2 - Literary criticism

Summary

Literary critics today fall into two broad categories. There are the academics, out to impress their colleagues and instruct their pupils. And there are, in the great tradition of Dryden, creative writers meditating on their craft. In the Roman world, academics, or their nearest equivalents, practised on literature something that they called kritikē (iudicium ‘judgement’), but at an infinitely lower level of sophistication than has now been reached. The creative writers might comment on their trades, but they did it less systematically than Dryden or Eliot, and in response, rather, to the feuds and challenges of the moment. Neither teachers nor writers give us anything as abstract and theoretical as Aristotle's Poetics, or anything with as perceptive a treatment of cited passages as ‘Longinus’. Cicero, Horace and Quintilian, authoritative and influential though they were, not only rank inferior to the best Greek critics: they are not competing in the same field.

THE ‘ACADEMICS’

Grammatici

Horace, registering the judgement that Ennius was a second Homer, adds ut critici dicunt ‘as the critics say’ (Epist. 2.1.51). What, for the Romans, was a criticus?

In Greece scholars seem to have been called kritikoi before they took over the term grammatikos. Even when grammatikos was in vogue, the exercise of judgement was regarded as an important part of a scholar's task; and Crates of Mallos, the wheel having come full circle, claimed to be critic rather than, or as well as, grammarian. For Crates a critic was a superior being, ‘skilled in the whole science of language’.