Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire

This is the first book to study the impact of invective poetics associated with early Greek iambic poetry on Roman imperial authors and audiences. It demonstrates how authors as varied as Ovid and Gregory Nazianzen wove recognizable elements of the iambic tradition (e.g., meter, motifs, or poetic biographies) into other literary forms (e.g., elegy, oratorical prose, anthologies of fables), and it shows that the humorous, scurrilous, efficacious aggression of Archilochus continued to facilitate negotiations of power and social relations long after Horace's Epodes. The eclectic approach encompasses Greek and Latin, prose and poetry, and exploratory interludes appended to each chapter help to open four centuries of later classical literature to wider debates about the function, propriety, and value of the lowest and most debated poetic form from archaic Greece. Each chapter presents a unique variation on how each of these imperial authors became Archilochus -however briefly and to whatever end.

Classical World, 2016

This stimulating and highly readable book explores the ancient afterlife of three famous literary bully-boys: Archilochus, Semonides, and Hipponax, the unholy Trinity of archaic Greek iambus. Tom Hawkins sets out to examine their reception, not among the classical and Hellenistic Greek poets to whom they were living forebears (although the Callimachean intertext is a lively presence, e.g., [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51], or in the literary flourishing that they in turn inspired in late Republican and "golden" Augustan Rome, but amid authors of the Empire and Late Antiquity, extending into a recognizably Christian age. Only one of the six authors chosen (Babrius) adopts an iambic meter, and three-Dio, Lucian, and Julian-do not even compose verse (or not here). Hawkins' choices are piquant. He has sought out the kinds of text that classicists generally skip: odd, minor works by the less reputable pagans, and by the type of early churchman we tend

in X. Riu, J. Pòrtulas (ed.), Approaches to Archaic Greek Poetry. Orione, 5. Messina: Dipartimento di scienze dell’antichità, 2012, p. 249-282.

This paper discusses the relationship between Lucian and Archilochus (as well as other iambic poets) and tries to define Lucian’s place within the reception of Archilochus’ poetry and persona in Antiquity.

Exemplaria classica: journal of classical philology, 2017

Exemplaria Classica, 2017

Journal of Roman Studies, 2008

ii. latin language and culture i.e. the iuvenis (E. 1.42), in whom we are to find a beneficent king like Ptolemy Philadelphus as praised in Theocritus 17. This is bold and original, but also far-fetched and fanciful, especially as H. privileges this bookish interpretation over the direct, namely that the grim upheavals of unresolved Italian civil war include Arcady; but he warned us at the start that he was approaching Roman poetry from a Greek perspective. If that is Meliboeus, then what or who is Tityrus? H. reviews the ways in which Virgil is ambiguously identified with Tityrus (E. 1 and 6; G. 4.563-6) and with Menalcas (E. 5.85-90), deriving this from Theocritus' identification with Simachidas in Id. 7; moreover (4.3. 'The song fades' (130-40)) 'every bucolic singer, every pastoral poet, is in various ways a Daphnis', whose death is both an end and for his successor a beginning: in pastoral poetry, the singer is central, not the song, which is unrecorded and evanescent; yet writing does already exist in Arcadia; H. ends strongly in discussing this paradox, which takes off from the encounter of Simachidas and Lycidas in Theocritus 7. At E. 5.10-15, the contrast of rustic improvisation and laboured craftsmanship is explicit. 'Afterword' (141-6): H. asks in retrospect, I think 'knowingly', whether it mattered to the Roman poets that Callimachus et al. came after the Archaic and Classical poets, and that in turn they had spawned their own schools of imitators, now forgotten because they stood in their masters' shade; he leaves it to us to respond with the 'no' that he is inviting. He wonders whether it would have been better to proceed genre by genre. Again, surely no; H.'s own 'Kreuzung der Gattungen' is an essential feature of his whole approach. It would, however, have been useful to flag at the sub-headings of each chapter which poems the reader should not merely vaguely recall but should read carefully afresh and entire before attending to what H. has to say; for H.'s own Callimachean style, his inventive juxtaposing, and the compression inevitable in a slim volume such as this, will bewilder the casual browser or the profanum uulgus seeking essay-fodder.

forthcoming in Greek Iambus and Elegy: New Approaches, eds C. Carey and L. Swift (OUP)

This paper explores Archilochus’ imagery and its relationship to his poetic and cultural precedents. I argue that Archilochus’ use of imagery is highly creative, and that he reworks conventional motifs in a way which plays on and undercuts their usual role in the poetic tradition. The paper investigates this theme with particular reference to Archilochus’ erotic imagery, and the main section deals with the imagery of nature and fertility which is a recurrent theme both in Archilochus’ erotic iamboi and in the wider archaic Greek tradition. This motif is a well worn one, with deep roots in myth and ritual as well as literary instantiations such as the Hieros Gamos in Iliad 14 or the abduction of Persephone in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and Archilochus uses the audience’s familiarity with the conceptual linking of female and natural fertility in order to reinterpret the trope. The paper will look in particular at four fragments which engage particularly richly with this theme: frr. 188, 30 and 31, and 196aW. Our understanding of all of these poems is enriched by reading them through the filter of the Greek locus amoenus or ‘meadow of love’. Thus fr. 188 uses the locus amoenus’ normal associations with youth and beauty in order to cruelly invert the trope and attack an older woman for her lack of sexual desirability, while frr 30 and 31 subtly invoke the association between the female body and the earth to cast aspersions onto the moral character of the young girl described. The longest section of the paper deals with the Cologne Epode (fr. 196a) and will argue that reading the fragment through this lens can provide a solution to the vexed question of the poem’s ending.