Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception

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C l a ssic a l L i t e r a ry C a r e e r s a n d T h e i r R ec e p t ion

This is a wide-ranging collection of essays on ancient Roman Â� literary careers and their reception in later European literature, with contributions by leading experts. Starting from the three major Roman models for constructing a literary career€ – Virgil (the rota Vergiliana), Horace and Ovid€ – the volume then looks at Â�alternative and counter-models in antiquity:€Propertius, Juvenal, Cicero and Pliny. A range of post-antique responses to the ancient patterns is examined, from Dante to Wordsworth, and including Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Dryden and Goethe. These chapters pose the question of the continuing relevance of ancient career models as ideas of authorship change over the centuries, leading to varying engagements and disengagements with classical literary careers. The volume also considers other ways of concluding or extending a literary career, such as bookburning and figurative metempsychosis. p h i l i p h a r di e is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge. He is a leading figure in Latin literary studies, a fellow of the British Academy, and author of books on Virgil, Ovid and other Latin poets. He also has strong interests in the Renaissance reception of Classical literature, and is co-editor (with Patrick Cheney) of the Renaissance volume in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (in preparation). h e l e n mo or e is University Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. She has published editions of Amadis de Gaule (2004) and Guy of Warwick (2007), and is currently working on a book on the English reception of Amadis de Gaule.

C l a ssic a l L i t e r a ry Ca r eers a nd Their R ece p t ion e di t e d b y ph i l i p h a r di e Trinity College, Cambridge

and h e l e n mo or e Corpus Christi College, Oxford

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521762977 © Cambridge University Press 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13

978-0-511-90974-0

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-76297-7

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of contributors Preface Note on the text

page vii xi xii

Introduction:€Literary careers –€Classical models and their receptions Philip Hardie and Helen Moore

1

1 Some Virgilian unities

17

2 There and back again:€Horace’s poetic career

39

3 The Ovidian career model:€Ovid, Gallus, Apuleius, Boccaccio

59

4 An elegist’s career:€from Cynthia to Cornelia

89

5 Persona and satiric career in Juvenal

105

6 The indistinct literary careers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger

118

7 Re-inventing Virgil’s Wheel:€the poet and his work from Dante to Petrarch

138

8 Did Shakespeare have a literary career?

160

Michael C. J. Putnam Stephen Harrison

Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie Stephen Heyworth Catherine Keane

Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel

Andrew Laird

Patrick Cheney

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Contents

╇ 9 New spins on old rotas:€Virgil, Ovid, Milton

179

10 Bookburning and the poetic deathbed:€the legacy of Virgil

197

11 Literary afterlives:€metempsychosis from Ennius to Jorge Luis Borges

209

12â•… ‘Mirrored doubles’:€Andrew Marvell, the remaking of poetry and the poet’s career

226

13 Dryden and the complete career

241

14 Goethe’s elegiac sabbatical

256

15 Wordsworth’s career prospects:€‘peculiar language’ and public epigraphs

275

Epilogue:€Inventing a life –€a personal view of literary careers

287

Maggie Kilgour

Nita Krevans

Stuart Gillespie

Nigel Smith

Raphael Lyne

Joseph Farrell

Nicola Trott

Lawrence Lipking

List of works cited Index

300 327

Contributors

a l e s s a n dro b a rc h i e s i teaches Classics at the University of Siena at Arezzo and at Stanford; his recent work includes editing a multi-author commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies (with W. Scheidel). pat r ic k c h e n e y is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He has written books about the literary careers of Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare, as well as co-edited (with Frederick de Armas) European Literary Careers:€The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2002). Currently, he is writing an essay on ‘literary careers’ for the Renaissance volume (co-Â�edited with Philip Hardie) in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. jo s e p h fa r r e l l is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Vergil’s Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic (1991) and of Latin Language and Latin Culture (2001) and is co-editor of two forthcoming volumes of essays on Vergil’s Aeneid and Its Reception and on Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic. roy g i b s on is Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester and author of a commentary on Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3 (2003), and of an introductory book on Pliny the Younger (co-authored with Ruth Morello) forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a commentary on Book 6 of Pliny’s Letters. s t ua r t g i l l e spi e is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is the editor of the journal Translation and Literature and joint general editor of the five-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (2005– ). In the field of Classical reception he has recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (with Philip vii

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List of contributors

Hardie, 2007). His study of historical English translation as a form of Classical reception will be published in 2011. ph i l i p h a r di e is a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Latin Literature in the University of Cambridge. Recent publications include The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (co-edited with Stuart Gillespie, 2007) and Lucretian Receptions (2009). With Patrick Cheney he is co-editing the Renaissance volume in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. s t e ph e n h a r r i s on is Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Professor of Latin Literature in the University of Oxford. He is the author of Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace (2007) and of many articles on Horace; and editor of Homage to Horace (1995) and The Cambridge Companion to Horace (2007). s t e ph e n h e y wort h is Bowra Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Wadham College, Oxford. In 2007 he issued a new edition of Propertius in the Oxford Classical Text series together with a detailed textual commentary entitled Cynthia. With James Morwood he is currently completing a commentary for students on Book 3. Future work will concentrate on Ovid’s Fasti. c at h e r i n e k e a n e is an associate professor of Classics at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. She is the author of Figuring Genre in Roman Satire (2006), Roman Verse Satire Reader (forthcoming) and numerous essays on satire and related literature. Her current book project is provisionally titled Looking at the Satirist:€Personae and Poetics in Juvenal. m ag g i e k i l g ou r is Molson Professor of English Language and Literature at McGill University. The author of From Communion to Cannibalism:€ An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (1990), The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995) and articles on subjects savoury and unsavoury, she is currently completing a book on Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid. n i ta k r e va ns is an associate professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests centre on Hellenistic and Latin poetry and the history of the book. In addition to numerous articles on Hellenistic poetry, she has published several articles on Virgil and a study of print and the Tudor poets.

List of contributors

ix

a n dr e w l a i r d is Professor of Classical Literature at Warwick University. His publications, mostly on Roman literature and early modern Latin, include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power (1999), The Epic of America (2006), Ancient Literary Criticism (2006) and, with Carlo Caruso, Italy and the Classical Tradition:€Language, Thought and Poetry 1300–1600 (2009). l aw r e nc e l i pk i ng is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Northwestern University. His books include The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (1970), The Life of the Poet:€ Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (1981), Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (1988) and Samuel Johnson:€The Life of an Author (1998). He is currently writing a book on the Scientific Revolution. r a ph a e l ly n e is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. He is the author of Ovid’s Changing Worlds (2001) and Shakespeare’s Late Work (2007), and the editor (with Subha Mukherji) of Early Modern Tragicomedy (2007). h e l e n mo or e is a university lecturer in English at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. She has published editions of Amadis de Gaule (2004) and Guy of Warwick (2007), and is currently working on a book on the English reception of Amadis de Gaule. m ic h a e l c . j. pu t n a m is MacMillan Professor of Classics and Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus, Brown University. His most recent books are Poetic Interplay:€ Catullus and Horace (2006), The Virgilian Tradition (2008, with Jan Ziolkowski) and Jacopo Sannazaro:€The Latin Poetry (2009). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. n ig e l s m i t h is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University. He is the author, among other works, of Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (1994), Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? (2008) and Andrew Marvell:€The Chameleon (2010); and editor of Marvell’s Poems (2003). c at h e r i n e s t e e l is Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Cicero, Rhetoric and Empire (2001), Reading Cicero:€ Genre and Performance in Late Republican Rome (2005) and

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List of contributors the Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics volume on Roman Oratory (2006).

n ic ol a t ro t t is Senior Tutor at Balliol College, Oxford, and until 2007 was Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on authors of the English Romantic period. Recent work includes essays about Southey, Austen, the Gothic, and an edition of Isaac D’Israeli’s Vaurien.

Preface

This volume is based on a selection of the papers delivered at the Second Passmore Edwards Symposium on Literary Careers, held in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on 2–4 September 2004, together with two additional chapters commissioned to cover important aspects of the subject. The conference was generously funded by the Passmore Edwards Committee of the University of Oxford; we are also grateful to Corpus Christi College for its support.

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Note on the text

For the abbreviations of the names of ancient authors and texts, readers are referred to the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

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I n t roduc t ion

Literary careers –€Classical models and their receptions Philip Hardie and Helen Moore

The subject of literary careers has attracted considerable interest recently among both classicists and students of English and other vernacular Â�literatures.1 ‘Career criticism’ has emerged as a distinct branch of literary scholarship and criticism. It is to be distinguished from the older fashion for a life-and-works approach to the biographical criticism of an author, and also from the more recent interest in the ancient tradition of authors’ lives. Instead of starting from what might be known, or claimed, about the historical life and times of an author, career criticism takes as its Â�starting point the totality of an author’s textual output and asks how that oeuvre as a whole shapes itself, both in its intratextual relationships (what kinds of beginnings, middles, and ends are traced in the pattern of an oeuvre), and in the claims it makes to reflect or mould extraÂ�textual Â�conditions of production (whether located in the personal history of the author, or in the relationship of the author to political and cultural Â�structures of power and authority). The previous sentence ascribes an agency to the oeuvre in ‘shaping’, ‘reflecting’ or ‘moulding’, an agency that can only be Â�realized through a reader’s perception of these processes. ‘Careers’, however, are things that authors, not texts or readers, pursue, and career criticism is unabashed in making the author its focus, always with the Â�recognition that the author is mediated through texts, which in turn are always received by readers.2 This is what Patrick Cheney, one of

Essential bibliography:€Helgerson 1983; Lipking 1981. More recently Patrick Cheney has worked intensively in the field, with books on Marlowe, Spenser and Shakespeare. The collection of essays in Cheney and de Armas 2002 focuses mostly on post-antique authors; this volume is divided fairly equally between antique and post-antique authors, and centres on the reception of the ancient models. 2 The status of the author in this kind of criticism may usefully be compared to the qualified ‘intention-bearing authorial voice’ constructed for the purposes of his study of allusion and intertextuality by Stephen Hinds in Hinds 1998:€47–51. Career criticism is consciously post-‘death of the author’. 1

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Philip Hardie and Helen Moore

the Â�leading practitioners of career criticism, means by ‘emphasizing the category of the literary (rather than, say, the biographical …)’.3 The presence of the reader in all of this, and the possibility that we may read into a writer’s oeuvre patterns of which he or she may only have been dimly aware, should at least prompt the general question of ‘who decides whether a poet has a career’. One answer might indeed be the reader, tempted to see patterns in a disparate body of texts. If we are prepared to allow the author some say in the matter, is it a decision taken at or near the beginning of a career, in the shape of a syllabus for future action (Virgil has often seemed to be this kind of careerist)? Or is it a matter of the retrospective realization of a pattern in what during the passage of the years may often have seemed a haphazard and accidental process (Ovid is very good at rearranging, at least, the pieces in the puzzle with the aid of hindsight). Another answer to the question of who decides whether a poet has a career, might be other, earlier poets. This is an answer that will usually imply a decision early in a career. By this we mean to refer to the intensely intertextual (or perhaps interauthorial) quality of literary careers.4 As this volume abundantly shows, writers are acutely aware of the career patterns of great writers of the past, and motivated by that awareness to emulation, or in some cases conscious avoidance, of the paths of their predecessors. This is a particular, and particularly large-scale, example of the rivalry, aemulatio, that characterizes many intertextual relationships. An author’s sense of his or her literary career is traced through statements or hints, explicit or implicit, in an oeuvre that point to a developmental relationship between the individual works in the oeuvre. There are some examples in ancient Greece where reference is made by an author in one work to another, for example in Aristophanes’ explicit reference in the parabases of some of his comedies to a previous play of his own. The parabasis is formally privileged as the place in an Attic old comedy where the playwright uses the chorus to speak in propria persona; but Aristophanes exploits the occasion (as does Terence in the prologues to some of his Roman comedies) in order to engage in literary polemic or literary criticism, praising his own earlier work and the good taste of the audience, not to present us with the outlines of a literary career. The modern critic may trace a development within the surviving plays of Aristophanes, say from the conventions of Old Comedy in the direction of the different conventions of Middle Comedy (and formal development of this kind Cheney 2002a:€6.

3

Noted by Cheney 2002a:€11–12.

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Introduction:€Literary careers

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has also been discerned in the corpora of the Attic tragedians), but this is not evidence that the author has self-consciously given shape to his career over the literary production of a lifetime. Furthermore the development is a matter of change within a genre (comedy, tragedy), rather than progression from one genre to another, which is a common (if not essential) marker of a literary career. At the end of his elegiac poem in four books on ‘Causes’, the Aitia, the Hellenistic poet Callimachus states that he is moving on to ‘the pedestrian pasture of the Muses’, which is normally taken to refer to the Iambi, a work in a more pedestrian, prosy metre than the elegiac couplet.5 Here we have self-conscious moving-on, from one genre to another, but it is unclear that it is part of a larger plan, of a career teleologically designed (the ‘pastures new’ of a Milton), rather than simply a change of course for the sake of variety. We simply have no way of knowing whether a part of the highly self-conscious poetics of Callimachus consisted in the representation of his multiform output as shaped by what might be called a strategic career-plan. Joseph Farrell has argued powerfully that it is in Rome that is first to be found a strong experience on the part of an ancient author of his output over time as conforming to the pattern of a career.6 According to Farrell, the decisive impetus was given by the position of the poet at Rome, typically dependent on an upper-class patron, and who came to fashion his own literary career on the political career of his patron, the aristocratic cursus honorum, the hierarchically ordered sequence of magistracies through which the successful Roman ascended to the consulship. Cursus, literally ‘running’, may refer to the running of horses in a chariotrace, the public career viewed as a competitive race to the top (the same image is found in curriculum uitae, lit. ‘racecourse of life’).7 The pinnacle of the Roman military career was to ride in a chariot as triumphator:€the motif of the literary triumph has a long history that perhaps goes back to Ennius (239–169 BC), whose culminating literary achievement was the writing of the national Roman epic of its time, the Annals, the first edition of which climaxed with the literal triumph of Ennius’ patron. Farrell gives a leading role to Ennius in stimulating the development of the Roman

For the issues see Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004:€33. Farrell 2002. 7 Cic. Rab. Perd. 30 exiguum nobis uitae curriculum natura circumscripsit, immensum gloriae; Sest. 47 uitae breuis cursus, gloriae sempiternus. On the racing connotations of ‘career’ see Cheney 2002a:€8. 5

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model of the literary career.8 To the institutional factors identified by Farrell as promoting the emergence of the Roman literary career might be added a marked tendency on the part of Roman poets to engage in autobiographical utterances, often with reference to their social status and to their relationship to their powerful patrons. Ennius cast out the impersonal objectivity of the epic narrator in opening the Annals with a scene of poetic initation in a dream, and gave a notice of his age, possibly in the last book of either the first or second edition of the Annals (sed. inc. fr. lxx Skutsch ed. 1985), and possibly in a passage in which he also referred to himself as an ageing racehorse (coming to the end of its career?). While Ennius does not seem to have used this autobiographical mode to talk about a career pattern stretching over his larger (and very varied) oeuvre, he offered what one might call a ‘licence to autobiography’ to later poets who might wish to reflect openly on their careers. Later in the first century BC the satirist Lucilius writes largely in autobiographical mode, and in this he is very influential on Horace. Lucilius does not appear to have shaped his output according to any coherent model of progression, but, Farrell suggests, this may have been deliberate:€as a member himself of the aristocratic patron class his choice to write poetry represents a deliberate rejection of the cursus honorum€– an anti-career. The Roman literary career finds its fullest and most influential manifestation in the three major works of Virgil:€ the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid.9 The perceived upwards progression through these three hexameter works was formalized in the medieval rota Vergiliana.10 There is a seemingly inevitable, and almost prescripted, development from the smallscale and self-reflexive green cabinet of the Eclogues, through the didactic intervention in the world of the farmer in the Georgics, to the sublime epic flight of the Aeneid, engaging with the widest themes of Roman history and imperial power. The generic variation that in Callimachus had not apparently been guided through time by a planned curriculum, is here informed by a drive to achieve progressively more ambitious goals in the genres of bucolic, didactic and epic. The poet comments on these ambitions at key points, most prominently in the proem to the third Georgic, the midpoint of the middle of the three poems, in which future poetic Farrell 2002:€37–8; see also Hardie 2007b. Very little, if any, of the Appendix Vergiliana, a body of works attributed to the young Virgil, is considered these days to be authentic; the situation was different from antiquity through to the early modern period, so yielding a more complex picture of the development of Virgil’s career. On the reception of the Appendix Vergiliana in the Renaissance see Burrow 2008. 10 See Putnam below, Ch. 1. ╇ 8

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Introduction:€Literary careers

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success is presented as a figurative triumph, the chariot of poetry harnessed to the horses that draw the imperial triumphator. In another crucial modification of the Alexandrian model, Virgil disobeys the Callimachean injunction to avoid the large-scale and epic,11 so allowing himself a career that audaciously challenges comparison not just with that of a Republican consul or general, but of the princeps Augustus himself. The Virgilian career has a formal perfection such that it almost seems that it could be explained purely in terms of the unfolding of a law of generic development. At the same time the smooth progress through literary genres is also a progressive rapprochement with the political and military realities of Rome. The question of the exact degree of pressure or constraint applied to Virgil by Augustus and his ministers will never be resolved. But, however much some readers will continue to find in the poems signs of a deep reluctance to accept the aims and ideology of the principate, the career itself, understood as a progression through genres that is at the same time a progression to an increasing engagement with the extra-literary world, shows remarkably few signs of strain. Indeed, Michael Putnam, in his revisionist account of the rota Vergiliana in this volume, directs attention to the continuity in change, unity in diversity€– itself a sign of the smoothly oiled machine. Partly because of its seeming inevitability, and partly because its products immediately established themselves as the central classics of Latin literature, the Virgilian career has been an enduring temptation, challenge or reproach to later poets. The Latin love elegists persist in the Callimachean refusal to venture beyond slighter genres, now not as a matter of aesthetic choice but because of the harsh necessity of a life of love that restricts their literary career to the narrow circle of love poetry, just as in his life the love elegist consciously rejects the career expected of the upper-class Roman male, the public cursus honorum. Once the Virgilian model for a literary career is available, the elegiac anti-career can also represent itself as a (forced) alternative to the Virgilian career. Stephen Heyworth shows how Propertius, despite the variety of his four books of elegies, repeatedly fails to break away from a life spent writing poetry about Cynthia to follow other paths; even in Book 4, a book which contains much allusion to the Aeneid, Cynthia, given her marching orders at the end of Book 3, and now further distanced through death, 11

Whether Callimachus himself referred to epic or other kinds of large-scale poetry in his literary polemics is disputed; what matters is that in the Latin recusatio (‘refusal’ to write in a more ambitious genre) the standard opposition is between slighter genres and epic (or sometimes tragedy).

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returns to life, irrepressible. In 3.9 Propertius justifies his own refusal to change course from elegy with an appeal to his patron Maecenas’ refusal to pursue a senatorial cursus honorum. In Propertius’ last elegy, 4.11, the emperor’s stepdaughter Cornelia boasts of a feminine kind of cursus honorum; but since in Rome only men can have public careers, this is a contradiction in terms, and the imperial matrona is dragged back into the elegist’s own world of lamentation and separation. Ovid, last of the love elegists, flags a relationship to the Virgilian model with the very first word of his oeuvre, arma, the first word of his elegiac Amores and also the first word of the Aeneid.12 In this context it introduces a version of the conventional elegiac recusatio, a refusal to venture into epic because of the erotic enslavement to which the poet is condemned in his real life. By the third book of the Amores Ovid has shuffled off the inevitability of the elegist’s lot, and looks forward to a career move to the higher genre of tragedy. From the Medea (now lost) he advanced higher still, to the epic Metamorphoses, outbidding the Aeneid both in length and in chronological scope. Within elegy itself Ovid progresses from the slight matter of love to the subject of Roman religion and history in the Fasti. After a career that has cheerfully freed itself from the personal and private constraints that dictate the literary output of his predecessors in Latin love elegy, as well as registering a fair degree of indifference to any claims that Augustus might have on a writer, Ovid has what might be called an ‘after-career’, the consequence of the harshest of external constraints, exile from Rome to the outer darkness of the Black Sea as a result of the emperor’s displeasure. This has the effect of undoing the satisfying closure of the Virgilian career: not only is the Metamorphoses not the crowning glory of Ovid’s career, what follows is a reversal of the upwards trajectory as the grief of exile forces the poet to return to the tearful elegies of his youth. Ovidian exile, or the danger of the artist losing status or position by offending through his art, is a recurrent model for literary careers:€Barchiesi examines three examples, the first an Ovidian retrojection of his own woes on to the first Latin love elegist, Cornelius Gallus, the second an ingenious reworking of the Ovidian elision of the boundary between art and life in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, and the third Boccaccio’s successful use in the Decameron of Ovidian apologetics to negotiate the rocks on which Ovid himself had foundered. ╇ On aspects of Ovid’s use of the Virgilian career model see Farrell 2004.

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Introduction:€Literary careers

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Yet even in the Ovidian pattern of an upwards career trajectory broken by exile there are traces of a Virgilian model. Exile, as Michael Putnam shows in this volume, is indeed one of the elements of unity in the diversity of the rota Vergiliana. At the end of his career Ovid relives the experience of Meliboeus, the shepherd-farmer who in Virgil’s first Eclogue has to leave the pastoral world for exile at the ends of the earth. At the very end of the Aeneid Turnus ‘flees’ into the perpetual exile of death, dispatched by the distant ancestor of Augustus. This is also the point at which to note another way in which Ovid’s ‘after-career’ mirrors the Virgilian career, but with reference not to the Virgilian oeuvre but to the biographical tradition that on his deathbed Virgil asked to be allowed to burn the manuscript of the Aeneid (vita Donati 39); in the first book of the Tristia Ovid claims that on being sent into exile he put the manuscript of the Metamorphoses on the fire (1.7.15–22; somewhat disingenuously Ovid now realizes that there were other copies in circulation). But this gesture marks all of the exilic poetry as, figuratively, poetry from the other side:€Ovidian exile is thereby equated with Virgilian death. The gesture of bookburning, real or threatened, will be used recurrently by later writers who do not want to leave their unpublished works as the coping-stone of a literary career, as Nita Krevans records. The epilogue to Ovid’s Metamorphoses itself, on the other hand, alludes to the notion of a more successful afterlife than exile in the Pythagorean belief of metempsychosis:€Ovid’s ‘soul’, his great poem, will survive the death of his body, given the breath of life by the living bodies of his future readers.13 By this conceit Ovid also acknowledges that his poem is the latest product in the history not of an individual writer, but of a tradition that goes back to Ennius, who in the prologue to his epic Annals claimed, in a speech put in the mouth of the phantom of Homer, to be the reincarnation of the true soul of Homer. If bookburning violently breaks off a career, the Ennian claim to be the reincarnation of an earlier poet extends a career to a time before the bodily birth of a writer:€Stuart Gillespie traces episodes in the afterlife of the Ennian conceit. The Ovidian career is an alternative, but also a reaction, to the Virgilian model. A third way is represented by Horace, who neither follows nor reacts against his friend Virgil, their two paths diverging, although not beyond close hailing distance, after each producing as a major early work a book of ten poems in hexameters, the Eclogues and the first book of ╇ See Hardie 2002a:€95.

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Satires.14 Horace’s career thereafter is characterized by a diversity at the generic level that may, as Stephen Harrison suggests in this volume, mark a reversion to the poikilia (generic variety) of Callimachus’ output. Horace is the most autobiographical of the Latin poets, allowing us to see (a carefully manicured version of) the external and internal pressures to which his writing responded at various junctures in his life. Great patrons, Maecenas and Caesar, are both empowering and constraining. The Carmen saeculare, written for performance at the Secular Games of 17 BC, was an important commission in itself, and may have been a significant factor in prompting Horace to return to a lyric career seemingly brought to a final conclusion, with a fourth book of odes. Equally important, so Horace tells us, as a determinant of literary choice is an inner desire for freedom that makes him kick against the demands of patrons, politics and the literary marketplace, a drive for independence that finds most sustained expression in Epistles 1. This more varied kind of career might be seen as anticipating the increasing fragmentation in post-Classical centuries of the shapeliness of Virgilian and Ovidian models, whether through the changing conditions of literary production and consumption, or, at a later date, through a set towards the expression of the writer’s inner self. Post-Augustan epic poets are keenly aware of the Virgilian challenge. Statius charts the poetic career of the dead Lucan (Silvae 2.7), a young man in a hurry and who is reported to have boasted that he had written his great epic at an age when Virgil had only got as far as the Culex (one of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, attributed to the young Virgil). Dead before his twenty-sixth birthday, Lucan had no time to waste:€ Statius outlines an ascent from epic juvenilia on merely Greek, Iliadic, themes, to the Jovian thundering of his epic on the Roman civil war, a poem inspiring awe even in the Aeneid itself. In his first satire Juvenal uses the autobiographical conventions of Roman satire that go back through Horace to Lucilius and Ennius to present a colourful picture of the reasons that impelled him to take up a literary career in the first instance. That career is confined to one genre, and the variations in tone between the five books of Satires have often been seen as formalist, rhetorical variations of a satirical mask or persona. Catherine Keane reads, rather, in the Juvenalian sequence a consistent story of self-fashioning over time, as the satirist calibrates his several satirical postures as an on-going negotiation of the excessively angry, and ╇ For the conscious engagement of Satires 1 with the Eclogues see Zetzel 1980.

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Introduction:€Literary careers

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in some ways epic, indignation with which he burst on to the literary stage. Writers in prose as well as verse may have literary careers. Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel develop Joseph Farrell’s insight into the connection between the political cursus honorum and the literary career with reference to Cicero and Pliny the Younger, both of whom did make it to the top of the cursus honorum. The prolific writings of Cicero are subordinated to the needs of his political career, and as a result display a ‘generic profligacy’, because in this case there is no literary career that shapes itself independently of the public career. On the other hand Pliny the Younger’s insouciant indifference, in his Letters, to a progression of the Virgilian kind in his own literary output, pointedly parades the fact that one who has reached the top of the political ladder has no need to aspire upwards in a literary cursus (in contrast to the career in literary prose of his equestrian uncle, Pliny the Elder); this snobbishness is all the more necessary in the conditions of the principate, when to reach the consulate in fact brings no real power on the political stage. The Classical models for the literary career, and the Virgilian career above all, exercise a fascination over medieval and early modern writers, but their applicability comes under increasing strain as conditions of literary production and consumption change, and as the ancient generic system expands and metamorphoses. In the middle ages the Virgilian model serves Dante well enough, as he crowns his writing career with an ‘epic’ even more universal and totalizing than the Aeneid. The epic Africa, however, does not similarly mark the culmination of Petrarch’s career:€begun in the middle of his life, the ambitions that Petrarch held out for it as the great work that would both sum up his dealings with antiquity revived and satisfy his own desire for lasting fame, were not realized. Andrew Laird takes a fresh look at some of the complexities of Dante’s and Petrarch’s imitation of Virgil and of their relationship to the Virgilian career pattern. From the earliest days of career criticism, ideas of progression, development and purpose have clustered around the notion of the literary career, accompanied by an acknowledgement of the existence of dissident and countering career practices:€ Lipking, for example, cites in passing Propertius, Ezra Pound, Yvor Winters and Robert Graves as poets whose ‘contempt’ for the career model ‘implies a reverse ambition’ manifested as ‘a self-consuming devotion to craft’. Similarly, his brief reference to Emily Dickinson raises the question of whether and to what extent the classically sanctioned (and implicitly male) career models are open to or

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embraced by women once they enter the world of public writing.15 Of the English literary careers discussed in this volume, none is straightforwardly Classical in the way of a Spenser or a Marlowe, whose career models have been successfully described by Cheney and others as Virgilian in the first case and Ovidian in the second.16 The existence, let alone format, of Shakespeare’s career is still a matter of debate; Milton’s later career, with his revision (in 1673) of the 1645 Poems and his ambiguous final work, Samson Agonistes, undermines the Virgilian confidence of his early self-proclamations; the range of Dryden’s career€– encompassing criticism as well as composition€– ushers in a new element to the career matrix; and assessments of the careers of both Marvell and Wordsworth are rendered problematic by a lack of self-commentary in the case of the former, and competing versions of the poetic self in the case of the latter. Within the context of English letters, there is also a notable lack of an English poetic career model to rival those of Virgil, Horace and Ovid. In particular, the failure of Chaucer’s life-narrative ‘to translate itself into a model for an Elizabethan poetic “career”’, as Kevin Pask puts it,17 both enhances the longevity of the Classical career models and ensures diversity in the scope and structure of their English successors. Patrick Cheney’s pertinent question framed in this volume, ‘Did Shakespeare have a literary career?’, hovers over any discussion of the literary career in the early modern period, and draws attention to the profound changes in the mechanics of literary production that were consequent upon printing, the opening of the public theatres, and the increasing professional self-reliance of the writing life (although, as discussed below, literary patronage continued to figure in much of the period covered by this book).18 Unlike Spenser and Marlowe, Shakespeare’s career has so far eluded characterization, mainly because the shape of his Lipking 1981:€xii–xiii. Outlining the ‘anti-careerist vocation’ of Dickinson, Lipking highlights ‘her unwillingness to publish, her preference for intensity and brevity, her hesitation to try new forms or to “develop”, her sublime independence’ (p.xiii); he develops this ‘anti-careerist’ line of thought further in Lipking 1988. For the applicability of the term ‘career’ to early modern women writers see Woods and Hannay 2002 and for the emergence of the nineteenth-century woman of letters see Peterson 2009. The relationship between English women writers and Classical modes and models of authorship is treated in Hurst 2006; see in particular ch.3, ‘Unscrupulously Epic’, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 16 Cheney 1993. Two other roles, those of secretary and bard, also figure in assessments of Spenser’s poetic identity. Rambuss 1993 examines the literary impact of Spenser’s other career as secretary and bureaucrat, and its intersection with his poetic career; whilst Highley 1997:€21–39 addresses Spenser’s ‘fugitive’ interest in the proscribed poetic persona of the Gaelic bard. 17 Pask 1996:€30. 18 For the professionalization of the male and female writing lives see B. S. Hammond 1997 and Turner 1992 respectively. 15

Introduction:€Literary careers

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career, whether viewed in its entirety or in its parts (beginning, middle and end), does not conform to Classical prototypes. It lacks both generic progression and a clear destination; critical dissatisfaction over the years with the ‘late’ plays might well be due in part to a feeling that they do not provide a fitting telos for this particular literary life.19 Another important factor is that the early ‘missing years’ in Shakespeare’s biography mean that it is impossible to pinpoint the reasons for, and mechanisms of, his entries to stage and print.20 Thus there is no identifiable trajectory to Shakespeare’s career, whether of the upwards or reverse kind. Lacking information as to the circumstances of Shakespeare’s initiation to the literary life, or other self-articulations€ – both traditionally important aspects of the ‘managed vita’ (see Lyne below, Ch. 13)€ – scholars have tended to construe Shakespeare’s career in non-classical terms that place his literary endeavours firmly in the context of his financial and business engagements with London’s professional theatre€ – concentrating, in other words, on ‘Shakespeare’s job’.21 Recent studies have shed much light on the precise mechanics of this ‘job’, revealing a world of extended financial and artistic collaboration (between playwrights, actors and owners), and textual revision. In short, the world of the London playhouses was one in which ‘authorship could be a continual process, not a determinate action’.22 Inevitably, however, such an interest in the theatre as Shakespeare’s ‘job’ has created over time a false distinction between his theatrical and poetic careers, a distinction that Cheney has sought to break down in another context by asserting a different kind of Ovidian identity for Shakespeare as ‘poet-playwright’ (the pertinent aspect of Ovid’s vita in this case being the surviving two lines of his tragedy Medea).23 In his chapter for this volume, Cheney turns his attention to the ‘classical underpinnings’ of Shakespeare’s career, one that he terms ‘counter-laureate’. Through a reading of the Choruses to Henry V, Cheney engages head-on with Shakespeare’s perceived failure (or playful refusal) to present himself in his works, finding instead a detailed engagement with the six elements Cheney identifies as constituting the ‘career On the critical significance of the terms ‘late’, ‘last’ and ‘final’ see Richards and Knowles 1999:€1–6 and McMullan 2007. 20 The classic articulation on this subject is Honigmann 1998. 21 P. Thomson 1992:€xv; see also Bentley 1971. 22 Ioppolo 2006:€1; see also Vickers 2002. 23 Cheney 2004. Lukas Erne has also sought to resolve the problems of Shakespeare’s career through a composite formulation, ‘literary dramatist’, arguing that, contrary to much hitherto received wisdom, Shakespeare did indeed take an interest in the publication of his plays (Erne 2003). 19

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template’. In Cheney’s analysis, Shakespeare is no longer an absent presence in his own works, but a writer with a finely tuned sense not only of his own composite career(s), but also those of his Classical forebears and ‘laureate’ contemporaries. In its avoidance of the laureate model, Shakespeare’s literary career employs strategies of self-effacement and authorial displacement that are reminiscent of Ovid. For Shakespeare, and later Milton, the uncertainties, recapitulations and reversals of the literary career as manifested in Ovid are just as important as the stylized assurance of the received Virgilian rota. Indeed, Ovid’s revision of the Virgilian career is a frequent point of reference for English writers, and most English relationships with the Virgilian model combine imitation with revision, a fact that is not always openly acknowledged at the time. As Kilgour argues in her essay, ostensibly Virgilian careers can be read as illusory self-representations that variously suppress early uncertainties, minimize the significance of deviation from the Virgilian norm, and play down public acts of self-correction or revision. Milton’s literary career was certainly announced in uncompromisingly Virgilian terms, with the inclusion of an epigraph from Virgil’s Eclogues on the title page, Baccare frontem / Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro (‘wreathe my brow with foxglove, lest the evil tongue harm the bard that is to be’), which claims both Classical and Christian poetic eminence through the ‘vates futurus’ tag, but as Colin Burrow has pointed out, the cracks in this Virgilian confidence were already apparent in Lycidas and Epitaphium Damonis, which ‘hint at early deaths and poetic unfulfilment’.24 The fact that Milton was thirty-eight when this collection of largely youthful poems was published is particularly significant in this context, drawing attention to the temporal gap between the actual and the public initiations of the poetic career. In the overlapping manuscript and print cultures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the literary career arguably has two beginnings.25 Kilgour’s chapter examines the closing stages of Milton’s career, the time when, according to Lipking, the ageing poet asks himself ‘whether he has accomplished everything of which he is capable’.26 She identifies a specifically Ovidian circularity and return to origins in Samson Agonistes, the tragedy on an Old Testament hero that in the 1671 volume comes after Paradise Regained, the epic on a New Testament hero. Viewed in career Eclogue 7.27–8 (trans. Goold; Virgil 1999:€69) and Burrow 1999:€57. See also Moseley 1991; Revard 1997. 25 Cf. Love 1993. 26 Lipking 1981:€68. 24

Introduction:€Literary careers

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terms, it is remarkable that Milton chooses to project himself through a hero, Samson, who literally brings the edifice tumbling down around his ears, and biographical parallels are seemingly irresistible. Accordingly, Helgerson writes that ‘Samson Agonistes reflects the experience of the older man whose work in the cause of liberty had failed to achieve its expected end and who seemed denied a second chance. The crisis of his defeat, his blindness and his captivity forces Samson, as the crisis of 1660 must have forced Milton, to review the signs of his vocation.’27 From a different perspective, however, the violence and destruction of Samson can be viewed as regenerative, although there are signs that the critical wheel is turning full circle and once more articulating a visceral horror at the poem’s action (see survey in Kilgour below, Ch. 9, n. 22). Lipking hints in his epilogue to this volume that the self-authored ‘grand design’ of the literary career is, indeed, something of a chimaera in post-Renaissance English literature, with contingent circumstances such as financial exigency, occasion and commission increasingly coming to dominate the writing lives of many authors and determining the shape of their vita; the modern literary career is just as likely to be unplanned or fortuitous, as it is to be modelled or managed. In some cases, such as that of Marvell, there is a notable absence of any grand design:€Marvell remained largely unpublished in print throughout his life, and, as Smith writes, he ‘seemingly … missed all the boats that guaranteed esteem’ (p.237). In stark contrast to Milton, Marvell did not seek or articulate a public place for himself within the traditions of Classical and English poetry. His sense of a career is revealed rather through the correspondences and coincidences that connect him to the writings of his contemporaries and forebears, as illustrated by the way in which the personal trauma of his father’s death by drowning resonates with Milton’s watery elegy, Lycidas. Smith characterizes Marvell as a secretive and elusive writer, whose poetic autobiography needs to be reconstructed from the ‘patina of allusion’ (p.236) that characterizes his poetry. Partly as a consequence of its fortuitous character and partly because of the diminishing power of Classical models, the post-Renaissance literary career typically ranges over a far greater generic territory than that of the ancients and their sixteenth-century imitators. Adherence to the hierarchy of genres is correspondingly weakened, most notably by the inexorable rise in the status of prose writing, primarily fiction and criticism. Accordingly, a new vocabulary of career criticism comes into play, 27

╇ Helgerson 1983:€279.

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one that emphasizes range and quantity rather than generic development. Steven Zwicker, for example, opens his assessment of Dryden’s poetic career by noting its ‘breadth and authority’ and characterizing it as ‘various and fecund’, ‘opportune and adventitious’, before baulking slightly at his own taxonomic task:€‘even the idea of a literary career gives a false stability to the haphazardness of Dryden’s literary production’.28 Raphael Lyne’s essay on Dryden addresses this fecundity by proposing a new model he terms the ‘complete’ career, in which ‘many different sorts of writing are attempted in an implicit or explicit project to command as much canonical territory as possible’ (p.241). ‘Variety and totality’ (p.246) are the characteristics of the complete career, characteristics that would seem to be at odds with the generic priorities and focused management of the Classical models, yet which co-habit with them in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary careers. The variety and totality of the complete career make possible surprising juxtapositions such as that manifested in Dryden’s Fables, when his translation of Iliad Book 1 is followed by The Cock and the Fox, translated from Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Rather than being incongruous, this acts as a showcase for Dryden’s command of incident and detail€– his ‘trivial virtuosity’ (p.254)€– and declares the power of his own ‘unifying presence’ that can bring great authors of the past into such proximity and thematic conversation. Of all the aspects of the Classical literary career that fed through into the Renaissance and later, patronage is perhaps the most enduring. Despite the increasing cultural and financial influence of the middle class, political and ecclesiastical patronage was still pervasive throughout the eighteenth century, and intersected with literary patronage in what David Griffin has termed ‘the interwoven braid of dependency’.29 All of the English writers addressed here were mapped into varying kinds of patronage relationships as well as engaging directly with the day-to-day business of the literary marketplace. Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) to the Earl of Southampton, and probably wrote his earliest plays for Lord Strange’s Men, who became the Earl of Derby’s Men. Marvell was employed in the early 1650s as tutor to the daughter of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, a situation that gave rise to arguably the greatest of English country-house poems, Upon Appleton House. Dryden enjoyed the favour of royals, politicians and peers, for whom he Zwicker 2005:€132.

28

29

D. Griffin 1996:€8.

Introduction:€Literary careers

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wrote dedications of such effusive praise that he called down centuries of criticism for flattery upon his head. Even Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the traditions of patronage by accepting the hospitality of leading figures of their day. The chapters on Goethe and Wordsworth test the continuing applicability of the Classical career model to writers of the later eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, a period which saw enormous changes both in the external conditions of authorship and in writers’ perception of their own relation to earlier tradition. Joseph Farrell focuses on a discrete segment of Goethe’s vast and polymorphous career, his Italian journey of 1786 to 1788, and on the classicizing Römische Elegien written out of the experience of those years. Reference to the literary careers of the ancient Roman elegists allows us to reflect on the ways in which the Römische Elegien both mark a brief, self-contained, elegiac career, separated from the public career in Weimar that Goethe had abandoned for the time being, comparable to the Propertian rejection of the public Roman career, and, if we think rather of Ovid, form only a stage in a more extended career, that will progress, once more, beyond the private and the erotic to works of greater ambition. In the case of Wordsworth, Nicola Trott has shown elsewhere how the shape and character of the poetic career as it is generally and personally inflected receive intense scrutiny through the ‘self-explorations’ of Tintern Abbey and The Prelude. The hitherto dominant metaphors of the path or journey that were traditionally employed by poets at the start of their careers are side-stepped by Wordsworth, to be replaced by the river and the church as ‘organic, counter-classical modes of organization’. A further element to Wordsworth’s poetic career that contrasts with the received classical models is the fact that his great work, The Recluse, was never completed.30 In her chapter for this volume, Trott continues her analysis of Wordsworth’s literary career through a reading of the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes€– in particular their Virgilian epitaphs€– as a disjunctive moment in Wordsworth’s career that in one sense enforced a ‘career break’ as the poet sought to revise his work in a less ‘peculiar’ direction, and in another advanced whilst concealing Wordsworth’s ‘hidden career’ working on The Prelude (p.285). As Trott points out, it is this ‘hidden’ career that has subsequently commanded greatest critical attention, in a marked break with the traditionally valorized motif of the unified and public cursus honorum. All of the post-Classical literary 30

╇ Trott 2003:€9.

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careers addressed here€ – from Shakespeare’s ‘counter-laureate’-ship to Wordsworth’s Â�‘hidden’ career and Goethe’s elegiac ‘sabbatical’€ – bear eloquent testimony not only to the continuance in post-antique literature of ancient career models, but also to that Ovidian principle of career Â�re-scription and re-vision that is as much a part of the ancient conception of the literary career as is the rota Vergiliana.

Ch apter 1

Some Virgilian unities Michael C. J. Putnam

The standard demarcations of the Virgilian career are already present at, or soon after, the poet’s death in 19 BC in his epitaph and in the famous lines that purport to introduce the Aeneid. The first may, or may not, be the work of Virgil: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces.1 Mantua begot me, the Calabrians snatched me away, Parthenope now possesses me. I sang of pastureland, the country, leaders.

The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid are denoted by the words pascua, rura and duces, pasture for animals, ploughlands and heroes, standing emblematically for pastoral, didactic and epic verse. Servius tells us that the second passage was excised from its place as the opening hexameters of the Aeneid, but scholarly opinion largely regards it as Tiberian in date:2 Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus auena carmen et egressus siluis uicina coegi ut quamuis auido parerent arua colono, gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis … I am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed, and, departing from the woodland, compelled the neighbouring fields to obey the husbandman, however grasping, a work welcome to farmers:€ but now [I sing] of the bristling [arms] of Mars.

Here carmen, in association with gracili auena and siluis, stands for Virgil’s initial masterpiece. The Georgics is an opus that has uicina arua, Quoted in Vita Donatiana 36 (in Brugnoli and Stok 1997). See Thilo and Hagen 1881:€preface to Book 1 of the Aeneid, and Vita Donatiana 42.

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worked by a colonus, and agricolae for its theme. We move into the Aeneid via the phrase horrentia Martis, anticipating arma to come.3 Though the arc from ego to cano implies a unity of imagination behind the whole of Virgil’s output, the lines dwell on distinctions and on evolutionary development. Both the first and, implicitly, the last centre on the poet and his song (carmen, cano), with the pastorals having as sign a reed pipe, slender like the stylistics of the poems it accompanies. The second, presuming a progress (egressus) from woods, which is to say uncultivated nature, to arua, lands tamed by the plough, heralds the emerging from one imaginative sphere into another. As we dwell on the poetry of instruction, an element of compulsion appropriately enters the language that describes its creator (coegi) and of greed, that of his human pupil (auido). Finally, horrentia anticipates the weapons, bristling and inspiring dread, that are a metonymy for the Aeneid. The two passages complement each other:€pascua, nourisher of animals and setting for singers, finds a counterpart in auena and in siluis, the milieu for song and those who ponder its ‘woodland Muse’, rura in the more specific arua, and duces in the instruments of a warrior’s force. The brisk, asyndetic compartmentalization of the epitaph is tempered, and glossed, in the four-line segment by the participle egressus. This suggests a creative evolution on the poet’s part from one genre to the next, an evolution that depends both on acculturation, as the addressee leaves the forest of primitivism for the task of domesticating fields and for the uses of energy that founds cities and builds empires, and on power. The verb egredior means to emerge but also to climb. Virgil, it suggests, was involved in a poetic journey that moved both outwards and upwards. Its horizontality follows a typology that takes us, metaphorically, from woods to fields to urban communities, and to the specific itinerary from Troy to Rome. The vertical dimension places us, metaphorically, on a societal, cultural ladder that ascends hierarchically from lowly shepherd, inhabiting the woods of hard pastoral, to intermediate farmer, taming and educating his fields in the battle against nature, to the high grandeur of heroes whose prowess brings the ways of civilization to mankind.4 The implication of uicina is that arua and siluis are proximate, as aspects of the natural world and as emblems of types of poetry that tell of them. In adjacent lines at the opening of the first Eclogue Virgil has Meliboeus contrast the siluestrem Musam (2), that Tityrus can continue pondering, and the dulcia arua (3) that he himself must abandon. 4 Compare Propertius 2.34.61–80 for another, more intricate summary of the Virgilian career, as well as Ovid Amores 1.15.25–6 (with the comments of Cheney 2002a:€9–10). 3

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This complex progress from pastoral to georgic to epic, though touched upon in both the Virgilian vitae and in the commentary tradition from Servius on, is formalized graphically in the thirteenth-century Parisiana Poetria of John of Garland.5 Such a cursus served as a model, with variations, for poets from Ovid, Virgil’s immediate successor, and Statius, in the subsequent century, to Dante and Petrarch, at the dawn and early morning of the Renaissance, to Spenser and above all Milton whose accomplishment might be considered its modern climax. The poets whose careers most resemble that of Virgil€– besides those just named I could add later poets such as Pope, Wordsworth (see ch. 15) and Tennyson€– were imbued with the Classical tradition and, however multiform the results, learned the craft of writing in part from studying the bard of Mantua. They were self-consciously fashioning their development as writers on the forward advance of the master’s poetic progress. But what of Virgil himself? Was he aware from the start, and, if so, to what degree, of the way his career would evolve, especially in terms of the genres that it would follow? The answer, I think, is positive, but I wonder if such an affirmation should rely specifically on the genres of his three great poems that proved so significant in assuring his future status as model for the spiritual development of poets. We have the famous recusatio at the opening of Eclogue 6, prominently placed halfway through the first collection. There the speaker claims to have pondered the singing of epic deeds (reges et proelia ‘kings and battles’), in particular the ‘praises and gloomy wars’ (laudes … et tristia … bella) of Alfenus Varus.6 Apollo twitches his ear and urges a ‘song fine-spun’, namely a continuation of pastoral.7 But two matters tell against taking this declaration as a ‘refusal’ that is in fact an omen for the future. The first is that, as an allusion to the Â�opening of Callimachus’ Aetia and to its stylistics,8 the lines are a selfconscious act on Virgil’s part of modelling himself on his Hellenistic past, not a declaration of originality directed toward a vocational path. Second, even assuming that this might be the case, the exploits of P. Alfenus Varus were hardly worth the epic context into which Virgil’s speaker contemplates putting them.9 See Garland 1974, ed. and trans. Lawler, and, on the Rota Vergilii, Faral 1924:€ 86–9; Curtius 1953:€201 n. and 231–2; Laugesen 1962; Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008:€744–50. 6 Ecl. 6.3.6–7. 7 The placement of programmatic moments at positions halfway through their respective works is a common feature of Eclogues (opening of the sixth eclogue), Georgics (opening of the third georgic) and Aeneid. On these median moments see Conte 1992. 8 Callimachus Aetia fr. 1.21–4 Pfeiffer. 9 See for example Coleman 1977 on Ecl. 6.7; Clausen 1994 on Ecl. 6.6–7. 5

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My concern, therefore, about early understanding and assurance on Virgil’s part of his poetic journey rests primarily on questions of genre. I am not certain that Virgil at the start of his career could, or would, have deliberately set out to climb the ladder of perfection that we know he chose, and that led him backwards in Greek literary time from Theocritus to Hesiod and Homer, from pastoral to didactic to epic, to complete at the end a circle that returns to origins and that makes a whole of western literature as Virgil would have known it. What I am assured of is that certain topics and themes remain constant throughout Virgil’s writing, themes that withstand the mutations of genres and that give a sense of unity to the total ensemble. It is aspects of this homogeneity that I would like to trace. Though this may seem a reactionary aspiration, it is my hope that this pursuit will also be of value as we survey the careers of those who modelled themselves on the generic framework that, for generations beginning with Ovid, became one of Virgil’s major trademarks. I will begin by focusing on the Aeneid and by suggesting reasons for its wholeness. I will then expand our horizon within the Virgilian corpus to examine the informative relationship between the epic and the first Eclogue and to propose that the latter poem is proleptic, indeed programmatic, for its author’s works as an amalgamated entity.10 I will then ask whether or not any of the interconnecting strands serve to elucidate further the careers of those authors who knowingly fashioned their writing and its evolution according to the pattern established by the Latin poet’s development, a pattern which remained paradigmatic because of the authority exercised by Virgil’s imagination. Let us look first at some particularities. It is well to remember how Â�verbal repetition and rhyme bring the Aeneid, technically, to a firm Â�conclusion. I quote 12.947–52 as Aeneas begins his final speech: ‘tune hinc spoliis indute meorum eripiare mihi? Pallas te hoc uulnere, Pallas immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit’. hoc dicens ferrum aduerso sub pectore condit feruidus; ast illi soluuntur frigore membra uitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. ‘Are you, clothed in the spoils of my own, to be snatched from me? Pallas, Pallas sacrifices you with this wound and exacts punishment from your criminal On the programmatic aspects of the experiences of Tityrus and Meliboeus vis-à-vis Virgil’s ambiguous views of Rome throughout his career, see Batstone 1990:€10–11. The tensions between ideal and real, between the dream of Augustan aurea saecula and the immediacies of the uses of power in the progress of history, are already present at the initiation of the Virgilian career.

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blood.’ Saying this, ablaze he buries his sword in the chest of his enemy. But [Turnus’] limbs are undone with cold, and his life with a groan flees resentfully beneath the shades.

The repetitions of meorum and mihi in lines 947–8, and of the name Pallas in the later line, slow the text, for the reader to pause and to consider Aeneas’ words as he in turn contemplates Turnus and, vicariously, the young warrior whom Turnus had earlier killed. Though the enjambment of feruidus moves our attention along and, for his last appearance, puts stress on Aeneas’ intense emotionality, the two sets of end rhymes, with sumit and condit followed by membra and umbras, bring a standard form of closure.11 The balanced pairs have an inexorability about them. Aeneas’ final word, with its imputation that he has become the incorporation of Pallas’ vengeance, anticipates the occurrence of the deed itself. The movement from membra to umbras in the poem’s extraordinary, ultimate hexameters is equally gripping. Within the penultimate line we turn from active to passive, from victor, in the heat of anger’s fury, to victim whose limbs are, ironically, loosened by cold. The final rhyme aims our attention strictly at the dying Turnus. Repetition again plays a slowing role here as sub pectore (950) leads to sub umbras. But it is the assonantal twining of membra with umbras that lends the final lines their conclusive force as lexical interplay helps us eye closely not the hero in glory but the disintegration in death of his adversary, as collapsing limbs enter the world of disembodied shades.12 The impressive tightness of the epic’s conclusion helps form part of a larger unity. Resonances between the final lines as a whole and the epic’s opening segments have the effect of complementing the poem’s climactic linearity with an equally potent element of circularity. Such an act of enclosure forces the reader’s attention back to the poem’s start and into an act of rereading and of reprobing meaning. The phrase soluuntur frigore membra, for example, applied to Turnus in the epic’s penultimate hexameter, serves as a reminder of 1.92:€extemplo Aeneas soluuntur Â�frigore membra. ‘Suddenly the limbs of Aeneas are undone with cold.’ As the first line in which Aeneas is named, the hexameter endures in the 11

On rhyme as a standard signpost of conclusion, and closure, see B. H. Smith 1968:€44–5. There is no rhyme when 12.952 makes its first appearance at 11.831, or with sub umbras at 4.660 and 6.578, or ex sanguine sumit at 11.720. At the end of the Aeneid, the iterations of prosody replace the literal rituals, with description of ceremony mimicked in the formality of a poem’s completion, which the conclusions of the Iliad and the Odyssey lead us to expect from Virgil’s own finale. Virgil’s final paradox is to have the patterned shaping of words bring order to Aeneas’ summary violence.

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reader’s memory as reminder of the hero’s initial brush with mortality.13 The recurrence of its final phrase at 12.951, during Turnus’ passage from life to death, announces a larger mutation within the poem, of Aeneas from stoic sufferer of destiny to a warrior who controls the fate of his defeated antagonist. This echo is complemented by the vocabulary of emotion that swathes both events. At the conclusion it is Aeneas, ‘set aflame by furies and terrible in his wrath’ (furiis accensus et ira / terribilis, 946–7), a rage stemming from the ‘fierce resentment’ (saeui … doloris) that the reminder of Pallas precipitates, who brings death to his opponent. At the epic’s opening it is the remembering wrath (iram, 4; irae, 12; irarum, 25) of ‘fierce’ (saeuae, 4) Juno and her ‘fierce resentments’ (saeui dolores, 25), soon embodied in Aeolus’ storm, that seek annihilation for Aeneas. On each occasion victim has become victimizer. We should attend further to the verb condere. At the beginning of the poem we find it associated with Aeneas’ founding of the city of Lavinium (conderet urbem, 5) which anticipates ‘the walls of lofty Rome’ (altae moenia Romae, 7), then with the Rome, in the famous line (33):€tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. ‘Such an effort it was to found the Roman race.’ At the end we find the verb employed to describe the burial of Aeneas’ sword in the chest of his opponent. We will return in a moment to the city as a notion central to Virgil’s thought. We should observe here the implicit irony to be discovered in a founder who is also last remembered as a killer, in generalized initiations that have negative particularities about them, in births that need, or claim, deaths to bring them to fruition, and in the moral dilemmas that often ensue from such tensions. Last is the idea of exile, carried from the poem’s second line, where the compound adjective profugus is applied to Aeneas, to its concluding verse where the verb fugit characterizes the brisk departure of Turnus’ life beneath the shades. We are again engaged with a form of metamorphosis as one man’s topographical exile leads to another’s eternal relegation from a sublunar existence to the realm of the dead. But here, too, we must have recourse to particularities. The same hero who suffers fated exile from the shores of Troy and survives its terrors to become the emblem of the future of Rome is the instigator of the more permanent exile inflicted upon his antagonist as the poem reaches its extraordinary final moment with a vision of mortality. For a discussion of this and other examples of ring-composition, connecting the opening and closing of the epic see Hardie 1997a:€150–1.

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Let us return to the theme of the city by means of another set of circularities, this time between Books 7 and 12, demarcating the poem’s second half. One of the astonishing moments in the epic’s concluding book, astonishing because it is as unexpected as it is gratuitous, is Aeneas’ instigation of the destruction of Latinus’ city (12.554–92). Because his words (567–9) are addressed to his soldiers as ciues (572), citizens are ironically preparing to destroy other ciues (583): ╅╅╇ ‘urbem hodie, causam belli, regna ipsa Latini, ╅╅╇ ni frenum accipere et uicti parere fatentur, ╅╅╇ eruam et aequa solo fumantia culmina ponam’. ‘The city, the reason for war, the very kingdom of Latinus, unless, vanquished, they agree to submit to the bridle and to obey, I will today raze and will place its smoking rooftops level with the ground.’

Words turn to deeds as the men advance to the walls while ladders and fire are prepared. Aeneas leads the charge as ‘strife arises among the anxious citizens’ (exoritur trepidos inter discordia ciues, 583) about how to respond. The poet metaphorizes the whole in simile (587–92): inclusas ut cum latebroso in pumice pastor uestigauit apes fumoque impleuit amaro; illae intus trepidae rerum per cerea castra discurrunt magnisque acuunt stridoribus iras; uoluitur ater odor tectis, tum murmure caeco intus saxa sonant, uacuas it fumus ad auras. Just as when a shepherd has tracked down bees in haven-studded pumice and filled it with bitter smoke; in anxiety about their situation they rush through their waxen fortifications within. The black stench swirls through their dwellings, the rocks inside re-echo with their black rumble, smoke pours out into the empty air.

There is a past history here that begins most immediately in Book 7. Near its start Virgil introduces us to Latinus as the founder of a citadel (primus cum conderet arces, 7.61).14 At its foundation a swarm of bees settled on the peak of a laurel tree growing deep within Latinus’ dwelling. A seer pronounces (68–70):€‘externum cernimus’ … / ‘aduentare uirum et partis petere agmen easdem / partibus ex isdem et summa dominarier arce’. ‘I see a foreigner approach’ … ‘From the same quarter a troop seeks the 14

Virgil would have us compare Latinus’ present with Aeneas’ future, as summarized in words we have seen opening the epic’s first half (dum conderet urbem, 1.5). The verb condere links Latinus, and the narrative of Book 7, with the conclusion of the poem as well.

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same quarter and lords it over the topmost citadel.’ The language is suitably oracular, but commentators have shied away from the full sense of the final words. Deryck Williams sees the concluding phrase as meaning ‘that the foreign invasion will be successful’ while Nicholas Horsfall, in his commentary, finds that ‘the verb [dominarier] … looks ahead to Aeneas’ rule as Latinus’ successor, after the end of the poem’.15 But there is a before and after here that complicates these readings. What precedes the omen is a reminder that the newly landed Trojans are now characterized by Virgil’s narrator as an aduena exercitus (7.38–9), a foreign army poised for the attack. The phrase anticipates the concentration on the arrival of an outsider (externum … / aduentare uirum), namely Aeneas who will become master of the city and its citadel.16 If we follow out the implication of the omen for later events in the epic, we find ourselves watching Aeneas first prepare to destroy Latinus’ city, then actually in control of its core. For when we last see him before the final duel begins we are told (12.698):€ deserit et muros et summas deserit arces. ‘He abandons the walls and forsakes the lofty citadel.’ Though we hear eight lines later of battering rams at work on the city’s bastions, the suggestion of the phrase summas arces is that Aeneas is now in possession of the city. It is again with some irony that Virgil presents his hero as the demolisher-in-progress of Latinus’ anonymous city since he is at pains shortly later in Book 7 (170–91) to draw connections between aspects of the aged king’s temple-palace and edifices of Augustus’ Rome, on both the Capitoline and Palatine hills. Our city founder also has within him the potential to be a razer of cities. In particular we find him both conquering and savaging a city’s central monument that has similarities to buildings in a Rome that Virgil’s contemporaries would have recognized.17 There is a larger history embracing both earlier and later moments in the Aeneid of which events of Books 7 and 12 form a part. Aeneas’ involvement with the destruction of cities begins in Book 2 where, both in the fighting and as a witness, he participates in the demise of Troy. Aeneas Williams in Virgil 1973 on 7.64; Horsfall 2000b on 7.70. The negative use of aduena, an outsider who does violence to a land’s denizens, begins at Ecl. 9.2–3, which take notice of the aduena … possessor who has displaced the shepherds. In Book 7 we hear, immediately after the mention of aduena exercitus, of, among other matters, exordia pugnae and horrida bella, in the précis of Books 7 to 12 mentioned earlier. At Aen. 4.591 Dido considers Aeneas an aduena who has scorned her, while at 12.261, in the eyes of the augur Tolumnius, he is an improbus aduena. 17 The primary figure for the forfeiture of pastoral innocence is Silvia’s tamed stag, maimed by the arrow of Ascanius (see Putnam 1998:€ 97–118). On the loss that she finds compensated for ‘by Rome and civilization’, see Theodorakopoulos 1997:€162. 15

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is largely the passive sufferer of fate’s twists, not the initiator and implementer of action, especially when it takes a negative turn. For the sake of both parallelisms and comparisons let us look simply at the word arx. It is ‘from the top of the citadel’ (summa … ab arce, 41) that Laocoön descends to forewarn his countrymen about the dangers of the wooden horse. He is replaced by the enormous creature itself. In Aeneas’ words (244–5): Â�instamus tamen immemores caecique furore / et monstrum infelix sacrata sistimus arce, ‘Forgetful and blind with frenzy we press on and establish the ill-fated monster on the doomed citadel.’18 The horse is soon replaced by twin snakes, which make their way ‘to the topmost shrines’ (delubra ad summa, 225) and ‘the citadel of harsh Minerva’ (saeuae Tritonidis arcem, 226). They yield place to the Greeks in person. Finally we have the ruinous gods. Watch Minerva, commands his mother (615–16):€iam Â�summas arces Tritonia, respice, Pallas / insedit nimbo effulgens et Gorgone saeua. ‘Behold, now Tritonian Minerva has taken her seat on the topmost citadel, gleaming with her storm-cloud and her fierce Gorgon.’19 The capture of the arx means the capitulation of the city. Chronologically the next city with which Aeneas is involved is Carthage. Here his role in the city’s metamorphosis is more subtle, combining aspects that are both active and passive. When we first come upon the city, we see it through his eyes (1.418–40), gazing at houses, gates, streets. The inhabitants are at work on a citadel, harbour, theatre and a temple for Juno. On its steps Dido dispenses rights and laws. With the arrival of Aeneas, and the arousal of the queen’s passion for him, all this creative energy comes to a halt (4.86–9): non coeptae adsurgunt turres, non arma iuuentus exercet portusue aut propugnacula bello tuta parant:€pendent opera interrupta minaeque murorum ingentes aequataque machina caelo. The towers they had started do not rise, the youth does not practise with its weapons, they do not ready the harbours or the bulwarks for safety in war. The works hang, their construction cut off:€huge, menacing walls, a crane that reaches the sky.

Gone is emphasis on the evidence of culture. Instead Virgil has us notice how preparations for defence are no longer in progress. The city’s guard is down. 18

Virgil puns on sacrata which means both hallowed as well as accursed. The verb insideo here has specific military overtones of occupation and entrenchment.

19

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There is a more sinister side to events, built as much on metaphor as on immediate circumstances, that suggests that the enemy is already within. The sequence begins at 1.673–4 where we hear of Venus’ plot ‘to seize [the queen] by guile and gird her with flame’ (capere … dolis et cingere flamma). The metaphorical pattern, which likens Dido to a Troy-like city readied for capture, continues with the verb insido at 719 to describe the love-god’s posture as besieger.20 By the next occurrence in the pattern, at 4.330, the ‘city’ has already been seized, when Dido exclaims that, had she conceived a child, non equidem omnino capta ac deserta uiderer, ‘I would not seem so completely captured and abandoned.’ Metaphor is expanded into simile, and Dido replaced by her city, for which she now stands as synecdoche, in the final instance of the comparison. The queen’s death, and the mourning that ensues, create a scene (669–71): â•…â•…â•… non aliter quam si immissis ruat hostibus omnis â•…â•…â•… Karthago aut antiqua Tyros, flammaeque furentes â•…â•…â•… culmina perque hominum uoluantur perque deorum. no different than if all of Carthage or of ancient Tyre were to collapse, once the enemy was at loose within, and raging flames billow through rooftops belonging to men, belonging to gods.

However vicarious his responsibility, the result of Aeneas’ arrival at Carthage is the literal as well as figurative weakening and destruction of both the queen and her city. The transition for Carthage and its ruler from powerful to powerless, from industrious builders to subjects of ruinous incursions, can also be illustrated by simile, as we move from Book 1 to Book 4. At 1.430–6 the creative Carthaginians are compared to bees fostering their hive. The simile’s imagistic complement and lexical counterpart occurs at 4.402–5 where the absconding Trojans find kinship with ants, ransacking a heap of grain. Virgil makes his point by a brilliant transfer. At 1.527–8 Ilioneus, spokesman for the Trojans before the Carthaginian queen, asks forbearance of Dido:€ non nos aut ferro Libycos populare penatis / uenimus, aut raptas ad litora uertere praedas, ‘We have not made our way here either to despoil with the sword the household gods of Libya, or to turn shoreward booty that we have claimed.’ But Virgil’s re-employment of parallel language in the later ant simile tells another tale (402–5): For dolus in Book 2 alone, see 34, 44, 152, 196, and 264. For parallels with insidat we have noted the use of the cognate verb insideo at 2.616. Cf. appearances of the noun insidiae at 36, 65, 195, 310 and 421. For use of the phrase cingere flamma in connection with the besieging of a city see Aen. 9.160 and 10.119.

20

Some Virgilian unities â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•…

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ac uelut ingentem formicae farris aceruum cum populant hiemis memores tectoque reponunt, it nigrum campis agmen praedamque per herbas conuectant calle angusto.

And just as when ants, mindful of the winter season, despoil a huge heap of grain and carry it within their dwelling, a black troop makes its way along the open spaces, and they carry their booty on a narrow pathway through the fields.

Crafting Carthaginian bees, instinctive cherishers of their ordered existence, have been replaced by ravaging Trojan ants who parasitically support their lives on what the labour of others has amassed.21 They, too, symbolically are devastating Dido and her city. In Book 7, at a moment in the epic’s second half parallel to these earlier events in its opening book, Ilioneus is again spokesman for his countrymen, this time before Latinus. His words follow by some hundred hexameters the omen we earlier examined of the Trojans, now in the guise of bees who, as the prophet forewarns, will swarm possessively toward the king’s citadel. The apian horde is seconded shortly by the appearance of flames on the head of Lavinia (7.73–6, where words for fire are heaped one upon the other).22 Latinus is told that the monstrum portends her future fame but, more immediately, a ‘mighty war’ (magnum bellum, 80). The next occasion that flame and smoke are associated with Latinus is when his city and its houses are set afire by Aeneas and his men, as the epic nears its conclusion. There are several ways in which Virgil invites his readers to connect the three books€– 2, 4 and 12€– in which Aeneas is associated with the downfall of cities. One of the most salient is again his use of simile to help us deepen our understanding of his text’s meanings. For example, these are the only books of the epic where Aeneas is compared to a shepherd whose situation serves as potent metaphor for the contexts in which they are placed. The climactic sequence from one to the other is central to one of the poet’s designs, namely to illustrate Aeneas’ growing responsibility for his actions, as he turns from endurer of fate to apparent realizer of his own destiny and imposer of their fate on those subject to him. The first occurs at 2.304–8, when Aeneas listens to the sounds of his city’s catastrophe: â•…â•…â•… in segetem ueluti cum flamma furentibus Austris â•…â•…â•… incidit, aut rapidus montano flumine torrens Virgil uses the phrase farris aceruum, also at line ending and accompanied by a form of populo, in a literal agricultural context at Geo. 1.185 where marauding ant is joined by weevil. 22 Within five lines lines we have ignem, flamma and accensa (bis). Lavinia is fumida fuluo lumine, and Vulcan shares in the enterprise. 21

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Michael C. J. Putnam â•…â•…â•… sternit agros, sternit sata laeta boumque labores â•…â•…â•… praecipitisque trahit siluas; stupet inscius alto â•…â•…â•… accipiens sonitum saxi de uertice pastor.

‘Just as when flame with raging south winds falls on a crop, or a rushing swirl of a mountain stream lays low fields, lays low fertile seedlings and the efforts of cattle, and drags forests headlong. The ignorant shepherd stands amazed on the rock’s lofty crest, taking in the noise.’23

Troy’s fall is like the moment when elemental forces of nature obliterate the traces of humankind, in this case of man the farmer, one of whose tasks, the Georgics teaches us, is to keep wild nature at bay. The shepherd, standard protagonist of pastoral poetry, is both physically and, in terms of metapoetics, generically removed from the distant horror that he witnesses. This he absorbs only through hearing, much though we expect sight to be his organ of sensation because of the eminence on which he stands. Though we watch him closely (Virgil gives him the last word, pastor), the shepherd’s ignorance keeps him aloof from what he hears but cannot see, senses but cannot intellectually comprehend. The second appearance of Aeneas as shepherd, at 4.68–73, finds him in a more involved posture. Though Dido is the primary object of comparison, the pastor is now a focal figure in the story, just as the word is central to the simile: â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•…

uritur infelix Dido totaque uagatur urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerua sagitta, quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit pastor agens telis liquitque uolatile ferrum nescius:€illa fuga silvas saltusque peragrat Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo.

Ill-starred Dido burns and in her frenzy ranges the whole city, like an unwary hind, upon the shooting of an arrow, whom a shepherd amid the groves of Crete has pierced from afar as he herds it with his weaponry, and unwittingly has left [in her] the speeding steel. In her flight she roams the woods and glades of Dicte. The deadly shaft clings to her side.

We have moved from Aeneas observing to doing. The shepherd is displaced from his ordinary regimen of tending tame flocks into the more tangential, more primitive, role of hunter, just as Aeneas in Carthage has been momentarily seduced from following out his quasi-impersonal destiny into a situation where emotionality rules. The gist of the simile is For a detailed discussion of this simile in relation to its sources in Homer and as the first in the sequence of comparisons between Aeneas and a shepherd, see Anderson 1968.

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a pictorial expansion of one of the several erotic metaphors that, in the book’s opening hexameters, reinterpret the situation of Dido in particular. We are told how, as part of the extensive wound she suffers, Aeneas’ ‘features and words cling pierced to her breast’ (haerent infixi pectore Â�uultus / uerbaque, 4.4–5). We also learn that Aeneas in fact reciprocates Dido’s feeling. But the force of the narration puts more emphasis on the effect than on the cause, on the wound rather than on its perpetrator. Both aspects are present in the powerful simile, but spatial distance between hunter and prey serves to suggest ethical differentiation as well. The doe is incauta, with a lack of guard that suggests irresponsibility. The hunter purposefully causes the hurt€– he is driving the animal with his arrows€– but remains ignorant that the shaft has struck home and that the wound is mortal. Aeneas may be the instigator of Dido’s self-slaughter, and the implicit agent of the doom of her city, but he is unaware of the extent of the harm he has caused. Turning to the final simile in the chain, Aen. 12.586–92 quoted earlier, we find the word pastor placed prominently at the analogy’s start just as the shepherd himself is now in control of a dramatic situation that he instigates. Once again there is a sense that the shepherd is deliberately placed out of his element, as if to affirm that Aeneas is involved with a morally questionable activity as he sets Latinus’ city afire. The suggestion is borne out by a comparison with Virgil’s source in the second book of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (130–4). The Roman poet typically adds details that not only requalify the simile’s object of comparison€– the hive, for instance, like Latinus’ city, has been turned into a waxen version of an armed camp (castra, 589)€– but also personify his protagonists. His bees worry about their situation (trepidae rerum) and respond with anger to provocation. Apollonius lists two initiators of his simile’s action, shepherds and beekeepers. Virgil dispenses with the latter and focuses on a single example of the former, as if to emphasize that one particular shepherd, the central figure of his poem, was as out of place in firing his opponent’s city as would be a shepherd when smoking out bees from a rocky hive. Here, too, we confront the same metapoetic element that we found in the pastor simile in Book 2, and it reinforces Virgil’s point. Beekeeping in its poetic manifestations belongs under the rubric of didactic, as illustrated in the fourth book of the Georgics. The shepherds of pastoral verse are as incongruous in the role of apiarists as is an Aeneas in the position of city-razer. Yet this is exactly how Virgil would have us see him.

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In our discussion of the first Eclogue we will return to Virgil’s detailing of the events reinterpreted by the simile. Let us conclude our survey of Aeneas’ literal and figurative connection with cities by a glance at the brief final similes in the poem. At the moment when Aeneas hurls at Turnus the spear that fells but does not kill him, the poet offers two comparisons for the noise its onrush makes (12.921–3):€ murali concita numquam / tormento sic saxa fremunt nec fulmine tanti / dissultant crepitus, ‘Never do rocks roar so loudly when sped from a besieging catapult, nor do such crashes burst forth from a thunderbolt.’ Aeneas’ spear-thrust has a share in Jovian omnipotence. It also represents metaphorically a force that is bent on capturing a city.24 In his initial wounding Turnus therefore vicariously becomes a city under assault. The deadly plunging of Aeneas’ sword into his antagonist’s chest, which we witness some thirty lines later, completes the epic with the final evolution of this particular metaphoric drama through the ambiguities which we have already traced of the verb condere. The hypothetical founder of Lavinium, and ancestor of Rome, can also behave in such a way that, at least in the medium of the metaphoric, he is, in the reality of his final deed, a city-destroyer as well. Dido, too, makes a figurative appearance here. In the extraordinary first simile of Book 12 Turnus is compared to a lion wounded by hunters, become a single robber, in Punic fields. The language of the simile’s second line (saucius … graui … uulnere, 12.5) echoes the opening hexameters of Book 4 where Dido, ‘wounded with the weight of anxiety, nourished the hurt with her veins’ (graui … saucia cura / uulnus alit uenis, 4.1–2). And the topographic placement at Carthage reconfirms the echo. Dido and her city become symbolically complementary at her death. The demise of Turnus as city is meant by Virgil to be parallel, with the salient difference that, in the first instance, the titular hero was only in part blameworthy for the resultant suicide whereas in the second he bears responsibility for his final burst of fury and subsequent killing. Once again figurative turns to literal in the final reach of the story of Turnus. Here the eroticism involved is, if anything, more complex than in the tale of Dido’s liaison with the Trojan hero. In the concluding lines of the epic Turnus renounces Lavinia, the presumed source of the metaphoric wound of the initial simile as well as the prey of its latro. Aeneas kills, however, not to punish his opponent for his ill-fated expectation of marriage with the Latin princess but because he is reminded of Pallas, killed by Turnus. The more sweeping vengeance against Latinus’ city 24

╇ See Putnam 1995:€195–6; Rossi 2004:€203.

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takes an intricate turn toward specificity as Aeneas slays Turnus in the final moment of the poem.25 Using the city and its several connotations as common ground, let us turn back from the Aeneid to the first Eclogue. We will be watching again the notion of exile and taking up for the first time the idea of shade and its many nuances. But first a word on the poem as a whole. The reader shares in a dialogue between two shepherd-singers given the Greek names of Meliboeus and Tityrus, evocative of the Theocritean background of Virgilian pastoral yet placed in a country setting within the orbit of Rome’s influence. This bucolic landscape is largely perfect and allowed to remain the permanent setting for Tityrus.26 For Meliboeus matters are different. There is illness in his flock. Worse, he, along with an apparent majority of his colleagues, is being forced from this spiritual centre toward the bounds of the empire. Tityrus alone seems fortunate in continuing to inhabit his world of fountains, shade and the various musics of man and nature. The poem’s narrative seems to run the partial course of a day, leading us from the happy shepherd, reclining under a spreading beech and chanting of Amaryllis, to nightfall as the mountain shadows lengthen. But this crepuscular beauty means different things to the two protagonists. For lucky Tityrus it signifies the conclusion of an ordinary ideal bucolic day of leisure and song. For Meliboeus it portends the possible passing of one more night within his beloved landscape before departure into a land or lands whose remoteness helps set off its core differences from the realm of Tityrus. Ideal contrasts with real, happiness with suffering, stability with motion, while the diurnal time of the pastoral arcadia stands against the vast temporalities of history and of ordinary life. Meliboeus is leaving the pastoral world, but there are aspects to his existence other than storyline that contrast with that of Tityrus. For one thing he is closely linked to the georgic as well as to the pastoral sphere. Already in the poem’s third line we hear of his ‘sweet ploughlands’ Â�(dulcia arva). As the poem nears its end, we are told of ‘ears of corn’ (aristae, 69), of his ‘newly-tilled fields’ (noualia, 70) and ‘crops’ (segetes, 71). The language of Virgilian didactic is concentrated at lines This series of metaphors suggests a commonality between Books 4 and 12 as conclusions, respectively, of the first and last thirds of the epic. The suggestive parallels with the finale of the middle third, the only full-scale description of the city of Rome in the epic as climax of the ecphrasis of Aeneas’ shield, deserve separate treatment. 26 For a recent survey of the pointed, but limited, allusions to Theocritus in this very Roman poem, see Tracy 2003:€66 and n. 1. 25

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72–3 where Meliboeus addresses himself with irony:€his nos conseuimus agros! / insere nunc, Meliboee, piros, pone ordine uitis, ‘For this we have sown our fields! Graft now your pears, Meliboeus, place your vines in a row.’ The tasks that the displaced shepherd must forgo draw us lexically into the farmer’s world, the subject matter of the first and second books of the Georgics. But there is a third characteristic to Meliboeus’ condition that further differentiates him from Tityrus. We attend to it first also in the opening lines where we hear, once, of his ‘bounded lands’ (fines, 3) and twice of his ‘fatherland’ (patriae, patriam, 3–4). The territory in which he resides is defined in a broadly political sense as his homeland, with all the word’s civic connotations which further set his life apart from the idyllic, yet hermetic, existence of Tityrus. And at line 67, as the unlucky shepherd prepares to reveal the reasons why he must abandon the pastoral world, we are told again of ‘the domain of his fatherland’ (patrios fines, 67), of a national landscape that also stands for the identity of his people as a governed entity. There is a more potent dimension to the distinction between the two shepherds, the examination of which will take us beyond Eclogues and Georgics, and back to the Aeneid, for Meliboeus represents aspects of all three poems.27 This further dimension centres on the idea of the city, in the case of Eclogue 1 the city of Rome. As with the Aeneid where the presence of power looks both to its raw, personal manifestations in the present and to its golden applications in an Augustan future, so in the programmatic introduction to the Virgilian career Rome makes its force felt in two ways. There is the young god (deus, 6–7; iuuenem, 42), worshipped by Tityrus, from whom in Rome he has received his libertas (32). For him this means release from slavery which results in leisure (otia, 7) to create easeful song. For the reader, allowed to plumb the depths of Meliboeus’ misfortunes in ways Virgil shows were impossible for the naïve, cosseted Tityrus, his situation also suggests larger freedoms open to citizens in a peaceful political situation. To view the second way in which Rome appears in Eclogue 1 we must turn from distance to immediacy, from general to particular, from a The three ‘divisions’ of the Virgilian career converge at other moments. The most striking is the opening of the third Georgic where the self-consciousness of the poet is most apparent in his work. It comes at the central moment of Virgil’s tripartite production. That it, too, like the first Eclogue at the initiation of the Virgilian career, partakes in aspects of pastoral, georgic and epic, further confirms the unity amid this triple diversity that typifies Virgil’s work.

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perfected centre of righteous power to the tangible effects on the landscape of a different Rome, riven by civil strife. One immediate sign of this internecine warring was the distribution of lands to veterans of the winning side in the years after the Battle of Philippi, in 42 BC. The ‘young god’, presumably Octavian, was one of those victors. His alter ego, and palpable emissary from a different Rome from that granting Tityrus his freedom, is a soldier whom Meliboeus styles impius (70) and barbarus (71). Impius contrasts the soldier’s behaviour with Meliboeus’ culta noualia (70), tilled lands that, metaphorically, are both ‘civilized’ and ‘worshipped’ by their tender (to Meliboeus, divinity inheres in his landscape, not in some remote youth). The adjective also implies that the soldier incorporates in himself, and stands as a synecdoche for, Furor impius at Aen. 1.294, emblem of civil war imprisoned in an Augustan peace envisioned for the future. Barbarus has parallel significance. It, too, reorients us so that, at least in Meliboeus’ eyes, civilization exists in the pastoral foreground, not in the metropolis on the Tiber that brutally inflicts its inner turmoil on a subservient world. It is by means of this aspect of the city that we can turn back, in conclusion, to the Aeneid and to the larger circles of the Virgilian poetic career that lend it wholeness as well as distinctiveness. Let us begin with Ecl. 1.71–2:€en quo discordia ciuis / produxit miseros, ‘behold whither discord has brought our wretched citizens’, following upon Meliboeus’ characterization of Rome’s encroaching soldiery. Virgil repeats the phrase discordia ciuis, also at the hexameter’s conclusion, at Aen. 12.583 to qualify the reaction of the inhabitants of Latinus’ city to the start of Aeneas’ setting it afire. His action is the cause of controversy for those penned within the walls about whether to fight back or to open the gates. But since Aeneas shortly before has addressed his besieging army as o ciues ‘o citizens’ (572), Virgil implies that we are dealing with a larger form of discord, an example of war between citizens that is a microcosm of the events which take up the epic’s second half. Already in the first Eclogue Virgil has prepared us for this particular type of warfare as well as for the more general fighting of Aeneid Books 7 to 12 which allegorizes the recent condition of modern Rome and its destructive penchant for fratricide. I have already quoted three earlier lines in Aeneas’ exhortation to his troops (12.567–9). There is one phrase in the last of these hexameters that also has the effect of returning our attention to the first Eclogue:€aequa solo fumantia culmina ponam, ‘I will place [the city’s] smoking rooftops level with the ground.’ The phrase fumantia culmina completes a further

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circling back to Virgil’s first poem, this time to the eclogue’s concluding lines that Virgil allots to Tityrus (79–83): â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•… â•…â•…â•…

Hic tamen hanc mecum poteras requiescere noctem fronde super uiridi:€sunt nobis mitia poma, castaneae molles et pressi copia lactis, et iam summa procul uillarum culmina fumant maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.

Here, nevertheless, you could rest this night with me upon green leaves. I have ripe apples, soft chestnuts and an abundance of cheese. And now afar off the roofs of the farmhouses are sending up smoke, and deeper shadows are falling from the lofty hills.

In the narrow confines of Tityrus’ world and language, the phrase culmina fumant looks to a typical evening scene in the countryside, lowering the curtain on a shepherd’s quotidian existence.28 Cottages send up smoke, shadows lengthen, and a pastoral poem comes to an appropriate finale.29 To the reader of Virgil’s work as a whole the phrase takes on a more complex meaning. We have seen how in Aeneid 12 it forms part of a description of civil war that led us back to Meliboeus’ suffering. The poet now offers us a further connection between Eclogue 1 and the same event in the epic. As we read, and reread, the phrase can be interpreted in several ways. Seeing the smoking ridgepoles through the eyes of Tityrus, we contemplate the beauty of an ebbing pastoral day. Applying what we have garnered from the end of the Aeneid, which itself offers a further articulation of the reasons for Meliboeus’ plight, we contemplate these smoking dwellings in a more sinister light, as the literal, but equally symbolic, manifestation of what civil war does to citizens€– a group for which our suffering shepherd also stands€– and to their various landscapes, whether urban or rural.30 This connection leads to two further instances of the unity of the Virgilian career that help form the outer ring of this concentricity. The On the ambiguities of poteras, as fulfillable invitation or acknowledgement that the possibility of further respite for Meliboeus has passed, see Batstone 1990:€11, who finds that the word offers us ‘not closure, but the imagination of closure’. 29 The use of fumant at 82 recalls altaria fumant (43) and Tityrus’ unambiguous offerings to Rome’s young god. Culmina recalls the culmen of Meliboeus’ hovel (68). These are the only uses of the word in the Eclogues. For its connection in the Aeneid with the destruction of cities see, in Book 2 alone, 290, 410, 446, 479 and 603. For fumo and fumus and the razing of cities see Aen. 2.609, 3.3 (omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia) and 10.45–6 ( fumantia Troiae / excidia). Fumus, as we saw, appears twice in the shepherd simile of Aen. 12 (588, 592), as echo of fumantia (569). 30 For a further echo between Eclogue 1 and Aeneid 12 note the reflection of nos patriae … arua (Ecl. 1. 34) in nos patria … aruis (Aen. 12.236–7). See Putnam 2001:€331–2. 28

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first is the idea of shade.31 Virgil’s use of umbrae, as the concluding word of Eclogue 1, works its magic by several means.32 It looks back to the poem’s fourth line which finds Tityrus, in Meliboeus’ words, lentus in umbra (at ease in the shade), and the repetition helps bring to a satisfying fulfilment the regular continuum of a pastoral day, from one moment of shade to another.33 It also anticipates the last word of the epic as (Aen. 12.952) uita … cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras, ‘[Turnus’] life, indignant, flees with a groan beneath the shades.’ Again, Virgil would have us reread, and recontemplate. But is John Hollander, in his recent splendid lectures on shade, entirely on the mark when he states that ‘the umbrae into which Turnus descends with a moan of indignation … are of another stuff entirely’ from Tityrus’ nocturnal shadows (Hollander unpublished)? Virgil has already educated us into the understanding that any attempt to measure the richness of his work depends on the reader’s cyclic meditation of his three masterpieces en groupe. If we leave Tityrus’ umbrae with only the sense in which the lucky shepherd would find them, as evidence for the passing of a day and of a song, then they bear little kinship with Turnus’ vita as it descends into the eternal shadows. But if we accept what discordia means in the life of Meliboeus and carry its intensity through to its logical conclusion, in the narrative of Aeneid 12, from Aeneas’ burning of Latinus’ city to his furious killing of Turnus, then even in Eclogue 1 its resonances take on an ominous tone. The world of on-going time into which Meliboeus is forced is one in which helpless citizens become a prey to the might, as well as to the Â�foibles, of the empowered. It takes no great leap of the imagination to envision the effects of such warring not only in the suffering of Meliboeus but in the finality of one fighter’s demise at the hands of his stronger adversary. For the figurative importance of shade in the poetry of Virgil see D. Kennedy 1983. For its role as a unifying factor in Virgil’s poetry see Theodorakopoulos 1997:€162–3. 32 On the conclusion of Ecl. 1 see Traina 1968 and Van Sickle 1984. 33 Shade plays a multivalent, often structuring, role throughout Virgil’s poetry. Its appearance at Ecl. 10.75–6, for instance, serves at least two purposes. By reference back to the conclusion of the first Eclogue it brings unity to the book of Eclogues. But the phrase nocent … umbrae (Ecl. 10.76) also anticipates its use at Geo. 1.121 (umbra nocet). It thus helps create a verbal nexus that forms a transition to ‘pastures new’ in Virgil’s career, which is to say from Eclogues to Georgics (the most prominent example of these connectives is the reuse of uere novo [Ecl. 10.74] at Geo. 1.43, the initiation of the later poem’s didacticism). But whether in terms of the history of his ideas or of his acts of poetic structuring, the evolving and developmental aspects of Virgil’s poetry are ever in counterpoint to the circular and the recurring. Direct quotation of the first line of Ecl. 1 in the last of Geo. 4 and parallelism in the configuration of the last eight lines of Ecl. 10 and those of Geo. 4, make it further clear that Virgil authorizes us from the start of his career to think of cyclicity as a guiding principle of his ideas and their formulation. 31

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Here, too, it is appropriate that mention of shade likewise brings another poem, and with it this time a poetic career, to a conclusion.34 In terms of genre we have, of course, left pastoral behind for the heroics of epic. If we adopt the categorization of John of Garland, warrior has replaced shepherd, just as country yields to city and diurnal time to the grander reaches of history’s temporal sweep. But the larger context of Tityran shade leads inexorably from idealism to realism, and with realism comes the darkness of death. Through mention of shade the initiation of this extraordinary poet’s imaginative course contains intimations of its finale. The reader moves forward, following the writer’s sequence of production, through three great opera. But Virgil’s extraordinary, demanding gestures of circularity keep us, his admirers, in a continuous present of contemplation. Paradoxically shade both bounds the poems and remains central to their meaning.35 The second, enclosing manifestation of the unity of the Virgilian career, one closely tied to the various nuances of shade, lies in the theme of exile.36 We have already observed how in the Aeneid it runs from the second line of the poem, where we find the titular hero fato profugus, to its last, as the life of Turnus flees in exile. This technical use of the verb fugio we find already in the fourth line of Eclogue 1 as Meliboeus tells of himself and his colleagues:€nos patriam fugimus, ‘we are being exiled from our fatherland’.37 Meliboeus’ banishment is horrific enough, relegated as he is Fowler 1997:€14 n. 47, finds that the final umbrae ‘figure the death of its author’. If so, and the biographical facts bear out a literal acceptance of the suggestion, it is a death in possession of the force of revival, a clear moment of stoppage invested with a dynamism that places exceptional demands on the reader to reach beyond any superficial sign of termination. See also Hardie 1997a:€145 and n. 26. 35 In the heady world of Virgilian circularities, we must take due note of the careful repetition of virtually the whole of Eclogue 1.1 as the concluding hexameter of the fourth Georgic. The clarion echo asks us to reread the Eclogues in the light of what we have learned from the later poem as a whole, as well as to utilize our appreciation of the earlier poem in the interpretation of the later. Close study of the Georgics with their multivalent meditation on power and its uses, will give us good reason to ponder why the speaker (in the guise of the poet), in the poem’s penultimate line, can proclaim the earlier poem to be the product of someone ‘bold in his youth’ (audax iuuenta). The depth of that ‘audacity’ is still further clarified in the final book of the epic whose more subtle references back to Eclogue 1 ask us to perform what the conclusion of Georgic 4 accomplished more directly. Virgil once again urges us to see his trifold achievement both developmentally and as a complex whole. 36 For the importance of Meliboeus’ exile as a theme that reaches out beyond the poetic space of the first Eclogue, see Van Sickle 2000, especially 45–9. See also 42–3 for the part played in the poem by ‘the tensions of contemporary Rome’, ‘the crisis of the late republic’. 37 The close parallels between Ecl. 1.3–4, nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua. / nos patriam fugimus, and Aeneas’ reaction to Mercury’s command that he must leave Carthage (Aen. 4. 281) ardet abire fuga dulcisque relinquere terras, ‘he burns to depart in flight and to depart from the sweet lands’, are scarcely coincidental. It is the presence of the adjective dulcis that, in the first 34

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37

from the sequestered existence of pastoral’s dream to actuality’s great distances. But even here lies the incipience of that greater exile from life to death, as we again move out into history and especially to those moments when men take each other’s lives. The ending of the Virgilian career is clearly present at its start as, in terms of genre, pastoral both anticipates and in several senses is defined by epic. Et in Arcadia ego.38 If I am correct about the particular intellectual force of Eclogue 1, then Virgil self-consciously initiates and concludes his career not with any firstperson apologia, but by adopting more subtle and more powerful frames of reference which lexically and ideologically link the beginning with the end, and vice versa. His most forthright statement of poetic purpose comes at the centre of his poetic accomplishment, during the prooemium of the third Georgic, halfway through his central work. But linkage of the first Eclogue with the finale of the Aeneid expresses, however indirect the poetic means, the deeper interests conveyed by Virgil’s master text. At the epic’s end we move from apparent reconciliation between Juno and Jupiter in heaven to the hero’s enraged killing of Turnus. We turn from anticipating the deification of Aeneas, peace between warring parties and the glory of Rome to come, to the reality of an angry hero inflicting vengeance on a suppliant. My goal has been to use Virgil’s treatment of the city, of the rich ambiguities he associates with shade and the problematics of exile to help find unity amid the splendid diversity of his poetic progress.39 I would hope to stimulate discussion of these and other amalgamating factors€– or lack thereof€– in the poets who were influenced by the generic superficies of the Virgilian career. Take exile as an example. Virgil’s naming of Scythia instance, lends poignancy to the idea of Meliboeus’ banishment and, in the second, helps give a secondary nuance to the word fuga. Aeneas must flee at the god’s insistence, but to flee from something that is also ‘sweet’ implies an element of unwillingness, and of untoward compulsion, that helps the noun also attract the sense of exile. Cf. also the use of dulcia limina in relation to exile at Geo. 2.511, and of patriae and relinquo in relation to exul at Aen. 3.10–11. For fugio, and fuga, as components of the language of exile see also Aen. 8.320 and 11.541–2, 547, 559, and 563. 38 The phrase pererratis … finibus exul appears pointedly at Ecl. 1.61 in Tityrus’ list of adynata, as part of a series of analogies that, for him, will never occur. Already however at line 3 the reader knows that exile is in the process of becoming a central reality in Meliboeus’ life. 39 My insistence on certain ‘enclosing’, unifying, themes in Virgil’s poetry is meant in no way to extract Virgil’s work, especially the Aeneid, from its position in the larger sweep of Augustan culture, and from its important place in determining, as well as exposing, Rome’s complex reliance on power. Circularity does not demand finality, and rereading presumes constant intellectual motion and the expectation of change. In one sense Virgil does away with the problematics of closure, by teasing the reader away from projecting the future, or futures, beyond his text and into reading it again, and thereby into deepening and broadening the experience such rumination provides.

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as a potential place of banishment for Meliboeus unwittingly anticipates the fact that this region would be the site of Ovid’s relegation.40 But exile as a theme permeates not only literally the later poet’s elegies from the Black Sea but also, on a deep psychological level, the Metamorphoses with their notion of change as a form of exilic limbo, poised between life and death.41 We think also of Dante, the exile, and the complex combination of love and hate, even in Paradiso, in which he held the city of his birth. Likewise it is no accident that in the first of his twelve pastorals, written in the 1340s and collected as Bucolicum Carmen, Petrarch associates himself not with the stable Monicus (a figure for his brother Gherardo) but with the poet-wanderer Silvius.42 We could ponder, too, Milton’s many exiles. On the biographical level he is excluded from politics after the Restoration, and from ordinary human life by his blindness. On the level of his poetic genius we contemplate exile as a major theme of Paradise Lost:€ the banishment of Satan and his followers from heaven, of Adam and Eve, and their offspring, from Eden, to live in a world of woe until the Second Coming in the distant future brings the final relenting of God’s anger€– the Miltonic equivalent of Virgil’s distant aurea saecula and Dante’s imagined heaven.43 Here, too, the continua of the Virgilian career loom as a potent presence. And, of course, after we have read Ovid’s nine books of exilic poetry, we return to the first Eclogue with renewed understanding of Virgil’s figurations, especially of Meliboeus. With Scythia and Ovid’s exile see Fasti 4.82 as well as the numerous references in Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. For the connection between exile and metamorphosis see Met. 10.232–4. 42 Petrarch thus clearly adopts Meliboeus as his model€ – a clear challenge to the inherited allegorical tradition, which saw Tityrus as Virgil (see Servius’ comment on Ecl. 1.1). He thus acknowledges the force that Virgil lodged in the itinerant singer whose life is to be one of displacement. Both are partial models for Diggon Davie in Spenser’s September eclogue. See further W. J. Kennedy 1984:€89–95. Petrarch’s bow to the epic segment of the Virgilian career was the Africa, on which he worked sporadically from the late 1330’s until his death (the poem was not published until 1397). His chief ancient model was both honoured and criticized, for in Scipio Africanus, unlike Aeneas, we have a hero verging on the faultless. 43 Anger, too, is a unifying factor. We have already seen the importance of its appearance at the beginning and the conclusion of the Aeneid. It figures prominently as a motivating force for the implementation of mutation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The locus classicus for a discussion of anger as a primary motivating force for the events of epic, from Homer to Milton, is to be found at the opening of the ninth book of Paradise Lost, lines 1–19. 40 41

Ch apter 2

There and back again:€Horace’s poetic career 1 Stephen Harrison

1.╇ I n t roduc t ion:€s om e f r a m e wor k s This chapter considers the self-constructed poetic career of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 BC) through his various poetic collections, moving from his debut as writer of hexameter sermo in Satires 1 (35 BC) and 2 (30 BC), through his iambic poetry in the Epodes (30 BC), his lyric activity in Odes 1–3 (23 BC), his reprise of sermo in letter form in Epistles 1 (20/19 BC), his return to lyric in the Carmen Saeculare (17 BC) and Odes 4 (13 BC), to his final phase of epistolary sermo in Epistles 2 and the Ars Poetica (12–8 BC). This catalogue of works presents several Â�patterns:€ ascent from humble sermo to higher lyric, engagement in different genres at the same time, and (ultimately) a parabolic move from lyric back to sermo. My investigation will be especially interested both in the ‘vertical’ aspect of Horace’s career, its representation of the poet’s apparent rise from lowly and ‘outsider’ political and poetic beginnings to a more elevated ‘insider’ status in both fields, and its ‘horizontal’ aspect, its representation of the broad variety of genres in which the poet works, sometimes simultaneously. Discussions of the poetic career in Augustan poetry have mainly concerned themselves with the evident self-fashionings of Virgil’s ascent through the Greek hexameter genres and Ovid’s parabolic progress through elegy to the Metamorphoses to return to elegy in exile.2 Horace’s trajectory has elements in common with both:€ a Virgilian pattern of ascent through lowly sermo and iambus to higher lyric, using increasingly elevated Greek models and growing in political commitment, and an My thanks to Philip Hardie for the invitation to write this piece. I have referred freely to the evidence recently gathered in Harrison 2007a, Harrison 2007c and Harrison 2008, where more detail may be found on a number of elements briefly discussed here. Translations of Horace are taken from West 1997 (Epodes, Odes) and Rudd 1979 (Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica). 2 See Theodorakopoulos 1997, Farrell 2002, S. J. Harrison (2002), and Barchiesi and Hardie in this volume. 1

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Ovidian parabolic pattern of returning to a slightly modified and epistolary version of the initial literary genre.3 Within this overall framework, a bipartite structure can also be discerned:€until the publication of Odes 1–3 in 23, the route is almost entirely one of conscious ascent, while after that date choices of poetic genre represent something of a horizontal spread, with sermo and lyric alternating. Discussions of the Roman poetic career have also naturally compared it to the Roman political career:€this was a ready analogy which occurs in Horace himself, in the catalogue of life-choices at the beginning of the Odes which rejects alternatives in favour of the career of poetry:€the politician seeking election (1.1.7–8) is ultimately contrasted with the poet’s divine calling (29–34). In Horace’s case, his career as poet is indeed a kind of continuation of his interrupted public career:€ beginning (albeit in extraordinary times) as a tribunus militum under Brutus, a normal first career step for a Roman elite youth,4 Horace ends up at the literary summit as the national bard of Rome:€his political career is in effect diverted into that of poetry and then goes all the way to the top. His move from poet of protest in Epodes 7 and 16 to the laureate of the Carmen Saeculare is a long journey indeed, and it is important to see his poetic ascent as keeping pace with his socio-political rise. The final stage of Horace’s poetic career, that of the wise preceptor of Epistles 2 and the Ars Poetica, nicely parallels the last stage of a Republican political career, the office of censor, in which an experienced senator would give moral and political guidance. Economics play a part here, too:€ looking back on his poetic career in Epistles 2.2.49–51, Horace identifies post-Philippi paupertas as his motive for turning to poetry at all, but of course progress in poetry brings the wealth and landed independence available through the patronage of Maecenas and Augustus. In what follows, I want to keep these various models in mind as I consider Horace’s developing poetic career. 2 .╇

1, s at i r e s 2 a n d e p o d e s :€ f rom ou t s i de r t o i ns i de r

s at i r e s

The three earliest books of Horatian poetry begin from self-consciously low literary predecessors:€Satires 1 and 2 pick up the hexameter sermo of Lucilius, the humble and parodic cousin of Ennian hexameter epic, looking at least momentarily to Attic Old Comedy as a Greek parallel (Satires Ovid’s last epistolary phase seems indeed to be conscious of Horace’s (see section 5 below). Nisbet 2007:€8.

3

4

There and back again:€Horace’s poetic career

41

1.4.1–6), while the Epodes take on the rumbustious and low-life world of archaic Archilochean iambus. This constructs a poetic career as beginning near the bottom of the generic scale:€such self-positioning, along with the elements of aggression fundamental to both these low genres, nicely fits a poet who starts the period as an angry young man who has suffered real worldly dispossession. It has been well argued that within Satires 1 we find a kind of autobiographical progress of Horace from the excluded moralist of Satires 1.1–3 to the Maecenatic poet of 1.4 and beyond who has entered the literary establishment:€we move from the apparently isolated street preacher to the amicus of Maecenas in 1.5, 1.6 and 1.9 who in 1.10 takes his place amongst the leading writers of the day.5 This trajectory comes out especially in the two literary catalogues of this concluding satire of Horace’s first book. In the first of these, Horace looks to take his place amongst the master poets of his time just as he has taken his place amongst the amici of Maecenas (1.10.40–8): arguta meretrice potes Dauoque Chremeta eludente senem comis garrire libellos unus uiuorum, Fundani, Pollio regum facta canit pede ter percusso; forte epos acer ut nemo Varius ducit, molle atque facetum Vergilio adnuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae: hoc erat, experto frustra Varrone Atacino atque quibusdam aliis, melius quod scribere possem, inuentore minor. In constructing chatty comedies where Davus and a crafty mistress outwit old Chremes, you, Fundanius, delight us more than anyone living. Pollio celebrates the deeds of kings with triple beat. Varius marshals heroic epic with a fiery spirit no one can match. To Virgil the Muses who love the country have given a light and charming touch. This form had been tried by Varro of Atax and others without success and was therefore one which I could perhaps develop€– though always below its inventor.

Indeed, the social and the poetic circles are to some degree co-extensive: in 1.6 Varius and Virgil are said to have introduced Horace to Maecenas, and all three are found in Maecenas’ train in 1.5, while it is Fundanius who reports to Horace in Satires 2.8 the gastronomic excesses of the cena Nasidieni at which Fundanius himself, Varius and Maecenas were all present. The implication of this passage is that Horace clearly places himself 5

╇ See Zetzel 1980.

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as the contemporary master of satire (better than Varro of Atax, presumably dead at this point) amongst the contemporary masters of other genres (Fundanius/comedy, Pollio/tragedy, Varius/epic, Virgil/pastoral). The second catalogue is that of the critics Horace would like to please now that his poetic career is seriously under way (1.10.81–92):€ Plotius et Varius, Maecenas Vergiliusque, Valgius et probet haec Octauius optimus atque Fuscus et haec utinam Viscorum laudet uterque ambitione relegata. te dicere possum, Pollio, te, Messalla, tuo cum fratre, simulque uos, Bibule et Serui, simul his te, candide Furni, conpluris alios, doctos ego quos et amicos prudens praetereo, quibus haec, sint qualiacumque, adridere uelim, doliturus si placeant spe deterius nostra. Demetri, teque, Tigelli, discipularum inter iubeo plorare cathedras. i, puer, atque meo citius haec subscribe libello. I should like these poems to win the approval of Plotius and Varius, Maecenas and Virgil, Valgius, Octavius, and the admirable Fuscus; and I hope the Viscus brothers will enjoy them; I can also mention you, Pollio, without incurring any suspicion of flattery, you, Messalla, and your brother, and also you, Bibulus and Servius, and you, my dear candid Furnius, and several other accomplished friends whose names I purposely omit. I should like them to find my work attractive, such as it is; I’d be sorry if I caused them disappointment. But you, Demetrius and Tigellius, go and moan somewhere else€– the ladies are waiting for their singing lesson in their armchairs. Off with you, boy; add this at once to my little volume.

These lists obviously overlap, with Varius, Virgil and Pollio appearing from the earlier catalogue, but this one addresses them in their critical rather than poetic capacity (like the poets of Hellenistic Alexandria, they are deemed to excel in both). Those added are partly further poet/Â�critics (Plotius Tucca, supposed co-editor of the Aeneid, the elegist Valgius later addressed in Odes 2.9), but also important contemporary patrons€– Maecenas (of course), Messalla and his brother, and Pollio (the last as patron rather than tragedian), as well as those known only as critics (Octavius, Fuscus, the brothers Visci, Bibulus, Servius, Furnius); this long list of fellow-spirits is balanced by the inferior Demetrius and Tigellius. This list of potential reviewers is the last item in Satires 1:€Horace’s first poetic book is offered for the approval (presumably forthcoming) of his

There and back again:€Horace’s poetic career

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literary colleagues. This epilogue to critics may be fashionable in the period:€in what seems to be the final sequence of a book from his Amores, to be dated either to the mid-40s BC or not long after Naulochus in 36 (fr.2 Courtney lines 6–9),6 Cornelius Gallus (interestingly not mentioned by Horace at all) likewise addresses Viscus and Cato, two of the critics named in Satires 1.10. A final appeal to critics seems then to be a standard gesture in Latin poetry of the triumviral period, and a standard way of marking the entrance of a new work, and in Horace’s case of a new poet, whose literary career is now launched under impressive auspices. In Satires 2 and the Epodes we find the first example of Horace’s working on more than one poetic genre simultaneously:€not only were these two books published about the same time (30 BC:€both appear to be after Actium in 31 but before the triple triumph of summer 29), but the Epodes also show traces of Horace’s emerging work on lyric (though Odes 1–3 are published in around 23, some at least seem to predate Actium in date of composition). As already noted, this ‘horizontal’ aspect is an interesting part of Horace’s poetic career:€such an implicit self-construction as a poet who operates on more than one generic front suggests the poikilia or generic versatility for which Callimachus represents himself criticized in the first of his Iambi, a collection which is certainly significant for Horace’s Epodes.7 Satires 2 itself shows only a little overt contact with the Epodes:€its mention of Canidia in its final line (2.8.95) is presumably a clever allusion to the ending of the simultaneous Epodes, in the last poem of which (17) Canidia makes her most extensive appearance. In general, the second book of the Satires reinforces the ‘vertical’ aspect of Horace’s poetic career:€five years or so on from Satires 1, he can open his new sermo collection by implying that not just Maecenas but also Caesar is a supporter:€Satires 1.1 began with an address to Maecenas, but Satires 2.1, addressed to the lawyer Trebatius, has as its first major topic a discussion of whether Horace should address Caesar directly (10–20) and ends with the poet’s selfcharacterization as laudatus Caesare, ‘praised by Caesar’ (84). Maecenas himself has to wait for mention until the end of 2.3 (2.3.312), though he re-emerges in the last three poems of the book, especially in 2.6, effectively a thanks-offering for the gift of the Sabine estate (see also 2.7.33 and the dinner party of 2.8, mentioned above). The implicit support of Caesar through the amicitia of Maecenas in Book 1 is replaced by direct praise of the great man:€the pair of passing complimentary allusions to Caesar 6

See Anderson, Parsons and Nisbet 1979.

7

See Watson 2003:€12–17.

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of the first book is surpassed, not only by the introduction of Caesar as the first topic of the second book but also by a complimentary prophecy about his victories wittily inserted into the mouth of Tiresias in 2.5.62–4. This apparent social elevation after the ascent of Book 1 is matched by a literary elevation. Satires 2 has only eight poems to the ten of Satires 1: this is mainly because of Satires 2.3 (a vast 326 lines), where the Stoic Damasippus comically fails to stick to Stoic brevity in his philosophical exposition. Such impressive length (even if parodic here) was not found in Satires 1, not least because that book criticized Lucilius for his prolixity and promoted Callimachean polish and brevity, and represents a Horace unafraid to expand, even parodically. Satires 2 also contains a wholesale epic parody in 2.5, a rewriting of Odysseus’ underworld consultation with Tiresias in Odyssey 11 as a set of instructions on how to repair an impaired fortune by captatio or legacy-hunting:€this return to a traditional feature of Lucilius naturally stresses the affinity of satire with the higher genre of epic as its lower twin, only implicitly stated in Satires 1.8 As already noted, this ascent between the two books of Satires is accompanied by the simultaneous emergence of Horace as an iambic poet in the Epodes. In generic terms this is again an ascent:€ the lowly musa pedestris of satire (Satires 2.6.17) and the self-image of Horatian sermo as not really lofty enough to be poetry9 mean that even the bluff, aggressive and sometimes pornographic persona of Archilochus is a move up because of his undoubted status as a vigorous and inspired poet. As scholars have noted, Horace’s version of Archilochus is toned down and less ‘potent’ than the original,10 but once again we find the Horatian literary career paralleling his socio-political positioning. Though published after Actium, the Epodes show the whole extent of the movement from outsider to insider:€ the aggressive, Archilochean analyses of the ills of Rome in Epodes 7 and 16, which have plausibly been suggested as the poems which triggered Horace’s recruitment into the Maecenatic circle,11 turn into equally Archilochean celebrations of the victory at Actium in Epodes 1 and 9, both addressed in warm terms to Maecenas, which recall Archilochus’ poems of friendship and shipboard action in war.12 This ‘vertical’ aspect of the Epode book is matched with the evident turn in its second part towards an interest in higher literary genres. As Most evidently in Satires 1.5, which constructs Horace’s journey to Brundisium as a kind of Odyssey:€see conveniently S. J. Harrison 2007a:€86–9. ╇ 9 See conveniently S. J. Harrison 2007c:€32–4. 10 See Watson 1995. 11 Nisbet 1984. 12 See S. J. Harrison 2007a:€106–14. ╇ 8

There and back again:€Horace’s poetic career

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scholars have shown,13 the Epodes’ opening sequence of ten poems in a strongly Archilochean metre is followed by a group of poems which, in both metre and subject matter, look to love elegy and to lyric:€ the former anticipates the emergence of the Odes, some of which were surely composed at this time. Epode 13, with its scenario of a landscape description with a storm motivating a sympotic occasion and moralizing reflections, famously represents a striking anticipation of Odes 1.9. The interest in elegy is surely helped by the flexible output of Archilochus himself, who composed both elegy and iambus:€Epode 11, with its presentation of the exclusus amator, and Epode 14, with its helpless lover, look to the world of the love-elegy, no doubt to the lost Amores of Gallus. Those Gallan elegies are also alluded to in the Eclogues of Virgil, published in 38 BC.14 Just as Virgil had been instrumental in Horace’s social career in introducing him to Maecenas (Satires 1.6.54–5), so the same poet’s first published poetry book (briefly commended as we have seen at Satires 1.10.44–5) exercises considerable influence over this first phase of Horace’s poetic career. The ten poems of Satires 1 may follow the number of poems in the Eclogues,15 while Epode 2 and Epode 16 plainly interact with the collection’s poetic world:€the praise of the rural life ironized in the former has clear elements drawn from Virgilian bucolic, while the fantastic dimension of the Islands of the Blest in the latter inverts in pessimistic mode the optimistic pastoral fantasies of the prophecy of Eclogue 4.16 This first and formative phase of Horace’s poetic career, then, is marked by a rhetoric of literary and socio-political ascent. Horace rises from the humble exponent of rough Lucilian satire, refining it in Callimachean terms, through Archilochean iambus, tempered for new times, to the brink of lyric operations, matching his movement from Republican defeat at Philippi and loss of property to the generous patronage of Maecenas and political engagement with the interests of the young Caesar. This vertical element is counterbalanced by a horizontal axis:€Horace’s simultaneous collections in Satires 2 and the Epodes look out not only to each other but also to the contemporary poetic scene sketched in detail at the end of Satires 1.10. Horace has arrived amongst the poets of triumviral Rome, and is concerned to negotiate his space on the current literary horizon by See S. J. Harrison 2007a:€119–30. Especially Eclogue 10, where Gallus appears as a character. I here hold that Eclogue 8 is addressed to Pollio and dated 39–38, following Tarrant 1978. 15 Zetzel 1980. 16 See the references collected by S. J. Harrison 2007a:€130–4. 13

14

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interacting with its important strands. As we shall see, all these elements will continue in the lyric project of Odes 1–3. 3. ╇ o d e s 1– 3 a n d e p i s t l e s 1:€ t h e t u r n t o ly r ic a n d t h e f i r s t r e t u r n t o s e r m o Though it is possible that it was also published serially in single books,17 the collection of Odes 1–3 which emerged as a unit about 23 BC must be conceived as a single stage in Horace’s poetic career. Its opening and closing poems, Odes 1.1 and 3.30, share a metre (first Asclepiad) not otherwise used in the eighty-eight odes of the three books, and the latter poem is clearly a pendant to the former. At the end of 1.1, itself constructed on the basis of a priamel framework from early Greek lyric, Horace famously asks for inclusion in the canon of Greek lyric poets (29–36): me doctarum hederae praemia frontium dis miscent superis, me gelidum nemus Nympharumque leues cum Satyris chori secernunt populo, si neque tibias Euterpe cohibet nec Polyhymnia Lesboum refugit tendere barbiton. quod si me lyricis uatibus inseres, sublimi feriam sidera uertice. As for me, it is ivy, the reward of learned brows, that puts me among the gods above. As for me, the cold grove and the light-footed choruses of Nymphs and Satyrs set me apart from the people, If Euterpe lets me play her pipes, and Polyhymnia does not withhold the lyre of Lesbos. But if you enrol me among the lyric bards my soaring head will touch the stars.

Though tempered with the humour Horace often uses when making grand statements about his own poetic status (the star-striking here at least partly suggests a literal headache),18 this represents a lofty ambition:€the canon of Greek lyric poets had been fixed at nine in the Hellenistic period, and its re-opening is a lot to ask. Nevertheless, in Odes 3.30, Horace suggests that he has done enough to deserve this (3.30.10–16): G. O. Hutchinson 2008.

17

See S. J. Harrison 2007c:€28–31.

18

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dicar, qua uiolens obstrepit Aufidus et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium regnauit populorum, ex humili potens princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos. sume superbiam quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica lauro cinge uolens, Melpomene, comam. I shall be spoken of where fierce Aufidus thunders and where Daunus, poor in water, rules the country people. From humble beginnings I was able to be the first to bring Aeolian song to Italian measures. Take the proud honour well-deserved, Melpomene, and be pleased to circle my hair with the laurel of Delphi.

Aeolium … carmen identifies Horace as the new Roman exponent of the archaic Lesbian lyric of Sappho and Alcaeus, two of the nine canonical poets, and the poetic status requested of Maecenas in 1.1 is here demanded as a right from the lyric Muse Melpomene, symbolized by the garland of bay, picking up her sister Muses Euterpe and Polyhymnia from the earlier poem. One subject of justifiable pride in Horace’s lyric achievement in Odes 1–3 is the dexterous employment of choriamb-based Greek lyric metres, harder to accomplish in Latin with its greater number of long syllables, something made even harder by Horatian tightening of the archaic rules.19 This is clearly an ascent in complexity from the simple hexameters of the two books of Satires and the identical epodic metres of Epodes 1–10, though the more mixed metres of Epodes 11–17 (one of which (the first Archilochean) re-appears in the Odes:€Epode 12 = Odes 1.7 and 1.28) are some kind of anticipation of this move. This metrical prowess is famously stressed by the use of nine different metres for the first nine odes, followed by a sequence of poems (12–18) in which thematic elements appear from an identifiable range of individual Greek lyric poets.20 This appreciable technical step in Horace’s career is thus strongly marked in a major group of initial poems. Between the challenge of Odes 1.1 and its fulfilment in Odes 3.30, there is some sense of internal ascent and onward movement. While I do not fully subscribe to general interpretations of Odes 1–3 which regard their See Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:€xxxviii–xlvi

19

Lowrie 1995.

20

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order as completely plotted by their author with narrative significance,21 some element of progress through the collection seems clear. The initial window-display of the adaptation of Greek lyric through metre and themes just noted is followed in Book 2 by a quieter approach to both metre and subject matter:€ a set of topics in which moral philosophy is prominent is treated in twenty poems which mostly comprise the commonest Horatian lyric metres (the Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas). As the book comes to a close, it shows some anticipation of the national and grave themes of the Roman Odes at the beginning of Book 3:€in particular, 2.18, with its criticism of luxury and commendation of the poet’s own modest sufficiency in the Sabine estate, looks forward to themes from Odes 3.1. In Odes 3, there is a clear elevation of content:22 the opening sequence of six lengthy Roman Odes tackles major themes of politics and public morality in an enigmatic style which combines a vatic, oracular stance with elements of higher poetic genres. Odes 3.3 gives a version of the divine assembly approving the apotheosis of Romulus from Ennius’ Annales, while Odes 3.5 tells the story of Regulus, likely to have been treated in the account of the First Punic War in Naevius’ Bellum Punicum. Several other poems later in the book narrate myths associated with tragedy (Hypermestra in 3.11, Danae in 3.16) or epyllion (Europa in 3.27), and the lofty tone and impressive length of 3.24 and its address to a generalized reader pick up the initial Roman Odes symmetrically towards the book’s end, just as 3.29 combines Roman Ode-style length and moralizing with a final address to Maecenas before the epilogue of 3.30. Here in the final book of the first collection of Odes, Horatian lyric reaches its most elevated literary texture:€though the Carmen Saeculare and Odes 4 address equally lofty subject matter, in Horace’s subsequent poetic career his mid-life lyric achievement seems to represent his finest moment, and his lasting reputation is presented as that of the Roman Alcaeus (Epistles 2.2.99), a clear allusion to his extensive use of that poet in Books 1–3 of the Odes (see above on 3.30 and also 1.32) rather than to Book 4, where Alcaeus is barely present. The first book of Epistles dates to 20/19 BC and presents a conscious contrast with the first collection of Odes. Its opening programmatic poem claims that Horace has renounced the frivolities of lyric for the serious concerns of philosophy (1.1.7–12): See Porter 1987 for an extreme version of this thesis, Santirocco 1986 for a milder one. See Lowrie 1997:€224–316.

21

22

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est mihi purgatum crebro qui personet aurem: ‘solue senescentem mature sanus equum, ne peccet ad extremum ridendus et ilia ducat.’ nunc itaque et uersus et cetera ludicra pono, quid uerum atque decens, curo et rogo et omnis in hoc sum; condo et compono quae mox depromere possim. A voice whispers in my well-rinsed ear: ‘Have some sense and release the ageing horse in time, or he’ll end by stumbling and straining his flanks to the jeers of the crowd.’ So now I am laying aside my verses and other amusements. My sole concern is the question ‘What is right and proper?’ I’m carefully storing things for use in the days ahead.

The pose of not writing poetry is surely ironic in this book of carefully crafted hexameters, and forms part of a consistent ambiguity about the poetic status of Horatian sermo (is it ‘really’ poetry?).23 The collection’s overt epistolary shape, though picking up epistolary elements in Lucilius, points to a genre of prose, as does its philosophical content (though one should not underestimate the influence of Lucretius’ philosophical poem), but in terms of Horace’s poetic career Epistles 1 represents a conscious return to the sermo of the 30s, in a slicker, more varied poetry book:€the greater number of items (twenty in Epistles 1 as opposed to ten and eight in Satires 1 and 2) reflects not only the relative brevity conventional for the letter but also a poet who has in the last decade produced eighty-eight lyric poems in three books. The turn from Horatian lyric form is matched by a partial turn from Horatian lyric persona. Though Horace can still describe himself as Epicuri de grege porcum (‘a porker from Epicurus’ herd’, Epistles 1.4.16) and can still suggest (in the same poem, at 1.4.13) that each day should be treated as one’s last in the true Epicurean style, the poet’s hedonistic involvement in the sympotic and erotic world of Odes 1–3 has indeed vanished, and the poet is presented as a trainee moral philosopher who encourages his friends along the same road by appearing equally fallible rather than a stern and superior sage. The themes of love, drinking and politics linked with lyric in the style of Alcaeus (Odes 1.32.1–12) are replaced by concerns with ethics, friendship and patronage, all part of moral philosophy in Roman terms. This is best seen in two pairs of poems where an addressee is shared between the two collections. Horace’s friend 23

Note that condo and compono in line 9 can refer to poetic composition:€see Mayer 1994:€90. On the ‘non-poetry’ pose in Horatian sermo see S. J. Harrison 2007c:€32–4.

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Fuscus can be teased for his Stoicism in both Odes 1.22 and Epistles 1.10, but where the former poem then turns to Horace’s own comic love-affair with Lalage, the latter poem develops an ethical argument about living according to nature. Likewise, the Quinctius invited to put away political concerns and attend a symposium in Odes 2.11 is in Epistles 1.16 invited (via a description of Horace’s Sabine estate) to match good reputation with good actions and determined moral character. Likewise, the political themes prominent in Odes 1–3 and soon to be central to Odes 4 are introduced only briefly and incidentally:€the military doings of Agrippa, Tiberius and Augustus are added as mere epistolary topical references at the end of Epistle 1.12 (25–9), while Augustus is further alluded to only in celebrating his birthday (Epistles 1.5) and as a presentee of the first collection of Odes (Epistles 1.13). The last two poems of the first book of Epistles stress further this more relaxed and less grand self-presentation of the philosophical and selfironizing poet. In 1.19 Horace, in a poem which wittily uses the idea of the drunken poet to pick up the sympotic themes of the Odes, asserts his literary importance as the exponent of iambus and lyric in Latin, taking stock of his poetic career so far while ignoring sermo as less important (1.19.21–34): libera per uacuum posui uestigia princeps, non aliena meo pressi pede. qui sibi fidet, dux reget examen. Parios ego primus iambos ostendi Latio, numeros animosque secutus Archilochi, non res et agentia uerba Lycamben; ac ne me foliis ideo breuioribus ornes quod timui mutare modos et carminis artem, temperat Archilochi Musam pede mascula Sappho, temperat Alcaeus, sed rebus et ordine dispar, nec socerum quaerit, quem uersibus oblinat atris, nec sponsae laqueum famoso carmine nectit. hunc ego, non alio dictum prius ore, Latinus uolgaui fidicen; iuuat inmemorata ferentem ingenuis oculisque legi manibusque teneri. Beholden to no-one I blazed a trail over virgin country; nobody had trodden that ground. The one who trusts himself will rule and lead the swarm. I was the first to show the iambics of Paros to Latium, keeping Archilochus’ rhythms and fire, but not his themes or words which hunted Lycambes. In case, however, you think I deserve a smaller garland because I declined to change his metres and verse technique, manly Sappho largely retains Archilochus’ metres;

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Alcaeus does the same, though different in themes and arrangement; he doesn’t look for a father-in-law to smear with invective, or make a noose for his bride out of his scarifying verses. I, the lyrist of Latium, have made him familiar€– a poet never sung before. I am glad to be held and read by the better sort, and to convey things that no-one has uttered.

As so often, this proud claim is counterbalanced by Horatian selfirony:€ the poem closes with the comic picture of Horace’s determined avoidance of poetic recitation (1.19.35–49), and the collection’s final piece takes up the witty conceit of addressing its own poetry book as if it were a slave-boy destined to lose its bloom and beauty through sexual experience. Both poem and book end with an ambivalent autobiography which provides the personal counterpart to the poetic career sketched in 1.19 (1.20.19–28): cum tibi sol tepidus pluris admouerit auris, me libertino natum patre et in tenui re maiores pinnas nido extendisse loqueris, ut quantum generi demas, uirtutibus addas; me primis urbis belli placuisse domique, corporis exigui, praecanum, solibus aptum, irasci celerem, tamen ut placabilis essem. forte meum siquis te percontabitur aeuum, me quater undenos sciat impleuisse Decembris collegam Lepidum quo duxit Lollius anno. When the warmer sun brings you a larger group of listeners, you will talk about me:€‘he was born in a home of slender means, a freedman’s son:€but his wingspan proved too large for the nest.’ (In this way what you take from my birth you will add to my merits.) ‘In war and peace he won the esteem of the country’s leaders. Of small build, prematurely grey, and fond of the sun, he was quick to lose his temper, but not hard to appease.’ If anyone happens to ask my age, you can let him know that I saw the end of my forty-fourth December in the year when the consul Lollius was later joined by his colleague Lepidus.

Comic self-deprecation is here matched with some pride:€Horace’s struggle from his unpromising background and early setbacks to the position of friend of Maecenas and Augustus is presented for approval, and the marking of his forty-fourth birthday in December 21 BC is not so much a date for the book (which must have appeared in 20 or 19) as a parallel to the normal cursus of the elite Roman:€Horace has passed the normal consular age (42 in the late Republic), and here sets himself as a private

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citizen with personal foibles and achievements against the consuls who would normally be his co-evals. It is notable that his poetic career (listed in 1.19) is not set against the conventional political career here, as happened in Odes 1.1.7–8 (see section 1 above). Just as Epistles 1.1 represented Horace as renouncing poetry, so the final position in the same book, often a locus for poetic self-projection (cf. Satires 1.10, Odes 2.20 and 3.30), presents him as a private individual in the context of the public magistracies of the Roman state. 4 .╇

and r e t u r n t o ly r ic

car men saecul ar e

odes

4 :€

Horace’s commission to write a lyric poem (conventionally labelled the Carmen Saeculare) for performance by a mixed choir of boys and girls at Augustus’ ideologically crucial Ludi Saeculares of 17 BC, celebrating the renewal of the saeculum or generation of 110 years, represents an anomaly in his career as a one-off lyric piece outside a collection written in a choral rather than an monodic mode.24 Its link with the Greek lyric genre of paean is clear, but its importance in Horace’s poetic career is not so much for its literary qualities as for its status as an occasional poem commissioned for an express politico-religious occasion, and the ancient life of Horace attributed to Suetonius suggests the hand of the princeps himself in Horace’s selection. The death of Virgil in 19 left Horace as the unchallenged chief poet of Rome, and the Carmen Saeculare clearly presents him as a kind of laureate, addressing the gods on behalf of the Roman state on a public occasion of the highest profile. This externally motivated resumption of Horatian lyric clearly led to a further period of production in the genre (this time in its monodic form) which culminated in the fourth book of fifteen Odes in about 13 BC. Whether or not (as the Suetonian life suggests) Augustus himself stimulated this sequel collection by requesting the poems in praise of the victories of his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus (Odes 4.4 and 4.14), the character of this last lyric book is distinctly different from that of the first three. It begins by figuring itself as a return to love (and therefore lyric lovepoetry) presented as inappropriate for a man past 50 (4.1.6–7), adding six years to the age paraded at the end of the first book of Epistles (1.20.16–8, above) and a decade to that advertised (at least partly ironically) as already past the time of love in the second book of Odes (2.4.22–4), and love 24

╇ For recent helpful material on the Carmen see Feeney 1998, Putnam 2000 and Barchiesi 2002.

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and its sympotic context appear only in the sequence of poems 4.10–13 (see further below), while the rest of the book is dedicated to weightier themes. This change from the first collection is interestingly indexed in 4.7 and 4.8:€4.7, the famous ode to Torquatus, linking the return of spring with thoughts of changing seasons and human mortality, echoes that to Sestius in 1.4, but without the explicit sympotic and erotic references of the earlier poem (1.4.16–20), while 4.8, stressing the power of poetry to commemorate great deeds, uses the first Asclepiad metre reserved in the first collection for marking Horace’s own poetic ambitions in 1.1 and 3.30 (see section 3 above), but apparently honours Censorinus for his military services to Rome.25 This turn to more nationalistic themes in Horace’s final lyric book is partly thematized in 4.2.26 There Horace addresses Iullus Antonius, claiming that it is impossible to imitate Pindar, the grandest of the Greek lyric poets, and encouraging Iullus in an alternative epic project to praise the victorious Augustus on his forthcoming return from German campaigns. Horace’s strictures against Pindaric imitation are at least partly belied in this same poem, where Pindar’s function as the encomiast of the victories of great leaders surely points to Horace’s own celebrations of Augustus, as well in the Pindaric colour of 4.827 and the very obviously Pindaric victory odes for the two imperial princes Tiberius and his brother Drusus (4.4 and 4.14), which celebrate their conquests of the Raeti and Vindelici in 15 BC. The framework of Pindaric celebration of athletic victory is here turned to the praise of Roman military success. This nationalistic tendency of the book comes to a climax in 4.5 and 4.15, which address Augustus himself directly:€ 4.5 longs for his return to Italy and honours him as bringer of peace and prosperity,28 while 4.15 rounds off Horace’s lyric output with an equally enthusiastic encomium of the princeps.29 In both these poems Horace moves into the first person plural in his descriptions of the capacity of the Roman nation to praise its leader, suggesting solidarity with the community’s feelings. This capacity to address and praise Augustus in a whole ode is a new feature in Horace’s lyric output, no doubt expressing his increased personal and professional proximity to the princeps, but also matching the capacity of Pindar to address the greatest figures of the Greek world:€ amongst the most enthusiastic political poems in the first collection, Odes 1.2 turns to Augustus directly only at the end (1.2.41–52), Odes 1.12 turns 25

See S. J. Harrison 1990. 26 For a more detailed analysis see S. J. Harrison 1995b. 29 See again S. J. Harrison 1990. 28 See Du Quesnay 1995. See J. Griffin 2002.

27

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to Augustus at the end but actually addresses Jupiter (1.12.49–60), and Odes 3.5, though it suggests that Augustus will be a god on earth after his conquests, does not ever address him personally. The public and professional recognition conferred by the Carmen Saeculare commission stimulates an important set of themes in Odes 4, which contains Horace’s most extensive reflections so far on the status and function of the poet in Rome:€the fame that the poet can himself achieve is compared with athletic and military achievement (4.3.1–9), while the fame he can confer on others is consistently seen as outlasting more conventional modes of commemoration (thematized especially in the pair of poems 4.8 and 4.9). Horace’s public fame is alluded to openly. In 4.3 he thanks the muse Melpomene for his celebrity (4.3.21–4): totum muneris hoc tui est, â•… quod monstror digito praetereuntium Romanae fidicen lyrae; â•… quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, tuum est. This is all your gift, that people as they pass point to me as the player of the Roman lyre. That I breathe, and give pleasure, if I give pleasure, is due to you.

Similarly, in 4.6 he imagines the words of one of the maidens who had served in the choir at the Ludi Saeculares (4.6.41–4): nupta iam dices:€‘Ego dis amicum, saeculo festas referente luces, reddidi carmen docilis modorum â•… uatis Horati.’ In time to come when you are a Roman wife, you will say, ‘When the Secular Festival brought back its lights, I performed the hymn which so pleased the gods, And was taught the music of the poet Horace.’

This is the only self-naming by Horace by his nomen gentilicium in the Odes and one of only two in all his works,30 and points to his high public recognition factor after 17 BC. This increasingly public aspect of Horace’s poetic stance is a crucial feature of Book 4, but at the same time continuities with Odes 1–3 should not be neglected:€this final lyric book coheres with as well as departs from the framework of the previous three. ╇ The other is at Epistles 1.14.5; his cognomen, Flaccus, is used at Epodes 15.12 and Satires 2.1.18.

30

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The sequence 4.10–13 is important here. Ode 4.10 picks up the ironic address of 4.1 to Ligurinus and similarly looks to pederastic material in the earlier collection,31 while 4.11 is a sympotic/erotic ode celebrating the birthday of Maecenas. The appearance here both of this lighter material and of the great patron of Odes 1–3 (mentioned only here in Book 4, presumably because his role as patron has now been taken by the princeps himself ) again looks self-consciously back to the earlier collection in its themes. Ode 4.12 is also sympotic, addressed to a Vergilius with evident echoes of the Eclogues and Aeneid:€ though it is possible that a relative is meant rather than the poet himself, dead for some years by the time of the poem’s publication, both addressee and theme look back to the first collection (where the poet Virgil was addressed in 1.3). Likewise, 4.13 returns not only to an erotic theme of the first collection (the beloved grown old, also alluded to in 4.10€– see 1.25) but also to a name used for a love object in Odes 3.10 to which it serves as an ironic pendant (in 3.10 Lyce rejected Horace, and now she no longer attracts him). But the main emphasis in Odes 4 is undoubtedly that on the mature poet at the zenith of his career who has established himself in a public and national role. One further feature allied to this is the prominence in the book of odes to addressees who are both young and from the highest level of Rome’s elite€ – the imperial princes Tiberius and Drusus (4.4 and 4.14), Iullus Antonius, the nephew and then favourite of Augustus (4.2), and the nobilis Paulus Fabius Maximus (4.1, which alludes to his recent marriage to Augustus’ niece Marcia).32 As with his more direct relationship with Augustus himself (see above), Horace presents himself as operating at the very highest level in Rome, but the youth of these addressees also allows him to come across as a fatherly figure dispensing wise advice to the younger generation. This stance, natural to the ageing poet, had been deployed with good effect with addressees such as Lollius, Florus, Celsus and Scaeva in the first book of Epistles,33 and will be seen as central to the last phase of Horace’s career in his return to sermo. The older poet who advises the younger literary aspirant Iullus Antonius in Odes 4.2 is a recognizable anticipation of the national authority on poetry in the didactic mode of the second book of Epistles and the Ars Poetica.

E.g. 1.4.19–20, 1.32.11–12, 3.20.5–16. Epistles 1.2, 1.3, 1.8.

31

33

See Bradshaw 1970.

32

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Stephen Harrison 5.╇

2 a n d a r s p o e t i c a :€ fi na l r et u r n to ser mo

epistles

The three poems Epistles 2.1, 2.2 and the Ars Poetica, which may have been conceived by the poet as a unit and issued separately by another hand after the poet’s death, seem to belong together and to the final phase of Horace’s poetic career.34 Epistles 2.1 and the Ars Poetica can both be dated to the period after Odes 4 and in particular to the period between 12 BC and the death of the poet in 8, and though Epistles 2.2 is usually dated shortly after the first book of Epistles around 19 BC, there are plausible arguments for grouping it chronologically with Epistles 2.1 and the Ars. Florus’ service to Tiberius which opens both Epistles 2.2 and Epistles 1.3 may refer to two different campaigns rather than the same eastern expedition:€ indeed, 2.2.1 fidelis amice Neroni may allude pointedly to Florus’ years of faithful service since Epistles 1.3, and the references in Epistles 2.2 to having given up writing lyric could be to the second ‘lyric silence’ after Odes 4 (13 BC) rather than the gap between Odes 1–3 and the Carmen Saeculare (23–17) alluded to in Epistles 1 (above). This sense of a final phase in a distinguished career is accentuated by several features of these three poems as a collectivity. First, all deal with the theme of poetry in general from a didactic angle. Epistles 2.1, addressing Augustus himself, argues against the automatic honouring of older writers, criticizes the crudity of early Roman literature and praises the civilizing influence of literary Hellenism, while 2.2, to Florus, himself probably a poet, talks about the right and wrong ways to approach the profession of poetry, using Horace himself as an example, and the Ars Poetica famously sets out a series of precepts on poetry, its kinds and the behaviour of the poet for the appreciation of the young Pisones. This role of poetic preceptor follows naturally on the advisory role Horace had assumed to some addressees in Epistles 1 and Odes 4 (see above). Second, all three poems share a sense of Horace’s self-location in the Roman literary tradition:€ a wide range of previous poets is discussed, and there is some emphasis on the dead Virgil and Varius and on the living Propertius, suggesting that Horace has some consciousness that the great days of Augustan poetry are coming to an end and that he is the final survivor of the generation which emerged around the time of Actium (31 BC). Third, all three poems deal with the theme of the usefulness of the poet and of Horace in particular to the community of Rome (2.1.124, ╇ See S. J. Harrison 2008.

34

There and back again:€Horace’s poetic career

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2.2.121, Ars Poetica 396–401), though typically this self-elevation is on each occasion followed by some final self-deflation:€ 2.1 concludes with the lowly fate of bad poets and their verses which Horace seeks to avoid (2.1.267–70), 2.2 with a playful self-address which suggests that the poet has enjoyed more than enough of the pleasures of life (2.2.213–16), and the Ars with the celebrated picture of the mad poet who will not leave his listener alone (470–6). Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, it is in these poems that Horace gives us the fullest retrospective on his poetic career, augmenting the account in Epistles 1.19 (see section 3 above). This is done through the poet’s self-representation as the author of a body of works in various genres which can now be presented for comparison and assessment. In Epistles 2.2 Horace’s friends are said to differ in their preferences between odes, epodes and sermones (59–60):€carmine tu gaudes, hic delectatur iambis, / ille Bioneis sermonibus et sale nigro, ‘You put lyric poetry first€– he’s for iambics€– / he prefers the tangy wit of Bion’s homilies.’ This generic variety is matched at Ars 79–85: Archilochum proprio rabies armauit iambo; hunc socci cepere pedem grandesque coturni, alternis aptum sermonibus et popularis uincentem strepitus et natum rebus agendis. Musa dedit fidibus diuos puerosque deorum et pugilem uictorem et equum certamine primum et iuuenum curas et libera uina referre. Madness handed Archilochus her own missile€– the iambus. The foot was found to fit the sock and the stately buskin, because it conveyed the give and take of dialogue; also it drowned the noise of the pit and was naturally suited to action. The lyre received from the Muse the right to celebrate gods and their sons, victorious boxers, horses first in the race, the ache of a lover’s heart, and uninhibited drinking.

This passage implicitly covers key elements of Horace’s career with elegant indirection, moving from Archilochus (as the model of the Epodes) via a digression about the use of iambics in drama to a Pindarizing account of lyric which clearly encapsulates the major themes of the Odes:€hymns, epinicians (no doubt looking to the Pindaric imitations of Odes 4), love and the symposium.35 Once again the element of surveying the poet’s 35

With 83–5 compare Odes 4.2.13–20, describing Pindar’s lyric output but also alluding to Horace’s own:€see S. J. Harrison 1995b:€112–13.

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output, whether explicitly or implicitly, would be appropriate to a unified and self-consciously ‘late’ book in Horace’s poetic career. These factors, taken together, present a consistent picture of the poet in his fifties, a self-constructed Roman laureate at the end of a distinguished career who combines proud self-elevation and self-inscription in the annals of literature with a beguiling touch of self-deprecation. In returning to sermo and his earliest and least ambitious literary mode, albeit in the refined epistolary form which he himself had created in the first book of Epistles and in a group of works including the longest poem in his output, Horace’s poetic career has in a sense come full circle. Though the commitment and importance of his strictures on poetry are not to be underestimated, Horace here elects to bow out on a note of self-restraint and irony towards his own undoubtedly paramount poetic status, and to return to a modified form of the poetic mode in which he had made his name perhaps a quarter-century previously. This parabolic trajectory stands in contrast with the Virgilian model of steady and continuous ascent which Horace had before him, and provides some precedent for Ovid’s return within two decades of Horace’s death to a modified form of elegy in exile after the grand enterprise of the epic Metamorphoses.36 36

See S. J. Harrison 2002:€89. Ovid’s letter to Augustus in Tristia 2 indeed has several points of contact with Horace’s in Epistles 2.1:€see Barchiesi 2001:€79–103.

Ch apter 3

The Ovidian career model:€Ovid, Gallus, Apuleius, Boccaccio Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie

1.╇T h e Ov i di a n c a r e e r Ovid has the historical privilege of being next in line and the first to react to what had been the boom in poetic self-reference and auto(bio) graphy in the times of Catullus, Virgil, Propertius and Horace. He is also the one who does the most to continue Horace’s invention of a ‘literary system’ and a ‘school’ and an ‘Augustan age’ model of Roman poetry (compare e.g. Horace, Serm. 1.10.31–50 with Ovid, Tristia 4.10.41–56; Ex Ponto 4.16.5–40). Furthermore, Ovid is unique in ancient literature for the sheer number and quasi-systematic regularity of autographic situations:€ in his extant production, every single work (with the exception of genres that cannot accommodate authorial self-expression:€ his heroic epic, and presumably his lost tragedy Medea) has a space of self-expression and, often, of recapitulation. Equally important, there is no single poetic text by Naso that remains ‘unsigned’, either through the inclusion of the author’s name, or by explicit reference in another Ovidian text, or, often, both. In other words, there is almost no Ovidian poem that remains unacknowledged. Even more important, in a number of cases his texts ‘talk to each other’ (Hinds 1985; Barchiesi 2001; compare Frings 2005), with the result that each work is positioned within a career:€for example, the Fasti engage the earlier elegiac/erotic work with the question ‘Who would believe that a path could lead from there to here?’ (2.8). Central to Ovid’s construction of his poetic career is the model of Virgil, exploited in different ways in different contexts. In histories of western literature the Virgilian and the Ovidian have recurrently been elevated to opposing ideological and formal principles. On the one hand a Virgilian poetics evolving in symbiosis with the construction of the Augustan principate and working towards the achieved monumentality of the Aeneid, a totalizing epic that sums up and contains 59

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both Virgil’s own earlier works, the Eclogues and the Georgics, and the previous Greco-Roman literary tradition as a whole. On the other hand an Ovidian poetics whose invention and humour feed on a detachment from the political goals of Augustus, and which in formal terms is characterized by a drive to repetition that undermines teleology and closure, the ‘evolutions of an elegist’, to use Stephen Harrison’s phrase,1 a poet who does not forget that he is an elegist even in the hexameter Metamorphoses, and who in the exile poetry returns to a pure strain of elegy of unending lament.2 Ovid himself is the first to write the literary history of this opposition, but the opposition itself is subject to the same lack of finality and closure that characterizes other aspects of Ovid’s literary activity. There are times when Ovid aspires to an enduring monumentality perhaps greater even than Virgil’s, for example in the Epilogue to the Metamorphoses, and times when Ovid imputes to Virgil a changeability and antifoundationalism that licenses Ovid’s own shifting standpoint. A similar oscillation3 characterizes Ovid’s construction of his own literary career, which contains moments of a rise through the genres in conscious emulation of the Virgilian career pattern, moments of unchanging continuity, as well as moments of regression. But the Virgilian model is always present, whether through affirmation or negation, and the Ovidian career is the first episode in the long history of the reception of the Virgilian career. The first word of the Amores, Arma, notoriously repeats the first word of the Aeneid, so highlighting the sharp generic Â�contrast between the career of love elegist forced on Ovid by Cupid in Amores 1.1 and Virgil’s national epic. That is the contrast which Ovid presents in self-assertive mode in his defence against Envy at Remedia 361–96, Â�culminating in the expansive claim at 389–96: rumpere, Liuor edax:€magnum iam nomen habemus; â•… maius erit, tantum quo pede coepit eat. sed nimium properas:€uiuam modo, plura dolebis; â•… et capiunt animi carmina multa mei. nam iuuat et studium famae mihi creuit honore; â•… principio cliui noster anhelat equus. tantum se nobis elegi debere fatentur, â•… quantum Vergilio nobile debet epos. S. J. Harrison 2002:€79–94. On the history of this Virgilian/Ovidian polarization see Hardie 2007a. 3 ‘Oscillation’ is the term of Cheney 1997:€ch. 1. 1

2

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Burst, devouring Envy; I already have a great name, and it will be greater, if only its feet continue on the path on which it began. You are in too much of a hurry; if only I live, you will have more cause for pain, and my genius has room for many songs. I enjoy my appetite for fame, which has grown with recognition; my horse pants at the beginning of the ascent. Elegy admits that it owes me as much as noble epic owes Virgil.

Here Ovid is at the beginning of a course that will lead to yet greater things in the future, but which will not diverge from its present metrical and generic track (tantum quo pede coepit eat). The language of 393–4 echoes Propertian formulations of elegiac ambition; 4.1.70 has meus ad metas sudet oportet equus, ‘this is the goal towards which my horse must sweat’; 4.10.3–4 magnum iter ascendo, sed dat mihi gloria uires:€/ non iuuat e facili lecta corona iugo, ‘I am set on a great climb, but glory lends me strength; a crown plucked from an accessible hill gives no pleasure’; but where Propertius speaks of the elevation of his elegy to national and epic themes, Ovid looks forward to increasing fame within the narrow limits of his habitual lasciuia ‘playfulness’ and materia iocosa ‘jesting subjectmatter’ (385, 387). On the other hand Joseph Farrell has argued that the allusion to the Aeneid in the first word of the Amores, followed by the scene in which Cupid thwarts Ovid’s epic ambition, is a moment of poetic initiation that corresponds to Virgil’s reworking of the Callimachean Aitia prologue in Apollo’s warning in Eclogue 6 to the pastoral poet not to sing of epic kings and battles.4 With hindsight Ovid’s reader knows that that had been only the first stage in a career that would culminate in the grandest of Roman epics, and the same might be expected of Ovid in due course. Indeed, as Ovid tells us himself in Amores 2.18, by the time of the publication of the three-book second edition of the Amores he had already branched out beyond personal love elegy into didactic, with the Ars Amatoria, corresponding to the second of the three major works in the Virgilian career, the Georgics, and also into a form of erotic elegy focused on the great legendary figures of epic and tragedy, the Heroides.5

Farrell 2004. In this article Farrell also traces the apparent echoes in the Ovidian corpus of the Ille ego proem to the Aeneid, and the implications for Ovid’s retrospective construction of his own career. 5 Discussion of the actual sequence of works in Ovid’s career is bedevilled by problems of dating:€Amores 2.18 speaks of a tragic venture followed by a relapse into love poetry, while Amores 3.1 and 3.15 look forward to the writing of tragedy. For the issues of dating see Hollis 1977:€150–1; McKeown 1987:€74–89. Ovid is more interested in the gesture politics of career construction than in presenting a consistent and coherent account of the chronology of his works. 4

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Book 3 of the Amores is framed by poems that announce a generic ascent, after the completion of the business of love elegy, to the greater work of writing tragedy, an area maior (3.15.16) for the exercise of the horses that pull the chariot of Ovid’s poetry.6 The loss of Ovid’s Medea may lead us to underestimate the importance of tragedy for Ovid’s sense of his own career; Patrick Cheney argues that it was given full weight in Marlowe’s construction of his own ‘counter-national’ career.7 At Amores 3.1.24 it is tragedy that is the maius opus ‘greater work’, a phrase used by Virgil of the greater business of the second half of the Aeneid (Aen. 7.44–5 maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo, / maius opus moueo), and echoed by later poets with reference to the bold epic ambitions of the Aeneid as a whole.8 At Tristia 2.63 Ovid, addressing Augustus, uses the phrase of his own long hexameter poem, the Metamorphoses:€inspice maius opus, quod adhuc sine fine reliqui, ‘look at the greater work, which to date I have left unfinished’. If the Ars Amatoria is Ovid’s answer to the Georgics, the hexameter Metamorphoses together with the Fasti in elegiac couplets constitute Ovid’s complex and confident rewriting of the Aeneid:€the long narrative poem that covers the history of the world from creation to the genesis of the Augustan imperial cosmos, together with the aetiological poem that focuses the Callimachean interest in origins exclusively on the matter of Roman and Augustan history. Together the Metamorphoses and the Fasti form the monumental climax to a career that begins in Amores 1 with Cupid’s sabotage of the poet’s epic project. Intense intertextual engagement with the Aeneid characterizes both poems, but for explicit comparison of the careers, as opposed to the works, of Ovid and Virgil we must look not to programmatic statements about the coming ascent to the greater works of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, but to Ovid’s textual processing of the event that interrupts their completion, his exile (in the qualified form of relegation) to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8. Ovid was exiled in his fifty-first year (Trist. 4.10.95–6); Virgil died in his fifty-first year (so, correctly, Vita Probiana 17). According to the biographical tradition Virgil left the Aeneid lacking the summa manus, and on his deathbed asked to burn the poem (for the longer history of the reception of this deathbed gesture see Krevans below, Ch. 10). Out of this Ovid fashions Ovid alludes to this passage at Fasti 4.10 nunc teritur nostris area maior equis, in another restaging of a generic ascent, this time within the elegiac metre, to aetiological didactic; at the same time, in typical Ovidian fashion, he protests that in fact it is more of the same, continued devotion to the goddess of love (8 tu mihi semper opus). 7 8 Cheney 1997. Starting with Prop. 2.34.66 nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade. 6

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the myth of his own exile as a form of death, the exequies of which are conducted on the night of his departure from Rome (Trist. 1.3), leaving behind the unfinished Metamorphoses, which, Ovid tells us, he placed on the fire as he left Rome, in conscious fulfilment of Virgil’s deathbed wish (Trist. 1.7.15–22).9 Death, the biological fact that ends and comes after the literary career of Virgil, figuratively becomes exile, another brutal fact of a writer’s biography but one which Ovid transforms into the last stage of his own literary career (fittingly enough, since, according to Ovid, his poetry, specifically the Ars Amatoria, was one of the causes of his real-life exile). A number of further points may be drawn out with regard to exile and the literary career. First, Ovid incorporates exile into poetry with such intensity that readers are almost forced to situate every text as ‘pre-exilic’ or ‘exilic’. This has interesting consequences:€ the impact of exile is so strong that when we discuss the chronology of the so-called Â�double Heroides (16–21), a series of poems surely written later than the single Heroides, and we find metrical and stylistic clues indicating a late composition, we are reluctant to accept this fact, simply because in his ‘sad’ poems Ovid is explicit that erotic poetry is over for him and only a poetics of gloom can suit his changed circumstances. Since the double Heroides are about love, although with an interesting atmospheric mix of the gleeful and the doomed, critics have preferred (we think wrongly) to assign them to the pre-lapsarian career of Ovid; in so doing, they show the power of Ovid’s model of poetry as a coherent response to changing circumstances in life. The second point is to note the significance of Ovid’s exile, and of Ovid’s literary representation of his exile, for the later history of exile, literal or figurative, in the self-representation of writers and intellecÂ� tuals.10 Sometimes this is a matter of a persona, permanently or temporarily adopted, but sometimes exile forms a stage in a larger pattern. Janet Smarr argues that Boccaccio sees Dante’s journey in the Commedia as a reversal of the tripartite career of Ovid, viewed as successively poet of love, poet of transformations, and poet of exile; the three cantiche move from the realm of exile, through the realm of transformation, into the realm of love.11 The third point concerns the relationship between literary career, viewed as a consciously literary construction, and the historical biography 9

See Hinds 1985:€21–7 on Trist. 1.7.

See Lyne 2002.

10

Smarr 1991.

11

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of the poet. The literary career is by definition not the same as the life of the poet, but the extent to which elements of a ‘real-life’ autobiography may be woven into the pattern of a literary career varies from author to author. In the Eclogues Virgil exploits pastoral’s generic predisposition to the allegorical in order to define his version of pastoral in part through a veiled account of a personal history of exile from a rural home, as a result of historical land-confiscations. In the Georgics Virgil eschews the licence for the autobiographical granted by Hesiod in the Works and Days; the most extensive passage of first-person self-representation, the triumph of poetry at the beginning of Georgics 3, is a fantasy on the parallel courses trodden by princeps and poet. In the Aeneid Virgil’s cameo appearances are limited to moments of metapoetry. Horace by contrast writes mostly in first-person genres which elicit the construction of an autobiography (see Harrison above, Ch. 2). Ovid begins and ends his career with firstperson genres that test the relationship between literature and life in various ways. Where Horace for the most part claims to be in control of the shifting directions of the paths through his life (with the notable exception of the complaint at the beginning of Odes 4 of a forced return to a former state of slavery to love), Ovid presents himself as the unwilling victim of circumstances at the beginning and end of his career. The author of the Amores serves up for the nth time, and now in not very convincing terms, the love elegist’s complaint that the force majeure of the god of love and of the mistress prevents him from pursuing a more respectable and more Roman path in his poetic and non-poetic careers. For this unserious flirtation with the inexorability of real life when it comes to poetic choices, reality takes its revenge with the relegation of AD 8, a thunderbolt of a blow which interrupts Ovid’s upward course (graphically in the truncation of the Fasti at the poem’s halfway point) and knocks him back to his elegiac beginnings. The tears of the elegist are now for real. The exile poetry also gives a more veristic account of the relationship between life and literature at the beginning of Ovid’s career, in the autobiographical Tristia 4.10. Here the young Ovid attempts to obey the superior power of his father’s argument for the uselessness of poetry, but is thwarted not by the counterforce of a divinity or personification, but by the spontaneous flow of metrical words from his lips (Trist. 4.10.21–6). After this scene in the family home, the young poet next gives up on the cursus honorum after embarking on the first stage (33 cepimus et tenerae primos aetatis honores, ‘I undertook the first office for a young man’), finding body and mind inadequate to the labour. At a similar stage of his life

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history Propertius had combined Callimachean divine machinery with Roman topography, 4.133–4 tum tibi pauca suo de carmine dictat Apollo / et uetat insano uerba tonare Foro, ‘then Apollo dictated a few words from his song and forbade me to thunder in the mad Forum’. Ovid gives the reader what appears to be unadorned autobiography. This divergence from the public cursus honorum onto an alternative path of poetry is perhaps in conscious rejection of a conception of a Roman literary career as equivalent to the public cursus honorum, in Joseph Farrell’s suggestive Â�formulation (see Introduction above). 2 .╇ Ov i di a n au t o g r a ph i e s, f rom C or n e l i us G a l lus t o B occ acc io The life of our poet … was bisected. Rand 1925:€8

i.╇ Gallus in Ovid Ovid needs to be singled out as a major influence on career autography. He teaches by example not just because he talks a lot about his career at different times, not just because he reacts at lightning speed to the first fallouts of the Virgilian boom, but also because he is ready to compare his mix of biography and authorship to other examples, and to enhance patterns of ‘exemplary’ careers in his models. As a test case of what might be labelled ‘retrospective reception’, we will examine what can be recuperated about the case of Cornelius Gallus, according to Ovid the father of Roman elegy. We will focus not just on what can be inferred from Ovid about Gallus, and about Ovid’s relationship to him:€our central interest is in the use of intertextual connections in a dynamic and almost narrative way, so as to suggest the evolution of a career, not just an individual, textual model. Now Gallus was without doubt a striking early example of what Farrell 2002 might call a cursus litterarum, a mix of the traditional Roman cursus honorum and literary career. The two paths converge for example in the breathtaking moment when the most famous love poet of Rome has the duty of arresting Cleopatra, the future dark lady of Roman elegy (Plutarch, Antony 78, although we can only speculate on what younger Roman elegists made of this), but there is a problem:€ this elegiac poet seems to have had no occasion to register his own downfall in poetry€– this is precisely where Ovid jumps in and completes the job. We are

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convinced (thanks also to Ingleheart forthcoming, who contributes two of our observations on lines 1–8) that there are traces of Gallus in Ovid’s apology to Augustus, Tristia 2. This is how the poem begins, with an apostrophe by Ovid to his books of poetry, and indeed to his entire career (Trist. 2.1–8): Quid mihi uobiscum est, infelix cura, libelli, â•… ingenio perii qui miser ipse meo? cur modo damnatas repeto, mea crimina, Musas? â•… an semel est poenam commeruisse parum? carmina fecerunt, ut me cognoscere uellet â•… omine non fausto femina uirque meo; carmina fecerunt, ut me moresque notaret â•… iam demi iussa Caesar ab Arte mea. What have I to do with you, my books, ill-starred labour? Why do I return to my condemned Muses, the causes of my guilt? Is it not enough to have earned one punishment? It was my poems that made women and men want to know me, an unlucky undertaking; my poems that made Caesar brand me and my ways, commanding that my Art of Love be removed.

In spite of our huge ignorance of the poems of Gallus, there is a cluster of details that point in his direction. The appositional use of cura in the first line of Tristia 2 is found in a crucial passage of Virgil’s Eclogue 10 in a context addressing Gallus and his beloved Lycoris (22):€tua cura, Lycoris. It has been clear since Servius that Virgil in Eclogue 10 is interested in Gallus’ career and also in intertextuality with his elegies. Virgilian commentators suspect that the erotic connotation of cura was in itself a Gallan innovation.12 Ovid uses cura in a different sense, but of course the context requires that we identify the dangerous libelli as erotic elegy. In the next hexameter, another appositional construction, damnatas … mea crimina, Musas, puts the downfall of Ovid in a nutshell. The stylistic device has been labelled by modern critics ‘schema Cornelianum’ (Skutsch 1956). The attribution to Gallus rests on the combination of passages such as Virgil, Eclogue 1.57 raucae, tua cura, palumbes ‘the hoarse doves, your love’ (again with appositional use of cura), Propertius 3.3.31 et Veneris uolucres, mea turba, columbae, ‘Venus’ birds, my flock, the doves’ (explicitly about erotic poetry). The repetition of carmina fecerunt in the next two hexameters offers a parallel to one of the few lines of Gallus known to us though direct transmission, fr. 2.6 Courtney tandem fecerunt carmina Musae, ‘at last the Muses have made songs’. Considering the proximity of the Muses ╇ Clausen 1994 on 10.22; Skutsch 1956:€198–9; Ross 1976:€69.

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in Ovid’s context, it may well be that he is thinking of Gallus:€translators normally assume that in Ovid carmina is the subject, but the memory of Gallus’ model could suggest an ambiguity:€‘my poems’ as subject, but also as object, with Musae understood as the subject from the previous couplet (as argued by Hollis apud Ingleheart:€ after all, the Muses’ involvement makes them as guilty as the poems). In the same fragment, Gallus had expressed self-assurance in the face of a judge, presumably in a context of aesthetic criticism (non ego … iudice te uereor, ‘I have no fear if you are judge’). Ovid’s damnatas Musas might be a bitter rejoinder to Gallus’ statement, now that the circumstances of life have brought about the downfall of two love poets through the verdict of a judge, Augustus, who cannot be ignored. damnatas Musas expresses the unexpected result of Gallus’ stance, one that Ovid had largely adopted in his early poetry:€‘not being afraid of a iudex’ because of the quality of the creation made by his Muses. Now Ovid’s Muses have been put on trial and a much harsher kind of judgement has been made, by the same judge who had caused Gallus’ political downfall€– the same person is now judge, emperor and supreme critic of Roman literature, and this is a crucial idea for Tristia 2.13 Ovid wants his readers to recall not only the poetic model of Gallus the elegist, but also his entire ‘cursus of dishonour’. In the juvenile Remedia the Ovidian Muse had been acquitted (387–8) si mea materiae respondet Musa iocosae, / uicimus, et falsi criminis acta rea est, ‘if my Muse meets the charge of mirthful subject matter, I have won, and she is accused on a false charge’. Now she is guilty. Now, according to the only substantial fragment we have from Gallus’ poetry there was a certain dynamics in his work, an intertwining of two life choices, poetic and political career: – SAD FATE because of Lycoris – SWEET FATE because of Caesar – And nothing to worry from a ‘judge’: Tristia nequit[ia … ]a Lycori tua. *** Fata mihi, Caesar, tum erunt mea dulcia, quom tu â•… maxima Romanae pars eri<s> historiae The elegiac tradition had made much of the puella as a judge of poetic quality, in self-conscious modification of the theatrical tradition in which the audience was ‘the judge’:€Terence is our crucial witness to the use of judicial discourse in a context of evaluation and competition of poetic texts (see Focardi 1978).

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Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie postque tuum reditum multorum templa deorum â•… fixa legam spolieis deiuitiora tueis. *** ] … tandem fecerunt c[ar]mina Musae quae possem domina deicere digna mea: â•… ] . atur idem tibi, non ego, Visce, â•… ] ….. Kato, iudice te uereor

… sad because of your naughtiness, Lycoris. Caesar, my fate will be sweet when you are the greatest part of Roman history, and when after your return I read of the temples of the gods enriched with the spoils you have fixed to them… At last the Muses have made songs that I can sing as worthy of my mistress …. the same to you, I do not, Viscus, … Cato, fear you as judge. (C. Cornelius Gallus fr. 2 Courtney)

This is now reconfigured in Ovidian exile poetry as – SWEET FATE as a love poet – SAD FATE (Tristia) because of Caesar – And a judge to worry about (not Cato but Caesar)

Even the title Tristia in this context retains some implications from Gallus’ career, except that this new Gallus ‘talks back’, Tristia 2 being in part an experiment in alternative history:€what if Gallus the inventor of Roman elegy had used elegy as a way to react against the Augustan indictment? Tristia, quo possum, carmine fata leuo, ‘I lighten my sad fate in the only way I can, through song’ (Trist. 4.10.112). Another indication that Ovid is meditating on the pattern of Gallus’ career is his use of the Virgilian ‘epitaph’ of Gallus in his own death fantasy, now set in Pontus not Arcadia: tristis at ille ‘tamen cantabitis, Arcades,’ inquit ‘montibus haec uestris; soli cantare periti Arcades. o mihi tum quam molliter ossa quiescant, uestra meos olim si fistula dicat amores!’ In his sadness he said ‘But you, Arcadians, will sing these songs to your mountains, Arcadians alone skilled in song. Oh how softly would my bones then rest if only your pipe were to sound my loves in future.’ (Virg. Ecl. 10.31–4) hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum â•… ingenio perii Naso poeta meo at tibi qui transis ne sit graue quisquis amasti â•… dicere ‘Nasonis molliter ossa cubent.’ I who lie here once played with tender loves, Naso the poet who perished by my own genius. Passerby, if you have loved, do not begrudge the words ‘May Naso’s bones lie softly.’ (Ov. Trist. 3.3.73–6)

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As a poet of amores (like Gallus) Ovid will be remembered in the same soft elegiac language that Virgil’s Gallus had used about his own death. Tristia 2 is in fact the only text in Roman poetry where the author dares to speculate on why Gallus had been forced to commit suicide, 445–6 non fuit opprobrio celebrasse Lycorida Gallo, / sed linguam nimio non tenuisse mero, ‘Gallus was not blamed for celebrating Lycoris, but for not holding his tongue under the influence of wine’.14 The disclosure, allusive and abrupt as it is, almost forces one to think about possible analogies. If we try to think of an implied model, where a friend€– because of too much wine€– provokes the destructive reaction of a ‘king’, we end up with a famous episode (indeed a turning point) in the career of Alexander the Great: These and similar things the young soldiers heard with pleasure, but they were odious to the older men, especially because of Philip, under whom they had lived longer, when Clitus, who was himself by no means wholly sober, turned to those who were reclining below him, and quoted a line of Euripides in such a tone that the sound could be heard by the king rather than the words made out, to the effect that it was a bad custom of the Greeks to inscribe on their trophies only the names of kings; for the kings stole the glory won by the blood of others. Therefore Alexander, for he suspected that the words had been somewhat malicious, began to ask those next to him what they had heard Clitus say. (Curtius Rufus 8.1.27–9, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Loeb))

A sinister analogy for Octavian in the early 20s, especially because what Clitus had said, with the help of Euripides, is not so different from what people, at least in hindsight, must have speculated about, in the absence of official disclosure, as to the crime of Gallus€– when he had inscribed on stone in three languages ‘not even kings have dared to tread the land I have conquered’,15 did people argue post factum that he had been stressing his proud autonomy vis-à-vis Octavian’s growing monopoly on far-off victories? As Euripides would have said, the victory monuments are only for kings, but the blood is always someone else’s. Thus Ovid constructs a narrative of Gallus’ career, the princeps of elegy becoming a victim of the princeps, and Tristia 2 is implicitly structured as a supplement to Gallus’ career, an opportunity for a victimized elegiac poet to talk back. This link is also credible on the ‘juristic’ level€– Roman historians have independently argued that the model of ‘imperial displeasure’ used in Ovid’s case has a precise precedent in Gallus (cf. Rogers On the frequency of Ovidian allusions and references to Gallus see Barchiesi 1981. See IG Philae II 128.

14 15

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1966) even if Gallus had only been forbidden from imperial provinces and declared odiosus, persona non grata, to the emperor. Therefore, the beginning of Tristia 2 is even more sensitive to ‘Gallan’ resonance. A ‘career man’ himself, Ovid is especially sensitive to the career of his predecessors:€he imitates predecessors not only through textual memories, but by constructing a mix of poetic utterances and (auto)biography. ii.╇ Ovid and Lucius Apuleius We turn to Apuleius, intense reader of Ovid. Ovid’s approach to his own poetic career is influential on Apuleius, but with a twist:€ the Ovidian career model is now adapted not to authorial self-fashioning but to a fictional plot:€the plot of the novel Metamorphoses. Apuleius alludes to Ovid not only as a major influence on his novel, but as a dynamic model of evolution from one text to another. Thus he continues the strategy we have encountered in Ovid’s recreation of Gallus in his exile poetry, that of inscribing a career within literary allusions. This time, of course, Ovid’s exile poetry begins to assert its influence. The hotspot for Ovidianism in the Metamorphoses (we have a vested interest in preferring this title to The Golden Ass:€ more on titles below) is the description of the wealthy house of Byrrhena at the beginning of Book 2 (4):16 The atrium was particularly beautiful. Columns were erected in each of its four corners, and on these stood statues, likenesses of the palm-bearing goddess; their wings were outspread, but, instead of moving, their dewy feet barely touched the slippery surface of a rolling sphere; they were not positioned as though stationary, but you would think them to be in flight. Next I saw a piece of Parian marble made into the likeness of Diana, occupying in balance the centre of the whole area. It was an absolutely brilliant statue, robe blowing in the wind, vividly running forward, coming to meet you as you entered, awesome with the sublimity of godhead. There were gods protecting both flanks of the goddesses, and the dogs were marble too. Their eyes threatened, their ears stiffened, their nostrils flared, and their mouths opened savagely, so that if the sound of barking burst in from next door you would think it had come from the marble’s jaws. Furthermore that superb sculptor displayed the greatest proof of his craftsmanship by making the dogs rear up with their breasts raised high, so that their front feet seemed to run, while their hind feet thrust at the ground. Behind the goddess’s back the rock rose in the form of a cave, with moss, grass, leaves, bushes, and here vines and there little trees all blossoming out of the stone. In ╇ For a rich commentary and bibliography see van Mal-Mader 1998.

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the interior the statue’s shadow glistened with the marble’s sheen. Up under the very edge of the rock hung apples and the most skilfully polished grapes, which art, rivalling nature, displayed to resemble reality. You would think that some of them could be plucked for eating, when wine-gathering Autumn breathes ripe colour upon them; and if you bent down and looked in the pool that runs along by the goddess’s feet shimmering in a gentle wave, you would think that the bunches of grapes hanging there, as if in the country, possessed the quality of movement, among all other aspects of reality. In the middle of the marble foliage the image of Actaeon could be seen, both in stone and in the spring’s reflection, leaning towards the goddess with an inquisitive stare, in the very act of changing into a stag and waiting for Diana to step into the bath. (trans. J. A. Hanson (Loeb))

The Ovidian allusion is well known, as is its impact on the plot of the novel. The subject of the décor in the atrium is the myth of Actaeon and Diana as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (3.137–252), and the complex poolside sculpture in the atrium imitates the setting of Actaeon’s transformation: Vallis erat piceis et acuta densa cupressu, nomine Gargaphie succinctae sacra Dianae, cuius in extremo est antrum nemorale recessu arte laboratum nulla:€simulauerat artem ingenio natura suo; nam pumice uiuo et leuibus tofis natiuum duxerat arcum; fons sonat a dextra tenui perlucidus unda, margine gramineo patulos incinctus hiatus. There was a valley thick grown with pine and cypress, called Gargaphie, sacred to high-girt Diana. In its inmost recess there was a woodland grotto, worked by no artist’s hand. Nature by her own cunning had imitated art:€for she had shaped a native arch out of the living pumice and soft tufa. On the right side sounded a clear spring with its slender stream, widening into a pool surrounded by grassy banks. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.155–62)

Apuleius turns a passage of obvious ecphrastic quality into the ecphrasis of an actual work of art, and the intertextuality is sealed by the wonderful meta-allusion whereby the marble fruits in the statuary complex within the atrium are the product of ‘art imitating nature’ while the cave of the nymphs in Ovid is a product of ‘nature imitating art without any artistic labour’ (Hinds 2002:€146). We might consider this simply as a homage to Ovid, but the sequel shows that this episode is less decorative and digressive than it seems. At this very moment€– when we begin to feel that the narrator is a little too absorbed in the activity of viewing this sensual and enchanting work of

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art€– the owner of the house, Byrrhena, appears and announces to Lucius, her nephew, that ‘all you see is yours’ (2.5): I was staring again and again at the statuary enjoying myself enormously, when Byrrhena spoke. ‘All that you see’, she said, ‘is yours.’ And with that she ordered everyone else to leave so that we might talk in private. When all had been dismissed she began. ‘My dearest Lucius’, she said, ‘I swear by this goddess that I am very worried and afraid for you, and I want you to be forewarned far in advance, as if you were my own son. Be careful! I mean watch out carefully for the evil arts and criminal seductions of that woman Pamphile, who is the wife of that Milo you say is your host. She is considered to be a witch of the first order and an expert in every variety of sepulchral incantation, and by breathing on twigs and pebbles and stuff of that sort she can drown all the light of the starry heavens in the depths of hell and plunge it into primeval Chaos.

The situation somehow combines thoughts of sensual desire with ideas of appropriation, and tua sunt quae uides could well be a pointer towards what is going on at the level of programmatic allusion:€ the appropriation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a central model for the entire work.17 But the situation is also seminal at the level of plot, because Byrrhena immediately adds a warning about Pamphile and her sensual magic:€in other words, she warns Lucius about the imminent turning-point of the plot, the magical metamorphosis of the narrator into an ass. The two fields of reference converge because of course metamorphosis is what links Apuleius to the Ovidian model. It is also important to realize that when Byrrhena dramatically warns that the sorceress is able to bring down the daylight of the upper world into Tartarus, and to bring back primeval chaos (chaos uetustum), she is using Ovidian language:€ at a dramatic moment in Book 2, the goddess Tellus warns Jupiter that the cosmic crisis brought about by Phaethon’s skyride will ‘bring back ancient chaos’ (Met. 2.298–300): ‘si freta, si terrae pereunt, si regia caeli, in chaos antiquum confundimur! eripe flammis, si quid adhuc superest, et rerum consule summae!’ If the sea perish and the land and the realms of the sky, we are hurled back into primeval chaos. Save from the flames whatever remains, and take thought for the safety of the universe.

The analogous expression in the Psyche tale, tua sunt haec omnia (5.2.1), is also used to cap an ecphrasis of a wealthy palace, and the entire situation is based on an intertext from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the description of the Sun’s palace and Phaethon’s reactions to its cosmic setting (see Met. 2.31; 95–7).

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For readers of Ovid’s epic, the threat of a regression to ‘old’ chaos is a powerful one, since chaos had been the first form of reality evoked in the work at the beginning (1.4–5:€‘before sea, lands, sky, there was only one face of nature … chaos’). Even the location of Byrrhena’s utterance, the magnificent atrium dedicated to Diana, is affected by the resonance of the Ovidian model:€a couple of lines before the menace of chaos appears, Tellus had warned the gods that the disaster will strike even their magnificent atria and provoke a celestial collapse (Met. 2.294–7): at caeli miserere tui! circumspice utrumque: fumat uterque polus! quos si uitiauerit ignis, atria uestra ruent! Atlas en ipse laborat uixque suis umeris candentem sustinet axem! Take pity on your sky ! Look around:€both poles are smoking. If fire weakens them, your homes will fall in ruins. See, Atlas himself is labouring and can scarcely hold up the white-hot vault on his shoulders.

The pattern of Ovidian negotiations also extends back to the beginning of Book 2, in the description of Lucius’ emotions after waking up in Hypata, just before he enters the suburban villa of his aunt (2.1–2): As soon as night had been scattered and a new sun brought day, I emerged from sleep and bed alike. With my anxiety and my excessive passion to learn the rare and the marvellous, considering that I was staying in the middle of Thessaly, the native land of those spells of the magic art which are unanimously praised throughout the entire world, and recalling that the story told by my excellent comrade Aristomenes had originated at the site of this very city, I was on tenterhooks of desire and impatience alike, and I began to examine each and every object with curiosity. Nothing I looked at in that city seemed to me to be what it was; but I believed that absolutely everything had been transformed into another shape by some deadly mumbo-jumbo:€the rocks I hit upon were petrified human beings, the birds I heard were feathered humans, the trees that surrounded the city wall were humans with leaves, and the liquid in the fountains had flowed from human bodies. Soon the statues and pictures would begin to walk, the walls to speak, the oxen and other animals of that sort to prophesy; and from the sky itself and the sun’s orb there would suddenly come an oracle. I was in such a state of shock, or rather so dumbfounded by my torturous longing, that, although I found no trace or vestige whatever of what I longed to see, I continued to circulate anyway. As I wandered from doorway to doorway, like a man bent on prodigal extravagance, suddenly without knowing it I stumbled upon the provision-market. There I saw a woman …

Guided by his long-standing fascination with magic, Lucius accepts the idea that the Thessalian city of Hypata is the capital of magical arts:€he starts looking at everything in a spirit of credulity as well as curiosity

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and sensual desire, and sees magical transformation wherever he looks€– stones, birds, trees, fountains, statues. In Hypata, nothing is what it seems, everything is the result of metamorphosis, and metamorphosis is the revelation of magic in natural life. More exactly, the mental state of Lucius could be summed up in the words used by Leonard Barkan to explain the huge influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in later ages:€‘The extraordinary fascination that the Ovidian poem has exercised over two millennia can be traced in large part to this paradox:€it proves the natural world magical and the magical world natural’ (Barkan 1986:€19). So when Lucius insists that in Byrrhena’s atrium it is all about stone and art imitating nature, he is not being totally sincere:€in Hypata, he believes, statues are transformations of humans, and are ready to change again. Lucius has whetted his appetite for magic through avid assimilation of Ovidian metamorphic ideology;18 only this Roman text, not the novelistic models in Greek, could have prompted such a cosmic and euphoric belief that everything is in fact a transformation of something else, or bound to become something else. Of course, there is the Apuleian twist, and Lucius is in a sense a naïve, literal-minded reader of Ovid; he is trivializing the Ovidian idea, he thinks that metamorphosis is the result of magical acts, while the Ovidian approach is that nature is magic because storytelling can be attached to it. The next question is how far the specific choice of the Ovidian version of the Actaeon myth contributes to the programmatic importance of the ecphrasis, with its undertones of magic. The first aspect is of course the idea of human consciousness in an animal body. This is one of the few Ovidian transformations19 in which the focus is on the enduring human consciousness of the animal. The image of Actaeon as a human body with stag horns is of course relevant here€– one might debate whether this common iconography aims to make the subject immediately recognizable, or to illustrate a pregnant moment in the narrative, or even to make the point that the final result of the metamorphosis will be not just game, but game with human feelings. This last approach is clearly a link between Apuleius, Ovid and the visual tradition of the story. So the main narrative strategy of the novel, Penwill 1990:€8 n. ‘Lucius is suffering from lurid imagination arising from too literal a reading of Ovid’s Met.’ (a Petronian approach to narrative intertextuality). 19 The other obvious example being the story of Io, the Argive heroine transformed into a cow and striving to get free of this animal body which does not match her identity. The plot provides the clearest mythical parallel to the story of the human ass which Apuleius found in his Greek Â�models (including retro-morphosis, see Bandini 1986), and offers the aetiology for a goddess who will prove to be the most compassionate and helpful in the divine cosmos of the poem€– Isis (see Met. 9.686–701; 773–81). 18

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that Lucius is still ‘himself’ in the body of an animal, is recapitulated in advance through the encounter with an Ovidian monument. The second factor is the framing of authorial irony as a passive, not (as usual) active, concept. Actaeon has a special status in the Ovidian model not only because he is one of the few characters who focalize their stories from within an animal body€– but also because he is the only character of the poem who has a proleptic control, a magnetism over the destiny, of the unwitting narrator. In a weird postscript to the poem in his exile poetry, Ovid will explain that he has become Actaeon, and not just any version of this character, but his own version, the innocent victim20 of arbitrary divine retribution: cur aliquid uidi? cur noxia lumina feci? â•… cur imprudenti cognita culpa mihi? inscius Actaeon uidit sine ueste Dianam: â•… praeda fuit canibus non minus ille suis. scilicet in superis etiam fortuna luenda est, â•… nec ueniam laeso numine casus habet. Why did I see anything? Why did I make my eyes guilty? Why did I thoughtlessly become privy to a fault? Actaeon saw Diana naked, unwittingly:€none the less he became prey to his dogs. Clearly with the gods even bad fortune must be paid for, and chance is no excuse when a god is offended. (Trist. 2.103–8)

Now if Ovid’s downfall and punishment is the story of Actaeon, the author is entering the human and animal body of his mythic character; he is being trapped within one episode of his epic and becoming the subject and victim of the most insane metamorphosis of them all:€being punished by becoming a part of his own creation (the innocent version of another favourite mythologeme of Ovid’s exile poetry, the Phalaris– Perillus story). Lucius is a Milesian narrator about to be swallowed up by his own fiction, just as the Pontic Ovid is a narrator trapped within a stag’s hide, a poet in exile experiencing humiliation and loss of civilized life. In other words, and this is for us the relevant aspect, Apuleius has used as a model not only Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but Ovid’s reinterpretation and revision of the Metamorphoses in exile (see Hinds 1985).21 He has combined localized allusion with an idea of authorial career, which His own version because Ovid’s Actaeon is the most innocent in the entire history of the motif, while Apuleius is more interested in innuendoes of sinful voyeurism:€see Schlam 1984 and Heath 1992. 21 There had been a comparable tendency in Neronian and Flavian poetry, see Hinds 2007 and forthcoming, on Seneca and Martial imitating Ovid. Sometimes one suspects that intertextual contaminations between the Ovidian epic and the exile poetry are enough to suggest a similar 20

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is what Ovid had been doing with Cornelius Gallus, with Virgil and of course with his own earlier self. The difference is that the author is now more protected than Ovid, through the fictional character of the work and the more ambiguous relationship between author, narrative voice and protagonist. This revealing episode encourages us to look for other points of contact between Apuleius and his Ovidian model. Apuleius’ novelistic plot is dominated by a single instance of metamorphosis, but the author broadens and multiplies the concept of metamorphosis€– and so justifies the plural in the title€– by extending it to ideas of translation, style, change of fortune and transition from life to book. He is in fact justifying the plural of his title by using Ovidian strategies. The idea of reversal of fortune (Greek metabolē or peripeteia) as a further revelation of metamorphosis is fundamental to the novel’s programme from the prologue on, and it betrays the influence not just of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but of Ovid’s rereading of his epic in the elegies of exile:€the author’s change of fortune should now be inscribed into his poem of changes, and will retrospectively transform its originary meaning (Trist. 1.1.117–22): sunt quoque mutatae, ter quinque uolumina, formae, â•… nuper ab exequiis carmina rapta meis. his mando dicas, inter mutata referri â•… fortunae uultum corpora posse meae, namque ea dissimilis subito est effecta priori, â•… flendaque nunc, aliquo tempore laeta fuit. There are also fifteen rolls about changing shapes, poems recently snatched from my funeral. I bid you tell them that the appearance of my own fortune can now be counted as one of the changed bodies, since it has suddenly been made different from what it was, a cause of tears now, though once of joy.

Thus when Apuleius announces a work about shape-shifting but also change of fortune (1.1),22 figuras fortunasque hominum in alias imagines scenario. For example, the only substantial fragment we have of Lucan’s poem on Troy, the Iliacon (fr. 7 Morel; 6 Courtney), comments on the catastrophic paradox of natura uersa after the fall of Phaethon, with a clear allusion to Met. 2.329–32, contaminating this model with the expression uice mutata from a crucial passage of the exile poetry, Ov. Trist. 4.1.99. Perhaps Lucan wanted to reinscribe the fallen Ovid into his own Phaethon myth, which is what Ovid had done with the Actaeon story; Lucan’s situation was no less tense than Ovid’s, if one considers that the Iliacon was itself in competition/collusion with Nero’s Trojan epic, the Troica (see Dio 62.29.1), and that Nero himself was often identified as a modern Phaethon. 22 Once again, as we remarked about the Actaeon episode, the new version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an ameliorative one:€there is nothing in the Ovidian model to balance the idea of ‘restoring the original shape’; in Boccaccio, as we will see, the idea of an improved and safer version of Ovid’s career is again important.

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conuersas et in se rursum mutuo nexu refectas ut mireris. exordior, ‘so that you may be amazed at men’s forms and fortunes transformed into other shapes and then restored again in an interwoven knot. I begin my prologue’, he alludes to Ovid’s ‘first-person’ exilic version of the Metamorphoses, and the prologue of the novel takes on not only the prooemium of the epic, but the prooemial elegy of the Tristia.23 The prologue to the novel is also remarkable for extending to the level of linguistic and literary form the theme of metamorphosis. This is again an Ovidian programme:€the prooemium to the Ovidian Metamorphoses had implicitly commented on how metamorphosis extends from the level of mythological narrative to that of poetics.24 The prologue of Apuleius similarly foregrounds the idea of uocis immutatio as a thematic but also formal aspect of the work (see also Shumate 1996), and even alludes to code-shifting from Greek to Latin as a related issue, just as Ovid had implied that the transition from Greek to Latin, as seen in the juxtaposition of the paratext Metamorphoseon libri with the incipit formas mutatas in noua corpora, ‘forms changed into new bodies’, is itself an instance of metamorphosis. In Apuleius, the principle of uocis immutatio goes hand in hand with the perception of the story as an example of mutatio of body (as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and also of fortune (as in Ovid’s Tristia, where again the style has to morph accordingly and change; cf. Apuleius 3.9 dii boni, quae facies rei? quod monstrum? quae fortunarum mearum repentina mutatio?, ‘Good gods, what a sight! What an apparition! What a swift transformation of my fortunes!’). On the other hand, the characterization of the work as intended to provoke amazement and curiosity (ut mireris) has a precise match not just in the Ovidian epic but in Ovid’s interpretation of his epic from exile:€Ovid had categorized his epic of change as a poem of non credendos … modos. The correspondence becomes very precise when, in a unique episode of foreshadowing, Lucius receives a prophecy about his future (2.12): When I asked him about the outcome of this trip of mine, he gave several strange and quite contradictory responses:€on the one hand my reputation will really flourish, but on the other I will become a long story, an unbelievable tale (incredunda fabula), a book in several volumes. quid referam libros, illos quoque, crimina nostra, â•… mille locis plenos nominis esse tui? 23

Tatum 1972. On the implications of 1.2 nam uos mutastis et ista see Tarrant 1982: 351 and n. 35; Barchiesi 2005 ad loc., with further references.

24

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Why should I say that my books, even those that accuse me, are full of your name in a thousand places? Look at the greater work, which is as yet unfinished, on bodies changed in unbelievable ways. (Ov. Trist. 2.61–4)

vt mireris and incredunda fabula confirm that the rereading of the Ovidian epic from exile is important to Apuleius. If the reference to the ‘incredible’ (Greek apiston, paradoxon, apithanon) fits the status of both works as fantastic fiction, the reference to ‘I will become books’ anticipates the fate of Lucius by activating a link with Ovid’s nightmarish ‘metamorphosis in exile’:€ the transformation of authorial humiliation into additional material for the author’s own texts. The Apuleian novel can be seen as a first person version of the Ovidian epic, one in which the narrator fails to keep a safe distance from the metamorphic Â�narrative25€– and the basis for this self-destructive strategy is precisely Ovid’s construction (or perhaps destruction)€– through his exile poetry€– of his career as supplementary metamorphosis and as reinscription of the author within a narrative of woe. The shared idea of seeing as a crime or error is programmatically mythologized in the shared iconography of Actaeon and Diana. Ironically, this new first-person version of Metamorphoses brings ordeals to the narrator, but final redemption for the author, while Ovid the author, after his safe joyride through the metamorphic stories, ends up as a victim. In the endgame, the author Lucius Apuleius will reap profit from Lucius’ transformation into ‘books’. This is the glorious prospect entertained by the author Naso at the end of Metamorphoses (‘Ovid will go higher than the stars, and become a book’, Feeney 1991:€249; ‘Hercules and the others may have become gods in eternity, but Ovid will become his poem’, Barkan 1986:€88), but the exile poetry had changed this outcome. The novel turns Lucius into metamorphic books of exile from himself, only to reward him with the safe prospect of becoming the author. iii.╇ Boccaccio and Ovid Ovid in the Middle Ages is an author perpetually falling foul of authority. Dimmick 2002:€264

On the idea of danger and the transgression into the fantastic mode see the incisive comments of Laird 1993.

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Ovid and Apuleius are favourite authors for Boccaccio, and, like Apuleius, Boccaccio reacts not just to individual models in Ovid but to the whole career. Even more than Apuleius, Boccaccio has invested Ovidian Â�memories26 with the problems and dangers of being a prose author:€the author of Decameron, a programmatic work of fictional prose. The importance of authorial voice is already clear in the rich Proemio, which is a real author’s foreword: From my tenderest youth until today, I have been aflame with love … This love has … proved wellnigh unendurable … my disordered appetite has ignited in my heart an uncontrollable fire which has refused to leave me satisfied with moderate expectations but has caused me constant and quite needless vexations … my love, then, was passionate beyond all measure. (Proemio § 3 (Boccaccio 1993:€3, trans. Waldman))

This is the initial drive of Ovid’s career, from the programmatic uror of the Amores to the confession of the prooemium to the Remedia (7–8:€ego semper amaui, / et si, quid faciam, nunc quoque quaeris, amo, ‘I have always loved, and, if you ask what I am doing now, I love’:€ cf. Decameron IV Intro. 32 and 42). Boccaccio continues straight into the signature success of the early Ovid, the Ars Amatoria: And who is going to deny that this offering, such as it is, should properly be devoted to the fair sex very much in preference to the men? It is women who timorously and bashfully conceal Love’s flame within their tender breasts; and those who have had experience of him know well enough how much harder it is to control the suppressed than the open flame. (Bocc. Dec. Proemio § 9–10)

This is typical Ars material (cf. 1.275–88., esp. 276 on gender and dissimulation), already revised by Ovid in the prologue to Ars 3,27 and Boccaccio’s reasoning soon embraces the related subject matter of the Remedia, the therapy for men in love (Rem. 151–224): If a man is down in the dumps or out of sorts, he has any number of ways to banish his cares or make them tolerable:€he can go out and about at will, he can hear and see all sorts of things, he can go hawking and hunting, he can fish and ride, gamble or pursue his business interests. (Proemio § 12)

There is already a distinguished bibliography on Ovid in the Decameron (we have profited especially from Mazzotta 1986; Smarr 1987 and 1991; Hollander 1997; S. Marchesi 2001 and 2004):€we will not list individual contributions below for reasons of space; the focus of our discussion is on the cumulative effect of the allusions. 27 See Gibson 2002 on Ars 3.29–30 and 30, and also on 31–2 for the revision of Ars 1.645–6, 657–8. 26

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But what about women? If the Ars already rewrites men-oriented arguments for a female audience, can one extend this approach to the Remedia? Now since Fortune has tended to be at her most niggardly in that one quarter where strength has proved the most defective, as is evident in the gentle sex, I will to some degree make amends for her sin:€to afford assistance and refuge to women in love€– the rest have all they want in their needles, their spools and spindles€ – I propose to tell a hundred tales (or fables or parables or stories or what you will). (Proemio § 13)

This decision to provide assistance and therapy for a female audience is consonant with Ovid’s surprise gambit of tucking in a book for women after the conclusion of the ‘official’ programme of the first two books of the Ars Amatoria (cf. Ars 3.29–52); equally important is the recollection of a programmatic passage of Remedia amoris€– a text that turns out to be relevant to Boccaccio’s poetics precisely for its central positioning in the Ovidian Lebenswerk (49–52): sed quaecumque uiris, uobis quoque dicta, puellae, â•… credite:€diuersis partibus arma damus, e quibus ad uestros siquid non pertinet usus, â•… attamen exemplo multa docere potest. But whatever is said to men, consider it said to you as well, girls; I give weapons to opposing sides, and if any of this does not serve your needs, yet it can teach much by example.

The echo of the prooemial section of the Remedia, a text that is in itself another surprise coda to the Ars Amatoria, a ‘fourth’ book on antidotes after two books on male and one book on female seduction, is interesting, because Boccaccio is framing the Decameron as a substitute for a missing ‘fifth’ book in the erotic cycle:€ a text offering remedies to a female audience, a text that for Ovid’s audience had existed only in a potential state of readerly reception. In Ovid, women had been invited to respond to a text written for men, using strategies of ‘exemplary’ interpretation for their own benefit (there is perhaps an innuendo that men can apply a similar strategy, with even more profit, to the ‘women’s studies’ department of Ars Amatoria 3).28 Now Boccaccio will step in and offer guidance, although by using examples and ‘parables’ (not without a memory of the Ovidian exemplo … docere project).29 On this approach see Gibson 2002, passim. The issue of examples and parables is of course much broader, and a crucial one for the poetics of narrative in Boccaccio, see e.g. Marchesi 2004:€1–8, with bibliography and new suggestions.

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After this eloquent prooemium, the existence of a second prooemium, located at the beginning of the Fourth Day in the ten-day festive cycle of the Decameron, comes as a real surprise:€this proem in the middle disrupts the narrative program, forcefully projects the authorial voice into the progress of the work, constructs the author as commentator of his own text, and the book, ‘after being presented as an opera-sistema, begins to appear as a work in progress’;30 it merges women as addressees of the work and women as represented in the work.31 There is also an apologetic style that surprises a reader who has been influenced by the ‘early Ovidian’ enthusiasm of the first prooemium: I always assumed that it was only the high towers, the loftiest tree-tops that bore the brunt of the searing blasts of envy; this is what I have read and myself observed, and what I have heard from the lips of wise men. (Carissime donne, sia per le parole de’ savi uomini udite …). But I find myself gravely deceived. I avoid, and have indeed always striven to avoid, the fierce onslaught of this rabid spirit of envy:€to do so I’ve made a point of sticking to the low ground, of stealing in furtive silence along the valley floor. (Bocc. Dec. IV 2–3)

By now, it should be clear that ‘savi uomini’ is a reference to a poet who did famously32 say that thunderbolts strike high places, but precisely by saying this got himself into further trouble with Jupiter€– once again, this had happened in the proem-in-the-middle of the Remedia (369–71): summa petit liuor; perflant altissima uenti: â•… summa petunt dextra fulmina missa Iouis. at tu, quicumque es, quem nostra licentia laedit … Envy seeks the heights, the winds blast the highest points, thunderbolts cast by the hand of Jupiter seek the highest points. But as for you, whoever you are, who find my licence offensive …

– the same context where Boccaccio found the image of a literary career as a journey, Rem. 394 principio cliui noster anhelat equus, ‘my horse is panting at the beginning of the hill’ (see p.61). This is an interesting prophylactic use of literary appropriation:€ the dangerous results of the thunderbolt image€– so obsessively reworked in the exile poetry€– have now taught Boccaccio’s literary horse to ‘stick to the valley floor’ instead of proudly striving for the mountain tops. Baratto 1982:€35. 31 Forni 1992:€58. On the importance of this Ovidian formulation in medieval literature, note e.g. Modoin of Autun on Ovid’s exile, Dümmler 1881: 371 Livor edax petit alta fremens (and compare Dimmick 2002:€267 on Ovid as an ‘indispensable’ but also ‘acutely combustible’ author).

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Now the apology in the Remedia is framed by two significant passages, closely related to each other. The defence speech€– if this is what it is€– actually interrupts a sequence that goes beyond the usual, almost ascetic limits of Roman elegy in describing love as a physical activity:€ nausea, body odour, even bowel functions will not be screened off this time, and this choice is empowered by the advertisement that more is to come, and by the dangerous hermeneutic principle of ‘readers are to imagine more than my words suggest’ (Rem. 357–60): nunc tibi, quae medio Veneris praestemus in usu, â•… eloquar:€ex omni est parte fugandus amor. multa quidem ex illis pudor est mihi dicere; sed tu â•… ingenio uerbis concipe plura meis. Now I will tell you what I recommend in the middle of sex; love must be routed on every side. Much of this I am ashamed to speak; but use your wit to understand more than I say.

Those are the last words before Ovid confronts his detractors and censors in 361–98. There is a clear symmetry with the restarting of the didactic plot after the long proem-in-the-middle33 (both passages stretching sexual licentia in elegy almost as far as it will go), with its blunt use of concubitus and the technical advice about bedroom strategies, Rem. 399 ergo ubi concubitus et opus iuuenale petetur, ‘so when you get down to copulation and the work of youth’. The Decameron mirrors this structure with a parallel symmetry of risqué narratives. Before the prologue to Day Four (which will be, by the way, the occasion for ‘Stories about People whose Love Has Ended in Tears’) there has been an unforgettable end to the narrative of Day Three, amid gales of inexhaustible laughter of the audience at the level of first and second narrative instance: ‘Learn therefore, young ladies, as you stand in need of God’s favour, to put the devil back into hell.’ Alibek, a very naïve 14-year-old, retreats into the Thebaid only to discover the well-known secret of how to restore the Devil to hell. Before the regular beginning of the narrative, the prologue to Day Four incorporates the truncated little tale of the goslings:€‘do let’s bring one of these goslings back with us, and I’ll see to feeding it grain.’ ‘Absolutely not,’ said his father, ‘you don’t know which end to feed it.’ The son of Filippo Balducci, raised in absolute ignorance of women in the Apuleian location of Monte Asinaio, goes On the extreme character of the framing passages in the Remedia and their intentional recuperation of the most explicit sexual material in the whole Ars see Gibson 2007:€134.

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to Florence only to discover the not-so-secret art of love. These two tales are not only parallel at a narrative level:€ they push the envelope of the Decameron towards a level of licentiousness very rarely achieved elsewhere in the collection. Again, however, Boccaccio not only alludes to the Remedia’s proem-inthe-middle and its framing in the poem; he also learns from the atmosphere of looming danger and the courting of disaster that every post-exilic reading of the Remedia is bound to sense. So the author substitutes the deft and unassuming parable of the dust for the proud image of envy’s thunderbolt striking high places: I shall turn my back on this squall and leave it to rage, for I can’t see myself faring any worse than a handful of dust:€when the wind blows, either the dust remains undisturbed or else it’s caught up into the air and deposited, more often than not, on people’s heads, on the crowns of kings and emperors, on the roofs of lofty palaces and high towers; and if it is dislodged from these places it cannot fall lower than whence it was scooped up. (Bocc. Dec. IV, 40)

He also begins adopting, in a timely way, defensive strategies from Tristia 2, the Ovidian exile text that functions as a remedy to the crisis caused by the Ars and exacerbated, not palliated, by the ironically named Remedia: these little tales of mine€– not only are they written in the vulgar tongue and in prose (rather than in a high-flown Latin verse) not only do they lack even a title, but they’re couched in as humble, unassuming style as could be. None of this has saved me, however, from being savagely buffeted by this storm-wind, nay, I’ve been practically torn up by the roots, I’m totally lacerated by it … nothing is beyond the reach of envy save poverty. (Bocc. Dec. IV § 3–4)

When claiming, in the manner of Tristia 2, that a humble genre is not safe from the highest authority, Boccaccio anticipates Ovid’s late turn to humility:€in so doing, he uses one more Ovidian allusion, perhaps a Â�double one. On the one side, talking about a work that ‘lacks even a title’ is a loaded Ovidian move in the Middle Ages, when Ovid’s Amores was both famous and circulated with the unpretentious€– but famous€– title ‘sine titulo’. On the other, Boccaccio knew Ovid so well that he may have been impressed by the importance of titles in the exile elegies. In the Tristia, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is the one text that does not dare to display its title, now that it has been punished: aspicies illic positos ex ordine fratres, â•… quos studium cunctos euigilauit idem. cetera turba palam titulos ostendet apertos, â•… et sua detecta nomina fronte geret;

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You will see your brothers arranged in order, the products of the same sleepless toil. The rest of the band will display their titles openly, bearing their names on their exposed edges, but you will see three lurking in a dark distant part; even so, as everyone knows, they teach how to love … And I warn you, if you have any concern for your father, do not love any one of them, although he himself teach you. (Trist. 1.1.107–12, 115–16.)

As one who goes one better (or worse) than Ovid, Boccaccio now realizes that repression is on the cards: For if before I’ve completed even one-third of my labour they’re already such a swarm and lay such claims upon me, I suspect that before I reach the end, if they’re not stopped in their tracks, they will have increased and multiplied to a point where they could trample on me without the smallest effort. (Bocc. Dec. IV § 10)

In fact his farewell to the incomplete story of the ducks bears a clear sign of self-repression, a virtue that had been clearly lacking in the Ars and Remedia (‘But that’s as far as I …’ [Bocc. Dec. IV § 30]). Next, the final chapter of Day Ten, the author’s Afterword, immediately confronts the dangers of authorship: Conceivably some of you ladies will observe that in writing these stories I have made a little too free, occasionally putting into my ladies’ mouths, and frequently having them listen to, things that no reputable woman should say or hear. (Bocc. Dec. Conclusione dell’autore § 3)

After mobilizing the ‘generic’ defence typical of the Remedia: To begin with, supposing there were something off-colour in any of the stories, the nature of those stories required it, and any reasonable person considering the matter objectively would readily grant that there was no other way in which I could have told them without distorting them out of their proper form. (Concl. § 4)

Boccaccio begins adapting arguments from Tristia 2: Besides, my pen should be accorded no smaller licence (auttorità) than is granted to the brush of the painter who attracts no criticism – at any rate, no justified criticism€– if he shows Saint Michael piercing the serpent with a sword or lance, and Saint George striking the dragon here, there, and everywhere, and, what is more, if he portrays Christ as a male and Eve as a female; why, he will stick sometimes a single nail, sometimes two, through the feet of the One

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who was ready to die for the salvation of human kind, to fasten him to the cross. (Concl., § 6)

The example of painting ‘Christ as a male and Eve as a female’ is the Christian version of a famous defensive argument from Tristia 2 (287–90, 301): quis locus est templis augustior? haec quoque uitet, â•… in culpam si qua est ingeniosa suam. cum steterit Iouis aede, Iouis succurret in aede â•… quam multas matres fecerit ille deus. … omnia peruersas possunt corrumpere mentes. What place is more august than temples? But these too should be avoided by any woman whose nature inclines to fault. When she stands in Jupiter’s temple, in the temple of Jupiter she will think of all the women made mothers by that god ... All things can corrupt perverted minds.

Boccaccio’s familiarity with this line of argument is confirmed by another of his main works, the Genealogie (14.18), where the discussion of the frescoes of Castelnuovo in Naples, ‘in the rooms of the king and of the nobles the same painter is allowed to paint the loves of the ancient gods and the crimes of men, and any other invention he likes, without any ban’, looks back to a related (and even bolder) argument in Tristia 2.521–8: scilicet in domibus uestris ut prisca uirorum â•… artificis fulgent corpora picta manu, sic quae concubitus uarios Venerisque figuras â•… exprimat, est aliquo parua tabella loco. utque sedet uultu fassus Telamonius iram, â•… inque oculis facinus barbara mater habet, sic madidos siccat digitis Venus uda capillos, â•… et modo maternis tecta uidetur aquis. To be sure in your houses, just as figures of old heroes shine, painted by an artist’s hand, so there is a small panel somewhere that represents the various copulations and sexual positions. There sits not only Telamonian Ajax with a look confessing anger, and the barbarian mother has crime in her eyes, but dripping Venus too wrings out her wet hair and seems barely covered by her maternal waves.

This way the crux of the apology in the Afterword requires identification not with the authorial voice of the Remedia, but with that of Tristia 2: Now whether those stories, for what they are worth (indeed whether anything of any description) prove wholesome or noxious depends entirely on the hearer. (Concl. § 8)

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– this being of course the core argument of the entire epistle to Augustus, Trist. 2.255–66 (esp. 264 posse nocere animis carminis omne genus). This evolution from Remedia to Tristia is glossed by a famous34 series of exempla, where the two sources are layered: We know that wine is highly beneficial to sound constitutions€ – we have it on the authority of Messrs Bacchus and Silenus, to name only two€– but it is harmful to those with fever … and fire, fire is undeniably an asset, indeed vital to human life. Are we going to condemn it because it burns down houses and villages and entire cities? Again, weapons safeguard those who wish to live in peace, but they also slay people all too often, and not because those weapons are evil€– the evil resides in those setting hand to them. To the corrupt mind nothing is pure. (Concl., § 9–10)

The emphasis on wine as a danger and a therapy comes from the Remedia, 131–2: temporis ars medicina fere est:€data tempore prosunt, â•… et data non apto tempore uina nocent. quin etiam accendas uitia inritesque uetando, â•… temporibus si non adgrediare suis. The art of timeliness is almost a medicine; wine given timely helps, untimely harms. Indeed you would inflame and irritate the disease by forbidding it, should you attack it at an unfitting time.

and is seamlessly joined to the argument about fire, weapons, and a reader’s responsibility, from Trist. 2.263–76: persequar inferius, modo si licet ordine ferri, â•… posse nocere animis carminis omne genus. non tamen idcirco crimen liber omnis habebit: â•… nil prodest, quod non laedere possit idem. igne quid utilius? siquis tamen urere tecta â•… comparat, audaces instruit igne manus. eripit interdum, modo dat medicina salutem, â•… quaeque iuuet, monstrat, quaeque sit herba nocens. et latro et cautus praecingitur ense uiator; â•… ille sed insidias, hic sibi portat opem. discitur innocuas ut agat facundia causas; â•… protegit haec sontes, immeritosque premit. sic igitur carmen, recta si mente legatur, â•… constabit nulli posse nocere meum. ╇ Mazzotta 1986:€39; Smarr 1987:€248–9.

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I will show later, if only I can present it in order, that every kind of poetry can harm the mind. But not on that account will every book be held guilty. Anything useful can also harm. What is more useful than fire? But whoever sets out to burn a house, arms his criminal hands with fire. Medicines sometimes remove, sometimes bestow health, teaching which plant cures, and which harms. Highwayman and the cautious traveller alike gird on a sword :€the one carries it to attack, the other for protection. Eloquence is learned for the conduct of just cases; yet it protects the guilty and crushes the innocent. Just so if a poem€– one of mine€– is read with upright mind, it will clearly harm no one.

Now Boccaccio is also able to confront what is a signature obsession in Ovid’s late work, the complex of frons (front, frontmatter, forehead): In order to deceive no one, my stories all carry signed on their front (nella fronte) that which they hold concealed in their bosom. (Concl., § 19)

Frons in Ovid’s exile work is a very representative word:€technical ‘frontmatter’ of a book + place of textual manipulation, as well as ‘forehead’, the locus of shame/public image/ageing/sincerity.35 Now Boccaccio’s novelle can forestall this forehead complex:€they are innocent, because they may lack a title, but they always carry ‘frontally’ their own description as Â�‘frontmatter’, without deceiving, or hiding any dangerous secrets. We have registered the Ovidian invocations in the sequential order they have in the text of the Decameron because our interest is in the dynamic effect that those intertextual contacts create, both in Boccaccio’s text, and as a rereading of Ovid’s career and its unforgettable consecutio temporum. In the unruly appropriative culture of the Middle Ages, the very fact that the Ovidian texts are being alluded to in their unmistakable proper autographical order (Ars€– Remedia€– Tristia) should give one pause. Once again, exile is being used as a hinge. The sequence of Ovidian allusions mobilizes a series of Ovidian models that are recognizably organized in a biographical sequence and an argumentative evolution. The author’s prooemium finds a keynote in the early amatory works, including the first part of the Remedia, a work whose positioning in Ovid’s oeuvre had always instigated creative revisions in medieval authors (‘The acutely unstable relationship between Ars and Remedia in medieval readings’, Dimmick 2002:€273). The proem-in-the-middle prefixed to Day Four is modelled on the apologetic€– but also bold, in-your-face€– oration 35

See e.g. Trist. 1.1.8 candida nec nigra cornua fronte geras; 1.1.11 nec fragili geminae poliantur pumice frontes; 1.1.110 et sua detecta nomina fronte geret; 1.7.33 hos quoque sex uersus, in prima fronte libelli; 3.7.34 rugaque in antiqua fronte senilis erit; Pont. 4.13.7 ipse quoque, ut titulum chartae de fronte reuellas.

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that functions as a proem-in-the-middle to the Remedia, but it also anticipates the growing censorial reactions that will lead to the late and exilic€– therefore more oblique and cautious€– defence speech of Tristia 2. In the Afterword, the Remedia lead into the recreation of Tristia 2, and the effect is now clear, especially if one thinks of previous modifications of the Remedia model, such as the ‘envy strikes high places’ topos turning into the ‘dust’ parable, and the ‘uphill journey’ being replayed as a safer non solamente pe’ piani ma ancora per le profondissime valli kind of journey (see pp.81, 83 above). This revised Ovid turns out to be a great poet of mediation:€now he knows that the blunt formalistic defence of the Remedia must be completed by the oblique and ironic judicial defence of Tristia 2:€the Ovidian strategies had been incompatible in their original contexts (the Remedia proem-in-the-middle claiming that every genre should be evaluated according to its own decorum, Tristia 2 that sexual content is endemic to every act of communication and that responsibility should be laid at the reader’s door) but now they can be combined into a more mediated and sly forestalling of future censorial interpretations. The point, for us, is not just that Boccaccio at times likes to imagine himself as a new Ovid; it is more about his dynamic reimagining of Ovid’s entire career as the story of an ‘improved Ovid’, a poet of moderation,36 in fact an author of fictional prose who discovers a safer, remedial approach to writing about love, yet combines it with Ovidian edginess:€one of the peculiar ‘judicial’ responsibilities typical of the implied reader of the Decameron is that of having to arbitrate between dangerous and safe Â�interpretations of Ovid’s model. 36

Gibson 2007 shows the importance of recuperating moderation and medietas in Ovidian poetics.

Ch apter 4

An elegist’s career:€from Cynthia to Cornelia Stephen Heyworth *

Virgil created the ideal poetic career, an upwards progression within the range of hexameter poetry, pastoral to didactic to epic. He marked this movement in ways obvious and less obvious:€ he gets up from the shepherd’s sitting position at the close of the Eclogues; at the end of the second Georgic he regrets both the loss of pastoral innocence and his inability to write Lucretian natural philosophy; at the start of the third Georgic he looks ahead to an Augustan epic of sacred importance; in each work he presents an emblematic vision of the nymph Arethusa. Subsequently Ovid produces his own more ambitious versions of the ideal career, going from love elegy to tragedy to the universal epic of the Metamorphoses, and within elegy itself advancing from personal love elegy through the didactic of the Ars to the sacred and aetiological narratives of the Fasti. Each cycle then returns to the personal elegy of lamentation in the Tristia; but even in exile Ovid expands his range with the curse poem Ibis, and more letters.1 What of Propertius, Ovid’s predecessor as love elegist? Does he show a similar reaction to the Virgilian pattern? Ovid’s poetry repeatedly builds on Propertian models, and there is a temptation to see the elegiac books as describing a similar arc to that from the Amores to the Ars and the Fasti, with the personal material of Books 1 and 2 opening out to more general material, discursive and moral in 3, aetiological in 4. There is truth in this, but more truth in a rather different view, which I shall pursue here. Rather than a rising curve we should perceive stasis, and a persistent refusal to have a career. After all, Ovid himself defines Propertius as the poet whose work is solely concerned with Cynthia (Rem. 763–4): carmina quis potuit tuto legisse Tibulli uel tua, cuius opus Cynthia sola fuit? * Translations throughout the chapter are the author’s own, unless otherwise stated. 1 On the Virgilian and Ovidian careers, see the Introduction and Putnam, Ch. 1 and Barchiesi and Hardie, Ch. 3 in this volume.

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Who could safely have read the poems of Tibullus, or yours, whose work was Cynthia alone?

T h e c a r e e r r ej e c t e d:€s ta s i s a n d r e pe t i t ion Book 1 stresses that, because of his commitment to Cynthia, Propertius cannot choose to vary his output. This is symbolized by his exclusive concentration on her in poems 1 to 19, and by his refusal of other careers, whether as poet (1.7 and 1.9 reject the epic of Ponticus) or as politician (Prop. 1.6.1–2, 5, 19–22):2 Non ego nunc Hadriae uereor mare noscere tecum, â•… Tulle, neque Aegaeo ducere uela salo, … sed me complexae remorantur uerba puellae, … tu patrui meritas conare anteire secures, â•… et uetera oblitis iura refer sociis. nam tua non aetas umquam cessauit amori, â•… semper at armatae cura fuit patriae.

5 20

I do not now fear to experience the Adriatic sea with you, Tullus, nor to spread sail on the swell of the Aegean, …; but the words and embrace of my girl hold me back, … You should try to go in advance of the axes your uncle has earned, and bring back old laws to forgetful allies. For your life has never had the leisure for love, but always there has been a concern for your country and its arms.

Tullus travels abroad, but Propertius is stuck in Italy:€the words and the embrace of Cynthia hold him back. Whereas love of his belligerent country is Tullus’ permanent condition, for the poet love is to be a lifelong career, and his assertion that he is not suited to gaining glory in warfare is attached to a forecast of his death (27–30):3 multi longaeuo periere in amore libenter, â•… in quorum numero me quoque terra tegat. non ego sum laudi, non natus idoneus armis: â•… hanc me militiam fata subire uolunt.

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Many have willingly perished in a long-lasting love:€ may I too be among their number when the earth covers me. I was not born suited to glory, nor to arms:€this is the soldiering that the fates wish me to undergo. The Propertian passages are cited in the form in which they appear in the new Oxford Classical Text (Heyworth 2007a); the text is explained in Heyworth 2007b. 3 Philip Hardie points out the implicit contrast with Gallus, whose elegiac career (sadly lost to us) did not stand in the way of a political career. 2

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The most explicit statements come in 1.7. Not only are the travails of love his way of life (verses 5, 9), but this is where he wants the fame of his poetry to come from (10). Even though he is forced to serve his passion rather than his intellect (7–8), he has no ambition to make a name in another genre. nos, ut consuemus, nostros agitamus amores, â•… atque aliquid duram quaerimus in dominam; nec tantum ingenio quantum seruire dolori â•… cogor, et aetatis tempora dura queri. hic mihi conteritur uitae modus, haec mea fama est, â•… hinc cupio nomen carminis ire mei. me legat assidue post haec neglectus amator, â•… et prosint illi cognita nostra mala. me laudet doctae solitum placuisse puellae, â•… Pontice, et iniustas saepe tulisse minas.

5

10 13 14 11 12

We, as is our custom, deal with our love affair, and search out something for a hard-hearted mistress. I am forced to serve my emotions more than my talent, and to complain about the harsh circumstances of my life. This is the way of life I tread, this is my fame, from this I desire the name of my poetry to come. May the abandoned lover read me assiduously in the future, and may knowledge of our woes help him; may he praise me as one who regularly pleased a learned girl, Ponticus, and often endured unfair threats.

Again the inexorable nature of his condition is stressed by reference to death (Prop. 1.7.21–4): tum me non humilem mirabere saepe poetam; â•… tunc ego Romanis praeferar ingeniis; nec poterunt iuuenes nostro reticere sepulchro: â•… ‘ardoris nostri magne poeta, iaces?’ Then you will often wonder at me as no humble poet; then I shall be set above Roman wits; nor will the young men be able to keep quiet at my tomb:€‘Great composer of our passion, do you lie dead?’

Though death features in these earlier poems, it is the dominant theme for the first time in 1.19, the poem that ends the Cynthia sequence in Book 1 (1–4): Non ego nunc tristes uereor, mea Cynthia, manes, â•… nec moror extremo debita fata rogo; sed ne forte tuo careat mihi funus amore: â•… hic timor est ipsis durior exsequiis. I do not now fear the grim underworld, my Cynthia, nor do I put off the death owed to the final pyre; but that my burial may happen to lack your love, this is a fear harsher than the funeral itself.

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These opening lines are at first sight a striking announcement of Â�closure:€death is inevitable, and the poet accepts that. Nunc and nec moror suggest death’s imminence, extremo stresses that it is an end. But then through the interest in the arrangements of the funeral we are given hints of a future beyond death; and the following lines confirm this (Prop. 1.19.5–6, 11–12, 17–18): non adeo leuiter nostris puer haesit ocellis â•… ut meus oblito puluis amore uacet. … illic quidquid ero semper tua dicar imago: â•… traicit et fati litora magnus amor. … quamuis te longae remorentur fata senectae, â•… cara tamen lacrimis ossa futura meis.

5 11 17

Not so lightly does the boy stick in my eyes that love would be forgotten and absent from my ashes. … There whatever I will be, I shall ever be called your image:€great love crosses even the shores of death. … Though you be held back by the fates of a long old age, yet shall your bones be dear to my tears.

What has seemed the finishing line for Propertius and Cynthia is treated rather as a turning post, the end of one lap, but the start of another:€the poet’s death will mean separation, but not forgetfulness; whatever the metaphysical truth of existence after death, Propertius will remain identified as Cynthia’s (mirror) image; their love transcends death to such an extent that he in the underworld will mourn her death. The denial of delay in verse 2 is undone in 17:€however imminent the death of one lover may be, the story can continue through the lengthy old age of the other€– and beyond, with the concrete nouns lacrimis (tears) and ossa (bones) presenting a physical encounter after the second death. The closing couplet then invites the reader to see a withdrawal from this confident assertion of an unending future (Prop. 1.19.25–6): quare, dum licet, inter nos laetemur amantes: â•… non satis est ullo tempore longus amor. So, while we may, let us enjoy our love between the two of us:€love is not long enough over any period.

‘While we may’; but the final pentameter insists on the need for infinite continuation. Satiety, so often a marker of closure (most obviously at the end of Eclogues 3 and 10), is here denied. Though this is the final Cynthia poem in the book, as it finishes we are given a hint that this is not enough (non satis est), that more must follow. Propertius had begun, famously, with Cynthia:€ she was the first (Cynthia prima, 1.1.1), but also, he has promised us, the end (1.12.19–20):

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mi neque amare aliam neque ab hac desistere fas est: ╅ Cynthia prima fuit; Cynthia finis erit. For me it is not possible to love another nor to abandon her:€ Cynthia was the start; Cynthia will be the end.

The first book thus in various ways establishes that this is not a poet who aims at a career, but one whose work will remain forever concentrated on a single mistress€– unless he misleads her, and us. One can imagine several possibilities for further development. Cynthia prima might in the second book be followed by a different mistress (as it were Anna secunda), just as Tibullus’ Delia is replaced by Nemesis in Book 2. Or we might see the poet moving away from erotic material, even abandoning love elegy, as he has seemed to do in the epigrams, sepulchral and signatory, that end Book 1. In fact, he largely gives us more of the same (2.1.1–4): Quaeritis unde mihi totiens scribantur amores, â•… unde meus ueniat mollis in ora liber. non haec Calliope, non haec mihi cantat Apollo: â•… ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit. You ask how it happens that so often I write of love affairs, how my book comes in elegiac form on to people’s lips. It is not Calliope who sings this for me, nor Apollo:€it is my girl herself who creates my poetic talent.

The book begins by marking itself as continuing a sequence.4 The amores of which he has already written in his elegiac book have reached an audience and provoked a response, from the vague plurality of readers implied by Quaeritis. The sense of seriality is stressed especially by totiens (‘so often’);5 the poet even gives his readers a touch of impatience:€When are they going to get something other than amores? Isn’t one book of more than twenty poems enough? He immediately raises doubts about how long his erotic material can be pursued. In starting from a question he This is one reason for rejecting the attempt by Butrica 1996 to distinguish Book 1 as a Monobiblos, separate from the four books that follow under the (supposed) patronage of Maecenas. More substantial reasons can be found in the use of alter at 2.3.4 to number the second book as the second book, and the way 3.24–5 recalls 1.1 in bringing the Cynthia cycle to a premature close. 5 It is worth noting that the poet has created an image of repetition already with Cynthia’s saepe at 1.3.44 interdum leuiter mecum deserta querebar / externo longas saepe in amore moras:€ in her creative mind, even by the time of his third poem Propertius has often dallied in other affairs. Then we see similar effects at 1.5.21 nec iam pallorem totiens mirabere nostrum, 1.9.21 pueri totiens arcum sentire medullis, where Gallus and Ponticus (respectively) are warned about the impact of love. Again, in the first line of 2.13 (perhaps the first line of the original third book) tot sagittis implies the plurality of the poet’s works:€there is a constant threat of ending through death, but the address to Cynthia prompts continuation. 4

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implies that an answer may be given, that the conversation will continue. The figuring of his elegy as conversational is a significantly Callimachean touch:€ one thinks perhaps of the λέσχη (‘talk’) in Epigram 2 Pfeiffer (= A.P. 7.80), but especially of the conversation with the Muses throughout Aetia 1 and 2. And yet when the answer begins to be given in verses 3–4, he rejects the Callimachean model:€unlike the Aetia, his material is not spoken by Calliope (and her sisters) or written under the instructions of Apollo. What he emphasizes is not τέχνη (= ars) but ingenium (‘talent’ or ‘inspiration’):€contrast Ovid, Amores 1.15.13–14 on Callimachus (which perhaps picks up on the earlier summary judgements that Propertius has in mind): Battiades semper toto cantabitur orbe: â•… quamuis ingenio non ualet, arte ualet. The son of Battus will always be sung all over the world:€ although he is not strong in inspiration, he is strong in craft.

Propertius’ (superficial) rejection of Callimachus in 2.1 is markedly in contrast to the opening poem of the first book, where the first word Â�echoes Callimachus’ name for Apollo (used at fr. 114.8, as well as at 67.6, cited below), and subsequent details amplify the echo of the Acontius and Cydippe episode of Aetia Book 3. Compare Propertius 1.1.1–5: Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis, â•… contactum nullis ante Cupidinibus. tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus â•… et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus donec me docuit castas odisse Puellas. Cynthia was the first; she caught me with her eyes and made me miserable€– I had never been infected with desire before. Love forced me to drop my look of resolute pride, put his feet on my head and pressed it down, until he had taught me to dislike the chaste girls (i.e. the Muses).

and Callimachus, fr. 67.1–6:6 Αὐτὸς Ἔρως ἐδίδαξεν Ἀκόντιον, ὁππότε καλῇ â•… ᾔθετο Κυδίππῃ παῖς ἐπὶ παρθενικῇ, τέχνην (οὐ γὰρ ὅγ’ ἔσκε πολύκροτος) ὄφρα λέγοιτο â•… τοῦτο διὰ ζωῆς οὔνομα κουρίδιον. See Puelma 1982:€288, n.86. He notes the link with Venus as teacher of the lover at Tib. 1.8.5; cf. also Virg. Ecl. 8.47 and Tib. 1.2.19 (with Murgatroyd 1980). None of the other passages are as close as the Callimachus to Propertius’ opening lines (beyond the links picked out in italics, we may note that Acontius is a child, hence inexperienced like Propertius).

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ἦ γάρ, ἄναξ, ὁ μὲν ἦλθεν Ἰουλίδος, ἡ δ’ ἀπὸ Νάξου, â•… Κύνθιε, τὴν Δήλῳ σὴν ἐπὶ βουφονίην.

Love himself taught Acontius when the boy burnt with love for the fair maiden Cydippe, taught him craft [or a trick] (for he was not cunning) so that he might choose for himself this name, bridegroom, throughout his life. For, lord, he came from Iulis (Ceos) and she from Naxos, Cynthius, to your sacrifice in Delos.

However, in 1.1.17–18 the poet complains that in his case, unlike that of Milanion€– and, implicitly, Acontius and Hippomenes7€– Amor does not think up any tricks to help him win his beloved: in me tardus Amor non ullas cogitat artes â•… nec meminit notas, ut prius, ire uias. In my case Love is slow and does not think up any tricks [literally arts], nor does he remember to travel the old familiar courses.

Already in 1.1, then, the Callimachean model is evoked to be abandoned. What has looked like a striking change at the start of Book 2 turns out to be a repetition. A major difference from 1.1 is the omission of Cynthia’s name from 2.1. After its extraordinary prominence as the opening word of the opening poem of the first book, Cynthia does not appear until poem 5 of Book 2 (though earlier lacunae may mislead us here), and there is room for us to wonder about the identity of the beloved.8 Different readers may see ipsa puella in 2.1.4 as a sign of coyness about disloyalty, or as carrying the implication that Cynthia’s identity is so securely linked with the poet’s that he could not possibly mean any other girl. In either case, he is playing against the preconceptions built up by the existence of his first book. But he maintains his career as the lover of Cynthia, and this clearly persists, despite a variety of divagations and distractions, until the end of Book 3. Prope r t i us on t h e p oe t ic c a r e e r : € B o ok s 2 a n d 3 As we have seen, Book 2 from the very start emphasizes the repetitiveness of what the poet is offering. There will be increasing numbers of divergent poems, as we move on to Books 3 and 4 especially, but the love

See Heyworth 2007b:€8. Even after 2.3.8 differtur, numquam tollitur ullus amor, for he may be repeating for a new mistress his earlier claims of love until death, and beyond.

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elegist’s voice dominates. However, one repeated motif is the pointer to a change of genre followed promptly by a refusal to carry out any such promise. Thus the opening verse of 2.2 describes Propertius’ determination to change: Liber eram et uacuo meditabar uiuere lecto. I was free and thinking of life in an empty bed.

but the abandonment of love is set in the past, and Cynthia’s attractions are too great for him to persist (2.2.5–8). The following poem likewise starts with a retrospective account of a failed abandonment of love (2.3.1–4). The poet was experimenting to see if a fish could live out of water€– or if he could stay awake at night engaged in some serious study (2.3.5–7): quaerebam, sicca si posset piscis harena â•… nec solitus ponto uiuere toruus aper; aut ego si possem studiis uigilare seueris.

5

That was me investigating if a fish could live on dry sand and a grim boar in the sea, being unaccustomed, or if I could stay up all night pursuing serious matters.

The use of uigilare recalls Lucretius 1.142 noctes uigilare serenas (‘to pass the calm nights awake’) and carmina uigilata (‘poems resulting from sleepless nights’) in Cinna 11 (= 13 Hollis), his version of Callimachus’ epigram hailing Aratus’ Phaenomena (27 Pfeiffer = A.P. 9.507), and thus (with studiis … seueris) implies an aborted move to didactic on a serious topic. A more concerted movement in a new direction comes in 2.10. This poem starts9 with a clear announcement of an immediate change of style:€sed tempus lustrare aliis Helicona choreis (‘But it is time to traverse Helicon with other dances’); and this drive towards the new is maintained in subsequent couplets, with pointers towards the new manner (2.10.9–12): nunc uolo subducto grauior procedere uultu; â•… nunc aliam citharam me mea Musa docet. surge,10 anime, ex humili iam carmine; sumite uires, â•… Pierides; magni nunc erit oris opus. Sed reacts to a preceding context, possibly the book as a whole, but possibly some verses now lost:€see Heyworth 2007b:€153. 10 cf. Virg. Ecl. 10.75 surgamus. ╇ 9

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Now I want to advance more serious with a frown on my face; now my Muse teaches me a different lyre. Rise, my spirit, from a song now humble; take strength, Pierides; now there will be need of a big voice.

The new music is to be that of military epic (2.10.3–4, 7–8): iam libet et fortes memorare ad proelia turmas â•… et Romana mei dicere castra ducis. … aetas prima canat Veneres, extrema tumultus: â•… bella canam, quando scripta puella mea est. Now it pleases both to record the squadrons valiant for battle and to tell the Roman camp of my leader. … Let the first age sing Venuses, the last disorder:€I shall sing wars, since my girl is written.

In this last verse the poet goes as far as to assert that he can now go on to writing bella because his puella is finished. But she is not; and in 2.13, which a number of scholars11 have seen as belonging at the start of the original third book, Love with his very different, more potent weapons, turns Propertius back towards Cynthia and elegy (2.13.1–7): Non tot Achaemeniis armatur Itura sagittis â•… spicula quot nostro pectore fixit Amor. hic me tam graciles uetuit contemnere Musas, â•… iussit et Ascraeum sic habitare nemus; non ut Pieriae quercus mea uerba sequantur, â•… aut possim Ismaria ducere ualle feras, sed magis ut nostro stupefiat Cynthia uersu. Itura is not armed with so many Persian shafts as Love has fixed arrows in my breast. He has forbidden me to disdain Muses as slender as mine are, and ordered me to dwell in the Ascraean [i.e. Hesiodic] grove in the way that I do; not in order that Pierian oaks may follow my words, or so I can lead wild beasts through the Ismarian valley, but rather to stun Cynthia with my verse.

The god insists on poetry to enrapture the mistress:€the arma of warfare will feature only in (dis)similes, and any move to Augustan panegyric is postponed€– or forgotten. Between these two poems12 2.12 offers an account of Amor that emphasizes permanence and continuity:€ tela manent, manet et puerilis imago (13:€‘the weapons remain valid; so too does the boyish appearance’). This is emphasized especially by the failure of the image of Amor’s wings, at least in the case of Propertius. In the generalized picture in verse 8 non E.g. J.K. King 1980; Heyworth 1995 (esp. 165–8); Günther 1997:€6–14; on the programme of 2.13, see Heyworth 1992 and Wilkinson 1966. 12 But see Heyworth 1995:€166–71, where I argue that the poem has been displaced. 11

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permanet (‘does not remain steady’) pictures Amor flying away; but this is negated for Propertius in 13–14 (in me … certe pennas perdidit ille suas:€‘In my case … he has certainly lost his wings’). The poem closes with a further paradox, building on the idea of Love unto Death. Propertius has already become a shadow of himself; if the god continues to beat the shade he will lose his poet, and there will be no continuation of his love poetry, no one to sing elegiac songs of the elegiac mistress (2.12.20–4).13 Another poem that reasserts the permanence of his love for Cynthia is 2.25. His career is never-ending:€unlike soldiers, plough-oxen, boats and shields, he will not retire (2.25.5–10): miles depositis annosus secubat armis, â•… grandaeuique negant ducere aratra boues, putris et in uacua requiescit nauis harena, â•… et uetus in templo bellica parma uacat: at me ab amore tuo deducet nulla senectus, â•… siue ego Tithonus siue ego Nestor ero.

5

10

A soldier of many years sleeps away from the arms he has laid down, and aged oxen refuse to draw the plough; the rotting ship rests on the sand of an empty shore, and an old military shield rests in a temple. But no old age will draw me away from loving you, if I become a Tithonus or a Nestor.

Poem 3.5 follows 2.10 in announcing a new topic for the poet as he grows older, but the change is not imminent here, and warfare is replaced by natural philosophy as the improbable subject for Propertius’ old age (19–20; 23–5): me iuuat in prima coluisse Helicona iuuenta â•… Musarumque choris implicuisse manus; …

20

atque ubi iam Venerem grauis interceperit aetas â•… sparserit et nigras alba senecta comas, tum mihi naturae libeat perdiscere mores. It pleases me to have cultivated Helicon in first youth, and to have entwined my hands with the dancing Muses; … And when the weight of time has stolen Venus away, and white old age has speckled my black hair, then let it be my delight to learn the habits of nature.

In 3.9 Maecenas is praised for his analogous reluctance to follow the cursus honorum;14 he could easily lay down the law in the forum and fix victorious arms to his walls (23–6), but he prefers humility and the The passage is brilliantly explored by Lyne 1998:€175–7 (= 2007:€202–5). See the Introduction and Farrell 2002 on the significance of the cursus honorum for poetic careers in Rome.

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shade (29–30), a judgement that sets him up as a new Camillus (31–2). Propertius is just the same, an unambitious writer of elegy, who rejects Maecenas’ attempts to thrust him into the ocean (3–4):€any epic is made to depend on Maecenas’ willingness to lead by taking up electoral office (te duce, 47)€– and so it will not happen. The programmatic poems thus provide an assertion of stasis, not a route map for a career. The poet’s sophisticated interest in the concept of the career is demonstrated most clearly in 2.34. Lynceus, the poet’s friend, has fallen in love with Propertius’ darling, and tried to seduce her (1–26). At this point he is revealed to be a moral philosopher and a poet of high pretensions, who must consequently give up his serious study and grand poetic genres, and move to elegy, to poetry that can help in love affairs (27–46). Propertius thus constructs for this friend, as previously for Ponticus, a career that moves on from the traditionally high to the erotic. Before he can enjoy love properly, Lynceus needs to learn from his friend’s experience (47–50). Girls are not interested in natural philosophy (51–4). Propertius himself reigns over groups of them at symposia, entirely thanks to his ability as an elegist (55–8). This is what he enjoys€– the life of love (59–60); it is for Virgil to compose an Aeneid (61–4): me iuuat hesternis positum languere corollis, â•… quem tetigit iactu certus ad ossa deus; Actia Vergilio est custodis litora Phoebi â•… Caesaris et fortes dicere posse rates, qui nunc Aeneae Troiani suscitat arma â•… iactaque Lauinis moenia litoribus. Me it pleases to languish settled on yesterday’s garlands:€the god, certain in his aim, has touched me to the marrow. It is for Virgil to have the power to tell of the Actian shores of Phoebus the protector and the bold boats of Caesar, Virgil, who now rouses the arms of Trojan Aeneas and the walls cast on Lavinia’s shores.

Here he goes far beyond what he has done in 1.7/1.9, in setting his poetic achievements in the erotic sphere with Virgil’s as the singer of the Aeneid. But the celebration of Virgil continues with an account at greater length of the non-epic works, and in particular of the Eclogues, cast as essentially erotic poems (67–76): tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi â•… Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin harundinibus, utque decem possint corrumpere mala puellas, â•… missus et impressis haedus ab uberibus. felix qui uiles pomis mercaris amores, â•… huic licet ingratae Tityrus ipse canat.

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Stephen Heyworth felix intactum Corydon qui temptat Alexin â•… agricolae domini carpere delicias. quamuis ille sua lassus requiescat auena, â•… laudatur faciles inter Hamadryadas.

75

You sing, beneath the pinewoods of shady Galaesus, of Thyrsis and Daphnis with well-worn reeds, and how ten apples can seduce girls, together with a kid sent from the milked udder. Happy are you who buy love cheap with apples; to her though she be ungrateful let Tityrus himself sing. Happy is Corydon who tries to pluck the untouched Alexis, darling of his master, the farmer. Although he rests tired from his pipe, he is praised in the conversations of the easy nymphs.

This is the kind of poetry readers enjoy, Propertius claims, just like the erotic verse of Varro, Catullus, Calvus, Gallus€– and himself (81–2, 85–8): non tamen haec ulli uenient ingrata legenti â•… siue in amore rudis, siue peritus erit. … sic quoque perfecto ludebat Iasone Varro, â•… Varro Leucadiae maxima flamma suae; sic quoque lasciui cantarunt scripta Catulli, â•… Lesbia quis ipsa notior est Helena.

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But these songs will not come unpleasing to any reader, whether he happens to be new to love or experienced. So too did Varro play once his Jason was finished, Varro the great flame of his Leucadia; so too did the writings of playful Catullus sing, through which Lesbia is better known than Helen herself.

Virgil’s Eclogues are thus likened to the work of Catullus, Calvus and Gallus, consistently erotic poets (as they are represented here). But there is a contrast, in the presence of the Aeneid in Virgil’s oeuvre; and his is even unlike Varro’s career, in which the Argonautica was followed by erotic verse (85–6), and unlike the course Propertius advises for Lynceus, another writer of epic (perhaps philosophical epos) who must now turn to love poetry. Moreover, as we have seen, he places Eclogues and Georgics, the lighter genres, after the Aeneid, and so artfully inverts the ascent of genres and imposes on Virgil a career like Varro’s. Bio g r a ph y, u n i t y a n d t h e c u r s u s h o n o r u m :€B o ok 4 Propertius’ life within his poetry is dominated by Cynthia:€they repeatedly fight and make up, and eventually at the end of Book 3 undergo an acrimonious divorce. The final poem of Book 3 is a firm farewell to Cynthia:€her constant infidelity has at last compelled the poet to abandon her. He will weep as he leaves, but he leaves nonetheless, and curses her

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as he goes (3.25.7–16). When the next book begins, there is no mention of Cynthia in the first poem, and where she does appear, in 4.1b, it is only in the account of the poet’s past with which the astrologer Horus tries to bolster his claim to insight into the poet’s future (121–46), and even here she is not named. Horus repeats Apollo’s early advice to the poet, warning him of the una puella who will elude his palms (140). But the book continues without any mention of Cynthia, even in the attack on the lena Acanthis, who is encouraging the venality of his girlfriend:€there is nothing here to show the poet has gone back to his earlier mistress, and the implication that the girl needs advice on how to behave seductively suggests that she is not to be read as the experienced and always culta Cynthia. Book 4 thus at last offers a real change:€the poet presents himself has having moved on from Cynthia biographically and poetically. Even if his announcement sacra deosque15 canam (‘rites and gods I shall sing’) is not whole-hearted, the compositions have undergone a major change:€he speaks in other voices (Vertumnus and the pseudonymous Arethusa following Horus), and his narratives of Tarpeia’s treachery (4.4) and Actium (4.6) are not motivated by the erotic interests of himself or his friends (contrast e.g. 1.20; 3.12, 13, 15). He writes with the love elegist’s perspective, but is expanding his range of material into aetiological narrative and social commentary. Eventually Cynthia does appear, in 4.7. But the incident narrated is placed just after her burial, and the figure that seems to lie on his bed (uisa est incumbere fulcro, 3) is now her ghost. The sense of separation is thus compounded:€ she chides him for his infidelity, his indifference to her funeral and her fate, and she ends by avoiding his embrace. Their affair may continue in time to come in the underworld, but his career as a love elegist is clearly at an end. However, any sense of an apt ending to a lifelike story is overturned by the following poem:€4.8 is one of the most vivid expressions of love elegy, yet it comes immediately after this second apparent farewell to the genre. Cynthia is once more alive, and driving off to Lanuvium on an assignation with a toy boy. She returns to catch Propertius with two prostitutes and to lay down the law. He accepts her peace terms, and the poem ends with them in bed together€– a rare sight, and an effective ending to their poetic career, but ‘biographical’ nonsense after 4.7. Far from a career, Propertius does not have a life that makes sense. ╇ Or diesque, as the MSS have it.

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How far are we to make a unity of a single poet’s career, especially when he strays into unfamiliar territory? As I have said, Propertius can for the most part in Book 4 be read as continuing to write with the love elegist’s perspective:€when he sings of a deity it is the slippery Vertumnus whose voice he adopts, the statue who can be dressed to fit any character, including the non dura puella (4.2.23 ‘an easy girl’); as a Roman matron, he inveighs against the separation of man and wife caused by foreign wars (4.3; cf. 3.12); his Tarpeia sells her city for love in 4.4, not gold (as in Livy 1.11.6); his Actium is sung in the mode of the supremely elegiac Callimachus,16 and he moves away from the narrative for a party with the words bella satis cecini (4.6.69:€‘I have sung wars enough’); his Hercules pleads with a woman as he stands outside a locked door (4.9). Yet the book has one aetiological poem that lacks any hint of an elegiac voice, the account in 4.10 of three occasions on which the spolia opima were won. This is a military theme and a heroic one; the treatment is concise but comparatively straightforward, and shockingly bloody (4.10.11–12, 37–8, 43–4): hic spolia ex umeris ausus sperare Quirini â•… ipse dedit, sed non sanguine sicca suo. … di Latias iuuere manus:€desecta Tolumni â•… ceruix Romanos sanguine lauit equos. … illi uirgatas maculanti sanguine bracas â•… torquis ab incisa decidit unca gula. He, having dared to hope for spoils from the shoulders of Quirinus, ended up yielding them himself, and they were wetted by his own blood. … The gods aided Latin hands:€the cut neck of Tolumnius washed the Roman horses with blood. … To Claudius, as he spattered striped breeches with blood, fell the twisted necklace from the cut throat.

After the formal dedication at the end of 4.9, asking Hercules to favour his book, this poem has been marked as a new, grander beginning (4.10.1–3): Nunc Iouis incipiam causas aperire Feretri â•… armaque de ducibus trina recepta tribus. magnum iter ascendo, sed dat mihi gloria uires. Now I shall begin to reveal the origins of Feretrian Jove and the three sets of arms received from three leaders. It is a great route I climb, but glory lends me strength. ╇ See Heyworth 1994:€59–67.

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Note the references to Jupiter, arma, grand scale, travel, ascent, glory, strength:€the lines imitate Georgics 4.559–62 in their use of such diction to imply a change of topic. In Virgil’s case, a twelve-book poem in a new genre follows. But for all the blood Propertius gives us a rather halfhearted poem, in which the three winnings of the spolia opima are treated at decreasing length (eighteen verses for Romulus, sixteen for Cossus, six for Claudius):€how different from the Ennian or Livian pattern by which the treatment gets longer the closer to the author’s own day. The contraction suggests boredom with the topic, and we should not be surprised when we find a reprise of the bella satis cecini with which he has signed off from the narrative of Actium at 4.6.69:€after a poem that seems to show how alien to Propertius’ elegiac voice military narrative could be, he starts 4.11, his final publication, with a resounding Desine, ‘Stop’. Once more a development is denied. Before he ends his career Propertius leaves a final puzzle. Poem 4.11 is an apology, delivered in her own voice, for the life of the matron Cornelia, daughter of Scribonia, and thus step-daughter of Augustus. In her public defence before the judges of the underworld (the very speech a bold assertion of a masculine power), she lays claim to the various honours and achievements more typically associated with Rome’s men (29 tropaea, ‘trophies’; 32 tituli, ‘titles’; 47 leges, ‘laws’; 61 honores, ‘magistracies’; 61 sellam … curulem, ‘consul’s chair’; 70 facta, ‘achievements’); she has lived a distinguished life between wedding and funeral (46) and in producing three children while remaining married to a single husband she has won a female equivalent of the triumph (4.11.71–2): haec est feminei merces extrema triumphi, â•… laudat ubi emeritum libera fama torum. This is the ultimate reward of a woman’s triumph, when gossip freely praises her conjugal service as duly completed.

Thus she creates a kind of feminine cursus honorum:€marriage, childbirth, death. This stress on magistracies and triumphs is in contrast not only with the absence of political and military achievement in the matrona’s own life, but also with the poet’s own refusals of a political or military career for himself in 1.6 (see above), and for his descendants in 2.7 (nullus nostro de sanguine miles erit, 24:€‘There will be no soldier from my blood’). Moreover, in this final poem it plays up his continuing refusal to follow the poetic cursus honorum established by Virgil. Even if we emphasize the difference between the dead matrona celebrated here and the lively ghost of 4.7, the final poem does not break away from elegiac norms. From the

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start elegiac motifs predominate:€ tears, death and unopening doors in verses 1–4, for example: Desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum: â•… panditur ad nullas ianua nigra preces; cum semel infernas intrarunt funera leges, â•… non exorando stant adamante uiae. Cease, Paullus, to burden my tomb with tears:€the dark door is opened to no prayers; when once the corpse has entered the domain of the underworld, the way stands fast with inexorable adamant.

The speaking voice is female, the text a quasi-epigram (compare the reference to the memorial stone on which Cornelia imagines her words appearing, 36), a poem that reasserts elegy as the poetry of lamentation and separation. And even the move from Cynthia to Cornelia may be read as a final trick of the fallax opus (4.1.135:€‘tricky work’). As we have seen, the poet in Book 1 has promised that Cynthia, who was the beginning, shall also be the end (1.12.20). Cynthia was literally the first word, as well as the dominant theme of Book 1. Poetically, however, the promise about the finis was not fulfilled there, but left for later. By including 4.7 within the final book the poet has invited us to ask why he has not taken the opportunity to place the poem on his dead beloved at the end. If we wish to find a development, we may see the young man maturing, and coming to prefer the sobriety of Cornelia to the unpredictability of Cynthia. But if we take the poet determined to have no career at his word, Cornelia is a representation of Cynthia. If Cynthia is to be read as the end, as the poet has advised, Cornelia, Augustus’ step-daughter, is the unemotional, idealized, public face of the woman whom Propertius has loved in private in all her liveliness and changeability:€this is what polite Roman society makes of its women. And with this conundrum the Propertian career lapses into silence.

Ch apter 5

Persona and satiric career in Juvenal * Catherine Keane

V e r s ions of t h e s at i r ic c a r e e r In discussions of Roman poets, the term ‘career’ is most often used in reference to authors who wrote in a variety of genres, such as Ennius, Virgil and Ovid. In the work of these poets, well-marked transitions from one genre to another adumbrate literary biographies of sorts. By contrast, the satiric poets, with the exception of the prolific and versatile Horace, are not described as having progressed through ‘careers’.1 This has several likely causes:€ the fact that most of the poets in question restricted themselves to satire, the different length and structure of each poet’s contribution, differences among the authors’ social and financial circumstances, the genre’s strong associations with performance and the idea of the Â�fictive persona, and the current interest in satire as social discourse. But the prominent constructed author figure and his commentaries on his environment, his memories and his aims, encourage us to consider satiric texts as stories about the author. Satire’s characteristic subjectivity can be read as manifesting a ‘career consciousness’ in the generic formula. We may define the satiric career as the narrative that is strung together with even the briefest fictionalized portraits of the satirist figure, a narrative that posits an on-going and symbiotic relationship between the satiric text and the world that the poet inhabits and negotiates. Recent interpretations of the earlier satirists have focused heavily on the subjective element. In Horace and Persius, piecemeal personal accounts have been shown to function as symbolic narratives about the development of the texts themselves. In studies of their successor Juvenal, however, there is no expressed or operative notion that the text contains such *╇I thank Philip Hardie, the other participants in the 2004 conference, and Michael Sharp for their input on this essay. 1 See Harrison above, Ch. 2 in this volume.

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a narrative€– even though his five books of poems reflect many years€– and phases€– of labour.2 One reason for this is that studies of Juvenal’s oeuvre as a whole (and its fictional author figure) are rare; another is that we know virtually nothing about the historical author’s experiences in his social, political and literary culture. Unlike his predecessors, he acknowledges no patron or social context for his poetic project; rather, from the beginning, he presents his work as a solipsistic experiment motivated by both psychological and literary impulses. This aspect of Juvenal’s poetry planted him at the centre of formalist satire studies in the mid twentieth century. But as many satire scholars shifted their focus to the genre’s social and political contexts, Juvenal’s work drifted toward the sidelines. In short, current interpretive models handle Juvenal differently than they do his predecessors. This gap will be narrowed if we conceive of his oeuvre as dramatizing a ‘satiric career’, despite the absence of elements that are present in earlier cases. Juvenal’s work still typifies satiric subjectivity, and encourages the reader periodically to consider the author’s circumstances and aims. The inaugural performance of the Satires builds both an authorial self-portrait and a complex definition of satire. In Satire 1 Juvenal describes himself as entering an already glutted Roman poetry industry, as revenge for his constant subjection to comedies, elegies, tragedies and epics (he evokes the last genre with clever parodies in lines 4–11). The rant culminates in a vignette of the satirist as a schoolboy learning declamatory techniques (15–17), which we are to interpret as the literary credentials that qualify him to join the fray. Among the striking aspects of this self-portrait are Juvenal’s framing of satire as a delayed enterprise following a period of passivity (he claims to be no longer young),3 his claim to be writing out of indignation (79), and the ironic parallel between satire€ – Juvenal’s revenge against poets!€ – and the equally self-gratifying recitations of contemporary hacks, who like himself are clearly not being encouraged by modern-day Scipios or Maecenases.4 Satire is held up both as anti-poetry, and as a predictable, competitive literary product of the times; as a product of emotions, and of an entirely typical education; a spontaneous individual choice, and Several references in the text suggest a career spanning about AD 110 to 130; see e.g. Highet 1954:€11–16. Juvenal refers to the barber who used to shave his beard ‘when I was a young man’ (iuueni mihi, 25). This could mean that he is now past forty (Braund 1996b:€82). 4 On Juvenal’s parody as a sign of his immersion in the literary culture, see Henderson 1999:€249–73. 2 3

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an entrance onto a path already cut by Lucilius’ thundering chariot (19–20). The reader is made to juggle various conceptions of the genre and the sort of person who writes in it. Amid all these contradictions, however, the opening of Satire 1 clearly focuses on the satirist figure and on his decision to begin writing€ – even figuring the latter as a ‘career change’. The passage starts textual time rolling and links it to ‘real time’ in Juvenal’s Rome, where at this very moment pompous foreigners and lawyers are crossing his path.5 This authorial ego is a descendant of those planted in early satire by Ennius and Lucilius.6 The device creates a fiction that personal experiences and observations are prompting the composition of the poetry. Horace is stressing this aspect of Lucilius’ poetry when he likens it to a votive tablet that illustrates ‘the old man’s entire life’ (Satires 2.1.30–4). The calculated comparison of Lucilius’ satire to a simple visual medium allows Horace to promote his own literary autobiography as being more subtly and more artistically presented.7 Horace’s real life story also happens to be quite dramatic and entangled with major historical events, from the ill-fated Republican stand after Julius Caesar’s assassination through the struggle between his successors. As a result, scholars have long regarded political and personal themes as essential to Horace’s construction of the Sermones. The two books, published on either side of Octavian’s decisive victory, Â�represent two distinct stages of a career-long process of Â�self-presentation. In Book 1, Horace’s evolution from bumbling adolescent to articulate socialite is a subtly expressed but significant theme.8 In turn, Book 2 manifests Horace’s new concerns as a satirist after Octavian’s rise to power. Scholars have summed up the book’s program with Â�various metaphors, including Saturnalian reversal, prudent ventriloquizing, a hunt for equal Â�companionship and self-induced exile.9 Such interpretations recognize that in the Sermones, real experience is fictionalized, and in turn that fiction becomes part of satire’s evolving generic theory. Juvenal claims to scribble on the street corner; like the poetasters whom he mocks, he crams his tablets full (1.63–4; compare 5–6). 6 Muecke 2005. 7 G. Harrison 1987. On Horace’s own autobiographical plot, see W. Anderson 1982:€50–73. 8 For a summary of the ‘rhetoric of literary and socio-political ascent’ that spans the whole satiric phase of Horace’s career, see Harrison above, Ch. 2 in this volume. On Book 1 see e.g. Oliensis 1998:€18–41; Schlegel 2000; Cucchiarelli 2001; and Gowers 2003. 9 On Book 2 see Oliensis 1998:€41–63; Gowers 1993:€130–79 and 2005:€57–61; compare Freudenburg 2001:€108–24; and Keane 2006:€89–92 and 113–21. 5

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Persius has also received attention of this kind, although he produced just one book and his life story is shorter and less dramatic than Horace’s. His six hexameter Satires, augmented by a so-called ‘prologue’ in choliambics, spin a narrative based on the generic theme of teaching, pieces of Persius’ real life story and aspects of his culture. Throughout the book, the poet figure acts both as teacher and as maturing student, undertaking a course in self-reliance in a world obsessed with self-presentation. The poet also becomes preoccupied with the future of his text, his ‘legacy’, according to metapoetic readings of the sixth Satire.10 These stories are not typically called ‘careers’, but the term would fit. They convey a sense of the passage of time both inside and outside the text. They also highlight the relevance of external circumstances to a poet’s constructed experiences and personality, whether the product is a poet figure whose friends are involved in world-changing affairs or a story of the increasing appeal of self-education (which itself tells a story about what is happening on the ‘outside’). Some of these themes call to mind other literary genres with prominent author figures, which influence the satirist figure and the story that he presents. Horace’s Sermones 1, with its overarching narrative, embodies the structural conventions of the Augustan poetry book.11 Love elegy especially cultivates a story of the poet’s life and erotic experiences outside the text, which are cited as the explanation for the text’s existence.12 Persius’ extensive use of Stoic themes and ideas permeates not just the moral content of his satire, but his own self-presentation.13 It is natural to compare his satire to the philosophically themed letters and dialogues of Cicero and Seneca, especially considering the vivid textual personalities of the latter two authors (made more striking in retrospect by their fatal entanglement with their political environments). All of these models for the earlier satirists are reflected to some extent in Juvenal’s work, which stands at the end of the Roman satiric tradition and looks back, omnivorous, on the ‘hodge-podge’ ( farrago, 1.86) that helped build the genre.14 Throughout the Satires, we can find periodic and tantalizing suggestions that Juvenal is modelling his oeuvre on one or other of the traditional types of literary career. His ‘revenge’ See Henderson 1999:€228–48; Malamud 1996; and Freudenburg 2001:€195–208. Zetzel 1980. See e.g. Holzberg 2002:€17 on Ovid’s Amores. As Heyworth above, Ch. 4 of this volume shows, Propertius’ staged career highlights both consistency and change. 13 Cucchiarelli 2005. 14 Rimell 2005 sums up Juvenal’s contribution in these terms. 10 11

12

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against trite epic in the opening lines of Satire 1, which takes the form of a Â�sustained parody, foreshadows his own epic-style descriptions of Â�ordinary life. Beginning his second ‘book’, Satire 6, Juvenal recalls the literary mistresses of Propertius and Catullus as he begins his own rather different poem on women (7–8). In Satire 7, he plays the experienced man of letters, advising impoverished writers (‘get to work, young men’, 20). In his last two books of poems, the satirist’s musings become more visibly influenced by philosophy, conjuring an author who like Cicero has undertaken to study conventional moral topics in his later years.15 Even the treatment of soldiers’ legal rights in what remains of the sixteenth and last Satire oddly evokes the martial climax of the idealized Virgilian literary career.16 The above instances do not only underscore satire’s parasitic relationship to other genres,17 but suggest that the very shape of Juvenal’s oeuvre is ‘allusive’. Along the way, however, Juvenal presents a distinct narrative about the satirist figure, using well-Â�documented rhetorical transitions. C on t e m p or a r y s at i r e s t u di e s: € J u v e n a l l e f t at t h e c ro s sroa d s Juvenal’s tendency to appropriate other discourses is especially evident in the declamatory rhetorical character of his Satires.18 This feature is largely responsible for making his texts so central in the development of the Â�persona theory, which began to influence scholarship on Roman satire in the 1960s. The persona (‘mask’) theory conceives of satire as a form of drama or rhetorical performance. Juvenal, initially characterized as a virtuoso of ‘angry’ satire that contrasts with the gentler Horatian mode, soon came to be appreciated as a master of several different modes, all exhibited through strategies that were the fruits of the typical Roman secondary education in rhetoric.19 The ability to convey particular emotions or attitudes, Â� a basic tool of persuasion in forensic oratory and other literature, was one goal of this training. The reference in Juvenal’s first Highet 1949b takes the philosophy-laced later Satires as evidence of the poet’s conversion to Epicureanism (see Highet 1954:€122–37). See also Keane 2007. 16 See Introduction and Putnam, Ch. 1 in this volume. 17 See Schmitz 2000 on allusion and parody in Juvenal. 18 De Decker 1913. 19 Juvenal’s trademark indignation is a theme of Kernan 1959; W.S. Anderson 1982:€277–92 analyses rhetorical differences across the five books. Braund 1988 examines Book 3 closely, but sketches Juvenal’s entire series of personae. 15

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Satire to the poet’s experience in declaiming conveniently invites a rhetorical approach to the text. Fictive autobiography serves as an interpretive key. Juvenal’s text was not only the chief beneficiary of the persona approach but an essential source of fuel for it. The impressive rhetorical range Â�exhibited in the Satires, which seems to render authorial temperament irrelevant, was just the element that the persona scholars needed to highlight in order to argue the genre’s dramatic and literary richness.20 But clear as the influence of rhetoric is, an entirely different feature of Juvenal’s work may have had an equally crucial role in linking the poet to persona theory:€ namely, the fact that the sixteen Satires come to us unaccompanied by a reliable biography of the author. The ancient vita is a combination of generic and implausible material, and since Highet, it has hardly featured in handbook discussions, let alone interpretations.21 Far more so than with the other satirists, in the case of Juvenal scholars were given a free pass to go straight to the text. In turn, Juvenal’s text served as a vehicle for the persona scholars as they expounded the rhetorical-dramatic theory of the genre. The persona scholars were reacting to the limits of the biographical and moral approaches to satire, and ultimately built a picture of Juvenal as a self-conscious parodist of flawed moral discourse.22 A new shift in methodology, another reaction to limits, has occurred in the last decade and a half. While satire scholars have certainly not rejected the idea that satire is a performance, they have been developing more sociopolitically grounded notions of ‘performance’ than the rhetorical persona theory offers. In giving more emphasis to satire’s social functions, they aim to correct two problems:€first, the paradoxically Â�moral-biographical premise behind readings that argue Juvenal’s self-critical intentions, and second, the inadequate attention paid to satire’s cultural context in some W.S. Anderson’s essays on Juvenal were among his earliest, and stimulated work on the other authors. The persona theorists paved the way for sociological study, analyses of satiric allusivity and politics, and readings of satire as a performance of cultural identity; see e.g. Oliensis 1998, Freudenburg 1993 and 2001, and Henderson 1999. 21 According to the vita, Juvenal practised declamation before taking up satire in middle age; after arousing resentment, he was banished to Egypt while in his eighties, and died of bitterness there. Much of this surely derives from remarks in Satire 1, and the banishment story in particular from the poet’s later claim that he has observed Egyptian culture (15.45). Highet 1954:€2–41 makes a few adjustments to the ancient account, but still draws on the Satires. More recent handbooks do not discuss the poet’s life:€in Braund 1996a:€xii–xiii, the summary of Horace is highly biographical in contrast to that of Juvenal. Courtney 1980 also avoids biographizing (see especially 9–10). See the author chapters in Hooley 2007. 22 See Winkler 1983. 20

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rhetoric-focused persona studies. Thus some recent work aims to elucidate what is at stake socially and politically in the performance of satire’s constructed spokesman€– a more complex, more fleshed-out and more recognizably Roman persona.23 It has been acknowledged that emphasis on the rhetorical (i.e. declamatory) persona risks figuring satire as either a frivolously ‘entertaining’ game without moral or cultural resonance, or a fundamentally moral parody of invective.24 In either scenario, paradoxically, the author’s intentions would be the most important source of meaning. But the rhetorical approach has another built-in flaw that has not been addressed. While the persona studies illuminate the range of personae in Juvenal’s work, they do not try to explain (or challenge future scholars to explore) why he adopted particular personae at particular points in his career. The persona approach essentially posits an ever-resourceful poet who adeptly switches from one persona type to another.25 While the general idea is plausible, it is of limited use in this undeveloped form. It implies that Juvenal was motivated only by his rhetorical competence and a drive to experiment, that he wrote frozen in time and in an intellectual vacuum. Nevertheless, attempts to account for specific changes in his approach to satire are rare and rarely consulted, as if reading in this vein might be seen as unwise regression to the biographical approach.26 The scholars who study satire as Roman discourse have not pointed to this problem, perhaps because they have not yet outlined an alternative strategy for interpreting changes across the oeuvre. Instead, genreoriented studies have tended to draw on ‘key’ poems of Juvenal that exhibit interesting satiric methods, such as the telling explorations of bodies and sexual deviance in 2, 6 and 9.27 Gestures to book division See especially Freudenburg 2001 and many of the essays in Freudenburg 2005. Many critics now see little value in what I call the basic ‘negative’ form of persona theory (which dwells on the distinction between author and speaker) and recommend a ‘positive’ model that focuses on the strategies of the speaker. On this matter, Wray 2001:€161–7 and P.A. Miller 2003:€51 are enlightening. Clay 1998 and Mayer 2003a argue that ancient audiences would not have consciously made an author/speaker distinction. 24 For criticisms in this vein see Freudenburg 2005:€28–9 and Green 1998:€xxviii. 25 E.g. Braund 1996a:€18:€‘By the end of Satire 6 … Juvenal … has exhausted the artistic possibilities of anger. So he needs to bring this venture in angry satire to a close.’ 26 Bellandi 1980 examines poetics, but leans on biography, arguing that Juvenal’s anger is his natural mode and that it bursts through even when he tries his hand at more conventional diatribe. In contrast, Lindo 1974 adumbrates a reading of Juvenal’s oeuvre as an evolving literary experiment in the self-conscious manner of the Augustan poets. 27 E.g. Gold 1998, Walters 1998, Habinek 2005:€185–8 and Gunderson 2005. Freudenburg 2001:€11–12 gestures to the new perspective reflected in Books 3 and 4 before focusing exclusively on Satires 23

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and structure seldom feature in studies of satire as social discourse. This may reflect deliberate avoidance of any approach that smacks of New Criticism. One result is that the later Satires, brought into the foreground in the rebalancing achieved by the persona studies, have slipped into the background again. Meanwhile, the sensationalist early Satires and others with prominent sexual or political content have occupied scholars’ attention. No truly comprehensive and theoretical study of Juvenalian satire has appeared since the concluding survey in Braund’s Beyond Anger. All of the Satires, by definition, should play some role in theories of satire; they represent a whole range€– five? sixteen? more?€– of ways to ‘do satire’. But we still lack a language with which to discuss the stages of Juvenal’s oeuvre. Whether or not we want to highlight these as representing stages in the poet’s life, we ought to be able to discuss their areas of difference and continuity. Until we do, the later Satires will be neglected as weak afterthoughts, and we will not fully appreciate Juvenal’s version of the satiric career. To begin this task, we need to pick up where the Â�persona studies left off, and consider the organization of the five books. A c a r e e r i n a ng e r a n d i t s a lt e r n at i v e s Four distinct rhetorical personae are employed over the five books of Satires:€ the angry, the ironic, the mocking and the cynical.28 Juvenal makes his persona types identifiable with two kinds of clues:€ declamatory rhetorical devices that convey the speaker’s emotional attitude, and statements that the speaker makes about emotions, which usually appear in the beginnings of poems or books. A third type of evidence consists of portraits of other characters that convey the effects of undesirable Â�emotion (usually anger); in these cases, the reader is supposedly being encouraged to mock the emotion or at least to recognize that the satirist is doing so.29 The following table outlines Juvenal’s personae and the clues that reflect their characteristics: 1–6. A. Hardie 1990:€152, analysing the speaker’s ‘personality’ in Satire 7, urges further investigation of the later Satires in this vein; compare Keane 2007. The next several paragraphs draw on Braund 1988 and W.S. Anderson 1982:€277–361. 29 The last is a trickier kind of evidence, in that it leaves room for circular reasoning that engages preconceived ideas about the satirist’s position. 28

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Book/Satires

Persona

Announced by

1 / 1–5

angry

rhetorical clues (e.g. over-generalizations, Â�aggressive rhetorical questions); the speaker’s references to Â�physiological manifestations of his emotion; speeches by angry characters (particularly in Satires 2 and 3) that elicit the speaker’s approval

2/6

angry

rhetorical clues (as above)

3 / 7–9

ironic

rhetorical clues (e.g. a less aggressive style of Â�expression, undercutting of explicit statements with alternative Â�perspectives); the speaker’s attitude of moral indifference; his subtle mockery of an angry interlocutor (9)

4 / 10–12

mocking

the speaker’s praise of laughter and condemnation of tears (10); topics suggestive of philosophical Â�detachment (human ambition, wealth and hospitality, friendship)

5 / 13–16

cynical

the speaker’s advice to addressee against vengefulness and naïveté (13); his condemnation of the violent anger of narrative subjects (15)

With this many different satiric modes on display, it is best not to Â�conflate ‘Juvenalian satire’ with any one. We could conclude that the collection does not tell a story about one satirist, but about many. But the persona studies reflect a different way of thinking. While the distinct performances in the individual books each provide evidence of Juvenal’s rhetorical versatility, the persona scholars also highlight moments of self-conscious contrast between books. The satiric mode of each book is accentuated by its differences from€– and sometimes by suggestive allusions to€– the others. Thus the persona theorists presuppose a poet behind the scenes, a self-conscious actor who regularly reminds his audience that he is behind every new mask. While this assumption is not discussed in the persona studies, it is the basis for their most tantalizing conclusions. When we envision a consistent poet behind the masks, we can discern not only significant variation, but a specific trajectory. The most noticeable contrasts are those between the angry Satires 1 through 6 and the ironic, mocking and cynical performances of each of the next three books. In each of the later books, the satirist appears to reject the extreme emotion that he exhibited previously, using dramatic characters to illustrate the negative effects of strong emotion. In the last poem of Book 3, the ranting of the angry gigolo Naevolus throws the satirist’s own recently acquired ironic perspective into sharper

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relief. At the opening of Book 4, the negative exemplar is the philosopher Heraclitus, who wept at examples of human folly; his foil Democritus wisely laughed at the same sights (10.28–32). The addressee of Satire 13 is the first straw man of Book 5:€Calvinus is portrayed as being consumed with unseemly and naïve anger after being defrauded of a sum of money. This accidental social critic is reminiscent of the early Juvenal, who seethes with indignation, but the satirist in this poem is cynical and worldly, not indignant. Later in the same book, in Satire 15, Juvenal also condemns Egyptian villagers who acted on their own rage towards Others and Â�cannibalized a neighbour during a brawl. In sum, it is not simply rhetorical experimentation that Juvenal undertakes in the Satires, but an extended exploration of the angry mode and its alternatives. Anderson all but acknowledges that such a reading posits a consistent author behind the masks:€ ‘The farther he gets away from Satire 1, the more outspoken does the satirist grow against his once cherished indignatio.’30 In other words, the story unrolled in the Satires revolves around the ‘actor’ Juvenal’s repeated consideration, from different angles, of the emotions that characterize his early satiric mode. To be sure, this narrative does not embed the poet in society, thematize his patronage relationships or relate personal intellectual progress. But it is inspired by those themes in Horace and Persius€– writing as therapy, friendship, philosophical retirement€– and is more usefully read as a dynamic narrative than as a series of isolated portraits. Each time Juvenal chooses a new Â�rhetorical mode, he conjures the memory of his first performance, Â�weaving his own career narrative. The openings of Books 4 and 5 contain the most strikingly selfÂ�conscious commentaries on the emotions, and especially invite a Â�revision of the traditional rhetorical interpretation. At the beginning of the panoramic Satire 10, which catalogues human ambitions and the disasters they inevitably incite, Juvenal imagines the philosopher Democritus transported from fifth-century Thrace to modern-day Rome (10.28–53). In the satirist’s vision, Democritus still finds the inner peace to laugh at what he sees around him (specifically, a parade that precedes the races and that embodies Roman hierarchy and pomp). The philosopher’s mentality, described as enviable tranquillitas by Seneca (Dialogue 9), becomes the foundation of the recommendations on prayer offered at the poem’s climax. Considering its important position in the book, the portrait of W.S. Anderson 1982:€290. Compare Braund 1996a:€22:€Satire 10 with its programmatic opening ‘amounts to a clear rejection of the angry mask adopted in the early satires’.

30

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Democritus looks like a declaration of Juvenal’s new satiric perspective as he commences once again to ponder human folly. The remaining two Satires of the book do seem to reflect a continuing desire for emotional detachment on the satirist’s part, an effect that is achieved partly through a continuation of the religious theme of Satire 10. The next two poems are set in the satirist’s domestic retreat, where he criticizes the bustle and ambition of the world outside and savours his own unpretentious social and religious rituals. For all the assertions of the persona theorists, however, this does not exactly represent an imitation of Democritus. The philosopher is described in Satire 10 as crossing his threshold (limen, 29) to watch Roman public rituals in action. In Satires 11 and 12, in contrast, the satirist writes from home, only imagining the social, religious and commercial activity of the city and the empire outside. He thus keeps his distance from the emotional urban crowd (envisioned in the tableau of the races at 11.193–202) and duplicitous, greedy individuals (the legacy hunters described at 12.95–130). On the safe side of his threshhold (meum … limen, 11.190), occupied with friendships and sacrifices, the satirist can remain relatively unperturbed. This is no Democritean experiment, but a pre-emptive retreat, which suggests that perhaps Juvenal cannot quite live up to the philosopher’s example. The contrasting sketches of Democritus and Heraclitus, then, do not so much prefigure the satirist’s own tranquillity in the poems to come as set an emotional goal that he is motivated to achieve€– one way or another. The portrait of the ideal initiates a dynamic plot in the book, in which the poet constructs his own ambivalent version of Democritean detachment.31 The other often-cited illustration of Juvenal’s increasing emotional detachment is the address to the angry Calvinus in Satire 13 (Book 5). The satirist’s addressee is fuming with indignation at the crime committed against him, and Juvenal criticizes his friend’s naïveté and vengefulness, recommending calm realism (‘Let’s put aside this excessive groaning’, 11). Like the earlier praise of Democritus, Satire 13 appears to advertise Juvenal’s own rejection of the indignant mode. While the satirist proposes to talk Calvinus out of his anger, his chosen strategies are really vehicles for his new cynical style of satire. His representation of human moral character is unvarnished, to say the least; he also vividly portrays the visceral pleasures of anger and the gratification that comes with envisioning See, however, A. Hardie 1990:€151–60 for the argument that a performance of non-tranquillitas can already be detected in Satire 7.

31

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revenge. Calvinus is both an unwilling exhibit and a near-silent participant in this drama.32 This new anti-anger programme must be more than a demonstration of rhetorical versatility. Why would the poet make a theme of the rejection of anger? More precisely, why would he construct such a reactive programme in order to demonstrate emotional detachment? After all, the satirist has not recently expressed anger himself. The mask of Book 4 is striving for amused tranquillity, and that of Book 3 is ironic. Anger is the mode of Juvenal’s first six Satires, those poems that represent satire-Â�writing as a visceral and therapeutic response to everyday outrages (‘indignation makes my verse’, 1.79). Although that all changes in Books 3 and 4, in Book 5 Juvenal returns to the theme of indignatio. Indeed, he revives it, specifically the notion of anger’s appeal, in the character of his frustrated friend. In this way, Juvenal reminds his reader of anger’s pleasures and its dangers even as he makes a show of condemning it.33 If Satire 13 is programmatic for Book 5, then the programmatic theme that it puts forth is this conflict between the allure of anger and the need for reason. This idea should also prompt us to adjust the traditional rhetorical interpretation of Satire 15 on the angry cannibals, according to which the inflamed Egyptians are a foil for the rational satirist. In 15, the satiric speaker is again preoccupied with the problem of anger; it is (in the fiction) encroaching on his world for the second time in one book, and prompting him to respond. But Juvenal chose this angry subject. To be sure, he does not start out the poem in the angry mode, but resembles the speaker of Satires 13 and 14. As anger becomes his theme, however, it also gradually erodes his air of detachment and permeates his rhetoric. The grisly account of the cannibalistic act (33–92), and the invocation of humanity’s lost capacity for reason in the final section (131–74), make Satire 15 look almost as angry as the early poems. In condemning the cannibals’ anger, the satirist is both sarcastic and hyberbolic (‘You won’t find a worthy punishment … for a people in whose minds anger and hunger are one and the same’, 129–31). The rhetorical question that opens the poem suggests dry world-weariness (‘Who has not heard of the perverse beliefs of the Egyptians?’, 1–2), but the one that ends it is far more indignant, in the style of the early Satires (‘What would Pythagoras, the vegetarian philosopher, say?’, 171–4). As the Egyptian mob in the poem See Braund 1997. Calvinus emits groans (gemitus, 11), feels resentment (dolor, 12) and burns inside (spumantibus ardens / uisceribus, 14–15)€– similar symptoms to those exhibited by the angry Juvenal and his ancestor Lucilius (1.45, 152–3, 165–6). 33 Harris 2002:€225–7 gives a brief cultural and literary interpretation of anger in Juvenal. 32

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closes in on and consumes its unfortunate neighbour, in a moment that dissolves the boundaries between the equally ‘perverse’ communities of Egypt, so too the satirist seems to have swallowed his angry subjects and thereby stirred up his own capacity for savagery.34 In Book 5, anger is dynamic, not simply an object of the satirist’s study. It infects his narrative subjects and tests his own emotional stability, in the way that the troubling sights of the city did in Book 4. A programmatic sentiment or exemplar may be prescriptive, but is not necessarily descriptive, as the original persona studies posited. In these two cases, the programmatic discussions look like portrayals of dilemmas, not of decisions firmly made. The two books dramatize a struggle between the satirist’s new, selfpreserving emotional stance and the alternatives of anger, despair and other destructive passions. Enriching the larger plot that spans the series of five books, there are even plots within the individual books of Satires, linked by the image of the author constantly revising his approach to the genre. As Juvenal composed Book 1 with its portrait of the rhetorically qualified, and indignant, satirist, he may well not have anticipated his future shifts to irony, mockery and cynicism. Nevertheless, the Satires grow into a story that has as its foundation the image of the angry neophyte satirist. This fictionalized career narrative is not an autobiography; rather, it enacts Juvenal’s re-invention and negotiation of his genre by means of the anger theme. Although anger becomes one of many modes at which this satirist excels, it is cast as the one with the most persistent allure€– no doubt because it is associated with his own debut and sets him so decidedly apart from his predecessors. The strong and vividly portrayed emotion of the early persona becomes the foil for the alternative stances of irony, amusement and cynicism, further highlighting the poet’s chosen rhetorical shifts. Juvenal begins his career as the angry, passionate satirist, who cannot ‘not write satire’ (1.30). His dramatic entrance into the genre initiated centuries of biographical interpretation, and eventually motivated scholars’ emphatic separation of poet from persona. In short, Juvenal’s early indignant performance helped to change the way Roman satire was read. It would be throwing the baby out with the bath water to label the satirist’s series of personae as simply a parade of mastered styles, each having equal significance in his generic recipe. Although his first performance is both disingenuous and finite, the poet draws on its energy again and again€– reviving the notion of a satiric career inspired and shaped by experience and reception€– as he re-fashions himself and his genre. 34

╇ Keane 2006:€68–71.

Ch apter 6

The indistinct literary careers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel

The careers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger go well together. Or at least so Pliny, who explicitly modelled himself on Cicero, would have hoped.1 Both were men of equestrian and non-Roman origins, noui homines who rose to the consulship (although Pliny notes at Epist. 4.8.5 that he attained both consulship and augurate while younger than Cicero), masters of eloquence in senate and law court, and recognized practitioners of a wide range of literary genres, including forensic oratory, poetry and epistolography. Pliny of course was well aware of the gulf in talent and, no less important, in political and forensic opportunities under the Principate which separated him from Cicero under the old Republic.2 Within the context of the present collection, nevertheless, the literary careers of Cicero and Pliny are a productive pairing, inasmuch as they both exhibit a certain indistinctness. However, the reasons for the indistinctness of each author’s career differ in meaningful ways. These differences, as will be suggested later in the paper, possess significance in the context of the post-Ciceronian emergence of the ideal of a literary career€ – associated above all with Virgil€– which pursues a trajectory from humbler to higher genres.3 One conclusion of the second part of this paper will be to affirm the usefulness of the ‘Virgilian’ literary career as a way of thinking about the careers of other Classical authors. In particular, validation will be sought for Joe Farrell’s argument that ‘In all cases, the career of the patron class is the standard of reference against which the literary career defines itself or is judged.’â•›4 In sum, according to Farrell, ‘the careerist See Pliny, Epist. 1.2.4, 1.5.12, 1.20, 3.15.1, 4.8.4, Cugusi 1983:€223–5. See Pliny, Epist. 2.14, 4.8.5–6, 9.2, Mayer 2003b:€227–9. 3 This ideal literary career may of course be a creation of Virgil’s inheritors rather than the poet himself; see the contribution of Putnam to this volume, which emphasizes continuity and circularity in the Virgilian corpus. 4 Farrell 2002:€43. 1

2

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ideology of the patron class’€– obsessed as it is with progression up the strict sequence of the political cursus honorum€ – plays a direct role in shaping the idea of the literary career.5 From the first part of the present paper, however, it may inferred that Farrell’s taxonomy of pre-Â�Virgilian literary careers may require some broadening, since he presents a spectrum of patterns established for a literary career by the end of the Republic which leaves little room for Cicero. The four basic patterns identified are:€a) a complicitous relationship (where a poet’s literary career enhances a patron’s political position on the cursus honorum); b) a competitive relationship (where a poet’s literary career both enhances and competes with his patron’s political career); c) a complementary relationship (where ‘men of the patron class … write poetry in their leisure time and ha[ve] the good taste not to write in praise of their own achievements’ (Farrell 2002:43)); and d) an antithetical relationship (where the literary career is seen as alternative to the political career). These patterns provide the larger context within which the Virgilian pattern arose; but none, of course, quite works for Cicero. It is not only poets who may have a literary career, but prose writers too. It is one of the purposes of this paper to suggest that room be made for the literary careers of prose authors. C ic e ro’s i n di s t i nc t l i t e r a r y c a r e e r In terms of the varieties of literary career open to Roman writers outlined above, Cicero falls between the third and fourth stools:€ some of his writings, such as his lyric poetry, are clearly the product of the otium of a Roman aristocrat, whilst others€ – most obviously, the philosophical works of the 40s BC€ – are set up as an alternative to his political activity, in abeyance at that time due to Caesar’s dictatorship. But stating the problem in these terms indicates the extent to which invocation of the writer–patron model cannot cover the blurred and indistinct case of Cicero. Equally, however, simply to classify Cicero’s writing as the (un) reflecting mirror of a Roman politician’s public life misses the dynamic relationship between writing, authority and memorialization in the late Republic, to the development of which nexus Cicero was a major€– but not unique€– contributor. If the development of poetic genres at Rome can be clearly understood within the framework of aristocratic patronage, prose writing was, from 5

╇ Farrell 2002:€44; see also 35.

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its beginnings, more complex.6 Historiography was a leisure occupation for the political classes as well as the potential product of patronage, and liable to the distortions imposed by family pride.7 Other forms of prose writing reflected the interests and expertise of the ruling classes:€ most obviously, agriculture and law.8 In disseminating such works, their authors were presumably conscious of their own reputations as men whose lives were dedicated to the service of the Roman state. These prose works were all the result of their authors’ volition, who had made a choice first to write and then to disseminate:€if writing was an acceptable use of otium for members of the senatorial class, it was by no means expected or demanded. Oratory was a different matter:€formal speech was one of the activities expected from a man in public life, rather than an acceptable diversion. But the transition from oral delivery to written form was not automatic:€it depended upon the orator’s choosing to prepare and disseminate a written text. Much of Cicero’s written corpus should be seen, therefore, as the result of a series of decisions about what it would be appropriate for him to write at any particular time and what was possible. The constraints included the time for writing and mental capacity as well as what his public career allowed. Thus, the composition of poetry was in theory always possible,9 whereas written speeches had to follow appearances in court.10 Cicero’s speeches, indeed, provide a clear demonstration of the capacity of written texts of speeches to contribute to self-promotion in public life. As Crawford has shown, the numerical relationship between the number of speeches which Cicero delivered and the number which he disseminated in written form varies very considerably over the course of his public career from his first legal case in 81 BC down to the final Philippic in 44 BC.11 Initially, he disseminated a high proportion of his cases; later, the proportion drops noticeably. It is easy to establish an explanatory framework:€at the start of his public life, he needed all the attention he could generate; later, he had more freedom to select what he preserved.12 ╇ 7 Rawson 1985; Courtney 1999; Goldberg 2005. Wiseman 1979. Cato, Agr.; on early legal writing, see Rawson 1985:€201–14. ╇ 9 Cicero wrote poetry from his adolescence onwards; see Courtney 1993:€149–78. 10 Two of Cicero’s most famous speeches, or sets of speeches€ – the Verrines, and the Second Philippic€– were never delivered; in both cases there were good reasons why delivery had not been possible, and the written versions rely on the illusion that the speeches had been given. 11 Crawford 1984:€1–21. 12 Steel 2005:€21–8. ╇ 6 ╇ 8

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The result of Cicero’s choices about whether or not to write up a speech is a heavily edited account of Cicero the orator:€one which has largely removed his failures, his obscure clients and the grosser humiliÂ� ations of court and Senate. The written speeches€ – of which a large though by no means complete record survives€– provide the wherewithal to construct a narrative of Cicero’s public career, which demonstrates its own set of generic transitions within oratory, from civil to criminal law and from forensic to deliberative oratory, as the range of locations and circumstances for speech expand as Cicero rises up the political cursus. Indeed, Cicero draws attention to the novelty of the circumstances of the delivery of a speech where appropriate. The first sentence of On the Command of Gnaeus Pompeius underlines the fact that this is the first occasion on which Cicero has addressed the Roman people.13 In the exordium of In Defence of Sextus Roscius of Ameria he ascribes surprise to the jurors, that he, Cicero, should be undertaking the defence, given his youth, lack of talent and lack of authority. He then revels in these characteristics, establishing them as qualifications to undertake resistance to ‘an abuse concocted by a new type of criminality’.14 In On Behalf of Marcellus, over thirty years later, Cicero combines the appeal to novelty with reference to his own established practice:€Caesar’s unprecedented mercy paradoxically enables Cicero to return to his ‘original habit’ of speaking.15 The narrative of Cicero which emerges from his speeches is nonetheless a partial and lacunose account. The generic conventions of written speeches get in the way; so strong is the illusion that what one is reading is a record of what was said that framing material which could contribute towards understanding the context is excised.16 Combined with the denseness of legal argument, in some of the forensic cases, and of allusion to contemporary political events, this austerity of presentation was demonstrably causing readers difficulties within a generation of Cicero’s death, as Asconius’ set of explanatory notes on five speeches indicates.17 In

Cic. Leg. Man 1; Steel 2001:€174–6. Cic. Rosc. Am. 1; on the rhetorical strategies of this exordium more generally, see Loutsch 1994:€127–74. 15 Cic. Marcell. 1. 16 Indeed, the written texts seem to offer a more unified and coherent account than would have been the case, eliminating the cross-examination of witnesses, for example:€see Humbert 1925. 17 Marshall 1985:€26–38. 13

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large part, one can make a narrative out of Cicero’s speeches only because there are so many of them.18 In the aftermath of Catilina’s attempted coup, Cicero’s attention turned explicitly to the question of how to record his activities and ensure that a favourable account of them dominated the historical record. In part he did so through a collection of ‘consular speeches’, which contained the oratorical highlights of his year as consul, but his attention turned also to the potential of poetry and history to preserve his memory.19 Initially he addressed the problem as one which could be solved through patronage. One of the poets he identified was A. Licinius Archias, who had built a long and, it seems, reasonably prosperous career through responding to the desires of the elite to have their achievements recorded. Cicero defended him on a charge of usurping citizenship in 62 BC and hoped that Archias would reciprocate with a poem on Cicero’s consulship; he was to be disappointed in this, however, and as far as we can tell from the letters he did not look for a substitute poet.20 For a history, he turned to Posidonius, to whom he sent an outline account:€Posidonius declined the commission, on the grounds that Cicero’s own prose draft needed no embellishment.21 Cicero’s next documented candidate for historian is Lucceius, to whom Cicero wrote a famous and much-discussed letter.22 This commission too was apparently not taken up. It is too easy to see Cicero’s difficulties here as a mildly comic commentary on vanity and lack of judgement after his consulship. As an episode in the history of Roman patronage, it deserves considerable attention, both for the independence displayed by the intellectuals approached and for the range of possible relationships between the one who commissions a work and the one who is commissioned. Posidonius had no qualms about turning Cicero down; Archias, a much more obscure figure, does not seem to have said no with the same directness, but nonetheless communicated his lack of enthusiasm successfully. These men relied on the Roman elite for their prosperity to a greater or lesser extent, but were by no means dependent upon specific Romans. At the same time, patronage was not always the relationship involved:€Lucceius was Cicero’s social and political equal. In asking him to write his history in a way that took There is a comparison here to be made with the elder Cato, whose output of speeches was similarly voluminous; but Cato also wrote history. Consular orations:€Att. 2.1.3. 20 Att. 1.16.15, in which Cicero also refers to Thyillus, otherwise unknown, as someone who has not written poetry for him. 21 Att. 2.1.2. 22 Fam. 5.12; Hall 1998. 18

19

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Cicero’s interests into account Cicero was asking a favour of a friend and not making a request of a client. Faced with uncooperative writers, Cicero elected to provide his own memorialization, and chose poetry as well as prose as a suitable medium. In so doing he does appear to have done something new in terms of the generic range of an elite writer; he also innovated in the nature of the epic he wrote, combining the divine apparatus of hexameter epic with the traditions of self-serving prose autobiography already well established in Latin literature.23 It was not a successful experiment, if judged by audience reaction; but it can be seen as a decision to control both message and publication timetable by eliminating dependence on the writing skills, and diligence, of another. Cicero never wrote a full-scale piece of conventional historiography, a gap in his output to which he draws attention in the opening of De Legibus.24 His explanation there is that history requires a commitment of time which he cannot provide. One might speculate further on his reasons. One may have been a lack of fit between what Cicero felt should be recorded and the usual preoccupations of Roman historiography. In particular, his consulship had been exclusively civilian:€indeed, this became one of the aspects of his conduct in 63 BC he stressed. He might well have felt hesitant about setting himself up in a form easily to be compared with, most obviously, Pompeius Magnus, whose historian, Theophanes of Mytilene, was recording his conquest of the east at this very time.25 Moreover, the letter to Lucceius betrays a consciousness of the difficulty which attends the writing of history where the historian himself is one of the characters; Cicero may well have concluded that it was impossible to combine the intellectual dignity of a historian with his own urgent need to establish his version of events.26 Caesar, of course, demonstrated only a few years later that this could be done; and Cicero acknowledges his achievement in Brutus.27 But it is not easy to see how Cicero could have successfully accomplished it. Until the outbreak of civil war in 49 BC, Cicero’s literary activity is marked by generic flexibility and inventiveness, but it is hard to see any specific concern for a literary career:€ the point of writing is initially to assist his public career and then, increasingly, to ensure that his achievements in public life are remembered in the right way. It is his ascent of the political cursus which provides the energy and framework for his writing. 23

24 Steel 2005:€55–9. Leg. 1.5–12. Fam. 5.12.8. 27 Brut. 262.

26

W.S. Anderson 1963.

25

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During and after the civil war the relationship between writing and political career changes:€ two phases can be discerned, the first the period down to Caesar’s murder€ – during which Cicero wrote many, though not all, of his philosophical works€– and the second the year and a half between Caesar’s death and Cicero’s own assassination. In neither period can one speak of a straightforward literary career; but during the last five years of his life Cicero did explore new ways of structuring, and promoting, his writing. Throughout his rhetorical and philosophical writing Cicero is concerned to justify the activity as an appropriate occupation for the otium of a Roman statesman, but these concerns take on particular resonance after the civil war, where there is no negotium to act as a counterweight. The writing of philosophy is then presented as the best way that Cicero can now fulfil his duties towards the State.28 And he also displays an awareness that generic completeness is an issue within philosophy.29 In the period after Caesar’s death, Cicero’s use of writing undergoes a further evolution into a dynamic tool in its own right, something which initiates events and is not merely the recorder and commentator upon them. This is a distinction one should not press too far, inasmuch as some of Cicero’s letters, throughout his career, were intended to secure a specific outcome. But during the intense struggle with Antonius Cicero’s letters to magistrates throughout the empire become a major factor in his efforts to orchestrate, and control, a broad and desperately unstable coalition in support of the Senate. They work in parallel with the Philippics; the written texts of these speeches are primarily records, but uniquely among Cicero’s oratory record a story whose ending Cicero does not himself know at the time of writing. The Philippics derive a large part of their distinctive power from the sense they convey of unfolding and unpredictable events, as well as from the reader’s knowledge with hindsight of their part in leading to Cicero’s death. During this final period, writing has become central to the operation of politics:€and, as Butler has shown, this shift is captured by the stories which are told about the nature and aftermath of Cicero’s death.30 See, for example, Tusc. 1.1, Diu. 2.1. Cicero includes within his philosophical corpus some of his rhetorical works, using the example of Aristotle and Theophrastus as justification (De Diuinatione 2.1.4). But one could slice up the whole differently to create a group of rhetorical works (e.g. De Inuentione, De Oratore, Orator, Brutus, Topica, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Partitiones Oratoriae), a grouping which demonstrates that writing on rhetorical theory, just as writing poetry, was an option available to Cicero throughout his career. On the political ambitions of the Tusculans, see now Gildenhard 2007. 29 Diu. 2.4, where there is reference to the reliqua, the remaining, unwritten, books of philosophy. 30 Butler 2002. 28

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So, for Cicero, writing is essential to his career€– but writing derives its meaning from other activities. His literary career is entirely subordinated to the needs of his career as a politician, and generic profligacy is the result:€ his strategy is based on using texts to multiply possibilities for communication and directed, in a very clear and obvious way, by the external political climate. Indeed, one could argue that the problem which Cicero has as a writer is not how to place himself within the generic and chronological structures of a Roman literary career, but how to fashion a convincing and coherent form of narrative which can record his political career. Cicero never tells the story of Cicero the writer; but more intriguingly, and despite his prolific and largely solipsistic output, he never in a straightforward way tells the story of Cicero.31 And that is undoubtedly the omission which Cicero himself found more frustrating. Pl i n y ’s i n di s t i nc t l i t e r a r y c a r e e r Pliny’s literary career, it will be argued below, ultimately shares the same quality of indistinctness possessed by Cicero’s literary career. But if Cicero’s generically profligate ‘indistinctness’ is driven by the demands of political opportunism, similar opportunism was clearly not an option for Pliny the Younger. The latter operated under a system where one man alone now had the monopoly of political agency and attendant fame. Pliny’s own literary career is not driven by the subordination of his output to the needs of his career as a politician:€he is too obsessed with his own literary fame for that (in the absence of any real opportunity for political fame).32 Rather, it is driven by the desire to rise above the new Virgilian model of generic progression and to suggest a ‘Ciceronian’ attitude to generic progression (albeit one now stripped of any political significance). But where Cicero was flexible in relation to genre and its attendant hierarchies, Pliny shall be selfconsciously ‘indifferent’. The poetic career of Pliny the Younger€– for the Younger did write poetry (as we shall see), even if little of it survives€– conforms to the type of career identified by Farrell as being ‘complementary’.33 For according In Brut. 305–19 Cicero offers an account of his intellectual formation; but he stops this story at the point where his public life begins. See Epist. 5.8. All translations of Pliny are taken or adapted from B. Radice or P. G. Walsh (whose use is gratefully acknowledged). 33 Farrell 2002:€43 (quoted above); poetry thus produced was meant ‘to provide momentary relief from the ubiquitous pressures of a political career’ (Farrell 2002: 41). 31

32

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to its author’s own most common descriptions, Pliny’s poetry is firmly in the ‘nugatory’ mode, a product of otium. But if we look at Pliny’s entire ‘literary’ output€ – not just his poetry, but also his letters and ‘Ciceronian’ courtroom speeches€– then an interestingly different picture begins to emerge. Farrell notes that, ‘For later ages, Virgil’s gradual ascent from humbler to grander genres was generally regarded as defining the ideal poetic career’34€– and the Virgilian model, arguably, had already begun to wield its influence in Pliny’s time. But Pliny’s own literary career invites reading as a species of reaction against the Virgilian model of a generic cursus honorum. A non-senator such as Virgil might rise through the genres in a progression that could be interpreted as parallel to an ascent to the summit of Roman political offices. How then might Pliny€– who was in fact a senator and rose up the actual cursus honorum in strict sequence€– fashion his own literary career? Pliny was perfectly capable of reproducing the Virgilian model€– and additionally of linking it with a rising political career€– as is clear from a reading of Epist. 3.5. This letter was destined to have great influence in shaping the reputation and reception of the Elder Pliny,35 and in it the Younger Pliny fashions for his uncle and adopted father a literary career which moves upwards through the prose genres, culminating in the latter’s master work, the Natural History. The letter is addressed to one Baebius Macer, Pliny’s fellow Transpadane,36 whose ‘close study of [Pliny’s] uncle’s books has made [him] wish to possess them all and ask for a complete list’. Pliny goes on (3.5.2): fungar indicis partibus, atque etiam quo sint ordine scripti notum tibi faciam; est enim haec quoque studiosis non iniucunda cognitio. I shall perform the role of an index, and I shall also inform you of the order in which the books were written, for this too is knowledge which scholars are pleased to have.

The complete listing of the Elder’s seven works is as follows (reproduced here in tabular form with Pliny’s interspersed commentary and context):37 Farrell 2002:€24. 35 See S. Carey 2003:€5–7, 10–11. For the addressee, who is mentioned or receives a letter elsewhere at 4.9.16–17, 19, 4.12.4, 6.24, see Birley 2000:€41 s.v. 37 For Pliny the Elder’s career, see Healy 1999:€1–30, also Beagon 1992:€1–25; 2005:€1–5; SherwinWhite 1966:€219–21. 34 36

Cicero and Pliny the Younger Title

Translation

1

De Iaculatione Equestri unus

2

127

Younger’s Comments

Translation

Throwing the Javelin from Horseback (one volume)

hunc cum praefectus alae militaret, pari ingenio curaque composuit

A work of industry and talent, written when he was a junior officer in the cavalry

De Vita Pomponi Secundi duo

The Life of Pomponius Secundus (two volumes)

a quo singulariter amatus hoc memoriae amici quasi debitum munus exsoluit.

My uncle was greatly loved by him and felt he owed this homage to his friend’s memory.

3

Bellorum Germaniae uiginti

The German Wars (twenty volumes)

incohauit cum in Germania militaret, somnio monitus:€ astitit ei quiescenti Drusi Neronis effigies …

He began this during his military service in Germany, as the result of a dream; in his sleep he saw standing over him the ghost of Drusus Nero …

4

Studiosi tres

The Scholar (three volumes)

quibus oratorem ab incunabulis instituit et perficit.

in which he trains the orator from his cradle and brings him to perfection.

5

Dubii Sermonis octo

Problems in Grammar (eight volumes)

scripsit sub Nerone nouissimis annis, cum omne studiorum genus paulo liberius et erectius periculosum seruitus fecisset.

this he wrote during Nero’s last years, when the slavery of the times made it dangerous to write anything at all independent or inspired.

6

A Fine Aufidi Bassi triginta unus

A Continuation of the History of Aufidius Bassus (thirtyone volumes)

[none]

7

Naturae Historiarum triginta septem

A Natural History (thirty-seven volumes)

opus diffusum eruditum, nec minus uarium quam ipsa natura

a learned and comprehensive work as full of variety as nature itself

In his recent monograph on Pliny’s third book of Letters, John Henderson identifies a number of ‘progressions’ in this catalogue of the Elder Pliny’s works.38 The first involves a move from the military life (1, (2), 3) Henderson 2002:€97–100. For the details of the various works mentioned and subjects covered, see Healy 1999:€31–5.

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to civic life (4, (5)), to full imperial history (6), and finally to natural history (7). Alongside this operates a progression from Pomponius Secundus (2) to Drusus Nero, the hero of his work on the German wars (3). Pliny ascends from the personal (a biography of his early patron Pomponius Secundus) to military history and the personal-national (Germany and Drusus Nero). Having brought this stage of his career to a close, the Elder (in the words of Henderson) now ‘trains himself as scholar and stylist’ (4, 5)€– composing a handbook of rhetoric and a work of grammar during the last years of Nero’s malign reign39€– ‘before raising his game to full imperial history’, by continuing where the historian Aufidius Bassus had left off (6). At the end of his career Pliny produces ‘a learned and comprehensive work as full of variety as nature itself’. Here is a classic Virgilian style ascent from low to high, from small to big. Starting out with a single-volume work on one aspect of military tactics in one technical area, the Elder Pliny ends his career with his longest work, an ‘epic’ thirty-seven-volume monster on Nature herself. Indeed one could argue the Younger has deliberately engineered the list of the Elder’s works so as to make the parallel clearer. The latter evidently conceived of his Natural History as a representative national work to rival and even replace the Georgics and Aeneid,40 but in the preface to that work nevertheless implies it is a mere ‘trifle’ when compared to his continuation of the history of Aufidius Bassus (Nat. praef. 18–20; compare 1). In the same passage, he declares that this apparently greater work, although already written and ready to appear, is to be reserved for posthumous publication. It will (necessarily) be his final work. By contrast, not only is the Younger conspicuously silent on this magnum opus of Flavian history€– these are the only volumes in the list to pass without authorial comment€– but his decision to list the works in order of composition, rather than in order of publication, ensures that is the Natural History which now rounds off the Elder’s career (rather against the tenor of the wishes expressed in the preface to that work).41 Rising in parallel with the Elder’s literary career, as the Younger’s own commentary strongly hints, is the uncle’s political career.42 This slight disruption in the otherwise smooth trajectory of the Elder Pliny can fruitfully be read within the context of the ideal Virgilian literary career:€ bad emperors may cause authors to stall in their generic ascent; Virgil under Augustus rose unimpeded. However, the Elder’s political career may have continued under Nero without serious interruption; see M. T. Griffin 1992:€438–9. 40 See Bruère 1956; Howe 1985:€570–2. 41 See further Gibson (forthcoming 2011). 42 Healy 1999:€2, 5–6 fills in the specific details of the Elder’s rising early career. An equestrian, by the time of the Elder Pliny, did have his own career path to follow, rising from militiae 39

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Nevertheless€– and this is the point which requires emphasis€– the Elder Pliny remained all his life an equestrian, and never became a senator (unlike his nephew).43 The junior posts to which the Younger refers here€– along with the more senior posts to which he alludes later€– in Epist. 3.5 are all equestrian positions. Is it significant that the clearest example in the whole of Pliny’s Letters of a Virgilian ‘gradual ascent from humbler to grander genres’ is constructed for a man of this rank and order? Not only that, but the Elder’s rise through the genres is nudgingly associated, at least at the early stages of his career, with his rise through equestrian positions. Furthermore, in the sequence of letters 3.5–7 the Younger is strongly focused on issues of rank and status. If Epist. 3.5 is a kind of monument to an equestrian career, then 3.6, as Henderson also suggests€ – wherein Pliny describes a statue he has bought€– is a monument to the Younger Pliny’s senatorial aspirations. On the pedestal of this statue, to be set up in the temple of Jupiter in Pliny’s home town of Comum, will be inscribed nomen meum honoresque (‘my name and official titles’). That is to say, the base will carry Pliny’s own cursus honorum, which of course would include the consulship, so recently achieved in AD 100. And 3.7 focuses on both the (chequered) political career and (second-rate) literary career of the recently deceased ex-consul Silius Italicus.44 My suggestion of some significance for the construction of a Virgilian generic progress for a rising equestrian, is perhaps lent some support by a subsequent letter in which the Younger Pliny comments very pointedly on both his own (‘superior’) status and that of Virgil. In Epist. 5.3 he defends his own ‘far from serious verse’ (uersiculos seueros parum), insisting that it ‘it is an honour to imitate their lighter as well as their more serious work’ (quorum non seria modo uerum etiam lusus exprimere laudabile est). The models he has in mind are all senators, and include (not insignificantly equestres through the post of procurator to one of the various prefectures; but it is fair to say that the equestrian ‘cursus’ lacked the history, dignity and indeed clarity of the senatorial cursus. 43 For the Elder’s pride in his equestrian rank, see also the famous passage on the history of the order at Nat. 33.29–36; for the Natural History itself as the product specifically of equestrian interests and emphases, see Beagon 2005:€16–17. Henderson 2002:€97 wittily glosses the title of the Elder’s first work De Iaculatione Equestri as ‘Mounting the Missile:€ On Equestrian Pride’. 44 The sequence 3.5–7 is further bound together by the pointed allusion in the Younger’s unflattering description of Silius Italicus’ magnum opus at 3.7.5 (scribebat carmina maiore cura quam ingenio) to the earlier description at 3.5.3 of the Elder’s first literary effort (hunc cum praefectus alae militaret, pari ingenio curaque composuit). The Elder’s first work, so the allusion strongly suggests, showed greater evidence of cura and ingenium than Silius’s national epic.

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for this paper) Cicero, as well as Asinius Pollio, Memmius and some (if not all) emperors (5.3.6): Neronem enim transeo, quamuis sciam non corrumpi in deterius quae aliquando etiam a malis, sed honesta manere quae saepius a bonis fiunt. inter quos uel praecipue numerandus est P. Vergilius, Cornelius Nepos et prius Accius Enniusque. non quidem hi senatores, sed sanctitas morum non distat ordinibus. I except Nero, though I know that what is the occasional practice of the vicious is not corrupted thereby, but retains its integrity through being the usual practice of the virtuous. In the latter class Virgil, Cornelius Nepos, and, before their date, Accius and Ennius must rank high:€ it is true they are not senators, but moral integrity knows no class distinctions.

Putting Pliny’s pointed awareness of the non-senatorial status of Virgil in Epist. 5.3 together with the construction of a Virgilian-style generic ascent for his rising equestrian uncle in 3.5, we might possibly attribute to Pliny an underlying desire to associate this style of literary career with nonsenators. Such a desire might ultimately, of course, be defeated (as we shall see later). But the plausibility of attributing such a desire to him may receive support from some other circumstances, namely the manner in which Pliny chooses to reveal his own ‘literary career’. The first three books of Pliny’s letters appear to have a dramatic date of AD 96–103.45 These books contain numerous references to prose works written up for publication or circulation by Pliny himself, including his forensic oratory, other speeches, and Letters.46 Running alongside Pliny’s discussions of his own literary works or works in progress are numerous references to the literary activities of others, either those of his own friends and acquaintances or in Rome at large. In Books 1–3 the majority of such references are to endeavours by others in the field of poetry47 (although it is noticeable that Pliny attempts to insinuate himself into the role of The dramatic dates of Pliny’s books remain controversial (their publication dates even more so); for one reconstruction, see Sherwin-White 1966:€41. 46 Epistles 1–3 contain four letters on his own speeches (1.2, 1.8, 2.5, 2.19); two on the Panegyricus (3.13, 3.18); one on a eulogy for the deceased son of an amicus (3.10); and two references to the progress of his own letters as a literary work (1.1, 3.20). For the order of Pliny’s ‘career’ in speeches published or edited in AD 96–8, see Sherwin-White 1966:€91 on Epist. 1.2.6; for his later speeches, see Sherwin-White 1966:€334 on Epist. 5.8.6. For Pliny’s increasing awareness, over the course of his letter collections, of the full status of letters as a separate genre, see Fitzgerald 2007. 47 Pliny praises the excellent verses of Titinius Capito on the latter’s heroes (1.17), urges Octavius Rufus to circulate his poems (2.10), describes the leisure-time composition of lyric verses by Spurinna (3.1), sets out the literary and political career of the recently dead Silius Italicus (3.7), and informs Cornelius Priscus at length of the death of the poet Martial (3.21). See also 1.3 (an encouragement to Caninius Rufus to write something that will last), 1.16 (on the mixed literary production of Pompeius Saturninus), and€– of course€– 3.5 (on the prose output of the Elder). 45

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Ciceronian senior literary statesman here).48 Of his own poetry, however, there is no mention by Pliny until Book 4, where he takes care to mention it in four separate letters (4.14, 4.18, 4.19, 4.27), alongside continuing references to his speeches (4.5, 4.19, 4.26; compare 4.9.23, 4.20). This fact is remarked upon by Sherwin-White:49 The letters about Pliny’s versification begin in IV and continue through to IX. The longer letters form an orderly series:€ here his first volume of hendecasyllables is introduced [= IV.14], V.3 gives his reply to criticism of it, VII.4, 9–14 is an account of its composition, VIII.21 announces his second volume of verses. Interspersed are shorter references … Certain cross references tie these letters to the chronological frameworks of the books … There are no references to his verses in I–III, although his elder friends are mentioned as amateurs of the game … The total absence of any reference to his versification in I–III is in striking contrast to his parade of it from IV onwards.

So, why does Pliny introduce us to his poetry only at this moment in his ‘literary career’, long after the letters and speeches? Pliny’s purpose can perhaps be understood best by looking at Epist. 4.14, which sets out the author’s poetic programme and practice. Pliny has not published epic or a tragedy, but rather a book of (Catullan) Â�hendecasyllables.50 From 4.14 it emerges that the hendecasyllables are a product of leisure time (2 ‘… with which I amuse myself when I have time to spare in my carriage, my bath, or at dinner’), and the subject matter and style of the book is deliberately varied (3 ‘here are my jokes and witticisms, my loves, sorrows, complaints and vexations; now my style is simple, now more elevated’), even to the point of including some indelicate work (petulantiora)€– although this is justified (4) by the precedent of ‘distinguished and serious writers’, who refrained neither from lasciuia nor ‘plain language’. Pliny adds that he has not gone so far in this direction as his models, but in his defence maintains the arguments of Catullus poem 16 (5), and ends the letter with the reminder that his poems are ancillary to his main literary career€– by which he means, most In Epist. 3.15.1 Pliny responds to Silius Proculus’ request for comment on the addressee’s own poems and the flattering remark of the latter that ‘Cicero was wonderfully generous about encouraging the talent of poets’. In 1.13 Pliny welcomes the new crop of (nameless) poets that April has brought to Rome, in a manner that is reminiscent of the reception given by Horace to the poetic efforts of Julius Florus and his young friends (Epist. 1.3) or€– less kindly (and perhaps more accurately)€– of the list of non-entities pointedly provided by Ovid in his review of the literary scene in his absence from Rome (Epist. Pont. 4.16). 49 Sherwin-White 1966:€ 289; see also Fantham 1996:€ 217; Hoffer 1999:€ 166–7; I. Marchesi 2008: 67–8. 50 On Pliny’s poetry in general, see now I. Marchesi 2008:€53–96; also Hershkowitz 1995; Gamberini 1983:€82–121; compare the commentary of Courtney 1993:€367–70 on the surviving fragments. 48

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probably, his career as a publisher of speeches in the mould of Cicero and others in the past (and for which his Letters act, at least initially, as a kind of insurance policy).51 The kind of poetry which Pliny writes can now be put together with the moment at which the author chooses to introduces his poetry. His hendecasyllables appear in Book 4, immediately after the book which marks Pliny’s arrival in the top stratum of Roman society. On 1 September, AD 100, Pliny became consul.52 This moment is underlined in Book 3 by Pliny’s references to the reading and revision of his Panegyricus, a speech addressed to Trajan and rendering thanks for his ascension to the summit of the cursus honorum. It is only after this key progression in his political career that Pliny chooses to reveal in Book 4 the next step in his literary career. Having extensively trailed his career as a writer of Ciceronian-style forensic speeches, and having allowed us to track his development as a writer of exemplary letters, Pliny now reveals that his next step is into poetry€– and trifling, nugatory, Catullan, somewhat risqué poetry at that. His political career has reached its summit; but his literary career shows no sign of generic ascension. Quite the opposite in fact. This is a generic choice which refuses to make the same kind of progression in the literary field which Pliny’s other career had just so clearly made in the political field. Generic ascent was a viable option for the Younger Pliny. He might have turned his hand towards patriotic and national epic, such as the consular Silius Italicus produced in his leisure time (Epist. 3.7), and to which Pliny in a rather later book admits having occasionally turned his hand (Epist. 7.4).53 Alternatively, as the Elder Pliny moved from theoreticalÂ� rhetÂ�orical-grammatical works on to history in the grand manner of Aufidius Bassus, so the Younger might have moved from publishing examples of rhetoric in practice and epistles ‘upwards’ into imperial history. In fact Pliny floats this as a possibility in his next book. For in Book 5, he considers emulating the example of his uncle in the field of historiography. In Epist. 5.8, Pliny admits the attractions of history as a genre over For this last point, see Mayer 2003b. Pliny’s letters in some measure retell the ‘story’ of his speeches, and in this sense Pliny’s output resembles Cicero’s multiple attempts to retell the story of his consulship across a range of genres. The one exception here is Pliny’s poetry, which€– in accordance with the expectations of senatorial light verse€– may have done little such retelling. 52 For the major dates of Pliny’s political career€– many being a matter of debate€– see the most recent reconstruction in Birley 2000:€5–17. 53 Nevertheless, for the pressures acting on Pliny which made a choice of epic unlikely, see I. Marchesi 2008:€61–2. 51

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oratory and poetry (4) and suggests that the example of his uncle gives strong encouragement (5): me uero ad hoc studium impellit domesticum quoque exemplum. auunculus meus idemque per adoptionem pater historias et quidem religiosissime scripsit. In my case family precedent is an additional incentive to work of this kind. My uncle, who was my father also by adoption, was a historian of scrupulous accuracy.

Pliny insists, however, by way of apology, that he is currently planning to revise all his important speeches and that one cannot realistically expect to rewrite speeches and write history at the same time (6–8).54 The letter ends, nevertheless, with an invitation to the addressee to give some thought to what period might appropriately be treated; Pliny would not be deterred even from writing modern history (12–13). The history was never completed (perhaps not started)€– or at least Pliny does not mention it again. Nevertheless, the important point is that Pliny does put himself on record€– like Cicero in De Legibus 1.5–12 (a passage clearly in the Younger’s mind here)€– as contemplating a move to history. And Pliny confesses, not without some attempt at irony, that the move from rhetoric to history would be a kind of ‘ascent’. The greater potential for history rather than rhetoric to grant an author fame is admitted (4, 6–7), and, while oratory and history are agreed to have much in common, it is conceded that they differ in terms of importance of topic covered (history being less mundane) (9). Nevertheless, after his ascent to the summit of the cursus honorum€ – and here is the nub of the argument about Pliny€– it would seem to be a matter of indifference whether, alongside his letters and speeches, Pliny write hendecasyllabic poetry or turn his hand to history. Pliny’s literary career€ – at least as it is presented in the Letters€ – begins at an already elevated generic level, with forensic and panegyrical speeches (and the epistles which record these literary endeavours). But once the summit of the political career has been ascended, Pliny allows himself to descend to nugatory poetry in Book 4 or to consider varying his output with history in Book 5. The ‘generic cursus honorum’, it would appear for Pliny, is a matter of indifference to one who has completed its political counterpart. 54

Epist. 5.8 in fact represents the first act in Pliny’s big push towards the revision of his speeches. The earlier books contain numerous references to the revision of speeches for publication, which are then in Book 4 rather overshadowed by the preoccupation with poetry, only to reappear in Book 5 (here and at 5.12), before dominating Books 7 to 9 (where, however, verse does not disappear by any means); see Sherwin-White 1966:€334 on Epist. 5.8.6, also Sherwin-White 1966:€91 on Epist. 1.2.6.

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Such pointed ‘indifference’ gives some support to the idea of Pliny’s underlying desire€ – suggested earlier€ – to associate a career of generic ascent with non-senators. The clearest example of a ‘Virgilian’ literary career in the Letters is constructed for that equestrian among equesÂ� trians, Pliny the Elder. The senator and consul Pliny the Younger, by contrast, flaunts the non-progressive nature of his literary career after he has ascended to the summit of the cursus honorum. One reason why it might have been useful for him to emphasise the redundancy of the progressive model is the spectre of Tacitus. The literary career of the latter, starting from such minor works as the Agricola, Germania and Dialogus and rising eventually to imperial history, preserves the same upwards trajectory as that of the Elder Pliny. This most eminent of senators and consuls cannot, of course, be convincingly associated with ‘equestrian’ literary progressiveness. But it is nevertheless useful for Pliny to hint that the model of generic ascent is not invariably appropriate to a senator, particularly in Book 5. For, as Syme suggested, Epist. 5.8 may record the moment when Pliny catches first wind of Tacitus’ composition of the Histories (or presents himself as doing so).55 To bolster this position, Pliny had of course the example of Cicero. While Pliny never contemplates full generic profligacy in the Ciceronian manner€ – no works of philosophy or rhetorical theory are advertised (although the Panegyricus does contain elements of political theory)€ – Pliny does place emphasis on Cicero’s importance as a literary role model. Cicero sets the standard for Pliny’s speeches (1.5.12 ‘personally I do try to copy Cicero … and am not satisfied with the oratory of today’, 1.20.4), letters (9.2.1–2 [of a request that Pliny write long letters] ‘besides, I lacked subject matter for writing more. You want me to follow Cicero’s example, but my position is very different from his’), and, not least, his poetry in the nugatory mode, where Cicero heads the list of exemplars (5.3.5 ‘but surely I need not be afraid that this practice is unsuitable for me, when it was perfectly proper in the case of Cicero, C. Calvus, Asinius Pollio …’; compare 7.4.3–6). But Pliny could profitably use Cicero as a model not only for individual works, but also for his literary career as a whole (see esp. 4.8.4 M. Tullius … quem aemulari in studiis cupio, ‘Cicero … whom I am anxious to make my model in my literary work’). Just as the republican Cicero moved freely between genres without thought of ascent or Syme 1958:€ 117 ‘The consular orator (it appears) was hankering after history. There was one impediment, however, that he does not mention. The best subject, embracing both written and unwritten annals, had already been undertaken.’

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generic progress, so might a latter-day Cicero follow his model and avoid the pressure placed (latterly) on him by the example of Tacitus. Cicero’s generic profligacy, of course, is driven by the subordination of his literary to his political career. Pliny’s generic indifference cannot have the same source, for he lives under a political system which supplies personal constraints of which Cicero knew nothing (9.2.2–3):56 illi enim et copiosissimum ingenium, et par ingenio qua uarietas rerum qua magnitudo largissime suppetebat; nos quam angustis terminis claudamur etiam tacente me perspicis. [Cicero] was not only richly gifted but was supplied with a wealth of varied and important topics to suit his abilities, though you know without my telling you the narrow limits confining me.

There was little enough fame to be had from a career in the law courts€– as Pliny himself is quite aware.57 Literature cannot be subordinated to politics; rather, it is literature alone, in the absence of opportunity for significant (political) actions, which now offers a chance for lasting fame (3.7.14):58 sed tanto magis hoc, quidquid est temporis futilis et caduci, si non datur factis (nam horum materia in aliena manu), certe studiis proferamus, et quatenus nobis denegatur diu uiuere, relinquamus aliquid, quo nos uixisse testemur. All the more reason then why we should prolong all our passing moments, uncertain though they are, not perhaps by action, since here the opportunity no longer rests with us, but at any rate by literary work. Since we are denied a long life, let us leave something to bear witness that at least we have lived.

The only field in which Pliny does reveal full and positive generic profligacy is that of poetry.59 A letter on the author’s poetic career, late in the collection, confirms in retrospect Pliny’s commitment to generic indifference in the larger sense. In Epist. 7.4, Pliny confesses that he has always been interested in poetry and provides a full survey of his poetic career to date. At age 14 he composed a Greek tragedy (2), before attempting next Latin elegiacs about the sea and islands (3). Next he reveals that he has ‘occasionally tried [his] hand at epic verse’ (3 expertus sum me aliquando et Cf. 3.20.10–12. See 2.14.1 (of cases at the Centumviral court) sunt enim pleraeque paruae et exiles; raro incidit uel personarum claritate uel negotii magnitudine insignis. Pliny is more sunnily optimistic elsewhere about these courts; see Sherwin-White 1966:€181 ad loc. 58 Compare 5.8.2–4. For the Elder’s own valuation of literary over political achievement, see Beagon 2005:€51 on the eulogy of Cicero at Nat. 7.116–17. 59 For his generic profligacy across prose and verse, Pliny constructs only a ‘negative’ manifesto:€in 9.29 he declares he tries his hand at many genres because he cannot be supremely good at one (although Sherwin-White 1966:€512 takes the reference here to be to verse alone). 56

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heroo), and that the book of poetry which is the subject of the letter is the ultimate result of his first attempt some time ago at hendecasyllables (3). Cicero’s epigram to Tiro is cited as the explicit inspiration for Pliny’s own light verse (3–6). Pliny’s poetic career then took him back to elegiacs (7), and next on to an attempt at other metres in scattered moments of leisure (8 ‘whenever I had time, especially when travelling’),60 before a final decision was made to put together a separate volume of hendecasyllables (8–9). Again the poetic ‘career’ outlined by here Pliny conforms to Farrell’s ‘complementary’ pattern. More importantly, Pliny’s interest in and involvement with verse has been more or less a constant since he was a boy of 14. Yet, as we have seen, there is no mention of it until Book 4, after Pliny has reached the consulate. Such leisure-time verse, it seems, must be kept hidden while ascending the cursus honorum, but upon completion of the cursus may be paraded€– perhaps as evidence of the success of the political career. Furthermore, Pliny’s hidden poetic career displays the same disregard for generic progression from high to low which his broader literary career€ – of speeches, letters, poetry and contemplated history€– also parades. For in this hidden poetic career, Pliny traces a path which evinces the same sort of generic profligacy which Cicero displayed across his larger literary career, both in poetry and prose. Pliny’s non-hierarchical movement between genres is confirmed by the verb chosen to describe his passage from hendecasyllables to elegiacs:€transii ad elegos (7 ‘I passed on to elegiac verses’).61 Here is a disregard for Virgilian poetic progression from low to high:€Pliny refrains from fashioning his poetic career as progression upwards through the genres. This is in obvious contast to his other ‘political’ career, which was a classic example of orthodox movement The contrast with how the Elder Pliny used his travelling time rather more seriously€– described in Epist. 3.5.15–16€– cannot but be deliberate. The Younger, following the ascension of the senatorial cursus honorum, underlines his difference by writing verse in the manner of previous consuls (see Epist. 5.3). There is a also a strong hint of a contrast between respective literary-political careers:€the Elder wrote the De Iaculatione Equestri ‘when he was a junior officer in the cavalry’ (3.5.3), and the work on the German Wars was begun ‘during his military service in Germany’ (3.5.4); but the Younger reveals that he ‘wrote some Latin elegiacs with the island and sea for theme’ while ‘on [his] way home from military service’ and he was ‘weatherbound in the island of Icaria’ (7.4.3). Even in his youth€– we belatedly learn here in Book 7€– the Younger was heading in a distinctly dilettantish direction, appropriate to a future consul and quite different from the equestrian Elder. If these strong contrasts between Epist. 3.5 and 7.4 constitute an invitation to compare literary careers, then it will be seen that 7.4 deliberately eschews the upward generic ascent implicitly attributed in 3.5 to the Elder. 61 For an alternative reading of this complex letter, and the way in which it first sets up ‘an ascending order of cultural importance’ in verse only to reverse it immediately, see I. Marchesi 2008:€78–88. 60

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up the political cursus honorum. Here we may Â�contrast Catullus, Pliny’s hendecasyllabic model. As Farrell argues,62 Catullus perhaps meant his poetic career to be the antithesis of€– in the sense of a rebuke to€– the political cursus honorum:€ though he composed in a dazzling array of genres, Catullus ‘does nothing to define his career as progressing over time through a hierarchy of genres’. This poet, who defines himself in opposition to the cursus honorum, finds himself adopted€ – and neutralized€– as model by Pliny as he catches his breath in the intervals of pursuing the conventional honours of this same political paradigm. Pliny’s poetic career is the antithesis of the cursus honorum only in the sense that it provides relief from its pressures to climb upwards, perhaps (later) even a sign of having completed it successfully.63 In sum, Cicero and Pliny were both authors (primarily) of prose whose political careers followed the normal ascent up the cursus honorum, but whose literary careers are marked instead by flexibility and evince few signs of sustained generic ‘progression’. The reasons for the ‘indistinctness’ of the two literary careers differ markedly. Cicero’s generic profligacy is the product of his desire to multiply possibilities for the public communication of his evolving political career. For Pliny the political imperative is necessarily less paramount. His generic indifference is driven rather by a desire to rise above the new Virgilian model of generic ascent, and to insinuate the idea that one who has risen up the political cursus honorum need not concern himself with its literary counterpart. Farrell 2002:€43. For Pliny’s general ideological suppression of Catullus the social radical, see the brilliant study of Roller 1998; see also I. Marchesi 2008:€62–78. In the preface to the Natural History, the Elder Pliny adopts towards Catullus the rather different stance of (submerged) hostility and mockery; see Howe 1985:€567–70.

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Ch apter 7

Re-inventing Virgil’s Wheel:€the poet and his work from Dante to Petrarch* Andrew Laird

The Italian word for ‘career’, carriera, had become associated with a working life or employment from the mid-1600s, long before its English equivalent acquired the same sense in the early nineteenth century.1 In fact the first attested use of carriera in this way was in association with the profession of literature. In the preface to his Trattato dell’arte e dello stile del dialogo (1662), the historian and poet Pietro Sforza Pallavicino expressed his thanks to the Bishop of Fermo for encouraging his ‘childhood in the career of letters’ (la mia puerizia nella carriera delle lettere).2 Carriera, like the Latin via carraria from which it derives, originally denoted a ‘carriage road’ or track for a wheeled vehicle (carrus).3 The meaning turns out to have a felicitous bearing on the idea of the literary career which is unlikely to be coincidence:€in the middle ages, the most influential literary career of all was visualized as a wheel€– the rota Vergilii or rota Vergiliana (‘the Wheel of Virgil’.)4 An arrangement of the poet’s works and their respective themes and styles in a circular diagram seems to have developed from the use of rota as synecdoche for the Classical image of the Muses’ chariot, an image mediated by the schoolmasters of late antiquity.5 And when Virgil conceives his poetic cursus as a military *╇I am very grateful to Carlo Caruso, Philip Hardie and Antonio Ziosi for their comments on this chapter. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated. 1 Battaglia 1961–2003, vol. II, sv. carriera, § 8. (‘fig. indirizzo dato alla propria vita, studio, professione’) citing Pallavicino 1662 and Frugoni 1960. Battisti and Alessio 1950–7, vol. I, 781 concurs with the seventeenth-century origin of the figurative use, as does Cortelazzo and Zolli 1979, which also cites the first use by Pallavicino. 2 Pallavicino 1662:€3. Cardinal Pietro Sforza Pallavicino (1607–67) published an apologetical history of the Council of Trent. His literary works include a poem in octaves, I Fasti cristiani (1636), and a tragedy, Ermenegildo (1644). 3 Compare Cheney 2002a:€8 and Hardie and Moore’s Introduction to this volume, on uses of the word ‘career’. 4 On the rota, see Laugesen 1962; Hardie and Moore, Introduction, and Putnam above, Ch. 1, in this volume. 5 Bajoni 1997 is an ingenious demonstration of this, adducing testimonia from Sidonius Apollinaris and Ausonius, with a range of earlier Classical sources.

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triumph at the opening of Georgics Book 3, he envisages himself as a victor, crowned with palms, who will set a hundred chariots in motion.6 That passage has been taken to hint at a future epic, but Virgil gives no more explicit indication of his poetic programme from one work to the next.7 Taken as a whole his compositions really only indicate a de facto progression from the bucolic to didactic poetry, and then from didactic to epic. However, the four hexameter verses which were long transmitted as the poet’s own introduction to the Aeneid place the epic as the last in a planned sequence of his compositions.8 On the basis of those verses alone, medieval readers might readily assume, as had Virgil’s ancient biogÂ� raphers, that the high poetic genre of epic represented the culmination of his achievement. What follows can only provide a very selective account of the emulation of Virgil’s ascending course in Dante and Petrarch.9 The focus will be on their works in Latin, so that most attention will be devoted to Petrarch, as his Latin writings€– especially those in verse€– engage far more frequently and intensively with the Roman poet than those of Dante. However, the first part of this discussion (I) will summarize the significance that Virgil acquires in Dante’s work, with some reference to the vernacular Commedia. That short treatment will put into relief the rather different character of Petrarch’s reception.10 A brief account of the way Petrarch’s Latin poetic works accumulate to display a trajectory which is explicitly Virgilian (II) will be followed by a more extensive examination (III) of passages from the Africa and two epistles from Familiares Book 24. A complex and competitive interaction with the poet of the Aeneid is exhibited in Petrarch’s epic, whilst imitation is directly explored through the persona he adopts in his letters to Homer and Virgil. As well as recognition of the notion of persona, a distinction between the rationalized author and the historical author will be important for the conclusion (IV).11 Virg. Geo. 3.17–18; see Hardie 1993b:€100–1. Passages commonly viewed as connecting Virgil’s works are Georgics 3.1–48, Georgics 4.559–66 (in relation to Eclogue 1.1), Aeneid 1.742–6 (in relation to Eclogue 6.64 and Georgics 1.1–6). 8 See Putnam above, Ch. 1 in this volume, and Horsfall 2000a:€24 and 300 on these verses. Laird 2003 considers their significance for later performance and reception of the Aeneid. 9 Good orientations on Virgil and Dante are Comparetti 1997, Consoli 1984, C. Hardie 1984, Highet 1976:€70–80, Villa 2009, Whitfield 1969, Zabughin 1921:€i.3–21; for Virgil in Petrarch see Billanovich 1947, Feo 1988, Highet 1949a:€81–8, Nolhac 1907, Zabughin 1921:€i.21–38. 10 Petrarch’s handling of Virgil can prompt some conclusions about his relation to Dante, even though Dante’s role as a model or foil for Petrarch’s career cannot be pursued directly here:€see e.g. Feo 1973, Baranski and McLaughlin 2007. 11 The rationalized author is constructed by the reader from the text (whether the reader imagines him as present in the text, or as the mastermind behind it) and cannot possess any of the attributes of an historical author€– except, conventionally, his or her name. Any details of the 6 7

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In trecento Italy, an environment in which the Roman practices of the triumph and of crowning poets with laurel were being enthusiastically revived, the attempt to re-enact Virgil’s role took literary homage into broader social and political domains. Petrarch’s coronation in Rome in 1341 represents at once acclaim for his individual success and the confirmÂ� ation of continuity with Italy’s Roman past.12 Thus the appropriations of Virgil in both Dante and Petrarch are normally approached from a historical and biographical perspective.13 However, the aim of the following discussion is to show how author-oriented criticism can advance specifically literary interpretation of Dante and Petrarch in relation to Virgil€– without appeals to intentionalist models of poetic communication and without giving centre stage to biographical questions.14 I The greatest writer of the middle ages was far more of an originator than an imitator. Dante’s works in Latin and Italian, in prose and verse, combine Christian thought with the influence of writers from Classical antiquity. Given the thematic and disciplinary range of his oeuvre, it is unsurprising that the author whom Dante invokes most in his works is Aristotle. But Virgil’s prominence is striking:€leaving aside his role as companion to the dramatized figure of Dante in the Commedia, the number of citations or echoes of his work (mostly, though not entirely, from the Aeneid) is almost equal to that of all the references to Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Cicero and Boethius put together.15 Although the popular myths of Virgil as a historical author, including his other works, are usually discounted for the purposes of categorically literary interpretation because they will be extraneous to the text from which the rationalized author derives. Thus the text of The Catcher in the Rye has a named narrator (persona), Holden Caulfield, and an author (the rationalized author) whom the reader perceives to be ultimately responsible for generating Holden, for concocting the fictional events Holden experiences and for staging the manner in which Holden relates them. For convenience, this author who is constructed from the text is referred to as ‘J. D. Salinger’. The reclusive writer of that name who lived in New Hampshire is quite different (the historical author). For further discussion of issues raised by these distinctions, see Laird 1999:€71–4, 211–13. 12 Dante refused the honour of coronation because he was in exile (n. 20 below). The significance of the laurel crown for Petrarch is explored in Usher 2009. A text of the Collatio laureationis or ‘Coronation Oration’ is in Godi 1988; English translation in Wilkins 1955:€300–13. 13 Holmes 1980:€ 1 remarks:€ ‘Dante’s ideas evolved in response to important experiences … His thought was in a constant state of evolution which is why a biographical approach to it is essential.’ Similar approaches are naturally applied to Petrarch, e.g. Dotti 1987. 14 This is not, of course, to deny that biographical information is important for an historical understanding of the thought of Dante and Petrarch and no pretence is made that it can be ignored insofar as the historical authors are involved in what follows (n. 11 above). 15 Highet 1976:€79 summarizes the statistics collected in Moore 1896 for the main Classical sources in all of Dante’s works.

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sorcerer still current in Dante’s time are disregarded, the presentation of the poet in his work is still very different from that provided by Petrarch and other later Italian humanists.16 In particular Dante lays emphasis on Eclogue 4 as a prophecy of the birth of Christ and on the allegorical or ‘polysemous’ quality of Virgil’s expression.17 Two passages in his Latin writings in which Dante claims for himself something like his ancient predecessor’s ability and achievement will be reviewed here. First, in a chapter (2.4) of the De Vulgari Eloquentia (written between 1302 and 1305) which warns amateurs against casually attempting vernacular poetry on the weighty subjects of salvation, love and virtue, Dante moves towards what appears to be a coy characterization of his own accomplishment: Caveat ergo quilibet et discernat ea que dicimus et quando hec tria pure cantare intendit, vel que ad ea directe ac pure secuntur, prius Elicone potatus, tensis fidibus ad supremum, secure plectrum tum movere incipiat. Sed cautionem atque discretionem hanc accipere, sicut decet, hic opus et labor est, quoniam nunquam sine strenuitate ingenii et artis assiduitate scientiarumque habitu fieri potest. Et hii sunt quos Poeta Eneidorum sexto Dei dilectos et ab ardente virtute sublimatos ad ethera deorumque filios vocat, quanquam figurate loquatur. Et ideo confutetur illorum stultitia qui, arte scientiaque immunes, de solo ingenio confidentes, ad summa summe canenda prorumpunt; et a tanta presumptuositate desistant, et si anseres natura vel desidia sunt, nolint astripetam aquilam imitari. Caution and discrimination in what I am talking about are required and let anyone who intends to sing of the three great subjects [salus, amor, virtus] purely and simply, or things which directly and purely bear on them, let him first drink of Helicon and then, after finely tuning the strings, confidently begin to use the plectrum. But exercizing proper caution and discernment, this is the work and toil, since it cannot be done without strenuous exercise of talent (ingenium), constant practice of the art, and habitual mastery of the sciences. It is those [so inclined] whom the poet of the sixth book of the Aeneid calls ‘beloved of God’ and ‘exalted by fiery virtue to the heavens’ and ‘the sons of the gods’, although he is speaking figuratively. And so for those untouched by art and science relying on their native talent alone who burst forth to sing of high subjects in a high manner, let their stupidity stand confuted and let them cease from such Whitfield 1969:€94–5 remarks ‘Boccaccio, so often hailed as the initiator of the Renaissance, is more medieval than Dante. For Dante … gives no heed at any point to the childish legend which had grown up around Virgil the Magician’ (the story told by Boccaccio that Virgil freed Naples of a plague of flies and mosquitoes). 17 This observation does not solely rely on Dante’s Latin letter to Can Grande (edited in Toynbee 1920:€ 166–211), the authenticity of which is much debated:€ see e.g. Cecchini 1995. Fulgentius’ mediation of an allegorizing Virgil is crucial to the Commedia:€Maresca 1981, Laird 2001. Virgil first appears in Convivio 4.4–5 where he is praised in the context of a celebration of Rome’s imperial mission. 16

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presumption:€if they are geese by nature or by indolence, they should not wish to imitate the starwards flight of the eagle.

Echoes of Virgil perfuse this part of the treatise on the Italian Â�vernacular.18 The phrase hic opus et labor est (‘this is the work and toil’) recalls the Sibyl’s warning to Aeneas about the difficulty of ascending from Avernus to the world above (Aeneid 6.129); through her very next words (6.129–31), Dante tells us, Virgil is ‘speaking figuratively’ about poets. The contrast between the goose and eagle which closes this chapter of the De Vulgari Eloquentia also has its source in Virgil:€in Eclogue 9.35–7, Lycidas considered his poetry inferior to that of Varius and Cinna and described himself as a goose honking among shrill swans. Dante’s proud deprecation of the geese, his substitution of the eagle for the swans, and his supposition that he, like Virgil, can make these discriminations suggest that he regards his own status as comparable. The second passage is from the first of the two Latin Eclogues which Dante composed in response to a letter in Latin hexameters he received in 1319 from Giovanni del Virgilio, a professor at Bologna. Giovanni praised the Commedia (which he has read as far as the Purgatorio) but gently reproached its author for writing in Italian, urging him to compose an epic in Latin on a martial theme. As a follower of Virgil (vocalis verna Maronis), Giovanni would be happy to crown Dante with garlands before the cheering students of Bologna.19 Dante’s reply took the form of a bucolic poem in which the persona of Tityrus, often identified with Virgil, turned down this request.20 But to placate Giovanni who was cast as the absent Mopsus, Tityrus pledged to send him ten vessels of milk from his favourite ewe. This is widely agreed to stand for ten cantos of the recently finished Paradiso but in such a pastoral context the ten Eclogues are doubtless in play as well. A likely implication is that the vernacular Commedia represented a bold fusion of Virgil’s bucolic and heroic modes. Dante’s experiments in pastoral are a form of recusatio€– to refrain from composing a Virgilian epic, but they ended up contributing to a major trend. Petrarch and Boccaccio both produced pastoral poetry in Latin, and later Renaissance authors followed suit. If writing Latin bucolic came to be a benchmark for those aspiring to a Virgilian curriculum, Dante had a part in this. For the conjunction of Helicon with movere compare Aeneid 7.641, 9.163 (also Dante, Purgatorio 29.40). 19 The texts of this correspondence are in Bolisani and Valgimigli 1963. 20 Tityrus indicates (41–9) that he would prefer to be crowned by the river Arno in Florence€– from where Dante was exiled. Compare Paradiso 25.1–9. 18

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Among many other things, Virgil’s role in the Commedia as a guide through Hell and Purgatory indicates that his poetry in Latin contributed to Dante’s capacity to describe and present in Italian a vision of eternity. What the Commedia reveals about Dante’s actual perception of his creative course in relation to that of his ancient Roman predecessor has to be a matter of conjecture. Too much can be made of the dramatized Dante’s courteous declaration to Virgil in Inferno 1.86–7:€‘You are alone the one from whom I took the fine style [lo bello stile] that has brought me honour’€– this is odd given that he writes in a different style, a different metre and a different language. Conversely in Purgatorio, it is the character of Virgil who says when taking his leave: ‘Tratto t’ho qui con ingegno e con arte; lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce … Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno; libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio, e fallo fora non fare a suo senno: per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio.’

Purg. 27.130–1, 139–42

‘I have brought you here with poetic talent and with skill. Take henceforth your pleasure as your guide … No longer expect word or sign from me. Free, upright and whole is your will, and it would be an error not to act on its bidding; Â�therefore over yourself I crown and mitre you.’

The poet is thus staged as formally disowning any status he may have had as a model. But another important association between Dante and Virgil rests on the latter’s reputation as a Christian avant la lettre or at least as an unconscious witness to the faith.21 The significance of the apparent prediction of the birth of Christ by the Sibyl in Eclogue 4 was reinforced by her function as seer in the underworld of Aeneid Book 6€– and the whole of the Aeneid is concerned with the fulfilment of the great prophecy of the establishment of Rome which would have so much consequence for the Christian era. Consequently, throughout the Commedia Dante draws connections between pagan antiquity and the Weltanschauung of his own epoch and his own self-portrayal:€thus the imperial Roman poet Statius is portrayed as a Christian converted by his reading of Virgil in Purgatorio, and in Dante’s celebrated account of his encounter with Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan in Inferno 4, those Classical poets, along with Virgil, welcome ╇ Augustine, Epistula ad Volusianum 137.12:€see further Comparetti 1997:€96–103.

21

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the Tuscan vernacular author as a sixth member of their ‘fair school’, la bella scola.22 The Commedia also contains a number of prophecies of its own, notably of the birth of a saviour of Italy in the first canto of Inferno (1.100–11) which resonates with Jupiter’s foretelling of the foundation of a Roman imperium ‘without end’ in the first book of the Aeneid.23 Dante’s De Monarchia had affirmed that an empire uniting humanity was God’s will, and this idea of empire is endorsed in many parts of the Commedia:€in Inferno 34.61–7 Dante and Virgil witness Satan as he devours Caesar’s assassins Brutus and Cassius, along with Judas Iscariot.24 Finally the choice of title for the Commedia indicates that the work’s conception is designed to match the Aeneid rather than merely imitate it. At Inferno 20.113, Virgil refers to his epic as l’alta mia tragedia. By calling his own work a ‘comedy’ Dante is aligning it with Virgil’s tragedy, a complement to it, if not an actual rival.25 The author of the Commedia (far more than in other texts such as the De Monarchia and the De Vulgari Eloquentia) emulates the position of Virgil in history and eschatology, and not merely in poetry. This form of appropriation goes beyond purely literary competition:€any attempt to construct a ‘literary life’ for Dante through his works has to accommodate apprehension of political, religious and scientific sources as well as poetic models.26 And those poetic models€– Virgil is very much a case in point€– cannot be conceived as exclusively literary either.27 Statius appears in Purgatorio 21; in Purgatorio 22.64–73 he explains how the fourth Eclogue led him towards Christianity. Highet 1976:€70–80 provides an excellent accounts of Dante’s relation to pagan antiquity, and Curtius 1953:€17–30 of its context and origins in the ‘Latin Middle Ages’. 23 Hollander and Russo 2003 discover significant numerological connections between Dantean and Virgilian prophecies. Purgatorio 33 is connected to the momentous historical prediction that an unidentified figure will come to bring peace and unity to a troubled Italy:€Holmes 1980:€93–4. 24 See Convivio 4.4–5 (n. 17 above). 25 See Highet 1949a:€ 70–1. Although medieval comicus and tragicus did not correspond respectively to our own idea of comedy and tragedy, comedy was a lower genre than tragedy, as Dante recognizes in De Vulgari Eloquentia. Horace, Ars Poetica 93–4 tamen et uocem comoedia tollit ‘yet comedy elevates its tone’, provided some authorization for regarding comedy as on a par with tragedy:€the passage, quoted at the beginning of the Epistle to Can Grande, was known to Dante, whether or not he was author of the letter (n. 17 above). Villa 2009:€ 143–7 examines Dante’s understanding of comedy in connection with other ancient sources including Virgil. The relation between Virgil and tragedy in antiquity, with ramifications for later periods, is addressed in Pöschl 1978 and Hardie 1997b. 26 Cheney 2002a:€6 bears on this:€‘Such holistic commentary [sc. ‘on the total oeuvre of an author from beginning to end’] differs from other overview accounts by emphasizing the category of the literary (rather than, say, the biographical, which often includes the non-literary) … we can define career criticism as a form of commentary that looks holistically at the literary dimension of a writer’s life, especially as that life is grounded in his or her works.’ The formalist response to this would be that the category of the literary naturally excludes the biographical anyway; but the ‘literary dimension of a writer’s life grounded in his works’ can be nothing other than a form of biography. 27 Curtius 1953:€207–8, 221–7. 22

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II Petrarch, like Dante, is more celebrated for his poetry in Italian than for his prose and verse in Latin, though he set far greater store by the latter. His work too conjoins pagan and Christian influences, but draws from a wider range of Classical texts€– and in more detail. In a Latin letter he wrote at the end his life (Seniles 16.1), Petrarch recounts that his father burned all his books, except those by Virgil and Cicero, in order to punish him for reading Classical literature instead of law. The pervasiveness of both Classical authors in his work does justice to that story.28 But while the Dante of the Commedia could portray himself being welcomed into the scola of the Classical poets, Petrarch tends to emphasize his sense of distance or even exclusion from their company.29 As well as being the object of Petrarch’s scholarly attention (demonstrated by his extensive annotations on the Ambrosian manuscript from 1338 onwards), Virgil was also involved with his self-presentation.30 The Bucolicum Carmen and Africa are conceived along the lines of the Eclogues and the Aeneid respectively, but Petrarch’s own place in literary history is a concern in both those texts.31 In the tenth eclogue of the Bucolicum Carmen, after the death of the laurel at 376–7 (representing both Laura, the mistress of the Canzoniere, and Classical poetry), the future of Classical learning and literature is entrusted to Silvanus (who stands for Petrarch himself); the ninth book of the Africa has Franciscus€ – that is Francesco Petrarch€ – hailed as Ennius’ long-awaited successor by none other than Homer.32 In the last letter of the Seniles, known as Epistola Posteritati (‘Letter to Posterity’) probably written in the year before his death in 1374, Petrarch An earlier letter (Familiares 22.10) had affirmed that Cicero and Virgil meant more to him than any living man. As well as the influence of the Tusculan Disputations on the De Remediis utriusque Fortunae, Cicero’s correspondence is the obvious inspiration for Petrarch’s 477 prose letters collected in the Familiares and the Seniles. The burning of the books is a literary conceit with many obvious precedents in Classical literature:€compare Familiares 24.11.62–3 quoted below. For later variants of the conceit see Krevans below, Ch. 10 in this volume. 29 Greene 1982:€ 28–32, cited in an essential chapter on imitatio in Petrarch:€ McLaughlin 1995:€22–48. 30 Petrarch’s postille on the Ambrosian Virgil are edited in Baglio, Nebuloni Testa and Petoletti 2006. W. J. Kennedy 2002 treats Petrarch’s self-presentation in relation to Virgil; a chapter entitled ‘The life as work of art’ in Mann 1984:€87–104 is a good general account. 31 Fielding 2006 is a recent exploration of Virgil’s influence on the Bucolicum Carmen. Fraenkel 1927:€487:€‘in grossen Stücken ein erstaunliches Denkmal für die Zeugungskraft des virgilischen Epos’ (my emphasis). Virgil’s pervasive influence on the Africa is now well established after Nolhac 1907:€Hardie 1993a:€295–302, Kallendorf 1989, Seagraves 1976 and Foster 1979. 32 Freccero 1986 examines the role of laurel in Petrarch’s self-creation in the Canzoniere and other texts. 28

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offers a narrative of his life which follows a Virgilian path.33 Dates and factual details are effaced in favour of a more idealistic ‘autobiography’:€the writer’s visit to Rome recalls Aeneas’ movement from Carthage to Italy, but most significantly mention of the Bucolicum Carmen in this text precedes that of the Africa in order to give the impression that the latter, like Virgil’s Aeneid, represents the culmination of a life’s work€– when in fact Petrarch had embarked upon his unfinished epic in 1338–1342, some four or five years before his endeavour in pastoral. This sustained and systematic emulation, fashioned over the course of some decades, should not be summarized as crudely as it has been here.34 But what makes Petrarch’s appropriation of Virgil distinct from Dante’s is clear enough. Apart from the imitation (or parody) of Virgil in his Eclogues, Dante uses the Aeneid as an impetus for the independent experiment of the Commedia. On the other hand Petrarch’s detailed knowÂ� ledge of Virgil’s entire oeuvre facilitates far more direct imitation of him in Latin. The latter form of reception has something in common with the aspirations of Virgil’s successors in imperial Rome:€the bucolic poet Calpurnius Siculus, the didactic poet of the Aetna and epic poets such as Lucan, Statius and Silius, as well as those who masqueraded as Virgil himself by producing poems like the Culex which rapidly acquired the status of juvenilia in narratives of the poet’s creative development.35 For ancient imitators trained in prosôpopoeia, the impersonation of their model relied on close study or proficient memorization of the authentic Virgilian corpus.36 A testimony from Propertius shows that Romans in Virgil’s lifetime could perceive a progression in his works€– or at least an increase in their importance€– from the Eclogues and Georgics to the Aeneid.37 But perhaps post-Classical vernacular poets such as Cervantes and Spenser discerned, and responded to, a progression because the pattern of the Virgilian career was made so evident in Petrarch’s Latin works. Kennedy 2002 discusses Epistola Posteritati, noting at 146:€‘The poet’s programmatic statements in the Africa, Bucolicum carmen, the “Coronation oration”, and the “Letter to Posterity” project an idealized course conformable generally with the Virgilian rota.’ 34 Kennedy 2002 treats the complexities, ambivalences and contradictions. Kallendorf 1989:€ch. 2 and R. F. Thomas 2001:€157–8, 164 treat Petrarch from the perspective of Virgilian reception. 35 Suetonius, Vita Lucani; Statius, Silvae 1, praefatio. 36 Quintilian explains prosôpopoeia in Institutio Oratoria 3.49–54, saying it is invaluable for future poets and historians. Cicero’s posturing as both Appius Claudius Caecus and Clodius, respectÂ� ively rebuking and encouraging Clodia’s vices in the Pro Caelio 33, is specified as an example. 37 Prop. 2.34.61–80. The responses of other Roman poets, including Ovid, to Virgil’s career are considered elsewhere in this volume but there is not one Latin poet from antiquity who sought faithfully to re-enact it. 33

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For that reason alone it is worth looking at the manner of Petrarch’s appropriation of Virgil in some specific texts.38 Consideration of the Africa itself is especially important:€this ambitious undertaking epitomizes the intersection between the climax of Virgil’s career and his own. But all the texts reviewed below€– from the Familiares as well as the Africa€– throw some important light on Petrarch’s poetic practices and authorial identity in relation to his model. III Themes and structures from the Aeneid abound in the Africa.39 There is an obvious debt to Virgil’s narrative of Aeneas and Dido, for example, in the fifth book in which Massinissa, the Numidian chief allied to Scipio, decides against his better judgement to marry the beautiful Sophonisba, the captive wife of Syphax, an ally of the Carthaginians.40 Other parts of the Aeneid are also recalled in the same book of the Africa:€ 5.59–63, part of the long description (5.18–78) of Sophonisba’s beauty, compares her to Venus asking Jupiter to help Aeneas:€an episode narrated in Aeneid 1.227–96. Massinissa’s enumeration of women in the underworld at Africa 5.657–63 is informed by Virgil’s katabasis, as are the details of the dead Turnus who is aggrieved that Lavinia had been snatched away from him (Africa 6.64), and of Lilybaeum as the location of the tomb of Anchises (Africa 6.694–5).41 But wherever one might expect references to the story of the Aeneid to prompt an overt or positive acknowledgement of its poet, that expectÂ�ation is confounded. An episode in Africa Book 3 shows how its epic narrator can even disparage Virgil. The embassy of Laelius to forge an alliance The other reason is to avoid replicating the important discussion of Petrarch’s career in relation to Virgil provided by Kennedy 2002. 39 Virgil’s influence in the Africa is less discernible in terms of lexical echoing, although Foster 1979:€295 observes that ‘key words from Vergilian passages in the same metrical sedes … form a substructure’. In addition to the nineteen instances Foster collects,€see Africa 5.746–58 as a recolÂ� lection of Dido’s curse in Aen. 4.612–29; Africa 8.45–6 and Georgics 4.184–5 (with Aen. 8.184); Africa 7.362–4 and Aen. 1.286–8; Africa 7.489–99 and Aen. 7.632–40. Kallendorf 1989:€54 (compare 181 n. 5) remarks on the recreation of Virgilian verse in Petrarch’s Africa:€‘Petrarca’s hexameters are surprisingly free of postclassical words and constructions when we consider how little serious work had been done before in those areas; indeed the notes to his Ambrosian Virgil and the body of annotations to the Africa identified by Fera [1980] show how hard Petrarca worked at purifying his diction and metrics.’ Compare Petrarch, Fam. 23.19.3. The most comprehensive study of the Petrarchan hexameter runs to 515 pages:€Ruiz Arzalluz 1991. 40 Africa 5.240–76:€ cf. Aeneid 4.169–73, 189–94; Africa 5.257–73:€ cf. Aeneid 4.460–70; Africa 5.242–4:€cf. Aeneid 4.288–91; Africa 5.245:€cf. Aeneid 8.526. 41 The grouping of underworld heroines is in Aen. 6.445–61; the burial place of Anchises is given in Aen. 3.705–15. 38

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with Syphax against Carthage involves a feast in which Laelius’ company is entertained by a Numidian bard who sings of the accomplishments of Hercules, Dido and Hannibal.42 The bard’s portrayal of Dido in this embedded poem culminates in an aside which is implicitly directed against Virgil: Post regina Tyro fugiens his finibus ampla Menia construxit magnam Carthaginis urbem. Ex re nomen ei est. Mox aspernata propinqui Coniugium regis, cum publica vota suorum Urgerent, veteris non immemor illa mariti, Morte pudicitiam redimit. Sic urbis origo Oppetiit regina ferox. Iniuria quanta Huic fiat, si forte aliquis€– quod credere non est€– Ingenio confisus erit, qui carmine sacrum Nomen ad illicitos ludens traducat amores!

420

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Africa 3.418–27

Later a queen fleeing from Tyre constructed huge walls in this territory, the great city of Carthage:€ from this fact it derived its name.43 Soon after, she spurned marriage with a neighbouring king, although her people’s wishes pressed for this, but she, never forgetting her former husband, redeemed her chastity through death. And so the fierce queen, the founder of the city, met her end. How much wrong would be done to her, if someone by chance€– impossible to believe€– relying on his talent for poetry were to play at sullying her sacred name with illicit passions!

The name of the queen is not given, although ‘Dido’ is later mentioned by Syphax in 4.5. Virgil is not named either:€the bard performing in 206 BC could not know of him. In his other writings, Petrarch drew from ancient sources to highlight Dido’s chastity and the fact that she lived three centuries after Aeneas.44 Here in the Africa, Dido is a moral exemplum to be The embedded poem is obviously based on Iopas’ recitation in Aeneid 1.740–7, just as the situation in which it is recited follows the precedent of the Trojans’ encounter with Dido in Aeneid 1. The introduction of Dido into this reported poem is also significant. The bard’s account of Hercules which immediately preceded the passage quoted here ended at 3.417 with Sic nocuit mundo vivens moriensque Medusa ‘So, alive and dead, Medusa did harm to the world.’ In Aeneid 1.496–7 Dido’s first entrance, where (as here) she is described as regina, directly follows the retrospective representation of Penthesilea’s death in the temple pictures of Aeneid 1.490–3 discussed in Conte 1986:€194–5. 43 The derivation of Carthage from the Phoenician ‘Kereth-Hadeshoth’, ‘new city’ was known to Roman authors and hence to Petrarch:€t he third-century AD grammarian C. Julius Solinus notes (40):€istam urbem Cathardam Elissa dixit, quod Phoenicum ore exprimit Civitatem Novam ‘Dido called this city Catharda which means ‘New City’ in the tongue of the Phoenicians’. Compare Servius on Aen. 1.12 and 4.683. 44 Petrarch’s best-known defence of the historical Dido is the invective against the ignorant populace (’ l vulgo ignorante) in the vernacular Trionfi:€ Triumphus Cupidinis 153–9. According to 42

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complemented by the account of Lucretia’s suicide in Laelius’ survey of Roman achievements that follows. The implicit charge against Virgil in verses 425–7 (that he traduced Dido’s reputation) is complemented and supported by Laelius who is asked by Syphax to tell of the origins and leaders of his own people. Like Aeneas in Dido’s court, Laelius prefaces his words by saying this is too much to recount late at night:45 Nunc quantum nocturna patet sermonibus hora, Principia expediam. Teucrorum a sanguine longe Gentis origo venit, victrix quem Grecia bello Dicitur ad patrios muros sparsisse bilustri: Et fortasse aliquis iam tanti criminis ultor Natus in Italia est. Sed nunc ad cepta revertor. Naufragio ex tanto vixque et tot milibus unus Integer enavit sine crimine. Namque ubi Troiae Matris adhuc Frigio fumabat litore bustum Iamque cinis facilem incipiens glomerare favillam, Inclitus et claris multum spectatus in armis Dux Anchisiades, cui non via prona salutis Viribus aut propriis aut urbibus esset amicis, Destituit patriam lacrimans caramque cubilis Consortem, et passus terra casusque tremendos Erroresque vagos et mille pericula ponti, Impiger Ausonias tandem tamen attigit oras: Isque, ubi belligerum Latii sensere coloni Troiugenam, externoque viro Lavinia pactos Reddidit amplexus, sacro pia flumine membra Deseruit moriens. Puer hunc excepit Iulus Succedens illumque alii.

495

500

505

510

Africa 3.491–512

Now I will set forth the major points for as long as the hour of the night has room for talk. The root of our people comes from far away, from Trojan blood, which conquering Greece is said to have shed by our ancestral walls, in a tenyear war. And perhaps someone to avenge so great a crime has already been born in Italy. But now I return to the subject I began. From such a great shipwreck Servius on Aen. 4.682 and 5.4, Varro had recorded it was Dido’s sister Anna who killed herself for love of Aeneas. The only full account of Dido–Elissa prior to Virgil is in Justinus’ epitome of Trogus, 18.4–6. Warner 2005 observes that Petrarch actually presents Massinissa in the mould of Dido, as he nurtures ‘the wound burning through all his marrow’ (vulnus inardescens totis errare medullis:€Africa 5.70; compare Aeneid 4.66–7:€est mollis flamma medullas / interea et tacitum vivit sub pectore vulnus). However in Seniles 4.5 Aeneas’ meeting with Dido is incorporated into Petrarch’s allegorical reading of the Aeneid as a triumph over lust. Warner 2005:€20–51 considers the significance of this for an interpretation of the Africa as a poem of spiritual struggle. 45 Africa 3.475–90.

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involving so many thousands, scarcely one emerged intact and without harm. For when the pyre of Mother Troy was still smoking on the Phrygian shore and ash was already beginning to form over the embers, a glorious leader, the son of Anchises, much tested in famous deeds of war, once he saw no ready route to safety in his own resources or in friendly cities, tearfully left his native land and the dear woman who shared his bed. He underwent fearful trials on land, long wanderings and a thousand perils at sea. Undaunted he at last reached the shores of Ausonia. Once the Latian tribes experienced for themselves this war hero born in Troy, and once Lavinia had bestowed the embraces contracted with a foreign husband, he died leaving his pious limbs in the sacred river. His child Iulus took his place, and others succeeded him.

The constraints of chronology which prevent Laelius from knowing of Virgil facilitate a strategic occlusion of Petrarch’s clear model. This has become increasingly evident as Laelius’ narration gets underway.46 Aeneas, who was completely absent from the Numidian poet’s account of Dido, is the central figure here, but he is identified only by his patronym€– Anchisiades. It is as if the actual name of Aeneas (never mentioned in the Africa) would draw too much attention to the fact that this embedded narrative is effectively an epitome of the Aeneid. But closer examination shows that these verses, even though their organization owes much to Virgil’s poem, do not yield a particularly precise summary of it. Dido is absent. Aeneas’ Trojan wife and his Latin wife Lavinia are given an emphasis which is disproportionate in comparison with the Virgilian version of events. No gods are involved, there are no prophÂ� ecies, and there is no katabasis. What Laelius relates has a naturalistic, historical quality. Only at the end of the story is there a supernatural element:€the death of the Trojan hero is presented as a kind of transmigration, as he leaves his membra (limbs, physical body) in the ‘sacred river’. This particular suggestion of Aeneas’ divinity comes not from Virgil, but draws from Livy’s mention of the event as it is amplified by Ovid, in Metamorphoses 46

There is multiple reference to Virgil in this passage. At 3.495–6 Fortasse aliquis iam tanti criminis ultor / Natus in Italia est ‘And perhaps someone avenging so great an atrocity has already been born in Italy’ alludes to the Virgilian Dido’s hope that someone will avenge her, similarly expressed in Aeneid 4.625 (exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor). But on the historical plane, Laelius appears to be hinting at Mummius Achaicus, whose career he presents as revenge for the fall of Troy. Laelius’ Fortasse aliquis also recalls the forte aliquis used by the Numidian performer for the ‘someone’ who might one day use poetry to link Dido with ‘illicit passions’ earlier at 3.425. The connection between Mummius and Virgil might involve a kind of romantic irony:€Petrarch after all identifies his own epic endeavour with the achievements of Scipio himself in Africa 1.53–5:€Ipse ego non nostri referam modo temporis acta, / Marte sed Ausonio sceleratos funditus Afro / Eruere est animus nimiasque retundere vires; compare Africa 9.233–6.

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14.598–604 where Venus intervenes to achieve her son’s deification.47 Petrarch’s use of this episode as the conclusion to the ‘Aeneid’ of Laelius significantly prefigures€– and may well have determined€– the complexion of Maffeo Vegio’s close to his thirteenth book of the Aeneid (1428) in which Venus secures her son’s immortality with the help of Numicius, after her supplication to Jupiter and the assent of Juno.48 In Book 2, the shade of the Elder Scipio outlines to his son the course of events in future times, assuring him that he will be celebrated by Petrarch who, though he is not named, is identified as a ‘second Ennius’ (Ennius alter 2.443). There is no place for Virgil in this sketch of future literary history:€ the original Ennius is to be honoured for bringing the rough Muses to Latium in the first place; his successor, who is Petrarch, for delaying them as they flee. Again in Book 9, on the return voyage to Rome Ennius recounts to Scipio how he conversed with Homer in a dream. In the vision which followed, Ennius saw a young man sitting in a secluded valley (clausa valle = Vaucluse, Petrarch’s retreat near Avignon), pondering something of great importance. Homer explains to Ennius who this person will become: Hic ego€– nam longe clausa sub valle sedentem Aspexi iuvenem€– :€‘Dux, o carissime, quisnam est, Quem video teneras inter consistere lauros et viridante comas meditantem incingere ramo? Nescio quid, nisi fallor, enim sub pectore versat Egregiumque altumque nimis.’ Non falleris’ inquit: ‘Agnosco iuvenem sera de gente nepotum, Quem regio Italie, quemve ultima proferet etas … Ille diu profugas revocabit carmine Musas Tempus in extremum, veteresque Elicone Sorores Restituet, vario quamvis agitante tumultu; Francisco cui nomen erit; qui grandia facta, Vidisti que cunta oculis, ceu corpus in unum Colliget:€Hispanas acies Libieque labores Scipiadamque tuum:€titulus poematis illi AFRICA.’ Africa 9.216–23, 229–36

Then, catching sight of a young man sitting far off in a secluded valley, I said ‘O dearest guide, who is it I see resting among the tender laurels and planning Livy 1.2.6 situs est, quemcumque eum dici ius fasque est, super Numicum flumen:€Iovem indigetem appellant ‘he is buried, whatever it is right and authorised for him to be called, by the river Numicus:€they call him Jupiter Indiges’. 48 Vegio, Supplementum 593–630; text and translation in Putnam and Hankins 2004. 47

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to bind his hair with green shoots? Unless I am mistaken he is pondering in his heart something remarkably special and noble.’ ‘You are not mistaken,’ he said. ‘I recognise the young man from a late line of your descendants whom the kingdom of Italy and its last age will bring forth … With his poetry he will call back the long-exiled Muses to his late age, and he will restore the ancient Sisters from Helicon, though disturbed by all kinds of uproar. His name will be Francesco and he will collect all the great deeds you have seen with your own eyes as if into one body:€the battles in Spain, the trials of Libya and your very own Scipio. The title of his poem will be Africa.’

Petrarch, through Homer’s words, embedded in Ennius’ account of his vision to Scipio, goes so far as to mention himself and his poem by name.49 There is no mention of Virgil even here, when the debt to him could not be more obvious. The scenario however recalls Virgil’s role in inducting Dante into the bella scola of ancient poets in Inferno 4.88 as well as Virgil’s own work:€Ennius’ questions, Homer’s responses, and the apparition of a youth still unborn are reminiscent of the exchange between Aeneas and Anchises presenting the Marcelli at the close of Aeneid Book 6.50 And what is more, the very opening of Ennius’ dream in the Africa has an obvious precedent in Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ dream of Hector (Aeneid 2.268). Thus the poet of the Africa draws extensively from Virgil, but avoids referring to him at all costs€– and even disparages him by innuendo. That curious stance cannot be reconciled with the importance the historical Petrarch attached to his renowned predecessor’s life and work without this fundamental realization:€ the speaker or narratorial persona of the Africa (who strives to eliminate all thematic reference to Virgil) is the creation, not the porte-parole or mouthpiece, of its rationalized author, whose presence is betrayed by the imitation of Virgil. A distinction between Petrarch as rationalized author and his constructed persona is just as important for making sense of Petrarch’s epistle to Homer (Familiares 24.12). Virgil is characterized in this letter as some who ‘was in very many respects [Homer’s] imitator’:€in pluribus imitator tuus fuit.51 That observation leads to the elaboration of a conception of imitation: Iam vero de imitatione quid dicam? Debuisti praesagire, dum tam alte alis animi te sublatum cerneres, numquam tibi defuturos imitatores. Gaudendum Ennius’ dream of Homer is in the Annales 1 ii–x Skutsch 2005. Usher 2005 examines the implication of Petrarch’s avowed succession to Homer and Ennius for Boccaccio. 50 The sense and diction of Africa 9.229–31 here recall Aen. 6.855–9:€aspice, ut insignis spoliis Marcellus opimis / ingreditur uictorque uiros supereminet omnis. / hic rem Romanam magno turbante tumultu / sistet eques. 51 Ancient accusations against Virgil of theft from Homer inform Petrarch’s discussions here. Donatus’ life of Virgil (45) mentions an eight-volume collection of these thefts compiled by 49

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vero talem te cui multi similes fieri velint, sed non multi possint. Quid ni autem gaudeas tu primi semper certus loci, cum ego ultimus hominum gaudeam, nec gaudere sat est, glorier quoque tanti me nunc fieri, ut sit aliquis, si tamen est aliquis, qui imitari optet ac fingere, illud magis gavisurus tales imitatores fore qui me superent? (Ad Familiares 24.12) Now indeed what am I to say about imitation? You, Homer, must have foreseen, as long as you beheld yourself raised so high on the wings of your talent, that you would never lack imitators. It is really a matter for rejoicing that you are such as many wish to resemble, but not many are able. So why should you not rejoice, always assured of first place, when even I, the last of men rejoice, and, more than rejoice, I also glory in the fact that I am now held in such account, that there is someone€– if indeed there is someone€– who wishes to imitate and model himself on me, with all the more cause for joy in that my imitators will be such as to surpass me.

The writer compliments Homer for inspiring so many literary imitators and imagines he may be able to do the same, expressing the hope that his imitators’ work might surpass his own. Petrarch’s lack of reference here to his recurrent imitation of Virgil is one reason to be wary of taking these comments at face value. The entertaining implication is clear enough:€ Virgil may not outdo Homer who can always be sure of his supremacy, but, if imitators can surpass their models, there is room for Petrarch to outperform the poet of the Aeneid. Familiares Book 24 also contains epistles to Cicero, Seneca, Varro, Quintilian, Livy, Pollio, Horace and Virgil.52 Although these letters exhibit considerable erudition, such a correspondence with long-dead luminaries is evidently playful:€the letter to Homer should not be read as a veridical source for the way Petrarch regards his own work and its legacy. But by again exhibiting a distinction between Petrarch’s constructed persona (here the dramatized figure who addresses Homer) and Petrarch the author (who is responsible for the ironies in that address), this text can enhance our understanding of his imitation of Virgil from another perspective. If Petrarch created an evidently distinctive persona for his own epic and for his other Latin poems, then it is likely that he discerned€– or simply presupposed€– that Virgil had engaged in a similar practice. Such an understanding of Virgil would naturally entail a disinclination to regard first-person Quintus Octavius Avitus. The nature of Virgil’s plagiarism is debated at length by the interlocutors of Macrobius’ Saturnalia. Laird 2002 reads Petrarch’s cameo in Africa 9 as following a metapoetic tradition in Classical epic. 52 Hinds 2004 considers the significance of the presentations of Cicero and Virgil in Ad Familiares 24 for Petrarch’s literary activity.

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affirmations or programmatic statements made in his poetry (such as the proem of the third book of the Georgics or the coda to the fourth) as literal forms of autobiographical testimony€– Petrarch’s propensity for allegorizing Virgil would certainly be consistent with that position.53 That position would actually render the course of imitation more viable for Petrarch and his successors:€no one could be Virgil himself, but it was possible to fashion a comparable persona as a stylistic Â�vehicle. That in turn would render it feasible to embark on a programme of emulating Virgil through a succession of works. The Latin bucolic and epic of Iacopo Sannazaro and the didactic and heroic poetry of Girolamo Vida from the sixteenth century illustrate some ways in which this could be achieved. Even though Petrarch may not overtly discriminate between author and persona, an equally important distinction€– between the figure of an author on the one hand and his work on the other€– is made directly in relation to Virgil in Familiares 24.11.54 The letter lays emphasis on the fact that its addressee, the historical author, is dead. This is accented from the very beginning which recalls the epitaph Virgil reputedly composed for himself: Eloquii splendor, latine spes altera lingue, Clare Maro, tanta quem felix Mantua prole Romanum genuisse decus per secula gaudet.

Fam. 24.11.3–5

Luminary of eloquence and [with Cicero] another hope of the Latin tongue, famous Maro, fortunate Mantua rejoices in bringing forth so great a son as you, a glory of Rome through the ages.

The last three words of Virgil’s lapidary distich had encapsulated the three stages of his poetic career: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc â•… Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.55 Mantua brought me forth, Calabria snatched me away, now Parthenope holds me:€I sang of pastures, farms, leaders.

Petrarch’s verse epistle goes so far as to envisage Virgil in the underworld that he himself described in Aeneid 6 and Georgics 4.56 The engagement In addition to the allegorical interpretations on the Ambrosian manuscript Petrarch explicates the hidden meaning of the Aeneid in Senilis 4.5. 54 The title (constituting verses 1–2) is Ad Publium Virgilium Maronem heroycum poetam et latinorum principem poetam ‘To Publius Virgilius Maro, heroic poet and principal poet of the Latins’. 55 See Horsfall 2000a:€21 for bibliography on the transmission and early circulation of this epitaph. 56 This is not the first time that a Christian writer has inserted Virgil in the hell he Virgil himself created:€ see Laird 2001 on Fulgentius and Ermenrich of Ellwangen. The ‘circle’ (circulus) is a 53

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with Aeneid 6 is developed in detail:€Petrarch asks Virgil whether Aeneas, ‘sent out through the ivory gate’, the exit of false visions from the world below in Aeneid 6, is now there to receive him. While the purpose of Aeneas’ jouney to the realm of the dead had been to seek wisdom about future historical events, Virgil will now need to rely upon a messenger from the world of the living to discover what has occurred since his demise (30–4): Tu, mundo siqua silenti Umbra recens nostra veniet tibi forsan ab ora, Quis tria cara tibi loca nunc totidemque libellos Exitus excipiat, nostris simul accipe verbis. And for your part, if any shade fresh from our own shore should by chance come to you in your silent world, learn from my words what has become of the three places dear to you and of your little books, the same number.

There could be more particular correspondences between the three opera or ‘little books’ (libelli) that constitute the life’s work of Virgil and the locations whose fortunes Petrarch goes on to explain:€Virgil hints that he composed the Eclogues in Parthenope (Georgics 4.564); he envisages wearing a poet’s palms to honour Mantua (Georgics 3), and he fanfares the foundation of Rome as the programme of his epic (Aeneid 1.5–7, 33). Petrarch’s news of these locations affirms his own personal association with all of them. The possibility that this association might bear on the relation of his literary production to Virgil’s is confirmed by what he says about Mantua (42–50): Hic tibi composui que perlegis, otia nactus Ruris amica tui, quonam vagus avia calle Fusca sequi, quibus in pratis errare soleres, Assidue mecum volvens, quam fluminis oram, Que curvi secreta lacus, quas arboris umbras, Quas nemorum latebras collisque sedilia parvi Ambieris, cuius fessus seu cespitis herbam Presseris accubitu, seu ripam fontis ameni; Atque ea presentem michi te spectacula reddunt. Here I have composed for you what you are reading, and have found the friendly repose of your own countryside, the path on which you used to roam the unfrequented shades, the meadows in which you used to wander. Continuously I wonder which shore of the river, which recesses of the curving lake, which shady trees, which hidden parts of woods, which banks on a small hill you frequented, clear evocation of Dante’s Inferno€– as Usher 2000 has remarked€– but thereafter Virgil’s own imagery is used to ring some funereal changes on the Classical apparatus of poetic inspiration.

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what grassy lawn you rested on when tired, or what bank of a pleasant stream. These sights make you present to me.

The meadows, groves, hills, and banks are at the same time poetic topoi. Petrarch’s speculations about Virgil’s haunts as a location for his own composition suggests that following in Virgil’s footsteps is a precondition for his own literary endeavours. The distinction between Virgil’s poetic corpus and Virgil the historical author is most clearly expressed at the end of the letter (53–67): melioribus aurem Ergo adhibe et rerum successus disce tuarum: Tityrus ut tenuem senior iam perflat avenam, Quadrifido cultu tuus ut resplendet agellus, Ut tuus Eneas vivit totumque per orbem Et placet et canitur, tanto quem ad sidera nisu Tollere conanti mors obstitit invida magnis Principiis; miserum Eneam iam summa premebant Fata manu iamque ore tuo damnatus abibat, Arsurumque iterum pietas Augusta secundis Eripuit flammis, quem non morientis amici Deiecti movere animi, meritoque supremas Contempsisse preces evo laudabitur omni. Eternum, dilecte, vale nostrosque rogatus Meonium Ascreumque senes salvere iubeto.

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So turn your ear to better tidings and learn of the success of your endeavours:€how old Tityrus still blows on a slender oaten pipe, how your small farm is resplendent through fourfold cultivation, how your Aeneas lives, gives pleasure and is sung all over the world, he whom you were attempting so strenuously to elevate to the stars when envious death obstructed your great undertaking. Already the last fate weighed on poor Aeneas, and he was already on his way out, condemned by your mouth, when the piety of Augustus snatched him from a second conflagration, when he was on the point of burning again. The dejected thoughts of a dying friend did not move Augustus and he will be rightly praised by every age for having defied your last request. Farewell for ever, beloved one, and, at my request, greet our elders, Homer and Hesiod.

The final farewell comes very abruptly after a rebuke to Virgil for asking the Aeneid to be burnt when he was dying and depressed:€ in Christian teaching a ‘dejected soul’ commanded reproach more than sympathy€– something encountered by any reader of Dante’s Inferno.57 And the praise lavished upon Augustus for preserving the work seems almost to match Compare e.g. Thomas Aquinas, In Psalmos, Ps.36, num. 23:€Iste ergo sciens se separatum a Deo per peccatum, reputat se miserum; et ex hoc dicitur animus ejus dejectus.

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the credit due to the poet for composing it. Whilst immortality is attributed to the characters Aeneas and Tityrus, and even to Virgil’s smallholding, the mortality of the poet who created these entities continues to be heavily emphasized:€ Petrarch’s other letters to other ancient authors do not draw such attention to the fact that their recipients are dead. The imitation of Virgil accomplished in this epistle is of vital metaliterary significance in that it provides a practical demonstration of the categorical division between the dead poet on the one hand, forever confined to remote antiquity or Avernus, and the Virgil ‘present’ to Petrarch through his work on the other. Virgil’s poetry is now the property of Petrarch’s epoch, subject to reinterpretation in the light of insights from Christian theology, the passage of time, contemporary events, and literary history. And it is again through a crafted persona of his own that Petrarch clarifies the distinction between Virgil the historical author and the Virgilian corpus that is now prone to appropriation, imitation and recreation€– in the manner of this very epistle. IV Biographical approaches to both Dante and Petrarch in relation to their work continue to be fruitful. However, the selection of texts surveyed above shows that heavy emphasis on biography is not an absolutely necessary prerequisite to appreciate the significance of the Virgilian career for either Dante or Petrarch. And the intricacies of their engagement with Virgil highlight the problems€– identified in antiquity€– that the postulation of an author’s personal will can raise for literary interpretation.58 Signs of human intention and agency can of course be seen in the responses to Virgil provided by Dante and Petrarch, but those human touches are in the end only discernible in texts. To confuse a persona or rationalized author with the historical author, or to read a literary programme The problem of authorial control is raised in Plato, Phaedrus 275, and, with varying degrees of explicitness in Roman poetry (e.g. Catullus 42, Horace, Satires 1.10.92, Ovid, Tristia 1.7, Propertius 3.23). The ‘intentional fallacy’ was addressed by Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946 long before Barthes 1977 (1967), which preceded and provoked Foucault 1998 (1969); compare Cheney 2002:€21. Aristotelian criticism, mostly mediated to Dante and Petrarch by Horace, and mediÂ�eval literary theory are rarely given to intentionalism:€Servius’ intentio Virgilii refers to the meaning of Virgil as a rationalized author. Petrarch’s actual practice in appropriating Virgil nicely illustrates Barthes’s observation that ‘the text is a tissue of citations … [its writer’s] only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others’, while the words Dante has Virgil speak in Inferno 26.73–4 could have a metapoetic implication bearing on authorial control:€Lascia parlare a me, ch’ i’ ho concetto / ciò che tu vuoi ‘Allow me to speak, for I have conceived what you want.’

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in a literary work as autobiographical testimony is rather like mistaking a Â�fictional character for a real individual. The respect in which ‘career criticism’ makes an important contribution to literary interpretation is in relaxing the formalist tenet that only a single text (and not a collection of texts) can be subjected to literary anaÂ� lysis. That tenet has always been justified on the basis that ‘if we amend the rationalized author’s image with the help of the historical author we destroy the text’:€ the perceived threat is that interpretation of a literary text will be distorted or constricted by the consideration of an historical author or of his other works.59 But it can be countered that an explicit reference to the Eclogues in Virgil’s Georgics (4.565–6) is as demonstrably attributable to Virgil the rationalized author of the Georgics as it is to Virgil the historical author. Thus bringing the Eclogues to bear on interpretation, even stylistic interpretation of the Georgics, is perfectly justified. To ascribe all the compositions by Virgil to the same rationalized author is audacious in that it is tantamount to regarding his entire oeuvre as a single text.60 But this may not be unwarranted where Virgil’s medieval reception is concerned:€ generic boundaries and texts were configured differently in a time before printing became widespread and Virgil’s poems were presented together in the manuscripts.61 Moreover, Virgilian ‘paratexts’, like the spurious introduction to the Aeneid or the apoÂ�cryphal epitaph quoted above, along with other material, notably Fulgentius’ Virgilianae Continentiae (which was frequently copied and later printed in the form of a preface to the poet’s corpus), might all contribute to a sense that Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid constitute a unity. The depiction on the rota Virgiliana, for mnemotechnical purposes, of each of Virgil’s poems as a third part of a whole circle, three in one, could be a reflection of this.62 However, Dante and Petrarch show ample recognition of the generic distinctions between Virgil’s works:€as we have seen, Dante hints that his Commedia offers an adventurous fusion of them, whilst Petrarch imitates Riffaterre 1983:€5. The argument against explaining one work in the light of others by the same historical author, from a formalist point of view, is that to do so presupposes stylistic identity between different works€– an impossibility if style is taken to be the unique quality of a work, tantamount to the text itself. 60 Theodorakopoulos 1997 offers a reading of the ‘book of Virgil’ as a single text. 61 Reynolds 1983:€433–6. 62 Carruthers 2008:€ 251–2:€ ‘Virgil’s Wheel was clearly a mnemonic diagram that his [John of Garland’s] students held; it is likely that it could be physically manipulated, as its concentric circles suggest. The figure of the rhetorical “rota Virgili” may provide the connection between the Latin word rota, “wheel,” and the English phrase “by rote”.’ 59

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bucolic and epic in separate projects. But both authors can present their own individual compositions as parts of a whole:€Dante’s La vita nuova (which shows no Virgilian influence) embedded thirty-one of his Italian poems in a prose narrative, in order to recount his relationship with Beatrice; Petrarch organized his vernacular sonnets into the series of the Canzoniere which became as influential as the sonnets themselves.63 The rota Virgiliana served as a tool for rhetoricians and poets who sought to remember and replicate the three Virgilian styles, at the same time as it conveyed a consistent identity underlying the poet’s works. But the circular form of the wheel could not linearise the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid into a temporal sequence. And it is certainly the case that Petrarch did not follow the diachronic trajectory of his Roman precursor, as he only started composing his own pastoral poetry after he had embarked on his heroic epic. However, the hints, such as we find in the Epistola Posteritati, that the Africa succeeded the Bucolicum Carmen€– compounded with the disciplined memorization of Virgil’s corpus€– may have helped to spin the Virgilian literary career into motion as a vehicle for Petrarch’s successors. 63

╇ Carrai 2009.

Ch apter 8

Did Shakespeare have a literary career? Patrick Cheney

Among the authors addressed in this volume, William Shakespeare is something of a special case:€ he alone is thought to lack a ‘literary career’. Unlike Virgil and Horace, or Petrarch and Boccaccio, or Milton and Dryden, Shakespeare is thought to have a ‘professional career’:€he is a man of the theatre, a jobbing playwright, a consummate actor and a savvy shareholder of an acting company, too preoccupied with the daily business of his new commercial enterprise to take an interest in the literary goals of English authorship.1 Only during the past few years, however, have we detached ourselves enough from this twentieth-century classification to recognize it as a classification, a critical construction of ‘Shakespeare’ born out of specific temporal origins, with its own location in history. That history, we shall see, is less Shakespeare’s than our own. Even so, we need to begin with it because so many critics continue to subscribe to it. Indeed, during the past century many were intent to announce this classification as a seminal achievement, and we may single out two primary movements that coalesced to create it. The first is theatrical, which Harry Levin summarizes in an important 1986 essay:€‘Our century has restored our perception of him to his genre, the drama, enhanced by increasing historical knowledge alongside the live tradition of the performing arts.’2 Levin is reacting to the Restoration, Augustan, Romantic and Victorian reduction of Shakespeare’s theatrical art to what John Dryden called in 1668 ‘Dramatick Poesie’.3 If critics from the late seventeenth century through the nineteenth tended to read Shakespearean drama as poetry, critics in the twentieth century succeeded in detaching the drama from poetry, viewing it largely as theatre. The flagship for this theatrical project continues to be the 1986 Oxford Bentley 1971; P. Thomson 1992. As we shall see, Helgerson 1983 is the bridge between Bentley and Thomson, classifying Shakespeare as a ‘professional’ rather than either a ‘laureate’ or an ‘amateur’. 2 Levin 1986:€228. 3 Vickers 1974–81:€i. 136. 1

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Shakespeare, the goal of which is to produce a Shakespearean text as it was originally performed.4 In 1997, The Norton Shakespeare:€ Based on the Oxford Edition institutionalized this theatrical classification for the American academy, with Stephen Greenblatt presenting ‘Shakespeare’ as ‘the working dramatist’.5 The second movement is materialist, which we have anticipated by mentioning Greenblatt. In origin, this movement is post-structuralist, indebted to Roland Barthes’s work on ‘the death of the author’ and Michel Foucault’s on the ‘author function’.6 The general goal has been to challenge traditional notions of the autonomous author by seeing literary work produced through cultural institutions. In Renaissance dramatic circles, the playwright emerged not as an intending author who wrote masterpieces of literature for all time but as a bending collaborator in a complex cultural process that includes businessmen, actors, printers and so forth.7 As recently as 2001, David Scott Kastan can indicate the complicity of the materialist with the theatrical movement:€ ‘At least in his role as playwright, Shakespeare had no obvious interest in the printed book. Performance was the only form of publication he sought for his plays. He made no effort to have them published.’8 According to Kastan, for a critic to work on the ‘book’ of Shakespeare means to decentre the individuated literary author and foreground the process of theatrical collaboration. The coalescence of the theatrical and materialist movements was popularly rehearsed in the 1998 Academy Award-winning film, Shakespeare in Love, when a new financial sponsor asks the owner of the Rose Theatre, Philip Henslowe, ‘Who’s that?’, pointing to a young Shakespeare. ‘No one’, Henslowe remarks. ‘He’s the author.’â•›9 During the past few years, however, a backlash has set in, and several critics have challenged the man-of-the-theatre model as simplistic and anachronistic. Most importantly, in 2003 Lukas Erne published Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, arguing that Shakespeare became a dramatic author during his own lifetime. Whereas most recent bibliographical work joins the Oxford Shakespeare in producing a Shakespearean text that editors believe was performed, Erne uses bibliography to show that Shakespeare and his acting company produced Wells, Taylor, Jowett and Montgomery 1986:€xxxvi. 6 Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard and Maus 1997:€1. Barthes 1977; Foucault 1998. 7 See Orgel 1991; De Grazia and Stallybrass 1993; Masten 1997. 8 Kastan 2001:€5–6. 9 Shakespeare in Love, directed by John Madden, written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (Miramax Home Entertainment, 1998). See Wall 2006:€1. 4 5

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playtexts for both performance and publication. As Erne himself puts it, ‘Printed playbooks became respectable reading matter earlier than we have hitherto supposed, early enough for Shakespeare to have lived through and to have been affected by this process of legitimation … The assumption of Shakespeare’s indifference to the publication of his plays is a myth.’10 Within the past five years, enough criticism has emerged to allow Catherine Belsey to speak of ‘a quiet revolution in Shakespeare studies’:€‘More than two decades after New Historicism turned our attention away from close reading and toward locating Shakespeare more firmly in his own culture, scholarship is shifting our focus onto Shakespeare’s own place in that culture itself, and the case is founded firmly on the texts.’11 In addition to Erne, Belsey cites James P. Bednarz’s 2001 Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, which shows Shakespeare to be a deeply self-conscious dramatist using the stage between 1599 and 1601 to challenge Jonson’s selfÂ�proclaimed authority as an English author; and my own 2004 Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright, which responds to Erne (and Bednarz) by reclassifying Shakespeare as a literary poet-playwright, the author of both poems and plays.12 Since 2005, the ‘quiet revolution’ has become louder. Not simply has Erne written a number of follow-up essays, but considerable bibliographical support has emerged.13 For example, Stanley Wells has examined the unpublished manuscript of William Scott, The Model of Poesy (1599–1601), to document the way in which a Shakespearean play, Richard II, was read, by a contemporary, in quarto form alongside his published poem, The Rape of Lucrece, for verse style.14 Additionally, M. P. Jackson has argued that Shakespeare created the figure of the Rival Poet in the Sonnets in response to Francis Meres’ 1598 portrait of him in Palladis Tamia, by drawing on bits of Meres’ discourse about Marlowe, Chapman, Jonson, Drayton and even Spenser.15 Finally, Alan Nelson has surveyed book owners of Shakespeare’s poems and plays before 1616 to ‘conclude, against the grain of much modern criticism, that Shakespeare’s poems and plays ought to be approached, if we are to respect history, not as documents of politics, theology, religious controversy, philosophy, or anthropology, but as “poesy”:€that is to say, as objects of delight, as verbal and dramatic art, as€– dare I think it?€– English Literature.’16 Erne 2003:€25–6. Erne traces his project to Berger 1989 and Peters 2000. Belsey 2006:€170. 12 Bednarz 2001. 13 Erne 2006, 2007 and 2008. 14 15 16 Wells 2008. Jackson 2006. Nelson 2005:€70. 10 11

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In addition to bibliographers, literary critics have looked at Shakespeare’s poems and plays to find evidence of Shakespeare’s standing as a literary poet-playwright:€not simply my own 2008 Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship but Charlotte Scott’s 2007 Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book€– two monographs that try to break apart the binary thinking that sees Shakespeare as a man of the theatre opposed to print culture.17 Finally, two 2008 collections support this project:€ Shakespeare’s Book, edited by Richard Meek, Jane Rickard and Richard Wilson, which forms ‘part of a new phase in Shakespeare studies’ by challenging the man-ofthe-theatre model with that of ‘a literary “poet-playwright”, concerned with his readers as well as his audiences’ (jacket cover); and Shakespeare and Spenser:€Attractive Opposites, edited by J. B. Lethbridge, which demonstrates that ‘Shakespeare read Spenser, remembered what he read and put it to good use.’18 With such recent work now available, perhaps the question, ‘Did Shakespeare have a literary career?’, acquires new urgency. When we look into this question, however, we confront an immediate paradox:€theorists of literary careers have viewed Shakespeare as the arch-theatrical man who foregoes print. As a result, we do not merely lack a study of Shakespeare’s literary career; we have absented this author from the felicity of a literary career altogether. In this chapter, I would thus like to look further into the topic of Shakespeare’s ‘career’, with particular reference to its Classical underpinnings.19 In the first section below, I review our main critical models for a literary career to discover a template against which to answer the title question, including Virgilian and Ovidian intertextuality as mediated by Spenser and Marlowe, respectively. In the second section, I summarize the evidence of Shakespeare’s poems and plays as it maps onto this template, focusing on a single example:€the Choruses to the mid-career history play Henry V, replete with a well-known ‘epic’ presentment. In a concluding section, I suggest not that Shakespeare lacked a literary career but that we lack a lexicon for classifying it. If we are to map Shakespearean authorship historically, perhaps we need a more empirically grounded idea of a literary career than has yet been developed. Although the following account cannot sufficiently map such terrain in its limited space, some preliminary work might open up areas for further research. 18 Scott 2007; Cheney 2008a. Lethbridge 2008:€52. On Shakespeare’s Classicism see, for example, J. Bate 1993 and H. James 1997. Also invaluable are P. Hardie 2002a; Martindale and Martindale 1990; Martindale 2004b.

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The two inventors of criticism on ‘literary careers’ have little to say about Shakespeare. In his 1981 Life of the Poet:€ Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers, Lawrence Lipking includes only a unit on Ben Jonson’s memorial poem to Shakespeare from the 1623 First Folio. Lipking may exclude Shakespeare because his book examines ‘poetic careers’€– the careers of ‘great poets’ writing poems, not playwrights writing plays.20 If so, we indeed run into a deep structural problem:€ Shakespeare’s practice as a playwright in the newly marketed theatre is simply too messy to allow for a literary career. Lipking’s model is nonetheless important. His book is ‘about the life of the poet:€poetic vocations, poetic careers, poetic destinies … By listening carefully both to what poets say about their works and to what works say about themselves, it hopes to arrive at a clearer understanding of the way that a poem can constitute the experience of a life’ (ix). Accordingly, Lipking organizes his study around ‘Three points’ in the poet’s life:€‘the moment of initiation or breakthrough; the moment of summing up; and the moment of passage, when the legacy or soul of the poet’s work is transmitted to the next generation’ (ix). Lipking’s method, then, is to read the ‘poems’ of ‘great poets’ for their self-reflexive sense of vocation or destiny, their idea of a literary career. If Lipking emphasizes a great poet’s self-discovery, the other pathfinding book on literary careers, Richard Helgerson’s 1983 Self-Crowned Laureates:€ Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System, emphasizes the poet’s self-presentation.21 Helgerson proposes a three-part classification for Renaissance writers:€ laureates, amateurs and professionals. Laureates are the national writers, such as Spenser, Jonson and Milton, who write serious literature throughout their adult lives to serve both the state and eternity (8). Like Lipking (1981:€xi, 69, 76–80), Helgerson discusses (but does not emphasize) the Classical underpinnings of an English Renaissance literary career, since Spenser selects Virgil as his primary model; Jonson, Horace; and Milton, Homer (Helgerson 1983:€ 1). According to Helgerson, ‘the something of great constancy at the centre of the laureate’s work is … the poet himself’ (40):€‘His laureate function requires that he speak from the centre’ (12). In contrast, amateur poets, Lipking 1981:€ix. As Helgerson himself puts the difference:€‘where I direct my attention to the outer works of both careers and texts€– that is, to the system of differences by which a poet might make his status known€– Lipking directs his to the inner development of both’ (Helgerson 1983:€153).

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such as Philip Sidney, write poetry during their youth, see their art as a pastime, and do not publish their work. The professionals are primarily public playwrights, like Marlowe, who write to make a living. Helgerson briefly classifies Shakespeare as a ‘professional’ writer who ‘made … [his] living from the public theater’ (Helgerson 1983:€4–5). In contrast, Spenser is Renaissance England’s first ‘laureate’ (100), because this print-author uses strategies of self-crowning to present himself as a poet who will shape national destiny.22 As Helgerson deftly puts it, ‘Shakespeare [as an author] is simply not there. The laureates are’ (10). Helgerson’s distinction between the laureate Spenser who is there and the professional Shakespeare who is not continues to inform criticism today. In fact, this distinction updates one of the longest held commonplaces in Shakespeare studies, tracing most famously to John Keats’s model of ‘Negative Capability’, and articulated well by Alvin Kernan in 1995:€‘Shakespeare was not an autobiographical poet, at least not in any simple, direct sense. Anything but. He remains, in fact, the most anonymous of our great writers€ – we seem always to glimpse only the back of his head just as he slips around the corner.’23 This commonplace is so entrenched that it becomes a recurrent feature of Greenblatt’s 2004 biography, Will in the World:€How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare:€‘Shakespeare was a master of double consciousness … [H]e contrived … to hide himself from view … [he had an] astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints.’24 Thus, Helgerson and Lipking may bypass Shakespeare because he does not conform to the gold standard for a literary career that they share; this standard is based on authorial agency. In his 1996 Big-Time Shakespeare, Michael Bristol does accommodate the gold standard to Shakespeare, yet helps us to understand the problem:€‘It is not clear … whether William Shakespeare did or did not aspire to the status of author [as established by Spenser and Jonson] … [W]e [simply] don’t know what we need to know about Shakespeare as an author.’25 Bristol’s formulation helps explain why Wendy Wall, in her 2000 overview essay, ‘Authorship and the Material Conditions of Writing’, foregrounds the laureate achievements of Spenser and Jonson yet mentions Shakespeare only once in Â�passing:€‘When Spenser and Jonson used the book format to generate the Criticism on careers has grown up around Spenser, foregrounded in Helgerson 1983, ch.1:€ see Rambuss 1993 and Cheney 1993. On ‘career criticism’, see Cheney 2002a. 23 Kernan 1995:€179. For Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’ see Cook 1990:€370. 24 25 Greenblatt 2004:€155. Bristol 1996:€57. 22

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author’s laureate status, … they produced … modern and familiar images of literary authority€– classically authorized writers who serve as the origin and arbiter of a literary monument that exceeds its place in everyday cultural transactions.’26 Effectively, Shakespeare has been written out of our narrative about the invention of English laureate authorship, and thus the idea of a literary career. Let us see if we can summarize why. To have a ‘literary career’, a writer needs to aspire to the status of author, in the canonical literary tradition of authorship growing out of Virgil and other classical authors, in open competition with authors in his own literary system, via a generically patterned set of traditional works that rely on visible strategies of both self-presentation and self-discovery, in order to achieve the twin goals of national service and literary immortality. While this definition may be cumbersome, it has the advantage of bringing together six concepts that form a career-template:€authorship, intertextuality, genre, selfcrowning consciousness, nationalism, fame. Together, these concepts (I suggest) form the foundation of an early modern author’s literary career as we understand it today. For most critics, Shakespeare gets himself into hot water quickly in terms of the career-template. For we do not know what we need to know about Shakespeare’s aspiration to be an author. We cannot find the sustained quotation of Classical authors that we expect of someone who aspires to be an author. Nor does this professional write in the genres expected of a literary career, especially Virgilian pastoral and epic. In the plays and poems he writes, he notoriously fails to present himself, and thus to represent his self-discovery. Consequently, we cannot determine the pedigree of his politics in relation to the nation, or discover a concern with a literary afterlife. Yet those who resist this author’s agency by relying on the revisionist principle of ‘social construction’ forget that we have moved into a postrevisionist era. Since the mid-1990s, many leading Renaissance critics have been articulating a model of authorship that allows for both social construction and individual agency. The leading voice is that of Louis Montrose, who offers a thrilling indictment of Foucault: Foucault’s own anti-humanist project is to anatomize the subject’s subjection to the disciplinary discourses of power. I find this aspect of Foucault’s social vision€– his apparent occlusion of a space for human agency€– to be extreme. In ╇ Wall 2000:€83, 86; on Shakespeare, with reference to the First Folio, see p. 83.

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other words, my intellectual response is that his argument is unconvincing, and my visceral response is that it is intolerable.27

In responding to Foucault, however, Montrose does not ‘seek to restore to the individual the illusory power of self-creation’; nor does he ‘wish to remystify the social production of the text, to reassert its status as an expression of the autonomous author’s singular creative genius’:€ ‘Any meaningful response to Foucault’s provocative concept of the “author function” will commence, not by rejecting it, but rather by expanding and refining it, by giving greater historical and cultural specificity and variability both to the notion of Author and to the possible functions it may serve’ (Montrose 1996:€ 92). More succinctly, Helgerson has said in his 1992 Forms of Nationhood, when discussing the topic of Shakespeare’s authorial agency, ‘he helped make the world that made him’.28 Among leading Shakespeareans, it is Bristol who has looked into Shakespeare’s authorship and career in most detail, and he outlines a post-revisionist model: Authorship need not be understood as a sovereign and proprietary relationship to specific utterances. It is perhaps more fully theorized in terms of dialogue and ethical sponsorship. The author is both debtor and trustee of meaning rather than sole proprietor; authority is always ministerial rather than magisterial.29

Bristol acknowledges Shakespeare’s intentions as an author within a collaborative culture, and sees him working intertextually with other authors:€ ‘Shakespeare labored in his vocation at the selection, composition, and verbal articulation of scripts intended for production in the theater … He was in continual dialogue with other writers, including both his literary sources and his immediate contemporaries.’ Consequently, Bristol interprets ‘Shakespeare’s vocation’ both ‘as the practice of a craft and as the production of a commodity in the context of a nascent show business’ (Bristol 1996:€58). In this pre-Ernean account, Bristol aims to correct the emphasis on collaboration, which minimizes individuation, to allow the author’s agency to accrue force. His word ‘vocation’ replaces the more traditional word, ‘profession’, used by Bentley, Helgerson and Thomson.30 Bristol’s post-revisionist model of Shakespeare’s authorial vocation, anticipating Erne’s ‘literary dramatist’, prepares us to take up the question of whether Montrose 1996:€92. 28 Helgerson 1992:€215. 29 Bristol 1996:€58. Bristol prefers vocation over profession, because of ‘its fundamentally religious sense of active commitment to the values of a particular craft’ (Bristol 1996:€55).

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Shakespeare might be an author with an enigmatic literary career€ – so enigmatic we have yet to chart it. ‘Ou r Be n di ng Au t hor’: €S h a k e s pe a r e’s C ou n t e r-L au r e at e C a r e e r Once we try to chart it, we discover not simply how different Shakespeare’s writing practice seems from the laureates but finally how deeply embedded it is in the laureate craft. For instance, Spenser tells fictions directly about the literary career of the author, but, according to the received wisdom, Shakespeare does not. Here is E.K.’s gloss on Colin Clout in the Januarye eclogue from The Shepheardes Calender:€‘Under which name this Poete secretly shadoweth himself, as sometime did Virgil under the name of Tityrus.’31 In contrast, we are told, Shakespeare tells fictions about characters such as Falstaff and Hamlet.32 If, as Lipking says, ‘to teach us how to see him, the poet must first project himself into his work’ (Lipking 1981:€ ix), we face stern€ – or perhaps playful€ – resistance from William Shakespeare. In Timon of Athens, the tragic hero precisely ridicules a figure named The Poet for ‘Stand[ing] for a villain in [his] … own work’:€‘Wilt thou’, Timon adds, ‘whip thine own faults in other men?’33 Yet, as the case of The Poet in Timon intimates, Shakespeare turns out to possess knowledge of, and control over, the western idea of a literary career, as we have defined it in our template. For instance, even though we cannot find a recurrent, recognizable persona like Colin Clout in the Shakespeare canon, critics have repeatedly made cases for cameo appearances of the author in his plays, with the three ‘William’ characters the most formalized, since they gesture to the author’s own name, as identified in Sonnet 136 (‘my name is Will ’ ([14]):€ William of Windsor in The Merry Wives of Windsor; William of Arden in As You Like It; and Williams of England in Henry V.34 Moreover, by looking in on each of the six concepts in our template, we may see that Shakespeare is historic precisely for putting the idea of a literary career centre-stage, and in doing so for countering the notion of a laureate career, especially as the Spenser quotations come from Spenser 1909–10 (ed. Smith and de Selincourt). The i–j, u–v, and other early modern typographical conventions, such as the italicizing of names and places, have been silently modernized from all early modern texts. 32 Bloom 1998 is vocal about the historic significance of Shakespearean ‘character’. 33 Timon of Athens 5.1.37–9, in Evans and Tobin 1997. All Shakespeare quotations come from this edition. 34 On William of Arden, see Bednarz 2001:€117–29. On William of Windsor, see J. Bate 1997:€8, 13. And on Williams of England, see Patterson 1989:€88–92. 31

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Classically oriented Spenser and Jonson define it for their contemporaries:€Shakespeare invents a counter-laureate authorship, and thus a counterlaureate career.35 Shakespeare’s counter-laureate career is on display throughout his poems and plays, but here we need to let a single example ‘St[and] for the whole to be imagined’ (Rape of Lucrece 1428)€ – in particular, the visible (and detailed) meta-theatre of the six-piece sequence in Henry V, which consists of a Prologue, four Choruses and an Epilogue. Critics have discussed these bits of metatheatre a good deal, but have tended to focus on their authorship (the consensus is that Shakespeare wrote them), on their uniformity with the plot of the play, and especially on the relation expressed between actor and audience, with Shakespeare assigning remarkable authority to the audience in the working of Â�theatre:€ ‘eche out our performance with your mind’ (Chorus 3.35).36 Thus far, however, no one has looked at the Choruses as ‘career Â�documents’€ – moments inside Shakespeare’s plays that reflect on his ‘literary career’. Shakespeare’s plays contain twenty-eight such documents, although eleven (from Pericles, Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen) may not be by him. That still leaves seventeen, from the two-scene Induction of The Taming of the Shrew to the Epilogue from The Tempest. To these, we may add the two Dedicatory Epistles to Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), as well as the Dedicatory Epistle to Troilus and Cressida, which may (or may not) be by Shakespeare.37 These meta-documents demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion, Shakespeare does present himself. In particular, he joins the laureates in presenting his authorship, as the opening to the Epilogue to Henry V makes clear: Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, Our bending author hath pursu’d the story. Henry V, Epilogue 1–2

Throughout his canon, Shakespeare uses the word ‘author’ twenty-four times; fully half of them refer to the author as a writer. As Katherine Duncan-Jones suggests, the phrase ‘Our bending author’ has two meanings, especially if Shakespeare performed the part of the Chorus himself, This is the topic of Cheney 2004 and 2008a. For these issues, see Taylor 1982; Gurr 1992a; Craik 1995. For recent criticism, see Baldo 2008; Kezar 2001:€176–95; Weimann 1988. 37 On the possibility of Shakespeare’s co-authorship, see K. Duncan-Jones 2001:€219–22. 35

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as critics believe:€1) the author bends over his desk working with pen, ink and paper; 2) the author-actor ‘bends’ in genuflection before his audience. She adds ‘a further point’, that ‘our bending author’ identifies the play as ‘the work of a single writer only’ (K. Duncan-Jones 2001:€ 112), and, equally important here, she sees the phrase evoking the Keatsian principle of Negative Capability, the ability of this author to rise by bending (107):€ ‘Shakespeare draws attention to his sole authorship so unobtrusively and tactfully that modern readers … may not even notice that anything unusual is being claimed’ (112). In this way, the Chorus uses a single phrase to mark the signature of Shakespearean counter-authorship as we understand it today. The bending author’s word ‘Our’ draws attention to a feature of Shakespeare’s authorship much commented on:€ he communalizes the agency of the ‘author’, drawing himself into the community of the theatre, which rehearses a dialogue between actors and audience. The word ‘pen’ recalls the author’s material instrument, which Shakespeare had recently featured in the coat of arms drawn up for his family:€a spear in the shape of a pen.38 The word ‘pursu’d’ draws attention to the author’s agency, while ‘story’ makes sure we do not mistake his Life of Henry the Fifth for mere ‘history’; rather, it is a work of historical fiction. Finally, the phrase ‘rough and all-unable’ not only deploys the author’s modesty topos but transposes the laureate self-presentation of Spenser to the stage. For, in the June eclogue Colin Clout tells his friend Hobinoll, ‘I wote my rymes bene rough, and rudely drest’ (77). Spenser’s use of ‘rough’ introduces a Virgilian provenance to the Chorus’ utterance:€the Shakespearean author presents himself unobtrusively as a pastoral poet. In sum, this inept (pastoral) author, in the raw of nature, works hard at the refined art of literary courtesy. He works so hard that he makes the opening two lines of the Epilogue the beginning of a Shakespearean sonnet, as scholars have long realized.39 The presence of an inset sonnet within a Shakespearean play, familiar from Romeo and Juliet and elsewhere, speaks deftly€– one wants to say, invisibly€ – to this author’s standing as a national poetplaywright. More to the point:€the man of the theatre presents himself as a literary poet-playwright, an author with a dramatic career, combining plays with poems, following the lead of Marlowe, and, before him, Ovid.40 For details, see Cheney 2008a:€34–7. Cheney 2004:€17–73.

38

40

See, for example, Walter 1954:€156.

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The opening two lines to the Prologue of Henry V also self-present Shakespeare’s theatrical authorship: O for a Muse of fire that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention! Henry V, Prologue 1–2

This utterance is oblique, so much so that the Victorians chose to Â�perform it as a ‘Pre-Raphaelite sigh’ uttered by a female,41 yet it feels masculine enough, and anything but a sigh. Rather, it is an exclamation, voicing a resounding literary possibility:€that an author (‘a Muse of fire’) could use his inspired (female) imagination to ‘invent’ a work so powerful it participates in the divine (‘ascend / The brightest heaven’). The Christian resonance of ‘ascend’ and ‘heaven’, together with the imagery of light (‘fire’, ‘brightest’), makes this author’s Classical invocation to the Muse not a mere convention but a semi-religious ritual. In the October eclogue, Spenser had used the topos to describe the literary fame of ‘the Romish Tityrus’, Virgil, whose three-part career€– ‘Oaten reede’, ‘laboured lands’ and ‘warres’€– affects the divine:€‘So as the Heavens did quake his verse to here’ (55–60). Like Spenser’s Virgilian career-poetics, Shakespeare’s poetic metatheatre has a metaphysical dimension to it; yet, rather than invoke the Muse for inspiration, this author vaunts the telos of his own renown. In particular, Shakespeare’s Classical reference to the Muse presents his play as an English national epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil. Thus, Shakespearean authorship operates through intertextuality, and intertextuality itself is the singular marker of authorship. In his Oxford edition of the play, Gary Taylor glosses the opening two lines of the Prologue as ‘a collocation of phrases in Chapman’s Achilles’ Shield (1598):€“his ascential muse” (Dedication, l. 117), and “Bright-footed Thetis did the sphere aspire / (Amongst th’immortals) of the God of fire” (ll. 1–2)’.42 In his introduction, Taylor takes the eighteenth-century cue of George Steevens, who first cited Chapman’s 1598 Seven Books of the Iliad as a source-text:€‘though Shakespeare is known to have read Chapman’s translation some time between its publication in 1598 and the composition of Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), the possibility of Chapman’s influence on Henry V has never been followed up. This is surprising, since Shakespeare clearly encourages comparison of Henry with his classical counterparts’ (Taylor 1982:€ 52). For Taylor (as for many), the Classical 41

Taylor 1982:€56.

42

Taylor 1982:€91.

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matrix ‘elevate[s] … Henry V to the status of “epic”’ (58), in part because, like the Iliad and Odyssey, the play is ‘a study in human greatness’ (72)€– a ‘greatness’, Taylor ‘believe[s]’, that ‘Shakespeare, in 1599, was aware of’, especially with respect to ‘his own success’, ‘his achievement and potential as an artist’ (73). In Shakespeare’s hands, the intertextuality by which his Classical English counter-authorship proceeds foregrounds ‘consciousness’.43 Thus, the Choruses of Henry V script a dramatic poetics linking ‘author’ with actor and audience by featuring the power all three share, imagination: And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. … Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance.

Henry V, Prologue 17–25

The effect of linking author, actor and audience is to highlight the Â�cultural ‘work’ of the literary imagination that theatre performs. As such, the Choruses show the author engaging in the process of self-Â�discovery outlined by Lipking. I propose that the Choruses constitute a historic ‘summing-up’ of Shakespearean art at the midpoint of his career. According to Lipking, this middle phase can ‘take many forms’, but the one he discusses first is relevant to Henry V:€ ‘an epic could conclude a career’ (Lipking 1981:€68). Henry V is not the epic crowning Shakespeare’s career, but criticism has long argued that in this play, as in the Henriad as a whole, the author puts the genre of national epic on the stage.44 What has escaped notice is Shakespeare’s use of a Classical topos for the generic shape to a literary career, ‘to compare great things with small’, which John S. Coolidge identifies as a Virgilian strategy for representing the progression from pastoral to georgic to epic:€ ‘To signalize this progression Virgil makes special use of the familiar phrase, “to compare great things with small” … Thus the idle shepherd carries the implicit promise of … the strenuous hero, to come; and the lowly pastoral kind looks forwards towards the epic.’â•›45 For Virgil, pastoral contains or compresses epic in order to predict it. As Coolidge shows, writers from Lucretius to Milton rely on the topos, including Ovid, who uses it several times, in part to counter the Virgilian progressive model with one featuring his oscillation On this concept, see Cheney 2008a:€203–33, especially 205 n. 8 for a history of criticism. 45 See Cheney 2008a:€31–62. Coolidge 1965:€2, 11.

43

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through the genres of erotic elegy, tragedy and epic.46 In Elizabethan culture, Marlowe and Spenser both use the career topos to play out the opposition between an Ovidian and a Virgilian career model:€ Spenser, in Cuddie’s Emblem concluding October; Marlowe, in his translation of Amores 2.17.4. In the Choruses to Henry V, Shakespeare deploys the career topos three times, and in each he applies it to his theatrical poetics, as his phrasing in the third example formalizes:€‘in that small most greatly lived / This star of England’ (Epilogue 5–6). First, in the Prologue, the bending author addresses the audience directly: O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million. Henry V, Prologue 15–16

Typically, editors unravel the mathematics:€ ‘a zero, in the unit’s place, transforms 100,000 into 1,000,000 … The same point is made in George Peele’s Edward I’.47 I suggest, rather, that Shakespeare has his eye on another Elizabethan dramatist, whom critics identify as his greatest rival, including in Henry V:€ Christopher Marlowe.48 For, Shakespeare’s formulation, in which a single actor (‘crooked figure’) may represent (‘attest’) ‘in little place a million’, rewrites one of Marlowe’s most famous lines:€‘Infinite riches in a little room.’49 In The Jew of Malta, Barabas refers to the wealth in his counting-house, yet, as the actor gestures with his arms, the ‘little room’ becomes the theatre, and the ‘infinite riches’ the wealth of the theatre itself. Chapman may have been the first to hint at this meaning, when he writes of Ovid seeing Corinna/Julia in Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595): He saw th’ extraction of all fairest dames: The fair of beauty, as whole countries come And show their riches in a little room.50

Shakespeare had himself rewritten the Marlovian line in As You Like It, when Touchstone refers to ‘a great reckoning in a little room’ (3.3.12–15)€– an ‘allusion to Christopher Marlowe’s death at the hands of Ingram Frizer in 1593 in a quarrel over a tavern bill’.51 In particular, the Henry V Chorus For details, see Cheney 1997:€63 and 286 n. 30. 47 Taylor 1982:€92. See Shapiro 1991; J. Bate 1997:€ 101–32. On the Tamburlainian underpinnings of Henry V, see Logan 2007:€143–68. 49 Jew of Malta 1.1.32. Quotations from Marlowe’s plays come from Burnett 1999. 50 Chapman, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, in Shepherd 1911–24:€ii.29. 51 Evans and Tobin 1997:€421. 46 48

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may gesture to the Marlovian ‘reckoning’ in the term ‘accompt’, meaning ‘reckoning’ (Evans and Tobin 1997:€ 979). If so, Shakespeare credits Marlowe with voicing the theatrical strategy evoked in the Choruses:€the communal ability of author, actor and audience to make ‘infinite’ with ‘little’, ‘great’ with ‘small’.52 Second, to open Act 2, the Chorus says, O England! model to thy inward greatness, Like little body with a mighty heart. Henry V, Chorus 2.16–17

Here, Shakespeare extends the career topos to the communal performance of nationhood, as the word ‘model’ indicates. England is a ‘model’ (or ‘small-scale replica’)53 of its ‘inward greatness’; or perhaps it is a ‘mould’ of that greatness,54 the way a small body contains a big heart. Like theatre, the nation is a small thing containing ‘inner greatness’. In keeping with the generic dynamic operating in the ‘great things in small’ formula, the second Chorus is important because it begins with displaced versions of both the Ovidian and Virgilian career models: Now all the youth of England are on fire, And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies; Now thrive the armorers, and honor’s thought Reigns solely in the breast of every man. Then sell the pasture now to buy the horse, Following the mirror of all Christian kings, With winged heels, as English Mercuries.

Henry V, Chorus 2.1–7

Here, Shakespeare transposes the authorial ‘Muse of fire’ from the first Chorus to the character of the ‘youth of England’, who ‘are on fire’€ – inspired with the author’s epic ambition. Thus they have left their ‘silken dalliance’ in the ‘wardrobe’ and donned manly ‘armor’, reversing the trajectory of Ovid in the Amores, when he turns from ‘stern war’ to ‘amorous lays’.55 Like Virgil, the Chorus presents the English youth moving from the domain of pastoral to that of epic, when they ‘sell the pasture’ to ‘buy the horse’. The reference to ‘winged’ Mercury confirms this metapoetic reading, for Mercury is not simply the messenger god but the god of The editions of Walter 1954, Taylor 1982, Craik 1995 and Gurr 1992a do not gloss the lines with Marlowe. 53 Taylor 1982:€118. 54 Craik 1995:€153. 55 Ovid, Amores 1.1.32–3, trans. Christopher Marlowe, in Cheney and Striar 2006. 52

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poets, as Michael Drayton knew when he used Mercury’s hat on his coat of arms to exhibit his laureate status.56 The Epilogue uses the Marlovian topos a third time, right where we should expect it: Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, Our bending author hath pursu’d the story, In little room confining mighty men, Mangling by starts the full course of their glory. Small time; but in that small most greatly lived This star of England.

Henry V, Epilogue 1–6

Here Shakespeare defines the essence of his counter-authorial poetics, the stage means by which the ‘bending author … pursu[es] the story’:€he confines ‘mighty men’ in a ‘little room’, ‘misrepresenting their glorious series of achievements through the fragmentary nature of this play’.57 Again, Shakespeare acknowledges the limitation of theatre while highlighting the Mercurial leap of imagination€– both his own and that of actor and audience€– which makes theatre work. Then he locates the career topos in the hero of the epic history, King Henry, who lived but a ‘Small time’ but nonetheless who concentrates greatness:€ ‘but in that small most greatly lived’. In sum, Shakespeare rewrites the career topos to highlight not the author alone but the link between author, actor, nation and national hero. The phrase ‘the full course of their glory’ warrants pause here. Taylor glosses ‘course’ as meaning four things:€‘(a) gallop on horseback (b) military encounter (c) hunt, pursuit of game (d) sequence, narrative’ (Taylor 1982: 281). The fourth meaning is especially to the point, for the metapoetic word ‘course’ can also refer to the ‘narrative’ or ‘story’, even as it gestures to the original meaning of career, ‘Of a horse:€a Short gallop at full speed’ (OED, Def. 2), ‘By extension:€A running course’ (Def. 3). The sixteenth-century definition of ‘career’ derives from the Latin word cursus, the course of a chariot-race, used by Ovid and Virgil to represent their progress as poets. For instance, Ovid ends the Amores by announcing the conclusion to his poem:€ ‘This last end [= turning-post] to my Elegies is set’ (3.15.2). Similarly, Virgil opens Book 3 of the Georgics by imagining himself entering Rome in triumph to greet Caesar:€ ‘In his honour I, a victor resplendent in Tyrian purple, will drive a hundred ╇ Craik 1995:€152 and Cheney 2008a:€34–7, including scholarship on Mercury as a poet-figure. Craik 1995:€370.

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four-horse chariots beside the stream.’58 As Leo Braudy writes in The Frenzy of Renown, ‘Although the Latin cursus remains most obviously in the English course, it shares a more intriguing metaphorical relation with career:€ Both are words that first applied to horse races and later to the stages of professional development.’59 Significantly, Shakespeare uses the word that is Braudy’s great subject:€ ‘glory’€ – authorial fame, as the sonnet-rhyme with ‘story’ intimÂ� ates. Indeed, the ‘story’ of Henry V is about ‘glory’, as the king himself announces:€‘I will rise there with so full a glory / That I will dazzle all the eyes of France’ (1.2.278–9). Pistol parodies Henry’s project after the king urges his men, ‘Once more unto the breach’ (3.1.1), for the Ancient lapses into mock-frenzy of ‘plain-song’ (3.2.7): … God’s vassals drop and die, And sword and shield, In bloody field, Doth win immortal fame.

Henry V 3.2.8–11

Long ago, William Hazlitt noted, ‘It has been much disputed whether Shakspeare was actuated by the love of fame’, but he himself goes on to dissent. Milton, Spenser, Bacon, Chaucer, Dante and others sought fame, ‘But it is not so in Shakspeare’:€‘There is scarcely the slightest trace of any such feeling in his writings … And this indifference may be accounted for from the very circumstance, that he was almost entirely a man of genius’, not a man of ‘taste’.60 The idea is still current, for in 1992 Andrew Gurr says of Shakespeare and fellow dramatists, ‘Except for a few poets, nobody gave a thought to posterity.’61 Yet Erne has reminded us of the historical context for viewing ‘literary fame’ at this time:€‘Toward the end of the sixteenth century, an English poet’s hopes that his verse would live on after his death were probably more likely to come true than ever before’, because of the steady emergence of printed books (Erne 2003:€6–7). Erne cites J. B. Leishman, who in 1961 challenged the notion that Shakespeare took no interest in the afterlife of his plays:€Shakespeare, ‘who is commonly supposed to have been indifferent to literary fame, … has written both more copiously and more memorably on this topic than any other sonneteer’.62 Erne’s Georgics, 3.17–18, in Fairclough 1916–18. On Virgil’s use of the chariot as a figure for his poetry, see P. Hardie 1993b:€100–1. 59 Braudy 1986:€61 n. 4, and see Introduction above. 60 Hazlitt 1930:€iv.21–3. 61 Gurr 1992b:€46. 62 Leishman 1961:€22. 58

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conclusion, that ‘Shakespeare’s dramatic writing … does suggest a fair amount of Â�artistic ambition and self-consciousness’ (2003: 5), can be amply supported. For starters, Shakespeare uses the word ‘fame’ and its cognates nearly 200 times; the word ‘renown’ and its cognates, over 50 more; and the word ‘glory’ and its cognates, an additional 100€– bringing the total to around 350. From beginning to end, he meditates deeply on the topic of literary fame, as passages from 2 Henry VI (1.1.92–102, 5.3.29–33) to Sonnet 55 make clear.63 The Act 5 Choruses to Henry V both bear on Shakespeare’s literary quest for fame by engaging in a well-marked strategy of a literary career:€the advertisement for both past and future works. To open Act 5, the Chorus pauses to compare Henry’s wartime London to Classical Rome: Like to the senators of th’ antique Rome, With the plebeians swarming at their heels, Go forth and fetch their conqu’ring Caesar in.

Henry V, Chorus 5.26–8

According to Duncan-Jones, ‘Shakespeare looks forward to his next play in the initial comparison of the return of Henry from Agincourt with that of Caesar from his triumph over the sons of Pompey.’ Specifically, Shakespeare ‘neatly provides the Globe audience with some of “the story so far” as background to Julius Caesar’.64 Yet Duncan-Jones does not record the self-reference in the last line:€the Caesarian phrase ‘go forth’. In Act 2, scene 2 of Julius Caesar, the phrase occurs three times, when the emperor says to his wife, Calphurnia, on the morning of the Ides of March, ‘Caesar shall forth … / Yet Caesar shall go forth … / And Caesar shall go forth’ (10, 28, 48). The repetition is notable because, as editors have long recognized, it repeats the repetition in Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, where the Guise, about to be assassinated, says, ‘Yet Caesar shall go forth … / Thus Caesar did go forth’ (21.71, 91).65 Shakespeare’s allusion to The Massacre in Henry V may help confirm the Marlovian provenance of the ‘great things in small’ topos elsewhere in the Chorus. As Duncan-Jones also observes, ‘The Epilogue … reminds the audience of Shakespeare’s earlier work, the Henry VI cycle, “Which oft our stage hath shown”’, adding:€ ‘Though Shakespeare has often been viewed as careless about personal fame …, these allusions show him effectively “puffing” his own history plays, … but doing so in such an affable and relaxed way that we scarcely notice that it is being done’ See the Index to Cheney 2008a under ‘fame’, ‘glory, Christian’, ‘literary eternal’ and ‘immortality’. K. Duncan-Jones 2001:€113. 65 See Cheney 2008b:€145–6.

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(K. Duncan-Jones 2001: 113–14). Not mere puffery, the allusions to the Henry VI trilogy and to Julius Caesar constitute Shakespeare’s version of the career advertisement made famous by England’s Virgil, Edmund Spenser, whose Faerie Queene begins with an announcement that the national poet who wrote pastoral in the past progresses to epic in the present (1.Pr.1). Yet, as is almost always the case, Shakespeare’s announcement is counter-laureate, because in the self-presentment of his counter-career ‘we scarcely notice that it is being done’. ‘T wo T ru t h s A r e T ol d’:€S h a k e s pe a r e’s C a r e e r s Did Shakespeare have a literary career? According to our received critical narrative, he did not. Rather, he had a ‘professional career’, devoted to the commercial demands of the new London theatre. But, according to the narrative he invents in his fictions, as concentrated here in the Choruses of Henry V, William Shakespeare also has a second career, and he uses the theatre to re-imagine the very concept of a career. Bending between a professional career in staged theatre and a literary career in printed poems and plays, England’s (future) National Poet manages to author the most sustained counter-laureate career on record. Four hundred years later, we are still trying to chart it.

Ch apter 9

New spins on old rotas:€Virgil, Ovid, Milton Maggie Kilgour

As other essays in this volume have already indicated, the contours of the Virgilian rota, once considered the dominant career pattern for any serious Renaissance poet, do not seem as clear as they once did. Despite the trope of the wheel, critics have often focused on the linear, teleological thrust of the Virgilian model, which has been seen to give a progressive, developmental shape to the poet’s life that reflected simultaneously the movement of civilization.1 As Michael Putnam’s essay reminds us, Virgil’s model is also a rota in a truer sense, as it comes full circle to trace a movement back to its earlier origins. Virgil’s career ends where it began, in the dubious land of shades, umbrae.2 This return to origins reveals the unity of the works as a whole and brings them to a close in a final self-gathering of climactic fulfilment and resolution. But it also creates a counter, centrifugal pressure to the linear thrust of Virgil’s career that resists closure. The unresolved tension between the two movements mirrors the conflict now frequently noted in the Aeneid itself. While Aeneas’ career involves progression, his transformation from defeated Trojan into the Roman whose climactic victory over Turnus suggests the triumph of civilization over barbarism, the final moments of the text seem to suggest that the hero is relapsing into barbarism.3 The abrupt ending of the poem€– which focuses on the slaying of the defeated Turnus€– calls the progress of Rome into question. But it also raises questions about the career of the author which ended On this model and its influence, see Curtius 1953:€231–2, Lipking 1981:€76–93, Coolidge 1965:€1–23, Neuse 1978:€606–39, Cheney 2001:€79–80 and also Cheney 1993:€49–63. 2 See Putnam above, Ch. 1, and also Theodorakopoulos 1997:€157, 162–4 especially. 3 For a discussion of the tradition of darker readings of the poem, see R. F. Thomas 2001. David Quint also shows how Aeneas’ linear progress is haunted by the temptation not just to return to Troy but also to repeat his past. The journey to Rome must include but redirect this drive backwards:€rather than simply replicating the past, Aeneas must find a way of recreating it ‘with a difference’ (Quint 1993:€50). Readers do not agree as to whether the end demonstrates such a triumphant recreation, or a darker type of regression. 1

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equally abruptly with death.4 Like the poem, the Virgilian path seems haunted by shadows and questions that make the end of the poem and the author’s life less the triumphal climax of interdependent empire and authorial self than a confession of radical uncertainty about the poet’s past and future. If the poet’s rota comes full circle, where indeed has he been going? Moreover, who has been spinning the wheel? As Nita Krevans’ essay in this volume further shows, Virgil’s reported and highly ambiguous deathbed request that the Aeneid be destroyed both reinforces and undermines the final shape of the rota. While the gesture seems one of supreme authorial control, the story reveals the lack of the poet’s authority over his own works; the Aeneid was published, as Donatus tells us, ‘auctore Augusto’. As critics have begun to look more closely at Virgil’s career, they have also begun to re-examine its meaning for and indeed dominance of Renaissance poets. Certainly other models were possible, especially for the growing number of professional playwrights whose careers took a very different shape. As several essays in this volume demonstrate, other Classical writers established alternatives as well. Patrick Cheney, who has gallantly rescued several writers from the relentlessly ‘grinding circumference of the Virgilian Wheel’ (Cheney 1993:€53) has argued that Ovid offered Marlowe a fruitful counter-Virgilian model. Cheney suggests that Ovid’s vision of his own development from elegy to tragedy in the Amores presents Marlowe with ‘a relatively stable and coherent Ovidian career model’ (Cheney 1997:€ 41). Moreover, Ovid offers an alternative to the Virgilian model which is (Cheney 1997:€29): non-progressive and non-typological:€ it sets up a sacred generic order only to scramble it. In this generic play, oscillation infiltrates, contaminates, and finally orders progression. Thus genre progression and genre itself remain vital to the Ovidian poet, but he delights in a series of deft manoeuvres that explode the developmental idea of a career (literary or civic) so important to Roman and Elizabethan culture, even as he clearly develops himself.

Given Ovid’s general influence in the Renaissance it seems highly Â� plausible and helpful to imagine that writers studied his example. But I have some reservations about this model. It first of all presupposes an opposition between Virgilian and Ovidian paradigms. Where Virgil is progressive and typological, Ovid is not; he scrambles the order Virgil A rather literal identification of the death of Turnus with that of the author was made by Petrarch who wrote in his copy of Virgil:€‘You were too sure a prophet of your own death:€for with such words on your lips life fled you’ (qtd in P. Hardie 1997a:€145).

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sets up. This is a common way of thinking about the two poets, as well as their legacies in the Renaissance. It assumes that Ovid is a ‘“bad” reader’€– or at least a very naughty one€ – of Virgil (Cheney 1997:€ 15).. I’ll return to this traditional antithesis shortly. But the alternative looks somewhat limited, as Cheney’s reading has Ovid creating another typological and teleological sequence, with an ‘Ovidian triad’ (Cheney 1997:€ 41), based on the plan of the Amores, that indeed progresses as it evolves from elegy to tragedy (epic’s rival for the highest status in the Renaissance hierarchy of the genres). Although Cheney notes that, in reality, Ovid offers two career models, the one he announced in the Amores and the other that he actually lived, Cheney argues that only the first is important to Marlowe (Cheney 1997:€12, 47). This may be true of Marlowe, whose career reached its own abrupt and unexpected ending. But it is not true of other Â�writers of the time. While Ovid’s early proposed programme sets his (and our) expectations, it is finally his lived career, like that of Virgil, that later writers knew all too well. The spectre of Ovid’s life haunted the reception of his works from the beginning.5 In his career, as in so many other ways, Ovid has indeed seemed the antithesis of Virgil€– and certainly has not offered an obviously attractive role model for any later poet! Where Virgil’s writing appears to unfold itself naturally towards its final epic triumph, Ovid’s career has been seen as one of sad decline, a myth of regression not progression. He reaches his epic peak prematurely with the Metamorphoses; his last poems, written from exile in Tomis, are repetitive, and frankly whiney. It is hardly heartening for a reader when a poet himself announces that his creative powers have been worn down by circumstance. But the loss of ability becomes itself a major theme of these works, as Ovid constantly complains that his talents have been worn away by hardship; he fears that he is regressing, devolving from the urbane and witty Roman into a barbaric demi-Gete. He notes that his writing is becoming monotonous in its subject, for the exiled poet can only write of one single subject:€his own dismal fate. If the Metamorphoses, like the Aeneid, ends like a grand symphony, in which beginning and end are gathered together into a single climactic whole, the end of Ovid’s exilic work might better be compared to the fade-out on a modern recording, when a tune simply repeats itself over and over, echoing itself, until it disappears altogether.

5

See Lyne 2002:€ 288–300. See also Robathan 1973:€ 191–209 and Smarr 1991:€ 139–51; Piccone 2003:€389–407; and Pugh 2005.

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For a long time, Ovid’s disclaimers made it easy for critics to ignore these works except as the sorry end of a great talent. Still, if they are indeed the failure Ovid insists, their attraction and importance for later writers, especially those who also experienced some form of exile, seems odd, or at least sadistic or possibly masochistic. Recent criticism has begun to suggest the importance and complexity of Ovid’s last poetry.6 Even as the poet complains that his career is over€– crushed by the princeps’s power€– he is subtly putting himself back together and reinventing himself. In exile, he reviews and indeed rewrites his entire career, giving it a unifying shape, so that it appears held together as carefully as Putnam shows Virgil’s was, and by oddly similar means.7 After experimenting with the epic in the Metamorphoses, Ovid returns in his final works to his first source of poetry, the elegy. The themes of the erotic verse reappear, though typically metamorphosed:€the frustrated sexual desire of the erotic verse becomes the longing to return home and the disdainful mistress is replaced by the princeps. At the end, the poet comes full circle, back to where he started. Here again Ovid might seem Virgil’s opposite, who is deliberately and cheekily turning the Virgilian rota the wrong way, setting it in a backwards motion.8 Yet given the retrogressive undertow of the Virgilian career itself it seems too simple to see Ovid as merely reversing Virgil’s motion. Rather than being an antithetical ‘bad reader’ of Virgil, Ovid shows himself here to be, as Stephen Hinds notes, ‘one of Virgil’s most sympathetic and perceptive readers’ (Hinds 1988:€16). As Richard Thomas suggests, ‘he brings out what was already there in Virgil’ (R. F. Thomas 2001:€80).9 Like Virgil, at the end of his career Ovid returns to his own origins. In so doing, he circles back to the questions raised at the end of the Aeneid. Where indeed has the rota brought the poet? At the end of the Metamorphoses, and in the Fasti, Ovid asserts that art takes him to the stars. The last work suggests that poetry also has led to Tomis, to exile, where, as Putnam reminds us, Virgil’s poetry began. Ovid seems to have gone both too far and nowhere at all. See especially Kenney 1965:€37–49, Dickinson 1973:€154–90, Nagle 1980 and H. Evans 1983. Also see Hinds 1985:€13–32 and Hinds 1999; Williams 1994 and P. Hardie 2002a:€283–325. 7 See also Hardie 2002a:€31 n. 1. 8 In a paper presented at the conference in which this volume originated, Patricia Parker spoke of Ovid’s Medea as a figure for the ‘preposterous’ career, modelled on Medea’s powers to reverse the forces of nature and make time run backwards. Given Ovid’s interest in and later identification with Medea, a figure to whom I will return, Parker’s reading is highly suggestive. 9 On Ovid’s adaptation of Virgil, and its influence, see also Farrell 2004:€ 41–55 and Barchiesi 2005:€cxlviii–cxlix. 6

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At the same time, Ovid’s final poetry is a powerful summary of and conclusion to his career in which the poet seems to take control of his life once again. It is an astonishing feat, in which he gives his career€– a career which was interrupted and derailed by external circumstances over which he had no control€ – the illusion of authorial organization. As Putnam suggests, Virgil’s career seems planned, crafted itself by the poet’s art. By following Virgil and bringing his poetry back to its origins, Ovid asserts his control over the shape of his life. At times also, especially early on, he defiantly asserts the inability of Augustus to influence his art.10 Speaking of himself as already dead, he both conveys his insubstantiality outside of Rome and gives himself a striking authority:€he is a voice issuing from beyond the grave, posthumously pronouncing the last word on his own poetry.11 As Krevans notes also in the following chapter, Ovid restages Virgil’s deathbed scene playing all the roles:€it is he, not Augustus who saves his work for posterity and shapes his career. But at the same time, the poetry draws attention to the poet’s loss of control. This is not just a strategy of self-deprecation, though it clearly has a rhetorical purpose. It suggests the other pressing question:€ who finally determines the shape of the poet’s career? In a very real sense, the answer for both Ovid and Virgil is Augustus, who rescued Virgil’s epic and sent Ovid to Tomis. As Ovid explains too, Augustus had exiled the poet partly in anger after reading Ovid’s earlier erotic verse (Trist. 2.207). The princeps demonstrates the power of the reader over the works and, in Ovid’s case, even over the poet himself. Given the questions Ovid’s last verse raises, it is not surprising that it moved poets, especially at the end of their lives. The influence of Ovid’s exilic review is evident at both the beginning and end of Milton’s Â�career. In the early Elegy 1 (the first of the Latin poems in his 1645 volume of works), Milton playfully compares his own pleasant rustication with Ovid’s bleaker relegation; his final works suggest more sombre parallels between his own situation and that of the exiled Ovid.12 Ovid’s example, however, seems in conflict with a career that is usually imagined as planned and executed on a linearly Virgilian trajectory. As often noted, the young Milton bursts on the scene in 1645 with a volume See especially his poem to his protégée Perilla:€Ovid Trist. 3.7.43–54. On the theme of exile as death see Nagle 1980:€21–32. See lines 17–24. E. K. Rand suggests the parallel also:€ Rand 1922:€ 109–35. The connection is implied but never really developed by Louis Martz (Martz 1980). It is common to see Milton’s life after the Restoration as a period of exile; so Elizabeth Sauer notes wryly that ‘Ovid’s punishment is now visited on Milton in his late years’ (Sauer 2001:€217).

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that is carefully crafted to present him as a Virgilian poet.13 His early autobiographical statements impose a deterministic and rigorously linear shape upon his life that seems, in retrospect, uncannily prophetic. Richard Neuse and Louis Martz see his debut collection as prophesying a Virgilian career, a prophecy which is neatly fulfilled in Paradise Lost. According to John Coolidge, moreover, Milton is finally able to go beyond Virgil:€the epic’s ‘sequel’, Paradise Regain’ d, is Milton’s Christian transcendence and fulfilment (by typological completion) of the Virgilian progression (Coolidge 1965:€20–3).14 Milton’s cunning presentation of his own development has too often encouraged readers to see him as a monolithic ego, sure of himself from the very start and unchanging from beginning to end. This is Stanley Fish’s Milton, a ‘poet of closure’ and relentless consistency (Nuttall 2001:€19).15 This monumental Milton has been challenged in recent years by readings which have focused on a Milton who is conflicted, destabilized, ‘uncertain’, even, in Gordon Teskey’s deliciously provocative term, ‘delirious’ (Teskey 2006).16 Milton’s development, like Ovid’s, was certainly derailed by forces he neither foresaw nor controlled. Moreover, the early works and statements show an uncertainty about direction understandable in even a highly gifted young man:€Milton has a sense of his own promise, but the path to fulfilment is shadowier to him than it is to the modern reader, blessed with the prescience of hindsight.17 While the opening of the English section of the 1645 Poems with the Nativity Ode, with its echoes of Eclogue 4, seems to present his own poetic nativity as Virgilian, the opening of the second Latin section with the exilic Elegy 1 gives us a second beginning with a more ominous subtext that points to another possible career path. If Milton begins his career twice he also gives us two endings from which to choose. In general, Milton brings See Neuse 1978; Martz 1980:€31–59; and Revard 1997. For the young Milton’s identification with Virgil, see also Campbell 1984:€234–8. 14 Martz’s identification of Paradise Regain’ d as a ‘Georgic’ work, however, suggests the possibility of a different sequence; see Martz 1980:€293–304. 15 Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson also note how Milton continues ‘to enjoy the status of the most monumentally unified author in the canon’ (Nyquist and Ferguson 1987:€xii). 16 See also Fallon 2007 and Herman 2005. 17 Lorna Sage notes the danger of simply accepting the superb illusion of self-completion in Milton’s self-presentations:€‘Milton has excluded muddle, failure, contingency, all the signs of the experiment he was continuously engaged in’ in order to ‘present himself so determinedly as a finished product’ (Sage 1973:€261). As Sage reminds us, ‘We tend to under-rate the amount of creative energy certain artists€– Milton and Joyce among them€– put into shaping their lives in order to write their works. It is easy to be taken in by the illusion they project, and to treat them as distantly god-like figures in control of all the pressures and accidents of existence’ (262). One might add Ovid to her list. 13

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his career to a stutteringly clumsy conclusion€– in which two versions of the grand climactic epic (1667, 1674) frame another complex and generically shady pair of poems, Paradise Regain’ d and Samson Agonistes (1671) (a brief epic and a closet drama).18 These poems are themselves about careers and career choice; the first shows Christ searching for the path by which he may start to fulfil his destiny, and the second, the path by which Samson may end his.19 Together they therefore show the beginning and endings of a career, and each has frequently been read autobiographically. In 1673 Milton also returned to where he started as a poet, releasing a new edition of the 1645 Poems, with the addition of some other early but previously unpublished works. Talk about generic scrambling!€– and at the very point in his career when Milton might have been expected to be arranging things carefully to present his final word and summing-up of his achievement.20 But this, I believe, is precisely what he was doing. Milton’s encyclopedic mind certainly had the power to absorb events, history, the literary and intellectual tradition, and shape them into a focused whole, whether that be the myth of Genesis or the myth of his own maturation. Given Milton’s care with the publication of individual works in this period€– his revision of the 1645 Poems (in which also the addition of dates of composition to the individual poems gives a precise and linear sequence to artistic development) and his restructuring of Paradise Lost€ – it seems hard to imagine that he was not involved in the presentation of the 1671 volume. As Milton must have anticipated also, the juxtaposition and order of the two poems has influenced their reception, and especially the reading of Samson Agonistes as in some sense the blind failed revolutionary’s last word. I therefore want to look at Samson as part of Milton’s retrospective on his poetic development, his spin of the rota as he also looks back on his career.21 Milton’s tragedy depicts the end and John Shawcross notes also the contemporary concern with questions of genre; see Shawcross 1983:€238. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy argues that in Paradise Regain’ d ‘the interpretation of one’s career’ is ‘the basic temptation in the poem’ (Rushdy 1988:€ 255). One might expect it to be a temptation to which Samson, unlike Christ, succumbs; as I will suggest, the end of Milton’s play however makes the temptation that of the reader. 20 Lipking notes how writers have often felt that ‘Last works, like last words, have a special aura of authenticity’, so it is ‘Small wonder that poets should take such care to end on a proper note’ (Lipking 1981:€ 67, 68). Herman suggests that, while ‘it seems as if Milton intended his final poems as a summa of his life’s work€– a crowning achievement that summons all his previous writing on stage for a final, brilliant affirmation and curtain call’, Samson undermines the grand climax:€ ‘Samson Agonistes undoes whatever certainties Paradise Regain’ d achieves’ (Herman 2005:€24). 21 My argument here is anticipated in some points by Coiro 1998:€123–52. 18

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summing-up of a life which leaves us not with a triumphant sequence of early promise posited and then neatly fulfilled€ – which would be truly fearful symmetry€– but with a messy and open ending, full of questions about the past, and the future. Milton’s most disturbing and controversial work is doubly so because of its apparently intimate relation with Milton’s own life and even, as in Virgil’s case, death. Milton’s blind and imprisoned Samson, a revolutionary betrayed by his people, is inevitably compared to the poet himself. Yet critics disagree violently on Milton’s attitude towards his violent hero.22 These debates are in many ways reminiscent of critical disagreement over the end of the Aeneid. In a longer paper, I argue for a Virgilian Â�subtext in Samson Agonistes, especially comparing Samson and Aeneas as heroes.23 I’ll abridge a few important points of comparison here. Both heroes’ careers are themselves derailed by disasters connected with the sea: at the start of the Aeneid, Aeneas first appears in the storm that tosses his ships off course to Carthage, while Samson and the Chorus both describe him as shipwrecked by his Dido, Dalila (SA 198–200; 1044–5). The situation symbolizes the protagonists’ loss of a past heroic identity and marks the beginning of their transformation into a new kind of hero. Their journeys take them through a process of rebirth and renewal, reinforced in both cases through images of fire and serpents, which culminate when the originally shipwrecked heroes obtain symbolic power over water.24 Even more strikingly, however, both heroes undergo this regeneration by As Stephen M. Fallon notes, Samson is ‘Milton’s most indeterminate poem, the most resistant to critical consensus’ (Fallon 2007:€251). Many readers have seen Samson’s final act as proof of his recovery of his insight and his fulfilment of God’s plan; the drama thus shows the process of regeneration. See Radzinowicz 1978; Low 1974; and Shawcross 2001. While most regenerative readings tend to downplay the violence as an unpleasant but necessary side-effect of spiritual growth, Michael Lieb argues forcefully that Milton approves of violence as a regenerative act. Violence is not a by-product of the action, it is the main action:€‘The drama is a work of violence to its very core. It extols violence. Indeed, it exults in violence’ (Lieb 1994:€237). See also Feisel G. Mohamed who argues that current critical denials of Milton’s support of violence suggest a need to idealize both Milton and the western tradition as rational and pacific (Mohamed 2005:€327–40). In contrast, John Carey and Joseph Wittreich especially have argued that Milton means us to denounce, not applaud, Samson’s violent end. Carey’s article, ‘A Work in Praise of Terrorism’ (2002:€15–16), pushes to an extreme the arguments of his earlier work; see especially J. Carey 1967:€395–9, J. Carey 1969, as well as the notes in J. Carey 1968:€337–41. See also the series of arguments developed by Joseph Wittreich (Wittreich 1986b, 2002; Wittreich and Kelly 2002). Derek Wood provides a thoughtful summary and critique of the critical disagreements over the character of Samson during the last fifty years (Wood 2001:€3–26). 23 See Kilgour 2008:€201–34. 24 On the imagery of fire and serpents in Virgil, see especially Knox 1966:€124–42. On this imagery and that of water in Milton, see Carey 1967 and Wittreich 2002:€247–60. 22

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means of a process of definition by contrast in which they reject alternative models of heroism embodied in a series of potential rivals. In the Aeneid, Aeneas’ identity is transformed through relationships with three central figures who serve as doubles for aspects of himself:€Anchises, Dido and, finally, Turnus. Similarly, the main action of Samson Agonistes revolves around the encounters with Manoa, Dalila and Harapha which lead up to the drama’s climax. Each hero thus faces a benevolent father figure who ties him to his own past, a female counterpart who dangerously seduces him from his destiny, and a foreign hero who most directly represents an alternative set of heroic values. Each hero must leave behind these seductive potential selves, undergoing renewal through psychological amputation. Both narratives thus seem to suggest a pattern of heroic growth and development, through loss, trial and the rejection of temptation. Despite the initial setbacks, these seem progressive career models. The fates of both Aeneas and Samson are more complex, however, than this model might suggest. The violent climactic act that seems to separate the hero from his alternatives in fact potentially confirms continuing identification and hints at a darker end for individual and historical progress. Both endings generate parallel questions:€do the authors celebrate or critique violence, as a tool of empire, in Virgil’s case, or of revolutionary change in Milton’s? The final scenes€– the slaying of Turnus and the slaughter of the Philistines€– make us question whether the career of the hero is one of progression or regression. Like the Aeneid, Samson Agonistes seems to look backwards. In every way it seems a throwback. Generically, Milton is returning to the Classical models renounced in Paradise Regain’ d. Stylistically and thematically the poem seems also to belong to an earlier stage of Milton’s career€– a fact which has caused some critics to argue that it was written much earlier.25 The verse builds on patterns of doubling and repetition.26 The retrogressive quality is evident in Samson himself, who evokes earlier models of heroism and who moreover, like Aeneas, has a bad habit of repeating the past. Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips claimed that the name Samson meant ‘There a second time’€– an appropriate etymology for a man whose See especially Parker 1949:€ 145–66 and Shawcross 1961:€ 345–58. In response, see Radzinowicz 1978:€387–407. As the subtitle of Radzinowicz’s book (‘The Growth of Milton’s Mind’) suggests, debates over Samson, including the date of composition, are very much concerned with the shape of the poet’s development. 26 See Carey 1968:€328–9. There has been much discussion of repetition and doubling in the poem; see especially the analyses of the role of verbal repetition and rhyme in the poem in Carey 1968:€335–8 and Coiro 1998:€134–6. See also the powerful reading in Shoaf 1985:€169–89. 25

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fall is linked to a repeated compulsion to marry foreign females. As a result of his choices Samson finds himself in a helpless state of dependency and weakness, in which he appears infantilized. By succumbing to temptation, Samson has returned to a more primitive state of individual development. But the climax of the poem is seen by his followers as a more positive form of return, in which Samson recovers his original identity and divine purpose. The dead Samson now appears to his father, Manoa, to be reunited with his early self (1709–11): Samson hath quit himself Like Samson and heroicly hath finish’d A life Heroic.27

As the verbal circularity suggests, Manoa and the Chorus think that Samson’s career reaches fulfilment by both moving forward and coming full circle. To celebrate this achievement, Manoa claims he will build a memorial monument€ – the traditional marker for Classical closure and poetic immortality€– and heads off any further doubts by telling us not only the meaning of Samson’s life, but how we are to respond to it:€‘With peace and consolation … And calm of mind all passion spent’ (1757–8). Closure is thus marked symbolically and achieved aesthetically, through the creation of the illusion of Aristotelian catharsis.28 There are, however, some unsettling elements here that open up the questions Manoa and the Chorus seem to be trying to close off. Manoa’s tautological comparison of Samson ‘to himself’ draws on a Renaissance commonplace, used to stress a hero’s self-consistency and integrity.29 It shapes Samson’s character as a closed and autonomous circle. Yet the verbal and logical redundancy, in which an anticipated simile collapses in on itself in perfect likeness (A is like A), seems potentially suspicious here, especially given Samson’s previous tendency towards repetition. The phrase has also disturbing parallels with the language of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Lucilius prophesies that the captured Brutus ‘will be found like Brutus, like himself’ (Julius Caesar 5.4.25), and we later learn that by committing suicide, ‘Brutus only overcame himself’ (5.5.56).30 The All citations of Milton’s works are from Flannagan 1998. The impression of closure and the containment of strong feeling is reinforced by the forceful emergence of rhyme in the final speech which, as Coiro notes, almost settles into the form of a sonnet (Coiro 1998:€146). The technique here also looks backwards in Milton’s career, to the conclusion of ‘Lycidas’ with an ottava rima. 29 See Price 1940:€178–81. 30 Citations to Shakespeare’s works are from Evans and Tobin 1997. 27 28

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redundant phrasing contributes to Shakespeare’s image of Rome as a divided world, caught in an endless and self-destructive cycle of violence.31 Brutus’ enemy and conqueror Antony will in turn commit suicide, as ‘a Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquish’d’ (Ant. 4.15.57–8).32 Despite the Chorus’ attempts to convince us of the contrary (SA 1665–6), Samson’s end is also hard to differentiate from sheer suicide. The Chorus suggests that Samson has progressed from a physical hero to a more saintly figure of heroic suffering and patience (1287–95)€ – one who might seem to later readers as a type of Christ. But his final violent action is hardly Christlike or patient; to many modern readers especially it marks an even more vicious relapse into barbarism than that suggested at the end of the Aeneid. Even in terms of practical effects it seems ambiguous, as it does not lead to an even brief liberation of Samson’s people. Instead it produces a state of anarchy which, tellingly for British history, leads eventually to the Israelites’ request for a king (I Samuel 8:5). As in the story of the Augustan empire, the revolutionary leader leads to the consolidation of power in one man:€all roads lead to Rome, indeed. It is hard not to ask cynically what Samson’s career has achieved.33 The complicated imagery at the end of the play further suggests the underlying tensions here. When Manoa hears of his son’s death, he is first crushed (SA 1574–77): What windy joy this day had I conceiv’d Hopeful of his Delivery, which now proves Abortive as the first-born bloom of spring Nipt with the lagging rear of winters frost.

‘Delivery’ is a key word in the poem, connected to Samson’s sense of his own identity as the liberator of his people. The wordplay here shifts it into an image of birth (see also 1504–6), only to slip once again:€ Samson’s death is imagined grotesquely as an abortion€ – a See Kahn 1997. On the influence of Antony and Cleopatra, a play which combines Ovidian and Virgilian elements, on Samson, see Guillory 1986:€112–15 and Ferry 1968. A central question of Shakespeare’s play is when is Antony ‘himself ’ (see for example 1.1.42–3, 57–9; 3.11.7; 3.13.92–3, 185–6):€he is divided between his Egyptian and Roman natures which are only resolved€– if ever€– through suicide. Shakespeare also exploits the potential humour in these tautologies in Antony’s comically redundant description of the crocodile:€‘It is shap’d, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates’ (Ant. 2.7.42–5). 33 As Teskey notes, ‘any episode chosen from history for heroic celebration will be unintentionally ironized by our knowledge of what is to follow; our knowledge, that is, that in history, nothing heroic is definitely achieved’ (Teskey 2006:€140). 31

32

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collapsing of birth and death.34 It turns Samson into a child again, who has prematurely died before he could be reborn, and who ends before he can begin. The sense of regressive, almost self-consuming, circularity is reinforced by the fact that in these lines Milton is coming back to one of his earliest English works, ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough’, which he would publish for the first time in his collected poems of 1673. There the dead child is a ‘Fairest flower no sooner blown but blasted’ (1) by ‘Bleak winters force’ (4). At the end of Milton’s career, he, like Virgil, looks back to his own beginning, through an image of the destructive identification of birth and death, beginning and ending.35 However, this image of a destructive return is itself overturned. If Manoa’s anticipated birth turns into death, Samson’s death is quickly reimagined by the Chorus as rebirth through an elaborate and intricate series of images of birds and snakes, which culminate in the figure of the phoenix (SA 1697–1707): So vertue giv’n for lost, Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d, Like that self-begott’n bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay e’re while a Holocaust, From out her ashie womb now teem’d, Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most unactive deem’d, And though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird ages of lives.

The phoenix is of course a conventional, even predictable, figure for rebirth, appropriated by Christians as a type for Christ.36 Milton’s readers would have recognized this significance, which reminds them that Samson is also a type for Christ. While the Hebrew Chorus is obviously ignorant of typology, the image seems intended to celebrate Samson’s triumphant recovery€– his return to ‘himself’. However, if the general meaning seems Christian, the image and wording itself are Classical, looking back especially to Ovid’s phoenix in Metamorphoses 15.391–407, a figure which brings other elements into the ╇ On the imagery here, see also Kerrigan 1974:€212–17. ╇ On the echo here as part of Milton’s retrospect, see also Coiro 1998:€138. 36 ╇ See Van den Broek 1972. 34 35

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poem.37 It suggests a subtle shift from Virgilian influence to an Ovidian one, recalling especially a moment in which Ovid is himself commenting on Virgil. The phoenix appears near the end of the Metamorphoses, in which Ovid directly retells the Aeneid. While chronology gives these last books a slightly more linear thrust, Ovid’s version of Virgil’s story is typically digressive and redundant.38 Moreover, his history of Rome is jarringly interrupted by Pythagoras’ lengthy lecture which provides a vision of eternal return that counters and here even impedes the forward linear movement towards Augustan Rome. In contrast to the grand linear march of Virgilian history, Pythagoras suggests a world of endless recycling, in which things change, omnia mutantur (Met. 15.165), but stay the same:€animam sic semper eandem / esse, sed in uarias doceo migrare figuras ‘I teach that the soul is always the same, though it takes different forms’ (15.171–2).39 Pythagoras’ vision of eternal return is especially easy to identify with the poet of endless flux who himself recycles old stories in new forms.40 Juxtaposed with the linear narrative of Roman history that emerges, if faintly, in the last books, Pythagoras seems to reinforce an opposition between Virgilian and Ovidian routes. The figure of the phoenix appears itself as a kind of further digression within or exception to this Pythagorean digression. Pythagoras notes that in a world of flux and mutable identities, the phoenix is the only thing that does not change, that is, in essence, always and only like itself:€una est quae reparet seque ipsa reseminet ales ‘there is one bird which itself renews and reproduces itself’ (15.392). For this reason, it was a useful image for Elizabeth I, associated with her motto, Semper eadem.41 In the Metamorphoses, the figure has itself a kind of autonomy, detached from the narrative proper and even outside of Pythagoras’ vision of flux. On the periphery of the Virgilian narrative, from which it seems completely cut off, however, it is one of Ovid’s most perceptive readings of the darker undertones of Virgil’s story. The image of the son who fertque pius cunasque suas patriumque sepulcrum ‘piously carries his own cradle and his See especially Kerrigan 1974:€232–9, 256; Wittreich 2002:€261–9. As in Ovid, the phoenix is both male and female, which complicates matters further. On the revisions of Virgil in these books especially, see Solodow 1988:€ 110–56; Hinds 1998: 104–22. 39 Citations are from Tarrant 2004. Translations are my own. 40 See Solodow 1988:€162–8 for overviews of the critical responses to this pivotal episode. As Solodow notes, readers have tended to see it either as the metaphysical key revealing the principles behind Ovidian metamorphoses, or utter nonsense, Ovid’s little joke. 41 Strong 1987:€82–3, 104; as Strong also notes, Elizabeth used imagery that identified her rather ambiguously with both Aeneas and Dido, otherwise known as Elissa, or Phoenissa; see 106–7. 37 38

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father’s tomb’ (15.405), recalls the journey of the pious Aeneas who carries his father out of Troy. For Virgil, Anchises borne on his son’s shoulders from the burning city is a central image for the progress of civilization through the pious transmission of the past. In this succinct rewriting, Ovid suggests that the Virgilian line is in fact sheer repetition, an endlessly circular exit from and return to a fiery origin by a son who is his own father.42 The wheel may be spinning, but it is not advancing. Milton’s phoenix is similarly a problematic image for transcendence. Like Ovid’s bird, it provides an indirect interpretation of the main action, one that seems to counter, not support, Manoa’s reading. The description of the bird seems to echo Ovid’s claim at the end of the Metamorphoses that:€per … omnia saecula fama … uiuam ‘I will live in fame through all time’ (15.878–9). The wording thus might suggest Samson’s own achievement of immortality beyond change€– an idea that is reinforced by his father’s plan to turn the dead man into his own monument. But Milton’s ‘secular bird’ (SA 1707) seems bound to the endurance of ‘fame’ (1706) and to the repetitive cycles of human time and the world, ‘saeculum’,43 and thus cut off from the spiritual resurrection of Christ. The fact that it is ‘self-begott’n’ (1699) recalls Satan’s claim in Paradise Lost to be ‘self-begot, self-rais’d’ (PL 5.860). The phoenix suggests an ideal for self-sufficiency, which, as in Shakespeare’s Roman works also, seems at least socially suicidal. If the phoenix generates itself, it also cannot generate anything else:€it knows no second or third. There is no succession when the bird that dies is simply reborn as itself. When the son is his own father, the present is an exact repetition of the past, recycled without progression or difference and, as ‘secular’ may suggest, without transcendence. Like the Aeneid, Milton’s tragedy makes much of father–son relations, and gives a central role to Samson’s father, Manoa. But it ends with the rupture of succession. Samson does not leave a son. In this he is differentiated from his final adversary, the giant Harapha, a figure Milton not only invents but also ostentatiously claims is the father of Goliath. By making the rival Harapha the founder of a gigantic dynasty, Milton emphasizes Samson’s contrasting lack of progeny. For Samson, circling back to the past entails a cutting off of the future. The father becomes his son’s heir, custodian of his memory, builder of his monument and shaper of his career and fame; succession is both broken off and reversed. See also my discussion of this figure in relation to Roman law, in which the son is heres sui ipsius in Kilgour 1990:€41–2. The fact that Ovid’s bird is female also creates an unsettling parallel with Dido, Phoenissa, who immolates herself and from whose ashes will be born war with Rome. 43 See also Kerrigan 1974:€245–6. 42

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This sense of a backwards movement is reinforced by the poem’s presentation. It was published in 1671 along with Paradise Regain’d, the poem which Neuse and Coolidge have read as the climax of Milton’s Virgilian career. The pairing of the two poems and heroes makes it hard not to see the Old Testament hero from a New Testament perspective and to compare the two. But Paradise Regain’ d precedes Samson Agonistes in the volume:€the order of their presentation seems provocative and even perverse.44 If Samson had been placed first in the volume, the two poems would have presented a neat piece of typology:€we would read the shadowy antitype of the Old Testament hero first and then move on to the new, improved New Testament fulfilment. The volume itself might then suggest repetition that includes progression:€ Samson would be the historically earlier and therefore morally inferior version of Christ whom Christ completes and replaces when he imagines a new form of heroism. Instead, the reading experience takes us backwards in time, undercutting any sense of historical advancement. The tension between progressive and regressive movements here points to a perhaps surprising but suggestive parallel between Samson and the conclusion of another work written at the end of its author’s life:€ Shakespeare’s Tempest. Prospero is often read as a double for Shakespeare as he concludes his career.45 Like Samson, The Tempest has a complicated literary genealogy that has itself generated much debate. Partly because of interest in the play’s relation to colonization, many recent readings of the play have focused on allusions to Virgil.46 Yet in some ways the Virgilian references seem subsumed by a vaguer yet more discernable Ovidian element;47 certainly the interweaving of these two sources contributes to the complexity of the work. In a recent reading, Nothing is known of the publication of the volume, so we simply do not know whose decision it was to print the texts together, and in the present sequence. Stephen Dobranski notes that authors at this time had little control over publication, but argues that the sequence conforms to Milton’s general practice of pairing poems. He therefore suggests a collaboration between publisher and author (Dobranski 2002:€ 32–3). Wittreich also notes how the present order of the poems conforms to Milton’s recurrent habits of thought:€ see Wittreich 1986a:€ 164–6. For other discussions of the unity of the volume, see Wittreich 1986b:€ 329–85, Coiro 1998:€ 127–8, Shawcross 1983:€225–48, Rajan 1973:€82–110, Barker 1973:€3–48 and Herman 2005:€155–76. 45 The engraving of Prospero’s speech (Tempest 4.1.149–58) on Shakespeare’s monument in Westminster Abbey set the identification in stone. On the Shakespearean career see Cheney above, Ch. 8; on the relevance of Prospero to Shakespeare’s review of his own career, see also Nuttall 2007:€376. 46 See especially Hamilton 1990 and Kallendorf 2007. 47 On the Ovidian elements in the play generally, see J. Bate 1993:€ 8–10, 239–63; and Lyne 2000:€ 150–64. Charles Martindale argues that Shakespeare’s engagement with Virgil is rarely profound:€see Martindale 2004a:€89–106. 44

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Craig Kallendorf argues that Prospero takes on aspects of the character of Aeneas (Kallendorf 2007:€107). At the same time, Prospero’s great speech renouncing his art (Tempest 5.1.33–57) is based on Medea’s summoning of her powers in Metamorphoses 7.192–219. The emergence of this subtext as Prospero both returns to his old life and yet seems to move forward to a higher stage of art is unsettling:€Medea is a figure associated with the relapse into barbarism; her powers, as she notes in her speech, enable her to reverse nature and time. It is tempting to speculate that Shakespeare reads Ovid’s Medea as a comment on the Aeneid, which suggests that Aeneas himself is at heart a truly deranged version of Dido.48 But it is also tempting to read Prospero as a redeemed Aeneas, and a Medea Â�corrected by reversal€ – black magic turned into white. Still, the superimposition of a scene of renunciation of power on one of its affirmation creates an uneasy effect of simultaneous detachment and reattachment, exclusion and inclusion:€ vale atque ave. The rhetorical analogue for this kind of strategy is the recusatio, in which the stance of exclusion inevitably entails inclusion. Jonathan Bate thus can state that:€‘Prospero and Medea are in some sense the same’ (J. Bate 1993:€9).49 But the situation is not that clear; Charles Martindale notes the problems raised by the subtext:€‘Is Prospero being sharply differentiated from Medea, the mage who renounces his white magic from the witch who abuses her black powers? Or is there a worrying insinuation that one form of magic may not differ much from another?’ (Martindale 2004b:€204).50 The author leaves the question and relation open:€it is the readers who have to make the choice. The parallel with Prospero may not be coincidental; as Ann Baynes Coiro argues, ‘The idea of Shakespeare haunts, I think, Milton’s last poem’ (Coiro 1998:€125). As she suggests also, in this Milton is returning to preoccupations also evident in his early works, especially his first publication ‘On Shakespeare’.51 In Samson, the sense of going backwards is heightened The Argonautica is of course one of Virgil’s important subtexts. Virgil himself links Medea and Aeneas, transferring Apollonius’ simile describing Medea’s troubled mind (Met. 3.756) to Aeneas (Aen. 8.20–5). Ovid’s representation of Medea has one eye on Virgil’s rewriting of Apollonius’ Argonautica. 49 For Bate also, Sycorax, a version of Medea, is Prospero’s ‘dark Other’ (J. Bate 1993:€254). See also Lyne, who reads the renunciation as a farewell to Ovid in which ‘if Shakespeare plays with the idea of renouncing the “magic” of Ovid, that too is only partial’ (Lyne 2000: 162). 50 In fact, Martindale, who is arguing for caution in interpreting the relation between text and subtext, notes other options:€‘Or is Shakespeare adapting a famous locus about magic with little regard for its original context or speaker? … The reader will have to decide between such mutually exclusive possibilities’ (Martindale 2004b:€204). 51 Coiro argues that the echoes of ‘On Shakespeare’ suggest Milton’s concern with artistic immortality:€ Milton looks back to his earlier poem on a great dead poet from the ‘threshold of his 48

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further by the sense of the poet returning, like Virgil and Ovid, to the start of his career. The poem makes us consider the relation between the young and old Milton, the poet’s beginnings and his ending. Debates on the politics of the poem have noted the echoes and parallels with Milton’s early political pamphlets.52 What is their role here? Is Milton returning to these scenes to affirm and renew his continuing beliefs, or to critique and detach himself from them? The tantalizing question thus concerns the development of his political thought:€does it change, or does he remain relentlessly the same, true to his early revolutionary principles?53 It is also striking, however, how in Samson Milton returns to his early poetry, and especially passages dealing with young and premature death€– the topic that also haunted Virgil and with which his epic abruptly concludes. The imagery of shipwreck recalls Virgil, but it also echoes ‘Lycidas’, Milton’s early lament for the drowned Edward King. Manoa’s plans to take Samson’s body and, ‘from the stream / With lavers pure and cleansing herbs wash off / The clotted gore’ (SA 1726–8), recalls both ‘Lycidas’ and the description of the watery baptism of another young suicide, Sabrina, in Milton’s masque, Comus (832–41). I have already noted parallels with Milton’s very early ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’. Manoa’s closing claim that ‘Nothing is here for tears’ (SA 1721) translates ‘Nec tibi conveniunt lacrymae’ (202), of Milton’s ‘Epitaphium Damonis’, a poem written on the death of his closest friend, Charles Diodati, in which also he first used the image of the phoenix to suggest rebirth (187–9). The theme of young death moved the young Milton, as it had Virgil, perhaps because of his own fears of mortality cutting short his poetic career. In Samson, as the poet looks back on his beginning from the perspective of his end, these images of premature ends seem to return with renewed urgency. They create the impression that Milton is writing an elegy for himself that will safeguard his own immortality. As in Virgil’s return to his shadowy origins, the bringing together of beginning and end of Milton’s career creates the effect of a self-gathering towards climactic fulfilment and resolution that seems appropriate for what was Milton’s last published new work. But at the same time, as Ovid shows, such a return inevitably opens up new questions. Has Milton indeed acquitted himself like Milton€– and, if so, what does that mean? becoming a great dead poet himself ’ (1998:€126). For a related discussion of ‘On Shakespeare’, see also Lipking 1981:€139–40. 52 See especially Lieb 1994:€226–63. 53 The poem thus seems to keep making us return to Joseph Wittreich’s question:€‘whether Milton’s is a mind fixed or changing’ (Wittreich 2005:€1641).

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As Milton comes back to his beginning, things must have looked rather different from the view in 1645. When he set out on his Virgilian jaunt, Milton did not know that there would even be a revolution, let alone that it would be lost€– as would be two wives and his eyesight along the way.54 In Samson, Milton rereads his own life in order to find a pattern, the underlying coherence to unify a life full of change, revolution in all senses, and to understand the meaning of his own achievement. Like the exiled Ovid, he turns the Virgilian rota to review and make sense of his career. Samson’s absence at the final summation, however, is important. In Virgil, it is the narrator who brings the story and the author’s career to an end; in Ovid, it is the poet himself, as he struggles to assert his own power over the shape of his life. In a drama, the task falls usually to a character. Here, significantly, the hero does not have the last word on the meaning of his life; this is given the Chorus and his heir, who also happens to be his own father. A conservative figure who looks back to the past, Manoa tries to resolve ambiguity and achieve what we today call ‘closure’. He ties up the loose ends of Samson’s life, asserting its essential unity. Projecting the act of summation and unification onto this backwards-looking character suggests that coherence may itself be simply a fiction. Moreover, it enables Milton to include within the play the act of interpretation that will continue long after the poet is himself dead. Samson himself exits in a state of ‘abiding uncertainty’ (Fish 2001:€420),55 not knowing that the end is near or what it will mean. His last words are a simple confession of his own ignorance of his fate:€‘the last of me or no I cannot warrant’ (SA 1427). For many critics, these words are a sign of Samson’s final redemption through submission to faith and indeed uncertainty.56 But they also suggest the author’s submission to a future whose reading he cannot control, and which may, in a new Augustan age especially, be as severe as that of Augustus. The audience or reader decides Prospero’s fate:€is he really Medea or not? If Milton’s final work is about Milton, it is also about us, the readers, and our role and responsibility in the poet’s career. See also Fallon on Samson as Milton’s darker double who reflects ‘the distance Milton has come from the fantastic and naïve self-constructions of the young man’ (Fallon 2007:€263). 55 See also Fish 2001:€417, 464–5. 56 See Fish 2001. The concept of uncertainty is key also to Herman’s reading of the poem and Milton’s works generally (Herman 2005), as well as to Shawcross 2001. Barbara Lewalski argues that the play shows how ‘political choices must be made and actions taken in medias res, in circumstances always characterized by imperfect knowledge and conflicting testimony. The thematics of true political experience in this work offers readers no definitive answers, but instead presents a process for making such choices in such circumstances.’ (Lewalski 1988:€248) 54

C h a p t e r 10

Bookburning and the poetic deathbed:€ the legacy of Virgil * Nita Krevans

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

Oscar Wilde, Intentions

The Virgilian tradition preserves three problematic and somewhat contradictory sets of testimonia about Virgil’s role in framing his own corpus as a ‘career’. On the one hand, there are the passages where Virgil himself clearly marks his own progression from Eclogues to Georgics to Aeneid. These include instances of self-quotation (Ecl. 5.85–7; Geo. 4.566) and promises of future work in higher style (Ecl. 8.6–13, Geo. 3.46–8) as well as less explicit passages whose imagery is now interpreted as foreshadowing the pastoral–didactic–epic progression€– for example, the closing lines of Eclogues 1 and 10 often read as a transition to the harsher world of the Georgics.1 Reinforcing and completing these internal signposts are two pseudo-Virgilian texts. First, there is Virgil’s supposedly self-Â�composed ‘epitaph’, which neatly concludes cecini pascua rura duces (‘I sang pastures, farms, and war-leaders’).2 The other passage is the famous ille ego prologue which, according to Servius and Donatus, originally opened the Aeneid. It offers a brief literary biography of the poet:€ first I composed with a ‘slender reed’ (gracili … auena); then I left the woods and produced a work ‘pleasing to farmers’ (gratum opus agricolis), ‘but now’ (at nunc) I sing of arms and the man.3 The potent combination of Virgil’s own statements, the pseudepigraphical additions, and the canonization of the Aeneid quickly transformed the Virgilian corpus into a poetic version *╇ Translations are the author’s own, unless otherwise stated. 1 For references to Virgil’s career in his own works see Theodorakopoulos 1997. On the ending of Eclogues 1 and 10 see P. Hardie 1997a:€144–5; Martindale 1997b:€113–14. 2 All excerpts from the vita of Virgil are quoted from Brummer 1912. Although the life is attributed to Donatus, Horsfall 1995:€3–4 argues that it is copied, nearly verbatim, from Suetonius. The epitaph is found at Brummer 1912:€136–7 = Vit. Verg. 36, and discussion at Horsfall 1995:€21. 3 On this early addition to the Aeneid see Austin 1968 and Horsfall 1995:€ 24 with further references.

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of the cursus honorum. By the medieval period this model, the so-called ‘wheel of Virgil’ had became so iconic that it even acquired its own Â�pastoral–georgic–epic line of accessories:€ trees (beech–fruit–laurel), animals (sheep–cattle–horses) and tools (shepherd’s crook–plough–sword).4 The third set of testimonia€ – and the focus of this essay€ – presents a troubling counterpoint to this anthem of literary triumph. Virgil, it appears, did not wish to complete the cursus by publishing his epic. Donatus’ vita tells us that the poet ordered the Aeneid burned as he lay dying in Brundisium (Brummer 1912:€149–57 = Vita Verg. 39–41): egerat cum Vario, priusquam Italia decederet, ut si quid sibi accidisset, Aeneida combureret; at is ita facturum se pernegerat. igitur in extrema ualetudine assidue scrinia desiderauit, crematurus ipse; uerum nemine offerente nihil quidem nominatim de ea cauit. ceterum eidem Vario ac simul Tuccae scripta sua sub ea conditione legauit, ne quid ederent, quod non a se editum esset. edidit autem auctore Augusto Varius, sed summatim emendata, ut qui uersus etiam imperfectos, si qui erant, reliquerit. Before he left Italy he had proposed to Varius, that Varius should burn the Aeneid if anything should happen to him, but Varius said he would not do it. Thus in the last stages of his illness he constantly called for his book-boxes, meaning to burn it himself, but when no one brought it to him he took no specific measures about it. For the rest, he left his writings to that same Varius and also to Tucca, on the condition that they publish nothing he would not have published. Varius, however, published [the Aeneid] on Augustus’ orders, but only lightly corrected, so that he even left any verses that were incomplete in that state.

This report is not without its own problems,5 but it is transmitted by numerous other imperial sources6 and becomes, in its own way, as canonical as the Virgilian career. As Horsfall points out, Virgil is not the first writer to propose burning his oeuvre before he died; similar stories are told about Plato, for example.7 But Virgil’s deathbed gesture€ – like his Aeneid, like his three-step career€– becomes an instant classic. The vitae even preserve a poem celebrating the rescue of the manuscript (Brummer 1912:€143–8 = Vita Verg. 38):8 iusserat haec rapidis aboleri carmina flammis â•… Vergilius, Phrygium quae cecinere ducem. Curtius 1953:€201 n. 35 and 231–2; Lipking 1981:€208 n. 77. See Avery 1957; Horsfall 1995:€22–3. 6 E.g. Gellius 17.10.7, Pliny HN 7.114. 7 See Horsfall 1995:€22 for further references. 8 The author’s name is given variously as Sulpicius Carthaginensis (presumably Sulpicius Apollinaris, the teacher of Gellius) or (in the vita of Probus) as Servius Varus. 4 5

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Tucca uetat Variusque; simul tu, maxime Caesar, â•… non sinis et Latiae consulis historiae. infelix gemino cecidit prope Pergamon igni, â•… et paene est alio Troia cremata rogo. Virgil ordered the poem which sang of the Phrygian leader to be destroyed with devouring flames; Tucca forbids it, and Varius, and you, great Caesar, do not allow it, and you take thought to save the story of Latium. Unhappy Pergamum nearly perished twice by fire, and Troy was almost burned on a second pyre.

Virgil’s attempt to destroy the Aeneid is usually read as a gesture of artistic modesty. The language of the directive to Varius and Tucca (ne quid ederent, quod non a se editum esset) certainly supports this,9 as do the reports of Gellius and Pliny:€ Gellius mentions the deathbed incident immediately after his famous description of Virgil licking his imperfect works into shape like a mother bear (Gell. 17.10.2), while Pliny explicitly uses the word modesty (uerecundiam) in his account (Pliny HN 7.114):€Diuus Augustus carmina Vergili cremari contra testamenti eius uerecundiam uetuit (‘The deified Augustus forbade the poems of Virgil to be burnt, countermanding the modesty of the instructions in [Virgil’s] will’). In one sense, then, the bookburning episode can be read as an inevitable by-product of the ‘career’ narrative:€as Virgil ascends up the generic ladder, his standards for his own work grow correspondingly more stringent until he cannot meet them to his own satisfaction even after eleven years of work on the Aeneid.10 The vita itself, however, emphatically rejects Virgil’s modesty; it underlines the poem’s status as a masterpiece by quoting Sulpicius’ epigram and by presenting the rescue of the manuscript as a suspenseful narrative of danger and salvation. A second, and much darker reading transforms Virgil’s verecundia into despair. Virgil becomes a nihilist, refusing poetic closure, unwriting As does the interpolation into the Donatan life at Vita Verg. 35 (Brummer 1912:€ 123, see his apparatus plenus ad loc.), which says that Virgil wished to burn the Aeneid because it was inemendatam imperfectamque (uncorrected and not properly finished). 10 The equation higher genre = higher level of poetic craft is standard in the Renaissance adaptations of the Virgilian model, but is already present in ancient sources, notably Catalepton 15, a closing epigram for a collection of Virgilian juvenilia. The epigram alludes to the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid in order and then ‘adds’ the Catalepton at the beginning of the sequence, noting that ‘et rudis in uario carmine Calliope’ (‘even in these varied songs there is Poetry, however unpolished’; translation from Oosterhuis 2007:€ 27, where see further discussion). The Renaissance formulations are exemplified by E. K.’s ‘Epistle to Harvey’ preceding the 1579 edition of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar:€[Spenser writes pastoral] ‘following the example of the best and most auncient Poetes, which devised this kind of writing … at the first to trye theyr habilities:€and as young birdes, that be newly crept out of the nest, by little first to prove theyr tender wings, before they make a greater flight. So flew Theocritus … So flew Virgile, as not yet well feeling his winges.’ See Cheney 2002b; Helgerson 1983:€67–82; Krevans 1992. 9

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his poem, dismantling his career.11 This is the reading which informs Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil, whose central section consists of a long debate between Augustus and the poet about Virgil’s plan to destroy his epic. As Virgil explains to Augustus:€‘It must sink out of memory, and I with it … I want to forget … to forget everything … and I want to be forgotten.’12 Broch’s Virgil thus echoes the Aeneas of Book 6, who, seeing the souls of future Romans preparing to be born, cries out (6.721):€quae lucis miseris tam dira cupido? (‘why do these wretched souls have such a dreadful longing for the light [of the world above]?’). It is instructive, in this regard, to contrast Virgil’s attempted self-censorship on his deathbed with the reports about early Imperial authors such as Petronius, Seneca and Lucan catalogued in Toohey’s study of literary suicide. Their deaths, although self-inflicted, are a defiant affirmation of their careers; far from destroying their work as they die, they are writing, dictating or reciting up until the last moment.13 There is, however, a third way to read this episode in terms of career studies, a middle ground between the modest Virgil and the neurotic Virgil. This reading brings forward the figure of Augustus and recognizes that Virgil’s career requires not only a vates, but a deus ex machina. Just as the young god Octavian saved Tityrus’ (i.e., in the ancient biographical tradition, Virgil’s) farm in Eclogue 1, so now Augustus rescues the Aeneid from destruction. In fact, although the epigram cited above aptly figures the Aeneid manuscript as Troy, an even better analogy between poem and vita is the near-destruction of Aeneas’ fleet in Aeneid 5 (5.604–99). The Trojan women, exhausted by years of wandering towards an everreceding goal, are incited by Juno to burn their ships. The flames are already consuming the hulls when Aeneas arrives; no mortal actions can save the fleet (5.684, nec uires heroum infusaque flumina prosunt, ‘neither heroic feats nor gouts of water are of any use’). In despair, Aeneas prays to Jupiter, who immediately quenches the fires with a massive rainstorm and saves all but four of the ships. In this deathbed scene, then, Augustus plays the part of Jupiter, rescuing Rome’s future from the fire and midwifing the birth of the Virgilian Wheel, which cannot come into being without the publication of the Aeneid. Critics beginning with Petrarch have speculated about connections between the abrupt and morbid ending of the poem, Virgil’s own death and his plan to destroy the manuscript. See Lipking 1981:€83; P. Hardie 1993b:€101–2; Theodorakopoulos 1997:€163–4. 12 Broch 1983:€332. On Broch’s novel see Cox 1997; Lipking 1981:€130–7. 13 Toohey 2004:€173–93. Tacitus preserves descriptions of all three deaths in the Annales:€Seneca (dictating):€15.63; Lucan (reciting):€15.70; Petronius (writing/reciting):€16.19. 11

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Virgil’s dying request has nearly as many imitators as his career; the list begins with Ovid and continues into the modern period.14 In some cases (Dickinson, Gogol) modern biographers see the request as part of a larger pattern of isolation and neurosis.15 In other cases, however, it is clear that the request is a gesture€ – both in the literary sense (as an acknowledgement of earlier poetic deathbeds) and in the psychological sense (as an attempt at self-destruction that is intended to fail).16 I would argue that we can recognize an allusion to the tradition of Virgil’s death in these later anecdotes by the presence of four key elements. First, the modesty of the poet designates the work as somehow imperfect€– either incomplete, or generically unworthy. Second, the poet requests on his deathbed that the work be burned. Third, the biographer refutes the poet’s judgement and provides evidence of the greatness of the work. Finally, a patron or friend intervenes to rescue the manuscript and publish it posthumously. A good example is the case of George Herbert (d. 1 March 1633). Walton’s Life of George Herbert (1670) describes the poet’s last thoughts for his work as follows:17 Having said this, he did with so sweet a humility as seem’d to exalt him, bow down to Mr. Duncon, and with a thoughtful and contented look, say to him,€– Sir, I pray deliver this little Book to my dear brother Farrer [Nicholas Ferrar], and tell him, he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul … desire him to read it:€and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor Soul, let it be made publick:€if not, let him burn it:€for I and it, are less than the least of God’s mercies.€– Thus meanly did this humble man think of this excellent Book, which now bears the name of The TEMPLE:€Or, Sacred Poems, and Private Ejaculations.

Walton initially seems to present his subject as conforming to the Â�‘modest’ reading of Virgil’s deathbed wish (‘humility’, ‘meanly’, Â�‘humble’), and concludes the poet’s speech with Herbert’s supposed motto (which prefaces Authors alleged to have called for the destruction of their writings under similar circumstances include Heinrich Heine, Nikolai Gogol, Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka. Heine only thought he was dying; see his postscript to Romanzero (1851). 15 For Dickinson see Erkkila 2002:€25–6 and 29 n. 27; for Gogol see Zholkovsky 1992:€175:€‘[Gogol] had a penchant for destroying his writings:€he burned a juvenile novella, a romantic poem, a historical drama (after it put Zhukovsky to sleep) and twice the second part of his “epic” … [his] annihilatory pyrotechnics can be viewed as a will to monopolize his literary rights, and his nearsuicidal death, as a desperate gesture of control over his very life.’ 16 E.g. Kafka; see Mailloux 1989:€11–12. Kafka left letters addressed to his friend and literary executor Max Brod directing him to burn all the unpublished work. As Mailloux points out, Brod was the last person likely to obey such a request. 17 Walton 1927:€314–15. 14

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The Temple):€‘less than the least of God’s mercies’.18 This humility is leavened, however, by hints of the future success of the manuscript. Herbert does not, for example, describe the work itself as imperfect or unfinished; it is a book, albeit a little one, and Ferrar is ‘desired’ to read it. Moreover, Herbert identifies himself with the book (‘I and it’), and instead of burning it himself or even requesting its destruction, he transfers the responsibility for choosing between the fire and the printer to Ferrar. This mixture of modesty and ambition is in fact well suited to Herbert. Although his reputation now rests largely on his vernacular religious Â�lyrics, he initially served in the court of King James and wrote a number of poems in Latin, including lengthy works defending royal positions on church policy. One recent biographer has explicitly suggested that he hoped to become the Virgil for James I’s Augustus.19 Even when Herbert turned to more private, religious verse, his architectural design for The Temple hints at larger poetic goals than the Christian humility of the poems’ speaker might at first suggest, and Herbert’s family ties to Sidney provide yet another model for poetic achievement€– not to mention yet another example of a poet who imitated Virgil on his deathbed. When Herbert offers Ferrar control over the fate of his manuscript, then, he is writing Ferrar into the Virgilian story in the role of Varius, Tucca and Augustus. Ferrar, of course, plays his part, shepherding the work through publication and even writing the preface.20 Walton continues: of which, Mr. Farrer would say, There was in it the picture of a divine Soul in every page; and that the whole Book was such a harmony of holy passions, as would enrich the World with pleasure and piety. And it appears to have done so:€for there have been more than Twenty thousand of them sold since the first Impression.

Walton’s account thus takes full advantage of the Virgilian model. Herbert is allowed to express the modesty appropriate for a religious poet on his deathbed, while Ferrar’s turn as Augustus is triumphantly justified by a bestseller. (In fact, Ferrar’s choice of the word ‘enrich’ in his praise of the book’s virtues acquires new meaning after Walton’s naïve boast about sales figures.) The allusion to Virgil’s death combines Christian As in the case of Philip Sidney (see below), this follows the conventional portrait of the ‘good death’, but as Gouws points out, the dying man is also aware of the conventions. Thus, ‘it is often difficult to decide whether the actor or the reporter was responsible for the shaping of the incidents recorded in a narrative’ (Gouws 1986b:€67). This observation, in my opinion, holds true not only for the Christian elements of the Renaissance poetic deathbed, but also for the Virgilian elements. 19 Malcolmson 2004:€51. 20 A detailed discussion of Ferrar’s role in publishing The Temple can be found in Charles 1977:€177–86. 18

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motifs with an implicit suggestion that The Temple is a masterpiece like the Aeneid. Deathbed anecdotes about Sir Philip Sidney, Herbert’s kinsman and poetic predecessor, also include the Virgilian motif, but here it is in conflict with other potential narratives. Sidney died in October of 1586 after being wounded in the thigh a month earlier during a skirmish near Zutphen. The weeks of illness provided an opportunity for extensive communication with friends (both by letter and by visits to his sickbed); accounts of these letters and visits were then woven into a series of increasingly hagiographic descriptions of the battle, Sidney’s illness and his death. One set of anecdotes aims to portray Sidney as a knightly hero in the style of his own romances, attributing his failure to wear armour on his legs to chivalry and praising him for refusing water in favour of a more gravely wounded soldier, an incident borrowed from Plutarch’s life of Alexander.21 A second set of anecdotes, as with Herbert, attempts to emphasize Sidney’s Christian humility as he prepares his soul for death. It is here that we find references to Sidney’s wish to destroy his manuscripts, but instead of a neatly balanced blend of modesty and self-assertion leading to a happy ending (20,000 copies sold), the sources are confused and contradictory. The briefest description is in Moffet’s Nobilis, a portrait of Sidney Â�written for Sidney’s nephew William Herbert in 1592.22 Sidney’s death is presented as a model (exemplum):€Sidney first condemns his own eyes for their former adoration of Stella (Lady Penelope Rich, disguised heroine of his sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella) and cleanses them with tears; he then asks his brother repeatedly to prevent any of this sort of poem from being published:€ne quid eius generis poematum in lucem prodiret, fratrem … semel atque iterum rogavit (fol. 24r). After this double renunciation of illicit love and the poetry inspired by it, Sidney turns to Christian contemplation and dies in prayer clasping a Bible. Earlier in the work there is another mention of Sidney’s wish to suppress publication, this time not only the Stella sonnets but also the Arcadia:€ Stellam (lepidum sane opus atque Â�festivum) primum tenebris, deinde flammis addixit. Immo Arcadiam (calami non mali filiam) partitudinis tempore suffocari voluit (fol. 9r:€ ‘He consigned his Stella (truly an elegant and pleasant work) to darkness and then favoured giving it to the fire. Nay, more, he desired to smother the Arcadia Â�(offspring of no ill pen) at the time of its birth’). After a few sentences in ╇ Alex. 42.3–6. See Gouws 1986b. ╇ For text and translation see Heltzel and Hudson 1940.

21

22

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praise of the Arcadia, Moffet returns to Sidney’s wish to suppress Stella and the Arcadia and suddenly introduces a motif straight from the Virgilian wheel, the ascent to worthier themes:€ ad digniora conversus argumenta Â�canere aliquid, quod vel severissimi Catonis censuram ferret, valde voluit (fol. 9v:€‘having turned to worthier subjects, he very much wished to sing something which would abide the censure of the most austere Cato’). A slightly more extended description of the deathbed is preserved in an account attributed to George Gifford.23 It conforms strictly to the ‘good death’ model and focuses on Sidney’s repentance. Sidney’s writings are not mentioned, but once again he renounces his love for Penelope Devereux, saying to Gifford, ‘There came to my remembrance a vanity wherein I had taken delight, whereof I had not rid myself. It was my Lady Rich. But I rid myself of it, and presently my joy and comfort returned.’24 Finally, there is the very detailed account by Fulke Greville in his A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, likely the latest of the three accounts (c. 1612).25 Greville, a friend who helped edit and publish parts of the Arcadia, discusses the wound and illness in gruesome detail, and offers several quotations from Sidney as he lies dying. There is no reference to his poetry or to the Arcadia. Earlier in his portrait of Sidney, however, Greville follows a long discourse praising the Arcadia with the admission that when Sidney was dying he looked back on it as a ‘vanity’ and for this reason ‘in that memorable testament of his, he bequeathed no other Â�legacy but the fire to this unpolished embryo’.26 From these various narratives it is possible to interpret Sidney’s deathbed renunciations in a number of different ways. Does the man Sidney repent an adulterous affair with Lady Rich? Or does the renunciation of Lady Rich/Stella represent the reluctance of a court poet to see his sonnets in print?27 Is the Arcadia Sidney’s unfinished masterpiece, which, like Virgil, he consigns to the flames on his deathbed knowing that his sister and Greville will play Augustus and Varius?28 Or is the Arcadia merely a The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death; see Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 1973:€163–5. Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 1973:€169. On the odd wording of this passage, see their note ad loc. Modern scholars continue to debate both the authenticity of this account€ – and especially of this particular statement€– and its significance. See Stewart 2000:€318; K. Duncan-Jones 1986:€172–3. 25 Gouws 1986a. For the date of composition, see his introduction, pp. xxi–xxiv. 26 Gouws 1986a:€ 11. Gouws notes ad loc. that Sidney’s will does not, in fact, mention his manuscripts. 27 Sidney in Helgerson 1983 is the exemplar of the ‘amateur’ poet as opposed to the ‘laureate’ and ‘professional’; here Helgerson follows Saunders 1951. But see Krevans 1992. 28 See Buxton 1963:€ 246:€ ‘[Arcadia] was but a patched-up fragment which the dying Sidney (no doubt remembering Virgil) had asked his friends to destroy. They (likewise remembering Virgil) had not obeyed his wishes’. 23

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stepping-stone to a greater work, a work ‘which would abide the censure of the most austere Cato’, which Sidney’s untimely death prevented him from writing? While the accounts disagree, it is clear that the Virgilian model plays a major role:€in every biographical passage where Sidney disparages his writing and calls for its destruction, the narrator praises it and records its preservation. In a telling demonstration of the power of the Virgilian anecdote, even Sidney’s own testimony about the Arcadia ends up contaminated with the bookburning motif. Here is an excerpt from his prefatory epistle to his sister about the Arcadia; it is a catalogue of apologetic topoi from classical prefaces, including key terms such as ‘idle’ and ‘trifle’, the comparison of the book to an unwanted child, and the assertion that the patron (his sister) has demanded the work. The only non-conventional item is the description of the composition of the work (highlighted in bold): Here now have you … this idle worke of mine:€which, I feare (like the Spiders webbe) will be thought fitter to be swept away, then worne to any other purpose. For my part, in very trueth (as the cruell fathers among the Greekes, were woont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well finde in my heart, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnesse this childe, which I am loath to father. But you desired me to doe it … Now, it is done onely for you, only to you:€if you keepe it to yourself, or to such friends, who will weigh errors in the ballance of goodwill, I hope, for the fathers sake, it will be pardoned … though in itselfe it have deformities. For indeed, for severer eies it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your deare selfe can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheetes of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest, by sheetes, sent unto you, as fast as they were done.29

Compare this description of the composition of the Arcadia from the normally reliable 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica (error highlighted in bold): The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia written by Philippe Sidney (1590), in quarto, is the earliest edition of Sidney’s famous romance. A folio edition, issued in 1593, is stated to have been revised and rearranged by the countess of Pembroke, for whose delectation the romance was written. She was charged to destroy the work sheet by sheet as it was sent to her.

The report that Sidney wished to burn the Arcadia has become confused with other traditional apologetic motifs. The result is a bastard anecdote in which Sidney, taking Virgilian modesty to a new extreme, asks Mary Herbert to burn the work as it is being written. 29

╇ Sidney 1593:€¶ 3r-v.

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The very first imitation of Virgil’s deathbed, of course, is Ovid’s assertion that he burned the Metamorphoses as he went into exile (Trist. 1.7.11–16): sed carmina maior imago â•… sunt mea, quae mando qualiacumque legas, carmina mutatas hominum dicentia formas, â•… infelix domini quod fuga rupit opus. haec ego discedens, sicut bene multa meorum, â•… ipse mea posui maestus in igne manu. but my poem, whatever sort of work it may be, is a better portrait of me, and I bid you read the verses which recount the transformed bodies of men, a work which the wretched exile of its author cut short. This poem, as I was leaving, I placed sadly with my own hands (like so many of my things) in the fire.

Ovid next compares this bookburning with infanticide, in a simile which references Althea’s burning of the brand which contained her son Meleager’s life, and mourns the fate of his innocent books (non meritos mecum peritura libellos, ‘little books that did not deserve to perish with me’, Trist. 1.7.19), now designated by a term that can mean either ‘offspring’ or ‘entrails’ as he repeats the description of the burning (imposui rapidis viscera nostra rogis, ‘I put them on the devouring pyre, my own flesh’, Trist. 1.7.20). The poem is identified physically with its author; thus, as the author ‘dies’ (is exiled), the work perishes with him. The allusion to burning viscera strongly suggests a sacrificial context in which Ovid is both priest and victim.30 After this disquieting image, Ovid suddenly becomes a commentator on his own narrative. He offers two possible explanations for his actions, introduced by the repeated scholiastic phrase uel quod (Trist. 1.7.21–2):31 uel quod eram Musas, ut crimina nostra, perosus, â•… uel quod adhuc crescens et rude carmen erat. Either because I hated the Muses, as the basis of the charge against me, or because the poem was still evolving and rough.

As the horrified reader envisions the Metamorphoses crumbling to ash, Ovid again changes his tone:€wait, the work survived€– copies existed€– and now Ovid prays that the poem will flourish and bring readers pleasure as it reminds them of Ovid (Trist. 1.7.23–6). See Hinds 1985:€22 and 31 n. 30. Ovid repeats this story in his verse autobiography in Tristia 4, but the two different motives for the bookburning in Tristia 1.7 (perfectionism versus anger) are now applied to two different actions:€t he perfectionism engenders an ongoing practice of discarding flawed drafts, while anger becomes the sole motive for burning the Metamorphoses (Trist. 4.10.61–4; compare. 5.12.61).

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This account has long been seen as a deliberate re-enactment of the Virgilian episode.32 Ovid’s analogy of exile to death permeates the Tristia; he represents his departure from Rome as his funeral, and his burning of the Metamorphoses thus has a ‘deathbed’ setting.33 Acting as both dying poet and biographer, Ovid invokes all the elements of the Virgilian scene. As poet, he disparages the Metamorphoses with Catullan terms like qualiacumque34 and describes the work as unfinished:€‘broken off’ (1.7.14), ‘still evolving’ and ‘rough’ (1.7.22);35 he emphasizes that he burns the work himself (ipse, mea manu, 1.7.16) As biographer, however, he praises and preserves the work. He offers the poem to the reader as a portrait of himself (1.7.11) using the word maior (‘greater’, a word strongly associated with the Aeneid),36 rescues the work retroactively from the fire by revealing the existence of copies, and wishes the verses a long life (uiuant, 1.7.25). It should not surprise us, since this is Ovid, that there are several ironic twists to this passage. First, the whole episode is self-consciously tonguein-cheek. The poet did not die; the book did not burn. By exaggerating his personal tragedy Ovid steers it towards satire; the scholarly speculation about his own motives, for example, adds an element of parody to the versified biography. More significantly, a key player is missing from the narrative. Where the Virgilian account emphatically names the agents of salvation€– Varius, Tucca, Augustus€– Ovid’s report is vague and passive:€pluribus exemplis scripta fuisse reor (‘I think several copies were made’, Trist. 1.7.24). Here is repetition and difference with a vengeance:€Augustus, the hero of the Virgilian story, is conspicuous by his absence. If Augustus is absent as rescuer, he is present in another, uglier role, for Ovid’s poem traces a second narrative alongside the Virgilian deathbed scene. There is, after all, a different tradition involving bookburning in ancient Rome€– a tradition of censorship and purification€– which is all too applicable to Ovid’s situation. Normally the purged texts were religious; during the republic both Roman and foreign sacred scrolls were burned, and Augustus ordered unauthorized prophetic books destroyed Nagle 1980:€29; Hinds 1985:€22; Williams 1994:€82; Holzberg 2002:€36. On the pervasive imagery of exile as death in the Tristia see Nagle 1980:€19–32; more recently R. J. King 1998 reads Ovid’s autobiography in Tristia 4.10 as a memorial addressed to mourners at a funeral. 34 A device he uses repeatedly in the exile poetry; see Luck 1977 (ad Trist. 1.7.11). 35 Hinds 1985 and 1999 and Williams 1994 analyse the new preface to the Metamorphoses at the end of this poem, demonstrating that Ovid’s treatment of the Metamorphoses in Tristia 1.7 unravels his epic€– makes it more unpolished, less finished€– to match his exiled state, thus reversing the upward trajectory of Virgil’s writings. 36 See Prop. 2.34.66, quoted in the vita (Brummer 1912:€102–3 = Vita Verg. 30). 32 33

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when he was pontifex maximus.37 But not all the burned books were cult texts. Under Augustus and Tiberius, several orators committed suicide after their works were burned by decree of the senate.38 While most of these incidents postdated Ovid’s exile, there is a similar and very famous incident that did not:€ the damnatio memoriae of Antony. By senatorial decree, Antony’s statues were pulled down, inscriptions erased, his birth date designated as unlucky, and his praenomen forbidden to males in his family. The familial, monumental and inscriptional record of Antony’s achievements was, literally, erased.39 Ovid pointedly reminds the reader several times in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto that his writings have suffered condemnation along with their author. (The most vivid description occurs in Tristia 3.1, where Ovid’s personified books, sent to Rome on their master’s behalf, discover that they and their ‘brothers’ are banned from the public libraries.)40 Ovid is well aware, then, that his own literary cursus honorum has suffered the same fate as Antony’s:€ erasure.41 The image of bookburning thus has a double valence in Tristia 1.7. As an allusion to the Virgilian deathbed, it equates Ovid’s epic to the Aeneid and reinforces the picture of exile as death which is so prominent in Ovid’s exile poetry. As an allusion to state censorship, it reminds Ovid’s reader that the Augustus who failed to appear as rescuer in Ovid’s recapitulation of Virgil’s tale is, in fact, present in the bookburning scene as the instigator of damnatio and relegatio. The man who created Virgil’s career by preserving the Aeneid has destroyed Ovid’s career and erased his masterpiece. Livy 25.1, 39.16, 40.29; Pliny HN 13.84; Suet. Aug. 31. See Sarefield 2006:€ 288–9 with further references; he and Bosmajian 2006:€24–32 both emphasize the public nature of the destruction of the texts; the burnings occur in marketplaces or forums and are the equivalent of a public execution. 38 Cassius Severus, Labienus and Cremutius Cordus; Suet. Calig. 16; Tac. Ann. 1.72, 4.21, 4.35. See Bosmajian 2006:€143–5; Báez 2004:€87–93. 39 Dio Cass. 51.19; Plut. Ant. 86, Cic. 49. 40 See Nagle 1980:€85–7 and compare Trist. 3.14.79, Pont. 1.1.5. 41 For the comparison of the poetic career to the cursus honorum see Cheney 2002a:€8–9. 37

Ch apter 11

Literary afterlives:€metempsychosis from Ennius to Jorge Luis Borges* Stuart Gillespie

As well as providing paradigms for the literary life, ancient authors and texts have also furnished highly influential models for what may be termed the literary afterlife. That is to say, ancient works have led later writers to envision and present their predecessors, and their relationships to those predecessors, in highly specific ways. This essay explores how one ancient trope has been used for these purposes over the long period indicated by my title, together with some other metaphorical concepts into which it has ramified during the last two centuries. Since Joyce intended Ulysses to contain everything, it naturally contains a reference to metempsychosis, when, in the ‘Calypso’ episode, Molly asks Bloom to explain the word in a book she is reading. The reference is fleeting; Joyce wishes to avoid labouring Bloom’s role as reincarnation of Odysseus: – Metempsychosis? – Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home? – Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek:€from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. – O rocks! She said. Tell us in plain words … – Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past lives.1

Bloom’s ‘some other planet’ is misinformation, but the rest of his informal definition is substantially correct. Metempsychosis, the transmission or * For suggestions on this paper I am grateful to Leon Burnett, Robert Cummings, Richard Cronin and Philip Hardie, as well as to members of the audiences who heard and discussed versions of it in British Columbia, April 2008, and my hosts there Susanna Braund (University of British Columbia), Alison Chapman (University of Victoria) and John Lepage (Malaspina University College). 1 Joyce 1993:€62. For a recent study of the novel’s use of metempsychosis see Levy 2002.

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transmigration of the psyche, has its Classical treatments in the myth of Er in Book 10 of Plato’s Republic; Macrobius on the dream of Scipio; the underworld of the Aeneid; and of course the soliloquy of Ovid’s dramatized figure of Pythagoras in Book 15 of the Metamorphoses. All these loci have something to say about the subject. But metempsychosis takes on in other literary contexts a special sense, for which these loci are not seminal. It is used for the notion that what in English is usually called the soul or spirit of one writer can be transferred to another born later. This special sense has usually been invoked by poets who invite readers to see them as the current embodiment of a predecessor poet. Invoking the concept of metempsychosis has been a means for such writers to express their relationship to the tradition in which they stand, or€– to adopt the language they have themselves sometimes used€– their relationship to their family:€their ancestors and descendants. It is, in other words, a vehicle for staking a claim to a place in the succession, registering their own status, and (just like other appropriations and rejections of Classical career paradigms discussed in this volume) constructing their role. The teachings of the historical Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans are the first point at which the idea of metempsychosis can be discerned in western thought.2 Pythagoras himself, according to Heraclides of Pontus, believed he was a reincarnation of the Trojan warrior Euphorbus. But the first point at which we can see it appearing as a trope for literary succession is in Ennius. Because the post-antique world has never possessed a text of the Annales, Ennius’ epic on the history of Rome, only limited precision can be achieved about what went on here. But the fragments taken together with the ancient testimonia inform us that near the start of the poem came allusions to natural cycles and the transmigration of souls, plus a dream-vision in which Homer appeared and said, in a phrase quoted by Donatus, that he had once been a peacock (Memini me fiere pauum).3 Ennius’ dream has fascinated ancients and moderns alike, and this enigmatic fragment, in particular, kicked off a crazy history of glosses and explanÂ� ations. Persius in an obscure line in his sixth satire talks of Ennius considering himself to be descended from ‘the peacock of Pythagoras’, and the scholiast on this line in Persius, in turn, drew up a hypothetical Â�

Some of the early sources are discussed by Barnes 1982:€103–20 and Burkert 1972:€120–65. Donatus cites this expression in his commentary on Terence at Andria 429, Phormio 74, Adelphi 106. For this and other surviving fragments of the Ennian passage see Skutsch 1985.

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sequence or Â�genealogy, the order of transmission being Pythagoras, peacock, Euphorbus, Homer, Ennius.4 There are variations on this genealogy in antiquity, and a fuller account in Diogenes Laertius (8.4–6), but much more important in the present context is Ennius’ claim about his relationship to Homer. It looks as though in Ennius’ dream Homer told him that his soul, ‘in the course of its migrations’, was currently ‘embedded in Ennius’ himself.5 Ennius was claiming Homeric inspiration and authority, and hence staking his claim to primacy at the head of a Latin poetic tradition. On the other side of the equation Ennius apparently assumes that poets can live on in later poets, so that Homer’s survival after death, his immortality, is not simply in the metaphorical sense that his poetry survives as something to be read. Taken together with the proem to Annales 7, the move has recently been described as ‘an attempt on Ennius’ part to canonize the history of Latin literature in Enniocentric terms, as the poet proclaims himself, on the basis of his Homeric credentials, simultaneously founder, pater, and telos of a new Roman literature’.6 It can also be seen as a way of justifying the Homeric features (such as quantitative hexameter verse) which Ennius wanted to introduce into his poem, a work which in this respect constituted a distinct departure from the Latin epic tradition.7 What happened next was a sequence of revisitings and revisions of this passage in later Latin writers,8 of which the most decisive as a claim to cultural authority is Virgil’s programmatic statement in Georgics 3 in which he renegotiates the role of primus for himself (Geo. 3:€10–12): Primus ego in patriam mecum, modo uita supersit, Aonio rediens deducam uertice Musas; primus Idumaeas referam tibi, Mantua, palmas

In the Dryden translation (Dryden 1987:€5.209): I, first of Romans shall in Triumph come From conquer’d Greece, and bring her Trophies home: With Foreign Spoils adorn my native place; And with Idume’s Palms, my Mantua grace. Persius 6.10–11:€cor iubet hoc Enni, postquam destertuit esse / Maeonides, quintus pauone ex Pythagoreo. The scholiast tried to explain this by taking the word quintus, which probably refers merely to the name ‘Quintus Ennius’, as meaning that Ennius was the fifth possessor of one soul. 5 Skutsch 1944:€85. 6 Rossi and Breed 2006:€412. 7 Aicher 1989:€227; see further 232:€‘the dream helps to authorize the Homeric (and all the Greek) elements of the verse, and they in turn give evidence of the dream experience’. 8 For some of these see W. R. Hardie 1913; Skutsch 1985:€150–3. 4

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Just as Ennius seems to have done, Virgil claims here to have been the first to import Greek muses to his homeland. And just as Ennius had used Homeric features for his poem, Virgil uses language and (probably) imagery that evokes Ennius.9 Of course, what Virgil is doing at his quite different point in time cannot be exactly the same as what Ennius was doing. For example, if we accept Skutsch’s arguments, one of Ennius’ purposes was to release himself from the Alexandrian prohibition against the imitation of Homer, on the grounds that if he actually is Homer, then he cannot be imitating him.10 This obviously has no relevance to Virgil. But a mix of humility and self-aggrandisement is still there. Virgil, in ‘becoming’ Ennius, taking on the role Ennius had performed, is ambivalent about Ennius’ importance. Ennius is a source of authority, but on the other hand he is ‘out of date’, retroactively ‘old’ now that Virgil is proclaiming himself the coming thing.11 We shall return to this mix in later writers, and we shall return too to the way both Ennius and Virgil refer to a transference across languages. But from the ancient beginnings our itinerary now embraces the surprisingly extensive subsequent history of metempsychosis. Petrarch’s Africa is the first modern handling of some of these materials in a poetic context. Like other Renaissance readers, Petrarch had access to all the well-known ancient texts on metempsychosis (understood in the general sense of transmigration of souls)€ – Plato, Ovid, Macrobius, Virgil€– and was plainly familiar with them. He was also well aware of Ennius’ presentation as well as various responses to it, as we shall see. But greatly significant for Petrarch were certain intervening traditions. The Church had since its early days condemned metempsychosis as a heresy; it ran too obviously counter (or too embarrassingly close) to the doctrine of Redemption.12 Other authorities had treated it as a subject for levity:€Horace, for example, dismissed it as the ‘somnia Pythagorea’ (Ep. 2.1.52; compare Carm. 1.28.9–15), and Lucian made sport with it in a story in which Pythagoras arrives in the Underworld.13 Nevertheless, there is no aversion to using the trope for poetic tradition in the middle ages. Hence Petrarch reflects a kind of forking of paths that had taken place between 10 Hinds 1998:€53–6; P. Hardie 2007b:€137–9. Skutsch 1944. This point is developed by Rossi and Breed 2006:€414–15. 12 To be more specific:€Jerome reports that metempsychosis was a secret doctine of certain sectaries in his time. It was held in a Platonic form by the Gnostics, and is so taught by Origen Peri archon. Augustine De Moribus Manichaeorum ridicules the Manichean version. 13 Lucian, The True History, 2.21; see also The Dream, or the Cock. ╇9 11

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metempsychosis as a philosophical or religious doctrine Â�(dangerous and heretical, or comically fantastical), and metempsychosis as a poetic metaphor (attractive and traditional). Outwardly he expresses his contempt for the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul, publicly characterizing it as ridiculous.14 But Petrarch’s own epic Africa, the Latin hexameter poem he worked on for most of his life, engages vigorously with the other tradition, in particular with what he knew of Ennius’ part in it€– so much so that it constitutes easily ‘the most important document we have for the reception of Ennius and his work at the dawn of the Renaissance’.15 The climax of the Africa is the key point for Petrarch’s elaboration of his authority topos in his work as a whole, ‘staging the drama of his literary predecessors authorizing his epic endeavor’16 in an elaborate scene for which the famous ‘Somnium Scipionis’ in Book 6 of Cicero’s De Republica is the initial pretext. In Book 9 of Petrarch’s narrative, his hero Scipio settles down to a long conversation with his companion and commemorator Ennius. Ennius recounts (9.158–285) that as a result of his long cultivation of Homer, he dreamed of him the night before the battle of Zama in which Scipio has just been victorious. Homer appeared to him, explained the nature of poetry, and revealed the outcome of the battle. Then Homer took him to see a youth sitting under a laurel whose leaves seemed about to crown him:€he was Petrarch, at the moment he conceived the Africa itself. (A lacuna precedes this point, in which Petrarch may have intended to present a vision of the great poets who followed Ennius.) Homer now makes a full prophecy to Ennius revealing who Petrarch is, the nature of the poem he will undertake, and the laurel crown he will win at the Capitol, the first time it has been awarded in a millennium. Homer now hails Petrarch as his ‘only friend among the Latins’ (Salve, care michi Latie telluris amice / Unice!, 9.174–5). At these words, Ennius reports, he was inspired by great affection for Petrarch, before being awakened from his dream by battle trumpets. In rewriting Ennius in the fourteenth century, Petrarch’s aims seem to correspond closely to what we can discern of Ennius’. Petrarch seeks to position himself as the modern poet who will stand as the Homeric fountainhead of a new literature, just as Ennius had claimed to stand in Rome. Thus, in the words of a recent commentator, ‘it is the historical fact of his laureation … for his Latin epic that serves to confirm his genealogical Petrarch’s various animadversions are conveniently assembled, quoted and translated in Usher 2005:€125. 15 Houghton 2007:€145. 16 Brownlee 2005:€479. 14

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link to his poetic predecessors:€ Homer, the founder of Greek epic, and Ennius, the founder of Latin epic. Petrarch would then be the equally “foundational” poet of renovatio.’17 The legitimizing translatio of Ennius is extended by making Petrarch himself into the third poet in the series. We note that while Petrarch presents himself in self-effacing fashion, ‘about to melt into a composite with his poetic kin’, paradoxically ‘that tendency to self-effacement results in an almost hubristic self-affirmation’.18 There is an inevitable conflict in Petrarch’s conception of Ennius, for while he prefigures Petrarch and embodies his ideals, Petrarch was also well aware of the denigration of Ennius’ work in ancient literature.19 In fact, Petrarch’s Horatian prediction20 earlier in the Africa that he will come to celebrate Scipio ‘as another Ennius’ (velut Ennius alter, 2.443) can be understood as realizing itself in Petrarch’s replacing Ennius€– substituting for Ennius’ work which has not survived. Or else we might say that Petrarch could claim to have made Ennius live and speak again. Few modern responses to the notion of poetic metempsychosis are as rich as Petrarch’s, but there are many of them to mention, so the rest of this tour must move at rapid pace. Petrarch himself sponsored several, including Boccaccio’s brief flirtation with the idea, which involved proposing for his hero antecedents in Virgil and Dante (Petrarch rejected both).21 We may travel northwards through the European Renaissance via a final glimpse of Petrarch in the sixteenth century. By this time he has been canonized not for his epic verse, but as the guiding spirit of vernacular love lyric. This is the context in which Petrarch is himself figured as the soul undergoing metempsychotic displacement in Ronsard’s ode to Du Bellay of the 1560s:22 â•…â•…â•… Si ce qu’a dit Pythagore â•…â•…â•… Pour vrai l’on veut estimer, â•…â•…â•… L’ame de Petrarque encore â•…â•…â•… T’est venue r’animer: â•…â•…â•… L’experience est pour moi, Veu que ses vers Tuscans tu ne leus onques Brownlee 2005:€480–1. Murphy 1997:€ 116. See Brownlee 2005 for the argument that Petrarch’s strategy is expressly designed to promote his authority over that of Dante. 19 See further Suerbaum 1972. 20 Horace characterizes Ennius as ‘alter Homerus’ at Ep. 2.1.50. 21 For discussion see Usher 2005. 22 This passage is the focus of Murphy 1991. The quotation is from ‘A Joachim Du Bellai’, Ronsard 1993–4:€2.984. 17 18

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Et tu écris ainsi comme lui, donques â•…â•…â•… Le même esprit est en toi. If we choose to believe what Pythagoras said was true, the soul of Petrarch has returned again to live in you:€that is my experience, given that you have never read his Tuscan verses, yet you write like him, therefore the same spirit must dwell in you.

In a further piece of cross-hatching in this intertextual picture, Du Bellay himself makes similar use of the doctrine in his own ode to Antoine Héroet, Du Bellay’s conceit being that Plato is revived in Héroet.23 His verb is revivre, Ronsard’s (above) r’aminer:€the term métempsychose itself is awkward to incorporate in metrical verse, and few French poems make bold to use it, while English poets have yet another syllable to contend with.24 But the concept is common currency over the full range of English as well as French Renaissance culture. The simple ‘transmigration of souls’ version of metempsychosis is ubiquitous:€ the idea was in the air, and expressions of it are easily called to mind.25 Malvolio in Twelfth Night mentions it (4.2.51), as does Nano in Volpone (1.2.6–24, drawing on Diogenes Laertius’ life of Pythagoras), as too€– less comically€– does Faustus at the end of Marlowe’s play: Ah Pythagoras Metemsycosis; were that true, This soule should flie from me, and I be chang’d Unto some brutish beast.

Burton cites Ovid on metempsychosis, and summarizes Lucian’s story of the cock.26 Sir Thomas Browne has a good deal to say about it, offering at one point a down-to-earth interpretation in terms of how ideas will in time inevitably resurface: For as though there were a Metempsuchosis, and the soule of one man passed into another, opinions doe find after-revolutions, men and mindes like those that first begat them. To see our selves wee neede not look for Plato’s yeare, Du Bellay 1919:€1.196–7. For an example of how not to do it, see Richard Lovelace’s 1659 lines ‘To the Genius of Mr. John Hall On his exact Translation of Hierocles’:€‘Who now shall doubt the Metempsychosis, / Of the great Author, that shall peruse this?’ 25 For further French Renaissance allusions see Montaigne, Essais, 2.11; Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel, 5.4. Full-scale discursive treatments of the doctrine around Europe include Paganini Gaudenzio’s De Pythagorica Animarum Transmigratione (Pisa, 1641), Whitlock Bulstrode’s Μετεμψυχωσις, or an Essay of Transmigration, in Defence of Pythagoras (London, 1692), and Gulielmus Irhovius’ De Palingeneia Veterum seu Metempsychosi sic dicta Pythagorica (Amsterdam, 1733). 26 Anatomy of Melancholy, 1.1.2.9. 23

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every man is not onely himselfe; there have beene many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name; men are lived over againe, the world is now as it was in the age past, there was none then, but there have been some one since that paralels him, and is as it were his revived selfe.27

John Donne’s Progress of the Soul is, at least in ambition, the most elaborate, and today perhaps the most familiar English Renaissance handling. Ben Jonson summed up Donne’s plan thus: The conceit … was, that he sought the soul of that apple which Eva pulled, and thereafter made it the soul of a bitch, then of a she wolf, and so of a woman. His general purpose was to have brought in all the bodies of the heretics from the soul of Cain.28

The only completed canto of the poem is roughly the length of one book of an epic, taking the soul’s progress through a mandrake, a sparrow, several fish, a whale, a mouse, two wolves and an ape, to Cain’s wife, Themech. It would have required a full epic-sized work to bring it from Eden to what the poem indicates was to be its last resting-place in the body of Luther.29 But these many references, though they help suggest the wide recognizability of the concept of metempsychosis, whether among poets, scholars or theatre audiences, do not deploy it for the most characteristic literary purposes€– those of laying claim to cultural capital. We come closer to such claims with perhaps the best-known remark on metempsychosis from the English Renaissance, Frances Meres’ on Shakespeare, to the effect that the English poet had acquired the soul of Ovid. Meres made specific reference to the Classical tradition summarized above:€ ‘As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to liue in Pythagoras:€so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare.’30 But, as with Ronsard and Du Bellay, this is more of an elegant compliment than a purposeful use of the idea. Of more substance is Spenser in the Faerie Queene (1596), stating his sense of poetic discipleship to Chaucer in a passage which might be called the defining Chaucerian moment of the Elizabethan era:31 Browne 1642:€11. Conversations with William Drummond, 8; Jonson 1975:€464. 29 For a standard scholarly account of the scheme, and failure, of The Progress of the Soul see Milgate 1967:€xxv–xxxiii. Milgate also supplies a list of the sources for the doctrine of metempsychosis available to Donne at pp. 171–2. See also Allen 1952. 30 Meres 1634:€623. 31 For a recent reading of the passage see Cheney 2009:€103–5. 27 28

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Then pardon, O most sacred happie spirit, That I thy labours lost may thus reuiue, And steale from thee the meede of thy due merit, That none durst euer whilest thou wast aliue, And being dead in vaine yet many striue: Ne dare I like, but through infusion sweete Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me surviue, I follow here the footing of thy feete, That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.32

This is certainly a complex intertextual moment. Spenser pays his tribute to Chaucer in terms used in Lucretius’ praise of Epicurus as well as in the envoi to Troilus and Criseyde.33 Spenser is in fact claiming here a position analogous to what Ennius had claimed, because of Chaucer’s role as the generic ‘father’ of English poetry; Chaucer is the fountain-head for Spenser as Homer was for Ennius. One of the differences, however, is that whereas Homer is a Greek and Ennius a Roman poet, Chaucer and Spenser are both English ones. This makes Spenser unusual, because the metempsychosis trope was most often used to refer specifically to cross-cultural inheritance€– Greek or Roman to English.34 For instance, the latinate Cowley is lauded as a reborn Virgil by Denham in his elegy on the poet, with specific reference to the Pythagorean doctrine (‘She’ is Denham’s Muse): ’Twas taught by wise Pythagoras, One Soul might through more Bodies pass; Seeing such Transmigration here, She thought it not a Fable there.35

But Homeric ‘infusion’ remains the more usual claim. George Chapman advances it in the especially charged context of his translation of Homer, although the passage, as it happens a rather fine one, is out of the way. Chapman has Homer speak: I am (sayd hee) that spirit Elysian, That (in thy natiue ayre; and on the hill Next Hitchins left hand) did thy bosome fill, Faerie Queene 4.2.34 (Spenser 2007:€424). For Lucretius’ praise of Epicurus see De rerum natura 3.1–30; Spenser’s particular borrowing is from line 4, ficta pedum pono pressis uestigia signis in ‘follow … the footing of thy feete’. Note also the secondary meaning ‘feete’ = ‘metrical divisions’, specifically Chaucer’s iambic pentameter. For Troilus and Criseyde, see 5.1791–2 of Chaucer’s poem. 34 This point is made by Terry 2001:€162. 35 Sir John Denham, ‘On Mr Abraham Cowley his Death and Burial Amongst the Ancient Poets’, 67–70, in Denham 1969:€151. 32 33

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Stuart Gillespie With such a flood of soule; that thou wert faine (With acclamations of her Rapture then) To vent it, to the Echoes of the vale; When (meditating of me) a sweet gale Brought me vpon thee; and thou didst inherit My true sense (for the time then) in my spirit; And I, inuisiblie, went prompting thee, To those fayre Greenes, where thou didst english me.36

This beckons us on towards a more elaborate use of the same rhetoric of spiritual inheritance at the very end of the seventeenth century, by a poet who is probably the first English writer ever to have a full sense of the complete English poetic tradition down to his own time, and who is also a major Homeric translator:€John Dryden. Introducing his last collection of poems and (mainly) translations, the Fables Ancient and Modern of 1700, a collection which happens to include a superb translation of the Pythagorean section of Metamorphoses 15, Dryden muses on the family resemblances between the characters of the writers he has been translating. Before long he is claiming these are very much more than coincidence, and is thus led to refer to the claim we have just seen Spenser making in regard to Chaucer, as well as other cases of ‘lineal descent’: Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax; for we have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body; and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original; and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloigne which was turned into English by Mr Fairfax.37

We perhaps see in Dryden here the earliest manifestation of a different nudge given to the metempsychosis idea in later times. References so far canvassed make no mention of family relationships as such; in those cases the peregrine soul of the poet seems, like that of the Dalai Lama, to light on an otherwise unrelated body. But Dryden insists that all concerned in the sequence of English poets belong to a single family, using the word ‘clan’, almost uniquely in his work,38 to enforce the sense he requires of Chapman 1609:€A4r–v. Dryden 1995–2005:€5.49–50. ‘More than once’:€Spenser alludes to Chaucer in a similar way in the Envoi to The Shepheardes Calender. For further discussion of the Dryden passage, with particular reference to its relationship with the accompanying translation of the Pythagorean section of the Metamorphoses, see Hopkins 2001. 38 The sole other use appears to be The Hind and the Panther, 1.521. 36 37

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consanguinity between different branches of a single family network. This idea of the interrelation of all poets seems to be new. As we shall see in a moment, it is taken further in a later era, towards the more extravagant idea that these related writers are not merely relatives but actually, at some deep level, the same writer. The language of literary paternity was a generic one for Dryden’s time, but he seems to have used it in particularly significant ways.39 He had elsewhere employed in a similar context the word ‘traduction’, technically the notion espoused by Hippocrates that the parent engenders the child’s soul as well as its body.40 Poets of the past were regularly envisaged as ‘fathering’ living poets, and accounts of the Fables’ Preface have rightly stressed Dryden’s use of these standard metaphors. But the trope of metempsychosis raises the stakes, and, as we might by this time expect, Dryden implies (though it would not be good manners to insist) that he is himself rather more than merely the descendant of these illustrious forebears:€he is their reincarnation. In the course of his work he has found, he says, that he ‘ha[s] a Soul congenial’ to Chaucer’s, and he feels he has been led to translate him by the influence of ‘something … like fatality’.41 And if we wish for a more explicit presentation of the claim that Dryden is the modern avatar of the poets he translates, we need look no further than the poem an admiring Joseph Addison wrote on the publication of one of Dryden’s earlier translations of Ovid. Addison invites Dryden to ‘prolong his noble task’ (which he did) until he reaches the passage in Metamorphoses 15 which tells of ‘How some in feathers, or a ragged hide, / Have lived a second life, and different natures tried’. ‘Then’, writes Addison, ‘will thy Ovid, thus transformed, reveal / A nobler change than he himself can tell.’â•›42 If poets down to the eighteenth century like to imagine themselves as possessing the souls of their great predecessors, the post-Romantic era takes this one step further. Poets may still present themselves as animated by the spirit of Chaucer or Homer, but they also have a new tendency to envisage all great poets as one and the same poet:€in a current but not completely standard piece of terminology, a (or the) ‘universal author’. Before embarking for the twentieth century, one early and, for its time, extraÂ�ordinary statement of this idea calls out to be registered. Shelley, expressing the Terry 2001:€145–56; Terry 1996. ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew’, 23; Dryden 1995–2005:€5.7. 41 42 Dryden 1995–2005:€5.79, 83. ‘To Mr Dryden’, Addison 1854–6:€vol. I. 2. 39

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fundamental oneness of the poetry of the world in the ‘Defence of Poetry’, assumes not only that all poets are one, but that all poems are (or are part of) a single poem. Here he is discussing the Greeks: It will readily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria who were delighted with the poems of Theocritus were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the rest of their tribe. Corruption must have utterly destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all … And let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions simply as fragments and isolated portions:€those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.43

This too has clear precedents in the thought of the ancients. The central idea of a chain down the links of which influence is exerted is evidently drawn from Plato’s theory of inspiration in the Ion (533, 563), which Shelley himself translated. Inspiration is like a magnetic force holding together the links of a chain: And as the power of the stone circulates through all the links of this series, and attaches each to each, so the Muse, comunicating through those whom she has first inspired, to all others capable of sharing in the inspiration, the influence of that first enthusiasm, creates a chain and a succession. For the authors of those great poems which we admire … utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed of a spirit not their own.44

The twentieth century, like the Renaissance, is an era in which metempsychosis has considerable literary currency. I have alluded to Joyce’s exploration of it; Yeats could also be adduced, or for the specific idea of the transmigration of the poet’s own soul, Valéry. T. S. Eliot’s famous use of Dante’s words of acknowledgement to Arnaut Daniel in dedicating The Waste Land to Ezra Pound, ‘il miglior fabbro’, was certainly intended to hint at a mysterious transference of poetic spirits. For a more head-on Shelleyan presentation there is Proust. At the conclusion of his essay on Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire, Proust dwells on Baudelaire’s final portrait, a portrait depicting the long white hair which Baudelaire joked made Shelley 1954:€286–7.

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Quoted from Shelley’s own translation:€Shelley 1880:€3.263–4.

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him look like an academician abroad. Proust, far from finding anything humorous about it, sees this portrait as corroborating a Shelleyan notion of the unity of all poets and all poems: In this last portrait he bears an uncanny resemblance to Hugo, Vigny and Leconte de Lisle, as if all four were only slightly different versions of a single face, the face of that great poet who has been fundamentally one, since the world began, whose life is intermittent yet as long as that of mankind … and the cantos of whom, contradictory at times as is natural in so great a work, within none the less ‘a dark and profound unity’, are bound together, would understand one another were the various parts known to each other, and which ‘answer one another’ in our hearts, that have entertained them and recognize themselves in them!45

The notion of the ‘unity of all poems’, as I have called it (the logical term might be ‘the universal poem’), has obvious implications for intertextual practices on the part of poets, a theme which could be developed in relation to translation, for example,46 and to a number of twentiethcentury writers. It has, for instance, been remarked in the work of Anna Akhmatova by Sonia Ketchian, who observes:€‘if the œuvre of each poet can be construed as one lifetime or stage in the process of literary reincarnation, then resonances with other writers’ works represent, as it were, an incorporation of other lives and the memories of others into the framework of Akhmatova’s verse’.47 Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘A Primitive like an Orb’ embodies it quite explicitly, beginning by referring to ‘The essential poem at the centre of things’, ‘something’, we are told, ‘seen and known in lesser poems’. This essential poem has its own procreative capacity, and thus fathers offspring just as the family of poets has (in Dryden’s expression) its ‘lineal descents’:€ ‘The essential poem begets the others.’â•›48 One thinks, too, of Mallarmé’s unrealized and unrealizable project of writing Le Livre, the ‘total book’ in which the whole world would be gathered (‘tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre’, he wrote).49 There is space here to do little more than draw attention to a few modern contributions to these strands of thought and imagery. But one word more on Proust, who himself used the term métempsychose on the first page of À la recherche du temps perdu. This is disguised in most English translations:€the translators, presumably not wishing to send their readers ‘Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire’ (written 1909, text of 1971), quoted in corrected form from Proust 1988:€55. 46 For some further suggestions here see the essay ‘Metamorphosis as Translation’, in Tomlinson 1983: 72–97. 47 49 Ketchian 1981:€46. 48 Stevens 1955:€440–1. Mallarmé 1945:€378. 45

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to the dictionary at this early point, actually do, in Leopold Bloom’s words, ‘call it reincarnation’. Swann has dozed off after reading a book about Charles V and François I; on waking he imagines himself back in their world. Lydia Davis’s recent rendering is an exception to English translators’ normal practice of substituting the word ‘reincarnation’ here: This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit. Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not.50

This first episode of Proust’s great work could, like Joyce’s, be said to be more substantially concerned with the theme of metempsychosis. But this is at a remove from our primary interest here. Jorge Luis Borges is our finishing point, not least because he harks back explicitly to several episodes in the history I have been describing. There is in this respect a fitting element of recapitulation in what Borges has to say about what he calls the ‘unity of authors’. For instance, Sir Thomas Browne, some of whose writings Borges translated, was a long-term influence on him, and is often somewhere on hand in Borges’s allusions to metempsychotic matters.51 But his take on the subject is his own. In fact, he develops it away from metempsychosis and reincarnation (involving death and rebirth) and towards the typically Borgesian idea of ‘an impersonal author of all literature’, a universal author (involving continuous existence through time).52 It is typically Borgesian in that it plays heavily on the paradoxes of the one and the many that are treated so often€– too often, some would say€– in his stories. As we shall see, though, the direction Borges’s meditations take is not so very different from the cases of Ennius, Petrarch or Dryden. This passage from Borges’s essay ‘La flor de Coleridge’ is one instance of his very self-conscious reflections in this area: The pantheist who declares the plurality of authors to be illusory finds Â�unexpected support in the classicist, to whom such a plurality barely matters. For the classical mind, literature is the essential thing, not individuals. George Moore and James Joyce incorporated in their works the pages and sentences of others; Oscar Wilde used to give plots away for others to develop; both procÂ� edures, though apparently contradictory, may reveal an identical sense of art, an Â�ecumenical, impersonal perception. Another witness of the Word’s profound Proust 2002:€1. 51 See recently C. Johnson 2002. The phrase is from Dominique Jullien’s essay on Borges’s Homeric stories, Jullien 1995:€139.

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unity, another who defied the limitations of the individual, was the renowned Ben Jonson, who, upon writing his literary testament and the favorable or adverse opinions he held of his contemporaries, simply combined fragments from Seneca, Quintilian, Justus Lipsius, Vives, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon, and the two Scaligers. … Those who carefully copy a writer do so impersonally, because they equate that writer with literature, because they suspect that to depart from him in the slightest is to deviate from reason and orthodoxy. For many years I thought that the almost infinite world of literature was in one man. That man was Carlyle, he was Johannes Becher, he was Whitman, he was Rafael Cansinos Asséns, he was De Quincey.53

Borges expresses the concept of the universal author in characteristically topsy-turvy terms:€he used to think not that all authors are one, but that one author was all. But he is also characteristically poised between the suggestive and the evasive. He believed this ‘for many years’€– but does so no longer? And is he describing something routine (borrowings, appropriations), or something extraordinary (‘the Word’s profound unity’; an ‘infinite world … in one man’)? I turn finally to Borges’s ‘El inmortal’ (1957), a short story in which, in a fictional context, he allows himself a freer play of implication. ‘El inmortal’ is a tale ‘alternatively viewed as Borges’ most rewarding and most forbidding, yet unanimously accepted as his most ambitious’; ‘perhaps more than any of Borges’s other works … an allegory of literature’.54 The last words (in English translation) of its protagonist and narrator, Joseph Cartaphilus, are these:€‘I have been Homer; shortly I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.’55 This improbable declaration is made less so by a dense surrounding framework of incident and allusion. A one-sentence summary of the narrative might go:€a Roman centurion drinks from a fountain of youth, thereafter leading a peripatetic existence as a transhistorical personality in search of an antidote for his immortality. ‘Cartaphilus’ is the name of the Roman guard who becomes the Wandering Jew of the earliest written accounts of that legend. More recent literary precedents include Orlando€– at one point Cartaphilus visits Alexander Pope in England, just as Woolf’s ‘La flor de Coleridge’ (1945), translated by Suzanne Jill Levine; quoted from Borges 1999:€242. Asséns (1883–1964), the Andalusian poet, was Borges’s early mentor. M. Evans 1984:€275; Jullien 1995:€138. 55 Quotations from this story are taken from Borges 1970:€135–49 (here 148–9). The translator is Irby. The Spanish original€ – though in fictional terms the text is itself a translation from an English original€– was published in El Aleph, 1957. 53

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protagonist does€– though it is much darker in tone, and another relevant precedent is Swift’s sordid and despairing immortals, the Struldbruggs.56 Now Cartaphilus is, as the final words say, a shadow of Homer; he is also a shadow (through quotations and plagiarism) of Browne.57 He is in fact, as previous commentators have recognized, all authors. What is more, Borges has embodied in this tale a more than ordinarily intertextual play that will make his story itself a ‘witness of the Word’s profound unity’, as he had called it in ‘La flor de Coleridge’. In Michael Evans’s words, ‘the verbal repercussions carry beyond the bounds of the work itself and communicate with a constellation of external texts’.58 Not only Browne is quoted:€a facetious fictional postscript draws attention to ‘interpolations’ from Pliny, De Quincey, Descartes and George Bernard Shaw. The postscript also makes mention of Ben Jonson, who himself ‘defined his contemporaries with bits of Seneca’. ‘El inmortal’ is a version of the Wandering Jew, but it also rewrites Ulysses, and indeed ‘all those texts that both thematize and theorize the … amalgamation of cultural fragments’. In fact, ‘El inmortal’ ‘tends to incorporate other texts in order to represent the essence of all literature’.59 But one of the authors alluded to is of special significance. Immediately on drinking the water the protagonist ‘repeat[s], inexplicably, some words in Greek’. These turn out to be from the end of the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad. Cartaphilus becomes Homer. So does his companion, whom he calls Argos, and who utters a line from the Odyssey.60 So too, in a slightly different sense, does Borges, partly through the tale’s stress on blindness, partly because the first of these Homeric lines has been previously used by Borges elsewhere.61 Borges’s story, of course, does not present us with the transmigration of souls€ – rather the survival through times and places of one soul in one body. But not just any soul. The narrative framework itself turns on Cartaphilus’s copy of Pope’s Iliad, which he informs us he subscribed for in 1714, and tucked into the back of which has been found the sole copy M. Evans 1984:€281 n. 3 suggests another ‘possible precedent’ in the ‘fantastic chapter’ of the ‘poisonous book’ in Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray. With Orlando (which Borges translated in 1968) the involutions begin to multiply, and readers starting to imagine that there might, after all, be something more than metaphor in the notion of the transhistorical author may consult (for Thomas Browne as a source for Orlando) Caughie 1985, (for Proust ditto) Shore 1979, (for Ulysses ditto) Webb 1994, and (for Orlando as a source for Borges) Ayuso 2004. 57 For the connection with Browne see Stephens 1992. 58 M. Evans 1984:€275. 59 Jullien 1995:€140. 60 Jullien 1955: 138, 143; the lines are Il. 2.824 and Od. 17.394. The first one is itself rewritten slightly:€see Evans’s analysis of this (1984:€278). 61 For the blindness and association with Homer see M. Evans 1984:€ 277; for Borges’s previous quotation (in ‘Las versiones homéricas’) see Jullien 1995:€142. 56

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of his memoir which, when translated, constitutes the story itself. Borges is still talking, some 2,200 years after Ennius, about Homer, ‘the “absent” figure around whom the story pivots’, as the fount of his literary tradition, and ‘deliberately chooses to relate to Homer through the chain of authors who have echoed his work’ in a mise en abîme of allusions each reflecting ‘a different member of an infinite succession of rhapsodists and writers who have repeated and re-written’ Homer.62 One important qualification is that this chain is, of course, a canon personal to Borges. Borges, we can now see, is doing the sort of things that it has always been the function of these ideas to do, from antiquity to the present. My plural ‘ideas’ acknowledges that there are differences between reincarnation, rebirth, metempsychosis and transhistorical personality; but all express a version of literary afterlife as a kind of immortality, and the purposes for which writers use them are uniform enough. To make them more fully explicit, they include the following: stressing the prestigious pedigree of your literature, and thereby of your own individual work. Claiming that your own writing is just as valid as the more prestigious literature you draw on (Greek in the case of Ennius; primarily Roman in the case of Dryden). Proposing that your literary tradition does not exist merely inertly, but as a living reciprocity between writers past and present (also good for you, because just as the past lives in you, you have the godlike power to make past writers live again). And more negatively, perhaps, suggesting that all creativity must take place within the tradition, the tradition you specify (or, if powerful enough, create), and including some writers within that tradition while excluding others. These are some of the ways in which writerly roles may be constructed by the representation of literary afterlives. M. Evans 1984:€278, 280. Borges’s other ‘Homeric’ short story, the two-page ‘El hacedor’, falls outside the scope of this essay; see here Jullien 1995:€136–8.

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‘Mirrored doubles’:€Andrew Marvell, the remaking of poetry and the poet’s career Nigel Smith

For someone whose reputation as a major poet depends almost entirely on retrospective construction in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Andrew Marvell has a surprising amount to say about his own literary career.1 For someone who was consciously aware of the way in which others around him and just before him had sounded their own trumpets, proclaiming themselves latter-day Virgils, Ovids or Lucans, Marvell is remarkable for the degree to which he is able in his verse and his prose to speculate on his own career as a poet even while refusing the terms of aggrandizement claimed by his contemporaries. Jonson, Milton, Herrick, Cowley, Davenant and Katherine Philips all took pains to make their voices major, distinctive and above or beyond the tradition that had formed them. Marvell is a poet who denied this sense of poetic egotism by a form of studied imitation (echoing all of the people named above and many more) but who nonetheless made a virtue and indeed a highly creative resource of being other men’s (and women’s) mirrors. I once said, and was pilloried for it, that Marvell was a ‘weak poet’ in this sense and of course it was meant in a Bloomian sense.2 He did not murder his father poets in order to find his own voice so much as echo them within his own voice, never letting the discerning reader forget about their distinctive identity. Marvell was aware that this could be regarded as a kind of feminine principle of writing, which begs Â�further questions of the intriguing issue of his sexuality.3 He had no interest in anyone hearing his poetic ‘echoing voice’ since he remained almost entirely unpublished in print until after his death. Furthermore, no See Ray 1998; N. Smith 2007a. Conference on Marvell and Liberty, Institute for English Studies, University of London, July 1996. See also Bloom 1973. 3 The classic discussion is P. Hammond 1996; a later version, ‘Marvell’s Ambiguities’, is ch. 4 in P. Hammond 2002. 1

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substantial collection of his lyric verse survives in manuscript form and very little of it circulated in manuscript miscellanies. Most of his prose tracts, the majority of which are rich with literary and theatrical allusion, were published anonymously. Marvell was the son of a provincial ‘low church’ Jacobean divine. It is probable that he too intended or was intended to be a divine, possibly a university man, and in that role he could have prospered as a poet if he had so desired.4 Two of his favourite poets were important academic divines:€George Herbert and the Oxonian William Cartwright. But the death of his father in 1641 and the loss of his scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, put paid to that ambition, depriving him both of means and a place in the institution of the university and the church.5 He was cast adrift in the capital early in the Civil War decade, dependent on the goodwill of those with whom he had connections (usually northern ones), the sale of small properties€– all that could be called a patrimony€– and eventually became a tutor for the great, in their households, or on tours of Europe. He would gain a reputation as a tutor, indubitably overqualified, a man with secretarial and ambassadorial skills who had been kept waiting too long.6 He would remain a servant in some sense for the rest of his life. In this way, although from a family background that became in the 1640s and 1650s mostly parliamentarian and republican, Marvell fell in with royalists, and, while in Europe, possibly in Italy, appears to have met and spent time with the Villiers brothers, George, the young second Duke of Buckingham, and his younger brother Lord Francis. This led to all of four lines of aggressively royalist poetry in an elegy of 128 lines written in the summer of 1648, when Lord Francis was killed in a skirmish at the beginning of the Second Civil War. Indeed the dominant concern with all of Marvell’s royalist poems of the late 1640s is the business of writing poetry, none more so than the verse epistle to the cavalier Richard Lovelace, another father poet for Marvell, and where the literary impact For Marvell’s life records, including the complexity of Andrew Marvell Sr’s position and beliefs, see Maltzahn 2005. 5 The evidence of an encounter with Roman Catholicism might be adduced as one reason for being required to leave Trinity College. But probably more suggestive is the evidence that he did not keep up his residence requirement. Was he in London enjoying city life, as his own later testimony in The Rehearsal Transpros’ d (1672) hints? See further Smith 2008. 6 Samuel Hartlib’s ‘Ephemerides’ reports from Dr John Worthington, c. October 1655:€ ‘There is one Marvel of 40. years of age who hath spent all his time in travelling abroad with Noblemens Sonnes and is skilled in several languages, who is now again to goe with one’s … sonne of 8. thousand a year, who is fitter to bee a Secretary of State etc. Hee is advised to make the like contract as Page hath done being thus far in years’ (Sheffield University, Hartlib Papers, 29/5/50A). 4

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of the Civil War (pamphlet wars and the rise of serial journalism) is analysed with remarkable clarity (ll. 11–14): These virtues now are banished out of town, Our civil wars have lost the civic crown. He highest builds, who with most art destroys, And against others’ fame his own employs.7

In this poem, the speaker’s allegiances remain with the old world of courtly, cavalier verse, but he will soon be tainted, if it has not already happened with the new (and in his view debased) values of the pamphleteers, journalists and Puritans. It has also been conjectured that in the last line of the elegy on Lord Hastings the Hippocratic formula describing the physician’s vocation (art is long, but life is short) is meant also to refer to the literary art of the elegist.8 These perceptions also testify to Marvell’s membership of a literary circle at the point of the regicide and the creation of the English republic in 1649–50 that was attempting to reframe English letters in the context of the tumultuous events that it found itself living through. Many of its members, although not all, were royalists, or had had royalist connections, and many of them sought patronage with the new regime.9 Thus, even as their verse endeavours to address a new age, so also traces of past associations and sentiments remain. Nowhere was this signalled more clearly than in the packing of Lucanic, Lucretian, Longinian and Machiavellian energy inside Horatian tightness in Marvell’s most famous political poem, An Horatian Ode (13–24): And like the three-forked lightning, first Breaking the clouds where it was nursed, â•… Did thorough his own side â•… His fiery way divide. (For ’tis all one to courage high, The emulous or enemy; â•… And with such to inclose â•… Is more than to oppose). Then burning through the air he went, And palaces and temples rent; â•… And Caesar’s head at last â•… Did through his laurels blast. 8 All references are to N. Smith 2007b. ╇ McWilliams 2003. This picture was first described in Worden 1984. See also Norbrook 1999:€ 158–82 and 243–71; McDowell 2005:€273–303; McDowell 2008.

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This was coupled a few months later with Marvell’s poetic dismissal of a poet from the former generation€ – Tom May, would-be laureate and translator of Lucan€– in the voice of Ben Jonson:€a voice from the past to be sure, but in the very act of imitation, Marvell was both distancing himself from Jonson’s anti-republicanism while allowing it to attack May, and ensuring that his readers understood that poetry’s career had moved on€– as it certainly had in An Horatian Ode. May’s literary crime, according to Jonson’s voice, is that he has alienated the true role of the poet by expressing Classical republican views in partisan pamphlets and histories. The poem understands that May’s ‘decline’ began with the translation of Lucan’s De Bello Civili or Pharsalia (1627), which is presented not as the complicatedly ambiguous epic it was for readers in the 1620s and 1630s, but very much as the reading matter of republicans and of commonwealth supporters, one of the very sources for An Horatian Ode. While Upon Appleton House (composed in summer 1651 just one year after An Horatian Ode) rewrites the parameters of both estate and prospective poetry, it is also a meditation upon epic poetry, the proper business of the commonwealth poets. This was highly appropriate:€ Marvell had been hired to teach Lord Fairfax’s daughter Mary on his estate at Nun Appleton, Yorkshire, Fairfax having recently retired from being commander of the New Model Army. He was out of sorts with the republic’s politicians, and Marvell was out of sorts with new literary fashions, not of the republic’s men of letters but of the exiled royalists. The episode in the Aeneid in which Evander puts Aeneas to bed on a couch of strewn leaves (Aen. 8.359–69) offers a model for the pastoral depiction of the great man, in this case the retired general Fairfax. Marvell is replying to Sir William Davenant’s recently published heroic poem Gondibert (1651), with its pretentious claims of producing epic literature on subjects distanced from the present time, its grand claims for poetry as high architecture (to be read by princes only), its preference for books (as opposed to the book of nature), and the influence in its preface of Hobbes’s psychological and political theories. To all of these themes, Upon Appleton House replies in the negative, most notably through its concern with a living hero who, unlike Davenant’s heroes, confronts military action before retreating. Gondibert describes a Baconian natural utopia, whereas Marvell’s poem enacts one; Gondibert reveals a suspicion of courts, described at first by Davenant as gardens, whereas Marvell makes the garden the centre of Fairfax’s noble life.10 Rhodalind’s beauty is compared in Gondibert to alchemical 10

E. E. Duncan-Jones 1975:€77 makes the case for Davenant as the hero referred to in ‘Tom May’s Death’, 65–6.

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processes, but the poet doubts that ‘Verse has Chymick pow’re’ (1.4.4.1); Marvell’s figure of Maria Fairfax effects an alchemical transformation, communicated through the verse. In this light, the embrace of French libertin verse as part of a poetics of retirement offered in the poem becomes an act of subversion against those such as Davenant who postulate literary rules, and the ostentatious making of a new literary era. Upon Appleton House is full of echoes and reworkings of Lord Fairfax’s poems, and in particular his translation of Saint-Amant’s ‘La Solitude’ (1625). Fairfax’s translation replicates SaintAmant’s vivid interest in ruins and the quarries from which the rocks came, and their representation of an absolute retirement. The libertin poets had been banished from the official court-centred French literary panoply, which is where Davenant and other English royalists sought their literary guidance at this time. This truculent pursuit of doubleness is at the heart of Marvell’s understanding of literary activity, and it is an element in the consciousnesses of his characters. Thus, the Villiers elegy is concerned not with a loyal subject but a lover; it is ‘a poem attempting to mediate between modes of representing its dead’. ‘There is a narcissistic, self-enclosing movement about [Villiers’] gaze which is directed at himself, and which finds other masculine objects€– even the eyes of an enemy soldier€– to reflect it back, rather than the eyes of his mistress. Marvell’s conceit labours to preserve the all-male circuit of vision.’11 More famously, we have the gaze of the coy mistress, textually drawn from Ovid’s Narcissus and its English translations, engaged in mutual reflection with the poet (in the position of Ovid’s Echo), who can only promise to the future his ‘echoing voice’ (25–7): Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song.12

Reflexiveness had already been explored by Marvell with regard to poetic careers in the splendid Flecknoe, An English Priest at Rome, probably written in 1646. Here the intricate, theologically acute satire of the English Jesuit poet Richard Flecknoe stands as a frightening and even repellent mirror of what Marvell the emergent poet might become. In a dining scene that alludes to Trimalchio’s dinner in Petronius, the observing poet is a ‘martyr’ to Flecknoe’s ‘hideous verse … in dismal tone’, the poem standing P. Hammond 1996:€107–9. Marvell also echoes in several significant places in his poem the translations of Golding and Sandys:€ see Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, in N. Smith 2007b:€ 82–3, nn. 26, 27, 33–6, 36, 39–40.

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then as an exploration of how not to be a certain kind of poet:€Roman Catholic, not Protestant, pretentious, exiled, forced to survive by ignoble means as household priest and confidante, emaciated and bad on the lute. Flecknoe was in truth a fine, innovative lutanist, but Marvell, his brush with Catholicism and the desperation of recent years never far from his mind, writes with excruciating percipience:€this was all far too close to the bone, a destiny as poet that he might well have adopted. Poetry beckons from wherever it comes, and martyrdom in this poem represents the compelling lure of verse. The passage in question begins with a parodic allusion to Milton’s already famous call to poetic ambition in Lycidas, passes through the listener’s depiction of himself as St Lawrence, turning first one, then another ‘burning ear’ to Flecknoe (just as the saint asked his torturers to turn him over on the grid-iron), to the uncomfortable picture of listener as mistress being wooed by priest Â�troubadour with tremulous lute and rumbling stomach (27–36): Only this frail ambition did remain, The last distemper of the sober brain, That there had been some present to assure The future ages how I did endure: And how I, silent, turned my burning ear Towards the verse; and when that could not hear, Held him the other; and unchangèd yet, Asked still for more, and prayed him to repeat: Till the tyrant, weary to persecute, Left off, and tried t’allure me with his lute.

The reference (one of several such in Marvell) to Lycidas, 70–1, unmistakably signals poetic ambition, although poetic endeavour is as much present from an audience’s point of view as it is from one of composition and performance by the poet.13 Poet as imprisoned martyr lover, bound to retransmit in his own verse that to which he is subjected, connects directly with the wonderful image of Flecknoe as transparent, and therefore (again the description figures poetry) like a chameleon, changing his appearance according to his surrounding. Here the poet is like an earthly version of Marvell’s soul in The Garden, projecting from human bodies, like a bird flying onto a tree bough, waving in its plumes the ‘various light’ (56) of the world (79–82): But were he not in this black habit decked, This half-transparent man would soon reflect See Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Death by Drowning:€ Marvell’s “Lycidas”’, read at Modern Language Association, Chicago, December 2007.

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Nigel Smith Each colour that he passed by; and be seen, As the chameleon, yellow, blue, or green.

But chameleons were not well regarded in early modern Europe, being associated with flattery, changeability and vacuity.14 The near parody of Lycidas, where Milton’s ‘Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (The last infirmity of noble mind)’ (70–1) becomes ‘Only this frail ambition did remain, / The last distemper of the sober brain’, associates ambition not merely with embattled faith but also with personal history. Nicholas von Maltzahn connects Marvell’s interest in Lycidas, the poem that elegizes a man who drowned, with the watery fate of Marvell’s father. While Marvell’s close engagement with Milton’s great elegy enables him to find a voice for grief at the abrupt ending of young lives (in the elegy of Lord Francis Villiers), the deeper trauma of death by drowning, so crucial to Marvell’s career path, is signalled in the presence of Lycidas in no fewer than eight Marvell poems. Marvell turns Milton’s ‘beaked promontory’ (Lycidas, 94) into the ‘beaked promontories’ of English Commonwealth battleships (First Anniversary, 358) that terrify the monarchs of Europe. They are the dry refuge in the middle of the waters for the worthy subject who would otherwise drown. In this respect, the scene brings to mind Marvell’s unfortunate lover clinging to a rock. Marvell’s lover has been very plausibly connected with images of the orphaned royal princes in 1649:€Charles, Prince of Wales, and James, Duke of York. But the motif, with its roots in prose romance, also suggests a personal connection:€‘The Unfortunate Lover’ becomes the poem in which Marvell’s complicated sense of severance from his source of wellbeing and guidance in his father, and his further sense of torture at the word’s expense, is superbly encrypted.15 There is no space here to discuss in detail Marvell’s second two poems on Oliver Cromwell, the panegyric The First Anniversary (1655), and the elegy, except to note the forceful deployment of Pindar and Milton in a continued reworking of Caroline court poetry, and where the military hero becomes a kind of poet who far exceeds the powers of his lesser mirror, the poem’s poet, to match or catch up (First Anniversary, 125–6): â•… Till then my muse shall hollow far behind Angelic Cromwell who outwings the wind.

See Hartwig 1996:€192 and 196. I am grateful to Stephen Zwicker for discussing his psychological reading of ‘The Unfortunate Lover’ with me.

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It is in a further echo of Lycidas that the transference of creative Â�powers from poet to martial and civic hero becomes evident. Milton’s swain ‘touched the tender stops of various quills’ (188), and Oliver Cromwell ‘still new stops to various time applied’ (58). In Marvell’s imaginative engagement with Milton, Cromwell becomes the living hero who is already redeemed€– Lycidas on earth€– and in this way is a new father figure for the lost poet. Marvell spent much of the later 1650s as Cromwellian household and civil servant and diplomat, writing exquisite Latin verse praising the Protector to foreign powers (such as Queen Kristina of Sweden), but mostly translating a lot of letters. He was never present at the initial reception or performance of this verse, although his name is present in the first known version of the Kristina poem, which was the version probably read to her.16 The verse epigrams attached to the portraits of Cromwell can only have exaggerated this sense of the poet as mere echo to the hero. Just one year after Marvell wrote The First Anniversary, he was busy helping to distribute Milton’s Defensio Secunda in France, playing the role of facilitator to a literary figure who declared his identity and affiliations loudly and proudly. The First Anniversary was published anonymously. The poet who is imitated throughout is Ben Jonson. If Milton makes possible a world of registers for Marvell, it is Jonson who becomes the voice of poetic authority:€ the figure whom Marvell has condemn Tom May, and whom the voice of Cleveland imitates when Marvell has him praise Captain Douglas at the beginning of The Loyal Scot. Although Marvell stands between Milton and Dryden in ‘On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost’, the poem itself imitates Jonson’s ‘To my Chosen Friend, The Learned Translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esq.’ The phrasal echoes of Jonson, especially at the beginning and end of the poem suggest that Marvell wanted to praise Milton as the author of a Lucanic poem, a Stoic and a republican.17 This has been regarded as evidence that Marvell was the greatest ‘son of Ben’, even as he was adapting Jonson’s own master, Horace.18 But the political reversal of 1660 abruptly caused a change in fortune, making Marvell’s choices of verse composition fit again the pattern we have already seen, albeit contingently rather than by design. Yes, Marvell was in a general sense part of the new regime in that he was an MP, and undertook diplomatic missions on behalf of the government. But he also became a conspiratorial operator, writing and publishing poetry See Holberton 2005:€233–53; N. Smith 2007b:€259–66. See Shifflett 1996. 18╇ See Scodel 1999:€546.

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clandestinely in order to undermine Lord Clarendon’s regime. If The First Anniversary remodels Edmund Waller’s court panegyrics of the 1630s, and if Waller allegedly wrote his ‘Augustan’ panegyric of Cromwell to correct Marvell, rejecting Marvell’s incisive Machiavellianism, Marvell upended Waller’s jingoistic Instructions to a Painter (1665) in the Second and Third Advices to a Painter (1666–7).19 There is no challenge to Waller’s strong sense of poetic signature, and this is compounded by the fact that the painter satires may have been jointly written, not even unsigned but attributed to an improbable author, Sir John Denham, who was insane at this time. The Second Advice begins however with an allusion to Horace’s De arte poetica, 9–10:€unlike the useless courtiers who sacrifice England’s honour at sea, the poet and the painter both ‘dare all’ in their endeavours. It is no small point. Marvell was already aware of the way in which his former Protectoral foreign office colleague John Dryden was at this time successfully redefining the nature and reputation of English letters to fit the restored monarchy, and in order to forget republicans, Cromwellians and Puritans. Dryden’s influential Essay on Dramatic Criticism (1668) is a dialogue that takes place in a small boat whose occupants had been down the Thames to witness the Battle of Lowestoft, the engagement that Waller’s panegyric glorified. In the Essay, the Longinian ideals of repubÂ� lican and Commonwealth verse are sunk in the year following the publication of the Commonwealth’s greatest literary monument, Paradise Lost. Marvell’s mirror answered back, most pointedly in the Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) where the heroes of the hour are those whose self-sacrifice contains both martyrdom and narcissistic self-awareness:€most famously in the figure of Captain Archibald Douglas, who is, we intuit, an object of at least admiration for the speaker. Another epigram added to the front of the Directions to a Painter volume is from Tacitus, Annals III.49–51. Here, Tacitus relates how Clutorius Priscus, having been handsomely rewarded by the Emperor Tiberius for a poem on the death of his adopted son Germanicus, composed another in anticipation of the death of the Emperor’s other son, Drusus, hoping for an even bigger reward. Having recited the poem to an audience of women, he then boasted of his performance and predictably fell victim to an informer. Marcus Lepidus tried to plead leniency but Priscus was Â�summarily tried and executed. The passage is at the front of the poem because it facilitates another swipe at Waller, who had published two versions of his Instructions to a Painter. As Martin Dzelzainis argues, the ╇ See Raylor 2002.

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epigram reads as if the ‘Company of Poets’ who sign the verse are both censoring and ostracizing one of their members.20 Of course, this sense of joint enterprise (and the fact that the Directions volume contained poems certainly not by Marvell) makes it hard to tie the Tacitus passage to Marvell with any certainty. Tellingly, and with more certainty that Marvell was the author, The Third Advice, 3–10, opens with the choice of painter as not Lely, who after all was Dutch, but Richard Gibson, the dwarf miniaturist, who, not unlike Marvell, was a great survivor, having been a page in the court of Charles I, then Cromwell’s portraitist, and finally official miniaturist in the court of Charles II. He was a tiny man, and he copied Lely in miniature; in Marvell’s imitation of him there is a sense of resonance with the small, the unnoticed, not a self-proclaimed aesthetic leader, but someone with powers of great observation. Marvell’s satirical prose pamphlets of the 1670s, for which he was notorious in his lifetime, were written, so he claimed, in disgust at authoritarian Church of England divines, one a former Puritan, who had alienated their proper pastoral role, and with it the vision of a tolerant national church that Marvell probably shared with his father. In several letters to his nephew, William Popple, Marvell wittily delights in the fact that the author, widely supposed to be Marvell, has not been found.21 Two of the passages are written in the third person, Marvell sharing silently with Popple the joke of his authorship, but concealing it still should the letter have been intercepted and steamed open by a government agent. The appeal of Marvell’s pamphlet was rooted in its hilarious fusion of satirical drama and ecclesiastical controversy€ – an irreverent subversion of religious propriety that was guaranteed to produce titters, or Â�outrage. Marvell’s editors source his chosen technique in John Owen’s use of Aristophanes to attack Patrick, and Parker’s suggestion that Ben Jonson’s anti-Puritan drama would have been just as appropriate a model. Behind this still lay the Marprelate tradition€– the Elizabethan Puritan who had used the humanist jesting tradition to abuse the bishops in the name of Presbyterianism in the late 1580s and early 1590s. But the choice of Buckingham’s play, which is densely and playfully alluded to and Â�echoed throughout the text, can also be seen as a form of appropriate praise or Â�signalling of affiliation, just as Marvell’s Cromwellian poetry uses ideologically appropriate poetic models. Marvell was signalling and exploiting the love of wit that prevailed amongst Buckingham and his friends, Dzelzainis 2008:€63. ╇ Marvell 1971:€vol. II. 328, 345–6, 357.

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including the King, who certainly thought that some of the Â�bishops deserved to be mocked. In Marvell’s play The Rehearsal, a satirical parody of Dryden, the latter appears as the buffoon Mr Bayes, and Marvell’s intention is to show that Parker and Bayes ‘do very much Symbolize’ each other. The dramatic framework allows Marvell to make the vagaries of ecclesiological animadversion acceptable to those who would normally prefer the stage, the coffee houses or the court. While The Rehearsal Transpros’ d (1672) contains within it a compact theory of magistracy, it begins with a patina of literary allusion that looks like a poetic autobiography of Marvell, even as his prose develops its attack on Bishop Parker. The prose also reworks passages from the verse as if it were a mirror unto it. Thus, the weaknesses of nature are expressed through the Italian (and an English translation) of Amaryllis in Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido. This is a reversal of the valance of expression in which Bishop Samuel Parker becomes a whining nymph complaining, reversing one of Marvell’s most famous lyric figures. At the end of this section Parker (already ‘doubled up’ by being represented as the Duke of Buckingham’s comic creation, Mr Bayes in The Rehearsal) is likened to an old-fashioned romance hero, and one whose fitting poetry parodies that given by Marvell to Cromwell in An Horatian Ode. Marvell’s Parker looks at a bloated reflection of himself in a mirror€– not unlike ‘Damon the Mower’s’ (another Marvell lyric) version of the Polyphemus eclogue in Theocritus€ – and like Damon he is discomforted by the dog-days of high summer.22 More famously, the conceit in ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’ of the soul as the torturing rack of the body, so that stretched and upright, he imagines himself as a walking precipice, always in danger of falling over himself, is reworked to suggest the exaggerated heights of Parker’s delusion:€ ‘he was stretch’d to such an height in his own fancy, that he could not look down from top to toe but his Eyes dazled at the Precipice of his Stature.’23 There is also the invocation of the Platonic love cult of the Renaissance, instanced in the conjunction of astronomy and astrology in ‘The Definition of Love’, now redirected in The Rehearsal Transpros’ d to mock Parker’s desire for absolute authority. ‘As smiling and frowning are performed in the face with the same muscles very little altered; so the changing of a line or Two in Mr. Bayes at any time, will make the same thing serve for a ╇ Marvell 2003: vol. I.43–4, 101. ╇ Marvell 2003:€vol. I.75.

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Panegyrick or a Phillippick’, wrote Marvell of Parker, but the sentence applies equally to himself in respect of method. These qualities of self-enclosedness, self-reference, and perception or argument by doubles, are related to the chiming effect of Marvell’s rhymes, about which I have written elsewhere, where the power of the rhyme throughout and not merely at the ends of lines suspends our ability to make distinct judgements of who is speaking and what is happening: Oh let our Voice his Praise exalt, Till it arrive at Heavens Vault: Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may Echo beyond the Mexique Bay.24

The other or echoing voice speaks when you have spoken, and in a rhyming poem is always there, a fraction of a second behind the lead voice:€the rhyme, the mirror of the maker. Some of the qualities discussed above have been identified and venerated by critics for a long time:€ ‘reversals transposed’ and ‘its own resemblance’.25 But my point is not merely that these are formal qualities of the poetry and the prose. They are ways for Marvell to structure his own sense of career as a poet, his own sense of performance, despite seemingly having missed all the boats that guaranteed esteem. Not for the first time in this period, the reference back to Ovid’s verse and the idea of Ovidian perception is telling. In the wellknown poem on Paradise Lost, Marvell ‘commends’ Paradise Lost into praise (because praise won’t rhyme with ‘offend’), even as he lets Milton’s blank verse largely stand, and mocks Dryden’s own attempts to rhyme Paradise Lost for the stage. In this prefatory verse, the mirror of rhyme is subversive both of Miltonic authority (even as the poem offers deep respect to Milton) and once again also of those who would have regular literary rules in authoritarian monarchies. In Marvell’s last poem, in Latin, an (in his view) unjustly tortured Scottish Presbyterian and assassin is given a victory because the verbs suggest that it is the executioner administering the torture who is more the sufferer. I cannot help but feel that the arrest induced by Marvell’s rhyme was as subversive of orthodox perspectives as his panegyrics are notable for articulating the contrary energies that make up polities. The complexities of difficult choices that he shows as part and parcel of a literary career afford just such a narrative that refuses hurdles or doubts them even as it presses forward in inventive power. Marvell’s doubles are inherently subversive entities, making verse do its arresting or See Smith 2001. ╇ From the titles of essays respectively by John Carey and Christopher Ricks in Patrides 1978.

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troubling work in a disturbing career when the sublime was neither available nor appropriate. At his best Marvell did what, in his view, in one of his rare pieces of critical judgement, Simon Ford failed to do: a Poem, writ (but that is a piece of a secret) by Mr Ford the Minister that was of Northampton, of Exeter &c:€The Latin, in this last, (if I may presume to censure in your Lordships presence) hath severall excellent heights, but the English translation is not so good; and both of them strain for wit and conceit more then becomes the gravity of the author or the sadnesse of the subject.26

In an equally rare piece of confession in The Rehearsal Transpros’ d, Part II, Marvell answered the charges of his opponents that he was a mask for Milton. There is much in this important passage for the biographer to tease out regarding the complexity of Marvell’s religious position and his view of English history. Marvell insists that Milton had no hand in the writing of The Rehearsal Transpros’ d, which was Parker’s charge, even as he had used Milton’s history of printing in Areopagitica to lambast Parker.27 In all of this, somewhat disingenuously, he insists that Milton (‘a man of great Learning and Sharpness of wit as any man’) cannot have written so ‘simple a book’.28 But the presence of Milton in the tract is palpable from its opening pages.29 It would be neat to be able to say that Marvell’s works show a particular imitation and development of Ovid, one that echoed in its own way the ancient poet’s shadowy career:€highly promising as a public poet but marred by scandal, banishment and exile. Marvell might not have achieved the fame of Ovid as a poet in his own lifetime, but the ludic sophistication of his love poems bear a resemblance to Ovid’s love poetry. The Restoration satirical poetry, and what we know of the circulation of the lyrics then, suggests a life for these poems among candid libertines as well as discontented former commonwealthsmen. Far from Marvell is the imperial strain of Virgil, and the complicated engagement with Virgilian themes that we find in Dryden’s work.30 The same might be said, with the exception of An Horatian Ode, of Horace as a model for Marvell. The poet who was reconciled with Augustus does not chime with the private context of the Ode; the later Cromwell poetry is not notably Horatian. It was in respect of public life and politics rather than poetry that Marvell wrote to his nephew William Popple on 21 March 1670, quoting Aeneid 12.435–6, Aeneas’ exhortation to Ascanius to learn valour and toil from him.31 Marvell to Lord Wharton, 2 April 1667 (Marvell 1971:€vol. II.310). See Ford 1667. 28 Marvell 2003:€vol. I.45–6. ╇ Marvell 2003:€vol. I.417. 29 See further Marvell 2003:€vol. I.329, n. 565 and 335, n.592. 30 31 P. Hammond 1999. ╇ Marvell 1971:€vol. II.316. 26 27

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There is something scandalously Ovidian about The Rehearsal Transpros’ d. If Bramhall is effeminated, Parker is subjected to a sexual travesty. His energies in respect of his verbal superabundance are complicit with a sexual intemperance, so Marvell suggests:€he is the slave of a mistress as well as a bookseller, the child of his invention inseparable from the work of his loins. Later on, his overblown rhetoric makes him a lover of Bishop Bramhall (‘he should make a dead Bishop his Mistress’). His love of uncontrolled discourse makes him an enthusiast, the very kind of Puritan he wishes to attack, and the climax of his pleasure is not to be hidden from public view. Indeed, in a parody of Aretino, Marvell has Parker running naked and erect down the street, a phallic travesty of Archimedes, perhaps with more water to displace: But there was no holding him. Thus it must be and no better, when a man’s Phancy is up, and his Breeches are down; when the Mind and the Body make contrary Assignations, and he hath both a Bookseller at once and a Mistris to satisfie; Like Archimedes, into the Street he runs out naked with his Invention.32

Picking up on a common Restoration theme, heroic boasts are indicative of unbounded priapic energy. Elsewhere, we glimpse Parker as a sexual deviant, a sadist deriving sexual pleasure from the punishment he wreaks on nonconformists:€‘down with their breeches as oft as wants the prospect of a more pleasing Nudity’. Taking this pathology further, Marvell sees that this attitude may have an educational root. Parker had formerly been under John Owen’s sway when the latter was Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. Now in the driving seat in the Restoration, Parker can transfer his abuse to Owen, to say nothing of the spy networks that Marvell associates with this persecutory attitude. Marvell writes to correct the want of wit among the clergy, and with a refinement he had not yet deployed in prose spans the amusing analogy between apostolic succession and the conferring of wit. It is in fact an elaboration of the same concern with the witty writer that occurred in RT, II: It is not every man that is qualified to sustain the Dignity of the Churches Jester:€and, should they take as exact a scrutiny of them as of the Non-conformists thorow their Diocesses, the number would appear inconsiderable upon this Easter Visitation. Before men be admitted to so important an employment, it were fit they underwent a severe Examination; and that it might appear, first, whether they have any Sense:€for without that how can any man pretend, and yet they do, to be ingenious? Then, whether they have any Modesty:€for without 32

╇ Marvell 2003:€vol. I.48.

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that they can only be scurrilous and impudent. Next, whether any Truth:€ for true Jests are those that do the greatest execution.33

Francis Turner ‘took up an unfortunate resolution that he would be Witty’ but such was his shortfall, it was as if he had sinned against nature, an assertion that has been seen to carry associations of simony and sodomy.34 The consequence of the unnecessary terms of Turner’s attack upon Croft is a polluting of the public, a folio’s worth of falsehood inside one side of quarto, and ‘that Calumny is like London-dirt, with which though a man may be spatter’d in an instant, yet it requires much time, pains, and Fullers-earth to scoure it out again’.35 It is only fitting for Marvell to conclude a section with a quotation of Rochester’s ‘Satire against Reason and Mankind’, which had an added section attacking ‘prelatic pride’.36 Mr. Smirke (1676) marks a new stage in Marvell’s literary career:€a full engagement in the literary scene of the day, notably the theatre and libertine verse. Gone is the sense, by allusion, of continuous literary venture. Ovidian reference is certainly present in the form of three indented quotaÂ�tions, but very much (for the purposes of mocking Francis Turner) as a memory of grammar-school learning practice.37 The same is true of the Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government with its heavy investment in the record of parliamentary deliberations and the final work, the defence of John Howe, except for one recourse to the figure of the mirror with an Ovidian allusion to the story of the Cyclops Polyphemus.38 In both of these works, Marvell was able to disappear into the foliage of his subject matter. In the case of the latter tract this occurs to such an extent that it has become a matter of dispute what the author really thought. Finally then, Marvell’s sense of being an author in a cause was best served by his total anonymity. But elsewhere there is enough reflection of himself in the mirror of his art to see his sense of authorship and of literary identity. It is as disturbing and transgressive as it is exquisite and delightful. We glimpse it just like the face in the mirror in Vermeer’s painting, thought to be the artist himself. 34 Marvell 2003:€vol. II.40. ╇ Marvell 2003:€vol. II.42. Marvell 2003:€vol. II.58. 36╇ Marvell 2003:€vol. II.61. 37 Marvell 2003:€vol. II.45–6, 101. 38 Marvell 2003:€vol. II.447. See Ovid Met. 13.767. 33 35

C h a p t e r 13

Dryden and the complete career Raphael Lyne

I may venture to say in general Terms, that no Man hath written in our language so much, and in so various Manners, so well.1

Congreve’s comment reveals itself as praise only at the last€– at least he did it ‘so well’. The volume of Dryden’s achievement is undoubted. It is not so clear how to evaluate his literary career, or indeed to assert that his collected works constitute a literary career at all. Steven Zwicker opens The Cambridge Companion to Dryden with this very point:€‘Who first thought of The Works of John Dryden? Not, I think, the poet himself.’2 If the goal is ‘holistic commentary’, then it may be unattainable.3 When Zwicker faces the challenge of assessing Dryden’s poetic career, he emphasizes the role of irony, and finds the author ‘disappearing into his art’.4 He does not fit the post-Virgilian mould that has dominated career criticism, though he certainly had plans and ambitions. It may be that Dryden actually had multiple careers€ – epic poet, translator, dramatist, critic, satirist€ – that overlap at times but cannot feasibly be made to cohere. However, he may also be a significant representative of another sort of literary career:€the ‘complete’ career, where many different sorts of writing are attempted in an implicit or explicit project to command as much canonical territory as possible. Dryden wrote in almost all the key modes of his day, and about the key issues of his day:€he reflected critically on his own time, the preceding era, the ancients and the key contemporary competitors (the French); William Congreve, epistle to the Duke of Newcastle in the 1717 Works, in Kinsley and Kinsley 1971:€265. 2 Zwicker 2004:€ 3. See also pp. 4, 13 and 285 on the ‘elaborate, opportunistic, and incredibly Â�productive collaboration’ between Dryden and his time. 3 The phrase is used by Cheney 2002a:€6. 4 Zwicker 2005:€ 159. P. Hammond 1992 also sheds useful light on the shape of Dryden’s oeuvre: the poems were indeed uncollected but the process suggests ‘professionalism’ as well as ‘modesty’ (p. 409). 1

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he wrote tragedies, comedies and tragicomedies for the stage; he did not write Paradise Lost, but he did turn it into an opera; he translated vast swathes of Classical poetry including definitive versions of the whole of Virgil. So his complete career actually encompassed the archetypal managed vita€ – but was itself not visibly managed:€there is no explicit programme to dominate the literary world in all its variety. In addition, many of his literary decisions were made in reaction to worldly circumstances:€patronage, changing political events, changing religious views€– the largest impact being made by the revolution of 1688, after which Dryden, as a Catholic, lost his posts as Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal. In the late twentieth century influential critics reclaimed the integrity of Dryden from lingering accusations of opportunism and fickleness.5 The arguments were for consistent interests and views rather than for a consistent project; nevertheless the new coherence in modern images of Dryden may open up possibilities in the realm of career criticism. There is nobody quite like Dryden, but there are other people with tendencies towards complete careers. This category, as I conceive it, does not include those who write individual works that dominate the canon or are praised for containing the whole of a given world€– The Divine Comedy or Ulysses or The Canterbury Tales. Rather this kind of completeness derives from diversity and volume of output, ideally including criticism, poetry and drama (or appropriate contemporary equivalents), and should not result in an altogether stable achievement:€in Dryden’s case completeness results partly from difficult scrambles to maintain a position and a voice. The best candidates in English literature are Samuel Johnson (poet, novelist, critic, editor, writer of a dictionary) and T. S. Eliot (poet, dramatist, critic, publisher). Ben Jonson might qualify as a miniature ‘complete’ but was too abstemious in his choice and use of different genres; Pope comes close. In other languages a shortlist might include Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, Lope de Vega, Tasso, Soyinka and no doubt others. All the English-literature candidates, and most of the others, act as mediators between literary past and present. These complete careers incorporate and categorize what came before; in Dryden’s criticism there is a remarkable restless need to organize the past, returning repeatedly to the contrast between Homer and Virgil, and reviving the reputation of Chaucer. He is unusual in the extent to which he is also acclaimed as See P. Hammond 1991 and Fujimura 1993:€236:€‘The real Dryden accommodated himself to changing times while maintaining his integrity.’

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the voice of his own time.6 T. S. Eliot found one way of expressing what amounts to a double nature: Being so completely representative, Dryden not only formed the mould for the next age, but himself derived very clearly from the last. In his work there is nothing unexpected, no new element with unknown properties.7

This attitude is recognizable from Eliot’s criticism more generally:€ he is always interested in how past, present and future relate.8 Dryden is represented as an ideal individual talent wholly deriving from, and yet reshaping, the tradition. This helps explain, but does not wholly assuage, the faint praise in deeming him ‘completely representative’€ – Dryden is a super-everyman. Although Eliot’s career shares the ‘complete’ pattern he has to grapple with the phenomenon when seen in his predecessor:€ its particular shape of greatness does not attract unalloyed praise. Dryden and several other ‘completes’ are Neo-classical in temperament, and yet the complete career is not conventionally a classical thing to do. The most famous ancient careers were limited and structured: Â�tragedy or comedy, drama or poetry. In some cases€ – perhaps Ovid€ – the management of modes may be more adventurous than in others. Horace’s complaints about the over-prolific hardly provide models to emulate. The Hellenistic period comes nearest to providing Classical precedents for later complete careers:€it was characteristic to write in different Â�genres€ – and not only in poetry. Eratosthenes’ soubriquet ‘beta’ (a universal second-best across all fields of philosophical endeavour) is emblematic of this alternative career goal. There is a difference, however, between the miniature encapsulations of weighty inherited material characteristic of the work of Callimachus, and the grand aspirations of later ‘completes’.9 It is also the case that for Dryden not being like Virgil was something to contend with, whereas being like Callimachus, who was hardly known, was not. In this context it is not surprising that the complete career is difficult to acknowledge as well as to appreciate. If it is not planned, then it could hardly be proposed; if planned, it may still go unproposed because to do so would be to take an enormous risk. In order for it truly to be a career, however, it ought to be more than the sum of its parts. It ought to be held together:€if not proposed or planned, it ought to be discovered, or ╇ Hopkins 1986:€2 (for example) calls him ‘in a very literal sense, the spokesman of his age’. ╇ Eliot 1932a:€9. 8 ╇ The classic essay is ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Eliot 1932b:€3–11. 9 ╇ Farrell 2002, especially 31–4. 6 7

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recognized, or implied. In fact there are numerous fleeting and surreptitious engagements with the idea that are evident in Dryden’s work. But before moving on to these, it is worth establishing in more detail how other writers (especially those with completist tendencies) appreciated the completeness of Dryden in his time and shortly after.10 One, Voltaire, was decisively negative: Voici encore un passage d’un fameux tragique anglais, Dryden, poète du temps de Charles II, auteur plus fécond que judicieux, qui aurait une réputation sans mélange s’il n’avait fait que la dixième partie de ses ouvrages, et dont le grand défaut est d’avoir voulu être universel.11 Here is another passage from a famous tragedian, Dryden, a poet of the time of Charles II, and an author more fertile than judicious, who would have an unmixed reputation if he had written only a tenth of his works, and whose great failing is that he wanted to be universal.

At this point in the letter (XVIII:€ ‘Sur la Tragédie’) Voltaire is praising the energy, though not the correctness, of English tragedy. He pauses to note another unclassical quality in Dryden’s career:€his range. ‘Universel’ relates primarily to excessive fecundity, but it implies that this is all in the service of completeness. It is not easy to weigh the word ‘voulu’, but it seems that Voltaire is basing his assessment purely on the works and treating everything in them as willed. When writers do take biography into account they are often even less sympathetic€– and this starts early: And so much for Mr Dryden, whose burial was the same as his life, variety and not of a piece:– the quality and mob, farce and heroicks; the sublime and ridicule mixed in a piece;– great Cleopatra in a hackney coach.12

In this wry comment there is a possible overlap between the discussion of a mixed career and a discussion of a mixed mode of writing:€this all happens ‘in a piece’ and yet the variety of life unfolds over time. At various points (as will be seen below) there is a productive interplay, in what may be Dryden’s covert career awareness, between discussion of tragicomedy and implications about a varied writing life. Farquhar sees mixedness everywhere in Dryden, in moments and in the overall structure of his writing life. The Voltaire example that follows is the most useful, but Van Doren 1920:€ 241–78 details a wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century responses, including the influentially hostile Macaulay (Van Doren 1920:€265). Lewis 2001 looks at ‘the awkwardness of Dryden’s exemplarity’ in the same period. 11 Voltaire 1943:€71. 12 George Farquhar, letter in Kinsley and Kinsley 1971:€242. 10

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Dryden, then, attracted rather mixed appreciation for the range and Â� diversity of his achievements. A notable voice in this chorus is that of Samuel Johnson, whose life of Dryden ends in a high estimation of his genius, but also involves some sharp thoughts about his subject’s dependency on patronage, and his attitude to work: Though the life of a writer, from about thirty-five to sixty-three, may be supposed to have been sufficiently busied by the composition of eight-and-twenty pieces for the stage, Dryden found room in the same space for many other undertakings.13

However, being prolific is not the same as being hard-working; he later asserts that Dryden displays little love for laborious effort (Johnson 1975:€159). Johnson does not make the fact that Dryden ‘found room’ for a range of undertakings sound like a grand plan. In crucial ways he finds his subject enigmatic (Johnson 1975:€162): He who writes much will not easily escape a manner€– such a recurrence of particular modes as may be easily noted. Dryden is always another and the same, he does not exhibit a second time the same elegances in the same form, nor appears to have any art other than that of expressing with clearness what he thinks with vigour. His style could not easily be imitated, either seriously or ludicrously; for, being always equable and always varied, it has no prominent or discriminative characters.

This description has a number of suggestive and perceptive pairings:€‘clearness’ and ‘vigour’, ‘equable’ and ‘varied’, and of course ‘another’ and ‘the same’. The dynamic between integrity and change is, as so often in relation to Dryden, vital.14 Again there is little sense that all this variety, with its complex relationship to the author’s artistic integrity, can truly be seen as a career, planned or discovered. And yet, when Johnson gathers his Life together, he is drawn towards an analogy that suggests something more than Protean (Johnson 1975:€193–4): Of Dryden’s works it was said by Pope, that ‘he could select from them better specimens of every mode of poetry than any other English writer could supply.’ Perhaps no nation ever produced a writer that enriched his language with such variety of models. … What was said of Rome, adorned by Augustus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dryden, ‘lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit,’ he found it brick, and he left it marble. Johnson 1975:€136. Pechter 1975 returns to this Johnsonian territory in exploring Dryden’s ‘balanced’ critical outlook, in which a variety of things can be good.

13

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The initial note is again variety, but then he moves on to an ambiguous and provocative analogy. On the one hand, likening Dryden’s achievement in giving decorum to English poetry to that of Augustus in building a glorious Rome might endow it with great substance. This also has the character of a project€– a coherent and measurable achievement that results from a systematic plan. But this is something ‘embellished’, not built€ – and the real value could still lie in the brick. Overall, Johnson comes close to saying, but steps back from saying, that Dryden compromised his talent and himself in creating such variety, when in another way variety was his talent and did not compromise his integrity at all. Most of the time one completist contemplates another and cannot see the wood for the trees, but in the final analysis the overall programme is asserted.15 In retrospect Dryden’s achievement had tendencies towards variety and towards totality; these two appear to be necessary though paradoxical companions. This awkward pairing makes a strategic account of this and perhaps all complete careers very difficult€– since from some angles it appears that it is by being unsystematic and unprogrammed that the grand structure is created. This makes the construction of any strategic account of Dryden’s career, already problematic owing to the pivotal role played by contingent decisions, all the more difficult. Nevertheless it is possible to glean signs of an awareness of the emerging structure of Dryden’s career from local tactics rather then the overall strategy. These come at early and late points and do not sit comfortably into an evolving narrative; nevertheless they can be arresting in different ways. The issue of the complete career comes to or near the surface in details at various points in Dryden’s work, as in the shadowy and sporadic discussion of the author’s multi-faceted dramatic career, which is enabled by the need to account for the mixed mode of tragicomedy. The four voices of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie present alternative views of the decorum of plays and playwrights. One foray into the question of how a literary career should be constituted comes from Eugenius, who recognizes the schism between modern multiplicity and ancient singularity: Tragedies and Comedies were not writ then as they are now, promiscuously, by the same person; but he who found his genius bending to the one, never See Lipking 1970:€442–8 on the Life of Dryden and Lipking 1998 on Johnson’s reinvention of the idea of authorship. See also Clingham 1993; Adams 1990.

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attempted the other way. This is so plain, that I need not instance to you, that Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, never any of them writ a Tragedy; Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Seneca, never medled with Comedy; the Sock and Buskin were not worn by the same Poet:€having then so much care to excel in one kind, very little is to be pardon’d if they miscarried in it.16

The usual attack on the English stage emphasizes its indecorousness. The pugnacious response is that the ancient models of decorum made their tasks easier by narrowing their expertise. As he says, specialization among Classical writers is ‘so plain’€– everyone knew it. This partly leads to an argument for toleration:€under the prevailing circumstances strict adherence to inherited rules is not likely. It also opens up the possibility of a surreptitious, but perhaps emerging, endorsement of the modern mixed career as decorous within its own milieu, and more challenging to the writer.17 The Essay does not really pursue this line of argument as such. There is a rejoinder of sorts, though, in a later preface to The Spanish Fryar, an indecorous tragicomedy: The truth is, the Audience are grown weary of continu’d melancholy Scenes:€and I dare venture to prophesie, that few Tragedies except those in Verse shall succeed in this Age, if they are not lighten’d with a course of mirth. For the Feast is too dull and solemn without the Fiddles. But how difficult a task this is, will soon be try’d:€for a several Genius is requir’d to either way; and without both of ’em, a man, in my opinion, is but half a Poet for the Stage.18

The argument from popular taste would have worried Ben Jonson, but again a crucial tension between centrifugal and centripetal elements crops up in relation to Dryden. The audience’s weariness is lightly validated (‘continu’d scenes’; though perhaps the ‘Feast… without the Fiddles’ is sardonically put). There is a sense of contingent factors compromising any author’s wish to follow the true path. Then, however, the nature of focused, decorous Classical drama is quite rudely questioned:€maybe the imagined ‘half a Poet’ is only a contemporary phenomenon, but this is not stated, and the implication is that the aspirant writer ought to aim at a full range of achievements.19 Dryden 1971:€28. Gelber 1999 provides encouragement for reading across from the criticism to the author’s own career with his repeated emphasis on the personal, life-story element in the critical works. 18 ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, The Spanish Fryar (1681), in Dryden 1992:€103. 19 See Fujimura 1993:€ 29–30, and more generally, which identifies lively, constructive attack and defence, debate and battle, as essential characteristics of Dryden’s outlook in many contexts. See also Salvaggio 1983:€14–21. 16

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The explicit subject in the Preface to The Spanish Fryar is tragicomedy, a form of drama which has a very rough ride in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie. In both works there is an implicit subject€ – the mixed, or complete, career. Lisideius is the pro-French voice and not surprisingly he has little time for the traditions of English tragicomedy where they offend classical standards, deeming them fundamentally ‘absurd’ (35). The key defence of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is that their variety corresponds to the decorum of nature (itself various). Some of the time the discussion of tragicomedy is clearly distinct from that of promiscuous working habits, but the naturalness of variety, for example, might make a suggestive contribution to the consideration of the mixed dramatic career (and even the wider complete career). The topic does not blossom explicitly, but then Dryden’s complete career does not manifest itself readily as it goes along:€these ideas, like the discoveries of the career as a career, happen below the surface. There are a few more direct hints at the problems of poetic careers in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie. Neander presents the modern writer’s inheritance from the past as a predicament rather than an opportunity (72–3): We acknowledge them our Fathers in wit, but they have ruin’d their Estates themselves before they came to their childrens hands. There is scarce an Humour, a Character, or any kind of Plot, which they have not us’d:€all comes sullied or wasted to us:€and were they to entertain this Age, they could not now make so plenteous treatments out of such decay’d Fortunes.20

He is referring to the legacies of the triumvirate of the previous era, before the rupture of the Civil War:€ Fletcher, Jonson and Shakespeare. His tribute to these predecessors acknowledges the burden of their example. Dryden’s assessment of the territory they have spoiled (‘There is scarce an Humour, a Character, or any kind of Plot’) parallels others’ assessments of his work. He stands as a point of convergence between the spent variety of the past and the new variety bestowed by the present on the future:€perhaps a true characteristic of the complete career with its fleeting containment of literary vicissitude.21 There is a rich analogy for the complete career along these lines in Dryden’s poem printed with Congreve’s play The Double-Dealer: ‘Us’d’ is the reading of Q2 and Q3 but Q1 and F have the more vivid ‘blown upon’, presumably in the sense ‘To take the bloom off; to make stale or hackneyed; to bring into discredit, defame’ (OED 30), but also with some relationship to flies laying eggs in meat, rendering it inedible (OED 28). See also Brady 1993. 21 Hume 1970:€66–80 and 160–1 discerns Dryden from conventional images of Neo-classicism by exploring his interest, and indeed his belief, in progress. See also Miner 1961. 20

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Well then; the promised hour is come at last; The present age of wit obscures the past. Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ, Conquering with force of arms and dint of wit; Theirs was the giant race before the flood, And thus, when Charles returned, our empire stood. Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured, With rules of husbandry the rankness cured; Tamed us to manners, when the stage was rude, And boisterous English wit with art indued.22

‘Our sires’ are Fletcher, Jonson and Shakespeare, and the point (as so often) is that the new era has added refinement. The ‘flood’ is the cultural razing of the Civil War and the Interregnum, and it suggests a crucial comparison for the poet stuck between ancient and modern. The Noah who saved the diversity of nature from this flood is Dryden himself. His complete career, perhaps other complete careers, is an Ark of past culture preserved and categorized and resituated for a new era. This works well with the complete career’s deep involvement in the relationship between past and present, and with its commitment to both diversity and wholeness, change and continuity. It is also a role we would not expect writers to proclaim or even plan for themselves. Noah takes precious few with him; it is an exclusive and difficult calling. This analogy may be a deeply embedded acknowledgement of the nature of the career suggested by the emerging pattern of his works. Something of this awareness may be apparent in a rather different way in more superficial, almost throwaway comments about nature, variety and change. As has been said already, a crucial part of the defence of tragicomedy is an emphasis on the variety of nature. This may sometimes also stand as a justification of writing in a variety of modes€ – it is only natural, and indeed the complete career may be a full expression of human possibility. Dryden embraced his own human changeability, or at least deployed it when it suited him, as in a Latin quotation which undergoes a striking repetition. It is first seen in the dedication to Aureng-Zebe: Yet, after all, I will not be too positive. Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto. As I am a Man, I must be changeable:€and sometimes the gravest of us all are so, even upon ridiculous accidents. Our minds are perpetually wrought 22

‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, on his Comedy called The Double-Dealer’, in Dryden 1995– 2005:€IV, 326–35, ll. 1–10.

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on by the temperament of our Bodies:€ which makes me suspect, they are nearer alli’d, than either our Philosophers or School-Divines will allow them to be.23

The line comes originally from Terence, where it has a rather different sense:€Chremes uses the phrase to explain why everything concerns him. The Loeb translation runs:€ ‘I hold that whatever affects another man, affects me.’24 It is quoted by Cicero in De Officiis, with the same meaning, and from there became a Renaissance commonplace.25 Dryden shifts the meaning towards the individual’s centrifugal variability, and away from the interdependence of people. Specifically, here it gives a way of stepping back from commitment to an opinion about a point of dramatic decorum. Generally, it rationalizes changeability. In the later play Don Sebastian it does a similar job, exonerating people of their failure to be obdurate€– this is part of an anti-Stoic section: True Philosophy is certainly of a more pliant Nature, and more accommodated to human use; Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto. A wise man will never attempt an impossibility; and such it is to strain himself beyond the nature of his Being; either to become a Deity, by being above suffering, or to debate himself into a Stock or Stone, by pretending not to feel it.26

Paul Hammond’s analysis of the use of Latin quotation in these prefaces uncovers the ways in which the practice of quotation itself relates to the vulnerability of constancy€– quotation in part resists change by appealing to static authority, but it also resituates that authority and participates in change.27 Both these uses of the tag are wry, if not regretful. The human condition is changeable and fragile, and what are often acclaimed as the best efforts to resist this are made to look unnatural. In one case Dryden is reflecting on artistic practice; in the other, on how best to live your life. It seems reasonable to suggest that, for him, these things are intimately connected, and that the doctrine of nihil alienum maps onto his artistic life, and the complete career. On the large scale, the task of identifying a ‘complete career’ in Dryden’s life and work depends on the identification of signs of a coherent programme amid manifest variety. This method is applicable also to the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Aureng-Zebe (1676), in Dryden 1994:€157. Terence, Heauton Timoroumenos, line 77, in Terence 1912. 25 Cicero 1975:€30. ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Don Sebastian (1690), in Dryden 1976:€62. 27 P. Hammond 1999:€59–68. Dryden’s practice in quoting is an important aspect of Kramer 1994, in which he emerges as acquisitive and invasive in his imitative practice:€this surely overlaps with any covert ‘complete career’. 23

24

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Fables, which is both miscellaneous and a part of its author’s monumental achievement€– in the last year of his life, Dryden tackles Homer, Ovid, Chaucer and Boccaccio. Its Preface gives hints that the accompanying poems have canonical aspirations beyond the obvious. The bluff opening passage says that the process of writing was haphazard, but more and more this looks like a ruse (47–8): ’Tis with a poet as with a man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the cost beforehand; but, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his account, and reckons short of the expense he first intended:€ He alters his mind as the work proceeds, and will have this or that convenience more, of which he had not thought when he began. So has it happened to me:€I have built a house where I intended but a lodge; yet with better success than a certain nobleman, who beginning with a dog kennel never lived to finish the palace he had contrived. From translating the first of Homer’s Iliads (which I intended as an essay to the whole work) I proceeded to the translation of the Twelfth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, because it contains, among other things, the causes, the beginning, and ending, of the Trojan War. Here I ought in reason to have stopped, but the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses lying next in my way, I could not balk ’em. When I had compassed them, I was so taken with the former part of the Fifteenth Book (which is the masterpiece of the whole Metamorphoses) that I enjoined myself the pleasing task of rendering it into English.28

One grand plan, the whole Iliad, is replaced by another, but the genesis of Fables sounds very genial here€– we are given a robust and unpretentious expression of the poet refusing to baulk at an obstacle. The order of the poems in the collection is not the same as the order of encounter described:€ the eventual book suggests an arrangement with a purpose. Recent critics have indeed identified a range of themes around which the poems group:€ love, power, the good life, succession, reproduction, change.29 This identification has been crucial to the perception of Fables as a key work in Dryden’s career, and the general restoration of his translations to the mainstream. The chance encounters imagined by the Preface bring Dryden into contact with writers in his own and other literary traditions. His Â�reflections on these open up issues surrounding literary careers and the 28

Quotations from Fables are taken from Dryden 1995–2005, vol. V. Vital reassessments include P. Hammond 1991:€158–68; Hopkins 1986:€168–200; Miner 1967:€287– 323; Sloman 1970–1 (which differs from the others in emphasizing overall pessimism); Garrison 1981; Winn 2000. Bywaters 1992 is sceptical:€variety for its own sake is the anti-thematic theme. See also Miner 1986; Reverand 1988.

29

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fabric of authorial identity. He describes, discerns and organizes his models’ Â�positions in the canon. This takes him on to the issue of literary inheritance (49–50): Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax; for we have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original; and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloigne which was turned into English by Mr Fairfax.

‘We’ (poets) have our lineal descents, says Dryden, and it is only reasonable to wonder who his forebears are, given the drift of the passage. But he coyly avoids asserting his own paternity. He translated Virgil more than anyone else, but pronounced himself more stirred by doing Homer€– but he does not try to find a Classical ancestor here. The complete career is a several rather than a single inheritance, so the filial metaphor would be a paradox. And as was seen above, Dryden repeatedly emphasizes the cultural gap between him and Shakespeare’s time. When writing about Chaucer, though, he asserts continuity (74–6): He must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. All his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other; and not only in their inclinations but in their very physiognomies and persons. … ’Tis sufficient to say according to the proverb that here is God’s plenty. We have our fore-fathers and great grand-dames all before us as they were in Chaucer’s days; their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, though they are called by other names than those of monks, and friars, and canons, and lady abbesses, and nuns:€for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though every thing is altered.

In his assessment of Chaucer there is, yet again, a rich dialogue between diversity and fullness€ – because the pilgrims are ‘severally distinguished’ from one another this creates ‘plenty’. Chaucer is ‘comprehensive’, holding variety together, like the complete writer must. This leads towards a philosophical gesture:€ everything is still the same, though it is all changed. This picture of literary diversity and fullness, change and continuity, Â�resonates with key themes of the complete career:€ perhaps Dryden’s discovery and assertion of Chaucer’s virtues is yet another hint at an appreciation of his own work.

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Since others have demonstrated the larger-scale coherence of the collection, and the ways in which its larger purposes work, the aim here will be to observe this tendency working on a smaller scale, at close quarters, in the creation of miniature points of friction between difference and unity. Two transitions between stories reveal new ways in which surprising coherence may be discovered. The end of Iliad Book 1 is followed by a translation from Chaucer, The Cock and the Fox. The initial expectation might be that this could be an incongruous transition from the initiation of a grand epic to a beast fable borrowed from the mouth of a Nun’s Priest. Even as the Homeric sequence closes, however, the expectation requires modification (800–15, p. 332): At Vulcan’s homely mirth his mother smiled, And smiling took the cup the clown had filled. The reconciler-bowl went round the board, Which emptied, the rude skinker still restored. Loud fits of laughter seized the guests, to see The limping god so deft at his new ministry. The feast continued till declining light; They drank, they laughed, they loved, and then ’twas night. Nor wanted tuneful harp, nor vocal choir: The Muses sang, Apollo touched the lyre. Drunken at last, and drowsy, they depart, Each to his house, adorn’d with laboured art Of the lame architect. The thundering god, Ev’n he withdrew to rest, and had his load. His swimming head to needful sleep applied, And Juno lay unheeded by his side.

This is a long way from the anger of Achilles, where Book 1 started. The scene of ‘homely mirth’ and a ‘swimming head’ welcomes the succeeding text rather than challenging it. The homeliness continues (1–8, p. 333): There lived, as authors tell, in days of yore, A widow somewhat old, and very poor: Deep in a dell her cottage lonely stood, Well thatched, and under covert of a wood. This dowager, on whom my tale I found, Since last she laid her husband in the ground, A simple sober life in patience led, And had but just enough to buy her bread.

Words such as ‘clown’ and ‘skinker’ in the Homer passage have already prepared the way for the Chaucerian tone. Any bathos The Cock and the Fox might cause is blunted by the image of drunken, sleeping Jupiter,

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whose thunder turns to snores. Dryden alters the image of Juno to enhance the hint of sexual frustration (he adds the idea of ‘unheeded’). So when the next tale starts it is as if we have discovered a surprising similarity between the tales. And there is a parallel between the two female figures here, both patient while their husbands rest.30 This may seem like a casual, even facetious link between the ‘dowager’ and the queen of the gods, but the sort of trivial virtuosity implied here, finding a throwaway connection between the two sources, puts extra focus on the unifying presence in the book€– Dryden himself. A similar technique may be identified in the transition between the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale. The initial expectation would be that the change would be a stark one:€ from a grand rhetorical set-piece deriving from Homer (and in the Preface Dryden sets out exactly this route to Ovid), to a tale full of robust and pugnacious humour (and indeed elves and fairies at the outset). Ovid’s story ends, as usual, in metamorphosis, rather than in the anger of the debate (603–13, p. 498): He said, and with so good a will to die Did to his breast the fatal point apply; It found his heart, a way till then unknown, Where never weapon entered but his own. No hands could force it thence, so fixed it stood, Till out it rushed, expelled by streams of spouting blood. The fruitful blood produced a flower, which grew On a green stem; and of a purple hue, Like his, whom unaware Apollo slew. Inscribed in both, the letters are the same, But those express the grief, and these the name.

In Dryden’s version, as in Ovid’s, there is irony in the hyacinth flower’s double inscription:€ AIAS for the stricken hero, AIAI, previously, as a record of Apollo’s lamentation for Hyacinthus. The event is extraordinary but it is not as unique as it should be. In neither the original nor the translation is the issue tackled. It does have an effect, though, on the way the next story arrives (1–6, p. 499): Miner 1967:€ 291 argues generally for the ‘shared emphasis of juxtaposed tales’, and picks out features on a slightly larger scale than the ones discussed here. Between The First Book of Homer’s Ilias and The Cock and the Fox debate between characters and sexual non-events are shared features (Miner 1967:€298). In both the Wife of Bath’s Tale and The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses he says ‘wisdom or skill triumphs over brutal strength’ (Miner 1967:€299).

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In days of old, when Arthur filled the throne, Whose acts and fame to foreign lands were blown, The king of elves and little fairy queen Gambolled on heaths, and danced on every green; And where the jolly troop had led the round The grass unbidden rose, and marked the ground.

The switch to Chaucer is less drastic because the majesty of the Trojan material has already been compromised. There is also another moment of trivial virtuosity:€in both stories we see the spontaneous growth of plants (a flower from blood, and grass from fairy dancing). This is, of course, nothing like as important as the larger thematic connections within the Fables that others have explored. However, it does suggest in a significantly different way that there is a unifying presence in the collection. In this case there is something skittish but irresistible about the completist tendency to complement its more substantial aspects with miniature demonstrations of coherence amid diversity. Variety and co-ordination are operating at different levels, just as throughout Dryden’s career variety and co-ordination interact. This is not an argument for a strategy or a consistent process, but rather for the existence of numerous tactics, enough tactics to constitute, in hindsight, a kind of strategic tendency. It is debatable whether this means that the complete career, in this case or in general, actually existed in anything like the same way that Spenser’s Virgilian career existed. The various forms in which Dryden hints at, implies, justifies and enables the completeness of his work do add up to a significant presence for the idea, especially in proportion with how emphatic one might expect an author to be, and the pressures on his work exerted by historical circumstances.

Ch apter 14

Goethe’s elegiac sabbatical Joseph Farrell

Any effort to interpret Goethe’s career according to a single, pre-existing pattern would obviously be misconceived. Not only was his literary career a vast, sprawling thing in itself, but it was thoroughly intertwined with several others, including those of courtier, politician, diplomat, scientist and artist. Moreover, several of these callings interacted quite directly with his work as a writer. Even if we focus on Goethe’s literary career in the narrowest possible sense, we cannot really speak in any simple way either of continuous Virgilian ascent through ever more elevated genres, or of Horatian retirement to an aesthetic angulus, or of any other model derived from the careers of Classical poets as the dominant lens through which to view Goethe’s experience. And let us admit this at once:€ the evidence that Goethe himself modelled his own career upon any of these patterns is non-existent. In this respect he differs from Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, Milton and other poets who explicitly represent themselves as fashioning their careers after Virgilian, Horatian and Lucanian prototypes. All of this might seem to make Goethe an unpromising subject in the context of career studies. I take the opposite view. To date, career studies have flourished particularly in contexts where ingredients such as imperial patronage, epic pretensions and a strong sense of Classical precedent are found. But it is reasonable to investigate the applicability of the method to other literary systems, whether contiguous to or widely removed from the homeland. And it is especially worth trying it on some hard cases. Goethe lived and worked well after the Renaissance and in a very different literary culture from those that obtained for Virgil, Horace, Petrarch, Spenser or Milton. He lived a different life as well. And yet some of the factors that informed earlier ages are visible in Goethe’s relationship to princely patronage and in his distinctive, highly deliberate approach to Classicism, so that it seems worth looking for at least some common ground. In addition, the 256

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singular course of his career makes it appealing as limit-case for this sort of analysis. In this spirit I propose to examine the Römische Elegien, one of the principal literary remains of the period that Goethe spent in Italy from 1786 to 1788, which is widely recognized as a distinct and important episode in Goethe’s protean career. Accordingly, I consider the episode as a kind of ‘sabbatical’ in the context of Goethe’s career as a whole. This is perhaps a departure from the established paths of career studies, but I hope that my analysis will bear out the validity of the approach. Let me begin with a brief syllabus. After surveying the most salient features of Goethe’s biography I will summarize what scholars consider the main results of his Italian sojourn. I will then turn to my principal text, the Römische Elegien, first to contrast them with the Italienische Reise as a record of Goethe’s Italian adventures, and then to elucidate their place in Goethe’s career. In the course of this elucidation, I will have something to say about the specific Classical models that I believe are behind Goethe’s self-conception as Roman elegist; and I will conclude with some observations about one model whose importance seems to me to be underappreciated. G oe t h e’s e a r ly c a r e e r a n d h i s I ta l i a n s ojou r n When Goethe went to Italy, he had been a major literary figure for over a decade, having gained precocious prominence with the phenomenal success of his novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers when he was only 25.1 Lionized by German literary society as a leader of the Sturm und Drang movement, and recognized as a figure of European importance, in 1775€– just a year after the publication of Werther€– Goethe made the first of several mercurial moves that mark out discrete stages in his unconventional career. Despite or because of his early success, he found himself at a loose end.2 Some change was necessary, and Goethe was torn between two For the general shape of Goethe’s life in the period up to the conclusion of his Italian permanenza, see Boyle 1991. The evidence that establishes Goethe’s movements in detail is assembled in Steiger 1982–96. I cite the text of Goethe’s works and letters from the Frankfurt edition (Goethe 1985– ), cited herein as SW. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2 As he confesses for instance in a letter to C. L. von Knebel dated 14 April 1775:€‘Leben Sie mich?€– Ich!€– falle aus einer Verworrenheit in andre.’ SW 2.1:€446–7 (#363). 1

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possibilities:€ a trip to Italy, which his father advocated and was willing to finance, and an invitation to join the court of Carl August, the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.3 After some hesitation, in November of 1775 Goethe arrived in Weimar.4 This move represents a major reorientation of Goethe’s activities. He was undoubtedly recruited to Weimar to advance the ruling family’s cultural ambitions in accordance with policies laid down by Carl August’s mother, the Duchess Anna Amalia.5 But his duties there were essentially bureaucratic. He was for most of his time in Weimar a member of the privy council, and he served various terms in other capacities€– Director of Mines, Chair of the War and Highways Commissions, and, on an acting basis, Chancellor of the Exchequer.6 These are all posts of major administrative and even political responsibility, and for over ten years Goethe devoted himself very successfully to his governmental career. He did not entirely neglect his literary work:€this same decade witnessed the writing of Wilhelm Meister, Iphigenia and other works, and culminate in an agreement with the Leipzig publishing house of G. J. Göschen to publish Goethe’s literary works in an edition of eight volumes.7 But it must be emphasized that this first Weimar period was one in which Goethe’s literary creativity and also his reputation did suffer. One critic wrote of him as early as 1781 that ‘he has given what he has given; he is now as unfruitful for the public as the desert sand’.8 And for that matter, the eight volumes of collected works that were contracted with Göschen in 1786 and eventually published in 1789 consisted of previously published and unfinished works in about equal proportions. The edition thus had something of a memorial character, almost as a monument to promise unfulfilled. Goethe himself was well aware of this interpretation. As he wrote to Carl August at the end of 1786, ‘When I decided to have my fragments printed, I regarded myself as dead.’9 In response to this awareness that his literary career had stalled, Goethe made a second decisive move, even more dramatic than the first. After a lot of preparation that he managed to keep obsessively secret until the last For Goethe’s evaluation of the alternatives see Boyle 1991:€210. Letter of C. M. Wieland to F. H. Jacobi, 10 November 1775, in Herwig 1965–1987:€1.167 (#323). 5 On the character of the court at Weimar see Boyle 1991:€223–9 and, on Anna Amalia, 241; more controversially, Ghibellino 2007. 6 Boyle 1991:€251–6. On Goethe’s experience with the mines in particular see further below. 7 On Goethe’s relations with the Göschen Verlag see Unseld 1996:€34–79. 8 Cited by Boyle 1991:€391. 9 ‘Da ich mir vornahm meine Fragmente drucken zu lassen, hielt ich mich für tot’ (letter dated 12 December 1786, SW 2.3:€190 (#40)). 3

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minute, on Tuesday, 24 July 1786 he boarded a coach and quit Weimar for a vacation in Carlsbad, probably with the intention not of returning but of going on to a lengthy stay in Italy, as he in fact did.10 The trip was eventually sanctioned and largely financed by Carl August, though it involved no official duties whatsoever.11 For most of the next two years Goethe travelled through much of the peninsula and through Sicily, enjoying two extended periods of residence in Rome. Then on Tuesday, 24 April 1788, after a series of delicate communications with Carl August, Goethe boarded the coach that would take him away from Rome€– for the last time, as it turned out€– and, after a journey that lasted two months, back to Weimar.12 The effects of this Italian sojourn on Goethe’s life and art are well known. Most immediately, after a dozen years as courtier and bureaucrat in Weimar, the sheer freedom from official duties presented a welcome opportunity to advance a number of literary projects. Goethe took good advantage of this. But in some larger sense, the experience reoriented Goethe’s energies and self-conception towards his true calling. He states this very clearly in announcing to Carl August his approaching return from Rome:€‘I can truly say:€in these one and a half years of solitude I have found myself again; but as what?€– As an artist!’13 Nicholas Boyle’s interpretation of this remark is convincing: He is first and foremost an artist€ – by contrast with any other administrative tasks to which Carl August may choose, and is welcome, to direct him. Less politely:€Goethe is willing to remain a servant of the state of Weimar, on condition that the primacy of his ‘artistic’ vocation is acknowledged. And it is his time in Italy which has clarified what that vocation is.14

So the first point is that Goethe’s Italian journey was a significant, though not a total, break with his activities of the previous decade or so. In general terms, it represents a turn away from the bureaucratic career that he had been following and a return to the life of poet and artist that For the departure from Weimar see Steiger 1982–96:€2.664. It is unclear how definite Goethe’s plans were even as he arrived in Carlsbad, where he celebrated his birthday with other members of the court. Certainly he confided his intentions to no one, even Carl August:€see Boyle 1991:€391–7. Goethe begins the Italienische Reise with his stealthy departure from Carlsbad in the dead of night on Sunday, 3 September 1788 (IR 13–15; SW 15.1:€11–14). 11 12 Boyle 1991:€394. Boyle 1991:€508–9; Steiger 1982–96:€2.664. 13 ‘Ich darf wohl sagen:€ ich habe mich in dieser anderthalbjährigen Einsamkeit selbst wiedergefunden; aber als was? Als Kunstler!’ (letter to Carl August dated 17 March 1788, SW 2.4:€394–5 (#164)). 14 Boyle 1991:€491. 10

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he had enjoyed before€– or even to a closer approximation of the ideal artistic life than he had ever previously experienced. At the same time, it was an officially sanctioned and limited, if indeterminate, leave of absence from the official duties to which Goethe eventually returned, even if in modified form. In short, it was a sabbatical, and in every respect a notably successful one. But there is an additional point. Biographers are agreed that one cannot account fully for the significance of Goethe’s Roman permanenza without understanding certain developments in his personal life as well. It is universally held that Goethe, at the time of his arrival in Rome, was rather more inexperienced in sexual matters than one might have expected in a man of 37 years, and one who had lived for over a decade in the worldly court of a German prince who fancied himself an expert in this area. In Weimar, however, this aspect of Goethe’s life was largely absorbed by an intensely platonic relationship with Charlotte von Stein, who was several years his senior and the wife of another court official.15 In this respect as well Rome represented a decisive change:€it was there that from January to March of 1788 Goethe had an affair with a young Roman widow and so, it is generally believed, enjoyed the first experience of real erotic fulfilment in his life.16 The Römische Elegien, in the style of Classical Roman elegy, present themselves as the record of this affair. But the elegies were composed after Goethe’s return to Weimar over a period of several years during which, crucially, he had begun what was to be a lifelong relationship with Christiane Vulpius.17 This relationship began almost immediately upon Goethe’s return to Weimar, and the following year Christiane produced the first of the couple’s five children (and the only one who survived past infancy). In 1806 they were married and they remained happily together until Christiane’s death in 1816. Goethe composed the Römische Elegien during the first years of his relationship with Christiane. It was a period during which he tried in a number of ways to recreate aspects of his Roman sabbatical. The liaison with Christiane, especially in its initial stages, seems to fit very well into this pattern. Scholars agree, therefore, that both Goethe’s sexual initiation with his Roman mistress and what was to become his marriage with Christiane provide the essential biographical context within which the Römische Elegien are to be understood. And the effect of this sabbatical Boyle 1991:€256–66; Lavater-Sloman 1960. 16 Eissler 1963 2:€988; Boyle 1991:€507. On Christiane see Boyle 1991:€ 537–40, 570–4 and passim. Goethe’s relationship with her has been the subject of a number of studies including Klessmann 1993; Damm 1998; Keuthen 1999; Frühwald 2007.

15

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was long-lasting:€ after returning to Weimar, Goethe was able to maintain a much better balance between the competing claims of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa and to reclaim his place of leadership in European letters. The

römische elegien

and the

i ta l i e n i s c h e r e i s e

Anything like a detailed account of the effect that Goethe’s journey had on his literary output as a whole is well beyond the scope of this paper.18 Our main concern is with two works that were in fact largely written after the return to Weimar. One is the journal that Goethe kept during his journey, which was partially revised and ultimately published between 1816 and 1829 under the title Italienische Reise.19 The other is the collection of Römische Elegien, poems in elegiac couplets that Goethe began writing in 1788 and started fashioning into a cycle under the working title ‘Erotica Romana’ in 1790 or 1791, publishing them for the first time in 1795.20 Both works provide illuminating, but not totally consistent, perspectives on Goethe’s Italian sojourn. The significance of the Elegies is acknowledged by all Goethe specialists. As Nicholas Boyle observes, this significance stems in large part from the appearance within the cycle of features never before seen in Goethe’s poetry but common thereafter, all of which Boyle relates to a new poetic self-reflexiveness on Goethe’s part.21 Indices of this self-reflexive quality include frequent references within the poems to their elegiac form; episodes dramatizing the production of distichs; the poet’s apostrophes to his verse, in which he addresses the initial line of the distich and its partner as hexameter and pentameter, respectively.22 In a related move, it is clear that the protagonist of these poems is not merely the generalized ‘I’ of Goethe’s previous lyrics, but that he is very emphatically a poet and most particularly the author of these very elegies.23 And this poet-protagonist regularly draws explicit analogies between his own experience and that of the ancient love poets, inscribing this analogy within a more general comparison between the ancient and modern worlds.24 All of these elements Some of the more recent work on the subject includes Hoffmeister 1988; Zapperi 1999; N. Miller 2002; Block 2006; Buck 2008. 19 The early publication history of this work is conveniently reviewed by Thomas P. Saine in Goethe 1989:€5–7. 20 Boyle 1991:€631–41. 21 Boyle 1991:€631–4. 22 RE 20.21 (SW 1.1:€437); cf. 5.16 (SW 1.1:€407). 23 RE 5:€15–20 (SW 1.1:€407); 11 (SW 1.1:€413, 415); 13:€1–36 (SW 1.1:€417, 419); 15.31 (SW 1.1:€427). 24 RE 3:€7–18 (SW 1.1:€399); 12.9–34 (SW 1.1:€415, 417):€13.19–24 (SW 1.1:€419); 15 (SW 1.1:€425, 427); cf. Erot. Rom. 17 (SW 1.1:€420, 422). 18

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look forward to ideas that would become still more important in Goethe’s later work and that would exert a broader influence on European literature generally. All, in addition, can be easily correlated with analogous features of Classical Roman love elegy. The Italienische Reise agrees perfectly with the elegies in making antiquity a touchstone of Goethe’s experience in Italy and in regarding poetry as a privileged medium by which to understand Italy as an ancient, symbolic space. In the elegies, for example, he revels enthusiastically in the inspirational quality of Rome (RE 5.1–2; SW 1.1:€405): Froh empfind’ ich mich nun auf klassischem Boden begeistert; Lauter und reizender spricht Vorwelt und Mitwelt zu mir. Gladly I find myself inspired upon Classical soil; past and present speak to me more clearly and charmingly.

The Reise offers a fascinating gloss on this form of inspiration. In a famous early episode of the Italienische Reise Goethe visits Lake Garda and (prompted by his guidebook) quotes Virgil’s beautiful line in which he addresses the lake (Geo. 2.159): Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marinis. And you, Benacus, rising up with roaring waves worthy of the sea

Goethe’s comment is that (IR, entry for 12 September 1786 (SW 15.1:€32) Der erste lateinische Vers, dessen Inhalt lebendig vor mir steht und in dem Augenblick, da der Wind immer stärker wächst und der See höhere Wellen gegen die Anfahrt wirft, noch heute so wahr ist als vor vielen Jahrhunderten. So manches hat sich verändert, noch aber stürmt der Wind in dem See, dessen Anblick eine Zeile Vergils noch immer veredelt. This is the first line of Latin verse whose content has come to life before me, and which is as true at this moment, when the wind is growing ever stronger and the lake is casting higher waves against the landing place, as many centuries ago. Many things have changed, but the wind still churns the lake, and the sight is still ennobled by a line of Virgil. (Goethe 1989:€28–9)

And without question in the Journey as a whole Classical poets serve as privileged interpreters of the landscape that Goethe was to explore over the next two years.25 By the same token, in Goethe’s elegiac project ancient Roman poets were to serve him as guides to the highly charged world of 25

In Naples, for instance, Goethe looked back on his earlier visit to Sicily and commented that what he saw there made the Odyssey live in his eyes for the first time (IR 256 = SW 15.1:€ 345 (17 May 1787)).

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erotic experience, into which Goethe was initiated along with the other mysteries of Italy and Rome. So the similarities between these works are not negligible. But for our purposes the differences are much more striking. The Römische Elegien focus solely on Rome while the Reise follows Goethe through the length and breadth of Italy. In addition, the elegies, which adopt the most salient conventions of ancient love elegy, are notable for their literary formality and self-reflexivity, while the Italienische Reise gives the appearance of a diary narrating in real time Goethe’s spiritual and intellectual reawakening. But the relatively unmediated appearance of the latter work is an illusion. The Reise, it is true, is based largely on letters that Goethe wrote and received during his Italian sojourn and on a journal that he kept at that time. But ironically, it is the collection of elegies that was published soon after the experiences that they purport to describe (even if scholars regard Goethe’s domestic arrangements in Weimar as being equally important to his Roman affair as a context for interpreting the poetry); but the publication of the Italienische Reise was not complete until twenty-five years after the fact.26 The end result is more memoir than a diary, and it is hardly in all respects a careful redaction of the original sources. Of its three parts, the first two were published in 1816 and 1817 and the third, which is much less finished than the first two, not until 1829. Altogether, then, the Römische Elegien and the Italienische Reise are very different Â�literary records of ‘the same’ formative experience. It is true of course that the author of the journal, like the author of the elegies, is a poet. But in the journal, Goethe the poet is basically trying to finish off projects to satisfy his publisher back in Germany.27 In the Â�elegies, poetic composition, enthusiastic love-making, and wilful self-fashioning join forces to produce nothing other than the elegies themselves. Crucially, the Italienische Reise makes no reference at all to the affair that is the subject of the Römische Elegien. Indeed, it contains much that is so foreign to the spirit of the elegies that one could wonder that they are the work of the same author. Conversely, there is nothing in the Elegien that recalls Goethe’s official duties in Weimar, where he had been among other things, as I have noted, Minister of Mines. But in the Italienische Reise Goethe can never visit a place without remarking on its geological position, its wealth or poverty in mineral resources and so on.28 See n. 19 above. 27 Entry for 8 September 1786 (IR 22 = SW 15.1:€24) and passim. The very first entry for 3 September 1986 (IR 13–15 = SW 15.1:€11–12) is almost programmatic in this regard.

26 28

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Goethe was a man of almost limitless intellectual interests, but in this respect his behaviour seems obsessive, rather like that of the overworked court functionary that he actually was and almost as if he were unable, especially in the early stages of his journey, to unwind and begin to enjoy a long vacation. And even after six months in Italy, during his visit to Naples€ – which charms him as it does so many other northern visitors because it seems the perfect opposite of the cities that they know, and thus the most quintessentially Italian of places€– even then, when he visits Herculaneum, he cannot keep himself from complaining about the way the site has been treated (IR, entry for 18 March 1787 (SW 15.1:€228): Jammerschade, daß die Ausgrabung nicht durch deutsche Bergleute recht planmäßig geschehn; denn gewiß ist bei einem zufällig räberischen nachwühlen manches edle Altertum vergeudet worden. A great pity that the excavation was not systematically carried out by German miners:€for certainly the haphazard later digging has wastefully destroyed many a noble relic of antiquity. (Goethe 1989:€173)

In this as well as other ways the Italienische Reise, which represents the author as being in constant communication with friends back home, connects the two worlds of Weimar and Italy and treats the experience of life in both places in a more continuous way than do the elegies. The journal begins by recounting in detail every stage of Goethe’s journey from Germany to Rome, thus establishing a sense of geographical continuity. In sharp contrast, the elegies open suddenly with the poet simply in Rome:€how he got there is not important.29 In the Reise Goethe takes with him everywhere many of the same concerns that were typical of his life in Weimar; in the elegies he cares about nothing other than love. In these ways it is the elegies much more than the Italienische Reise that establish Goethe’s Roman permanenza as the life-altering experience that critics agree it was. G oe t h e a n d t h e e l e g i ac c a r e e r Several clear indications situate the Römische Elegien within the larger, sprawling diversity of Goethe’s career as an episode that conforms to what 29

The theme of Goethe’s nationality appears at RE 2.28 (SW 1.1:€397), where the poet calls himself a barbarian conqueror (but cf. 4.32 (SW 1.1:€405) where he is the captive); at 7.1–10 (SW 1.1:€410–11), where he contrasts the climate and atmosphere of Rome with that of the north; at 13.5–6 (SW 1.1:€417), where Love says that he has followed the poet into a foreign country; at 15.9–10 (SW 1.1:€425), where the poet refers to a coterie of fellow German expatriates.

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we may call the canonical elegiac experience. In fact, we have Goethe’s own observations about the place of the elegies within his career to date, and these observations belong to the textual history of the poems themselves. Here are the opening lines of the second elegy as they were actually published in 1795 (RE 2.1–4 (SW 1.1:€397)): Ehret, wen ihr euch wollt! Nun bin ich endlich geborgen! â•…â•…â•… Schöne Damen und ihr, Herren der feineren Welt, Fraget nach Oheim und Vetter und alten Muhmen und Tanten, â•…â•…â•… Und dem gebundnen Gespräch folge das traurige Spiel. Auch ihr Übrigen fahret mir wohl, in großen und kleinen â•…â•…â•… Zirkeln, die ihr mich oft nah der Verzweiflung gebracht. Wiederholet, politisch und zwecklos, jegliche Meinung, â•…â•…â•… Die den Wandrer mit Wut über Europa verfolgt. Flatter all you want! Now I am finally safe! Fair ladies and you fine gentlemen of the beau monde! Ask about your old aunts and uncles and cousins, and let the unhappy game follow the elegant talk. And farewell to you too, who have often driven me almost mad with your social circles great and small! Repeat, politically and vainly, that opinion which the traveller angrily flees right across Europe.

And now here is the earlier, unpublished version of these same lines from the ‘Erotica Romana’ manuscript (SW 1.1:€398, 400): Fraget nun wen ihr auch wollt mich werdet ihr nimmer erreichen, â•…â•…â•… Schöne Damen und ihr, Herren der feineren Welt! Ob denn auch Werther gelebt? ob denn auch alles fein wahr sei? â•…â•…â•… Welche Stadt sich mit Recht Lottens der Einzigen rühmt? Ach wie hab ich so oft die törigten Blätter verwünschet, â•…â•…â•… Die mein jügendlich Leid unter die Menschen gebracht! Wäre Werther mein Bruder gewesen, ich hätt ihn erschlagen, â•…â•…â•… Kaum verfolgte mich so rächend sein trauriger Geist. Now ask all you want, you will never get near me, you fair ladies and you fine gentlemen of the beau monde:€did Werther really live? and it was all really true? In which town did dear Lotte actually live? Alas, how often I’ve cursed those foolish pages that spread my youthful sorrow abroad! Had Werther been my brother and I had killed him, his unhappy ghost would hardly have haunted me so vengefully.

The published version alludes vaguely to the tedious niceties of the society that Goethe has left behind, and to the refuge offered him by his unpretentious mistress, who knows nothing of her lover’s former life. What emerges clearly from the variant is that Goethe, while composing the elegies after his return to Weimar, looked back on the Italian sojourn as an escape not only from his bureaucratic duties at court and the jejune

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social rituals that they entailed, but from his earlier literary reputation as well. The Werther phenomenon, as I noted before, greatly oppressed him; and in the light of his complaints about this oppression, the refuge that he finds in the bosom of his beloved takes on a significant Â�metaliterary aspect. The move to Rome and to elegy amounts to a metamorphosis by which the author of Werther recreates himself as a poet of love in the mould of the ancient elegists. There is more. A number of scholars have explored the generic and intertextual relationship between the Römische Elegien and Classical love elegy, and it is well known that Goethe incorporates most of the specific motifs that define the genre.30 One of these involves the name of his mistress, whom he calls Faustine (RE 18.9, SW 1.1:€429). Many scholars think that this is the real name of the woman with whom Goethe actually had his Roman fling€– namely one Faustina di Giovanni Antonini who, like the Faustine of the elegies, was a young widow who had a son.31 But whether or not this is so Goethe follows the ancient convention of giving the beloved a name laden with literary significance. Propertius and Tibullus (in his first book of elegies) followed the founder of the genre, Cornelius Gallus, whose works did not survive antiquity, by giving their mistresses names that allude to cult titles of Apollo, the god of poetry (Cynthia, Delia and Lycoris, respectively). The proto-elegist Catullus, and Ovid, the last member of the elegiac canon, opted for names, Lesbia and Corinna, that allude to two of the great women poets of Greece, Sappho of Lesbos and Corinna of Thebes. Goethe takes a different and more self-referential tack.32 Faustine’s name gestures not to models from the past or to external literary ideals but to what would become the poet’s masterpiece, his Faust. Many precise details regarding the long genesis of this work cannot be established with confidence, but for our purposes the main outlines of the process are clear enough.33 It is certain that Goethe had conceived the idea of a Faust at least ten years before his Italian journey. A nearly complete play that was never published, conventionally known as the Urfaust, exists in a manuscript that was written down about two years before Goethe’s flight to Rome. While There is, as one might expect, a long tradition of investigating Goethe’s sources. Some of the principal studies include Bronner 1898; Klingner 1956; Wimmel 1958; Luck 1967; Rüdiger 1978 and 1984; Neumeister 1985; Ammer 1990; Althaus 1994; Appel 1998. 31 RE 6.6, 27–8 (SW 1.1:€407–9). 32 Cf. Boyle’s remarks on the self-referentiality of the elegies, n. 21 above, and see further Schweling 1964. 33 For details see Hamm 1997. 30

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in Rome, he came up with a new plan for the work, one that involves Mephistopheles presenting Faust with different experiences upon which he, Faust, would pass judgement; and the text of the play as written, probably, within a year of Goethe’s return to Weimar speaks of ‘a new career’ that will take Faust from low life to high life as represented by his relationships with Gretchen and Helena, respectively.34 This version of the play, published in 1790 as Faust:€ein Fragment, was being put into final form just at the time when Goethe was working on the ‘Erotica Romana’, which would become the Römische Elegien. So, from these relationships, it seems more than reasonable to infer into the Römische Elegien a measure of self-Â�consciousness concerning their importance to the development of Goethe’s literary career. Indeed, by piecing together the clues that I have just been discussing, one could almost construct a quasi-Virgilian cursus that would explain Goethe’s career as a progression from Werther to the Römische Elegien to Faust. The phrase that Virgil uses to describe himself as author of the Eclogues is audax iuuenta, ‘youthfully bold’, or ‘precocious’ (Geo. 4.565), and this would certainly be apt for the author of Werther as well. The Georgics has often been seen as a transitional work, as have the Römische Elegien. And of course Faust as the poet’s masterpiece answers very well for Virgil’s Aeneid. But any invocation of the Virgilian rota merely confirms my earlier point about the inadequacy of prefabricated schemes. The Virgilian model of ascent cannot fully capture the dynamic of Goethe’s struggle to find his way from Werther to Faust. Virtually absent from the Virgilian model, for instance, is the important notion of a turn towards antiquity, very evident in Goethe’s representation of the elegies as something different from his Werther. And this is to say nothing of Goethe’s astonishingly diverse literary activity in other genres. But the idea that I want to stress is that the Römische Elegien were crucial to his development because the elegiac genre€– in its form, in its characteristic concerns and in a sense by virtue of its curious nature as a simultaneously closed and unclosed genre€– gave Goethe the opportunity in effect to enjoy a complete career as an elegiac poet in a comparatively brief episode within a long and multiform literary life; and that it was this possibility that made his elegiac sabbatical both an antidote and a stimulus to the various other life-projects in which he was engaged. The alternative openings of the second elegy link Goethe’s Roman permanenza and his elegiac project to the theme of escape, whether from his 34

╅ Faust 1:€2072 (SW 7.1:€88).

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earlier literary reputation or from the demands of the society in which he lived. But as I have said, the biographical record makes it very clear that escape from his official duties at court was a crucial factor as well. All three factors are linked, but it is the first and third, literary reputation and bureaucratic duties, that are most relevant to the idea of Goethe’s career. The elegies do not allude directly to the third element, duties at court. But the genre of elegy itself embodies this theme in such a way as to make it, in effect, a constitutive element of the ancient genre and one that echoes throughout Goethe’s work as well. We can begin to get at this aspect by considering a very well known acknowledgement of Goethe’s generic indebtedness and pressing it for its careerist significance. The fifth elegy, which expresses the most intense perception in the entire collection of the relationship between presence in Rome, Classical learning and erotic fulfilment, ends with a vignette of the god Amor holding a lamp that softly illuminates the lovers in their embrace (RE 5.19–20 (SW 1.1:€407)): Amor schüret indes die Lampe und denket der Zeiten, â•…â•…â•… Da er nämlichen Dienst seinen Triumvirn getan. Amor tends the lamp and recalls the times when he did the same service for his own Triumvirs.

The imagery of this passage virtually conflates the emblematic ‘mirror’ and ‘lamp’ that M. H. Abrams uses to suggest the difference between Classical and Romantic imitatio.35 For Goethe, Amor’s lamp illuminates a realm of natural experience that was, to him, previously obscure. At the same time, he revels in the fact that his erotic adventures are also reworkings of highly overdetermined, conventional subjects that had been the defining material of Classical love poetry. But the reference to Love’s ‘triumvirs’ is also of great significance. By the word Triumvirn Goethe alludes to the phrase triumviri Amoris, a flourish of Joseph Scaliger, and Goethe’s use of it here has been taken as an acknowledgement of his principal elegiac models.36 Quite apart from the specific identity of these triumviri (a point to which I shall return), I see no evidence that Scaliger coined the phrase with any ulterior purpose. It was, as I say, a rhetorical flourish, an imaginative and slightly elevated way of saying ‘the three principal love poets of ancient Rome’. But to connoisseurs of the kind of generic posturing that was so dear to the Roman elegists, and so perhaps to Goethe Abrams 1953. On this phrase see Bernays 1899. Goethe also uses it at IR 386 (SW 15.1:€515) in an address given on the occasion of his induction into the Arcadian Society on 4 January 1787.

35

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himself, the phrase is capable of meaning much more. A triumvir is of course, in ancient Roman terminology, a member of a board of three appointed by the government for some specific purpose. But the word gained a defining resonance from the activity of a specific board of three, Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Antonius and M. Aemilius Lepidus, who in 42 BC became iiiviri rei publicae constituendae€ – something like ‘commissioners for the establishment of public order’. These triumviri wielded extraordinary powers, quarrelled and bargained, and made war upon one another, until one of them, Octavian, got the better of his colleagues and became the sole leader of the Roman state for the remaining forty-five years of his life. From this historical episode the word triumvir acquired its associations with extraordinary power, and did so in the context of the turbulent transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire€ – which happens to be the setting in which the genre of elegy took shape as well. These points might have little relevance to my argument were it not for the fact that the relationship of poetry to power was a stock theme of ancient elegy. Permutations in the treatment of this theme are many and complex, but a few general tendencies can be stated. In ancient elegy, the poet wields no political power. He has in effect renounced political ambition altogether. He maintains his relationship to at least one powerful man, who is his patron, and generally supports this patron’s career, which involves joining the patron in support of the princeps, Caesar Augustus; but the poet is concerned to represent his own career as one of abandonment with respect to political power and even as the anti-career of enthralment to a whimsical beloved€– who is herself a woman, probably foreign-born and definitely from a lower social class, and therefore absolutely devoid of political power herself.37 In short, the elegiac career is the total antithesis of a Roman political career. The canonical ancient elegists are all clear and insistent on this point.38 So, even if Scaliger did not have these ideas in mind when naming his erotic triumviri, I think we can be open to the possibility that Goethe found in this phrase something more attractive than the opportunity to quote a great philologist. The paradoxical, almost oxymoronic formulation On the elegiac puella see Lilja 1965; S. L. James 2003 and the essays in Part 1 of Wyke 2002. The Roman elegists consistently represented their poetic calling as an anti-career. Catullus in several poems speaks disparagingly of his experiences serving as part of a praetorial cohors governing the province of Bithynia (see especially Poems 10 and 28). Tibullus contrasts his life with that of military men, particularly his patron Messalla (1:€1.53–6, 75–9, 3.81–2, 6.43–6, 10.29–34, 45–52, 2:€ 6, 4.14–16). For an effective point of entry into the question vis-à-vis Propertius see Gale 1997. Ovid speaks of how, at his father’s insistence, he took the first steps towards an official career, but abandoned it for poetry (Trist. 4.10.17–40).

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triumviri Amoris€– men of power in a field of powerlessness€– speaks to Goethe’s situation immediately before, during and after the period of his permanenza. When he left Weimar, Goethe was at the apex of his political power. As acting president of the privy council, he was the highest authority in Weimar after the prince himself.39 He renounced this position to go to Rome, and before returning to Weimar he negotiated with his own ‘Augustus’, Carl August, an agreement that would relieve him of any regular and continuing responsibilities of the sort that he had previously fulfilled.40 He did rejoin the privy council, however, which (I note in passing, for whatever it may be worth) happened to be a board of usually three, though sometimes four, men.41 And it was at this point that he wrote the elegies that look back to his experience in Rome. It thus seems to me possible that Goethe found in Scaliger’s arresting phrase something that spoke to his own complex attitude towards his dual careers as poet and politician. But in any case, I think it certain that he was attracted to the elegiac genre in part by the generic inheritance that involves these themes. The tenth elegy expresses the typical elegiac attitude towards such things:€the lover in his private obsession with erotic matters rules a kingdom greater than mighty empires and is a fit object of envy by the likes of Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, the kings and princes of France and Prussia (RE 10.1–3 (SW 1.1:€413)): Alexander und Cäsar und Heinrich und Friedrich, die Grossen, â•… Gäben und hälften mir gern ihres erworbenen Ruhms, Könnt ich auf eine Nacht dies Lager jedem vergönnen. Alexander and Caesar and Henry and Frederick, the great ones, would gladly give me half of their fame if I could grant them to lie in this camp for one night.

Before closing, I want to return as promised from the connotative to the denotative range of the expression triumviri Amoris. In one sense it is not important to whom exactly the phrase refers. The Quellenforscher have shown that Goethe’s Classical models go well beyond any three ancient love poets whom one might care to nominate. If we ask about the poets whom Goethe actually names in the elegies, we find that there are three, but that they are Propertius (Erot. Rom. 16.19, SW 1.1:€422), Horace (RE 15.28, SW 1.1:€425) and Lucretius (Erot. Rom. 16:€13, SW 1.1:€422). Propertius of course is a canonical elegist; more on him in a moment. Horace is a love poet, but not, as it were, a full-time one and in any case not an elegist at all; and the particular passage of Horace that Goethe seems to Boyle 1991:€307.

39

Boyle 1991:€267–8.

40

41

Boyle 1991:€238, 252.

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have in mind is from the Carmen Saeculare (11–12), one of Horace’s least erotic compositions. As for Lucretius, commentators point to his recommendation that any sexual urges be satisfied before they get out of hand (De Rerum Natura 4.1063–7), but this occurs in the context of a diatribe against love, which is not encouraging for anyone who would see Lucretius as a presiding genius in the Römische Elegien; and, of course, like Horace, he is not an elegist. Many others could be named to whom Goethe alludes not for purposes of establishing the elegiac ambience of the cycle, but his conception of antiquity, while centred on elegy, expands far beyond the normal boundaries of the genre; and of course, though it sounds paradoxical to say it this way, aficionados will recognize this as a tendency of Classical elegy itself.42 So who are these triumviri? Clearly they are in some sense none other than who Scaliger says they are€– not Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid, the three surviving elegists of Quintilian’s canon, but Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius€– a grouping that makes perfect sense when we consider the textual history of these poets. Their rather slender collective output made inclusion of all their works within a single volume very common, both in manuscripts and in printed books, at least from the later middle ages onward.43 The more voluminous productions of Ovid stood alone. But from our perspective, which is the interpretive history of the Römische Elegien, the results of this historical accident have been unfortunate. From an early date there has been a consensus that Goethe’s most important elegiac model is Propertius. There is no difficulty in mustering evidence, internal and external, to lend credibility to this theory. In particular, Propertius’ first book, his Monobiblos, which he purports to have written as a means of coping with the effects of his virtual enslavement to Cynthia over the course of the preceding year, is probably the closest parallel we have from ancient elegy to Goethe’s record not of enslavement, but of fulfilment in his relationship with Faustine during his last months in Rome. Moreover, as we have seen, Propertius is the only one of the Classical elegists whom Goethe names in the Römische Elegien. To speak of external evidence, Schiller in his essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry The tendency is especially notable in Ovid (see e.g. S. J. Harrison 2002 and Farrell 2003) but it is clearly a feature of earlier elegy as well, most obviously perhaps in respect of the aetiological focus of Propertius’ fourth book and of certain poems of Tibullus (J. F. Miller 1982). 43 Scaliger himself in fact published a one-volume edition and commentary (entitled castigationes) on all three poets in 1577, though he was not the first to do so:€see Grafton, 1983:€161–79. The tendency to group these poets together is abundantly illustrated in the materials catalogued and described in Butrica 1984. 42

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hailed Goethe as the German Propertius; and Goethe himself in his elegy ‘Hermann und Dorothea’ referred to Propertius as an inspiration for the Römische Elegien.44 This assessment has become traditional, and in much of the secondary literature the centrality of Propertius to Goethe’s conception of elegy is simply assumed.45 One effect of all this has been to obscure the importance of Ovid to the Römische Elegien. In one sense, this has been a non-problem:€ again the Quellenforscher have done their jobs and have uncovered a wealth of Ovidian material in these poems.46 But when we regard the Römische Elegien from the particular angle of Goethe’s career, Ovid assumes a greater importance than he might from the perspective of genre criticism. Ovid, though a canonical elegiac poet, was also more than that; one might say that he was also a distinctly non-canonical elegiac poet whose career conformed to established patterns, which generally involve some sort of generic differentiation, more than is true of Catullus, Propertius and Tibullus.47 Thus Ovid’s potentially larger relevance to Goethe’s conception of his own career starts to come into focus. If we regard the Römische Elegien as, in effect, an entire elegiac career, then it is probably adequate to think of Propertius as Goethe’s chief conceptual model. If we regard the elegies as part of a more extended career that both began some Schiller 1962:€465 and SW 1.2:€198, where Goethe goes on to mention Martial as the model for the Venetian Epigrams. But the issue of Propertius seems to me less than straightforward. Schiller’s point is very much implicated in his argument about the two categories of poetry that are at issue in his essay. For him, both ‘The Roman and the German Ovid’ (i.e. Friedrich Manso, author of Die Kunst zu lieben (Berlin 1794)) belong to the camp of the sentimental poets, while ‘the Roman and German Propertius’ (i.e. the Goethe of the Römische Elegien) belong to the naïve camp. Both passages, then, have to be read not merely as data concerning how Schiller and Goethe both saw the latter in his relationship to ancient elegiac models, but also as contributions to an ongoing discussion between the two on the nature of poetry and on Goethe’s poetry in particular. Relevant here is the fact that the Römische Elegien were first published by Schiller in his journal Die Horen (1795), but not without the excision of two poems (3 and 17 in modern editions) that Goethe had wanted to include, but that Schiller regarded as coarse and offensive to common decency (letter to Korner dated 20 July 1795 in Schiller 1969:€13). The literature on the relationship is large:€see (e.g.) Martin 1949 and Oberlin 2007. 45 In his assessment of Goethe’s models, Boyle (1991:€591–2) follows the majority in emphasizing the role of Propertius:€he notes that Goethe studied the elegiac form with Knebel, ‘who was translating Propertius at the time’, and that ‘it is no surprise that he should have been reading, and no doubt looking for models in, Catullus and Propertius, and probably Tibullus and Ovid’s amatory poetry too’ (emphasis mine). 46 Specifically or characteristically Ovidian are:€the dialogues with Amor (Am. 1.1, Pont. 3.3), the motif of writing in wine on a tabletop (Am. 1.4.17–20, 2.5.17; Ars 1.569–72; Her. 1.31–6, 17.87), the motif of the magister amoris (Am. 1.4, 2.19, 3.1, 3.4, and the erotodidactic works as a whole), not to speak of the many myths that Goethe mentions, many of which occur in the Metamorphoses but not in surviving love elegy. 47 Cf. Farrell 2004. 44

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time before the elegies and continued long after them, then Ovid may be more relevant. On the other hand, perhaps we should regard Goethe as having adopted a more restrictive conception of ancient elegy than Ovidian exuberance and experimentation would allow, and thus of Ovid rather than Propertius as casting his particular spell over not the elegies, but the Reise. As a final thought along these lines, consider the way in which Goethe frames Part 3 of his memoir – one of the relatively scarce indications of careful revision in this part of the work. The epigraph is taken from Ovid’s Fasti:€ it is the prayer that Romulus pronounces for the welfare of the city that he has founded.48 Even more resonant is the conclusion of the work, perhaps its most famous passage, in which Goethe wanders about the ancient city under a full moon, finding his way to the Colosseum, where he goes over his entire stay in Italy, a process that ‘being felt deeply in my agitated soul, evoked a mood that I might call heroic-elegiac, out of which an elegiac poem began to take form’ (Goethe 1989:€ 497–8: in aufgeregter Seele tief und groß empfunden, erregte eine Stimmung, die ich heroisch-elegeisch nennen darf, woraus sich in poetischer Form eine Elegie zusammenbilden wollte (SW 15.1:€596)). It would be natural to try to relate this remark to the Römische Elegien themselves, which so closely identify Goethe’s Roman permanenza with this specific poetic form; but heroicelegiac does not seem very apt as a description of the erotic cycle. It would make more sense to think here of the Fasti, where the relationship of the heroic and elegiac modes, or of heroic content to elegiac form, is a pervasive theme; and the epigraph that I cited previously may also point in this direction. But Goethe immediately follows up this remark about the heroic-elegiac mood by asking, Und wie sollte mir gerade in solchen Augenblicken Ovids Elegie ins Gedächtnis zurückkehren, der, auch verbannt, in einer Mondnacht Rom verlassen sollte. Cum repeto noctem! seine Rückerinnerung, weit hinten am Schwarzen Meer, im trauer- und jammervollen Zustande, kam mir nicht aus dem Sinn, ich wiederholte das Gedicht, das mir teilweise genau im Gedächntnis hervorstieg, aber mich wirklich an eigner Produktion irre werden ließ und hinderte; die auch, später unternommen, niemals zustande kommen konnte. (SW 1.15:€596) And how could I not recall Ovid’s elegy at these very moments, for he too was banished and was about to leave Rome on a moonlit night? Cum repeto noctem!€– his recollection far away at the Black Sea, where he was sad and miserable€– kept 48

longa sit huic aetas, dominaeque potentia terrae, / sitque sub hac oriens occiduusque dies (Fasti 4.831–2; IR 275 = SW 15.1:€373).

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recurring to me, and I recited the poem, which in part I remembered exactly. But actually it only interfered with and hindered my own production, which, although undertaken again later, never came into existence. (Goethe 1989:€498)

Goethe’s memoir then concludes by quoting a passage from the Ovidian poem that has crowded Goethe’s own heroic-elegiac effort out of his mind. The poem in question is Tristia 1.3, which for its Virgilian reminiscences comparing Ovid’s final night in Rome with Aeneas’ final night in Troy, might well be considered heroic-elegiac in mood.49 Remembering that Goethe published this memoir many years after his Italian journey, the idea that an Ovidian experience of elegiac eroticism followed by exile from the site of those pleasures presents itself as another factor of relevance to our assessment of Goethe’s elegiac career. To conclude:€the biographical data suggest to most critics that Goethe’s excursion to Italy represents both a break in his bureaucratic career and a readjustment of the balance between his official duties and his literary ambitions. On this basis, I have argued that the excursion helped bring about a redirection of Goethe’s literary representation of his career. One of the most direct literary results of this excursion, the Römische Elegien, takes advantage of the ancient genre’s potential to embody in literary form qualities antithetical to the life of a responsible civic or court official, whether in Augustan Rome or in eighteenth-century Weimar. These antithetical qualities were essential to the success of Goethe’s Italian sojourn. But Goethe also took advantage of the elegiac poet’s capacity to fashion himself as someone who deliberately rejects other literary genres and the entire way of life that he takes them to represent, both in the form of overt comments on the course of Goethe’s career, as in the original opening of Elegy 2 with its jaundiced comments on Werther, and in their manipulation of elegiac conventions, such as the name of the beloved Faustine and elegy’s constitutive rejection of political careerism. And finally, I just raise the possibility that Ovid, the only one of the canonical Roman elegists who might be said to have led a career that was not entirely elegiac, and one in which erotic elegy as strictly defined plays a more circumscribed role€– that Ovid might be an important model for Goethe’s design of his own brief elegiac career. In a broader sense, in keeping with my opening remarks, I hope to have contributed as well to a small expansion of career studies as a method of literary history. Goethe first makes the connection between Ovid’s departure and his own in a letter to Herder dated 12 December 1788 (#221, SW 2.3:€452). On this motif see Huskey 2002 and Putnam 2010.

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C h a p t e r 15

Wordsworth’s career prospects:€‘peculiar language’ and public epigraphs Nicola Trott

Coleridge to Southey, July 1803, discussing plans for a ‘Bibliotheca Britannica’, to include ‘all great names as have either formed epochs in our taste, or such, at least, as are representative; and the great object to be in each instance to determine, first, the true merits and demerits of the books; secondly, what of these belong to the age€ – what to the author quasi peculium.’1

‘The modern “epic”’, Lawrence Lipking has observed, ‘is dominated by one story and one story only:€the life of the poet.’2 The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind is the classic example. But if Wordsworth’s is the model of a modern ‘literary career’, it is so because of its insufficiency as a model, its incapacity to offer anything so generic.3 For one thing, The Prelude addresses itself not to the poet’s life but to his Mind and, even if that mind’s making is revealed through life events, its material is something altogether more elusive than is the stuff of autobiography. For another, the subtitle, Growth of a Poet’s Mind, conveys, in that small detail of the indefinite article, a gesture of humility that demonstrates complete specialness:4 ‘a’ Poet, this Poet, can never be ‘the’ Poet whose attributes are common to poets in general, or whose skills aim to be transferable to others. Of the closing lines of ‘There was a Boy’ Coleridge memorably remarked that, ‘had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out “Wordsworth!”.’â•›5 Even with Griggs 1956–71:€vol. II:€955. Lipking 1981:€70. Lipking takes as his starting point the pseudo-Virgilian opening€– much-imitated and often considered authentic€– of The Aeneid:€‘Behind the story of arms and the man, another insistently makes itself felt, the Virgilian story that begins with Ille ego€– “I am the one.”’ (69). 3 Wordsworth’s career has been discussed by various recent commentators:€ Galperin 1989; Schoenfield 1996; Pfau 1997; Trott 2003; Siskin 2006. See also accounts of the money Wordsworth made from authorship in Douglas 1948 and L. Erikson 1990. 4 The subtitle was not, however, Wordsworth’s, but his widow’s. 5 Griggs 1956–71:€ vol. I:€ 453; the lines referred to are ‘that uncertain heaven, received / Into the bosom of the steady lake’. By contrast, Seamus Heaney offers a notable reading of ‘There Was a Boy’ precisely in terms of the transferable skills of a ‘poetic career’. Heaney identifies ‘three 1

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no other cultural markers to orientate his reader, the Wordsworthian identity would declare itself unmistakably€– indeed, it is as though the very potency of that identity makes it the only surviving life form in an otherwise deserted land. That this poetic DNA should reveal itself especially in language is only appropriate:€that is the code in which the poet works, and of which this particular usage is the uncloneable signature. Coleridge found another, equally hyperbolic, way of putting it when writing to Robert Southey in 1803:€‘Wordsworth’s words’, he observed, ‘always mean the whole of their possible Meaning.’6 Setting aside the improbability that any poet’s words could always fulfil their potential so entirely, what stands out is the insistence on this poet’s linguistic properties:€ ‘Wordsworth’s words’ are especially his, we gather, in the sense that they are omnisemantic. Coleridge’s assertion stands out because it contradicts€– and, in the wake of the 1800 and 1802 Prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads, very deliberately contradicts€– the key argument that Wordsworth had made for poetry as originating in ‘common life’ and as composed out of the ‘language really used’ or ‘really spoken by men’;7 and in doing so it calls into question the literary career that Wordsworth, half accidentally,8 half provocatively, built out of that polemical stance. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads expressly denies the poet the use of ‘a peculiar language’:€given that ‘Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for men’, ‘he must express himself as other men express themselves’ (Gill 2000:€608). Still more challengingly, the society that is ‘chosen’ to keep the poet grounded in the ‘real’ is ‘Low and rustic life’ (597). The loftiest claims are made for the language of such a society. Nevertheless, by this account, ‘Wordsworth’s words’ are not his at all, or are his only by virtue of their being in general circulation. In setting out his ‘opposition’ to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge later insists that, insofar as the peasant’s language is identical with the degrees of poetic achievement’ and allegorizes ‘There Was a Boy’ ‘as a parable of these three stages’. Stage one is emergence into craft-consciousness, the boy’s ‘fingers interwoven’ to make the sound of owl-hooting; stage two is ‘the classically empowered poet’€ – art that ‘has found ways by which distinctively personal subjects and emotional necessities can be made a common possession of the reader’s’€ – and occurs in the poem ‘When the vale fills with the actual cries of owls responding to the boy’s art’; stage three, which takes place after the owls have fallen silent, is ‘that in which the poem’s absolute business is an unconceding pursuit of poetic insight and poetic knowledge’. This last achievement can be arrived at only by passing through the first and second stages, of ‘poetic making’ and ‘of social relation and emotional persuasion’ (Heaney 1988:€153–63). 6 Griggs 1956–71:€vol. II:€977. The words Coleridge has just ‘quoted’ as Wordsworth’s refer to his daughter Sara Coleridge:€‘She feeds on Quietness, & “has the most truly celestial expression of countenance, I ever beheld in a human Face.”’ 7 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Gill 2000:€597, 602. 8 The late Wordsworth protested he ‘never cared a straw about the theory’ (Little 1975:€62 n. 101).

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poet’s, it is because it is ‘ordinary, or lingua communis’ and not because it is ‘real’ or ‘rustic’; and that, for all higher uses, requiring Â�‘general terms’, ‘reflection on the acts of the mind itself’ or ‘moral and intellectual processes’, the language-gap between poet and peasant will be self-evident and enormous.9 Granting all this, there is still very considerable resistance in Wordsworth’s work to the ‘principle’ which Coleridge, looking to Aristotle, requires it to uphold, namely ‘that poetry as poetry is essentially ideal’ and ‘generic’ (Coleridge 1997:€ 204).10 The Preface to Lyrical Ballads defines the Poet, at his most elemental, as ‘a man speaking to men’ (Gill 2000:€603). Apropos of which, there again is that seemingly modest indefinite article. For all the fact of his and their shared manhood, Wordsworth preserves the singularity of the poet, as against the plurality of his audience. And the poetic effects are indeed singular. To take Wordsworth’s language theory to its extreme, and Wordsworth for a period does precisely that,11 is to find poetry not just in ‘the language really spoken by men’ or by speakers of English (Gill 2000:€602), but in the ‘Chatter, chatter, chatter’ of Harry Gill’s teeth,12 the ‘burr, burr, burr’ of an Idiot Boy’s lips,13 the ‘Bumming, bumming, bumming’ of a Tinker’s patter;14 in a valley filled with the ‘long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud’ of hooting owls,15 and€– by still more comprehensive ‘sympathies’€– in ‘things that hold / An inarticulate language’,16 phenomena for which no audible sound-world exists at all, but which, to the poet who has learnt to Biographia Literaria ch. 17 (Coleridge 1997:€211, 210). As Coleridge would have been aware, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads had itself cited Aristotle to similar effect, probably on his own authority:€‘Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing:€its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative’ (Gill 2000:€605). 11 See Barstow 1917. 12 ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ 4. Unless stated otherwise, all Wordsworth poems are quoted from Gill 2000. 13 ‘The Idiot Boy’ 115€– words regarded by Coleridge as unfortunate in that they only ‘assisted in recalling’ to the reader ‘the disgusting images of ordinary, morbid idiocy’ (Coleridge 1997:€206). Johnny’s percussive ‘noise’ starts at l. 19, ‘His lips with joy they burr at you’, takes up again at l. 107 and l. 387, and emerges in actual speech in the final stanza, ll. 460–1, where it is his ‘idiot’ wisdom that fuses the poem’s various elements in poetry. 14 Wordsworth cancelled The Tinker from the printer’s MS of Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), and never afterwards published it (first printed, Hale White 1897:€ 67–8); but, to judge from Rawnsley’s transcription of the talk of a former Rydal Mount gardener’s boy, the Tinker’s rhythmical working song was humorously close to that of the poet himself:€‘out upon his gres walk … he would start a bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, Stop; then bum, bum, bum reet down till t’other end, and then he’d set down and git a bit o’ paper out and write a bit; and then he git up, and bum, bum, bum, and goa on bumming for long enough … I suppose, ya kna, the bumming helped him out a bit’ (Rawnsley 1903:€15–16). 15 ‘There Was a Boy’ 14. 16 ‘Not Useless Do I Deem’ 2–3; Gill 2000:€678. 9

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discern ‘an active principle alive in all things’,17 are merely different aspects of a single, universal ‘song’ (Prelude 2.431). That metaphysical ‘principle’ can lead to fits of evocatively gnostic abstraction€– ‘And I would stand, / Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are / The ghostly language of the ancient earth’ (Prelude 2.326–8)€– but is equally tuneable to the sort of demotic vocality that is found in the ballads (6.562–4; my emphasis): The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side As if a voice were in them.

Conversings such as these extend the concept of ‘real language’ (Gill 2000:€ 608) so far in the direction of the extra-linguistic as to amount, at least potentially, to a private poetic idiom. This is an irony, albeit one that has travelled light years away from the specialized Augustan diction against which Wordsworth set his face€– and his Preface. The intersection of Wordsworth’s ‘system’, as it was dubbed in the press, and Coleridge’s doubts about the experiment he himself had started, would last Wordsworth’s lifetime and beyond, becoming referred to by shorthand as ‘the Wordsworth question’.18 In this respect, Wordsworth’s career is not his either, but is that of modern poetry at large. Wordsworth is the very model of a modern literarian, the model that claims to be wholly representative because utterly unique. It is his ‘peculiar grace’€– qualities which, to his hostile critics, are straightforwardly peculiar€– that has made him so intensely indicative. The critical reaction to his apparently quixotic adventure in his own time saw him mock-elected to the leadership of a ‘Lake School’, and nowadays sees him charged with various sins of cultural or historical commission or omission.19 The paradox can be scaled up, and to do so is to encounter, if not Wordsworth exactly, then the epistemic shift of which he is a part€– the modern cult of individualism arising in a pan-European order of things:€a Rousseauist tradition of autobiogÂ�raphy, an Idealist philosophy of consciousness, a ‘Copernican revolution in epistemology’.20 The Christian pilgrimage of Everyman morphs into the autonomous journey of the Individual. But while saying these things may describe important turnings in Wordsworth’s career path€– his discovery ‘There Is an Active Principle Alive in All Things’ 1; Gill 2000:€676. Simpson 1993:€152. 19 Claims about the agency of History by new historicist critics or about alternative Â�centres of Romantic authorship€ – Byron or Blake€ – have typically been made in contestation of Wordsworth. 20 Abrams 1953:€58, a phrase routinely associated with the philosophy of Kant and sometimes attributed to him. 17 18

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of ‘the evanescenece of any subject’ for poetry ‘but subjectivity’,21 for instance€– it does not ‘instantly scream out “Wordsworth!”’. The limits imposed or invited by Wordsworth’s oddity or individuality are if anything most obvious in places where the poetry is most aware of its duty in embracing universals. ‘Points have we all of us within our souls / Where all stand single’, the Prelude poet declares, having led his readers ‘Up to an eminence’ from which the grand narrative of the work thus far is made visible (Prelude 3.186–7, 169, 171–4): Of Genius, Power, Creation and Divinity itself I have been speaking, for my theme has been What passed within me.

A superb nonchalance ends by compressing the whole of the ‘heroic argument’ (3.182)€– ‘Genius, Power, / Creation and Divinity itself’€– into the single personal pronoun ‘me’; but this ‘me’ then opens up again, in subsequent lines, to include a whole world of others: Points have we all of us within our souls Where all stand single.

These lines adopt the first-person plural of Wordsworth’s most inclusive pronouncements; but, as the syntactical inversion€– and inverted foot€– suggest, the ‘Points’ themselves have priority and they each by definition cannot be occupied by any other body. And yet, the jostling of these irreducible experiences€– ‘Points’€– and plural pronouns€– ‘we … us … our’€– memorably elbows them onto the same ground, ‘Where all stand single’. In the space between one line ending and the next beginning, ‘all of us’ have found room to ‘stand single’, a crowded universe of exclusive selves. It is characteristic that the ‘Points’ might be rhetorical or literary as well as autobiographical or epistemological; and characteristic, too, that at ‘Points’ like these, the declamation of summative wisdom€– such as might be appropriate to the summit of a literary career€– is so faithful to intricacies of Wordsworth’s own making, to the perplexity of a poetry that is seeking to generalize that which originates in moments of self-colloquy ‘far hidden from the reach of words’ (3.185), yet which must be held in common if the claim to epic vision is to have validity and to achieve anything like a mass communication (‘Home at Grasmere’ 897–9, 901–2): Possessions have I wholly, solely, mine, Something within, which yet is shared by none, ╇ Bloom 1970:€8.

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At one level, the paradox of the exclusive and the exemplary becomes merely a problem, and one that is readily solved. Alongside the vatic seer, who rejoices in the gifts of the spirit, is the psychological materialist who knows that he shares his mental equipment with everyone else. The two can co-exist in the space of as many lines. While the former has to ‘make / Breathings for incommunicable powers’, the latter can immediately offer the normative qualification, ‘Yet each man is a memory to himself’ (Prelude 3.187–9). That being the case, the precise contents of each man’s memory€– his ‘Points’ or ‘spots of time’€ – are exclusive ‘Possessions’, but the fact of their ‘existence’ is necessarily universal (11.258):€ ‘And, therefore’, the poet comforts himself, ‘I am not heartless; for there’s not a man / That lives who hath not had his godlike hours’ (3.190–2).22 A Miltonic inspiration assures the poet of his special ascendancy, a Hartleian associationism of his ordinary mentality. Preoccupied as it is with poetic authority, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads expounds at some length the psychological theory that supports it. The poet’s capacity to speak intelligibly to others derives from his observing the ‘general’ laws of the mind:€‘thoughts’ are the means by which our current ‘influxes of feeling’ are ‘modified and directed’, but are also ‘the representatives of all our past feelings’, and it is ‘by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other [that] we discover what is really important to men’ (Gill 2000:€598). The innumerable layerings of thought upon feeling constitute ‘general representatives’, and these in turn ensure that the poet himself becomes a representative figure, whose every emotion ‘will be connected with important subjects’ (Gill 2000:€598). Representativeness is placed at the heart of a subjective art-form. The beauty of the system, for Wordsworth’s poetry, is that it combines a necessarily general psychology with an equally individual set of results. Its weakness, for Wordsworth’s critics, is on the contrary that the poet’s appeal to ‘Moods of [His] Own Mind’ appears arbitrary, his choice of subjects ‘uninteresting’ and his ‘associations’ about them ‘forced, strained, and unnatural’.23 The tension remains however:€ compare for instance the question posed by Wordsworth’s Fenwick Note to the Ode:€‘Who has not felt the same aspirations as regards the world of his own mind?’ with his January 1815 letter to Catherine Clarkson on the same:€‘A Reader who has not a vivid recollection of these feelings having existed in his mind cannot understand that poem’ (Wordsworth 1970:€189). 23 All three quotations refer to Poems, in Two Volumes (1807):€Wordsworth’s subheading to a group of thirteen works in vol. II; Robert Southey to Anna Seward, December 1807 (quoted, E. Smith 1932:€84); Francis Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review (Jeffrey 1807:€218). 22

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That antagonistic response to Wordsworth was fixed by the Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), which were read and reviewed in light of the theory provided by the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The comparison of the two publications had been deliberately encouraged, in that the title page of the 1807 Poems advertised that they were ‘By William Wordsworth, Author of The Lyrical Ballads’, and the printer had been instructed that the volumes themselves were ‘to be presented uniform with the Lyrical Ballads’ (quoted by Jones, Wordsworth 1987:€ x). According to Patrick Cheney, ‘a “life” becomes a “career” when a writer can be seen to plot his time on earth through a sequence of literary works that stage both his and the work’s development’.24 Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1800) and Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) are self-consciously the staging-posts of Wordsworth’s early and middle career. It is at this period, too, that the relationship between the ‘representative’ and the ‘peculiar’ Wordsworths is at its most tense or intense. One rather surprising aspect of that relationship, and one which may be of special interest in a study tracing the literary career from its Classical roots, involves the particular use that Wordsworth makes of Latin sources. The career-making volumes of 1800 and of 1807 are identified as such by means of Classical devices. Subsequent to the jointly authored and anonymously published Lyrical Ballads (1798), the first and second major publications of Wordsworth’s solo career are graced by Latin epigraphs. Few literary conventions are as career-minded as the epigraph; and Latin, at least in the age of Wordsworth, is the language of public announcement. In 1800€– and again in the 1802 and 1805 editions€– the title pages of Lyrical Ballads bore the words ‘Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum!’ Only in 1898 was the source of the epigraph traced, to a piece by John Selden reproduced in Anderson’s British Poets.25 The Latin text from which he in turn had quoted was tracked down as late as 1980;26 but its transmission through Selden, a seventeenth-century jurist, has lent credit to the identification of Papinian with the third-century Roman lawyer Aemilius Papinianus. An alternative candidate has recently been proposed, by David Chandler, in the shape of Papinius Statius, the Latin poet of the Silver Age who had come to be ‘associated with an elaborate,

Cheney 2002a:€8. Foreword prefixed by Selden to Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (Wordsworth and Coleridge 1898:€lix). 26 To a verse epistle by a sixteenth-century Dutch writer named Jan Dousa the Elder (Binns 1980:€223). 24 25

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mannered style of writing’.27 H. W. Garrod had already plausibly suggested that the Papinian in question would be a Popean, or ‘hanger-on of the school of Pope’;28 and, given that the periodicals, those arbiters of a largely Augustan contemporary taste, often had lawyers among their reviewers, it is conceivable that in the minds of Wordsworth and Coleridge at least there was a deliberate connection to be drawn between the two Classical faces of Papinian. The epigraph has been variously translated, ‘How absolutely not after your liking, O learned jurist!’, ‘absolutely worthless in comparison with your genius, Papinian!’, and ‘worthless and insignificant according to your taste, Papinian!’.29 However it is rendered, and whatever its antecedents, this title-page exclamation demands attention. It is the mark of the avant-garde artist, just as the Preface is his manifesto, and with its exclamatory punctuation (think of Look! We Have Come Through!) abruptly and intentionally utters a challenge to the reader. Like other consciously modern art movements since, Lyrical Ballads aims to attract and repel in equal measure. In 1800, ‘Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum!’ excites curiosity in those who dare and inspires dislike in those whom propriety forbids. There is considerable irony in the fact that a learned language is used to frame a work which addresses itself to ‘real language’ in ‘rustic life’; but the intention is at once to shock and to influence an educated reading public. In 1807, by contrast, a very different note is struck. The title pages of Poems, in Two Volumes feature these lines from ‘Culex’, a poem traditionally thought to be Virgil’s, Posterius graviore sono tibi Musa loquetur / Nostra:€dabunt cum securos mihi tempora fructus, or, ‘Hereafter shall our Muse speak to thee in deeper tones, when the seasons yield me their fruits in peace’ (Wordsworth 1987:€ xv). This epigraph was originally to have had a gloss in an Advertisement which sought to place the ‘short Poems, of which these Volumes consist’ in the context ‘of a work of length and labour’ not yet completed (Wordsworth 1987:€145). Written while Coleridge was staying with the Wordsworths during their residence at Coleorton, the Advertisement was clearly a response to the renewed pressure he was exerting on Wordsworth to abandon ‘small pieces’30 and Chandler 2002:€ 35. Chandler 2002:€ 40 n. 4 summarizes the argument between scholars over whether or not ‘Papinian’ is also a coterie joke on the part of Wordsworth and Coleridge against the Scottish lawyer Sir James Mackintosh€– a private reference first mooted by Hutchinson. 28 Garrod 1923:€152. 29 Hutchinson in Wordsworth and Coleridge 1898:€ lix; Mason in Wordsworth and Coleridge 1992:€95. 30 Wordsworth to Scott, Wordsworth 1969:€96. 27

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return to the philosophic epic that they both regarded as his true poetic destiny. By allusion if not by name, the Advertisement referred to the unfinished business of The Recluse and to the epic-derived judgement of poetic achievement that had been a standing reproach to Wordsworth since at least 1803.31 The Advertisement seems to have been set up in proof but then deleted, while the epigraph from ‘Culex’, which was not in the printer’s manuscript, was inserted at proof stage instead (Wordsworth 1987:€145, xii). This choice of epigraph, it might be said, also contrives to tell the story of the poet’s career, but from an impersonal point of view. The Muse that ‘Hereafter shall … speak to thee in deeper tones’ notifies the reader that there are greater works to come, that the poet is versed in the hierarchy of poetic genres, and that he labours within the long shadow that is cast by epic example. Although the Virgilian lines are quoted from the original, readers of Latin could be relied upon to know both that they have an English version by Spenser, ‘Virgil’s Gnat’,32 and that the Classical shorthand for career progression is the ‘rota Vergiliana or Wheel of Virgil’, whereby the writer ‘progressively matur[es] from lower to higher forms along a temporal life span’.33 In this brief text, then, Wordsworth alludes to the entire Classical structure of the poetic career and to his own lineation within the epic tradition that begins with Virgil and is descended in English through Spenser and Milton. The epigraphs of the 1800 and 1807 publications are distinct career markers. In 1800, the poet claims to be ahead of his time, in 1807 he appears to be marking time. While the one gives notice of arrival, the other gives promise of more to come. In the first, the poet bursts upon the literary scene; in the second, he craves his audience’s patience. The first is a challenge to literary orthodoxy; the second an apology for poetry, or poetry of a particular kind. David Ginsberg has allocated the genre of the shorter 1807 Poems to ‘the ancient rhetorical tradition of “adoxography,” or the praise of “things without honor.”’34 That hardly reflects the ‘true pleasure’ Wordsworth took in these works (Wordsworth 1969:€96), Viz. Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, early 1804, echoing explicit criticism voiced in October 1803 by Coleridge:€ ‘I have great things in meditation, but as yet I have only been doing little ones’ (Wordsworth 1967:€436)€– a letter which goes on to mention his attempt at three long and ambitious works, later known as The Prelude, The Recluse and The Excursion. 32 The Spenserian link is explicit in Pelion and Ossa€– a poem Wordsworth cancelled in proof from Poems (1807), along with a note identifying its reference to Virgil’s Gnat 21–4 (Wordsworth 1987:€183). 33 Cheney 2002a:€7–8; and discussed in the present volume by Maggie Kilgour. 34 Ginsberg 1995:€112. See also Curran 1986:€234–53. 31

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the weight he attributed to them ‘taken collectively’,35 or the fertile idiosyncrasy of the lyrics themselves, but it does indicate their Classical precedence in the English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which he had been reading, chiefly in Anderson, and which also devoted itself to apparently trivial subjects. In Spenser’s rendering of the Virgilian ‘Culex’, the ‘excuse’ for ‘This Gnats small Poeme’ is ‘that th’ whole history / Is but a jest’, not to be taken in earnest or judged too seriously either (‘Virgil’s Gnat’ 4–6). Wordsworth practises by his epigraph a similar sort of deflection of judgement, while his lyrics find the poet ‘at ease’ among his favourite objects and occupations and content to ‘weave a web of similies’, ‘As is the humour of the game, / While I am gazing’.36 Yet to attend to that strain alone is to under-estimate the selfassertiveness that matches the self-protectiveness or playfulness of these poems. Wordsworth’s daisy with its ‘function apostolical’ lays a weight of Latinate elaborateness upon a feminine rhyme scheme that will not keep within the ostensibly ‘unassuming Common-place’.37 The poet who ‘drink[s] out of an humbler urn / A lowlier pleasure’ is also a virtuoso rhetorician agilely linking ‘high and low’.38 And the volumes are full of select self-images of his performance:€ the butterfly ‘Historian of my Infancy!’ (‘To a Butterfly’ 4), the linnet, ‘Presiding Spirit … perch’d in ecstasies’ (‘The Green Linnet’ 14, 27), the stockdove’s ‘Song, the Song for me!’ (‘O Nightingale! thou surely art’ 20), the cuckoo’s ‘wandering Voice’ whose elusiveness makes the earth itself a poetic or ‘unsubstantial, faery place’ (‘To the Cuckoo’ 4, 31). The daisy, ‘The Poet’s darling’,39 and the celandine or ‘Common Pilewort’, his notice of which Wordsworth considered a first, prompted the strongest analogies with his own wayward poetic progress: Thou wilt be more belov’d by men In times to come; thou not in vain Art Nature’s Favorite.

‘To the Daisy’, ‘In youth’, 78–80

Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807, referring specifically to the ‘Moods of My Own Mind’ section, and already through the Beaumonts conscious that the 1807 Poems are fated to appear ‘very trifling … to many’, but asking if, ‘taken collectively’, they do not address a ‘subject eminently poetical, viz., the interest which objects in nature derive from the predominance of certain affections more or less permanent, more or less capable of salutary renewal in the mind of the being contemplating these objects? This is poetic, and essentially poetic, and why? because it is creative’ (Wordsworth and Wordsworth 1969:€147). The career move of taking a collective or ‘ensemble’ view of a poet’s work is noted by Lipking 1981:€70. 36 ‘To the Daisy’, ‘With little here’, 10, 15–16. 37 ‘To the Same Flower’, ‘Bright Flower’, 23; ‘To the Daisy’, ‘With little here’, 5. 38 ‘To the Daisy’, ‘In youth’, 51–2; ‘To the Small Celandine’, 20. 39 ‘To the Daisy’, ‘In youth’, 32. 35

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Prophet of delight and mirth, Scorn’d and slighted upon earth! Herald of a mighty band, Of a joyous train ensuing, Singing at my heart’s command, In the lanes my thoughts pursuing, I will sing …

‘To the Small Celandine’, 57–63

The fuller complexity of the covert ambitiousness of Poems, in Two Volumes emerges only with the very last poem of the collection, the ‘Ode’ (later titled ‘Ode:€Intimations of Immortality’), and in the Latin Â�epigraph that was affixed to it. Paulo majora canamus, ‘Let us sing a loftier strain’,40 is taken from the invocation to the Muses of Sicily or pastoral at the opening of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, which prophesies, in the birth of a wondrous child, a future ruler over a new golden age. The immortality glimpsed in Wordsworth’s poem is very much harder won;41 but the odic epigraph, which stands on a page of its own, makes for an answering voice to the epigraph on the title page, Virgil countering Virgil (or pseudoVirgil), and relating to it rather as does antistrophe to strophe in the ode form itself. That suggestion of a deliberate counter-voice is corroborated by the fact that this epigraph, too, like the title-page quotation, was added in proof (Wordsworth 1987:€xii). At any event, the Poems that begin by protesting their modesty end on a consciously high note. His inclusion of Virgil’s invocation of poetic power allows Wordsworth to leave off the 1807 volumes with a suggestion of the heights to which he aspires and which his title-page epigraph had foretold. In this limited sense he enacts the promise of his own Poems within the cycle of the poems themselves. By this astonishing feat of Pindaric ode-writing, Wordsworth in mid career masters a form that in the hierarchy of genres is midway between lyric and epic. The latter is a genre which, in one form€ – that of the Coleridge-commissioned encyclopediac Recluse€– he feels himself unable or incompetent to write, but which, in another form€– the Prelude to that philosophical epic€– he has already accomplished in thirteen books. This achievement was hidden from Wordsworth’s contemporaries and would remain so until shortly after his death. The Latin epigraphs to the 1807 volumes both acknowledge and conceal this hidden career. However, the volumes’ reception, combined with their very slow sale, also resulted in a Gill 2000:€714. Wordsworth 1987:€180 prefers ‘Let us sing of somewhat more exalted things’. See Manning 1983:€526–40 for a fine discussion of the ‘Ode’ in relation to its different epigraphs in 1807 and 1815.

40 41

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profound career break. The break in the career is twofold:€Wordsworth was dissuaded from publishing anything further until 1814, a seven-year silence; and he was persuaded into a continuous revision of his earlier work in the direction of a less ‘peculiar’ style, a trajectory that has been described as a ‘regression’ to Classicism42 and has traditionally been summarised as ‘Wordsworth’s anti-climax’.43 The broken career is the public shape that Wordsworth’s peculiarity takes. Wordsworth criticism began by taking sides in this matter, and as often as not has gone on doing so ever since. Until quite recently, there has been an academy-led interest in the ‘professional’ career, the poetry in its public relations to law, contract, copyright, economics, cultural production, or to the Victorian age in which it came to prominence. But it was the hidden career, the performances Wordsworth did not publish and which have since been painstakingly edited, that occupied much of the later twentieth century’s estimate of his writing. This hidden career made him as exemplary a figure as, for different reasons, he was to the Victorians and moderns. Each critical era, perhaps, makes a career in its own image. For Mill, or Arnold, Wordsworth was a salvational force, who showed a path back from alienation to psychic and emotional health. For A. C. Bradley at the start of the twentieth century, Wordsworth was on the contrary a means of seeking out alienation, if by that was meant the power ‘to dispense with custom and surroundings’ in order to ‘startle and confuse with intimations of infinity’.44 In this broadly idealist tradition of criticism, anti-climax, like other sorts of Wordsworthian deprivation, is no simple failure but rather the pre-condition of a ‘peculiar’ and solitary greatness. Hartman 1987:€ 93. Kneale 1999:€ 4–6 offers a useful summary of the critical literature on Wordsworth’s Classicism, on which see further Harding 1995. Sperry 1935. 44 Bradley 1909:€144; cf. 101:€Wordsworth’s ‘poetic experience’ is ‘original, and something more … it is, for good or evil or both, peculiar’. 42 43

E pi l o gu e

Inventing a life€–€a personal view of literary careers Lawrence Lipking There is an old story about an analytic philosopher who became Â�exasperated with the shocking neglect of history in his field. He decided to give a lecture on the Meaning of Truth, and prefaced it by saying that, this time, he would go back to the very origins of the problem. Then the Â�lecture proper began:€‘In 1910 Bertrand Russell …’ A part of me finds that story quite sympathetic. Reflecting on the scholarly field of literary careers, I might follow the same route back to the very origins of the problem. The study of poetic careers began one January day in 1981, in Santa Barbara, California, when I gave a talk that drew on my forthcoming book The Life of the Poet, and that evening took part in an informal seminar where Richard Helgerson described his work in progress on laureate poets. Together we made history that day€– though no one then seemed to notice. Eventually our ranks would swell and others would join the conversation, until a whole new discourse was born.1 Or so goes my story, which seems as plausible as most that scholars tell about their own importance. But even in a personal view, that history might be just a bit self-Â�serving. Perhaps one ought to go back a little€– say three millennia or so. Instead of starting in Santa Barbara, then, the story would begin on the mountain This essay is dedicated to the memory of Richard Helgerson. In his introduction to European Literary Careers (Cheney 2002a:€4), Patrick Cheney credits The Life of the Poet (Lipking 1981) and Self-Crowned Laureates (Helgerson 1983) as twin founders of the field. Cheney’s account of this joint ‘invention’ prompted a correspondence in which I elaborated many of the ideas and recollections that inform this paper; I am grateful for his interest and suggestions. In Self-Crowned Laureates, Helgerson suggests that the two books are ‘complementary accounts of the same phenomenon’:€‘He emphasizes the individual poetic utterance, the parole; I emphasize the literary system, the langue’ (Helgerson 1983:€153 n.). A fuller chronicle of modern career criticism would have to mention many more pioneers. For instance, as early as 1979 Wayne C. Booth identified ‘career-authors’ as one of the five main types of authorship (writers, dramatized authors, implied authors, career-authors, and public characters) and observed that:€‘Some authors … work as hard at planning the trajectory of their artistic careers as they work at their actual writing’ (Booth 1979:€270–1).

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of Helicon. It was there that the shepherd Hesiod, while quietly minding his lambs, was accosted by Muses, who first insulted his greedy guts and then gave him an olive staff and a voice, so that he could spend the rest of his life singing their praises. That is his story, at least; he tells it in both the Theogony and Works and Days. But one might note a slightly different emphasis in those two poems. The poet of the Theogony might be described as a vates, or less nicely as a ventriloquist’s dummy; involuntarily inspired, he sings whatever words have been put in his mouth. But the Muses have taught the poet of Works and Days to sing for himself; he crosses the sea to compete against other poets at funeral games, and there wins a prize. One theme drives this book:€a man must work hard for a living; and poetry, evidently, is Hesiod’s work. If he has been called to a prophetic vocation, he also has made a career. Two fundamental points emerge from Hesiod’s story (whether or not we believe it).2 The first is the peculiar relation between composing poems and making a living. To put it bluntly, the poetry business has never paid off. Very few poets historically have earned their keep through the poems they create. Other artists at least produce some tangible artefacts to be sold:€a portrait, an urn, a shield. Poets rely on less solid goods, or on the pleasure of those who read and feed them. Hesiod competes for applause, until some other favourite comes along. From a material point of view, the history of literary careers is a subset of the history of patronage, or later of print culture. Hence ‘career criticism’ always involves some tension between the internal shape of a career€ – its movement or progress from one sort of work to another€– and the external conditions that allow an author to function or just stay alive. Many do not stay alive. Hesiod, like Orpheus and Osip Mandelstam and plenty of others, was killed when he fell in with the wrong crowd. The second point is the strange disparity between two versions of the poet, as inspired bard or as master artist€ – Virgil’s sibyl, or Virgil the craftsman, who each day patiently licks a few lines into shape. How does someone become a poet? Traditionally with a visit from the muse, or today we might say with bi-polar disorder; against one’s will, the rage to compose descends. The ancients knew all about it. In his famous epistle to a young would-be poet, Horace offered prudent advice:€ submit all your writing to some wise critic, then put it away for nine years (Ars 386–9). But The Art of Poetry starts with a crazy painter who mates people with horses, and ends with a crazy poet, cursed with an itch that drives ╇ C. G. Thomas 2005:€88–127 examines contested traditions about Hesiod’s life and work.

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him to rave at passers-by and hang on like a leech till gorged with blood. Evidently most poets are mad. To counter that charge, Horace and legions of other well-endowed craftsmen insist on the dignity of their profession. Spewing verses does not make one a poet, they say; the master of a discipline is always in control. This argument has given much comfort to poets. A career involves rational planning; good training; a logical progress; a sense of the work as a whole or oeuvre. It does not depend on whimsical spirits who strike in the night. No wonder that authors and critics prefer to believe that writing can be a career. Nevertheless, few poets achieve that blessed steady state. A sceptic might view the career ideal as a convenient illusion, a way of imposing some sense of order on the chance inspirations that come and go during a lifetime. In retrospect, a work called The Prelude can crown a project under construction for fifty years; and thus the antechamber becomes the temple. But critics took a long time to see it as anything other than anticlimactic. Nor do the careers of most poets make sense, even posthumously. Virgil’s Wheel set the pattern for only a tiny number of heroes.3 By contrast Wordsworth, in a black moment (he was about to get married), accounted for hundreds, past and to come: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.4

The vast majority of British working-class poets, the ‘children of nature’ from Stephen Duck and Mary Leapor to Robert Bloomfield and John Clare, fall into that track (though not all began in gladness). From this point of view, the prospect of a literary career might seem a fiction foisted on gullible, needy young people. More grandly, successful authors join an exclusive club, restricted to one or two new members each generation. Like other professions, that of the laureate poet engages in a conspiracy against the public, relieving it from any need to pay attention to the less well off or merely talented. The field of career criticism is in this regard an agent of the conspiracy, united against leeches and sibyls. Poetry, we collectively say, can make lives meaningful. And insofar as scholars devote themselves to that discipline, it makes their lives meaningful too. Thus far, however, my survey of the field has centred on poets rather than scholars, as if it were Hesiod and Horace and Petrarch and Wordsworth, rather than modern critics, who invented this discourse. On Virgil’s supposed creation of a model career, see Theodorakopoulos 1997. ‘Resolution and Independence’, 48–9 (Gill 2000:€262).

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That emphasis is quite intentional; for I do think that career criticism first belonged to poets. As The Life of the Poet argues, ‘it is through rereading their own work, discovering the hidden meanings sown by their younger selves, that poets grow’ (Lipking 1981:€xiii), and such acts of interpretation also shape the paths they follow to the end. The role of scholars is therefore recreative; we try to understand careers as poets once did, and to retrace their steps. Much modern theory has been contemptuous of authors’ selfunderstandings or conscious intentions. Randall Jarrell once ridiculed critics who do not care what poets say about poems:€‘if a pig wandered up to you during a bacon-judging contest, you would say impatiently, “Go away, pig! What do you know about bacon?”’ (Jarrell 1953:€66–67). But as René Wellek pointed out, ‘this is literally true of the pig. It does not know anything about bacon’ and could not appraise it. One would not make an elephant Professor of Zoology, Wellek concludes (Wellek 1967:€100). Since then many critics have gone much further; like vegans, they would never touch bacon and speak not of pigs but pig-functions. Yet poets, I venture, can be quite articulate about what they bring forth. Through most of western history, at least since Horace, they have been among the most influential critics. In England in particular, they dominate the critical tradition:€Sidney, Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot and so many more. This point is so obvious that I feel embarrassed to make it. Yet lately it has not seemed obvious at all. Poets still write intelligently about poetry and about their careers; reviews of poetry are written almost exclusively by members of the clan. But poet-critics no longer figure in the landscape of critical theory. In the early 1980s I was commissioned to write a piece on ‘Poet-Critics’ for The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume VII:€Modernism and the New Criticism. The piece lay in a drawer for a couple of decades. By the time it was published, in 2000, the subject must have seemed dated, a historical curiosity, like the manual typewriter on which it was composed. Volume VIII of the series, From Formalism to Poststructuralism, had already appeared in 1995, without any hint that poet-critics had existed lately or ever existed, as my piece was able to note (Lipking 2000:€466–7).5 The same is true of recent anthologies, not only of Literary Theory but of Contemporary Literary Criticism€– no poet-critics there. Thus modern criticism, once organized around a revolution in poetics, now dangles from developments in linguistics, Â�philosophy, cultural studies and psychoanalysis. Vol. IX of the series, Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Knellwolf and Norris 2001), also excludes poet-critics.

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Career criticism, by and large, has been more attached to poetics and to the past. One reason, of course, is that so much of it is occupied with Classical texts as well as what, in this context, we still might call the Renaissance and not the Early Modern. Good literary historians cannot abandon their ties to tradition. But perhaps career critics are also accustomed to listening hard to poets. As a matter of fact, The Life of the Poet evolved as an offshoot or cast-off of a much larger manuscript on poetcritics. Eventually some chapters bloated so much that they had to be given a room of their own. The traces of that primal manuscript can still be detected, I think, not only in my book but in some later work on literary careers. The Life of the Poet itself has had two modest careers:€one as an occasional influence on scholars; the other as a master plan for poets. The poets, on the whole, have been more loyal. Regularly a sheaf of poems arrives by mail or email, in which a well-wisher suggests that he or she amazingly fits my guidelines and asks what to do now. I am grateful for the attention, of course, and try not to mention my book’s gloomy dictum, that most poets fail. At any rate, whatever their talents, these readers offer hope and a faith in the future. The idea of a career, for poets, is no curiosity, but still a living enterprise. From my own perspective, as a literary historian and critic rather than a poet, the field of career criticism arose, or perhaps resumed, as a response to two contrary movements in the 1960s and 70s. One might call them historicism and anti-historicism. Anti-historicists included both formalists and structuralists, as well as early poststructuralists; or as we called them then, New Critics and deconstructionists (those labels now seem quaint). What all these varying schools shared, despite their dramatic differences, was an effort to read texts divorced from stories about authorial intention or historical contexts. New Critics developed techniques to analyse anonymous poems€– poems, that is, reduced to I. A. Richards’ ‘protoÂ�cols’, discussed without reference to names and dates and origins and footnote information (Richards 1929). Structuralists and poststructuralists developed techniques to analyse poems as dehumanized pieces of language, under Heidegger’s slogan ‘Die Sprache spricht, nicht der Mensch’ (apparently the agent who spoke for National Socialism in the 1930s was not a person but language itself).6 Many of these close readings were technically brilliant. But their triumphs were won at the cost of the many questions they did not ask:€ not only questions about what authors had 6

Heidegger’s lectures on language, Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959), have been translated by Peter Hertz (Heidegger 1971).

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meant but also questions about the worlds and times and minds through which poems pass. The cleverest readings of Cleanth Brooks and Roman Jakobson and Paul de Man often left me hungry. Like many others, I wanted readings that were saturated€ – alive not only to the intricacies of language and form but also to the situations and contexts that are so deeply woven into any kind of writing. History is not external to poems; it leaves its mark in every thread of the fabric. Yet historicism did not seem to be the answer. The critique that antihistoricists had mounted€ – that literary scholarship had long been in thrall to a literal-minded philology, preoccupied with source materÂ�ials and biographical details€ – still rang true in the 1960s. When Roland Barthes accused academic criticism of ‘a kind of analogical determinism, according to which the details of a given work must resemble the details of the author’s life’, etc.,7 he may have been unfair, but he did describe the ideology behind much of my own graduate training. Nor did a broader historicism, which interpreted individual works as expressions of the thought of their time€– Courtly Love; the Elizabethan World Picture; the Mirror and the Lamp; the Revolt of the Masses€– escape from similar charges of determinism. Specific authors and texts always slipped through the mesh. Some of the great philologists, such as Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius and Leo Spitzer, undoubtedly managed to combine immense historical learning with acute and refined close readings. But they were rare, and the culture that nourished them had already broken apart. When P. O. Kristeller looked back on his career, he compared it to the ride across Lake Constance; the ice that sustained him had melted (Kristeller 1990). A new historicism was called for. And of course it soon came. In an essay written in 1984, ‘Life, Death, and Other Theories’, I associated Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) with Self-Crowned Laureates and The Life of the Poet as books that redefined the author by conceiving identity as the scenario for a programme of action, within the social and historical circumstances that enabled a possible self (Lipking 1985:€188). Perhaps that was too optimistic. New historicist readings often turned out to be no less deterministic than the old. But at their best they did provide new ways of looking at careers and interrogating the texts and contexts that shaped them. Some earlier critical and scholarly works also went into my personal habits of thinking about careers. One was W. Jackson Bate’s very moving biography, John Keats (1963). That book, along with The Burden of ╇ Barthes 1971:€433; originally published in 1963.

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the Past and the English Poet (1970), and to some extent Bate’s anthology Criticism:€The Major Texts and his books on Johnson and Coleridge, examined the lifework of authors in terms of two questions that no ambitious writer could keep from asking:€what has been done? what is there left to do? Those questions have haunted me too. Taken seriously, they rearrange the history of literature as a series of projects, in which each new age or writer responds to the past by gathering in what has been done and charting a new direction. That view of literary history is not altogether novel; to some extent it had been anticipated, for instance, by one of my own teachers, M. H. Abrams. But career criticism has found fresh ways to explore it. When Harold Bloom dramatically and violently recast Bate’s questions, in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), he made the history of poetry intensely personal€ – a series of agons, not a succession. Some reviewers of The Life of the Poet suspected that Bloom had influenced me. I do not think so; nor am I conscious of feeling anxious about it. But like everyone who ponders the struggles of poets, both of us do take up again the burden of the past. My own work, along with that of most later career critics, departs from both Bate’s and Bloom’s in three crucial, interrelated aspects. The first is their devotion to Freud. Bate admires his timeless insights into a universal human nature, akin to Samuel Johnson’s; heroes such as Johnson, Coleridge and Keats are valuable because they represent ‘most of us’, the driven, grasping, often tormented selves that Freud described as the human condition. Bloom embraces and generalizes the Oedipus Complex; in his view we suffer most because we have not created ourselves, and all strong writers must forge original selves, even at the cost of killing their fathers (Bloom himself has killed many critical fathers, not excluding Yahweh the Creator). These Freuds are not my guide. I do not believe that his wisdom is timeless, nor does patricide appeal much to me (as I once argued, Oedipus did not want to kill his father and marry his mother; the problem that rules his life is that, abandoned at birth, he does not know who he is (Lipking 1988:€ 19–20)). Insofar as Freud does cast light on literary careers, his ideas seem most useful in Erik Erikson’s versions of identity and the life cycle, which draw on the existential account of life as a series of projects; the life of the poet might be a project either for wholeness or death.8 My second departure from Bate and Bloom concerns their investment in greatness. Bate sinks himself so deeply into his heroes that their causes ╇ E. H. Erikson 1959. On life as a project for death, see Jaspers 1955.

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become his own€– or vice-versa. However inspiring, these identifications tend to shut out rival views or ‘minor’ poets and critics. Bloom famously favours ‘strong misreadings’ over the craven submission to others that scars poetic and academic correctness; only the strong will survive. This homage to genius certainly simplifies the study of careers; for instance, one can pass directly from Milton to Blake and Wordsworth without having to pause at Pope or Thomson or Gray or Cowper or Charlotte Smith. Yet sometimes greatness itself must bow to the creatures it has excluded. (Virtually every great male poet has needed to borrow, at some point in his career, an abandoned woman’s voice (Lipking 1988:€128–9).) As all of us know from our own lives, deep influence can flow from the humblest sources. Nor should we read history only by flashes of lightning. And this reaction spurs my third departure from Bate and Bloom:€the need to repair their historical oversimplifications. Like many Romanticists, they tend to divide the story of literature into two halves, Before and After, or as in the title of one of Bate’s books, From Classic to Romantic (1946)€– the Great Divide of 1789 or 1798. The spirit of revolution, a revolution in poetic as well as political visions, thus marks a decisive turning point in human affairs€ – not least, by positing that there can be such turning points, when everything changes, including human nature (pace Johnson and Freud). That story places Milton in Eden, the world before the Flood. But Renaissance scholars might well put him into the midst of the Flood, the counter-counter-Reformation that forced a poet to invent his own career track. Indeed, even Dante had to invent the pattern of his career (Ascoli 2008). The life of the poet has never been untroubled. Hence part of the attraction of career criticism, for me and many other literary historians, has been the opportunity it offers to watch the constantly shifting historical and cultural moments that entwine with each author’s effort to make a life and lifework. From the standpoint of the individual artist, every era has a potential for revolution; we all live in times of unsettling changes and hopeful or menacing futures. Young authors always stand at a crossroads, choosing a path whose end cannot yet be seen. Poetic breakthroughs, The Life of the Poet argues, often occur at the critical juncture when ‘the poet realizes that his own personal history, reflected in his poems, coincides with the universal spiritual history of mankind’ (Lipking 1981:€ 18). For Dante, he and Italy have reached the point when the secular and spiritual Romes must come back together; for Blake, the New Jerusalem is born in London and himself; for Yeats, the wheel of history has come round

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as Anima Hominis enters Anima Mundi; for Whitman, America and the great American poem suddenly seem identical with his own coming of age; and Anna Akhmatova takes on the burden of preserving the memory of a silenced Russia in her poems. Each of these stories is different; history, despite Yeats’s gyres, does not repeat itself. But telling such stories allows the poet to fabricate a historical vision in which he or she will be, if not the unacknowledged legislator of mankind, at least its acknowledged seer. Then scholars follow, unwinding the path, and interpreting the poet in terms of history, and history in terms of the poet. In recent decades, those histories have usually been shaped according to national interests. Career criticism, by and large, has moved in the track of Helgerson, from self-crowned laureates to forms of nationhood (Helgerson 1992).9 There is a good historical reason for this:€ from the beginning, the histories of literature served patriotic causes. In my first book, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (1970), a chapter on the uses of literary history concludes that the first histories of English poetry were written to affirm a national identity and to define the superiority of the national character. The idea seemed novel to some scholars then, but looks like a commonplace four decades later. Some years ago, when the editor of the eighteenth-century volume of The New Cambridge History of English Literature commissioned me to write its essay on criticism, he supplied a title:€‘Literary Criticism and the Rise of National Literary History’. I do not think that Alexander Pope would have approved of that conjunction; his Essay on Criticism mocks British self-congratulation, and he never wrote his prospective epic Brutus, on the origins of Britain’s national ideals, because (he told Joseph Spence) ‘I did not care for living always in boiling water’.10 Most poets prefer to separate their careers from the party lines of patriotism. But the subordination of criticism as poets would like to think of it, in service to poems, to a mode of national history, in service to politics, has been confirmed by many recent articles and books. I took the assignment; the essay joined the consensus and did its duty (Lipking 2005). The identification of poetic careers with national interests is not something new; it might be traced back to King David or Homer, if not to Enheduanna of Ur (the first poet whose name we know (Hallo and van Helgerson’s contributions to career criticism deserve an essay of their own. A Sonnet from Carthage:€Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe (Helgerson 2007), published less than a year before his death in April 2008, exemplifies his remarkable ability to found an original literary history on the fine-grained close reading of one particular author. 10 Spence 1966:€vol. I:€134. ╇ 9

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Dijk 1968)). But its full potential depends, of course, on the rise of the modern nation-state, over which poets often preside as emblems or guardian angels. The phenomenon is especially clear in nations that struggle for a place in the world. In Britain the question of whether Shakespeare should claim the title of national poet, in competition with Chaucer, Spenser and Milton, provokes some interesting arguments, among them issues of what is the nation and what is a poet. Do playwrights qualify? Is the nation Great Britain or England? But such questions hardly arise in Portugal and Poland. Luis Vaz de Camões towers over Portuguese literature and history, just as his statues stand watch over Lisbon. Adam Mickiewicz represents the soul of Poland as well as its story. It is not only that Os Lusíadas and Pan Tadeusz are great poems about the making and breaking of nations, or that both poets had long and distinguished careers. It is also that each poet equates his own strivings with those of his native land€– most famously in the words Camões wrote from his deathbed:€‘All will see that my country was so dear to me that I was content to die not only in her but with her’ (later that year, 1580, Portugal would be swallowed by Spain). Nor is it coincidental that both poems were written in exile:€Os Lusíadas in the Far Eastern reaches of the Portuguese empire, Pan Tadeusz in Paris, where Chopin, already the national composer of Poland, wrote polonaises and ballades inspired by Mickiewicz. If nations are best understood as imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson argues, then no one imagines them better than exiles, whose dreams of community are uninterrupted by the confusion of the actual country, with all its local frictions (Anderson 1991). Thus displaced poets keep faith with their dreams. Even in times when those nations had ceased to exist€– when Portugal was a province of Castile, and Poland a spoil of Russia, Germany and Austria€– the national poems preserved them. Indeed, some lovers of poems and country might feel that such poems were the nation. Career critics, however, might bring a somewhat different perspective. Perhaps the sense of exile in such poems, which culminate long careers, is internal as well as external; that is, the expression of a personal estrangement from some of the sources of national pride. The glory of Portugal lies in the past, according to Os Lusíadas. At present it wallows in greed and narrow self-interest, reflected not least by the inattention it pays to its starving poets. Many readers think that the best parts of the poem, as in Paradise Lost, are those in which the poet speaks directly in his own voice, lamenting the belatedness and afflictions that keep him apart from the bygone visions his epic unfolds, when men and gods talked together. The real nation has not lived up to its dreams, and he has been

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left stranded on a farther shore. But the poet may be revealing a still darker secret:€a flaw at the heart of the nation. It was not only enemies who sapped the strength of Portugal; her own imperial ambitions both raised and doomed her. Mickiewicz never published the epilogue he drafted for Pan Tadeusz, but there he makes one undercurrent of the poem into something personal and explicit:€his Poland is a fairytale or land of childhood, created in part to balance the exile’s self-hatred. Can anyone live in that fairyland? Just before the end of the poem, when everyone claps to the sound of the national anthem, ‘Poland is not yet dead’, it is Jankiel, an ancient Jew, who plays the song on his dulcimer and draws the patriotic moral:€Poland awaits its saviour as the Jews their Messiah. Love and irony are both thick in the air (within the world of the poem, the moment will forever be 1812, when Napoleon and his Polish allies are poised to join forces to conquer Russia and set Poland free forever). But the special insight of the poet in 1834 is that his nation exists in memory alone, where he invents a community healed of its real tensions and fissures.11 There, at least, the Jews will be converted. Rather than being the nation, therefore, the poem contrives a substitute nation, not unlike Zion.12 Poetry, rather than people, will have the last word. But poetry also has its own logic, which often differs from the ways of nations. The integrity of that internal poetic logic cannot be ignored by those who study careers. Each major poet is of course unique, not only because of the circumstances that shape him or her but also because of his or her special gifts. Yet poetic careers rehearse the same stories again and again. From one point of view, Camões and Mickiewicz have nothing in common€– no nation or language or background or genre or time. And yet their achievements, and even despairs, coalesce in their lives as poets. This was the sort of puzzle I tried to address€– if hardly to solve€– in The Life of the Poet. But most of the pieces of that larger picture have yet to be filled in. One reason, obviously, is specialization. Career critics believe in reading a poet’s lifework as a whole, and doing justice to even one poet’s total achievement can be the work of a lifetime. Camões and Mickiewicz€– and Ovid and Dante and Milton and hundreds of others€– are fields in themselves, not merely parts of a field. A modern reader will surely notice two glaring contradictions in this picture of an ideal Polish community:€the setting is a village in Lithuania, which is reckoned the heart of Poland; and the plot is driven by a brutal feud between local factions. 12 In his great poem of exile ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’, Camões, like Mickiewicz, specifically associates his distant homeland with Zion. 11

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Nor has the recent expansion, or rather explosion, of canons helped to build bridges across the frontiers of global specialization. In the 1960s a group of literary scholars in the former, always imperilled Czechoslovakia collaborated on a textbook, The World of Literature, intended to teach the history and principles of literature to every gymnasium student. The first volume of this text was published in 1967, but the authorities quickly suppressed it, on the eve of Prague Spring; few copies survive (Striedter 1989:€288). That may have been the last fling for the ideal of world literature. Moreover, comparative literature, as it used to be practised, has also gone out of style. Literature now seems too diverse for Northrop Frye’s anatomies or other attempts at comprehensive systems. Perhaps the word ‘literature’ itself has regressed from its modern sense of ‘writing of permanent worth’ to its older inclusion of any writing at all. In similar fashion, the title of poet might no longer be honorific but simply a term for any writer of verses. If that is so, then the life of the poet, as the sign of a special career or vocation, must yield to the multiple, undefinable lives of the poets. That takes me back to where I once began. ‘We have heard too much about the lives of the poets’, the first sentence of The Life of the Poet, hazards a little inside joke, since my previous book had wrapped up with Johnson’s Lives. The itch to gossip, or to pry into what writers do when they are at home, can deflect attention from what they write (Johnson himself did not write lives, of course, but biographical and critical prefaces to a collection of poems). Most biographies of writers fail at the crucial task of shedding light on the work. What we need instead, I argued, is studies of the life that gets into poems; of Dante within the Commedia, converting his experience into vision. That argument still seems persuasive to me. But it will never be easy to carry out. Johnson’s own life as an author exemplifies the problems (Lipking 1998). Most people, and many reviewers, would rather read about him€– or about that mythical figure or hero of anecdotes Dr Johnson€– than look at the work that he left. Moreover, Johnson did not lead the life of a poet. It is no accident that his most lasting piece of verse is called The Vanity of Human Wishes. He never claimed to be a major poet who would devote his life to ever greater poems; and though his kind of verse did influence many later poets€– Goldsmith, Crabbe, Landor, Housman, and in recent times Samuel Beckett, Donald Davie, John Wain and Philip Larkin€– that line of influence conspicuously omits the great poetic careerists. Johnson’s verse, quite obviously, is but a small part of his larger life as an author. And even that life might be considered glorified hackwork, shaped not

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by visions of work he wanted to do but by the commissions he took for money. Perhaps that is the real story of any career:€no grand design but only one thing after another. But career critics do not think so. For them€– for us€– the contrast of whole to part, or of a lifework to any piece of it, always seems superficial. The two are not opposed but mutually sustaining. Just as the word ‘life’ can refer to the daily grind experienced by each of us minute by minute, or else to the total shape of everything that each of us has been, so ‘the work’ can refer equally to an individual piece of writing or to a whole corpus. The best critics know how to read those relations. In this respect the field that we are building has expanded the hermeneutic circle. If we can understand the meaning of the whole only through understanding the meaning of each of its parts, and the parts only through a prior sense of the whole, a whole that takes in the full career will also illuminate the details of any particular text. In Gadamer’s terms, the reader questions the text as if it were a ‘Thou’, in dialogue with an ‘I’; so every good reading brings about a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Gadamer 1994:€306–7). The life of the poet thus represents a larger Thou who points to a further horizon. I do not regard this as merely a matter of theory. At its best, career criticism has been far more than an alternate way of writing lives; it has also been the source of deeper and better readings of texts. In an era when close reading has lost its glamour, the study of poetic careers has shown how much remains to be explored. Great poets have made themselves the hard way, line by line, and that is how we must make sense of their lives. To speak for myself, that seems enough work for a lifetime.

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Index

Abrams, M. H. 268 Actaeon 71, 74–6 Actium 43, 44 Aeneas as shepherd 27–9 Akhmatova, A. 221, 295 Alcaeus 48 Alexander the Great 69 Anderson, W. S. 114 Antony 208 Apollonius of Rhodes 29 Appendix Vergiliana 4 [n.9] Apuleius Metamorphoses, 70–8 and metamorphosis 76–8 prologue 77 Archias, A. Licinius 122 Archilochus 44 Aristophanes 2–3 Ascanius 121 Augustus (Octavian) 43–4, 52–4, 67, 69, 183, 200, 208 Barkan, L. 74 Barthes, R. 161, 292 Bate, W. J. 292, 293, 294 Bednarz, J. P. 162 Belsey, C. 162 Blake, W. 294 Bloom, H. 293, 294 Boccaccio 214 Decameron 79–88 De Genealogia Deorum 85 bookburning 7, 62–3, 156, Ch. 10 passim Booth, W. C. 287 Braudy, L. 176 Braund, S. 112 Bristol, M. 165, 167–8 Broch, H. 200 Browne, T. 215 influence on Borges 222 Borges, J. L. 222 ‘La flor de Coleridge’ 222–3

‘El inmortal’ 223–5 Boyle, N. 261 Bradley, A. C. 286 Burrow, C. 12 Burton, R. 215 Butler, S. 124 Callimachus 3, 19, 43, 94–5 Camões, L. V. de 296–7 career criticism 1–2, 164–5, Ch. 16 passim Carthage 25–7 Catullus 137 Chapman, G. 171, 173, 217 Chaucer 10 Cheney, P. 1, 62, 162, 180, 181, 281 Cicero 9, 118–25 and civil war 123–4 historiography 123 Philippics 124 philosophical works 124 poetry 123 speeches 120–2 Cleopatra 65 Coleridge, S. T. on Wordsworth 275, 276 Coolidge, J. S. 172, 184 Cornelia 103–4 cursus honorum 3, 39–40, 51, 65, 103, 119, 133, 175 Cynthia 90–3, 95, 100–1, 104 Dante 9, 38, 63, 294 Commedia 143–4 De Monarchia 144 De Vulgari Eloquentia 141–2 Eclogues 142 and Virgil 140–4 Democritus 114–15 Denham, J. 217 Dido 148–9 Donatus 198, 199 Donne, J. 216

327

328

Index

Dryden, J. 10, 14, 160, Ch. 13 passim Aurang-Zebe 249–50 on Chaucer 252 Don Sebastian 250 Essay of Dramatick Poesie 246–7, 248 Fables Ancient and Modern 218–19, 250–5 on literary inheritance 252 The Spanish Fryar 247 ‘To My Dear Friend Mr Congreve, on his Comedy called The Double-Dealer’ 249 Du Bellay, J. 215 Duncan-Jones, K. 169, 177 Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land 220 on Dryden 243 Erikson, E. 293 Erne, L. 161, 162, 176 Ennius 3–4, 7, 151–2, 210 and Homer 211, 212 and Virgil 212 exile 6, 7 see€also€Ovid, Virgil fame 176 Farquhar, G. 244 Farrell, J. 3–4, 61, 118, 125, 137 Foucault, M. 161, 166 Freud, S. 293 Gadamer, H. G. 299 Gallus, Cornelius 43, 45, 65–70 Gellius 199 genre, hierarchy of 285 Gibson, R. 235 Gifford, G. 204 Giovanni del Virgilio 142 Goethe 15, Ch. 14 passim and classical models 270–1 early success 257 Faust 266–7 Italienische Reise, Ch. 14 passim in Italy, 1786–8, 258–60; in Rome, 260 and Ovid 272–4 and Propertius 271–2 relationships with women 260, 266 Römische Elegien Ch. 14 passim and Virgil 262, 267 in Weimar 258 Greenblatt, S. 161, 165 Greville, F. 204 Griffin, D. 14 Hammond, P. 250 Hazlitt, W. 176

Heaney, S. on Wordsworth 275 Helgerson, R. 13, 164–5, 167, 287, 295 Henderson, J. 127 Herbert, G. 201–3 Hesiod 288 Highet, G. 110 Hollander, J. 35 Horace 7–8, Ch. 2 passim, 288–9 Ars Poetica 56–8 Carmen Saeculare 52 Epistles I 48–52 Epistles II 56–8 Epodes 40–6 and Greek lyric 46–7 on metempsychosis 212 Odes I–III 46–8 Odes IV 52–5 and philosophy 49–50 and Pindar 53–4 on the poet’s fame 54 Satires 40–6, 107 and Virgil 45, 55 intertextuality 163, 172 Jackson, M. P. 162 Jarrell, R. 290 John of Garland 19, 36 Johnson, S. 298–9 on Dryden 245–6 Jonson, B. 216 Volpone 215 Joyce, J. 209 Juvenal 8–9, Ch. 5 passim ancient life of 110 and anger 114–17 personae of 112–13 Satire I 106–7 Kastan, D. S. 161 Kernan, A. 165 Ketchian, S. 221 Kristeller, P. O. 292 Levin, H. 160 Lipking, L. 9, 164, 275 love elegy, Latin 5–6, 266 as anti-career 269 power, theme of 269 Lucan 8 Lucceius, Lucius 122, 123 Lucian 212 Lucilius 4, 40, 44, 107

Index Maecenas 41, 43, 98 Maffeo Vegio 151 Mallarmé, S. 221 Marlowe, Christopher 10, 62 Doctor Faustus 215 Marvell, Andrew 10, 13, 14, Ch. 12 passim Account of Popery and Arbitrary Government 240 and Dryden 234 Flecknoe, An English Priest at Rome 230–2 and Horace 238 An Horatian Ode 228 and Jonson 233 and ‘Lycidas’ 231, 232, 233 and Milton 237, 238 Mr Smirke 240 and Ovid 238, 239, 240 parentage 227 The Rehearsal Transpros’ d 235–7, 238–40 rhyme 235–6 Royalist poetry 227–8 and Tacitus 234 ‘Tom May’s Death’ 229 as tutor 227 and Waller 234 Upon Appleton House 229–30 and Virgil 232 Meres, F. 162, 216 metempsychosis 7, Ch. 11 passim Mickiewicz, A. 296, 297 Milton, John 10, 12–13, 38, Ch. 9 passim Comus 195 ‘Epitaphium Damonis’ 195 ‘Lycidas’ 195 ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough’ 190 and Ovid 183, 184 Paradise Regained 185, 193 Poems, 1645 185 and premature death 195 Samson Agonistes 185, 186–96 and Shakespeare 188–9, 193–4 and Virgil 183–4, 186–7 Moffet, T. 203–4 Montrose, L. 166 Nelson, A. 162 Ovid 6–7, 12, 38, Ch. 3 passim Amores 60–2 and Apuleius 70–8 Ars Amatoria 79 and authority 183 and Boccaccio 79–88 and exile 62–4, 75–7, 181–2

329 Fasti 62 and Gallus 65–70 Heroides 63 Medea 62 Metamorphoses 62, 190–2 and Propertius 89 Remedia Amoris 80, 81–3 Tristia I.3 274 Tristia I.7 206–7, 208 Tristia II 65–9 Tristia III.1 208 Tristia IV.10 64–5, 83–7 and Virgil 59–63, 180–1, 182, 192, 206

Parker, P. 182 Pask, K. 10 patronage 14 Persius 108 persona theory 109–11, 153–4 Petrarch 9, 38, 180 Africa 147–52, 212–14 Bucolicum Carmen 145 and Ennius 151–2 Epistle to Homer 152–3 Epistle to Posterity 145–6 Epistle to Virgil 154–7 laureation 140 and Virgil 145–57 Phaethon 72 Plato 220 Pliny the Elder 126–9, 199 Pliny the Younger 9, 118, 125–37 and Catullus 131–2 and Cicero 133, 134–5 as consul 132 and historiography 132–3 poetry 131–2, 135–7 statue of 129 and Tacitus 134 and the Virgilian career 125–30 poet-critic 290 poet laureate 52, 58 poetry counter-laureate 168–78 language of 276–8 laureate 165, 168, 175 poikilia (generic versatility) 43 Pope, A. 295 Posidonius 122 Propertius 5–6, Ch. 4 passim Book I 90–3 Book II 93–100 Book III 98–9 Book IV 100–4 and epic 97, 100–1

330 Propertius (cont.) and Virgil 99–100 prose genres, ancient 119–20 Proust, M. 220, 221 Pythagoras 210 Quint, D. 179 rationalized author 139 recusatio 6, 19 Richards, I. A. 291 Ronsard, P. de 214 rota Vergiliana 4, 19, 138–9, 158–9, 172, 179, 197–8, 267, 283, 289 Sage, L. 184 satiric career, Ch. 5 passim Scaliger, J. 268 Schiller, F. 271 Shakespeare, William 10–12, 14, Ch. 8 passim As You Like It 173 and fame 177 Henry V 168, 169–77 and Marlowe 173, 175, 177 Merry Wives of Windsor 168 and Ovid 170, 174 Rape of Lucrece 162 Richard II 162 Sonnets 162, 168 Tempest 193–4 Timon of Athens 168 Twelfth Night 215 and Virgil 174 Shakespeare in Love 161 Shelley, P. B. 219 Sherwin-White, A. 131 Sidney, P. 203–5 Silius Italicus 132 Smarr, J. 63 Spenser, Edmund 10, 178, 283, 284 and Chaucer 216–17 Shepheardes Calendar 168, 170, 171, 173 Statius 8 Stevens, W. 221 Tacitus 134 Taylor, G. 171

Index tragicomedy 248 Virgil 4–5, Ch. 1 passim, 166 Aeneid 20–31, 200 ille ego proem 17–18, 197 city, theme of 23–31, 32–3 Culex 282 civil war, theme of 33 Eclogue I 31–7 Eclogue IV 141, 285 Eclogue VI 19 epitaph 17, 154 exile, theme of 22, 36–8 and Gallus 66 Georgics 31–2, 211 and Ovid 59–63 as proto-Christian 143 shade, theme of 35–6, 180 Voltaire 244 Wall, W. 165 Walton, I. 201–2 Wellek, R. 290 Wells, S. 162 Whitman, W. 295 women and the literary career 10 [n.15] Wordsworth, William 10, 15, Ch. 15 passim and classicism 286 and epic 285 ‘Home at Grasmere’ 279 his language 276, 278 Poems, in Two Volumes Ch. 15 passim epigraphs 282–4, 285 relationship to Lyrical Ballads 281 and poetic authority 280 The Prelude 275, 279, 280, 289 The Recluse 283 and subjectivity 279, 280 and Virgil 282, 283, 285 Wordsworth, W. and S. T. Coleridge Lyrical Ballads epigraph 281–2 preface 276, 277 Yeats, W. B. 294 Zwicker, S. 14, 241