The ‘Challenges of Humanism’ in Roman Historical Poetry

Mediaevistik, 2014

Peter Joosse, The Physician as a Rebellious Intellectual. The Book of the Two Pieces of Advice or Kitāb al-Na. sī. hatayn by c Abd al-La. tīf ibn Yūsuf al-Baghdādī (1162-1231) (2013)

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.

Scholia, 2005

1994

In 1986, the work of Gian Biagio Conte was little known in this country. Indeed, the avowed purpose of The Rhetoric of Imitation, published in that year, was, as Charles Segal stated in his foreword to the volume, to "bring [. .. ] before an English-speaking public a book that consolidates new approaches to literary study with erudition, originality, and penetrating insight. " 1 In some ways, the volume succeeded brilliantly, introducing Conte to a wide American readership and making him an active force in Latin studies on these shores. But whether by accident or design, one result of the book has been to feed the ongoing debate among American Latinists about whether attention to literary theory is a way to rejuvenate the profession or a distraction from its basic mission. A tendency on the part of readers largely unfamiliar with his work to regard Conte as an apostle of continen tal theory, combined with the fact that RI is by no means a theoretical primer for classicists but a collection of work that relates a certain kind of practical criticism to selected theoretical issues, may have meant that the publication of the book created expectations that could not be satisfied. The primary theme of RI is the nature of the relationship between distinct texts that exhibit a particular type of similarity, a phenomenon that is variously called imitation, emulation, allusion, reference, or intertextuality-a branch of literary study in which classicists have always been active. It is a small but significant irony that American students of Greco-Latin intertextuality share with Conte an indebtedness to the great Italian classicist Giorgio Pasquali, whose paper on arte allusiva articulates clearly the importance of such research to all students of classical literature. 2 But where American scholars have tended to emphasize those aspects of the art of allusion that appear to remain firmly under the control of the masterful hand of the poet, Conte instead has preferred to explain the phenomenon as a property of texts that must be noted and interpreted by readers as if it were any other rhetorical figure as a textual rather than a psychological effect. From a certain perspective, these two approaches to intertextuality appear highly complementary and compatible. Unfortunately, some members of the 1 Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, edited and with a foreword by Charles Segal, (Ithaca, 1986), 17; hereafter cited as RI.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 04 Feb 2016 16:53:00 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEW ARTICLE TURNING BACK THE CLOCK* Love is after all a very personal and individual as well as universal experience, and love poetry is usually (among other things) the expression of an individual who is or has been in love. -R. 0. A. M. Lyne, The Latin Love Poets By introducing the "image" of the poet, as distinct from the facts of the poet's life, as the true content of relevant poetry, he can forbid us to use poetry for disengaging "mere historical information." -E. Badian, review of J. E. G. Zetzel's contribution to B. K. Gold, ed., Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Romwe

Graeco-Latina Brunensia, 2020

In his Civil War, Lucan enters into intertextual game not only with epic and tragedy, but also with love poetry. A number of references to Roman elegy, the Heroides, and Ariadne's lament in Catullus (64) have been noted in Book 5, when Caesar arrives in Epirus and summons his troops from Italy. The aim of this article is to examine the functions of these elegiac references related to Caesar and to propose an interpretation slightly different from that found in earlier studies. Using elegiac vocabulary, motifs, and topoi (servitium and militia amoris) in 5.476-497, Lucan makes his audience perceive Caesar in the role of an elegiac mistress (domina), who thereby imposes the role of lover on his soldiers. However, those roles do not correspond to their real meaning in the poem as Caesar is quickly forced to transform into a lover. This shift is crucial for the intertextual game with love poetry. Nevertheless, the troops do not notice the change, standing by the role they were previously cast in (5.678-699). In this way, they allow their leader to become a mistress again and continue the war.

The stereotypical image of Marcus Tullius Cicero as the best orator and the worst poetaster in the history of literature was born as far back as in Antiquity. It swiftly spread with the development of instituted schooling and became an integral part of the portrayal of Graeco-Roman culture, passed down from generation to generation within Western civilization. In the present paper we shall outline the characteristics of the stereotype of Cicero the Poet along with its influence on Classical Studies and humanistic culture writ large. Special focus will be put on extracting the very roots of this stereotype. Furthermore, it will be shown that the particular case of Cicero the Poet ought to be reconsidered in the context of a wider process we have been witnessing in recent times: the disintegration of traditional models which, paradoxically, offers many appealing opportunities for Classical Studies to better understand the past and to develop in new, ground-breaking directions.

Latomus, 2013

Prolepsis' Third Postgraduate Conference: "Optanda erat oblivio. Selection and Loss in Ancient and Medieval Literature", Università degli Studi di Bari "A. Moro", 20–21/12/2018

2011

Liberalitas forms one of the central frameworks for defining social bonds within Roman society, and was part of how Roman poets constructed the world. This is most explicitly evident in the poets' references to "patrons" and benefactors, but it extends much further. The poets worked within a broad framework of social conventions and expectations which must be understood in order to see how their poetry uses and responds to the concepts associated with liberalitas. Cicero's de officiis and Seneca's de beneficiis are therefore useful, as they offer idealised, prescriptive views of liberalitas in Roman society. Many scholars have investigated the relationships between poets and their patrons, including Peter White, Barbara Gold, James Zetzel, and Phebe Lowell Bowditch. I argue that any true understanding of the role of liberalitas in Roman poetry must also comprehend its importance in other areas. This dissertation focuses on the poetry of Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, and Virgil in the Eclogues. The introduction addresses traditional liberalitas as defined by Cicero and Seneca in their works on benefits and duties. Chapter one illustrates how Catullus, Horace, and Tibullus display ideals similar to those of Cicero and Seneca and use the conventions of liberalitas for praising and blaming members of their social groups. Chapter two addresses the problems of status raised by liberalitas and investigates the strategies used by Catullus, Horace, Propertius, and Tibullus to v

2014

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 Archilochushowever briefly and to whatever end. tom hawkins is Associate Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. His work and teaching focus on iambic poetics and invective as well as animal studies and personhood.