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The Rhetoric of Imitation
 0801417333, 9780801417337

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The Rhetoric of Imitation Genreand PoeticMemory in Virgil and OtherLatin Poets Gian Biagio Conte TRANSLATED

EDITED

FROM THE ITALIAN

AND WITH A FOREWORD

Charles Segal

Cornell University Press ITHACA

AND

LONDON

BY

Copyright © 1986 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1986 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number 0-8014-1733-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 85-24316 Printed in the United States of America

Librarians: Library of Congresscataloginginformation appearson the last page of the book. The paper in this bookis acid-freeand meetsthe guidelines for performanceand durability of the Committeeon Production Guidelinesfor Book Longevityof the Councilon Library Resources.

Contents

Foreword, by Charles Segal Abbreviations PART ONE.

POETIC

7 19

MEMORY

AND LITERARY

SYSTEM

Introduction: The Art of Allusion and Models in Literature 1. Poetic Memory and the Art of Allusion 2. Poetic Memory: Its Historical and Systematic Features Poetic Language and Rhetorical Function All us ion and Rhetorical Figures 52 Forms and Types of Poetic Memory 69 PART

Two.

GENRE

23 32 40

40

AND ITS BOUNDARIES

3. An Interpretation of the Tenth Eclogue 4. Aristaeus, Orpheus, and the Georgics 5. Virgil's Aeneid: Toward an Interpretation 6. The Baldric of Pallas: Cultural Models and Literary Rhetoric 7. The Helen Episode in the Second Book of the Aeneid: Structural Models and a Question of Authenticity Index

100 130

141

185

209

[5}

Foreword

Since the publication of T. S. Eliot's celebrated essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), modern criticism has been faced with a choice between what Claudio Guillen calls the "psychological" and the "literary" ways of relating the discreteness of literary texts to the continuity of literary history. 1 For the Romantics that relation was dominated by the individual poetic genius. For the post-Romantic critics, whose descent may be traced at least in part to Eliot, the relation is less one of persons than one of literary forms and implies the interrelatedness of all literature as a totality. Although the personalizing, psychological view has reemerged recently in Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence," it still does so under the sign of language rather than under that of personality. For our time the problem of literary influence takes place within the sphere of language as a system of communication and signification, and this too is the intellectual context of Gian Biagio Conte's approach to Latin literature. Over the past decade Conte and a small group of disciples and colleagues at the University of Pisa have been energetically reexamining the nature of literary allusion in Roman poetry in the light of the structuralist and poststructuralist theories of language developed by such critics and theorists as Jakobson, Lorman, Barthes, See Claudio Guillen, Literature as System (Princeron, 1971), 27; also L. D. Martin, "Literary Invention: The Illusion of the Individual Talent," Critical Inquiry, 6 (1980), 649-67, especially 651ff. 1.

Foreword Genette, Riffaterre, Todorov, and others among the Russian Formalists and the "new" rhetoricians of Paris. Conte combines an original synthesis of this contemporary methodology with traditional stylistic and philological analysis. 2 He is particularly successful in exposing and examining the assumptions about literary form and language which underlie approaches that have been taken to Roman poetry during the past hundred years. The essays in this volume include the larger part of Conte' s two volumes Memoria dei poeti e sistemaletterario:Catullo, Virgilio, Ovidio, Lucano (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1974) and II generee i suoi confini: Cinque studi sulla poesia di Virgilio (Turin: Editrice Stampatori, 1980; enlarged edition, Garzanti Editore, 1984). The publishers have kindly granted permission for these translations to appear in this volume. From the first volume the essay on Lucan is omitted; from the second the brief concluding essay, "Proemi al mezzo," is omitted. Professor Conte has added a new Introduction on the general nature of his approach to Latin poetry. As the work of Giorgio Pasquali on "the art of allusion" may be unfamiliar to many anglophone readers, I have transferred some general remarks on this subject from Chapter 1 to this Introduction. The end of Chapter 6 has also been shortened and recast. A few minor deletions have been made from the text and the notes, some scholarly polemic has been abbreviated, and a few passages have been recast, expanded, or curtailed with a view toward greater clarity for the Anglo-American reader. The purpose of the changes is to focus the volume more specifically on Virgil while at the same time preserving the broad theoretical and methodological reflections on literary imitation and intertexuali ty. As the literary criticism of Roman poetry, at least in the United States, still remains heavily under the influence of the now-aging New Criticism, Conte's approach offers a more systematic via media between the newer Structuralist directions of recent French criticism and the emphasis on sources, models, and imitation that has been a dominant interest of classical literary studies. His work is less a radical departure from traditional scholarship than a reorientation of its goals. His concern is with the synchronic rather than the diaMany applications of Conte's approach and influence can be found in the journal that he edits, Materiali e dismssioni per l'analisi dei testi dassici. 2.

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Foreword chronic aspects of literary influence, with literature as system rather than as historical evolution. His theoretical and semiotic direction differs from the more historically oriented "generic" criticism of, say, Eduard Fraenkel and the practical criticism (in I. A. Richards's sense) of some recent literary scholarship in the United Kingdom. 3 Recent years have seen a renewed interest in both theoretical and "practically" critical questions of literary allusion, influence, and the formation and validity of canons; and this translation of Conte's book should help encourage a fuller inclusion of classical literature in such discussions. 4 Conte builds on the structuralist conception of language as a secondary modeling system, a system imposed upon the "everyday" discourse of practical communication. In poetry, and in literature generally, other aspects of language besides its referential function become important, especially its metalingual functions: here language calls attention to the process and nature of its signifiersignified relations and operates with far greater self-consciousness of its autonomy and its systematizing, organizing power. Poetic discourse, however, is not a totally other kind of language; its autonomy goes only so far, for it too refers to "real" things in the external world, to historical events, cultural practices, objects, and persons. "The artist makes use of a 'vraisemblable' form to render the 'vrai' substance of history into a coherent and motivated shape" (Chapter 2).

Tradition, code, and genre mediate between the self-enclosed, autonomous system of literary discourse and the referential language of social discourse. The specific functions of literature as system include the coherence and interrelation of literary works within a given context. Literary code and genre dictate the nature of the tacit communication between the poet and the audience. The two are the 3. See, e.g., the essays in David West and Tony Woodman, Creative Imitation and Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1979). 4. See, e.g., Alastair Fowler, "Genre and the Literary Canon," New Literary History, 11 (1979), 97-119; David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, 1983); James E. G. Zetzel, "Catullus, Ennius, and the Poetics of Allusion," Illinois Classical Studies, 8 (1983), 25 1 -66, and "Recreating the Canon: Augustan Poetry and the Classical Past," Critical Inquiry, 10 ( 1983), 83- 105. This issue of Critical Inquiry (vol. 10, no. 1, September 1983) focuses on the question of literary canons.

Foreword means by which the author signals to the reader how a particular part of the tradition is being used, and they govern the expectations that the reader may have regarding the level of style that the author may be using for a given content. By calling attention to the code, the author is able to indicate both his place in the continuum and his divergences from it. In a sophisticated and self-conscious literature, such as Roman poetry and its immediate Hellenistic predecessor, tradition and imitation always stand in a dialectical relation to one another, as Conte shows with numerous examples. To refer to and use a tradition is inevitably to modify the tradition. Yet even the mode of divergence is itself coded within the norms of the tradition. The dynamic aspect of the relation between author, reader, and tradition particularly interests Conte. The author not only presupposes the reader's literary "competence"-knowledge of the conventions of a given genre-but also creates that competence in the reader who both uses and modifies the code. The poet's task, like that of any writer, is to invent a reader. 5 The self-conscious use of literary models also straddles the dialectical relation between a literary work's reflection of cultural contents and its deliberate recasting of those contents into a new form, a form "estranged" (to use the Russian Formalist term) from the familiar, everyday discourse of the culture. Literary allusion in particular partakes of this dialectical relation. On the one hand it assimilates present experience to past tradition and therefore provides a larger frame for validating the literary work as a representation of "reality" and as an embodiment of cultural norms. On the other hand allusion calls attention to the autonomy of the literary system, to the art world created as something apart from the "real" or the experiential world, as something with a logic, structure, and coherence of its own. By its very nature allusion calls attention to the fictive frame as a fiction and thereby also calls attention to the art and artifice of literary representation. For Conte, then, literary echoes are not just the passive repetition of traditional topoi but the places where the tradition deliberately intrudes into the text, bringing with it the sign of its own differ5. See Walter

J. Ong,

Interfacesof the Word (Ithaca, 1977), 76ff. ( I O}

Foreword ence from as well as assimilation into the work. These are also the places where the work manifests its divergence from the purely mimetic representation of a signified and from the narrowly referential function of its language. Here it shows itself as belonging also to the secondary system constituted by the corpus of literary works in which it has its place. In pursuing this method in the analysis of passages from Catullus to Ovid (the latter, of course, is the great master of manipulating the fictionalizing frame), Conte draws heavily on Pasquali's "arte allusiva" and "variatio in imitando." Unlike Pasquali, however, his emphasis is less on cultural or historical continuity than on the means by which authors both open and close the gaps between their own works and the models they "imitate." The study of imitation is not only a matter of tracing individual quotations consciously borrowed by one author from another but also a theoretical analysis of an essential feature of the systematicity of literature, that is, of the tendency of art works to refer to and build upon one another. Poetic "memory"-the recall of past forms, styles, mood, and atmosphere as well as of specific phrases or images-is not a casual but a ubiquitous and a necessary feature of the arts. 6 To Conte the poet's incorporation of the older work into a new creation by means of allusion has the status of a rhetorical figure and carries with it the knowledge of distorting, transforming, playing with the surface of the text. Instead of being a transparent vehicle to a signified, the text becomes a web of intermeshed overlays of meaning, a complex space where signifiers call not merely to signifieds but also to a series of other signifiers and other signifying systems. If Pasquali's arte allusiva reflects Europe's abortive attempt to regain the comfortable security of classical humanism between the two world wars, Conte's semiotic interpretation of literary allusion reflects a contemporary awareness of the problem of coherence and meaning. How do we construct significance for and from a past 6. For the visual arts see, e.g., Michael Fried, "Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet," Critical Inquiry, 10 (1984), 510-42, especially 5 15ff., citing Rudolf Wittkower, "Imitation, Eclecticism, and Genius," in Aspectsof the EighteenthCentury, ed. Earl R. Wasserman (Baltimore, 1965), 154. Fried also provides a useful bibliography of studies of the subject in both the visual arts and literature: 535, n. 10. [ I I]

Foreword that, for all its assimilation into history, remains foreign, remote, and elusive? The intertextual basis of literary allusion reflects the precariousness rather than the givenness of history. Literary tradition is not just a smooth, well-oiled groove on which the past slides into the present: it also poses the problem of overcoming the otherness, the nonrelevance, inherent in the past. Conte addresses this issue briefly in his discussion of Ovid's playing on and with the "auctoritas" of Ennius in Metamorphoses14 (Chapter 2) and at greater length and with more substantial issues at stake in his interpretation of the Aeneid (Chapter 5). Virgil and Ovid embody for him two complementary modes of literary allusiveness. The Virgilian "integration" (as Jackson Knight called it) blends the allusion into a new synthesis that minimizes the juncture; the Ovidian mode is to call attention to the artifice involved in the allusion, to break the frame and make the enframing structure visible. For Conte both are rhetorical figures of a sort, the former (Virgilian) analogous to metaphor, the latter (Ovidian) analogous to simile. The essays in Part 1 provide the theoretical basis for the interpretation of the three works by Virgil studied in Part 2 but also make specific applications to other texts. The Virgilian studies of Part 2 are meant to be exemplary rather than exhaustive; they could obviously be filled out in far greater detail and could take many different directions. Alongside Conte's analysis of the intertextual relationship between elegy and pastoral in Eclogue 10 one could place the function of Gallus and elegy as a foil against which Virgil defines the quality of pastoral and pastoral (as opposed to elegiac) love: something lighter, less tragic, softer, set not in the harsh winter of the mountains but in the mildness of the moist forests from which Menalcas emerges to offer his consolation (Eclogue 10. 20). So too the echoes of the Theocritean nymphs of Idyll 1 in Eclogue10. 9- 15 are Virgil's way of stating his divergence from his predecessor. His shepherds do not meet the desperate and fatal loves of the Theocritean Daphnis. Conte' s interpretation of the finale of the Georgicsas the victory of the didactic-georgic style over the epic-elegiac mode of Orpheus is a convincing view of the ending of the poem, and yet the differences between the two figures, and therefore the ending as a whole, could be seen as less resolved than Conte allows. These are [12}

Foreword questions, of course, that readers will answer in different ways, but Conte's method provides a stimulating and disciplined way of relating the total meaning of the work to the expectations of the genre and to the literary traditions that Virgil continually invokes and manipulates. The brilliant study of the Aeneid in Chapter 5 suggestively reformulates the issues that have held the forefront in Virgilian criticism for the past quarter century. Instead of attacking the question of the meaning of the poem from the "psychological" or personal point of view-was Virgil pro-Augustan or anti-Augustan?Conte speaks of the interaction between the norms of epic and the epic code. By the latter he means the objective narrative structure, conventions, expectations defined by epic as a literary genre, for example heroic combat, divine interventions, extended similes, and so forth. Epic norms, on the other hand, refer to the cultural contents with which a poet in a given society will fill that narrative grammar, the ideology that the particular realization of the epic code will _convey. Conte draws on the Saussurean dialectic between "langue" and "parole" (corresponding roughly to epic code and epic norm), but he also operates with a third term, which is the historically conditioned nature of the epic norm and the role of the individual poet within a social and historical context. The epic norm, one could say, is a historically privileged specification of the epic code. It is both a narrative grammar and a structuring of cultural contents, and it implies the historical determinants that give the epic code its particular realization, its mental categories at a specific time and place. The norms of Roman epic, for example, give weight to the absolute value of the State and the choice of political over personal ends as a fundamental element of its ideology. The epic code, however, comprises the narrative elements and descriptive devices that belong to the genre from Homer on and need contain no particular cultural message. Virgil, Conte argues, exploits the endlessly rich combinations and choices in the epic code to broaden the Roman epic norm. The unitary viewpoint of Homeric epic implies a unitary perspective on the events narrated in the poem and an absolute standard of heroic values; Virgil introduces a multiplicity of points of view and

Foreword thereby relativizes the epic norm. He thus undermines one of the essential attributes of epic in the classical tradition, its unifying interpretation and condensation of cultural values in mythical poetry. Virgil meets this risk by rebuilding the epic code, widening its flexibility by the intertextual references to the whole epic tradition, from the Iliad to Ennius's Annales. The result is a new "polyphonic" epic that not only incorporates multiple viewpoints but even allows contradiction and incoherence as a fundamental part of its multilayered texture. Although Conte does not develop the implications of his theories for Virgil's political attitudes in the Aeneid, the narrative structures that he analyzes are clearly not merely formal constructs but also the shape of content. By strengthening and enlarging the epic code, Virgil acknowledges the ideology contained in the epic norm as the poem's indispensable armature and at the same time exposes that ideology in a wider frame of literary (and, implicitly, moral) reference that calls it into question. In Conte's subtle reinterpretation of the relations between history, the narrative grammar of epic, and Virgil's personal vision, Virgil emerges as able "to retrieve from the depths of history the lost truths that the epic norm had always smothered" (Chapter 5). Attention to the viewpoint of the narrative in the deep structure of the Aeneid yields some interesting conclusions about the relation between epic and dramatic form and some suggestive remarks about the shifting functions of the character of Aeneas. Aeneas sometimes has the objective function of an agent of Destiny and the Roman historical mission. At other times he has the subjective associations that most of Virgil's characters have in the poem. The former, fixedly oriented toward the future, carries the ideological thrust of the epic norm; the latter, an aspect of Virgil's individual handling of the epic code, his own selection from among the combinational possibilities in the epic genre, looks toward the past. Hence the tendency for the feeling quality of Aeneas to be involved with the past and hence too the paradoxical "sensitive insensitivity" in his character. The recognition of such divisions in Aeneas and in the Aeneid as a whole is not in itself new (one is reminded of Adam Parry's "two voices," with which Conte acknowledges some affinities). The great [ I

4)

Foreword

advantage of Conte' s method is to ground interpretation in a systematic view of the epic genre, of literary borrowing generally, and of character in epic narrative. He avoids the dangers of the intentional fallacy (as he notes in his Introduction) and also escapes the pitfalls of simply identifying plot and character and of making a developing, "lifelike" character the focal point of the work's movement. Instead character appears in its proper perspective, as another function of the total narrative stru.cture. Conte, however, does not empty character or other narrative elements of their human significance. He is always concerned to bring the semiotic analysis of literary structure back to the moral significance of the action: the questions of ideology, values, suffering, and history. His systematic structural methodology, however, by making clear its premises and procedures, cautions us against reading the Aeneid through the subjectivizing filters of our own ideologies. The last two chapters are brief, sharply focused studies of two episodes of the Aeneid. Here Conte's approach supplements the textimmanent reading that has dominated the American critical scene and reminds us again that Virgil's works, like most classical poetry, are not self-enclosed units but partners and participants in a continuous dialogue with the literary tradition. The representation of the murdered bridegrooms on Pallas's baldric (the subject of Chapter 6) is not only the "fitting booty for the breaker of a marriage treaty," as Otis suggested,7 but also, in its condensed, self-consciously figural form, the signal of a whole cultural code of mourning the premature death of the young. It resonates too with the other mythical paradigms of the "mors immatura," like the death of Penthesilea, the last scene on the portals of Dido's temple (Aeneid 1.490-93), as well as with the other tragedies of untimely death in the action of the poem. Here the epic norm-the glorious death of the warrior fighting for his country-is immeasurably widened by the intertextual allusion that reaches out to funerary epigram and tragedy as well as to Homer. In Chapter 7 Conte applies his semiotic methodology to a famous philological controversy, the authenticity of the Helen episode of Aeneid 2. After studying the relation between Virgil's narrative pat7. Brooks Otis, Virgil (Oxford, 1964), 356.

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Foreword tern of divine intervention and its literary models in Homer, he concludes that Virgil was the author, although the difficulties that scholars have found in the passage, he concedes, may relate to an intended revision that Virgil did not live to execute. Conte approaches with rigor and freshness the questions that, for all their familiarity, force themselves upon us each time we try to understand that astonishingly complex masterpiece, the Aeneid. In these essays Rome's greatest poet takes the foreground as the figure who most demands and stimulates a new orientation of our critical theories. The first draft of the translation was made by Susan George, Anthony L. Johnson, and Sylvia Notini under the direction of Gian Biagio Conte, at the Istituto di Filologia Latina of the University of Pisa. This I revised, along the lines described above, with the valuable aid of Craig Manning of Brown University, who did most of the work of checking and standardizing references and locating, where possible, the English-language editions of works cited. I am fortunate, once more, to have benefited from Craig Manning's sharp eye and wide learning. My warm thanks go also to Ruthann Whitten of Brown University for her exemplary patience and accuracy in retyping the manuscript. The task, frustrating at times, of preparing a truly English version of such a characteristically Italian work has been very much a collaborative endeavor, with indispensable help from the Pisan side of the project. I thank also the anonymous readers of the manuscript who were provided by Cornell University Press for their many helpful remarks and useful suggestions. I am most grateful to Bernhard Kendler of the press for expert editorial advice, for encouragement, and particularly for his patience with regard to a project that took longer than expected. Thanks too to Marcia Brubeck for scrupulous copy editing and elegant solutions to stylistic problems. Above all, Gian Biagio Conte's warmth, support, and energy transformed the possible snags of international collaboration into a friendly sharing of the "munera Musarum." Such friendship and the opportunity to work together on subjects of common interest are always among the happiest side-benefits of philological labor, the "voluptas suavis amicitiae" that lightens the nocturnal vigils. The [ I

6)

Foreword reader unfamiliar with Conte's work will find here "multa lumina ingeni, multa tamen artis." I am delighted, both personally and professionally, to have had a role in bringing before an Englishspeaking public a book that consolidates new approaches to literary study with erudition, originality, and penetrating insight. CHARLES

Providence,Rhode Island

SEGAL

Abbreviations

BOOKS

AP FPL RE TGF

Anthologia Graeca, ed. Hermann Beckby (Munich, 1958). Fragmentapoetarum Latinorum epicorumet lyricorum:Praeter Ennium et Lucilium, ed. Willy Morel (Leipzig, 1927). Paulys Real-Enzyklopadieder klassischenAltertumswissenschaft,ed. Georg Wissowa (Stuttgart, 1894-). TragicorumGraecorumfragmenta, ed. August Nauck, 2d ed. (Leipzig, 1889). PERIODICALS

A&A AJP BICS CJ CQ CR CSCA DArch G&R HSCP JP JRS MD MH PMLA

Antike und Abend/and AmericanJournal of Philology Bulletin of the Institute of ClassicalStudies of the University of London ClassicalJournal Classical Quarterly ClassicalReview California Studies in ClassicalAntiquity Dialoghi di Archeologia Greeceand Rome Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Journal of Philology Journal of Roman Studies Materiali e discussioniper l'analisi dei testi classici Museum Helveticum Publicationsof the Modern LanguageAssociationof America

Abbreviations RBPh REL RF RFIC RhM RP SIFC TAPA

Revue Beigede Philologieet d'Histoire Revue des Etudes Latines Rivista di Filosofia Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica RheinischesMuseumfiir Philologie Revue de Philologie Studi ltaliani di Filologia Classica Transactionsand Proceedingsof the American PhilologicalAssociation

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PART

ONE

POETIC MEMORY LITERARY

AND

SYSTEM

Introduction: The Art of Allusion and Models in Literature

The work of tracing "loci similes," passages in one author which recall those in another, is the bread and butter of traditional classical literary study. Long in the grip of a positivistic hunt for sources for "Quellenforschung," such study has classified these literary phenomena as "influences," or more concretely as "sources" (a revealing metaphor of fluidity), rather than in terms of texts and the structuring of texts. Without a basic model of literary production, I would argue, the philologist's collecting of comparative and contrastive materials (loans, debts, parallels, etc.) suffers from what I may disrespectfully name "comparisonitis"-collecting for the sake of collecting. My approach is quite different. Its dominant feature is the use of explanatory models drawn from linguistics and rhetoric. I have tried to bring allusion and poetic memory (within which I situate allusion) into a functional rhetorical matrix (defining rhetoric as the ability to motivate the linguistic sign) and thus to make them contribute to the process of poetic signification as constitutive elements of poetic discourse. Allusion, I suggest, functions like the trope of classical rhetoric. A rhetorical trope is usually defined as the figure created by dislodging of a term from its old sense and its previous usage and by transferring to a new, improper, or "strange" sense and usage. The gap between the letter and the sense in figuration is the same as the gap produced between the immediate, surface meaning of the word or

Poetic Memory and Literary System phrase in the text and the thought evoked by the allusion. The effect could also be described as a tension between the Ii teral and the figurative meaning, between the "verbum proprium" and the "improprium." In both allusion and the trope, the poetic dimension is created by the simultaneous presence of two different realities whose competition with one another produces a single more complex reality. Such literary allusion produces the simultaneous coexistence of both a denotative and a connotative semiotic. My interest as a philologist lies here. It is firmly anchored in a specifically Italian tradition, particularly that associated with Giorgio Pasquali. Although I am indebted to Pasquali's notion of "allusive artistry" or "art of allusion" ("arte allusiva"), a few words about the differences between my approach and Pasquali's will assist the reader in understanding what is new about the critical methodology set forth in the following essays. What is truly remarkably in Pasquali's famous article on arte allusiva in r 942 is his ability to bring together its essentially unitary nature in its various manifestations, including poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. 1 A disciple of the historicism of Wilamowitz (Pasquali had studied and taught at Gottingen), he maintained fiercely that no interpretation of an art form was possible unless one recovered and reconstructed its specific cultural identity and exact cultural context in all its historical density. 2 Culture, in fact, acts as the common source of all the arts-a culture that springs from the artist's will to create and from the difficulty of the artist's critical task-the necessity of rejecting one thing and adopting something else: "In reading cultured, learned poetry, I look for what I have for years stopped calling reminiscences, and now call allusions, and would call evocations, and in some cases quotations. The poet may not be aware of reminiscences, and he may hope that his imitations escape his public's notice; but r. Giorgio Pasquali, "Arte allusiva," in Stravaganze quarte e supreme (Venice, 195 r), I r-20 = Pagine stravaganti (Florence, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 275-83. It is important to keep in mind the brevity of Pasquali's essay. 2. For this reason Pasquali's essay drew the ire of Benedetto Croce, who attacked it sharply in his journal La critica. To Croce, Pasquali's juxtapositions of parallel passages and loci similes were death to poetry. The cultural hegemony that Croce's idealistic philosophy enjoyed in Italy did philological studies no good. On the other hand, Pasquali's essay may well have owed some of its celebrity to Croce's polemic.

Jntroduction

allusions do not produce the desired effect if the reader does not clearly remember the text to which they refer. "3 Pasquali produced important studies of Callimachus and of the Odes of Horace, and his conception of allusive art was clearly formed by his interest in Hellenistic literature, with its distinctively learned character. But he drew suggestions also from the work of Eduard Norden (e.g., on Horace's practice of beginning an Ode with a mottolike citation of another poet) and of Wilhelm Kroll. 4 One may also trace some important predecessors, probably unknown to Pasquali, in the United States and in England during the 19 30s and in many observations scattered throughout W. F. Jackson Knight's Roman Vergil (London, 1944). 5 In Orazio lirico,6 Pasquali interprets two odes of Horace, analyzing the poet's "epigraph" technique-that is, his use of a quotation from another poet to begin a poem whose development includes that initial poetic retrieval but subordinates it to its own purposes, including deliberate contrast. What is recalled is extraneous to the new poem because it is irrevocably embedded in the other poetic situation. But the previous poetic context necessarily carries over into the new. The new text therefore tends to become a visible "sign" of the old. In this case, Pasquali accepted the formula chosen by Eduard Norden to define Horace's use of the technique (the concept 3. Pasquali, Pagine stravaganti: "In poesia culta, dotta io ricerco quelle che da qualche anno in qua non chiamo piu reminiscenze ma allusioni, e volentieri direi evocazioni e in certi casi, citazioni. Le reminiscenze possono essere inconsapevoli; le imitazioni, il poeta puo desiderare che sfuggano al pubblico; le allusioni non producono l' effetto voluto se no su un lettore che si ricordi chiaramente del testo cui si riferiscono" (vol. 2, p. 27 5). See also Einar Lofstedt, "Reminiscence and Imitation," Eranos, 47 (1949), 148-64. 4. E. Norden, Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft,vol. l (1909), 504; but see Eduard Fraenkel, Horace(Oxford, 1957), 158, n. 2. W. Kroll, Studien zum Verstdndnisseder riimischenLiteratur (Stuttgart, 1924), 139-84. See Konrat Ziegler's useful article "Plagiat," in RE 20. 2 ( 1950), cols. 1956-97. 5. Antonio La Penna, "Esiodo nella cultura e nella poesia di Virgilio," in Hesiodeet son influence, Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt, 7 (Vandoeuvres, 1960), 2 33- 34, mentions E. E. Kellett, Literary Quotation and Allusion (Cambridge, 1933), 17ff.; E. K. Rand, The Magical Art of Vergil (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), ro- 12 and 26972; W. A. Edwards, Plagiarism (Cambridge, 1933), 45-75. All these were utilized by W. F. Jackson Knight, Roman Vergil, 4th rev. and enl. ed. (New York, 1971), 99-100. 6. Published in 1920 and reprinted (Florence, 1964) with an introduction by Antonio La Penna that is relevant to the present discussion.

Poetic Memory and Literary System of epigraph technique and the idea of its function are both Norden' s), but he disagreed with him sharply on the question of originality. 7 The instances of "allusive art" studied by Pasquali are in large part "emulative" allusions, that is, they refer to cases where the allusion stands primarily in a relationship of "aemulatio," of competition with and improvement over the original. Here we can glimpse Pasquali's way of drawing upon and absolutizing the literary technique of Alexandrian poetry, which treats literary composition as reelaboration or reworking, a kind of literature at "the second degree." On closer examination, Pasquali's approach reveals a privileging of the moment of intentionality in the "poetic memory." His method creates a substantial opposition between inert material and intentional elements. These latter, precisely because of their intentionality, enter the realm of creativity. (The ancient poet, let us recall, did not share the agonizing concern of the idealistic view of art and culture in the Romantic and post-Romantic periods). Within certain limits, such an approach is obviously fruitful, and I by no means wish to deny its validity. One of its limitations, however, is its reduction of the poetic function to the moment of the willed poetic creation. My purpose is rather to explore the rhetorical function of the allusion as an aspect of the systematic character of literary composition, and hence I arrive at a very different valuation of literary allusion. Mine is obviously not the only approach. Harold Bloom's psychological criticism, for example, would stress the intention of the author rather than the rhetorical and linguistic functioning of allusion in the text. Bloom sees poetic influence as a psychological dialectic between the poet's anguish at being imprisoned within a conditioning system belonging to others and the poet's need for creative correction and renewal. He classifies the poet's relationship to earlier models accordingly, defining imitation as "clinamen" (a swerve away from earlier models) and "tessera" (the "completion" and "an7. A remark by Eugenio Montale, whose poetry relies a great deal on cultured allusion, is appropriate here: "True originality ... is not originality which resembles nothing else; it consists of what cannot be reduced to similarities and is 'guaranteed' and conditioned by them." The essay from which I quote ("Intenzioni: intervista immagin\ aria"), written in 1946, is now available in Eugenio Montale, Sulla poesia (Milan, 1976).

Introduction tithesis" of earlier models). For him literary activity is dominated by the poet's need to establish individuality and identity in relation to former models. Bloom, eminent scholar of Romanticism that he is, in the end promotes the Romantic aesthetic to an absolute. "Poetry expresses a poet's melancholy at not being first" might summarize his view. Mystical influences suggesting strange magical astrological forces also figure in this psychoanalytic tendency. 8 Within an approach of this kind, the position of the author becomes predominant and the notion of the centrality of the text as a unified, complete, and interlocking system is inevitably weakened. In the philological tradition this imbalance in favor of the author is decidedly unfruitful. Indeed, although Bloom's conception of the literary act is more obvious and insistent than Pasquali's, it still reflects a desire for confrontation-competition as the guiding impulse of poets. Bloom of course forgets the inexorable but essentially neutral meeting with a "tradition" that both conditions and helps poetic expression. Tradition can be defined simply as poetic "langue," the simultaneous projection of literary models and codifications, a single organic body of once individual but now institutionalized choices, a system of rules and prescriptions. If one concentrates on the text rather than on the author, on the relation between texts (intertextuality) rather than on imitation, then one will be less likely to fall into the common philological trap of seeing all textual resemblances as produced by the intentionality of a literary subject whose only desire is to emulate. The philologist who seeks at all costs to read intention into imitation will inevitably fall into a psychological reconstruction of motive, whether it is homage, admiring compliment, parody, or the attempt to improve upon the original. If poetic memory is reduced to the impulse to emulate, the production of the text will be devoted to the relationship between two subjectivities, and the literary process will center more on the personal will of two opposing authors than on the structural reality of the text. 9 8. Here I refer to The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford, 1973), but other well-known works by Bloom are guilty of the same approach. 9. A recent volume of collected essays shows this tendency-Creative Imitation and Latin Literature, ed. David West and Tony Woodman (Cambridge, 1979), which I have discussed in MD, 6(1981), 147-60.

Poetic Memory and Literary System My main criticism is that the concept of allusion is frequently extended far beyond its legitimate confines. The tendency to see intention and specific allusions everywhere is an old vice of the philologist and is perhaps intrinsic to the need to proceed by inference. When I emphasize, by contrast, the concept of a literary system and regard allusion as performing the same function as a rhetorical figure, I am trying to purge any excess of intentionalism from the concept of "imitatio." One text may resemble another not because it derives directly from it nor because the poet deliberately seeks to emulate but because both poets have recourse to a common literary codification. Even when the resemblances do not appear gratuitous-that is, even where some form of intentionality seems undeniable-my concern is with describing how such resemblances/unction within the literary text. In studying such functions, one must examine how the process that shapes the production of a literary text and permits its readability absorbs and transforms not just a single work but a whole series of texts. The process of literary composition is, to some degree, a process of assimilation in which a text centralizes different languages and accepts responsibility for the new sense of the whole. A further observation may serve to clarify the distinction between Pasquali's and my mode of conceiving emulation. Pasquali seems to wish to redeem the imitatio: by assuming that the poet desires to emulate, he attributes authorial intention to the imitatio. 10 Whereas he thereby ennobles what is a passive moment, I renounce the nobility and treat the art of allusion as a cog in the general mechanism of textual composition. For me allusion is part of the rhetoric that systematically constitutes literary discourse. The philologist in Pasquali, however, is ill at ease with conferring nobility on both philological procedure and the object of his study. By distancing the art of allusion from Quellenforschung and moving it closer to poetic creativity, he hopes to rescue his craft from the grip of positivism and its facile branding with accusations of "lese-poe. " s1e. Today these contradictions are no longer with us. We have long since freed ourselves from such trammels, and the critical philologi10.

Pasquali obviously had in mind learned poetry of the Alexandrian school.

Introduction cal tradition (in part the Italian school of Romance philology) has pointed the way out of this aesthetic dilemma. This tradition has its roots in stylistics, in the analysis of author variants, and in textual criticism. Furthermore, the tradition has made use of different theoretical contributions of narrative analysis, poetics, and the semiotics of culture in the service of the analysis of texts. It is therefore not difficult today to accept the idea that a text can be read only in connection with, and in opposition to, other texts. These texts form a grid through which the text is perceived according to the expectations of a reader capable of organizing its sense. Readers or imitators (also a type of reader) who approach the text are themselves already a plurality of texts and of different codes, some present and some lost or dissolved in that indefinite and generic fluid of literary langue. Intertextuality, far from being a matter of merely recognizing the ways in which specific texts echo each other, defines the condition of literary readability. II Certainly the sense \ and structure of a work can be grasped only with reference to other models hewn from a long series of texts of which they are, in some way, the variant form. The literary text realizes, transforms, or transposes in relation to these essential basic models. A literary work cannot exist outside this system; it can be perceived only if the reader is able to decipher literary language, and this ability presupposes familiarity with multiple texts. Although a philologist finds it hard to specify on each occasion what distinguishes the separate modes of literary imitation, it is still fruitful to consider the relationship between one text and another as one of transformation. The practice of classical "imitatio" is an invitation to the double 11. The term "intertextuality"

is now widely accepted, not least because of its opposition to "intersubjectivity." The term was coined by the Tel Quel group and was associated with Kristeva's work. Although these scholars often extend the ideological import of the notion too far for the concrete needs of the philologist, who is a less abstract analyst of texts, we should probably accept the term and seek to redefine it. I consider it equivalent to the less technical "poetic memory"-a strategic working equivalence suited to our needs. Cesare Segre in "Intertestuale-interdiscorsivo: Appunti per una fenomenologia delle fonti" makes some interesting points; his essay appears in Costanzo Di Girolamo and I. Paccagnella, eds., La parola ritrovata: Ponti e analisi letteraria (Palermo, 1982), 15ff., esp. n. 1. Gerard Genette in Palimpsestes(Paris, 1982) with his usual clarity tries to sort out the terminology and in the end accepts the term while purifying it of the ideological overtones found in Kristeva's work; he thereby makes it a more neutral instrument suited to philological analysis.

Poetic Memory and Literary System reading of texts that is implicit in the work of deciphering the intertextual relationship with a model. The modes of reading (and imitatio) of each epoch are implicit in their modes of writing. The text requires the cooperation of a reader as a necessary condition for its realization. To be more precise, a literary text is a product whose interpretative destiny belongs to its own generative mechanism. Generating a text means activating a strategy that predicts the moves of others. 12 In my research on poetic memory in general and on allusion in particular, I tried to show how the author presupposes the competence of his (or her) own Model Reader. Today I would go further and say that the author establishesthe competence of the Model Reader, that is, the author constructs the addressee and motivates the text in order to do so. The text institutes strategic cooperation and regulates it. 13 Once the philologists have stressed the functional character of poetic memory and have allowed it equal status with the rhetorical figure, they can seize the literary process in action. 14 It almost becomes possible to "simulate" the mechanism 12. When critics speak of "typology," they are generally taking their own point of view, i.e., the perspective of someone who stands more or less objectively "outside" the text, itself considered as a fixed, concrete, externalized object. When considered from within the text, i.e., from the standpoint of the text in relation to the reader who is prefigured in the text, typology can be defined as convention. For the reader a series of narrative constants organizes the text according to a system of expectations. Because of this conventionalization, the narrative text (and most obviously the epic text, which even more faithfully respects the rules of construction) acts as programmed structure. It becomes the place of an author-reader strategy, a strategy grounded on the predictability of the discourse, upon which basis a communication can be constructed. 13. Precisely because the text constructs its own Model Reader, because it actively works to producethe competence of its prefigured reader, the limit implicit in the notion of the literary genre as a "horizon of expectations" may have become outdated. Although this notion has been heuristically extremely fertile, it does, in the final analysis, appear static, impeding the image of the text as process. If, instead, the textual process is rendered dynamic, then in the dialectic between author and reader a renewed authorial responsibility emerges that even goes beyond the expectations of the public and extends them while conquering new spaces of meaning. This is the thesis of my recent work Saggiodi interpretazionedell' Eneide(see Chapter 6). 14. Even in fields of research far removed from my own where methods are considerably different, Michael Riffaterre ("Syllepsis," Critical Inquiry, 6 (1980}, 625-38) also approaches a "rhetorical" vision of allusion. Riffaterre too compares the function of allusion to that of a specific "figura elocutionis," the syllepsis (although the tropic function of the syllepsis is extremely limited, since it is confined to simple grammatical functions). It is interesting to note, however, that Riffaterre, proceeding along a different route, touches upon the most delicate node of my discourse on poetic memory.

Introduction of production of the text insofar as it allows the reader to compare the precise textual reality with the model 1ying behind it. What, then, has happened to the notion of the literary model? In the traditional arsenal of classical philology there exists the notion of an Exemplary Model, the single word to be precisely imitated. There is, however, an alternative model, that is, the Model as Code. This literary institution permits more or less faithful representations, or, in other words, a system of conscious, deliberate rules that the author indentifies as indicators of ways in which the text must be interpreted. Such a model is a paradigm inflected by an author (following a specific grammar) in the individual word. This second notion allows the philologist to reconstruct, from analysis, a corresponding hermeneutic model-a simulacrum of the overall sense which could coherently represent a series of phenomena that could be otherwise registered only piecemeal, in uncoordinated, discrete details. This concept may appear abstract or may seem a useless reduplication, but its value becomes more obvious if one recalls the classical sense of Virgil's imitatio of Homer. The wide variety of intertextual relationships between the two poets (the structural composition and rhetoric of content, style, and language) has excited extraordinary critical interest in Virgil's mode of composing the Aeneid. Homer is often, indeed nearly always, Virgil's "exemplary model" (together with Apollonius of Rhodes, Naevius, Ennius, the Greek and Roman tragedians, and several other authors), but he is also constantly the "code model." That is, he is present as the model divided into a series of individual sedimented units, but he is also the representative of the epic institution that guarantees the ideological and literary functions of poetry itself-functions that Virgil uses for their exemplary value and restores by direct, unmediated contact. Virgil composes "de Homeri speculo" (from the mirror of Homer), as Macrobius once tried to understand the process. The essential question is obviously whether he was trying to reproduce single loci or to assimilate rules and codifications. The double vision of a literary model suggests that both interpret.ations apply.

[r} Poetic Memory and the Art of Allusion non subripiendi causa, sed palam mutuandi, animo ut vellet agnosci.

hoe

not for the sake of stealing, but of open borrowing, for the purpose of having it recognized. Seneca the Elder, Suasoriae3. 7

Let us first consider a line by Catullus which has not yet been "recognized." It is line r of poem r or, the celebrated elegy for his brother: "Multas per genres et' multa /ipe/ aequora I vectus" (Borne through many peoples and many seas). The still unvisited tomb of his brother lies near Troy, far from home-"not near the family ashes" (Catullus, Carmina 68.98). To make the painful encounter possible, Catullus must become a navigator. But the "many peoples" and "many seas" that will mark out his long voyage belong to Homer's Odysseus. The Odysseybegins:

0~ µaAa Jf,OAAO. nAayxe11, f:Jf,£1, Tgo(ri~ LEQOV Jf,"COALE0QOV EJT,EQOE. Jf,OAAWV b' avegwnwv '(bcv ao-rca xat v6ov eyvw, Jf,OAAO. b' o y' ev n6v-rcpna0EV aAyca ov xa-ra 0vµ6v. who was greatly buffeted about after destroying the great citadel of Troy; he saw the cities of many peoples and learned their ways and on the sea suffered many sorrows in his heart.[r. r -4)

Memory and the Art of Allusion The essential features of Homer's opening, with its evocation of Odysseus's long wanderings, all appear in Catullus's line. The only appreciable variation is "vectus" (borne [sailing]), a slight transformation of JtAayxeri, "was buffeted about." Everything in Catullus melts into a soft, misty, melancholy mood created by the slow, lax-almost weary-rhythm. This effect owes much to the secondary trochaic caesura in the fourth foot: "Multas per genres / / et multa / / per aequora vectus. " 1 The movement quietly follows the line's extremely simple syntax. After the primary (penthemimeral) caesura, the coincidence between metrical beat and word accent (et / multa per / aequora / vectus) creates an effect of relaxation. The metrical and rhythmic foregrounding of "multa" between two caesuras conveys semantically the enormous distance between Catullus and his brother's tomb. Catullus thus gives his line a hidden reserve of literary energy whose full potential is released when the two texts are brought together. Catullus offered all his readers this extra power, but Virgil made the most of it. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, at the watershed between its Odyssean and Iliadic halves, Anchises, now in the Kingdom of the Dead, greets his son, Aeneas, who has finally come to the end of his "wanderings." Anchises utters a happy cry of satisfied expectation: Venisti tandem, tuaque expectata parenti vicit iter durum pietas? Have you come at last, and has the devotion that your father looked for overcome the arduous road? [Aeneid 6.687-88} This first expression of emotion is followed-with a change in tone-by regretful sympathy for the difficulties overcome by his Cf. Virgil, Aeneid I. 749 (again providing a sense of languor): "infelix Dido II longumque II bibebat amorem" (unhappy Dido continued to drink deep draughts of love); Aeneid 6.523: "dulcis et alta quies II placidaeque II simillima morris" (sweet, deep silence, the very image of peaceful death); and Aeneid 6. 702: "par levibus ventis II volucrique II simillima somno" (like light winds and most like a winged dream). See Eduard Norden, P. VergiliusMaro: Aeneis Buch VI, 4th ed. (Stuttgart, 1957), 428-30, where he notes the rarity, and above all, the archaic nature, of the metrical structure used here (trochaic caesura in the fourth foot) and examines the refined effects it yielded in the "poetae novi" and in Augustan poetry. I.

Poetic Memory and Literary System long-exiled son (Aeneid 6. 692-93): "Quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora vectum I accipio" (I receive you, borne through what lands, and over how many seas). Catullus's line has gone into the making of Virgil's first line here. 2 There is hardly any difference in meaning between "terras" (lands) and "gentes" (peoples; Aeneas is defined less by his having met many different "peoples" than by his having sought, among many different "lands," the fatherland assigned to him by fate), or between "multas ... multa" (many [peoples] ... many [seas]) and "quas ... quanta" (what [lands] ... how many [seas]). The shift is compulsory, because Virgil's line is part of an exclamation. Virgil had already had recourse to Homer's opening when, at the very beginning of the Aeneid, he displayed his wanderer, Aeneas, as a reflection of another wanderer, Odysseus (Aeneid r. 2 - 5: "Laviniaque venit / litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto / ... / multa quoque et bello pass us" [and he came to the Lavinian shores, tossed much on land and sea ... and having suffered much in war also]). At the point of transition in Book 6, Virgil must close the narrative arc that has been opened in this way. Symmetrymakes Anchises greet Aeneas as a new Odysseus, and Catullus's fine line has helped Virgil to achieve it. But Catullus was not enough. Homer had to under.... write Virgil's operation personally. The threefold anaphora, 3 rtoAJ ... JtOAAWV ... JtOAAa([who was] greatly [buffeted] ... [of] many [men] . . . [who suffered] many [sorrows]), and the energy of rtAayexri (buffeted) had to be recreated. Hence the second line:

a

2. Norden, in his commentary on Aeneid 6, was not expecting Catullus's intervention here. The archaic nature of the secondary trochaic caesura in the fourth foot (n. 1 above) took Norden back to Ennius, and his comparison of Virgil's line and Catullus's "per aequora vectus" (borne across seas; pp. 227-28, and 304) was restricted to the secood (archaic) half of the line. The very first word Anchises uses in greeting his son, "venisti" (you have come), recalls the verb (used in a perfective sense) in Catullus's introductory movement: "Multas per genres ... / adveniohas miseras, frater, ad inferias" (Through many peoples ... I am come,brother, to these sad rites; 101. 1 -2). 3. The threefold anaphora is also found in the proem to the Aeneid, where it is partly transposed into an ancillary three-membered polysyndeton: "multum ille ... et terris ... et alto ... multa quoque et bello" (much he ... and on land ... and on sea ... and in war, much also). The persistence of "multum ... multa" (much [tossed about} . . . [having suffered} much) assured the presence of a characteristic feature of the epic defined as an "arrform ... always calculated for continuation" by Hermann Frankel in Early Greek Poetryand Philosophy(Oxford, 1975), 13-14 (originally published as Dichtung und Philosophiedesfriihen Griechentums,3d ed. [Munich, 1969}).

Memory and the Art of Allusion Quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora vectum accipio, quantis iactatum, nate, periclis!

I receive you, my son, borne through what lands and over how many seas, tossedabout by how many dangers! {Aeneid 6. 692-93)

I have already referred to the art of allusion in the title of this chapter. This phrase is the tide of the short essay by Giorgio Pasquali, which I discussed in the Introduction. 4 Keeping in mind Pasquali's art of allusion, I will make a more general point. Homer's opening has a high degree of memorability for Catullus, as has Catullus's for Virgil (however different the effects), thanks to the prominence given by initial position. We might say that rhythmiccompositional recall is preferentially oriented toward the openings of other poems. 5 Before the allusion can have the desired effect on the reader, it must first exert that effect on the poet. The more easily the original can be recognized-the more "quotable" (because memorable) it is-the more intense and immediate its effect will be. The reader's collaboration is indispensable to the poet if the active phase of allusion is to take effect. Thus allusion will occur as a literary act if a sympathetic vibration can be set up between the poet's and the reader's memories when these are directed to a source already stored in both. Reference should be made to a poetic setting rather than to individual lines. A single word in the new poem will often be enough to condense a whole poetic situation and to revive its mood. 6 On 4. See the Introduction, pp. 24-26. 5. Especially in the archaic period of Greek literature, the "incipit" of poems and even prose (as in Herodotus) had all the importance of a title or a heading; its function was that of the author's "signature." The well-chosen examples given by Luigi Enrico Rossi ("La fine alessandrina dell'Odissea e lo tt;Ao~ cOµ'Y]QLX0~ di Apollonio Rodio," RF, 96 (1969}, 159-61) may be cited here. The first line of the fourth (and last) book of Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica recalls the incipit of the Iliad, and its second line recalls that of the Odyssey,with a clear attempt at "aemulatio"; similarly, using a "frame" technique, the last line of the Argonautica is modeled on what, for the Alexandrian poets, was the last line of the Odyssey,23.296. The cyclic poem Thebais, written in an earlier period, already clearly displays the features of mosaic work. The first half of the first line is modeled on the first half of the Iliads first line, and the second half of the same line is modeled on the second half of the Odyssey'sfirst line. 6. I have discussed one such example in Lucretius in "Hypsose diatriba nello stile di Lucrezio" in Maia, 18 n.s., (1966), 347-48.

Poetic Memory and Literary System the other hand, a lengthy periphrastic expansion may be needed to sound the resonances contained in a single word or phrase in the original- resonances the new poet wishes to make explicit. But the process may entail more than simple recall. The allusion may involve an attempt to compete with the tradition recalled. In this case the allusion aims to focus attention sharply on a restricted area of that tradition in order to heighten a contrast. A known poetic form or formula is conjured up, not simply to revive it by finding it a place in a new context but also to allow it to become the weaker member of a pair ("old" versus "new") joined by a relationship of opposition or differentiation or a relationship merely of variation. 7 Pasquali fails to distinguish between allusion and emulation. Many of his instances (certainly those found in the last two pages of his essay) are examples of emulative allusion. Such a dynamic use of language is characteristic of learned poetry (that written by the Alexandrian poets, the "neoterici," and-but with a preference for selective recall over variation-by the Augustans). In any event, the relationship between aemulatio and allusion is asymmetrical. Emulation (at least in its most direct form) cannot exist without allusion, whereas allusion has no necessary connection with emulation. Catullus alludes to Homer but simply to make Odysseus's mythical journey well up through his words. 8 He certainly has no intention of competing with Homer. With Virgil the situation is different. We have already seen how many different threads have been woven into his lines. Homer's 7. Koenraad Kuiper's definition "oppositio in imitando" is appropriate here. See his Studia Callimachea I: De Hymnorum I-IV dictione epica (Leiden, 1896), 114. Something may also be learned from Arno Reiff, Imitatio, aemulatio, interpretatio (diss. Cologne, Wiirzburg, 1959), but it tends to be pedestrian. 8. The possibility cannot be excluded that Catullus's allusion to Odysseus may be connected with a desire to present his brother as a hero who, like Homer's warriors, had died near Troy. Line 6 reads: "heu miser indigne frater adepte mihi" (ah, poor brother, undeservedly taken from me), recalling Carmina 68.92, "ei misero frater adempte mihi" (0 brother, taken from wretched me), which was written when Catullus was still in the grip of grief, soon after his brother's death. On that occasion his strong hatred for Troy, which had just robbed him of his brother (Carmina 68.99), "Troia obscena, Troia infelice sepultum" (buried in hateful Troy, ill-omened Troy), led him to treat the legendary heroes who had died at Troy as young men ruined by bad fortune, like his own brother.

Memory and the Art of Allusion words and Catullus's are intertwined there, but their functions differ. Virgil admires Catullus as a man of letters and wishes to show that he has grasped the intention of his allusion. Virgil's motive in using Catullus's line and in deciphering its relation to Homer is not emulation but a desire to pay tribute to the methods of a poetic he values and wishes to be identified with. 9 I have already touched on Virgil's need for greater closeness to Homer's text than the reworking of Catullus alone would have permitted. The relationship between Virgil's allusion to Homer and Homer himself is clearly one of emulation, as is fully explained by the majestic authority that the Iliad and the Odysseyenjoyed. Homer's authority derives from his twofold value as "monumentum." On the one hand he is still "alive" (able to teach and arouse interest, to commemorate and to move); on the other, he possesses a definitive canonical character that makes him irreplaceable-and thus "quotable. " 10 Virgil wishes to acquire this prerogative himself-to become a Latin Homer; this is his ~Y)AO~ c0µ11gtx6~ (Homeric rivalry), and as in a duel, Homer, the challenged contender, chooses the place and weapons. Imitatio and aemulatio tend to converge in much of classical poetry. The essential point, however, is not that the imitator-poet desires to surpass his model but that "tradition" is a necessary precondition for both emulation and allusion. The tradition both conditions the later poet's work and helps him to formulate its distinctive qualities. A more rigorous definition of this tradition may perhaps be given by calling it a poetic langue, a system of literary conventions, motifs, ideas, and expressions, with its laws and constraints, that each "speaker" (writer) will use in his or her own way. If this concept and its critical implications are absorbed by the philologist, it will become possible to avoid positing the relationship between traditio and aemulatio as a diametrical opposition that must then be treated as an invariable key to interpretation. There 9. Pasquali (Pagine stravaganti, vol. 2, p. 278) chooses the fine term "compliment"

(complimento), for this attitude. On the need to recover and display the whole artistic pedigree behind each new poetic experiment, especially in the case of emulative translation from Greek models, see my discussion in "Ennio et Lucano," Maia .. 22 n.s. (1970), 137 n. 12. 10. See Gianfranco Contini's view of the Aeneid as a source of "nourishment" Dante's Commedia in Varianti e aftra finguistica (Turin, 1970), 374.

for

Poetic Memory and Literary System will no longer be a linguistic compulsion to believe that every later poet must feel a competitive ambition to outdo all predecessors. (Such mental routines may be a legacy left by people who have supposed that language exists only as a means to creativity.) 11 When a past text is summoned up allusively and its latent vitality spreads through a new poem, allusion works as an extension of the other weapons in the poet's armory. Allusion, in fact, exploits a device well known to classical rhetoric, "figurae elocutionis" (tropes). If a poem uses "golden scythe" to denote "moon," rhetoric teaches me that this is a figure-more precisely, a metaphor. The verbum proprium "moon" and the figurative expression "golden scythe" denote exactly the same object, but the difference in functions is crucial. By substituting a metaphorical use of language for a nonmetaphorical use the poet sets up a tension. A gap is created between the letter (the literal meaning of the sign) and the sense (the meaning), and this gap has its own form, which we may term a "figure. " 12 Thus allusion works in just the same way, and in the same semantic area, as a rhetorical figure. The gap in figurative language that opens between "letter" and "sense" is also created in allusion between that which is said (as it first appears), a letter, and the thought evoked, the sense. And just as no figure exists until the reader becomes aware of the twofold nature of figurative language, so too allusion only comes into being when the reader grasps that there is a gap between the immediate meaning ("after I have sailed through many peoples and on many seas") and the image that is its corollary ("as Odysseussailed"). In the art of allusion, as in every rhetorical figure, the poetry lies in the simultaneous presence of two different realities that try to indicate a single reali~y. The single reality can perhaps never be defined directly, but it is specific and is 11. Pasquali, although laying too much stress here as elsewhere on emulative allusion, wisely remarked that "the language of Greek poetry ... is, on the whole, derived not from contemporary usage but from Homer" (vol. 2, p. 278). Some very instructive examples of ways of reconstructing late Latin texts are found in Scevola Mariotti, "Imitazione e critica del testo," RFIC, 97 (1969), 385. 12. The clarity and essentiality of Gerard Genette's analysis in Figures(Paris, 1966), 207, make it preferable to comparable studies; another advantage for our purposes is Genette's constant focus on textual examples from classical rhetoric. I am well aware of the complexities involved in the concept of "figure"; the volume Rhetoriquegenerate,by Jacques Dubois et al. (the so-called Group µ from Liege; Paris, 1970), offers some fine analyses of this problem, especially in the excellent first chapter (pp. 30-48).

Memory and the Art of Allusion known to the poet. The poetry lies in the area carved out between the letter and the sense. It exists by refusing to be only one or the other. This still unknown area, this tension between meanings, can be described only by referring to the two known limits that demarcate 1t. The analogy of functions between rhetorical figures and allusion has a general validity for the specifically literary character of poetics. Allusion has every right to a recognized position within rhetoric and within the wider system of compositional poetics.

(2) Poetic Memory: Its Historical and Systematic Features

Poetic Language and Rhetorical Function "In principio erat Verbum" (in the beginning was the Word); the poet beginning to write, contemplates the Verbum, a discourse filled with meaning, an instrument of reason and communication, a way of thinking. This Verbum must be made flesh if it is to be revealed, if it is to take shape and have effect. The various modes of incarnation, of descent into the finite space of poetic discourse, will be our concern. For the moment, suffice it to say that the medium of this process is the poet's own culture as expressed in the literary act. The art of allusion is usually confined to that which is "external" to the text- that is, to the larger, more general field of culture in its literary form. Our argument will be that allusion must be recognized not only in its relation to culture but also as an integral part of the literary system. Allusion, we maintain, performs rhetorical functions similar to those performed by certain figures of speech. It must therefore be seen as an intimate part of, and an essential impetus to, the organization of poetic discourse. But what is poetic discourse, and how shall we define it? Heinrich Lausberg makes a useful distinction between "Wiedergebrauchsrede" -language that can be reused-and "Verbrauchsrede," language that is used up in the currency of everyday living.

Historical and Systematic Features Reusable language endows with meaning specific well-defined moments that structure the social order. It thus "plays an explicit role in raising awareness of the rich continuity of social order and of the specifically social nature of mankind in general." 1 Reus'!.~le lang~age exists precisely because society recognizes its value. Without this recognition it would not be freed from the obligation to communicate, or at least, to have communication as its sole and primary purpose. The essential condition of this type of discourse is therefore the privileged position that it enjoys as a result of being distinguished from the perishable commodity that is practical daily language. poetic discourse is a Wiedergebrauchsrede and shares with other Wiedergebrauchsreden (such as religious, magical, __an~ judicial dlscourse) a certain formality of structure, but it also differs from them by being substantially richer and more varied and ultimately by having a freer intention that leaves more scope for the varying effect of the individual. 2 It would perhaps be wise to note here that any explanations of a more specifically anthroplogical nature lie completely beyond my sphere of interest or intent. I do not wish to consider any suggestions that seek to link the origins of poetry and of literary discourse in general to the sacred-religious sphere. Nor do I wish to consider the Romantic belief, propounded by Vico and Rousseau, that accords poetry priority over every other form of language. We are interested not in literature in its "barbaric," spontaneous and primitive state but in literature as a type of cultural consciousness. I wish to emphasize here, 1n order to form a definition of reusability (the fundamental condition for the formation of an active tradition), merely the presence at the formal level of certain invariable and common structures. Language that is reused is inevitably preservedin the poetic memory. In the case of poetry this process results in the shaping of a literary tradition that I will discuss in more detail later. Literary tradition does not exist in a vacuum but must work within the area of poetic discourse and must respect poetic norms. Only in this dimension Heinrich Lausberg, "Rhetorik und Dichtung," in Der De11tsch11nterricht (Stuttgart, 1967), 47-48. 2. See Jan Mukafovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970). 1.

Poetic Memory and Literary System can the Verbum be totally absorbed and preserved and thus have the potential for regeneration and incarnation. 3 The poetic word has no isolated existence but is rather a meeting place between convergent meanings; it is, in a sense, a privileged "place" where such convergence is possible. This holy place, however, defies intrusion. Whether we pass from a vast area, the language of a poetic culture, to concentrate on the language of a genre or to examine even more closely the fine-grained contextualization of a specific artist's language, we can never discover the texture at its finest, such is poetry's "pudor nuditatis" (shame at nakedness). So intricately and densely composed is the fabric of poetry that it is charged with a signification beyond its proper meaning, as with a second voice or an inscription that stands above it in a second register and gives it a timbre, ?ituates it in a context, even before it has any specific "meaning." This process derives from the historical action of the poetic tradition. To use this attribute of the poetic word and to place it in another network of coordinates (its new context) means taking into account its second nature, accepting the qualities that belong to its second voice or second register. Tradition also has another meaning for the poet; it is both a witness to "history" in general and a guarantor of the "new history" that the poet is making; his reworking of the poetic word needs the authoritative seal of poetry. The classical poet therefore respects the tradition that confers respect on him and through which he can claim, "/ too am a poet!" He learns by reference to a tradition that also 3. The cultural and literary situation of the Greek epic in its oral phase when the celebrated "formulas" were created and fixed provides, in a certain sense, an exemplary situation. Here we are quite close to the formulative sacredness that I mentioned above, and it would be appropriate even to talk about a "laic sacredness," which would become sacredness "tout court" for those who wish to believe, like Detienne, for example, in the Greek poets as "maitres de verite." In modern philology the recognition of Homeric formularity and its mnemonic value dates from the early studies of Milman Parry (1928). See also the work of James A. Notopoulos, notably "Mnemosyne in Oral Literature," in TAPA, 69 (1938), 465-93. See also Bruno Gentili, "Lirica greca arcaica e tardo arcaica," in Introduzione a/lo studio de/la cultura orale classica (Milan, 1972), 56ff., and Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). It is useful, too, to look at the work of a Romance philologist on the permanence of the letter (the signifier) as a means to ensure the permanence of the spirit in the chansons de geste and troubadour poetry: Paul Zumthor, Langue et techniquespoetiquesa l'epoque ro,nane(Paris, 1963), and now, by the same author, Introductiona la poesieorale (Paris, 1983).

Historical and Systematic Features prompts him to experiment; he examines worthy examples and reuses them. 4 As Bacchylides said, "One man gains wisdom from one thing, another from another, both of old and now, too. To find out the gates of words unspoken is no easy task" (ETEQO££~ £TEQ01J 00q>O£. TO TE naAaL TO TE vuv. [ O'OC)Eyag QULOTOV]OVOl't' avbQOX'taotat 'tE.

Marvelous was the belt around his chest, a baldric of gold, on which wonderful works were fashioned: bears and wild boars, and lions with flashing eyes, and the press of battles, and combats, and murders, and the slayings of men. [Odysseyr r. 609- r 2}

Lions and wild boars, battles and death: these terrible figures on the baldric of Heracles, hunter of wild beasts and war hero, evidently do not constitute a problem. These images directly repeat and condense the essential life and actions of the hero. They are the motivated and permanent signification of his own characteristics, those emblems that even here, in Hades, distinguish him among the shades. But why is the myth of the Danaids represented on Pallas' s baldric? First of all, there is no connection between this Virgilian representation and the traditional funereal iconography that condemns the Danaids to pay for their crime among the most infamous sinners punished in Hades. 1 Virgil recalls only the most dramatic moment of their story, the massacre of the young bridegrooms on their wedding night. The portrayal of the scene is not the usual one, Their punishment is to pour water into a vase with a perforated bottom: see especially Lucretius 3. 1008; Propertius 2. 1.67; Horace, Carmina 3. l 1.26-27; Seneca, Hercules /urens 757; Hyginus, Fabulae 170; Otto Waser in RE, IV (1901), 2087-91; Wilhelm Roscher, Ausfiihrliches Lexicon der griechischen und rrimischen Mythologie, 1. 1949ff. The myth was fairly popular in Rome-so much so that in the Augustan period a marble group in the portico of the temple of Palatine Apollo showed the Danaids facing their young bridegrooms (on horseback): see Propertius 3. 29.4; Ovid, Amores 2.2-4, and Ars amatoria r.73-74; and the "scholia" to Persius 2.56, citing Aero. Has the mythical connection between Pallas and the Palatine ever suggested to anyone that it might be the reason why the Danaids and their husband are present in this scene? I am afraid so. This is the old methodology whose proponents call for "Reali en" before considering their pertinence to the sense of the text. 1.

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The Baldric of Pallas which presents the Danaids as protagonists of "nefas" (crime). That action is not represented here-that is, it is not described. Here the massacre is all that remains of the crime: the torn bodies of the bridegrooms and their blood everywhere. The accent does not fall on the women themselves; rather the periphrasis that recalls the myth focuses on the youths and on their tragic fate. But the tone that interprets the entire scene is set by "foede" (barbarously): the poet's intervention is characterized by his pity and his horror: "the band of youths so barbariously slain." Servius has a helpful note on the adjective "foedus" (ad Aeneidem 2. 5 5: "'foedum' enim tarn apud Vergilius quam apud Sallustium non 'turpe' significat, sed 'crudele' ["foedum" in Virgil, as in Sallust, means not "foul" but "cruel"); see also his comment on Aeneid 3.216). Even without Servius's comment, I see no room for doubt about the sense of the adverb here. To interpret it as "with ignominy" or "with shame," meaning that the young men died inglorious! y because they were killed in bed and not in battle, would certainly be wrong. Virgil's feeling for glory is notoriously strong, but this is certainly not the right moment to suffocate the Virgilian Muse of piety for the sake of glory, all the more so because the context is perfectly clear: "foede" refers to the ferocity with which the array of young men has been "caesa," and that is why this deed is a nefas. Horace accuses the Danaids of impiety: impiae-nam quid potuere maius!impiae sponsos potuere duro perdere ferro. impious-what greater crime could they do!-impious, they could destroy their bridegrooms with the pitiless sword. [Carmina 3. I

1.30}

The psychologizing interpretation of "foede" must be rejected for another reason too, suggested here in Horace's hint of the Danaids' hardening of their hearts: it empties the image of its physical, and especially its visual, vividness. This characteristic is not, in any case, an outcome of ecphrastic virtuosity but springs from the sullying profanation that ancient culture associated with certain [187)

Genre and Its Boundaries forms of bloodshed, particularly those that violate basic societal rules or taboos, and with the experience of having seen bloodshed. For this use of "foede/foedare" one need go no further than Aeneid 2. 5 39: "patrios foedasti funere voltus" (you have defiled with death a father's gaze; Priam to Pyrrhus, who has killed his son while he was watching); and Aeneid 2. 50 r - 2: "vidi . . . Priamum . . . per aras / sanguine foedantem quos ipse sacraverat ignis" (I saw Priam at the altar, defiling with his blood the flames he himself had hallowed). In the poet's manner of commenting on the narration, a bitter, accusatory tone recalls the tragic disenchantment of those who had awaited the happiness of love during their first "nocte iugali" (nuptial night) and had instead met with death. "Thalami ... cruenti" (chambers drenched in blood) becomes an oxymoron. When Ovid comes to narrate the episode, he indulges the pleasure of a mannerist, extracting the full contrast from the image (Heroides14. 3 r): "in thalamos laeti-thalamos, sua busta!-feruntur" (joyfully they make for their marriage chambers-chambers of marriage that are their tombs). 2 Into the myth of the Danaids Virgil reads the cruel fate of young bridegrooms brutally betrayed in their illusion of happiness during their first encounter with love. Let us turn our attention to Pallas. While the figures of the youthful heroes constitute one of Virgil's most important creations, the figure of Pallas certainly reflects the sentiment of the poet with more integration and intensity. In his case, more than in any other, The pity Virgil shows for these young Egyptians is also evident in other poets of the period-Horace, for example (Carmina 3.11.26-31), and Ovid (Heroides 14). Apart from the influence that may have been exerted on them by the attitude taken up in love poetry, it is worth recalling that, in a trilogy by Aeschylus of which only the first tragedy (The Suppliants) is extant, the second, entitled Alyunuot (or 0aAaµonotot, if the identification is correct: TGF, 4 and 26), certainly had as its central motif the defense of the young bridegrooms and the accusation against the Danaids. After Aeschylus this motif was kept alive by tragedians such as Timesitheos (the Suda attributes ~avatOE~ ~' to him) and Theodectes of Phaselis, the author of a tragedy entitled Lynceus:TGF, 802, who were probably known to the Latin tragedians: see, for Timesitheos, Ernst Diehl in RE, VI A 1 (1936), 1251; for Theodectes, Felix Solmsen, RE, V A 2 ( 1934), 1726-27. Given also this myth's occurrence in Ovid's Heroides 14 (the epistle from Hypermnestra to Lynceus, mentioned above), where-as noted by my friend Vincenzo Tandoi-there occur elements attributable to Roman tragedy, may one suspect that there may have been at least one Latin play dealing with the myth from this point of view? 2.

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The Baldric of Pallas the theme of mors immatura reaches the depth of tragedy. He appears in the field (Aeneid 10. 365) on his first day at war-the baptism of his weapons. Courage leads him to fight arduously, while success and victory encourage him and assure him glory. But suddenly, under Turnus's lance, his aristeia comes to an end: death demolishes this beautiful illusion, and Turnus's superior force destroys the confident hope that courage will suffice for victory. Before the duel he had prayed: cernat semineci sibi me rapere arma cruenta victoremque ferant morientia lumina Turni let him see, half-living, that I am carrying off his blood-drenched arms, and let Turnus's eyes in death endure (the sight of) a victor. [Aeneid 10.46-62} Precisely at the end of the episode in which the youth dies, Virgil stresses the tragic collusion of circumstances that brought together his first day at war and his last in life: "haec te prima dies bello dedit, haec eadem aufert" (this first day gave you to war; this same day carried you off; Aeneid 10. 508). 3 Evander, his father, while mourning, will painfully accuse the naive, bold enthusiasm of a youth and the love of glory that had excited Pallas during his first experience to war: haud ignarus eram, quantum nova gloria in armis et praedulce decus primo certamine posset. primitiae iuvenis miserae bellique propinqui dura rudimenta ... well I knew how strong was the fresh glory of arms and the oversweet pride of the first battle! 0 bitter first fruits of your youth! Cruel schooling in neighboring war! [Aeneid r r. 54- 57} Thus Turnus's act of tearing the baldric from Pallas's body strikes a painful similarity between the death of the youth on his first day 3. "quae dedit, ipsa culit virtus Pallanta dolendum; / prima dies, bello quae dedit, ipsa culit" (The same courage that gave Pallas carried him off to be lamented; the same first day that gave him to battle took him away; Anthologia Latina, ed. Riese, I.51).

Genre and Its Boundaries at war and the death of the fifty bridegrooms on their wedding night. I will not discuss superimposition here or symbol or allegory. The first, more immediate impression is that of a lyrical contact, of a unifying "Stimmung," or mood. Deaths suffered with naive confidence, with disenchantment, are all the more bitter because of the contrast between what the heart had wished and what reality, with heedless cruelty, has imposed-and precisely during the first experience, when enthusiasm is greatest. Virgil derived from his own cultural reality what existed not only in popular opinion but also in the images of high-level poetry, that youths is, a closeness between the O.WQOL (the untimely ones)-the destroyed by "mors immatura" (death before maturity)-and the ayaµot (those who die before marriage). 4 The theme of ayaµ(a (death before marriage) was most frequently connected with the O.WQO~eavaTO~ (premature death) of boys and girls. 5 Latin sepulchral epigrams attest to this connection. One is struck by the similarity between those themes as they appear in sepulchral inscriptions and in elegiac poets: for example, the same image of the Carmina epigraphica38 3. 2 Biichtorch- nuptial and funereal-in eler (CIL 9.6315): gum ia[m sibi posceret Hymen finissetque} diem nuptis, faxs altera morti[s inluxit prior. ... 4. Comparison between Virgil's poetic description of the other world (especially of the banks of Acheron, where Aeneas, before entering Hades, finds the souls kept out of the underworld (Aeneid 6-426ff.) has shown that both partly derive from a single source which associated the "immaturi" (UWQOL, the untimely ones) with the "innupti" (ayaµot anatc>Ei;, unmarried childless), together with others who had died "ante tempus" (before their time), such as the ~Lato0avai:ot (those who die by violence): see Joseph Bidez and Franz Cumont, Les mages hellenises (Paris, 1938), vol. 2, p. 287; Franz Cumont, Lux perpetua (Paris, 1949), 307ff.; Jan Waszink's comment on chapter 56 of Tertullian's De anima (Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani de anima) (Amsterdam, 1947), 564-67, is particularly illuminating. 5. The principle of i:O.oi; 6 yaµoi; (the goal (of life] is marriage; see Johanna ter Vrugt-Lenz, Mors immatura [Groningen, 1960), p. 13, n. 3) was equally applicable to men and women; see Ewald Griessmair, Das Motiv der mors immatura in den griechischen Aeni pontanae, 17 (Innsbruck, 1966), metrischen Grabinschriften Commentationes 64ff.

The Baldric of Pallas Although now the god of marriage was calling, and had brought the wedding day to its close, the other torch-of death-blazed first. and in Ovid, Heroides2 r. 172: "et face pro thalami fax mihi morris adest" (and instead of the marriage torch, the torch of death is before me). But we may compare Fasti 2.561-62: conde tuas, H ymenaee, faces et ab ignibus atris aufer: habent alias maesta sepulchra faces; God of marriage, extinguish your torches, take them away from the sombre flames; the sorrowful graves have other torches. and Propertius 4. 11 .46: "viximus insignes inter utramque facem" (we lived in reknown between the two torches). The same formal principle of antithesis and contrast-with the rigidity that often characterizes a theme that has become a toposcharacterizes Greek tomb eipgraphs and certain epigrams of the Palatine Anthology on the immaturi. 6 Among innumerable cases we may cite epigraph 12 50a Peek, line 4: ot Taq>ov avTl yaµov (for him in death they wrought a grave inTEll~av (1Jtoq>0tµEvcp stead of marriage)7 and 1584, lines 5-6:

avi:l 6€, µot eaAaµoto xal £'0l£QWV uµcva(wv i;{,µ~0£ xal 01:~AAY) xal XOVL£ txegoi;ai:11 For me, instead of the marriage chamber and the holy hymns of marriage, there was a tomb, a stele, and most hateful dust. 6. See Griessmair, Das Motiv, 70-74, who also quotes passages by Greek tragedians (especially Euripides); I would add a particularly significant passage in Euripides: µEta~aAOU~ JtEQL VEX.Qq_), ta vuµcptx.a / tEAl7Aaxwv 6dAato~ ELV "At6ou 66µot~ (he lies, a corpse, on a corpse-poor man, to have consummated his marriage in Hades; 1240-41). 7. Werner Peek, Griechische Vers-Inschriften, vol. 1: Grab-Epigramme (Berlin, 1955). Two further examples may be added to those given by Peek: 1234.5-6 (AP 7.367) and 1910.5-8 (AP 7.712).

Genre and Its Boundaries For the image of the wedding day coinciding with the day of death (as in the myth of the Danaids' bridegrooms), compare 1800, lines 7-8, and AP 7. 188:

er

11µa-rLb) vuµq>£LO£ 0.V~JtT£TO AaµnaOL JtaCTTU£, TOUT(pJtUQXaLY]£ O'O0aAaµwv £TUX££. On the day when the bridal chamber was lighted by the torch, you entered the funeral pyre, not the marriage chamber.

But aside from the interesting thematic resemblances, can we safely say that we are sure of this exegesis? The fact is that what is reconstructed does not appear to be a fortuitous convergence of details of content but rather reproduces a creative mechanism whose significant elements have the same function in the anthropological system as in Virgil's text. The same rhetorical figure of connection-a synecdoche, to be more precise-in the anthropological text connects genus