We have learned a great deal in recent years about reading Horace's satires; there is now widespread agreement that the speaker of the satires is himself a character within them, a persona. Such a persona may be most effective when it has obvious connections with its creator, but that fact does not preclude the exaggeration of reality, or even its complete inversion. For Horace the implications of this approach are exciting: instead of a poet discoursing with cheerful earnestness on morality, on poetry and on his daily life, we have a fictional character, whom we do not have to take seriously at all.

The three diatribe satires present us with a character so absurd that they have been taken, I think rightly, as parodies. Although the poems were once appreciated as effective moralising sermons, even their admirers found it hard to justify the lack of intellectual coherence, to say nothing of the astonishing vulgarity of the second satire. As parodies, however, the poems are wonderfully successful. The speaker trots out a series of banalities: ‘people should be content with who they are’; ‘people should not go to extremes’; ‘people should be consistent’. But he invariably gets distracted, goes off on tangential rants, and makes a fool of himself. The moralist of the first three satires is, to put it bluntly, a jerk.

Two major editions of the Iliad appeared at the end of the twentieth century: Helmut van Thiel's for Olms (1996), and Martin West's for Teubner (1998-2000). They are radically different in their methodological assumptions, and hence in the texts they offer. Helmut van Thiel trusts the direct transmission, i.e. the best medieval manuscripts. He takes the position that ancient variants reported in the Homeric scholia are usually ‘suggestions’ of ancient scholars (for example Zenodotus) ‘towards the improvement of the text, or…deliberations about it’, and that they are therefore of little significance when constituting the text. He also insists that modern editors not indulge in conjectures of their own. What they should do, rather, is represent the medieval transmission as faithfully as possible. He concedes that this is a modest aim, but one which he considers appropriate, given what can and cannot be known about the Homeric text. According to him, ‘laurels in textual criticism are not to be won from the text of Homer’. Martin West would surely disagree: his edition offers a dazzling display of editorial ambition. He does not trust the medieval manuscripts, and sees his task as that of exposing and mending their shortcomings. In order to restore what he thinks was the original wording of the Homeric text, West makes use of weakly attested ancient variants; and, above all, employs his own critical acumen to weed out corruption and modernisation.

All drama, indeed all literature, shows people acting on the basis of beliefs and values. We take those values for granted when we watch a play, and observe how the characters negotiate their way within the world as it appears to them. I wish to call attention to some underlying moral and psychological assumptions to which we implicitly assent as a condition for appreciating the story in a couple of Greek tragedies. For sometimes those assumptions are just what the play is really getting across.

‘This poem is the feeblest and least poetical of all the Heroides, and has certain solecisms in diction and metre, which are either spurious or show that the epistle is an unfinished and careless performance.’ So Arthur Palmer in the preface to his commentary on Heroides 8, Hermione's letter to Orestes imploring him to rescue her from Neoptolemus, her abductor; and Peter Knox fans the flames of doubt about the authenticity of the letter (or at least parts of it) in his analysis of lines 65-74, where Hermione locates herself alongside Leda, Hippodamia and Helen in a Tantalid tradition of rape-victims:

num generis fato, quod nostros durat in annos,
Tantalides mattes apta rapina sumus?
non ego fluminei referam mendacia cygni
nee querar in plumis delituisse Iouem.
qua duo porrectus longe freta distinet Isthmos,
uecta peregrinis Hippodamia rotis;
[Castori Amyclaeo et Amyclaeo Polluci
reddita Mopsopia Taenaris urbe soror;]
Taenaris Idaeo trans aequor ab hospite rapta
Argolicas pro se uertit in arma manus.
(Her. 8.65-74)

The end of the first Georgic is turbulent. The assassination of Caesar leads to civil war; Mars rages savagely; the charioteer can no longer control his chariot (512-14). But at the beginning of Georgic 2 normality seems to have returned, and the farmer is not only plowing but planting trees for his grandchildren (2.58). Later in the book, however, Virgil's instructions for planting grapevines include a puzzling simile which reminds the reader of the end of Georgic 1. He compares the arrangement of vines in a field to the deployment of battle troops on a plain.

For classical antiquity the division between history and poetry is often arbitrary and misleading. The history-writing of antiquity not only subsumes what we would call political science, sociology, and psychology, but is also linked to epic poetry and to moral speculation on the good life and the good community. Just as Herodotus is not fully intelligible without Homer nor Thucydides without the tragedians, so not only Livy, but also Tacitus cannot fully be understood without reference to Virgil.

Like Gorgias or Apuleius, Tacitus also reminds us that the division between poetry and prose is more fluid in ancient than in modern literature. Scholars have long recognized Tacitus' debt to Virgil, especially in vocabulary and expression. Yet there is another, more elusive quality in Tacitus which is ultimately traceable to the influence of the great epic poet. This is the creation of an atmosphere around events which confers on them a weight, penetration, and richness of suggestion which the bare facts could not possibly convey.

D M

J. P. Sullivan

In chapters 24 and 25 of the Poetics Aristotle discusses an aspect of poetry which is important even for satire. Aristotle states that to thaumaston, the element of ‘the wondrous’ necessary for tragedy, depends on what he terms to alogon, ‘the irrational’ (Poet. 1460a11-14). He continues to explain that ‘once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity’ inherent in it (an de thēi kai phainētai eulogōterōs, endekhesthai kai atopon <on>). Accordingly, Aristotle postulates that the poet should prefer ‘likely impossibilities to unlikely possibilities’ (adunata eikota mallon ē dunata apithana). Aristotle stresses the importance of this demand by repeating it later (Poet. 1461b11f.). The poet's justification for proceeding along such lines rests on the effect he achieves: his composition becomes ‘more striking’ (ekplēktikōteron, Poet. 1460b24-27). The irrational does not necessarily violate reason, ‘for it is likely that something may happen contrary to likelihood’ (eikos gar kai para to eikos ginesthai; Poet. 1461b15). Although not real, the irrational is ‘better’ (beltion); it is not that which is, but that which ‘ought to be’ (hōs dei). S.H. Butcher summarises the subject by observing: ‘These so-called adunata are the very dunata of art, the stuff and substance of which poetry is made …. The adunata, things impossible in fact, become pithana [likely].’

Language is among the most mysterious of man's attributes. Its power not only to communicate truths about reality, but also to compel assent in the face of reality has often appeared miraculous, magical, and also dangerous. The marvel that mere words could impel men to the most momentous actions, and the admiration or fear that this fact inspires, are recurrent themes in classical literature. To express and understand this power Greek myth early framed the figure of Orpheus, a magical singer, half-man, half-god, able to move all of nature by his song. How that myth shifts in meaning and emphasis in representing that power is the subject of this essay. Though primarily concerned with classical writers, I shall also consider how a few modern poets used and transmuted this mythic material. My reading of the myth is both diachronic and synchronic. I attempt to study some aspects of its historical development and also to interpret it (especially in part I) as if all of its versions, taken together, form a contemporary statement about the relation of art and life.

Orpheus is a complex, multifaceted figure. For the ancients he is not only the archetypal poet, but also the founder of a mystical religion known as Orphism, with a well-developed theology, cosmogony, and eschatology of which much survives in hymns and short epics, mostly of late date. The ‘poetic’ Orpheus inevitably overlaps with the founder of Orphism, but it is the Orpheus of the poetic tradition that this essay discusses.

Carlyle, On History

Petronius, Satyricon

Tantalus as paradigm disturbs. The cooking and serving of one's children's flesh to test the omniscience of gods seems gruesome index of perverse ambition, a hunger for knowledge, superiority, power, for which the everlasting frustration of corresponding bodily appetites seems not only fitting punishment but emblem — emblem of man's status as appetite, his natural affinity with the beast. To the saga of the Tantalidae Seneca devotes two plays: Agamemnon and Thyestes. Dramaturgically and stylistically they differ. Verse-dialogue, lyric metre, prologue integration, interrelation between chorus and act, the choral persona, the structuring and unfolding of dramatic language and imagery, the messenger's speech, dramatic structure, movement, tempo are handled very differently in each play. Even the number of actors and choruses differs. Formal similarities of course abound: the ghost-prologue, the protagonist-attendant scene, the thematic employment of imagery (and similar imagery at that), chorus-act ‘joins’, the spectacular and thematic use of ‘theatre’, the use of postclassical dramatic conventions — the five-act structure, entrance monologue-asides, choral exit and re-entry. But these only underscore the marked dramaturgical differences between the two plays, their distinguishing characteristics and defining style.

Michael Cronin once described translation as ‘what saves us from having to read the original’. To cite this statement at the start of any discussion of Terence is a little ironic given that critics have not infrequently used his comedies as an opaque glass through which, if only one squints hard enough, one can read the original Greek New Comedy. Noticeably, these lost originals usually live their imagined existences free from the dramatic flaws of Terence's adaptations. For example, Grant writes on the seeming abruptness of Micio's challenge to Demea at Adelphoe 829-31, that in the Greek original ‘the challenge would not have been as abrupt as it is in the Terentian adaptation. The probable reason for the abruptness is that Terence did not realize the difference between Attic and Roman law [on inheritance] in this respect.’ It is certainly possible that he is right, and that Terence omitted something in Menander which caused problems for the flow of his play. It is, however, also entirely possible that the original was similarly abrupt or that there was some other reason for the scene's choppiness than Terence's lamentable ignorance of the inheritance laws of Athens or his poor skills in translation.

Any critical investigation of Apuleius' Metamorphoses needs to come to terms with the basic problem of structural and thematic design. If there is any consensus among modern scholars it is that this is no easy task: ‘[It] is so varied a work that it resists an easy reading’; ‘we are still none the wiser as to why [Apuleius] should have written the Metamorphoses as he did’; ‘there is … little agreement as to whether the Golden Ass is “a collection of breezy tales” or a moral fable’. While few now would opt for an unqualified version of the former of these last-mentioned alternatives, the difficulty of reconciling comic and serious, entertaining and instructive, profane and sacred remains. For some it is a ‘deeply religious work’; others see it more as a Platonist fable; others again have sought to identify unifying themes such as curiositas (‘curiosity’) or metamorphosis. The very nature of this critical endeavour indicates the prevailing perception: the Metamorphoses is a collection of tales and incidents so diverse in nature that their presence in the same book gives it the appearance of a mismatched patchwork quilt, and yet somewhere beneath it all there is a key whose discovery will enable the discerning reader to achieve a vision of its overall unity.

Claims about the physical substances and the reproductive processes of human bodies underwrite presuppositions about familial identities and roles in many cultures. The claim, for example, that the male is the true parent and the female a mere receptacle becomes part of a brief for justified matricide in Aeschylus' Eumenides (657-673). Roman declaimers often take up the question of whether blood is thicker than water. A would-be adoptive father finds his attempt to adopt a young man criticised as a symptom of the disease of luxury (Sen. Con. 2.1), while a foster father finds his argument for retaining his adolescent foster sons rebutted by the birth father's claim that his biological ties are more significant—even though the birth father has not seen the children since he exposed them shortly after birth (Sen. Con. 9.3). Depending on the observer, the birth of twins may be viewed as a source of family pride, as evidence of the mother's adultery, or as an abomination.

Interest in the study of rhetoric and its effects has, of late, seen a notable increase in literary circles. This is understandable, given the whole tendency of current literary theory, but one might equally understandably suppose that that tendency would long postdate Greek poetry of the Archaic period. It would be striking, then, to discover here—at the earliest extant stratum of western literature—a vital interest in the nature of human communication, in its sociological and political effects, and in its relationship to what we have come to think of as artistic creativity. And yet, I submit, that is just what we do discover.

In the case of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the task of extrapolating a synthetic theory of rhetoric would be a complex one, because so much of the text is couched in what Benveniste calls ‘histoire’, i.e. ‘historical narration’—that is, rather than the narrator's addressing the audience, implicitly or explicitly, in a direct I/you relation, both are looking away towards a third point, the site of the dramatic action. Moreover, rather than engage the reader/audience in the consideration of some abstract disquisition, the poet presents a muthos, i.e. represents a series of actions. Much more of Hesiod's verse, however, is in the form of what Benveniste calls ‘discours’, or ‘discourse’, which is directed precisely to the reader/audience. Even the narrative portions of Hesiod often have what we might term a frankly philosophical application; that is, the purpose of the narrative is didactic and, typically, ethical.

As the third pastoral poet, Calpurnius Siculus was the first to take up the genre fully formed. For all their many differences, Theocritus and Vergil had given bucolic poetry an established frame of reference, a characteristic subject matter, and a self-contained mythology. From a poet in Calpurnius' position whose work would inevitably be measured against that of his predecessors, one would expect a certain amount of generic self-consciousness, taking such forms as an implicit evaluation of the tradition, numerous allusions and specific verbal borrowings, and, ideally, an assurance that the genre had not been exhausted, that is to say, some open-ended indication of the new directions in which pastoral might turn. The first of these elements is clearly present in the poetry, but the last remains elusive. A major imaginative influence upon his genre is something Calpurnius did not provide for antiquity. Unlike his contemporaries, Persius and Lucan, he has no conspicuous literary heir, nor do the Einsiedeln fragments or the slim corpus of Nemesianus give much proof of his having invigorated the tradition. Indeed the effect of Calpurnius upon the pastoral is rather comparable to that often assigned to Paradise Lost upon the epic: he closed it off for centuries. But this fact need not stand in the way of an evaluation of the poet's artistry, nor originality. My argument in this paper is that Calpurnius' originality in adapting the pastoral tradition to his own sense of the temper of the Neronian Age was so extreme as to constitute a reluctant denial of the validity of pastoral mythology for contemporary Rome.

Whenever we discuss the Frogs of Aristophanes we find ourselves discussing Athenian tragedy in the Frogs, because Frogs is the play that sends Dionysos down to Hades to recall the tragedian Euripides to Athens, the play that pits Aeschylus and Euripides against one another in a contest that provides one of the earliest specimens of Western literary criticism, and the play in which Aeschylus is finally resurrected to bring the Athenians the teaching that will save the city in its hour of distress. Athenian comedy in Frogs, in contrast, is a much less urgent topic, for while Frogs is a comedy, it does not seem to be about comedy in the same way that it is about tragedy. It includes no comic poets among its characters, it makes no mention whatsoever of comedy in the agōn of the tragic poets, and it even lacks the section of the parabasis praising Aristophanes' art, so familiar from the plays of the 420s. The few references to comedy that do appear in Frogs all occur in the first third of the play; after the parodos, there is silence.

The rich diversity of Martial's Epigrams makes up, in Duff's words, ‘one of the most extraordinary galleries of literary pictures, vignettes, miniatures, portraits, caricatures, sometimes almost thumbnail sketches' of the Classical Age. Yet the books are by no means merely random or haphazard assortments. Like other Roman poets, Martial was attentive to the need to impose a sense of order and continuity on his published material. Naturally the very number of poems, as well as their varied inspiration and often impromptu composition, would militate against any overall thematic coherence. Moreover, Martial was also keen to exploit the inherent variety of the epigrammatic genre; thus, in the preface to Book 8, he says that he has interspersed more trivial and jocular material among his panegyrics of the emperor to prevent continuous eulogies from becoming tiresome to their recipient.

On the surface, Propertius 1.2 seems to propound a traditional thesis, the superiority of unadorned beauty to artifice, and to scold Cynthia for not living up to this ideal of the natural. I believe that the ideal actually asserted is more complex than mere natural beauty and in fact paradoxically entails a large measure of artifice. Artifice itself becomes the central theme of the poem as its value is radically reinterpreted.

Part of the complexity comes from the fact that the ideal embraces more than physical appearance, whether adorned or not. A Catullan Parallel will illustrate. Propertius is here building upon and rivalling a Catullan poem, in a manner which has the effect of emphasizing the non-physical elements in his definition of ideal beauty. A poem on the nature of true female beauty in which the beloved is contrasted with other women and which attempts to define what is truly formosus (‘beautiful’ or ‘lovely’; cf. the insistent repetition of: forma 8 and 24, formosa 9, formosius 11) would immediately be recognized by the Roman reader as a challenge to Catullus 86, which centers on the word formosa.

One approaches Hesiod's discourse on the two erides—or, if I am correct, the duplicitous nature of eris—with some trepidation, since the scholarship on this passage has been voluminous and rewarding. But the passage, which Hesiod launches into immediately after the formal prologue of the Works and Days (11-26), may yet have more to teach us. It is, as Richard Hamilton has recently shown, programmatic for the entire poem; it may also be a definitive statement on the archaic construction of competition and conflict. In it Hesiod urges his brother explicitly (as he does implicitly throughout the poem) to stop coming after him for their father's patrimony and do some productive work; however this simple message is embedded in traditional allusions, poised between intense ambiguities and (like all good archaic poetry) fraught with the resonance of larger issues. All this has made it difficult to achieve scholarly consensus about the meaning of the passage. A close and helpful parallel is provided in the Works and Days itself by the brief discussion of the two functions of aidōs (317-19), helpful primarily because it is in fact one principle with two functions that Hesiod describes there; but to put into relief more of the complexity of 11-16 we need to look at two other archaic passages that offer some perspective on the application of dualistic logic to conflict and related issues.

Pliny's encyclopaedia demands a very particular approach from its readers. The key paradox of the genre is that, having gone to the immense effort of gathering together information covering all the branches of human knowledge, it expects its readers not to read it all. The tension between the unifying discourse of complete knowledge and its practical segmentation into digestible chunks requires a certain amount of conceptual shimmying on the part of the reader. How relevant is the surrounding information to the single fact retrieved? In the case of Pliny, the possibility of understanding disembodied sections and facts in isolation is a promise held out to the reader by the book itself: Pliny explicitly gives his blessing in the preface and provides a summarium to aid in the process. This summarium takes up all of Book One of the Natural History, listing the contents of other 36 books, together with the sources Pliny consulted. But although the paratext promotes one model of how to read the Natural History, the text itself is ambivalent; the insistency of linear narrative never quite surrenders to the allure of complete segmentation. There is a logic to the Natural History that only reveals itself to the reader who follows the stream of information from fact to fact, section to section, book to book, subject to subject.

Athenian tragedies are dated by didascaliae that commemorate public performance, less satisfactorily by historical allusion or parody in dated comedy. Because Seneca's were never publicly performed and, therefore, lack didascaliae, and because precise historical allusions and comic parodies do not exist, we have no absolute date for Thyestes. Traditionally the tragedies are assigned to the eight year exile in Corsica (41-49). There the busy statesman enjoyed the leisure necessary for composition. But Quintus Cicero (Ep.Quint. 3.5.7) wrote four tragedies in sixteen days. The speed of Pliny's composition is attested. There is a further objection. Seneca did not write tragedies because he was bored. He had something compelling to say. More easily the fifties. Neronian classicism and the youth's histrionic enthusiasm stimulated the playwright, a view not inconsistent with Tacitus Ann. 14.52. Relative chronology, argued from the texts themselves on stylistic grounds, is another matter. Thyestes precedes Agamemnon.