Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome

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W R I T I N G , P E R F O R M A N C E , A N D AU T H O R I T Y I N AU G U S TA N ROM E

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Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome M IC HE` L E LOW R I E

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Miche`le Lowrie 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–954567–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Lucas

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Preface This book argues that the power poets attribute to words in Augustan Rome is intimately related to the language they use to describe the representing media. Although interest in the relation of the means of representation to power can be traced to the earliest Roman poetry, the historical crisis of the transition from Republic to Empire opened new avenues for literary production and offered fertile ground for an examination of the modes of cultural production, their respective powers and inadequacies. Literature’s ability to form reality is ﬁgured in this period through the ways literature represents its own media of representation, speciﬁcally in the interaction each work sets up between writing and literal performance modes. The question is what difference the various media make or are thought to make regarding words’ ability to achieve some effect in the world. Roman poets were aware that poetry does not function like ordinary language, and much of Roman poetry is preoccupied with the nature of the gaps between ordinary and poetic language, poetic and political power, what these gaps disable or enable, and the relations between them. An anecdote from Macrobius exempliﬁes the intersection of media and power and demonstrates the breadth of this concern within elite society. He tells of Asinius Pollio’s retort when the future Augustus targeted him with scurrilous verse: Pollio, cum fescenninos in eum Augustus scripsisset, ait: at ego taceo. non est enim facile in eum scribere qui potest proscribere. (Macrobius 2. 4. 21) (When Augustus had written fescinnine verse against him, Pollio said: ‘But I am silent. For it is not easy to write against one who can proscribe.’)

Pollio contrasts writing (‘scribere’) with real political power (‘proscribere’): when Caesar can kill you with proscription, writing is powerless in comparison. The mot, however, belies its own claim to silence.1 Pollio’s response is ironic, devastating, and oral. Horace describes how such satiric wit circulates: ‘insignis tota cantabitur urbe’ (he’ll be marked and sung all over town, Serm. 2. 1. 46). He ﬁgures a witticism’s repetition as potent song.2 Macrobius’ anecdote, however, reveals that writing is less powerless than ﬁrst appears. 1

Peachin (2007) 119. Wray (2001) 59 notes the difference between this Augustan age response and the possibilities for invective open to Catullus in the late Republic. 2 Muecke ad loc.: ‘the relevant meaning of cantare is “to repeat over and over again”’ (with parallels).

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Augustus’ writing (‘scripsisset’) sets the event in motion with apparently harmless verses that nevertheless wound. Moreover, the events are themselves preserved through writing. Pollio was a political maverick who survived the violence of the civil wars with his life and neutrality intact. He wrote tragedy and history, and his name is associated not only with the ﬁrst public library in Rome, but with new practices of recitation. He would have been highly aware of the relation of the representational media to power and of words’ potential violence.3 Abuse operates pragmatically: the words do as intended, namely sting.4 Magic also claims powers to create realities through language in the form of spells. Although Roman literature is drawn to such power, it often shies away. Much poetry neither has nor claims pragmatic ability, which functions more often as a desire-laden fantasm than a potential reality. The Augustan poets yearn for their words to have effects, to bring things into being, but realistically explore poetic potency as a thought experiment and protect themselves from claiming more than they can deliver with numerous distancing techniques.5 Questions are: can literature be used as a means to an end, is it its own end, does it have ends independent of its ostensible use? Abuse poetry’s aesthetic value differs from its pragmatic effect, though both are ends. Charles Martindale (2005) shows that while the aesthetic as a category stands on its own, literature in practice has political implications. Even with poetry that claims a lesser or merely different degree of potency from that of pragmatically effective language, power nevertheless underlies poets’ deﬁnitions of themselves and their medium.6 This study aims to disentangle the different kinds of power Roman poets in the age of Augustus attribute to the various media and to show that a persistent dialectic obtains between literature as living voice and as dead but eternal letter, between pragmatics and representation.

3 Dalzell (1955); Quinn (1982) 128, 158–60. For Pollio’s career as a politician and historian, Zecchini (1982). 4 Wray (2001) presupposes Catullan invective actually hurts and really does perform a poetics of manhood (see comments on the performativity of invective ‘in the strictest Austinian sense’, 179), but Freudenburg (2001) shows the satirists worried about whether they could perform anything but a poetics of incapacity. Henderson (1999) performs his own abuse on the reader while discussing its traditions. 5 Kirk Freudenburg calls my attention to the Babylonian Enuma Elish: ‘to sing the hymn about the victory of Babylon’s god in ordering the word is also to magically (for lack of a better word) produce the ordered world to which the song refers … The hymnic language is factitive.’ Struck (2002) ﬁnds similar ideas in Neoplatonic literary theory: ‘Proclus makes the poet “creative” in an elemental sense of the term. The poet does not reproduce the world in the poem but invokes it and calls it into existence’ (131). Habinek’s (2005c) idea of founding song involves a less direct relation between song and social realities. 6 Ford (2002) 9 articulates the relation between critical notions about poetic production, actual modes of performance, and the technologies of communication.

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In method, I start from literary self-representation and move outwards towards cultural context. Should it be the other way around? There is a temptation in cultural history to elide the extent to which literature is our primary source, to read through poetry as if one could erase tradition, genre, and convention to reach an extra-literary culture, which is then read back into the literature.7 This is an especial danger for Augustan Rome, which suffers from a dearth of contemporary sources about contemporary history. The material record supplies independent evidence, though less than for the later Empire. The majority of our evidence, however, is literary. Furthermore, an underlying assumption of much sociological investigation is that aesthetic production serves economic interests.8 Rather, it produces economic interests.9 People pay for things they value, such as style. Money allows value to circulate without having any intrinsic value of its own, but much social exchange takes place without money. The control of cultural production confers prestige because of the power inherent in aesthetic objects. This power derives from insight combined with compelling form—truth and beauty, if you will. The insights must concern things people care about: sex, religion, politics, the workings of society. The reproduction and production alike of ideologies make them interpretable to those who hold them, and also amenable to critique. To win the culture wars, it is not sufﬁcient to control art economically. You need compelling ideas. At this point, we return to sociological analysis, though of theme rather than strategy. I am more conﬁdent of our ability to interpret representations of, say, gender and class relations than of our ability to interpret the relations themselves. Given that representation actively constitutes culture, I start from literature. One caveat: I examine here elite productions. To study mass culture would require different methods.10 7 Grifﬁn (1985) is to my mind too optimistic about our potential recovery of actual practices from literature, though his point that literature stylizes life holds. Thomas (1988). 8 Lowell Bowditch (2001) reads the poets’ commitment to style as mystiﬁcation; their poses of artistic independence validate dedications to patrons as sincere and obscure economic interests. Although Krostenko (2001) 21–2 recognizes aestheticism’s socio-political value, he sometimes reduces aesthetics to the mere display of wealth (79). Sciarrino (2004a) 354: ‘No amount of evidence as to the elite affection for or intellectual interest in individual poets can contravene the economics underlying elite sponsorship and imitation.’ For critiques of economic reductionism, Murray (1995) and Lowrie (2002b). Martindale (2005) is a powerful defence of the aesthetic against its reduction to economics, politics, or morals, with critiques of Bourdieu (23, 120, 166), Habinek (1998a) (11–12), and important statements of the independence of the aesthetic as a category (24–6 and passim). Adorno (2005) no. 22 warns economic materialists not to throw the cultural baby out with the bathwater. 9 Interesting remarks and bibliography on ‘art’ as something of genuine value versus ‘elitist mystiﬁcation of poetry for the purpose of amassing cultural prestige’ in the development of a critical concept of literature in Ford (2002) 295. 10 Horsfall (2003) and Habinek (2005c) instantiate different approaches: the former meticulously and with scepticism amasses data from various sources as a historian, the latter adopts a cultural studies perspective.

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Over the course of this book, I intertwine formal considerations of the poets’ representations of their modes of production with more theoretical and political questions of the relation of representation to power. My analysis falls into an introductory section and four subsequent parts. Chapter 1, ‘Arma uirumque cano’, starts with the question from which this book arose: why does Vergil begin the Aeneid ‘I sing of arms and the man’ (1. 1) when his actual composition and reception practices entailed writing and reading aloud? The Aeneid identiﬁes itself primarily as song not only because of epic’s traditional afﬁliations, but also because prophecy was closely associated with the divine. By contrast, writing is largely represented as uninterpretable. The Aeneid’s self-deﬁnition arises from a history of valorizing utterance over writing, which appears epistemologically and socially inauthentic in comparison. The Augustan age has a uniﬁed interest in representation, its objects and processes, and Vergil’s privileging of presence is one important paradigm. The rest of the chapter considers production and reception practices and some basic meanings of words, and deﬁnes the project of the book as the ‘how’ over and above the ‘what’ in Augustan Rome. Chapter 2, ‘Some Background’, provides diachronic background material from Callimachus and early Republican poetry to Lucretius and Catullus. I establish the premise that different genres have a primary afﬁliation with either song or writing; however, the other medium asserts itself thematically and cannot be entirely excluded. These topics largely revolve around poetic self-deﬁnition, speciﬁcally poetry’s relation to god, to immortality, and its embodied or disembodied nature, and what it can accomplish pragmatically. These passages establish some parameters for Augustan poetry, although its outlook was more overtly political. The chapter makes a transition to the Augustan period at the end with Horace’s and Vergil’s perspectives on the carmina conuiualia. Part I, ‘Writing, Performance, and Performativity’: Chapter 3, ‘The Performance of Horatian Lyric: The Limits of Reference’ opens with an analysis of the uses and limitations of speech act theory for the interpretation of occasional poetry. The scholarly split over whether Horatian lyric was actually performed is paradigmatic for determining our modern commitments to taking the language of song as literal or metaphoric. Chapter 4, ‘Horatian Lyric and Metaphorical Truths’, considers Horace’s ﬁgurations of his lyric media. ‘At the Limits of Performativity: The Carmen saeculare’ (Ch. 5) is a test case for the relation of literal performance to poetic claims about pragmatic power. Chapter 6, ‘Monument and Festival in Vergil’, examines how Vergil compensates for his undervaluation of writing. The monument and the festival occur in a dynamic relation throughout his corpus, and I argue that ecphrasis

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carries the burden of ideas elsewhere associated with writing in the Aeneid. Chapter 7, ‘Elegy: Overcoming Inability’, mostly considers elegy’s tendency to avow powerlessness; there are wide differences among authors and even within the same corpus in how they represent their genre’s medium and social success. Although sex is the central criterion, praise is also an important preoccupation. Elegy’s historical afﬁliation with epigram remains strong, though various authors in various contexts ﬂirt with or fully appropriate song’s power. Ovid’s transition from elegy to epic becomes especially salient in this context. The development of a more authoritative voice in the Metamorphoses does not obviate a complex deﬁnition of epic’s medium or generic identity. Elegy colours the poem and writing plays a stronger role in it than in the Aeneid. Part II, ‘Performance and the Augustan Literary Epistle’: the Augustan literary epistles are fascinated with semiotic issues and performance media. In ‘Love and Semiotics’ (Ch. 8), Propertius 4. 3 and Ovid’s Heroides are mostly concerned with whether writing succeeds in transmitting the letter’s message. Chapter 9, ‘Beyond Performance Envy’, focuses on how Horace’s Epistle to Augustus discusses the relative merits of different media, especially theatre. Here Horace favours writing. Although he is nostalgic for venerable forms and exalts the connection between choral lyric and the gods, he nevertheless sees himself as a modern who has broken with the past and this entails writing. Chapter 10, ‘De- and Re-contextualization’, analyses Horace’s resistance to recitation, particularly in Epistles 1. 19. Chapter 11, ‘Ovid’s Triumphs in Exile’, shows how Ovid turns the tables on the assumed priority of being present—writing and absence saturate even that pre-eminent spectacle, the triumph. Part III, ‘Writing, Performance, and Politics’: concern for the relation of absence to presence in the different media informs an important complex of Augustan monuments at the northern end of the Campus Martius: the Mausoleum, sundial, ustrinum, Ara Pacis, and Res gestae. Chapter 12, ‘Auctoritas and Representation’, considers the Res gestae as both a written and physical monument where Augustus deﬁnes his own power as auctoritas. I argue this ﬂuid, context-dependent power has a performative basis and examine the relation between the more static medium of representation and the power depicted within. Chapter 13, ‘Occasion and Monument: The Ara Pacis’, returns to the dynamic between festival and monument examined in Vergil (Ch. 3), now in the context of an actual building. Part IV, ‘Reading and the Law’: a number of Augustan poets engage with the law as a rival discourse and judge their own power by contrast; they directly confront Augustus to varying degrees. In Chapter 14, ‘Horse Law and Caesar in Horace, Sermones 2. 1’, Horace shows anxiety about satire’s ability to

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do its job—to lambaste the wicked—because of the restrictive libel laws. He ﬁnds power in the rhetoric of inability: his protest critiques the entrenched hierarchies. In ‘Inscription and Testimony: Propertius 4. 11’ (Ch. 15), I show how the poem presents itself as both speech and inscription, summing up the available media. The exemplum of Cornelia, a citizen facing judgement in the underworld, operates in ways similar to Augustus’s own exemplarity. The book’s argument climaxes in Ovid. The ﬁnal chapter (16), ‘The Pragmatics of Literature’, shows how Tristia 2 and the end of the Metamorphoses counter Augustus’ ability to determine the law and affect people’s lives with poetry’s longer-lasting control of representation. Ovid may suffer in the present because of Augustus’ pragmatic power, but writing, despite its present impotence, has a determinative power for posterity. To avoid repetition, I have broken up my original introduction and distributed it among the sections. The reader with more theoretical interests should read the beginnings of each Part and focus on Chapters 1, 3, 12, and 16. This will give the overall arc of the argument. Close readings of the passages I ﬁnd most productive for individual authors are in the chapters organized accordingly. My principle of selection is the productive interaction of performance with writing. I therefore omit Tibullus, whose commitment to song—beyond even Vergil’s—makes his attitude towards the media exceptionally uniﬁed. Vergil’s Orpheus in Georgics 4 shows song perhaps at its most powerful in Latin literature: it would conquer death literally, not just as a metaphor for poetic immortality, were it not for the failures of the human heart, which undo art’s potential. Orpheus cannot obey Proserpina’s injunction not to look back and therefore loses Eurydice forever. Horace, grieving for Quintilius, chides Vergil for his fantasy about song’s power (Odes 1. 24). Horace gently but realistically reminds Vergil that Orpheus cannot bring him back. Although these passages provide fascinating evidence for the Roman debate about song in this period, they do not overtly discuss alternative media and I mention them here only in passing. There are many other such. Self-representation in the Augustan age, both poetic and political, sets performance and writing into a productive dialectic. Neither term occupies a ﬁxed position: song does not align unequivocally with presence and effectiveness, nor writing with absence and powerlessness, though this conﬁguration is dominant and basic. For the Augustan poets, writing and song are inextricable in that both contribute to the greater problematics of representation; each has different functions enabling different aims. Augustus himself is not content just to be powerful; harnessing representation in the various media, with their various advantages, contributes to his power. The poets not only watch him, but push back.

Acknowledgements Several reviews or articles have been reworked for this book. Minor reworkings are acknowledged ad loc. Substantial points of contact are: ‘Beyond Performance Envy: Horace and the Modern in the Epistle to Augustus’, Rethymnon Classical Studies 1 (2002) 141–71, which is largely reproduced in Ch. 5; three articles, ‘Slander and Horse Law in Horace, Sermones 2.1’, Law and Literature 17 (2005) 405–31, ‘Cornelia’s Exemplum: Form and Ideology in Propertius 4.11’, in G. Liveley and P. Salzman-Mitchell, Latin Elegy and Narratology, Columbus (2008) 163–77, and ‘Reading and the Law in Ovid, Tristia 2’, in E. Horn, B. Menke, and C. Menke (eds.), Literatur als Philosophie—Philosophie als Literatur, Munich (2006) 333–46, all contribute to the book’s ﬁnal chapter. The ﬁrst two are shortened for the book, the last expanded. There is also substantial overlap with ‘Performance and Performativity’, in W. Scheidel and A. Barchiesi, Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, Oxford (forthcominga), which is in some ways a bouillon cube of this book. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. I am the grateful recipient of institutional and collegial assistance. The ACLS/Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship Program for Recently Tenured Scholars and the Institute for Advanced Study enabled me to spend a year devoted to this project. The Burkhardt fellowship furthermore provided funding for a summer examining monuments in Rome. The Warburg-Haus in Hamburg funded a semester abroad. New York University’s sabbatical system has been generous with time. Thanks for reading drafts are owed to Alessandro Barchiesi, Seth Benardete, Joy Connolly, Lowell Edmunds, Laurel Fulkerson, Eva Geulen, Anselm Haverkamp, John Henderson, Nicholas Horsfall, Barbara Kellum, Christina Kraus, Phillip Mitsis, Michael Peachin, Alessandro Schiesaro, and Barbara Vinken. I am grateful to numerous audiences for their response to various parts of this book given as talks: Lowell Edmunds’ Horace seminar at Rutgers, Mae Smethurst’s Horace seminar at the University of Pittsburgh (I single out Jana Adamitis), the audiences at the British Institute for Classical Studies, the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, the Wissenschaftskolleg at the University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder, Princeton University, the University of Arezzo, the University of Crete, the University of Florida at Gainesville, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas, the University of Verona, and my home institution, New York University. I have beneﬁted enormously from Elizabeth Meyer’s rigorous

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critique of the sections on Augustan auctoritas and the Ara Pacis; she has been a model of friendly engagement from a position of disagreement. She has persuaded me on many points, though I would not claim the inverse. Kirk Freudenburg read the typescript in its entirety and provided valuable advice about reorganization as well as a host of lively ad hoc comments. All the above have saved me from many errors, though many surely remain, and no one should be assumed to agree. I owe a special word of thanks to Denis Feeney. Not only has he read or heard multiple drafts, but we have had many lively conversations on the topic over the years. For material assistance, the staff at OUP has been invaluable, most especially Jenny Wagstaffe, Dorothy McCarthy, and Sylvia Jaffrey. My student Danielle La Londe helped read proofs and check references. No amount of thanks will repay my family for their unquestioning support. I thank my parents Joyce and Ernest Lowrie as well as Seth Fagen and Paul Keyser. This book was begun in earnest the year my son Lucas Fagen was born. I dedicate the book to him.

Contents 1. Arma uirumque cano 2. Some Background

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PART I: WRITING, PERFORMANCE, AND PERFORMATIVITY 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The Performance of Horatian Lyric: The Limits of Reference Horatian Lyric and Metaphorical Truths At the Limits of Performativity: The Carmen saeculare Monument and Festival in Vergil Elegy: Overcoming Inability

63 98 123 142 175

PART II: PERFORMANCE AND THE AUGUSTAN LITERARY EPISTLE 8. 9. 10. 11.

Love and Semiotics Beyond Performance Envy: Horace, Epistles 2. 1 De- and Re-contextualization: Horace, Epistles 1. 19 Ovid’s Triumphs in Exile: Representation and Power

215 235 251 259

PART III: WRITING, PERFORMANCE, AND POLITICS 12. Auctoritas and Representation: Augustus’ Res gestae 13. Occasion and Monument: The Ara Pacis

279 309

PART IV: READING AND THE LAW 14. Literature and the Law: Horace, Sermones 2. 1 15. Inscription and Testimony: Propertius 4. 11 16. The Pragmatics of Literature: Ovid

327 349 360

Abbreviations References Index locorum Subject Index

383 388 411 419

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1 Arma uirumque cano La langue Grecque, vraiment harmonieuse et musicale, avoit par ellemeˆme un accent melodieux, il ne falloit qu’y joindre le rythme, pour rendre la de´clamation musicale; ainsi, non-seulement les trage´dies mais toutes le poe´sies e´toient ne´cessairement chante´es; les Poe¨tes disoient avec raison, je chante, au commencement de leurs poemes; formule que les noˆtres ont tre`s-ridiculement conserve´e. (J.-J. Rousseau, ‘Fragmens d’observations sur l’Alceste italien de M. le Chevalier Gluck’, E´crits sur la musique, le langue et le the´aˆtre, Ple´iade 5 (1995) 445)

Perhaps the most famous speech act in Roman literature is the ﬁrst verb of the Aeneid. Despite all the evidence that Vergil wrote,1 he opens his epic with ‘arma virumque cano’ (arms and the man I sing). Rousseau calls this a ridiculous claim. The ﬁgure has been so naturalized, it takes students by surprise if you ask what act Vergil’s utterance denotes. Vergil is not putting melody to words or vice versa, but it is also not ﬁction. He may have composed in writing, but to begin an epic, ‘I write of arms and a man,’ would be literalistic. His representation is entirely subsumed by the poetic act: initiating an epic. An accurate, but unpoetic translation would be: ‘I make an authoritative utterance in the epic tradition that brings into being a story about arms and a man.’ There is no literal word in the vocabulary of poetic composition in Latin that a poet could adopt in a poem in the ﬁrst person to denote this speech act 1 The vita Donati aucti 33 transmits the well-known story that when writing (scriberet) the Georgics, Vergil dictated a number of verses and spent the rest of the day whittling them down to a few. The story about his composing the Aeneid ﬁrst in prose also emphasizes craft, as does the account of the half-lines, left as planks until more solid columns were inserted (34–5). The general word for his composition is scribere (30). I take these accounts not as historical truths, but as part of Roman myths about composition. Lefe`vre (1990: 9–10) accepts them uncritically. Horsfall (1993b) reviews the volume Lefe`vre (1990) is in. For the unreliability of the Vergilian Lives, Horsfall (1995a: 2, 15–24); for Suetonius’ unreliability, Horsfall (1992). Quinn (1982: 152–3): some of the material testiﬁes to practices, whether or not any particular story is historical. The terminology does not clarify whether Vergil wrote or dictated; Horsfall (1995b) emphasizes dictation, McDonnell (1996) elite writing by hand.

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(Lowrie 2009). This verb, cano, is a metaphor that calques the Greek Iø (I sing). It conveys what Volk (2002: 13) calls ‘poetic simultaneity’, namely ‘the illusion that the poem is really only coming into being as it evolves before the readers’ eyes’. This at Rome required a catachresis in the language of song; that is, cano is a metaphor for something for which there is no proper term. It is an ideological rather than a literal truth. We can tell that canere is not the proper word for authoritative utterance without ﬁguration because, unlike carmen, which Horace adopted for satire, it does not occur in contexts such as letter-writing where authoritative utterance is also at issue.2 Although carmen (song) is a related word we can trace back to the Twelve Tables, there it does not mean poetry, but spells or incantation. Even in historical times, song at Rome covers a broader range than poetry (Habinek 2005c). Its oldest meanings are religious (carmen Aruale, carmen Saliare) and juridical (‘law of an awful song’, Livy 1. 26. 6) (Ernout-Meillet: at carmen), and it only comes to mean poetry via song, which applied as much to tunes as to words (Ennius, Annales 519 Skutsch, of trumpets). Canere emerges as a positively evaluated speech act in Latin literature relatively late, precisely during the collapse of the Republic, and became generalized during the Augustan period. It is a powerful ﬁguration that lays claim to discursive power. The claim to song obviously gains for Vergil inscription into the epic tradition with its tremendous authority. Tradition offers a purely literary answer to why Augustan poets represent themselves as singers, and answers of this kind accord with the poetry’s genre: Horace comes across mostly as a singer in the Odes, as a writer in the more prosaic hexameter poetry. Epistles by deﬁnition present themselves primarily as writing. Generic differences are not, however, absolute, and larger issues are at stake. When Helenus advises Aeneas to ask the Sibyl to sing herself, rather than write her oracle on leaves, the issue shifts to poetic interpretability: the wind disturbs the leaves making them unreadable. insanam uatem aspicies, quae rupe sub ima fata canit foliisque notas et nomina mandat. quaecumque in foliis descripsit carmina uirgo digerit in numerum atque antro seclusa relinquit: illa manent immota locis neque ab ordine cedunt. uerum eadem, uerso tenuis cum cardine uentus impulit et teneras turbauit ianua frondes, numquam deinde cauo uolitantia prendere saxo nec reuocare situs aut iungere carmina curat: 2 For the anomaly of carmen for satire, Pierre (2008) 5. I. 1. C. Freudenburg (2006) 143–5 suggests that ‘canas’ at Horace, Serm. 2. 3. 4, might point towards lyric.

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inconsulti abeunt sedemque odere Sibyllae . . . quin adeas uatem precibusque oracula poscas ipsa canat uocemque uolens atque ora resoluat. (Aeneid 3. 443–52, 456–7) (You will see an insane bard, who sings the fates under a crag and consigns the marks and words to leaves. Whatever songs the maiden writes on the leaves, she gathers into a group and leaves apart in a cave. They remain unmoved in their places and do not go out of order. But the same songs, when a slight wind has hit them when the hinge turns and the door has disturbed the tender leaves, she never cares afterwards to catch while they ﬂy around the hollow cave, nor to recall their position, or to join the songs: people go away with questions unanswered and they hate the seat of the Sibyl . . . You rather approach the bard and ask with prayers that she herself sing the oracle and willingly loosen her voice and mouth.)

Vergil’s allegory of reading is unfavourable.3 The text, once produced, remains undisturbed until consulted. Approaching the songs changes their order and the original meaning is lost.4 It could perhaps be recovered, but the Sibyl does not care to do so. The allegory further suggests there is no connection between her engaging in prophecy and any actual question. People consult her about prior prophecies and come away disappointed. If she wrote her answer on the leaves in response to an immediate question, surely they could be read. Her written prophecy exists outside any sense-lending pragmatic context that would grant it validity. For that, Helenus advises song and when the time comes, Aeneas makes a request: ‘ipsa canas oro’ (I ask that you sing yourself, Aen. 6. 76). The description of the Sibyl’s prophecy to Aeneas and her possession by Apollo in Aeneid 6 shows what her prophecy gains by song: authorization by god. at Phoebi nondum patiens immanis in antro bacchatur uates, magnum si pectore possit excussisse deum; tanto magis ille fatigat os rabidum, fera corda domans, ﬁngitque premendo. ostia iamque domus patuere ingentia centum sponte sua uatisque ferunt responsa per auras . . . talibus ex adyto dictis Cumaea Sibylla horrendas canit ambages antroque remugit, obscuris uera inuoluens: ea frena furenti 3 Domenichino’s ‘Sibilla’ at the Galleria Borghese in Rome clearly interprets Vergil: his Sibyl leans on the arm of her stringed instrument, holding a codex and a scroll. The codex is blank, while the scroll holds musical notation. She gazes upwards, as if towards god. Breed (2006) 149–51 emphasizes the reader’s freedom to put things back in order. 4 Fowler (1997) 269: ‘whatever ﬁxity a text might possess, it disappears in the very act of reading’.

4

Arma uirumque cano concutit et stimulos sub pectore uertit Apollo. ut primum cessit furor et rabida ora quierunt, incipit Aeneas heros. (Aeneid 6. 77–82, 98–103)

(But the bard, not yet submitting to huge Phoebus in the cave, goes wild like a Bacchant, to see if she could shake the great god from her breast; all the more he wears out her raging mouth, taming her ﬁerce heart, and shapes her with pressure. And now one hundred huge portals of her house opened of their own accord and bear the response of the bard through the breezes . . . With such words from the shrine, the Cumaean Sibyl sings circuitous speech to be shuddered at and groans back from the cave, turning true things with obscure: Apollo shakes those reins while she rages and twists the spurs under her breast. When ﬁrst the fury subsided and her raging mouth grew quiet, the hero Aeneas began to speak.)

In this description, orality becomes supernatural. Emphasis falls on the Sibyl’s own ‘raging’ mouth both before and after the prophecy, and the entire cave becomes a metaphorical mouth with one hundred openings. Epic convention sets up an expectation of fulﬁlment. Homer claimed he could not get through the catalogue of ships if he had ten tongues, ten mouths (Il. 2. 489), Hostius not if he had one hundred (3 Courtney).5 Homer calls on the Muse to help. Here god speaks. The oral nature of this utterance does not guarantee interpretability— obscurity clouds the truth—but at least the message is actually transmitted. Even so, the Sibyl’s prophecy does not tell Aeneas anything he did not already know (‘omnia praecepi atque animo mecum ante peregi’ (I anticipated it all and have previously worked it through in my mind), 6. 105).6 All the frisson associated with oral prophecy in the Aeneid results in something of a let-down. Even here, perhaps the most phonologocentric passage of Latin literature, song is not the be-all and end-all of communication. With few exceptions, Vergil adheres to epic coyness about its medium and comments indirectly on the relative validity of song and writing through the passages on the Sibyl. The archaic, mythic setting of the Aeneid makes song the preferred medium within the story and this accords with the poem’s dominant self-presentation. But writing is important to Vergil despite the disavowal. It ﬁgures the immutability of the word,7 so that fate, whose etymological link to fari (speak) was recognized in antiquity,8 lends itself to the metaphor of the book because of its ﬁxity. Vergil hints that the Parcae read 5

Hinds (1998) 34–47 covers allusivity and this topos. Fowler (1997) 269: ‘the Sibyl’s response is as ambiguous as all the prophecies of the Aeneid ’. 7 Horace’s tag ‘nescit uox missa reuerti’ (a word sent does not know how to come back, AP 390) refers to publication. 8 Varro, LL 6. 52; Minucius Felix 36. 2; Maltby ad loc. 6

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their prophecy about Rome’s (past and future) eclipse of Carthage from a book roll: ‘sic uoluere Parcas’ (thus the Fates (un)roll/read, Aen. 1. 22). Similarly, Jupiter reveals the fates to Venus with language suggesting unrolling a scroll (‘uoluens fatorum arcana mouebo’, 1. 262).9 The relation of speech to writing is indeterminate, in that Jupiter makes an etymological pun on fate here with ‘fabor’ (I will speak, 1. 261): will he speak out what was already in the book, or will his utterance be inscribed in the book?10 Either way, Jupiter reassures Venus these words remain unchanged: ‘manent immota . . . fata’ (the fates remain unmoved, 1. 257–8).11 Vergil, who strenuously critiques the Sibyl’s writing, reinscribes writing among the gods themselves through the book of fate. This metaphor sets the Aeneid’s double perspective in a Mo¨bius strip: Vergil represents the past of his country as prophecy within his own book, but it turns out that this ‘forespeech’ derives in turn from a divine book.12 Anchises can thus ‘read’ the future heroes of Rome (‘legere’, Aen. 6. 755) when he teaches Aeneas his fate (‘tua fata docebo’, 6. 759). But if we suppose that the book of fate trumps Vergil’s song, James O’Hara (1996: 108) suggests the text may get the last word after all: ‘this etymologizing [in Jupiter’s speech] sets up an expectation that will be frustrated, as events of the poem prove to be more complicated than Jupiter’s deceptively reassuring words to Venus promise’. In the Aeneid, neither gods nor human institutions can in the end make words correspond to reality or preserve them effectively.13 Vergil’s utterance controls Jupiter’s: while the god may have conﬁdence in the performative power of his utterance, the author determines the narrative. If Jupiter’s speaking (fabor) results in fate (fatum), Vergil’s singing (cano) similarly results in a ﬁxed text, but he leaves it to us to identify his song with writing (Barchiesi 2001b: 130–2). Vergil privileges song for epistemological reasons, but the Sibyl does not. Her prophecy comes at the price of violent possession. The Sibyl’s pain guarantees the authenticity of her utterance, but her resistance is understandable.14 She will sing if asked, but she would much rather do her job via writing. The constraint she undergoes for Aeneas’ sake allegorizes the disadvantages of song from a poet’s point of view. Despite the advantages of song’s purported authenticity,

9

Austin (1971) ad loc. is less conﬁdent of the book-roll metaphor than R. D. Williams (1972). O’Hara (1990) 40, 137–8; Feeney (1991) 139–40; O’Hara (1996) 108, 121; Fowler (1997) 259. 11 Though, like speech, fate can be revised or reinterpreted, as Jupiter does in reconciling Juno in Aen. 12; Feeney (1991) 151. 12 For Vergil as a prophet, though not an entirely truthful one, see O’Hara (1990) 176–84. 13 Nicholas Horsfall notes to me that the Sibyl arranges her leaves in an act of archiving. 14 Scarry (1985) ch. 1 analyses how torture converts pain into a ﬁction of power. Dubois (1991). 10

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many Augustan poets avow writing precisely as an area where they may exercise freedom and escape the constraints imposed by duty to the state. The accounts just given of the differences between singing and writing, namely tradition, genre, hermeneutics, and politics, are products of textual self-representation. The degree of ﬁt between actual modes of production and a text’s story about its medium reveals ideological commitments. Vergil’s privileging of song over writing belongs to a tradition that goes back to Plato. Why here?

THE AESTHETICS OF PRESENCE Writing can precede or follow song: it denotes both composition and recording over against the moment of performance. A realistic description of composition has poetry composed in writing and performed afterwards:15 ‘cum cenaret . . . Simonides apud Scopam . . . cecinissetque id carmen, quod in eum scripsisset’ (when Simonides was dining at Scopas’ house and had sung the ode which he had written in his honour, Cicero, de Oratore 2. 352).16 Less realistic are depictions of originary song, inspired by god,17 though even here, writing may record the song after the fact. Vergil’s Sibyl takes her cue from Homer, who asks the Muse to sing herself: I Ł (sing, goddess, Il. 1. 1),18

15 In Latin, comedy is composed in writing (scribendum, Ter. An. 1) and then performed (sum acturus, Ter. Haut. 5). In Horace’s Sermones, scribere consistently refers to the poet’s occupation, e.g. 2. 1. 10, 16, 60. In Greece, however, poiein is a late term for poetic composition. Ford (2002) 135: it is superﬁcial to attempt to pinpoint the division between ‘singers’ and ‘poets’ on the basis of the historical separation of ‘the arts of composing and performing’. He examines Herodotus’ terminology: Arion makes, names, and produces a dithyramb then sung by others (‘poiesanta/onomesanta/ didaxanta/aeidomena’) (133). Herington (1985) 46–7 examines passages in Aristophanes that show poets composing and concludes that for tragedy writing was used for recording at the end point of composition; instruction was oral (49); bibliography at Ford (2002) 153 n. 84. Hunter (1996) 3–4 comments on the beginning of the separation between metrical and musical rhythm in the early ﬁfth century and the development of recitation as the prime performance medium in the fourth and third centuries; see also ibid. (7). For the shift in research from orality in composition to performance, Bakker and Kahane (1997) 3. 16 Alternative sources at Quintilian 11. 2. 14, Wilkins ad loc., Malcovati (1943) 60. Quintilian has ‘carmen . . . scripsisset’ (11. 2. 11). 17 Feeney (1991) 225: the representation of the divine in narrative takes ‘the reader to the heart of any author’s conception of ﬁction’. 18 P. Hardie (2002a) 3–4, 15: ‘Homer’s invocation to the Muses in the Catalogue of Ships builds a poetics of presence into the Greco-Roman literary tradition at its point of origin’.

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but differs both in suffering divine possession19 and in recording her prophecy on a primitive writing material.20 Proximity to the god guarantees truth. The present moment of divine inspiration, however, quickly recedes into the past and becomes irrecoverable without the intervention of writing. Hence the Sibyl records her prophecy on leaves. The aim is to give later access to the originary moment with god, to enable another performance in another present. Ideally writing brings back a lost presence that can eternally be recreated. But—the wind blows the Sibyl’s leaves and what the god said is lost for good. The disruption attendant on writing is not merely a technological breakdown to be solved by replacing leaves with paper, paper with microchips, but a sign of the irrecuperability of a lost presence. Even if you could paste the leaves together again to reconstruct the god’s message, the moment of inspiration has passed and the words have become empty. The dialectic sketched above is the aesthetics of presence.21 It is a mystiﬁcatory valuation of plenitude in language and the assignment to writing of an irreparable break between composition and reception. For literary texts in Augustan Rome, writing and song, presence and absence are thematically inextricable. I start by identifying song with presence and writing with absence as a heuristic gesture on the way towards differentiating aspects of a larger cultural practice whose terms easily shift into one another depending on the particular point being made.22 Poets representing their work as song appropriate the fullness of presence associated with divinity, where divinity is a metaphor for social and epistemological plenitude. The language of song is a claim to truth and value. When Vergil says ‘cano’, he sets his poetry within a poetic tradition whose ideology 19 For the lack of ecstasy or possession in Homer, Ford (2002)167, who refers to Heraclitus for the Sibyl’s possession. 20 Canere can mean ‘prophesy’ even in prose, of gods sending signs, Cic. Cat. 3. 18. The scholiasts, however, recognize poetic activity as writing even when poets use the language of song, e.g. Servius’ ‘scribo’ of G. 3. 40–1, where Vergil says ‘canemus’ (3. 1) and ‘dicere’ (3. 46). 21 P. Hardie (2002a) focuses on Ovid’s illusionism as part of his stance ‘as the poet of the Augustan here and now’ (1) and immediately proceeds to poetic duplicity and its relation to writing (1–2); Ovid’s contribution to the Augustan reinvention of the uates ﬁgure is a nostalgic desire for the impossible potency of primitive magicians (22–3). 22 Oesterreicher (1997) 191–6 aligns immediacy with ‘informal/oral’ discourse (Sprache der Na¨he) and distance with ‘the elaborate/formal/literate type’ (Sprache der Distanz) while making the larger point that medium and conception are independent, so that formal language can be oralized, and informal written. Language has ‘medium-transferability’ (195–6). Homeric epic has formality of conception, but its ‘enactment or mise-en-sce`ne’ is typically immediate, ‘faceto-face’ (207). He sees ‘no signiﬁcant difference’ between the oral and written composition of a poem because of the rules and memorization enabling the composition (209). For the medium/ conception distinction, Bakker (1999) 29–31.

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he describes with the Sibyl’s song.23 The earthly tradition, however, maps imperfectly onto this image. For one thing, Vergil’s methods of composition were unlike the Sibyl’s. Even Homer’s song corresponds to the Sibyl’s in ideology rather than performance medium. Homer’s Muse occupies the same role as the Sibyl’s Apollo: poet and Sibyl alike become the god’s mouthpiece.24 But the Homeric poet does not go into a frenzy and the invocation at Iliad 1. 1 is already distanced from the poem’s actual performance medium, which rather resembled recitative: dramatic speaking with musical accompaniment.25 Archaic Greek IØ (song) refers not to the vocalization of words with melody,26 but to ritualized language. In Latin, carmen covers similar ground, although, unlike aoide, it is not restricted to poetry, but includes a gamut of rhythmic and socially laden utterances. The Greek tradition is as metaphorical as the Latin, although its primacy creates an illusion of a natural accord between poetry and performance. Rousseau’s comment in the epigraph to this introduction refers to Greek pitch accent, not literal song, and reveals the metaphor behind the claim to song.27 23

Quinn (1982) 157 treats the stance as ‘ﬁction’: ‘The original performance becomes, however, something which is imagined, and is not wholly realized in any reader’s performance of the text.’ Volk (2002) 16–20: Vergil’s ‘cano’ is a topos going back to the ‘compositioncum-performance of oral poetry’; critique by Habinek (2005b) 84. 24 Aeidein becomes the word for the poet’s as well as the Muses’ activity, e.g. Homeric Hymn to Demeter (2. 1). Dodds (1951) 80–1: Homer asks the Muse for help with content, not form. Herington (1985) 59: the appeal to the Muse sets distance between the poet and his subject matter, but this distance guarantees a ‘ﬁxed truth’. 25 Herington (1985) 38; for rhapsodic performance (10–15). Bing (1988) 16–17 stresses the incidental use of writing until the late ﬁfth century and the transition from an oral to a literate culture in the fourth (10–11). Stehle (1997) 1–7 provides descriptions of performance in Greek literature and Rohde (1974) 327 n. 1 and 379 n. 1 (actually the second n. 1) reviews Greek performance traditions up to recitation in Hellenistic times. Latin poetry is generally understood to have been composed in writing for the purposes of either reading or recitation. Since reading was an oral activity, the distinction between these two is artiﬁcial. Starr (1990–1) 337–8 insists that Roman society was not ‘oral’, but could more properly be called ‘aural’: books were read by professional lectors. Campbell (2001) argues that the Aeneid was written for performance on the basis of its paratactic composition, which facilitates comprehension. His categories, however, make the poem as accessible to private reading as to public performance. He generalizes simplistically from the Aeneid to all literature composed during Ong’s (1982) 94–5 period of chirographic literacy. He cannot account for differences between Vergil and Lucan (130) and does not recognize that the earlier poet’s greater accessibility owes as much to style and conception as to medium. 26 Nagy (1990) 21 explains ‘diachronic skewing’: ‘Self-references in Archaic Greek poetry may be diachronically valid without being synchronically true’, as in the language of song for recitative. Bakker (1999) 32 n. 6 refers to ‘the tendency of each new medium to ﬁctionalize the previous one’. Bing (1988) 58 cites Sotades 15, who attributes writing to Aeschylus. My son at age 4 generalized as ‘song’ anything metrical or rhythmic. Ford (2002) 137 points out the avoidance of ‘poet’ and related words by ‘all the high poets of the ﬁfth century’, though they were available. 27 Herington (1985) 73: the ‘built-in musical quality of Greek versiﬁcation’.

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AU THENTICITY To privilege performance over writing has become a recent scholarly trend, which seeks to correct the excessive formalism and interest in writing arising from the New Criticism and deconstruction alike. Two aspects to the interest in performance at ﬁrst appear unrelated. They turn on age-old desires for authenticity. One wants to ﬁnd a more organic and less artiﬁcial culture at Rome on the analogy of Greek performance culture. Florence Dupont, for instance, contrasts ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ cultures in L’Invention de la litte´rature and devalues the book in favour of performance both in general and at Rome.28 This is a gesture towards popular culture and away from elitism (Markus 2000b). The second wants to ﬁnd congruence between literature’s form and content, another move against artiﬁce, towards authenticity. Denis Feeney, reviewing Dupont, unites the two. Much modern theory is saturated with nostalgia for some lost plenitude, a time of grace and wholeness before the invasion of all kinds of serpents (language, gender, class, culture, self-consciousness). Among Hellenists who are inclined this way, the favoured candidate for serpent is writing, held to mark the fall from fullness of presence, shared community and immediacy of communication, as an oral-performance culture inexorably gives way to the dusty culture of the book. (Feeney 2000: 9)29

He argues that experience, even when performed, always separates from its representation (asking if Alcaeus waited until it rained to sing hØ b O ZF , Zeus is raining, fr. 338 V).30 Furthermore, Alcaeus transmitted a mass of writing as a record of his songs.31 The phonologocentrism of the position Feeney attacks is an inheritance from Plato, whose critique of writing in the Phaedrus depends on a contrast with more organic forms of communication: SOCRATES: Writing (ªæÆç), Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a 28 Ibid. 63 is nostalgic about community in contrast to modern poetic working conditions. Dupont’s more recent work, e.g. (2005), is less polarizing. 29 The Romantic fetishizing of performance belongs to the tendency to attribute authenticity to the Greeks and artiﬁciality to the Romans. In Feeney (1998) 6–8, he shows the similarity in modern attitudes to both literature and religion: cultural power is granted the Greeks and denied the Romans. 30 Nagy (2004) 48 quotes a blues player saying, ‘when I play the blues I don’t necessarily have to feel blue’; Barchiesi (2001d) 154. 31 Feeney (1993) 56 inquires about the status of the speaking ‘I’ in archaic lyric if the poems were repeated, and how they could have been preserved if they were not. For the writing of lyric (and Homer) versus preservation through repeated performance, Ford (2002) 100.

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question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words (ƒ ºªØ); you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when illtreated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself. (Plato, Phaedrus 275d4–e5, Loeb translation)

Written language’s separation from its author results in breakdown both epistemological and social. Its inability to respond when questioned means that the reader who has difﬁculty determining the sense cannot engage in the social conventions of communication to solve the problem. Writing has no sense of decorum; it is democratic and will talk to anyone who can read. In patriarchal societies such as ancient Greece and Rome, Plato’s charge of orphanage leaves writing, as he says, powerless. Hostility to writing goes hand in hand with the privileging of authenticity and of performance. Latin literature and culture have been consistent victims of these attitudes.32 Even Plato, however, uses writing as a metaphor while reviling it.33 Socrates contrasts the ‘bastard’ word of writing with its ‘legitimate’ brother (ª Ø , 276a1), living voice, then proceeds to deﬁne it: SOCRATES: The word which is written (ªæç ÆØ) with intelligence in the mind ( KØ Å ) of the learner, which is able to defend itself and knows to whom it should speak, and before whom to be silent. PHAEDRUS: You mean the living and breathing word (ºª ÇH Æ ŒÆd łıå ) of him who knows, of which the written word may justly be called the image? (Phaedrus 276a5–9)

This passage is emblematic for the issues on which this book turns: we read in a written text a defence of the living word that sublates writing as a metaphor for the inscription of the word onto the soul.34 Sublation (Aufhebung) entails three interrelated moves: cancellation, preservation, and elevation. Despite the rejection of writing, this discussion takes place entirely within it and cannot escape. Socrates, however, has a higher standard to which all words should adhere, whether speaking or writing, and preserves writing at a higher level: ‘SOCRATES: We should, then, as we were proposing just now, discuss 32 Sharrock (1994) 103: ‘The Roman is often subordinated to the Greek in this regard’, i.e. performance. 33 Derrida (1972b) 71–198, ‘La pharmacie de Platon’, is the classic deconstruction of phonologocentrism. Derrida (1972a) 106 n. 9 analyses Hegel’s privileging of reading poetry aloud. 34 Ford (2002) 240, 246: the writing Plato afﬁrms in the Phaedrus must resemble a living animal in structure; here it manages to be ‘“alive” and “ensouled”’.

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the theory of good (or bad) speaking and writing’ (Phaedrus 259e1–2). He implies the qualities of goodness and truth can be found in both; only subsequently does he express a preference for the talking word, but even then he calls the ‘gardens in letters’ a more noble pursuit than banquets and entertainments (276d). Those who see convivial song as more authentic than writing should remember that Plato valorizes philosophical writing over merely social conversation and entertainment—presumably sympotic song. When Horace sets a premium on poetry’s aesthetic quality, he makes a similar gesture against entertainment in favour of a higher standard that separates him from popular culture (‘odi profanum uulgus’ (I despise the vulgar throng), Odes 3. 1. 1). His repeated claim he will leave poetry for philosophy in the Epistles also expresses a desire for independence from the social obligations of clientage. Rather than attempt to rescue the serpent that is writing from a false apprehension, there has been a movement among Latinists to highlight performance at Rome. Thomas Habinek’s The World of Roman Song posits a deeply engrained song culture at Rome that structures society through and through, from aristocratic hegemony to the resistance of the disenfranchised, whether woman, sexual deviant, or slave. While Plato prefers the spoken word because we can test the speaker with questions, the current favouring of orality has to do with social rather than epistemological authenticity. In either category, the Greeks have since German Romanticism come off better than the Romans and Habinek’s project is to ground the Romans in an equally vibrant oral culture. I doubt the Roman plebs, whose entertainment culture was extremely active (Horsfall 2003), were any more or less authentic than the aristocrats, or that popular culture was any more or less constructed than elite culture. Societies produce their elites, and their hegemony must make ideological sense to the society as a whole.35 Artiﬁce functions socially no less than ritually grounded performance and was at a high social premium at Rome. The appropriation of Greek culture, from collections of art and books to the composition of poetry within Greek styles, may have been practised by the elite because they cornered ﬁnancial and educational resources, but they were not merely engaged in display among themselves. Elite behaviour deﬁned Romanness for all Romans and for non-Romans observing them.36

35 Connolly (2004) 164–5: we should know better ‘than to assume that poetic texts merely reﬂect the ideological outlook of the patron class’ and that ‘the community itself forms an important element in the pressure on the ruling class to claim unconditional domination’. 36 Gruen (1992): the appropriation of Greek culture in Republican Rome displays Roman political and cultural mastery.

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Writing was not only deeply engrained in many cultural practices, practical and aesthetic alike, but valued because it enabled exactness in legal and ritual language (Meyer 2004) as well as the possibility of learning and revision in poetic composition (Catullus 95; Horace, Serm. 1. 10. 67–71; Ars 388–90)37— not that writing guarantees polish. Feeney (2000: 9) would celebrate writing even among the Greeks, since ‘the creative power of alphabetic literacy made . . . new forms of immediacy possible’. The forms in question are Athenian drama, choral lyric, and other complex performances requiring a script. If Horace was pointed out by passers-by and called lyrist of the Roman lyre (‘monstror digito praetereuntium j Romanae ﬁdicen lyrae’, Odes 4. 3. 22–3), it was because the man in the street appreciated the successful appropriation of Greek culture. Horace shields himself from or appreciates the people depending on whether their judgement is favourable or not. The intermittent but persistent desire to prove that Horace actually sang, recited his lyric poetry, or had it performed revolves around different types of authenticity. The impetus to ﬁnd a performance tradition at Rome arises from a desire for socially embedded poetry, but the obstacles preventing a deﬁnitive answer to the socio-historical questions are precisely the kinds of deferral writing’s critics in the epistemological tradition hold against it: ﬁction and metaphor. While external evidence guarantees the Carmen saeculare was performed in the ludi saeculares of 17 BCE (Ch. 5), that for the Odes is entirely internal, and this stumbles on the problem of referentiality (Ch. 3). The Romans are unforgivable according to the paradigm of authenticity not because they use writing, or re-perform plays, which the Greeks also did, but because they talk about it.38 Self-consciousness spoils everything. When Horace refers to the chorus learning the poem in the Carmen saeculare (75–6), he seems engaged not in the sublime activity of Aeschylus or Pindar, but rather in imitation. He mentions song, rather than uses it. Greek tragedy, like epic, is remarkably silent about its own production, and the places where Old Comedy points to itself lower the tone.39 The Romans ﬂag their awareness of the problems informing the western valuation of the spoken over the written word from both epistemological and social angles. They themselves advance a

37 For books and reading in Roman life and the possibility that ‘literary phenomena may inﬂuence social practices’, Thomas (1988) 59–60. 38 Barchiesi (2000) 167: Latin poetry folds genre into the discussion through mention rather than use; Connolly (2004) 166: ‘the thematization of hermeneutics’ is central to how Latin poetry deﬁnes its relation to ‘referential reality’; Lowrie (2005a) 36–9. 39 e.g. the jokes opening Aristophanes’ Frogs. The poet’s role of ‘teaching’ the play to the performers is more digniﬁed: N. W. Slater (2002) 10; his introduction catalogues metatheatrical topics.

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complex view of the interrelation of writing and performance that can offset the privileging of authenticity over constructedness.

P RO D U C T I O N A N D R E C E P T I O N P R AC T I C E S For Rome in the Augustan period, writing and some form of orality were intrinsic to literature for both composition and reception.40 The literary texts that survive do not arise from oral composition or even the oral transmission presupposed for archaic Greek epic, but Cicero attests to Archias’ poetic improvisation in the generation before (Arch. 18).41 Epigrams were routinely improvised,42 Catullus 50 refers to convivial poetic exchange, and there is no reason to believe poetry stops being improvised under the early empire.43 What are transmitted as literature, however, are highly crafted and polished artefacts that present themselves as such (Quinn 1982: 85–8). Writing has become an intrinsic aspect of poetic production, and Horace’s prescription to turn the stylus often (Serm. 1. 10. 72) presupposes composition on wax tablets as the norm. Any original improvisation has been ﬁnely whetted by the time it reaches us. Although a host of different kinds of performance—full-ﬂedged song with instrumental accompaniment, recitation in various degrees of privacy, mime enactments—were standard media for literature’s reception, the mime productions of Vergil’s Eclogues and the like were performances after the fact and not intrinsically part of the literature as one could argue for drama.44 Even comedy at this time consisted largely of revivals of the previous century’s greats (Horace, Epist. 2. 1. 60–2) and tragedy is thought to have gone over to a recitation format.45 Recitation itself covered a range of practices, all 40

Valette-Cagnac (1997) 306: ‘Rome se caracte´rise par un incessant brouillage, un e´change permanent, entre les fonctions de l’e´criture et celles de la parole.’ 41 Quinn (1982) 85 sees Archias’ performance as ‘a kind of trick’, but also recounts the story of Vergil’s ﬁlling in half-lines during performance. Horace disparages rapid composition (Serm. 1. 4. 9–10, 1. 9. 23–4, 1. 10. 60–1), but the practice surely persisted. 42 A. Hardie (1983) 74–85, Gutzwiller (1998) 4–5, 49, 231–5. 43 Particularly given the prominence of declamation, an oral practice combining careful argument with an oral medium, Imber (2001). 44 The actors are called cantores: Vita Donatiana 26; Vita Donati Aucti 41; Vita Philargyriana 1, Brugnoli–Stok 181, 1–3. Quinn (1982) 152–3; Horsfall (1995a) 17; Wheeler (1999) 35. Dupont (2004) 182 presumes the Eclogues were written for the theatre; Servius at Ecl. 6. 11 is discussed below. 45 Varius probably produced his Thyestes at Augustus’ triple triumph in 29 BCE, though there are doubts: Goldberg (2005) 210 n. 13. Fantham (1996) 148 cites Tac. Ann. 11. 13 as ‘the ﬁrst and only evidence for a contemporary writer of stage [as opposed to recitation] drama since the

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script-based.46 Quinn (1982: 154) identiﬁes four kinds of poetic performance for the post-Catullan generation, of which the ﬁrst three fall under recitation: traditional performance before a group of friends to elicit criticism, semi-public poetic contests,47 public non-dramatic performance by the poet of a ﬁnished work, professional theatrical performance in a spectacle. Private reading covered a gamut of degrees of orality: group reading and discussion, a slave (lector) reading out a text to his master, silent reading alone. But it was script-based.48 It is generally agreed that elite, literary reading was a kind of performance rather than the solitary activity now standard,49 although there has been something of a backlash against a purely oral understanding of reading: silent and solitary reading did exist and was presumably common among the well-educated.50 Actual practices obviously contribute to the poetic vocabulary of selfrepresentation. Certain words, such as canere (sing), liber (book-roll), or pagina (page), have clear dominant afﬁliations with singing or writing. But an enormous gray area covering various degrees of oralization in different contexts makes certain other words more ambiguous. This has to do ﬁrst with the orality of reading and our inability to separate entirely writing as composition from writing as the recording needed for subsequent oralization. The same words (scribere: write; the language of the book-roll) pertain to both. But it also depends on literary tradition and each particular author’s stakes in poetic self-deﬁnition.

Thyestes of Varius’. For the blurring of the distinction between recitation and staging, Fitch (2000) 2 on Seneca. Whether or not meant for performance, plays written for recitation could always be staged after the fact. Fantham (2000), who believes Seneca wrote for recitation, envisions her own production of Troades (20–4). G. W. M. Harrison (2000). Wheeler (1999) 36 n. 11 understands Ovid’s Medea as recitation drama. 46 Basic on recitation is Quinn (1982) 158–65. Also Salles (1992) 93–100; Valette-Cagnac (1997) ch. 3, summary 167; Wheeler (1999) 36; Markus (2000a) 154. Horsfall (1995a) 19 is sceptical about Vergil’s recitation, as Pliny the Younger does not know whether Vergil, Nepos, Accius, or Ennius recited. He uses different words for his reception of different genres: ‘et comoedias audio et specto mimos et lyricos lego et sotadicos intellego’, Epist. 5. 3. 2. The passage suggests lyrics were read in his time, unlike comedy and mime. Cicero read lyric as well, Starr (1990–1) 338. 47 These are the least well attested. Quinn (1982) 148–9 relies entirely on Horace Epistles 2. 2. 48 Kenney (1982). W. A. Johnson (2000) describes different reading practices. Many of his passages (from Pliny and Plutarch) entail reading in groups; Sharrock (1994) 103. 49 e.g. Fantham (1996) 8; details about drama and recitation (8–11). 50 Horace, Serm. 1. 6. 122–3 (‘lecto j aut scripto quod me tacitum iuuet’ (when I’ve read or written something which pleases me in silence) is often cited as evidence for silent reading. W. A. Johnson (2000) 594–600 summarizes the silent versus oral reading controversy. Starr (1990–1) 337: silent reading was used for documents and other writings where content predominated over style. Valette-Cagnac (1997) 71: reading practices at Rome were complex; often the distinction turns on whether reading is done (either silently or aloud) for oneself or for an audience, even of one (ch. 1). For criticism, Harris (2000). Also Herington (1985) 42–3.

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Let us consider several words in the interstices. Dicere (say), which appears to an English speaker less emphatic a poetic verb than canere, in poetic selfreference differs from it hardly at all.51 According to Ernout–Meillet (265), this word’s derivation from the same root as the Greek deiknumi (point out, show) gives it ‘a solemn and technical character’; it occurs in religious and legal contexts (ius dicere: pronounce the law, sententiam dicere: give one’s ofﬁcial opinion) and is the word par excellence for oratory. Cicero joins it to ornare (adorn) as the orator’s activity (Or. 113). Adorned and emphatic speech is a shared feature of poetry and oratory. Dicere can become neutral, but while it may replace loquor (speak, talk),52 the converse does not happen. Consequently, in poetic vocabulary dicere retains a strong link to presence, both because of its etymological connection with deixis, and because of the performative function of ofﬁcial Roman discourse.53 Conversely, while we might expect carmen (poetry, song) to be closely afﬁliated with canere because of its etymology, in practice it does not necessarily imply song in contradistinction to writing. Of course, proximity to other words denoting song may activate the etymology, but from the beginning its semantic range encompasses much more than our ‘poem’, since it can refer to anything from a spell to a law and is not even necessarily metrical.54 Its connection to writing is deep, since spells, laws, and the like were written on tablets. Elizabeth Meyer (2004: 44) says that the Romans grouped everything written on tablets (even accounts) under the conceptual category of carmen because of a shared rhythmic, formulaic quality, though her focus on the law leads her to omit poetry. Michael Putnam (2000a: 132) insists that carmen in whatever guise is powerful language that ‘can bring about a physical reaction that reiﬁes the speaker’s wishes’. Pierre (2008) offers an innovative thesis that carmen denotes language that carries authority within itself. Meyer similarly suggests the Romans attributed great potency to material placed on tablets. As a word for ‘poem’, carmen is transgeneric and denotes both genres more associated with song, such as lyric and epic, and elegy and satire with their connotations of writing.55 This word consequently is always emphatic, but neutral regarding a distinction between writing and song. 51

Heyne, G. 3. 6 ‘Dicere enim de poetis sollenne’; Newman (1965); Habinek (1998b) 71–2; Wheeler (1999) 42. 52 For unmarked loquor and the contrast with canere, Habinek (1998b) 70–1. 53 Horsfall (1995b) 50: dictare progresses from ‘dictate’ to ‘compose’, hence German Dichtung. 54 Servius wrongly calls it anything metrical (Aen. 3. 287, Ernout–Meillet 155). Gordon Williams (1982), CHCL i. 53–5; Pierre (2008). 55 Putnam (2000a) 136–7; Hardie, Aen. 9. 774–8. Putnam shows that Horace uses carmina for lyric over against other genres (138–9), but this is a special instance. Horace uses carmina of Lucilian satire, Serm. 2. 1. 63. Pierre (2008) 5. I. 1. C.

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The oral quality of reading in antiquity means that certain phrases that designate orality point automatically to reading. In Greek, for instance, akouein (hear) in Hellenistic times means hearing from a book, consequently ‘reading’.56 An important word linked to reading in Latin poetry, especially when poets talk about poetic immortality, is os (mouth). Commentators routinely refer such phrases to reading aloud. Nemo me lacrimis decoret nec funera ﬂetu faxit. cur? uolito uiuus per ora uirum. (Ennius, Epigrams 9–10 W ¼ 17–18 V ¼ 46 C) (Let no one decorate me with tears nor make funeral rites through weeping. Why? I ﬂy living through the mouths of men.)

Ennius deﬁnes a social context for himself in death through funeral ritual, but this pales beside the life constituted by people reading his works. Ovid’s ‘ore legar populi’ (I will be read in the mouth of the people, Met. 15. 878) makes explicit the reading context that Horace merely suggests with ‘dicar’ (I will be spoken, Odes 3. 30. 10). Propertius makes reading similarly explicit by joining mouths with his book: ‘unde meus ueniat mollis in ora liber’ (from where my book comes soft on the lips, 2. 1. 2).57 Even silent reading can entail a metaphorical orality (the mind’s ear) that cannot be distinguished lexically from the literal. A wide variety of terms denote vocalization. Valette-Cagnac (1997: 21–7) distinguishes legere from recitare not on the basis of whether the reading was silent or not. Rather, legere is the neutral term for reading, while recitare presupposes an audience.58 The performance of poetry is further distinguished by a special verb, cantare (Markus 2000a: 141–4). Servius uses different words to refer to Vergil’s reading of an Eclogue and Cytheris’ performance of it in the theatre: ‘dicitur autem ingenti fauore a Virgilio esse recitata, adeo ut, cum eam postea Cytheris cantasset in theatro’ (It is said to have been read aloud by Vergil to great approval, so much so that when Cytheris later sang it in the theatre, Ecl. 6. 11). There is evidence, however, of wrangling over the meanings of the words, or at least the appropriateness of different styles of vocalization. Quintilian, who advocates a more masculine style of reading aloud than was currently in vogue, reports Caesar’s bon mot about overdoing the performance of a praetextata in the direction of song: ‘si cantas, male cantas: si legis, cantas’ 56

Schenkeveld (1992); Valette-Cagnac (1997) 27–8. Parallels in Enk ad loc. 58 Harris (2000) 527 criticizes Valette-Cagnac’s hypothesis (1997: 26) that the distinction rests on the audience since legere may entail an audience. But her structure is rather that legere is unmarked, while the requirement of an audience for recitare is marked (23). 57

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(If you sing, you perform badly; if you read, you ‘sing’, 1. 8. 2). His irony depends on the ambiguity between cantare meaning both ‘to sing’ and ‘to perform’. The lexical range of the language makes it hard to pinpoint exact performance techniques. Although actual practices and terminology are important for gauging what the poets owe to experience and what to convention or metaphor, I am more interested in analysing the cultural representation of the media of production and reception. Vergil’s ‘cano’ is a signal instance where literal interpretation is insufﬁcient.59 Quintilian acknowledges the poetic convention of song, ‘se poetae canere testantur’ (poets declare that they sing, 1. 8. 2) before demonstrating that the word for the performance of poetry, cantare, is related but different. Literary conventions lie alongside actual practices, with greater or lesser degrees of correspondence. The verb canere is attracted to poetry through metonymy from song. Singing itself needs the iterative. English does not have such a word for poetizing; our ‘sing’ is misleading. German dichten corresponds better.60 Similarly, representations of poetry as books map to greater or lesser degrees onto the reality of their production. Poetic descriptions of books’ physical conditions employ a range of stylistically coded vocabulary (Gareth Williams: 1992a): Catullus 1 describes his book with the language of neoteric approbation and poem 22 mocks the disparity between the smart appearance of Suffenus’ book and its rustic style;61 the shabbiness of Ovid’s book (Tristia 1. 1. 2–14) accords with the new sad elegiac style, which reﬂects its author’s circumstances in exile. Furthermore, while the historical information about the book trade contained in Horace, Epist. 1. 20, may be precious, there is no guarantee that the actual book’s afterlife would correspond to the story told.62 The gap between representation and fact is salient in Ovid’s depiction of his exile poetry returning to Rome and being turned away from the libraries (Tristia 3. 1. 67–72). A poem containing such a story, were it true, could not logically be included in the book, but would need to have been added afterwards. With reading as well, the practices do not line up exactly with their literary representations. A common form of reading, oralization by a slave, is not depicted in Augustan poetry: Propertius would rather read 59 Wheeler’s (1999) insistence on the self-representation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a ﬁctional viva voce performance takes the metaphor literally; Barchiesi (2001a). See Markus (2000a) 140 on epic’s tenuous performance history in Rome compared to other genres and the difﬁculty of differentiating between performance categories (141–4). 60 For the etymology from dictare, Quinn (1982) 85. 61 Krostenko (2001) 254 traces the relation between poem 1’s physical and social appearance. 62 Quinn (1982) 92, ‘Excursus on publication’; this passage (172).

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himself, ensconced in his learned girl’s lap (‘me iuuet in gremio doctae legisse puellae’, 2. 13. 11). The language of the modes of production and reception can itself ﬁgure other ideas and vice versa. Ennius’ epitaph, quoted above, uses life as a metaphor for reception, itself ﬁgured as reading. The practice of reading aloud lends a vivid image of orality to reception. Ennius does not distinguish between public recitation and private reading aloud. It is all reception and to that extent, it is performance in Iser’s sense of active imaginative re-enactment.63 The emphasis in Ennius’ formulation is not the orality of ‘per ora uirum’, but the life granted to poetry through imaginative re-enactment (‘uiuus’): this is literature at a moment of fullness. The point is simple, but easy to forget: self-reﬂexive depictions of any kind of medium of composition, publication, or reception use aspects of current cultural practices to tell stories with purposes that exceed and distort the practices depicted. Much of Augustan literature presents itself in ways that may or may not accord with the poem’s actual medium of production. These self-deﬁnitions respond to social needs. The Romans privilege different media depending on context, but we would do better to analyse how and why they make their choices than to accept their posturing uncritically.

SCRIPTS AND ‘REPERFORMANCE’ Within the many ways of conceptualizing performance, spontaneous poetic utterance inspired by god—the song of Vergil’s Sibyl—lies beyond lived experience. More realistic are stage performances of drama, recitation, and reading aloud in groups or even to oneself. It is generally assumed that Roman texts functioned like scores and enabled performance, which was the ‘real thing’ (Quinn 1982: 90). In understanding attitudes both ancient and modern, we need to address the glorious Sibyl as much as historical practices. Possibly because we know less about archaic Greece than about late Republican and Imperial Rome, it is easier for the heroic content of epic to rub off on the audiences of the Iliad,64 for the glory of the games to burnish not only the Olympian victors but the townspeople who welcomed them home with epinician song and feasting, for aristocrats to appear noble while singing of exploits heroic or erotic among their peers. When Cato reconstructs the 63 64

Wheeler (1999) 3–4 on Iser. Ford (1997) 107 argues against archaic epic performance as ‘mindless theatrical orgy’.

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convivial practice of Roman aristocrats celebrating each other’s deeds, he creates a heroic image (Ch. 2). Greek poetry was taught and disseminated from scripts just as much as Roman and was controlled by professional artists.65 Why then does the aura of immediacy cling to Greek literature but not to Horace’s Carmen saeculare? One reason is Roman self-consciousness. Another is the misleading dichotomy made between performance and reperformance. Modern and Roman conceptions here overlap without coinciding. Habinek distinguishes between canere, which authorizes the ritual language of song, and cantare, the performance of the authorized song. Although both can be translated by ‘sing’, the ﬁrst means to authorize and the second to perform. The iterative means to ‘reperform’ in the sense of performing someone else’s utterance, i.e. sing a song or perform a poem composed by someone else.66 Both can be oral, but canere can also refer to utterance that is not. Vergil authorizes the Aeneid regardless of the form of the poem’s transmission. If utterances are events, however, Vergil’s cano never actually takes place. More precisely, it occurs outside time and hence lacks the status of an event. It only falls into time when performed—whether read aloud or silently. Lowell Edmunds insists on the self-difference between the poet as author and as performer (if the author performs): even in the ﬁrst performance the poet is ‘already lost for the purposes of a biographical, intentionalist reading’ (2001b: 4).67 What about a play? The Latin vocabulary suggests there too, even the original performance is reperformance (cantare). From the Roman point of view, the ﬁrst performance of a Greek tragedy at the Greater Dionysia is no less a reperformance than a modern production.

65 For rhapsodes and citharodes, Herington (1985) 10–20. Choral performance was not as professionalized (20–31), though professionals certainly wrote the poetry and music. Sympotic poetry was performed by both professionals and amateurs (31–9). 66 Habinek (2005c) 66 calls cantare the ‘mere repetition or reperformance of someone else’s authorizing performance’; Markus (2000a) 141–4. Quinn (1982) 154 distinguishes the poet’s own reading (recitare) from that of a professional performer and warns against conﬂating cantare, ‘little more than a frequentative of canere’, with other meanings, such as the cantor’s art and the term’s pejorative use by critics (156). 67 Herington (1985) 54 asks whether Archilochus performing his poetry saw himself as ‘impersonating another character’ or simply as himself; performance by someone besides the poet would be acting: the subsequent performances of Alcman’s partheneia are impersonations (55). Of historical practices, he concludes that monody was performed by the poet, although vases show sympotic performers who were not the poet (36). Nagy (1990) 360 suggests that genre substitutes for an originary performance context, but in (1994) 415–17 sees successful reperformance as re-enacting the archetypal ﬁgure. Barchiesi (2001d) 154 comments that ‘reperformance blurs the distinction between performance and generic convention’. Biographical interpretations are ancient: Ford (2002) 147 on Herodotus.

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Let us step back. I have slid from authorization to stage production. Each creates some sense of an original and its iteration. A literary speech act like Vergil’s ‘cano’ may have pragmatic force in authorizing the discourse without being an event in ordinary language. Contrary, however, to ordinary speech acts, which can lose force if repeated, literary speech acts need iteration through reception. Production in a theatre, however, is always performance.68 To privilege the ﬁrst performance is to grant a play the authority of a speech act in ordinary language, which it cannot have. The reason we tend to distinguish between original and reperformance is the subsequent removal of the play from the ritual context of the original production.69 Ritual contexts, however, by deﬁnition require iteration. Their point is the repetition of the form, which generates a meaning particular to the historical moment. Only productions that try to reproduce the original context should be considered reperformances, and these are often stultifying because their interest is merely historical. For those of a Romantic bent, the ritual and social context of the ﬁrst performance occupies an analogous place to the song of the Sibyl inspired directly from god. I submit, however, that the ﬁrst performance activates a work of literature’s self-authorization no more or less than any other performance.

THE AUGUSTAN QUESTION: ‘HOW’ AS WE LL AS ‘WHAT ’ In claiming that Augustan poetry is intensely interested in representation and performativity,70 I link several different ideas. By representation, I mean ﬁrst, the ability of literature and other forms of cultural production to make present things that are literally not there, that is, the re-presentation of the world to the mind through ideas embodied in language or images; and second, literature’s own modes of production. The latter entail presenting representations in the ﬁrst sense through different media such as writing or song. One difﬁculty with the term ‘representation’ is that it means both the idea transmitted and the 68

Herington (1985) ch. 2, ‘Text and Re-performance’, is a central treatment. Aristophanes, Clouds 1355–8 offers an instance of ancient decontextualization: Strepsiades expects his son to sing an epinician ode of Simonides at a symposium. Although the son refuses, the passage reveals expectations. Herington (1985) 28, Ford (2002) 123–4, 207. 70 Krostenko (2001) 18: ‘Roman culture, as a whole, was intensely aware of what might be called broadly semiotic distinctions.’ For semiotics in Roman religion, Beard (1985) and (1987), Barchiesi et al. (2004). Ando (2000) 120 emphasizes the fact of imperial communication beyond the ‘quality of information’ conveyed. 69

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process of transmission. Another is that, narrowly construed, it means the presenting again of something pre-existing,71 that is, it implies poetry reﬂects rather than produces culture. I could write ‘re/presentation’, as it would deﬁne artists’ contribution to culture as both the presentation of something new and reﬂection on something pre-existing; their intervention would be both reactive and constitutive. But I prefer the ambiguity of ‘representation’ without fancy markings. Its double meanings are congruent to the double meaning of the Greek mimesis: imitation and enactment. In every instance content interacts with transmission, ﬁxity with dynamic process. The Augustan fascination with the different representing media is a response to contemporary shifts in the structures of power. The renegotiation of political forms in the wake of civil war opened space for ideological redeﬁnition, producing, in simplistic terms, hyperactivity in the ﬁeld of cultural representation. The chicken-and-egg question of whether the changes in politics sparked a cultural response, or whether a new cultural formation paved the way for a shift in politics, instantiates the problematics of performativity, namely that a moment of origination requires pre-existing conventions to produce an event. While the parallels between religion, politics, coinage, the various visual arts, and literature have attracted much attention, most comprehensively in Karl Galinsky’s Augustan Culture, the focus has often been on this activity’s content: the so-called Augustan programme.72 This formulation makes it appear the message came from the top and that there was cohesion. The age’s shared concern with representation by no means implies it worked everywhere in the same way or even was understood to do so. Thirty years ago, Ralph Johnson (1973: 172) made an impassioned plea against univocality among poets and society at large in their reactions to the emperor: ‘All of us assume a stability for the regime and a constancy of attitude towards the regime that did not exist.’ He argues for constant change. Paul Zanker’s (1988) analysis of the Augustan monuments has attracted criticism for giving the appearance of an orchestrated ‘Augustan programme’ and a generalized social acceptance thereof.73 Stability is the aim of the representations conveyed by 71

Feeney (2004) 4 objects to the narrow sense of this word for this reason. Syme’s (1939) 440–58 summarizes this as ‘The National Programme’, and assumes the authors function as spokesmen for it, whether or not sincerely, in ‘The Organization of Opinion’ (459–75). Habinek and Schiesaro (1997) pp. xv–xvi critique both Marxist and traditional political historians’ assumptions that culture is secondary to economic or political ‘revolutions’. Their title, The Roman Cultural Revolution, honours and corrects Syme. Sauron (1994) 519 suggests Horace as an architect of the Augustan programme; Putnam (2000a) reads Horace’s Carmen saeculare as creating the message more than as conveying something handed down from above. 73 e.g. Wallace-Hadrill (1988). Henderson (1998) on Galinsky (1996). Ho¨lscher (1993) 87: the Augustan simpliﬁcation of myth to a few ideologically laden themes lays a simply structured meaning over ‘multifarious, random, and contingent events, actions, and fates’. 72

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the monuments rather than a pre-existing reality. Similarly, attitudes towards the media were not totalizing. Within the common ground of topoi such as the monumentum, there is huge variety. The interest of this analysis lies in uncovering the different ways individual poets and their ruler arrange the pieces and reﬂect on their arrangement. I focus less on the message represented, important as this is, than on the media’s self-consciousness about representing.74 A focus on ‘how’ instead of ‘what’, however, hardly means abandoning politics. The poets compete with Augustus for control over cultural representation, and Chs. 12 and 13 on the monuments at the north end of the Campus Martius show that similar concerns about performativity, representation, inscription, ritual performance, and authority inhabit not only the monuments as representing media, but the nature of the political power they present to the world. The monuments embody many of the topoi explored in contemporary poetry. The Augustus of these monuments is as self-conscious as any of the Augustan poets, whether we construe him as author or as represented object.75

CONTINUUM OR DICHOTO MY? In Hellenistische Dichtung, Wilamowitz refers to the easy equation among the Romans of ‘Dichten und Singen’, of literary composition and song.76 As mentioned above, Dupont differentiates between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ cultures, between performance and writing as means of literary production, between Greece and Rome, between Republican and Imperial Rome.77 Her argument about decline adopts the Romans’ own rhetoric—but the vigour of Latin

74 Schaeffer (1997) gives an update on media studies, their origins in Classics, and their relation to other critical modes, such as philology and deconstruction. 75 Kennedy (1992) 35: ‘Conventionally we tend to look upon Augustus as a person, but he was more signiﬁcant as an idea.’ He attributes similarities in the legitimating discourse of the Augustan age to e.g. Livy and Augustus not as individuals, but as participants in contemporary social and discursive practices (44). 76 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1924) i. 180–1, critiqued by Bing (1988) 22–3. Poets sometimes shift between the vocabularies of song and writing without marked difference, e.g. Catalepton 9: ‘scribere’ (10), ‘chartas’ (13), and ‘carmine’ (62) of the poet’s composition, and ‘cantus’ (7), ‘choros’ (8), ‘carmina’ (13-16), and ‘scriptore’ (23) of that of his laudandus Messalla. Skilful poets handle the terms more precisely, even when commingled. 77 Dupont (1994). Citroni (1983) 211 uses similar language for occasionality in Horace: heat accrues to poetry that arises from a concrete experience of daily social relations, cold to gnomic impersonality. Barchiesi (2000) n. 30, Feeney (2000) on Dupont.

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literature belies their anxieties.78 We need to walk a tightrope between a false dichotomy and a simplifying collapse of terms, although different poets engage in both strategies. The slippage between writing and song in Latin literature is not meaningless, nor is the language of song a nostalgic reﬂex. These result from various literary, cultural, and political pressures. Song and writing are different but interrelated positions along a continuum. Sometimes they are in antithesis, sometimes in harmony, or are at least little differentiated.79 In most cases, however, song and writing are mutually implicated within a larger coherent system of cultural signiﬁcation. Untangling the differences in various authors, and within authors in various genres or individual poems, shows there is no ﬁxed way of constructing their relation, though I would venture to say that in the Augustan age there is a shared yearning in artistic and political representation for presence, however difﬁcult, and a heightened awareness that all forms of representation entail mediation.80 This tendency does not result in a uniﬁed, monolithic Augustan culture, but results from a series of interventions, some idiosyncratic, some in dialogue, but many addressing a similar question: how to actualize cultural production, in what form, and what the constraints are. Mediation comes in multiple forms, but some forms (song, utterance) appear more immediate than others (writing). Furthermore, some forms of mediation, again writing, appear to inhibit enactive or effective utterance more than others. A unifying concern in this period is the dynamic interaction between presence, whether this be construed as song, ritual, or auctoritas, and absence, taken to encompass writing, monument, and representation. Poets need both the performative moment and the transmission of writing to create literature. Literature arises from its cultural context and sits apart from it. Vergil needs Augustus as well as Homer, and he furthermore needs Milton and Broch. I attempt to tease out how the poets themselves understand the relation between the transient moment, with all the seductions and pressures of actuality, and the possibility of breaking from the present and speaking to other ages through the distance writing affords. The media in this period often ﬁgure the trade-off between power and freedom.

78 Levene (2004): Tacitus’ Dialogus itself provides evidence against its own thesis of literary decline. 79 Miles (1995) 59: for Livy fama and scripta are equally unreliable. Habinek (2005c) 2: in Roman culture, ‘the boundary between the oral and the written, which preoccupies much scholarship on Greek culture, ends up being less important than the ongoing negotiation between the everyday and the special’. 80 Habinek (1998a) 152: ‘Roman writers routinely privilege direct communication between author and audience.’

2 Some Background TRADITION, GENRE, AND STYLE Most genres at Rome identify themselves primarily with either song or writing. While epic, lyric, and tragedy gravitate towards song and epistles unsurprisingly represent themselves as written,1 the dominant afﬁliations of some genres are unclear. Elegy, with its derivation from epigram, has a strong link to writing, and yet frequently calls itself song (Ch. 7). Horatian satire, named sermo, can approximate conversation, but satiric composition is writing.2 Didactic leans toward epic, and shepherds’ songs align pastoral notionally with song, but the link is weaker than in epic or lyric.3 Comedy, with its realistic self-consciousness, presents itself as performance subsequent to writing. These dominant generic afﬁliations derive from a genre’s traditional modes of production, but contain traces of subsequent literary history: there are no pure forms. It is no accident that the genres with more complex afﬁliations developed later, but even the earliest Greek poetry shows an interest in communication media. Although heralds, with their largely verbatim repetition, are the usual means for conveying a message, writing appears at Iliad 6. 169 as a new technology (Herington 1985: 45 n. 11). No connection is made between writing and the poetry itself, and the damage that comes to Bellerophon from writing implicitly suggests its potential for harm. Different genres, and different authors within genres, align themselves with the various media for overdetermined reasons. Actual practices intersect not only with a particular genre’s traditions, but also with stylistic levels. Augustan poetry’s habit of citation makes it imperative to start with the tradition to see how writing and song serve as indicators of generic and stylistic afﬁliations. 1 Horace’s Epistles refer internally to the poet’s and his addressee’s letter-writing activities: 1. 3. 30, 1. 4. 30, 1. 8. 2, 1. 10. 49, 1. 15. 25, 1. 16. 4. The collection itself is a book: liber 1. 20. 1. 2 Lucilius does not embrace the vocabulary of song in the extant fragments, though it is unclear whether he presents satire overtly as writing. In Horace, Serm. 2. 1 alone, satire is referred to with ‘scribere’ at lines 10, 16, and 60. The song it will create (‘cantabitur’, 46) is the gossip mill. 3 Ebbeler (forthcoming).

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Song is elevating, while writing is more realistic. Augustan Rome in both literature and politics characteristically makes things new by citing the old; engagement with the tradition entails difference along with identiﬁcation. The following sections touch on the various attitudes towards different media inherited by the Augustans from their close predecessors.4 Signal elements are the relation of their medium to their religious outlook and immortality, realism versus mystiﬁcation, embodied and disembodied poety.

GOD, DEATH, A ND THE MODERN ˇ Ø ˚ÆººÆå › ªæÆÆ ØŒe e ªÆ Øº Y ºª r ÆØ ﬁH ªºø ﬁ ŒÆŒﬁH (Callimachus 465Pf)5 (that Callimachus the grammarian said that a big book was equal to a big evil.)

For all his bookish learning, Callimachus follows Homer in referring to his own poetry as song. His adherence to the traditional formulation is such that Newman sees the newly positive valuation of song in late Republican Rome as a sign of Alexandrianism.6 Although there were plenty of reasons for Romans to value song,7 the Latin poets noticed Callimachus’ stance. He is paradigmatic for a positive evaluation of song over writing. The ‘big bore’ is not a song, but a book. But he also provides a model for a realistic presentation of writing as part of poetic composition and preservation (Lowrie 1997: 59– 61). I discuss his interest in the relation of writing to performativity in Ch. 6, 4 I treat here only extant material, and argue below (Ch. 9) that any archaic song culture was lost to late Republican Rome. 5 Cameron (1995) 52 suggests the big poem elicits censure not in itself, but perhaps because of recitation weariness. 6 Newman (1990) 428–31. The language of song is overwhelming in the hymns. Hunter (1996) 54 refers to the ‘“mimetic” mode’ of Callimachus’ hymns and contrasts it with Theocritus’ treatment of hymns as ‘a kind of brief “memory” of performance’. Callimachus also refers to non-literary writing: e.g. sky-charts (110. 1Pf) or mathematical ﬁgures (191. 58, 60). Cameron (1992) and (1995) chs. 2 and 3 challenges the characterization of the Hellenistic age as bookish as opposed to the oral culture of archaic Greece. He argues for a culture of public performance at festivals and symposia, including for elegy, and for a literary culture where poets wrote for readers as well as listeners but not exclusively for them (33). See Hunter (1996) ch. 5 for Apollonius’ and Theocritus’ self-presentation in relation to a lost archaic song culture, Bing (1988) 20 for Theocritus’ depiction of the Graces as scrolls. 7 Habinek (2005c) 275 nn. 28 and 30 rightly critiques Newman for neglecting the importance of song in Roman culture and attributing reference to it to imitation of the Greeks. Habinek sees carmen as a category ‘capable of absorbing new markers of specialness (e.g. adherence to a Hellenistic tradition) without thereby ceasing to be Roman song’ (80–1).

26

Some Background

which explores differences between his and Ovid’s accounts of Acontius and Cydippe. Writing is a poet’s activity before god intervenes.8 ŒÆd ªaæ ‹ æ Ø KE Kd º ŁÅŒÆ ª Æ Ø , ººø r ‹ Ø ¸ŒØ · . . . IØ, e b Ł ‹

Ø åØ ŁæłÆØ, c ıÐ Æ TªÆŁb º ÆºÅ · (Callimachus, Aitia 1. 1. 21–4Pf) (And indeed when I ﬁrst put a writing tablet on my knees, Lycian Apollo said to me, ‘Singer, bring up the sacriﬁcial victim as fat as possible, but the Muse, my good fellow, slender.’)

Divine inspiration elevates Callimachus with the appellation ‘singer’ and this calling accompanies advice to embrace the slender style. The turn from writer to singer parallels the rejection of the fat style for the thin. Callimachus explicitly attaches fat to writing in his criticism of Antimachus: ¸Å ŒÆd Æåf ªæÆ ŒÆd P æ . (Callimachus, 398Pf) (Lyde, a writing both fat and not clear.)

Although the Aitia prologue suggests the antithesis will be between fat and thin, toros normally refers either literally to the voice or metaphorically to clear utterance, so that it contrasts with both pachu and gramma.9 This fragment corrects Asclepiades’ praise of Antimachus as a gramma:10

PŒ I ºÆ ¸ıÅ ,

e ı e ı H ªæÆ ŒÆd Øåı; (Asclepiades, AP 9. 63. 3–4) (Who hasn’t read the Lyde, the common writing of the Muses and Antimachus?) 8

Snell (1953) 283 understands this passage as ‘a joke’. Cameron (1995) 86–7 notes that Callimachus refers to writing in the context of composition, as opposed to performance, and lists parallels. 9 Krevans (1993) 158–9 pursues the stylistic connotations of pachu; writing is an additional term to be considered for Alexandrian poetics. Another fragment of Callimachus’ literary criticism containing a reference to writing is hard to fathom: ﬁH YŒº e ªæÆ e ˚œ (to which the Coan writing is like, 532Pf). Depending on the antecedent, Philetas’ writing is either praised (Pfeiffer ad loc. suggests a comparison to Mimnermus), or censured (Cameron 1995: 319–20 suggests a comparison to Antimachus). Callimachus’ use of the language of song when conferring compliments (e.g. to Aratus, whose song, ¼Ø Æ, and manner are said to be Hesiod’s, Epigram 27Pf) supports Cameron. 10 Pf. ad loc.: ‘Asclepiadis ipsa verba ad ridiculum convertit’, with bibliography. Cameron (1995) 303–4 thinks a new fragment mentioning song and Lyde may be by Antimachus. He notes that Antimachus wrote a collection called Deltoi (‘Writing Tablets’), probably a miscellany of short occasional poems (87–8): this probably does not ‘represent a revolutionary attitude toward his craft’. Rather, he ‘composed on tablets; performed before a live audience; and later published in book form’.

Some Background

27

By contrast, Callimachus represents his own relation to the Muses in Aitia books 1–2 as a conversation, namely as utterance.11 For Callimachus, poetic writing is ﬂat, incomplete without god’s intervention. It is a big deal for Creophylus that his work passes as a ˇæØ . . . ªæÆ (writing of Homer, Epigram 6. 3–4Pf), but the terms used for Homer himself mark the difference: ŁE IØ (divine singer, 1). Writing is the humdrum reality of poetry, which needs divine inspiration to elevate it to song. Gramma is the mot juste for prose (of Plato, Epigram 23. 3–4Pf). If tablets are a metaphor for composition, cedar oil, used as a preservative in book-roll production, identiﬁes writing’s role in preservation.12 ººÆ F , KºªØ Ø K Øł Æ Ł ºØ Æ

åEæÆ KE , ¥ Æ Ø ıºf ø Ø . (Aitia 1. 7. 13–14Pf) (Be propitious now, and wash your sleek hands on my elegies, so that they may remain for me many a year.)

By itself, however, cedar oil cannot ensure poetic longevity; this requires the Graces. Writing’s technology marks the end points of composition and preservation, but without Apollo Callimachus would not rise to the level of song and without the Graces’ blessing, his poetry would not be worth preserving.13 Callimachus identiﬁes his poetry as writing until god’s intervention saves it from the mundane.14 Bookish research on the one hand, divine song on the other—Callimachus has it both ways: Iæ ıæ Pb Iø (I sing of nothing unattested, 612Pf; Bing 1988: 36). This manifesto sums up a procedure exposed in detail in the story of Acontius and Cydippe. Callimachus does research and names his source Xenomedes, but also sets this prose history, written on tablets (Aitia 3. 75.66Pf), against the divinity of his Muse-inspired poetry. The story ‘ran to

11 Cameron (1995) 352 draws the contrast to Asclepiades. Poiema in KåŁÆæø e ÅÆ e ŒıŒºØŒ (I hate the epic cycle, Epigram 28. 1Pf) may also be negatively marked. 12 Bing (1988) 18; Fowler (1994) 251 n. 46. Speech, death, and writing are interrelated at the opening of the Iambi: Hipponax calls on us to listen to him (191. 1Pf) as he speaks from the dead and ask us to record his speech (ªæç Ł c ÞÅÐ Ø , ‘write down the speech’, Iambi 191. 31Pf). 13 Callimachus explores the irony that the inscription on the tomb of Simonides, who invented the art of memory, could not prevent its destruction (64Pf). Callimachus has Simonides speak. 14 Writing is the medium of envy (even when complimentary) and retribution: 393. 2Pf, Hymn 6. 56.

28

Some Background

his Muse’ (K æÅ æÆ ˚ÆººØÅ , Aitia 3. 75. 77).15 Hutchinson sees the Callimachean paradox as emotion and distance at the same time (1988: 30–2); these correspond to phonocentric inspiration and stark realism about the toils of writing and book production.16 Ennius is the ﬁrst Latin poet extant in substantial enough quantity for us to hazard some guesses about his self-representation regarding the media. His well-known antipathy to the native vocabulary of song—Camena, carmen, canere, uates—in favour of Greek words emphasizing human literary production (poema, poeta) accords with his religious beliefs.17 Cotta in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (1. 119) says Ennius was a follower as well as translator of Euhemerus, who held that we worship great men divinized after death.18 Those thinking this way are entirely bereft of religion in Cotta’s view. Ennius’ vision of Homer revealing the nature of things in a dream (Ann. iv Sk) gives him contact with divinity as he understood it: a great man honoured after death. His remark that no one saw philosophy in dreams before beginning to learn it deﬂates the mysticizing trope (proem book 7, 211Sk). Ennius further embraces writing over against religious posturing when he declines rewriting Naevius’ account of the ﬁrst Punic war (206–7Sk). Ennius’ evaluation of the terms, however, is opposite to that of Callimachus. scripsere alii rem uorsibus quos olim Faunei uatesque canebant (Others have written the matter in verses which once the Fauns and prophets used to sing.)

Skutsch (at 206): ‘Criticism begins in the next line with vorsibus quos etc. Here the phrase scripsere . . . rem probably is not meant to convey that Naevius’ 15 For the assumption of writing, Bing (1988) 18; Cameron (1995) 352: ‘the Muse is represented as reading the story in Xenomedes!’ 16 Callimachus aligns himself with the poietes rather than the usual aoidos at Epigram 8, about the realities of winning and losing competitions. 17 See Newman (1990) 422–4 and Skutsch at lines 1, 12, 293, 451, 487 for Ennius’ distaste for canere, carmen, Camenae, and uates; he prefers poema, Musae, and poeta. Habinek (2005c) 79–81 sees Ennius as a rule-proving exception to his general argument that Roman poets divide poetry into valorized song (canere/carmen) on the one hand and mere speech (loquor/locuta) on the other. He omits writing from his account and does not try to explain Ennius’ difference from the tradition he sketches. Memorare, collected at Habinek (2005c) 275 n. 29, is a verb of utterance without strong afﬁliation to either song or writing. Ford (2002) traces the development of Greek words for ‘making’ (as opposed to ‘singing’) in Part II, general statements at 93. 18 The sacred scripture of Euhemerus is exactly that, writing: ‘haec ut scripta sunt Iouis fratrumque eius stirps atque cognatio; in hunc modum nobis ex sacra scriptione traditum est’ (this is the lineage and kindred of Jupiter and his brothers as have been written; in this manner it has been handed down to us from sacred writing, Euhemerus 35W). Callimachus disparages Euhemerus’ writings as ¼ØŒÆ ØºÆ (191. 11Pf). Ennius also provides rationalizing explanations of the gods in his Epicharmus (Var. 50, 54–8V). Feeney (1991) 120–1.

Some Background

29

writing was unpoetic; it seems to express rather that Ennius feels himself to be a rerum scriptor.’ In contrast to shaggy verse and songs coloured with divine inspiration, Ennius prefers the hard work of a ‘dicti studiosus’ (philologist, 209Sk).19 It is hardly accidental that Horace brings back the divine demimonde of nymphs and satyrs disparaged by Ennius along with the gods above (‘dis superis’), lyre (‘barbiton’), and bard (‘uates’), in his programmatic ﬁrst ode (Odes 1. 1. 29–36). Ennius deﬁnes himself as a modern by being a writer. The Augustans make a postmodern gesture by re-endowing song with a numinous conception of god. In Lucilius, canere similarly represents a mode the poet, another realist, does not himself embrace. It is alien to his genre. percrepa pugnam Popili, facta Corneli cane (621M ¼ 26.26 Charpin) (Cry Popilius’ battle abroad, sing the deeds of Cornelius!)

The lack of context makes the fragment hard to gauge, but commentators assume an interlocutor is advising Lucilius what speech acts to undertake: denounce and celebrate. Marx suggests the interlocutor proposes Hostius’ Bellum Histricum and Ennius’ Annales as a model for Lucilius—he not only suggests a genre antithetical to satire, but vocabulary the moderns view as archaic. The alliteration in each half of the verse and the contrast in verbs spoofs Lucilius’ gauche adviser and Gruen takes the passage as a recusatio.20 Canere here means ‘celebrate’ and represents a cliche´ to be avoided as well as a different genre. Lucilian satire represents itself rather as play and conversation (‘ludo ac sermonibus nostris’, 1039M ¼ 30.85 Charpin).21 Speech, and not 19 Ennius differentiates himself from his predecessors in metre—an index of style—and theology. Ford’s (2002) 57–8 argument about Xenophanes is illuminating: he also criticizes his predecessors’ theology, but his substitute of ‘plasmata ton proteron’ for the epic ‘kleia proteron anthropon’ is a category rather of representation. 20 Gruen (1992) 282; Freudenburg (2001) 76. Horace’s Trebatius imitates the misguided adviser who advocates praise poetry, but with more nuanced vocabulary. He suggests the high ‘dicere’ (Serm. 2. 1. 11) for praise, but uses ‘scribere’ for Lucilian and Horatian satire (Serm. 2. 1. 10, 16). 21 Parallels for both words in Charpin ad loc. Habinek (2005a) analyses satire as ‘play’ and takes Lucilius’ other uses of -can- as sarcastic (2005c) 78. He does not attempt to account for why Lucilius would choose not to align himself with the powerful discourse of honoriﬁc carmen and overlooks the negative connotations of canere in Pacuvius: ‘ubi poetae pro sua parte falsa conﬁcte canant j qui causam humilem dictis amplant’ (when the poets who amplify their lowly case with assertions sing false ﬁctions for their own beneﬁt, 366–7W; Ribbeck at 337–8 edits out ‘canant’ for ‘autumant’) (77). Plautus uses ‘canere’ only of trumpets (Am. 227), Terence of harping on a topic (Phormio 495), and of an omen given by a chicken (Phormio 708). Neither has carmen. This may be an accident of transmission, but there is no secure attestation of a positive evaluation of canere for poetry before Lucretius.

30

Some Background

song, hits the right note, as it will for Horace’s Sermones, ‘Conversations’.22 Writing occurs as reference to a realistic activity that the poet engages in.23 But Roman Republican literature by no means uniformly opposes song. Ennius himself offers an accommodation. While he may present himself as a writer in comparison to the native tradition in the Annales, his adoption of the Greek tradition brings in, to some degree, the vocabulary of performed song. He uses melos as a substitute for carmen in describing the tune of a reed: ‘tibia Musarum pangit melos’ (the Muses’ reed offers a song, 293Sk). The status of this language is linked to his representation of god. Ennius includes the gods as characters in the Annales as part of ‘epic’s operational norm’ (Feeney 1991: 124), but contrary to his translation of the native Camenae into the Greek Muses, he refers to the other gods by their habitual Latin names.24 The difference is that the gods of the Roman state religion form part of the subject matter of Roman history, while the Muses function ﬁguratively in the poem’s programmatic apparatus. In the opening invocation, his Muses thump great Olympus with their dancing feet, presumably to the sound of music (‘Musae, quae pedibus magnum pulsatis Olympum’, 1Sk), evoking a Greek tradition of choral Muses deriving from Hesiod that has no more bearing on the poem’s actual means of production than the conventional epic treatment of the gods has on Ennius’ religious views.25 The realism of his religion and the enduring ‘primitive sense of cano’ (Newman 1990: 422) in Latin may make the singing uates an antipathetic ﬁgure in the Annales, but these elements accompany a ﬁgurative appropriation of Greek performance. Just as Callimachus’ song depends on writing, Ennius inversely needs enactment in the spoken word. Each provides the other’s immortality: the book-roll

22 Horace represents these in a moment of ironic self-deﬂation as ‘creeping along the ground’ (sermones . . . j repentis per humum, Epist. 2. 1. 250–1) as opposed to higher style honoriﬁc language (‘dicere’, 252). 23 See e.g. 354M ¼ 9.5 Charpin, on the difference in pronunciation of long and short a’s but their similar spelling, and 1294–5M ¼ H 3 Charpin on ﬁtting words into the metre. 24 ‘Iuno Vesta Minerua Ceres Diana Venus Mars j Mercurius Iouis Neptunus Volcanus Apollo’ (240–1Sk). 25 The verb the Muses governed was certainly not canite, for metrical reasons beyond his aversion to Latin words for song, and was more probably something like poema mouete or poemata pangite nobis, compare frs. 12, 403, 293Sk; Vergil did join mouere with cantus, see Skutsch on fr. 403. Varro (RR 1. 1. 4) guarantees this was an invocation. Newman (1990) 422 suggests that if canite underlies cante in the Salian hymn, the religious associations would be exactly what Ennius abhors. Ru¨pke (2001) argues the poetry of Ennius and his kind were performed at Roman symposia since convivial scenes are represented in the poetry. There is no hard evidence either for or against this supposition, as admitted by Sciarrino (2004b) 50 n. 26. Even if true, the Muses’ dancing does not purport to represent the poem’s mode of production.

Some Background

31

for Callimachean song, speech in Ennius’ writing.26 Two fragments represent the ﬁgures whose immortality concerns much of later Latin poetry: laudandus and poet. quantam statuam faciet populus Romanus quantam columnam quae res tuas gestas loquatur? (Ennius, Scipio 1–2V)27 (How great a statue will the Roman people make, how great a column to speak of your accomplishments?)

Monuments, the markers of death, speak through people’s reading aloud the inscriptions written upon them.28 The metaphor in Scipio’s speaking monument becomes literal in the poet’s own epitaph, quoted above: speech passes through the mouths of men.29 Life in death, performance in writing—these terms’ interdependence manifests itself when the committed scriptor faces death. Ennius’ epitaph is often quoted in isolation from another epigram cited in the same context by Cicero (Tusc. Disp. 1. 15. 34). Whether or not the two were originally one,30 together they convey Ennius’ immortality through the available representational media. aspicite o ciues senis Enni imaginis formam. hic uestrum panxit maxima facta patrum. (Ennius, Epigrams 15–16V) (O citizens, look at the form of the image of old Ennius. He divulged the greatest deeds of your fathers.)

Although the couplet falls short of a full-ﬂedged ecphrasis, it creates the image of a statue of an old man with the epigram itself inscribed on the base. Vahlen emends the text from ‘pinxit’ (he depicted) to ‘panxit’ (he revealed), on the 26 Habinek (2005c) 275 n. 29 emphasizes the verbal performance implied in ‘poemata nostra cluebunt’ (our poems will be heard, Ann. 12Sk). 27 For text, see 3 op. inc. Sk. Habinek (2005c) does not consider this use of loquor. 28 Svenbro (1988) ch. 3. Ennius associates statues with tombs as a way of creating a name for oneself after death: ‘reges per regnum statuasque sepulcraque quaerunt, j aediﬁcant nomen, summa nituntur opum ui’ (kings through their reign pursue both statues and tombs, build their name, strive with all the force of their resources, 404–5Sk). Mariotti’s emendation of Ennius, Ann. 579Sk would allow a precedent for Horace’s ‘exegi monumentum’ (Carm. 3. 30. 1), but Skutsch deems it unlikely. 29 In their imitations of this epigram, Vergil keeps the writing metaphor implicit at Georgics 3. 9. Horace averts both funeral song and tomb at Odes 2. 20. 21–4, and Ovid ﬁnally makes writing explicit at Metamorphoses 15. 878; see Ch. 15. 30 As in W 1, Ennius, Epigrams 7–10; Pohlenz ad loc. accepts Vahlen’s argument they are separate.

32

Some Background

grounds that painting is an intolerable image in an epigram,31 but ecphrasis may pull the language of representation towards the visual arts. With the statue, which represents a forma, which in turns represents an imago, the epigram displays a high degree of self-consciouness about mediality. The monument and reading aloud—persistent object and performance—in the two couplets together function as tropes for Ennius’ immortality.

LUCRETIUS: REALISM AND T HE TALKING CURE If we expect an epicurean rationalist who makes a god of a man (Epicurus, DRN 5. 8) to display the same mistrust of song as Ennius, Lucretius will surprise. Canere regularly denotes poetic activity32 and carmen is now the unmarked word for poetry.33 For Lucretius, writing refers to the process and labour of composition,34 but the product is song.35 In his view of the poetic tradition, writing is necessary to produce literature: carminibus cum res gestas coepere poetae tradere; nec multo priu’ sunt elementa reperta.

(5. 1444–5)

(when poets began to entrust accomplishments to songs; nor were letters found much earlier.)

Poetry Greek and Latin, Alexandrian and epic, his own and others’, once written, is sung.36 Although Pohlenz ad loc. states that panxit ¼ cecinit, and cites ‘tibia Musarum pangit melos’ (Ann. 293Sk), Skutsch on the latter passage explains that Ennius is reluctant to adopt the language of song. 32 Volk (2002) 84 lists uersus, carmen, and canere of the poet’s activity; uates (1. 102, 109) remains a bad word. 33 Carmen also means actual song: sense perception (2. 506; 4. 981); history of music (5. 1380; 5. 1451). Lucretius seems to distinguish between poetry (‘carmina’ of Empedocles, 1. 731) and prose (‘tuisque ex . . . chartis’, from your papers, of Epicurus, 3. 10). 34 He asks Venus’ assistance for writing verse (‘sociam . . . scribendis uersibus’, 1. 24); he dreams of writing as among his daily activities (‘naturam quaerere rerum j semper et inuentam patriis exponere chartis’, 4. 969–70). Volk (2002) 84: the gerundive ‘scribendis’ (1. 24) creates ‘poetic simultaneity’, the impression the poem is coming into being before our eyes (13). ‘Charta’ also occurs of sense perception (the crackling of paper, 6. 112, 114). 35 ‘dulcique reperta labore j . . . pergam disponere carmina’ (3. 419–20); ‘quis potis est dignum pollenti pectore carmen j condere pro rerum maiestate hisque repertis?’ (5. 1–2). He refers to an earlier section of his poem: ‘quod in primo quoque carmine claret’ (6. 937). 36 Greek (Alexandrian: 2. 600, 5. 405, 6. 754; epic: 5. 327), Roman (Ennius: 1. 117–19; Lucretius himself: 5. 509, 6. 84). In these passages (and 5. 1444) poet is ‘poeta’; the sole use of ‘scriptores’ (3. 629) possibly includes prose writers (Plato comes to mind), though Kenney L ad loc. assumes poets. Non-poetic authors do not sing: ‘Grai memorant’ (the Greeks relate, 1. 831). 31

Some Background

33

Lucretius’ didacticism lends his poem a pragmatic aim. He labours and stays up nights for a purpose: quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti . . . (1. 143–4) (seeking with which words and what song I could ﬁnally spread clear lights before your mind . . . )37

With this programmatic passage, repeated in book 4, Lucretius tries to make complex thought intelligible. Unlike Vergil’s Sibyl, he makes sure his message can get through to his audience (‘obscura de re tam lucida pango j carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore’ (I compose such clear poetry on a dark matter, touching all things with the Muses’ grace), 1. 933–4).38 The purpose of writing verse is to hold the mind of his readership on difﬁcult material through ‘sweet-speaking Pierian song’ (1. 943–50). He never tells anyone to read, but rather to listen: ‘cognosce et clarius audi. j nec me animi fallit quam sint obscura’ (learn and listen more clearly. Nor does it escape my notice how dark things are, 1. 921–2).39 Hearing does not, however, immediately grant understanding and his task as philosopher poet is to make the message interpretable once heard.40 Writing is the medium of Epicurus’ prose philosophy; his ‘aurea dicta’, golden sayings, are transmitted through paper, ‘chartis’ (3. 10–12). But writing is only a medium to a higher end and interpretation is ﬁgured as speech. Writing, however, is also a metaphor for the very nature of things, exactly what is so hard to understand. Elementa, both atoms and letters, when Newman (1990) 430 understands canere in these passages as a mark of speciﬁcally Alexandrian poetry, or in the case of epic, of the poetry they imitated: Ennius is cast as an Alexandrian not only with cecinit but by association with Helicon, suggesting Hesiod rather than Homer as predecessor; Lucretius uses canere of himself when he sounds like Aratus. For critique, see Habinek (2005c) 275 n. 30. Although Lucretius appreciates Alexandrianism, Kenney (1970b), he may simply distinguish for Ennius between poetic composition as writing and transmission as song. 37 Volk (2002) 85–6 comments on the image of writing as composition here and the difference from the norm where writing refers to the ﬁnished product. Other metaphors (journey) attend signals of impending closure (88–9). 38 For lepos and aestheticism for Epicurean aims at 1. 934 and elsewhere, see Krostenko (2001) 86, 259–60 n. 69. 39 Legere never occurs. Lucretius’ arguments reach his addressee’s ears (e.g. 1. 417; 4. 912). Kenney (1970b) 371 emphasizes the Callimachean insistence on poetic clarity. Volk (2002) 80 refers ‘illud in his rebus tacitus ne forte requiras’ (5. 1091) to the convention that the didactic addressee not speak. Perhaps he is rather a listening reader. 40 Speech does not in itself guarantee either clarity or truth: ‘uatum terriloquis . . . dictis’ (1. 102–3). Gale (1994) 140–1 comments on Lucretius’ ambivalence to carmina according to the criterion of truth (e.g. he is suspicious of ‘Tyrrhena carmina’, 6. 381, namely Etruscan books of divination). The problem is not medium, but content. He himself is the ‘bard of the uera ratio’; in the same chapter she explicates his system of poetic valuation along the Epicurean principles of pleasure and clarity.

34

Some Background

rearranged, produce different substances and words alike,41 so that ﬁre (‘ignis’) emerges from an atomic change in wood (‘lignum’, 1. 908–14). Lucretius’ understanding of atomic composition is similar to his understanding of writing as poetic composition. Both are pragmatic. Rearrangement can change the world just as it can communication. Although their commitments are antithetical, Lucretius and Vergil alike use writing as a metaphor for the world. The scientist takes letters into the minute structure of things, while the believer inscribes history in the book of fate. Lucretius, himself a material part of the world, presents himself realistically as writing. Vergil by contrast is a mystic whose speech emerges already formed from the beginning as song. If poetry makes Lucretius’ message so clear, then why does the addressee never learn anything?42 Didactic conventions keep the pragmatic aim foregrounded, so that the aim can never be represented as achieved. Hopefully, the poem’s teaching will result in learning. The poetry shoots over the addressee who ﬁgures the reader within the text to target the real reader. The written poem remains static on the page, but produces speech at the point of reception. Lucretius’ addressee cannot change, but the reader can. Every reader, however, must be convinced from scratch, so the poem must persist, always ready to be re-enacted.

CATULLUS: FRO M EMB ODIED TO DISEMB ODIED P OETRY Catullus takes us in two directions. One is towards an intense identiﬁcation of his poetry with writing. The other explores poetic song. Writing, the medium of distance and absence, paradoxically conveys a sense of lived immediacy.43 The polymetrics, infused with the language of the book—paper, tablets, pumice, knobs, thongs44—are the paradigm of poetry that rings true. These 41 For extensive bibliography and positions on this analogy, Volk (2002) 100–5. Martindale (2005) 188 addresses this issue within a larger discussion of the relation in Lucretius of form and content that resists the honey versus wormwood dichotomy (182–200). 42 For the didactic addressee’s relation to the implied reader and the failure of learning in the poem, Mitsis (1993) esp. 122ff., with bibliography; Volk (2002) 80–2. 43 Bakker (1997) explores distance and immediacy in oral performance, but these qualities are also relevant to poetry meant for reading. 44 Wiseman (1982) 38 notes there is nothing about reading aloud in Catullus and surveys the language of writing. carta (1. 6 of Nepos; 22. 6 of Suffenus; 36. 1, 20 of Volusius); tabella (50. 2); catagraphi (25. 7); pugillaria (42. 5); codicilli (42. 11, 12, 19, 20, 24); scribere and its compounds (22. 5, 16 of Suffenus; 36. 7; 44. 18 of Sestius; 50. 4; also at 68. 7; 68. 33); poema (22. 15, 16; 50. 16); poeta (14. 5, 23; 16. 5; 35. 1; 36. 6; 49. 5, 6). Pumice, thongs, etc. occur in these passages. Besides literature, writing pertains to grafﬁti on walls (37. 10), promises in water (70. 4), and letters (68. 2; 68. 27). Reception depends on readers moving their hands, presumably to pick up a book: ‘si qui forte mearum ineptiarum j lectores eritis manusque uestras non horrebitis admouere nobis’ (14b). Also Wheeler (1999) 61–2.

Some Background

35

realistic details of daily life reinforce Catullus’ vaunted spontaneity. With few exceptions, the language of writing occurs in the polymetrics or short elegiacs, that of song in the long poems. The difference? The shorter poems have a strong generic afﬁliation with epigram.45 Catullus concentrates his engagement in what Krostenko calls the ‘language of social performance’ (2001: 12) in the polymetrics, where the quotidian is more at home.46 The high style treatment of mythic themes elevates the long poems and keeps realism at bay. Although there is a movement from poetry conceived as a physical, written object to a more abstract notion of song, at all points, Catullus stages a dialectic between embodied and disembodied poetry, capable and incapable of fulﬁlling social obligations. Catullan spontaneity arises from address, the sense that his poetry talks, and talks to someone (Citroni 1995). Selden argues that Catullan language is essentially performative (1992: esp. 480–9); speech acts such as dedication, censure, advice, warning, invitation, repudiation, apology, etc. by deﬁnition do what the utterance says. Catullus’ interest in performativity is an important step towards the Augustans’ exploration of literature’s potential felicity, that is, its success in achieving what it says.47 Writing provides a locus for this concern, because its ability to decontextualize can set obstacles in the way of performative felicity. It is, however, the proper medium for certain kinds of speech acts, so there is no one-to-one correspondence between speech and felicity on the one hand, and writing and infelicity on the other. Catullus opens the polymetrics by offering his ‘little scroll’ as a gift to Cornelius Nepos (‘cui dono lepidum nouum libellum . . . ? j . . . Corneli, tibi’ (to whom will I give my new and elegant little scroll? To you, Cornelius), 1. 1–3).48 Dedication is a speech act writing can actually perform. A mere oral dedication would fail since knowledge of it would be limited to the dedicatee and any chance witnesses. Writing enacts the dedication for all time and communicates it to all readers. Why then does the dedication need to be uttered twice? Catullus wants to make sure the speech act goes through. Ring composition ties mention of the book as an object (‘libellum’, 1) and the decision about the dedication (‘Corneli, tibi’, 3) to the actual act of dedication (‘quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli’ (therefore, have 45

For epigram’s inscriptional quality, Bing (1988) 17. Wray (2001) 55–63 introduces a number of ways of understanding performance in Catullus from the literal performance of his works to various kinds of social performance, and covers the relevant bibliography. He understands Catullan social performance as an aggressive and pragmatic display of manhood (esp. 67). 47 For the value of speech act theory for reading literature, see ‘Performance and Performativity’ in Ch. 3. 48 Krostenko’s (2001) 255 remark that poem 1 begins ‘a cycle of giving’ is important for the poetics of response in the polymetrics and the theme of the munus in the longer poems. 46

36

Some Background

for yourself whatever of a book this is), 8). The question and answer format dramatizes the poet’s deliberation as if outside the reiﬁed book. Cornelius’ name reveals the dedicatee constatively, but the imperative ‘habe’ explicitly performs the dedication.49 We see both the book as embodied object and the words as disembodied meditation, we hear the words as coming from both within and without the book. In Catullus 42, the address to the poetry (‘adeste, hendecasyllabi’ (be present, hendecasyllables), 1) highlights the difference between poetry as object and poetry as act. The poem stages the failure of ritual language in favour of the pragmatic aim of the poem’s own genre, invective. The scene is a contest between Catullus and a girl who has stolen his writing tablets (‘pugillaria’, 5; ‘codicillos’, 11, 12, 19, 20, 24) and refuses to return them. The paradox is that her withholding the tablets—the medium of composition and recording—should theoretically keep the poet from poetry. However, Catullus calls on his verses to engage in ritual shaming, the ﬂ agitatio , and so composes poetry for a pragmatic effect.50 His poetry does not need the tablets after all: its reality exceeds the mechanics of its medium. Can the poetry be effective as ritual language? Catullus presents his poetry as having voice (‘reﬂagitate’ (ask back), 10; ‘conclamate iterum altiore uoce’ (shout again with louder voice), 18) and as capable of presence (‘adeste’, 1). His verses join the poet in action (‘persequamur’ (let us chase), 6) and in a speech act (‘reﬂagitemus’ (let us ask back), 6). These are words that do things. He calls all his hendecasyllables together to speak the refrain and its variant (‘moecha putida, redde codicillos, j redde, putida moecha, codicillos!’ (stinking whore, give back the tablets, return the tablets, stinking whore!), 11–12, 19–20; ‘pudica et proba, redde codicillos’ (modest and honest woman, give back the tablets), 24). If the verses already existed in other poems, they would have to say something different from what they originally said, but their denotative function yields to their pragmatic power. Still, there is something jarring about this divorce of content from performativity. Even if the hendecasyllables belong only to this poem and not others, Catullus in the poem’s ﬁction asks them to speak only the refrain and not the poem itself, which consists of the request to them. The real hendecasyllables, of course, speak the whole poem. The gap between what they are asked to speak (refrain) and what they do speak (the poem) arises from self-reference. Speech can split internally even without writing’s decontextualization. 49 Woodman (2003) 193 underscores that dono is a ‘genuine indicative’, so that ‘the question is intended to imply that the answer is not in doubt’—a constative format. 50 Fraenkel (1961) 49–51; Selden (1992) 482.

Some Background

37

Why does Catullus call on his verses rather than a group of sodales to participate in the ﬂ agitatio ? The hendecasyllables are not quite equivalent to a group of friends, or even a slave Catullus could boss around. Here reference to the poetry’s material nature, its composition in a particular metre, is the less realistic option. He does this because the tablets arguably belong to the poetry, because of the self-reﬂective punch in having poetry make the demand in the poem’s ﬁction when poetry is making the demand through the poem itself, because of the opportunity for juxtaposing different kinds of utterance and media, and for creating slippage between the formal addressee, the hendecasyllables, and the girl who is the invective target—in short to explore the nature and status of poetic discourse. Power is also at issue. Catullus controls what the tablets say: friends and slaves both have their own wills. But can he control his discourse or does it run away from him? In the end, the ritual does not work. The ﬂ agitatio fails to achieve the tablets’ return. The ﬁnal change of strategy highlights effective discourse (‘siquid proﬁcere amplius potestis’, if you can do anything further, 23), but functions as a punchline rather than a bona ﬁde attempt to recover lost property.51 The girl is right: Catullus is a joke (3), though one told on her. The aims of the poetry, to lambaste the girl with invective, trump the aims of the ﬂ agitatio . Getting the tablets back is not the point after all. The poem is all the more effective as invective for the failure to move the girl with ritual language.52 Given Catullus’ representation of his poems as speaking and achieving pragmatic poetic aims, if not those overtly stated, why expend so much energy appearing to attempt to recover the tablets? They seem superﬂuous—a token of the means of communication rather than communication itself, one possession among others, like the napkin Asinius Marrucinus steals in poem 12. But extra value attaches to Catullus’ stolen napkin as the locus of memory: it is a souvenir of a friend (‘mnemosynum mei sodalis’, 12. 13) and a metonymy for their relationship. The value of these particular tablets is less clear. The poem’s existence proves Catullus can compose without them, and tablets are merely a transient medium for poetry, which was later copied onto neatly produced book-rolls. Neither composition nor immortality is at stake.53 The tablets’ importance is as a token of communicative exchange. 51 On the poem’s illocutionary success (as insult) and perlocutionary failure (to recover the tablets), see Selden (1992) 484. 52 Wray (2001) 127 analyses the poem as invective against attempts to detach Catullus from aggression through ironic self-awareness. He traces the devastating social consequences of similar abuse in modern contexts (133–4) and suggests that contemporaries could have recognized the anonymous target (139 n. 57). He emphasizes the public forum for verbal aggression (141). 53 Tablets could also be used for permanent recording, as detailed by Meyer (2004), but for documents rather than poetry.

38

Some Background

Although any set of tablets could serve as a medium of communication, so their intrinsic worth is small, Catullus’ attachment to these tablets is sentimental, the affection transferred to things valued for other reasons.54 If the napkin embodies friendship and the pet bird of poems 2 and 3 betokens his girlfriend’s capacity for love, the tablets stand for communication itself. They belong to the poetry (‘uestra’, your, 42. 4)55 in its embodied form. Although the poetry has independent existence and can travel—Catullus calls his poetry from everywhere (‘undique’, 42. 2)—it must be written somewhere and cannot travel as pure voice. If the book-roll is poetry become object upon publication, tablets stand for occasional writing as communicative exchange. They transmit ad hominem verse. Catullus threatens Asinius Marrucinus with three hundred hendecasyllables if he fails to return the napkin (12. 10): in the meantime he receives rather the poem’s seventeen lines, presumably via sent tablets.56 In poem 42, Catullus’ handling of grammatical persons explores the dynamics of communication. Poet and poetry are initially separated as ﬁrst and second persons (‘me’, ‘mihi’; ‘adeste’, ‘hendecasyllabi’, ‘quot estis’, 1–4); they then join as ‘we’ against ‘her’ (‘persequamur eam et reﬂagitemus’, 6). Then the poetry goes off, ‘you’, to address a third person ‘her’ (‘circumsistite eam, et reﬂagitate’, 10) in a second person address (‘redde’, 11–12). At the poem’s centre, the mediation the poetry provides between poet and girl dissolves and the poet speaks directly to the girl in the second person (‘non assis facis?’, you don’t care?, 13) and apostrophizes her with invective (‘o lutum, lupanar’, O ﬁlth, whorehouse, 13). The shift in persons reﬂects the communicative process: the author views the message as separate from himself during composition; once sent he and it cannot be entirely separated; when the message speaks to the girl, the medium tends towards transparency as if the poet were speaking directly.57 The conjunction of apostrophe, which speaks to what is not there, with address, which speaks to someone present, epitomizes the duality of occasional verse.58 The poetry is physically present at the moment of reception, but the author is not. The rest of the poem alternates between

54 Krostenko (2001) 245 n. 23 calls attention to the difference between the affective and legal value of the napkin with parallels from Roman law. 55 Editorial alteration to ‘nostra’ (our) overlooks spoken poetry’s need for writing, as well as the play between grammatical persons (more below); see Quinn ad loc. and Fraenkel (1961) 46–7. 56 Krostenko (2001) 252 highlights the interplay in the poem between actions and words— the latter deﬁnitely gain the upper hand. 57 The poem then returns with slight variation back through the stages to the situation at the beginning, with the ﬁnal line recapitulating a second person (poetry) addressing a further second person (girl). 58 For the distinction between apostrophe and address, see below n. 75.

Some Background

39

the poet’s identiﬁcation with and separation from the verse (‘exprimamus’, ‘conclamate’, ‘proﬁcimus’, ‘uobis’, ‘potestis’, 17–23). The disappearance of the ﬁrst set of tablets changes nothing in the structure of communication—one can always use another set. Yet some set of tablets is always needed. Catullus explores a crisis in communicative exchange. Tablets are supposed to carry a message to a recipient, who then erases the message, writes a new one, and sends them back. The girl has kept the tablets and hence disrupted the process. The poem’s situation corresponds to poetic receipt: the reader does not write back and keeps the physical text. In comparison to the dynamics of communicative exchange, poetic communication is static: the poet wants his tablets back, but poetry is structurally incapable of gaining an answer. Instead of the genuine response of a blush (‘ruborem’, 16), he gets no response (‘nihil mouetur’, 21).59 The ritual language depicted in the poem may fail, communication may derail, but the hendecasyllables succeed as invective, and the poem succeeds as an allegory of reading. Outside the polymetrics, carmen is standard for high-style poetry.60 By contrast, the likes of Suffenus can aspire to no more than poema, if that (22. 15–16). Even so, canere, as Newman observes, is conﬁned to contexts of religious or ritual signiﬁcance, where it denotes actual singing.61 The ecstatic association of canere is best exempliﬁed in poem 63 where it occurs only in conjunction with Attis’ song while possessed (11, 22, 27): when (s)he comes to, (s)he speaks (‘allocuta . . . est’, 49), as does Cybele (‘loquitur’, ‘inquit’, 77–8). These usages are far from the measured high style of Vergil’s cano. The only place Catullus might use canere of his own poetic production is at 65. 12, where the Veronensis’ ‘tegam’ (I will cover) has been emended to ‘canam’ (I will sing).62 In 65, the poet’s song (if it is so) is antithetical to the fruits of 59

The blush also signals a response in communicative exchange at 65. 24. carmen: 64. 24 and 116 of the poem itself; 65. 12 poetry as mourning song, 16 translation of Callimachus; 68. 7 poetry, 149 poem itself; 116. 2 of a translation of Callimachus. The following are real song, not poetry: carmen: 61. 13 hymn; 90. 5 magic/religion; cantus: 64. 264 thiasos, 306, 321, 322, and 383 song of the Parcae. These instances are largely in the longer poems. Skinner (2003) ch. 1 treats carmina Battiadae at 65. 16 and 116. 2. 61 Newman (1990) 433. Passages are: 34. 4, hymn to Diana; 61. 12, 123 [concino] nuptial hymn; 62. 9, nuptial hymn; 63. 11, 22, 27, Attis’ song within the poem; 64. 383 song of the Parcae. 62 See Clausen (1970) 93 n. 11 on the scribal error, already in Munro (1938) ad loc. Ellis’ ad loc. defence of ‘tegam’ meaning ‘mufﬂe or veil in silence’ appears motivated by a desire to keep Catullus from producing poetry according to the disavowal of poetic ability. Levine’s (1952) 97 defence of ‘legam’ as giving the desired sense and being closer to ‘tegam’ overlooks the poem’s subject, poetic production. Newman (1990) 433–4 accepts ‘canam’ and argues that ‘concinit’ retains an archaic ill-omened association with song. Selden (1992) 493 n. 191 is the only modern I know to accept the paradosis in V. He takes ‘tegam’ as ‘clothe’, but the parallel with Cicero’s description of Hortensius Hortalus’ style seems insufﬁcient to defend the reading. Wray (2001) 198 emphasizes song in the poem’s intertextual relation with Od. 19. 518–22. 60

40

Some Background

the Muses (3). One might expect him to link the transcendence of canere with divine inspiration in the manner of Vergil, but Catullus does not actually invoke god for inspiration. Rather, god ensures reception. Poem 1 is programmatic in this regard. The language of the bookroll links his ‘libellus’ (1. 1) with that of his analogue and dedicatee Cornelius Nepos: the former has had its rough edges smoothed with pumice (1. 2), the latter has entrusted his work to paper (‘cartis’, 1. 6). But the book as an object cannot guarantee longevity—for that Catullus invokes a divine patron beyond his human one, whatever her identity: ‘< o> patrona uirgo, j plus uno maneat perenne saeclo’ (O patron maiden, j may it [the book] last more than one generation, 9–10).63 Poem 68 likewise calls on divinity (‘deae’, goddesses, 68. 41) to guarantee the longevity of the poet’s writing and to reanimate his written word with voice. As in poem 1, the goddesses do not occupy their traditional role as the source of inspiration.64 Rather, the poet tells them what to say. Their job is transmission: to make the paper speak and preserve the memory of the laudandus after death.65 Non possum reticere, deae, qua me Allius in re iuuerit aut quantis iuuerit ofﬁciis, ne fugiens saeclis obliuiscentibus aetas illius hoc caeca nocte tegat studium: sed dicam uobis, uos porro dicite multis milibus et facite haec carta loquatur anus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . notescatque magis mortuus atque magis, nec tenuem texens sublimis aranea telam in deserto Alli nomine opus faciat. (Catullus 68. 41–50)

45

50

(Goddesses, I cannot keep silent in what matter or with what great services Allius helped me, lest age ﬂeeing through the forgetting centuries cover his exertions in blind night: but I will tell you, you then tell it to many thousands and make this old lady 63 The abrupt transition from Nepos to god reveals the insufﬁciency of human patronage for immortality. For difﬁculties with ‘o patrona virgo’, see Fordyce ad loc. Goold (1981) 235–8 and Nisbet (1995) 404 accept Bergk’s ‘patroni ut ergo’ (in consequence of the patron). Goold misunderstands Catullus’ unusual use of Muses, who offer not inspiration, but, like a patron, a material advantage in the duration of his poetry. Wiseman (1982) 39 supports ‘patrona uirgo’. Krostenko (2001) 255 notes the typically Catullan tension between a ‘political vaunt (patrona) and marginal social status (uirgo)’ and emphasizes the modesty of the request that his poetry last only ‘more than one generation’ (272)—this is as much of a long view as the polymetrics provide. 64 This contrasts with all the situations described by Calame (1995) 62–3 for Homer and the Homeric hymns. 65 This reverses Callimachus Hymn 3. 186, Kroll ad loc.

Some Background

41

paper speak . . . and let him dead become more and more known, nor let a spider on high, weaving a slender web make her work on Allius’ deserted name.)

The personiﬁcation of the page brings the dead word back to life. Catullus uses this ﬁgure elsewhere in contexts where writing and utterance are mutually implicated. In ‘fama loquetur anus’ (old lady fame will say, 78b. 4), we assume the written poem as the vehicle of speaking fama;66 in ‘Zmyrnam cana diu saecula peruoluent’ (the grey centuries will read the Zmyrna for a long time, 95. 6) personiﬁcation animates the unrolling of the scroll.67 The developed image in poem 68 shows the risks of writing. It may sit untouched and end up covered in spider webs.68 The image shifts from paper (‘carta’) to an implied tombstone: cobwebs cover Allius’ name inscribed on a monument. Without the reanimation of voice, the monument of the poem would be truly dead. The weaving (‘tenuem texens . . . telam’) is the spider’s rather than any ﬁne Alexandrian spinning of the poet; her sterile work comes at his work’s expense. Catullus calls on god in the face of death and loss of memory, which threaten not only reception, but poetic production, because god reanimates the voice. In poem 65 Catullus’ grief at his brother’s death and consequent outpouring of song ironically jeopardizes his ability to compose along with his ability to meet requests. Catullus’ difﬁculty with both social and poetic acts arises from memory problems: his brother’s foot is washed by Lethe’s waves (5) and the poem’s concluding simile compares Catullus’ potential forgetting of Ortalus’ request to a girl’s forgetting she was hiding a love token (‘oblitae’, 21). Song irrupts in this poem as the uncontrollable outpourings of grief and Catullus’ emotional turmoil does not produce the fruits of the Muses, but separates him from them (1–4).69 He calls on no divinity for assistance, and the song he imagines producing in his brother’s honour is described in terms of mourning, not inspiration. 66 The irony that we can no longer identify the person whose identity fama should preserve belongs not to writing’s failure to reproduce speech, but to Catullus’ setting up the problem. Instead of a name at 78b, he leaves a blank: ‘qui sis’ (who you are, 4). Habinek’s (1998b) 70–2 and (2005c) 71–4 analysis of loquor as mere utterance suits 68. 46 and 78b. 4: the paper speaks mindlessly, but the reader must provide understanding. 67 At poem 64. 23–4, the poem (‘carmine’) is the vehicle of the poet’s utterance: beyond actual apostrophe of the heroes (‘heroes, saluete’), he describes what his poetry does (‘uos ego saepe, meo uos carmine compellabo’). 68 The impermanence of lovers’ promises is ﬁgured as writing written on the wrong medium: water (70). 69 Other Catullan references to the Muses line up with all aspects of poetry: production (Mentula tries poetry, but the Muses throw it out with pitchforks, 105), its embodiment in writing (68. 7, 10), and with reception (Caecilius’ girlfriend likes his poetry because she has taste: ‘Sappica puella j musa doctior’ (a girl more learned than Sappho’s Muse), 35. 16–17). Where his own poetry is associated with the Muses, Catullus claims poetic inability (65. 3, 68. 7, 10).

42

Some Background numquam ego te, uita frater amabilior, aspiciam posthac? at certe semper amabo, semper maesta tua carmina morte canam, qualia sub densis ramorum concinit umbris Daulias, absumpti fata gemens Ityli— (Catullus 65. 10–14)

10

(Will I never look on you again, brother more beloved than life? But I will certainly always love you, always will I sing sad songs because of your death, such as the Daulian sings under the branches’ dense shade, bemoaning the fate of Itylus who was snatched away.)

The two kinds of poetry Catullus represents himself as able to compose are ﬁgured as song: emotionally charged mourning and translation (‘maesta . . . carmina’ (sad . . . songs), 12; ‘haec expressa . . . carmina Battiadae’ (these squeezed out songs of Battus’ son), 16). I am inclined to accept the conjecture ‘canam’ for ‘tegam’ (12), but even without it the conjunction of the poet’s ‘carmina’ (12) with the singing of the nightingale (‘concinit’, 13) places the poetry Catullus imagines producing for his brother within song.70 Callimachus’ poems are also ‘carmina’ (16). Both belie Catullus’ initial disavowal of poetic ability, as does the poem itself. The word used for translation, ‘expressa’ (16), puns on the very word he disclaims: ‘expromere’ (3). The simile comparing Catullus’ mourning songs to the nightingale’s exhibits exactly the learning expected from the learned maidens (2) that Catullus alleges separation from.71 The apple simile, reworked from Callimachus, is evidence of further learning (Skinner 2003: 15–18). The two kinds of song differ in important ways. Catullus can send Callimachus’ songs, as he can poem 65 itself. The poem presumably accompanies poem 66, the actual translation, in the packet to Ortalus. But Catullus does not claim Callimachus’ poetry as his own qua song, but qua translation. These songs exist as objects. The comparison of Catullus’ feelings to the maiden’s involves an object, the apple, which, while not directly compared to the translation, similarly indicates a relationship. If this apple derives from the one Acontius sent Cydippe, it alludes to writing. By contrast, the simile comparing Catullus’ mourning songs to the nightingale’s imagines song as the pure performance of unmediated emotion. The translation is sent despite grief (‘sed tamen in tantis maeroribus’, 15), mourning song is sung because of it. Translation and lament together cover Catullus’ range: unmediated

70

Skinner (2003) 13 cites bibliography for the potentially programmatic nature of this passage for the elegiac libellus as a whole. 71 The nightingale is conventionally associated with lyric and functions as a symbol for ‘recomposition-in-performance’, Nagy (1996) 7, 16. Here it also alludes to Homer, Od. 19. 518–23.

Some Background

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emotion and artiﬁcial learning.72 The similes attaching to each differ in tone: myth and nature elevate song, while daily life, however learned, sets writing on a realistic plane. Somehow, neither option wins the epithet ‘sweet fruit of the Muses’. Full song overshoots; translation falls short. Catullus ﬁgures his poetry as an object with the well-studied image of the munus (gift or obligation) in all the poems touching on his brother’s death: the complex of 65 and 66, 68,73 and 101. Catullus frets over whether he can successfully perform a requested or expected munus in poems strongly identiﬁed with writing. Poems 65 and 68A are epistles and the analogy between the separation between author and addressee in the epistolary situation and the separation from his brother through death points up the different degrees to which social communication is possible. In both, Catullus starts by denying he can fulﬁl his social obligations—in each case a poem requested of him— because of grief over his brother. Both poems fulﬁl to some extent their addressee’s request as well as the poet’s fraternal obligations—breaking off from emotion displays sorrow, however conventionally. Poems 101 and 68B advance as well by explicitly afﬁrming the poet’s capacity to fulﬁl his duties.74 In 101 Catullus attempts to overcome the separation caused by death by actually visiting his brother’s tomb. Catullus calls on his brother in poems 65, 68, and 101, but this last is entirely directed to him, whereas in 65 and 68, apostrophe irrupts into poems addressed to another. Catullus’ poetry operates largely by address: the words appear intended for receipt by an addressee, and apostrophe is rare.75 In 68A, the apostrophe to the brother underscores the poem’s emphasis on separation. The call to his brother in poem 101 matches the physical visit to the tomb. In full awareness of the impossibility of being heard, he nevertheless directs his speech towards his brother. Multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus aduenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, ut te postremo donarem munere mortis et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem. (101. 1–4) 72

Selden (1992) shows how the poetry produces both self-images. Clausen (1970) discusses where the translation shows in poem 66. 73 I examine the poem’s unity and the relationship between the addressees at Lowrie (2006b) n. 5. I use A and B to refer to sections 1–40 and 41–160 respectively without prejudice as to the poem’s unity. 74 Citroni (1995) 57–117 underscores the social impetus behind these poems: Catullus rises to special stylistic heights in response to the pressures of courteous exchange (93, 98). I rather see social situations in Catullus as serving to explore poetic issues. 75 For the directedness of address, as opposed to apostrophe, see Culler (1981) 135–54, Lowrie (1997) 20–6. The exceptionally frequent apostrophes in poem 64 (heroes and Peleus, 22–30; Theseus, 69, 133; Cupid and Venus, 94–8; Ariadne, 253; Phoebus, 300; Achilles, 324) bring liveliness to the mythological narrative.

44

Some Background

(Borne over many peoples and many seas, I come to these pitiful funeral offerings, so I might present you with a ﬁnal gift for death, and speak in vain to a mute ash.)

Speech uttered despite its futility (‘nequiquam’, 4) bears an inverse relation to the recusatio, which effects what it ostensibly denies. In each case, speech has a certain power beyond what it says, so that its denotative aspect is insufﬁcient to account for its performative force. In poem 101 Catullus performs the munus of funeral rites. His visit has a double purpose (‘ut’ (in order that), 3), to perform the rites and to speak vain speech. The latter prompts the apostrophe in a line recalling those in 68A and B: ‘heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi’ (alas pitiful brother undeservedly taken from me, 101. 6).76 The apostrophe effects futile speech, but Catullus returns to the funeral rites as a munus with ‘nevertheless’. nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, accipe fraterno multum manantia ﬂetu, atque in perpetuum, frater, aue atque uale. (101.7–10) (Now meanwhile, nevertheless, receive these things, which in the ancient custom of our fathers have been handed down for offerings in sad gift, moist with a brother’s tears, and for all time, brother, hail and fare well.)

The futility of apostrophe does not bear on the effectiveness of the funeral rites, which by nature require the absence of the honorand. This poem effects an important transition, since the emotional apostrophe that speaks across a hopeless divide accompanies an effective ritual performance.77 The poem with its inscriptional overtones itself offers a funeral munus that averts the futility of ordinary occasional speech. This move resembles the ‘nevertheless’ of poem 65 (15), where Catullus advances from grief to a poetic gift. Catullus’s gift in poem 65 also encapsulates the dialectic between failure and the fulﬁlment of social obligations. The social rite that transpires is not, however, a ritual performance, but an exchange of words. Ortalus’ request is emphatically verbal (‘tua dicta’, 17).78 The fear that Ortalus might think these words have been entrusted in vain to the winds (‘tua dicta uagis nequiquam credita uentis’, 17) anticipates the communicative breakdown when Vergil’s Sibyl does not care to rearrange the leaves disturbed by wind.

76

‘o misero frater adempte mihi’, 68. 20; ‘ei misero frater adempte mihi’, 68. 92. Feldherr (2000) traces the relation between the singular event, the farewell to the brother, and the repeatable literary artefact: the poem draws on the conventions of epitaph and Roman funerary ritual to enable reperformance. 78 For the authoritative weight of dicta, Habinek (2005c) 71–4, 80. 77

Some Background

45

If the structure of ‘nevertheless’ allows Catullus to fulﬁl his social obligations despite adversity, such success still falls short. The similes following the song for his brother and the reference to his obligation to Ortalus both emphasize absence despite song, despite his meeting the request made of him. The nightingale sings, lamenting the fate of Itylus who was taken away: ‘concinit . . . absumpti fata gemens Ityli’ (13–14). The apple that falls from a girl’s lap is itself a token, a signiﬁer. The translation, the promise, and the love pledge all oscillate between emptiness and fulﬁlment. The negation of the poet’s forgetfulness (17–18) tells a story of forgetting. The translation is a stopgap, itself a token to reassure Ortalus he remembers his obligation, but only as a substitute for the imagined Muse-inspired poetry he has been incapable of writing; it furthermore substitutes for the original text. It tells of a lock of hair Berenice dedicated as a vow—yet another token—for her beloved husband’s safe return (33–5). Her fulﬁlment comes comically at the expense of the lock’s, which laments its separation from its beloved and ﬁnds no consolation in its arbitrary metamorphosis into a star.79 In the simile, the apple signiﬁes a munus (‘missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum’ (an apple sent as a furtive gift of her betrothed), 19) and holds the place of the lover in his absence. It rather than he nestles under the girl’s clothes in her lap (‘procurrit casto uirginis e gremio, j quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum’ (it runs out of a girl’s chaste lap, which, placed under the soft clothing of the miserable girl who forgot), 19–20). She is chaste, so sexual consummation has not occurred, and she forgets, another mark of absence, but the token nevertheless signiﬁes a relationship. The fulﬁlment of promises or obligations, however, counteracts this series of substitutions. The girl loves her suitor. Berenice keeps her vow. Catullus sends not just one poem to Ortalus, but two. The lock’s new divinity compensates light-heartedly for Catullus’ alleged distance from divine inspiration. It speaks of itself as a munus given for vows met: (‘pristina uota nouo munere dissoluo’ (I fulﬁl the old vows with a new gift), 66. 38). Catullus presents a reality of obligations met, forgetfulness thwarted, love reciprocated, marriage consummated, poetry inspired—though he says the opposite. The only thorough lack of satisfaction falls to the hard-to-please lock, which (who?) at any rate appears disingenuous. The lock’s insistence on refusing perfume offerings from adulterous wives matches both poems’ emphasis on social wholeness, but it still desires gifts—munera again—for ritual fulﬁlment (91–2). Poems 65

79 For the relation of Catullus 65 and 66, Clausen (1970), Skinner (2003) 34–5, 39–40, Wray (2001) 105, 202.

46

Some Background

and 66 map a trajectory from potential lack to wholeness. Even Catullus’ loss of his brother is transmuted into song, whose eternity (‘semper . . . semper’ (always . . . always), 11–12) counteracts Lethe’s forgetfulness (5). Poem 65 itself with its meditation on different kinds of poetry surely satisﬁes both the Muses and Ortalus. It is literature and social exchange, even in its knowledge of the impossibility of fully meeting either’s demands.80 Since I have analysed poem 68 in detail elsewhere (Lowrie 2006b), I conﬁne my remarks here to two parallel developments: one in the poet’s avowal of a capacity to fulﬁl a munus to a friend and the second in the poem’s represented medium. The epistolary beginning (68A) yields to a higher elegiac style in which the poem identiﬁes itself as producing speech and then, in the ﬁnal section, as carmen. The Muses are to make the page speak (46; cited above) and in the epilogue (149–60) Catullus avows the poem as a gift (‘hoc tibi, quod potui, confectum carmine munus j pro multis, Alli, redditur ofﬁciis’ (This gift, made of a poem, such as I could, is given in due thanks to you, Allius, for many acts of friendship), 149–50). The apology, ‘quod potui’, is like the qualiﬁcation of the poetry he sends Ortalus in poem 6581 and stresses the reversal from his prior inability (Macleod 1983: 85). The completion of the munus in the epilogue accompanies other positive aspects: Allius is happily with his beloved, as is Catullus himself, who conﬁdently asserts the gods will confer their munera on his friend (152–4). Emphasis falls on life, a striking shift from 68A, which stresses his brother’s death.82 Allius’ mistress is his life (‘tua uita’, 155), and Catullus sets his own mistress alive alongside his own continued life (‘uiua uiuere’, 160). After an initial inability, Catullus returns to love and poetry. Two considerations cloud this rosy picture. The indeterminacy of the identity of the addressees of 68A and B further thwarts our determining whether the munus given in 68B fulﬁls the request denied in 68A, or whether the reversal is merely thematic. Our failure rests on an essential ambiguity. The solution I prefer is for Mallius to masquerade for Allius under a pseudonymn in 68B. The name itself asks whether it could be determined if Allius is not another (alius). But even if ‘munus’ (149) and ‘munera’ (154) give speciﬁc, positive answer to ‘munera’ (10), the diminutive ‘munuscula’

80

Skinner (2003) 3–5, 19 treats the paradox of the recusatio, which does what it refuses. And of ‘quidquid hoc libelli’ (1. 8). Krostenko (2001) 253–5 with n. 48 comments on the tension between brilliance and ‘agonistic modesty’ in Catullus’ poetics of social performance. 82 Sarkissian (1983) 37 suggests the corrupt text of 68. 157 ‘ought . . . to refer to Catullus’ brother’, since everyone else in poem returns here, but emphasis on love and life should preclude the brother. 81

Some Background

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(145) still raises the spectre of infelicity. Catullus’ beloved offers her gifts furtively, stolen from her husband (145–6), contrary to her marriage obligations. Her favours do not arise from nor lead to marriage, the social contract par excellence. Catullus may be ever so mature in relinquishing his anger and tolerating sexual inﬁdelity (135–48), but ‘munuscula’ suggests not so much failure as indeterminacy. What is marriage for him is not so for her.83 At poem 68’s close, Catullus turns again to a metaphor from writing. Kroll interprets the rust that Catullus wants to keep from touching Allius’ name (151–2) as the metal letters of an inscription (1960: ad loc.). This desire to confer immortality on the addressee corresponds to the wish that the Muses may make Catullus’ page speak (45–6). In each, decay and the passage of time threaten a monument representing the addressee’s future fame. Catullus wishes to avert this with the animation of his poetry, ﬁgured as speech or song. The representation of poetry and language as communicative response progresses in poem 68 from a letter (‘hoc . . . epistolium’, 2), to a page capable of speech (‘haec carta’, 46), to a gift conferred by song (‘hoc . . . confectum carmine munus’, 149). Shifts in the use of deictics from concrete to abstract conceptions of presence accompany poetry’s increasing dematerialization. In each case a deictic hic gives the impression some speech medium is present, but its kind of presence changes. The addressee’s letter at the poem’s beginning is physically present. There follows an artefact that will endure as an object and transmit speech to future generations. This yields to a gift of poetic song with the capacity of transcending physical limitations.84 There is a progression from refusal, to a qualiﬁed gesture of giving, to the ﬁnal afﬁrmation of the accomplished social act. Writing attaches in this poem to incapacity, while song attends performative success. The move to valorize song over writing here has programmatic consequences for Augustan poetry. This narrative is hardly straightforward; most exemplary in the Catullan paradigm are perhaps the bumps along the way. Apostrophe and the failure to achieve a social contract in his love relations resist performative felicity, but the poetry succeeds in its representation of the complex relationship between enactment and deferral.

83 The language of marriage for the erotic relationship in this poem has been much remarked upon, e.g. Quinn ad loc. For marriage as a metaphor for Catullus’ love for Lesbia, Holzberg (2002) 171, 179–80. 84 Habinek (2005c) 135–6 traces the progression from writing, to vocal transmission, to fullﬂedged song.

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Some Background L I T E R ATU R E A N D T H E LO S S O F OR I G I N S : THE CARMINA CONVIVALIA

The late Republicans evaluate song positively because they found a way to turn its sublimity to their own purposes. Others with more overtly ideological interests champion its ability to preserve values, ensure social cohesion, and pass on a notional tradition. Cato and Cicero mention the lost ancestral songs conventionally called the carmina conuiualia. Their attitudes also contribute to the Augustan inheritance: Horace and Vergil were interested precisely in harnessing song’s ideological potential, while fully aware of its dangers. Testimony about the carmina conuiualia has generated a revival in the notion of an archaic song culture at Rome.85 I am agnostic about the historical truth of such a culture.86 Of course the Romans sang—the question is whether the song can be considered literary and what that would mean. Habinek subsumes poetry into the larger category of ritual song, where ritual entails a formalization separating the utterance from ordinary language (2005c: 1–4), but the term ‘literature’ is not so easily discarded (Feeney 2005: 228). The Romans approximate it in litterae. Cicero uses this word for ‘texts marked with a certain social status’, whose ‘inherent aesthetic value’ is not free-standing, but appreciated by ‘the society that receives them’ (Goldberg 2005: 18).87 Furthermore, much of what we call Roman literature spends a great deal of effort in exploring the boundaries between itself and competing discourses (Lowrie 2006a). Cicero and

85

Zorzetti (1990) and (1990–1), with critiques by Cole (1990–1) and Phillips (1990–1); Habinek (1998a) ch. 2; Ru¨pke (2001). Leigh (2000) links primitivism and power. 86 Momigliano’s (1957) 110–11, 113 attitude toward the carmina conuiualia seems reasonable: they existed, they died out near the end of the fourth century, and were unimportant as a vehicle for transmitting legend. Wiseman (1989) 134 thinks there is no reason to doubt the continuity of seventh-century Roman banquet conversation with the songs of Xenophanes, Anacreon, and Mimnermus, or this existence even in the time of Cato, though he recognizes that Plutarch’s depiction of ‘much praise of honourable and worthy citizens’ (Plut. Cato maior 25. 3) may go back to Cato. Horsfall’s (1994) 54 interest in the Roman recording of their literary prehistory honestly confronts the problem of transmission: ‘If from Cato on, our sources lament the demise of the carmina and if virtually all the details preserved in the learned tradition can be shown to conform to Greek usage and in almost all cases to derive from extant Greek scholarship on the ı Ø , then it seems to me incautious and ingenuous to say that we do actually know something about the carmina’ (72–3); also Horsfall (2003) ch. 8. Grandazzi (1997) has a healthy and non-literal respect for the tradition, and the discovery of a seventhcentury BCE banquet service at Ficana among other archaeological evidence leads him to lend credence to a sympotic culture in archaic Rome (188–9), which had a high degree of contact with Greece in any event. He, however, does not press the details of what can be reconstructed. 87 Goldberg (2005) 42–3 covers the debate about the continuing usefulness of ‘literature’ and ‘the literary’ as terms.

Some Background

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Horace at any rate, who supply much of the evidence, show great interest in early Roman literature. Their stakes in deﬁning their tradition cloud the evidence. For my question, how the Augustans position themselves in relation to various media, accuracy matters less than the traditions they construct for themselves or inherit. The scholarship of Cicero, Varro, and others of their generation greatly affected the Augustans’ understanding of their literary history.88 The Augustan project of reinventing Greek literature is clear, but Horace emphatically distances himself from earlier Roman literature on aesthetic grounds: literature requires a certain polish. Ideas about ancient song need to take account of the break in historical times from real or imagined tradition. Despite great activity in popular entertainment, there was no continuous formal performance tradition for high literature in Augustan Rome.89 Any performance medium that may have transmitted Horatian lyric or other genres was, if not an outright innovation, some sort of reconstruction, whether Greek or Roman.90 Once there has been a break in the tradition, restarting it is an act of will that constitutes the literary.91

88 Feeney (2002a) 16–18 and (2005) 227; Goldberg (2005). Malcovati (1943) ch. 2, sect. 2 goes over Cicero’s scholarship on Roman poetry. For the shift of emphasis in scholarship from reconstruction to ideological analysis, Grandazzi (1997) 59; instances are Sciarrino (2004a) and Goldberg (2005). 89 For mime’s displacement of comedy and tragedy in the theatre during the Augustan age, Fantham (1996) 146–7. Tragedy in this period was in transition from full stage performance to a recitation format. See Boyle (2006) 13–16, 145, 186–8, 192–3, 235–6 for dramatic performance practices. Performance activity was generally a popular phenomenon. Horsfall (2003) 56 has remarkably little evidence for what he calls ‘respectable’ levels of performance, and this is mostly of Vergil, who had a special rank, and that mostly in mime; Horsfall (1995a) 249–50. Suetonius on Augustus’ dinner entertainment includes all kinds of performers, but not high literature (Aug. 74); Wiseman (1989) 135–7 with other evidence for popular performance traditions. While McKeown (1979) 71–2 argues for the high literary sophistication of some branches of mime, his analysis of its inﬂuence on elegy never goes so far as to suggest either that elegy was performed, or that the boundaries between the two were unclear. 90 Zorzetti (1990), who argues for a lyric symposium culture in Roman literary prehistory, does not think that anything but a memory of it survived into the historical period, so that Horace’s interest in the early material was not indicative of a continuous tradition, but rather a search for models. The amateur song tradition declined in the face of Hellenistic musical (and poetic) professionalization (304–5). Although one could take the anecdote in Aulus Gellius (19. 9) about the Spanish rhetor Antonius Iulianus’ singing (19. 9. 10) the love songs of Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinius, and Quintus Catulus to counter Greek assumptions of superiority as a sign of a performance tradition in Republican Rome, Murray (1990) 42 understands the story rather to conﬁrm ‘the traditional absence of sympotic poetry in Rome’. All the verses quoted by Gellius are in elegiacs and there is nothing about an original performance tradition. 91 Feeney (2005) critiques Suerbaum (2002) for over-emphasizing the continuity between archaic Rome and the historical period, and Latin scholarship in general for assuming the inevitability of the development of literature and for failing to appreciate the uniqueness of Rome’s adaptation of Greek literature in its own vernacular (229–30).

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Some Background

Much of the debate about the carmina conuiualia has turned on Greek versus Roman identity and originality.92 For the Augustan age, the most important aspect of any early Roman song tradition is its loss.93 It is lost not only to us and to Horace, but already to Cicero, probably even to Cato. Loss is functional: what makes Latin literature literary in our modern sense is the break from origins. The debate about a break or continuity in the tradition revolves around performance. Cicero’s testimony in the Brutus about the carmina conuiualia records the poems’ loss. The practice had died out in his day and probably already in Cato’s. Ru¨pke (2001: 49) would extend convivial song into Cato’s time. Atque utinam exstarent illa carmina, quae multis saeculis ante suam aetatem in epulis esse cantitata a singulis conuiuis de clarorum uirorum laudibus in Originibus scriptum reliquit Cato! (Brutus 75) (And would that those songs were extant, which Cato left written in the Origines that they were sung repeatedly by individual dinner-guests about the praise of famous men (for) many years before his age.)

If we translate ‘sung many years before his age’, the tradition had already died out by the time of Cato.94 Ru¨pke would translate ‘sung for many years before his age’, with an inclusive time-frame, though this strains the Latin. Cicero’s other two references to Cato’s statement entail no temporal speciﬁcation (Tusc. 1. 3, 4. 3). It is also unclear whether the ancestors mentioned were Cato’s contemporaries or already his own ancestors.95 Cicero is confused

92

Horsfall (1994) 73; Ru¨pke (2001) starts with a case of ‘Greek envy’—for which see Feeney (1998) 6–8—since the scholarship on early Greek epic has been richer than that on early Roman. Horace’s comment is apt: ‘si, quia Graiorum sunt antiquissima quaeque j scripta uel optima, Romani pensantur eadem j scriptores trutina, non est, quod multa loquamur’ (if, because the oldest writings of the Greeks are also the best, Roman writers are weighed on the same scale, there is not much to say, Epist. 2. 1. 28–30). Suerbaum (2002) 41–2 documents the view that the Romans had Romantic ﬁctions about their forebears on the basis of their own Greek selfmodelling, but ends up ﬁnding some sort of sympotic song likely. 93 Horsfall (2003) ch. 8 has a complex argument. Although his book is devoted to demonstrating the rich musical and literary (in the popular sense) culture of the lower classes at Rome, he is sceptical about the ‘oral transmission or diffusion of stories from history, myth, or legend’ (96) as has been supposed for the carmina conuiualia. This assumption accords with the elite Roman representation of their high-style literary history as discontinuous from whatever song culture may have come before. Horsfall’s attitude to song culture is similar to Grandazzi’s (1997) to myth: neither expects a direct and truthful transmission, but both value and see continuity in the tradition. Horsfall, however, is more sceptical about the possibility of recuperating any meaningful evidence, however distorted, Bremmer and Horsfall (1987) chs. 1 and 2. 94 Momiglianio (1957) 82; Coarelli (1995) 206; Suerbaum (2002) 41; Goldberg (2005) 12. 95 Goldberg (2005) 12 n. 30 takes Cicero’s ‘apud maiores’ (among the ancestors, Tusc. 4. 3) as longer ago than Cato.

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about some of the things Cato says.96 He conﬂates the aristocratic singers of the Origines with poets, who are disparaged in one of Cato’s speeches (Tusc. 1. 3). Varro further confuses the matter, since he makes boys the performers.97 In conuiuiis pueri modesti ut cantarent carmina antiqua, in quibus laudes erant maiorum et assa uoce et cum tibicine. (fr. 84 Riposati ¼ Nonius 107-8L) ([There were even] at parties modest boys to sing ancient songs, in which there were praises of ancestors, both with unaccompanied voice and with a reed-player.)

There are still many problems even if Cicero accurately transmits Cato. The tibia rather than the lyre has been taken as evidence for a genuine Roman tradition and hence to validate the evidence as a whole, but these are tiny scraps.98 Greek inﬂuence could have intervened at various points in the record. Cicero, Cato, or their sources could have been inventing or incorrectly interpreting other sources. Cicero’s three testimonia seem to go back to a single statement in the Origines. Cato’s nostalgia for genuine, non-Greek Roman culture still throws back to Greek models. Against these reasons for scepticism, however, it is still possible, even if Cato were reporting a long-dead tradition, that Ennius and his kind performed professionally at dinner parties. Cato may have approved of guests singing songs individually in the context of a good old Roman conuiuium, but not of professional artists at a Greekiﬁed symposium. Cicero’s regret over the songs’ loss implies he took them to be ﬁxed and transmittable, but the songs may have been informal and nothing like epic or epinician. It was rather funeral laudations that were preserved. They may have sung not about legendary famous men, but distinguished contemporaries. Varro’s account suggests something more formal about ancestors, but he may refer to a different practice. We simply do not know. I fail to understand why scholars use such meagre and uncertain evidence to reconstruct something as hard to fathom as a social context.99 These issues are complex enough for Horace, who offers a comparative wealth of evidence. The reason, I think, is the desire to forge a referential link between a poem and its context. Ru¨pke takes the next logical step from positing sympotic performance

96 Goldberg (2005) 10 distinguishes three separate levels of witness conﬂated and distorted by Cicero. 97 Momigliano (1957) 110 is right that the disparity between Cicero and Varro is no reason to doubt that some such practice occurred. 98 For the tibia accompanying sacriﬁce, see altars at Ryberg (1955) pl. 10 ﬁg. 20, pl. 16, ﬁgs. 29, 30, 32. On the Ara Pacis, there is a tibia on the incense box of the third attendant of the north frieze, Torelli (1982) ii. 25, but none depicted in the processions themselves anywhere on the altar. 99 Barchiesi (2002b) has many objections to Ru¨pke’s philology, but remains sympathetic to the project of reconstructing social contexts.

52

Some Background

for early Latin epic and sees the mention of feasts as inscribing the poetry’s own reception medium. Although he recognizes that ‘socially important institutions can be thematized outside the institutions themselves’ (2001: 50), the temptation to ﬁnd reference is irresistible. The Homeric model suggests that there is no direct correspondence between performance institutions and poetic representations. The formal festivals of the Homeridae differ greately from the songs of Phemius and Demodocus. Did Greek bards ever sing about famous deeds after dinner? Probably. Archaic Romans may have done the same, whether professional bards or amateurs, on their own or in imitation of the Greeks. But heroizing representations do not match contemporary social practices or give accurate pictures of lost customs. They do, however, provide a reliable guide to contemporary ideas about heroic behaviour. The link between a poem and its context is not referential, but ideological. Enrica Sciarrino’s analysis of the carmina conuiualia shifts the focus from referential truth to Cato’s pragmatic aims (2004a): his image of elites singing the praises of other elites and disparagement of contemporary literary and musical professionals attempt to keep cultural representations within his own class. Her reading is persuasive because the extant fragments of Cato’s text concern class more overtly than, say, style. An archaic song culture at Rome has come into vogue for the same reasons behind the current popularity among some scholars of the performance of Horatian lyric. There is an assumption that performance, whether musical or recitation, entails greater social embeddedness than reading. If the consumption of poetry can be linked to food and wine, religion, or a parade, it wins greater social importance than if read by elites in privacy at home. Study appears arid and artiﬁcial. However, scholarship in antiquity did not occur in a social vacuum. Although some must certainly have studied alone, as in Lucretius’ picture of late-night poetic composition (1. 140–5), much research entailed social interaction, whether the company of a slave, a friend, or a group of peers, in person or by correspondence. Cicero and his friends circulated and discussed texts. Even solitary reading is a social practice. At stake is the concept of ‘literature’ and its origins. Derrida remarks, ‘Literature is a Latin word’ (2000: 20; Lowrie 2001: 29). He expresses the typical dichotomy between Greece and Rome: ‘In Greece there is still no project, no social institution, no right, no concept, nor even a word corresponding to what we call, stricto sensu, literature’ (23).100 This is an

100 Ford (2002) 10 emphasizes that there was no unitary notion of poetry or literature in archaic Greece: the many kinds of song for different occasions went by speciﬁc names. The naming of genres after metres, such as iambic or elegiac, is a later, more formalistic development (18). A unitary notion of poetry does not begin to develop until the ﬁfth century and only fully develops in the fourth (Parts III and IV).

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overstatement. Callimachus would probably have understood the modern idea,101 and writing leaves its traces in archaic Greek poetry.102 Furthermore, litteratura, which might best be translated ‘lettering’, only develops from the technicalities of writing and language instruction to our meaning of literature with Marcus Aurelius and the Christians.103 For the Romans of the Republic and early Empire, litterae (letters) either remains concrete or stands for literary culture as a whole. It includes philosophy and history and does not separate poetry out.104 Common in our period is Horace’s ‘scripta’ (writings), also concrete.105 The Augustan poets, however, unquestionably produce literature, even if their word for poetry is carmen (‘song’). Several recent works speak of the ‘invention of literature’ (Dupont 1994; Habinek 1998a: 34-68),106 and the concept entails a contrast between performance and writing, whether at the point of composition or circulation. Goldberg (2005) argues that literature is made at the point of reception and consequently began at Rome with the rise of scholarship in the late second century BCE, but this leaves open what the early epic poets thought they were doing in bringing epic into Latin (Lowrie 2007c). It is important to weigh who—whether ancient or modern—makes these distinctions and in what context. Concepts acquire names after their manifestation

101

Bing (1988) 56–7 identiﬁes the ‘rupture with the literary past’ as a predominant characteristic of Hellenistic poetry, and the whole chapter presupposes such rupture as constitutive of literarity. Ford (2002) 4. 102 Edmunds (2001a) 79 identiﬁes the inscription of the occasion of song into the song itself in Pindar and the identity of the lyric speaking voice as a type rather than as the poet as already ‘grammatological’ elements, which he deﬁnes as ‘a potential deferral of the voice of the poet or performer(s) to other, later voice(s)’. ‘The transition from live performance to the textuality of the text, from aural reception to reading, has thus begun with those aspects of the earlier stage of literature that provided for secondary audiences, later in time.’ Stehle (1997) 297–8 discusses the interaction of textuality with performance in Sappho. Bing (1988) is the classic study of Hellenistic poetry’s preoccupation with writing. Jonathan Culler is currently working on lyric address, and in a chapter on classical poetry similarly comments on the grammatological quality of Greek lyric. I thank him for sharing drafts of this material. 103 ‘a Graeca litteratura tantum absum quantum a terra Graecia mons Caelius meus abest’ (I am as far from Greek literature as my Caelian hill is from the land of Greece, letter to Fronto, Loeb edn. (1928) i. 142 (31N)). For the Christians, TLL 3 de operibus scriptis. 104 ‘abest . . . historia litteris nostris’ (history is absent from our writings, Cic. De leg. 1. 5); ‘ut Graecis de philosophia litteris non egeant’ (that they [the Romans] not lack Greek writings about philosophy, Cic. Div. 2. 5); ‘rarae per eadem tempora litterae fuere’ (rare were the writings through the same times, Livy 6. 1. 2). Quinn (1982) 137–9, 141 argues that litterae means something akin to ‘civilized life’. 105 Of his own writing, Sat. 1. 4. 22–3; of Greek, Epist. 2. 1. 28–9; of the contents of the Palatine library, Epist. 1. 3. 17. 106 For Ford (2002) ch. 10 the terms are song versus poetry, but poetry clearly means literature, and his narrative traces the development of poetry as a category in relation to the development of prose.

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Some Background

as realities, so anachronism is not a decisive charge against calling Livius Andronicus’ Odyssia or the Homeric epics themselves literature. However, the technical vocabulary of literary production varies according to the point being made, so that it is difﬁcult to isolate ideas in the abstract. Horace, who refers to Homer’s poetry as song when envisioning a translation into drama (AP 129), calls him a writer when reading the text (‘Troiani belli scriptorem . . . j relegi’ (I reread the writer of the Trojan war), Epist. 1. 2. 1–2). Horace clearly thought Homer belonged to literature and that this encompassed both performance and reading as modes of reception. The distance he puts between himself and his native tradition, however, is perhaps partly responsible for some modern categories. Several intertwined issues troubling modern thinking arise in Horace’s Epistle to Augustus: the relation of the literary to the preliterary, the date of the beginning of Latin literature, the importance of authorship, and the competition between aesthetic and social value. If no ﬁrm line separates the preliterary from the literary, if authorship is not a decisive category, and social value trumps aesthetic, it becomes hard to assign Latin literature its canonical Varronian starting date of 240 BCE, when Livius Andronicus staged plays in Latin at the Ludi Romani.107 Horace puts the beginning of Latin literature viewed aesthetically closer to his own times—at the earliest after the Punic Wars (Epist. 2. 1. 162)—even though he assents to Livius’ position as the ﬁrst recorded author.108 For him the decisive distinction is not between the pre- or non-literary and the literary, but between literature with or without polish; 240 BCE is consequently less decisive for him than if authorship is the distinctive category. Horace starts his own literary history in the Epistle with ‘preliterary’ texts.109 He lists the twelve tables, ancient treaties, and the pontiﬁcal libri dismissively. His satiric target admires old things and claims the Muse dictated these on the Alban Mount (Epist. 2. 1. 23–7). All belong to the so-called carmen tradition, as does the ‘Saliare carmen’ of line 86, but he does not call 107

Zorzetti (1980) 12 contests the assumption that this date symbolizes the acquisition at Rome of a concept of literarity. Also Habinek (1998a) 36; Goldberg (2005) Introduction. For Cicero’s taking the Varronian dating over the Accian of these performances, Malcovati (1943) 91–2, Douglas at Brutus 72. 108 Cicero comments on the lateness of the Romans’ taking up literature (Tusc. 1. 3). 109 For the ‘preliterary’, Zorzetti (1980) 14. Goldberg (1995) assumes all other song was not literary, e.g. ‘Yet the earliest Saturnians offer little hint of literary potential’ (62), in his analysis of the elogium to L. Cornelius Scipio (ILLRP 310), though he goes on to attribute ‘a strong sense of verse structure’ to that of L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (ILLRP 309). The anthropological perspective will draw into poetry and song all sorts of material the aestheticizing perspective might exclude from literature. One of the criteria for exclusion is a religious context, another is preprofessionalization.

Some Background

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the former ‘carmen’.110 Horace’s joke queries the aesthetic quality of this material, but their lack of style does not necessarily mean that Horace excluded them from literature, only from literature of the best sort. Horace uses a reductio ad absurdum, but what is the criterion? If literature is a social category, these texts certainly belong, as does anything else included in the Roman canon of education, although even the most socially committed critic might put these texts in a different aesthetic ﬁle. Horace, however, insists on polarization: those who admire Numa’s carmen Saliare therefore hate the modern (Epist. 2. 1. 86–9). Horace is being funny, but the serious point is ﬁrst, an absolute divide between antiquarian and modern taste, and second, that much of archaic Roman preliterature was inaccessible to late Republican and early Imperial Romans. Horace presumably looked into the carmen Saliare sufﬁciently well to state he knows nothing about it.111 He was clearly fascinated by archaic material, as his frequent references to the Salii suggest (Odes 1. 37. 2, 1. 36. 12, 4. 1. 28), and his Carmen saeculare itself belongs in a tradition of song composed for a speciﬁc religious occasion that goes back at least to Livius Andronicus’ expiatory hymn to Juno of 207 BCE (Schnegg-Ko¨hler 2002: 235–6). Horace, who has done his homework, prizes the old material’s social and historical value enough to argue energetically against its aesthetic achievement. The divide Horace sets between ancient and modern taste does not depend on actual age. The nearly 25-line gap between the archaic carmen material (23–7) and the next list of third- and second-century BCE authors (50–62) may separate them, but the intervening argument from the heap allows no numerical principle to determine the old. The difference he values is not temporal, but qualitative. Another apparent difference between the carmen tradition and the list starting at line 50 is authorship, and the turning point between the truly ancient material and the merely old is Livius Andronicus: ‘habet hos numeratque poetas j ad nostrum tempus Liui scriptoris ab aeuo’ ([Rome] considers and numbers these as poets from the age of the writer Livius to our our own time, 61–2). An author produces a ﬁxed historical point. Horace disagrees not with the chronology,112 110

here.

Gordon Williams (1982) 53–5; Habinek (2005c) 81 emphasizes Horace’s tendentiousness

111 He could have read Aelius Stilo, who wrote a commentary on the Twelve Tables and an interpretation of the Saliaria carmina (Kiessling-Heinze, and RE ad loc.), or Varro; M. Barchiesi (1962) 43 n. 175. Quintilian claims they are scarcely intelligible to their own priests (1. 6. 40). Horsfall in Bremmer and Horsfall (1987) 10 comments that the distaste of ‘sophisticated scholars and stylists’ for the Latin of the early Republic was due not just to literary taste, but to changes in the language which made it difﬁcult to understand, and quotes Polybius (3. 22). 112 M. Barchiesi (1962) 46–7 disputes (against Kiessling-Heinze ad loc.) that Horace is following the Accian chronology which put Livius Andronicus’ ﬁrst performance in 197 BCE, but rather follows Varro who put him in 240 BCE. The ancient source for the controversy is Cicero, Brutus 72–3, where Atticus is probably following Varro, see Douglas ad loc.

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only with the over-evaluation of older material vis-a´-vis contemporary literature. Here, however, Horace sweeps the mid-Republican authors into the same dustbin as the archaic material. Further into the poem, he locates the beginnings of a more reﬁned style in the disappearance of the Saturnian metre (158) after the Punic wars when tragedians began to imitate the Greeks (162–3).113 Authorship may be a necessary category for a work to rise to the desired level, but is not sufﬁcient. Given Horace’s clear approval of the Greek inﬂuence on Latin literature, we would expect poema and poeta to carry a positive evaluation. These terms include the text in question within literature, but this category is wider than what he judges worthy. Horace uses the terms when he himself accords the text aesthetic value, but also to attribute such an evaluation to others, although he disagrees. The contrast to others’ assessment of Livius as poeta makes Horace’s ‘scriptor’ a put-down (61–2). Horace’s disparagement is not absolute, but he thinks it surprising people consider it polished and beautiful (69–72). He does not deny poeta to the old poets (‘ueteres . . . poetas’ (old poets), 41, 64), but questions those who admire them. He uses these terms only for identiﬁable authors. His ‘adeo sanctum est uetus omne poema’ (so hallowed is every old poem, 54) follows his comment about the rage for Naevius,114 and his expostulation that an occasional felicity ‘unjustly draws and sells the whole poem’ (‘iniuste totum ducit uenditque poema’, 75) targets Livius. Earlier texts are ‘tabulae’, ‘foedera’, ‘libri’, ‘uolumina’ (23–6), ‘fabula’ (80), and ‘carmen’ (86). Greek terminology marks the material as literature even if it is no good. Horace cares about the distinction between media, but his valorizing the library over spectacle (214–18) dichotomizes for the sake of a joke. Although he makes a break between old and new, inferior and superior, performed versus read, we cannot quite align early literature, lack of quality, and orality against modern literature, excellence, and book reception. The categories do not line up neatly. What does reception then mean for him? Jo¨rg Ru¨pke (2001: 47–53) has suggested the epics of Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius were performed at aristocratic banquets.115 He applies to partially extant literature Cato’s statements about the controversial carmina conuiualia. Whether right or not, Ru¨pke, among others, is trying to re-establish a link 113 M. Barchiesi (1962) 46 calls the disappearance of Saturnians Horace’s sign of the passage from the prehistory to the history of Roman poetry and culture. Pierre (2005) 232–5 analyses the rustic poetry in Horace’s literary history as symbolizing poetry lacking civilization. This ﬁction of origins polarizes poetry with and without Greek inﬂuence so as to stand for contemporary alternatives. 114 Cicero did research on Naevius, Malcovati (1943) 92–4. 115 Goldberg (2005) 12 n. 30 and 46 n. 63 emphasizes the lack of evidence for this ‘otherwise appealing suggestion’.

Some Background

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between a native tradition of song and Roman literature that Horace vigorously depicts as broken. Which is more accurate, the link or the break? That the tradition of choral performance goes back to the detested Livius Andronicus in no way devalues Horace’s Carmen saeculare in his own eyes. The tradition links, but its quality makes the break. Horace’s stance as a singing poet in the Odes rather cites the Greeks, though his native tradition does come into view at the end of Odes 4. 15 (see below). Does Horace undervalue and distort his native tradition to enhance his own imitation of the Greeks? Maybe, but then what is native? Momigliano (1957: 110) insisted the Romans had always been under Greek inﬂuence116 and so could easily have taken convivial song from the Greeks at an early date.117 Horace’s criticism of his early Roman predecessors has nothing to do with the lack of a broad cultural interaction, but learning (‘serus enim Graecis admouit acumina chartis’ (for late did he [the Roman] move his attention to Greek papers), Epist. 2. 1. 161). The mid-Republicans did not reach the polish of Greek literature—speciﬁcally written on paper—but they at least looked to Greek models. Hellenization per se is not desirable, but the new aesthetic model the Greeks provide the Romans is. Furthermore, Horace’s project is not to create a Roman version of Greece. He mocks those who make Ennius the Roman Homer (Epist. 2. 1. 50) and the whole project of ﬁnding Roman equivalents to the Greeks (Feeney 2002a: 11–12; 2002b: 178–9). But Horace is not above taking advantage of the idea of an archaic song culture when, in his lyric, he wants to construct his activity as traditional. His methods, however, differ signiﬁcantly from Vergil. Let us examine two passages, Vergil’s reception of the Salian hymn and an important Horatian passage where the ideology of the banquet song is in operation. The two together represent the opposite drives characteristic of Augustan poetry: towards mythic continuity and towards decontextualization. Vergil tilts to tradition, Horace, even where he most embraces song, to the break. After Evander recounts the story of Hercules and Cacus in Aeneid 8, the festivities resume. They consist of feasting, the carmen Saliare, and choruses of youths and elders. 116 Also Pasquali (1936) ch. 5, ‘La cultura di Roma archaica’. Wiseman (1989) 130–1 criticizes Horsfall (1987) 1 for driving a wedge between Roman and Italian myths of great antiquity predating regular contact with Greek literature and ‘secondary myth’, i.e. products of some sort of contact often in the form of study. Wiseman remarks that secondary myth can contain traces of the former, that stories are likely to be amalgams of old and new, and that not all stories fall into these antithetical categories. 117 Wiseman (1989) 131–3 offers a more recent summary of the archaeological evidence and cites evidence for seventh-century BCE sympotic mixing bowls and drinking cups from Ficana, eleven miles from Rome. Horsfall (1994) 52; Coarelli (1995) 206–7; Suerbaum (2002) 42. Dupont (2005) analyses how the Romans conceptualized the Greekness of their banqueting practices.

58

Some Background tum Salii ad cantus incensa altaria circum populeis adsunt euincti tempora ramis, hic iuuenum chorus, ille senum, qui carmine laudes Herculeas et facta ferunt. (Aen. 8. 285–8)

(Then the Salii are present at the songs around the ﬂaming altars, having bound their temples with poplar branches, here a chorus of youths, there of old men, who raise the praise of Hercules and his deeds in song.)

Vergil anachronistically sets the hymn before the traditional foundation of the Salii by Numa and Tullus Hostilius, and the semi-chorus of elders is ‘suspect’ (Gransden and Eden at Aen. 8. 285). Since the Salii were known to have had a cult of Hercules not at Rome, but at Tibur, many aspects of Vergil’s account seem ﬁctitious (Eden ad loc.). An important difference from the Salian rites is the lack in Vergil’s description of dance and elaborate costume (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 2. 70. 1). Furthermore, the song concerns laudes and facta, and Vergil continues with a list of Hercules’ mythic deeds. Both Cato and Varro attribute praise of deeds to the carmina conuiualia, and I think Vergil here adds elements from the latter to the rites of the Salii and conﬂates a variety of prehistoric song traditions. This would explain the combination of Varro’s youth chorus with Cato’s adults. Missing are the songs by individuals, attested at Cicero, Brutus 75, unless Evander’s narrative of Hercules and Cacus holds their place. Vergil situates song within Roman heroic prehistory, and the worship of Hercules at the Ara Maxima allows for historical continuity into his own times.118 Vergil’s constructed representation reveals a desire, shared by moderns, for a more precise understanding of archaic Roman song. Horace’s evocation of the carmina conuiualia does the inverse: he brings old practices into the present. The new political situation interposes a break.119 Prehistory accompanies the Augustan peace, but the celebration of the end of civil war earlier in the poem admits of discontinuity. nosque et profestis lucibus et sacris inter iocosi munera Liberi cum prole matronisque nostris rite deos prius apprecati

118 Habinek (2005c) 263 n. 18 suggests that in addition to Greek hymnic traditions, Vergil could have been ‘reﬂecting actual practice in indigenous rites’. I would emphasize the distortion and afﬁrm his point about the carmen Saliare: Roman writers retroject the carmen to the ‘era of foundation’ (24) or, as here even before. 119 Momigliano (1957) 110; Riposati (1983); Putnam (1986) 272; Murray (1990) 41; La Penna (1995) 267.

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uirtute functos more patrum duces Lydis remixto carmine tibiis Troiamque et Anchisen et almae progeniemVeneriscanemus. (Odes 4.15.25–32) (And we, on work days and holidays, among the gifts of playful Bacchus with our offspring and wives, after duly praying to the gods, will sing in song mixed with Lydian reed, the leaders’ manly deeds in the manner of our fathers, and Troy, and Achises, and the child of nurturing Venus.)

The banquet context suggested by Liber, praise of famous men, the national myth, and the tibia accord perfectly with Cato’s description as reported by Cicero.120 The presence of the whole family and the prayers to the gods elevate the practice to a ritual occasion. The occasion itself, however, slips through our ﬁngers: the merism of the song’s performance on days both sacred and profane generalizes the event to the point of dissolution. The occasion is not speciﬁc. The relegation of the song to the future idealizes it as effectively as Cicero’s regret over the lost songs of the good old days. The power of this passage dwells not in its representation of actual practices, but in the projection of a kind of national unity consisting of images drawn from the mythic, but lost Republican past. The nostalgia goes hand in hand with the idealization of Caesar’s restoring fertility to the ﬁelds (‘tua, Caesar, aetas j fruges et agris rettulit uberes’, 4–5) and the unreal enemies located vaguely in the east (Seres, 22–3).121 The ideological burden carried by these lines requires the break from origins that constitutes the literary. The great strength of literature is its ability to separate from its original context and still remain meaningful.122 To this extent it differs from other sorts of ritual language, such as religious or legal, which are similarly distinct from ordinary language but continue to operate within more localized contexts. No matter how many new meanings the repetition of religious ritual can engender, it must take place within a culture that continues the practice.123 120 Riposati (1983) 9 thinks Horace had independent knowledge of the carmina conuiualia as part of the ‘archaic cultural patrimony’ and did not need Cato or Varro. Horace certainly would have had access to other sources that have not survived, but whether this amounted to a patrimony is unclear. 121 T. E. Page ad loc.: ‘Put for any remote Eastern nation.’ For the slippage between Getae and Dacians, see Orelli ad loc. 122 Habinek recognizes ‘song’s capacity to be dislodged from the speciﬁc context of the ritual’ (2005c) 25. 123 For ritual’s polysemic nature, Elsner (1991), Barchiesi, Ru¨pke, and Stephens (2004) vii, who also comment on the need for textual recording to reconstruct rituals that lack continuous practice. For the distinction between the ‘festival poets’ conception of sacred time’ as ‘renewable in reperformance’ versus a ‘historical approach’, which ‘viewed origins as unique and isolable human events’, Ford (2002) 142.

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The iteration of literature enables sublation (Aufhebung), with its triple movement of cancellation, preservation, and elevation. The original context is destroyed, but the aesthetic object acquires value precisely because of its elevation out of that context. The object becomes worth preserving according to criteria that transcend the moment of production. Repetition in any medium preserves literature equally, although writing allows for a greater distance from the originating context than song.124 Literature’s awareness that it will lose its original context means that whatever strategy the utterance may have for conferring symbolic value on author and audience, whether elite or popular, must be balanced against a competing strategy: to make a possession for all time. Literature’s ability to remain relevant is dependent on its continued valuation and not on the persistence of its context.125 We no longer practice Roman religion or law, but we do continue to read Roman literature. What enables continued relevance beyond mere historical curiosity is literature’s potential rupture with its origins. To understand how an aesthetic object functions, sociological analysis should take account not only of cultural production, but of the disembedding processes that enable reception.

124 Osterreicher (1997) 199: ‘writing easily allows for a spatial and temporal separation of text production and reception, and it enhances planning, offers the possibility of correction and editing, including recourse to supplementary information . . . All these factors produce a ﬁlter that causes immediate forms of expression to be altered or eliminated.’ 125 Ford (1997) 86 emphasizes the independence of what may later be valued in poetry from ‘the processes by which their subject texts came into being’. His case in point is the ‘organic unity and completeness’ of the Homeric epics. New technologies enable new ‘forms of analysis’ (107).

Part I Writing, Performance, and Performativity

A performance is an event, but the poem itself, if there is any poem, must be some kind of enduring object. (Wimsatt and Beardsley, ‘The Concept of Meter’, in Hateful Contraries)

3 The Performance of Horatian Lyric: The Limits of Reference Horace’s Carmen saeculare is the only extant Latin poem of the Augustan period where external evidence establishes that it was composed for performance and actually performed (Ch. 5). There has been, however, something of a movement since the early 1990s to revive the idea that some of Horace’s Odes were also performed.1 The options range from music, both choral and monodic, to recitation before the addressee.2 Some form of recitation remains given, despite Horace’s protestations he did not enjoy doing it in public (Serm. 1. 4. 23, 73–4).3 It is uncertain whether we can take Horace’s satiric statements seriously and whether they pertain to lyric, but the likelihood of recitation is based on current cultural realities rather than anything Horace says. The revival of performance replays an earlier argument, in which Richard Heinze, ‘Die horazische Ode’ (1923, in 1972), suggested that the language of song— indeed all poetic communication in Horace—was a poetic ﬁction, and Gu¨nther Wille (1967; 1977) and Noel Bonavia-Hunt (1969) insisted on taking this language literally. For Horatian lyric, performance means reproducing in

1 NR intro. to 3. 9 (135) are sceptical, though they entertain the notion in some cases. For recent speculation about ‘oral and performance elements latent in our literary texts’, Horsfall (2003) 25, contrasting highly oral popular culture with the ‘stiffer’ world of Vergil, Tacitus, and ‘their readers’ (26). 2 Feeney (1998) 38–44 analyses the debate about performance versus ‘literary exercise’ for various Latin hymns; most extant Greek hymns including the Homeric hymns are literary in that they self-consciously negotiate the problematics of representation and context. This does not mean they were not religious, but the ‘reality’ of performance ‘proves impossible to ground’ (40). Murray’s (1985) 43–4 agnosticism is salutary, but he elides many relevant distinctions since he includes in performance both a poem’s publication or circulation among a wider group of friends and its eventual preservation in a poet’s collected works. He suspects a number of occasional poems were performed (e.g. Odes 1. 36) (47). 3 Quinn (1982) 145–65 reviews the evidence for ‘Public and Semi-Public Performance’ and the ‘Recitatio’ under Augustus.

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some oral and social context poetry from a highly polished script.4 Improvisation is never at issue.5 Horatian lyric offers a test case for the performance of Latin poetry in the Augustan period. ‘Performance’ has a wide range in English. Alessandro Barchiesi (2001a: 288) expresses misgivings: Yet it worries me a bit that English but not Italian, German, Greek, or Latin, had a word that can be stretched to cover (1) Wolfgang Iser’s theory of literary meaning as ‘performed’ at the point of reception; (2) the Roman tradition of recitatio (whose beginnings can be located in the Augustan age);6 (3) evidence or pseudo-evidence (like the Servian reference to the Eclogues being performed by the actress Cytheris in front of Cicero . . . ) about poetry being performed in theaters; (4) the traditional avoidance of references to written medium in epic;7 (5) the critic’s romantic nostalgia for an age when it was all about reading aloud and ‘live’ communication in the open air; (6) a model of literature that creates through written signs a spectacular manipulation of emotions and reader response.8

The debate over Horace’s lyric performance reveals slippage between these categories. The historical question about Horace playing the lyre bleeds into whether the poetry presents itself as intended to be sung, which in turn makes us ask which is more important, its communicative function in a particular occasion, directed to a particular addressee, or its role as aesthetic artefact, meant for a wider readership for all time. Furthermore, historical performance can be subsumed into reception. To make things more complicated, there are further associations in English with the word ‘perform’. One is performative discourse. Does a consolation poem console? The other is the

4 Sharrock (1994) 103 takes radically different performance media together: tribes around the campﬁre listening to ‘proto-Homer’, dramatic performances in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens, the formal recitatio as described by Pliny; since some form of performance was the norm, the separation between author and audience highlighted in literary epistles, e.g. Ovid’s Tristia, creates anxiety. 5 Improvisation is a feature of epigram and hexameter poetry, A. Hardie (1983) 74–85, Gutzwiller (1998) 4–5, 49, 231–5 (Cic. De Or. 3. 194, of Antipater in hexameters and other unspeciﬁed metres; Arch. 18). Horace, however, makes fun of Lucilius’ rapid composition, ‘uersus dictabat stans pede in uno’ (Serm. 1. 4. 10). Lowrie (2002a) 240 n. 32. Lefe`vre (1993) 143 asserts ‘Horaz dichtete gern spontan’, but means Horace composed while doing errands and later entrusted his thoughts to paper. Horace does refer to informal, perhaps improvisational singing with ‘dum meam canto Lalagen’ (Odes 1. 22. 10); Wille (1977) 130. 6 Funaioli (1914) traces evidence for the inﬂuence of Greek practices on Roman recitation. Substantial advances, particularly in public recitation, occurred in the Augustan period. 7 Ford (1992) 31 refers to epic’s ‘chaste distance from the present of performance’. 8 Barchiesi is no anti-anachronist: he considers items 1 and 6 the most useful for Ovid’s Metamorphoses. To counteract an overvaluation of items 2–4 he defends the poem’s textuality with an analysis of Met. 1. 61–6, where the ‘mise en page’ of the physical disposition of winds’ names balances the ‘richness of acoustic effects’ evoking performance.

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poem’s social function: what role does it perform? The stakes in the debate are not only historical accuracy, but our own commitments to a greater valuation of a text’s social or aesthetic aspects. Although we cannot deny the social dimension of posterity’s interest (who reads Latin today has much to do with class),9 or that contemporaries had an appreciation for the aesthetic quality of poetry, there is a tendency to link poetry’s social function to its context of production and allow its aesthetic quality to endure over time.10 Socially embedded performance and a readerly appreciation of aesthetic quality can come notionally at each other’s expense.11 These moves are largely unexamined. In this chapter and the next I explore the interrelations of these various categories as they pertain to the performance of Horatian lyric. At their centre is a struggle between inert and active conceptions of literature. After a long period of formalism, which kept the aesthetic artefact in a space apart, Latinists now insist that literature intervenes in the world. I start by examining the extent to which speech act theory is useful for understanding social communication in the Odes. At the heart of speech act theory lie two divides, one between denotative and performative utterance, another between language that is and is not felicitous in the sense of actually doing what it says. A prime reason for infelicity is that the utterance is ﬁctitious. Fiction is a central stumbling block both for the argument about whether literature can communicate speciﬁc speech acts to the addressee and also for whether Horace’s representation of his lyric as song corresponds to an external reality. To move beyond polarization, we need to acknowledge that metaphors contain certain truths. What these are, however, is also contested. Horatian lyric does not have to be either literally performed (on a lyre or recited) or literally performative (in the sense of inviting the addressee to dinner) to participate in society. Habinek states, ‘all utterance is to some degree strategic’, and studies how literature is not only ‘a representation of society, but . . . an intervention in it as well’ (1998: 8, 3). Oliensis cites Wallace Stevens’s dictum on art as ‘[p]art of the res itself, and not about it’ in asserting that ‘Horace’s poems are not detached representations of society but consequential acts within society’ (1998: 2–3). Even ﬁction is a consequential act, though the category is misleading for understanding poetry addressed to contemporary addressees. My argument concludes with two ways Horace’s representations intervene in the world. The ﬁrst is through deﬁning a social 9 For reading cultures and the elite appreciation of ‘difﬁcult’ literature, W. A. Johnson (2000) 600–6. 10 Payne (2006): lyric poetry’s cognitive aspect endures over time outside its original social context. 11 Recently, a more anthropological approach has emphasized the embeddedness and ritualization of writing: Meyer (2004), Barchiesi et al. (2004), Habinek (2005c).

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role for himself as a lyrist.12 This develops over time and differences between the Epodes and the Odes are examined (Ch. 4). Central to this project is how he depicts his medium. The second is through using lyric to give form to and to work out ideological concerns. Here I would revise Stevens’s dictum. Horatian lyric is a signal instance of the Roman deployment of a host of different cultural media, particularly but not exclusively in the age of Augustus, not only as ‘part of the res itself ’, but also to comment explicitly on it.13 Commentary and intellectual engagement are strong ways of participating. This thought leads into the Carmen saeculare (Ch. 5).

P E R F O R M A N C E A N D P E R F O R M ATI V I T Y The overlap between performance and performative discourse is no mere pun; German scholarship links questions of Vortrag and Auffu¨hrung (actual performance) with those of Wirkung (effectiveness or performativity). The problematic revolves around presence and absence or fullness and emptiness in language. Language may create certain realities.14 The branch of linguistics called pragmatics studies this power; a prime concern is language’s potential also not to do what it appears to do. J. L. Austin’s (1962) premise is that words do things in the world. ‘I promise’, ‘I name this ship’, ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ are phrases with pragmatic effects: they perform what they say when the person promising, naming, or pronouncing has the authority to do so and does so in an appropriate context.15 Austin calls such phrases ‘explicit performatives’ (32). Literature is vexed regarding these: it is not clear whether such phrases maintain the power to do what they say or merely imitate ordinary language. Austin excludes certain contexts from ‘performative felicity’ because they lack seriousness. The actor is not held outside the theatre to have promised what his character promises on stage. Austin says for seriousness to hold, ‘I must 12

Lowrie (2009a) has a section on social performance in this period. For the distinction between producing and reproducing the world, Connolly (2004) 162: surely literature does both. Current scholarship overstates production because of the long postenlightenment assumption of reproduction. 14 Kennedy (1992) 29: ‘Every utterance . . . enacts a relationship of power.’ Aristotle may offer an early instance of pragmatic interpretation. Herington (1985) 33 states that Aristotle views Tyrtaeus’ Eunomia as being meant to reconcile dissension ‘between the haves and the have-nots among the citizenry’ (Politics 5. 1306b–1307a). 15 M.-E. Conte (1984) 67–70 provides a history of performative discourse theory before or contemporary with Austin. 13

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not be joking, for instance, nor writing a poem’ (1962: 9).16 While the distinction between actor and character, author and ﬁrst-person narrator may be clear because ﬁction lacks seriousness, that between author and lyric ego is much murkier, particularly when addressed to a historical person alive during the poem’s composition. While the speaker of a lyric poem is generally recognized as a ‘persona’, I baulk at categorizing most of Horace’s Odes as ﬁction.17 The seriousness of performatives in Horatian lyric poses a quandary. Do they perform or not? Does the aesthetic sphere, which sets literature apart from ordinary language, impede its social function?18 To some extent, yes, of course. When Horace invites Maecenas for a drink in Odes 1. 20, we can only wonder whether the invitation is serious in the sense of actually proffering an invitation. First, certain formal elements are lacking: no time or place is speciﬁed; no word denoting invitation occurs.19 But the relation of form to function is a problem for performatives even in ordinary language, since context affords a more reliable guide to pragmatic function than grammar or semantics.20 ‘Potabis’ (you will drink, Odes 1. 20. 1), like Catullus’ ‘cenabis’ (you will dine, 13. 1), proffers the so-called ‘future of invitation’ without any explicit performative.21 The lack of expected formal elements impedes performative felicity no more in literature than in life.22 The time and date could be arranged subsequently, outside the poem. More difﬁcult to ascertain is the effect on the invitation of the poem’s literary nature. Catullus 13, which spoofs the convention, cannot function as an 16

Goldhill (1994) 56–8 addresses context in performative discourse, as well as literature’s status. 17 Todorov (1975) 355 cites prayer and exhortations—obvious speech acts—along with other forms that challenge literature’s deﬁnition as ﬁction in the sense of being neither true nor false. 18 Pratt (1977) argues that literature operates within the workings of ordinary language: she outlines a theory of literary communication and social function and does not argue for the felicity of explicit performatives. Pagnini (1987) is more of a hybrid of narratology and communication theory than an intervention in speech act theory. 19 NH offer the full formulas at Odes 1. 20. 1 and comment, ‘It is not an invitation in the strict sense, asking Maecenas on a deﬁnite occasion to a particular party’ (244). Edmunds (1982) 185 concludes it is not even an invitation poem, though it contains some of the requisite elements, since it lacks the tripartite structure (invitation, menu, entertainment) of the form proper. For the interplay of metaphor and the real in invitation poems, Gowers (1993) 220–8. 20 Stanley Fish offered the following example on National Public Radio, July 2005: the phrase, ‘Why don’t we go to the movies?’, means something different according to the interlocutors’ particular relation: a casual invitation or a long-married couple arguing about why they never go out. 21 Fraenkel (1957) 214 n. 2 resists taking ‘potabis’ as the future of invitation and refers any actual inviting to circumstances outside the poem, which ‘must not become an object of his reader’s curiosity’ (214–15). Farrell (2005) analyses Fraenkel’s contextualism in relation to his seemingly New Critical insistence on textual self-sufﬁciency. 22 I agree with Cairns (1992) 236 n. 8 that Odes 1. 20 is an invitation poem (though perhaps not an invitation) over Edmunds’s (1982) 185 useful formal objections.

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invitation because he tells his guest Fabullus to bring everything—the dinner, wine, company, and entertainment—except the scent, with which Venus has endowed his girl.23 Parody undermines the effectiveness of the performative, but it would do the same in ordinary language. Horace’s invitation to Maecenas runs up more fundamentally against literarity: the invitation could be satisﬁed entirely by the gift of the poem. The wines’ names easily slip into metonymy for poetry, so that drinking Sabine wine in a Greek jar becomes strictly metaphorical for receiving a Latin poem in Greek metres.24 Lowell Edmunds (2001c: ch. 2) argues against the usefulness of speech act theory for analysing poetry of this sort.25 I largely agree with him. The invitation in Horace Odes 1. 20 has an indeterminable felicity. The poem’s aesthetic nature, a different category from ﬁction, impedes the invitation because literary language is set aside from the workings of ordinary language. However, the suggestion that the poem itself may substitute for the invitation’s felicity retains the notion of a kind of pragmatic effectiveness for literature: the poem may fail to proffer an invitation, but honours Maecenas nevertheless and hence remains effective in one of literature’s canonical tasks.26 Commemoration and praise fulﬁl a more basic literary function. Horace put up some wine when Maecenas received applause in the theatre. The poem, with or without the wine metonymy, commemorates the occasion by mentioning it. Vile potabis modicis Sabinum cantharis, Graeca quod ego ipse testa conditum leui, datus in theatro cum tibi plausus,

23 Gowers (1993) 229–44, Wray (2001) 104–5, Krostenko (2001) 265 recuperate the ineffective invitation metaphorically as an invitation to urbanity, to ‘a feast of words’, or to recognize the reworking of Greek conventions. The last sees Catullus’ polymetrics as ‘occasional verse without an occasion’ (289). 24 Commager (1962) 326, dismissed by NH Odes 1. 20. 2, though Nisbet (1987) 186 remarks that Horace need not have literally bottled Sabine wine on this occasion. Putnam (1969) 153–4 shows the poetic double-entendre underlying many of the poem’s words: ‘condere’, ‘linere’, ‘reddere laudes’, ‘laudes’, ‘iocosa imago’. Pavlock (1982) discusses all Horace’s invitation odes to Maecenas. 25 The modernist stance against the directedness of literature is instantiated in Blanchot (1959) 299, ‘La Puissance et la gloire’: ‘L’e´crivain aime dire qu’il e´crit son livre en le destinant a` l’unique ami. Vu bien de´c¸u. Dans le public, l’ami n’a pas de place. Il n’y a de place pour aucune personne de´termine´e, et pas davantage pour des structures sociales de´termine´es, famille, groupe, class, nation. Personne n’en fait partie, et tout le monde lui appartient.’ B. Johnson (1980) argues for a special poetic performativity where utterance brings the poem into being. 26 For kleos, Herington (1985) 60–1. Kahane (1997) 118 describes kleos as ‘a special type of performative speech-act’ (his emphasis) and associates performance media with performative discourse.

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care, Maecenas, eques, ut paterni ﬂuminis ripae simul et iocosa redderet laudes tibi Vaticani montis imago. (Horace, Odes 1. 20. 1–8) (You will drink cheap Sabine in moderate cups, which I myself sealed away in a Greek jar, when applause was given you in the theatre, dear knight, Maecenas, such that the shores of your ancestral river and the laughing echo of the Vatican mount gave you praise duly at the same time.)

From a formalist angle it is surprising, if we agree (provisionally) that the poem offers Maecenas praise,27 that it ends up not doing what it ostensibly does (offer an invitation), but rather what it reports: ‘redderet laudes’ (7). The distinction between referential and performative discourse lies at the basis of speech act theory, but here we ﬁnd a congruence between what the poem actually does (praise) and its referential language (the report about the landscape’s praise), while what looks to be the poem’s illocutionary force (the invitation) is suspended. So far, I have assumed the poem succeeds in offering Maecenas praise. But several things obstruct praise as the illocutionary substitute for an infelicitous invitation. Horace withholds its content, so that commentators have looked outside the poem to determine why Maecenas received the applause.28 Unless praise can be a speech act sufﬁcient in itself without any articulation of what was praiseworthy, this is strange praise in the ordinary language sense.29 Furthermore, this poem engages in several levels of deferral that mark it as an aesthetic object and question its ability to perform any illocutionary force whatsoever. This poem offers an invitation to commemorate in a social occasion an event that Horace at the time marked for commemoration, the applause in the theatre, itself praising something unspeciﬁed. Quite a few layers separate the praiseworthy action and its commemoration in a drinking party—itself 27

Race’s (1978) 182 paraphrase subsumes the poem entirely into praise: ‘This little ode will have to sufﬁce in commemorating your tribute in the theater, Maecenas. You deserve a grandstyle encomium; I can only offer you cheap wine, but it is Sabine and it is special.’ 28 NH introduction to Odes 1. 20; Cairns (1992) 91–6. 29 Murray (1990) 45 suggests an alternative pragmatic aim for this and other Roman invitation poems in Greek and Latin: a poor client pleads for assistance from a wealthy patron. He comments that ‘Horace does not ask for money directly.’ A poem could accordingly have a pragmatic force entirely absent from its content. He also suggests a displaced performativity for a Greek paraclausithyron, inscribed as grafﬁto outside the ‘Auditorium of Maecenas’: it apologizes for bad behaviour at a symposium held within the building instead of at the beloved’s house (43). In one case, Murray decontextualizes from a poem’s content, in another he recontextualizes according to its physical location.

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relegated to the future. Besides, it is not praiseworthy action that elicits commemoration, but rather a conferral of praise (the applause). The relation of the two social events, drinking party and applause in the theatre, is mediated by writing, in the form of the invitation poem, as well as reﬂected in another form of representation in the broadest sense, the applause’s echo on the Vatican hills. The word chosen for echo, ‘imago’ (image), bridges the aural and the visual, the respective domains of performativity and writing. Overall, Odes 1. 20 meditates on literature’s intervention in social relations.30 It falls temporally between the theatre and the party, a piece of writing between two celebrations. Do the poem’s invitation and praise imitate the illocutionary forces of the corresponding speech act in ordinary language, or enact them? I say this poem intervenes in the world not by literally proffering Maecenas an invitation to a speciﬁc event, but by provoking thought about poetry’s odd place both in the world and outside it.31 Why the theatre? Those who think about performative discourse are uncannily attracted to performance media.32 Austin uses Hippolytus, whose tongue swore, but mind remained unsworn, as an example of bad faith (1962: 9; Eur. Hipp. 612). Stanley Cavell shows Austin gets Hippolytus wrong: he in fact stood by his disavowed promise (1994: 100–5). But why use an example not from ordinary language, but from the very medium, drama, that Austin excludes from seriousness, on the same page where he says, ‘I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem’(9)?33 The questions of whether representation is imitation or enactment, whether literature is read or performed, replay many of the issues of illocutionary felicity. Literature’s seriousness and social function are displaced from direct pragmatic efﬁcacity. Speech act theory literally applied will not help understand 30 It is not a ‘straightforward account of a minor incident in the life of the poet’, Race (1978) 189; ‘Like any good poem this ode goes far beyond the reproduction of a fragment of actual life’, Fraenkel (1957) 216. 31 Denis Feeney comments to me that the addressee is well chosen: Maecenas is also both in the world and out of it. The address to Maecenas as ‘care’ (5) situates him in the private sphere, ‘clare’ in the public. The textual problem recapitulates an interpretative problem in the poem. Feeney has a theory he hesitates to publish: the echo—called iocosa—of Maecenas’ name would be cenas, in which case, the invitation lies under erasure. Nicholas Horsfall assures me the Vatican hills still echo. 32 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2. 39 (¼ 448A), compares a public speaker’s difﬁculty in ‘ﬁnding the word capable of ordering everyone’ to playing a stringed instrument. He links musical with rhetorical performance, and both with effective language. I thank Susanna Elm for this reference. 33 That literature offers useful examples for performative discourse says more about exemplarity than literature’s lack of performative seriousness: examples are by deﬁnition removed from context, Agamben (1998) 21–2. Cavell (1994) turns on the relation of philosophy to personal voice, especially in a sung performance medium: opera. Davidson (1984) 269–70.

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poetry, but it is a useful tool for helping pinpoint where literature distinguishes itself from ordinary language. Latin poetry of the Augustan age shows a strong interest in exploring these rifts. There are countless ways ordinary discourse goes wrong, though, to take Austin’s primary examples, people successfully marry and name ships every day.34 Writing’s divorce of utterance from its context leaves us clueless about whether or not intended effects took place. But perhaps it is not necessary to discover actual pragmatic effects. All that may be needed is to determine what types of strategies are attempted, not whether they succeed. Their very attempt reveals underlying assumptions, expectations, and desires. If speech act theory is largely a tool to be used through negation, that by no means inhibits its felicity as a tool.

RE PRESENTATION Song and writing produce representation. This word is standard in Romance languages for theatrical production: la repre´sentation d’une pie`ce. In Italian, recitare is also used for putting on a play or opera. While English ‘performance’ encompasses perhaps too broad a semantic range covering different forms of the production and reception of literature, other languages create overlap between theatrical representation and representation as the expression of ideas. The difference between ‘representing’ a tragedy and ‘playing’ it (jouer une trage´die) contains the same problematic as the difference between performance and writing. One is action, agere, while repre´senter implies a gap between a script and its enactment. The overlap between the language of performance and literary reception with that of representation as the expression of ideational content, derives, I think, from an attraction of different problematics with similar structures. Representation can be viewed from two perspectives: mere imitation, hence a form of deferral, or enactment, whereby the object of representation is brought (really) into the present. This is not the place to trace the differences between Plato and Aristotle in this regard.35 Sufﬁce it to say that this double 34 NR pp. xxiv–v are too optimistic about successful communication in ordinary language, Lowrie (2005d) 330, Henderson (2006) 110. 35 Laird (1999) 44–78 brings together Plato and Aristotle with modern narratology. One of the difﬁculties is that mimesis can refer speciﬁcally to enacted (as in drama) or quoted (as in epic) speech (Plato, Rep. 392d5), while the verb mimeisthai looks more generally to representation (e.g. Ar. Poetics 3. 1448a), within which either narrative or mimesis can be understood as enacted or quoted speech. For Aristotle, Halliwell (1986) ch. 4, stresses the incompatibility of ‘mimesis as image-making and mimesis as enactment’ (53, 130). Nagy (1990) 42–5, 346, 349,

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perspective informs literary criticism from the beginning. In Aristotle, the modes of discourse, that is, narrative (diegesis) versus enacted speech (mimesis), have nothing to do with performance modes (recitation, drama, reading). Mimesis, however, overlaps with drama as a performance medium because tragedy and comedy characteristically engage in it.36 Vivid speech presentation accords with the vividness of performance, and can easily be confused with it. Furthermore, mimesis in the sense of a representation of a human action is accessible through reading as well as performance.37 One of the Latin words denoting vividness (Greek enargeia) is repraesentatio.38 A representation containing the techniques of repraesentatio approximates sense perception more than, for example, impersonal narrative.39 Here again, we meet a similar problematic: a verbal representation vivid enough to seem visible to the senses can go in the direction of either presence or absence. Barbara Cassin emphasizes enargeia’s double nature: the words present material to an audience ‘as if ’ it were really there (1997: 20–1).40 You can emphasize the appearance of presence, as in enactment, or its ﬁctionality, as in imitation, but you cannot entirely extricate the two.

REFERENTIALITY AND THE PERFORMANCE O F H O R AC E ’ S OD E S The question of Horatian lyric performance replays the age-old competition between referential and ﬁgurative language. Poetry’s social context and 373–5, 381, 387, 411, and (1994) 415 distinguishes between ‘re-enactment’ and ‘imitation’. Sifakis (2001) shows that Aristotle in the Poetics considered music a kind of mimesis internal to tragedy’s representational ability. Russell (1981) 100 uses Twining’s terms: ‘imitation in ﬁction’ and ‘personative poetry’, which are in Aristotle, as well as ‘simple imitation by sound’ and ‘imitation in description’, which are not. He surveys the history of mimesis (99–113). 36 Halliwell (1986) 54, 131 warns against confusing dramatic enactment with performance as such but points out that performance has ‘its own claims to mimetic status’. 37 Ford (2002) 95: what makes Aristotle’s a ‘literary’ theory ‘is his observation that audiences respond to representations in ways that are different from how they would respond in encountering the originals’. The literary event stands apart from life regardless of reception medium. 38 Quintilian 8. 3. 61; generally called euidentia, Lausberg 810, p. 401. 39 Lausberg 810, p. 400: ‘Die Versetzung in die Augenzeugenschaft . . . ist der Effekt einer Mimesis.’ 40 Also Webb (1997) 229–30. Quintilian speciﬁcally conjoins seeming and ‘as if ’ with the language of presence: ‘credibilis rerum imago, quae uelut in rem praesentem perducere audientes uidetur’ (a believable image of things, which seems to lead the listeners as if into a present matter, 4. 2. 123). For this ﬁgure’s importance to Ovid, P. Hardie (2002a) 5–6.

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implied audience pull in one direction, the autonomy of its self-representations in another.41 The vocabulary of song,42 instruments,43 Muses and other singing gods,44 verbs of utterance or singing,45 and the like abound in 41 Performance is just one area of a dispute about autobiographical elements in Horace’s— and others’—poetry. G. Davis (1991), Lowrie (1997) ch. 6, Horsfall (1998). 42 In the following lists the material from the Odes, Carmen saeculare, and Epodes are separated out; ‘own’ marks references pertaining to Horace. Odes: cantus: 1. 24. 3, 2. 12. 14, 3. 1. 20, 4. 13. 5, 4. 15. 30 (perhaps own); carmen: 1. 7. 6, 1. 15. 15, 1. 32. 4 (own), 3. 1. 2 (own), 3. 30. 13 (own), 4. 1. 24, 4. 2. 32 (own), 4. 3. 12 (perhaps own), 4. 6. 30 (own), 4. 6. 43 (own), 4. 11. 36, 4. 12. 10; ludus (of song and dance): 2. 19. 26; 4. 2. 42; melos: 3. 4. 2; modi: 2. 1. 40 (own), 3. 9. 10, 3. 30. 14 (own), 4. 6. 43 (own), 4. 8. 11, 4. 8. 11 (own), 4. 11. 34 (perhaps own); nenia: 2. 1. 38 (own), 2. 20. 21, 3. 28. 16 (perhaps own). Carmen saeculare (all of event itself): cantus: 22; carmen: 8; ludi: 22. Epodes: cantus: 13. 17; carmen: 5. 72 (spell), 9. 5 (perhaps own), 14. 7 (own), 17. 4 and 28 (spells); nenia: 17. 29 (spell). 43 Odes: barbiton: 1. 1. 34 (own), 1. 32. 4 (own), 3. 26. 4 (own, but given up); cithara: 1. 15. 15, 1. 24. 4, 1. 31. 20 (own), 2. 10. 18, 2. 12. 4 (perhaps own), 3. 1. 20, 3. 4. 4 (own with Calliope), 3. 9. 10, 3. 15. 14; ﬁdes: 1. 12. 11, 1. 17. 18, 1. 24. 14, 1. 26. 10 (perhaps own), 2. 13. 25, 3. 4. 4 (own with Calliope), 4. 3. 23 (ﬁdicen, own), 4. 6. 25 (ﬁdicen), 4. 9. 12; ﬁstula: 1. 17. 10, 3. 19. 20, 4. 1. 24, 4. 12. 10; lyra: 1. 6. 10 (own), 1. 10. 6, 1. 12. 1 (own), 1. 21. 12, 2. 11. 22, 3. 3. 69 (own), 3. 19. 20, 4. 1. 22, 4. 3. 23, 4. 15. 2; plectrum: 1. 26. 11 (perhaps own), 2. 1. 40 (own), 2. 13. 27, 4. 2. 33; testudo: 1. 32. 14 (perhaps own), 3. 11. 3 (own), 4. 3. 17; tibia: 1. 1. 32 (own), 1. 12. 2 (own), 3. 4. 1 (own with Calliope), 3. 7. 30, 3. 19. 19, 4. 1. 23, 4. 15. 30 (perhaps own); drums: 1. 18. 14; horns: 1. 18. 14. Carmen saeculare (no instruments). Epodes (many fewer instruments than in the Odes): ﬁdes: 13. 9; lyra: 9. 5 (perhaps own), 17. 39 (own); testudo: 14. 11; tibia: 9. 5 (perhaps own). Herington (1985) 28–9 covers Greek lyric instruments; see Hunter (1996) 21–2, 101–2. 44 Odes: 1. 12. 2 (Clio); 1. 15. 5 (Nereus); 1. 21. 10 (Apollo); 1. 24. 3 (Melpomene); 1. 26. 9 (Piplea); 2. 1. 37 (Musa); 2. 10. 19–20 (Muse and Apollo); 2. 12. 13 (Musa); 2. 16. 38 (Graiae . . . Camenae); 2. 19. 1 (Bacchus); 3. 1. 3 (Muses); 3. 3. 70 (Musa); 3. 4. 2, 4, 21 (Calliope, Apollo, Camenae); 3. 19. 13 (Muses); 4. 3. 1, 18 (Melpomene, Pieris); 4. 6. 26, 27, 29 (Phoebus, Dauniae . . . Camenae, Phoebus bis); 4. 8. 20 (Calabrae Pierides), 4. 9. 8, 21 (Camenae, Muses); 4. 14. 21 (Pleiades as stars); 4. 15. 1 (Phoebus). Carmen saeculare: whole poem dedicated to Apollo and Diana, but Apollo also occurs with the Camenae (62). Epodes: as Barchiesi (2001c) 148 notes, no actual Muses; though Diana is a goddess of magic at 17. 3. 45 Odes: audior: 3. 25. 4 (own); cano: 1. 10. 5 (own), 1. 15. 4, 1. 32. 10, 4. 2. 13, 4. 2. 47 (own); canto: 1. 6. 19 (own), 1. 22. 10, 2. 9. 19 (shared), 3. 1. 4 (own), 3. 28. 9 (shared), 4. 637 (own), 4. 15. 32 (shared); celebrare: 1. 7. 6, 1. 12. 2 (own with Clio); concino: 4. 2. 33, 41; decanto: 1. 33. 3; dico: 1. 2. 50, 1. 7. 9, 1. 8. 1, 1. 12. 13, 25 (own), 1. 17. 19, 1. 21. 1, 2 (related to own), 1. 32. 3 (own), 2. 11. 22, 2. 12. 10, 14 (latter of own), 2. 12. 30, 3. 3. 58, 3. 4. 1 (own with Calliope), 3. 13. 14 (own), 3. 14. 21, 3. 25. 7 (own), 3. 28. 16 (shared), 3. 30. 10 (own), 4. 2. 19, 4. 6. 41, 4. 9. 21, 4. 12. 9; laudo: 1. 7. 1, 3. 29. 53 (own, but used to beg off), 4. 1. 27, 4. 2. 50 (own), 4. 4. 49, 4. 5. 38, 39; loquor: 1. 11. 7 (own), 3. 25. 18 (own), 4. 2. 45 (own), 4. 4. 68, 4. 9. 4 (own), 4. 15. 1 (own); ludere: 1. 32. 2 (own); narro: 3. 19. 3; oro: 1. 8. 2, 1. 31. 2 (own); ploro: 4. 2. 22; posco: 1. 21. 1 (own), 1. 32. 1 (own or of self); precor: 1. 31. 18 (own); psallere: 4. 13. 7; recanto: 1. 16. 27 (own); recino: 3. 27. 1, 3. 28. 11; referre: 3. 3. 70 (own); negated sileo: 1. 12. 21 (own), 4. 8. 21 (perhaps own), 4. 9. 31 (own); taceo: 3. 19. 8, 2. 10. 18; uoco: 1. 2. 43. Carmen saeculare: audio: 34, 35; cano: 25; dico: 8 (related to own), 26, 76 (of poem); sentio: 73.

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Horace.46 What is the status of this language? In the scholarship, pragmatic and effective language aiming at a contemporary audience lines up with performance in and for a speciﬁc occasion, while literariness implies a divorce from context through writing with posterity as the poetry’s readership.47 The unexamined assumption is that referential language implies literal performance, which in turn entails a grounded social context, and that the divorce from a particular context unhinges poetry from an organic relation to society. This is false. Occasional poetry lives after its occasion has passed, Horace certainly anticipated and composed for poetic immortality, and the most metaphorical, aesthetically independent poetry arises in societies that value this quality. What is the nature of the link between what a poem says and its external production conditions? This cannot be determined objectively from reading a poem, but is largely projected from its content. This projection is no violation, but an intrinsic and necessary part of reception. It is the contract audiences and readers alike perform. Although I incline to read Horace’s language of performance as metaphorical, this choice results from my own educational formation, and there are alternatives. I believe the bitter disagreement about whether language in any particular instance is ﬁgurative or referential responds to a genuine indeterminacy. To that extent the controversy as a whole is more faithful to the text than any individual position.

Epodes: cano: 9. 18, 13. 11; dico: 5. 49, 14. 9; excanto: 5. 45; laudo: 11. 19 (own of behaviour not followed); loquor: 2. 67, 13. 7, 17. 3 (emendation); responsum do: 17. 4; sono: 17. 40 (own); taceo: 5. 49, 7. 14. 46 Odes: chorda: 4. 9. 4 (own); chorus: 2. 5. 21, 2. 12. 17, 2. 19. 25, 3. 4. 25 (own), 4. 3. 15 (own), 4. 14. 21; laus: 1. 6. 11 (own, forbidden), 1. 12. 14 (own), 1. 20. 7, 1. 21. 9 (related to own), 4. 8. 20, 4. 14. 39 (cause for praise); loquax: 3. 13. 15; ludus: 2. 19. 26; modi: 2. 12. 4 (perhaps own); pes: 4. 6. 35 (own metre), 1. 36. 12 (Salian dance), 1. 37. 1 (dance), 2. 12. 17 (dance); preces: 1. 2. 26, 1. 21. 16, 1. 24. 17 (implied own; negated effectiveness), 1. 28. 33, 1. 35. 5, 3. 10. 13 (implied own), 3. 27. 11 (own), 3. 29. 58, 4. 1. 8, 4. 5.1 3 and 33; silentium: 3. 2. 25, 2. 13. 29, 4. 1. 36 (own); tacitus (negated): 4. 1. 14; uox: 1. 10. 3 and 11, 1. 24. 4 (Melpomene’s), 2. 2. 21, 3. 4. 3 (Calliope’s), 3. 7. 22 (fail to persuade), 4. 2. 46 (own), 4. 6. 22 (successful persuasion), 4. 11. 35 (girl’s voice, perhaps own song). Carmen saeculare: chorus: 75 (of poem itself); laus: 76 (of poem’s utterance); preces: 70 (of ritual). Epodes: alloquium: 13. 18; preces: 5. 86, 10. 18, 17. 43 and 55 (own, referred to by Canidia); silentium: 5. 51, 85 (during ritual), 11. 9 (own; sign of love); uerbum: 12. 13; uox: 5. 45, 76 (magic), 6. 9, 17. 6, 78 (spells). 47 My dichotomy is heuristic. Barchiesi (2000) 170 states: ‘it will not do simply to say that Horace, operating in a different historical context, supplants a performance culture with a new model of bookish lyric.’

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Genre and the Internal Divide The hymn is the classic locus for the competition between form and function.48 Long before the Carmen saeculare, a choral ode sung by a mixed choir of girls and boys hymning Apollo and Diana, Horace wrote an ode of choral inspiration, Odes 1. 21, where he instructs a mixed choir of girls and boys to hymn the same deities. The hymn is a good place to measure the distance travelled between ‘occasion’ and ‘genre’ because we expect performance in a religious rite (Feeney 1998: 38–44). Nagy makes genre a substitute for the lost occasion, once poetry has separated from the social context that would generate an utterance’s parameters.49 Beyond belonging to genres, poems signal their participation and talk about it. Barchiesi’s deﬁnition reveals the extent to which reception conditions, including performance, are brought inside a poem: ‘Let us imagine genre as a conceptual, orienting device that suggests to an audience the sort of receptional conditions in which a given ﬁctive discourse might have been delivered or produced’ (2000: 168, his emphasis). The restriction to ﬁction is, I think, unnecessary. Its appearance here reveals the assumption that genre pertains to utterances at some remove from reality. The question of Odes 1. 21 is less whether it was actually performed by a chorus than its identity as a choral ode. Does the poem present itself as participating in a choral occasion, as belonging to the choral genre, or— even worse for those valorizing presence—as talking about the choral genre without necessarily belonging to it?50 One could set to music and sing just about any poem;51 without external evidence, we cannot know. A similar, but reverse problem, is that a poem’s presenting itself as sung is no guarantee it really was. The heart of the debate is a disagreement about how to take the orienting devices poems deploy. Some who think various odes present themselves as sung make a leap and assert that the representation corresponds to historical fact. The sticking point for Odes 1. 21 is the speaking voice. If Horace gives instructions to the chorus, does that mean the chorus can sing the poem? The second-person-plural address (‘dicite’ (speak), 1, 2; ‘tollite laudibus’ (raise her in praise), 9) has the strange effect of removing the speaking voice from the 48 For the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘cult’ hymns and their performance, Hunter (1996) 48–9, who comments that Theocritus’ ‘recuperation of the archaic hymnic voice was, in one sense, not a task of recuperation at all, because the chain of rhapsodic transmission had never been broken’ (51). For similar problems in epithalamium (149, 152). 49 Nagy (1990) 9; Lowrie (1997) 31–2, 38 n. 49, Barchiesi (2000) 174. 50 Classic is Derrida (1980) on the inside/outside distinction in the language of genre. 51 Wille (1967) ch. 7 documents the rich afterlife of Catullus, Vergil, Horace, and the Elegists in medieval and modern music.

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speech acts denoted. Horace does not hymn the gods, offer their praises, or pray that they divert plague from Rome to her enemies; he encourages the chorus to make these utterances. The verbs are imperative or predictive, in a future dependent on the chorus’ prayer (‘uestra motus aget prece’ (he, moved by your prayer, will drive [war and pestilence over to the enemy]), 16).52 The controversy sets logic against convention. Nisbet and Hubbard state the poem ‘could not conceivably have been sung’ because of ‘the mode of addressing the boys and girls’. Although they recognize the recollection of ‘genuine cult songs’ in ‘dicite’, they insist only the poet could utter them, and therefore the poem ‘is no more a real hymn than those of Callimachus’ (NH 1970: 254). Once they show the impossibility of the poem’s utterance if it pretends to choral lyric, they make another important move: ‘The song of praise is nothing other than the ode itself ’ (ibid.). The poem is the song of praise it cannot be. I much prefer this illogicality to readings insisting that metaphoric language refer outside the poem to the world. The proponents of choral performance, however, could here legitimately counter by suggesting that if the ode is the song of praise it requests (a performative issue), it could also be the choral ode it requests (a performance issue). Such a self-conscious effect seems particularly Horatian. Cairns traces to the choral lyric tradition the illogicality of the poet or choregos giving the chorus instruction.53 He summarizes W. J. Slater’s seminal article ‘Futures in Pindar’ and quotes: the choral ego is ‘an element that implies in fact a vague combination of Pindar, chorus and choral leader’.54 He concludes that Odes 1. 21 is a choral ode with built-in stage instructions; Horace innovates in applying throughout the poem a convention Greek choral lyric uses only partially (441–2).55 Nisbet and Hubbard, in his view, rightly signal the illogical nature of conventions that are still in operation, however absurd (n. 29). The self-conscious effect derives from Greek. Cairns, however, does not take the next step, which would be to try to prove that, since this poem is a choral ode, it was performed as such. He is content to restrict the ode’s performance to ‘imagination’ (442), whether the poet’s or ours. Comparison to Catullus 34 reveals that a more logical choral voice does not necessarily convince us of actual performance. 52

‘Dicite’ is here regularly translated as ‘sing’: West ad loc.; Syndikus (1972) 222. Syndikus (1972) 219, with extensive parallels n. 5, La Bua (1999) 176. 54 Cairns (1971) 441; W. J. Slater (1969) 89. For the identity of the Pindaric ﬁrst person, Lefkowitz (1963) and (1991). D’Alessio (1994) 118–20 critiques her for dividing authorial and choral voices too schematically between the various genres. Faraone (1995) 1–2 nn. 1 and 5–9; n. 111 below. 55 La Bua (1999) 176 suggests, the poem’s hymnic conventions pull both away from the canon but still appear to introduce cultic celebration. 53

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Dianae sumus in ﬁde puellae et pueri integri: {Dianam pueri integri} puellaeque canamus. (1–4) (We girls and boys untouched are in Diana’s faith: untouched boys and girls, let us sing of Diana.)

The choral ﬁrst person plural and canere (to sing) unambiguously connote song, unlike Horace’s dicere (to say). Syndikus (1984: 194) calls this stanza the prooemion to the hymn proper, which starts by declaring song, and comments on the enargeia: we see the living chorus before us.56 The concluding prayer obeys the conventional form with a second-person address to the god (‘sis . . . sancta . . . sospites ope gentem’ (may you be blessed . . . preserve the race of Romulus with good aid), 21–4). Despite the poem’s certain speech situation, most scholars believe the poem unlikely to have been intended for performance, but rather for reading. There are two grounds: imitation of Greek predecessors and the lack of an identiﬁable performance occasion.57 Syndikus’ analysis is exemplary. Because Catullus 34 has the same metre as the ﬁrst poem in the Alexandrian edition of Anacreon, a hymn to Artemis of Magnesia,58 and obeys Greek conventions, he concludes that Catullus ‘pursues artistic aims above all’ (ibid. 199). He dismisses suggestions (n. 37) that the poem was or could have been performed or contained aspects of ‘true Roman religiosity’ since original Italian piety did not need so many Greek and literary ideas. The poem’s status as ‘artwork’ vitiates its pragmatic use.59 True religious feeling lines up with performance, imitation of the Greeks with literarity and bookishness. It has since become commonplace to note how deeply Greek Roman culture was from the beginning, so the dichotomy is spurious.

56 Fordyce and Quinn here, T. E. Page at Horace, Odes 1. 21 take the choral situation straight. 57 On the latter, Fordyce introduction ad loc.; Quinn. These criteria are similar to the debate over the performance of Catullus 61, a combined hymenaion and epithalamium. Pighi (1948–9) 43–6; Kroll 110; G. Williams (1968) 199–201; Fedeli (1983); La Bua (1999) 120–6. Wiseman (1985) 115 notes the ritual’s obsolescence in contemporary Rome. 58 Although not strictly a ‘motto’ (the ﬁrst line does not allude to a ﬁrst line), it ﬁts Cavarzere’s (1996) model. For the literary manipulation of conventional Greek hymnic elements here, La Bua (1999) 119: Catullus engages in a literary game that surpasses convention without breaking with tradition (116). 59 La Bua (1999) 161 distinguishes between the literary and ‘la realta` della celebrazione religiosa’. Syndikus (1972) 4 offers a general statement of the dichotomy between occasion and literature.

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Denis Feeney devotes Literature and Religion at Rome to breaking down the polarity between ‘religious’ and ‘literary’. Chastising Horace for composing a hymn that was not part of cult is like chastising Beethoven for composing a Mass that was not part of cult; and trying to recuperate an Horatian hymn by saying it might have been performed beside an altar is like trying to recuperate Beethoven’s Mass by saying it might have been performed in a church. (Feeney 1998: 42–3)

He targets the champions of the religious over the literary. But, some also champion the literary over the religious, and for these, the converse is worth stating: performance in a church or by an altar in no way detracts from the aesthetic integrity of either Beethoven’s Mass or the Roman poets’ hymns. Religious feeling does not guarantee a particular poem was performed, nor does literarity ensure it was not. Another Horatian ode to Diana, Odes 3. 22, offers a comparandum for the disparity between genre and reality.60 Similar issues attach to writing as to performance. Montium custos nemorumque, Virgo, quae laborantis utero puellas ter uocata audis adimisque leto, diua triformis, imminens uillae tua pinus esto, quam per exactos ego laetus annos uerris obliquum meditantis ictum sanguine donem.

5

(Guardian of mountains and groves, Maiden, you who hear, when called three times girls labouring in the womb and save them from death, trifold goddess, let this pine, hanging over my villa, be yours, so I may happily through each passing year offer it the blood of a boar, plotting a sideways thrust.)

Here we have a context, the dedication of a tree, and a proper I/thou relation between poet and god.61 The dedicatory epigram should in theory be afﬁxed beside the dedicated object. Scholars have searched for a historical occasion

60 Cavarzere (1996) 235–6: this poem uses a motto from Catullus: ‘montium custos nemorumque’ looks to ‘montium domina . . . siluarumque’ (34. 9–10). 61 Henderson (1995) 106, 113, 119–23 plays out the rich thematic links between this poem, Odes 3. 21, and Catullus 34, all involving Diana. He acknowledges the poem is both invocation and dedicatory epigram (103), but dismisses these restrictive appellations for a more performative conception of writing that dramatizes a scene (127) and meditates on writing itself (128). He links annual sacriﬁce to Horace’s survival through reading and emphasizes the power of ‘the spell of words in the bind of the speech-act’ (107).

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not provided by the text.62 Inscription and performance work analogously as marks of the real within the respective realms of writing and song.63 Williams (118) argues from the lack of deixis, that is, ‘this pine’, that Horace ‘is not thinking in terms of a poem to be inscribed near the object . . . ; he is addressing the goddess, but writing a poem to be read’.64 As poetic hymns cannot be performed, Horace’s dedicatory epigram cannot be inscribed. Writing and performance are equally impossible if they imply the poem functions like cultic utterances. For both hymn and epigram, scholars take recourse to ‘reading’ as the area where poetry retreats from the world, whether as performance or writing. Even with recitation or reading in an addressee’s presence, there are obstacles to direct connection between the poet and his represented audience. But such a connection cannot be excluded. Williams vacillates between Horace’s ‘addressing the goddess, but writing a poem to be read’ and ‘actually speaking to the goddess’; this reveals in a nutshell the indecision the poem creates between literarity and openness to performativity. The tree’s mediation between poet and goddess—he would really offer the putative sacriﬁce to Diana, not the tree—parallels the chorus’s intervention between poet and Palatine deities in Odes 1. 21. A layer of deferral keeps each poem from cultic felicity, whether or not inscribed or sung. I think Horace consciously uses formal devices—addressing the chorus instead of the god, withholding a deictic link between poem and object—to generate indecision. But, as Catullus’ hymn shows, even a standard we/thou choral relation to god is subject to charges of artiﬁciality, and deictics are notoriously slippery.65 If Horace added ‘this’ to the pine, it could imitate the Hellenistic ‘dedication epigram’ occupying Palatine Anthology book 6 and supply a ‘reality effect’. Deictics, however, are not essential for the genre. 62 Henderson (1995) 134 lists attempts, including that Horace himself fathered a child on the occasion of whose birth the tree was planted. This idea is oddly entertained by NR 257, who list similar views. 63 Day (2000) 42 argues that ‘in Archaic Greece, reading a dedicatory epigram . . . was comparable at the level of pragmatics to the performance of a poem’; both serve to ‘(re-)activate a kind of ceremonial or ritual occasion’. Feeney (2003) critiques the assumption that ‘the performative is grounded in a bound social praxis’. Day draws parallels throughout his piece between dedicatory epigram and hymn. Cairns (1982) 241 argues that early Greece lyric anathematica were all choric, but that Horace was more probably inﬂuenced by Roman epigraphic behaviour (242); the poem was unlikely to be afﬁxed to the tree because of its hymnic character. 64 Syndikus (1973) 196, however, does not exclude the poem’s being ﬁxed to the tree. NR at line 5 note the usual lack of deixis here and conclude that Horace ‘avoids the formulae of genuine inscriptions’. 65 Depew (2000) 76 comments of hymns that ‘deixis is, in a sense, always a compensation of the absence of an actual communicative event’ and warns (n. 89) against taking deixis as a marker of orality. For ‘ﬁctive deixis’, Felson (1999) and introduction to Felson (2004).

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Williams quotes several that include deictics of the thing dedicated (156), but in his parallel to Odes 3. 22, chosen for the pine, he translates an absent deictic. ¥ºÆØ a łÆØ a Œç , º Y Å

Æ Ł’, NÆŒø HæÆ N ºı (Leonidas of Tarentum, Pal. Anth. 6. 334. 5–6) ([Rustic gods], kindly accept these cakes and cup ﬁlled with wine, the gifts of Neoptolemus, descendant of Aeacus.)–Williams’s translation, 156–7 (my emphasis)

Cakes and wine could hardly persist long after dedication; an epigram set up beside them would look foolish pointing to long-since perished perishables. In fact, the poem reads simply, ‘kindly accept the cakes and the cup . . . ’ Deﬁnite articles lend the objects a particularity short of full-ﬂedged deixis.66 This epigram is as literary as Horace’s. We do not expect literal dedication by a mythological ﬁgure. The Greek models need have no more (or less) connection to their represented context than their Roman counterparts. Horace’s choice of a wild boar as Diana’s victim in Odes 3. 22 entails temporal problems paralleling the omission of deixis for space. He promises annual sacriﬁce, yet the speciﬁcation of unpredictable hunting quarry rather than a domestic pig conﬂicts with the promise of a recurring day (Williams 118). Metonymy is the markedly literary solution: Horace’s boar honours Diana the huntress and ﬁgures its tame equivalent.67 Ritual performance of a now established cult becomes subject to a hunter’s random success. Horace resists performative felicity in both time and space. A further obstacle to successful dedication is the omission of quid pro quo exchange. Syndikus concludes the poem is not in fact a dedication (1973: 197–9). Dedications should have some speciﬁc need arising from the dedicator’s life and manifest in the god’s epithets. Diana is here goddess of the wild, childbirth, and the hunt; none applies to Horace and the me´lange praises her generally outside any speciﬁc occasion. More than anything, the lack of occasion removes literature from the performative.68 Folding a poem into the structure of the book-roll also emphasizes textuality. The previous poem displaces its address from Manlius to a wine-jar 66

Deixis is lacking at AP 6. 157 by Theodoridas, Syndikus (1973) 196 n. 3. Ibid. 197 n. 9. NR 256 also think it a domestic pig. Henderson (1995) 126 offers a magisterial catalogue of pig vocabulary and warns against domesticating the image of the dangerous boar. 68 Cairns (1982) 236 suggests the Ides of August, celebrated as Diana’s birthday throughout Italy. Although the date ﬁts the pig’s age (237–8), the speciﬁcation of a wild boar blurs any speciﬁc date for the poem’s imagined occasion, even the discrepancy disappears through metonymy. 67

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(Odes 3. 21), so two adjacent poems raise formal bars to occasionality. But after reading about Horace’s near-death encounter with a tree in Odes 2. 13, we read ‘imminens uillae’ (hanging over/threatening the villa, 3. 22. 5) with amusement.

‘FICTION’ Actual performance aligns notionally with performative discourse because both concern utterance in context. Decontextualization through writing blocks an utterance’s potency, or at least alters it. Removed from its context, a prayer becomes a representation rather than the thing itself. Each has different sorts of cultural power. Richard Heinze’s ‘Die Horazische Ode’ (‘The Horatian Ode’) is seminal for the intertwining of performative discourse with performance.69 Before the invention of speech act theory, he argues that Horace’s poetry is an expression of will (1972 [1923]: 180).70 He lists speech acts, such as warning, question, request for access to the beloved, invitation to festivity, invitation to poetry, prayer, command to slaves, that cover similar ground to Austin’s (1962: 148–64). His treatment of actual performance follows without transition. Heinze astutely observes that despite the language of song and lyre, the poet himself never holds a lyre in a concrete situation (187). It follows that his poetry was not improvisation. Heinze dismantles the entire image of a speaking poet he had just built up: ‘It is ﬁction that the poet stands opposite his addressee, ﬁction—except where general admonitions are concerned— that he wishes to affect his interlocutor, ﬁction that the listener should, from the songs, recognize the occasion in which they were composed’ (188). Heinze notes we know of no male lyre players in the times of Cicero or Horace (187)71 and cites Horace’s statements about recitation at Epistles 1. 19. 41 and the labour of composition (e.g. Odes 4. 2. 31–2). Heinze envisions musical performance as song by the likes of Phyllis, whom Horace asks to learn ‘measures’ at Odes 4. 11. Since he accepts recitation by the poet or performance by a lyre-playing woman, Heinze rejects not all forms of performance, only immediate improvisation on the lyre within a context informing the 69

Edmunds (2001c) 83–4. Translated in Lowrie (2009) 11–32. He uses ‘wirken’ several times of effective discourse (183, 184), and conjoins ‘wirken’ with ‘singen’ (177). 71 Nisbet (1995) 396. Von Albrecht (1992: 76–7) counters this view of unmusical Roman men, but his instances are of male singers, not lyrists. Treggiari (1976) 91 ﬁnds a male lyre-player at CIL vi. 7286, but he is a slave. 70

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represented speech acts. He rejects performance along with the performative, and puts in its stead an idealized and literary version of communication:72 Horace requires the reader to imagine him in the world of Alcaeus and Anacreon.73 The Greek model just barely palliates the social stigma—lyreplaying was unmanly at Rome. Fraenkel (1957: 404) summarizes: ‘a Horatian ode has no place in the sphere of any actual events, such as for instance the celebration of a religious ceremony, but serves rather as an ideal screen on to which certain ideas and emotions arising out of, or connected with, some actual events may be projected.’ One could theoretically retain performance, even the poet singing to the lyre in a convivial setting, without accepting performative effectiveness. Aesthetic form distances speaker and addressee, even when present—even in archaic Greece.74 At Rome an invitation poem, sung on the lyre in a sympotic context in imitation of the Greeks, could demonstrate the poet’s ability at handling the genre and praise the addressee indirectly without inviting him to dinner.75 The price of Heinze’s link between performance and the performative is a stark dichotomy: an entirely literary Rome versus the originary, socially grounded presence of a Greek lyric performance culture.76 After rejecting performance for Horace, he does not return to his earlier argument showing the importance of speech acts for all ancient lyric. 72 Rossi (1998) 168 insists on the reality of literary communication, despite its absence from a pragmatic context: literature refers to other texts (171), which exist in the world. 73 Gordon Williams (1994) 405 argues for a ‘setting in real life (not mechanical borrowing from Alcaeus)’; Grifﬁn (1985) passim, critiqued by Nisbet (1987), R. F. Thomas (1988). 74 Barchiesi (2000) 175 and Feeney (2000) independently make a similar point about reference in Archaic poetry to rainy weather, the former of Anacreon fr. 7 Gentili and reperformance, the latter of Alcaeus 338 and original peformance. Feeney asks whether Alcaeus improvised the song when it was raining or ‘came with a rainy opening ready just in case it happened to rain’. Barchiesi locates aesthetic pleasure in the gap between the poem’s origo and the present occasion, unless it were only subsequently performed at the winter solstice. For deictics and weather, Mayer at Horace, Epist. 1. 6. 3. Depew’s (2000) analysis of hymn, which in the main emphasizes the genre’s ritual enactment, nevertheless shows how deictic language ‘marks an objectiﬁcation of performances into texts, establishing a break between production and performance that some would deny for this [Archaic] period’ (61, 76–7). She traces via deictics the historical development from performance to textuality in Greece that entails a movement from enactment to representation: both are already in the earlier material and still relevant in the later (78–9). Stehle (1997) 15: in Archaic Greece ‘the performers were conceived by the audience to be speaking “spontaneously” ’; the utterance was not thought to be authored by the performer, but the performers ‘afﬁrmed it by speaking the words in public’. This approach allows speech to lend pragmatic import to written language and disjoins authorization from authorship. On orality, transmission, and the relation of education to occasion, Kurke (2000), Nagy (2004), Wissmann (oral presentation). 75 Sider 153: there is no need to search pre-Hellenistic literature for sources to the invitation poem; the invitation makes sense once writing becomes a dominant poetic modality. 76 Such a dichotomy is pervasive in Dupont (1994).

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He cannot reject performance for archaic Greece and ends up with a model of Greek lyric as effective discourse, which is as questionable for the Greeks as it is for Horace. One could also theoretically reject performance and retain performativity in poetic written communication. The addressee need not be present with the speaker to read a poetic letter and for its speech act to be operative.77 Such would be the case if an actual invitation were sent in verse. Reactions to Heinze go in two historicizing directions. One pursues actual Roman reception methods: private reading by the addressee or general public, recitation, performance with various degrees of accompaniment. The other addresses communicative effectiveness. At issue are the directedness of the speech acts within the poems toward a speciﬁc addressee and the relation of the individual communication to publication for posterity.

Figuration and its Discontents Vergil’s Eclogues were performed as mime and portions of Ovid were also performed.78 The same probably happened for Horace. The dominance of music and performance media in Roman culture is undisputed.79 A better question is whether we can prove the Odes were intended for performance on internal grounds. The frequency of reference to music and the Odes’ selfdeﬁnition as lyric, a musical genre, tempts us to want to. I argue we cannot, but this counts in no way for or against their historical performance. We cannot determine whether Horace’s self-referential musical vocabulary is ﬁgurative or literal. Wille (1977: 128), who believes the Odes were performed, notes that ancient reports of reading and recitation do not exclude song; no positive reason restricts Horatian lyric to ‘book poetry’. But he recognizes that the possibility of transferred and symbolic meaning withholds from Horace’s references to music the evidential value needed for proof. Bonavia-Hunt (1969: 1–27) insists that those who take Horace’s references to music metaphorically cannot prove they are not literal.80

77

This is rather the approach of Citroni (1995). Don. Vita Verg. 26.; Vita Donati Aucti 41; Vita Philargyriana 1, Brugnoli–Stok 181, 1–3; Servius at Ecl. 6. 11. Ovid, Tr. 2. 519 and 5. 7. 25. Horsfall (2003) 15, 56. Wille’s (1977) 135 suggestion that Ovid’s love poetry was performed as well as the Met. exceeds the evidence. 79 Wille (1977) and (1967); Beacham (1999); Horsfall (2003). 80 He mostly, however, treats the internal musicality of Horace’s Odes, which is indisputable. For later musical renditions, Wille (1967) 253–81. Piperno (1998) 661–2 traces the debate about the origin of the musical notations in medieval manuscripts. He sees the single medieval melodies as indicative of their didactic function once the metres became unfamiliar; their rhythm assimilates the quantitative metres to accentual medieval versiﬁcation (665). Rossi’s 78

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Literalistic reading is not restricted to Horace. Ancient testimony on performing Vergil reveals a long tradition of inferring a poem’s intended performance medium from within. The commentary attributed to M. Valerius Probus, similar to others from the fourth or ﬁfth century,81 explains how to determine when to sing: With what pronunciation each eclogue should be read, it will be determined thus, since in those very poems he thinks should be sung, he makes mention of song; if he does not think so, he entirely forgets this word. To that end, the second eclogue had to be sung: he says in the beginning (Ecl. 2. 6): ‘O cruel Alexis, do you not care for my songs?’ But in the third, so long as it was not to be sung, he omits the word; but where it had to be sung (Ecl. 3. 60–1): Ab Iove principium, Musae: Iovis omnia plena, Ille colit terras, illi mea carmina curae The beginning is from Jupiter, Muses: everything is full of Jupiter, He cultivates the lands, to him my songs are a care. And in the remaining eclogues we may notice this same thing. For how the Georgics are to be pronounced, he immediately shows, saying (G. 1. 5): ‘From here I will begin to sing’. Likewise, since he wanted the Aeneid to be read with modulation, he says (Aen. 1. 1): ‘I sing of arms and the man’. (‘Probus’ Thilo–Hagen 3. 2. 328)

The commentary probably reﬂects contemporary performance techniques. But other ancient testimony reveals that these changed and were subject to taste. Quintilian’s report is closer to Vergil: ‘However, ﬁrst of all let the reading be manly and serious with a certain integrity, and not indeed similar to prose, because it is song (carmen) and the poets testify that they sing (canere), not however, resolved into melody and with effeminate modulation, as is now done by most’ (1. 8. 2).82 Poetry was not read as prose (Wille 1967: 226);83 conversely, Quintilian does not approve of song, or even vocal modulation. The comment about contemporary practice implies that in Vergil’s time, reading techniques were more restrained. Quintilian, like ‘Probus’, also uses

(1998) 164 arguments against music as an ‘original factor’ of Horatian lyric are in my view decisive. Nisbet (1995) 396: Horace views music as entirely negative and socially disreputable. 81 Jocelyn (1985) 468–9 rules out for Probus (Flavian) commentaries such as those of Donatus and Servius and denies there is any genuine material from Probus in Servius. Probus’ note perhaps belongs to the ‘much material of scant value’ Geymonat attributes to the commentary, Horsfall 302. Wille (1967) 226 refers to the quotation as Probus without qualiﬁcation. 82 Text from Russell ad loc. 83 Quinn (1982) 103–4 discusses Dionysius’ prescription of different reading styles according to genre.

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poetry’s self-deﬁnition as song as indication of the requisite performance technique. He, however, better grasps ﬁguration and takes carmen somewhere between prose and full-ﬂedged song. Apparently external evidence suffers from the same dilemma. Of Ovid’s recollection of Horace from exile, Bonavia-Hunt asks why, if recitare applies to Propertius, such technically musical language attaches to Horace: ‘et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius aures, j dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra’ (and Horace of the many metres held our ears, while he beat cultured songs on the Ausonian lyre, Tr. 4. 10. 49–50). ‘Why ferit unless he intends to convey just that? Horace, the minstrel, could and did actually play the lyre: that is why’ (1969: 15; Luck ad loc.). The committed metaphoric reader answers, ‘Perhaps.’84 Ovid establishes a personal link with the preceding generation of poets with a touch of realism, but conveys their poetry in language matching their various genres. Ovid depicts these poets in increasingly formal performance contexts: ‘legit’ (reads, Tr. 4. 10. 43), ‘recitare’ (to recite, 45), and ‘ferit’ (he strikes (of playing the lyre), 50). Didactic epic and elegy both present themselves primarily as writing genres, for which song entails elevation.85 Ovid typically goes one further than Horace and puts a lyre in his hands, unlike Horace himself.86 The image may, but need not have reference beyond lyric’s dominant generic deﬁnition. Catullus is drawn into lyric when Ovid says of Lesbia, ‘cantata est saepe Catullo’ (she was often sung by Catullus, Tr. 2. 427), even though Catullus presents his erotic poetry as written, and we do not generally suppose he sang the polymetrics.87 Rossi (1998: 170), confronting literalist interpretations, establishes a rule: ‘The more his [Horace’s] lexicon and musical culture are Greek, the more suspect their eventual referential value in the context of a Roman reality should appear.’88 The same goes for contemporary readers of Horace such as Ovid. The ‘Ausonian lyre’ Ovid attributes to Horace conﬂates his ‘princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos j deduxisse modos’ ([I was] ﬁrst to lead Aeolian song to Italian measures, Odes 3. 30. 13–14), ‘Romanae ﬁdicen lyrae’ (player of the Roman lyre, Odes 84 Gordon Williams (1994) 405 also takes the passage literally. Dalzell (1955) 28 refers to reading, Quinn (1982) 142–3 to ‘private readings open to a privileged few’. 85 Vergil’s strong commitment to song makes the Georgics exceptional. 86 Ovid literalizes and exceeds Horace elsewhere, Lowrie (1997) 288 n. 60. His ‘legar’ (Met. 15. 878) brings out the implicit writing imagery in Horace’s ‘dicar’ (Odes 3. 30. 10). Skinner (2003) p. xx on Amores 3. 9. 61–2: ‘Ovid, who of all Roman authors was most conscious of the artiﬁciality of the poetic persona, may be speaking only of the character projected in the liber Catulli.’ 87 Newman (1990) 393 erroneously attributes ‘dulci uoce cantabat’ (he sang with a sweet voice) to the Scholia Veronensia at Vergil, Ecl. 7. 22. I cannot ﬁnd the citation. 88 Barchiesi (2007) 148: the music is present as theme, not as performance.

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4. 3. 23), and ‘Latinus . . . ﬁdicen’ (Latin lyrist, Epist. 1. 19. 32–3). The phrase ﬁts Horace’s language of generic deﬁnition so well, it offers no independent external evidence. In the 1990s, discussion of the performance of Horace’s Odes concentrated on book 4. The assumption is that the performance of the Carmen saeculare in 17 BCE opened up new horizons for Horace. Even Rossi, who argues against musical accompaniment, thinks Horace’s adoption of archaic ﬂexibility in the caesura’s placement in the Sapphics of book 4 alludes to the Carmen saeculare’s more musical metre.89 Although suggestions are not limited to book 4, I concentrate here on Odes 4. 5, 4. 6, and 4. 11 and highlight three strong readings by Michael von Albrecht (1992), Ian Du Quesnay (1995), and Eckard Lefe`vre (1993), all suggesting, to different degrees, actual performance. They share with Bonavia-Hunt, Wille, and others, a frustration with ﬁguration. Our inability to differentiate between the literal and the metaphoric is a stumbling block for those arguing both for and against actual performance. No markers reveal how to take the language.90 We must decide without sure knowledge. In the ﬁnal stanzas of Odes 4. 6 the language of merte and of music are identical. Von Albrecht, who acknowledges that the lyre and other symbols are metaphors for poetry and, therefore, unreliable indicators (1992: 81), nevertheless takes the time-keeping thumb in Odes 4. 6 of musical accompaniment (ibid. 79–80): uirginum primae puerique claris patribus orti, Deliae tutela deae fugaces lyncas et ceruos cohibentis arcu, Lesbium seruate pedem meique pollicis ictum rite Latonae puerum canentes . . .

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(31–40)

Beyond the lack of a symposium context at Rome and the metaphoricity of Horace’s language, Rossi uses the regularity of the caesura after the ﬁfth syllable as evidence for recitation as opposed to musical accompaniment. The Carmen saeculare is more ﬂexible because it was performed to music, and he attributes the later irregular caesura in the Sapphics of Odes 4 to Horace’s reminiscence of the Carmen saeculare (1998) 171–5. Von Albrecht (1992: 86–9) takes the frequent sixth-foot caesura in the later Sapphics, as analysed in Odes 4. 11, as creating a ‘Parlando-Effekt’, which would support musical performance. Nisbet (1999) 140 remarks on the ‘simple texture’ of the word order in the Carmen saeculare ‘which was meant to be sung’. The same problem inhabits musical metaphors and metre: imitation resembles the thing itself. 90 Gordon Williams (1994) 408 takes the vivid representation of Actium in Epode 9 as enargeia (not his term), but assumes the poem is set at the real celebration at Maecenas’ house. Where to draw the line between one representation and another?

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(First of the maidens and boys arisen from illustrious fathers, wards of the Delian goddess who checks the ﬂeeing lynxes and deer with her bow, preserve the Lesbian metre and the beat of my thumb, you who sing Latona’s son according to the rites . . . )

This passage is (almost) universally taken of rehearsal for the Carmen saeculare because of the chorus of boys and girls, mention of the festival, and the honour accorded the Palatine deities. The choral context certainly implies music, but since the shape of a metrical foot would determine the musical beat, we cannot distinguish sharply between metre (pedem) and music (pollicis ictum).91 Von Albrecht (1992: 85 n. 34) takes the poem’s ﬁnal stanza to suggest Horace was also the music’s composer, but ‘modi’ (measures) may refer to either metre or music.92 nupta iam dices ‘ego dis amicum, saeculo festas referente luces, reddidi carmen, docilis modorum uatis Horati.’ (Odes 4. 6. 41–4) (Now married, you will say, ‘I brought forth a song, friendly to the gods, when the century brought back festive days, taught the measures of Horace the bard.’)

Von Albrecht would like Horace to have directed at least one rehearsal, though he admits this is beyond resolution. Docilis does not imply Horace taught but that the girl learned; his role in the process falls out. A further referential problem is Odes 4. 6’s relation to the Carmen saeculare. Cairns (1971: 443) exceptionally refers the instructions to the chorus not to the Carmen saeculare, but to ‘what is actually being sung’, the poem itself. The ode is yet another poem celebrating the ludi saeculares and this interpretation makes Odes 4. 6 useless as evidence for the Carmen saeculare. Cairns’s move resembles Nisbet and Hubbard’s for Odes 1. 21: the poem itself fulﬁls a poetic task it appears to refer elsewhere. He underscores that no lyric poem

91 Fraenkel (1957) 404 takes Quintilian’s beating of the hand, foot, or ﬁngers (9. 4. 51) of metre, and interprets the scholiast’s ‘modulationem lyrici carminis, ueluti ipse lyram percutiat’ with Horace’s other references to musical technicalities as metaphors for lyric. 92 Horace’s reference to Lucilius (Serm. 1. 4. 58) and Ovid’s to elegiacs (Am. 2. 17. 22; Tr. 2. 220) must refer exclusively to metre, OLD ad loc. 7a. The acta of the Ludi saeculares reveals nothing more about Horace’s role than the poem’s composition (149). It speciﬁes the chorus of 27 boys and girls (147–8), but not the accompaniment. Syndikus (1973) 346–7 remarks that Odes 4. 6’s ﬁnal stanza could have been written only after the Carmen saeculare’s successful performance and takes Horace’s role as chorus leader strictly symbolically (also 354). Barchiesi (1996) 9 explains the difference between the singular voice (41–3) here and the plural voice of the doctus chorus of the Carmen saeculare (75) as ‘Horace’s way of imagining and reconstructing “the monodic” and “the choral” across an unbridgeable distance from the Greek origins’.

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deﬁnitively refers to another,93 and offers as parallels for double poems celebrating the same occasion Pindar, O. 2 and 3, 4 and 5, 10 and 11; P. 4 and 5. He differentiates sharply between convention and reality: the former cannot substantiate the latter.94 But whether this poem celebrates the ludi or commemorates the Carmen saeculare, with ‘referente’ and ‘reddidi’, Horace ‘brings back’ practices that had died out. Like Augustus, he is an innovator in reinventing tradition. Each reader draws the line differently and I fear every position has some inconsistency. Fraenkel (1957: 403–5) himself, whose charming enargeia of Horace’s ‘fat thumb’ dismisses his role as chorodidascalos in both reality and representation, then proceeds to paint an equally attractive picture of Horace attending the rehearsals and beaming at the healthy, good-looking, and noble youth while they practised. At the rehearsal, but not actually rehearsing, Horace is neither fully present nor absent. Odes 4. 6 and 4. 11 share musical vocabulary: ‘modi’ (measures), ‘reddere’ (bring forth),95 ‘carmen’ (song), and learning (docilis, condisce). Horace invites Phyllis to Maecenas’ birthday party, already in preparation, to love, and also to learn some ‘measures’. condisce modos amanda uoce quos reddas; minuentur atrae carmine curae. (Odes 4. 11. 33–6) (Learn well measures you may bring forth with a voice to be loved; dark cares are lessened by song.)

Von Albrecht argues Horace’s injunction is of song, not poetry. The choral situation at the end of Odes 4. 6 suggests music, but without stronger indicators, modi need not imply music over metre. Still, I accept Phyllis’ lovely voice as singing, although she could also recite poetry beautifully with or without musical accompaniment. In Odes 1. 17, a verb of speaking accompanies the lyre in Horace’s description of Tyndaris’ poetry: ‘ﬁde Teia j dices laborantis in uno j Penelopen uitreamque Circen’ (you will speak on the Simonidean lyre Penelope and glittering Circe labouring over one man, 93

But A. Hardie (1998) 266 n. 67 notes Pindar’s apparent reference to Paean 4 at I. 1. 7–9. Hardie opens interpretation up: the instructions to preserve the Sapphic metre pertain to both poems (ibid. 267); the voice belongs to chorus and poet (270); the poem represents the scene in the pronaos of the temple of Palatine Apollo right before the performance of the Carmen saeculare (289–90)—with due respect to Fraenkel (1957) 405—without, however, coming down on the ‘vexed question’ of actual performance (252 n. 5, 273). 95 ‘Reddere’ is used of discourse, whose type is speciﬁed by the object. Von Albrecht (1992) 85 n. 35: ‘reddidi carmen’ (Odes 4. 6. 43) equals ‘cantaui’. But Lucretius, of appearing to speak in dreams, says ‘reddere dicta tacentes’ (in silence to bring forth words, 4. 461). 94

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18–19). The lyre pulls in the direction of song, dicere pertains to poetic utterance, but full-ﬂedged song? recitative? rhythmical utterance punctuated by instrumental solo? In Odes 3. 28, Horace and Lyde will sing together (‘cantabimus’, 9) of Neptune, but she will answer with the curved lyre (‘tu curua recines lyra’, 11), hymning other gods, including Venus. The lyre sits in the girl’s hands. How literally should we take lyric’s emblem when Horace reinvented the genre? Tyndaris, Lyde, and Phyllis with their Greek names should sing in the Greek tradition. The ladies’ metaphoricity and the performance of Horace’s Odes are equally controversial. If Phyllis is a ﬁction, her actions are irrelevant to the performance of Horace’s poetry, but highly relevant to the idea of lyric produced.96 Reading self-referentially further complicates things. Von Albrecht (1992: 82) argues we naturally take the injunction to Phyllis as suggesting she learn Horace’s own poetry; this then implies some other Horatian lyric was performed.97 Kiessling went further: Horace encourages her to learn this very poem.98 Surely she could not learn a new song for a party already in preparation. Moreover, the one person the poetry could not logically be sung (or even recited) by is Phyllis, since she would vocalize an invitation to herself.99 How concerned is Horace with logic? If choral lyric presents instructions to itself, as Cairns (1971) suggests, could Phyllis sing the instructions given her? I dislike this solution, but cannot exclude it.100 Song may always be added after the fact, as Horace manuscripts attest,101 but even if Horace did compose his own music and it was performed either by himself or another on the lyre, an inherent break still separates what the poetry represents and the performance. I can envision Horace singing or reciting Odes 4. 11 at Maecenas’ birthday party, even with Maecenas present, though he is not the addressee.102 This invitation poem, unlike Odes 1. 20, actually has a date, the Ides of April (14–16). Layers of deferral, however, keep this poem from representing itself directly as a song sung in honour of 96

Horsfall (1998) 51 relates Horace’s ﬁctional ladies to poetic self-representation. Orelli ad loc. dismisses the suggestion Phyllis should learn the modes from Horace on the grounds that they are music. 98 Von Albrecht (1992: 97 n. 67) reports on Kiessling and rightly insists we do not know. I am friendly to metapoetic readings, but recognize this is the reader’s choice; Fowler (1994) 252–3 ¼ (2000) 30–1. 99 Heinze argues against her learning this poem as Horace cannot ask her to sing of Telephus rejecting her, Kiessling-Heinze ad loc. 100 Pavlock (1982) 89–95: the song Phyllis is to sing is Odes 4. 12. 101 Von Albrecht (1992) 100; there is no continuous tradition from Horace’s time to the medieval manuscript notations (77); n. 80 above. 102 Von Albrecht (1992) 90 dislikes the indirect approach to Maecenas, and envisages Horace sending him the poem by mail ‘as substitute for a personal congratulation’. 97

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Maecenas at his party: instead of the honorand, a love-interest is addressed; the party is not under way, but under preparation; the person invited to sing or recite poetry, cannot logically do it, if this poem is to be performed. These considerations do not bar another singer from singing the poem, or even Phyllis from the logically impossible. Such deferral makes for knowing courtly discourse, but also prevents our proving the poem actually was performed or even imagined as such. The more political the ode, the more desirable reference appears and the more problematic. Du Quesnay’s (1995) analysis of Odes 4. 5 shows in spectacular detail how Horace’s poem responds to contemporary issues: Augustus’ relation to the Senate (152–3), his abandoning land conﬁscation as a way to settle veterans (174), the marriage legislation (168), the Ara Pacis, whose constitutio on the occasion of Augustus’ return from Gaul in 13 July BCE matches the ode’s celebration of Augustus’ incipient return (138). Du Quesnay additionally wants the ode—indeed Odes 4 in entirety—to have a performance context. ‘Odes 4 was intended to be performed as part of the celebrations of Augustus’ return’ (143). His parallels are Vergil and Maecenas reading Augustus the Georgics103 and the production of Varius’ Thyestes in the triple triumph on Augustus’ return from the east in 29 BCE, but private reading and theatrical production are performances of different kinds. Augustus is clearly one important implied reader for Odes 4; his relation to Horace was close enough we can imagine the author presenting him the written book, whether in person or, as in Epist. 1. 13, by messenger.104 In Suetonius’ Life of Horace (22), Augustus teases Horace by letter about the disparity in size between his stomach and his ‘little book’. Some form of presentation is uncontroversial. The claim to choral performance is something else again, for which, as Du Quesnay (1995: 144) admits, ‘there is no direct evidence’. Why then suggest something possible, but unknowable? More than the uniﬁcation of disparate transmitted elements of cultural history,105 at issue is the poem’s interpretation. Du Quesnay is sensitive to Odes 4. 5’s resistance to representing performance directly. He posits a gap between its dramatic setting before Augustus’ return and the ﬁrst performance, when he actually did return in 13 BCE (ibid. 134),106 since there is nothing in the poem like the triumph in Odes 4. 2, honouring 103

Horsfall 17 is sceptical. Mayer, p. 4 and at line 17, thinks Odes 1–3 is meant, but the reference is not secure. 105 If Billows (1993) is right that the procession on the Ara Pacis represents Augustus’ supplicatio on his return in 13 BCE, and Du Quesnay (1995) is right that Odes 4. 5 was performed by a chorus on this occasion and that Horace helped plan the monument (182), we might expect more explicit references to the Ara Pacis. Maybe Horace’s portrait is on the monument. 106 Lyne (1995) 194 suggests the poem was written ‘post eventum’. 104

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Augustus’ anticipated return from defeating the Sygambri in 16 BCE. In Odes 4. 2, Horace suggests Iullus Antonius as an alias for writing a Pindaric ode of the kind Du Quesnay supposes of Odes 4. 5.107 Grand singing falls to Iullus Antonius: Horace is limited to the triumphal refrain and part of a uersus quadratus everyone chanted at a Roman triumph.108 Irony inhabits the poem’s failure to recognize itself as celebration, but choral lyric is ﬁrmly disavowed. Du Quesnay would need to account for choral performance in 13 BCE in light of Odes 4. 2.109 Horace habitually keeps his distance from overt praise poetry, through the recusatio and surrogate laudator of Odes 4. 2, or other devices. The fact that the triumph represented in Odes 4. 2 never happened undermines its value as a source for actual performance:110 poetry creates performances and festivals of the mind. Odes 4. 5 does have a public occasion, and the separation of dramatic date from the hypothetical ﬁrst performance would be another Horatian distancing technique. But the represented absence of Augustus (151), which makes sense before his return, would confront his actual presence were the ode performed among the festivities. This is another illogicality similar to Phyllis’ addressing to herself Horace’s injunction to learn his poetry should she perform Odes 4. 11. Such distancing techniques might appeal to postmodern sensibilities, but seem far from the desired socially embedded occasion. Du Quesnay’s (ibid. 146) attempt to localize Odes 4. 5’s original occasion in a performance context is paradigmatic: desire for actual performance accompanies desire for referential speciﬁcity. He resists language’s metaphorical dimension: ‘The evidence of the Odes themselves [regarding performance] is explicit enough as long as we do not dismiss it all as ﬁgurative. It is perhaps time to take Horace, e.g. at Odes 4. 15. 25–32, as meaning what he says.’ If only he said what he meant! The future ‘canemus’ (we will sing, 32) Du Quesnay cites cannot literally be fulﬁlled by the ode itself; it cannot be its own future. We can collapse the gap with the Pindaric future,111 so the utterance is 107 For how Horace could reasonably write such a triumphal poem, his refusal’s terms, and its irony, Fraenkel (1957) 432–40. On the locus conclamatus at Odes 4. 2. 49, I follow T. E. Page ad loc.: ‘tuque dum procedis’ (and while you take the lead). Horsfall (1987) 136 reads Gow’s ‘ioque dum procedit’: the triple ‘io’ links etymologically with ‘triumphus’. 108 Fraenkel (1957) 439 n. 2; Handley (1988) 167. 109 Fraenkel (1957) 440 sidesteps the issue: ‘whereas some time ago he had declined to write a solemn triumphal song, he now, unasked and unprompted, endeavoured to express his own feelings and those of his fellow citizens and so produced one of his most perfect poems’. 110 Rossi (1998) 171: Odes 4. 2 instantiates his rule that explicit song vocabulary indicates against its taking place. 111 W. J. Slater (1969) 86–94; Bundy (1986) 43, 74: ‘voluntative encomiastic futures’; Faraone (1995) extends the ‘performative future’ beyond poetry to magic; in Horace, Lowrie (1997) 89 n. 29, 225, 325.

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metaphorically self-fulﬁlling, or take the future literally of another song. For ‘canemus’ to refer to the poem’s own performance, we must take it ﬁguratively since the literal meaning points outside the poem. Du Quesnay pins the poem’s ﬁnal three stanzas to the occasion: preparation for a celebration honouring Augustus’ return. He argues from Menander Rhetor’s description of an appropriate ‘kletikos logos’ (invitation speech) and ‘basilikos logos’ (speech honouring kings), but the parallels are not all tight. While praise of the city corresponds to the rhetorician’s recommendation (ibid. 170–1; Men. Rh. 377. 10–17), the enargeia Menander prescribes for what the honorand will ﬁnd on arrival has no correspondence in Odes 4. 5: ‘Add to the epilogue: “The city already stands before the gates, with whole families, meeting you, greeting you, praying to the gods to see you soon . . . ; poets are ready with works of the Muses fashioned for the occasion, prose writers too: all are ready to hymn and praise you”’ (172; Men. Rh. 427. 17–27). Horace, by contrast, is remarkably vague. What Du Quesnay (1995: 172) calls preparations for the ‘welcome that is even now being prepared’ are taking place not collectively at Rome, but individually in the country (Odes 4. 5. 29–40). The divine honours given Augustus do not depict the sort of public celebration Menander Rhetor expects: ‘lo, they are already ﬂocking to the gates to receive you.’ Horace knows how to create celebrative urgency for political success, as in ‘nunc est bibendum’ (now we should drink, Odes 1. 37. 1). Even there, however, the verb’s mood removes the celebration from the moment—why say ‘should’ when the thing is happening? Even a present indicative could be analysed as enargeia. The parallel at Odes 3. 14, for Augustus’ return from Spain in 24 BCE, also calls for celebrations public (‘prodeat’ (let [Livia] come forth), 6; ‘parcite uerbis’ (spare your words—of a group of boys and girls who could form a chorus), 12) and private (‘i, pete’ (go seek), 17; ‘dic . . . properet’ (tell [Neaera] to hurry), 21). Here, the speaking voice is ﬁrmly Horace’s, his celebration is deﬁnitively private and qualiﬁed—it may happen, but if not, he will let it go. The desired present indicative and actuality are in Odes 4. 5 (‘adhibet’ (brings), 32; ‘prosequitur’ (honour), 33; ‘miscet’ (mixes), 35), but displaced from where Augustus will be and performed by someone other than the speaker. If Odes 4. 5 is in fact in the choral ‘we’, the speakers depict rites they infer, but experience indirectly. The indicative need not indicate reality. Horace invariably sidesteps immediacy. This feature gives his poetry aesthetic independence and keeps it from embracing fully the occasional moment. The utterance of Odes 4. 5 cannot be imagined in lived time and space. Rather, the distance involved in speaking to Augustus while absent accords with writing. Du Quesnay (1995: 151) rightly points out that Horace’s ode does not match the kletikos logos, where an ambassador delivers the invitation

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to the honorand in person (Men. Rhet. 424. 4–6), and argues against the scholiasts, who posit an embassy. Du Quesnay’s suggestion of choral performance lends the poetry a presence that would be added externally: he needs to separate speech and performance. But maybe we need imagine no occasion of utterance at all. This would detract in no way from the historical embeddedness Du Quesnay deﬁnitively establishes. Still, someone speaks: who? A demonstrably choral voice would provide internal evidence. But even in Pindar, identifying the ‘ego’ is notoriously difﬁcult, and choral performance does not necessarily erase the perception the poet speaks.112 Du Quesnay (ibid. 150) introduces another layer: ‘the speaker in this poem is a chorus which represents senatus populusque Romanus [the senate and the Roman people]’. The concluding ‘dicimus . . . dicimus’ (we say . . . we say, 38–9) opens the voice to the Roman people: they join the generalizing picture of the grateful landowner of the previous stanzas. Odes 4. 2 offers a parallel: Horace broadens the perspective from himself (‘canam’ (I will sing), 47) to the citizenry (‘dicemus . . . ciuitas omnis’ (we, the whole citizenry, will say), 50–1). I ﬁnd it more likely, however, that the speaker represents the generalized ciuitas, the collective body of citizens, rather than the speciﬁc political entity of the SPQR. The ﬁrst two stanzas mention the two bodies of state in order (‘patrum j sancto concilio’ (to the holy council of fathers), 4. 5. 3–4; ‘populo’ (to the people), 7),113 so the SPQR would mention itself—there is no Latin equivalent to ‘we the people’.114 The only unambiguous speech by the chorus in the Carmen saeculare is in the singular: ‘reporto, j doctus et Phoebi chorus et Dianae j dicere laudes’ (I bring back report, I a chorus taught to speak the praises of both Phoebus and Diana, CS 74–6). The plural ‘precamur’ (we pray, CS 3) is hard to pin down (Ch. 5). Even there, I think the poet speaks for the community rather than that the community itself speaks or the chorus, but how to prove it? The utterance relegates the actual chorus of ‘uirgines lectas puerosque castos’ (chosen girls and untouched boys, CS 6) to the third person—the same distancing as if the chorus actually spoke in Odes 1. 21, or Phyllis in Odes 4. 11, or the SPQR in Odes 4. 5.

112 Lefkowitz (1963) and (1991), Lidov (1993) 75-6, D’Alessio (1994). Stehle (1997) 16-17 argues that in performance, the audience assumes the chorus speaks in its own voice, but I am not convinced. Iteration is a grammatological feature independent of textuality. A. Hardie (1998) 267 n. 68. 113 Populus is the political and legal body at Cicero Rep. 1. 39; Goldberg (1995) 107. 114 One speaks to the people as Quirites, Romani, Romane, or ciues: Dickey (2002) 286. Fraenkel (1957) 289 n. 1 discusses the anomaly in o plebs (Horace, Odes 3. 14. 1). Horace never engages in prosopopoeia of the Respublica as does Cicero (Cat. 1. 27), but deploys speeches by gods or other mythic or historical ﬁgures who personalize the utterance: Helm (1935); Lowrie (1997) see index s.v. ‘speech’.

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In itself the plural hardly guarantees a choral voice. I say Horace grounds the country’s desire for its leader (‘quaerit patria Caesarem’ (the fatherland searches for Caesar), 4. 5. 16) in his own person and speech act, namely to tell Augustus ‘you are absent for too long now’ (‘abes iam nimium diu’, 2). The voice remains his whether or not literally or imaginatively performed by a chorus, whether or not representing some larger whole. This poem presents Horace’s voice, broadened to encompass his people, speaking in a speciﬁc historical context without a speciﬁc context of utterance. Despite speaking (‘abes iam nimium diu’) and represented speech (‘dicimus’), it is fundamentally written. The ﬁnal stanza dissolves ﬁrm and historical speciﬁcity. ‘longas o utinam, dux bone, ferias praestes Hesperiae!’ dicimus integro sicci mane die, dicimus uuidi cum sol Oceano subest. (Odes 4. 5. 37–40) (‘O may you offer long festivities to Italy, good leader!’ we say sober in the morning of unbroken day, we say at drink when the sun is under the Ocean.)

The quoted wish asks a speciﬁc person, Augustus, for a speciﬁc occasion, a long holiday on his return, in a speciﬁc place, Italy.115 The utterance itself, however, is iterated—by the multiple speakers, contexts, and times of day. Drunk and sober, day and night, are merisms expressing universality.116 The wish resounds all over Italy. The initial utterance, whose context cannot be localized, yields to an utterance whose speciﬁc contexts are generalized beyond any individual instance. The repetition of ‘dux bone’ (good leader, 5, 37) brings us from the opening’s direct speech (‘abes’ (you are absent), 2; ‘redi’ (come back), 4; ‘redde’ (give back), 5) to the quotation at the end. From absence, desired presence, and apostrophe, we reach iteration, quotation, and dissolution into universality. This poem moves from a request that takes place nowhere, to one which takes place everywhere. Performance of Horace’s Odes may have happened, and may still, but the utterance internal to the poem resists occasionality. Even without musical accompaniment, some link poem to occasion by having it recited at dinner (or other festivity) in the addressee’s presence. Eckard Lefe`vre (1993: 144) applies Horace’s statement about recitation in the Sermones to the Odes: ‘nec recito cuiquam nisi amicis, idque coactus, j non ubiuis coramue quibuslibet’ 115

Putnam (1986) 112–13 sees the quoted speech as ‘the actual words uttered during the communal country feast’ and a ‘hymn within a hymn’, ‘as if the prolongation of rural festival offered the ﬁnal reassurance for the permanence of his own song’. 116 Implied by Syndikus (1973) 342.

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(I do not recite to anyone except friends, and that forced, not everywhere or openly to anyone you please, Serm. 1. 4. 73–4). The argument for recitation inevitably ﬁnds poems addressed to historical personages attractive, though an erotic ode could equally well be recited at a party. Lefe`vre’s argument demonstrates the close connection of performance to performativity, especially since this wordplay does not operate in German. The stakes are clear: oral recitation in the addressee’s presence (Vortrag) engenders an effect (Wirkung) occuring in reality (Wirklichkeit). Of Odes 2. 4, he admits it could be a ‘literary game’, but exclaims: ‘How much more the poem gains if it reﬂects reality!’ (ibid. 150). He attributes a greater effect to it if performed among friends than it could achieve written in a book. Reality, however, is supplemental; the poem stands to gain by reﬂecting it. Language uncoupled from reference and a context of utterance appears less dangerous than disappointing. We lend reality to the poetry through reading.117 Lefe`vre furthermore falls for one of the oldest tricks in the book. He takes deictics (‘huc’ (to this place), Odes 2. 3. 13; ‘hac’ (this), 2. 11. 13) as indication of the speaker’s presence in the pleasure gardens of the poems’ mutual addressees, Dellius and Hirpinus Quinctius.118 Deixis creates enargeia. Quintilian calls the kind of image Horace evokes phantasia or uisio: ‘what the Greeks calls phantasias, let us name truly visions (uisiones), through which images of absent things are thus represented to our mind that we seem to perceive them with our eyes and have them present’ (6. 2. 29). Lefe`vre demonstrates how vivid Horace’s representations are: we mentally ﬁll in the circumstances. With, ‘[o]ne may imagine’, Lefe`vre (ibid. 149) responds correctly to Horace’s use of the ﬁgure. Although I disagree with his literal reconstructions, he does what the poetry demands. If Horace were additionally to actualize his representations by reading the poems aloud to their addressees, this would be to add perception to a mental image. Aristotle conceived of phantasia as a ‘faculty set in motion by sense-perception, and subsequently reproducing, more faintly, the images presented by the sense’, although he did not connect this with artistic representation (Russell 1981: 109). The deﬁnition in LSJ shows phantasia’s indifference to reality: ‘appearance, presentation to consciousness, whether immediate or in memory, whether true or illusory’. Phantasia works whether or not Horace uttered his poetry in person. The problem belongs to pragmatics. No formal difference indicates when an occasional poem was enacted in history, or even was meant to be, just as no 117

For the theory that ‘the reader performs the meaning of the text’, Edmunds (2001c) 44. Rossi (1998) 169 includes false deixis in his discussion of how contextual reality needs no mention in a pragmatic context. 118

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formal difference indicates when a declarative sentence is an assertion. Gottlob Frege invented a sign to indicate assertion, which the analytic philosopher Donald Davidson (1984, ‘Communication and Convention’: 269–70) critiques as incapable of resisting imitation. The theatre is once again the locus: Before Frege invented the assertion sign he ought to have asked himself why no such sign existed before. Imagine this: the actor is acting a scene in which there is supposed to be a ﬁre . . . . It is his role to imitate as persuasively as he can a man who is trying to warn others of a ﬁre. ‘Fire!’ he screams. And perhaps he adds, at the behest of the author, ‘I mean it! Look at the smoke!’ etc. And now a real ﬁre breaks out, and the actor tries vainly to warn the real audience. ‘Fire!’ he screams, ‘I mean it! Look at the smoke!’ etc. If only he had Frege’s assertion sign. It should be obvious that the assertion sign would do no good, for the actor would have used it in the ﬁrst place, when he was only acting. . . . The plight of the actor is always with us. There is no known, agreed upon, publicly recognized convention for making assertions. Or, for that matter, giving orders, asking questions, or making promises.

Davidson’s example contains a classic enargeia: ‘Look at the smoke!’ Discursively it is indistinguishable from the real thing—though dry ice will not make the audience cough. Drama recurs as an example for Austin’s illocutionary infelicity because it combines two issues that clearly set this language apart: ﬁction and utterance in a character’s voice. But what happens when the speaker’s voice looks like the author’s, as in much ancient lyric, and when ‘ﬁction’ means made rather than made up? We must still confront the ﬁgurative status of poetic language in Horace’s poems to contemporaries. Du Quesnay’s frustration with ﬁguration (cited above, 1995: 146) goes to the heart of the matter: it could all be a gorgeous lie. The particular ﬁgure at issue is metaphor. Davidson remarks, ‘The most obvious difference between simile and metaphor is that all similes are true and most metaphors are false’ (1984, ‘What Metaphors Mean’: 257) and explores metaphor’s formal similarity to lies. The stumbling block is less that ﬁguration is patently false, than that it blurs the truth. The ﬁgurative dimensions to Vergil’s ‘cano’ at Aeneid 1. 1 having to do with generic convention, allusion to Homer, and the like, mean that while he does not lie, we cannot disambiguate between metaphorical and literal truths.119 The language of performance and the performative alike produces a vivid image of communication. Longinus associates this kind of enargeia with the more realistic phantasia of the orators rather than the fantastic (excuse the pun) 119

Nauta (2002) 366–7 speaks of ‘partial ﬁctions’.

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types he cites from Greek tragedy—signal are Orestes’ visions during madness. ‘The poetical examples, as I said, have a quality of exaggeration which belongs to fable and goes far beyond credibility. In an orator’s visualizations, on the other hand, it is the element of fact and truth which makes for success’ (On Sublimity 15. 8, trans. Russell–Winterbottom). This translation removes a level of deferral, since ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ are e æÆŒ ŒÆd K ºÅŁ , more literally ‘practicable’ and ‘accordant with truth’ (LSJ). Longinus recognizes phantasia as pragmatic. It is important not simply for literary but any artful language not to elide ‘truth’ and ‘accordant with truth’. Phantasia and enargeia belong to the ﬁeld of representation—Russell (1981: 108–10) discusses phantasia with mimesis. He emphasizes that ancient literary criticism distinctively took it for granted that ‘the artist’s product, the mimema, could not come into existence without a corresponding object outside, on which it depends for its structure and characteristics’ (ibid. 99). Small wonder we are seduced by Horace’s reality effects.

4 Horatian Lyric and Metaphorical Truths Things that are made up are not therefore false. I try in the last chapter to move beyond attempts, in my view misguided, to prove the literal truth of Horace’s language of performance and performativity. What does ﬁguration accomplish? Two approaches predominate: aestheticizing and sociological.1 As there are obvious social consequences to aesthetic acts, the challenge is to unify these approaches. Let us explore some alternatives through Odes 4. 1. At its centre, this poem describes Paullus Fabius Maximus’ hypothetical dedication of a shrine to Venus, including a statue and twice daily celebratory rites by a chorus of girls and boys dancing and singing the goddess’s praises to lyre, reeds, and panpipe (19–28). The description is metaphorical, but in the book’s ﬁrst poem, it casts a programmatic aura of performance over Odes 4. Horace begins by disavowing Venus, who attacks him after a hiatus, and offers Maximus, a young man from an important family, as surrogate target. His marriage to Marcia, Augustus’ cousin, has been suggested as the occasion for this poem’s composition.2 Horace’s emphasis on his sexual desirability might otherwise seem strange praise for a youth of good repute embarking on an illustrious career. Horace urges Venus herself to lead a ‘komos’ to his house. If correct, the marriage hypothesis lends the ode an occasional cause for a strong performative dimension. Programme, performance poetry, occasion, and illocutionary force—performance and performativity are overdetermined in this poem. The difﬁculty is that Horace’s failed apopompe of Venus and metaphorical recusatio of love poetry pulls the poem toward aesthetic,3 while his laudation of Maximus towards sociological analysis. These are difﬁcult to reconcile.

1 Bowditch’s (2001) Marxist perspective valorizes economics as primary while courtly, aestheticizing discourse is a mystifying distortion. MacNeill’s (2001) approach to patronage is more traditional. 2 Bradshaw (1970) 148–51; Habinek (1986). 3 Putnam (1986) 36 n. 1.

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Mario Citroni makes this poem exemplary of how Horace harmonizes various poetic functions (autobiography, prooemion, encomium, dedication, reﬁned poetic gift) and planes of destination (dedicatee and his community, general readership) (1983: 159–60). He aims to show that many Horatian odes—Latin poetry generally (1995)—bear a strong communicative burden to historical addressees.4 He argues against Heinze’s (1972 [1923]) thesis that the apparent directedness of speech in Horace’s Odes is ﬁction (1983: 133–4 n. 1).5 Poems involving historical persons are highlighted because only real people communicate; addresses to objects are granted as ﬁctitious, but often have a recipient besides the inanimate addressee. Corvinus, who calls for wine in Odes 3. 21, is the poem’s real recipient rather than the wine-jar addressed. The neoteric mode of staging typical moments of the poet’s life persists partially in Horace (1983: 143). Citroni infers production and distribution practices from poetic representations and asserts that a substantial part of Horace’s poetry circulated within a restricted circle of friends prior to publication as a collection. This move resembles von Albrecht’s inference of real from represented performance (above, 86–90). Citroni attributes to these poems ‘full sense only in the presupposition of their having been sent to their addressee’ and makes the next logical move by insisting on the intention of reception for the poems’ composition, whether or not they were actually sent (152). But Citroni fully recognizes this sense of social space as a representational effect.6 His examples of poems addressed to presumably ﬁctitious persons as if in communicative situations (1983: 148–9) show that this feature need not derive from a real communicative situation. By his analysis, poems to both ‘real’ and ‘ﬁctitious’ addressees contain conventional and more pointed situations.7 We can accept that Horace shared all his poetry in one way or another with friends prior to publication without privileging poems representing themselves that way. The danger lies in projecting onto Roman social history relations deriving from the poetry and then reprojecting these on the poems as if they had external explanatory value.8 4 Citroni (1995) has been criticized in two directions, by Horsfall (1996b) for not sufﬁciently addressing the realia of reading and by Edmunds (2001c) 86–7 since apparent external factors, such as warm emotion in Horace’s propempticon to Vergil (Odes 1. 3), are products ‘of poetry’, not imitations or reﬂections ‘in poetry’ of something external. Citroni could better clarify whether the perceived communication belongs to the world, or is projected by the poem, or if this difference matters. A shortened version of Citroni (1983) is translated in Lowrie (2009). 5 See Edmunds’s (2001c) 83–94 brilliant dialogue between himself, Heinze, and Citroni. 6 These poems ‘si pongono . . . come interventi’ (1983: 143); also ‘questi carmi si presentano’ (148–9). 7 Edmunds (2001c) 91 insists ‘the real addressee is a literary device’. Markers of the real are not necessarily ﬁction. 8 Crane (1971) 56. Citroni reads too carefully to fall into this trap. He rejects the marriage hypothesis of Odes 4. 1 because of insufﬁcient external evidence (1983: 160 n. 38).

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Horace’s description of Maximus folds external reality into his poem’s needs. Fraenkel (1957: 413–14) refers a ‘strange detail’, ‘pro sollicitis non tacitus reis’ (not silent for his worried defendants, 14), to external propriety. Maximus, however persuasive, must not appear a ladies’ man: ‘Somehow his real position in life and also the Roman standard of values had to be taken into account.’ He then recuperates mention of Maximus’ success as a lawyer programmatically: Horace signals he will dedicate much of book 4 to praising contemporaries. This mark of realism can also be recuperated on internal grounds. Citroni notes the thematic contrast Maximus offers to Horace’s age and fatigue. The phrase furthermore touches on performativity in the sense of effective speech. The formal correspondence between Maximus’ successful speech (13–14) and the poet’s ostensible failure (35–6) turns on decorum and silence. Where Maximus is ‘decens’ (becoming) and ‘non tacitus’ (not silent), Horace lapses into ‘parum decoro . . . silentio’ (silence too little becoming);9 while Maximus eloquently defends others in court, Horace cannot make his own case privately to Venus or even eke speech out. Horace locates himself on the losing side of competing areas of effective discourse (Ch. 14). He fails even at the poem’s apparent aim, warding off Venus, as she makes herself felt with a vengeance in his love of Ligurinus. But the poet’s discursive failure is hardly the last word on performativity.10 The topic of effective speech meets an intense description of choral song and dance. The many instruments lyric and choral, eastern reeds (22–3), Roman dances in the Salian manner (28), the Italian locale by the Alban lakes (19), a cultic context including a miniature ecphrasis of Venus’ statue and shrine—all amount to a powerful depiction of performative effectiveness embedded in ritual. Public festivity matches the komos (‘comissabere’, 11) Horace suggests Venus lead to Maximus’ house. Horace’s strenuous disavowal of this festivity for himself leaves us wondering whether the poet’s self-contradiction in admitting passion for Ligurinus after claiming neither woman nor boy pleases him opens the ﬂoodgates to everything Horace keeps at a distance in this poem. Is Horace in Odes 4 a choral poet after all? Certainly the book is preoccupied with performance. A triumphal procession occupies Odes 4. 2 and Horace foists song onto Iullus Antonius (‘concines’ (you will sing), 33, 41); he vaunts over the appellation ‘Romanae ﬁdicen lyrae’ (lyrist of the Roman lyre, Odes 4. 3. 23); he repeats festal ‘dicimus’ (we acclaim, Odes 4. 5. 38–9); a maiden participant in the chorus of the Ludi saeculares voices his sphragis (Odes 4. 6. 41–4); he exhorts Phyllis to learn 9 Commager (1980) 66: the hypermetric line produces a verbal icon of the statement about indecorous speech. 10 Putnam (1986) 43: ‘words and their use’ are programmatic here.

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modes (Odes 4. 11. 34–5). These elements climax in the book’s ﬁnal word ‘canemus’ (we will sing, Odes 4. 15. 32). At the beginning of Odes 4. 15, Apollo dissuades the poet from war poetry with the emblem of small-scale lyric (‘increpuit lyra’ (he scolded me with his lyre), 2). The poet’s averted utterance is ‘loqui’ (speak, 1), a far remove from song. By poem’s end, however, Horace abandons the lyre entirely for choral reeds: ‘remixto carmine tibiis’ (song mixed duly with the reeds, 30).11 The future song opens onto a world of peace, prosperity, and Roman imperialism—the world celebrated in the truly choral Carmen saeculare. Whether the realization of this world entails Horace’s acceptance of and success at the role of choral lyrist in Odes 4 is complicated by the formal elements that consistently defer the choral moment elsewhere, speciﬁcally to the Carmen saeculare. The future of canemus is one more such element. In analysing Horace’s negotiations between the performative origins of the lyric genre and his own bookish medium, Barchiesi (2000: 176) observes: ‘With profound insight, Horace ﬁrst promotes the use of occasion as a marker of lyric to a generic convention, and then he shifts it from a convention to a theme.’ Choral song is one such theme in Odes 4. Barchiesi’s formulation offers an alternative vision to Citroni’s for understanding Horace and much Augustan literature.12 Barchiesi elsewhere (2001d: 147) tries to dismantle the polemic between formalist and historicizing readings. While I am less optimistic this battle is over, let us heed his call and see what results from integrating these approaches. Barchiesi traces an arc from enactment to representation that appears to relocate poetry from active engagement in society to a distanced position of comment.13 But in renegotiating lyric conventions, Horace does something with words. He does not need instruments and a chorus or even to vocalize his poems. His poetry is performatively felicitous not in uttering invitations to Maecenas or the probably ﬁctitious Phyllis, or in covert epithalamia to Maximus. While he does effectively honour these, his major achievement is 11

Ibid. 272 with this phrase and ‘more patrum’, Horace reinvents Cato’s ‘carmina conuiualia’ (Ch. 2). 12 Barchiesi (2000) 167 isolates three dominant features of the Roman handling of genre: thematization and dramatization; a sense of rift and loss; politicization. Genre ‘is now more mentioned than simply used’. 13 Davis (1991) 126–32 on Odes 3. 13 offers a good instance. The poem’s opening, ‘O fons Bandusiae splendidior uitro’ (O Bandusian spring, more shining than glass), begins the fountain’s elevation. The lines, ‘ﬁes nobilium tu quoque fontium, j me dicente’ (you also will become one of the noble fountains, with me speaking, 13–14), both effect what they say and identify the mechanism effecting it: the utterance is performative and commentary at the same time. Putnam (2000b): Odes 3. 23 ﬁguratively effects the religious rites it represents. Furthermore, the transformation into poetry compensates for Phidyle’s simple offering.

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to have fundamentally reinvented and altered the lyric genre. Citroni desires to retain some form of poetic engagement with the real, but he aims, in my opinion, too low. Poetic commentary and self-consciousness renegotiate poetry’s cultural position by virtue not of content—though this must accord with accepted values—but through the intervention of speech. Feeney (1998: 38) highlights recent developments in the study of Roman religion: ‘exegesis and interpretative dialogue help constitute Roman religious practice, rather than being something extraneous or added on.’ The same goes for Roman poetry, and Roman politics. Edmunds (2001c: 91) rightly identiﬁes a poet’s desire to honour someone with his poetry as useless for interpretation. Relegating this desire to social history,14 however, would miss the large degree to which Horace’s poetry thematizes poetry’s role in honouring its honorands, beyond doing so. The progressive move towards thematization, what Barchiesi, following Derrida, calls the ‘fold’,15 is endemic to Roman cultural history. The directedness of Horace’s various lyric speech genres is not, as Heinze has it, ﬁction (Citroni 1983: 144). They do not, however, bear literal effectiveness. I suggest that direct address in Horace’s Odes ﬁgures performative effectiveness and thereby enables Horace’s presentation of himself and his social network to the world. In Oliensis’ words (1998: 1–2), ‘Horace’s poetry is itself a performance venue . . . Horace is present in his personae, that is, not because these personae are authentic and accurate impressions of his true self, but because they effectively construct that self.’ Address likewise constructs the other.16 Lowell Bowditch (2001: 72) argues for a ‘performative effect’ on Horace’s lyric audience. Contrary to the dominant understanding of Horace’s relation to religion as discursive, speciﬁcally when poems adopt hymnic conventions, Bowditch analyses Horatian lyric according to the expiatory model of tragic sacriﬁce, a gift to society whose ‘performative effects’ entail not only ‘puriﬁcation but also the reinforcement of social cohesion and stratiﬁcation’ (69). A performance genre again enters the discussion when effective discourse is at issue, although Bowditch treats the actual performance of the Odes in recitation as separate from the poetry’s metaphorics (94). Even without tragedy as Horace’s model,17 her idea that Horace’s lyric intervenes as a healing power after the disaster of civil war underscores literature’s social weight. Religious metaphors, speciﬁcally from choral lyric, enable the idea of socially efﬁcacious poetry. 14 Edmunds’s (2001c) hermeneutic approach by no means dismisses historical readings; he rather refuses to privilege one over another (89). 15 Culler (1982) ‘Critical Consequences’, explicates the fold, esp. 198–9; Lowrie (1997) 166. 16 Fowler (1994) 250 ¼ (2000) 27 remarks: ‘our awareness of the true nature of art need not invalidate an emotional response.’ Figuration and construction are not unreal. 17 I do not follow all the details of Bowditch’s reading (Lowrie 2002b).

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In Odes 1–3, Horace maintains distance from choral lyric. He withdraws from Simonidean lament in Odes 2. 1 (‘Ceae . . . munera neniae’ (the ofﬁce of Simonides’ lament), 38) to a safe poetic space (‘Dionaeo sub antro’ (in Dione’s cavern), 39). Munera, ranging from rites, gifts, ofﬁces, to public performance, suggests socially effective poetry (Bowditch 2001: 82–3). Horace offers rather to re-establish play, love, and the calm of light lyric after taking us through an unnarratable narrative of civil war (Lowrie 1997: 175–86). Horace signals choral lyric as the genre performing the lament, but the distance he puts between his Muse and this higher range is in itself a political gesture that restores along with his genre the social order where light lyric has a place (Adorno 1991: 38–40). The actual healing is performed not by choral lyric, present as an idea, but the light lyric at hand. Then again, is it? I think Horace deploys so many distancing devices—the intervention of other voices, self-reference, the fold or mise en abyme, impossible instructions—because of a profound ambivalence about poetry’s actual role in society. Can poetry really effect social cohesion, restore calm after war, produce ideology? Can it teach (Epist. 2. 1. 124–8)? Horace repeatedly makes the gesture of poetic efﬁcacy, and repeatedly pulls it back. Performativity is a topic, but does poetry actually perform? The Epodes lay some ground for Horace’s conception of himself as an authoritative speaker in the Odes.

H O R ACE ’ S E P OD E S AND EFFE CTIVE P OETRY If the aesthetic ﬁeld is in fact empowering, why do the poets so consistently depict themselves as disempowered in the Augustan age? Just as poetic speech acts operate indirectly and through displacement, poets create a limited social power for themselves through the rhetoric of inability. They acknowledge the dominant ideology that lends full manhood only to those controlling politics. Nevertheless, social intervention through poetic discourse allows for an alternative, and ultimately more lasting power than the transient sphere of the forum however potent—at least, in the poets’ representations. In the Epodes, Horace is less interested in the absolute success or failure of various discourses than their interrelation. The one clear reference to the Epodes’ own medium combines carmen with an image from book production (‘ad umbilicum adducere’ (to lead to the boss), with a pun on birth, Epodes 14. 8); they are song composed and recorded in writing.18 Comparison with 18 Freudenburg (2006) 145–7 suggests a lyric dimension to ‘carmen’ here because of the parallel between the poet and Anacreon.

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rival discourses works out their power. Epodes 7 and 16 address the people and evoke oratory during the horror of the civil wars. In the former, the poet’s expostulations cause stupeﬁed silence in the guilty populace, but the attribution of civil disturbance to fate lets the people off the hook. The poet stands no chance of stopping behaviour, though he induces reﬂection. In the latter, the uates’s impractical proposal to ﬂee to the Isles of the Blessed will change nothing. These poems stage a public discourse whose promise falls ﬂat.19 When Horace discusses iambic outside the Epodes, the genre appears more powerful, though this too is qualiﬁed. When Horace disavows iambic for lyric at Odes 1. 16, potency attaches to both genres. He links iambic with anger (‘tristes . . . irae’, 9), tells of the horror it has wrought—the destruction of Thyestes and entire cities (17–20)—and invites a girl to destroy ‘criminal’ iambics (2–4). He redeﬁnes his current genre against the iambic of his youth (22–5), but also has a practical aim: to return to her good graces (‘dum mihi j ﬁas recantatis amica j opprobriis animumque reddas’ (provided you become my girlfriend once the blame has been recanted and you give back your heart), Odes 1. 16. 26–8; Davis 1991: 74–7). Whether her poetry or his is to be consigned to the dustbin is unclear.20 Words change things and this very poem offers reconciliation. The shift in aim from harm to healing marks lyric, but both genres appear capable of achieving positive and negative aims respectively. Elsewhere Horace has difﬁculty meeting this ideal, whatever the genre. Archilochus is the paradigm for iambic effectiveness.21 In Epistles 1. 19, Horace disavows Archilochean violence: he followed his metres, but not the ‘matter and words driving Lycambes’ (‘non res et agentia uerba Lycamben’, 25). Our ‘real’ derives from res;22 agere is a basic Latin verb meaning ‘to do’. Archaic iambic had worldly effects: according to tradition, Lycambes and various family members hung themselves because of Archilochus’ invective (IEG i. 63–4). Although Horace recoils from doing harm, effective poetry remains tantalizing. 19

Watson 266–8: the topoi of public address in Epode 7 create a ﬁctitious ‘mimetic poem’ whose real context of utterance was convivial. Even within the ﬁction Horace’s warnings are ‘a failed voice of reason’ (269). The seriousness of Epode 16 is disputed (485), but still Horace offers a ‘counsel of despair’ (479). 20 NH see the lady as angry, but assign the ‘lampoons’ to the poet. MacKay (1962) attributes the iambs to her. 21 Barchiesi (2001c): this collection ‘mobilizes Archilochus as a model precisely because reenactment of that model has become problematic, and this difﬁculty is foregrounded as a main recurring theme of the collection’ (142). ‘Doing things with words’ has become problematic (148); political reality dampens the poetry’s form, which strives towards illocution (147). 22 AHD ad loc. Fraenkel (1957) 342 notes the importance and repetition of ‘res’ here (also, ‘sed rebus . . . dispar’, but different in subject, 29).

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The Ars poetica describes the iambic metre in its transition from active to acted poetry. Stage performance is the locus of the intersection. Archilochum proprio rabies armauit iambo; hunc socci cepere pedem grandesque cothurni alternis aptum sermonibus et popularis uincentem strepitus et natum rebus agendis. (Ars poetica 79–82) (Rage armed Archilochus with its own iambus;23 the comic sock and high-style tragic boots took over this foot, suited for dialogue, able to conquer the audience’s noise, and born for acting things.)

The metre passes from functional weapon to isolation on stage. Iambs no longer arm the poet; they merely drown out noise.24 The double meaning of ‘rebus agendis’ (again conjoined) measures the difference between the metre’s original (‘natum’) and current use: for Archilochus, iambus acts (action); in drama, however, it play-acts (representation).25 The Epodes offer a similar dialectic between active and representational poetry. The image of Horace’s own iambics here comes closer to Epistles 1. 19’s harmless than to Odes 1. 16’s effective iambics. Horace consistently tempers his potency with some ﬁguration of powerlessness in politics, sex, genre, or the capacity for enactment.26 Critics derive the speaker’s pervasive impotence from the chaotic politics of the 30s BCE.27 Outside the Epodes, Horace explores iambic power through Archilochus, lyric, and drama; within, through oratory, elegy, lyric, and magic. Various media differentiate the alternative discourses. Epodes 11 rejects the elegiacs Horace ostensibly wrote previously for ‘now’ (23)—presumably iambic verse.28 Elegiacs are either no longer aesthetically pleasing or no longer effective—‘iuuat’ is ambiguous: ‘Petti, nihil me, sicut antea, iuuat j scribere uersiculos amore percussum graui’ (Pettius, it does not 23

‘Proprio’ goes with both ‘rabies’ and Archilochus. Brink (1971) ad loc.; Barchiesi (2001c) 144. Audience noise recurs in similar language at Epist. 2. 1. 200–1. The word for audience is again ‘populus’ (197). 25 Barchiesi (2001c) 145 translates ‘natum rebus agendis’ as ‘born to act and perform’. Both words are also ambiguous in English: to act as in perform on stage or perform actions? 26 Fitzgerald (1988) and L. Watson (1995) emphasize the epodic Horace’s weakness, but Oliensis (1998) situates Horace’s concern for power within a poetry ‘of socially engaged and consequential acts’ (64). 27 Fitzgerald (1988) shows that ‘private’ and ‘public’ poems alike are concerned with power; Oliensis (1998) 64–101. Watson (1995) supports the overall idea of a powerless poet; in one strand of the iambic tradition, the poet comes off as a schlemiel. All discuss Epode 16’s blend of an apparently potent public discourse with a counsel of despair. 28 For generic modulation here, Barchiesi (1994a). Watson’s introduction ad loc. 24

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at all please/help me, as it did before, to write little verses when shaken by a heavy love, 11. 1–2).29 Composing this sort of poetry was supposed to console, but failed: ‘haec ingrata . . . j fomenta uulnus nil malum leuantia’ (solace unpleasing/not deserving gratitude, not at all alleviating a bad wound, 11. 16–17). The solace is also ambiguous: was it to cure love by winning the beloved (werbende Dichtung) or by helping the poet accept failure? The ‘uersiculi’ did achieve something, just unintended. They compromised the poet’s reputation. He became a ‘fabula’. Our idiom ‘spectacle’ picks up this word’s association with the theatre, but not the etymology from fari (to speak; Ernout–Meillet). heu me, per urbem (nam pudet tanti mali) fabula quanta fui! conuiuiorum et paenitet in quis amantem languor et silentium arguit et latere petitus imo spiritus. (Epodes 11. 7–10) (Alas for me, through the city (for I’m ashamed of such great evil), what a spectacle I was! I repent of banquets where languor and silence and sighs sought from deep in my side argued I was in love.)

His (former) poetry and behaviour meld, as is characteristic of the elegiac code. Since even his silence reveals his innermost feelings, poetic expression is superﬂuous. Horace rejects not only a kind of writing, but its typical social context: conuiuium, elegiac lament (‘querebar’, 12),30 paraclausithyron (20–2). ‘Nunc’ (11. 23) announces a contrast. We expect the poet to have abandoned love, or poetry, but here he is, speaking of love in a poem. What is the difference? He speaks transparently, without reference to his medium, though it is obviously iambic. His love is entrenched as before, but the poet’s attitude has changed and he has no expectation that either poetry or friends’ advice will effect a cure (11. 25–6). The poem addresses a friend, Pettius, rather than some beloved, and Horace neither dramatizes any scene nor fetishizes the individual erotic object. Now it is a boy, soon it could be a girl or another boy, but talking will have no effect. The poem’s own discourse does not aim to accomplish anything, whether seduction or consolation. It announces rather a new point of view, that poetry is ineffectual.

29

Watson 358–9 and ad loc. translates ‘iuuat’ as ‘pleases’, Barchiesi (1994a) 129 as ‘serve’. Mankin ad loc: ‘queror and its cognates are almost technical terms for elegia’. Barchiesi (1994a) 134–5: ‘incerto pede’ ﬁts not only elegy, but this poem’s metre, the ﬁrst of the collection to combine not iambic trimeters and dimeters, but elegiac elements. For the Third Archilochean Asynartete, Watson 360–1. The phrase rejects past behaviour, but heralds the poem’s own elegiac colouring. 30

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Lyric offers the comparandum to iambic in Epodes 14, with a marked difference in medium. Horace asks Maecenas to stop nagging him to complete the book, since he cannot. Technical language conveys unreadiness for publication in writing: ‘inceptos olim, promissum carmen, iambos j ad umbilicum adducere’ (to bring the iambs, begun long ago, a promised poem, to birth [a papyrus roll staff], 14. 7–8). The following analogy shows Anacreon singing, ‘who often wept his love on a hollow tortoise shell, to a simple metre’ (‘qui persaepe caua testudine ﬂeuit amorem j non elaboratum ad pedem’, 14. 11–12).31 The analogy’s nature is disputed and the difference in media has been overlooked. Watson thinks the analogy most likely means that Horace, like Anacreon, turned to poetry when in love and both directed their energies ‘away from iambic and towards amatory poetry’.32 This implies Horace was already imagining a turn towards lyric with its emblematic lyre and away from iambic conceived as a book-roll.33 Horace’s expected party at Maecenas’ house may also anticipate a lyric, not just sympotic celebration: ‘bibam j sonante mixtum tibiis carmen lyra’ (I will drink with a lyre sounding a song mixed with reeds, Epodes 9. 4–5).34 Iambic’s destructive anger in Odes 1. 16 is inappropriate for the new interest in love. Meanwhile, Horace has learned the lesson from Epodes 11: his does not expect composition in any genre to have any effect. Rather, he speaks from a certain distance. Iambic, for Horace, not only lacks Archilochean bite, but his ‘mollis inertia’ (soft sloth/ artlessness, Epodes 14. 1) has reduced him to not even being able to ﬁnish the book. Others rather harass him, Maecenas by nagging, his girl by promiscuity. The poem’s last word, ‘macerat’ (she vexes, 16), denoting Phryne’s effect on the poet, also means ‘to steep’ or ‘to soften’ and responds to ‘mollis’, the poem’s ﬁrst word. His softness corresponds generically to the erotic verse now drawing him,35 and contrasts strongly with iambic. Horace is stuck: he cannot ﬁnish his book, nor can he sing spontaneously like Anacreon. The impasse in

31 Allusion to Anacreon follows a disavowal of iambic in Epodes 14 and in Odes 1. 16 and 1. 17 combined (‘ﬁde Teia’, Odes 1. 17. 18). 32 Comment at Epodes 14. 9–16. Although we expect Eros to enable the generic turn, an acrostic on Diana begins with deus (6–10). I thank Lowell Edmunds for sharing the observation of his student, Michael Dougherty, whose schoolteaching career gives him insufﬁcient opportunities for publication. The chaste goddess is related to Apollo, who often instructs poets on appropriate genres and styles (Call. Aitia 1. 22; Verg. Ecl. 6. 3, Hor. Odes 4. 15. 1), but Diana looms large in the Epodes for her afﬁliation with magic (e.g. Epodes 5. 51, 17. 3). Is Canidia afﬂicting the poet? She is in Epodes 17. 33 Bartol (1992) weighs the evidence for the performance of literary iambic. 34 Watson ad loc. identiﬁes lyre and ‘tibia’ with celebratory and convivial settings. 35 Davis (1991) 72–4 traces softness and roasting in Horace’s generic redeﬁnition here, but sees the newly preferred genre more generally as erotic verse. I take the lyre as a strong lyric marker.

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medium corresponds to the impasse in genre. Archilochus and Anacreon are equally inaccessible. The word ‘carmen’ is a locus for an uncomfortable union. It covers Kø ﬁ , ‘epodes’, and Kø ﬁ Æ, ‘spells’,36 and lyric as well. Horace’s own promised ‘iambos’ is ‘carmen’ at Epodes 14. 7. It denotes Canidia’s spells at Epodes 17 (4, 28), a poem staging a power struggle between poet and witch. The poem exploits our assumption that the literary will be ineffective and magic spells will work. But Horace subtly dismantles the dichotomy. Effective discourse opens and closes Epodes 17 as a topic, and runs throughout as a leitmotif.37 Horace ostensibly surrenders to Canidia’s magic, characterized as effective (‘iam iam efﬁcaci do manus scientiae’ (Now already I surrender my hands to efﬁcacious knowledge), 17. 1). Her spells inhabit books (‘libros carminum ualentium’ (books of powerful spells), 17. 4), but are enacted through voice (‘uocibus . . . sacris’ (sacred words), 17. 6), perfectly encapsulating performativity.38 Horace overcomes his doubts about magic’s efﬁcaciousness: his typical symptoms are proof (21–6; Watson on each). Magic’s medium is ‘carmina’ and ‘nenia’ (27–9), song words shading towards ‘spell’;39 utterance makes them effective. Canidia picks up Horace’s comment ‘potes nam’ (for you can, 45) and represents her own words as potent (‘quae j . . . polo j deripere lunam uocibus possim meis’ (I who can snatch the moon down from the sky with my words), 76–8). Her decisions are like immutable divine law (69), though presumably against the laws of physics. Her prediction that Horace will wish to hang himself (72) appropriates Archilochus’ ability to drive his victims to suicide by hanging (Barchiesi 1994b: 213). Horace will undergo a worse fate and fail even to kill himself. By contrast, she presents the poet’s pleas as incapable of uptake: they fall on deaf ears (53). Her speech is effective; the poet’s is not. Doubt about Canidia’s powers, however, comes in the poem’s last line through negation: ‘plorem artis in te nil agentis exitus?’ (should I bewail the outcome of an art having no effect on you?, 81; Barchiesi 2001c: 148; Watson 541 and ad loc.). Canidia elevates magic to an art and ‘agere’ conveys iambic 36

Oliensis (1998) 76 suggests their kinship. Barchiesi (1994b) analyses magic and iambic as interrelated performative discourses. I add a concern for these discourses’ forms. 38 Campbell’s ‘non loquenda nomina’ (names not to be spoken), printed by SB, for the transmitted ‘non mouenda numina’ (godhead not to be roused, 17. 4) of Diana is attractive as another instance of powerful speech. The transmitted text, however, conveys the same idea, Watson ad loc. 39 Like carmen, nenia has multiple meanings, and does not primarily mean ‘spell’. In the Odes it denotes funeral lament or plaintive song (2. 1. 38, 2. 20. 21, 3. 28. 16), in the Epistles a children’s rhyme (1. 1. 63). Habinek (2005c) ch. 6 sees it as a female discourse in rivalry with male forms of song. 37

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effectiveness in the Epistles, but her question may not be merely rhetorical. Conversely, Horace has not been ineffective after all. She seeks revenge for his ﬁlling the city with her name (59), a canonically powerful poetic act. He may be incapable of pulling down the moon, or convincing the Roman populace to migrate to the Isles of Blessed, but his poetry can blame and praise. Its pragmatic power is to circulate representations and affect reputations. Horace’s disingenuous offer to change Canidia’s reputation through poetry highlights what poetry can and cannot do. He combines allusion to Greek and Latin predecessors, generic deﬁnition, and reference to song. His ostensible capitulation to Canidia is an attack in disguise: the rhetoric of inability has its own power. effare: iussas cum ﬁde poenas luam, paratus expiare seu poposceris centum iuuencis, siue mendaci lyra uoles sonari, tu pudica, tu proba perambulabis astra sidus aureum. (Epodes 17. 37–41) (Just say it: I will pay the ordered penalty with faith, prepared to expiate with a hundred cattle if you ask, or if you wish to be celebrated on a mendacious lyre, you will walk ‘chaste and honest’, a golden star among stars.)

His defence of poetry’s truthfulness undercuts his offer and adheres to iambic’s invective identity. Allusion to Catullus (‘pudica et proba, redde codicillos’ (chaste and honest woman, return my writing tablets), 42. 24; Ch. 2) shows Horace’s awareness of how real and ostensible pragmatic aims may conﬂict.40 In Catullus, the lady he abuses had stolen his writing tablets, threatening his craft through its emblem. Both ladies’ power, however, is limited, since neither poet refrains from composing. Horace, however, chooses the lyre to represent his trade over Catullus’ tablets. The lyre was associated with Archilochus (Mankin), but this was not ‘Horace’s instrument of choice at this point in his career’ (Watson; both ad loc.). Lyric is the right genre for praise, Stesichorus’ palinode is exemplary, and Horace characterizes his lyric predecessor as ‘uates’ (bard, 17. 44). According to Plato’s Phaedrus, among other sources, Helen blinded Stesichorus for representing her unfavourably, though he told the standard myth. He recanted and restored her reputation with a story about how she was not responsible for the Trojan war, but had been abducted to Egypt; in return, she restored his sight (Watson 17. 42–4). Horace innovates in attributing the 40 Lindo (1969) thinks Catullus is not the source of ‘pudica et proba’; the phrase probably goes back to Stesichorus’ palinode. Since Catullus is also (not) making a palinode, this is a probable case of layered allusion.

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power to remove and grant sight to Helen’s brothers, Castor and Pollux, and in the reason for their acquiescence: they heeded prayer (‘uicti prece’, 17. 43). Horace does not say Stesichorus retracted his earlier version, though implies it by offering to restore Canidia’s reputation. This contrasts strongly with Odes 1. 16, where the girl is to become Horace’s friend again ‘recantatis . . . opprobriis’ (when blame has been sung back, 27–8). Horace puts forward the idea of a palinode rather than the thing itself and conspicuously does not follow in his iambic Stesichorus’ positive model for lyric reconciliation. It indicates generic difference when Canidia asserts Horace will try to kill himself ‘fastidiosa tristis aegrimonia’ (sad with nauseating anguish, 73), while in a more lyricizing poem Horace attributes to Chiron a picture of the consolatory power of song and wine: ‘illic omne malum uino cantuque leuato j deformis aegrimoniae, dulcibus alloquiis’ (there alleviate all evil of formless anguish with wine and song, sweet concourse, Epodes 13. 17–18). Consolation is conveyed by a word with a strong root in speech (alloquium).41 Canidia’s ﬁnal words negating her inability at the end of Epodes 17 bear a strong resemblance to the poet’s ﬁnal words in Epodes 6. Horace ﬁrst conﬁdently deploys the word for iambic effectiveness (‘agam . . . j quaecumque praecedet fera’ (I will drive whatever prey precedes me), 6. 7–8), but by the end, Horace recalls the previous poem where a boy was powerless against Canidia: ‘an, si quis atro dente me petiuerit, j inultus ut ﬂebo puer?’ (or, if someone comes after me with a black tooth, will I weep like an unavenged boy?), 6. 15–16). Both Canidia and Horace undercut the discursive power they claim by questioning their own inability. Horace again shows ambivalence about pragmatic iambic power. In Epodes 5, the boy brings the media of potent discourse into the mix. Watson weights the power of Canidia’s magic against the boy’s utterances (introduction Epodes 5 and ad loc.). Canidia’s magic has been ineffective— Varus has not returned to her—and she is bafﬂed Medea’s poisons have failed (‘minus j . . . ualent’, 61–2). When the boy hears he is to end up as a love potion, he breaks the sacred silence (85) and lets loose a curse. He gives up trying to win the witches over with ‘soft words’ (‘mollibus j . . . uerbis’, 83–4), and his ﬁnal speech is characterized as potent language: ‘misit Thyesteas preces’ (he sent forth Thyestean prayers, 86). Unlike the poet or Canidia, his speech ends on a note of successful revenge. He will harass the witches as a spirit with the word for iambic potency: ‘diris agam uos’ (I will drive you with spirits of vengeance, 89). The townspeople will pursue them, wolves will disturb their bones, and the culmination is to call on his parents: ‘neque 41 The ﬁrst extant appearance in Latin, Watson ad loc. For compensatory speech here, Lowrie (1992) 430–2.

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hoc parentes, heu, mihi superstites j effugerit spectaculum’ (nor will this spectacle escape my parents, who will, alas, survive me, 101–2). Even in death, the boy will exact vengeance through his own agency or that of others. The poem’s ﬁnal word, ‘spectaculum’, evokes the dramatic associations of the boy’s ‘Thyestean prayers’. Thyestes was a popular subject for tragedy at Rome42 and Watson (182–5) analyses the poem’s close relation to mime in form—highly mimetic—and subject matter. Since mime often featured lastminute escapes, Watson suggests the boy might do so too. The abrupt breakoff, another feature of mime, leaves us, however, uncertain. While mime conventions might suggest the boy’s ultimate victory, Horace’s formal choices shed light on his views of performance. ‘Spectaculum’ does not literally imply performance: the boy is a sad sight, buried up to his chin, his parents will see and avenge. But how will the parents ﬁnd out? If Canidia turns his liver into a love potion, his parents will arrive on the scene too late. If they arrive in time, he will become a happy sight. Horace turns him into a spectacle through poetry’s mimetic power. I would argue that even in this most dramatic epode, Horace presents poetry’s power as representational rather than pragmatic and leaves whatever punch the boy’s utterance may have in suspense. Do the Epodes present a consistent view of the powers attaching to different media? Their own discourse falls short of pragmatic effectiveness, and the representation they offer is stymied when associated with writing or the book. Anacreon with his lyre and Canidia with her spells set up images of poetic efﬁcacy that initially contrast with the poet as a toothless iambic dog. But in the end, their potency is as illusory as Horace’s. The difference is: he knows it and makes it a poetic topic.

HORACE’S OD E S AND THE SINGING I NSTANCE Given the apparent ease of Vergil’s cano (Aen. 1. 1), it is remarkable that something comparable occurs in Horace’s Odes only once. When it does, Horace pulls out all the performative stops. Odi profanum uulgus et arceo. fauete linguis: carmina non prius audita Musarum sacerdos uirginibus puerisque canto. (Horace, Odes 3. 1. 1–4) 42

Erasmo (2004) 101–17; Boyle (2006) 79 (see also index).

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(I disdain the uninitiate mob and ward them off. Keep ritual silence with your tongues: I, priest of the Muses, sing songs previously unheard to unwed girls and boys.)

Latin does not differentiate between ‘I sing’ and ‘I am singing’, so the particular moment is indistinguishable from habitual action here and for Vergil’s ‘cano’. Horace’s prior hesitation about donning the high lyric mantle lends salience to his stepping out as priest of the Muses at the Roman Odes’ beginning.43 He claims to ofﬁciate over a religious ritual imparting an original song in an educational context. Nothing in the Epodes or even earlier in the Odes matches the claim here to poetic song. This is, furthermore, full-ﬂedged song, ‘canto’, not the claim to authoritative poetic discourse, ‘cano’ (Ch. 1). Vergil proclaims his subject matter with ‘cano’ and leaves the situation of utterance indeterminate, but Horace hints at a speciﬁc occasion.44 Priests wore distinguishing garb; ‘profanum uulgus’ gives the impression of a crowd in a speciﬁc location before the temple (punning on ‘pro fano’); an audience of girls and boys listens; the sacred words of the Muses’ priest establishes the hush of ritual silence. Horace more usually defers such performative utterances with such devices as the ‘Pindaric future’: singing may be enjoined (Odes 2. 9. 19), or predicted (1. 10. 5; 3. 27. 9, 11, 16; 4. 15. 32),45 but statements of speech or song typically fail to align with the utterance of the moment. With ‘dum loquimur, fugerit inuida j aetas’ (while we speak, envious time will ﬂee, 1. 11. 7–8), we cannot tell whether Horace generalizes or says ‘as we speak’.46 Prayers are exceptional: in Odes 1. 31 an explicit performative enacts the prayer (‘mihi j Latoe,

43 Horace builds up to the Roman Odes: Porter (1987), Santirocco (1986), Lowrie (1997) ch. 6. For the appropriation of religious imagery, Commager (1962) 16–17, who limits its extent and sincerity; Syndikus (1973) 13–15 links the ceremonial tone with archaic Greek lyric. For Greek appropriation of initiation language (Xenophanes, Derveni papyrus, spoofs in Aristophanes), Ford (2002) 62–3, 75–6. 44 Commentators tend to translate the veiled occasion into realistic terms; e.g. Syndikus (1973) 14; Quinn (1982) 156-7: Horace ‘hopes he will be read by the younger generation and that, when they read him, they will imagine they are actually listening to the poet speaking to them in the solemn or exalted tones appropriate to the opening lines of the ﬁrst of the Roman Odes.’ Poetry of this period is ‘offered as . . . a transcript of a performance which the reader recreates for himself, by reading the text aloud or having it read aloud’, but the occasional setting is a ﬁction. 45 e.g. the prediction of tomorrow’s sacriﬁce at Odes 3. 13. 3. For the ‘Pindaric future’, Slater (1969), Faraone (1995); on Odes 4. 15. 32, Lowrie (1997) 349. 46 ‘Dum canto’ (while I was singing) in Odes 1. 22. 10 is a historical present (‘fugit’ ([the wolf] ﬂed), 12) and not parallel. Ovid may imitate Horace with ‘dum loquor, hora fugit’ (while I speak, the hour passes, Am. 1. 11. 15); McKeown: by referring the time to a speciﬁc occasion Ovid makes the expression ‘humorously banal’ and gives the poem a ‘dramatic touch’. His parallels show the expression’s comparative frequency in Ovid.

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dones . . . precor’, son of Leto, I pray that you give me, 17–18) and answers the distanced third-person questions at the poem’s beginning (‘quid . . . poscit? . . . quid orat?’ (what does he ask for, what does he beg?), 1–2). Naming the act is, however, less immediate than the previous poem’s straightforward imperatives: ‘O Venus . . . j sperne . . . et . . . j transfer’ (O Venus, spurn [your usual haunts] and come, 1. 30. 1–4).47 Horace just speaks to his addressee when he does not want to highlight the speech act: ‘Icci, beatis nunc Arabum inuides j gazis et acrem militiam paras?’ (Iccius, do you now envy the rich treasure of the Arabs and are you preparing for harsh war? 1. 29. 1–2). Horace dramatizes a situation only once: someone answers his question without our hearing it. In Odes 1. 27, a narrative gap falls between the request for a secret (‘quidquid habes, age, j depone tutis auribus’ (come on, entrust whatever you have to safe ears), 17–18) and the reaction (‘a miser!’ (Ah, you wretch!), 18). Nevertheless the poem ﬂows without pause; the caesura does not match the break between utterances.48 The exception highlights the rule. In Odes 3. 1, Horace’s declaration of song in the moment of utterance is nevertheless highly grammatological. Why announce your song if your audience hears you singing? Allusion signals the poetry’s written dimension: ‘odi’ evokes Callimachus’ famous epigram: ‘I hate the cyclic poem’ (28. 1Pf). The adaptation of a literary critical and erotic epigram advocating the rare over the trite into a vatic pronouncement of originality is a transformational act of will: the professional versiﬁer becomes a bard of national importance. Medium and social conﬁguration realign together, as ode replaces epigram. Paronomasia in ‘odi’ puns on the poem’s genre. The call for ritual silence could be metonymy for reading attentively, the songs’ novelty a vaunt of poetic originality. The act of transformation, however, leaves traces of writing the performative situation denies. I argue elsewhere that Horace’s Odes have a complex relation to writing, which is disavowed (Odes 1. 6), alluded to under erasure (Odes 1. 38), or implicated in Horace’s understanding of literary immortality for both author and addressee (Odes 3. 30, 4. 8, 4. 9) (Lowrie 1997: Ch. 2; 164–75). Here too, allusion makes writing felt in Horace’s most performative gesture. The lack of integration between this stanza and the rest of the ode further isolates this performative moment.49 47 Compare the tree’s dedication to Diana with ‘esto’ (let it be) at Odes 3. 22. 5. In Odes 3. 18, what ﬁrst appears a direct prayer to Faunus (‘incedas abeasque’ (may you come and go), 3), is qualiﬁed by the protasis of a simple condition. 48 For the poem’s ‘performative possibilities’ and ‘unusual pragmatics’, Martin (2002) 106. 49 The ﬁrst stanza introduces the following cycle as well as Odes 3. 1; NR ad loc. take ‘carmina’ of the Roman Odes in entirety and note the religious context. The second stanza’s integration is also a question: Syndikus (1973) 13, Po¨schl (1991) 150–1.

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Horace’s approach to what Brian Krostenko calls the language of social performance contrasts strongly with that of Catullus. He argues that Catullus in the polymetrics innovates substantially in co-opting the language of aesthetic evaluation away from the public sphere to valorize his private, apolitical activities. This is a profoundly political gesture (Krostenko 2001: ch. 7). By contrast, the Augustans engage in a poetry of retreat (2001: 18, 296–304, especially 300). They are no longer players like Catullus and the conuiuium is the place no longer to advance in the world, but to avoid worldly cares in peace with one’s friends.50 Perhaps politics looms so large thematically because they carve an aesthetic place for themselves outside politics looking in. This allows them to comment, evaluate, and praise. The Augustans compensate for Augustus’ centralization of power by reclaiming for themselves a social role harking back to the good old days of the collective imaginary. The uates (Newman 1967) harnesses a different kind of performativity from Catullus’ barbs at rivals. Even if his speech acts are suspended by literary self-consciousness, they prove Catullus’ wit and enhance his standing. With Horace as priest of the Muses ofﬁciating before a temple, he appropriates the language of potency without participating in it independently: Horace was not a priest. Ironically, Augustus decided to literalize this trope when he invited Horace to compose the Carmen saeculare, to be sung by a chorus of girls and youths before the temple of Palatine Apollo (pro fano) at the Century games.51 The children of Odes 3. 1 pass from audience to participants and the poet achieves a social integration unimagined in the ﬁrst collection of Odes. In his lyric, Horace embraces ‘uates’ of himself six times, ‘poeta’ only once.52 This impressive appellation, however, does not entirely present the poet in a public role. In Odes 2. 6, Horace imagines Septimius celebrating his funeral, once life has ended in a pleasant locale. The poem’s close, ‘uatis amici’ (your poet friend, 24), emphasizes friendship over any bardic quality. Horace’s participation as ‘uates’ in the dedication of the temple to Apollo in Odes 1. 31 is not public. He prays for a modest life in physical, mental, and ethical health including the enjoyment of poetry, not the wellbeing of the

50 Lowrie (2002a): Horace explores the rift between the roles of poet and statesman that opened during the Republic’s collapse. 51 No one has suggested this stanza was added to the collection in a second edition, after the Carmen saeculare. I believe it more likely that Augustus literalized the stanza than that Horace retrojected the image. 52 ‘Vates’ occurs once of another poet (Stesichorus, Epodes 17. 44), likewise ‘poeta’ (Iullus Antonius, Odes 4. 2. 33). ‘Vates’ also pertains to the ‘magister bibendi’ (Odes 3. 19. 15), where it is unclear whether Horace will adopt the role. Singing and ‘poeta’ are not incompatible, since Odes 4. 2 has both ‘concines’ and ‘poeta’, and Horace calls himself ‘poeta’ (Odes 4. 6. 30) on the way to characterizing himself as the ‘uates’ of the Carmen saeculare.

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state. When Horace imagines transforming into a swan at Odes 2. 20, ‘uates’ (3) enhances his glory, but self-irony does not translate into a fully serious public role. No instance in Odes 1–3 matches the admittedly self-aggrandizing ‘uate me’ (with me as your bard) of Epodes 16. 66, when he invites the Roman population to ﬂee to the Isles of the Blessed. In giving up iambic’s embittered stance for lyric acceptance, Horace largely fashions for himself a less overblown position in society. In Odes 4, Horace reaches higher and inscribes himself within the ranks of uates (4. 3. 15), who are capable of conveying immortality (4. 8. 27, 4. 9. 28), although these last two instances describe more than enact and do not pertain directly to himself. His most authoritative vatic claim concerns the performance of the Carmen saeculare, but is distanced by quotation: a girl who performed the poem will one day recall it, saying she learned the modes of Horace the bard (‘uatis Horati’, Odes 4. 6. 44). Venerability has supplanted eroticism. Horace makes few performatives explicitly perform and dramatizes occasions at some remove. Horatian lyric falls between full enactment and Heinze’s ﬁction and is perhaps best summed up in the double effect of the ‘Pindaric future’. It defers and enacts at the same time; poetic celebration takes place in the act of prediction. This double movement foregrounds selfdifference in the moment of speaking and corresponds better to Horace’s actual poetic medium than fully enacted speech. The moments where he does enact speech, as in ‘canto’, mark an ideal unity of denotation and utterance. The ideal is good to think with, but never achieved. In Odes 3. 1. 1–4, poetry subsumes the poet’s priestly function: he is a singing priest of the Muses.53 Is anything performed other than the poetry itself? At poem’s end, he retreats from public grandeur to the Sabine farm. Folding performativity from poetry’s external social context into the fabric of the text has a strong history.54 Gregory Nagy, who has been such an advocate for performance in Greek studies, best exempliﬁes this move for Horace. His article ‘Copies and Models in Horace Odes 4.1 and 4.2’ asserts the absoluteness of occasion for Horatian lyric while eliminating the need for real performance (1994: 417). He distinguishes between mimesis as ‘re-enactment’ and ‘imitation’ to argue that the occasion in Horace is real by ‘re-enactment’ but becomes unreal if we take it as ‘imitation’.55 He quotes Gadamer’s discussion of Horace, Pindar, and the comic parabasis: 53 Bowditch (2001) 71, 95, 108 understands the poet’s priestly function as sacriﬁcial. I fail to ﬁnd sacriﬁce an ‘implicit metaphor’ (95) here. 54 NH and Cairns make similar arguments, above 76. 55 Kirk Freudenburg points out to me that the structure of the debate about occasion in the Odes resembles the structure of the debate about persona in satire: a tug of war between lived experience and artiﬁce.

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The occasional in such works has acquired so permanent a form that, even without being ﬁgured out or understood, it is still part of the total meaning. Someone might explain to us the particular historical context, but this would be only secondary for the poem as a whole. He would be only ﬁlling out the meaning that exists in the poem itself. (Truth and Method 2002: 147)

Performance ﬂips over from an external mode of reception to an aspect projected from the work. But after subsuming meaning entirely into the text, Gadamer immediately addresses real performance. The theatre and music offer the best instances: they ‘wait for the occasion in order to exist and deﬁne themselves only through that occasion’; ‘Every performance is an event, but not one in any way separate from the work—the work itself is what “takes place” in the event of performance’; this happens differently every time (147). The text now needs the performance to exist fully, but cannot be reduced to it: ‘the work’s unique relation to the occasion can never be ﬁnally determined, but though indeterminable this relation remains present and effective in the work itself ’ (Gadamer 2002: 148).56 Nagy’s analysis of Odes 4. 1 locates performance’s thematization not in its representation—the ritual celebration of Venus with double chorus (19–28)— but in the actual epiphany of the goddess in the poem. The word on which reenactment hangs is ‘again’ (‘Intermissa, Venus, diu j rursus bella moues?’ (‘Venus, are you moving wars again, having left off for a long time?’), 1–2), which quotes Sappho 1, where Aphrodite is called upon to come ‘again’ (Ås ). Nagy’s (1994: 417) choice of ‘re-enactment’ as his translation of this kind of mimesis and of repetition as the ‘premier metaphor for this paradox of re-enactment’ indicates that some prior enactment already underlies the current instance. The goddess has come before; her rites have been performed since time immemorial; the poem reperforms the rites; reception, whether reading or performance, reperforms the poem. The narrower meaning of mimesis as imitation Nagy (1990: 43) takes as turning re-enactment on itself: ‘by extension mimesis can also designate the present reenacting of previous reenactments’. His ‘re-enactment’ rather than plain ‘enactment’ privileges an original, prior enactment, but the original disappears into irrecuperable myth and pretextual orality, into endless iteration. But every reperformance is also simply a performance, and even the ﬁrst performance enacts what is represented therein and consequently already reperforms. 56 Gadamer (2002) 147: occasionality ‘in no way diminishes the claim of such works to be artistic’; Edmunds (2001c) 87. Ford (2002) 81: ‘hermeneutics arises in heavily literate cultures that need to understand texts whose author is absent; classical rhetoric was an art of performed eloquence and was aimed at the needs of prospective speakers rather than of readers and interpreters. Where author and receiver were present to each other and able to interact, whether in the assembly, the courts, the agora, or the salon, there was less need for an impersonal method for understanding texts from the texts themselves.’

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We must choose whether to take the presence accompanying any notion of performance as transcendent or historical. Even during the poet’s life, there were multiple historical readings:57 the addressee’s reading differs from his friends’, from that of the general Roman public, not to mention the Romanized barbarians (us?) who will come to know Horace in Odes 2. 20. Writing’s iterability breaks with an utterance’s original context (Derrida 1972a: 377); the same holds for the iteration of performance. The problem with the two dominant approaches to occasionality in Horace is that they either posit an outside to which the text refers or subsume the world into the closed inside of textuality. Even if we admit we cannot know, we imaginatively jump back and forth between these options. I think we as readers perform this inside/outside dichotomy according to a text’s script and that some texts can lead beyond this impasse. I argue below that in Odes 3. 30 both writing’s materiality and the event of performance are sublated into a higher level of abstraction. The concrete text and performance event are cancelled, but the idea that copying on paper and repetition in a performance context enable persistence over time is preserved. Horace elevates poetic longevity away from material production toward social continuity.

The Immaterial Monument and the Sublation of the Event: Odes 3. 30 Another [book] (much consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters whose penultimate page contains the phrase O Time thy pyramids. (Borges, ‘The Library of Babel’)

Two axes ground Horace’s claim to immortality in Odes 3. 30. The ﬁrst is poetry as writing: the poem presents Odes 1–3 as a monumentum.58 exegi monumentum aere perennius (Odes 3. 30. 1) (I have completed a monument more lasting than bronze.)

The monumentum is a complex and pervasive ﬁgure for literary works, both poetry and prose, in Latin literature. Material duration conveys longevity, though the tradition is sceptical that monuments can meet their promise.59 57

Edmunds (2000c) 89 reﬁnes Jauss’s method. P. Hardie (1993a) 127: bronze could imply either inscription or statuary. 59 Ford (2002) chs. 4 and 5 trace the monument as poetic metaphor in archaic epigram, Simonides, Bacchylides, and Pindar. For the ephemeral nature of sympotic verse and even cult 58

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Woodman explores the metaphor of the monument as tombstone and Habinek discusses the embedded nature of inscriptional writing in this poem.60 Inscriptions are by deﬁnition physically bound, whether to tombstone, dedication object, or temple.61 The other axis is ritual performance: usque ego postera crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita uirgine pontifex. (Odes 3. 30. 7–9) (I will continually grow, new with posterity’s praise, so long as the priest ascends the Capitoline with the silent Vestal.)

Horace’s immortality depends on his society’s continuation, expressed as ritual repetition. Habinek sees the conjunction as happy: embedded writing meets an embedded social context that will guarantee poetic immortality. But there are cracks in both axes and their interrelation.62 Horace insists on the insufﬁciency of the mere physical persistence of the ‘monumentum’. His poetic task is (provisionally) complete and has achieved the ﬁxity of writing;63 his literary monument surpasses in longevity the bronze letters or tablets of an inscription and therefore ofﬁcial government documents.64 However, as a metaphor, inscription appropriates an aspect of writing Horace’s own poetry lacks: linkage to a physical medium, here bronze, set in place for a speciﬁc purpose. Horace’s ‘monumentum’ surpasses literal monuments (pyramids, 2): they are subject to the elements—rain, wind, and temporal decay (3–5)—while his transcends physical limitations.65 Inscription’s hymns, 67. For ofﬁcial documents, bronze lasted longer than whitened boards, Ando (2000) 123. 60 Woodman (1974); Lowrie (1997) 70–6; Habinek (1998) 110–12; Fowler (2000) 193–217. For monumentum as both writing and tomb, Ernout–Meillet at moneo; Kraus 86. 61 Even they are iterable. Some inscriptions (Augustus’ Res gestae and several obelisk bases at Rome) were erected in multiple copies (Ch. 12). Is this disembedding or recontextualization within the unifying parameters of empire? 62 Barchiesi (2000) brings both axes into play. 63 Valette-Cagnac (1997) 313 identiﬁes a text as monumentum once revision stops, although gradual publication in antiquity allowed for less deﬁnite demarcation than now between published and unpublished texts (158). 64 Cornell (1991) 23: most day-to-day writing materials were perishable and ‘inscriptions carved on pottery, metal or stone were exceptions’. For the Roman association of bronze with their government, Ando (2000) 123–4. 65 Architectural metaphors are already dematerialized in Pindar, Ford (2002) 124. Fowler (2000) ‘The Ruin of Time’ traces the monuments’ susceptibility to decay in the Latin poetic tradition. P. Hardie (1993a) 134 discusses Horace, Odes 4. 8. 13–20, ‘non incisa notis marmora publicis, j per quae spiritus et uita redit bonis j post mortem ducibus, j . . . clarius indicant j laudes quam Calabrae Pierides’ (marble [statues] inscribed with public writing, through which spirit and life return to good leaders after death . . . do not indicate praise more illustriously than

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embeddedness depends on its placement in a meaningful location. Horace’s writing lacks such grounding, but it is untethered from the constraints embeddedness imposes on meaning. So what is Horace’s monument if inscription and building prove temporally and spatially fragile and constraining? This monument’s materiality is sublated: abstraction cancels the merely physical literal monument, but preserves the image for a higher semiotic purpose.66 Odes 3. 30 situates Horace’s immortality in time. This locus is more abstract than the spatial immortality of Odes 2. 20, which will extend geographically over the Roman empire. Abstraction similarly valorizes voice over sight. In Odes 2. 20, Horace will traverse the empire visually: ‘uisam’ (14). By contrast, with ‘dicar’ (Odes 3. 30. 10), his body will be transumed into voice, as others vocalize a ‘great part of myself ’ (‘multa pars mei’, 6), the part that remains. This yielding of sight to sound, body to voice, space to time, accords with western logocentrism. Horace’s monument leaves behind material inscription and literal monuments for voice instantiated in time. Horace’s metaphor acknowledges death, but turns the trope towards life: the result is a living and performative monument that surpasses the monument conceived as dead letter (bronze inscription, pyramids).67 But Horace cannot entirely escape the materiality of writing—sublation preserves as well as cancels. He reaches for a signiﬁed ideality independent of bodily decay, but poetry needs the concrete and even Plato could not escape into pure abstraction (Ch. 1). From the inert monument Horace turns to the living bodies of priest and priestess as vehicles for immortality. Horace resists the constraints of material production by deﬁning his poetry as disembodied voice, yet recognizes his resistance’s futility. For voice to speak, it needs the body of a future readership within a given cultural matrix—this is conveyed by speciﬁc places. The Vestal and pontiff climb the Capitoline and Horace locates his immortality within the geography of his Italian origins. Rome and Italy in Odes 3. 30 and the outreaches of empire in 2. 20 together provide the stage for the performative ‘monumentum’.68 the Calabrian Pierides): ‘The implication is that in truth it is songs, rather than statues, that have the magic power to bring the dead back to life . . . Monumental statues plus inscriptions on stone are, surprisingly, less powerful than simple words written on paper’. His shift from describing poetry as song to writing corresponds to Horace’s description in this passage of his poetry as ‘chartae’ (21). Lowrie (1997) 68–70 analyses Horace’s tendency towards writing metaphors in the context of praise and immortality. 66 For Hegel’s use of the pyramid as a metaphor for signiﬁcation, Derrida (1972a) ‘Le puits et la pyramide’. This image mediates between the materiality of the sign and the signiﬁed ideal. 67 Derrida’s (1972a) 95 somewhat mystic exposition of the ancient association of signs with tombs (soma/sema) emphasizes the relation of the physical aspect of the sign to life as well as death. 68 For the performativity of monuments, Ch. 13.

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Even here, however, Horace resists direct embodiment. The ritual represented by the priest and priestess climbing the Capitoline is not a poetic performance. Compared to epinician celebrations or dramatic festivals, this ritual separates from the poem’s performance. A rite is performed, but not the poetry. The poetry is embedded within the culture at large, not in a speciﬁc, ofﬁcial ritual occasion, nor is it performed at, for example, a symposium that could preserve it speciﬁcally.69 Horace’s expression of cultural continuity in terms of ritual folds his poetry into a broad social context,70 but he works with generalities, not the particular institutions that gave Greek poetry its social speciﬁcity. Furthermore, writing and ritual meet at a word—‘tacita’ (silent, 9)—often overlooked in this poem’s analysis. The pontifex ascending the Capitoline joins a monument, the Capitolium, with a generalized ritual, writing’s physical continuity with performative repetition. But the Vestal is silent, ‘tacita’, at this intersection. Why? Kiessling-Heinze (ad loc.) explain that Vestals expressed themselves openly only in the performance of their duties and few men would ever have heard a word from their mouths. Oliensis (1998: 103) relates the Vestal’s sexual and verbal subordination to the decorous control of the Odes. If the feminist reading posits the cost of a woman’s silence as the price for Horace’s successful boast, the silence in the ritual also lies alongside the prospect of poetic immortality. The call for ritual silence opening the Roman Odes is substantially different (Odes 3. 1. 2–4): the poet dons the role of priest and his educational song ﬁlls the holy silence kept by the participants. Here there is no connection between this ritual and Horace’s boast in the next line, ‘dicar’ (Odes 3. 30. 10), that he will be spoken of, that his poetry will be repeated.71 Horace’s poetry will not be re-enacted in a ritual context however much it will be reread. His poetry does not inhabit the bodies of Vestal and priest; the society they represent will independently perform his works. Rather than

69 On immortality through oral reperformance in Homeric epic, Fowler (2000) 195, Ford (1992) 146. 70 It is not clear a speciﬁc ritual is alluded to, Kiessling-Heinze ad loc. Denis Feeney tells me that the description of the Fordicidia at Ovid, Fasti 4. 629–40 is the only evidence putting a ‘pontifex’ (plural in the passage) and a Vestal on the Capitoline on a speciﬁc date. Since the Fordicidia lead up to the Parilia, the festival for Rome’s birthday, Horace could nod to cultural longevity. However, the general association of the Pontifex Maximus with the Vestals, their probable collaboration on the Capitoline more than once yearly (Wissowa 1912: 509), the association of both with the Julian ‘gens’, and Vesta with eternity (Horace, Odes 3. 5. 11) all link Horace’s poetic immortality more generally to religious institutions with a Julian resonance (EncOr ii. 513). Nicholas Horsfall per litteras ﬁnds the linkage of pontifex with Vestal at Lydus, de Mensibus 4. 36 (Romano ad loc.) insufﬁciently speciﬁc to Odes 3. 30. 71 Reference to the work as ‘multa . . . pars mei’ (6) conjoins poet and poetry. ‘Dicar’ refers literally to the poet, but suggests the text. Habinek (1998b) 111.

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pregnant ritual silence welcoming the performance of song, Horace’s silent ritual parallels a non-material performance. The emptying of literal performance indicates Horace needs the performative short of performance. With intimations of embeddedness, Horace both evokes and holds at bay a social relationship his own poetry lacks. Monument and ritual are metaphors that could tie his poetry to speciﬁc locations and events, to speciﬁc ofﬁcial functions, but do not. Aeolic song (13) suggests performance—sympotic and wedding songs, hymns, the other lyric genres of Sappho and Alcaeus—but again no speciﬁc social occasion welcomes the Italian modes (14–15). The translation of Aeolian song to Italian measures does entail spoken performance, ‘dicar’ (10), but this word is unlocalizable and passive. This, however, is its strength. Horace assembles embedded elements as a recuperation, a restoration of something broken where the separate elements may be reassembled, but in fragments and displaced. The governmental associations of bronze and the religious hierarchy do not bind the poem to their needs. His poetry surpasses the particularity and limitations of embeddedness narrowly construed by embracing a larger culture, not merely as an inscription tied to a speciﬁc locale, or a song performed once in a festival. Such recontextualization within the larger structure that is empire is an act of will made by the boast of this poetry and not deriving from any pregiven context. Horace does not want to be centre stage, the way he would have to be as presiding poet in a Greek context. To do so at Rome would implicate him in Augustus’ public rituals more than he can envisage at this point—the Carmen saeculare represents a fundamental shift. But he can participate in empire as a private citizen and spectator, displaced from the centre. Monumentum occurs as a metaphor in Latin literature in contexts highly allusive to the city of Rome and with strong imperial colouring. Horace’s ‘monumentum’ is not built on the Capitoline, but will reside there inasmuch as the citadel symbolizes Rome (Edwards 1996: 88). Livy, Horace’s contemporary, maps his history onto the city itself with his title, Ab urbe condita, and uses ‘monumentum’ as an implied metaphor for his work in the preface.72 Hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu foedum exitu quod uites. (pref. 10) (This is especially healthy and fruitful in the understanding of things, for you to look on the evidence of every example placed on a shining monument; from there you may take what you may imitate for yourself and your state, from there what you may avoid—foul in inception, foul in execution.) 72

Kraus in Kraus and Woodman (1997) 55–8; Moles (1993) 153–4.

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Visual imagery pervades Livy’s conception of the monumental work and accords with writing (Feldherr 1998: ch. 1, esp. 1–4), but writing also participates dynamically in spectacle.73 Feldherr emphasizes spectacles’ performative aspect and sees the conjunction of written histories and funeral masks (imagines) in Roman aristocratic self-representation as an ‘integrated system of signs’ (22). The monument transmits the exemplum, a central Roman concept conjoining narrative and ideology with a view to the reinstantiation of prior representations in the present (Roller 2004; Ch. 15); it therefore enacts as well as represents and participates in Roman values. When Ovid imitates Horace Odes 3. 30 at the end of the Metamorphoses, he speciﬁes the realm of his own future fame as coterminous with Romana potentia (Met. 15. 877). Physical reading is located more explicitly than in Horace in the body of the people and is oralized: ‘ore legar populi’ (I will be read by the mouth of the people, Met. 15. 878). Ovid reveals the physical city of Horace and Livy as a metaphor for the socio-political order to which they belong. In forgoing the event—occasionality construed as performance in a speciﬁc time and place—Horace does not cancel it entirely. Particulars leave traces. But he subsumes the particular into an abstract plane so that discovering more prosopographical detail about his addressees or poetry’s material transmission will elucidate his poetry’s participation in society only so much. Horace sees his poetry as both liberated and constrained by dependence on empire. Unimaginable was that the social context of the Roman empire would exceed its own spatial and temporal constraints. 73 Jaeger (1997) 23: Livy’s preface stresses ‘the active role that his audience must play to comprehend the past’.

5 At the Limits of Performativity: The Carmen saeculare FOUNDATIONAL SONG Augustus asked Horace to compose a song for the ‘ludi saeculares’ (century games) in 17 BCE.1 The acta of the games contain the arresting sentence ‘carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus’ (Quintus Horatius Flaccus composed the song, 149),2 and the ordering of the poem after Odes 4 in the manuscripts sets this ode apart (Rossi 1998: 176). The inauguration of a new, golden age celebrated by the poets was aligned with the new century.3 The games function performatively in several senses: they perpetuate already existing socio-political structures while articulating their new imperial formulation.4 The ludi saeculares were foundational in bringing together the state in all its constituent parts in an act of afﬁrmation by and of the community. Foundation is originary (though not absolute) and representational, and can involve the new creation of institutions. The Romans, however, use foundational language not just for beginnings, but realignments and reafﬁrmations.5 To privilege some initial foundation or performance is to miss the citation and 1 Internal evidence does not reveal whether the poem was performed or not. Rossi (1998) 176: the paucity of ‘musical mimesis’ in this poem supports actual performance; music when played needs no mention; ‘chorus’ (75) at the poem’s end is the sole reference to performance. The poem’s unique status is much discussed, e.g. White (1993) 123; Barchiesi’s (2002a) title is paradoxical: ‘The uniqueness of the Carmen saeculare and its tradition’. We know little about the performance context of Varius’ Thyestes at Augustus’ triple triumph, which might offer useful comparanda. 2 CIL vi. 32323. 149 ¼ ILS 5050. 149 ¼ Pighi (1965) 117 ¼ Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 42 line 149. Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 287 provides a clear photograph of this line halfway down the righthand fragment. Before this inscription’s discovery (1890), commentators relied on Zosimus for evidence of performance, e.g. Orelli at line 1, and the prefaces in Acro and Porphyrio (‘cantatur’, ‘cantatum est’), Hauthal i. 433, 439. Pighi (1965) collects the sources. 3 For the calculation of the ‘saeculum’ (century), Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 156–64; for the festival’s incorporation of Greek elements, Feeney (1998) 28–31. 4 Habinek (2005c) 151: ‘the Carmen Saeculare concerns itself with the role of song in securing the reproduction of the state over time’. 5 Lowrie (2005b) 952–3, 968, and (forthcomingb), ‘Refoundation’.

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self-distance necessary for each to occur and the deﬁning power of each iteration in its own present (Ch. 4). Even colonies, founded at a precise historical moment, look back to already existing metropolises. The Roman myth of a colonial foundation substituted an accessible and powerful story for the real history of gradual development.6 Like performative discourse, foundation combines a repeatable event with representation. The role of the Carmen saeculare is to enact, represent, and transmit the foundation embodied in the games. The poem looks back to a mythic Roman foundation it depicts as an absolute breaking point: the Trojans, including Aeneas, are ordered to change homes and their city (‘iussa pars mutare Lares et urbem’, 39) and leave burning Troy behind (‘per ardentem . . . Troiam’, 41).7 The result is increase, an Augustan theme: Aeneas will give more than was left (‘daturus j plura relictis’, 43–4). Although the event recedes into the past, giving continues as the speaker asks the gods for good things (morals to the youth, peace to the old) culminating in a generalized gift to the Roman race: ‘Romulae genti date remque prolemque j et decus omne’ (give to the race of Romulus wealth and children and all honour, 47–8). The elision over line break (synapheia) conveys an abundance correlating with Aeneas’ gift of ‘more’ (plura). The single event commutes into a continually re-enacted divine gift. This, the only extant poem to have external evidence of performance, is a limit case for foundational song and performative felicity in all senses. We know about other lost or fragmentary songs performed in analogous religious, state-sponsored contexts, although much less contextual information about them survives. The Salian song was regularly performed through Augustan times. Livius Andronicus’ hymn to Juno of 207 BCE was performed once, like the Carmen saeculare.8 The former habitually conﬁrms foundation, while the latter secured the state in a moment of crisis—in Roman parlance a foundational act. Habinek (2005c: 9) makes the carmen Saliare paradigmatic for foundational song: ‘the Salian performance exempliﬁes ritual as foundational social act’; ‘Each and every instance of song within Roman culture relies 6 Bremmer in Bremmer and Horsfall (1987) 42: ‘the archeological evidence shows that in the case of Rome we have to speak of a gradual Stadtwerdung rather than Stadtgru¨ndung . . . Myth clariﬁes this process by representing it as a one-time historical event.’ 7 Interpretations of the stanzas on Troy and Aeneas vary widely. Feeney (1998) 36. Putnam (2000a) 72–6. Habinek (2005c). 8 W ii. pp. xi–xiii provides the basic sources and considers the possibility of a second hymn. Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 235–7 compares this song with Horace’s Carmen saeculare: each chorus had the same number of maidens. She ﬁnds it a more relevant parallel than previous songs at Century games because Horace’s song was not performed at the Terentum, the festival’s main site, but within the city, like Livius’ song. Both concern generation. Also comparable was P. Licinius Tegula’s partheneion in 200 BCE, Suerbaum (2002) 36.

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upon practices of ritualization analogous to those found in the Salian rite.’ I address differences between his and my models of song through the Carmen Saliare and comment on Livius’ archaic song as preface to the Carmen saeculare. Habinek grants enormous power to song generally, the Salian in particular. The few interpretable words Varro records are hymnic markers, plural imperatives to sing and supplicate the god (‘diuum . . . cante, divum . . . supplicate’).9 Every performance of it relegitimates one of Rome’s founding myths, the divine sanction of a bronze shield falling from the sky into Numa’s house (ibid. 10 with n. 14). Augustus maintained this link with sovereignty by inserting his name into the hymn; Germanicus’ name was also included (25), whether once or regularly. Habinek does not literalize the myth, but sees the rite as foundational in itself: retrojecting the myth to the period of foundation expresses something inherent in ritual song and dance as practices (24). Repeated performance continually reﬁgures foundation and new political situations result in the song’s reformulation: it is continually and renewably relevant (25). Fundamental differences distinguish the Salian song from Livius’ hymn and Horace’s Carmen saeculare. Priests performed it repeatedly in a ritual context from time immemorial. By Horace’s day it was unintelligible and therefore beyond pragmatics, where denotation remains essential even if at odds with an utterance’s force. The Salian song’s obscurity turns the rite into pure ritual performance, where context supplies a meaning the song lacks in itself. Pragmatic reading becomes less anchored with unauthored, ritual song. No agency sets intention in motion: the dancing priests merely transmit, although the rite’s association with Numa perhaps attributes agency. For Horace, literature begins with named authors and Numa is not credited with authorship (Epist. 2. 1. 86–7).10 Livius’ hymn and the Carmen saeculare have known authors; the latter’s literary dimension allows it potentially to stand aside from and comment on the rite as well as participate in it. But I overstate. The few intelligible bits of the Salian song also stand apart: to enjoin song and supplication on a second person while singing and supplicating sets an internal divide even within this foundational song. It mentions as well as does; denotation complements performance.

9 Ling. 7. 27; Habinek (2005c) 262 n. 1. For writing’s role in preserving unintelligible ‘antiquarian religious mumbo-jumbo’, Beard (1991) 57. 10 For literary history in Epistles 2. 1, Ch. 9. Habinek (2005c) 8–9, 25 discusses the Salian rite’s association with Numa, despite evidence of ancilia much older than Rome’s purported eighth-century foundation, and the song’s unintelligibility even to the Salian priests.

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Livius Andronicus’ hymn to Juno is an icon of effective song. After a series of disturbing prodigies, the priests decreed that twenty-seven maidens should process through the city, singing expiatory song (Livy 27. 37. 1–10). While they were learning the song, lightning struck Juno’s temple on the Aventine, so she was thought to need placating in particular. After a separate sacriﬁce to Juno by matrons, the maidens processed through the city, singing a song in honour of queen Juno (‘carmen in Iunonem reginam canentes’, 27. 37. 13), accompanied by the ‘decemuiri’ (college of ten). The maidens performed a rope dance in the Forum, then proceeded to Juno’s temple for the sacriﬁce. The expiation was successful (‘deis rite placatis’, 27. 38. 1). Bringing white cows through the gate of Carmentis, goddess of prophetic song, may reinforce the song’s foundational aspect (Ch. 6). Livy judges its quality: ‘illa tempestate forsitan laudabile rudibus ingeniis, nunc abhorrens et inconditum si referatur’ (in those times perhaps praiseworthy for uncouth spirits, now uncongenial and disordered if it should be recalled, 27. 37. 13). Who knows? Maybe it was already archaizing in its own time, reaching back in a moment of crisis to the same power as harnessed by the mysterious Salian song. We cannot tell if it too referred to performance. Livy’s choice of ‘inconditum’ for an aesthetic judgement is interesting; a song itself lacking order restored the order of the state. I suspect he was thinking of foundation (condere). The Salian song, Livius’ song, and the Carmen saeculare were statesponsored and their performance conveyed an image of sovereignty. For this reason, I doubt such songs were paradigmatic for all song and dance at Rome. Authority makes the difference for an utterance’s pragmatic ability. Surely the community created by convivial song and dance functions differently. Some forms of transmission may engender their own realities, but only within a framework of authority (Ch. 12). Habinek to my mind valorizes song’s self-authorization too much over its speciﬁc performance context. The performative religious framework of the hymn to Juno and the Salian song means that the song’s quality hardly matters. The aesthetic integrity of Horace’s poem has also received criticism (below), but his aesthetic ambition exceeded the context of state-sponsored song. Habinek explicates the ideology of Roman song, rather than its reality. I would shift the emphasis: rather than relying on practices of ritualization, if we mean by that exploiting culturally available forms, Roman poetry deﬁnes its own practices in relation to an ideology of ritual song instantiated in the Salian rite and Livius’ song. Available options are to appropriate such power, to establish distance from it, or both. In the Augustan age, much poetry presents itself as deﬁcient. Horace’s Carmen saeculare appropriates this potent ideology, but even here he deploys distancing techniques intimately involved in the poem’s and the games’ use and discussion of writing.

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T H E M E D I U M O F T H E C AR ME N SAECULARE Horace’s Carmen saeculare was actually performed. What difference does it make?11 The inscription of the acta of the ludi saeculares allows us not only to measure the correspondence between ceremony and poem, as has been done since Mommsen (1905 and 1913), but to examine the relation of writing to performance in both.12 Surprising or not, the interpretative questions attending poems without such decisive external evidence persist.13 External evidence by no means resolves the problematics of the inside/outside relation. The inscription, outside the poem, becomes a textual inside for the ceremony, which in turn becomes another inside to the cultural matrices producing it. This performed poem weaves writing and performativity as themes into the cultic context.14 As Habinek (2005c: 151) remarks, ‘the Carmen Saeculare concerns itself with the role of song in securing the reproduction of the state over time’. It also concerns itself with other media. Within the overarching prayer to Olympian and chthonic deities, the ﬁrst seven stanzas present a selfconscious range of different types of effective language, writing, and time.15 The opening invocation of Phoebus and Diana exempliﬁes a speech act in standard prayer form (‘date’, 3) and effectively names the performative (‘precamur’, 3). Explicit mention of the Sibylline verses in the second stanza brings up writing and contrasts with the performative emphasis of the ﬁrst. This leads in turn self-referentially to the poem’s utterance (‘dicere carmen’, 8).

11 Feeney (2000) deconstructs a simplistic dichotomy between performance and writing; (1998) 40: ‘ “real performance” is not the trump card its advocates take it to be’. Barchiesi (2002a) 108: ‘As a performance poem originating in a post-oral culture and resurrected in a bookish ambience, the Carmen has been invested by a powerful dichotomy between oral and written, and between (secondarily but not marginally) Greek and Roman.’ 12 Schnegg-Ko¨hler’s (2002) edition of the acta is indispensable. The editio princeps is Mommsen (1913). Also useful are CIL vi. 32323, ILS 5050, Pighi’s (1965) convenient handbook. Moretti (1982–4) edits new fragments. The Sibylline oracle is cited from Phlegon 56–8. I cite oracle and acta by line number. 13 The Carmen saeculare has recently attracted serious analysis, after a hiatus since Fraenkel’s (1957) 364–82 magisterial treatment: Schmidt (1985), Arnold (1986), Cancik (1996), Feeney (1998) 28–40, Putnam (2000a), Barchiesi (2002a), Farrell (2005), Habinek (2005c) 150–7. 14 Good treatments of the actual performance and its history are White (1993) 303 n. 21, Barchiesi (2002a) 112–18, Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) ch. 13. 15 These issues cross over the poem’s various divisions, Arnold (1986), Radke (1996) 301. Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 229 ﬁnds the poem’s beginning unstructured, but separates the ﬁrst three stanzas off before the poem comes to the actual ritual. Time is a recurrent motif, as is poetic self-consciousness, Feeney (1998) 36–8, Barchiesi (2002a) 113, 118, 123. For hymnic elements, La Bua (1999) 162–70.

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Horace exploits an equivocation between the different media he mentions. Our perception of the speaking voice changes, depending on whether we receive the poem in performance by a chorus of twenty-seven boys and girls respectively, or as a text. The voice praying is plural (‘precamur’, 3), although it initially appears to separate from the girls and boys, who occur in a third person accusative and inﬁnitive construction (‘uirgines . . . puerosque j . . . dicere carmen’ (that virgins and boys utter a song), 6–8) without any link (pronoun or ﬁnite verbal ending) between ‘we’ and ‘the boys and girls’. It is as if they were not speaking and the poem they are to voice were not this one (5–8).16 The analogy between the ‘quindecemuiri’ whose prayer Diana hears (70) and the children, who return toward the end (71), makes it hard to determine the identity of the poem’s voice until the chorus speaks in the ﬁrst person singular: ‘reporto, j doctus et Phoebi chorus et Dianae j dicere laudes’ (74–6). In actual performance, the identity of the subject of ‘precamur’ (3) would be obvious, and the Sibylline verses’ demand for girls and boys to recite a song would be met by the girls and boys present. But this would entail a distancing effect: why would they need to identify themselves and their singing of the poem, not to mention another text requiring this action? In the poem’s afterlife as a written document, however, knowledge of the demand’s fulﬁlment must wait for the identiﬁcation of ﬁrst-person chorus in the poem’s last lines.17 Whether read or heard in performance, we at some point perceive a discrepancy in poetic voice: either our initial impression that the poet is speaking in a plural, communal voice is corrected to a chorus, or the chorus refers to itself as if it were not speaking. This equivocation comes at a point where performative discourse and writing overlap as topics. The inscription into the text of the Sibyl’s instructions recalls the poet’s instruction to the chorus in Odes 1. 21. It deploys the same illogicality Nisbet and Hubbard use to argue against performance and Cairns shows is a recognized feature of choral lyric (Ch. 3). Even when we know a poem was performed, choral markers are no guarantee. The poet can address instructions to a chorus, a single voice or chorus can sing the poem, or an individual reader can read it in privacy. Any congruence between the voice in the text and historical speakers depends on a producer’s decision to train a chorus of children.18 Beyond empirical decontextualization, the internal logic of the text is already decontextualized. It is not simply that an utterance can be 16 Peerlkamp, with his ﬁne sense of the incongruous, excised the second stanza as a gloss, partially because it was not decorous for the chorus to utter it. What he considered lapses, we treat as signiﬁcant poetic effects. 17 This is the sole instance of ‘musical mimesis’ in the poem, Rossi (1998) 176. 18 Stephen Daitz trained a chorus of high school students to chant the poem at the New York Classical Club’s Horace day in February 2000.

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repeated outside its original context and writing aids in this iteration, but an original context for the poem’s utterance is hard to imagine. Doubt about the speaker’s identity shows the poem’s internal untethering from its context. Iteration supports the perpetuation of both song and state. The extraordinary appellation of the Sun as different and the same (‘aliusque et idem’, 10) sums up iteration: the same time recurs with a difference.19 Horace links abstract repetition to the state with the wish that the Sun see nothing greater than the city of Rome (11–12) and follows by propitiating childbirth (fourth stanza) with speciﬁc reference to the Augustan marriage legislation, which aimed to produce more Roman children (ﬁfth stanza). The perpetuation of the cultural matrix through offspring leads to the return of poem and games: ‘certus undenos decies per annos j orbis ut cantus referatque ludos’ (so the globe, sure through eleven years tenfold, may bring back the songs and festivals, 21–2). Whether purpose or result, the close conjunction of productivity and the survival of song and festival should warn against viewing the reference to legislation entirely in a political light. Poetic immortality depends on its success. Given the mutual implication of writing and effective discourse in the poem’s opening, the often reviled stanza on the marriage legislation has a speciﬁc role.20 The law (lex), with its derivation from legere (to read), complements the expression of the performative decision-making of the Senate in ‘decreta’ (decrees, 18; from decerno, to decide). The oral decision results in a written law, which is ratiﬁed by being read aloud (Magdelain 1978: 18–20). The law will result in the reperformance of songs composed in response to the Sibyl’s written verses. The poem’s preservation through writing is implicit when at the poem’s end the chorus states that it was taught to praise Phoebus and Diana. The chorus presumably learned from a script: ‘doctus’ (learned, 75) has bookish overtones. The mutual implication of human writing and performance contrasts with the Parcae’s oral activities. The Roman Fates truthfully sing (‘ueraces cecinisse’ (truthful in singing), 25) a prior utterance. Horace calques ‘fata’ (fates, 28) with ‘quod semel dictum’ (what was once said, 26).21 Contrary to the 19

Nagy (1994) analyses ‘again’. Peerlkamp ad loc.: ‘quattuor uersus Horatio plane indigni’. Grifﬁn (1997) 58 n. 15: on lines 17–20: ‘Not the laureate’s most inspired stanza.’ Arnold (1986) 485 sets Commager (1962) 229, who does not like this stanza (‘wooden and dutiful’), against Fraenkel (1957) 373–4. Gordon Williams (1968) 59 takes the stanza to task for its descriptive, matter-of-fact style. Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 230 ﬁnds the stanza untypical. For a more extended discussion of the law and literature, Part IV. 21 Ernout–Meillet under fatum cite Varro, LL 6. 52: ‘ab hoc [sc. fari] tempora quod tum pueris constituant Parcae fando, dictum fatum et res fatales’. 20

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necessary return needed among mortals (‘referat’ (may bring back), 22), divine time appears stable, if only as a wish: ‘stabilis . . . j terminus seruet’ (may the world’s ﬁrm boundary preserve [fate], 26–7). But if orality prevails among the gods, their utterances reach men as text. Unlike Vergil’s Sibyl, who can be induced to sing, Horace’s is now just text: ‘Sibyllini . . . uersus’ (Sibylline verses, 5). Given this poem’s concern with Vergil, the contrast is signiﬁcant.22 The Carmen saeculare’s preoccupation with the relation of performance to writing responds to the dialectic it explores between social groundedness and aesthetic freedom.23 Fraenkel (1957: 364–82) deﬁnes the problematic of this poem’s interpretation as a competition between social context and literarity.24 He defends the poem’s literarity against Mommsen’s reductive dissatisfaction with it on the grounds that it does not correspond sufﬁciently with the ceremony (1905: 356–9).25 This kind of interpretation, whichever side we adopt, continually refers the poem’s meaning elsewhere. Dissatisfaction with its aesthetic merit qua poetic artefact leads us to look for meaning in its performance context. But then we ﬁnd it was not ‘grounded’ in the ritual celebrations: there are too many failures of correspondence. Fraenkel understands the poem as a supplement to the ritual.26 He mistakenly thought the poem took place after the games and read its external status as afﬁrmation of it as a literary artefact instead of a fully integrated ritual utterance.27 The difference is between a ‘real’ and a ‘literary’ hymn. He throws us back on the

22

For Vergilian allusion, Feeney (1998) 36; Putnam (2000a) passim; Barchiesi (2002a) 109–10. Arnold (1986) 475 n. 2 lists scholars who feel the poem is a perfunctory and unfelt response to an ofﬁcial charge. Gage´ (1934) 27–8, 31–2 deﬁnes scholarly dissatisfaction with the Carmen saeculare as depending on our knowing the ritual (26): either it is unfaithful and deﬁcient—Mommsen’s (1905) position—or its ﬁdelity shackles ﬂight, e.g. Gordon Williams (1968) 61 criticizes its lack of emotion. White (1993) 127, however, locates aesthetic quality in independence: it is ‘perverse’ to read the poem ‘as a composition written to glorify Augustus, to articulate his ideology, or to summarize his administrative program’. 24 Putnam (2000a) 50 defends Horace’s ‘autonomous genius’ against the ‘communal purposes of the state’. 25 For correspondences (or not) between poem and other sources for the ritual, SchneggKo¨hler (2002) 232–3. 26 Fraenkel (1957) 378 goes too far: ‘The sense of Horace’s poem is completely lost as soon as we attempt to tie it down to any particular stage in the course of the ceremonies of the three nights and the three days. So far from forming a part of them, the carmen is deliberately placed outside them.’ NH (1970) 253. 27 The poem was in fact not performed after the entire ritual, as more games were celebrated after the poem. For the poem’s intrinsic link to the occasion, Cancik (1996) 105–6, SchneggKo¨hler (2002) 235, Habinek (2005c) 152. Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 236–8 produces the most complex understanding of the relation of song to ritual. The song was not an original part of the historical ritual (Suerbaum 2002: 36), but in Horace’s hands serves several functions necessary to the Augustan innovations: to expand the locale of celebration away from the Terentum into the city and to link the sacriﬁces to the Olympian deities to the rest of the festival. 23

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poem’s literarity, where a perceived lack required fuﬁlment by its integration into performance. The literary and the real circumscribe a void. Feeney (1998: 28–38) escapes this problem by emphasizing the creative invention informing ceremony and poem: both were equally made up and traditional.28 He views constructedness not as a failure stemming from an artiﬁce divorced from social grounding, but as responsive to contemporary needs. The addition of Greek cultic practice to native tradition makes for a speciﬁcally Augustan festival. The poem’s participation in the festival without subordination lets Horace have it both ways: he gets the satisfaction of contributing to a public event, but his poem’s composition preserves aesthetic independence. Feeney wants to preserve a space for poetry as a ‘distinctive discourse’, but nevertheless breaks down the difference between poem and ritual (36).29 This is not a contradiction. He treats the Sibylline oracle as a ‘poetic text of a certain kind in its own right’ (36) and shows the allusive layers between Horace, Vergil, and Sibylline language (‘bellante prior, iacentem j lenis in hostem’ (stronger than the enemy in war, gentle once he lies low), CS 51–2; ‘tu . . . Romane, memento j . . . parcere subiectis et debellare superbos’ (You, Roman, remember. Spare the subjected and war down the proud), Verg. Aen. 6. 851–3; ‘ B ŁÆØ, PøÆE’ (Remember, Roman), Sib. or. 3) (Horsfall 1993c: 39). Furthermore, a Century song is in itself an innovation for the rituals (Schnegg-Ko¨hler 2002: 236, 243). Horace transfers to the games an expiatory song analogous to Livius Andronicus’ hymn to Juno. Intertextuality here both establishes a special and independent role for literature and binds it to a larger social context. Treatments of the Carmen saeculare often analyse the poem’s relation to the ceremony without considering the textuality of the inscription providing the relevant information. The inscription becomes a transparent source for lost events instead of an object of analysis with its own mediality. Such an approach would be a scandal for a literary text: the ﬁrst thing we learn about the Carmen saeculare is that we cannot regard it merely as a source for the ceremony—or even for the song performed in 17 BCE. Poems have lives independent of their original context, and a striking instance of later appropriation is G. F. Malipiero’s decision to use the Carmen saeculare to close his opera Giulio Cesare (1934–6), a copy of which bears an autograph dedication to Mussolini (Piperno 1998: ii. 676).30 Full understanding must take both 28 Barchiesi (2002a) 121. Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) chs. 7, 8, and 14 provides detailed analysis of tradition and innovation in the song and games. 29 Cancik (1996) and Habinek (2005c) 150–7 ﬂatten the poem’s literarity in making it more coextensive with the ritual than either Fraenkel or Feeney. Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002), who shows the complementarity of poem and ritual, is agnostic about aesthetics (232). 30 Barchiesi (2002a) 107: we tend to view this poem as ‘pre-Fascist’.

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poem and inscription in themselves and in their contexts, when recuperable. Feeney and Schnegg-Ko¨hler stand out in taking the sources for the ludi saeculares seriously not just as records, but artefacts requiring interpretation. Feeney (1998: 36–7) treats the Sibylline oracle as an intertext and notes that the state’s concern to preserve the memory of the ludi in inscriptions in both bronze and marble ‘ad futuram memoriam’ (for future memory, suppl., acta 61) resonates powerfully with Horace’s general concern for immortality and his insistence that poetry is a stronger medium than statues or inscriptions (Odes 3. 30. 1, 4. 8).31 Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002: 181) emphasizes that recording the rites in an inscription goes back to the earliest myths about the ludi saeculares and links it to the games’ requirement that no one see them twice in a lifetime—some form of record was needed to offer the next generation a template for their own games. Like the Carmen, the acta inscription bridges writing and performance.

THE AC TA OF TH E LVDI SAECV LARE S: IN S C R I P T I O N AND PERFORMANCE The acta are overwhelmingly concerned with pragmatic language. The ﬁrst section prescribes the ritual and its recording in the subjunctive and records the senatus consulta, edicts, and announcements about the upcoming ceremony in the perfect indicative.32 The second section, beginning with Augustus sacriﬁcing nine female lambs (90), records the actual ceremony in the perfect indicative; by now, it has taken place. The political and legal decisions brought about an event and the inscription testiﬁes to these speech acts’ efﬁcacy. These concerns also pertain to the ceremony itself. The acta record verbatim the ritual prayers, and each citation identiﬁes the speech act. Where Horace has ‘precamur’ (CS 3), the acta have ‘precatus est hoc modo’ (he prayed in this manner, suppl. 91, 116, 120, suppl. 135) or ‘precati autem sunt ita’ (they moreover prayed thus, 104; varied, 140).33 The actual words quoted not only record the prayers, but consistently cite a text. After invoking 31 Williamson (1987) 165 argues that bronze tablets were more important as ceremonial display than for their legibility; Horace discussed (169). 32 Schnegg-Ko¨hler’s (2002) 46–8 tables divide the acta into preparations and record. 33 Other speech is announced with ‘edictum propositum. XVuir. s. f. dic.’ (an edict was put forth. The quindecemuiri for the making of the sacriﬁces say, 110), ‘edictum propositum est in haec uerba’ (‘an edict was proposed in these words’, 155; 162), and ‘praeit in haec uerba’ (he goes before with these words, 124). For the textuality of the antiquarian research in preparation for the festival, Beard, North, and Price (1998) i. 205.

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the deity, the ﬁrst phrase of each prayer is ‘uti tibi [or ‘uobis’] in illeis libris scriptum est’ (as it is written for you in those books, 92, 105, 117, 121, 136, 141). The books are the Sibylline oracle,34 and the striking conjunction of performative prayer with textual citation marks both Horace’s poem and the acta.35 Barchiesi (2002a: 111) comments that Horace’s change from ‘libri’, as the formula is recorded in the acta, to ‘uersus’ (5) ‘shows that this event in the history of Roman poetry, a live performance of Latin sapphics, is sparked by a book-roll of Greek hexameters’. At lines 27–8, the speciﬁed need for publication (‘si qui a contione afuissent aut non sat[is --- ] cognoscerent, quid quemque eorum quoque d[ie ---’ (if any were away from the meeting or did not sufﬁciently . . . that they should come to know what each of them on each day), led Mommsen (1913: 570) to reconstruct reference to a whitened board and a letter from Augustus specifying such.36 The proliferation of textuality complements the proliferation of effective language. Differences between inscription and ceremony are that the text names the performative enacted in the rites, but further, that the acta mark their status as writing in quoting prayers subsequent to the ﬁrst. The inscription abbreviates the prayers with self-reference: ‘cetera uti supra’ (106, suppl. 118, suppl. 122, 137, 142). The prayers do not need reinscription, since they are visible in the text above; they would, however, need full repetition in the ceremony. The entire prayer to Diana is omitted, since it was identical to Apollo’s (‘eisdem uerbis Dianam’ (with the same words Diana), 146). A double abbreviation results: we look to Apollo’s prayer for Diana’s, then to the ﬁrst prayer to the Moerae for the full text of Apollo’s. Abbreviated reference applies even to the Carmen saeculare, whose double performance, like the prayers, is given one full and one shortened reference, ﬁrst to the performance on the Palatine, then to the one on the Capitoline: ‘sacriﬁcioque perfecto pueri [X]XVII quibus denuntiatum erat patrimi et matrimi et puellae totidem carmen cecinerunt. Eo[de]mque modo in Capitolio’ (and when the sacriﬁce was done, twenty-seven boys, to whom it had been announced, with father and mother living and the same number of girls sang a song; and in the same way on the Capitoline, 147–8).37

34

For the quindecemuiri’s access to these books and their removal by Augustus from the Capitoline to the Palatine, Wissowa (1912) 536–7. 35 For the relationship of the prophecies’ original oral utterance to their textual circulation, Beard (1991) 49–53; the Sibylline oracle (51). 36 CIL vi. 32323 (p. 3242) lists the documents, edicts, and decrees that were apparently cited in the damaged ﬁrst part of the text, including a letter from Augustus. Tables at Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 46–7. 37 Unlike the acta of Septimius Severus’s ludi saeculares, these do not record the actual poem; Feeney (1998) 37.

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The inscription refers to itself with a distance similar to the self-reference in the Carmen saeculare. Rather than abbreviating, the inscription mentions itself twice, as both document (‘commentarium’) and object (‘columnam’). Quod C. Silanus co(n)sul u(erba) f(ecit) pe[rti]nere ad conseruandam memoriam tantae r[eligionis – commentarium ludorum] saecularium in colum[n]am aheneam et marmoream inscribi, st[---] eo loco ubi ludi futuri[ s]int q(uod) d(e) e(a) r(e) f(ieri) p(lacuerit) d(e) e(a) r(e) i(ta) c(ensuerunt) uti co(n)s(ul) a(lter) a(mbo)ue ad f[uturam memoriam tantae religionis columnam] aheneam et alteram marmoream, in quibus comentari[um ludorum inscriptum sit eo loco ubi ludi futuri sint] locent. (acta 59–63) (Whereas Gaius Silanus as consul made a speech that it pertained to the conservation of the memory of such great religious awe . . . for a record of the Secular Games to be inscribed on a bronze and marble column . . . in that place where the games would be, what it was pleasing to be done about this thing, they decreed about the matter thus, that the consuls either or both for the future memory of such great religious awe contract for a bronze column and another in marble on which the record of the games will be inscribed in that place where the games will be.)

The doubling of the inscription’s self-reference is itself doubled, since two inscriptions were erected, one bronze, one marble.38 This textual repetition matches the Carmen saeculare’s double performance on the Palatine and Capitoline hills. The physical inscription fulﬁls the words it records, as the poem fulﬁls the Sibylline oracle’s request. Preoccupation with meeting instructions oral and written is a shared feature of the festivities, the acta, and the poem itself. At the inscription’s fragmentary end, the quindecemuiri declare supplementary games, and their declaration is fulﬁlled in words (slightly shortened) proclaiming these games were held as declared. edictumque propositum est in haec uerba: XV uir(i) s(acris) f(aciundis) dic(unt): ludos, quos honorarios dierum VII adiecimus ludis sollemnibus committimus nonis Iun(ii) Latinos in theatro ligneo quod est ad Tiberim h(ora) II Graecos thymelicos in theatro Pompei h(ora) III Graecos asti[cos i]n thea[tro quod est] in circo Flaminio h(ora) I[III]. Intermisso die qui fuit p[rid(ie) Non(as) Iun(ias) ---] nonis Iun(iis) ludi sunt com[missi quos honorarios dierum VII ludis sollemnibus adiecti sunt Latini in] theatro ligneo Graeci thy[melici in theatro Pompei, Graeci astici in theatro quod est in circo Flaminio]. (acta 155–61) (And an edict was proposed in these words: the quindecemuiri for the making of the sacriﬁces say, ‘The honorary games of seven days we have added to the festival games we are holding on the Nones of June, Latin in the wooden theatre which is by the Tiber

38 Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 181: the double inscription’s unusual expense indicates how seriously the organizers took the obligation to record the event for posterity. For extant multiple copies of inscriptions, Ando (2000) 111–13.

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at the second hour, Greek choral performances in the theatre of Pompey at the third hour, Greek city games in the theatre which is in the circus Flaminius at the fourth hour.’ When the day had passed which was the day before the Nones of June --on the Nones of June, the games were held, which honorary games were added for seven days, Latin in the wooden theatre, Greek choral performances in the theatre of Pompey, Greek city games in the theatre which is in the circus Flaminius.39)

Such verbal repetition characterizes the inscription, but not the festivities, since they fulﬁlled the instructions simply by occurring at said places and hours. This interplay resembles that between the decrees, edicts, and letters announcing the festival: perfects in the middle of the inscription match the prospective futures at the planning stage.

EFFECTIVE POETRY The Carmen saeculare shares the acta’s interest in pragmatic language.40 When performed, it occupied a temporal gap in the inscription. While the acta vacillate between future and past, the poem falls in the interval and speaks in the lyric present. The poem is unusual in Latin poety in leading up to the performative accomplishment of its own prayers. After a subjunctive asking that Augustus, the blood of Anchises and Venus, receive (‘impetret’, 51) what he prays for (‘ueneratur’, 49), there is a remarkable sequence of present indicatives, with various and decreasing degrees of objective reality. Horace’s account of political affairs could well be true: the Mede fears Alban axes, Scythians and Indians await answers for petitions (53–6).41 The following stanza is less objectively true: personiﬁed peace and virtues, including Virtus herself, dare return. Horace takes one step further and represents the gods as answering the prayers just made. Instead of imperatives and optatives as earlier in the poem, simple indicatives prevail: ‘if Apollo looks with fairness on the Palatine, he brings forward a better age and Diana cares for the prayers of the ﬁfteen priests and applies friendly ears to the prayers of the children’ (‘si Palatinas uidet aequus arces j . . . melius . . . semper j prorogat aeuum, j . . . que . . . quindecim Diana preces uirorum j curat et uotis puerorum amicas j applicat auris’, 65–72).42 The condition expects fulﬁlment. But we leave 39

On ludi graeci, Beaujeu (1988), Dupont (forthcoming). Effective language is a consistent theme in Putnam (2000) and Habinek (2005c) 150–7. 41 Barchiesi (2002a) 229 n. 2 compares this passage with Augustus’ Res gestae. 42 Bentley ad loc. reports that the deteriores have subjunctives for ‘prorogat’, ‘curat’, and ‘applicat’, and thinks they were interpolated, since the indicatives go back at least to Porphyrio, 40

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the ‘if ’ behind. Diana’s responsiveness hardly appears logically subordinate to Apollo’s actions, but to stand alone. The ﬁnal stanza subordinates the gods’ acceptance of the prayers in indirect statement to the good hope the poem conveys: ‘haec Iouem sentire deosque cunctos j spem bonam certamque domum reporto’ (I . . . bring home a hope good and sure that Jupiter and all other gods ratify these things, 73–4). The choral voice does not quite guarantee divine sentiment, but the present ‘sentire’ rather than the regular future of hoping makes the gods’ will present and vivid. Although Putnam reserves ‘performative’ and the ‘enacting dynamism of the word’ for his conclusion (2000a: 147), this passage grounds his interpretation of the poem as effective language: ‘it is the poet’s special power that assures the coming-true of prayers to fulﬁl the purposes of the Ludi themselves’ (95).43 Horace’s description of choral power in the Epistle to Augustus supports the conjunction of poetic effectiveness with performance poetry:44 poscit opem chorus et praesentia numina sentit, caelestis implorat aquas, docta prece blandus, auertit morbos, metuenda pericula pellit, impetrat et pacem et locupletem frugibus annum. carmine di superi placantur, carmine Manes. (Epist. 2. 1. 134–8) (The chorus asks for help and feels the gods’ presence, it begs for the sky’s waters, pleasing with a learned prayer, it averts illness, repels fearsome dangers, obtains both peace and a year rich in fruits. The gods above, the shades below are placated by song.)

Verbs denoting prayer (‘poscit’, ‘implorat’) introduce ones implying they are answered (‘auertit’, ‘pellit’). The chorus feels the gods’ presence and power, where praesens means both ‘presence’ and ‘effective’. This corresponds to the end of the Carmen saeculare, where indicatives convey the gods’ presence in this double sense. Rationalizing moderns know such power is ﬁction, part of ‘the poet’s rhetoric’ (Putnam 2000a: 93). Poetry’s power to shape social realities through who comments that Horace means the future: ‘si propitius Romanos aspicit Apollo, melius saeculum tribuet in futurum’ (Hauthal reads a subjunctive ‘tribuat’ here too). The subjunctives have been dropped since Fraenkel’s (1957) 377 n. 6 opposition. He notes there are no thirdperson prayers in the Odes. 43 Arnold (1986) 487: ‘the indicative absolutely guarantees the answer to the previous prayers’; the source of the guarantee is the ‘accomplished fact of the Augustan political order’. La Bua (1999) 168. While Putnam appreciates Augustus’ role, since the indicatives follow his entry into the poem (50), he makes ‘Rome and Augustus’ depend on the poet and his representational powers rather than vice versa (2000a) 93–5. 44 In the scholarship, social context, performance, and effective language converge, e.g. Arnold (1986). Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 240 reads this passage literally.

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representation does not encompass inﬂuencing the gods or shades. Scholars are quick to drain the force from the poem’s claims to performativity and redirect it to expression, representation, or praise.45 That is, they commute ineffective speech acts into effective ones. This move is independent of the poem’s performance. The performance context, however, does have a direct impact on representation. The poem’s spatial orientation and reference are decisively interrelated. Performative discourse and performance depend for their effectiveness on the context of utterance or production. I argue that the two original performances of the Carmen saeculare stage a contrast between embedded and disembedded relations to the poem’s context of production that resembles in structure the interrelation of performance and writing. Simply put, the performance on the Palatine links intrinsically to what the poem denotes, while the Capitoline performance is displaced. Writing’s characteristic decontextualization already occurs in this poem’s original performance context.

I N S IT U Several things mentioned in the Carmen saeculare were visible at its ﬁrst performance on the Palatine. The lesser visibility of items relating to the Capitoline performance involves the problem of reference, treated below. The ‘Palatinas . . . aras’ (Palatine altars, 65) are the original performance’s actual location. In their vicinity, the roof statue of the Sun’s chariot on the temple of Apollo Palatinus was conspicuous (‘curru nitido’ (shining chariot), 9).46 The Palatine performance took place near not only the statues of Apollo and Diana in the temple’s cella, but also perhaps the Sibylline oracles, which resided in two golden boxes under the base of Scopas’ statue of Apollo citharoidos (Suet. Aug. 31).47 If so, statues and texts complemented each other. But we can make such connections only from knowledge of the performance’s location. No deictic adjective or pronoun produces vividness. Deixis is actually limited to the poem itself, since ‘haec’ (73) refers to what has been said and points within the poem. Lack of deixis here should give pause to those who assume it indicates actuality for other Horatian odes. 45

Williams (1968) 58; Arnold (1986) 487–8. P. Hardie (1993a) 125-6; Feeney (1998) 33; Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 241. 47 Gage´ (1934) 29. Gage´ (1931) 100–1 corrects Suetonius, Aug. 31, who ascribes the transfer to after Augustus became pontifex maximus in 12 BCE, and suggests a date between 23 and 19 BCE on the basis of Dio 54. 17. 2, Tib. 2. 5. 17–18, and Verg. Aen. 6. 69–74. 46

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Performance in a speciﬁc place has been offered as the solution to the poem’s great conundrum: the failure to name the Capitoline deities Jupiter and Juno as addressees. The acta reveal that Apollo and Diana were not offered animal sacriﬁce (142–5), so that lines 49–50 (‘quaeque uos bobus ueneratur albis j clarus Anchisae Venerisque sanguis’, ((grant) Anchises’ and Venus’ bright bloodline what is prayed of you in sacriﬁce of white oxen)) must refer to Jupiter and Juno, who were each offered cattle by Augustus and Agrippa (‘bouem marem’ (a male cow)—for Jupiter, acta 103; ‘bouem feminam’ (a female cow)—for Juno, acta 119).48 To infer a shift in addressee requires external evidence.49 Mommsen thought the suppressed reference could be supplied by the context of utterance and posited a choral procession. Rather than two performances, one on each hill, the beginning and end of the ode would be performed on the Palatine, with the middle on the Capitoline. Location would supply the missing reference. On the actual Capitoline, it would redound to the poet’s credit ‘that, as the poem was sung, the location of the singers made the connection and the audience did not miss what must have misled most readers’ (1905: 358). Mommsen’s suggestion, however, has been roundly reviled.50 Vahlen (1923: 384), the ﬁrst to challenge Mommsen, appeals to poetic licence, but then turns the Capitoline performance into a reperformance, due to spontaneous acclaim, without organic link to the festival.51 Having broken Mommsen’s bond between performance and reference, he empties the second performance of meaning. Horace’s licence is to put the general for the particular: ‘Roma si uestrum opus est’ (if Rome is your work, 37) includes all gods who care for Rome and ‘di’ (45–6) extends to Juno and Jupiter. But Vahlen (ibid. 385), who forgoes the Capitoline’s physical presence to supplement its deities’ proper names, still needs the festival to supply the reference, since the participants would hold the Capitoline gods’ relevance ‘in living memory’.

48

For a concise history of the problem, Feeney (1998) 33–4. Although many claim the oracle implies blood sacriﬁce for Apollo and Diana, it merely says they received the ‘same’—perhaps as each other and not as Juno, the previous deity mentioned (16–17). 50 Vahlen (1923) 381–7; Fraenkel (1957) 378–80 compares Livy’s report on Livius Andronicus’ procession song of 207 BCE (27. 37. 11–15); Schmidt (1985) 42–8, however, turns Livy the other way, and fulﬁls Fraenkel’s prediction that ‘the procession song will from time to time ﬁnd a new champion’ (378 n. 5). Schmidt is translated in Lowrie (2009). 51 Aristophanes, Frogs, and Terence, Eunuchus, received immediate da capo performances. Vahlen (1923) 386–7 explains the change in location by the divorce from the festival context. The choice of the Capitoline then becomes mysterious—the poem happened to be reperformed where the context would supply the reference. Why not an encore in situ? 49

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The link between performance and reference, however, can and should be broken.52 Gage´ (1934: 41–3) suggests all the prayers are mutually implicated: the chorus does not ask for anything precise, but for general divine benevolence: ‘an appeal to Jupiter and Juno is not more difﬁcult to accept before the temple of Palatine Apollo than an invocation to Apollo and Diana on the Capitoline’ (42), and, ‘he may invoke them in every space’ (43). Although he concludes that the whole poem was performed on the Capitoline in the same way as on the Palatine, this need not follow. Schmidt (1985: 42–8), who revives the procession song, tolerates neither Fraenkel’s aesthetic exclusion of the poem from the social sphere nor Mommsen’s social reductionism. He notes that Fraenkel’s description of a procession song ﬁts the evidence: ‘The choir would move from one shrine to another, halt in front of each shrine, and there sing either the whole prosodion . . . or an appropriate section of it’ (Fraenkel 1957: 379; Schmidt 1985: 48). Under this supposition, the whole song could be sung on both Palatine and Capitoline, but we cannot know this for sure or whether there was a pause in the Forum. Whatever the mode of performance, however, it would not in itself supply the missing reference.53 The fortuitous discovery of the acta has allowed its reconstruction. Horace certainly knew such a text would be made, so those arguing that context could ﬁll in the reference must recognize the textual record was as much part of the context as the festival itself. We do not know why Horace omitted the Capitoline deities’ names. While the greater emphasis on the Palatine god and his sister ﬁts Apollo’s importance to Augustus after Actium and this song’s identiﬁcation as a paean, such considerations do not entirely explain Jupiter and Juno’s eclipse.54 These mattered to the ritual, where they received blood sacriﬁce, and the poem, where Jupiter grants the prayers. The chorus’ hope that the gods assent to the prayers makes Jupiter preeminent (73–4). The Capitoline deities lose nothing by the performance of a paean to Apollo and Diana in the formal festival’s closural position. We also do not know why the Carmen saeculare was performed twice. Fraenkel’s rejection of the procession song follows from his view that the song was extrinsic to the ceremony and occupied an aesthetic 52

Warde Fowler (1933) 444 has the chorus turn and face the various parts of the city as they reach the poem’s relevant parts (445–6). This would be physical, instead of verbal deixis. The chorus could not look towards either the Tarentum or the Capitoline given that Palatine would block the view. The temple was on the hill’s south side. 53 Feeney (1998) 34 considers the different meanings of the omission of the Capitoline deities on the Palatine, on the Capitoline, and in the poem’s life as a text. 54 Schnegg-Ko¨hler (2002) 240 emphasizes Augustus’ cult of Apollo. Habinek (2005c) 152 stresses the Sibyl’s call for Latin paeans, but his idea that Horace saves Jupiter for the climactic position (155) is less convincing.

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space outside the religious sphere. He did not object to a second performance in itself. Double performance even with a procession, however, would not automatically absorb the poem totally into cult.55 I suggest that the Capitoline performance, as original as the Palatine, stages the possible disjunction between meaning and context. The Sibyl speciﬁcally called for a paean (18–19), and it obviously satisﬁes when sung at a temple dedicated to the god or gods it addresses and identiﬁes as praiseworthy (‘Phoebi . . . et Dianae j . . . laudes’, 75–6). However, performance on the Capitoline in no way impedes Apollo and Diana from hearing their praises: gods can presumably hear prayer wherever it is uttered and the poem would be as effective when sung before the temples of the Capitoline deities. The supplementary performance shows that the close link between explicitly identiﬁed addressees and their physical presence is unnecessary. The festival similarly engages with supplementarity: after the ‘ludi sollemnes’, the ‘quindecemuiri’ added (‘adiecimus’) more games (acta, 156). Should we also question their intrinsic participation in the festival? The dissociation from the context of utterance characteristic of writing already inhabits the performance of both poem and games alike. The dialectical competition between text and performance, supplement and reference, aesthetic and social, tradition and innovation, is shared by the festival and the poem, both internally and in their relation.56 This is as intrinsic and meaningful a feature of Roman processes of signiﬁcation as whatever conceptual meaning emerges from these cultural artefacts—here, the celebration of the Augustan age and perpetuation of the state. Interest in the production of meaning belonged to the Roman cultural endeavour as much as the meaning created. Barchiesi’s (2000: 176) point about how Horace thematizes occasion pertains equally to the Carmen saeculare and the Odes. This poem concerns the processes of making the Augustan programme as much as the programme itself. Brunt and Moore (1967: 65) take the poem as being about the programme: ‘All this is hardly poetical, but it illustrates what were considered at the time the greatest achievements of the new regime’. I would locate this poem’s literarity not in its failure to participate in the festival as Fraenkel has it, but in its degree of self-consciousness about creating meaning. This interest is not exclusive to Latin literary texts, but pervades Roman culture.

55 Schmidt’s (1985) 45 call to interrelate the aesthetic with the social is salutary: Horace was neither a pawn of Augustus’ religious politics, nor a free artist in the Romantic sense. 56 These oppositions govern the act of representation; Feeney’s (1998) 30 cover what is represented: ‘night/day, without/with civic cult, Greek/Roman, aniconic/iconic, personiﬁcations/individuals, un-Olympian/Olympian, chthonic/heavenly, outside/inside the pomerium, plain/hilltop, single/paired sacrifer’.

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A D DE NDUM The acta contain an interesting instance of erasure, another problem of reference paralleling the poem’s omission of Jupiter and Juno’s names. At line 168, one name has been erased in a list of the quindecemuiri. The text is fragmentary, but the erasure has ironically been preserved. The quindecemuir subjected to damnatio memoriae was C. Asinius Gallus, condemned for an unknown reason.57 The erasure is not in itself odd, but Gallus’ name was not erased at either 107 or 151. The remaining references allow his full name’s reconstruction: ‘Asiniu[s G]allus’ and ‘C. Asinius’. Why was he not erased in all three places? Perhaps his name was noticed only at the inscription’s end— the reason has been lost. The result is both a reference gone wrong, since it was later erased, and also a backﬁred erasure, since its reference can be reconstructed from other passages of the same text. The referential problem in Horace appears internal in belonging to the poem’s original composition, while that in the acta appears external, a subsequent accident of history. The two together, however, recreate a similar problematic as the relation of poem to festival: sometimes the difference between internal and external, what is aesthetically and socially motivated is clear, sometimes not. 57

ILS note ad loc.; Syme (1986) 138.

6 Monument and Festival in Vergil Closeness to god’s word, active intervention in society, pragmatic effectiveness—the advantages of literature ﬁgured as song, as living presence, as performative in all senses overwhelm and seduce. In the Aeneid, song is foundational: the prophetic song of the Sibyl and Carmentis among others, directs Aeneas toward his fate’s fulﬁlment and Vergil’s own song relates indirectly to theirs. His song is foundational in giving representation to empire. Writing, however, has many advantages Vergil cannot simply forgo. Fixity and temporal persistence are no mere conveniences, but essential to foundation: empire needs stability. The representation of empire in all media continually brings foundation forward in an act of cultural transmission. Vergil may disavow writing (Ch. 1), but he sublates it with the monument and book of fate. Writing’s essential qualities return under other guises. I argue that Vergil transfers aspects of writing onto the monument throughout his corpus. While Eclogue 5 sets writing and song in antithesis, a more complex relation emerges already in the subsequent poem. By the Aeneid, the monument has (almost) completely absorbed writing. While others—Horace and Ovid—embrace the monument to ﬁgure their poetry as writing, Vergil is coy about characterizing his own work this way. As an image for literature, the monument aligns with writing because of its association with tombs and memorialization.1 Monuments are for the living in honour of the dead: they reanimate the dead within living minds, and therefore have an enactive, performative function2—this Vergil can embrace. The image invites a Roman locale and turns consistently towards imperial commemoration. Poem and city meet under the umbrella of the monument’s semantic range. A portent in Iliad 2 is an early instance of the monument as a metaphor for longevity and linked to fame. Odysseus convinces the assembled Achaeans to 1 OLD 4 and 5 calls the monumentum ‘a written memorial, document, record’, ‘a literary work, book’; TLL 2e ‘opera conscripta tam publica quam priuata’. The monument as textual metaphor in Latin may go back to Ennius: Moles (1993) 155 n. 68. 2 Miles (1995) 16–17 calls the monumentum ‘something that makes one think’, and afﬁrms its dependence on speech and oral tradition (55–6).

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endure because of a portent at Aulis: a snake devoured eight chicks, the mother made a ninth, and the snake turned to stone. Calchas prophesied they would ﬁght for nine years and take Troy in the tenth. He calls the statue a marvel,3 and his description elides the difference between the long-lasting fame of the object and of the deeds it symbolizes. E b ’ çÅ æÆ ªÆ Å Æ Z , ZłØ , OłØ º , ‹ı Œº h ’ OºE ÆØ. (Iliad 2. 324–5) (Zeus the great counsellor showed us this portent, late, late of fulﬁlment, whose fame will never die.)

Poetry transmits kleos in the Iliad’s conception. The monument conjoins the deeds’ longevity, the statue portending their longevity, and the poem, which perpetuates monument and deeds alike.4

INSCRIPTION AND CULT: ECLOGUES 5 AN D 6 The Eclogues meditate on poetry’s role in society and how much it affects political reality. The land conﬁscations put poetry to the test. Tityrus’ success in recovering his land (E. 1) contrasts with Moeris’ loss of both farm and poetic memory (9. 51): the rumour his friend Menalcas had saved things with his song turns out to be false (10–11) and Moeris makes a stark statement of poetic impotence: ‘sed carmina tantum j nostra ualent, Lycida, tela inter Martia quantum j Chaonias dicunt aquila ueniente columbas’ (but our songs, Lycidas, prevail against Mars’ weapons as much as Chaonian doves, they say, against the coming eagle, 11–13; Breed 2006: 18). Poetic power, however, receives positive evaluation when Amaryllis’ magic and song together bring Daphnis home from the city in Alphesiboeus’ song in Eclogue 8—this despite Daphnis’ care for neither gods nor song (‘nihil ille deos, nil carmina curat’, 103). Gallus’ example, however, in Eclogue 10 gives pause again if we think Vergil advances the view that song can prevail in love if not in politics.

3

Fagles (1991) translates teras as ‘monument’. Ovid emphasizes the preservation of the snake’s image (‘seruat serpentis imagine saxum’, Met. 12. 22–3), but a few late readings lend the statue a semiotic function (‘signat’). Hector imagines future generations will see someone’s tomb (‘sema’) and comment that Hector killed him; his ‘kleos’ will never be destroyed (Il. 7. 87–91); Bakker (1997) 33. 4

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Vergil’s ambivalence about the power of his shepherds’ song matches modesty about his own. Although he speaks of his own experience in the land conﬁscations, if at all, allegorically under the persona of Tityrus, he is more forthcoming about his own song’s power in another central poetic domain: praise. Although the addressee of Eclogue 8 is disputed,5 Vergil looks forward to a time when he can praise his deeds in a manner worthy of a higher genre, tragedy, and a lofty predecessor, Sophocles; meanwhile, he offers this poem like pastoral ivy among the addressee’s victorious laurels (7–13). His own abilities are not yet as he would like, but he may still offer song to someone who desires it (‘accipe iussis j carmina coepta tuis’ (receive songs begun at your request), 11–12). This is a rhetoric neither of total mastery, nor impotence; it elegantly recognizes poetry’s desirability and limitations. Vergil folds the representational media into a larger discussion about poetic power, speciﬁcally poetry’s ability to praise. There are surprisingly frequent references to reading or writing in the Eclogues, given ‘one of the strict conventions of pastoral poetry: its stance as an oral art’ (Putnam 1970: 198).6 Although these become more covert in the Georgics and Aeneid through greater reliance on the monument as a locus for the enduring transmission of representation, Vergil establishes many of his techniques for handling writing here. For economy’s sake, I focus on writing in the programmatic middle: Mopsus performs a song he inscribed on a tree (E. 5. 13–14) and Vergil refers to his own poetry as a page (‘pagina’, E. 6. 12).7 The latter’s singularity cannot be overemphasized, given Vergil’s later reluctance to identify his poetry overtly as writing.8 The topic of 5

Pollio and Octavian are the candidates; Clausen 233–7. Ebbeler (forthcoming). Gallus’ desire to write on trees (‘tenerisque meos incidere amores | arboribus’, E. 10. 53–4) is markedly elegiac. Martindale (2005) 147 stresses the ‘performance element’ in the Eclogues. Dupont (2004) focuses on the ﬁctive song’s impossibility, particularly Eclogue 2, and thinks Virgil lends voice to the mime actor who performed the poems (182, 188–9). Although she goes too far in suggesting the Eclogues were composed for mime performance (Breed 2006: 156: the Life of Virgil says theatrical performances respond ‘to the success of poems had previously achieved in another venue’), she subtly analyses the disappearance of authorial song and voice. Breed (2006) considers textuality in the Eclogues through overt references to writing (15) and the implications of intertextuality and the book form. His is a welcome embrace of reading and writing as ‘an encounter with the humanity of others’ (27); pastoral community with its expression of ‘humane values’ is potentially expandable through writing (158). 7 My discussion of E. 6 revises Lowrie (1997) 61–4. For ‘proems in the middle’, G. B. Conte (1992). Kirk Freudenburg remarks to me that trees are like columns, an urban locus of writing, in Vergil’s pastoral world. 8 Uncompounded scribere occurs nowhere in Vergil. Compound forms do occur: of poetry (rather than e.g. enlistment), they mean not composition but recording. The single compound pertaining to Vergil’s own poetry is here (Ecl. 6. 12), with the only occurrence of pagina. Charta, biblus, and other words denoting writing apparatus are similarly absent (tabellae are planks, pumex rock formations). 6

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how best to praise unites these passages, and allusion in Eclogue 5 to Julius Caesar’s apotheosis situates Vergil’s examination of different poetic modes within pressing contemporary concerns.9 The two songs of Mopsus and Menalcas in Eclogue 5 offer alternative methods of praise in the face of Daphnis’ death.10 Although both were composed before their performance within the poem and seem sung to music, the language describing them differs markedly. Mopsus presents his song as written and concludes his lament with an imagined inscription on Daphnis’ tomb. immo haec, in uiridi nuper quae cortice fagi carmina descripsi et modulans alterna notaui, experiar (E. 5. 13–15) (Nay, rather, I will attempt this song I recently wrote down on the green bark of a beech and noted the interludes when I was playing.)11 et tumulum facite, et tumulo superaddite carmen: ‘Daphnis ego in siluis, hinc usque ad sidera notus, formosi pecoris custos, formosior ipse.’ (E. 5. 42–4) (and make a tomb, and add a poem to the tomb: ‘I am known as Daphnis in the woods, and from here up to the stars, guardian of a lovely ﬂock, more lovely myself.’)

The lament opens with ‘exstinctum . . . Daphnin’ (dead Daphnis, 20) and his death has precipitated a breakdown of the rustic world. The sympathetic reaction of the gods (35), pastoral society (25–6), and nature (36–9) may honour Daphnis, but the result is bleak. Writing is associated with death; the song’s content and medium cohere. Menalcas’ song in every way surpasses Mopsus’. Instead of Mopsus’ promise of fame reaching to the stars (‘hinc usque ad sidera notus’ (known from

9 Heyne 148 lists suggested allegories for Daphnis and tolerates Caesar, provided correspondences are not exact; Coleman 173–4. Apotheosis and praise recall Caesar whether or not the link is tightly allegorical. 10 Gordon Williams (1968) 323: Mopsus’ song is traditional and Theocritean, while Menalcas’ is original; therefore Vergil attributes Eclogues 2 and 3 to Menalcas and chooses him ‘as his own masquerade’. P. Hardie (2002a) 20–1 analyses ad loc. the two songs for presence and absence. Breed (2006) 57–73 set Mopsus’ inscription within the Eclogues’ interest in a broader temporality than can be captured with the ﬂeeting spoken word, and rejects T. K. Hubbard’s (1998) 95 characterization of Mopsus’ epitaph as ‘cold and remote’ over against the presence of voice in Menalcas’ song. 11 ‘Alterna’ is a conundrum. Servius suggests it denotes the variety in the music because of the metre. Different combinations of marking words and music at Coleman, Lee (1980), Goold (1999), Clausen. For modulari, Coleman; Tarrant 672.

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here to the stars), 43), Menalcas offers Daphnis immortality through translation to the stars: ‘Daphninque tuum tollemus ad astra’ (and I will raise your Daphnis to the stars, 51). Menalcas’ ﬁrst word makes Daphnis shine, as opposed to the death Mopsus stresses: ‘candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi j sub pedibusque uidet nubes et sidera Daphnis’ (Shining, Daphnis marvels at the unaccustomed threshold of Olympus and sees clouds and stars under his feet, 56–7). The pastoral landscape, which Mopsus depicted as dead and sterile, comes alive with pleasure (‘laetitia’, 62) and bursts into voice: ‘ipsae iam carmina rupes,j ipsa sonant arbusta: “deus, deus ille, Menalca!”’ (now the cliffs themselves, the bushes themselves sound out the songs: ‘A god, he’s a god, Menalcas!’, E. 5. 63–4). A description of Daphnis’ cultic honours follows, which answers the funeral honours described by Mopsus: instead of an inscription, Menalcas will arrange a performance. Its regular repetition will guarantee Daphnis’ perpetual praise. cantabunt mihi Damoetas et Lyctius Aegon; saltantis Satyros imitabitur Alphesiboeus. haec tibi semper erunt, et cum sollemnia uota reddemus Nymphis, et cum lustrabimus agros. (E. 5. 72–5) (Damoetas and Lyctian Aegon will sing for me; Alphesiboeus will imitate dancing Satyrs. These things will always be there for you, both when we render ceremonial prayer to the Nymphs, and when we purify the ﬁelds.)

Menalcas will ofﬁciate at a festival entailing ritual, song, dance, and, most importantly, representation (‘imitabitur’, 73). This performance will repeatedly recur, although Menalcas will preside the ﬁrst time (‘mihi’, 72). Afterwards, it will be annual, and Vergil emphasizes perpetuity: ‘semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt. j ut Baccho Cererique, tibi sic uota quotannis j agricolae facient’ (Your honour, and name, and praise will always remain. Just as to Bacchus and Ceres, so to you farmers will make prayers yearly, 78–80). The rituals imagined here evoke ones familiar to Romans. The contrasts between media line up neatly in polarities: death/life, funeral honors/cultic honours, inscription/performance, a tomb monument/perennial praise. But honouring mortals is not the only question. Daphnis, like Julius Caesar, has become a god.12 The performative response from farmers and landscape answers the god’s performative power. The song’s last words indicate this power: ‘damnabis tu quoque uotis’ (You also will hold people to their vows, 80). He will enforce promises. Although the specialized use of damno (condemn) with vows restricts the speciﬁc meaning here, the word 12 The allegory goes back to Servius. Martindale (2005) 149–50 defends allegory, here and elsewhere.

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generally suggests notions of contract, liability, and law. The god’s power is analogous to that of judges on earth. The praise’s own worthiness is also at issue and again the media contrast. Menalcas praises Mopsus both before and after his song. A double entendre covertly plays writing against song: ‘nec calamis solum aequiperas, sed uoce magistrum’ (you equal the master not only with the reeds, but with your voice, 48; Ebbeler forthcoming). Since calamus means reed either as musical instrument or as writing implement, the suggestion that Mopsus equals Daphnis in voice and composition underlies the more overt pastoral meaning of excellence in instrumental and vocal music. The older singer (4) praises the younger with terms associating writing with the younger generation. By contrast, his own praise of Daphnis promises immortality and takes the form of ritual song. Mopsus also praises Menalcas in advance, but the terms emphasize song. an quicquam nobis tali sit munere maius? et puer ipse fuit cantari dignus, et ista iam pridem Stimichon laudauit carmina nobis.

(E. 5. 53–5)

(Or is anything greater to us than such a gift? Both the boy himself was worthy of being sung, and now for a long time Stimichon has praised this song of yours to us.)

Munus means not only ‘gift’, but ‘public entertainment’ or a spectacle like the gladiatorial games given at the funerals of the wealthy. Similarly, ‘cantari’ (to be sung, 54) identiﬁes Menalcas’ performance distinctively with song. The shifted emphasis from death to immortality through cultic performance matches the representation of the song as sung. The gifts exchanged by the singers also reveal the alternative songs’ afﬁliations. Mopsus’ song evokes Theocritean pastoral: he gives a shepherd’s crook. Menalcas’ is Vergil’s own: he gives the pipe that taught him the incipits of Eclogues 2 and 3. Mopsus and Menalcas exchange mutual, but unbalanced praise. The latter has additionally won praise from another, Stimichon, while Mopsus is presumed to have praise for another, Alcon, in his repertory (E. 5. 11).13 Menalcas’ poetry, aligned with Vergil’s, not only confers divinity on mortals, it itself wins praise. Given the dichotomies in Eclogue 5, we might expect Vergil to claim potent and ritual song. But in the next poem, he soon complicates things. Vergil makes signiﬁcant changes from the prologue to the Aitia, the model for the poem’s opening. While Callimachus was writing on tablets when Apollo appeared to him, Vergil was already singing: ‘cum canerem reges et proelia’

13 Neither Stimichon nor Alcon occurs in earlier extant pastoral (Colemen ad loc.); their novelty focuses attention on their acts, granting and receiving praise respectively.

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(while I was singing kings and battles, 6. 3). Beyond poetic representation, medium matters for pragmatics, here the very Roman concern for praise. Although Vergil disavows a certain kind of praise—telling of battles—the verb he embraces for himself (‘deductum dicere carmen’ (to say a slender song), 5) and others is the same. nunc ego (namque super tibi erunt qui dicere laudes, Vare, tuas cupiant et tristia condere bella) agrestem tenui meditabor harundine Musam. (E. 6. 6–8) (Now I—for there will be plenty who will wish to tell your praises, Varus, and celebrate sad wars—will contemplate the rustic Muse on a slender reed.)

Although he aligns his pastoral poetry with song and musical accompaniment, he also adopts the apparatus of writing. Unlike the inscription and monument in Mopsus’ song, however, the writing Vergil embraces is far from inert: it enables subsequent performance by a reader. si quis tamen haec quoque, si quis captus amore leget, te nostrae, Vare, myricae, te nemus omne canet; nec Phoebo gratior ulla est quam sibi quae Vari praescripsit pagina nomen. (E. 6. 9–12) (Still, if someone, someone taken by love, reads these things too, Varus, my tamarisks, the whole grove will sing of you, you; nor is any page more pleasing to Apollo than one with Varus’ name written on top.)

Vergil will not narrate a battle, but will nevertheless (‘tamen’, 6. 9) praise Varus in pastoral terms. Writing in the Aitia prologue denotes composition; here it is displaced to preservation. The page and title in line 12 are the ﬁnished product and to that extent Vergil’s writing resembles the monument and inscription Mopsus promises Daphnis; inscription and the name at the top of the page (6. 11–12) can be called titulus, though Vergil avoids technical vocabulary.14 Vergil turns his own writing towards the performative. Given a well-disposed reader, the pastoral landscape embodied in the poem will itself sing. This passage describes what Menalcas’ song in Eclogue 5 enacts when the shrubs resound (5. 64). Vergil recognizes reading’s performative power, which 14 The technical terms’ suppression leaves convoluted syntax. Servius disentangles thus: ‘nec enim pagina ulla Apollini est gratior, quam quae Vari nomen gestat in titulo: quod ideo dicit, quia hanc eclogam constat in honorem Vari esse praescriptam’ (nor is any page more pleasing to Apollo, which bears Varus’ name in its title: which he says because it is clear this eclogue was preﬁxed with writing in Varus’ honour, E. 6. 11); Lowrie (1997) 63 n. 36. Callimachus is similarly obscure, when asking the Graces to wash their hands on his elegies (Aitia 7. 13–14Pf). Fowler (1994) 251 n. 46 suggests a reference to preserving books with cedar oil: Callimachus indirectly avows writing by suppressing technicalities.

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animates the poem’s pastoral landscape.15 Allegory, allusion, personiﬁcation, and other poetic strategies require a reader’s active participation to elicit textual meaning. Since a landscape cannot literally sing, reading is what makes it perform. Eclogue 5’s distinction between writing and song collapses in Eclogue 6 as both pertain to Varus’ praise. Furthermore, this distinction is more tenuous in Eclogue 5 than ﬁrst appears. While the citation of incipits makes Menalcas’ claim stronger as a stand-in for Vergil, both modes correspond to aspects of the Eclogues: Mopsus could represent Vergil’s younger, more Theocritean self; Menalcas upgrades his praise of Mopsus from good reed-player (or writer) to good singer (‘uoce’, 48), but his epithet goes only half-way: ‘diuine poeta’ (divine poet, 45). Callimachus calls Homer divine, but Homer is a singer (ŁE IØ , Epigram 6. 1Pf.). Despite Vergil’s metaphorics of song, the Eclogues appear highly written and even in places acknowledge writing’s role in transmitting song: ‘pauca meo Gallo, sed quae legat ipsa Lycoris, j carmina sunt dicenda’ (a few songs must be said for my Gallus, but such as Lycoris herself would read, Ecl. 10. 2–3). Although elegiac colouring in Eclogue 10 pulls song for Gallus towards writing, Vergil still fully owns the song. Pure song seems to be reserved for mythic characters (Daphnis) and mortals of mythic proportions. Caesar underlies Daphnis and in Eclogue 1, Tityrus, closely allied with song in the poem’s opening lines, establishes an altar proclaiming that the man who gave him peace—generally taken to be Octavian—will always be a god to him (‘namque erit ille mihi semper deus’, Ecl. 1. 7). The altar will host future, repeated sacriﬁce (8), and goes towards the performative rather than the monumental. Vergil confers his more complex understanding of his medium on a lesser mortal, whatever Varus’ identity, but conjoins monument and song later in the Georgics, when he honours Caesar Augustus. There, writing goes under erasure to a greater extent and the poet’s power is more foregrounded. But poetic power already concerns the Eclogues: land recovery may be contingent, but what about the power of representation? How real can it make things? Menalcas identiﬁes praise as one of three fundamental pastoral topics along with love and blame (Alconis . . . laudes, E. 5. 10–11), but divinization goes further. Allegory keeps the divinization of real men under wraps in Eclogue 5, but allusion reveals that divinization of mortals is indeed at stake. The shrubs’ declaration that Daphnis has become a god (‘deus, deus ille, Menalca!’, Ecl. 5. 64) recalls Lucretius (‘deus ille fuit, deus, inclute Memmi’ (that man was a god, renowned Memmius, a god), DRN 5. 8), where Epicurus 15 Reading aloud mediates between song and writing. For the Eclogues’ performance history, Ch. 1. Habinek (2005c) 68–70 examines song here.

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is the divinized mortal. Ennius’ written euhemerism is turned upside down: instead of a rationalistic, aetiological account of the gods’ origins, Menalcas’ song divinizes mortals. Daphnis’ honours equal those of the Olympian gods: he and Apollo receive two altars each (66) and his vows match those of Bacchus and Ceres (79). Vergil goes only so far with Varus—but with Augustus, the laudandus’s greater external power enables Vergil to make a greater claim for his own in the Georgics.

T E M P L E A N D F E S T I VA L : T H E P ROE M TO VERG IL , GEORGICS 3 Vergil announces a multimedia extravaganza honouring Caesar Augustus at the beginning of Georgics 3. Monument (a temple) and festival join as metaphors for the future song of praise16 and together convey poetry’s permanence and enactive capacity. Vergil’s description (ecphrasis) develops a technique central to his mature art. His statement about poetics, however, serves higher pragmatic aims, praise foremost. The nature of the laudandus requires an equally potent singer and this passage dissolves boundaries remarkable for their number and kind: between media, object of representation and representing discourse, singing subject and sung object. Why such ambition? Caesar’s power is not his alone; it is emblematic of empire. Simon Goldhill (2007: 2) argues that ecphrasis ‘is designed to produce a viewing subject’ (his emphasis). This passage is training ground for the heady representing machine set in motion with Augustus’ accession. A signal feature of Augustan poetry is the poets’ self-deﬁnition over against this central ﬁgure. Princeps, poet, and reader all come into their imperial roles here—the Aeneid will question their success. Vergil begins the Georgics with song (‘canere incipiam’ (I will begin to sing), G. 1. 5) and maintains it here (‘canemus’ (I will sing), 3. 1). The programmatic middle conjoins medium and object of representation. Caesar will occupy the temple’s middle (‘in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit’, 3. 16). His placement here picks up his predicted divinization in 16 The conjunction of temple with games goes back in Latin literature to the testimonia on Ennius Ann. 1. li Sk (= Schol. Bern. at Vergil, Georg. 2. 384). Inscription links monuments to writing: Ennius Ann. 404Sk (‘reges per regnum statuasque sepulcraque quaerunt j aediﬁcant nomen, summa nituntur opum ui’, kings through their reign seek statues and tombs; they build a name and strive with the highest force of resources). The architectural metaphor in ‘building a name’ reiﬁes the effect.

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Georgics 1 and parallels the recurrence of authorial song. Although these two avowals belong to the singing instance of the poem itself,17 this passage also looks forwards and backwards within Vergil’s uvre, though we learn the full extent only retrospectively. The futures introducing temple and festival are generally thought to predict the Aeneid beyond their relevance to the song instantiated here.18 The temple and festival recall the monument and rites in Mopsus’ and Menalcas’ respective songs in Eclogue 5,19 where Caesar was Julius, and look forward to Aeneas’ shield, where Caesar Augustus’ triumphs culminate in his receiving tribute before another temple (Aen. 8. 714–22).20 The proem to Georgics 3 links the permanent monument to the transient but repeatable athletic and dramatic performances of the festival.21 Where Mopsus’ song in Eclogue 5 promises inscription, here the monument in marble will display elaborate visual images. These different engravings offer a similar problematic: writing and pictorial representation can both be static or dynamic. Ecphrasis becomes for Vergil the locus for exploring the relation between constant and repeatable time that Augustan poetry analyses elsewhere through the interaction of writing and song. Vergil’s displacement of writing’s potentially static nature onto visual representation reaches full fruition in the Aeneid (below). Vergil’s metaphors obscure a clear conception of the future poem. There is plenty of information about subject matter: the peoples adorning the doors and theatre curtains (25–33) represent contemporary conquests either achieved (Nile) or projected (Britons); the Trojan ancestors of Parian marble (34–6) and Inuidia banished to the underworld (37–9) indicate a mythological dimension both historical and allegorical.22 Nevertheless, the project’s description is so opaque that scholars still debate how much the plan 17 Volk (2002) 124 notes the poem’s ‘poetic simultaneity’: ‘Creating the vivid impression that the composition of the poem is going on “now”, the poet starts his work with the announcement, hinc canere incipiam (1. 5), and ends with the observation, haec super aruorum cultu pecorumque canebam | et super arboribus (4. 559–60).’ She suggests translating ‘I have been singing’ for the epistolary imperfect ‘canebam’ (Thomas ad loc.). 18 Kraggerud (1998) 9 suggests Vergil’s allegorical project is no longer identiﬁed with the Georgics, but see L. Morgan (1999) passim. Volk (2002) 151: the passage is a recusatio deﬁning the Georgics through negation. 19 The middle Eclogues are important here, Boyle (1979) 70–1, G. B. Conte (1992) 150–3, Kraggerud (1998), Nelis (2004) 73–5. 20 Drew (1924) 195; Kraggerud (1998) 14. 21 Drew (1924) 196, who argues that Aeneas’ shield fuses Augustus’ triple triumph with the dedication of Apollo’s Palatine temple, also pursues these events’ inﬂuence on the proem to Georgics 3. Flower (2004b) 329 notes the general association of triumphs with monuments and statues in Republican Rome. 22 Gale (2000) 189–90 explains the parallel to Lucretius (5. 1120–42): Augustus ended civil war.

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corresponds to the Aeneid (Kraggerud 1998). I would refocus debate from the what to the how (Ch. 1). The reception media, vividly described, occupy the foreground, but have received little attention. Enargeia (vividness) lends dynamism to the potentially static visual images and the interweaving of permanent memorials with performative rituals produces a complex celebration uniting the different available media. Although the temple and its decorations initially appear to consist of inert materials—stone (3. 13), gold, and ivory (3. 26)—their setting and enargeia bring them alive. Vergil’s marble temple occupies a living landscape of a green ﬁeld and ﬂowing water lined with reeds (3. 13–15). The reed is a musical instrument (Ecl. 6. 8) and the temple is itself the setting for athletic and dramatic performances, sacriﬁce, and the poet’s own procession, described in triumphal terms. The personiﬁed images of Britons raising the curtain depicting them lends animation to the inert. The ecphrasis of the doors begins with materials, gold and ‘solid’ ivory (3. 26), but quickly proceeds to movement: ‘undantem bello magnumque ﬂuentem j Nilum’ (the great Nile, undulating with war and ﬂowing, 3. 28–9). We see the waves, whether of war or water, and the great Nile on the doors resembles the huge Mincius, on whose banks the temple sits. The similarity of rivers within and without the ecphrasis highlights the intervening layer of representation—both are transmitted in words. Vergil indicates we remain in the ecphrasis by noting his own agency (‘addam’ (I will add), 3. 30) or the materials (Parian marble, 3. 34). Deixis (‘hic’, 3. 28) enhances vividness, whether ‘here’ refers to the doors earlier in the sentence, so that place is discursive, or Vergil gestures hypothetically to a place conceived literally nearby. The conventional enargeia of ‘spirantia signa’ (breathing statues, 3. 34; Thomas ad loc.) accords with the emphasis on life and movement. The art on the temple’s doors is as alive as the festival’s different parts and the sacriﬁce of cattle (3. 23) subsumes death into living ritual.23 With line 3. 37, however, Vergil no longer indicates clearly whether the ecphrasis continues.24 Scholars divide over Inuidia’s banishment to the underworld: does Vergil describe another representation on the temple doors or has he shifted to reality?25 Is there one level of representation (words about things) or two (words about images about things)? For a 23 ‘Caesos . . . iuuencos’ (23) points back to 2. 537, forwards to 4. 284 and 4. 547, and forwards to Aen. 8. 719, Drew (1924) 195; Boyle (1979) 80 with n. 31. Kraggerud (1998) 10 recalls the ‘cura boum’ (G. 1. 3) of book 3. 24 Ambiguity marks poetry for reading, as opposed to performance, Edmunds (2001a) 89. Gale (2000) 14–15 argues for the Georgics’ interpretative openness. 25 Thomas takes Inuidia’s banishment as real; Heyne, Mynors, Kraggerud (1998) 14 take her as a statue, painting, part of a pedimental group around Apollo, or other temple ornament.

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hypothetical description, this question is somewhat futile. Furthermore, enargeia blurs the distinction between levels and pertains equally to the festival’s performative and monumental aspects. Vergil starts the procession with ‘iam nunc . . . j iuuat’ (Already now it is pleasing . . . , 3. 22–3) as if it were really happening.26 The theatrical performance would represent some topic and the stage is subject to description. The Britons on the curtains are meaningful decoration and represent desired Roman imperial expansion, the same as on the temple doors.27 Surface and content blend.28 There are further ambiguities. Is Caesar to be visualized as a statue in the middle of Vergil’s temple, or does the entire conceit means he will be a poem’s subject (3. 16)?29 Since the temple ﬁgures a poem, it hardly matters. The statue would signify the same thing as the subject matter, but slippage between media pervades this passage. Also ambiguous is where the deictic ‘hic’ (3. 28) points, as mentioned above; also is the transition from the address to Maecenas to the topic itself, which expresses Vergil’s commitment to his current georgic subject. With ‘en age segnis j rumpe moras’ (come, now, break your lazy delay, 3. 42–3), it is initially unclear whether Vergil still addresses Maecenas or goads himself on.30 Again, it hardly matters: to direct his patron towards his chosen material ﬁgures self-direction. Each ambiguity turns on the degree of imagistic vividness. Vergil presents his subject matter as actively pressing and present. The vividness here consists of a personiﬁed voice: ‘uocat . . . Cithaeron . . . j et uox adsensu nemorum ingeminata remugit’ (Cithaeron calls, and the sound echoed in agreement with the groves reverberates, 3. 43–5).31 The enargeia of this proem oddly enough puts everything on the same level and in the foreground, whether actual subject matter, hypothetical subject matter delayed to the future, metaphor for the latter, and the various representations of the ecphrasis. All are currently present. Vergil, with his consistent commitment to song, also commits himself to the fullness of the present. The enargeia of the proem to Georgics 3 exempliﬁes Richard Thomas (1983) 99–100 calls attention to Callimachus’ own epitaph (‘he [of self] has sung greater than envy’, Epigr. 21. 4Pf). 26 Heyne: ‘Rapitur animus aestuans in medias res, tamquam si coram gerantur.’ 27 For the curtains, ecphrasis, and weaving, Richard Thomas (1983) 113 n. 120. 28 The blurred levels of representation here resemble Horace’s account of Pollio’s history in Odes 2. 1; Lowrie (1997) 182–3. 29 Heyne, Mynors, and Thomas take it Caesar will be a statue. Richard Thomas (1983) 96 goes on to analyse how Vergil’s temple is metaphorical (97) and also real (99). 30 Thomas: Vergil addresses himself; Mynors and Heyne: he continues to address Maecenas. Heyne brings out the enargeia: ‘Praeclare illud: Ades, o Maecenas! (ad absentem, puta, dictum a poeta) ex eo ornat, quasi rerum, quas dicturus sit, turba instet.’ 31 Nicholas Horsfall suggests to me that while Cithaeron is unimportant in Pindar, to a Roman ear it evokes Boeotia and therefore Pindar himself.

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such fullness to a strong degree. The dissolution of boundaries between various levels of representation sweeps everything into the present of the poem’s performance. If we consider, however, Vergil’s later critique in the Aeneid of writing as uninterpretable (Ch. 1), the numerous ambiguities in this proem stand out. Doubts about the level of representation of Inuidia’s description or whom ‘en age’ addresses might disappear in an oral performance. Plato makes this point in the Phaedrus: a text is an orphan without its father to defend it. Then again, Horace’s Carmen saeculare hardly resolves all ambiguity. Even if Augustus interrupted Vergil and Maecenas for clariﬁcation when they apparently read the Georgics to him when returning from Egypt on his way to his actual triple triumph,32 the poem still resists full and present enactment: the temple and its attendant rituals remain verbal constructs to be visualized imaginatively from the description. Vergil throughout his corpus creates a paradoxical effect. He, if any poet, instantiates the artiﬁciality of writing and bookish learning. His commitment to song and enargeia, however, cannot be overestimated. This is the aesthetics of presence: palpable artiﬁce conveying a high valorization of present plenitude. He is for many reasons the paradigmatic Latin poet, in this regard no less than in others. This paradox is salient in the metaphor of the victor informing this passage.33 The victor metaphor cuts through the proem’s various levels of representation. It creates a complex relationship between subject and object, and a complex image of poetic creation. In line 9, it pertains to Vergil’s success as a poet in his projected project. Vergil’s citation of Ennius’ epitaph (above, 16) in ‘uictorque uirum uolitare per ora’ (and keep ﬂying victorious through the mouths of men, G. 3. 9) picks up on the idea of death accorded life through performative reception, but Vergil makes a striking substitution.34 Instead of Ennius’ ‘uiuus’ (alive), Vergil calls himself ‘uictor’. One word associated with force (uis) takes the place of another.35 Vergil retains the performative moment, but where Ennius’ formulation sets a dead poet—it is his epitaph, after all—against life through performance by others, Vergil leaves death behind. Rather than composing a text that will live on in others’ mouths after death, Vergil himself participates in the rites’ performance. Unlike Ennius, he is not 32

For the oral reading of the Georgics and the Aeneid, Ch. 1. Balot (1998) 87: the parallel between poet and victor goes back to Pindar, but is not found in Callimachus. 34 The epitaph is discussed above (16, 30–2). 35 Lucilius links uis to uita: ‘uis est uita, uides, uis nos facere omnia cogit’ (fr. 1340 M = H 25 Charpin), cited by Varro, LL 5. 63; Isid. Orig. 11. 1. 3, ‘uita dicta propter uigorem, uel quod uim teneat nascendi atque crescendi’. For uictoria, Isid. Orig. 18. 2. 1, ‘uictoria dicta quod ui, id est uirtute, adipiscitur’. References from Maltby. 33

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living despite death: he simply still lives. His performance follows from his leading the Muses to Italy, something to take place, god willing, within his lifetime (‘modo uita supersit’, 3. 10).36 Vergil uses ‘uictor’ again of himself, not as some distant founder of the temple and festival, that is, as author of the future poem: he himself will participate and perform his own script. illi uictor ego et Tyrio conspectus in ostro centum quadriiugos agitabo ad ﬂumina currus.

(G. 3. 17–18)

(For him (Caesar) I, victorious and conspicuous in Tyrian purple, will drive one hundred four-horse chariots to the river.)

Servius takes the number literally and the driving ﬁguratively so that the poet presides over a full day’s worth of games in Caesar’s honour. The degree of implied authorial control is great. Vergil establishes the temple, puts Caesar in it, and drives the chariots; he writes the poem, determines its subject matter, and performs it. The victor metaphor takes us to the next level of representation; the same terms cover speaking subject and represented object.37 The military victory occupies the temple doors (‘uictorisque arma Quirini’ (and the arms of victorious Quirinus), 3. 27) and most of the ecphrasis treats Roman imperial expansion. The expected victor, however, is implied rather than identiﬁed as such. When Vergil at the proem’s end defers his hypothetical poem decisively into the future, Caesar’s battles are climactic. mox tamen ardentis accingar dicere pugnas Caesaris et nomen fama tot ferre per annos, Tithoni prima quot abest ab origine Caesar. (G. 3. 46–8) (Soon, however, I will gird myself to tell of Caesar’s burning battles and bear his name with fame through as many years as Caesar is distant from Tithonus’ ﬁrst origin.)

Victory is understood. Laudator and laudandus operate together as victors for all time; the speaking subject (‘dicere’) and represented objects accord.38 Potency links Vergil to Caesar to empire in other ways as well. Beyond poetic performance, the victor metaphor evokes performativity as the capacity for

36 P. Hardie (1993a) 128 brings together Ennius’ ‘templum Herculis Musarum’, the real Palatine temple of the musagete Apollo, and Vergil’s leading the Muses in triumph (parallels at Horsfall 96 n. 156) from Mount Helicon to his fatherland. 37 For the extended parallel between the poet and Caesar, Buchheit (1972) 17–26; Kraggerud (1998) 8–9; Morgan (1999) 56, 216–18. 38 Mynors at G. 3. 46–8 expatiates on the singing metaphor: with Caesar as the ‘ﬁnal chord’ of the prelude, ‘we strip off our singing-robes and get back to work’.

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effective action, as Servius’ comments on ‘uictor’ reveal: ‘uictor, effector propositi’ (victor, the one who brings about the proposal and the wish, G. 3. 9) and ‘compos uoti’ (in possession of his desire, G. 3. 17).39 The ability to bring things into being underlies another decisive word in this passage: ‘auctor’. Although the Georgics were probably completed by 28 BCE, the association of ‘auctor’ with Apollo, Augustus’ patron god, anticipates the honoriﬁc name, Augustus, granted in 27 BCE.40 Kraggerud (1998: 13) emphasizes this word’s importance in ‘Troiae Cynthius auctor’ (Cynthian Apollo, author of Troy, G. 3. 36) and underscores Augustan resonances: Apollo is important to Vergil’s temple; he founded Troy; Vergil’s temple recalls Apollo’s temple on the Palatine; Apollo was Augustus’ patron god. Vergil does not appropriate ‘auctor’ for himself, nor even for Caesar, but folds Apollo into the overall sense of imperial power.41 For himself, however, he claims an originality that gives him an analogous position of bringing things into being. Two words are repeated of the poet: ‘uictor’ (3. 9, 17) and ‘primus’ (10, 12). The newness topos is a traditional statement of originality42 that enacts an inherited code in the moment of utterance. Vergil’s interest in performativity here reaches beyond the mechanics of representation to generative power. But a reader is required to guarantee posterity. Vergil’s victory depends on reception (‘uirum . . . per ora’, 3. 9), as does Caesar’s (‘fama’, 3. 47). The reader’s role surpasses receiving mechanical transmission; he accords value to both text and what it represents and thereby participates in the laudatory discourse. Busiris’ epithet, ‘inlaudati’ (unpraised, 3. 5), establishes a rejected alternative among the listed trite subjects to avoid.43 Inuidia’s relegation to the underworld (3. 37–9) pertains at all levels of representation: for praise to succeed, envy must not accrue to Caesar, to the Roman victories in the ecphrasis, to the contestants in the games, or to Vergil’s hypothetical poem.44 In epinician rhetoric, envy is praise’s rival discourse. Although in Pindar, it usually attacks the victor (P. 7. 19), it can also attack the poet (O. 8. 55).45 Vergil constructs an imperial reader who joins the poet to accord praise. As a citizen, he will share in the victories of his people and his Caesar. 39

Quoted with approval and conﬂated by Heyne at G. 3. 9. For augeo and related words, Ch. 12. Morgan (1999) 74 and passim: the epic poet is analogous to the divine dimiurge. 42 Mynors, Thomas, and Heyne trace the parallels. Richard Thomas (1983) 92–101 ﬁnds points of contact with Callimachus; Kraggerud (1998) 6–8; Gale (2000) 3–15; Balot (1998) with Pindar. 43 Gellius defends Vergil against detractors (2. 6. 3) by equating this word with inlaudabilis and linking it to fame: ‘qui neque mentione aut memoria ulla dignus neque umquam nominandus est’ (2. 6. 17–18). An exemplum of damnatio memoriae follows. 44 Wilkinson (1969) 170 and Morgan (1999) 57 take envy of both Vergil and Octavian. 45 Balot (1998) 86–7 sees Vergil’s envy as more Pindaric than Callimachean. 40 41

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All participants—poet, reader, and prince—at all levels of representation in all media meet in a common cause.

THE A E N E I D AND THE IMPE RIAL CITIZEN Being a good imperial citizen entails, among other things, participating in the production and reception of cultural representation, namely the circulation of ideology.46 I suggest above that with the monument and the festival Vergil talks about imperial processes of representation, where the victory of the Roman people is commensurate with Caesar’s and the poet’s as well. I also suggest Vergil uses ecphrasis as a locus for working out issues elsewhere linked with writing. In the Aeneid, the relation of the representing media to the workings of empire is fraught. If we take Aeneas as a multivalent emblem for both imperial citizen and emperor, his reactions go in many directions. Although he is capable of aesthetic appreciation, he is notorious for misinterpreting or failing to interpret what he sees. Both aspects pertain to his receipt of his shield. Furthermore, when he sees Pallas’ baldric on Turnus, he reacts pragmatically to the exclusion of an interpretative or aesthetic response. He cannot serve as a model for a fully integrated participant in imperial representation. If such a model exists, it would dwell in the implied reader the Aeneid projects. Mary Jaeger (1997) and Andrew Feldherr (1998) show that Livy shares the poets’ interest in monuments and spectacles respectively, and in their relation to performativity. Beyond literary self-reﬂection, both argue that reading Livy’s history constitutes its readers as Roman citizens: the text is performative. Representing representation makes it intelligible to those confronting change in Augustan Rome.47 Feldherr (1998: ch. 1) examines monuments as visual artefacts subject to a viewer or reader’s gaze, and Jaeger (1997: 28) as dynamic constituents of memory through which Livy creates an illusion of ‘sensory experience’ in his readership. Enargeia links the literal visual aspect of 46

Reed (2007) connects the formation of Roman identity with viewing, speciﬁcally the erotic gaze. To turn this idea towards the media, if the monument attracts a gaze ﬁgured as reading, festivals call rather for participation. 47 Dupont (1985) 34, Feldherr (1997) 152, 156. Bonfante (1998) considers archaeological and textual monuments in Livy as the ‘physical embodiment and visual record of [Rome’s] traditions’. Ford (2002) ch. 9 traces the idea of literature as ideological formation to Plato and critiques the view that we cannot confront ideology critically (210–11). Veyne (1976) 669: ‘les individus sont ine´galement re´fractaires aux ide´ologies’; ideology is the use of certain ideas as justiﬁcation for the existing social order (670–3).

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spectacles and monuments to the images created in readers’ minds.48 Both spectacle and monument are metaphors for Livy’s project, and the language about the object of representation, the city of Rome,49 and about the representing language itself shows that Livy sets his own contribution to Roman culture on par with other media.50 Literature restores memory when physical monuments decay,51 and this record enables the restoration of extinct or decaying rituals.52 Literature has social utility. Does Vergil, like Livy, conceive of his reader’s engagement with the Aeneid as fully participatory? Aeneas offers a fragmented paradigm. Horace holds back from fully embracing song. Vergil embraces foundational song, but is, I think, sceptical about the participatory imperial citizen.53

Ecphrasis and the Limitations of Reading Vergil assesses writing negatively when Helenus warns Aeneas to have the Sibyl sing: it lacks song’s interpretative stability (ch. 1). Ecphrasis offers another opportunity for Vergil to express doubts about the potential for communicative success, framed speciﬁcally in terms of reading. His descriptions are often of monuments: although this metaphor for writing is largely implicit, the ecphrases contain other traces of textuality. But Vergil does not dichotomize the media. Monuments often join with some performative ritual either in context or theme.54 Through these passages, Vergil explores static and dynamic, transient and eternal aspects of artistic representation. The question is whether he thinks some form of performativity can overcome reading’s limitations. When the eyes scan a visual image, they ‘read’ it. The metaphorics of reading frames Aeneid 6: ‘legere’ (read) and ‘perlegere’ (read completely) indicate the internal reception of the two great descriptions: the doors of Apollo’s temple at 48

Jaeger (1997) 22; for evidentia, 175 n. 74. For the relation of Ab urbe condita to the city of Rome, Kraus 268–70. 50 Intense interaction among these metaphors marks Augustan Rome. Similar intensity existed in different ages, particularly the Romantic period, with a different constellation of metaphors, e.g. prosopopoeia and anthropomorphism, de Man (1984). I do not see any way out of what Kennedy (1992) 39 calls the ‘dominant ideology’ that leads to periodization. 51 Jaeger (1997) 11, 122; Fowler (2000) ‘The Ruin of Time’. 52 Feldherr (1998) 183–5 provides a complex example of the interrelation of ritual, inscriptional record, the ritual’s recovery and recording in Livy’s history. 53 Reed (2007) sees Roman identity as constituted through difference in the Aeneid, and therefore as inherently multiple. 54 I am indebted to Putnam (1998) throughout this section. Bartsch (1998) 329 interprets the Aeneid’s parades as analogous to artworks. 49

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Cumae and the underworld procession of future Romans. Each has interpretative constraints. The Sibyl interrupts Aeneas and his companions as they gaze at the temple doors: ‘quin protinus omnia j perlegerent oculis’ (indeed they would forthwith have read it all thoroughly with their eyes, 6. 33–4; Bartsch 1998: 327). Vergil does not explicitly call the temple a monument, but characteristically folds the word into a mise en abyme. The cow structure Daedalus built for Pasiphae so she could consummate her love for the bull is called ‘Veneris monimenta nefandae’ (a reminder/warning of unspeakable love, Aeneid 6. 26). The engraved ‘monimentum’ recalls its primary meaning of reminder or warning (from moneo). This vignette sits adjacent the labyrinth, a monumental building with strong associations of uninterpretability.55 The allegory of reading here implies a moral model. Livy’s ﬁgurative monument preserves exempla to serve as paradigms for imitation or avoidance. Pasiphae’s example, depicted on a monument, warns against its model. Vergil ﬁgures uninterpretability by interrupting the images’ author and viewer. This is paradigmatic for how material works of art in the Aeneid fail to be understood and contrasts with the proem to Georgics 3. The doors to the temple of Apollo at Aeneid 6 recall those of the Georgics temple; both are thought to allude to the temple of Palatine Apollo.56 Line initial ‘in foribus’ (on the doors, G. 3. 26, A. 6. 20) introduces both door ecphrases. But in the Aeneid passage, there is no integration of monument with ritual, of aesthetic and pragmatic functions as in the Georgics. The Sibyl rather turns Aeneas away from the temple’s aesthetic qualities towards its sacred function. She asserts it is not the time for spectacles (‘non hoc ista sibi tempus spectacula poscit’, 6. 37), but for sacriﬁce, and calls him into the temple (6. 41). The interruption sets religious rites over learning and pleasure. It limits reading and turns Aeneas from viewing to action.57 Even had the Trojans viewed it all (‘omnia’, 6. 33), their reading would still have been ﬂawed: Daedalus’ inability to depict his son’s death left an incomplete image. When the poet supplies the missing narrative,58 he highlights the speaking voice by apostrophizing Icarus: ‘tu quoque magnam j partem opere in tanto, sineret dolor, Icare, haberes’ (you would have had a great part in such a great work, if [his father’s] 55

Miller (1995): the labyrinth is a metonym for passion’s containment. A. Hardie (2002) 196 lists other temples recalled here, especially the Aedis Herculis Musarum (194–200). 57 Bartsch (1998) 334 suggests the Sibyl deters Aeneas from viewing from fear of the ‘imitative pull of the representation of violence’ (334–5). She then trumps this view of art with one favouring interpretative openness. 58 For this passage’s interpretation as the failure (Daedalus’) or success (Vergil’s) of art, Bartsch (1998) 336. Paschalis (1986): the door’s thematics—the sequential death of young men—anticipates the poem’s second half. 56

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grief had permitted, 6. 30–1). Apostrophe is a classic tool of enargeia: speaking out gives an impression of presence, while the technique’s artiﬁce recalls the addressee’s absence.59 Icarus is not represented in Daedalus’ art, but remains discursively present. Full comprehension is denied Aeneas, but the poet’s voice grants it to the reader. In the underworld, Anchises ‘reads’ the line of future Romans:60 et tumulum capit unde omnis longo ordine posset aduersos legere et uenientum discere uultus. (Aen. 6. 754–5) (And he reaches a high point from which he could read them all opposite in a long line and learn their faces as they came.)

The shades do not mill about, but arrange themselves in order like lines of text. The visual image matches the poetry. Anchises and the poet lead their respective audiences through things one by one (‘per singula duxit’, 888). The procession itself is a Roman ritual. The interpretative task is foregrounded as Anchises himself learns their faces (755) and teaches Aeneas his fate (‘te tua fata docebo’, 759). Vergil deploys enargeia and rhetorical point to make the spectacle available to Aeneas as internal viewer and the implied reader: deictics (e.g. ‘hic’, 789, bis 791; ‘ille’, 836, 838), rhetorical questions (e.g. 808–9; 841–5), dramatizations of viewing (e.g. ‘uiden?’, 779; ‘en’, 781). Anchises imparts both information and moral commentary. Aeneas learns eagerly, asking about Marcellus (863–6), his soul blazing with love of his future fate (‘incenditque animum famae uenientis amore’, 889). As in Eclogue 6, love inspires reading (above, 148). Vergil questions successful reading on interpretative and pragmatic levels. The exit of Aeneas and the Sibyl through the ivory gate, characterized as the gate of false dreams, is a famous crux. I note only the lack of consensus even whether this passage allegorizes interpretative failure: it certainly instantiates reading’s pitfalls, whether commenting on them or not.61 More secure is the pragmatic failure. Foreknowledge cannot prevent fate and Anchises mourns for young Marcellus’ lost potential. He succeeds in mourning with his trifold ‘heu’ (alas, twice in 878, 882), but characterizes the funeral offerings to Marcellus, lilies and crimson ﬂowers, with words with deep resonances in 59 For apostrophe, Culler, ‘Apostrophe’ (1981) 135–54; Lowrie (1997) 20–6; for enargeia, Zanker (1981), Webb (1997). 60 R. D. Williams (1972) comments that legere means ‘scan’ and notes the similarity to Aen. 6. 34 (discussed below). 61 The suggestion that Vergil ﬁgures interpretative dilemma goes back to Servius Aen. 6. 893: ‘uult . . . intellegi falsa esse omnia quae dixit’. Norden at 893ff. lists rationalizing interpretations. Austin ad loc.: we cannot know what Vergil means. R. D. Williams (1972) ad loc.: ‘possibly Virgil symbolizes the uncertainty of his own religious vision’.

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Latin poetry: ‘et fungar inani j munere’ (and I will perform an empty task/give an empty gift, 885–6). Vergil uses fungi (to perform) only here: perhaps it is prosaic (Norden 346), perhaps he doubts performative felicity. Catullus uses munus for poetry’s pragmatic function (Ch. 2). The word does not here pertain directly to Vergil’s poem, but like inanis (empty) of the murals on Juno’s temple in Carthage (see below), raises broader questions about art and social exchange. Even if the reader emerges as a citizen, it is not clear there is potential for agency beyond useless mourning. The characters’ inability to interpret the great ecphrases in the Aeneid is notorious: Aeneas misreads the panels in Juno’s temple in book 1 and is ignorant of the future when shouldering the shield in book 8; Turnus sees Pallas’ baldric as an object, not a representation.62 Writing appears uninterpretable within the ecphrasis in book 1. While Troilus is dragged behind Achilles’ chariot, his spear inscribes the sand—the signs left behind him, however, are meaningless: ‘huic ceruixque comaeque trahuntur j per terram, et uersa puluis inscribitur hasta’ (his neck and hair are dragged over the ground, and the sand is inscribed with his turned spear, 1. 477–8). The spear, turned the wrong way, is a metaphorical stylus. Horace tells writers to turn the stylus often (‘saepe stilum uertas’, Serm. 1. 10. 72), to erase and rewrite in the interest of writing something worth reading twice. Here, writing and erasure blur. The images are ‘empty pictures’ (‘pictura . . . inani’, 1. 464), like the empty writing they depict. The difference is that the panels do represent, although the pictures cannot restore those who have been lost or change history. The most they offer is consolation, if that.63 The writing, however, produces no meaning whatsoever. The spear’s metaphorical inscription signiﬁes Troilus’ death without commemoration—at least in the description. Vergil provides the memorial at a remove. Aeneas is blind to Juno’s wrath and does not consider that the Trojan war shown on her temple is told from his enemies’ perspective. His assumptions reveal Roman expectations: monumental representation entails sympathetic praise. sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. solue metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.

(Aen. 1. 461–3)

(Here are even the rewards due praiseworthy action, are tears for things, and mortal affairs touch the mind. Release your fears; this fame will bring you some help.)

62

Fowler (2000) 78–81 suggests the reader should read tragically, like Aeneas, not triumphantly (81); Barchiesi (1997b) 275, 277. 63 Johnson (1976) 104–5 explains ‘inani’ as art’s inability to provide emotional satisfaction; it is in the end illusory; Horsfall 107 n. 40.

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Aeneas’ inference that his reputation offers salvation follows from these assumptions. The ‘praemia laudi’ correspond to ‘fama’, the sympathy to ‘salus’.64 Aeneas passes from the images’ content to the reason they were established and their function; he derives what welcome to expect from these images. Pallas’ baldric is an object whose pragmatic import surpasses its aesthetic value. When Turnus strips off the baldric, he does not read the images on it. The poet describes the Danaids’ slaughter of their husbands on their wedding night, without indication Turnus has seen anything but monetary value. Again a Vergilian ecphrasis recalls the temple of Palatine Apollo, whose portico depicted the Danaids, but the thematic and ideological resonances that exercise modern scholarship completely bypass the characters.65 Turnus treats the baldric not as an artwork with embossed images (‘impressum . . . nefas’ (evil pressed in), 10. 497), but as spoils (‘et laeuo pressit pede talia fatus j exanimem rapiens immania pondera baltei’ (and, having said such things, he pressed on the dead with his left foot snatching the baldric’s immense weight), 10. 495–6).66 The difference between ‘pressit’ and ‘impressum’ spans a potentially aesthetic response and the baldric’s treatment as a mere object. Its content matters less than its symbolic value, and this prompts authorial comment. Whereas after the shield ecphrasis, Vergil says Aeneas marvels and rejoices in the images without comprehension (8. 730), here a different kind of incomprehension receives comment: ‘nescia mens hominum fati sortisque futurae’ (the mind of men is unknowing of fate and of their future lot, 10. 502). Turnus does not notice the images to misread them, but rather misreads his action’s consequences. Turno tempus erit magno cum optauerit emptum intactum Pallanta, et cum spolia ista diemque oderit. (Aen. 3. 503–5) (There will be a time when Turnus would greatly wish Pallas had been bought untouched and hate those spoils and the day (he took them).)

Turnus will hate not the baldric itself, but his action, which turned it into spoils. He would ‘buy back’ his despoiling of Pallas, but the economic metaphor reveals his pragmatic conception of value. When Aeneas views the baldric, unlike Turnus, he engages in an act of interpretation. He drinks the object in with his eyes, but, like Turnus, he does 64

Horsfall 107, with n. 39. Putnam (1998) 198. Spence (1991) 12: the baldric represents Pallas, but also itself carries a representation. Aeneas sees the former, the reader the latter. 66 Nicholas Horsfall suggests to me that with ‘immania’, Vergil nods to the monstrosities depicted. 65

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not read the images for their content. He reacts rather to his painful memory of Turnus’ taking it. ille, oculis postquam saeui monimenta doloris exuuiasque hausit, furiis accensus et ira terribilis (Aen. 12. 945–7) (That man, after he drank in with his eyes the monuments of cruel pain and the spoils, inﬂamed with fury and terrible in anger)

He in fact apprehends the object’s emotional import correctly. The hendiadys ‘monimenta exuuiasque’ effectively sums up the baldric’s pragmatic function for both Turnus and Aeneas—spoils and a reminder of pain. The reader knows, however, that the baldric is a monimentum not just as a reminder of personal pain to Aeneas, but that it also commemorates an important myth. Furthermore, this word evokes textuality. As in many of the other ecphrases, writing leaves metaphoric traces. This monument, furthermore, engenders a metaphoric ritual. Aeneas’ reaction to seeing it incites him to kill Turnus. His decision, however, does not present the killing, as he could have, as a legitimate act of war—we must supply that. He speaks of vengeance, which corresponds to his responsibility for Pallas, but also of sacriﬁce: ‘Pallas te hoc uulnere, Pallas j immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit’ (Pallas, Pallas with this wound offers you in sacriﬁce and takes vengeance from deﬁled blood, 12. 948–9). The sacriﬁce is no more literal than the monument, but conjoined they unite, as often, a performative moment with a representational object.67 We readers supply an interpretation beyond the characters’ capacity, yet for them, it is a matter of life or death. The Ganymede ecphrasis (Aeneid 5. 250–7) offers a familiar pattern writ small and less fraught: a static representational object performs a social role. Aeneas gives the cloak, woven with a depiction of the rape of Ganymede, as a prize in a ritual context, the funeral games for Anchises. Textuality leaves traces in the object’s description: the fabric’s weave ﬁgures textual composition. In addition to literal meanings, ‘intexo’ (OLD 4b; TLL IB2) was used since Cicero for incorporating a passage into a book or speech. This meaning pertains to a purple textual passage as much as to the boy’s image on cloth. The weaving metaphor also attends Aeneas’ shield: ‘non enarrabile textum’ (a fabric that cannot be narrated, 8. 625). Its inability to be narrated implies a disparity between visual and verbal representation and ‘textum’ works both literally for a framework of intercrossing timbers on the shield (OLD 2), and

67 For sacriﬁce in the Aeneid, Bandera (1981), P. Hardie (1993b) ch. 2, ‘Sacriﬁce and Substitution’. For layered violence, Lowrie (2005b).

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ﬁguratively, by evoking other ecphrases where weaving ﬁgures textuality.68 In most Vergilian ecphrases, understanding is reserved for the reader, while the characters use the objects pragmatically, as prize or in battle. Aeneas’ shield is the most ideologically weighted ecphrasis in the poem. Like the procession of heroes in book 6, it represents not myth but history, but here the vision is literally triumphalist: the description of the battle of Actium culminates in Caesar’s triple triumph where he receives tribute before the temple of Apollo (8. 714–22). Vergil conjoins the monumental leitmotif of his ecphrases with the grandest festival under Augustus before the ludi saeculares and combines two historical events: the triple triumph of 29 with the dedication of the temple to Palatine Apollo in 28 BCE (Drew 1924; Kraggerud 1998: 14). Vergil fashions these events into a meditation on the representational potential of performance and plastic media. Interspersed among the initial scenes encircling the Actium panel are several monuments, festivals, or both, anticipating Caesar. Consequent on the rape of the Sabines, the kings establish a treaty by sacriﬁcing on the altar of Jupiter (8. 638–41); Manlius stands guard before the temple on the Capitoline (8. 653); there are dancing Salii, the nude Luperci, and chaste matrons leading ritual processions through the city (8. 663–5). Verbal links recall other passages where monuments and rituals come together. The Georgics’ projected poem with Caesar ‘in medio’ (3. 16) is realized by his placement in the Actium scene ‘in medio’ (Aen. 8. 675; both phrases line initial). The shield dedicated at Actium stands near Leucate (Aen. 3. 274) where the shield depicting Actium situates the battle (8. 677; Leucate second foot in each). Vergil’s ecphrases often contain a mise en abyme, where an ostensibly irrelevant but thematic word carries larger connotations. In the shield, ‘canebat’ evokes the poet’s song. While we might resist connecting poetic activity with that a goose, canere is marked, and in the Eclogues Lycidas compares himself modestly to a goose: ‘nam neque adhuc Vario uideor nec dicere Cinna j digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores’ (For I do not seem yet to have said things worthy of Varius or Cinna, but to honk as a goose among swans, 9. 35–6). Mention of contemporary historical poets encourages us to identify

68

This interpretation of ‘enarrabile’ goes back to Servius, Laird (1996) 78; Bartsch (1998) 327. Fowler (2000) ch. 3 queries the traditional dichotomy dividing narration from description. Putnam (1998) 187–8 notes the fabric metaphor in textum: ‘enarrabile’ indicates the ecphrasis is synecdoche for all Roman history; the description partially accounts for the object. Ecphrasis, weaving, and poetic self-consciousness go back to Helen’s weaving a cloth depicting the Iliad ’s subject matter (Il. 3. 125–8); Scheid and Svenbro (1996), especially ch. 6. Apollonius, Arg. 1. 721–68; Catullus 64. 48. 51, 265–6; Ovid, Met. 6. 70–128 (Arachne and Minerva’s tapestries), 6. 576–8 (Philomela’s tapestry). Richard Thomas (1983) 107–11 conjectures an ecphrasis of a peplos in Callimachus; for Ovid, Leach (1974).

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Lycidas with Vergil himself.69 The epic goose is transformed to match its genre. Instead of the lowly ‘strepere’ (to make a loud noise), the sacred goose sings with the poet’s characteristic verb. Its song, however, differs pragmatically: the goose warns, while the poet supposedly praises. While warning frequently attends praise in epinician, particularly when the poet addresses a tyrant, the nature of the warning is different here. Vergil represents, but does not address Augustus; the goose’s alarm indicates present danger, while warnings to heads of state tend towards the moral. The song of the goose with its simple pragmatic function is a foil to the complexity of poetic effectiveness. While an alarm must work in a present moment of danger, the poet’s song needs to endure to be successful. Furthermore, the alarm is easy to understand, while the shield meets with incomprehension. Since Aeneas met important characters from Roman history in the underworld, he could theoretically recognize a central ﬁgure such as Augustus. But even prophecy about his own future is hard for Aeneas to understand; Roman history exceeds his reach: talia per clipeum Volcani, dona parentis, miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum.

(Aen. 8. 729–31)

(He marvels at such things on the shield of Vulcan, the gift of his parent, and, ignorant of the content, he rejoices in the image, raising to his shoulder the fame and fate of his grandchildren.)

Here the disparity between the poem’s internal viewer and implied reader is perhaps the greatest. Although Putnam (1998: 120) uses reading metaphorically for both our and Aeneas’ viewing of the shield, the one explicit trace of textuality is ‘in ordine’ (in order, 8. 629). Vulcan arranges the images just as Anchises reviewed his descendants: in order. Here the alleged order is hard to reconstruct visually while chronology is the sticking point for the future Romans. In each, the order corresponds better to the poet’s arrangement of the material. This makes it no easier for his internal viewer, who lacks the cultural background of the contemporary Roman and later readers. The disparity results in something unique for Aeneas: an aesthetic response of marvel and joy. Why uncomprehending aesthetics here? Viewing the shield is the primary locus, if any in the Aeneid, for the reader to don the mantle of imperial citizenship. But for Aeneas, understanding and aesthetic response are

69 The commentaries (Coleman, Clausen) note Servius’ identiﬁcation of a satiric pun on the poet Anser. The overt meaning aligns Lycidas with Vergil.

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divorced. The shield is useful as defensive armour, not as a guide for decisionmaking. Poet and reader rather share the burden of poetry’s use function. Speaking history is the poet’s national task. He retails what has already been said (fatum) to prolong its fame. The reader’s job is to receive this speech. The monument, reading, and song come together in two passages in Aeneid 9. In the ﬁrst, Vergil’s promise of poetic immortality to Nisus and Euryalus recalls Horace, Odes 3. 30. fortunati ambo! si quid mea carmina possunt, nulla dies umquam memori uos eximet aeuo, dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit. (Aen. 9. 446–9) (Fortunate pair! If my songs have any power, no day will ever remove you from a mindful age, while Aeneas’ house dwells on the immovable rock of the Capitoline and the Roman father will maintain empire.)

The condition politely asserts poetic power with an implied speech act, the promise to memorialize the dead heroes, poetry’s canonical task. But the condition also leaves the question open. Vergil’s power, like Horace’s in Odes 3. 30, is commensurate with empire. The Roman poets take empire as everlasting, but by framing temporality in political terms, rather than relying on a divine Muse, they forgo universal claims for cultural particularity. Vergil symbolizes imperium with a monument, Aeneas’ house on the Capitoline, bound to unmoving rock.70 Horace’s image is less concrete and based in ritual. The pontiff and Vestal climb the same Capitoline, but poetry and ritual surpass mere physical monuments (Ch. 4). Poetry for Vergil, however, does more than merely record. Nisus and Euryalus are his invention. He confers fame on an otherwise unknown story. Furthermore, Vergil’s self-representation here corresponds in many ways to Aeneas’ assumptions about Juno’s temple in book 1. The pathos created by the disparity between the heroes’ death and the blessing of poetic immortality shows Vergil’s lacrimae rerum, even if he will not save his characters. The implied textual metaphor of the monumental Capitoline meets a more explicit reading metaphor when Vergil invokes the Muses shortly thereafter. uos, o Calliope, precor, aspirate canenti quas ibi tum ferro strages, quae funera Turnus ediderit, quem quisque uirum demiserit Orco, et mecum ingentis oras euoluite belli. (Aen. 9. 525–8)

70 Parallels at Hardie 9. 446 and 448–9: Aeneas’ house also occurs in a prophecy of ‘Rome’s eternal and universal power’ (3. 97–8).

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(You, O Calliope, I pray, inspire me while I sing what slaughter, what deaths Turnus handed out there at that time with his sword, what man each sent down to the underworld, and unroll with me the huge territory71 of war.)

The Muses inspire song, as expected, and Calliope eventually becomes epic’s Muse. Calling on the Muse in preparation for a catalogue is a Homeric convention. By quoting Ennius, however, (‘quis potis ingentis oras euoluere belli?’ (who could unroll the huge territory of war?), 164Sk), Vergil turns this Greek and oral constellation of topoi towards writing. Unrolling implies a scroll (Sk ad loc.) and Ennius generally conceives of his poetry as writing. Vergil answers the question: he can, but needs the Muse’s help, and furthermore, he will sing. But he does not entirely eclipse the technical vocabulary of reading, which comes in precisely when he memorializes the dead. Vergil needs writing as a concept to give permanence to his tributes. He turns to Ennius to balance the oral with the written tradition of epic self-deﬁnition. But Ennius also serves because he asks a question of poetic power. When Vergil raises this question of himself, the media join poetic efﬁcacy as topics. Aeneas, Vergil’s only analogue as a writer in the Aeneid, sets up an inscription at Actium on nothing less than a shield. Both write songs for shields associated with Actium. Whereas many ecphrases allegorize reading, here is a rare allegory of writing. Many elements are familiar.72 This monument follows the establishment of altars and celebratory games. aere cauo clipeum, magni gestamen Abantis, postibus aduersis ﬁgo et rem carmine signo: AENEAS HAEC DE DANAIS VICTORIBVS ARMA (Aen. 3. 286–8) (A shield of hollow bronze, the wielded burden of great Abas, I afﬁx to the posts opposite and I sign the deed with a song: ‘Aeneas gives these arms from the victorious Greeks.’)

Again, a mythic monument anticipates an Augustan temple to Apollo, here the one he would build at Actium.73 Unlike Dido’s temple to Juno, who had been victorious against the Trojans, or the shield celebrating Augustus’ triple triumph over Eastern barbarians, this shield is not triumphalist. Aeneas, oddly enough, dedicates spoils taken from the victors. This is an inverse

71

Hardie ad loc., Sk 164. Horsfall (2006) ad loc. compares this inscription to that of Daphnis (Ecl. 5), noted by Servius. 73 Horsfall (2006) at 3. 287 compares 8. 721 and Suet. Aug. 18. 2 for the ‘Actian and Augustan’ nature of the dedication. The inscription marks the ‘poet’s undervalued epigraphic culture’ (an inscription honouring Caieta at Aen. 7. 3–4 is intimated), and indicates literacy in the epic world. 72

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trophy commemorating escape. Far from a simple dichotomy between Greek and Trojan, vanquished and victors, the cultural blurring colouring the games provides a complex idea of imperial identity.74 Allusion to the games Augustus established at the site casts these Trojan games in a Greek light:75 Actiaque Iliacis celebramus litora ludis. exercent patrias oleo labente palaestras nudati socii (Aen. 3. 280–2) (We throng the Actian shore with Trojan games. Bared allies exercise their ancestral wrestling bouts with slippery olive oil.)

The palaestra, competing in the nude, and olive oil evoke Greece despite the games’ identiﬁcation as Ilian and Aeneas’ relief to have escaped so many Argive cities (3. 282–3). The Greeks may be the enemy, but they are less alien than might ﬁrst appear. Similarly, the Egyptian enemy on Aeneas’ shield, depicted as barbarians, turns out to represent one side of a Roman civil war. To be a citizen of empire entails recognizing self-difference and perhaps also not drawing a stark line between victory and defeat. Rome’s foundation depended on Troy’s fall; the empire grew on the assimilation of the conquered. The Trojans do engage in reading, but it is transferred to their journey over the imperial landscape: ‘litoraque Epiri legimus’ (we scan the shores of Epirus, 3. 292). Do they read the landscape correctly? Their next stop is Buthrotum, where they witness a doomed recreation of the past, where Troy is refounded not as Rome, but as a miniature of itself. They reject this model for something bigger and outside their ken. Aeneas’ interpretative abilities may be limited, but he is on the right track. He reads monuments pragmatically. He is capable of aesthetic response. He may not unite the qualities needed in a reader at one go, but his own writing contributes to fame and his poignant commemoration of loss makes his expectation of sympathy from those who establish war memorials understandable.

Carmentis, Foundation, and Song Aeneas is not the primary internal poet ﬁgure in the Aeneid. He is an imperfect reader and a writer of inscriptions. Vergil presents other models 74 The multiple peoples making up the eventual Romans throughout the Aeneid’s second half suggest a more pluralistic and inclusive society than the shield’s stark dichotomies: Lowrie (2005b) 971–6; Reed (2007) 6–13. 75 R. D. Williams (1962) at 3. 278f. and 280: Vergil transferred the games Aeneas inaugurated at Zacynthus to Actium in allusion to the games Augustus established there on the model of the Greek festivals. Horsfall (2006) at 3. 281 notes the festival’s paradoxical Greek and Trojan nature.

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for poetic song. Iopas’ song (‘canit’, 1. 742) recalls Vergil’s earlier foray into didactic poetry; the Sibyl’s prophetic song approaches Vergil’s own. But as with the few lines on Aeneas’ inscription, which allegorize writing in brief, another short passage sets out another model for the poet’s foundational song. The lines on Carmentis, Evander’s mother, address the Aeneid’s driving plot, the foundation of Rome, and touch on Vergil’s embrace of song. I argue there are similar limitations on foundational song as on writing’s interpretability. While writing disappoints in its ability to elicit comprehension, song falls short in the pragmatic domain. Evander tells Aeneas his own story at the site of Rome—this sounds in many ways like that of Aeneas himself. ‘me pulsum patria pelagique extrema sequentem Fortuna omnipotens et ineluctabile fatum his posuere locis, matrisque egere tremenda Carmentis nymphae monita et deus auctor Apollo.’ Vix ea dicta, dehinc progressus monstrat et aram et Carmentalem Romani nomine portam quam memorant, nymphae priscum Carmentis honorem, uatis fatidicae, cecinit quae prima futuros Aeneadas magnos et nobile Pallanteum. (Aen. 8. 333–41) (‘All-powerful Fortune and inescapable fate placed me in this location when I was driven from my fatherland and pursuing sea’s hard treatment. My mother’s fearsome warnings drove me—the nymph Carmentis—and Apollo was the guarantor god.’ These things scarcely said, he moved forward from here and showed the altar and gate the Romans call ‘Carmentalis’ as an ancient honour for the nymph Carmentis, a fatetelling bard, who ﬁrst sang that Aeneas’ sons would be great and Pallanteum noble.)

Carmentis and Evander share foundational status. She ﬁrst (‘prima’) predicted Rome’s future greatness and he is called the ‘founder of the Roman citadel’ (‘tum rex Euandrus Romanae conditor arcis’, 8. 313). As Michel Serres and others have remarked, Rome is continually refounded.76 This ﬁrst fully human foundation resembles subsequent ones. Evander and Aeneas are obviously parallel: both were driven from their homeland and subject to ineluctable fate; they have Apollo’s backing, are helped by their mothers, and follow a woman seer’s prophecy; both are proto-founders of Rome. The link to Apollo further intimates parallels with Augustus (Gransden at 8. 333–6). While Evander is an Aeneas ﬁgure, his mother evokes the poet (ibid. 8. 340–1). Carmentis’ association with song is ﬁrmly established with ‘fatidicae’ 76

Serres (1991) passim; Lowrie (2005b) 952–3.

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and ‘cecinit’. While her religious function concerned childbirth and etymological wordplay emphasizes the similarity between her name and ‘carpentum’, the matron’s wagon, as much as between her name and song,77 Vergil exploits a popular and characteristically Roman etymology.78 He moreover foregrounds song to the exclusion of a similar association between Evander and writing. Carmentis replicates Vergil’s own choices. Dionysius of Halicarnassus tells us that Arcadians brought Greek letters to Italy (1. 33. 4) and Tacitus that Evander taught the so-called Aborigines letters (Ann. 11. 14. 4).79 But Livy offers the most interesting comparandum. Euander tum ea, profugus ex Peloponneso, auctoritate magis quam imperio regebat loca, uenerabilis uir miraculo litterarum, rei nouae inter rudes artium homines, uenerabilior diuinitate credita Carmentae matris, quam fatiloquam ante Sibyllae in Italiam aduentum miratae eae gentes fuerant. (Livy 1. 7. 8) (At that time Evander, a fugitive from the Peloponnese, was ruling those places, more by authority than by military power, a man venerable for the marvel of letters, a new thing among people ignorant of the arts, even more venerable because of the believed divinity of his mother Carmenta, whom those races had admired as a prophetess before Sibyl’s arrival in Italy.)

Several words resonate with both Aeneas and Augustus: Evander is ‘profugus’ (exile, Aen. 1. 2) and rules more by auctoritas (authority) than imperium (power to command). His mother is in both authors a ‘speaker of fate’ (Livy ‘fatiloquam’; Vergil ‘fatidicae’). Livy, however, links the pair to writing and song. This passage follows with an account of Evander’s welcoming Hercules to Rome—another similarity to Vergil, whose Evander tells the story at Aen. 8. 184–278. Livy’s Evander recognized Hercules because his mother sang a prophecy about him (‘cecinit’, 1. 7. 10). Mother and son together engage in the available media of representation. Similarly, after reporting that the Arcadians brought Greek letters to Italy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus says they also brought music performed on various string and reed instruments. For him, as for Livy, writing and song belong to the same cultural dimension. By contrast, Vergil consistently excludes writing from foundational song and here leaves it conspicuously out.

77 Wissowa (1971) 219–21 notes the discrepancy between her literary and cultic functions. Ernout–Meillet under carmen; Eden at Vergil, Aeneid 8. 336ff. Ogilvie at Livy 1. 7. 8 dismisses alternative etymologies. 78 Carmentis from carmen: Dion. Hal. 1. 31. 1; Ovid, Fasti 1. 467; Plut. Quaest. rom. 56 and Romulus 21 (etymology refuted: carmen rather from Carmentis); D. Serv. at Aen. 8. 336; Martianus Capella 2. 159; Isidore 1. 4. 1; Solinus 1. 10. Maltby at Carmentis. 79 Pliny, however, asserts the Pelasgians brought letters to Latium (NH 7. 193).

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Instead, as in the ecphrases discussed above, writing leaves traces through monuments. Aeneas has been hearing from Evander about the ‘monuments of prior men’ (‘uirum monimenta priorum’, 8. 312). The buildings that would become famous have not yet been built, but deeds already existed to serve as models or warnings. Furthermore, Evander points out ruins, also monuments, left by the prior Saturnian inhabitants (‘reliquias ueterumque uides monimenta uirorum’ (you see the remains and monuments of old men), 8. 356). In between, Carmentis’ link to the monimentum goes deeper than the physical gate, the Porta Carmentalis, preserving her name. Her prophecies are ‘monita’ (8. 336), a word that shares its etymology with monimentum and aligns her poetic activity with the poet’s. In book 7, he does not author his own ‘warnings’, but invokes a Muse, Erato, to warn him (‘tu uatem, tu, diua, mone’ (you goddess, you warn your bard), 7. 41). Carmentis, as a goddess, can author her own. Vergil breaks down the monument’s various aspects here. Carmentis issues warnings; the Porta Carmentalis honours her name and memory. Honour, the preservation of memory, warning through exemplarity—these are literature’s canonical functions. Although Evander’s role in bringing letters to Italy is eclipsed, writing’s cultural function is transferred onto the monumental gate. If in Livy, writing and song together engage in cultural transmission, Vergil’s song and monument cover a similar ideational range. The passage on Carmentis is in the poet’s voice, sandwiched between speeches by Evander. The gate already exists in Aeneas’ time—Evander points it out, together with an altar. By Vergil’s time, the honour to Carmentis can be qualiﬁed as ancient. The shift in voice and point of view spans the Aeneid’s dual temporal perspective: both Aeneas and contemporary Romans can view the monument. But the connection between these moments surpasses mere physical persistence. Vergil does appreciate persistence; in his grant of poetic immortality to Nisus and Euryalus, he emphasizes the immobility of the Capitoline. Here, however, ritual repetition links the monument then with the monument now. Besides the gate, she is honoured with an altar. Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports he has seen an altar to Carmentis by the Porta Carmentalis near the Capitoline, where yearly sacriﬁces are offered (1. 32. 2). Ovid has Carmentis predict she will ‘one day receive sacriﬁce on perpetual altars’ (‘ego perpetuis olim sacrabor in aris’, Fasti 1. 535). With the altar, Vergil hints at the activities there that provided an unbroken chain between Aeneas’ time and his own. Evander and Carmentis are in many ways foundational, but just as Vergil sets limits on writing’s interpretability, he similarly stops short of fully foundational song. Another aspect of foundation could be, but is not associated with them: laying down the law. Here the difference between poetic and political power

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emerges. In Horace’s Ars poetica, Orpheus and Amphion, both characterized as carmen-singing uates, the latter as a ‘conditor urbis’ (founder of a city, AP 400–1, 394), are also lawgivers (‘leges incidere ligno’ (to carve laws onto wood), 399). Dionysius of Halicarnassus tells us the Arcadians, namely Evander and Carmentis, brought laws along with music to Italy (1. 33. 4). In Aeneid 8, the lawmaker is neither Evander nor Carmentis, but a divine founder: Saturn (‘legesque dedit’, 8. 322). He, like Evander and Aeneas, was also a fugitive (‘exsul’, 8. 320) and was ﬂeeing from Zeus. The parallel between Saturn and Evander as founders is close, since ‘condere’ and ‘arx’ attach to both in fewer than ﬁfty lines (Evander: ‘Romanae conditor arcis’ (the founder of the Roman citadel), 8. 313; ‘hanc Saturnus condidit arcem’ (Saturnus founded this citadel), 8. 357). The difference between them is precisely in establishing the law or not. Saturn’s association with lawgiving is inextricable from the ‘golden age’ that spread under his reign (‘aurea . . . j saecula’, 8. 324–5). I think Vergil does not make the Arcadians lawgivers because they ﬁgure his own foundational song and he shrinks from such responsibility. He lends this role, as conventional, to Numa (‘regis Romani primam qui legibus urbem j fundabit’ (of the Roman king who will ﬁrst found the city on laws), 6. 810– 11). He furthermore makes the gods the guarantors of law under Augustus. Jupiter predicts in Aeneid 1 that Fides, Vesta, Quirinus, and Remus, will establish justice when Augustus reigns (‘iura dabunt’ (they will give laws), 1. 292–3). Anchises similarly predicts in Aeneid 6 that Augustus will found another golden age and extend the Roman empire. Augustus Caesar, diui genus, aurea condet saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arua Saturno quondam, super et Garamantas et Indos proferet imperium (Aen. 6. 792–5) (Augustus Caesar, the race of a god, who will found again a golden age in Latium over ﬁelds once ruled by Saturn, he will additionally extend empire over the Garamantes and Indians.)

The analogy to Saturn puts Augustus in the company of a lawgiver, even if Vergil shies from calling him such directly. Vergil divides up foundation into lawgiving and ruling on the one hand, and a complex form of representation on the other, where song, monument, and transmission of memory through ritual go hand in hand. Carmentis’ song, like Vergil’s, encompasses divine inspiration and features, like longevity, conventionally associated with writing. Their representation furthers empire, but neither has access to the power that brings it into being.

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The Book of Fate80 So far, I have argued Vergil privileges song over writing. This is, however, only partly true. Vergil sublates writing with the metaphor of the book of fate. All human representation yields to the divine. Writing ﬁgures immutable speech,81 so that fate, etymologized from fari (speak) since antiquity,82 invites the metaphor of the book. Vergil hints the Parcae read their prophecy about Rome’s eclipse of Carthage from a scroll: ‘sic uoluere Parcas’ (thus the Fates (un)roll/read, Aen. 1. 22). Jupiter reveals the fates to Venus with language suggesting reading (‘fabor enim . . . j longius et uoluens fatorum arcana mouebo’ (for I will speak further and set the fates’ secrets in motion by unrolling/reading), Aen. 1. 261–2).83 Speech’s relation to writing is indeterminate: Jupiter puns on fate with ‘fabor’ (I will speak, 1. 261). Will he reveal the book’s contents, or will his speech be recorded?84 Either way, Jupiter reassures Venus of permanence (‘manent immota . . . j fata’ (the fates remain unmoved), 1. 257–8)85 and guarantees the Roman empire for contemporaries (‘imperium sine ﬁne dedi’ (I have given empire without end), 1. 278). Vergil, who strenuously critiques the Sibyl’s writing, preserves its ﬁxity by elevating it to the gods. The book of fate sets the Aeneid’s double perspective in a Mo¨bius strip: Vergil represents his country’s past as prophecy, but this ‘forespeech’ derives in turn from a divine book.86 This may be why Anchises can ‘read’ the parade of Roman heroes. But if we suppose the book of fate trumps Vergil’s song, James O’Hara suggests the text may prevail after all: ‘this etymologizing [in Jupiter’s speech above] sets up an expectation that will be frustrated, as events of the poem prove to be more complicated than Jupiter’s deceptively reassuring words to Venus promise’ (1996: 108). Neither the gods nor human institutions in the end make words correspond to reality or preserve them effectively. Vergil’s utterance controls Jupiter’s: while the god may trust his performative power, the real ability to determine the narrative 80

This section owes much to a talk given by Don Fowler at Princeton in 1994. His book on the book in Latin poetry is forthcoming. 81 With ‘nescit uox missa reuerti’ (a word sent does not know how to come back, AP 390) Horace transfers a tag from utterance to literary composition. 82 Varro, LL 6. 52; Minucius Felix 36. 2: ‘quid . . . aliud est fatum quam quod de unoquoque nostrum deus fatus est’ (what else is fate but what god has said about each and every one of us?); Maltby ad loc. 83 Austin ad loc. is less conﬁdent of the book-roll metaphor than R. D. Williams (1972). 84 O’Hara (1990) 40, 137–8; Feeney (1991) 139–40; O’Hara (1996) 108, 121. 85 Though, like speech, fate can be revised or reinterpreted, as when Jupiter reconciles Juno in Aen. 12, Feeney (1991) 151. 86 For Vergil as a prophet, though not entirely truthful, see O’Hara (1990) 176–84.

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lies with the author. If Jupiter’s speaking (‘fabor’) results in fate (fatum), Vergil’s singing (‘cano’) produces a ﬁxed text, but he leaves it to us to identify his song as writing (Barchiesi 2001b: 130–2). We are all implicated in the production or reception of imperial representations in the Aeneid. Vergil sketches possible reactions, aesthetic, pragmatic, some more successful than others, none perfect. More important than getting it right is some form of engagement and somehow muddling through.

7 Elegy: Overcoming Inability Elegy is to all appearances in revolt against imperial citizenship, early love elegy in particular. Its interests rather lie in protecting individual rights to erotic selfabsorption. This is, of course, a political gesture that comes with more than a grain of salt. But resistance to militarism and the responsibilities of marriage also accords with the social reality of the development of an increasingly private sphere even during Augustus’ ﬁrst decade. This chapter examines how the elegists see their own social power in light of the way they represent their and others’ media. The elegiac couplet’s putative history as a verse for inscription makes for a primary association of elegy with writing. This would suggest a strong commemorative function, but Roman elegy’s obsession with sex makes writing and the tomb a threat to fulﬁlment in the present and the genre’s relation to writing is fraught. Song is a temptation—a powerful mode of discourse to be held at arm’s length, appropriated, spoofed, or tossed aside in the endless rounds of renegotiating the elegist’s place in the world. The poet’s failure to effect his desires is a leitmotif of Roman love elegy and Horace’s tag ‘querimonia’ (complaint, Ars 75) suggests the genre is expressive, rather than pragmatic. But this formulation belies the great staging of its poets’ inability—to win love, to praise, to be a player in normative Roman macho society, or even to establish a counter-culture where the ‘soft’ man rules or at least gets his due. The poets protest too much and are targets of their own humour. Erotic poetry, however, also provokes desire, perhaps even more so when the poet fails to get the girl. Longing keeps desire in play and talking about it arouses, distracts, and disturbs. Augustus’ suspicion of elegy was on target—no matter how much Ovid argues for poetry’s impotence, no matter how much elegists show their own failures, their poetry changes the game. There is a tremendous amount of elegy in Augustan Rome and, unlike other extant poetic genres, which tend to be dominated by individual authors, elegy has many adherents. The self-authorization strategies of each poet vary so much, generalizations can only be partial. Furthermore, elegy develops away from its primary association with love, so that Propertius’ more mytho-historical fourth

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book, Ovid’s Fasti, and his exile poetry all establish poetic authority and question it in ways radically different from early elegy. Ovid’s Heroides and exile poetry also explore semiotic issues having to do with epistolarity that differ from the ﬁrst-person love elegist’s attempts to woo his beloved, though Ovid will attempt to woo his prince from exile. I make no claim here to comprehensiveness. Rather, I treat representative passages at the intersection of representational media, self-authorization, and self-doubt. This chapter is limited to Propertius and Ovid. Tibullus deserves attention, but I omit discussion because he is less complex. As a consistent song poet, he presents his speech as deﬁcient in winning love, but he is the most conﬁdent of the Augustan praise poets, perhaps because his praise is limited to his patron Messalla and his family and does not extend to Augustus. The elegiac epistles occupy the next section (Part II) and elegy returns in the book’s ﬁnal section on reading and the law (Part IV). Generally, I trace an arc toward greater self-conﬁdence and a greater interest in mediality and politics.

PROPERTIUS: PROCESSION AND INSCRIPTION Propertius’ main ostensible pragmatic aim is sex. The poetry is supposed to woo the girl into bed and keep her there (werbende Dichtung). She keeps springing out, however—a good thing for poetry, because if she stayed, it would be needed no longer.1 The frustration of the poet’s immediate aims, however, is only one elegiac conundrum. Propertius constantly and histrionically imagines himself dead. This threat spurs him to establish a readership that will mourn for him when dead and utter or inscribe elegiac mottoes over or on his grave. Sex and death are the poles around which early Propertian poetics revolves, and the alignment of this poetics to the poetry’s medium shifts over time and according to context.2 We might expect sex, presence, and utterance to line up against death, absence, and inscription, but Propertius’ conception of his medium is especially unstable. He does become increasingly interested in representational media as his political voice develops.3 If the monument and the festival are the loci for Vergil to work out the relation of the performative to the permanence associated with writing, Propertius starts 1 Fowler (2000) 161 discusses lovers’ desires to ‘sweep away the codes and conventions of love in order to be truly together’. They privilege bodily presence over semiotics. 2 La Penna (1977) 157–66 treats love and death. 3 Unlike Catullus, Vergil, Horace, Tibullus, or Ovid, where generic alignment impels a strong preponderance of either writing or singing vocabulary, Propertius is consistently, though unevenly mixed. The more the references to song, the more to writing.

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by embracing a smaller scope in keeping with his smaller genre and ostentatious lack of ambition. Rather than a whole festival and a complex monument such as a temple or shield, the procession—often a triumph, but sometimes a funeral corte`ge—and the tomb motto or inscription serve a similar function. Rather than offering a bridge to a larger political universe, as in Vergil, Propertius turns these tropes inward. But whether he takes these topics entirely seriously is always in suspense. The Monobiblos does not make a claim to full-ﬂedged song.4 That more often belongs to others, if then.5 His poetry is mostly ordinary words: uerba denotes poetry, love language, and communication with friends or rivals.6 It rises to carmen when represented as having pragmatic force (in contrast to Ponticus’ poetry, 1. 7. 10, 25; when it convinces Cynthia to stay, 1. 8b. 40), but seems to mean unmarked poetry at 1. 11. 8. Propertius does not identify his poetry strongly with writing in this book either. The ‘libelli’ (tablets) he sends Cynthia at 1. 11. 19 are a letter that perhaps but not necessarily consists of the poem itself. The association of elegy with writing seems restricted to the inscription of Cynthia’s name on a tree (‘scribitur’, 1. 18. 22), which is balanced by the echo of the poet’s uttering her name in the woods (21, 31).7 Poem 1. 7 stands out in deﬁning its author positively as a poet conﬁdent of winning a readership. Several motifs developed later are already present: a contrast between high-style song and less ambitious elegy, conceived as written; the implication that elegy’s function is pragmatic and will win the girl, but in the end can only console or mourn; the inevitability of death and with that pithy statements that could be inscribed on a tomb. Although Ponticus may rival Homer (3) with his high-style utterance (‘dicuntur’, 1)8 and his songs (4), Propertius presents himself more modestly as a love poet (5). The praise he hopes to win is restricted to his pleasing one learned girl (11), but he aspires to a wider readership through his poetry’s use for those unfortunate in love: ‘me legat 4

Canere only of Ponticus’ attempt to sing in a lighter vein (1. 9. 14). As an epic poet, he comes on too strong for love poetry (1. 9. 13). 5 Carmen: spells (1. 1. 24, 1. 18. 9), Cynthia sings on a lyre (1. 2. 27–8; called Orphic, 1. 3. 42), Ponticus’ poetry, whether epic or attempted love poetry (1. 7. 4, 20; with lyre, 1. 9. 9, 12), the songs of the paraclausithyron (1. 16. 10, 16, 41). 6 Poet’s poetry: 1. 1. 38; 1. 10. 18, possibly 1. 18. 21; love language: 1. 2. 29; 1. 6. 5; 1. 10. 6, 24; 1. 13. 32; 1. 15. 25; communication among others (friends or rivals): 1. 5. 17 (querenti gives elegiac colouring); another’s discourse, partially poetic: 1. 9. 2. Love language and communication with rivals or friends are also uoces: 1. 4. 18; 1. 5. 1; 1. 13. 3. Propertius defends his ability to speak (‘loqui’, 1. 1. 28). 7 Writing on trees crosses genres, Rothstein ad loc., Gow at Theocr. 18. 47 for parallels; amatory grafﬁti at Olson, Aristoph., Acharnians 144. 8 This verb attaches to Ponticus: also his utterance, 1. 9. 9, 33; the poet’s heightened utterance about him: reference back to 1. 7 at line 1, of prophecy at 6. Elsewhere of emphatic utterance pertaining to Cynthia (1. 8a. 24–5, 1. 8b. 32, 1. 11. 25).

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assidue post haec neglectus amator, j et prosint illi cognita nostra mala’ (let the neglected lover read me incessantly after this, and may the knowledge of my woes be of use to him, 13–14). Ponticus will long in vain to write love poetry if struck by Cupid’s arrow, but no ‘carmina’ (20) will be forthcoming. The implication is that love poetry helps win the girl, but it turns out that its pragmatic value is consolation instead. Unfortunate youths will exclaim over the poet’s grave: ‘ardoris nostri magne poeta, iaces’ (you lie, great poet of our passion, 24). Rather than helping in seduction, the poet and his readership engage in reciprocal acts of consolation and lamentation. But this at least is an improvement over Ponticus’ poetry, which, good as it may be, effects nothing at all. Book 2 contains a ﬂood of all kinds of media that sustains Propertius’ project of self-deﬁnition and intersects with the sex/death polarity informing his poetics. The book encompasses a trajectory from the ﬁrst poem where a clear difference between the afﬁliation of writing with slight genres and of song with high yields to a strong appropriation of song by written genres in the last.9 A deﬁning issue is what constitutes a suitable object of praise, and here the political import of Propertius’ poetic choices emerges, since the main contestants are the girl and Caesar.10 The deﬂation entailed in this contest is less politically threatening than coy. Propertius seems to enjoy setting up categories only to mix them up again. Propertius 2. 1 aligns elegy with writing, death, erotic themes, and a funerary monument, and higher genres with song, warfare, and social performance through the representation of a triumph. The poem opens by linking elegy with writing and reading aloud: ‘quaeritis, unde mihi totiens scribantur amores j unde meus ueniat mollis in ora liber’ (you ask, from where are loves so often written by me, from where my book comes soft on the lips, 2. 1. 1–2).11 Divine song is disavowed in favour of the girl as Muse, whose actions directly affect Propertius’ poetry, conceived as a book-roll: non haec Calliope, non haec mihi cantat Apollo, ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit. siue illam Cois fulgentem incedere {cogis{, hac totum e Coa ueste uolumen erit (2. 1. 3–6) 9

Given the uncertainty whether book 2 was originally one book or two, Goold (1990) 16–18, Keyser (1992), I refrain from claims about the whole. Nevertheless, the opening and closing positions in a book had especial weight, and 2. 1 and 2. 34 clearly relate to one another whether or not in the same book. 10 Stahl (1985) 249: ‘powerful Cynthia, and powerful Octavian’. 11 The commentators consistently take in ora (or in ore) of readers, not of the poet composing: Camps of publication; Rothstein of ‘vor Augen kommen’, who comments on scribere: ‘das altro¨mische, nach unserem Gefu¨hl wenig poetische Wort fu¨r das Dichten, gebrauchen Properz und andere Dichter unbedenklich’.

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(Calliope does not, Apollo does not sing these things to me, the girl herself makes my talent. If {you have{ her walk shining in Coan silks, the whole volume will be from this Coan garment . . . )

Propertius is a ‘poeta’ (2. 1. 12) rather than a ‘uates’ (bard). The entire apparatus of divine inspiration yields to an immediate correlation between lived experience and poetic composition, where the poetry is a scroll that corresponds not to its author’s condition, as sometimes, but to the subject. Made from silk, the scroll shares the girl’s attractions, but perhaps also her ﬂaws. Propertius again uses the vocabulary of song to characterize the higher style and genre of poetry he disavows: quod mihi si tantum, Maecenas, fata dedissent, ut possem heroas ducere in arma manus, non ego Titanas canerem, . . . bellaque resque tui memorarem Caesaris (2. 1. 17–25) (But if the fates had given me, Maecenas, to be able to lead heroic bands into arms, I would not sing of the Titans, . . . I would relate the wars and deeds of your Caesar)

Military topics are the purview of song and his silky scroll would be out of place. Propertius continues with a list of civil war topics he could, but will not sing—his personal reasons surpass generic decorum. The last poem of book 1 reveals that he lost someone close at Perusia (1. 22. 7).12 Propertius’ ostensible reason for avoiding these topics, however, has to do, as is conventional, with poetic decorum, expressed in terms of power. After citing Callimachus and his aesthetic of the slight or ‘narrow’ (‘angusto’, 39–40), he avers that each does according to ability: the soldier counts wounds, the shepherd sheep. nos contra angusto uersantes proelia lecto: qua pote quisque, in ea conterat arte diem. (2. 1 .45–6) (I rather turn battles on a narrow bed; each wears down the day in the art he can.)

Turning battles evokes turning verse; he turns his militarism towards the erotic and his poetry accords with his life. Choice or ability? Propertius ostentatiously chooses not to exercise a certain kind of poetic power directly, since his list of disavowed topics in fact surveys Augustan victories and his triple triumph. His power play is to insist on doing poetry his own way; his scroll is as wilful as a courtesan. Propertius displays will in redirecting Augustus’ triple triumph away from its honorand and toward Propertius’ friend and patron Maecenas: he is the 12

Stahl (1985) 165: Propertius could therefore not sincerely want to praise Augustus.

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one Propertius would emphasize if he did write this sort of poetry, not Augustus (35–6). The personal trumps the political. Also wilful is the turn from events to another medium of representation: the list of victories slides into a description of a triumph (27–34). Propertius consistently blurs life and representation. Experience is his inspiration and this surpasses rival genres: seu nuda erepto mecum luctatur amictu, tum uero longas condimus Iliadas; seu quidquid fecit siue est quodcumque locuta, maxima de nihilo nascitur historia. (2. 1. 13–16) (Whether she struggles nude with me, her garment snatched off, then truly we compose long Iliads; whether she does something or says something, the greatest history is born from nothing.)

While we might align the triumph generically with epic and history, Propertius brings it over to his conception of representation. What is represented in the triumph seems actually to do what it is represented as doing. The Nile cannot literally be described as ‘drawn into the City’; it did not ‘ﬂow weakly, its seven waters captive’ (‘cum attractus in urbem j septem captiuis debilis ibat aquis’, 31–2). The ﬂoat enables the image. For Actian ships’ beaks to run down the Sacred way (34), they are detached and carried as booty. Song might take Propertius towards political themes and triumph, but the latter entails a further level of representation. Where the triumph is an event for Horace, one he takes in the direction of performativity, Propertius sets in motion a long elegiac tradition of seeing the triumph as a medium of representation analogous to elegy. For Propertius, this means occluding the representational capacity of both. Ovid will turn this tack inside out and expose the workings of the triumph and his poetry alike. Propertius later undercuts the illusion that his poetry corresponds directly to experience by baldly admitting his praise derives from his imagination: ‘noster amor talis tribuit tibi, Cynthia, laudes’ (my love attributed such praise to you, Cynthia, 3. 24. 3) and ‘mixtam te uaria laudaui saepe ﬁgura, j ut, quod non esses, esse putaret amor’ (I often praised you as a blend of a number of beauties, so that love would think you were what you were not, 3. 24. 5–6). Propertius’ admission of his imagination’s role in creating the perfect girl paradoxically renders Cynthia all the more real, since a ﬂesh and blood woman would have to exist to fail to live up to the image. In 2. 1, poetry and reality are circular, since his girl rejoices in the praise he confers on her: ‘seu uidi ad frontem sparsos errare capillos, j gaudet laudatis ire superba comis’ (or if I see loose hair wandering over her forehead, she is pleased to go proudly with praised hair, 2. 1. 7–8). Experience engenders poetry, which reinforces the reality.

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Life experience, however, eventually ends in death and the poem turns morbid midway. Praise is the hinge and representation persists as a topic. Real praise attaches not to dying in warfare—no Horatian ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (it is sweet and beautiful to die for one’s country, Odes 3. 2. 13) here—but to dying for love (‘laus in amore mori’ (it is praiseworthy to die for love), 2. 1. 47). This contrasts implicitly to dying in civil war, which is neither sweet nor beautiful: ‘ciuilia busta’ (27) rings the wrong note for celebration. In 2. 1, overt praise is reserved for nothing less than the girl’s hair (8). Propertius glides over the tone of his hypothetical song about Caesar’s civil victories. How could it be anything but bitterly ironic? If praise attaches to anyone, it is to Maecenas for his loyalty (35–8). Propertius would appreciate Horace’s calling their shared patron ‘dulce decus meum’ (my sweet distinction, Odes 1. 1. 2). Friendship and love are serious elegiac values that civil war can only disrupt. As in 1. 7, Propertius knits together a thematic nexus where writing attaches to the elegiac conﬁguration of love and death. He transfers glory and loyalty from militaristic poetry towards elegy. The poem’s ﬁnal lines bring many of the elements from the disavowed subject over into elegy: the tomb (‘busta’, 27; ‘busto’, 75), address to Maecenas, glory (74), hardness (‘duro . . . uersu’, 41; ‘dura puella’, 78). The fates, who deny Propertius the ability to sing (17), will bring about his death (71) because of the girl (78). quandocumque igitur uitam mea fata reposcent, et breue in exiguo marmore nomen ero, Maecenas, nostrae spes inuidiosa iuuentae, et uitae et morti gloria iusta meae, si te forte meo ducet uia proxima busto, esseda caelatis siste Britanna iugis, taliaque illacrimans mutae iace uerba fauillae: ‘Huic misero fatum dura puella fuit.’ (Propertius 2. 1. 71–8) (Therefore whenever my fates ask for my life back, and I will be a brief name on a scanty marble, Maecenas, enviable hope of our youth, just glory to both my life and death, if by chance a close road will lead you by my tomb, halt your British carriage with its embossed yoke, and toss off such words, crying over my mute ash: ‘To this miserable man, a hard girl was his death.’)

Where the grand, epic themes require song, the elegiac medium is writing subject to the performativity of reading. In death Propertius will become (‘ero’) his own name on marble, that is, an inscription. The slight style marks the name (‘breue’) and the marble (‘exiguo’) in accord with elegy and unlike Horace’s ‘monumentum’ (Odes 3. 30). A procession also returns, but in reduced form. Propertius imagines Maecenas going down a road (‘uia’, 75)—not the

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triumphal Sacra Via (34)—in a highly ornamented British carriage. Geographic speciﬁcity turns imperial expansion towards style. The reduction of Augustus’ triumph matches the reduction in performativity from song to reading. Propertius dictates the words his friend should say over his tomb, so that the poem is analogous to the tombstone that addresses passers-by, telling them what to say. The poem merges notionally with the inscription. The poet may have been reduced to mute ash, but he gains voice (‘uerba’, 77) through his loyal readership. This passage deﬁnes Propertian elegy as writing to be read. He dictates his own terms and his art resists the call to song and all its ideological baggage. Horatian undercurrents show him to be reactive, but he puts the elements together in a fresh way, to suit his fresh genre. Poem 2. 1 sets a dichotomy between sung triumphal poetry in honour of Caesar and a written poetics revolving around sex and death, but the rest of the book veers in a number of different directions as Propertius toys with his reader. What emerges by the end of the book is writing’s appropriation of song. Media, praise, and power recur and reconﬁgure their relations in poems (or fragments) 2. 10 through 2. 14.13 In some places, reading and writing are speciﬁcally elegiac. Propertius would rather read in his girl’s lap than have Orpheus’ power to lead the trees (2. 13A). When he presents his girl as unworthy of praise, he uses the vocabulary of writing and vindictively denies her a funerary inscription (2. 11). When he decides to praise Augustus in 2. 10, he adopts the language of song. Taken out of context, the line ‘bella canam, quando scripta puella mea est’ (I will sing of war when my girl has been written, 2. 10. 8) polarizes written elegy with sung epic, each genre indicated by its appropriate subject matter.14 Rising to song requires strength (‘iam, carmina, sumite uires’ (now, songs, take strength), 2. 10. 11); the military subject will lend bardic greatness to Propertius himself (‘uates tua castra canendo j magnus ero’, as a bard singing of your camp, I will be great, 19); singing accompanies another Augustan triumph (15). But even in this context, singing is generalized to both genres: ‘aetas prima canat Veneres, extrema tumultus’ (let youth sing of Loves, old age of tumult, 2. 10. 7). By the end of 2. 12, song is used entirely of an elegiac topic: Propertius asks Cupid who would sing of his girl if he made his poet waste entirely away (‘cantet’, 21, and ‘canat’, 24). The categories subsequently become further destabilized.

13 Goold (1990) places lacunas before poems 10 and 11, and at 13. 16–17, where other editors (Barber; Fedeli 1984) mark two separate poems. The turn to the poet’s imagined death at 13B is no more abrupt than at 2. 1. 47. If there is a lacuna between 13A and B, it is not substantial; I incline to read it as a single poem, with Goold. 14 Wyke (1987b) points out the commensurability of the girl and the book.

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If we are surprised when Propertius embraces praise of Augustus in 2. 10 after disavowing song and the triumph in 2. 1, he turns the tables on us again by elevating the inscription to epic levels in 2. 13B and reappropriating the triumph slyly for elegy in 2. 14. The same word applies to his tomb as Achilles’ (‘busto’, 33; ‘busta’, 38), just as it spans the epic-scale tombs of civil war and the poet’s own in 2. 1 (27, 75). As is conventional, the tomb ensures memory (‘lapides . . . memores’, 2. 13B. 40), but the categories blend when the triumphal laurel is to adorn Propertius’ ‘slight’ tomb (‘exiguo’, 33). Writing and performance are further fused when Propertius avers that his own little books would be a sufﬁcient funeral procession (‘pompa’, 2. 13B. 25)—perhaps his three libelli stand in for the three children (liberi) he never had and should qualify him for the rights granted the parents of three. The two inscriptions in poems 2. 13B and 2. 14 make a transition from strictly elegiac writing to an appropriation of a triumphal inscription. In the ﬁrst, he dies for love. et duo sint uersus: QUI NVNC IACET HORRIDA PVLVIS, VNIVS HIC QVONDAM SERVVS AMORIS ERAT. (2. 13B. 35–6) (and let there be two verses: ‘He who now lies as horrid dust, he was once the slave of a single love.’)

Elegy sees death as an absolute end, since a talking inscription cannot speak as a living body (‘sed frustra mutos reuocabis, Cynthia, Manis: j nam mea quid poterunt ossa minuta loqui?’ (but in vain will you call back my mute spirits, Cynthia, for what will my diminished bones be able to say?), 2. 13. 57–8). Propertius says a resolute ‘no’ to poetic immortality and would rather, like Woody Allen, continue to live in his apartment. With this inscription, Propertius furthermore plays games with his medium. The inscription is not commensurate with the processing books that contain it, nor could it actually be inscribed, since it is lacking the ﬁrst two and a half feet. Rather, the inscription represents a restricted idea of elegy as merely about sex and death. The full genre, however, entertains thoughts about its own difference from others in terms of poetics, medium, strategies and objects of praise, and so on. In 2. 14, Propertius completely overturns the categories: he appropriates the epic-scale triumph for erotic victory and locates immortality in a single night of sex. Non ita Dardanio gauisus Atrida triumpho est, cum caderent magnae Laomedontis opes; . . . quanta ego praeterita collegi gaudia nocte: immortalis ero, si altera talis erit. (2. 14. 1–2, 9–10) (The son of Atreus did not rejoice so much in the Dardanian triumph, when the great wealth of Laomedon fell . . . as I collected joys last night: I will be immortal, if another such will come to be.)

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Naughty, funny, ironic? Certainly when he raises his victory (‘uictoria’) over a conquest of the Parthians and makes ‘these my spoils, my kings, my chariot’ (‘haec spolia, haec reges, haec mihi currus erunt’, 23–4) he is spooﬁng the high-style political triumph. He overturns even the elegiac association of writing and death with an inscription celebrating victorious sex. magna ego dona tua ﬁgam, Cytherea, columna, taleque sub nostro nomine carmen erit: HAS PONO ANTE TVAS TIBI, DIVA, PROPERTIVS AEDIS EXVVIAS, TOTA NOCTE RECEPTVS AMANS. (2. 14. 25–8) (Venus, I will ﬁx great gifts on your column, and such a couplet will be under my name: ‘These spoils I, Propertius, place for you before your temple, a lover received all night long.’)

Whether or not he actually set up an inscription at Venus’ temple, he certainly inscribes it into his work, a metaphorical monument to love. Propertius’ desire to ﬁx things in stone or at least paper, however, must recognize the reality that victory of this sort—military too?—can be transient. He wishes to lie dead before her door if she changes her mind (2. 14. 31–2). What ﬁrst appears as a singular event is quickly presented as potentially iterable. After expressing enthusiasm for a marvellous night in 2. 14, Propertius is still on a high in 2. 15, but qualiﬁes his immortality. Once is not enough; he will need many: ‘si dabit haec multas [noctes], ﬁam immortalis in illis’ (if she gives many [such nights], I will become immortal in them, 39). Does he also need multiple poems to record these events or multiple readings to re-enact them? Propertius’ own triumph leads him back to those of Augustus and he muses that if everyone desired to lead their lives the way he does, the ‘Actian sea would not be tossing our bones, nor would Rome, beset so often by triumphs over her own people, be weary of loosening her hair in mourning’ (‘nec nostra Actiacum uerteret ossa mare, j nec totiens propriis circum oppugnata triumphis j lassa foret crinis soluere Roma suos’, 44–6). These triumphs are no metaphor, but historical victories in civil war. The Roman system of values is overturned here: Romans would win praise from their descendants (47) not for the usual reason, valour in warfare, but for leading a dissolute life. Beyond the reductio ad absurdum, Propertius’ method of becoming immortal is democratic: it would allow everyone or at least many to do so, not just the victor at Actium. Propertius’ immortality in sex spoofs and demystiﬁes the more usual poetic gambit, where poetry itself provides immortality. Horace’s ‘non omnis moriar’ (I will not entirely die, Odes 3. 30. 6) is antithetical to Propertius. Death provides too strong a threat to love’s pleasures and these cannot be

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recuperated in readership. Song offers attractions because of its association with power, but if this cannot get the girl into bed, what good is it? Propertius’ reduction of weighty and courteous themes to this one issue shows the artiﬁciality of poetic immortality and upends national glory: our triumphs are only over ourselves and furthermore not to our credit. The different media are brought up to serve this larger purpose. The last poem in book 2 also deploys the language of song and writing, only to dissolve these categories as well. This poem matches 2. 1 in offering a display piece of poetic selfdeﬁnition (Camps 1967: 223; Stahl 1985: 173). Where Propertius was willing to entertain the possibility of song, the high style, and epic/historical themes in 2. 1, if only to disavow them, by the end of 2. 34, it turns out not only that writing underlies song, but that poetry with a strong afﬁliation with writing can sing just as well. Vergil is the primary model against whom Propertius deﬁnes himself in terms of both ideology and genre. The context of 2. 34 is Propertius’ advice to his friend Lynceus on how to write love poetry, but Propertius turns midway to the canon of Roman poets among whom he would like to be numbered. Among these, he starts with a contrast between himself and the Vergil of the Aeneid: he would be happy to relax after removing yesterday’s garlands (59–60) while Vergil intones the Actian shores and Caesar’s ships with the weighty dicere (62).15 Propertius disavows any triumphs in his lineage and puns on his verse’s lightness: ‘eleuor’ (58). Literally, he is ‘exalted’ by his genius among an audience with girls mixed in, but etymology also suggests ‘I am made light of ’, where ‘leuis’ indicates a light poetics. The rest of Rome’s authors, Greeks too, should yield. Their appellation as writers apparently contrasts with Vergil’s high medium. cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai! nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade. (2. 34. 65–6) (Yield Roman writers, yield Greeks! Something greater than the Iliad is coming to be.)

Propertius carefully imitates Vergil’s language with words recalling the themes of the opening of the Aeneid (63–4: arms, Troy, walls, Lavinian shores), but writing returns under erasure. Quinn (1982: 87) notes that the gestation image matches writing, so that the reality of Vergil’s endeavour emerges despite the oral stance. Underlying writing also characterizes Vergil’s lighter genres. 15 In the Eclogues, Vergil uses dicere for both the slight style and for praise poetry: ‘deductum dicere carmen’ (to say a ﬁne-spun poem, E. 6. 5) and ‘dicere laudes’ (to say praises, 6. 6) (Wheeler 1999: 42–3). He avows telling of Caesar’s battles with this verb at Georg. 3. 46–7 and inaugurates the second half of the Aeneid (‘dicam horrida bella, j dicam acies’ (I will tell of horrid battles, I will tell of the front), 7. 41–2).

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Vergil is a complex model for Propertius because he belies the inability argument. The poet of the Eclogues and the Georgics, genres congenial to elegy, has embraced epic praise. He also sings whatever his genre and Propertius sets ‘tu canis’ (you sing, 67, 77) in emphatic line-initial position at the beginning of sections on both pastoral and georgic.16 Propertius is an attentive reader of Vergil’s own representations of his medium. non tamen haec ulli uenient ingrata legenti, siue in amore rudis siue peritus erit. (2. 34. 81–2)17 (These things, however, will not come unpleasing to any reader, whether unskilled or skilled in love.)

Propertius alludes to Eclogue 6, where Vergil identiﬁes his reader as such and as someone captured by love (‘si quis j captus amore leget’, 6. 9–10; above, 148). The page which will be pleasing to Apollo (‘gratior’, 6. 11) is also echoed here in ‘non . . . ingrata’. The verbatim repetition of ‘tamen haec’ (6. 9; 2. 34. 81) reinforces the parallel.18 Vergil’s erotic poetry and the interweaving of his song with writing offer a model Propertius is willing to embrace, one that accords with the erotic poets he lists at the poem’s close and whose ranks he would join (93–4). He makes his concern with poetic media clear in presenting the writing of both Catullus and Calvus as song: ‘haec quoque lasciui cantarunt scripta Catulli’ (the

16

The imitation assimilates the two genres. The Galaesus (67), in Propertius’ Eclogues section, comes rather from Georgics 4. 126. Furthermore, Propertius transposes not only to a pastoral, but an erotic context Vergil’s ‘felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ (happy is he who could know the causes of things, G. 2. 490). Propertius realigns Vergil’s nod to Lucretius in didactic to his own envy of the pastoral lover, who buys love for the price of apples: ‘felix qui uilis pomis mercaris amores’ (2. 34. 71). In the Georgics section, details of the poetics derive from both Georgics and Eclogues. Propertius keeps the same adjective of Hesiod as Vergil and changes ﬁrst person singing to second (2. 34. 77): ‘Aescraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen’ (I sing an Ascraean song through Roman towns, G. 2. 176). The only time Vergil uses ‘testudo’ to mean lyre (instead of a military formation) occurs at Georgics 4. 464 of Orpheus. From the Eclogues comes the calque on the Greek poiein in ‘facis carmen’ (2. 34. 79). Vergil uses it once of a contemporary poet who, like Lynceus, also wrote tragedy (‘Pollio et ipse facit noua carmina’ (Pollio himself makes new songs), E. 3. 86), and again comparing an admired poet to Apollo: ‘proxima Phoebi j uersibus ille facit’ (he makes things closest to Phoebus’ verses, E. 7. 22–3). Propertius transfers Cynthius, Vergil’s epithet Vergil for Apollo in Eclogue 6, to the Georgics section (2. 34. 79–80). 17 Goold (1990) accepts Ribbeck’s transposition of the lines on the Georgics (47–50) to after the Aeneid; nice discussion in Enk 460–1. Camps (1967) ad loc.: the repetition of ‘tu canis’ makes the transposition possible, but there appears no cogent reason for it. 18 A further parallel is the contrast between swan and goose (E. 9. 36; 2. 34. 84), where both ‘poeta’ and ‘uates’ apply to Lycidas. The tuneful swan is clearly related to song, one the goose cannot quite match. The text and meaning of Propertius’ imitation are disputed; Goold (1990) ad loc.; Stahl (1985) 179, 183–4.

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writings also of playful Catullus sang these things, 2. 34. 87); ‘haec etiam docti confessa est pagina Calui, j cum caneret miserae funera Quintiliae’ (these things even the learned page of Calvus revealed, when he sang funeral laments for poor Quintilia, 89–90). Their poetry is a hybrid of media, as Propertius’ own becomes, and the language of the media supports a poetic self-deﬁnition otherwise carried out through the vocabulary of style, genre, and subject matter. The difference between Propertius’ careful allusion to Vergil’s handling of poetic media, and his version of Catullus, whose polymetrics shun the language of song and whose elegiacs only begin to embrace it (above, Ch. 2), suggests that Propertius is crafting his generically closer predecessor in the image he would create for himself. He is collapsing some of the distinctions made in 2. 1. Vergil offers a model for a poet’s ability to engage in both erotics and high-style praise. Vergil cannot be conﬁned to the Aeneid and rejected. His Corydon’s audience is similar to Propertius’ own (‘mixtas inter . . . puellas’ (among mixed girls), 57; ‘[Corydon] laudatur facilis inter Hamadryadas’ (Corydon is praised among the easy Hamadryads), 76).19 One can take their poetry’s praise as a shared feature, or focus instead on the difference in object: while the Aeneid tells of Caesar’s brave ships (62), Propertius praises Cynthia (‘uersu laudata Properti’ (praised in Propertius’ poetry), 93). Furthermore, his singing, like that of the erotic poets, depends on writing and reading. If written erotic poetry rises to the level of song and the Aeneid is writing despite its high-style utterance, there is less distinction between them than might ﬁrst appear. The catalogue of poets leads the way for Propertius to desire a broader renown: ‘hos inter si me ponere Fama uolent’ (if Fame will wish to place me among these, 94). Propertius ﬁnally deﬁnes his immortality in terms of poetry. He includes himself in a canon with a reach beyond the audience of living girls. Although he does not imagine himself as dead, as he does elsewhere, the death of a girl (‘Quintiliae’, 90) and a poet (‘Gallus j mortuus’, 91–2) hold the place for the deaths of Cynthia and Propertius.20 Although he has acknowledged earlier in the book that fame will accrue to him after death (‘haec nostri notescet fama sepulcri’ (this fame of my grave will grow), 2. 13. 37), the fusion of writing with song at the end of book 2 is an innovation

19 Some see this passage as allegory for Vergil’s praise among Roman ladies, even though he, like Corydon, may be tired of the oat ﬂute and working instead in other genres (75). See Enk, Camps (1967), Richardson (1977) ad loc. 20 Barber suggests a text that intimates as much. For ‘quin etiam’, which leaves the verse in aposiopesis without a verb, he proposes ‘Cynthia quin uiuet uersu laudata Properti’ (Indeed Cynthia will live, praised in the verse of Propertius, 2. 34. 93). Living in verse implies her physical life will end. Enk ad loc. Goold (1990) prints the emendation.

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allowing him to take the imagistic nexus of fame, praise, and poetic media further at the beginning of the next book. In 3. 1, Propertius emerges as a poetic priest (‘sacerdos’, 3) in full Horatian regalia. His pastiche reduces the lyric poet’s strategies to cliche´s, but he leaves Horace’s model behind in mixing writing with song so much that no dominant identity emerges from this point on for the genre.21 He is a poet who has writings (‘pagina nostra’ (my page), 3. 1. 18; ‘poetae’, 19) and a bard with a priestly and civic function (‘sacerdos’ (priest), 3; ‘auguror’ (I predict as augur), 36), who leads choruses (4), and whose Muse actually triumphs (10).22 The explicit link to 2. 34 is personiﬁed fame (2. 34. 94): ‘me Fama leuat terra sublimis’ (Fame on high lifts me from the ground, 9). The metaphorical appropriation of song and performance effected in 2. 34 is now complete. Books by themselves are not enough. They must engage in society. Poetic immortality accompanies this fusion. meque inter seros laudabit Roma nepotes: illum post cineres auguror ipse diem. ne mea contempto lapis indicet ossa sepulcro prouisum est Lycio uota probante deo. (3. 1. 35–8) (Rome will praise me among her late grandchildren: I myself as augur predict that day, after I turn to ash. It has been provided in advance—the Lycian god approves my wishes—that a stone indicate my bones with a tomb not disregarded.)

Propertius fulﬁls his priestly function by auguring his own praise among the descendants of Rome, with Apollo himself protecting his tomb—a ﬁgure of the poetic corpus as monumentum. Now Propertius has it all.

P RO P E RT I US : R I T UA L A N D WA X Propertius lays claim to both writing and song in many passages in book 3 and there is a conﬂuence of media in book 4. I analyse the Actium elegy, 4. 6, because the media here raise important questions about authority, performativity, and reference. As often, a textual problem reveals an interpretative question, here the poet’s ability to praise. 21 e.g., in 3. 3, Apollo warns the poet from high style themes (‘carminis heroi’ (heroic song), 3. 3. 16) by emphasizing writing (‘libellus’ (little book); ‘legat’ (reads); ‘pagina’ (page), 3. 3. 19– 21), but Calliope accords him typical elegiac subject matter (the paraclausithyron) with ‘canes’ (you will sing, 3. 3. 48). 22 Hunter (2006) 7–16 situates Propertius’ stance as priest here against other such claims.

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Poem 4. 6 is a hard nut to crack for subversive readers.23 Propertius abandons any trace of the recusatio, apparently unironically adopts the role of the uates ofﬁciating at the dedication of Apollo’s temple on the Palatine, and narrates the battle of Actium. Performance vocabulary and portentous utterance ﬂood the poem.24 The poet (‘uates’, 1, 10) performs a sacred ritual (‘sacra’, ‘sacris’, 1) to musical accompaniment (‘carmen . . . j tibia’, 7–8).25 Sacriﬁce (2) and libation (8) are metaphors for Propertius’ song. He invokes ‘Musa . . . j Calliope’ (11–12) to help him tell of the temple of Apollo (11) and glides from there into the praise of Caesar, deﬁned as song (‘carmina’, ‘canitur’, 13, 14). Apollo himself gives a substantial speech; negation of the lyre and song deﬁnes him as a god of war (32, 36). The divinized Julius Caesar also speaks (60). Triton makes a procession with song (‘cantu’, 61) and the nymphs give applause. The triple triumph (65) is mentioned in a couplet adjacent to the temple of Apollo, which is designated ‘monumenta’ (67). Propertius rises to Vergil’s metaphorical monument and triumph in Georgics 3, but does one better by referring to actual events and buildings. The poet makes a transition from war to celebration with reference to his singing (‘bella satis cecini’ (I have sung enough of war), 69) and Apollo’s leading choral dance with the cithara (‘choros’, 70). The Muse returns to distribute genius among the poets (‘poetis’, 75), who are to celebrate or predict Roman victories in a range of oral and laudatory poetic activities (‘memoret’ (let him relate), 77; ‘canat’ (let him sing), 78; ‘referat’ (let him tell), 79). Some sample poetry is quoted, and Propertius ends partying into the night with song (‘carmine’, 85). Horace, perhaps the consummate poet of song, would be hufﬁng and pufﬁng by now.26 Why the performative overkill? This question must be asked in relation to a single overt and prominent reference to writing that has been edited out of the text.27 Instead of ‘cera’,

23 Sullivan (1976) 145–7 suggests a ‘near parody of such a [grandiose, panegyric] poem’ and a ‘deﬁant proof of Propertius’ inability’ to write this sort of poetry; Stahl (1985) ch. 11 calls it a ‘surrender’, and reads 4. 1B and 4. 4 against it in ch. 12. Janan (2001) 198 n. 13 sees it as ‘masculinism’s purest representative’ in book 4, and reads 4. 7 as undoing it (101). My point below about the similarity of fullness/emptiness in both language and politics does not subvert Propertius’ praise, but suggests a power play directed towards Augustus: the emperor’s realm is as subject to deferral as the poet’s. 24 Sullivan (1976) 145: ‘the opening claim to be an inspired priest of song beginning his ceremony is unusually drawn out’. 25 The sacral stance is often compared to Horace’s at Odes 3. 1: Commager (1962) 16–17; Syndikus (1973) 14; La Penna (1977) 89. 26 Sullivan (1976) 147: the poem’s exaggeration is irony directed against Vergil and Horace. 27 Fedeli records bibliography pro and con. Goold (1990) goes against Shackleton Bailey and prints serta.

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which is printed by Fedeli, Barber accepts an emendation of Scaliger’s, ‘serta’ (garlands). cera Philiteis certet Romana corymbis et Cyrenaeas urna ministret aquas. (4. 6. 3–4) (May Roman wax tablets strive to equal Philitas’ ivy clusters and an urn administer waters from Cyrene [i.e. Callimachean].)

The choice of wax tablets as a poetic emblem along with Philitas’ ivy and Callimachus’ waters has seemed jarring, since it is a poetic emblem of a different order.28 Furthermore, ‘cera’ does not represent ﬁnished writing, as does ‘pagina’ or ‘charta’.29 We can defend ‘cera’ for preserving alliteration with ‘certet’,30 because Propertius favours meaning over imagistic consistency (Schuster 1926: 476–7), and there are Greek parallels for literature (not mere drafts) on tablets (Shackleton Bailey 1956: 244–5). Furthermore, Propertius characteristically mixes song and writing. But why ‘cera’, when ‘charta’ would scan? In a sacriﬁcial context, the wax tablet helped safeguard the pragmatic effectiveness of the prayer.31 Double reading guaranteed the prayer’s exact wording. It is unclear whether Propertius imagines the ‘uates’ reading the prayer off the tablet (‘praeire uerbis’) or as the one whose repetition of the utterance would make the prayer felicitous. Probably the latter, since his song is accompanied on the ‘tibia’ (8), but since there was no ofﬁce of uates at Rome, this is at any rate a poetic stance.32 The poem, however, does and does not correspond to the prayer on the wax tablet. As the prayer, it cannot have a performative effect unless uttered under the right ritual circumstances, which, since imagined, do not take place. The question is whether and how the poem

28 The wax tablet conjoins two semantic ﬁelds: cult object and symbol for a poetic relation with Philitas and Callimachus. Philitas’ ivy clusters also have both cultic and poetic associations, and may even, through the garland metaphor (for anthology), similarly suggest writing. [Moschus’] epitaph of Bion puts clusters in the anthology (4), one of whose ﬂowers, the hyacinth, is asked to ‘speak its letters’ (6). Callimachus’ poetic waters have a cultic role at the end of the Hymn to Apollo, where the ‘libas’ (drop, 112) from the holy spring may suggest, through paronomasia, song as libation (‘libet’, 4. 6. 8). Williams (1968) 52–3, 781–2 traces poetic and sacriﬁcial ﬁelds in the entire opening section; Johnson (1973) 154 sees the overlap as humorous and inviting disbelief. 29 Butler, Postgate, ad loc. 30 Eisenhut (1956) 124; Richardson (1977) ad loc. 31 Another element in Eisenhut’s (1956) 124–5 defence of ‘cera’. For ‘praeire uerbis’, ValetteCagnac (1997) 247–303, esp. 269–71; Meyer (2004) 76: ‘the more important the event, the more likely it was that there would have been recitation from tablets’. Double reading argues against rejection of a reference to a tablet here; it refers to ritual practice, not provisional composition. 32 Syndikus (1973) 14 n. 48: sacriﬁce here is a ‘Sinnbild fu¨r seine Dichtung’.

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claims pragmatic effectiveness, and whether it effects other canonical poetic functions such as praise. What the poem does do is to explore whether representation, in speech or other forms, makes things so. Apollo denies it. He lets loose a quiverful of arrows against the enemy (55) and each arrow fells ten ships apiece (68), so he appears a paradigm of effective action. When he pronounces that a just cause is needed for military success (51– 2), rather than prows merely painted with scary Centaurs (‘tigna caua et pictos . . . metus’ (hollow wood and painted fears), 50),33 his utterance seems authoritative: representation must be supported. But then another god alleges the opposite. Julius Caesar pronounces himself a god and claims the victory at Actium as proof for Augustus’ bloodline to him (‘sum deus; est nostri sanguinis ista ﬁdes’ (I am a god; this is proof of my blood), 60). Adoption does not create a tie by blood but rather a representation of family ties with legal validity. Slippage between ‘Caesar’ as Augustus (13 bis, 56) and as Julius Caesar questions the stability of reference. Julius is differentiated from his son with ‘pater’ (59) and for different things and people to go by the same name is not uncommon, but J. Caesar asks us to believe metaphors are true. His divinization does not quite lend him authority equal to Apollo’s, though Propertius does ask that Jupiter step aside while Caesar Augustus is being sung (14). But still, Romans took representation seriously. Furthermore, Augustus also has the potential to become a god, but like the potential effectiveness in performatives, he ﬁts the formula, but still needs enactment.34 Which god do we believe? Since Apollo is as much Propertius’ representative as Caesar, we need not decide so much as note that the discrepancy poses the question. The stakes of representation here revolve around authority: repetition links Augustus to Caesar and Apollo, the poet to Apollo. The name of Augustus occurs frequently: he is not only three times ‘Caesar’ (13 bis, 57), but four times ‘Augustus’ (23, 29, 38, 81). Apollo, like Augustus, is mentioned under different names, and in total, just as many times: Apollo (11, 69), Phoebus (15, 27, 57, 67, 76). The association between god and emperor is further enhanced by the phrases ‘se uindice’ (with him as champion, 27), ‘te uindice’ (with you as champion, 41), and ‘principe te’ (with you as prince, 46), where the poet speaks of Apollo and Apollo speaks of Augustus. The repetition of ‘ﬁdes’ (trustworthiness, proof) in short order further enhances the bond between Augustus and divinity, as Apollo’s protection of Rome (57) becomes 33

A nod towards writing? Tablets were wooden and graphein creates a semantic overlap between writing and painting. 34 Eisenhut (1956) 128 reads Augustus as already a god, Propertius his priest, and the poem the sacriﬁce. But Augustus is no more a god than Propertius a real priest.

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Julius Caesar’s proof that Augustus is his son (60). The poet is also linked to divinity through repetition: the triumphal laurel accompanies the ‘uates’ on a new path (10) and Apollo announces he will draw (‘ducam’) the ships at Actium with a laurel-bearing hand (54). The verb itself recurs of the poet’s song (‘ducuntur’, 13; ‘ducam’, 85). God and poet turn from war to celebration together (69): Apollo’s asking for the cithara allegorizes the poet’s own change of subject. Apollo links the poet to Augustus through his own association with both. One of the poem’s most conspicuous instances of repetition folds the monumentum into questions about representation and deferral: ‘Actia Iuleae pelagus monumenta carinae’ (the sea, the Actian monument of the Iulean ship, 4. 6. 17); ‘Actius hinc traxit Phoebus monumenta’ (from here Actian Apollo draws his monument, 4. 6. 67). Apollo’s monument in line 67 is the temple of Palatine Apollo heralded in line 11. The sea, however, can only be a monument in a more abstract sense.35 The site preserves the memory of the events that happened there, while the temple is built as commemoration. Since the temple housed a library, in which books such as this one recorded the battle, it enables further levels of mediation.36 But the water at Actium is also a medium of representation: ‘armorum et radiis picta tremebat aqua’ (and the water, painted with the rays of the arms, was trembling, 26). Is the water decorated with the spikes of the weapons? Does it reﬂect them? Can it reﬂect while trembling?37 Whatever the literal resolution of this image (of an image!), it anticipates the ‘pictos . . . metus’ (50) Apollo mentions to draw a distinction between reality and mere representation. Here nature represents. The idea is doubly expressed through ‘monumentum’ and ‘pictus’. The poem draws us in two directions: one separates the picture from the reality, the other accepts and encourages the fusion of nature and representation. If representation resides already in nature, are our own representations superﬂuous? And if there is need for the supplement, what exactly does it add? The ﬁnal instance of quoted speech belongs not to a god, whether traditional or invented, but to a poet with an indeterminate relation to Propertius himself. He proposes various projected or achieved victories over recalcitrant

35 The apposition of ‘pelagus’ and ‘monumenta’ in line 17 is difﬁcult to translate, Camps, Rothstein ad loc., who cites Catullus 11. 10 for geographical monuments. 36 W. R. Johnson (1973) 155 links this poem to Horace’s discussion of the library at Epist. 2. 1. 214–18 and makes Propertius into a parodic aedituus (temple attendant) of the sort Horace warns Augustus about (2. 1. 229–31). Horace’s epistle is probably later than Propertius 4. 6, which is conventionally ascribed to 16 BCE on the basis of reference to the ‘clades Lolliana’ at the hands of the Sygambri (77). In that year, there was a quadrennial celebration of Augustus’ principate (Dio 54. 19), which could have provided the occasion for the poem’s composition. Camps (1965) 104; Gordon Williams (1968) 52. 37 Rothstein: a reﬂection in water disturbed by waves.

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enemies for an indeﬁnite group of poets to sing. The last should take as his topic the Parthians’ return of Crassus’ lost standards and their future defeat.38 Form and content alike raise the question of performativity for poetic utterance and political reality. hic referat sero confessum foedere Parthum. reddat signa Remi, mox dabit ipse sua: siue aliquid pharetris Augustus parcet Eois, differat in pueros ista tropaea suos. gaude, Crasse, nigras si quid sapis inter harenas: ire per Euphraten ad tua busta licet. sic noctem patera, sic ducam carmine, donec iniciat radios in mea uina dies. (4. 6. 79–86)39 (Let this one relate the Parthian, who admitted (defeat) in a late treaty. Let him return Remus’ standards, soon he will give his own: if Augustus spares the Eastern quivers somewhat, let him defer those trophies on his grandsons. Rejoice, Crassus, if you have any knowledge among the black sands: we can go over the Euphrates to your tomb. Thus will I lead the night with the libation bowl, thus with song, until the day throws its rays on my wine.)

It is not clear whether the ﬁrst person in the poem’s last couplet refers to Propertius outside the hypothetical poet’s speech, or whether these lines conclude the quoted or parenthetical speech.40 If Propertius speaks, there is slippage between the third and ﬁrst persons (79, 85). If not, quotation puts performative power in suspension. Either way, our hesitancy between the quotation of song and a ﬁnal announcement of song replays the dilemma about representation and performative force. The blurring of any authorizing voice leaves it uncertain whether these words are spoken ‘for real’. The actual subject matter further explores the distance between reality and representation. Propertius raises the stakes militarily by suggesting an offensive attack on the Parthians, a stage beyond the diplomatic recovery of the standards in 20 BCE. Only here in this poem does Augustus’ name occur as the subject of a verb. Although the account of Actium praises him, all the action is carried out by Apollo. The verbs he governs here, however, fall short of the desired military goal (‘parcet’ (spares); ‘differat’ (let him defer), 82).

38 For predicted victories and triumphs, Ch. 11. Stahl (1985) 252 connects the prediction here to Ovid’s prediction at AA 1. 177. 39 My alterations to Barber’s text preserve the ambiguity of the speaker’s identity: period for colon end of 79, omission of quotations marks, omission of capital with ‘reddat’. 40 Barber, Camps (1965), Fedeli (1984), Goold (1990) put quotation marks around lines 80–4. Richardson takes these lines as a parenthesis by the poet himself (1977 ad loc.). I can imagine closing the quotation at line 86.

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Sparing and deferral are a far cry from sovereign agency. Furthermore, the sons again bring up the transferred paternity that is adoption. We can emphasize the lineage from father Caesar, to Augustus, to the sons who will achieve military victories to equal or surpass their ancestors. Or we can emphasize the gaps between Augustus and his divinized adoptive father on the one hand, and his adopted descendants on the other.41 The sons are imagined as succeeding where he has not, and other elements suggest that Augustus falls short. The Roman standards go under the name of Remus, a marker of fraternal strife in a poem celebrating victory in civil war. The reminder of Lollius’ military disaster with the Sygambri (77) similarly suggests that the Romans should redirect their energies from civil to foreign war. Crassus’ tomb (‘busta’, 84) brings another monument into the poem, so that the poem ends with the conjunction of a monument and a song. But unlike the victorious triumph and temple of lines 65–8, this monument records defeat and as for the song—there is no suggestion that the turn away from wars announced in 69 has been either successful or celebratory. The representational potential of the combined monument and performance goes in a different direction from the poem’s beginning. It has been suggested that the ﬁnal distich offers libation to Augustus as a god.42 The metaphorics of song as libation accords with that of the uates. The only ritual actually performed by Propertius is the poem, and we can legitimately ask what it performs. Praise of Augustus? Although that is its ostensible purpose, many have found the poem ﬂat in comparison with other Augustan treatments of Actium, such as Horace’s Cleopatra Ode and the shield of Aeneas in the Aeneid (Sullivan 1976: 146). Something obstructs praise differently from Horace’s complex admiration for Cleopatra and Vergil’s thoughtful contemplation of poetic mediation.43 I suggest that Propertius reveals the artiﬁce of poetic performativity by staging excess. At the beginning of the poem, reference to a wax tablet invites us to think about the differences between ritual and literary performativity. The indicative in ‘sacra facit uates’ (the bard makes sacriﬁce or the bard performs the ritual, 1) describes an action as if already in motion. By the end of the poem, a poet is leading libation and poetry into the night. The verb, however, conveys less conﬁdence in the activity’s occurrence. I translate it above as a Pindaric 41 The Julian family’s lineage is a matter of representation at the end of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, see Ch. 16. 42 Stahl (1985) 254 cites Dio 51. 19: since 30 BCE, Augustus was supposed to receive libation even at private parties. I am not convinced this is relevant here. At Aug. RG 9 with reference to Dio, Volkmann (1964) comments that private prayers for the emperor’s health were yearly. 43 Cleopatra Ode: Lowrie (1997) 139–64, Oliensis (1998) 136–45; shield of Aeneas: above, Ch. 6.

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future: ‘I will lead.’ But it is more probably subjunctive, like the verbs attaching to the other poets listed: ‘may I lead’. Propertius ends with a wish for poetic performance, for Augustan triumph, rather than the actual thing. But this means he produces literature. The pragmatic failure of a poem to praise actually results in a better poem and hence a more valuable tribute than pragmatically successful praise.44

OVI D A ND IRO N Y ( E A R LY E L E G Y ) Already in the Amores, Ovid treats the association of the uates with song as a cliche´ to be ironized. Cupid throws it in the poet’s face when his theft of a foot opens the collection and reduces the poet’s epic pretensions to elegy. While the poet makes a desperate attempt to deﬁne himself as a ‘Pieridum uates’ (1. 1. 6), Cupid mocks his vatic song and makes him sing of love instead: ‘“quod” que “canas, uates, accipe” dixit “opus”’ (24).45 Ovid drags Horace’s stately ‘Musarum sacerdos’ (Odes 3. 1. 3) into a paraclausithyron, where he cuts a ridiculous ﬁgure:46 ille ego Musarum purus Phoebique sacerdos ad rigidas canto carmen inane fores. (Amores 3. 8. 23–4) (I, that pure priest of the Muses and Phoebus, sing an empty song at stiff doors.)

Ovid controls the joke he plays on himself,47 and thereby recuperates with the poem itself the force he represents as ineffective in the poem’s situation, but the social role he creates for himself lies outside the workings of power. Triumphal imagery is consistently and conspicuously displaced from politics to love and poetry and the comparison of Caesar’s clemency to Cupid’s malice 44 Doblhofer’s (1966) idea that departures from panegyric convention indicate the poet’s sincerity is misguided in that sincerity is less at issue than felicity. Nisbet (1969). 45 McKeown ad loc. For Ovid’s playful use of ‘uates’ and afﬁnity with Tibullus and Propertius, Janka at AA 2. 11–12. 46 Other deﬂations are the realistic procuress’ complaint that all a bard can offer a girl is song (1. 8. 57), and the admission that love triumphed over him when trying to write tragedy (2. 18. 18) so that he now sings of achievements and battles waged at home (‘resque domi gestas et mea bella cano’, 12). When Ovid defends the value of song (1. 10. 59–62), he drops the pretentious bard language. It recurs, however, when song is represented as effective in magic, for seduction (2. 1. 23–8, 34), though epic song is useless for this end (29), and honoriﬁcally several times of Tibullus and his like, including Ovid, in Am. 3. 9, and seriously of Ovid at Am. 3. 15. 1, where it is tempered with ‘poetam’ (13). 47 Like Horace, who at Serm. 2. 3. 4 satirizes his own pretensions to song in Davus’ mouth: ‘nil dignum sermone canas’ (you sing of nothing worthy of conversation).

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highlights the transfer of the triumph from the emperor to the god (Am. 1. 2. 25, 49–52).48 But rather than making a claim to power with these displacements, Ovid suggests the shallowness of political pageantry. Like Propertius, Ovid presents elegy as a hybrid medium, but his baseline identiﬁcation is with writing (‘libelli’, Am. Epigram 1). Emphasis on poetic production accompanies the language of writing (‘uersu . . . pagina’, 1. 1. 17; feet, 27, 30), while ‘carmen’ is the unmarked word for poetry (5).49 When Ovid rises at book 1’s close to defend the fame he will win with the collection, the language is mixed, but the more serious context puts song in the lead. The ﬁrst boast predicts his transmission in song (‘mihi fama perennis j quaeritur, in toto semper ut orbe canar’ (I seek immortal fame, so that I’ll be sung over the whole world), 1. 15. 7–8), while the last anticipates his boast he will be read at the end of the Metamorphoses (‘a sollicito multus amante legar’ (I will be read much by a worried lover), 1. 15. 38; ‘ore legar populi’ (I will be read in the mouth of the people), Met. 15. 878).50 The difference between the two statements about his own fame in Amores 1. 15 aligns reading and writing with elegy, song with larger claims.51 At the end of the Metamorphoses, he revives a different tradition, where allusion to Ennius supports the notion of being read in the public domain (Ch. 16). The reception of the other poets whose company he adopts is both song (‘Battiades . . . cantabitur’, 1. 15. 13) and reading (all works of Vergil ‘legentur’, 25), without regard for genre. The centrality of writing to Ovid’s elegiac world is manifest in Amores 1. 11 and 1. 12, which offer an extensive meditation on tablets in their dual role as medium of communication among the living and as commemorative votive offering. The representation of tablets as inert wooden objects contrasts with their potential for making things—communication, life, love—happen. Ovid underscores the tension inherent in the performative: there is a potential to be realized, but which may always not be. The poet sends tablets asking his beloved for a rendezvous in the ﬁrst poem and laments the negative answer brought back on them in the second. The convention of elegy as werbende 48

1. 7. 35, 1. 14. 46, 2. 9. 16, 2. 12, 2. 18. 18. For presence and absence here, P. Hardie (2002a) 35. Am. 2. 17. 33 and 3. 8. 1–6 offer song in the context of books. 50 Ovid anticipates his poetry’s endurance after death at Am. 3. 15. 20; ‘dicar’ pertains to the poet’s fame (8) and speech about him at his funeral is also ‘dicat’ (Am. 2.10. 36–7). Emphasis falls on the poet’s person with dicere, whereas legere refers more to the work’s duration. For the sphragis motif in Ovid, Paratore (1959); Farrell (1998) 332 n. 48. 51 Also at Am. 3. 1, where Tragedy asks him to sing the deeds of men (‘cane facta uirum’, 25), while Elegy is not afraid to be read by passers-by when inscribed on hard doors (‘uel quotiens foribus duris incisa pependi j non uerita a populo praetereunte legi’, 53–4). The people are the audience, as at Met. 15. 878, and ‘munus’ (57, 60) conveys elegy’s effectiveness in love. Song and the bard indicate Macer’s high style (Am. 2. 18. 35). 49

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Dichtung, however, is insufﬁcient to account for the care lavished on the description of the processes of writing, reception, and answering, and on the double mediation, through tablets and through the message-girl Nape. The process of communication comes to the fore at the expense of the message conveyed, though the desire for success still lies at the heart of the exchange. The messages can be reduced, as Ovid suggests, to a few performative words. He relates his query to Nape so: ‘spe noctis uiuere dices’ (you will say that I live in hope of a night, 1. 11. 13); the answer he desires is ‘ueni’ (come, 24). Still, the tablets are not a sufﬁcient medium between lover and beloved in themselves. Nape is to convey them and pay close attention to the girl’s reaction as she reads (16–17).52 Since the poem is addressed to Nape and tells her what to do, the tablets are, strictly speaking, superﬂuous. The servant girl could convey the message by herself.53 But it is not a question of mere pragmatics, the solicitation of an invitation and its acceptance or refusal. The poet vacillates between wanting the bare response and a lengthy one (19–24), basic fulﬁlment and an elaboration of its medium. When the poet imagines an answer in many ‘uersus’ (21), the word has colouring of poetry, though it need only mean lines (Barsby 133). That and the poet’s interest in erasures in the wax (21–2) show that the medium is meaningful beyond its message— provided the performatives are both felicitous and successful. On this condition, Ovid offers to transform the tablets from cheap wood to votive offering, from inert object to ones serving an even higher function, to communicate his gratitude to Venus. Their new performativity would follow on their success, which Ovid likens to the ultimate performance in the public spere, the triumph (‘uictrices lauro redimire tabellas’ (to wreath the triumphant tablets in laurel), 1. 11. 25; McKeown ad loc.). Subscribam VENERI FIDAS SIBI NASO MINISTRAS DEDICAT. AT NVPER VILE FVISTIS ACER. (Amores 1. 11. 27–8) (I will write underneath: Naso dedicates to Venus servants faithful to him. But you were recently cheap maple.)

The relation between represented and representing writing is one of both analogy and difference. Ovid does write the inscription at the bottom, but of his poem, not the tablets themselves. If he did dedicate the tablets, he would presumably have to add another set of tablets to carry the inscription, unless he were willing to write the dedication on the tablets and collapse the

52 53

For intermediaries, McKeown at 1. 11, 308–9, Barsby 129. McKeown at 1. 11. 17–18 makes Nape superﬂuous rather than the writing.

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difference between writing and votive tablets.54 The poem surpasses the writing in the poem’s story in that it conveys the poet’s message without conveying its form; the message’s form is obscured by the form of the poem itself, whose purpose cannot be reduced to that of the message. Similarly, the poem’s version of the inscription cannot be the same as the inscription itself, if it is in verse, since what is quoted is not a full couplet.55 The anxiety about effective discourse within the poem parallels anxiety about reaching the reader, and the tablets’ failure in their mission reported in the next poem reveals pessimism about literature’s ability to be effective. The tablets are consequently demoted from venerable instrument of performativity to mere wood whose value is questioned (‘funebria ligna’, 1. 12. 7; ‘inutile lignum’, 13; ‘arbore’, 15). Objects can, of course, function as a medium for conveying emotion, as when Ovid sends his lady a ring, with the hope that she feel his faith is given along with it (‘illa datam tecum sentiat esse ﬁdem’, 2. 15. 28). The optative lets it be known that this performative ability, however, is not guaranteed, and the ring serves as a locus for a phantasmagorical yearning on the poet’s part for tokens to convey lived presence: he would be the ring, slide over her body, to the extent of committing intercourse with her in an inversion of male and female sexual roles. Even at his most fetishistic, Ovid folds in deferral: the ring will be used to seal tablets which the poet hopes will not betray him (2. 15.1 5–18).56 Rings, tablets, and other tokens may be successful media; then again, they may not.57 Words can simply lose their power (‘uerba potentia quondam’, Am. 3. 11. 31). The suggestion that the unsuccessful tablets of poem 1. 12 would be better used in the courts (23–6) is an early intimation of the relationship between reading and the law Ovids

54 For pun, Barsby 133. An analogous internal split inhabits the epitaph for the parrot, Am. 2. 6. 61–2. The complete couplet could stand as such on its tomb, but the form of the ‘carmen’ (60) surpasses what the parrot could say, despite the claim that its mouth had learned to speak beyond the capacity of a bird (‘ora fuere mihi plus aue docta loqui’, 62). 55 On the incomplete couplet, McKeown at Am. 1. 11. 27–8: the last sentence belongs to the imagined inscription and is not a separate authorial comment. Either way, what is recorded cannot match the inscription. The incomplete couplet at Am. 2. 13. 25 could represent a prose inscription. 56 P. Hardie (2002a) 55–8 draws a line between the fantasy and the more realistic ‘copresence, of a material with an immaterial gift’, that is, the ring and the faith, but I would emphasize the continuity between the fragile performativity of the ring and thoughts of intercourse as the ultimate performance. One kind of performativity often leads to another; at Am. 3. 2, a spectacle accords with the poem’s dramatic form. Albert (1988) 230–3: this poem ﬁts the tendency of ‘mimetic poems’ to take place during festivals. 57 Ovid makes the analogy between sex and the arts in exploring failure at the point of reception: his impotence leads him to ask, ‘quid iuuet ad surdas si cantet Phemius aures? j quid miserum Thamyran picta tabella iuuat?’ (What good would it do for Phemius to sing to deaf ears? How could a panel painting avail Thamyras [legendarily blind]? Am. 3. 7. 61–2).

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develops later. The overt meaning of ‘ephemeridas’ (25) slurs the tablets as no better than those used for the daily accounting of income and expenditure (McKeown ad loc.), but ‘ephemeral’ also intimates they will not last, as writing should. Ironically, the poet’s ﬁnal curse damns them to old age, corrupted by ‘situ’—exactly what Horace’s immortal monumentum will lack (Odes 3. 30. 2). These tablets fail in performativity and monumentality together. This pessimistic view of writing sits against an optimistic view of words as effective, though the strongest statements in this vein come with more than a grain of salt. Love language works even when hidden in signs and letters (‘sermonem . . . agentem’, Am. 2. 5. 19), and the poet of the Ars amatoria is wildly unrealistic about the ability to win love by trying. Ovid here again controls his mockery of his shiftless persona and part of the spoof lies in the speaker’s conﬁdence in his own abilities as well as in those inept enough to need a guidebook to seduction. His poem is to be read (AA 1. 2), and the ﬁction is that representation can make things come true. The verb agere is paradoxical, implying both effectiveness, as in the passage cited above, and acting. Est tibi agendus amans imitandaque uulnera uerbis; . . . Saepe tamen uere coepit simulator amare; Saepe, quod incipiens ﬁnxerat esse, fuit. (quo magis, o, faciles imitantibus este puellae: ﬁet amor uerus, qui modo falsus erat.) (AA 1. 611–18) (You must play the role of lover and imitate love’s wounds with words . . . Often, however, a pretender has begun to love truly; often has he been what he had at the beginning pretended. (O girls, be all the more easy on imitators: love will become true, which was recently false.))

The ability of representation to make things real has political consequences. Ovid takes on the mantle of an augur (1. 205) and predicts that Gaius will triumph over Parthia (AA 1. 177–216). The pragmatics of the prediction is subtle: the representation before the fact will encourage the troops (‘consistes aciemque meis hortabere uerbis’ (you will stop and encourage the front with my words), 1. 207), so that then Ovid’s poetry can serve as a votive offering (1. 205) and he will authoritatively declare the fact (‘dicam’, 1. 209). But representation runs up against hard reality. The prediction did not come true and Gaius died of a wound.58 Ovid intimates that saying things cannot make them true, however, with his depiction of the would-be lover. The feckless 58

For the representation of triumphs, Ch. 11.

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preceptor advises the seducer to explain the triumph to the girl even if he himself knows nothing. The names he mentions need not be literally true, so long as they are apt (1. 222, 227–8). Ovid offers the lover’s creative ﬁctions as a foil for the poet’s ability to make things up. Sleazy behaviour in a lover comes off better in a poet. His poetry must be apt rather than true, and to this extent, the prediction of triumph is socially apt, not as a representation of a reality, but of a desire. The premise of the Remedia amoris takes the notion of poetic effectiveness further: what can give can also take away, but success depends equally on reading the poetry, which requires perpetual commitment of the reader. Naso legendus erat tum cum didicistis amare; idem nunc uobis Naso legendus erit. (Rem. am. 71–2) (You had to read Ovid when you were learning to love; you will now have to read the very same Ovid.)

The poet’s success is intertwined with the lover’s under Ovid’s tutelage: the latter wins a readership because his teaching is effective. The slippage from Ovid’s advice that girls should learn to sing to a literary history of which he is the culmination turns on the ﬁgures of Orpheus, Amphion, and Arion— mythic ﬁgures of song’s potency (AA 3. 321–6). The magical property of song to move stones and animals translates into the attractiveness of someone who can sing or recite poetry. The girls’ performance is consistently ﬁgured as song with musical accompaniment or reading aloud (3. 315, 319, 327, ‘legisse’ 333, ‘lege’ 341, ‘legas’, 344, ‘cantetur’, 345), in line with the mythic ﬁgures’ song. But the historical poets are poetae (3. 329), and Ovid’s own poetry is writing (‘scripta’ 3. 340, ‘libris, titulo’ 343). The shift from the effectiveness of moving stones to that of being cultured accompanies a shift from the mythic poet singing his own song to a girl’s vocal performance of others’ writings. When Ovid ends this section with a prayer to Apollo and Bacchus that someone request a performance of his own poetry, it is wishful thinking that includes him among the bards: ‘pia numina uatum’ (3. 347). The equivalent passage in the Remedia grants the same power to a shortened list of the same cast of characters, here only historical love poets, with Ovid similarly and modestly included (‘et mea nescioquid carmina tale sonant’, even my poems sound out some similar thing or other, 756). Poetry is dangerous, like the theatre, because of the power of representation: ‘ﬁcti saltantur amantes’ (ﬁctitious lovers dance/perform, 755). Imagined love will reinforce real love. Ovid’s recommendation anticipates what will become a developed paradox in the exile poetry. Only poetry can remove the harm it causes, but if it is harmful, it should be avoided altogether. What is here a

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recommendation to another (‘summoueo dotes ipsius ipse meas’ (I myself remove my own gifts), 758) later becomes a personal crisis. The Remedia is supposed to undo the effects of the Ars; Tristia 2 is supposed to undo the harm the Ars has caused the poet himself. The pragmatic question operates both within the elegiac world represented by the poetry (the lovers), and in the effects the poetry has on the external world (Augustus). But this latter consideration is only developed once Ovid confronts it in his life. Even where poetry fails to win love in the early elegy, it does nevertheless succeed in representation. The poet of the Amores laments that people have taken his depiction of Corinna seriously and therefore become his rivals. The irony is that his poetry’s success in representation poses a threat to its performativity. This situation is all the more lamentable in that one is supposed to take poetry as ﬁction. nec tamen ut testes mos est audire poetas: malueram uerbis pondus abesse meis. (Am. 3. 12. 19–20) (However it is not the custom to hear poets as witnesses: I would rather my words lacked weight.)

These two drives, to performativity and to representation, come together in the Ars, shortly after Ovid has intertwined the girl’s need to learn to sing with literary history. The intervening passage on the advantages of board games frames the relation of performative to representational goals as play. The girl’s need for an audience parallels the poet’s, and ‘fama’ links them (AA 3. 403), but while being seen can win her a man, a pragmatic aim (‘fructus abest, facies cum bona teste caret’ (there is no fruit, when a good face lacks a witness), 398; ‘utilis est uobis, formosae, turba, puellae’ (a crowd is useful to you, pretty girls), 417), art’s need for fame is an end in itself which may subsequently improve the poet’s social standing. Ennius won his statue’s placement near Scipio’s through his poetry (409–10), though this example of social advancement is no longer available to Ovid’s contemporaries (411–12). The overlap and confusion between life and art, pragmatic ends and fame for its own sake, comes together with the word populus. The people are the audience for the girl here (421) and for the poet at Metamorphoses 15. 878. Poets are useful for advertising girls’ beauty (535)—their own need for fame serves the girls’ need for publicity and so we come full circle to poetry’s ability to get things done. The concern for representation leads directly to questions of truth or falsity, and the passages between a girl’s fame and Ovid’s recommending poets as useful for providing it turn on this issue. He warns the girl to be on guard against fakes. This is easy to see from their social performance: their insufﬁcient masculinity indicates their words are insincere (433–6): their

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performance undercuts their self-representation. Some men furthermore use lovers’ language for a completely different end—stealing your cloak (441–52). But ‘fama’ attaches also to these, so one should pay attention to scuttlebutt (453–6). Although the transition to the advice about how to write on tablets appears abrupt, the theme of representation and its reliability continues. Now the girl must learn to deceive (484) and writing serves this end. Ovid works systematically through all the possibilities of relating pragmatics to representation without offering a consistent position: poetry is successful in seduction, unsuccessful in seduction, successful in representation, even when ostentatiously ﬁctitious.59 The most extreme case of a desperate desire for words to have power is his plea to Corinna to lie to him about her inﬁdelities (‘concedent uerbis lumina nostra tuis’ (let the evidence of my eyes yield to your words), Am. 3. 14. 46). The implied power of her words collapses in the face of his suggesting it. The expression ‘dare uerba’ (to deceive, 29) rips the veil off the ﬁction. The early Ovid is fascinated by truth and ﬁction, presence and absence, by the various media and their potential effectiveness, but is more interested in discovering their potential combinations than in developing a coherent poetic system.60

OVID WINS A HIGHER AUTHORITY (FAS T I A N D M E TA M O R P H O S E S) The later Ovid goes in two directions: in the Fasti towards the hybrid textuality typical of elegy and in the Metamorphoses towards epic song.61 While the Fasti exposes with great fanfare the research that has gone into the poem’s production, the Metamorphoses conﬁnes this aspect decorously to the Alexandrian footnote. The Fasti produces authority for the poet as a researcher and writer, while the Metamorphoses assumes it through song. Ovid’s epic poem opens without bombast to deﬁne his utterance as authoritative speech (‘dicere’, Met. 1. 1) and his poetry as song (‘carmen’, 1. 4). He speaks from the ﬁrst person, but indirectly (‘meis’, ‘mea’, 1. 3–4) and without the grounding speech act of Vergil. In contrast to the exploration of his authority to speak in his early elegy, Ovid tones down his vatic stance and does not ironize it, though there is plenty of irony toward other bards 59

Am. 2. 17. 27–9 presents poetry as socially valuable—it is as a census to him—at the same time as representationally unreliable: a woman boasts she is Corinna, although she is not. 60 For the Heroides, Ch. 8. 61 For hybrid generic identity in the Fasti and Metamorphoses, Hinds (1987).

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elsewhere in the poem, Orpheus in particular. The Fasti differ yet again and go further in the direction of both song and text.62 Ovid announces he will sing (F., ‘canam’, 1. 2)—a stronger representation of himself as singing than in the Metamorphoses—but that the song will result in a text (‘opus’, 1. 4) on a page (‘pagina’, 1. 19) which both derive from prior texts (‘annalibus . . . priscis’, 1. 7) and will need to be read (‘legendus/a’, 1. 10, 20).63 The text is distanced from the speaking utterance of the prologue: the deictic is ‘illic’ (there, 1. 9) and not ‘here’. The almost manic exposition of sources pervading the Fasti contrasts further with the cool assumption of authority in the Metamorphoses.64 Again, the media represented in the former go further both towards writing and towards song, and Ovid gives an ironic version of the divine epiphany conventional since Callimachus. While he, like the poet of the Aitia, had taken up his writing tablets (‘sumptis . . . tabellis’, F. 1. 93), Janus, the god whom he had announced as already present in the text on the ﬁrst day of the year (‘ecce . . . jadest’ (behold, he is present), 1. 63–4; P. Hardie 2002a: 18–19), appears in person to give a lengthy disquisition in song (‘canam’, 1. 104) on his own origins. The poet and god then engage in spoken dialogue (1. 145–8). This scene vividly conveys the requisite antiquarian information while giving Ovid a claim to divine authority—or would if the god were less chatty and the scene less staged.65 By foregrounding the conventions of authorization Ovid effectively calls his own bluff and at the end of this section he more realistically reveals an alternative, written source, the calendar itself (‘fastis’, 1. 289).66 His prayer to Janus, now not merely a textual construction, is for the poem’s continuation: ‘neue suum, praesta, deserat auctor opus’ (grant that the author not abandon his work, 1. 288). The god is to back up the poet’s own function as guarantor of his work. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid adheres to generic convention and takes a dim view of writing, although I stop short of Stephen Wheeler’s assertion that the poem engages in a ‘ﬁction of viva-voce performance’ (1999: 40). Ovid 62

P. Hardie (2002a) 18 skips the prologue in his claim that the Fasti opens with ‘a tour de force of evocations of presence’. 63 At the end of book 1, Ovid calls his work a little book (‘libellus’, 1. 724). Song and book are identical at the opening of book 2 (1–2), as are year and book. 64 In comparing the Met. with the Aeneid, Barchiesi (1999) 113–14 remarks: ‘the Ovidian narrator has as much authority as the Vergilian narrator—that is, a lot of it—but much less responsibility’ in that Ovid controls and edits ‘the multitude of voices’ of his poem, but is less responsible for the ‘overall plot’. He does not co-opt fate for his plot. 65 For the traditional unreliability of divine interlocutors regarding both information and authorization, Barchiesi (1997a) ch. 5, this passage (230–2). 66 For the written calendar, see F. 1. 657, where the poet becomes puzzled on reading the fasti (‘euolui’ (I unrolled)). Again, a god comes to help, this time the Muse.

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presupposes song without ﬂagging it, and full-ﬂedged song with instrumental accompaniment is the purview of characters.67 The association of epic with arms and violent war (Amores 1. 1) persists, though both the Amores and the Metamorphoses go against Augustan convention by failing to make the link between epic and praise, at least until the actual epic’s end.68 The writer styled as ‘uates’ of the Amores, the writer of the Fasti, and the more straightforwardly vatic author of authoritative discourse in the Metamorphoses represent the range of Ovid’s self-representation. The material on Ovid is now vast, and Philip Hardie’s Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion makes it unnecessary for me to treat in detail Ovid’s manipulation of the topoi of presence and absence. This is an obsession throughout Ovid’s corpus, and the interrelation of writing and song recurs nearly everywhere as a deﬁning concern.69 Here, let it sufﬁce to take a few representative moments from the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s pre-exilic works are much more interested in semiotics than in pragmatics. This corresponds to the apoliticization of second-generation Augustanism, and poetic effectiveness only comes to the fore as a topic under pressure, when Ovid actually wants his poetry to effect his recall. P. Hardie argues that ‘Ovid is afﬂicted with a nostalgia for a primitive world of art in which the poet or artist was a potent magician’, and considers Orpheus and Pygmalion as ﬁgures for the poet and artist respectively ‘in their role as primitive magicians’ (2002a: 22–3). Ovid himself, however, stands at a distance from those roles, and while they may be desirable, they do not represent realistic poetic options.70 The anxiety the earlier Augustans feel about praise poetry has subsided. Ovid praises casually. He deploys panegyric topoi to a greater extent, but lightly; they are not central to his poetry and do not often convince. Ovid is not fraught about praise until exile, with the exception of the remarkable conclusion of the Metamorphoses. I therefore postpone analysing this passage until the discussion of reading and the law that concludes this book (Ch. 16). In the Metamorphoses, writing is a second-class form of communication on the story level, and Wheeler notes its association with women (1999: 57,

67 e.g. Calliope, Met. 5. 332–45, 463, where ‘dicere’ and ‘canere’ both denote her utterance; ‘cantus’ at 5. 662. Farrell (1999) 128 argues that the poem moves from an image of a ‘bookish body to that of the poem as disembodied song’, but this depends on taking Ovid’s ‘mythological surrogates’ (133) as stand-ins for the poem’s own medium. 68 For the strong elegiac dimension of the Metamorphoses, Hinds (1987) chs. 5 and 6. 69 For semiotics in the Heroides, Ch. 8, in the exile poetry, Chs. 11 and 16. 70 Leach (1974) emphasizes the failure of the artist ﬁgures of the Metamorphoses and sees a difference between them and Ovid’s claims for heroic apotheosis at the poem’s end (133–5).

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50–5). One recurrent characteristic of metamorphosis is the loss of speech.71 This does not, however, preclude the use of signs, among which is writing.72 For Io, writing her name in the sand with her hoof is a measure of last resort (1. 648), and her return to human form is accompanied by an anxious resumption of speech (1. 745–6).73 By contrast, speech and song are consistently potent, magic is oral and effective.74 Odysseus’ eloquence wins him Achilles’ arms in preference to Ajax (12. 382). Although the prophetic songs of the uates are not always clear (7. 759–61), their prophecies and the poetic tradition are presumed to carry weight, if not full truth.75 The great song cycles of the Muses and Orpheus are often argued to be paradigmatic for the poet’s own song,76 and the Muses themselves, when ﬁnally invoked at the 71 Met. 2. 482–8; 2. 658–75; 2. 829–31; 3. 21; 3. 201–3, 239–41; 3. 674; transformation of voice 4. 382; 4. 12–13; 4. 586–9; 5. 192–4; 6. 306; 6. 374–8; 9. 369–70, 388, 392; 13. 568–9; 14. 498; 521–6. Macareus’ story of Circe transforming him into a pig ironically emphasizes his loss of speech (14. 280–1). Cessation of speech or song also marks death (5. 105, 112–18; 11. 325–7; 12. 457–8). The Sirens are unusual in being dehumanized, but they keep their enchanting song along with their faces (5. 561–3), although their tongues produce music, canor, rather than song, carmen. 72 Battus becomes a ﬂint-stone (‘lapis . . . loquetur’, 2. 696, ‘index’ 706), Aglauros and Anaxarete become stones (‘signum’, 2. 831, 14. 759), and a statue of Picus is also ‘signum’ (14. 313). Canens dies singing and the place’s fame is marked (‘signata’, 14. 433). One of the indications that Narcissus’ reﬂection lacks an independent existence is its inability to speak, though it makes signs by nodding (3. 460–2). Pyramus and Thisbe progress from mute signs (4. 63) to speech, though they are separated by a crack (69, 77); Pyramus’ tragic misreading of a sign kills them. Only meaningless speech is left the Pierides once they change into magpies (5. 295–99, 677–8), and the sounds Ceyx and Alcyone emit as halcyons resemble lament (11. 724–5). Once changed, Cyane cannot speak, but can use signs (‘signa . . . notamque’, 5. 468). Echo is exceptional in that her voice remains, but what she says is limited to others’ authorization. The Sibyl prophesies her own future reduction to voice (14. 153). 73 Farrell (1999) 133–6 sets Io’s story in relation to Daphne’s transformation, where bark evokes a book (‘liber’), and to Syrinx’s, where she becomes ‘pure melody’ (135); he shows the slipperiness of the reading process and the nymphs’ loss of agency, whatever the medium. 74 Medea’s spells are ‘carmen’ (7. 137), and Jason implies magic’s efﬁcacity when he asks, ‘quid enim non carmina possunt?’ (7. 167), though there are limits. Medea uses a compound of scribere to denote what Hecate will not allow, though she does not imply that Jason’s request to transfer some of his years to his father is not possible (‘transcribere’, 7. 173). Alcmene’s labour is delayed by ‘carmina’, though it is not clear whether these are prayer or magic (9. 300–1). Mycale led down the moon ‘canendo’ (12. 263). Glaucus is purged by saying ‘carmen’ nine times (13. 952). Glaucus comes to Circe assuming she can effect what she wills through ‘carmen’ or other means (14. 20), and her ‘carmen’ proves effective at 14. 44, 58, 301–2, and 387. The Proetides are said to have been purged by ‘carmen’ and herbs (15. 326). By contrast, magic is revealed a sham at Med. fac. fem. 39–42, where cosmetic technology offers a more reliable route to beauty. 75 The potential ﬁction of the poetic tradition by no means prevents story-telling: ‘si non omnia uates j ﬁcta reliquerunt’ (if everything the bards have left is not ﬁctitious, 13. 733–4); ‘nisi uatibus omnis j eripienda ﬁdes’ (unless all trust should be snatched from the bards, 15. 282–3). Vatic prophecy is assumed to carry authority (15. 435). 76 The vatic language and song are particularly strong with Orpheus (10. 12, 82, 89, 143–54, 300–1, 11. 1–68). The parallel with Ovid is strengthened by Orpheus’ ability to pass easily from

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poem’s end, are ‘praesentia numina uatum’ (present divinities of bards, 15. 622) (P. Hardie 2002a: 4–5). Fama also ﬁgures the poem and its multivocality; her utterance is powerful, if short on truth (12. 43–63) (Barchiesi 2001b: 130–1). The poem teems with stories of vocal walls (8. 15), improvised choral hymns (7. 432–3), the invention of instruments (Syrinx, 1. 689–712), and fates of those who play them (Marsyas, 6. 386; the contest between Pan and Apollo on pan-pipes and lyre respectively, 11. 153–71). The sheer abundance of song and its accoutrements lends it predominance, and I have merely scratched the surface.77 Before examining how the poem presents its own medium, let us consider a number of passages that present writing as ineffective or otherwise deﬁcient. Although there is nothing wrong with writing per se, it becomes tainted by association. Philomela’s is a story full of non-verbal signs, which nevertheless manage to communicate perfectly.78 The need for these signs, however, comes at the price of trauma. Like Io, Philomela turns to writing as a last resort because she is bereft of speech. It is her threat that she would speak of Tereus’ misdeeds— his betrayal of his wife Procne by raping her sister—that leads him to cut out her tongue in one of the most memorably gruesome descriptions of the Metamorphoses. The horror of the tongue’s murmuring after being cut out and attempting to seek its mistress’s footsteps as it dies (6. 557–60) matches the horror of Procne’s and Philomela’s revenge: Procne kills her own son Itys, and his members still retain some life after death (6. 644–5), before he is fed to his father. The use of signs instead of speech corresponds in the story to the partial life that remains in dismembered limbs after they have been severed from the living body; neither is entirely dead or alive. The cut-off tongue even manages to murmur (6. 558)—inarticulate, but expressive nevertheless. Philomela would have preferred death (6. 554), and is reduced to communicating with gestures to both her guard and with her sister, once they are reunited (6. 579, ‘pro uoce manus fuit’, 609). But her most elaborate communication through signs is her tapestry. stamina barbarica suspendit callida tela purpureasque notas ﬁlis intexuit albis, high-style epic to erotic themes (10. 143–54). His powerful song converts a spear into an instrument that leaves a mark (‘notam’, 11. 9) instead of a wound. The metaphor of an ineffectual stylus is implicit. For Orpheus’s song as a ‘mise en abyme of the poem as a whole’, P. Hardie (2002a) 66, with n. 9. Habinek (2005c) 59–64 makes the episode between the Muses and their rivals paradigmatic for ‘the system of verbal performance that characterizes Roman culture’. Leach (1974) 119–27, however, makes Orpheus’ song one among other instances of artistic failure. 77 Zehnacker (1993) traces orality as a theme throughout Ovid. 78 Detailed treatment at P. Hardie (2002a) 258–72. He makes the tapestry ‘an exempliﬁcation of the universal character of absent presence’ (268).

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indicium sceleris, perfectaque tradidit uni, utque ferat dominae, gestu rogat. illa rogata pertulit ad Procnen; nescit quid tradat in illis. euoluit uestes saeui matrona tyranni fortunaeque suae carmen miserabile legit et (mirum potuisse) silet. dolor ora repressit, uerbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguae defuerunt; nec ﬂere uacat, sed fasque nefasque confusura ruit poenaeque in imagine tota est. (6. 576–86) (She hung a clever warp on a barbaric loom and wove crimson marks on white threads, disclosing the crime, and when it was ﬁnished, handed it to one, and asked with a gesture that she take it to her mistress; she who was asked brought it to Procne: she did not know what she was handing over in it. The wife of the cruel tyrant unrolled the tapestry and read the pitiful song of her own fortune and—a marvel that she could—kept silent: pain quelled her speech, and words sufﬁciently indignant failed her tongue, nor was there occasion to cry, but she, mixing speakable and unspeakable rushes to ruin and is consumed with the image of revenge.)

Whether or not ‘carmen’ is the right reading,79 and whether or not we can take the marks as literal writing,80 this passage is imbued with writing imagery: unrolling the tapestry resembles unrolling a scroll; the servant probably cannot understand what is depicted because she cannot read, though she can understand gestures; the poet marvels that Procne remains silent as she reads the representation, just as people marvel at silent reading; one sister’s silence leads to another’s, even while they are communicating; right and wrong are expressed with ‘fas’ and ‘nefas’, whose etymology goes back to utterance. Ovid emphasizes time and again the horror of the women’s silence, whether through inability or the unspeakable revenge they plot.81 The alternative system of signs works as communication, but its reason for coming into being and use are similarly traumatic: a wound engenders representational repetition. Philomela’s tapestry engenders an image in Procne of revenge (‘imagine’, 6. 586); Procne rescues her sister via simulation (596); metamorphosis eternalizes signs: ‘neque adhuc de pectore caedis j excessere notae, signataque sanguine pluma est’ (nor have the marks of the slaughter

79 Editors are uncertain, but Bo¨mer and TarrMet ad loc. call attention to ‘miserabile carmen’ of Philomela’s song as a nightingale at Vergil, G. 4. 514. 80 For parallels, Bo¨mer ad loc., though he points out that writing often pertains to visual images; P. Hardie (2002a) 268 n. 19. Haupt–Ehwald ad loc. compare the writing to an inscription, as at 2. 326. 81 Procne keeps her vindictive plans to herself (6. 622–3); she compares Itys’ ability to speak to Philomela’s inability (632–3) and his calling her ‘mother’ only reinforces her resolve (640); Philomela most wishes she could speak when Tereus realizes he has eaten his son (660).

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yet fallen from her chest, and the plumage is marked with blood, 669–70). The same word denotes the signs on Philomela’s tapestry and the marks on Procne’s chest. Byblis’s story makes several other points about writing (9. 450–665): it is an effective communicative medium for conveying information, but may not be the best at persuasion, since the author cannot alter the letter’s contents according to the reader’s reaction.82 Her story and Myrrha’s form a pair: each girl conceives an incestuous love for her brother and father respectively. They achieve a different degree of success according to the medium they use to pursue their beloved. Byblis writes her appeal on tablets, where the salutation trips her up. Any way she identiﬁes herself, whether as ‘soror’, which she deletes, or by her proper name, her identity is revealed (529–34). Although she chooses writing because its secretive nature corresponds to her secret ﬂame, her secret must be revealed for her to achieve her aim (‘littera celatos arcana fatebitur ignes’ (the secret letter will confess hidden ﬂames), 9. 516). Byblis learns her lesson too late. Her brother does not even ﬁnish reading the tablets before throwing them down (575) and she realizes she should have been more subtle. Rather than tablets, which reveal everything all at once (586–7), she should have used ambiguous words (588) and learned to read the signs (‘notare’, 590). All in all, she thinks, ‘she should have spoken herself, and not entrusted herself to wax, and revealed her fury in person’ (‘et tamen ipsa loqui nec me committere cerae j debueram praesensque meos aperire furores!’, 602). She tries this approach too, and is again repulsed. Although it is not writing but impiety that dooms her efforts, Ovid turns her story into a meditation on the differences between communicative media. Byblis mistakenly condemns writing rather than its content. She even blames the messagebearer for not choosing the right time to deliver the message in a spoof of the convention in Horace’s Epistles that books must be given when their recipient is well disposed (9. 611–13; Hor. Epist. 1. 13. 1–5, 2. 1. 220–1).83 Myrrha seems to have learned from Byblis and chooses a different approach. She also must use an intermediary to ensure secrecy, but her nurse preserves her anonymity in proposing her as a ﬂing to her father. The oral medium corresponds to the discourse of the internal narrator, Orpheus, whose medium is song, and it is successful—if incest is a success. Myrrha takes her cue from Byblis and is careful to use ambiguous language. She tells

82 These are issues already in the Heroides, with which the Byblis story has afﬁnities, Paratore (1970). For epistles, Part II. 83 Parallels in McKeown at Am. 1. 11. 15–16. On our inability to control a letter’s reception, Kennedy (2002) 222. For gender and communication media in the Byblis episode, Farrell (1998) 318–23.

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her father, when asked whom she would like to marry, ‘someone like you’ (similem tibi, 10. 364). He, of course, does not understand and praises her devotion (365–7). Names will out, however, and they end up calling each other ‘father’ and ‘daughter’ in bed (467–8). The irony is that they are the generic appellations of men and girls of different ages that happen to denote their particular family relation.84 The contrast with Byblis underscores the sense on the story-level that writing is an inferior medium to speech or song and Iphis’ use of tablets in wooing is similarly unsuccessful (14. 707). Even the preservation of Byblis’ and Myrrha’s names is marked by a subtle difference. nomen habet dominae nigraque sub ilice manat (Byblis’ spring: Met. 9. 665) (It has the name of its mistress and ﬂows under a dark holm oak.) nomen erile tenet nulloque tacebitur aeuo (Myrrha’s tree: Met. 10. 502) (It has its mistress’s name and will be spoken of in every age.)

The parallel lines end with a focus on the spring in Byblis’ case, but on eternal fame in Myrrha’s. This corresponds to the immortalization conferred by song. Writing does commemorate in the Metamorphoses, and a number of inscriptions are either mentioned or recorded. Every inscription cited verbatim, however, is accompanied by a reference to song. corpora dant tumulo, signantque hoc carmine saxum: HIC SITVS EST PHAETHON CVRRVS AVRIGA PATERNI QVEM SI NON TENVIT MAGNIS TAMEN EXCIDIT AVSIS.

(Phaethon: Met. 2. 326–8) (They lay his body in a tomb, and sign the stone with this song: Here lies Phaethon, driver of his father’s chariot. If he did not control it, still he fell with great things dared.)

Phaethon had wanted a sign of Sol’s paternity (‘ueri . . . signa parentis’, 1. 764), and got it. His mistake was thinking it would be mastery of his father’s chariot, rather than his own funeral inscription. dant munera templis, addunt et titulum, titulus breue carmen habebat:85

84

For these names in the festival of Ceres, during which the incest occurs, Lowrie (1993). Titulus at 12. 334 is not writing, but a metaphor for victory deriving from dedicatory inscriptions. 85

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(Met. 9. 793–5) (They give gifts to the temples, they also add a dedication, the dedication had a brief song: Iphis paid gifts as a boy which he had vowed as a female.)

Unlike the other Iphis, who used writing in an attempt to gain love, this Iphis uses it properly, as commemoration of the gods’ gift, a sex change that enabled him to consummate a love already gained. urnaque Aeneia nutrix condita marmorea tumulo breue carmen habebat: HIC ME CAIETAM NOTAE PIETATIS ALVMNVS EREPTAM ARGOLICO QVO DEBVIT IGNE CREMAVIT.

(Met. 14. 441–4) (And Aeneas’ nurse, buried in a marble urn, had a brief song on her tomb: Here my foster child, known for his piety, cremated me, Caieta, with deserved ﬁre, after I was saved from that of the Greeks.)

Whereas in Vergil, it is Caieta who ‘gave fame to our shores by her death’, and there is only a hint of an inscription on a tomb (‘et nunc seruat honos sedem tuus, ossaque nomen j Hesperia in magna, si qua est ea gloria, signat’ (and now your honour preserves the place, and your name signs your bones in great Hesperia, if that is an honour), Aen. 7. 3–4), Ovid, as is usual in his imitations of predecessors, makes the mechanics of the preservation of fame explicit. In all of these passages, song works together with writing to preserve a name. When inscription occurs without mention of song, the emphasis falls more on mourning: absence rather than commemoration is at the fore. The sisters of Meleager turn into birds because they cannot overcome mourning. His tomb is marked with his name, but there is no mention of a song: ‘adfusaeque iacent tumulo signataque saxo j nomina conplexae lacrimas in nomina fundunt’ (and they lie slumped on the tomb, and embracing the named signed into the rock they pour tears on the name, 8. 540–1). The several cenotaphs similarly lack song. The writing on them is viewed as inadequate or otherwise emotionally insufﬁcient. Priam and his sons mourn Aeson since they do not know he is still alive. His cenotaph bears his name (12. 1–3), but the insufﬁciency is underscored by Paris’ not being there to honour the tomb (‘defuit ofﬁcio Paridis praesentia tristi’ (Paris’ presence was lacking to the sad duty), 12. 4). Before Procne learns her sister is not in fact dead, she mourns her with an empty tomb (‘inane sepulcrum’, 6. 568). Authorial comment marks the action’s inappropriateness: ‘et luget non sic lugendae fata sororis’ (and she mourns the fate of her sister, who ought not be mourned thus, 570). Alcyone begs her beloved husband Ceyx not to leave by reminding him she

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has often read names on tombs without bodies (‘et saepe in tumulis sine corpore nomina legi’, 11. 429). When he dies, she laments that they will not even be joined in death by an urn; the letters joining their names is consolation however small (‘inque sepulcro j si non urna, tamen iunget nos littera, si non j ossibus ossa meis, at nomen nomine tangam’ (and in the tomb, if an urn will not join us, at least a letter will, if I will not touch your bones with my bones, at least I’ll touch your name with my name), 11. 705–7). Her ﬁnding his body and their subsequent transformation into halcyons appear by contrast as plenitude. The difference between the mere record of a name and the full commemoration of writing coupled with some form of performance emerges most strongly in the doublet of the hyacinth, which honours both Ajax and Hyacinthus with the inscription AIAI on its leaves. Apollo ﬁrst promises to celebrate Hyacinthus in person with song, presumably on a single occasion, then adds the inscription on the ﬂower (10. 205–6).86 Sparta’s annual festival corresponds in medium to Apollo’s song, and honours Hyacinthus with ritual iteration (10. 217–19).87 This is about as much honour in as many media as is humanly possible, with god, nature, and culture all conjoined in writing, ritual, and song.88 Several special characteristics of writing emerge here that differentiate it from the performative honours. Orpheus’ authorial voice underscores its supplementary status (‘non satis hoc Phoebo est’ (this [metamorphosis] is not enough for Phoebus), 10. 214) and funerary nature (‘funesta . . . littera’, 216). Apollo furthermore makes a prediction about Ajax’s name (AIAI) being added to the ﬂower that reveals writing’s potential for polysemy. Additional meanings can later accrue to the writing, which will then be recuperated in the act of reading: ‘tempus et illud erit, quo se fortissimus heros, j addat in hunc ﬂorem folioque legatur eodem’ (and that time will come when a very brave hero will add himself to this ﬂower and be read on the same leaf, 10. 207–8). This brief couplet offers a paradigm for reception theory: reception adds and transmits meaning. After Ajax’s suicide, Ovid notes the addition of the hero’s name to Apollo’s lament and the letters’ capacity for bearing double meaning (13. 397–8). The cause of his death was Odysseus’ performative success, emphasized at the beginning of the section

86 TarrMet thinks lines 10. 205–8 are interpolated. Apollo’s own mention of the inscription is redundant with line 215. If so, there is still a mixture of writing with the performance of the Spartan festival, but the allegory of reception suggested below is less explicit. 87 The annual festival for Adonis keeps his representation ongoing, but this need not be conveyed via writing: Venus says, ‘luctus monimenta manebunt j semper, Adoni, mei, repetitaque mortis imago j annua plangoris peraget simulamina nostri’ (monuments of my grief will remain, Adonis, and the repeated image of death will perform the yearly imitation of my lament, 10. 725–7). This occurs in the same book, also in Orpheus’ song. 88 Janan (1988) 120–4 on writing’s ‘absent-presence’, P. Hardie (2002a) 64 the multiplicity of media.

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(‘quid facundia posset, j re patuit’ (what eloquence could do was revealed in deed), 13. 382–3).89 In both episodes, writing commemorates, but neither overcomes effective speech, nor commemorates entirely on its own.90 It has value, but does not measure up to performative ritual or utterance. Despite the writing’s portrayal as an incomplete or otherwise ineffective medium within the stories, whose mythic and epic dimension invites a greater emphasis on song, writing manifests itself, as in Vergil, as an important ﬁgure for the poem itself. We will return to the fates inscribed in adamant and the epilogue of book 15, where reading is attributed with the power to preserve Ovid’s name, in Ch. 16, since these are implicated in the rivalry between poetry and another powerful discourse, the law. Here, let me mention a brief simile Pythagoras uses to argue that everything changes: ‘utque nouis facilis signatur cera ﬁguris’ (and as wax is easily marked by new ﬁgures, 15. 169). The theme is mutability itself, the very topic and name of the poem we are reading. The poem opens with Ovid’s claim that his own endeavours have changed, so that the poem matches its subject matter.91 The presumed medium of composition, tablets, also partakes of mutability. Augustan poetry’s consistent preoccupation with mediality, both as a theme and as a locus for self-deﬁnition, is intimately intertwined with the question of the power of language. Epic and lyric have strong afﬁliations with song, while elegy and iambic are hybrids. Within elegy, different authors tilt more towards one pole or another, with Tibullus more of a song poet, Ovid more of a writer, and Propertius evenly mixed. The particularly pressing issue for the earlier Augustans is how to praise, both in the sense of rhetorical efﬁcacity and of what form the praise should take, but this question participates in a larger preoccupation with the relationship between representation and effectiveness. 89

Eloquence does not always prevail over brute force: Hercules answers Achelous’ speech with ‘melior mihi dextera lingua’ (my right hand is stronger than my tongue, 9. 29), and beats him at wrestling. But speech often simply makes things happen. A run of words result in immediate deeds in book 4. This is, in Juno’s case, the instant performativity of divine utterance (‘res dicta secuta est’ (the deed followed the words), 4. 550): she turns her detractors into stones, as ‘monuments of my cruelty’ (‘saeuitiae monimenta meae’, 4. 550). Although Cadmus and Harmonia pray to the gods to transform them, there is no evident divine agency. The words themselves appear to makes things happen (‘dixit et . . . ’ (he spoke and [changed into a snake]), 576; ‘dixerat’ (she had spoken [and changed into a snake]), 595). 90 The persistence of physical monuments commemorates in itself: Phineus’ turning to stone is called ‘mansura . . . monimenta per aeuum’ (monument enduring through the ages, 5. 227). P. Hardie (2002a) 178–9 treats Phineus as an artistic surrogate. 91 Reading Lejay’s ‘di, coeptis (nam uos mutastis et illa) j aspirate meis’ (gods, inspire by undertakings, for you have changed them too, 1. 2–3) with Kenney (1976) and TarrMet, against ‘illas’ in Anderson.

Part II Performance and the Augustan Literary Epistle

Turpilius 213: Sola res est quae praesentes homines absentes facit. Hieronymus epist. 42: Turpilius comicus tractans de uicissitudine literarum sola, inquit, res est quae homines absentes praesentes facit. Nec falsam dedit quamquam in re non uera sententiam. Quid enim est, ut ita dicam, tam praesens inter absentes quam per epistolas et alloqui et audire quos diligas? (Ribbeck 1873)

8 Love and Semiotics THE A DVANTAGES OF WRITING Closeness to the word of god, an active intervention in society, pragmatic effectiveness—the advantages of literature ﬁgured as song, as living presence, as performative in all the word’s senses overwhelm and seduce. Why then does every poem not claim this mantle? Besides misrepresenting literary production in this period (a secondary consideration), such a strategy disregards writing’s advantages.1 These depend on writing’s double position prior and subsequent to song, both composition and recording. Writing ﬁgures realism and social immediacy in several Catullan epistles to his friends, and poetic longevity in the metaphor of the monumentum employed by Horace, Livy, and Ovid. In either case, writing entails distance, physical and temporal, between author, addressee, and readership. Distance in itself has many advantages, some more closely linked to writing than others. Divine inspiration has attractions, but so does independence. When Vergil says ‘cano’ (I sing) in the ﬁrst person before invoking the Muse (Aen. 1. 1, 8),2 this is a step further from god than in Homer, where the poet asks the Muse to sing. Vergil claims credit for a song that originates with him.3 Distance from social obligations also has attractions. The Augustan recusatio often sets the poet’s aesthetic independence against real or felt obligations to

1

Ford (2002) 235 goes over Alcidamas’ treatment of writing’s advantages: he may reach those who have not heard him extemporize; written orations can be studied. 2 Suerbaum (1968) 23 n. 68. Hunter (1996) 53–4 highlights the difference between the Homeric Hymn to the Dioscuri ( F ÆØ, 33. 1) and Theocritus’ ﬁrst person (22. 1): Theocritus takes a step from the ‘archaic “servant of the Muses”’ towards the ‘Roman uates’. 3 Calame (1995) 18: ‘And when inspiration represented by the Muses becomes merely a literary convention, it is the I of the narrator that inherits the power-knowledge previously bestowed by the Muses’; ‘the appearance of the I is not a distinctive trait of written literature’ (27). For the ‘I’ in Greek, see some parallels in Brink (1971) at line 137; Gordon Williams (1968) 35–7 traces the history of the shift in commenting on Aen. 7. 40, for which also Horsfall (2000) ad loc.

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men in positions of power. Social embeddedness, like divine inspiration, comes at a price, and aesthetic value is worth defending. Horace plays both cards in his Epistle to Augustus: his defence of the choral lyrist’s social function—highly reminiscent of his own Carmen saeculare—stands apart from his valuation of the library over spectacle as a locus for good literature. Although Ovid complains bitterly from exile about his divorce from society, and pleads to be brought back to Rome, he also makes a strong case for artistic independence, which compromises his pleas: he apologizes in no sense except defence.4 Distance furthermore is a fact of publication authors must reckon with. Horace and Ovid both address their poetry hypostatized as books that leave their author’s control for the world. Freedom from god or society may be advantageous for the author, but it comes at a price. Horace styles his book of epistles as a slave for sale, and Ovid his as the disenfranchised offspring of an exile (Epist. 1. 20. 1; Tr. 1. 1. 1). Depending on whether song relates to writing as composition or as recording, the one or the other can lie closer to immediacy or to the eternal. For Ovid writing epistles in exile, the performance of his other poetry back at Rome (Tr. 2. 519–20) represents the lost plenitude of home and a living social context for his poetry, but for Horace, in the face of an ostensible demand for a poem in praise of Agrippa (Odes 1. 6), it is advantageous to align his lyric song with eternal Homer over against the social pressures of the moment, which he links to writing. Horace disavows writing by offering his friend Varius for the job instead (‘scriberis Vario’ (you will be written of by Varius), Odes 1. 6. 1), and by contrast embraces song (‘cantamus’ (we sing), 19) (Lowrie 1997: 55–70). Which is more present, social immediacy or the eternal? Writing and song can accord with either, according to the particular context. Furthermore, where does poetry’s social function lie? In meeting some present demand, as in Horace’s Carmen saeculare, whose performance contributed to the festivities of Augustus’ ludi saeculares, or in ﬁlling the shelves of the Palatine library, as Horace suggests in his Epistle to Augustus? Books written for readers fulﬁl the social obligations of the moment by handing on tradition or praise through commemoration. Rarely in poetic self-representation, however, do all these elements come together. I argue in Part II that Augustan poetic epistles explore an anxiety about the loss of direct contact with their audience.5 You send a letter by deﬁnition to

4

Barchiesi (1993); Gareth Williams (1994) ch. 4. Bing (1988) sees the thematic preoccupation with books in Hellenistic poetry as symptomatic of a cultural transition from performance to reading and the concomitant separation between author and audience. By the time of Augustan poetry, this anxiety is already an inherited part of the tradition. 5

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someone who is not there while you are writing it, and when the addressee becomes present to the letter, you are no longer so. This obvious and essential feature makes the epistolary genre a perfect vehicle for exploring communication in absence, and beyond that, for reﬂection on literary communication, since literature shares with letters a separation between author and audience.6 There is a diachronic development in the Augustan epistles from more strictly semiotic questions to larger issues of mediality in public spectacles.7 Whether in the heroine epistles of Propertius and Ovid’s Heroides, or in Horace and the later Ovid’s meditations on performance, the problematics facing the epistle are essentially those of representation, making present what is not there, and of pragmatics, using words to achieve an effect. The developing importance of spectacle is an attempt on the part of Horace and Ovid in particular to recuperate thematically what the structure of the genre precludes: ﬁrst, the audience’s presence, but then, the presence of the world as lived experience. Both, however, in the end embrace mediation with its full potential for deferral. In Part I, writing is by and large subordinate to song in Augustan poetic self-representation. Elegy is a partial exception in that, despite its dominant afﬁliation with writing, song plays a deﬁning role, especially when the poet elevates his endeavours—whether in earnest or in play—and makes claims to immortality. Satire is a strong exception, an instance of which will be treated in Ch. 14. In Part II, writing becomes the dominant medium, but performance and the performative keep recurring as a concern.8 The second line of Catullus 68 (‘conscriptum hoc lacrimis mittis epistolium’ (you send this epistle, written with tears)) contains three words crucial to communication by letter: the object itself (‘epistolium’), the process of writing (‘conscriptum’), and its sending (‘mittis’).9 The frigidity of such language, however, is belied by the tears, which inscribe emotion. The Augustan literary epistle inherits this formulation.

6 Gunderson (1997) 201–3; Kennedy (2002) 220–1, 230–1. Fitzgerald’s (1995) 188 formulation applies equally well to a letter: ‘A written poem is a communication in which one or other of the parties is absent—depending on whether you look at it from the poet’s or the reader’s point of view.’ 7 For Horace’s originality in publishing a collection of literary epistles in hexameters, see Kilpatrick (1986) pp. xiii–xiv, who emphasizes the need to interpret the individual poems as ‘poetic constructs’ that may have arisen ‘from genuine occasions and personalities’ (p. xvi). 8 Kennedy (2002) 220 traces theory and criticism that make epistolarity paradigmatic for writing as a whole, and identiﬁes as a dominant feature of the medium desire for (and anxiety about) getting a response. 9 Syndikus (1990) 249 details the poem’s epistolary conventions.

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Performance and the Augustan Epistle CATULLUS 50: COMMUNICATION AND ABSENCE La forme est la pre´sence meˆme. (Derrida, ‘La Forme et le vouloir-dire’)

Catullus’ several epistles set up many of the issues informing their Augustan counterparts. All are explicitly about poetry and their self-conscious examination of writing as a kind of mediation between letter-writer and addressee explores the differences between this relation and that of author to reader.10 I limit myself to poem 50 here; poems 65 and 68 are discussed above, Ch. 2. Desire inﬂames Catullus 50, an epistle written to a friend and fellow poet, Licinius, probably Calvus.11 This poem meditates on the complex role writing can play in friendship by polarizing presence and absence.12 Writing sits on either side of the dichotomy, but in different ways. It is both a social activity and a medium of communication, an act and a means. Catullus splits two lived experiences. Yesterday, he and Licinius had immediate access to each other at a conuiuium, where they wrote verse responsively on Catullus’ tablets (1–6). Today, Catullus also writes, but his writing now seeks to overcome the desire aroused by Licinius’ absence. What he wanted, while tossing sleepless in bed, was bodily presence and unmediated speech (12–13).13 The dichotomy between the two situations, however, is hardly neat. Yesterday’s fulﬁlment was mediated by art. Poetics and erotics share a vocabulary (‘otiosi’, ‘lusimus’, ‘delicatos’, ‘reddens mutua per iocum atque uinum’, 1–6) and the poet’s arousal is metaphorically sexual. But the exchange of tablets displaces direct physical contact. At the heart of ostensible plenitude lies the mediation of a writing tablet.14 If the tablets keep people apart while together, writing can also bring people into contact from a distance. The communicative medium is the poem itself,

10

Skinner (2003) 20 links the epistolary setting of poem 65 with ‘a sense of rupture’. Wray (2001) 97 n. 72 notes important discussions. Krostenko (2001) 248 calls attention to the response required within the economy of social performance in the Late Republic; Skinner (2003) 20, on poem 65; Wray (2001) 158, 180, 199. 12 For presence and absence in this poem, Janan (1994) 50–5, Fitzgerald (1995) 110–13, Gunderson (1997), P. Hardie (2002a) 53–4. 13 Habinek’s (1998b) 70–2 and (2005c) 61, 71–4 deﬁnition of loquor as the act of speaking reveals Catullus’ need is communication itself without a speciﬁc need to impart any particular content. 14 Fitzgerald (1995) 112: ‘The emphasis in the description of their day together is on alternation and responsiveness, anything but simultaneity.’ Fowler (2000) 22: ‘Love cannot help but be a ﬁction, but it is a ﬁction by which we live: and it is this role as a supreme ﬁction which makes it a paradigm of human culture in general.’ 11

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which Catullus has written so as to make his feelings known (16–17). The etymologizing in poema feci (ØE ¼ facere) reiﬁes the poem as an object that transmits emotion.15 Speaking through the poem substitutes for the shared speech of togetherness. Sending a poem and not an ordinary prose letter will continue yesterday’s poetic exchange—as in poem 42, tablets will presumably convey the text. Tablets mediate between Catullus and Licinius whether they are together or apart. The poem, however, goes beyond the constative task (to convey Catullus’ feelings) and conveys a speech act. Catullus makes a request of Licinius under threat of retribution, and its lack of speciﬁcation constructs the two men’s relationship as extratextual. They share an understanding denied to the reader16 and we can only wonder about the poet’s ‘prayers’ (18).17 A prayer is a performative, but Catullus withholds it as well as its content—the formal performative is rather ‘oramus’ (I beg, 19), the request that Licinius not reject the unspeciﬁed prayer. Performatives need not have formal correctness to be pragmatically effective and Licinius would understand the ellipsis, but our own lack of knowledge highlights the difference between Catullus’ relation to his addressee and to his readership. Writing can overcome absence through its physical existence and can communicate real performatives to real people, but it needs to be supplemented by actual presence. Mediation can be viewed as half empty or half full, as a barrier or as a connection. For writing to succeed as communication, it must travel over space and time. The antithesis made between ‘yesterday’ (1) and ‘today’ is implied, but the latter is not speciﬁed. Instead, the last section of the poem, as often in Catullus, is introduced by ‘nunc’ (18) (Witke 1968: 3). This ‘now’ does not contrast with ‘yesterday’, and is not even temporal, but inferential. It reaches beyond the time of the poem’s composition to its receipt by Licinius: ‘given that you now see how the situation is, you must not spurn my prayers’. No time represented in the poem actually corresponds to the time of its composition. The events described took place yesterday, the previous night, and by the time the poet speaks, he has already composed the poem (‘poema feci’, 15 Wray (2001) 97 n. 75 and 98–9 discusses the suggestion that the poem introduces the gift of the following poem, a translation of Sappho, by analogy with poem 65, an epistolary introduction to translation of Callimachus given in poem 66. 16 For this phenomenon generally in Catullus, see Citroni (1995) 63–5, though he, like us all, must speculate: ‘probabilmente la preghiera di rinnovare l’incontro’ (77). Nisbet (1995) 83 argues against obscurity of reference (to an unnamed third party in 35) in light of the ‘conventions of this type of poetry, which in spite of its air of intimacy is written for a public audience’. The ellipses create the impression of lived relationships with the addressees, and do not generate real obscurity. See poems 30, 60, 102—this last promises to keep a secret. The obscurity of poem 68 challenges this hypothesis. 17 On our lack of knowledge, see Witke (1968) 4. For parallels, Wray (2001) 106–7.

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16). He speaks in the time of its receipt. The price of the poem’s communicative success is that by the time the message gets through, Catullus is no longer there. To this extent, the situation in the poem corresponds to the relation of author to reader. Catullus 50 is paradigmatic for the Augustan epistles in its handling of the relation of presence to absence, the mediality of communication, speech acts, and time. A genre identiﬁed with writing posits a lost and desired plenitude, located elsewhere (yesterday for Catullus, Greece for Horace, Rome for Ovid in exile) or in some other communicative medium that links author and audience (poetic exchange for Catullus, theatre for the Ars Poetica, public spectacles for Ovid). Some lost plenitude turns out to have been already hollow, and the epistolary situation compensates by reinscribing some kind of performative success thematically within its own medium. Where Catullus frames the interaction as differences within lived experiences, the Augustans pursue similar questions as the semiotic differences between various media. The relation of presence to absence is governed by an economy that prevents a simple identiﬁcation of the spoken word with presence and the written word with absence, but rather knits them together, however asymetrically.

PROPERTIUS 4.3: E´ C R I T U R E F E´ M I NI N E AND ITS E XCLUSIONS Jerome cites Turpilius (epigraph to Part II) with an assumption about a letter’s addressee: you write to someone you love. Although Horace’s Epistles and Ovid’s exilic corpus are largely to friends, some to important political ﬁgures, the early Augustan epistles tend to go between lovers. Their mythic context allows them to explore communication in absence more abstractly than in epistles to contemporaries, where reality intervenes, and the femininity of their purported authors distinguishes them from their actual poets. While writing appears insufﬁcient for love in Propertius and Ovid’s single Heroides, the double Heroides offer a more optimistic view: they get a response. Arethusa’s letter to her beloved husband Lycotas (Propertius 4. 3) is the ﬁrst extant Augustan heroine epistle and is paradigmatic for the function of writing in the genre. She reduces writing to a medium for love, and hence dooms it to failure. Other uses of tablets and documents impinge on her consciousness, but her mind is closed to public discourse, except as pertains to love. The performative moment is consistently displaced from writing’s representational capacity, whatever sphere she considers.

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Separated lovers in literature do not just talk, they thematize their communicative medium. haec Arethusa suo mittit mandata Lycotae, cum totiens absis, si potes esse meus. si qua tamen tibi lecturo pars oblita derit, haec erit e lacrimis facta litura meis: aut si qua incerto fallet te littera tractu: signa meae dextrae iam morientis erunt. (Propertius 4. 3. 1–6) (Arethusa sends these writings to her Lycotas—if you can be mine when you are absent so often. If, however, any part is smeared or lacking when you read it, this will be an erasure made by my tears: or if any letter escapes you because the trait is uncertain, these will be the signs of my right hand, already dying.)

Sexual possession and interpretability are elements of plenitude equally threatened by absence. Ironically, Arethusa’s emotional distress—a sign of her love—renders her letter unreadable, though the love comes through loud and clear whether or not Lycotas manages to read a single word, even more so because of the expressive smudges. The topos of blurred letters highlights the difference between the writing within the text and the text itself, which transmits the words as faithfully (or not) as any other poem.18 Our text has no smudges and the original was never Arethusa’s anyway, but Propertius’, whose erasures on the wax tablet were just a part of ordinary composition. Just as the poem connects and separates poet and reader, Arethusa’s writing cannot literally connect the lovers. The very salutation turns them into third persons, although they resume a ﬁrst to second person relation once the letter has been initiated: ‘suo’ (1) becomes ‘meus’ (2). Still, writing is better than nothing. Signs on tablets open up the whole world to Arethusa, or at least they could. She has acquired what must have been a rare and valuable object, a map.19 It is on a tablet (‘tabula’) and the world is depicted on it (‘pictos . . . mundos’, 37). Her interest in geography, however, is, well, interested and her learning lacks focus. Arethusa’s knowledge of geography—or of military tactics—is not enough to give her pause when she has Lycotas running off beyond the borders of the Roman empire in several directions in short compass (7–10). The medium leads her in all directions, and without independent knowledge of what she wants to know, cannot help her pin Lycotas’ location down. Her desire exceeds the map’s representational capacity, which

18 19

For the difference, see Farrell (1998) 335–6; Kennedy (2002) 229. Janan (2001) 65–9: Propertius critiques the map as a bearer of imperial ideology.

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is general. Propertius’ point about representation here trumps realism, since a wife would presumably know which campaign her husband was on. Writing becomes a sufﬁcient medium of expression in Arthusa’s mind only once the lovers are rejoined and she can dedicate a votive inscription attesting their reunion. The moment of plenitude is displaced from writing, and Arethusa is happy with the idea of writing as a record of the event. She sets her dedication in relation to other performative acts: triumphs, treaties, and the law. While we might expect her to support these, since Lycotas can return only on the condition of a military success, Arethusa applies the typical logic of the militia amoris and reverses the priority; she makes triumph conditional on the preservation of her marriage. She is concerned foremost with the treaties of her bed and her law is personal. sed (tua sic domitis Parthae telluris alumnis pura triumphantis hasta sequatur equos) incorrupta mei conserua foedera lecti! hac ego te sola lege redisse uelim: armaque cum tulero portae uotiua Capenae, subscribam SALVO GRATA PVELLA VIRO. (67–72) (But (thus may your headless spear follow the horses in triumph when the sons of the Parthian land have been overcome) preserve uncorrupted the treaties of my bed! I would wish you to return on this law alone: and when I have brought votive arms to the Porta Capena, I will write underneath, ‘A girl grateful for her safe man’.)

From an Augustan perspective, Arethusa appears narrow-minded and naive. However, Propertius’ choice of marriage rather than a casual liaison for the girl not only links bedroom to international politics in the playful manner of elegy, it forges a connection between centrepieces of Augustan ideology: military conquest and the marriage legislation. Propertius may be suggesting that the former does not support the latter, but the ideological weight of the nexus of triumph, laws, treaties, and inscription surpasses the erotic twist. This embryonic rapprochement of the performative to the written ﬁnds fuller development in Ovid, who will make a full-scale critique of Augustus’ role as auctor in an examination of the interrelation between triumphs and writing (Ch. 11) and between reading and the law (Ch. 16). The only auctores in this poem, however, are birds. When Arethusa tosses sleepless in bed, she complains: ‘lucis et auctores non dare carmen auis’ (the birds, authors of light, do not give forth their song, 32). In a poem so pessimistic about the possibility of communication, it is hardly surprising that even song is negated. Communication cannot function in any medium until Lycotas comes home. Even the meagre authorship of the birds is stranded in limbo while Arethusa waits. Sexual consummation needs presence

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and writing offers Arethusa satisfaction only as an adjunct to the ultimate performative.

OVI D’ S H E RO I D E S: M E S S AG E S S E N T A N D M E S S AG E S S E N T BAC K Letters in Ovid’s Heroides appear as much a hindrance as an aid to communication.20 As the praeceptor amoris, Ovid identiﬁes the convention of the letter as a substitute for living speech: ‘sit tibi credibilis sermo consuetaque uerba, j blanda tamen, praesens ut uideare loqui’ (let your conversation be credible and words habitual, though winning, so that you seem to speak in person, AA 1. 467–8).21 A substitute, however, cannot function exactly like what it replaces. Seeming presence operates according to the logic of the rhetorical ﬁgure enargeia, in Latin repraesentatio. The capacity of words to evoke visual images and to operate through the distance that is writing is a two-edged sword in these self-conscious epistles. The single Heroides are conventionally described as monologues converted into letters22 and Ovid takes advantage of the differences between the two forms.23 The solitude of the speaker or writer is essential to each, but in writing letters, Ovid’s heroines turn apostrophe, where response is not expected, to address: whether or not the beloved ever receives the letter, much less answers it, the heroines’ utterances expect receipt.24 The act of writing necessarily delays receipt, but by taking up the stylus, an abandoned heroine does more than toss a complaint to the winds; she actively tries to change her story’s plot. Oddly enough, the written letter approximates the efﬁcacy of spoken language better than the monologue whose language, though 20

On the ‘bridge/barrier’ function of the letter, see Kennedy (2002) 221. Thraede (1970) ch. 3 traces the motifs of letters as conversation, as-if presence, presence in spirit, consolation and longing, in Ovid’s epistles and remarks on their frequent deployment of epistolary motifs (55). 21 Thraede (1970) 51 and 54: ‘bei Ovid die brieﬂich bezeugte Ææı Æ den Bereich konkreter sinnlicher Wahrnehmung gern verla¨sst’; Jacobson (1974) 336; P. Hardie (2002a) 108. 22 Kenney (1967) 214; (1970a) 389, 398; Knox 14–18. Verducci (1985) 16: ‘the epistle can combine, often in radical tension, the privacy of the interior monologue and the publicity of would-be persuasion’. On the importance of the ‘other’ for differentiating the Heroides from soliloquies, Jacobson (1974) 326; he refers to the ‘speech-epistle form’ (328), which has the advantages of both monologue and dialogue (337). Hollis at AA 1. 463–8 refers to Demetrius, On Style, 223–35, who claims a letter should be like one side of a dialogue; also Jacobson (1974) 336. Half a dialogue differs from a monologue because the latter presumes no listener. 23 Kennedy (1984) 416: the ‘apparent inappropriateness of the epistolary form to the dramatic context’. 24 On the difference between address and apostrophe, see Lowrie (1997) 20–6.

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spoken,25 goes nowhere. Ovid’s generic innovation challenges the dynamics of communication.26 The expectation of receipt is independent of its likelihood. Although the situations in the epistle (address) and the monologue (apostrophe) blend,27 their differences can be gauged by comparing Ariadne’s monologue in Catullus 64 with her letter in Heroides 10. Catullus’ Ariadne begins with a long passage where her utterance is directed at the absent Theseus (64. 132–63). She calls on him in the vocative and uses the second person singular (‘sicine me patriis avectam, perﬁde, ab aris, j perﬁde, deserto liquisti in litore, Theseu?’ (Thus you, treacherous, took me from my father’s altars and abandoned me on a deserted shore, treacherous Theseus), 64. 132–3). She does not expect him to hear, but vents her feelings—as if this situation could possibly obtain with Theseus still present. Once she realizes she is getting nowhere, she refers to him in the third person and turns her utterance to Jupiter—he will hear wherever she happens to be. Catullus indicates his self-consciousness of the discursive format by showing her realize no one is there. sed quid ego ignaris nequiquam conquerar auris, externata malo, quae nullis sensibus auctae nec missas audire queunt nec reddere uoces? ille autem prope iam mediis uersatur in undis, nec quisquam apparet uacua mortalis in alga . . . . fors etiam nostris inuidit questibus auris. Iuppiter omnipotens . . . (64. 164–8, 170–1) (But why should I, laid low by evil, lament in vain to the ignorant breezes, which, endowed with no senses can neither hear words sent nor return them? He however is now almost in the middle of the waves, nor does any mortal appear in the empty seaweed . . . . My luck has even begrudged ears for my laments. Jupiter almighty . . . )

By contrast, Ovid’s Ariadne naively expects Theseus to read a letter she has no physical means of sending—or even writing. When she uses the epistolary present of the time of Theseus’ reading (‘quae legis’) and refers to sending the letter (‘mitto’) from the desert island where she has been abandoned (10. 3–4), more than playing 25

The AA envisions the gradual effectiveness of love letters: ﬁrst she may not receive the letter, then she may read it and not write back, soon she will wish to respond, though perhaps asking you not to write, then you might approach her in person. Ironically, you cannot speak in her presence without the subterfuge of signs (1. 489–500). The assumption of an attempt at effectiveness in the Heroides makes it necessary for Dido to spell out her abandonment of hope (7. 3–4). 26 On Ovid’s originality, Jacobson (1974) ch. 17. 27 Ovid’s interest in the forms shows up in extended apostrophes, e.g. Dido’s to Sychaeus, Her. 7. 103–10; Jacobson (1974) 335–6.

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a joke on his heroine, or characterizing her as deluded, Ovid underscores the futility of her utterance.28 Who will bear her letter? Does she really have writing materials perched on her rock or sitting on the beach? She may be naive, but Ovid is not. Signals are repeatedly sent, but not received. Ariadne calls out Theseus’ name, but hears only the empty response of an echo (21–3). The text iconically reverberates his name (‘Theseu’, 21; ‘Thesea . . . Theseu’, 34–5). She utters an abbreviated monologue (34–5; Knox ad loc.), and then considers that if he cannot hear her, he would at least be able to see from his receding ship, and so raises an impromptu semaphor of a veil afﬁxed to a branch (39–41).29 This signal also fails, and Ovid hints at the emptiness of signs when she describes the still warm traces Theseus left in bed (‘vestigia’, 53). Ariadne addresses the problem head on by asking Theseus to imagine—via her written representation—what he could not see face to face: nunc quoque non oculis, sed, qua potes, adspice mente haerentem scopulo, quem uaga pulsat aqua. (135–6) (Now also look, not with your eyes, but, as you can, with your mind, at me clinging to the cliff, which the vagrant water pounds.)

Much of what she describes is repeated from earlier descriptions (dishevelled hair, 47 and 136; tears, 55 and 137; similes at 48–50 and 139). Since he failed to see it the ﬁrst time around, she tries to bridge the gap of separation with an appeal to his mind rather than his eyes. This is the move from perception to enargeia. But it is not just sending the letter that deﬁes possibility. The conditions of writing it seem impossible. And even if Theseus did receive the letter, he could not mentally recreate her depiction either the ﬁrst or second time because her writing is illegible (140). Our own text’s legibility highlights the gap between her letter and Ovid’s epistle. Do the letter’s impossible conditions make us wonder about the success of our own communication with Ovid? Ovid acknowledges that receipt is hypothetical in his description of the Heroides in the Amores. He writes the kind of thing the heroes could read (2. 18. 23–4). Some of the epistles do imply receipt, but this literary function involves a context larger than the represented plot, touching again on presence, effectiveness, and dialogue. Kennedy shows that it is not the mythic plot of Ulysses’ homecoming but an intertextual relation to the Odyssey that allows us to understand that

28 Kennedy (1984) 416 suggests delusion, Rahn (1958) 111 that thoughts about the postal service are unsuitable; also Kennedy (2002) 219. Ovid raises such questions by placing the epistolary convention ‘quae legis’ (3) in the same couplet as the statement of her abandonment. 29 The signals sent but not received reverse Catullus 64. 225–45, where Theseus forgets to change his sails to white as a signal of success to his father, who consequently reads the dark sails as a signal that was not in fact sent.

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Ulysses would receive Penelope’s letter of Heroides 1.30 She writes her letter after Telemachus’ return from Pylos and Sparta, and states that she gives a letter to any stranger who visits and might be able to transmit it to her husband (1. 59–62). In the Odyssey, the disguised Odysseus is the next stranger to visit after Telemachus’ return. Kennedy argues that discrepancies between the stories as told in the Odyssey and in Heroides 1 serve a particular purpose—to characterize the letter’s author, Penelope—and are not simply traces of a different version. The one-sided communication of each heroine parallels that of the epistles’ author. While she attempts to change her plot, Ovid attempts to rewrite a prior text. Each sends a missive into the void. Neither succeeds—Homer writes back to Ovid no more than Ulysses to Penelope—but the apparent failure on both counts results in the successful composition of a new text. Basically, the letters of the heroines cannot be effective because their pleas go against received myth:31 Theseus cannot come back to Ariadne, nor Aeneas to Dido. Ulysses returns, but not because of Penelope’s letter. Humour resides in entertaining a possible confutation of mythic givens. Why write a set of ﬁctitious letters that, if received, would change nothing, rather than free-standing monologues? Dido may write ‘perdere uerba leue est’ (it is a light thing to waste words, 7. 6), but Ovid is no less disingenuous than she.32 Just as he writes what heroes could read, he writes what the heroines could say—he makes no claim to truth.33 Wit explains much of the single epistles’ aridity (Verducci 1985), but Ovid was not just playing games he learned from declamation, pulling new genres out of a hat, or making emulative swipes at his predecessors.34 He is interested in communication, especially as it fails.35

30 Kennedy (1984) 420–2. Gareth Williams (1992b) makes a similar argument about how Canace’s letter ﬁts into a speciﬁc moment of her story, but the fragmentary nature of the literary versions of it make it hard to see whether Ovid is speciﬁcally manipulating a prior text or the myth. In each epistle, irony attends the futility of writing the letter in the ﬁrst place—comic because Ulysses is already home, tragic because Canace’s father has been appeased without her knowledge and no longer wishes her to kill herself. Furthermore, the letter, though received, has no plot function. 31 Anderson (1973) 66–7 treats mythic constraints and non-receipt. 32 See ibid. 50–3 on the irony of Dido’s disavowal of hope: words are her ‘very raison d’eˆtre’. 33 ‘aut quod Penelopes uerbis reddatur Vlixi j scribimus . . . j quodque tenens strictum Dido miserabilis ensem j dicat’ (or I write what would be given to Ulysses in Penelope’s words . . . and what wretched Dido, holding the sword drawn, could say, Amores 2. 18. 21–2, 25–6). 34 Knox 14–18 discusses the importance of declamation, the old view of these poems as ‘rhetorical set pieces’, generic innovation, and the poems’ intertextual comment on known literature. 35 Anderson (1973) 64 remarks that Dido does not communicate with Aeneas—her letter never reaches him and ‘her words and ideas are basically beside the point’.

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These issues return in the double epistles.36 By composing responses, Ovid exploits opportunities untouched in the single epistles, though a certain Sabinus took the occasion and wrote responses to several of Ovid’s single epistles (Am. 2. 18. 27–34; Ex P. 4. 16. 13–14).37 The responsive framework of the double Heroides by no means provides deﬁnitive answers to the problematics of the single ones, but the next stage in Ovid’s thinking about writing and semiotics addresses effective speech. Paris and Helen, the respective letter-writers in Heroides 16 and 17, sleep under the same roof and have no ostensible barrier to their spoken communication, but are nevertheless absent to one another (Kenney 1967: 214–15). The dramatic justiﬁcation for letter-writing, that Paris was rebuffed on approaching Helen’s companions, makes us wonder why, when the departing Menelaus had enjoined especial care of Paris on Helen (16. 303–4; 17. 157– 62), he did not speak directly.38 The reason is the eroticism arising from semiotic exchange. The rebuff ’s terms indicate Ovid’s understanding of communication. Cymene and Aethra break Paris off mid-prayer (16. 262). They understand and reject his message because of its content even without his completing it. He has tried the wrong medium and therefore replaces direct speech with writing and the intermediaries with a direct addressee. His communication, while still mediated, at least does not pass through others’ volition. His love itself depends on mediation: it is completely independent of Helen’s presence and predates their meeting. Tamino in Mozart’s Z auberﬂ o ¨te at least sees Pamina’s portrait before falling in love. Paris’ love depends on hearsay and enargeia. te uigilans oculis animi, te nocte uidebam, lumina cum placido uicta sopore iacent. quid faceres praesens, quae nondum uisa placebas? ardebam, quamuis hic procul ignis erat. (16. 101–4) (I saw you with the eyes of my soul while awake, I saw you at night, when my eyes lay conquered in placid sleep. What effect would you have had in person, when you were pleasing even before being seen? I was burning, although my ﬂame was here, at a distance.)

The textual corruption of ‘animi’ to ‘animo’ at line 101 demonstrates our expectation of a contrast between seeing with the eyes during the day, and

36

On the presumption that these are Ovidian, but late, see Kenney H 20–6. Writing responses proved irresistible, see Knox 34 on Ovidian imitators, who extend into the eighteenth century. Differences from the single epistles are reviewed in Kenney (1967) 214. 38 Kenney (1970a) 390 comments on the disregard of verisimilitude and epistolary convention, but sees the poems as an exercise along the lines suggested in the Ars amatoria. 37

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with the soul at night, a difference between presence and absence.39 But Ovid has turned the tables on this conventional antithesis: Paris sees Helen only in his imagination whether awake or asleep. To Paris, Helen is desirable as a symbol of desirability. This situation hardly changes even in Helen’s presence. Their communication is overtly semiotic. Paris opens his letter asking if he should speak or if there is no need for a sign of his love, already known (‘eloquar, an ﬂammae non est opus indice notae’, 16. 3). He does not refer directly to his love, but uses an ‘index’ (sign) of it with the common metaphor of ﬂame. But it turns out that this utterance is not enough to convey what it clearly conveys: he must speak the very thing in addition to asking if he needs to name it. When he does meet her expectation, that is, one he attributes to her, he cannot call his love by its name and resorts again to the same metaphor: ‘si tamen expectas, uocem quoque rebus ut addam— j uror! habes animi nuntia uerba mei’ (if nevertheless you expect that I also add the word to the things—I’m on ﬁre! you have the words that announce my spirit, 16. 9–10). It is an elegiac convention that lovers use secret signals over the dinner table when the presence of the lady’s husband prohibits direct communication, but here again the signs antedate the relationship. Helen’s description of Paris’ unspoken communication corresponds to his asking if he needs to speak (above). His signs are hidden, but ‘almost’ speak nevertheless: ‘quotiens ego tecta notaui j signa supercilio paene loquente dari’ (how often I noted your hidden signs were given with your brow almost speaking, 17. 81–2). On the table, he writes the word he proffered in metaphoric form at the beginning of his letter. orbe quoque in mensae legi sub nomine nostro, quod deducta mero littera fecit, AMO. (17. 87–8) (Also on the round table I read under my name what a letter traced in wine made: ‘I love’.)

When Paris claims to speak the real thing, he uses a metaphor (‘uror’); when he writes on the table, he says the real thing (‘amo’). Some form of distancing consistently affects their communication, even beyond the letter form. Helen, to whom this indirect means of communication is new, exclaims to her amazement that she has already learned to talk in this way (‘loqui’, 90). Talking is of course another metaphor since their affair is entirely unspoken.40

39

Text as in Kenney H, with Bentley’s correction of ‘animo’. The newness of this communication extends to the letter itself, also silent speech: ‘nunc quoque, quod tacito mando mea uerba libello, j fungitur ofﬁcio littera nostra nouo’ (now also, in that I entrust my words to a silent little book, my writing performs a new function, 17. 143–4). 40

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And such talk is seductive. Helen explicitly admits she could be won over thereby (17. 91–2). Speech for Paris and Helen does not offer a middle ground between writing and sex. Although Paris asks her to receive him in bed so they may talk (‘ut plura loquamur’), his calling the night silent (‘nocte silente’, 16. 283–4)— among other things—reveals that conversation is not what he has in mind. Helen calls his bluff: ‘quod petis, ut furtim praesentes ista loquamur, j scimus, quid captes conloquiumque uoces’ (as for what you seek, that we may speak secretly about these things in each other’s presence, I know what you’re driving at and what you’re calling conversation, 17. 2–2). She is not ready for sex, but the courtship intrigues her, therefore she sets up a more direct medium of communication. This time it entails speech, but as deferral is essential to their affair, the speech will pass through intermediaries: ‘cetera per socias Clymenen Aethramque loquamur’ (let us speak of the rest through my friends Clymene and Aethra, 17. 267). Paris mistakenly thinks his presence will enhance his persuasive abilities (‘praesens’, 16. 324). The paradigmatic love story turns out rather to depend on the titillating mediation.41 The story of Acontius and Cydippe turns to pragmatics: Cydippe reads an oath Acontius wrote on an apple pledging to marry him, and marry him she must.42 Despite not meeting Austin’s conditions for felicity, her utterance nevertheless proves binding through Diana’s miraculous intervention. The gods’ backing renders empty formalism full. The story invites literary exploration of the problematics of writing, and the poetic versions themselves replay the issues. Callimachus’ version ends with his own literary source (Aitia fr. 75. 51ff.Pf). He read or ‘heard’ the story (KŒº 75. 53Pf) in Xenomedes,43 who wrote it on tablets (ªæø K ŁŒÆ º Ø , 75. 66Pf), and thence it ran over to Callimachus’ Muse ( Ł › ÆØ j FŁ K

æÅ æÆ ˚ÆººØÅ 75. 76–7Pf). In a story foregrounding the authority of written language, Callimachus addresses his own authority as narrator. By invoking Xenomedes, Callimachus points out that, like Cydippe, he is not the author of his utterance, but in repeating another’s makes it his own. Ovid’s version enhances the problematic with the couple’s communicating via writing, already a dangerous medium for Cydippe. If Paris and Helen’s

41 Ovid makes Paris self-conscious of his exemplarity: he lists himself as the fourth in a series of rapists (16. 330). 42 Apples were also used in magic as love charms. Faraone (1995) 9–10 discusses a Hellenistic incantation that uses a ‘performative future’ for the throwing of the apple. 43 See Hendrickson (1929) 188 and Schenkeveld (1992) on the use of verbs of hearing, particularly IŒØ , meaning to read.

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letters show that love can be a semiotic affair, Heroides 20 and 21 demonstrate writing’s potency. The letter’s integration into the plot in Heroides 18 and 19 shows that writing can have real consequences, since Hero’s letter asking Leader to come instigates his drowning in the Hellespont.44 Her emphasis on caution underscores the irony. In the following paired epistles, Ovid stages an explicit discussion of writing and intention according to the terms of rhetorical theory. He anticipates speech act theory in many details. The particular danger of writing in this case derives from reading aloud.45 If Cydippe had read the inscription on the apple silently, she would not have sworn the oath. But the accident of oral reading highlights a danger already inherent in writing: the inevitable appropriation of another’s words. You cannot know what something says without reading it, but once you have, it becomes yours willy-nilly. Although Callimachus’ Muse does not appear to resist Xenomedes’ story, the verb of action belongs to it. Acontius’ opening words in Heroides 20 assuring Cydippe she can read his letter safely (‘pone metum! nihil hic iterum iurabis amanti j . . . perlege!’ (Lay down your fear! You will not swear again to your lover . . . Read through!), 20. 1–3) raise the paradox that she cannot know these words are safe or dangerous without reading them ﬁrst—exactly the problem with the apple, additionally treacherous because its roundness would obscure the message’s visibility at one glance. This danger is such that the actual wording of Cydippe’s oath disappears from the two epistles. By including it Acontius would force her to read it again, and thus undermine both his good faith in promising a safe letter, and his assertion that her promising once was enough (‘satis . . . semel’, 20. 2). The passive ‘promissam’, however, indicates a problem: she had no agency in uttering her promise. She of course wants to avoid any more promises and likewise omits it. But in asserting that one promise was enough, Acontius touches on a crucial difference between speech and writing. An oath may lose potency through repetition, whereas iterability is the whole point of writing. Acontius treads a ﬁne line by asking her repeatedly to recall the oath and to swear again by repeating it to others. The anxiety he manifests shows there is something wrong with taking a` la lettre a performative read out loud. When he asks her to recall what she said, he carefully omits the promise’s content, though he counts on her memory of the actual words and reiterates mention of it (‘uerba licet repetas . . . j inuenies illic id te spondere, quod opto j te potius, uirgo, quam meminisse deam’ (You may recall the words . . . there you 44

Kennedy (1984) 415: the double epistles integrate epistolary form into the plot more than the single. Anderson (1973) 70 comments on the ‘tragic return’ in this story in contrast to the failure of receipt in the single epistles. 45 On reading aloud and its relevance here, Kenney (1967) 218.

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will ﬁnd that you promise what I wish you remembered, maiden, rather than the goddess), 20. 9–12). For her ﬁance´ and mother, however, to know both that and what she has promised, she will have to repeat its content, and thereby promise again. Even citation seems not to blunt the performative’s force. recitetur formula pacti; neu falsam dicas esse, fac ipsa legat!

(20. 151–2)

(Let the formula of the promise be recited, and lest you say it is false, have her read it herself.) ne tamen ignoret scripti sententia quae sit, lecta tibi quondam nunc quoque uerba refer.

(20. 213–14)

(However, so she may know the content of what was written, now also repeat the words you once spoke.)

Although Cydippe argues against the binding quality of an oath read without intention, she nevertheless fears its power.46 Despite Acontius’ opening reassurance, she reads his letter without a murmur (21. 1), and falters in her narrative when about to repeat the fruit’s powerful text (carmen). mittitur ante pedes malum cum carmine tali— ei mihi, iuraui nunc quoque paene tibi! (21. 107–8) (A fruit is sent before my feet with such an inscription—oh my, I now almost swore again to you.)

Perhaps the actual oath has disappeared from the epistles because anyone could read it. The writing Acontius directed to Cydippe would become available to Ovid’s audience. Acontius would hardly want all of posterity swearing to marry him, although the distancing of citation would presumably protect us! Ovid plays with our desire to know this text when Acontius promises a votive offering, including a statue of the apple and no less than a commemorative inscription. aurea ponetur mali felicis imago, causaque uersiculis scripta duobus erit: EFFIGIE POMI TESTATVR ACONTIVS HVIVS QVAE FVERINT IN EO SCRIPTA FVISSE RATA.

(20. 237–40)

(A golden image of the happy apple will be set up and the reason will be inscribed in two verses: Acontius testiﬁes with the image of this apple that what was written on it was ratiﬁed.)

46

Ibid. 225 discusses intention here in relation to the law.

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Our curiosity is thwarted as we wonder whether the statue will represent the oath, in addition to the votive inscription underneath. The votive inscription would be obscure without the text of the oath, but writing it would reopen the problem that anyone could read it and swear to marry Acontius. Once the line between denotative and performative language has been erased—as in this story’s ﬁction—how can it be restored? The essential issue is intention. Cydippe, like a good speech act theorist, argues at length that she was merely reading (21. 133–54). Cydippe distinguishes empty words (‘sine pectore uocem’, 141) from the fullness of intention (‘animi sententia’, 137), but a paradox emerges: words do not in themselves have faith, which intention rather adds to them (136), but it would not be possible to refer to ‘words bereft of their own strength’ (142) if words did not normally have force. The problem is similar to Hippolytus’ famous formulation (‘My tongue has sworn, but my mind is unsworn’, Eur. Hippolytus 612). Cydippe also emphasizes the mind: ‘quae iurat, mens est’ (what swears is the mind, 135). But Hippolytus swore without understanding the full implication of his oath,47 while Cydippe argues she did not swear at all. The problem lies in reading, and her argument would hold under the usual circumstances, as her reductio ad absurdum proves: Acontius could misuse such oaths for the acquisition of wealth and even deceive the gods.48 The reason, however, her argument fails revolves around presence, not that of intention, but the arbitrary presence of a god.49 Comparison with Callimachus reveals an important difference: Diana was literally present when Cydippe swore the oath. Apollo’s oracle details a list of places where she was not, and ends with her being ‘at home on Delos’, Aitia 75. 26). Ovid forgoes such explicitness but still refers frequently to Diana as ‘praesens’. The Latin word, however, means not just literally present, but also helpful and efﬁcacious (OLD 3 and 5a). A god is called ‘praesens’ when manifesting power, and this often, though not necessarily entails bodily presence (OLD 3). Although Acontius insists that Diana was there as a witness,50 he nevertheless removes Cydippe’s oath from the accident of divine presence by insisting on faith, which needs no witness (20. 181–2). Cydippe grudgingly admits Diana’s presence (‘praesentem . . . deam’, 21. 134),51 but

47 For Hippolytus’ oath in Austin (1962) and Cavell (1994), above, Ch. 3, ‘Performance and Performativity’. 48 See Kenney (1970a) on the rhetorical and legal background to her argument. 49 Ibid. 406: the conﬂict in the poem is ‘between human law and divine will’. 50 20. 19–20, 97–8, 211–12. 51 The text at 21. 235 makes it unclear who exactly the divine witness is. Goold (1977) prints ‘teste sorore’, i.e. Diana, while Kenney H prints ‘testis habere’, i.e. Apollo.

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advances the argument beyond divine happenstance in her discussion of intention and in bringing up the paradoxical presence of writing. Cydippe entertains the possibility of Acontius’ writing having its own ‘praesens . . . numen’ (potent divinity, 150), which would make it even more powerful than Diana and capable of capturing the great gods (149; 238). Unlike Diana, who, Callimachus implies, must be present to witness an oath, Acontius is able to be efﬁcacious from afar through writing. es procul a nobis, et tamen inde noces. mirabar quare tibi nomen Acontius esset: quod faciat longe uulnus, acumen habes. certe ego conualui nondum de uulnere tali, ut iaculo scriptis eminus icta tuis. (21. 208–12) (You are far from me, and yet you harm from there. I was wondering why your name was Acontius: you have a sharpness that can wound from afar. I have certainly not yet recovered from such a wound, hit at a distance by your writings, as by a javelin.)

This situation reﬂects and reverses that between Paris and Helen in Heroides 16 and 17. Paris was also hit by a wound from afar and the same phrase occupies the same metrical sedes. te prius optaui quam mihi nota fores; ante tuos animo uidi quam lumine uultus; prima tulit uulnus nuntia fama mihi. nec tamen est mirum si {sicut opporteat arcu{ missilibus telis eminus ictus amo. (16. 36–40) (I desired you before you were known to me: I saw your face in my mind before seeing it with my eyes. The report of fame ﬁrst bore me a wound. Nor however is it surprising if, {just as if with a bow{, I love, hit by missile weapons from afar.)

For Paris, however, the wound is brought by speech (‘fama’) instead of writing (reiterated at 17. 134: ‘auditis . . . bonis’ (heard goods)); it was not the sight of the beloved that caused his love, but his imagination. These two pairs of letters are complementary. Heroides 16 and 17 demonstrate the erotics of semiotic exchange, and Heroides 20 and 21 show the potency of writing. The overlap between the two pairs is indicative of elegy’s will to power, or at least its desire for signs to be effective. A god of love sets each story in motion, each with a method more appropriate to the other plot. Venus appeared in person at the judgement of Paris, and Paris quotes her promise of Helen’s embrace (16. 83–6). The set of letters that revolves around absence turns out to begin with a performative uttered in a divine epiphany. The set that revolves around the binding nature of ostensibly empty words ﬁnds its origin instead in dictation.

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(20. 29–30)

(I made a marriage contract with words he [Love] dictated and was clever with Love as my lawyer.)

Love is the reason Acontius’ written oath was efﬁcacious, and the law stands as the paradigm for effective, if coercive discourse.52 Cydippe’s sarcastic suggestion that he win wealth and political power this way (21. 146–8) takes for granted that this tactic will not prevail in a world governed by real laws. However, love’s metaphorical law writes a contract that dissolves the usual constrictions on speech. The apple symbolizes desire—to pick it (legere) or read it (legere) implicates you willy-nilly. These poems together constitute an advance in Ovid’s thought about communication. Writing, it turns out, is not speech sent into the void without possibility of response or effect, as in the single Heroides. Rather, it can be dialogic—the form of the double Heroides suggests this ipso facto. Paris’ love for Helen before seeing her shows that representations can have real effects, and the effectiveness of Cydippe’s oath shows that reading can have pragmatic force. Love overcomes the ordinary limitations on semiotic systems. Venus and Amor respectively authorize Paris and Acontius to transgress not only moral rules, but those governing representation. Through fantasy, Ovid explores to the breaking point the desire for plenitude handed down to him by the elegiac tradition.

52 For Ovid’s preoccupation with the law, Kenney (1967 ¼ 1970a) and (1969). In the former (217–18), he suggests that Ovid’s rhetorical training would have exposed him to the law’s vocabulary, and points up the difference from Callimachus, who makes Love Acontius’ teacher rather than lawyer (219). Acontius’ coerciveness disregards the law, which prohibited trickery (219–20).

9 Beyond Performance Envy: Horace, Epistles 2. 1 If Ovid explores in the Heroides a mythic phantasm where love dissolves the ordinary constraints on representation and writing’s pragmatic capacity, Horace asks a more realistic question about poetry’s ability to achieve wordly effects. In the Epistle to Augustus (2. 1), one of the predominant concerns is poetry’s social function, and this is tied closely to its medium. Horace’s literary critical epistles are preoccupied with performance.1 Just as Horace’s literary theory is not about the poetry he himself writes, its medium differs from that of the genres analysed. Augustan literary epistles attempt to recuperate their epistolary distance from their addressee by a thematic preoccupation with performance, spectacle, and with presence in general. His theoretical interest in choral lyric and drama stems from a desire to reconstitute through displacement a social function for his own poetry he perceives as lost. The social function Horace’s poetry asserts for itself is constructed: if it becomes true after the fact, it is because the poet has made it so. I suggest that Horace re-enacts in his theoretical poetry the same conjunction of and split between writing and performance we see in Odes 3. 30 (Ch. 4: The Immaterial Monument), and that he deﬁnes his role in society through this relationship. Horace challenges the idea that the divorce between writing and performance leads to poetic alienation. As in his lyric (Chs. 3–5), Horace questions any direct correspondence between literal performance and social performativity. Things made up are still real, and the relation of poet to reader is no less real than that of poet to addressee or poet to audience. Horace’s rhetoric of 1

Feeney (2002b) 182–4 emphasizes Augustus’ known liking for old comedy (Suet. 43. 1, 89. 1), and characterizes Horace as having doubts about his world of ‘public display’ and ‘political theatre’. I thank him for sharing this paper in advance of publication. Gordon Williams (1968) 73 makes a similar point; furthermore, the earliest poetry at Rome was largely dramatic—that the apparatus of literary criticism revolved around this genre makes it natural for drama to occupy such a large scope in Horace’s literary history and criticism. The eclipse of drama, particularly comedy, as an active or appreciated genre in the Augustan period (Jocelyn 1988: 57–60), however, sets theory and practice against each other. Fraenkel (1957) 396 addresses Augustus’ literary taste in the context of Horace’s freedom to disagree.

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modernity ironizes both his relation to the past and his deﬁnition of his social function. This irony enables him, and his readers, to move beyond nostalgia. I look in particular at how Horace uses metaphors from inscriptional writing and performance, lyric and dramatic, to deﬁne his poetry’s role in society. If an immediate social role comes at the expense of immortality, Horace will choose the latter every time, but immediacy is not the only option. Horace, by virtue of his literarity, writes social poetry, one that corresponds to his age and bears the important burden of communicating that age to posterity. Passages from the Ars poetica set the stage for the Epistle to Augustus.

FOUNDING SONG POETS: THE A R S P O E T I C A The Ars poetica sets a divide between the plenitude of Greek performance poetry and what Horace can aspire to. In the Ars Orpheus and Amphion exemplify poets as culture heroes, who embody the greatest social function for poets imaginable (391–401). They interpret the gods, prevent slaughter, turn people towards good food,2 establish property, religion, and marriage relations, build cities and—notably—set up legal inscriptions. This civilizing function has a hint of the aesthetic in ‘lenire’ (assuage, 393). These are singing poets (‘sono testudinis’ (the sound of the lyre), 395) and the transitional phrase between the mythological and historic poets assumes the oral nature of their poetry: ‘sic honor et nomen diuinis uatibus atque j carminibus uenit’ (thus did honour and renown come to divine bards and their poetry, 400–1). The writing these performance poets engage in, the inscription of laws, is as embedded as their song.3 Like Ennius’ fauns and bards, Orpheus and Amphion have something of a rustic ring that makes it questionable whether they can serve as realistic models for our polished and urbane poet. The brief literary history of Greek poets and genres that follows is organized around poetry’s social utility (Ars 401–7). The historical poets continue the mythic poets’ job. Homer and Tyrtaeus whet men’s spirits for war; religion and morality follow; choral lyric attracts royal patronage. The

2

Possibly away from cannibalism, Brink (1971) and Rudd (1989) ad loc. Horace’s expression, cutting laws into wood, activates the etymological connection between lex and legere (Magdelain 1978). The etymology reveals the Romanness of his account, since nomos in Greek rather plays on the relation of law to song: Korzeniewski (1968) 183 n. 105. Svenbro (1993) ch. 6 locates nomos between orality and writing (lex), since he shows that it too has a connection to reading (110–11), but Horace would rather have associated Greek lawgiving with song. 3

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list ends with drama (‘ludus’), which shares with lyric the job of recreation. Pindar often represents the choral festival as the end of labour (e.g. O. 11. 4–6), and the position of ‘ludus’ between ‘Pieriis modis’ (Pierian modes, 405) and ‘Musa lyrae sollers’ (Muse clever at the lyre, 407) links drama to lyric. I emphasize three elements here: the linkage between lyric and drama, a genre Horace wrote and another he did not, both of importance in the Epistle to Augustus; the representation throughout of poetry as a performance genre, signalled concisely by ‘cantor Apollo’ (Apollo the singer, 407); the shift, starting with choral lyric, away from a utilitarian social function to play, repose—in short, the aesthetic.4 Horace carves out for Greek lyric a space inhabited by song and music, shared by lyric and drama, where the aesthetic and the social coincide. Horace’s defensiveness about the Pisones’ potential discomfort with lyric shows that the case needed to be made for the more aestheticizing genres’ social utility. Horace does not in the Ars claim a similar function for Latin lyric, though he does in the Epistle to Augustus. The passages to either side of Horace’s literary history together link this passage to Horace’s description of the social function of the poetry in which he engages at the moment. Leading up to the literary history is his offer to the elder of the young Pisones to critique whatever he might write (Ars 386–8). There follows a restatement of the poem’s leitmotif, whether ars or ingenium is more important for poetic composition. Horace disavows inspiration as madness in favour of a didactic role at Ars 301–8. Here Horace ironically separates himself from his lyric uvre and embraces the persona of teacher, and the difference between his own poetry and that of the Greeks splits writing from song. At every point Horace turns away from song and performance to describe his poetry. The representation here accords with his didactic persona and he describes himself differently in a lyric context. Instead of ‘carmina’ (401), he would write ‘poemata’ (303), where the derivation from ØE emphasizes poetic craft. Likewise he uses ‘poeta’ (307) of the poet he teaches about instead of ‘uates’ (400). He disavows writing with ‘scribens’ (306), the same verb that applied to the elder Piso son, should he write something (387); by contrast the Greeks engage in music and song (‘Musa lyrae sollers et cantor Apollo’, 407). This language might not be so surprising if Horace were here referring to the poetry he is currently writing: we expect the language of writing in an epistle, which presents itself as a written genre. But the poetry Horace here disavows is lyric, of which he was an established practitioner. Rather than writing highstyle poetry such as drama or lyric, Horace writes a didactic treatise on 4 For play as mediation between the social and the aesthetic, Habinek (2005a) and (2005c) ch. 4.

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poetics: ‘nil scribens ipse, docebo’ (writing nothing myself, I will teach, 306).5 The formulation shows that even if he were writing ‘real’ poetry, he would still conceive of it as writing and not song like that of the Greeks. The poem at hand does not qualify as poetry at all and not even as writing6—clearly an ironic pose. Nevertheless, despite the contrast with the Greeks, Horace asserts even for the non-poetry he is writing an important social function he shares with them: he is a teacher. The section immediately following this assertion of his didactic function identiﬁes wisdom (‘sapere’, 309) as the source of writing well. Wisdom is exactly what Orpheus and Amphion offered: ‘sapientia’ (396). There is a displacement here: Horace does not claim himself to teach philosophical wisdom—instead he refers the poet-in-training to the philosophical writings of the Greeks (‘Socraticae . . . chartae’ (Socratic papers), 310). Furthermore, Horace’s teaching differs from the lessons of the culture heroes. Horace teaches poets how to become the modern equivalents of the mythic ﬁgures, and if the ﬁnal genres in his literary history are the ones at issue, drama and lyric, then the highest he might himself aspire to, at least here, would be to teach how to achieve the aesthetic worth attributed to those genres. He cannot touch the foundational status of a singing Amphion or Orpheus, even wearing his other hat as a lyrist. Performance envy is a selfconscious rhetoric of decline and inability.

CHORAL LY RIC AND LIBRARY Horace raises the stakes when he addresses the princeps. In the Epistle to Augustus, Horace’s deﬁnition of poetry’s social use responds to the depiction of Amphion and Orpheus in the Ars and expands on the teaching poet of the Roman Odes (Odes. 3. 1. 4).7 castis cum pueris ignara puella mariti disceret unde preces, uatem ni Musa dedisset? poscit opem chorus et praesentia numina sentit, 5 Horace unmasks such disavowals at Ep. 2. 1. 111: ‘ipse ego, qui nullos me afﬁrmo scribere uersus, j inuenior Parthis mendacior’ (I myself, who afﬁrm that I write no verses, am found to be more mendacious than the Parthians). 6 For poetry that, however ironically, does not ‘make the grade’, see Freudenburg (1993) 124, 149. 7 Fraenkel (1957) 392: ‘Poetry conceived in this way, so far from being a plaything for idle hours, is eminently ºØ ØŒ , utile urbi.’

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caelestis implorat aquas docta prece blandus, 135 auertit morbos, metuenda pericula pellit, impetrat et pacem et locupletem frugibus annum. carmine di superi placantur, carmine Manes. (Epist. 2. 1. 132–8) (Where would a girl, without knowledge of husband, and chaste boys learn prayers, if the Muse had not bestowed a bard? A chorus asks for help and feels the godheads’ presence, it winningly begs the gods for water with learned prayer, averts disease, drives off fearsome dangers, and wins peace and a year rich in fruits. The gods above are appeased by song, by song the spirits below.)

The elements are familiar: aesthetic and moral education conjoined with religion. Here the poet is uates and the medium choral lyric. The poem’s numerical middle (line 135) falls in his discussion of the chorus and the language recalls his references to the Carmen saeculare in Odes 4 (4. 6. 29–44). This self-consciously rosy view of poetry’s social function is enhanced by the chorus’ direct access to god’s presence: the gods answer their prayers. And the rustic history of the next passage situates verse’s invention at Rome in a ritual context. Although Horace does not speciﬁcally make the point, we should remember in a poem addressed to the princeps, that it was Augustus who gave Horace the occasion to lead a chorus.8 This image of poetry’s social context, however, should not be isolated from the rest of the poem, which questions whether a contemporary poet may aspire to such plenitude. If Horace achieved it with the Carmen saeculare, he did so only once. It was not a performance to be repeated, and the ritual itself was as constructed as the poem (Feeney 1998: 28–38). The poetry Romans learn by heart and crowd the theatre for is the old canon of Ennius, Naevius, Pacuvius, Accius, Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence (60–2).9 The theatre is at a remove from the direct access to god posited for choral lyric, and the words for poet here are ‘poeta’ and ‘scriptor’, not ‘uates’, but drama is still reperformed before a living audience, and here audience loyalty appears enviable. However, the conditions of the contemporary stage with its emphasis on spectacle are such as to drive Horace away from trying to reach such an audience directly himself (180–8). It is not just the plebs, but the equites whose taste can no longer be counted on.10 Horace pleads for patronage from

8 Oliensis (1998) 192 notes the absence of Augustus in this passage: the Muse rather provides the bard the occasion. 9 Livy’s account of the invention of drama at Rome (7. 2) shows how closely conjoined the aesthetic and the social were at Rome, since the original ludi scenici were intended to appease the gods whose anger manifested itself in pestilence. 10 Habinek (1998a) 99 oversimpliﬁes in aligning the elite with literature and the masses with ludi. The equestrian class can hardly be equated with the masses; Feeney (2002b) 183, 245 n. 27.

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Augustus instead—for himself presumably, but also for any poet who wants to be spared the indignity of being ousted for a bear show (186).11 The relocation of poets’ sources of income entails a divorce from a performance context (179–80), where dramatic poets at least ostensibly made their living (175). Horace chooses a reader over an audience, the Palatine library over the stage, dependence on Augustus instead of on the public.12 The ideal of embedded and potent poetry fragments. In Odes 3. 30 (Ch. 4) and the Ars, embedded inscriptional writing offers a positive, if inadequate analogy to the aesthetic artefact. In Epist. 2. 1, Horace positively puts such writing down: it does not reach his standards of aesthetic quality. He mocks those who allege that the Muses spoke the twelve tables, treaties, and the like on the Alban mount by contrasting writing with utterance (Habinek 2005c: 81): sic fautor ueterum, ut tabulas peccare uetantis, quas bis quinque uiri sanxerunt, foedera regum uel Gabiis uel cum rigidis aequata Sabinis, pontiﬁcum libros, annosa uolumina uatum dictitet Albano Musas in monte locutas. (Epist. 2. 1. 23–7) ([Your populace] is such a fan of old things that it repeats the Tables forbidding sin that the decemvirs sanctiﬁed, the treaties of kings struck with the Gabii or the stern Sabines, the priests’ books, the volumes of the bards, full of years—these the Muses spoke on the Alban Mount.)

The parallel between the ironically described writings of ‘uates’ inspired by the Muses on the Alban mount here and the apparently serious call to Augustus to aid poets, again ‘uates’, to ﬁll the library with books and thereby aim for verdant Helicon makes us wonder what if anything has changed in Roman literature besides the shift from a Roman to a Greek poetic mountain. uerum age et his, qui se lectori credere malunt, quam spectatoris fastidia ferre superbi, curam redde breuem, si munus Apolline dignum uis complere libris et uatibus addere calcar, 11 Horsfall (1996a) 31 muses on the range of meanings for such interruption—whether lack of high taste or concerted effort to embarrass the presiding magistrate. His point that bears and boxers belong not to the repertory of the theatre but to the circulatores or itinerant performers tilts the balance towards taste. The adaption from Terence (Hec. second prologue, 29ff.) warns against taking the event too literally. 12 In Horace’s depiction (Epist. 2. 1. 214–28), the library with its canonizing power recreates the social structures of patronage. Horsfall (1993a) 62–3: admission depends on ‘cross-fertilization between the salutatio and library policy’.

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ut studio maiore petant Helicona uirentem. (Epist. 2. 1. 214–18) (But come, and to those who prefer to entrust themselves to a reader than to bear the haughtiness of the proud spectator, give a little care, as is due, if you wish to ﬁll the worthy gift to Apollo with books and add a spur to the bards, so that they seek green Helicon with greater zeal.)

Yes, Greek inﬂuence has made for better poetry, as it is responsible for chasing Saturnians, so to speak, off the stage (158), but it has also imported the criterion of quality that separates Horace from a living audience interested in a show. Imitation of the Greeks has improved Latin poetry from its antique shagginess, but at the cost of writing: the library replaces the chorus. It is ironic, in light of the nostalgia for a lost plenitude that informs Latin literature’s response to Greece, that imitation of the Greeks should separate contemporary Roman poetry from a native ritual context.13 When Horace uses ‘uates’ of the authors of the pontiﬁci libri, the word retains Ennius’ disdain for old-fashioned poetry in Saturnians, here described as writing rather than song; when he uses it of himself and his contemporaries in the context of aspiring to Helicon by writing books, he reminds us that its modern use is a self-consciously nostalgic appropriation of something lost. Horace’s lyric may be metaphorically sung—and may actually have been performed—but it still lives in a library. The poetic gift and recitation are presented as the venue for direct contact between poet and patron (219–28). As a medium, recitation partakes of both performance and writing,14 although it by no means recuperates the grounding of poetic performance in ritual, and elsewhere Horace expresses reluctance to engage in the practice (Ch. 10). Rather, the new context rather enables a new social function having to do with status and power within the Roman literary elite. The language associated with recitation in the Epistle to Augustus ﬁrmly links it with writing (‘poeta’, ‘librum’, ‘recitata’, ‘reuoluimus’, ‘poemata’, 219–28). The one word that suggests song, ‘carmina’, occurs when there is heightened expectation: ‘as soon as you learn that we are composing (ﬁngere) songs’ (227). The imagined interest of Augustus raises

13 Native, that is, in the depiction. Horsfall (1994) 68 notes the parallels between Horace’s account of the rustic origin of drama and the Greek accounts of the origins of iambus, and shows the ﬂimsiness of most of what we think we might know about the native origins of Latin literature. Galinsky (1992a) 29 comments that Horace in the Epistle to Augustus is unanxious about Greek predecessors, but ‘depressed . . . about the Romans’ obsessive preference for his Roman precursors’. 14 Barchiesi (2000) 290 n. 6 reports on Don Fowler’s objections to the idea of recitation as mediating between song and writing.

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the poetry’s stylistic level to match, until we reach money and actual poetic production, when the verb becomes more mundane: scribere. Horace is a committed modern.15 Although we might expect the language of modernity to attach itself ﬁrmly to writing, while performance would adhere rather to the Greeks and early Romans, this would be a distortion. After all, the description of choral lyric looks to Horace’s own Carmen saeculare. In this epistle, the Greeks parallel the Romans as writers (‘scripta’ and ‘scriptores’, Epist. 2. 1. 29–30), and their writings dwell on paper (‘Graecis . . . chartis’, 161). Writing, paper, reading, and the like are the standard words for poetic production, in accord with the conventions of the literary epistle.16 The vocabulary of song, however, is marked. When Horace uses ‘carmen’ of Livius Andronicus, this accompanies an allusion to the ﬁrst line of Livius’ translation of the Odyssey: ‘non equidem insector delendaque carmina Liui j esse reor’ (I do not indeed attack the songs of Livius or think they should be deleted, 69–70) looks to ‘uirum mihi, Camena, insece uersutum’ (Camena, pursue the man for me, a versatile one, Livius Andronicus fr. 1 Bla¨nsdorf). ‘Insector’ recalls ‘insece’ as ‘carmen’ does ‘Camena’ (Hinds 1998: 71). Horace cleverly preserves Livius’ line as he talks about not wanting to delete it. Citation also accounts for ‘carmen’ in the reference to the XII Tables, where defamatory song is prohibited (153–4; Brink 1982: ad loc.). Several other occurrences have to do with genres or contexts speciﬁcally associated with song: the symposium (110), choral lyric (138), staged poetry (185). The most interesting usages, however, occur near the poem’s end in the context of patronage. Like ‘carmen’ when Augustus putatively learns about a poet’s activities (227), the two remaining instances deﬂate heightened expectations. Each concerns the disparity between glorious deeds and insufﬁcient poetry: Horace generalizes from Alexander’s blindness to poetic quality (‘fere scriptores carmine foedo j splendida facta linunt’ (writers nearly smear splendid deeds with foul song), 236–7) and refuses to sing of Augustus (‘sed neque paruum j carmen maiestas recipit tua’ (but your majesty does not accept a small song), 257–8). The adjectives ‘foul’ and ‘small’ undercut otherwise glorious song. Instead, Alexander bought Choerilus’ ‘poema j . . . ridiculum’ (silly poem, 237–8) at a high price, and Horace refers to the genre at hand as ‘sermones . . . j repentis per humum’ (conversations creeping along the ground, 250–1). This recalls his apology for occupying the princeps’ time with ‘sermone’ (4) at the poem’s opening. Needless to say, we should take the 15

Wili (1948) 264: ‘bewusst moderner Dichter’. Rudd (1979) 175, afﬁxes ‘To Augustus: a defence of modern poetry’ to his translation of this poem; also (1989) 4. 16 In the Odes, Horace usually refers to his own work as song, but writing is by and large standard for the Sermones and Epistles : Lowrie (1997) 56–9.

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implied comparison between Horace and Choerilus with a pinch of salt, but the elevation in diction when poetry faces a man in power indicates the nature of the pressure Horace graciously refuses. In this genre, ‘carmen’ offers a reason for our writing poet to keep his distance.17 With ‘sermo’, however, Horace returns to a poetry of utterance. High carmen and lowly sermo are differentiated in style, but they also imply a difference in performative power. Why can the choral lyrist of the poem’s middle, who neglects mentioning Augustus, not produce song for Augustus at the poem’s beginning and end, where his name does occur? When faced with Augustus, Horace embraces writing over song, sermo over carmen. What do these choices mean for Horace’s understanding of his social function and for his stance as a modern?18

T H E M O DE R N The heart of these issues lies, I think, in Horace’s modernity, that is, in how he represents his poetry’s relation to time and the eternal. In ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, de Man (1983: 152) refers to the ‘temptation of immediacy’ as ‘constitutive of a literary consciousness’. Horace is not a modern in wanting to eliminate the past: he explicitly dismisses the imputation that he wishes to destroy Livius’ poetry (Epist. 2. 1. 69). He is one, however, perhaps by default, in not automatically admiring the ‘ancients’. His argument about the priority of literary quality over age in fact dismisses the consideration of age, whether old or new, as valuable in and of itself. But the ‘temptation of immediacy’ brings us directly into the poet’s relation to Augustus and to choral lyric as a performance genre. The word ‘praesens’ occurs twice in Epistle 2. 1, the ﬁrst time of the divine honours offered Augustus (15), the second of the gods choral lyric successfully invokes (134). Augustus occupies the position of the modern, invested with the numinous presence of the immediate—what de Man calls ‘the power of the present moment as an origin’ (149)—and is unlike anything past or future (Epist. 2. 1. 17). Choral lyric’s effectiveness has to do with its immediate access to the divine. It turns out that the things Horace claims for these present and potent divinities are things he has claimed for Augustus either in this poem or elsewhere. Choral lyric’s ability to drive off fearsome dangers corresponds to 17

The techniques in the Odes are different. For the relation of praise poetry to writing and song, see ibid. ch. 2. 18 Wili (1948) 310, also 264: the epistle is Horace’s attempt ‘das Verha¨ltnis von Herrscher und Dichtung, Augenkunst und Ohrenkunst fu¨r seine Zeit zu lo¨sen’.

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Augustus’ protection of Italy (2); its success in providing peace and a year rich in fruits recalls ‘tua, Caesar, aetas j fruges et agris rettulit uberes’ (your age, Caesar, has brought back rich fruits to the ﬁelds, Odes 4. 15. 4–5). The performance genre has immediate contact with divine and political power, which are here closely conjoined. Even the debased version of performance presented as a staged battle scene and triumphal procession at Epist. 2. 1. 189–93 has roots in the political. Here perhaps we may discover why, despite the manifest attractions of such power, Horace in the end, at least in this genre, turns away from it. If Augustus is honoured in the present just short of a god, and people see him as unlike anything in the past or future, we must remember, with Horace, what exactly this collective amnesia was forgetting. In the Odes, Horace glides over Augustus’ role in the civil wars. He brings peace by bringing them to an end: ‘custode rerum Caesare non furor j ciuilis aut uis exiget otium’ (with Caesar as guardian of affairs, civil rage and force will not drive out peace, Odes. 4. 15. 17–18). De Man (147) describes the essential impulse of the modern as an act of forgetting: ‘Moments of genuine humanity thus are moments at which all anteriority vanishes, annihilated by the power of an absolute forgetting. Although such a radical rejection of history may be illusory or unfair to the achievement of the past, it nevertheless remains justiﬁed as necessary to the fulﬁllment of our human destiny and as the condition for action.’ He continues with a description that on the face of it pertains more obviously to the statesman than the poet. In Horace, parallels link the modern politics to modern poetry: each is set in relation to both the Greeks and prior Romans (Augustus: ‘te nostris ducibus, te Grais anteferendo’ (by setting you ahead of our leaders, ahead of the Greeks), Epist. 2. 1. 19; contemporary Latin poetry: 28–30, 50ff., 93ff., 156ff.). But while Augustus may eclipse the past, public taste has not accorded the same privilege to literature, so that politics and poetry are out of sync.19 Poetry is a vehicle for memory, and so the poet’s and the statesman’s modernities become at odds. The poet cannot help but remember what the statesman would just as soon forget. One of the things Horace mentions in the sample of praise poetry he disavows is the closing of the gates of Janus.20 Here he implicitly credits Augustus for putting an end to civil war, since the ﬁrst and most prominent 19 Barchiesi (1993) 157 rightly points out the alignment of poetry and politics. He understands this poem as saying that a new literary good taste accords with a new discourse of power: Augustus demonstrates good taste by declining monarchy just as the poet declines poetry that would compromise his demanding aesthetics. I see this alignment as preliminary to a further, more radical split. 20 The Gates of Janus, however, have a tendency to burst open again, Fowler (2000) 172–92. In Lowrie (2002a) I argue that extensive allusion to Cicero here allows the reader to remember, among other things, Octavian’s collusion in Cicero’s death.

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time the gates were closed under the princeps was at his triple triumph in 29 BCE, a triumph for victory in civil war however much the battle of Actium masqueraded as a foreign war.21 The emphasis on the ending of conﬂict, civil and foreign (253–6), makes it hard to understand Horace’s reluctance to undertake Augustus’ ‘res gestae’ (accomplishments, 251), particularly given his speciﬁcation of what poetry is good for in the middle of the poem: ‘recte facta refert, orientia tempora notis j instruit exemplis’ (it relates things rightly done, it provides coming ages with known examples, 131–2). What better topic than the end of war? Both war and its end are ruptures that separate then from now, and thereby constitute modernity. Furthermore, the ending of war consistently comes up in this poem in relation to moments of intense aesthetic production, whether playful or serious. Greece began to engage in frivolity consisting of athletic games, pictorial, and poetic art once she lay down war (93–4). Rome’s interest in art began after conquering Greece (156–7). The end of the Punic Wars brought an interest in imitating the Greek tragedians (161–3). The explicit statement of the poet’s lack of utility in war must be understood in this context (124). Peace offers an opening for art (101). Therefore, the temporal break afforded by Augustus’ setting an end to civil and foreign conﬂict should allow his age a new ﬂourishing of poetic production—and so it did. But the new and demanding aesthetic evidenced throughout the poem makes writing Augustus’ ‘res gestae’ an impossible task. Overt praise poetry is distasteful by the standards of the literary elite, however fashionable triumphal processions may be in the theatre (191–3). Here the modernity of the statesman and the poet coincide, if only not to meet.22 Poetry and politics do come together, at least tentatively, in the epistle’s opening, where the issue is time: ‘in publica commoda peccem, j si longo sermone morer tua tempora, Caesar’ (I would sin against the public advantage if I wasted your time with lengthy discourse, Caesar, 3–4). Horace’s apology for distracting the princeps from important affairs of state with his poetry answers and modiﬁes Augustus’ own letter to Horace, preserved in Suetonius: post sermones uero quosdam lectos nullam sui mentionem habitam ita sit questus: ‘irasci me tibi scito, quod non in plerisque eius modi scriptis mecum potissimum loquaris; an uereris ne apud posteros infame tibi sit quod uidearis familiaris nobis esse?’ (Suetonius, Vita Hor. 18–20) 21 Gurval (1995) 33 downplays the emphasis on Actium in the triple triumph, but see Pelling (1997). 22 Fowler (1995) analyses how Horace applies the language of his poetics to the emperor, who emerges as a bad artist, thundering on the Euphrates. Horace makes the parallel between the two, only to reject it on aesthetic grounds.

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(But after he had read certain Sermones, he complained that no mention was made of him thus: ‘Know that I am angry with you, because in most of those writings of that sort you do not converse rather with me. Or are you afraid that it will bring you infamy among posterity that you seem to be my friend?’)

Augustus and Suetonius alike consider Horace’s poetry both writing and utterance, just as in this poem sermo will win poetic longevity in the library. For Augustus, Horace’s poetry also participates in two kinds of time: posterity and the friendship of the moment. In Horace’s epistle, altering the ordinary idiom for delaying someone’s attention touches on these two kinds of time. Normally, moror (delay, drag out) takes an accusative of the person (OLD 3), but here the accusative is ‘tua tempora’ (your times), and the person is vocative. Brink (1982: ad loc.) cites Wilkins on the plural of tempora, which ‘in prose always seems to carry with it something of the force of ŒÆØæ , “opportunities” for doing anything, not merely the lapse of time’, and this would certainly accord with the primary meaning of the phrase.23 In this sense, tempora is immediate. But a secondary meaning of drawing out ‘your times’, for example, the Augustan age as in Cicero’s ‘o tempora, o mores’ (O the times, O the ways! Cat. 1. 2), answers to Augustus’, as to Horace’s interest in immortality. The intersection of the present with immortality, of utterance, whether conversation or choral peformance, with writing, touches exactly on the poem’s framing issue: the pull between appreciation of one’s contemporaries and of the past.24 The people’s assessment of Augustus as already divine has changed the rules—but what does that mean for poetry? The inability of the present moment reliably to assess the worth of things makes it impossible for Horace to embrace in entirety a poetics of performance. Implicit expectations of panegyric might follow on poetry conceived as serving the moment. The advantages of power linked with chorus and politics come with risks—literal disruption by bears or boxers (186) or more serious errors in judgement, whether aesthetic, political, or theological. The library at least offers the potential for a more discerning readership. De Man’s understanding of the modern emphasizes in a ﬁrst movement the drive to the immediate and the rupture with the past for the purpose of living in the present. Horace, in this view, would have too much at stake both in his connection to the past and in a desire for posterity to rate as a true modern. But de Man shows that in Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and even Fontenelle the 23

Translation from Rudd (1989) ad loc. See Lowrie (2002c) for an extended section on de Man (1983) 154–5 and Fontenelle, ‘Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes’ (1991) 428, who depends heavily on Horace. Fraenkel (1957) 388 cites other modernist imitators. 24

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appeal of immediacy is concomitant with a desire to record it, so that memory, representation, the techniques for linking past with present and present with future are reinscribed. The modern turns out to reside in the recognition of the inability to achieve one’s desire to break with the past. Horace’s new aesthetic norms establish a break, but the ‘sorites’ paradox (48) acknowledges the impossibility of a clean break and his norms take the past as a model, whether positive or negative. If we take Horace’s Epistle to Augustus as a literary history outlining something approaching a critical method, de Man’s (1983: 164) statement could apply to him: ‘the critical method which denies literary modernity would appear—and even, in certain respects, would be—the most modern of critical movements’. Such a formulation, however, captures only half the stakes for Horace. If there is a problematic desire for rupture in this poem, it lies less in the relation of the present to the past than in that between poetry and politics. Horace acknowledges the impossibility of making a clean break between the two. It is tempting to develop an integrating solution in the person of Augustus: he offered Horace the opportunity to become a choral lyrist and similarly gives the ‘little care’ (216) that protects poets of quality from the insensitive public and inspires them to ﬁll the libraries. Habinek remarks of Epist. 2. 1 (1998a: 101): ‘Once the connection between performance and text, or between poet and traditional community, is broken, there is no easy way to localize the imagined community that replaces the real one.’ Can we localize this surrogate community in Augustus? The difﬁculty comes in bringing together Horace’s deﬁnition of poetry’s social function in the section on choral lyric with his treatment of Augustus, since he explicitly identiﬁes commemoration as one of poetry’s functions (130). Augustus may pay the bills, Augustus may maintain the library, but the divorce from a choral lyric community absolves Horace of this duty: he alleges incompetence to relate Augustus’ ‘res gestae’ (251). Horace simultaneously attempts to counter a fall from grace by recuperating through metaphor the language of embeddedness (he is the lyrist of the Carmen saeculare) and to reveal the artiﬁciality of such a recuperation (he is a writer of books and the teacher of the Ars). Yes, he wants the power of engagement; no, he refuses to compromise his standards to exercise it; and no, he cannot extricate himself from the dilemma. For Horace, writing and performance are intimately bound up with two issues: temporality and power.25 Within each realm exists a dissonance that is less a dialectic to be overcome, than a reality that ﬁnds expression in the work of art. 25 Feeney (1998) 114, outlines how ‘the power and immortality of Augustus were both bound up with the representations of poetry’. Part of Horace’s difﬁculty in talking about these issues as a poet is that they automatically bring in the princeps.

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The Epistle to Augustus concerns itself thematically with poetry’s social function, but what it says interferes with our perception of its actual function within society as projected by the poem. Adorno’s essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’ can offer a roundabout route into this topic.26 I think we can extrapolate these ideas beyond lyric to any poetry that resists social pressures. Adorno differentiates modern lyric from ancient. He cites Pindar and Alcaeus (with Sappho as the exception) as lacking ‘the quality of immediacy, of immateriality’ we expect of modern lyric (1991: 40). These qualities are some of the issues involved in Horace’s treatment of time, writing, and performance. You experience lyric poetry as something opposed to society, something wholly individual. Your feelings insist that it remain so, that lyric expression, having escaped from the weight of material existence, evoke the image of a life free from the coercion of reigning practices, of utility, of the relentless pressures of self-preservation. This demand, however, the demand that the lyric word be virginal, is itself social in nature. It implies a protest against a social situation that every individual experiences as hostile, alien, cold, oppressive, and this situation is imprinted in reverse on the poetic work: the more heavily the situation weighs upon it, the more ﬁrmly the work resists it by refusing to submit to anything heteronomous and constituting itself solely in accordance with its own laws. (1991: 39–40)

Patronage is perhaps a source of pressure in Horace’s society analogous to that Adorno attributes to the industrial revolution. The recusatio both acknowledges these pressures and keeps them at bay. The language of Epicureanism as much as Callimachean aesthetics creates poetry’s ‘own laws’.27 No matter how much Horace avers the social utility of, for example, choral lyric, his poetry, the Epistle to Augustus in particular, comes off as poetry in resistance. The recusatio and the insistence on formal excellence contribute to this sense of poetry as a space apart. This impression of resistance is particularly interesting in light of Adorno’s attribution of our sense of a modern individuality isolated from and set against society to the post-industrial revolution bourgeoisie. In comparison to modern poetry, Latin poetry of the Augustan age may look embedded, but in comparison to Greek lyric and tragedy, it looks considerably less so. It is with the Romans—Cicero, Lucilius, Horace even, portraiture certainly—that we ﬁrst get the sense of idiosyncratic individuals, as opposed to the universalizing individuality of the Greeks. 26

Adorno (1991) 37–54. Fowler (1995) 266 would have us commit either to the sublime and Fascist Horace or to his unpretentious Epicurean and Callimachean alter ego, and sees fence-sitters as lacking in courage. I tend to leap back and forth rather than sit still, e.g. Lowrie (1997) 352. 27

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The sense of resistance in this poem, however, does not arise merely from thematic and rhetorical features. After all, to say your poetry is not of the right style to praise the chief of state has a strong illocutionary force of praise. The resistance comes from the poeticity of the language, not least where Horace describes poetry’s social function most positively. The nostalgic distance of ‘agricolae prisci, fortes paruoque beati’ (the old farmers, brave and blessed with little, Epist. 2. 1. 139) arises in part from the mention of a social class far from Horace’s own and the literal temporal separation of the word priscus, but more so from the piling up of wholesome adjectives. While the rusticity of the farmers is hardly something we identify with Horace, the soothing last line of the deﬁnition of choral lyric’s role in society touches on a kind of poetry our poet himself wrote: ‘carmine di superi placantur, carmine Manes’ (The gods above are appeased by song, by song the spirits below, 138). The balance of repeated ‘carmine’, a central verb linking gods above and below, ‘abcab’ word order, creates a sense of universal accord between god and man through poetry—but at a remove.28 This line attributes such bliss to a different kind of poetry and the poem we are reading has a radically different function. I assume that all poetry, whether lyric, drama, or epistle, enacts both the aesthetic and the social.29 Adorno’s thesis is that the more lyric represents the individual in resistance to society and the ‘bustle of competing interests’, the more it encodes social reality (1991: 49). This resistance is a social phenomenon resulting from the bourgeois renunciation ‘in aesthetic form as in politics’ of ‘humankind as something whole, something self-determining’. Horace’s poetry, whether lyric, satire, or epistle, never creates the impression of an individual in resistance to society to anything like the degree we ﬁnd in modern lyric. Yet the impression conveyed of restriction, of an attempt to get away from competing interests, seems nevertheless linked to a renunciation of a notion of humankind as self-determining.30 The poem’s ﬁrst line identiﬁes Augustus as the sole (‘solus’) ruler.31 Horace’s retreat, often identiﬁed as 28 Klingner (1964) 420, understands this pious line as Horace at his most ironic and playful, and therefore sincere. Fraenkel (1957) 391 makes of the line ‘the crown of his epistle’. 29 So far, I have been analysing what Horace says; at issue is also how his literary criticism is poetic. Fr. Schlegel (1988) 249 ¼ ‘Critical Fragments’ 117: ‘Poesie kann nur durch Poesie kritisiert werden. Ein Kunsturteil, welches nicht selbst ein Kunstwerk ist, entweder im Stoff, als Darstellung des notwendigen Eindrucks in seinem Werden, oder durch eine scho¨ne Form, und einen im Geist der alten ro¨mischen Satire liberalen Ton, hat gar kein Bu¨rgerrecht im Reiche der Kunst.’ 30 Feeney (2002b) 186 remarks: ‘The poem is full of things Horace cannot or will not do’; yet this ‘incapacity’ is matched by an equal admixture of ‘conﬁdence’. 31 Rudd (1989) ad loc., refers to Augustus as a ‘despot’; Brink (1982) ad loc.: ‘To H. the reality of Augustus’ autocracy seems as unambiguous as it does to a Tacitus or Dio.’ Both target Heinze’s blindness to this issue, Kiessling-Heinze ad loc.

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epicurean (with a small ‘e’), is elite: it consists speciﬁcally of a renunciation of political engagement within a cocoon of high aesthetic standards. Everybody now composes poetry (117), presumably because the political sphere is occupied entirely by one person, but not everyone can compose it well. In his retreat from politics, Horace perfectly represents his times.32 In his retreat from the uneducated masses, Horace further embraces the relative safety of the judgement of posterity. The library ﬁgures this safe place. 32 Friedrich Schlegel calls Roman satire, and Horatian satire in particular, a ‘Gesellschaftspoesie’ (Athena¨um fr. 146) and makes it emblematic for Roman literature as a whole. Resistance is a strong feature of Augustan poetry. One thinks of the Eclogues and of elegy in particular, and the same argument can be brought to bear: the greater the retreat, the more the poetry represents its own social conditions. Consequently, it is not just when Horace ‘expands his poetic vision so that he draws into the picture the sense of a whole age and a great echoing corridor of Roman history’, Gordon Williams (1968) 77, that he is a social poet, but everywhere.

10 De- and Re-contextualization: Horace, Epistles 1. 19 En disant tout comme on l’e´criroit on ne fait plus que lire en parlant. (Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine de langues)

If Horatian lyric claims music and performance thematically rather than through enactment, the Epistles embrace not so much writing as a technology, but the resulting decontextualization. Horace consistently dissolves any present context as the overriding interpretative parameter for poetry. This move transcends the particular medium avowed in any individual poem, so that throughout his various genres Horace lets his poetry slip out from any single, contextualizing moment. This move can perhaps explain Horace’s reluctance to engage in recitation.

ON NOT RECITING Recitation, popular and elite, has recently attracted much attention as a venue short of dramatic enactment that brings poetry into direct and present contact with an audience.1 Although most of the evidence postdates the Augustan period, even then we can ascertain that this medium is heavily steeped in the literary, understood as some sort of distance from the immediate engagement sought in performance. The question is why Horace, who is otherwise attracted to decontextualization, resists this performance medium.2 1 Popular, Wiseman (1982) 36 ( ¼ 1987: 263), with references from Cicero, Horace, Vitruvius, and Petronius; popular and elite, Horsfall (2003) 55–7, who also considers more dramatic performance; elite, Wiseman (1982) 32, Salles (1992) 96–100, Fantham (1996) 87–8; ValetteCagnac (1997) analyses both literary recitation (ch. 3) and other forms, especially in politics and the law (ch. 4). 2 Barchiesi (2000) n. 6: ‘Don Fowler rightly stressed in the discussion that recitation is not to be imagined as a mediation between book and performance. Whatever the true importance of recitation in literary society, Horace ﬁghts constantly to reduce its authority; satires and epistles

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C. Asinius Pollio began the fashion, if not the institution of public recitation at Rome.3 He also established the ﬁrst public library there, the Atrium Libertatis, and innovated by decorating it with busts of authors.4 These efforts supported literature by facilitating research, by providing contact with a public audience and an accessible place to store ﬁnished books. Recitation and the library are together emblematic for Roman literarity. Both offer a social context for texts, whether fully composed or under revision. As with song in his lyric, Horace thematicizes recitation in his hexameter poetry, the difference being that the former is evaluated positively and the latter negatively. But in no genre does he present himself as engaging in the medium on the spot.5 Recitation, like writing, sits apart from some originary occasion.6 The dissociation between medium and context is evident in a letter the younger Pliny addresses to the parents of Vestricius Cottius, who died prematurely. He informs them after the fact that he wrote up and recited Vestricius’ praises. Pliny did not recite at the funeral, nor did he think to invite the parents to the recitation. They heard about it second hand. Pliny did not even tell them about it when he saw them in person, but writes explaining the situation afterwards (3. 10. 1). This is a far cry from the Republican laudationes funebres (funeral praises) recited at funerals and that families kept as a treasury and memorial of the dead (e.g. Cic. Brutus 62; Flower 1996: ch. 5). Pliny is debating about whether to send the family a copy immediately, or to wait until he has put all his materials together. Catherine Salles (1992: 104) analyses this passage as an instance of a ‘profound divorce’ between the primary meaning of a work and the use to which an author puts it in recitation. Although over a century separates Pliny from the Augustans, this sort of distance between the occasions of composition and recitation was always potentially there.

are faithful allies of Horatian lyric in creating a gap between the poet’s voice and the recitation arena, the rat run of literati.’ 3 Funaioli (1914) 437–9 reviews the evidence for earlier recitation, including private readings. Dalzell (1955) analyses the testimonia about Pollio (especially Sen. Contr. 4, pref. 2) and concludes that his innovation was neither the general practice of reading aloud, which had been done privately before him, nor the reading of his own works, nor the issuing of invitations, but formal public readings in locales such as the library he established (26–7). See also Rawson (1985) 52; Goldberg (2005) 192 n. 35. 4 Andre´ (1949) ch. 7, 115–22 gathers and evaluates the evidence for Pollio’s role as friend of arts and letters. 5 Even Juvenal’s ‘semper ego auditor tantum?’ (Am I always only a listener?, 1. 1) aligns occasion with poetic content only if we imagine the line recited. 6 The decorum appropriate to recitation is generic, not occasional. Dionysius Thrax enjoins matching tone and genre—heroic for tragedy, colloquial for comedy (Ars grammatica, Uhlig 6). Selden (1992) 491 n. 168 comments: ‘this conﬁrms prosopopoeia as the basic ﬁgure of close reading’.

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Horace’s strenuous objection to recitation does not in fact hang on the divorce from occasion—he might even have found this appealing. He objects rather to the rat race and literature’s commodiﬁcation, that is, a speciﬁc kind of recontextualization that ignores aesthetic quality. The end of Epistles 1. 19 contrasts reading with recitation. The poem as a whole sets social performance against literary imitation. The contrast between production methods parallels the modes of reception. In each, the authentic is opposed to the inauthentic and the application to life of poetic topoi is critiqued as misguided. Consideration of the available media accompanies an analysis of poetry’s effectiveness in the world. Epistles 1. 19 opens with an explicit citation contrasting writing with inspiration from wine. Quotation cleverly anticipates the topic of literary imitation in the poem’s middle section (19–34). prisco si credis, Maecenas docte, Cratino, nulla placere diu nec uiuere carmina possunt quae scribuntur aquae potoribus. (Epist. 1. 19. 1–3) (If you believe ancient Cratinus, learned Maecenas, no songs can please or live a long time which are written by water drinkers.)

The epistolary addressee is qualiﬁed as learned, the songs are written, the concern is with poetic longevity, the opinion is a citation7—these markers align the poem with writing. But the content of Cratinus’ dictum privileges inspiration through wine: (‘he who drinks water could produce nothing wise’ PCG 4. 203). Horace reworks the original citation according to the dictates of writing and learning: Cratinus’ verb does not represent poetic composition as either writing or song, but as birth. The disparity between an utterance’s content and its alignment is further exempliﬁed in an ostensible self-citation:8 ‘Forum Putealque Libonis mandabo siccis, adimam cantare seueris:’ hoc simul edixi, non cessauere poetae nocturno certare mero, putere diurno. (Epist. 1. 19. 8–11) (‘I will consign the Forum and Libo’s well to the sober, I will take singing away from the stern’: as soon as I decreed this, poets have not ceased to compete with strong wine by night, to stink by day.)

7

The classical poet was probably received also through (Hellenistic) citation. Mayer ad loc. suggests Horace’s potential knowledge of Nicaenetus, AP 13. 29 ¼ HE 2711–16. 8 The interplay between what Horace says and his stance keeps him from fully aligning with either drunkards or teetotallers. Fraenkel (1957) 340–1.

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Horace mocks the poets’ self-exaltation with ‘cantare’. They take him literally and miss the point that he is manipulating a learned tradition rather than giving advice about how to live. Legal language also mocks the literal application.9 Horace issues this pronouncement as an edict—or they take it that way. Instead of following the exemplum that his poetic utterance offers qua utterance, his readership rather imitates the content, as if it were a real law or pattern to be copied (‘exemplar’, Epist. 1. 19. 17).10 Their turning poetic convention towards social practice leads them to vice. They do the inverse and imitate form rather than content in Cato’s moral example: imitating his clothing and facial expression will not represent (‘repraesentet’) his virtue and customs (Epist. 1. 19. 12–14). Things cannot be rectiﬁed by consistently following form or content. In each area, the imitators miss the point. Horace’s support for judgement in imitation emerges in his discussion of his own adoption of Archilochus as a literary model. He has imitated his predecessor’s form and his spirit, but not the content, namely personal invective (Epist. 1. 19. 23–5).11 Moral distaste for abuse leads him to reject poetry with worldly consequences (‘non res et agentia uerba Lycamben’, not the matter and words harassing Lycambes, Epist. 1. 19. 25). Horace cites Sappho and Alcaeus as precedessors for his own adaptation of Archilochus, and speciﬁes that he has good company in retaining the form, but not the content. Rhythm and metre are kept,12 but the subjects are not, nor is the order (Epist. 1. 19. 29). Horace gives up poetry with a pragmatic effect, if it means causing one’s betrothed and father-in-law to hang themselves (Epist. 1. 19. 30–1). So the story goes about Archilochus. Horace is interested in effective poetry in the Carmen saeculare, but here, in a written epistle, the effects represented are purely negative and harmful. Horace rather takes refuge in poetry read by a reader. This accords with his aligning himself with writing in the poem’s opening. hunc quoque, non alio dictum prius ore, Latinus uulgaui ﬁdicen, iuuat immemorata ferentem ingenuis oculisque legi manibusque teneri. (Epist. 1. 19. 32–4) 9

Fraenkel (1957) 341, Brink (1963) 181–2 on legal language; Oliensis (1998) 220. On the difference between the exemplum and the exemplar, Ch. 12. Nisbet (1987) 186: Horace may refer literally to imitation of his sympotic odes. 11 Watson 5; Barchiesi (2001c) 143. The literary critical distinction between ‘rhythm and mood on the one hand and matter and words on the other . . . or between verse on the one hand and subject and arrangement on the other’ goes back to the Aristotelians, Brink (1963) 181. 12 For different views of Horace’s statement about lyric metres, Fraenkel (1957) 341–6; NH at Odes 1. 35. 6; Woodman (1983a); Mayer ad loc. I follow Mayer. Cavarzere 14–34 measures Horace’s practice in the Epodes against their description in the Epistles. 10

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(I, Latin lyrist, also brought this one, previously unspoken by another mouth, to the people; it is pleasing for someone bearing untold things to be read by free eyes and held by free hands.)

The reader could be singular, but the plural eyes and hands invite an image of a wider audience than Maecenas, the poem’s addressee. This passage, if any in Horace, makes clear that his language of lyric performance is metaphorical. No contrast is felt between the appellation he chooses for himself, ‘ﬁdicen’ (lyre-player, 33), and his image of a reader holding the scroll. Depending on the point being made, reading can be an activity for eyes or ears. The valuation of vision here contrasts with the Epistle to Augustus, where Horace denigrates the taste of the spectators in theatrical performances (Epist. 2. 1. 187–9). The spectators invert the Aristotelian hierarchy and cherish opsis as a component of tragedy. Their dedication to the vain entertainments afforded by sight is such that their voices drown out the actor, and applaud even before he speaks because of his dyed costume (Epist. 2. 1. 199–207).13 For Horace, the words, conveyed by sound, surpass mere visual appearance, but enargeia (vividness), often linked to sight,14 trumps any kind of performance: he appreciates the poet who can ﬁll him with emotions and place him now at Thebes, now at Athens (Epist. 2. 1. 210–13). This power belongs to the text and affects his imagination. It sublates opsis and he therefore prefers a reader over a spectator (Epist. 2. 1. 214–16). When Horace entrusts himself to a reader’s eyes and hands in Epist. 1. 19, the eyes are less the organs of immediate sense perception than those of the imagination. The next lines outline a contrast between this sort of reading, with the eyes and at home, and hearing in the public sphere. Hearing governs recitation, but ends up blurring into private reading. scire uelis mea cur ingratus opuscula lector laudet ametque domi, premat extra limen iniquus? non ego uentosae plebis suffragia uenor impensis cenarum et tritae munere uestis; non ego nobilium scriptorum auditor et ultor grammaticas ambire tribus et pulpita dignor. hinc illae lacrimae. ‘spissis indigna theatris scripta pudet recitare et nugis addere pondus’ si dixi, ‘rides’ ait ‘et Iouis auribus ista seruas: ﬁdis enim manare poetica mella te solum, tibi pulcher.’ (Epist. 1. 19. 35–45) 13 14

Plato was also concerned with noise in political assemblies and the theatre; Ford (2002) 283. Longinus 15. 1; Quintilian 4. 2. 123–4, 9. 2. 40. An instance is Cicero, Pro Rosc. Am. 35. 98.

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(Would you like to know why my thankless reader praises and loves my little works at home, but unfairly comes down hard on them out the door? I do not buy the votes of the ﬂighty plebs by shelling out money for dinners and handouts of used clothes. I, audience and defender of noble writings, do not deign to canvass the tribes of critics and the grandstand. That’s where the tears come from. If ever I say, ‘I’m ashamed to recite my worthless writings in a crowded theatre and lend weight to triﬂes’, he says, ‘You’re making fun of us. You’re keeping your stuff for Jove’s ears: ‘cause you’re sure you’re the only one to drip poetry’s honey, self-satisﬁed pretty boy.’)

When Horace calls himself an ‘auditor’ (listener) of noble writings, he may actually attend and appreciate recitations of quality. Fraenkel (1957: 349) suggests that Horace recognizes the greats as his teachers and is willing to defend them from oblivion; ‘auditor’ can mean a student who listens to lessons. But Horace could also be a reader of great poets like those mentioned earlier in the poem. The prevalent Greek use of akouein for reading (Schenkeveld 1992) suggests that Horace ‘listens’ to the greats by reading. Similarly, the accusation of the imaginary interlocutor, that Horace refuses to recite because he reserves his poetry for the ears of Augustus, may imply that he reads his poetry aloud to Augustus out of public view. Or, the hearing could be metaphoric for his being Horace’s chosen audience. When he brings Augustus’ eyes and ears together at Epist. 1. 13. 17–18 (‘carmina quae possint oculos aurisque morari j Caesaris’ (poems that could cause Caesar’s eyes and ears to tarry)), we imagine a reading situation where the poet is not present. He has sent the poems to the emperor via an intermediary, Vinnius. Whether Caesar reads the poems with his own eyes or has them read aloud to him is unspeciﬁed; what is speciﬁed is that Caesar is a reader of Horace’s. The basic contrast informing Epist. 1. 19’s ﬁnal section is between private and public modes of reception. Poetry is valued by the world only as a token in the poet’s social advancement. Horace’s reaction—his represented reaction—is to ﬂee. He resists recitation because the wrong thing is on display: the poet and his cliente`le rather than the poetry for itself. It is not so much that the public has poor taste, though it probably does. Rather the public wants to be paid off, and this has nothing to do with quality. A private setting will not guarantee the right appreciation of poetry and in Epodes 8 tasteful books nestled among the cushions are no more an aphrodisiac than is high birth (15–16). At least in private, the reader is free to judge his poetry on its merits; in public, what matters is the poet’s status. This consideration motivates the language of class (plebs, noble writers) in this section, and this language turns on Horace. Horace’s imaginary interlocutor calls him on his false modesty by accusing him of reserving his poetry for a very special audience, Augustus himself. This accusation recalls the story Cicero tells about a recitation given by Antimachus: when deserted by his audience with the exception of Plato, Antimachus

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declared, ‘legam . . . nihilo minus: Plato enim mihi unus instar est centum milium’ (I will read nevertheless: for Plato alone is the equal of a hundred thousand, Brutus 191). Cicero insists that an orator needs an audience—only a poet could afford Antimachus’ attitude. Oratory must make an immediate impression, but poetic reception can be deferred. It is better read than recited. But Horace’s substitution of emperor for philosopher reveals the hollowness of his own desire for a purely aesthetic poetic reception. He aims to please not the most intelligent citizen, but the most powerful. Horace is an elitist, not merely an aesthete, but a snob.15 The real strength of this poetry is Horace’s control of his own discomfort, which he displays for poetic effect. The poem constructs numerous antitheses: form versus content, life versus convention, ears versus eyes, reading versus recitation. Horace consistently evaluates one over the other: he embraces poetry abstracted from life, imitation as literary ﬁliation rather than as a model for how to live; he differentiates himself from the effectiveness of the iambic tradition that drove its targets to suicide; he would rather be read than recite. But Horace’s categories are unstable and he knows that poetry cannot stand entirely on its own in the world. The accusation that he reserves his work for Augustus rings true and he reveals the weakness of his own argument and his own desires. The poem’s ﬁnal image ﬁgures recitation as a public spectacle, the gladiatorial game, which is presented as a step on a slippery slope towards outright warfare. Although the suggestion of war is clearly satiric exaggeration, anger is important for the idea of iambic as effective poetry.16 Horace runs from consequential poetry as he does from the rat race itself. ‘displicet iste locus’ clamo et diludia posco. ludus enim genuit trepidum certamen et iram, ira truces inimicitias et funebre bellum. (Epist. 1. 19. 47–9) (I yell, ‘this place of yours isn’t for me’ and ask for a time out. For the game generates fearsome contest and anger, anger leads to ﬁerce enmities and deathly war.)

As is often noted, the image of the gladiatorial game makes a ring with the beginning of the collection, where Horace turns down Maecenas’ invitation to write more poetry (lyric? the epistles themselves?) on the grounds that he has retired, like a gladiator, from the game (Epist. 1. 1. 2–3; 10). In all the passages where Horace uses gladiatorial imagery for the social world of poetry (also Epist. 2. 2. 97–8), he makes a display of despising social positioning. In the 15 Oliensis (1998) analyses Horace’s multi-layered presentation of himself as a social agent; for elitism here (174). 16 Ch. 4, ‘Horace’s Epodes and Effective Poetry’.

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Epistle to Florus, even the library, elsewhere a sanctuary from performance (Epist. 2. 1. 214–15), is a place to aspire to (Epist. 2. 2. 93–4). Performance in this understanding has nothing to do with creating a ritual space where poetry brings society together; it is rather a space where the poet establishes a niche for himself as a social agent. The desire to escape pigeon-holing informs Horace’s strongest rejection of engagement with this world. multa fero, ut placem genus irritabile uatum, cum scribo et supplex populi suffragia capto; idem, ﬁnitis studiis et mente recepta, obturem patulas impune legentibus auris. (Epist. 2. 2. 102–5) (I endure a lot to please the irritable race of bards when I write and supplicate the people to win their votes; but when my studies are over and I have restored my mind, I may block my open ears to readers with impunity.)

Of course, Horace is writing as he says this, and although the passage has to do with reciting lyric and elegy (Epist. 2. 2. 91, 99–100), it is tempting to imagine Horace reciting this poem and making it impossible to offer him any direct compliment. Even a supporter would be implicated in the culture of mutual backscratching. But by silencing supporters as well as critics, Horace’s poetry would end up having a pragmatic effect. Horace, if anyone, knows he needs the world for the reception of his poetry. This appears as a grand idea in Odes 2. 20 and 3. 30, and the pride with which he speaks of his participation in the ludi saeculares in Odes 4 counters his rejection of recitation by analogy to the gladiatorial ludus. This is not a matter of chronology. Clearly, some games are more worth playing than others, and generic decorum allows for more or less digniﬁed notes to be struck. The satiric vein accounts largely for the degradation of contemporary reception in the Epistles. The realization that poetry needs reception while he would rather keep it pristine motivates his depiction in the next poem, Epistles 1. 20, of his collection going into the world as a prostitute. The world is degrading, but Horace is well aware there is no alternative. Poetry’s educative function, something he extols in Epistles 2. 1. 126–9, appears here as lowly (Epist. 1. 20. 17–18). Just as recitation lets the poetry—and the poet—circulate, reading, which ﬁrst appears as a refuge, turns out to be circulation as well. He admits to pride at pleasing the elite (Epist. 1. 20. 23), but he knows he cannot control his audience or his reception. This ambivalence is his subject matter.

11 Ovid’s Triumphs in Exile: Representation and Power WRITING FROM EXILE Exile offers Ovid reason to dwell on the absence inherent in writing. Erotic love drops out of this new brand of elegy, and amicitia does not quite take its place as a transformatory force.1 Ovid’s situation resembles his single Heroides: abandoned and alone, he writes letters, trying to change his fate against insurmountable odds.2 No Sabinus composed a literary response, however often friends and family actually sent correspondence. The exile poetry is another advance in Ovid’s thinking about communication. The poet of exile is not as resourceless as his heroines: he is the speaking ego, he writes literature in addition to letters, and is acutely self-conscious. Poetry replaces love as the genre’s driving force (Gareth Williams 1994: 69–70, 124, 203) and its effectiveness in the world is more than a theoretical question. Writing is not one theme among others in the Tristia and Ex Ponto, but central to its new poetics.3 Ovid’s exile poetry is the extreme case of poetry representing itself as writing. It is heavily preoccupied with the dyamics of presence and absence.4

1

Labate’s (1988) understanding of the poetics of participation (107) and occasionality fails to confront Ovid’s separation from all he would participate in. 2 Rahn (1958), Anderson (1973) 81, Dickinson (1973) 159 offer parallels between the Heroides and the exile poetry; Rosenmeyer (2001) 12 differentiates between ﬁctive and ‘not invented’ ‘writers or receivers’, but insists that ‘[e]pistolary technique always problematizes the boundaries between ﬁction and reality.’ 3 Ovid takes further the poetics of Horace’s Epistle to Augustus. Rahn (1958) 107–9, Evans (1983) 33, Luck 2. 11–12, Davisson (1979) 70–2, Barchiesi (1993). Tristia 1. 1 reverses many features of Horace, Epist. 1. 20: Horace’s book is sent to provinces in his old age, while Ovid’s books go to Rome; Horace will be canonical in education, while Ovid begs for inclusion in the library; Horace pleases the ﬁrst men in the city, Ovid not. 4 I wrote this chapter long before seeing P. Hardie (2002a) ch. 9, with which it shares many points of contact. Although we both focus on the interrelation of presence and absence, I emphasize absence’s positive contribution to Ovid’s new poetics. Presence is valorized at P. 1. 4. 49, 2. 2. 4, 2. 6. 1, 2. 7. 47–8, 3. 1. 70, 3. 3. 2, 4. 9. 97, but is insufﬁcient at 1. 10. 36, 4. 3. 50.

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Because he is not at Rome, Ovid communicates only through writing: letters, poetry, literary letters.5 His contemporary audience receives him through the same medium as posterity. He no longer has an audience to recite to in person—the Getae are a reductio ad absurdum showing the necessity of an audience within one’s own culture. Horace has made this point already in Odes 3. 30 and Ovid reiterates it in the ﬁnal lines of the Metamorphoses. The constant complaints about the deterioration of his poetry go hand-in-hand with complaints about not being there, where ‘there’ is Rome. Plenitude has disappeared, and with it both Ovid’s happiness as a person and his ability to escape from the compulsion to rehearse and conceal the trauma leading to exile. It is obvious Ovid is obsessed with presence. I aim to show that he constructs a poetics of absence, a poetics of deferral that compensates for trauma. There are (at least) two Ovids in the exile poetry, the man and the poet: each knows and desires different things. The man longs to return home, the poet knows this is impossible; the man values presence, the poet understands absence’s advantages and appreciates the consolation poetic immortality affords personal unhappiness. In exile, the poet furthermore draws Augustus into his theory of representation so that sheer political power fails to have the last word. This chapter analyses poetic power in terms of representation, Ch. 16 in terms of the law. Presence for Ovid does not mean wherever he is, but Rome.6 Exile means absence;7 since it is reciprocal, people and things are also absent from him.8 Writing, however, affords a paradoxical presence, whether narrowly construed as a letter or a book, or more broadly as the process of representation—what the rhetoricians call phantasia, which leads to evidentia, enargeia, or repraesentatio. A book can travel as a physical object in the poet’s stead; his mind can go anywhere freely. But this surrogate compensates only so much for lived experience. In exile, Ovid dwells on the commonplace, already operative in the Heroides, that a letter substitutes for speech. The opening of P. 1. 7. 1, ‘littera pro uerbis’ (a letter instead of words) states in a nutshell what Ovid states elsewhere at length (T. 5. 13. 27–30). The letter takes on a role (P. 4. 9. 7–8), and, like any 5 Oliensis (1994) 185 on T. 1. 7. 9: ‘Naso is here invoked and deﬁned as an absence, less a living source of language than an alienated word which will be spoken by others.’ 6 P. 4. 14. 10, where Tomis is called ‘praesenti humo’, is unusual. 7 T. 1. 3. 101, 3. 4. 74, 3. 5. 17, 3. 14. 4, 5. 1. 22, in words of Bacchus back at Rome: 5. 3. 34, birthday genius must come and ﬁnd him: 5. 5. 13, P. 2. 10. 19, 43, 2. 11. 3, 23, 3. 4. 70, Ovid was ‘praesens’ when back at Rome, but is now ‘absens’: 3. 5. 41–4, he used to be present (‘adesse’): 4. 3. 14, ‘procul positus’: 4. 6. 18, Ovid is not part of Graecinus’ entourage but would like to be among ‘praesentes . . . amicos’: 4. 9. 35, ‘longe’: 4. 9. 93, ‘procul urbe remoti’: 4. 9. 123; Zehnacker (1993) 176. 8 His wife: T. 3. 3. 17, 5. 5. 23; friends: P. 1. 6. 13; desirables such as vines and trees: T. 3. 12. 14, 16, 5. 4. 28; an audience: ‘nullus . . . adest’, T. 3. 14. 39–40.

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substitute, replaces the real thing with a difference: the voices the letter conveys are silent.9 The time whiled away speaking (P. 2. 4. 11–12) commutes to written speech’s ability to travel through space: ‘eminus . . . j adloquio’ (from a distance . . . encouraging words, P. 1. 6. 17–18); ‘conloquium . . . ab Histro’ (conversation from the . . . Danube, P. 2. 4. 1); ‘ab Euxinis Naso salutat aquis’ (Ovid salutes from the Euxine waters, P. 2. 6. 2). The letter mediates between the writer and the addressee. As in Catullus, its physical substance invites address.10 Ovid apostrophizes his letter to Perilla, and tells it what to say. Unlike a sentient messenger, who can omit or revise the part meant only for him,11 Ovid’s letter, as a faithful servant (T. 3. 7. 2), conveys its author’s speech both to Perilla and to itself. The description of how the letter will ﬁnd Perilla (3–6)—ostensibly just for the letter—is also conveyed to her. Ovid layers the communication with a gradual transition between his apostrophe to the letter and his address to her: ﬁrst he tells the letter what to say in indirect statement (‘uiuere me dices’ (you will say that I am alive), 7), then in quotation (‘“tu quoque” dic’ (say: ‘do you also?’), 11). Perilla becomes a second person for both letter and poet. The ‘quoque’ that begins the quoted speech effects the transition by linking his poetic endeavours, mentioned in indirect statement, to hers, the subject of the question. This link would make no sense if she were to read only from the quotation addressed to her. From this point the poem continues to the end without addressing the letter, so we forget the intermediary between speaker and addressee. Ovid ﬁrst emphasizes deferral, then minimizes it. This double movement characterizes Ovidian poetics: an ersatz presence compensates for the deferral inherent in all representation. Similar deferral and its concomitant eclipse most intensively inhabit two contexts: poetics, as in the epistle to Perilla—about poetic immortality among other topics—and politics, when Ovid addresses Caesar Augustus.

POETICS AND POLITICS All ﬁve books of the Tristia incorporate a word for book, liber or libellus, in their ﬁrst line. Ovid’s address of his book at Tristia 1. 1. 1 both links and 9 For the antithesis of writing and hands versus the speaking tongue, P. 4. 9. 11–12. For the inferiority of ersatz presence, T. 5. 1. 80. 10 Ch. 2, ‘Catullus: from embodied to disembodied poetry’; also poem 35. 11 Compare e.g. how Mercury changes Jupiter’s speech in Aen. 4. Jupiter tells him ‘adloquere et celeris defer mea dicta per auras’ (226); Mercury reports this: ‘ipse haec ferre iubet celeris mandata per auras’ (270).

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separates poet and work: the one ﬁgures the other. The book will go to Rome for the poet, as his servant, perhaps his slave, certainly his representative. It will convey his words and mimic his appearance—in short, substitute for him as person and author (T. 1. 1. 1–4, 16). The book will touch with metre (pes) places the poet cannot with his foot (pes).12 Gareth Williams (1992a) has shown that the description of the physical book’s shabby appearance conveys a self-referential description of the poetry, as is conventional. The object represents the poetry within via literary code. Here, the poetry’s degraded style represents the author’s unfortunate circumstances. Or does Ovid’s exilic persona reify the poetry as much as the description of the book? Representation goes both ways. Once opened, the gap between signiﬁer and signiﬁed tends to multiply, as the signiﬁed in turn signiﬁes something else. Ovid desires to close this gap, to make everything whole again (‘possem nunc meus esse liber’ (would that I could now be my book), T. 1. 1. 58); he would be his own representative (‘pro me’, T. 1. 1. 57). Instead, the layers multiply, and the poet’s understanding confutes the man’s desires. Speech is both distanced via the intermediary of the book and immediate since the poet still practises direct address. In Tristia 3. 1, the book itself takes over the poet’s voice and speaks in its own person. It not only speaks, but quotes itself. At ﬁrst we think the book addresses us as its reader and asks for our help (T. 3. 1. 1–2), but it turns out it was addressing some other reader, and only subsequently speaks to us (21–2). There follows a dialogue between a person who would talk to it and the book itself, as the latter is guided around Rome. Again Ovid makes the analogy between himself and his book when it comments on the similarity of their fates. The book, ﬁgured as the pious son, is turned away from the important libraries, an exile like its father (T. 3. 1. 73–4). After all these layers of distancing, the poem ends with two apostrophes, to Caesar (78), as the recipient of the book’s prayer for its author, and to the reading public (‘plebs’, 81–2). The conjunction of these two exposes yet another layer. The Epistulae ex Ponto consist entirely of literary epistles and the Tristia largely so. It is a commonplace of scholarship on the exile poetry that Ovid aims beyond the actual addressees of the letters, whether anonymous (Tristia) or named (ex Ponto), to Caesar and the Roman public, and beyond these to posterity.13 While the letters have their own addressees, the epistles as literature direct their utterance elsewhere. The poet does not address a single letter directly to the princeps, though his indirect methods are manifold. He pleads for others to speak to Caesar or 12

Hinds (1985) 17 on the familiar pun; Barchiesi (1994a) 135–8 and (2001c) 144–5. See e.g. Barchiesi (1997a) 29, Barsby (1978) 42, Marg (1959) 346–7, 353. Oliensis (1998) 6–7 calls such oblique addressees ‘overreaders’. 13

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apostrophizes him with evident deferral, as in letters to other people (T. 5. 11. 23, P. 2. 7. 67; Evans 1983: 11). In Tristia 5. 5, devoted to his wife’s birthday, the entire system of address goes haywire: everything goes into the vocative except the person celebrated. Caesar’s name caps the series, after a slave (11), his wife’s birthday genius (13), a generalized second person (29), Pontus (32), and even the sacriﬁcial smoke (40). Ovid prays to the gods and Caesar (61), but Caesar will hear him no more than the smoke. More than indicating a fraught personal relation, Ovid makes a point about representation and address: the message would get through, if only Caesar would read the poetry. Some form of artistic representation often intervenes between poet and princeps. Ovid backs into addressing Caesar in Tristia 2. He begins with an apostrophe to his own poetry (‘libelli’, T. 2. 1. 1), and the book’s defence of the Ars amatoria is a treatise in poetics. Caesar comes up twice in the third person (8, 23) before the vocative ‘mitissime Caesar’ (27) creates a more intimate I/thou relationship.14 These formal devices do not prevent the poem from being an epistle to Augustus, but they establish distance. Tristia 3. 1 similarly addresses Caesar directly only after mentioning him in the third person (76). The delay shows these vocatives are really apostrophes—address without hope of receipt. This poem is spoken entirely in the book’s voice, and the apostrophe to Caesar asks him nothing less than to be present: ‘Caesar, ades’ (T. 3. 1. 78). The book’s intervention between poet and princeps keeps poetry in play as a contentious topic. Elsewhere, visual art mediates. At P. 2. 8, Ovid thanks Cotta Maximus for the gift of a set of statues of the imperial family, whose contemplation instigates a series of apostrophes: Augustus (23), Tiberius (37), and Livia (43) in turn. The statues make the imperial family present without actually being there, just like the canonical gods. Normally, one would have to die to meet a god face to face; Romans just have to go to Rome, with travelling statues a second best. Ovid emphasizes and ironizes their presence, speciﬁcally because he can speak to them—so to speak. est aliquid spectare deos et adesse putare, et quasi cum uero numine posse loqui.

(P. 2. 8. 9–10)

(It is something to look at gods and think they are present, and to be able as if to speak with the real divinity.)

14 Barchiesi (1997a) 29: the poem reads more like a letter than Horace’s epistle to the same. On epistolary form, see Davisson (1981). In P. 4. 5, Ovid similarly addresses his poetry (‘leues elegi’, 1), and only addresses Sextus Pompeius, who has become consul (16), via a quoted message the poetry is to report (31–44). Such distancing devices occur in conjunction with poetics or in the presence of political power.

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The whole reason to have gods present (praesens) is so they can manifest their power (praesens) by hearing and granting your wishes.15 adnuite o! timidis, mitissima numina, uotis. praesentis aliquid prosit habere deos. (P. 2. 8. 51–2) (Nod yes, o gentlest divinities, to my timid wishes. Let it be of some help to have gods present.)

But these gods are not there except through representation (‘simulacra’, 57), and Ovid speciﬁes that it is art that allows this substitution (‘quos dedit ars, uultus efﬁgiemque colo’ (I worship the faces and images art has given), 60), however much one might prefer true bodily presence (‘coram corpora uera’, 58).16 Jupiter’s form is worshipped instead of Jupiter himself (‘colitur pro Ioue forma Iouis’, 62). Apostrophe to Augustus recurs with the statues in P. 4. 9. The ultimate obstacle to direct address has intervened: Augustus’ death. The formulation of this passage must give pause even to the most committed literalist, reading the exile poetry as a plea for recall. After describing to his friend Graecinus his worship of the statues of the imperial family, Ovid asserts this is not directed at those in the city, but the deiﬁed Caesar. He has only recently gone to heaven (‘caelite’), even though he has been a god for some time. tu nostras audis inter conuexa locatus sidera, sollicito quas damus ore, preces. perueniant istuc et carmina forsitan illa, quae de te misi caelite facta nouo. (P. 4. 9. 129–32) (You, set among the arching stars, hear my prayers, which I offer with troubled countenance. Perhaps even those songs will reach you, which I sent, composed about you, a new god.)

Ovid would not mention worship of the statues if he truly wished to keep it silent, but if we are at ﬁrst tempted to read ‘Caesaris’ at 125 as Tiberius, or suppose that these lines are indirectly directed at a living Caesar, the apostrophe to the dead Augustus (‘Caesar’, 128) explodes a reading that would take Ovid’s rhetoric at face value. As if death were not enough, another layer of deferral

15

But one may pray in absence to absent divinities, T. 5. 2. 45. Alessandro Schiesaro suggests to me that this passage engages with Epicurean epistemology and recalls with ‘felices . . . qui’ (57) Vergil’s ‘felix qui potuit rerum cognosere causas’ (G. 2. 490) with its Lucretian reference. In Lucretius, mental images are stimulated by simulacra, atoms shed from the real thing, so that representation never takes place: it is always presentation. Ovid identiﬁes art as the conduit for representation and corrects Lucretius via allusion. P. Hardie (2002a) 318–19. 16

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separates the poet from Caesar. The songs that will reach him are not this poem, but some other poem Ovid claims to have written about his divinization (also mentioned at P. 4. 6. 18). Ovid’s barriers against addressing Augustus contrast with Horace’s epistle to the same, which begins in the second person and addresses Augustus directly in so-called conversation (‘si longo sermone morer tua tempora, Caesar’ (if I should waste you time in long conversation), Epist. 2. 1. 4), although he learned much about indirection from Horace.17 But, despite all Ovid’s personal complaints about exile, he comes down on the side of writing and absence in artistic mediation. Deferral is a good thing for his poetics and in this regard he establishes an analogy between Augustus and himself.

T R I UM P H P O E M S The textual locus of the intersection of Ovid’s poetics with his representation of Caesar is the triumph poems (T. 4. 2, P. 2. 1, P. 3. 4).18 Spectacles are performative events par excellence and always representations. Triumphs display the power of the honorand and hence need witness. Ovid, however, never actually represents a triumph directly in the exile poetry. Furthermore their historical references are foggy, as well as his internal cross-references. I will argue that contrary to his rhetoric of aesthetic failure, his theory of representation compensates for the terrible inability to be there. Reading provides a surrogate presence.19 Although Ovid seemingly makes the case Augustus should recall him so he could write up triumphs properly, close reading reveals a counterargument: he does as good a job from abroad.20 He has this event down and knows so well how Augustus’ public relations 17

On Horace’s approach avoidance of Augustus, Lowrie (2007a). Beard’s (2004) 121 emphasis on these poems as a locus for thinking about the triumph supports her intellectual project of assigning equal cultural meaning to the analysis of ritual as to the institution itself. She makes similar points about representation and writing as below and likewise turns towards the positive Ovid’s poetics of deferral. For observers of religion as participants, Ru¨pke (2004) 24. 19 Ovid asks Fabius Maximus to be present (‘ades’) by devoting time to the poem, i.e. reading it (P. 3. 3. 2). 20 Barchiesi (1997a) 36–7 articulates the implied promise of the exile poetry (‘bring me back, and I’ll sing what will please Caesar’), with the caveat that we should read Ovid’s panegyrics as poetic artefacts. He characterizes Ovid as ‘an exile who describes without seeing precisely because the conventional nature of the ofﬁcial parade had no need of a direct witness’ (n. 34). Ovid’s ability to write poetry pleasing to Caesar even from exile shows the implied promise’s futility. 18

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machine works, he does not even need to be there. Ovid demonstrates to Caesar that deferral is the name of the game, not only in poetry, but also in politics. He shows that for all his absence in exile, Caesar is no more present than he, that Caesar cannot control his poetic imagination, that Caesar’s power operates according to similar principles. Caesar may make Ovid miserable, but Ovid will prevail in posterity’s eyes. In T. 4. 2, Ovid imagines a triumph over Germany could be taking place back at Rome, with emphasis on potentiality (‘potest . . . fortasse’, 1–3). Beyond the deferral entailed in an imagined triumph, the irony is that a triumph was also literally postponed. Tiberius, who had triumphed over Germany in 7 BCE, had to return there in 4–6 CE. Before ﬁnishing the business, he went from 6–9 CE to address a more pressing revolt in Pannonia and again earned a triumph. At the same time, Germanicus was awarded ornamenta praetoria and ornamenta triumphalia for his exploits in Illyricum. A few days after the announced celebration came news of Varus’ defeat and loss of three legions in the Teutoburg forest (9 CE). Tiberius postponed his triumph and set off for Germany. Due to references to other historical events and the seasons Tristia 4 is dated to 10–11 CE, after Tiberius’ postponement of the Pannonian triumph and before his return from Germany in 12 CE. Tiberius did celebrate his Pannonian triumph in 12 CE, but did not triumph again over Germany (Kienast 1990: 77–8). Since Ovid bothers imagining a triumph, why not the one over Pannonia, which would take place once Tiberius returned from Germany? The glorifying answer implies victory over Germany as well as Pannonia, the disparaging that Germany must be conquered yet again. The one historical fact mentioned, that Drusus won his cognomen in Germany (T. 4. 2. 39) reminds us that Germany’s conquest was celebrated before;21 covert references to Varus’ defeat by ambush and the sacriﬁce of captives hardly paints a rosy picture of Roman victory (33–6) (de Jonge ad loc.). Answers pro or con matter less than Ovid’s choice to represent something different from what was likely to occur. He could have learned the lesson not to predict triumphs from the Ars amatoria, where Gaius’ predicted triumph over Parthia (1. 177–216) came to naught. Gaius eventually died from a wound there and never returned victorious.22 Although the campaign was sufﬁciently successful for Augustus to claim victory over Armenia (Res gestae 27), the triumph Ovid heralds as a 21

Drusus won ornamenta triumphalia and an ouatio in 11 BCE. This reference misleads Galinsky (1969) 102 into thinking Drusus is the honorand, but the poem was composed over twenty years later. 22 Nicolet (1991) 29, 44; Syme (1979) 921–3.

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chance to pick up girls never occurred (Hollis 65–73). Galinsky’s (1969) theory, that the triumphs in the exile poetry are palinodes for their frivolity in the amatory poetry, understands Ovid’s poetry within a dialectic of ‘pro’ and ‘con’. In both love and exile elegies, elements of panegyric coexist with subversion. The manner of representation is constant: Ovid predicts triumphs that fail to transpire and his representations are not referential. A further element of deferral obtains in T. 4. 2: all of the essential details— who is who—are reported by a generic authority (‘pars’, 26) speaking to a generic audience (‘pars’, 25). Although Ovid maintains the structure of conveying information, the information itself is transumed into generality. There is a paradox here. The deictics (hic, ille) and sermocinatio (reported speech) are standard features of enargeia, vividness, in Latin repraesentatio (Lausberg 402–8). These vivid markers are emptied of referential content through the absence of proper names (T. 4. 2. 25–32). This expands the trick recommended in the Ars for impressing a girl at a triumph. When she asks the details, tell her, even if you do not know: ‘et quae nescieris, ut bene nota refer’ (and what you don’t know, relate as if well known, 1. 222); ‘ille uel ille, duces; et erunt quae nomina dicas, j si poteris, uere, si minus, apta tamen’ (that one or that one, are the leaders; and there will be names for you to say—true if you can, if not, still appropriate, 1. 227–8).23 In the Ars, the generality ﬁts the act of prediction. When the occasion actually comes about, names will ﬁll the blanks. The poet’s advice to invent turns the didactic addressee into a cad, but also reveals the nature of poetic truth, to say apt things without reference. In the Tristia, Ovid himself understandably does not know future details, but he engages in vivid description even without proper names. Here, the entire Roman population will generalize the behavior of the cad. Whereas the offensive amatory context may have vanished, Ovid maintains the strategy of deferral: others will still not know the details. Denotation yields to repraesentatio. Topping the cake, Ovid represents himself as incapable of seeing these things except through mind travel in the future:24 ‘haec ego summotus qua possum mente uidebo’ (I, removed, will see these things with what mind I can, T. 4. 2. 57). The distance is temporal as well as spatial. His imagination 23 Fowler (2000) 208 links these two passages: ‘Ovid’s tactic is the Derridan [sic] one of implicitly denying that “presence” is ever fully possible, and stressing rather the power of absence and writing to produce a satisfactory representation.’ 24 Mind travel begins with Iliad 15. 80–3, de Jonge at T. 4. 2. 59–60. For the motif, Nagle (1980) 91; Kenney T p. xv n. 4; Gale (1994) 119 n. 79, with bibliography; A. Hardie (2002) 190–2. Instances of imagined presence at T. 3.4b. 55, 4. 2. 57, 4. 3. 19, P. 1. 8. 34, 1. 9. 7, 2. 4. 7, 2. 10. 47, 3. 5. 48, 4. 4; of a preference for actual presence, T. 2. 2. 91, 4. 7, 4. 9 (but uses mind nevertheless).

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has the power to give eyes (61) to his ears (68), to create a surrogate presence through his mind of what others enjoy in the ﬂesh (‘populus . . . praesens’, 65–6). The technical term is phantasia.25 Quintilian’s deﬁnition uses language close to Ovid’s. quas çÆ Æ Æ Graeci vocant, nos sane visiones appellemus, per quas imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo, ut eas cernere oculis ac praesentes habere uideamur. (IO 6. 2. 29–31) (What the Greek call fantasies, let us rather call visions, through which the images of things absent are represented in such a way by the mind that we seem to see them with our eyes and have them present.)

By anticipating future imaginings, Ovid creates an odd distance from those of this very poem. By citing the Ars, Ovid suggests that, unlike Augustus, he can stage a triumph without an actual victory to celebrate: ‘hos super in curru, Caesar, uictore ueheris’ (you will ride above them, Caesar, in a victorious chariot, 47). Ovid puts him there. Tristia 4. 2 is not explicitly about writing a triumph; it is about the poet’s ability to visualize it from report (‘fama’, T. 4. 2. 18; eagerness for news, 69– 70). The report comes in P. 2. 1. 1 (‘fama’), but he defers writing about it so that scholars hesistate to identify this poem as Ovid’s triumphus, to which he refers elsewhere (P. 2. 5. 27–34, 3. 4).26 Twenty lines of indirect discourse convey the body of the narrative, a report of what personiﬁed and apostrophized ‘Fama’ (19) told him (‘tu mihi narrasti’ (you narrated to me), P. 2. 1. 25ff.). Ovid presents the historical circumstances less clearly than we might expect in a poem primarily concerned with celebrating a triumph. It refers to Tiberius’ Pannonian triumph, delayed until 12 CE, as we can tell from one word, ‘Bato’ (46), the name of the enemy leader, and more generally from the address to Germanicus as having (triumphal) honours.27 But Ovid addresses neither Tiberius nor Augustus, the more obvious honorands, the description is as generic as in the imagined triumphs, and the triumph he promises to write about is not the same as the one just announced, but one he predicts, with vatic authority, for Germanicus (P. 2. 1. 55–8). After his consulship in

25

Webb (1997) traces the relation between sensory perception and mental images for enargeia in Greek (and Latin) rhetorical theory. Menander Rhetor’s assumption of equivalence between images evoked through description and those made by sensation and stored in memory privileges the word over experience (242–4). 26 Goold (1988) ad loc. uses ‘perhaps’ each time; Syme (1997) 53–4 implies Ovid’s ‘Triumphus’ is P. 2. 1, but leaves it unclear; della Corte–Fasce are categorically negative. 27 In the following poem, Ovid refers to the triumph, but calls the Pannonians through metonymy or paronomasia by the names of neighbours further east (‘Paeonas’, P. 2. 75), though he gets the area under Germanicus right (‘Illyris’, 77).

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12 CE, Germanicus went back to Germany and won a triumph in 17 CE after the presumed date of Ovid’s death in 16. Although Ovid does not specify a German triumph as in T. 4. 2, and we cannot know if Ovid knew exactly where Germanicus was going when he composed this poem, Ovid here probably predicts another triumph over Germany. He at least qualiﬁes with ‘fortasse’ (perhaps) his prediction that he will write about it. Later in the book, Ovid reiterates his desire for a German triumph, now for Tiberius (P. 2. 8. 39–40, 49–50). He is tenacious. Ovid transmutes P. 2. 1 from a poem about Tiberius’ Pannonian triumph (a real celebration) into one predicting a triumph for Germanicus (an imagined one). Although Ovid’s capacity for deferral seems limitless, relevance to the poet’s own life pulls him back into direct utterance. The single couplet narrating the triumph outside indirect discourse tells of clemency. Ovid speaks in his own voice and draws the analogy between clemency for others and his own hopes (P. 2. 1. 47–8). Furthermore, he acknowledges he has in fact written of Tiberius’ Pannonian triumph, this with the same word that effects the transition between his address to his letter to Perilla and his address of Perilla herself: ‘quoque’. When he promises to write up Germanicus’ triumph, he says he will relate it also in verse (63). He has in fact already written about a triumph, which must mean the poem at hand on the triumph at hand. On the one hand, personal experience emerges as the ultimate reality; on the other, representation can make things so within its limited sphere. The man and the poet speak conﬂicting messages, but if we think political reality lies with the man, we are mistaken. The last triumph poem (P. 3. 4) presents familiar topoi. Ovid defends his poem, which he calls triumphus, and entrusts it to the addressee Ruﬁnus. After the usual self-deprecation, Ovid embarks on a long passage presenting his absence from the festivities and his reliance on fama—hearsay instead of autopsy—as a liability for his poetic imagination (ingenium), but several reasons impede our taking this statement at face value. Rhetorical theory suggests these obstacles are easily overcome by vividness. Ovid’s antithesis between seeing and hearing is standard: ab aliis ø Ø dicitur proposita quaedam forma rerum ita expressa uerbis, ut cerni potius uideantur quam audiri. (Quintilian, IO 9. 2. 40) (By others a certain proposed form of things is called hypotyposis, expressed in such a way in words that it seems to be seen rather than heard.)

There is a risk that leaving things out detracts from vividness (Demetrius, On style 4. 209) and Ovid asks for forgiveness if he has left anything out. Theon tells us that peoples, places, and battles are typical subjects for vivid descrip-

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tion (ecphrasis), and Nicolaus the Sophist adds festivals, among which a triumph would surely count.28 Rhetorical theory, however, nowhere says you must be an eyewitness; you must only give the illusion of such, by creating a phantasia in your mind which you can then describe. Ovid’s use of the language of repraesentatio is pointed. The passage is not about the triumph as much as about representation. Furthermore, a simile calls into question the experiential difference between seeing and hearing: Ovid would have taken as much vigour from the populace’s applause as a new soldier from hearing the trumpet (P. 3. 4. 32). Hearing also contributes to vividness. The ironization of the senses’ similarity turns out in a further twist not to hold: ‘Certainly (scilicet) similar emotions or the same drive comes from things heard and things seen!’ (21). Ovid’s complaint that he did not know the leaders or the places (39) should be measured not only against Bato’s proper name at P. 2. 1. 46, but against his depiction of the imagined triumph at T. 4. 2. 25–6, where half the people ask about the res et nomina and the other half tell them, though they themselves know too little: ‘quamuis nouerit illa parum’. Being there provides no more secure knowledge than rumour. The second part of the poem announces yet another triumph for Tiberius, over none other than Germany: ‘alter enim de te, Rhene, triumphus adest’ (for another triumph is here, over you, Rhine, P. 3. 4. 88).29 This obviously invites the subversive reading, ‘a second triumph’, with the implication that Germany needed conquering again, and Ovid’s address to Livia can be read similarly: ‘geminabit honorem j ﬁlius . . . ut prius’ (your son will repeat his honour, 99–100). Does ‘as before’ refer to another triumph after the Pannonian, the presumed subject of the earlier part of the poem, or to a second triumph over Germany? Syme reconstructs a German campaign, complete with imperial acclamations for Augustus, Tiberius, and Germanicus in 13 CE.30 But while a triumph may have been earned at this time, there is no evidence of an actual celebration.31 Germanicus was decreed a triumph in 15, though war with Germany remained (Tac. Ann. 1. 55. 1). Whether this was actually decreed for a campaign in Gaul and celebrated then, as Gonza´lez reconstructs, or deferred until 17, as does Syme, we still have no external evidence for a Tiberian

28 Bartsch (1989) 9–10. Theon, Spengel 11, 2. 118–20; Nicolaus the Sophist, Spengel 12, 3. 491. Doblhofer (1966) 68ff. notes that loca, montes, ﬂumina, regna ﬁgured in Roman triumphs (Prop. 2. 1. 25ff., Ov. AA 1. 219ff.). 29 Amor announces this triumph in the previous poem, P. 3. 3. 85–6, as in P. 2. 1, an occasion for imperial leniency (83). Again, Ovid’s predictions fail. 30 Syme (1997) ch. 4, following Barnes (1974). 31 Velleius 2. 122: Tiberius should have triumphed seven times, four more than his three.

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triumphal celebration over Germany.32 My point, however, is not that Ovid continually makes reference to a German triumph continually postponed, nor that his poetry lends itself to subversive readings. Such things can always be read two ways.33 Ovid, I think, has a larger point about the similarity of poetic and political representation. Augustus is subject to the same constraints of deferral as Ovid. The poet takes the triumphal celebration out of Augustus’ hands. I say Augustus and not Tiberius, whom, after all, Ovid’s prediction in P. 3. 4 concerns, because Tiberius functions as Augustus’ representative in the ﬁeld. Ovid formulates this historical reality as a substitution: ‘nunc te prole tua iuuenem Germania sentit, j bellaque pro magno Caesare Caesar obit’ (now Germany perceives you as a youth via your offspring, and Caesar meets war for great Caesar’, T. 2. 229–30). Augustus triumphs when Tiberius wins.34 In Ovid’s ﬁrst triumph prediction, wild Germany will bend her knee to the Caesars (T. 4. 2. 1), that is, Tiberius and Augustus (Andre´ 103 n. 1). While the Caesar in the triumphal chariot (47) could be either, ‘populus tuus’ (48) most likely points to Augustus. In P. 3. 4, however, Augustus disappears. Ovid apostrophizes Livia instead. Her presence in this poem surprises because Ovid depicts her as the one to prepare the triumph (95–6). Livia represents Augustus at Rome just as Tiberius represents him at war. He himself is subsumed into his representatives. If the triumph makes political and military power manifest at Rome, it is no less a representation than Ovid’s poetry. Ovid calls attention to the ﬁction entailed in the making of ﬂoats (‘ﬁcta res’, P. 3. 4. 105–6),35 and uses the same word in T. 4. 2 of his own imagination (‘ﬁngendo’, 67–8). Both political and poetic representation depend on writing. Triumphs not only paraded pictorial representations of captive towns and their landscapes, they labelled them with placards (tituli) to be read. At T. 4. 2. 19–20, Ovid links the people’s ability to see the procession itself with the ability to read the signs: ‘ergo omnis populus poterit spectare triumphos, j cumque ducum titulis oppida capta leget’ (therefore the whole people will be able to look at the triumph, and will read the captive towns along with the tablets of the leader). Reading pertains even to the things that grammatically do not have titles: watching a

32

Syme (1997) 59–61, Gonza´lez (1984) 64–6. Marache (1958) takes Ovid’s panegyric as genuine: his unconscious hostility manifests itself despite his best efforts. 34 Augustus wins an imperial acclamation whenever Tiberius does, Kienast (1990) 66–7, 80–1. Augustus lends his auspices to Tiberius, T. 2. 174, discussed below. 35 Galinsky (1969) 105 takes res ﬁcta of Ovid’s imaginings, but Ovid here talks about actual preparations, not his description. 33

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triumphal procession is an act of reading whether literally, reading the writing incorporated therein, or ﬁguratively, decoding a representation. In P. 3. 4, Ovid will represent a product of representation—this of a triumph whose reality is entirely reconstructed. Perhaps the most salient dissolution of the boundary between poetic and political representation is Ovid’s calling his poem by the same name as the thing itself: ‘Triumphus’. In its ﬁrst occurrence in the poem, it refers to another poem called ‘triumph’ (P. 3. 4. 3). At line 88, it means the thing itself: ‘alter enim de te, Rhene, triumphus adest’. Or is this yet another poem about a triumph over the Rhine? The lines depicting the conquered Rhine recall those in T. 4. 2: cornibus hic fractis, uiridi male tectus ab ulua, decolor ipse suo sanguine Rhenus erat. (T. 4. 2. 41–2) (This, with broken horns, poorly covered in green sedge, was the Rhine himself, stained with his own blood.) sqalidus inmissos fracta sub harundine crines Rhenus et infectas sanguine portet aquas. (P. 3. 4. 107–8) (Let the Rhine in mourning bear his hair under broken reed and waters stained with blood.)

Ovid’s earlier prediction becomes not reality, but another prediction in another poem: the broken Rhine, bloodstained and covered in aquatic ﬂora has shifted only from the future to the subjunctive. This is the river Horace identiﬁes as a conventional topic for ecphrasis in his famous discussion of the ‘purple patch’ at Ars poetica 18. Furthermore, what can ‘adest’ mean? In a body of work so consumed by presence and absence, this word is remarkable. As a prediction, we cannot take ‘adest’ literally. The only ‘Triumphus’ present is the poem. Ovid blurs the real thing with its representation in a way familiar from his amatory poetry. In the Amores, the frequent triumph motif devolves on Amor, an appropriation of political imagery for poetic purposes (Galinsky 1969: 91–6). The metaphor of love governs poetics in the earlier poetry. With the banishment of this metaphor along with its poet, Ovid appropriates the political sphere perhaps even more powerfully. Earlier, we saw how writing in book form allows Ovid to be present in Rome without being there (especially Tristia 1. 1 and 3. 1). In book 2 a similar statement is now about the princeps. He manages to be in places without being there, just like the poet. The generally accepted date for this poem puts it before the announcement of Tiberius’ Pannonian triumph and before the news of the Varus disaster broke in Rome. If true, Ovid’s wish comes before

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even the projection of the event, though he would have known Tiberius was in Pannonia.36 sic adsueta tuis semper Victoria castris nunc quoque se praestet notaque signa petat, Ausoniumque ducem solitis circumuolet alis, ponat et in nitida laurea serta coma, per quem bella geris, cuius nunc corpore pugnas, auspicium cui das grande deosque tuos, dimidioque tui praesens es et aspicis urbem, dimidio procul es saeuaque bella geris. (T. 2. 169–76) (Thus may Victory, always accustomed to your camp, now also proffer herself and seek the known standards, and ﬂy around the Ausonian leader with her usual wings, and place the laurel wreath on his shining hair, through whom you wage war, through whose body you now ﬁght, to whom you lend your great auspices and gods, and by half of yourself you are present and watch the city, by half you are far away and wage ﬁerce wars.)

Like Ovid, Augustus is in Rome and at the frontier at the same time. Like Ovid, he acts through representatives: compare ‘pro . . . Caesare Caesar’ (T. 2. 230) and ‘pro Ioue forma Iouis’ (P. 2. 8. 62) to ‘littera pro uerbis’ (P. 1. 7. 1) and the book that goes ‘pro me’ (T. 1. 1. 57) to Rome. Ovid ﬁnds immortality by being subsumed in his work, which he calls a greater image of himself (T. 1. 7. 11–12)—greater than the visual portrait his friend carries on a ring. The Metamorphoses, which he tells us in the same poem he laid on the ﬁre, remains through writing: he offhandedly remembers several copies (24). Writing, both poetic composition and the artefact taking the voice’s place, compensates for his absence. Ovid now prays that the Metamorphoses live (25): even the author cannot destroy his own work. Is there anything comparable for Augustus? Not only Tiberius and Livia represent Augustus. Ovid represents him as well, though Augustus moves from representing subject to represented object.37 Ovid claims to have written a poem immortalizing him after death (P. 4. 9. 131–2), and in the previous poem reminds us that we know things through writing. scripta ferunt annos. scriptis Agamemnona nosti . . . di quoque carminibus, si fas est dicere, ﬁunt, tantaque maiestas ore canentis eget . . . et modo, Caesar [Germanicus], auum, quem uirtus addidit astris, sacrarunt aliqua carmina parte tuum. (P. 4. 8. 51, 55–6, 63–4)

36 Kenney T pp. x–xi before announcement; Syme (1997) 38 before Varus disaster. After it, Ovid wishes to hear news of Germany’s defeat and of ‘triumphos j Caesaris’ (T. 3. 12. 45–6). 37 On Ovid’s Augustus in the eyes of posterity, Marg (1959 ¼ 1968).

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(Writings bring years. You know of Agamemnon through writings . . . Gods are also made, if divine right lets us say, through poems, and such great majesty needs the voice of a singer . . . and now, Caesar, poems have made your grandfather sacred in some part, whom manly courage added to the stars.)

Ovid’s poetry is in part responsible for Augustus becoming a god. The poems treating Augustus most extensively as a god are none other than the Tristia and ex Ponto. If representation is the game, the poet has power over the princeps, however much the latter can ruin the former’s life. He cannot prevent Ovid from naming him, because he is ‘a public matter’, indeed he is the state (‘quia res est publica Caesar’, T. 4. 4. 15). Perhaps the most widely quoted lines from the exile poetry are Ovid’s deﬁant statement of his freedom in the letter to Perilla. Caesar cannot control his mind. ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque: Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil. (T. 3. 7. 47–8) (Nevertheless I myself enjoy and am a companion to my own imagination: Caesar could have no right over this.)

Ovid’s statement is about politics and presence alike: despite exile, deferral, and the concomitant writing, he is present to himself. The internal split will not disappear—he is his imagination’s companion—but it is enough. Ovid would prefer presence to absence (‘felices, quibus, o, licuit spectare triumphos . . . !’ (O, happy are those to whom it was allowed to see the triumph!), P. 2. 2. 91–2). He would rather recite before an audience than send epistles back to Rome.38 But the identity of his audience matters more than the venue. Ovid presents his reciting to the appreciative Getae (P. 4. 13) as an absurdity demonstrating how much he belongs to his own culture. The poem he says he wrote for the barbarian audience tells of Caesar’s apotheosis and the virtues of the imperial family (25–32). His actual poetry tells of something else: his own poetic vocation and its relation to his life. In exile Ovid’s life corresponds to the situation facing a poet after death. His writing lives in the absence of a performing voice, subject to reanimation by god. nec mea uerba legis, qui sum summotus ad Histrum, non bene pacatis ﬂumina pota Getis: ista dei uox est, deus est in pectore nostro, haec duce praedico uaticinorque deo (P. 3. 4. 91–4)39

38 39

He would also prefer to witness his friend perform orations he has read (P. 3. 5). Compare also P. 2. 1. 55.

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(Nor do you read my words, who am removed by the Danube, a river drunk by the not well-subdued Getae: this voice you hear is that of god, there is a god in my heart, I predict and prophesy these things with god as my leader.)

I have argued that Ovid’s predictions of German triumphs embrace the emptiness of representation. Is it the irony of history or god’s plenitude that granted one to Germanicus after Ovid’s death? So far I have said nothing about the main topics of scholarship on the exile poetry: nothing about carmen et error, about how the poetry is good after all (e.g. Kenney 1965: 37–8), and I have equivocated about Ovid’s Augustanism. I have done the same as the readers who attempt to read the writing on the Sibyl’s leaves in the Aeneid: my approach has blown the poems all out of order. Excerpts from one stand by excerpts from another. If my approach violates the integrity of individual poems and cannot throw light on the basic questions, what good is it? In the spirit of Ovid’s poetics of exile, I say it is no good at all. I cannot give you the answer to whether Ovid was for or against Augustus, nor tell you what his error was. I cannot because Ovid understands representation as a process of deferral. In the triumph poems, poetic talk outweighs any actual triumphs. Ovid sidesteps the one historical triumph so that scholars reconstruct some other poem to account for the references to Ovid’s triumph poem. In the phrase ‘carmen et error’ (T. 2. 207), we ﬁnd both poetry and some historical event which passes in silence. Or does it? The ‘error’ has the structure of a secret. It is known by some: Ovid, Augustus, Cotta Maximus (P. 2. 3. 65–6). In writing about it without revealing its content, Ovid testiﬁes there is something to be known. This secret cuts to the heart of the relation of literature to presence, since the error had to do with witnessing an event (‘cur aliquid uidi?’ (Why did I see anything), T. 2. 103), that is, with autopsy, whose lack ostensibly vitiates Ovid’s representations of triumphs.40 For something unknown, we know an awful lot, but lack the detail: ‘pars causas et res et nomina quaeret, j pars referet, quamuis nouerit illa parum’ (T. 4. 2. 25–6).41

40 Derrida (2000) 30–3, in exploring the relation of literature to testimony, of possible ﬁction in relation to the legal obligation to truth, assembles a number of issues relevant here: the secret, the instant, sensory perception, and experience. 41 Many have given answers, reviewed in Thibault (1964). My favourite is John Williams’s in his novel Augustus (New York 1972). Hinds (2007) gives a non-answer according to Ovid’s poetics, but sees the need for the paranoid response; he classiﬁes the answers (214–17).

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Part III Writing, Performance, and Politics

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12 Auctoritas and Representation: Augustus’ Res gestae The [unnamed] aide [to George Bush] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he deﬁned as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. . . . ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore’, he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ (Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine, 17 Oct. 2004)

The public performance and the monument, I have argued, are two primary and interdependent vehicles in Augustan Rome for both literal and metaphoric selfrepresentation. The performance brings a representation into actuality, while the monument preserves it over time. The same holds for Augustus’ own selfrepresentation. Various media—sponsoring shows, setting up buildings and inscriptions—were part of the repertory of political display inherited from the Republic.1 What differs under Augustus is the focus on one man and the extent and complexity of the interplay between media and their relationship with the new modality of power. In this chapter, I argue that auctoritas is a performative kind of political power2 and that Augustus’ use of this word in the inscription of the Res gestae engenders interplay between the lived moment and memorialization in many ways analogous to Augustan poetry.3 The entire monumental complex at the north end of the Campus Martius instantiates this dynamic. The Mausoleum, before which the Res gestae was set, links writing with death and 1 Dupont (1985) 23: ‘la dimension the´aˆtrale de toute la civilisation romaine’; Beacham (1999) takes monuments together with spectacles. 2 Gunderson (2000) 7–8: ‘Auctoritas is the performance of authority as a live social experience’; ‘good manliness and performative authority are a mutually reinforcing dyad. The two require practice and iteration. Neither is given: they are performed and lived.’ 3 For Augustus’ obsession with writing, McEwen (2003) 34.

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commemoration. The Ara Pacis depicts ritual processions in unchanging stone, so that transient immediacy ﬁnds expression in a medium that, if not quite eternal, at least transmitted the representation to posterity.4 This nexus of actuality and eternalizing ﬁnds its most salient instance in the sundial near the Ara Pacis. This clock sits at the intersection of the predominant signifying modes of the age: a simultaneously timeless and historically grounded timepiece always indicating the transient moment and standing symbolically for the passage of time itself. Horace calls the Sun ‘different and the same’ (Carmen saeculare, 10). This sums up the instant, continuity, and temporal progression. Let me emphasize that you cannot convincingly represent non-existent realities. A declaration that your mission has been accomplished, as George Bush did in Iraq in 2003, does not make it so. One of the fastest ways to lose authority is to insist on something false. But public relations are formative of perception and Bush’s aide, quoted above, is right that action—including representation—can change reality. However, his dichotomy between action and study, while a modern commonplace, would have bafﬂed the Romans, for whom study and commentary were generative, not merely reﬂective (Ch. 5). In considering Augustan auctoritas as a performative power dependent on representation, I do not mean that his authority derived from representation, but that the interaction of these elements reinforces each other. The origin of authority is mysterious, as perhaps best appears in Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963: 179–214), but this is a separate issue I hope to address elsewhere. After the ﬁrst Augustan settlement in 27 BCE, when Augustus handed the state back to the senate and the Roman people, the power by which he held sway was auctoritas. This at least is his assessment in the Res gestae. post id tempus auctoritate omnibus praestiti, potestatis autem nihilo amplius habui quam ceteri, qui mihi quoque in magistratu conlegae fuerunt. (Res gestae 34. 3) (After this time I surpassed all in authority, however in formal powers I had no more than the others who were my colleagues in each magistracy.)

Historians point out that he held maius imperium, which gave him control of the armies and allowed him to govern.5 He also continued to hold 4

Fowler (2000) 211: ‘The essence of the monument is paradoxically its lack of monumental stability.’ 5 Brunt and Moore (1967) 40, on RG 1. 4: from 43 BCE onwards, Octavian held imperium; this was the ‘legal power in virtue of which he commanded armies and transacted most of his ofﬁcial business’. Wallace-Hadrill (1982) 32 analyses the polarization among modern historians and reports that Mommsen espouses the juridical deﬁnition, where legal powers are the only that mattered; Alfo¨ldi (1970) emphasizes that ‘imperial ceremonial and self-presentation’ evoke ‘a monarchical reality’. Yavetz (1984) 24–5 takes the polarization back to Kaerst (1898) 80, who cast doubt on a purely juridical understanding of the principate.

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magistracies with their particular form of power, potestas. Why focus on a less formal power operating in a grey zone regarding governmental structures? This question is similar to asking why Vergil represents himself as singing. Song and auctoritas both denote the power to make authoritative utterance. The man with auctoritas has the right to speak and the presumption that people will listen and act accordingly, even if they are not bound to do so.6 Song and auctoritas are social powers that exceed formal structures of legitimacy and have a link to the divine. Both also have a complex relationship to writing in the Augustan period, whether literal or metaphoric. In Latin the law has close associations with writing (Meyer 2004), and lex (law) is etymologically linked with legere (to read) (Magdelain 1978: 18–21). The mode of representation conveying Augustus’ auctoritas, inscription on bronze and the dissemination of monuments across the empire, differs from the nature of the power represented therein, just as Vergil’s written text differs from the song it conveys. Augustus, like Vergil, privileges the lived and performative over the written and static, but like most poets in this period, is preoccupied not only with transmitting a message, the renowned Augustan programme of peace, stability, and moral renewal, but with the means of conveying it. I ask the same question of Augustus as I do of the poets: given the overwhelming advantages of performative self-representation—association with god, real power, the allure of actuality—what are the corresponding advantages to writing and the monument that make it useful for political selfrepresentation? Any line between the performative and textuality is heuristic. As with literature, the two are not so easily disentangled. ‘Auctoritas’ is a word Vitruvius uses of monuments (Pref. 2; Ch. 13): they, like texts, produce authority for their authors by creating representations in the moment and across time. Monumental representation typically mixes images with writing and the differing kinds of monuments on which the Res gestae were inscribed show that even in a medium that aspires to ﬁxity, there was huge variation. Do the art and monuments of a particular period need to be considered in relation to literature? Different media have different concerns, and to bring them together presupposes a coherent cultural matrix.7 The Augustan age is 6

Heinze (1972) 51, 52, 57. It is indicative of speech’s importance to Roman culture that Cicero translates axioma—a standard Greek translation of auctoritas—in its philosophical sense, with pronuntiatum (proposition), a word emphasizing that concepts come into being through speech (Tusc. 1. 14). For ‘self-activating actors’, Lendon (1997) 17. 7 Richard Thomas (1988) 57: ‘no form of art, least of all poetry, is explained because we have authenticated the social milieu in which it presents itself ’. W. A. Johnson (2000) 607, highly aware of the problem, states his assumptions up front: ‘a writing system largely reﬂects the system of reading with which it interrelates’. He sets the stage for a sociology of reading: reading difﬁcult texts serves to build the sense of an intellectual community among the elite. Reading is

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remarkably uniﬁed, not so much in content or attitude but in a persistent preoccupation with thinking about the media of representation and what they offer.8 The notion of a Zeitgeist is misleading because it hypostatizes into this (or any) age a set of complementary and overlapping preoccupations among individuals within a community with ﬂuid if not open borders.9 The Augustan age is a transitional period from the violence and chaos of the late Republic to a system which offered both peace and a greater degree of social control over elite and plebeian alike. All were concerned with deﬁning themselves in a society whose rules had changed and the intense reﬂection on the media is a way of thinking about the mechanisms for doing so. The poets appreciated and supported the cessation of civil war, but their various attempts to deﬁne their social position in this new society often reveal anxiety. Augustus’ own proliferation of representations reinforced his message of political and social stability, and the dynastic pretensions of the Mausoleum and the prominent children on the Ara Pacis represent these aims for the imperial family and the future of Rome. Augustus brought peace, but the concentration of auctoritas in his hands redirected the avenues of contestation rather than eliminated them altogether. He won popular consent but left some disgruntled elite. Augustus, in my view, believed that representing stability supported it—hence the proliferation of representations concentrating auctoritas in him. It was not propaganda, ﬁction, or bad faith, but rather an attempt to frame a reality many desired by representing it, that is, to make it happen performatively. Furthermore, I think he understood that the performative moment—acts of authority and foundation—needed recording to perpetuate what the moment brought about. The energy gone into maintaining the representations indicates a need for continual re-enactment. The stability Augustus attempted to perpetuate was a process and a representation rather than a static social reality.10 Different media operate in different ways, and the common metaphor of the monument for a written work highlights shared features without implying not merely a cognitive, but a social process, ‘the negotiated construction of meaning within a particular sociocultural context’ (603, his emphasis). 8 P. Hardie (1993a) 121 speaks of the ‘ﬁercely conducted competition between the powers of the poet and of the monumental artist’. 9 Feeney (2004) 3 criticizes structuralism and symbolic anthropology for positing ‘an overarching holistic and unifying thought-world for any given society, a mentalite´’. WallaceHadrill (1997) 6: ‘It is no more helpful to suggest that cultural change caused social and political change than that it is merely a second-order reﬂection of more fundamental changes.’ He analyses the ‘cultural revolution’ of the Augustan age in terms of changes in authority. Habinek and Schiesaro (1997) pp. xv–xvi, Feldherr (1997) 137. 10 Connolly (2007) 13–15 explores the tensions between subjective experience, ideology, and the drive to foster stability among citizens and state in the civic order.

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equivalence. A signal difference between monuments and literary texts is the extent to which we can identify their authors. Although the major works of literature of this period have known authors, we simply do not know who was responsible for the design of the Ara Pacis or other monuments, much less the names of the artists who executed the plan. Even literary works of unknown authorship still convey the impression of some unifying mind, Foucault’s ‘author function’.11 Jerome’s criteria for determining whether people of the same name are the same author all revolve around different kinds of unity: quality, conceptual coherence, style, chronology. The Augustan monuments largely ﬁt these criteria although we cannot identify a single author besides Augustus, and he was not an author in the same way as the poets.12 One meaning of auctor is a legal guarantor. Since the poets of this period frequently set themselves in rivalry with Augustus (Part V), let us consider him the auctor of the monuments, not in the sense of authorship, but as the guarantor of their meaning.13 The primary aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship of the representing mode to the power represented therein.14 Augustus’ performative type of political power, which at ﬁrst appears antithetical to the inscription recording it, turns out to require the kind of representation writing offers. But ﬁrst I must address the basic distinction between auctoritas and potestas.

AU C TOR I TA S AND POTESTAS The contrast between powers Augustus presents at Res gestae 34. 3 (cited above, 280) is between his formal magisterial powers (potestas) and extra-constitutional power residing in actuality (auctoritas).15 Since the Romans did not have 11

Foucault (1969) 86–7 discusses Jerome. Fowler (1995): Augustus as a metaphorical artist. Sauron (1994) 519 suggests Horace; Du Quesnay (1995) 182 also makes Horace a possible planner of the Horologium complex. Gage´ (1934) 39 comments that Horace’s Carmen saeculare (eighth stanza) seems inspired by the Ara Pacis if the latter came ﬁrst. Could it be the inverse? Larissa Bonfante suggests to me that Livia may have had an important role in setting the ideological programme. 13 Dupont (2004) 171–4: the guarantor of the worth of a piece of literature was not the author in our sense, but rather the patron to whom it was dedicated, who lent it his auctoritas; Pierre (2005) 241–2. 14 Feeney (2004) 18: ‘mediation and representation and encoding are operative all the way down, on both sides of what we represent as the fence between “life” and “literature” ’. 15 Pugliese Carratelli (1949) 37 puts auctoritas outside the potestates of magistracies, and locates Augustus by virtue of his auctoritas, outside the state. Agamben’s (2005) ch. 6 on the difference between auctoritas and potestas culminates an argument begun in (1995) that sovereignty resides paradoxically both inside and outside the law. Basic discussions are Heinze (1972) ‘Auctoritas’ and Galinsky (1996) ch. 1. Ando (2000) sees Augustus’ position as extra12

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a written constitution based on law, it will not do to say that potestas is lawbased while auctoritas is extra-legal. It is also an overstatement to say that auctoritas is in general extra-constitutional, since this is the name of the Senate’s advisory power. It is only extra-constitutional when wielded by an individual operating politically without the sanction of a magistracy. For my purposes here, the important distinction is between the formal channels of potestas and the lack of codiﬁcation for auctoritas. This aligns the former with the ﬁxity of writing and codiﬁed law, although we cannot say that potestas is itself codiﬁed, and the latter with performativity. Both powers are part of the mos maiorum, the ‘customs of the ancestors’ that institutionalized political practice, but potestas resides in a ﬁxed form, the grant of power for a set period deriving from elected ofﬁce, while auctoritas attaches to the individual rather than the ofﬁce and is consequently less bound by temporal constraints and more ﬂuid. Let the following passages sufﬁce for outlining this basic distinction. In the Republican period, Cicero’s anecdote about how Q. Metellus stopped illegal games from being performed contrasts real with formal power, auctoritas and potestas respectively. Metellus was consul designate. Although he lacked the ofﬁce’s formal powers, he nevertheless prevailed (‘sed ille designatus consul . . . priuatus ﬁeri uetuit, atque id quod nondum potestate poterat obtinuit auctoritate’ (but he, consul designate, as a private person forbade this to happen, and what he was not yet able to do by ofﬁcial power, he achieved through authority), in Pis. 8).16 It is not clear whether the people obeyed him in anticipation of the imminent ofﬁce, or simply through Metellus’ independent authority, but without the latter, the former would not have been sufﬁcient. Cicero sets these powers in a binary opposition that suggests they are more intertwined than ﬁrst appears. Dio’s explanation of why Greek cannot express the Roman concept of auctoritas in one word (more on Greek and Latin terms below) makes it clear that auctoritas is a political power that operates outside formal channels (55. 3. 4–5).17 This can shed light on Augustus’ distinction at RG 34. 3 between auctoritas and potestas. Under the Republic, the Senate’s authority

constitutional, but disputes the binarism of imperium and auctoritas (28), while recognizing his ‘transcendent charismatic status’ (29). 16 Brunt and Moore (1967) 79; Galinsky (1996) 16: this anecdote gives a precedent for Augustan auctoritas, but Metellus was able to exercise auctoritas in anticipation of the potestas of the ofﬁce of consul, while Augustus’ auctoritas increased the more ofﬁces he relinquished. Nisbet (1961) distinguishes the ‘legal power of a consul’ from the ‘moral prestige of a consul-designate’ at Cicero, Pis. 8. 24. Lendon (1997) 109: the emperor’s honour ‘was little different in kind from that of his subjects; there was simply more of it’; he draws similar conclusions about the difference between divine and human honours (162). 17 On untranslatability, Galinsky (1996) 12.

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was only advisory—though its advice carried the expectation of enactment— but by Dio’s time, it could enact decrees. Augustus’ power was, outside a military context, also advisory. The Senate declares that its resolutions were enacted by auctoritas when it could not legally enact a decree because it assembled at an unusual time or place, without legal summons, or because the tribunes blocked their action. The purpose of recording their auctoritas was to make their opinion manifest (‹ø çÆ æe e ºÅÆ ÆP H ﬁ q) when they could not bear for it to be hidden ( c b c ª Å çH På IŒæıçŁB ÆØ). After the fact, they would enact it as a decree according to custom. Dio uses light imagery to describe auctoritas: it makes manifest what does not tolerate being hidden. The Senate did not have potestas, so the difference between their regular and irregular expression of auctoritas in the imperial period rested on whether they produced some valid form of law or not. Both passages show that auctoritas operates when ﬁxed structures do not provide sufﬁcient power to get done what a political agent or body wants to accomplish. Potestas and auctoritas are interrelated in much the way that the codiﬁcation of the law relates to power, that writing relates to performativity. Potestas supplements auctoritas; it is the formality added to real power that makes what is real ofﬁcial,18 but conversely auctoritas permeates potestas and holding ofﬁces certainly increased a man’s authority. Augustus presents the two as operating independently, but as complements.19

AU CTOR ITAS AND THE PE RFORMATIVE Auctoritas is performative in that it is a capacity to make things happen through words, that is, it enables performative discourse, and furthermore its medium is 18 Hellegouarc’h (1972) 310: auctoritas complements potestas. His comment that the latter disappears with the function to which it is attached, while the former remains and grows with the number of posts occupied, shows the primacy of auctoritas. 19 The priority of auctoritas or potestas is a chicken and egg problem. Last (1950) 120–1 rightly criticizes Magdelain (1947) 47 for arguing that it was Augustus’ auctoritas that made him princeps, at least in his translation of auctoritate at RG 34. 3: it is an ablative of respect and not one of cause. Last, however, goes too far in arguing on the other side that Augustus’ auctoritas derives from his potestas (Veyne 1976: 577 remarks that the ‘throne’ endows ‘charisma’), and hits a truer note in saying that auctoritas cannot be sharply separated from imperium and potestas. Kienast (1999) 84–5. Wallace-Hadrill (1986) 73 ﬁrst suggests in the context of Augustan coinage that the representation of the emperor’s head was not an emblem of legality, but rather a charismatic force that elicited a powerful emotional response, but pulls back from discounting legality entirely in favour of a ‘conception of imperial power in which the legal and supralegal become inextricably intertwined’.

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performance largely construed. The reality of such power is undisputed.20 The association between auctoritas and counsel reveals a discursive function, although it surpasses words. Bodily hexis conveys authority, and the scholarship on manliness emphasizes gait and gesture over and above whatever a man might say.21 Auctoritas is a social quality requiring visual and discursive enactment partially because, while real, it is hard to pin down.22 Sponsoring games and erecting monuments contribute not only to social worth (dignitas), but to the capacity to put symbolic capital to use. Authority is upheld and augmented by sponsoring literal performances, whether triumphs, religious festivals, or gladiatorial games. In addition to other social functions, such representations perform their sponsor’s auctoritas, that is, they represent an already existing power and also enact it in the sense of bringing it once again into actuality. Although it is important not to conﬂate performance with the performative, in Austin’s or the broader sense in which historians and sociologists use the language of speech act theory,23 public performances are important vehicles for power.24 Part of this is the ability to speak so that the utterance carries an expectation of being put into action. Auctoritas drives from augere (to grow) and this has suggested to many that it grows on its own power.25 This aspect, I believe, allowed Augustus to give up more and more, though not all, of his magisterial powers. Austin’s (1962: 6) formulation of performative discourse is fundamental: ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action’. But ‘performative discourse’ has developed a broader sense than the explicit performatives Austin begins his analysis with (e.g. ‘I promise’). By the end of How to Do Things with Words, Austin comes to the view that uttering even a denotative assertion performs an act, if only one of representation, and others (Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, discussed below) broaden performativity to include acting social roles. In love and politics, representations can change 20

force’.

Hellegouarc’h (1972) 307: ‘c’est un ve´ritable pouvoir qui contraint sans emploi de la

21 Gleason (1995), Gunderson (2000), Connolly (2006b) and (2007) 54 (embodiment), 132–6 (the body in epistemology and ethics), 163–9 (passion and decorum), 214–16 (gesture and gender). 22 Gunderson (2000) 18–19: ‘the trajectory of the performative ultimately extends beyond the material possibilities of any given performance. One reaches for something that is never quite there.’ 23 Austin (1962). Speech act theory is a good tool for analysing political power if we expand its range to encompass non-verbal discourse: representations intervene in the world by means of certain formulations (illocutionary force) and having certain results (perlocutionary effects). Pocock (1984) is representative of the appropriation of these terms by historians. 24 Geertz (1977) and (1980), used extensively by Price (1984). Lendon (1997) 142: ‘Addicted to looking through appearances to the realities of power beneath, we are surprised to see power dependent on, and attacked through, appearances.’ 25 Hellegouarc’h (1972) 306: ‘l’auctoritas acquise contribue a` son propre accroissement’.

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realities, whether ‘I love you’ or a statement from the Federal Reserve about the economy. Auctoritas is unlike Austin’s explicit performatives in not referring to itself: self-referentiality might indeed undercut it because nothing is less convincing than stating one has authority when one does not (Lowrie 2007b). From one point of view, auctoritas appears spontaneous and to emanate from the individual:26 it seems to come into being by use and not to pre-exist its manifestation, unlike legal powers such as the potestas of a magistrate. Is it produced, or rather exercised? Bruce Lincoln (1994: 2) ﬁrst deﬁnes auctoritas as a capacity prior to performative discourse, so that it is exercised in the production of speech acts: it is used ‘usually in connection with the capacity to perform a speech act that exerts a force on its hearers greater than that of simple inﬂuence, but less than that of a command’. His further pragmatic description is more layered: ‘discursive authority is not so much an entity as it is (1) an effect; (2) the capacity for producing that effect; and (3) the commonly shared opinion that a given actor has the capacity for producing that effect’ (ibid. 11). By calling this kind of authority an effect, he recognizes that it is produced as well as exercised. If auctoritas is both produced by its use and is also the capacity for its production, then it has a structure like performative discourse in its broader deﬁnition. Without the words and conventions capable of producing the performative and a person to put these to use, the individual instance of performative discourse or of authority could not emerge. The instance cannot be entirely accounted for by the conventions giving rise to it, since its actualization is due to use. Auctoritas is a capacity whose exercise results in a particular aim, but furthermore produces itself anew in its exercise. Action engages in an accumulative relation with auctoritas. Effective action needs it, and yet success breeds greater auctoritas. Cicero describes how this relation can snowball among orators with expertise in the law: ‘and there are furthermore many who, when they acquired public approval (dignitatem) for themselves through the agency of their talents (ingenio . . . auctore), brought it about that in responding to legal questions, they prevailed even more by their

Heinze (1972) 50: ‘die auctoritas . . . ﬂießt aus der Perso¨nlichkeit’; Galinsky (1996) 12: ‘Auctoritas is or denotes a quality that is inherent in and emanates from an individual.’ He later comes to the mutuality needed between the carrier of auctoritas and those who grant it to him: ‘Basic to its reciprocal and social aspect is the recognition that auctoritas “presupposes the approbation and voluntary allegiance of those on whom it is exerted” ’ (14, quoting Hellegouarc’h 1972: 302). Lincoln (1994) 4 understands authority ‘in relational terms as the effect of a posited, perceived, or institutionally ascribed asymmetry between speaker and audience’, but since he denies ofﬁce or charisma as this asymmetry’s source, it is hard to locate its origin: an institutional source implies an ofﬁce, and if it is posited or perceived, charisma. 26

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authority (auctoritate) than by their very talents (ingenio)’ (de Or. 1. 198).27 Their talent breeds respect in disproportion to the talents themselves. The word auctor, in apposition to ingenium, reveals, however, that auctoritas is, in some form, already there.28 This passage shows auctoritas can surpass its origins through the giving of consilium, a certain kind of speech. Auctoritas must begin somewhere and cannot produce itself in a vacuum. Octavian’s authority began with his posthumous adoption by Julius Caesar.29 Although family ties could not in themselves grant auctoritas, it developed more easily if one were from an aristocratic background. As (partial) corrective to the view that auctoritas emanates from the individual, Bourdieu (1991: 192) locates the source of authority in political representation not in the politician who exercises it, but in the group conferring it:30 Symbolic power is a power which the person submitting to grants to the person who exercises it, a credit with which he credits him, a ﬁdes, an auctoritas, with which he entrusts him by placing his trust in him. It is a power which exists because the person who submits to it believes that it exists.

For Bourdieu (ibid. 223), power derives from prior social realities: The effectiveness of the performative discourse which claims to bring about what it asserts in the very act of asserting it is directly proportional to the authority of the person doing the asserting: the formula ‘I authorize you to go’ is eo ipso an authorization only if the person uttering it is authorized to authorize, has the authority to authorize.

27

Heinze (1972) 52 cites this passage with a bolder text: ‘auctoritatem’ for the transmitted ‘auctore dignitatem’. Wilkins (1888) ad loc. defends the paradosis, taking ‘auctore’ in apposition to ‘ingenio’, although he recognizes that the otiose word could have been generated by a marginal gloss that made the parallel between ‘auctoritate’ and ‘dignitate’. 28 Wallace-Hadrill (1986) 84 argues for a similar process regarding coinage’s persuasive power and legitimacy: the symbols persuade that the coin is legitimate, but their claim to the user’s respect for the images further legitimates the regime issuing them. 29 Kienast (1999) 6–10 reviews whether Caesar intended Octavian to be his political heir, or whether the will was merely private. Luca Gavarini reminds me that auctoritas travelled in families, so that the distinction between private and political heir hardly matters. Lendon (1997) 45 emphasizes that honour, a related concept (61, 129), is a ‘personal quality’, whose ‘aura extended over household and connections by blood and marriage’ (also 228), though it also increased by circulation: ‘honour came to exist also through one’s being “honoured”—publicly praised—by individuals who possessed it’. 30 Bourdieu (1991) ‘Political Representation’ 192, also ‘Identity and Representation’ 222, 227. Veyne’s (1976) 85–9 analysis of de- and a-politicization shows it is not imposed on the masses from above: they produce it. He warns against taking the effects of Augustan depoliticization for its cause. Similar warnings that ideology projected from above may not work at Lendon (1997) 11, 168; ‘The emperor’s honour was in large part a creation of what his subjects wanted to believe’ (174).

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Bourdieu understands authority as exercised like legal powers, rather than produced. But the man with authority does produce a representation. The role of the politician with authority is to concretize or sanction (OLD auctor 3): he might not create the reality he sanctions, but he brings it forward in an act of representation.31 Even when he merely states with authority what is already the case, even when he contents himself with asserting what is, the auctor produces a change in what is: by virtue of the fact that he states things with authority, that is, in front of and in the name of everyone, publicly and ofﬁcially, he saves them from their arbitrary nature, he sanctions them, sanctiﬁes them, consecrates them, making them worthy of existing, in conformity with the nature of things, and thus ‘natural’. (ibid. 222)

The change the auctor effects, even when he makes no substantive changes, is to make reality manifest and especially to make it public.32 He uses ‘natural’ in scare quotes to show that the statement of reality lends it an appearance of belonging to the order of things: the reality may have already been there, but it is contingent rather than natural. Bourdieu is fully aware of the ambiguity of political ‘representation’— which in French and English denotes both political delegation and semeiosis.33 Although he would limit the comparison of political life to the theatre, he nevertheless uses an ancient word intimately related to theatrical enactment: ‘the struggles of the representatives can be described as a political mimesis of the struggles of the groups or classes whose champions they claim to be’ (ibid. 182).34 I assume he means enactment, rather than imitation: politicians cannot simply reproduce their constituents’ will, which in any particular matter could be contradictory. What they do is play out (another theatrical metaphor) these struggles. At issue is the objectiﬁcation of subjective relations of trust, belief, recognition, and the like that constitute power. Representation in this context gives form in a ﬁeld of action to preexisting social realities: it makes the real manifest. Realities need the auctor to give them form, but the authority’s apparent location in the person is, for Bourdieu, illusory: ‘Political fetishes are people, things, beings, which seem to owe to themselves alone an existence that social 31

Millar (1984) stresses that perceptions and representations are ‘an essential aspect of what the Roman Empire “was” ’ (40, also 56), even when erroneous. The emperor is the node around which such representations cluster, whether or not he generated them. 32 Cic. Cat. 4. 19: ‘atque haec, non ut uos qui mihi studio paene praecurritis excitarem, locutus sum, sed ut mea uox quae debet esse in re publica princeps ofﬁcio functa consulari uideretur’. 33 Italian uses rappresentazione for semiotic representation and rappresentanza for political. 34 For theatricality in Roman politics: Dupont (1985) 410–37, Bartsch (1994), Beacham (1999).

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agents have given to them; those who create the delegate adore their own creature’ (ibid. 205). In emphasizing external sources of authority, Bourdieu makes a point similar to Austin’s, when he insists that having the authority to execute a performative is a requisite part of a successful speech act; see, for example, the instance about naming ships (Austin 1962: 23–4). But if a person wielding authority is always already authorized from elsewhere, that raises questions about political agency. Can he effect change? Or can he represent only some already given reality? Judith Butler criticizes Bourdieu’s understanding of political representation and performativity for not allowing for recontextualization: the status quo prevails since its representative is limited to representing prior realities.35 This debate touches on a number of questions at the heart of Augustus’ regime. Can a representation constitute a new reality, or it is limited to reﬂecting a prior situation, which may change independently? What is the relation of auctoritas to political representation in the transition from Republic to Empire, particularly in the strange conjunction of apparent continuity and radical change under Augustus? A society that grants auctoritas to a person might also accept innovation, provided he operates within their consent. Bourdieu cites Benveniste on ﬁdes and ‘credit’ in speaking of authority, but he does not cite him on auctoritas. This is perhaps because Benveniste sees auctoritas as a power that generates realities. He, like others, derives auctoritas from augeo, but comments that our word ‘increase’ implies making greater something already in existence, whereas augeo indicates the act of producing something from the beginning: it is the privilege of gods and natural forces.36 ‘Every utterance pronounced with authority determines a change in the world, creates something; augeo expresses this mysterious quality that makes plants grow and gives existence to the law’ (1969: ii.150). This change is not the change of representation, but of making things happen to begin with, unless we take the act of representation as itself generative. Benveniste, who conjoins nature and the law, sees auctoritas as a power that produces. It generates the law, rather than exercising its power. Bourdieu would see this understanding of augeo as mystiﬁcation. Etymologies give histories of words rather than their 35 J. Butler (1997) 141–59 sect. ‘Speech Acts Politically’ (see below). For a critique of Bourdieu as creating ‘a stiﬂing view of culture in which change is virtually beyond conceptualization’, Martindale (2005) 120, 166; other theories allow for change, largely through the aesthetic (160). 36 Isidore: ‘auctor ab augendo dictus’ (10. 2). His explanation about Augustus and increase, however, is a rationalization: ‘Augustus ideo apud Romanos nomen imperii est, eo quod olim augerent rempublicam ampliﬁcando. quod nomen primitus senatus Octauio Caesari tradidit, ut quia auxerat terras, ipso nomine et titulo consecraretur’ (9. 3. 16). Benveniste (1969) ii. 149–50 links augeo with Indo-Iranian roots for ‘force’. Ernout–Meillet 89 cite Cicero, Inu. 1. 43, in the context of ‘consequence’: ‘deinde eius facti qui sint principes et inuentores, qui denique auctoritatis eius et inuentionis comprobatores atque aemuli’.

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truth. Furthermore, Benveniste overstates. An auctor may sponsor a law (e.g. Augustus, RG, ‘legibus nouis me auctore latis’ (With new laws carried by my authorship), 8. 5) or be said in a panegyric context to be responsible for the increase of crops (Vergil on Augustus: ‘auctorem frugum’ (increaser of crops), G. 1. 27),37 but his power does not fully bring these things into being. The auctor can, however, initiate within the framework of society’s authorization. The Greek translation of the sentence in the Res gestae where Augustus articulates his auctoritas reveals subtle differences between the Greek and the Latin that touch exactly on authority’s source.38 Augustus writes: ‘auctoritate omnibus praestiti’ (RG 34. 3). Brunt and Moore translate: ‘I excelled all in inﬂuence.’ In Greek, however, inﬂuence derives from others IØÆ Ø ø Ø ªŒÆ, ‘I excelled all in honour’.39 The honour of axioma, like that of dignitas, is granted, but does not have the further component of initiative. The difference between auctoritas and axioma reﬂects a difference between Augustus’ being an authorizing subject and an object produced from the worthiness reﬂected onto him in the opinion of others. The other time he uses auctoritas of himself in the Res gestae—of sponsoring colonies—the Greek is happier to make him the authorizing subject and elides any abstract noun. For ‘colonias . . . mea auctoritate deductas’ (colonies sponsored by my authority, RG 28. 2), the Greek reads a simple but powerful pronoun: KF (by me).40 For the Senate’s authority, the Greek resorts to governmental legalize: ‘ex senatus auctoritate’ (RG 12. 1) becomes ªÆ Ø ı Œº ı, often used of senatus consulta (LSJ ªÆ 2). The Greek cannot capture the full range of the Latin word and instead splits it into two aspects: agency, whether personal or institutional, and community. When Augustus transferred the state from his power to the decision-making control of the Senate and Roman people (‘rem publicam ex mea potestate in senatus populique Romani arbitrium transtuli’, RG 34. 1), although it is not clear exactly what he gave up in 27 BCE,41 he certainly relinquished some degree of formal power. Symbolic capital, however, more than made up for this loss, so that the sum of his powers remained the same, or even increased. In direct 37

For the panegyric, Mynors ad loc. The Greek is not a word-for-word translation, Gordon (1968) 131. Ehrenberg and Jones (1955) ad loc. Heinze (1972) 43 records the history of interpretation of this word. Mommsen, who was reconstructing from the Greek before a piece of the inscription was ﬁtted to reveal auctoritas as the word corresponding to IøÆ, remarked, ‘quod est IøÆ, Latine non tam est auctoritas quam dignitas’. Mommsen was of course right about translating from Greek to Latin, but not about translating from Latin to Greek. 40 Ramage (1987) 131 ﬁnds the Greek ‘so lame’ that he questions whether auctoritate is the correct supplement. 41 Brunt and Moore (1967) 75–7; Millar (1973) 61–7, who argues against a ‘restoration of the Republic’. 38 39

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response to the transfer (‘quo pro merito meo’ (in return for my service), RG 34. 2), the Senate granted him an honoriﬁc name, Augustus, laurel wreaths on his door-posts, the corona ciuica above his door, and a golden shield inscribed with his virtues set up in the Senate house. This compensation is metaphoric: it is the counter gesture to Augustus’ act of ‘bearing across’ (‘transtuli’ or ªŒÆ, RG 34. 1), and it results in auctoritas above and beyond potestas. Augustus still retained magistracies, but his auctoritas operated so far beyond his formal powers he could afford to give up actual ofﬁces in a gesture that further increased his auctoritas.42 The ideational component of symbolic capital is conveyed largely visually: the corona ciuica is an object that stands for its recipient having saved citizen life. The difference between potestas and auctoritas in their symbolic manifestation is that the former has set symbols, for example, the fasces or a ﬁxed number of lictors for the various ofﬁces. The fasces in particular symbolize force and therefore inspire fear. Auctoritas requires extra, non-canonical symbols to match the extra-ordinary power it denotes.43 These inspire less fear than awe. Such symbols must conform to standards of intelligibility and therefore work within a pre-established semiotic range. What is unusual for Augustus is that they were continually made afresh. His auctoritas’ idiosyncrasy depends on recontextualization.44 Unlike potestas, which is only ever exercised, auctoritas is always producing itself anew, and is therefore an active sphere for political representation. The person wielding auctoritas may engage in such acts of representation, but also feeds on representations made by others.45 Augustus describes melting down eighty silver statues of himself, and with their proceeds he dedicated golden offerings in the temple of Apollo ‘in my own name and in the name of those who honoured me with statues’ (RG 24. 2). His auctoritas increases when people set up statues of him and 42 I take quoque as from quisque, with Brunt and Moore (1967) 78–9, who explain their reservations. 43 Heinze (1972) 43: ‘einzigartige Ehren’. Dupont (1985) 24–5 considers Romulus’ invention of the apparatus that accompanies power (lictors, etc.) in conjunction with auctoritas, on the basis of Livy’s comment that these symbols made Romulus ‘augustiorem’ (1. 8). The question is whether their invention belonged in the region of auctoritas, and, once they became conventional, they passed over to potestas, in the process of the institutionalization of charisma, or whether they always conveyed auctoritas. I lean to the former. Price (1984) 52 analyses the imperial cult in Asia Minor as a reaction to and representation of power. 44 See e.g. the transformations in the meaning of the corona ciuica, although the symbol itself remained constant, Weinstock (1971) 163–7. 45 This is a huge topic, encompassing imperial cult and coinage among others. WallaceHadrill (1986) 73 makes the link between images of Augustus’ head on coinage and the honoriﬁc and cultic inscriptions that spread across the empire, and cites Levick (1982): the emperor is not addressing persuasion to his subjects through coinage, but the subjects offer respect thereby to the emperor (67).

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theirs does too. His increases again when he removes the statues, although theirs does not, and despite preserving the names of those who honoured him on the offerings, he omits them in the Res gestae itself. The act of transforming the statues keeps the representing process in play. Auctoritas thrives on representation. We might think overwhelming and actual power would be sufﬁcient in itself and wonder why Augustus would need to represent it beyond its exercise.46 Symbolic power is real; it does not merely represent something else. The perennial reassertion of auctoritas leads to a heightened situation in Augustan Rome where Augustus’ maintenance of power goes along with a huge quantity of cultural representation. Poetry, history, monuments, spectacles—this representing overdrive has often been called ‘propaganda’, a term implying that Augustus handed down the ideas from the top, but if Bourdieu is right that society projects auctoritas onto the man, this has consequences for both the source and the function of representation. I suggest that a society that produces a man who governs by auctoritas needs such power to be manifest, especially at moments of fragility. The Augustan transition took a while and required consent—attempted coups show it was not shared by all. As when the Senate recorded its auctoritas to make its opinion visible (Dio 55. 3. 4–5), this sort of power needs some form of record or representation to counteract potential evanescence. Performances (games, triumphs, public rituals) and monuments serve the same purpose: to manifest and solidify society’s continuing grant of power.47 The two modes of representation Augustus engages in reveal different needs. The performance—gladiatorial games, various ludi, and mock battles (RG 22–3; spectaculum bis)—brings the sponsor’s name into currency in the immediate present. The phrase ‘meo nomine’ occurs four times in paragraph 22; since each instance represents an event given anywhere from two to 46 Veyne (1976) 677–9 distinguishes between informing, acting on others, and expression, and locates the representation of majesty under expression: ‘Une superiorite´ qui ne s’exprime pas ne saurait donc trouver cre´ance: ne serait-elle pas plus de´bordante, si elle e´tait aussi grande qu’elle le pre´tend? Il ne sufﬁt pas d’eˆtre roi, il faut encore le laisser apparaıˆtre, sous peine de faire douter du troˆne. Toute majeste´ s’accompagne de quelque apparat.’ 47 Geertz (1980) 104 comments on ceremonial’s actualizing power in Bali: ‘The state ceremonials of classical Bali were metaphysical theatre: theatre designed to express a view of the ultimate nature of reality and, at the same time, to shape the existing conditions of life to be consonant with that reality: that is, theatre to present an ontology and, by presenting it, to make it happen—make it actual’; and 120: ‘the pageants were not mere aesthetic embellishments, celebrations of a domination independently exisiting: they were the thing itself ’. Eder (1990) stands on two sides of the issue. On the one hand, he views the function of images, i.e. ‘monuments, statues, and memorials’, as ‘to make visible the ideologies behind the reality’ and doubts whether they have the power ‘to create new identities’ (84). On the other, he ascribes to the Augustan programme a ‘reality of its own’ that no longer admitted of ‘any distinction between seeming and being’ (97).

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twenty-six times, the phenomenon occurred much more frequently. Additionally, Augustus several times gave spectacles in the name of his sons or grandsons. The monument answers a different need, for longevity. Since auctoritas vanishes with the person wielding it, the public record is a bulwark against death. Buildings, through physical durability, and writing, through iteration, whether literary or inscriptional, offer the allure of permanence over and above their substantial impact in the present.48 What conjoins performance with monument is ritual, whose iteration shares with writing reenactment in the present, in relation to forms established in the past. Price sees the eastern imperial cults as institutionalizing Augustus’ auctoritas, a power by nature transient. His formulation helps answer why this power has such need of representation: it bolsters stability. The imperial cult succeeded brilliantly in solving the problem of Augustus’ charismatic authority. The extraordinary signiﬁcance accorded to the birth of Augustus [in imperial cult] was something uniquely personal and potentially evanescent. In its pure form charismatic authority is naturally unstable. It may not last the lifetime of its possessor and it certainly cannot be transmitted to his successor. The importance of rituals is that they can objectify and institutionalize this unstable form of charisma. Thus the sudden outburst of cults of Augustus helped to ensure the perpetuation of his personal authority. (Price 1984: 58)49

At Rome, such rituals could take place only after death. During the emperor’s lifetime other ceremonial performances serve the purpose, and the monuments where such rituals take place anticipate future institutionalization through divine honours.

C O N T E XT, I T E R AT I O N , A N D C H A N G E With Augustus, the power structure changed but the institutions remained the same.50 This is the puzzle of the transition between Republic and Empire. I think this happened through the performativity of auctoritas in relation to 48

MacMullen (1982) 246 ascribes the ‘epigraphic habit’ to a ‘sense of audience’ and to people’s counting ‘on their world still continuing for a long time to come, so as to make nearly permanent memorials worthwhile’; for texts supporting this view in Cicero and the legal corpus, Meyer (1990) 76–7. 49 Hellegouarc’h (1972) 310 insists on the personal and private aspect of auctoritas in contradistinction to postestas. For parallalels to the RG in inscriptions commissioned by oriental kings regarding the ﬁrst person, cursus honorum, and elogia, Nicolet (1991) 20. 50 Ramage (1987) 38–66 outlines the relation between the res publica and imperium: ‘The new government established by Augustus is not just the republic warmed over’ (58).

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notionally ﬁxed structures—if the Romans had a constitution, one could say the constitution, but the particular dynamic has to do with the relation of codiﬁcation through custom to the real power of the moment exercised by individuals. The relations between media are here also an issue, though now at a more abstract level. I propose that Augustus could change everything while making it look the same because of the structure of auctoritas as a power that operates performatively outside the law—understood broadly as structures codiﬁed through custom—but in relation to it. The particular change he made was to consolidate power;51 he made this acceptable by the citation and re-enactment of existing structures. The law (lex), it turns out, has a strong association with reading (legere).52 The etymology is less important than the social practice, which makes the poets’ willingness to pun on the words less arbitrary than appears to us (Part IV). The law is a written text, meant to be read aloud, but also ﬁxed once written. The codiﬁcation of potestas stands in a different relation to power from the social realities of performed auctoritas.53 The essential difference is that auctoritas has no ‘text’ to follow, but must be improvised within the regulating norms of social and political conventions. Someone must perform 51

His restrictions on who could sponsor spectacles support this consolidation, Flower (2004b) 323. 52 For a discussion of the law in Latin as a ‘reading’, Svenbro (1993) ch. 6, and as a ‘ritual reading aloud’ (123). Magdelain (1978) 18–21 places this reading in the ritual constitution of the law, i.e. before the vote, the dedication, and the oath, rather than in reading a law already posted; lex comes to designate the text itself as a secondary development from its original meaning as an action noun. Meyer (2004) 97–101 emphasizes the complex interaction of writing and reading out in all stages of the law’s ratiﬁcation; the posting is as much part of the process as the reading out of the tablets beforehand. Williamson (1987) 172–3 discusses the publication of laws through the reading aloud of drafts and the posting of copies in the forum. In Greek, nomos, with its emphasis on custom, implies oral diffusion, but Svenbro shows that nemein can also mean reading, so that nomos would occupy a position between the orality of rhetra and the written nature of lex. Ernout–Meillet (543) remark: ‘Le caracte`re spe´cial de la loi explique au contraire qu’elle doive eˆtre e´crite et promulgue´e. De la` les expressions legem ﬁgere “graver la loi sur bronze et l’afﬁcher sur le forum”, legem delere, perrumpere, perfringere “effacer, briser la loi”’ Williamson (1987) argues that inscription in bronze had the symbolic function of embodying the law, rather than the utilitarian and archival one of publishing it, and Meyer (2004) 100–1 makes a similar argument for tablets. 53 Galinsky (1996) 13: ‘In the political realm, the auctoritas of the senate . . . is not binding legislation, but the sort of approval that precedes it. It involves the actions of others, such as the consuls; it has no legal force but plenty of moral authority’ (my emphasis). Agamben (2005) 70, on the basis of Pseudo-Archytas, contrasts the ‘“living” law’ of the sovereign with the ‘written law’ subordinate to it, and cites Heinze (1972) 50 (trans. K. Atell): ‘Every magistracy is a preestablished form, which the individual enters into and which constitutes the source of his power; auctoritas, on the other hand, springs from the person, as something that is constituted through him, lives only in him, and disappears with him.’ Although Bourdieu’s corrective that authority is granted needs to be taken into account, the difference between pre-established and living forms stands.

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the improvisation and Bourdieu does not say how society chooses to endow an individual with auctoritas—the person must ﬁt the bill.54 Heinze (1972: 44) dismisses the idea of an abstract noun detached from the person. To be granted authority, one must have earned it, yet there are few opportunities for earning it without ﬁrst having some in reserve. To this extent, authority is not entirely constituted by society’s interpellation from without and depends on an individual’s suitability to receive this interpellation. The individual can then serve as a vehicle for real change or at the very least for making it evident. Performative power in the hands of an individual responds to and aligns with present needs, while to be pertinent one must separate the written law from its original context and recontextualize it in the present.55 I am applying to law, ﬁxed in writing, Derrida’s deﬁnitions of writing in ‘Signature e´ve´nement contexte’, precisely because this piece takes further Austin’s analysis of performative discourse from the vantage point of writing. A written sign . . . is then a mark that remains, that is not exhausted in the present of its inscription and can give rise to iteration in the absence of and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject that has, in a given context, emitted or produced it . . . a written sign carries with it a force of rupture from its context, that is, the ensemble of presences that organize the moment of its inscription. (Derrida (1972a) 377)

In Austin, performative success depends on the context of its utterance— citation or a literary context, for instance, neutralizes a performative.56 Language’s iterability puts a hole in the centre of performativity. Since the technology of writing enables exact and formal repetition, it becomes a site of infelicity. Derrida, however, points out the double role of citation: it may cause infelicity, but is nevertheless essential to the performative because convention always imply citation.57 The phrase ‘I do’ in a wedding ceremony is valid not only if a sanctioned authority ofﬁciates (Bourdieu’s emphasis), but if the ceremony already exists as a ritual. The ‘properly’ functioning ritual cites prior instances and thereby both brings them into the present and differentiates itself from them to pertain uniquely to the two individuals 54 Dupont (1985) 25 touches on both the independent and collective aspects of this power. Connolly (2007) 38–47 uses Gramsci to outline a model of mutual construction between people and elite representations. 55 Pierre (2008) sect. 2.II analyses Cicero’s frustration with the law: since it is ﬁxed and carried its authority within itself, it does not admit of judgement according to context, while the orator’s judgement can recontextualize. 56 Austin (1962) 9: ‘I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem.’ Derrida (1972a) 386–7. 57 Pocock (1984) 31: ‘language-structures . . . can never be reduced to the performance of any one person’s intention. To perform my speech-act I must borrow another’s, and he was in exactly the same predicament; all verbalized action is mediated.’

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who are marrying. Derrida stresses that the necessity for citation in performative discourse gives it a similar structure to writing: each entails a rupture from an originating context to bring it into a new one. Writing is reperformed and recontextualized when read; performatives are reperformed and recontextualized when enacted. Both depend on iterability and on rupture from prior contexts. Writing, with its difference from an original context, is both enabling and disabling. It allows the performance to go through, but always recalls the fragility of the conditions of performativity. Felicity in performatives is not the norm from which the failures are special cases; rather, citation lies at the heart of performative discourse so that its condition for success can also make a particular utterance infelicitous. What does the inevitability of citation mean for the difference between potestas and auctoritas, between codiﬁed power and that granted immediately by society? How does a person exercising auctoritas relate to the social conventions within which he must operate? The Augustan question is the extent to which he depends on externally authorizing forces for his consolidation of power (as in Bourdieu) and the extent to which citation (as in Derrida) allows him to break with the conventions granting him authority to begin with. Judith Butler (1997: 150) critiques both Derrida and Bourdieu from different vantage points. Each locates the failure of performatives in a separate area, Bourdieu in an insufﬁciency of social authorization, Derrida in basic structures of discourse: ‘Whereas Bourdieu fails to take account of the way in which a performative can break with existing context and assume new contexts, reﬁguring the terms of legitimate utterance themselves, Derrida appears to install the break as a structurally necessary feature of every utterance and every codiﬁable written mark, thus paralyzing the social analysis of forceful utterance.’ Butler’s solution is to join the re- and de-contextualizing aspects of speech insisted on by Derrida with Bourdieu’s social analysis. This enables the use of conventions in new contexts where they may acquire entirely different meanings.58 ‘Performatives do not merely reﬂect prior social conditions, but produce a set of social effects, and though they are not always the effects of “ofﬁcial” discourse, they nevertheless work their social power not only to regulate bodies, but to form them as well. Indeed, the efforts of performative discourse exceed and confound the authorizing contexts from which they emerge’ (ibid. 159). This formulation provides a framework for Augustus’ construction of his particular brand of power, which breaks from prior 58

Connolly (2007) 25–7 links the ‘fundamental instability’ in the ‘performance of authority’ both to the fragile ‘consensual relation between performer and audience’ and to competing drives to action and self-memorialization. She argues, ‘the temporal dynamic at work in the republican performance of tradition at once ensures stability and change’.

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governmental forms through citation: he recontextualizes the status quo. Citation creates continuity, while recontextualization marks a shift. Augustus intervenes as the auctor who makes things happen in response to society’s interpellation of him to create the Augustan moment of innovation within tradition.59 He does not, however, confound the contexts authorizing him— he rather enables a shift his society (mostly) willingly accepts. Performative power helps clarify a signal phenomenon of Augustus’ principate, that he exercised the powers of ofﬁces without holding them. He held maius imperium without the consulship. Tribunicia potestas gave him a tribune’s powers—to submit legislation to the people, to veto, to compel citizens to obey orders, to help citizens oppressed by other magistrates (Brunt and Moore 1967: 11–12)—without the actual ofﬁce.60 Similarly, he exercised the censorial function of reviewing the equestrian class at their annual parade without being censor (Yavetz 1984: n. 123). When he took colleagues in the tribunician power, it was at his request (‘depoposci’, RG 6. 2); a usual tribune would have been elected without pre-selection.61 The phrase tribunicia potestas shows ambivalence about its legal status, since the speciﬁcation potestas reveals the gap between the powers belonging to the ofﬁce and the ofﬁce itself. The conjunction of different powers appears in Augustus’ formal name: Imperator Caesar Augustus.62 The formal basis of his power resided in imperium, hence imperator (Brunt and Moore 1967: 40, 83–4), while ‘Augustus’ is related etymologically to auctoritas through their mutual derivation from augeo (increase). These two components of power frame the dynastic family name Caesar. McEwen (2003: 35–6) points out that Vitruvius is the only author to call Augustus ‘Imperator Caesar’, but that the name belonged to the language of inscriptions. So performative and inscriptional language are both encoded in his name. Furthermore, the addition of Divi ﬁlius connects Augustan power to the divine in a way that recalls the complexity

59 Yavetz (1984) 17: the principate was not a creatio ex nihilo. Weinstock (1971) traces the many continuities. Galinsky (1996) 3–9 emends Syme’s (1939) ‘Roman Revolution’ to ‘The Augustan Evolution’. 60 Henderson (1998) 110: tribunicia potestas is a ‘fundamental usurpation of Latinity by a military conqueror’. 61 Brunt and Moore (1967) 47: colleagueship in this power marked its holder (Agrippa, Tiberius) ‘as virtually the heir presumptive to Augustus’. 62 Karl Galinsky remarks to me that Augustus’ legal power, imperium, was inscribed into his name. This name is the shortest version: others are Imperator Caesar Divi ﬁlius Augustus, with various additions afterwards, such as pater patriae, pontifex maximus, the number of times he has held tribunician power, etc. For a sample, see the inscriptions in Millar (1984). Henderson (1998) 109: the innovation on the praenomen, nomen, cognomen is a ‘travesty of Roman nomenclature and the civic tradition it had betokened’.

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of the Vergilian formulation of the relation of writing to voice (Ch. 1).63 On the one hand, god manifests his will through the oral prophecy of his devotees, on the other, the metaphor of the book of fate opens onto the concept of law. Not only is the number of priesthoods held by Augustus important in this context, but speciﬁcally that he held the position of augur (RG 7. 3), whose duty was to interpret ‘signs by which the gods were thought to declare whether or not they approved of a proposed ofﬁcial action’ (Brunt and Moore 1967: 49). It was the link between augur and Augustus that caused Munatius Plancus to suggest the name (Suet. Aug. 7. 2).64 His extraordinary role as a religious ﬁgure links him in general to the divine, but the augurate gives him a function in the real world close to the Sibyl’s. Augustan auctoritas resembles in some respects the poets’ formulation of the relation of performance to writing. Performance and things associated with it, voice, immediacy, actuality, god, surpass writing, and yet they cannot do without it. Auctoritas needs formal structures to surpass and its representation needs the longevity promised by monuments. Games and largesse are too transient. Elsner (1996b with ﬁgs. 10 and 11) emphasizes the Res gestae’s situation in every known or extant copy on an elaborate physical monument, so that it paradoxically does not need to be read as a text to convey the message of power: the monument is enough. At Rome, its inscription in bronze on two square columns before the Mausoleum and under the statue of Augustus that crowned the Mausoleum supplements the dead man’s already evident power. The copy at Apollonia was inscribed on a base supporting a statue of Augustus surrounded by the imperial family, with Germanicus and Tiberius on the left, Livia and Drusus on the right. Again, personal power is pre-eminent. The inscription on a gateway or portico between the fora of Augustus and of Tiberius in Antioch helps deﬁne civic space according to the personal powers of a succession of Roman emperors. At Ankara, the placement of the Latin and Greek inscriptions on the temple of Augustus and

63

It would be worth exploring the connection of ruler cult to sovereignty in light of Schmitt (1985) 36: ‘All signiﬁcant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.’ 64 Both words derive from augeo, Benveniste (1969) ii. 150. Alternative ancient etymologies were from auis (bird), Pease (1963) 47, though Ernout–Meillet 88 have passages from Cicero, Ovid, and Val. Max. linking auctoritas, augur, augurium, augustus, and augere. They identify the original meaning of augur as ‘accroissement accorde´ par les dieux a` une entreprise’ and say that it designates ‘celui qui donne les pre´sages assurant l’accroissement d’une entreprise’ (89). Ennius makes a ﬁgura etymologica with augusto augurio, Ann. 155Sk, with note ad loc.

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Rome links the individual power of Augustus to the greater personiﬁed power of the state. If the monuments were sufﬁcient to convey such power, why the need for an inscription, and furthermore, why the need for Augustus to deﬁne his peculiar power as auctoritas? It was not an ofﬁce to be catalogued among others in an imperial funeral inscription and would disappear with the man at death, though its residue would rub off on those who could claim association with him. The Res gestae was published only on its author’s death, although drafts probably circulated beforehand.65 The text’s placement just outside the Mausoleum emphasizes its role in deﬁning Augustus after his death. The most obvious reason to mention auctoritas in writing is to lend permanence to the transient through recording and to enable the diffusion of its representation across the empire, as is attested by the extant fragments.66 Language identiﬁes the nature of the power much more precisely than spectacles, which could serve merely to enhance dignitas. Such are the reasons as Augustus probably conceived them. Derrida’s deconstruction of the difference between performative discourse and writing, however, invites us to ask: if the performative and writing both depend on iteration, why does it matter whether a performative type of power, as I argue auctoritas is, was inscribed or not? Yet it does matter. Iteration may be essential to all speech, but Derrida’s point that writing’s dissociation from context also pertains to performative discourse, indeed all speaking, does not sufﬁciently explain the different ways speech and writing are dissociated from the present, or in turn, embedded in it. The performative’s dissociation from the context that makes it felicitous turns on the fact that any particular felicitous utterance depends on convention, that is, the repetition of contexts, while writing’s dissociation from the present looks to a singular context. The citation or recontextualization in the two cases differs in being particular or general. Reading partially brings back a lost particular context, while the performative depends on a prior generalized context: the formula ‘I do’ at a wedding has force because it has been repeated countless times by others before. Although the social matrix that preserves conventions

65 Brunt and Moore (1967) 6; Santirocco (1995) 231; Lowrie (2002a) 238 n. 4. Ramage (1987) 13 takes the expression dating the document’s composition to Augustus’ seventy-sixth year (RG 35. 2) to exclude earlier drafts, though Gordon (1968) 133 n. 36 suggests the framework and bulk of composition may go back to 27–23 BCE and Nicolet (1991) 19 with 27 n. 12 dates a ﬁrst draft to 2 BCE, and gives a history of suggestions that this draft may have been posted in the Forum of Augustus (42; n. 51 pushes the ﬁrst draft’s date even further back). 66 The fragments’ location in a single province, Galatia, remains puzzling: Yavetz (1984) 29 n. 49.

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might endure, any particular instance will not. Writing allows the future reenactment of the lost particular, however partially. Augustus’ auctoritas works within the system of citation that is the performative. The code is based on his predecessors—Caesar, but also Cicero.67 But to record his unique contribution, he needs writing.68 One mark of the Augustan age is a high degree of self-consciousness about symbolic representation. The monuments, as Elsner emphasizes, themselves perpetuate auctoritas after their author’s death, but writing the word in an inscription outside Augustus’ tomb reinforces the message. Writing is the medium that surpasses the monument—it creates a ‘monumentum aere perennius’ (more lasting than bronze, Horace, Odes 3. 30. 1)—precisely because of its iterability. Copying the Res gestae inscription onto other monuments in Ankara, Antioch, and Apollonia is what preserved the lost original. Horace similarly goes to the ends of empire in the last stanzas of Odes 2. 20, implicitly through dissemination in writing. Augustus’ inscription of auctoritas onto bronze tablets exploits the monument in all its physical presence and transcends it by writing—making iterable—both about what passes away and on a perishable material.

RES GESTAE : E X E M P LU M AND EXEMPLAR The Res gestae depends on copying and iteration, citation and imitation, but also thematizes these aspects.69 The copy preserved at Ankara begins by differentiating itself from the original at Rome: Rerum gestarum diui Augusti, quibus orbem terrarum imperio populi Romani subiecit, et impensarum quas in rem publicam populumque Romanum fecit, incisarum in duabus aheneis pilis, quae sunt Romae positae, exemplar subiectum. (RG title) (A copy is set below of the accomplishments of Divine Augustus, by which he set the world below the empire of the Roman people, and of the expenses which he made for the Republic and the Roman people, cut on two square bronze pillars, which are placed at Rome.)

67 Caesarian and Ciceronian precedents for Augustan honours throughout Weinstock (1971). 68 North (1983) 169: ‘Perhaps the very greatest could survive without the help of writing— though even Augustus needed his Res Gestae as well as his Mausoleum; but written record and hope of survival were inseparable ideas for almost everybody.’ 69 Elsner (1996b) 35–6 emphasizes the importance of copying and transmission. For Augustus’ adherence to exempla, Connolly (2007) 244.

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Brunt and Moore (1967: 19) translate this sentence with quotation marks from ‘the accomplishments’ to the ‘Republic and the Roman people’. Of course, this inscription is a copy of the representation in writing of these accomplishments and expenses in the inscription back at Rome, and not of the accomplishments and expenses themselves, but the lack of such punctuation in the Latin allows for slippage. Furthermore, the genitive ‘incisarum’ (inscribed) modiﬁes no word for original, as in Brunt and Moore’s translation (‘the original is engraved’), but simply the accomplishments and expenses themselves. Similar slippage joins subjugating the world to Roman power and setting up this copy of the inscription. The same verb applies to both: subicere (literally, ‘to place under’, as in the inscription, or ﬁguratively, ‘to subject’, as in the world).70 These slippages invite investigation into the relation between representing medium and thing represented, all the more so since Augustus himself hands down ‘exempla imitanda posteris’ (examples to be imitated by posterity, RG 8. 5). The moral pattern is aided in its transmission by the physical copy, and Festus distinguishes the exemplum from the exemplar on the basis of their organs of perception, the former the mind, the latter the eyes.71 Like auctoritas, as discussed above, exemplum is a challenge for Greek and neither exemplum nor exemplar is translated. For ‘exemplar’ in the title, the Greek omits the word itself and turns the genitives of the accomplishments and expenses into nominative subjects: ŁÅæÅ ı ÆØ ªæçÅ Æ æØ ŒÆd øæÆd Æ F ŁF (the deeds and gifts of Augustus the god were written, translated, below). Further simpliﬁcation is that Augustus becomes a god tout court, rather than divinized, although Augustus himself used hemitheos (demigod) for divus of Caesar.72 A layer of mediation consistently drops out in Greek, indicating a speciﬁcally Roman concern. For exemplum, which occurs several times, the Greek takes two tacks. In neither case does it take advantage of Greek words for exemplum, whether paradeigma or the contemporary hypodeigma.73 The ﬁrst is to highlight the link to the ‘mos maiorum’ (customs of the ancestors), and translate it as ŁÅ. In the case of ‘maiorum nostrorum exemplo’ (by the example of our ancestors, RG 27. 2), the translation ŒÆ a æØÆ H ŁÅ (according to the ancestral customs of ours) makes sense, even though a Latin reader would miss the notion of moral pattern. Similarly, ‘exempla’ become ŁÅ in RG 8. 5: 70 Nicolet (1991) 17 comments on the ambiguity of subiecit, though not on the repetition in subiectum. 71 Festus 57 Lindsay: ‘exemplum est quod sequamur, aut uitemus. exemplar, ex quo simile faciamus. illud animo aestimatur, istud oculis conspicitur.’ 72 Serv. Ecl. 9. 46: ‘in Capitolio statuam super caput auream stellam habentem posuit: inscriptum in basi fuit “Caesari emitheo”.’ Nicolet (1991) 55 n. 58. 73 I thank Richard Janko for this information.

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legibus nouis me auctore latis multa exempla maiorum exolescentia iam ex nostro saeculo reduxi (With new laws carried by my authorship I brought back many examples of our ancestors already fading away from our age) N ÆªÆªg ŒÆ ı ı ººa XÅ H IæåÆø KŁH ŒÆ Æºı Æ ØøæŁø Å . (I introduced new laws and set right many of the ancient customs which were already dissolving.)

The lack of an equivalent word becomes more problematic when Augustus, continuing in the same sentence, speaks of himself: et ipse multarum rerum exempla imitanda posteris tradidi. (and I myself handed down examples of many things to be imitated by later people.) ŒÆd ÆP e ººH æÆª ø ÅÆ KÆı e E Ø Æ ÆæøŒÆ. (I myself handed myself down as an imitation of many things to later people.)

The Greek reﬂexive, ‘I handed myself down’, reveals much more decisively than the Latin that Augustus is handing down examples he himself set.74 The Greeks were less squeamish than the Romans of this period about recognizing absolute leaders, and the Latin is tactful in not stating overtly that Augustus sets himself up as a model. The translation mimema picks up ‘imitanda’ at the expense of ‘exemplum’. Mimema is the thing imitated, rather than imitating action (mimesis). Still, this word opens onto representation.75 Augustus has inscribed himself—ﬁguratively and literally–into history.76 Livy’s preface brings together imitation, example, and monument in a famous and contemporary sentence describing history’s utility:

74

Lowrie (2007b). Exemplum tradere (to hand down an example) means ‘to set an example’ at Sallust, Hist. 1. 55. 25. The reﬂexive pronoun in the Greek is bald in comparison to Augustus’ obliqueness. Gage´’s (1935) apparatus reports that Ramsay and von Premerstein (1927) added a me before tradidi. Although it is not clear what a me should mean even literally, the tendency in antiquity or modernity to add additional pronouns referring to Augustus reveals how strongly he presents himself here. For a later parallel at a lower social level, Lendon (1997) 245. 75 Historians refer this sentence to the marriage legislation, as it follows on the description of censorial activities. Salient to a literary critic is the actual expression, which contains no reference to the laws’ content, but lays out the structure of exemplarity, innovation, and imitation. 76 Kienast (1999) 211: we measure him against the heroes of the Republic, and yet he created new standards.

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hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in illustri posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu foedum exitu quod uites. (Livy, preface 10) (In this way, it is especially healthy and fruitful in thinking about things, for you to contemplate the instruction of every example placed on an illustrious monument; from there you may take what you may imitate for yourself and your state, from there what you may avoid, foul in its beginning and outcome both.)

By erecting a monument on which he presents himself as both saving exempla from the past and establishing new ones for imitation, Augustus does two things. He positions himself at a pivotal point between past and future: his recuperation of the past meets the projection of a similar future recuperation. He will submit to the same processes of imitation as he himself engages in, although his exceptional status makes imitation in toto impossible even for subsequent emperors. Furthermore, he erects an equivalent to Livy’s textual record: he makes these examples (‘exempla’) available for teaching (‘documenta’) by inscribing them on a monument (‘in illustri posita monumento’). For Augustus, the monument is literal, while Livy’s is metaphoric for a book, but the desire for self-perpetuation is the same. In Horace’s formulation, the erection of a monument (which he explicitly makes metaphorical by having it outlast bronze) goes hand in hand with immortality: ‘exegi monumentum aere perennius . . . non omnis moriar’ (I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze . . . I will not die in entirety, Odes 3. 30. 1, 6). The poetic immortality Horace accords himself is analogous to the perpetual imitation of his example Augustus posits in history. While Livy and Horace use the monument as an explicit metaphor for their own literary work, it is not clear the Res gestae is as self-conscious about its representing medium. It does not use monumentum of itself, and is either strangely blind to or canny about its status as an inscription. Augustus refers to his restoration of the Capitoline and Pompey’s theatre at great expense, then adds he did this without inscribing his name: ‘sine ulla inscriptione nominis mei’ (20. 1). Since he here inscribes his name, the inscription is displaced onto a different monument. Something similar occurs with the portico of Octavius: Augustus claims he retained the name of the man who erected the previous portico on the same site. ‘Octavius’ makes ‘Octavian’ apparent without naming. His claim in 20. 3 to have begun to rebuild a portico between the temples of Castor and Saturn ‘under the inscription of my sons’ name’ (‘sub titulo nominis ﬁliorum meorum’, 20. 3) also takes credit for an action under another’s name. This monument names all the places Augustus ostensibly went nameless. The Res gestae is a metamonument that lists all the other monuments Augustus built or restored (19–21). If a monument is meant to preserve

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over time the sponsor’s name in a movement complementary to that of the spectacle, which makes the name manifest in the transient moment, then the Res gestae does not quite turn out to be a monument like the ones it mentions. It preserves the memory both of the other monuments and of the spectacles sponsored by Augustus (22–3), that is, it reduplicates their memorializing function. Nicolet (1991: ch. 1) has emphasized the geographic conquests in the Res gestae and how it represents the spatial extension of empire. The representation furthermore extends Augustus’ own auctoritas in time: the lists of spectacles and monuments as well as the sentence where Augustus says he has handed down exempla to be imitated by posterity touch on the transient moment and its preservation through memory and re-enactment. One of the puzzles of the Res gestae is the appendix added as a supplement, in all likelihood only in the provinces.77 It covers only expenses, and not accomplishments, but the majority of the expenses mentioned are those devoted to buildings, both new and restored (RG app. 2–3), to games (explicitly called spectacula), and to public and private largesse. The list of monuments dominates. Although I do not pretend to account for this addition, it is interesting that a need is felt to return speciﬁcally to the Roman monuments the provincials could not see and the spectacles they missed. For some reason, mention of monuments or spectacles calling for direct experience tends to reduplicate itself, as if to compensate for the lack of sensory perception. When Ovid describes from exile triumphal processions he has not seen, he pulls the rug out from the necessity of direct observation (Ch. 11). When Augustus’ inscription goes abroad, it does something equivalent. Instead of Ovid’s dizzying self-consciousness, it offers a mise en abyme: the appendix reﬂects (imperfectly) the monuments in sections 19–21, which in turn reﬂect the city itself. The Res gestae achieves its particular representing effect by conjoining intense awareness of the present with a larger immortalizing function. The inscription’s focus on the present is manifest in a Catullan technique: the obscure reference presumably known to the intended audience, which projects a sense of historical reality beyond the text.78 But where Catullus names names and leaves out the circumstances of the dramatic situation, Augustus suppresses others’ names. We require knowledge of Roman history to ﬁll in the gaps. Although the primary goal may be to keep other names from competing with the inscription’s relentlessly ﬁrst-person author (Ramage 77

Brunt and Moore (1967) 81: ‘The purpose of the Appendix remains an enigma.’ Gage´ (1935) 9 has bibliography suggesting the appendix was added to the inscription at Rome. 78 Veyne (1976) 678 considers that obscurity is beside the point for poets, writers of political tracts, and monuments when the desire is to express rather than convey information.

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1987: 21–8), this suppression further creates collusion between the author and the readership. The reader would presumably be able to ﬁll in the gaps.79 Just in the ﬁrst paragraph, we would need to know the year Augustus was 19, who the factio was, what the circumstances of dominatio were (1. 1).80 Julius Caesar and his murder go unmentioned, and the later reference in 2 (‘qui parentem meum trucidauerunt’, those who murdered my father) assumes we all know, as we in fact do, their names. We must furthermore supply the other triumvirs’ names in 1. 4, and it is not at all clear why the Senate enjoined the ‘senatus consultum ultimum’ on the consuls and on Augustus as propraetor in 1. 3. The impression conveyed is one of immediacy: the obscurity felt by less-informed later readers is a cue to attribute to contemporaries a direct knowledge of events we must reconstruct. Augustus, however, may have actually been happy to let the details of this period become somewhat hazy and detailed knowledge among his contemporaries was not necessarily universal. The Res gestae further emphasizes its own present by referring twice to Augustus’ age during the document’s ostensible composition before its author’s death. During the inscription, Augustus uses the epistolary imperfect: consul fueram terdeciens, cum scribebam haec, et eram septimum et tricensimum tribuniciae potestatis. (4. 4) (I had been consul thirteen times, when I was writing these things, and was in the thirty-seventh year of tribunician power.)

Brunt and Moore comment: ‘This section was brought up to date on his death’ (1967 ad loc.).81 The statement is not literally true, or, even if it were, it would still have needed correction had Augustus lived longer. At the end of the document, however, the perfect closes the act of writing. cum scripsi haec annum agebam septuagensumum sextum. (35. 2) (When I wrote these things I was in my seventy-sixth year.)

In its original setting, Romans read these words before Augustus’ mausoleum. Given our increasingly disposable reading media, it is easy to forget the material texture of ancient scrolls, tablets, and inscriptions. Still, they convey an iterable content that cannot be located in a single embodied object. The references to writing within the Res gestae reveal the inscription as a copy. We 79

Kraft (1967) 202: ‘eine der u¨blichen, leicht zu durchschauenden Verschlu¨sselungen’. Horsfall (1980) 18 solves the question of the ﬁrst-person subject by suggesting the bronze tablets stood near Augustus’ epitaph on the Mausoleum; the preamble on the provincial copies tells us, but may differ from the original. 81 Gordon (1968) 133 n. 36: Augustus himself brought it up to date. 80

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hardly imagine Augustus physically carving the bronze, but composing on wax or giving dictation. Several layers of copying, written or oral, separate Augustus’ composition from the inscription. Suetonius records that the document was read aloud before the Senate (‘recitata’, Aug. 101. 1). The Galatian copies were also probably read aloud; up to seven different types of punctuation, including apices on (some) long vowels may have aided vocalization.82 Every reading creates another evanescent event, another enacted copy, if only in the mind of the reader. Augustus’ ﬁnal verb ‘scripsi’ is set in relation to his life (‘agebam’ plus his age), which ﬁxes the particular moment into the text. The author’s personal presence is subsumed by representation after death, but is brought back ideationally repeatedly with each reading. Writing and the monuments are all that is left, and with them the necessity of re-enactment through reading. Augustus’ last preserved written words share with his last spoken words a concern for mediation. The two together set writing with its permanent openness to re-enactment, against the theatre, love, and spectacle. Cassius Dio records two and Suetonius no fewer than three sets of ‘last words’ spoken by Augustus leading up to his death. Often quoted is the query whether he played his part well (e.g. Beacham 1999: 151). On his last day, asking repeatedly whether there was already a disturbance outside about him, he sought a mirror and ordered his hair to be combed and his slipping jaws to be set straight, and asked the friends he had admitted whether he seemed to them to have passed through the mime of life well, and added this conclusion: Since it has been entirely well played, give applause and all of you send me forth with joy. (Suetonius, Augustus 99. 1 (Dio 56. 30. 4 without quotation))

Augustus arranges his looks before the ﬁnal show, uses a theatrical metaphor, and ends by citing a clausula, a set of concluding words. The interest in the public reaction to his upcoming death goes hand in hand with the notion of life as a stage. His recognition of having played a role reveals the extent to which he views the processes of representation as constituting reality. He has not engaged in deception, but has rather worked within an artistic medium. Mime is the perfect genre, since in improvising from a text it sits on the cusp of writing and orality.

82 Rolfe (1922), especially 85 on Terentius Scaurus. For punctuation assisting oralization, Meyer (2004) 83 n. 44 in general and 89 n. 74 for the RG. I thank Brent Shaw for the observation about the apices.

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Less often commented upon are his other last words, which similarly focus on presence. He slipped into death while kissing his wife and asking her to remember their marriage. Catullus himself could ask for no better death.83 suddenly in kissing Livia and with these words (hac uoce) he failed: ‘Livia, live mindful of our marriage, and fare well!’ (Suetonius, Augustus 99. 1)

Kisses, voice, the ﬁnal address, memory, a wish for life, and for wellbeing— presence both social and sexual imbues this scene. The last ﬁnal words, however, evoke the ﬁnal element of presence: political pageantry. ‘All told, he showed one sign of a deranged mind before breathing out his soul, because suddenly afraid, he complained he was being snatched off by forty youths. This was also more a portent than a lessening of mind, since indeed the same number of praetorian soldiers carried him in state out into the public’ (Aug. 99. 2). The spectacle of the funeral goes hand in hand with Augustus’ closeness to god: Suetonius interprets his ﬁnal delirium as a portent rather than true derangement. Of course, since Augustus had already made and recorded his funeral arrangements (Suet. Aug. 101. 4), he knew exactly what came next. The upcoming spectacle depends on a script. The set of last words Dio records works in monumentality: ‘I received a Rome of clay and leave you one of stone (ºØŁ Å )’, 56. 30. 3. Dio explains that this was not a literal reference to the buildings but to the solidity of his rule, but clearly the metaphor’s effectiveness depends on its also carrying a literal truth. McEwen (2003: 298) notes that Dio’s ‘arche’ would be imperium in Latin, and draws the link between architecture and empire. The juxtaposition in the Res gestae of monuments and spectacle matches the way these modes of political representation worked in Augustus’ life as well as his death. What aligns this text with the literature of the age is the explicit awareness that these are the predominant modes of representation. This text, furthermore, tends to blend death and writing with the means of representation associated with presence, and some form of performativity with writing. The Res gestae not only foregrounds the means of self-perpetuation by recording the spectacles and monuments Augustus sponsored, but by locating Augustus’ power in auctoritas, itself conjoins the written with the performative. 83 For fantasies of sex and death in elegy, Grifﬁn (1985) ch. 7, with Nisbet’s (1987) 188 less than romantic commentary.

13 Occasion and Monument: The Ara Pacis RITUAL PERFORMANCE AND THE ELUSIVE OCCASION: THE ARA PACIS AUGUSTAE If the inscription of the Res gestae before Augustus’ Mausoleum aligns writing with death, the processions depicted on the Ara Pacis focus on ritual performance. The larger procession on the exterior precinct walls with its portrait features represents an actual occasion, or the idea of one, while the smaller, internal procession along the altar’s frieze shows a generalized, repeatable event: animals being led to sacriﬁce and a parade of Vestals.1 Only the singular event with its individual historical participants needs permanent commemoration and this monument enhances Augustan exemplarity with its focus on one family. But the depiction of both iterable ritual and unique occasion raises the question of their interrelation. We should heed Ovid who, in the exile poetry, makes it clear that artists can convincingly depict performances without witnessing them, or even without the performance ever having occurred (Ch. 11). I say this word of caution the better to focus on the representations themselves, independent of the actuality of what they represent or their participation in ritual.2 The complex on the Campus Martius consisting of the Mausoleum, ustrinum,3 Ara Pacis, and

1 Excellent pictures of the Ara Pacis are at <www.bluffton.edu/sullivanm/italy/rome/ arapacis/arapacis.html>, accessed 27 April 2009. 2 Elsner (1991) 50–1 cautions against the seduction of ‘naturalist’ interpretation and emphasizes viewing in (and out) of the altar’s sacriﬁcial context over against artist or patron intentions. 3 Strabo 5. 3. 8 attests that a wall of white marble surrounded the area of Augustus’ cremation, the ustrinum. The actual location is vague. He mentions it right after the Mausoleum and its gardens, but says it is in the middle of the plain, presumably the Campus Martius, it was surrounded by an iron fence, and the area within the wall was planted with black poplars. For the word’s meaning and Strabo, Boatwright (1985) 493, 495. No physical evidence has been found, Davies (2000) 182 n. 4.

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sundial,4 presents a layered and complementary relationship between performance and monument, ritual and inscription, even in the objects themselves; their cultic context enhances the layers. I do not aim to develop a new or complete interpretation of the Ara Pacis, but rather to tease out the intersection of monument and performance. We have seen the occasion evanesce in much Roman poetry of this period, most especially in Horace and Ovid. Similar interpretative problems dog the Ara Pacis. The ﬁrst is reference. Although scholars agree the altar refers to something, there is no consensus about what. It notoriously contains no explicit representation of peace; Weinstock (1960) even queries whether it is the Ara Pacis Augustae of Res gestae 12. 2. Furthermore, there is substantial disagreement about what event the processions on the north and south sides depict,5 the exact identity of many historical ﬁgures on the larger friezes, particularly the north,6 the precise iconography of the Tellus panel,7 and the relationship of the small procession on the altar to the large procession on the precinct walls.8 Nevertheless, there is signiﬁcant agreement that referentiality is in full operation as well as broad agreement about the general message of Augustan prosperity.9 Perhaps the idea of speciﬁc reference is more important than any recuperable speciﬁcity. 4

A ‘Plan of the Campus Martius’ is available at under ‘Maps and Plans’, accessed 27 April 2009; also Davies (2000) 138 ﬁg. 93. Buchner’s plan of the relation between the Mausoleum, the Horologium, and the Ara Pacis can be viewed at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis website, under ‘The Ara Pacis in the Field of Mars’. For the individual monuments, Richardson and LTUR ad loc. Davies (2000) 18–19: the topographical proximity and isolation from other buildings unites this complex, although the buildings were actually built over a period of twenty years. Favro (1993) 239–44 provides a verbal walking tour. 5 Torelli (1982), LTUR Pax Aug., ara 72, Bowersock (1990), Billows (1993). 6 Torelli (1982) 47–53 points out that only four ﬁgures have portrait features, Augustus, Agrippa, Sex. Appuleius (one of the ﬂamines), and an unidentiﬁed ﬁgure often called ‘Maecenas’. Weinstock (1960) 56, however, notes that Agrippa is wearing the wrong kind of shoes and there is no evidence he was a member of the Pontiﬁcal College. The identiﬁcation of the remaining ﬁgures depends on dynastic hierarchies. Modern remodelling, particularly on the north side, makes such identiﬁcations uncertain, Kleiner (1992) 92–3. 7 Zanker (1988) 172–6, Galinsky (1992b) and (1996) 148–9, Torelli (1982), LTUR Pax Aug., ara 71–2 argue for a composite and multivalent meaning to the panel, against De Grummond (1990), who prefers a univocal identiﬁcation of the ﬁgure with Pax. Feeney (2004) 12 sees allusion to the Ara Pacis at Ovid, Fasti 1. 671–722, where sacriﬁce to Ceres and Tellus is made on the altar of Pax. This would suggest contemporaries saw multiple references in the ﬁgure. 8 The small frieze is generally taken to correspond to the anniuersarium sacriﬁcium performed by magistrates, priests, and the Vestals of RG 12. 2, e.g. Kleiner (1992) 90. But whether there is a division between the unique and historical large procession and the annual, repeatable small one on the altar, Holliday (1990) 554, or the two are somehow conjoined through yearly sacriﬁcial re-enactment, Elsner (1991) 56, remains unresolved. Kellum (1994) 26–8 with n. 12. 9 Zanker (1988) 253: ‘Lack of narrative and an intellectualized symbolism lend classicistic imagery a remarkable “openness” of interpretation. Evoking a whole ﬁeld of associations was more important to the artist than iconographic precision. This is why some ﬁgures, like the Pax

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However much scholarship is needed to recover its message, the physical monument is immediate and still accessible. The massive precinct walls themselves convey stability. Their visual programme is dedicated to controlled movement. The regularity of the procession, with adults of the same height punctuated by the lower and variable heights of the children, coordinates with the regularity of the sprawling but symmetrical acanthus frieze and the meander pattern dividing the two registers.10 The impression is of a lasting society. The human ﬁgures are stately and classicizing, but more than anything, this effect of stability arises from the density of massed individuals. People crowd together in several registers. The children are well behaved and cling to their parents. There is no space for them to run around. The feeling of social control is overwhelming. The crowd functions symbolically as the Roman people,11 including its most prominent members both individually in portraits and symbolically through priestly garb, but also plenty of anonymous Romans: obscured faces in the background and even some backs of heads. Augustus emerges as primus inter pares. He does not stand out from the crowd and must be recognized by his portrait features, but he has a speciﬁc and unique role to play in the upcoming sacriﬁce. What was to be gained by regularity and regulation is evident: calm luxuriance dwells less in the processions than in the seductive vegetation, at eye level inside and outside, growing freely and bound into garlands. Undisturbed prosperity is also manifest in the folds highlighting the youthful breasts of the Tellus ﬁgure and the sacriﬁcial animals at her feet. The meander pattern in particular shows abstractly the formal control of dynamic energy.12 This regular movement complements the daily and annual progression of the shadow of the sundial Augustus dedicated to the Sun (‘soli donum dedit’ (he gave it to the Sun as a gift), CIL vi. 702) and set up in close proximity to the Ara Pacis within a year of the altar’s dedication in 9 bce.13

on the Ara Pacis, cannot be easily identiﬁed.’ De Grummond (1990) 665–6 summarizes the message of peace: Augustus returns from pacifying Gaul and Spain; fertility and prosperity inhabit the images of both vegetation and children; Roma sits triumphant with armour under her feet. Sauron (1994) 511–19 reads these monuments together with Augustan poetry as announcing a new Golden Age. 10 Kellum (1994) ﬁg. 14 ¼ Musei Capitolini Archivo Photograﬁco n. 9451. 11 For the Roman people as a crowd and the need for ‘crowd control’, Connolly (2006a) esp. 86–94. 12 Davies (2000) 60 links the meander pattern on the Ara Pacis with labyrinthine elements in the Mausoleum’s interior design. 13 The sundial’s inscription dates it to 10–9 bce; the Ara Pacis was dedicated on 30 January 9 bce, Livia’s birthday: sources in Elsner (1991) 50 n. 1. The obelisk with inscription can be viewed at the Horologium website: , accessed 13 May 2009.

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Whether there existed a speciﬁc relation of the sundial’s shadow to the Ara Pacis remains open, but the general association of time’s progression as depicted by the sundial with an altar representing unique and annual processions is undisputed.14 This movement offsets the stillness of the Mausoleum and ustrinum. Life, depicted through human families in procession, vegetation populated by animals,15 the Tellus panel, and the regular progression of the sun’s daily course,16 balances death. The burning of the emperor’s unique and irreplaceable body at the ustrinum and the solid mass of the Mausoleum housing his remains stand opposite the regular movement of the altar and sundial. I emphasize in Ch. 12 the temporally all-encompassing nature of the Res gestae, an inscription erected at death expressing Augustan auctoritas, a performed power that surpasses ﬁxed forms. The representations on the Ara Pacis, much as they embrace life, similarly encompass death and monumental timelessness. Over against the movement of the exterior, the interior walls are remarkably still. The bucrania strongly emphasize the death attendant on animal sacriﬁce (Elsner 1991: 58–60). Paterae (libation bowls) hang impossibly arrested in the air between the skulls and above the garlands.17 The festoons contain summer and autumn vegetation and fruits, an unreal combination that suspends temporal particularity in a fruitful and eternal simultaneity where symbols of plenty prevail.18 The marble versions of wooden slabs translate the transient into the permanent and evoke the original temporary and vanished structure, or at least create the idea of such.19 The palmettes separating lower and upper registers offer another vegetative motif in a ﬁxed decorative convention, more reminiscent of other stone versions than any living plant. Even the ribbons around the bucrania ﬂap in the air so symmetrically that their decorative movement appears frozen. But movement returns in the processions on the altar itself. The result is not so much a dichotomy between life and death, movement and stillness, as an alternation 14

Buchner (1982) remains standard on the sundial, though Schu¨tz’s (1990) calculations have challenged his theory that the sundial cast its shadow on the Ara Pacis on Augustus’ birthday. Torelli (1982), LTUR Pax Aug., ara 70 offers a balanced view. 15 Kellum (1994) emphasizes the rich meanings associated with the animals. 16 The Domitianic restoration of the sundial’s pavement markings indicate not only the zodiac, but seasonal changes, such as the cessation of the Etesian winds; for detailed pictures of the letters, Buchner (1982) tables 134–41 (pp. 96–103). 17 Simon (1967) 13 thinks they are to be imagined as hooked from the central boss (omphalos), but this requires a rationalistic conception of the space. 18 Simon (1967) 13–14 identiﬁes the plants. She associates their season with Augustus’ return in late summer, but that does not account for the autumn fruits. De Grummond (1990) 672–4 links the garlands with the vegetation on the exterior, where spring (ﬂowers, baby birds) and winter (reeds, other winter images) are represented, so that peace pertains to all seasons. She also explores the seasonal comprehensiveness of the altar in reference to constellations. 19 Welin (1939) 509–10; Torelli (1982) 30; Du Quesnay (1995) 138.

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wherein each includes the other. If the exterior of the monument conveys historicity, and the interior death and timelessness, the overall impression is of a stillness transcending time. Like the Res gestae, an inscription in stone conveying life and performative power, the Ara Pacis also arrests life to transmit it. What remains of the procession on the altar itself conjoins death in the cattle being led to sacriﬁce with repeatable time, through sacriﬁce’s ritual iterability.20 The procession of Vestals and lictors foregrounds the ofﬁcial nature of the sacriﬁce, and their generic rather than individual status emphasizes ritual re-enactment. This links the annual sacriﬁce with the other sacriﬁces depicted on the altar, particularly the Aeneas relief, where the hero is about to slaughter a sow. Elsner comments (1991: 55): ‘The present is validated by being the enactment of the “original” past, the past is meaningful because it is relived, re-presented, in the present.’ He sets the ritual at the altar in relation to the ritual depicted thereon: ‘Ritual is action through time while the image is the static synchronic commentary and prescription for this action; although when it partakes in the rite (by being a decoration of the Ara Pacis), it may be symbolically “activated”.’ The Ara Pacis engages multiple temporalities: a mythic dimension in the Aeneas panel, a ritual dimension where the rites depicted on the small frieze correspond to the repeatable sacriﬁce performed every year on the altar itself, but furthermore, a singular originating act in the procession on the outside walls.21 Here, the representation adds the element of particular, historical time without there necessarily having been any occasion to which these processions refer. There are incongruities either with a procession at the altar’s constitutio, or with its dedication, since for the former, Drusus was still in Gaul on 4 July 13 bce, Agrippa was probably also not back from Syria, and furthermore, the ofﬁce of ﬂamen Dialis was not ﬁlled until 11 bce.22 For the latter, Agrippa died in 12 bce, and so was not present for the altar’s dedication in 9 bce, although his is one of the recognizable portraits. Bowersock (1990) argues for a procession honouring the declaration of Augustus as pontifex maximus on 6 March 12 bce, when all the people depicted on the altar were actually in the city, but Billows (1993) gives equally persuasive arguments for a supplicatio celebrating the emperor’s return to the city, the reason Augustus himself gives for the Senate’s decision to honour him with the altar: 20

Feeney (2004) 11 emphasizes iteration as a distinctive feature of sacriﬁce; Ru¨pke (2004) 25. Ho¨lscher (1993) shows how myth was moulded to history from early Greek to Augustan times and emphasizes the Augustan reduction of mythic elements to a few ideological themes (Aeneas and Romulus). 22 Bowersock (1990) 391, following Weinstock (1960) 55–6, argues therefore that the procession cannot be for the constitutio. 21

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In the consulship of Tiberius Nero and Publius Quintilius, when I returned to Rome from Spain and Gaul, with affairs in those provinces accomplished prosperously, the Senate decided that an altar of the Augustan peace should be consecrated for my return on the campus Martius, on which it ordered that the magistrates and priests and Vestal virgins make a yearly sacriﬁce. (Res gestae 12. 2)

Must the representation of the procession depict a historical event? Horace, Odes 3. 14. 5, when he calls Livia ‘unico gaudens mulier marito’ (wife rejoicing in her single husband), suggests that in art symbolic representation may overwhelm literal truth, since Augustus was her second husband.23 Furthermore, we should wonder whether contemporary audiences had any more privileged a view than ourselves. I suspect that soon after the altar’s dedication, people asked each other what the procession’s occasion was, and some gave answers: ‘pars causas et res et nomina quaeret, j pars referet, quamuis nouerit illa parum’ (some will ask the causes and things and names, and some will answer, though they know these things too little, Ovid, Tr. 4. 2. 25–6). Ovid’s point holds equally well for a represented procession as for a real one. Even if the occasion could be securely identiﬁed, it would have been as open to distortion in antiquity as it is now. The occasion also dissipates through the failure to depict the processions’ end points. Processions are teleological. They reach a place where an event, such as a sacriﬁce, should happen. The processions on the external walls are shown in process, rather than at their terminus. These images resemble many Horatian odes where the poem’s utterance corresponds to sympotic preparations rather than the party itself. There is a sense of anticipation for an event that is always deferred. Although many in the procession look backwards, as if in conversation while waiting, the preponderant movement on each side is forwards, as to some undepicted ritual space. But the ritual space need not be depicted because we as viewers are not so much already in it—these processions are outside the precinct. Rather, the processions invite us in, at least partially. Not many people could actually ﬁt inside, but the space, open and closed, creates a sense both of hierarchy and of inclusion. The ofﬁcients entered to conduct sacriﬁce, but the people outside could still view the rites. The unique and past sacriﬁce yields to participatory re-enactment in the present. The monument is material, but also abstract. It integrates myth and history through style (i.e. portrait features of easily recognizable ﬁgures such as Augustus and Agrippa) and known iconography (Aeneas, Rome). The layering of myth, history, and ritual responds to the other monuments in the complex. Davies (2000: 124) suggests that the proximity of the sundial to the 23

NR ad loc. evade the problem by translating ‘incomparable’.

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Mausoleum lends Augustus immortality: the sundial incorporates ‘the dimension of time into the tomb’s design: the sundial stands as icon for the passage of time, through which Augustus’s memory will survive’. The Ara Pacis also sets Augustus’ historical time within a larger temporal framework by looking both backwards to myth and forwards to ritual. Augustus’ prominent position towards the front of the procession, but not at its very head, and his implication in both past and future recalls Res gestae 8. 5, where he claims to have brought dying exempla back from the past and handed exempla to be imitated down to future generations. The images of Aeneas and the Lupercal scene promote the city while folding Augustus into the national myths. He emerges repeatedly as the focal point.24 Augustus’ description of the Senate’s authorization of the altar makes it clear they had a speciﬁc pragmatic aim: to welcome him home. This welcome shares many aspects with a triumph,25 and indeed games were held on his return.26 In addition, transient celebration is subsumed into a more permanent honour: the monument itself persists through time and the annual sacriﬁce allows for a ritual in perpetuity. The monument compensates for the triumph—a singular spectacular event—that did not occur by representing a procession, whether or not such a procession in fact took place. It has become commonplace to emphasize the ability of inscriptions to communicate even with the illiterate: their power exceeds their referential capacity.27 A similar argument pertains to visual images.28 They can convey clear meanings whether or not their references are recuperable. This power is a kind of performativity: the monument’s pragmatic function can succeed independent of reference.

24 Ho¨lscher (1983) 80–1: Augustus gradually reduced his mythic palette to Aeneas and Romulus to consolidate his image. The coalescence of his personal genealogy with the state myth grounds his authority (‘versteinerte Autorita¨t’, 82). 25 Torelli (1982) 28–30, discussed in greater detail below. Billows (1993) 84 rightly objects to the depiction on the large friezes as triumphal. 26 Weinstock (1960) 48 n. 50: CIL vi. 386 ¼ ILS 88 ¼ Ehrenberg–Jones 36: ‘P. Quinctilius Sex. F. Varus . . . cos. ludos uotiuos pro reditu imp. Caesaris diui f. Augusti Ioui optimo maximo fecit cum T. Claudio Nerone conlega ex s.c.’ Du Quesnay (1995) 142–3. 27 e.g. Veyne (1976) 676–8, Elsner (1996b) 39, 52; Gu¨ven (1998) 39–40; S. Butler (2002) 101; Meyer (2004) 100–1. Harris (1983) and (1989) 175–284 argues against widespread literacy. Rosalind Thomas (1992) 164–5 weighs the symbolic against the functional value of documents, taking the distinctions from Beard (1985) and Williamson (1987). 28 Favro (1993) 231: ‘in a society in which few could read, visual imagery functioned as a literal text legible to all’. She, however, admits that a full understanding of the visual programme required elite education, 248–9, and also acknowledges the role of writing, such as in the Res gestae in communicating the message to those who could read, 247.

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Writing, Performance, and Politics THE P RAGMAT ICS OF M ONUMENTS: T H E M AU S O L E UM C O M P L E X But when I noticed that you had care not only of the common life of all and the constitution of the republic, but also about the advantage of public buildings, in order that the state be increased (aucta) by you not only with territory, but also that the majesty of empire have outstanding examples of public buildings (ut maiestas imperii publicorum aediﬁciorum egregias haberet auctoritates), I did not think I should in the ﬁrst instance omit publishing for you these things about these matters . . . (Vitruvius, Arch. 1, Pref. 2)29

How can a building offer auctoritas? Does the quality reside in it? Or does the building lend it to the builder? The builder is not, of course, the contractor, or the architect, but the auctor who takes legal responsibility for the project. The architect too has authority, but this is restricted to competence within his ﬁeld (Vitruvius 1. 1. 2). OLD translates auctoritas in the passage above as ‘(of works of art, etc.) impressiveness, dignity, authority; pl. impressive examples’ (8c), but McEwen’s translation better captures the spirit: ‘so public buildings were to provide eminent guarantees for the majesty of empire’ (2003: 35).30 She picks up on auctor as a legal guarantor and makes the buildings’ contribution to empire active, instead of mere possession (‘haberet’). ‘Auctoritates in the plural were, speciﬁcally, duly witnessed written records or “guarantees” that transcribed ofﬁcial resolutions.’ They do not so much represent power as ‘make it a matter of public record’ (ibid. 36). Vitruvius’ remark about Augustus’ building programme comes in the context of the emperor’s attention to the general wellbeing of all and the constitution of the state (Putnam 1986: 335). The pun on aucta and auctoritas shows that the buildings lend ‘increase’ to the state;31 they serve a pragmatic function even if they themselves are inert.32

29

M. H. Morgan (1909) provides a commentary on the preface. Rowland–Howe–Dewar 21 translate ‘the majesty of the Empire had found conspicuous proof in its public works’. M. H. Morgan (1909) 158 ‘that the greatness of its [the State’s] power might likewise be attended with distinguished authority in its public buildings’; for auctoritas, he argues against ‘model’ for ‘inﬂuence’ and of buildings suggests that it implies their dignity or imposing effect. 31 Rowland–Howe–Dewar 2 translate aucta ‘august’. 32 On the semiotics of monuments in relation to documents in the Republic, S. Butler (2002) 98–9. McEwen (2003) 130–54 emphasizes Vitruvius’ conception of architecture as ‘service’, a pragmatic function. Ru¨pke (2004) considers the performativity of monuments, speciﬁcally calendars (34), and the ritual character of inscriptions (35–9). 30

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Vitruvius speciﬁes the role of buildings in handing the memory of accomplishments down to posterity since they persist over time.33 ‘Because I noticed that you had built and were building many things, and in the remaining time would have care for public and private buildings in order that memories be handed down to posterity (ut posteris memoriae traderentur) in proportion to [your] accomplishments (rerum gestarum), I have written down restricted instructions’ (Vitruvius pref. 3). The conﬂuence of key words and ideas from Augustus’ Res gestae is remarkable: auctoritas, res gestae, exemplarity, handing memory down to posterity, the importance of monuments.34 So far, we have seen how monumentum ﬁgures texts in Latin, but here the metaphor goes backwards as monuments serve the same function as texts. McEwen shows that Vitruvius was preoccupied with writing, his own medium for turning architecture into an intellectual discipline contributing to empire (2003: on this passage 32–8, 279–80). He makes numerous analogies: between himself and the emperor, the discipline of architecture and empire, architecture and writing (2003: ch. 1 and 2). Buildings ‘localize imperium and make it spatial’ and also ‘localize the achievements of Imperator Caesar’ (ibid. 279). The preface to book 9 especially valorizes writing over against the transient beneﬁts of athletic victories. Writing’s value is universal: it lies in the transmission of ideas, which beneﬁts not only the author’s fellow citizens, but all nations. Writing also provides auctoritas to authors: their authority is greater in their ﬁeld of inquiry than those actually present discussing it (‘maiores habent, quam praesentium sunt, auctoritates omnes’, pref. 9. 17). This conception reveals why Augustus was so concerned to pass on his auctoritas in writing. A text, in Vitruvius’ conception, brings back not just disembodied ideas: it evokes an image of the author himself (pref. 9. 16–17). Varro literalized this idea by placing portraits of authors as well as their texts in the Palatine library. As with texts, buildings acquire their memorializing function by being read, but their act of transmission is hardly passive.35 Vitruvius lends an active engagement to architecture in the sense both of buildings and of an intellectual discipline.

33 For Vitruvius’ understanding of the exemplary meaning of Augustus’ building programme, Chaplin (2000) 174. 34 The de architectura is dated to the early years of the principate, Fleury pp. xvi–xxiv; Millar (1973) 66 n. 105. Ramage (1987) 63: ‘the most complete statement of the concept of empire outside the Res gestae.’ 35 The metaphor of reading monuments is ancient: Vergil, Aen. 6. 34 ‘perlegerent’. Ovid, Fasti 5. 568 has ‘lecto Caesare’ of Mars’ viewing of the temple of Mars Ultor, but what he reads is an inscription, ‘Augusto praetextum nomine templum’ (the temple with the text of Augustus’ name woven on its front, 567); otherwise he views (‘conspicere’, ‘perspicere’, ‘uidere’, ‘spectare’ 5. 545–77). For Mars as reader of intertexts and viewer of monuments, Barchiesi (2002c) esp. 8.

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The pragmatic function of monuments and their signifying modes overlap considerably with literature. If the external friezes of the Ara Pacis recall a foundational event, they do not bring the unique event back any more than an invitation poem in a collection still invites, if it ever did. Increase of empire and commemoration are functions Vitruvius identiﬁes and that literature shares. Ho¨lscher argues that Roman art uses formal typologies in a semantic system to convey speciﬁc ideas and makes the analogy with language. On the Ara Pacis, a classicizing style in the north and south friezes conveys Augustus’ auctoritas and the dignitas of the state’s leading personalities, while the unique historical event is marked by the realism of Hellenistic drapery and portrait features in some of the participants (Ho¨lscher 2004: 77–8). The composition of the procession on the altar follows the ‘unpretentious koine’ of Hellenistic Italy: a paratactic arrangement of anonymous ﬁgures without overlap corresponds to the need for formal ﬂawlessness in the ceremony and thereby conveys the ritual element of the annual procession (ibid. 79). As with literature, ideas are communicated through form—pietas in the classical pose of the sacriﬁcing Aeneas, the lowly social status of his attendant in the Hellenistic style of realism (ibid. 81). Another similarity to written texts is that a monument has an original context of production whose inevitable transience makes way for recontextualization (Barchiesi 2002c: 3–4). In the complex at the northern end of the Campus Martius, Augustus’ Mausoleum shows both aspects. It was built, as argued by Kraft (1967), not as a kingly grave without precedent in Rome, but as a speciﬁc counter to Antony’s will—which Octavian opened illegally in the events leading up to Actium—wherein he stated his intention to be buried in Alexandria.36 With Actium as the original building context, the Mausoleum makes a statement by its massive presence: the centre of power will remain in Rome and not migrate to the east. But the monarchical and dynastic implications of this huge construction cannot be denied by the time its builder occupied it, even if they were not the impetus for its building.37 Marcellus, 36

Kraft (1967) argues it was begun shortly after Octavian’s forceful publication of Antony’s will and largely ﬁnished by 28 bce, the Suetonian date (‘id opus inter Flaminiam uiam ripamque Tiberis sexto suo consulatu exstruxerat circumiectasque siluas et ambulationes in usum populi iam tum publicarat’, Aug. 100. 4). Kraft takes the pluperfect as indicating the Mausoleum was already largely built, though, as Dio’s imperfect ﬁTŒE (53. 30. 5) suggests, it was still not completed in 23 bce when Marcellus was buried in it (191). While most scholars date the monument’s inception and completion slightly later, the contrast with Antony remains persuasive. Davies (2000) 50. 37 North (1983) 169: Augustus was ‘making a clear political statement about his new position, and that which his successors would inherit’. For change in meaning over time, Hesberg, LTUR Maus. Aug. 236; for openness to ‘multiple readings’, Favro (1993) 248. Arce (1988) 72 identiﬁes the monument’s multiple aspects: a political idea in the contrast to Antony,

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Octavia, Agrippa, Lucius, Gaius, and possibly the elder Drusus had already been buried there with great pageantry before Augustus himself.38 The choice of name in itself suggests analogies with eastern kingships.39 Buildings develop different meanings over time. Walking through the Mausoleum’s gardens as pleasure grounds (Strabo 5. 3. 8), a Roman would surely recall Augustus, whether still alive or dead, but not with the same focus as when the building was used for ritual performance. With each funeral of members of the JulioClaudian family, starting with Marcellus in 23 bce (Dio 53. 30. 5), the building’s dynastic signiﬁcance increased. Even when not used for burial, the Mausoleum’s very form evokes the ritual context for which it was built. Davies (2000: 124–6) links its circular design and the annular corridors with the circling of Augustus’ bier during his funeral (Dio 56. 42. 2). She cites similar evidence for other imperial funerals, and also for subsequent ritual reenactment of such circumambulation of funeral monuments. Although the Mausoleum was unlikely to be entered except during ritual activity, when priests and family members would engage in funeral offerings, its circular form recalls the funeral performance as well as the rites occurring periodically within the building. During Augustus’ actual funeral, attention was focused on the ustrinum. This was where Augustus was cremated, while the Mausoleum carried numerous other functions: memorial, outward sign of the grandeur of empire, of dynastic continuity. According to Dio, after the ceremonies the masses departed and Livia remained on the cremation site for ﬁve days along with the most prominent equestrians, and only then gathered up the bones and placed them in the monument, which he signiﬁcantly calls a ÅE (‘memorial’, 56. 42. 4), instead of some other word for tomb. The actual burial was less of a public occasion than the cremation,40 but the Mausoleum’s imposing presence was still visible on the Campus Martius during the earlier events—all knew it was the body’s eventual destination. In the relation between ustrinum and Mausoleum, the singular action is again set in relation to a more permanent, memorializing conception of time. Even before Augustus’ death, the Mausoleum functioned as memorial by anticipating the emperor’s death, just as he was able to predict his transmission of exempla when writing

the Hellenistic idea of a dynastic ruler, a religious idea in the gardens reminiscent of hero cult, and an association with triumph. 38 Beacham (1999) 149–50; Coarelli (1997) Appendix 1; Macciocca, LTUR Maus. Aug. 237–9. 39 Suet. Aug. 100. 4 guarantees this name for Latin as well as Greek, though Tacitus says tumulus (Ann. 3. 4. 1). Hesberg, LTUR Maus. Aug. 234. 40 Suetonius, Aug. 100. 4, does not record the delay, but adds a ceremonial element: barefoot equestrians in loose tunics carried the remains to the Mausoleum.

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the Res gestae. The ustrinum, however, memorializes the singular event of his funeral. The interplay of monument and performance is particularly striking in Augustus’ funeral, since the strong triumphal elements in the ceremony play off similar, but more discreet resonances in all the monuments at the northern end of the Campus Martius.41 After his triple triumph, Augustus did not himself triumph again, but preferred to establish more lasting monuments conveying a message of peace and stability. The celebratory medium changed with the emphasis on the transmission of empire to posterity. Ovid’s discussion of the Ara Pacis makes this dynamic clear. He makes the cessation of triumphs a sign of peace (‘dum desint hostes, desit quoque causa triumphi’ (provided enemies are lacking, let the cause of a triumph also be lacking), F. 1. 713) and tells the priests rather to ask the gods to perpetuate the house with the peace it provides (‘utque domus, quae praestat eam, cum pace perennet j . . . rogate deos’, 1. 721–2). Elements formerly conveyed through the spectacle are displaced into more permanent media. According to Dio (56. 34), at Augustus’ funeral, one wax image of his body was clothed in triumphal dress and visible on a couch of ivory and gold covered with purple and gold cloth. The body itself lay in a cofﬁn underneath. Two other images, one golden, one of unspeciﬁed material, but borne on a triumphal chariot, were also carried in the procession. The reduplication of the images highlights the self-consciousness of the symbolism. Behind these came not only the imagines (wax images) of his ancestors—with the exception of Caesar, who had become a god—but also those of other prominent Romans starting with Romulus and including Pompey the Great. After eulogies by Drusus at the Rostra and by Tiberius at the Julian Rostra,42 the procession passed through the triumphal gates and culminated on the Campus Martius, where the circumambulation took place (56. 42). Tacitus adds that it was proposed the procession carry tituli (placards) of the laws Augustus had passed, along with the names of peoples conquered by him (Ann. 1. 8. 3). As in actual triumphs, writing on placards supplements the procession’s purely visual aspects. This re-enactment of a triumphal procession should be understood in the larger context of the sublimation of triumphal elements in the sundial, Ara Pacis, and Mausoleum itself—all backdrop to the funeral. The inscription on

41 Versnel (1970) 122–3 identiﬁes Augustus’ funeral as the source of triumphal elements in imperial funerals and discusses Augustus’ passage through the porta triumphalis (132). This was unique to Augustus, Arce (1988) 43. Arce thinks imperial funerals should not be reduced to triumphs; their wider purpose is to prepare for the emperor’s consecratio (34). 42 Arce (1988) 43: the rostra uetera were beside the sepulchrum Romuli, with clear symbolism.

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the sundial commemorates the victory over Egypt at Actium, although it was erected over twenty years later (CIL vi. 702): imp. caesar divi f. avgvstvs pontifex maximvs imp. xii cos. xi trib. pot. xiv aegvpto in potestatem popvli romani redacta soli donvm dedit (The emperor Augustus, son of the divinized, pontifex maximus, imperator twelve times, consul eleven, with tribunician power fourteen, gave this gift to the sun when Egypt had been brought into the power of the Roman people.)

The obelisk memorializes Augustus’ triumph over Egypt, celebrated in the triple triumph in 29 bce. A monument records a performance after the fact and gives body to what was evanescent. This monument and this inscription, however, literalize the iteration entailed in viewing and re-viewing monuments: not only is the same inscription written on two sides of the base, but it is repeated identically, again on two sides, in the base of another Augustan obelisk originally set up in the Circus Maximus (CIL vi. 701). One was located near other lasting monuments, the Mausoleum and Ara Pacis, the other in a place devoted to the performance of games. Like the double performance of the Carmen saeculare, the double inscription of the acta of the ludi saeculares, the double wax images of Augustus at his funeral, the repetition of this inscription proliferates the medium along with the message.43 As a further triumphal element, Davies argues that the Mausoleum also served as a tropaeum (2000: 61–7; Arce 1988: 69). She attributes Egyptianizing motifs in its construction to Augustus’ victory over Egypt.44 The monument denotes the victory in the trophy’s form and also symbolically brings back Egyptian art as spoils. She calls it a ‘visual res gestae’ complementing the inscription later set up before it (64). The building would certainly have been in progress by the time of the triple triumph. The Ara Pacis rather displaces a triumph through the declaration not of victory, but of peace. Torelli (1982: 28) notices parallels between the Ara Pacis, and the Ara Fortunae Reducis, which Augustus mentions in the previous chapter (Res gestae 11), both of which were voted by the senate after he

43

Inscriptions were frequently copied, Ando (2000) 111–13. Iteration is a pervasive aspect of Roman culture. 44 Also Sauron (1994) 511 n. 125, 517. De Rachewiltz and Partini (1999) survey Egyptian religion and religious objects in the Roman Empire.

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returned victorious from war. He notes the altar’s placement exactly one mile from the pomerial line at the city limit, the point of transition from military to domestic imperium (command) where returning soldiers laid down their arms. ‘The altar is surely connected with the concept of peace, as the arrival of Augustus is marked with the deposition of the magistrates’ warlike signs and power and the assumption of the imperium domi’ (ibid. 29–30).45 Augustus’ refusal of triumphal honours after the massive celebrations in the wake of Actium should be understood in the context of other honours such as the Ara Pacis that touched on various elements of victory without the actual procession, dress, and other pomp that marked the triumph. In acknowledging success in ‘rebus . . . prospere gestis’ (RG 12. 2), the emphasis shifts from war to peace and the means of commemoration shifts from triumph to monument. The individual moment of historical importance is subsumed into a more general and lasting statement about prosperity and the triumph as an institution is shown to be obsolete. The generalizing aspect of this monumental complex pertains not only to time, but to its range of geographical references, which are similarly universalizing and triumphant. Egypt is manifest in the obelisk of the sundial, the smaller obelisks put up to either side of the Mausoleum’s entrance,46 and the Mausoleum’s very design. Balancing the eastern references are the western successes in Spain and Gaul, the occasion for the Senate’s dedication of the Ara Pacis. Nicolet emphasizes the geographic extensiveness of the Res gestae: chs. 25–33 recording Augustus’ military and diplomatic coups are a virtual map of the known world in catalogue form (1991: ch. 1). The range of scripts in the complex similarly covers the world: hieroglyphics on the sundial’s obelisk, Greek letters in its grid,47 Roman letters in the Res gestae and the inscription on the sundial. The importance of the ustrinum as a monument should be situated in the dynamic interaction between performance and monument, present enactment and persistence through time because it was the site of Augustus’ turning into a god. The emperor’s passage from the transient to the eternal was a transition point between the particular and the universal.48 Of course, 45

Also LTUR Pax Aug., ara 70; Dupont (1985) 415; Galinsky (1996) 142, 146; Du Quesnay (1995) 141, 161. 46 Ammianus Marcellinus 17. 4. 16. If erected later, they reinforced the message of the sundial obelisk. 47 Favro (1993) 243 sees the Roman use of Greek science in terms of conquest. Hieroglyphics and Greek letters can be viewed at: , accessed 13 May 2009. 48 Although most scholars situate Augustus’ ustrinum to the east of his Mausoleum (Richardson 404), Jolivet (1988) and LTUR ustrinum Aug. 97 (accepted by Coarelli 1997: 599–601) thinks

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the Senate had to make divinization ofﬁcial through consecratio, but the event itself was properly—or improperly—witnessed and recorded. Suetonius records that a man of praetorian rank swore he saw an image of the cremated emperor ascending to heaven (Aug. 100. 4). Dio adds his name, that Livia paid him, and more particularly that he was to model the story on those told of Proculus and Romulus (56. 46. 2; on Proculus, Livy 1. 16. 5).49 The funeral’s symbolism anticipated such a story: an eagle was released from the lit pyre ‘as if to bear his soul to heaven’ (56. 42. 3).50 Dio’s attitude is clearly cynical, but this act is semiotic rather than literal. Herewith Augustus symbolically became a god. The architectural complex at the north end of the Campus Martius not only puts together a consistent and rich programme of Augustan preoccupations—from triumph to peace, the bargain of social control for prosperity— but replays many of the issues revolving around representation and its problematics found in the poets. Writing and performance, monument and ritual, are reciprocally implicated. The present moment stands against the eternal, the particular the general, the historical the divine. What characterizes the poetry of this age beyond a preoccupation with systems of signiﬁcation, however, is a high degree of self-consciousness. Do the monuments share this? The complex as a whole displays a strong degree of self-reﬂection and self-reference.51 The obelisks before the Mausoleum reﬂect the sundial. The Res gestae, erected before the Mausoleum, refers to the Ara Pacis, which lies nearby. To see the object and its mention in writing, all you needed was to turn your head. One monument memorializes another through writing. You could read about the annual rites while witnessing them occur. This fusion of the performative with writing is characteristic of Augustan representation.

that the monument must have been located further to the south with the other imperial ustrina, and lines it up with the Mausoleum through the axis of the sundial obelisk. If he is correct, the sundial would mediate between two monuments, one housing the emperor’s material remains, the other indicating his apotheosis. Bickerman (1973) 17–18 insists on the difference between the state cult of diuus Augustus, who had gone to heaven, and the private, domestic cult of which Livia was the priestess. He cites Velleius on Augustus (17 n. 4): ‘corpus eius humanis honoribus, numen diuinis honoratum’ (2. 124. 3). 49 For consecratio, Bickerman (1973). The bureaucratic nature of the Augustan method of a witness’s deposition to the Senate allowed intellectuals such as Dio to ‘scorn the humbug on the Campus Martius’. This led to the rite of the double funeral in the second and third centuries, where the waxen image’s lack of material traces accorded better with apotheosis (19–24). 50 Davies (2000) 10, with parallels: ‘Cremation often led to apotheosis.’ Arce (1988) 140 treats the importance of funeral pyres for divinization: they were used at a later date for imperial efﬁgies even when the body was inhumed. Some doubt the historicity of the release of the eagle, but Arce understands the symbolism in Dio’s account (134–7). 51 Alfo¨ldy (1991) 307–9: a further degree of inscriptional self-awareness is that both beginning and end of the Res gestae refer to still other inscriptions.

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Part IV Reading and the Law

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14 Literature and the Law: Horace, Sermones 2. 1 I have argued throughout that the Romans had an intense interest in how the forms of their discourses related to their efﬁcacy. My ﬁnal section, Part IV, examines several poems that set the law and literature in competition as powerful discourses. The law has recently received attention in Roman literary studies,1 but remains underappreciated. Earlier scholarship regularly condemns as boorish passages referring directly to legal technicalities, for example, the notorious stanza on the marriage legislation in Horace’s Carmen saeculare (17–20). Elite Romans were conversant with the law, but familiarity is only one aspect of its importance.2 Roman literature is interested in the law as a locus of power. Furthermore, literature and the law share media: a conjunction of writing and performance. Poetry and the law are both carmen and both concerned with reading. I have several times mentioned the etymological link between reading (legere) and the law (lex). Magdelain (1978: 18–21) argues that lex derives from legere because the law was read out in the Senate before ratiﬁcation by oath.3 Laws were subsequently inscribed on tablets, whose relation to orality is complex.4 Elizabeth Meyer (2004: 97–101) describes the interaction between writing, reading out, and posting necessary for the law’s ratiﬁcation as a ‘unitary act’.5 Reading pertains to the law not merely to consult a static text, though this 1

e.g. Ducos (1994), Tatum (1998), McGinn (2001). Crook (1967) 8: ‘the talkers of law were also the readers and quite often the writers of literature—for such reasons, legal talk and terminology seem rather more frequent and more at home in Roman literature than in ours’. McGinn (2001) 81. Peachin (2001a) 120 suggests the jurists saw themselves as engaged in similar intellectual pursuits as other writers, including what we call literature. 3 Maltby, esp. Varro, LL 6. 66; Cic., Leg. 1. 19; Isid., Orig. 2. 10. 1: ‘lex a legendo uocata, quia scripta est’. 4 Meyer (2004) 97–101, 86 n. 61 describes how laws on tablets were used in court, the need for inscription and to read them out. S. Butler (2002) emphasizes the importance of documents and textual production in the late Republic and resists the recent trend to valorize oral culture. 5 Especially useful for me are Meyer’s treatment of the so-called carmen-style of archaic tablet writing (2004), ch. 3; ‘Recitation from Tablets’, ch. 4; ‘Tablets and Efﬁcacy’, ch. 5. Beard (1991) 48 also analyses the performativity of writing for votive tablets: ‘Inscribed votive texts enacted that crucial conversion of an occasional sacriﬁce into a permanent relationship’ (her emphasis). 2

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surely happened. Rather, it is performative: ritual reading brings the law into effect and ritual reading brings it to bear on particular cases (86 n. 61). The performativity of reading extends beyond the law’s inception and remains an active component afterwards. The jurists’ job was to interpret the law: in addition to counselling clients, they literally read the text aloud (83). Oralization and interpretation go hand in hand. As with literature, the formal modes of the law’s presentation as performance and writing are intimately linked with its authority. Meyer explores the inscription of the law as a reiﬁcation of its power. The physical embodiment of documents in writing, speciﬁcally on tablets, lends writing an authority Meyer argues it did not have among the Greeks (ibid. ch. 1). Roman tablets do not merely record an agreement but are ‘dispositive’: the document is the legal act itself (2, 18–19, 297). The complex ceremonial, entailing writing and being read out, that leads to their ratiﬁcation creates a new entity. The ‘magic’ of effective discourse is not merely oral at Rome: it resides in the object.6 I submit, however, that numerous traces in the forms of their use, both oral and written, show some dissatisfaction with a written document’s performativity. Romans were highly aware of the difference between a script and performative discourse outside literature. Meyer lists many things that were read aloud—recited—in Roman society, including rosters of people, senatus consulta, treaties, wills, the Twelve Tables, accounts (86).7 She focuses on the performative power of the word read out from tablets, which are a special locus of powerful language. In a will, a single recitation enacts its contents. However, the law and prayers are recited in repeated ritual contexts (75–7, 83, 86 n. 61) and are consequently more like literature. Differences in transmission, however, reveal a heightened awareness of performativity and its limitations. When words needed exact reproduction in ritual contexts, the method was not for the magistrate or other relevant ofﬁcial to read from the tablet, but rather for another, often a priest, to read off the tablet ﬁrst and then for the magistrate to repeat them, a process called praeire uerbis, to ‘go ﬁrst in words’ (75–7; Valette-Cagnac 1997: ch. 5). This resembles our marriage ceremony where bride and groom repeat verbatim vows dictated by the 6

Ducos (1994) 84 cites Gaius, Inst. 4. 11 for the ancient juridical tradition’s attachment to uerba and its relevance to Horace’s insistence on speaking the law at Serm. 2. 6. 27 and Epist. 2. 2. 18–19. Horsfall (2003) 25 n. 29 collects bibliography on ‘oral elements in Roman legal procedures’. For the persistence of legal orality into the early modern period and difﬁculties in the transition to printing, Goodrich (1990) ch. 4, ‘Legal Writing Systems’ (particularly 116–17); the moderns continued to regulate carmina, still associated with magic and other false discourses (140–1). 7 Beard (1987) 12 uses ‘pageant’ and ‘performance’ for living through the Roman calendar’s ritual organization of time. Ru¨pke (2004) 32–4.

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ofﬁciant. The need for the two utterances says something important about performative discourse and its relation to writing. The reading out of the prayer or vow is the rehearsal that prepares for the magistrate’s utterance. Why can the magistrate not simply read the words aloud himself and achieve the same effect? If exactness only were at issue, he could practise in advance. Reading twice contributes to the ceremonial, but, furthermore, the magistrate’s authority renders the words, in J. L. Austin’s terminology, felicitous (Ch. 3 above). Reading out a prayer or a law announces its contents, which are already binding in themselves (Pierre 2008), but does not enact the contents in the moment. For this, the utterance needs to be spoken by the appropriate authority. Furthermore, the developed form of the tablets reiﬁes a division between the dispositive document and writing as record. As time progressed, tablets needed more and more seals and strings to safeguard against forgery, and eventually developed into a form whereby the document itself resided within the sealed tablets, and a copy was inscribed on the exterior for reference (Meyer 2004: ch. 6).8 The Romans would not normally break the seals, but inspect the tablets from the outside (162). The dispositive document was protected within, but another allowed people to verify its contents. These demarcations between performative and non-performative discourse, both oral and written, reveal a high degree of consciousness about the conditions for efﬁcacious language. Maxime Pierre (2008) takes a different tack on the medium of the law. He analyses it as carmen, a Latin word, he argues, that implies neither orality nor writing, prose or poetry per se, but denotes a kind of discourse that carries its own authority within itself without requiring external authorization.9 His section on the law as carmen (Part II) examines resistance to it by orators such as Cicero because of its incapacity for recontextualization. The orator’s authority is needed to judge whether the law should be applicable in any particular case. The contest is between different kinds of effective discourse, an authority residing in a ﬁxed text or one that performs in context. The orator possesses judgement, while the law is inert, however authoritative. 8

The medium of inscriptions (bronze, marble) helped convey legitimacy, Ando (2000) 97; for processes of authentication, their irregularity, and the physical description of the original in the copy (87–90). 9 Pierre (2008) sees this aspect as unifying the various uses of carmen in Latin, from birdsong to the law, from the early period through Augustan Rome, when the late appropriation of the word for ‘poetry’ represents a shift. He emphasizes that poetic authorization comes not from the author; rather a poem’s auctor is the legal guarantor or the patron. Florence Dupont commented at Pierre’s dissertation defence that poets win authority from their poems after composing them rather than vice versa.

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Depending on the kind of performativity, it is a quality that inhabits different discourses in different contexts and media. All forms of carmina were formulaic, ritualized, and potent uses of language;10 this is why the law occupies the same realm as magical spells and prayer (Meyer 2004: 194) and why the Augustan poets regularized carmen as a word for poetry (Pierre 2008: pt. 5). But just as there are chinks in the authority of written legal language, it was also possible to query the efﬁcaciousness of carmina. Meyer cites Pliny the Elder (297). polleantne aliquid uerba et incantamenta carminum . . . uiritim sapientissimi cuiusque respuit ﬁdes, in uniuersum uero omnibus horis credit uita non sentit. [He mentions prayers at sacriﬁces, for getting favourable omens, the formulas of magistrates’ prayers, devotions, the prayer dictated by the master of the college of quindecemuiri, which] si quis legat, profecto uim carminum fateatur . . . si semel recipiatur ea ratio et deos preces aliquas exaudire aut ullis moueri uerbis, conﬁtendum sit de tota coniectatione. (Pliny 28. 10–13) ([It is uncertain whether] words and the chanting of songs have any power . . . individually the belief of the wisest rejects [the idea], but as a whole at all times people believe it and do not think about it . . . [which] if one should read, one would certainly confess the force of the songs . . . if once that thought should be accepted that the gods do hear some prayers or are moved by any words, then one would have to confess about the whole conjecture.)

Conﬂict between the beliefs of the wise and the naive subtends Augustan poetry: it appropriates the power of other potent discourses while harbouring doubts about its own abilities. It does this with the ironic consciousness of the wise that sometimes the naive have a deeper understanding of things. Spells and curses are the alternative discourses through which Horace’s Epodes explores its own power (Ch. 4); prayers and prophecy occupied Vergil throughout his career and Horace in his lyric (Chs. 4, 5, and 6). The law is the remaining aspect of carmen that will be at issue in satire and elegy (Chs. 14, 15, and 16). The law’s political dimension responds to poetry’s preoccupations in this period. On the one hand, the law will always win in the struggle the poets depict between it and literature because the law has obvious worldly effects: the poets conceive of it as performative and binding, while literature effects things indirectly. On the other hand, literature has staying power because of poetic immortality, should one achieve it. Literature, furthermore, has a force deriving from its inability to enact explicit performatives. Its powers are 10 Rives (2002) charts changes in views about the efﬁcacity of carmina from the Twelve Tables to the imperial period and notes that Pliny, in the passage quoted above, ‘never explicitly answers his own question of whether words have power’ (289).

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representation and critique; it enhances the symbolic capital of the poet and anyone praised therein; it disseminates cultural ideologies and thereby has a profound inﬂuence on identity formation. It just cannot bring about what it directly represents. In each poem analysed in Part IV, Horace, Serm. 2. 1, Propertius’ Cornelia elegy (4. 11),11 and Ovid’s epistle to Augustus (Tr. 2), the poet or speaker faces judgement. For Horace, the libel law compromises satire’s task of censure. Cornelia’s exemplary life will be judged in the underworld.12 Ovid has already suffered the judgement of the princeps who exiled him. The efﬁcacy of each speaker’s discourse is a pressing concern since it aims to avert or reduce punishment. But who decides? Judgement requires a judge, and Horace presents Caesar as the ultimate arbiter after Actium. Ovid responds to Augustus’ decisive exercise of power by setting literature’s performativity and legitimacy over against the law. He had already as early as the Amores contrasted the transience of leges and the forum (‘mortale . . . opus’ (a mortal work)) with poetic immortality (1. 15. 1–7). His youthful professional choice in deﬁance of his father becomes in his maturity a question of his very life. The law and literature compete in Sermones 2. 1 and Tristia 2 because these poems are interested in language’s pragmatic power. Who authors it? Who interprets it? Can literature be effective like the law? If so, does authority derive from the author or the reader? If it is the reader who makes literature effective, then the author may evade responsibility, and Ovid could be exculpated for one alleged reason for his exile, writing the Ars amatoria, a didactic poem on seduction. These questions touch on issues of exemplarity, imitation, and representation in relation to authorial control. Augustus is credited with strong authorial control in the legal sphere and shown to be naive about who controls literature. Ovid relocates control from the author to the reader. This gesture sets freedom—willingly accorded his own readers— against Augustus’ totalizing control. One effect of framing the pragmatics of literature in terms of reception is that any distinction between performance poetry and that destined for the library breaks down. In Propertius, speaking and writing join together in a funeral monument to honour a virtuous woman. Where Horace’s Epistle to Augustus makes an aesthetic distinction between spectacle and literature that will last through writing, Ovid’s extended meditation on the legitimacy of literature in relation to power exercises a levelling force. All literature, indeed all cultural production, of whatever worth and whatever modality, ends up 11 Janan (2001) 146–63 emphasizes the law in this poem, which she interprets in Lacanian terms as ‘all social constraints, not just those embodied in formal legal codes’ (147). 12 Janan (2001) 210 n. 2 covers the scholarship on Cornelia’s judgement.

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paradoxically both impotent before the law, and powerful in transmitting representations. Where Ovid’s power surpasses that of Augustus is in his willingness to accord freedom of interpretation to posterity. Does the avowed medium of a particular poem then not matter? Far from it. The language of mediality is itself one means by which the Augustan poets work out their various theories of literary performativity and representation.

HORSE LAW AND CAESAR IN HORACE, SERMONES 2. 1 Sermones 2 opens with a dialogue between Horace himself and the famous jurist Trebatius Testa that stages a dialectic between satire and the law.13 Both are domains of speciﬁcally Roman creativity;14 both judge human weakness. At stake is the relative power of rival discourses vis-a`-vis contemporary politics. Caesar, soon to become Augustus, has recently consolidated power and put an end to civil war. This has changed both what a satirist can say openly and the validity of the law. Horace presents himself as impotent before raw political power; whatever power he wins for himself emerges ironically from that very position, which is one of critique. Horatian satire constructs its generic history as a lost paradise of free speech and empowerment.15 Along with ‘eruditio’ (learning), ‘acerbitas’ (acidity), ‘abunde salis’ (a huge amount of salt), what Quintilian praises in Horace’s satiric predecessor Lucilius is ‘libertas’ (10. 1. 94), speciﬁcally freedom of speech.16 Rather than lampooning others’ failings, Horace turns the satiric lens on himself, his social position, and his own thwarted satiric libertas. In his hands, 13 The conversation occurs not just among different people, but the institutions they represent. McGinn (2001) 99: the poem is a ‘dialogue between poet and autocrat’. 14 Cloud (1989) 65: while Horace teaches us nothing new about Roman law, the presence of the law ‘enhances the Romanness of the Satires’. Ducos (1994) 79: Horace’s position as scriba quaestorius may have taught him about the law. She underlines Roman quotidian contact with law, though does not devalue it in Horace as a mere reﬂection of ordinary life: the juridical world constitutes for Horace ‘un objet de re´ﬂexion’ (88–9). 15 Freudenburg (2001) understands Roman satire after Lucilius as a struggle with the impossibility of recapturing the genre’s foundational libertas (2–4). 16 Gruen (1992) ch. 7, ‘Lucilius and the Contemporary Scene’, largely explores the truth behind ancient representations of Lucilius as having freedom of speech. He argues that Lucilius is his own master and does not pander to his friend Scipio Aemilianus, but that the apparent intent to ‘institute legal proceedings’ must be taken with a large pinch of salt (310–11). For the difference between Lucilian freedom to name names, which sets the generic norm, and Horace’s discomfort arising from his historical situation, LaFleur (1981) 1790–4; for Republican citation of Lucilius as justiﬁcation for libertas (1804–5).

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satire turns on the satirist for not living up to the genre.17 But the satirist’s position is universal under Caesar. Witty self-exemplarity compensates for the turn to self-awareness and the ostensible failure to achieve his generic telos.

The Law of Genre Sermones 2. 1 frames a literary-critical conundrum in terms of the law, which carves out a double bind.18 The joke is the intersection between the libel law, which would regulate against excessive bite (‘ultra j legem tendere’ (go beyond the law), 1–2), and the law of the genre, which demands it and high quality verse as well (2–4). To obey the one, he would have to violate the other. The literary-critical question raises the expectation that Horace would consult another author or critic.19 Instead, he goes to a lawyer—and not just any old trial lawyer, but the great C. Trebatius Testa.20 By the poem’s end, Trebatius, who up to that point advises about everything except the law, makes a legal pronouncement to keep Horace from ‘ignorance of the holy laws’ (‘sanctarum inscitia legum’, 2. 1. 81). si mala condiderit in quem quis carmina, ius est iudiciumque. (2.1.82–3) (If someone authors bad songs on someone, law and judgement exist.)

17 For genre being about genre, Derrida (1980); Lowrie (1997) 37; Barchiesi (2000) 167, discussed in Lowrie (2005a) 36–9. Freudenburg (2001) 2: satire is open to becoming whatever the satirist wants. 18 Fraenkel (1957) 148; LaFleur (1981) 1813; on the lex operis, Muecke (1995) 206. She calls the bind a ‘false dilemma’; the discussion about satire and the law is a ‘metaphorical way of raising the problem of the satirist’s relationship with his audience’ (211–12). 19 Freudenburg (1993) 163–4 sees Horace’s poetic solution as the ‘golden mean’ between criticisms of two different intellectual groups; also McGinn (2001) 96. Freudenburg takes his interpretation towards power at (2001) ch. 1. 20 For C. Trebatius Testa, Bauman (1985) 123–6. Cicero’s letters are our primary source for Trebatius (Ad Fam. 7. 5–22), who appears learned and interested in literature and rhetoric. Cicero quotes to him from Ennius (7. 6. 1. 8–9, 12–13, 2. 4; 7. 13. 2. 5–6), Terence (7. 10. 4. 8), and some unidentiﬁed authors (7. 16. 1; 7. 15. 1. 1), and dedicates to him his version of Aristotle’s Topics (7. 19. 6; Top. 1–5). He is socially well connected (the early letters in Cicero’s correspondence establish a relationship between Trebatius and Julius Caesar in Gaul), and appreciative of legal puns, Shackleton Bailey at letter 27 = 7. 6. 2. 1. Cicero quotes from legal formulas or edicts (7. 12. 2. 3–4; 7. 13. 2. 8–9; 7. 21. 3–4), and discusses cases hypothetical and real with him (7. 22, 7. 23). There is much jocularity between them: Cicero teases that he will be the most experienced in the laws of a Gallic village (7. 16. 3. 7–8), that if he had gone to Britain, he would be the most learned man on the island (7. 10. 1. 3–5). He also is famous for his love of swimming and of drink, though he shrank from braving the Ocean (7. 10. 2. 8–9).

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He quotes the libel law from the Twelve Tables, once recited by Roman schoolboys,21 now fragmentary, and imitates their archaic legal style, heavy on indeﬁnite pronouns:22 ‘qui malum carmen incantassit . . . occentassit carmen cond’ (whoever casts a magic spell . . . sings in enmity composes a song, 8. 1).23 Cicero reveals, with approval, that the offence was capital (Rep. 4. 10. 12). Horace makes it appear that the prohibition against defamation spurred Roman satire’s failure to target living men or women of any importance. We should view this representation with suspicion, however. Gruen notes no instances of capital punishment are recorded for libel cases: the Roman tragedian Accius won a suit against an actor who had defamed him on stage, and Lucilius himself lost a similar suit. Lucilius never got into legal trouble despite satirizing important living contemporaries, and Gruen concludes that during the end of the second century bce at least, ‘Roman society respected the independence of writers.’24 Momigliano argues from the libel case against Naevius that ‘the prohibition against slander served the interests of the patricians particularly well’ and restricts the respect for independence to that of the ‘governing class’.25 Several comments seem tailored to Sermones 2. 1: ‘written works remained comparatively free until Octavian prepared to become Augustus’ and ‘satire began to be effectively repressed only in the period between Caesar and Augustus’.26 Horace blames the law for a situation more likely due to the transition between Republic and Empire. His narrative 21

Cicero, Leg. 2. 59; Meyer (2004) 71. For style in the Twelve Tables and the modernization of their language, Crawford (1996) 2. 571, Meyer (2004) 49, 61–2. 23 Cited from Crawford (1996) ii. 677–9 (40, ‘Twelve Tables’), who takes the law against spells and against libel as the same, against Brink (1982) 196–9 and others, who think Horace either conﬂated two laws, or displaced libel onto spells, Cloud (1989) 67, bibliography at Muecke ad loc. Rives (2002) 282 argues convincingly that Horace conﬂated not two laws, but ‘two clauses of a single law’. The law of the Twelve Tables prohibited a broad category of potent speech he calls ‘malediction’ (286). Magic and libel are terms that were ‘points on the same spectrum’ at the laws’ composition but later diverged (285). Ernout 119 at tabula 8.a provides a less reconstructed version of the law. Horace was much preoccupied with this law, and Brink’s discussion is on its citation at Epist. 2. 1. 152–4. For occentare and other forms of aggressive ‘song’, Rives (2002) 283–4, Graf (2005) 196–9. For this law’s relevance to the ‘poetics of aggression’, Wray (2001) 117–23. 24 Gruen (1992) 295–6. Given the Romans’ reputed touchiness about honour, Crook (1976) 136–7 ﬁnds surprising the paucity of attested cases prosecuting iniuria, as well as the great wealth of defamation in political and forensic oratory. The fears preventing the poets of the Principate from satirizing living persons are difﬁcult to explain legally. He suggests alternative ways of responding to defamation such as the injurious response and the semi-legal wager, sponsione prouocare; upper-class Romans may have not been ‘over-fussy’ about their dignity. 25 Momigliano (1942) 122, 124. Elite immunity, Tatum (1998) 696. 26 Momigliano (1942) 123, 120. LaFleur (1981) 1824–5 cites Asinius Pollio’s quip about the invective Caesar wrote against him before Actium (Preface). Graf (2005) 201. 22

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rather heightens poetry’s power and danger. If his own satire lacks the bite of Archilochus’ iambics, which, as the story goes, drove his targets of abuse to hang themselves, if his satire does not savage the powers that be like Aristophanes,27 if he is not living up to his Greek invective precursors,28 it is the fault of the restrictive libel law. But why legislate, if poetry did not have real world consequences?29 The double meaning of carmen as ‘spell’ and ‘poem’ is a fantasm of poetic potency Horace can only aspire to. Horace wriggles out of the law’s double bind by elaborating on the pun between the two kinds of law: ‘esto, si quis mala; sed bona si quis iudice condiderit laudatus Caesare? si quis opprobriis dignum latrauerit integer ipse?’ ‘soluentur risu tabulae, tu missus abibis.’ (2. 1. 83–6) (Horace: ‘So be it, if someone authors bad songs; but if someone authors good ones, praised by Caesar as the judge? If someone without harm to himself barks at another worthy of reproach?’ Trebatius: ‘The case [tablets] will be dissolved with laughter; you will get off the charge.’)

Aesthetically good poetry trumps legally bad poetry, that is, defamation. Since this move would not hold in a court of law,30 Horace changes the court, to that of approval, and there Caesar sets, if not the law, at least the standards. Horace does, however, represent standard legal procedure.31 For a civil case, a praetor oversaw a preliminary hearing (in iure) to attempt a settlement, to determine the case’s language and the relevant laws. What followed was the judgement (iudicium), which could be before a jury, but was often, as here, before a single judge (iudex unus).32 27 Fraenkel (1957) 147: it is unlikely Horace was criticized for his invectives in Sermones 1 because he ‘had hardly attacked persons of any consequence’. 28 For Horace’s identiﬁcation of Archilochus as a founding invective predecessor in Epist. 1. 19, Ch. 4. Wray (2001) 167–86 examines Archilochus as a code model for Roman invective, particularly for Catullus. For comedy in the Sermones, see the opening lines of S. 1. 4. LaFleur (1981) 1794–5; Lyne (1995) 26 n. 19. Muecke (2005) 35: neither iambic nor comedy determines the genre, as Lucilius added new textual elements. 29 For the actual danger of prosecution in Horace’s age, Muecke (1995) 211. 30 McGinn (2001) 97 calls the poem’s end an ‘out-of-court settlement’. 31 Leeman (1982): Horace follows legal rhetorical procedure. Trebatius’ various pronouncements go step by step over the status of the hypothetical case until the status translationis, which is the case’s dismissal. The steps are highly relevant to Trebatius as the dedicatee of Cicero’s Topics. Although Cicero presents Trebatius as ignorant of rhetoric when he dedicated the book, he would have learned by reading it. Against Leeman, Muecke (1995) 214–15. 32 Crook (1967) ‘in iure’ (74); ‘iudicium’ (77); ‘iudex unus’ (78); Muecke at 2. 1. 82–3; Frier (1996) 959 distinguishes between iurisdictio and iudicatio and assigns the greatest role in these trials to the jurist, the role Trebatius would occupy (960). The iudex was usually a layman, so

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Although the joke about the law’s being both literary expectations, the ‘law of the genre’, and the law that can punish may appear trivial,33 it sets up the dialectic Horace establishes between literature and the law. The stakes are nothing less than literature’s worldly power. For Horace, satire and the law are incompatible, but nevertheless intimately connected.34 Their relationship has the structure of a pun.35 Puns necessarily conjoin incompatible meanings. Neither operates at exactly the same time as the other; meaning vacillates between the alternatives and creates not an empty void, but rather the negotiated space of ﬁguration.36 The pun on the two kinds of law frames the poem at either end and the middle develops various strands binding literature and law in a mutually uncomfortable relationship.

Modes of Speech The media of satire and the law are more similar than we might expect. Both join writing to utterance, and the dynamic between their modes of represenHorace jokingly puts Caesar in that position to override Trebatius. For Caesar’s special status, Tatum (1998) 693; Wallace-Hadrill (1982). 33 Oliensis (1998) calls the advice Horace requests ‘mock-legal’ (42) and has Trebatius respond ‘(mock-)solemnly’ (45). As Horace himself avers, ‘quamquam ridentem dicere uerum j quid uetat?’ (Though what keeps someone from telling the truth while laughing? S. 1. 1. 24–5). Tatum (1998), McGinn (2001), and Freudenburg (2001) 74 take the law seriously. Muecke (1995) 204–7 argues that satire and the law do not interpenetrate each other as discourses. Those analysing their interrelation need to acknowledge this point. Muecke 99: this poem ‘seems far less of a serious statement of literary theory than the other two literary satires (1. 4, 1. 10)’. 34 Muecke 100: ‘Trebatius argues from the perspective of the law and Horace replies in the terms of poetics . . . the satire dramatises the independence of literature and the law as “genres” or verbal systems. Neither of the interlocutors can “talk to” the other.’ Muecke (1995) argues that Horace does not create a ‘poetics of the law’, but rather sets up poetry and the law as incompatibles. For other such views, see Tatum (1998) 689. Posner (1988) 15 explains that the law depicted in literature is not ‘lawyer’s law’, but ‘is often just a metaphor for something else that is the primary concern of author and reader’. Unfortunately, he lists not a single work of Roman literature (6–8). Horace addresses larger issues in the philosophy of law in Sermones 2. l, which also turns on a minute knowledge of ‘lawyer’s law’. 35 Goodrich (2005) 311 takes puns as a fundamental satiric structure back to Quintilian on ambiguity (6. 3. 87). Quintilian praises these sorts of jokes when they are ‘lenia’ (gentle) and ‘boni stomachi’ (of good humour) (6. 3. 93), exactly the sort Horace makes. Ducos (1994) 85 considers law as an area of ambiguity. 36 My suggestion about the ﬁgural structure of puns is similar to Conte (1986) 36 on intertextuality: ‘In the art of allusion, as in every rhetorical ﬁgure, the poetry lies in the simultaneous presence of two different realities that try to indicate a single reality. The single reality can perhaps never be deﬁned directly, but it is speciﬁc and is known to the poet. The poetry lies in the area carved out between the letter and the sense. It exists by refusing to be only one or the other. This still unknown area, this tension between meanings can be described only by referring to the two known limits that demarcate it.’

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tation mirrors their contestation. Which is more potent, writing or utterance? Which better achieves pragmatic effects, literature or the law?37 The effects at issue revolve around judgement. The law judges innocence or guilt, but poetry decides between praise and blame. The latter spawns literary-critical jockeying between Horace and Trebatius. While the jurist has more knowledge of literature and criticism than we might expect, Horace has deeper control of the law than has been recognized.38 In both realms, social position enables or disables freedom of speech. Caesar emerges as the ultimate arbiter of both. Limits are a consistent preoccupation: how far satire can go in causing harm, how far the law can reach. Trebatius’ ﬁrst response reveals the stakes: ‘quiescas’ (shut up, 2. 1. 5). Trebatius calls the entire genre into question. Horace, of course, cannot be deterred and persists in his bumbling satiric persona (‘ne faciam, inquis, j omnino uersus?’ (you say I shouldn’t write verses at all?), 2. 1. 5–6). Trebatius: ‘aio’ (I say so, 2. 1. 6).39 The contrast between the poet’s long-winded questions and Trebatius’ single-word answers underscores the lawyer’s authority over the very ability to speak: he tells another to be quiet and emphasizes his own speech’s potency with ‘aio’. Horace ignores the legal authority, shifts tactics, and claims he would not sleep. Trebatius deploys legal diction40 in giving the advice of another authoritative profession, medicine,41 (swim and have a drink before bedtime), but ﬁnally concedes to the question and addresses how Horace should write. At least he grants him the right to do so. ‘aut, si tantus amor scribendi te rapit, aude Caesaris inuicti res dicere, multa laborum praemia laturus.’ (2. 1. 10–12) (‘Or, if such a love of writing takes you, dare to speak the affairs of unconquered Caesar—you’ll win many prizes for your efforts.’) 37

Habinek (2005a) uses play—one of Roman satire’s self-representations—as a way into the dynamic between literary power and powerlessness. Satire ‘never succeeds’ (182): it cannot change the political order. Still, it performs an important social function, namely to substitute and prepare for (177–9, 188) the adoption of one’s social role. Play is essentially educative in allowing for a safe space from which to emerge into reality. 38 Literary critics and lawyers were less specialized as intellectual pursuits than today. Crook (1967) 8. McGinn (2001) 81. Peachin (2001a) 120. 39 Tatum (1998) 691. For the legal tone and characteristic terseness of this utterance, Bauman (1985) 132; Muecke ad loc.; Ducos (1994) 87 cites archaic procedure and the formulas of the legis actiones where the accuser said ‘hunc ego hominem . . . meum esse aio’ (I declare this man mine, Gaius, Inst. 1. 119). 40 Future imperatives (‘transnanto’, let them swim, 8; ‘habento’, let them have, 9); indeﬁnite pronouns, Muecke ad loc.; Ducos (1994) 87. 41 Cicero Ad Fam. 7. 20. 3 implies Trebatius knew something about medicine—or at least overeating.

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Beyond telling Horace to go jump in the Tiber, Trebatius again undermines satire as a genre, though differently from before.42 As an alternative, he suggests praise poetry, invective’s traditional rival. Trebatius grudgingly grants Horace the right to write, but only within a narrow sphere excluding satire. The lawyer tries to shut the genre down. Authoritative speech, the lawyer’s ‘aio’, apparently contrasts with the poet’s compromised writing, ‘amor scribendi’. Trebatius furthermore directs Horace towards a more authoritative mode of representation, that he tell of Caesar’s deeds: ‘dicere’ is a strong word of poetic utterance in accord with praise poetry’s seriousness (Habinek 1998b: 71–3). This kind of poetry would match Trebatius’ utterance in authority. However, we have already seen Horace resist Trebatius’ advice and Trebatius concede—his authority does not withstand resistance. When Horace disavows praise poetry in a recusatio,43 Trebatius yields once again: stick with satire, but give compliments from within the genre. ‘Attamen et iustum poteras et scribere fortem, Scipiadam ut sapiens Lucilius.’ (2. 1. 16–17) (‘Nevertheless you could write of him as just and brave, as wise Lucilius wrote of the scion of Scipio.’)

Lucilius and ‘scribere’, satire’s standard mode of composition, show Trebatius has provisionally accepted the genre, but with his epic-style patronymic for Scipio he clings to the high style, however bombastic.44 Horace’s refusal reveals the stakes as decisively and indirectly as Trebatius’ advice to keep quiet. The poet claims to want to write praise poetry, but to lack the strength: ‘cupidum . . . uires j deﬁciunt’ (2. 1. 12–13). This is the last thing Horace wanted to do and the allegation of poetic deﬁciency is belied, as often in the recusatio, by a brilliant sample, here a description of British and Parthian campaigns. The terms again foreground power. Horace alleges his satire has been accused of lacking nerve (2. 1. 2)—how could he possibly attempt a higher genre? He limits the conversation to aesthetic power, as if that were the only question. Caesar’s name, however, has broken through and with it come considerations of power surpassing aesthetics. What kind of speech can Horace embrace? Both Trebatius and Horace present Lucilius as a model, the former as a praise (16–17) and the latter an invective poet (62–70). But where Lucilius could skewer the ‘primores populi’ 42

For Trebatius’ resistance to the genre, Anderson (1984) 37. Fraenkel (1957) 149; Lyne (1995) 26 n.19, 35–6; Muecke (1995) 215–16; generally Davis (1991) passim. 44 The patronymic belongs to epic; this one is Ennian, Muecke ad loc. 43

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(ﬁrst men of the people, 69), Trebatius accuses Horace of attacking nobodies (22)—better Caesar with praise than inconsequentials with blame.45 Horace’s instance of the poetry he refuses reveals more than his formal ability, should he choose to write it. A difference emerges again between potent and impotent language. When Horace asks Trebatius for advice, he uses one compound of scribere: ‘quid faciam? praescribe’ (What should I do? Prescribe, 5).46 He introduces his high-style praise poetry with another: ‘neque enim quiuis j . . . describat’ (for not just anyone could describe . . . , 13–15). The lawyer’s language is active and prescriptive; the poet’s, even the epic poet’s, is passive and describes the deeds of others. The content of the sample verse, however, restores the poet’s power. Freudenburg (2001: 82–92) shows that Horace alludes to Lucilius’ mockery of Ennian bombast: he reinscribes satire into epic. Furthermore, Horace avoids the obvious timely topic of praise: Actium. The Britons and Parthians were the kinds of foreign campaign the future Augustus should have been waging but was not. Horace cleverly belies his incapacity—he sidesteps and signals his sidestepping of what he would rather not do.

Modes of Representation and Pragmatic Effects Satire and the law have so far been contrasted as powerful and powerless discourses, but formal and substantive parallels question this distinction. Satire is represented strongly with the language of writing, but it also shades into song. Likewise for the law, whose mode of representation parallels satire—one of several uncomfortable links. The law resides not only in authoritative utterance, as in Trebatius’ opening words, but in tablets. The Twelve Tables are named after the tablets on which they were written (Meyer 2004: 26 n. 29). Their name is alluded to in the text: Trebatius refers to the dissolution of the hypothetical libel case against Horace, ‘soluentur . . . tabulae’ (2. 1. 86). The law at the poem’s end is presented as writing, in both general and particular manifestations. As such, it resembles satiric writing, which, when libellous, goes by the diminutive libelli.47 Horace refers to his craftmanship (‘pedibus claudere uerba’ (enclose words in feet), 2. 1. 28–9), afﬁrms writing (‘scribam’, 60), uses the stage as a metaphor for the publicity 45 Peachin (2001b) 137, 139, shows it is persons of lower status who utter abuse. Horace is trying to rise in society, passim in Oliensis (1998) and Bowditch (2001). 46 Michel (1999) 374 denies a technical legal sense to praescribere, though it is the right word for the preamble preceding the procedure’s formula. 47 Elmore (1919) 101 suggests risu implies an oral context at Horace’s hypothetical trial: his poetry would be read out.

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Lucilius avoids (‘a uulgo et scaena’ (from the mob and the stage), 71).48 Most salient, however, is Lucilius entrusting his secrets to books as to trusty friends (‘ille uelut ﬁdis arcana sodalibus olim j credebat libris’, 30–1), so that ‘the old man’s life was open to the public, described as if on a votive tablet’ (‘quo ﬁt ut omnis j uotiua pateat ueluti descripta tabella j uita senis’, 32–4). The word for the votive tablet is the diminutive for the word for the laws at line 86.49 Satire and the Twelve Tables also share the metaphorics of song. Carmen, the standard word for poem in this period, also means spell—what is regulated in Table 8. 1 (‘carmina’, 2. 1. 82), discussed above. The use of the word for Lucilius’ satire is unemphatic (2. 1. 63), but it also applies to the Twelve Tables themselves. Cicero, recounting how he memorized them as a child, calls them a ‘carmen necessarium’ (Leg. 2. 59), and scholars tag the ‘rhythmic formulaic quality’ of things written on tablets as ‘carmen’. Elizabeth Meyer (2004: 44) lists ‘prayers . . . treaties, leges, edicts, accounts, vows, curse-tablets, and individual legal acts’ in this category. We might separate these types of social discourse from poetry, and at Epist. 2. 1. 23–7 Horace supports this distinction: his list of tablet-writing includes the Twelve Tables and he mocks those who think they were inspired by the Muses. But any contrast between writing (tabulas, libros, uolumina) and speech (locutas) becomes problematic, since the hoary priests (uates) who are responsible for the annals, also listed, have been since Ennius associated with song (Ch. 2). In Sermones 2. 1, Horace puts on similar footing a mode of discourse we assume is literary and one we think is not. The Twelve Tables turn out to be ‘songs’ regulating ‘songs’. Poetry and the law appear less distinct than at ﬁrst. Horace consistently represents literature as implicated in the law going back to the beginning.50 Sermones 1. 3, written in the 30s, tells of man’s emergence from primitivism: after language (‘uerba . . . j nominaque’, 103– 4) comes the law (‘leges’, 105), which prohibits typical topics of satire, theft, and adultery (106). Earlier in the poem, ‘legem’ (67) indicates the judgement we incur for foolishness, more a concern of satire than the law proper. He returns to the Twelve Tables’ regulation of literature a good ﬁfteen or so years later when discussing the origin of literature at Rome (Epistles 2. 1. 139–55).51 His picture is idealized: rustic levity gave rise to jocular verse. Eventually ‘licentia’ (145) and ‘libertas’ (147) got out of hand and the Twelve Tables 48

The comparison of public life to the theatre is proverbial, Muecke ad loc. LaFleur (1981) 1789 suggests similarly intentional ambiguity at Serm. 1. 4. 66 and 71, where libelli refers respectively to ‘writs or legal dossiers’ and to satirical poems. 50 Ducos (1994) 80, 83; Marasco (1997) 164–5. 51 Feeney (2002b) 182: Horace posits no golden age of literature at Rome before its regulation by the state and draws the parallel with his own career, since he began with satire and iambic, for which licentia and libertas are fundamental. 49

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intervened. The result was a turn from ‘bad poetry’ (‘malo . . . carmine’, 153) to good speaking (‘ad bene dicendum’, 155). The same pun obtains as in Sermones 2. 1: libel shades over into aesthetically poor verse, and the law turns poets towards quality. Horace tells a similar story of Greek comedy in the Ars poetica with a different result: its libertas also ran riot so it was restrained by the law (lege), but the chorus of Old Comedy fell silent when it lost the right to harm (282–4). His description of the emergence from primitivism here also links literature with the law. Orpheus and Amphion are vatic civilizers. They raised walls, laid down society’s basic rules, and cut laws on wood (‘leges incidere ligno’, 399). Again, writing commingles with song: ‘thus honour and a good name came to the divine prophets and to songs’ (‘sic honor et nomen diuinis uatibus atque j carminibus uenit’, 400–1). Song means both the laws and the bards’ poetry— indeed they are the same. Horace then presents a literary history of serious poetic genres, socially wholesome epic and lyric (Ch. 9). In form and in history, Horace consistently presents law and literature as intimately related. Satire in Sermones 2. 1 shares the law’s telos. Both are forms of judgement and attack; each targets those who act not as they should.52 Both entail penalties, though the law should in principle exact some forfeit greater than mere ridicule. However, the law may attack satire itself, though this poem ends up querying its success in doing so. Despite many points of contact, the two still sit in rivalry. Their weapons differ and the law is liable to corruption. When Horace compares his stylus to a sword, it is only a potential weapon. sed hic stilus haud petet ultro quemquam animantem et me ueluti custodiet ensis uagina tectus (Sermones 2. 1. 39–41) (But this stylus will not attack anyone living ﬁrst and it will guard me like a sword in a sheath.)

Its force is deterrent, and as such, the stylus is kept safely sheathed. However, if it comes out of hiding, the result will be not writing, but powerful song. at ille qui me commorit (melius non tangere, clamo) ﬂebit et insignis tota cantabitur urbe. (2. 1. 44–6)

52 For ‘notare’ (note) as both satirist’s and censor’s censure, LaFleur (1981) 1800. For judgement, Freudenburg (2005) 25.

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(But he who disturbs me—better not touch, I shout—will weep and he’ll be sung as notable all over town.)

Pragmatically effective satire is ﬁgured as song. This is the word not for highstyle poetry, canere, but for actual singing, cantare. People will circulate Horace’s mockery like a catchy tune through the grapevine.53 Horace also imagines presenting his work to Caesar orally—or rather, its reception is ﬁgured aurally (‘per attentam . . . Caesaris aurem’ (through Caesar’s attentive ear), 2. 1. 19). This mode of presentation also has pragmatic effects, only they may be unintended: Caesar might kick back (‘recalcitret’, 20). The contrast between Caesar’s alert equine ears and Horace’s cognomen (‘Flacci j uerba’ (the words of Flop-Ear), 18–19), which rather evokes a donkey’s, ﬁgures their difference in power.54 The law is also a weapon and Horace presents it as the rabble’s ﬁrst recourse when wounded by satire.55 Ceruius iratus leges minitatur et urnam, Canidia Albuci quibus est inimica uenenum, grande malum Turius, si quid se iudice certes.

(2. 1. 47–9)

(Cervius keeps threatening the laws and voting urn when angry, Canidia rather Albucius’ poison to her enemies, Turius a great evil, if you should dispute something when he is judge.)

Rather than Trebatius’ authoritative realm, the degraded law keeps company with poison.56 Furthermore, the judge is corrupt. Satire’s targets are reaching for effective remedies: law, poison, a frighteningly unspeciﬁed ‘grande malum’ (great evil).57 Their bark, however, exceeds their bite. The frequentative ‘minitatur’ shows they have to threaten again and again.58 A real threat need be made only once, or merely perceived, like Horace’s sheathed stylus. Even the law Trebatius presents in more noble guise melts before satire’s purported weapon of last resort: the laugh. The tablets will dissolve and Horace will be let off (‘soluentur risu tabulae’, 86).

53

Muecke ad loc.: ‘the relevant meaning of cantare is “to repeat over and over again”’ (with parallels). For the dissemination of scurrilous song over the city and Ulpian’s inclusion of writing, posting, or singing such songs under actionable infamia, Horsfall (2003) 37, 41–2. 54 Muecke ad loc.; Freudenburg (2001) at 96–7. 55 LaFleur (1981) 1815 stresses this passage’s juridical context and takes the threat to Horace literally. 56 Muecke at 2. 1. 55 suggests the reference to Scaeva (2. 1. 53–6) as a poisoner may be to a real case. 57 Canidia was a witch whose association with poison here makes her liable to prosecution for transgression against religious norms under the lex Cornelia de sicariis et ueneﬁciis, Rives (2003). 58 Horace’s targets are impossible to identify or from long ago, Muecke ad loc.

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Before we conclude the law is more toothless than satire, Trebatius has one further objection. Here is real power, and it is a question of having the right friends: ‘maiorum ne quis amicus j frigore te feriat’ ([I fear] some friend of the great might strike you with a chill, 2. 1. 61–2). This sets up Trebatius’ ﬁnal objection about the Twelve Tables as well as Horace’s response, basically to pull Caesar out of his hat as the ultimate arbiter. The transition passes through a change in the representation of Lucilius. After defending his freedom to lampoon any enemy of Virtus (62–70), Horace shows Lucilius as the friend of the great (71–4), and this allows him to make an extraordinary claim about his own social position.59 quidquid sum ego, quamuis infra Lucili censum ingeniumque, tamen me cum magnis uixisse inuita fatebitur usque Inuidia (Sermones 2. 1. 74–7) (Whatever I am, although below the census and genius of Lucilius, nevertheless Envy will confess to the end, willy-nilly, that I have lived with the great.)

Caesar is Horace’s trump card: the ‘great’ even beyond the ‘friend of the great’ Trebatius exhorts Horace not to offend. Horace will get off scot-free, even from libel cases, so long as he wins Caesar’s approval. The appeal to Caesar as the last recourse, however, leads us directly back to the law.

Caesar and the Law’s Suspension Satire and the law are both at issue when Horace represents Caesar as a dangerous audience. Adding Caesar to the mix makes the rivalry between the two modes of discourse moot: a stronger player has emerged. The role of the law here has not previously been noticed.60

59 Horace consistently underplays his status. Gordon Williams (1995): Horace’s self-satiric refrain ‘libertino patre natus’ (born from a freedman father) is disingenuous, since his father was wealthy; the father may have lost his freedom in the Social Wars, which would mean something entirely different from being descended from slaves. Williams’s reconstruction accords with how Horace seems actually to have operated as a social agent. He further shows that Horace’s and Trebatius’ families came from the same region of southern Italy and may have been friends of long standing (303), also Fraenkel (1957) 146. If true, this would add point to the topic of knowing the right people in Serm. 2. 1. Michel (1999) 387 thinks it more likely they met through shared association with Augustus. 60 Bauman (1985) 133 suggests Horace refers to Caesar’s tribunician sacrosanctity, conferred 36 bce (CAH 68–9); he keeps this passage distinct from that on the libel law because ‘the remedy

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(But if Flop-ear’s words do not go through the attentive ears of Caesar at the right time—who, if you stroke him the wrong way [badly], could kick back on all sides, himself safe.)

Horace’s ﬁguration of Caesar as a horse is ironic.61 It is constructed exactly to offend. His bungle challenges Caesar to be the dangerous audience he alleges and reveals more authorial control than he lets on. Horace also controls satire’s rival discourse more than expected: he jokes on the law in his own person.62 The law in question is none other than the Twelve Tables; in fact, from the same ‘tablet’ as the one on libel: ‘si quadrupes pauperiem . . . .’ (if a quadruped loss . . . , 8. 2).63 Starting with the Twelve Tables, the Digest records a detailed discussion about laws regarding quadrupeds, one phrase of which sounds remarkably like Horace: At si, cum equum permulsisset quis uel palpatus esset, calce eum percusserit, erit actioni locus. (Digest 9. 1. 7 (Ulpian 18 ad edictum))64 (But if, when someone strokes or caresses a horse, it strikes him with its hoof, an [Aquilian] action will be available.)

The joke is complex, perhaps more disturbing than funny. In one move, Horace degrades Caesar with the comparison—mishandling that might provoke a kick in response. In another, he raises him above the law.65 Caesar will not be held liable for his actions. Is this panegyric or criticism? It depends entirely on your view of the relative value of absolute power and the rule of

for violations of sacrosanctity was coercive rather than judicial’. This may explain Caesar’s ability to defend himself with impunity, but not the horse. 61 For animal fable, Muecke ad loc. with bibliography. 62 The late Seth Benardete made this suggestion to me years ago, as he happened on this law while reading the Digest. I thank him belatedly. I was not interested in the law in literature at the time and failed to record the reference—tracking it down has been a scholarly odyssey, greatly aided by my colleague Michael Peachin. 63 Crawford (1996) ii. 680–1, his edition’s translation; for laws about horses generally, Hyland (1990) 237. 64 It is not clear how early this law can be dated, but I assume the phrasing developed from the Twelve Tables and antedated Horace. Alternatively Horace’s phrasing made its way into the law, but this is unlikely. Gaius 17 (Digest 9. 2. 8) also records a law holding mule and horse drivers responsible for animals running berserk. 65 Wallace-Hadrill (1982) 39: ‘The emperor’s power placed him above the law’; also (44). He discusses libertas as ‘freedom of speech’ in the context of the law’s impotence ‘against the will of the emperor’ (38–9).

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law. Caesar might indeed appreciate reference to his power and take the compliment as the insult’s antidote. Committed republicans, however, might baulk. What about Trebatius? Cicero’s correspondence shows he developed a close relationship with Julius Caesar on Cicero’s own recommendation. He later played a strong role as an Augustan jurist.66 Above and beyond the Caesarian connection, however, Cicero reports a case on which he had consulted Trebatius (Ad Fam. 7. 21), where he appears to put the power of a magistrate above the law. Shackleton Bailey summarizes the case: a certain Turpilia made a will granting P. Silius her estate, but the will was legally void.67 The urban praetor nevertheless granted Silius the estate. When the intestate heir contested the will, Cicero consulted Trebatius in his defence of Silius. His rationale was: ‘si bonorum Turpiliae possessionem Q. Caepio praetor ex edicto suo mihi dedit’ (if Q. Caepio the praetor gave the possession of Turpilia’s estate to me by edict [then the will is valid], Cic. Ad Fam. 7. 21. 3–4). Other jurists, however, disagreed: an edict could not grant the possession of an estate when a will was invalid.68 Shackleton Bailey speculates whether Trebatius based his opinion on special circumstances or ‘more probably, he held that a grant of possessio bonorum, even if made in error, was none the less ex edicto’. If the latter interpretation holds, Trebatius put a magistrate’s authority above the formality of the law. The ﬁnal line of Serm. 2. 1 appears in a radically different light along this line of argument. Trebatius lets Horace off the legal hook when the poet takes refuge 66 Bauman (1985) 129, 134–5 (with counter-arguments): Trebatius may have helped Julius Caesar in Gaul on a legal defence against a maiestas charge, and his equestrian rank may be a reward for this service. Trebatius’ De religionibus may also have ‘formulated the legal principles which enabled Caesar to make a violation of tribunician sacrosanctity his one constitutional pretext for civil war’ (130). Julius Caesar furthermore used Trebatius to approach Cicero in the fraught period leading up to civil war in 49 bce (Ad Att. 9. 17, 7. 17. 3; 130). Bauman dismisses several testimonia that could construe Trebatius as anti-Caesarian (130–2). He argues Trebatius could also have been responsible for Augustus’ tribunician sacrosanctity, and shows that he used pro-Augustan delicacy in handling the divorce case between Maecenas and Terentia (Digest 24. 1. 64; 133). Justinian’s Institutes attest that under Augustus Trebatius held auctoritas maxima, and show that he ruled favourably for Augustus in his ability to carry out codicils made abroad (2. 25 pr.; Bauman 1985: 134; Muecke at 100). Bauman thinks Trebatius was ‘Augustus’ most likely adviser on sacral law in general’ (134), a position that, given Augustus’ commitment to religious revival (for which, Galinsky 1996: ch. 6), would make him central to the Augustan programme, even though he avoided political ofﬁce (135). Frier (1996) 964–5 with n. 26 speculates less and says that Trebatius, like the other early Augustan jurists, is ‘not expressly associated even with the drafting of major Augustan legislation’, though he at least ‘survived long enough to comment on it’. 67 Shackleton Bailey at 472–3, relying on A. Watson (1971) 73–5. 68 Cicero summarizes the law, learned apparently from this case, at Top. 18, a work dedicated to Trebatius.

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in Caesar’s judgement. Although Horace cites Caesar as a judge of poetic worth (‘iudice . . . Caesare’ (with Caesar as judge), 84), the recurrent context of the law reminds us that Caesar was the legally the last court of appeal.69 Freudenburg suggests that Trebatius’ joke about the case’s dissolution has overtones of the dissolution of the law: ‘soluentur risu tabulae, tu missus abibis’ (the case [tablets] will be dissolved with laughter; you will get off the charge, 86).70 The ‘tablets’ probably refer to a hypothetical case against Horace, although their exact meaning is disputed.71 The reference just made to the Twelve Tables, however, suggests a more sombre connotation: the dissolution of an individual case (tabulae) means the dissolution of the laws (tabulae) as a system. What is good for an individual may be less good for society as a whole. Reference to the equine legislation, where Caesar is above the law, reinforces Freudenburg’s argument about the law’s dissolution.72 If Trebatius had authoritarian tendencies, that would add further support.73 If Caesar is beyond the law, Horace manages to ride his coattails and escape the law himself.74 Caesar’s judgement gives him immunity. But Caesar is also 69

Muecke at 2. 1. 84, relying on Jones (1960) 4, 54, 94–7, points out that Augustus gained some form of appellate jurisdiction through a plebiscite in 30 bce, so the allusion is topical. Jones sees the honours voted to Augustus at this point (Dio Cass. 51. 19. 7) to have been the turning point from the Republican appeal to the people (prouocatio ad populum) in capital cases involving citizens to the imperial appeal to Caesar (appellatio ad Caesarem). Galsterer in CAH 407–8 uses Suetonius Aug. 33. 3 to claim that ‘Already in the ﬁrst years of the Principate the number of appeals had grown to such dimensions that Augustus had to delegate appeals.’ 70 Freudenburg (2001) 106–8; McGinn (2001) 97. 71 Elmore (1919) 102, Muecke at 2. 1. 86, Michel (1999) 380–5, Meyer (2004) 82 n. 40. PsAcro suggests the Twelve Tables will themselves laugh. Although Elmore comes down for court records, the numerous rejected possibilities (indictment, writing tablets, jury’s benches, satires themselves, law, praetor’s formula in the case) show this word reaches deeply into the law. 72 McGinn (2001) 98 quotes from a letter attributed to Brutus and addressed to Atticus about the young Caesar in 43 bce, Cic. Ad Brut. 1. 17. 6. Brutus vows to ﬁght for the rule of law. Shackleton Bailey 10–14 argues against authenticity: the letter reﬂects sentiments from the rhetorical schools. The reference to Caesar is an emendation for Antonius (Tyrell–Purser 194; Shackleton Bailey ad loc.), but the point about domination still obtains. Extra-legality became a preoccupation in the imperial period. 73 Tatum (1998) 695–7: the problem of ad hominem justice subtends the whole of the poem. He suggests that inconsistencies in the law’s application were problematic under the Republic, but the Augustan jurists attempted to ﬁx the problem. Frier (1985) locates the beginning of regularization in the late Republic. Tatum (1998) argues that Trebatius represents ‘the principles of jurisprudence’, while Horace appeals to ad hominem justice, but Trebatius clearly caves in to exceptionalism at the poem’s end. I agree that the difference between satirist and jurist collapses ‘under the societal pressure of the 30’s or in the presence of the victor at Actium’ (698), but insist that the general regularization in the law’s application had to confront the emperor’s power after Actium. Peachin (2001a) discusses several cases where the emperor overruled jurists. Also Meyer (2004) 229–30. 74 Muecke (1995) 203: there is no accommodation between Horace and Trebatius. Although Trebatius does yield, her larger point stands: ‘The solution comes from the political sphere, which encompasses them both.’

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responsible for the restrictions on what people can say. Momigliano traces the obscure history of Republican legislation against ‘calumnia’ (calumny), possible Sullan legislation against slander under the cover of ‘maiestas’ (dignity, sovereignty), later Augustan maiestas legislation included regulation of ‘carmina (et libelli) famosa’ (defamatory songs and little books) enacted about 12 CE. Although the Augustan legislation postdates Sermones 2. 1 by a good forty years, Momigliano sees Julius Caesar and Augustus as following in Sulla’s path. ‘The ﬁrst explicit application of the law to slander may have been that of A.D. 12, but the factual inﬂuence of the new juridical development upon free speech must have been felt before.’75 Horace was surely sensitive to expectations. He does not talk about contemporary restrictions, but the archaic Twelve Tables, under which Momigliano supposes Naevius was the last poet ‘(known to us)’ to be prosecuted. These provide a good butt for a joke, but although poets may have been under no danger of actual prosecution, Horace uses the older laws as a screen for something of contemporary relevance: people’s libertas was restricted by the quality of their social network. Both satire and the law are impotent before the realities of Roman society.

Satire’s (Limited) Revenge I have painted a bleak picture of an apparently light-hearted and amusing poem. Horace wields power and he knows it. It is not, however, the same kind as Caesar’s, or even Trebatius’. It is highly restricted, more by convention than by law, but restricted nonetheless. Still, Caesar’s right-hand man Maecenas collected good poets, rewarded and protected them. Their capital was symbolic and highly valued.76 They offer exactly what Horace provides in this poem: exposure of society’s rules couched within a form that somehow makes truth palatable. Vergil colours his critique in the Aeneid with epic grandeur and tragic pathos. Horace practises an approach avoidance technique towards Augustus that plays him up as a dangerous topic, but carves out space for independent thought (Lowrie 2007a). Horace deploys wit in all genres, but his lyric moves towards grandeur, while his satire dons the mantle (rags?) of a certain scrappiness.

75

Momigliano (1942) 123. On Horace’s antiquarianism, Muecke (1995) 210–11, Tatum (1998) 693, who point out that in Horace’s day, the relevant legislation was de iniuria; LaFleur (1981) 1820–3. 76 For symbolic and literal capital in Horace, Bowditch (2001), reviewed in Lowrie (2002b).

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Horace’s scrappiness is unquestionably of the highest aesthetic quality, and quality constitutes Horace’s ﬁnal bid for power. Caesar judges him favourably for it,77 and the allegation that a thousand of his verses could be produced in a day (2. 1. 4) is laughable. There is a price to pay, and Horace consequently turns satire into a genre that mentions rather than uses its bite.78 He unsheathes his pen to call attention to its not being used for attack. Satire does, however, effect its aims, however indirectly. Trebatius would have Horace turn the genre from invective to panegyric, and the suggestion signals that Horace does this in this poem to some extent. His Caesar transforms from a satiric horse to a panegyric judge. But Horace turns the tables ever so deftly: while Trebatius suggests Caesar as an object of praise (2. 1. 11), the panegyric representation has him praise the poet (‘iudice . . . laudatus Caesare’ (praised with Caesar as the judge), 2. 1. 84). Horace also achieves the genre’s conventional aim by wielding his pen in critique. He points out that Caesar is above the law and that his own libertas is guaranteed only by his good connections.79 If he plays by the rules and keeps within societal constraints, he will at least win the favour that allows him to point out how much his voice is muzzled. 77 Tatum (1998) 695 cites Suetonius Aug. 89. 3 on how Augustus instructed the praetors— that is, those responsible for setting legal cases on the right footing—not to let his name get worn down by excessive use. Augustus cared for quality. 78 This differs from the price paid under a totalitarian regime, where praise bought some privacy, Milosz (1953) 64–9. Horace’s praise and critique and are equally public. Fowler (1995) 251–2 discusses the impossibility of Horatian panegyric within the context of Walter Benjamin’s dictum that ‘Fascism renders politics aesthetic while Communism responds by politicizing art.’ 79 McGinn (2001) 99: Horace’s freedom is ‘liberty without license’.

15 Inscription and Testimony: Propertius 4. 11 In the Cornelia elegy, Propertius mixes up the categories. This is the ﬁnal poem in his last collection and with it he makes a statement about representation under Augustus. Cornelia was Augustus’ ex-stepdaughter and an exemplary (one of few) member of the imperial family; her death allows Propertius to explore the interrelation of social performance and the law, of speech and writing as media of defence and commemoration. Cornelia speaks throughout the poem. The number of situations—speech to her husband, before the judges in the underworld—makes a conundrum of the performative occasion and confutes the unities of time and place. Her speech’s complex relation to inscription furthermore evokes literature’s canonical functions of commemoration and praise. Many of the dynamics here—performativity in relation to the law, indeterminacy of medium, exemplarity and the vitality of representation—return in Ovid, Tristia 2, where they acquire political urgency (Ch. 16). Cornelia has long been identiﬁed as an exemplum.1 This ﬁgure is a medium of representation that unites a strong, formal narrative element with considerable ideological power.2 Quintilian’s deﬁnition separates out the components: narration (commemoratio), content (res gesta), and purpose, namely persuasion.3 quod proprie uocamus exemplum, id est rei gestae aut ut gestae utilis ad persuadendum id quod intenderis commemoratio (IO 5. 11. 6)

1

nn. 18 and 27 below. The exemplum has attracted considerable recent attention, e.g. Bloomer (1992); Agamben (1998) 21–2; Chaplin (2000); Roller (2004); Kraus (2005); Lowrie (2007b). 3 Lausberg i. 227–8. Roller (2004) 4–6 offers a somewhat different scheme: an exemplum’s components are action, audience, commemoration, and imitation (positive and negative). The pragmatic effect Quintilian envisages is spread between Roller’s audience and imitation, but sometimes an exemplum’s persuasive force is merely to prove something, so that it functions more like our ‘example’ or ‘instance’, and is not meant to be imitated. Roller considers the stronger cases. 2

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(what we properly call an exemplum, that is, the recalling to mind of something done, or as if done, that is useful for persuading what you intend).

Although literature may not use the exemplum to persuade, it always serves some end. The word derives from eximo (to remove), and Ernout–Meillet deﬁne it as ‘properly the object distinguished from others and set aside to serve as a model’.4 As a singular instance, it represents the category from which it has been removed. Pragmatically, however, it surpasses mere representation. Livy understands the exemplum morally as an instance to be imitated or avoided and Augustus presents his own actions as exemplary in the sense of inviting imitation (Ch. 12). The exemplum’s moral weight emerges when conceived of beyond its singularity: models are repeatable. As with the distinction between form and content, narrating and story, the division into representation and ethics is an abstraction that helps understand this ﬁgure’s manifold functions. Following Quintilian, I will treat the how (commemoratio) and the what (res gesta) of Propertius’ Cornelia elegy, and then attempt to understand the poem’s pragmatic aim.

INCOMPATIBLES IN NARRATIVE AND MEDIA Poem 4. 11 challenges the unities of time, place, and character in Cornelia’s speech and as a poem. No situation grounds the utterance as an occasion. In literature, there are plenty of narratologically sensible ghosts who speak logically in well-deﬁned non-existent places—Anchises in Aeneid 6. But Cornelia straddles two incompatible speech situations. Butler comments on the poem’s speech genre: ‘This elegy takes the form of a funeral laudatio of a noble Roman lady, Cornelia, spoken by herself. It is possible that it may have formed the inscription of her tomb’ (392). These terse sentences require much unpacking, since, while true, they contain many incompatibles.5

4

Agamben (1998) 21–2; Lowrie (2007b) 97. The scholarship has not sufﬁciently differentiated between these modes. Hubbard (1974) 146: ‘the address to the bereaved husband that we ﬁnd on ancient tombstones’ as an introduction to ‘Cornelia’s speech in defense’. Wyke (1987a) 170–1 moves seamlessly from the one to the other. For the complex relation of speech to writing in archaic Greek funerary epigram, Svenbro (1993). Steiner (2001) 154 suggests that a statue’s epitaph ‘acts in the manner of the spokesman or prostates whom those barred from speaking in the ﬁfth-century polis would later employ: stating the claims, merits, and achievements of the silenced party, it makes the case on his or her behalf ’. 5

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In the bulk of the poem, Cornelia speaks her praises as a defendant before the judges of the underworld. The stakes are clear: judgement on her life will determine her treatment in the underworld. She entertains the possibility of failure and envisages the punishment of the husband-slaying Danaids, in direct contradiction to her own faithfulness and fertility (4. 11. 27–8).6 Her reductio ad absurdum, however, presupposes success and the speech ends with conﬁdence: ‘causa perorata est . . . j moribus et caelum patuit (my case has been made . . . even the sky lies open to good morals, 4. 11. 99–101).7 The poem opens, however, with her addressing her husband Paullus, asking him not to mourn. Propertius could have framed the speech of defence within the larger address to her husband; instead, the two speeches are inextricably intertwined. We could suppose that the words to husband and children within the underworld speech are apostrophes, that is, she addresses people represented as absent.8 Then there would be a difference between the initial address to Paullus, imagined as present in line 1, and the later apostrophes, but this begs the question. Ghosts blur the difference between presence and absence so no sharp line separates present address and absent apostrophe. A further problem with the speech genre is that funeral laudations are not conventionally in the deceased’s own voice: their sons gave them.9 Propertius enlivens the genre by not praising in his own voice, or even imagining a family member speak at his mother’s funeral, whether her son or husband, as in the Laudatio Turiae.10 Canonical for avoiding self-praise is to attribute it to another. Quintilian cites Cicero, who often praises himself in dialogues in the voice of Atticus, Brutus, Quintus, or other interlocutor.11 Propertius reverses the technique. He lends his own words to the laudanda as if she were speaking herself. This ﬁction is narratologically innovative. In a third person omniscient narrative, focalization reveals that a character’s point of view is being expressed. Here is the opposite: the ﬁctive speaker focalizes the author’s viewpoint. A further inconsistency in Cornelia’s speech genre is the deployment of the conventions of grave epigram, at odds with the speech of defence. The poem opens with her telling Paullus to stop pressing her grave with tears. We 6 7 8

20–6.

She could be punished for adultery should she fail, Janan (2001) 157. Camps, ad loc.: she anticipates a favourable verdict. On the difference between apostrophe and address, Culler (1981) 135–54, Lowrie (1997)

9 Flower (1996) 130–1. For the conventions of the laudatio funebris here, Butler 392; M. Hubbard (1974) 146. 10 Flower (1996) 131–2: the laudatio Turiae probably belongs ‘to a more private context than the public speeches on the rostra’. 11 aliena persona, Quintilian, IO 11. 1. 21; Lowrie (2007b) 98.

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imagine him at the tomb, her hovering ghost uttering the words or conveying them through an inscription. But neither need be at the tomb. He could dream or daydream her words. Tomb inscriptions characteristically localize corpse and speech in a particular place.12 But Cornelia wanders off to the underworld and deictics explicitly locate her in Hades: ‘immatura licet, tamen huc non noxia ueni: j det Pater hic umbrae mollia iura meae’ (though before my time, I did not come to this place guilty: here let the Father give soft laws to my shade, 4. 11. 17–18). If we conclude, however, she is really in the underworld and take the conventions of inscription as dislocated from the grave, another deictic returns us to the tomb: ‘in lapide hoc uni nupta fuisse legar’ (it will be read on this stone that I was married to one man, 4. 11. 36). Maybe we are the ones imagined at the tomb, reading the inscription. We are certainly reading the poem, and the tomb inscription has an uneasy relation with the poem itself—there is a suggestion of identity, although the poem cannot be imagined as transcribed verbatim on stone.13 Still, the poem conveys what Cornelia attributes to the inscription, namely her status as univira, and to that extent, the deictic moves over at least partially to our frame of reference. If there is a disparity between the deictics placing Cornelia both in the underworld and at her tomb, the latter is further equivocal in partially linking the inscription and the poem. The inscription is bound as an object to a particular place, but the poem can move.14 Another logical discrepancy makes another speech act inconsistent. Cornelia proudly describes her lineage: the fama of her paternal ancestors, victorious in Africa, aligns with speaking (‘loquuntur’ (they speak), 4. 11. 29–30), while her family on both sides can boast of inscriptions (‘titulis’, 4. 11. 31–2). Oral testimony and honorary inscriptions tell the same story of her ancestors’ greatness. When she calls on the ashes of her ancestors to witness her obedience to the censor’s law (41–2), their testimony appears to emerge from the inscriptions: ‘testor maiorum cineres tibi, Roma, colendos, j sub quorum titulis, Africa, tunsa iaces’ (I call to witness the ashes of my ancestors, which should be worshipped by you, Rome, and under whose inscriptions

12

Even if, as Svenbro (1993) 30 notes for Greece, ‘Egocentric inscriptions are staged by an author who is systematically considered absent.’ 13 For the appropriation of tomb inscription conventions in Roman poetry, Woodman (1974) 116–17. 14 Catullus 68 offers a comparable slide between deictics referring to the text in both the author’s time and our own, Lowrie (2006b). A difference between ‘haec carta’ at Catullus 68. 46 and ‘in lapide hoc’ at Propertius 4. 11. 36 is that paper applies both to the poem’s original and subsequent material of transmission, while stone pertains to neither. For deixis in performance texts, Felson (1999) and her introduction in Felson (2004) 253–66.

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you lie, Africa, 4. 11. 37–8). Logically, however, the inscriptions cannot attest to her virtue, but only to familial glory.15 The disparity between Cornelia’s various speech modalities covers many categories. She seems to be in (at least) two places at once, but furthermore, speech and inscription presuppose not only antithetical occasions, but antithetical temporal spheres. The speech to the judges is, properly speaking, an occasion. She utters it only once, she means to achieve a speciﬁc result, and she will be judged in consequence. The inscription, however, exists hypothetically for all time. We can read it, like the poem, again and again. Its purpose, however, is not judgement, though it may encourage a positive assessment of Cornelia; it rather commemorates. With this we return to the laudatio, a speech of praise given on a single occasion and later inscribed. Commemoration obviously also has ties to the poem’s own pragmatic ends. While the laudatio and the inscription work towards the same aim (praise), they still offer different temporal frameworks: the single event, and the timelessness of repetition. Aristotle in the Poetics (ch. 8) remarks that the unity of a plot resides in being about not one individual, but a single action. This poem’s action (Cornelia’s utterance) is hardly single. Aristotle (ch. 17) further advises the poet to keep the scene before his eyes as much as possible. This does not happen here. Any unity in this poem consists in being about an individual life. However, there is not even clearly a character here. Cornelia is deﬁned by her historical accomplishments—as a man is on an inscription.16 Her life is a list of Roman female virtues and social desiderata. She comes from a long aristocratic line, she is related to the imperial family, her close male relatives have recently held prestigious ofﬁces, she has won the ius trium liberorum (law of three children) by actually having three children. Furthermore, she has an ideal, selﬂess character: she releases her husband from mourning and wishes him and the children well with the putative new stepmother. Compared to Cynthia, Cornelia is historically speciﬁc, but as a character, even that cipher Cynthia, with her passion and jealousy, seems emotionally fuller than Cornelia, who appears as nothing more than a symbolic representation.17 Her 15

Flower (1996) 159 links the funeral oration with grave inscriptions in a single event: the oration was followed by a procession to the family plot, where the inscriptions on ancestors’ tombs could be read. The ‘imagines’ (funeral masks) of the ancestors also had their own inscriptions (180–4). These masks normally were kept in a house’s atrium (ch. 7), but also accompanied the dead to the tomb. 16 Wyke (1987a) 173: the woman here is ‘everywhere organized in relation to the male’; Cornelia appropriates the roles of orator, magistrate, and triumphant general. 17 The bibliography on Cynthia as a cipher is long, Miller (2004) 60–8. For critiques of his Lacanian frame, Buchan (2005), Lowrie (2005e).

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emotions, pride in her social standing and concern for her children, do not distinguish her individually, but reinforce her paradigmatic status. Cornelia functions as an exemplum of female virtue rather than as a well-rounded character.18 The exemplum has a complex relation to narrativity. Formally, exempla are often narrated within some larger discursive frame where they have a persuasive function.19 As nodes of ideology, they offer dynamic story patterns whose pragmatic function is to elicit imitation or avoidance. Poem 4. 11 gives no frame to guide interpretation. Readers tend to adopt the whole book as a frame,20 and here contrast with Cynthia and other demi-mondaines has produced various interpretations of Cornelia within elegy’s generic code. She is an ‘anti-elegiac woman’ to be scorned, a paragon of Roman virtues to be admired, or a focal point of elegiac resistance to such virtues.21 These interpretations depend on reconstructing the poet’s attitude towards Cornelia and founder because the poem does not offer that kind of guidance. Even where a poet or character in his or her voice guides the interpretation, exempla tend to escape their authors’ intentions.22 Here, the lack of a discursive frame leaves the poet’s purpose in telling Cornelia’s story in suspense.

I D E O LOG Y A N D T H E F O R M O F T H E LAW The consistent disunity examined so far is a formal feature that needs to be related to the exemplum’s role as a vehicle for ideology. What is to be gained from it? Michaela Janan’s analysis of the poem as ideology revolves around the poem’s representation of the twofold nature of the Law—deﬁned not as earthly formal legal codes, but ‘all social constraints’. The Law, like other systems of signiﬁcation, is an arbitrary and ungrounded realm where distinctions are produced by difference. Cornelia embodies reciprocal aspects of the Law: she is an honorable paradigm but also shows up the Law as ‘meaningless 18

Janan (2001): ‘exemplary virtue’ (147) and ‘exemplary maternity’ (160). Roller (2004) 2 and 10: even just the mention of an exemplary name implies a narrative the reader is meant to supply. The relation of the narrative to the frame is a pervasive theme of Lowrie (1997). Horace Odes 1. 15 is anomalous as an extended narrative because it lacks a frame (123–35). More usual and paradigmatic is Odes 1. 7 (101–23). 20 Stahl (1985) 262; Wyke (1987a) 171–2; Janan (2001) 147 comments on interpretations that view 4. 11 as reversing a stance articulated earlier in the book. 21 Janan (2001) 147 summarizes these interpretations and their history. 22 The best ancient description of how exempla escape their authors’ original intentions is Velleius Paterculus, 2. 3. 4; Lowrie (2007b) 91. 19

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horror’.23 I would say what arbitrary systems of signiﬁcation produce is rather meaning. It may not be stable; it may be challenged as a social construction, as unjust; one might disagree; it may be amenable to change; but it is meaningful. Janan (2001) 162 reads Cornelia’s selﬂess sacriﬁce as critique: she asks for nothing in return for her life, such as a vow of chastity from Paullus. But Cornelia did not choose death willingly or, like Alcestis, make a bargain. She merely and contingently died. To read poetry as ideology need have little if anything to do with form; it depends more on content. Such narratives are social constructs regardless of their aesthetic value and do not require formal narration to produce stories.24 Aesthetic quality can play as ideological value, without conveying particular meanings. Janan herself is sensitive to the poem’s formal features—such as the poem’s repetition of urna—and her emphasis on the Law comes as a result of the remarkable repetition of lex and other words having to do with the law (iura, iudex, tabellae, testor, testis). These words, however, convey the ideological without necessarily contributing much to narrative form. They do, however, reveal the structure of the law in Propertius’ analysis. To link form and ideology in this poem will require considering the relationship of reading and the law. A ﬂimsy pun, I think, brings together the essential aspects of how representation was understood during this period. In addition to numerous references to leges, Cornelia speaks of herself twice with the passive of legere, once meaning ‘gather’ and once meaning ‘read.’ The beginning of Ch. 14 treats the etymological connection and social practices linking reading to the law. I will argue that the duality of Cornelia’s utterance as speech and as inscription corresponds neatly to the double status of the law as ﬁxed, to be read on tablets, and as coming into being performatively, through ratiﬁcation. Cornelia imagines a vote will be taken about her: the resulting law is to be written on tablets (‘tabellas’, 4. 11. 49). This combination of ﬁxity and enactment within processes of representation— aesthetic, social, and political—is typically Augustan. With legere Cornelia aligns reading with death, but also contrasts the differing materialities of physical and textual existence. Cornelia’s body has been reduced to a handful of dust: et sum, quod digitis quinque legatur, onus (4. 11. 14) (and I am a burden which could be gathered in ﬁve ﬁngers)

But she projects a future for herself through reading. 23 Janan (2001) 147 (all quotations from this page). For an assessment of Janan’s Lacanian frame, Lowrie (2002d). 24 For minimal narration in exempla, n. 19 above.

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(It will be read on this stone that I was married to one man25) Writing up her life whether in a laudatio, inscription, or poem, is conditional on her death. It ﬁxes her life in a narrative we can view as complete after the fact and that can be presented as a whole to the judges in the underworld for judgment. Reading compensates for bodily dissolution. By contrast, Cornelia treats the law as a code informing living behaviour. When Cornelia faces the judges in the underworld, she wishes the iura Father Dis will give her will be soft (‘mollia’, 4. 11. 18). She claims never to have herself ‘softened’ (‘legem mollisse’, 4. 11. 41) the law of censorship (as, say, an elegist might). The lawgiver’s prerogative is to set the standards; her job is to obey. In the second passage, ‘lex’ implies a set of social constraints and expectations—Janan’s deﬁnition—rather than of speciﬁc codiﬁed prohibitions. Cornelia refers to the censor’s role in overseeing morality. These are expectations to be lived out dynamically. The laws (‘leges’, 47) are located in nature and in her patrician class; they are not formal statutes. Cornelia’s understanding of the law as custom, however, confronts an actual governmental law in the ius trium liberorum, and the Augustan marriage legislation has much to do with her status as an exemplum.26 This legislation paradigmatically joins law as ﬁxed statute and law as lived social expectations; these particular laws are path-breaking in legal history precisely in intervening in bio-politics. Augustus must have been thrilled that at least one woman in his family met the legal standards he established. Finally someone ﬁt the requisite story pattern and neatly died before life’s unanticipated twists could alter the narrative. Cornelia is a perfect candidate for being written up and for being read as instantiating in her life the very laws that intervened in life.

EXEMPLUM AND REPRESENTAT ION The attraction of Cornelia for Augustus is evident. She exempliﬁes the ideology underlying his marriage legislation. What is the attraction for Propertius? This poem neither forwards nor resists Augustan ideology, but

25

The Latin construction is personal: ‘I will be read.’ Stahl (1985) 262 calls Cornelia a ‘ﬂesh-and-blood paradigm of the legislated Augustan womanhood’. 26

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rather exposes how this story works as a form of representation. It is less critique than analysis. The exemplum, as a device for representation, mediates between singularity and repeatability. Cornelia is a singular instance, but her actions are imitable and hence exemplary. Cornelia was ‘a part to be imitated of a great house’ (‘Cornelia . . . j erat magnae pars imitanda domus’, 4. 11. 44). Her third-person name accords with the objectivization of turning herself into an exemplum.27 She herself has already lived up to the model set by great past examples of female virtue, Claudia and Aemilia (51–5). She enjoins on her daughter to imitate her in having only one man (‘ﬁlia, . . . j fac teneas unum nos imitata uirum’ (daughter, . . . make sure to have one man in imitation of me), 4. 11. 68). She inhabits the turning point between her ancestors and her progeny. She updates another Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, the exemplum of female virtue par excellence into an Augustan— not politically disruptive—context. Propertius sets Cornelia up as a singular, but repeatable instance; he locates her at the fulcrum of past and future; she is a speaker who performs a singular speech on an individual occasion, but whose utterance has another modality in writing; she lives in accordance with the law as both written statute and social expectations; her life is told on the occasion of her death. This intermingling of life and death, singularity and iterability, writing with performative utterance and social performance, is central to how the Augustan age ﬁgures representation. Augustus’ own Res gestae encapsulates this dynamic (Ch. 12); his self-presentation at RG 8. 5 (cited 302–3) bears many points of resemblance to Propertius’ Cornelia. The laws he brings back are generally agreed to be the moral legislation, of which the marriage laws were the centrepiece (Brunt and Moore 1967: ad loc.). Augustus is the fulcrum between past exempla and those transmitted for future imitation. His singularity is emphasized repeatedly in the Res gestae, yet he offers a model for imitation (Ramage 1987: 21–32). His performance as emperor is recorded in the inscription of the Res gestae, itself a text copied and disseminated to at least the eastern province of Galatia. Augustus’ last words conceive of his life as a role in mime (Suetonius, Aug. 99). Cornelia’s performance venue is rather the lawcourt, though her speech’s conclusion (‘causa perorata est’ (the case has been spoken), 4. 11. 99) and the release of her audience (‘surgite, testes’ (rise,

27

She speaks of herself by name at lines 13 and 43. The choice is not for the sake of the metre. First-person habui would retain the same scansion as ‘habuit’ in 13, as would eram for ‘erat’ in 44; syllables heavy by position would become heavy by nature. For the split between speaker and person spoken of, Lowrie (2007b).

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witnesses) recall the formal conclusions of Roman comedy.28 Both Cornelia and Augustus ﬁll roles already largely scripted, though Augustus certainly surpassed Cornelia in his ability to control his own script. Propertius with his Cornelia creates his feminine version of the master narrative of his age. The formal features examined above—the repetition of legal vocabulary, the exemplary structure—serve the greater ideological purpose of summarizing Augustan representation. The narrative illogicalities explored at the beginning of the chapter, however, question any straightforward ideological statement. The dissonances do not undermine the represented ideology, but highlight the poem as a medium. Propertius’ task of persuasion is not a persuasion to—that task falls rather to Cornelia—but a persuasion that, namely that he makes a correct analysis of the ideology. In addition to the what of artistic representation, Propertius also considers the how. Quintilian’s res gesta is the story part of an exemplum, but there is also the commemoratio, the discourse conveying the story. Cornelia ﬁgures many things—chastity, the combined dynamism and ﬁxity of the law and of representation, but she also ﬁgures the challenges to discourse itself, particularly poetry’s aspiration to communicate beyond death. At the poem’s beginning, death appears as a brick wall: its immutable, infernal laws (‘infernas . . . leges’, 4. 11. 3) withstand any pleas (‘preces . . . exorato . . . orantem’, 4. 11. 2–5). Against death, no discourse is effective, nor are institutions or public performances or speech acts. Cornelia cites marriage, the triumphal chariots of her ancestors, and pledges (11–12)—all are vain. But the major events of her life are marked by processions. ‘Intrarunt funera’ (3) suggests her funeral procession, as do the trumpets of the rites (Camps line 9). The ancestral chariot indicates a procession, and she refers to her marriage with the common metaphor of the torches that accompany the wedding procession (‘facibus . . . maritis’, 33). Her adult life is framed by these torches, in marriage and in death (‘uiximus insignes inter utramque facem’ (I lived, a remarkable woman, between both torches), 46). She further appropriates a triumph to herself: ‘haec est feminei merces extrema triumphi’ (this reward is the uttermost of a woman’s triumph), 71). She continues the triumphal metaphor by calling her achievements ‘deeds’ (‘mea facta’, 70), a phrase Ovid uses of Jupiter and Caesar (Tr. 2. 69, 326). All these positive, living actions and performances are transient. Communication with the dead, however, seems possible, and is a recurrent concern in Propertius—Cynthia speaks from the dead in 4. 7. He lends 28 e.g. Plautus, Captiui 1029, 1036: ‘Spectatores, ad pudicos mores facta haec fabula est . . . j qui pudicitiae esse uoltis praemium, plausum date’ (Spectators, this play was made for modest manners . . . j those who wish to give a prize for modesty, applaud).

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Cornelia a voice in death through his poem; in addition to speaking to Paullus, the judges, and later readers, she addresses or apostrophizes myriad objects and persons.29 Despite the complexities of her speech genre, the voice is static and cannot respond. It is in fact written. Although Propertius cannot surpass the conﬁnes of his representation to make what he represents happen, he suggests a possible countervailing assumption on the audience’s part about a work of art’s responsiveness. Cornelia asks Paullus to speak to her statue as if it would respond (‘ut responsurae’, 84).30 I take this as an allegory of reading. Even more than Cornelia, Propertius lends himself a voice after death. The inert statue is a work of art that preserves Cornelia’s memory and stands for her completed narrative and her completed life. She assumes Paullus will speak to it. The statue simply exists and cannot answer back, but he is to leave pauses in his speech as if it could. Janan reads this passage as empty and horriﬁc: Cornelia occupies the gaps in conversation.31 The passage could rather be half full. Although art or poetry cannot speak to us on its own initiative, Propertius urges us to continue to engage it as an active partner. 29

Address: Paullus (1, 35, 73, 81), ‘mater Scribonia’ (55), her sons Lepidus and Paullus and daughter (63, 67, 87), the ‘testes’ (witnesses, 99). Apostrophe: ‘noctes et . . . paludes’ (nights and swamps), 15; Sisyphus, 23; Tantalus’ water, 24; the exemplary Claudia, 51–2; personiﬁed lands (Rome, 37; Africa, 38). Several of these apostrophes countervail the assumption that the ﬁgure is directed to people or objects who cannot respond (n. 8 above). Cornelia enjoins silence on some of the standard inhabitants of the underworld in a convention offering them respite from their travails (‘taceant’ (let them be silent), 23; ‘tacita’ (silent), 26); the assumption is that they could in fact speak. 30 Rothstein ad loc. reads ‘tace’ (be silent) for ‘iace’ (throw out), with no essential change in meaning. Steiner (2001) 151 calls attention to the consolatory aspect of the negation of loss made by archaic Greek statues and inscriptions that represent the dead in motion and speaking; images put up in honour of dead wives attempt to restore what was lost and to preserve the social relations that deﬁned the dead woman in life (13). This instance goes beyond its predecessors in the ‘typical dialogue motif ’ between lovers and the absent portrait of the beloved, Bettini (1999) 118. 31 Janan (2001) 162. Bettini (1999) 119: Paullus is to engage in sermocinatio, i.e. bestow speech on someone without a voice.

16 The Pragmatics of Literature: Ovid TRISTIA 2: UP AGAINST THE LAW He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It it literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order. (This is why in Romance languages, to be ‘banned’ originally means both to be ‘at the mercy of ’ and ‘at one’s own free will, freely,’ to be ‘excluded’ and also ‘open to all, free.’) (Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, 1998: 29)

We can count on Ovid for a pun. In his famous remark about how the most read part of the Aeneid is the illegitimate love affair between Dido and Aeneas,1 paronomasia brings together reading and the law.2 et tamen ille tuae felix Aeneidos auctor contulit in Tyrios arma uirumque toros, nec legitur pars ulla magis de corpore toto, quam non legitimo foedere iunctus amor.

(T. 2. 533–6)

(And nevertheless, that famous, happy author of your Aeneid brought arms and the man into a Tyrian bed, nor is any part from the whole corpus read more than the love joined in a not legitimate treaty.)

Ovid manipulates Vergil tendentiously: even Augustus’ favourite Aeneid has a sex scene. The dead metaphors of a textual corpus and marriage treaty become salient when talking about sex and the law. Ovid’s literalist 1

Augustine proves Ovid right, Conf. 1. 20–1. Kenney (1969) 253 notes the frequency of ‘legitimus’ in Ovid, while it is ‘otherwise unknown to the “high” genres of Latin poetry before Lucan’. The pun on law and writing occurs several times in the Metamorphoses. At 1. 90–2, the Golden Age is said to have had no law, nor were threatening words to be read on bronze. At 10. 203–8, repetition of ‘leg-’ creates more of a sound effect, if the passage is genuine; see TarrMet. 2

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imagination concretizes the ‘arms and the man’ of Aeneid 1.1;3 in bed, the arms become a common sexual metaphor and the man wears a corporeal rather than heroic aspect.4 The stakes, however, surpass an amusing and perverse reading. Vergil is presented as an author (auctor) who has offered a well-read exemplum of an illegitimate love affair. Augustus also calls himself ‘auctor’ in describing the passage of his marriage legislation (RG 8. 5; above 302–3). Ovid sets the poet and the lawmaker in contest as authors whose writings contradict each other. Even if the Res gestae was not yet known to Ovid, he reveals an understanding of Augustus’ exemplarity as set out there.5 urbs quoque te et legum lassat tutela tuarum et morum, similes quos cupis esse tuis. (T. 2. 233–4) (The city also tires you and the guardianship of your laws and of customs, which you wish to be similar to your own.)6

Augustus wants to establish the law by his authority and to determine the imitation of examples. What Augustus presents as accomplished fact in his Res gestae, Ovid slyly makes a desideratum (‘cupis’, 2. 234). The possessive ‘your’ of both the laws (2. 233) and the Aeneid (2. 533) points up Augustus’ inability to control the literary sphere, however much he can determine the law.7 One could say Vergil supports Augustus and the marriage legislation by presenting Aeneas’ affair with Dido as illegitimate, but it comes down to reception. Ovid’s remarks this part of the Aeneid is the most read: negative exempla cause pleasure. The mutual implication of reading, reception, legitimacy, and the law is decisive in the extended passage surrounding that cited above. Ovid moves from questioning whether Augustus actually had time to read his Ars amatoria, the didactic poem on seduction partly responsible for his exile, to appropriate reading material for matrons. The law comes into play as a sphere of business occupying Augustus’ time and as imposing limits on married women’s reading. The frequency of words beginning with leg- is a formal feature inviting comparison of the law and literature as texts, particularly regarding their ability to effect things in the world.8 Their pragmatic 3

For Ovid’s literalism, Barchiesi (2001b) 39–40. Parallels for arma at Adams 21, 224. 5 Fairweather (1987) 193 speculates: similarities in language between Ovid and Augustus’ Res gestae point to a common source in the emperor’s autobiography. 6 For the parallel between RG 8. 5 and Met. 15. 832–4 (cited below), Bo¨mer ad loc.; Gordon Williams (1978) 95; P. Hardie (1997) 192; Scheid 41. 7 The anecdote about Pollio’s response to Octavian’s Fescinnine verses against him reveals the interface between writing as literature and as law (Preface). 8 ‘Lego’ (T. 2. 220, 240, 242, 255, 260); ‘lex’ (233, 243); ‘legitimum’ (249). 4

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effectiveness is intimately connected to their exemplarity. Ovid defends his Ars: he explicitly excluded from his intended audience women who could not legally engage in affairs. His exclusion of the princeps from the audience on the basis of the poem’s unworthiness (242), however, shows you cannot control your readership—if Augustus did in fact read the Ars amatoria, which Ovid doubts. Furthermore, people’s imitation of texts depends on them, not the text.9 Augustus may want people to imitate his obedience to law and morals, but when he presents literature in the same light, he fails to understand not only that people do not necessarily imitate what they read (a point in Ovid’s defence), but they may also not act in accord with the law. Ovid shows you cannot control what people do with your text by changing his own text after the fact—this intervention happens to be authorial. His citation of the Ars is exact except for an alteration highlighting the law: ‘nos uenerem tutam concessaque furta canemus’ (I will sing of safe love and thefts which are allowed, AA 1. 33); the ﬁrst half of the line becomes ‘nil nisi legitimum’ (nothing unless legitimate, T. 2. 249).10 ‘Safe sex’ represents the seducer’s point of view, while Augustus focalizes legitimacy.11 Legal language marks reading, beyond legitimacy at the point of composition: ‘nec tamen est facinus uersus euoluere mollis, j multa licet castae non facienda legant’ (nor, however, is it a crime to unroll a volume of soft verses, it is allowed for chaste women to read of many things that should not be done, 307–8). The contrast between reading and doing, literature and life, lies at the centre of the problematics of representation and performativity. Ovid’s long list of examples of things not to imitate broadens his argument. Light verse offers erotic exempla not to follow, but tragedy, presented as text, does too (‘scripti’, 381; ‘legeremus’, 392; ‘legis bis’, 395–6). Games, the theatre, the Circus, and temples offer ‘seeds of depravity’ (279–80): they represent tawdry material like the gods’ sex lives (289–300), but also offer occasions for men and women to mingle (284–6).12 The spectacles and monuments not only suggest illicit 9

Gibson (1999) esp. 36–7: authorial inability to control reception confers freedom on the reader. Sharrock (1994) 111 notes the contradiction of accepting respectable women as readers but excluding them as students. 10 On this notorious substitution, Gareth Williams (1994) 206–9; Barchiesi (2001b) 91. Sharrock (1994) 111–12 comments on the ‘absurd juxtaposition’ of ‘concessa’ with ‘furta’, which brings out the legal sense of furtum as theft, a word otherwise standard for an affair. 11 Gareth Williams (1994) 206–7 takes ‘uenerem tutam’ from the ladies’ point of view. But Ars 1 targets male seducers, and I take the claims about its being written for courtesans another of Ovid’s later distortions, made to contrast with the matrons. 12 Gareth Williams (1994) 165 notes that Ovid contradicts what he says about ‘semina . . . nequitiae’ at AA 3. 4. 9–10, where he argues that ‘allowing people to do what they want weakens the potential for wrongdoing’.

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material; they enable its enactment among the spectators. Representation becomes more dangerous in a performance context because spectacles are public events in public spaces allowing for the conﬂuence of bodies. Ovid’s main argument in representation’s favour is that ﬁction severs manners and poetry (‘uita uerecunda est, Musa iocosa mea’ (my life is modest, my Muse playful), 354). He claims his poetry lies and is largely ﬁctitious (‘mendax . . . ﬁcta’, 355) and that poets’ characters do not necessarily match their poetry. This poetic topos goes back to Catullus 16, where the threat of sexual violence against his addressees, Furius and Aurelius, simultaneously calls into question his ostensible separation of poetry from life and reveals the speaker’s threats as obscenities whose power is exhausted in their utterance (Selden 1992: 477–82). Like Catullus, Ovid’s statement here involves him in the liar’s paradox, so we cannot tell whether the statement itself is ﬁctive.13 It also involves the poem in a paradoxical interplay between the performative and representation. Tristia 2, if any poem in Latin literature, makes a claim to performative power: Ovid asks Augustus for clemency. Let us assume momentarily that Ovid does want reprieve from exile and considers poetry an effective means for obtaining it.14 Towards the poem’s beginning, he emphasizes poetry’s worldly effects with repeated clauses of substantive result (‘carmina fecerunt, ut . . . ’ (poetry brought it about that . . . ), 5, 7).15 What his poetry achieved was ﬁrst a readership, then banishment. His poetry’s capacity to achieve effects, even if catastrophically different from those intended, gives him hope in its continued power. He musters a series of exempla in support, the ﬁrst mythological (Telephus, 19–20), the second based on Augustus’ own use of poetry. Musaque, quam mouit, motam quoque leniet iram: exorant magnos carmina saepe deos. ipse quoque Ausonias Caesar matresque nurusque carmina turrigerae dicere iussit Opi: iusserat et Phoebo dici, quo tempore ludos fecit, quos aetas aspicit una semel. his precor exemplis tua nunc, mitissime Caesar, ﬁat ab ingenio mollior ira meo. (T. 2. 21–8)

13

For the liar’s paradox, Nugent (1990) 253; Gareth Williams (1994) 169. Thibault (1964) 2, Little (1976) 24, and Gordon Williams (1978) 96–7 take the appeal literally. Marache (1958) is paradigmatic for the opposite view: the poem is directed to the public rather than Augustus and is a not so covert attack on the emperor. Marg (1968) also takes Ovid ironically (510) and divides his public into his contemporary literary circle and posterity, leaving Augustus out entirely (503). 15 The repetition of ‘fecit’ of love (‘concitus a laeso fecit amore dolor. j fecit amor’, T. 2. 388–9) later in the poem offers a more standard view of the causes of terrible events. 14

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(and the Muse, who moved anger, will also appease it once moved: songs often win over the great gods. Caesar himself also ordered Ausonian mothers and brides to say songs to tower-wearing Ops: he had ordered one to be said to Phoebus, in the time when he made the games which each age sees once. I pray by these examples, gentlest Caesar, that your anger now become softer by my genius.)

The generic joke—what genre but elegy could soften Caesar’s anger?—points out that elegy’s job is to woo (werbende Dichtung). Its illocutionary force should ideally have seduction as its perlocutionary effect. Ovid, the ‘magister’ (teacher) of love in the Ars, should theoretically know how to seduce, although he risks everything by putting Augustus in the rhetorical position of the beloved. With at least apparent seriousness, Ovid notes that Caesar himself has used poetry to appease the gods, and refers to Horace’s Carmen saeculare and Epistle to Augustus in support. Horace shows great interest in performative discourse in the choral ode (Ch. 5) and states that poetry appeases the gods explicitly in the epistle (‘carmine di superi placantur, carmine Manes’ (the gods above, the shades below are placated by song), Epist. 2. 1. 138).16 Ovid aligns Augustus as a present and potent god (‘te praesentem . . . deum’, T. 2. 54) with the ‘praesentia numina’ (literally ‘present divinities’, Epist. 2. 1. 134) Horace claims hear a chorus. As such, he should be amenable to persuasion. Ovid and Horace both present the gods as granting suppliants’ wishes (‘exorant’, T. 2. 22; ‘placantur’, Epist. 2. 1. 138). Augustus himself has used poetry to try to win over Ops, ‘Aid’ (2. 24),17 what Telephus sets against his wound (‘uulnus opemque’, 2. 20) and Ovid desires for himself. Ovid’s exempla (2. 27) themselves embody the problematic of literature’s relation to the world. When Augustus used song to propitiate the gods, the example is both his use of song and the propitiatory songs themselves. The Carmen saeculare represents its prayers being granted (above, 135–7). If, however, we take literature as ﬁction, as Ovid suggests (355), the Carmen saeculare’s self-representation emerges as wishful thinking and Augustus’ use of literature appears naive. We are not told whether Ops or Phoebus granted Augustus’ prayers: they may have fallen on deaf ears. Ovid shows the vulnerability of his argument with ‘saepe’ (22): the gods often grant prayers, but not always. A similar tentativeness lies in ‘forsitan’ (19): the aid Achilles gave Telephus after wounding him will ‘perhaps’ come to Ovid. The Telephus example furthermore suggests that while harm and healing may come from the same source, the one who harms or heals also 16

For intertextuality between Horace Epistle 2. 1 and Tristia 2, Nugent (1990) 249, Barchiesi (1993) ¼ (2001b) ch. 4. 17 This was the temple he build for the Magna Mater, Owen T at T. 2. 24, Augustus RG 19. 2 and Appendix 2. Wiedemann (1975) 269 locates this ritual use of song in the famine of 5–8 ce.

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decides. Ovid’s entire argument about the Ars rests on people’s ability to choose whether to follow an exemplum or not: responsibility resides in the agent, not the one offering the example. The illocutionary force of the Ars has no necessary perlocutionary effect. Should the same not pertain to this poem’s requests? The area where speech is binding is the law, as exempliﬁed by Augustus’ words about Ovid’s case. His clemency has preserved Ovid’s life and, signiﬁcantly in light of ‘ops’ in the passage above, his ‘paternae . . . opes’ (paternal wealth, 129–30). The different speech and legal acts in Ovid’s description of his terms of banishment deserve analysis as discourse.18 nec mea decreto damnasti facta senatus, nec mea selecto iudice iussa fuga est. tristibus inuectus uerbis (ita principe dignum) ultus es offensas, ut decet, ipse tuas. adde quod edictum, quamuis immite minaxque, attamen in poenae nomine lene fuit: quippe relegatus, non exul, dicor, in illo, priuaque fortunae sunt ibi uerba meae. (T. 2. 131–8) (Nor did you condemn my deeds with a decree of the Senate, nor was my ﬂight ordered by a special judge. Having reprimanded me with sad words (as is worthy a prince), you yourself avenged, as is ﬁtting, offences against you. Add the fact that the edict, though harsh and threatening, nevertheless was mild in the name of the punishment: indeed, I am said to be relegated, not an exile, in it, and the words there are particular to my fortune.)

Since a decree and an edict would be equally binding on Ovid, the store he sets by their difference reveals social and discursive concerns. The Senate’s vote on a decree (decretum) would have exposed Ovid to society’s judgement and public humiliation (2. 131). Augustus rather made an edict, or proclamation, so that he alone was responsible. Ovid consequently explores Augustus’ use of words. Augustus’ pronouncements on Ovid take two forms, a verbal reprimand (‘tristibus inuectus uerbis’ (scolded with sad words), 2. 133), and the edict— etymologically a pronouncement (e-dictum). Since Ovid speciﬁes that the edict contains words pertaining to his own fortune, presumably it was formulaic and did not contain speciﬁcs of the reprimand, which was oral and private. Augustus’ reprimand sets the generic tone for Ovid’s poetic response, since the princeps’ ‘sad words’ cause the poet to write those of the Tristia. Ovid links his punishment and his poetry: ‘his ego deceptus non 18 Focardi (1975) 117–22: Ovid emphasizes Augustus’ merely verbal favour to point up the procedure’s irregularity; Nugent (1990) 253.

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tristia carmina feci, j sed tristis nostros poena secuta iocos’ (deceived by these [examples], I made poems not sad [the Ars], but a sad punishment followed my jokes, 2. 493–4).19 Since then, his poetry has been sad. By taking playful verse as exemplary, Augustus acquires authorship at least of the reading, if not of the poem. Generic determination on Augustus’ part is matched by the effectiveness of the edict: the ‘edictum’ results in the passive ‘dicor’ (137), so that Ovid says ‘I am said’ to be relegated. Ovid emphasizes the use of words (‘in poenae nomine’, 136; ‘uerba’, 138) that determine his legal status as ‘relegatus’ and not ‘exul’ (137). Here, another compound in leg- receives emphasis.20 Why? It is not simply the more lenient legal status, but the emperor’s speech act that interests Ovid.21 Augustus has the power to make things so by saying so and Ovid has become the recipient of his speech, which exiled him. Since he readily calls himself ‘exile’ elsewhere (‘exul’, T. 1. 1. 3; ‘exilium’, 2. 577) ‘relegatus’ expresses something important in this context that ‘exul’ does not. The force of relegare is transitive and Augustus can and does utter words that bring this result about, as the active voice later in the poem shows: ‘unde precor supplex ut nos in tuta releges’ (from this I pray as a suppliant that you relegate me into safety, 201). The contrast between speech acts could not be stronger: Ovid’s prayer needs a corresponding speech act from Augustus to achieve its intended effect. Ovid’s words are not determinative, while Augustus’ are. In light of Augustus’ formal pronouncement, the other occurrence of ‘dicor’ in this poem stands out. The speaker is not clear in ‘qui nec contraria dicor j arma nec hostiles esse secutus opes’ (I, who am not said to have pursued weapons against you nor hostile resources, 51–2).22 Whether the poet’s reputation or a speciﬁc statement of the emperor’s, what is said (or not) determines what is held to be true. Again, resources (opes) are at issue in the context of effective speech. Language also has binding effects on Augustus. The emperor is called ‘pater patriae’, and Ovid asks him to act accordingly, like the god with same name (39–40). Since he explains that Jupiter ‘therefore is justly called the father and ruler of the gods’ (‘iure igitur genitorque deum rectorque uocatur j iure’, 19

For collusion between poet and princeps here, Habinek (1998a) 155–6; he notes legal terminology in Ovid’s self-elogium at T. 4. 10 (154). 20 OLD derives relegare from legare, which in turn derives from lex. 21 Nugent (1990) 252–3: while the legal status may be more lenient, Ovid insists no exile was sent further from home (2. 188). She takes the discrepancy between word and deed as another similarity between poet and emperor: Ovid has spoken well of Augustus in works characterized as either criminal, or unbelievable: ‘crimina nostra’ (2. 61) and ‘in non credendos corpora uersa modos’ (2. 64). 22 Goold (1996) ad loc. translates: ‘none assert’.

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37–8) and governs with clemency—repetition underscores the grounding of divine power in natural law—Augustus should apply the exemplum to himself. Does the appellation of father derive from Jupiter’s and Augustus’ stern but clement behaviour? Or it is it an interpellation meant to elicit a clement response? Regardless, Jupiter and Augustus operate according to natural or earthly law respectively. Ovid formally brings the law into poetry’s realm, but deprives it of power by relegating it to superﬁcial play. One of the didactic poems he mentions which treat either illicit activities such as games of chance or trivial ball games is a book on ‘the laws’ (‘leges’) of banquets and hospitality (488). These are laws by metaphorical extension; any binding quality is due to custom and infractions are not prosecuted in court. Ovid includes this book under the category of ‘alii lusus’ (other games, 483). Play is the subject matter of these books and the game of writing itself (‘talia luduntur’ (such things are played), 491). If law falls short of full seriousness in poetry, Ovid conversely turns the tables on Augustus by making him responsible for play: ‘inspice ludorum sumptus, Auguste, tuorum: j empta tibi magno talia multa leges’ (examine the expenses of your games, Augustus: j you will read that many such things have been bought by you at a great price, 509–10). Of course, public festivals (‘ludi’) are play on a different level from the pastimes of ‘lusus’ in the previous section (483), and the reading involved is the serious matter of going over accounts rather than entertainment, but Ovid’s point holds: the emperor himself sponsored spectacles and has looked on scenic representations of adultery without anger (514).23 Ovid sets these remarks on the emperor’s patronage and tolerance in the middle of a section on mime, and here lies a great difference between Tristia 2 and Horace’s Epistle to Augustus.24 Horace’s main concern in the epistle is the difference between good and bad poetry, where the criterion is aesthetic and not moral. The former is to last in the libraries, while the latter dominates the transient and chaotic stage. Horace respects tragedy, and (says he) wishes he could write it, but most literary performance is merely spectacular and in poor taste. Augustus comes across as a patron with discriminating judgement, who has supported the likes of Vergil and Varius and certainly done better than Alexander, who threw good money after bad poetry. Horace and Augustus, each in his own realm, upholds high standards (Barchiesi 2001b: 84). Ovid’s concern is with good and bad poetry in the moral sense: even the most upright of authors, including Augustus’ own Vergil, have illicit sex 23 24

For Augustus’ popularizing tastes, Horsfall (2003) 34, 68, 70, 78, 100. Above, n. 16. For discrete points of convergence, Gareth Williams (1994) 53, 90, 180–1.

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scenes. The difference between the greats and lowly mime becomes minimal: both inhabit the library and receive sponsorship. All kinds of morally corrupt stuff, even accounts of their authors’ sex lives (2. 418), mingle with monuments of learning in the libraries, which are supported by the patronage of society’s pre-eminent men (2. 419–20).25 Augustus himself has sponsored morally dubious spectacles, and Ovid, far from keeping his own poetry apart from the indignity of the stage as Horace does, recalls that Augustus has often seen Ovid’s own poetry performed (519–20). What for Horace is a matter of taste, becomes for Ovid a matter of power. Where Horace and Augustus inhabit the separate realms of poetry and politics respectively, each adhering to high standards, Ovid has suddenly found his poetry dragged into the political world, where aesthetics yields to morals.26 Here the performative power of his poetry is equally weak or strong whether read or performed on stage. Ovid makes several gestures of separating poetry and politics, but this distinction breaks down. His division of the reasons for his exile into two, ‘carmen et error’ (song and mistake, 207), superﬁcially keeps the two apart. Making a mistake is more personal, less juridical than committing a crime, and downplays the offence, however easy it is to recall his frequent pun on ‘carmen’ and ‘crimen’. A comparison, however, with his discussion of Gallus, another poet sent into exile, reveals a difference: poetry played no part in his exile, which was strictly political. He did not hold his tongue (445–6). Ovid demonstrates that he can in fact hold his tongue in the political realm, and the secrecy of his error has plagued scholarship ever since.27 perdiderint cum me duo crimina, carmen et error, alterius facti culpa silenda mihi: nam non sum tanti, renouem ut tua uulnera, Caesar, quem nimio plus est indoluisse semel. altera pars superest, qua turpi carmine factus arguor obsceni doctor adulterii. (T. 2. 207–12) (Since two accusations lost me, a poem and a mistake, the blame for one of these deeds must be kept silent by me: I am not worth so much that I should renew your wounds, Caesar, whom is it more than too much to have grieved once. The other part remains, in which I am accused of having been made a teacher of obscene adultery by a foul poem.)

25

Goold (1996) takes this passage of libraries. Horace questions the separation of poetry from politics through allusion to Cicero, Lowrie (2002a), but their surface separation still holds. 27 Thibault (1964); Gareth Williams (1994) 174 n. 48. 26

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Literature can talk ad nauseam about itself, and so Ovid does, but the political mistake remains off limits. If he had really wanted to keep his mistake quiet, however, Ovid could simply not have mentioned it. He rather accords it the status of a secret, something known to be not or partially known. His display of tact is overly ostentatious. This partial drawing of the political into poetry complements poetry’s intrusion into the political. The contradiction between the effective poetry Ovid hopes this poem will be and his argument against the effectiveness of the Ars is, I think, the poem’s chief burden.28 It appears formally in the tension between the statement that every poem can harm (‘posse nocere’, 2. 263–4) and that his cannot (‘posse nocere’, 2. 275–6). Both cannot hold at the same time. This contradiction expresses in a nutshell the irresolution I have approached from different angles throughout this book. Writing and performance do not line up neatly, the former with ineffective representation and the latter with effective performativity. Rather, the lines have been redrawn to explore the interaction between representation and performative power within poetry’s own domain, in the parallel world of politics, and in the new and strange crossover between them. The focus on reading in this poem is signally important because it shifts power from composition to reception, from authorial intention to uncontrollable effects. This difference between poetry as mere representation and as exemplary should be measured against Augustus’ power. The emperor himself manages the empire through representation, in this context, political delegation (Chs. 11 and 12). In Tristia 2 he, like Ovid, is both present (‘praesens’, 175) and absent (‘procul es’, 176) from Rome through his delegates (‘pro . . . Caesare Caesar’, 230). The emperor’s effectiveness through others’ representation, however, should count against his assumption of the harmlessness of his own sponsorship of games (514). If Augustus is willing to separate these two for himself, he should do the same for Ovid. The crisis in power that Tristia 2 explores is that suddenly, one poet has been granted an exemplary and performative power that sets the separation of the political and the literary into question. Augustus, to Ovid’s surprise and dismay, takes his poetry seriously (Habinek 1998a: 155). Ovid takes advantage of his work’s new status and makes an exemplary argument on the basis of Augustus’ treatment of those vanquished in war (43–50): if he forgives those who have borne arms against him, he should pardon all the more one who has not. But the poet falls between the cracks and receives neither the indulgence Augustus affords himself in sponsoring entertainment, nor the clemency he grants 28 Nugent (1990) 243: the poem is ‘not only unconvincing but self-defeating’; Ovid’s point is ‘to speak beside the point (245). Gibson (1999) 27, 36.

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enemies. The blurring of the literary and the political has resulted in his exclusion from both. Ovid’s singularity would at ﬁrst glance countervail his exemplary force. He insists on his isolation in the literary tradition twice with the word ‘unus’ (one, 2. 495–6, 568),29 and reiterates the point by repeating ‘solus’ (2. 361–2). He is unique in being punished for his poetry, although not for writing ‘tender loves’.30 It is unclear whether the Ars alone is exceptional—Ovid worries about writing at all given the effect his poetry has had (3–4), but writes again nevertheless (2. 16). Can he achieve an effect more in line with his desires? Is writing still dangerous and potent? His self-inscription into the line of Roman erotic writers, speciﬁcally elegists (467), aligns him with entertaining and harmless poetry, but furthermore lends him the support of the entire literary tradition going back to the Greek lyrists, elegists, and Homer (363–466). Is he in this tradition, or suddenly out of it? And furthermore, what is this tradition and why does he distort it so wilfully (Gareth Williams 1994: 193–4)? These two questions are at odds. Ovid’s reduction of Homer, both Iliad and Odyssey, to erotic tales makes sense in justifying his Ars; his poem belongs to a venerable tradition. His chronological displacement of Homer until after the Greek lyrists (363–80), and even Menander, shows he is on shakier ground with Homer, as does his hyperbole: ‘Ilias ipsa quid est aliud, nisi adultera . . . ?’ (What else is the Iliad itself, unless an adulteress . . . ?, 371); ‘aut quid Odyssea est, nisi femina . . . ?’ (or what is the Odyssey, unless a woman . . . ?, 375). The synopses of tragedy that follow are equally tendentious. Since his description of the Greek and Roman traditions occupies over a hundred lines, he expends tremendous energy in establishing a history from which to exclude himself. Of course, it is Augustus who makes an exception of Ovid, as the only one to have to pay such a price for writing in a long tradition of entertaining erotic literature, and Ovid presents this tradition to prove that his treatment is unjustiﬁed and lacks precedent. Did this happen only once or have things now changed for good? In Tristia 2, Ovid points out that erotic literature is mixed together with the writings of learned men in the libraries (419–20) to justify his own experiments in eroticism and to show that this aspect, whatever its worth, belongs ﬁrmly in the canon. In the following poem, however, the book speaking in its own voice reveals not only that the Ars has been excluded from the libraries 29 Whatever the text of 495–6, Ovid’s fate is exceptional. Goold (1996) reads ‘nempe (nec inuideo) tot de scribentibus unus, j quem sua perdiderit Musa, repertus ego’, and translates, ‘Truly, I am the only one singled out from so many writers (and I bear them no ill-will) to be ruined by his muse. ’ Owen reads ‘denique nec uideo tot de scribentibus unum, j quem sua perdiderit Musa, repertus ego’; the syntax of ‘repertus’ is unclear. 30 Ovid’s singularity returns: he is the only one his Muse has harmed (‘unus’, 2. 568).

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(Palatine, Porticus Octaviae, and Atrium Libertatis), but it itself has been turned away (T. 3. 1. 59–72).31 The Tristia is in the same boat (to use Ovid’s metaphor, 2. 469–70) as the Ars. As with the Ars, the power to exile, to exclude, to make exceptions lies with Augustus. Ovid’s poetry may have caused effects, but these escape his control. Ovid’s hopes in this poem of achieving some degree of correspondence between his illocutionary force (supplication) and the desired perlocutionary effect (pardon) are strangely curtailed. Several times, he states he is asking not for recall, but a half-measure: displacement to a less extreme, safer, and quieter place (2. 183–6, 201–6, 577–8). This seems rather modest, given a full book-roll of verbal outpourings. Over the whole exilic corpus, even this wish fails to be granted. This poetry, nine books of Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, turns out to be extremely ineffective. This is, perhaps, the point. Ovid’s very inability to persuade Augustus proves he was wrong to exile him in the ﬁrst place: how can the Ars persuade if the Tristia cannot? If his situation was really more like Gallus’, where poetry was not at issue (2. 445–6), and Augustus simply mentioned it as a supplement to Ovid’s political mistake, then, in the political realm, the poem’s entire argument is misplaced. Be that as it may, Ovid gets his revenge on Augustus via poetry. The power of representation remains his and Augustus goes down for all time as an emperor who refused clemency to a harmless and entertaining poet with a ﬁrm position in the canon. Ovid presents Augustus as at least understanding poetry’s power enough to have commissioned Horace’s Carmen saeculare for his Century Games (2. 25–6), and his refusal to represent Augustus as he wished demonstrates his control within his own domain. In three separate passages (73–4; 321–40; 529–30), Ovid addresses his own writing up of Augustus’ deeds (‘facta’, 2. 69, 322, 327, 530; ‘acta’, 2. 335).32 The conventions of the recusatio, deployed to some extent in each, articulate an analogy between genre, style, and content, and Ovid maintains this convention until the poem’s end,33 when he ﬁnally avows he has in fact written in praise of Augustus, in the high style at that (2. 547–62). Repetition helps isolate the relation of the representing discourse to the thing represented. By the end, the deeds to be related drop out of consideration. Ovid stands back from representation taken in its ordinary sense of presenting anew something, 31 Starr (1987) 219: being turned away from the library was a disgrace for the author, but in no way inhibited the circulation of texts, which took place largely through private hands. Goldberg (2005) 203. Learning joins these passages: ‘doctorum monumentis . . . uirorum’ (2. 419); ‘doctis . . . libellis’ (3. 1. 71). 32 Related is the generic attenuation of Achilles’ facta by another author (412). 33 e.g. Gigantomachy’s association with high-style narrative praise poetry (71, 333), the metaphors of ﬁeld and ship for poetic self-deﬁnition (327–30, 547–9).

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that is, deeds, pre-existing in the world. Can poetry praise without representing in this narrow sense (Ch. 3)? In the ﬁrst passage, Ovid argues he has praised Augustus in the Ars because these books are full of his name (61–2). Although his main point is that even small-scale praise is valuable, in the course of his argument, he sets a wedge between action and words. non tua carminibus maior ﬁt gloria, nec quo, ut maior ﬁat, crescere possit, habet. fama Ioui superest: tamen hunc sua facta referri et se materiam carminis esse iuuat, cumque Gigantei memorantur proelia belli, credibile est laetum laudibus esse suis. te celebrant alii, quanto decet ore, tuasque ingenio laudes uberiore canunt: sed tamen, ut fuso taurorum sanguine centum, sic capitur minimo turis honore deus. (T. 2. 67–76) (Your glory does not become greater by songs, nor does it have any space where it could grow so as to become larger. Jupiter has an excess of fame: nevertheless it pleases him for his deeds to be related and himself to be the subject matter of song, and when the battles of the war with the Giants are told, it is believable that he is happy because of his praises. Others celebrate you, with as much voice as is ﬁtting, and sing your praises with a richer genius: but a god is nevertheless as much taken by the smallest honour of incense as he is by the spilt blood of one hundred bulls.)

The honoriﬁc parallel between Jupiter and Augustus creates a picture of the relation of poetry to deeds: the honorand ﬁrst achieves something sufﬁcient unto itself, the poet subsequently gives pleasure by recounting the achievement. Ovid’s choice of words, however, belies poetry’s derivativeness. Both ‘gloria’ and ‘fama’ connote not merely the deeds, but their dissemination.34 Language, far from superﬂuous, is already present. Ovid uses one of the conventions of the recusatio, the allegation that others may sing the laudandus’ praises in the high style his deeds deserve, a move that allows the poet to represent the laudandus in a qualiﬁed way as he wishes. He develops this argument at lines 321–40, where he regrets he chose light topics in the Ars instead of Caesar’s deeds, but defends himself on the grounds that he seemed

34 For ‘gloria’, deﬁned ﬁrst as ‘praise or honor accorded . . . by general consent, glory’, OLD cites Cicero, ‘gloria est frequens de aliquo fama cum laude’ (glory is regular fame about someone with praise, Inv. 2. 166). Merit creates its own glory: ‘Though they died, they are not dead; Arete, through the glory which she gives them (ŒıÆ ı ’), leads them up, from above, out of the house of Hades’ (‘Simonides’, Page’s translation, FGE 9. 716–17). It is not poetry, but Arete that gloriﬁes, pace Barchiesi (1996) 20.

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to detract from them with his style: these deeds’ greatness would require a divine genius he disavows of himself. Singing has connotations of a higher style and genre than elegy (74, 324; also 530, 562), and at 75–6 the common metaphor of sacriﬁce (e.g. Horace, Odes 4. 2. 53–60) implies not only a smaller generic offering, but a different kind of speech act. Rather than giving superﬂuous pleasure, his poetry aims to propitiate. Finally, Ovid admits he has written often in the high style (548) and sung of Caesar, but makes an important innovation. For elegy, the issue is recounting Caesar’s deeds, but in his higher style poetry, Caesar’s deeds are still not the subject matter. In the Fasti, he is—or was—the dedicatee (2. 551–2).35 In the Metamorphoses, Augustus emerges as a surrogate Muse.36 dictaque sunt nobis, quamuis manus ultima coeptis defuit, in facies corpora uersa nouas. atque utinam reuoces animum paulisper ab ira, et uacuo iubeas hinc tibi pauca legi, pauca, quibus prima surgens ab origine mundi in tua deduxi tempora, Caesar, opus: aspicies, quantum dederis mihi pectoris ipse, quoque fauore animi teque tuosque canam. (T. 2. 555–62) (Although the last touch was lacking to my endeavours, bodies turned into new appearances have been said by me. And would that you call back your spirit for a short while from anger, and order a few things from here to be read to you at leisure, a few things, with which I led the work, rising from the ﬁrst beginning of the world, down to your times, Caesar: you will see how much inspiration you yourself have given me, and with what a favourable mind I sing of you and yours.)

Ovid dissolves the association maintained elsewhere between genre, style, and subject matter. He does not propitiate Augustus, but suggests he read the Metamorphoses to discover Ovid’s disposition to him. Even where he recognizes having written in the high style, he still does not narrate Augustus’ deeds. Praise honours and so preserves the honorand’s name for posterity, but does not represent in the narrow sense of reproducing actions in words. The manner of his representation of Augustus does not in fact change with the genre. Ovid furthermore parallels Augustus in also having deeds. The emperor chose not to name them (‘facta’) in a senatorial decree (131) and his own stern words were private (133). The edict seems unlikely to have speciﬁed the reason for Ovid’s condemnation (138); his so-called ‘error’ (207) may 35

Ovid subsequently dedicated the work to Germanicus (Fasti 1. 3). Ovid uses the language of writing for the Fasti and his Medea (‘scripsi’, 2. 549; ‘scriptum’, 551; ‘scriptum’, 553), although the Fasti represents itself as both forms of discourse (Ch. 7). For the Metamorphoses, he embraces speech and song. 36

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consequently have been unknown at least publicly to his contemporaries. For both Augustus and Ovid, it is not their deeds that earn representation in the other’s medium, but the authors’ disposition. The difference is that the emperor’s speech is effective in the present, while the poet’s words have the power of duration, if not of effectiveness. Ovid does not argue for his own power on the basis of poetic immortality in Tristia 2. He focuses on the present and emphasizes rather his great name among the living (118). He imagines the long time-span of his punishment and hopes Augustus will relent in his lifetime (576). His literary history, however, invites contemplation of longevity: the ‘monuments of learned men’ are preserved in the libraries (419–20). Furthermore, Ovid’s invitation to Augustus to read a few things about himself and his family in the Metamorphoses brings us to the end of book 15, where he makes his strongest statement about his own immortality, which is entirely dependent on reading. The—again distorted—quotation, from ‘ad mea . . . tempora’ (to my times, Met. 1. 4) to ‘in tua . . . tempora’ (T. 2. 560), is another indication to turn to the Metamorphoses and the competition between poet and princeps enacted there.37

READING, FREEDOM, AND IMMORTALITY: ME TA MOR PHOS ES 15. 745–879 The end of the Metamorphoses is the climax in the relations between media, performativity, representation, poetic and political power traced throughout this book. Ovid is the last of the Augustans and this is his culminating statement, even if some of the exile poetry may postdate the ﬁnal revision of his magnum but incomplete opus. This ending is much more abstract than that of the Aeneid. It would be impossible to provide closure to the plot, so Ovid turns rather to the conditions of poetry itself. Images of reading and writing pervade the poem’s end—a surprising development for an epic presenting itself as song (Wheeler 1999: ch. 2). It is not just the poem’s own status as writing Ovid unmasks. He explicitly and emphatically reveals as writing metaphors that underlie two seminal intertexts that have been important in establishing the self-deﬁnition of Augustan poetry: Jupiter’s speech to Venus in Aeneid 1 and Horace’s Odes 3. 30. These allusions together juxtapose political and poetic immortality. Julius Caesar 37 Segal (1969) 260. Little (1976) 26 compares these passages while arguing that we should read the Augustan panegyric straight.

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and Augustus have or will become gods, but the poet will live on through being read. His writing is described in language similar to the records of the fates, a rapprochement that recalls the complex relation between fate and the plot in the Aeneid. Augustus appears as a giver of laws and exempla in language similar to Res gestae 8. 5. The contrast between divine and performative efﬁcacy, and writing’s ability to work beyond the present is also made again. This passage supplements and completes Ovid’s argument in Tristia 2. Fate and fame (fama) emerge as two principles of speech: ﬁxed and free. The law, with its efﬁcacious power, pales beside literary principles of reading, which allow for freedom of interpretation.38 If Ovid and Augustus respectively personify the literary and the legal, the poet wins out over the emperor when his work is freed from the exigencies of supplication. Ovid’s revision of the tradition established by the previous generation of Augustans corrects their depiction of poetic media on the way to redeﬁning his own relation to Augustus. The hint of writing in Jupiter’s speech to Venus in Aeneid 1 (‘uoluens fatorum arcana mouebo’, Aen. 1. 262; Ch. 1) expands in Ovid’s hands into a detailed description of a collection of tablets inscribed on various metals, that Jupiter himself has read and whose content he will relate to Venus. sola insuperabile fatum, nata, mouere paras? intres licet ipsa sororum tecta trium: cernes illic molimine uasto ex aere et solido rerum tabularia ferro, quae neque concussum caeli nec fulminis iram nec metuunt ullas tuta atque aeterna ruinas: inuenies illic incisa adamante perenni fata tui generis, legi ipse animoque notaui et referam, ne sis etiamnum ignara futuri. (Ovid, Met. 15. 807–15) (Alone, daughter, do you prepare to move unconquerable fate? You may yourself enter the house of the three sisters: there you will see a vast expanse of the tablets of things, made of bronze and solid iron, which fear neither the shaking of the sky nor the anger of the lightning bolt or any destruction, since they are safe and eternal: you will ﬁnd there the fates of your race inscribed on lasting adamant. I read it myself and noted it in my mind and will relate, lest you be even now unknowing of the future.)

The strong parallels between this passage and Ovid’s ﬁnal lines on his own work are made via allusions to Horace, Odes 3. 30 and Odes 3. 3. Ovid makes explicit Horace’s implicit metaphor for writing, but the ideas he adopts from

38 I develop for the end of the Metamorphoses Gibson’s (1999) arguments about freedom of reception in T. 2.

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Horace reveal the stakes in his linking his own writing with fate.39 These are immortality and immunity to external destructive forces, threats both physical from Odes 3. 30 and political from Odes 3. 3, which Ovid signiﬁcantly speciﬁes as anger. Omissions as well as inclusions from the opening of Odes 3. 3 play in the allusion. Iustum et tenacem propositi uirum non ciuium ardor praua iubentium, non uultus instantis tyranni mente quatit solida neque Auster, dux inquieti turbidus Hadriae, nec fulminantis magna manus Iouis: si fractus illabatur orbis, impauidum ferient ruinae. (Horace, Odes 3. 3. 1–8) (The just man, who holds to his purpose, will not be shaken from his solid intention by the passion of citizens ordering evil, the pressing tyrant’s countenance, or the south wind, turbulent leader of the restless Adriatic, or the great hand of lightning Jupiter. If the world breaks and falls, the ruins will strike him unafraid.)

The verbal parallel to the tablets’ not fearing ruin or lightning at Met. 15. 811–12 recalls Horace’s speciﬁcation of the excesses of democracy and tyranny as political dangers. Ovid is more concerned about the latter—the former were no longer a potent threat. What links the fates to Ovid’s own work is their invulnerability to physical destruction and anger: ‘iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iouis ira nec ignis j nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere uetustas’ (and now I have composed a work, which neither Jupiter’s anger nor ﬁre can destroy, nor iron nor consuming time, Met. 15. 871–2). Whether this passage was revised from exile or acquired a new meaning thereafter (Segal 1969: 291), Jupiter’s anger cannot help but recall that of Augustus.40 Horace’s picture of the menacing tyrant becomes difﬁcult to lay aside. Ovid has added anger to Horace’s more neutral depiction of Jupiter’s lightning (‘fulminantis’, Odes 3. 3. 6) for both the fates, where he retains lightning (‘fulminis iram’, 15. 811), and his own work (‘Iouis ira’, 15. 871). Writing’s great advantage is resistance to both physical destruction and political forces. 39 P. Hardie (1993a) 127: Horace’s bronze could be either inscriptions or statues, but Ovid speciﬁes writing (n. 29). On allusions to Horace, Paratore (1959) 193 with Grisarton’s response in the same volume (203). 40 The analogy between Augustus and Jupiter is a staple of the exile poetry and is made explicitly at Met. 15. 857–8. Segal (1969) 291 lists references to the anger of Jupiter and of Caesar in the Tristia; at T. 3. 11. 61–2, 71–2 the link is especially strong.

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Allusion to the physical aspect of immortality in Odes 3. 30 contrasts the fates with Ovid’s own writing. Horace claims to have written a monument more lasting than bronze (‘exegi monumentum aere perennius’, Odes 3. 30. 1). The comparative implies an insufﬁciency in the material. Ovid’s fates, however, are heavily metallic—written in iron and adamant as well as bronze (15. 810, 813). He transfers ‘perennis’ (lasting) from Horace’s monument to adamant. Of course, divine tablets are not subject to the same decay as earthly ones, but Ovid’s own writing, like Horace’s, is immaterial. Death will take his body, but ‘perennis’ modiﬁes his work, his better part. iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iouis ira nec ignis nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere uetustas. cum uolet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius ius habet, incerti spatium mihi ﬁniat aeui: parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam. (Met. 15. 871–9) (And now I have composed a work, which neither Jupiter’s anger nor ﬁre can destroy, nor iron nor consuming time. When it wishes, let that day, which has no right except over this body, end my stretch of uncertain life: nevertheless, by my better part, I will be borne lasting over the high stars, and my name will be indestructible, and where Roman power extends over conquered lands, I will be read by the mouth of the people, and through all the centuries, I will live on in fame, if the prophecies of the bards have any truth.)

Ovid’s writing therefore surpasses the indestructibility of fate, ﬁgured as merely physical. Two kinds of performativity emerge amid the strong focus on reading lent by Ovid’s transformation of Horace’s ‘dicar’ (Odes 3. 30. 10) to ‘legar’ (15. 878).41 Ovid stresses reading’s performative element by specifying its orality: ‘ore legar populi’.42 Allusion to Ennius’ epitaph (Ch. 1) again makes explicit a predecessor’s implied reading metaphor. The other performative element is the qualiﬁcation ‘siquid habent ueri uatum praesagia’. Ovid identiﬁes himself as a ‘uates’ in the previous section: he prays to a series of gods, culminating 41 For writing and speaking in Ovid’s epilogue, P. Hardie (2002a) 91–7. Farrell (1999) 128 takes Ovid’s exploration of body and voice as analogous to ‘written text and performative song’; in the epilogue (129). 42 Farrell (1999) 129–33 stresses Ovid’s survival as disembodied voice over against a physical book.

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with ‘quosque alios uati fas appellare piumque est’ (and the others whom it is right and respectful for a bard to call on, 15. 867). Bardic prayer and prophecy are areas where poetry expects to be effective. Together, the ﬁnal sections (861–70, 871–9) present the poet as praying bard and soon to be dead author. His utterances are present, historically contingent, and performative on the one hand, and eternal writing on the other. The categories, as usual, blur. Ovid’s future readership depends on the historically contingent continuation of Roman imperial domination (15. 877) and he calls attention to the bardic nature of his prediction of future immortality with ‘uatum’ in the poem’s last line. For future readers such as ourselves, this prediction has come true, but the performative prayer in 861ff. is now merely a record of the past. The poet and Augustus, who also emerges as an author, both participate in writing and performativity. The terms are familiar—prayer, the law, and exemplarity—and with them Ovid subtly demonstrates his discursive control over the emperor.43 Ovid’s prayer in lines 15. 861–70 contrasts the two: the poet prays and the divinized emperor will answer prayers. Ovid is not, however, praying directly to Augustus as in the exile poetry. The apparent reciprocity of their positions is belied by the folding of Augustus’ capacity to answer prayers into the content of Ovid’s prayer. Comparison with Vergil’s equally panegyric treatment of Augustus’ future divinization in the Georgics reveals an important difference. After a list of possible scenarios for divinization, Vergil actually prays to him, whereas Ovid does not. da facilem cursum atque audacibus adnue coeptis, . . . et uotis iam nunc adsuesce uocari. (G. 1. 40–2) (Give me an easy course and nod to my daring endeavours . . . and already now grow accustomed to being called in prayer.) Di, precor, . . . tarda sit illa dies et nostro serior aeuo, qua caput Augustum, quem temperat, orbe relicto accedat caelo faueatque precantibus absens! (M. 15. 861, 868–70) (Gods, I pray . . . may that day be slow in coming and later than our age, when Augustus’ head reaches the sky, with the world he governs left behind, and may he favour those praying to him in his absence)

43

Segal (1969) 290–2 ﬁnds the turn from the emperor’s deiﬁcation to a ﬁrst-person examination, at least ‘from an Augustan point of view, a rude anticlimax’. Gordon Williams’s (1978) 87–96 argument against reading these passages as an attack on Augustus relies on the Augustan/anti-Augustan dichotomy he would overthrow.

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Both poets refer to Augustus’ role in answering prayers, but the difference between praying to a second person and praying about a third disrupts the expected reciprocity of performance utterances. Although both authors set Augustus’ divinization in the future, Vergil elicits in the present a direct response. Augustus is not to respond directly to Ovid, and his performative power is referred away from the present. Another panegyric intertext reveals another difference. Horace also asks that Augustus, whose body Mercury may have inhabited, return late to the sky (Odes 1. 2. 45–52; see also Georgics 1. 503–4). Horace repeats a deictic to emphasize the desirability of Augustus’ presence on earth (‘hic’ (here), 49–50) and asks that he remain among them (‘intersis’, 46). When Ovid puts him in heaven, he uses a strange word to describe a deity answering prayers. Instead of the usual present, potent god (praesens), Ovid presents Augustus from the point of view of those on earth and calls him ‘absens’ (absent). He corrects this in Tristia 2, where Ovid swears by Augustus as a ‘praesentem conspicuumque deum’ (a present and conspicuous god, 54), but in the Metamorphoses, the contrast with the poet is acute. Augustus is ‘absens’ in this section’s ﬁnal word, while the poem’s ﬁnal word is ‘uiuam’ (15. 878) of the poet. Life after death pertains to poet and emperor in different ways. The law is where Augustus emerges as an author. Jupiter predicts for Augustus a series of ‘res gestae’ (accomplishments, 15. 821–31), his authorship of laws (‘auctor’), and the governance of morals through his own exemplum. Ovid’s language resembles not only the emperor’s own at RG 8. 5, but also the passage in Tristia 2 uniting law, morals, and exemplarity (above, 361 with nn. 5 and 6). pace data terris animum ad ciuilia uertet iura suum legesque feret iustissimus auctor exemploque suo mores reget inque futuri temporis aetatem uenturorumque nepotum prospiciens prolem sancta de coniuge natam ferre simul nomenque suum curasque iubebit nec, nisi cum {senior similes{ aequauerit annos, aetherias sedes cognataque sidera tanget. (M. 15. 832–9) (When peace has been given to the lands, he will turn his attention to civil legislation and as a most just author carry laws and he will rule morals by his own example and looking to the age of future time and of grandchildren to come, he will order the offspring born of his holy wife to bear at the same time his own name and cares, and he will not touch the ethereal seats and brother stars except when he has {reached old age{)

This passage explores the limits of authorial control over language. Scholars take the new laws Augustus mentions as the marriage legislation (RG 8. 5),

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one of whose aims was the production of children and heirs. Ovid passes directly from Augustus’ laws and morals to his adoption of Tiberius.44 No amount of legislation could produce a biological heir.45 Jupiter’s repetition of ‘nomen’ (name, 15. 837) from above, where he calls Augustus the heir of Caesar’s name (‘nominis heres’, 15. 819), refers succession to the realm of language and social contract. Adoption produces an heir through performative discourse. Ovid compliments Augustus on his authorship of the marriage legislation and his solution to the succession problem, and simultaneously makes a point about Augustus’ success in using performative language. Even though the Caesars control language in naming and succession—and Ovid has Augustus surpass even Pompey’s name (‘magnum . . . nomen superabitur’ (the name ‘Great’ will be surpassed), 15. 825)—the exemplum nevertheless necessarily evades their grasp.46 This is the burden of Ovid’s defence of the Ars amatoria in Tristia 2: it is not exemplary but entertainment. At the end of the Metamorphoses, the exemplum pertains to Augustus at line 15. 834, where he appears successful in having people imitate his example. But Ovid also uses it to show that Augustus cannot control his reputation. What people say (‘fama’) remains free and refuses command. Although Ovid’s ﬂattery is extraordinary, ‘fama’ and exemplarity nevertheless exceed the emperor’s control. hic sua praeferri quamquam uetat acta paternis, libera fama tamen nullisque obnoxia iussis inuitum praefert unaque in parte repugnat. sic magnus cedit titulis Agamemnonis Atreus, Aegea sic Theseus, sic Pelea vicit Achilles, denique, ut exemplis ipsos aequantibus utar, sic et Saturnus minor est Ioue: Iuppiter arces temperat aetherias et mundi regna triformis, terra sub Augusto est; pater est et rector uterque.

(M. 15. 852–60)

(Although he forbids his deeds to be preferred to those of his father, nevertheless fame free and obedient to no orders prefers him though unwilling and resists him in this one part. Thus did great Atreus yield to Agamemnon in honours [inscriptions], thus did Theseus conquer Aegeus, thus Achilles Peleus, and ﬁnally, that I may use examples equalling themselves, thus even Saturn is lesser than Jove: Jupiter rules the ethereal

44 Gordon Williams (1978) 95 takes the Met. passage as unmistakable praise of the marriage legislation. Galinsky (1996) 64). Henderson (1999) 111: Augustus is ‘de-individualized’ into an exempliﬁcation of moral values. 45 Barchiesi (1999) 113 calls Jupiter’s promise to Venus that her descendant will rule the world a ‘sleight-of-hand’. 46 For ancient awareness of the uncontrollability of the exemplum, Velleius 2. 3. 4, Lowrie (2007b).

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citadels and the realms of the threefold world, the land is under Augustus; each is father and ruler.)

Ovid is explicit: what he says here countervails Augustus’ wishes. The two points of panegyric are surpassing the father and the analogy to Jupiter. Although Augustus forbids the ﬁrst, the second would hardly have been more welcome. Where Augustus could govern the behaviour of others through his example, his overly loyal poet asserts his independence by choosing his own examples against the emperor’s will. Control also pertains to the gods, who determine processes of signiﬁcation more than events. Jupiter appears not as an omnipotent ruler, but a reader. His description of consulting the three sisters’ records reduces his power to iteration: ‘legi ipse animoque notaui j et referam’ (I read it myself and noted it in my mind and will relate it, 15. 814–15). While the gods’ signs forewarning Caesar’s murder may include songs (‘cantus’, 15. 792), whether or not intelligible, we are a far cry from Vergil’s divinely inspired Sibyl, a direct and oral mouthpiece of Apollo. Being able to read the future, however, lets neither men nor gods change the inevitable (15. 781, 799–801) and Jupiter chastises Venus by asking if she alone plans to move insuperable fate (15. 807–8). For Julius Caesar’s murder, the gods give out sure signs (‘signa . . . haud incerta’, 15. 782). The omens do not enable the terrible events’ aversion, but merely reproduce them through signiﬁcation. The conjunctions ‘although’ and ‘nevertheless’ recur in these passages about the failure to change fate, and provide a link to Augustus’ failure to control fama. Fate and fame represent radically different modalities: one is ﬁxed and cannot be changed, the other is free from control. Both are linked to speech (fari).47 Barchiesi makes of fate and fame two models for intertextuality in Vergil: fate corresponds to the ﬁxed givens of the epic tradition including the dominant plot line and fama governs aspects, such as the Dido episode, which resist tradition and the plot (2001b: 130–2). For Ovid, he emphasizes that fate, ﬁxed in the sisters’ metallic tablets, represents speciﬁcally the plot handed down by Vergil—and one could add by history—so that Jupiter chides Venus for not remembering her Aeneid. Ovid’s fama adds a political dimension that takes the contest between ﬁxed and free speech beyond literary relations among texts. Ovid is not one to leave such distinctions unchallenged. Who speaks such that his utterance can be ﬁxed? Jupiter’s speech is introduced in a section beginning with ‘fatum’ (15. 807) and itself mentions fate twice (15. 807, 814). The epic tag ‘uix ea fatus erat’ (scarcely had he spoken these things, 15. 843) 47

Ernout–Meillet at fama and fatum cite Varro on words derived from fari (LL 6. 52, 55).

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follows and acquires new resonance in the company of words for fate. Does Jupiter’s presenting the fates as ﬁxed in metal have any bearing beyond his own speech? He says so, and therefore so it will be. He may not have authored the higher law of the sisters’ decrees (15. 781), but his reperformance of the fates’ written decrees in his speech authorizes the pre-existing law. Jupiter’s reading lends authority to what he reads. We have access only to his interpretation and not to the decrees independent of his report. This dialectic between written ﬁxity and the living reauthorization of reading pertains as much to Ovid’s own uvre as to the fates. He owes his future immortality to his writing, presumably as ﬁxed as the fates, and to the free and uncontrollable speech that is ‘fama’. The two concepts frame the poem’s penultimate line: ‘ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama j . . . uiuam’ (I will be read by the mouth of the people, and through all the centuries, I will live on in fame, 15. 877–8).48 I earlier suggested that the Augustan monuments at the north end of the Campus Martius fuse writing and the performative. Ovid’s vision for his poetry trumps Augustus’ own selfrepresentation and offers the capstone for the development of these intertwined ideas throughout this period. Ovid ascribes to himself not only poetic immortality of the sort the monuments offer the emperor, but also freedom. It resides in the people and they exercise it by performing poetry anew by reading. Song has desirable powers in Augustan Rome, but carries the risk of being co-opted for interests of the state. Although the poets are invariably attracted to the idea that poetry matters, writing and reading give them an out. Each modality has its political advantages. 48 Feeney (1991) 247–9 brings together Fama’s ﬂuidity and unreliability in the House of Fame (Met. 12. 53–8) with Ovid’s acceptance of his own contribution to ‘the slippery Fama which constructs our literary world’.

Abbreviations Standard editions, commentaries, and other abbreviations are listed here, unless the editor has too many such to make abbreviation convenient, in which case they are differentiated by date in the references section. AHD AP Adams Anderson Andre´ ANRW Austin Barber Barsby Bentley Bla¨nsdorf Bo¨mer Brugnoli–Stok Butler C CAH

Camps Cavarzere Charpin CHCL

W. Morris (ed.), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Boston 1969. Anthologia Palatina. J. N. Adams (ed.), The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore 1982. W. S. Anderson (ed.), P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses. Leipzig 1985. J. Andre´ (ed.), Ovide: Tristes. Bude´. Paris 1968. Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt. Berlin. R. G. Austin (ed.), P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos, Books 1, 2, 4, and 6. Oxford 1971, 1964, 1955, 1977. E. A. Barber (ed.), Sexti Properti Carmina. Oxford 1960. J. A. Barsby (ed.), Ovid’s Amores: Book One. Oxford 1973. R. Bentley (ed.), Q. Horatius Flaccus, 2 vols. Leipzig 1826. J. Bla¨nsdorf (ed.), Fragmenta poetarum Latinorum epicorum et lyricorum praeter Ennium et Lucilium. Stuttgart 1995. F. Bo¨mer (ed.), Ovidius Naso Metamorphosen, 6 vols. Heidelberg 1969–86. G. Brugnoli and F. Stok (eds.), Vitae Vergilianae Antiquae. Rome 1997. H. E. Butler (ed.), Sexti Properti Opera Omnia. London 1905. E. Courtney (ed.), The Fragmentary Latin Poets. Oxford 1993. A. K . Bowman, E. Champlin, and A. Lintott (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History, The Augustan Empire, 43 B.C.–A.D. 69. 2nd edn. Cambridge 1996, x. W. A. Camps (ed.), Propertius: Elegies Book IV. Cambridge 1965; Book II 1967. A. Cavarzere (ed.), Orazio. Il Libro degli Epodi. Marseilles 1992. F. Charpin (ed.), Lucilius. Satires, 3 vols. Paris 1978, 1979, 1991. E. J. eKnney (ed.), Cambridge History of Classical Literature. Cambridge 1982, ii.

384 CIL Clausen Coleman DAI de Jonge della Corte–Fasce Douglas Eden Ehrenberg–Jones

Ellis EncOr Enk Ernout Ernout–Meillet FGE Fleury Fordyce Gentili Gow Gransden Hardie Haupt–Ehwald

Hauthal HE Heyne Hollis Horsfall IEG

Abbreviations Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Berlin 1862– . W. Clausen (ed.), Virgil: Eclogues. Oxford 1994. R. Coleman (ed.), Vergil: Eclogues. Cambridge 1977. Deutsches Archa¨ologisches Institut. T. J. de Jonge (ed.), Publii Ovidii Nasonis Tristium Liber IV. Groningen 1951. F. della Corte and S. Fasce (eds.), Opere di Publio Ovidio Naso. Turin 1997, ii. A. E. Douglas (ed.), M. Tulli Ciceronis Brutus. Oxford 1966. P. T. Eden (ed.), A Commentary on Virgil: Aeneid VIII. Leiden 1975. V. Ehrenberg and A. H. M. Jones (eds.), Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus & Tiberius. 2nd edn. Oxford 1955. R. Ellis (ed.), A Commentary on Catullus. Oxford 1889. F. della Corte and S. Mariotti (eds.), Orazio, Enciclopedia Oraziana. Rome, i. 1996, ii. 1998. P. J. Enk (ed.), Sex. Propertii Elegiarum liber secundus. Leiden 1962. A. Ernout (ed.), Recueil de textes latins archaı¨ques. Paris 1973. A. Ernout and A. Meillet (eds.), Dictionnaire e´tymologique de la langue latine. Histoire des mots. Paris 1939. D. L. Page (ed.), Further Greek Epigrams. Cambridge 1981. P. Fleury (ed.), Vitruve: de l’architecture. Paris 1990. C. J. Fordyce (ed.), Catullus. Oxford 1961. B. Gentili (ed.), Anacreonte. Rome 1958. A. S. F. Gow (ed.), Theocritus, 2 vols. Cambridge 1952. . W. Gransden (ed.), Virgil: Aeneid, Book VIII. Cambridge K 1976. P. Hardie (ed.), Virgil Aeneid Book IX. Cambridge 1994. M. Haupt (ed.), P. Ovidius Naso Metamorphosen, 10th edn, unchanged from the 9th, ed. R. Ehwald, corrected by M. von Albrecht, 2 vols. Z urich and Dublin 1966. F. Hauthal (ed.), Acronis et Porphyrionis commentarii in Q. Horatium Flaccum, 3 vols. Amsterdam 1966. A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page (eds.), The Greek Anthology. Hellenistic Epigrams. Cambridge 1965. C. G. Heyne (ed.), Publius Virgilius Maro. Leipzig 1830. A. S. Hollis (ed.), Ovid: Ars Amatoria Book 1. Oxford 1977. N. Horsfall (ed.), A Companion to the Study of Virgil. Leiden 1995. M. L. West (ed.), Iambi et Elegi Graeci, 2 vols. Oxford 1971, 1972.

Abbreviations ILLRP ILS Janka eKnney H eKnney L eKnney T iessling–Heinze K raus K roll K Kox n L Lausberg Lindsay LSJ LTUR Luck M McK eown Maltby Mankin Mayer Muecke Mynors NH

Norden

385

A. Degrassi (ed.), Inscriptiones latinae liberae rei publicae. Florence 1957. H. Dessau (ed.), Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae. Berlin 1902. M. Janka (ed.), Ovid. Ars amatoria Buch 2. Heidelberg 1997. E. J. eKnney (ed.), Heroides 16–21. Cambridge 1996. E. J. eKnney (ed.), Lucretius, De rerum natura, book III. Cambridge 1971. E. J. eKnney (intro. and notes) Ovid: Sorrows of an Exile: Tristia, trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford 1992. A. K iessling and R. Heinze (eds.), Q. Horatius Flaccus, 3 vols. Berlin multiple editions with multiple dates. C. S. K raus (ed.), Livy: Ab urbe condita, book VI. Cambridge, 1994. W. rKoll (ed.), Catull. Stuttgart 1959. P. K nox (ed.), Heroides. Select Epistles. Cambridge 1995. W. M. Lindsay (ed.), Nonii Marcelli de compendiosa doctrina, 3 vols. Hilesheim 1964. H. Lausberg (ed.), Handbuch der Literarischen Rhetorik. 2 vols. Munich 1973. W. M. Lindsay (ed.), Festus, de Verborum Signiﬁcatu cum Pauli Epitome. Stuttgart 1997. H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S. Jones (eds.), A Greek– English Lexicon. Oxford 1968. E. M. Steinby (ed.), Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae. Rome 1996. G. Luck (ed.), P. Ovidius Naso. Tristia, 2 vols. Heidelberg 1967–77. F. Marx (ed.), C. Lucilii Carminum Reliquiae, 2 vols. Leipzig 1904–5. J. C. McK eown (ed.), Ovid: Amores, 3 vols. ARCA 20: 1987; ARCA 22: 1989;ARCA 36: 1998. R. Maltby (ed.), A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies. Leeds 1991. D. Mankin (ed.), Horace: Epodes. Cambridge 1995. R. Mayer (ed.), Horace, Epistles Book 1. Cambridge 1994. F. Muecke (ed.), Horace: Satires II. Warminster 1993. R. A. B. Mynors (ed.), Virgil. Georgics. Oxford 1990. R. G. M. Nisbet and M. Hubbard (eds.), A Commentary on Horace: Odes. Book 1. Oxford 1970; A Commentary on Horace: Odes. Book 2. Oxford 1978. E. Norden (ed.), P. Vergilius Maro Aeneis Buch VI. 4th edn. Darmstadt 1957.

386 NR Ogilvie OLD Olson Orelli Owen Owen T PCG Peerlkamp Pf Pohlenz Postgate Quinn RE Ribbeck

Richardson Riposati

Romano Rothstein Rowland–Howe–Dewar Russell Russell–Winterbottom

Abbreviations R. G. M. Nisbet and N. Rudd (eds.), A Commentary on Horace: Odes. Book III. Oxford 2004. R. M. Ogilvie (ed.), A Commentary on Livy, Books 1–5. Oxford 1965. P. G. W. Glare (ed.), Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford 1968–82. S. D. Olson (ed.), Aristophanes. Acharnians. Oxford 2002. J. C. Orelli (ed.), Q. Horatius Flaccus, 2nd edn. 2 vols. urich 1843. Z S. G. Owen (ed.), P. Ouidi Nasonis Tristium libri quinque. Oxford 1915. S. G. Owen (ed.), P. Ovuidi Nasonis Tristium Liber Secundus, with trans. and comm. Oxford 1924. R. aKssel and C. Austin (eds.), Poetae Comici Graeci. Berlin 1983. P. Hofman Peerlkamp (ed.), Q. Horati Flacci Carmina. Haarlem 1834. R. Pfeiffer (ed.), Callimachus, 2 vols. Oxford 1949, 1953. M. Pohlenz (ed.), Ciceronis Tusculanarum Disputationum, libri V. Amsterdam 1965. J. P. Postgate (ed.), Select Elegies of Propertius. London 1968. . Quinn (ed.), Catullus: The Poems. Houndmills 1970. K G. Wissowa (ed.), Paulys Realencyclopa¨die der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart 1894–1980. O. Ribbeck (ed.), Scaenicae Romanorum Poesis, i. Tragicorum Romanorum Fragmenta; ii. Comicorum Romanorum praeter Plautum et Terentium Fragmenta, 2nd edn. Hildesheim 1962. L. Richardson, Jr. (ed.), A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Baltimore 1992. B. Riposati (ed.), M. Terenti Varronis De Vita Populi Romani, Pubblicazioni dell’universita` cattolica del S. Cuore. Milan 1939. E. Romano (ed.), Q. Orazio Flacco: le opere, ii. Rome 1991. M. Rothstein (ed.), Die Elegien des Sextus Propertius, 2nd edn., 2 vols. Berlin 1924. I. D. Rowland, T. N. Howe, and M. J. Dewar (eds.), Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture. Cambridge 1999. D. A. Russell (ed. and trans.), Quintilian: The Orator’s Education. Loeb edn., Cambridge, Mass. 2001. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (eds.), Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations. Oxford 1972.

Abbreviations SB Scheid Shackleton Bailey Sider Sk Spengel Tarrant TarrMet T. E. Page Thilo–Hagen

Thomas TLL Tyrell–Purser Uhlig V W Watson West Wilkins Williams

387

D. R. Shackleton Bailey (ed.), Horatius Opera. Stuttgart 1985. J. Scheid (ed.), Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Paris 2007. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (ed.), Cicero: Epistulae ad Familiares. Cambridge 1977, i. D. Sider (ed.), The Epigrams of Philodemus. New York 1997. O. Skutsch (ed.), The Annals of Quintus Ennius. Oxford 1985. L. Spengel (ed.), Rhetores Graeci ex recognitione Leonardi Spengel. Leipzig 1856. R. J. Tarrant (ed.), Seneca, Agamemnon. Cambridge 1976. R. J. Tarrant (ed.), P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses. Oxford 2004. T. E. Page (ed.), Q. Horatii Flacci, Carminum Libri IV, Epodon Liber. London 1956. G. Thilo and H. Hagen (eds.), Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, 3 vols. Leipzig 1881–1902. R. F. Thomas (ed.), Virgil. Georgics, 2 vols. Cambridge 1988. Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Leipzig 1900– . R. Y. Tyrell and L. C. Purser (eds.), The Correspondence of M. Tullius Cicero, 2nd edn. Dublin 1904, vi. G. Uhlig (ed.), Dionysii Thracis Ars Grammatica. Leipzig 1883. I. Vahlen (ed.), Ennianae Poesis Reliquiae. Leipzig 1928; 2nd edn. Amsterdam 1967. E. H. Warmington (ed.), Remains of Old Latin, 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass. 1935–40. L. C. Watson (ed.), Horace’s Epodes. Oxford 2003. D. West (ed.), Horace Odes I. Carpe Diem. Oxford 1995. A. S. Wilkins (ed.), Cicero: De Oratore, 3 vols. 1881. G. Williams (ed.), The Third Book of Horace’s Odes. Oxford 1969.

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Index locorum Adorno ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’ 248 Alcaeus 338 V: 9, 82 n. 74 Anacreon Hymn to Artemis 77 fr. 7 Gentili: 82 n. 74 Archilochus IEG i. 63–4: 104 Aristophanes Frogs 12 n.39, 138 n. 51 Aristotle Poetics 3. 1448a: 71 n. 35 5. 1306b-1307a: 66 n. 14 8: 353 17: 353 Asclepiades AP 9. 63. 3–4: 26–7 Augustine Conf. 1. 20–1: 360 n. 1 Augustus Res gestae : xi, 135 n. 41, 279–308, 312, 313, 317, 320, 323 8.5: 315, 347, 361, 375, 379 9: 194 n. 42 11: 321 12. 2: 314, 322 19. 2: 364 n. 17 25–33: 322 27: 266 Aulus Gellius 19. 9: 49 n. 90 Callimachus 1. 1. 21–4Pf: 26 1. 7. 13–14Pf: 27 1. 22Pf: 107 n. 32 3. 75. 66Pf: 27 3. 75. 77: 28 64Pf: 27 n.13 75: 229–30 110. 1Pf: 25 n. 6

191. 1Pf: 27 n. 12 191.11Pf: 28 n. 18 191. 31Pf: 27 n. 12 191. 58–60: 25 n. 6 398Pf: 26 393. 2Pf: 27 n. 14 465Pf: 25 532Pf: 26 n. 9 612Pf: 27 Epigrams 6.1–4Pf: 27, 149 8Pf: 28 n. 16 21. 4Pf: 153 n. 25 23. 3–4Pf: 27 27 Pf: 26 n. 9 28. 1Pf: 27 n. 11, 113 Hymns 3. 186: 40 n. 65 6. 56: 27 n. 14 Catalepton 22 n. 76 Catullus see also subject index for word and topic lists 1: 17, 35–6, 40, 46 n. 81 2: 38 3: 38 11. 10: 192 n. 35 12: 37 13: 67–8 16: 363 22: 17, 39 30: 219 n. 16 34: 76–8 42: 36–9, 109, 219 50: 13, 218–20 51: 219 n. 15 60: 219 n. 16 63: 39 64: 224 64. 23–4: 41 n. 67 64. 225–45: 225 n. 29 65: 41–6, 218, 219 n. 15 65. 12: 39–40 66: 42, 43–5, 219 n. 15

412

Index locorum

Catullus (cont.) 68: 40–1, 43, 46–7, 217, 218, 219 n. 16, 352 n. 14 78b: 41 95: 12, 41 101: 43–4 102: 219 n. 16 Cicero see also subject index under Trebatius Testa Arch. 18: 13, 64 n. 5 ad Brut. 1. 17. 6: 346 n. 72 Brutus 62: 252 72–3: 55 n. 112 75: 50, 58 Cat. 1. 2: 246 3. 18: 6 n. 20 4. 19: 289 n. 32 Div. 2. 5: 53 n. 104 Inu. 1. 43: 290 n. 36 2. 166: 372 n. 34 de Legibus 1. 5: 53 n. 104 2. 59: 334 n. 21, 340 de Natura deorum 1. 119: 28 de Orat. 1. 198: 287–8 2. 353: 6 3. 194: 64 n. 5 Orator 113: 15 in Pis. 8: 284 Rep. 4. 10. 12: 334 pro Roscio Am. 35. 98: 255 n. 14 Top. 18: 345 Tusc. Disp. 1. 3: 50–1

1. 14: 281 n. 6 1. 15. 34: 31 4. 3: 50 CIL vi. 386: 315 vi. 701 and 702: 311, 321 vi. 32323: 127 n. 12, 133 n. 36, 321 vi. 32323. 149: 123 n. 2 vi. 7286: 81 n. 71 Cratinus PCG 4. 203: 253 Demetrius On Style 4. 209: 269 223–35: 223 n. 22 Digest 9. 1. 7: 344 9. 2. 8: 344 n. 64 24. 1. 64: 345 n. 66 Dio Cassius 51. 19: 194 n. 42, 346 n. 69 53. 30. 5: 318 n. 36 54. 17. 2: 137 n. 47 54. 19: 192 n. 36 55. 3. 4–5: 284–5, 293 55. 46. 3: 323 56. 30. 3–4: 307–8 56. 34: 320 56. 42. 3–4: 319, 323 Dionysius of Halicarnassus Ant. Rom. 1. 32. 2: 171 1. 33. 4: 170, 172 2. 70. 1: 58 Dionysius Thrax Ars grammatica Uhlig 6: 252 n. 6 Ennius Ann. 1Sk: 30 12Sk: 30 n. 25, 31 n. 26 15Sk: 299 n. 64 164Sk: 167 206–7Sk: 28 209Sk: 29 211Sk: 28 240–1Sk: 30 n. 24 293Sk: 30, 32 n. 31 403Sk: 30 n. 25

Index locorum 404–5Sk: 31 n. 28 519Sk: 2 579Sk: 31 n. 28 op. inc. 3Sk: 31 n. 27 Epicharmus Var. 50, 54–8V: 28 n. 28 Epigrams 7–10 W: 31 n. 30 9–10 W = 17–18 V = 46 C: 16, 18, 154, 377 Euhemerus 35W: 28 n. 18 Scipio 1–2V: 31 Euripides Hippolytus 612: 70, 232 Gaius Inst. 4. 11: 328 Gregory of Nazianzus Oration 2. 39: 70 n. 32 Homer Iliad 1. 1: 6, 8 2. 324–5: 142–3 2. 489: 4 6. 169: 24 7. 87–91: 143 n. 4 15. 80–3: 267 n. 24 Homeric Hymns Demeter 2. 1: 8 n.24 Dioscuri 33. 1: 215 n. 2 Horace see also subject index for word lists Ars Poetica 220, 236–8, 240 18: 272 79–82: 105 129: 54 283–4: 341 388–90: 12 390: 4 n. 7 394–401: 172 Carmen saeculare 12, 55, 63, 66, 75, 86–8, 93, 101, 114, 115, 121, 123–41,

413

154, 216, 239, 242, 247, 254, 283, 321, 364, 371 10: 280 17–20: 327 74–6: 12, 93 Epist. 2, 109, 220, 242 n. 16, 251, 254 n. 12 1. 1. 2–10: 257 1. 2. 1–2: 54 1. 3. 30: 24 n. 1 1. 4. 30: 24 n. 1 1. 6. 3: 82 n. 74 1. 8. 2: 24 n. 1 1. 10. 49: 24 n. 1 1. 13: 90 1. 13. 1–5: 208 1. 15. 25: 24 n. 1 1. 16. 41: 24 n. 1 1. 19: xi, 105, 251–8 1. 19. 32–3: 86 1. 19. 41: 81 1. 20: 17, 258, 259 n. 3 1. 20. 1: 24 n. 1, 216 2. 1: x, 54, 235–6, 238–50, 259 n. 3, 263 n. 14, 364, 367 2. 1. 4: 265 2. 1. 10: 24 n.2 2. 1. 16: 24 n. 2 2. 1. 23–7: 54, 340 2. 1. 28–30: 50 n. 92 2. 1. 60–2: 13, 55 2. 1. 60: 24 n. 2 2. 1. 86–7: 125 2. 1. 126–9: 258 2. 1. 134–8: 136, 364 2. 1. 139–55: 340 2. 1. 152–4: 334 n. 23 2. 1. 162: 54 2. 1. 200–1: 105 n. 24, 208 2. 1. 214–18: 192 n. 36, 258 2. 1. 229–31: 192 n. 36 2. 2: 14 n. 47, 257–8 2. 2. 18–19: 328 n. 6 Epodes 66, 103–11, 254 n. 12, 330 5: 110–11 5. 51: 107 n. 32 6: 110 7: 104 8: 256 9: 86 n. 90, 107 11: 105–7 13. 17–18: 110 14: 107–8

414 Epodes (cont.) 14. 8: 103 16: 104, 105 n. 27, 109 16. 66: 115 17: 108–10 17. 3: 107 n. 32 17. 44: 114 n. 52 Odes 2, 66, 242 n. 16, 243 n. 17, 244 1–3: 115 1. 1. 2: 181 1. 1. 29–36: 29 1. 2. 45–52: 379 1. 6: 113, 216 1. 7: 354 n. 19 1. 11. 7–8: 112 1. 15: 354 n. 19 1. 16: 104–5, 107, 110 1. 17: 88 1. 17. 18: 107 n. 31 1. 20: 67–71, 89 1. 21: 75–6, 79, 87, 93, 128 1. 22. 10: 64 n. 5, 112 n. 46 1. 24: xii 1. 27: 113 1. 29: 113 1. 30: 113 1. 31: 112–13, 114 1. 36. 12: 55 1. 37: 194 1. 37. 1: 92 1. 37. 2: 55 1. 38: 113 2. 1: 153 n. 28 2. 1. 38–9: 103 2. 3. 13: 95 2. 4: 95 2. 6: 114 2. 11. 13: 95 2. 13: 81 2. 20: 117, 119, 258 2. 20. 3: 115, 301 2. 20. 21–4: 31 n. 29 3. 1. 1–4: 111–15, 120, 189 n. 25, 195, 238 3. 2. 13: 181 3. 3: 375–6 3. 13: 101 n. 13, 112 n. 45 3. 14: 92 3. 14. 5: 314 3. 18: 113 n. 47 3. 19. 15: 114 n. 52 3. 21: 80–1, 99 3. 22: 78–81, 113 n. 47

Index locorum 3. 23: 101 n. 13 3. 28: 89 3. 30: 113, 117–22, 166, 181, 235, 240, 258, 260, 304, 374–7 3. 30. 1: 31 n. 28 3. 30. 6: 184 3. 30. 10: 16 3. 30. 13–14: 85 4: 86, 90, 98, 100, 115, 123, 239, 258 4. 1: 98–100, 116 4. 1. 28: 55 4. 2: 90–1, 93, 100, 114 n. 52 4. 2. 31–2: 81 4. 3. 15: 115 4. 3. 22–3: 12, 86, 100 4. 5: 86, 90–4 4. 5. 38–9: 100 4. 6: 86–8 4. 6. 30: 52 4. 6. 41–4: 100, 115 4. 8: 113, 115, 118 n. 65 4. 9: 113, 115 4. 11: 81, 86, 88–9, 91, 93 4. 11. 34–5: 101 4. 12: 89 n. 100 4. 15: 57, 58–9, 101, 244 4. 15. 1: 107 n. 32 4. 15. 25–32: 91, 101 Serm. 242 n. 16, 335 nn. 27 and 28 1. 1. 24–5: 336 n. 33 1. 3: 340 1. 4: 336 n. 33, 340 n. 49 1. 4. 1: 335 n. 28 1. 4. 9–10: 13 n. 41, 64 n. 5 1. 4. 58: 87 n. 92 1. 4. 73–4: 95 1. 6. 122–3: 14 n. 50 1. 9. 23–4: 13 n. 41 1. 10: 336 n. 33 1. 10. 60–1: 13 n. 41 1. 10. 67–71: 12 1. 10. 72: 13, 161 2. 1: xi–xii, 54–7, 331, 332–48 2. 1. 10: 6 n. 15, 29 n. 21 2. 1. 11: 29 n. 21 2. 1. 16: 29 n. 21 2. 1. 63: 15 n. 55 2. 1. 16: 6 n. 15 2. 1. 46: vii 2. 1. 60: 6 n. 15 2. 1. 250–2: 30 n. 22 2. 3. 4: 2 n., 195 n. 47 2. 6. 27: 328 n. 6

Index locorum Hostius 3: 4

Nicaenetus AP 13. 29 = HE 2711–16: 253 n. 7

Isidore Orig. 11. 1. 3: 154 n. 35 18. 2. 1: 154 n. 35

Nicolaus the Sophist Spengel 12, 3. 491: 270 n. 28

Juvenal 1. 1: 252 n. 5 laudatio Turiae 351 Leonidas of Tarentum Pal. Anth. 6. 334. 5–6: 80 Livius Andronicus fr. 1 Bla¨nsdorf: 242 Livy pref. 10: 121, 303–4 1. 2. 6: 2 1. 7. 8: 170 1. 16. 5: 323 6. 1. 2: 53 n. 104 7. 2: 239 n. 9 27. 37. 1- 38. 1: 126, 138 n. 50 Longinus 15. 1: 255 n. 14 15. 8: 96–7 Lucilius 354 M = 9. 5 Charpin: 30 n. 23 621 M = 26. 26 Charpin: 29 1039 M = 30. 85 Charpin: 29 1294–5 M = H 3 Charpin: 30 n. 23 1340 M = H 25 Charpin: 154 n. 35 Lucretius see also subject index for word lists 1. 140–5: 52 4. 461: 88 n. 95 5. 8: 149 Lydus de Mensibus 4. 36: 120 n. 70 Macrobius 2. 4. 21: vii G. F. Malipiero 131 Marcus Aurelius letter to Fronto, i. 142: 53 n. 103 Menander Rhetor 92–3 Minucius Felix 36. 2: 4 n. 8 [Moschus] Epitaph of Bion 4–6: 190 n. 28

415

Ovid, see also subject index for word and topic lists Amores 195–9, 201, 204, 272 1. 11. 15: 112 n. 46, 208 n. 83 1. 15: 196, 1. 15. 1–7: 331 2. 17. 22: 87 n. 92 2. 18. 23–4: 225 2. 18. 27–34: 227 3. 12. 19–20: 201 Ars Amatoria 199–201, 227 n. 38, 263, 331, 361–2, 364–5, 369–72, 380 1. 33: 362 1. 489–500: 224 n. 25 1. 219: 270 n. 28 1. 222–8: 267 1. 177: 193 n. 38 1. 177–216: 266 1. 467–8: 223 3. 4. 9–10: 362 n. 12 ex Ponto: xi, 176, 204 n. 69, 220, 259–75 4. 16. 13–14: 227 Fasti 176, 202–3 1. 535: 171 1. 713–22: 320 2. 551–2: 373 4. 629–40: 120 n. 70 5. 545–77: 317 n. 35 5. 567–8: 317 n. 35 Heroides: xi, 176, 204 n. 69, 208 n. 82, 217, 220, 223–34, 235, 259, 260 1: 225–6 10: 224–5 16: 227–9, 233 17: 227–9, 233 18: 230 19: 230 20: 229–34 21: 229–34 Metamorphoses: xi, xii, 202–12, 273, 373 1. 1: 202 1. 4: 374 1. 90–2: 360 n. 2 10. 203–8: 360 n. 2 12. 22–3: 143 n. 4

416

Index locorum

Metamorphoses: (cont.) 12. 53–8: 382 n. 48 15. 745–879: 374–82 15. 832–4: 361 n. 6 15. 871–9: 260 15. 877–8: 16, 31 n. 29, 122, 196, 201, 204 Remedia Amoris 200–201 Tristia: xi, 176, 204 n. 69, 220, 259–75 1. 1. 1: 216 1. 1. 2–14: 17 2: xii, 331, 349, 358, 360–82 2. 220: 87 n. 92 2. 519: 83 n. 78, 216 3. 1. 67–72: 17 3. 11. 61–2, 71–2: 376 n. 40 4. 2. 25–6: 314 4. 10: 85 5. 7. 25: 83 n. 78 Pacuvius 337–8: 29 n. 21 366–7 W: 29 n. 21 Phlegon 56–8: 127 n. 12, 131 Pindar Isthmians 1. 7–9: 88 n. 93 Olympians 2: 88 3: 88 4: 88 5: 88 8. 55: 156 10: 88 11: 88 11. 4–6: 237 Pythians 4: 88 5: 88 7. 19: 156 Paean 4: 88 n. 93 Plato Phaedrus 109, 154 275d4–6d: 9–11 Republic 392d5: 71 n. 35

Plautus Am. 227: 29 n. 21 Capt. 1029 and 1036: 358 n. 28 Pliny (the Elder) 28. 10–13: 330 Pliny (the Younger) Epist. 3. 10. 1: 252 5. 3. 2: 14 n. 46 Plutarch Cato maior 48 n. 86 Polybius 3. 22: 55 n. 111 Probus 3. 2. 328: 84 Propertius 176–95 1: 177 1. 3: xi 1. 7: 177–8, 181 1. 22. 7: 179 2: 178 2. 10–14: 182–4 2. 1: 178–83, 187 2. 1. 2: 16 2. 1. 25: 270 n. 28 2. 13. 11: 18 2: 15: 184 2. 34: 185–8 3: 188 3. 1: 188 3. 24: 180 4: 175, 188, 189 n. 3 4. 1: 189 n. 23 4. 3: 220–3 4. 4: 189 n. 23 4. 6: 188–95 4. 7. 189 n. 23, 358 4. 11: xii, 331, 349–59 Quintilian 1. 6. 40: 55 n. 111 1. 8. 2: 16–17, 84 4. 2. 123: 72 n. 40, 255 n. 14 5. 11. 6: 349–50 6. 2. 29–31: 95, 268 6. 3. 87 and 93: 336 n. 35 8. 3. 61: 72 n. 38 9. 2. 40: 255 n. 14, 269

Index locorum 9. 4. 51: 87 n. 91 10. 1. 94: 332 11. 1. 21: 351 n. 11 11. 2. 11–14: 6 n. 16 Rousseau E´crits sur la musique: 1, 8 Sallust Hist. 1. 55. 25: 303 n. 74 Sappho 1: 116 Schlegel, Friedrich ‘Athena¨um’ fr. 146: 250 n. 32 ‘Critical Fragments’ 117: 249 n. 29 Seneca (Elder) Contr. 4, pref. 2: 252 n. 3 Seneca Troades 14 n. 45 Servius Aen. 3. 287: 15 n. 54 6. 893: 160 n. 61 Ecl. 6. 11: 13 n. 44, 16, 83 n. 78 9. 46: 302 n. 72 Geor. 3. 9: 156 3. 17: 156 3. 40–1: 7 n. 20

Tacitus Annales 1. 8. 3: 320 3. 4. 1: 319 n. 39 11. 14. 4: 170 13 n. 45 Dialogus 23 n. 78 Terence And. 1: 6 n. 15 Eunuchus 138 n. 51 Heaut. 5: 6 n. 15 Phormio 495: 29 n. 21 708: 29 n. 21 Theocritus 22. 1: 215 n. 2 Theon Spengel 11, 2. 118–20: 270 n. 28 Tibullus 2. 5. 17–18: 137 Turpilius 213: 214, 220 Varius Thyestes 13 n. 45, 90, 123 n. 1 Varro LL 5. 63: 154 n. 35 6. 52 and 55: 4 n. 8, 173 n. 82, 381 n. 47 7. 27: 125 RR 1. 1. 4: 30 n. 25

Sibylline oracle, see Phlegon

fr. 84 Riposati = Nonius 107–8 L: 51

‘Simonides’ FGE 9. 716–7: 372 n. 34

Velleius Paterculus 2. 3. 4: 354 n. 22, 380 n. 46 2. 124. 3: 323 n. 48 2. 122: 270 n. 31

Sotades 15: 8 n. 25 Suetonius Life of Augustus 31: 137 n. 47 33. 3: 346 n. 69 89. 3: 348 n. 77 99–101: 307–8, 318 n. 36, 319 nn. 39 and 40, 323, 357 Life of Horace 22: 90 18–20: 245–6

417

Vergil Lives of 83 n. 78, 144 n. 6 Aen. 142, 144, 151, 152, 154, 157–74, 185, 187, 203 n. 64, 375 1: 374 1. 1: x, 1, 7–8, 17, 19, 20, 39, 84, 96, 111, 215, 361 1. 8: 215 1. 22: 5 1. 257–8: 5 1. 261–2: 5, 375

418 Aen. (cont.) 3. 443–57: 2–3 4. 226: 261 n. 11 4. 270: 261 n. 11 6: 350 6. 34: 317 n. 35 6. 69–74: 137 n. 47 6. 76: 3 6. 77–105: 4 6. 755: 5 6. 759: 5 6. 851–3: 131 7. 3–4: 210 7. 40: 215 n. 3 8. 285–8: 57–8 8. 714–22: 151, 152 n. 23 9. 774–8: 15 n. 55 Ecl. 83, 151 n. 19, 186 1: 143, 149 2: 144 n. 6, 145 n.10, 147 3: 145 n. 10, 147 3. 86: 186 n. 16 5: 142, 143–50, 151 6: 143–50, 160, 186 6. 3: 107 n. 32 6. 8: 152 7. 22–3: 186 n. 16 8: 143, 144 9: 143 9. 35–6: 164, 186 n. 18

Index locorum 10: 143 10. 53–4: 144 n. 6 Geor. 90, 144, 149, 186 1. 3: 152 n. 23 1. 5: 84, 150, 151 n. 17 1. 40–2: 378 1. 503–4: 379 2. 176: 186 n. 16 2. 490: 186 n. 16, 264 n. 16 2. 537: 152 n. 23 3. 1–48: 150–7, 159, 189 3. 1: 7 n. 20 3. 6: 15 n. 51 3. 9: 31 n. 29 3. 16: 164 3. 26: 159 3. 46: 7 n. 20 4: xii 4. 126: 186 n. 16 4. 284: 152 n. 23 4. 464: 186 n. 16 4. 514: 207 n. 79 4. 547: 152 n. 23 4. 559–60: 151 n. 17 Vitruvius Arch. 1 Pref. 2: 281, 316 1 Pref. 3: 317 9 Pref.: 317

Subject Index abuse, see also invective viii, 104, 254, 335 Accius 54 n. 107, 334 acrostic 107 n. 32 Actium 164, 180, 184–5, 318, 321–2, 331, 346 n. 73 Propertius’ Actium elegy 188–95 address 35, 43, 102, 113, 223–4, 261 to different persons (or things) 38, 138, 261, 262–3, 359 to historical persons 99, 153, 265 adoption 191, 194, 288, 380 Adorno, Theodore 248–9 Aelius Stilo 55 n. 111 Aeneas 2–3, 5, 157–62, 171, 314, 315, 318 death of Turnus 157 shield of 151 n. 21, 157, 162, 164–6, 194 writer 167–9 aesthetics or aestheticism viii–ix, 33 n. 38, 60, 64–5, 68, 74, 98, 103, 114, 126, 237, 249, 338 aesthetic appreciation 157, 165, 257 aesthetic freedom or independence 130, 215–16, 274 aesthetic value 162, 216, 238, 240, 242, 243, 246, 250, 253, 331, 348, 355 aesthetics of presence 7, 154 agere 71, 104, 108, 199 Agamben, Giorgio 360 Alcaeus 9, 82, 121, 248, 254 Alcidamas 215 n. 1 Alcman 19 n. 67 Alexandrianism 32 n. 36 Anacreon 48 n. 86, 77, 82, 103 n. 18, 107, 108 Antimachus 26, 256–7 Antonius Iulianus 49 n. 90 Apollo 3–4, 26, 75, 87, 107 n. 32, 113, 114, 137, 138–40, 156, 178–9, 200, 211, 232, 237, 292, 381 in Carmen saeculare 127, 129, 133, 135 in Propertius 4. 6: 189, 191–2 Apollonius 25 n. 6 apostrophe 38, 43, 44, 94, 159, 160, 223–4, 261, 262–4, 351, 359 apotheosis 145–6 Ara Fortunae Reducis 321

Ara Pacis xi, 90, 280, 282–3, 309–23 Aratus 32 n. 36 Archilochus 104–5, 108, 109, 254, 335 Arendt, Hannah 280 Aristophanes 6 n. 15, 112 n. 43 Aristotle 71–2 Asclepiades 26–7 C. Asinius Gallus 141 C. Asinius Pollio vii–viii, 252, 334 n. 26, 361 n. 7 auctor 156, 222, 288–9, 291, 298, 316, 329 n. 9, 361, 379 ‘Auditorium of Maecenas’ 69 n. 29 Aufhebung (see sublation) augere 286, 290, 298, 316 cognates 299 n. 64 Augustan culture and politics vii, 21, 136 n. 43 poets 114, 374–5 privatization or depoliticization 114, 175, 204 ‘programme’ 21, 140, 150 Rome 175, 248, 281–2, 323, 329 n. 9, 355, 357–8 Augustus 59, 125, 138–9, 149, 239, 246, 279–308, 310 n. 6, 311, 314–15, 317–23 beyond law 346, 348 death and funeral of 306–8, 319–20 deiﬁed 264, 274, 322–3, 375, 379 and elegy (including Ovid) 175–6, 177, 179–85, 187, 188–95, 201, 222, 260–6, 268, 271, 273–5, 349, 356–82 as exemplum xii, 303, 315, 319, 350 in Horace 90–4, 240–9, 256, 331, 332–48 as innovator 88, 130 n. 27, 131 and law xii, 343–7, 365–6, 375, 379 and ludi saeculares 123 and Pollio vii–viii priesthoods 137 n. 47, 298 n. 62, 299, 313 taste or judgment of 235 n. 1, 346, 348 n. 77, 367 in Vergil 150–1, 153–7, 164–5, 169, 172 Austin, J. L. 66–7, 81, 96, 286–7, 290, 296, 329 authority xi, 23, 126, 170, 191, 251 n. 2, 329, 337, 345, 361, 382

420

Subject Index

authority (cont.) in Greek 284, 291 of monuments 316 poetic 202–3, 229, 329 n. 9, 331, 338 auctoritas and performativity 279–94 Bacchylides 117 n. 59 Barchiesi, Alessandro 64, 75, 101, 133, 140, 174, 206, 318 blush 39 book 17, 107, 108, 178, 188, 216 n. 5, 241, 247, 261, 362, 371, 377 n. 42 aphrodisiac (failed) 254 doing things 183, 216, 258, 260, 262 ﬁgures ﬁxity 4–5 of fate 5, 34, 142, 173–4, 299 girl and 182 n. 14 physical conditions 17, 179, 262 Borges 117 Bourdieu, Pierre 286, 288–91, 293, 296–7 Butler, Judith 286, 290 Callimacheanism 33 n. 39, 248 Callimachus x, 25–8, 42, 53, 148, 154 n. 33, 156 nn. 42 and 45, 179, 190, 203, 229–30, 232–4 Calvus 186–7, 218 Campus Martius 279, 309, 318–20, 323, 382 canere 14–15, 17, 19, 32, 39, 40, 77, 112, 150, 177 n. 4, 179, 186, 195, 203, 204 n. 67, 342, 373 and Iø 2, 8 and carmen 2 catachresis 1–2 etymology 170 of poetry 32, 165 of prophecy 6 n. 20, 170 Vergil 1, 164, 174, 215 cantare vii, 16–17, 19, 112, 115, 147, 195, 200, 253–4, 341–2 Capitoline 120–1, 133–4, 138–40, 166, 302 n. 72, 304 carmen, see also spell 8, 88, 101, 103, 108, 177 n. 5, 189, 198 n. 54, 207, 209, 237, 242–3, 249, 253, 275, 329–30, 368 birds 222, 329 n. 9 and canere 2, 15, 32 carmen style or tradition: 54, 55, 327 n. 5, 340 law 327, 329–30 of poetry 32, 39, 196, 202, 329 n. 9, 330, 335 Carmen saeculare 19, 21 n.72

Carmen Saliare 54, 55, 57–8, 124–5 Salii 100, 164 Carmentis 126, 142, 168–72 etymology 170 carmina conuiualia ix, 48–52, 57–9, 101 n. 11 Capitoline 119–20, 133, 138–40, 164, 171 Cato 18–19, 50–2, 58, 59, 254 Catullus x, 34–47, 161, 215, 335 n. 28 address and apostrophe 35, 38, 43, 44, 47, 261 cantus 39 n. 60 carmen 39 n. 60, 47 and social performance 114, 218 n. 11 Muses in 41 n. 69 in Propertius 186–7 singing 39 n. 61, 85 understanding shared with addressee, but denied reader 219, 305 writing materials 34 n. 44, 40, 47 Cavell, Stanley 70 c(h)arta 32 n.34, 33, 40–1, 119 n. 65, 190, 352 n. 14 Choerilus 242–3 chorus, see also choral lyric 57, 58, 75–9, 87, 90–1, 93, 98, 100, 101, 114, 116, 189, 241, 246, 364 of Carmen saeculare 123 n. 1, 124 n. 8, 128, 139, 239 Cicero 244 n. 20, 248, 294 n. 48, 296 n. 55, 301, 329, 351 on auctoritas 284, 287–8 on improvisation 13 on literary history 48, 50 on orator’s activity 15 and reading 14 n. 46 and recitation 251 n. 1, 256–7 Circus Maximus 321 Citroni, Mario 35, 99–102 comedy 24, 335 n. 28, 341, 358 conuiuium 51, 57 n. 117, 106, 114, 218 Cornelia xii, 123–41 C. Cornelius Gallus 143, 149, 368, 371 corona ciuica 292 Creophylus 27 cult, see ritual Davidson, Donald 96 de Man, Paul 243, 246 dead poets 16, 118, 176–7, 183–4, 196 n. 50, 378 declamation 13 n. 43 dedication 35–6, 78, 80, 99

Subject Index deixis 79–80, 82 n. 74, 95, 137, 139 n. 52, 152, 153, 160, 219, 267, 352, 379 denotation Derrida, Jacques 10 n. 33, 52, 102, 117, 119 nn. 66–7, 275 n. 40, 296–7, 300 Derveni papyrus 112 Diana 75, 78, 80, 87, 107 n. 32, 108 n. 38, 113 n. 47, 137, 138–40, 232–3 in Carmen saeculare 127, 128, 129, 133, 135 dicere 15, 76, 89, 185, 196 n. 60, 202, 204 n. 67, 338, 365–6, 373 dictation 1 n. 1, 233, 307 didactic 24, 33 n. 39, 34, 85, 237–8, 247 Dio Cassius 249 n. 31 double abbreviation 133 images 320 inscription 134, 301, 321 obelisks 322 performance 133–4, 138–40 Drusus 266, 299, 313, 319 Dupont, Florence 9, 22–3 ecphrasis x–xi, 31, 100, 150–1, 155, 156, 157, 158–68, 171, 272 elegy 24, 85, 105, 106, 144 n. 6, 175–203, 258, 330, 370 and death 176–7, 181, 183–4 and writing 175, 177, 181, 217, 259 embodiment or disembodiment 119–20, 204 n. 67 Empedocles 32 n. 33 empire v, 101, 119, 121–2, 123, 142, 150, 153, 155–6, 157, 165–6, 168, 172, 173–4, 175, 221, 289 n. 31, 292 n. 45, 294, 300, 305, 316, 318–19, 334, 378 enargeia 72, 77, 86 n. 90, 88, 92, 95–6, 152–4, 157, 160, 223, 225, 227, 255, 260, 267, 268 n. 25, 290 Ennius 28–32, 32 n. 36, 51, 56, 57, 142 n. 1, 150, 154–5, 196, 201, 236, 239, 340, 377 epic xi, 341, 347 coyness about medium 4 song 24, 182, 374 tradition 2, 53, 381 Epicurus or Epicureanism 32, 33 n. 38 and n. 40, 248, 250, 264 n. 16 epigram xi, 13, 24, 35, 113 dedicatory 78–80 ‘epigraphic habit’ 294 n. 48 epinician 120, 156

421

epistles 43, 83, 176, 215–75, 249, 251 heroines 220 responses to (or not) 224, 226–7 and writing 24 erasure 141, 197, 220, 225 Euhemerus 28 Evander 57–8, 169–72 exemplar 254, 302 exemplum xii, 121–2, 171, 254, 302–5, 315, 317, 319, 331, 349–59, 361–7, 369–70, 375, 378–81 exile 176, 200, 204, 216, 220, 259–75, 365–6, 368, 371, 376, 378 fame 187–8, 201, 206, 210, 268, 352, 372 bad 202 and free speech 375, 380–2 fari 106 fate(s) 142, 160, 169, 173–4, 181, 206, 212, 259, 262, 375, 377, 381–2 Fates 129, 173, 381 and fari 4–5, 129, 166, 170, 173, 381 Feeney, Denis 9, 12, 48, 78, 102, 131–2 felicity 65, 68, 80, 96, 296–7, 329 festivals (see also ludi saeculares) 120–1, 123, 129, 130, 135, 139–40, 146, 150–7, 164, 168, 198 n. 56, 239 nn. 9 and 10, 286, 293, 299, 362, 367 Ficana 48 n. 86, 57 n. 117 ﬁction 65, 67, 68, 72, 75, 81–3, 89, 96, 99, 102, 115, 136, 202, 259 n. 2, 363–4 ﬂoats in parades 271 love as 218 n. 14 ﬁguration 72, 74, 83–97, 98, 102, 105 focalization 351 foundation 123–6, 168–72, 282, 318 foundational song 123–6, 142, 168–72 Fowler, Don 173–4, 251 n. 2 Freudenburg, Kirk viii, 339, 346 Gadamer, Hans Georg 116 Gallus, see C. Cornelius Gallus genre 75–81, 333, 338, 348, 351, 364, 373 Germanicus 125, 266, 269, 275, 299 grammatology 53 n. 102, 113 Habinek, Tom viii, 11, 48, 65, 118, 124–7, 338 Heinze, Richard 63, 81–3, 99, 102, 115, 296 Helenus 3 Hercules 170 and Cacus 57–8

422

Subject Index

Herodotus 6 n. 15, 19 n. 67 Hesiod 32 n. 36 Homer 6, 8, 25, 32 n. 36, 52, 96, 149, 177, 180, 185, 215, 216, 226, 236, 370 as literature 54 and writing 9, 24 Horace 53, 142, 158, 180, 188, 189, 194, 215–17, 220, 310, 330 ﬁctitious ladies 89, 101 instruments in 73 n. 43 literary criticism or history 49, 54–7, 235, 247, 249 n. 29 Muses and other inspirational gods in 73 n. 44 miscellaneous performance vocabulary 74 n. 46, 108 n. 39 performance of x, 12, 52, 63–141 on recitation 251–8 Sabine farm 115 social performance (rat race) 253, 256–7, 337, 347 verbs of utterance or singing 73 n. 45 vocabulary of song 73 n. 42, 112, 242 writing 53 n. 105, 241–2 horologium, see sundial Hostius 29 hymn 25 n. 6, 63 n. 2, 75–8, 82 n. 74, 94 n. 115, 102, 124 n. 8, 125–6, 130 iambic 104–7, 257, 335 ideology 157, 185, 331, 354–6, 358 illocutionary force 69–70, 96, 98, 249, 365, 371 immortality, poetic or representational 16, 37, 60, 74, 120, 129, 132, 147, 188, 196 n. 50, 209, 217, 236, 273, 315, 330–1, 374, 376, 382 refused or overturned 183–5, 374 imperium 170, 280, 294 n. 50, 298, 308, 322 improvisation 13, 64, 81 inability viii n. 4, xi, xii, 175–212, 238, 337 n. 37 infelicity (see felicity) inscription 79, 118–19, 121, 127, 131–5, 141, 143–50, 158 n. 52, 167–9, 176–7, 181–4, 209–11, 222, 231–2, 235, 240, 279–308, 313, 320–1, 329 n. 8, 349, 350–3, 356 impossible 183, 197–8, 352 instruments, see also lyre and tibia 73, 101, 206 invective, see also abuse 38, 335 n. 27, 338, 348 invitation 67–70, 82, 89, 101, 197, 318 judgement 331, 335, 351, 353, 356, 365–6

C. Julius Caesar 145–6, 149, 151, 191–2, 194, 288, 301, 306, 345, 347, 374, 380, 381 Juno 124–6, 131, 138–9, 141, 161, 167, 173, 212 n. 89 Jupiter 138–9, 141, 164, 172, 173, 358, 366, 372, 374–7, 379–82 and fate 5, 375 kleos 143 land conﬁscation 143–4, 149 landscape, living or vocal 146, 148–9, 152, 153 law 38 n. 54, 147, 171–2, 211, 222, 234, 236, 260, 284, 294 n. 48, 382 divine: 108 lex derived from legere 129, 236 n. 3, 281, 295, 327, 355 Lacanian 354–5, 356–7 language 254 libel xii, 331, 333–5, 339, 347 and literature 327–82 marriage legislation, see marriage poetic 248, 333, 336, 367 and reading xi, 176, 222, 327–8 and recitation 251 n. 1 rule of 345–8, 365–6 trium liberorum 353, 356 legere 16, 148, 160, 196 n. 50, 200, 274 pun or wordplay on 234, 295, 355–6, 360–1, 366 liber, see also book and writing, materials 14, 54, 261, 263, 339, 340 n. 49 libertas 332, 340–1, 344 n. 65, 347–8 library 56, 192, 216, 241, 247, 250, 258, 331, 367, 370, 374 Atrium Libertatis 252, 371 exclusion from 17, 262, 370 Palatine 216, 240, 317, 371 Porticus Octaviae 371 P. Licinius Tegula 124 n. 8 literacy 315 literature 32, 48, 52–4, 60, 65, 195 and performative discourse 66, 68, 71 litterae 48, 53 Livia 271, 273, 283 n. 12, 299, 319, 323 Livius Andronicus 54–7, 124–6, 131, 138 n. 50, 242, 243 Livy 21 n. 75, 23 n. 79, 121–2, 157–9, 215, 303–4, 350 logocentrism 7, 9–11, 119 loquor 15, 218 n. 13, 228, 352

Subject Index Lucilius 248, 332, 334, 338, 340, 343 Lucretius x, 32–4 Ludi saeculares 12, 123–41, 164, 216, 258 acta 127, 132–5, 138, 139, 141 lyre 51, 64, 65, 81–2, 85, 86, 98, 100, 107, 109, 170, 192 negated 189 lyric 24, 101–2, 108, 237–8, 249, 251, 258, 330, 341, 347, 370 over against iambic 107 choral passim in Ch. 3, 100, 102–3, 135, 216, 235, 236, 238–9, 242–3, 247–9, 364 ego 19 n. 67 Maecenas 67–9, 86 n. 90, 89–90, 101, 107, 153, 154, 179, 181, 253, 255, 310 n. 6, 347 magic viii, 7 n. 21, 105, 107 n. 32, 110, 204, 205 efﬁcacy in Ovid 205 n. 74 metaphorical 328 marriage 47, 175, 222, 236, 351, 356 legislation 129, 222, 303 n. 75, 356, 361, 379–80 Mausoleum (of Augustus) xi, 279, 282, 299–300, 306, 309, 311 n. 12, 312, 315, 318–23 mime 13, 49 n. 89, 83, 110, 144 n. 6, 307, 357, 368 mimesis 71–2, 97, 115–16, 289, 303 Mimnermus 48 n. 86 modern, the 243–7 monument 21–2, 23, 144, 164, 171, 194, 279, 281, 286, 293, 299, 301, 308, 309–23, 382 in relation to festival x, xi, 142–74, 176–7, 294 metaphoric 31 about other monuments 304–5 performativity of 142, 281, 315, 316–23 monumentum 22, 117–22, 142 n. 2, 159, 163, 171, 188, 189, 192, 212 n. 90, 215, 282–3, 304, 317, 368, 374 Munatius Plancus 299 munus 35 n. 48, 43–7, 103, 147, 161 Muse(s) 39, 41, 43, 44, 46, 54, 73, 103, 112, 114, 115, 166–7, 171, 178–9, 188, 189, 195, 203 n. 66, 204 n. 67, 205, 215, 230, 237, 239 n. 8, 240, 340, 363 Augustus as 373 girl as 178 music 75, 89, 116, 123 n. 1, 128 n. 17, 145, 148, 170, 189, 200, 251 musical vocabulary 83, 86–8, 123 n. 1

423

Naevius 56, 239, 334, 347 Nagy, Gregory 42 n. 71, 115 nenia 108 Numa 55, 58, 125, 172 occasion x, 38, 74, 75–81, 93–4, 98, 116–17, 122, 130, 251–3, 309–23, 327 n. 5, 349 orality 4, 7 n. 22, 11, 13 in research 6 n. 15 and reading 14, 16, 18 ordinary language vii, 48, 68–71 Orpheus xii, 172, 200, 203, 204, 205, 208, 211, 236, 238, 341 Ovid xii, 7 n. 21, 142, 175, 180, 215–17, 220, 309, 310, 358 Ajax 211 Byblis 208–9 cenotaphs in 210–11 elegy in relation to epic xi, 195, 202–3, 204 n. 68 and enargeia 72 n. 40 exile poetry xi explicitness of 210 Hyacinthus 211 Iphis 209–10 making things up 200 magical efﬁcacy 205 n. 74 Myrrha 208–9 performance of 17 n. 59, 83 Phaethon 209 Philomela and Procne 206–8 on power of song 195 n. 46 presence/absence 259 n. 4, 260–1, 267 n. 24, 272, 274 as singer 195, 203 triumphs in 195–6, 199–200, 222, 265–75, 305 vocabulary of writing 196, 200, 203, 205 n. 73, 209 as writer 197, 202, 204 paean 139 pagina 14 Palatine 133, 137, 138–40, 216 Palatine Anthology 79 Pallas’ baldric 161–2 palinode 109–10 pastoral 24 performative discourse, see also speech act theory 20, 35, 65, 66–71, 128, 137, 219, 230–2, 285, 287, 300, 328–31, 364, 380 failure of 37, 296, 329

424

Subject Index

perlocutionary 365, 371 persona 67, 115 n. 55 Petronius 251 n. 1 phantasia (see enargeia) 280 Philitas 190 Pindar 53 n. 102, 91, 93, 115, 117 n. 59, 118 n. 65, 154 n. 33, 156 n. 45, 248 ‘Pindaric future’ 76, 91–2, 112, 115, 194–5 Plato 71, 157 n. 47, 255 n. 13, 256–7 and writing 9–11, 119 Pliny on recitation 252 poema 28, 39, 56, 218, 237 poeta 28, 56, 114, 179, 186 n. 18, 200, 237, 239 ‘poetic simultaneity’ 32 n. 34, 151 n. 17 popular culture 11, 49 n. 89, 50 n. 93, 63 n. 1 Porcius Licinius 49 n. 90 potestas 281, 283–5, 292, 294 n. 49, 295, 297 praeire uerbis 132 n. 33, 190–1, 328–9 praesens 136, 232–3, 243, 264, 364, 379 pragmatics of literature 331–2 praise 58, 68–70, 76, 99, 137, 140, 144, 146–50, 155, 156, 161–2, 165, 212, 216, 243 n. 17, 291 alternative to invective 338–9, 348 in carmina conuiualia 51 casual 204 disavowed 244–5 in elegy xi, 177–81, 184, 187, 188–95, 349–59, 371–3 and epic 204 laudatio funebris 252, 350–1, 353 pragmatic failure 195 prayer 112, 127, 128, 132–3, 135–6, 139, 328, 330, 340, 378–9 effective 135–6 unspeciﬁed 219 presence/absence 7, 23, 145 n. 10, 176, 196 n. 49, 202, 204, 206 n. 78, 211 n. 88, 272, 351, 378–9 and epistles 217, 218–20, 221, 223, 228, 235, 259–61, 265 priests poetic 112, 120, 188, 189, 191 n. 34, 195, 199 pontifex maximus 118–20 priestesses Vestal virgins 118–20 Propertius xi, xii, 176–95, 196, 212, 349–59 epistles 217 language of writing and song 177, 189–90

prophecy x, 2–3, 5, 6, 165, 169, 171, 173, 299, 330, 378, 381 proscription vii publication 38, 99 pun 234, 295, 341, 355, 360 structure of 336 Quintilius xii queror and cognates 106, 175 Quintus Catulus 49 n. 90 reading 14, 17–18, 72, 229 n. 43, 374 allegory of 3, 39, 160, 198, 359 aloud x, 16, 19, 84, 95, 129, 149 n. 15, 178, 200, 230 and freedom 375, 382 inability 207 interrupted 159 and the law 327–82 as listening 33, 256 metaphorical 158, 160, 162–3, 165, 168, 173 as opposed to performance 77 and posterity 156, 369 private 83, 90, 254–6 silent 14, 19, 52, 207 realism 35, 79, 85, 95, 97, 99, 222 recitare 16, 19 n. 66 recitation 8 n. 25, 13–14, 18, 63, 64, 65, 72, 79, 83, 241, 274, 327 n. 5 in Greece 6 n. 15 resistance to 251–8 of tragedy 49 n. 89 recitative 8, 89 recusatio 29, 44, 46 n. 80, 91, 98, 151 n. 18, 189, 215, 248, 338, 371, 372 referentiality 74, 91, 139 suppressed reference 138, 141 repraesentatio (see also enargeia) 72 representation ix, xi, xii, 20, 23, 71–2, 101, 137, 140 n. 56, 142, 146, 150, 156, 157, 161, 165, 172, 181, 192–3, 197, 207–8, 212, 220, 235, 254, 262, 309, 314, 350, 356–9, 362–3 auctoritas and 279–308 deferral 261, 266–7, 274–5 of different media 164, 221, 339–43 epistles 217 levels of 152, 153–5, 157, 180 poetic and political 271–3 poetry’s power of 110, 149, 260, 329–30, 332, 369, 371

Subject Index pragmatic effects of 191, 199, 201–2, 269, 286, 290 of representation 157, 272, 302 simulacra 264 successful when pragmatics fail 201–2 of triumphs 178, 180, 265–75 res gesta(e) 32, 317, 321, 349, 358, 379 Augustus’, see index locorum Rhine 272 ritual 127 n. 15, 131, 139, 143–50, 158 n. 52, 159, 160, 211, 239, 241, 296, 319 language 36–7, 39, 104, 112 metaphorical 163 occasion 59, 120–1, 130, 309–15 perpetuity and repetition 146, 171, 294, 309–15, 328 performance 44, 118, 125, 147, 152, 189, 194, 309–15 reading 328 song 48, 126, 147 Sappho 41 n. 69, 53 n. 102, 116, 121, 248, 254 satire 24, 29–30, 217, 249, 250 n. 32, 251 n. 2, 330, 332–48 Saturnians 56, 241 scribere and cognates 14, 144 n. 8, 178 n. 11, 237–8, 239, 242, 307, 337–9 script 18–19 selfrepresentation xii, 4, 6, 14, 18 semiotics 204, 206–8, 215–34 sermo 243, 246 Servius 146 n. 12, 155 sex xi, 45, 47, 105, 175, 198, 218, 222, 229, 360–1, 363, 367–8, 370 and death 177, 183, 308 and immortality 183–4 as pragmatic aim 176–7, 201–2 safe 362 Sibyl 2–7, 18, 20, 33, 44, 130, 142, 158–60, 169, 170, 173, 275, 299, 381 Sibylline oracle or verse 127–31, 133, 137 silence, see also speech, loss of 100, 120, 207, 229, 261, 359 n. 29, 368 ritual 112, 113, 120 simile 45, 96 Simonides 6, 27 n. 13, 103, 117 n. 59 social pressure 6, 248–50 sociological analysis ix, 60, 98 song 195 Aeneid identiﬁes itself as ix archaic song culture 48, 52, 57 divine inspiration 3–4, 215–16 ideology of 7, 48, 57, 126, 175, 182

425

vocabulary of 28, 73, 84, 91 n. 110 Sophocles 144 speech, loss of 205–6 speech act theory, see also performative discourse ix, 35 n. 47, 65, 66–71, 232, 286 avant la letter 81 spell, see also carmen 108, 330, 335, 340 sphragis 196 n. 50 Stesichorus 109–10, 114 stylus 341–2 sublation 10, 60, 117, 119, 142 Sun 129, 137, 280, 311 sundial xi, 280, 283 n. 12, 310, 311 n. 13, 312, 315, 320, 322–3 Suskind, Ron 279 symposium 48 n. 86, 49 n. 90, 51, 82, 86, 120, 242 tablets 15, 36–9, 109, 132 n. 31, 189–90, 191 n. 33, 194, 196–9, 202, 208–9, 212, 220 composition on 13, 27, 37, 218–19, 221 fate 375, 377 law or document 327–9, 339–40, 342, 346, 355 map 221 votive 196–8, 222, 327 n. 5, 340 Tacitus 249 n. 31 temple 150–7 of Apollo at Actium 167 of Apollo at Cumae 158–9 of Palatine Apollo, see also Palatine 151 n. 21, 155 n. 36, 156, 159, 162, 164, 189, 192 Terentius Scaurus 307 n. 82 theatre 66, 68, 70, 71, 96, 116, 289, 307, 362, 367 Theocritus 25 n. 6 tibia (or reeds) 51, 59, 98, 100, 101, 107 n. 34, 152, 170, 189–90 Tibullus xii, 176, 212 Tiberius 266, 268–9, 271–3, 299, 314, 380 Trebatius Testa 332–48 in Cicero 333 n. 20, 337 n. 41, 345 tribunicia potestas 298 triumph, see also Ovid, triumphs in and representation 90–1, 123 n. 1, 151, 152, 155 n. 36, 164, 176, 178–80, 182–3, 185, 188, 189, 193 n. 38, 194–6, 222, 244–5, 265–75 appropriated 358 other honors instead of 315, 320–2 Twelve Tables 2, 55 n. 111, 240, 242, 328, 330 n., 334, 339–41, 343–4, 346–7

426

Subject Index

Tyrtaeus 236 uates 109, 114, 186 n. 18 Ennius 28, 340 Horace 113, 114–15, 236, 237, 239, 240–1 Lucretius 32 n. 32 Ovid 7 n. 21, 195, 200, 202, 204, 205, 377–8 Propertius 179 (not), 189–90, 194 Sibyl 2–3 ustrinum xi, 309, 312, 319–20, 322–3 Valerius Aedituus 49 n. 90 Varius 13 n. 45, 90, 216 Varro 48, 54, 55 n. 111 and 112, 58, 125, 317 Venus 5, 32 n. 34, 98, 100, 116, 173, 233, 234, 374–5, 380 n. 45, 381 Vergil 131, 142–74, 176, 194, 202, 299, 330, 347, 379, 381 composition methods 1, 8 n. 25 dicere in 185 n. 15 and death xii, 154 and song x, 1–6, 215 lives of 1, 83 n. 78 in other poets 185–7, 360–1 performance of 13, 64, 83, 90, 144 n. 6, 154 n. 32 and recitation 14 n. 46 victor metaphor 154–6 vocabulary of reading, writing, or song 144 n. 8, 147–8, 173, 186 n. 16 writing 2–6, 154, 158, 167, 173 Vitruvius 251 n. 1, 298, 316–18 werbende Dichtung 106, 176, 196–7, 364 Williams, John 275 n. 41 writing 317, 374–6

advantages of 215–18 of archaic Greek 9 comedy 6 n. 15 composition 6, 13, 14, 32, 33 n. 37, 148, 215–16 and death 145, 154, 279, 308 and deception 24, 202 and distance 215–16 and ﬁxity 142, 151, 173, 208, 284, 295–6, 358, 382 by hand (or hoof) 1 n., 205 and immediacy 34, 215–16 interrelation with performance or song 79, 142, 170, 172, 185–8, 196, 204, 211, 216, 235, 240, 247, 281, 299, 300, 310, 341, 349, 357, 369, 382 and iteration 294, 295–7, 300–1, 321 n. 43, 381 longevity (or not) 172, 199, 378 materials 32 n. 34, 34, 119 n. 65, 189–90, 206–7, 225, 306 origins at Rome 170–1 in Plato 9–11 pragmatic failure 36–7, 196, 208–9, 212 preservation and recording 6, 27, 148, 215–16, 294 and realism 25, 28, 30, 79, 215 on trees 144 n. 6, 177 separation from author 10 vocabulary of, see also individual authors 27, 107, 167 wrong medium 208, 227 women and 204, 220–34 Xenomedes 27–8, 229–30 Xenophanes 48 n. 86, 112 n. 43