1942), Lewis (1950), Garrison (1971), Cook (2003), Berthold (2013), Anderson (2017). See Woodson (1966), Sweeney (1975), Treichel (2009). ‘But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand – miles of them – leagues. Inlanders all, they come from

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lanes and alleys, streets and avenues – north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?’ ‘An airy crowd came rushing where he stood, | Which fill’d the margin of the fatal flood: | . . . The hero, who beheld with wond’ring eyes | The tumult mix’d with shrieks, laments, and cries, | Ask’d of his guide, what the rude concourse meant; | Why to the shore the thronging people bent; | What forms of law among the ghosts were us’d; | Why some were ferried o’er, and some refus’d.’ (trans. Dryden, 6.422–40=Aeneid 6.305–20). While Treichel (2009, 137) connects this passage to Chapter 87 and the ‘vast host’ of whales which greet the Pequod, not to the horde of souls at the Styx in Aeneid 6. Treichel (2009, 182–8) also suggests that Dryden’s jaws have influenced Melville here, though her excellent analysis is too restricted in aligning them simply to the whale’s mouth. For the Medieval Hell Mouth (though the work does not refer to the Roman antecedents), see Schmidt (1995). See Hänssgen (2003, 57) for a succinct summary of different interpretations of the Pequod. On catalogues and the epic tradition, see Williams (1961), O’Hara (1989), Batinski (1992), Boyd (1992), Quint (2007). ‘They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip – he never did – oh, no! he went before.’ See Treichel (2009, 125–7) for the Charonic features of Fedellah. On Moby-Dick as martial epic and the various epithets applied to Ahab, see Hänssgen (2003, 11–51 and 104–5). On the Platonic background of the Nisus and Euryalus episode, see Makowski (1989). Hänssgen (2003, 253) notes that in Ishmael’s interpretation of Ahab’s rebuke of Starbuck (Chapter 36, ‘The Quarterdeck’) there is an allusion to the dira cupido of Nisus and Euryalus. See Satterfield (1959) on the Hephaestus-like blacksmith, Perth. Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near. ‘No, no – no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?’ holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then tempered. ‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!’ deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.

36 Treichel (2009, 187–8) suggests that the Europa myth here gestures to Crete and the Cretan Labyrinth as well. She keenly refers to the ‘inextricable intricacies of rope’ (Chapter 34), which may gesture to Daedalus’ doors in Aeneid 6. 37 ‘A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-grasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and

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so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.’ 38 Melville forms a complex comparison between Ahab and Perseus, filtered through sculpture and painting; see Chapters 28, 55, 82, 133, and 135. Melville seems to be suggesting that the mimetic artistic representations, which form and inform Ahab, are confronted by the true form of the whale itself in the demigorgon Moby Dick (see Chapter 38). Fedellah even becomes Ahab’s Andromeda in the final chapter: [L]ashed round and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab. 39 Of course, their relationship in terms of the heroic tradition extends beyond simply Catullus 64. See Hänssgen (2003, 198–206) and bibliography therein. 40 See Treichel (2009, 185–90) for the whale as Cretan Labyrinth. Sten (2007, 178) suggests that Ishmael is ‘too green’ to realize he is about to become an American Theseus. He is both a Theseus and an Ariadne. 41 In Chapter 110, ‘Queequeg in his coffin,’ Queequeg’s labyrinthine tattoo merges with his coffin: [W]ith a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. 42 On the translation and reception of Catullus 64 in Britain, see Stead (2016, 99–152). The evidence suggests that Melville could have encountered four different translations of Catullus 64, which were published between 1795 and 1821 (Stead [2016, 101]). 43 See Couch (1933), Levin (1979), and Sealts (1982, 23–30, 278–336). 44 On Phaedo and Cato’s suicide, see Zadorojnyi (2007). 45 Hayes (2007, 48). 46 See Dryden (1968, 83–113) for problems connected to the ‘verbal identity assumed by the narrator,’ in addition to various other associations in his name. Knowlton and Lipking (1997) suggest that Melville may be referring to Camões’ Chamei-me Adamastor. It is recommended to look at Hänssgen (2003, 50–1), who has nicely included the opening lines of Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dryden’s Aeneid, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. 47 Melville recounts in his journal conversations with Germans (Oct. 12, 1849) and a trip to Germany (Dec. 8th 1849), where he purchased a number of books. It is inconceivable that Melville would not have known German ‘Ich’ was English ‘I.’ See Harrison et al. (1989).

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Works cited Anderson, M. 2017. ‘Platonic and Nietzschean Themes of Transformation in MobyDick.’ In Melville Among the Philosophers, eds. C. McCall and T. Nurmi. London, 25–44. Batinski, E. 1992. ‘Lucan’s Catalogue of Caesar’s Troops: Paradox and Convention.’ Classical Journal 88, 19–24. Berthold, D. 2013. ‘Melville’s Medusas.’ In Melville among the Nations: Proceedings of an International Conference, Volos, Greece, July 2–6, 1997, eds. A. C. Christodolou and S. Marovitz. Kent State, 287–96. Boyd, B. 1992. ‘Virgil’s Camilla and the Traditions of Catalogue and Ecphrasis (Aeneid 7.803–17).’ American Journal of Philology 113, 213–34. Braswell, W. 1940. ‘Melville’s Use of Seneca.’ American Literature 12, 98–104. Cambon, G. 1966. ‘Dante’s Presence in American Literature.’ Dante Studies 84, 27–50. Coffler, G. 1985. Melville’s Classical Allusions: A Comprehensive Index and Glossary. Westport, CT. Cook, J. A. 2003. ‘Moby-Dick, Myth, and Classical Moralism: Bulkington as Hercules.’ Leviathan 5, 15–28. Couch, H. N. 1933. ‘Moby Dick and the Phaedo,’ Classical Journal 28, 367–8. Dryden, E. 1968. Melville’s Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth. Baltimore. Garrison, D. H. 1971. ‘Melville’s Doublon and the Shield of Achilles.’ NineteenthCentury Fiction 26, 171–84. Harrison, H., Parker, H., and Tanselle, T. eds. 1989. Journals: Writings of Herman Melville 15. Evanston, IL. Hänssgen, E. 2003. Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick und das antike Epos. Heidelberg. Hayes, K. J. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville. Cambridge. Horth, L. ed. 1993. Correspondence: Herman Melville. Evanston and Chicago. Knowlton, E. C. and L. Lipking. 1997. ‘Camões’s Os Lusíadas.’ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 112, 123–4. Levin, M. E. 1979. ‘Ahab as Socratic Philosopher: The Myth of the Cave Inverted.’ American Transcendental Quarterly 41, 61–73. Lewis, R. W. B. 1950. ‘Melville on Homer.’ American Literature 22, 166–76. Madison, R. D. ed. 2016. The Essex and The Whale: Melville’s Leviathan Library and the Birth of Moby-Dick. Santa Barbara, CA. Makowski, J. F. 1989. ‘Nisus and Euryalus: A Platonic Relationship.’ Classical Journal 85, 1–15. Moses, C. 1989. Melville’s Use of Spenser. New York. Newman, L. B. V. 1993. ‘Melville’s Copy of Dante: Evidence of New Connection between the Commedia and Mardi.’ Studies in the American Renaissance, 305–38. O’Hara, J. 1989. ‘Messapus, Cycnus, and the Alphabetical Order of Vergil’s Catalogue of Italian Heroes.’ Phoenix 43, 35–8. Olsen-Smith, S. and M. M. Sealts. 2004. ‘A Cumulative Supplement to Melville’s Reading (1988).’ Leviathan 6, 55–77. Pommer, H. F. 1970. Milton and Melville. New York. Quint, D. 2007. ‘Milton’s Book of Numbers: Book 1 of “Paradise Lost” and its Catalogue.’ International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13, 528–49. Satterfield, J. 1959. ‘Perth: An Organic Digression in Moby-Dick,’ Modern Language Notes 74, 106–7.

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Schmidt, G. D. 1995. The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell: Eighth-Century Britain to the Fifteenth Century. London. Sealts, M. M. 1942. Herman Melville’s Reading in Ancient Philosophy. New Haven (Yale PhD diss.). 1982. Pursuing Melville, 1940–1980. Madison, WI. ———. 1988. Melville’s Reading, revised edition. Columbia, SC. Sheldon, L. E. 2002. ‘Messianic Power and Satanic Decay: Milton in Moby-Dick.’ Leviathan 4, 29–50. Stead, H. 2016. A Cockney Catullus: The Reception of Catullus in Romantic Britain, 1795–1821. Oxford. Sten, C. ed. 1991. Savage Eye: Melville and Visual Arts. Kent, OH. ———. 2007. ‘Sounding the Whale: Moby-Dick as Epic Novel.’ In Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick Updated Edition, ed. H. Bloom. Yale, 171–98. Sweeney, G. 1975. Melville’s Use of Classical Mythology. Amsterdam. Treichel, T. 2009. ‘And so Hell’s Probably’: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Pierre as Descent Narratives. Heidelberg. Williams, R. 1961. ‘The Function and Structure of Virgil’s Catalogue in Aeneid 7.’ The Classical Quarterly 11, 146–53. Woodson, T. 1966. ‘Ahab’s Greatness: Prometheus as Narcissus.’ English Literary History 33, 351–69. Wright, N. 1960. ‘Herman Melville’s Inferno.’ American Literature 32, 167–81. Zadorojnyi, A. V. 2007. ‘Cato’s Suicide in Plutarch.’ CQ 57, 216–30.

16 Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex The libretto Stephen Harrison

This chapter considers the genesis and character of the Latin libretto of Igor Stravinsky’s neo-classical opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, premiered in Paris in 1927 and often regarded as one of the key works of the composer and of its period.1 This libretto came about as follows.2 Jean Cocteau, then a rising French literary figure, was commissioned by Stravinsky in 1925 to write a libretto in French for a musical work based on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; Stravinsky knew Cocteau’s 1922 version of Sophocles’ Antigone, a French prose reduction of the play. Stravinsky always intended to have this French libretto translated into Latin, something about which Cocteau was unenthusiastic;3 Cocteau’s original draft no longer exists, but there is a later verse version which may have been a re-translation of Daniélou’s Latin (see later), written in Cocteau’s copy of the full score.4 Cocteau later published a (different) short dramatic adaptation of Oedipus Rex in prose, Œdipe-roi (1928, written 1925),5 as well as his longer and rather more contemporary dramatic adaptation of the Oedipus story in La machine infernale (1934, prose).6 There is extensive extant correspondence showing Stravinsky’s modifications of successive drafts by Cocteau in 1925–6.7 Once a final draft was agreed, the main part of Cocteau’s libretto (the verse scenes) was translated into Latin by a young student of Latin at the Sorbonne, Jean Daniélou (see later); the prose introductions to each scene, spoken by a Speaker, remained in French, and were later translated into various languages for various productions. The full text of the opera’s revised version of 1947–8 (both French and Latin) was translated into English in 1949 by the US modernist poet e.e.cummings.8 The major 1960 production at London’s Sadler’s Wells and its 1963 recording under Colin Davis used an English translation of the prose parts by Carl Wildman, translator of other Cocteau works in the 1940s.

Why Latin? The use of classical Latin seems naturally appropriate for the neo-classicism of this middle period of Stravinsky’s music.9 Stravinsky himself later claimed to have sought ‘monumentality’ in the translation of the libretto ‘from a secular to a sacred language’;10 for him as for his contemporary Carl Orff, Latin

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had the timeless permanence of stone.11 A religious/ritual influence seems clear. In the period 1921–25, Stravinsky seems to have picked up again the Orthodox Christianity of his Russian youth, and formally returned to that church in 1926;12 Cocteau was also interested in Catholicism in the mid1920s through his connections with the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain.13 The ritual aspect is helped by the evident links of the libretto with Church Latin, which would have been familiar to a contemporary French audience of Catholic culture, for whom (before the Second Vatican Council of 1962–5) liturgy in Latin was normal.

The author and his Latin In 1925–6, Jean Daniélou (1905–74) was a classical student at the Sorbonne, whence he would graduate in 1927. He would go on to have a distinguished career as a Jesuit, a bishop and cardinal archbishop who was a papal adviser to the Second Vatican Council, and a prolific and significant patristic scholar and theologian who received many honours, including towards the end of his life membership of the Académie Française and of the Légion d’Honneur.14 It is not clear how he was selected for the job of writing the libretto; perhaps a contact at the Sorbonne suggested him to Cocteau or Stravinsky. The Latin of his version is unusual; some of its salient features (I suggest) show the influence of two intellectual currents of the Sorbonne at the time, the revival of interest in Seneca’s tragedies, and the study of archaic Latin, as well as of Catholic Latin liturgy. Modern scholars have viewed the libretto as a student oddity replete with bizarre constructions and infelicities;15 it is indeed no literary masterpiece, and some elements do seem hard to understand. Stravinsky himself defended the Latin text later as ‘Ciceronian’ (by which he meant ‘using the language of classical Latin’) rather than medievalising, though he admitted that the metaphor omniscius pastor, ‘all-knowing shepherd’, used of the priest Tiresias, could be seen as ecclesiastical. He also rather hopefully suggested that the odd ablative construction Laudibus regina Iocasta | in pestilentibus Thebis (‘with praises [?] queen Jocasta in pestilential Thebes’) might have been drawn by his librettist from ‘an old text’16 (we might expect e.g. laudetur, ‘let praise be given to’: textual corruption is not impossible in the printing stage given the other surrounding ablatives). This treatment focusses not on the issue of the text’s literary quality, but rather on explaining some of its unusual elements in terms of its particular cultural context and the background of its author.

Influence of Catholic liturgy This was a natural source for the devout Daniélou, soon to join the Jesuits (1929). Medieval Latin liturgical texts such as the Mass tend to have short lines with occasional rhyme/assonance and some repetitions, e.g. the ‘Gloria’ from the Ordinary of the Mass:

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Domine Deus, Rex coelestis, Deus Pater omnipotens. Domine Fili unigenite Jesu Christe. Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris. Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram. Qui sedes ad dextram Patris, miserere nobis. Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father almighty, Lord Jesus Christ, only-begotten Son, Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, You who take away the sins of the world, Have mercy upon us. You who take away the sins of the world, Receive our prayer. You who sit at the right hand of the Father, Have mercy upon us. Compare the opening of Daniélou’s libretto: CHORUS: Kaedit nos pestis, Theba peste moritur. E peste serua nos qua Theba moritur. Oedipus, adest pestis; e peste libera urbem, urbem serua morientem. A plague strikes us down, Thebes is dying from a plague, Save us from the plague From which Thebes is dying. Oedipus, the plague is here: Free the city from plague, Save the city that is perishing. The content of the two passages is clearly similar (both are requests to powerful individuals for deliverance), and so is their style and format. Neither text is in a strict metrical form, though both are poetic; but the brevity of Daniélou’s choral lines, important for the musical setting, can be associated

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with Latin verse forms which were designed to be sung by groups, or are represented as such. Similar brief metrical lines can be found both in classical literature in the choral lyrics from Seneca’s plays (see later), and in early Christian hymns; the latter, sung by congregations in chorus, were characteristically in short iambic dimeters and four-line stanzas. A good example is Ambrose’s fourth-century hymn Veni, redemptor gentium | ostende partum Virginis | miretur omne saeculum: | talis decet partus Deum, ‘Come, Thou Redeemer of the earth, | And manifest Thy virgin birth: | Let every age adoring fall; | Such birth befts the God of all’ (tr. J.M. Neale, 1862); its use of repetition (partum . . . partus) and partial/irregular end-rhyme (gentium . . . saeculum . . . deum) may be a further source for these same features in Daniélou’s text (cf. urbem | urben . . . morientem earlier); but Daniélou’s very insistent use of repetition, along with his orthography (see later) may also seek to create a suitably archaic and primitive atmosphere for the ancient story of Oedipus.

Influence from the Sorbonne – Alfred Ernout and archaism in Latin? In 1924 the Latinist Alfred Ernout (1879–1973) was appointed to teach at the Sorbonne, where Jean Daniélou was already a student. Ernout was a major specialist in the Latin language,17 later the co-author of the most-used etymological dictionaries of Latin18 and already the author of an influential edition of archaic Latin texts (1916).19 It seems very likely that Daniélou knew this last book as a work of his recently arrived teacher, and it can be connected with one of the most striking features of Daniélou’s text, its use of k for c throughout. This is a rare feature of archaic Latin script with words beginning ka-, to be found in several of the pre-classical inscriptions collected in Ernout’s book, and in fact occurs twice in the first text in the book (CIL I.4123). Daniélou’s use of k for c goes well beyond this, and this may be due to Stravinsky’s musical needs; the libretto uses k not just at the start but also in the middle of Latin words, and before e and i as well as a (but not o), not a feature of archaic and classical Latin texts as preserved. This artificial orthography was a guide to the ‘hard’ pronunciation of the letter ‘c’ usual in classical Latin, but later softened before vowels in medieval and church Latin; as Stravinsky noted,20 this gives a better attack at the beginning of a word, something suitable for a libretto (e.g. the first word Kaedit); for anyone who knows classical Latin it presents a distinctly odd and hyperarchaic feature (indeed Stravinsky himself thought it was wholly alien to Latin).21 Another feature to be found in some types of archaic Latin texts in Ernout’s 1916 collection is insistent repetition. This emerges especially in its item 145, the inscriptionally preserved Carmen Arvalium Fratrum, the ancient hymn of the priesthood of the Arval Brethren, which transmits a text likely to go back at least to the early Roman Republic and certain to antedate any formal Latin literature. Its sense is obscure in parts, but it is clearly a prayer to

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the Lares and Mars for protection against plague and agricultural disasters, asking Mars to be sated without future acts of destruction, to dance and to invoke the Senones, probably gods linked with fertility:22 nos Lases iuuate enos Lases iuuate enos Lases iuuate neue lue rue Marmar sins incurrere in pleores neue lue rue Marmar sins incurrere in pleores neue lue rue Marmar sins incurrere in pleores satur fu, fere Mars, limen sali, sta berber satur fu, fere Mars, limen sali, sta berber satur fu, fere Mars, limen sali, sta berber semunis alternei advocapit conctos semunis alternei advocapit conctos semunis alternei advocapit conctos enos Marmor iuuato enos Marmor iuuato enos Marmor iuuato triumpe triumpe triumpe triumpe triumpe Help us, Lares, Help us, Lares, Help us, Lares. And, Mars, do not allow disease and disaster to attack the multitude, And, Mars, do not allow disease and disaster to attack the multitude, And, Mars, do not allow disease and disaster to attack the multitude. Be sated, ferce Mars; leap the threshold . . . Be sated, ferce Mars; leap the threshold . . . Be sated, ferce Mars; leap the threshold . . . In turn you shall summon all the Senones, In turn you shall summon all the Senones, In turn you shall summon all the Senones. Help us, Mars, Help us, Mars, Help us, Mars. Triumpe triumpe triumpe triumpe triumpe. The kind of ritual repetition and consequent rhyming so evident here can be seen in Daniélou’s text in Oedipus’ initial promise to the Chorus to solve the mystery of the oracle’s shocking pronouncement: OEDIPUS: Deus dixit . . . Sphynga solvi, carmen solvi, ego divinabo,

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CHORUS: Solve! Solve! Oedipus, solve! OEDIPUS: Pollikeor divinabo. Clarissimus Oedipus, pollikeor divinabo. OEDIPUS: The god has spoken. I solved the Sphinx, I solved the riddle, I will guess it. I will guess it, I will guess it again, Oedipus the most renowned, I will save Thebes again, I, Oedipus, will guess the oracle. CHORUS: Solve it! Solve it! Oedipus, solve it! OEDIPUS: I promise, I will guess it, Oedipus the most renowned, I promise I will guess it. The repetition and rhyming here (due no doubt in part to the musical needs of Stravinsky)23 can be said to look back (in a more limited form) to the incantatory style of the Arval hymn; again (as with the ‘Gloria’, earlier) the context is similar. The hymn represents a group appeal to the god Mars to prevent plague and other acts of destruction, while the Chorus likewise appeal as a group to the god-like Oedipus to release them, by his skill in bringing the oracle to fulflment, from the plague which already afficts them.

Influence from the Sorbonne – Léon Hermann and the revival of Senecan tragedy? As Daniélou was writing his libretto in Paris in 1925–6, the emerging French Latinist Léon Hermann (1889–1984) had recently published in the same city the first volume of his bilingual Budé edition of the tragedies of Seneca (Herrmann 1924a) as well as his Sorbonne doctoral thesis, a monograph on

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Senecan tragedy (Herrmann 1924b); in 1925 he moved to Brussels, where he spent the rest of his prolific and sometimes speculative scholarly career.24 Hermann’s 1920s publications were an important point in the revival of interest in Senecan drama in modern Europe after WW1;25 his monograph, in particular, had some influence, arguing in detail that the plays had real literary value and that they were written for performance, both of which had been firmly denied in earlier scholarship. This prominence of Seneca in Paris and at the Sorbonne in this period is highly relevant to Daniélou’s text; such a student would no doubt know something of local scholarship and recent doctorates. In particular, the honorand of this volume has conclusively shown that Daniélou made use in his libretto of the language of Seneca’s own version of the Oedipus story in his Oedipus.26 This is natural enough, given that Seneca’s play is in fact the only extant ancient drama on the topic in Latin; Daniélou also clearly made use of Sophocles’ Greek version in constructing his plot, for example in his choice of the manner of Jocasta’s suicide (hanging, not self-stabbing). Braund’s two key parallels are worth repeating here. Oedipus 217–20 ulcisci . . . peremptor . . . luat is evidently picked up in Daniélou’s ulkiski . . . luere . . . peremptor within the first ten lines of Creon’s presentation of the Delphic oracle’s response,27 while Oedipus 131–2 premiturque iuncto | funere funus, ‘and each death is closely pressed by another conjoined death’ is clearly echoed in the Chorus’ early prayer to the gods et premitur funere funus (see later), both describing the devastating effects of the plague on Thebes. Further convincing lexical connections can be added. When Daniélou’s first messenger describes the cruel maiming of the baby Oedipus in paruulum Oedipoda | foratum pedes, ‘little Oedipus pierced in his feet’, the phrase owes a clear debt to Oedipus 812–13 forata ferro gesseras uestigia, | tumore nactus nomen ac uitio pedum, ‘you bore feet pierced by iron, gaining your name from the swelling and problem of your feet.’ And when the second messenger describes the self-blinding of Oedipus (sanguis ater rigabat | ater sanguis prosiliebat, ‘the dark blood began to flow, the dark blood began to leap out’), the language recalls both Creon’s reaction to the perverted sacrifice of Tiresias at Oedipus 585–6 gelidus in uenis stetit | haesitque sanguis. saeua prosiluit cohors, ‘my blood stopped and was still, freezing in my veins, and the savage band leapt forth’, and the parallel description of the blinding at Oedipus 978–9 rigat ora foedus imber et lacerum caput | largum reuulsis sanguinem uenis uomit, ‘the foul rain soaked his face and his pierced head poured out blood from his veins, torn open’, though ater sanguis (‘dark blood’) is itself a Virgilian tag (Georgics 3.221, 3.507–8, Aeneid 3.33). As suggested earlier, the metrical shape of Seneca’s short-line choral lyrics also presents Daniélou with a model. Take Oedipus 180–6, describing the symptoms of the plague: O dira noui facies leti grauior leto:

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Stephen Harrison piger ignauos alligat artus . languor, et aegro rubor in uultu, maculaeque cutem sparsere leues. tum uapor ipsam corporis arcem fammeus urit multoque genas sanguine tendit.

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O terrible appearance of strange death More cruel than death itself: A sluggish languor grips limbs In inaction, and a redness appears on a sick face, And light spots scatter over the skin. Then the faming heat sets fre to The very citadel of the body And stretches the cheeks with a rich fush of blood. Seneca’s lyrics have a strict metrical form unlike the free verse of Daniélou, but they look similar in presenting short lines on the page in modern editions such as Herrmann (1924a), and show some repetitions of key terms similar to those in the libretto (cf. leti . . . leto earlier). Outside the four-line stanzas of Horace’s Odes, a key source for Seneca28 but not for Daniélou, short-line lyric metres are rare in Latin; Seneca’s choruses are the obvious classical source for this formal feature of the modern Latin version. Naturally, Seneca is not the only classical source for Daniélou’s Latin. A consideration of a short passage from near the opening of the libretto, where the Chorus call upon the gods to rescue Thebes, will show this clearly: Delie, exspectamus. Minerva flia Jovis, Diana in throno insidens, et tu, Phoebe insignis iaculator, succurrite nobis. Ut praekeps ales ruit malum et premitur funere funus et corpora corporibus inhumata. Expelle, everte in mare atrocem istum Martem qui nos urit inermis dementer ululans. Et tu, Bakke, cum taeda advola nobis urens infamem inter deos deum. Lord of Delos, we wait, Minerva, daughter of Jupiter,

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Diana, sitting on your throne, And you, Phoebus, Outstanding spear-thrower, Bring us aid. Disaster rushes in like a headlong bird And death is closely pressed by death, Unburied bodies by more bodies. Drive out, turn out into the sea That cruel Mars Who burns us all unprotected With his wild cries, And you, Bacchus, fy to us With your torch, burning The god infamous amongst gods. In this passage, Daniélou understandably uses the prime classical source for the description of a plague, Lucretius’ plague of Athens at the end (as transmitted) of the De Rerum Natura (6.1138–263), clearly drawing on 6.1215– 16 multaque humi cum inhumata iacerent corpora supra | corporibus, ‘since many unburied bodies lay on the ground on top of other bodies’, 6.1237 idque vel in primis cumulabat funere funus, ‘and this above all was what piled death on death’ (echoed here alongside Seneca Oedipus 131–2; see earlier). It is surely relevant to note that it was at the very time of the writing of the libretto that Daniélou’s Sorbonne teacher Alfred Ernout (see earlier) was working on his still-useful commentary (published 1925–8) on the whole of Lucretius’ poem in conjunction with the philosopher Léon Robin; no doubt Ernout lectured on the poet at the time.29 Echoes of other canonical authors here also suggest standard student reading: Ut praekeps ales ruit malum picks up Cicero De Re Publica 1.44 malum praeceps, ‘headlong disaster’, while insignis iaculator recalls Ovid Metamorphoses 8.306 iaculoque insignis Acastus, ‘Acastuis outstanding for his spear’, and infamem . . . deum looks back to Tibullus 2.4.38 infamis . . . Amor, ‘infamous Cupid.’ In all three of the last cases, the familiar phrase is slightly tweaked: Cicero’s noun-adjective pair is separated, Ovid’s instrumental ablative becomes an agent noun, and Tibullus’ Mars is morphed into Cupid (both destructive deities). As befts ambitious student composition, Daniélou does not lift an expression directly from its source but adapts it slightly for its new context.

Links with Roman pantomime? Finally, it is worth speculating on a possible link between Daniélou’s text and the ancient genre of pantomime. Roman pantomime (not to be confused with its modern equivalent, a comic stage-show) was a literary form for performance parallel to tragedy under the Roman empire, comprising a libretto based on a tragic myth, presented through mimic solo dance and a choral

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libretto to a musical score.30 The story of Oedipus is recorded as the topic for a Roman pantomime (Macrobius Sat.2.7.15), and affinities have recently been noted between pantomime and the tragedies of Seneca,31 suggesting that elements such as their loose dramatic structure, running commentaries on the action, self-analytical monologues and set-piece narratives may all be features shared between the two dramatic types. Could the young Daniélou (unlike his senior Hermann, who draws no such connections) have seen this possible link with his libretto in the 1920s, especially given that the work was originally written for Diaghilev to celebrate the twentieth season of the Ballets Russes?32 It is not impossible: Roman pantomime had been popularised in France a generation before by the successful novel Le Mime Bathylle, roman historique (1894) by Jean Bertheroy (really Berthe-Corinne Le Barillier),33 and seriously studied already in revolutionary Paris in François de l’Aulnaye’s 1790 De la Saltation théatrale, ou Recherches sur l’origine, les progrès et les effets de la pantomime chez les anciens.34

Conclusion This piece has tried to illuminate the Latin libretto for Stravinsky’s operaoratorio by contextualising its unusual and much deprecated form in the cultural context of its composition by its author the Sorbonne Latin student and future cardinal Jean Daniélou. It is certainly not a misunderstood masterpiece, but its unexpected character can be better comprehended through appropriate consideration of relevant links with Catholic liturgy, Seneca’s Oedipus and the study of Latin language and literature in the Paris of its period.

Notes 1 I am delighted to be able to dedicate this chapter to my old friend and distinguished colleague Susanna Braund, who has done so much for the study of Latin literature and its reception, especially since it was some comments of hers on the libretto’s use of Seneca’s tragedies that led me to pursue this topic (see Braund [2015, 118–21], discussed later), along with an invitation to speak at a day conference on Stravinsky’s work at the Archive for Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford in November 2015 (many thanks to Fiona Macintosh). 2 For all aspects of Stravinsky’s work, the excellent handbook by Walsh (1993) is indispensable. 3 For full details of the interactions of the two on this project, see Connon (2011). 4 Its text is published alongside Daniélou’s Latin in Cocteau (2003, 209–31). 5 Text in Cocteau (2003, 429–43). 6 Text in Cocteau (2003, 469–542). For the development of Cocteau’s interest in the Oedipus story, see Bauschatz (1991). 7 See Carr (2002, 23–64). 8 Reprinted in Walsh (1993, 79–91). This Latin text is the one used in this piece. 9 For this neo-classical period of Stravinsky’s work (c. 1920–54) and his overall career, see conveniently Walsh (2002).

Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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Stravinsky and Craft (1963, 21). Stravinsky (1936, 125). See Walsh (1993, 4). See Walsh (1993, 6). For his career and writings, see Fontaine (2005). See e.g. Farrell (2001, 117–21). Stravinsky and Craft (1963, 14–15). See Heurgon (1975). Ernout and Meillet (1932); its fourth edition (1959, corrected 1985) is still in print in 2019. Ernout (1916); third edition 1947. Stravinsky and Craft (1963, 119). Stravinsky and Craft (1963, 119). I here cite the text and translation of Courtney (1995, 34–5). So Citti (2012, 99–100). For his life and work, see Renard (1987). See e.g. Harrison (2009). See Braund (2015, 118–21). This parallel can be reinforced by the consideration that the agent noun peremptor is found only in this passage of Seneca before the time of Apuleius. See Trinacty (2014). Ernout and Robin (1925–28). For the form in general, see Hall and Wyles (2008). See especially Zanobi (2014). See Walsh (1993, 8). See Hall and Wyles (2008, 375). See Hall and Wyles (2008, 374).

Works cited Bauschatz, P. 1991. ‘Œdipus: Stravinsky and Cocteau Recompose Sophocles.’ Comparative Literature 43: 150–70. Braund, S. 2015. Seneca: Oedipus. London. Carr, M. 2002. Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky’s Works on Greek Subjects. Lincoln, NE. Citti, F. 2012. Cura sui: studi sul lessico filosofico di Seneca. Amsterdam. Cocteau, J. 2003. Théâtre Complet. Paris. Connon, D. 2011. ‘Notes from a Collaboration: Cocteau and Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex.’ French Studies 65: 30–44. Courtney, E. 1995. Musa Lapidaria: A Selection of Latin Verse Inscriptions. Atlanta. de l’Aulnaye, F. H. S. 1790. De la Saltation théatrale, ou Recherches sur l’origine, les progrès et les effets de la pantomime chez les anciens. Paris. Ernout, A. 1916. Receuil de textes latins archaiques. Paris. ——— and Meillet, A. 1932. Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Latine. Paris. ——— and Robin, L. 1925–28. Lucrèce De rerum natura: commentaire exegetique et critique [3 vols.]. Paris. Farrell, J. 2001. Latin Language and Latin Culture. Cambridge. Fontaine, J., ed. 2005. Actualité de Jean Daniélou. Paris. Hall, E. and Wyles, R., eds. 2008. New Directions in Ancient Pantomime. Oxford. Harrison, S. J. 2009. ‘Modern Versions of Senecan Tragedy.’ Trends in Classics 1: 148–70.

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Herrmann, L. 1924a. Sénèque: Tragédies I. Paris. ———. 1924b. Le théâtre de Senèque. Paris. Heurgon, J. 1975. ‘Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Alfred Ernout, membre de l’Académie.’ Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres 119: 76–93. Renard, M. 1987. ‘Leon Herrmann* (1889–1984).’ Latomus 46: 3–28. Stravinsky, I. 1936. An Autobiography. New York. ——— and Craft, R. 1963. Dialogues and a Diary. Garden City, NY. Trinacty, C. 2014. Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry. Oxford. Walsh, S. 1993. Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex. Cambridge. ———. 2002. The New Grove Stravinsky. London. Zanobi, A. 2014. Seneca’s Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime. London.

17 Muted voices Marina Tsvetaeva’s and Anna Akhmatova’s classical heroines Zara Torlone

Je ne crois pas à l’inconscience d’êtres pensants, encore moins – d’êtres pensants écrivants, point du tout – à l’inconscience écrivaine feminine. I don’t believe in the unintentionality of thinking beings, even less of writing thinking beings, and not at all in the unintentionality of feminine writing. Marina Tsvetaeva, Lettre à l’Amazone1

The pre-revolutionary era in both of Russian capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, saw an unprecedented flourish of poetic talent. Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, Ivan Bunin, Nikolai Gumilev, Viacheslav Ivanov – these are only a few names with which the misnomer of Russian poetry’s ‘Silver Age’ became linked. The age can be viewed, despite its catastrophic political upheavals, as ‘Golden’ for Russian lyric voice. Among the new poets at the beginning of the twentieth century were two women without whom the modernist poetic epoch in Russia cannot be fully comprehended. Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, two extremely different poets, were the master craftswomen of Russian poetic language. Furthermore, both of these poets created their unique poetic voice, easily recognizable to any reader of Russian poetry. They both received, reinterpreted, and acculturated the literary legacies that preceded them. One of these receptions was concerned with the classical mythological heroines, and that reception is the focus of this essay.

Marina Tsvetaeva: women interrupted2 Tsvetaeva’s interest in classical myth became evident from her first collections of poems. Her use of classical references matured especially in Remeslo (Craft 1922) and in her collection Posle Rossii (After Russia 1923); the characters taken from classical mythology were chosen not at random but in connection with the central preoccupations of Tsvetaeva’s poetic system. Not surprisingly in the same year (1923) Tsvetaeva began working on her classical dramas.3 Her interest in classical drama stemmed from her long-standing interest in playwriting as ‘a new . . . means of expressing human interrelations, conflicts,

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characters and passions.’4 When in 1918 she grew increasingly close to a group of actors in the Third Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, Tsvetaeva articulated rather vocally her dislike for the theater: I do not respect Theater, I am not attracted to Theater, and I do not reckon with Theater. . . . But the essence of the Poet – is to believe in the word! . . . Theater I always feel as a violence.5 Tsvetaeva directed the reader to interpret her classical plays not as dramas intended for a stage but as an extension of her lyrics. Tsvetaeva’s use of classical sources in the creation of her classical dramas was limited, by her own assertion, to the didactic moralizing adaptation of Greek myths by Gustav Schwab, Die schönsten Sagen des klassischen Altertums, published in 1837–9, which targeted German children of the Victorian era.6 Although most scholars agree that this bowdlerized adaptation of Greek myths was the main source of Tsvetaeva’s mythic engagements, her denial of any knowledge of ancient sources must be taken with a grain of salt. She was after all a daughter of Professor Ivan Tsvetaev, who had begun his career by writing a dissertation on the Oscans7 and whose major accomplishment was the foundation of the Museum of Fine Arts, today known as the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. While Tsvetaeva herself did not receive an uninterrupted formal education, during the peregrinations of her childhood in Europe she attended several schools that emphasized classical education. She was also a close friend of the classical philologist Vladimir Nilender and most likely had more than a passing acquaintance with classical tragedy (Nilender later also translated Aeschylus and Sophocles). In her letters to Alexander Bakhrakh in 1923 she admitted that she was avidly reading the Greeks and she asked him for a copy of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.3.8 Tsvetaeva may have been unwilling to admit that she had read and absorbed (albeit in translation) Euripides’ and perhaps Catullus’ and Seneca’s renditions of the myth of Theseus due to her conscious and aggressive desire to set herself apart from any comparison or imitation. Tsvetaeva, as Maria Stadter Fox suggested, ‘through her belligerently unscholarly approach . . . demystifies the power ascribed to the Greek myths and texts.’9 Tsvetaeva discovered her dramatic voice at the same time and even earlier than the European writers who were also breathing fresh life into Greek tragedy. Jean Cocteau wrote Antigone in 1922 and Orphée in 1926, while Jean Giraudoux’ Amphitryon did not appear until 1929, and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone as well as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les mouches until 1942 and 1943 respectively. W. B. Yeats wrote his Sophocles’ King Oedipus in 1928 and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus in 1934, while T. S. Eliot began his use of Greek plots for a modern audience only in 1939. Tsvetaeva was decisively one of the pioneers in creating the original neo-classical tragedies with a

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pronounced and explicitly articulated twentieth-century sensibility, which centered on the exploration of a dialectic between the main generative oppositions in her poetics: male and female. Furthermore, all of Tsvetaeva’s poetry was inextricably connected with her biography and her binary perception of the world which hinged on the struggle and attraction of two genders and the theme of eros-nosos (‘love-sickness’) fueled by the sweeping strength of Tsvetaeva’s immediate personal experience. ‘In the creation of a contemporary work on a mythological theme’, wrote Tomas Venclova in his discussion of Russian mythological tragedy, a double transition takes place: from the language of myth into the language of art and from the language of an ancient (classical or other) culture into the language of modern culture. It is rather difficult in practice to distinguish these processes.10 Svetlana Boym has emphasized a ‘structure of love’ that organized Tsvetaeva’s writing, and Joseph Brodsky discussed Tsvetaeva’s ‘emotional’ poetic form.11 Both of these characteristics can also be applied to Tsvetaeva’s innovative attitude in her ‘modernization’ of the familiar myths. In 1923 during her first years as an emigrant in Czechoslovakia, Tsvetaeva turned her attention to classical mythology. In the summer of 1923, she started to conceive the dramatic trilogy ‘The Wrath of Aphrodite’, later renamed ‘Theseus.’12 The theme she aimed to explore in the trilogy was the fatal and doomed but true passion of love. According to Tsvetaeva’s original intention, the three plays of the trilogy were supposed to be named after three women whom Theseus loved and lost: Ariadne, Phaedra, and Helen. In a letter to Anna Tesková on November 28, 1927 Tsvetaeva explained the plan for her trilogy: ‘Did you know that all women, once and for all, were the destiny of Theseus – Ariadne (the soul), Antiope (the Amazon), Phaedra (passion), Helen (beauty). . . . So many loves and all of them unhappy.’13 This letter explains to a degree Tsvetaeva’s choice of the Theseus cycle. Tsvetaeva’s uncanny penchant for selecting unavailable and sometimes unworthy lovers was translated into Theseus’ passion for Ariadne, Ariadne’s for Theseus, and Phaedra’s for Hippolytus. In that respect, Tsvetaeva was not much different from her ancient predecessors at least in Latin poetry, who found the myths about Cretan women especially attractive because of ‘the voicing of feminine passion.’14 Ariadne: ‘abandoned or conceded?’ Ariadna (Ariadne) was intended as the first play of the unfinished trilogy ‘Theseus.’15 The play consists of five scenes (tableaux) that retell the familiar myth about Ariadne’s assistance of Theseus and her subsequent abandonment by him on the island of Naxos. The play opens in the Palace Square at Athens as a herald announced that the customary Athenian sacrifice to

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Minos was due. This scene is followed by a scene of encounter between Minos and Ariadne, in which the king complains to his daughter:16 A daughter is no son, A daughter, – alas! – a fne substitute! – For a son! A stronghold – for foam Exchanging? In this sea of tears A girl is a foam, a son is a rock. Enter Theseus lamenting his pending un-heroic death because he would have to face the Minotaur unarmed. Ariadne who has fallen in love with a stranger begins convincing him that he needs to take up arms despite his promise. After Ariadne helps Theseus to conquer the Minotaur, she agrees to accompany Theseus to Athens but with heavy premonitions. The scene ends with the somewhat ironic inquiry of Theseus: ‘Maiden, what is your name?’ to which she replied ‘Ariadne.’17 The fourth scene, set on the island of Naxos, opens with Theseus’ monologue over the sleeping Ariadne reflecting on the strength of his passion. His musings are interrupted by a voice declaring that Ariadne is destined for Bacchus and that he [Theseus] must surrender her. This scene presents the core of the tragedy and Tsvetaeva’s poetics is closely tied to it. Before we look closely on that scene, it is important to note that Tsvetaeva’s Ariadne was a much more complex character than her bowdlerized version in Schwab. Her decision to sail with Theseus is burdened with premonitions bordering on divine foresight.18 She even asks Theseus if he is ready to compete with a god for her love: ‘Will you, mere ashes, dare to compete with a god?’19 While this question is prophetic in light of Theseus’ later confrontation with Bacchus, it is also Ariadne’s attempt to explain to Theseus that his earthly love might be powerless to overcome her own connection with the divine (first Aphrodite and then Bacchus). Since her only meaningful earthly relationship with Minos was one of insecurity and uncertainty because he longed for a son, she anticipates Theseus’ weakness in the realm of emotions as well. While Ariadne, for the most part, fulfills the expectation of the traditional demure female (at least in comparison with her sister Phaedra), she also understands the consequences of her choice when she decides to follow Theseus away from her homeland. Not yet fully developed into a tragic heroine (as Phaedra would be) she nonetheless reflects Tsvetaeva’s main preoccupation in the trilogy: unhappy love. It is, however, the agōn between Bacchus and Theseus that recalls ancient tragedy most strikingly and forms the culmination of the play. It seems appropriate at this point to survey briefly which ancient sources contributed to Tsvetaeva’s version of the story. At the center of this inquiry is Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne since this seems to be of pivotal interest for Tsvetaeva’s dramatic action and ‘modernization’ of the play.20 The most famous recounting of Ariadne’s abandonment is Catullus 64.52–75,

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where the ecphrasis on the coverlet for the marriage bed of Peleus and Thetis depicted Ariadne engulfed in rage and grief, cursing Theseus as she watched his sail disappearing at sea.21 The entry in the Oxford Classical Dictionary has based an assumption of magically induced forgetfulness by Theseus on a fragment from Theocritus.22 Neither of these versions, however, contributed much to Schwab’s. Rather, it was the less familiar rendering of Diodorus Siculus that provided most of Schwab’s version of the story.23 Schwab borrowed from Siculus the episode of the dream in which Bacchus appeared to Theseus and scared him into abandoning Ariadne. In that version, fear was the primary reason for Theseus’ treacherous conduct, which even Schwab acknowledged to be lacking in heroic honor.24 Tsvetaeva, however, altered significantly the confrontation between Bacchus and Theseus over the body of the sleeping Ariadne and turned it into the agōn at the core of the tragic conflict. The agōn between god and mortal was as much a struggle between two rival lovers as it was a matter of general and social import. Tsvetaeva explicated the confrontation between Bacchus and Theseus in the outline in her notebook from November 1923 as follows: Dialogue between Dionysus and Theseus. To understand Dionysus: does he want merely Ariadne or immortality for her? Who is more magnanimous: Theseus or the god? Dialogue over her sleeping. Theseus’ doubts: but maybe earth is worth the sky? – Yes, especially when these cheeks become earth! I cannot become a man, you become a god. (I cannot become less, you become – more!).25 These preliminary notes found their refection in more detail in the culminating scene with one added feature refected in the fnal line of her notes of August 1924: It is nothing to slay the Minotaur, but there is a monster most horrible: your own greedy heart: slay that!26 The fnal version of the confrontation settled for this interpretation of Theseus’ act of abandonment. Theseus, unlike his ancient counterparts, is at frst reluctant to give Ariadne up and is fearless when faced with the divine presence. Furthermore, he juxtaposes the intensity of his mortal passion to the ephemeral promise of the god’s affection:27 Theseus: She will never get past My avid desire! Bacchus: My Ariadne Will have new feelings . . .

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Theseus: A woman who has known a man at her side Will never desire a god! Bacchus: My Ariadne Will have a new sense of touch. Although Theseus’ arguments sound persuasive, Bacchus prevails not because his love for Ariadne proves to be stronger, but because Theseus comes to realize that he could not give Ariadne one thing Bacchus could: immortality.28 Theseus: This is not within a man’s limits! Greater than human strength Is this feat! Bacchus: So become a deity. The metrics of this exchange are highly curt, and the remarks of both protagonists have a staccato rhythm, increasing the intensity of their confrontation. The undercurrent of antagonism in this agōn might be patterned after Euripides’ Bacchae, especially the confrontation between King Pentheus and the captive Dionysus, which also forms the turning point of that play.29 Both agones are concerned with the theme of initiation into the divine. Like Tsvetaeva’s Theseus, Pentheus challenged Dionysus’ assumption of supremacy over his own position as a king of Thebes. Like Tsvetaeva’s Bacchus to Theseus, Dionysus offered advice to young Pentheus: Dionysus: If I were you, I would offer him [Dionysus] a sacrifce, not rage and kick against necessity, a man defying god. (Euripides, Bacchae 793–6, tr. Arrowsmith) Here too the juxtaposition between human powers and divine necessity is represented explicitly, as it is in Tsvetaeva’s dialogue between the man and the god. Like Pentheus, Tsvetaeva’s Theseus is initially a skeptical challenger of the god. But unlike Pentheus, who rashly refused to follow the advice of Bacchus and brought upon himself a gruesome demise, Theseus in the end acknowledges his powerlessness and his hybris in face of the divine and admits the fleeting nature of the happiness he could offer to Ariadne. Although Theseus starts off in the play as a hero embarking on a concrete and earthly adventure, a savior of the Athenian youths and maidens, after his encounter with Bacchus he begins to see beyond the trappings of mortal

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glory. The abandonment of Ariadne, which was represented in most versions of the legend as an act of betrayal (to some degree even in Schwab, Tsvetaeva’s alleged source), becomes in Tsvetaeva’s rendering a heroic endeavor, a rational and even selfless choice signifying the maturity of the hero. Theseus’ subsequent forgetfulness and complicity in the death of his own father are explained as the result of his grief over the loss of Ariadne rather than as another moral failure to fulfill his promises. The most astonishing feature of Tsvetaeva’s tragic plot in Ariadne, however, is the absence of Ariadne’s voice after her abandonment. While Catullus allows a central figure in the ecphrasis of his poem to express her rage in bitter words, Tsvetaeva decides her fate in the play through the debate of two male protagonists over her sleeping body. It was only in the lyric cycle Ariadne, written in 1923 (before the play was finished) and included in her 1928 collection After Russia (Posle Rossii) that Ariadne receives the right of final complaint so conspicuously missing in the play:30 To be abandoned – is to be with a blue tattoo Of sailors etched right into the chest! To be abandoned is to be thrown To the seven seas . . . Isn’t it to be the ninth Wave that sweeps you off the deck? To be surrendered is to be bought Expensively: nights, nights, and nights Of mind’s ecstasy! O, to blow the trumpets – To be conceded! It’s to be continued and to be renowned Like the lips and the trumpets of oracles. In these lines, Ariadne compared her pain to that of engraving a tattoo on a chest, which would also leave an unsightly, indelible mark. At the same time, she still could not decide whether she had been ‘abandoned’ (‘ostavlennoi’) or ‘conceded’ (‘ustuplennoi’). While these two stanzas are merely a lament of the embittered Ariadne who does not explicitly blame Theseus, the last stanza of the poem, which was omitted from the fnal publication, suggests that Tsvetaeva might have been familiar with the Catullan version of Ariadne’s abandonment (Catullus 64.52–163).31 In Catullus’ poem, Theseus was not justifed in forsaking Ariadne. The beautiful cover on the marriage bed of Peleus and Thetis represents in detail Ariadne’s agony after Theseus had left her on the island of Naxos, where Bacchus would come to her. Catullus’ description, however, was mostly concerned with Ariadne’s state of mind, and the deeds of Theseus were understood only from her point of view. She was seduced only to be abandoned. She looked toward the horizon where the diminishing sail of Theseus’ ship could still be seen. Theseus’ disregard for Ariadne and her plight was punished with his father’s suicide, for in his oblivion of her Theseus also forgot to exchange the black sails

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of mourning for the white ones announcing the happy news of his return (Catullus 64.247–8): Morte ferox Theseus, qualem Minoidi luctum Obtulerat mente immemori, talem ipse recepit. Theseus ferocious with death, the same sorrow that he brought to the daughter of Minos because of his forgetful mind, the same sorrow he himself received. Tsvetaeva’s last stanza of the poem (but not the tragedy) is replete with the same sense of bitterness:32 O Theseus! You abandoned her. O Theseus, like a thief, You left both the lips, and the teeth, and the beads . . . (You prostrated your lover to Bacchus’ orders!) – Resound then, immortal disgrace of Theseus, the immortal coward. Catullus’ Ariadne addressed Theseus as ‘perfde’ (‘a traitor’ – 64.132) and ‘immemor’ (‘forgetful’ – 64.135) while she recounted how she had rescued him from the Minotaur and the maze of the Labyrinth. In Catullus’ rendition, the blame lay solely with him, while Ariadne was portrayed as a victim (still lovely in her disarray and anguish) of his treachery, who cursed Theseus even as the procession of the Bacchants was heard from afar, coming to claim her as their god’s bride. The second poem of Tsvetaeva’s Ariadne cycle continues to depict the maiden in despair, but the physical imagery changes to figures from nature.33 The preliminary title that Tsvetaeva herself gave the poem in her letter to Boris Pasternak was ‘Antifon.’34 This title, not retained in the final edition, might indicate that Tsvetaeva wrote this poem having in mind alternating lines for a chorus, each expressing an opinion about the events transpiring. ‘Oh, with all the voices of shells You have sung for her . . .’ ‘With every blade of grass.’ ‘She languished for Bacchus’ caress.’ ‘She yearned for the poppies of Lethe . . .’ ‘No matter how salty the taste of the sea He was rushing on . . .’ ‘The walls were falling.’ ‘And she tore out her curls in full Handfuls . . .’ ‘They fell into the foam.’35 This poem shows that while writing her lyric cycle Tsvetaeva was already thinking in the form of the tragedies, which would follow the cycle.

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In the tragedy, however, Tsvetaeva deprives Ariadne of any rage, despair, and curses originally granted to the heroine of her lyric cycle. Furthermore, the chorus of Athenian youths and maidens who accompanied Theseus on his journey is not given any lines to comment on the most important event of the play. Like Ariadne, the chorus is muted. The reasons for this might be connected (but not completely equated) with several aspects of Tsvetaeva’s biography and one of the core themes of her poetics. It has been pointed out that Ariadne was influenced to a certain degree by the end of Tsvetaeva’s affair with the ‘unworthy’ and unreceptive, by most accounts, Konstantin Rodzevich.36 Other critics suggested that the planning of the trilogy and the beginning of Ariadne chronologically overlapped with the writing of the poems occasioned by the departure from Berlin of Boris Pasternak, with whom Tsvetaeva had maintained a long and passionate correspondence in the preceding years.37 Tsvetaeva may have projected both romantic disappointments into Ariadne’s lack of choice over her destiny. The elevation of Theseus to tragic status also illustrates Tsvetaeva’s idealization of the male protagonist, who despite his despicable conduct was still portrayed as a hero torn between passion and fate. Theseus, standing at the center of Tsvetaeva’s exploration of female characters in the trilogy, lost his ‘soul’ (Ariadne) as he came of age in pursuit of his heroic fate. The binary opposition between male and female is decided in the first play of the trilogy in favor of the male protagonist: he is given the choice, while she is assigned a silent role. Although Ariadne is Aphrodite’s favorite, she is undone by her desire for an ordinary woman’s fate: a husband and children. When she was given the voice to articulate her feelings (as late in the play as the third tableau), she argues powerfully that she could not follow Theseus because that would lead to unhappiness for both of them. But her strong argumentation is interrupted by the chorus of Athenian youths and maidens saved by Theseus from the Minotaur; one stanza counters all of Ariadne’s good reasoning and explains her fatal choice and her later muteness in the play:38 Set the sails, Helmsman! Southward! The sin is atoned! The stone is lifted! I will be a sweetheart And a wife And I will rock my children to sleep! Ariadne’s resistance to Theseus vanishes as she contemplates that ordinary happiness and decides against her best judgment to follow Theseus. Her voice to regret that decision later in the play is taken away because the reader sees Ariadne no longer as a powerful princess but a girl of marriageable age longing for progeny. Ariadne’s successor in Theseus’ affections,

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Phaedra, would receive that completed dimension of a tragic heroine able to voice her passion and her sorrow in her own right. Phaedra: speaking up Tsvetaeva’s Phaedra (Fedra), the second play of the trilogy, must be considered a continuation of the lyrical cycle written in March of 1923 and also entitled Phaedra. Tsvetaeva’s feelings for Boris Pasternak and her inability to see him in Berlin must again have contributed to the main theme of first the lyric cycle and then the tragedy: the emotions of unresolved passion and longing.39 The first poem of the cycle entitled ‘Zhaloba’ (‘Complaint’) opens with a play on Hippolytus’ name, which rhymes in Russian text with the word ‘bolit’ (‘it hurts’): ‘Ippolit! Ippolit! Bolit!’40 The whole poem is a description of the physical pain inflicted on Phaedra by her passion for her stepson. Here the description of Phaedra’s love has familiar Euripidean overtones of eros-nosos (‘love-sickness’) complete with fever and outright physical pain. Phaedra addresses Hippolytus as ‘son and stepson’, emphasizing his youth and her dominant role in the passion and the poem. In this poem (unlike the tragedy of the same name) Phaedra’s love is seen not as a choice of the beloved but almost as a natural force (compared to the destruction of Herculaneum), a fate inflicted by vengeful gods. The second poem of the cycle, ‘Poslanie’ (‘A Letter’), written in the form of letter from Phaedra to Hippolytus, continues the theme of unrequited passion and can be interpreted as a send-off of her fellow poet, Boris Pasternak. The connection between physical desire and the longing of the soul is especially striking in this poem:41 Quench my soul! (it’s impossible without touching the lips To quench our soul!) it’s impossible, pressing against the lips, Not to touch the Psyche, the futtering guest of lips . . . Quench my soul: thus, quench my lips. The spiritual consummation of love becomes intertwined with physical consummation. The poem is permeated by the sexuality of longing. Hippolytus, however, is again described as the beloved, not the lover, a passive recipient of Phaedra’s devouring emotions (‘voracious Phaedra’ – ‘nenasytnaia Fedra’ – she calls herself in the last line of the poem). In the frst stanza, he is described as ‘capricious boy, whose beauty, . . . fees Phaedra’ (‘prikhotlivomu mal’chiku, ch’ia krasota . . . ot Fedry bezhit’). In the fourth stanza, he is called ‘virgin, youth, rider, and hater of pleasures’ (‘devstvennik! otrok! naezdnik! neg | nenavistnik’), while Phaedra is at pains to fnd a defnition for herself. She calls herself frst a Mother, then Phaedra, and then the Queen. That stark contrast between the appellations of Hippolytus and Phaedra draws attention to the inequality of their feeling. She also identifes herself as a rider (‘ia naezdnitsa tozhe’).42 That detail, in my opinion, shows

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that Tsvetaeva was a careful reader of Euripides. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, the love-sick Phaedra searches for the space where her union with Hippolytus would be natural and fnds the possibility of their union in the wilderness, where Hippolytus pursues his passion for Artemis (Hipp. 208–38). Tsvetaeva’s Phaedra, like Euripides’ heroine, wants to become an Amazon, the only type of woman Hippolytus, named after his mother the Amazon Hippolyta (whom Tsvetaeva equates with Antiope), does not despise.43 All these themes of the lyric cycle Phaedra were to resonate through the second play of the ‘Theseus’ trilogy. Tsvetaeva’s tragedy Phaedra consists of four scenes and has far fewer characters than Ariadne: Phaedra, Hippolytus, Theseus, the Nurse, and the Servant. The action of the play is set in Troezen, where Theseus had brought his young wife Phaedra to visit his adult son Hippolytus (Ippolit).44 The play opens with a long chorus of Hippolytus’ huntsmen friends who praise their patron Artemis, reject marriage as a pitiable lot, and describe Hippolytus as an outstanding hunter and marksman who shunned all female company. The chorus of huntsmen echoes both Hippolytus’ first entrance in Euripides’ Hippolytus and his misogynistic monologue later in the play (Hipp. 58–113, 616–68).45 In his first appearance, Hippolytus emphasizes his vow of chastity as he sings his hymn to Artemis; in the second he condemns ‘woman’s wickedness’ and declares in a somewhat exaggerated manner his hatred for the whole female sex. The monologue of Tsvetaeva’s Hippolytus, which immediately follows the chorus, is, however, far from the self-assured and slightly arrogant Euripidean version. He describes his dream of ill omen in which his dead mother appears to him wounded. Hippolytus is troubled by the dream and his friends try to offer him consolation. His loyal Servant, however, becomes apprehensive, warning Hippolytus that ‘a mother does not rise from her grave in vain’ (‘mat’ iz groba ne vstanet darom’).46 At that point, Phaedra appears and the two of them reveal their identities, he as a worshipper of Artemis, she as a servant of Aphrodite. The divine juxtaposition familiar from Euripides is thus established. As Phaedra becomes sick with love (‘this unknown foreign illness’),47 the Nurse, living vicariously through Phaedra’s passion, insists that it must be consummated. The physical imagery in the speech of the unlovable old Nurse is striking in its stark description of sexual desire.48 To prove her point that love should be more powerful than any other loyalty, she even somewhat illogically invokes the fate of all of Phaedra’s ill-fated female relatives: Pasiphae and Ariadne.49 The same recounting of Phaedra’s female relatives’ ill-fated love appeared in Euripides’ play in the form of a dialogue between Phaedra and the Nurse where the forbidden passion is emphasized as a hereditary curse (Hipp. 337–44). For Euripides (and later for Seneca), Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus was as much a perversion as her mother’s mating with the bull. Tsvetaeva’s Nurse, however, uses the reference to, in fact, advance her argument as she prepares to approach the misogynistic Hippolytus. Tsvetaeva completely excises the idea of ‘unnatural’ and incestuous

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passion (of which Phaedra was not really guilty, strictly speaking); her love is depicted as the longing of a young woman for a young man who could also fulfill her yearning for offspring. The third scene, ‘Priznanie’ (‘The Confession’), is set in Hippolytus’ lair and presents Hippolytus’ ruminations about his mother Hippolyta who died defending Athens from an attack by her own Amazons.50 It is clear from Tsvetaeva’s notes to the play that she was initially indecisive about whether to make Hippolytus’ Amazon mother a happy wife of Theseus or his enemy. She settled on the latter and intended to use the fate of Hippolyta (who is blurred with her sister Antiope) as the means to justify Hippolytus’ own behavior in the play: The image of Hippolyta as a woman who did not love her husband and who fought for her son is more valuable. Hippolyta, to the end, was entirely within the female kingdom. Theseus, to the end, was an enemy for her. Hippolyta did not love anyone except her son. Just the same ([concerning] relations with women) is Hippolytus.51 Biographical influences notwithstanding (Tsvetaeva’s obsessive attachment to her only male child and her own mother’s preference for the male off-spring), the figure of the Amazon, so central to Tsvetaeva’s poetic mythology in general, acquires an additional dimension in the play.52 Hippolyta in the Servant’s recollection has been caught in the conflict between her identity as a warrior and her duty as a mother, both roles emphasized by differences between her breasts – one severed (‘skudomiasaia’) and the other nourishing her child.53 Furthermore, the Servant’s reminiscences of Hippolytus’ mother’s selfless maternal love and sacrifice prompt Hippolytus to reflect sadly on his own childless state (doubts that were unknown to his Greek predecessor): ‘I will die childless, it is not the first time I lament that’ (‘Umru bezdetnym, | Ne vpervye o tom skorbliu’).54 However, his wish for progeny does not neutralize his expressions of hatred for all womankind and is akin to his ancient counterpart’s diatribe against women. Just as Hippolytus is expounding on his hatred of women, the Nurse enters carrying a secret tablet with Phaedra’s confession of love and followed by Phaedra herself. In his shock and confusion, Hippolytus believes at first that he is feverish and hallucinating, only to be offered a confession of Phaedra’s passion for him, asking him to accept her love not as a momentary whim but as an eternal devotion. She even hints at the possibility of committing suicide together and finding union in death, thus eerily anticipating the end of the play. As he, stunned but silent, listens to her shocking plea, she finishes it with: ‘Just a word! Just one word!’ (‘Slovo! Slovo odno lish!’) to which he replies: ‘Vermin!’(‘Gadina!’).55 It remains an open question whether Tsvetaeva was aware of the first version of Euripides’ Hippolytus in which Phaedra made her proposal of love directly to her stepson and which Euripides had to revise, because the

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play outraged the audience by ‘the shamelessness of its Phaedra who openly declared her guilty passion to Hippolytus, and when rebuffed, just as brazenly confronted her husband face to face and herself accused Hippolytus of sexual assault.’56 If Tsvetaeva was aware of Euripides’ early version of the play, she clearly embraced it because she was interested in the ultimate manifestation of Phaedra’s unruly nature: her confession of love to Hippolytus. Tsvetaeva would hardly have found the brazen slander of Hippolytus by Phaedra attractive or advantageous to her own poetic agenda since she was developing her Phaedra as a tragic victim of unrequited love, not as a duplicitous female character in the image of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra. Tsvetaeva’s decision to give her Phaedra the power of voice, which she had denied to her Ariadne, was central to Tsvetaeva’s interest in Phaedra’s own articulation of love. It has been pointed out that one of Tsvetaeva’s main interests in both plays was the problem of feminine voice and speech.57 Nancy Rabinowitz in her analysis of Euripides’ play argued that ‘Hippolytus empowers men and reaffirms their authority; . . . the female emerges as carnal, her language and activity curtailed.’58 We see that Tsvetaeva’s Ariadne, due mostly to her gender, is also deprived altogether of the most decisive speech in the tragedy that bore her name, and is allowed to express only doubt. While Tsvetaeva allowed her Phaedra to speak, she at the same time seems to suggest ‘that despite its truth, feminine speech and writing were rejected or fatally misunderstood.’59 Hippolytus never reads the letter from Phaedra brought by the Nurse, and only at the end of the play that letter is read and understood by Theseus the way Phaedra intended it to be understood by Hippolytus. While Phaedra’s letter in Euripides’ Hippolytus was a weapon of deception and slander, in Tsvetaeva’s play it was a baring of the loving heart, a disarmament without any intent for vengeance. She takes Hippolytus’ rejection and curse to her grave stoically and, like Ariadne, without a word of reprimand. It is evident from the letter to Anna Tesková cited earlier that while Tsvetaeva saw Ariadne as an embodiment of soul, she saw Phaedra as an embodiment of passion who thus must be given a full voice to express it. Hippolytus’ underwhelming and self-righteous response in the play must be interpreted therefore not as a sign of loyalty to his father or an exercise in self-restraint, but as an inability and perhaps fear to match Phaedra’s strength and recklessness to sacrifice everything for love. In the fourth and last scene, it is the Nurse who accuses Hippolytus of inappropriate conduct and makes Theseus, invoking his father Poseidon, to curse Hippolytus. The chorus of Phaedra’s female friends laments her death and Hippolytus’ sense of loyalty but sides with Phaedra:60 ‘Passion is my right!’ ‘Loyalty is my armor!’ Glory to the stepmother, To her stepson – ridicule!

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However, when Theseus discovers the remains of Phaedra’s tablet that saves Hippolytus’ reputation (rather than destroys it like in Euripides), he prompts the Nurse to reveal the truth and blames Aphrodite’s old hatred for him on account of his abandonment of Ariadne. Tsvetaeva thus eliminates Phaedra’s traditional guilt in Hippolytus’ demise. In an unexpected fnal twist, Theseus orders Hippolytus and Phaedra to be buried together under a myrtle tree in the unity of fnal unearthly love:61 Theseus: There, where the myrtle rustles, full of her groaning, Raise to them a single doubled mound. And so there let cover – peace to them, poor ones! – Phaedra’s bone – the bone of Hippolytus. This posthumous consummation of love is another revealing feature in Tsvetaeva’s treatment of the myth. The semi-happy conclusion itself was borrowed from Schwab’s version, aiming to provide some brightness in the generally hopeless situation. Tsvetaeva, however, turned Schwab’s naïve and contrived optimism into an eternal and natural union after death. One noteworthy detail of the fnal line is that ‘Phaedra’s bones’ (‘kost’ Fedrina’) are the subject of the sentence whereas ‘Hippolytus’ bones’ (‘Ippolitovu kost’’) are the direct object. Thus even beyond the grave Phaedra remains the active agent of love and Hippolytus the recipient of her passion. Furthermore, Tsvetaeva was also much more attentive to the details of Phaedra’s death than Schwab; she selected the myrtle tree, sacred to Aphrodite, as Phaedra’s chosen tool of suicide. Tsvetaeva herself explained that choice: ‘I would like to depict Phaedra as an incarnate myrtle, to twine her all around a myrtle sapling.’62 By choosing Aphrodite’s tree, Phaedra insisted on her right to passion and confrmed it even in her fnal act. The connection between sexuality and its articulation sets Tsvetaeva’s Phaedra apart from her ancient predecessor; Phaedra becomes ‘a woman-poet in a world traditionally dominated by men.’63 Phaedra’s ability to voice her passion and pain is translated by Tsvetaeva into misunderstood and unfulfilled artistic potential.64 Through Phaedra, Tsvetaeva attacked the world of mere appearance and lamented a willful, unrestrained, and at times excessively emotional heroine’s preclusion from creative productivity. Phaedra’s failed love for Hippolytus translated into her failure in any self-expression, whether her own impossible maternity or her misread and misheard words. Despite Tsvetaeva’s self-proclaimed ignorance of the classics, this ‘modernized’ version of Euripides’ play is in some aspects more ‘classical’ than any of its Russian predecessors. In her choice of Phaedra’s method of death, Tsvetaeva remained faithful to the ancient sources and turned away from Racine’s suicide through poison back to Euripides’ hanging, the exclusively feminine means of suicide in classical antiquity.65 The play is also remarkable in following Aristotelian concepts of tragedy closely: the observation

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of the unity of time; the emphasis on the tragic flaw of the heroine brought down by necessity that was beyond her control; the feelings of pity and fear – the two required conditions of the tragic katharsis. However, the most important aspect of Tsvetaeva’s modifications of the traditional myth reflected her own position as a woman in juxtaposition to her male predecessors.66 Antonina Gove rightly observed that a recurrent strain in the development of Tsvetaeva’s lyric verse was ‘a rejection by the poet of the conventional roles imposed on the individual by society, particularly certain characteristics of the feminine role.’67 The outrageous in the eyes of the Greek audience detail that forced Euripides to change the original plot of his Hippolytus became for Tsvetaeva the forbidden but inevitably chosen fruit: the emotional intensity of the female protagonist. Tsvetaeva, if anything, wanted to escape the ghosts of predictable female discourse and resisted her enforced literary identity as a ‘woman-poet’ while embracing the femininity of her tragic heroines.68 For Tsvetaeva, the main concern in Phaedra was one of female sexuality and the right to articulate it.69 In Euripides’ play, Phaedra’s love was not only an inherited curse but also an eros-nosos (‘love-sickness’, and eventually a cause of dishonorable behavior). Although Tsvetaeva’s Phaedra was still a victim of mortal and uncontrollable disease, she was at the same time a sympathetic character whose love lacked the treachery and deceit of her ancient counterpart. Phaedra’s only guilt was succumbing to and voicing her passion in a way that was socially inappropriate for a woman. Ariadne’s silence in the first drama of the trilogy followed the expectations of the social norm: men wooed or disparaged and rejected her and decided her fate. Phaedra was granted the self-affirmation denied to her sister, and because of that she found in the play virtually no equal in range and power. Although in Ariadne Theseus is as much the focus of the play as the title character, in Phaedra he is marginalized, while the female heroine is brought to the forefront. Tsvetaeva was indeed much more interested in the fate of Theseus’ women than she was in the hero of her planned trilogy ‘Theseus.’ However, it would trivialize Tsvetaeva’s place in the Russian poetic landscape to see her merely as a woman-poet describing female emotions in her poetry. Joseph Brodsky, when asked if ‘women’s poetry (‘zhenskaia poeziia’) is something specific,’ aptly answered that ‘you can’t apply adjectives to poetry.’70 It is hard not to agree with Anya Kroth, who described Tsvetaeva’s poetic vision as ‘dichotomous’, infused with the notion of androgyny, ‘sexlessness of the soul’, a desire that must transcend cultural sexual stereotypes.71 Furthermore, an interpretation of Tsvetaeva’s poetry must move carefully between literature and biography. It is possible to assume that the circumstances of writing the classical plays (Tsvetaeva’s expatriation and the loss of her native literary milieu) found reflection in Tsvetaeva’s exploration of both the feminine voice and words in tragedy and the heroines’ alienation from and rejection by their male counterparts. Although Tsvetaeva did not write

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explicitly about exile, the experience of it marked all the poetry she wrote abroad.72 In Phaedra, exile is metaphorically explored in Phaedra’s sense of loneliness, isolation, and confusion. A feeling of despair haunts Tsvetaeva’s experimentation with the language of this play, despair familiar to a poet physically removed from the space that resounds with her native tongue, the space she tries to recreate in her poetry. It is perhaps because of the difficult diction of both plays, but especially of Phaedra that they did not win Tsvetaeva any acclaim. Tsvetaeva’s classical plays have not been treated kindly by either contemporary or later critics of her poetry.73 Tomas Venclova went so far as to call Phaedra a ‘chaotic and anarchic work.’74 There is no doubt that even for a native speaker of Russian these plays present a difficult reading challenge with their tangle of language, unusual meter, and often inexplicable choice of words. The impossibility of staging Tsvetaeva’s plays stems from the difficult diction as well. Tsvetaeva remained unwavering in her rejection of theater as a medium for her dramas. Phaedra as well as Ariadne should be seen as a continuation of Tsvetaeva’s lyric voice and even to some degree, as stated earlier, a reflection of her emotional life. In penning the end of Phaedra, Tsvetaeva gave herself an ‘archetypal’ script for suicide that she could carry out more than a decade later in the despair of her exiled life in Elabuga. Helen, the last play of the intended trilogy, was never written for reasons that remain unknown. It is possible that for Tsvetaeva Phaedra represented the pinnacle of experimentation with classical drama and thus, after writing it, she abandoned the form of mythological tragedy altogether.75 It is also possible that the lack of support and critical acclaim for her tragedies led Tsvetaeva, motivated by more practical considerations, to take a new direction in her poetry that would enable her to fare better with the critics and publishing venues.

Anna Akhmatova: Dido Speaks Anna Akhmatova’s use of classical material is very rare, barely present in her poetry. That is why it is rather telling that one of the few times when she actually turns to classical mythology, she tends to explore the same themes Marina Tsvetaeva had addressed in her mythological tragedies almost four decades later. Anna Akhmatova’s 1962 lyric cycle ‘Shipovnik rastet’ (‘Wild-rose is growing’) explores themes that are traditional for Akhmatova’s poetics: the appearance of a mysterious guest from far-away land, love, betrayal, abandonment, separation. Just as in Tsvetaeva’s case, the exploration of her poetics is usually linked with the details of her biography. The whole cycle was most likely inspired by Akhmatova’s relationship with Isaiah Berlin, her meetings with him in 1945–1946 and the later ‘non-meeting’ ten years later, in 1956, in Moscow, when he came to visit from Berlin. The fourteenth poem of that cycle was published in 1962 under the title ‘Govorit Didona’ (‘Dido Speaks’)

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and it explicitly uses self-identification of Akhmatova with the Carthaginian queen. The poem has two epigraphs: one is taken from the Aeneid 6.460 – ‘Protiv voli ia tvoi, tsaritsa, bereg pokinul [Invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi – ‘I left your shore, queen, against my will’],76 and another is by Akhmatova herself ‘Romeo ne bylo, Enei, konechno byl’ (‘Romeo never was, Aeneas was for sure’), which reflects the emotional and gender specific message of the poem and the lyric cycle overall: men do not die for love, rather they leave women who love them. The earlier draft of the poem had another epigraph from the Aeneid 4.9, Anna, soror!, which had a double meaning: as an appeal of Dido to her sister, and as Akhmatova’s own appeal to herself in the past while she reminisces about her separation from Berlin:77 Do not be scared, – I can with even more likeness Depict us right now, Although you either are a ghost or a passerby, I, for some reason, keep your shadow. You were not my Aeneas for long, – Back then I got away with bonfre only. We can keep silent about each other. And you have forgotten my cursed house. You have forgotten those hands, Stretched to you in horror and agony, And the damned hope you have forgotten too. You do not know, what have been forgiven . . . Rome is built, the herds of feet are passing, And the fattery glorifes victory. The gender perspective in this poem is remarkably clear: Akhmatova’s poem is an articulation of Dido’s anguish over her abandonment and Aeneas is only behind the scene, her unaware addressee. In Akhmatova, the bonfre is not Dido’s fnal moment; it is in fact a mild punishment for the forbidden passion (‘I got away with bonfre only’).78 She clings to Aeneas’ ghost and her memory of him, while he is presumed to have forgotten everything, even her agony on the pyre. But furthermore, the poem ends on the note of forgiveness still mixed with lingering attachment, certainly unimaginable for the Virgilian Dido, who categorically declares the end of love and initiation of interminable hostility for centuries to come (nullus amor populis nec foedera sunto – ‘let there be neither any love nor truce between our people’ – Aen. 4.624). Akhmatova’s Dido sees her house ‘cursed’ and her hope ‘damned’, but she does not curse or damn the beloved who betrayed her. And the last stanza explains why: Rome is built, the great feet is sailing by, and the air resounds with glory of the man’s achievement. The tragedy of love gone awry brings about the foundation and development of Rome’s

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imperial power. The high price for it was paid by a woman who is destined to fade into obscurity and insignifcance.

Notes 1 Tsvetaeva (1979, 11). The ‘Amazon’ addressee of the work was the American expatriate, Natalie Barney who was also the addressee of Rémy de Gourmont’s widely known collection Lettres à l’Amazone. See Perkins and Cook (1993). Unless otherwise stated, all the translations in this chapter are mine. 2 The only existing translation into English of Tsvetaeva’s classical plays was done by Maria Fox and myself. I quote the translations from that edition. See bibliography Torlone and Fox (2012). 3 A discussion of other classical motifs in Tsvetaeva’s poetry of that period (Sibyl, Eurydice, Orpheus, Psyche) remains beyond the scope of this study, which is focused entirely on Tsvetaeva’s treatment of the myth of Theseus. For comprehensive and detailed discussions of other mythological themes, see Hasty (1996) and Ruutu (2006). 4 Tsvetaeva (1988, 342). 5 Tsvetaeva (1988, 360). 6 See Venclova (1985, 100) and Karlinsky (1986, 181–2). Tsvetaeva cited Schwab as her source in the letter to Iurii Ivask dated April 4, 1933. In the same letter she added: ‘I was never under anyone’s influence. I began with writing, not with reading poets.’ Another source identified by Tsvetaeva herself was Heinrich Stoll’s Die Sagen der klassischen Altertums (1862). See Tsvetaeva’s letter to Rainer Maria Rilke of August 22, 1926 in Tsvetaeva (1994–5, 7: 73). 7 Tsvetaeva (1971, 23). For a more detailed account of Ivan Tsvetaev’s academic career, see Frolov (1999, 202–4). 8 Bakhrakh (1960–61; 1960, 299–318, 1961, 322, 337). 9 Fox (2001, 32). 10 Venclova (1985, 89). 11 Boym (1991, 200). Brodsky (1986, 195–267) in ‘Footnote to a Poem.’ 12 See Sumerkin’s commentary in Tsvetaeva (1980), vol. 5 (1990, 469). He noted that Tsvetaeva decided to change the title for the trilogy in October 1924. 13 Cited and translated in Karlinsky (1986, 182). 14 See Armstrong (2006, 12). 15 The play was originally called Theseus but later renamed Ariadne to avoid confusion with the whole trilogy. It was completed in 1924 and published in 1927. 16 Torlone and Fox (2012, 34). 17 Torlone and Fox (2012, 69). 18 Lafoy (1981, 112) duly noted that Ariadne has often been considered an embodiment of Aphrodite, which also explains her reliance on and connection to Aphrodite as her mother figure and her protectress in the play. 19 Torlone and Fox (2012, 63). 20 The story of Theseus and Ariadne appeared in many ancient sources starting with Homer’s Odyssey and ending with Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses. For a detailed account of them, see Lafoy (1981) and Armstrong (2006). 21 In Heroides 10, Ovid transformed Ariadne’s indignant speech in Catullus’ ecphrasis into a letter. Although Ovid’s Heroides might have been one of the sources for Ariadne’s lament by Tsvetaeva, Ovid had also written it with Catullus in mind. See Armstrong (2006, 222). 22 See OCD, Ariadne, 106. 23 Diodorus Siculus, 4.61.5; 5.51.4.

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24 Tsvetaeva also intended originally to use fear of the god as the reason for the Theseus’ betrayal but then changed her mind, according to Makin (1993, 277), under the influence of the end of her love affair with Konstantin Rodzevich. 25 Tsvetaeva (1997, 265). 26 Tsvetaeva (1997, 299). See Ruutu (2006, 112) for a more detailed discussion of Tsvetaeva’s notes to the play. 27 Torlone and Fox (2012, 84–5; emphasis in Tsvetaeva’s original). 28 Torlone and Fox (2012, 88–9). 29 Venclova (1985, 103) suggested the general similarity to the dialogues in the Bacchae. 30 Tsvetaeva (1980, 3: 64). 31 Ruutu (2006, 85–6) mentioned Ovid, Schwab, and Stoll as Tsvetaeva’s sources for the abandonment of Ariadne. As for Tsvetaeva’s Russian predecessors in the story of the abandoned maiden, Valerii Briusov treated the theme similarly in his two-poem cycle written in 1918 and also called ‘Ariadne’ (Briusov [1973–75, 3: 27–9]). On the parallels between Tsvetaeva and Brisuov see Ruutu (2006, 87–9). 32 Tsvetaeva (1980, 3: 451). This stanza is preserved only in the handwritten draft but not in the published version. Tsvetaeva might have excised the final stanza of the first poem in the Ariadne lyric cycle because she later had reconsidered the reason for Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne. 33 Tsvetaeva (1980, 3: 64–5). 34 Tsvetaeva and Pasternak (2004, 81). See also Ruutu (2006, 93). 35 In this line the imagery of sea, which is also pervasive in Catullus’ rendition of Ariadne’s abandonment, especially stands out (Cat. 64.62–67). 36 See Karlinsky (1986, 136–7, 139, 161, 187, 194). 37 The correspondence started in 1922 in Berlin and continued for many years after that, until 1934. See Karlinsky (1986, 134) and Gove (1977, 251). See also Shevelenko (2002, 239), who cautioned against overstating the influence that the ‘non-meeting’ (Tsvetaeva called it ‘nevstrecha’, ‘razminovenie’) with Pasternak had on Tsvetaeva. For a detailed account of Tsvetaeva’s relationship with Pasternak, see Ciepiela (2006). 38 Torlone and Fox (2012, 66–7). 39 Tsvetaeva’s passion for Pasternak was not unrequited, although, in my opinion, judging from their poetry and correspondence, it was more important to her than it was to him. He was, no doubt, one of very few men who was her equal, not frightened by Tsvetaeva’s intensity of feeling. He was, however, considerably more restrained in expressing his feelings. See Schweitzer (1988, 223–4 and esp. 273–85). 40 Tsvetaeva (1980, 3: 54). 41 Tsvetaeva (1980, 3: 55). 42 Tsvetaeva’s emphasis. 43 For the importance of the figure of the Amazon in Tsvetaeva’s poetics, see Forrester (2000), Gove (1977, 247), and Perkins and Cook (1993, 19, n. 2). 44 See OCD, Amazons, 50. 45 There is little doubt that Tsvetaeva was aware of this Euripidean tragedy. Annenskii, Zelinskii, and Merezhkovskii had all translated Hippolytus. These translations appeared between 1902 and 1920, and several of the editions included commentaries. 46 Tsvetaeva (1980, 5: 274). 47 Tsvetaeva (1980, 5: 275). 48 Tsvetaeva (1980, 5: 284–5). 49 Tsvetaeva (1980, 5: 279). 50 Tsvetaeva (1980, 5: 294).

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51 Cited and translated by Makin (1993, 285). 52 For more on the tensions attending Tsvetaeva’s views of gender and sex, see Gove (1977) and Boym (1991, 192–234). 53 Tsvetaeva (1980, 5: 294). 54 Torlone and Fox (2012, 170–1). 55 Torlone and Fox (2012, 182–3). 56 Zeitlin (1985, 52). 57 Fox (2001, 40). 58 Rabinowitz (1986, 127). See also Gill (1990) on the connection between the ‘selfarticulation’ and sōphrosynē (‘moderation’) in the play. 59 Fox (2001, 40). 60 Torlone and Fox (2012, 196–7). 61 Torlone and Fox (2012, 212–13). 62 Cited in Venclova (1985, 106). 63 For Tsvetaeva’s play on the words ‘sounds’ (‘zvuki’) and ‘letters’ (‘bukvy’) as the building block of her depiction of Phaedra as a poet, see Thomson (1989, 346–7). 64 See Boym (1991, 234). 65 Cantarella (1986, 57–78). 66 On women in Russian literature and the Russian cultural tradition, see Heldt (1987). 67 Gove (1977, 231). For the theoretical basis of the perception of ‘female poetry’ (‘zhenskaia poeziia’) in opposition to ‘ladies’ poetry’ (‘damskaia poeziia’), see Shevelenko (2002, 64–74) and Perkins and Cook (1993, 1–22, esp. 14–17), who pointed out that the complexities of the lives and poetry of women poets in Russia ‘challenge Western feminist criticism’ (2). 68 For more on Tsvetaeva’s treatment of gender, see Sandler (Summer 1990). 69 See Thomson (1989, 343). For a more recent discussion of Tsvetaeva’s sympathetic portrayal of a powerful femininity, see Dinega (2001). 70 Volkov (1998, 42). 71 Kroth (December 1979, 563–82). Tsvetaeva also provided her other traditionally passive heroines, Eurydice and Ophelia, with an active role and authoritative voice. See Hasty (1996, xv). 72 Stock (July 2001, 776). 73 See Karlinsky (1986, 184). 74 Venclova (1985, 104). 75 Makin (1993, 294). 76 The English translations are mine. 77 Akhmatova (1989, 421). 78 Akhmatova alludes perhaps here to a decree of 1946 launched by one of the Communist Party leaders and the cultural ideologist under Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov, in which her poetry was condemned as decadent and civically inappropriate.

Works cited Akhmatova, A. 1989. Stikhotvoreniia i poėmi. Leningrad. Armstrong, R. 2006. Cretan Women: Pasiphae, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry. Oxford. Bakhrakh, A. 1960–61. ed. ‘Pis’ma Mariny Tsvetaevoi.’ Mosty 5 (1960, 299–318). Mosty 6 (1961, 319–46). Boym, S. 1991. Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet. New York, NY. Briusov, V. 1973–75. Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], 7 vols. Moscow.

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Brodsky, J. 1986. Less Than One: Selected Essays. New York. Cantarella, M. 1986. ‘Dangling Virgins: Myth, Ritual, and the Place of Women in Ancient Greece.’ In The Female Body in Western Literature. Ed. Susan R. Suleiman. Cambridge, MA, 91–101. Ciepiela, C. 2006. The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva. Ithaca. Dinega, A. 2001. A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva. Madison. Fox, M. S. 2001. The Troubling Play of Gender: The Phaedra Dramas of Tsvetaeva, Yourcenar and H.D. Selingsgrove. Forrester, S. 2000. ‘Daphne’s Tremor: Tsvetaeva and the Feminine in Classical Myth and Statuary.’ Indiana Slavic Studies 11, 367–80. Frolov, E. D. 1999. Russkaia nauka ob antichnosti. St Petersburg. Gill, C. 1990. ‘The Articulation of the Self in Euripides’ Hippolytus.’ In Euripides, Women, and Sexuality, ed. A. Powell. London, 76–107. Gove, A. F. 1977. ‘The Feminine Stereotype and Beyond: Role Conflict and Resolution in the Poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva.’ Slavic Review 36.2, 231–55. Hasty, O. 1996. Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word. Evanston, IL. Heldt, B. 1987. Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature. Bloomington. Karlinsky, S. 1986. Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry. Cambridge. Kroth, A. 1979. ‘Androgyny as an Exemplary Feature in Marina Tsvetaeva’s Dichotomous Poetic Vision.’ Slavic Review 38, 563–82. Lafoy, R. 1981. Ariane: Tragédie de Marina Cvetaeva traduite et commentée. La resurrection d’un mythe grec dans la poésie dramatique russe au XXe siècle. Clermont-Ferrand. Makin, M. 1993. Marina Tsvetaeva: Poetics of Appropriation. Oxford. Perkins, P. and Cook, A. 1993. The Burden of Sufferance: Women Poets of Russia. New York and London. Rabinowitz, N. S. 1986. ‘Female Speech and Female Sexuality: Euripides’ Hippolytus as Model.’ In Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological Approaches to Women in Antiquity. Ed. M. Skinner. A Special Issue of Helios, 127–40. Ruutu, H. 2006. Patterns of Transcendence – Classical Myth in Marina Tsvetaeva’s Poetry of the 1920s. Helsinki: Slavica Helsingiensia 30 (PDF). Sandler, S.1990. ‘Embodied Words: Gender in Tsvetaeva’s Reading of Pushkin.’ Slavic and East European Journal 34.2, 139–57. Schweitzer, V. 1988. Byt’ I Bytie Mariniy Tsvetaevoy. Paris. Shevelenko, I. D. 2002. Literaturnyi Put’ Tsvetaevoi: Ideologiia – poetika – identichnost’ avtora v kontekste epokhi. Moskva. Stock, U. 2001. ‘Marina Tsvetaeva: The Concrete and Metaphoric Discourse of Exile.’ The Modern Language Review 96, 762–77. Thomson, R. D. B. 1989. ‘Tsvetaeva’s Play Fedra: An Interpretation.’ Slavic and East European Journal, 6.3: 337–52. Torlone, Z. and Fox, S. 2012. Soul and Passion: Marina Tsvetaeva’s Classical Plays ‘Ariadne’ and ‘Phaedra’: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Oxford, OH. Tsvetaeva, A. 1971. Vospominaniia. 1st ed. Moscow. ———. 1979 Mon frére feminin: lettre à l’Amazone. Paris. ———. 1980. Stikhotvoreniia i Poemy v Piati Tomakh. [Lyric Poetry and Long Poems in Five Volumes], vol. 1., ed. A. Sumerkin. New York. ———. 1983. Stikhotvoreniia i Poemy v Piati Tomakh. [Lyric Poetry and Long Poems in Five Volumes], vol. 3., ed. A. Sumerkin. New York.

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———. 1988. Teatr. Eds. A. Efron and A. Saakiants. Moscow. ———. 1990. Stikhotvoreniia i Poemy v Piati Tomakh. [Lyric Poetry and Long Poems in Five Volumes], vol. 5., ed. A. Sumerkin. New York. ———. 1994–95. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. [Collected Works in Seven Volumes]. Eds Anna Saakiants and Lev Mnukhin. Moscow. ———. 1997. Neizdannoe: Svodnye tetradi. Eds. E. B. Korkina and I. D. Shevelenko. Moscow. ———. and Pasternak, B. 2004. Dushi nachinaiut videt’: Pis’ma 1922–1936 godov, eds. E. B. Korkina and I. D. Shevelenko. Moscow. Venclova, T. 1985. ‘On Russian Mythological Tragedy: Viacheslav Ivanov and Marina Tsvetaeva.’ In Myth in Literature, eds. A. Kodjak, K. Pomorska, S. Rudy. Columbus, 89–109. Volkov, S. 1998. ‘Marina Tsvetaeva.’ In Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey through the Twentieth Century. Tr. M. Schwartz. New York, 37–56. Zeitlin, F. 1985. ‘The Power of Aphrodite: Eros and the Boundaries of the Self in the Hippolytus.’ In Directions in Euripidean Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. P. Burian. Durham, 52–111.

18 Translating friendship My Brilliant Friend and the Aeneid Corinne Pache

In an essay on female authors who reimagine ancient female characters, Susanna Braund shows how modern artists can make ancient myth ‘strange, often paradoxically, by making the mythical material unstrung, by giving it mundane trappings, in what has been well termed a “postmodern domestication of myth”’ (Braund 2012, 190).1 Taking this observation as my starting point, I examine the role of Aeneid 4 in Elena Ferrante’s quartet of novels known as the Neapolitan Novels (Ferrante 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015). While the focus of Ferrante’s work is resolutely modern, ancient epic and the figure of Dido play a central role in the friendship between the two protagonists, Elena Greco (Lenù) and Raffaella Cerullo (Lina or Lila; in this chapter, I use the names used by the friends for each other). Learning Latin (and then Greek), the two girls repeatedly go back to Aeneid 4 to understand their relationship and various events in their lives. Besides the figure of Dido, classical literature and languages more broadly play an essential role in the narrative, as Ferrante uses the story of Dido and Aeneas as a framework for her narrative of friendship. The Neapolitan Novels is thus also a work about classical literature as a model to emulate as well as a prison to escape. The narrative arc of the novel presents itself as a repetition of ancient patterns: both women are likened to Dido, and both fall for the same Aeneas-like figure, Nino, but Ferrante offers a radical reimagining of Aeneid 4, one in which Dido not only survives, but abandons Aeneas and thrives, and epic focuses on friendship rather than strife and empire. The Neapolitan Novels recount the life-long friendship between two women who grow up together in a working-class neighborhood of Naples. The story is told in the form of a long flashback: at the beginning, Lenù, in her sixties, hears from Lila’s son that his mother has disappeared and erased all traces of her existence by getting rid of all her possessions and going so far as to cut herself out of old photographs. Lenù reacts with annoyance and anger: she understands Lila’s disappearance as a challenge, an attempt not only for Lila to escape but also ‘to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind’ (1.23). Angry at her friend’s desire to erase her own existence and implicitly their friendship, Lenù turns on the computer and begins to write Lila’s story from the beginning of their relationship. The tetralogy is

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thus both vengeance and memorialization, bringing Lila back to life through writing. The Neapolitan Novels is often described as a novel of female friendship, but it is also much more: it explores the influence of their environment over the intellectual and emotional maturing of the two protagonists, the larger intellectual movements of the mid-20th century, and more particularly feminism. But what is strikingly fresh about the work is indeed its focus on a close relationship between women. Novels with female protagonists typically focus on what the literary scholar Carolyn Heilbrun called the marriage plot, the narrative of seeking or finding romantic love, where friendship plays an essential but always secondary role. The Neapolitan Novels contains all the same elements – its protagonists fall in and out of love and marry (and divorce) – but the central relationship it explores throughout and in all its complexities is the friendship between Lenù and Lila, which outlasts all their other attachments. From the outset, we are aware that this is a complicated and competitive friendship. At the beginning of the narrative, the two friends have not seen each other in years, and Lenù presents their friendship in martial terms, whose latest battle she is determined to win (‘We’ll see who wins this time’, 1.23). The two girls meet and grow up in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood that is utterly removed from the city’s center, its history, and culture. The neighborhood is a violent place where physical violence often takes the place of conversation and few know how to read. Yet books come to play a central role in Lenù’s and Lila’s lives from an early age. Lila astonishes the firstgrade teacher as well as her own family when they realize that she has taught herself how to read and write by the time she is six years old. Both girls excel at elementary school, though Lila’s father prevents her from continuing into middle and high school, throwing her out of the window into the street rather than letting her go on. Lenù’s and Lila’s fascination with books begins after they lose their dolls in Don Achille’s cellar, a ‘mythical’ moment at the beginning of their friendship that evokes the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.2 This event is also the first of many ambiguous depictions of motherhood (actual or symbolic) as both deep attachment to and brutal rejection of children. As a compensation for the loss of the dolls, the two girls obtain money from the redoubtable Don Achille, and buy a copy of Little Women that they read and reread obsessively – aloud to each other or silently together. They thus exchange their dolls for a new narrative, which becomes their blueprint for life. The two girls start associating the idea of writing novels with making money, perhaps, Lenù suggests, because they had heard that Louisa May Alcott had become rich enough from her novel to give money to her family. But Lenù is also strikingly diffident on the matter: ‘But I wouldn’t promise’ (1.71). As is typical of Lenù, she casts doubts on both her inner motivations and reliability, traits that also define her as a narrator. From early on, Lenù sees education as a means of escaping the neighborhood and the kind of life it imposes on its inhabitants. She goes on to middle

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and high school, to eventually obtain a Ph.D. in classical studies and make a living as a professional writer. Despite her lack of formal education, Lila remains a keen autodidact throughout her life, who reads avidly, and teaches herself ancient Greek as well as computer languages that allow her to build her own business. Languages thus play a central role in the two friends’ relationship: they grow up speaking in dialect in the neighborhood, but learn Italian in school, often through translation of ancient classical works. While Lila continues to speak mostly in dialect, Lenù’s education gives her access to a wider range of diction, but she experiences the acquisition of a new language as a loss of authenticity. She notices that her teacher’s Italian resembles the Iliad (1.93) early on, and later in life muses that her friend Alfonso’s ‘Italian [is] made slightly artificial by the study of Latin and Greek’ (3.210). Italian is thus portrayed as a classical language that imposes itself as a translation of the characters’ neighborhood dialect. While Lenù ascribes authenticity to dialect, it is an authenticity that comes with its own shackles. When she reads Donato Sarratore’s negative review in Roma describing her first novel as ‘a cheap version of the already vulgar Bonjour Tristesse,’ Lenù is tempted to call the reviewer and ‘insult him atrociously in dialect’ (3.58). Long after she leaves Naples, during a return visit to her family Lenù loses control of her emotions and her language during an argument. She starts to speak in dialect: ‘the neighborhood – from the courtyard to the stradone and the tunnel – was imposing its language on me, its mode of acting and reacting, its figures, those which in Florence seemed faded images and here were flesh and blood’ (3.328). Dialect is thus the language of the neighborhood, the language of poverty, frustration, anger, and violence. Lenù often describes language as an external force that imposes its own pattern on people’s lives. At times, she refuses to speak in dialect, and in one striking instance she cannot discuss sex honestly with Lila, because she doesn’t want to use the ‘vulgar’ language from the neighborhood but is unable to express herself about the topic in Italian (3.174–5). Her refusal to speak in dialect is a way of keeping the neighborhood and its dangers at a distance, but eventually she loses the ability to use it. As her friendship with Lila deteriorates later in life, Lenù sees their problems of communication, again, as an issue of translation: It occurred to me that it was now a linguistic question. She resorted to Italian as if to a barrier; I tried to push her toward dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false language. (4.362) But while Lenù often depicts translation (and implicitly education) as an imposition of a false language over an authentic one, she also sees new languages as opening new worlds and providing an escape from old patterns.

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She can see that in others, as when she praises Nino for his ability to manipulate the Italian he learned at the same school she did to his own advantage. During a reading at which she is attacked by an older professor, she admires Nino’s deft defense of her work and his daring ‘to insert disorder into that polished Italian with a bold nonchalance that rapidly managed to make the professorial tones of the other man sound out of date and perhaps a little ridiculous’ (3.31). Lenù continues to feel her origins as limitations, but a trip to Montpellier expands her understanding of herself and the world around her: she experiences a new sense of freedom ‘for the first time, freed from the chains I had accumulated over the years – those of my origins, those I had acquired through academic success, those derived from the choice I had made in life, especially marriage’; and she also discovers that other cultures and languages have their own parameters, which make her grasp ‘the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute’ (4.26). But Lenù also gradually understands her status as a ‘perpetual outsider’ in both the world of the neighborhood and the new world of her ‘adopted culture’ (Love 2016, 77). Education provides an escape, but propels her into a new trap. Classical languages and literature thus feature prominently as a force shaping the language spoken by characters who gain a school education. Lenù becomes a classicist who marries a specialist of Bacchic ritual, but her interest in the classics diminishes as her career as a writer takes off. At the same time, Ferrante builds her narrative on a scaffold of ancient myths that she in turn translates into a modern narrative. I have already mentioned the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which provides a fascinating and complex lens through which to understand the relationships between daughters and mothers throughout.3 But the Neapolitan Novels’ principal mode is epic, both in scope and in spirit. Ferrante mentions the Aeneid in several key passages, and Aeneid 4 is explicitly and implicitly intertwined with the two protagonists’ lives. Learning Latin, and then Greek, Lenù repeatedly comes back to the story of Dido to understand her own life and connection to Lila, while Lila’s interpretation of Aeneid 4 in particular plays an important role in the friendship between the two protagonists. When Lila has to give up school, she does not give up her desire to learn. She wants to learn English, which Lenù has started learning, and she ‘seemed ahead of me in everything as if she were going to a secret school’ (1.160). Lila’s ‘secret school’ is her intellectual curiosity: she becomes obsessed with the Aeneid and talks at length about Dido, a character Elena knows nothing about because, typically, she has not read beyond the assigned material. Lila devours the entire poem in just a few days and comes up with her own interpretation: ‘When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.’ Although the narrator puts Lila’s words in quotation marks, she also points to her defective memory and makes it a point to say ‘I don’t remember exactly how she expressed it, but that was the idea, and I associated it with our dirty streets, the dusty gardens, the

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countryside disfigured by new buildings, the violence in every house, every family’ (1.160). In Lila’s view, both Carthage and Rome are cities without love: Aeneas abandons Dido to enter a loveless marriage with Lavinia for political reasons. And both cities are doomed, either to destruction or endless conflict. Lila’s interpretation of the poem is original and fresh, and contrary to that of most readers before her, who often see love as an obstacle to the wellbeing of Carthage (or the creation of Rome). Lila’s interpretation of the Aeneid is wonderfully broad. We know that she is interested in the figure of Dido, but it is unclear to whose love she refers when she talks of the role of love in the life of cities. While Aeneas’ departure is an important element of Aeneid 4, it’s also interesting to consider that it begins and ends with conversations between Dido and her sister, Anna, described as Dido’s ‘same-souled’ (unanimam, 4.8) sister, but their relationship ends in conflict with Dido’s suicide, which Anna understands partly as an act of aggression against herself and the city: Aeneas abandons Dido, and Dido abandons Anna. Virgil’s description of dying Dido as semianimem . . . germana (‘half-alive sister’, 4.686) echoes the unanimam . . . sororem of the beginning of the book, but this time the vocabulary of sisterhood and soul emphasizes the separation between the two sisters, no longer same-souled as Dido expires in Anna’s arms. Anna reproaches Dido for scorning her friendship in dying (comitemne sororem | spreuisti moriens, 4.677–8), severing the bond between them. Greek philia and Roman amicitia are typically defined as an expression of men’s social and political power, a definition that excludes women. There are very few places in Greek and Roman literature where we can find descriptions of female friendship (Theocritus’ Idyll 15 is an interesting exception I do not have the space to explore here), and so the relationship between Dido and Anna gives us a way around ancient authors’ propensity to think of friendship as exclusively male. When Aristotle discusses the origins of friendship in the bonds of household and as a model for the polis, he talks of the relationship between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and brother. Philia thus encompasses a variety of loving relationships, but strikingly Aristotle does not mention sisters (or for that matter brother and sister).4 While sisters are not necessarily always friends, thinking of friends in terms of siblings is a common trope in both ancient and modern times. We find this conflation, or ‘translation’, between friends and kin already in Homeric epic, where warriors consider their hetairoi (‘companions’) to be their ‘dearest and nearest.’5 When Virgil describes Anna as Dido’s ‘samesoul sister’ (unanimam . . . sororem, 4.8), he draws on that notion of the friend as another self (e.g., Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1166a30). Samesoulness is good not only for relationships between individuals, but also for the well-being of cities: for Aristotle, homonoia or ‘unanimity’ is a consequence of friendship between men that holds states together while factions bring them down (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1155a). Like the Latin

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adjective, the Greek noun exemplifies its meaning by joining two words into one (homo, ‘same’ + noia, ‘mind’ and una ‘one’ + anima, ‘soul’). Odysseus similarly describes the symbiosis of mind that makes a good marriage possible when a husband and a wife think in the same way (homophroneonte, Odyssey 6.183). By contrast with the ancient definitions of male friendship, Anna and Dido (and Lenù and Lila) are sisters-friends who are not always in agreement. In My Brilliant Friend, love between friends – or sisters – is complex and ever shifting, as friends change, and grow apart and together again at different stages of their lives. Lenù and Lila inspire, compete with, and ‘grow out’ of each other (Chihaya [2020, 19]). The two friends also have very different relationships with their native city: apart from a brief detour in a different area of Naples, Lila stays grounded in the neighborhood and eventually learns the history of the city and its buildings; Lenù spends much of her youth trying to escape Naples and her own origins, but returns for a period in middle age when she realizes that the neighborhood is a source of inspiration for her writing. In the end, Lila stays and Lenù leaves. While their lives’ trajectories diverge on the surface, both Lila and Lenù reenact the story of Dido (and Anna), at different times, with the same man, Nino Sarratore, a local boy whose father is notorious for having seduced a neighborhood widow who goes mad when he abandons her. When Lila and Lenù discuss the Aeneid together, Lenù is annoyed at her friend’s ease in interpreting the poem she has not yet fully read, and interrupts her by announcing that she has a boyfriend, Gino, and passingly mentions Nino. Lila makes fun of her for going out with the pharmacist’s son, and tells her ‘Good for you, you’ve given in, you’re in love like Aeneas’ lover’ (160), unaware that Lenù is secretly in love with Nino. Lila then seemingly changes the subject abruptly from Dido to Melina. But Lila’s mind is in fact still on Dido: to her, Melina is a modern Dido figure, a woman abandoned by her lover, who loses herself and goes mad in a loveless city. Lila ends her disquisition by going back to Nino, the son of Melina’s lover and tells Lenù, ‘Tell him about Melina . . . tell him he should tell his father’ (161), thereby implicitly connecting Nino with the figure of Aeneas. Lila’s interpretation of the Aeneid agrees with Anna’s perspective, and at first seems to give love a pride of place as a force for fertility and security, but her understanding of love is too complex to allow for such a rosy-colored perspective, and she fully understands its dangers. From early on, she witnesses the instability that arises of such strong emotions, and the devastation of unrequited love. Lila understands individuals’ and cities’ need for love, but she is also keenly aware of the difference between love as an ideal and the more problematic forms it takes in people’s lives. Because of Lila’s fear of the madness of being in love, she vows never to fall in love with anyone and never to write poetry, one of the means through which the older Sarratore seduced Melina. Lila is weary of the different ways love is experienced by men and women and, based on her reading of

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the Aeneid and her observation of Melina, assumes that all women in love are at risk of being abandoned and losing their identity, while men in love with a woman they cannot have simply ‘go and find someone else, just like Aeneas, who eventually settled down with the daughter of a king’ (159). Lila’s thoughts on Melina and Dido prepare the reader for both her own and Lenù’s future relationships with Nino, as the son will show himself to be similar to the father. Lila never writes poetry, but her vow does not protect her when she falls passionately in love with Nino during a summer vacation at Ischia. She is not yet 20, but she’s already married to the brutish Stefano, and eventually decides to risk everything and leave him for her love of Nino. They live together for a time, but Nino gets cold feet, abandons her while she’s pregnant, and although he has second thoughts about leaving her, fails to return after a neighborhood thug beats him up. Lenù, still secretely in love with Nino, leaves soon after those events to go to graduate school in Pisa, the first long separation between the two friends. The idea of repetition is central to Ferrante’s narrative, in which both friends face similar experiences despite the different turns their lives take. Lenù writes an essay in school – based on Lila’s ideas – on ‘The Various Phases of the Tragedy of Dido,’ a title that could very well apply to the two friends’ involvement with Nino/Aeneas. After graduate school, Lenù marries into a respected and wealthy academic family, but her husband is a workaholic who leaves her experiencing early motherhood as a lonely and draining trap. When her husband connects with Nino, now a promising academic himself, Lenù is inspired to write again. She writes a feminist work about the biblical story of the creation of woman, but paradoxically writes it to impress her husband’s new friend, ‘as if Nino had commissioned that work’ (3.363). When she starts an affair with him, she first sees it as a liberation from her stale marriage, but also makes the uncomfortable realization that for Nino it is a reenactment of his earlier relationship with Lila (and others). For Lenù, the affair is ‘a unique experience, for him a repetition.’ Yet when Lenù asks herself ‘Were we not doing but redoing?’, she also acknowledges a kind of repetition in her own behavior (3.394). She finds herself ‘redoing’ what Lila already experienced years earlier with Nino. This epiphany also connects Lenù to Dido, another lover who experiences falling in love as a ‘redoing’ or recognizing ‘the ancient signs of an ancient flame’ (agnosco ueteris uestigia flammae (Aeneid 4.23). Lenù’s attempt to escape her traditional marriage lands her onto Dido’s ancient path. Ferrante thus connects the figure of Dido and Aeneas with Lenù (and Lila) in both explicit and less obvious ways, though it takes many years for Lenù herself to be able to see Nino as he is rather than as she wants him to be. Lenù’s youthful naive perspective on the affair between Melina and Donato informs her understanding of her later relationship with Nino. When young Lila points out Donato’s callous treatment of Melina and his hypocrisy, Lenù retorts ‘[h]e and Melina were overcome by passion, like Dido and Aeneas.

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These are things that are hurtful, but also very moving’ (1.221). She imagines both sets of lovers as equal in their passion and awareness of the consequences of this passion, disregarding Donato’s and Aeneas’ leaving, and ignoring Melina’s and Dido’s grief. Despite multiple warning signs, and even after the older Sarratore later on assaults her and reveals himself as a predator, Lenù fails to see the resemblance between father and son. When it comes to Nino, for many years, Lenù only sees the things that are ‘very moving,’ not the ones that will be ‘hurtful’ and destructive. While Lenù starts by seeing Nino as essentially different from all other men who are ‘made from the same clay’ (2.303), she gradually comes to understand his true character. Lenù’s double perspective as the older narrator remembering events from her youth allows her to present this process as taking place incrementally throughout her life. Early on, Lenù is aware of her own role in turning Nino into an ideal object of desire ‘made of dreams’ and ‘constructed out of childish desires’ (3.44), but that does not make him any less irresistible. She has fleeting moments of clarity: whereas Nino used to shine as a passionate and radical speaker, he grows into an accommodating interlocutor who ‘tactfully crossed academic barriers’ (4.27). Ambition – first academic then political – in fact explains all of Nino’s actions and affairs. Women help him to secure possessions, publications, and positions. Just after Lenù gives birth to their daughter, she wonders about her part in turning him into a fantasy: ‘Was it him? Was he the man I had always loved? Or a stranger I was forcing to assume a clear and definite character?’ (4.196). Lenù gets a devastating answer to that question when she catches Nino having sex with their older housekeeper in their bathroom. She subsequently learns of his many other sexual adventures and repeated attempts to seduce Lila while all along maintaining two separate households for his wife and mistress. But Lenù is not destroyed by Nino’s betrayal. Rather her love for him becomes scorn, and she is finally able to disentangle her life from his. She decides to return to the neighborhood that has become the inspiration for her most successful novel to date, and she and Lila live in the same building, one floor apart, for many years, forming a new family of sorts. Lenù and Lila, two Dido figures, not only survive but offer a ‘narrative of progress’ (Graziosi [2016]): Lila survives abandonment, and Lenù leaves Nino; Dido and Anna thrive without Aeneas. The Neapolitan Novels have a complex relationship with the classical past. One of the recurrent themes of the work is the notion of repetition, as we have seen in the multiple reiterations of the Dido motif. During an awkward dinner with both their families, Lenù realizes that she and her husband Pietro carry their ‘ancestors in our bodies’ (3.100). In the neighborhood, sons and daughters literally embody their parents. In another striking moment, Lenù finds her small daughter, Dede, playing with Nino’s son (by another woman), pretending to be the parents of a doll, and fighting, with Dede explaining to Mirko that he now has to hit her. For Lenù, the

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two children are simply repeating their ancestors’ behaviors: ‘The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence’ (3.291). Lenù, to her own distress, becomes increasingly like her mother as she ages, replicating her limp, while her two daughters in turn become infatuated with Lila’s son, reenacting their mother’s obsession with Nino. Lila’s relationship to the past is similarly complex. She is obsessed with understanding ‘the things that happened before us’ (1.162) and how past events determine present circumstances. As she learns the history of neighborhood families in her youth, she sees friends and neighbors as stuck in a chain of causality that started generations earlier. Worried about recurrent street fights between fascists and communists, Lila goes to visit Professor Galiani and confronts memories of her younger self in her teacher’s apartment. She feels a sense of inescapability: ‘How brittle the past was, continually crumbling, falling on her’ (3.136). But later in life she becomes fascinated with the history of the city, and the many hidden layers underlying its monuments and gardens. She wants to write about the city as its own world, which replicates what happens on the entire planet. She tells Lenù’s daughter, ‘what a splendid and important city: here all languages are spoken, Imma, here everything was built and everything was torn down’ (4.440). Vesuvius, she goes on, stands there as a reminder that the city (or the planet) can be reduced to ashes anytime, and rebuilt again. History for Lila is cyclical, and violence is always embedded deep in the foundations of cities built on top of blood, filth, and limbs then ‘literally covered’ by churches (4.447). When Lila tells Lenù what she learned, she does it in a mixture of languages that reflect the complexities of the city’s history. ‘Lila, between fascination and horror, spoke to me in a mixture of dialect, Italian, and very educated quotations that she had taken from who knows where and remembered by heart’ (4.447). To tell the story of the city in which all languages are spoken requires a mix of languages, local, national, and literary. But while both Lenù and Lila are attuned to the ways in which the past exerts its hold on the present, Lila also recurrently experiences a phenomenon she calls ‘dissolving margins’ (smarginatura) when ‘the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared’ (1.89). Those experiences are terrifying to her, as the world becomes shapeless, but also offer the possibility that some patterns, at least, are not immutable and can be reimagined. Translating Latin as girls, Lenù and Lila open up their world beyond that of their family and the neighborhood, and create narratives and lives for themselves that go beyond the confines of their circumstances. Friendship is tied up with language, and with telling stories. Starting early in their relationship with Little Women, Lenù and Lila read and imagine their lives together. The friendship ends like it began, with a novel: Lila essentially disappears from Lenù’s life after she publishes a novel, A Friendship, that tells the disappearance of Lila’s daughter. In the process, she betrays a

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promise she made to Lila never to write about her life, a promise she breaks again in writing the events depicted in the Neapolitan Novels. By the end of the Neapolitan Novels, Lila has gone and the friendship is ostensibly over. But in an extraordinary epilogue, the past once again bursts onto the present, and Lila manages to dissolve the boundaries of Lenù’s narrative (McCarter [2016]). It turns out the friendship lives on because it is a story told by both friends, whose bond endures even in separation. Lenù’s early fascination with the classics diminishes with age, and her last foray into trying to create a tv show focused on the classics of Greek and Latin literature turns out to be ‘an unquestionable fiasco’ (4.338). Ferrante’s engagement with the classics however remains central throughout, but the classical model for Lenù and Lila turns out not to be ‘The Various Phases of the Tragedy of Dido’ after all. Instead Ferrante radically challenges ‘the masculine hegemony of myth’ (Braund [2012, 206]) and creates a modern epic that invites us to explore the story not told by Virgil, the story of a friendship between two women who tell each other stories, and expand our notion of what is thinkable, sayable, and possible.

Notes 1 I had the extraordinary good luck of meeting Susanna in my first academic job. I am so grateful for her friendship and mentorship, Indian feasts, and conversations about the ways in which ancient and modern literature intersect and reinvigorate one another. 2 For Ferrante’s use of motifs from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, see Fletcher (2019, 132–7). For motherhood as a metaphor of authorship in the Neapolitan Novels, see Fletcher (2019, 137–40), and also Geue (2016, 18). 3 Tragedy also informs the narrative in the several brutal deaths that change the course of the narrative. Ferrante portrays the mysterious killing of Don Achille in particular as a tragic turning point that changes the lives of several characters. 4 On these omissions, see Schweitzer (2016, 340). 5 See, e.g., Iliad 9.642, kēdistoi . . . philtatoi, and Shay (1994, 40–1); see also Konstan (1997) and Williams (2012) on Greek and Roman friendship.

Works cited Braund, S. 2012. ‘“We’re Here Too, the Ones Without Names.” A Study of Female Voices as Imagined by Margaret Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, And Marguerite Yourcenar.’ Classical Receptions Journal 4: 190–208. Chihaya, S., M. Emre, K. Hill, and J. Richards. 2020. The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. New York. Ferrante, E. 2012. My Brilliant Friend. Vol. 1. Goldstein, A. (trans.). New York. ———. 2013. The Story of a New Name. Vol. 2. Goldstein, A. (trans.). New York. ———. 2014. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Vol. 3. Goldstein, A. (trans.). New York. ———. 2015. The Story of the Lost Child. Vol. 4. Goldstein, A. (trans.). New York. Fletcher, J. 2019. Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture. Oxford. Geue, Tom. 2016. ‘Elena Ferrante as the Classics.’ Melbourne Historical Journal 44: 1–31.

Translating friendship

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Graziosi, B. 2016. ‘Elena Ferrante is My Mother.’ Eidolon. October 10, 2016. https:// eidolon.pub/elena-ferrante-is-my-mother-3149471c7336 Konstan, D. 1997. Friendship in the Classical World. Cambridge. Love, S. 2016. ‘“An Educated Identity:” The School as a Modernist Chronotope in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.’ In The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins, ed. by R. Bullaro and G. Love, 71–97. New York. McCarter, S. 2016. ‘Elena Ferrante’s Virgil: Rewriting the Aeneid in the Neapolitan Novels.’ Eidolon. November 17, 2016. https://eidolon.pub/elena-ferrantes-vergil2f6babd05f16 Shay, J. 1994. Achilles in Vietnam. New York. Schweitzer, I. 2016. ‘Making Equals: Classical Philia and Women’s Friendship.’ Feminist Studies 42(2): 337–64. Williams, C. A. 2012. Reading Roman Friendship. Cambridge.

Index

Accius 9, 10–14, 18n44, 18n45, 19n48, 19n49, 20n67, 63 Achilles 3, 6, 9–14, 15–6, 38, 244; divine armor of 12, 19n47; Cicero on 13–4; education of 9, 63–4, 18n36; in conflict with Agamemnon 26–7, 59, 66–7, 61–4, 66, 71n21; in contrast to Odysseus/Ulysses 3, 6, 8–11, 15–6, 63; as problematic exemplum for Romans 10; at Scyros 9, 21n69, 62, 63, 70n23, 71n30; in Statius’ Achilleid 58–9, 61–4, 65, 66–7, 71n27 Actium, battle of 43, 45, 50, 52, 157 aedile (aedilis) 84–5, 88n22, 89n27 ‘aftering’: as related to translation 199–200 Aeneas 5, 128, 150, 153, 168, 183, 185, 279–80; and Dido 26, 30–4, 279–80, 285, 288–92; in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels 288–92; epiphany of Venus 108–9; as “good king” 34–9; intertexts in Lucan 137, 140–2, 145–6; in Naevius’ The Punic War 5; in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova 278–9; slaying of Turnus 153–5, 156–7, 159 Aesacus 187–8 Aeschylus 3, 62, 231, 264, 275; role in shaping Roman view of Achilles 9–10, 63, 71n27 aesthetics: and morality in Juvenal 216, 220 aetiology 80, 83, 84, 89n29 afterlife and existence after death 243–4. See also Underworld Agamemnon 11, 26–7; 58–67, 69n8 Ajax (Greater) 8; in conflict with Ulysses 11–3, 20n58; heroic ethics of 11

Akhmatova, Anna 264, 278–80, 282n78 Alaric 157, 171, 216, 224–5, 226 alcohol and drunkenness 33, 113; association with musicians 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85; immunity of Socrates 92 Alcott, Louisa May 286, 293 allegory 149–59, 163–73; relationship to reality and truth 164–5 Amazons: in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetic mythology 265, 273, 274 Ammianus Marcellinus 225, 226 Anchises 153; epiphany of Aphrodite 19n3, 112–3 andreia (courage or manliness) 3–4, 10 Anna (sister of Dido) 289–90, 292 Anouilh, Jean 264 Antiope 265, 273, 274 Antisthenes (contemporary of Socrates and Plato) 4, 10, 63 Aphrodite: and Anchises 112, 119n3, 266, 271, 273, 276; in the plays of Marina Tsvetaeva 265, 266, 271 273, 276, 280n18 apiculture see bees Apollo 57, 60–1, 110, 157, 168, 181; and Delphi 92, 94–5, 168, 170 apotheosis: of emperors 125, 166 Appius Claudius 78–9, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86n10, 87n14, 89n33 Apuleius 86n5, 108, 109, 113–5 Arachne 109–10 architecture and building projects: in Christian writing 156–9, 168–70, 171–2 Ares 26–7. See also Mars Argonauts 58, 61, 68, 69n6

Index Ariadne: in Melville 241–2, 248n40; in the plays of Marina Tsvetaeva 265–72, 273, 275, 277 aristeia 8 Aristotle 59, 184; on friendship 289–90; on tragedy 276–7; art: versus nature 192–3, 196 Artemis 32, 273. See also Diana Asia: Greek and Roman characterization of 64–6; and the Trojan War 66, 69n6 ataraxia (tranquility) 27, 35–6 Athena 61, 62, 119n2. See also Minerva auditory poetics: of Gavin Douglas’s Eneados 179–89 Augustus 51–2, 82, 128, 129, 157; comparisons to Jupiter 124, 165–6, 171; relationship with Ovid 82, 128, 129. See also Octavian Aulis: episode in Statius’ Achilleid 57–8, 60–4 Ausonius (teacher of Paulinus) 167, 173 autocracy 43–4, 50–1, 52 Bacchus 110–1, 118, 120n12, 125; in Marina Tsvetaeva’s Ariadna (Ariadne) 266–70 Bannon, Steve 64 Baptism: Christian 169–70, 172; connection with Cybele 154; in Melville 230–1, 247n35 beauty 171, 265, 272; as connection to divinity 37, 109, 113–4; of Dido 31–2, 109; as a quality of good kings 29, 37; of Rome 171 bees: in Virgil’s Georgics 43, 49–52 Bible 167, 168, 169–70, 171–2, 185, 291; in Prudentius’ Psychomachia 149, 150, 153, 155–6, 157–9 biē 6–7, 9 birds and birdsong 179–89; in auditory poetics 179–89; cormorants 187–8; cranes 182–6, 187, 188, 189; as metaphor for poetry 179, 182; nightingales 186–7, 192–3, 199; roosters 181–2 Boccacio, Giovanni: treatment of Ovid’s Aesacus 188 Briseis 62, 65 Browne, Sir Thomas 235 Browne, William 232, 233 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (television series) 117–8

297

Carmen Arvalium Fratrum 254–6 Carthage and Carthaginians 30, 34, 38, 289; Roman stereotypes of 3. See also Hannibal; Second Punic War Catholics and Catholicism 252; liturgy of 252–4, 260 Catullus 61; Catullus 64 15, 241–2, 248n42, 264, 266–7, 269–70, 280n21; condemnation of Achilles 15; in Melville 239–42 Ceres 114, 138. See also Demeter Cethegus (Marcus Cornelius) 7 Ceyx 156 Chiron: as teacher of Achilles 9, 63–4 chorus (dramatic) 48–9, 51, 271, 273, 275 Christians and Christianity 156–9, 188, 254; in Claudian 166–7; Orthodox Christianity 156, 252; in Paulinus 167–73; as portrayed in Gibbon 219, 224; in Prudentius 149, 156, 157–9, 160n7; use of allegory 163, 167–73 Cicero 13–4, 18n41, 48, 70n15, 104n13, 184, 226, 231, 259; and Greek philosophy 91, 103; on tragedy 13–4 cities: destruction and/or foundation of 4, 5, 68, 154–7, 158–9, 168, 279–80, 289 civil war 57; connection with empire 67–8; in Lucan 125–6 137, 145, 184–5, 190n14; Roman 25, 49, 50–1, 72n43, 125–6, 131, 156, 157; in Statius’ Thebaid 57–8 Claudian 163–7, 168–9, 170–1, 173; as influence on Strada’s Prolusiones 2.6 192, 194, 197, 201 clementia (clemency) 43, 49, 50, 51, 56, 126–7, 128 Clytemnestra 61, 63; as duplicitous 220, 223, 275 Cocteau, Jean 251–2, 264 comedy (genre): in Ovid 85, 89n37; in Paulinus 170; of Plautus 91–103 Cominius, Gaius: trouble with Tiberius 126–30 Commodus 222 conspiracy 129–30; Pisonian 126, 128 Cornelius Nepos 77 Corrina (girlfriend of Ovid) 112–3 Crashaw, Richard 195–6 Creon 257 Creusa 108, 119n4

298

Index

cross-dressing: of Achilles 63, 71n30, 87n16; of musicians 85–6, 87n16 cummings, e. e. 251 Cupid 112, 259; and Psyche 113–5, 121n24 Cybele 154 cyclops: connection to bad kings 8 Dacier, Anne 231, 243, 244 Daniélou, Jean 251–60; influence of liturgical Latin on 252–4, influence of Seneca’s tragedies (and Léon Hermann) on 256–8; translation style of 252 death: criticism of fear of 14, imagery of in Melville 236, of Phaedra 276; of Priam 144, 150–3, 155, 156, 159, 232; of Turnus 153–5, 156–7, 159 decapitation 150–3, 155, 187, 239 declamation 218, 219, 220 Delphi 170; oracle of 60–1, 92, 93, 94–5, 98, 257 Demeter 140; Homeric Hymn To Demeter 286, 288 dialect: in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels 287 Diana 28–9, 31–2, 108, 109, 157, 258–9. See also Artemis Dido: as “good king” 25, 26, 28–34, 36, 37; in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels 285, 288–92, 292; in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova 278–9; as resembling a goddess 108–9; relationship with Anna 289–90, 292; weaknesses of 34, 38–9 Diodorus Siculus 267 Diomedes 10–1, 19n49, 57, 62, 63, 69n8 disguise 81–2; of immortals 109–10, 118; in Roman comedy 93 divine armor 157, 231; Melville on 231 divinity: as aspect of kingship 44–6, 48; mortal impersonation of 109–10, 113 Domitian 66, 67, 131–2, 219 Douglas, Gavin 179–89; interaction with Virgil in his Eneados 179–89; and Lucan 184–5; and Ovid 180, 187–8; The Palice of Honour 187–8; translation philosophy of 179–80, 188–9; treatment of the seasons 181–7, 189 dreams: nature of 164–6, 167, 169, 174n10 Dryden, John 199, 231, 235, 236, 239–40, 244, 248n46

ecphrasis 167–8, 169, 222, 236, 267, 269 education 26, 65; of Achilles 9, 18n36, 63–4, 63; of Marina Tsvetaeva 264; role of the poet in 11; at the Sorbonne 254–9; status of Roman theatrical audience 91–2; teaching of Greek in England 233; use of Strada 192, 193–4 Egypt and Egyptians 50, 59, 101, 141–5; as portrayed in Juvenal 218–9, 220–1 empire 58, 66; arena as embodiment of 60; connection with strife 54n44, 58, 123, 285; relationship with civil war 67–8; ‘without end’ 155, 159 Ennius 5–8, 10–11, 16n15, 17n18, 18n44, 59, 70n14; Annales 5–6, 7–8, 16n15, 126–9, 139–40 Epaminondas 77 epic (genre) 56–68, 69n8, 137–46; Archaic Latin 3–16; Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels as 288–94; imperial 67–8; martial 139, 238; in Melville 234, 236–42, 244–5 epic topoi (tropes): decapitations 150–4, destruction and foundation of cities 154–7, funerals and/or burials 137, 139–46, storms 27–8, 34–5, tree-fellings 137–46 Epicurus and Epicureanism 15, 25, 35, 165; influence on Philodemos 29, 30–1, 32, 33, 36, 39; influence on Virgil 25–7, 32, 34; in Lucretius 15, 27–8; rejection of sexual passion 34, 38; rejection of luxury 32–4, 38 epigrams 8, 33–4, 193, 208 epiphanies 61, 107–19; essential elements of 107–8 Bacchus/Acoetes to Pentheus 110–1; Cupid to Psyche 113–4, 115; Isis to Lucius 114–5; Jupiter and Mercury to Baucis and Philemon 110; Jupiter to Semele 109; Minerva to Arachne 109–10; Venus to Aeneas 108–9 Ernout, Alfred 254, 259 Erysichthon 138–40 ethics: association with cranes 185–6; heroic 3–16; Roman criticism of Greek 11 eunuchs 222, 226 Euripides 3, 61, 62–5, 231, 264; Bacchae 111, 268; Hippolytus 273–7; influence on the works of Marina

Index Tsvetaeva 264, 268–9, 272–3, 274–5, 276, 277; Scyrians 3, 18n40 Europa 64, 240 Euryalus see Nisus and Euryalus episode exempla 47; Augustus as exemplum domesticum 51; in Homer 15; in tragedy 13 exile 128, 129, 130, 225, 278; of Ovid 82, 128, 129 Fabius (Quintus Fabius Maximus): as Ennius’ ‘unus homo’ 7 fate 13, 49, 70n26, 116, 241–2 fathers and fatherhood: and daughters 112, 265–6, 286, 290; in Juvenal 218; leaders as 124; as metaphor for the author and his works 100; and sons 12–3, 168, 218, 129–30, 268–70, 275, 290–1, 292 fear 267, 275, 277; of death 14, 233; in epiphany scenes 108, 109, 110, 113, 118; Lucan’s Caesar as agent of 139; removal of 28 feasts, banquets, and eating 32–3, 34, 37, 78–9, 80, 85, 86n9, 87n10, 87n12, 221–2 Felix (saint): and Paulinus 167, 171, 173 feminism: in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels 286, 291 Ferrante, Elena 285–6, 288, 290–2, 294, 294n3; theme of repetition 291–2 festivals 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 91 fides (loyalty or faith) 138, 158, 167–8; in Lucan 138 figuration 164, 168, 169 flattery 46, 124, 126–8, 130, 132, 222. See also panegyric Flavell, John 197 Ford, John 194–5, 196 Fortune: in Gibbon 225–6 foundation myths 4, 5, 82, 156–7, 159 friendship: between women 275, 289–94; dangers of 290–1; in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels 285–94; Epicurean 34; Greek and Roman conceptions of 289–90; funerals, funerary rites, and burial 11, 78, 81, 88n21, 89n27, 144–5, 258–9. See also epic (genre): epic topoi (tropes): funerals and/or burials; Misenus, burial of

299

games see ludi gender: androgyny 277; effeminization 153, 221; gender-bending 72n46; in the plays of Marina Tsvetaeva 264–77; in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova 275, 279; politics of 63, 68, 72n46; presentation of Achilles 9, 21n69, 62, 63, 70n23, 71n30; uncertain status of musicians 81–2 Germanicus 82, 129, 130 Ghosts 108: Cicero on tragic 14 Gibbon, Edward 216–27; Juvenalian satiric dimensions in 223–6; opinions on Juvenal 217–21 Gigantomachy 139, 164–5, 240 gladiators 222. See also spectacle Golden Bough 141, 145–6 ‘good king’ see kingship theory Greece and Greek culture 3, 92; philosophy 25, 91–103; political structure in drama 57–8, 59, 60, 66, 77 Grosart, Alexander 195–6 hagiography and saints 163–73, 219 Hannibal 7, 8, 224 Hector 8, 12, 13–4, 109, 119n4, 119n5, 141 Helen (of Troy) 61, 69n6 Hera: in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) (movie) 116 Hercules 154, in comparison to Epicurus 21–2n85 Hermann, Léon 256–7, 260 Hermes 115, 117, 232. See also Mercury Herodotus 64, 231 Hesiod 46, 116. Hippolyta: in the plays of Marina Tsvetaeva 273, 274 Hippolytus: in the plays of Marina Tsvetaeva 272–8 Homer: animal similes 60, 183–4, 187; Iliad 4–5, 15, 38, 59–60, 61–2, 63, 65–6, 69n8, 71n27, 139–40, 183, 236, 237–8; kingship theory 3–16, 29–32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 46, 59–60; Odyssey 4–5, 8, 30–4, 59, 184, 231–2, 290; in Melville 231–2; 235, 237–8 Homeric Hymn to Demeter 286, 288 Honorius 164, 165, 166, 167, 170–1, 225 Horace 3, 15, 69n8, 70n15, 165, 219, 231, 233, 258; on ethical lessons in Homer’s epics 15

300

Index

hubris 48, 110, 139, 140 humour 82, 88n23, 109; in Juvenal 218–9 hunters and hunting 35, 58, 60–1, 108, 190n10, 240, 273; legacy-hunting 218, 223 imagery 173; of destruction of cities 155–6; of jaws in Melville’s MobyDick 236, of the natural world 43; of trees 141, 142; of water 169 imitation 8, 138–9, 140, 151, 192, 194–5, 196, 198, 199, incest 112, 120n16, 273–4 invocation 124, 127, 238; of Apollo 60; of the Muse 60, 238 Iphigenia 61–4 Ireland and Irish translators 180 irony 60–1, 63, 225, 266 Isis 86n5, 115, 220–1, 226 Italy and Italian writers: Elena Ferrante 285–94 Jacobitism 208 Jason 115–7 Jason and the Argonauts (1963) (movie) 115–7 Judaism and the Jewish people 157–9, 226, 235, 243; antisemitism 217 Julius Caesar 51–2, 231; De Bello Ciuili 137; in Lucan’s De Bello Ciuili 137–46 Juno 26, 34, 109, 110, 114, 116, 119n4, 168 Jupiter 58–9, 70n26, 86n9, 109, 110, 116, 155, 159, 164, 165–6, 171, 239–40; as coming to power through violence 16n16; as “good king” 26–8, 32; connection to the emperors 46, 48–9, 124, 126, 131–2. See also Zeus justice: and the Roman legal system 129–30; as a virtue of good kings 29–30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 48 Juvenal 127, 156–9, 217–27, 231; aesthetics of 220; style as understood by Gibbon 217–21 Kant, Immanuel 230, 238, 239 katabasis: as leitmotif in Moby-Dick 235–6, 237, 240, 242 Killing Eve (television series) 121n24 kingship theory: in Ennius 5–8; Hellenistic 8–9, 10, 29–30, 39, 44; in Homer 3–16, 29–32, 33, 35, 36,

39, 46, 59–60; in Naevius 4–5, 8; in Philodemos 3, 26–36, 38–9, 59; in Seneca 43–52; in Statius 56–68; in Virgil 16n1, 25–39 Lares 255 Latin language: in Catholic liturgy 252–3; learning Latin in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels 285, 287, 294; Medieval 252–4; neo-Latin 192, 200; Renaissance 193; study of in Paris in the early twentieth century 251–60; use of Strada’s Prolusiones 2.6 as educational tool 193–4 letters 96–7, 100–1, 169, 231 libretto: of Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex 251–9 Little Women (book) 286, 293 Livius Andronicus 4, 8, 12, 17n30, 18n39, 18n40, 59, 70n14, 70n18 Livy 78–86, 231 Localism: in Scottish and Irish reception of Virgil 180 Locke, John 238, 239 love and sexual desire 34, 113–4, 239; dangers of 112, 115; in Elena Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Novels 288–9; in Plato’s Phaedrus 99–100; in Plautus’ Pseudolus 99–100; in the plays of Marina Tsvetaeva 265, 266–78; in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova 278–80 Lucan 59, 68, 124–6, 137–46, 184–5, 234, 235; attitude towards civil war 145–6, 184–5; and Caesar’s De Bello Ciuili 137; Bellum Civile 124–6, 132, 137–46, 184–5; delay (mora) in 137, 145; panegyric of Nero 124–6, 127, 128; intertext with Ovid’s Metamorphoses 138–9, 140, 141; intertext with Virgil’s Aeneid 137–38, 184–5 Lucretius 15, 19n52, 34, 38, 62, 113, 165, 166, 169, 233, 259; Epicureanism in 27–8, 32 ludi (games) 86n5, 86n9, 91; Megalenses 91 Macrobius 166, 260 magic and spells 63, 112, 113, 114–5, 129, 232, 267 manuscripts and manuscript authority 12, 83–6, 89n33, 89n35, 193, 197–8, 200, 204–13 See also textual criticism

Index Mars 153, 255–6, 259; Field of 221 Marsyas 110 masks and costumes: of musicians 79, 81–2, 83, 84, 85 Massilia, siege of 137–46 Medea 64, 69n6, 116 Melville, Herman 230–45: Harper’s Classical Library 231, 234–5; interest in classical works and their reception 231–5; Moby-Dick 231–2, 234–6, 237, 240, 242; potential reworking of epic openings 244 incorporation of classical works in Moby–Dick: allusions to Jupiter 239–40, catalogue of ships or troops 236–8, Catullus 64 240–1, chthonic jaw imagery 235–6, the Nisus and Euryalus episode 239, Plato’s Phaedo and Republic 242–3 Menelaus 61, 65 Mens Humilis (character in Psychomachia) 149–54, 156, 159 Mercury 28, 110, 120n9. See also Hermes metapoetics 180, 184, 185–6 metasatire 132–3 metatextuality 95, 150, 151; in Lucan 145 metatheatre 9, 11, 85 meteorology see storms mētis 6–7, 9 Mexican mythology 243–4 Milton, John 198, 231, 232, 233, 234–5, 236, 244, Minerva 80, 81–2, 83–4, 85–6, 107, 109–10, 258. See also Athena Minos 265–6, 270 Minotaur 266, 267, 271 Misenus, burial of 137, 140–6 misogyny 273–4 monarchy 58, 59–60, 68, 222; Roman attitudes toward 49–51, 52, 56 Morpheus 166 Moses 168, 169 mothers and motherhood 63–4, 114, 144, 285, 286, 291, 294n2; Cybele (“Magna Mater”) 154–5; and daughters 285–6, 288, 293; and sons 39, 61, 62, 108–9, 112, 113, 272–4, 274–5, 276 Muses 116, 164, 173, 237, 238; invocation of 7–8, 60, 238 music, musicians, and musical instruments 14, 110, 192–6, 198,

301

199, 253–60; association with Apollo 110; masks and costume of 81–2, 85; religious use of 78–9, 86n5, 86–7n10; role in Roman warfare 77–8; Roman attitudes towards 77–86; in Strada’s Prolusiones 2.6 193, 194, 198, 199; tibia (‘pipe’) and tibicines (‘pipers’) 77–86, 86n8, 87n11 Myrrha 112 Naevius 4–5, 8, 18n41, 59, 70n14 Narcissus 235; reception in Christian writing 165, 166, 169 Native American mythology 243–4 nature: as symbolic of kingship or politics 43–4, 47–8, 184–5; versus art 192–3, 196 Nausicaa 31–2 neo-classicism: in Stravinsky’s music 251–2; in Marina Tsvetaeva’s plays 264–5 Neoptolemus 6, 12–3, 150–2 neo-Pythagoreanism 25 Nero 43–4, 47–9, 50, 51, 77, 125–6, 128 Nestor 33, 35–7 nightingales 186–7; in Strada’s Prolusiones 2.6 192–3, 199 Nisus and Euryalus episode 151, 239 Octavian 43–4, 45–6, 48, 50, 51–2, 60, 124; comparisons to Jupiter 46, 124. See also Augustus Odysseus 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15–6, 30, 33, 35–6, 37, 59–60, 63, 64, 232, 290; as a king 3, 4; as model for Aeneas 34–5. See also Ulysses Oedipus 235, 260 Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky opera) 251–60; features of archaic Latin features in 254–6; influence of liturgical Latin on 252–4; influence of Lucretius on 258–9; influence of Seneca’s tragedies on 252, 254, 256–8, 259 opera see Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky opera) oracles see prophecies and oracles Orthodox Christianity see Christianity: Orthodox Christianity otium (leisure): Roman suspicion of 91 Ottey, G.F. 241–2 Ovid 180, 188, 190n22; exile of 82, 128, 129; influence on Claudian and Paulinus 165–6, 167, 169, 171, 172;

302

Index

exile of 82, 128, 129, 128; influence on comedy 85; influence on Lucan 138–41; influence on Statius 71n27; musicians in 79–86; panegyric of Augustus 124, 126, 127, 128; poetics of illusion 165–7 Amores 112–3, 233; Elegies 233; Fasti 79, 80–6, 154, 88n18, 154; Metamorphoses 107, 109, 111–2, 124, 138–40, 151, 156, 186–8, 259 Pacuvius 9; 11–2, 14, 19n52 Pallas (son of Evander) 151, 153 Pan 114 panegyric 44–5, 48, 59, 164–7, 170, 173; gauging sincerity of 124–33 pantomime 259–60 papyrology 4, 25–6 Pasternak, Boris: relationship with Marina Tsvetaeva 263, 270, 271, 272, 281n39 pastoral (genre) 114, 199–200, 232 Patroclus 12, 13, 37, 38, 140 Pattison, William 198 Paulinus of Nola 163, 167–73; Ovidian poetics in 169, 172 Peleus 67; wedding with Thetis 61, 66, 266–7, 269 Pentheus 110–1,118, 268 performance 62, 89n37, 91, 257 Perseus 107–8 Phaeacia and the Phaeacians 30–4, 37, 38 Phaedra: in the plays of Marina Tsvetaeva 265, 266, 272–8 Pharsalus, battle of 138, 141, 190n14 Philip II of Macedon 8 Philips, Ambrose 198–9, 202, 214n12 Philodemos 25–7; kingship theory 3, 26–36, 38–9, 59 Philomela 186–7, 188; connection with the nightingale 192–3 philosophy 13: Epicurean 15, 25, 26–7, 34, 35, 39, 165; Greek 25, 30, 91–103; Hellenistic 3, 10, 25; in Melville 238–9, 240, 242, 243; Platonic 91–103, 243; of Seneca 43–4 Pighi (Pighius) 83, 86 Piso, Gaius Calpurnius and his conspiracy 126, 128 Plato and Platonism 4, 13–14, 231; comic elements in 98–9; in Melville 231, 238–9, 242–4; reception in Plautus’s Pseudolus 91–103

Plautius, (Gaius Plautius Venox) 78–9, 81, 82–86 Plautus 91–103, 170; Pseudolus 91–103; Stichus 93 Pliny the Younger 220; Panegyricus 124, 126, 128–9 Plutarch 80, 82, 87n16, 88n18, 88n20, 88n22, 89n33 poetics: auditory 179–89; of illusion 165–7 Polyphemus 8 polytropia (versatility) 4, 10, 63 Pompey the Great: death of 141–5, 152; Gibbon on 226; in Lucan’s De Bello Ciuili 137, 138, 140–5, 152 Pope, Alexander 195, 231, 235, 240, 245 postmodernism: treatments of myth 285 Priam 13–4, 16n16, 144, 187; death of 144, 150–3, 155, 156, 159, 232 Procne 186–8 prophecies and oracles, 4, 67, 121n28, 144, 159, 255–6; Delphic 60–1, 92, 93, 94–5, 98, 257; in the plays of Marina Tsvetaeva 266, 273 Prudentius 137–59; Apotheosis 157–8; audience of 149; Christian appropriation of Roman mythohistory 158–9; Psychomachia 149–59 Psyche (mythology) 109, 113–15, 120n23, 121n24 Punic Wars 4–5; Second 7, 15, 154 puns see wordplay and puns Pyrrhus (king of Epirus) 6 Pyrrhus (son of Achilles) see Neoptolemus Quinquatrus 80, 85 reception: in antiquity Chapter 1; Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 6, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11; in the modern age 108, 115–8, 285–94, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18 religion and ritual 67, 78, 79, 86n10, 87n11, 142, 149, 252, 254–6, 288; use of music in 78 remorse 187–8 rhetoric and oratory 91; in the Phaedrus 100–3; Strada used to teach

Index 192, 193, 194; Ulysses/Odysseus as skilled in 63, 64–6, 104n8 Roach, Richard 211–3 Romulus 5–6, 17n19 Russia and Russian writers: Anna Akhmatova 278–80; Marina Tsvetaeva 263–78 sacrifice 62, 78, 86n5, 86n9, 86–7n10, 87n11, 87n12, 156–7, 244, 257, 265–6 Sallust 77–8, 156, 231 sapientia 6–7, 9, 13, 15 Satan (Milton) 234–5, 236 satire (genre) 127, 131–3; Alcaeus of Messene 8; ‘metasatire’ 132–3; qualities of 223–4. See also Juvenal Schwab, Gustav 264, 266–7, 269, 276, 280n6, 281n31 Scotland and the Scottish language 179–89 Second Macedonian War 7–8 Second Punic War 7, 15, 154 Sejanus 129–30, 217, 223 Seneca the Younger 43–5, 47–52, 53n14, 62, 127, 170, 254, 256–60, 264, 273; connection between tragedies and pantomime 260; De Clementia 43–4, 47–9, 51–2, 52n1, 127; Senecan tragedy 252, 254, 256–60 sententia 13, 128–9, 130, 132–3 Severus, Alexander (emperor) 221–2 Shakespeare, William 107, 116, 231, 233–4, 246n12 shame and shamelessness 38, 110, 186–7, 274–5 Silius Italicus 59, 68, 132 similes 8, 31–2, 35, 61, 109, 154, 156, 165–6, 170, 183; animal 58, 60, 184–5; in Lucan 142–4 sincerity, study of in Latin literature 124–33. See also flattery; panegyric sisters and sisterhood 113, 114, 118, 168, 186–7, 266, 274, 277, 279, 289–90 slaves and slavery 37, 48, 81, 84–5, 129–30, 217, 218, 223; comic stock type 84–5, 92, 96, 101–2, 104n15 snakes 113, 187, 235, 236, 244 Socrates 4, 14, 91–6; in Plautus 92–6, 98–101, 103 Sophocles 3, 14, 62, 63, 231, 264; reception in Stravinsky’s Oedipus

303

Rex 251–9; translations and renditions of Antigone 251, 264 soundscape see auditory poetics spectacle 222, 223; as embodiment of empire 60, 68 Spenser, Edmund 199 spolia opima 12 Statius 219; Achilleid 56–68; and Domitian 131–2; Silvae 132; tension with Tacitus 132–3; Thebaid 56–63, 66, 131–2 stereotypes: of Asia 64–6, 69n6; of Carthage 3; of Platonic philosophy in Roman theatre 91–6 Stoics and Stoicism: Aeneas as 35–6; in Melville 238–9 storms 157, 183–4, 185–6, 187, 218; in connection with kingship 35, 46–7; epic 27–8, 34–5 Strada, Famiano 193–213 translations or renditions of Prolusiones 2.6: John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1629) 194–5; Richard Crashaw’s Music’s Duel (1646); anonymous translation (1671) 196–7; Francis Wortley 196–7; Robert Vilvain (1654) 197; John Flavell (1669) 197; William Strode (1620s) 197–8; William Pattison (1725) 198; Ambrose Philips’ Fifth Pastoral (1709) 199–200; anonymous translation, ‘Betwixt a Lutenist and a Nightingall: There sweet expressions of musicke in a shady Groue. Translated by two Friends’ (1620s) 204–6; anonymous translation (late 1600s) 206–8; Thomas Warton (1706–25) 208–11; Richard Roach (1726) 211–3 Stravinsky, Igor 251–60; religious influences on 252 Strode, William 197–8, 204, 214n11 suicide 187–8, 242, 269, 274, 276, 278, 289; of Ajax 12; of Jocasta 257; as method of execution/Roman tradition of 129–30 Superbia (character in Psychomachia) 149–55; 159 Tacitus 67, 124–133, 219; Annals 126–31; Histories 132; and Seneca’s De Clementia 127, tension with Statius 132–3 Tartarus see Underworld

304

Index

television 117–8 Tesková, Anne 265, 275 textual criticism: of Ovid’s Fasti 83–5 Thebes and Theban myth 56–7, 60–1, 68, 69n8, 110–1, 118, 252–6, 257, 258, 268; Statius’ Thebaid 56–63, 66, 131–2 Theodosius 158–9, 166–7 Theseus 56, 242; in the plays of Marina Tsvetaeva 265–72, 273, 277 Thetis 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 70–1n26, 267, 269 Tiberius (emperor) 88n21; portrayal in Tacitus’ Annals 126–31 tibia (‘pipe’) and tibicines (‘pipers’) 77–86, 86n8, 87n11. See also music and musicians Tibullus 259 Tiresias 116, 252, 257 tragedy (genre) 9, 15, 56, 61, 71n27, 91, 116, 118, 265–80; as exempla for the Romans 13–4; Aristotelian concepts of 276; Senecan 256–60 Trajan 126, 128–30, 221 translation 179–89, 192–213; act of 234; ‘aftering’ 199–200; as distinguished from imitation 193, 194–5, 196, 198–9; as embodiment of communication issues 287–8; fidelity in 196, 200; process of 179–80, 89; terminology of 196 trophy (tropaeum) 12, 20n61, 20n63 Tsvetaeva, Marina 263–78; artistic worldview and interests 263–5; education of 264; influence of biography on themes 265, 271, 274, 277–8; reception of 278; rejection of theater 263–4, 278 Ariadna (Ariadne) 265–72; Helen 278; Phaedra (Fedra) 265, 266, 272–278 Turnus 39, 151; death of 153–5, 156–7, 159 tyranny 48–9, 56, 130–1, 219–20, 221, 224; Roman fear of 46 Tytler, Alexander 194 Ulysses 9, 10–14, 64–6; and Diomedes 10–1, 19n49, 62, 63, 69n8; as opposed to Achilles 3–4, 15–6, 17n34, 18n41, 63, 64; as skilled in rhetoric 21n70, 63, 64–6 Underworld 46–8, 57, 185, 232; allusions to in Moby-Dick 235–6, 237, 243–4 unus homo: in Ennius 7

Valerius Flaccus 58–9, 61, 68, 69n6, 70n20, 72n42, 151, 219 Valerius Maximus 79–80, 82, 85, 86n5, 88n18, 89n33 Venus 27–8, 32, 45; epiphany to Aeneas 108–9; and Pygmalion 112; role in Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche episode 113–4 Vilvain, Robert 197–8, 202 Virgil: Epicureanism and 25–7, 32, 34; kingship theory 16n1, 25–39, 43–6, 50 Aeneid 25–9, 57, 108–9, 137, 139–40, 141–2, 144–6, 150–9, 179, 180, 183, 236, 279, 285–94; Eclogues 167, 180; Georgics 43–5, 48–52, 124, 180, 181, 184, 189, 257 translations or renditions of the Aeneid: William Caxton 180; Gavin Douglas 179–89; John Dryden 231, 235, 236, 239–41, 244, Alexander Pope 235; Robert Stanyhurst 233 uirtus 3, 10–2, 20n57; epic 4–8; tragic 8–14 uis 6–7, 9 vision, eyes, and seeing 60 109, 112, 113–4; in Plato and Plautus 101–2 Warton, Thomas 208–11, 231–5, 246n16 water, symbolism in Christian writing 169–70 weather see storms weaving 109–10; and the Fates in Melville 241 Whedon, Joss 117, 118, 121n33. See also Buffy the Vampire Slayer (television series) women 111; abduction or rape of 62, 64–5, 113–5, 121n24, 186–8, 192–3; friendship between 275, 289–94; misogyny 220; as musicians 81–2 wordplay and puns 57, 96–8, 99, 101, 102–3, 104n8, 104n13; in Melville 244 writing and written objects: association of cranes with 185; as element in Plautus’s Pseudolus 96–103 Zeus 28, 46, 59, 61, 66, 69n8, 70–1n26, 71n35, 116; in Homer 26, 40n14