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Laying it on with a Trowel: The Proem to Lucan and Related Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Michael Dewar
Michael Dewar
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
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Extract

The extravagant, not to say fulsome, praise showered upon Nero in Lucan's proem to his De Bello Civili (1.33–66) tends to divide scholars neatly into two factions. In the blue corner are those for whom it is ‘obviously’ sarcastic or ironic in some degree, whether they consider it intended to be circulated privately or understood only by a small group of initiates, or else see it as actually being designed to offend the princeps. In the red we find those who attempt to explain what the modern palate finds offensive by reference to the Realien of Nero's reign and to the processes of literary representation in general—and what we loosely call ‘rhetoric’ in particular—current in the poetry of the time.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , May 1994 , pp. 199 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1994

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References

1 Lucan. An Introduction (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, XXXIX, Ithaca/London, 1976), pp. 47f.Google Scholar

2 See OLD s.v. 2, citing Hor. Epod. 12. 3 ‘naris obesae’ and, with a metaphorical reference to artistic insensitivity, Calp. Ecl. 4. 147f. ‘carmina…/…obesis auribus apta.’

3 Contrast Johnson, W. R., Momentary Monsters. Lucan and his Heroes (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, XLVII, Ithaca/London, 1987), p. 121.Google Scholar

4 ‘Lucan's Political Views and the Caesars’, in Neronians and Flavians I (ed. Dudley, D. R., London, 1972), p. 76.Google Scholar

5 Op. cit., p. 121. Johnson also pits his opinion only against those who see the passage as ‘a clumsy imitation’ of Virgil, while failing to acknowledge that the whole line of argument taken by, for example, Grimal and Thompson (below, n. 8), clearly works from the premise that the imitation is skilled and, in the context, effective.

6 Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero (Ithaca/London, 1985), p. 145.Google Scholar

7 Nock, A. D., ‘The Proem of Lucan’, CR 40 (1926), pp. 17–18Google Scholar; Grimal, P., ‘L'Eloge de Néron au début de la Pharsale, est-il ironique?’, REL 38 (1960), pp. 296–305.Google Scholar

8 Grimal, art. cit., pp. 302–5; Lynette, Thompson, ‘Lucan's Apotheosis of Nero’, CPh 59 (1964), 146–53.Google Scholar

9 Thompson, art. cit., pp. 148f.; Jenkinson, J. R., ‘Sarcasm in Lucan i. 33–66’, CR n.s. 24 (1974), pp. 8–9Google Scholar. Weight, of course, was a traditional attribute of divine beings, and had been since Homer: see Iliad 5.838f., where, when Athena mounts Diomedes' chariot, µγα δ' ἔβραχε ϕγιµος ἄξων / βριθοσνῃ. δεινν γρ ἄγεν θεν ἄνδρα τ' ἄριστον. The use to which the idea could be put in encomiastic poetry can easily be seen in a number of passages in the Silvae where the object of Statius' praise is the emperor Domitian: see Silv. 1.1.18ff., 56f. ‘insessaque pondere tanto/ subter anhelat humus’, 4.2.25f. ‘ille penates/implet et ingenti genio gravat.’ It is quite easy for modern readers to import into texts which use this topos a comic effect which there is no good reason to believe was intended by the author. This is true, for example, of Virgil's picture of Aeneas, son of a goddess and future god himself, weighing down Charon's boat (A. 6.413f. ‘gemuit sub pondere cumba/sutilis’). So too, in a passage of high pathos where humour is surely out of the question, Statius makes the seer Amphiaraus say to Apollo, who is disguised as a human charioteer, that he knew it was him all along because his weight had put unusual strain on the chariot (Theb. 7.779ff. ‘olim te, Cirrhaee pater, peritura sedentem/ ad iuga…axe trementi/ sensimus’).Google Scholar

10 As is well known, Otto Zwierlein has made a convincing case for putting the composition of the Hercules Oetaeus as late as the middle of the second century, ‘certe post Silium Italicum’ (L. Annaei Senecae Tragoediae (Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis) [Oxford, 1986], p. vi).Google Scholar

11 Jenkinson, art. cit., p. 9.

12 It seems worth observing that the articles cited in the preceding paragraph have not always been accorded the attention their arguments seem to warrant. Ahl, op. cit., p. 47 n. 54, somewhat misrepresents the force of Nock's article, and cites Grimal without addressing the evidence he presents. Not one of the four appears in Sullivan's bibliography, and Johnson's splendidly impressionistic monograph, owing its origins as it does to a series of lectures, has no room for in-depth discussion of such matters. Those who wish to trace the history of the scholarly debate on the question of irony in the proem further will find a convenient bibliography at Jamie, Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan's Bellum Civile (Cambridge, 1992), p. 137 n. 101.Google Scholar

13 See e.g. Duff, J. Wight and Duff, Arnold M., Minor Latin Poets (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA, 1934), p. 329Google Scholar note d, and Sullivan, op. cit., p. 58. The references to Virgil and Homer which follow (vv. 48f., discussed below) make an allusion to Nero's epic poetry seem more likely.

14 Op. cit., p. 58.

15 See further Dilke, O. A. W., Statius, Achilleid. Edited with Introduction, Apparatus Criticus and Notes (Cambridge, 1954), ad loc. (p. 81).Google Scholar

16 See Margit, Benker, Achill und Domitian. Herrscherkritik in der ‘Achilleis’ des Statius (Diss. Furth, Bayern, 1987)Google Scholar, passim (review, Dewar, M. J., CR 38 [1988], 252–3).Google Scholar

17 See further van Dam, H. J., P. Papinius Statius. Silvae Book II (Mnemosyne Supplement 82, Leiden, 1984), ad loc. (p. 470).Google Scholar

18 Francis, Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Latin Poetry (Edinburgh, 1972), p. 32.Google Scholar

19 Nero in particular, it must be admitted, had a reputation for considerable tolerance towards personal attacks made against him in verse, and Suetonius preserves for us a nice collection of lampoons current in his reign (Suet. Nero 39). But it is worth noticing the limits of what Suetonius considers tolerance: he appears astonished that Isidorus the Cynic and the actor Datus suffered no more outrageous punishment than ‘mere’ exile (ibid.). And men of rank were not permitted perfect libertas either, as is shown by the banishment of Antistius Sosianus by the senate under the lex maiestatis in 62 (Tac. Ann. 14.48f.).

20 The referee for CQ sounds a judicious note of caution on this point, arguing that ‘it seems just as plausible to say the subtleties of first-century Latin are as accessible to us as Sidonius, and that we may be better readers of Lucan than he’, and asking ‘would a German scholar who worked on Shakespeare be a worse interpreter of his meaning than a modern English poet?’ There is certainly much in this, and I am reminded of a very frustrating argument I once had with a Swiss woman. She stoutly maintained that being a native speaker of French automatically (almost genetically) guaranteed that, by simply opening her mouth and pronouncing Latin as if it were French, she would come closer to the authentic classical pronunciation than any poor Anglophone foolish enough to put his trust in the conclusions of scientific philology. But the situations are not perfectly comparable. Sidonius is both scholar and poet, and the language he studies and writes in is a more than usually artificial literary construct, which, under the influence of tradition and of the schools of rhetoric, was surely far less fluid and subject to change than the idioms of English poetry have been since the sixteenth century. His ‘reading’ of a predecessor in this same tradition must be treated with a considerable degree of respect if we are to avoid the excesses of Besserwissen.

21 ‘The Art of Safe Criticism in Greece and Rome’, AJPh 105 (1984), 174–208.Google Scholar

22 See especially Demetrius, On Style 287–95, and Quintilian, Inst. Or. 9.2.66 (discussed by Ahl, art. cit., pp. 177ff., 189ff.).

23 Art. cit., p. 184.

24 Cited by Ahl, art. cit., pp. 200 and 196 respectively.

25 See the Suetonian vita of Lucan, printed at Hosius, C. (ed.), M. Annaei Lucani de Bello Civili libri decem (2nd edition) (Leipzig, 1905), p. 335. 21–5Google Scholar; also Stat. Silv. 2.7.58.

26 I would like to express my gratitude to the referee for CQ who made several very useful observations which have greatly added to the clarity and force of this paper.