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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
  • Cited by 81
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1982
Online ISBN:
9781139054881
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521210430
Subjects:
Classical Studies, Classical Literature
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Ancient History & Classics
Series:
The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
Information

Book description

The Cambridge History of Classical Literature provides a comprehensive, critical survey of the literature of Greece and Rome from Homer till the Fall of Rome. This is the only modern work of this scope; it embodies the very considerable advances made by recent classical scholarship, and reflects too the increasing sophistication and vigour of critical work on ancient literature. The literature is presented throughout in the context of the culture and the social and hisotircal processes of which it is an integral part. The overall aim is to offer an authoritative work of reference and appraisal for one of the world's greatest continuous literary traditions. The work is divided into two volumes, each with a similar and broadly chronological structure. Among the special features are important introductory chapters by the General Editors on 'Books and Readers', discussing the conditions under which literature was written and read in antiquity. There are also extensive Appendices or Authors and Works giving detailed factual information in a convenient form. Technical annotation is otherwise kept to a minimum, and all quotations in foreign languages are translated.

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 25 - Persius
    pp 503-510
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the satires of Persius that are preceded by fourteen choliambic lines. The lines form a single piece and were intended to serve as a prologue, not as an epilogue. The literary texture is also very rich. Several expressions recall the language of Propertius, a repulsive slave-dealer is satirized through a parody of Virgil, and Ennius is directly quoted. This is learned satire for a sophisticated audience; there can be no question of general reform. According to the Vita some lines were removed from Sat. 6 to give the impression of completeness; then the poems were handed over to Caesius Bassus, who produced the first edition. The poet's interest in Stoicism had some bearing on his choice of themes, and it helps to explain his earnest tone and his rather intolerant attitude to human failings.
  • 26 - The Younger Seneca
    pp 511-532
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A generation after Seneca's suicide Quintilian composed his survey of Greek and Roman authors, classified by genres. All the authors in Quintilian's survey could be neatly slotted into a traditional genre; Seneca, alone, attempted almost all the genres. Seneca was no more free of extremes in his life than in his writings, and his biography is as dramatic in its vicissitudes as any in the story of Rome. Senecan prose stands to the prose of Cicero or Livy much as pointillism stands to the style of the Old Masters. The Appendix on the tragedies will show that the external evidence concerning Senecan tragedy is minimal, far less than exists for any other dramatic corpus of comparable importance in the history of European literature. Both in ancient and modern times Seneca's personal character has been vilified by some critics.
  • 27 - Lucan
    pp 533-557
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Lucan is a model for orators, not poets. Martial shows that prose and verse had become polarized that sense was now distinct from sensibility, when Quintilian records that Lucan, for many, had forfeited the name of poet: there were rules, and the rules were there to be followed. In the Bellum civile, Lucan began with tired neoteric essays, stylistically akin to those of the princeps, quite mainstream, and accomplished. Rhetoric may demand an increasing amount of anti-Caesarian invective, but that has no necessary bearing on Lucan's relations with the princeps. Lucan devoting too much space to moralization, and little, if any, to narrative; and his apotheosis at the beginning of Book 9 is too abstract to reflect on him as an individual. Rome had seen a good deal of civil war, and a literature had been adapted to the theme.
  • 28 - Flavian epic
    pp 558-596
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Each of the three epic writers of the Flavian era, Valerius Flaccus, Papinius Statius, Silius Italicus sought to be Virgil's successor: a laudable but daring aspiration. All ancient poets were bound by the principle of imitatio. This implied not merely respect for the past but a desire to reach new and individual standards of excellence. Statius was rarely, if ever, subservient to those whom he would have named with pride as his models. Valerius also took pains to create his own interpretation of the Argonautic myth, reassigning to Jason a heroic status which the cynical Apollonius had eroded. Even Silius, the most patently dependent of the three, did not hesitate to modify the events of the Punic War to illuminate a wider philosophical perspective. The Punic War provided Silius with rich scope for discursiveness and for pedantic disquisition.
  • 29 - Martial and Juvenal
    pp 597-623
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The beginning of Juvenal's literary career coincided with Martial's later years: the composition of the first satire, which contains a reference to the trial of Marius Priscus in AD 100 was probably contemporaneous with the epigrammatist's retirement to Spain. Juvenal, is less obedient to the rules of his genre and sometimes even anarchic, his language a medley of high and low, his tone contemptuous, and, in any normal sense of the words, unconstructive, negative. Martial never plays the fool, and never makes people think. He is poetic on occasions and the rules remain intact: even Quintilian, perhaps against his will, receives an epigram. Martial is Juvenal's senior, his work covers the twenty years which provided the satirist with the matter for much of his first two books, the twenty-year period during which the satirist still listened. The comparison with Martial's easy life in Spain would hardly be charitable, unless Juvenal's life in Rome were a figment taken from his poetry.
  • 30 - Minor poetry
    pp 624-632
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Phaedrus stands apart from the main stream of Augustan and post-Augustan poetry. Phaedrus' language is generally plain and commonplace, occasionally coarse. He admits colloquial and prosaic terms avoided by most of the poets. Like Publilius, he can point a memorable phrase. The eclogues of Calpurnius originate perhaps from a single literary coterie, centred upon the patron represented as Meliboeus in Calp 1 and 4. Enthusiasm about a new golden age, evinced both by Calpurnius and the Einsiedeln poet, links these writers together and accords with other evidence for the optimism and sense of revival which seem to have marked Nero's accession to power. Calpurnius is overshadowed by Theocritus and Virgil, who provided his main inspiration. Calpurnius' book of eclogues has an intentionally patterned structure: the first, central, and concluding poems relate to the real world around him, while the others stand, ostensibly apart from their present circumstances.
  • 31 - Prose satire
    pp 633-638
  • View abstract

    Summary

    For sparkle and malicious with few works of Latin literature can match the only complete Menippean satire which has survived, a skit upon the life and death of Claudius Caesar ascribed in manuscripts which transmit it to Seneca. Transition from prose to verse, a distinctive feature of the Menippean genre, is aptly and amusingly contrived. In general frivolity prevails, but the praise of Nero can be taken seriously and, of course, many of the charges against Claudius, made by Augustus and elsewhere, are in themselves grave enough. Petronius' Satyrica, commonly known as Satyricon, raise abundant problems for literary historians and critics alike. Petronius presents the adventures of a hero, or anti-hero, Encolpius, a conventionally educated young man, without money or morals, and his catamite, Giton, handsome and unscrupulous. Both in incident and character Petronius' novel is highly realistic, indeed startlingly so, if compared with sentimental romances.
  • 32 - History and biography
    pp 639-666
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Several major historians, including Aufidius, Servilius, and Pliny, flourished in the century between Livy and Tacitus. Of the historical writing of this period only two representatives survive, Curtius and Velleius. Velleius is much indebted to Livy and Sallust, more to the former, though he sets great store by brevity. Curtius writes volubly, almost precipitately, as if embarrassed by a surplus of material, but he is never in real difficulties. Tacitus never became a classic or school-book in antiquity, for he arrived too late to enter a limited repertoire. As a traditionalist in an age of declining standards he was averse from outline history and scandalous biography, and his brevity defied the tribe of excerptors and abbreviators. In the Agricola, his earliest work, Tacitus amalgamates biography and historical monograph. Tacitus' historical style is a masterful and strange creation, difficult to characterize.
  • 33 - Technical writing
    pp 667-673
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Columella's Res rustica, 'Agriculture', the fullest treatment of the subject in Latin literature, is a product of wide reading and long personal experience. Pliny is one of the prodigies of Latin literature, boundlessly energetic and catastrophically indiscriminate, wide-ranging and narrow-minded, a pedant who wanted to be a popularizer, a sceptic infected by traditional sentiment, and an aspirant to style who could hardly frame a coherent sentence. The Natural history, dedicated in an unwieldy and effusive preface to the heir apparent Titus, comprises list of contents in relation to medicine, and mineralogy. Frontinus' two surviving works, De aquis and Strategemata, have somewhat limited pretensions to be literature. The De aquisis exactly what it claims to be, a systematic account of the water-supply of Rome. Frontinus asserts that this Strategemata too is practical: the information he has arranged and classified will be of use to generals.
  • 34 - Rhetoric and scholarship
    pp 674-680
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Quintilian, the leading rhetor, 'teacher of rhetoric', of the Flavian period, fostered and, in his own writing, represented a reaction in literary taste against the innovations of Seneca, Lucan, and their contemporaries. In the long technical sections of Books 3-9 Quintilian attempts mainly to evaluate existing theories rather than to propound new ones: he is flexible and undogmatic. Cicero is his principal model, but he is no thoughtless imitator. Quintilian exercised vast influence on critics and teachers of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries: he seemed to offer precepts they could accept and ideals they could try to realize. Fronto is a rhetorician, confirmed by an introduction to his projected history of Lucius' Parthian campaigns: he apparently intended to work up Lucius' own notes. The principal interest of the correspondence lies in language and style. Aulus Gellius retails numerous fascinating details of Greek and Roman life, language, and thought, suitably predigested.
  • 35 - Introductory
    pp 681-691
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the period that extends roughly from the middle of the third century to the middle of the fifth century AD. The period, that of Diocletian and Constantine saw the re-establishment of firm central power in the empire on a new basis. By Constantine's death stability had been restored in the military, administrative and economic spheres. Literature and art began to find patrons and the pen began to replace the sword as an instrument of persuasion. The period, in the first half of the fifth century, saw the political separation between the eastern and western parts of the Roman empire, which had been a temporary expedient in the past, become permanent. Christian writers, with their essentially historical view of the world, were more sensitive to the signs of change than the pagan contemporaries. Augustine's City of God in its way marks the end of the ancient world in the west as clearly as do the great barbarian invasions.
  • 36 - Poetry
    pp 692-722
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Latin epic had come to an end with the generation of Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus at the end of the first century AD. Personal elegy, that peculiarly Roman creation, had ended with Ovid. Annianus' and Serenus' poems on the joys of country life follow neither the pattern of Virgil's Eclogues nor that of Tibullus' elegiac poems, but are written in a variety of metres. The earliest major poem surviving from the fourth century is the Evangeliorum libri by Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus. Ausonius provides an interesting example of the social mobility which literary distinction could bring in the fourth century. Most of Ausonius' poems are in hexameters or elegiac couplets. Prudentius takes over classical forms in language, metre and figures of speech without the body of classical allusion which traditionally accompanied them. Claudian and Prudentius tried to do something new with a very old and by now rigid literary tradition.
  • 37 - Biography
    pp 723-731
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The form of imperial biography established in the second century by Suetonius continued to be followed during late antiquity, and was later adopted as a model by Einhard for his Life of Charlemagne. The Historia Augusta is a collection of lives of emperors from Hadrian to Numerian, dealing not only with reigning emperors, but with co-emperors and pretenders as well. There are thirty biographies in all, some dealing with groups of emperors or pretenders. They are addressed to Diocletian, Constantine and various personages of their period, and purport to have been written at various dates from before 305 till after 324. They are attributed to six authors: Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcatius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio and Flavius Vopiscus. The Confessions were written about 397, in the early years of Augustine's episcopate of Hippo.
  • 38 - History
    pp 732-754
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The writing of history had different roots, going back to Polybius, Isocrates, and Thucydides. Some of it was merely belles-lettres, designed to give pleasure or to move the emotions harmlessly. In the second century, Arrian of Nicomedia wrote not only a history of Alexander based on reliable contemporary sources, but also a whole series of local or provincial histories. Christians were beginning to write in Greek either on the history of the church or on universal history seen from the Christian point of view. Florus wrote his summary of Roman history from the foundation of the city to Augustus in the books in the reign of Hadrian. Aurelius Victor's compendium dealt only with the history of Rome since Augustus. Ammianus Marcellinus, though writing in Latin, was a Greek, familiar with the living tradition and practice of Greek historiography and welding it together with Roman gravity and sense of tradition to form a new whole.
  • 39 - Oratory and epistolography
    pp 755-761
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The study of rhetoric and the practice of declamation went on throughout the half-century of military anarchy in the third century. Roman emperors had always spent a surprising proportion of their time listening to speeches made by representatives of the Senate and delegates of provinces and cities. Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, known also as Eusebius, belonged to one of the most distinguished senatorial families of Rome. Symmachus well knew that the epistolary genre calls for brevity and compression. Symmachus was the last great Roman orator in the classical tradition and the last senator whose correspondence was collected and published. But both oratory and epistolography found a new place in the life of the Christian church. The needs of Christian communication broke the narrow bounds within which classical epistolography flourished. In the same way the Christian sermon was a new form of oratory.
  • 40 - Learning and the past
    pp 762-769
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, apparently an African, is probably to be identified with the Theodosius who was Praetorian Prefect of Italy in 430. The picture painted by Macrobius of late fourth-century senatorial society is the very antithesis of that provided by Ammianus Marcellinus. But it is probably going too far to suggest that the desire to rebut Ammianus was high among Macrobius' motives. Wooden and mechanical as much of it is, the Saturnalia is a touching picture of the nostalgia of a class which had been overtaken by events, not the least among which was the conversion to Christianity of the great bulk of the Roman aristocracy. Martianus writes a baroque and convoluted Latin often of extreme obscurity. Throughout the period under review grammar, in its Hellenistic sense of the systematic study of language and literature, continued to form the main content of the education of those who proceeded beyond mere practical ability to read and write.
  • 41 - Minor figures
    pp 770-773
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Astrology was believed in and practised by all classes in the Late Empire. Julius Firmicus Maternus defends astrology against sceptical criticism and alleges that he was the first to introduce the science to Rome. Maternus' vocabulary includes many late Latin words such as concordialis, mansuetarius, quiescentia, and he is particularly fond of intimare. Arnobius uses a wide-ranging vocabulary, including many archaisms and poetic words, and often piles synonym upon synonym for the same idea. As a display of rhetorical pyrotechnics his treatise has few rivals. As a serious contribution to its declared subject its value is negligible. It is noteworthy that his style is very different from the sober, rather dull Ciceronianism of the contemporary Gaulish orators whose speeches survive in the Panegyrici Latini. Perhaps the influence of Apuleius and Tertullian was still strong in their native land.
  • 42 - Apuleius
    pp 774-786
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the history of Latin literature, Apuleius has two main claims to attention. As a philosopher without original genius he is important for his transmission of the ideas of Middle Platonism, and as a writer of fiction he is the author of the Metamorphoses, the one Latin romance to have survived complete from the classical period. The Apologia was a speech of self-defence delivered before the proconsul Claudius Maximus at Sabrata. The extant philosophical works traditionally attributed to Apuleius are De deo Socratis, De Platone et eius dogmate, De mundo and Asclepius. The discussion of Plato's physics is preceded by a hagiographical life, important as preceding the not dissimilar account of Diogenes Laertius. The treatment of physics is faithful to the Timaeus and Republic, but the explanation of ethical tenets owes more to the post-Platonist tradition. Middle Platonism had incorporated Peripatetic and Stoic elements into the developed system, and the later systematization Apuleius misleadingly attributes to Plato himself.

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